Ever since Can't Hardly Wait, I dropped my crush on Jennifer Love Hewitt for the more talented and beautiful Lauren Ambrose. Claire was one of my favorite Six Feet Under characters and I'm happy to see Lauren will be playing Parker Posey's (who I also dig) sister on a pilot called Jezebel James, which is written by Amy Sherman-Palladino of Gilmore Girls fame. I haven't had the chance to watch a whole lot of Gilmore, but I've really enjoyed the writing on the episodes I have seen. Here's hoping the show gets picked up.

Some pretty cool things happening this week. Tomorrow I have a midterm and then I'm going with some folks to the Griffith Observatory. I've never been, so I'm pretty excited.

Friday I am going with Justin and some folks to see 300 on Imax at the Spectrum. That should be pretty freaking awesome. This is definitely a movie that will greatly benefit from the Imax experience.

The kicker is on Saturday. I've got a poker game with Kevin Smith and company. It's not the usual game though, this time it is at his house. So that should be pretty darn cool. No cameras will be allowed, but Kevin once put some pics up here so that will give you an idea. Hopefully this time I will actually win some money. I've been trying to beef up my game, but I don't know how that will turn out.

It's been a few weeks since I caught Little Children in the theatre, and honestly, I'm still trying to put my mind around how I feel about it. On the one hand, it's a well-made movie, and on the other, it almost feels like a zero-impact movie.

Interestingly, the movie has a third-person narrator. I liked the style of his dialogue, but his voice popped up so rarely it felt like writer-director Todd Field only inserted it when the dialogue or actors weren't able to easily convey a particular idea or joke.

The story is two-fold, featuring unhappy marriages (and their resulting affairs) and the story of a pedophile whose presence is is (rightfully but too zealously) disapproved of by the neighborhood. Kate Winslet plays Sarah, a plain stay-at-home mom whose husband doesn't pay much attention to her. She is having an affair with Brad (Patrick Wilson), the local neighbor-women's dream man, whose wife works and wears the pants in the family while he takes care of their son. The two seem to fall together because of they have a lack-of-a-"real"-life in common. The pedophile, Ronnie, lives with his mother, and tries to get back into the swing of things when he is released from prison, but finds this difficult with neighborhood watchdogs inflicting hate crimes on them. Ronnie is one messed up guy. The two stories intertwine ever so slightly here and there.

All of the actors are great in their roles, the dialogue is crisp, and the color and lighting of the movie are cool. Actually, I was surprised to see Jennifer Connelly giving one of the best performances I've seen her give - one where she genuinely seemed to be the person she was playing instead of just Jennifer Connolly. My favorite performances were actually Phyllis Somerville's portrayal of Ronnie's mother, as well as Patrick Wilson's more amiable equivalent to Kevin Spacey in American Beauty.

In his review, Nobody referred to how the movie comes across as a drama but has a sense of humor that keeps the mood light. I think that combination is actually what kept me from being able to figure out how I felt about the movie's goings-on. There's an affair, which is bad, but the light mood almost had me rooting for it to happen, which irked me. The characters I should feel sorry for are minimalized, and the people who make the most errors are the ones who receive the least amount of consequences. My sense of morality and the way the movie messed with it left me feeling ambivalent about the whole thing instead of truly sympathizing with anyone.

One thing I did admire was the direction the movie went at the end. I didn't expect it and found it incredibly refreshing. As Nobody says, "it doesn’t contain profound revelations about the human condition," but for some reason I felt like it was trying to make some profound revelations that I just didn't pick up on. On the other hand, the movie is definitely entertaining, has a lot of funny moments, and is very clever in some of its observations.

Basically, I find myself jumping back and forth in an argument over whether I like Little Children for its strengths or dislike it for its weaknesses. I guess, in the end I liked it, but didn't find it as important as I think it wanted to be.

Well, great news! Rodney finally gets his star. I donated to this cause ages ago. Unfortunately, the people who started the donation cause forgot to email donors until TODAY that the ceremony isgoing to be this Friday. Thanks for the three-days' notice. I have two appointments set up that day and really can't move them, so I can't go. I was totally planning to skip work for this ceremony. I hope someone out there takes photos. Rodney shaped my musical tastes in high school and college, which is a bigger thing than it sounds like. And besides that, we all owe him a lot for the important bands he discovered and introduced to the U.S. over the years. Congrats, Rodney!

Once again, John K has the answers. But this time he says people are ready to listen.

You know all those Google Ads on the sides of websites? I've never understood those. Why is there so much money being spent on them? No one reads them. We automatically just tune them out when we visit websites. We don't even see them.

It seems like a huge waste of money to me. I also don't understand popups. Popup ads just piss everyone off! Like TV and movies. Modern corporate thinking has a strange habit of doing things to make the audience mad:

Commercials in movie theaters.
Network bugs crawling all over the TV screen when you are trying to watch your favorite shows.
Commercials that are obnoxious.

It used to be that big companies would compete with each other by making their products more appealing and attractive.
Movie theatres ran short cartoons before the movies.
TV Networks tried making shows better than other TV networks.

I pitched my idea to John and the FM shows. It's so simple:

Make an attractive animated banner ad that the sponsor places on various websites.
If it is fun and attractive, people will notice it and click on it.

The banner then takes you to another site where there is full blown animated content.

The content can be pure entertainment, or entertainment coupled with ads.
BUT!!! The ad has to be entertaining too, or no one will want to watch it!

This makes simple common sense to me and I have been pitching it for so long, I am amazed that it has been so hard to grasp for the business community.

Until now. Finally someone got it.

Read the rest.

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

White House official Libby guilty (BBC) - A former key White House official, Lewis Libby, has been found guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury. Libby, ex-chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, faces a prison term of up to 25 years. He will be sentenced in June.

I wish this trial had been about the real issue, which is the outing of a covert CIA agent. I also wish that they could have gone after the people that told Libby to do this. Cheney was involved in this. I also thought that Robert Novak should have felt more heat than he did over this, but I guess some people are tougher to get than others. If they're willing to lie about something that they claim is not even illegal, is there really any reason to trust this administration about anything?

Whew! I finally finished the third section of Against the Day this past weekend. This was a tough one.

The novel continues to follow multiple storylines with an abundance of obscure, archaic, and anachronistic allusions to culture, history, politics, and science. Up until now I've been able to follow it pretty well, mostly because the topics Pynchon references are ones that are fairly familiar to me. Starting in the third section, Bilocations, there is a greater emphasis on mathematical theory, something I have very little experience with. I sometimes find myself trudging through pages of debate about vectors, quaternions, and zeta-functions, looking for some idea that I can get my head around. I have been able to gather that these things connect with the larger themes of refraction (of light and matter) and of multiple realities existing adjacent to one another. Many of these things are made clear in the following key passage:

He saw that if the Q-waves were in any way longitudinal, if they traveled through the Aether in any way like sound traveling through air, then among the set of further analogies of sound, somewhere in the regime, must be music--which, immediately, obligingly, he heard, or received. The message it seemed to convey being "Deep among the equations describing the behavior of light, field equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety....Within the mirror, within the scalar term, within the daylit and obvious and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark itinerary, the corrupted pilgrim's guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist."

While these ideas are all very metaphysical, Pynchon always brings them back into the reality of the novel. That's probably one of the more interesting features of the world it takes place in: mathematical and scientific theories are not merely abstract. They have very real and immediate ramifications in the physical world. Thus, a mathematical guru is able to apply his ideas to make himself change shape into a different person, visitors from the future travel along the fourth dimension to perform their mischief, and a single professor lives two lives in two different locations simultaneously.

Meanwhile, all the story threads are continuing at a rapid pace toward whatever end point Pynchon has in store. It reminds me a little of A Tale of Two Cities, except that in this case it's more like A Tale of Twenty Cities. In the background of the action is the vague and inevitable threat of World War I. A few of the characters have had premonitions about this coming disaster, but most of them are much more preoccupied with the search for the mystical city of Shambhala. As of the end of the third section of Against the Day it seems that this, more than anything else, is looking to be the point of convergence of all the storylines of the book. Yes, after 700 pages, the various threads are finally starting to come together.

Only 300 more pages to go!

Barefoot Gen Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa