Quick Rant

Okay. Political correctness bothers me. Here is an example that came to mind for no reason relevant to anything else.

Since it measures time based on the birth of an actual, verifiable person... I find (even in my most anti-Christian moments) the BCE/CE (instead of BC/AD) delineation offensive to my scientific sensibilities. It'd be like... calling Farenheit "the non-metric system." That'd be offensive to Farenheit and his family, students, and, well, fans. Or like PRETENDING that the Celsius scale was based on some ARBITRARY number and NOT the freezing point of water.

Am I the only progressively-minded person who sees this retarded PC fallacy? I mean.... it's almost like telling me that my OWN AGE is measured not based on the day and the year I was born, but by some internationally agreed upon delimiter that HAPPENS to coincide with my mother's not-terribly-brief-or-painless labor. Like... "Hey, so it snowed on April 11th, 1983, in New Jersey. Let's measure time in Erik Martin's life based on that meteorological event."

It's not offensive to Christians... it's simply offensive to SENSIBLE PEOPLE. Sure, if "Anno Domini" seems a little too preachy, I can settle for AC, or AJ, or STBOJON (since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth)... but c'MON people. Call a spade a spade.

Idle Minds...

Okay, so I get delayed waiting for my plane out of this godforsaken excuse for a country and have had to fill my time and mental energy somehow. I mean, if I DON'T, my mind wanders and usually ends up ideating overly dramatic conversations that usually end up making me really upset.

Bottom line: idle mind means I need to fill it with mindless movies. The other night, in order to stymie the flow of daydreams of my life falling apart upon my return home (hey, this place makes you think some DEPRESSING thoughts!) I decided to check out this "Twilight" thing all the ladies have been raving about.

Bad idea. I mean... REALLY bad idea.

And I'm a guy who likes vampires AND chick flicks. The Notebook made me cry. Anne Rice captivated my high school years, until I realized halfway through Tale of the Body Thief that it was actually just gay erotica, and I put it down, so as not to tarnish my memories of Interview/Lestat/QOTD (granted, I turned almost immediately to Michael Chabon, so it's not like I've been able to ESCAPE gay sex in my literature...)

But I digest. Point is, WTF? After the first five minutes of some decent acting between father and daughter that I appreciated, the movie devolved into a Dawson's-Cree-esque montage of actors pushing thirty trying to play seventeen-year-olds and attempting to convey an entire range of emotions though the use of the same two pained expressions.

But hey, now I know what TRUE LOVE is! Twenty minutes stranded in the woods talking weird is what women REALLY want!

If ONLY I had decided to do my hair and makeup like Robert Smith in high school, I too might have managed to bag the new girl. None of the guys I knew in high school who looked like they were from the Cure managed too well, but times have changed! Awful hair and male-lipstick are IN now!

Okay... it wasn't all bad. The one vampire sister with the short hair was cute. I'd TOTALLY do her. Also, the soundtrack was decent. Everything else was bad.

OKAY OKAY OKAY, it's NOT OVER.

I still couldn't sleep. So what did I do? I WATCHED SUNSHINE.

Yea, that's right, I watched The Core... In Space! Cillian Murphy plays Aaron Eckhard from the first iteration of this entirely predictable sci-fi cliche patchwork. So yes, overly attractive astronauts say overly attractive things while getting all sweaty and very attractively save the world by BOMBING THE SUN. Maybe I'm jaded because I was so unenthused by bombing the ACTUAL MOON two weeks ago, but c'mon... they put The Core, Even Horizon, and Armageddon in a Hollywood blender, hired the director of an old Linkin Park video and called it a movie.

Un-like x2.

Next: Spirited Away: a good movie.

Halfway and counting

I'm halfway through my time out here, slowly desiccating in the wind and the sun, but hopeful... or am I depressed? Funny how perspective can change everything.

Yesterday, the relief of saying "halfway done!" was fairly overwhelming. But today, staring down the back half of this trip felt really daunting. "Halfway still to go." But such is everything?

I've adopted what I hope is a Zen attitude about life here. Not a happy existence, but it needn't be sad. I have time with my thoughts - which means my memories, fantasies, and creativity. But it also means my fears. I can make plans, set goals, and reach epiphanies, if I focus. And I can let myself play out disasters if I'm not careful.

Or I can face my fears. I can face the thoughts that make me worry about the future, about my relationships, my friends, my family. I can find the solace that meditating on my existence allows me to. The nature of my own mind has become my focus.

The frustration of not being able to act on these thoughts has me channeling that energy into my fitness, in all its forms. Physical, mental, spiritual. And, amazingly, they are overlapping more than I'd expected.

Memory, it seems from a brilliant article in Discover, is more malleable than science ever before thought. Ponder that for a second and tell me that doesn't force you to contemplate your faith in existence. Our sentience is practically called into question, yet we live! We experience the universe! How joyous is life? Love? And what a blessing to BE here, experiencing, fleeting and ephemeral as existence may be. My very physical being may be but a phenomenon of observation. I owe it to myself to make the most of that, to whatever force allows me to be conscious.

I sometimes question my faith. I think most of us do at some point. I typically conclude that, while I'm unsure at this point in my life WHAT I believe in, I am certain I DO believe.

So what's the point of my writing this? Will anyone ever read it? Has some discovery been made? Is this simply a collection of bits that will, for a time "exist?" Or am I simply sacrificing my thoughts to the internet? Good question.

Good question indeed.

I'm hot cuz I'm deployed, you ain't cuz you not.

Okay two pronged post here with a final gesture at the original point of this blog.

First, yea, I'm deployed, which means that I'm leading a rather monastic existence right now. Regimented, spartan, but with a few luxuries. I could tell you where I am and what I'm doing, but I'm not Geraldo Rivera. It is hot, though.

Second, being here has given me some time to think on things, and realize that I kinda want ot shift the focus of this blog from literally watching film and TV (which I intend to continue commenting on) to seeing life around me. Not being able to PARTICIPATE at life back home in the States, I have a unique perspective being "outside the fishbowl" as it were. I realized that even how, the way I watch film is the way I'm watching life.

I accept what's coming, and I enjoy the surprises. I don't stress out wondering "who's that guy with the knife?" or "is that the bad guy? have we seen him before?" or "what's he doing?" but rather, I appreciate the mystery. I'd like to take the time to talk about some of my thoughts and perhaps observations. The social petri dish is simply too ripe to let it go to waste. And I think it'll help me understand everything.

Okay, and last but not least, a nod to film. I saw Taken, and loved it.

And let me just say, I apologize to all of the women in the world for being somewhat turned on. There, I said it. But, I mean, I think Dr. Kinsey... I mean Liam Neeson... would say that that's okay, as long as I kill at least a hundred bad guys to set things right.

Has it really been two months?

I TOLD you guys not to expect too much from me...

Still, I owe you, dear reader or two, an apology. Two months is a far cry from "infrequent" even. It's downright dreadful.

Seeing as I can't talk about what I DO so much these days (deployment fun), I can however talk about what's on my mind pertaining, not only to movies and TV, but also various and sundry aspects of the world.

For instance: I'm sorry Michael Jackson't dead, but please continue showing me news about the rest of the damn world and LET IT GO.

And this: Dear Iran, I so dare you to prove the world right and execute that dude. We're ready to publicly smear your already tarnished global image so fast shit-through-a-goose would blush.

And last: A lot of fucking famous people died since I left the US! Holy Crap! How will my life EVER BE THE SAME???

Of note: Not watching much new TV these days, but I am happily catching up on Battlestar Galactica, which I started last time I was out here. I'm also getting some decent movie watching in, including I Love You, Man and The Shawshank Redemption. Both awesome.

Oh, and Strange Brew. When I told the rest of the crew it was just Hamlet in a brewery in Canada, my literary criticism was met with "hey nerd, it's a movie about BEER!"

It makes me long for my wife's more polite questions about impending plot developments.

Star Trek

Approved. Definitely go see this movie, but definitely do NOT wear a red shirt! Old timey trekkers know what I mean by this :)

She couldn't go very long without asking "did that happen in the original series?" And, without offering any spoilers, All I could say was, "just relax. It'll all work itself out, I'm sure." Because I KNOW HOW TO BE PATIENT AND LET A MOVIE REVEAL THE ANSWERS TO MY QUESTIONS!

Also, have a little TNG parody break today. You've earned it.
Brokeback Enterprise

Wolverine

I didn't think it was that bad, but SHE did.  Granted, a movie can only include SO MANY times where the main character stands over a corpse and screams into the sky, but I suppose my tolerace for campiness in comic book movies is higher than most.

However, I was TOTALLY pissed that one would choose to completely butcher so many popular characters' origins in order to tell one origin story.  Though, if their dedication to continuity is anything like the last two X-Men films, I shouldn't fear that they can go ahead and accurately tell every other story regardless of the "facts" they've established.

Oh.  And I twitter now.  The blog may be dead... or maybe revived!  Who knows.

emart83

re: Watchmen

Lisa: "That's not how Lee Iacocca died!"

HERE WE GO!

Okay, so this time of year, I suppose most of my "watching" revolves around the NFL. Specifically, the STEELERS!

WOO!

I explained homefield advantage during the playoffs last night, and generally speaking, there wasn't a lot of "shutting up" necessary. My wife is my sports-watching partner. I cannot express how awesome this is. I love that my girl gets into sports - especially when they matter to me!

So it seems this blog has, as they do, strayed from its intent. Bite me. I like it this way! I'll keep the title, but maybe post increasingly arbitrary content. I love it.

And Go Steelers! Another Super Bowl!

Wish I were going...

Top 3 Reasons Why 2009 will RULE.

New X-Men
New Transformers
Watchmen

Apparently the only things good in the world are movies.

Also, I'm back home. Maybe I'll post now that I'm not in the damn DESERT.

Excitement?

Dude, Jason totally got punched outside a strip club by this dude who was trying to get with this girl that we met at upstream. WILD.

Sprint sucks

I know I'm not the first to mention it, and I'm sure AT&T, Verizon, and all the others have their faults, but SPRINT SUCKS.

They are trying to charge me over $270 for an early termination fee on a contract I DIDN"T TERMINATE.

Also, they continued to charge a friend of my dad for the reminder of his daughter's contract AFTER SHE DIES IN A HORRIBLE CAR ACCIDENT.

These are despicable business practices.

I don't advocate boycotting companies, but I highly encourage you to call Sprint and demand that they treat you better if you are their customer.

The End of Music (Horribly Nerdy Post)

So I have this theory. It's a little like this: http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001304.html

Except in my future world, all the music that could ever be made HAS BEEN MADE. Seriously. I think it'd could happen, and as long as humanity continues to grow and create at an exponential rate, that moment gets closer and closer.

Here's how I see it:

As long as a few given conditions are followed, eventually computers will be able to start generating combinations of words and matching them up to computer generated music considerably more rapidly then a person. I'm talking thousands to millions of songs daily, increasing exponentially, as all things do.

SO what keeps the set of possible songs finite? This is where thigns start gettign REALLY nerdy.

1) Finite length: This one's not so nerdy. Even if we cap a "song" off at in a gadda da vida, we've established a finite length. More likely, lets talk about radio airplay where songs are limited to about 3:30, or as Billy Joel put it "if you want to make a hit / you've got to make it quick / so they cut [my song] down to three-oh-five."

2) Audiotory discernability, that is to say, the ability for the human ear to pick out the sonds, words, instruments, tones, etc.
a) Speed - BPM must be limited, as must words per minute to make a song litstenable
b) Tonal range - Theoretically, you can create a string of any length and strum it, yet, the human ear can only separate tones separated by some given frequency which doctors know but I don't.
c) Instrument (or voice) capacity - As above, we can only separate out so many different sounds at once before it becomes a meaningless mush of noise. Even when attempted by bands such as NIN, this effect is highly limited in its ability to integrate into music, and I therefore consider it a songle "instrument."
d) Instrumentation - okay, so the Blue Man Group can pound on PVC all they want, but let's face it, there are a limited number of instruments that actually sound different. I'll acknowledge that unique sounds will probably be invented, and all tones can basically be put onto a musical scale, but the ability to separate those sounds is, I believe, still finite. I mean, dogs barking jingle bells. It's done.

3) Repetition and Sampling - A song can't just add another "la la la" at the end to be a new song. I'll therefore add the new rule that if you compress all repeated words and phrases (For instance, the phrase "No One" in the eponymous song by Alicia Keys) into a single block of [(phrase) x n] a song cannot contain an entire other such compressed song within it. Sampling would be a special case here where some limitation (legal or industry standard) would limit the length of a "sample" allowed to operate within a unique song.

4) Combination Limitation - Combining the lyrics to Queen's "Another one Bites the Dust" to the music of Metallica's "Unforgiven II" does not count as a "new" song. This doesn't adress the finity of music, but it does limit the scope of the musical universe more than exponentially.

So anyway, you have, during any given second for 3 minutes (I'll use "t" to represend the maximum number of theoretical seconds a song can last) "i" instruments generating "n" notes per second and "v" voices generating "w" words per second (likely some fraction), limited by the ever-expanding human voacublary (expanding slower than the computing power of machines, I might add. Google converging and diverging functions if you need an explanationas to why this is not a hole in my theory). That gives you an upper limit for songs of:

t * i * n * x * v * w

Poetry is capped (and probably will come closer to this limit than song writing) by

w * l (where l is the number of words the theoretically longest poem can be)

Wordless music is bounded by

t * i * n * x

And I haven't even accounted for limitations for repetition of tone or word! Functionally this allows a three minute song repeating the word "dog" to the beat of several guitars each playing a single distinct note. But hey, I figure that allows for the space I forgot to mention for songs that use nonsense words like "De doo doo doo, de da da da" from the Police. Again, I claim, finite in their existence.

So yea. The singularity approaches, and I expect SkyNet will probably write all the music in the world in order to break our spirits just before it nukes us all.

Practicing

I'm blogging just to sort of keep in practice, you know?

I don't have anything funny to say re: the so-called theme of this blog other than this:

Frank said that he stopped watching Nip/Tuck after the Rosie O'Donnell episode.

Us? We pretty much called everything that would happen minute by minute and loved it.

Disturbing? Of course! Enough to stop watching? No way.

Lisa still wonders if they guys hang out after filming the show, or if they're to messed up to look each other in the eye after cutting.

The main reason I will probably vote republican...

Is so that we can officially coin the term VPILF. And because the overall hotness in Washington should exceed that of Paris. C'mon guys. Michelle Obama is good looking and all, but Joe Biden brings nothing to the table. Cindy McCain and Sarah Palin are a solid ticket.

The squaky wheel...

Dude, I totally called and complained for half an hour to some dude in India, and I got over $30 knocked off my Sprint bill. All I did pretty much was ask. And they did it. And I got unlimited text messages for the SAME COST as a customer loyalty bonus. And the original mistake was probably actually MINE. Capitalism RULES. Jumping through customer service loopholes? WORTH $60/hour.

TRUE.

My weakness

Again, I've lost the impetus to post regularly. So this is another apology to the two readers who ever look at this (almost exclusively family, I believe).

Granted, I was out for the country for most of that time, without internet access.

And during that time, I wondered...

What up with those guys who go to England, go out for Chinese food, order steak at Italian restaurants, Budweiser beers, and hamburgers?

I mean... seriously?

dum DUM!

Okay, so Enterprise notwithstanding, our latest kick has been watching Law and Order: SVU reruns, thanks to a little thing called DVR. You can also blame said DVR for my lack of posting, given that a) its mostly reruns, and b) I am not as clever as Seth McFarlane or Matt Groening, and Family Guy and Futurama have accounted for the remainder of our TV watching.

Okay, but seriously? The L&O theme song needs words. Initially, thes best I had was

Bum BUM
Law and order SONG!
Bum BUM
Law and order So-Ong
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wa-now

But then I got another idea, and nearly killed my wife with laughter (though I may merely traumatize you, dear reader, with silliness). So here it is, my NEW L&O:SVU theme song (first verse) with WORDS!

Bum BUM
Don't have sex with KIDS!
Bum BUM
Or Elliott will punch you!
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wa-now

Okay, so that's my submission. If you read this, watch an episode of any Law and Order show and submit YOUR BEST LYRICS! First prize wins a bag of money.

Father figure

"I read an article in a textbook about how kids without fathers who watch the Simpsons grow up with a bad example of what a father is supposed to be."

"Um. What?"

"Yea, I guess their claim is that because Homer is lazy, fat, stupid, etc. etc. then kids will grow up thinking that too."

(At this point I farted. I was then reminded of the Family Guy episode where Peter puts on Anna and the King, absolutely destroys it, and then after Lois berates him in front of the audience, he farts really loudly and everybody laughs, thus proving that he is, in fact, the better entertainer. There is no moral to the story.)

(My wife glares at me when I fart.)

"You know, in comparison, Family Guy makes the Simpsons look like a really normal, loving, functional family."

"Yea, but in the early '90s, it was pretty... racy isn't the right word..."

"I suppose. But that's hard to believe now."

(We rehash a couple of episodes that show some pretty good family values.)

"Of course we watch Futurama these days. But that also shows the same values."

"Are you surprised?"

"No, of course not. But either way, their conflicts always get resolved in a fairly realistic consistent way that promotes friendship and loyalty! Even Bender!"

"Truuuuuuue."

"But I think I may need to write an article about how kids without robots will grow up thinking that all robots are amoral, alcoholic kleptos."

I imagine this is also the way my dog things about getting a treat.

Spoiler Alert!

Trip and T'Pol had sex? Finally!
They had sex! Theyyy haaad seeeexxxx.
They had sex they had sex they had sex!
Theyhadsextheyhadsextheyhadsex!
Did you see that? They TOTALLY had SEX!
OH MY GOD! They had SEX!
AAAHHHHHH!
They had sex!
They.
had.
sex.
Theyhadsex.
They did.
Sex.
Ah.

Enterprise Season 3, Episode 15: Harbinger