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2004-01-29
Procrastination
I know, I should be writing the second part of "Know Your Enemy", but although I'd love to blog right now, I just can't be arsed to actually type. Does that make sense? In other words, I'd like to have an interface through which I can directly pour my thoughts into a blog post, none of that frustratingly slow typing, none of that error-prone speech recognition, Just a direct thought-to-text interface.
Please?
2004-01-24
Public Service Announcement
"We regret to inform you that the publication of the second part of the Know Your Enemy post, dealing with the stunning inability of the conservatively aligned Heritage Foundation to grasp some basic facts as they are taught in any beginner's course on statistics, has been put on hold indefinitely."
And now excuse me while I go back to shitting and vomitting my intestines out. It seems to be the only thing I'm capable of today.
PS: Thanks to whoever sent that particular bug my way!
[Update: Ryan has recently written a post titled "Just Say No To Mayo". Damn straight! Seeing as it apparently was mayonnaise on some sandwiches which incapacitated me and several co-workers throughout Saturday, I can only agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment.]
2004-01-23
Know Your Enemy, Part I
Every once in a while I browse through a website which I know to represent opinions and views that are vastly different from mine. Sometimes just for kicks, sometimes to test my own views and opinions, and sometimes to try and dissect their arguments, which is, how my post about the Papal Considerations regarding homosexual marriage came to be.
The two sites I've been browsing since the christmas holidays are the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality and the Heritage Foundation, both highly deserving of a thorough fisking. Sadly, I'm just not mentally up to the task, what with the stress at work and all. Still, there are several thoughts about those two sites cruising around in my head, hogging valuable resources, and begging to get out of my system.
The homophobes from NARTH are the more interesting of the two, while the Heritage Foundation is by far the scarier bunch, so let's do NARTH first. While they state again and again on their site how they respect homosexuals and how they only want to help those who are uncomfortable with their sexuality and want to be "healed" to heterosexuality, the material on their site speaks an altogether different language.
Apparently they think that homosexuality is a deviation from the Way Things Are Intended To Be that is caused by a failed father-son-bonding. Yes, that means they are basically only interested in male homosexuality, which I find passing... strange. It also means that they blithely ignore all the documented cases of homosexuality in other mammals and birds, which are hard to relate to any kind of father-son-bonding, failed or otherwise. And these cases also mean that who- or whatever Intended Things To Be either messed up in the animal realm as well, or actually made homosexuality part of their Intentions... I'm afraid that the irony in that is completely lost on these guys, though.
They also seem to regret that some years ago homosexuality was struck from the register of psychological illnesses and replaced with a generalized term describing the state of someone who is uncomfortable with his own sexual orientation, whatever it may be. Of course, that doesn't quite mesh with what they say about their aims, but a little self-contradiction has never stopped anyone with a Mission.
Some of what they are writing on their website though, is interesting and important for the GLBT community. For example, they criticize the insistence of the GLBT community that sexual orientation is immutable, and the way it has traditionally based their defense on that premise. Their reasons for this ought to be transparent, simply because their own mission is based on the basic assumption of the mutability of sexual orientation. And I find myself tacitly agreeing, if for totally different reasons. I've always thought that insisting on the immutability of sexual orientation was an unnecesary weakness. Yes, I basically agree with it as well, but the fact that it is by no means a certainty is a risk, and hinging the defence of homosexuality on it is risky as well. Not to mention wrong.
Because the immutability of homosexuality is most emphatically not the point. I understand why they use that avenue of defense, because if it is immutable, they have to accept them right? Because the homosexuals can't do anything against it, right? Uh, wrong. At least judging from how viciously the GLBT community attacks anyone who claims to be able to "heal" homosexuality. For what if it is possible to "heal" homosexuality?
The point is that homosexuality is a threat to no-one, despite the insistence to the contrary on the part of paranoid christian conservatives the world over, is neither sinful nor harmful. Therefore, discriminating against someone based on their sexual orientation is just plain wrong. I admit that any defense based on that is harder to accomplish, but at least it is solid and independent from any success people like NARTH might achieve in their mission. Plus, the recent judicial decisions in the US, which caused such a tempest in conservative circles, show that this idea can be sold to those who sit where it matters...
2004-01-22
Revelations through Selfrelations
Yesterday's experimenting has brought me some new-found appreciation for why some people like to get fisted. I won't bore you (or weird you out, more likely) with the sordid details of how a latex glove was instrumental in bringing me to one of the most awesome, strong, and uniquely deep orgasms I've ever had the joy of experiencing. Except, perhaps, to mention that the obvious idea you might get about the proceedings leading up to said orgasm is bound to be dead wrong. :-P
Let's just say that the prostate isn't called the male g-spot for nothing: If you don't stimulate it just right, it feels weird. If on the other hand you do, it can provide you with a mind-blowing orgasm that easily dwarves anything you get by more, uhm, traditional means.
In other words, wow, just wow.
2004-01-15
Seeing the Good in it
Having to get up at half past three in the night after my birthday this year unsurprisingly sucked as much as it did each and every time in 2003. Knowing that the business trip which caused the alarm clock to go off at that godless hour was for the kick-off meeting of the Project >From Hell didn't exactly elevate my mood, either. But then, my body surprised my by not being tired on either leg of the trip despite the obnoxious sleep deficit. Of course, I will remain silent about its opinion on that matter during the meeting. But I have to add in defense of my body that my near-inability to prevent myself falling asleep and in the process potentially banging my head on the conference table thereby interrupting the slow-as-molasses flow of discussion was only partly caused by the sleep deficit. That, and the thought that the meeting was both less successful and less awful than it could have been, is all I'll say about it.
Since I am determined to have 2004 suck less than the previous year despite the Project From Hell, I used the opportunity presented by 10 hours of sleepless train travel to do two enjoyable things, one of them being reading more than half of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix". My wife is somewhat miffed about my quick progress on the latest Potter novel, because she started reading it a day earlier than me and had hoped that we could read it more or less synchronously: she in German and me in English. I told her that the book is too much fun to pass up such a prime opportunity for lots of undisturbed reading, but that didn't really placate her. I'll try the lots-of-cuddling approach this evening. With the weather as ghastly as it is, and the desire for cuddling in the human female being reported from empiric evidence by quite a few males to be inversely proportional to the environmental temperature, this has a good chance of working, I'd hope... ;-)
The other enjoyable thing? Watching People. If I'm in the right mood, I just love watching other people, all the better if they're beautiful, but that is by no means a necessity. Granted, the InterCity Express between Berlin and Frankfurt is not the ideal venue for that passtime, because the vast majority of travellers are boring guys in suits who either read, sleep, use their notebooks or chat on their cell phones. In other words, people just like me.
This time I was lucky, though. First I had a guy sitting beside me who made a nice contrast to all the other suits in the compartment. While he looked perfectly ordinary, he was unusually cheery and witty, so we chatted for a short while until he got up, presumably prowled around in the train a bit, then with a grin announced that he would now get off although this was a non-stop train between Berlin and Frankfurt, mimed doffing his hat towards me, and finally sauntered off.
I was still grinning when they announced over the speakers that we would make an unscheduled stop in Göttingen to pick up some travellers who due to some technical difficulty or other were stranded there, unable to continue their journey. The announcement made me wonder about the schedule and whether I'd still manage to be on time for the meeting, which turned out in the end to be no problem because we were all of two minutes late in Frankfurt.
I had barely managed to get back to Hogwarts, when a pleasent, female voice asked me whether the seat beside me was still free. I looked up into a tired, somewhat plain face with dark eyes hidden behind thick lashes and accentuated by the equally dark frame of her glasses and judicious, skillful use of eye-liner (a rarity these days), a small nose, and an almost unremarkably average mouth, all framed by short, perky, black hair. I told her that yes, the place was free, helped her stow her single bag of baggage in the overhead compartment, and earned one of the warmest, most beautiful smiles I have ever had the profound pleasure of seeing. The transformation of her face from almost plain and average to radiantly, warmly, heart-breakingly beautiful was a wonder to behold. It took me so much by surprise that I had to look away, sit down, and bury my nose in my book, or the overwhelming beauty of that smile would have made me cry.
Totally unaware of her effect on me (as are most people who sport such a warmly radiant smile, in my experience), she just slumped into her seat and was fast asleep within minutes. This gave me ample opportunity to study her remarkable face which turned out to be far less plain than the first look suggested. Without that radiant smile it was still easy to overlook in a crowd, still easy to dismiss as average and unremarkable when it was in fact just lacking in any outstanding eye-catchers. If I had to choose a word or two to describe it, harmonious and serene would be the first to come to mind, and like the mysterious smile of Mona Lisa, her own magical smile was lurking just below the surface.
She slept through the whole ride until Frankfurt, where she got out in front of me, and I had occasion to admire her understated, unrushed, balanced and graceful way of walking along. We said good-bye when we had both left the train, where she graced me again with the wonder of her warm smile, and I hurried off to catch the underground train to the business meeting awaiting me.
Meeting her was worth the whole trip alone, and yes, I'm still wowed two days later. And in case you are wondering, I harbour no romantic feelings for her, no crush, no desire, just the memory of a warm smile on an otherwise cold, wet, and depressingly grey day.
Thank you, whoever you are.
2004-01-11
Sorry for the lack of updates, but as was inevitable, 2004 has inherited some of the suckage of the previous year, which has drained away a lot of my energy that would have been much better spent elsewhere, like say updating this blog. I may get to write about this, or I may not, or at least not here, we'll see... Anyway.
My wife and I have determined to do everything we can to make this year suck less. Towards that goal we did two things yesterday: For one thing, we bought tickets for the Blue Man Group which will be in Berlin throughout most of May this year. I've been meaning to go to one of their performances for quite some time, and when I saw the posters hanging at the local ticket booth, we quickly determined that we would spend the not insignificant amount of bucks for two tickets, lest we miss these guys like we missed Stomp a few years ago, which I am still angry at myself about.
Secondly, we watched
The Last Samurai
What reviews I had read before were so varied that I wasn't sure whether all the critics were talking about the same movie, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. One of them equated The Last Samurai as Dances With Wolves meets Shogun, and as a rough, clichéd summary that wasn't too far off the mark. But it doesn't do the movie justice, either. Yes, the beginning was reminiscent of the beginning of Dances with Wolves, and the situation of Captain Algren, superbly played by Tom Cruise, in the middle parts of the movie was roughly similar to that of Navigator Blackthorne in Shogun and of Lieutenant Dunbar in Dances With Wolves, but that is where the similarities end.
For one thing, both Shogun and Dances With Wolves had their lengths, and in stark contrast to those two, The Last Samurai is superbly paced, intense battle scenes alternating with calm scenes of a frequently almost meditative quality. The contrast between the two is almost shocking in places, and if this movie doesn't get the Oscar for Best Cut, something is seriously wrong.
Also, I'm not exactly a fan of Tom Cruise, as I'm wary about his evangelism for Scientology. Neither do I think that he looks all that hot, or that most of his acting performances were all that great, but his embodiment of a disillusioned, broken, weary veteran of both the Civil War and the bloody conflicts between the US and the native Americans which have transformed him from a soldier full of ideals to a cold, sick, bone-tired, alcohol-dependent mercenary is simply great and trumps both Richard Chamberlain and Kevin Costner. If he can keep this up, I'll credit him with having grown into a serious actor at long last.
But then, in pleasant, almost shocking, contrast to The Return of the King, the acting in The Last Samurai was very, very good throughout, be it Katsumoto (the last samurai in the title), his sister and the rest of his command, the westernized Japanese of the emperor's court, or those Americans and Europeans with a significant place in the story, all their actors delivered good and sometimes great performances.
Another highlight of the movie were the battle and fighting scenes. Make no mistake, they are gory, bloody, brutal, and honest to a fault in their depiction of the horrors of war. Some might say they were too bloody, but none of that violence felt gratuitous to me when seen in the context of the film. Even my wife, who is more sensitive towards depictions of violence in movies, had to concede that while some of the scenes where almost too much for her, they all served their purpose and had their place in the story. To which I would like to add that the fighting scenes were choreographed well, too. Kudos to whoever trained the actors in sword fighting and martial arts!
There were, of course, a few weaknesses as well. Two of them I'll easily forgive and forget, while others are less easily dismissed. As to the first ones, one is the romanticization of the samurai. After all, at the time of the movie, they were a very conservative, reactionary force who were opposed to most all social change in Japan, including the abolition of the obsolete and unfair caste system and with it the abolition of the numerous privileges of the samurai caste. But then, the movie lived off that romanticization, the contrast between the cold, mercenary modern world and the romantically depicted, honor bound, old ways. And so I feel that in this, as well as the fighting scenes, historical accuracy has to take a step back in favor of telling a good story for the audience.
So what's wrong about the fighting scenes that I'd so praised only a moment before? Well, opposed to what is so spectacularly and frequently depicted in movie sword fighting scenes, ringing edge-on-edge blade contact (such as blocking a mighty blow instead of redirecting it) was avoided in most if not all eastern and western fighting styles, because it is extremely harmful to the blade which will easily chip, bend, or even break from such abuse. But then, two samurai circling each other for hours on end, only to end the fight in one short, fast burst of movements consisting mostly of each avoiding the swings of the other instead of blocking them until suddenly one of them is dead, does not make for a satisfying fighting scene, especially not for an audience that is so inured to the ringing blade-on-blade kind of fighting.
One inaccuracy though I will not forgive, because it was gratuitous and unnecessary and served no discernible purpose whatsoever: There is a scene where Katsumoto's village is attacked at night by a group of black-clad assailants bent on assassinating the leader of the rebellious samurai. And of course these guys are depicted as the typical Hollywood-cliche Ninjas which have never really existed the way they are shown in "Easterns". Yes, there were groups of warriors trained specifically for infiltration, espionage, and assassination missions in historic Japan. Yes, some of these groups actually may have been known as Ninja, and yes, they frequently used weapons other than the curved sword and the long bow.
But that's were the truth ends and the fantasy of Hollywood script authors starts: No, these guys never used the so called Ninja swords, the infamous, straight-bladed contraptions with the rectangular, black guard pieces, which were fabricated from whole cloth by some Hollywood screen writer with a lively fantasy. Instead, they used what everyone used at that time and place: blades of varying length and varying, but nearly always existing, curvature. And while they occasionally made use of throwing weapons called Shuriken, these were rarely star-shaped, but were in fact simple throwing knives of differing sizes and shapes.
Yes, this glaring inaccuracy bothers me, especially in an otherwise great movie like this. Still, if you enjoyed RotK, Dances With Wolves, or Shogun, and can stomach the violent, bloody battle scenes, go see The Last Samurai. It's definitely worth it.
PS: the Blogger spell-checker sucks. It doesn't know "blog", and if you go ahead and let it replace faulty words with the version it thinks is correct, chances are, it'll make a thorough mess of it. So I'll revert to un-spellchecked posting for the foreseeable future...
[Update: one thing I forgot to mention about the movie: both me and my wife really, really liked the ending. The Last Samurai is a Hollywood movie, so it's a Happy End, of course, but this one was well done, and not at all cheesy.]
2004-01-06
Counting My Blessings
Many of the people I talked with these last few days agree about one thing: 2003 sucked. Mightily. And with both my and my wife's last remaining grandparents having died last year, I'm not about to argue against that.
Hell, even now, a week after 2003 is over, we are still discovering new and refreshingly awful ways in which the last year sucked for friends and family. My father and step-mother had been here for a belated Christmas visit (and with her soon being hospitalized for some extensive foot surgery that will leave her leg in a plaster cast for at least 6 weeks, also a premature birthday visit) on Sunday. This time was better than the last few times we met, as we got to talk about the issues which were important to us.
They also talked about what happened in her part of our family shrub (calling it a tree would be oversimplifying a bit much, methinks), and the news was not good. Apparently, A, the wife of M, the eldest son of my step-mother, told him more or less out of the blue that she had a lover, that they would get divorced, and that he'd have to understand because she had butterflies in her stomach. To say that he was shocked is an understatement of astronomical proportions. In fact, from what we know now, in his shock he meticulously planned and executed a suicide attempt that would surely have succeeded had his soon-to-be-ex wife not come home a bit earlier than usual that day and found him, blood flowing from his wrists.
He lives, though barely so (the flesh is hale, it is the mind that is ailing). Which reminds me, I forgot to ask whether M is getting any psychological assistence, and it is entirely possible that no one in the family has thought of that... But this is just a symptom of why things are so hard for M right now: his mother is still in shock, his sister and my father both manage to be hurtfully cold and distanced on such occasions (a trait that I share in part, sadly, although it is somewhat mitigated by my empathy), and his younger brother, the person with the biggest heart and the smallest intellect in their part of the family, and the one who would be able to help M the most, is a truck driver who due to his job only manages to touch base every odd weekend or so. And me, I barely know the guy.
Fuck it. I hate having no idea about how to help.
But 2003 hasn't been all bad, far from it, even if it had more than its fair share of suckage. Some of the good things that happened last year:
- the big and obvious one: we got our shiny new house,
- we both continue to be gainfully (self-)employed, and I have so far managed to survive the continued (15 months and counting) slump in the IT job market with just six weeks of unemployment,
- Helen started blogging,
- Sedalina ditched Jill, found the wonder that is Laurel and her love, and bought a house
- Johnny Huh? has married and is on his way to producing offspring,
- Finding Nemo, 'nuff said,
- and finally me keeping this here blog limping along. This is by far my most succesful attempt at keeping some form of diary, and it's filling a need that I hadn't thought existed. Most surprsing to me: despite what it all too often costs me in energy and time to plonk down my butt and write something up, I can't see me abandoning this any time soon.
So there you have it, not exactly 2003 in twenty words for me, but it will do as a résumé.
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