The Pseudoreality of Late-Night TV

When I went to bed late last night (ok, early this morning), the death count in south Asia was estimated at 16,000. When I woke up this morning (ok, this afternoon), the paper said 20,000. Then CNN told me that, no, it's closer to 33,000. Later, the local news said 44,000. And at 11:15 pm, the BBC said it was an estimated 60,000 dead in at least nine countries around the Indian Ocean.

ABC News has had the best coverage so far, including some downright fucking chilling first-hand accounts. But the BBC has had the most devastating video, including a couple carrying their dead, mud-covered infant twins aimlessly through the streets.

You know all this, of course, what I'm getting at is how disturbing it is to watch Late Night and the Late Late Show blithely forge ahead, oblivious. Now, I can understand carrying on with the comedy when a tragedy happens, because of laughter being the best medicine and all that shit. But after Sept. 11, 2001, both these shows set aside a respectful amount of time to talk about it. And I remember staying up late, watching Late Night with David Letterman in 1989, when Dan Rather broke in to tell me that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Then it went back to Dave and he was pretending to be a monkey, and I thought, "This just seems wrong." In 2001, 3000 people were missing in Manhatten, and American television just stopped. As I type this, days after the quake and tsunamis killed at least 60,000 people in Asia, Conan O'Brien is rubbing a live chinchilla on his face.

Draw your own conclusions.

Sleet and Opera 7.54u1 Beta

Memphis has become a frozen, unnavigable mess, and we had no warning whatsoever. "You might see some isolated freezing rain and snow today," the weathermen cheerily told us. I guess what they meant was, "It's going to sleet for six hours across the entire tri-state area, then the temperature will stay below the freezing point for the next three days, making it impossible to go anywhere or do anything." Fortunately, our crack Municipal Adverse Weather Patrol Squad, or MAWPS, a name which I just made up, sprang into immediate action by de-icing the interstates. Not the on or off-ramps or any other roads. Just the interstate. Whatever. It got me out of any sort of Christmas get-together, so I say, Go MAWPS.

I downloaded Opera 7.54u1 the other day. I actually like it quite a lot. Not enough to pay nearly forty bucks to get rid of the ad banner, but it's still very good, much better than the last version I tried years ago, and, like Firefox, it easily outclasses Internet Explorer in nearly every way. I particularly enjoyed noting that it's substantially faster as an application than IE, even though IE is half-integrated into Windows to begin with. Of course this means I now have four web browsers and four email clients installed. I'll probably go ahead and drop the Mozilla suite, as it's the least useful. I just can't seem to come up with an excuse to use it.

Which brings me to another thing that's bothering me. I still can't resolve any non-PeoplePC SMTP mail server using any email client. You only get one email account with PPC, which I can understand at 11 bucks a month, but this forces you to sign up for additional POP3 mail services unless you want to go with webmail. And I don't. I fucking hate webmail, because all webmail services suck. I want to use Thunderbird, or christ, even Outlook Express, anything. But when I try to send a message, any client I try will invariably time out trying to reach the outgoing server. I've tried every conceivable configuration. I've tried numerous support databases. I can ping any SMTP server I want, getting instant, regular returns. I just can't send mail to 'em. The only thing left to do is to call PPC support, and I know, as a former ISP tech support rep, that they'll just tell me it's not their resposibility. It's just so fucking maddening. I've even tried a POP3 service based in Ireland, for christ's sake.

The hell with it. I'm going to go watch the DVD commentary on The Royal Tenenbaums.

Mozilla Application Suite 1.7.5

Mozilla 1.7.5 was released yesterday, so I downloaded it. I don't know why. I really have no use for it. Its browser is based on a build of Gecko so similar to Firefox 1.0, which I have, as to be more or less indistinguishable, aside from some aspects of the interface. The mail client's nice and all, but I'm going to install Thunderbird 1.0 this weekend, so I won't need that either. I haven't looked at Composer since Netscape 6, however, so maybe I'll like that. In any case, I might as well keep it, because why the hell not.

I'm reading Mostly Harmless and The Salmon of Doubt, by Douglas Adams, as well as Sean Astin's odd little narrative, There and Back Again, an Actor's Tale. I also rented Minority Report, Snatch, and From Hell. And I managed to find a place in Frayser, in the shitty, backwards heart of Frayser, in fact, that gets The Memphis Flyer. Apparently, I'm just trying to keep myself as occupied as I possibly can so I can go on pretending that there's no such thing as Christmas. Seems to be working.

Blog Post 27

I really didn't want to blog this shit, but it's life, and karma, and there's no denying it. Reality exists, and I should share it.

Shredder the Incredible Megadog has met his match, and is no more. Every superhero has a tragic end, and for Shredder, a 14-year-old, 110-pound doberman, it was one winter night too many. Shredder had to be euthanized. Three days ago, my mother and I agreed that it was in the best interests of Shred himself. He's been suffering through inoperable hip problems and the general issues a dog gets when he's lived through three generations of owners. The poor guy could hardly walk anymore, but he was game to try, and after carrying him into the house the morning we made the decision, and after carrying him to the car, I decided to help him walk from the Explorer into the veterinary clinic, through the waiting room, to the examination room. He'd been a watch-dog in Frayser his whole life, and he deserved to walk to his death, humane as it may be, under his own power. Shredder was nervous but calm, as he dropped to the floor under the steel exam table, exhausted, his head on my lap. I sat with him, on the hard floor, waiting for my mom to fill out the paperwork in the lobby. He was only half-interested in the people walking to and fro around him, mostly focused on me. I think he knew that this was it. He was old, older than a dog his size should ever be, and his breathing was steady. He looked at me like he always did, eager to please, but muted. You did your job, and I know it, boy. After a while, though, after my mom joined us, he did get a little restless. We had a while to wait still, and Shredder just wanted to make himself useful. So he tried to stand up a few times, and at first we let him have a go at it, but he just couldn't do it. Eventually the vet came in with his assistant, and Shred allowed himself to be lifted by three of us onto the exam table, looked passively, almost apologetically, at my mom and me, and passed quietly away as the vet injected him with whatever it is vets use to humanely silence wonderful pets forever.

It had been arranged that the clinic would do with Shredder whatever it is that state regulations say should be done with expired dogs. Still, it felt somehow wrong to have left Shredder there, still and silent on a steel table, while we climbed into a much emptier Explorer, backed out of the lot, pulled into traffic, and drove home. But that's how it works. Shred was an incredible dog, a terrifying but lovable dog, and nobody but my mom and myself will remember him as being anything but that.

The Greatest Movie in the World

...is not Crossroads. But Crossroads is damned close. It has everything: A cast full of newcomers who couldn't get through a junior high talent show without giggling about the chemistry teacher's bow tie; a plot that a coked-up Paris Hilton would find "endearing;" a soundtrack so incompatible it seems like a sick joke; a plot aimed at pre-teens that involves rape, child abuse, abandonment, and abortion; and best of all, a wonderfully miscast, confused-looking Britney Spears as a geeky, introverted valedictorian. Crossroads could possibly be the basis for the best Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode ever made. As it is, it's easily worth the ten bucks you can probably get it for at Target. I can't WAIT to hear the DVD commentary.

In serious, non-ironic cinematic news, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best film I've seen all year. Really. Jim Carrey finally nailed a dramatic role head-on, after near-misses in The Majestic, which was good but just too boring, and The Truman Show, which was aimless and condescending. Eternal Sunshine has everything. There's just no categorizing this movie. It seems like a drama, then a dramatic comedy, then a romance, then an abstract indie. Then it turns out to be all at once, and that's something you just don't find in American cinema. I checked out my copy of the DVD from the Raleigh branch of the Memphis Library, and that is exactly where this film belongs: in a library, where anyone with a face and a driver's license can find out what filmmaking is supposed to be about.

JuCo My Ass

Lionel Hollins is many things, but an NBA head coach he is not. Sure he's in the Junior College Basketball Hall of Fame, but so the fuck what? After repeatedly watching him get blatantly out-coached, it was interesting watching Mike Fratello tell his team exactly how ball games are won tonight as the Griz spanked the one-trick pony Sixers. I was right about Fratello being the perfect fit for this team. Of course, it helped that Pau Gasol had a monter game, with 34, 15, and 3 blocks. The Sixers had absolutely no answer for him. I was waiting for him to turn to one of the sideline cameras after facing one of Philly's hapless forwards to scream, "I claim this land in the name of Spain!"

In non-living-vicariously-through-others news, I spent twenty minutes late, late last night chasing Shredder the Ageless Doberman around Frayser in 40-degree weather without a jacket after he forced his way out of the back yard. The only thing shittier than trying to catch a huge dog who doesn't want to get caught is catching up with him when he's sniffing around a stray chow mix who doesn't want you to live. So that was fun.

Anyway. The audio commentary on the Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines DVD really sucks. There are a few different commentary tracks, but the actors one, which is the only one anyone wants to hear, is terrible. Everyone was recorded separately, except Claire Danes and director Jonathan Mostow, and it's clear immediately that they are the only ones actually watching the film. Arnold, Kristanna Loken (the chick who plays the terminatrix), and the new, non-Eddie Furlong John Conner guy are clearly giving interviews, with excerpts pasted into the commentary. This is especially bad with Gov. Schwarzenegger, who rambles on and on in endless run-on sentences like some monstrous Faulkner clone with a bad accent about how important it was for the terminator to get dragged through a building by a crane. But the movie itself is surprisingly good. Much like The Matrix Reloaded, the writers have gone out of their way to bring the most stupefyingly unrealistic action sequences to the screen, and they pulled it off somehow.

To make this deluxe-edition update complete, I'll mention that I spent a couple hours yesterday customizing Firefox. I've got this browser doing things Internet Explorer can't even dream of. I can't stress this enough, people: Firefox, if not Mozilla as a whole, is probably the single most usable and effective internet application ever. And it's open source. Maybe that says something about the state of the mainstream, stock-exchange-listed computer industry.

A Festivus for the Rest of Us

I'm already sick of Christmas. I've done Christmas. It should end when you're nine, like Easter. Sure, when I was a kid I got a lot of cool Star Wars shit when it was brand new, but I immediately took it out of the packaging so I could play with it (like every kid), so it's worthless now.

Anyway. I sat through a couple movies this weekend, and I might as well make you people sit through my reactions. First, Buffalo '66. Written, starring, and directed by Vincent Gallo, who is seriously in love with himself. There's no plot at all, just the outline of a story about a guy getting out of jail and immediately grabbing some random hot girl, played by Christina Ricci, and dragging her to his abusive, neglectful parents' house to tell them how successful he is (they've been too engrossed in Buffalo Bills football to notice he was arrested). I had to fight with myself to sit through the whole thing, and I lost. I watched it all. Gallo builds and builds this film to either one sort of climax or the other and ends up with neither. He gives you both the happy ending and the sad ending, then tells you which one was real. A depressingly Hollywood anticlimax to what could have been a nice indie setpiece flick.

The other film I saw was Lost in Translation, which got enough hype from the Academy Awards that I don't have to say anything about it, other than it was much better than I thought it would be. Again, there's no real plot to speak of, and it's extremely slow, but it's never, ever boring. The cinematography is excellent and the pacing works. The acting is believable, and the dialogue is instinctive and genuine. What's more, the ending is somehow satisfying and inconclusive, an almost impossible feat. The only disappointment came when the credits came up and I remembered that Sophia Coppola wrote and directed it. Somehow you just want privileged kids to fail, you know?