Michael Offutt's Blog, page 103

A Man from U.N.C.L.E. is delightful in a year chock full of secret agents.

In a way, I suddenly feel like I'm living in the golden age of spy movies. Earlier this year I got treated to Kingsman: The Secret Service, then Tom Cruise served up a stellar Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, and now Man From U.N.C.L.E. turned in an impressive story set (to my surprise) in the "Mad Men" era of the sixties.

I never actually watched the t.v. show "Man from U.N.C.L.E." so I had no idea what to expect. Henry Cavill as the main lead named "Napoleon Solo" was superb. He had great lines, and his talents perfectly complimented the imposing Russian K.G.B. agent that became his partner. I was wondering when they were going to explain what "Uncle" was and it didn't happen until the last five minutes, which seems like the studio behind it all is bent on creating a franchise. Personally, I'd go see another based on this one, so a franchise seems like a good move.

The movie was delightful. Style is the substance in this Guy Ritchie remake, and I was surprised that there weren't "gunkata" moments like you see in the Batman or Bourne Identity movies. The bad guy (I swear) is a clone of Paris Hilton. I did a double take several times as I was watching, but my friend that went with me to the movie assured me that it wasn't Paris Hilton. The resemblance, however, was uncanny.

Now I guess I have a few months to wait before the next Bond movie which has my all time favorite villain in it called, "Spectre." It looks so good.

Google is now Alphabet and in that one change was all the money made for the one tech company meant to rule them all.

Taking a page from Warren Buffett, the young billionaires of Silicon Valley entity Google (you may have heard of this company) announced that they would be reorganizing under an umbrella company called "Alphabet." Berkshire Hathaway is essentially the same kind of entity, being a huge company that owns things like Heinz, R.C. Willey, and many other companies that Warren has selected over the years. Under Alphabet's umbrella are: Google (now only a search engine company), Calico (a health effort/life sciences/longevity research company), X Lab (a mad scientist kind of company), Nest (a smart home technology company), Fiber (broadband and cable service), YouTube (a video hosting services company), Ventures (a seed and growth stage funding source for startups), Capital (a late-stage growth venture capital fund), Sidewalk (a company focused on improving city living through technological innovation), Android (phones), and a Drone Deliver Service company. Sundar Pichai was made C.E.O. of Google and Larry Page and Sergey Brin will go on to the top two positions at Alphabet. This means all Google stock will become Alphabet stock.
I think this move is actually pretty brilliant. Google was becoming an enormous octopus where the bottom line of one division impacted the other and had the potential to drag it down like lobsters in a basket. It was impossible to see how all the companies figured into the whole because it was all viewed as one company. Now, each separate tentacle of the monster that is Alphabet will have to declare its own earnings and losses and it will be easy to pinpoint what makes money and what doesn't. Snip snip, cut cut, that is the way of things when it comes to capitalism. In a way, it's a lot like editing. It's why we have chapters instead of one chapter that spans 2,000 pages with no breaks. How hard would that be to edit? It'd be one hot mess. Separation of a huge company like Google creates value, transparency, and a catalyst for a capital return to all investors.

I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I find the whole thing fascinating. On one hand we have a company that is exactly the same as it was yesterday, only because of the reorganization, $25 billion dollars was created in the space of just a few hours. That's pretty crazy just to think about, but it also makes me realize just how awesome it is to own a publicly-held company in America. It's illegal to print money, but it isn't illegal to print new shares of a publicly-held company. If you create value in those shares (however it is warranted) then you have your own private printing press on which infinite dollars can just roll off and into your pocket. I wish I could figure out a way to get in on that game. Sigh.

As a side note, I guess I'll have to start calling the self-driving cars "Alphabet self-driving cars" instead of "Google self-driving cars." I got to admit, it's gonna take some getting used to.

Fear the Walking Dead actually looks better than The Walking Dead. How is that even possible?

You all know how much of a HUGE fan I am of The Walking Dead. I like the characters, the setting, zombies...what more could you ask for from an ongoing series? Everybody else seems to agree with me because The Walking Dead is a monster hit. In the world of cable shows, it's basically what Harry Potter was to young adult fiction. With only a couple weeks and counting from the premiere, AMC released another trailer with some "behind the scenes" peeks at the series from showrunner Dave Erickson and many of the cast members.

What can you expect from season 1? Well it's going to take place in the time that Rick was in a coma (a period of about five weeks). But what I get from the sneak peek embedded below is a tremendous sense of dread, fear, and full on horror. It also promises to be action-packed because we all know how the world basically ends. That it ends in a mere five weeks is incredible. Imagine going from everything that we take for granted right now to five weeks later where we see the total and complete collapse of civilization as we know it. 

Chanie Gorkin's Bad Day poem is exactly what every writer needs to master their insecurities and appreciate the dual meaning of words.

Today is the first Wednesday of August, and I thought that 17-year-old Chanie Gorkin's "Bad Day" poem might be just perfect for an Insecure Writer's Support Group post. Chanie (a soon to be 12th grader in Brooklyn) wrote the poem last year and based it on Hasidic philosophy. The reason why I think it's perfect is because the poem has two meanings. When read top to bottom it has an entirely different tone than when read from bottom to top. Anyone who writes can appreciate this dual meaning of words and how oftentimes we must force ourselves to gain a new perspective on our work to see it in some meaningful way. I've even heard of writers reading their own words back to front in an attempt to catch errors. Chanie's poem is brilliant and wonderful and I think every single one of us can find some meaning in what she says. After all, there is power in insecurity once we learn how to channel it into something positive.

Today was the absolute worst day ever
And don't try to convince me that
There's something good in every day
Because, when you take a closer look,
This world is a pretty evil place.
Even if
Some goodness does shine through once in a while
Satisfaction and happiness don't last.
And it's not true that
It's all in the mind and heart
Because
True happiness can be obtained
Only if one's surroundings are good
It's not true that good exists
I'm sure you can agree that
The reality
Creates
My attitude
It's all beyond my control
And you'll never in a million years hear me say that
Today was a good day.

(Now read from bottom to top).

I won't be posting Friday as I have a friend coming to visit from out of town (which is exciting). I'll see you Monday.

Is Mr. Robot noir and if so is it a reinvention of Breaking Bad?

  I just figured it out: Mr. Robot is just Breaking Bad, only it's Breaking Bad for techno geeks. Elliott is the stand-in for Walter White and his slow descent into the criminal world is basically the same as Walter White's. I mean, Walter White started out slow by cooking meth for small time drug dealers and then outwitted/killed them. Elliott is essentially doing the same thing: forced to outwit the clueless drug leaders by outplaying them. What really clued me in was last week's episode where he had a gun held to his head, and he began to rattle off all the reasons that the guy holding the gun to his head couldn't shoot him. It sounded eerily familiar to something Walter White might say to Tuco or to Gus.

As a caveat, Mr. Robot is not a ripoff of Breaking Bad by any means, but it certainly seems to be a clever reinvention, however intended as far as the writers are concerned. Which makes me ask the next question: is Mr. Robot noir then? From what I understand, noir is where the main character is basically an anti-hero and we are dragged along on a ride that ends in his ultimate destruction. If this is the case, then Elliott is doomed and the seasons of this show will show us his descent piece by piece (and of course his path will be littered with the bodies of everyone that knows him). We already started this in a way with Shayla's brutal death at the hands of Vera's henchmen.

So what do you guys think? Is Mr. Robot noir and if so is it a reinvention of Breaking Bad? Let's hope so, because Breaking Bad was probably the best television series I've ever seen.

I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 10. For the most part it was smooth but there have been bugs.

I upgraded to Windows 10 on Wednesday. My previous operating system was Windows 7 Ultimate, and I felt like it was time to make the jump even though there was technically nothing wrong with my computer and the way it was running. I did reserve a copy of Windows 10, but I didn't want to wait for my upgrade prompt. If you happen to be one of the few that are still waiting (or just never received one) you can go HERE to download and install Microsoft's Media Creation Tool. You'll launch it when you finish. To be clear, this is only for people making the update and not doing a clean install.

And before you upgrade, you'll want to have your Windows 7 COMPLETELY updated with all Microsoft patches. I've done this on several computers now, and the update screws up if your computer has any malware on it or if you are missing some critical updates. For example, I just installed Windows 7 on a computer and made the jump to Windows 10 thinking that it would be quicker (rather than waiting for all of the updates to install) and instead a weird bug caused the "Settings Applet" to keep crashing. This wouldn't be all that important, however, the "Settings Applet" is now where the Windows Update utility is located. If you can't launch the Settings, you can't get important updates pushed out by Microsoft. So yeah, that didn't work. Lesson learned. Update the old operating system completely before making your migration.

Once Windows 10 is installed on your computer, there may be bugs (Microsoft did not put out a perfect product--big surprise, right?). Some that I've experienced are that my Norton Security Suite and Cyberlink Power DVD appear to have issues. There's an update for the Cyberlink Power DVD that I use to play Blu-Ray movies on my computer, but it costs $50.00, and I assume it's compatible with Windows 10. The old version I use (version 11) has some issues where it won't shut down once the app is launched and you have to restart the computer. I think I'll look online for a free Blu-ray player that has Windows 10 support (not that I use my player much these days as Netflix has everything that I watch). If you know of any, please let me know in the comments :). As for my Norton, it's offered free through my Xfinity subscription. Since it's so buggy, I just downloaded the uninstall tool and uninstalled it. I'm using Windows Defender now which actually seems to be pretty good and has no bugs at all (being a Microsoft product).

Then there's a strange bug that's happening with my Motorola cable modem. It sometimes loses its internet connection when I restart because it can't get an I.P. address issued from the computer and shows as an unidentified network. If I do a complete shutdown and then start up the computer cold, it will start working again. I'm not sure if it's some kind of compatibility issue with the new operating system or if I should see if there's some updated firmware available through Motorola. It's not too much of a big deal because when I upgraded my computer a year ago, I bought a Haswell system with a motherboard that included wireless and bluetooth capabilities. So when the ethernet goes down, it just automatically logs onto the wireless signal.

All the drivers updated to the new system pretty easily. If you don't know what drivers are, they are what make all of the hardware on your computer work. So when a driver isn't working, it's trouble for your pc. Gripes I have about Windows 10 include the following: 1) because Microsoft's servers are overloaded with people downloading and upgrading, your own computer automatically gets enslaved to the Microsoft botnet so that critical files can be downloaded to other people's computers (you can turn this off), 2) Microsoft saves your old version of Windows as a temporary file that you need to find and delete (mine took up 32 gigabytes and I don't need a backup because I got one on an external hard drive), 3) Microsoft trademarked "Windows 365," which means that they probably intend to eventually move Windows 10 to a subscription based model.

If you don't know what subscription-based software is, then think of Microsoft Office 365 with a recurring cost of around $10 a month. It's my opinion that there will probably be ads on the operating system at some point in the future if you don't pay. Either that or some features may not be available (like automatic updates). It disturbs me that every company is moving to subscription-based service because recurring costs are essentially like interest. You can't ever get rid of them and they will keep you in the poor house if you don't find a way to control all the subscriptions. Personally, I think recurring costs are the death of wealth. More and more we are a society where upward mobility is becoming increasingly impossible as corporate forces keep pushing us down.

If you are still hesitating upgrading from your trusty old Windows 7, keep in mind that Windows 10 has far better security and loads faster. It also has better multi-monitor support (which is fantastic).

The fact that America's rapist Bill Cosby continues to lie seems like pretty typical American behavior

A now famous image of all Bill Cosby's victims. As I page through the online stories of Bill Cosby assaulting woman after woman, drugging them, taking advantage of them with his fame and then pressuring them into silence through intimidation, I am reminded of the hours and hours my mother spent in front of the television watching "The Cosby Show" in the late nineties.

A little background: I come from a kind of sad little family. It is likely that neither my brother nor myself will have children, and I think my parents knew this when "The Cosby Show" reruns were still popular about ten to fifteen years ago. My mother was hit especially hard (emotionally) because she had a longing to be a grandmother long after every single one of her friends got grandkids aplenty. But I'm not here to bitch about how life forks for different people, and how some people are never presented with the opportunities that others have. Rather, I'm here to talk about how "The Cosby Show" actually made my mother laugh and cry at the same time. The laughing is easy to explain if you've seen even a single episode of the Emmy winning program. But the crying? That requires a little psychology and how humble bragging can actually make those who live without just a wee bit depressed. Think of it as the "Facebook effect" long before Facebook made it possible for people to post the best moments of their lives on a news feed so that you can feel shitty about your own life. It happened because she (this little Japanese woman) bought the illusion that NBC shoveled to the masses. She believed that this was a "normal" American family and inevitably drew sharp contrast to our own dysfunctional one. And as for Bill Cosby? My mother thought he was a great American.

But behind all the glitz and magical humor of "The Cosby Show" lurked what headlines now call America's rapist...a man who knocked out more people than Sugar Ray Leonard so he could get down to his amoral business. From the perspective of 2015, "The Cosby Show" looks like nothing but a huge lie to me now. And the older I get, the more poisoned I've become to the idea that there is actually anything out there to respect. When I was young, I could look at the well-dressed people heading off to Sunday church and think, "how sharp and respectable they are." But then came the shattering illusions of my self awareness which was then shorn piece by piece away through the acts of society: the most popular couple in my high school separated because the boyfriend was beating his girlfriend in private, the clean scrubbed game store owner and returned LDS missionary was a pedophile, the local entrepreneur driving new cars and living large in a great mansion on the hill was a crook and running a ponzi scheme that destroyed people's retirements, and the new friend I just made really only wants me as a friend so that they can beg for money and share the link to their "Go Fund Me" account on Facebook.

Lies. Deception. More Lies. All to preserve the image of something that's wholesome and altogether a fiction. I guess what really makes me upset is the utter hypocrisy in presenting to the world an image of perfection while utter rot lurks just beneath the surface. Why do people feel compelled to lie so much? Just show your inner monster. If you're a bigot, admit it to the world. Gnash your teeth together in hatred so that we can have a real fight. For example, I actually am amused and respect Donald Trump for saying whatever the hell comes across his mind. I'd never vote for that racist bastard, but it's refreshing to see someone just tell it like it is. How about the guy down south that owns a hardware store that hung a sign that said, "No Gays Allowed?" I kind of respect the courage to wear your hatred on your skin like that. And what about Bill Cosby?

Well, he's being a coward. He should come clean, set the record straight, pay reparations and offer to go to prison for the rest of his life for the things he's done. Wear his monster instead of being a coward. It's practically the only thing he could do at this point that could possibly earn back any respect for who he is. But will he do that? My opinion is "probably not."

After all, my mom said it right. Bill Cosby is an American and that more than likely means, "Liar."

Why is The Strain's apocalypse so underwhelming when it should be the best thing on television?

I like pretty much anything science fiction. This weekend I watched Lavalantula and Two Headed Shark Attack. I thought Three Headed Shark Attack was threatening to overdose me on The Asylum's particular brand of terrible movies, so I'll spare you a review. And let's face it, it was all just filler for the normal Sunday night shows that I indulge this time of year: True Detective, Falling Skies (on its last season), and The Strain.

Aside from arguing with my friend Adam over who is the "True Detective" of season two, our other conversations tend to circle around "The Strain." This season, the vampire apocalypse has full on struck New York City. Vampires wander the alleys and streets in packs doing "The Master's" bidding while our would-be group of heroes from season one are cooking up a "strain" of their own that will infect vampires and essentially kill them.

Guillermo del Toro's handiwork is evident in the exploration of vampire biology which ends up being intriguing enough to stick with the show week after week. We are also fed nuggets of information about the vampires. We've learned there is more than one master, and they are not fond of one of their number going rogue. We've learned that Abraham is 94 years old and sustains his youth by turning the vampire worms into a boiled down cocktail that he injects into his eyes to give him the strength of someone thirty to forty years younger. And we've also learned that no one in New York City really seems to care that people are dying everywhere.

This is one of the things that I thought I Am Legend captured so wonderfully in those snippets of all hell breaking lose that we saw through Will Smith's flashbacks. Maybe Fear the Walking Dead (which is supposed to premiere in August) will show how an apocalypse exploding in real time should happen, i.e., widespread panic and people screaming while buildings burn to the ground. Everyone in The Strain just seems so damned calm, and it's weirding me out a bit. "Oh there's a vampire apocalypse? Let's just break into this spa, kill some vamps, and then have sex in the pool." "Oh there's vampires eating people by ejecting six foot snakes from their mouths? No worries, I still need to see your I.D. to get into this place and there's going to be a ribbon cutting ceremony at the new food bank down the street." As far as I can tell, it's business as usual in New York with people going to their jobs and kids attending school. All I can say is...really? Have you not seen the vampires eating your neighbor? Why is traffic on the streets not gridlocked with people trying to get the hell out of New York City?

Anyway, my criticism aside it's not going to make me stop watching. I just am a little flummoxed at this particular representation of an apocalypse.

Taking my mid-summer blog break. See you next Monday.

I'm taking a break from the good ole blog for one week. I shall see you again next Monday.

A Bones and Sleepy Hollow crossover is happening and I'm mad as hell about it.

I don't watch the show Bones anymore. It used to be one of my favorites but they killed Vincent Nigel Murray so that he could leave to go play in the doomed SyFy series, Alphas, and I declared myself, "done with this show." In the years since I abandoned it, I'd heard that Boothe and Dr. Brennan got married (yay...glad I missed that) and that Dr. Sweets (a character that I absolutely loved) also got killed off so he could leave for another show. Quite frankly, I'm glad I stopped watching.

So it really pisses me off that Fox is ramrodding a crossover of Sleepy Hollow (one of my favorite supernatural thrillers) with that of Bones. This reeks of desperation to me. Bones is losing viewers by the droves because the story jumped the shark a long time ago and they killed off too many beloved characters and/or had the characters on the show treat them like shit. Dr. Sweets rarely if ever got any kind of respect from the scientists in the show.

But one of the things that I liked about Brennan's character was her atheism, and her level headed-ness in the face of all things supernatural. I remember an episode where a voodoo priest tried to scare her with his curses and she poked him in the eye and said something like, "People aren't so scary when they get poked in the eye." Her belief in things that can be proven was like finding my fictional soul mate. When asked about her beliefs, Dr. Brennan said, "I believe that this coffee is warm because the molecules are racing around in it. I believe that the sun will rise in the morning because it has several billion years to go before its nuclear fuel is depleted" and on and on and on. Dr. Brennan is incredibly grounded in science and a crossover with Sleepy Hollow is going to suggest that Brennan doesn't know everything, which is wrong because SHE PRETTY MUCH DOES KNOW EVERYTHING. Brennan's IQ is off the charts. She's smarter than the crack of Indiana Jones's whip.

So now Abbey and Ichabod are going to cross paths with Boothe and Brennan? Give me a break. Ichabod is 250 years old...this can't/shouldn't exist in Brennan's universe. The first two seasons of Sleepy Hollow were about the Book of Revelations and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse which Brennan views as FICTION in the same vein as Harry Potter. It makes for a great story. But mixing these worlds MAKES BRENNAN wrong about everything she believes in. Why does FOX even think that this is a good idea?!

In a week full of outrage, I guess this latest insult from Fox makes me want to ask, "Et tu Fox?" But thanks to Shakespeare, we all know how that ended.