May 2008 Archives

Oh, boy, here we go again... another perfectly good noun transmogrified into an inelegant verb by the corporate buzz-speakers. From the document I'm proofing at work this afternoon:

"Can you evidence your compliance to... these standards?"

Evidence your compliance? Do you think they mean supply evidence of your compliance?

If you need me for the next few minutes, I'll be beating my head on a copy of Merriam-Webster's.

[Update: Huh. According to Merriam-Webster's, evidence was a verb, once upon a time. Circa 1610, to be precise, when it meant "to offer evidence of : PROVE, EVINCE syn see SHOW."

Somehow, I doubt that whoever wrote the whitepaper I found the term in knew that, though.]

This is a little too long, but pretty it's it's pretty amusing:

What? I've never claimed not to have a dirty mind...

(Actually, this clip makes me want to go back and re-watch The Next Gen, at least the TV episodes. Not the dreary movies. It's been a long time since I've seen any of the TV eps, and I've just realized that I kind of miss them...)

Via.

I've been saying all along that the only thing I really wanted from this movie was to see some old friends and find out what they've been up to for the last 20 years. It's not that I had low expectations, exactly; I like to think that I had realistic expectations. I wasn't looking for a transcendent experience, or a return to the happy days of childhood, as I was with the Star Wars prequels. I knew going into Crystal Skull that it wasn't going to be the second coming of Raiders or even of Temple or Last Crusade; basically, I just hoped the flick wouldn't be an embarrassing disaster.

After seeing it twice, I am happy to say that it was not a disaster. What it was, exactly, I'm still trying to figure out, so forgive me if the following is something of a ramble.

There are spoilers below the fold, so be careful if you somehow still don't what this movie is about...

I'm sure you're dying to know what I thought, so here's the short version: I liked Crystal Skull well enough, but I didn't love it. I had some reservations, and some things I wanted to take a couple of days to think about before I posted anything.

While you wait for the longer review -- because I know everyone out there in InternetLand is waiting with bated breath for my humble opinion of a movie you've probably all seen by now anyway -- allow me to entertain you with the following video clip, relayed to me this morning by Brian Greenberg:

People are weird...

Update: Doh! BoingBoing is reporting that this video is a viral marketing campaign from an agency that has the LucasArts games account. And as it so happens, there is an Indiana Jones LEGO game coming out in a couple of weeks to tie in with the release of Crystal Skull. So... it looks like I got taken, kids, used against my will and without my knowledge to spread the word about a product I will see no profit from myself and have no interest in helping to promote. And I have to admit, I'm feeling pretty damn annoyed about that.

In the interest of full disclosure, my own employer has been involved in creating several viral campaigns, but personally, I just don't "get" this sort of marketing. It seems to me that there's something sneaky about it, like you're trying to fool people into listening to a pitch, and very often the pitch is so subtle that the commercial message doesn't come through anyhow. If you have to really dig into the background of a video clip or a web site to find out there's something being sold there, how can you say that your message is being effectively delivered? How many people really exert that kind of effort? And isn't there a potential backlash against the product that's being advertised when people do realize that that funny clip they've been passing around to their friends is just another freakin' ad? I know I'd feel a little bit scammed and a hell of a lot less charitable toward Product X. Just like I'm feeling right now about freakin' Lego video games...

The funny thing is, I don't even remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark when it first came out. That's odd for me, because I can recall the circumstances and specific theaters where I saw every other major landmark film of my childhood: the Star Wars trilogy, the early Star Trek films, Superman, Tron, The Black Hole, hell, even Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. But not Raiders.

Sharing a few of the items that have caught my eye in the last couple of weeks:

Oh, and here are a couple of other things that went down while I was back east:

• One of my co-workers crashed his bicycle on Saturday during a race or a marathon or something and has spent several days in the hospital suffering from a severe concussion.

• And my corporate overlords started replacing those Flavia coffee machines on every floor with these nifty gadgets from Starbucks that actually grind fresh beans on demand for every cup they brew. I'm not the biggest fan of Starbucks, but my lord, this stuff is such an improvement over that vile "astronaut coffee" I've been suffering with for three years. I no longer have to leave the office to get a decent cup o' joe.

  Of course, the downside is that I no longer have to leave the office to get a decent cup o' joe... hm.

In any event, you see what happens when you leave town for a couple of days? Good thing I wasn't gone four days; we'd have cats and dogs living together, mass chaos!

One of the more colorful characters that has populated my life the last couple of years is a guy my co-workers and I dubbed "the Dancing Man." During the warmer months, he was a regular fixture on the plaza outside my office, out there at lunchtime just about every day, boogeying until his silk shirt was soaked through with sweat. Most days, he brought his own boombox and played an eclectic mix of rock, funk, and stuff I don't know how to classify. Every couple of weeks, the plaza plays host to a live act as part of Salt Lake's Brown Bag Concert Series, and he danced to the bands as well, regardless of who they were or what they played, as long as there was a good beat. He had some slick moves and was enjoyable to watch, but he could also be a bit unnerving with his intensity, and the occasional weird vocalization he would make, little shouts and popping noises. It often seemed as if he were in a trance or some other transcendent state of mind when he danced; as silly as it sounds, I was frequently reminded of the voodoo rituals I've seen in movies.

The weirdness ran deeper than his tendency to lose himself in the dance, though. Some of my co-workers interviewed him a while back for an in-house film project, figuring they'd just get something fun about a local eccentric. They got more than they bargained for when he started rambling about vampires and evil spirits and how he knew al-Qaeda had infiltrated a Salt Lake grocery chain and was planning to poison our food supply, but he couldn't get the FBI to listen to him. After that film made the rounds of the office intranet, everyone's enthusiasm for the Dancing Man cooled a little. We all wondered what his real story was, if he was dangerously nuts or just a guy with some funny ideas about how the world works.

Sunday afternoon, while I was in Pittsburgh, the Dancing Man -- whose real name was Douglas Cottrell -- was killed following a harrowing high-speed run from the police. The case has everyone a little baffled, because he wasn't wanted for anything serious; the officers just wanted to speak to him about a complaint made by someone who claimed that they'd paid Cottrell to do a job and he'd blown off doing it. It appears that he deliberately rammed his car into a semi-truck after racing up and down Parley's Canyon a couple of times with the cops in pursuit. According to his sister, Cottrell has suffered from schizophrenia most of his life, which no doubt explains his paranoid beliefs about terrorists in the produce section. It maybe also explains his devotion to his lunchtime ritual; maybe he only felt free when he was dancing.

I didn't know Doug Cottrell as anything other than a funny bit of scenery in my daily routine. But I hope that wherever he is now, there's a really smokin' band and that he's got a good pair of shoes. I can't speak for everyone else around work, but I, for one, am going to miss his performances...

Back in my pre-online days, I bought a lot of books via good old-fashioned mail-order catalogs, and even though this habit ended long ago, I still get quite a few book-related mailings in my daily allotment of recycling fodder. Sometimes this can lead to situations that I find perversely amusing. Yesterday, for example, I received a flyer advertising a new biography of the late president of the LDS Church, Gordon B. Hinckley. This on the same day that I also received a fat, full-color catalog from a company that specializes in, among other things, volumes of pin-up art and nude photography.

I can't imagine what my poor mail carrier must think...

Even as I type this, Dr. Jones is cracking his ratty old whip in theaters across the land and reviews are generally (thankfully) positive. Due to a cruel twist of fate, however, I won't be seeing it until tomorrow night, so all you folks out there who've already been just hold your tongues around me, okay? Okay!

In the meantime, let's all get in the mood with this catchy little ditty:

I don't know what I expected -- in fact, I'm not sure I even had a preconceived notion of how Gettysburg would look -- but the actual place surprised me. The battlefield is huge, for one thing, probably several square miles across (although I admit to being lousy at estimating distances; my dad has long been frustrated by my tendency to think three inches look like one of them). I guess I must've imagined it as a modest hay field like the ones I remember growing up. It turned out to be a fan-shaped plain bounded by two ridges (well, they call them ridges, but they're not dramatic vanes of rock bursting out of the earth like the ridges around here; they're actually more like grassy linear hills). And I also figured it would be empty and solemn, with nothing but strands of grass to catch the fickle breeze. Instead, the place is lousy with monuments, statues, and cannons, and every rock where a general sat or rested a boot has a marker on it.

But that gives the wrong impression, makes the place sound vulgar or crass, and it's really not. It is, in fact, beautiful. The whole area is, with rolling hills and thick woodsy patches and more green than Utah will ever see, short of an atomic explosion in a local paint factory. I found it quite soothing, actually, even with the knowledge of what happened on that field 145 years ago, of how many men lost their lives in three days of brutal fighting and how much blood must have soaked into that soil.

I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to shape a narrative out of my quickie Pennsylvania adventure, but the fact is, there just wasn't much of a story there, so I think what I'll do instead of telling a story is just offer up a few highlights. In bullet-point form! Because everyone loves bullet-points...

A couple weeks ago, I was on the phone with my "evil twin," the inimitable Cranky Robert, who was telling me he had to go to Pittsburgh, PA, on business. He mentioned that while he was there, he was thinking of maybe taking a field trip to Gettysburg, the pivotal battlefield of the American Civil War, which is only a few hours from Pittsburgh by car. I said that sounded really cool, that I've always wanted to go there myself. He immediately suggested I fly out and join him for the weekend, that we do a good old-fashioned, no-girls-allowed road trip.

I leave tonight on a red-eye flight that'll put me in Pittsburgh tomorrow morning.

I'm really looking forward to this. I haven't done this sort of thing in a long time, and I think I could really use it. It's going to be just like being 21 again, only with a lot less hair and about 40 extra pounds. C'est la vie...

You kids play nice while I'm gone. See you all next week...

Here are a couple of items I've been meaning to post for several days and just haven't gotten around to:

Okay, I know I recently made a rather harsh comment about the biggest movie of the summer so far (the remark, if you weren't paying attention, was "screw Iron Man), but of course I went to see it on opening weekend anyhow (along with, apparently, most everybody else in the country), and, as it turned out, it was a hell of a good way to kick off the summer season. If you happen to be one of the three or so people left who hasn't seen it yet, I highly recommend it.

Eric D. Snider, a BYU alum who managed to escape from Happy Valley and find happiness and success as a film critic in the Pacific Northwest, still enjoys making the occasional good-natured jibe at the culture he left behind. Today, he offers us his suggestions for a whole new genre of filmmaking: the Mormon horror movie...

[Ed. note: these probably won't make sense to anyone who hasn't grown up behind the Zion Curtain, but trust me, to those in the know, this is good stuff...]

“Children of the Quorum”
“Friday the 31st” (aka “Home Teaching Day”)
“Pet Seminary”
“Enrichment Night of the Living Dead”
“I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I’m Telling Your Bishop”
“The (CTR) Ring”
“Rosemary’s Baby, Which is Her Fourth, and She’s Only 23″
“The Hills Have Tithes”

IMG_1118, originally uploaded by Dave Malkoff.

...just testing out a new toy (Flickr's "blog this photo" feature) and sharing a cool picture I saw earlier today...

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

The travel site Expedia really knows how to push my buttons: they're now offering "Indiana Jones Travel Experiences," i.e., trip itineraries to India, Egypt, Italy, China, Jordan, Mexico, Peru, or the American Southwest, all places that have some kind of tie-in to the four Indy movies, and all of course intended to cash in on the marketing push surrounding Crystal Skull. Just book me for one big package that includes every one of these... and curse my movie-fueled imagination!

(Actually, the Southwestern destinations are all within a day's drive of me, so we can forget that one... but the others? One of these days, my friends, one of these days...)

Nice site design, anyhow.

I'm such a sucker for these meme/booklist things. Sigh.

Courtesy of Jaquandor:

...it's a list of books most often marked "Unread" on LibraryThing, indicating books people have copies of either so they can say they own them, or in the best intentions of reading 'em someday if only James Patterson would quit churning out must-read thrillers or whatnot. (Like I'm any different!) Anyway, the instructions are to bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you've started but not finished. I'll add another two rules: strike the ones you know you'll never, ever read and don't even own a copy of, and mark with a star (*) the ones you own and really, genuinely intend to read one of these days. OK? OK!

(Note: I made a few minor editorial changes to Jaq's set-up; hope nobody minds!)

To this set of instructions, I'd also add a mark to indicate the books you do not own but would like to read one of these days. Let's make that one a plus sign ( +).

Alright then, shall we?

Like any other couple who have been together long enough to drop our camouflage shields and start showing our true, obnoxious selves, The Girlfriend and I tend to disagree pretty frequently on what constitutes good television. My picks tend toward PBS documentary series like Nova and The American Experience, old TV shows, and movies. Anne, on the other hand, is into all the do-it-yourself, makeover, and "slice of life" reality shows that clog up the basic cable channels. Which means that about nine times out of ten, when I show up at her apartment, the tube is set on TLC or The Food Network, and it's all I can do to keep from groaning out loud. (To be fair, she has much the same reaction when I run across an old Godzilla flick and settle in for a blissful evening of daikaiju silliness...)

Anyway, there is one basic-cable show that manages to cross party lines, appealing to both of us more or less equally with its mixture of travel, nostalgia, and greasy-spoon cuisine and culture, a Food Network program called Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. The set-up is that the host -- a boisterous Gen-Xer like ourselves called Guy Fieri -- drives around the country in a classic Camaro, stopping into, well, diners, drive-ins, and dives to sample regional food favorites and give a little history about the featured establishments. It's a fun show; a half-hour episode typically covers three quirky, mom-n-pop-style locations, and the eps are often themed in some way, like all family-owned diners, or places that are open 24/7.

The show's website includes a feature called "Tell Guy Where To Go," and not too long ago, The GF and I had some fun coming up with a list of our favorite Salt Lake-area places we thought the show ought to visit. We never got around to submitting our list, but it turns out we didn't have to: Guy was here last week, filming segments for the new season, and as it turns out, the places he visited match our list almost exactly:

Far out on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley -- about as far west as you can go without piling into a mountain, actually -- there's a little town called Magna.

My local readers probably all just snickered; Magna doesn't get a lot of respect around here. It began a century or so ago as a company town housing workers for a nearby mine and smelter, and it's never managed to live down its humble roots or its rough-and-tumble reputation. It's certainly not a place you'd think to go in search of an enjoyable night of live theater. But that's exactly what The Girlfriend and I experienced Friday night at a charming little place called the Empress Theatre.

The weekend box office results are in, and The Wachowski Brothers' live-action remake of the old Speed Racer cartoon is looking to be a total bomb. Doesn't surprise me in the least, as the previews made it look (to this grumpy old curmudgeon, at least) like a blur of meaningless color and noise that nobody would remember five minutes after leaving the theater, let alone a year from now. Peter David, however, liked the film and has a different prediction of how Speed Racer will fare long-term:

...I realized a lot of this negativism was sounding familiar to me. Too long. Too loud. Too overwhelming visually with lots of mindless sound and fury signifying nothing. And I realized where and when I had heard it all before:

"Blade Runner."

Critics and fans leveled many of the same complaints at "Blade Runner," comparing it unfavorably to other then-popular SF films, and it was crushed at the box office by a powerhouse called "E.T." "Blade Runner" tanked.

Yet over time it was seen as visionary, and its stylings le[f]t an indelible impression on fans and future filmmakers. Any number of dramatic endeavors have the visual stamp of "Blade Runner" upon them. ...I suspect you're going to see tricks from "Speed Racer" showing up in other films in the next years, and it's going to be one of those movies in which, years from now, film students are going to be seeing the basis for many subsequent films.

Well, maybe. You never know what's going to inspire today's kids when they become tomorrow's filmmakers, and it's tough to predict how any given thing is going to look after 10 or 20 years of hindsight. Still, I can see one big difference between Speed Racer in the year 2008 and Blade Runner in the year 1981:

I wanted to see Blade Runner...

TO: The young lady at the sandwich shop where I purchased lunch today

FROM: The poor schmuck whose only crime is having a pair of eyes and a Y chromosome

SUBJECT: Your impressive assets and the ornamentation thereof

Miss:

When you (a) have been generously endowed by nature; (b) accent said enhancement by wearing a form-fitting t-shirt with a deep scoop neckline; and (c) further call attention to the situation by getting tattoos in the shape of lightning bolts that plunge directly into the middle of your cleavage, please do not become alarmed when you actually receive admiring glances from any men you may encounter in your daily activities.

To wit, our brief encounter when you took my order for a BLT sandwich. I try really hard not to be that guy... you know, the skeezy dude who can carry on a conversation with a woman for ten minutes and never once make eye contact with her. Most of the time, I think I do reasonably well with that. But I am male, and I do like the female form, and, well... you have freakin' lightning-bolt tattoos on your cleavage, so how is it that I can possibly deserve the dirty look you gave me when I actually had the temerity to follow my hardwired biological imperative and your body-art encouragement to take a little peek? Did you really think no one would check out your bolts this morning when you picked out that particular shirt? And it's not like I was staring... sheesh. Either lighten up or or buy some regular crew necks, will you?

Regards,
An all-right guy who can't help but appreciate what's in the shop window... especially when the window is open...

I was listening to one of my old Jimmy Buffett CDs yesterday, and a couple of lines from the song "Pencil-Thin Mustache" grabbed my attention:

Now I'm gettin' old, don't wear underwear
I don't go to church and I don't cut my hair
But I can go to movies and see it all there
Just the way that it used to be

It's weird when something seems to have been written exclusively for you, isn't it? I mean... how did he know? Well, aside from the bit about the underwear. I'm not a fan of chafing...

I got a pretty good chuckle out of this:

Not enough of one to actually want to drink one of those yucky energy drinks, of course, but a laugh regardless...

A couple days ago, I got an email from someone called Amy at something called Blogged.com, informing me that "[her] editors recently reviewed [my] blog and have given it an 8.1 score out of (10) in the Entertainment category of Blogged.com." Suspicious, cynical man that I am, I naturally assumed that the message was some variety of spam or maybe even a highly targeted phishing scheme. However, the fact that everything in the message was spelled correctly gave me the sense that it might be for real, so I thought I'd do a little googling when I had a free moment and try to determine what this Blogged.com thing was all about. It turns out that it is indeed a legit operation. This site describes it as "an online directory for all the blogs in the world. ...a catalog that offers information on the entire blog and its overall content." Which is actually a pretty cool idea, if rather ambitious (all the blogs in the world? How many do you suppose that is? Would it really be possible to catalog them all?).

I must admit, I'm flattered that my humble little scribblings here (a) attracted the notice of this sort of organization, and (b) that I scored quite highly in the eyes of those mysterious editors, whoever they may be. It's a nice pat on the head to have some maybe-professional say my stuff is "great." However, I'm not sure what to think of Simple Tricks being pigeonholed as an "entertainment blog." I know I write a lot about movies and TV, but I think of this place as my personal blog, not an entertainment blog in the sense of something like, say, ScreenRant or even Jaime Weinman's Something Old, Nothing New. My purpose here is to write about whatever happens to be on my mind... which I suppose the evidence would show tends to be movies and television. I don't know... maybe it's just the idea of being so easily categorized that rubs me the wrong way, or perhaps it's the notion that I might be somewhat single-minded (and hence, potentially, kinda boring). Anyone have any thoughts on this?

One of the little games I enjoy is trying to imagine what iconic movie characters would've been like if they'd been played by someone other than whoever made them into icons. For example, I think everyone knows that Tom Selleck would've been Indiana Jones if CBS hadn't held him to his Magnum contract, and that Ronald Reagan was once considered for Bogart's signature role, Rick Blaine in Casablanca. (For the record, I think Selleck would've made a fine Indy, but nobody today would remember Casablanca if Reagan had played Rick. Just my opinion, of course...)

Somewhat lesser known is that Nick Nolte was considered for Han Solo, and that Luke and Leia could just as easily have been played by William Katt (of The Greatest American Hero fame) and Spielberg's one-time girlfriend, Amy Irving, rather than Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.

One of the most intriguing possibilities, however, is the notion that Cary Grant could've been the original James Bond. That seems startling at first, given the lightweight stuff that Grant is mostly remembered for, but I really think it might have worked. I've long thought that North by Northwest has much the same tone and style as Dr. No, and I believe Grant could've played brutality if the script had called for it. Someone else apparently thinks so, too. Here's a video compilation that gives you a taste of what might have been:

The image you see up there at the top of this entry is a poster I remember well from my younger days, when I was working at that infamous movie theater I've mentioned many times before. You see, back in the late '80s, THX sound was still quite the novelty, at least in these parts, and my theater -- the first in Utah to boast a THX-certified auditorium -- used to heavily promote the system. This item, which the manager would occasionally throw up in one of the one-sheet cases when he didn't have any interesting new movie posters to display, attempted to explain to average movie-goers why sound is a critical part of their viewing experience, and how a THX-certified system enhances that experience.

I was always weirdly fond of this poster. I was proud of that whole "first in Utah" thing and thrilled to be a booster for both my employer and a division of Lucasfilm, a company that at that time could do no wrong in my eyes. And of course it amused my inner fanboy that the little cartoon audience on the poster is watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

I don't know what happened to that poster. A lot of one-sheets from the theater found their way into the hands of me and my co-workers, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that one of my buddies ended up with it, but if that's the case, I don't know about it. Whatever happened, it eventually stopped appearing in the one-sheet cases, and then I eventually left that job and now damn near 20 years have passed. I probably haven't seen this particular poster since 1991 or thereabouts.

This morning, I happened to run across a source that is selling them. Not reproductions, but actual vintage posters. I was immediately tempted to pull out the credit card, but... it's been a long time since I impulse-bought any collectible stuff with no practical value, and I wasn't sure if it was a good idea or something I'd come to regret. Lately I've been thinking again that I ought to be liquidating some (most) of the crap down in the Bennion Archive (a.k.a., my basement), not adding to it. Unsure of what to do, I called The Girlfriend for advice. I told her what the item was and why it tempted me (i.e., it's both a sentimental relic from my theater days and an Indiana Jones collectible). Here's how our conversation went:

I learned long ago that, in politics, you don't count your proverbial chickens until they hatch -- which is my roundabout way of saying I'm not writing off Hillary Clinton until I hear from her own lips that she's quitting -- but after yesterday's Democratic primary results in Indiana and North Carolina, the assumption across the blogosphere seems to be that her campaign is finished. On that note, Evanier makes a very interesting observation:

If all goes as expected, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of the Democratic party at their convention on August 28... 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

How cool would that be? Historic and poignant... almost cinematic, in fact. I can already see the "dream fulfilled" graphics on the television news coverage...

You may have noticed that I'm not always the world's cheeriest person. What can I say? I think too much and life has a tendency of getting me down. But every once in a while something comes along that wipes away all the gunge for a brief time and leaves me, to borrow a phrase some of you out there will easily identify, giddy as a schoolboy:

If you you look back through the archives of Simple Tricks, you'll see quite an evolution regarding this movie. At first, I wanted nothing to do with a fourth Indiana Jones flick. I didn't see any need for one and I had no confidence that G. Lucas could pull it off. My position gradually weakened as filming began and I started seeing stills from the new movie. And now... maybe it's just simple Pavlovian conditioning keyed to a familiar theme song, but this trailer causes me to break out in a big ol' grin every time I watch it... and I've watched it about a dozen times now since a crappy phone-cam bootleg of it surfaced on Friday night. Screw Iron Man, I'm ready for some Jones! Only 17 days to go...

SamuraiFrog poses a real head-scratcher:

Why is it that in a presidential race against a former First Lady and an admiral’s son who married into a beer fortune, it’s the black guy with almost no political presence who has to prove he’s not an elitist?

This started me thinking: What does "elite" really mean, anyway, and how does one become "elitist?" Is it a factor of education or wealth? If it's a question of intelligence or accomplishment, what's gone so wrong in our society that a term that once meant simply "the best" has acquired such a negative connotation? What's wrong with being the best at whatever it is you do?

Why is it that our current president, a New England blue-blood by birth who only plays at being a working man on his ranch in Texas, is seen as a "good old boy" and therefore not elitist, but our previous president -- who started life as poor Arkansas trailer trash -- was often accused of elitism? Is it perhaps more a reflection of the person calling someone elitist than the person being accused of it? Bill Clinton has a tendency to come off as the smartest guy in the room -- worse, as someone who knows he's the smartest guy in the room -- and perhaps he makes some people feel insecure because of that, or his detractors mistake his intellectual confidence for an air of superiority, so they call him an elitist. Here's the funny thing: smart people don't bother me, personally; the ones who I see as having an air of superiority are the wealthy, especially the children of the wealthy. For me, money and privilege are far greater indicators of "elitism" than brains. But that's probably just my own personal insecurity and prejudice; other people's issues may vary.

I think what's really going on is that "elitist" has taken the place of many other words that political correctness and a societal trend to not want to debate race and class no longer allow us to say. Where once you could call someone a nasty name or, in the case of a woman or a black candidate who rub one's prejudices the wrong way, uppity, our modern social mores now dictate you have to express yourself some other way than with the, ahem, traditional epithets. You have to call them something else, find a word that's less loaded than the one you'd probably really like to use. At the core of it, you don't like the thought of women or black people or smart people or rich people being superior to your own pathetic self (whatever your definition of superiority may be), so you call them "elitist." Really, all the word means these days is "other." By calling someone an elitist, you're saying, "this person isn't like me, he (or she) isn't one of my kind, so therefore, I dislike this person."

But that's just my Saturday morning theory...

Just checking my various news feeds here as I while away the last few minutes of a long work week...

I see that Roger Bergendoff, the crackpot who was making ricin only a stone's throw from my house, has pleaded not guilty to charges of possessing a biological toxin and various weapons. That's interested, considering his Vegas hotel room was full of nasty little toys. Maybe his logic is that he was in the hospital at the time those things were discovered, so he technically wasn't in possession of them. Or something.

Meanwhile, in a related story, Thomas Tholen, owner of the Riverton home where Bergendorff was brewing his poisonous crap, threw Bergendorff out after he figured out what his cousin was doing down in the basement because he "feared for his family's safety," but he didn't report Bergendorff to the authorities because he didn't want to get in trouble himself for the guns and explosives that were stored on his property. Real heroic there, Tom. He faces charges for "falsely telling federal agents he knew nothing about his cousin's production of ricin."

Sticking with local news, a new report from the American Lung Association places Salt Lake and Logan, Utah, in its list of the top-ten most polluted cities in the country (at least when you're talking about short-term particle pollution). Another Utah city, Provo, shows up at number 12. You know, when three of your state's four or five biggest cities are in the top 15 most polluted cities nationwide... well, it makes a guy proud.

The problem is the Wasatch Front's infamous "inversions," the cold-weather phenomenon that occurs when high-pressure zones in the upper atmosphere trap stagnant air at the bottom of our mountain valleys... which, of course, are where all the cities are located. We've always had cruddy air in the wintertime because of those damned inversions, but it's gotten much, much worse in the last couple of decades, a direct result of the booming population along the Wasatch. (Briefly, for my online friends who've never been here, just about all of Utah's population clusters in a line that runs north-south through the middle of the state, snuggled up nice and cozy against the Wasatch Mountains, hence "Wasatch Front.") I have a lot of reasons for hating all the development in the Salt Lake Valley that has transformed the rural pasturelands of my youth into a wall-to-wall (literally, since we're surrounded by mountains) subdivision, but the fact that we can't even see our beautiful mountains for a good chunk of the year now because the air is so filthy is right up there at the top of the list. If I could only turn back the world like Superman...

Finally, a Japanese company called Cyberdine has prototyped a robotic exoskeleton called HAL which is intended to help augment human strength or move paralyzed limbs. According to this article, the thing can even operate autonomously based on data stored in an on-board computer. That all sounds really cool... unless you're a sci-fi fan, of course. Then you can't help but think about that other Cyberdyne and HAL and it all becomes rather ominous, doesn't it? Hell, the exoskeleton even looks vaguely like stormtrooper armor, complete with some glowing bits like in Tron! How can an autonomous exoskeleton that looks like a stormtrooper, is built by the creators of Skynet, and is named after a murdering AI not lead to some kind of trouble?

On these happy notes, have a good Friday, everyone...

Cranky Robert sent me this earlier tonight:

Brilliant... and weirdly catchy. Go on, try not to sing along...

I've seen this meme in a couple of different places lately, and it's been a while since I did one, so...

Via SF Signal, here's an interesting link to a PDF that lists the books, movies, TV shows, and music stocked on board the International Space Station for the crew's off-duty entertainment. It's quite a nice little library that covers a pretty wide range of topics, genres, and quality levels (i.e., "hammock reading" versus Literature-with-a-capital-L).

Titles that caught my eye among the books were The Brothers Karamazov, Darwin's Origin of Species, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Da Vinci Code (of course -- is there anywhere you can't find a copy of that one?), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and, amusingly enough, several years-old issues of both Analog and Asimov's Science Fiction. (How weird would it be to read science fiction while floating weightlessly in a tin can that whips around the planet once every 90 minutes? But wait... it gets weirder...)