Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Bryant

But If It’s Us!

October 23, 2009
Leave a Comment

The current schadenfreude election race — if you’re a Democrat — is the NY-23 House race. You’ve got a moderate Republican, a Democrat, and a third party social conservative. Doug Hoffman, the social conservative, is getting lots of national attention: endorsements from Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and so on. It is symptomatic of the split in the Republican Party. Cue Daily Kos smugness.

It is oddly reminiscent of the doomful prognostication regarding the Lamont/Lieberman primary in 2006. Daily Kos did a couple of retrospects of that smuggitude recently. Alas for those who would learn from history, no parallels were drawn between the two elections.

Let’s Put On A Show

October 19, 2009
Leave a Comment

Susan and I caught the So You Think You Can Dance tour last Thursday. I’m not sure I’d shell out for the season 6 tour, but I had more fun than I expected at this one.

As expected, it was relentlessly full of tweens and parents, with a scattering of oddballs like us. The overall vibe, as Susan noted, was a high end Disney show. I imagine they’ve learned from High School Musical and so forth. The dances, of which there was not enough, were situated in a rather bland pudding of dancer banter. These kids are not in fact trained in the ancient art of standing on a stage and sounding conversational, excepting of course Evan. It showed.

Most of the dances were refined and tuned from the show versions, to good effect. Different intros, better performances, and so on.

Best dances, not in order:

Kayla and Kupono’s addiction dance. It brought me to tears again. Kupono’s overwrought performance style fit the theme and Kayla does vulnerable very well.

Phillip’s solo. He got a full solo; everyone else had a show-style 1 minute solo, but the Chbeeb got a few minutes to do what he does. He got the biggest solo ovation of the night, too (with Brandon as #2 in that regard). His sense of rhythm and bodily control are superb.

Brandon and Janette’s pop contemporary dance. The thievery dance, I suppose you’d say. Lovely and fresh as always.

Biggest surprise:

Randi and Evan’s samba. Of all the ballroom dances to include, that was the second one, after Brandon and Jeanine’s pasa doble? But it was really good. Randi seems a lot more relaxed now that she isn’t competing, and they really rocked it. Randi and Evan were a solid couple and if any couple not named Brandon and Janette was gonna get two dances on the tour, I suppose they’d be the ones.

Biggest disappointment:

No solo from Janette, no Brandon and Janette ballroom, etc. Maybe she was sick? It seems like a pretty glaring omission. I mean, she’s the one person who didn’t get a solo, out of all twelve performers.

Peace Out

October 9, 2009
Leave a Comment

Apparently everyone already knew the Nobel Peace Prize was going to be used as a way to increase someone’s influence. Reuters had the story two days ago. Not that anyone was paying attention.

Wanted – a peace maker or rights activist engaged in a current conflict whose influence would benefit greatly from winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

That is who Norway’s Nobel Committee will choose for 2009 Peace Prize laureate if, as experts expect, it returns closer to Alfred Nobel’s notion of peace. Past prizes went to climate campaigners, life-long diplomats and grass-roots economists.

Nobel’s will doesn’t exactly allow for this. The prize goes “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” I could get snarky and say he deserves it for preventing McCain from becoming President, but I’m not sure I feel quite that snarky about McCain.

On the other hand, I probably do feel that snarky about Palin. The world’s a safer place without her in the Executive Branch. Hey, good work, Obama.

Rope Ends

October 9, 2009
Leave a Comment

In episode 3 of FlashForward:

  1. The Center for Disease Control requests money from the Department of Homeland Security. In 1991. Which is somewhat prior to the date the DHS was founded.
  2. The only person in the world who notices all the crows in the world dying during the flashforward blackout is a Nazi prisoner.
  3. After all the crows in the world die, the crow population magically recovers.
  4. Approximately every single cast member explains that the world has changed, and we are all prophets, and we know our future, and the world has changed as a result. In case you hadn’t heard.
  5. Jack Davenport does not appear.
  6. Dominic Monaghan does not appear.

Sorry, semi-promising new SF show! Your time is up. Anyone still watching can let me know if it gets any better.

See This

October 2, 2009
Leave a Comment

John Woo’s new movie, Red Cliff, will be hitting US soil on November 20th. If you are a die-hard John Woo fan, you’ll see it. If you’re a John Woo fan who’s been disappointed by such cinematic masterpieces as Paycheck, you should see it: all reports are that he’s back to form. If you’re not a John Woo fan but you like big historical epics, you should see it. Everyone else: also see it.

Here, have a trailer.

The US version is two and a half hours, which is heavily chopped from the four hour double movie Asian version. Obsessive fans can get the original two movies on DVD or Blu-Ray. Consumer protection warning: the Mei Ah Blu-Ray discs reportedly have a small watermark in the letterboxing.

Petitioning Poorly

September 30, 2009
Leave a Comment

The Polanski petition doesn’t really cut it. I get the argument — that film festivals should be safe zones, because if you have a blanket policy of extradition then filmmakers from totalitarian regimes aren’t safe there. But no. This is not about free speech, this is about rape. It’s reasonable to make the distinction between types of crime; we do not need to protect rapists for the sake of protecting free speech.

Second Go-Round

September 29, 2009
Leave a Comment

The season two premier of Dollhouse got lousy ratings, which it deserved. The problem’s highlighted in the climatic scene, where Eliza Dushku is flipping through identities. You can’t really tell the difference between them. Which kick-ass identity is the meaningful one?

Kind of sad, insofar as Fran Kranz and Amy Acker knocked their scenes out of the park. Whedon just isn’t all that great at casting female leads, I guess.

Centralized Management

September 25, 2009
Leave a Comment

I woke up this morning thinking about FlashForward. (Jack Davenport, so big awesome potential. Susan notes concern that the show has absorbed all the British character actors, however, which could lead to a shortage over in the UK.) So I wanted to read some discussion on it, and I wound up missing Usenet.

Back in the day you could just go read the television newsgroup or the alt.tv.flashforward newsgroup and you’d get your fix of cranky geeks expressing poorly-formed opinions about new shows. These days, where do I go? I guess TWoP.

Kids, lawns, etc.

Political Poison

September 24, 2009
Leave a Comment

A moment of silence, if you will, for Deval Patrick. Setting aside the rather imperfect bill passed by imperfect legislators to fill Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat, Governor Patrick is taking a sizable political chance in order to maximize the chance that health care reform will pass.

It’s not just that he’s associating himself with a bill that’s not all that popular in his home state. Yeah, Republicans are savoring the idea of hanging this sucker around his neck in 2010. The public glee is all about Patrick appointing Dukakis; make no mistake, however. If Paul Kirk is appointed, that’s going to be just as useful from a Republican standpoint. “Duval Patrick, doing the work of the Kennedys.” Raw meat for the Republican base.

So he’s got that to worry about. And he’s got Democrats who dislike the way the law was changed. But he’s also sitting in the middle of a party fight: does he go along with the rather blatant Kennedy push for Paul Kirk, or does he appoint Dukakis and make some of his key supporters happy, or does he choose someone else and make nobody happy?

(By the way — not smooth, oh Kennedy clan. Backing Patrick into a corner like that was unkind. The Dukakis camp didn’t fight their battle in the media.)

He could have avoided this. He’d have made Obama mad, and he’d have hurt health care reform, but he could have hidden behind the emergency clause and let 90 days pass. He maybe could have made life easier on his legislature and avoided passage of the bill entirely. Lots of options.

So when he makes his announcement at 11 AM today, I’ll have a moment of sympathy for the guy. None of this has been at all easy on him, and I think it’ll be the final straw on the back of his reelection campaign. I appreciate his decision to make sure the Democratic Party has another vote in the Senate.

Obvious Joke is Obvious

September 17, 2009
Leave a Comment

It’s the week for rich businessmen to enter the political fray, huh? Of the two, I find Linda McMahon’s decision more interesting. Stephen Pagliuca is a fairly bland guy with a fairly bland background. Linda McMahon is also fairly bland, and she’s going to face the same questions about her loyalty to her party, but her background has somewhat more spice.

Her Web site is funny. You can barely tell her last name is McMahon, which is probably for the best. It’s not about Linda McMahon, it’s about Linda, who is barely related to that guy who shows up on your TV on Monday nights yelling at wrestlers. The WWE is merely “a company,” not a sports entertainment juggernaut or anything like that. It’s a pretty tasteful chunk of the Web.

There’s very little there about her positions on the issues. We learn she’s a fiscal conservative, which is poorly defined insofar as she’s not yet committed to supporting anything. That’s about it. In particular, there’s nothing on abortion. She donated to the Republican Majority For Choice, which will be impossible to play down and may sink her in the primary. Pro-choice views are nigh required for a Republican to win in New England, though. Ask Mitt Romney. So I’ll be watching to see how she walks that tightrope.

She’s smart. A lot of the WWE’s business success is thanks to her. She is undoubtedly a better businessman than her husband, who reliably lets emotion get in the way of decisions. She’d be a fierce defender of free speech for obvious reasons. On the other hand, she’s complicit in one of the worst abuses of employees in the United States — the WWE’s “independent contractor” crap, which directly results in drug addictions, ruined lives, and deaths.

In the end, you’d have to guess she’d be a business-oriented Republican, who’d work to keep government small and limited. She would most likely be consistent in that she wouldn’t want the government dictating social mores either. Could be worse; I’ve just never seen any great value in keeping government small while allowing big corporations to flourish. Large organizations are large organizations.

I can’t see it getting that far, though. WWE television programming is a great platform, but the skeletons are too visible. In way too many cases, quite literally.