timiathan

As those of you who are also friends with Megan know, the last couple days we've been all excited about the prospect of buying a house. I'd always assumed we just couldn't afford a house anywhere in Southern California -- we don't even live in a rich area, but the houses in our neighborhood all go for about a million dollars.

This weekend, though, I realized that houses the Antelope Valley, about an hour north of LA, are going for the national average right now, maybe even a touch below. You can get a kickass house like this:



for $120,000! The mortgage payment on that would be HALF what we're paying for rent, and we'd be building up equity. We're basically just flushing our money down the toilet right now, paying for the location, which we don't even really take advantage of.

So Sunday night we drove out there, and in the dark it's tolerable. Very monotonous, but quieter than LA, lots of stars in the sky, desert in the distance, row after row of nicer houses than I've ever lived in...

But then we just went back and reality was given the light of day, so to speak. Palmdale/Lancaster might, in fact, be hell. It certainly is A hell, if not THE hell. This is a ridiculously long, but fascinating article about urban sprawl, using the Antelope Valley as its case study. And it's ridiculously accurate. The entire city is was designed by land developers who never set foot there -- each perfect-square mile block is isolated from any sense of community by a brick wall, there's no foot traffic, no town center, no sense of community, no culture, no nothing, except block after block of sterile, corporate uniformity. We wouldn't have to make the zombie-like 2 hour commute like most people, but living there would still be absolutely soul-crushing.

Too good to be true probably is.

So instead, we're back in the San Fernando Valley, which suddenly looks like paradise, and vowing to take advantage of where we live more often. Might as well, because we're not leaving any time soon.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2387203.ece

Ignore the scapegoating, the stereotyping, the snickering, the journalistic integrity and the profit motive. Let's just look at the dumbfuck logic:

The argument we're given here is that fat people eat too much, which increases the demand for food, which puts a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere during production. Ignore the Michael Phelps diet for a second, just pretend there's no such thing as metabolic rates, and that fat people really do eat more than skinny people. Say it's the big fat pigs eating 12,000 calories per day...

The USDA recommends the average androgynous person should eat 2,200 calories per day. So our hypothetical big fat pig is eating 5.5 times what a normal person is supposed to.

That seems like a lot, right?

Well, it is, until you consider that eating meat uses about 16 times the fossil fuels to grow as soy, wheat, and corn. One pound of beef also takes 20 times the land area and 150 times the water of vegetables.

So the headline might as well be Meat-Eaters Cause Global Warming. But we wouldn't say that, because we're dumbfucks.

This self-righteous message was brought to you by Carl's Jr. Have it your way!(tm)

_________

Completely unrelated -- is it a good sign that there's been no codification of hyperlink grammar? In the above passage, I linked a partial sentence to another article, and didn't include the period at the end of that clause in the hyperlink. But I just as well could have, and no one would have giving an F, or even noticed. It seems like there's no convention at all, which is good, because conventions are pointless.

The end.

Don't know if others will find this as amusing as I do, but Megan made me this video for Valentine's Day:

I'm not sold on its worth yet, but Megan signed me up with Twitter the other day and I've been Tweeting up a storm. I'm not going to burden you with embedding it into LJ, though, unless there's unanimous petition for it in the comments. You can follow me on Twitter itself or on my blog's Twitter Page. Follow me and I'll follow you back.

Also, I'm trying to be more active on Facebook, so add me there if you're on it and not added, or comment to let me know I should look you up.

Edit: Don't worry, I'm not actually going to put 50 twitters a day on my LJ:)

Poll #1326710 Color Blind
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

Is the figure at the center of this image predominently red or orange?

I just set up an LJ Feed for The Found Poetry Project: foundpoetry_rss. Sign up and check out the latest post, a great WebMD found poem by doctortina! Don't forget to keep an eye out for unexpected poetry, and send it to us. www.foundpoetry.org

It's dark and depressing, and uncomfortably accurate, but Revolutionary Road is the best movie to come out in a long time.


ETA: Damnit, I thought if I just kept it to one sentence I could be quicker. Oh well... Might as well add, if you didn't like Dogville, you should probably skip this, but that's one of our favorite movies, too. This is just so perfectly captures the slow disillusionment that is American life--the struggle not to accept one's own mediocrity, the immaturity of love. It's brutal, and the theater was full of nervous laughter, but try to find a scene that could be improved or cut and you can't.

I forgot to mention that I joined Goodreads a couple months ago. I added a lot of people from LJ already (and a couple more I noticed through Patrick just now), but I'm sure I'm missing some of you, so add me if you've got an account:
http://www.goodreads.com/timothygreen

If you don't have an account, I'd recommend it -- it's like Myspace, but people are thoughtful and intelligent and talking about books!

About three years ago RM had a little post that sounded to me like a poem -- and so much better than the millions of war poems we were getting as submissions to Rattle. She wasn't trying to make it a poem, just blogging like the rest of us, but still the poetry emerges. I asked her if she minded turning it into a poem and publishing it, she said sure, so we put it in Rattle #24.

The little experience got me all excited at the time about making an anthology of found poetry -- not the traditional kind of found poetry, where the "poet" who adds line breaks gets all the credit, but something that acknowledges both the accidental artist, and the reader who was listening closely enough to hear the poetry in what was written.

The truth is, poetry is everywhere--it's not just the domain of people with degrees who dream of seeing their name in print. The idea that poetry is something special devalues the reality of what it is. Any phrase sings or rings is poetry, whether it's in a newspaper article, on a bathroom stall, or in Robert Hass's latest collection. All you have to do is pay attention.

So to that end, Megan and I have put together the Found Poetry Project at www.foundpoetry.org. It's basically a lit mag in a blog format -- posts every weekday as we have them (and of course we don't have any now). Anyone can submit, and we credit both the original author, and the poem's finder. The goal is to have a little fun, and get people listening to and enjoying the language they inhabit every day.

There are just a couple rules -- the original work can't have been meant as poetry, or written as literature. Found poems can come from blog posts, newspaper articles, letters, spam, street signs, graffiti, whatever you happen to notice. The "finders" can cut words and add line breaks and punctuation, but can't rearrange words or add new ones. They can also add a title or leave it blank.

Does this sound like fun to anyone? If so, we need your help -- we're announcing this just to friends right now (that's why the post says "beta"), so we can hit the ground running. So if you notice anything especially poetic in the coming days or weeks, send it in a note to submissions (at) foundpoetry.org. You can check out the About, Rules, and Submit pages for more info. Thanks!

01. What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?
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So I went to my reunion last Friday. If you don't remember, a few months ago when I got the invitation in the mail, we talked about whether I should go or not, and a lot of people encouraged me to make the trip. Then I had the frequent flyer miles for a free ticket, so that was motivation enough. I also wanted to see my brother, now that he's out of jail, and my grandma again, while she's still alive.

Anyway, the reunion was okay, but nothing special. We only stayed through dinner and then left before the drunken merriment really kicked into gear. The first half-hour was fun, catching up with maybe a dozen people that I was curious about. But I didn't have any interest in deep conversations with any of them, so after the standard, "So what have you been up to?" discussions, there really wasn't much left. Most people from my class never left Rochester, and so all the old high school cliques are still intact. The planning committee for this was the same that planned our prom and yearbook, and they all dominated this event just as much. I'd completely forgotten about this, but there was a small scandal during our senior banquet, when, for the class slideshow, 90% of the photos were from this same group of maybe two dozen people. Well, they showed that slideshow again, so we sall those same 20 people over and over, all over again.

Once again there was that strange feeling when the real world comes into contact with the poetry world. I feel like I have a pretty awesome job, but when you tell a nuclear engineer that you're editing a poetry magazine, it feels kind of like telling people your mom died. "Oh, that's...cool." Not that there are many nuclear engineers in this class, but even the mechanics and landscapers of the group don't know what to say. Surprisingly, at least to me, everyone was far more impressed that I'd moved to LA. I haven't talked so much about LA in a long time. But that's what you get from a reunion with people have haven't gone anywhere...

The best part about night was probably seeing all the girls I used to have crushes on -- well, the three -- and seeing that my wife is WAY hotter than them. Haha, suckers! I just wish I could have brought Megan with me to show her off. Maybe for the 25-year. Unsurprisingly, probably, me and John Hafner, the biggest geek in school, have the two most attractive partners of the bunch. (John's the aformentioned engineer.)

Beyond that, the trip has been great. I've gotten to spend a lot of time with my brother, and we had a pretty important talk about life and our family and so on. And my grandma looked better than she did last time I saw her, despite the 2 months this summer she spent in the hospital. All in all, a good trip, even if the Bills sucked on Sunday. One day left, and then it's home sweet home.

Megan already posted a lot of pictures here, so you might as well look there if you want to see more. What a beautiful wedding, with a beautiful bride, and a kick-ass photographer. It's too bad I have goofy expressions half the time, but what can I say, I'm goofy.

When you follow the link, pay special attention to Megan and her dad, who are not only adorable, but oh so photogenic. This is my favorite picture, because I'm blurry and my wife is hot:

Shock and awe can be a good thing again. We won with overwhelming force. Amazing. There are actually fireworks going off somewhere in the hills to the west.

This is your obligatory no post in two months so I have to post and say that I'm still here even though I haven't been posting I just haven't had time to post but I'm still reading you all and I probably catch about 80% of your posts even though I don't comment very often and I'm always interested in what you have to say and enjoy it and feel like I'm a part of your lives even though I realize the feeling isn't mutual because I never post but I love you all and I really should.

And I'm not really drunk, I just tried to go to bed too early and so now I'm wide awake and probably will be for a few more hours.

California is burning and Megan and I are getting married in 3 days. It's exciting, it's chaos, it's big, and it's happening so fast that the immensity goes almost unnoticed. We've got the cake, the cake knife, the flowers, the chairs, the hippie preacher lady, the Italian buffet, the stereo hooked up to the speakers in the walls, the linens, the napkins, the pitchers of water, the to-do lists, the honeymoon condo, the boutineers, however you spell them, the champagne and wine, the toaster to toast us, the transportation, the contract to sign, and don't forget the rings.

Besides for the materialistic stuff, it's all pretty easy, really. For some reason I always thought that getting married would be filled with doubts and second guessing, maybe it was the TV that told me that, or maybe all the divorced parents bouncing around each other, but that's just not the case. When all your ragged edges line up right, there's no need for a leap of faith, it's just a happy stroll across the gap, arm in arm, with a hard fade in the shape of a heart, and all that possibility after the credits.

After arguing with my friend Erik about The Dark Knight for almost an hour, I decided to look around more and see if I could dig up anything on Nolan's background that would settle the score. But I couldn't -- his politics seem pretty wishy-washy, what little is there. From an interview with Newsweek, this sounds good:


But then he follows it up with this:


Bush is Batman, but the more you look, the more you find people arguing about the politics of that fact. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Modern Conservative, and the Wall Street Journal all see the Bushy Batman as the depiction of a true hero. Liberals like Mother Jones and Alternet actually argue the opposite, that the movie criticizes the fearmongering absolutism of the War on Terror.

My conclusion, upon too much investigation, is that Nolan probably meant to to be critical of the war on terror, but from a kind of neutral, apologist perspective -- that we've been the victim of understandable pitfalls, that we're all human, and flawed. The fascist machine has been turned on, justified or not, but now we should probably smash it like Lucius Fox, before it' gets us into trouble.

The result, then, is a muddled mess. A movie that's clearly trying to make a political statement, but has no clear statement to make. And so it becomes a kind of 2-D spinning figurine -- does she spin to the right, or spin to the left? Everyone who watches the movie will see what they will, driven by either their desire or their fears, but the truth is, the figurine isn't spinning at all. It's not even a figurine, it's just a black blob bobbing back and forth.

One thing of note -- in addition to the wiretapping, the torture, the "noble lie", and the lack of due process, there was another contemporary issue I didn't notice -- early in the movie, Batman goes to Taiwan to kidnap a money launderer. Hello extraordinary rendition.

In my opinion, all of these things are painted in a positive light -- except maybe torture...we all know that it doesn't work, but it's just too much FUN!  Batman is the hero, and the implicit argument is always going to be that he is the ideal, no matter how fuzzy around the edges, and that the appeasement of "just once" is always a cancer.  But that's just my opinion. You see what you want (or don't want) to see.

Oh and one final thing, and then I'm done even thinking about a guy in a fucking bat suit. The original writer of the Dark Knight comic books really is a sociopathic neocon:

Megan and I just got back from watching The Dark Knight. Having heard that it was a deep movie, using the comic motif to address political and moral issues, similar to V for Vendetta, I was excited. But that excitement has become a kind of disgust; it's a 180 degree turn in ideology from V. This movie doesn't expose fascism, it defends it. The Dark Knight might as well be a commercial for the Bush administration.

I should say "SPOILER ALERT", but this has little to do with plot. Still, if you're worried about having the movie ruined by a few details, see the movie first and come back later...

( The details... )

Politics aside, if you like action movies, you'll like this one. It's sleek and stylish and action-packed. Heath Ledger really does play the Joker role about as well as you can imagine. But it's nothing like No Country For Old Men, and the Joker is no Chigurh. And if you're expecting the politics of V, you're really going to be disappointed

Sorry to do this to you, if you were reading, but Rattle has a new RSS feed, and so a new LJ syndication: rattle_rss. On the bright side, it's due to a nice upgrade -- I'm now publishing content in a blog format, with a new poem or review every single day. They'll all go up at 8am EST, so perfect for procrastinating first thing into the office!

I've been watching a lot of TED videos lately. Always a great way to kill eighteen minutes. Dennett's one of my favorites:

This has to be fake, right? The reason why kernels of corn pop is because microwave energy turns the water inside to gas, creating internal pressure with nowhere to go. Last I checked, there was plenty of water in your earlobe, and I've never seen an earlobe boil off. But still, I don't like cell phones, so I don't mind propelling the propaganda...



In other news, I friends-only'd all of my posts all at once, for various reasons. One of htem being that I often make stupid posts like this. If anyone isn't friended that wants in, comment here.