Don't pet the tiger

One of my colleagues is fond of that phrase, with reference to asking the executives anything, for fear of getting an answer. However, a film maker in Singapore seems to have learned a much harder lesson, by petting the tiger of the Indonesian Government.

A film about pretty boys on the beaches at Bali, making a tenuous living by having flings with women tourists, has started a pogrom against "tanned, muscular" guys. Have a look at the article; I especially liked the note near the end about how Bali has more than just gigolos to offer; they have "...Hindu temples, volcanoes, and terraced rice fields..." too!

Truly Nuts

I don't think I can say anything at all about this that the article doesn't already say. Strongly recommended reading.

Oh, come on ...

... it's just a typo. Would you do the publishing equivalent of a recall if you'd slipped up and spelled "pepper" as "people?" Would you if the publication in question was a cook book and the phrase in question was "... freshly ground black people?" This in a book called the Pasta Bible. (First published in 1642, in Florence, by Geraldus Irresponsibilus, a monk who later reigned briefly as Pope Noninnocenza the Third, and who specialized in variant readings of holy scripture, including the infamous Wicked Bible, which left the word "not" out of the admonition "thou shalt not commit adultery (true: look it up);" the Silly Bible, which included a thirteenth commandment, "Thou shalt not fling gnocchi at thy mother's brother's concubine;" and the bible d'accent indigne, which although based on English, renders everything in a spurious French accent.)

Apparently, the Pasta Bible's publisher is adopting the Toyota approach to public relations: "... if anyone is small-minded enough to complain about this ... "

Not ready for prime time

Or any other time:

North Korean Comedy! And now, Live from Pyongyang, it's Saturday Night!

Diversity, diversity ...

Here in Michigan, we have the full range of human experience, and our state's parenting skills are a good example. Last week's news carried two stories, demonstrating the scope of our population's abilities in child care-giving.

First: bad parent! A dad and an uncle spent two days driving around, drinking, bowling, and generally partying, with Dad's two young children in the car, frequently locked in the car, out in a variety of parking lots. Mom says she's "as shocked as anybody."

Next: good parent! A man (whose identity is not yet known) took his child to work, presumably to teach the 7-year-old valuable career skills. True, Dad's work was holding up retail establishments, child in tow, but still ...

Midwest family values, folks.

From my upcoming book

The classic dog cooking of the Middle West, everybody's favorite, Pizza Dogherita, with its beautiful bands of golden canned pumpkin and bright red tomato gunk representing the German (shepherd) flag, is traditionally served on a bed of 'large bites' dry food, topped with a dollop of Inova wet food and a doggie benadryl. Bon appetito!

A10 goes green

The Prius of the skies? How green can a ground-attack aircraft really be? Whatever, it's nice to see anything going on that preserves the useful life of these aging but successful flying tanks.

Try this at home

This weekend, I made a batch of cotechino, a sweet, mild Italian pork sausage that the Earle used to serve in puff pastry as Cotechino in Crosta. I've been meaning to try my hand at it for a while, but only recently assembled the ingredients. So ... fine, I've got some sausage to serve. What I really wanted to go with it was an earthy starch dish, redolent of damp, early-Spring woods and gradually resurgent nature. It's not all that often that I suit myself quite as successfully as I did with this three-P risotto - Porcini, Parmesan, and Peas. Drank a 2005 Barbaresco with it and marveled at my ability to very occasionally achieve what I set out to do.

Told you so

The study that sparked a wave of concern about a link between vaccination and autism, led to many parents failing to have their children vaccinated, and produced a resurgance of measles, among other childhood diseases, was retracted by the journal that published it. Not that it will change the minds of the many, many ignorant people who bought into the idea ... but at least there'll be formal consequences for the jackass who perpetrated it.

And even more pleasing to my sceptical mind, a large group of homeopathy-deniers took a "massive overdose" of various highly-diluted homeopathic "remedies," including some containing (or aledged to contain) toxins. None of them died or even felt bad.

New Scientist reports: No ill effects were reported by hundreds of volunteers who took part in a mass-overdose stunt around the world to demonstrate that homeopathic remedies are nothing more than sugar pills.

"There were no casualties at all, as far as I know," says Martin Robbins, spokesman for the "10:23" campaign, created to highlight the alleged ineffectiveness of homeopathic remedies.

"No one was cured of anything either," says Robbins. Like an estimated 300 volunteers in several cities in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US, he swallowed a bottleful of around 80 homeopathic "pillules" at exactly 10.23 am on Saturday. Each pillule is a tiny sugar pill dabbed with a drop of a homeopathic remedy, produced through "infinite" dilution – the process whereby a solution is diluted to the point where no molecules of an active component are likely to remain.

Remarkably, promoting and selling homeopathic remedies is not illegal here or in the UK, no more so than similar activities related to traditional Chinese medicine, hedge funds, or chiropractic.

Why I don't go out to the movies all that much

So we went to see Avatar yesterday. We emerged with a pair of splitting headaches and had to go home and lie down. Before the feature film (long, long before -- that's another issue I have with the modern theater experience), there was a promo for the National Guard which almost sent me out of the place, not for any political reasons but because it was so badly produced and so goddamn loud. Is this what it takes to get the attention of yoof -- quick-cuts and montages fit to produce seizures and inept vaguely metal music at actionably high decibel levels?

However, my aging intellect and hearing aside, I wonder if anyone else who saw this thing noted all the references and homages and outright thefts? Just as examples of those I picked up on, in between rubbing my aching eyes:

• Obvious similarities among the military and scientific technology of Avatar and Aliens (and of course, Sigourney Weaver as another link between the two films). I am not the first, by far, to make this observation.
  
• Weaver's character dies as a result of a stray round coming in the open door of a helicopter during an escape; lifted from an action bit in Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger (the book -- it didn't make it into the film)
  
• The female alien trapped under her fallen mount, unable to reach her weapon, while the bad guy menaces her; very similar to the final scenes of True Grit with John Wayne under his horse and Glen Campbell (!) picking the villain off at long range with a buffalo gun.
  
• The hero communing with the spirits of the dead or mother nature or something prior to the final showdown and saying, just as Sean Connery does in Outland, "I could use a little help."
  
• And finally, one that perhaps fewer of y'all will remember, the whole concept lifted from Clifford D. Simak's 1944 short story, Desertion, about a scientist / bureaucrat who's trying to explore, let alone colonize a vastly hostile planet (Jupiter; I said this was written in 1944) by transferring his staff into the physiotypes of a species of wolf or dog that inhabits the place. Trouble is, they don't come back. So he and his old faithful dog make the switch themselves and ... discover that what is to mankind a howling inferno is to the indigenous critters a heavenly place. Eventually (as mentioned in another Simak story (City? Don't remember.) everybody leaves Earth to become wolves on Jupiter.
  

In fact, the notion of a supposedly civilized individual "going native" with good, bad, or indifferent consequences is a central theme in the dialogue of imperialism. Who transforms who? Which side suffers most (although by now, I think the data are pretty clear on that question.) See Greene's The Quiet American for one exposition; A Passage to India (E. M. Forster) for another. Although I did like the idea of multiple species across multiple phyla evolving with compatible USB ports coming out of their heads, Avatar is still a silly film with little or nothing to say, and the 3-D glasses made my head hurt. The sheer amount of money it cost will probably bring in some Academy Awards, but for Christ's sake, folks, if you're going to spend all that dough, why not allocate a larger percentage to the writers? If you can simulate anything at all, why not simulate something new?