This movie had so many things in its favor, I’m surprised that I didn’t like it more. Naomi Watts was wonderful (and beautiful). Jack Black was great, although I think he toned down his intensity more than needed. Andy Serkis is probably one of the most talented and underrated actors working today.

Kong himself is a sight to behold. The movement, the hair, the eyes, the anger. He was great. Impressive.

Ultimately, however, the film left me unfulfilled.

Kong is a great character. He was just in a so-so movie.

The main reason the movie failed is because most of the action sequences are so over the top as to defy belief, even in context of the movie.

A raging dinosaur stampede down a narrow gorge, I can accept. The fact that characters were running between their legs for what seeemed to be about 20 minutes without getting even a scratch, I can’t accept. I just couldn’t suspend disbelief that much, and I was not engaged in the story for the rest of film. It just seemed so cartoony at that point. The rest of the film continued in the same vein, so I could never get back into the story.

There’s no need to detail all the over the top stuff, except one: Adrian Brody trying to do anything remotely resembling “Indiana Jones” type of action. He just seemed so miscast as a lead the charge, rescue the maiden in distress type of character. An action hero he is not.

Also, I just happened to have re-watched Jurassic Park a couple weeks ago. I think JP has better dinosaurs than KK even though JP was made over 10 years ago, and that repeat viewings of JP still offers a more engaging story than KK.

The ice skating scene? Please.

I paid full price to see this in the theater on the second day of release, a theater. Until the previews started I had the whole theater to myself. Some people rolled in during the preview. When the lights came up at the end, their were about half a dozen people in the theater.

I really wanted to like this movie. For me, it didn’t deliver. It’s worth a rental, if only to fast-forward to Kong himself.

Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, asks: If America were Iraq, What would it be Like? A very stark and thoughtful comparison.

What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? … it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll … What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings? … What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated? … What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target “safe houses” of “criminal gangs”, but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies? … What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?

Americans see corruption as problem

WASHINGTON - Indictments, investigations and a congressman’s guilty plea for taking millions in bribes have left most Americans convinced that political corruption is a deeply rooted problem, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

Missteps and misconduct that have reached into all levels of government - from the White House and Congress to governors’ offices in Connecticut and Ohio - have helped drive 88 percent of those surveyed to say the problem is a serious one.

I would like to read this and think that Americans are finally getting a wake-up call about the dramatic reforms and house cleaning that need to be done to our political system and our politicians.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe this wide-spread distrust of government will lead to any real change. I’m convinced that 90%+ of the all politicians will get re-elected in ‘06, and the status quo will remain.

Although a few seats will change hands, it doesn’t matter if Democrats gain control of the House or Senate. Americans see both parties as equally corrupt. The articles says, “Democrats were considered more ethical by 36 percent, while 33 percent cited Republicans. That difference is within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.”

It doesn’t matter if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi become Majority Leader of the Senate or Speaker of the House. It doesn’t matter if Hastert stays, or if Delay regains his seat. If we want to see anything beyond cosmetic sweep-it-under-the-rug type of changes, our only choice is to break the two-party system and DON’T VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS OR REPUBLICANS.

Unless we break the two-party system, we can just expect more of the same. I suspect the Demopublicans will have a good laugh on us come November 8, 2006. A tiny few faces may have changed, but the same two political machines will be running things, fighting amongst themselves, united in making sure they are the only two voices at the table.

Taxes will go up, or the deficit will go up, or both.

Spending will continue go up. Pork projects will continue to be funded.

More civil and/or economic liberties will be taken. More regulations will be enacted.

More beauracracies will be created.

Government budgets will take up a larger percentage of the GDP.

Another future generation will finance the current one.

Why? Because THAT’S WHAT THEY DO. AND WE KEEP SENDING THEM BACK.

Paul Graham has another excellent essay. This one is one “Web 2.0.” He’s talks about the origin of the term and what it means, and it boils down to three things:


  1. AJAX ( or, “Javascript now works”)

  2. Democray

  3. Don’t Maltreat Users


Then he points out that Web 2.0 is whole point of the Internet.
Web 2.0 means using the web the way it’s meant to be used. The “trends” we’re seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble.

True, that.

One of the other interesting things is a little tidbit that, I think, illustrates what is going to happen to those who don’t understand Web 2.0, or work to fight against it:
During the 90s a lot of people probably thought we’d have some working system for micropayments by now. In fact things have gone in other direction. The most successful sites are the ones that figure out new ways to give stuff away for free. Craigslist has largely destroyed the classified ad sites of the 90s, and OKCupid looks likely to do the same to the previous generation of dating sites.

Odd as it might sound, we tell startups that they should try to make as little money as possible. If you can figure out a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the better, if all fifty million go to you. Though indeed, making things cheaper often turns out to generate more money in the end, just as automating things often turns out to generate more jobs.

This means that many industries are simply going to be undone by the Web 2.0 approach. What kind of industries? Lots. But one specific example is here:
[Editors] control the topics you can write about, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. The result is to damp extremes. Editing yields 95th percentile writing– 95% of articles are improved by it, but 5% are dragged down…

On the web, people can publish whatever they want. Nearly all of it falls short of the editor-damped writing in print publications. But the pool of writers is very, very large. If it’s large enough, the lack of damping means the best writing online should surpass the best in print. And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web wins net. Selection beats damping, for the same reason market economies beat centrally planned ones.

I’ll go a bit further and say that any industry that relies on distribution, filtering or brokering of data, or counts on information asymmetry as an advantage is on the chopping block. There can be no more gatekeepers. This type of work can now be broken down into tiny chunks and handled by many, many people instead of a just select few.

I find it exciting and frightening at the same time. I work in the newspaper industry.

I watched The God Who Wasn’t There last night.

I’ve never been a religious man. I was born without the “God Gene” – so much so that I dismiss most religous dogma and orthodoxy without wasting any time on it, no more than I do thinking about unicorns or leprachauns. It’s just completely off my radar, and I’m not sure why I decided to add it to my Netflix list. Maybe it’s the recent crescendo of the Creation Science and Intelligent Design factions trying to elbow their way into public schools that brought it to my attention.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I watched it.

It was short, only one hour and two minutes. It starts out with a very entertaining “History Of Christianity In Six Minutes Or Less” and goes from there. Interviewing both academic skeptics and devout believers throughout, the documentary questions the very existence of Jesus as a historical figure, much less as the Son of God. And Brian Fleming, the writer and director, raises some darned good points, some I knew and many I didn’t. For example, it observes how closely the story of Jesus resembles the story of many other folk or mythical heroes. It notes that Paul never knew Jesus, and never even refers to Jesus as an actual person who lived on earth, but only as a purely heavenly entity, and how Christian leaders conveniently gloss over those first few decades of the first century in the religion’s history.

Mr. Fleming spends time discussing the Inquisition as Christianity in it purest form, not as a “perversion” of it. It’s not just an arbitrary assertion he makes, it’s a logical argument that I’d like to see some believers discuss.

The documentary loosely compares the Inquisition to modern-day Christian leaders, and shows some video clips of them saying some pretty alarming things, one of which is that homosexuals should be executed just like murderers, complete with biblical support.

(Which makes me wonder: Why is there a single Christian homosexual? Why would you adhere to a religion that literally calls for your death?)

The documentary wraps up with Mr. Fleming scoring an interview with the superintendent of the Christian school he attended as a child, and we learn that the documentary was a personal journey as much as it was an intellectual inquiry.

I should note that, while of course the documentary is supporting a particular viewpoint, it definitely did not resort of incendiary or sensational tactics, unless you consider facts to be incendiary or sensational. I’m now going to have to search the net for some Christian responses to the documentary.

Five stars. Highly recommended. Be sure to check out the DVD extras.

Slash Rating is back up after about 18 months. It’s a cheesy little utility I wrote that calculates a user’s recent value to Slashdot, and compares that value against other recent users.

It broke a long time ago when /. changed the user pages, and I never got a around to fixing it until just this week. I spent some time getting it working again. I also modified it a little to better maintain the cache of recent user lookups, and keep track of the recent high, recent low, and recent average.

Enjoy, or whatever.