The International House of Bacon

You know you read too many blogs when you’re without internet access from Friday afternoon -> Sunday afternoon, and you have 580 unread posts in your Google Reader. Let’s see if we can’t knock some of them off.

* Did I post this last week? Maybe I did, but it’s worth posting again: this is awesome. A cell phone that doesn’t work via voice.

* Do ankles really exist? Doctors in Texas can’t agree. Ah, licensing squabbles…

* If Jonah Goldberg wrote as intelligently as he did in Liberal Fascism, I’d read him more often. His piece this week on the stark realities of the New Deal is one of those good pieces that will likely get overlooked. There’s no rational reason why it took me until an upper-level college history class to learn that there was even a rational alternative view on the New Deal, let alone the economic facts behind it. If we taught that sort of information in high school, it would do wonders.

* Deval Patrick made a pretty big deal about the casino legislation - one of the few things he’s been up to that I’ve thought was a good idea up to this point. Too bad he was working on his book deal in New York when the bill was being voted on. Way to push those votes, Deval. Good job.

* I learned something new today: Most United States citizens get their water from public works/governments, most United Kingdom citizens get it from private companies. Pretty backwards if you think about it - I never knew it was that widespread here, or that private there.

* Forget those White Sox frauds, read up on how the Red Sox are built for the long haul. Happy opening week!

* I love the “Al Gore riding in on a white stallion and rescuing the Democratic Party during the convention” fantasies. The reality is that he’s not going to run, and the perception is that Gore is even further left than Obama’s is.

* More about where the two Democratic candidates stand v. McCain. It’s still early when we don’t know who the Democrat is, but this is where Obama’s hurting the most following the Wright debacle - he may be able to recover the hard left (if he ever lost them to begin with), but the center is where his bread and butter was supposed to be in terms of viability, and that’s no longer a given. Regardless, a LOT can change in 6 months.

* I don’t watch Fox News. I don’t have any standard feeling as to what they stand for, whether they’re actually conservative or just further right than their cable competition. I did see Outfoxed and found it to be ridiculous. With that said, MoveOn demonstrating against Fox News? Really? Apparently, they think the mainstream media is getting its talking points from Fox, and that’s apparently bad. Isn’t the left also in favor of reinstating the fairness doctrine? How do these two things compute? I’m glad MoveOn’s relevance is continuing to disappear.

* Coming soon: WiiGuyver, where you use your Wiimote to diffuse bombs. This is actually for real - the US military is using rigged Wiimotes to help diffuse land mines. How funny is that?

* This past weekend was “Earth Hour,” where some people, groups, businesses, and even governments turned the lights out for an hour for yet another statement about climate change that only echoed amongst those who care. Google took part, turning their homepage black. The irony? It uses more energy for a monitor to display black than it does to display white. Yeah yeah, “awareness” and all that jazz, but come on.

* Barack Obama says his foriegn policy is a “return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan…” So let me get this straight - Bush 41 made it so we had to spend 12 extra years bombing Iraq while we bent over backwards for the UN, Reagan spent a great deal of time funding contras and other undesirables in an attempt to disrupt various events, and JFK botched the Bay of Pigs so badly that it lead to a missile crisis that left the USSR in better condition defensively than it was when it started two weeks earlier. This is the type of foriegn policy he’s considering “realistic” and wants to return to, while deriding the alleged “naive ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation around the world?” Barack Obama has said some ridiculous things on the campaign trail so far, but this takes the cake.

That’s enough for today. More tomorrow.

Books:

A Shadow in Summer - Daniel Abraham: This is probably the first fantasy novel in a while that I thought I’d really enjoy and just couldn’t get into. It’s a short book, and I kept waiting to care about what was happening and it just wasn’t coming to me. I don’t think it was a bad book, I just couldn’t find much to like for myself in it.

Ex-Machina: March to War/Smoke Smoke - Brian K. Vaughan I’ll say it again - Brian K. Vaughan is probably my favorite comic writer, and I think if I had found Ex-Machina years ago, I would have gotten into comics a lot sooner. The Smoke Smoke arc was a bit off for me, but that’s still better than, I dunno, the latest Ultimates arc to this point?

Teen, Inc. - Stefan Petrucha: Too often, books get so bogged down in their messages that the narrative suffers a bit. While Teen, Inc is a well-written book with a fun concept (a child whose parents are killed by a defect in a product is adopted by the corporation that produced it, and now he’s a teenager), but goes knee-deep into the typical stereotypes about corporate America, and not in a humorous way. Message books are fine, and I expect them in young adult books, but this one was a little too overboard for me at some points.

Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me - Ben Karlin A fun set of essays about break-ups by famous people. As with any book of essays, there are good ones, bad ones, and weird ones. A fun bathroom read for me.

Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra - Wendy Lichman: A cute, if not a bit overly light and fluffy, YA novel/murder mystery/concept book. A very quick read, but still pretty enjoyable on a whole - the quirk is that the girl loves math (not in an Abundance of Katherines way for those who are familiar) and it influences things with her a bit. I dunno - it was almost too light to leave a noticeable impact, honestly. Which isn’t bad.

The Nine - Jeffrey Toobin: It’s interesting, reading this account of the Supreme Court in contrast to Supreme Conflict (my review here). In the latter, an appreciation for what the “conservative” wing of the Court brings plus an even-handed account of the political battles makes for a read that’s markedly different from Toobin’s view, where O’Connor is almost a martyr for the cause and where Souter is the thoughtful one while Scalia is the abrasive jerk. In reality, the “true” story likely falls somewhere between the two, but the more political tone of The Nine really drags it down a bit, especially when you know of more sober takes on the Court are available.

Civil War: Young Avengers and Runaways: I probably shouldn’t have read this a) out of order from where I was at the time w/Runaways, and b) without reading the establishing Civil War graphic novel. Oops.

Bones of the Earth - Michael Swanwick: All while reading this, I was chuckling a bit, as the book had a really Crichton-esque pop sci-fi feel to it and I was struggling to take it seriously. I didn’t really like it overall, just to learn that it was Nebula-nominated and Hugo-winning. Was 2002 a weak year or something? Compared to The Accidental Time Machine, the time travel aspect seemed forced and ended up awfully confusing, the characters were only marginally interesting, and I just really didn’t care much for it. I dunno - this was my first encounter with Swanwick and he’s apparently a pretty well-known author, so I’m not sure what to make of it.

Ultimate Spider-Man: Double Trouble/Legacy/Public Scrutiny - Brian Michael Bendis: I’m shocked I’m enjoying Spider-Man as much as I am. Absolutely shocked.

Stardust - Neil Gaiman: Neil Gaiman is good, but very hit-or-miss for me. This wasn’t quite a hit, but wasn’t a miss, either.

Apex Hides the Hurt - Colson Whitehead: I hate when I write a name of a book down in summer of 2006, pick it up in 2008, and just hate it. Sigh.

Movies::

Semi-Pro: After Blades of Glory, I was afraid that I was getting tired of the whole Will Ferrell shtick. The reality is that I’m not, and Semi-Pro was a very funny film, even if it wasn’t one of the better ones he’s done overall. You know what you’re getting with Will Ferrell, and that’s essentially what this is.

No Country for Old Men: Okay. Excellent movie, really one of the best of the year, and is generally deserving of all the awards it got. I still think There Will Be Blood is a better movie, and that has nothing to do with my being a Paul Thomas Anderson fanboy - the flaw in No Country is that the pacing, while deliberately so, really brings down the ride that the movie presents. That’s not to say it’s bad as an artistic choice, but as an entertainment one, I do prefer the slow burn of There Will Be Blood, which is very similar in pace but moves better as a whole. Also, the ending, while not Hollywood at all, didn’t bother me in the least. I thought it was a good ending and an interesting choice in what was ultimately an interesting film, and I’m glad I saw it.