Jottings about this and that on the 366th day of 2004
Dec 31 '04 (Updated Feb 05 '05)
The Bottom Line A long year ends (with me shooting off in many directions).
Usually, I give myself license to editorialize about the state of Epinions at every hundredth review. Earlier this month, when I passed 800, my epinions energy was focused on winning Lean 'n Mean III for movies. There didn't seem much new to say, so I put off my editorial for the end of the year. I gathered some jottings about movies that I saw but did not (in most cases could not) epine about, and that file soon grew so large(with comments on 30 movies) that it required separate posting (at http://www.epinions.com/content_4196573316).
I toyed with including my household's annual report, but decided instead to post on the state of epinions, the state of the war on terrorism, plus some jottings on books about which I have not epined (and more on movies).
How is the "war on terrorism" going?
The short answer is worse even than the "war on drugs," another quagmire the efforts of which makes the US of A (and other parts of the world) less safe.
Three and a quarter years after the 9/11 attacks, has Osama bin-Laden killed or captured? No.
What about the head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar? Also unaccounted for.
In the presidential debates, Dubyah claimed that three-quarters of al-Quaida has been destroyed. Perhaps encumbered with a greater sense of the uncertainty about how many people were a part of al-Quaida before 9/11/2001, John Kerry let this highly dubious claim pass. Perhaps the number of persons in al-Quaida camps within Afghanistan is one quarter of what it was (it is not zero), but the occupation of Iraq has infinitely increased the number of al-Quaida operatives in Iraq and almost certainly inspired recruits across the Abode of Islam numbering more than there were at the start of 2002.
And, back in Afghanistan, Kabul has various trappings of modernization, but in the countryside, mostly ruled by war lord/drug kings, poppy production has quadrupled in the last year, supplying most of the heroin for sale in the world.
The National Guard, which is supposed to be mobilized to defend the US (making it a safe haven for those like George W. Bush and Dan Quayle intent on staying out of harm's way during the Vietnam War) has been deployed to the very alien world of Iraq with multiply disastrous consequences, including unavailability for other tasks.
What the other constituents of what Dubyah called "the axis of evil," North Korea and Iran have drawn the lesson from Iraq that to be safe they need to speed up building or enhancing their nuclear weapons programs. (This does not make me feel safer!)
The Bush administration ideologues who shopped intelligence for the most extreme interpretations of Saddam Hussein's imminent danger have blamed the CIA and Bush has appointed an ideologue with the kind of lack of interest in facts contrary to the administration lines that characterizes the Rumsfeld rump intelligence service. (Does the further politicization of intelligence gathering make you feel safer? The White House hopes so.)
As for what Dubyah derided Kerry for calling "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time" (a formula that seems completely apt to me),
Pentagon statistics show that for the first 363 days of 2004, at least 838 U.S. troops died in Iraq. Of that total, more than 700 were killed in action, by far the highest number of American battlefield deaths since the Vietnam War though more than a year and a half after Dubyah proclaimed the triumphant end of combat in Iraq. U.S. deaths averaged 62 per month through the first half of the year. But since June 28, when U.S. officials restored Iraqi sovereignty and dissolved the U.S. civilian occupation authority, that average has jumped to about 78.
The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November. A year earlier, the attacks numbered 649 in September, 896 in October and 864 in November. Progress is our most important product, and Dick Cheney says that things are going well in Iraq, as they were in November when Americans seemed to ratify the wisdom of Bush's war and occupation.
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The state of Epinions
Compared to making America and the world more dangerous in the short- and long-run, Epinions is muddling along fairly well.
Although a number of the writers for whom I have regard continue to move on or fall more and more silent, some new ones appear. The ones who have joined in 2004 who have most impressed me are Inthelilypond in (mostly) books, and Metalluk in movies. The latter has posted 361 very exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) reviews and best-of lists in 335 days here!
Some irritants persist, including
(1) a search engine that often does not reveal an exact match but throws out myriad others (elaborated upon at http://www.epinions.com/content_3376849028)
(2) Garbled movie and book titles (coming from Muze, I know, but...)
(3) site messages that are not removed when a particular maintenance blockade ends
(4) nonsensical category sets, especially in travel and movies (elaborated upon at http://www.epinions.com/content_6958124676
(5) advisors who seem to rate by length, rewarding verbosity, and punishing concision (less is not always more, but sometimes it does not take many words to say all that is worth saying about something!)
(6) epinionators leaving questions in comments and not reading the answers writers provide
(7) the failure to update hit counts pretty much every weekend (and post what seem to be undercounts every day)
(8) the continued designation as "Top Reviewer" of writers who have not posted anything in two (or, in some cases) twelve rounds of TR selection. I don't think that someone who has long been a TR should be de-hatted for silence through one period, but we're getting on to years of inactivity (years in which expectations for top-rated reviews have risen).
And (9) the inexcusable switch of characters displaying properly [restored or fixed just before the Feb. 2005 members' chat, see http://www.epinions.com/content_4155744388.
Some modest proposals
re (1): Reconfigure the search engine so that exact matches appear first, whatever Boolean extensions are also churned up.
re (3): Assign responsibility to whomever is in charge of a maintenance to remove the warning message when the maintenance is done
re (4): Clean 'em up already!
re (8): Invent a "Top Review Emeritus" button for those who have left the epinions scene but left behind a substantial body of high-quality work.
re (9): Fix or restore immediately or sooner!
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Some notes on books I read that are not in the epinions database
(in chronological order by original publication)
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The Redemption of the Cannibal Woman, the title novella and three shorter works translator Alberto Manguel drew from 1970s collections in Spanish of Argentine writer Alberto Denevi's fiction all deal with nearly desperate hopes: a recently orphaned adolescent gay bartender's hope for a patron (who will whisk him away from the frustrations of serving bitter queens), an aging female poet's hope to be better appreciated posthumously than she has been in her lifetime which may be over, a pair of aging spinsters' hope to meet the only other nocturnal resident of a once fashionable apartment building that is now mostly offices, and an unbelievably buxom vaudeville performer's hope to have finally found someone to love and treasure here (and get her out of the tawdry theater at which she pretends to be a Caribbean cannibal).
I am puzzled by Manguel's assertion that Alberto Denevi's prime interest is in plot, because except in the first story, "Michel," there does not seem to me to be much in the way of plot in the four fictions. They are, instead, long on character development, with lives of quiet and not-so-quiet desperation. Although the denouement is very sudden in "Michel," I most like it and "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." I find "Letter to Gianfranco" and "The Redemption of the Cannibal Woman" overwrought-both in literary style and in their protagonists' wild fantasizing about recognition and redemption (and love). Both seem padded, though the four fictions together only fill 134 smallish pages.
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Nebraska-native Wright Morris (1910-1998) won a National Book Award forA Field of Vision and an American Book Award for Plainsong. Honored and esteemed by other writers for a large and diverse body of work, none of his writing ever caught on with many general readers. The 1977 Fork River Space Project was the 19th of his 20 published novels. It gets off to a promising start as a May-September couple on the Nebraska/Kansas border seek a handyman to deal with a clogged sink.
"Plumbers do not come cheap," but the plumber lives (in what turns out to be nearly a ghost town) with a house-painter (who used to write) who works for three dollars an hour. Dahlberg, the painter, establishes himself with the young(er) wife, as the husband bemusedly watches their relationship develop and investigates the strange depopulation of Fork River (the not-quite abandoned town in which 700 people formerly lived, until a tornado or something swept a dozen and a large amount of dirt away, leaving a crater that is guarded by the plumber, the painter, and one other resident).
The middle of the not-very-long novel drags, and the ending is disappointingly inconclusive. The wry, tolerant voice of the narrator glides through being usurped and the oddities of the isolated, haunted not-quite ghost town, making readers smile, but leaving them ultimately high and dry and, perhaps, wistful.
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And More Movies about which I did not epine
My previous posting of notes on movies provoked me to start listing others (the three lists together may say something about me and/or my taste in movies, though I think it says more about what TCM, IFC, FMC, and the Sundance channel showed in 2004 that I had not seen and wanted to examine, supplemented by HBO, Showtime, Netflix, and some generous friends). That I watch a lot of old movies was already obvious to anyone looking at any listing of my epinions! I used to go to movie theaters, but have found the commercials and audience (mis)behavior and need to fit schedules not of my own devising too annoying and inconvenient to venture further than my mailbox.
Movies that I'd already seen but watched again in 2004 included:
The African Queen, Algiers, All Fall Down, Body and Soul, The Cameraman, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Detour, Diary of a Country Priest, Dinner at Eight, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, The Haunting, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, In Name Only, Kwaidan, The Lady Vanishes, The Leopard, Malena, Marty, Nosferatu, Oklahoma!, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Phantom of the Opera (Chaney), Point Blank, The Shop Around the Corner, Seven Women, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Spiral Staircase, The Story of GI Joe, Tabu, Three Comrades, Topkapi,The Wild Ones, The World of Henry Orient
Other movies I saw in 2004 and didn't write about included
(foreign-language films) Gertrud, Ashes of Time, Beijing Bicycle, The Star Maker, The Dreamers, Decline of the American Empire, The Horseman on the Roof, Monsieur Hire, The Trial of Joan of Arc, The Pianist, Nowhere in Africa, Character, Goodbye Lenin, Coming Out, The Sea, Second Skin (Segunda Piel), The Dancer Upstairs, Talk to Her, The Crime of Padre Amaro, Burnt Money (Plata Quemada), El Mariachi, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, The Master of the Flying Guillotine, Once a Thief (Woo's), Police Story 2, Osama
(silent films) The Squaw Man, The Cheat, Flesh and the Devil, The Scarlet Letter, half a dozen Harold Loyd silent comedies and Harold Loyd's World of Comedy, He Who Gets Slapped, Laugh Clown Laugh, Spite Marriage,
(pre-1960 English-language movies) The Mask of Fu Manchu, Evelyn Prentice, Man Wanted, Jewel Robbery, Mary Stevens MD, Prisoner of Shark Island, The Keyhole, Three on a Match, Employee's Entrance, The Dragon Murder Case, Satan Met a Lady, Lady for a Day, Night Court, The Half-Naked Truth, Of Human Hearts, The Emperor's Candlesticks, Big City, Dramatic School, Black Fury, Dr. Socrates, We Are Not Alone, I Love You Again, Test Pilot, Third Finger Left Hand, Trouble in Paradise, The Shopworn Angel, The Mortal Storm, Hobson's Choice, Night Must Fall, I Walked with a Zombie, Leopard Man, The Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatcher, The Set-Up, Railroaded, Out of the Fog, And Then There Were None, Blossoms in the Dust, When Ladies Meet, Desire Me, Scandal at Scourie, Her Twelve Men, Sunrise at Campobello, A Royal Scandal, The Great Sinner, The Green Years, Heavenly Bodies, Kind Lady, The Secret Fury, The Mighty McGurk, Stars in My Crown, His Kind of Woman, Born to Be Bad, A Woman's Secret, The Story of Three Loves, The Hitch-hiker, The Man with a Cloak, Glory Alley, The Doctor's Dilemma, Libel, Verboten!, 40 Guns, Run of the Arrow, Confidential Agent, The Killing, See Here Private Hargrove,
movie from the 1960s: The Sporting Life, The Devil At 4 O'Clock, The Day of the Jackal, Toys in the Attic, Tender Is the Night, The Americanization of Emily, The Haunting
(post-1969 English-language films) The Emperor of the North Pole, End of the Game, 8 Million Ways to Die, The Way of the Gun, Support Your Local Gunfighter, Solaris, Logan's Run, Midsummer Sex Comedy, Another Woman, Mrs. Dalloway, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, Groundhog Day, Lilies, Bound, Unfaithful, The Designated Mourner, The Quiet American (the remake), Bloody Sunday, The Skinwalkers, The Windtalkers, Winter Kills, Gaudi Afternoon, Last Orders, The Blackwater Lightship, White Oleander, Catch Me If You Can, The Road to Perdition, The School of Rock, The Tao of Steve, The Life of Brian, The Full Monty, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, Le Divorce, Borstal Boy, Finding Nemo, Raising Helen, One-Hour Photo, Swimming, Seabiscuit, When the Whales Came,The Hulk, Harry Potter 3, Spiderman 2, Taking Sides,Three Kings, The Legend of 1900, Feeling Minnesota, The House of Sand and Fog, Shattered Glass, American Splendor, A Mighty Wind
(documentaries) In This World, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of "Smile," Abba: The Movie, Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic, Woody Allen on Woody Allen, Scorcese on Scorcese, Sidney Poitier: One Bright Light,
(HBO movies) The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, My House in Umbria, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Angels in America.
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