...might be Obama losing. Phyrric victories aren't good for anybody, either Obama in the nominating contest or anyone in the general election. I would kind of prefer McCain to win, but I want him to win because the American people reject Obama's orthodox liberal policies, not because he and Clinton have so damaged themselves and their party that McCain is the only option. I mean, I'll take it, but it's far from optimal.
My girlfriend and I went to see Notre Dame's student production of Christopher Marlowe's Faust last night. All in all, it was pretty good, considering. The pageant of the seven deadly sins was well done, and the fantastical caricatures of the papal court were amazing. But I hadn't made the connection between selling one's soul to the devil and playing Second Life. That just hadn't occurred to me. I mean, I know ND has a pretty sizable contingent of neo-Luddites, but really?
Beijing has released a statement on the Olympic Torch relay which is a sack of lies.
My roommate and went to see Drillbit Taylor last night. It wasn't entirely by choice: we wanted to be out of the apartment for a few hours, and there really wasn't anything else that looked remotely worth seeing.
I'm pretty disappointed with Rogen and Apatow for even being associated with the project. In Knocked Up, there were a few situations which were slightly unlikely, but not actually impossible. Though more or less harmless, there is absolutely no way kind of "hazing" the "heroes" in Drillbit were subjected to in school would ever be permitted at a school as wealthy as the one depicted here. Instead of buddying up to the principal, the perpetrators would be headed straight to juvie. And chasing someone with a car isn't hazing, it's assault, reckless driving, and attempted homicide, which doesn't send you to juvie, it sends you to the Big House. Oh, and I'm pretty sure that random adults are not permitted to wander around the school building, and even if they do manage to get inside, they aren't mistaken for teachers, especially if they're actually homeless bums. It just doesn't happen that way.
I'm okay with stretching the bounds of plausibility in cinema. In some sense that's kind of what it's for. Yes, pretty girls don't usually go for slovenly bums the way Katherine Heigl did for Seth Rogan, but dumber things have happened, especially where alcohol is concerned, and the story that results rings true enough to be interesting. But given today's security-crazed pseudo-Orwellian high school environment, the idea of bringing an unknown adult into a high school is so far-fetched it would never have occurred to any reasonably intelligent student even to try, and that same environment would probably prevent the bullying which is the premise for the movie in the first place. Real people don't act like this. Even in settings where it's quite clear that the situation isn't real, like, say any sci-fi movie ever, a film can still ring true if it captures what real people would do in those circumstances, especially if the filmmakers are skilled enough to show how the human condition doesn't really change across contexts.
Needless to say, Steven Brill is not so skilled. I don't know the last time I was so totally unengaged by a movie. I didn't care what happened to any of the characters, and was completely uninterested in finding out what happened in the end. We walked out after about 45 minutes.
It shouldn't really be surprising: if you're burning food for energy, that's food that can't be eaten. And when you've already got people who don't have enough food, this begins to look like a pretty exquisite form of conspicuous consumption. I usually hold a measured antipathy towards a lot of foreign aid, but there's something pretty fundamentally wrong about actually subsidizing the burning of food when there's sufficient demand to sell it to people will, you know, eat it.
This sounds like almost exactly what I did, with almost exactly the same timing. I don't know exactly how much weight I've lost since January, but my waist is two inches smaller. I guess I'm officially off the diet now, but like the author here, I just eat differently than I used to--mostly I just eat less than I used to.