P.S. A Column On Things

Summertime, and the living is "easy"

Well, you'd think summer would be relaxing. You'd think that. You'd be wrong. Monday my mother and niece were here after my nephew's graduation from Davis. Tuesday morning, my mother and I left the house at 5am to get her to her plane on time. When I got home, Vicki had to ask me to sit down and take a deep breath, because I was so nervous I was making her nervous.

I wrote down everything I had to do, and divided it into the "A" pile, the "B" pile and the "C" pile. Writing it down insures I don't forget it. Putting it in priority order insures I do the important stuff first. I still get a little distracted, but the system helps. I use little memo-sized slips of paper, so I can just throw it away when I'm done.

I am slowly unwinding, and, at the same time, feeling a sense of accomplishment as I come to the end of the first week. I could have gone to see Get Smart this morning, but chose instead to catch up on this very column, to write this very item, so I could be on time and offer you a full political section as well.

Groundhog Day in June

And now for something completely different--a man with three buttocks. No, actually, a major revision and update to my fan site groundhogdaythemovie.com. The home page was getting too long and disorganized, so it now consists only of the "first day" story and the "appearance on NPR" story, while the other miscellany has been moved, along with a bunch of new miscellany, to the other page. If you've never been, or haven't been lately, check it out.

Women for McCain? Papoon for President. Thoughtful Conservative Blogger

Women for McCain?

From Tom Lasusa:

I think as time progresses, you're going to see alot more of these emails coming from me. I truly believe that a vote for John McCain is a vote for Bush version 2.0. And we simply cannot afford that.

That's why I am so amazed at how many former Clinton Supporters are now saying they will vote for John McCain instead of Obama. While this article is directed more towards feminists, the message can be applied to anyone who feels this way: You're so angry that Hillary lost you would rather vote for the individual who supports few if any of the ideals you hold rather for candidate who shares the same values as you?

If you know someone who intends to vote this way, please ask them to read this article.

Feminists, the choice is obvious
By Susan Jhirad

...Let me get this straight; you consider yourself a Democrat and a feminist. Yet rather than vote for a man who supports a woman's right to choose, children's healthcare, and an end to the war in Iraq, you would vote for a man who voted against all of these things...

Also from Tom: McCain calls Putin the President of Germany

***

Papoon for President

Parodists have taken over talonnews, but it was still fun to get this email from the Firesign Theater.

Infamous Republican propaganda website www.talonnews.com, which used to employ Republican closeted gay prostitute Jim Gannon as a journalist and send him to White House press conferences to pitch softballs at Scott McLellan, has endorsed George G. Papoon for President!

http://www.talonnews.com/news/2008/june/0608_papoon_for_president.shtml

Help spread the news! The mainstream media are ignoring the tremendous implications when a longstanding Republican propaganda website endorses a fictional character created by the Firesign Theatre! Name-drop Papoon online, in blogs, chat rooms, and podcasts! Digg him, StumbleUpon him, and Technorati him, whatever the hell THAT means!

Remember....

HE'S NOT INSANE!

The site has also been plugged at the Huffington Post.

***

Thoughtful Conservative Blogger

From my friend Chuck Carroll: the link to his BLOG on the last three Presidential candidates. It is titled Hold Your Nose Vote. I certainly don't agree with it, but it is provocative and well-written. Also:

It is another presidential election; candidates and pundits are once again getting all wound up. After the election, as always, little good will come. I may have discovered the cause of this perpetual disappointment. And I offer a solution.

When I was barely old enough to read, I learned that elections are dark contests. Outside my hometown in Illinois a billboard said "Home of Adlai Stevenson, but We Like Ike!"

Now, 14 elections later, we are getting the same emotional combat. Candidates issue sound bites about solving problems, but once elected they rarely deliver. They seem to be just pretending, as if they are performing a charade.

As a uniquely free and open country, we deserve better. So I composed The Great Charade.

***

Briefs

• Mark Mason sent me this: News, Democracy, and the New Media
• War Powers - Why This Court Keeps Rebuking This President - NYTimes.com.
• Supreme Court to Decide Whether Sept. 11 Detainee Can Sue Ashcroft, Mueller
• Finally, the U.S. Mega-Bases in Iraq Make the News
• Comment on Dennis the Menace's impeachment resolution: Bush wrongdoing and Democratic complicity needs to be exposed
• A Hill in Lafayette: local memorial to American military deaths in Iraq
• CBS foreign correspondent: Watching US news would ‘drive me nuts’
• Who cares about the wife, here we have a major party Presidential candidate who has repeatedly admitted he did not love his country. How can he possibly be suited to be President if he did not love his country all the time? How can his party possibly be trusted if they give their nomination to someone who did not at all times love our country? McCain on Loving America.
• From the pot calling the kettle black department: McCain might want to reconsider attacking Obama for turning down public financing, given his own borderline illegal actions.

Mongol

4 out of 5 stars

Historically dubious. If you want the details, you can Google it for yourself. Like all biopics, Mongol (aka "Genghis Khan, The Early Years) uses elision to make the story more exciting, and creates both new characters and composite characters. The date cards (1192 Year of the Black Rat for example) are there to make you think it is all precise and historic. It isn't. Like all biopics, Mongol is more about our time than the time it represents. Like all biopics by people of one culture (Russians) about people of another (Mongolians), there are inevitable charges of racism and stereotyping. Also, the Mongolian woman (we asked to be sure) who was our waitress at the Swad Indian restaurant last night told us her friends had seen it and were not impressed with the history.

All that said, I now know more about Ghengis Khan than I did before, and am more interested in him, his life and Mongol history. I have also seen an amazingly epic motion picture, with great writing, directing, acting and dialog, which entertained and enthralled me. If you want history, read a book. If you want epic entertainment, go see Mongol.

Sex in old age, Lasusa Links, Dan Grobstein File

Peggy Coquet passed this on:

• An Affair To Remember
  She was 82. He was 95. They had dementia. They fell in love. And then they started having sex.
• A shy friend sends word of the world's oddest Star Wars video.

Tom Lasusa and his friends surf the web so you don't have to: Mobile Phone Popcorn [ed: turns out not to be true..Cuba approves free sex-change operations . .(Thanks Dawn)...Antarctica base gets 16,500 condoms before darkness. ..Baby Born with Two, er, rattles.. ..This Guy's Just a Headbutt away from a Darwin Award. ..BBC uncovers lost Iraq billions. .Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish. ..Forget the Plutonium -- Real Life 'Doc Brown's' DeLorean runs on Batteries. ..Single-horned 'Unicorn' deer found in Italy.

Dan Grobstein File

• WASHINGTON
| June 17, 2008
Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir
By JAMES RISEN
The official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq said he was fired when he would not approve over $1 billion in questionable charges.
• Another parody of airline service fees.
• We're still arguing about whether women should change their names when they get married. Be sure to read the comments as well.

End June 23 column

A Brief Apology For A Brief Column

It is already Monday afternoon; my niece just left, my mother's still here, and after I take her off to the airport at 5am on Tuesday, I still have to exercise, and start planning my summer. In short, no time to do the column and no prospect of much time anytime soon. So, I'll do a couple of short items of my own, and post the contributions of two regulars, Craig Reynolds and Neal Vitale. Dan Grobstein emailed me a week's worth of good stuff, and the usual correspondents inundated me with terrific political material. Tom Lasusa sent his links! Anything that doesn't got stale will be used next week.

A Trip To Davis

I was away in Davis, Calif. this weekend for the graduation of my nephew, P, from the University of California, Davis. He earned a B.S. in economics. My brother married a Fillipina woman, so Paul asked us to come, not to the University graduation, or the school graduation, but to Fil-Grad, the Filipino Graduation Celebration. Instead of 30,000 students, there were around 50. Each student got 45 seconds to thank everyone, a slide with their name and major on it, and a full page in the program. It was a bit long (especially the keynote speaker, mayor of Davis, UC Davis grad and Filipina), but overall the tone was sweet and energetic, and, in all humility, P was the best speaker of the bunch.

Of course I am very, very proud of my nephew. Neither his mom nor his dad ever finished college; he was fighting the odds, and he won!

When we made our arrangements in March, the closest we could get to Davis was Dixon, about 20 minutes away. It was hot; the thermometer soared over 90 degrees both Saturday and Sunday. Thank heavens Fil-Grad took place in an air conditioned hall. We stuck close to our air-conditioned rooms, had a nice late-evening outdoor Italian meal at Osteria Fasulo and spent a cool afternoon watching the Incredible Hulk (see review below).

And the produce stand was pretty good as well.

Technobriefs

by Craig Reynolds

Its a tough Jobs: apparently Apple announced some new phone or something. Here is Steve Jobs WWDC Keynote (in 60 Seconds) 'cuz who has time to sit through the whole keynote like some kinda Apple fanboy? There was a lot of buzz about Steve's gaunt appearance, here is some background on his health: Why does Steve Jobs look so thin?

GPGPU: a hot topic among computer geeks is "general-purpose computation on graphics processing units" or GPGPU. Originally graphics computations were performed in software. Then the most repetitive expensive parts were moved into special hardware. Eventually this GPU hardware became more powerful than the CPU it was paired with. As they became more flexible, interest grew in using the GPU for computational tasks unrelated to graphics. There was a recent special issue of ACM Queue on GPUs. Each of the major players in the computer world seem to be pushing a different variant of a GPGPU programming system. sh and Brook were early efforts from academia and now sh became RapidMind, NVIDEA has CUDA, AMD/ATI has CTM, and Intel has Ct. Just this week Apple announced Snow Leopard, the next version of OS X. It includes its GPGPU entry called OpenCL, along with Grand Central, its multicore programming technology acquired from PA Semi.

Biomimetics: looking to nature for technology designs: Nature-inspired robots swim, crawl, and scuttle like animals and 'Herds' of wary cars could keep an eye out for thieves.

Visualization: a few random selections from the world of information visualization. Cool animated visualization of the individuals that contribute to open source software, and the files they edit: code swarm. From the amazing visualcomplexity.com: see the Mammal Supertree. It is "just" a circular tree of mammal species, showing which descended from which. You will need to zoom in quite a bit (about 2000%) to read the species names placed just inside the black circle. I used a web utility called Wordle to make a "word cloud" of my del.icio.us tags.

Technobits: cooking Martian soil: Phoenix starts to get some reward --- When Robots Live Among Us --- BMW's fascinating GINA Light Visionary Model design study --- Google To Develop ISP Throttling Detector --- 2008 Web Design Trends --- Adapting Websites to Users --- Plan your room layout in 3D using furnishings from mydeco.

The Incredible Hulk

3.5 stars

Incredible? No. Pretty good? Yes. Which puts me in the good company of 1,000 American newspaper and magazine headline writers who can't resists playing off the "incredible" in the title.

But first, R, my younger daughter, asked me what Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) meant when he made a cameo appearance at the end of the film, when he told Gen. Ross (William Hurt) that he was "putting together a team" which might contain the Hulk. I explained to her that this meant Marvel was planning to make a movie version of the Avengers. As early baby boomers may recall, the Hulk was a member of the Avengers during the first two issues, then became a target of the group for some time afterwards. Stark funded the Avengers, and served as a member in his role as Iron Man.

This is a substantially better movie than the previous Hulk film; Edward Norton (Bruce Banner), Liv Tyler (Betty Ross) and Hurt (Gen. Ross), are just better casting than Eric Bana Jennifer Connelly and Sam Elliott. Zak Penn wrote a better script, and who knew that Louis Leterrier could, given this kind of material, be a better director than Ang Lee. In fact, it is a "reboot," (in the way that Batman Returns was a reboot of the Batman franchise), and this time the Hulk may have legs. Well, he always had legs, but you know what I mean...

This film concentrates on the essence of the Hulk--the conflicted nature of mild-mannered Banner, trying to control his Hulkiness. If there had been anger-management classes in the 60s, surely creators Stan Lee (who appears in a cameo as the gamma poisoning victim) and Jack Kirby would have sent Banner to one. As it is, Penn has to bring this archetypal cold war-based "hero" into the 21st century. Like most Marvel heroes (Spiderman: radioactive spider; Fantastic Four: Cosmic rays), Hulk is a victim of radioactivity--but you won't learn that from the film. So, like all Marvel heroes, Banner is flawed, human, tortured and beset with bad breaks and bad luck. This film shows us what that might be like. And it mixes in enough slam-bang action sequences to entertain the less cerebral viewer.

Norton is a genius, Tyler is a cipher, and Hurt is... well, his usual great self. I can't wait for the next one--because it might be even better.