Journalism is dead in America

Aqua Teen Hunger Force - a better than average absurdist cartoon on Cartoon Network - proves that everyone in Boston is an idiot. The link below is to all of the promo locations. Would YOU call this a bomb scare? Looks like more lazy news driven by a need to fill 24 hours up rather than actual journalism.

http://www.paqlog.com/exit.php?url_id=247&entry_id=198

Thanks to mob justice and some unresearched tip in a news room promoted with breathless hysteria all day, Cartoon Network pays millions because people in Boston think that a light bulb may be a terrorist plot.

Every graffiti artist in the city should pay the same, otherwise the terrorists win.

Excuse the dust

Yes, it's been well over a month since my last post. Not that nothing has been going on, but nothing that seemed worth overcoming my basic state of inertia enough to get me writing has been going on.

But as so often happens, I was reading through a friend's Xanga and, as my comment is going line after line after line, I figured I needed to just say something short and sweet there and I can wax prosaic here to my heart's content, especially since my subscribers are all probably annoyed at me for never posting anything about Christmas, New Years, or the various idiotic bumblings of our futile federal government for more than a month (and lets face it, the last few posts were softballs too about movies and silliness like that).

As such you need to first read http://www.xanga.com/AceytheDebater/566865766/love-was-kept-from-me-like-a-secret.html which is, as usual, a wonderful, sincere, uncluttered look inside a very real person's thoughts and feelings. No offense to any of the rest of you, because I read all your posts and enjoy them greatly, but for some reason her experiences seem to cut closely to mine - sometimes uncomfortably so, which is likely why I find them so compelling.

This recent post, however, in addition to being a lovely read as usual, was a little troubling on a different level. Clearly she's dealing with the big blinders of the heart in the midst of everything else, but this post is in no way meant to be a lecture for her alone (and quite possibly not for her at all; I think she'll understand my commentary on a more visceral level than most people). Nevertheless, as the transition from child to adult and from girlfriend to wife very often come crashing in at the very same time for many women, and because so many Christians are satisfied with milk because they've never been challenged to try anything more meaty, I decided this was a nice opportunity to add my perspective. And incidentally my comment, which I deleted from her site without posting, was only six or seven lines long so this is a rather more expanded essay than the original was, in my mind.

So the blinders of Christian romance...blinders aren't so bad - but as Christians we always need to consider a major point in Christ's teaching: Easy love is nothing special. Jesus calls his disciples on the carpet for loving their friends, because even the gentiles and pagans manage that. So what? So when tall, dark and handsome is sweeping you off your feet, who WOULDNT love him back?The thing with marriage is that it's not about him being tall dark and handsome, it's about him being short tempered sometimes, being moody and inconsiderate sometimes, and looking unattractive - sometimes very unattractive - sometimes. Easy love is nothing special, but we should strive at every opportunity to be different and better than that.

Love that endures - and a marriage that endures - has to survive the times when despite all the warm fuzzy romancey feelings now, you are at some point in the future telling yourself that getting married to this guy was clearly the single stupidest decision you have ever made in your life. Now, maybe you never get to that point - but then again, maybe you're right, and it IS the stupidest decision you ever made. God's love isn't about how you feel about it, or what you should have done if only you had known; God's love comes from God when no other love will do, when your own personal shabby version is all full of 'if only he's and 'why can't he just's and various other selfish demands and requirements for love and respect--but still you love, because you choose to, because you choose to obey Christ who is your greater love.

As for fear, love that endures and a marriage that endures has to also survive the times when, despite all he's feeling now - he feels that marrying you was the single stupidest decision HE ever made in his life. Maybe he never gets to that point; maybe he does, and maybe he's right. Love that endures is not a game of chance, of playing the odds and hoping you find the right guy, wishing for a crystal ball to see if he really is the one - none of that stuff , despite being foundational to dating and culture in America, is remotely biblical. Love that endures is love grounded in your free will choice to love someone who probably doesn't deserve it, with the same love Christ has for us, when we are short tempered, inconsiderate, foul and ugly; love without conditions. The fact that few people understand this and even fewer are willing to suffer, even for a short while, for the sake of their marriage is why divorce rates among evangelical Christians are no less than they are among other people in America. Unfortunately too many girls are conditioned to be princesses in a magical fantasy world where there is no divorce and no compelling reason to even think about it; Christians are supposed to have perfect marriages, right? Sure, we're supposed to do a lot of things. But most Christians can't even be bothered to go to church more than 1.7 times in a given month. An unbeliever at least has the excuse that he or she doesn't know God! How can we present a compelling alternative to the wretched world when we create and promote an unreal fantasy with unreal expectations which is even less connected to the hard work and selflessness of Christianity than the actual world? We need to live in it, but not be part of it - that's something very different than pretending the world is a beautiful rosy path if you're a christian, where every marriage lasts and every child grows up godly...

And that was the point of Christ teaching us to love our enemies, not just our friends, and to be willing to obey to the point of death, not merely to the point of slight inconvenience. Marriage is hard, harder than any other kind of love relationship by orders of magnitude. And the unfortunate side effect of growing up and leaving the cocoon behind is that now, there's no one to blame but yourself for your mistakes and missteps and misspoken words; you have to stand on your own faith, not that of your parents or friends. Love is a choice, it is always a choice, and you make that choice every day, sometimes many times in a day, and you have to live with the consequences whatever they may be. The difference for us is that we have CHRIST, and that gives us strength to face up to the challenges, and to accept the blessings as they come for what they are. We have purpose, and perspective, that an unbeliever can't begin to fathom. But if our reaction is to get mad at God when things aren't perfect, and demand to know why we suffer, then we are fundamentally incorrect in our understanding of God's love. God's answer to 'Why me?" is generally, "Why not you?"  - and why not us, indeed?

Having wandered fairly far afield of my original point, I'll sum up by saying that Christ gave us a brain to use it, two hands and two feet to use them, and a world ripe for harvest. God isn't powerless to change the world - He could of course remake it utterly in the space of a single moment. But He put us here in it, in this world, in this time, in this place. The power of youth is the power of potential.

Addendum

FYI I happened to catch a bit of "Dragonheart" on TBS last night. Sad to say the dragon didn't look all that dated; the one in Eragon, to someone who does graphics for a living, still looks terribly fake. Just something about the smoothness of the motion and the flatness of the coloration. Good CGI is like the CGI in Titanic, or in Jurassic Park, where you're not really sure when you're seeing a digital image and when you're seeing a 'robot' or maquette or miniature - Titanic was made in 93 and still has some of the best graphics in the movies yet because you never know you're even looking at a graphic most of the time you're seeing it. JP has a few pure CGI shots that look it, but the T-Rex was brilliant...Lord of the Rings was probably the best of all with their effects, because they're everywhere, yet you don't really notice them, except when it's that Charlie-Brown-on-dope called Gollum hopping all around. He's very cool, to be sure, but also a bit cartoony...

Oh, how could I forget Pirates 2 - Davey Jones was ALL digital. The easy way to do that is make an octopus head and bluescreen suit, so that you're 'painting' effects onto something that exists on film from the camera; but in fact the entire thing was created in the computer. And he is GORGEOUS, even in close-up, even in HD. The bit where he pops his lips while they're arguing over the price of Jack Sparrow's soul is - for a graphic artist, again - just incredible. That kind of spontenaeity is pretty much impossible, considering how much labor goes into every goraud-shaded gaussiean-blurred animorphic pixel that makes up Davey Jones...They don't just do stuff on their own, it all has to be wireframed, filled, shaded, textured, lit, and color-adjusted - every pixel in every frame. His eyes are just plain beautiful.

Currently Listening The Christmas Song By Nat King Cole see related

Movie News

Yes, gentle readers, it's been a while, but after reading through the reviews of Eragon I felt compelled to write, because a few of you who truly loved the book will soon be going through what I went through when George Lucas destroyed Howard the Duck. Getting a resounding 11% F on Rottentomatoes.com where the positive (100%) reviews are averaged against the negative (0%) reviews, it appears the Christmas movie push has started off with a resounding bomb. My apologies to those of you who adored the book.

Movie critics can be a dour and fussy lot, but on occasion they come up with real gems. For instance, this one from Film Freak Central: "Fears that Fangmeier's debut would be the sequel to Dragonheart nobody wanted prove unwarranted. It's the sequel to BloodRayne that nobody wanted."

From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel: "For those who love the fantasy genre known as sword and sorcery -- and I count myself in their number -- sitting through the movie version of Eragon will suck the will to live right out of you."

From LA Weekly: "In a time of darkness, under the evil reign of John Malkovich... a hero shall rise. But lo, there will be little rejoicing, for this dragon rider (newcomer Edward Speleers) is but a nancy boy."

The Arizona Star says: Eragon "is based on a book by a 19-year-old with a script that seems to have been written by a 12-year-old."

Generally it's the smaller press outlets that take some liberties with their reviews, seeing as they have to maintain an image of seriousness and impartial professionalism. But in this case the movie is apparently so wretched that even the major media has been brutally unkind.

The Associated Press says: "Bland pretty boy Speleers is overshadowed by his dragon and human co-stars, with Irons especially impressive despite some very silly dialogue." Eh, certainly not the worst review out there, but if even the humorless AP is calling it 'very silly dialogue' it must be practically Monty Python stuff.

The Washington Post mutters "Too bad the acting is so lame, the story so derivative and the thing so long."

And even USA today, usually cheery over even legitimately bad movies, can't get much more positive than mentioning "It's a pleasant enough fantastical adventure, but it does feel naggingly derivative."

Now, way back in the way back, when I was in middle school and high school, I used to collect comic books. I still have most of my collection, in fact, though I quit collecting more than a decade ago. The one title I prided myself on was Howard the Duck. The book was already out of print when I started collecting, but it was easy enough to find at comic shops, comic shows or flea markets, etc. It had had a not terrible run of about 35 or so books, with three annuals and a couple special editions, so it was well within the realm of possibility to collect the whole series, and in fact by the time I was a Junior in high school I had everything including the super-size annual crossover with the Defenders (you know, Sub-mariner, the Valkyrie, Beast - all the middle-to-bottom-tier Marvel Superheroes). The total value using the then-current comic guides was about $300, not bad at all for a collection of 40 books or so. If they had continued to increase in value they could have been worth as much as $1000 today if not more, as a quaint set-piece from the Ford/Carter era.

And then the movie Howard the Duck came out. George Lucas was a genius, right? And the material was so scathingly political it couldn't fail. Except Lucas decided to take every stupid idea he'd ever had, ideas that were even too stupid to put into Return of the Jedi (though he found plenty of room for them in later years with ep 1-3) and make a well-nigh-unwatchable train accident of a movie with some of the worst effects since Plan 9 from Outer Space. It was...indescribably bad, the kind of thing that you wonder how the film editor kept from abandoning the entire project on the first day. Then again, perhaps he/she did, it would hardly have made a difference in the final product.

Overnight that segment of my collection devalued to about $12 total. It cost me perhaps $50 to collect.

So, Eragon-lovers, I really do feel your pain right now.

Currently Listening Minimum-Maximum By Kraftwerk Disk 2 Track 1: Radioactivity see related

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