Can anyone tell me?

I got to thinking about this the other day...

So, who won?

I mean for the 18 months or so after Septmber 11th, you would often here, “If we don’t (or can’t what have you) [FILL IN THE BLANK HERE], THE TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON!”

I don’t know, did we win? Did they? I’m not getting that real big sense of change, any of you getting it maybe?

On a less dicier topic.

It has begun:

Apple introduced two computers, a notebook and an iMac desktop, based on Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - News) microchips, the first to result from its decision to switch from IBM PowerPC chips that it used for years.

“Everybody expected to see the Intel notebook computer at Mac World,” said Ted Schadler, a technology analyst with Forrester Research. “But people did not expect to see the new iMac.”

Objectification.

So, I got a mention on Elanye Riggs blog which really flattered me. I find any kind of attention for the blog a good thing for the most part but admittedly I do operate off in a rather remote part of the internet without a great deal of traffic. I am sure I don’t match the kind of traffic Elanye gets.

I got the mention mainly because there is something of a firestorm brewing in the world of comics over a story making the rounds about harassment of a women by a man (see below). I tried writing something to the issue (unfinished) but still haven’t fleshed out my ideas in a way I would like. In the meantime, I checked back on Elanye’s blog and saw some further comments and then got a bit worried because of a reference that made me think I might be suspect.

See, I have links too around here to half nekkid women and what worried me was I might have offended Elanye in some way.

Now, I happen to like half nekkid women. I am getting older though and the women in question are getting younger, there’s a bigger gap in the ages between me and the women I’m looking at which has an inherent creep factor in it. Truthfully, I don’t want to fall into the creep category. At the same time though, I don’t want to stop looking at half-nekkid women.

I imagine that’s a big part of the problem though.

An issue like this brings out many, much more complicated feelings and factors than are entirely being addressed. Does that mean I would endorse a guy being creepy to a woman? No. As a guy though, I know what guys are like and the truth of the matter is ladies, we are pretty disgusting creatures but, we’re not women. We don’t approach the world with the same outlook or POV that women do and I have to believe as a gender we ever will.

Men pursue, women get to do the picking. Of course, there are exceptions to each and every rule but, it’s pretty much the way things work. So, if a woman is being pursued by a man she finds attractive or interesting or desirable would the behavior displayed be viewed in the same light as the behavior of a man she wanted nothing to do with - in that way?

I am reminded of something that happened this weekend. In the course of my travels, a store I frequent regularly was staffed by a young woman whom I hadn’t remembered seeing before. The establishment in question has a register and sales counter placed a foot or two above the level of the sales floor (no doubt to control shrinkage). In any event, this young women was blessed with very (how shall we put this?) impressive physical attributes on prominent display due to the her choice of garments (not lift and separate here, more of a push together and out). The combination of the lady’s choice of dress along with the construction of the store combined in such a way so when I went to complete my purchase I was eye level, front and center with her assets (a combination of a low cut top underneath some sweater thingee which framed her in a flattering way) with perhaps less than two feet separating us.

I was embarrassed, really. I wanted to look, she was absolutely beautiful. There was no question and it seemed as if the male members of the store’s staff who pointedly fluttered into her orbit in a desperate attempt to gain her attention and approval confirmed that assessment. It didn’t seem as if she was a stranger to the attention.

Now during the course of my purchase, she was involved in movements which, shall we politely put it, made the display all the more obvious. I forcibly made an attempt to look everywhere but her breasts and it’s not I didn’t want to look believe me.

See, I’m a guy, we look. Furthermore, we like looking.

Now, I don’t or won’t justify putting hands on someone’s person in an unwelcome manner. I also won’t abide someone making someone else suffer because they have no interest in having sex. However, when we talk about things like objectification, I think we’re starting to get into a very hazy area here.

Sex sells. There’s just no other way to put it. Am I out there on the street whistling and catcalling at women with a group of construction workers? No, but mainly because I really don’t think most self respecting women are going to fall for that. Recently, I heard a story from someone who met their current beau in a bar. His line? “You are the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.” Now, my first response was, “AND THAT WORKED?!?!”

The woman in question was very flattered by the comment and in no way doubted its sincerity but, every guy I told the story to had the same knowing smile, it was a line. See, if it came from an ugly, balding troll it probably would have been viewed in harsher terms but, the lady in question found the speaker somewhat attractive and there you have it.

Look, I don’t want to get anyone pissed off or hurt anyone to be sure but, when we talk about these kinds of things it isn’t the zero sum game people would have you believe. I am not a proponent of the ‘she was asking for it’ school of excuses - that’s just bullshit but, I have also witnessed a bunch of times when someone cried ‘harassment.’ It’s unfortunate but true. Each and every time I’ve seen it done (and it’s been more than once - thankfully I’ve not been party to it), it just weakens the argument when someone is really being harassed.

This is a subject, I can’t do justice to with the written word either I feel because there is an antiseptic nature to the written word which doesn’t contain the nuance of speech. Also, it’s a damn complicated one, a few paragraphs here can’t do it justice.

But f**k! I’m damned confused by it all because there are some women who like being objectified, who don’t mind it at all and there aren’t any kind of warning labels on women to make things easier. And men are, really, really stupid. Plus if we didn’t think about sex so much there would probably be a cure for cancer, world peace, an end to hunger in our time and a lot of other good things. I’m not excusing obnoxious behavior but, I also think the world would be a much harsher place if we didn’t recognize some of the things that make us different particularly when it comes to gender.

An opinion I can agree with:

When every scene can be tossed out or invalidated by the next creative team, it gets that much more difficult for me to make any kind of emotional investment in these fictional characters. If one creative team can kill a character and the next creative team can say, “No, that character’s really alive” and the one following that can say, “Just kidding, the previous guy’s run was a dream” then I can’t help but saying, “deal me out.”

Erik Larsen’s column One Fan’s Opinion has ruffled many feathers in the short time Erik has been writing it but, I have to say more often than not I’ve been finding myself in agreement with his opinions and the column is rapidly becoming a favorite. This week’s column hits the nail right on the head, continuity isn’t the ogre it’s made out to be but to realize that you have to have a little respect for the work that’s been done before you – something that’s been noticeably absent from many comics for the last few years.

When is a comic convention like a misogynist convention?

Interesting column over on When Fangirls Attack that’s worth a read.

When I was a teenager I worked at my local comics shop. The staff consisted of the kindly and cantankerous older middle-aged comics fan and a cast of lovable zanies. I had a great time. Until my boss asked me if I could stay late at work one day to help him bag some comics. And so I stayed late and started bagging the comics. And my boss took the opportunity to tell me that he found me sexually arousing. And he asked me to have sex with him. And I started to silently cry — pretty babyish of me, huh? Should I have punched him in the nuts? I didn’t — I cried silently. I was 16, he was in his late 50s.

Speaking of movies.

I managed to catch a few things on DVD over the past week or two. I was in a place that had a deal of two DVDs for under $10 so I availed myself of some things I had wanted to see but, didn’t feel like getting to the theater for.

Saw Constantine which was passable and a bit of a popcorn film. Good casting even if the script was a little weak and strayed a bit far from the original concepts (Los Angeles can never match London in my book)

The Aviator was very interesting even if it did seem to end a bit abruptly (before Hughes got to Vegas). A visual treat for the viewer.

Miss Congeniality 2 - what?!?!? Yes, I enjoyed it. It was funny. I don’t want to hear any guff for it.

Catwoman, not as insipid as expected given the reviews but, certainly could’ve been much, much better. Again it was a matter of just having a bad script and not really being sure of who you were trying to get into the theater. It wanted to be everything to everybody and managed to fail miserably because of it. I don’t know if it was supposed to appeal to preteen girls, women or men. It didn’t seem the filmmakers knew either.

Alexander was just horrid - I‘ve never been a big Oliver Stone fan and he just confirms my distaste for his movies.



Finally, there was Million Dollar Baby. I wasn’t surprised by any of the movies’ “twists” or “turns,” finding the story direction heavily telegraphed and having been told it was a sad movie in advance without knowing the ending. I must admit though, it still got to me even with the foreknowledge where it was going to wind up so, saying something of the power of the film. It truly is one of those “must sees” but, I was thinking after watching it, it was the kind of movie that at one time was the rule as opposed to the exception. It had a quietness about it that reminded me of another movie I saw long ago, The Shootist.



Movies nowadays are all about quick cuts, lots of camera movement and visual clutter in the frame. Eastwood’s career and experience seem to have proven to him the strong power of the stark image and it shows in his work. There is a minimalism going on, a very straightforward way of shooting without all the cacophony prevalent today. The camera looks at the actors the way you would look upon art in a museum, lovingly with a strong unblinking gaze. Light and shadow are as important as the actors themselves in conveying the emotion and thrust of the story. Really classic work and not surprising it received the awards it did. See it if you haven’t.

The unfinished year.

’06 is rapidly turning into the year of unfinished entries. Everything has been so busy of late or rather, I’ve been so busy of late whenever I do get started on putting keystrokes to html, I find myself either distracted, preoccupied with something else or just out of steam.

This year started on a weird footing in that I came into the year fighting an ear infetion, having EYOC back in the hospital and just managing a full plate otherwise thank you very much.

I did manage to squeeze in seeing a movie the other day. Caught Spielberg‘s latest, Munich.

Enjoyable flick, Eric Bana does quite the turn. I find myself growing to be a bigger fan of Geoffrey Rush with each thing I see him in. Outside of a sequence of cross cutting in the third act (between a love making scene and an act of violence) which seemed a bad choice, I liked the film overall. It’s not a true depiction of history but interesting nonetheless and manages to be thought provoking entertainment.

There is a sequence towards the end where two characters are having a running dialog with the skyline of New York as a backdrop. Seeing as it is supposed to be the early 70s when the conversation is taking place, it was interesting to notice all the buildings in the shot (a couple of new apartment buildings over on the east side along 1st avenue, the new Trump building on 49th and the CitiCorp Center) that weren’t in existence back at that time.

Sounds like I’m being a bit of a stickler but the last shot in the movie as the ending titles run is a digital composite of the skyline of lower Manhattan with the WTC smack dab in the middle of the shot. WTC of course, long gone by the time the movie was filmed but digitally inserted by the filmmaker to make some kind of final point to the movie. A little heavy handed for me though. If the decision was made to put the WTC in they certainly could have digitally removed the newer buildings from the background in the other sequence.

There are some other plot twists which I found very transparent but, my fellow viewer didn’t pick up on them and I won’t go into detail here for fear of spoiling the film, it is worth seeing.

Now, that’s art!

Finally, graffiti I can enjoy.

The sadist in me.

I read this an had to surpress a chuckle (which I think says something about me). Maybe it’s that I look upon birds the way a cat does. I’m not sure - it’s either that or the fact I have found my car bombarded by rather disgusting, large bird crap on occasion or maybe I let my opinion of pigeons color my view of this particular fauna.

Klem, a professor at Mulhenberg college in Allentown, Pa., first learned about the “window hit” problem 30 years ago from a teacher.

Klem responded by marching into a forest and hanging a bunch of windows from the branches of the trees. Then he sat down and watched what he calls an “appalling” number of collisions. Some birds lived. Many did not.

There was this image bought to mind of many Monty Python moments.

Some notes from the land of the manufacturing employee

Habermehl says future wages at Toyota depend on the UAW, whether plant employees realize it or not. When wages rise at the Big Three, they’re also likely to rise at Toyota. And when they fall in Detroit’s plants, Toyota could reduce them as well.

and...

The hard facts about GM's predicament are by now well known. The company says health care makes up $1,500 of the cost of each vehicle produced. GM is the largest private purchaser of health insurance in the country, footing the bill for 1.1 million workers, retirees and family members. Most are retirees, the very people with the highest health care expenses.

and...

For decades building American cars was a family affair. Children followed their parents into the auto plants, where generous union-negotiated wages lifted them into the middle class.

But the days of the industry’s blue-collar aristocracy are numbered.

South Park meets the Superfriends

Excellent short promo worth checking out!

UPDATE: If you clicked through and wondered “Wha the fu?!” Let me add above the spotlight and below the headline “ZOOM SIGNAL” you’ll see a helmet-like icon which you need to click through to get to the animation in question.

The disappearing middle class?

Often during the transit strike of a few weeks back, I heard grumblings from people commenting on the audacity of transit workers who would dare go out on strike considering the benefit package they have. More often than not, these complaints masked a certain amount of jealousy on the part of the speaker. Any complaint about the transit workers was usually accompanied by the statement: “I don’t get a pension!, or I can’t retire at 55! or I have to pay for my medical benefits!

Whenever I heard these comments, my first thought was, “so, because you don’t have a decent benefit package, no one should?”

Instead of working people holding this (the transit workers’ benefit package) out as an example of the way things should be - they just buy into the histrionics of people like Mikey B who compared the transit workers to thugs. Of course, the interesting thing about Mikey B is that he makes more than enough money to pay for his own medical benefits, he’ll never have to worry about his retirement with all the wealth he has managed to amass during the course of his lifetime and hey, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing the guy has managed to make a fortune, good for him.

At the same time though, can we get the people of this country to acknowledge that a higher standard is needed as the low water mark for our citizens? Things like affordable health care, retirement benefits and pensions are not the evils of society they are portrayed to be?

We had a savings and loan failure back in the early nineties, anyone remember that? You should as the cost to American taxpayers was staggering even by today’s standards:

Estimates of a clean-up bill of around $30 to $50 billion shocked US taxpayers at the time, but turned out to be optimistic. Today we know that between 1986 and 1995, when the storm abated, the underwriting of US thrifts by the financial industry and the US taxpayer cost an extraordinary $153 billion.1 The extent of the disaster turned it into a major threat to the US financial system, and one of the most expensive financial sector crises the world has seen.

Yeah, it’s those goddamn workers making $50k and upward a year which are driving our country into the toilet! Puhhllleeeeeezzze!

How about this one for you a running total of the U.S. taxpayer cost of the Iraq War. The number is based on Congressional appropriations.

So, when I read the story linked to below, I shudder.

“They’re destroying the working class. Why can’t people see this?” asked the 38-year veteran. “Anybody who works in manufacturing has no future in this country, unless you want to work for wages they get in China.”

Abby Abdo, 52, of Weirton, said workers once believed that if they accepted pay cuts and shunned strikes, they would keep their jobs. Not anymore.

“Once they get what they want, they kick us to the curb,” he said. “There’s no guarantee anymore. No pensions. No health care. No job security. We have none of those things anymore.”

My point is this, whenever you hear people trying to blame the working class of our country for society’s ills, it’s time to take a step back and point out the skewed priority’s we seem to have as a nation. Affordable health care, pensions, social security, these are not bad things, these are not the evils they are made out to be. A social safety net isn’t something to be ashamed of (as a nation), it’s something to be proud of. Maybe it’s time the people of this country start to sit up and take notice of that and remind there fellow citizens, their elected leaders and the media of that very fact every opportunity we get.

A package of happiness?

Ingredients: mischief, curiosity, grace, stealthiness, happiness, love, contentment and lots and lots of fur.



Trying to get back into the habit of Friday Cat Blogging - Anna shows her continued fascination with boxes of all sizes and shapes.

Season’s Greetings.

Christmas Eve is upon us - I find my way over to my cousins’ to spend time with him and his family, happy that the holiday is here (meaning an end to the whole Christmas season) and thankful to have a place to go. The last few days have passed like a whirlwind and even though there is plenty of traffic on the way down to his house, I am surprisingly calm just enjoying the drive without the radio or sound of any kind.

Beautifully warm as the day was, it somehow takes the edge off of the holiday. I’ve never been a big fan of the cold weather and getting days where the temperature climbs towards 50° at this point in December is the best present I could imagine.

So, during my meandering drive, I take a somewhat different route choosing to go down the Sprain as opposed to the Bronx River just opting for a wider road that will more likely be easier to navigate than the winding curves of the BRP (especially when clogged with those who don’t drive much of the rest of the year).

This route takes me across Central Avenue, a shopping hub where the stores are still jam packed as people try to get that last minute shopping finished.

After I cross the Avenue, I wind up entering this very beautiful part of Yonkers, hidden away the BRP bordering it on the east and a ridge separating it from Central Avenue on the west. One stretch of the area has these wonderful wide tree-lined boulevards, with very quaint and stylish houses standing regally beside the road.

Every year at this time, some people are compelled to make a spectacle, adorning there house with the Las Vegas equivalent of home decoration and this neighborhood is no different with the occasional nod to garishness. However, the thing that is so striking, the thing that seems to embody some of the solemnness of the holiday and the quiet beauty which has diminished over time is the very simple decoration I come upon while driving through the area.

House after house festooned with a series of paper bags at curbside. Plain brown paper bags which contain nothing more than candles fluttering in the slight breeze of the evening. A sight which is both magical and wonderful to behold. I had never seen anything like it before - after doing some digging around I found it is called Luminaria. If there is one custom I would like to see more of during the holidays, this is it — it beats any light show I’ve ever seen hands down and the pictures don’t do it justice.

Manga as propoganda?

I’m a comicbook fan, unapologetically so but, I never caught the Manga bug. Some of tha Manga drawing style has seeped into mainstream comics and I don’t have a problem with it as some of the old guard do. However, Manga is something that mainstream comics is not, it’s more popular, reaches a broader audience and manages to embody more than the comics themselves.

So, is it any kind of surprise when an art form is used for the purposes of propoganda?

The reality that South Korea had emerged as a rival hit many Japanese with full force in 2002, when the countries were co-hosts of soccer’s World Cup, and South Korea advanced further than Japan. At the same time, the so-called Korean Wave — television dramas, movies and music from South Korea — swept Japan and the rest of Asia, often displacing Japanese pop cultural exports.

Here are two panels from a very popular and recently released Manga book in Japan (I’m just putting the images up, it’s in no way an endorsement of the views expressed):



The two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in Japan in the last four months.

Many of the same influences are at work in the other new comic book, “An Introduction to China,” which depicts the Chinese as obsessed with cannibalism and prostitution, and has sold 180,000 copies.

The book describes China as the “world’s prostitution superpower” and says, without offering evidence, that prostitution accounts for 10 percent of the country's gross domestic product. It describes China as a source of disease and depicts Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi saying, “I hear that most of the epidemics that broke out in Japan on a large scale are from China.”



In one book, crazed Chinese communist guerrillas spray benevolent Japanese troops with cyanide. In another, savage Korean immigrants massacre innocent Tokyo residents in the wake of World War II...

“These books finally depict history from a Japanese perspective, and there is nothing wrong with that,” says Atsushi Iwata, 22, student at Tokyo’s prestigious Waseda University who attends a weekly seminar by a co-author of “Introduction to China.”

“It’s the right of any nation to interpret history as it feels it should,” he said.

Yes, proof once again that a-holes come in all sizes, shapes and colors - well, they say you can’t argue with an idiot.

When the subways stop.

Before the workers are cursed, take a moment to read this editorial in the Daily News:

The great and growing disconnect between white-collar and blue-collar workers in our town makes it hard for office workers to see, understand or respect what is at stake in this labor standoff. Few riders know, for instance, that transit workers have to ask for a day off 30 days in advance. Back in October, in an annual ritual, some MTA workers slept on cots in bus depots so they could be first on line the next morning to ask for permission to take Thanksgiving off.

Nosing around.

Tonight I was nosing around the local 100 website, while I was doing it I found this little tidbit on the calendar about an event scheduled:

Dec. 20: Citywide Bus and Subway Strike

Submitted by eddie on Mon, 2005-12-19 05:39.
Start: 2005-12-20 06:01

So, I called channel 7 which was on the air to let them know. Seems like it could be nothing or it could be something. If channel 7 does wind up being the first to break the story, you’ll know where they got the tip.

...’tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la laa...

“They came in, said ‘Merry Christmas’ and then helped themselves,” store owner Changa Manakynda said.

A group of 40 people dressed in Santa Claus costumes, many of them drunk, rampaged through New Zealand’s largest city, robbing stores and assaulting security guards, police said Sunday.

The horror... the horror... (LOL)

Priceless.



I was looking around for material for another post when I came across the image above. It’s just struck me as a very funny image. I thought maybe about having a contest for the best caption.

The end is near?

I imagine, since we’re only a week or two away from the New Year.

Sounds rather dramatic though doesn’t it?

(Cue foreboding music) THE END IS NEAR!

What does a New Year mean anyway outside of the changing of the calendar, the marking of days? Do we wake up New Years Day to a new and suddenly different world?

I think not.

Depending on what we did the night before, we wake up either at the start of another day or with a terrific hangover if we’ve overdone it. Not much else happens really on New Years Day when you think about it. People are just bracing themselves to get back to work, having made it through another holiday season.

Oh, I guess it means stores will be putting up decorations in the next week or so for Valentines Day but outside of that, what else?

Over the next week or so, they’ll be lots of retrospectives about the year just passed on TV and in Newspapers. Lists of events that happened, people who died, those kind of things. It’s this onus that we burden ourselves with, a forced reflection due to a change in the calendar. In the coming weeks they’ll be talk about whether or not it was a good shopping season for retailers and then we’ll quickly move on.

I don’t like the calendar, never have. Calendars, clocks, all these human inventions to try and enforce a rigid structure to the world around us, are just off-putting. They force us to approach life in a very different way and I don’t know if it’s a good way. For example, did you know that:

On November 18, 1883, four standard time zones for the continental U.S.A. were introduced at the instigation of the railroads. At noon on this day the U.S. Naval Observatory changed its telegraphic signals to correspond to the change. Until the invention of the railway, it took such a long time to get from one place to another that local “sun time” could be used. When traveling to the east or to the west, a person would have to change his or her watch by one minute every twelve miles.

When people began traveling by train, sometimes hundreds of miles in a day, the calculation of time became a serious problem. Operators of the new railroad lines realized that a new time plan was needed in order to offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals.

Since every city was using a different time standard, there were over 300 local sun times to choose from. The railroad managers tried to address the problem by establishing 100 railroad time zones, but this was only a partial solution to the problem.

Imagine that!

Sun time. Can you think of how different life would be if based around Sun time? All those late nights at the job - do they still happen when you’re on Sun time? Thing is, we’re not talking about such a long time ago, a mere 122 years. This is the world my grandparents were born into. A world were Sun time was becoming a thing of the past and the world was entering the brave new frontier of “Time Zones.”

The pace of life is speeding up, getting faster and faster as the world becomes a smaller and smaller place. Does this mean one day, instead of the four time zones our country straddles, it will become sixteen time zones because having time zones of an hour will be a value far too large to use as a measure in such a fast-paced world.

I shudder at the thought.

If you focus so much energy on measuring something, of keeping track of it, are you able to enjoy it?

So, as the calendar turns over once again like an odometer on our lives, let’s take a moment to try and downplay its significance. Not that I don't think everyone shouldn't have the most wonderful holiday imaginable, just let’s try to move the focus away from the structure we try to impose on the world. We might all be a bit better for it.

More on time and its history can be found here.