March 23rd, 2007  9:34PM 46 61%H  27I  33dewpoint   bar, steady     0mph

  windrose shows NWN     

Waxing Crescent Moon   

  Lent 

Just watched "X-Men: The Last Stand."  I bought the first X-Man comic, along with the first Fantastic Four, Spiderman and Ironman.  Boy do I wish I had those now.  Point is I've been a fan of Marvel comics from the early days.  As I matured I began to read fantasy, too, but I kept my interest in comics, thought I've only begun to purchase them again in the last couple of years.  Nowadays I read Lucifer, Promethea, Sandman, and John Constantine.  Ovid and Dante both strike the same chord for me, though with a tony bio.

NCAA basketball on in the background.  There was a time before I left Indiana when I would not have missed a single game of the whole tourney.  Now, I only look occasionally.  It's still the greatest sporting event in the US in my opinion.  40 of the best playing one off until a champion.  No other sport can match it.

OK there.  My 1960's boy and man street cred.

Kate and I watched Capote.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman deserved his Oscar.  His performance was uncanny, closer to channeling than acting.  I realized this when I saw a few film clips of Capote in a DVD Making of... featurette.  The content of the movie, how he wrote In Cold Blood, and the personal price he paid for doing it, was sometimes painful to watch.  His frank duplicity to get what he wanted, yet his genuine caring seemed to create so much tension he couldn't resolve that it ended his life.  A slow side into alcoholism.  

Before we watched it I tried to watch a Sci Fi channel movie A.I. Assault, another riff on the runaway intelligent robot melody.  Too many false notes.  Dialogue sucked. The plot line veered from place to place, and events were more than hard to believe, they were incredible.  Sad.  

I've also, over the last week, watched two cult classics, The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II.  While they have their moments, they are few.  I can see the cult part because there is a certain Rocky Horror Picture Show caste to them, but in the end the gore and fake blood and smoke scenes run backward begin to repeat.  

"Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well." - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English Author, Lexicographer

Kate and I watched North Country tonight.  A good film.  Made me proud, in the end, to be a Minnesotan. This movie and others of its ilk need airing among young women;  they don't always seem to recognize the price their foremothers paid for the current ease of access to jobs, or, the decision to leave the job and stay at home.  Choice, as then, as now, is and remains the primary issue.

I've almost stopped going to movies in theatres.  Time and money.  It means I often have a lag between a film's release and seeing it, often at least the length of time it takes to get on DVD, usually longer.  I have to get around to watching it.  This makes me feel as if the culture moves slowly past me, then, in halting steps I catch up only to have more good films moving past me.  The process doesn't bother me; it just seems odd.

Mary sent me a movie, Be With Me, that features a deaf and blind Singapore woman though it weaves in three other stories, too.  This is a touching film, sweet and sad, angst-ridden and obstacle leaping by turns.  To describe the plot would never do the film justice because most of it is visual or text messages, very little actual dialogue.  The life of Singapore, in its most quotidian, is on display here, but the ordinariness becomes lyrical in the hands of these directors.  Highly recommended.

Started What the Bleep Do We Know.  Much of it, so far, is basic epistemology flavored with insights from quantum mechanics, none of which, as far as I can tell, add anything to the old arguments.  In fact, many of them seem to fall into a naive solipsism, or an updated Berkleyian Esse ist percipi.  I also wondered about the 48 other instances of meditators reducing crime by 25%.  Where? When?  How were the measurements done?  Was the only change the meditators?  As to the guy who photographs changes in water...has anybody else done it?  Do they show the same effects?  What exactly is he photographing?  

The anthropic principle* (observer bias) has a history and it extends even further back than Mr. Bostrom suggests.  The basic argument of the Sophists, "Man is the measure of all things." is the anthropic principle in classical Greek dress.  It is well known as both, on the one hand, a philosophical dead end, and, for the same reason, an irrefutable argument.  Once I become the sole observer, the sole "measure of all things," then you have no standing with which to deny what I assert.  I can simply say, "No. Not how I see it at all."

It is, for this reason, a philosophical dead end, since debate assumes at least a common ground to which two parties can refer.  No matter how contemporary the clothes an anthropic principle suffers the same fate.

Does this mean observer bias does not exist?  Not at all.  It does exist and it presents real problematics for scientific work.  Check out the website above if you don't think so.

Does this mean solipsism is wrong?  Not at all.  It can't be denied.  

Still, if we all create the world around us because we, as observer, think it so, then that makes me pretty damn uncomfortable since I know I lot of those thinkers out there are busy creating a world I don't want to have anything to do with.  Say, your Bush, neo-con, skinhead, racist, anti-immigration, anti-choice, anti-glbt types for instance.  Of course, I'd have to admit, I'm pretty damned uncomfortable.

All I'm really trying to say here is that What the Bleep Do We Know has little that is new, and the stuff I found that is new was suspect.

*Our data is filtered not

The term “anthropic principle”, which has been used to label a wide

Kate and I saw Walked the Line.  A good movie.  Great performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon.  Reminded me of my hillbilly heritage from Alexandria.

Watched Lake Placid on A&E.  Gotta buy this.  It is funny.  A&E chopped it and censored it to the point that some scenes made no sense at all.  

Disaster:  New York.  Sci Fi channel original movie.  Premise:  sandhogs (heroes of New York blue collar lore) discover lava escaping into utility/maintenance tunnels under NYC. Of course, nobody believes the no brain, big muscle, but really savvy underneath it all sandhog crew boss.  Not even his ex-wife who, surprise, comes into monitor suspicious activity with the USGS.  She interviews big muscle.  He says, "Saw lava."  She doesn't believe him either.  Not yet.  Do you think they'll get together by the end of the movie.  I can easily say I don't give anything away by saying, "Yes."

It's all Michael Ironsides fault; he's a deviant scientist with a dream:  geothermal energy.  "It'll get us out of the stranglehold those sandbox countries have on us."  A good idea, maybe, but not in this movie.  He digs down seven miles, pretty damned far.  You can guess the rest.  Explosions. Burning guys.  One falls in a hole full of lava.  

Finally, they believe the good-hearted hunk who turns out to be the only who can save NYC by digging a tunnel into the sewer tunnel so the hot lava can drain out through the cities sewers.  He does it!  And, perhaps, most happily of all new shelves of land show up just off the spot where the Fulton Fish Market used to be.  All I could think of at the end was how valuable those little lava shelves would be given the price per sq. inch of Manhattan real estate.

I suppose you could I ask why I bother, but this turns my crank.  Why?  I don't know.  Just does.

Well, I'm bored of the Olympics.  Maybe it's just not American success, but I don't think so.  The whole thing feels rather retro to me, and not in the positive, hip sense, but in the pejorative, so yesterday sense.  I might feel different if Kate and I were watching on Maui, as we did on our first trip there in February of 1992, but somehow I don't think so. 

I did watch Battlestar Galactica tonight.  This program, like Surface, Invasion, and Lost, has the capacity to surprise, and, even more than the others, the surprises seem to flow out of the narrative without necessity, almost as if we were watching a docudrama.  Tonight, for example, featured the Cylon process of rebirth.  After a death consciousness flows out of the dead body and into a new one, same as the old one, only alive.  Riverworld featured a similar idea, where characters traveling up river would die, then be reborn on the banks of the river.

A flaw has developed for the Cylons, however; two of the models, 6 and 8, have developed love for humans.  Now back in their new bodies, but with their love saturated consciousness, they have formed a compact to foment a velvet revolution, to transform the hearts and minds of their fellow robots.  An interesting twist, just as a Cylon/human child has died; or, so the Cylon # 8 mother, Sharon, believes.  Actually, the baby has been given up for adoption to a mother who recently lost her own child.  A bit of the Moses storyline thrown in.

Tonight I caught Lost (Sayid the torturer, and The Others) and Invasion (the women have giant ovaries full of squiggly things, the sheriff's daughter went in the water but it looks like the creatures spit her back out, and that one nasty woman killed her former boss, then changed into a red dress.).  At the same time I used the jump button to watch Lindsey Kildow's gutty run on the downhill (she finished 8th with lotsa bruises and plentya fear) and the American mogul's team settle for bronze with an Australian winning gold.  Do they even have snow in  Australia? Bit of Colbert report where he asked the question WWJDD?  What would Jim Dobson do?

It's a fair question to ask why I watch these rather than, say, read about Japanese Art or research post-modernism for my March 5th sermon.  My answer is:  downtime.  Even so, I admit the idea keeps running through---kill the tv, like the bumper-stickers say.  But, not having it as a passive entertainment makes me jiggly.  So.  Stay tuned.  Or, not.

Episode 15, Surface.  Tsunami  hit.  The engineered creatures have come ashore with the flood waters.  This was the season finale!  So, I hope they will continue.   Finished Eternity Road and Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz.  Koontz is a very facile story teller, but he seems to lapse over into sermonizing in the last few I've read.  Perhaps he did all along, but it sure is evident now.  He has a sort of theistic, family-centric, sha-na-na live for today ethic in these books.  Well, ok.  But, in the end.  Trite and annoying in the books. I've also started Sharpe's Havoc, the only one of Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe series I haven't read.  Head too fuzzy for much serious work.  Maybe tomorrow.

Watched two of my fav's tonight:  Surface (episode 14) and Battlestar Galactica. Surface has a complex story line with a new species, genetically engineered on purpose, human clones, a boy loves monster thread, and, next week, a tsunami headed for North Carolina from a 9.4 earthquake off Puerto Rico.  Battlestar is a reconceived version of an old series, but this time in a gritty, relationally messy, human struggle for survival against the Cylons, super-robots pissed off at the job their makers did with reality.

Jon Olson, soon to be Dad, has given me leads on new science fiction (or old SF I haven't bothered to locate).  He sent me Eternity Road for Christmas and I'm just now reading it.  It is a clever conceit, a world long after American civilization as we know it has mysteriously disappeared.  All that's left are small islands of settlements and the remnants of the Roadbuilders, most noticeable the long ribbons of road that criss-cross the country side, now often covered with up to a foot of earth.  It has a Celtic England after the Romans feel, but has an authenticity and American reality I've found compelling so far.