toastykitten

Unsurprisingly, I loved Ratatouille. Pixar wins again for story, animation, characters, comedy, drama. It's all good, and gorgeous, making my mouth water. Anyway, I found some stuff on the Internet to share - hope you guys like it, too.

The Onion Interview with Brad Bird.

Animation World Magazine profile of Brad Bird and how he got Iron Giant made.

Youtube Ratatouille page.

Patton Oswalt on Geeks vs. Nerds. (He plays D&D.)

GreenCine roundup on Ratatouille.

I am so sick of the iPhone. Yes, it'll change everything forever, with the nifty rotating browser! But how does it work, as a PHONE? Is the reception good? Do your calls get dropped?

I just finished reading this Wired article on Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer who's accused of murdering his wife. The whole thing is really strange. Three items I thought were odd, in a really bizarre article: The author describes the Oakland hills as "quiet and idyllic". Uh, quiet, maybe. Idyllic, no. He also mentions that Reiser first met his wife in Russia, where he had been several times previously using the Russian bride service. Okaaay. Three: Reiser has this obsession with manhood, and thought that teaching his son to play violent video games (which his wife objected to) would help prepare him to be "a man", because he otherwise wouldn't get that kind of education living in Oakland. (That is so funny I don't even know where to begin.)

Oh my god you know how I was bitching about our government and their stupid "English-is-the-official-national-language" thing? Apparently England has this thing where they offer free English classes to migrants, although they are considering limiting access. *sigh* And then I read that people are getting pissed off about having to "press 1 for English". Are you kidding me? Are you really that frickin lazy? And dumb?

We recently watched Sid and Nancy, which was a movie about Sid Vicious and his turbulent relationship with his groupie girlfriend. Neither of us know anything about the Sex Pistols, so we were both sort of befuddled when they cut to him not singing or actually playing any instruments while on stage. Maybe the movie itself is technically good, but I found it really hard to care about the title characters, because to me they both seemed like really unlikeable people who just screamed everything they thought. (And also mentally ill with no one to give them proper medication.) I thought Nancy seemed like a low-rent Courtney Love, and then I found out via Wikipedia that she did want to play the role, claiming that she "is Nancy Spungen". I mean, do you you really want to admit that you are a drug-addled groupie?

I'm almost done reading Extreme Cuisine: The Weird & Wonderful Foods That People Eat, by Jerry Hopkins. The foreword, of course, is written by Anthony Bourdain. There's some interesting stuff in here, but I doubt I will ever come up with the willpower to make myself eat ant salad, even if some varieties of ants "taste like honey".

I thought about the arguments that vegans make about how eating meat is immoral. I am not going to make any moral judgments about that, but I'm wondering about how vegans would suggest managing overpopulation of certain species? For example, crocodile and alligator meat were once banned, but once they started regaining their population, they had to be managed, and crocodile farms were born - for leather, meat, etc.

Hopkins makes a lot of arguments for adding other species to our diet as a "protein source", but I'm wondering why we even need to add another protein source. From all I've heard and read, most Americans consume too much protein anyway.

Amusing to me is the fact that the most befuddling items of consumption were started by the Chinese. Who the hell thinks up shit like bird's nest and thousand-year eggs (not actually a thousand years old)? Apparently, we do. (But I'm still American enough that I always turn that shit down.)

From the Wave Magazine (a free Silicon Valley rag):

TW: Judd, why did you have to show the baby coming out not once, but twice?

Judd Apatow: No, three times. You blocked one out. It’s three different angles. The reason that I show the crowning shot is if I don’t, it just looks like an episode of Friends. I’m trying to make you feel the pain of that experience, because it is the most intense moment in people’s lives. I had to do something that hadn’t been done before. My original goal was to find a woman who would allow me to shoot the baby coming out and then match it into Katherine, the same sheets, the same bed. And we got close to getting it done, but here’s why we weren’t allowed to: The state of California says you can’t do that because the unborn child would need a worker’s permit, and I can’t get it till he’s born. There is a Kurt Vonnegut problem right there. We weren’t able to do it, so it became a prosthetic.

I am in a writing mood right now, plus I don't have to go to work today.

Reading:

Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Fifth Book of Peace" - Half fiction, half memoir, this is about Kingston's struggle to find a way out of war and to bring peace to everyone. The book is divided into four sections - Fire, Water, Paper, Earth. Fire is about the Oakland hills fire that destroyed her home right after her father's funeral. Water is a fictionalized account of her time in Hawaii using a character from one of her previous books, Wittman Ah Sing, during the Vietnam war. Wittman is a war resister who evades the draft by flying to Hawaii with his white wife and their mixed-race son, where they meet all sorts of people and encounter the idea of "Sanctuary". I forget where Paper and Earth split off, but these chapters are about the years after the Oakland fire, where Kingston gathers a group of war veterans, mostly from Vietnam, but from Korea and WWII, too to start a writing workshop, so they can write their way out of their pain. I admit, I disliked the Water chapter the most for somewhat irrational reasons. The entire book is well-written; it's just that I prefer reading about Kingston's actual experiences as opposed to her fiction, which seems to me to be thinly veiled autobiography anyway. She mentions that she started the writing workshop for veterans as partly as a way to help her brothers cope with the trauma of war, but they don't come. (It makes me wonder how her brothers felt, fighting in the Vietnam war.) This book was published in 2004, but the workshop had been going on since the original Iraq war. Overall the book is good, but you have to have patience with the way the narrative jumps all over the place, and also when Kingston seems to drop in weird non-sequiturs and then never addresses them again. The workshop's writing has turned into the new book Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Excerpts can be read at Bill Moyers Journal website.

I still think from what I've read so far of her writing, that Woman Warrior was her best work. Interestingly, in this book she clarifies what actually happened with her parents when they immigrated here. She felt safe finally telling their stories for real now that they were dead and can't be deported.

Watching:

Top Chef 4 Star All Stars: Top Chef is one of those Project Runway spin-offs that was actually successful. This episode was a one-off before the start of Season 3, and pitted Season 1 against Season 2. It was so funny that the arrogant pricks from each season ended up being the team captains and basically went head-to-head against each other. I do have to say, I liked Stephen a lot more this time around.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: There's been some discussion online-the powers-that-be at HBO decided to center the story on a part-white Sioux doctor who marries a white woman, neither of whom actually appear in the work this was based on because "Everyone felt very strongly that we needed a white character or a part-white, part-Indian character to carry a contemporary white audience through this project," Daniel Giat, the writer who adapted the book for HBO Films, told a group of television writers earlier this year. I didn't really read all this stuff going in, but dude, this guy thinks only white people watch HBO? And that white people care only about watching other white people? Talk about low expectations.

I should preface this by saying that I know literally nothing about the Sioux or most Native Americans and their stories. Anyway, although I liked the actor who played Charles Eastman, because he reminded me of a young Chow-Yun-Fat, I thought his story fell kind of flat. There was decent acting in those scenes, but if his entire purpose was to connect the viewer with the rest of the Sioux who were forced from their land, it didn't really work. The story overall was very affecting, and really depressing. I didn't think the film itself, as a stand-alone product was that bad, and it made me want to find out more about the Sioux. Obviously, though, I know nothing about what actually happened or I would be more pissed off, probably. I would argue, though that we didn't get to see enough of the Sioux, and saw too much of the American government.

Pam Noles' post about Bury My Heart.

Statement by Hanay Geiogamah, Professor of Theater, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Director, UCLA American Indian Studies Center - he had some serious issues with it.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the book.

John Tucker Must Die - Teen movie fluff. It was enjoyable and not deep at all, even though we are informed that the main character likes Elvis Costello and Dave Eggers. Introduced me to the stereotype of "vegan is code for slut". When did that happen?

W00T! Forgive my geeking out for a second. Mark installed Ubuntu for me and I am totally blissing out. I had stopped using my own laptop entirely for a while, because I couldn't stand waiting for half an hour for my XP to boot up, and then waiting another half hour for whatever program I wanted to start up. It was annoying. I also didn't want to spend any money on buying a new non-Windows computer - I was getting pretty disillusioned with Apple's products - granted, I only have one iPod Mini, but that experience was enough.

There were a couple glitches, though. There was this one major bug that had actually been filed last year that Mark had to write a script around. And there's some minor bugs, like printing issues. But Mark says he'll fix that up for me later. And he also warns that I'll have a hard time playing media, but there are workarounds. In the meantime I don't have anything to print, and playing around with this has been a lot of fun. I'm also excited about playing around with GIMP, which is sort of like a Linux Photoshop clone. Everything loads up so quickly - I'm amazed.

South Park Mac vs. PC:



Other things:

I'm really looking forward to Judd Apatow's new comedy Knocked Up.

I'm terrified by this link that I saw at Warren Ellis' blog: Research from a British university suggests a common preservative found in drinks such as Fanta and Pepsi Max has the ability to switch off vital parts of DNA.

I watched the first one for Vin Diesel. Didn't watch the second one.

We watched 2 movies from Amazon Unbox. Both were rentals. It's really not worth the extra ten bucks to buy the movie, when you don't get any extras attached to it. The quality of the picture was a lot better than both of us expected, but not as good as watching an actual DVD. For Amazon Unbox rentals I would recommend getting stuff like comedies and things you know you're only going to watch once that isn't too gorgeous.

Hey, how long do you think this will be up? Watch full-length movies on TubeZoom.

I still haven't finished that damn Umberto Eco book and I started it in December. Does Foucault's Pendulum have a point? Is Causabon going to save his friend from the Templars? I am so tempted to re-write the book in the present, because then it would cut out two-thirds of the book. "Hey, look at this link on Wikipedia! It explains when the English Templars missed the French ones!"

I keep forgetting to write this, but Mark and I saw Pursuit of Happyness a while back. This is the conversation we had afterwards:

Me: Did you like it?
Mark: Yeah, I thought it was good. What did you think?
Me: I liked it, but if I were in the girlfriend's place, I so would have left him and taken the kid, too.
Mark: Really? I thought she was kind of a bitch.

Then we had a discussion about why Chris Gardner couldn't just get a job at McDonald's or something until he could finish paying off his rent. Don't get me wrong - I really enjoyed the movie, but the setup kind of irked me. Maybe I am old-fashioned. I was also annoyed at the scene where he's bitching at the Asian janitor for not fixing the word "happyness" on the wall, and the janitor just keeps telling him in Cantonese that he doesn't speak English. I kept wanting to scream at the screen - the guy doesn't speak English! Stop talking to him! Talking to him like he's deaf won't make him understand you!  People do it often enough in real life; I don't need a movie reminding me.

I have been really hungry for the past few days, and that's mostly because of the wisdom teeth removal. I am so paranoid right now that I'm going to get something stuck up there and then my mouth will get infected. A co-worker told me a horror story about her wisdom teeth and she is still having trouble even though her wisdom teeth were removed over 8 years ago. I hope I'm keeping my mouth clean enough. I really miss crunchy food. I'm getting really sick of noodles and soup.