Gripes and Grumbles

Jan042006

Incoming!

[Ed. note: if you’re squeamish about harsh language, be wary. F-bombs and other nastiness follows.]

Last night, right around the time I was posting the previous entry, I was startled by a sudden noise at my bedroom window. It was sort of like that sickening whump you hear when a bird ends its life against a pane of glass, but it also had a tinkling quality to it. The sound of something breaking.

For a brief, confused moment, I thought something had fallen inside the house, that a delicate knick-knack had somehow slipped off a shelf or something. But then I realized that my first impression was correct; something had hit the window. And I had a pretty good idea of what it must’ve been, too… you don’t usually get birds flying around at 11.30 at night, and I haven’t seen a bat around my neighborhood in years.

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Dec302005

The Bureaucratic Mentality Vs. My Mother’s Trumpet Vine

At the conclusion of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Dr. McCoy remarks that the bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe. It’s taken me years to completely figure out what he meant, but I think I finally get it. What old Bones is saying is that the world is filled with small-minded, mid-level-management types whose only purpose in life is to squash the unorthodox and ensure that everyone does everything “by the book.” These gray-skinned, unimaginative little beings live and die by their rules, their time clocks, and their almighty god, Procedure. Their thought processes are inflexible and binary in nature; they think in terms of black and white, on or off, one way or the other. They abhor the idea of a third possibility or an exception to the rules because it overloads their limited minds and interferes with their hardwired purpose, which is to use what little power they’ve been granted by the greater beings above them to enforce their mindless and impersonal regulations.

So, you’re wondering, what’s got ol’ Bennion riled up today? Nothing, except being awakened by the raspy buzz of a chainsaw, which was busily mutilating this wonder of nature:

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Sep282005

How Civilizations End

I used to think, back in the dark old days of the Reagan era, that human civilization would most likely end in an instant of nuclear fire, one brief flash of horrible beauty and destruction followed by eternal silence and ashes. After this morning’s commute, however, I’ve decided the end is going to come more slowly and far less spectacularly, in a prolonged struggle without end that fools us all into thinking we’re making progress and moving ahead, when in reality we’re just creeping our lives away inch by inch as we all slowly go mad.

I’ve decided, in other words, that humanity’s end will come in one colossal traffic jam.

I can see it all now… future archeologists from an alien civilization pondering the bizarre death rituals that would require each individual to be wrapped in a sarcophagus of steel and plastic and placed on a long ribbon of concrete running between our cities. Would they assume we wanted to keep our dead near us, above ground and in plain sight? Would they assume we shared some mythological vision of the dead traveling onward to our final destination? Perhaps the other seats within these sarcophagi were intended for symbolic passengers, or beings that we thought we’d pick up along the way. The scraps and crumbs littering the floor and control surfaces of the sarcophagi would surely be interpreted as symbolic meals to feed the travelers on their journey into the afterlife, while the various electronic devices plugged into the mummified ears of the deceased were perhaps intended to provide a way for the living to speak to the dead. I suspect these future scientists from another world will shake their heads at the sad superstitions that left we foolish humans so isolated, so wedded to the idea of perpetual motion despite the ironic fact that we really weren’t getting anywhere at all.

Yes, I can see it all… and I think I’m going to take the train to work the rest of this week.

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Sep212005

Sartre Was an Optimist

A few days ago, the Significant Other and myself saw the new movie Lord of War, a thought-provoking drama about the world of illicit arms trading (that’s gunrunning, for you folks who favor more direct language). Through the experience of seeing this movie, we learned two very important things, neither of which has much to do with gunrunning.

The first is that Sean Means, the Salt Lake Tribune film critic who called this well-made, intelligent movie “morally bankrupt” before giving it a rating of “no stars” — a worse rating than he gave The Dukes of Hazzard, by the way — is an idiot.
And the second thing we learned is that most of the other people sharing the theater with us were idiots, too.

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Sep022005

Overwhelmed, and Craving the Peace of 1985

Yesterday, John Scalzi wrote in his AOL Journal about the difficulty of being expected to produce what he calls a “variety show” — meaning lots of entries about many different and mostly lightweight subjects — while Something Big is going down in the world:

…it’s causing me some real cognitive dissonance to have an entry [about] the complete horror of what’s developing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and an entry about cats in a sink, right next to each other. I’m feeling mildly guilty about talking about cats in a sink at all.

I’m experiencing much the same kind of angst myself, actually. I’ve been looking at my last couple of published entries and thinking about the topics I’m planning to write about in upcoming ones, and suddenly I feel like I’ve got some really screwed-up priorities, like I’m a modern-day Marie Antoinette or something. Huge numbers of people are dying pathetic deaths right here in our own country and I’m writing about fake zombies and space movies, for god’s sake. It’s frivolous, isn’t it? A sign of a superficial personality? Do I have a responsibility to use my abilities and my little public forum here to acknowledge what’s happening? Am I being disrespectful to the victims of Katrina if I don’t?

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Aug222005

Kids Today…

Writer Peter David tells a heartbreaking story today about a little boy who loves Spider-Man. He wears Spidey-branded shoes, plays the Spidey video game, owns the Spider-Man movies on DVD and regularly watches the animated series on the Cartoon Network. But he’s never read a Spider-Man comic. Even worse, he has no interest in reading one. Zero. Zip. The very source of the character and stories that he’s made the center of his young life holds as much appeal for seven-year-old Steven as sitting through a grad-school lecture on macroeconomics. (Not that a lecture on macroeconomics holds much appeal for anybody except the tiniest handful, but you get my point.)

It is stories like this that are propelling me down the road to premature Grumpy Old Man-hood.

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Aug112005

What the Hell Happened to Sophistication?

I’ve been planning to write something about the recent death of TV news anchorman Peter Jennings, but I obviously haven’t gotten around to it yet. My plan was to follow my usual obituary schtick and be simultaneously nostalgic and curmudgeonly as I discussed how Jennings’ passing marks the end of an era, which was, of course, a better time than our current Dark Age of debased superficiality. But it looks like someone has already beaten me to that angle:

…it seems certain that, at least stylistically, Jennings will have no heir. News managers today aren’t looking to hire Cary Grant, the man of distinction; they’re looking for Matt LeBlanc, the dude next door. In fact, if young reporters in 2005 were to emulate the air of aristocracy that rocketed Peter Jennings to stardom two decades ago, they’d likely be shown the door. Q-score focus groups interpret urbanity as snobbery these days, which may be why Jennings himself lost ratings supremacy to Tom Brokaw when the glamorous 1980s gave way to the naturalistic ’90s. Once the millennium arrived, forget it: His brand of romantic persona had been supplanted by Britney Spears making pig noses and reality-TV contestants eating and vomiting up live worms. …Male news anchors no longer exude savoir-faire… because Hollywood actors no longer exude it. Yesteryear’s debonair hero has passed the torch to today’s cute goofball mensch: Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Ashton Kutcher.

That’s from a piece on Salon called “Peter Jennings and the Death of Panache”, by Richard Speer. It’s worth a read, if you don’t mind sitting through a commercial to get to it. (Sorry, Salon’s difficult that way.)

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Jul272005

Priorities

After a two-and-a-half year hiatus, America resumed manned spaceflight yesterday morning with a picture-perfect launch of space shuttle Discovery. You’d think that would be a fairly big deal, wouldn’t you? I certainly did. However, when I tuned into my 10 o’clock news last night, the lead stories were about an Amber Alert in the Sugarhouse area and a legal decision involving the goofball who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart. Yes, that’s right: instead of the cool video footage I hoped to see from Discovery‘s new external-tank-cam, I found myself looking once again at Utah’s overexposed ambassador of sticky namby-pambiness, Elizabeth’s father Ed. I wanted to scream. In fact, I think I may have, very quietly so as not to wake the S.O. in the other room. Ed Smart has that effect on me.

Now, I’m not saying these missing-children stories aren’t important, and I’m not naive enough to believe that everyone shares my interest or belief in the relevance of spaceflight. But I do believe our media’s choice of lead stories says something about where our culture is at right now, psychologically speaking, and it’s not a place I find particularly inspiring. Instead of looking upwards, we’re looking inwards. Instead of can-do optimism and a spirit of adventure, we feel fear and anxiety. And instead of celebrating what human beings can accomplish through pluck and applied intelligence, the news wallows in sensational stories about all the bad things that happen to little blond girls. (They’re always blond, have you noticed? You’d think that nothing ever happens to brunettes, redheads, or — gasp! — little-girls-of-color!)

I don’t know about you, but I personally find this a pretty damn depressing state of affairs. More later…

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Jun142005

Low-Flying Planes and 21st Century Angst

I don’t usually suffer from the post-9/11 jumpiness that afflicts so many Americans. I don’t freak out whenever Homeland Security spins the Big Color Wheel, I don’t compulsively imagine horrific scenarios of doom a la James Lileks, and, aside from the hour a week when I’m watching 24, I don’t fret about sleeper cells executing their nefarious plans within our borders. Generally, I’m more worried about other people’s road-rage than I am about swarthy militants setting off a dirty bomb in the quiet little backwater I call home. It’s not that I think another attack is impossible or even unlikely; I just don’t see the usefulness of living in a state of constant anxiety, and I also don’t think Salt Lake City is much of a target compared to other places around the country. We’re a smallish city, we don’t command much national attention, and we don’t have any globally recognizable landmarks whose loss would demoralize the entire country. (Well, I guess the main LDS Temple is pretty well known, but it’s not the same kind of high-profile target as, say, the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate.) Yep, I feel pretty safe living here in dull ol’ Deseret.

And that’s why my reaction to the incident this morning was so… unexpected. What incident, you ask? Well, kids, let me tell you a story…

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Apr272005

Of Poor Quality and Big Stupid Cylon Heads

The previous entry on home theaters started me thinking about consumer video technology, specifically the preferred video format of the moment, the DVD.

I’ve been collecting DVDs for about five years now. I wasn’t what you’d call an early adopter of the technology, but I did get in on it before it became hugely popular and started suffering the problems that inevitably come with ramped-up manufacturing and “lowest-common denominator” thinking. (Yes, I am a bit of a snob when it comes to these things, and I do think it’s fair to say that DVD content and overall presentation was much smarter when the format was still a niche market. But that’s a rant for another time.) At this point, I own roughly 230 unique DVD titles, comprising both movies and television programming, and I think my collection includes a pretty good sampling of product from all the major DVD producers, except maybe Disney. (I don’t have kids and I’m not a big animation fan, so very few Disney offerings appeal to me.)

What’s interesting about all of this — aside from the value of idle boasting, of course — is that the size and diversity of my collection has allowed me to recognize distinct differences in the product coming from each of the major labels. Just like each studio was known for making a particular kind of film back in Hollywood’s Golden Age, so too are their modern descendents easy to equate with specific DVD characteristics.

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