Kindling

Chip McGrath has pinpointed a big drawback with the Kindle:—

As you read along, there are very few cues to how near you are to the beginning, how far from the end. You’re always in the middle.

This is a pretty big drawback. You never know how far into a book you are? That's awful. 

To pee or not to pee

Here's a great idea: a website advising the public on the best time to go for a pee during a movie. Its called Runpee. As someone with a weak bladder and an unerring instinct for a dramatic lull, I was intrigued. For Star Trek they locate no fewer than six pee moments, which me as a little harsh. For Angels & Demons, RunPee advises a single dash at around the 70 minute mark when Hanks is in the archives and the power goes out. Amazingly, this is the only moment they recommend. One of the reliefs of that movie for me was I knew I could happily go anytime and not miss a thing. That said, I chose well and came back from the toilet to find Ewan McGregor a delivering a long speech about the unseen glories of the Catholic Church.

For Terminator Salvation, they advise two: one at the 50 minute mark, when Marcus cuts down the female pilot and another at around 75 minutes when he has almost had his leg blown off by a land mine and she helps him escape. Hard to disagree with those — there's a lot of agonised grimacing between the two of them which one takes to be evidence of a blooming romance — although Runpee also claim to have found two pee moments not only in the original Terminator but in Aliens. This is impossible: those movies are like bullets. Maybe that bit where Sarah Conner says, "I had a dream about dogs" but only in a real emergency.

If you want an overall rule of thumb: chose the 50 minute mark. You are, roughly, halfway through the movie. The first act is done. The action is beginning to let up. Maybe the director feels a theme coming on; the characters are gazing at one another, trying to figure they're all doing there and if there is a larger purpose to existence. The perfect time for a pee.

Terminator Cogitation

— "Why did he invent that frequency transmitter and then not use it?"

— "Lucky his heart was the right sort. Normally it takes much longer to find a donor."

— "They always end up in the furnace. You think they'd learn."

— "That was much worse than I thought it was going to be."

Some random comments on Terminator Salvation, made by me and my friend Scott, on the walk home.

Compassion is for losers

"Empathy triumphs over excellence." That was the headline of one of the articles announcing Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. "Empathy" was one of the qualities he said he was looking for, throwing everyone for a loop. There was a rash of learned articles about why empathy was a terrible thing in a judge, how it really meant activism, and so on. It was all very surreal. To my untrained eye they might as well have been headlined, "Compassion is For losers," or  "Goodness, go screw yourself". Personally, I like empathy and consider it a great quality in just about anybody. I liked bus conductors if they are empathic. I like policeman if they are empathic. I like scuba-diving teachers if they are empathic. It follows that I like supreme court justice possessed of the quality of empathy is a good thing. Obviously, it's not the only thing. I'd like them to have some legal training. I'd like it if they knew what a gavel is, and how and when to bang it. Imagine! And empathic too! Put it this way:  I tend to avoid people from whom the quality of empathy has been expunged. I wouldn't like an empathy-free bus conductor, for instance. Imagine the hit 'n' runs he'd get into, or the old ladies he'd get caught in his doors, all the prams he'd kick into the street. Same goes for judges. The article that ran under that headline "Empathy triumphs over excellence" was written by none other than John Yoo, the lawyer who told president Bush that it was okay to crush the testicles of a small child if he deemed it appropriate in the fight against terrorism. His answer, if memory sereves, was that it would depend on "why the president felt he needed to do that." A more empathic person might have inquired into the child's feelings on the matter. 

Up, Up, and Away

My review of Pixar's Up appears in The Daily Beast today. Cliff's Notes version: I liked it. 

No news is good news

This story, over at the Daily Dish, has me trying to work out why the biggest online news aggregator in America, The Drudge Report, is right-leaning. I don't mean the personal reasons why it's editor, Matt Drudge, leans to the right but why it might be that a news-website that leans to the right might be more successful than one that leans to the left.

It could just be that it is better, that Drudge has killer tabloid instincts, etc. But there's more to it than that, I think. Surveying a recent page of his, at random, I found stories about:—

— how Netanyahu is "defying" Obama
— Muslim riots in Athens
— a shoot out at a Sikh temple in Vienna
— a guy who mowed down a traffic cop
— another flu alert
— a NYPD forensics investigator stabbed to death in bed
— the Lars Vin Trier film Anti-Christ getting an award at Cannes
— British banks "revolting" against Obama's tax plan
— Iran wanting nukes

You get the picture: the world is a scary place. Muslims lurk around every corner. People are getting knifed in their beds. The French worship at the altar of the anti-christ. And our president is a wimp. Compare that to the leading liberal news aggregator, The Huffington Post, which today has stories about:

— Timothy Geithner disclaiming the accusation of "socialism"

— Colin Powell calling Rush Limbaugh "shrill"

— A woman in her fifties dying of swine flu

— the possibility of Afghanistan becoming second Iraq

— Bill Maher defending himself Sean Hannity

— Cannes gives top honors to film about Nazism

— An Iraqi interrogator calling Cheney on his facts

And so on. The only people dying of flu are old. The French know great filmmaking when they see it. America is not turning communist. The world is not such a scary place. The only scary thing about the world, in fact, is that it contains Republicans. The bulk of the left's stories involve defending themselves from the falsehoods and exaggerations coming from the right. One lights fires; the other puts them out. 

There's no question which world-view I find more helpful and yet the fact is: I read the Drudge Report way more than I read the Huffington Post. I'm tempted to explain that via an old debate that started up in England a few years back, when Martin Lewis, one of the BBC's blander anchors, complained that they reported too much bad news. His opinion was ridiculed by many senior journalists: what does he want? Stories about meals on wheels and puppy dogs? Most news, they pointed out, tends to be bad news by definition. I think much the same way about Drudge. Scary news is better than non-scary news. And the right has better scare stories than the left. Therefore, it makes sense that the biggest news aggregator in the country would be right-leaning. I'm none too certain about this theory but will continue to ponder the matter further.

The sidewalks of New York

Whenever someone asks you why I am in New York, tradition dictates that I reply with a sentence that uses the words "dream" or "opportunity". If pressed, I point to the fact that I was offered a job here, although the magazine I came out for is no longer in existence and the number of stamps in my passport tells you I was headed here long before that. America has been in my head for as long as I can remember. The simplest and most truthful answer to why I am here, in fact, is, "the sidewalks."

My vision of New York has always been bound up with its sidewalks. I can remember seeing Sesame Street when I was eight, or thereabouts, and being struck by them — big concrete walkways, the concrete a much lighter colour than it is in the UK, with the neatest of grooves separating each slab. They seemed so wide and inviting, big boulevards crying out for all manner of activity. The sidewalk, after all, is where most kids get to roam free. Roads are off limits: noisy dangerous places you cross with your mother attached to your elbow. And buildings are boring: the places the adults go to do their business. Which leaves, you, aged 8, with the sidewalk. That's your kingdom, as a kid. That's where you roam free.

We didn't have sidewalks in the UK; we had pavements, a very different thing, narrower, pinched walkways between roads and buildings which people funnelled down on their way to work. Ech. Some kids skateboarded on them, others rollerskated. I used to draw on them, using coloured chalks, outside my mother's shop in Brighton: pictures of Superman, mostly, and Batman, and Darth Vadar. I had a hat which passersby dropped money into, thus supplementing my pocket money so I could then go buy more Superman comics to study and transcribe. I used to get quite a lot of money, although once I was accosted by a crusty old man who told me it was "disgusting" that a child as young as I was was should be begging. I told him that I wasn't begging, I was drawing, but he didn't listen and staulked off.

What I really needed, of course, was a New York sidewalk. People draw on them all the time. They've got acres of room, plenty of admiring pedestrians and nobody calling them beggars. They're street artists. I'm no longer drawing, but sometimes, I'll be walking down one of the avenues, the sunlight will hit the sidewalk, dazzlingly, and I'll look about and think: this is the life. A nice, big, wide sidewalk. I could do anything.