First and foremost, right at the beginning (spoilers) Ben Affleck wakes up from his first memory loss job and wants to make sure he is ok. So he goes over to the stick fighting practice range and whacks some big soft pylons with a stick. Gee, I WONDER IF HE WILL GET TO USE HIS STICK FIGHTING SKILLS LATER? Perhaps. A second annoying aspect of this scene is that Paul Giamatti, in addition to being some kind of neurosurgeon, is apparently an ace stick fighting coach. Sidekick for all purposes!

The second ham-handed foreshadowing event is Uma Thurman’s use of her fancy remote control thingy in her plant lab. She hilariously makes robots fly around doing crazy things and makes the wind blow. Gee, I WONDER IF SHE WILL USE HER REMOTE CONTROL TO FIGHT SOME BAD GUYS LATER? Perhaps. Another non-foreshadowing annoyance is this: why would an evil mastermind place his all-powerful top-security future-seeing machine right next door to Uma Thurman’s plant lab? Does the machine run on biodiesel? Would it be wiser to have a bit of distance between the two labs?

I contrast this to the techniques used in “Cast Away”. Right at the end (spoiler) Tom Hanks makes a dramatic escape from the island by sailing a makeshift boat over the breakers. How can he do this? Does he have magical hero sailing abilities? No, he’s established early on as being an accomplished sailor. Not by a heavy-handed establishing scene of an MC announcing “and the winner of this year’s regatta is Tom Hanks!” No. Instead they have a couple sailing trophies in the background of a non-sailing related scene. This is good enough.

Anyway, I still like “Paycheck”.

The first problem with the movie is that there is no perceivable story arc. The three main characters go out on a series of missions, defuse some bombs and make a series of ridiculous decisions. The end. There is no development that I really care about as an audience member. This in itself could kill the movie.

A larger fault with the movie is that the protagonist is extremely unlikeable. He is totally out of control in a situation where control over oneself is absolutely critical. Not only does this make an emotional connection difficult, it is also impossible to believe that he would be allowed to operate the way he does for more than a day without being busted to private and sent off to peel potatoes. I’ve met members of Canada’s 1st combat engineers who deal with bombs in Afghanistan. I was extremely impressed with their dedication, and the level of seriousness they treated the problem of IEDs. I have a feeling they would be insulted to be associated with the behaviour demonstrated in this movie.

The fact is, even with my limited knowledge of real military life, this movie is totally unbelievable. There is a long list of obvious errors. Why is a bomb disposal tech allowed to act with total disregard for himself and his fellow team members? Where is the oversight? Are there no officers calling the shots here? Why are three bomb disposal techs driving around by themselves in the desert looking for trouble? Since when are bomb disposal techs trained to operate .50 cal sniper rifles to a level of expertise where they can headshot a running target at 800 meters? Assuming a bomb disposal tech is trained in sniping, why does he set up his rifle in the exact same spot where his buddy just got wasted 10 seconds before? Why do we never see the bomb techs communicating with anybody else? They never call for help! Why are three bomb disposal techs running around alleys at night, ultimately splitting up to search more effectively? Why did they leave their humvee, mounted with a .50 cal machine gun, parked unattended in a Baghdad street? How exactly did the protagonist manage to leave the compound searching for the kid’s family? Did he tell the guys at the gate that he was going out for milk? Why was the protagonist referred to as “sir” at least twice in the movie, when he is a sergeant?

When you make a movie about a real conflict, one that is still going on, you are constrained to tell your story within the boundaries of what is actually happening in that conflict. You can stretch the truth, but if you go too far then the movies looks more like a farce then a serious work. Doing this properly is not easy to accomplish, but it can be done, and has been done in the past. This is not something that has to be dealt with by story tellers who are telling fictional stories (e.g. Avatar). They can invent their own context. The makers of The Hurt Locker did not have this luxury, but apparently thought they did. And because of this they failed.

One such situation occured in grade 11, where we read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and had a small in-class discussion. I imagine everybody has read this short story at some point, but for those who haven’t, it describes (SPOILER!) a small town where all the people get together on a certain day, draw lots, and then stone the winner to death. The End.

So, my memory centers around one question, where the teacher asked something along the lines of “when do you think the story was situated?” A student raised his hand and responded “I think it was set a long time ago, hundreds of years, and these are people following an ancient rite.” Whoah! thought I. I don’t think this is correct at all. The teacher nodded his head, though, confirming the student’s answer as being correct, and prepared to move on. I had to interject, though. I did, and said “Wait, I don’t think that’s correct. There really isn’t anything in the story to indicate any particular time period. The people live in houses, which could occur any time, and there aren’t really any means of transportation that could betray it being set in some time. I think it was left intentionally ambiguous, so that the story could be used to illustrate the risk of slipping towards barbarism, regardless of the era.”

This obviously annoyed the hell out of the teacher. He didn’t want a debate. He wanted to get through the questions. The other students were also annoyed. They didn’t want to listen to me blabbering. So I was dismissed offhand, and we continued.

I remembered this. And periodically I would wonder: was I wrong? Was “The Lottery” actually set in some specific bygone era? Am I an intellectual fraud who suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect? Or did I know what I was talking about?

Well, today I happened across a mention of The Lottery, and it linked to the wikipedia entry. Looking at wikipedia I found these quotes fom the author: “I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers [...]“, and “Jackson lived in Burlingame, California, and [...] reveals that she had Bennington in mind when she wrote “The Lottery”.”

So, not only did she set the story in the present, but she set it in a specific small California town! This isn’t quite the same as my theory that she wrote it to be non-specific to era (although I think there may be an element of that), but it is FAR from the teacher’s assertion that it was set in some ancient village.

So, now I can rest. My teacher was an idiot, I was right, and I deserve better than the B I received on that assignment.

Now I’m older, and Dairy Queen isn’t quite the same. If I wanted I could eat there every day, although thankfully I don’t, and when I do go I don’t get that mystical feeling. That would be fine, and an expected outcome of getting older, but this post has to do with a different aspect of Dairy Queen.

Recently I went to Dairy Queen and ordered some sort of brownie/ice-cream/chocolate concoction. The ice cream was good, but the syrup was too sweet, and the brownie was sweeter than the syrup. Plus, the brownie and syrup comprised over half of the entire desert. The thing was basically inedible, except for the little bits of ice cream that I could excavate from between the gross syrup and brownie parts.

So, I wonder. Have Dairy Queen treats become grosser, or have my tastes changed? I think it is the former, since my tastes in other desserts haven’t changed much. So then why is Dairy Queen making these gross things? Have they focus grouped these desserts and determined they test well with people who like gross things? Are people who like gross things Dairy Queen’s main demographic target? I’m guessing the answer must be yes. They have even started mixing syrup in with the Blizzards.

Anyway, I’ll stick to my Blizzards, and I’ll make sure to request it be kept syrup-free.

“Mad Men” makes me feel dumb. There’s not a lot of actual “stuff” going on in the show (take as evidence this tongue-in-cheek fake trailer). There’s a total absence of gunfights, and the tension between characters is frequently hidden under a surface of civility. A result of this is that I often struggle to figure out the significance of what is going on. I can feel that every scene has meaning, but I only occasionally pick up on what is important (the ones I pick up on are often Don Draper monologues). For example, recently I found myself struggling to interpret a scene of Grandpa Gene teaching Sally to drive.

Well, I found a fantastic resource to help those like me who suffer from Mad Men inadequacy syndrome. This blog does an exellent job of analyzing, perhaps even over-analyzing, every detail of every episode. On reading the first entry I felt my eyes opened up to the importance of the show. This is the guide I need in my Mad Men watching. Tangentialy, it reminds me of my favourite class of all time, German Literature 051/052 (in translation) with Prof. William Reeve at Queen’s, where we dissected every detail of some great works (Goethe, Kleist, Mann, Grass). There was just no way I could absorb these works without proper guidance.

So I heartily encourage everybody to watch “Mad Men”, and I also encourage them to find an online guide to help them in their voyage.

The stories are well written, having a grand operatic feel to them, but what I find most interesting are the themes that lie on the periphery of the main stories. In particular I am fascinated by the relationship between the human members of the Culture and the machine members. The Culture is so advanced that is has managed to create artificial intelligences that possess almost infinite computational abilities. Many of them, especially the smaller “person-like” AIs are limited in intelligence, presumably so that the humans can relate. There are also many super intelligent AIs that run very large space ships on which millions of people live. The AIs are so powerful that they can monitor everything that is happening on the space ship and intervene if, for example, one of the millions of inhabitants is about to fall down and hit his head. They can also perform complicated reasoning beyond anything that humans can comprehend.

What I find interesting about the concept of the AIs is that, with them around, humans are far from being the dominant intelligence in the society. Humans are so inferior that they can never even really understand the nature of their relationship with the AIs. The AIs SEEM to be nice and supportive, and allow the humans freedom, but how can the humans really KNOW that they are free. A parallel might be a relationship between a dog and owner. A dog can never figure out the relationship between it and the human owner.

Of course the super AI theme has been explored before, for example in The Matrix and Terminator movies. But they are comparatively simple situations, because the relationship between the humans and the machines is purely adversarial. The balance between human and machine in this case is very clear. But the “friendly” relationship between humans and machines in the Culture novels is less clear, and is perhaps quite sinister, simply because the humans don’t and can’t know what is going on.

I recommend Banks’ books for some good but not mind blowing reading. He also writes normal (non SF) fiction. The one example I read was “The Steep Approach to Garbadale” which had a good story, but was marred by overly insistent political diatribes.

My latest run-in with Gladwell, and the inspiration for this post, was on TV the other night. He was being interviewed about his book, and specifically brought up his example of how The Beatles became famous. The Beatles, he explained, spent some time playing strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany. This was before they were famous, and they would regularly play 8 hour sets, 7 days a week. This is a very difficult schedule, and as Gladwell explains, this stint of very intensive performing (he equates performing with practicing, which is a mistake in itself), is the reason they became famous. Note, he does not say that this contributed to their success; he says it is the reason for their success. He was very explicit in saying that “talent is the willingness to practice.” This is horse hockey.

I don’t think anyone would dispute that effort is a critical element of success. But, anybody who has spent any time in a creative field would immediately recognize that with the same amount of effort given, there are wide variances in the level of individual accomplishment. In my life I have known dozens of individuals who have put in similar amounts of effort to The Beatles in Hamburg. After having invested the time the results were that these people range wildly in ability, from terrible to very good. None of them, I am sad to say, have reached Beatles levels of accomplishment.

To put it another way, The Beatles were certainly not the only band to play 8 hour sets 7 days a week in Hamburgian strip clubs. Where are the other bands who did so? They put in the same amount of effort as The Beatles. According to Malcolm Gladwell they should be equally accomplished.

Malcolm Gladwell is a very eloquent speaker. He presents things in such a way that one has a tendency to immediately agree with him. But, after a little bit of effort and probably a minute or so spent analyzing his statements one realizes that they just don’t hold up (I call this the Stephen Lewis effect). Furthermore, his writing seems designed specifically to make us feel better about ourselves. The particular claim that effort is the only differentiator is perfect for convincing myself that yes, I can be a rock star or an NFL quarterback, all I have to do is get off the couch (I’ll do this next week) and go put some effort in. I’m sorry, but the bottom 99% of us are simply incapable of being world class at pretty much everything. Implying otherwise is not going to help.

So, Mr. Gladwell, I really don’t think your writing is any good. I know you’ve put in the effort to write good books, but I don’t think you have the innate talent required to do so. And yes, the title is overly harsh, but I decided to honour Mr. Gladwell by extrapolating further than is justifiable from the data available.

My life’s relevancy ratio in general isn’t all that good. If you add up all the time I spend watching TV, sleeping, and dreaming about becoming an astronaut, you are left with maybe 2% of my time being actually productive, in the sense that it will advance humanity in some form. But now, after discovering how much of that stuff is fluff, I feel I have to now downgrade that score to 1%. That is a full 50% drop in estimated total relevant output.

And if the paper gets rejected the score is zero.

But then you run across something like this video of a guy named Rodney Mullen skateboarding, and you have to conclude that no, we are not hopeless. No matter how much evil there is in the world there remain great people who focus on bettering themselves, on creation rather than destruction, and expression rather than oppression. These people accomplish fantastic and beautiful things. We are not animals, and that which separates us from animals is evident in this video. Rodney Mullen, I salute you.

But fear not. The second Google result goes directly to a page on the CBC website, where a video of a performance has been embedded. A video linked from YouTube. The same video that doesn’t exist because the CBC demanded it be taken down.