Matt McHugh.com - Blog - February 2010

So the boy had his year-end rec league wrestling tournament today. I've avoided all his matches so far because of years of mutual frustration with trying to teach him basic baseball skills, so I'm letting him discover this sport entirely on his own.

After two years, it seems to be starting to stick. He won a few matches this year and in the tournament, easily pinned a younger, less experienced kid. That single win actually put him in the final, so he was quite enthralled by the possibility of getting a gold medal. However as the hours of waiting to get to the last match wore on, he began to complain his stomach hurt. We gave him the option to leave, but he wanted to stick it out for a shot at the gold. About ten minutes before he would have gone on deck, he projectile vomited all over the stands.

Mostly, he hit empty bleachers, but me and his little sister got a bit. He was pretty upset, his sister was hysterical, and the wife and I both felt like schmucks for not taking him home earlier. Back at home, we got some Tums and ginger ale and watched Justice League in bed, so everyone felt better, but still, hell of a day.

Dutch 4-man bobsled driver Edwin van Calker withdrew from the olympics yesterday after deciding he was not confident enough to compete on the Whistler Sliding Center track, which has already claimed one life and seen several crashes, including one he was involved in.

There seems to be a lot of chatter over whether or not this guy is being prudent or a wuss. Never having negotiated a sled down an ice track at 80-plus miles per hour myself, I can't say with any informed opinion if his withdrawal is justified. However, bobsledding is an innately dangerous sport and, as the sled's driver, he's directly responsible for the lives of the other men on board. So, for whatever reason on any given day, if he doesn't feel up to the task, he's right to step aside. Unfortunately, at this point, there's no one available to take his place so he kind of screws his teammates in the process.

I know two things for sure here: he and his teammates will go home alive and medaless because of his decision. I wonder how they feel about that trade-off. You can go on the "No guts, no glory" rant all you like but as I've aged, I've become less and less impressed with reckless risk-takers. Fortune may favor the bold, but the meek shall inherit the earth. A stitch in time saves nine, while fools rush in where angels fear to tread. You should always brush after meals and turn your wheels toward the curb when parking in San Francisco. And get down from there before you break your neck or poke someone's eye out!

At 69, Dick Cheney just had his fifth heart attack. He had his first when he was 37. Apparently, it's very, very rare anyone can have a history like that and still be alive. A real testament to the power of American health care when you can afford to buy the very best.

All I'll say here is to wonder how many people would still be alive if any of those past four myocardial infarctions had felled Mr. Cheney? Who can say how the winds of alternative history speculations might have blown, but I find it hard not to ponder the state of the world had the chief figure of the neo-con hawks been removed as a variable.

Several thousand U.S. soldiers would likely still be alive, plus about 100,000 Iraqis. Of course, Saddam Hussein and his kin would likely still be in control of Iraq. Discuss amongst yourselves if you find that an acceptable trade-off. Oh, and let's not forget all those Halliburton stockholders who would be even deeper in the hole had D.C. not helped engineer a nice bubble for them in the mid-aughts, before the bottom dropped out and they lost their shirts anyway.

Apple recently undertook to scrub the iTunes App store of "sexy" apps with bikini models and jiggly boob photos. Censorship? Not really. A bit unfair? Perhaps. So sing along in protest with me and Justin Timberlake:

I've got a Sexy App
Sent it to iTunes but they sent it back
Yet they still sell tons of R-rated crap
I guess that helps keep them all in the black

Unka Steve
What kind of #bleep!#
you hidin' up your sleeve?
You think you'll fool us with a press release
Tell the stockholders what they should believe

Yesterday, apparently Apple began a campaign to remove from the iTunes store the growingly common "bikini" apps -- i.e., photo collections with swimsuit or lingerie models, since they never permitted nudity. Some of the nerderatti are up in arms over censorship, but that's not really relevant. Apple is a private commercial entity and as such utterly free to choose what they permit in their own online store. And, if a bunch of moms complain about seeing cleavage on their kids iPods, they can damage control that however they see fit.

What bugs me is the hypocrisy. They take down scores of -- admittedly pointless -- cheesecake apps, yet leave up apps from Playboy and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, not to mention hundreds of R-rated movies and explicit song versions. Nope. They won't mess with those because they're actually profitable. A little PR tweak, but no high road for Apple.

CNN.com is probably my primary daily news source. I'll typically scan the headlines once or twice a day, maybe reading a story or two in full, but mostly just scanning. Gradually, I've come to see it as all but worthless.

Once, I considered it moderately respectable as a journalistic outlet. Lately it seems to be on par with the U.S.A. Today. If they could leave it free outside my hotel room, they would. Their inch-deep, foot-wide coverage of the day's events -- always heavily peppered with infotainment fluff -- seems less and less worth the eight minutes at lunch I spend on the site. When I check BBC.com or the NY Times or even Google News, there's always pretty major national and international goings-on that fail to cause a blip above or below the fold on CNN.com. And their actual stories seem to get shorter and shallower by the day. Have you noticed that the norm for an article on CNN.com is that they're written with one-sentence paragraphs. I'll grant you that makes it easier to scan, but it just feels like the consider their readership to be a hair above legal moron status. (Discuss amongst yourselves.)

Of course, the one thing CNN does well is run a lead story -- like yesterday's "The government is broken" poll -- that gets my dander up. Of course, I've long since come to understand that is one of the chief aims of commercial news outlets. Irritated people tend to spend more time on the site, garnering more of those ever-so-precious DoubleClick ad impressions. And I do, getting huffier as I click on op-eds and eagerly registering my discontent in the comments sections.

I'm getting a kick out of a new CNN poll saying 60-some percent of Americans believe the government is "broken."

First off, any poll like this is meaningless. Survey a few hundred people, ask them carefully crafted leading questions, and you can get a predictable majority to agree with whatever predetermined outcome you wish to report. Believe me. I've done it many times.

More to the point though, what the fuck is this supposed to mean anyway? "Broken"? The implication is that a vast bureaucracy made of ex-lawyers and businessmen beholden to the whim of public opinion once, somehow, functioned more effectively than it does now. A moment's reflection on the entrenched history of corruption, cronyism, and incompetence in the running of the republic should dispel that. No, the government today chugs along as always, like a train derailed yet upright, bumping over the ties because moving it a few inches onto the track is infinitely more difficult that adapting to its hobbled forward momentum.

If you think the government is "broken" you're romanticizing the rickety machinery of it. It's not broken; it just doesn't work all that well.

Fine. Everybody else is, so I'll go ahead and proffer my perspective on Tiger Woods, disclaiming first and foremost, now and forever, that I really don't care much about the whole thing.

Here's all I ever thought about Tiger Woods. Great golfer. Seemed like a decent guy. That's as much thought as I ever gave him. The oddity of his mixed racial heritage in a game (still can't bring myself to call golf a "sport") heavily dominated by white men was kind of academically interesting. I do recall being quite impressed when I found out that a trick he did on a commercial -- namely, bouncing a golf ball on a 9-iron for a minute, then wacking it in mid-air for a couple hundred yards -- was completely real and not staged or CGI. Oh, and my neighbor kind of looks like him. And there was a good skit on Saturday Night Live about the first time his father took him to a public course and made him play by taping a club to his hand (Tiger's Dad: "That was the best day of my life." ; Tiger: "That was pretty much the worst day of my life.")

Now that he's revealed to be a serial cheater -- rare for a wealthy pro athlete, huh? -- I still don't care. I don't think less of him, because I never really thought much of him. Except that he was a great golfer (still is). So I don't think he's such a decent guy anymore... but, hey, who is? Look under our surfaces and we're all selfish, lecherous children. Most of us just don't have the opportunity to act on those impulses Tiger had. I think of the Chris Rock line: "A man is only as faithful as his options." He certainly had plenty of options.

So cluck your tongue and wag your finger all you like, but to me, Tiger Woods is basically a character on a soap opera. The fact that he's "real" is irrelevant. I ain't never seen him but on TV, so, as best, he's a reality show star to me. And I don't watch reality shows.

Had a great dream last night. I didn't write notes immediately upon waking, so a lot of it has evaporated now, but I still recall enough of the general arc of it.

I was performing in a play I'd written. It was myself and an older man and we didn't so much interact as characters as recite separate monologs giving different perspectives on ideas. The theater was mid-size, true theater with a proscenium stage and a lighting balcony. The stage was simple "black box" set-up, with no props or sets. However, there were a series of scrims where lighting effects were projected for atmosphere.

I don't recall much of the play. I can remember being on stage, looking out and seeing people I recognized in the audience. There was a lot of ad-libbing and improvisation; I rarely seemed to know my lines, but it didn't matter since the play had an experimental feel well-suited to disjointed speeches. The only lines I specifically recall came in the opening in the third act -- which the other actor and I began at the back of the theater, forcing everyone to turn their seats -- were I recited the opening of The Canterbury Tales in Old English:

I have no doubt I mangled it, but it was right for the structure of the play nonetheless. Then followed some dissection of the words, for example: "roote" meaning "root" has the same original derivation as "ruth" meaning compassion or sympathy. (I don't think that's really true, but again, it fit into the play.) Also, I recall being in the balcony before the act wrapping small gifts that would be handed out to random people in the audience. Again, all part of the odd, experimental quality of the play.

Afterward, I remember walking down a Manhattan street with the other actor, marvelling that we'd just gotten to perform a play in a real Broadway theater. Apparently, it was as part of some festival and an executive at my employer had pulled used some influence to get my play a slot on the bill. I think there was to be one more performance next week. I have no recollection how the play was received, but that was utterly irrelevant. The point was all about the adventure of doing it.

I wish I could remember more of the dialog. I recall the look and staging of it vividly, but most of the words are gone. Still, a very cool dream.

Yesterday afternoon, a man angry over tax laws crashed a private plane in a U.S. government building as an act of protest. Today at lunchtime, when I surfed the news sites, every single one has Tiger Woods' apology as the lead story. Apparently the TV networks even interrupted regular programming to show it. I had to scroll way down to find anything on the crash buried in subsections.

The idea that the affairs of a celebrity get more media coverage than an act of terrorism (that's what I would call a deliberate, fatal plane crash into a government building to make a political point... what would you call it?) is just appalling. We are a silly, shallow, self-indulgent culture, and it's going to get us into trouble.

So, as I say, I actually had a hard time finding any substantive information about the crash. One thing I did come across, published in its entirety in the New York Daily News, was this guy's 10-page manifesto, detailing his grievances with the government, taxation, commercial lenders, and big business. I only skimmed it, but it seemed lucid enough -- at least not obviously schizophrenic raving. Still, I find it very difficult to acknowledge the validity of any points he makes because of the method he chose to call attention to them. Personally, I think you lose you're right to be listened to when you use homicide as a rhetorical device. I'm kind of prickly like that.

However, he did quote something I found amusing. I repeat it because it's not originally his:

The Communist Creed: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
- Karl Marx (1818-1883)

The Capitalist Creed: "From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."
- Henry Fairlie (1924-1990)

Oh, just realized I forgot to mark the anniversary of when I started this blog. February 12, 2004. Six years.

Sometimes, I've done daily entries. Sometimes, less than monthly. But the fact I'm still at in any form this far down the road is exactly what I was shooting for when I started: a long-running record of select ideas as they pass through my mind, spurred by events of the day or whatever random neurological collisions that happen to happen in my head for whatever reason.

So, the project continues, obsessively, but without aim or purpose. Just like I like it.

Had a bit of an eye-opener this evening. I was working late and my office building has a small, private exercise studio -- basically just a room with a wooden floor and mirrors. I thought I'd take a break and work out a little. I had a pair of shorts, but no T-shirt. Absolutely no one was around, so I didn't see the harm in going shirtless for a little 20-minute sweatbreaker.

Out there, under the fluorescent lights, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling/wall-to-wall mirrors -- holy crap! -- my pasty, hairy, jiggly midriff spare tire was the most appalling site I've seen in months. Watching that ring 'o flab lap over my waistband and bounce around like a jello-filled inner tube certainly motivated me to pick up the pace.

I've had my ups and downs, but I'm generally a pretty fit for guy my age. I have decent (though no longer impressive) muscle tone, and I tend to think I look OK. Seeing myself in that unforgiving arena, I just seemed like a scrawny-legged, middle-aged doughboy. And, it struck me, that's what I am. I do a few push ups and think I'm still spitting distance to my 25-year-old torso. No, my friend... thou doest thine own self deceive most egregiously! Thou art a blob.

I just finished the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. I'd been wanting to read it since seeing the Will Smith movie (good, not great) last year. Now I still need to dredge up Charleton Heston's The Omega Man for the complete experience.

Anyway, the novel... or novella, I should really say (for reasons that will become clear momentarily): I liked it. More dire, more depressing, more about human isolation than monster-fighting when compared to the movie's focus. And, just as it really starts to get good about 160 pages in -- pretty much halfway through the trade paperback -- the first section ends.

Or so I thought. As I read on, there's an odd chapter about a strange man at a carnival. I'm trying to think how this connects back to what I've just read. The next chapter is about a young woman menaced by a murderous wooden idol. What? Hey, I remember seeing that in that 70's Trilogy of Terror TV movie starring Karen Black (scared the bejezzus out of me as a kid... still creepy as heck). It slowly dawns on me that what I'm reading in the latter half of a book emblazoned "I AM LEGEND" on the cover (complete with Will Smith movie still) is not the latter half a novel but a collection of unrelated short stories. The book should be called "I Am Legend" ...and Other Stories ...but it ain't.

So what's going on here? Apparently, someone at TOR publishing (a Division of Warner Brothers) decided to re-release the Matheson original work to tie-in to the movie. Fine... but, in order to make it bigger and justify a more profitable trade paperback release, they pad out the pages with some Matheson short stories. Again, fine. What floors me is they don't even say so.

Why? Do they think movie fans might not buy the book if the story isn't a full-length novel? (They might be right.) Or do they think that adding "...and Other Stories" detracts from the book's shelf impact? (They might be right.) Or -- and this is the one that kills me -- do they think short stories are generally anathema to the book buying public? Sadly, publishers do seem to believe that last point... and they might be right.

The idea that even avid readers steer clear of short stories in favor longer single works is downright depressing. Are short story writers passing into legend? The last of their kind, surrounded by hordes of mindless zombie/vampire books? Makes you wonder.

I finally saw footage of the luge crash in Vancouver that killed 21-year-old Georgian athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili. I'd heard that it was captured on video, but for the first day or so, news outlets seemed reluctant to show anything but a few stills. Now, the video is all over the place online -- including every major news site

I have to say I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I tend to agree with those who feel it's inappropriate for a major news site to openly host a video of an accident that resulted in death. Still, this is big news and people need to see it to understand what happened.

Case in point: now that I have seen it, I can whole-heartedly conclude that the track was at fault. I don't care what the Olympic committee or the International Luge Federation or anybody says. That wall is four feet high with exposed steel beams. I don't give a crap if it's on the final straightaway and up to internationally standard luge track specifications, or whatever other hash is being slung out there. Any person with half a brain can see that it's inadequate safety preparation for human bodies hurtling by at 80mph.

A few thousand dollars of Plexiglass or even plywood would have saved this athlete's life. Perpetual shame and dishonor upon the designers (and financiers) of the Whistler Sliding Centre. Your lack of forethought and corner-cutting cost a young man his life.

Oh, and news organizations: if you're going to host a video like this, place it behind login or under some greater access control as a minimum bit of social responsibility. Shame upon you, as well.

In reading over assorted comments about M. Night Shyamalan's forthcoming movie of The Last Airbender, the whole issue of race in the casting keeps coming up with a fair bit of vitriol. The cartoon source material -- while created and produced by two Anglo-Saxon Americans -- is absolutely set in an east Asian universe. Personally, I found one of the pleasures of the TV show was how it grounded the fantasy in such a realistic yet exotic (at least to me) setting.

Here's a neat little YouTube video I found that explores the cartoon's Asian imagery:

When the movie's cast consisting of mainly white American actors was made public, there was quite a bit of hue and cry in the blogosphere over "racebending." I have to say, I was a little disappointed. I mean, when was the last time you saw a big-budget Hollywood movie with Inuit and Tibetan actors in starring roles? Would have been interesting. But, for whatever reason, Shyamalan -- who is, of course, of Indian descent -- went with white kids for the leads, with the exception of one Indian.

Again, a little disappointing, but I'm not bent out of shape over it. M. Night has a hell of track record for picking young stars (Haley Joel Osment, Abigail Breslin, and Bryce Dallas Howard all got their big breaks in Shyamalan movies), so I'll give him he benefit of the doubt here. Besides, seeing how that kid playing Aang handles the bo, it's obvious he got the part on merit.

In reading something on the Super Bowl commercials, I noticed a mention of one for The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan's live-action adaptation of my beloved Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender (James Cameron forced them to drop the A-word from the cinematic title). Apparently, the new trailer is online now, so had to check that out. Here you go:

Not bad. I like the look of it, though hard to imagine it could live up to the cartoon's visual inventiveness. And it seems a little dark -- both in palette and tone. Action and melodrama are what sell a movie in a minute-thirty, so it may not be quite like that in the final cut. And I have to say I'm not sure what I think of the cast yet, though the lead kid seems impressive.

Like many grown-up (relatively speaking!) fans of the cartoon, I'm wary of a film version. Geekdom loves company, so a bigger audience would be a welcome thing, but geeky movie dorks have a real love-hate thing for Shyamalan. Personally, I have great appreciation for his cinematic craftsmanship, not only for building suspense but for capturing the emotional core of his characters. At his best, he's brilliant. At his worst, he's maddeningly illogical. I'm reserving judgement till I see the movie, but I'm crossing my fingers. Come on, M. Night. Don't screw it up!

Back at work today. Usually, when I'm out for a day or so for whatever reason, things pile up unbearably But, fortunately, so many people took both days out of the office, things didn't get too bad.

I still have a lot of Brits, Germans, and Asians to deal with, though, so local weather doesn't really stop them from e-mailing more stuff to the slush pile. Though, for the first time in my memory, the U.K. had a fair amount of snow a few weeks ago, so Londoners were actually sympathetic to the whole once-alien concept of a "snow day."

School was closed again today, and even though the office was open, I stayed home. Still enough snow from yesterday to clean up out there to justify it. I got some work done on my laptop in the morning. The kids were in the next room watching Tom & Jerry cartoons, which, fortunately, I don't like all that much. If they'd put on Bugs Bunny or Avatar, my productivity would have been seriously hampered.

Anyway, as mentioned, it was a good, wet snow, perfect for sculpting. I started on a lion this afternoon with the kids, but the project never quite got finished.

However, I did complete carving out the igloo I started yesterday. Quite pleased with it. About five feet tall, eight feet wide, strong enough to stand on and big enough inside for me to crawl in and turn around easily. My daughter can almost stand it in.

And here's the snowman my son made, single-handedly. The head got a little mushed by the overnight driven snow, but still a solid piece of work. I feel like I've officially passed the mantel of the scarf!

Finally, my little corner of NJ got the big snowfall that's missed it several times this winter. It was a good one, dumping a foot of heavy, wet snow over a day and a night. I spaced out my shovelling over a few sessions and pulled out the snowblower for the straightaways, so all in all, not too taxing.

During the height of it, the kids were out sledding off the front lawn retaining wall, normally a three-foot drop, but perfectly drifted by the blizzard to form a neat slide. My son even built, completely on his own, with out a shred of assistance, his own snowman. He even took some construction advice when he was having trouble stacking the head ("You have to carve an round indentation in the body ball before you put the head on, so it has a place to sit.").

As they did that, I shoveled up a giant mound on the lawn in preparation to carve out an igloo. Spent four extra hours on the project, frozen and soaked to the bone by the time I was done, but it shaped up nicely with just enough room to crawl in. Tomorrow, I'll hollow out the interior space all the way so the kids can stand in it.

I vaguely remember hearing a year or two ago about the tobacco-less electronic cigarette, designed to skirt around public smoking restrictions because they don't emit secondhand smoke. Seemed like a goofy, doomed idea at the time, so I was kind of surprised to notice e-cigarette advertisements popping up online over the last few months.

The other day, I came across an article on CNN.com reporting the results of the first study of e-cigarettes by U.S. doctors that basically said two things: 1) they don't deliver a significant amount of nicotine, and 2) they contain carcinogens. Well, I thought, that's pretty much a nail in the coffin of these fake coffin nails.

However, as I read a bit more about how they work (they vaporize liquid nicotine with a small electric heating element) -- including numerous comments from users who claim they have been instrumental to their quitting tobacco -- I began to wonder. A few other commenters on the article noted weaknesses in the study and even called the impartiality of its director into question, stating he has been employed by both the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries at different points.

I can neither confirm nor deny one side or the other here, but more and more, I find myself distrustful of news items that so perfectly support someone's profit agenda. Seems to me the most significant threat posed by e-cigarettes is not to public health but to tobacco and smoking-cessation pharmaceutical products, if they work as cheap, relatively safe nicotine substitutes. As for toxicity, it's pretty hard to believe they have significant carcinogen content as compared to tobacco cigarettes or, say, the air I breathe daily in New Jersey.

Not that I suggest collusion, but tobacco settlement money does fund quite a bit of cancer research. It's not hard to imagine a roundabout conspiracy to discredit e-cigarettes by designing studies that make them look simultaneously ineffective and dangerous. Not saying that's what's happening here. Just saying I find it plausible.

Mine isn't a big sports-watching household, but the Super Bowl usually makes the cut. As we sat and watched with the kids, my son declared: "I'm kind of interested but kind of bored, since I don't understand football. Can you explain it to me, dad?"

Ah, the kind of teaching moment a father lives for! Here's the condensed version:

OK, son, there's two teams with 11 players each on a field 100 yards (that's 300 feet) long. The field is marked out with lines every ten yards. At each end is an "end zone." The object is for one team to get the ball into the other team's end zone to score, while the other team tries to stop them. So one team kicks the ball to the other, and they catch it and try to run it back to the end zone. If the guy with ball tackled, both teams stop and the offensive team -- the one with the ball -- gets three tries to move the ball 10 yards by running or throwing. If they do, they get three more tries. If they don't, they can take a fourth try and risk losing the ball close to their own end zone, or kick it to the other team and give them a turn at offense from farther away.

As we watched, I pointed stuff out (never realized how useful those digitally drawn scrimmage lines and first down markers are) and we talked about rules and techniques and even history (leather helmets, two-point conversion, a signed postcard I once got from 70's Philadelphia Eagles safety Bill Bradley). He wanted to watch the whole game and, by the end, he said he liked football and wanted to play next year.

I deflected that (my overtall, overly sensitive kid would not fare well on the gridiron with fourth graders who've been mixing it up since pre-K), but I was glad he enjoyed the game. As I've tried to explain to him on several occasions, we're American men, son. We relate to each other by tossing a ball back-and-forth. And when we get too old to do that, we talk about other people who do.

Last night, for the new, sort-of weekly tradition of "Family Movie Night," I forced my kids to watch The Princess Bride. And I do mean forced. I had to threaten both of them (Boy 9, Girl 6.5) to sit and watch it, without a word of complaint, or they'd be sent to be without supper. They were being served burger and fries on tray tables as they watch, so that was an immediate and credible threat.

Occasionally, and for reasons I only sometimes can understand, my kids take it into their heads that they would hate and will not watch a given movie. As maddening as this can be sometimes (a few weeks ago, I rented the Disney animated Tarzan, a perfectly serviceable version for all ages, and they flat out refused to sit through more than five minutes... still no clue why), mostly I don't force the issue. But for this one, I did. I love this movie. My peers all love this movie. I was going to share that with my kids, whether they wanted to or not, dammit.

So what happened? They loved it. Funny how their reaction paralleled the grandson's in the movie so closely. At first they whined. Gradually they got interested. By the middle, they were riveted. At the end, they asked when they could watch it again. Classic.

A huge snowstorm slammed the Mid-Atlantic U.S. today, blanketed Washington D.C. and all points north up to New York City. Yet, bizarrely, my little corner of New Jersey got nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Nary a flake.

This is the second time this year that's happened. A big snowfall is predicted, and hits spots within 20 miles of me hard, and utterly misses immediate environs like there's a dome over the area. Strange, but to be honest, not unwelcome. I've reached the age in life where snow is just a pain. I'm stuck inside with the kids for the day, except for the time spent shoveling the driveway.

Toyota's slogan over the past couple years has been "Moving Forward." Hard to not have a little fun with that with the latest spate of troubles the company's been having with stuck gas pedals and suspect braking systems.

Just as a quick FYI, these are the models affected by the recall/stop sale from Toyota pertaining to the sticky gas pedal issue:

Separately, it looks like the Prius -- the darling of appearance-of-greeness hypocrites -- may be recalled for braking problems, apparently having to do with software issues that control the "feel" of the brake rather than a mechanical failure of the braking system itself.

Personally, I've found some of the industry/media gloating/rah-rah ("See! They're not perfect! American cars aren't having these problems!") more than a little annoying. As an owner of a 2000 RAV4 with 70K miles on it, I'd put myself squarely in the loyal Toyota camp. Despite these rare but potentially serious defects -- which absolutely should be fixed at the company's expense as soon as possible -- I wouldn't think twice about buying Toyota again were I in the market for a new car (which I'm not, because a 2000 RAV4 with 70K miles on it still runs like a champ). Any Toyota owners I've spoken to pretty much feel the same.

Feel free to do your own little survey and see what you find. Then, just for fun, try it with owners of Big 3 cars and compare results.

One of this year's Oscar Best Picture nominees full, official title is: Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

Now that's a literary agent who knows how to negotiate a contract, getting the book and author name (such as it is) right up in the title. There was a crappy sci-fi movie last year called Push, so understandable they had to re-work the title. Still, to get all that self-promotional info right up where umpteen Oscar presenters will have to say it in front of a billion potential book buyers... sheer genius.

My two bits on some of the Oscar nominees (not all of which I've seen; I shan't reveal which!):

Avatar is a decent adventure movie that represents a quantum leap forward in cinematic technology. Up in the Air is a smart, humane look at our business culture in transition. Up is a sweet fable about life in different stages. District 9 is an intense sci-fi allegory of racial injustice. Precious is a harrowing tale of damaged people trying to find dignity in themselves. The others I have no opinion about at the moment, informed or otherwise.

I'm pulling for The Hurt Locker, a white-knuckle drama about how men face danger. One of the very few big-time female directors working in Hollywood today, Kathryn Bigelow has done some movies over the years I've found quite interesting (Strange Days and K-19:The Widowmaker stick out in my memory), so I'd be happy to see her recognized. Besides, she's got that seriously hot older woman thing going on. (That's 58! Yowsa!). I do appreciate that.

The Oscar (note, no trademark symbol; come and sue me, A.M.P.A.S.®!) nominations came out today. I don't know why I care. It's not like I even see many movies any more. But I guess it's all just so prevalent that tidbits even about ones I have not and are not likely to see still sink into my consciousness. Anyway, seems I care enough at least to read the list of nominees and mentally squabble about it.

This year, as forewarned earlier, there are ten nominees for best picture. This now gives even more movies a chance to get the revenue bump -- either at the box office or video kiosk -- invariably associated with the honor. This is such a transparent ploy by that vast publicity machine known as Hollywood that it's not even worth getting huffy about. In fact, I think it's a masterstroke. Bravo, for industriousness, film industry.

The other night, my 6.5 daughter had a nightmare that "sabages" were going to throw her into a volcano. I forgot about her little rejoinder at the time.

To help calm her down, I explained, half-amused, "Don't worry, honey. There are no savages around here."

Still upset from the dream, but with surprisingly fierce indignance, she answered, "I know that! They come from ancient islands!"

Matt McHugh.com - Blog - February 2010

Blog Archive