first off, check out this review of nine queens, courtesy brad. i didn't get a chance to watch it, but based on the review i now wish to do so...i did, however, read this amusing article about the metro's current woes. the best line comes midway through the article when, during an interview, someone becomes stuck in an elevator. classic. almost as predictable as this gem about the southern baptist convention displaying to the district of columbia that criticism will not be tolerated. i guess if you don't play strictly by the rules, you stand to lose money...unless, of course, you're a private school in which case, your indifference to the public school system enables you to take money from it. never have i understood why letting the few parents who care enough to send their kids to private school take money from the public school system makes sense. why not simply create two groups of public schools, one for parents who care, and the other for parents who don't? we wouldn't even need to have 'parents-who-don't-care' high schools, we could make attendance voluntary by them. on the other hand, 'parents-who-care' high schools could give way to 'parents-who-care' colleges, all for free. a think it's merely a modest proposal.

yesterday i caught an episode of hamtaro, a strange anime show about a bunch of hamsters...they talk (of course!) and have adventures, and hang-out. it's creepy but also strangely interesting. the group of hamsters are called ham-hams, and their leader, boss is actually quite amusing. in a similar vein, check out this piece about arafat calling for new elections here at home. classic. finally, i managed to find a cool website detailing the adventures of two people, a robot and the metro system. it's great stuff...check it out!

as quickly as my mood rose, this article dropped it back to reality. oh, yes, we need to be scared of the al-qaeda script kiddies who could take control of our dams, or power substations, through the internet. for a good response that mirrors my own incredulity that any reporter could be so easily duped, check out this slashdot thread. this is far far worse than the dirty bomb scare, because in that experts were quick to point out that there was no evidence that anyone was creating a dirty bomb. in this case though, unsubstantiated claims are preceded by lines like 'They surmise, with limited evidence'. Limited evidence? limited evidence? how can we be expected to even finish the rest of the article if the scare-mongering is being delivered so deadpan? these are, after all, the people who flew planes into buildings. ignoring the fact that no critical systems are hooked up to the internet, the complexity of using a dam floodgate system to kill people is absurd. hell, california had an energy crisis of epic proportions last year, but it wasn't due to terrorists, it was due to greedy corporations. go figure...

thomas jefferson would have been proud: today, the ninth circuit court decided to outlaw the pledge of allegiance on the basis of the line: 'one nation, under god'. this strikes me as interesting for a couple of reasons. first, the lines were added in 1954. before then, apparantly, there was no reference to us being a nation under god...the rationale then was that we wished to distinguish our country from the atheism over in Russia. this alone, apart from any legal precedent, seems to clearly mean that the pledge is an endorsement of mono-theism. it also seems to be easily fixed: why not simply restore the original pledge? much like south carolina's flag spat, which began in 1962 when someone decided the anniversary of the civil war was a good occasion to hoist the confederate flag over the capitol. (could well-meaning germans throw up nazi banners in 2038...claiming that the movement was really misunderstood?) One can only wonder why these ideas seemed good at the time. Yet even if the phrase is not struck down, some people's defense of it seems laughable, others quite clear. In the post article, it notes that the late justice William Brennan coined a phrase, "ceremonial deism" that refered to notions of god so frequently invoked that they lost all religious meaning. This seems to me to be the strongest argument against leaving it in the pledge, yet at the same time, isn't taking the Lord's name in vain a sin? Absurdly, any religious person should dismiss this argument because to trivialize god is worse than to simply omit the words: all good people of mono-theistic faiths should support the use of god in the pledge precisely because they feel the pledge should be rooted in mono-theism. For this reason, it should be stricken. The far less compelling argument, equally illogical given the current state of the nation is that the use of the word god doesn't promote religion. Yes, and Anderson's auditing was completely separate from their consulting work, too. If you believe that the use of religion in schools doesn't encourage students to support a faith, then you have been hoodwinked by those same people who believe that human nature is somehow divorced from peer and societal pressures. At least at Anderson, naked greed can be the cause of the willingness to wink, whereas in school, kids might only gain the knowledge that they are like their peers. The chinese wall between church and state should not be broken down for the mere convenience of so called moralists, the same way that auditors broke down their wall between client and consultant, or newsrooms between editorial and business. TJ, and by extension, the founders, were quite clear that America was not to be a nation, like England, with an offical state religion. If they had intended otherwise, then the nation would be filled with Episcopalians, like me.

$3.8 billion...makes my life, depressing though it may appear, seem even more trivial. Oh well.

this morning, while watching most of the german victory in the world cup, i happened across this article in the post describing the coming gender gap in colleges across the nation. hmm. so college women are emerging into the real world to discover that their male counterparts have been left behind...am i supposed to be upset about this? being a male college graduate (of only two years), this is great news, especially in a city that already has an urban myth about skewed gender ratios. in a year or so, i could actually start hyping myself as one of the few college-educated men left in the district. of course, anyone who believes that women are interested in a man's educational level is already a little crazy, so perhaps this is no big deal. then again...

on an unrelated matter, i'm enjoying a tasty calzone from the usda esra deli. they make a mean calzone de casa, which helps me through those incredibly frustrating days i seem to experience weekly. oh well, back to work.

the weekend was fairly sunny, for once; i managed to catch minority report, a great movie and i reviewed it also! other than catching some rays, not much else...which is as it should be. sometimes you just have to kick back and relax.

the man who inspired 'blade runner' and 'total recall' was both prolific and thought-provoking: philip k dick. this time, an even briefer story has been adapted into a major motion picture, without the usual naming sacrifice: unlike do androids dream of electric sheep or we can remember it for you wholesale, the powers that be thought minority report was cool enough to keep its own name. i'd never read the story but since i had enjoyed other pieces of his work, i figured minority report would be a good move. add in spielberg , cruise and max von sydow and you've got a seriously big box-office contender. despite straying from the short story, the main premise is the same: in the future, police-work has moved from post-crime detection and punishment to pre-crime prevention, through the use of psychics who can predict events before they happen. the system is fool-proof, or at least everyone believes it to be so, until the head of the unit, john anderton, discovers that the pre-cogs (the three psychics who predict crimes) have labelled him a murderer, with a victim that he's never even heard of. Anderton, predictably, pulls a logan's run, moving from policeman to runner in one of the best movie escape scenes ever. despite sounding excessively science-fiction oriented, i found that the movie's style didn't rely upon the gadgets and wizardry in a way that dehumanized it. instead, the futuristic details complement a tale of good intentions that could take place today, or fifty years ago. the themes displayed throughout are universal, and setting the story in the future only makes the premise appear more logical and the characters more like those of today, caught in a trap of their own time. cruise, as john anderton, could be a scarred cop plucked from the streets today, rather than the future, as could most of the characters. through the story, an overriding tale of humanity itself is broadcast, so that the story of a child lost and the lengths people go to bring back what is lost forever, resonates with the audience.

the strong story and cast are supported by a directorial style that focuses on light in a way that is almost the inverse of 'blade runner'. in 'minority report', all is full of brightness, from the sun-bleached streets of dc (i loved the inclusion of woodrow wilson plaza, but hated the typical nyc subway scene instead of the metro) to the luminescent shopping centers of the future. in addition to exposure, spielberg's judicious use of special effects range from the subtle (pervasive consumerism) to the incredible (ai driven spiders, dancing cereal boxes, etc.) All are done well, and help set up a reality that seems in many ways to be the day after tomorrow. rather than indulge in a darkened noir, like scott, spielberg manages to make dc of 2085 appear addicted to capitalism, a sort of chinatown in daylight experience. for a director not accustomer to subtlety, the ability to frame a man fights against the world story in terms that are not inherently depressing is laudable. the huge de-humanized advertisements on blimps flying about the trash-ridden steets in blade runner have given way to personalized gap ads which address each customer by name in minority report. no doubt, american studies majors will be looking at this movie for years to come as a jules-verne like indicator of the direction our society is moving, covering the lack of privacy and the desire to conform. even still, it is a bright future, even if the innocent are imprisoned (after all, the moral dilemna of the film rests upon the idea that perhaps people are wrongly imprisoned), and should the rights of a few outweigh the needs of the many? the utilitarian in me bristled at the thought of dismantling a system that could work as well as pre-crime appears to: in the story, unlike the movie, not only are murders prevented, but also petty crimes like forgeries and tax-evasion. imagining dc without any crime is cool enough, but to eliminate all fraud as well would be too golden a goose to give up.

it is, as total recall was, a thinking man's action movie. the idea of inexorable fate is also tweaked: through his knowledge of his own future, anderton is given the chance to back out of it unharmed, yet he seems drawn towards it if only for the desire to understand why he would perform such a violent act. when at last he does discover the truth, he both recognizes the absurdity of his situation and simultaneously gives in to the awful orchestration of it all. only the pre-cog cassandra called agatha (her two compatrious are named Dashiell and arthur, a tiny joke that christie fans the world over will probably laugh at) can sit and watch as his actions unfold, one by one, constantly telling him he can disobey the future only to watch him ordain it, piece by piece. the only significant flaw in the film is the paradox of the premise: how can anderton kill a man he's never met unless the pre-cogs instruct him to? (sure to start a lengthy argument, at least in my case) thankfully, although the movie only deals with this in passing, it is a minor item that doesn't detract too heavily from the film. after reading the short-story, it is interesting to note that this conundrum is the point of the entire exercise, and since the explanation in the story doesn't translate well to the big screen, perhaps it is just as well that not all is explicated. in the end though, 2 out of 3 people will agree: minority report is the rare big-budget movie that manages to satisfy on every level, from incredible visuals to good dialog, cinematography to plot. minority report has raised the bar on movie-making not only for this year, but for large budgets and directors forever.