fling93 loves fishies

Review: Dorian Blues

Sheesh, it’s been over a month since Cinequest, and I still haven’t reviewed Slim Susie and Dorian Blues. I know the odds are against any of you ever being able to see either film, but I still feel compelled to get the word out in the hopes that they are able to get wider distribution, because both are truly excellent films (although in very different respects). I’ll cover Dorian Blues here, since it’s the more heartfelt and moving.

On the surface, it seems like a rather routine storyline. A boy discovers that he’s gay and has to decide whether to come out of the closet, given that his father is a real die-hard conservative and his mother largely ignores him. Sounds like nothing to write home about. What makes this film truly special is how true and honest it feels. Not to mention the hilarious dialogue, especially from the title character, Dorian Lagatos, played wonderfully by Michael McMillian.

We meet Dorian in his senior year in high school, and he’s still at that very awkward stage, compounded by his discovery. That, and the fact that his younger brother, Nicky, is the star quarterback at the high school while Dorian is just a social outcast with effeminate mannerisms — the kind of kid that football players pick on. Dorian’s shy vulnerability combined with his sardonic wit comes off very endearing, so you quickly empathize with him strongly as he begins to gain some confidence in who he is.

Went to a Giants Game

Well, I went to my first Giants game of the season last Saturday against the Marlins. No regrets on not renewing our season tix. Seems like all the reasons I named are still valid. But I certainly missed going to the games, to our seats. Even if they were pretty high up, they were still in the infield in section 310, with a good view of the game and real convenient access to the escalator and the restrooms. Plus it was cool to pretend like we owned the place, going around wearing the 2002 World Series lanyards with our pretty tickets with the player pictures on them (gawd, I can be such an elitist).

And we had worked out a great setup, with a neat stadium bag that fits over the seat to become a seat cushion. And in it, we’d bring munchies, drinks, a portable radio to listen to the broadcast (much improved with Dave Fleming instead of Joe Angel), and most importantly, my clipboard with my scorecards and printouts of the rosters. Yes, I love scoring the games. I’ll get into more details on scoring and scorecards in a later post. One of the nice benefits is that I get a much more complete picture of the game than you can see in a boxscore. And this game was a pretty exciting one.

Schmidt had a rocky start, giving up two runs in the first inning, one on a passed ball by Pierzynski, another on a RBI ground-rule double by stud third baseman (and so far the most productive member of my fantasy baseball team — which incidentally has improved a bit up to 5th place), Mike Lowell, which of course, I had mixed feelings about (I kinda hate how fantasy sports really screw with your allegiances). I thought it was going to be another long day, but Schmidt settled down after that, shutting the Marlins down for the next three innings.

Abu Ghraib

Well, by now you’ve either seen the photos or heard about the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib (if not, you really should pay more attention to current events). The photos have created a firestorm of anti-American anger in the Arab world and have sparked calls for Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

And it now seems pretty clear that this was not an isolated incident, as the hard-core partisans were trying to spin it (including Bush, who obviously has a lot at stake). Yes, spin, because how would you even know whether it was isolated if you weren’t there? And if you didn’t know, why would you make such a claim unless you were intentionally trying to lessen the political damage? Blatant partisan spin (one of these days I’ll write up a rant on how stupid partisanship is, but for now, check out Antwon’s classic diatribe).

For anyone living under a rock and thus still trying to cling to the notion that this is an isolated incident, please read Hersh’s piece in The New Yorker:

A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community.

Systemic and illegal abuse were the words Taguba actually used, not systematic.

Rewatched Matrix Reloaded

I finally rewatched a few key scenes of The Matrix Reloaded when it aired on HBO, and thus I am finally providing, as promised a looong time ago, an update to my analysis of The Matrix Revolutions.

Incidentally, that post has become, by far, the single most frequently viewed post of this blog — every single damn month.

So I guess someone out there must like it or something.

Atom Feed

Well, those who are interested probably already noticed this already, but I finally added an Atom feed (you can also get it from the sidebar). I don’t know anything about Atom, and I’m not sure if the feed works correctly or not (it doesn’t validate properly, but it looks okay in Bloglines). I just noticed it was showing up a lot in my 404 stats, so I grabbed Movable Type’s default Atom template.

Seemed to make a lot of people happy, so this announcement was probably unnecessary, but I figured maybe there were some interested people out there who weren’t keeping an active lookout for it. Anyway, if there are problems with the feed (or the other ones, which probably don’t validate either), drop me an e-mail (check my About Page for how to do that) or write a comment here.

Not that I’d know what to do about it, but at least I’d then be motivated to figure out what’s going on.

Update

Well, now that I’ve also finally upgraded to Movable Type 2.661, it turns out the feed now validates just fine. Apparently, it was using a few recently added Movable Type tags. So if it doesn’t work, it’s probably something on your end! :)

Cirque du Soleil & Matthew Cusick update

Many months ago, I mentioned that Cirque du Soleil fired Matthew Cusick for being HIV positive, which struck me as discriminatory:

This additional article on Cusick from the Gay.com / PlanetOut.com Network notes that “there are no documented cases of HIV transmission between two athletes during a sports event,” which isn’t too much of a surprise. Even in contact sports, open wounds coming into contact are extremely rare, except perhaps in boxing (and really, if they cut down on the ear-biting, that’d go a long way). And as the CDC points out, even if “an open wound came in contact with an HIV-positive athlete who is bleeding, the odds of transmission would be less than 0.3 percent,” and of course, that’s a big if anyway.

I’d figured most people understood all this by now after the whole Magic Johnson deal, but I guess I was wrong.

If you consider that the odds are already astronomical for two open wounds to come into contact, it should be clear that Cirque du Soleil’s fear of HIV transmission is unfounded and not a good reason to fire somebody.

I’ve been meaning to post an update on his case for some time. Via Scott, PlanetOut reported in January that the EEOC indeed ruled that this was illegal discrimination:

Strange Connections

Here’s two seemingly unrelated posts from some fellow SFBayBloggers that I just had to tie together. According to Rich Thomas:

Phil Collins is coming to San Jose on his First Final farewell Show. … I know that Phil Collins has to be someone’s favorite artist. I just cannot imagine who those people are.

Here’s a reason he shouldn’t be your favorite artist, especially if you live in the Bay Area. Per Mark:

This morning a mountain lion was spotted in a Palo Alto neighborhood. “If you see a mountain lion, don’t run, but instead raise your arms and open your jacket to look bigger.”

And, of course, according to Phil, No Jacket Required. So if you listened to Phil Collins, you’d be royally screwed, not having a jacket with you to scare away the mountain lions.

And so, the moral of the story is that I’m terminally weird.

iTunes visualizations & G-Force

One of the cool things about iTunes is the truly trippy visualizations, especially in full-screen mode (and the “Tripping Hard” effect, of course). Some music-snob purists might object to needing any visual accompaniment for music, but I personally find it easier to concentrate on the music when viewing a visualizer, since I’m otherwise easily distracted by other things (the visualization, on the other hand, reinforces the music). Plus, it’s just way cool.

You may or may not be aware that it responds to keyboard input. While the visualization is running, you can hit ‘H’ to bring up the Help menu, from which you have a surprising number of options. The important ones involve the various configurations, namely the waveforms, effects, and color schemes (the combination of which make up what you see). You can use keys to cycle through them manually or switch to a different random configuration. Plus, if you see a particularly interesting combination, you can map it to a key to call it up later. Several cheat-sheets for all these options are available here and a more updated one here.

But there’s more to the story than that.

Milestones

I’ve had a pretty good day.

My Fantasy Baseball team, which had been mired near the bottom of the pack most of the year, is now up to 2nd place! I’ll post a more detailed update later. Of course, I think the team has been overachieving the past few weeks, so I fully expect to settle back around 3rd-4th place soon. But it’s nice to be up here (of course, at least one day in first would be nice—my team had a pretty decent day, so who knows? Update 5/21/04: Well, I dropped to 3rd yesterday, but then today, the Cute Smiley Fishies are indeed in first place. w00t!).

I also checked my stats and was quite pleasantly surprised that my site visits hit an all-time high, almost triple my daily average for the past few weeks and more than twice my previous high. It turns out it was mostly due to referrals from MacSurfer to my post about the G-Force visualization plugin for iTunes. So I know it’ll just be a one-day spike, but I’ll take what I can get.

But I’ve also hit a couple of milestones that won’t be reversed (short of Calvin and Hobbes hopping through their time machine to prevent this blog from ever being created).

Robert's Snow

I received an e-mail from my sister, Alvina, and thought I would pass it on. As I mentioned earlier, she works in children’s book publishing and is close friends with Grace Lin, the writer and illustrator of Okie-Dokie, Artichokie!, Olvina Flies, Dim Sum for Everyone, and my personal favorite, The Ugly Vegetables. Her new book coming out is Robert’s Snow. Here’s Alvina with the rest:

Hi all,

Many of you already know about this online auction for cancer research that children’s book author and illustrator, Grace Lin, started in honor of her husband, Robert, who was diagnosed with Ewings Sarcoma a few years ago. For those of you who don’t know the whole story, please go to the Robert’s Snow for Cancer’s Cure website or see the below press release for more information.

The auction is picking up steam: over 150 illustrators have signed up to illustrate/decorate wooden snowflake ornaments, including Jules Fieffer, Chris Van Allsburg, Mary Grand Pre, Peter Sis, Robert Macauley, Ruth Sanderson, Marc Brown, Todd Parr, Chris Raschka, Robert Sabuda, and more! Below are some of the snowflakes that have come in so far (there are more on the website). The actual auction will run via eBay from November 1-December 12. For those of you who are children’s book illustrators (or have illustrator friends who may be interested), please go to the website to sign up—the deadline for snowflakes is August 1.

But my main objective is to create more awareness of the auction itself. If you have any media contacts who you think might be interested in picking up this story, please let me know or pass along this email. Also attached is the press release. If you have a website and are willing to link to www.robertssnow.com, that would be great, too! If you know of any galleries or bookstores that may want to host the actual snowflakes, carry postcards, and/or put up a poster, please let me know. We are also looking for more sponsors—a celebrity would be nice! Any and all help is welcome.

Thanks for your support!

Best,

Alvina

Here’s some sample images of the flakes so far (click on them to zoom in — be sure your browser allows pop-up windows):

You can see a few more at the website.

And here is the press release she mentioned:

Hi. My name's fling93. And I'm NOT a blogoholic. Honest!

Seems like everybody from Dan Drezner to Brayden King to Jonas Luster to my brother (who IM’ed me about it) is talking about the New York Times article on how blogging is highly addictive and is the leading cause of car accidents and lung cancer and baby killing.

So when I don’t update for several days in a row, that’s actually a good thing. It proves I’m not addicted, but just a social blogger. And just to prove it even further, I will not blog at all today!

Oh, wait a second.

Discouraging College Students from Voting

No, we didn’t do any traveling this Memorial Day weekend. But no, it’s not because I’m addicted to blogging, but because my wife, Erika, graduated from San Jose State University with a double major in Anthropology and Behavioral Sciences, plus a minor in Women’s Studies. I am so very proud of her! And a little jealous, since she got so much more out of her college experience than I did. Instead of diving into schoolwork (like I did) or just partying and cruising by, Erika got involved. And I mean involved! She has blossomed into an impressive leader, serving in a variety of student groups1.

She also served on student government while fighting passionately against the rampant corruption perpetrated by many Greek fraternities and sororities who leverage their powerful networks to land cushy high-paying jobs for themselves and their friends (apparently, a phenomenon that’s pretty common across the country). Arguably, not a far cry from what actually happens in our “real” elections.

Indeed, my wife, ever the activist, forwarded an e-mail to me revealing yet another example of the kind of corrupt politics from which the above Greeks probably learned their craft. The e-mail highlighted a Rolling Stone piece by Damien Cave, Mock the Vote, which details cases of many local officials discouraging students from voting in local and national elections. Sometimes they even use illegal tactics, like requiring students to vote where their parents live despite the fact that “[f]ederal and state courts have clearly established that students have the right to vote where they go to school, even if they live in a dorm.”