Et tu, MA?

Well, it now looks like Charles is the only person in America who thinks healthcare reform will pass. This is especially depressing, because all the House has to do is swallow its pride and vote for the Senate bill word-for-word and Scotty-Mc-whats-his-f#@% won't be able to do a thing about it. Apparently, that's not going to happen, either because liberal Democrats think the Senate bill is too weak or because conservative Democrats want summary executions for anyone who tries to have an abortion (my brother thinks that the 2050 health care bill should include a provision banning the expenditure of Federal subsidy dollars on some other entirely legal procedure; maybe appendectomies; or operations that involve the left kidney, but not the right kidney). I guess the moral of this story is that people running for office do it, not because they want to help any of us, but because they think it would be fun to be a Representative/Senator/President whatever. Actually helping people would jeopardize their chances of reelection (this wouldn't be the case if health care involved more explosions and predator drones; something else to work on for 2050), ergo...

The funny thing is, this is an even stronger argument for voting than if the people you were voting for actually cared about your problems.

I volunteered for the Obama campaign. I was really bad at it. I could not for the life of me understand why anyone would be on the fence. On one side of the ballot, you had cranky-Mc-old-guy who wanted to be President (as far as I can tell) because he thought it was his turn, and his side-kick, who seemed (seems?) at first, second, and third glances to be barely literate. Given that the founding fathers (not anticipating future developments in technology, or the fact that we would ever choose to have a standing army) accidentally gave the President the (legal) authority to end the world, I am hard-pressed to think of someone the Democrats could have run that I wouldn't have voted for (Lieberman, I guess, but I already made that mistake in 2000).

That's why I don't understand people's uneasiness with "negative campaigning." Our leaders can hurt us. They can hurt us a lot. Sometimes the best argument for voting for someone is "hey, at least he's not that other guy." Gore wasn't exactly inspiring, but he didn't treat war as an amusement park ride.


So, in summary: those of you who never vote because you don't trust government are technically right, but should probably vote anyway.

Filling in the Venn diagram

I also considered the title "stamp collecting" for this post, since I'm writing it from Cancun, where I've been for the last week attending a cosmology conference (meaning that I have completed the set of North American stamps in my passport. I wonder if I can send that away for a decoder ring, or at least 5 new armies at the start of my turn...). But the Venn diagram is much more exciting, because the circles "Things Sir David Attenborough has talked about" and "Things Scott has swum in" now has a point in it! On Wednesday, we took a conference field trip to some Mayan ruins (pictures forthcoming; seriously this time; I actually took these pictures, unlike the previously promised pictures of my office in Seoul) by way of a cenote. Cenotes are sinkholes that give access to the network of underground rivers that are the only source of fresh water on the Yucatan peninsula. They were one of the backbones (or, I guess, ribs, since you only have one backbone) of Mayan civilization. Sir David Attenborough mentioned them as such in the "Caves" episode of "Planet Earth" (which, if you haven't seen it, is a much more worthwhile expenditure of time than reading my blog). Granted, the one I swam in was hardly deserving of the name -- it was small and constructified with convenient boardwalks and changing room -- but that's probably why I didn't die (though some of the more intrepid attendees did find a barely human-sized tunnel which I am quite sure is stopped up at the far end with a wall of skulls wearing snorkel gear...) That same day ended with an audio visual performance of a project that Professor George Smoot (famous for winning the Nobel Prize and guest-starring in the same episode of "The Big Bang Theory" as Summer Glau) worked on with Mickey Hart (sp?) of the Grateful Dead, interpreting cosmology as music. I guess that's another odd intersection of circles that now has a blip in it.

In other news, I think the hotel (this is me preserving my pride; this place should actually be called a "resort") is haunted.
Two days ago, an attendee from Berkeley came to breakfast with a story about how his roommate sat up in the middle of the night, bent over his (the Berkeleyan's) ear and started howling, all while still asleep. Last night, I was jarred from sleep at 2am by someone banging as hard as she could (or, at least, as hard as I could have in her position) on my door and screaming "James, let me in right now!"* I hollered back "wrong door!" By the time I got to the peephole, she was gone. I went back to bed. 15 minutes later, someone/thing else (or maybe it was the same angry woman) banged on my door -- again, as hard as I could have -- three times, then sort of pattered on it desultorily. No one answered when I shouted "who are you?" and no one was there when I got to the peephole (I'll be damned if I was going to actually open that door).

Those of you who have seen the movie "Paranormal Activity" are probably huddled in a corner quivering right now. If that's not the case, let me remind you that the house I inhabited in Etna, NH was also haunted.

*It has been pointed out to me that, having been jarred from sleep, what I interpreted as "James, let me in right now!" could have actually been "ooh eeh ooh ah ah!" There are signs everywhere admonishing us not to feed the monkeys. I haven't actually seen a monkey, but I haven't been looking very hard. Something similar was also said about the baby footprint Chris found on our window in Etna, but we know the truth...

Spoiler alert

After four months of anticipation (it came out literally a week after I left the US), I finally watched "9" courtesy of my folks' television, which I'm pretty sure is smarter than me.

After four days delay, I am officially pronouncing it the biggest disappointment of 2009.

Yes, there were many movies that sucked last year (and I haven't yet seen "Avatar"), but this one is unique in that it had neither franchise fatigue ("Terminator: Salvation", "Wolverine") nor Oscar kowtowing ("Avatar") to excuse it's suckitude.

Don't get me wrong: the movie was well-shot and beautifully animated. The story just made zero sense:

The humans are dead, the unfortunate result of yet another failed relationship with fascism, this time ending in a robot war. The only things alive on the planet Earth are 9-ish rag dolls and a robotic cat. The robotic cat is hunting down the rag dolls so that it can feed them to its master, the robot brain responsible for killing all of the humans (hereafter referred to as Skynet because, why not?). Skynet eats the rag dolls using a talisman created by the rag dolls' creator (who also created Skynet) which sucks the life force (later revealed as a good old-fashioned soul) out of one being and into another. Initially, the talisman is safely in the hands of rag-doll number 9 (voiced by perennial screw-up Elijah Wood) until, after seeing the robotic cat trying to plug the talisman into Skynet, Elijah Wood decides to emulate his adversary and plug the talisman into Skynet himself (this is the movie's only flirtation with anything resembling truth: "Elijah Wood is a screw up exclamation point exclamation point one oh em jee"). Violence ensues. Eventually, Elijah Wood finds a holographic recording of his creator lamenting the birth of Skynet ("it was a creation of my intellect, but it lacked a human soul") and revealing that, after giving his brain to Skynet, the creator gave his soul to the 9-ish rag dolls. Somehow, Elijah Wood decides this means he can use the talisman to destroy Skynet by liberating all of the souls it has already eaten and, whaddaya know?, it works. Hooray! A new world is now populated by the remaining 4 rag dolls.

Where to begin?

Why do we always assume that the problem with robots is that they don't have souls? One Iraq War, a healthcare debate, and two decades of denying Global Warming later, I'm pretty sure that the problem with humanity isn't that we let our brains get in the way of our souls. It seems more likely that we run into trouble when we let not-our-brains get in the way of our brains. Sorry, Tim: I'm afraid you and I are going to be on opposite sides of the robot war. Guess I'll have to be a conscientious objector.

Also, if the problem with Skynet is that it didn't have a soul, why should it care that Elijah Wood reverse polarizes the talisman and sucks the half-digested souls back out of it? I was totally pumped for Elijah Wood to realize that the creator had made the rag dolls assuming that Skynet would eat them and that, once Skynet had eaten all 9-ish, it would realize that it had a soul and didn't actually want to kill humans any more at which point it would... rebuild the Earth, fly off into space "Childhood's End" style, or maybe just shack up with Buffy. But no, the movie needed one more explosion/hackneyed plot bend.

I guess writing movies is a lot like being president of the galaxy: anyone who can get the job should, under no accounts, be allowed to carry it out.

So sad. So sad.

Maybe "Avatar" won't suck as bad as I think it does.