Okay, this has been bugging me for a couple of days now. To change things up for our kids my wife and I decided to borrow some Disney movies from family, one of which was the Greek themed Hercules. In this movie there is a brief reference to the infamous Trojan Horse, where one of the movie’s characters points out that the city of Troy had bet on the wrong horse.
When I heard this my ears perked up and I thought for a second that I had found an error. Now before I expound on this, let me point out that while I am no expert I have studied Greek mythology in a classroom environment before, as well as having read at least one book on the topic in my free time. I know, one book an expert does not make—good thing I’m not claiming to be an expert.
Anyway, in order to reveal my point in the proper context let’s take a very quick look at some fairly standard modern manufacturing and distribution practices. When one person or company or country produces something wholly original, they—or those who consume it—will often name it after the creator. Swiss cheese is a good example. I would imagine that today it is likely produced in most nations, and yet the “Swiss” remains part of its name.
That name, Swiss cheese, would make no sense if that particular kind of cheese had originated from, I don’t know, say Yugoslavia. Wouldn’t that cheese then be called Yugoslavian cheese? There are other examples as well that do not directly involve cheese: French bread, German beer, Texas Toast, Canadian Bacon, and so on. Are you starting to get the picture?
Now, if an item is produced in and by Country A, but then winds up being bought and consumed by Country B, we do not tend to change the name of it to reflect its new home. If you export German beer to India, it does not suddenly and magically become Indian beer. If a Christian gives his bible to a Taoist, it does not become a Taoist bible. See where I’m going with this?
When I heard that reference to the Trojan War in Disney’s Hercules regarding the Trojans having bet on the wrong horse, I became confused. Without thinking back to my preexisting knowledge of the subject, I decided that it had to be a false statement. The Trojan Horse simply should not be called the Trojan Horse. The opposite would have been true only if it had been produced by, you guessed it, the Trojans! But it wasn’t built in the city of Troy, nor was it built by the Trojans, it was built by the Achaeans outside of Troy’s walls. In fact it was built in utter secrecy, so the Trojans weren’t even aware of its existence until it was too late. So, why isn’t it called an Achaean horse?
When we gift something to a friend, family member, or even to an enemy, we do not suddenly change the name of the present to reflect its new owner. If I design a sculpture of a fire hydrant and decide to call it the “JMK Thirst Quencher,” then that is the name that it will bear indefinitely. If I were to gift that sculpture to someone—let’s say Hunter S. Thompson because I know his initials like I know U.S.A.—it wouldn’t suddenly become the “HST Thirst Quencher.”
So why, when the Achaeans build a horse and give it to the Trojans, does history decide to call it a Trojan Horse? The Trojans had nothing to do with the horse save for making the mistake of bringing it inside of their city gates. Perhaps this could be called a Trojan mistake, but convention dictates that the horse remain Achaean.
There you have it. I’ve toppled a story of mythological proportions using nothing more than sound reason. Now the historians of the world can laud me as a corrector—indeed, as the harbinger of truth. I’m sure that all of my readers are already doing so, right? If you disagree with my point of view, it’s no big deal. I do have a nice, large wooden horse here that I’d like to give you though. We can even name it after you if you wish!
Have you ever dipped your toe in the waters of an online DVD rental club? I just canceled a membership with Netflix this morning, I think. You see, I’ve modified my membership status twice previously and Netflix has both times simply ignored my requests.
Back in December my wife and I decided that Netflix just wasn’t suiting us, so I logged in and began to cancel. When you do this they offer to put a “hold” on your account instead. During this period of “hold” they claim that you will not be charged. A hold period can last for up to 90 days, which seemed to be a good deal at the time. Perhaps after 90 days we could better afford it, or so was our thinking. And this way our rental queue wouldn’t get erased in the meantime.
The first 90 days passed and we had no problems. It was what Netflix did on day 91 that caused a serious dilemma. Believe it or not we weren’t faithfully crossing off the days in our “hold” using a calendar, so we didn’t even know it when day 91 rolled around—but Netflix sure did.
Without so much as an email to warn us Netflix charged our account for a new month of membership. What’s the problem with this? Well, we did not have enough money in the account to cover it! What this meant was that we wound up paying almost $200 in overdraft fees ($35 for the overdraft and something like $7 per day—see, banks are evil too!) for a $15 membership with Netflix. In the eyes of Netflix and our bank though, this is all our problem.
The worst part was that we didn’t want the service anymore at all. Had they sent an email to ask for our permission to charge us for a new membership, we most certainly would have declined. So by this point we were $200 in the negative, but we had a bright and shiny new month of Netflix subscription, yay! (If you weren’t able to sense my sarcasm let me just point it out for you now: that ‘yay’ was sarcastic.)
So, knowing that I would have to speak with someone from Netflix to resolve this, I put the new membership back on hold to prevent any movies being sent to us. I then began to scour the Netflix site for a means of communicating with them, to no avail. That’s right, they DO NOT OFFER a way to speak to them. They have a help section, but it does not ever lead you to a phone number or even an email address. Thus, I am effectively left with no means by which to complain.
And then they went and tried to charge us this month! It’s getting ridiculous now. First they cause us to overdraft by not warning us before charging our account, a move which cost us a week’s pay in one fell swoop, and for something that we didn’t even want! Then they try to charge us for membership in the middle of a “hold” period which they claim exists for the sole purpose of preventing such charges in the first place!
You can bet that if this attempt, which they were kind enough to email me about after it was declined by the bank, costs us any money in the way of overdrafts, I’ll be seeking the recompense of my monies by way of court. We most certainly will never rent from Netflix again and will now begin an active campaign to warn potential Netflix customers of the trap that they are entering.
Netflix: You should be ashamed of yourselves. What you have done to my family is worthy of a good flogging and should land some of your middle and/or upper management in prison. It certainly would put you there if I had any sway over the courts. I am sick and tired of being cannibalized by the Capitalist, corporate world of American business. If our product producers and service providers feel that it is so important to cheat their customers, we will eventually reach a breaking point and topple them all!
They’ll feel pretty silly when I’m living out of their CEO’s office and parking my Lamborghini in his living room at home.
Anyway, there you have it. It’s as if our family name is on a list somewhere, just waiting to cause us unrest and bring mayhem into our lives. If I ever find the fellow who is holding that list I’ll tar his hands to his hips and dip his head in a vat of stomach acid!
Movie reviews are not a common part of this blog. I tend to reserve such exercises for movies that I find to be exceptionally good or an exceptional waste of time. In this case, I’m reviewing the movie in question because I was absolutely mesmerized by it!
Set in the “fairy tale” city of Bruges, Belgium this movie takes the viewer on an interesting journey into the career gone-wrong of a green hit man. On his first job, Ray—Colin Farrell—mistakenly kills a young boy along with his target. I should warn my readers that there are two scenes in this movie that are exceedingly gruesome and this scene where the boy dies was very difficult for me to watch.
With that said, I should also point out that this film is not your typical hit man movie. In fact it winds up being almost antithetical to the genre, going a long way to discredit the idea of being a hit man rather than to glorify it. When Ray’s employer learns of his botched job, he hires Ray’s only friend to kill him.
The dialog was probably my favorite part of this movie, with the characters themselves being a very close second. Farrell plays this character perfectly, and his Irish accent makes his punchlines funnier and his serious thoughts seem somehow more important. At times I was clutching my stomach because I was laughing so hard. As I watched the film I couldn’t help but to think that teens today might watch this film with the same kind of awe that I experienced while watching Tarantino rise to notoriety in the mid to late 90’s. The only difference is that Tarantino has a franchise where this film seems to be more of an oasis.
I would recommend this movie to anyone who can tolerate regular swearing and overlook the brutality of those two scenes that I mentioned. The second involves one of the characters tumbling from a clock tower, just in case you’re looking for those scenes in order to skip them.
If you choose to watch the film, do enjoy it! Feel free to comment on it here.
Okay, it was difficult finding a way to tie in my topic for this post with my recent pledge to return to writing mostly about writing. So, for the sake of relevancy, let’s assumed that there would be a reason that someone might want to write and make a movie about me. Clearly they’re going to need someone witty, charming, intelligent, and not at all uncomfortable on the fringe. Enter John Cusack.
Because I haven’t had cable for years, we don’t subscribe to a paper (sadly), and only listen to the radio in the car, I was previously unaware that the movie War, Inc. even existed. But that all changed this morning thanks to John making headlines with MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post. Both came into my inbox by way of a daily or weekly newsletter. The stories were about Cusack’s appearance on an MSNBC morning show to talk about his new political ad and his being mentioned by Bill O’Reilly as “peddling propaganda.” The ad is interesting, and makes perhaps the most important point about McCain that can be made. Watch it now:
Short, sweet, and to the point. Very effective in my book. Very true in reality. Anyhow, seeing this naturally led to me seeing other videos of Cusack, including a trailer for his movie War, Inc. Now, watching that trailer I couldn’t help but to feel as though I were watching the trailer for a sequel to Grosse Pointe Blank, which happens to be one of my all time favorite movies, ever. Believe it or not, there is a fight scene in the hallways of a high school between John and another actor playing a hit man that I have always touted to be the most realistic, “un-Hollywood-itized” fight scene that I have ever seen, including every Bruce Lee movie ever made, whether by or about him.
War, Inc. doesn’t just parallel GPB in terms of subject matter, apparent mood, dark humor, and so on — the casting is nearly identical too! John and real life sister Joan Cusack play killer/killer’s secretary just as they did in GPB. Dan Aykroyd is in War, Inc., playing an older and more experienced father/authority figure as he has been doing for the last decade or so, just as he did in GPB. The similarities are quite clear, but I see no mention on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) of War, Inc. being a GPB sequel. Besides, Aykroyd’s character in GPB was killed off, so having him appear in this new movie as the Vice President would be a bit of stretch in the case of a sequel.
Anyway, I’m not complaining. I loved Grosse Pointe Blank, and I can tell from the trailer that I’m going to love War, Inc. whether it’s a sequel or not. Hell, if John wants to make one of those movies every ten or eleven years until he retires, I’d be fine with that. I really like John Cusack’s movies, always have and — hopefully — always will. I can’t wait to see War, Inc. now and I feel a bit dumb for not having been aware of its existence before now. Check out the movie’s trailer below to see what I mean:
As I watch that trailer I am awed at how directly the movie seems to satisfy my needs as a fan of modern cinema. John Cusack plays a dark humored, quick witted bad guy who finds himself in both moral and physical dilemmas, always stumbling out very nearly on top. Somehow his bad guy character ends up doing something good, even if it’s only in the satirical message that he conveys through his failure. On the journey from Point A (FADE IN) to Point B (FADE OUT), we enjoy well written and executed action scenes, intelligent political and social commentary, hilariously sick humor, and gorgeous people who all execute their roles in the plot with minute precision.
Let’s emphasize the beautiful people bit too, while we’re at it. The cast is comprised of some very attractive people:
John and Joan Cusack — They may not be mainstream, “Pop Star” sort of sexy, but they have their own qualities that make them hot.
Marisa Tomei — What else do I have to say. Merisa is just as attractive today as she ever has been.
Hilary Duff — She’s not just a rising Disney star anymore. Hilary is commonly accepted as being one of the sexiest women alive.
Shirly Brener — I’ll admit that I didn’t recognize the name, but a look at her IMDB profile proves that she’s a busy woman, sexy as hell too.
And the list goes on. Anyway, even the music in this film speaks directly to me. It’s not often that I see a trailer and know instantaneously that I will love the film, but this is one time where it has undeniably happened. I think it would be an honor to have a man like John Cusack play me in a movie. And there, dear readers, is my tie-in. Thanks for reading.
Now, someone send me a copy of this movie, damn it!
I’ve completed as much of my video about infinity as I possibly could in one week. I made it through five of six sections, but the last one is probably going to be very visually intensive and I’d like to spend about as much time with it as I have spent with this one. This brings up an interesting point about me that only really applies when I’m creating video.
As with any creative sort of project that I might undertake, I exploded into this one, animating nearly half of it in a single day. But when it comes to video, my commitment to the project declines rapidly in each following day. For some reason I lose my fervor after a day or two, but only when doing video. Writing, websites, or other projects are able to command my attention for as long as it takes, but with video I have yet to maintain a driving work ethic.
By now I should known better than to undertake a project like this, which could be really nice if done properly, knowing that I’ll do around 90% of the work on the first day and then abandon it all together if it takes more than a week. You’ll notice that this video has potential to be more than it is, but because I did it all so quickly it comes off a bit weak. And yet, if i hadn’t done it so quickly it might never have been completed!
Anyway, without further adieu, here is my video:
Infinity
So there you have it. There is one part missing from this, which I intend to complete by next week. Basically though, the point is simple. If the Universe is infinite, then everything would exist every where at all times. As such, time travel, or travel through large areas of three dimensional space, would be as simple as figuring out how to “be” there instead of “being” here.
Anyway, this whole concept really just hit me one night while I was feeling bored. I had been reading a lot of Albert Einstein and Popular Science at the time, so that may be part of it. Anyhow, as the thoughts occurred to me I saw fit to record them. The original type-written documents were created in MS Word on a government computer. One day my entire drive was wiped clean. When they restored it from a system-wide backup, many of my documents were missing. Among the missing items was a training manual that I had been typing up for incoming analysts. I had the blessing of my supervisor to do it though, so I’m not sure why it was seized. But along with it went my typed up copies of this proof.
Lucky for me I had already printed a hard copy of it before all of this happened. Though this was technically illegal, the material taken was of my original creation. I felt I had every right to it and, because i suspected a possible attempt to suppress it, I felt I had an obligation to hold onto the information. It made little to no sense to me then. Now it seems more like the childish musings of an amateur. Either way, now it’s “out there” for others to interpret.
