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Friday, January 10, 2003Other News That Has Nothing to Do With Lists
- I'm halfway through The Lord of the Rings (this probably makes it about twenty times?) and I'm happy to report that my own imaginings of what the characters and events looked like have escaped more or less untouched. I'm grateful to the films, however, because their retooling of the story allows me to read the books with fresh eyes. (OK, there's a nasty image -- sshhhlloorp! have some fresh eyes!) Old passages are suddenly new again, and dialogue that was placed elsewhere in the movies gains new meaning in the books. It's a neat process.
- Christina and I went to a sports bar at the invitation of some friends last night and played one of those goofy electronic trivia games. It was fun, even the unexpected karaoke session during which we heard a lot of Western and '80s hard rock. There were a few, uh, unexpected entries. The woman who so desperately wanted to be Stevie Nicks was pretty funny, but nothing topped the deeply stoned heavy metal rocker (what song was that?), followed by the sixty-something fisherman (?) who sang "Mack the Knife." I need to brush up on my sports trivia. I got yer list right here.
Normally I don't talk much about movies in this blog, because I already do enough of that on every other web site of which I am a part. This morning, however, I got wind of the Online Film Critics Society Awards for 2002 and felt the wave of revulsion usually reserved for American Film Institute lists.
A bit of history: waaaaaay back in the day (1997?), Stomp Tokyo was rejected from the OFCS because we didn't cover "current" movies. At that time, membership was limited to people who reviewed a certain number of new releases annually, and we didn't qualify. We had a heyday bellowing from the front page that we'd been "banned by the OFCS!" and we even received a few plaintive e-mails from Society members reminding us that we hadn't been "banned," merely "rejected." We knew the difference, of course, but it was more fun to pretend to small bit of notoriety. Since then, membership requirements have changed and we'd probably qualify. We haven't bothered to apply. This back story might be enough to explain any bad feelings I might have towards the Society's list of last year's best films, but the truth is that lately I harbor resentment towards any list of the "best" of any sort of entertainment, particularly when one has been singled out as the best. I'm sick to death of the relentless pigeonholing that goes on, and then the endless rounds of discussion that result between the people who disagree with the order in which the pigeons were, uh, holed. For example, I could natter on about the fact that I don't think that a fundamentally flawed documentary like Bowling for Columbine could possibly have been the best film of its kind produced that year, but that's the sort of thing that drives me crazy. The creators of these lists rarely provide any sort of explanation as to why a film was considered superior to its fellows – the lists are simply tossed out there like beached whales at which the gulls may pick. Neither do I think they foster any particularly productive discussion – most of the conversations I've seen concerning lists are merely attacks on their order or on the omission of certain movies that "shoulda been" included. I'm getting tired just writing about the subject, but why not just talk about whether the film was good or bad? Did it accomplish the things it set out to do? Why all the focus on which one was the best? Go ahead - tell me that our society is fascinated with lists, labels, and the drama of awards night. See how far it'll get you. Scott and I have participated in a couple of lists over the years, most notably the Internet Film Laser Squad Top 100 Funniest Movies, which SeanBaby put together in retaliation for the AFI list on the same subject. (Tootsie at #2? Jeez Louise, the mean age of the AFI must be about 86.) I think that list sort of self-destructed when Seanbaby found out that our list was a bit more conservative than his. But hey, we actually like classic comedies. I look back at our personal list today and think it could be improved (Austin Powers 2 at #35? Was it really that funny?), but most of all I just think it was something we shouldn't have done in the first place. Even our lava lamp ratings (excuse me, LAVA© Motion Lamp Ratings) are a bit of a joke. If it weren't for the excuse to work in that awesome lava lamp graphic at every opportunity, I doubt we'd have a ratings system at all. You'll notice that we ditched them for the book. My thoughts about this are much less organized than I'd like, and I realize I've done little more than whine about my dissatisfaction with lists. (Suggest to me that I should make a list of things I hate about lists and you will get slapped.) But there it is. Lists, awards, labels – they're all crap. The only positive thing I can say about them is that they occasionally encourage people to see movies or experience things that they wouldn't have otherwise. I'd like to think that well-written reviews do that to a greater extent. I know better. Thursday, January 09, 2003Wednesday, January 08, 2003Even at home, I'm the tech support guy
You may have noticed that updates recently have been erratic; after the holidays I've been dealing with a lot of computer problems, including a dead monitor (well, two, really, but we're back up and running now), a wonky cordless mouse (fixed!), and the problem I'll describe here. This is really only for tech-heads, but it seemed a waste to write all this up and post it to a message board where it will be lost forever. I'll get back to less technical topics soon.
My original post to the Macfixit Forums: I have a B&W G3/300 upgraded with an OWC G4/450 chip. On the original 6 GB hd there are 2 partitions, one for classic, one for OS X 10.1. On an additional 80GB hard disk (the slave) I have installed Jaguar. When I boot up from this disk, it intermittently but regularly crashes on startup during the gray "wind" screen. (Every two out of three attempts, I'd say.) Sometimes the screen just freezes, sometimes I get a pattern of monochrome lines across the Apple logo. I can boot with a "safe" boot (shift key on startup) without incident, and into single user mode no problem. I have run Diskwarrior 2.0 on all the drives, and I have repaired the permissions on the Jaguar drive. I have run fsck -y in single user mode, although I have yet to repair it "completely" ("This disk appears OK") in this fashion. Booting from the OS 9 drive and OS X.1 drive is no problem. Any ideas on what's going on? Should I not have installed an OS on a slave drive? Your thoughts would be appreciated, and more info on my system is available if needed. Thanks. One of the resident geeks there indicated that it was likely a hardware problem, and that I should pull various things out to see if there was a conflict. I trundled the Mac into work, where I have more room to work, and the following 2nd forum post resulted. It seems I didn't know my own system as well as I thought -- six months after installing that 2nd drive I had forgotten the steps I'd gone through to get it there! The 2nd drive is an 80GB ATA-100 drive, which, following the handy instructions at xlr8yourmac.com, I installed using a Sonnet ATA-100 PCI card. Also installed in the PCI slots are: - an old iX-TV video capture card (only works when booted from OS9, but I use it regularly) - an Apple-installed SCSI card - the Apple-installed video card I tried removing the SCSI card, but that didn't result in a clean bootup from the 80GB Jaguar disk. Thinking it might be a problem with the Sonnet card, I pulled the ribbon cable from the Sonnet card and connected the 80GB Jaguar disk directly to the motherboard's IDE controller (disconnecting the 6GB disk first). Guess what? The Jaguar disk booted immediately, without incident. (!) I connected the 6GB disk to the Sonnet card. Not only did the Jaguar disk continue boot normally, but the 10.1.5 system boots fine when connected to the Sonnet card! So does the OS 9.2.1 system on a separate partition of the same 6GB disk. I re-installed the SCSI card (not that I use it anymore, but it's there) and all seems to be well. My only misgiving is that now the ATA-100 drive is connected to an ATA-33 controller and probably won't be fast enough to capture digital video from my Firewire camcorder. I guess I can always buy a new ATA-100 drive to replace the 6 GB drive. Thrilling stuff, huh? Tuesday, January 07, 2003Will the real millionaire please stand up?
Christina and I had fun late last night watching the premiere of Joe Millionaire. I even got off my duff and wrote a Tuber article about it.
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