You've all heard a reference to "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!" but you may not know that it came from Treasure of the Sierra Madre starring Humphrey Bogart—good movie, by the way. Want to know all of the bookies, movies, and TV shows that have made reference? Naturally, there's a site dedicated to Stinking Badges.
February 2003 Archives
You've all heard a reference to "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!" but you may not know that it came from Treasure of the Sierra Madre starring Humphrey Bogart—good movie, by the way. Want to know all of the bookies, movies, and TV shows that have made reference? Naturally, there's a site dedicated to Stinking Badges.
My friend Larry recently visited New York City—it's the February 18, 2003 posting (I'd link but he doesn't have permalinks. D'oh!)
From Kottke.org, I visited New York Songlines—an amazing annotated street-by-street guide to New York. Amazing in its breadth and its information structure using HTML to map the city. I can't imagine how long this must have taken, both to collect all the information and then to build it. For example, check out this sprawling view of 2nd Avenue—I'm sure this would mean more if I had ever visited NYC. You get a sense of the size of New York and also the diversity of commerce that Larry mentions.
Great site. And it'll probably get better as he adds more songlines.
With tongue firmly in cheek, I present to you BlackPeopleLoveUs.com—a site dedicated to the yuppies who have black friends and aren't afraid (or hesitant) to trot them out as examples of how racist they aren't.
Go read the hilarious diary of Grammy Watching from ESPN's The Sports Guy.
For those of you too lazy to go and read it yourself, here's the highlights:
8:01—Dustin Hoffman wobbles out to introduce Simon and Garfunkel. Where does Rain Man end and Dustin Hoffman begin? Has anyone ever taken the time to figure this out? ...
Norah's destined for at least four Grammys tonight. She's adorable. I'm not even making the requisite jokes about how she's this year's Nelly Furtado or Alicia Keys—in other words, in one ear, out the other—even though all the evidence suggests that she is. ...
I wish I could come back in my next life as a sensitive guitarist who makes weird facial expressions—the world would be my oyster. Don't you just hate these guys? They're like those guys who can randomly sit down and play the piano at any bar -- you just can't compete with them under any circumstances.
(By the way, the Dixie Chicks are fascinating—none of them are overwhelmingly cute, but all of them keep your interest, give you different looks and keep you guessing. It's the same dynamic that worked so well for Blair and Jo on "The Facts of Life"—you weren't bowled over by them, but you also weren't ready to write them off, either. ...)
9:58—Oh, boy. More Robin Williams. Cut his mike. Pull the fire alarm. Anything.
This show has been a solid A-minus, although we desperately needed at least one "Wow, what a harlot!" moment with the usual suspects (Pink, Aguilera, Spears, Mariah, etc.). And where was a whacked-out Whitney Houston? Or a random Michael Jackson appearance? They should have told him that the youngest Culkin brother was coming, he might have shown up.
There you have it. Great commentary and an application of the powers of sportscasting to awards show reporting.
From The New York Times: "Networks Plan Flood of Reality Shows for Summer"
The four big networks are preparing to unleash at least two dozen reality shows from June to September, dwarfing the number currently on their schedules and more than doubling the number they broadcast last summer. [emphasis mine]
I can understand the appeal of reality shows to the networks, and I guess I can understand the voyeuristic appeal to the American public, but isn't this a pretty dicey proposition for the networks? I've heard plenty of mumured disgust at the spate of reality shows—I've murmured myself—and it seems like this phenomenon was a refreshing breath of air from the tired, repetitive formula show. Of course, formula is what the media does best so they're naturally looking to formula-ize the reality TV show. Makes you wonder what'll come after this? Perhaps scripted sitcoms?
I'm watching the Grammy Awards and the two awards just presented illustrate a striking contrast in our culture: John Mayer as Best Male Performer and Eminem as Best Rapper. Your Body is a Wonderland versus Superman. One worships the female body and the other sees women as hoes. One exults in love and the other calls for one-night stands.
Let's hope that the Law of Non-Contradiction has a societal equivalent—regrettably, I don't think it does.
I've finished reading A Reader's Manifesto by B.R. Myers, which was originally an article in The Atlantic Monthly. It is an indictment of co-conspirators: the modern fiction writers and the critics that review them. Myers sets out to demonstrate the pretension of modern fiction by highlighting its tedious prose, self-aggrandizement, and pseudo-intellectuality. In this, he succeeds admirably. By citing passages from the books that the critics themselves used to praise the work, he shows the utter bankruptcy of both establishments.
I must confess to not having read any of the works he lambastes, having focused almost exclusively on historical non-fiction in the last couple of years. However, I've seen enough of such tripe in that field (and literary criticism, which has conflated with history all too often) to know that what he cites is pervasive.
Reading over the lengthy passages, you are struck by the tedium and banality of the writing. I'm not well-read in the classics of literature—mostly because the plots and themes don't resonate with me—but these represent crap of the lowest order. It's almost like I'm reading passages straight out of Atlas Shrugged or even examples of Vogon poetry. I'm struck by the sheer inanity of it all and I wonder how anyone could seriously believe that this is profound or enjoyable. Maybe that's the whole point, the secret everyone keeps.
Overall, he makes his case well and I agree with him as far as he goes. What is troubling is the pass he gives to the authors of the classics, like James Joyce or William Faulkner—two authors that I've actually read (err, tried to read). He heralds their obtuse use of language while damning the more prosaic authors of today. From my reading, I see as many classics as modern novels suffering from the charges he levels. For a long time, I thought that it was just me, that there was something I wasn't getting and that I just didn't have a literary mind. I realized that the problem wasn't with me, but with their writing. I wasn't getting it because it wasn't written to be gotten—either it was the product of an irrational mind or a concrete-bound mentality. The consciousnesses from which these streams come are not well-ordered, writerly ones; far from it, they seem addled and absent-minded. Yet still Myers praises them for the complexity of their thoughts.
Reaction to his essay and later book has, predictably, been fierce. If there's one thing pretentious people don't like being called, it's "pretentious." They would prefer to showcase their superiority and have it silently acknowledged then to be confronted with the reality of their self-deception. Myers, in this case, fired two such salvos and did so at two of the most vociferous, strident groups in the literary world: prolix writers and smug critics. Myers, to his credit, offers a nice summary and bibliography of these criticisms in an epilogue. A list of the web-accessible ones is below:
- The Complete Review: Article
- The Complete Review: Book
- Cold Bacon Review
- "On American Poetry Criticism"
- The Onion A/V Club
- FoxNews
- EchoPraxia
- New York Observer
- Seattle Times Review of Annie Proulx
- Montgomery Advertiser "Best reads of 2002"
- Moby Lives
IEEE Spectrum picks its "10 Techno-Cool Cars". The Chevrolet Trailblazer that switches between using 4 and 8 cylinders depending on load is especially intriguing.
I'm almost done reading A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose and I've got a lot of thoughts about it.
Apple's Safari browser just keeps getting better and better. I can't wait to see where this is heading!
I just got back from seeing Shanghai Knights. I went in with the expectation that it wasn't going to come close to Shanghai Noon in originality or quality. Right on the former, wrong on the latter. It retreads a lot of the same ground, but the chemistry between Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan works—unlike the forced pairing with Chris Tucker. The fight scenes are clever and mesmerizing; I can't wait for the DVD so that I can watch them over and over and over (in fact, I'd say the fight choreography surpasses the original movie).
That said, there were a few things that really bothered me. Namely Charlie Chaplin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Sherlock Holmes. The writer tried to be clever—along the lines of naming a Chinese in a Western Chon Wang—but completely missed the comic line indicating where he should have stopped. It was in the first movie with the original joke. Not terribly subtle: even the children in the theater got it.
I am watching One Hour Photo, a thriller starring Robin Williams. It is creepy—that word doesn't quite do it justice, perhaps chilling is better. Its world-view isn't mine, but it is exquisitely well-crafted and Robin Williams plays his character to perfection. His delusional fantasies, his obsessive shrine, his increasingly violent behavior, his stony demeanor, and his destitution of values combined with the utterly mundane nature of his life make for a very believable story.
Each scene builds on the previous one, each leading to an inexorable though horrific conclusion. Haunting music is used effectively throughout as well. I enjoyed the movie, but I don't think I could ever watch it again—it suggests that depravity can be found lurking behind every counter.
I totally called it. Today's DaveNet essay—Comments on the Google-Blogger deal—is rife with self-serving comments ("... the blogging developer community was founded, in 1996 or 1999 depending on whose histories you read or believe."), petulant pouting ("Every so often a major company would come for a visit ... and we never heard the question from Google, even though we know their investors and a few of the execs at Google. They bought Blogger, apparently, without talking to the field of competitors."), and stunning self-promotion ("However, Google will find this is already a competitive market, UserLand already offers a deeper product...."). It's quintessential Dave and it sickens me.
I've been enjoying several commercials lately.
- Toyota Camry: it's got a great background music track and the guy is doing all sorts of thrilling moves on empty freeways and streets. Just makes me want to do them in my Camry, except that I don't think my car could do those things.
- M&M's: I like that one with the guy smacking around the snack machine trying to get the M&M to let go. It builds up to the climax very effectively, leading you to wonder what candy bar is stuck until it turns out to be one of the animated M&M.
- Sierra Mist: I can't help it, I'm a total sucker for grinning dogs. There is just something so comedic about a dog smiling.
- Pepsi Twist: I watch The Osbournes occasionally because Sandi surprisingly likes the show. At any rate, the part where Ozzy says "You're a bunch of bloody magicians" captures the essence of Ozzy—completely out-of-touch with reality and stupid at the same time.
- Doritos: Tony Hawk is an amazing athlete—watch him in the X Games if you don't believe me—and the commercial with him doing daily activities without getting off his skateboard is mostly inspired (the part with the cart is a little stupid).
- Blind Date Uncensored: There is a part in that commercial where a woman showed up to the blind date topless. She rings the doorbell and the guy answers. After the split-second when he realizes that she's half-naked, his eyes bug out and he says "Holy smokes!" in such a way that it's indelibly burned into my consciousness.
[UPDATE (12/2/2005): I got an email from that "holy smokes" guy today. That was all there was to the email. "I am that holy smokes guy from Blind date!" Uh, thanks.]
Miscellaneous tidbits:
The best Switcher story I've ever read (excerpt):
And I want to do better, want us all to want to do better. I don't know what you do, but between us we do everything, and I believe that if the tools with which we do things were all this inspiring, we would do them better. And it compounds: as you make your things better, the person who uses your things to make their things makes their things better. Maybe you think I've been drugged, and a few bouncing icons can never instigate a better world, but better worlds have to start being better somewhere. Many somewheres, of course; the German who insisted on putting gel-damped grab-handles in my Golf is starting somewhere, and the Korean who designed the backlighting for my cell-phone keypad, and the manager at BMG who agreed to make the rest of the My So-Called Life DVDs. Tomorrow, or the next day, you'll get a chance to start somewhere, too.
It's this intangible betterness that has always eluded me in explaining why I prefer Apple computers. Glenn has captured it, though in a more long-winded form than most people can take. That's a pity, too, because his style and power of expression make for great credibility. As if to prove my point, he's also written an elegant description of the iPod's perfection.
Is it pathetic that the vast majority of search terms are to an obscure page containg a posting about Trading Spaces?You'll notice that I don't include any real data. If I did that, you would see how low traffic this site really is. As opposed to the imperious Bill Brown Information Center it purports to be. Or you might see how few people are really looking for information about Bill Brown. In other words, this site is mainly for my benefit, secondarily for any readers, and finally for posterity.
Wow, Google has bought Blogger. I'm not sure what to think of this. If you didn't know, this blog and its sister, Found on the Web, are run through the Blogger system.
What is this going to mean? Why would Google buy Blogger? I can completely understand why owner Evan Williams would sell Pyra Labs, Blogger's developer. It's a golden opportunity, completely dwarfing other fortunate opportunities. Gillmor, in his eJournal on the subject, opines that this deal will
... help readers of weblogs and other information find and collect material from a variety of sites.
It's hard to see how this all fits in with Google since its innovations have all been in accessing information better. Google Groups made it easier to find information in the newsgroups, though that property—acquired from defunct Déja News—has never been integrated into the main Google search. Google Images made it easier to find graphic content amid the texual Web. Froogle promises to facilitate product searching among e-commerce sites. What's Bloogle going to bring to the picture? Google search is already indexing blogs, including this one, on a regular basis—Google's crawler is currently the most frequent visitor to this site, sadly. There is a great deal of speculation about what Google will get out of this deal.
If Yahoo had done this, I wouldn't even have blinked since it fits right in with their portal strategy. They've got Yahoo! Groups and GeoCities, among many other such properties. They're acquisitory and they're really interested in content creation. Google is none of these things.
[UPDATE] The New York Times weighs in. Tony Pierce offers an insight.
I'm going to make a frank confession here.
I watch reality shows.
I watch a lot of them. Way too many, in fact. I watched Joe Millionaire last night. I'll watch The Bachelorette tomorrow and likely Survivor on Thursday. I enjoyed every season of The Amazing Race and will probably watch the next one, too. Amazingly—to me at least—I find myself constantly watching inspid dating shows like Blind Date, The Fifth Wheel, Shipmates, and Rendez-View.
To be fair, I watch a lot of non-reality TV and a lot of movies as well. I watch The Simpsons and Seinfeld nearly every night. I also read extensively and surf widely. But I find the reality TV watching to be the odd man out, so to speak.
What is it about those shows that makes me want to watch them? I'm not generally a naturalist in my artistic tastes. I've never been one for schadenfreude or envy—note the conspicuous absence of Fear Factor or some of the more horrible Fox specials. What's even more curious is my near-total lack of interest in the lives of most people. I'm beginning to think that I may be more interested in psychology than I thought. Perhaps, subconsciously, I've come to view these shows as raw data for observing situations that I will probably never personally experience.
After all, I'll probably never be stranded on a deserted island with a group of strangers, choosing a wife among a slew of strangers, or even dating indiscriminately. And I really don't want to either—but perhaps I do want to experience it vicariously or to understand it through observation. I'd like to believe that it's really just a implicit manifestation of an interest in psychology rather than a subterranean desire to do those other things. Introspectively, I think the former is the reason because I bought a number of psychology and psychology-related books at the VNSA book sale last Sunday.
Definitely something to keep an eye on, though.
Today I went to the annual VNSA book sale. I normally avoid the Saturday craziness in favor of Sunday's more relaxed atmosphere and half-off pricing plan. If you've never been, you absolutely must go sometime. There's tens of thousands of books in a large hall, all relatively well-organized and accessible. I usually get quite a few good finds, even on Sunday. Of course, the best stuff usually gets purchased on Saturday but those people get there at 5 a.m. and wait in line for several hours for that. I did it once, but didn't particularly enjoy it.
Here are the fifty books that I bought, in no particular order:
- The Practice of Management by Peter F. Drucker
- Give War a Chance by P.J. O'Rourke
- The Essentials of C Programming Language by Ernest Ackermann
- Bloom County: Loose Tails by Berke Breathed
- Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel
- All the Trouble in the World by P.J. O'Rourke
- The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski
- How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb
- Proverbs to Live By by Gail Peterson
- Cyber Rules: Strategies for Excelling at E-Business by Thomas Siebel and Pat House
- Emily Dickinson's Poems by Thomas Johnson
- Virtual Reality by Howard Rheingold
- Total Quality Control for Management: Strategies and Techniques from Toyota and Toyoda Gosei by Masao Nemoto
- P.E.T.: Parent Effectiveness Training by Dr. Thomas Gordon
- Unleashing the Killer App by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui
- Adventures of a Verbivore by Richard Lederer
- Holidays in Hell by P.J. O'Rourke
- Selected Poems and Letters of John Keats by Douglas Bush
- The Theory of Poetry by Lascelles Abercrombie
- Managing for Results by Peter F. Drucker
- The Art of Clear Thinking by Rudolf Flesch
- The Power of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden
- Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter F. Drucker
- Rational Thinking: A Study in Basic Logic by John Bennett
- The Works of Bret Harte by Walter J. Black
- The Works of Victor Hugo by Walter J. Black
- The Works of Gilbert and Sullivan by Walter J. Black
- The Spirit of Enterprise by George Gilder
- Honoring the Self by Nathaniel Branden
- Business Engineering with Object Technology by David Taylor
- Versus by Ogden Nash
- One Hundred and One Classic Love Poems by Contemporary Books
- The Oxford Book of American Verse by F.O. Matthiessen
- Poems by Alfred Tennyson by J.F.A. Pyre
- City Ballads by Will Carleton
- Poetry Handbook by Babette Deutsch
- American Poetry and Prose by Norman Foerster
- Inside American Education by Thomas Sowell
- The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World: Part 1 by Richard Aldington
- Haiku Poetry Volume 2 by J.W. Hackert
- The Pursuit of Poetry by Louis Untermeyer
- The Great Valley by Edgar Lee Masters
- Positively Outrageous Service and Showmanship by T. Scott Gross
- The Deming Management Method by Mary Walton
- The New New Thing by Michael Lewis
- The Colonial Experience: 1607-1774 by Clarence B. Carson
- The Beginning of the Republic: 1775-1825 by Clarence B. Carson
- The Sections and the Civil War: 1826-1877 by Clarence B. Carson
- The Growth of America: 1878-1928 by Clarence B. Carson
- The Welfare State: 1929-1985 by Clarence B. Carson
Reviewing them, you see some clear trends: poetry, P.J. O'Rourke, and business. I know that I've become more interested in all three lately—the results of which you, fair reader, will see one of these days.
Visual contrasts of individualism versus collectivism: North vs. South Korea and Earth at Night. Note: these are not perfect comparisons since Australia and New Zealand show up very faintly while France and Scandinavia glow.
Dave Thomas—no, not that one—wrote a great book that you absolutely must read if you want to be a better programmer. The book's site also has some great resources as well: a wiki, a talk entitled "How to Keep Your Job," and articles and essays.
He now has a blog. And it is fantastic. What's even more exciting, at least from my perspective, is that he's an avid Mac OS X user.
I've added pages for my formal writing, like essays and reviews. You'll notice that everything is, at present, available only in Adobe Acrobat format. That is not some plagiarism-paranoia on my part, but a quick and easy way for me to make available a huge batch of my writing. If you didn't know, Mac OS X features the ability to save output as PDFs. It is trivial to open an essay in my word processor and then save it to PDF.
Please note, it is also trivially easy to output the same document as HTML but the word processor—like all other word processors I've encountered—produces horrific, non-validating HTML, requiring hand-editing. I shudder to think of doing all this in an XML format—a longer-term goal of mine.
Also, if you read the essays, note the caveat on the front page of the writings section. All of these essays are imperfect and some represent immature views held on my part in my youth. If you are curious about anything therein, feel free to contact me with feedback, comments, and complaints. My next tasks for this site are to flush out the places section, convert all of the essays and reviews to HTML, and PDFify any essays and reviews written since 1999 (maybe 2000, I can't remember which).
It's taken awhile, but I've finally completed the rough draft of my people section of the values area. I've finished Part II of The Skeptical Environmentalist and I'll post my thoughts about it here today or tomorrow.
If you read my write-up on P.J. O'Rourke—and a quick scan of the logs shows that no one has—you'd know that I'm a former fan of Dave Barry. In my comments, I wrote that Dave Barry strikes me as formulaic and that it's really easy to be funny when you can completely fabricate any details.
As proof, I submit AutoDave!—"The automated Dave Barry column generator." Quickly fill out its form and it will generate an entire column that will easily pass for his dreck. Try it. If you do it repeatedly, you can slap together a book proposal and publish it. It's worked for him somehow.
My deepest sympathy goes out to the families of the seven astronauts killed in the space shuttle Columbia on Saturday. It is terrible to lose loved ones and especially so for children.
However, the national outpouring of grief and flagellation leaves me cold. "These men are heroes." "How could this happen?" "We as a nation have forgotten our space program and this is a clarion call." Two days of continuous Columbia crash coverage. Probably three days by now, or maybe even more. For what?
These astronauts knew that there were dangers inherent in their occupations. If they were lulled into complacency, they need only remember the Challenger explosion in 1986 to rock them back into realty. Seven people strapped into an enormous rocket that glides in through the upper atmosphere for its landing—it's an amazing feat of science and technology that this event has become routine enough for us to ignore—and people act like this is some miraculous happening. Any number of things can go wrong and the astronauts in the orbiter aren't coming back to their families. It's a dangerous endeavor and requires a lot of courage to undertake, but no more than millions of people in dangerous occupations possess. Firemen, police officers, and postmen all are more likely to die on the job than astronauts—postmen mainly because of miles driven, not deranged co-workers. Theirs is a noble profession, but there are few professions distinguished in their lack of nobility, properly viewed.
There are enormous risks in everyday life. I wonder how many "noble heroes" died in car crashes that same day. Or the innocent victims of countless crimes. The destruction of the World Trade Center is significant because those were victims of international aggression; the astronauts were, in all likelihood, the victims of minor problems compounded. Grief for them is understandle since death is the worst scenario for a human life. The astronauts were lucky in that they died while fulfilling their dreams: they had just had a successful mission that they had rigorously trained for for many years. I only wish that I die doing what I love.
One theme I heard repeatedly is that we has a nation grown apathetic towards the space program, "This landing of Columbia, like many before it, was only dimly received." This should surprise no one since the space program serves nary a useful purpose. Satellite payloads can be delivered far more economically, efficiently, and, for the military, secretly than sending a team of astronauts into low orbit to release. Experiments performed on the shuttle are usually trivial sops for political motivations. Repair work performed on the International Space Station or the Hubble Space Telescope (don't get me started on the former) could be done using manned rockets rather than billion-dollar space planes. I challenege anyone to find an experiment performed on the space shuttle that had redeeming qualities worth the expenditure. The program fosters apathy since few can even understand its purpose, apart from makework for former fighter pilots and scientists. I say this as someone who was deeply engrossed in manned spaceflight as a youth, going so far as to actually attend SpaceCamp.
What's the answer? Build a new space shuttle, of course, to replace the one lost and do it in West Virginia. Oh wait, I guess I was channelling Robert Byrd for a moment (except he's not dead). In reality, the space program needs to be evaluated and potentially scrapped entirely. If there are viable portions, they need to be sold off to private enterprise. The rest should be terminated. If that means that we have no men doing space walks or futzing around on the ISS, so be it. It's time to end the astronautical Amtrak.
OMG! The INS is easily one of the most bureaucratic agencies of the federal government. I'll have to find out if my friend routed through Laguna Niguel, California.
Apparently, DVDs aren't the permanent storage they're cracked up to be. This was a major reason why I've been switching from VHS tape to DVD. I had already experienced some severe VHS tape integrity problems and I liked DVDs digital quality/letterboxing format. Now, I'm not so sure.
Hopefully, this is just a manufacturing problem affecting only some movies and manufacturers and is not endemic to the format.
