perfidy

A while back, I linked to a speculative piece by author Dan Simmons. Simmons is, in my opinion, one of the best writers going. He effortlessly flits from grand scope sf to hardboiled detective novel to horror, leaving his distinctive mark on each. He's the real deal. In April, he imagined a time traveler from the future returning from a hindred years hence to inform the narrator of what nastiness awaits us, in the form of the century war, the 21st century's long war between the West and Islam.

He has posted a clueless-plus length expansion on the ideas he touched fictionally, thanks to the response (mostly negative, and nonsensical) that he recieved for the first one. It is very much worth reading. If you for some reason failed to read the fiction, that's here, and the essay can be found here. It'll be a while, but I'll wait. Read them. We'll discuss tomorrow.

If you are at all like EDog, even a little, you have wondered what it would be like to have super powers. To fight crime in a unitard and a cape, wielding vasty powers of mind and body, defeating eevill with a "pow" and a "biff." Wouldn't we all like that? Well, take this test to see the approximate form your superpowers would manifest in, did you but have superpowers, and weren't a whiny little runt reading a blog on your 'puter.

As it turns out, the Buckethead is just what he expected. Batman:

Your results: You are Batman

You are dark, love gadgets and have vowed to help the innocent not suffer the pain you have endured.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

[wik] hattip to Pixy Misa.

[alsø wik] Phil insists that he's not Spidey, but Mr. Furious.

Ministry crony and recent comment grouch Phil has changed the name of his blog. Again.

Ministry Crony and recent comment grouch Phil has a fascinating post discussing opening shots in movies. He, and the people whose idea he stole, are really on to someting here, as this is truly a crucial aspect of film making. A good opening guides expectations as well as setting the stage for what follows. One of my personal favorite openings is the beginning of Raising Arizona. (The Coen brothers are genii at this - the openings of Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou? are excellent as well.) Raising Arizona's opening is long, but brilliant. Characters that have no role in the rest of the movie nevertheless set the stage for the drama that follows. Like the growling floor-mopping con. And the cellmate who discusses the fine art of making crawdads. And the transgendered inmate in the group therapy session. The narration, by Nicholas Cage (in his last good role) as H. I. McDonough, sets a marvelous tone to the whole movie - elevated language, redolant of the Bible and Shakespeare, combined with lower class speech. This is mirrored by the use of Beethoven's Ode to Joy recast as mountain yodeling. All in all, a near perfect opener.

However, the good opening does not guarantee a good movie. I once saw a Steven Seagall movie - the first, I think, though I can't remember exactly. This was before the dumpy martial arts hero became ever present, and certainly before he became the darling of the straight-to-video set. Anyways, the opening of this movie was tight - it had a convincing sense of verisimilitude: real-seeming CIA types in a jungle locale, violence, intrigue. My friend Jon turned to me and said, "This is going to be good." Immediately thereafter, Seagall appeared onscreen and the movie promptly went utterly to shit. The tightly edited and focused opening morphed into sloppy and garish action shots. The plot hinted at turned muddy and incoherent. The actors in the opening sequence didn't appear again. It seemed as if the filmmakers had found this awesome short movie, or an opening to a movie that was never finished, and grafted it onto their shlockfest abomination.

Anyway, go read Phil's bit, and follow the links.

True story:

The next town over from me is widely considered an enclave of the wealthy. And it largely is. It's where alot of doctors, lawyers, and other well-paid professionals dwell, in addition to your business owners, small financiers, and assorted white collar folk. We're not talking, you know, robber baron wealth; there are no cottages- in the Newport sense of the word- anywhere near here. But the homes are modern, big, carefully landscaped, and seem to be raising a brood of young Audis or BMWs in their driveways.

And up until fairly recently, gray squirrels were seen regularly gamboling about the sweeping, manicured lawns in this town. Chittering and chattering, munching the occasional nut alertly, but without a sense of impending doom, clearly due to the absence of predatory creatures hereabouts. But I have noticed that they are being displaced. The numbers are not being depleted by cats, dogs, or commuters.

They are being displaced. By black squirrels.

Seriously.

Where the black squirrels go, the gray squirrels go away. We're not talking flying squirrels here, but squirrel flight. I can't help but wonder whether the black squirrels have moved on up to this fantastic, quaint town, but the grays feel the squirrely equivalent of "there goes the neighborhood".

Nobody thinks much of the Diamond State, but nevertheless, enterprising individuals have managed to come up with a plethora of divergent state mottoes:

• We make flat, boring and small cool!
• We Really Do Like the Chemicals in our Water
• The Corporate Haven state
• At least we're not New Jersey
• You'll need a map to find us
• The First State, But So Not Much Since Then
• Bet you forgot about us!
• The best .032% of America
• So close to Washington you can smell it
• See Maryland
• You know, the place you send your credit card payments
• The Weakfish State
• Come for the flat and uninteresting scenery, stay for the tax shelters
• Going to Delaware (scroll down to the "namesakes" section)

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• It's good to be first
• Unless it was the first state you got a handjob in, it's not really first
• First in self-storage facilities per capita in the lower 48
• West of Portugal, east of everywhere else
• Maryland's own Rhode Island
• The Delaware of Delaware
• Delaware: America's Clit

I meant to post this days ago, but the annual grueling Independence Day trek to Ohio and preparations therefor intervened. I was shocked, shocked to discover that Michael Barone of US News and World Report very nearly stole our thunder. In the beginning of his RealClearPolitics piece on the NYT's treasonous article, he is just one word away from trademark infringement:

Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society.

While its no longer as timely as it might have been if I had posted this last week, its still a good article. Go ahead, read it. You know you want to.

Clearly worried about becoming someone's bitch, convicted Enron founder Ken Lay decided to die to avoid prison. Perhaps we will see nigerian email scam letters from Mrs. Lay in the near future.

[wik] Geeklethal reminds me that that's "Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison."

I was going to post something more today. But I have opted not to. The reason being, I am exhausted from my trip out to Ohio and back. The trip was fine, saw family, blah blah blah. But the weather was hot, humid, and I spent the majority of the weekend damp or wet. And the air conditioning on the bucketmobile went out. And the journey home was made more stressful by virtue of the fact that I nearly rammed a cop on an exit ramp. Thankfully, he was alert and paying attention, and honked in time to avoid a collision. I was issued a warning, which was altogether fair. Having kids in the car helps you look more like a responsible adult who lost it for a moment, rather than an idiot who deserves a reckless driving citation. Then, continuing cop night for the buckethead clan, my Sir John-of-the-sudden-emesis woke from a deep sleep and began puking all over the interior of the unairconditioned bucketmobile. Fearing worse to come, we pulled to the side of the road to deal with the vomit crisis. Following their long an honorable tradition of appearing when they're not needed, a cop pulled up behind us, lights flashing, to insure that we weren't doing anyting nefarious. No officer, just squeegeeing the vomit off my son. We'll be fine, really. Do you have any napkins?

Despite all of that, one highlight of the trip was Mrs. Buckethead and I taking turns reading to each other. We'd never done that before. It is a truly excellent way to pass the time. The book we chose was Before the Dawn, by Nicholas Wade. So far, a fascinating story - how new genetics research is shedding light on the murky prehistory of our race. For example, did you know that the entire human population outside Africa is descended from a mere 150 people? One band of early humans snuck out of Africa, fought lions and tigers and bears - and neanderthals - and laid claim to a planet. How cool is that? I recommend it highly. While you're at it, I also recommend Charles Stross' new one, Glasshouse. Better written than Accelerando, if slightly toned down on the speculation. Excellent read.

But now, I must nap.

The Ministry has never believed in beating a dead horse. We are, however, all for beating mostly dead horses. Therefore, we bring you discarded mottoes for the moderately good state of Connecticut:

• Like Massachusetts, only dirtier and with less character
• Come for the scenery, stay to stalk Letterman
• Wedged into the armpit of New England
• New York City's other Suburb
• The second "C" is Silent, Casshole!
• Way too close to New York
• Home of Joe Lieberman
• Like Massachusetts, Only The Kennedy’s Don’t Own It - Yet
• In Texas, we'd be a county
• The state you can cross in 15 minutes ... on foot
• Nothing important has happened here since King Philip's War
• We're the Constitution State and we have no idea why
• At least we're not New Jersey
• We could kick Rhode Island's ass
• We'd really like to be part of France

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• The Home of Mark Twain. Oh, Missouri too I guess
• The Nutmeg State - whateverthefuck THAT's supposed to mean
• Home of the 4th-Farthest-North Located Ikea in the Continental US
• We Celebrate Diversity- ALL Are Welcome to do Our Landscaping
• Where News from Puerto Rico is Considered 'Local'
• We'd All Be Better Off as Far From Massachusetts as Possible
• The Elite-School-in-the-Ghetto State

The Ministry would like everyone to have a happy, explosive filled, and thunderstorm-free Independence Day. If you are in Ohio, achieving this will be rather difficult, as the last two options are nigh on to unachievable thanks to the vagaries of weather and an Ohio's nanny-minded legislature. The only legal fireworks in my homestate are now, sadly, smoke bombs and sparklers. Sad. The day we celebrate our independence, we are not free to buy rockets and explosives to celebrate. A small lesson that we should take to heart is that independence and freedom are not the same. Perhaps we should institute a Liberty and Freedom day, to drive home the point.

In the meantime, though, celebrate America's independence as best you can, wherever you are. And next year, the Buckethead will remember to stop in somewhere truly freedom loving, like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, to buy lots of fireworks before getting to Ohio. In this way, he will bring joy to his many nieces and nephews, rather than ridicule and derision upon himself for not thinking of it.