REVIEW: The Cooler

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The Cooler is based around a clever premise: casinos hire coolers, men who can change the luck of others just by being present, to cool off gamblers on lucky streaks. Bernie (William Macy) is the favorite cooler of old-school casino boss Shelly (Alec Baldwin in one of his trademark intense asshole roles that is always so much fun to watch). Shelly also once busted Bernie's kneecap with a baseball hat, one of the more telling symptoms of a love-hate relationship with one's employer.
The events that set the movie in motion: Shelly's partners apply some heat in the form of a consultant played by Ron Livingston who wants Shelly to go "Disneyland" with his casino, the Shangri-La. Meanwhile, Bernie gets lucky with cocktail waitress Natalie and falls in love, and suddenly the cooler's luck reverses which is good for Bernie, bad for business. And then Bernie's son shows up out of the blue looking for money for him and his floozy girlfriend.
The movie treats Las Vegas with a smirk. Bernie's cooling powers are used in the service of a whimsical tale centered around mythical Vegas archetypes, from the ruthless casino boss to the cocktail waitress/whore with a heart of gold to this new type called the cooler. It offers no searing insights into humanity, just a few simple lessons on luck, life, and love. But it has a whole lot of fun doing so. It's the type of lesson you learn when the blackjack beats your pair of face cards with a 6-4-2-7-2 draw: luck can be a cruel mistress, but the drinks are free, the buffets are cheap, and the neon lights are flashing, so we're having fun, right?
3 out of 4 stars.

King James

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Lebron James has been very impressive in his debut season, especially considering he's only 18 years old. 6' 8" 240 lbs?!
His new Nike shoe, though, is surprisingly old school and low-key in its design. Compared with all the other basketball shoes Nike has cranked out the last few years, it almost qualifies as retro.


I don't mind retro looks, but the James' shoe's simple and understated design may dampen its sales with basketball youths.


Plaxo

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I've been getting hit with a slew of Plaxo address update requests recently. Plaxo is a site that sends messages to people in your Microsoft Outlook address book and asks them to update their info which then, I surmise, flows back into your address book.
Good idea, but I don't think it will catch on because...
(1) With as much spam as I receive at work, additional e-mail that includes homework for me is not welcome.
(2) Every Plaxo request I get has to be filled out from scratch because all the people sending me these seem to have different pieces of information about me, and the only way to avoid that is to use Plaxo myself, and I'm too lazy to download and install anything.
And why is it that only people I haven't spoken to in 8 years and probably won't ever speak to again that send me these Plaxo requests? I'm certainly not expecting Xmas cards from them. And people who need to reach me can always get my snailmail address by e-mailing me. I like having that buffer there, and it's a light one because e-mail addresses are so easy to remember (everyone should strive for an easy-to-remember e-mail address that friends and family can derive easily but computers can't; firstnamelastname@yahooorhotmail.com is a good one if you can nab it).
Speaking of Xmas cards, with the advent of e-mail, it seems that Xmas cards have been dropped by all but those willing to put some time and effort into writing some informative messages or providing a photo along with a short recap of the year. I enjoy those. The number of Xmas cards I receive has decreased, but the quality has improved.

The Ring. Which Ring?

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Interesting article in The New Yorker speculating on how much Tolkien borrowed from Wagner's Der Ring Des Nibelungen for The Lord of the Rings. Both Tolkien and Wagner's works are grand epics. Howard Shore wrote some great scores for Peter Jackson's movie trilogy, and it would have been fascinating if he borrowed some motifs from Wagner.
Right now, some lucky fans are sitting in a theater watching all three episodes in Jackson's trilogy back to back to back. That's about 12 hours worth of sitting in a darkened theater. Watching Wagner's entire Ring cycle requires an even greater time commitment. I think it usually lasts around 15 hours and is usually spread out over several days. That's a long time to be looking at some large opera singers who aren't quite as photogenic as Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, or Liv Tyler.
In a class on Arthurian literature in college, the professor showed us clips from Boorman's Excalibur. I remember thinking (1) that it was a strangely gothic, kinky, atmospheric movie and (2) that the score was awesome. It turned out that most of the score was lifted from various works by Wagner, with Orff's Carmina Burana tossed in for apocalyptic effect.
Once in my life I'll listen to the watch or listen to the entire Ring cycle end to end (it's not often that an opera company puts on the entire series, and when they do, ticket prices are usually exorbitant).

The White Elephant problem

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It's that time of year for holiday parties. Everyone pulls out the one item of bright red clothing from their wardrobe, hams fly off of Christmas shelves, and someone from work drinks a bit too much and embarrasses themselves in front of their coworkers by falling prey to loneliness and the holiday blues and hitting on someone from another department. Fun!
A popular instantiation of the holiday party is the White Elephant party. Everyone brings a gift of roughly the same monetary value, wrapped and concealed from curious eyes. Everyone draws a number to determine the gift selection order. When your turn comes up, you have the choice of selecting one of the unopened gifts or stealing an opened gift from one of the previous participants. A gift can be stolen a maximum of three times, and when someone steals a gift from you, you can either steal a gift from someone else or choose one of the unopened gifts. The only limitation is that you can't steal a gift back from someone who stole it from you during the same turn. You can steal it back in a subsequent turn, however, if you get the opportunity to choose a gift again. A turn ends when everyone an unopened gift is chosen.
While playing earlier this evening at Eric and Christina's White Elephant party, I wondered what position was the optimal position for maximizing one's chance of ending up with the best gift. Maybe someone has worked this out, but I haven't heard of a solution. Let's call it the White Elephant problem.
Assume N particpants, each bringing one gift so we have N total gifts. If all gifts were exactly equal in desirability, then the problem would be uninteresting. Anyone who's been to such a party knows this is never true. Assume that each of the gifts varies in desirability, from most to least desirable, in linear fashion. The most desirable gift is N times as desirable as the least desirable gift, and the second most desirable gift is (N-1) times as desirable as the least desirable gift, the third most desirable gift is (N-2) times as desirable as the least desirable gift, etc. (this might seem unrealistic, but tell that to the person who brings the beautiful chrome martini shaker and ice bucket set only to walk home with a free AOL 9.0 CD-ROM or an avocado). To simplify the problem, we'll also assume that every person can compute exactly how the ratio of desirability of any two gifts if they those two gifts have been opened and that everyone judges the desirability of each gift the same exact way (this generally holds true at the White Elephant parties I've been to; if someone ends up with
Everyone draws a number from 1 through N. The person selecting number 1 chooses a gift first, and so on until the person drawing N has chosen, and then the game is over. Assume that when a person's turn comes up, they are statistical geniuses and can compute whether stealing a gift from another person or choosing from the unopened pile will maximize their chances of selecting the most desirable product possible. Based on all the previous assumptions I've stated, in some games, a participant whose turn comes up near the end will be able to tell even with a few unopened presents if one of the opened presents is the best gift from the group.
Express as a function of N what position is the most desirable position to be in if you want to maximize your chances of selecting the most desirable gift from among all N gifts at a White Elephant party. To remove the simple edge cases when there are only a few participants and to imitate reality, assume N is at least 10 or greater.
If someone can solve this, leave the answer in the comments or e-mail me the answer and I'll send you a stainless steel cocktail shaker or a mystery gift. I haven't had time to work out the problem myself, but I suspect there's an intuitive answer. You probably don't want to go first since you can't steal any gifts. Going last isn't necessarily the most desirable position, either, because the best gift may be selected early and stolen 3 times before the last participant's turn.
I myself was pleased to make out with a Dakine Metal Scraper and base wax combo at tonight's party. It was certainly a better bounty than Audrey's take of an anatomically incorrect blowup John doll, though in a place like L.A., dressing up John and getting to use the HOV lane might pay someone back in spades.
[There's also the Major League Baseball White Elephant Party, where the two partygoers named The Yankees and The Red Sox get to watch everyone else open their gifts and play with them for a while, and then the two of them steal all the most fun and desirable gifts. Okay, that's not entirely accurate, but I'm feeling quite bitter about MLB right now. Seriously, if you're Tampa Bay, holding one property, Baltic Place, and everyone else has built hotels on every other property on the Monopoly board, why even bother?]

Torschlusspanik

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Torschlusspanik. I think that's the German word that expresses how I feel right now, but I'm not exactly sure because I don't speak German. I love how languages other than English have simple words or expressions for feelings that can't quite be expressed as elegantly in English. German is especially strong here. Schadenfreude. Zeitgeist. Ohrwurm. Kitsch. Leitmotiv (leitmotif). Wanderlust. Gestalt. Angst. Fahrvergn

Thumbarounds:Pen Tricks | Dribbling:Basketball

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Back when I was a debate geek in high school, I learned to spin pens. Everyone did it, and it shouldn't have said anything about your argumentative skills, but if you had mastered the pen-fu and your opponent hadn't, you could just sit there twirling your pen like a madman, and your opponent would stare bug-eyed, transfixed, terrified, psyched out. Heaven forbid you screw up and send your Papermate flying across the room; it would be like launching an airball while shooting freethrows during warmups.
By now, we know that the web will inevitably grow to contain sites on any topic, no matter how mundane, and so it is with pen tricks. Some of these take pen tricks to a whole new level. For me, comparing some of these tricks to the basic thumbarounds and sonic normals (turns out these tricks even have official names) I mastered way back in the day is like comparing the BMX trickbook from my elementary school days with the arsenal of moves I saw on TV during the last airing of the X-Games on ESPN2.

Go with the Flow?

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This interesting bike saddle, built using mesh similar to that in the Herman Miller Aeron chair, won all sorts of design awards this past year. I'm eager to hear from actual cyclists who've ridden it. Is it comfortable?
I switched saddles compulsively during the first year or two riding. Buying saddles is tricky; you don't know if one fits you well until you've logged some time in it, and by then you usually can't return it. And once you break one in, it's difficult to give it up, especially if you ride an eighty pound Brooks leather saddle. But there's always that thought that perhaps some new saddle is just the one to make riding completely pain free.
When I was in France this year for the Tour, we stopped by the USPS Postal Service hotel after the stage to Lyon and watched the mechanics cleaning up all the Treks. Lance's pristine new bike frame was clamped to a bike stand, every part gleaming in the sun after a hand washing. But the saddle looked like it had been to hell and back, it was cracked, peeling, barely recognizable. Clearly, it had been with Lance for a long, long time.

One job I'm pretty sure I'll never get

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It figures that it was only while I was out of town in LA that I'd hear about a local controversy over the practice of nude sushi, in which patrons eat sushi off of the body of a nude woman. Apparently nude sushi has made it to Seattle, the third U.S. city after NY and LA to import this dining experience from Japan. The best line in the article: "It's dehumanizing to be treated as a plate."
Leaving aside ethical judgments, I find the idea of eating food off of another person's naked body unappetizing.
[On a somewhat related...okay, on an almost entirely unrelated note, Chuck, Karen, and I had a discussion of this list of the ten most overpaid jobs over Thanksgiving weekend. It's a good list.]

Meeting Mr. Wolff

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Tobias Wolff came to Third Place Books in Seattle to read from Old School tonight. I found out about the reading from Dan, and the two of us drove over in the evening rain.
I heard Wolff read from In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War once while I was still a student at Stanford (where he now teaches fiction writing). His reading then was spirited, lively, mischievous, and left me with a greater appreciation for his prose and how well it sounded when read aloud.
He has grown older, so his voice is not quite as strong as it once was. Still, he has a way of changing his voice at select times to enhance one's appreciation of his wit and humor. I could only find a few of my Wolff books to bring to the reading for him to sign; the rest are packed away God knows where. As he scrawled my name in cursive, I shared a story with him...
My love for the short story was kindled when, for some reason that now eludes me, I checked out the collected stories of Wolff, a paperback version I believe is out of print, from Green Library at Stanford. Despite all the reading and homework I had for my classes, I couldn't put it down. In a few days, I had read all twenty something stories in that collection.
The first story in the collection was one he had written as an undergrad at Stanford, Hunters in the Snow, and when I finished it, I felt both awe and sadness. I admired the story immensely and yet knew I'd never write a story that good as an undergrad.

A SoCal Thanksgiving

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Southern California is often described as a laid back environment, and a relaxed Thanksgiving was just what I needed this past weekend. Being around my little sister Karen usually calms me down as well; she doesn't seem to ever get too high or low. I suppose I knew that before, but it was particularly noticeable this weekend compared against my recent moodiness.
I was up most the night before heading down Wednesday. Most of my clothes were still packed away, and finding everything I needed for the weekend was a chore. By the time I arrived I felt a fatigue down to my bones. The afternoon was a drowsy blur, but one thing I do remember was the warmth of the air, about seventy or eighty degrees. That alone, after the temperatures in the thirties in Seattle, soothed me. I'm starting to understand why retirees seek out warm weather.
Howie met us for dinner Wednesday. I enjoyed listening to him and Karen discuss the LA social scene and to know that they had that shared context. Perhaps they'll hang out from time to time; I'm one of those people that feels it's some failure on my part when any two of my friends fail to appreciate each other. We drove down that night to San Marcos to Angela's family's place. Seeing James is always a happy moment; he's like an eternally happy puppy...that tells jokes...and performs insane magic tricks.
Angela's entire family was there as was James and Angela's friend Eddie. Big groups are fun at holiday time. Angela's parents were gracious hosts, and we never lifted a finger except to pick cards out of a deck of cards in James' hand which he would magically control back into his hands after a few shuffles. Our favorite sayings of the weekend were, "If I just give it a little shake..." or "Now I haven't been anywhere near my pocket..."
Thanksgiving Day, the kids (as I approach the big three-O I like to continue to include myself in that group though sometimes I think about it and it seems absurd) spent the morning up at a park at the top of a hill near Angela's house playing pickup hoops. A group of Russians came along and beat us up in a game of four on four, mainly because they had one gigantic brute of a guy who just ran us over.
Thanksgiving Dinner was so tasty, a nice mix of Korean and American cuisine. The turkey was cooked just right, something that in my experience happens less than you'd think given the popularity of the other white meat at this time of year. I brought up the turducken, but no one else thought it sounded very good.
After dinner we karaoked for something like five hours, and that's not an exagerration. I don't even like to karaoke, but after some initial shyness and hesitation, suddenly I had the mike in my hands on every song, belting away like Engelbert Humperdinck. James and I monopolized the mikes; I could barely talk by the time it was all over. Their karaoke machine gave scores after each performance, and James and I scored a perfect 100 for our rendition of Sweet Caroline. Though the evaluation algorithm was of dubious accuracy, we felt an unusually deep sense of accomplishment.
Friday morning we ventured to the gigantic outlet malls nearby, braving the capitalist hordes with designer fabrics in their eyes. Parking was so bad that LA drivers riding gargantuan SUVs (some were seriously monster trucks, leading me to wonder why they were shopping at outlets) simply hopped the curb across the street and parked in a giant dirt field. It was a massive outlet mall, one of the largest I've been to, but I managed to ignore the massive discounts and contain myself to a few odd items. Barney's had suits at half price, and while they were beautiful, I can count the number of times I wear a suit each year on one hand now. James scored two sweet suits, though, being the finance wheeler dealer that he is.
The only great stressor in LA is the traffic, and we got a taste of it driving back on Friday. The perfect gift for LA Karen would be the MIRT, if it were still legal. We were late to dinner with James' uncle and aunt up north, but we still managed to catch up with Jason and Jamie and Sadie at Kenny's place in Pasadena afterwards. I was so excited to find that Sadie hadn't yet gone to sleep, and I got a bunch of playtime with her. She's such a cutie! She's at the stage where she likes to bounce up and down if you hold her up and steady. I'd raise her up to the ceiling and then lower her down, and she'd jump up and down a bit and shriek happily, then every now and then she'd turn around and stare at me as if to say, "Who are you? Oh, it doesn't really matter, just toss me up in the air again, buddy."
Saturday during the day we did the relaxing Hermosa Beach thing. I rented one of those Schwinn beach cruiser bikes which sits you straight up, has just a single gear and two fat tires, and has handlebars that you have to hold with your arms spread wide and extended straight. The bike shop owner convinced me that to ride anything else, like a mountain bike, would mark me as a silly tourist. I felt like such a geezer, but riding at a lazy saunter down the boardwalk, sun-seeking folk all around and the ocean whispering to the beach to one side, I felt what it means to be a beach bum, to obey the call of the shoreline as it says, "Just chill out, man."
Saturday night Karen and I had dinner with our cousin Chuck at Blue Pacific, an Asian fusion restaurant on Hermosa Beach. Since my mother passed away, I've done a lousy job of keeping in touch with cousins on that side of the family, and that bothers me more now than it did before.
Afterwards, Karen and I met her friend Judy and caught the preview showing of The Last Samurai at Bridge Cinema de Lux. I'm not often tempted to move to LA, but if I did, getting to see movies before the rest of the country would be one of the reasons why, that's how much of a movie geek I am.
I saw only two movies this weekend in LA, so this conclusion is based on a small sample size, but the crowds in LA are refreshingly enthusiastic. After some assassins are turned back by Tom Cruise and some samurai, the crowd burst into applause and cheers. The theaters in LA are also much nicer than the ones in Seattle. Stadium seating is a norm, as is digital sound turned up nice and loud. LA respects its movies and presents them as nicely as possible, even if some of the content itself is dreck.
Sunday Karen went with me to see Love Actually. It was her second time, my first. I'm not much for romantic comedies, but after a Thanksgiving weekend among family and friends and by the time Bill desposited back on my Seattle doorstep, I couldn't much deny that love was indeed all around.

Cap Codes

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Ebert's latest Movie Answer Man includes a note from a moviegoer angered by the cap codes in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Ebert had addressed them before, but it was only while watching Master and Commander that I noticed the dots for the first time. They showed up repeatedly during the chase in the rain storm and were definitely distracting. For a minute or two, I tried to guess at what the dots were instead of following the chase.
At a preview screening of The Last Samurai in LA this weekend, a security guard spent the entire time scanning the audience with infrared binocs, checking, I presume, for recording devices. It's a shame, because as I was walking into the theater I was thinking that LA has so many impressive theaters (like the Bridge Cinema de Lux where Karen and I saw The Last Samurai), many more than Seattle does. The movie industry is moving towards the same antagonistic, distrustful relationship with its customers as the music industry. The type of customer who will watch a fuzzy, wallet-sized image of a movie on their desktop with lousy sound shouldn't worry movie studios.
And if the studios insist on making every moviegoing experience feel like a frisking, every theater feel like a police state, then can they at least stop forcing me to sit through those first person testimonial ads from respectcopyrights.org before every movie?