This is a minor post...
When I finished and published my last post, a few hours ago about Pete Rose and A-Rod, an ad next to the "...just posted successfully!" notice caught my attention.
It was an ad from blog2print, a company that specializes in turning folks' blogs into books. I raised my eyebrows. I'd be lying if I said I've never contemplated formatting the bulk of these musings into book form. Maybe a site that has the blogspot and wordpress format ingrained might be easier than whatever else I was imagining. After a second, I thought, nah, this probably won't be what I'm looking for, but I'll check it out anyway.
I knew the latter sentiment was right when I saw a "special" price: $14.95 for twenty pages in color. Twenty? I've got more pages that that this month. In any case, I followed some prompts to get a look at how the book could look. For the most cost effective way of dealing with photographs (which kinda goes against how I structure my posts) and going with their suggestion that I go with only the last three months, the price was almost $55 for one copy (each page past 20 costs a set amount).
I decided to get funky: I chose to the normal layout for dealing with photographs and told it to use all my posts. When you click okay on that prompt, the screen goes dark, and it says things like "Working on Book" and "Your Book's Almost Done", like an Orbitz screen checking for flights. When I told it regular-photo-display and all-posts, it looked like that for about six minutes.
When it finally showed up ready to display my "book", it said that the number of pages were too large for a single volume format. The digital copy I perused had almost thirty pages of "Table of Contents", and had almost six hundred pages of stuff.
And here I keep right on trucking, adding to the list...
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Pair of 99 Cent Sports Books
When I was living in San Luis Obispo, I visited the 99-cent store and happened to find Pete Rose's autobiography My Prison Without Bars, the book in which he is said to have admitted betting on baseball.
My dad is on the "Screw Pete Rose" side of the Charlie Hustle fence (usually the word "screw" is replaced with a more colorful word beginning with "F"), so that's how I grew up; my baseball heritage is anit-Pete Rose. My good friend Ryan is, as best my memory allows, to some degree (most likely the same as me--a result of his dad's preferences) on the opposite side of the Charlie Hustle fence, a more pro-Pete Rose baseball heritage. It was because of Ryan, probably, that I cracked up when I saw Pete's book, and bought it.
I read it in a few days, and my opinion of him changed. My view of Pete Rose changed to a more positive position. You won't see me with a picket, writing letters and trying to get Rose in the HOF, by any means, but you also won't see me running the "F Pete Rose" parties anymore.
The gamut of baseball and gambling runs through everything from poker with the guys in the off-season, to high-roller stakes in Manhattan poker clubs during the season, to betting on football, to the unspeakableness of betting on baseball, and plenty in between.
If you break down betting on baseball, there are shades of obviously-bad-but-not-compromising-the-integrity-of-wins-and-losses (betting on games you're not a part of to betting on your own team to win), and then there's the throwing-games-to-win-bets, which is, of course, the ultimate sin.
I don't think Pete Rose ever bet on his own team to lose, and I don't think the integrity of the losses his team had while he was making bets is in question. Is that enough to still keep him out of the HOF? Sure. What's the number one rule in baseball, even more important than not taking drugs to get better: NO BETTING ON THE GAME. A little personal accountability here, please...jeeze.
So, while I'm not now a Rose for the Hall kind of guy, I do respect how he played more, and view his achievements with more reverence than I did earlier in my life.
My mother, on a visit recently, gave me a copy of another 99-cent book she found, this one being Selena Roberts' A-Rod: The Many Lives Of Alex Rodriguez. Again, after reading it in a pair of days, I've had my opinion of the payer changed. This time for the worse.
I am an admitted Yankee fan. I am unabashedly supportive of the pinstripes, and that I have friends at all is curious, since most Yankee fans of my level are obnoxious assholes. I'm not, though, the fan that gives his own players passes on steroids while condemning the other players who used. But, in some strange magic trick, I don't condemn every single player who took 'roids. The steroid era is a blemish, a black eye on the sport as a whole, a image problem they'll have to live with going forward. Of course I view those players differently, but I don't use the word condemn, since we, as fans, were complicit in the culture that led to the rampant use of performance enhancing drugs.
I view it more as a symptom of the decay of personal accountability, humility, honest drive, and a toxic obsession with winning, the basic decay of the things that Americans take pride in, the basic decay of our American culture. Steroids in baseball isn't the end of the world, or even the end of the baseball world, it's just a symptom of this new American thing; greed and fame above all else, like the escalation of reality television and the superficiality of pop-culture. Greed and fame and the superficiality of pop-culture aren't anything new, so...
Maybe all I'm trying to say is that we're not allowed to be surprised that many, many players used steroids, human growth hormone, and lots of amphetamines.
From the Selena Roberts book we see the strange transformation of Alex Rodriguez, from sophomore year to junior year of high school. He returned after summer break having added twenty-five pounds of muscle. That doesn't happen even when you're seventeen. There's evidence that he was juicing even that early in his baseball life. There's evidence he juiced in Seattle, plenty of talk (even his own admission) that he juiced in Texas, and evidence he juiced in the Bronx.
Feeling abandoned by his father at a young age, he needed to be loved and accepted and told how great he was, and that never ended. He's portrayed in many negative lights in the book, but the ones I enjoyed reading the most were about his obsession with Derek Jeter.
Jeter: childhood household had both parents and strict structure; plays for one team; won four (five as of now) championships; disdained the gossip pages in the paper; guarded his private life vehemently; didn't care much for any baseball game he wasn't playing in; was roundly beloved by the fans in New York.
For A-Rod, the fact that he was a better athlete, had better stats, and would go down as an all-time great (before all the steroid revelations came out), the fact he wasn't more beloved in New York than Jeter was a great problem for him. He couldn't wrap his head around it. In each of those things listed for Jeter above, Alex has the complete opposite factoid.
I've been to games at Yankee Stadium and watched fans boo Alex Rodriguez. I've been at games where he's hit a home run and still been booed, "Do it in October when it counts!" a fifty-ish lady hollered from the seat directly in front of me.
I think the sympathy I had for Alex Rodriguez has evaporated since finishing the book. That's how my view of him has turned darker.
If somebody cheated and became the best of an entire group of cheaters, doesn't that still make them the best? (See Lance Armstrong)
My dad is on the "Screw Pete Rose" side of the Charlie Hustle fence (usually the word "screw" is replaced with a more colorful word beginning with "F"), so that's how I grew up; my baseball heritage is anit-Pete Rose. My good friend Ryan is, as best my memory allows, to some degree (most likely the same as me--a result of his dad's preferences) on the opposite side of the Charlie Hustle fence, a more pro-Pete Rose baseball heritage. It was because of Ryan, probably, that I cracked up when I saw Pete's book, and bought it.
I read it in a few days, and my opinion of him changed. My view of Pete Rose changed to a more positive position. You won't see me with a picket, writing letters and trying to get Rose in the HOF, by any means, but you also won't see me running the "F Pete Rose" parties anymore.
The gamut of baseball and gambling runs through everything from poker with the guys in the off-season, to high-roller stakes in Manhattan poker clubs during the season, to betting on football, to the unspeakableness of betting on baseball, and plenty in between.
If you break down betting on baseball, there are shades of obviously-bad-but-not-compromising-the-integrity-of-wins-and-losses (betting on games you're not a part of to betting on your own team to win), and then there's the throwing-games-to-win-bets, which is, of course, the ultimate sin.
I don't think Pete Rose ever bet on his own team to lose, and I don't think the integrity of the losses his team had while he was making bets is in question. Is that enough to still keep him out of the HOF? Sure. What's the number one rule in baseball, even more important than not taking drugs to get better: NO BETTING ON THE GAME. A little personal accountability here, please...jeeze.
So, while I'm not now a Rose for the Hall kind of guy, I do respect how he played more, and view his achievements with more reverence than I did earlier in my life.
My mother, on a visit recently, gave me a copy of another 99-cent book she found, this one being Selena Roberts' A-Rod: The Many Lives Of Alex Rodriguez. Again, after reading it in a pair of days, I've had my opinion of the payer changed. This time for the worse.
I am an admitted Yankee fan. I am unabashedly supportive of the pinstripes, and that I have friends at all is curious, since most Yankee fans of my level are obnoxious assholes. I'm not, though, the fan that gives his own players passes on steroids while condemning the other players who used. But, in some strange magic trick, I don't condemn every single player who took 'roids. The steroid era is a blemish, a black eye on the sport as a whole, a image problem they'll have to live with going forward. Of course I view those players differently, but I don't use the word condemn, since we, as fans, were complicit in the culture that led to the rampant use of performance enhancing drugs.
I view it more as a symptom of the decay of personal accountability, humility, honest drive, and a toxic obsession with winning, the basic decay of the things that Americans take pride in, the basic decay of our American culture. Steroids in baseball isn't the end of the world, or even the end of the baseball world, it's just a symptom of this new American thing; greed and fame above all else, like the escalation of reality television and the superficiality of pop-culture. Greed and fame and the superficiality of pop-culture aren't anything new, so...
Maybe all I'm trying to say is that we're not allowed to be surprised that many, many players used steroids, human growth hormone, and lots of amphetamines.
From the Selena Roberts book we see the strange transformation of Alex Rodriguez, from sophomore year to junior year of high school. He returned after summer break having added twenty-five pounds of muscle. That doesn't happen even when you're seventeen. There's evidence that he was juicing even that early in his baseball life. There's evidence he juiced in Seattle, plenty of talk (even his own admission) that he juiced in Texas, and evidence he juiced in the Bronx.
Feeling abandoned by his father at a young age, he needed to be loved and accepted and told how great he was, and that never ended. He's portrayed in many negative lights in the book, but the ones I enjoyed reading the most were about his obsession with Derek Jeter.
Jeter: childhood household had both parents and strict structure; plays for one team; won four (five as of now) championships; disdained the gossip pages in the paper; guarded his private life vehemently; didn't care much for any baseball game he wasn't playing in; was roundly beloved by the fans in New York.
For A-Rod, the fact that he was a better athlete, had better stats, and would go down as an all-time great (before all the steroid revelations came out), the fact he wasn't more beloved in New York than Jeter was a great problem for him. He couldn't wrap his head around it. In each of those things listed for Jeter above, Alex has the complete opposite factoid.
I've been to games at Yankee Stadium and watched fans boo Alex Rodriguez. I've been at games where he's hit a home run and still been booed, "Do it in October when it counts!" a fifty-ish lady hollered from the seat directly in front of me.
I think the sympathy I had for Alex Rodriguez has evaporated since finishing the book. That's how my view of him has turned darker.
If somebody cheated and became the best of an entire group of cheaters, doesn't that still make them the best? (See Lance Armstrong)
What's the Catch?
On the long bike ride adventure I took last week to San Pedro and specifically after my crash, I felt like just seeing a few things and turning around to head home. Like I mentioned, my motivation was sapped. As I checked out something calling itself an "Antique Mall" (something they have with a strange regularity down here) (I looked over their cameras, chairs, dressers and books) I dabbed my now pouring sweat. I start sweating once I get off a bike. I was still bleeding, and quickly left the establishment. I noticed a sign attached to a store as I was unlocking my bike. It proclaimed the store (name escapes me) as the oldest continuously operating bookstore in the Southland. I took it as a sign, stopped unlocking my bike, and went inside.
It was a haggard collection of new releases of the sort you see at airport bookstores, magazines, local writers, nearly outdated comic books, and a display shelf of poorly-constructed looking paperbacks by authors I'd never heard of.
There have been visits by me to local indie record and book shops where I learn about new authors and publishing houses, places that are reputable publishers that may take unsolicited material. I'm not quite ready, as a writer, to have things ready for an agent, but I like to do fleeting research with publishers who publish things I think my closest material to being done most closely resembles.
Those visits have given me names of operations to look up later when I leave those establishments. Same thing here in San Pedro, with that collection of poorly-constructed looking paperbacks, a construction quality level that maybe should have tipped me.
The name of the publisher on the binding and inside each book was Publish America. When I got home, I looked up the company's website. It all sounded quite unreal. They are not a POD (print-on-demand) or vanity press. They make money the old-fashioned way--by selling your books. They don't charge their writers a fee, they send them checks. They pay advances once the manuscript has been accepted and the contract offer has been signed and returned.
Sitting in our new chair at the computer desk in our apartment I stared at my computer screen puzzled. This was an incredible set of statements. It seemed far too good to be true. They had editors who'd pour over your work line by line, at no cost to you. If I had material farther along, and had been striking out with agents and unsolicited material accepting houses, I might've been tempted to rush off and get something ready to send. Like I said, I'm not that close, and I haven't exhausted traditional avenues to getting noticed, so I decided to a bit of research. The catch had to be something...
I started by simply typing "publish america" into my Internet browser's Google search window, and without hitting "Enter" I examined all the choices it generates for you. "Publish america scams" was something like second on the list.
It didn't take long to find out that the way Publish America operates is like a sinister vanity press. According to the horror stories of authors who are unsatisfied with their treatment by PA, you're obligated to purchase a certain amount of copies for promotional purposes, they do not accept returns, they charge prices for books that are far too high, they claim to sell their writer's books in "brick and mortar" bookstores, which is true in the sense that a customer can walk in and have it ordered special ("selling in a bookstore" and "shelving it in a bookstore" aren't the same thing) but even then they've been known to rarely complete sales or transactions. They even have a difficult time producing reliable sales accounts for authors of their books. When you find a bookstore, like I had, that shelved Publish America books, you must be in a place that's either sympathetic to a specific writer, ignorant to the system, or run by PA writers themselves; most traditional bookstores don't stock any POD, vanity, or PA books.
A company that proclaims that they discover authors and give them their first chance, give their material the opportunity it deserves, they seem, in actuality, to hustle the writer and their family to purchase copies of their own book to recoup the costs associated with printing it. Most reputable publishers and literary agencies don't consider a PA published book a writing credit. Worst of all, they own your story and characters for seven years.
The amounts of things that have been published by Publish America that are heavy with obvious typos called into question their editing staff's credentials. A claim made by them on their site, that they turn down 80% of all manuscripts also came under fire when an already published writer, on an experiment, wrote thirty pages of material, changed the name of the protagonist on page twenty-two, then photocopied the last ten pages over and over again until his manuscript was 120 pages long.
He was offered a contract.
After Publish America made disparaging claims about science fiction books and writers, like the gentleman who made them look foolish with the book from above, a group of published sci-fi writers got together and decided to have some fun. The ringleader picked a few names and sent them to everybody in their cabal. Everyone was to write a separate chapter using the names, and they were to commit every young-writer mistake in the book--overwriting, tense mistakes, self-reference, you name it. They were also told not to communicate with each other, so each chapter would be from a different genre and style.
Once they got everything together, the randomly drew numbers from a hat to decide the order in which this mish-mash of garbage would go. Chapter 21 was left as eight blank pages because one writer wasn't on time with their submission. Chapter 12 occurs twice; chapters 4 and 13 are word-for-word copies of each other; they even used a computer program to jumble words and use punctuation to mimic written English, but in reality, reads like garbled gibberish. The characters change sexes and races without explanation.
This is almost like the Plan 9 from Outer Space of books, only it's deliberate. It's called Atlanta Nights.
Publish America accepted it and sent out the form letter saying as much. The hoax became apparent and in the news, and PA repudiated their acceptance the novel, trying to save face and keep up the image of their "traditional publisher" status.
The writers had such a good time with Atlanta Nights that decided to sell it, but from a vanity press, from where it deserves to be published. Here's a link to it if, like me, you're curious to see how bad really bad can be. I hear it's good for young writers, highlighting all the things that are mistakes, and helping them to vet their own material.
I've yet to purchase a copy, but I'm thinking about it.
It was a haggard collection of new releases of the sort you see at airport bookstores, magazines, local writers, nearly outdated comic books, and a display shelf of poorly-constructed looking paperbacks by authors I'd never heard of.
There have been visits by me to local indie record and book shops where I learn about new authors and publishing houses, places that are reputable publishers that may take unsolicited material. I'm not quite ready, as a writer, to have things ready for an agent, but I like to do fleeting research with publishers who publish things I think my closest material to being done most closely resembles.
Those visits have given me names of operations to look up later when I leave those establishments. Same thing here in San Pedro, with that collection of poorly-constructed looking paperbacks, a construction quality level that maybe should have tipped me.
The name of the publisher on the binding and inside each book was Publish America. When I got home, I looked up the company's website. It all sounded quite unreal. They are not a POD (print-on-demand) or vanity press. They make money the old-fashioned way--by selling your books. They don't charge their writers a fee, they send them checks. They pay advances once the manuscript has been accepted and the contract offer has been signed and returned.
Sitting in our new chair at the computer desk in our apartment I stared at my computer screen puzzled. This was an incredible set of statements. It seemed far too good to be true. They had editors who'd pour over your work line by line, at no cost to you. If I had material farther along, and had been striking out with agents and unsolicited material accepting houses, I might've been tempted to rush off and get something ready to send. Like I said, I'm not that close, and I haven't exhausted traditional avenues to getting noticed, so I decided to a bit of research. The catch had to be something...
I started by simply typing "publish america" into my Internet browser's Google search window, and without hitting "Enter" I examined all the choices it generates for you. "Publish america scams" was something like second on the list.
It didn't take long to find out that the way Publish America operates is like a sinister vanity press. According to the horror stories of authors who are unsatisfied with their treatment by PA, you're obligated to purchase a certain amount of copies for promotional purposes, they do not accept returns, they charge prices for books that are far too high, they claim to sell their writer's books in "brick and mortar" bookstores, which is true in the sense that a customer can walk in and have it ordered special ("selling in a bookstore" and "shelving it in a bookstore" aren't the same thing) but even then they've been known to rarely complete sales or transactions. They even have a difficult time producing reliable sales accounts for authors of their books. When you find a bookstore, like I had, that shelved Publish America books, you must be in a place that's either sympathetic to a specific writer, ignorant to the system, or run by PA writers themselves; most traditional bookstores don't stock any POD, vanity, or PA books.
A company that proclaims that they discover authors and give them their first chance, give their material the opportunity it deserves, they seem, in actuality, to hustle the writer and their family to purchase copies of their own book to recoup the costs associated with printing it. Most reputable publishers and literary agencies don't consider a PA published book a writing credit. Worst of all, they own your story and characters for seven years.
The amounts of things that have been published by Publish America that are heavy with obvious typos called into question their editing staff's credentials. A claim made by them on their site, that they turn down 80% of all manuscripts also came under fire when an already published writer, on an experiment, wrote thirty pages of material, changed the name of the protagonist on page twenty-two, then photocopied the last ten pages over and over again until his manuscript was 120 pages long.
He was offered a contract.
After Publish America made disparaging claims about science fiction books and writers, like the gentleman who made them look foolish with the book from above, a group of published sci-fi writers got together and decided to have some fun. The ringleader picked a few names and sent them to everybody in their cabal. Everyone was to write a separate chapter using the names, and they were to commit every young-writer mistake in the book--overwriting, tense mistakes, self-reference, you name it. They were also told not to communicate with each other, so each chapter would be from a different genre and style.
Once they got everything together, the randomly drew numbers from a hat to decide the order in which this mish-mash of garbage would go. Chapter 21 was left as eight blank pages because one writer wasn't on time with their submission. Chapter 12 occurs twice; chapters 4 and 13 are word-for-word copies of each other; they even used a computer program to jumble words and use punctuation to mimic written English, but in reality, reads like garbled gibberish. The characters change sexes and races without explanation.
This is almost like the Plan 9 from Outer Space of books, only it's deliberate. It's called Atlanta Nights.
Publish America accepted it and sent out the form letter saying as much. The hoax became apparent and in the news, and PA repudiated their acceptance the novel, trying to save face and keep up the image of their "traditional publisher" status.
The writers had such a good time with Atlanta Nights that decided to sell it, but from a vanity press, from where it deserves to be published. Here's a link to it if, like me, you're curious to see how bad really bad can be. I hear it's good for young writers, highlighting all the things that are mistakes, and helping them to vet their own material.
I've yet to purchase a copy, but I'm thinking about it.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Two Towns Over
Being the owner of a new bike, I'd been wanting to take advantage to the relative flatness of the area and go on a nice long ride. There were times when I felt like I was wasting that relative flatness and owning a bike since I wasn't going on long rides, but really, I've only owned the bike for a fortnight now...apparently I feel I must take every opportunity to add action to my time off work. I need to just relax some days.
In any case, I checked Google maps, and planned my trip accordingly; I would ride from our place in Long Beach over to San Pedro, a total of about twelve miles one way.
The title of this post hearkens back to The Simpsons, but also highlights the fact that before the city of Los Angeles annexed the surrounding area of the Port of Los Angeles, Wilmington was a separate city, as was San Pedro. Wilmington is the immediate community between Long Beach and San Pedro, so I was really riding "two towns over".
I'm setting Long Beach as the center point for some reference notes about bridges, specifically, the Three Bridges of Death that I had to cross to make it to San Pedro. I will refer to them as the Inner, the Middle, and the Outer. (The following pictures are taken from the bridges.)
The Inner Bridge of Death is the first you have to cross while leaving my city, and it crosses over the Los Angeles River.
The Middle Bridge of Death crosses a railyard and parking lot that services the Ports of LB and LA.
The Outer Bridge of Death crosses some industrial waste-water creek that must be ocean bound (stay away from that beach).
I call them Bridges of Death because on a bicycle the air from the constant flow of semis if trying to throw you over the side. It's loud and nerve-wracking. You have to peddle furiously going up but can't enjoy coming down because of the stop lights and the loss of your bike lane. Feeling accomplished just surviving them is probably not a good sign.
There was a series of signs that mentioned evacuation routes for tsunamis, one more wonderful ling to worry about down here (wild fire, earthquake, Oscar snubbing).
I don't have a water holder on the bike, so I had to stop periodically to drink from fountains and diners, and at one point, on the northeast side of Wilmington, I stopped in at a diner. It was ridiculously overpriced, and looking around the community only perplexed me more. Then I noticed a shirt being worn by a gentleman stuffing his face in a booth: it said "Stevedoers Local ###". That supplied the explanation; longshoreman can afford overpriced steak and hash browns.
Leaving there and cruising through Wilmington led me to the following conclusion: (with no offense to anyone from there) Wilmington is one of the ugliest, crappiest, sun-blasted spits of sand and cheap housing I've ever had the displeasure of biking through. With no coastal access, any view of the Pacific is blocked by Port machinery. Apparently, the only Civil war historical sight in California is a house in Wilmington, but that must have been somewhere far away from where I rode my bike (Avalon and the letters).
After there, and before San Pedro, riding along a rode in the depression parallel to I-105, I totally bailed. My front tire caught a groove of an old train track that was beating it suppression and coming out of the asphalt, sending me over the bars and onto the ground, scuffing my left knee and left palm.
I jumped up and brushed it off, but I still hurt. It put a damper on the rest of my day and really sapped my motivation. I had bigger plans for riding through San Pedro. I had vistas I wanted to get to, but San Pedro is way more hilly than anything up till then, so I made some stops at old stores, took some pictures, and headed home. Here is a picture of the tracks that caused me to bail, heading off under the freeway:
Here's the old Warner Theater in San Pedro:
When I got home I felt like I'd finally done due diligence to my need to utilize my bike to it's fullest extant, all the way to the point of being over it.
In any case, I checked Google maps, and planned my trip accordingly; I would ride from our place in Long Beach over to San Pedro, a total of about twelve miles one way.
The title of this post hearkens back to The Simpsons, but also highlights the fact that before the city of Los Angeles annexed the surrounding area of the Port of Los Angeles, Wilmington was a separate city, as was San Pedro. Wilmington is the immediate community between Long Beach and San Pedro, so I was really riding "two towns over".
I'm setting Long Beach as the center point for some reference notes about bridges, specifically, the Three Bridges of Death that I had to cross to make it to San Pedro. I will refer to them as the Inner, the Middle, and the Outer. (The following pictures are taken from the bridges.)
The Inner Bridge of Death is the first you have to cross while leaving my city, and it crosses over the Los Angeles River.
The Middle Bridge of Death crosses a railyard and parking lot that services the Ports of LB and LA.
The Outer Bridge of Death crosses some industrial waste-water creek that must be ocean bound (stay away from that beach).
I call them Bridges of Death because on a bicycle the air from the constant flow of semis if trying to throw you over the side. It's loud and nerve-wracking. You have to peddle furiously going up but can't enjoy coming down because of the stop lights and the loss of your bike lane. Feeling accomplished just surviving them is probably not a good sign.
There was a series of signs that mentioned evacuation routes for tsunamis, one more wonderful ling to worry about down here (wild fire, earthquake, Oscar snubbing).
I don't have a water holder on the bike, so I had to stop periodically to drink from fountains and diners, and at one point, on the northeast side of Wilmington, I stopped in at a diner. It was ridiculously overpriced, and looking around the community only perplexed me more. Then I noticed a shirt being worn by a gentleman stuffing his face in a booth: it said "Stevedoers Local ###". That supplied the explanation; longshoreman can afford overpriced steak and hash browns.
Leaving there and cruising through Wilmington led me to the following conclusion: (with no offense to anyone from there) Wilmington is one of the ugliest, crappiest, sun-blasted spits of sand and cheap housing I've ever had the displeasure of biking through. With no coastal access, any view of the Pacific is blocked by Port machinery. Apparently, the only Civil war historical sight in California is a house in Wilmington, but that must have been somewhere far away from where I rode my bike (Avalon and the letters).
After there, and before San Pedro, riding along a rode in the depression parallel to I-105, I totally bailed. My front tire caught a groove of an old train track that was beating it suppression and coming out of the asphalt, sending me over the bars and onto the ground, scuffing my left knee and left palm.
I jumped up and brushed it off, but I still hurt. It put a damper on the rest of my day and really sapped my motivation. I had bigger plans for riding through San Pedro. I had vistas I wanted to get to, but San Pedro is way more hilly than anything up till then, so I made some stops at old stores, took some pictures, and headed home. Here is a picture of the tracks that caused me to bail, heading off under the freeway:
Here's the old Warner Theater in San Pedro:
When I got home I felt like I'd finally done due diligence to my need to utilize my bike to it's fullest extant, all the way to the point of being over it.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Go Go Matsui!
One of my favorite ballplayers has been, ever since his joining the Yankees in 2003, Hideki Matsui. His approach, attitude, and production have been positive qualities that he brought to his seven years with the Yankees, his one year with the Angels, and this year with the Oakland A's.
He was even named World Series MVP for the Yankees in 2009 when the Phillies couldn't, apparently, get him out or keep him from getting extra-base hits (he hit .615 and slugged 1.385).
Remember this from November 2009?
Wednesday night, in a victory for the A's over the Tigers (which, being for a team player like Matsui makes it all the more meaningful), Hideki Matsui hit his 168th career* major league home run.
I put that asterisk there on 168 because those are his career homers in the American professional leagues, and when you add it to his 332 major league homers from his days playing in Japan, you get to the cool fact (for baseball fans, since numbers play a bigger role in baseball than anywhere else) that last night Matsui hit his 500th major league home run, spanning the two sets of major leagues.
Go Go Matsui!
He was even named World Series MVP for the Yankees in 2009 when the Phillies couldn't, apparently, get him out or keep him from getting extra-base hits (he hit .615 and slugged 1.385).
Remember this from November 2009?
Wednesday night, in a victory for the A's over the Tigers (which, being for a team player like Matsui makes it all the more meaningful), Hideki Matsui hit his 168th career* major league home run.
I put that asterisk there on 168 because those are his career homers in the American professional leagues, and when you add it to his 332 major league homers from his days playing in Japan, you get to the cool fact (for baseball fans, since numbers play a bigger role in baseball than anywhere else) that last night Matsui hit his 500th major league home run, spanning the two sets of major leagues.
Go Go Matsui!
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Interesting Local History Lesson
The striking skyscraper building that I've been using as a visual landmark when I drive in Long Beach, bike in Long Beach, or show photographs on this blog is: (this is a different picture than the first...)
This building has a name, and is on the list of Historical Landmark buildings for Long Beach. It's known as Villa Riviera, and since it's completion in 1929, has stood as the iconic piece of skyline for the city of Long Beach.
It started off as a luxury Co-op, but couldn't find any takers after the crash, was bought by a couple with Hollywood ties (she was a silent film star, he ran Fox Studios) and turned into a hotel/condominium. Eventually it reverted back into a full scale condo, and that's where it is today. During WWII it housed Naval officers and had lookouts in the turret scanning for enemy ships (they were building vessels at the bay).
From this old ad, we can see an interesting historical fact: that it was the second tallest building in the Southland (as people call the Ventura/LA/OC/SD/Inland Empire area), and held that distinction for almost twenty-five years. It was second to this:
This is the LA City Hall. Hell yes I have two references to City Halls in a row.
The Villa Riviera also held the first ever Miss Universe Pageant in 1952, which may actually be a dubious mark on the ledger, depending about how you feel about beautiful young ladies and their abject objectification.
I like here how it looms out in the distance, rising above this alley. I call it my "They can almost see how the regular people live" photograph.
They replaced some of the original gargoyles in the past decade as well:
Here's a silly camera phone effect that I failed to completely block out with my finger...
This building has a name, and is on the list of Historical Landmark buildings for Long Beach. It's known as Villa Riviera, and since it's completion in 1929, has stood as the iconic piece of skyline for the city of Long Beach.
It started off as a luxury Co-op, but couldn't find any takers after the crash, was bought by a couple with Hollywood ties (she was a silent film star, he ran Fox Studios) and turned into a hotel/condominium. Eventually it reverted back into a full scale condo, and that's where it is today. During WWII it housed Naval officers and had lookouts in the turret scanning for enemy ships (they were building vessels at the bay).
From this old ad, we can see an interesting historical fact: that it was the second tallest building in the Southland (as people call the Ventura/LA/OC/SD/Inland Empire area), and held that distinction for almost twenty-five years. It was second to this:
This is the LA City Hall. Hell yes I have two references to City Halls in a row.
The Villa Riviera also held the first ever Miss Universe Pageant in 1952, which may actually be a dubious mark on the ledger, depending about how you feel about beautiful young ladies and their abject objectification.
I like here how it looms out in the distance, rising above this alley. I call it my "They can almost see how the regular people live" photograph.
They replaced some of the original gargoyles in the past decade as well:
Here's a silly camera phone effect that I failed to completely block out with my finger...
Only in Southern California?
Maybe a city in Germany, or even some gangster new-money town in Russia could sport a City Hall like the one we've got here in Long Beach:
It reminds me of some futuristic building where super-hero teams get together and plan out foils for their super-villain counterparts. Ironically, what goes on inside is probably closer to the opposite of that scenario.
It reminds me of some futuristic building where super-hero teams get together and plan out foils for their super-villain counterparts. Ironically, what goes on inside is probably closer to the opposite of that scenario.
Starting a Conversation
There are many debates in the world of useless distractions...and I'm starting one here: what might be the best year for movies?
In what year has the stable of movies been of the highest quality, the most commercial and artistic endeavors, in the history of the motion picture?
I only bring this up because I saw a collection of movies that all came out the same year and it got me thinking. I started thinking was that the greatest year for cinema? What other years could offer such artistic films that were also mainstream films? I'll post about different years in the future, as new years come to my attention, but let me start the debate with my first entry:
1967.
It's easy to look up the list of movies from 1967 on Wikipedia and peruse it. Let me rattle off some of the classics that I'll use to make the first case: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, and Melville's classic Le Samourai.
Movies from that era, the late sixties into the mid seventies all let audience get it. The end of The French Connection would never get green-lit today; the end of Bullitt seems out of place if watched with eyes that line up to see Transformers 3. Neither of those movies came from 1967, but the era's the same, and besides, Paul Newman doesn't end up starting a fishing venture with George Kennedy in Mexico. Alain doesn't load the gun, and the cops plug Warren and Faye's corpses a few extra times after they've already convincingly done the job.
How about breaking up a wedding and looking that sad sack on a bus in 2011?
Films were more daring in 1967; more was expected of them, and more was expected of audiences. A fatalism was present that seems to have morphed into cynicism by studio executives...maybe that's what happens when the cool people win out in history.
Mad magazine becomes full of ads and less relevant, the trajectory of popular movies finally arcs back to a mindless action sequences, and the only way to rebel is to be a square republican.
Forget it; it's Chinatown.
In what year has the stable of movies been of the highest quality, the most commercial and artistic endeavors, in the history of the motion picture?
I only bring this up because I saw a collection of movies that all came out the same year and it got me thinking. I started thinking was that the greatest year for cinema? What other years could offer such artistic films that were also mainstream films? I'll post about different years in the future, as new years come to my attention, but let me start the debate with my first entry:
1967.
It's easy to look up the list of movies from 1967 on Wikipedia and peruse it. Let me rattle off some of the classics that I'll use to make the first case: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, and Melville's classic Le Samourai.
Movies from that era, the late sixties into the mid seventies all let audience get it. The end of The French Connection would never get green-lit today; the end of Bullitt seems out of place if watched with eyes that line up to see Transformers 3. Neither of those movies came from 1967, but the era's the same, and besides, Paul Newman doesn't end up starting a fishing venture with George Kennedy in Mexico. Alain doesn't load the gun, and the cops plug Warren and Faye's corpses a few extra times after they've already convincingly done the job.
How about breaking up a wedding and looking that sad sack on a bus in 2011?
Films were more daring in 1967; more was expected of them, and more was expected of audiences. A fatalism was present that seems to have morphed into cynicism by studio executives...maybe that's what happens when the cool people win out in history.
Mad magazine becomes full of ads and less relevant, the trajectory of popular movies finally arcs back to a mindless action sequences, and the only way to rebel is to be a square republican.
Forget it; it's Chinatown.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Sam and Steve
Another round of my "First Name Basis" series.
An amazing eight months and one day and a little over two hundred miles in the same state separate two of the most important people for a different state's self identification.
Steve, the younger of the two, was born on November 3rd in 1793, in the south-east of the American state of Virginia. His ancestors can be traced back to arriving in Massachusetts in 1683 on a boat comically named the "Bevis". His father had obtained a land grant of sorts, allowing him to relocate 300 hundred families to some suitable tract of land in a province. Once the father, Moses, died, the son reluctantly took up the charge, and gathered people in New Orleans with the promise of cheap land. Machinations, revolutions, weird things, promises made and eventually battles were fought. Sam, with his military background, helped out, with the decisive battle against Santa Ana.
The man who had reluctantly brought the most legitimate Anglo settlement to this specific area, a varied mix of different landscapes named after a native word for "friend", Steve had been proclaimed by Sam as the Father of the land and, almost more importantly, the idea of this new republic, months after Sam had defeated Steve as her first President.
I saved Sam for last because to me he's more interesting, more colorful. Steve's background was more austere and refined, his people--his family--were merchants who'd been in America before America was an idea. Sam's family were Scots-Irish, and, having been pushed out of southern Scotland and moved to Northern Ireland, they decided to try out America, settled momentarly in Pennsylvania, before heading south to Virginia to get away from the German Catholics. Born on March 2nd, 1793, Sam was a bit more wild, and eventually proved a more sturdily built.
He enlisted in the army in 1812 for the War of the same year, was injured by an arrow in his thigh while serving under Andrew Jackson during his massacre of a native group, and went back out to the battle later the same week. Slaughtering natives may not have been on his mind, since Sam joined a Cherokee group, was taken in and accepted, and even took a wife. Jackson put him in charge of Tennessee's Indian Removal Program, and he showed up to meetings in full native dress, an act that angered Secretary of War John Calhoun, who urged an investigation into Sam's usage of Indian supplies. Offended, Sam quit the position.
He became a representative of Tennessee in the House, then became Governor of Tennessee, before a failed marriage to a much younger woman caused him to resign his post and join the Cherokee in exile in Arkansas. Then things got weird.
He was used by Jackson's rivals to smear Jackson (he'd resigned his gubernatorial post, the shame), and when his letters (from his trading post in the Cherokee Nation) in his defense went unanswered, he traveled to Washington DC and beat the main culprit in street with a hickory stick on Pennsylvania Avenue. The man he was beating pulled a gun and fired, but it mis-fired. Sam was arrested, acquitted (due to his powerful friends), and was sued in civil court. He was found liable in the physical assault, fined $500, and took off for Mexico without paying.
Later on, Sam defeats Santa Ana, thereby cementing the independence of a rather large piece of former Mexico for itself, and making the reluctant Steve the Father of Texas, the Craddo word for "friend".
Steve is (I've been working liberally with the name) Stephen F. Austin, born in Virginia in 1793, and Sam is Sam Houston, born in Virginia in 1793.
Sam won the first ever election to be the Republic of Texas' first President, then, after joining the Union to get military aid against a really pissed Santa Ana, he became a governor of Texas (after being a Senator).
In an interesting piece of trivia, Sam Houston is the only person to serve as governor of two different states in the United States.
When Texas' legislature had voted to secede and join the Confederacy, he refused to recognize the legitimacy, and was evicted from the governor's mansion.
Shot with an arrow and continued fighting soon after; showed up in full Cherokee dress for a meeting with the federal Secretary of War; beating a man in the street for talking trash; skipping out for Mexico instead of dealing with the fine; refusing to recognize the legitimacy of his state's secession from the Union during the Civil War... these are all events and scenarios that sound uniquely Texan, a mix of brash individualistic iconoclasm that is at once American, but so much more exemplifies that which Texans feel about themselves, or would like to believe how the characteristic Texan is defined.
Tough; self reliant; doing things there own way; standing up for themselves and for those they love, no matter what...
Not every segment of American population has this self image. Californians, and generally us westerners, tend to be laid back and individualistic, but ironically fiercely so, maybe a remnant of the Forty-niner days; back east folks are more traditional and family oriented, and even more chauvinistic.
It's an interesting thing they've got going in Texas, to be sure.
An amazing eight months and one day and a little over two hundred miles in the same state separate two of the most important people for a different state's self identification.
Steve, the younger of the two, was born on November 3rd in 1793, in the south-east of the American state of Virginia. His ancestors can be traced back to arriving in Massachusetts in 1683 on a boat comically named the "Bevis". His father had obtained a land grant of sorts, allowing him to relocate 300 hundred families to some suitable tract of land in a province. Once the father, Moses, died, the son reluctantly took up the charge, and gathered people in New Orleans with the promise of cheap land. Machinations, revolutions, weird things, promises made and eventually battles were fought. Sam, with his military background, helped out, with the decisive battle against Santa Ana.
The man who had reluctantly brought the most legitimate Anglo settlement to this specific area, a varied mix of different landscapes named after a native word for "friend", Steve had been proclaimed by Sam as the Father of the land and, almost more importantly, the idea of this new republic, months after Sam had defeated Steve as her first President.
I saved Sam for last because to me he's more interesting, more colorful. Steve's background was more austere and refined, his people--his family--were merchants who'd been in America before America was an idea. Sam's family were Scots-Irish, and, having been pushed out of southern Scotland and moved to Northern Ireland, they decided to try out America, settled momentarly in Pennsylvania, before heading south to Virginia to get away from the German Catholics. Born on March 2nd, 1793, Sam was a bit more wild, and eventually proved a more sturdily built.
He enlisted in the army in 1812 for the War of the same year, was injured by an arrow in his thigh while serving under Andrew Jackson during his massacre of a native group, and went back out to the battle later the same week. Slaughtering natives may not have been on his mind, since Sam joined a Cherokee group, was taken in and accepted, and even took a wife. Jackson put him in charge of Tennessee's Indian Removal Program, and he showed up to meetings in full native dress, an act that angered Secretary of War John Calhoun, who urged an investigation into Sam's usage of Indian supplies. Offended, Sam quit the position.
He became a representative of Tennessee in the House, then became Governor of Tennessee, before a failed marriage to a much younger woman caused him to resign his post and join the Cherokee in exile in Arkansas. Then things got weird.
He was used by Jackson's rivals to smear Jackson (he'd resigned his gubernatorial post, the shame), and when his letters (from his trading post in the Cherokee Nation) in his defense went unanswered, he traveled to Washington DC and beat the main culprit in street with a hickory stick on Pennsylvania Avenue. The man he was beating pulled a gun and fired, but it mis-fired. Sam was arrested, acquitted (due to his powerful friends), and was sued in civil court. He was found liable in the physical assault, fined $500, and took off for Mexico without paying.
Later on, Sam defeats Santa Ana, thereby cementing the independence of a rather large piece of former Mexico for itself, and making the reluctant Steve the Father of Texas, the Craddo word for "friend".
Steve is (I've been working liberally with the name) Stephen F. Austin, born in Virginia in 1793, and Sam is Sam Houston, born in Virginia in 1793.
Sam won the first ever election to be the Republic of Texas' first President, then, after joining the Union to get military aid against a really pissed Santa Ana, he became a governor of Texas (after being a Senator).
In an interesting piece of trivia, Sam Houston is the only person to serve as governor of two different states in the United States.
When Texas' legislature had voted to secede and join the Confederacy, he refused to recognize the legitimacy, and was evicted from the governor's mansion.
Shot with an arrow and continued fighting soon after; showed up in full Cherokee dress for a meeting with the federal Secretary of War; beating a man in the street for talking trash; skipping out for Mexico instead of dealing with the fine; refusing to recognize the legitimacy of his state's secession from the Union during the Civil War... these are all events and scenarios that sound uniquely Texan, a mix of brash individualistic iconoclasm that is at once American, but so much more exemplifies that which Texans feel about themselves, or would like to believe how the characteristic Texan is defined.
Tough; self reliant; doing things there own way; standing up for themselves and for those they love, no matter what...
Not every segment of American population has this self image. Californians, and generally us westerners, tend to be laid back and individualistic, but ironically fiercely so, maybe a remnant of the Forty-niner days; back east folks are more traditional and family oriented, and even more chauvinistic.
It's an interesting thing they've got going in Texas, to be sure.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
"Carmegeddon" is Over
And we beat it.
At least that's what all the radio spots I hear and television commercials I see before we started watching another one of the Great Film Salvage of Citrus Heights movies, this time George Clooney's directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, are telling me.
Apparently, Angelinos, as we (shudder) folks who live in the LA area are known, are perfectly able to heed warnings and stay home, stay out of our cars, and not get involved in a (supposed) chaotic mess.
Let me tell you, as someone who didn't stay home (I worked both days) and didn't stay off the freeways (405 is my lifeline to work), we should close the freeway more often.
On NPR the talk was about how the closure had turned into a national story, with LA being the butt of jokes, and the image of Angelinos confused and too vacuous to know how to live without their (our) cars was the dominant theme of the collective understanding of what people are like down here.
While they may be correct generally about people in LA, I'd like to think that we (wow, shuddering again) did the unexpected thing (to everyone not living here) and acted reasonably.
Has it really come to that? Acting reasonably is a surprising thing? Saying it like that I'd have to say, Who's not been paying attention?
It was interesting listening to a segment on NPR that featured the Commute Doctor, an apparent LA roadway expert who'd answer questions from callers about having to get from here to there, and how to do that considering the closure of those crucial fourteen miles of 405. His ability to instantly rattle off directions reminded me of my early days delivering pizza off Fulton in Sac and the commanding knowledge that pizza dudes wield. While my overall knowledge of the roads here is dwarfed by Corrie's (she's been driving to random places for work), I do feel like I've been getting a better feel for the myriad communities that dot LA county. One caller, though, asked the Commute Doctor how to get from one spot to another, both of which I had no idea where they'd go on a blank map of the LA area (that's how I gauge my internal understanding...could I get myself there by directional feeling alone). The caller wanted to get from Echo Park to Zuma Beach.
I felt at least proud to be able to place the general area from the Doctor's recommendations, which is a start.
On a side note from earlier in this post, I'll watch Sam Rockwell in anything. I might just have to go and buy Moon (2009).
At least that's what all the radio spots I hear and television commercials I see before we started watching another one of the Great Film Salvage of Citrus Heights movies, this time George Clooney's directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, are telling me.
Apparently, Angelinos, as we (shudder) folks who live in the LA area are known, are perfectly able to heed warnings and stay home, stay out of our cars, and not get involved in a (supposed) chaotic mess.
Let me tell you, as someone who didn't stay home (I worked both days) and didn't stay off the freeways (405 is my lifeline to work), we should close the freeway more often.
On NPR the talk was about how the closure had turned into a national story, with LA being the butt of jokes, and the image of Angelinos confused and too vacuous to know how to live without their (our) cars was the dominant theme of the collective understanding of what people are like down here.
While they may be correct generally about people in LA, I'd like to think that we (wow, shuddering again) did the unexpected thing (to everyone not living here) and acted reasonably.
Has it really come to that? Acting reasonably is a surprising thing? Saying it like that I'd have to say, Who's not been paying attention?
It was interesting listening to a segment on NPR that featured the Commute Doctor, an apparent LA roadway expert who'd answer questions from callers about having to get from here to there, and how to do that considering the closure of those crucial fourteen miles of 405. His ability to instantly rattle off directions reminded me of my early days delivering pizza off Fulton in Sac and the commanding knowledge that pizza dudes wield. While my overall knowledge of the roads here is dwarfed by Corrie's (she's been driving to random places for work), I do feel like I've been getting a better feel for the myriad communities that dot LA county. One caller, though, asked the Commute Doctor how to get from one spot to another, both of which I had no idea where they'd go on a blank map of the LA area (that's how I gauge my internal understanding...could I get myself there by directional feeling alone). The caller wanted to get from Echo Park to Zuma Beach.
I felt at least proud to be able to place the general area from the Doctor's recommendations, which is a start.
On a side note from earlier in this post, I'll watch Sam Rockwell in anything. I might just have to go and buy Moon (2009).
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Not Quite a Cinema Gem, but...
In the 80s or 90s in England there were a series of television ads for a Barclays credit card that were each made into a tiny feature, like a tiny, thirty second movie, mildly spoofing one thing or another, but always using the same comedic actor. Would you ever imagine that this character could get his own feature length movie some decades later?
Fast forwarding from Barclays advertiss-ments (as they call them in England), picture me at my brother's house outside of Sacramento a few months ago, rummaging through a pair of boxes of DVDs that were about to be tossed; the Great Salvaging of Citrus Heights as the day was known (to me). One of the movies starred a comedic English actor that I enjoy, and with a tagline like "He knows no fear. He knows no danger. He knows...nothing.", I thought it would probably be just atrocious enough to get some ironic laughter from and toss it myself after the initial viewing.
The comedic actor is none other than Rowan Atkinson, best known in the States as Mr. Bean, but Black Adder is a must see for fans of British comedy, and don't forget his seven minutes of screen time in the Anjelica Huston vehicle The Witches. In each of those meager moments on screen you know exactly where his character stands, and they're all funny in their own way.
The name of this movie starring Rowan Atkinson that I learned later was based on commercials from the past is Johnny English.
I guess with that tagline I expected a spy spoof of the likes of the late Leslie Nielson films, the poorly written and crudely thought out spoofs that make you groan and almost turn off the movie. That is definitely not this film. There is some slapstick, but the movie's not a slapstick; and if it's a spoof, it's not an American spoof, it, apparently, passes for a British spoof; and while Rowan's Johnny English is kind of a bumbler, he's not a walking menace like John Candy's Harry Crumb in Who is Harry Crumb?, a detective that ends up almost on the right track despite getting all the conclusions wrong.
Johnny English loves his job, loves England, does have some detective skills, does have some natural cop-like hunches that do turn out to be correct, and does surround himself with a very capable sidekick. There is some humor that has nothing to do with slapstick, poo, or hidden cameras, but there's also humor that has those three modern hallmarks.
There was an element that I found intellectually interesting while I was watching it: the film is very nationalistic for England. The antagonist is a character named Pascal Sauvage, and he is played by John Malkovich with long gray hair and an accent that is about as annoying as anything I've listened too since Ong Bak. Sauvage is a French billionaire with ties to the English throne through his relations to the Norman conquest of 1066, a billionaire who made his fortune by way of owning prisons throughout the world. It almost makes sense in the context of his evil plans, but...
When I say that the film is nationalistic for England, it is, but maybe the things I found more intellectually stimulating were the cultural cues that would only be understood by the English. At first I thought it was amusing how Johnny English outright--and from the first moment his name is mentioned-- doesn't like Sauvage because he's French. What I first took to be English stereotyping might be more than that, or maybe it's a stereotype for a reason. That's not as much a cultural cue as the mentioning of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
When I say the Archbishop of Canterbury to any of you fine folks, my small cadre of readers, does it mean a damn thing? If you'd come to me and asked me what I knew about that trio of words, I could come up with something like, "I'm guessing it's a guy, probably the top-guy in the place called Canterbury, probably having to do with the Church of England (Anglican Church)", all only things I could gather from my knowledge of England, some of her cities, and her main (state) religion.
I've been trying to discover cultural cues for us, for Americans...Shoeless Joe, maybe...Harrient Tubman, maybe...do we have any titular institutional rulers in this country? Besides Presidents? See, that's what makes that kind of comparison hard, the fact that we don't have non-governmental institutions that rotate people through a titled position. Well...university chancellors and presidents, maybe...but the lack of a state religion is the main culprit in that. The only culprit, really.
I digress. I learned more about something which I knew next to nothing about from this silly Rowan Atkinson movie, and it wasn't trying to teach it to me, it was made with the understanding that I knew all that history already. That's what I found interesting. The film almost seemed like it wasn't going to be sent abroad, or that little thought was spent on making it more atractive to, ahem, a big country full of people who go to see a lot of movies.
Wow. Cultural cue conversations and history lessons, all from a movie based on credit card commercials that doesn't even reach ninety minutes even after the credits roll. At least Field of Dreams is emotionally powerful enough that the American cultural cues can be more easily overlooked and the movie experienced by people in other countries.
Rowan Atkinson does, though, get a few chances of tearing ass through London in an Aston-Martin.
Fast forwarding from Barclays advertiss-ments (as they call them in England), picture me at my brother's house outside of Sacramento a few months ago, rummaging through a pair of boxes of DVDs that were about to be tossed; the Great Salvaging of Citrus Heights as the day was known (to me). One of the movies starred a comedic English actor that I enjoy, and with a tagline like "He knows no fear. He knows no danger. He knows...nothing.", I thought it would probably be just atrocious enough to get some ironic laughter from and toss it myself after the initial viewing.
The comedic actor is none other than Rowan Atkinson, best known in the States as Mr. Bean, but Black Adder is a must see for fans of British comedy, and don't forget his seven minutes of screen time in the Anjelica Huston vehicle The Witches. In each of those meager moments on screen you know exactly where his character stands, and they're all funny in their own way.
The name of this movie starring Rowan Atkinson that I learned later was based on commercials from the past is Johnny English.
I guess with that tagline I expected a spy spoof of the likes of the late Leslie Nielson films, the poorly written and crudely thought out spoofs that make you groan and almost turn off the movie. That is definitely not this film. There is some slapstick, but the movie's not a slapstick; and if it's a spoof, it's not an American spoof, it, apparently, passes for a British spoof; and while Rowan's Johnny English is kind of a bumbler, he's not a walking menace like John Candy's Harry Crumb in Who is Harry Crumb?, a detective that ends up almost on the right track despite getting all the conclusions wrong.
Johnny English loves his job, loves England, does have some detective skills, does have some natural cop-like hunches that do turn out to be correct, and does surround himself with a very capable sidekick. There is some humor that has nothing to do with slapstick, poo, or hidden cameras, but there's also humor that has those three modern hallmarks.
There was an element that I found intellectually interesting while I was watching it: the film is very nationalistic for England. The antagonist is a character named Pascal Sauvage, and he is played by John Malkovich with long gray hair and an accent that is about as annoying as anything I've listened too since Ong Bak. Sauvage is a French billionaire with ties to the English throne through his relations to the Norman conquest of 1066, a billionaire who made his fortune by way of owning prisons throughout the world. It almost makes sense in the context of his evil plans, but...
When I say that the film is nationalistic for England, it is, but maybe the things I found more intellectually stimulating were the cultural cues that would only be understood by the English. At first I thought it was amusing how Johnny English outright--and from the first moment his name is mentioned-- doesn't like Sauvage because he's French. What I first took to be English stereotyping might be more than that, or maybe it's a stereotype for a reason. That's not as much a cultural cue as the mentioning of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
When I say the Archbishop of Canterbury to any of you fine folks, my small cadre of readers, does it mean a damn thing? If you'd come to me and asked me what I knew about that trio of words, I could come up with something like, "I'm guessing it's a guy, probably the top-guy in the place called Canterbury, probably having to do with the Church of England (Anglican Church)", all only things I could gather from my knowledge of England, some of her cities, and her main (state) religion.
I've been trying to discover cultural cues for us, for Americans...Shoeless Joe, maybe...Harrient Tubman, maybe...do we have any titular institutional rulers in this country? Besides Presidents? See, that's what makes that kind of comparison hard, the fact that we don't have non-governmental institutions that rotate people through a titled position. Well...university chancellors and presidents, maybe...but the lack of a state religion is the main culprit in that. The only culprit, really.
I digress. I learned more about something which I knew next to nothing about from this silly Rowan Atkinson movie, and it wasn't trying to teach it to me, it was made with the understanding that I knew all that history already. That's what I found interesting. The film almost seemed like it wasn't going to be sent abroad, or that little thought was spent on making it more atractive to, ahem, a big country full of people who go to see a lot of movies.
Wow. Cultural cue conversations and history lessons, all from a movie based on credit card commercials that doesn't even reach ninety minutes even after the credits roll. At least Field of Dreams is emotionally powerful enough that the American cultural cues can be more easily overlooked and the movie experienced by people in other countries.
Rowan Atkinson does, though, get a few chances of tearing ass through London in an Aston-Martin.
Technical Difficulties 2
I have to delve a little deeper into the non-functioning Pay-Pal button for my handmade book sale. Thanks for the patience, I guess if you want to purchase the book for yourself or someone else (they make bizarre gifts!)...
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Dispatch from the Video Game Realm
I have my brother Dan to thank for turning me on to this (Thanks!).
Some background for the folks unfamiliar with some terminology. This entire post is aimed at exposing my few readers who don't care for, or play many, video games to a flash cartoon that is funny and entertaining. The background could prove helpful.
Video games are big business nowadays. Besides providing a lucrative environment for career computer folks, it provides fans of all stripes countless hours of entertainment. There are also many websites geared toward those fans, and many of these sites provide previews and reviews of new games, as well as forums so those fans can converse, post their own reviews, and post their own games and videos made using Flash technology, also known as "flash games" and "flash videos". (Flash is brought to you by a company called Multimedia, a rival of the better known Adobe.)
Gamers, as they're occasionally known, can show a cheeky sense of humor. Take this example, to which the flash video I'll eventually link to is in response: a game called "PSTW: An Epic RPG"
An RPG, in the video game universe, is a "roll playing game"; in this type of video game a player plays as a character solving puzzles and occasionally fighting bosses. The most famous RPGs are Nintendo's Zelda franchise.
PSTW is a crudely animated thing with stick figures created from large pixels, and, using a trope of the early RPGs, has worded prompts at every screen giving you your choice of action. Here, it says "Press Space-bar to pick up sword", and once you press the space bar, your stuck figure is now armed with a line. Then "Press Space-bar to attack enemy".
It becomes apparent quickly that the only action is to press the space-bar, and if you stop reading the prompts and continuously mash the space bar, you send your stick figure knight on a rather long quest, ultimately besting the final boss in a foregone conclusion. That's when you realize PSTW stands for "Press Space-bar To Win."
Now, the cheeky element of gamers thought this game was hilarious, satirically making fun of the RPG genre while producing a product that must have taken a while to program. It garnered an incredibly high aggregate score of something like 4.26 out of 5 on the member's voting board...while gamers may have a sense of humor, they are notoriously hard critics of new games.
Not everyone thought the game was a riot. It appears that on at least one reviewer the joke was lost. This person wrote an angry review; angry that it was so easy, angry that it dared to call itself "epic", and angry that anyone else could actually like it.
Fans of the game thought this review was also hilarious, and had some fun with it. That's what this link that I'm posting about in a second is: a flash video of a hilarious reading of the angry review of a satirical flash game.
Even if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, this video should still make you laugh. They've kept the misspellings and captured the tone of the angry reviewer well.
Dot Dot Dot
Here's the original game, PSTW if one might be interested in checking it out for themselves.
Some background for the folks unfamiliar with some terminology. This entire post is aimed at exposing my few readers who don't care for, or play many, video games to a flash cartoon that is funny and entertaining. The background could prove helpful.
Video games are big business nowadays. Besides providing a lucrative environment for career computer folks, it provides fans of all stripes countless hours of entertainment. There are also many websites geared toward those fans, and many of these sites provide previews and reviews of new games, as well as forums so those fans can converse, post their own reviews, and post their own games and videos made using Flash technology, also known as "flash games" and "flash videos". (Flash is brought to you by a company called Multimedia, a rival of the better known Adobe.)
Gamers, as they're occasionally known, can show a cheeky sense of humor. Take this example, to which the flash video I'll eventually link to is in response: a game called "PSTW: An Epic RPG"
An RPG, in the video game universe, is a "roll playing game"; in this type of video game a player plays as a character solving puzzles and occasionally fighting bosses. The most famous RPGs are Nintendo's Zelda franchise.
PSTW is a crudely animated thing with stick figures created from large pixels, and, using a trope of the early RPGs, has worded prompts at every screen giving you your choice of action. Here, it says "Press Space-bar to pick up sword", and once you press the space bar, your stuck figure is now armed with a line. Then "Press Space-bar to attack enemy".
It becomes apparent quickly that the only action is to press the space-bar, and if you stop reading the prompts and continuously mash the space bar, you send your stick figure knight on a rather long quest, ultimately besting the final boss in a foregone conclusion. That's when you realize PSTW stands for "Press Space-bar To Win."
Now, the cheeky element of gamers thought this game was hilarious, satirically making fun of the RPG genre while producing a product that must have taken a while to program. It garnered an incredibly high aggregate score of something like 4.26 out of 5 on the member's voting board...while gamers may have a sense of humor, they are notoriously hard critics of new games.
Not everyone thought the game was a riot. It appears that on at least one reviewer the joke was lost. This person wrote an angry review; angry that it was so easy, angry that it dared to call itself "epic", and angry that anyone else could actually like it.
Fans of the game thought this review was also hilarious, and had some fun with it. That's what this link that I'm posting about in a second is: a flash video of a hilarious reading of the angry review of a satirical flash game.
Even if that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, this video should still make you laugh. They've kept the misspellings and captured the tone of the angry reviewer well.
Dot Dot Dot
Here's the original game, PSTW if one might be interested in checking it out for themselves.
Ice Canyon Saddle Hike
The city of Long Beach is loosely bordered on the west and east by highways: the 710 on the west and the 605 on the east, both drawn on the red-and-blue Interstate signage. This past shared off day took us along the entirety of the San Gabriel River Freeway, as the 605 was known before the numbering scheme was completed. We traveled all the way from the marina on Long Beach's eastern side to the Foothill Freeway (I-210), at the base of the jagged mountain range that rings the LA area and houses the Angeles National Forest. The total drive on the 605 was less than 27 miles.
From the Pacific Ocean to a towering mountain range in less than 27 miles...
Corrie had been informed of a nice hike in the Mount Baldy camp from some of her new coworkers. They had hiked all of their gear in and camped for a long weekend. We didn't quite have that kind of time-frame, so we had decided to hike to the initial terminus, check it out, and turn around and hike out. That hike is the Ice Canyon hike, all the way to the Saddle, where two ridges come together and form a saddle point. The camping area is in and around the vicinity of the Saddle, and from there are a handful of other trails leading off into the Angeles Forest and up to Mt Baldy and Ontario Peak, two of the peaks on opposing hills that have created the Saddle.
Sounds great.
The trek is 4.6 miles, one way, starting at 1100 feet and climbing to 7200 feet.
So...Corrie and I, while not in very good shape, are also very good at starting these kinds of reckless adventures ill-equipped. I joke, and remember our hike to Lassen's peak in 2004: wearing Chuck Taylor's, we only brought about a liter of water and a half a pack of smokes, we eventually had to (slightly) raid one of the remaining glaciers for some liquid (I was rationing the water early on that walk).
By the Lassen hike's standard we were equipped for Everest this time. We had five water bottles--full; we had lots of fruit that we'd bought moments before leaving Long Beach at a farmer's market; and we had sunscreen.
It was a grueling two and a half hour hike up, with us many times contemplating whether we could actually finish. There were so many Japanese tourists, with their professional walking sticks and full sun-coverage outfits, that made us feel unprepared and added to our crisis of confidence. At one point Corrie's knee started acting up, and while on a break I asked how it was. She said it was fine, but that this time she needed a break because her legs were tired.
Legs? Tired? I think I said almost just like that. "I could curl up in a ball and go to sleep right here on these rocks," I huffed, so serious that as I said that I could feel my eyelids getting heavy. We had a quick and hearty laugh following that, and moved on.
At what seemed like the third day of the hike we asked a rare white guy if we were close. "To the saddle?" he said in a balloon-popping way. Later, we came to a sign that said "Ice Canyon Saddle: .6 mi". Our bodies were sure we'd walked fifty, but I tried to frame it like, "Only 3000 more feet honey..." Corrie responded, "Yay, only a thousand more steps!"
Three-thousand feet didn't sound like so much, but those last thousand steps sounded like a lot, and felt like more.
At the Ice Canyon Saddle we finished off our plums and cherries, our saved prize from the walk up, and finished our fourth water bottle, reserving just one for the (literal) run down.
Almost every part of my lower body hurts now; feet, ankles, knees, calves and thighs and hips...
Are we the only yahoos who're over-confident enough to say: 9 mile hike? Sure, why not, we can totally do that. We've got water this time...
Here are some pictures:
This is a waterfall in the early stages of the hike, before the 2 miles of sun-blasted swicthbacking takes you a thousand more feet up in elevation, while the walk is still shady and wooded...
Along the trail you can see sights like this. I'm pretty sure that's the hill-form for Ontario Peak on the right. The farther up you get as the hike progresses, you end up eventually far above this particular rock formation.
Here's me horsing around with some timber. There were spots all over the trail that had been blocked by a felled tree, only to have the Forestry Service (I imagine) come in and chainsaw a trail-wide chunk of trunk out.
OR
The sweaty pink man saves the day!
There were a series of what looked like stone-mason homesteads in different levels of ruin and decay. (You know how I like ruins.)
Here's Corrie after framing and snapping a shot with our Holga camera I posted about a few days back. She finished another whole roll out at this excursion, and since we haven't gotten back our other shots yet, we're still ignorant to either how cool or how lame the photos are.
We were thinking of making a full few days out of it next time. From the Saddle it's only .2 miles up to Kelly Camp, a camping ground off to the right (east). Kelly Camp serves as a launching pad for hikes to Ontario Peak, and another peak behind Ontario (in relation to the ocean). On clear days I imagine that from Ontario peak you'd have to be able to see the Pacific.
From the Pacific Ocean to a towering mountain range in less than 27 miles...
Corrie had been informed of a nice hike in the Mount Baldy camp from some of her new coworkers. They had hiked all of their gear in and camped for a long weekend. We didn't quite have that kind of time-frame, so we had decided to hike to the initial terminus, check it out, and turn around and hike out. That hike is the Ice Canyon hike, all the way to the Saddle, where two ridges come together and form a saddle point. The camping area is in and around the vicinity of the Saddle, and from there are a handful of other trails leading off into the Angeles Forest and up to Mt Baldy and Ontario Peak, two of the peaks on opposing hills that have created the Saddle.
Sounds great.
The trek is 4.6 miles, one way, starting at 1100 feet and climbing to 7200 feet.
So...Corrie and I, while not in very good shape, are also very good at starting these kinds of reckless adventures ill-equipped. I joke, and remember our hike to Lassen's peak in 2004: wearing Chuck Taylor's, we only brought about a liter of water and a half a pack of smokes, we eventually had to (slightly) raid one of the remaining glaciers for some liquid (I was rationing the water early on that walk).
By the Lassen hike's standard we were equipped for Everest this time. We had five water bottles--full; we had lots of fruit that we'd bought moments before leaving Long Beach at a farmer's market; and we had sunscreen.
It was a grueling two and a half hour hike up, with us many times contemplating whether we could actually finish. There were so many Japanese tourists, with their professional walking sticks and full sun-coverage outfits, that made us feel unprepared and added to our crisis of confidence. At one point Corrie's knee started acting up, and while on a break I asked how it was. She said it was fine, but that this time she needed a break because her legs were tired.
Legs? Tired? I think I said almost just like that. "I could curl up in a ball and go to sleep right here on these rocks," I huffed, so serious that as I said that I could feel my eyelids getting heavy. We had a quick and hearty laugh following that, and moved on.
At what seemed like the third day of the hike we asked a rare white guy if we were close. "To the saddle?" he said in a balloon-popping way. Later, we came to a sign that said "Ice Canyon Saddle: .6 mi". Our bodies were sure we'd walked fifty, but I tried to frame it like, "Only 3000 more feet honey..." Corrie responded, "Yay, only a thousand more steps!"
Three-thousand feet didn't sound like so much, but those last thousand steps sounded like a lot, and felt like more.
At the Ice Canyon Saddle we finished off our plums and cherries, our saved prize from the walk up, and finished our fourth water bottle, reserving just one for the (literal) run down.
Almost every part of my lower body hurts now; feet, ankles, knees, calves and thighs and hips...
Are we the only yahoos who're over-confident enough to say: 9 mile hike? Sure, why not, we can totally do that. We've got water this time...
Here are some pictures:
This is a waterfall in the early stages of the hike, before the 2 miles of sun-blasted swicthbacking takes you a thousand more feet up in elevation, while the walk is still shady and wooded...
Along the trail you can see sights like this. I'm pretty sure that's the hill-form for Ontario Peak on the right. The farther up you get as the hike progresses, you end up eventually far above this particular rock formation.
Here's me horsing around with some timber. There were spots all over the trail that had been blocked by a felled tree, only to have the Forestry Service (I imagine) come in and chainsaw a trail-wide chunk of trunk out.
OR
The sweaty pink man saves the day!
There were a series of what looked like stone-mason homesteads in different levels of ruin and decay. (You know how I like ruins.)
Here's Corrie after framing and snapping a shot with our Holga camera I posted about a few days back. She finished another whole roll out at this excursion, and since we haven't gotten back our other shots yet, we're still ignorant to either how cool or how lame the photos are.
We were thinking of making a full few days out of it next time. From the Saddle it's only .2 miles up to Kelly Camp, a camping ground off to the right (east). Kelly Camp serves as a launching pad for hikes to Ontario Peak, and another peak behind Ontario (in relation to the ocean). On clear days I imagine that from Ontario peak you'd have to be able to see the Pacific.
Technical Difficulties
Apologies for the difficulties experienced by trying to purchase my The Big Weirdness art project. I'm currently working on it, so please bear with me.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Ladies World Cup Soccer Note
Yesterday was a packed day for us, and first thing we did was get breakfast at our local diner. We'd planned to hike the Ice Canyon Saddle trail, and needed a full breakfast before attempting the 4.6-mile one-way hike. I've got a post about the hike coming, and again it was a little more than we could chew (but we made it)...we have a habit of doing that, picking hikes that are likely beyond our shape and fitness levels.
But at the diner, I asked the server to put on the US-Brazil game being broadcast live from Germany in this year's Women's World Cup. It was an elimination game. It was tied after the first 90+ minutes, so they went to the OT timing (two fifteen minute halves, not sudden death scoring), and we watched as Marta, the Brazilian striker and one of the best lady players in the world, score her second goal of the game, putting the US in a hole with just about twenty minutes to go. We left before seeing the end, sure the Lady Yanks has lost the game, or consigned to that anyway.
Of course we were wrong, a fact that I only learned this morning. The US women scored in the closing seconds, and then won on penalty kicks. I got a jolt when I looked at my sports page in my Press-Telegram today; there were smiling women soccer players from the US above the fold. Quickly I examined and learned.
I'd also like to note that soccer, in our little Long Beach Press-Telegram, is covered like it's a popular sport, and coverage of both the Galaxy and Chivas USA is in depth, well informed, and well intended. If the LA Times and the two New York tabloids, the Daily News and the Post, covered soccer with the same enthusiasm you see in our Press-Telegram, more people would begin to care more about it. I mention the NY tabloids because the vast majority of the people in the City don't read the NY Times, they tend to read one of the two tabloids. Where we lived in Bed-Stuy, you couldn't even buy the Times.
But at the diner, I asked the server to put on the US-Brazil game being broadcast live from Germany in this year's Women's World Cup. It was an elimination game. It was tied after the first 90+ minutes, so they went to the OT timing (two fifteen minute halves, not sudden death scoring), and we watched as Marta, the Brazilian striker and one of the best lady players in the world, score her second goal of the game, putting the US in a hole with just about twenty minutes to go. We left before seeing the end, sure the Lady Yanks has lost the game, or consigned to that anyway.
Of course we were wrong, a fact that I only learned this morning. The US women scored in the closing seconds, and then won on penalty kicks. I got a jolt when I looked at my sports page in my Press-Telegram today; there were smiling women soccer players from the US above the fold. Quickly I examined and learned.
I'd also like to note that soccer, in our little Long Beach Press-Telegram, is covered like it's a popular sport, and coverage of both the Galaxy and Chivas USA is in depth, well informed, and well intended. If the LA Times and the two New York tabloids, the Daily News and the Post, covered soccer with the same enthusiasm you see in our Press-Telegram, more people would begin to care more about it. I mention the NY tabloids because the vast majority of the people in the City don't read the NY Times, they tend to read one of the two tabloids. Where we lived in Bed-Stuy, you couldn't even buy the Times.
Derek Jeter, Style, and AZ SB 1070
Derek Jeter, shortstop on my Yankees, has joined the 3000 hit club, and has done it with the style he has brought to most games in his career. Last season for Jeter was probably his worst statistically, which made the negotiations between him and the Yankees for his new contract contentious. They overpaid, probably, but because they have a superstar in the autumn of his career who has meant so much to the team and its fans. This year held the promise of finally a Yankee reaching the 3000 hit club in Jeter, but has otherwise been forgettable for Derek, ranking below last season for him statistically.
With two games left at home before the All-Star break, Jeter needed two hits to reach 3000, which he desperately wanted to do in the Bronx. In the first of the two games, in is first at bat, he got a hit, bringing him to 2999. In his second at bat, he hit a home run, tying the game and giving him his 3000th hit. His last at bat of the game he got a hit and drove in the winning run. He went 5-5 on the game, and even stole a base. A rather perfect offensive performance.
Both Derek Jeter and his teammate Alex Rodriguez were voted in to be starters for the American League side of the All-Star game, and both are declining to mend injuries. The All-Star game is being held this year in Phoenix, at the beautiful home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Arizona, you may remember, has one of the most strict laws on the books concerning how brown your skin is and how much personal documentation you need on your person when you walk around.
Arizona state Senate Bill 1070, which hasn't been repealed or been found unconstitutional yet, is still in effect, and, in some weird twilight zone episode, has sent half the professional baseball all stars scrambling to obtain their papers, so they can "enjoy" the festivities and visit Phoenix without fear of being jailed until they produce their documentation.
Wow, I guess it finally came to that.
With two games left at home before the All-Star break, Jeter needed two hits to reach 3000, which he desperately wanted to do in the Bronx. In the first of the two games, in is first at bat, he got a hit, bringing him to 2999. In his second at bat, he hit a home run, tying the game and giving him his 3000th hit. His last at bat of the game he got a hit and drove in the winning run. He went 5-5 on the game, and even stole a base. A rather perfect offensive performance.
Both Derek Jeter and his teammate Alex Rodriguez were voted in to be starters for the American League side of the All-Star game, and both are declining to mend injuries. The All-Star game is being held this year in Phoenix, at the beautiful home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Arizona, you may remember, has one of the most strict laws on the books concerning how brown your skin is and how much personal documentation you need on your person when you walk around.
Arizona state Senate Bill 1070, which hasn't been repealed or been found unconstitutional yet, is still in effect, and, in some weird twilight zone episode, has sent half the professional baseball all stars scrambling to obtain their papers, so they can "enjoy" the festivities and visit Phoenix without fear of being jailed until they produce their documentation.
Wow, I guess it finally came to that.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Rene Laloux and his Draags and Oms
Last month I had a post about Rene Laloux and an animated short that he and Roland Topor produced called "Le Escargots". I said that it was a visually beautiful animated thing that was made in a similar way to early South Park episodes: using stop-motion animation with paper cutouts.
Laloux has said that he was willing to sacrifice the smoothness of the animation if the pieces of painted cutouts were beautiful enough, and in that I can say he was successful.
He was given the go ahead at some point later to work with Topor again, but this time on a longer feature, specifically a feature length animated film. The result, "Fantastic Planet", is, while starkly beautiful and moving, obviously the afterbirth of a concoction of LSD and anti-Soviet activism.
Topor planned almost every shot and helped Laloux with each character design in a work of exhaustion that led to the two never working together so closely again. The animation team was started and stopped a few times, mainly because of the USSR invading Czechoslovakia, where they were producing the film, and then the Soviets trying to decide if they were going to allow the production to continue. Eventually the animators just finished the film without waiting for word, risking imprisonment.
One thing I've learned from my lifetime of watching and studying the Simpsons is that the eyes of an animated character are the most expressive facial features of that character. Notice how each Simpson family member has the simplest features of all the show's characters. This simple conceit makes it possible to affect just a single line and change the emotional impact and depth of any scene.
With this knowledge, it was mildly off-putting watching the Draags of "Fantastic Planet", the blue giants. They're the dominant beings on a planet where humans, Oms in the story, have been brought and are considered a nuisance or a pet of the well-to-do. The Draags, as can be seen from the poster I put on the page that I've linked to above, have bright red eyes, and during the course of the film, they never contort to emote in any way. The very first sight in the movie shows an anguished and terrified human mother running and clutching her baby, a scene that shows that Laloux knew full well about the power of eyes and emotions. Watching the Draags for so long is eerie.
While Laloux and Torpor might not have literally been high on acid as they designed the sets and random animals and landscapes, all of those designs probably couldn't have come from artists who were totally unfamiliar with LSD.
I recommend this film, both as a trippy animated piece and as a biting political allegory. If someone acquires it off Amazon.com, beware that it might not play in your DVD player, and you may have to watch it on a computer.
Laloux has said that he was willing to sacrifice the smoothness of the animation if the pieces of painted cutouts were beautiful enough, and in that I can say he was successful.
He was given the go ahead at some point later to work with Topor again, but this time on a longer feature, specifically a feature length animated film. The result, "Fantastic Planet", is, while starkly beautiful and moving, obviously the afterbirth of a concoction of LSD and anti-Soviet activism.
Topor planned almost every shot and helped Laloux with each character design in a work of exhaustion that led to the two never working together so closely again. The animation team was started and stopped a few times, mainly because of the USSR invading Czechoslovakia, where they were producing the film, and then the Soviets trying to decide if they were going to allow the production to continue. Eventually the animators just finished the film without waiting for word, risking imprisonment.
One thing I've learned from my lifetime of watching and studying the Simpsons is that the eyes of an animated character are the most expressive facial features of that character. Notice how each Simpson family member has the simplest features of all the show's characters. This simple conceit makes it possible to affect just a single line and change the emotional impact and depth of any scene.
With this knowledge, it was mildly off-putting watching the Draags of "Fantastic Planet", the blue giants. They're the dominant beings on a planet where humans, Oms in the story, have been brought and are considered a nuisance or a pet of the well-to-do. The Draags, as can be seen from the poster I put on the page that I've linked to above, have bright red eyes, and during the course of the film, they never contort to emote in any way. The very first sight in the movie shows an anguished and terrified human mother running and clutching her baby, a scene that shows that Laloux knew full well about the power of eyes and emotions. Watching the Draags for so long is eerie.
While Laloux and Torpor might not have literally been high on acid as they designed the sets and random animals and landscapes, all of those designs probably couldn't have come from artists who were totally unfamiliar with LSD.
I recommend this film, both as a trippy animated piece and as a biting political allegory. If someone acquires it off Amazon.com, beware that it might not play in your DVD player, and you may have to watch it on a computer.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Quick Railroad Blast from the Past
This is a feeder car from the twenties. Feeder cars are used to inspect the track, according to the sign, and are still in use today, just newer models. This was an exhibit from the Port's Party, as train tracks and cars were, and are, in great use of getting the cargo from ship to distribution hubs.
Do these controls look familiar, Norm?
Do these controls look familiar, Norm?
Some New Stuff
I'm trying out some new gadgets and what not on my site. They might be entertaining. Have fun with barbecues and explosions today, if that's what you're into.
Church Relic Update
I had a post recently about a the theft--and return--of a tarsal bone from ol' Saint Anthony from Long Beach's own St. Anthony's church. How might there be an update?
Well, the women arrested for the theft has been deemed unfit in the noggin (the apartment where she stays is an assisted living facility), and the church has decided not to press charges or bring a civil suit against her. They felt it would be a waste of money as well as a waste of a chance to forgive and offer love, I guess.
They said they'll be more careful in the future with the relic.
All of my jokes are inappropriate right now, so I'm at a loss.
Well, the women arrested for the theft has been deemed unfit in the noggin (the apartment where she stays is an assisted living facility), and the church has decided not to press charges or bring a civil suit against her. They felt it would be a waste of money as well as a waste of a chance to forgive and offer love, I guess.
They said they'll be more careful in the future with the relic.
All of my jokes are inappropriate right now, so I'm at a loss.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Camera Follies
An increase in our discretionary funds, however minimal, has gotten us looking for a camera for Corrie. I like to joke and say that I like to take pictures, but she's a photographer. I got her a single-lens reflex film camera years ago, a camera that ultimately didn't survive so many trips through airport security x-ray machines. A single lens reflex camera, otherwise known as an SLR camera, has a view-finder to look through, but a combination of mirrors or a super fancy multi-faceted prism transports the image coming in from the lens directly to the view-finder. It is the only camera apparatus that has a view finder that shows exactly what the lens sees.
Nowadays as film cameras are beginning to wane (mostly) in usage and digital has begun to overtake the market, we started to do research on digital SLRs, or, D-SLRs, and looked at different levels of user interface, programming, and photographic representation. We looked at price as well, and tried to weigh how professional a camera Corrie might want. The eighteen-hundred dollar camera is probably too rich for how much she'd be using it, but the four-fifty one might be too automated for someone who enjoys the control of the fully manual old film cameras.
That is something for camera enthusiasts to think about; the level of manual control available to the user. D-SLRs today are big and bulky, a fact of life for their mechanism of image capture, and with each newer edition, the controls become more and more menu based, but, with each jump up the level and price chain, the ability to set manual controls becomes greater, and it's likely one of these on which we'll settle.
At one point Corrie said something to the effect of "Isn't there just a old school looking body that houses a digital camera, lets the user deal with the light meter and all the other manual controls themselves, and takes great pictures?"
Turns out we found it. It's made by a German camera company called Leica, and the camera is the M-9. If you look it up, you'll see a very beautiful old-school looking camera, and the example pictures are phenomenal. If you know about cameras, then the name Leica means a certain thing. Imagine me saying, "Oh, I found this beautiful car that's exactly as fast as I want and handles even better than I could imagine. It's from a company called Ferrari." Leica holds a spot like that in the camera world.
The price on the M-9 was an Abe Lincoln short of seven-thousand dollars. No shit, $6995 for the body only, and not any of the cool two-grand lenses.
So, that's when we returned to our research on D-SLRs. Later on, feeding off a memory I had of a family reunion in 1990, I decided to look into the company of a camera that my Uncle Henry had that my dad spoke of with hint of genuflection: Hasselblad. The Swedish camera company made many precision instruments in the past, specializing in something called "medium format". Nowadays, they make a medium format digital camera that is a working SLR, but has a mega-pixel count that gets into the 200 range. Primarily used for magazine photo-shoots, these suckers price out at (are you sitting down?) twenty-seven thousand dollars for body only, up to the forties if you want a lens with it.
That's not even a hot tamale, that's a lava flow burning your face off.
In any case, medium format was the first real breakthrough in bringing photography to the common person back in the early 20s. Medium is in contrast to "large" format, which most of us can imagine from old timey movies, with the guy going underneath a sheet behind a big box, saying something like "Now hold still..." Ansel Adams, the famous landscape photographer worked mostly with large format. Medium format gives negatives that tend to be 6cm x 6cm, which is larger than 35mm negatives, which is the main film available today, and produces larger photographs as a result.
Eastman, an innovator in the world of photography and the founder of Kodak, got his shutter mechanism small enough and rolls of light sensitive paper thin enough to fit in a rudimentary box, and home photography was born. Some decades later, the German Leinz and his Leicas did for 35mm what Eastman had done medium format.
While medium format cameras in the digital world inhabit the highest realm of the consumer market, the medium format is making a comeback in the traditional film medium.
Rolls of 120 film are widely available, and the notion of a softer image being out there is appealing to folks who like to take pictures. It'd be nice if there was such a camera...cheap and available to anyone and everyone...you see where I'm going with this?
This has been a long winded essay to say that I bought us a Holga. Holga cameras are the widely available Chinese made medium format film cameras that are so crappily constructed that light filters into the box, slightly exposing the film and "staining" a picture with random colors; vignetting is heavy due to the plastic lens; and you really don't know what you have until you develop the film. You can, though, easily double expose the same negative, and switch the shutter from the normal setting to a position where you hold it open, exposing the film to lots and lots of light, like for starry night shots or sunsets.
The Chinese manufacturers made a few hundred million of them for their burgeoning camera-hungry public, only for 35mm to sweep through all over again. They figured out that the colorful treasures made with Holgas were liked by professionals and amateurs alike, so they re-marketed them to that audience.
These guys are plastic, need no batteries, are super light, funky in having to load the film in the mostly dark bathroom like a cartoon character, and cost less than thirty bucks. I had an Amazon gift card, so I got one and some film, and Corrie's been playing around with it until we make the move on her D-SLR.
Once we get the first roll developed, I'll try to post anything good (we still have two pictures to go).
In the medium format world, I've been looking at the Hawkeye-Brownie Kodak box camera next, which is cheaper but constructed better, just not made anymore. I also found a working folding camera, you know, like an accordion, an Iskra...I only mention it because I cracked up when I found out that the only company that regularly makes the film needed for it is Croatian.
Nowadays as film cameras are beginning to wane (mostly) in usage and digital has begun to overtake the market, we started to do research on digital SLRs, or, D-SLRs, and looked at different levels of user interface, programming, and photographic representation. We looked at price as well, and tried to weigh how professional a camera Corrie might want. The eighteen-hundred dollar camera is probably too rich for how much she'd be using it, but the four-fifty one might be too automated for someone who enjoys the control of the fully manual old film cameras.
That is something for camera enthusiasts to think about; the level of manual control available to the user. D-SLRs today are big and bulky, a fact of life for their mechanism of image capture, and with each newer edition, the controls become more and more menu based, but, with each jump up the level and price chain, the ability to set manual controls becomes greater, and it's likely one of these on which we'll settle.
At one point Corrie said something to the effect of "Isn't there just a old school looking body that houses a digital camera, lets the user deal with the light meter and all the other manual controls themselves, and takes great pictures?"
Turns out we found it. It's made by a German camera company called Leica, and the camera is the M-9. If you look it up, you'll see a very beautiful old-school looking camera, and the example pictures are phenomenal. If you know about cameras, then the name Leica means a certain thing. Imagine me saying, "Oh, I found this beautiful car that's exactly as fast as I want and handles even better than I could imagine. It's from a company called Ferrari." Leica holds a spot like that in the camera world.
The price on the M-9 was an Abe Lincoln short of seven-thousand dollars. No shit, $6995 for the body only, and not any of the cool two-grand lenses.
So, that's when we returned to our research on D-SLRs. Later on, feeding off a memory I had of a family reunion in 1990, I decided to look into the company of a camera that my Uncle Henry had that my dad spoke of with hint of genuflection: Hasselblad. The Swedish camera company made many precision instruments in the past, specializing in something called "medium format". Nowadays, they make a medium format digital camera that is a working SLR, but has a mega-pixel count that gets into the 200 range. Primarily used for magazine photo-shoots, these suckers price out at (are you sitting down?) twenty-seven thousand dollars for body only, up to the forties if you want a lens with it.
That's not even a hot tamale, that's a lava flow burning your face off.
In any case, medium format was the first real breakthrough in bringing photography to the common person back in the early 20s. Medium is in contrast to "large" format, which most of us can imagine from old timey movies, with the guy going underneath a sheet behind a big box, saying something like "Now hold still..." Ansel Adams, the famous landscape photographer worked mostly with large format. Medium format gives negatives that tend to be 6cm x 6cm, which is larger than 35mm negatives, which is the main film available today, and produces larger photographs as a result.
Eastman, an innovator in the world of photography and the founder of Kodak, got his shutter mechanism small enough and rolls of light sensitive paper thin enough to fit in a rudimentary box, and home photography was born. Some decades later, the German Leinz and his Leicas did for 35mm what Eastman had done medium format.
While medium format cameras in the digital world inhabit the highest realm of the consumer market, the medium format is making a comeback in the traditional film medium.
Rolls of 120 film are widely available, and the notion of a softer image being out there is appealing to folks who like to take pictures. It'd be nice if there was such a camera...cheap and available to anyone and everyone...you see where I'm going with this?
This has been a long winded essay to say that I bought us a Holga. Holga cameras are the widely available Chinese made medium format film cameras that are so crappily constructed that light filters into the box, slightly exposing the film and "staining" a picture with random colors; vignetting is heavy due to the plastic lens; and you really don't know what you have until you develop the film. You can, though, easily double expose the same negative, and switch the shutter from the normal setting to a position where you hold it open, exposing the film to lots and lots of light, like for starry night shots or sunsets.
The Chinese manufacturers made a few hundred million of them for their burgeoning camera-hungry public, only for 35mm to sweep through all over again. They figured out that the colorful treasures made with Holgas were liked by professionals and amateurs alike, so they re-marketed them to that audience.
These guys are plastic, need no batteries, are super light, funky in having to load the film in the mostly dark bathroom like a cartoon character, and cost less than thirty bucks. I had an Amazon gift card, so I got one and some film, and Corrie's been playing around with it until we make the move on her D-SLR.
Once we get the first roll developed, I'll try to post anything good (we still have two pictures to go).
In the medium format world, I've been looking at the Hawkeye-Brownie Kodak box camera next, which is cheaper but constructed better, just not made anymore. I also found a working folding camera, you know, like an accordion, an Iskra...I only mention it because I cracked up when I found out that the only company that regularly makes the film needed for it is Croatian.
Long Beach Port Centennial Party
When we got a mailer put through our mailbox announcing the details of the centennial celebration for our very own Port of Long Beach, we learned that it would be free and everyone was invited to come out and visit and learn.
For some reason I was very excited. I saw that I had the particular Saturday off, and after talking with Corrie, we agreed to go and check it out. My enthusiasm, while surprising to her, was genuine, as the thought of the intersection of industrial aesthetic photo ops, the strength and prosperity of a non-sports related union, the ocean, and memories of Season 2 from The Wire must have imploded into a singularity in my brain.
The experience wasn't a let down, but it wasn't like a six-year-old's day at Disneyland. We had a good time, grabbed our free snow-cone and popcorn and squeeze bottles, looked at some awesome period photographs, and left an hour later to do other things on that particular Saturday.
Some pictures we took will appear in later installments, when the time is right for those tales to be told. But here are some pictures that help this tale.
This is the entrance to the bash, er, "bash". The Port, though, being the largest on the west coast of the Pacific Ocean, is very proud about its multi-billion dollar efforts to get as sustainable as possible as fast as possible. Almost a hundred-and-fifty billion dollars worth of goods comes through this port every year, and that can finance some things.
The particular site for the party was a former docking yard, and the ground was concrete and uneven in places. They used old "cans" as walls for different exhibits, but the vast parking lot nature was enhanced with views like the following one, giving the feeling of a cut-rate county fair, but not even able to be housed in a meadow.
One cool exhibit was a line of parked beautifully restored period trucks. This next picture is the oldest, and the period license plate says "California Horseless Carriage".
I went up and checked out the dials, since you could, and I had to take a picture, since speed isn't one of them. You get voltage, temperature, and oil pressure. Obviously velocity wasn't a big consideration, especially taking into light the utility of the truck.
Now, my last picture for this post is a much more modern apparatus. If you look close to the left side, you can make me out standing next to wheels just as large. This is some kind of mobile crane. Norm might be able to give its name (I didn't look it up), but it didn't seem out of place, like the old-school trucks, Ferris wheel, carpet slides and free hot-dogs.
For some reason I was very excited. I saw that I had the particular Saturday off, and after talking with Corrie, we agreed to go and check it out. My enthusiasm, while surprising to her, was genuine, as the thought of the intersection of industrial aesthetic photo ops, the strength and prosperity of a non-sports related union, the ocean, and memories of Season 2 from The Wire must have imploded into a singularity in my brain.
The experience wasn't a let down, but it wasn't like a six-year-old's day at Disneyland. We had a good time, grabbed our free snow-cone and popcorn and squeeze bottles, looked at some awesome period photographs, and left an hour later to do other things on that particular Saturday.
Some pictures we took will appear in later installments, when the time is right for those tales to be told. But here are some pictures that help this tale.
This is the entrance to the bash, er, "bash". The Port, though, being the largest on the west coast of the Pacific Ocean, is very proud about its multi-billion dollar efforts to get as sustainable as possible as fast as possible. Almost a hundred-and-fifty billion dollars worth of goods comes through this port every year, and that can finance some things.
The particular site for the party was a former docking yard, and the ground was concrete and uneven in places. They used old "cans" as walls for different exhibits, but the vast parking lot nature was enhanced with views like the following one, giving the feeling of a cut-rate county fair, but not even able to be housed in a meadow.
One cool exhibit was a line of parked beautifully restored period trucks. This next picture is the oldest, and the period license plate says "California Horseless Carriage".
I went up and checked out the dials, since you could, and I had to take a picture, since speed isn't one of them. You get voltage, temperature, and oil pressure. Obviously velocity wasn't a big consideration, especially taking into light the utility of the truck.
Now, my last picture for this post is a much more modern apparatus. If you look close to the left side, you can make me out standing next to wheels just as large. This is some kind of mobile crane. Norm might be able to give its name (I didn't look it up), but it didn't seem out of place, like the old-school trucks, Ferris wheel, carpet slides and free hot-dogs.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
From the DIY-Sports Edition File...
A baseball note I didn't get to earlier today in my quick sports note...
Something my mom would totally dig...
Former Oakland A's ace Tim Hudson now pitches for the Atlanta Braves, and is still a great pitcher, but not quite the badass he was in Oakland. Comparing 36 year old athletes with their own 24 year old counterparts isn't really fair.
In any case, the other day he pitched seven or eight innings without giving up any runs, and only three hits, dominating his opponents. The game ended 2-0, with the Braves beating the Toronto Blue Jays in an interleague game.
Being credited for a full victory, Hudson hit a two run homer, accounting for the games only runs.
Doing it yourself on the diamond...
Something my mom would totally dig...
Former Oakland A's ace Tim Hudson now pitches for the Atlanta Braves, and is still a great pitcher, but not quite the badass he was in Oakland. Comparing 36 year old athletes with their own 24 year old counterparts isn't really fair.
In any case, the other day he pitched seven or eight innings without giving up any runs, and only three hits, dominating his opponents. The game ended 2-0, with the Braves beating the Toronto Blue Jays in an interleague game.
Being credited for a full victory, Hudson hit a two run homer, accounting for the games only runs.
Doing it yourself on the diamond...
Photographic Vignetting
I have a planned post for either later tonight or tomorrow (well, soon anyway) about cameras and photography, and doing a little research on topics I discuss in that post, I learned about vignetting.
Vignetting is when the outer edges of the picture are darkened and is sometimes considered an artistic effect. It can be purposefully done during the development phase when using film; it can be done during the image-capture phase using film if the camera's lens is of low quality (back when it was considered less-that artistic); and it can be done after image-capture on digital media using photo editing programs.
It also happens "naturally" with digital cameras, if the data is of high energy at the edges of the frame and the camera's data-capture ability is easily overwhelmed; basically, if the background is too bright and your camera sucks. I joke like that, and I have three examples from my own Old Reliable, my first digital camera, that highlight this phenomena, but I want anyone reading this to understand how much I love my Old Reliable (that is sadly less reliable now) and how well it has treated me and Corrie.
In the course of owning this camera and using it as my primary device, basically 6/04 to 12/07, I took somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand pictures. It couldn't really handle anything close up, or in low light levels, or at night without a flash or a with the flash on and the subject farther than five feet, but that still leaves a wide range of possibilities.
And I never really minded the vignetting.
Here are some examples, in chronological order:
This one Corrie took of me at Sequoia Park in February of 2005. Anytime the sun is in my eyes, I have to squint, even with my sunglasses on.
From the same year, '05, but in either August or September, in Florence, looking out over the town and the imposing Duomo.
This is from June of 2006, taken from the roof of our apartment in Brooklyn. It didn't really do justice to how close those buildings in the distant skyline felt when you were up there looking at them.
This is from March of 2010, from the Guyton Ranchette, outside Bastrop, Texas, after Old Reliable was called back into service.
In all of these pictures you can see the vignetting heaviest in the upper right hand corners, where the picture looks rounded.
My Old Reliable is a Digitrex, the DSC-3000, now known as an Apex DSC-3000. I've seen reviews that paint the camera a nice, affordable, lightweight deal, and that was in 2005-6. Mine came as a free(?) gift with a computer I got as a graduation present.
Thousands of pictures later? Score.
Vignetting is when the outer edges of the picture are darkened and is sometimes considered an artistic effect. It can be purposefully done during the development phase when using film; it can be done during the image-capture phase using film if the camera's lens is of low quality (back when it was considered less-that artistic); and it can be done after image-capture on digital media using photo editing programs.
It also happens "naturally" with digital cameras, if the data is of high energy at the edges of the frame and the camera's data-capture ability is easily overwhelmed; basically, if the background is too bright and your camera sucks. I joke like that, and I have three examples from my own Old Reliable, my first digital camera, that highlight this phenomena, but I want anyone reading this to understand how much I love my Old Reliable (that is sadly less reliable now) and how well it has treated me and Corrie.
In the course of owning this camera and using it as my primary device, basically 6/04 to 12/07, I took somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand pictures. It couldn't really handle anything close up, or in low light levels, or at night without a flash or a with the flash on and the subject farther than five feet, but that still leaves a wide range of possibilities.
And I never really minded the vignetting.
Here are some examples, in chronological order:
This one Corrie took of me at Sequoia Park in February of 2005. Anytime the sun is in my eyes, I have to squint, even with my sunglasses on.
From the same year, '05, but in either August or September, in Florence, looking out over the town and the imposing Duomo.
This is from June of 2006, taken from the roof of our apartment in Brooklyn. It didn't really do justice to how close those buildings in the distant skyline felt when you were up there looking at them.
This is from March of 2010, from the Guyton Ranchette, outside Bastrop, Texas, after Old Reliable was called back into service.
In all of these pictures you can see the vignetting heaviest in the upper right hand corners, where the picture looks rounded.
My Old Reliable is a Digitrex, the DSC-3000, now known as an Apex DSC-3000. I've seen reviews that paint the camera a nice, affordable, lightweight deal, and that was in 2005-6. Mine came as a free(?) gift with a computer I got as a graduation present.
Thousands of pictures later? Score.
Couple Things...
I've been lagging with this site for a few days. Strange machinations have been going on. My work schedule has changed, for the better now that Corrie works a white collar job. We spent an evening with my Auntie and Uncle in Santa Monica (another LA beach city) and got to watch their fireworks show (they have it early to combat gang violence). We even went to the centennial birthday party for the Long Beach Port.
I'd like to pass on a quick few words about sports. The scene is getting pretty ugly out here with Frank McCourt and the Dodgers. Frank somehow bought the Dodgers with a credit card or leveraged debt or some other thing that lets fake rich people pretend to be wealthy, and now needs to declare bankruptcy in order to get a loan to make payroll. He's broken up the team's holdings into at least twenty-eight shell companies, all feeding off the team in some way or another. He's in Rule or Ruin mode, and the days grow dark for fans of one of baseball's cornerstone franchises in the second largest market. McCourt has the ability to go beyond the title of "bad owner"; he has the ability to screw up the Dodgers for a few decades.
The NBA owners, maybe feeling jealous of the NFL owners, have locked out their players. All joking aside, the NBA's situation is different than the NFL. In the NFL, the owners aren't satisfied with their share of the pie, and don't like the CBA (collective bargaining agreement) they signed just five years ago, and want the players to give up some cash. They have a better chance to get a deal done and play some games this year than their compatriots in basketball.
While owners like Ralph Wilson, of the NFL's Buffalo Bills, cry about small markets, the usual response is "be a better owner", since the small market complaints crumble is you look at Green bay and Pittsburgh, two historically classy and winning franchises.
I heard one problem facing NBA owners is that the league grew too fast and teams were overvalued, being sold for far too much. I suppose if you bought a team for $20 million and are getting an annual return of $2 million, as an owner you say, "swell." If, though, as the newer crop of owners have done, you buy a team for $300 million, and are receiving $2 million in returns, you might say, "HOLY CRAP! I can't even pay the interest of the leveraged debt that allowed me to buy the team in the first place!" This sounds like the case for twenty-two of the thirty franchises.
The NBA owners do not share revenue like the owners in the NFL or in baseball, a thing that the rich teams (Knicks, Lakers, et al) don't want a part of.
Whatever, I say. An owner should make sure that when they open up their McDonald's that the neighborhood it's in isn't a high-end 'hood populated by wealthy vegan housewives with tennis instructor fetishes. The players, though, are demanding an increase in an already astounding average annual salary. I generally side with labor, but this situation makes me wince. After the most intriguing season for the NBA in who knows how long, they are about to explode all that good will.
Go figure.
I'd like to pass on a quick few words about sports. The scene is getting pretty ugly out here with Frank McCourt and the Dodgers. Frank somehow bought the Dodgers with a credit card or leveraged debt or some other thing that lets fake rich people pretend to be wealthy, and now needs to declare bankruptcy in order to get a loan to make payroll. He's broken up the team's holdings into at least twenty-eight shell companies, all feeding off the team in some way or another. He's in Rule or Ruin mode, and the days grow dark for fans of one of baseball's cornerstone franchises in the second largest market. McCourt has the ability to go beyond the title of "bad owner"; he has the ability to screw up the Dodgers for a few decades.
The NBA owners, maybe feeling jealous of the NFL owners, have locked out their players. All joking aside, the NBA's situation is different than the NFL. In the NFL, the owners aren't satisfied with their share of the pie, and don't like the CBA (collective bargaining agreement) they signed just five years ago, and want the players to give up some cash. They have a better chance to get a deal done and play some games this year than their compatriots in basketball.
While owners like Ralph Wilson, of the NFL's Buffalo Bills, cry about small markets, the usual response is "be a better owner", since the small market complaints crumble is you look at Green bay and Pittsburgh, two historically classy and winning franchises.
I heard one problem facing NBA owners is that the league grew too fast and teams were overvalued, being sold for far too much. I suppose if you bought a team for $20 million and are getting an annual return of $2 million, as an owner you say, "swell." If, though, as the newer crop of owners have done, you buy a team for $300 million, and are receiving $2 million in returns, you might say, "HOLY CRAP! I can't even pay the interest of the leveraged debt that allowed me to buy the team in the first place!" This sounds like the case for twenty-two of the thirty franchises.
The NBA owners do not share revenue like the owners in the NFL or in baseball, a thing that the rich teams (Knicks, Lakers, et al) don't want a part of.
Whatever, I say. An owner should make sure that when they open up their McDonald's that the neighborhood it's in isn't a high-end 'hood populated by wealthy vegan housewives with tennis instructor fetishes. The players, though, are demanding an increase in an already astounding average annual salary. I generally side with labor, but this situation makes me wince. After the most intriguing season for the NBA in who knows how long, they are about to explode all that good will.
Go figure.
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