Elliott Hall's Blog, page 7

Have you vajazzled this woman?

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From Rachel Maddow, we have a new frontier in crime fighting. The FBI, after years of fruitless searching for Boston crime lord Whitey Bulger, has hit on a novel idea. The lady he's on the lam with is fond of all sorts of cosmetic procedures, so they've been running ads during Oprah hoping a viewer will recognise her from the beauty parlour.

I don't know if she goes in for vajazzling, but considering she's the consort of a crime boss and the procedure is both expensive and tasteless, the FBI should start there.

I'm sure it will be different this time

American music sharing service Pandora has been valued at £1.6 billion, The Guardian reports:

The company, which will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, raised $235m on Tuesday, selling 14.7m shares at $16 according to a government filing.

Late last week Pandora increased its original price range of $7-$9 per share for its IPO to $10-$12 – the latest sign of a company looking to take advantage of the investor enthusiasm for internet companies.

The pricing of the loss-making Pandora equates to 19 times the $137m in revenue the company made last year and values it at about $2.6bn. Pandora reported revenue of $51m, with a net loss of $6.8m in the three months to the end of April.

19 times the revenue of a company that has yet to break even.

Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, has warned that such competition makes Pandora a risk for investors.

"As consumers we love Pandora," he said in an analyst's note. "[However] investing in Pandora is a whole different story. While Pandora is creating a large active user base, its reach/frequency continues to pale in comparison to terrestrial radio, as does its profitability. Put simply, the revenue/earnings leverage from growing users/usage is simply not enough to scale earnings relative to the IPO's proposed valuation."

Which is a long way of saying 'have you people lost your minds?' They have. All people can see are the dollar signs. I'm reading about railway speculation in 1840s right now for a new book, and the investors back then had the same mix of greed, stupidity and magical thinking on display here. They were buying up pretty much anything that had 'railway' in its name, unable to find where this railway was let alone what it would carry and its expectation on return. It's no different than 'Pet food over the internet!' or valuing FaceBook at £100 fickin BILLION dollars.

The housing bubble collapsed in 2007, before that the internet bubble in 2000, and now social networking sites are being valued in the billions. I'm sure this will work out fine.

WashingTON!

I have probably this before. I will probably post this again.

Because HE'S COMING.

Make em do the chicken

Roscoe was not a religious man. He scowled at American Legion benedictions. He scoffed at his Presbyterian wife and forbade her to make weaklings of their children by taking them to Sunday school. He said that instead of turning the other cheek you should sap the motherfuckers to their knees then choke them out until they were 'doing the chicken' on the ground and then step over their twitching, jerking, unconscious bodies and kneedrop them with the full weight of your body down through the spear of the knee into the kidney. And that if Jesus Christ didn't have the balls to treat his enemies like that he was just another faggot Jew. Roscoe Rules wasn't raising his sons to be faggots.

That is Roscoe Rules, one of the ten LAPD patrolmen in The Choirboys. I wanted to excerpt this because it's one of those rare passages that is so funny I had to wait for the shakes to subside before I could read anymore. Rules is generally regarded as an 'insufferable prick' by everyone he works with, and they only socialize with him because he's always able to score free booze from the liquor stores on his patrol route.

The Choirboys takes place in 1975 and follows the five pairs or partners as they try to deal with LA's dangerous, insane and grotesque. Most crime novels center on a big case, or at least a single crime family. The Choirboys has a structure more like a ride along with certifiable patrolmen, which lets Wambaugh (himself a 14-year veteran of the LAPD) tell stories that are almost never told. Wambaugh's experience mean it's full of little details that I love, like the fact that they park thirty inches deeper into traffic when they pull someone over. That way both men can approach the car without getting run over by a motorist behind them driving H.U.A. (Head Up Ass.)

If you're a fan of Homicide (and you should be) The Choirboys is worth checking out.

The Third New York

Yesterday I ran across this excerpt from E.B. White's Here is New York:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the

man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and

accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second,

there is the New York of the commuter–the city that is devoured by

locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of

the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of

something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last–the city

of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city

that accounts for New York's high strung disposition, its poetical

deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable

achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives

give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

That third New York is what I wanted to depict in The First Stone because it is the one we foreigners see — the city of dreams on film — and also because it is that version of New York that is a direct challenge to the view of America that the fundamentalist Revivalists cherish. This is the 'Real America' canard that the GOP are leaning on so hard. It is a simple morality fable of the pious countryside and corrupt city, the same damn story people have told themselves since Babylon. Never mind that most Americans, real or fake, don't live in small towns anymore, that this oppressed homogenous Protestant majority they claim to spring from has never really existed. The idea of New York, the immigrant metropolis, even the physical geography of the city, is a living challenge to the America they wish to bring about, at the end of a gun if necessary. New York is a fundamentally different idea of what America is than the caricature of the modern Right sells, and that's why the city is the perfect place for a showdown between those two visions.

Dead Island

I know I know, it's another zombie game. I'm posting this more for the trailer than the game. Most video game previews are edited for caffeine-addled fourteen year-olds, but there's a gentleness to this that's surprisingly affecting. I think it's the great music.

The Gaudy Side of Town, Gayngs

Wednesday Exposition

Apocalypse still imminent: Rapture now coming in October – Guardian. I'm starting to think the whole Rapture announcement was part of a giant scientific experiment to see just how much bullshit the human mind can tolerate.

American Scripture: How David Barton Won the Christian Right – Atlantic. This article has a clue about why the experiment above is going so well. David Barton has made a career out of convincing the Christian Right in America that the country was founded as an explicitly Christain nation using selective quotation and dubious scholarship. Applebaum zeroes in on why he is so popular:

And, perhaps most crucially, he insists that the meanings of these texts should require no additional context; that they are readily evident to all who have eyes to see, and a mind to understand and discern. He proclaims a professoriate of all believers.

I think this is why pseudoscience is so popular. The charlatans frame it as an appeal to individuality and self-regard, as in: 'who's smarter, you or this pointy-head scientist?' As if truth was a matter of ego.

Denmark bans Marmite under food safety regulations – BBC

The last action heroine: Why tough actions don't always equal strong women – Alison Willmore, Onion AV Club

How did this get made? Expanding the menu of links, this is a podcast where funny people ask why/how crap films get made.

And no discussion of bad films is complete without Manos (and Torgo):

The Rapture has happened. So who's missing?

Well, the great and the good should be up in heaven by now, leaving, Kenobi-like, only some empty clothes behind. Who exactly the great and the good are is another question.

I had no idea just how thin the scriptural basis for The Rapture was when I began reading about it to write my book of the same name. It's basically the passage from Thessalonians above and some stuff from Daniel mixed with one part of Revelation. The rest is, shall we say, imaginative interpretation. It's twice as confusing when you realise the most solid believers in Revelation as prophecy also believe the Bible should be taken literally.

So who are the saints Revelation talks about? According to Protestants they aren't the most good in the conventional idea. These aren't the people who dedicated their lives to charity, healed the sick, cured cancer, etc. Individual good works means squat, it's a personal relationship with Jesus that counts. Despite it supposedly being just between you and Jesus, they're the ones who define it.

When you get down to it, if you're on their 'team,' you get a free pass on the Apocalypse. That's what it's really about. People can yearn for earthquakes, plagues and mass murder, knowing it will only happen to the 'bad people.' By now I think I would have heard if half the preachers in the country had disappeared, if the megachurches of the sun belt were suddenly empty of everything but piles of sunday best.

Either the Rapture hasn't happened, or there are far fewer saints than the smug would like to believe. If there's an apocalypse coming, they'll be down here with the rest of us when it happens.

The world ends tomorrow. Plan accordingly

From The New York Times:

Thousands of people around the country have spent the last few days taking to the streets and saying final goodbyes before Saturday, Judgment Day, when they expect to be absorbed into heaven in a process known as the rapture. Nonbelievers, they hold, will be left behind to perish along with the world over the next five months.

With their doomsday T-shirts, placards and leaflets, followers — often clutching Bibles — are typically viewed as harmless proselytizers from outside mainstream religion. But their convictions have frequently created the most tension within their own families, particularly with relatives whose main concern about the weekend is whether it will rain.

If you know any believers with a sweet stereo system, remind them that now is the time to give away their worldly possessions…