Deth's Journal

You know, it takes a certain amount of unmitigated balls to be handed everything on a platter, and then bitch.

To m y knowledge, the queen of england did nothing at all to be queen. She ain't elected, she ain't appointed. She got there by being the daughter of the previous monarch. Her life is pure tits all the way through, because of that simple fact of luck, being born into a rich and well-loved monarchy.

And she has the balls to sit and tell the paparazzi to back off? I mean really?

You don't want them taking pictures of you relaxing at your gods-be-fucking-damned *estate*? Really? What the fuck, pull the curtains, why don't you? Or just suck it up and be like, "well, yea, they take our picture, but we can still slip 200$ worth of champaign every 20 minutes if we want, haha poor sodders!" and laugh it off.

When you live a life of entitlement and ease, there are costs to that, and one of them - in the case of being a member of the royal family - is that your subjects like to see you.

And they should be grateful. They could have ended up like the french monarchy did, back in the end of the 1700's. Instead, they lead a life of luxury and ease bound only by their own desires. That's more then most of the people of Britain - or the world - can lay claim to.

Homecoming is pretty good and i recommend it, though i do have some questions. The actors are all pretty good, and while some of the stuff (notice the drinking) is a little irrational considering the presented facts, the overall story is very good.

There's a few really good scenes, to, which i quite like. And the entire thing is very plausible in it's own way. Not a bad film at all, and well made.

Editors Note: every time i hear the title i think first of blare witch, then of Fraggle Rock. Imagine the fraggle rock theme song with "Coffin Rock" instead of "Fraggle Rock" - yea, and people wonder why i'm a little off.

Coffin Rock is a pretty good movie, i recommend it. I've never seen a film done in quite this way before - it's really presenting the issue of having kids in a different way then one sees normally. It's pretty good and i recommend it.

I was thinking earlier today about the role of the experts in our society, and in any free society.

On the one hand, it's obvious to me that the world is to complex and science to vast for a layman to get much more then a general surveying of it, with deeper dives into some areas. some topics are so expansive and require such specialized knowledge that you really *can't* learn it on your own in your free time without tremendous dedication to that above all others.

So we have experts. An expert's a person who knows all about a single given subject, to the point where their opinion is pretty solidly valuable in making decisions. I might say to an expert "what are my odds of catching the flu if i go to a restaurant this weekend", and he might be able to produce me a probability - say 1 in 5 - that would help me figure out what i should do.

The problem is, how do you know who to trust? How do you know who's both knowledgeable, and unbiased?

The deeper issue is that vetting an expert can be very difficult. Clearly you need some kind of decision making group, but that group itself can become tainted with bias.

Of course, the less stringent the field the easier it is for bias to take hold. If you're an engineer and you claim that concrete has a loading strength of ten times what anyone else says, then it is likely you're not long for serious engineering. You can verify and check things like that through valid experiments. The loading strength of concrete is not a matter of opinion.

But any topic where you can't really do experiments, it's ripe to have bias influence what experts say. And the more impossible experiments are, the easier it is to fudge. I would argue the ultimate case of this is economics, a science so valueless that i'm sure it would prove itself unworthy of investment! But other areas also apply - medicine, climate science, etc.

Which leads to the deeper issue - one that is, you might say, at the heart of it all. Experts exist to inform our choices, and to make complex issues simple for us to grasp and incorporate into our decision making process. What do we do if the experts say something we vehemently disagree with, or which goes against our values?

It's a real dilemma, because there are certainly discoveries and facts that go against every day logic. But the majority of the world IS logical and rational, and does do more or less what you'd expect it to do. It's a real tossup how to deal with something like that, in the large scale.

The Atrocity Exhibition is so bizarre i have to assume it's some kind of elaborate hoax.

It makes no sense, it has no "narrative" per se. It has no logic. It's just random scenes, like shit that came from some other movie that made sense, shot through with lots of shots of nuclear explosions. It's just to weird to be anything but a very elaborate hoax.

cannot recommend.

Feeding Grounds is kind of an anomalous film. It's a creature feature with no creature It's philosophical but never explains itself. The characters are stereotypes, but you like them enough anyway.

All told, it's a good movie because it knows it's limitations and doesn't try to exceed them. It's somewhat like Feast without the effects quality. It works well for that - by never clearly showing the monster they avoid ever looking silly, and you kind of build some suspense at some points.

I recommend it. It's not a bad way to kill an hour.

Laid to Rest Is pretty good. I recommend it. didn't see some stuff coming, that's for sure. The acting is interesting, and pretty well done. There's a bit of a of a mystery to it.

All told a superb film.

The Triangle is a pretty good movie. I liked it. It was a somewhat new take on a old idea. The protagonist was an interesting choice, as was her motives. I recommend it.

There were some "technical" issues that i didn't like - they hand-waved some stuff pretty hard. It was uneven in it's treatment of some issues.

But, still - the overall affect was very good. And i liked it quite a bit.

The Objective is a pretty good film, though some parts were a bit out-there for my tastes. I recommend it.

The movie was blown for me in the first 15 minutes with a clue that - to me - tipped the whole damn thing. But there were still unexpected twists and turns and i was pleasantly surprised at several points.

The film stresses authenticity and it does a pretty good job of that. I found the depiction of the soldiers pleasing.

So, one of the issues heather and i have in our relationship is my sense of humor. She finds many of my jokes horribly offensive. I find many of my jokes hi-larious, and think that people should differentiate between what's said and what's *done*. But really, what this journal entry is about is what i call "the choirboy's asshole" joke, which i have been working for probably six months.

When you make a new joke, there's basically two ways it can go down - it can fall into place like the peices of a puzzle and just instantly "work", or it can take some time to be refined. The key is to have a good premise, a good punchline. The punchline of the choirboy's asshole joke is the clergy being upset at their inability to sodomize him. To anyone offended, i'd point out that it just came out that the catholic church covered up child abuse in ireland, so you know what they can do? They can be the butt of sodomy jokes (which is a pun not a joke, btw).

Now, first let's talk about what makes this funny, or why i think it's a funny joke. It firstly is unexpected, that someone would make such a joke, so it surprises people. It secondly makes people nervous, because it's dealing with a sensitive, delicate issue in a crass and ignorant way. Those two things create tension, they put you in a state of "oh man". You have to release that tension, and for most people in social situations - that's going to be laughing. Now, you have to pick your audience of course, but so far as it goes, it's got legs.

So, the first iteration was a riff on the stance against evolution and the inquistion: there was a big long lead up about how each generation of the choirboy's family has evolved smaller and smaller assholes until finally the current generation which has no asshole at all, and how the priest had to kill them because of this proving evolution. This got some laughs, but took to long to tell and was pretty clunky.

I began thinking about ways to tighten up the delivery and to shorten it down to a one or two line joke. Think dead baby jokes: most are 2-line jokes. "What's the difference between a dump truck full of bowling balls and a dump truck full of dead babies?" "you can't unload bowling balls with a pitchfork!" etc. The nice thing about 2-line jokes is their easy to work with and tell. The bad thing is their very tight and you have to maneuver well within that small, tight space, to deliver the punchline well.

So, last night it came to me: use the first line to set up a tragedy, then the second to riff on it as hard as i can. The result - speaks for itself.

Q: What's funnier then an eight year old without an asshole?
A: The look on his priest's face when he finds out!

Admittedly this isn't flawlessly perfect, but it is funnier then the original and it's got some room to work with it. I suppose it could also be worked into a funny story, but it'd be hard to set up the punchline well.

At any rate, i wanted to write this cause i feel pretty happy about finally coming up with it. Came to me last night, and while heather didn't really appreciate it, i sure did.

From "The Taming of the Shrewd: "Get her drunk then get her done"", to quote:

"There is a mud fight going on over at Ed Brayton's blog regarding his use of the word "shrew" in reference to Sarah Palin. The Kliqueons (rhymes with "Klingons") have called Ed out for being sexist. He says they should lay off and it is not OK to call him a misogynist, and anyway, he's done all kinds of good things on behalf of feminism and women and stuff so they should see him as an ally. They say they are not calling him a misogynist they are just calling his use of the word "shrew" a misogynist thing to do"

This, this is *exactly* why liberals never get shit done. Their willing to turn on each other over the passing use of a single word in a sentence. No shit, a *single fucking word in a single sentence*. That kind of bullshit is exactly the sort of nonsense that liberals love to do. I blame it on them being from a "debate" type culture, in which you get points for being a pedantic asshole who makes other people look stupid.

Unfortunately in the real world, that's just called "being a dick", and tends to impede progress on a grand scale. It inevitably degenerates into a witch hunt, based on semantic meanings and "implied" meanings of concepts and words. You dig up as much history and "context" as you can until you find something that supports your assertion.

All told, how many hours - that could have been spent doing actual work towards furthering a valid goal - were wasted on the pursuit of this non-issue? It staggers the mind.

The Carriers is a very good film and i strongly recommend it.

It's a pretty taut psychological thriller, and while i disagree strongly with it's conclusions, it has some great scenes. An interesting thing to watch for: everything LOOKS perfectly normal and mundane, with no sign of catastrophe - just like the people in the car.

There's some 1911 love, and the entire thing is utterly totally devoid of humor of any sort. It's as grim and horrible as it gets, a totally bleak film about a totally bleak situation.

It gets a little excessive at the end - i disagree strongly with some of it's conclusions and some of it's visuals. But, i can't fault a film for being 99% perfect, can i?

Also: Emily VanCamp looks a LOT like Leelee Sobieski, to me. It's so striking i thought it was her. It doesn't show in pictures, but on film - the two are very similar to my eye.

Saw VI is pretty good, i recommend it strongly.

Costas Mandylor really comes through as a strong, animalistic character, a caged beast of brutality and cruelty. There's one scene which COULD have been better that shows this off (you'll know it when you see it - it involves a shank), but there are other scenes that more then make up for it.

Also awesome: The return of Amanda. The explanation of many things. The general wrapping up of a legend.

The movie is a little lagging in some areas, but is overall superb. I didn't see the twist coming, though i should have. The Carousel was *excellent*. The overall ambiance, superb. It's a good movie, check it out.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

- Arthur C. Clarke

It's true. Whichever way that coin flip lands....it's a mind-blower, ain't it?

Let's say we're alone. Theres no one but us, and we have the whole universe as our domain. Then what? Everything we encounter will be either dead, our own handywork. There's no hope for true uniqueness, no chance for anything truly alien. It'll all be our hand, our work, our progeny forever and ever, amen.

If we're not alone, then that means we will encounter the truly alien. We'll look into the face of Other, we'll know what it is to be one of many, to lose our uniqueness, to give up our preconceptions. Would we communicate? Could we? What would we learn, what would we see?

Either option is terrifying in it's own way.

Call Back is an interesting film. It's torture porn (two girls on a guy), and it's basically pathos laden. The girls are lesbians, hot, and there's a great deal of violence.

I recommend it because it speaks well to the american heart. It's a movie full of our worst fears and our greatest dreams.

The House of the Devil is a reasonably decent satanic-panic film. It's set in the 80's, and is pretty true to it's era. There's some interesting stuff and some bad stuff. some stuff is really awesome about it, though - including a ceremonial bowl that i *want*, bad.

All told, i recommend it, but it's no great shakes either way.

There is something interesting though: the guy who plays the male lead is Tom Noonan. He was also in (among other things) robocop 2 and Manhunter. He's a very good actor, and it shows here, with his impressive and menacing height adding to his already excellent performance. He does brow beaten husband very well.

Tormented is a ghost story with a twist, set in a modern british highschool.

The story's pretty good, and the humor is very understated. There's some good kills, and while i found parts unbelievable, it's not poorly done at all. I recommend it.

Inglorious Basterds is a very good film, and one i heartily recommend.

There's really so much good about it that it's hard to pick one or two things to talk about. It has - by far! - the most realistic gunfight i have ever seen in a film (Hint: It's done and over in less then 20 seconds). There's also some really excellent dialog and it's quite gruesome at times. There's some humor, and some grimness.

All told though i would rank it among my "must see" films of 2009. It's that good. There's just so much good with the film that it's hard to even summarize.

Summer's Moon Is a not to-bad thriller. It's got some heavy themes, but it glosses over them in a way that makes them seem inconsequential; alot of stuff happens that is not spoken about on any level, and that's kind of unsatisfying.

That said, i can recommend it. The production values are good, and it's worth tuning in just for the Father. The father is sort of like what Otis from house of 1000 corpses would be like if he was totally in control of himself and very relaxed.

Not a bad flick though, either way.

Ohio needs to drastically increase the bag limit in it's eastern and north eastern counties. The deer population here is more then out of control, and it's obvious that the current bag limit is doing nothing to prevent out of control growth. It's a rare trip to the next town over that you do not see a deer - it's rare enough you comment, "oh, no deer today?" because literally they are so common to see.

There is no danger of the white tail deer going extinct any time soon, there's no benefit in having the huge population we now have, and there's no benefit in preventing the population from being put under more stringent controls.

I have no problem with the deer as a concept, i have no problem with sharing the land with the deer. But enough is enough, and they are a serious safety hazard. I am more then understanding that some counties have very few deer, and so a tight bag limit is required there to preserve genetic diversity and a good breeding stock. But my county and several others are literally overflowing, and we need to do some culling before starvation and disease takes hold of them.

I think if every hunter could take 8 to 12 deer, our problems would be over for at least a few years, then everything could go back to normal next year with the normal bag limit.

As well, i feel i should remind people that by removing the natural predators of deer, we have taken it upon our selves to be the force that keeps them in check. We must reap what we sow, and we have sown this matter, right and true. Now it is time to reap it.