There Will Be Blood

There Will be Blood is a brilliant title that effectively ties together the themes of a fantastic movie by Paul Thomas Anderson - the blood of family, oil as blood, and literal blood.

Daniel Day Lewis, as oilman Daniel Plainview, is absolutely brilliant. So over-the-top, it may not be true to life but says more in it's excess than a more subtle performance would. I can't remember the reviewer or even the movie he was talking about, but I recall the review of a movie in which the reviewer stated it wasn't the job of a movie necessarily to be hyperrealistic. The use of color, camera angles, music, acting - they all there to evoke a certain emotion or feeling. And that evocation often does a better job of putting you in a certain time period or situation than a movie that tried to emulate reality.

There Will Be Blood, loosely based on Upton Sinclair's "Oil!" , follows Plainview's ascension to pinnacle of California oil discovery. To get there, he will sacrifice anything - friendships, happiness, even his family. To gain the trust of a town, he will feign religiousity. Dishonest, for sure, but in this action he also reveals the dishonesty of the supposedly pious man of God, Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano.

Some of the film is darkly funny - uncomfortably so. And that's probably the point. Just such one of the ocassions is Lewis' "milkshake" outburst, cleverly mashed with Kelis here:

"Milkshake"

The music is dissonant and uncomfortable. A lot has been made about the soundttrack by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. It's neither as bad as some make it out to be or as brilliant as others do. The way in which it contrasts with the action on screen is intentional and ocassionally effective. But at other times, I really felt it was drawing too much attention to itself and detracting from the film.

The cinematography and pacing are great. It's a long movie but doesn't seem so.

It's not as topical as some of the films of this year. It's made that much more universal and timeless because of it. If there is any movie of this year that it is similar in tone and theme to, I would say No Country for Old Men. It shares with No Country the themes of greed and fate and also a sparseness in look.

Though, the subject matter is the early days of oil exploration in our country, there are no attempts to tie it in to any contemporary oil issues. Oil is merely the conduit for the character's greed and ambition. I highly recommend this movie. Grade: A

Stimulate this

Dumb, dumb, dumb. In typical Republican fashion, the President thinks the best way to get out of a problem is to spend your way out of it. The proposed economic stimulus plan suggests just that. That was his response to 9/11 and it's his response to an economic downturn. To be fair, it appears to also be the answer of our leading Democrats.

The people that will get the most are the ones that need it the least and that are likely to just save it. So, you've rewarded the rich, done nothing to help the economy and have effectively handed off a larger deficit to the incoming administration. Brilliant.

I'd gladly give every bit of refund that we would get if it would help move us closer to universal healthcare or to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Instead of attacking the real causes of why people can't make ends meet, they've done a blatant attention-grabbing stunt to mollify the electorate and make the Republican candidates look better.

When are these idiots going to get it through their thick fucking heads that trickle-down doesn't work? We need a trickle-up policy. Until you lift people out of poverty, you are going to have an increasingly two-class society.

Now, someone I like a lot, Paul Krugman, has said all this better than me:

Published on Friday, January 25, 2008 by The New York Times
Stimulus Gone Bad
by Paul Krugman

House Democrats and the White House have reached an agreement on an economic stimulus plan. Unfortunately, the plan - which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape - looks like a lemon.

Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

Those are harsh words, so let me explain what’s going on.

Aside from business tax breaks - which are an unhappy story for another column - the plan gives each worker making less than $75,000 a $300 check, plus additional amounts to people who make enough to pay substantial sums in income tax. This ensures that the bulk of the money would go to people who are doing O.K. financially - which misses the whole point.

The goal of a stimulus plan should be to support overall spending, so as to avert or limit the depth of a recession. If the money the government lays out doesn’t get spent - if it just gets added to people’s bank accounts or used to pay off debts - the plan will have failed.

And sending checks to people in good financial shape does little or nothing to increase overall spending. People who have good incomes, good credit and secure employment make spending decisions based on their long-term earning power rather than the size of their latest paycheck. Give such people a few hundred extra dollars, and they’ll just put it in the bank.

In fact, that appears to be what mainly happened to the tax rebates affluent Americans received during the last recession in 2001.

On the other hand, money delivered to people who aren’t in good financial shape - who are short on cash and living check to check - does double duty: it alleviates hardship and also pumps up consumer spending.

That’s why many of the stimulus proposals we were hearing just a few days ago focused in the first place on expanding programs that specifically help people who have fallen on hard times, especially unemployment insurance and food stamps. And these were the stimulus ideas that received the highest grades in a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

There was also some talk among Democrats about providing temporary aid to state and local governments, whose finances are being pummeled by the weakening economy. Like help for the unemployed, this would have done double duty, averting hardship and heading off spending cuts that could worsen the downturn.

But the Bush administration has apparently succeeded in killing all of these ideas, in favor of a plan that mainly gives money to those least likely to spend it.

Why would the administration want to do this? It has nothing to do with economic efficacy: no economic theory or evidence I know of says that upper-middle-class families are more likely to spend rebate checks than the poor and unemployed. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the Bush administration refuses to sign on to anything that it can’t call a “tax cut.”

Behind that refusal, in turn, lies the administration’s commitment to slashing tax rates on the affluent while blocking aid for families in trouble - a commitment that requires maintaining the pretense that government spending is always bad. And the result is a plan that not only fails to deliver help where it’s most needed, but is likely to fail as an economic measure.

The words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt come to mind: “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

And the worst of it is that the Democrats, who should have been in a strong position - does this administration have any credibility left on economic policy? - appear to have caved in almost completely.

Yes, they extracted some concessions, increasing rebates for people with low income while reducing giveaways to the affluent. But basically they allowed themselves to be bullied into doing things the Bush administration’s way.

And that could turn out to be a very bad thing.

We don’t know for sure how deep the coming slump will be, or even whether it will meet the technical definition of a recession. But there’s a real chance not just that it will be a major downturn, but that the usual response to recession - interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve - won’t be sufficient to turn the economy around. (For more on this, see my blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.)

And if that happens, we’ll deeply regret the fact that the Bush administration insisted on, and Democrats accepted, a so-called stimulus plan that just won’t do the job.

Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a regular New York Times columnist. His most recent book is The Conscience of a Liberal.

MLK

Pride (In the name of love) by U2

One man come in the name of love
One man come and go
One man come, he to justify
One man to overthrow

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love

One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resist
One man washed on an empty beach.
One man betrayed with a kiss

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love

(nobody like you...)

Early morning, april 4
Shot rings out in the memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love
In the name of love
What more in the name of love...

Happy Birthday, Dr. King.

Tinfoil Hat

"Why are you so paranoid, Mulder?"
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's because I find it hard to trust anybody."
- Scully & Mulder, The X-Files, "Ascension"

I seem to have a habit of using either my clients or my wife's friend as anecdotes on my blog. It's a potentially dangerous habit if either were to read my blog. But, I don't use names and I don't know of any of my clients who are actually aware that I have a blog. And at this point in my life, and with me having my own business, even if a client somehow did figure out they were being ridiculed and took offense, losing their patronage would not bother me that much.

Usually, I use them to illustrate some right-wing or religious nuttiness. Well, I'm going to draw from the well once again, but this time it's on the other end of the spectrum. I used to frequent Democratic Underground, especially in the days around the last couple of elections ('04 an '06). There are discussion groups on the site for different areas of the country and I would occassionally lurk in the Arizona group. Sometimes I would join in. On one occassion, a poster asked for a computer consultant and I ever so humbly offered my services. It worked out well for that client and they have referred me to other friends on and off the Dem Underground site.

Now, I consider myself very liberal, but I'm friggin' Ronald Reagan compared to the few that I've met. They mean well, are very kind and active in their communities, but they all seem to have an unhealthy paranoia. I have a general mistrust of our current administration and do feel that our civil rights are being infringed upon. But my leftist friends are X-Files/black-helicopter/conspiracy-theory kooky. We're talking break-out-the-tinfoil-hat kooky.

One called me today to set up an appointment for this week. She believed that her internet connection wasn't working because her boyfriend had started a petition seeking to recall Sheriff Joe Arpaio and this was the Sheriff department infiltrating their computers. I calmly explained that in my 15 years and thousands of computers that I've worked on, I've never seen such a thing. I'm not saying that the technology doesn't exist to facilitate it, but rather that if Sheriff Joe took the time to chase down and hassle everyone that has said anything negative about him, he'd never get a minute of sleep and would spend billions of dollars making it happen. One of my best friends used to work in the Maricopa County Sheriff's IT department and knew Joe well (she even got me this swell autographed poster). He was much more concerned with getting his mug on national talk shows than with anything important.


The lesson here is - it's good to have a healthy mistrust of your leaders. Don't take them at face value. Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you. The last few years have certainly shown that to be true. But don't let that paranoia cripple you and temper it with some common sense.

"I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code." -- Emo Phillips

I am Legend

Will Smith, Sci-fi, apocalyptic - that's all I needed to hear. I was sold on going to this movie. So, why did I come away a little disappointed? I think it's because I just felt I'd been there before. For example:

• It's got that Cast Away parlor trick feel to it. Like a one man play. Just substitute Wilson with mannequins.


• The ending (which I won't ruin for those who haven't seen it) reminded me way too much of Children of Men.


• The CGI of some of the animals and of the zombies is not as good as it could have been.

What DID I like about it?

I thought the scenes of a New York overran by nature looked good. It's a valid topic right now and has been posited in a more scientific sense just this year by Alan Weisman in The World Without Us. The movie, and Weisman's book, show how quickly nature would take back what humans have claimed over a very small part of the Earth's history. It does a good job of giving one a sense of humility. We're barely a hiccup in the grand scheme of things and the planet couldn't give a shit whether we're here or not. It's really a misnomer to say that we are "saving the planet". We're trying to save ourselves. The planet will be here regardless.

The movie also brings up some valid philosophical points. What are our ethical responsibilities as scientists? Do we really know the consequences of our actions when we re-engineer nature? Will we be the instruments of our own demise?

Favorite scene:

It's gut-wrenching, especially for those who have pets, but the scene in which he has to take his pet's life choked me up a bit. Smith is very effective at showing the anguish of a pet owner that is making a decision for the better of the pet but that is made no less difficult by that fact.

Overall, I think it's a very good movie and despite its shortfalls, I recommend it. Grade: B

Laura liked I am Legend quite a bit and did a great review here about a month ago. Check it out.

Magic Pony

courtesy Bill Watterson, UPI
From the latest Sierra Club magazine:

Magic Ponies
Everyone wants an easy solution

A useful import from the blogosphere is the concept of the magic pony. Originating in an old Calvin and Hobbes strip (Suzie wishes Calvin were nicer and for a pony too), the magic pony is a miraculous but not-yet-extant solution to a problem--a solution so awesome that it would be foolish to waste one's time with partial, more immediate fixes. Such steeds run wild in the fields of environmentalism. In their recent book Break Through, for example, critics Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that doom-and-gloom environmentalists are wasting their time trying to regulate carbon dioxide and that our only hope is to pour money into clean-energy technology in hopes of finding a complete replacement for coal and oil. A pony! When affecting concern for the environment, President George W. Bush finds magic ponies irresistible. Rather than promote higher fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks, for instance, Bush decided to pursue still-elusive hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles. A pony! Fueling these cells, in Bush's plan, would be largely as-yet-unproven "clean coal." Another pony! And how would that clean coal be burned? In plants using not-ready-for-prime-time carbon sequestration. His plan, in effect, is the Triple Crown of magic ponies. The profusion of magic-pony plans prompted Grist's David Roberts to lay down a challenge: "Unless you also describe practical steps for how we can achieve your Magical Pony Plan . . . then you are not, in fact, arguing on behalf of the Magical Pony Plan. You are arguing that we should reject the incremental advance in favor of doing nothing." ... Lacking a magic pony, we're left with the advice a veteran Alaska bush pilot gave to a visitor worried about what to do if approached by a grizzly: "Son, do the best you can." —Paul Rauberr

I hadn't heard the term "magic pony" before and in this instance it's applied to the environmental issue ... quite aptly. Bush will always bring out hydrogen powered cars as the solution because he knows he doesn't really have to deliver. Hydrogen cars are so far removed from being production cars that Bush will be long out of office before they provide any kind of help. So, they serve the purpose of making him look like he cares about the environment without actually having to do anything.

It's not just Bush. It's a whole segment of naysayers that will argue against any incremental advancement that moves us in the right direction. And it's not just with the environment. Let's "fight terrorism" and "spread democracy" they say. They're spreading something, alright. It's all talk. They don't really want to do the hard work that will make those things happen. Long term fostering of relationships, working to lessen our dependence on oil, helping to lift people out of poverty, giving people an actual homeland, debt-forgiveness, curing disease, etc. -- those aren't as sexy as saying, we're "fighting terrorism".

The sad thing is, our society has shown over and over the last few years that they'll buy that "magic pony".

Nano

"The car has become a secular sanctuary for the individual, his shrine to the self, his mobile Walden Pond." -- Edward McDonagh

I think I've found my new car:

From Good News Network

India's Tata Motors has unveiled what is being called the world's cheapest car — the $2,500 Nano. The four-person sedan, also called the People's Car meets all safety and environmental requirements, said the company's founder, even getting 50 mpg with lower emission levels than modern scooters of India.

I'm serious. If I could buy this car in the states, I would.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we haven't quite decided what our ultimate transportation plan is. We've successfully navigated through the last few weeks sharing one car. And there have been no major logistical problems so far. But I do think we'll have to get something here fairly soon. We're trying to weigh the options of buy or lease, hybrid or not, etc.

Sharing a car has certainly made us think more about the trips that we make and how we can most efficiently make those trips that are necessary. Considering how annoyingly liberal and environmental we already were, that's an accomplishment.

"It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours." -- Greenpeace ad

... No Sacred Truths

Two takes on religion that I've seen this week, basically saying the same thing, but from disparate sources and with distinctly different tones. The first, from the book I'm reading right now, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, one of my favorite people:

"Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? There isn't a religion on the planet that doesn't long for a comparable ability - precise, and repeatedly demonstrated before committed sceptics - to foretell future events. No other human institution comes close. Is this worshipping at the altar of science? Is this replacing one faith by another, equally arbitrary? In my view, not at all. The directly observed success of science is the reason I advocate its use. If something else worked better, I would advocate the something else. Does science insulate itself from philosophical criticism? Does it define itself as having a monopoly on the `truth'? Think again of that eclipse a thousand years in the future. Compare as many doctrines as you can think of, note what predictions they make of the future, which ones are vague,which ones are precise, and which doctrines - every one of them subject to human fallibility - have error-correcting mechanisms built in. Take account of the fact that not one of them is perfect. Then simply pick the one that in a fair comparison works best (as opposed to feels) best. If different doctrines are superior in quite separate and independent fields, we are of course free to choose several - but not if they contradictone another. Far from being idolatry, this is the means by which we can distinguish the false idols from the real thing.

Again, the reason science works so well is partly that built-in error-correcting machinery. There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths ..."

And the second by Bill Maher on Conan O'Brien:



Wow ... pretty gutsy to say on network television. I'm not disagreeing with anything he said, but most people don't have the cojones to lay it out like he did. You could sense Conan's and the audience's discomfort. But, why shouldn't he be able to criticize religion publicly? Truly, there should be "no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths". The generally accepted leader of Christianity, the Pope, recently seemed to have no problem laying all the problems of the world at the door of atheism:

Pope Benedict states atheism is responsible for some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" in history ...

Well, if that's isn't the pot calling the kettle black. Hypocrisy, thy name is Pope Benedict.

The Accidental Blogger

Nine days between posts? What the hell? Sometimes, you just don't know what to blog about. I've been slammed by work lately and haven't had a lot of extra time to do anything but eat and sleep. I can pay attention to all your blogs, but mine gets neglected.


In what spare time I've had, I've ducked out to catch a few hockey games (go 'Yotes ... on a 5 game winning streak) and I took in a rock and mineral show with the family. Alex is as much of a rock hound as I am and enjoys these type of things. My wife ... not so much. My personal faves are fossils of various kinds:


The coolest thing about them is that God took the time to put them inside of rocks 6,000 years ago, just so some random prospector could find them, cut and polish them and sell them to me at a rock show. Yeah. If your belief system relies on you ignoring every bit of fact, logic and practical experience, then maybe you should get a new belief system.

Between Christmas and New Year's, we made a trip up to the folks near Kingman, stayed in Laughlin for a day and took the scenic route back to Phoenix, traveling through Lake Havasu City - home of conservative retirees, crazy spring breakers who show their hoo-hoo's, and the London Bridge.


Here, Alex tries to escape the vicious tourist trap by using the TARDIS


I didn't have the heart to tell him it wasn't real. If it was real, I might have tried to use it to escape the innane, incessant and often incorrect news coverage of the political primary season.

I've watched very little of it on TV, though I do follow everything online. This is not my favorite time in the political schedule. Pretty much everybody irritates me in one manner or another right now, but topping my annoying list would the disingenuous aw-shucks populism of John McCain and Ron Paul. McCain will profess to be a man of the people and a 'maverick' when it suits him but will then toe the party line when it doesn't. Ron Paul rightly attracts widespread support through his anti-war views. But, I wonder if those same people would be so likely to support him knowing of the racist and violently anti-government rhetoric published under his name?

TV obviously blows in general with the writer's strike, but I'm reading a lot. Just finished U2 by U2. It's a narrative of their career culled from 150 hours of interviews with everyone in the band. There are a lot of insights into the songwriting that I did not know. They are much more Christian than I ever gathered. Definitely not in an annoying fashion. But rather their faith informs their songwriting choices quite a bit.

So, that's what's been happening in my boring life. I'm going to try and blog every day for a least a week just to get myself back in the swing of things. Lucky you. I'll probably be talking about what I ate for breakfast.

Top 10 Movies/Performances of 2007

These are the top 10 (OK ... 11) movies that I saw in 2007. It was a very good year for American cinema.

(1) Into the Wild -- By far, my favorite movie of the year. Breathtaking scenery, heartbreaking true story, great acting and a sublime soundtrack by Eddie Vedder (my favorite album of the year, BTW). As good as an actor Sean Penn is, he may be an even better director.

(2) 3:10 to Yuma -- A dream pairing of two actors who take their roles pretty seriously (some may say too seriously). I believe it's the best western since Unforgiven.

(3) Michael Clayton -- Yet another in the outstanding string of political dramas that Clooney has made. A great performance by Clooney perhaps only surpassed by co-star Tom Wilkinson.

(4) Children of Men -- Very early in the year but still in '07. I said then that it would be in my To 10 ... and here it is. Modern science fiction that's scary because we're not that far off from the ideas presented here. Science fiction works because you can put contemporary problems in a fantasy setting and they are more palatable to people than if you just had a dry condescending polemic.

(5) No Country for Old Men -- Typically (for them) great grasp of setting and dialogue by the Coens. A worthy addition to their body of work and in the same conversation as Fargo. It would have rated even higher for me if I had been smart enough to understand the ending.

(6) Bourne Ultimatum -- Action movies don't get much better than this. Plus, actors Matt Damon, David Straithairn, and Joan Allen and director Paul Greengrass give it an intelligence absent in most action movies.

(7) Breach -- A surprisingly credible acting performance by Ryan Phillipe in a taut spy thriller. Who knew? More cerebral than Bourne, but no less thrilling. Laura Linney and Chris Cooper are solid.

(8) 300 -- Glossy, loud, unapologetic pulp entertainment. Not much for subtlety but perhaps the most visually unique movie of '07.

(9) Sicko -- Michael Moore tones down his bombast a bit and thus attracts a bigger audience. He makes a well-made, well-received documentary on our pathetic health-care system

(10) Pan's Labyrinth/I am Legend - tie -- One very early '07, one very late. Ditto my appraisal of Children of Men. Both of these movies have flaws. I didn't like either as much as I went expecting to. But, still, two well-made science fiction films with things to say about current society. I'll give a more extensive review of I am Legend in a day or so.


Honorable mention:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Transformers
Ocean's 13
Enchanted

and the following two that are from '06 but I saw in '07

Pursuit of Happyness (released in December '06 but didn't see till '07)
Jesus Camp (opened end of '06 but never had a wide theatrical release - saw on video in '07)

I haven't seen Atonement or There Will Be Blood, both of which I've heard great things about. Charlie Wilson's War, Sweeney Todd and Juno are all highly praised also, but I haven't had the chance to see.

My Top 10 movie performances of '07 - no special order, no differentiation between lead or supporting, male or female:

Hal Holbrook and Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild
Javier Bardem, Kelly MacDonald and Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men
George Clooney and Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton
Russell Crowe and Ben Foster in 3:10 to Yuma
Amy Adams in Enchanted

It's a mystery to me
we have a greed
with which we have agreed

You think you have to want
more than you need
until you have it all you won't be free

... there's those thinking more less
less is more
but if less is more
how you keeping score?

Means for every point you make
your level drops
kinda like its starting from the top
you can't do that...

Society -- performed by Eddie Vedder

On the subject of religious hypocrisy

Why is there such a big gap between what we say and what we do?

My wife is going to hate me for again using one of her best friends as an anecdote, but I can't help it. She's a living, breathing object lesson. This friend, an evangelical, had a conversation with my wife yesterday lamenting that Jesus is the "reason for the Season" (if someone says that to my face, I'm going to punch them in the neck ... or I would if I wasn't non-violent). In the same conversation she talked about how she's getting a thousand dollar gun safe for her husband and spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on their already spoiled son. Plus, she complained that her husband probably wasn't going to get her anything good for Christmas.

In the later course of the conversation, my wife mentioned to her that we had tried to cut down on presents this Christmas and had given $400 to our son's school. Before you nominate us for sainthood for doing so, realize that we did it because it was smart, not because we're Warren frickin' Buffet. You can donate to Arizona public schools ($200 for one person or $400 for a couple filing jointly) and get a dollar-for-dollar credit. This is way better than a deduction in that it is money directly off of your tax liability. Plus, you can direct into which programs that it goes. In this case, we told them to use it for any arts-based extracurricular activities.

My wife's friend said that sounded interesting but they just couldn't afford to do that ...... wah? This is the same person who 10 minutes earlier was talking about the thousand-dollar gun safe. For someone to say something like that with no apparent sense of irony is incredible. And, unfortunately, it is not rare. Talking out of both sides of one's mouth is an art that I'm having less and less patience for. Being "Christian" seems to be more about a political movement than a religious one. The bible is selectively touted to justify your prejudice but ignored when it comes to the passages about caring for your neighbor and the poor.

--------------------------------------------------



On leaving one of my clients this week, she commented "Merry Christmas ... I AM going to say "Merry Christmas" regardless of what anyone says." She had worked herself into a lather ... not at me, but at "them"." She'd obviously must have just watched the O'Reilly Factor or had received some action item e-mail from Focus on the Family.

This was another of those instances where I just wanted to scream. If I have one more person complain about the "War on Christmas", I may just have to renounce my vow of non-violence. Have you ever complained about someone saying "Merry Christmas" to you? Who has ever known someone who complained about someone saying "Merry Christmas" to them? No one. It's a nonexistent controversy. People can say "Merry Christmas", "Happy Hanukkah", "Happy Holidays", "go piss up a rope", whatever. It won't bother me, because I know, generally, that they are all meant as a kind greeting. But this lady, and others who are so weak-minded as to believe anything they hear, are using "Merry Christmas" as a rallying cry. You'd think they were blacks marching in Alabama in the 60's or were breaking down the Berlin Wall. They can't accept they are the pampered majority so they have to make martyrs out of themselves. But I didn't say any of this to the lady. It would have just reinforced her martyrdom. So, I just said, "Taqabbala Allahu minna wa minkum" and "Joyous Yule" ... OK, I didn't, but I should have.

--------------------------------------------------

I think if the true message of Christ was followed by Christians, you wouldn't have screwed-up stories like I just recounted. But people believe what they want to believe. If they don't want to be giving, they'll think up a way to justify that. If they don't want to be tolerant of other religions, of gays, of minorities, they'll think up a way to justify that. And there will be focus groups and pundits who will be more than happy to create controversies that reinforce their beliefs. Because they have a vested financial and egotistical interest in a stoked-up culture war. It's political, not religious. It's not about religious freedom - it's about freedom to shove your particular belief down everyone's throat. Why don't you worry about real injustices in the world instead of creating fake ones?

"That's the true spirit of Christmas; people being helped by people other than me." -- Seinfeld

The Golden Compass

I'm really torn between the evisceration of this movie that it has been getting by some critics and the general approval of the same by CK. I see the valid points of both. The movie does take a lot of liberties with the source material, most notably the order of things and omission of the last few chapters.

And I don't know if my approval is just a product of me being happy to see the transfer to screen of a story that I like. I'm not like a lot of sci-fi fans who bitch about how movies mangle the stories they are based on. I actually liked David Lynch's Dune, though I have to admit it's an ambitious mess. I was just thrilled to see the visualization of one of my favorite novels of all time.


I cannot criticize the look of the movie. I think they did a good job with the daemons, with the bears, with the witches, etc. I cannot criticize the casting - cherry-picking from Casino Royale (Daniel Craig, Eva Green) and LOTR (Ian McKellan, Christoper Lee) and Sam Elliot playing ... well, Sam Elliot. But he's very likable and it's fitting for the role.

Another criticism of the movie by others is that it waters down the message of the books by not calling out the church by name. I don't agree with this criticism. Watching the movie, you'd have to be a moron not to understand what they are really talking about. Generously sprinkling terms such as "free inquiry" and "free will", the point is still made.

Illustrating complicated plot points from the book in a two hour movie is also a problem. So you have characters awkwardly explaining those plot points. This makes the movie a bit talky but I don't know how you can get around that short of having some kind of narration.

I'm not saying that the movie couldn't have been better. It would have been interesting to see what a director like Alfonso Cuaron or Guillermo del Toro could have done with this material. But I still liked it. Grade: B-

==============================

Good news on the fantasy/sci-fi front - the rumored Hobbit movie IS going to happen. Peter Jackson will be involved in one way or another. And even better, there will actually be 2 movies. One covering the Hobbit and another, I imagine, spanning the time difference between the Hobbit and the start of Lord of the Rings. For a lot more info on all this, check out Reel Fanatic's write-up

I'm going to try and post my year-end top 10 movies and top 10 acting performances of the year tomorrow.

She was a good truck ...

She lived a long hard life -

- 3 major accidents

- 210,000 miles, 12 years

- helped dozens of friends move

- went fishing in Minnesota, went tubing on the Salt River

Gone is my out-dated Janet Napolitano for governor and Jim Pederson for Senate '06 stickers (which are stuck on even older Kerry/Edwards '04 stickers). Gone is my Iowa State and Sierra Club stickers.

I hate cars, but I hated this one less than most.

Taken from me before I was ready because of a bonehead hitting me from behind. Oh well. Hopefully, from this very blog you'll hear of me getting something cool like a Prius or Smart Car. Or maybe you'll hear of me forsaking my driving ways altogether and doing something that doesn't require me to flit about Phoenix all the time and endanger myself and the planet. Who knows. For now, we'll see how long that we can share a car and still do our jobs. Stay tuned.

Short Attention Span Theater

Since I seem to be unable to give a bunch of time to any one subject lately, I'll give a little time to several:

Atheism for Kids? -- I haven't finished the book yet and have yet to see the movie, but I'm diggin' the controversy of 'The Golden Compass'. Articles lead with the scary title - "Golden Compass - Atheism for Kids?". Ooh, I hope so. As usual, Christians create a mountain out of a mole hill. Pullman's stories are more anti-Catholic than anti-Christian. But if these stories and movie get a few kids to question blindly following any doctrine, then I'll be happy. I know full well that most of the people making a big deal have not read the books or seen the movie.

I hate cars -- Now, I hated them before the last couple of weeks but getting unceremoniously rear-ended at a stop light two weeks ago cinches it. It screwed up my truck and I'm playing the always enjoyable insurance company dance. Did I mention that I also hate insurance companies? They deserve their own special circle of hell.

Movies -- There are a lot of good movies out there right now. I've yet to see 'American Gangster' and I want to see 'Juno', 'Sweeney Todd', 'Charlie Wilson's War', 'I am Legend',etc. when they come out. I'm going to try and go on a cinematic binge in the next couple of weeks so that I can have some good ammo for a year-end Top 10. Count on the following movies that I've already seen this year probably being in that list: 'Into the Wild', 'No Country for Old Men', 'Michael Clayton', '3:10 to Yuma'. 'Into the Wild' leads in nominations for the just announced The Critics Choice Awards.

I don't heart Huckabee - I truly, deeply feel sorry for anyone that thinks the future of our country should reside with a religious nutjob who thinks that AIDS patients should be quarantined and that 'wives should graciously submit to their husbands' . I vote for quarantining these zealots - an evangelical Ava Maria, if you will.

Books -- Writers should go on strike more often. I am getting a lot more read lately because I'm not parking myself mindlessly in front of the TV as much. Recent reads: 'Golden Compass' by Phillip Pullman (in progress), 'Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevara's Last Mission' by Richard L. Harris, 'Into the Wild' by Jon Krakauer, and 'Neverwhere' by Neil Gaiman.

Safe from what?

A few years back, we were looking at new housing developments and we had narrowed it down to two locations. The first location was a gated area, the 2nd was not. That first property was on our list not because of being gated, but rather, despite it. Ultimately, it was one of the deciding factors in us choosing against it. How we looked at it is not the norm, however. A recent article by Barbara Ehrenreich of the Nation has an interesting take on gated areas:

McMansions Meet the Mortgage Crisis
by Barbara Ehrenreich

Another utopia seems to be biting the dust. ... the paranoid residential ideal represented by gated communities may be in serious trouble. Never exactly cool–remember Jim Carrey in The Truman Show?–these pricey enclaves of privilege are becoming hotbeds of disillusionment.

At the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington last week, incoming association president Setha M. Lowe painted a picture so dispiriting that the audience guffawed in schadenfreude. The gated community residents Lowe interviewed had fled from ethnically challenging cities, but they have not managed to escape from their fear. One resident reported that her small daughter has developed a severe case of xenophobia, no doubt communicated by her parents:

We were driving next to a truck with some day laborers and equipment in the back, and we stopped beside them at the light. She [her daughter] wanted to move because she was afraid those people were going to come and get her. They looked scary to her.

...gated communities are no less crime-prone than open ones, and Gopal Ahluwalia, senior vice president of research at the National Association of Home Builders, confirms this: “There are studies indicating that there are no differences in the crime in gated communities and non-gated communities.” The security guards often wave people on in, especially if they look like they’re on a legitimate mission ... Or the crime comes from within ...

Most recently, America’s gated communities have been blighted by foreclosures ... So, for people who sought, not just prosperity, but perfection, here’s another sad end to the American dream, or at least their ethnically cleansed version thereof: boarded-up McMansions, plastic baggies scudding over overgrown lawns, and, in the Orlando case, a foreclosure-induced infestation of snakes. You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there’s no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.

All right, some gated communities are doing better than others, and not all of their residents are racists. The communities that allow owners to rent out their houses, or that offer homes at middle class prices of $250,000 or so, are more likely to contain a mixture of classes and races. The only gated community I have ever visited consisted of dull row houses protected by a slacker guard and a fence, and my host was a writer of liberal inclinations. But all these places suffer from the delusion that security lies behind physical barriers.

Before we turn all of America into a gated community, with a 700-mile steel fence running along the southern border, we should consider the mixed history of exclusionary walls. Ancient and medieval European towns huddled behind massive walls, only to face ever-more effective catapults, battering rams and other siege engines. More recently, the Berlin Wall, which the East German government described fondly as a protective “anti-fascism wall,” fell to a rebellious citizenry. Israel, increasingly sealed behind its anti-Palestinian checkpoints and wall, faced an outbreak of neo-Nazi crime in September–coming, strangely enough, from within.

But the market may have the last word on America’s internal gated communities. “Hell is a gated community,” announced the Sarasota Herald Tribune last June, reporting that market research by the big homebuilder Pulte Homes found that no one under fifty wants to live in them, so its latest local development would be un-gated. Security, or at least the promise of security, may be one consideration. But there’s another old-fashioned American imperative at work here, which ought to bear on our national policies as well. As my Montana forebears would have put it: Don’t fence me in!

It seems that in our fear-mongering society, we try to achieve security through building fences instead of engaging our community. In the world community, we are making the same mistakes - building fences and failing to engage our world neighbors. The places where I have felt the safest were those where neighbors knew each other - where if you had a problem with someone, you'd go talk to them civilly.

Are people wrong for wanting safety for their family? No. Are they wrong in thinking that ethnic and economic homogeny produce this desired safety? Yes. People are looking for "safety" from immigrants, from low-income people. They are using security concerns to justify xenophobia and racism. Again, they are taking their cue from our country's leaders who do the same on the world stage.

The post-war suburbanization of our society gave us the illusions of security, privacy and space. But it took away our connectedness. War, the environment, poverty - it's all connected. We overvalue material things and undervalue people and nature. Instead of building walls, we should be knocking them down.

"As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reviews

I keep thinking I'm going to have a bit of time to write extensive reviews for some recent movies I've seen (and albums I've bought) but it just ain't gonna happen. So, here are the Cliff Notes versions:


No Country for Old Men I love the Coen brothers and they are probably my 2nd favorite directors behind Kubrick. Fargo has always been my favorite of their movies(Raising Arizona and O Brother, Where Art Thou? after that). Add No Country for Old Men to that group. It's sparseness, lack of dialog and great cinematography is evocative of Fargo but this movie is definitely it's own animal. While on the surface it's a crime drama involving a triad of great actors (Jones, Bardem and Brolin) chasing each other, it's really about us and what we value and how screwed-up values can ruin people's lives. The great thing about the movie is that it works on both levels mainly because of the strength of those actors and the deft hand of the Coens. Kelly McDonald (Trainspotting), Stephen Root (NewsRadio, Office Space) and Woody Harrelson all give great supporting performances. Grade: A-

For a much better review of the movie than mine, check out Wunelle's blog:

No Movie for Sissies


Raising Sand - Robert Plant/Alison Krauss - Putting the lead singer of "the" definitive rock band together with a bluegrass legend doesn't seem logical or a recipe for success. But producer T Bone Burnett doesn't follow trends, he creates them. He was the genius behind the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and pretty much singlehandely made bluegrass cool. Well, he's struck gold again. Picking a mixture of old rock songs and country songs that are thematically dark, Krauss and Plant both step outside of their comfort zone and create a great album. I've heard they are going to tour in the spring and will even dust off some Zep songs. Count me in. I love Krauss and Led Zeppelin and would pay money to see her put her spin on some classics.


Bee Movie - Oddly, the start of the movie made me think of Into the Wild. Having just graduated from Bee school, the title character, voiced by Jerry Seinfeld, seeks to break out of the expectations that his family and society have placed on him. Granted, he doesn't hitchhike around the southwest and die of starvation in a bus. But other than that, it's the same.

I didn't expect much of this movie and mostly just went because I wanted to go to a movie with the kid and this one was the only appropriate one. But I liked the movie. Sting and Ray Liotta give funny cameos and all the main voice actors (Seinfeld, Zellweger, Broderick, Rock) do a good job. By no means high art, but an entertaining movie with a decent message. Grade: B (get it? I gave it a "bee". hoo-hoo, I kill me)

Reading

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader." -- Margaret Fuller

As a parent, most of the time, you feel pretty clueless. You do the best you can, try to instill good habits and manners with your child without stunting their creativity. So, it's gratifying when you have those seemingly spontaneous moments where it is obvious that you must have been doing at least something right. One of those occasions was last night about 7:00. It's prime TV viewing time and all three of us are sitting in the family room reading books ... by choice. Alex, at 6 years old, has become a voracious reader and is reading well beyond his age level. He'll probably be reading Harry Potter books within a year.

He could have been playing a game on a computer or watching TV, but he chose to read. But this is not the rule for most kids these days. I was listening to NPR the other day and they spoke of a recent National Endowment for the Arts study which I have excerpted here:

Washington, DC -- Today, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announces the release of To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence, a new and comprehensive analysis of reading patterns in the United States. To Read or Not To Read gathers statistics from more than 40 studies on the reading habits and skills of children, teenagers, and adults. The compendium reveals recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, exposing trends that have severe consequences for American society.

"The new NEA study is the first to bring together reliable, nationally representative data, including everything the federal government knows about reading," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "This study shows the startling declines, in how much and how well Americans read, that are adversely affecting this country's culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children's educational achievement."

... Among the key findings:

Americans are reading less - teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.

Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.

On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.

Americans are reading less well – reading scores continue to worsen, especially among teenagers and young males. By contrast, the average reading score of 9-year-olds has improved.

Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.

2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.

Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

The declines in reading have civic, social, and economic implications – Advanced readers accrue personal, professional, and social advantages. Deficient readers run higher risks of failure in all three areas.

Nearly two-thirds of employers ranked reading comprehension "very important" for high school graduates. Yet 38 percent consider most high school graduates deficient in this basic skill.

American 15-year-olds ranked fifteenth in average reading scores for 31 industrialized nations, behind Poland, Korea, France, and Canada, among others.

Literary readers are more likely than non-readers to engage in positive civic and individual activities – such as volunteering, attending sports or cultural events, and exercising ...

The show went on to discuss the fact that reading online items is not a substitute. Studies of children who spend equal amounts of time online but one group also reads recreationally finds that the offline readers have drastically better reading comprehension and school performance.

So, for those people that think visiting digg.com everyday is all the reading you need, you are kidding yourself and you are limiting yourself. And believe me, there are people that think this and have told me so.

Should we be surprised that no one can find Iraq on a map or string together a proper sentence without saying "ya know"? Not in a society where 30-second YouTube clips and text-messaging are ubiquitous. Getting someone to sit down and do one thing for a half-hour is unheard of. We're becoming an illiterate society that laps up anything that our government or FOX News says because we have no historical perspective to compare it with. Anybody that has ever read 1984 or Brave New World can't help but see the parallels.

I'm not saying that you should abandon TV or shouldn't read online. There are great sources in both areas. Just don't shortchange picking up a good book. It's not supposed to be work - it's supposed to be fun. Pick up something you are interested in. Do yourself a favor and unplug once in awhile.

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere." -- Jean Rhys

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." -- Ray Bradbury

Merry Chri$tma$

"Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts." -- Henry David Thoreau

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." -- From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

'What would Jesus buy?' film asks:

Buy Nothing Day is getting a Jesus jolt.

New York-based performance artist Bill Talen assumes the persona of Reverend Billy, often accompanied by a gospel choir, to use the histrionics and cadences of a televangelist (think Jimmy Swaggart) in an anti-consumerism effort to convert people to his "Church of Stop Shopping."

And for this year's Black Friday shopping frenzy, Talen is upping his profile with a colorful campaign promoting a new documentary film about his efforts, "What Would Jesus Buy?"

It will feature "Four Horsemen of the Shopocalypse" riding down Madison Avenue in New York and "elves on strike" at the Grove outdoor mall in Los Angeles, said Morgan Spurlock, who produced the film.



Spurlock, known for placing himself in uncomfortable situations in 2004's "Super Size Me" and his "30 Days" TV series, isn't going with the immersion technique for this project.

"I've unplugged, man," Spurlock said this week. "I've started to walk away from this idea of getting credit card after credit card to get people more gifts."

Spurlock says the campaign and film should appeal to conservative Christians as well as to those on the political left.

"People on both sides of the fence can agree on one thing, and that's that the holiday's gotten out of control," he said.

"We've been convinced that the way to show your love for someone is by what you buy them, by what the price tag is, by what is represented on the receipt. And that's the wrong message to send out," he added.

A review of "What Would Jesus Buy?" in "Christianity Today" questioned whether Talen's act, poking fun at both religion and consumerism, went too far.

"Yes, it's condescending. Yes, it cheapens Christianity," the magazine said, before concluding: "But the whole argument of the film is that our commodity culture has already cheapened Christianity."

Buy Nothing Day was conceived by artist Ted Dave of Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1992, and since then has been championed by Adbusters magazine, said Adbusters campaign manager Paul Cooper.

"It started off as a bit of a joke," said Adbusters editor-in-chief Kalle Lasn. "Environmentalists are really the core base of this movement. But after that there were religious people that came on board."

Cooper calls the day an "open source" event for all types of performance artists and activists. Any effort that generates thought about shopping and consumption is encouraged. Last year, one group wandered into stores wearing shirts that advertised 50 percent off everything in the store.

"There are a lot of people who don't like this weird tradition of hectic shopping and frenzied and angry crowds the day after Thanksgiving," Cooper said.

I'm hardly an off-the-grid type and certainly have not divorced myself from consumerism, but spectacles like Black Friday and the disgusting trend of stores putting up Christmas displays around Halloween sure makes one wonder what's it all about. I'm an atheist, but I can appreciate the complaint of some Christians that the point of Christmas has been lost. That "point" for them obviously relates to Christianity. My "point" is friends, family, food. Either way, the corporate, debt-producing, environment-wrecking, nausea-inducing Holiday season is not the answer for anyone. And any church, any leader, any media outlet or any acquaintance that tells you it is doesn't deserve your attention.

I'm sure I'm a raging hypocrite and you could probably find inconsistencies in my position over the years (probably on my own blog), but I'm trying. I'm still buying gifts but opted for Black Friday shopping in my skivvies, sitting at my computer. I'm going to try to buy local or used as much as possible. If not local, then non-profit, fair-trade, or organic.

Celebrate Christmas any way you want. Give gifts to friends and family if you can and because it makes you feel good, not because you feel society is requiring you to.

For like-minded people, here's a site with some great alternatives:

Buy Nothing for Christmas

"Who covets more, is evermore a slave." -- Robert Herrick

"The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing." -- John Berger

Good Weekend

OK, my last 6 posts have all been about what I don't like (evangelizing, Myspace, lack of privacy, Glenn Beck, hubris). Lest you think I'm depressed all the time, here are some highlights of a bitchin' weekend:

• -- Dinner out with E-Slice (Eric) and the family for his birthday at a small sushi place called Tokyo Lobby. Great straight up sushi plus some goofy specialties like Monkey Brains (deep-fried stuffed mushroom with crab meat and spicy tuna). Top it off with tempura banana with ice cream for dessert. yum.


• -- One of the best special exhibits that we've ever seen at the Arizona Science Center - Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition. It was instructive , had a lot of stuff (doors, windows, dishes, clothes, etc.) and was thematically well put together.




• -- Lunch Saturday at Uncle Sam's in Phoenix. Big portions and some of the better hoagies and cheesesteaks in Phoenix.


• -- Used book shopping at Bookman's (a local chain) and Half Price Books. I hit the jackpot today getting 3 Neil Gaiman books (American Gods, Neverwhere, and Good Omens), Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. I've been in a rut for the last couple of years of buying almost nothing but non-fiction. So, I'm trying to balance out with some good sci-fi.




• -- Plus, Thursday, I went to my first Suns game of the year - a win versus da Bulls.

So, I do occasionally enjoy myself between bouts of pulling my hair out over our country going to hell in a hand basket. "Can't rain all the time ..." as the Crow would say.

Jesus Saves

A good friend of my wife's, a Southern Baptist, said the oddest thing (maybe not odd for those of her beliefs) in reponse to a tragic event the other day. Her neighbor's 4-year-old had been killed by the family dog - a tragic event that I won't get into the details of as they are not relevant to the story. The friend had went to the funeral service this last weekend and lamented that there had not be enough speaking by the pastor. "All they had done was have friends and family talk about the life of the little girl" (paraphrasing her friend). She said that the time would have been better spent preaching to the people there because at a funeral service is the only time some people get to church. In other words, the time would have been better spent proselytizing. Now, I wasn't there when the friend said this to my wife and if I had, I cannot even imagine my response. But my wife, even though she considers herself religious, just about came unhinged. They argued on the point for several minutes before my wife, in the interests of maintaining the friendship, decided to let it go.

Add on to this the conversation of today that she had with the same friend: Her friend was commenting that their 6 year old son is not eating well, causes trouble and has sleeping issues. In the same conversation she talked about how they go to church every single night of the week and often do not get home till 9:30 or 10:00 at night. She did not see any apparent connection between the two.

A large portion of evangelicals seem to be living a life where your sole purpose is to evangelize and bring more into the fold - ignoring real life, parenting, those around you that don't believe the same. Please explain to me how this is different than a cult.

And my wife's friend is not some crazy person divorced from the rest of society. She is a genuinely nice person who watches Alex whenever we ask. That is the scary part -- she's not the lunatic fringe, she's representative of a lot of church-goers.

I don't want to tell anyone how to live their life, but my thinking is that if you want to attract more people to Christianity, you would be wise not alienate the youth that will be your next generation by shoving religion down their throats 24-7. And secondly, I'd advise not being so strident in interactions with run-of-the-mill Christians who would otherwise be sympathetic to your cause (my wife). And before you accuse some atheists of being strident (Dawkins, Harris), I will grant you that point. But there is a difference, they are not trying to engender a certain belief. There is no fold that they are trying to get you into. They are trying to get you out of the fold ... to look at things objectively.

But even the concept of evangelizing is strange to me. Call me crazy, but you either believe or you don't believe. Someone can't convince you that you believe. Or if you could, would that really count? Would God really buy it if someone had to twist your arm? It even seems to be less about the person being saved and more about the person trying to save someone. This same friend brags about how she goes to church every day and all the things she does at the church as if there is some kind of cosmic score card that will get your more bonus points in heaven because you got all your Christianity merit badges on earth.

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." -- Aldous Huxley