The spidey tracer

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Let me be up front: I'm repackaging a couple product links from Gizmodo here.
With a high quality Halloween costume, a couple of these inserted in plastic casing molded in the shape of a spider, and you could be a modern day Spiderman. In the old 1960's cartoon, not the sleek but dull new one on MTV with the slow and robotic animation, Spidey would toss small spider-shaped tracers on his enemies as they were fleeing the scene so that he could track them down later.
Everyone else will comment on how these Followit's can be used to track spouses or children, but family units built around distrust are somewhat dysfunctional anyway. This Spiderman angle will likely be overlooked by the press. Of course, some people want to be geo-tracked.
No self-respecting male will ever resort to using the self-parallel-parking feature coming in a future model of the Toyota Prius. I realize that's a sexist remark, but some things guys just generally do better than gals, and parallel parking is one of them. Don't ask me why, I have no idea. All I do know is that the one time I let a woman parallel park my car she scraped the hubcap against the curb, and the screeching sound of that metal against cement was like the sound of my heart shearing in half. No use trying to conceal the disappointment on my face, it was a look of sheer horror.

Another lesson for the little ones

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I thought of another thing to add to my list of things to teach every kid.
Teach them to ski. It's one of those sports that's much easier to learn when you're young and fearless. I never tried it until I was in college, and young kids without ski poles were flying circles past me. It looked so simple from the gondola, too. I told my friends to take me straight to the blues. No worries, I can handle this. I don't need a lesson.
That entire first run down the mountain, I suffered more spectacular crashes than Internet stocks in 2001. Skiing is one of those sports in which fear is a huge deterrent to improvement. Kids are physically indestructible and immune to such concerns.

Matrix Revolutions trailer

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The Matrix Revolutions trailer is available to stream or download from the Warner Bros. site. You'll have to navigate through the frames-based website to find it; it's a bit confusing. Start by clicking on Revolutions International Trailer in the left sidebar.
I don't know if John Woo invented the "whole group of people all have guns pointed at each other in a giant Mexican standoff" scene, but I think of him everytime I see one. It will be a fun holiday movie season with this and LOTR: ROTK.

Langley Music Project

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So you're disillusioned by the music factory which manufactures pop stars by grinding no-talent hacks through the marketing machine? Here's a refreshing variant on that story: The Langley Schools Music Project. Music teacher Hans Fenger took 60 school children from rural western Canada and taught them a few pop music tunes.
That the music was eventually recorded onto a CD was not the original goal of the group. But thankfully for us it was. I'd never heard of them until last week. I was trying to track down a charming version of Desperado I'd heard on NPR. By chance, an article crossed FeedDemon about those musical snippets played between stories on NPR's All Things Considered. Turns out those are called music buttons. Scanning through the archives, somehow I was led to the CD which I then purchased from Amazon.
Just a week later, I can listen to Desperado as sung by 9 year old Sheila Behman (the Internet is great for near instant satisfaction, but it's also made me very impatient). All the songs exude the charming joy of an elementary school chorus concert; any parent who has looked on proudly as their son or daughter belted out Christmas tunes on stage during the annual Christmas assembly knows the sensation. Of course, none of the singers are as vocally talented as your average recording artist. But what is wonderful about the way children sing is that they eschew the gratuitous sentimentality of someone like Faith Hill or Celine Dion. If the song is written well and the arrangement appropriate, the emotions will shine through even without Celine Dion's operatic megaphone of a voice belting or her rail-thin arms gesticulating (the musical equivalent of over-acting).

Neurobiology of trust

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Corante's Brain Waves consistently offers interesting content. This post on the neurobiology of trust interested me because of an aside on pregnant women:
We also found that women in the experiment who are ovulating were significantly less likely to be trustworthy (for the same signal of trust). This effect is caused by the physiologic interactions between progesterone and oxytocin, and it makes sense behaviorally: women who are, or are about to be, pregnant, need to be much more selective in their interpretation of social signals, and also need more resources than at other times.
I'm at the age where seemingly half the women I know are pregnant at any point in time, so I'll know now not to take it personally when they treat me with unusual suspicion.

Scary

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None of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels or Friday the 13th sequels will ever match the originals because Freddy and Jason went from terrifying boogeymen to actual heroes in the hearts of the audience, and that drained the terror out of the franchises. I had nightmares for an entire night the first time I saw the original Nightmare on Elm Street as a young child.
But I can't ever imagine a scenario where I'd be swimming out in the ocean and wouldn't be scared half to death of great whites. And now comes the news that they can actually breach! And not just for fun--they do it when hunting, too. Truly awesome.
You can get up close and personal with these predators down in the Bay Area.

Some trailers of note

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Really pretty trailer for the Christmas showcase movie from Disney, The Alamo. And a fun trailer for the upcoming Zatoichi feature film from Takeshi Kitano (for Windows users, the link will pop up a dialog box asking if you want to install the Japanese language character pack which, if you're like me, you'll never be able to locate, so just click the Cancel button).
My dad was a huge fan of the Zatoichi Blind Swordsman series, and it was contagious. The conceit of a blind samurai swordsman is a fun metaphor, and if the entire DVD series is too rich to purchase it's at least worth putting on your Netflix/Greencine rental list. The Kitano version will doubtless be more bloody.
I wonder if holding your sword with that strange backhand grip really works.

Push or pull this weblog

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In switching website hosts, I had to switch mailing list providers as well. To receive these weblog posts via e-mail, send a blank e-mail message to weblog-subscribe@eugenewei.com. And to unsubscribe, yes, just send a message to weblog-unsubscribe@eugenewei.com. The old mailing list no longer works so current subscribers should do this to continue receiving posts via e-mail.
The other option is to syndicate this blog via its RSS 1.0 feed and pull it into your newsreader. Or you can just read it here as a web page, though that's so 1999.

Things every kid should learn

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Now that friends of mine are having kids, I thought it would be worthwhile to pass on my wisdom. A draft was brewing in my head this weekend. I call this list Things every kid should learn, and it's arranged in no particular order:

  1. How to type. It's the computer age, and typing is key to being productive. I have a soft spot for artistic penmanship, but I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone worry about perfecting their handwriting. But let your kid lead life as a hunt-and-pecker and you're dooming them to thousands of hours of wasted life. I remember when my mom first sat me down with her old typing drill book and started me typing ASDFJKL; over and over and over. If I had a child today I'd start them on those drills much earlier. They even make videogames on the computer to teach typing so your kids can have fun while they're learning.

  2. How to ride a bike. I'm partial to cycling, but more than my affinity for the sport, cycling was a great way for me to explore the city I grew up in before I had a driver's license. I rode everywhere--to school, to baseball practice, to tennis courts, to the local 7-Eleven. Cycling was freedom. When your kids grow up, they'll be able to preserve their knees while staying in shape.

  3. How to swim. 2/3 the world is covered by water. Like cycling, a joint-preservation form of exercise. Alsi, like cycling, a skill whose absence will subject your kids to much ridicule.

  4. A foreign language. Or two. Or three. They say that languages are easier to learn while you're young, and I believe it. When I was young, I could never fall asleep so I'd lie in bed listening to my mother speak to my grandmother in Cantonese. They spoke to me in Mandarin, but somehow through simply listening I learned to understand Cantonese. I can't really speak it, but I understand it when it's used to refer to concepts I was familiar with as a child. Your kids won't understand why a language is of value until that first summer vacation to Europe, when they meet some fair young European of the opposite sex and realize they know how to say, "You are the most beautiful thing I've ever laid eyes on."

  5. A computer language/how to program. The new foreign language requirement. If French or Spanish will lend your child an air of sophistication, then C# or Java will increase their employability and lifetime earnings potential. Someday, I'm not sure when, more kids in the world will know a computer language than, say, German. We may already have passed that point, I'm not sure if stats are available. You have to at least hedge against the possibility that geeks will inherit the earth. And, while we're on the topic of languages...

  6. How to read music. And the easiest way to learn to read music is to learn...

  7. How to play an instrument. Force your child to take music lessons when they're young. Piano is a pretty good place to start. Keep them at it for a few years, enough to bridge to their school days when they can play with other students, and then hope they can stay interested. Even if they don't, reading music is a skill that never really leaves you, and so is the resulting increase in one's appreciation of music. They may resent the lessons for years, but someday, perhaps long after they've left your nest, they'll understand and look back in appreciation.

  8. Math. Okay, that's the last language on this list, but it's a universal one. No reason to let public schools determine the pace at which your kids learn math, either. My dad schooled me in basic algebra long before they covered it in school, and it made life so much easier further down the road.

  9. How to dance. Best to learn while your kids are shameless. Once they learn the meaning of embarrassment in front of their peers, it's tough to regain one's confidence. Seeing someone dance well without any concern for what spectators are thinking is an amazing thing.

  10. One good toast. One day your child will have occasion to lead a group in a toast, and a classy one will leave the room silent and nodding in appreciation at his/her eloquence and ability to command the moment. I'm tempted to replace this with "How to speak in public."

  11. How to mix one cocktail. Kool-Aid doesn't count, though the basic process is similar.

  12. How to prepare one impressive dish.

  13. One team sport. One's true nature is revealed inside the lines, and a team sport is a great forum for learning teamwork, leadership, performance under pressure, accountability, and a whole host of other valuable life lessons.

  14. How to disagree respectfully. Independence of mind is a wonderful thing. Of course, sometimes they'll disagree with you, and sometime you'll have to explain why they're wrong.

  15. How to criticize another, and how to accept criticism.

  16. Honesty. Parents need to lead by example here or your kids will also learn about hypocrisy. The thing is, the first time your kid owns up to some misbehavior, you'll be tempted to let them off easy to reward their honesty. That just teaches them to be honest when it suits them, robbing them of their integrity. And someday they'll realize it and resent you.

  17. Modesty and confidence. I'm not sure why modesty is important, but it's easier to move from modesty to confidence than in reverse. No one likes a snot.

  18. How to deliver the punchline. Anyone can learn a few jokes. Only a few can deliver them.

  19. The words to one good poem. Why is this essential? It isn't. But this is my list.


Jot down any list like this and inevitably one feels like some things are missing. Any obvious misses? Some addendums may bubble to mind in the coming days.
But it's a good start. I wish I had mastered this list when I was a kid.

O.C.

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"Welcome to the O.C., bitch!"
I caught my first episode of O.C. tonight. Part of it. I was eating dinner and it was on in the background, and enough latent buzz was ringing in my ears that I looked up from my laptop from time to time. For most of the episode, I was unimpressed and I couldn't even name many of the characters just five minutes later. But things took a turn for the better when the water polo-playing bully Luke started pounding the show's main character Ryan in a house where Ryan was hiding out. Luke was upset over some incident from the last episode and over a budding relationship between Ryan and Luke's girl whose name I never caught.
While fighting, they knocked over some candles and set the house on fire. Luke and his buddies started to flee as the flames erupted to the ceilings, but then Luke underwent a sudden change of heart and went back to pull Ryan out from the burning house. It was like the moment in Karate Kid when the bully Johnny hands Daniel the trophy at the end of the movie and congratulates Daniel on his victory. You realize that no kids are really cruel, just misguided. Taking things to another level, the two kids come back to the scene of the crime and both openly admit to having caused the fire which burned down the house. As the episode ended, the police were leading them off in a squad car.
It's the type of kitschy teenage drama which usually means a second season renewal. And it's set among the wealthy denizens of Orange County. All ratings-winning television teens lead lives which bear no resemblance to the lives of any normal, real-life teenagers.

*****

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When I dial my cell phone voice mail, it asks me to key in my password. Why does my phone then display the password on the screen as I type it? Why not replace the numbers with asterisks?
Not that accessing my voicemail password would be of much value to anyone, but it still bothers me everytime it happens. The worst case scenario, really, is that one of the guys would get a hold of it and leave a record a new, ridiculous voicemail greeting: "Hello, this is Eugene's male escort service. My next available time slot..."

Rich's big, phat Greek wedding

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Rich and Christina tied the knot Sunday. The reception was held at the Seattle Tennis Club, the tres exclusive club of the Seattle social elite. The waiting list to become a member is said to be five years long. I am tempted to fire off some socialist humor, but I harbor hopes of befriending a member who will then take me there to hit around on the immaculate courts, so I'll hold my tongue.
Greek wedding's offer some traditional group dances which are a lot of fun after a few cocktails. One minute you're standing at the edge of the dance floor, enjoying a drink, watching the family members dance in a giant line that swirls in on itself, and then suddenly a Greek woman grabs you and you're in the line, being pulled along into the center, side shuffling on a dance floor covered with dollar bills. It's a nice change-of-pace from the usual motley wedding bunch of the young and old, awkwardly trying to dance to music from each other's generations while dressed in formal attire.
The tradition I most enjoy from weddings is the best man speech. Nothing against the maid of honor speech, but women are just much sweeter and sentimental about the whole thing. Men have no qualms about embarrassing each other in front of their future in-laws, and in fact it has become a tradition to do so. How did it become so? I have no idea.
The audience is always riveted because the mix of alcohol and the heady emotions of the moment always leave open the possibility that the best man will inadvertently slip up and humiliate the groom. It's the turning point of every evening. When else will your best buddy give you an open mike to address his entire extended family about his personal character? What power. What responsibility. Wisely, none of us at table 18 were asked to speak about Rich. Smart move.
On a side note: yes, if I gave a best man speech, I would end with the line, "Before we're done here, we're all gonna be wearing gold-plated diapers." Hopefully one or two people would understand and laugh.
[By the way, the winning bet on when the DJ would play I Will Survive was the over on 8:45pm. I can understand thematically why the wedding DJ canon includes staples like We Are Family and Celebration, but the message of Gloria Gaynor's girl power dance tune seems out of place at an event joining a man and woman.]
Hopefully Rich's marital status won't turn him into a pumpkin. The guys gathered for an outing to the M's-BoSox game on Friday night, and his absence was conspicuous. It just wasn't the same, sitting there feigning Boston accents without our resident Mayor Quimby.
[Yet again, Jamie Moyer was starting. I think he has started every Mariners game I've ever been to. If it wasn't for television replays, I'd be convinced that Moyer starts every M's game. He throws about 50 mph, so he shouldn't put much stress on my arm. It's possible. For a change, though, this time Ichiro shook of the jinx of having me in the crowd and smacked a grand slam to lead the M's to victory.]

Open Range

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The Kevin Costner jinx is over. Open Range is quite entertaining. Hollywood is quite reactionary--a few cowboy movies flop and the judgment is that westerns just don't work anymore--but actors get a long leash. Costner is one beneficiary, and Freddie Prinze Jr. received more than three strikes.
The dialogue of Open Range is the traditional terse, ungrammatical, honest talk of men educated on the Western plains (or Western movies):
"Men are going to get killed her today, Sue, and I'm going to kill them."
"That Cuban cigar got me all riled up!"
"Cows are one thing, but a man telling another man where he can go? That's just wrong. It's stuck in my craw all day."
"A man gets hit in the head with a gun, it can make him crazy all the rest of his days."
I love that stuff, and Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner deliver it just right. It's probably not how people spoke back then, but it feels like our modern collective vision or hopes of what the wild West was like, just like The Untouchables felt like a dream about the days of bootlegging liquor and Al Capone.
Also, the gunshots in the movie are loud. Very very loud. They snap with percussive impact. The gunfights are realistic, messy. Gunfighters stand close to each other firing away with revolvers and shotguns, and usually they miss. The DVD has pre-earned a spot in my collection.

Moving

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I'm moving my website to a new host this weekend. It should be straightforward, but then again, nothing ever is. So perhaps this site will suffer its own major blackout for a bit. If so, we'll be back up and running soon enough.
It also means that if you subscribe to my weblog via e-mail, you won't be receiving any more posts. I'm going to investigate the various e-mail list services out there and will e-mail you some directions on how to subscribe again once I've made a decision.

Thirteen

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Attended a screening of first-time director Catherine Hardwicke's debut effort, Thirteen. Hardwicke herself was on hand to answer questions afterward.
First things first: Thirteen is very good, as I've recorded elsewhere. Evan Rachel Wood (is this the same Wood from Once and Again?!?) is amazing and utterly convincing as a 13 year old girl struggling against her resentment against her divorced parents, especially her mother and guardian (played by Holly Hunter) and the pressures to fit in with the cool kids at her new school, especially the devious and delinquent Evie (Nikki Reed).
It's a movie that's a marketing nightmare for Hollywood, though. It's a movie which will appeal to teenage girls, but it's rated R. So you hope that their mothers will take them, but the intense storyline centered on a young daughter whose life is raging out of control right under her mother's roof and care is not a message many mothers will enjoy hearing. The male market will be difficult to tap because all the main characters are female. Early reviews of the movie, broken down by demographic, clearly reflect these challenges (admittedly the sample size is small as the movie hasn't opened wide):
Females under 18 rate the movie 9.0 out of 10.0 (parents should wonder why this movie speaks so strongly to them)
Males/Females over 45 rate the movie 1.6 out of 10.0
Surprisingly, Males aged 30-44 rate the movie 6.9 out of 10.0
Hardwicke, only 25(?!) co-wrote the screenplay with Reed in only six days when Reed was only 13 years old, and the events are based on Reed's life. Reed's parents divorced when she was just two years old, and she was raised in Los Angeles. Hardwicke actually dated Reed's father for a while, and that's how she met Reed. Hardwicke has worked with plenty of A-list directors in the past but struggled mightily to get financing to direct her own feature. For that reason alone, I have a lot of sympathy for her.
But I still wouldn't plug Thirteen unless it was worth seeing, and it is. I can't remember another movie that depicted the forces that work on teenagers outside of the home environment with such realism. Parents wonder why their kids turn out the way they do yet rarely understand that their kids leave every morning for school and enter an entirely different universe for more than half the day. In Los Angeles, this alternate universe is even more frightening than elsewhere--I would never let my kids attend the L.A. public school system. All parents-in-training and parents-to-be would do well to watch this movie and read the Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do.

Killer instinct

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Watched Blue Planet--Seas of Life Part 4 yesterday. Rather, it was on in the background as I scanned slides. I have that distinctly male fascination with nature documentaries (maybe I'm being sexist, but while my guy friends often confess to watching documentaries on the Discovery Channel, I've never had any of my girl friends express a similar habit).
One reason these documentaries are so fascinating is the same reason conservatives decry video games and movies: they depict a healthy dose of murder and violence. Somehow it's acceptable to watch other species displaying the same brutal tendencies. Still, I feel the same sense of voyeuristic embarrassment and horror when shown animals ruthlessly attacking each other.
The "Tides" episode scored low on the violence scale, though I didn't realize that ocean snails would emerge from the sand to surf the tides onto beaches to feed on the flesh of dead fish. The sight of a dozen snails crawling all over the body of a dead fish was like something out of a disturbing arthouse movie.
"Coasts" had an insane body count. Hawks snare seagulls out of the air. A sea lion grabs a penguin and drags it out to sea to thrash its victim violently back and forth to, get this, skin the penguin. A pod of Orcas attack some naive young seal pups, snatching them from the shallow water along a beach. One shot shows a seal pup screaming in pain as an Orca tosses it up and down violently with its mouth. Then, the killer whale drags the still living seal pup out to sea and uses it like a volleyball with the other members of its pod. They take turns picking up the panicked, bleeding seal pup in their mouths and tossing it through the air. After the seal pup dies, the whale uses its tale to launch the limp corpse 30 to 40 feet out of the water through the air.
A day later and I'm still traumatized. That poor seal pup. Is it cruelty if there is no conscious intent?

Where is Saint-Malo?

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I want to be in Saint-Malo right now, for Festival La Route du Rock. I don't even know where Saint-Malo is, but the fest plays in an 18th century fort and on the beaches there, and that in itself is enough to make me cry. I also know that over the next few days, these are only a fraction of the bands that will be there: Travis (new album coming in October), Hot Hot Heat, 2 Many DJ's, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Audio Bullys, and Death in Vegas (yeah, I know, I only know Days Go By, too, but it's still catchy).
Why is it that all the coolest music fests are always in Europe?