My documentary is going pretty well and right now I have the release slated for Easter!! I wanted to release this week but unfortunately I have encountered numerous problems. I swear I am working through it.
But I have realized, I might need 2 things to make it the best.
1. New computer that I might be getting for graduation with the NEW iMovie with BETTER features that I will need (like separation of audio and video) for true documentary style
2. A camcorder. (FAT CHANCE). I’m entering a contest to win one but until then, I am working with what I got.
I’ll keep you updated as it progresses!
It was a beautiful day in the 70s and sunny. It reminds me about how I need to do some spring cleaning. Especially when it comes to clothes. I don’t have a lot of variety but I do have a lot of clothes, simply because a lot of them don’t fit, after so many washings a lot of them come short and in general my winter palette is much more boring than I spring one 🙂
A picture of my closet for inspiration..
From Network (1976):
Howard Beale: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.
Howard Beale: [shouting] You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
[shouting]
Howard Beale: ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:
Howard Beale: [screaming at the top of his lungs] “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
I Drew This:
Maureen Dowd, not exactly the sharpest nail in the toolbox as it is, posits that Barack Obama takes himself too seriously:
“Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama …
At first blush, it would seem to be a positive for Obama that he is hard to mock. But on second thought, is it another sign that he’s trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying? Or that eight years of W. and Cheney have robbed Democratic voters of their sense of humor? …
[I]f Obama gets elected and there is nothing funny about him, it won’t be the economy that’s depressed. It will be the rest of us.
You heard it here first, folks. It is a requirement for a president to be silly in some way, otherwise he’s “stultifying” in a way that will “depress” comedy writers, and, oh, the rest of us.”
I’m getting a little tired of these oddball ideals that the media considers important for leaders of a nation. Awareness of the issues? The ability to delegate wisely? Keen judgment during crucial diplomatic and economic junctures? No, you gotta want to have a beer with him. You gotta be able to laugh at him. Haw! Haw!
This lackadaisical attitude can’t possibly resonate with a voter faced with a horrible economy and a spiralling out-of-control war. In 2000, it was easier to be complacent and assume the President was a goofy figurehead who had no influence on the greater power of law. We know differently now. I think more and more voters are willing to skip the beer and laughs in order to point to their broken lives screaming “Fix it!” In order to inspire the confidence of a world-weary populace, you pretty much have to throw away the clown makeup.
I was listening to Fiona Apple’s “Better Version of Me” and it got me thinking. What would be the better version of me? Who would she be, what would she be doing? Would she have a smaller nose, be on less medication, have a better voice, be less awkward? I’d say yes. Maybe, a “hell yes”. She would be smarter, harder working, more wise, caring, and active.
To be honest, with my jealousy being perhaps the worst part of me, if I met a better version of myself I would most likely resent her. In some ways my sister is a better version of me. I’m a bit more in shape, but she has the rest of the good genes, is much smarter and more likeable than I. In some ways I do resent it, but when I sit and think about it, we have our own talents. Me, for arguing, and a passion for social justice (they go hand in hand, RIGHT?), being adventurous and having a lot of passion. She, for her compassion and unending patience. At this point most of the childish resentment has grown into admiration.
Speaking of social justice, the letter I received from my pen pal on death row was so amazing. From the beginning he has been totally honest. He told me how much he has the need to feel, he told me about his childhood even, and I was so moved. I really look forward to what continues in our friendship and will most likely be a life-changing experience. It was interesting how he stated that music can depress him because it reminds him of what might have been. In a sense the Fiona Apple song did remind me of what I could have been and what I couldn’t be and what I have the potential to be. It can be a bit depressing. But at the same time, I think it something that takes a lot of thought and it is something that needs to be thought out, if only to aid my own mental health.
A quick and short thought.
I was watching Bigger and Blacker, by Chris Rock the other day. He said, “What is it that women want? EVERYTHING. They treat life like it is a big sale.” But somewhere, I either read or heard someone say, “All women want is to be appreciated.” I find the latter much more convincing. I think that on a broad scale women can “want” a lot of things, so I guess it depends on the usage of the word “want.” I do think that on the whole women have the main desire to be wanted and appreciated. It actually does correspond to something Chris Rock had said earlier: “All women need is food, water, and compliments.” It’s the same idea. Women need to know, or at least be reminded, that they matter. I think any relationship has to have that balance of mutual appreciation. Otherwise, one person is above the other, leaving the other person a sort of victim.
You know, I’ve been writing a lot lately in my journal, ever since my Social Justice class where we had to do a lot of writing. It’s interesting and therapeutic to just write about politics, or issues, or personal shit, or events. I am thinking of posting some entries here twice a week or something. I know I haven’t written in forever, and by god is this blog old as shit, but really, I think it would be nice to write in my own blog instead of others’ for a change. But, until I get the next entry, some blogs I frequent include idrewthis.org; pharyngula; project rungay (http://projectrungay.blogspot.com/) (to ease another obsession); and jill stanek (jillstanek.com). I also love the Official Stephen Colbert Love Association boards. So show them some love. Until then.
The Institute for Creation Research is a treasure trove of sloppy pseudoscience. I mentioned one “research” article that they put out that was nothing but a flurry of bible verses wrapped around an argument from incredulity; now a reader has pointed me to another article that tries very hard to ape the form of a real scientific paper, and fails horribly.
It’s titled “COMPLEX LIFE CYCLES IN HETEROPHYID TREMATODES: STRUCTURAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL DESIGN IN THE ASCOCOTYLE COMPLEX OF SPECIES”, by Mark Armitage. Oooh. Sounds so sciencey. And then you read further, and you see that it almost follows the correct form.
It has the difficult title. It has a list of keywords. It has an abstract. There’s an introduction: it contains a brief summary of the complex life history of these trematode parasites, which are small invertebrates that live in the internal organs of fish, and it promises something.
In this paper, specific, complex life cycles and morphological structures of Ascocotyle leighi, A. pachycystis and A. diminuta, collected from fish hearts in Mississippi, Texas and California are evaluated in the light of the creation/evolution paradigms.
Then the paper has a materials and methods section, just like the big boys — the author extracted parasites from fish and used light and scanning electron microscopy to look at them. Finally, there’s a discussion and conclusion.
Notice anything missing? Right, no results. That’s a metaphor for the whole creationist movement right there. There are some photos imbedded in the methods section, but it’s like a random set of random photos of random parasites this guy found in his fish; there’s nothing systematic about it, and the photos aren’t even very good — the SEMs are way too contrasty.
Since he has no data, he has nothing to evaluate, and his discussion is a rehash of review papers he has read that highlight the complexity of the trematode life cycle (and it’s true, it is complex with a series of hosts), and that every once in a while raise a pointed question, such as, “What allows this cercaria to resist digestion within the fish stomach…?”, which I would have thought would be reasonable kinds of questions for a grad student to actually, you know, study. If this had been my grad student, anyway, I would have told him to knock off the pointless microphotography and focus on one of these questions and try to answer something.
But no. He’s not interested in answering questions, since to the creationist mind the existence of questions calls science into doubt, so it’s sufficient to throw out a flurry of unsolved problems … never mind that a primary research paper should have the task of addressing some problem. Even worse, a big chunk of the discussion is a paean to Michael Behe, who “shows the utter foolishness of expecting that a gradualistic, Darwinian mechanism could have produced such elegant systems, by chance, using the trial and error method”. Behe has shown no such thing. “Irreducibility” is not a barrier to addition of steps to a pathway, and Armitage has done no experiments to test “irreducibility” in his work — the concept is a non sequitur, and it’s introduction is irrelevant to this paper.
The work boils down to a summary of complex life cycles in some trematodes, taken from other people’s work, and a few tourist’s snapshots of trematodes that contribute nothing to the literature. It perpetuates the fundamental error of a common creationist argument against evolution: that something is complex could not have evolved. This is utterly false. Evolution is an undirected process that accumulates variation which is pared into shape by selection; it is eminently capable of generating more noise than signal and creating organisms that are absurdly complex. Complexity not only fails to be a strike against evolution, it’s an expected outcome of evolution.
This paper is completely unpublishable by any legitimate science journal. I doubt that it could get past an editor, who typically screen out the obvious crackpottery, and no reviewer would be fooled by it; it’s experiment-free and even its few observations are incoherent and pointless. Its conclusion reveals that the author doesn’t even understand the theory he claims to be criticizing. This is, apparently, why the creationists at ICR and Answers in Genesis are establishing their own venues for “research” publications: their standards are so appallingly low and the work they do is so pathetic that they need these fake journals to get their work published.
-PZ Myers
prettyinpink42 