Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 646

Yes, Ive posted a cat video. Dont judge me.

I have never posted and have rarely seen an online video involving cats.

But this one was too good to pass up.

Creativity runs in the family

Elysha was looking on Etsy.com for a handmade gift for our friend's daughter's first birthday and found a barrette holder that she thought would be perfect.

Something like this:

The little girl, whose name is Ella, wears a lot of barrettes and bows. 

She was about to click on the purchase button when it occurred to her that she could just make one herself. 

Three hours later, this is what she had created.

Not bad.  Huh? 

Good information. Bad writing.

After seeing the Tron Legacy this afternoon, I was left trying to remember which came first:

The film or the videogame? 

I was pretty sure that the film preceded the game, but in order to verify my suspicion, I checked the Wikipedia entry. 

The first line of the Wikipedia entry reads:

Tron is a 1982 American live-action-computer animated science fiction action cult film written and directed by Steven Lisberger.

Did you catch that?  Seven descriptors for the film.

Not the best writing.  I adore Wikipedia, trust its editors almost implicitly, and often find myself reading interconnected stories for much longer than I should. 

But the writing is sometimes less than outstanding.

UPDATE:

Before I even had time to finish and publish this post, the editors of Wikipedia had revised the first sentence of the Tron entry to read:

Tron is a 1982 American science fiction action film written and directed by Steven Lisberger.

Much better.  Still a little wordy for me but a noticeable improvement.

And because of Wikipedia's transparency policy, you can go back in time and see the version that I read while eating lunch this afternoon.

And all this for free.  My daughter is growing up in a fantastic age.

Oh, and I was right.  The film preceded the videogame that I adored.

True friends hurt one another whenever possible

By now you have probably heard about  New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan and the foot fetish videos that he and his wife have posted to the Internet.  When asked about them, Ryan has indicated that this is a personal matter that he would prefer not discuss.

In talking about the situation on ESPN radio, former NFL offensive lineman turned sportscaster Mark Schlereth was asked about how a football team might handle a situation like this in terms of the coach's feelings.

To paraphrase, Schlereth said that the players would first determine if the coach's marriage was potentially in trouble or if he was simply caught in an incredibly embarrassing situation.  If the situation proved to be the latter, the entire team would most assuredly attend the next meeting barefoot, and the torment that the coach would receive for something like this could last for months.

"We would bring it up at every opportunity," said Schlereth.   

He went on to describe a prank in which a rookie was served falsified court documents indicating that he was being sued for sexual harassment after he  had been seen flirting with a sound engineer on the sidelines during a game.  The coach allowed that prank to continue for an entire day before letting the rookie off with a warning.

"There are no rules in an NFL locker room when it comes to this stuff," Schlereth explained.  "And the best defense is a good offense.  So you nail the low-hanging fruit whenever you can."

I like this philosophy a lot. 

In my own life, my friends fall into two categories:

Those who believe that the world should operate like an NFL locker room and those who do not. 

And in almost every case, there is no middle ground.  Either you're someone who is willing to engage in this kind of cruelty or you avoid it at all costs.  And you learn very quickly who can take it and who cannot.

Unfortunately, a majority of my friends (and perhaps people in general) cannot.  For whatever reason, they tend to be (in my mind) overly sensitive to this kind of behavior.  For these people, pranks end up being watered-down excuses for what could have been or are avoided altogether.

I cherish my friends who share my no-holds-barred philosophy.  I admire their willingness to suffer embarrassment for the amusement of others.  I respect their ability to laugh at their own foibles, regardless of how personal in nature they may be.  And I readily accept their desire to do the same to me. 

In my most treasured friendships, there is little room for hurt feelings.  We give no quarter to one another of the battlefield.  We show no mercy. 

In the words of Mark Schlereth, we nail the low hanging fruit at every opportunity.   

I never had the opportunity to play organized football (one of my three greatest regrets in life).  My high school did not field a team and by the time I finally made it to college, I was working more than forty hours a week in order to pay the bills.  Redshirting as a freshman was not an option. 

But I wish I had.  I think I would've fit in well with a football team.

I tend to do a lot of stupid, prank-worthy things. 

And my mind is constantly filled with hurtful comments and ideas for acts of supreme cruelty.

I fear that my talents are often going to waste.

Avoid ambiguity in the demise of a character

I don't mind endings that make you wonder what might happen to a character had another scene been written or filmed.

Both SOMETHING MISSING and UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO end with the protagonist's future in doubt.  But at least you know that both protagonists will have a future.   

What I despise are endings in which the existence of the protagonist in a subsequent scene is in doubt.  

This is why the last episode of The Sopranos annoyed me.

Either kill Tony or don't.  Don't avoid taking a position on the matter by creating some multi-layered scene that might be interpreted as Tony's eminent death but might not.

This was a mobster show.  Whack the guy or don't.

This is why I didn't like the ending to The Wrestler, which Elysha and I watched last night.   

Yes, it's very likely that the viewer is meant to assume that Randy dies at the end of the film, but again, his fate is ultimately left to interpretation.

Does he suffer another heart attack as he dives off the top ropes? 

Possibly.  Probably.

But aren't there medical personnel on hand?

Didn't he survive his first heart attack?

Kill him or don't.

Ambiguity in the possible death of a character is an act of cowardice on the writer's part. 

Need a grocery store? We have plenty.

Slate's Chris Wilson reports on a 2009 study by the Department of Agriculture found that "2.3 million households do not have access to a car and live more than a mile from a supermarket.  Much of the public health debate over rising obesity rates has turned to these 'food deserts,' where convenience store fare is more accessible—and more expensive—than healthier options farther away."

 

An interactive map of these food deserts can be found here.

I'm stunned by these findings.   

And I'm ready to help.

As I've written about before, the area of Connecticut in which I live in inundated with grocery stores, and while their presence alone does not adversely impact me, their sheer number seems to compel consumers to frequent as many of them as possible in a given week, thus clogging my highways and surface streets with people who somehow manage to find the time to shop for meat at one store, fruits and vegetables at another, bulk items at a third, prepared foods at a fourth, and so on and so on. 

I wish I had that kind of extra time on my hands. 

The lack of efficiency in this model offends me on a personal level. 

The amount of fuel being used to shuttle oneself around to these stores is destructive to the environment. 

The presence of these multiple-grocery-store-maniacs on the roads slows me down. 

And seemingly gone are the days when a family was able to do its food shopping for the week on a single day.

In the land of fast-paced, on-the-move, not-enough-hours-in-the-day lifestyles, the majority of people who I know somehow manage to carve out enough time to shop for food three or four days a week.

This makes absolutely no sense to me. 

Using Google Maps I was able to determine that within a single mile of my home are a total of eight full-sized grocery stories, including two Stop & Shops and two Asian grocers.  And had I stretched the range out to two miles, I would have more than doubled this total. 

So what if we ship half of the grocery stores in my area of Connecticut to a place more needy?  Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Georgia, Arkansas, and parts of Texas could all use one of the Stop & Shops within a mile of my home, or one of the two Asian markets or three Aldis or two Shaws within two miles of my home. 

Lift these suckers up and send them someplace else.  Reduce the congestion on my roads, replace the vast acreages of parking lots with trees and grass, decrease the amount of fossils fuels burned while driving to these stores, and perhaps encourage consumers to return to a time when families did the bulk of their shopping on a single day at a single store and transform the time spent turning our towns into giant farm stands into something more productive. 

Food deserts? 

I'm drowning in food over here. 

The price of wealth

I posted this on Twitter and Facebook yesterday but liked it so much that I wanted to post it here as well.

A quote from Heather O'Neill, from this week's episode of This American Life:

No one from a rich background can ever be cool.

The more I think about it, the more I am certain that it is true. 

Topless, frigid and amusing

As a season ticket holder, I sit in the same seats at every Patriots game. 

As a new season ticket holder, those seats are far from the field.  My friend, Shep, and I sit on the 45 yard line, adjacent to the press box, four rows from the very top of the stadium.

To be honest, we like the seats a lot.  It can get windy up there, but we have a good view of the action at all times, regardless of where on the field the ball may be.  it's actually a view similar to the one I see on television except I can see the entire field at one time. 

The guys who usually sit to my right are police officers, and throughout the season, I have heard them tell one another stories that make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and cause me to wonder about the sanctity of their profession. 

I'm quite certain that many of the tactics that they describe are not legal, and they always make me a little nervous.

I already have good reason not to trust all police officers. 

The cops were not at the most recent Patriots-Green Bay contest.  It was a Sunday night game, so perhaps they were busy conducing illegal searches or smacking around prisoners in handcuffs or racially profiling motorists at stop lights.

All actions described during previous games.  

Instead, I found myself sitting beside two Asian men whose enthusiasm for the game was sadly not matched by their understanding of the lexicon of the game.  Though supportive of the team, many of the things that they shouted weren't quite right, and as a result, I laughed throughout much of the night.

A few of their more memorable remarks included:

C'mon defense! Interfere the ball!

Drop them on the bomb, defense!

Crack that punt!

C'mon Pats!  Win me a touchdown!

Pass that skin, Brady!

Tackle their legs into a little ball!

Midway through the third quarter, three guys off to my left decided to remove their shirts despite the sub-freezing temperatures.  This bizarre ritual typically occurs in inverse proportion the outside temperature. 

The colder the temperature, the greater the likelihood that guys will remove their shirts. 

I am mystified as to why grown men choose to inflict this kind of suffering upon themselves and then pretend that the freezing temperatures don't bother them.  If asked, they might say that they are expressing support for their team, but I suspect that Tom Brady (who literally wears a scuba suit in cold weather) and his teammates would be less than impressed by this demonstration of stupidity.

Instead, I suspect that these morons require more attention than their clothing-clad bodies can provide.  And while I'll admit that removing your clothing on a 10 degree night will garner you attention, but not the kind of attention that most people desire.

After watching these fools remove their clothing, the Asian man directly to my right decided that he would do the same and began stripping off the layers covering his torso.  Eventually he got down to just his tee-shirt, at which point he stood up, gripped the shirt around its bottom, and prepared to lift it over his head.  He held it there for about a minute before releasing the shirt and standing with his hands by his side.  He remained this way for another two minutes, seeming to ponder his next move, and then finally he began putting his sweatshirts and coat back on.

Smart move.  

"There's hope for you!" I said to him.

He smiled and thanked me as he pulled his hat down over his head. 

Im so jealous

Can't decide which is better.  Like choosing between hot dogs and ice cream.

I did not grow up with childrens books

Am I the only person in the world who has seen the film version of Where the Wild Things Are but has never read the book?