Walking on the Moon

September 30, 2003:

Q Do you think that the Justice Department can conduct an impartial investigation, considering the political ramifications of the CIA leak, and why wouldn’t a special counsel be better?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There’s leaks at the executive branch; there’s leaks in the legislative branch. There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.

Indeed.

Man, what a long day.

Lots to do, and a bad landing light started a chain of events that’s keeping me from meeting a buddy in Vegas tomorrow.

And Bruce Campbell’s still living my perfect life.

I recently had occasion to explain The Gong Show to a younger colleague and I got to thinking about it.  It really was a beautiful thing in ways that aren’t readily apparent from the many clips on Youtube. And there’s some great stuff on Youtube:

• Gene Gene the Dancing Machine
• One of the many censor-baiting acts
• Pie abuse
• and just weirdness

But the real delight of the Gong Show can’t be captured on Youtube.  Cool as it is, Youtube is a place where you go looking for weirdness.  The Gong Show just sort of wandered in and was weird.   It was completely out of context in a TV time full of game shows and soap operas.  Those shows took foolish things seriously;  the Gong Show was foolish, but consciously so, and never, never pretended to be anything but a goofy waste of time.  It was surprisingly sensible in its way.

Still, the contrast was jarring.  You’d be bopping around the wasteland of noontime TV looking for something to watch while you gulped down some snack and there it was.  In fact, you could miss it if you weren’t paying attention; it was camouflaged as a game show, and a hokey one at that.  But eventually you’d notice something off – what was that prize total? did that judge take her top off? – and realize that there was something seriously, delightfully wrong with these people.

Not only was the show bizarre, but it had it’s own set of off-kilter in-jokes.  Why was there a rack full of hats there?  What’re they throwing at that Gene guy?  Nothing was ever explained, it just was.  It was easily as confusing as the real world, but a ton more fun.  Finding it was like finding the Phantom Tollbooth.

I first saw it because my friend LJ described it to me and I didn’t believe such a show could exist.  Later I had the pleasure of showing it to others.  It was the kind of thing that you wanted to share, partially to be sure it wasn’t a mirage.  If they see it too, maybe it’s really there.

It’s not there anymore, of course.  But I still meet people who were on that same highway with me.

I just love it when things get as easy as one and zero. From CNN: Electronic voting machine fails to count any votes for a candidate who voted for himself. Of course CNN considers this “offbeat news.” Nimrods.

“If you ever want to see an example of social decline, just subscribe to the Madonna [email] list for a while.” — Peter Uchytil

Pete’s a fine observer of human society, but if you really want to be depressed, try to board a commercial airliner. Nothing could be more straightforward: fill in from the back. You can go on early if you need to pull your wheelchair or children on. Stow your bags and go. If we all do this simple intuitive thing together we get on the plane and be that much closer to getting off.

But, no.

Everyone’s special. If not special enough to believe that the numbers aren’t for them, special enough not to listen at all. It’s absolutely maddening. Just fill the goddamn plane back-to-front. Have your ticket ready for the person to take – that’s why the nice agent is there. Don’t get me started about the “carry on” baggage that they could have another whole person in, or the cell phone they’re talking into while the numbers they’re ignoring are being read.

And the dumb thing is that all these shenanigans cause them as much trouble as they cause me. People can’t act reasonably when it’s in their own best interest to do so, and simple to see the right course. Hell, we can’t get “fill the plane back-to-front” right, how are we gonna survive in times of crisis?

Nah, I don’t have a point. Just needed to get it out of my system.

Next time, stupidity in the air.

When I debug, which I’m doing now, I frequently hum songs to myself about puzzles or looking for answers – you know – songs about debugging. R. E. M.’s Strange is in heavy rotation for this and I’m sure you can guess others. Today’s was the refrain “I know there’s something going on…” repeated with a little baseline I won’t try to reproduce for you. Unfortunately, I began to think “who did that song?” and promptly distracted myself. I’m pretty good at “name that 80’s song” and really perturbed myself at not being able to think of this.
Google found the lyrics for me on the second hit. I am terrified and delighted. I console myself by realizing that I was able to get an attribute-based fix on it: “it was that girl from ABBA.”

Now back to something that’s going on…

I saw this today, because I was sure they would mess it up and I wanted to see how. I have to say, I was wrong. IMHO, they nailed this movie. It’s exactly what the title says it is: pure mindless action and entertainment.

Aside from following Jeffrey Rowland’s Overcompensating, I was pretty isolated from the hype over the film, other than that vague buzz that one can hear whenever something gets hold of the Internet. As such I didn’t realize how much of a slasher movie it was going to me. Once calibrated, though I was fine.

Of course it’s not a good movie, in any kind of sense but being a good slasher/shoot-em up movie. That’s to say that if you’re a sort of geeky 16-year-old-boy, this is your movie. Other than a few slaps at the really amazingly bad aviation references, I won’t even poke holes at the many errors in the movie, except to say that the characters are one-dimensional, the physics are unreasonable, continuity is questionable, and believability is right out. But, unless you’re a movie critic (who has to look for that stuff), looking for any of that in this movie means that you really have a problem connecting with your culture. Snakes on a Plane is going to be sophomoric by definition.

As sophomoric ideas go, the idea is killer. The slasher formula is basically creepie crawlies (or a maniac with a chainsaw and supernatural determination or powers) locked in an enclosed place, eating their way through a crowd of bystanders while a lone hero helps the survivors band together to get out alive. Once you recognize this, snakes and an airplane are such good choices it’s hard to go wrong. Then picking Samuel L. Jackson to be your hero, well, it’s tough to do better there, too. You’ve basically laid out your perfect slasher film (though it’s not far from your perfect action film – substitute terrorists for snakes and you’ve got Die Hard).

A specification for a movie’s not a movie, though, and many great ideas have gone awry. As John Landis said to the AV Club, “people don’t understand this: Ideas are important, but they’re not essential. What’s essential and important is the execution of the idea.” Many if not most really horrible movies, even the horrible sophomoric ones that need barely rise to 16-year-old notions of quality, sound great on paper. The ultimate example of this for me is Revenge of the Sith, which one really shouldn’t be able to screw up as badly is it was. More than anything else, Sith got me to see Snakes, just to see if Hollywood can hit even that low target.

As an aside, the reverse can happen: a weird or lousy idea can be turned into a great movie by suberb execution. I have a friend who heard the pitch for Speed as it was being filmed, and never was able to discuss the movie without giggling. It’s an action movie about high-speed thrills set on a bus. But it works fine because of the execution.

So, if you believe me that character development isn’t important and plausibility doesn’t matter, what’s there to execute? The heart of the slasher movie is to make things creepy and frightening while drawing the watcher into the struggle for survival. Also, there are a lot of genre conventions to play to and riff off, not the least of which is the implausible but excruciatingly painful execution of various victims. None of this could really be done better. The CGI snakes are creepy enough to frighten, but they don’t look entirely real; the situations are nail-biting enough, and the shocks effective enough to keep you on the edge of your seat, and there are many moments of uneasy laughter to hide a cringe – even when you know that the cringe-causer is about as plausible as a Ralph Nader presidency. Excellent job.

I’m not a 16-year-old boy anymore, though I still had a good time. I actually found some of the violence and gross-outs, well, violent and gross. There were many times where I realized that I would have laughed at something as a kid, but it was unnerving to me as an adult. And I’m sure that the creators of Snakes expected the laugh and got it from their audience. It’s strange to realize something about yourself from Snakes on a Plane, but there it is.

Can’t recommend it to everyone, but 16-year-old boys who think it sounds good will love it.

I don’t know if Scott Adams knows why he’s getting extra e-mail about his 4 July 2006 Dilbert, but I do. See, one of his characters told Dilbert that the “insane chick code of ethics” was influencing her behavior. Now, you can be offended by that in lots of ways, but I guarantee that part of the problem is that Adams meant to write “insane-chick code of ethics.” He means “the code of ethics imposed on (or generated by) insane chicks,” not “the code of ethics of all chicks, which is insane.” The second one is what the phrase he wrote unambiguously means. Really. Ask Lynne Truss. Unfortunately, it’s also offensive to more people the way he wrote it. (If nothing else, he’s upset the grammarians.)
And while we’re at it, note that those are descriptions of what the phrases mean. I’m not taking a position on the ethics of insane chicks, women, or any permutation thereof here.

This is my current favorite punctuation example.

OSHKOSH, Wisconsin (AP) — A woman accused of smothering her infant after she drunkenly fell asleep atop the 4-month-old while breastfeeding pleaded no contest Thursday to child neglect resulting in death.

Now, anyone losing a child is having a horrific day, but it’s really hard to sympathize here.

The reporter has an eye for distilling the sensational, though.