Oh, you’re all still here? Sorry, got busy, you know how it goes. You’ll have to wait until I get out of class.
Half the week is over, folks! If you haven’t contributed to QOTD or Hump Day, this is your last warning. If you have, make yourself a stiff drink, kick back and listen to the music. Continue reading
Finally, a return to women in film. Hasn’t it seemed like forever since a movie touted a primarily all-female cast? Not since 2008’s remake of The Women have we seen this much lady talent in one place. However, we’ll have to hope the outcome of these two new releases fares a bit better than what happened to Meg, Annette, Eva, Jada, and Debra in that last frozen-faced travesty. It just wasn’t good. No, no it wasn’t. And sorry, Meg, but we just don’t understand what’s happening below your hairline either. We’d like you to stop that. Anyway, it’s a new year, and these two offerings would like to reintroduce you to ladies who can act and make us laugh.
Who hasn’t read The Help? If there was a book club, a company break room, a yoga class, or an empty lounge chair at Starbucks there was someone reading The Help last year. This is the book whose name ended the sentence, “Hey, have you read…” or “Oh, my god. Read…!” It was just that kind of phenomenon, and seemingly overnight, plans for a movie were announced. Much of the excitement surrounded who would play all the roles in this inexplicably remarkable little book. The casting of Viola Davis, Oscar nominee and recent Tony winner, as Aibileen was a stroke of genius. The newly minted Emma Stone was at first a bit confusing since she was largely known for just a few lines in Judd Apatow’s Superbad — but her showing in Easy A added a bit more gravitas to her casting as Skeeter Phelan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_yiv4jqW_0
Some have noted the lighthearted approach in this trailer and feel it’s worrisome regarding the overall sentiment of the novel. I can’t say that I totally disagree.
While it’s certainly possible given that this is a spring release, and we’re not in a heavy Oscar push quite yet, the major concern for the studio is probably getting people to the theater — then perhaps they’ll hit you with the heavier subject matter. But I dunno. The trailer almost makes the movie look like a mash of Steel Magnolias with something Tyler Perry would direct (and probably star in). I don’t want to think that’s the case, but I can’t really explain the Rob Reiner music choice, or the Hollywood movie set, Technicolor backdrop, or the flouncy, almost Hairspray-esque visuals. It does seem a touch too light.
As someone who tore through the book in the matter of days, I really want them to do this story justice, but not because it was a book of such overwhelming literary prose. Compelling as it was, it had its foibles, but because for the real-life black women who did Days Work for decades — their story, even if told through the voice of someone who didn’t live that experience — shouldn’t be cavalierly diminished by quick, pre-fab, Hollywood spackle. Given the source material, there was real opportunity to turn it into something poignant. Let’s hope they deliver. At the very least, though, I expect Viola to be excellent. However, at this point I can’t get beyond Emma Stone’s hair. Just what the what? I fear she’ll be a caricature.
So you thought Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were the only two funny chicks on television and making movies in Hollywood? Well, you’d be so, so wrong. Kristen Wiig has finally emerged from the sidekick annals to star in her own ensemble-ly movie about a bunch of begrudging bridesmaids who embark in hilarious antics up the wazoo. Here’s the second trailer about these fine, and so very lady-like chicks in dresses they’ll never wear again.
It seems the new trailer further solidifies that this will be The Hangover: Lost in David’s Bridal, but that’s just fine. There are some identifiable archetypes here — we know what they are, and we’re not surprised to see them emerge. The fun, it looks like, is seeing what the actresses will do with them. If it’s the unexpected — we’ll be thrilled, if it’s the same thing Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, and Cameron Diaz could pull off — we’ll be less so. It looks so far to have the right balance between the believable and the absurd, even if it follows the current “funny movie” formula set-up by throwing most anybody into a movie with Zach Galifianakis. However, I can’t stop myself from thinking about what it could’ve been like if they actually did have Fey and Poehler in the mix here. Would it ratchet it up a notch? Possibly. But ultimately I think it’s good that Wiig is stepping out and away from the rest of the SNL alum. And this surely looks loads better than some of the SNL-born films in the last decade or so. Anyone remember The Ladies Man, or any of the things starring Chris Kattan? So, yeah, good on Wiig so far. I’m excited for this. And it’s about damn time.
So what do you think? Are you like, “I’m there with bells on!” or “I’ll update my Netflix queue.” or “Not even if Jesus was the co-star.” Tell us in the comments.
Sometimes the subways melt together, fuse, split apart and rise again, utterly different. Sometimes it happens slowly, and sometimes it happens in the course of a single stop.
Sometimes, Manhattan’s fabled street grid shifts, or tilts, making north become east and east become south.
My brain doesn’t accept direction, or distance, or shapes, or numbers the way most people’s brains do. In most people, there is an instinctual sense of direction. In me, there is not. I’m learning disabled in spatial relationships, affecting how I deal with things in space and time, and how I process non-verbal information. I can’t tell my left from my right unless I’m wearing my watch, which I understand, because I’ve memorized this fact, is on my left wrist. Even then, I have to think about it for a second. This was the main reason I didn’t learn to drive until I was twenty-two, after failing one drivers’ test and then getting a good word from a State Trooper friend whose barracks regularly got cookies from me in my reporting days.
The constant flogging from teachers and parents when it came to my math problems: You’re not trying hard enough. You’ve got to pay attention. I didn’t understand how crying at my desk wasn’t trying hard enough. It started with the shoes — all my classmates in first grade could tie their laces. I was still figuring it out in third grade. Thank God the mid-eighties Velcro trend kicked in. That only helped if I could put the damn things on the proper foot. Even now, at thirty-seven, I mark all my boots with a Sharpie so the left one doesn’t go on the right.
The problems were not officially noticed until I was in my second round of pre-algebra in high school. The teacher was your classic arithmetic teacher with chalk dust covering his pants and crooked glasses on his end of his nose kind of person and found it unusual that the editor of the high school paper was in the same math classes as the kids who showed up twice a week. I was sent to the school shrink (hysterically named Dr. Brain) who sat me down and asked me to put a simple puzzle of an elephant together.
I couldn’t do it.
“I don’t know how you’ve gotten this far,” he said. I was about to enter my senior year of high school, too late for remedial training, unless the school system kept me back a year. I had already been accepted to Emerson College, which openly said it did not care about a journalism major’s math scores.
I’ve learned to get around. I plot a trip to the mall like a Marine launching an offensive in Afghanistan. I play word association games to remember my parking spaces. (Section F is for a FANTASTIC space!) I make friends with mannequins upon mall entry, remembering their outfits as my entry/exit points. I go out of my way to use, say, the escalator by the tacky indoor waterfall to help remember my route through the retail wasteland, since the mall maps mean nothing to me. I feel my way though like a firefighter in a building filled with thick smoke, searching by hand, by touch, for The Body Shop.
I have gotten lost in giant Targets and Walmarts, desperately pawing through knockoff handbags for whomever may be my shopping companion. My mother still thinks it’s a riot to move her carriage over a few aisles and see if I’ll figure it out. We’ll see who’s laughing when Nursing Home Time comes.
At home, I foolishly refuse to accept my limitations, attempting to assemble cheap furniture and managing to put it together upside down and backwards. My husband, ever kind and patient, takes it apart and assembles it properly.
You’ll probably see me, the only person in Manhattan taking a compass out of her bag to figure out where she is in Midtown. Or maybe confused in a hospital, lost going to the doctor I’ve seen dozens of times. Or maybe in my own neighborhood, somewhat discombobulated having gotten off at the wrong subway exit and launched myself south instead of north. You’ll see me in a restaurant, using a tip calculator on my Blackberry to figure out a twenty percent tip on a ten dollar bill. I might show up for work when I’m not scheduled, because I have trouble absorbing the spreadsheet grid that spells out the shifts. Don’t laugh. Don’t yell. I’ll get it.
I’ll get there.
There’s an old adage that says, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But what about close friends who have relationships with people that you don’t like and—more importantly—don’t trust? It can put you in an undesirable position whether you consider them to be hostile to you directly or solely bad to, and for, your friend.
I had a much-beloved friend (I’ll call her Leila) who married a man after dating him for less than a year. Before her engagement she had asked me earnestly what I thought of her then-boyfriend (I’ll call him Robert). I decided to censor my intuitive assessment of him in favor of saying what I thought Leila wanted to hear. So I offered, “He seems like a really nice guy”, and neglected to add, “but he’s also got definite control-freak tendencies and he’s way too possessive of you.”
I’d watched Leila endure a bad breakup from a longtime lover not long before she met Robert. She seemed head over heels in love and I wanted her to enjoy happiness for a change. It was clear to me that Robert was her rebound relationship, but I felt that Leila needed positive reinforcement more than a reality check.
Fast-forward to three years after their elaborate fairytale wedding at a lush estate in the rolling verdant hills of California wine country. Leila spent several years discovering the depths of Robert’s petty, controlling ways. Nothing improved with couples therapy and Leila finally filed for divorce. Their convoluted disagreement was not only over pecuniary matters, but over far more poignant matters of the heart.
Since the couple had never had children Robert manipulated Leila the way that he knew would be most successful, he denied Leila visitation of their two dogs until she made financial concessions that she never would have agreed to otherwise. I sat with Leila numerous times over several months as she cried her heart out over missing her precious pups. There was never an appropriate time to say, even gently, “I told you so”; it would have added insult to injury and, to my regret, I hadn’t told her so to begin with.
In hindsight, I have often wondered if I did her a disservice by not revealing my honest assessment of Robert’s personality from the very beginning. Would it have made a difference in her decision to marry him? Would it have prevented her from drifting away from our friendship after her divorce? It’s impossible for me to say, but I do know that if I had to do it all over again, I would have definitely told Leila the truth of what I saw.
When friends choose friends who are more like enemies, what do you do?
Greetings comrades. I come to you tonight to humbly ask your assistance in our effort to win The Internet. As you all know, we have experienced a pretty amazing transformation in the last few months and our humble collective has turned into the beginnings of a Dictatorship of the Internet Proletariat. No longer mere peasants; we have taken control of the means of production.
However, our battle has just begun and it is time for our armies to grow. For this to happen I need your help. As you may have noticed, we have added some new editors and moderators in the last couple of weeks in an effort to improve the quality of the site. Now that we are making that effort, we need to find a way to get the word out about the great stuff going on here. For this I need a few volunteers to be part of the Crasstalk Ministry of Propaganda.
The CMP will be charged with getting Crasstalk content out to other places on the web. This includes the social media platforms we already use, but we are also looking for some really creative ideas about getting the word out about the community here. We actually have some really interesting stuff here in our little web oasis, but we need to find ways to show it off to the rest of the world. I know that many of you are smart and innovative thinkers and we would really love to have your assistance as we continue to grow and shape the site.
If you are interested in helping out please send an email to [email protected]. If anyone has suggestions or ideas for promoting Crasstalk please put them in the comments so we can get some ideas rolling.
As always, it is an honor to serve with you.
First things first: Nuclear Power is a tricky issue. I don’t expect to solve it in a short article and some snarky comments. Nonetheless, it’s one of the key issues confronting countries around the world as their existing power stations age and (in many cases) as their demands for energy grow, especially in developing countries like China and India.
Second things second: It’s important to look at this issue (like any issue) logically and not with emotional knee-jerk reactions.
What I mean is this. If I show you this picture:
and ask whether cats are cuddly and cute or vicious killers who must be controlled, you’ll at least be conflicted.
If I show you THIS picture:
and ask whether cats are cuddly and cute or vicious killers who must be controlled, I know your answer.
If I ask you what you think of nuclear power after you’ve just seen this:
well…..
But what if I showed you
and asked you whether you want a few hundred more of these going up around the world in the next decade, or whether you would prefer some power stations which don’t use coal or oil or gas and which don’t emit greenhouse gases?
For further amusing and scary information on the way this kind of emotional manipulation can be used in surveys, I highly recommend this classic Yes Minister clip:
Moving on:
What are the advantages of nuclear power? Well, that’s easy, we’ve cited some of them above:
1. No greenhouse gas emissions, or other noxious substances which contribute to acid rain, smog and other air pollutant.
2. Doesn’t use traditional fossil fuels and we don’t seem to be in danger of running out of uranium any time soon.
3. Already commercially viable and practical, and indeed very efficient, for use on the scale of providing power to millions of homes and businesses.
1 & 2 are the advantages over traditional fossil fuel power stations. 3 is the advantage over renewable energy sources apart from hydro power. Naturally, if we could just rely on solar power and wind power for all our energy needs, we would do it. It can’t be done yet. For now, it’s a 2 horse race. Perhaps we’re talking a stop-gap measure for only 5-10 years, maybe we won’t have renewal energy on a practical scale until vicious war halves the population. But every year, more power stations must go up around the world to meet demand, and we’ve got to decide what we want them to be NOW, not in 10 years (or after Thunderdome).
What then are the disadvantages?
1. If a nuclear plant goes bad, it will contaminate the surrounding land beyond habitability forever (until cleaned up, if it can be cleaned up, which will take decades).
2. If a nuclear plant goes bad, it may release radioactive particles into the wind and water which spread far beyond the immediate area, making the health damage more than just a localized issue.
3. Nuclear energy may not produce air pollutants, but it does create noxious waste of another kind which must be stuck somewhere. The more nuclear energy used, the more waste produced and the more secure faraway places we must find to stash the radioactive waste.
4. Risk of uranium fuel sales being diverted into weapons manufacture, or at “best” a “dirty bomb”.
To counter this, one could say: these are all manageable risks. If you don’t mess up running your nuclear plant (and hundreds of such plants around the world, for decades, have run without melting down), 1 & 2 don’t matter. if you can successfully store and partially recycle your radioactive waste (which, so far, has been managed by all nuclear countries), 3 doesn’t matter. If you keep proper security, 4 doesn’t matter. The problems with fossil fuels, on the other hand, cannot be stopped. Fossil fuels will run out, and when you burn them they release tons of air pollutants.
The trouble with that argument is of course, that ignoring Chernobyl, partial meltdowns and major leaks have occurred in the United States, the United Kingdom and now Japan. Few countries are not subject to major earthquakes or floods or other disasters which can affect the safe operation of plants despite all the safety precautions. And now we’re talking about rolling more of the things out in an era of lowest-price-wins construction tendering, in developing countries who haven’t had 30 years of experience to iron out the teething problems, in countries where a $10,000 bribe to divert some uranium isn’t chickenfeed but instead enough money to set a family up for life.
My personal belief is that most if not all nuclear power accidents have occurred with old technology (even the Fukushima reactor at the center of the present crisis is a very old one built to lower safety precautions than are now in use, and which was already overdue to be decommissioned). Countries can safely use nuclear power as a stopgap for renewable energy, and must do so to buy time to get greenhouse gas emissions down, but they should heed the lessons of Fukushima about doing anything on the cheap or taking anything for granted, and if wealthier countries need to chip in a bit to ensure others do it properly and don’t leave nuclear power plants to be built by the President’s brother-in-law and staffed by men paid $1 a day, then they should realise it’s in their own collective self-interest, less a fallout cloud sweep across their borders.
But on the other side, I can see how this will only create a permanent and huge hoard of nuclear waste, to be stored effectively forever, a long-term problem to be managed long after greenhouse gases have been brought under control, and that my idealistic dream of countries acting responsibly in this day and age is overly optimistic, and that fossil fuel power plants are a necessary way of playing it safe, the lesser evil to avoid the catastrophe of nuclear meltdowns.
Or maybe we should just accept global warming is inevitable and plan for how to survive that, not how to shuffle deckchairs on the beach while the tide is rising?
Your thoughts, upon reaching the end of this lengthy post, would be appreciated.
Everyone remembers their first ‘real’ concert. The one that took place in an arena, stadium, or at least a decent sized theater. Not the one that took place in the concourse at the mall. That doesn’t count, and you know it.
No, the first real concert is an unmistakable experience. For me, it involved piling into my grandfather’s ’77 Pontiac Grand Prix, making the two hour trip to Star Lake Ampitheater in Pittsburgh, and taking in Van Halen on their ‘Balance’ tour. Okay, so it was Sammy Hagar era Van Halen, and I was 15, so my father was the one who accompanied me, because, secretly, he wanted to see Van Halen as well. However, I got to test out my driving on the freeway chops, and despite my feelings about Sammy Hagar, I remember it being a high energy, loud, professional show. Even if I had to endure such songs as “Can’t Stop Loving You” (seriously, watch a video of Hagar signing “…Loving You” from around that era, he looks like Michael fucking Bolton), they offset it with enough “Panama” and “Jump” to satisfy the 12-year old inside of me that remembered roller skating to those songs. Yes, I had nostalgia at 15, so what?
What do you guys remember about your first concert?
Oh my. I almost forgot Hump Day this week. What would you have done? OK, here are some random people I think are sexy. Forgive my lack of theme, but I am sure you will all come up with something. Same rules as always, no naughty bits.
Here’s a young, hot Richard Chamberlain.
And let’s go with some classic Lynda Carter.
Once again, a tip on photo sizing. When you do a google image search, if you click on medium on the left column you will get images that don’t take up the whole page. This will make it easier for the page to load and for readers to scroll down. You’re welcome.
Have a great Hump Day.
What’s this? Lucky’s in charge of Wednesday’s Open Threads? Ha, you all thought Botswana’s were scary. Nobody is making it out of this one alive.
Kidding. I’ll be nice and let 1/3 of you live, but you have to beg.
It’s Wednesday folks, so get on over to the Hump Day post and make your contributions. For all three of you who are not perverts, today’s theme is ducks. Continue reading