Some rambling thoughts...

[seawasp]

You know what's really great but I can't find anywhere? GINGER Altoids. Found them once a few months ago in, I think, an airport, and never seen them before or since. But they were great.

HOW THE HELL do you make barbeque, etc., potato chips? It's not just figuring out the right spice mixture (though obviously that's a major trick -- it's not just spices but some kind of sweetener, maybe something like cornstarch, what?), there's some trick to making the chips themselves and getting the stuff to STICK.

I think "Speed Racer" is the second movie I've really liked that TOTALLY bombed (as in, didn't even come CLOSE to making its money back at the box office. The first -- which beats it hands-down in Total Bombery -- was Cutthroat Island, which IIRC cost about $120M to make, and earned $18M at the box office. (I think Speed Racer cost about the same and it earned I think $40+M, so in adjusted dollars it cost less and made back more)

Secondhand smoke: Are there actually studies proving it's bad that were done by disinterested parties? I've run into someone claiming there aren't.

Why exactly do we get "bags" under our eyes?

I am known for being an anime fan, so it sorta makes sense that I get Japanese spam, but why the hell am I suddenly getting Russian spam?

I love aspects of current video games, but I wish I could WRITE some that work the way I know they could. Alas, this would require an army of programmers and artists.

Comments

[corvidophile.livejournal.com]

1. if you have a really hankering for the Altoids, you could probably order some from their site. i don't think i've seen them here, but if i remember right, i do think i've seen the licorice ones hehe.

2. BBQ chips? well besides buying/ordering them, maybe check for those popcorn seasonings? that way you already get the dust and maybe use a ripple chip to hold all the dust when you toss them

3. i think you are the first person i know who actually liked Speed Racer hehe. what did you like about it?

4. um no idea :P

5. this is what they say

6. lol no idea, but at least its not readable

7. you and my hubby should get together. along with all those programmers and artists. so many games. so many things to fix!

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I've been getting spam in Thai and Hebrew lately, though only in small doses each; haven't the faintest reason why, though I suppose it'd be easier to find out if I could read what they're shilling. I'm starting to just chuckle at them, and view them as a visible reminder that indeed the Web is World Wide.

As to wishing to write games but requiring an army of programmers and artist, well, welcome to the rather large lodge, brother. :)

-- Steve rather enjoyed Baron Munchausen when it came out, which alas also bombed at the box office ($46M to make, $8M total box office)... though that was sabotaged, apparently, by a change in the production studio. Possibly deliberately, though that may be conspiracy theorist woo.

[kengr]

Everybody gets Russian spam. And for that matter, I've gotten Hebrew spam!

Remember, the whole *point* of spam is that you don't need to target your audience just send to any email address you can find.

RE Speed Racer...

[seawasp]

I think I say it all in my Amazon Review of Speed Racer.

Note that Amazon as 145 reviews of Speed Racer and the total ranking is 4 stars.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised to find that any studies proving secondhand smoke is bad are kinda-sorta buried in with studies proving other sorts of air pollution are bad.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I regularly get Chinese-language spam.

I also get spam from alternate worlds in which English has evolved differently.

[guy-jin.livejournal.com]

1. altoids are nasty.

6. I get lots of portuguese spam for some odd reason.

[xyzzysqrl]

It could be the whole "Russians own Livejournal" thing? Maybe Russian spammers are searching it now or something...

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

I quite liked Cutthroat Island, too...I am really not sure why more people didn't see that one.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I've seen ginger Altoids now and then. I forget if I ever tried them. I should; I do love ginger.

I bet that when the chips are still hot, their surface is relatively sticky, and thus will hold onto stuff sprinkled on them.

I liked both Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight. I think both did poorly at the box office.

[brooksmoses]

On secondhand smoke:

Well, what's a "disinterested party"? Anyone who's doing a study will be funded for that study, and if you don't consider a university researcher funded by NIH (for example) to be disinterested, then you'll have a hard time finding any. But I shall assume sanity here.

Given that assumption, it's not hard to track down an answer. Google quickly provides some reports produced by governmental agencies: U.S. EPA, the U.S. Surgeon General, California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, and World Health Organization. These are presumably "interested" parties, but these are also not studies as such -- they are reviews of studies, considering the scientific literature and drawing conclusions. Thus, they cite references, which is the key data here. I started with the WHO article, since it was the smallest PDF; it has well more than a hundred references, most of which are studies of one sort or another. Picking one (reference 51) that the text considers particularly significant and chasing it down finds that the primary author is employed at the University of Louisiana Medical Center, which I think is as close as one can plausibly get to a disinterested party. And there are dozens more of these, cited by this one report alone.

(Meanwhile, who exactly are the "interested" parties you think are going to be doing the studies? The EPA and so forth don't do scientific research; they review research done by other people to make their judgements.)

smoking second hands (aren't they hard to light?)

[alex swavely (from livejournal.com)]

Secondhand smoke: Are there actually studies proving it's bad that were done by disinterested parties? I've run into someone claiming there aren't.

I haven't come across any, though I have come across an Italian "disinterested party" study on the effects of red bell pepper use in smokers...

Those in the study who regularly ate red bell peppers had a vastly lower occurrence of the problems usually associated with smoking (lung cancer, emphysema, etc) than those who did not partake (red bell peppers are the #1 highest naturally occurring source of vitamin A - smoking causes vitamin A deficiency).

I would assume that the same works for second-hand as well.

[brooksmoses]

Or, if you want a review article published by a disinterested party, written by disinterested researchers in the field who were selected by the publisher's editors as the pre-eminent specialists on the topic, here's the article in Annual Review of Public Health.

(Disclaimer: My wife works for Annual Reviews; I am not disinterested in recommending them. But, because of that, I happen to know that the articles this journal publishes are all invited submissions, not unsolicited submissions as with most scientific journals. Thus, I can pretty safely say the authors of this article were the experts on the topic at the time.)

[amberdine.livejournal.com]

I've found ginger Altoids at Trader Joe's. Not that I've looked lately, but it might be worth checking.

[thette.livejournal.com]

I suspect sodium glutamate is a big part of the barbeque spice mix.

Re: RE Speed Racer...

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I liked Speed Racer. Not enough to rave over it, but enough to buy the DVD when it came out.

It was fun. It was ridiculous and campy and fun, and it adamantly refused to mock its source material. (Tease, yes; mock, no.) It's much the same reason I liked Kung Fu Panda.

I'll admit to being torn between admiring the movie for actually going to the trouble of having a plot which explains why the bad guys can only be defeated by winning a series of races, and being impatient that they were spending so much time on the plot when they should just be getting back to the racing already because who watches Speed Racer for the plot?

But that's a quibble. Mostly it was fun.

[shana.livejournal.com]

Speed Racer had the disadvantage of coming out this year -- when there were good movies almost every week. If it had been a more typical year, it would have gotten a bigger audience, because there was less competition.

Amazon had ginger altoids, expect them on Wednesday.

Re: RE Speed Racer...

[seawasp]

The "not mock" is the key to me. It's also why I loved Galaxy Quest despite normally hating parodies. It clearly understood WHY Old Trek was still beloved by so many people -- and understood that MOCKING that love, even if it seemed silly to others, would be directly attacking the primary demographic at which the movie was aimed.

I admire the movie for the worldbuilding. You NEEDED that to make it work as a movie -- and work it did.

[seawasp]

What's sodium glutamate's schtick? That is, why would it be a large part of such a mix?

[seawasp]

Timing is certainly part of it. I'm not sure I have **EVER** seen a stronger year for movies, especially in the spring through summer timeframe.

I think another part is the perception and embarrassment threshold for the average viewer. Regular comics have gotten some "street cred" in the movies from things like Spider-Man, Batman, X-men, etc., but even with the anime boom, Speed Racer is an anomaly -- old, mostly forgotten except in parodies, etc., -- and even most anime fans regard it as "before my time". The nostalgia factor is for a relatively small niche. (I suspect the Wachowski(sp?) brothers basically did the same thing with Speed Racer that Eric Flint did with his Philosophical Strangler/Joe's World books: "Look, we make you tons of money, this one might flop but we REALLY want to make it, and make it right, give us this.")

SQEEE! on the Altoids.

[seawasp]

I also loved Ang Lee's Hulk, which apparently put me in a minority. But Hulk earned out, or came close to it, on box office around the world, which meant it definitely made money in the long run. I'm not sure Cutthroat Island DID.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I thought the first two-thirds or so of the Ang Lee Hulk was passable enough, but the final part killed it for me.

I think I've only ever seen the first ten minutes or so of Cutthroat Island, but my recollection is that based on that it was either going to be a terribly fun romp or just flat-out terrible, with not much option of anything in between.

On the other hand, I liked the recent CG Clone Wars movie, and as near as I can tell I'm the only one who did.

[seawasp]

What particularly bothered you about the latter third of Hulk?

Cutthroat Island was a fun romp. It couldn't compare with PotC, though.

I have not seen the Clone Wars movie. The TV animated shorts were great, though.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Ang Lee's Hulk... it got weirdly incoherent in the final sequence where Bruce was fighting his dad.

Clone Wars... the movie was the pilot for the new TV series, which is running now on Cartoon Network. The movie/new series are 3D rendered animation, unlike the first Clone Wars series which was 2D. Unfortunately the new stuff is CG on a TV budget, so for an audience that's been spoiled by Pixar feature films it can look pretty crude. Also, they made what I consider a questionable decision to try to imitate the 2D Genndy Tartakovsky character designs in 3D, and the result is... odd.

On the plus side, it's having a good time playing in the Star Wars universe, and Anakin gets a spunky teenage girl padawan sidekick, and what's not to like about that?

[brooksmoses]

Enhances perception of umami.

[seawasp]

Incoherent? You know, I'm normally the person people point to as "doesn't get subtlety" but that entire battle made perfect sense to me. David Banner wanted power -- he always did -- and he wanted to take it from Bruce, who never wanted the power in the first place. He was playing on Bruce's psychological weaknesses, fears, and so on, as he tried to absorb the Hulk's essence.

Unfortunately, he didn't realize that ANGER isn't really a limited resource. Rage and fury can keep building pretty much forever. Bruce's transformation was DESIGNED, while David was an after-the-fact kludge. David absorbed powers and characteristics... but he had a limit. "You want it? Take it! TAKE IT ALL!"

And ... kaboom.

Re: RE Speed Racer...

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

Everything fans loved (or hated) about the original cartoon was not only present but cranked up to 11--the stilted voice acting and delivery (which the Wachowskis managed to construe as an extremely stylized acting convention, like Kabuki); the ninja battles for the whole family; the wincingly cornball character names; the Car Fu; the pervasive Day-Glo color scheme; the vaudevillean national stereotypes--they had an unshakeable sense of where in Storyland they were supposed to be. (Bonus points for the Wacky Races in-jokes; I recognized cheerfully brazen knock-offs of Penelope Pitstop and Sergeant Blast among Speed's opponents, and Skull Duggery was played as a near-clone of Dick Dastardly.)

The only off note was the Mach 6, which I choose to regard as a numerical typo; I consider the multi-layered punning implicit in the word "go", and the auspicious connotations of the number 5, an intrinsic part of the show's mythology.

Re: RE Speed Racer...

[seawasp]

I think the Mach 6 was the right choice. It fit with the world -- i.e., that you had to have a different vehicle for the Grand Prix than for an offroad race like the Casa Cristo -- and the Mach 5 had already been prominently on display for most of the movie.

I never saw any Whacky Races AFAIK, but my wife recognized a lot of the references.

One of the other things I appreciated about Speed Racer was the self-control of the actors; no matter how ridiculous things got, they portrayed their characters as seriously living in this world. (I mean, really. Opening a door and saying "Inspector Detector." with a straight face has to be a major achievement in acting)

And how can you go wrong with a movie that has lines like:


"My god, was that a ninja?"

"More like a non-ja. Terrible what passes for ninjas these days."