Rav Yehudah Amital Zt"l Updates

Some links to eulogies and other resources for my recently departed Rosh Yeshiva. These are from the Yeshiva and I'm just reproducing their list (however I want to emphasize the one from Jewish Ideas Daily which is a great web-resource, and subscription source in general).

1) R. Yoel Amital (Hebrew) (audio)
2) R. Shlomo Brin (Hebrew) (audio)
3) R. Aharon Lichtenstein (Hebrew) (audio)
4) R. Moshe Taragin (English) (audio)

...Some others from around the blogosphere. The first three are from Yeshiva alumni.

Elli Fischer
Michael Eisenberg
Alex Israel
Jewish Ideas Daily
"A Rare Breed this Simple Jew" (Ha'aretz)

Rav Yehudah Amital Zt"l

My Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Yehudah Amital, died this morning at age 85. He was a gadol b'Torah and gadol b'middot, a truly angelic person who radiated warmth for Torah and for humanity like his teacher, Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook. Rav Amital zt'l was also a Shoah survivor who came to Israel in 1944 and fought in the War of Independence as a member of the Haganah. Thus, he was an embodiment of modern Jewish History as well as an embodiment of Jewish wisdom and spirituality.

Barukh Dayan ha-Emet.

Update: Some links to eulogies.

Tea Party?

The current Tea-Party takes their title from the Boston Tea Party. From the beginning, I've been disturbed by the imagery because even though the original Tea-Partiers became heroes of the American Revolution, at the time they were committing treason. And the current teabaggers, by using that event as a standard, are thus declaring to the world that they intend treason. No?

That established, the Tea Party is in fact the wrong image - because bottom line, the rebellion/treason that they intend to enact is Fort Sumter. Not just because the Teabaggers are generally egotistical misanthropic crackers, but also because they hate non-Whites and especially our Black president.

Image from here. And, note, these people are proud of their Frankenstein imagery.

Color Video of Israel in 1947

Thanks to my friend Shaul Kelner for sending me to this video below:

Fred Monosson, a Bostonian, came to Israel beginning in 1947 with the latest model COLOR movie camera. His son recently discovered reel upon reel of film stored in an attic and was about to throw it away when he happened to mention it to an Israeli film director. The trove was saved. No other color film of this era is known to exist.

Happy Flag Day

Flag Day always brings up, for me, this classic Onion piece:

Nation Hoping For A Windy Flag Day
June 5, 2007 | ISSUE 43•23

Have a flappy Flag Day everyone.

Pic from here.

Flotilla Context: Another Mexican Shot by US Border Patrol

Just to give some context to the Gaza Flotilla-Palooza, see this top-story from the AP (not found on the NYTimes front page) about the murder of a Mexican teenager by the U.S. Border patrol. OK, you can say that it's not news because we're Americans and we generally get a free pass to kill people whenever we want (it's called He Who Has the Most Nukes Makes the Rules) - like the unmanned wedding-crashing drones in Afghanistan - but let's dig deeper:

The killing of the Mexican by U.S. authorities — the second in less than two weeks — has exposed the distrust between the two countries that lies just below the surface, and has enraged Mexicans who see the death of the boy on Mexican soil as an act of murder. Mexico's government says the number of Mexicans injured by U.S. immigration authorities has increased this year. ... [The boy] was found 20 feet (six meters) into Mexico, and an autopsy revealed that the fatal shot was fired at a relatively close range, according to Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state attorney general's office. Mexican authorities said a .40 caliber shell casing was found near the body, suggesting that the Border Patrol agent might have crossed into Mexico to shoot the boy.

Compare and contrast.

Pic presumably of the Mexico-US border from here.

Helen Thomas and Applying the Double Standard

As you doubtless have heard, Helen Thomas - the bubbie-like senior White House Correspondent for the world, a chum of Steven Colbert and champion of freedom under George "The Scumbag" Bush - turns out to be a raging wacko anti-Semite. Thankfully, she has announced her retirement after her these comments were spread all throughout modern technology's platforms:

Thomas was asked by Rabbi David Nesenoff on May 27 if she had "any comments on Israel."

"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she said.

Nesenoff, who was attending the first Jewish American Heritage Month event at the White House, asked where Jews should go.

"Go home," Thomas said. Asked to elaborate, she said: "Poland, Germany and America, and everywhere else."

Ya see, simple point for Helen and her fellow Nazis: it rankles many of us Hebrews, or really any thinking educated human, when someone tells Jews to go back to Germany. It's clear Nazi talk. Just a reminder.

You got to see the video for the full effect. She's one crazy Nazi:


OK, now that she's been successfully retired, let's apply a little bit of the double standard that's normally applied to us (Jews/Israelis). First, it should be noted that her comments were made before the Flotilla Debacle, so unlike her soul-brother Mel Gibson, who made his drunken comments in the midst of the Second Lebanon War, she was neither drunk nor responding to a recent crisis.

Second of all, it turns out that she's the child of Lebanese Christians - which shows that it's not easy to profile the enemies of Israel and the Jews into simple categories.

Third: a good sign for an anti-Semite is the automatic conflation of "Israel" with "Jew." Israelis should go back to where they came from? Yeah? And that's Germany & Poland - the wonderlands of genocide - or America (part of the Jewish American notorious Israel lobby, no doubt). An anti-Zionist non-Anti-Semite (who may exist) would say, possibly, "Europe" instead of the concentration-camp intensive specific countries. Just playing Devil's advocate. Almost literally.

Fourth: let's apply the double standard here. This evil woman was a "dean" of the Press Corps and she's a closet neo-Nazi. I think that just as every Jew is put on the hot-seat every time Netanyahu commits another in his colossal string of screw-ups, so now every journalist should be under the presumption of being a barely hidden anti-Semite. Payback's a beeyatch.

The History of Assaulting Progress

I own many books in the genre of "non-fiction miscellany" (I find 'trivia' to be too, uh, trivial a term for these things). In any case, I just read in Panati's "Browser's Book of Beginnings" about the formation of FM radio (p.221-2). Basically, Edwin Howard Armstrong patented FM to provide a clearer, less static, signal than the currently dominant AM radio. His patent was in 1933 but FM didn't become available until the late 40s. Why? Well, before I answer that, I will ask you that if you *do* listen to radio, do you do so on AM or FM. I believe the majority will answer FM. OK, so let's continue.

According to Panati and the Wiki, RCA successfully sued the FCC to prevent FM from being allowed on the radio. The suit lasted years. Sarnoff, head of RCA, also sued to prevent Armstrong from getting patent royalties from inventing FM and Armstrong committed suicide in 1954 as a result of that battle.

Why did RCA try to block FM? Because they owned AM. Did RCA succeed in getting the FCC to hamstring and restrict FM? Oh yes indeed. Was this good for the world. No, I don't think it was - considering that everyone prefers FM.

Does this remind you of anything? I'm sure somebody put a list up somewhere, in some book, about these types of things - The History of Assaulting Progress - where a company, or the government - uses all of its resources to hurt others, and hurt progress, in order to keep its own money flow.

I'm not naive, so I am not arguing against commerce or against companies looking out for themselves. But if there's any mature theory of government (libertarians, Marxists, and fellow travelers need not apply), all of these theories try to strike a balance between individual rights and community rights. The corporation ("Big Business") is basically a private collection of individual rights - but the rest of society has a right to progress.

I'll look for the list of those who've assaulted progress but off-hand we can include all those Oil Companies, and their marionettes in the Republican Party including their bought and paid for President G.W.B, who furiously try to keep us from alternative fuel.

Pic of RCA from here, of Armstrong from the Wiki.

Dvorak's Symphony No. 9

Just now listening to Dvorak's "New World" Symphony which has been my favorite for decades. So much so, that recent nostalgic musings have reminded me (I just got my son's report card, more on that later) about a nerd explosion of mine back in 1982 when I moved from Binghamton to Ithaca.

Back then my pop music consumption was eclectic and my classical music knowledge was pretty good for a 10 year old. We had some decent pop records at home, notably the Jackson 5 which got me into their song "ABC" (who knew my father was so funky to own that record?) but when we would drive frequently from Binghamton to Brooklyn to visit my mother's parents (an action I know mightily endorse and would probably do the same if I could) the music in the car came entirely from 8-track tapes of classical music. And Dvorak's 9th was my permanent favorite.

The nostaglia point is to illustrate my immense dorkiness back then. Again, I knew pop music, but I dare say that compared to Dvorak's 9th, pop back in 1982 just couldn't compare. It was all soft-rock and disco for goodness sakes! I am defensive because, in 1982, I had entered a new school in a new city. I had been in Hillel Academy, a Torah U-Mesorah parochial school, and had just entered Northeast Elementary in Ithaca - a public school. And for the 5th grade yearbook, we were all asked what our favorite song was. The most popular ones were "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson (which is great, don't get me wrong) or "Africa" by Toto. But when asked I said "Dvorak's 9th Symphony, 4th Movement."

And you know what, I'm still right!

But I also dare you to find non-pictorial proof of greater dorkiness than having a newly acclimatized Orthodox Jewish keepah-wearing fish-out-of-water-in-public-school 10 year old declare in his 5th grade yearbook, on a page of neo-disco tunes, that his favorite song is - the editorially shortened - "9th Symphony." I guess I'm still ticked that they shortened it, because I actually like Dvorak's 9th better than Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" (which is my second favorite classical ditty).

And, I guess this shows that I'm still a massive nerd. Ah well, at least I get paid for it now. That's the joy of adulthood and the hope of all teenage nerds everywhere - in America, and other Western countries - you will get paid handsomely for being a nerd.

Pic of the autographed score of Dvorak's 9th from here.

End Semester Nigh

I haven't blogged in a while because I'm working furiously to finish all my papers before the end of the semester. It's coming close... and then I'll be able to relax a bit and sort through all the ideas that have clogged unblogged. In this Fin-de-Siecle push, almost everything has been breaking down except for the overall health of my family (and may it stay that way!). My back has held up (but I did lose a tooth - long story), and compared to last year's hospital saga, this has been a breeze.

One last note, I am now indebted to Endnote that I will need to give it much love in an blog entry soon. It's so amazing, especially when paired with the academic search engines (PDF delivery machines, more like it), that I have through school. I know I'm in the right professional direction when I consider it a valuable professional perk to have access to a full online library.

Boston 'Catastrophic' Water Woes

Right after Motzei Shabbat, my internet connection wasn't working, so it took a bit for us to get the message that there was a 'boil water' emergancy condition for eastern Massachusetts after a 'Catastrophic' water main break. This is not a good way to begin the week. Add onto that the terrorist bomb attempt in Times Square and a children's Tylenol recall, and you got a trifecta of Doom.

I have a few musings on the water subject:

1. After taking a shower last night, bathing myself in e-coli, I realized that I hadn't felt so dirty after 'washing' since I went to the Washington Heights mikvah erev Yom Kippur.
   
2. It's situations like these that we need to recall whenever we feel high-and-mighty about our technical mastery of nature. A busted pipe - a few centimeters gone wrong - will leave 2 million people without potable water.
   
3. Also, this should remind the crunchy green granola types that 'natural' water is deadly.

I hope the crisis will pass quickly - it's not fun to be frightened of a normally life giving substance.

Pic from the Globe story.

Happy 62nd Birthday Israel!

Today's the 62nd birthday (docheh) of Israel, Yom Ha'Atzmaut. Yay.

Every year, I need to revisit the halakhic question, especially when the holiday is docheh (pushed off from its official date), of whether Hallel should be said with a bracha, without a bracha, or if we should say tachanun.

There's strong arguments about the first two (the latter is reserved for cheresh, shoteh or katan - deaf = ignoring the crucial miracle reveals flawed senses, crazy = blinded by twisted ideology, or childlike = too young to realize how earth-shaking the establishment of Israel was).

The best argument for not saying a bracha is that the miracle of YHA was incomplete. I.e. a war started immediately after the declaration of independence and that war has not stopped. This means that the halakhic appropriateness of a bracha is based on an empirical judgment: was the establishment of Israel a big enough miracle to say Hallel (similar to Purim and Hanukkah) for all of Jewry.

This past year I've been doing extensive reading about Zionism and especially anti-Zionism. And I've gotten a new appreciation for the massive miracle of the State of Israel - and how precarious a State it is. I believe Hallel with a bracha I feel a need to express my gratitude not only for the reality warping, dry bones resurrection, miracle of Israel but also for God's continuing miracle of Israel's preservation.

Israel should not, based on rules of Nature and Humanity, have been established in 1948 and should not - nuclear weapons aside - continue to exist. To paraphrase Darth Vader:"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed [nukes]. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force [Hashem]."

Maybe it's my work this semester in liturgy, TAing for Professor Reuven Kimelman. Liturgy uses physical triggers to remind us of theological truths; we use the sun rising to remind us of Creation, and thus bless the God of Creation. We use the reminder of the Exodus to remind us that God is the One Who Redeems. And in Shemona Esrei we use rain to remind us of the resurrection of the dead.

In 1945 Jews were still being rounded up and murdered all over the world. In 1946, 1947 the survivors were living in DP camps and being barred from entry into Israel. In 1948, the dream of 2000 years was fulfilled, a phoenix rising from the ashes, to provide our halakhic homeland and a worldwide protection for Jews. This is modern History's greatest miracle.

Cynical Philosophical Question

Who do you bet on in a battle between Google and China? One is a rising power for the 21st Century, the other a billion slave-owning nation state. Both are our future, which is more powerful? (Or as Stalin said about the Pope, how many divisions does he command... well China has nukes, but Google has a better search engine).

216

That's it, the House voted to approve the Senate bill. We've finally entered the Western World for social safety net - guaranteed health insurance.

It's a good day to be an American.

Update: I mean, I feel so happy right now for the fact that we got this done. It's good in itself - it will both help save lives and save poor people money. Isnt' that what Hashem wants?

And I feel good, because as a number of commentators have said: the GOP bet everything on this - they gave nothing and promised that it will destroy all life in the universe - and now they lost. So they can't even claim victory for anything. And this victory thus makes Obama look like a super-ninja with rocket roller skates - he's so truly Da Man - and the Democrats in congress showed their constituency that it was the right thing to vote for them, and shows the independents that if you put the Democrats in charge, they will get big things done

This is a great victory.

Obama and the Jacksonian Zionists

Goldblog sent me to one of the best things I've seen written about the non-Jewish American support for Israel - this article by Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest: Obama and the Jacksonian Zionists. I don't know what the journal "American Interest" is about (its anodyne title could mask any sort of partisan lunacy) nor who Mead is, but Goldblog highly recommends him by name.

Pic made by me from an original within Mead's piece.

More on Droid

So why did I switch to the droid?

1. My phone went kaput. Well that's not totally true. My old phone was a Palm Treo 680, which I have had since July 2007. It was my upgrade to the "trio" of phone/web/PDA. I've been using Palm devices for nearly a decade (I believe) - starting with the Palm IIIe, then the Palm Vx, and then the Treo. In all cases, I acted like a good middle-class Gen-Xer: I waited until the first one died before upgrading. This time, my Treo was a bit of a lemon from the git-go:
   
   
   1. The online activity was spotty and over time, I stopped having access to almost every webpage except, luckily, my email and yahoo. No explanation was available on the intertubes except possibly my SIM card was messed up. Lovely.
      
   2. The key factor was that the touchscreen just died. It started acting really screwy at first and finally, on Tuesday, the screen basically went dead.
      
   3. Ironically, the only thing that actually worked, still, was the phone. I lived without full web access for a few months, but when I lost the PDA, the thing was done.
      
      
2. My wife needed a new phone. She had a simple one (ya know, only a camera on it, har!) for almost 5 years by her reckoning. But it too needed to be replaced. She also started to hanker after the web/email uses that she saw others have.
   
   
3. Once we both needed new phones, we felt that we should get a package deal (not only on the physical devices but also on the calling plan). I used to have AT&T and it worked OK but I've grown weary of Luke Wilson's idiotic commercials and my rebel nature against The Man (Corporate Division) made me feel I should switch to Verizon.
   
   
4. The Kicker was that my brother had just gotten a droid and he liked it and showed off all the wicked cool features (youtube! google maps! metallic-droid sounds!)

So, it's been two days, how do I feel about it?

1. The sales process was slow and annoying. The six-foot tall ex-jock doofus who sold us the phones had no real idea what he was selling. He reminded me of what the house sellers must have been like during the height of the bubble: i.e. he had a product that everyone wanted but nobody really looked too closely at. As such, he wasn't prepared to answer any questions.
   
   
2. Quick analysis: This is not a PDA. It sucks at that big time.
   
   
3. This is not really a phone, it's a web-browser with a phone "app." More: Ya remember how weird it was when they first put cameras on phones? And we old-tech people made jokes about it. Basically, we realized, especially after a number of key testimony incidents, that it's good to have an easy access camera/video and while it won't replace a real camera, it's a nice thing. So too, the Droid, so far, is a pretty bad phone, non-existent PDA, but the web access is crisp and keen. So is the sound quality, for all you hip rad children who need that thing.
   
   
4. The Man (Corporate) lives well with the droid. It's a google product. And while I've said in the past that I like the company's plan to digitize every bit of information and place it online, they still seem to act like a "splitting" company. That's a term I use for companies, especially in tech, who force incompatibility with other techs. Apple is terrible about this, IMHO, which is why I refuse to get an Iphone... after my Ipod disaster (which forced me to use Itunes, which meant I had to convert all my files from Microsoft Media Player (which played both WMA and MP3) and modify the data of every one of my billion media files. So here, google apps work well on the droid, but why can't it run Flash? If Youtube works, and Flash doesn't, it looks like an arbitrary "split."
   
   
5. Why is it a bad phone? Because the keys disappear, when you talk, making it hard to end a call. The volume ringer is screwy and will turn on, or off, despite your previous settings. It's like a freakin' embarrassment timebomb.
   
   
6. And it doesn't work as a PDA. Yeah, I've got 10 years of great Palm programs which I can no longer use. And that's a serious loss. But so far, I haven't found a decent replacement on the Droid (possibly because it's too new, but probably because the market is now split between Droid/Iphone/Blackberry as opposed to the not "split" days under the Palm umbrella.

I'm giving myself another week with this. If I can't find a way to have it improve, then I may need to switch. Maybe a blackberry? That looks like it was made for adults...

First pic is yet another version of the Indiana Jones Droid Hieroglyphs. Second is from the 2004 Onion story of the camera-phone.

The Droids We Were Looking For

Yesterday, the wife and I, after a few weeks of struggle, succumbed and bought new phones. Droids. This is my first post on it - and while it's now possible to do this, it taint easy. So I'll wait for a real 'puter to tell the whole story.

Pic is of the hidden droids in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Purim Pic of the Littest Styx

My daughter in her cow costume Purim eve:

Cockney Rhyming Parenting

I declared back in 2003 that it should be heretofore known that Cockney Rhyming Slang is not cool. It's actually less cool for Britons to use it than Americans because we Yanks just assume everything in a British accent is fancy. Hence, Americans will consider high-class London, Manchester, Cockney, Irish, Scottish, and Australian all 'British accents' and high class. So if an American uses Cockney Rhyming Slang its usually in the same sentence with the word "gov'ner" and a few lines from Austin Powers.

When the British use it, though, it's the UK version of "jive talkin'" and it sounds ridiculous. White boys from Chicago suburbs aren't ghetto and pasty-faced Britons still sound irredeemably wussy even if they attempt to redeem some toughness with the Rhyming Slang.

Moreover, the entire concept is anti-meaning - the phrases are arbitrary and irrelevant. What thief needs to make a code for his wife ("trouble and strife," har har Andy Capp).

Parenting Use

Yet after that devastating rant of mockage, my wife and I actually found a use for Cockney Rhyming Slang that is both legitimate and practical. And thus my derision for the verbal form is now modified: if a person is actually employed as a thief/spy/parent and uses CRS in it's intended manner, then you are spared the otherwise heavy criticism automatically triggered in all right-thinking people.

I'll explain. Every parent, as you know, needs a special language so they can discuss things in front of the kids. My parents (and many of ya'lls, I assume) used Yiddish. However, while my wife knows many languages, I'm stuck with Hebrew and Spanish. The kids are learning Hebrew in school, so that's out, and Spanish is all over PBS (besides being intuitive for most English speakers, as this sound file attests).

So the other day, my wife, to her immense credit, realized that we should just use Cockney Rhyming Slang (we just had a Guy Richie movie marathon so it was in our heads). And it works! So here's some of our terms, for use for the public weal.

[Key: Original Term = CRS (Annotation)]

1. Nap = Ginger Snap (This is by far the best one, and most redolent of the original art form. Say the word 'nap' - even spell it out - and the kid dissolves in tears, hence we now say "ginger")
   
   
2. Lollipop = Boughs of Holly (We use sugar-free lollipop as a reward/bribe but if the boys hear the word, they go nutso in demanding them - so now we say Hollies. It may not work for long so our rejected backups are: "Seward's Folly" or "Lassie, Assuming She Was a Collie")
   
   
3. Television = Long Division (other options: "nuclear fission" or "gone fishin'" or even "double vision" which may be too close to the original; my wife thinks that this weak entry may need to go to "Telly" and then it could be "Jam & Jelly" which sounds satisfyingly like the original form.)
   
   
4. Blankie = Yankee Doodle (If a blankie is missing, it leads to more wailing, so we now use "Yankee" - doodle actually has other uses in our home; another option: "fish tankie")

Pic from here. Oh, see also this google book, cool eh?

Oscar Reax

I will give my full debrief soon, but before that I must post this awesome Oscar-mocking video from Cracked magazine online. When I was a lad, Cracked was a cheap Mad Magazine knockoff, but their online presence has been consistently funny, smart and sharp:

A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever -- powered by Cracked.com

Monkey Man

So my mother-in-law took my wife and kids to a live action Curious George show in Worcester. The eldest, Big B, likes the TV Show quite a lot and Jota goes along for the ride. As for me, I'm ambivalent: on one side, I have the adult male's appreciation for monkeys, on the other hand, the show is destructive and even terrible.

This is a PBS kids show and, you may not know, but PBS now has top level animated educational shows that I would have killed for as a kid (instead we had puppet shows and Reading Rainbow). So while there's some superlative stuff, e.g. Zula Patrol & Super Why, there's also Curious George.

Any thinking person will be driven batty by this show - it takes the conceit of the books that a monkey can act as a surrogate/metaphor for a child's sense of curious wonder, play down the freaky pre-War imperialism angle, yet play up the imperiling destructive power of the lead primate.

In nearly every episode, a different set of adults give George access to sensitive and/or expensive venues and he spends most of the episode enacting thousands or millions of dollars of property damage - often to irreplaceable or significant objects. And, after the adults realize that they've allowed such damage to occur, George bears absolutely no consequences! What a wonderful metaphor and lesson for our youth.

My favorite example is when George manages to flood the first few floors of his New York City high-rise domicile. Ha ha! As a former tenant of a flooded NYC building, this episode was both humorous and a PTSD trigger. Another example is when George is introduced to the train engineer booth which had a control set-up similar to an airport's tower. The trains needed the engineer to switch tracks, as they move at top speed, so they will arrive on time. The engineer, after telling our hero about the controls, decides to leave George alone in the booth while he departs for a long lunch. As he leaves, George hears radio calls for help from the trains and he uses his monkey ingenuity to switch the trains - potentially ramming each locomotive into others, resulting in death and carnage. Hoo hah.

Ironically, my boys haven't learned to emulate the destruction (yet) but they do like speaking like monkeys. Which sounded cute, at first, but is actually annoying.

Anyhoo, the live show. The tickets were expensive, and I asked if there was a trained monkey on stage - which would kinda justify the cost, right? I mean, add up your monkey chow, monkey cage interior design, and the rest and that means high overhead. But no, George was played by a dude in a monkey suit (see pic above). So I concluded that the cost must be going to pay for therapy for the kids of the guy in the suit.

Oscars 2010 - Analysis, part 2

A note about the acting awards: even though I, and everyone else, calls them, e.g. "best actor," the real title is "best performance by an actor" - which has some crucial ramifications.

Back in 2007 I quoted the TNR's Kaufmann why he doesn't judge the Oscars and he said: "Oh, I always watch the Oscar broadcast. I wouldn't want to miss the irritation--or the laughs. I'll never forget the year that Marisa Tomei beat out Vanessa Redgrave as best supporting actress." I liked this quote at the time, but it only makes sense if you describe the award as 'best actor' and not 'best performance.' Only a geriatric pompous gasbag would deny that while a person can be a better actor over a life-time, a specific performance, whether for the legitimate (read: obsolete) theater or a film, can be better than any other that year. It's akin to what I've heard about golf - people like the game because there's a possibility that on a particular hole, you can get a score better than the superstars, for that hole.

As such, when calibrating the acting awards, the voters may actually be rewarding a performance over an actor. And this is especially so when a performance is spectacular. The question is whether there's a curve; whether the pretty-boy leads who finally turn in a decent performance are given extra weight (a handicap, to continue - and exhaust my - golf metaphor) than others. Truly this is what has happened for Best Actress in the past - where some sexy - and popular - ingenue finally dials in a serious performance and is given extra credit. How else to explain the absurd wins of:

• 1997: Helen Hunt - As Good as It Gets
• 2001: Halle Berry – Monster's Ball (the most egregious of this already egregious category)
• 2002: Nicole Kidman – The Hours
• 2003: Charlize Theron – Monster
• 2005: Reese Witherspoon – Walk the Line
  

There are probably many more from the earlier years. Suffice to say, that this is a clear pattern, especially for Best Actress, and while it's possibly from a weird sexism of the above-mentioned octogenarians, I'd personally bet on it.

Best Peformance: Actor -- Odds; Nominees:

1. Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart (2009) *
   
2. George Clooney for Up in the Air (2009/I)
3. Colin Firth for A Single Man (2009)
4. Morgan Freeman for Invictus (2009)
5. Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker (2008)

OK, so while Clooney is awesome in general, he has won recently (Supporting in 2006), and is young enough to have a few more years of good potential performances. Renner is new and is honored to just be nominated (and I'm glad he's able to rise above his bad-guy turn in S.W.A.T.); Morgan Freeman has also won recently and since he plays his persona in every movie, I don't see his performance getting such a nod. Firth has been doing some good work recently, basically filling in Hugh Grant's soggy shoes, and his character is gay and oppressed - Milk may have, uh, milked that guilt award away. But, really, from all I've heard, the word on the street is that the voters are finally going to reward Bridges for his years of incredible work. As above with The Departed etc, there's no standout performance that can take away Bridges' lifetime (read: Big Lebowski) achievement award. I mean, it's his fifth nomination, with his first nom in his first starring role (The Last Picture Show) and he's never won.

Best Actress -- Odds, Nominees:

1. Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side (2009)
2. Helen Mirren for The Last Station (2009)
3. Carey Mulligan for An Education (2009)
4. Gabourey Sidibe for Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009)
5. Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia (2009)*

I just see this as the classic battle between the Finally-Serious-Ingenue (Bullock) and the Truly-Great-Peformance (Streep).

Pros for Bullock:

1. She's been out of work for a number of years after spending her 20s as quiry-manic-pixie-girl romantic comedy leads. When she started work again, this past year, she returned with a vengeance: two romantic comedies and one drama (All About Steve, The Proposal and The Blind Side)
   
2. The movie she's in is racist as all git out, but specifically, just as racist as Crash, which won in 2004.

I'm outa time here (I just got home from an all-day-trip), so I'll say that the odds-makers are saying it's Streep, and A.O. Scott as well, and her performance was definitely wonderful (I saw it). She's also been nominated a billion times and has only won Best Actress once, even though she's the best of her generation, back in 1983! It's a real tough one - the stupid ingenue-award pattern, a la Halle Barre, vs. an overlooked superstar (like Jeff Bridges) who was great in Doubt, and others. I'm going to go with Streep on this and hope that it's because of the racism of "The Blind Side" in our Obama age. I'm going against my instincts, letting my intellect outvote my gut, but I'll gamble on it (although if I were a real gambler I'd put money on Bullock).

Best Supporting Actor - Nominees:

1. Matt Damon for Invictus (2009)
2. Woody Harrelson for The Messenger (2009/I)
3. Christopher Plummer for The Last Station (2009)
4. Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones (2009)
5. Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds (2009)*

Oh this is another toughie. Plummer has had an awesome career and this is the only time he's been nominated, and he's getting way too old for other stuff. And he would win in a normal year (crushing even Tucci who is one of the best actors of this generation and who is also being nominated for the first time, for what I've heard is a so-so role, but who's young enough to get nominated again, especially because his work has been consistently great). But this is where the "performance" part of the award comes in: Waltz's performance was one of the best I've ever seen, and I think it trumps Plummer's lifetime achievement and Tucci's general awesomeness.

Best Supporting Actress

1. Penélope Cruz for Nine (2009)
2. Vera Farmiga for Up in the Air (2009/I)
3. Maggie Gyllenhaal for Crazy Heart (2009)
4. Anna Kendrick for Up in the Air (2009/I)
5. Mo'Nique for Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009)*

Everyone says it's Mo'Nique (not Monique, not Monica, it's got a vestigial apostrophe like the umlaut of Spinal Tap), and that's good enough for me.

Best Original Screenplay

1. The Hurt Locker (2008): Mark Boal
2. Inglourious Basterds (2009)*: Quentin Tarantino
3. The Messenger (2009/I): Alessandro Camon, Oren Moverman
4. A Serious Man (2009): Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
5. Up (2009): Bob Peterson, Pete Docter, Thomas McCarthy

No time, no time. I'm hoping they'll award Inglorious because it was a genius film, but the leftover spillage will probably help The Hurt Locker.

Best Adapted Screenplay

1. District 9 (2009): Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell
2. An Education (2009): Nick Hornby
3. In the Loop (2009)*: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
4. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009): Geoffrey Fletcher
5. Up in the Air (2009/I): Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner

District 9 is supposed to be excellent (I just got it from Netflix and haven't seen it yet). I did just see "In the Loop" and it's as sharp as a samurai sword. I hope it wins and it's likely to, since it's an allegory of the Iraq War (which people still are against) while District is an allegory about race and immigration (which is passe in Obama's America... at least according to the standard Hollywood meathead)

Oscars 2010 - Analysis, part 1 (Picture, Director)

Oscar Day is upon us and, as has been happening more often in recent years, I have had no time to read up or prepare for my predictions... which will make them as accurate as always. Sadly, I have seen one or two of the nominated films, which naturally biases my analysis. Maybe, after my planned success at the super-Lotto, I will have the time and means to watch all the films, but until then, I will continue my flawed merry way.

Method

The baseline, so far as I've seen, is that the voters are truly trying to choose the best but (a) because most people in Hollywood are high-school dropouts, it's not clear that my criteria are anywhere near theirs, and (b) the voters are swayed by a number of crazy biases that put predictions into the random category. Big biases are: (a) the producer voters, often in their 70s and 80s, are not only stupid and uneducated, they are prejudiced with archaic stereotypes about life and meaning (see below for applications of this), (b) many of the awards are given to make up for last year's Oscar mistakes, e.g. Sean Penn wins for "Milk" because "Brokeback Mountain" was rejected a 2 years before aaaand (c) [current events' issues] California had just rejected gay marriage.

To be honest, I used to think that the voters were sympathetic to (d) 'lifetime achievement' candidates, but I think that it's just the fourth prong of the general computation - that a majority of voters will choose lifetime achievement if (a) there's no clear standout candidate, plus (b) no mistakes or (c) politics. Again, see below for applications.

As such, I need to analyze the candidate's (a) history of past work, concentrating on the past 3 years and then lifetime, (b) general murmuring of the quality of performance, (c) the zeitgeist of Hollywood-idiot politics, and (d) commercial success (which I've discussed before, but basically since the Oscars are simply put an industry awarding it's top employees, success is going to be rewarded - this can be called the Titanic effect).

This year, I'm also going to Odds from here - because there's some social-psychological merit in the collective wisdom of crowds. My basic ballot (and links) are from IMDb. Predicted winner is marked with a star (*).

Best Picture -- Odds; Nominees:

1. Avatar (2009) *: James Cameron, Jon Landau
2. The Blind Side (2009): Gil Netter, Andrew A. Kosove, Broderick Johnson
3. District 9 (2009): Peter Jackson, Carolynne Cunningham
4. An Education (2009): Finola Dwyer, Amanda Posey
5. The Hurt Locker (2008): Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier, Greg Shapiro
6. Inglourious Basterds (2009): Lawrence Bender
7. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009): Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness, Gary Magness
8. A Serious Man (2009): Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
9. Up (2009): Jonas Rivera
10. Up in the Air (2009/I): Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman

Now remember that this year they've expanded to 10 movies and revamped the voting system - which will make predictions harder than ever. Yet, even then, almost everyone thinks that this is a battle between two powerhouses: Avatar and The Hurt Locker. I'll give pros/cons for those 2 alone because I don't have time to eliminate all the other movies, except for some quick comments:

Inglourious Basterds - the more time since I've seen the film, the more I feel that it's a masterpiece; both of Tarantino and of Borges-like meta-fiction. If there were no other strong contenders, then this would win - it would be like No Country for Old Men or The Departed - which were OK movies from great directors who got the top prize because the competition was weak. I happen to hate "No Country" and compared to O Brother, Where Art Thou? (which wasn't even nominated!!) it's just plain bad. But compared to puppy-dogs like
Atonement and Juno , or good-but-not-spectacular Michael Clayton or There Will Be Blood then the Coens were given their lifetime achievement award. Same can be said for Departed (vs. Babel; Letters from Iwo Jima; Little Miss Sunshine ; or The Queen) none of those four were quality enough to overpower the lifetime achievement of Scorcese... even though it was not his best film by a long-shot.

So sorry Tarantino; I hope you're still creative enough to make another brilliant epic like Inglorious.

Pros for Avatar:

1. It's one of the most lucrative movies in history - as of this week, it has grossed 2.6 billion dollars and it's still in theaters.
2. It has advanced film technology to the next level, just on it's own
3. It has restored the glory of the movie theater experience - and this is a big deal. Ya see, movies have been in competition with TV ever since the latter was born (e.g. it's why movies are 'letterbox' - to compete with TV's square screen). Personally, I avoid the theater because I enjoy movies 100x more at home. But my popularizing digital-3D, Cameron may have just saved the entire movie theater industry.
4. I've heard from others that it is derivative but fun. It's "Dances with Wolves" but with better explosions. And remember, Dances won.

Cons:

1. I've heard people grumble that it's derivative and dumb. Note, this really hasn't hurt a movie's Oscar chances in my memory. See, uh, Titanic.
   
2. I've heard people grumble that it's racist. This *really* hasn't hurt any movie. I was just thinking about this the other day: two of the biggest movies in Hollywood history are racist as hell: The Birth of a Nation (1915) - which glorified the KKK, and The Jazz Singer (1927) whose movie posters have a guy in black-face for goodness sake!

Pros for The Hurt Locker:

1. It depicts the Iraq War with "realism" (defined here as "it looks scary for people who've never been to war but has been derided by actual veterans"). As such, this movie can benefit from the Platoon - Deer Hunter effect. Not too shabby.
2. As above with 'Nam, many people in Hollywood want to be seen as 'serious' about a terrible current-event, and war is the best event to be current on. Most of the Iraq War movies have been turkeys. This is the best one yet (sez many many people). And that helps.
3. This is a war movie directed by a woman. That gets some votes, for a double glass-ceiling breaking (directing itself, and a war movie nukh).
4. This may be too weird vis-a-vis Hollywood politics, but Bigelow's cult classic Point Break (1991) starred Patrick Swayze who just died tragically, and that also could help.

After all has been said and done, I think that Avatar has too many pros, not enough cons. It's too freakin' huge and it did 3 things that nobody has done before (2 billion sales, grounbreaking new movie tech, saving movie theaters). Would Hurt Locker have beaten Inglorious without Avatar, dunno, but this one seems to be Avatar's win.

Best Director -Nominees:

1. Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker (2008)
2. James Cameron for Avatar (2009)
3. Lee Daniels for Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009)
4. Jason Reitman for Up in the Air (2009/I)
5. Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds (2009)

These two categories go together - and in an uncontested year they'll share winners, as the Wiki sez:

Invariably, the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture have been very closely linked throughout their history. Of the 80 films that have been awarded Best Picture, 59 have also been awarded Best Director. Only three films have won Best Picture without their directors being nominated (though only one since the early 1930s): Wings (1927/28), Grand Hotel (1931/32), and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The only two Best Director winners to win for films which did not receive a Best Picture nomination are likewise in the early years

And according to this fun stat site it's very rare for Best Picture and Director to be separated:

1. 1972 (45th) Picture: The Godfather (director Francis Ford Coppola was nominated).
   Directing: Cabaret (Bob Fosse).
2. 1981 (54th) Picture: Chariots of Fire (director Hugh Hudson was nominated).
   Directing: Reds (Warren Beatty).
3. 1989 (62nd) Picture: Driving Miss Daisy (director Bruce Beresford was NOT nominated).
   Directing: Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone).
4. 1998 (71st) Picture: Shakespeare in Love (director John Madden was nominated).
   Directing: Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg).
5. 2000 (73rd) Picture: Gladiator (director Ridley Scott was nominated).
   Directing: Traffic (Steven Soderbergh).
6. 2002 (75th) Picture: Chicago (director Rob Marshall was nominated).
   Directing: The Pianist (Roman Polanski).
7. 2005 (78th) Picture: Crash (director Paul Haggis was nominated).
   Directing: Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee).

Given that, I think it's probable that they will be separated this year with Avatar as best picture and Bigelow as best director. Mainly because all the pros (above) for Avatar winning 'picture' are about its production and not its direction/art. Hence, I believe the voters will intentionally split the difference. Then again, like with Peter Jackson's win for the Lord of the Frodo trilogy, they could just bow down to Cameron's expertise... but since he won for the same honors for Titanic, I feel Bigelow's strong candidacy will pay off in this.

Part 2+ will be for the other awards.

Food Normalities

Note: this was a draft that was accidently published too early. It's a note to myself (in bad grammer): "why is salad = lettuce"

It's part of a larger investigation in the sociology of knowledge, focusing on food. In this case, the simple question, why did lettuce become the absolute basis for the thing we call "salad."

Pic from here.

Glorious Purimshpiel

I saw the most excellent film, Inglorious Basterds, earlier, but rather than wait for all my ideas to coalesce around it I just want to say, on this Purim day, that the movie works perfectly as a Purimshpiel. It's possibly the most gloriously violent (and sadly fictional) destruction of Amalek by Jews ever shown on film.

Pic from here of the awesome Bear Jew.

Gefilte Fish is a Funny Word

This is not a joke:

Oooooklahomaaaa!

Not sure why, but I was reminded recently about how much I like Jon Lovitz. It's this 80s Nostalgia stuff that we gen-Xers are allowing ourselves, who knows. Lovitz was consistantly weird and funny (and, evidently he beat up Andy Dick in 2007 - which is more than I'd dare imagine a comedic hero doing). Maybe the nostalgia was fueled by someone mentioning the state of Oklahoma.

So after looking all over the intertubes, I just can't find a clip of the super-wonderful Jon Lovitz SNL sketch from 1987: "Wedgie Fever." A sketch that permanently changed the nations view of, and pronunciation thereto, of Oklahoma.

I did find the pic from here though, and while searching the official NBC SNL clip site, I came across these two clips from the 80s which can satisfy some of the nostalgia cravings.

The first is Lovitz - who is underrated, possibly because he's quite strange - as Mephistopheles in the People's Court:


The second is possibly one of the finest from the Reagan era, if not all time. It's just a snippet of the brilliant sketch of Reagan as a competent world leader:

Me and the New Republic

We finally canceled our subscription to the New Republic. I'd like to contrast my relationship to TNR to two other magazines: The Atlantic, which I also canceled, and the New Yorker, which I've retained.

The Atlantic is a very good magazine, with a top-notch website and bloggers. But when the recession hit, I needed to cut back on frivolities, and I found that I was just not reading the Atlantic that much. Maybe a fifth or quarter of the issue. So out it went - but if my fortunes were better, I'd subscribe again because it's a quality product.

The New Yorker is both a quality product and an identity object. My family's been subscribing for decades, even through the execrable Tina Brown years, and it's part of how we see our life as public intellectuals. The writing is consistently superb - it's probably the finest source non-fiction around. They also employ fact-checkers, so you can actually trust what's between the covers. And they have cartoons.

Just a quick example of the New Yorker's excellence; last week's issue has an story about an international arms dealer, that you should read if you want to (a) know how accurate Hollywood action-thrillers are (e.g. the dealer, Monzer al-Kassar, is the son of a Syrian diplomat, buys weapons from a factory in Poland, lives in Spain, and uses third and fourth person proxies, in different countries, so to avoid violating flaccid international laws against arms trafficking; he's arrested in Spain in 1995 and after three main witnesses are compromised - somebody killed them or kidnapped their children - he's let free); (b) to know just how scary international intrigue is; and (c) read something you can trust, because as opposed to most books, magazines, and especially newspapers, everything in the article has been verified.

Anyway, what about the New Republic? Well, like the Atlantic, I found that I wasn't reading the magazine - or website - all that much. True, both magazines suffered from the end of the Bush era/2008 Election and the news-junky-dom that those terrible times created, but it's more than that. I found that I just couldn't trust what I was reading in TNR anymore. Here's why:

1. Very Bad Reporters - Top of this list is the uber-hack James "T" Kirchick. I even asked TNR to change their editorial policy and put the authors of specific pieces at the beginning of the article rather than at the end - not only to avoid the worst of their reporters (more below) but specifically for Kirchick who is a serial fantasist, hysteric, and all-around worthless presence. James Woolcott, not usually a person I'd quote due to his persona as bilious cat queen, was spot on when defending Joe Klein in a spat with Kirchick, stating:

   "Kirchick is the Eddie Haskell of neoconservatives, a calculating little suck-up whose obsequious pieties drip like melted plastic. (To wit: "Reached for comment, Kirchick said 'McCain spent five years in a North Vietnamese torture camp. He doesn't need lessons in the horrors of war from the likes of Joe Klein.'") If Commentary made a lunch box, Kirchick is what you find packed inside, between a banana and a hand grenade. "

   There's a certain amount bathhouse politics in Woolcott's assessment, true, and my opposition to Kirchick isn't solely based on his idiot politics (gay republicans, like black republicans, are mystifying to me considering the GOP party platform is explicitly anti-gay and even more so implicitly anti-minority), but is focused on his journalistic crimes: he makes stuff up, distorts everything else, and his continued presence in TNR made me doubt the higher editorial purpose of the journal.
   
   
2. Other bad reporters are there too, and I'd list them, but their names get confusing to me (there's like 11 Jonathans on staff) and the key is that some may get the facts right but when called on to editorialize - which is nearly all the time - their judgement/wisdom is abysmal. The mixing of editorialism and journalism is the next big issue:
   
   
3. TNR Moved from News to Opinion - I never knew if a story could be considered journalism or an editorial. Almost every piece seemed to advocate a position and it was getting maddening. Not only do I want to read journalism from journalists - I get opinions from better people, thank you - but the opinions presented were often purposefully marginal and loopy; what has now been labeled 'Contrarianism.' I first noticed this in Slate - which is why I stopped reading them as well, about 3 years ago. Every Slate piece seemed to be angled to present an opposition to conventional wisdom, which thus meant that facts were twisted or obviated and crazy ideas were emphasized, just to be hip/catchy/shocking/whatever. Since it was clearly a marketing strategy rather than an intellectual one, I swiftly chucked the website from my reading. But then the same tone/goal seemed to spread all across the intertubes and eventually rested uneasily in TNR (see next).
   
   

4. TNR Started to Champion 'Contrarianism' as an editorial policy - as stated above, Contrarianism (for how this is used by others, see this Economist piece) is a journalistic attitude of twisting a story's perspective to present a minority/marginal point of view. E.g. "eating cheese may lower cholesterol!" "Cheney says Obama is not a liberal!" "Spree Killers may eat too much cheese, are too liberal, says Cheney"). It's a terrible trend in journalism and it reeks of flop-sweat. This trend is especially sad given that the Obama administration is fighting gamely against the gnarled nihilistic nub of the GOP who have cynically contradicted everything the good-guys have been trying to do. But since TNR, Slate, and even the Washington Post (so I've been told), among others, are committed to contrarianism - the two intellectual tactics help each other. The GOP happily distorts facts and these journalists oblige with their own twists. It's hurting the country and I want no part of it.
   
   
5. The Website became unusable - at one point, early in 2008, TNR's website was still a place I could go to find out breaking news in politics or what-have-you. Now, I have no idea how to use the dang thing - there's thirteen different blogs, each sharing front-page space, and it's just an addled mess.

All told, TNR had to go, and I don't see returning any time soon.

Update 1: When searching for good pics for this post, which I do after writing it, I found this story from Oct 2009 about others who hate Slate's contrariansism. Nice to know I'm not alone.

Update 2: Just had a blinding insight - contrarianism has existed on the internet for a while, but it's generally called being a 'concern troll.' While they're not exactly the same, the attitude is similar enough that I think the epithet fits.

First pic from here, second from here. Third pic comes from some dude's 4-chan pile and relates to update 2.