But as an interesting side note….while I was watching the movie by myself at the theater, A-Yo was watching a pirated Russian version on the computer at home.  When I got home, she was at the cave scene.  So I watched the end of the movie again in Russian at home.  After Snape killed Dumbledore, A-Yo asked “So is Gandalf really dead or can they bring him back to life?”   I just answered “Yes, he’s really dead” rather than completely nerd out and talk about how not all wizards are Gandalf, and how the avada kedavra spell can’t be reversed, as anyone who paid attention in Defense Agianst the Dark Arts would know…

Actually, he does have some good points about how Americans are
slovenly and don’t dress properly. People in Kazakhstan are horrified
to see Americans in jeans and dirty sneakers (what! you don’t polish
your black leather shoes three times a day!!!!). I am always a little
surprised by the number of people that come to the legislature to
testify in committee in jeans and casual clothes. I love casual
office wear and comfortable clothes, but a lot of people in America
really have lost the ability to dress properly based on the occasion.
And considering how little most Americans read, know about history,
(non-pop) music, and culture, maybe George Will does have a point
about connection between the lazy appearance and worst instincts of
Americans.

But George Will definitely paints with too broad a brush when he
brings in gamers:

“Seventy-five percent of American ‘gamers’ — people who play video
games — are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote.”

I play “video games”, but I am perfectly able to wear a suit to work,
dress in clothes other than jeans, and be an informed citizen and
voter. I assume he is exaggerating for satirical effect, but video
games and slovenly clothing (outside the home) aren’t necessarily
linked. of course, if George Will had seen me alone in my apartment,
unbathed, unkempt, playing WoW for 10 hours and subsisting on turkey
sandwiches and carrot sticks, he might be justified in concluding that
I was unable of functioning or dressing properly in society…

Highlights

1. The battle scene in the first half. Great action, a real sense of urgency and uncertainty of how things would unfold.  The battlestar acting as a battering ram and boarding the Colony was pretty awesome.
2. Getting to Earth. The real Earth that is.  I guess I took for granted that the first earth was the real thing…even though we never did get a good look the continents, moon, etc.
3. Rosslyn death scene. Very touching.  I wish they had built their cabin first.  It was kind of odd that Adama wanted to go live by himself, but after all he’d been through, quiet contemplation and solitude might not be so bad.
4. Tigh at the strip club. You got to love a couple that can enjoy themselves together at a nudie bar.  His post-shot, oogling-the-stripper yells were awesome.  And their flashbacks throughout the episode actually had the most resonance, both in context of the final episodes and the whole series.  It showed how much they loved each other, despite all the bad things they’ve done over the years (cheating, neglect, drinking, etc) and when they got their happy ending on earth, it felt very well deserved.
5. Cavil/Boomer Deaths. It was sad to see Boomer go after redeeming herself (partially), but it was worth it seeing Athena get her revenge (never fuck my man while I’m bleeding and tied up on the bathroom floor!). And Cavil, realizing the gig was up, deciding to blow his brains out was fitting.  I’m sure he computed the odds and realized it was the most logical thing to do.

Lowlights

1. Kara just disappears. OK…I get it.  She is an angel or a messenger or a Moses-guide type figure.  But after 4 seasons of getting to know this character (and one of the best characters on the show), to simply have her disappear is very disappointing.  Surely she deserved some happiness and peace on new Earth.  Having her disappear after guiding everyone to Earth reduces her to just a plot device, rather than a three-dimensional character.
2. Hera has midochlorians! Or we have her mitochondria DNA.  I tend to get confused when “sci-fi” gets to close to the “sci” half of the genre and falls on its face.  Having Hera be the missing-link “Eve” skeleton seems like a weak excuse to try to justify why she was important.  Yes, showing that humans and cylons can frak and reproduce was important, both for the plot and for the themes of the show (shared humanity of humans and cylons, etc).  Why all the fighting about Hera?  She too was reduced to a plot device and it was never clear what her real importance was.  During the final battle, if Racetrack had nuked the cylon ship when Hera was still on it and she was killed, would anything be different?  Starbuck still could have jumped the ship to new Earth and everyone lives happily ever after.  Oh, and did I mention the opera house splicing was very forced…
3. Tyrol goes to Scotland. Or the rocky highlands somewhere, just to go live by himself.  I know he’s had a rough time of it, but come on.  Surely having some company and eating gazelle burgers on with other survivors wouldn’t be that bad.
4. Ditching the technology. Surely it wouldn’t have hurt to keep a mining/refining operation going and maintain the ability to fly around the planet.  Maybe there could be conflict with the freed centurions or others, but surely maintaining some technological capabilities would have been worth it.  I liked the idea of the clean break but cold turkey seems a bit rash.

A funny Doonesbury today.  As a Twitter user, I know that it is completely pointless…but it is a fun way to make little jokes and let people know what you are doing.  And reading up on Shaq is always fun.

It seems like there is a Twitter backlash going on (Thanks John Dickerson of Slate for showing me Shaq’s twitter page!).  But Technology always brings about a backlash.  There were similar naysayers about Facebook and Myspace and all the social networking “web 2.0″  sites.  Go back far enough and you’ll find people decrying the use of email and mobile phones as the harbinger of death for civilization.

Like anything, it’s all in how you use it…kids nowadays are obsessed with texting and it does seem pretty ridiculous.  It’s a busy month if I send 50 txts…I can’t imagine sending several thousand…don’t these kids sleep?!.  But as long as people have the ability to pick up a book or go to a museum or grab a pen and paper (or open MS word) and write or draw or think and create, I think there is still hope for our culture.  I don’t think we need to blame new media and communications for the supposed decline of intellectual discourse and culture.  Twitter’s 140 character limit doesn’t stop people from developing deeper thoughts, stories, and articles outside the little box a website.  Maybe failing schools, bad parenting, and other aspects of American society share greater blame than than the Twitter and Facebook if society and culture seem to be declining?

It’s like the NRA says:  Twitter does kill culture, people do.

Admittedly, I generally don’t watch shows on TV, since I prefer to binge on entire seasons all at once on DVD or BitTorrent, but I was thinking which I liked better:  Lost or Battlestar Galactica.  And the winner for me would have to be BSG.

Lost is a very good show, but so far I’ve been disappointed in the fifth season, and am losing some confidence that the ending will be satisfying after season 6.  What I liked most about lost in seasons 1 through 3, was the sheer confusion and multiple potential explanations.  Using your imagination, you could try to fit things together, but the changing alliances and bits of information kept you on your toes.  Now that they’ve started explaining more secrets of the show, it brings up more questions, but not good ones… These questions are more about the authenticity of the revelations, than curiosity about what will happen next (How does Ms. Hawkins know so much about how to get back to the island?  So why does Jack need his fathers shoes? )  There needs to be some good pay-off in the next few episodes to get the show back on track.

Right now I’ve watched through the middle of the fourth and final season of BSG.  The characters are much better developed than on Lost.  There is intrigue throughout the show (who is a Ceylon, who isn’t, what about Earth, etc) but even when things are unclear, the show fits them together nicely, all while hitting on the shows main themes:  family vs. obligations, faith vs. rationality, freedom vs. security, and what it means to be human.  Some of the second season got bogged down with the religious stuff, but overall the show has been consistently awesome.

Lost also focuses on faith vs. rationality (primarily through Locke and Jack) but sometimes the conflict gets lost (no pun intended) in the convoluted story, shifting or unclear motivations, and over-the-top nature of the show.

The style was very direct, crisp, and matter-of-fact, which made for a brisk read. The story is about a woman that hadn’t slept in 17 days. I’m not sure if this is actually physically possible (the character in the story wonders the same thing.) Although not a lot happens in the story, it builds up nicely. When she first describes her dissatisfaction with domestic life, she seems unhappy, but as the story progresses, you can sense her desperation growing, and the tone becomes more menacing.

The ending, however, did leave me a little confused.  (spoilers!) At the very end she is trapped, crying in the car and says that the two guys are going to flip the car over.  What I got out of it, was that even as she was “expanding her life” by staying up all night, she was becoming increasingly isolated, her discontent was swallowing her, the walls were closing in.  So it made sense that she ends up trapped alone in her tiny car, which was being assaulted from the outside, rocked back and forth by forces beyond her control.  So I think I understood the feeling he was invoking, but when I think about it logically, I wonder what was going to happen.  Were they going to kill or rape her? Were they just going to flip the car over as a prank? I guess no matter what happens, her secret night life is over since something terrible was about to happen.

Anyways, that my rambling on the story.  If you read this and wonder “what story was he reading?”, then maybe I understood the Japanese less than I thought!

I’ve read maybe 6 or 7 pages of the story “眠り/ Sleep” so far.  It is interesting to read, even if it is challenging for my Japanese level.  On each page, there are usually at least 5 words that I have to look up, but the writing style seems to be very direct and matter-of-fact, which I think makes it easier for me to understand.

I’m sure I’m missing out on the subtle nuances of the work, nevertheless I think it is good Japanese practice.  Reading this, I’ve realized how boring most Japanese textbooks are.  Studying in a textbook is a chore, but so far I am enjoying this. 

Another thing good about reading novels or  short stories is that they introduce and reinforce vocab really well.  In the story I’m reading, I’ve seen so many new phrases related to sleep, and many of the phrases come up repeatedly in the text, which is useful for remembering the words later.

There’s no way I’m going to finish the whole collection before the book is due back, but hopefully I’ll be able to finish a story or two.

2) Who is the idiot that scheduled a WWII Hitler assassination-attempt film to open on Christmas day?

3) How many children will want eye patches in their stockings as Valkyrie-mania sweeps the nation this Christmas?

A friend of mine sometime back recommended this book, “Norwegian Wood” to me. He said that since I liked Japanese novels, that I would get a kick out of it. I was pretty surprised by just how good a book it was. Its not in my particularly favorable genres, but the love story told in its pages was magnificent, touching, sad, funny, you name it. Apparently the book and its author Haruki Murakami are pretty big here, yet even though the book says its a book “everyone” has read in Japan, only one of the foreigners at work had ever heard about it. Then again it is 20 years old, so I wouldn’t expect some of the people there to know about it. But certainly, its a great love story, and the late 60’s college setting really is a change of pace for the modern Japanese novels I have read, particularly the ones I read in college, that tended to fall into the usual overplayed time period of post war Japan. Definitely one of the best love stories I’ve read. The author even described my old home of Yotsuya perfectly in the book.

Next up for me, the works of Sherlock Holmes, and Neuromancer.

The article is based on the opinions of a Catholic cleric in England, but I think the main points are valid, whether or not you support the Catholic perspective or not.  From my experience working in an office with other people who have kids, I see the yearning for Disneyland, the desire for merchandise of their favorite characters, the aisles of crappy Chinese-made junk toys at Walmart.  Disney (and lots of other companies) are instilling a driving consumerism in children that most parents and society enable.  Many parents are clueless about how consumeristic they are teaching their children to be, and other know but don’t want their kids to feel left out of the Hannah Montana feeding frenzy or don’t want to deal with the inevitable tantrums that follow the refusal to buy something.

Black Friday, Christmas, kids birthday parties that cost thousands of dollars…so much in American society is driving people, and kids in particular, to consume.  Maybe its no different from when we were kids, but to me, the consumeristic culture in which kids today grow up makes the He-Man toys, Thundercat action figures, and Saturday morning cartoons of our youth seem like child’s play.  Maybe I am just more sensitive to this type of consumerism in childhood after being in Peace Corps and seeing a different environment that kids can grow up in.  Maybe it is because I’ve thought about how we would want to raise our kids in the future and it seems seems hard to shelter a child from the wasteful, superficial culture while also letting a kid be a kid and having fun and friends.

Of course, even considering the consumerism from my childhood and all the cartoon tie-in merchandise, atari/nintendo and other products, it seems like the current environment is more all-consuming.  We still had lots of time where we played outside, climbed trees, played with sticks and dug in the dirt.  And one of my favorite toys as a kid was a set of plain wooden blocks of various shapes that had belonged to my dad when he was a kid.  How many children today have such a simply thing as wooden blocks to play with, to imagine  and build something, without the help of Disney?