Good Actors in Bad Movies

GQ Interview Bill Murray...

How about Garfield? Can you explain that to me? Did you just do it for the dough?

No! I didn't make that for the dough! Well, not completely. I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I'd never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, "So-and-so and Joel Coen." And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They're funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I'd like to do that.

[...] So I worked all day and kept going, "That's the line? Well, I can't say that." And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, "Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we're dealing with." So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, "Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the fuck was Coen thinking?" And then they explained it to me: It wasn't written by that Joel Coen.

-----

According to GQ this is only the fourth or fifth time that Bill has been interviewed in the past decade, starting off on the right foot...

Bill Murray: How long do these things last? [picks up recorder] How much time is on these things?

GQ: A lot. They're digital.

Digital? I was thinking of recording myself sleeping. Would this work?

Well, assuming you don't make more than an hour and a half of noise each night, you'll be okay.

I donno. That's why I need the recorder. Sometimes I snore, like when I get really tired. Smoke a cigar or something, you know. I have a brother with sleep apnea. That's terrifying.

Tricking Alzheimers Patients

In Germany...

There's a fake bus stop in front of a German nursing home; its purpose is to "trap" Alzheimers patients who wander off from the home in search of home.

"Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home." The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

Give the Germans credit for there unconventional methods.

Mad Men

A new season embarks...

Most of you are not fans of Mad Men, either because you have never seen it, or because you have seen it once and deemed it to serious or slow moving. As season four of Mad Men begins this Sunday evening at 10pm, my recommendation would be to tune back in and give it a chance. There are few, if any shows I have ever seen that create the depth of an era, complexity of character, and intelligence in dialogue that Mad Men does. It assesses the culture of the early 60's, the changing tides of social thought as post World War II thought expires, and the baby boomer generation begins to come to fruition-- the American dream was cynically packaged for mass consumption creating a society perpetually distracted and dissatisfied.

The plot follows Sterling Cooper, an ad agency on Madison Avenue, as it navigates a changing American landscape. The storyline, though centered specifically around Don Draper-- the cool and commanding creative director at Sterling Cooper, bounces back and forth between the lives of various Sterling Cooper ad men. The ambition and conflicted desires of these characters in their pursuit of happiness is what makes "Mad Men" such a singular and resonant reflection of a particularly American puzzle. Its dramatic reenactment of the disconnect between the dream of dashing heroes and their beautiful wives, living in style among adorable, adoring children, and the much messier reality of struggling to play a predetermined role without an organic relationship to your surroundings or to yourself is what spurs you to ask 'What's missing from this pretty picture?'.

Watching the show, its almost surreal how it transports you to a 1960's atmosphere, its detail, the props, plot, and script—is precise, spare, correct. Character development is not spoon fed, angst is rarely resolved, and cultural innuendo not always explained. Vanity Fair likens it to a Paradise Lost, a precipice of smoking, drinking, loving, and lies. Mad Men's depiction of taboo behavior is not crass, nor is it upsetting, but it does provide an understanding of how much things have changed (or improved) in the past 50 years.With male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, and housewives’ depression commonplace-- the interaction with the issues and a sense of something new on the horizon looms.

Your 24 or Lost-esque need for immediate plot twist gratification will not be fulfilled in Mad Men, but count on a fascination for details to develop. Mad Men scripts don’t waste words. Intricately crafted and intelligently written, despite a lack of action, Mad Men will leave you anticipating the next episode all week.

On Memorization

And a 60,000 word poem...

John Basinger, a standard, run-of-the-mill 58 year old man, decided one day that he wanted memorize all 12 books of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Nine years later he performed the poem from memory in a three-day period and continues to do so in public performances whenever the opportunity avails itself. Mr. Basinger was tested by psychologists in a research setting and was gauged to have average day-to-day memory and intelligence, this demonstrates that cognitive expertise in memorization remains possible even in later adulthood, a time period in which cognitive researchers have typically focused on decline. The accomplishment wasn't tackled without rigor however:

Just how did JB manage to pull off this incredible feat? He studied for about one hour per day, reciting verses in seven-line chunks, consistent with Miller's magic number seven - the capacity of short-term, working memory. Added together, JB estimates that he devoted between 3000 to 4000 hours to learning the poem. Seamon's team interpret this commitment in terms of Ericsson's 'deliberate practice theory', in which thousands of hours of perfectionist, self-critical practice are required to achieve true expertise.

True, Mr. Basinger had a determination and commitment that many of us don't possess, though he demonstrates that memorization isn't about being a genius or autistic. I fret over a line I want to memorize three or four times, then confident with my intellectual prowess move on in life, only to realize I have forgotten the phrase an hour later. It is somewhat inspiring, however, that we all have the wherewithal to commit anything to memory given enough motivation. Maybe I'll get started on Finnigans Wake.

Interesting Swedish Sub-Cultures

And the influence of America...

Fashion and sub-cultures have an intersting way of spreading. One countries trash is another's treasure-- or in this sense, shunned trends of America have the ability to be picked up by the rebellious youth of a traditionally liberal minded nation like Sweden:

For the weekend, the small city of Västerås, Sweden gets overrun with drunken packs of a very specific Swedish subculture called raggares, riding through the streets in a parade ‘57 Chevys and Ford Mustangs.

“Raggare” is a delightful mix of the style of a’50s greaser, the corpulence and bad hygiene of a biker, the love of the Confederate flag of a southern redneck, and the enthusiasm for drinking of a British soccer hooligan. Basically, every stereotype about poor white trash spanning both time and globe, rolled into one.

By all accounts, an unusual stock of people to crop up in the north European Scandinavia. All these photos are from Sweden, of Swedish people.

It seems that a nostalgic lust for mid-twentieth century Americana has been somehow crossbred with a fascination for the Southern redneck. Perhaps the true nature of what they're representing in stateside culture has been lost in the trip over the Atlantic-- either way, I wouldn't deny that America's youth is equally susceptible to fuse foreign cultural inclinations together in a hipster effort.

Facts of the Day

From Harpers Index...

On Japan...

Chance that a Japanese grade-school student reports never having seen a sunrise or sunset: 1 in 2

Number of days a Japanese arrestee can be interrogated without a lawyer: 23

--Percentage of Japanese arrestees who confess to crimes: 92

--Percentage brought to trial who are convicted: 99.9

College...

Chance that a student at Indiana University reports having used a tanning lamp in the past year: 1 in 2

Estimated percentage of women’s college sports teams that were coached by women when Title IX was enacted in 1972: 90

--Percentage today: 42

Percentage of U.S. college students who believe the “next Bill Gates” is among today’s generation of college students: 50

--Percentage who say they are the next Bill Gates: 24

Vodka...

Annual amount that Americans spend on vodka, expressed as a portion of the value of Russia’s publicly traded companies: 1/3

Liters of vodka drunk in the Soviet Union in 1984: 2,577,000,000

Length, in miles, of a rubber hose used in 2005 to smuggle vodka from Belarus to Lithuania: 2

Quick Notes

Volume IX

1. Anyalze your writing style | I write like David Foster Wallace when blogging, and like Issac Assmov in my occasionally private forays into fiction. Via LRB.

2. Interviews with a window cleaner | From the article --"For safety reasons, music and cellphones are not allowed up in the scaffolding, but some of us listen to our own music in our heads."

3. How supermodels are like toxic assets | An interesting read on the speculative nature of the fashion industry.

4. Living with a computer | An article from The Atlantic circa 1982.To quote the author, "The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen". The piece is as intriguing as it is funny.

Visualizing a Billion Dollars

And how its spent...

(Click to enlarge)

Some interesting points: the African debt is about the same as Apple's market value, the Global Pharmaceutical market is almost equal to Medicare and Medicaid year expenditures, and the amount of interest per year on the US Government deficit is almost enough to lift one billion people out of extreme poverty.

All the data and more billion dollar amounts.

Interesting Blog of the Day

On science...

Sam Kean at Slate blogs on the periodic table of elements. A post each day for each element, surprisingly interesting and entertaining. For example:

Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen; the other 10 percent are helium. The rest of the universe is a rounding error

Don't take me as a science nerd, but your lying if your not somewhat interested in why the future of toilet design hangs in the balance of nitrogen and phosphorus.

Picky Eating as a Disorder?

Support group included...

The Wall Street Journal does a report on picky eaters.

Picky eaters tend to gravitate to certain foods, including blander products that are often white or pale colored, like plain pasta or cheese pizza. For reasons that aren't clear, almost all adult picky eaters like French fries and often chicken fingers, health experts say.

Many are now considering picky eating as a sort of medical disorder, in the same category as anorexia, bulimia, and certain binge eating conditions. Initially thought to just be a state solely stricken to the mind of head strong child, something that eventually was to be grown out of, researchers are now seeing adult eating habits running in the same vein.

In fact, Internet support groups and organizations are now cropping up all over the web.. Picky Eating Adult Support, for example, is piloted by picky eater Bob Krause who claims he has a rule that he will not go to someone's house before 7:30 pm in order to avoid any chance of being invited to eat dinner. From the WSJ, a sample of Mr. Krauses daily menu:

This type of obsessive compulsion is not uncommon for picky eaters. Amber Scott, a writer and picky eater, reveals that she is "terrified" of having to sit through networking dinners as many of her friends and associates don't know about her tendencies. Avoiding social situations involving eating, she says, has become a part of her life.

If your a picky eater, let this be a word of caution-- change your selective ways before your situation becomes to chronic.

To conclude on a more rational note-- as interesting as picky eating is, I would gather that it is far from being a diagnosable disorder, rather being more of a manifestation of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Quick Notes

Volume VIII

1. San Francisco's crusade to ban the sale of all pets | Dubbed the "Hamster Crusade", the city seeks to deprive all children of living play things.

2. Season four of Mad Men starts July 25th | Best show on television, those of you weened on action will hate it. For some background, here is the Mad Men blog.

3. Are blogs dying out? | An interesting trend in wake of gorwing social media sites. Also the original Economist article.

4. Approved haristyles for Iran | Failure to conform is now a breach of Islamic principals, similar to veiling among women. Haircut models here.

5. Hacking the Price is Right | Terry Kniess, a former weatherman with a knack for numbers and seeing patterns, went on The Price is Right and won more than $50,000 in prizes because of an exact bid on his Showcase. His secret? He watched hundreds of hours of the show and discovered its secrets and weaknesses.

Harrowing Drug Trends In Africa

Heroin addiction...

Depseration that will chill you to the bone. Via the MR blog

Desperate heroin users in a few African cities have begun engaging in a practice that is so dangerous it is almost unthinkable: they deliberately inject themselves with another addict’s blood, researchers say, in an effort to share the high or stave off the pangs of withdrawal.

The practice, called flashblood or sometimes flushblood, is not common, but has been reported in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the island of Zanzibar and in Mombasa, Kenya

It puts users at the highest possible risk of contracting AIDS and hepatitis.

It sounds almost to extreme to even be possible, given the small amount of the drug that would even be concentrated in a blood transfusion. Despite my skepticism, first hand confrimation emerged via the comments:

to all of the sceptical commenters here, this really does happen. I am currently interning in Mombasa through an organization called the Foundation for Sustainable Development. They have helped place me with a host family, local NGO to work with, and orient me to the city. There are many other interns in this program working with various NGOs. Through one of these interns, I have met the leader of a community based organization (CBO) that works in Changamwe (district that is right next to Mombasa Island) on HIV-related issues.

This man has informed me about the practice of flashblood. It is done by youth who do not have enough money to buy the drugs for themselves, so they pool money together for one person to inject themselves. Then, they inject that person's blood into the rest of the members of the group.

The practice is extremely dangerous. It also highlights once again how poverty causes people to take on riskier activities than they otherwise would. Drugs are plenty dangerous in their own right, but when people are desperate for them and lack money, they expose themselves to extreme danger.

All a result of little or no education, extreme poverty, and a cycle of hopelessness that many in Africa struggle to break.

Spain Wins!

and the Dutch say an octopus is to blame for World Cup defeat...

As Spain celebrates their first ever World Cup victory, the Dutch are searching for a scapegoat. As it happens, Paul the Octopus has predicted every single German World Cup ame correctly over the past month. In his first non-German psychic prediction, he forecasted a Spanish victory and a Dutch loss.

One Dutch fan, completely without irony, blamed the psychic predictions of a certain German octopus named Paul, who correctly predicted Netherlands would lose. "Had it not been for this creature called Octopus Paul, which weakened our team by its predictions, Holland could have destroyed Spain,” says Walt van Vonk, emerging from Soccer City stadium after the game. "I am not taking anything away from Spain, but this creature's match outcome prediction was bad news."

Paul makes his predictions by choosing the mussel from a glass box decorated with the either opponents national flag.

Census Workers

The most qualified ever?...

This past spring I, along with every un- or underemployed friend I have, applied to be a US Census worker. Seemingly an easy job, going door to door and getting paid $13 an hour while asking the same ten questions over and over. I took the "aptitude" test comprised of 30 questions with a junior high difficulty level (to qualify for work you had to get a minimum of 20 correct), and after getting all correct I though I was a US Census worker shoo in. Even after continually ribbing my then roommate for getting one question wrong, we both thought we were prime government worker material... that is until the beckoning of employment never came and a Census worker come to our door requesting will fill out our form, twisting the stake of rejection in a bit further.

However, the Census Bureau did hire over 700,000 other people around the nation for temporary work, with what is considered an assembly of the most experienced workers with more sophisticated skills than any other time in history. So how did a young, hard working, ambitious, seemingly sufficiently qualified college graduate with a year of work experience get passed over by the Bureau's hiring crew? The recession is a major factor-- when a large middle aged, qualified, though unemployed population is vying for a way to pay the bills, a government job could carry a lot more luster. A NY Times reporter ran into architects, former executives, and even nuclear engineer with a degree from MIT taking temp work with the Census Bureau.

It seems temporary government work arrived just in time for almost a million people who's recession starved former employers couldn't justify keeping them aboard after last years economic dive. Although now the Census is over, and the 700,000 people who had jobs now do not. Optimistically speaking, the economy has had time to recover possibly opening doors for all the former Census folks to ply their studied trade once again.

Either way, after seeing what I was up against my self-esteem has regained a few points-- enough at least to vie for another government job.

How to Write Historical Fiction

Badly Well....

An excerpt from the ever entertaining satirical blog How to Write Badly Well. Read as the author allows one of his characters to be centuries ahead of his time, you can't help but laugh at the exploits of Edward and Rev. Hobbington.

‘Fire!’ shouted Edward, pointing at the bakery. ‘Hobbington, old friend, we must do something.’

‘Should I fetch buckets?’ asked the clergyman. Edward shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The pace at which that fire is spreading would make buckets useless. We ideally need a pressurised system of pipes and tubes to spray water across the building from a distance, possibly carried on some kind of large vehicle.’

‘Such a thing would take many men to operate,’ observed the Reverend Hobbington.

‘Men and women,’ said Edward. ‘There is no reason whatever that women should be considered inferior to men in carrying out physically demanding tasks or taking on other responsibilities. In fact, should we ever have a system of government which functioned purely on the basis of a popular mandate, I think that women should be given an equal say to men.’

‘My goodness,’ laughed Hobbington. ‘You do have some novel ideas, Edward.’

Also funny in faux historical fiction catering to cameos, getting bogged down in research, and changing the past.

Where Did the Term 'Soccer' Come From?

Its not American...

From The New Yorker:

Soccer," by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby's nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers-a bit of upper-class twittery, as in "champers," for champagne, or "preggers," for enceinte. "Soccer" is rugger's equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The "soc" part is short for "assoc," which is short for "association," as in "association football," the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA-the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S.

I suppose that means we can take all our Yankee ignorance and turn it into a bit of edgy slang pride.

A New Blog

On World Affairs...

I've started another blog, you don't have to read it-- but at the very least check it out.

Quick Notes

Volume VII

1. Fastest Modern Case of Human Evolution | Genetic adaptions in Tibet, at 14,000 feet.

2. Woody Allen's six favorite Woody Allen films | I won't spoil it for you, I have never seen any of them. I post this in honor of my wife's love for Woody Allen.

3. Why Intelligent People Fail | Lack of motivation, Lack of perserverance and perseveration, Inability to complete tasks, etc...So many ways to fail, it really makes us semi-intelligent people quiver with fear.

4. Efforts to eliminate the penny in the USA | An update, a comprehensive history, and if you care at all-- what you can do.

Modern Art

To complicated for human brains?...

To quote Joyce's Finnigans Wake, "It is the circumconversioning of antelithual paganelles by a huggerknut cramwell energuman, or the caecodedition of an absquelitteris puttagonnianne to the herreraism of a cabotinesque exploser?" This, one of thousands of sentence's in the Irish authors follow up to Ulysses containing language that is "slightly" veiled. It is considered one of the most difficult reads in the English language, subsequently left unread by the general public due to its obvious inaccessibility.

Jackson Pollock's vaunted Autumn Rhythm can present equal baffle both among the discerning and undiscerning eye. Appreciated by many for its departure from everything before it or by more modern advocates, just being Autumn Rhythm by Jackson Pollock.

Joyce's and Pollock's work beg the question: Are certain kinds of modern art too complex for anybody to understand? The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating view on the issue. Fred Lerhahl looks at complex musical compositions and our ability to cognitively understand or comprehend them:

There is a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result--." he [Lerdahl] distinguishes between pieces of modern music that are "complex" but intelligible and others that are excessively "complicated"—containing too many "non-redundant events per unit [of] time" for the brain to process. "Much contemporary music," he says, "pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity.

Making sense of all that, Ledahl is basically saying that when we are confronted with works that have no redundancy, we get confused, can't connect thoughts,-- more importantly, we can't create a point of reference in our own minds, there is no internalization, or an inability to internalize. Though WSJ makes a case for "hypercomplex" visual art:

Hypercomplex modern visual art is accessible in a way that hypercomplex literature and music are not. You can't get through a complicated novel faster by turning the pages more quickly. Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting, and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book.

Visual stimuli is almost instantaneous, you either get it or your don't and your reward can be unique, if even just appreciating that its crazy. Ledahl claims written and musical art that suffers from a "lack of redundancy" that "overwhelms the listener's processing capacities and can hardly be appreciated. Reading literature like Finnigans Wake can be seeming dizzy display of vocabulary and directionless plot lines, this is why no one reads it. Human minds can only appreciate overly complicated art for the sake that it is complicated.

Worlds Worst Commutes

Americans have it easy...

Making a long commute to work is simply part of life for many city and suburban dwellers. Once having to take an hour drive both to and from work myself, I am familiar with the psychological stages one goes through. At first its terrible, then bearable, and finally your mind simply shuts off for the entirety of the commute. Looking back, you realize the how easily you flushed two hours a day down toilet.

It's somewhat heartening to know that people around the world share in the pain. Here are the world's worst commutes according to IBM's Commuter Pain Index:

IBM surveyed 8,192 motorists in 20 cities across six continents and compiled an index of 10 issues: 1) commuting time, 2) time stuck in traffic, agreement that: 3) price of gas is already too high, 4) traffic has gotten worse, 5) start-stop traffic is a problem, 6) driving causes stress, 7) driving causes anger, 8) traffic affects work, 9) traffic so bad driving stopped, and 10) decided not to make trip due to traffic.

In fact traffic in Beijing has been so bad that 69% of survey respondents say in the past three years traffic has been so bad they have given up, turned around, and gone home. Commuters in Russia reported being stuck in traffic, on average, for 2.5 hours and even as high as three-- though the Russians are less apt than their southern neighbors to concede defeat and go home.

Research done by Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) via The Atlantic found that every minute shaved off America's commuting time is worth an estimated $19.5 billion dollars. That translates into $97.7 billion for five minutes, $195 billion for 10 minutes, and $292 billion for every 15 minutes saved nationally. A good deal of cash. Perhaps investing in public transit is not such a bad idea?

Quick Notes

Volume VI

1. How much do Somalian pirates earn? | The FT article is gated for non-subscribers, but I linked a blog excerpt in its stead.

2. Architectures most important buildings | Since 1980.-- 21 cool pictures included for those who don't like reading.

3. Mick Jagger on the economics of music | He talks about music sales, why the Rolling Stones did well, and why making music isn't making money any more. Here's the actual interview.

4.The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest-- "Best bad first lines of 2010" | An international parody contest, entrants submit bad opening lines to imaginary novels, and the winners get to revel in their shame.