Though my posting rate has been intermittent at best, I’m still keeping the blog alive! Unfortunately, that meant renewing my domain name/hosting plan. Since the thieves at GoDaddy wanted more to renew the domain than it costs to register a new one, I decided to go with an idea I’ve been kicking around for years.

I don’t know precisely how many of you have seen Avenue Q, but it definitely influenced the public’s awareness of the German word, “schadenfreude.” Schadenfreude means deriving happiness from the misfortune of others. Due to the cost and because the domain was available, I decided to let my cynic flag fly and move everything over to schade.nfreu.de. This will be my last post on this domain, though it’ll stay up for another month or so.

Naturally, with a new name comes a new look. This time, I took the default Wordpress theme and kicked the crap out of it to do what I wanted it to. Update your links and RSS feeds if you care, and join me on the same old adventure with a revised look and a brand-new name.

I first became acquainted with Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones at some point over the summer. For those who are not acquainted with the novel, it's the story of a 12-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in the '70s. It's told from her perspective while in heaven, looking at how her death impacts her family.

I probably first heard of the book when information about Peter Jackson's adaptation was first hitting the newsstands. I bought the book, read it, and was suitably impressed. I wouldn't consider it Important with a capitaI "I," but it's definitely well-written. A disturbing portrait of small-town life coupled with one of the worst situations (rape and murder of a young girl) one can possibly conceive of, it's one of the few serious novels that has entered the public consciousness.. But it's done with tact and care, not oversentimentalized and it's told (this is the important adverb) honestly. Inherent in any translation to a different medium is a slight adjustment to the story, but one would expect them to at least hew to the foundations or idea behind it.

Imagine my overwhelming joy when I read this quote from Jackson:

We have a daughter, Fran and I have a daughter who’s very similar to Susie’s age. We wanted Katie to be able to see this film. There’s a lot of positive aspects of this film and it’s not something that I think I wanted to shield our daughter from. So it was important for us to not go into an R rated territory at all.

All due respect, Mr. Jackson, but it's a story centered around a child being raped and murdered. If you want to make a movie your daughter can go see, maybe you should be a bit more discerning in what projects you take on. I'm not suggesting we should have a long, drawn-out rape scene, but it could have been handled better. The murder (it's only a murder in the movie) isn't even depicted. Instead, we see her elbow her attacker in the face and escape — but as she runs by another girl, she takes on the ethereal quality of a phantom. It's disappointing, if only because the book's depiction of her death is one of the more powerful scenes. Instead, it's almost like we're supposed to think she got lost. It's exactly what you'd expect if you were trying to lessen the impact of the story's brutality. 

When you take the most central element to a plot and remove it, the story immediately loses a number of things: coherency, poignancy, and of course, honesty.

The movie opens with some shlocky foreshadowing, and really doesn't get much better from there. I don't really blame Mark Wahlberg for being cast in this role, as Jackson screwed it up pretty badly in the script, but he's still more distracting than anything. I don't know if it's the problem of translating a long-form medium to a short one, or simply from relating a textually driven story to images, but if there's one word to describe this movie, it's "weak." There's no time given to develop anything; literally seconds after finding out about their child's death, the parents are in a bed, Wahlberg trying to comfort his wife, crying "We're going to get through this," as she wails in torment.

Let's not let the moment breathe or anything.

Most often, the problem feels like trying to make every scene a trailer scene: All image, no substance. Consider the "helpful grandma" montage, where Susan Sarandon sets the stove on fire, sweeps everything under the rug (quite literally), and dances in the suds caused by the overflowing washing machine. Sometimes, he doesn't even bother with the pathos. This may not be shocking to those of you who have lived the Peter Jackson theatrical experience before, but he may have confused whimsy and imagination with computer-generated special effects. See the "heaven" scene, a miasma of primary colors and three-dimensional landscapes and a rose blooming under a sheet of ice. 

The biggest problem with the film is it transforms a story about growth, grief and dealing with loss into a sort of metaphysical whodunnit, a murder mystery. This is not supposed to be CSI: Supernatural, but it's given the kid-gloves treatment like it's a made-for-TV Lifetime special. 

Anymore, when you want to find a real story being told (properly), you have to look for it on television. After wading through the scores of reality TV programs and the lifeless sitcoms supporting by aging stars (and CSI, natch), you can find the good stuff. Somehow, HBO, ESPN (30 for 30), the Beeb or even — at times — ABC (the first season of Pushing Daisies or Friday Night Lights) manage filmmaking far better than any movie studio.

It’s Dec. 31, which means I’m parked in front of my television starting my annual personal Twilight Zone marathon. Though I stole the idea from the SciFi channel, mine’s better because a) there aren’t any commercials and b) I have the full complement (the original series and the remake from the ‘80s).

But, as with whenever I watch movies, I need something else to do at the same time. Since my blog has lain dormant for more than a month, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to update with a summation of this year. However, seeing as how distracted I am (“ooh, pretty flickering black-and-white television!"), it’ll be largely composed of lists.

Thoughts that have occurred to me only since I've lived in Idaho:

• "When that nice young man driving by as I was walking down the road yelled, 'I will set you on fire!' at me, was that a threat or a come-on?"
• "Hmm … It's New Year's Eve, and my apartment faces both downtown and the outskirts. From which direction am I least likely to get hit with a stray celebratory bullet at midnight?"

My top ten entertainment products produced this year:

• Castle (TV show)
• The Book of Basketball, by Bill Simmons
• The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell
• In The Loop (movie)
• God Is A Twelve-Year-Old Boy With Asperger's, by Eugene Mirman (standup)
• Zombieland (movie)
• The Unusuals (TV show)
• Star Trek (movie)
• My Weakness Is Strong, by Patton Oswalt (standup)
• The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

Things I miss about Pullman:

• A bus system that takes you everywhere in town, for free
• Bars populated by people that don't look ready to kill me for being younger than 40 and/or giving them unwelcoming looks when they loudly proclaim their bigotry
• The town being small enough to walk everywhere you could want to go
• New Garden
• The people

Job titles of four positions I applied for but didn't get:

• Anything with the word "newspaper" (a few small-paper editors, sports writing, etc.)
• Social networking director
• Text processor (for a bible software company, but I withdrew from that one fearing damnation)
• Editor, I Can Haz Cheezburger group

Discomfiting realizations from 2009:

• Remember how much we were looking forward to 2009? Look how that turned out. Now consider how optimistic people are about 2010. And how often do the expectations of optimistic people come true? We're in for a rough year.
• As our body of knowledge amasses in ever greater qualities, our ability to use the truly innovative kind of imagination decreases at a similar rate. In earlier times, people were able to conceive of interplanetary travel with relative ease. Now that we know how difficult and expensive such trips would be, we can walk into a movie like Avatar secure in the knowledge that, if such things are even in the realm of human possibility, they are so far off in the future as to be fictional.
• Much along the same lines, as interdisciplinary studies become the norm, the propensity of revolutionary new ideas appearing will decrease drastically. Great breakthroughs are usually found by people who have no knowledge of dogmatic "facts" (generally accepted principles that may not be the case) in a particular field. Obviously, most people who claim such things (think perpetual energy) are cranks. But Einstein was able to formulate his theory of relativity because he didn't know the rules of the system. Once everyone is grounded in precisely the same knowledge, the chances of a brilliant outsider to see something no one else did are greatly diminished.

Things I'm sad are no longer with us:

• The Post-Intelligencer
• A friend from high school
• Jon Updike
• B. Dalton stores
• The Rocky Mountain News
• Ted Kennedy; and with him, civility in the Senate
• Walter Cronkite

Things that I feel nothing about one way or the other that are no longer with us:

• Brittany Murphy
• Psystar
• Michael Jackson
• Socks the cat
• Analog broadcast TV
• Bees
• Billy Mays

Things people thought might have disappeared I'm glad are still around:

• Ernie Harwell
• Web comics
• Used bookstores
• Sbarro
• Borders
• Miramax

Things I wish would disappear:

• Athletes in the news for things other than athletics (Michael Phelps, Tiger Woods, etc.)
• The phrase "raising Cain"
• People being surprised when politicians act like politicians
• Archie comics
• Printed phone books
• TV news

Technical skills I have learned while on the job that weren't strictly necesssary:

• How to use XSLT to style/translate XML files
• Working knowledge of ASP.NET
• Advanced Javascript magic
• Useful tricks for AfterEffects, Illustrator and Blender

Women I would gladly marry if only they would rescind the restraining orders:

• Tina Fey
• Sarah Vowell
• That one girl from high school
• Zooey Deschanel

The Six Most Recent Additions to My "To Read" List:

• Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger
• Gilligan's Wake, by Tom Carson
• Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by Barton Gellman
• The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought To You By Pop Culture, by Nathan Rabin
• Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, by Nevin Martell
• His Name is Still Mudd: The Case Against Doctor Samuel Mudd, by Edward Steers

Things I’ve learned from watching The Twilight Zone:

• Most alien planets/asteroids look like Death Valley
• Windows in the 1950s had the tensile strength of wax paper
• Time must have worked a helluva lot differently back then (direct quote: "Well, we can't see the movement of a clock's hands, but they move")
• In most alternate realities, Earth ceased to exist by the mid-80s.
• Military officers can be knocked out with a swift punch to the gut
• I'm 90% sure the father of Tim Matheson (Otter from Animal house) wrote for the show
• All scientists are required to possess a full complement of chemical-filled beakers. Even if you’re a physicist with a time machine, next to it should lay a full spread of fancy tubes and Bunsen burners on a table.
• Turns out it was earth all along

First of all, happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Though it pales in comparison to Slapsgiving (the best made-up holiday since Festivus), it's not so bad. It's a chance to gather your entire extended family together, have everyone complain, drink/eat too much, then sit around and watch football.

Oh, the "American" holiday bit wasn't referring to Thanksgiving. That only sort of applies.

No, I'm referring to Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. In an amazing bit of cognitive dissonance really only possible on American soil, we took hold of a "holiday" exclusively focused on shopping and somehow managed to over-commercialize it. And I'm not even referring to the deaths or gang shoot-outs at big-box stores that captured the nation's attention last year.

Sounds nigh impossible, doesn't it? Let's explore.

Black Friday originated as a term that marked the day when most stores turned profitable (thereby going from "in the red' to "in the black"). It wasn't about having ridiculous markdowns on tons of products; the day after Thanksgiving was just the perfect opportunity to get some shopping done. Sure, there were loss-leaders, but nothing like the across-the-board cuts to 15 or 16 different items, with clothing stores, grocery stores or adult toy stores (not confirmed, but I have to imagine there's one out there somewhere) getting in on the action.

I think the holiday reached critical mass around five years, when someone (I remember it being USA Today, but the Internet says the NYT. I remain skeptical) invented the term "Cyber Monday." Contrary to my definition when I first heard the phrase, it does not mean the tendency of teenagers to engage in cybersex on a specific day. It refers to the Monday following Black Friday, when a number of people go shopping online.

I want to be absolutely clear: Cyber Monday did not exist in 2005. Some Web site (shop.com) did a survey that found some people went shopping online, and they declared it a trend. But, since the survey was conducted online, there's every chance that the EXACT SAME number of people went shopping online on any given Monday, or any given day of the year. The damage was done, however, and reputable media outlets started reporting it like it was fact, and the pseudo-holiday ontologically established its bona fides in much the same way Jon Gosselin became famous: It is because it is.

Coincidentally or not, this was around the same time Black Friday lost all connection to the origin of its name, like Christmas and the Fourth of July before it. Rather than celebrate the original meaning, people require constant reminders as to what the name actually stands for, and even then they don't seem to care much. Instead, it's just become one frenzied rush of people trying to get "amazing deals" and spending their money.

I'm not really bemoaning the loss of Black Friday's innocence — after all, it started out as purely a commercial endeavor. I merely find it odd and somewhat unsettling that the holiday with the least veiled excuse for commercialism (even nudging out Valentine's Day) somehow managed to lose its translucent facade.

Perusing NPR today, I found a story about how much more likely male teen drivers are to get in crashes. I have no particular problem with the story itself; it passes the "common sense" test, has a few good anecdotes, talks to an expert or two and even presents some of the solutions. But then we get to the infographic.

From glancing at this, the average reader will assume that the number of people getting into crashes starts extremely high at the outset, decreases as we reach middle age then incurs a sharp increase once you hit about 43-47 years of age. If you look closely, however, there are two huge problems with it. The first, and in my opinion most grievous, offense is the use of a line graph when it should have been points. Because the ages are grouped, you CANNOT assume there is an even transition between the two. This is how the graph should look:

Because they chose to group the data by age, you cannot infer the relationship between the two. You only have plot points. If you want to use lines to better help people understand the progression, you have to do something like this:

This brings me to my second egregious oversight. Notice something odd about that last graph? How the middle looks all stretched out? That's because they grouped 30 YEARS together for the middle group, as opposed to the 3, 10 and 7 (using the average life expectancy) allotted for the other groups. Come on, NPR. You're better than this.