Month: October 2012

Finally had a chance to see Cabin in the Woods and somehow managed to avoid all of the spoilers. That will not be the case for readers here. This will be spoilerific. Follow the jump if you dare continue…

Cabin in the Woods does more than challenge the traditional horror formula. It gives that formula a purpose and a larger structure by which to be measured. The new mythos centers around ‘The Old Gods’ who are a malevolent bunch, possibly ripped right out of the old testament. These Gods want their yearly sacrifice, but it isn’t enough to merely slay a whore, a virgin, a jester, and a jock (the standard horror complex). You have to kill with style. The victims need to suffer according to the familiar tropes of horror. In this respect, there is a global organization responsible for storing these horrors, collecting unwitting victims and releasing them according to design. The movie follows one such yearly happening from the perspective of the techs working the, well, murders and the victims experiencing a weekend getaway gone wrong.

What makes the film so spectacular is how they bring it all together. There are elements of every horror movie I’ve ever heard of and it is all slapped together sensibly. If the horrors win, the world continues. If the horrors lose, the world is the property of the Old Gods once again. You’ll be surprised how it turns out and why.

Some Thoughts:

1. Mark ‘Sanchize’ needs to be benched. I don’t care how much money you’ve paid to play him or how bad it would look approaching the possibility of a trade. Sanchez has awful accuracy that declines sharply past 30 yards. He is a poor decision maker on 3rd down and is constantly hovering near or (more often) below 50% a completion rate. He is Romo with far less success. I don’t know if Tebow is the answer, but he deserves a chance to prove what he can accomplish in this offense. The smattering of snaps he’s had are meaningless if not given the chance to carry at least a full series of downs.
2. Fell asleep after the first quarter of the Giants-Cowboys game. The score was 23 – 0 GMen. Woke up in the 3rd facing a 1 pt deficit. Apparently the team fell asleep when too.
3. Woke up before dawn to the sounds of someone moving around my room. Turns out it was a kid, nervous about not being able to turn the bathroom light on. The power was out for the whole area. At first I thought the zombie apocalypse had begun. I soon discovered a drunk driver had taken out a transformer. It took six hours to get the lights on again.

From time to time I delve into conversations about talismans–wards or symbols designed to portray some level of understanding and even unify a population. Today’s talk is about beer. There are few more defining masculine elements than beer. We are at the point where drinking beer means you are a man. I know this, because when I drink mixed drinks  (often the pink kind), people find it gives them reason to challenge my masculinity. This challenge does not always arise from men. Often women question my manhood when they see me kicking back a cosmopolitan. What about me as a person changes from the moment I am drinking a Cosmo to the moment I’m drinking a Coors Light? Nothing does, and everything does, because the perception of who I am becomes so narrowly focused on the seemingly incongruous drink in my hand. It stands out, and suddenly questions become assumptions and blossom into fears.

Beer is marketed as a man’s drink. Beer commercials show hearty men kicking back a drink with friends and circling the bar for prey. By prey I mean women, as the entire operation is a mirror of animalistic mating rituals. We men, who were once hunters and gatherers, must proudly shout our masculinity by displaying the most desirable traits of our gender to the other gender–and even to our own kind. Those traits are not the ones you might imagine on the surface. Unlike we expect women to do, we don’t thrust out our sexual parts in hopes of being noticed. If anything, we abhor those who do so. Men are expected to be judged by a different set of symbols. We are expected to be judged by how tough and manly we appear to be.

At some point beer became manly. This is even more the case than hard liquor. There is a peculiar connotation to hard liquor that separates the drinks from beer. In fact, different types of hard liquor have different connotations, based primarily on social strata. Vodka is easily accessible to the moderately wealthy, so it conveys a since of class and danger. On the other hand, truly fine whiskey is reserved for the wealthiest echelon. I’ve known shots of whiskey to go for upwards of $55.

So, what about beer? Beer is man water at a bar. Beer sends the message that you are a social drinker and that you understand that men are expected to behave a certain way in that environment. Drink beer or be seen as an outsider, or at least as different. Even within beer there are strata. I drink Stella (though not as a strata–for taste), which is seen as a bit more of a connoisseur taste than, say, Coors or Pabst Blue Ribbon. The message inherent in the selection is that I don’t settle for the cheap crap.

I’m a symbolic interaction theorist, and I believe all of the interactions we have between each other are governed by symbols that are meant to have shared meaning. Understanding and agreeing upon what these symbols mean is the quickest path to clear and agreed upon communication.

Some Thoughts:

1. Weak post yesterday. I apologize for that. As it turns out, posting with your eyes half-closed and your consciousness sagging is not an effective plan. However, it became a learning moment. I learned that I don’t do well after 9pm unless I have coffee. This is further proof of my caffeine addiction. Well, if I have to be addicted to something this is much better than alcohol, drugs, gambling, or even sex.

A few days ago I started a conversation about the difficulty of creating a TV show that maintains continuity and evolves story from start to finish. I found myself enthralled by Haven tonight and thought, this show is making it work. Haven is based in part off of Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid. The show started a year or two back, drawing heavily on the fiction of King to create a town where nearly everyone suffers from a ‘trouble’. Being troubled is a nice way of saying these people all have some form of mutant power.

As the show developed, it focused in on a main character, Audrey. Turns out she has lived many lives, all of them in Haven. The show focuses on the quest to stop her from dying or disappearing before another of these lives emerge.

It isn’t BSG, but this is another example of a show that has a chance to pull it all together in the end. I think the key to that is not being open ended. You have to know when you want it to end, because all good scripting is about drawing the lines from that end back to the beginning.

The majority of films about computer intelligence ascribe human principles to the machine. They create the impression that machines, if allowed to gain consciousness and thrive, will actively seek to enslave or destroy man. What if the speculators are wrong? I don’t see why a machine brain would even want to busy itself with the destruction of humanity. On the other hand, I can see why humanity would attempt to destroy it.

We are incapable of believing in benevolence. Even our concept of God is born from fire and brimstone. Given our proclivity for binary confrontations, there will always be an us vs. them mentality. Thus, the only way to unit all of us humans is to have a them–non human. I think we’re seeing the beginning of this philosophy budding in books like 1984 and shows like Person of Interest where an overarching presence watches all that we do. POI treats the force, a semi-autonomous knowledge construct, as benevolent. It has a singular purpose of discovering threats and informing the law of those threats. It has a side gig of telling its creator of smaller threats as well, which is the focus of the show. This system is powerful and intelligent and does, on occasion, take the initiative to help its creator accomplish goals.

Is this a possible future? Surely. We have the technology and the connectivity to make these things a reality. Ideas such as the cell phone hacking concept that bubbled up in The Dark Knight are not born in the darkness. They come from scientific fact and attempt. Will the force we create be benevolent? Only as much so as the creators allow.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The new Iron Man film looks better than the 2nd, which isn’t very hard. Still, it may be the case that Iron Man III will be better than I. I hope they do a six film run that is spectacular throughout.
2. I really do need that vacation.
3. Tough class again today. I often feel extremely disrespected by the students. They should be there to learn, but they are not. I am at the point that the next student who disrespects me will be thrown out of the classroom.

Turns out I’m quite prophetic. I said MJD would speak up with his feet and he did, to the tune of a possible Lisfrancs injury in the first quarter of a game that quickly dissolved into a loss. So was my week. 8-5, and I still haven’t one a single fantasy football match up this season. 0-7 puts me quite close to being out of the playoffs. Maybe I’m long since out, but some part of me is an optimist and thinks that I can squirm into the top six.

In terms of the picks, I’m in the top 4 with Wickersham (71 – 33) and Mortensen (73 – 31) ahead of me. I am tied with Jaworski at 64 – 40. This week promises to be exciting. There are several games on the docket that could wind up being upsets and a few more that are nearly too close to call. I’m calling all of them.

TB over MIN
Historically, Tampa owns this match up. While history doesn’t mean so much given the new coaching staff in Tampa, one truth that holds up is the Tampa D and the relative 1 dimensionality of the MIN passing attack. If Tampa can take away #12, they can stack the line against AP.

CAR over CHI
Carolina needs a win like I need a raise. Their continued existence depends upon it. I say they wake up this week and get that W.

CLE over SD
This is my upset pick. Cleveland is emerging as a low level threat, and SD doesn’t do too well with those. I’m not sure how the superstars will perform on the CLE offense, but with nothing to lose, I see them winning.

GB over JAC
MJD? Done. Without his consistency, I doubt JAC can run the sort of ball control game they need to in order to keep Rodgers off the field.

IND over TEN
This should really be a big fantasy week for me. I may find my way to a win. Just like INDY

NE over STL
I want NE to lose so bad, but I cannot believe that STL has the firepower to make that happen. AZ lost in the ‘louis, but that was because of an offensive blackout. Trust Belicheck to read his notes from last week and make the proper adjustments.

NYJ over MIA
Jets aren’t that bad. Miami is though.

PHI over ATL
You fire a coach and people start to notice. Expect blanket coverage on the top two receivers. This will expose the relative weakness of the ATL running game. Better now than in the playoffs where they will likely be jacked by Green Bay.

WSH over PIT
PIT is reeling, despite some good games. I see a team that is pulling out wins, but is playing inconsistent football. Washington is playing good ball right now, and they are in a desperate dogfight to catch up to the Giants before the two teams meet again. Point-Washington.

OAK over KC
KC is terrible. Rarely have a seen a team so flat out bad and overlooked as they are. When you are so grossly overshadowed in your own town by, well, the RAMS! you stink.

NYG over DAL
Giants have never lost a game at the new Dallas Stadium. I don’t think they fall to the 3-3 Cowboys, especially with Murray on the bench. Jones is fumble prone and the QB turns it over more than even Sanchize…

NO over DEN
Who dat gon beat dem Saints? Everyone apparently. I don’t see Denver continuing this trend. Not with the heart of the Saints D back in action, and cool Brees throwing well.

SF over AZ
I am really torn here. Kolb is a better decision maker than Skelton, so if he were playing I would give the win to AZ. The Cardinal D has been stunning–especially at home. However, if the Cards cannot score, the Cards cannot win. Thus is what it will be.

 

I missed my Monday blog.

This was in no way intentional. I actually wrote out the header and prepared to write before   I was distracted by other responsibilities. It is my fault that I never remembered to go back to it. This ends a streak of 899 days of successive writing. I’m considering resetting the numbering as symbol of the failure, but I am still unsure. The fact is, I’ve been slipping a lot lately. That is a sure sign that something is wrong.

I cannot point to anything specific. I know that I’ve spent a foolish amount of many as of late. I am eating more junk food than a human should consume, and I missed the football game this weekend. This means my health is not tip top. Nor do I feel like working on that at the moment.

The fact is, something is not right in Denmark. There is something very off with me as of late and I have no idea what or why it is. Apparently I have a mystery on my hands. I’m trying to solve a disappearance, and the person who is missing is me.

I’ve begun to appreciate BSG and Babylon 5 more over the past few months. I can’t fathom how hard it must be to pull together a series over the course of several years and maintain the continuity, progress the storyline, and keep it good. As I watch shows like Dexter, et al, I wonder if it can be done all that well.

What all of these successful shows have is this sense of continuity. Despite the fact that writers may change (a problem that plagues shows and video games of this manner), the key plot remains strong. BSG and B5 both had clear endings that were hinted at from the first episode and developed throughout. This often was not apparent until the last season. Now shows like Lost, which had a clear ending but no sense of how long the show would last. Those factors contributed to a show that slowed along the way and, on occasion, became desperately confusing and strayed far off the storyline. The same could be said of Buffy or Fringe, the latter of which is ending this season without pursuing huge parts of the plot.

In short, it is tough to tell a story. It is even tougher to tell a story in pieces that stretch across the years. I tip my hat to those who pull it off.

Let me get the dark stuff out of the way first: I beat my kids. I offer up spankings on a platter of misbehavior and hastily ignored rules. I spank ruthlessly, seeking to inure my kids to the consequences of poor choices. Yes, I know it isn’t the way of modern times. I am old school. I have read the research, and I think it was written within a vat of excrement (i.e. full of sh–). The research fails to account for the social strata of the spanking victim and, furthermore, fails to project past the age of 25, the age where we know our decision making skills are fully affirmed.  That being said, I believe I am a good dad. At least partly. Sometimes I think I  am a bad dad, and those times are when I am giving the kids what they want vs. what they need.

Today we went to the Out of Africa Wildlife preserve. The 2.5 hour drive lasted closer to three and was marred by crying, fighting, and a lot of complaining. The complaints continued throughout the trip, ranging from demands for more food or water or to go a certain place right away. Afterwards we fed the kids junk food (bad parent right there) and drove home. There were a smattering of thank yous, but when we got home the complaining started in earnest.

Maybe the house is possessed by an evil spirit that turns my children into demons of demand. Maybe they feel so entitled by what they get that they feel they can demand more and get away with it. Maybe I don’t beat them nearly as much as required. I don’t know the answers, but I do know they actively disrespect my wifey and I following any trip or anything special that they get. The bad parent in me is not consistent with the responses to  their behavior and that creates a situation where they don’t know what is going to happen (outside of some general yelling, which I am quite consistent about). To make matters worse, my wifey and I are also inconsistent with how we punish.

Clearly there are no exact rules to being a good parent. There are guidelines, at least one of which I am not following. You need to be consistent. I need to be consistent.