Category: Thoughts

Tourist Trophy

The Isle of Man TT motorcycle races are having their 100th anniversary this week. They’re not really shown on any US TV networks, but it’s a big deal in a lot of places. Here’s a scene:

The narrator says the rider “survived with only a bruised lung.” Actually it was a lot more than a bruised lung: several ribs broken, kidney damage, spleen destroyed… apparently there were more than a couple days they didn’t know if he was going to survive, but he did. He no longer races, but in this Times (UK) article he rides the 37-mile course with a journalist in his passenger seat.

Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I’ve been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the latest book by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s nonfiction, in contrast to her earlier books, and it’s about her family moving to Appalachian Virginia and living on a farm. She tries to do it right: local and seasonal food, sustainable agriculture, all that jazz.

Bookdwarf read it about two months ago and kept going on about how we had to eat locally, especially this summer, since it’s easiest in summer. We already subscribe to the Parker Farm community-supported agriculture farm-share, but she wanted to make sure we got our beef from River Rock (run by the family of a college classmate of mine, who sadly died in a car crash while delivering beef), wanted to make sure we grew at least some veggies from Seed Saver’s Exchange out on the porch, and so on.

I resisted. I resisted a lot. This dream of a pastoral America is easy to have, because people have forgotten just how damn hard farm work is. When I get my vegetables from Farmer Steve (and yes, we call him Farmer Steve) at seven this coming Wednesday, I know he’ll have been up and working since five AM, and won’t get to bed until midnight at the earliest.

Also, I think the people advocating a 100-mile diet have forgotten that healthful food is not some perfect natural state. An all-local all-the-time diet is almost certainly better than the typical American diet in many years, but when you have a bad spring and your harvest fails, you really want some petroleum-based imports from California or Chile. People don’t get scurvy and goiter and rickets much these days, because our artificial-nutrient-laced diet supplanted a local food culture that, in bad years, consisted of lard and whiskey. And while I agree that “food culture” and having dinner with the kids is important, it’s not just a lack of willpower that keeps that out of reach of Americans– it’s our entire economic structure and philosophy of work. France has dinner with its children, but France has an extra hour every day to do it, because France works thirty-five hours a week and has free health care. America works forty if America is lucky: a real salaried professional works sixty if she wants to get ahead, and an hourly worker holds down two thirty-hour ‘part-time’ gigs and doesn’t get sick days or vacation.

Still, I started reading the book, because Bookdwarf said it was important and because she read me some incredibly funny passages (the interactions between Kingsolver and her daughter Lilly are precious: a 7-year-old on a farm says the darndest things). So for the first couple chapters, I reluctantly agreed with everything she had to say: small farms are failing not just because it’s hard work that a lot of kids don’t want to do, but because massive farms and government subsidies tailored to agribusiness are squeezing them unfairly. Our national overproduction of corn and soybeans, and our love of grain-fed beef, are terrible (this I know already, from Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan and King Corn and many others). And then I really began to get into it.

Kingsolver acknowledges that it’s hard, that she’s very lucky in a lot of ways: the farm was already in the family, so they didn’t have to buy it. Her husband is an academic, meaning he gets summers to farm. While working on the farm she was able to write a book about it, which is a contribution to the farmer’s budget that most people won’t have.

She’s just trying to do what she thinks is right, and trying to live it like a normal person. The book is peppered with recipes and notes from her kids and her husband: their Friday night routine involves movies and pizza, like mine does, although they have grown the tomatoes, made the dough, and as often as not made the cheese themselves.

So now I’m halfway through the book and sitting out on the porch with the tomato sprouts and pea tendrils coming up out of pots on the porch, and daydreaming about life on the farm.

Nuts on the News: Neal Cavuto

In the “why do we bother” column, Fox News’ Neal Cavuto brings crazy-ass people on TV. I can’t tell if he’s actually agreeing with them, or just giving them enough rope to hang themselves.

First, a segment that begs for a caption like “it’s not over til the fat lady sings” — Neal finds a group called National Action Against Obesity to claim that Jordin Sparks is fat and that fatties shouldn’t win singing contests. Maybe they’re part of the pro-ana movement or something, or perhaps it’s a desperate attempt to create news or controversy out of an otherwise boring American Idol finale. Either way it’s stupid.

Second, via Crooks and Liars, an argument so mismatched and stupid that it ought to be in the Onion’s “point/counterpoint” section. The “point” is a woman who says that the newest birth control pill that skips menstruation altogether is just as safe, just as useful, and just as good as the existing birth control pills. The “counterpoint” comes from woman who believes that all birth control is bad, and that NARAL and Planned Parenthood are conspiring with Big Pharma to enslave women in some kind of sex prison. Cavuto then suggests that birth control makes underage girls have sex. My theory: Fox is trying to drum up birth control controversy as an excuse to talk about teen sex, and we all know that teen sex is a huge seller.

Hey Neal! How about doing a special investigative report about how drunken idiots are annoying? Maybe you could bring in an expert about alien abduction and thought screen helmets— you know people are only drinking too much because they’re driven mad by alien mind control attempts and Morgellons disease.

The short premise

My dad used to say that you could tell a movie would be bad if you could explain the plot in fewer than five words. For example: “DeVito and Schwarzenegger are Twins” makes for a bad movie. I’m beginning to think that the opposite holds true for TV shows, though. For example, some of the best shows are very simple setups which rely on excellent acting and writing. Think about it: Sex and the City is “four single women are friends in New York.” “Friends” is just that– some friends interact in funny ways. A complicated premise is often an excuse to avoid the hard work of writing a good script.

Looking at the fall TV schedules, I’m guessing we’ll have a combination of absurd concepts that fail to hide poor execution, and simple concepts which are imitations of successful concepts and which fail because of poor execution. Typical pessimism from me, though. There’s a chance that one or two of these will be good.

The first batch of shows is basically Sex and the City variations. The Women’s Murder Club, in which four women share friendships and crime clues, is basically Sex and the City but with murder. Plus, it’s an adaptation of a James Patterson series, so that’s two strikes against it already. Lipstick Jungle features three powerful New York City women are who are friends, making it Sex and the City with fewer women. Because it’s on broadcast TV, there will also be less sex. I can’t wait. A few shows try to do Sex and the City with men: Carpoolers might as well be titled Sex and Dudes in the Suburbs, and Big Shots is the same thing with CEOs and country clubs. A special shout-out to Cavemen which places the gimmick cavemen from the Geico ads into big city life: Neanderthals and the City.

Then, you’ve got your silly, complicated ideas that are ripoffs of other silly, complicated ideas: a man goes back in time and has to decide whether to save his ex-girlfriend and risk changing his future (Journeyman— but it’s basically Quantum Leap); a NYPD cop is cursed with immortality (New Amsterdam, but it’s basically Highlander); a private detective feels conflicted about also being a blood-sucking vampire (Moonlight, but it’s basically Angel, which is basically Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Finally there are two shows which at least are not obviously plagiarizing other shows. That’s about the only thing I can say in their favor, though: there’s a good reason nobody else used these ideas before. Pushing Daisies features a baker who can bring dead people back to life by touching them once and return them to death by touching them again– he uses this ability mostly to solve murders but things get awkward when he saves his childhood sweetheart’s life but can never touch her again. Reaper is about a slacker who discovers on his 21st birthday that his parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born and that he’s going to have to do Satan’s bidding, which turns out not to be so bad because his job is to find escaped evil souls and capture them using a vacuum cleaner.

I got nothing

I spent all weekend offline and playing God of War, which was lovely, but didn’t give me much to blog about.

In place of actual content, go look at this chart about obesity, which is linked from Ezra Klein.

Also, you should read Crooks and Liars, which so far today has told me about a Republican state senator arrested for raping pages, the GOP campaign against “voter fraud,” which turned out to be a drive to repress the minority vote, and a bunch of crap that Alberto Gonzales is in danger of getting away with.