A President Who Actually Encourages Science?!

After 8 years of Flat Earth-like ignorance and willful stupidity emanating from the White House, this sort of thing can almost take your breath away. Wow! If post-19th century thinking like this isn't curtailed, pretty soon Americans will stop believing that HIV is just God's punishment for homosexuality, that all of our natural resources are boundless, and that the planet is only six thousand years old. And then what the Hell will the Conservatives ever campaign on?

Feeling All Twittery

I'm labeling this an experiment, much like I did when I embarked into blogging for the first time...

I just finished creating a Twitter account (using kimota94, of course) and invited a few suckers -- I mean, friends to follow along. I'll also be adding some people to my own list of... followees?... to see if there's really any value in being quite that plugged in to whatever they're doing, moment to moment.

Going in, I'd say that "tweeting" is probably redundant for me, considering how much I blog. But we'll see. I guess if it's so absorbing that members of the U.S. Congress would rather do it than pay attention to a speech by their President, there must be something to it.

Or maybe they're all just idiots.

Much Better Weather Than A Year Ago

A year ago today, we apparently got enough snow that we weren't going anywhere on our 17th wedding anniversary. Today, as we add another year of marital bliss to our permanent record, the lawns and roads are all clear, and it's a relatively comfortable 3 degrees C outside. That means we can go out for dinner this year!

To otherwise mark the occasion, I now have a new (to me) copy of Aquaman # 29 from 1966 to add to my collection, as well as a second page from Eddie Campbell's Black Diamond Detective Agency to go alongside this one that I'd purchased 18 months ago. Vicki has new additions to her book, CD and DVD piles, courtesy of Greg Rucka, Bruce Springsteen and J Michael Straczynski, respectively. So we did quite fine for ourselves once again this year.

How Did This Guy Survive?

... with minor injuries only, it's been reported!

Who Really Expected "Change" To Be So... Well, Different?

Every weekend, I watch President Obama's weekly address with great interest, and I'm struck each time by just how much change he's actually introducing. In the past, when politicians won on platforms of "reform", "change" or "a new day", what the electorate almost inevitably got for their vote was either more of the same, or a return to the status quo from the last time that party held office. Obama's version, on the other hand, is proving to be the rarest of all political fowls: change that you've never seen before.

I'm not sophisticated enough to know whether the measures he's enacting are actually going to stem the Recession, but I do know that they're in line with my own personal values. When Bush would strut around the stage, puff out his chest and talk about "evildoers" and how everyone was either "with us or agin us," his eerily child-like approach didn't reflect any attitude that I could get behind at all. I want to see green technologies take off, health care for all, fiscal responsibility and transparency within the government... and we're getting all of that, and more, from this latest American administration. But at the same time, Obama is providing the Peanut Gallery (formerly known as the Republican Party) so much ammunition with which to fuel their Fear Machines, thanks to him venturing into new territory as he is. I worry about just how long the American public will continue to ignore those nattering nabobs of negativism, especially as the financial meltdown refuses to hit bottom. After a month and a half in office, I don't think the new President has gotten even one bit of good news to reward his efforts. I just hope that no one ever told him that this was going to be easy!

Test Your Watchmen Trivia

If you're so inclined, take the test at Rotten Tomatoes and see if you can beat my score... of 19 out of 20! ;-)

It's an interesting mixture of movie and comic trivia related to Watchmen, and of course the one question that tripped me up was about a previous, aborted film treatment. I'd have been stunned (and slightly embarrassed) if a non-comic site had been able to stump me on the original material, but you never know. Most of the answers seemed obvious to me, but that'll happen when you've read something that many times. There were even two questions where I could almost make the argument that the correct response is "None of the above" but I knew what they were trying to get at and answered accordingly.

Off To See "The Movie" Tonight

I attempted to get out to a midnight showing last night, but it was already sold out at 5:30 in the afternoon. Now we have our tickets purchased for tonight, and so, with some trepidation, I'll be going out to see the most talked about film in ages... on Opening Night.

I'll probably post a review over at The Studio tomorrow, unless it turns out to be such an excruciating experience that I immediately purge it from my memory and vow never to think of it again... sort of like I did with this piece of garbage, also (frighteningly) based on an outstanding Alan Moore comic series.

[Update: After spending about as much time writing the review as I did watching the movie, my thoughts are now out there.]

Another Brain Teaser

Boneman was kind enough to pass along this link that got posted on one of the General Interest forums at work. It's a geometry puzzle that took me about 45 minutes to solve, showing just how rusty I am at the moment. On the bright side, though: I did solve it, and at no point did I even consider giving up! So that's encouraging. If there's enough demand, I'll post the solution later on. Or maybe it's just so straight-forward that everyone will already know how to solve it.

Re-Watching The Watchmen II

Just finished Chapter VI, another favourite of mine. In this one, we learn how Walter Kovacs became Rorschach, and it's not a pretty picture at all.

The use of actual Rorschach ink blot tests within the story itself (and on the cover!) may seem at first like a clumsy attempt at irony, but as you pay greater and greater attention to the details of Alan Moore's script and how artist Dave Gibbons incorporates each of the blots' black shapes into the panels around each appearance, you begin to appreciate just how incredibly well-constructed this chapter really is.

One of the best lines from the series shows up in this issue. As he's about to get stabbed in the back while standing in the food line in prison, Rorschach grabs a hot, steaming platter of cooking fat and throws it in the attacker's face. While being dragged away to solitary confinement, Rorschach says, "None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me."

Later, after he finishes recounting the case that actually transformed him from Kovacs into Rorschach, he describes the revelation that completed the metamorphosis: "This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."

His conversations in this issue are with the seemingly-unimportant supporting character, Dr Malcolm Long. The psychologist, recognizing in Kovacs a goldmine in terms of putting his own name on the map, gets considerably more than he bargained for in these interviews. And we learn that he's not just there to give Rorschach someone to talk to. Moore wisely introduces Long as a surrogate for the reader, in order to allow us to start out with him at Square One (thinking that Rorschach's a fascinating character who's maybe just a little "out there") and then discover incrementally, along with the doctor, just how little we actually knew about the man behind the moving mask. Everything that Rorschach's done up to that point in Watchmen is cast in a different light as we proceed through "The Abyss Gazes Also."

An interesting bit of detail that I'd probably picked up on previously but had forgotten involves the way in which Rorschach's dialogue is presented. The letterer uses a specific type of font for the character's words whenever he's in costume, except that his very early appearances (chronologically-speaking) didn't have that special effect in play. What might have seemed like a creative screw-up earlier (when a younger Rorschach was shown in flashbacks, without the speech effect) is now explained: his voice, body language and demeanour all changed as a result of that one case in 1975.

Going back one chapter, I marveled once again at the layout of the fifth issue, entitled "Fearful Symmetry." The entire 28 pages of it are composed in a symmetrical fashion, for the double-paged centre spread outward. Each corresponding pair of pages, moving out from the middle, showcase the same characters in the same settings. It's the sort of thing that you could miss even after a dozen readings, but once you notice it (or hear about it), you can't help but appreciate how effective it is at (subtly) conveying a cyclical feel to the events. Each path that you traveled down in getting to the midpoint is then traversed again, in reverse order, on the way back out. Just mind-numbingly impressive how much is packed into this 12-issue series!

An Article Worthy Of The Onion

I started reading this article this morning and didn't clue in at first that it was a joke. Considering some of the things that the Oxycontin-addicted moron Rush Limbaugh has said recently, learning that he'd announced that he was "hoping the planet Earth would explode" ("on Barack Obama's watch") didn't seem all that implausible. He's just that much of a loon. It's a fun read!

A New Name For The Self-Destructing Republican Party

"The Dittohead Party". I like it! And if they can manage to make themselves even more irrelevant right now, that'd be great, too. After all, it's probably going to take the Democrats 8 to 12 years to undo all the harm caused by Bush, anyway. So it'd be nice if the opposition was busily eating its own young while that was going on. It would just make the cleanup operation go that much more smoothly, I think.

2009 Biking Season Now Open

I took advantage of the relatively warm temperature today (0 degrees C) to bike to my chiropractor appointment (about a 14-km round trip, I'd estimate). Not quite the same distance as my usual trek downtown and back, but nevertheless a very good way to break myself in. I figure I'm still a couple of weeks away from regular cycling (especially if this depressing prediction is right), but it still feels good to get that first ride of the year under my belt.

Surely this counts as a sign of spring?!

Re-Watching The Watchmen

I'm in the process of re-reading Watchmen (in gorgeous Absolute Watchmen format) in preparation for the movie's release later this week, and just finished Chapter IV. It's always been one of my favourite of the twelve issues because it focuses squarely on Doctor Manhattan, the only truly super-powered member of the ensemble cast. I love how you discover in that part of the story that he perceives all events as happening more or less simultaneously, rather than serially as we mere mortals perceive the flow of time.

It's a clever device for writer Alan Moore to have introduced because it provides a framework for us to understand why the all-powerful Jon Osterman affects the course of history but only in certain ways. He allows JFK to be shot (and stands idly by while the Comedian brutally murders the Vietnamese woman carrying his child) but ends the Vietnam War. This seemingly-random act/don't act dynamic on Manhattan's part comes about thanks to a combination of drift and belief in pre-determination. The blue doctor is losing touch with his own humanity (and any connection to the rest of the world), all the while comforting himself with the notion that everything happens simply because it's already happened.

Later, when he'll experience his epiphany about the nature of the universe with Laurie on Mars, he'll finally be shaken out of that state. That scene is made all the more powerful because by then we understand just how long of a journey back that actually represents for the man/god. That revelation can only happen on the reader's part because of the amazing job done by Moore and Gibbons here in the 4th chapter.

These Are Always Fun

No matter how busy you are, how far behind you may be running at the moment, or how much you hate to read... you've still just got to check out these six word stories!

My personal favourite is: "Exec 'jumps' from building. Assistant promoted."

As Someone Who Enjoys A Good Income Tax Discussion

I had a good laugh reading this story about an ABC News article in which the news agency demonstrates that they have absolutely no clue how marginal tax rates actually work.

In short: an ABC reporter who apparently doesn't know much about income tax matters goes around interviewing people who made more than $250,000 in the past and are now planning to reduce their income in the future so as to avoid President Obama's tax hike (which is really just Bush's tax break expiring) for family incomes of a quarter million and over. In other words, there are idiots out there who actually believe that, if your income pops up from $249,999 to $250,000, you suddenly have to pay a higher tax rate on the entire amount! And if marginal tax rate systems indeed did operate that way, then it would make perfect sense to drop your income down if you were close to the limit (giving to charity would be one noble way to achieve this, by the way).

But of course taxes aren't calculated that way in North America (or anywhere else, for all I know). Instead, you pay the lower rate(s) on the amount you earn up to the limit, and then a higher rate kicks in for the rest. It's astonishing to me that:

• ABC News hires people sufficiently ignorant of such matters to write articles on the topic, and
• the reporter was able to find so many people in that income bracket who've never had their tax system explained to them by an accountant or, y'know, a high school math teacher!
  

But I guess there isn't any correlation between income and intelligence after all!

Math Is Easy! Fiction's Hard!

Today I finally got the first chapter of my mythical novel to a level of quality whereby I can actually stand to read it without wincing. It's taken many passes to get there, and a few weeks on the calendar. That's quite a different experience than I had with either of the AgileMan books, where I could just write a first draft (in fairly quick fashion) and then go over the entire thing in a second pass to pretty it up. I'd say this whole "fiction notion" is proving to be a whole lot more challenging.

I have about 10,000 words and just under 20 pages to show for all of my effort so far. I figure that I'm about 10% of the way through, based on the mental outline in my head, and it's taken me about a month to get here (including throwing out much of what I'd written earlier). In other words, I'm going to be at this a long time, if it's ever going to be completed!

Oh well... no one said it'd be easy!

A Few More Thoughts On Killzone 2

Having played a few more hours now (although not anything excessive yet, since I don't want to repeat the Resistance 2 experience where I overdid it), I think that I've gained a better feel for the game. I've been splitting my time between the campaign and online play about equally because I'm enjoying them both quite a lot at the moment.

The campaign is proving to be fairly challenging to get through so far, even on the middle difficulty setting ("Trooper"?). It's not that I'm getting stuck anywhere, but rather that I'm just dying a lot and therefore it's taking me several attempts to get through pretty much every new encounter with the Helghast. I'm still struggling a little with aiming, mostly because I end up changing weapons a lot (as the one I start with runs out of ammo and I can't find any lying around) and some are harder to sight with than others. That problem notwithstanding, it's a very entertaining storyline to date. I'd definitely rate this single player campaign above Resistance 2's (but below Resistance: Fall of Man's). It feels like a game that I'll probably end up finishing and potentially even playing through more than once (as I did with R:FoM).

In online play, I've been successful at finding maps that are filled with players more at my skill level (and thus, less likely to kill me before I even see them). I imagine I've also gotten a little better, especially in terms of figuring out the layout of the maps (always important in multiplayer!) and adjusting my gameplay to be somewhat more cautious. When I checked this evening, my kill-to-death ratio for online was slightly below 1.00, but nothing like the bad start that I had with both of the Resistance games.

I like the rank-up system for online, although I've certainly been moving through it quite slowly to date. My next promotion will allow me to play as a Medic, I think... but I just achieved the rank below that, meaning that it could be awhile before I find out. I've noticed a real sparsity of Medics in the games I've been in since the first day, which now I understand: I've been staying within my own rank and we're all too low for anyone to be able to play that role. Because there's never anyone around to heal me if I get critically wounded, I find that I tend to stay to the edges of the action and try to pick enemies off rather than heading into the middle of the fight. Even with that, though, I'm still dying about as often as I score a kill... so who knows if that's even the right approach!

They need to introduce a party system for online and there are others bits that bug me (not being able to map the controls is annoying) but those are minor gripes against a very solid game. Right now I'd put Killzone 2 up on the same level as the Halo and Resistance franchises in terms of how much I enjoy it (offline and online), and it definitely has the most impressive graphics of any console game I've ever played. One or two new offerings each year of this calibre is generally enough to keep me gaming, and I expect that I'll be engaged with KZ2 for quite a few more weeks (Resistance 2 kept me busy for over 3 months). And that sort of thing makes it well worth the $60 price tag, unlike disappointments like Haze and many of the comic book-based ones I've bought. Way to go, Guerrilla Games!

Not Exactly Looking Like Spring Just Yet

After most of our snow disappeared over the past week (for the second time in February), we got a bit more today along with very cold temperatures and a high of -11C to look forward to tomorrow. I realize that the start of March might seem premature to be complaining that spring isn't here yet, but considering that winter set in for a long, miserable stay all the way back in early November... I say, enough's enough already! After all, seasons are only supposed to last three months, not four.

I really want to get back to biking now, especially with Vicki working during the week! So everybody out there start thinking warm thoughts and maybe we can wish our way out of this interminable winter of ours.

So Long, February!

As seems to happen all too often for a month that should be short and sweet, I really didn't much care for February this year. I had a week-long cold during it, was pummeled mercilessly by the professional sports leagues that I (used to) follow, and watched our retirement savings drop another 10% or so.

The good news is that in about one minute from now, March arrives. Here's hoping it's better than the steaming pile of crap that it replaced!

Now That's A First Lady!

Not that I had anything against the last couple of women to hold the title, because I didn't. But I just happen to think that Michelle Obama is more grounded, more compassionate, and more of a genuine role model than any other First Lady who's taken up residence in the White House during my lifetime.

The image above, by the way, is the official First Lady Photo.

[Update: CNN commentator Jack Cafferty perfectly summed up my own feelings about Mrs Obama here.]