Month: March 2005

Rabbit Proof Fence

Ralph has this great movie review that I want you to read, so I have copied it all. If you like the review go visit Ralph and let him know (and read the comment from Colorado Luis).

When a really great movie comes along, one that really grabs you, you think: “With all the dough the big shots in Hollywood spend, why can’t they make a movie like that.” Such is the case with Rabbit Proof Fence.

In what is very arguably the best directing job I’ve ever seen, Phillip Noyce took three young amateur actors and made a film that is starkly believable.

In 1931, three aboriginal children were taken from their home and transported to a boarding school to further the Eugenic policies of the Australian government. They aren’t in the school long when the oldest, Molly, takes her sister and her cousin and says, simply, “C’mon, we’re leaving.” So begins one of the most incredible (yet true) chase scenes on the big screen.

The young actors are incredibly good, and Noyce deserves the highest praise for getting this work out of them. The strength and determination the young women display is incredible. Kenneth Branaugh is actually so good I didn’t realize it was him until the movie was almost over.

The screenplay and cinematography are first rate and quite frankly this is a film everyone should see. I was left with two questions: 1972? Did it really take until 1972 before the Australian government abandoned this hideous policy? and Why can’t Hollywood make a movie about America’s experience with boarding schools?

Mixed message

There’s this:

Undocumented immigrants would be eligible to qualify for the lottery scholarship and all other state grant and financial aid programs for education, under a bill passed Tuesday in the Senate.
Sen. Cynthia Nava, D-Las Cruces, said removing the current prohibitions against undocumented immigrants is simply a matter of fairness.

“Young people affected by this bill did not have a say in their decision to come to New Mexico, and this gives them the same opportunity as their classmates,” she said.

To qualify, a student must have graduated from a New Mexico high school or received their GED in the state.

Farmington Daily Times

And then there’s this:

Max says, if it becomes law, he will trade in his Utah driver license for a state-issued “driving privilege card” because he wants to follow the rules here – a place his family calls home.

Max, an illegal immigrant, is one of tens of thousands who will be stripped of their driver licenses and issued a different-looking card starting July 1, if Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. signs Senate Bill 227, which passed the Legislature on Tuesday. The driving card, which will be issued to people who do not have a Social Security number, will read: “For driving privileges only – not for identification.”

Salt Lake Tribune

Floral fireworks

A report from the Los Angeles Times on the good news coming out of the record wet winter in California:

The process is easy: just add water and the deserts of Southern California burst into color. During the El Niño year of 1998, for instance, a series of rainstorms transformed a 40-mile stretch of Interstate 40 between Barstow and Needles into a carpet of gold, and while this year’s flowers can still be jeopardized by heavy rains or a sudden heat wave, 2005 promises to be a phenomenal year. Already wildflower enthusiasts are making plans to follow the bloom from the lower elevations — Anza-Borrego, Joshua Tree and portions of Death Valley — in March to the higher elevations — the Mojave Preserve — in April and May.

The article continues to provide details — and many photos.

Big brother

From The New York Times:

Paris Hilton is not alone.

According to a Los Angeles security consulting firm that went skulking outside the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood on Sunday, as many as 100 people who walked the red carpet were carrying cellphones vulnerable to the kind of privacy invasion that recently gained Ms. Hilton a new round of unwanted notoriety.

Three employees of the company, Flexilis, founded two years ago by four University of Southern California students, positioned themselves in the crowd of more than 1,000 people watching celebrities arrive at the Kodak Theater. John Hering, one of the company’s founders, wore a backpack in which he had placed a laptop computer with scanning software and a powerful antenna.

The Flexilis researchers said they were able to detect that 50 to 100 of the attendees had smart cellphones whose contents – like those of Ms. Hilton’s T-Mobile phone – could be electronically siphoned from their service providers’ central computers. The contents of Ms. Hilton’s phone, including other celebrities’ phone numbers, ended up on the Internet.

In a related privacy matter, the State Department is going ahead with passports that will include electronic data about the individual. These passports reportedly can be tapped by nearby scanners.

Some last comments on the Oscar show

These observations from Dave Pell:

Bummer of the Night
Of course it was painful to see Scorcese go home empty-handed yet again. But look at it the other way. What if he had failed to win for masterpieces like Goodfellas and Raging Bull but won for an afterschool special like The Aviator?

Blowhard of the Night
The idiotic moment of the night belonged to Sean Penn who showed up looking like he had just been booted out of a Hollywood version of an Irish bar and defended Jude Law who Chris Rock has poked fun of in the opening monologue. Law needed no defending. Penn was immediately rushed to the Betty Ford wing for actors who take themselves way too seriously (Hollywood’s most overbooked destination).

Best Oscar Feature of the Night
No Billy Crystal song and hence no listening to people who think he’s just so creative and talented and hence no deep and painful feelings of alienation for those who have at least half a brain.

Effort? Effort?
We don’t have to make any stinkin’ effort

Cheeky Prof illustrates why Bill Gates may be wrong:

I had a student give me attitude earlier because (ready for this?) he had to spend 2 hours doing a lit search for his project and still didn’t find enough usable sources. When I told him that, yes, doing a lit search can take time and I go through the same thing he responded, “Well, I have other classes, I can’t be spending all my time on this one.” At that point I reminded him how at the beginning of the semester I had explained that students should expect to spend a few hours per week doing work outside of the class, to which he replied contemptuously, “That’s ridiculous.”

I may have to kill him.

Life in the fast lane
Will surely make you lose your mind

Colorado Luis is unhappy about a change in state law:

It’s weird to be driving out on the interstate in rural Colorado and seeing the flashing highway signs (the ones that otherwise warn of icy roads or Amber alerts) saying “Keep Right Except To Pass.” Now, that was my driving habit to begin with, but why did the Colorado legislature feel like it was important to actually make that a law last year instead keeping it as just a good guideline?

If anything, I think making that the law makes things a bit more dangerous, because it leads to more cars in the right lane when people are coming onto the freeway — and Coloradans are notoriously bad at merging. But putting that aside, I can’t see what the benefit is to the rule except for making it easier for people who want to speed.

Works for me.

Of course, I’m probably the only driver who was taught how to merge at gunpoint.

Thirty-five years ago I was driving my VW bug in the right lane of a Detroit freeway. When a car coming down an entrance ramp attempted to merge in front of me, I sped up so that he had to slow down. He entered the freeway behind me, then came along side in the middle lane and honked. I gave him a friendly gesture (it wasn’t the peace sign). He honked again. This time when I looked over he was waving a revolver pointed at me (holding it in front of his passenger). He gestured to pull over.

This didn’t seem like a good idea, but the VW couldn’t out run his Oldsmobile. I attempted to lose him in congestion at the next exit, but he caught up to me when I got to a stop light.

He came up to my car, identified himself as an off-duty Detroit police officer (he was partially in uniform), and — at gun point — and despite the fact that he himself was profane — made me apologize to his woman passenger (his wife I was told) for my obscene gesture. He seemed as rattled from anger as I was from fear — his badge was upside-down when he showed it to me — but he did have his service revolver pointed in the right direction and I did what he said.

In the process he educated me to the difference between “merge” (give and take) and “yield” (right-of-way).

Rather fight than switch

Unless you’re trying to fill out your bullpen for a post-season run, the evolutionary usefulness of left-handedness may seem a little puzzling. But it turns out that southpaws may remain in the gene pool because they’re good to have around in a fight. A study by two French academics tracked the prevalence of left-handedness across a variety of traditional societies, and found that the more violent ones tended to have a higher percentage of lefties. Among the Dioula people of Burkina Faso, for instance, the homicide rate is just 0.013 murders per thousand inhabitants per year, and left-handers make up only 3.4 percent of the population. In contrast, the more warlike Yanomamo of the Venezuelan rain forest have a homicide rate of four per thousand per year, and southpaws compose roughly 23 percent of their population. What’s advantageous in baseball, it turns out, may also be advantageous in a jungle knife fight.

The Atlantic Online: Primary Sources (April 2005)

Love thy neighbor (unless he’s different)

Jesus taught Christians to “love thy neighbor.” According to a recent survey by researchers at Cornell University, however, the more religious the American, the less likely he is to love (or at least trust) his Muslim neighbors. For instance, 42 percent of the highly religious (versus only 15 percent of citizens who are “not very religious”) believe that American Muslims should have to register their whereabouts with the government; 34 percent (versus 13 percent) say that U.S. mosques should be monitored; and 40 percent (versus 19 percent) look favorably on government infiltration of Islamic civic and volunteer organizations. The highly religious are also more distrustful the more attention they pay to TV news.

The Atlantic Online: Primary Sources (April 2005)

Harry Belafonte …

is 78 today. Here is what Bob Dylan wrote about Belafonte in Chronicles:

Harry [Belafonte] was the best balladeer in the land and everybody knew it. He was a fantastic artist, sang about lovers and slaves—chain gang workers, saints and sinners and children. His repertoire was full of old folk songs like “Jerry the Mule,” “Tol’ My Captain,” “Darlin’ Cora,” “John Henry,” “Sinner’s Prayer” and also a lot of Caribbean folk songs all arranged in a way that appealed to a wide audience, much wider than The Kingston Trio. Harry had learned songs directly from Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. Belafonte recorded for RCA and one of his records, Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean, had even sold a million copies. He was a movie star, too, but not like Elvis. Harry was an authentic tough guy, not unlike Brando or Rod Steiger. He was dramatic and intense on the screen, had a boyish smile and a hard-core hostility. In the movie Odds Against Tomorrow, you forget he’s an actor, you forget he’s Harry Belafonte. His presence and magnitude was so wide. Harry was like Valentino. As a performer, he broke all attendance records. He could play to a packed house at Carnegie Hall and then the next day he might appear at a garment center union rally. To Harry, it didn’t make any difference. People were people. He had ideals and made you feel you’re a part of the human race. There never was a performer who crossed so many lines as Harry. He appealed to everybody, whether they were steelworkers or symphony patrons or bobby-soxers, even children—everybody. He had that rare ability. Somewhere he had said that he didn’t like to go on television, because he didn’t think his music could be represented well on a small screen, and he was probably right. Everything about him was gigantic. The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry—who could have kicked the shit out of all of them—couldn’t be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight. He even said he hated pop songs, thought they were junk. I could identify with Harry in all kinds of ways. Sometime in the past, he had been barred from the door of the world famous nightclub the Copacabana because of his color, and then later he’d be headlining the joint. You’ve got to wonder how that would make somebody feel emotionally. Astoundingly and as unbelievable as it might have seemed, I’d be making my professional recording debut with Harry, playing harmonica on one of his albums called Midnight Special. Strangely enough, this was the only one memorable recording date that would stand out in my mind for years to come. Even my own sessions would become lost in abstractions. With Belafonte I felt like I’d become anointed in some kind of way. … Harry was that rare type of character that radiates greatness, and you hope that some of it rubs off on you. The man commands respect. You know he never took the easy path, though he could have.

Witch way did they go?

On March 1, 1692, Salem, Massachusetts authorities charged Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and a slave woman, Tituba, with practicing witchcraft. The arrests inaugurated the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Over the following months, more than 150 men and women in and around Salem were jailed on sorcery charges. Nineteen people eventually hanged on Gallows Hill and an additional victim was pressed to death.

Cousins Abigail Williams and Betty Parris began entering trance-like states and suffering from convulsive seizures in January. By late February, prayer, fasting, and medical treatment had failed to relieve the girls’ symptoms and quiet the blasphemous shouting that accompanied their fits. Pressured to explain, they accused three local women of sorcery.

A recent epidemic of small pox, heightened threats of Indian attack, and small town rivalries, primed the people of the Salem area for the mass hysteria that characterized the witch trials. Although social status and gender offered little protection from accusations, historians note that single women particularly were vulnerable to charges of practicing witchcraft. Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba all lacked male protectors.

Acting on the recommendation of the clergy, civil authorities created a special court to try accused witches. As the number of imprisoned people approached 150, however, public opinion shifted against the proceedings. On October 29, 1692, Massachusetts Governor William Phips dissolved the special court. When the remaining witchcraft cases were heard in May 1693, the Superior Court failed to convict anyone.

In the 1950s, playwright Arthur Miller explored the Salem witchcraft trials in The Crucible. Writing during a period when concern about “subversive activities” ran high, Miller used his play to protest the red scares of the postwar era. Once again, Miller implied, innocent people were sacrificed to public hysteria. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, Miller refused to supply names of people he met years before at an alleged Communist writers meeting. The resulting contempt conviction was overturned on appeal.

Library of Congress

First iPod

The president has owned the personal accessory of the moment for some time, said Johndroe. He’s loaded his iPod with his favorite country singers: George Jones, Kenny Chesney and Alan Jackson. He also listens to Aaron Neville, Creedence and Van Morrison.

AP via The New Mexican

Hey Shaq, try this!

[John] Wooden, as noted here recently, once made 134 consecutive free throws in competition in a pro league. He said he shot them underhanded, as was common in those days. But, he said, his form was different from that used years later by Rick Barry. Wooden said he put his left foot ahead of his right and didn’t dip as much as Barry.

Repeating the exact motion every time was the key, he said, recalling that he could close his eyes and still make his free throws.

Morning Briefing

Our high schools are obsolete

Bill Gates in the Los Angeles Times on “What’s Wrong With American High Schools” —

Our high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they are broken, flawed and underfunded — although I can’t argue with any of those descriptions.

What I mean is that they were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Today, even when they work exactly as designed, our high schools cannot teach our kids what they need to know.

Until we design high schools to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting — even ruining — the lives of millions of Americans every year. Frankly, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.

Key point: “We need a new design that realizes that all students can do rigorous work.”

The whole essay is worth your time.

What nonsense

Caryn James in The New York Times:

And with “Million Dollar Baby” winning three of the four biggest prizes – best picture, Clint Eastwood’s for director and Ms. Swank’s for actress – the awards themselves hint at how happy Oscar voters are to linger in the past. The film may be about a woman boxer, but it is shaped by a pure retro sensibility. It’s a throwback not only to 30’s-era boxing movies but also to other Oscar-winning films about underdogs, like “Rocky.”

“Million Dollar Baby” is, essentially, “Rocky” with a tragic ending, the kind of familiar movie it is easy for the academy to embrace. … But in the future the enthusiasm for such an unoriginal film may seem as inflated as the Oscar for “Rocky” does now.

The most original film to gather a handful of nominations this year, “Sideways,” went the way of another fine, innovative movie, “Lost in Translation,” which in 2003 was also nominated for best director and best picture and, like “Sideways,” won only for its screenplay. The fate of “Sideways,” like the choice of Mr. Rock as host, says that the academy will let in a breath of fresh air, but quickly close the window before an actual breeze comes in.

Sideways is fresh air?! Sideways is original? How was it original?

This kind of talk worries me

Sometimes you realize you’re worried but you can’t remember what you’re worried about. You know there’s something out there, a thing that was worry-worthy. You ransack your memory. Gone. It has become a stray worry. It’s a worry on the loose, no doubt rambling all over the neighborhood, causing trouble. It may be hours, days or even months before it returns. This REALLY worries you. Because if you want to keep your sanity you need to keep your worries front and center, where you can watch their every diabolical move.

Joel Achenbach

Lee …

circumnavigator of the globe and Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker, was born in Flint, Michigan, on this date in 1957. He hiked the PCT from Mexico to Canada in 2002, amazingly enough providing a journal along the way (on the tiniest of keyboards). Here’s an excerpt from NewMexiKen’s younger brother:

For the first time since I began this Odyssey I fear my life-long dream to do a single season thruhike of the Pacific Crest Trail could be in serious jeopardy.

Four consecutive days of 110 degrees didn’t stop me.

Streams deep and icy enough to make all men equal didn’t stop me.

High mountain passes clogged with ice and snow didn’t stop me.

Rattlesnakes, cougars, bears, howling packs of coyotes, ticks, wasps, bees, hornets, gnats, biting flies, and mosquitoes did not deter me.

Raging fires with smoke thick enough to give me headaches and a sore throat have not chased me off the trail.

God help me even a broken heart didn’t stop me.

So what insidious thing could hold me back on the threshold of my dream? The huckleberry!

“But how,” you ask? By slowing my progress to a veritable standstill! One can walk by only by so many bushes teeming with these succulent purple orbs of orgiastic delight without stopping! My God, I’m not made of stone!

So my pace seems to be half of what it was. Instead of the mighty 30 mile days I had looked forward to in Oregon I will be very lucky to eke out a meager 15 or less. There just isn’t enough time to reach British Columbia before winter sets in. I fear the only hope to salvage my trek may be to enlist the aid of a top-notch hypnotist to attempt to persuade my subconscious that I really don’t like wild huckleberries, at least until I get to Manning Park. Drastic measures indeed, but what else can I do?

Statehood

Ohio became the 17th state on this date in 1803.

Nebraska became the 37th state on this date in 1867.