Going 'cold lembas'
One movie I'm looking forward to seeing is "Little Fish", starring Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Elrond (Hugo Weaving) as recovering drug addicts:

Algebra 101
Phantasmagoria recently found the following posting on Technocratic's Xanga blog:

*****

Let Rodrigo Santoro = (hot).
Let David Wenham = (hot) (Faramir).
Let Dominic West = (badass).
Let Gerard Butler = (hot) (badass).

300 = [ ( Rodrigo Santoro + Dominic West + David Wenham + Gerard Butler ) x (Frank Miller) x (What I assume will be copious amounts of naked) ] ^ (Thermopylae)

Which can be reduced to:

300 = ARE THEY TRYING TO KILL ME WITH THE WAIT, AND WITH THE MEN?
= WHY DID PRODUCTION ON THIS ONLY BEGIN YESTERDAY?
= HOLY ****, I AM SO EXCITEDER.

*****

Well, you can't argue with the math.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 10:16 AM EST

Updated: November 4, 2005 2:53 PM EST

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It's....the perfect storm!
Mood:  accident prone
I'm too lazy to actually go and dig up this interview, but somewhere awhile back, David Wenham mentioned that he almost didn't survive a viewing of "The Perfect Storm".

I bring this up today because we've got a repeat performance going on outside. Hurricane Wilma and Tropical Storm Alpha have combined with another storm from the west to bring us 60+mph gusts and lashing sheets of rain along the coast. Snow is predicted tonight for the mountains.

When I saw "The Perfect Storm" in the theater, my friend kept quietly predicting each line seconds before they were uttered. For example, some meteorologist might be droning on in a long rambling monologue. As he paused, my friend would whisper gravely, "It's....the Perfect Storm", moments before the meteorologist said the exact same thing. After nearly an hour of this, my stomach hurt from holding in the laughter and I had to beg her to stop.

Quote from boyfriend: "My primary enjoyment of the film was watching George Clooney drown."

For me, the most unforgivable sin was the Boston Brahmin "pahk your cah" accents. Mark Wahlberg should know better. He's from Dorchester, for crying out loud.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled weather.

Books books books
Mood:  caffeinated

Today, I dreamt that I was given $1000 by a benevolent, book-worshipping deity, and commanded to spend it as fast as possible at Amazon.com. Not one to upset the gods, I spent part of lunch hour creating a 5-mile long wish list.

A good chunk of this hypothetical money went into the pockets of Andy Goldsworthy.

He creates mesmerizing earth art out of leaves, grass, feathers, raw sheep's wool, sticks, icicles, and pebbles, then photographs it. Circles, serpentine shapes, and spirals figure prominently. His pieces are simply breathtaking. For example:







And:






Photographs of his ephemeral art have been compiled into a series of beautiful, but pricey, coffee table books: "Wall", "Wood", "Stone", "Arches", "Time", etc.

Another portion of my invisible $1000 was spent on Dust and Van Helsing.

Six Degrees of David Wenham
Mood:  a-ok

Okay, you all know the party game, "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". Somebody names an actor, then you have to link them to Kevin Bacon via other actors who've appeared in films together. It's based on that Stanley Milgram study from the 1950s, where he found that it takes an average of six people to link any two people in the world together.

So, for anybody reading this blog, odds are you can link yourself to David Wenham via six or fewer intermediaries. Even if you live on a remote Pacific atoll that gets visited by a mail ship once every five years.

Not too long ago, I was startled to discover that my degree of separation from David is one person. The link is Glenn Murcutt, who appeared in the film "Inside the Mind of the Architect", narrated by David. Back in 1993, at architecture school, Mr. Murcutt was our visiting studio professor. His work is utterly original and fascinating - he builds houses you could actually picture yourself living in. He uses simple building materials (recycled timber, corrugated steel), with linear forms and moveable shades designed to capture sunlight and allow for maximum windflow. His design motto (borrowed from the Aborigines) is "Touch the earth lightly", so his houses often perch on stilts and wind through existing trees. Tres cool.

Okay, so it probably doesn't count as a genuine Kevin Bacon link if David and Glenn didn't interact in the film. But, that's about as good as it gets.

Unless maybe when my cousins lived in Sydney during the 1980s, they had some random connection to David. But let's assume they didn't. It's a big city. I used to play roller hockey with this girl from New Zealand, and it drove her crazy whenever anybody said "You're from New Zealand? Hey, do you know Mary?"

The mathematics of "The Bank"
Mood:  lazy
Now Playing: Third base
Does the math in "The Bank" have any basis in the real world? Or does Jim Doyle ruin tablecloths for no good reason?

Jim's theories have their roots in the work of Paul Nelson Eliott, who first noticed nearly a century ago that, in between the peaks and troughs, stock market price fluctuations tend to come in clusters. Strangely enough, those clusters generally correspond to Fibonacci numbers - 3 waves on the way up, 2 on the way down. On smaller and smaller time scales, the larger peaks show clusters of mini-peaks corresponding to higher values in the Fibonacci sequence (21 and 34, or 55 and 89).

Benoit Mandelbrot, father of chaos theory, expanded upon this phenomenon of "self-similarity" - the idea that at any time scale, a stock market graph tends to look the same. If you put a 10-year graph and a 1-day graph side by side, without a horizontal scale, it's difficult to tell which is which. In nature, coastlines, craters, and clouds exhibit the same phenomenon. Like Eliott, Mandelbrot also noticed that violent price swings tend to occur in clusters. If a stock moves by 10% on one day, chances are good that it will have another large price change the following day.

The general consensus is that Mandelbrot's fractal equations are great at describing the behavior of the stock market, but lousy at predicting it. (Otherwise, we'd all be millionaires.) His chief contribution to financial theory was in demonstrating that price swings don't operate on an independent, normal bell curve; and that markets are far more risky and turbulent than previously thought. Prices do not move by chance; they react to themselves and to events outside the market.

My guess is that Jim's tablecloth equations were all horseflop, and that he secretly hacked into CentaBank's financial data server and cooked the market returns. For one thing, a real computer genius wouldn't waste processing power generating pretty grahics of Mandelbrot sets.

For another thing, he would also know enough to send faxes face down.

Work part II
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: Schubert's Unbegun Symphony

Periodically, my company's Employee Assistance Provider holds Wellness Seminars on topics relating to health and stress reduction.

Here's an excerpt from their recent PowerPoint presentation, entitled "Developing A Sense Of Humor":


* Get some feedback from others about how they see your sense of humor

* Visualize how your sense of humor needs to improve

* Gather resources such as books or magazines on humor

* Take a controlled risk


I think these are excellent suggestions. To improve my sense of humor, I've created an Excel spreadsheet and embarked on a feasibility study. Phase 1 of PROJECT HUMOR will consist of Simulation and Analysis, including military exercises designed to duplicate the stresses of actual humorous situations.

In Phase 2 (Implementation and Deployment), a banana peel will be left on the sidewalk and kept under 24-hour surveillance.

MIS
Mood:  hungry
Now Playing: Garfunkel, Oates & Messina

In response to the previous entry, meaningofhaste wisely cautions: "Watch less TV. Read more books."

Amen, sister!

When I read Stiff and The Brush-Off two summers ago, my family banned me from the living room for disturbing the peace with continuous snorts and howling laughter. Really, you can't blame them. I think my favorite line came when Murray got clocked in the head, and he held his hand up to his bleeding ear "like a harmonising Bee Gee".

Speaking of Shane Maloney...

I used to work in an architecture office that employed the exact same scam as the meat-packing fiddle in Stiff. The owner kept several phantom people on the payroll, including assorted friends, Chinese emperors, and ex-employees, so that he could bill out projects at the partner rate instead of the associate rate. We, the lowly associates, were made to falsify our timesheets by including hours for projects we didn't work on. If we refused, we were threatened with firing and jail time (and the timesheets were falsified later on by his partner). As one of the most vocal protestors, I found myself steadily demoted, marginalized, and abused.

Some months later, as I was gathering up the courage to sacrifice my livelihood and blow the whistle with the government agency, the owner passed away suddenly from a pulmonary embolism, and the firm was dissolved. The issue became moot.

It was a little disappointing, actually. I had this really great resignation letter all prepared. It was called "95 Theses". I had been planning to nail it to his office door late on a Friday afternoon, a la Martin Luther, and walk out of the building forever. A few of the highlights:

1. At my second day on the job, I was called into the owner's office and made to explain the instructions on an enema bottle. The owner was Chinese and didn't understand English. Or pretended not to. Later, one of my co-workers commented, "Well, how often in life do you legitimately get to tell your boss to stick it up his &@*) and squeeze?"

2. I was made to eat fortune cookies out of a box full of cobwebs and mice droppings, which had been living in the basement for five years.

3. My ideas were routinely mocked and spat on and insulted, and then would turn up verbatim in his designs two weeks later (with no credit).

4. At municipal planning meetings, I was routinely introduced as "This is my associate. She's a woman. I hope no one here minds." I then had to sit quietly by while he called the clients "whores" and scribbled derisively on tablecloths and expensively-produced RFP booklets. Not surprisingly, we didn't get a lot of repeat business.

5. One Christmas, everybody else got a $7,000 Christmas bonus. I got two pieces of Chiclets gum. (Now, to be fair, they were unused pieces of gum. Not chewed or anything.)

6. I was often told, "If you don't have anything better to do, you can shine my shoes," followed by a pair of feet being propped up on my desk.

7. When I came in in the mornings, more often than not the presentation drawings I'd been working on would be covered in coffee stains and scribbled doodles, forcing me to start all over again. This was especially likely to happen near a deadline.

And so on, and so on. If only we'd had Murray on the job, it would have saved a lot of grief.

Revenge, of a sort, came a few weeks later when I had to write a letter to the Rhode Island State Minority Board, informing them that we would not be re-applying for minority firm status, as my boss had unexpectedly passed away. Before putting the letter in the envelope, I set it aside for a moment and slit open the rest of the day's mail.

Then I sealed the Minority Board letter and took it outside to the mailbox. As the letter disappeared into the dark innards of the mailbox, I was horrified to see bloody thumbprints all over the envelope. Looking down at my hand, I discovered a huge paper cut caused by one of the junk-mail flyers from the pile of mail.

I had a sudden, vivid image of the person on the other end, opening up a letter covered with bloody thumbprints and alluding to a recently deceased boss. It was about 15 minutes before I could stop laughing enough to go back inside.

mis
Mood:  accident prone
Now Playing: "Last Night I Dreamt Of A Bagel"

"And so-and-so produces mediocre theatre!" -- David Wenham

Here's a summary of my Mediocre Theatre Weekend:

1. "Bug". I went to see a regional theatre production of this on Saturday. The story, which takes place in a motel room, involves sexually-transmitted paranoia, blood, self-mutilation, insanity, blood, drugs, blood, blood, and tiny insects implanted by the Army. The play was performed by nude actors who, at the end, douse themselves with gasoline and drop a match. On the way out, I overheard one patron mutter "Well, they won't be making a musical out of THAT one."

2. "The Brothers Grimm". OK, I have loads of respect for Terry Gilliam, who's done some brilliant work in the past, but this was a real mishmash that lacked soul, focus, and direction. A few stunning visuals, bland dialogue, not much in the way of plot. It felt like Gilliam's usual flights of tall-tale creativity were being restrained by budget and commercial restrictions. Did "Lost in La Mancha" break him? I hope not. Heath Ledger was good as the socially maladjusted, introvert brother.

3. "The Simpsons", which used to be one of the funniest things on television. Last night's season premiere was even lamer than the Australian episode (still considered the gold standard of horrid, shark-jumping Simpsons shows). The narrative had something to do with Homer paying off Mafia debts by allowing Fat Tony to shoot a porn video in his house, which caused Marge to leave and join up with a Save the Manatees organization. I didn't laugh once. Not even a wan chuckle. This was followed by.......

4. "The War At Home". Worst.Show.Ever. DO NOT WATCH THIS. The remote was lost somewhere in the couch and I was mesmerized by its sheer awfulness. No stereotype was too crude, no potty humor too lame to shoehorn into the dialogue. The basic plot: Blue-collar dad's world is under assault by modernity. His daughter is dating....gasp!...a black guy. His son.....gasp!....is ambiguously gay. His wife....gasp!....used to go out with black people and...gasp!....smoke cigarettes. Whoever wrote this show clearly hasn't been outside in a long, long time.

I found myself thinking, "They cancelled Firefly for this?"

make_it_stop
Mood:  on fire
Now Playing: Vicki Sue Robinson has left the building.
I guess there's no need to keep putting my name on these Sacred Grove blog entries anymore, since PrincessFaz is no longer co-adminning this site. In fact, it might be better to post these anonymously, and then walk away quickly and pretend I had nothing to do with them. *tum de dum de dum*

***

Now, here's an interesting coincidence. Two of the top-grossing movies in the U.S. this summer were remakes of the very two movies that scared me most as a kid:

1. War of the Worlds
2. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Let's just keep going with this trend. How about a remake of "The Day After"? And while we're at it, why not redo "Squirm" (in which a hick town is terrorized by man-eating earthworms that come out of the faucets). And that traffic-safety film they showed us in elementary school, where the girl slips on a snowbank and gets run over by a bus.

Yes indeedy, there's some lucrative box-office potential there, deep in the catalog of Childhood Traumas. In the meantime, I'll be hiding under the couch with a baseball bat.