Reading List 2012

Okay, for anyone interested, here are the books that i read/reread/listened to in 2012. The book that i was reading when i left Connecticut, "Starman" by Paul Trynka, belonging to the New Haven Free Public Library, remains unfinished. The ARVRLS doesn't possess a copy. I plan on buying a copy this year, finishing it and then donating it. I am still reading "Gone With the Wind" and listening to "The Execution of Sherlock Holmes". My book total this year was 46, down about 12 from last year. I attribute this to the fact that my commute no longer consists of an hour-long drive, but of a walk from my living room to my bedroom. The really kind of embarrassing part for me is that i only read/listened to SIX non-fiction books, down THIRTY-ONE from last year. I guess i can only attribute that to the fact that this was a year of transition for me, so i just wanted to challenge myself less than usual. I'm sure that i'll get back up to where i was. That leaves 40 works of fiction, up 19 from last year. Here's my list, title and author. Relativity Albert Einstein The Loner: Inferno J. A. Johnstone Muhammad: A Story of the Last Prophet Deepak Chopra 11/22/63 Stephen King Alvin Maker 4: Alvin Journeyman Orson Scott Card Blockade Billy Stephen King I Didn't Ask to be Born, But I'm Glad That I Was Bill Cosby The Loner J. A. Johnstone 2030 Albert Brooks Faith of My Fathers John McCain Fear Index Robert Harris The Invention of Hugo Cabret Brian Selznick A Princess of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck Wonderful Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum Gods of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs Alvin Maker 5: Heartfire Orson Scott Card Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin The Ultimates: Against All Enemies Alex Irvine Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury Damned Chuck Palahniuk Hamlet's Father Orson Scott Card 2012: The War For Souls Whitley Streiber The Divine Comedy Dante Allegheri Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden Peter Bergen A Pleasure to Burn Ray Bradbury The Final Solution Michael Chabon Resolution Robert B. Parker Survivor Chuck Palahniuk Appaloosa Robert B. Parker Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury Brimstone Robert B. Parker Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit Barry Estabrook Blue-Eyed Devil Robert B. Parker The Green Mile Part 1: The Two Dead Girls Stephen King Deadlocked Charlaine Harris No Easy Day Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer Turn of the screw Henry James The Rogue: Searching for the real Sarah Palin Joe McGinnis Invisible Monsters Chuck Palahniuk Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell Practical Demonkeeping Christopher Moore Snuff Terry Pratchett The Execution of Sherlock Holmes Donald Thomas Peace. Randal

Movie Review: Batman: The Dark Knight Rises

Year: 2012
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Jonathan Nolan
Christopher Nolan
Stars: Christian Bale
Michael Caine
Morgan Freeman
Anne Hathaway

For those who haven't seen it, this is supposedly Christopher Nolan's last Batman film. Kind of disappointing for those of us who how magnificently Nolan brought the Batman series back to life after the dismal "Batman and Robin". Whoever thought that George Clooney would make a good Batman and that Arnold Schwartzenegger would be able to act in that Mr. Freeze suit should be shot.

The basic premise of the film is that a supervillian named Bane, a former member of Ra's Al Ghul's League of Shadows from the first film, comes to Gotham to "finish" Al Ghul's work. This film also introduces Anne Hathaway as Catwoman. I'll tell you, i had my doubts about her as Catwoman until i rewatched the old Batman TV series from the sixties and became reaquainted with Julie Newmar's Catwoman. At that point, i thought 'if Hathaway plays Catwoman just like that, it'll work'. And she did. And it worked. I also appreciated that Bane was handled with respect and dignity. For those who don't follow the comics, Bane was a character in the nineties who broke Batman's back. For a year, while he recuperated, Bruce Wayne was NOT Batman. This led to probably the most interesting year in Batman's history. Bane was brought, luchadore mask and all, into "Batman and Robin" basically to carry Poison Ivy's luggage. In this film, they ditched the luchadore mask in favor of a mouthpiece.

THE GOOD: Overall, an excellent film. The story is great, the special effects rock, and the performances overall are very good. The film is just short of three hours long and you don't notice the time passing. Nolan brings the same bizarre touches to this film that he did to "Memento", "Inception" and the previous Batman films.

THE BAD: Let me start this section with a disclaimer: these are just little nit-picky problems that i had with the film. Nothing major. So if you want to skip this, fine. Okay, on to the picking of nits... I hated Batman's cape in this film. For some weird reason, they replaced the cape that they used in the previous two films with this black velveteen thing that doesn't hang or billow right. Because it's jet black, it also doesn't mesh well with Batman's costume, which is gray-black. They changed Bane's backstory slightly from the comics, and i would have liked to have known more about him. A good editor would have also trimmed about 30 minutes from the film without damaging it. They also missed a bet with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who played a young cop who figured out Batman's secret identity. In the first film, Batman saved a young boy who had been gassed with the Scarecrow's fear gas, and Batman said "Don't be afraid" and the boy said "I'm not". This should have been Gordon-Levitt's character, and it wasn't.

THE UGLY: Christian Bale's heart didn't seem to be in this film. His performance didn't seem to be up to his usual excellent standards.

All in all an excellent film, well worth theater prices. They left the film open for sequels, but Nolan will be missed as director.

Peace.

Randal

The Culture of Conflict

I had a very disheartening experience last night.

I belong to a dating website called okcupid.com. I haven't had a lot of success there. Met my second wife through it, not sure if you'd call that success or not the way that things worked out. But anyway, the site will occasionally pick three people out that it thinks that you'll like for your "quiver". Sometimes it's off and sometimes it's WAY off.

So last night i was looking at my quiver matches and quite enjoying one of the profiles. She's a teacher, which i dig. She's articulate and seems intelligent, both of which are good. She has a cute nose. Then when i got down to the section about TV shows that she watches she put "FOX News (LOL)". I wasn't sure what that meant. I mean, if i told anyone who knows me that i'm an avid Faux News viewer they would say "Yeah, right" realizing that i was being sarcastic or ironic. And she had said earlier in her profile that she was looking for someone who shared her dry sense of humor. Okay, so she's being ironic.

Then a little later, she said that one of the things that she enjoys doing is trolling Yahoo News on the internet and leaving comments just to "piss liberals off". Okay... so her "LOL" after FOX News wasn't meant to be ironic and i was back to being confused about it.

This got me to thinking about the culture of conflict that we have in this country that's preventing us from moving forward, and Faux news viewers are not the only ones responsible. Both democrats and republicans (i won't say liberals and conservatives because i don't feel that these parties represent those ideals anymore, if they ever really did) have fallen into this pattern of just getting up in each others faces and refusing to budge. Republicans are just better at it, because today's democrats are a bunch of wimps who tend to fold like a birthday card whenever the republicans want something. I just don't understand it, frankly. If you have two people trying to go somewhere and both refuse to move, guess what doesn't happen? Both sides seem to have the intellectual attitude of "shoot first, ask questions later" and i personally can't think of a worse way to get information. Ask your questions first. Get your information first.

Then shoot.

I will say, though, that it also confuses me because she's a science teacher. Anyone who watches Faux News on one side or MSNBC on the other shows a blind loyalty to one party and a blind refusal to listen to the good ideas of the other. And i can't figure out how a science teacher can blindly support this party. This is the party who supported Scott Walker, who wants to balance a state budget by cutting the pensions of teachers. This is the party that insists that the non-scientific non-theory of "creation science" be taught side-by-side with the scientific theory of evolution. This is the party that insists that global climate change was dreamed up by Al Gore in 2000 to destroy American business.

So i guess what i'm asking is that we get past this habit of digging our feet in on stuff and start compromising enough to move forward again.

Peace.

Randal

Movie Review: The Amazing Spider-Man

Year: 2012
Director: Marc Webb (No joke)
Writer: James Vanderbilt
Alvin Sargent
Steve Kloves
Stars: Andrew Garfield
Emma Stone
Martin Sheen
Sally Field

I'm a DC guy. Always have been. Superman, Batman, the Flash. Seriously. The only Marvel comics that i read with any regularity were the "weird" titles... Werewolf By Night was a favorite, and of course, House of Dracula, and Dracula's nemesis, Blade.

And Spider-man.

None of the other Marvel heroes captured my imagination quite like Spider-man did. Maybe it was because he was a little tormented, but not as mopey and gloomy as the rest of the Marvel heroes. Even BATMAN seemed more energetic than most of the Marvel Heroes. I realized pretty quickly that if you thought too hard about Spider-man's powers he would fall off the side of the skyscraper and die on a New York city street (like if it's his skin that allows him to cling to stuff, shouldn't his gloves and boots make him fall?), but the stories... especially the early stories by Lee and Ditko and the 80's stories by John Byrne... were really gripping, well-told tales.

So here comes desperately needed reboot of the Spider-man franchise. The basic story, for those who don't know, is teenage Peter Parker being bitten by a radioactive spider and gaining the powers of a spider. The ability to climb walls, super agility and strength. In this film, unlike the earlier series, Parker has to build his web shooters like he did in the comic. The bad guy in this film is the tragic Dr. Curt Conners, AKA the Lizard. I like that Dr. Conners was trying to do good and wound up doing bad in the process. The only reason that he fights Spider-man is because he sees Spidey as trying to stand in the way of his grand design for human beings.

THE GOOD: The story. Except for having to retell his origin (a necessary evil) the story moves along at a great clip. It's a fun, engaging movie. The performances, for the most part, are terrific, but what do you expect from a cast like Emma Stone, Martin Sheen, Sally Field and Denis Leary?

THE BAD: I hate to say it, but Andrew Garfield as Spider-man. He gives a good performance, but he's also very twitchy and spastic. It's almost like he was trying to be too serious of an actor. Which he is. He's a very serious actor. But when you're playing a super hero, you have to let some of that go and just have fun with the role. I'm also starting to get really tired of seeing actors in their twenties playing high school students. At one point Emma Stone says to Denis Leary "Dad, I'm SEVENTEEN!" Sure you are, sweetheart. No offense, but you're obviously NOT seventeen.

THE UGLY: Spider-man 2 and Spider-man 3. The first Spider-man film was so good that i expected great things from the sequels that they didn't deliver. Spider-man 2 wasn't bad, it was just basically a replay of the first film and Spider-man 3 started off great and then degenerated to beyond terrible in the second half. And this was the one that i most looking forward to because this was the film that introduced Venom, one of the great villains of all time. I knew that i was in trouble when i saw that they had cast Topher Grace (Eric from "That 70's Show" as Venom. Please, guys... you've started off so well... please don't let us down again with the sequels.

All in all a great film. And the 3-d effects are definitely worth the extra dollar or two.

Peace.

Randal

Americans Need To Ask Better Questions

When the newly-elected governor of Michigan announced last year or year before that he planned on balancing the state budget on the backs of teachers, it made me mad. You know what made me madder? The drive to recall him.

When he rode into office on a wave of "I'll do whatever's necessary to balance the state budget", no one bothered to say "Really? And what are your plans?" If he had said "Well, i plan on cutting the pay, benefits and pensions of teachers", then i'm sure that he wouldn't have been elected. As it is, no one bothered to ask, so he didn't have to tell.

But that's one of the big problems with America today. We don't ask enough questions. Like when Walmart promises that they'll always have the lowest prices. Heck, sometimes they'll drop their prices so low that a competitor will have to go out of business because they can't compete. But it seems like no one asks "How?"

Well, since the majority of Americans today have no idea how retail works, let me explain it to you.

Contrary to what it seems, retailers don't just randomly assign prices to things. It's actually a formula. This isn't exact, but it goes more or less like this... overhead (payroll, electricity, advertising, taxes, etc) plus profit margin equals markup. Markup plus wholesale cost equals the price of the item. I can tell you that in our "get rich or die tryin'" 21st century mentality, profit margin is the last thing to get cut. You know what's usually first? Well, they can't change the amount of taxes that they pay... they can't significantly change the cost of their electricity... i mean they can, but only to a certain extent. So what does that leave? Payroll. The first thing to go in payroll is usually benefits. Like Walmart setting it up so that only about 45% of their employees (most of that 45% being management) have access to health benefits. But we don't have to worry about that because we don't pay for that, right? Except, when one of these people, unable to afford to see a doctor for that cold goes into the ER to be treated for pneumonia and can't pay their bill, who do you think does? You and I. Another thing that they do is pay the absolute minimum that they can for labor. But we don't have to worry about that, either, because it just saves us money, right? Except that a lot of these people end up on government assistance of one sort or another (food stamps, energy assistance, whatever), which we pay for. Another trick that not just Walmart, but a LOT of retailers do (Target seems to be the only one that doesn't do this) is to have one employee performing four or five tasks at once. This doesn't actually cost us money, but think of this the next time that you're in a Walmart and see one employee going crazy trying to process returns, money orders and bill payments and answer the phones all at the same time. These hidden costs are what retailers call "backend" expenses. You don't see them... but they're there.

I saw this first hand years ago when i was working for Costco. A customer said "Why doesn't Costco have bags like everyone else does?" I responded "Because, ma'am, we don't charge you for bags." Her response? "The grocery store doesn't charge me for bags." Of course they do. That's part of their overhead.

And it goes deeper than that, too. Every since the Reagan administration, we've allowed slave labor to assemble our crap. And i don't want to hear that garbage about how anything that we pay them is better than what they could get otherwise. When you look at an outfit like the Chinese company Foxconn, which builds Apple products, and take into account that many of their employees are working sixteen hour days and six hour weeks for almost no pay and no benefits, it doesn't become worth it. When they had five employee suicides in five months because of the working conditions, it doesn't become worth it. When you realize that (i think that the figure is) 40% of the money that we send over there goes to enrich and prop up the Communist government, It doesn't become worth it.

We're full of big talk about how we're working to bring democracy to the world, and that we want everyone to have the same quality of life that we do. But that's all that it is... talk. Unless you mean, like Newt Gingrich apparently does, that we should lower our quality of life to match the average Chinese quality of life. And trust me... most of them ain't living high on the hog. We're really perfectly okay with propping up a repressive government like China as long as we can get an HDTV for $200, or overthrowing a democratically elected government like we did in Iran in the forties or Cuba in the fifties. In both cases, we disliked the duly-elected official, so we performed a coup and put someone that we liked in power. In Iraq it was the Shah. In Cuba it was a bright young up-and-comer named Fidel Castro.

Now. Having said that, i would also like to say that it may be too late to change our massive sell-out of our economy to Communist China. We are so deeply in debt to China that our politicians have to convince us that we're really doing something good over there, because if one of them actually had the balls to suggest that we change the way that we're doing things all that China has to do is call that debt home and our economy sinks like an anchor. The republicans are right... we need to change the way that we're doing things. But cutting the salaries of Americans, denying Americans health care and robbing our teachers and public officials isn't the way to do it.

Peace.

Randal

Movie Review: Ringmaster

Year: 1998
Director: Neil Abramson
Writer: Jon Bernstein
Stars: Jerry Springer
Jaime Pressly
Molly Hagan

I've been meaning to watch this film for years because i like the two female leads. Really i have. Just not enough to... you know... actually RENT it or add it to my Netflix queue or anything. I kept thinking "I like those two... i'd like to see that one of these days." So a couple weeks ago it was on one of Showtime's innumerable channels, so i dropped it on the DVR and finally watched it a couple of days ago. Why the delay? I hate the Jerry Springer show, as well as his new show on GSN, "Baggage". I mean, i don't dislike Springer himself, he strikes me as a man of some intellect and talent. One of those talents just seems to be making crappy TV shows. At my old job they would watch his show in our breakroom and... i swear that this is true... every time that i heard that "JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!" it would give me a stomach ache. I'm not kidding. In the interest of full disclosure, i have watched two almost full episodes of the show. One because i was channel flipping and i saw that he had as his guests the Shappell twins, two of my heroines. These two women have lived their entire lives (i'm not even kidding here) joined at the forehead. They've even managed to make a bit of an acting career for themselves. It's amazing. The other time it was the whole freakshow element of the thing. I don't remember how i started this one, but there was the gorgeous girl on there breaking up with her schnook of a boyfriend. I couldn't help but think "how'd this guy let himself get into this?" Then they brought they guy out that she was sleeping with, and, of course, the two guys fought. After the commercial, they had everyone calmed down. Then she dumped the SECOND guy on national TV and they brought out the girl that she was now sleeping with. The girls kissed. What did they guys do? They couldn't beat up a girl. So they fought again. That's my shameful confession of the day. You don't get another one.

Oh, the movie? It was pretty good, actually. Molly and Jaime were both as sexy as all get-out and their two "guys" seemed adequately like whipped dogs through the whole film. And Jerry was... Jerry. If you don't know, the movie is like a behind-the-scenes story of the Springer show. Molly and Jaime are mother and daughter who were going to be on an episode called "I slept with my step-daddy". That about sums it up.

The good: This actually seems like a pretty honest look at the Springer show. I mean, at one point, a reporter is interviewing Springer when a tussle breaks out in the hallway between two of the guests. After Jerry helps to break it up and scolds them, he returns to the interviewer, who asks "Are they okay?" And Jerry says "Of course they're not... they're on my show."

The bad: With the exception of Jerry, the male characters in this movie are like cardboard cut-outs. They're more male stereotypes than men. You have the unemployed, hard-drinking horny redneck. You have the dumb, whipped young redneck. You have the dog of a black guy who will sleep with anything female that moves, but is especially drawn to white girls. There are also some major editing and continuity problems with the film. Like at one point the young, dumb redneck locked his key card in the hotel room that he shared with his girlfriend, Jaime. So he goes out to see the town. He returns later and somehow opens his door to find Jaime having sex with the dog of a black guy. Molly Hagan gets her t-shirt signed by Jerry, who signs it "love, Jerry". In the next scene, the writing on the T looks completely different and it says "thanks, Jerry".

The ugly: The Jerry Springer Show. This show generally shows no respect for humanity at all. Like those "Which of these five guys that i slept with over the course of a week is my baby's daddy?" episodes. I mean, you know that this crap is going to be in syndication for ever. What happens when that kid's twelve and his friends recognize his mom on a rerun? It's awful.

Peace.

Randal

Sexuality

I realized after i wrote that blog entry on gay marriage that i should probably make myself clear on sexuality in general.

First off, as a Christian, i believe that God WANTS us to enjoy the gift of sexuality responsibly. If God only wanted us to enjoy sexuality within the confines of marriage, then that's what we'd be able to do. I mean, God's pretty good at making things work the way that God wants them to work. Besides, as some great wit once said, if God didn't want us to masturbate, then our arms wouldn't be the right length.

Also, i believe that heterosexuality and homosexuality are not only misnomers, but a false dichotomy. I say that they are misnomers because it's not really about sex. It's about who you love. It's about who you want to spend your days and nights with. Let's face it, you don't have sex with everyone that you love and most of us don't always love everyone that we have sex with. My preferred terms, because i think that they're more accurate, are heteroamorous or homoamorous. I say that it's a false dichotomy because, except for maybe John Wayne at one of the spectrum and Harvey Fierstien at the other end, there are no perfect homo- or heterosexuals. Years ago, in the fifties, the great sex researcher Alferd Kinsey came up with his scale of human sexuality. The scale runs from zero (absolutely heterosexual) to six (absolutely homosexual). I think that most of us tend to fall somewhere on that spectrum outside of zero and six. Kinsey, for instance, classed himself as a two. I would class myself as about a zero point five. I think that homophobes (or heterophobes, they do exist) would class themselves as a perfect zero or six, but tend to be more like a two, three or four.

Good information on the Kinsey scale can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale

Peace.

Randal