Tag: bad_idea

Right now I'm blogging about Twitter

At the office today, a few of us were discussing Twitter, the website that lets people broadcast mini-updates about their life, thoughts, whereabouts and other news in chunks of 140 characters or less, all the time. People do it through their cell phones and desktop computers, and they do it from home, the car, the airplane, the airplane skyway, the airport lobby, the baggage claim, press conferences, government meetings, trade shows, beaches, you name it. Barack Obama uses Twitter. So does CNN, so does Wil Wheaton. There are YouTube videos explaining how Twitter works. There are how-to articles on how to get more people watching your Twitter updates.

The one question I have is...
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The Golden Compass Movie: The Wrong Direction

In September, I suggested that the new movie The Golden Compass might be worth a see based on the adventureful book by Philip Pullman, which I'd just finished. I would now like to retract that recommendation, and replace it with a new one: avoid The Golden Compass movie at all costs.

It was poorly written, poorly directed, poorly acted, and poorly edited. The dialogue was fluffy and cheesy and delivered with little authenticity. The cutting of the scenes almost made you wonder if they'd randomized their order and lost a bunch of footage along the way. The story barely made any sense to me and I just finished the book a few months ago - I pity anyone who came in off the street wondering what it was about, even with the artificial backstory narrative at the beginning. The action scenes were boring and confusing. And so on.

The one redeeming quality was the computer-generated graphics work that brought the characters` "daemons" - animal manifestations of one's soul that travel alongside - to life. It was integrated very smoothly into the action and some of the detail and nuance was excellent.

But that was not enough to save this sinking ship - The Golden Compass is an unfortunate mangling of a perfectly good story, and a total bomb of a movie.

Dihydrogen Monoxide, available at a store near you

When I grow up, I want to get a job (or an internship, or just a stint in the mail room) with Corporate Accountability International, the folks who are behind the recent announcement by PepsiCo that they will label their Aquafina bottled water for what it is - tap water that's been filtered a few extra times. It's good news in the world of truth-in-marketing, and a nice success story for a so-called "corporate watchdog." (Blog entry for another day: why do we need so many corporate watchdogs? Hmmm.)

And yet, Pepsi will continue to promote the unique benefits of their Water(TM) - 0 calories, 0 sodium, 0 carbs, hooray! - just as every other bottled water maker will continue to sell their product as one of the best possible ways we can consume Water(TM). Consumers will probably continue to buy large cases of plastic bottles with plastic caps filled with Water(TM). Public drinking fountains will continue to be replaced by vending machines that glow into the night.

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Curfews as further erosion of a healthy public life

IMG_2360.JPGI remember seeing author and activist Parker J. Palmer speak in Richmond in the late 90s, about the needed renewal of America's public life. He spoke of a time and a culture where U.S. citizens were much more likely to engage each other fully and authentically in the public sphere - parks, playgrounds, town meetings, neighborhood events, community gatherings. And it wasn't just nostalgia - he talked about a strong public life as a therapy for some of the world's ills, by connecting us with viewpoints, resources, and people beyond what we know in our more insulated lives at home. As Ronald Rolheiser put it, "To participate healthily in other people’s lives takes us beyond our own obsessions. It also steadies us. Most public life has a certain rhythm and regularity to it that helps calm the chaotic whirl of our private lives." Indeed.

It's too bad, then, that we often seem to be trending toward the further diluting and replacing of a strong public life, especially for our younger community members. In Richmond, the Common Council recently decided to enact a new curfew that restricts people under the age of 18 from being out past a certain time of the evening, and threatens to fine the parents of those people progressively higher for each offense.
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Doug, it's time to get up

Doug, Scott, Brandon and I were all sharing a room at Chicago's Drake hotel while on a weekend school field trip early on in high school. I was having a miserable time for various teen-agey angst reasons I won't go into, and I was tired of being cooped up in our room watching JFK (that is one long movie!). At the same time, I was quite fearful that our chaperones would make good on their threat to send us home early if we were caught even so much as peeking into the hallways after our prescribed curfew, so I remained stationary.

Doug, unfortunately, became the target of my antsy-ness. He had fallen asleep in one of the beds, and as 2 AM rolled around, I suggested to Brandon and Scott that we play a prank on the poor boy. All clocks were set to appear as 6:50 AM, the alarm clock was set for 10 minutes later (our prescribed time to start getting ready to go), the rest of us got into bed, the lights were turned off.
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Our education system is broken

IMG_1334.JPGThis rant may eventually turn into a podcast segment, but I haven't had time for that and I can't wait any longer. The news has been all the buzz lately: Only 54% of Richmond Community Schools students graduated in 2006, putting us in the bottom 7% of Indiana high schools. There's the commentary on the school system's reaction, great thoughts on what to do and how the community can be more involved. And I'm sure some good things will come out of all of the discussion that is being generated.

But the bottom line for me is that that our system of education in the US is almost entirely broken, ill-conceived in the first place, and that calls to make incremental improvements to a broken system feel largely like a waste of time.

Old minds think "how do we stop these bad things from happening?" New minds think "how do we make things the way we want them to be?" If education in the city of Richmond, the state of Indiana, and the U.S. is to be improved or fixed, it will be with new minds, not new programs put in place by old minds.

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Experts agree, neurotoxins are good for you

I've had a bad case of unusually persistent headaches lately, and when I experience health problems I usually try to identify simple potential causes and solutions before I go get all up inside the conventional healthcare system. Some call this holistic health, I just call it common sense and listening to the marvelous self-diagnosing machine that is the human body. Am I particularly stressed out or upset about something? Have I been getting enough exercise? Is my cuisine all screwed up? And so on. I was talking to someone today who practices craniosacral therapy and she did a good job of reminding me how many ridiculously toxic, but FDA approved, headache-causing substances there are out there in the food we buy.

I caught her mention of aspartame as a common one and started doing a little research. While I tend to avoid looking up medical information on the Internet after previously embarrassing experiences doing so, I found lots of connections mentioned between headaches and aspartame. Who would have thought that ingesting formaldehyde would have negative health effects? Huh! Thanks, Monsanto! I took a brief skim of my pantry and found three products at the front of the shelf with aspartame and related substances like sucralose / Splenda, listed as an ingredient, both of which I've consumed lately - they're now in the trash. Yeah, I know - we can't just start throwing away everything that's bad for us to any degree. But I figure that if a given edible substance has to have dueling propaganda websites and panels of experts to talk about whether or not it REALLY causes brain tumors, I can probably live without it to be on the safe side.

Perhaps I can ONLY live without it.

The War on Terror is Over

It looks like the War on Terror is over. That is, it's now become a Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, according to the Bush administration's shift in language being used to describe that particular set of economic, military, domestic law enforcement, and foreign policy initiatives. I suppose we've come along way from the national security policy known as "Smoke 'Em Out" or "Bring 'Em On", but this new phrasing doesn't really warm the heart either. As someone who has come to appreciate the value of framing - and how good the current administration has been at it in the political sense - I'd like to suggest a few bits of analysis of what this new frame means.
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Channel surfing to save your life

Hayden L. Sheaffer, the pilot who is being raked over the coals for his role in flying a Cessna 150 into restricted airspace over Washington D.C. earlier this month, which prompted the scrambling of jets and the evacuation of thousands, noted today that he did in fact try to contact the military on the radio channel they instructed him to use, but that he couldn't get through. In today's issues, the New York Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that Sheaffer was instructed to use a frequency that was not available at the time. What? Huh? Okay, the guy shouldn't have gotten lost in the first place, but the whole incident was fairly ridiculous, and the thought that they might have been blown out of the sky because they were given instructions they couldn't follow is a pretty scary one. When I was flying Cessnas with minimal avionics (far from restricted airspace, mind you), I don't think would've had much of a "plan B" in that case either.

REAL ID a dangerous power grab

Bruce Schneier has saved future bureaucrats some time and written the core text of the 2015 US Congressional report on the impacts of the REAL ID Act. The report will find that the creation of this national ID card back in 2005 introduced unnecessary security risks, compounded existing data privacy issues, incurred extraordinary costs to implement and maintain, represented a troubling power grab by the federal government over state systems for issuing identification, and, perhaps worst of all, was passed without any serious debate in Congress or in public because of its attachment to a bill funding operations in Iraq. The report will also find that the ID card has not substantially met any of the goals its introduction was intended to achieve. Given the above, the report concludes that the REAL ID Act was a shining example of the quality and sensibility that characterizes much of the law-making that went on at the time.