Bitch Spot

I recently got the update for Internet Explorer 8.  I don’t care, I use Firefox, but since most Windows applications are so tightly interwoven that even if you don’t use it, it’ll still screw up all your other programs if you don’t have it installed,  I installed it anyhow.  I’ll almost certainly never run it.

Dean Cain, former Superman back in the Lois and Clark days, is doing commercials for IE8.  I think he’s done a total of four and most of them are just stupid and inane, but this one… this one I just don’t get.  Where do they propose to show this thing?  I can’t imagine any television network that would be caught dead putting it on the air.  Why make a commercial, especially one so completely tasteless, that you can never even use?

Fair warning, it features graphic projectile vomiting.  Do not watch if you are at all squeamish.

I’ve posted a couple of times about the really idiotic things that religions do in order to bring about entirely natural events, we’ve known for centuries that people will do ridiculous dances to make it rain, will perform sacrifices to make the crops grow, etc. and that doesn’t even include the people who will perform silly rituals to drive out demons or the like.  Luckily, most of the stories I’ve related about the India region have been relatively innocent, people doing stupid things for silly reasons that don’t really hurt anyone.  This is another one of those.

In Bangladesh, more than 250 people gathered at a marriage ceremony between two frogs intended to bring rain to the parched region.  According to Noor Mohammad Kalon, a school teacher, “The bride and groom were in special wedding dress. We blessed them in the ceremony and released them in a nearby pond afterwards. Last night there was rain. I believe it was because of the wedding.”

No, it’s because you’re coming up on the monsoon season, you retard.  If you’d actually bother to think, rather than follow outmoded religious traditions, you might have realized that.

Of course, this is harmless, even the frogs were released and get to live out their days in their natural habitat, there’s just something about the fact that grown adults are marrying frogs for superstitious reasons that really grates with me.  There’s just no logic to it and that’s where things can get scary if taken to extremes.  If the frog marriage didn’t work, if they still didn’t get rain, would they have moved on to something else to get the desired result?  This is pure conjecture, but let’s assume for a moment that a group of people lived in a drought-stricken area and they had always been able to get rain by marrying frogs.  They tried it this year, but because it was a particularly bad drought, the ceremony didn’t bring rain.  They panicked, not knowing what else to try.  So they married a woman to a dog.  That didn’t work.  What if it didn’t start to rain until they were up to sacrificing children?  After all, human sacrifice worked for the Aztecs and Mayans, right?  So maybe, as the holy man was lifting the still-beating heart of the murdered child from his lifeless body, it starts to rain… what are they going to do next year?  Start with the frog marriage or jump straight to the heart-rending carnage?  That’s the problem when you start with superstition and ignore rationality.

These people need to realize that marrying all the frogs in the world won’t make it rain, frog matrmony has nothing whatsoever to do with weather dynamics.  This isn’t really aimed at the people of India, I’m not suggesting that they’re going to go bad one day and start hacking up people with axes, just that it’s the same kind of primitive superstitious nonsense that would lead a people to marry frogs that could, conceivably, lead to them doing worse to innocent people.  That’s the danger and I don’t think it’s all that farfetched for people who have demonstrated a distinct inability to separate fantasy from reality.

This is likely not a fair review, it’s certainly not the kind of movie I’d ever sit down and watch of my own volition, but those wonderful folks over at Rifftrax happened to do this movie and as I see everything the Rifftrax people do, this was one that I ended up sitting down to watch.

This is probably the worst movie I’ve seen in recent memory.  I don’t say that because of content, although that’s bad too, I don’t say it because of genre, I say it because there simply are no redeeming characteristics to this movie whatsoever.  Whoever funded The Room ought to have their wallet confiscated, obviously they’re too damn stupid to handle money on their own.  Honestly, this thing makes Harry Potter slash fanfic look like high art.

Let me give you a rundown of this slow-motion disaster.  It stars Tommy Wiseau, who also directs it, wrote it, produced it… I think you get the picture.  Wiseau plays Johnny, a long-haired, nondescript-European-type with a horrible accent and absolutely no acting ability whatsoever, who is preparing for his wedding to Lisa, who he endlessly describes as “beautiful and sexy”.  But Lisa is a shallow bitch beyond all hope of redemption, she’s decided that even though Johnny is financially stable, absolutely devoted and apparently a saint who when he’s not supporting troubled neighborhood kids, is probably making Mother Teresa look like a piker, she wants more out of life.  Lisa’s mother is a complete sleeze who wants Lisa to marry Johnny anyhow, even if she doesn’t love him, just so she can have all the finer things in life.  So she starts sleeping with Johnny’s best friend Mark, who has a problem with it for about 10 seconds, then hops into bed with her.  Everyone knows, I mean everyone, it’s painfully obvious to everyone but Johnny, who can’t imagine that Lisa isn’t being true to him, after all, she’s so “beautiful and sexy”.

In the end, Johnny shoots himself.  The audience cheers.  At least we don’t have to figure out what the hell he’s saying anymore.

Bad points of this movie… um… all of them?  Seriously, I can’t think of anything good except maybe the end credits.  Some of the really, really bad things are the numerous soft-core porn sex scenes where we get to see entirely too much of Tommy Wiseau’s naked body.  The movie was billed as a “dark comedy” but the darkness is so ineptly done and overblown and the comedy isn’t in the script, it’s the fact that everyone laughs at the script, that “dark comedy” takes on an entirely new meaning.  The reality is, this thing makes some of the crap you see on YouTube look good.  Tommy Wiseau didn’t have a clue what he was doing and it shows.  He filmed in both 35mm and high-definition video, but because he didn’t know the difference between the two formats, he used the same camera mounts for both.  The movie has a total of 3 sets but most of it takes place in one, which explains why they called it The Room, that’s all they could afford on the budget.

Now I know I said the acting was bad, but I mean really, really, really, really bad.  None of the people in this movie have ever had an acting lesson in their lives and it’s painfully obvious.  There’s no delivery to be had here, it’s people reading words off a page very badly.  I suppose Wiseau might be the worst, but only because his accent makes him so hard to understand much of the time.  I might even forgive him slightly, I guess it’s analogous to a non-Russian speaker trying to act through a script in Russian that they’ve only learned phoenetically and don’t really comprehend.

The funny thing is that Wiseau was completely blindsided by the horrible reviews his movie got.  When the critics soundly and well-deservedly thrashed his magnum-crapus, he pulled a Pee-Wee Herman and adopted a “I meant to do that!” attitude.  Screenwriter Michael Rousselet says this of the film: “People are tired of paying money to see crap from Hollywood. With The Room, they can pay for crap, knowing full well it is crap.”  This film has become somewhat of a cult classic along the likes of the Rocky Horror Picture Show where fans dress as the characters, attend midnight shows, throw spoons and footballs around the theater and generally make fun of it.  Wiseau sometimes attends these midnight movies and answers questions.  I bet he still doesn’t understand that they’re all making fun of him.

If you’re going to watch this, watch it with the Rifftrax, don’t attempt to watch it unaltered.  It’ll make your brain dribble out your ears and make you claw your eyes out.  It really is that bad.

(0.1/5)

Every once in a while, I’ll respond to a caller on The Atheist Experience.  It’s not that I think Matt Dillahunty has done a bad job, in fact I am almost always impressed with the work he’s done, but it’s often easier to sit back and take a few minutes and digest what a caller is trying to say before formulating a response, a luxury that the host of AE really don’t have.

The last caller of the day on their 6/28/09 show, starting at about 1:15, was a theist named John who, as Matt very correctly pointed out, didn’t have a clue whatsoever what ‘rational’ means, nor how to construct a rational, logical argument.  He kept insisting that there must be a god, put in lower case because the caller didn’t seem to embrace any particular religion, and then proceeded to heap a lot of unwarranted assumptions on the claim and couldn’t imagine why everyone was getting so upset with him.

Here’s why:

He starts off saying that the reason people believe in a god isn’t necessarily because they want something out of it, but because they “feel” that there’s something there.  That’s blatantly untrue.  Don Baker was entirely correct when he said that most theists want to go somewhere after they die, they want to feel part of a community, etc. but he didn’t go far enough.  Humans are inherently pattern-seeking creatures, we don’t like not knowing the answer to things.  When we are faced with a question that currently has no answer, it is common for humans to “invent” an answer, even as a placeholder, rather than say we just don’t know.  The problem comes in when long-held “invented” answers start to take on tradition and a life of their own in society so that it doesn’t matter anymore whether the answer is true or not, the “invented” answer means more to believers than truth.  This is exactly what has happened with many long-held religious answers, people have assigned them an importance in their minds that goes beyond the fact that many of these answers are demonstrably wrong.  They simply no longer care, they have an emotional attachment that overrides logic and reason.  Had that been pointed out at the beginning, it would have derailed a huge number of the coming rambling disaster.

Then he leaps into his first massive logical problem and it’s another opportunity lost to put a stop to this, but it’s largely missed or at least not pursued as far as it ought to have been.  John says that he’s convinced that something could not have come from nothing and therefore, that requires that a god created the universe.  So John, where did your god come from?  If something, in this case god, could not have come from nothing, then you ought not have a god at all.  If you want to assert that your god gets special dispensation and has always existed, then why can’t we say the same of the universe and skip your invented middleman?  Occam’s Razor would seem to necessitate exactly that.  Matt mentions it in passing but doesn’t pursue it and it’s immediately forgotten.  John then goes on to assign characteristics to this invented god and entirely freaks out when Matt very correctly calls him on it.  However, Matt doesn’t go back nearly far enough.  From the get-go, John seems to assign intellience to his god, that’s certainly not proven.  There’s no reason to think that even if there was a god, for the sake of argument, that this god must have been intelligent or must have created this universe on purpose.  It’s entirely possible, again for the same of argument, that whatever creative agent might have existed could have been entirely non-sentient and knocked over a beaker in some cosmic lab somewhere that spawned our universe.  John doesn’t stop there though, he continues to assert that this god must be benevolent and care about his creation.  Why?  There’s no logical path one can follow which would lead one to that conclusion.  Even if we accept for the moment that this initial agent was intelligent and created the universe on purpose, there’s no reason to assume that he continues to care about us at all, or ever did.  Our universe might be one of millions of failed experiments that were tossed into the universal dustbin and forgotten about.  Or, to follow another line of reasoning, there’s no reason why we should assume this god is still alive, it’s entirely possible that it created our universe, maybe even cared about it, and then dropped dead millenia before mankind ever evolved on this insignificant rock.  Making any claim whatsoever about the characteristics of an unsupported deity is entirely idiotic on the face of it, it’s like explaining what Bigfoot’s favorite music is or the Loch Ness Monster’s favorite food.  It’s not even speculation, it’s wild fantasy run amuck.

Unfortunately, then he goes leaping into “science will never be able to prove anything about spirituality”.  That may be true, simply because there’s no reason to think that spirituality is anything but a made-up fantasy.  Spirituality is a buzz-word for self-delusion, nothing more.  Science can deal with anything which has actual existence in the factual universe.  It might not be able to do so right this second, but if history is any guide, eventually it will be able to.  There was a time when we had no way of proving black holes were real, but they were very clearly demonstrated in Einstein’s theories.  If Einstein was right, they ought to exist.  It was more than 50 years later that we actually found evidence which showed they were real all along.  Likewise, the fact that we couldn’t detect sub-atomic particles until very recently in our history doesn’t mean they only started to exist once we came up with the first test.  At best, John can only logically say that we have not yet proven anything about spirituality, but that presents it’s own problems.  If we cannot demonstrate anything about spirituality, then how can we say that it’s real?  There are no testable models which demonstrate it, even if we cannot perform the tests today, there isn’t anything remotely predictive which would lead us to think that “spirituality” is some factually existent thing in our universe, it’s just an assertion, and an entirely bald assertion at that, made by people who want to invent a wholly new reality to suit their illogical belief systems.

Ultimately, John’s failure is one of imagination.  He says he looks at all the options, but as Matt points out, he doesn’t have a clue what all the options are.  He can only state, without proof, that he’s got them all and ignore any that don’t fit into his perfect little worldview.  I pointed out a number of options above that I’m sure he hasn’t considered, nor would he ever consider, which has led him to a faulty conclusion.  It’s one part fallacy from ignorance and one part fallacy of the false dilemma rolled into one.  He’s come up with a belief that makes him comfortable and then bamboozled himself into thinking it’s the only belief that makes any sense, he throws a fit when Matt points out that he has no logical, rational, evidentially-based reason whatsoever to think any of the things he’s asserting.  In the end, he gets hung up on because it’s like talking to a brick wall.  He’s convinced himself he can’t be wrong, therefore he’s unwilling to shut the hell up and listen to anyone who doesn’t roll over and take him at his word.

That’s really where most theists fail, they don’t care about reality, they care about how it makes them feel.  They care about how happy it makes them.  They care about the emotional impact of a position, not the truth value.  John, do us all a favor and go get yourself a good, basic education and come on back when you learn that reality, not your feelings about reality, is what counts.  That’s why these people are so frustrating and ultimately why they’re so pointless to talk to, they cannot separate what is from how it feels.

And that’s downright pathetic.

It’s been a little while since I’ve reviewed a j-drama and after the long series of posts over the last week, I thought we were due.  It seems to be feast or famine when looking for a new j-drama, but now I’ve found a few and this is the first one we’ve tried.  As might be expected, it’s very good.

Hancho is a 12-episode police drama about a small police station called Jinnan, just starting out.  It’s got a small but loyal staff under the command of Asumi Tsuyoshi and they struggle to gain the respect of the other police branches who largely look down on them for being so inexperienced.  The series is scheduled to finish up in Japan in early July.

Unlike a lot of the other shows I’ve reviewed lately that have been sort of gimmicky, this is a much more straightforward police drama.  Not that there’s anything wrong with gimmicks, a lot of them are fun, having crazy professors scribbling madly on chalkboards, high school students making declarations that they’ve solved the mystery, but you won’t find any of that here.  What you will find is good police work and a camaraderie between officers that grows with every episode.  Beyond being co-workers, these six detectives are also becoming close friends and learning how to be an effective team.  As such, they go through various trials, learning to trust each other and rely on their teammates and in doing so, gain the respect and admiration of the surrounding police stations one by one.

One other element that I’ve noticed is that many of the cases that they work on have a dramatic emotional element, it’s not just catching bad guys and putting them in jail, the majority of the criminals are a myriad shade of gray, there’s no question that what they do is wrong but often, there are very good reasons why they might have done it and we get to see the Jinnan station cops reactions to having to do their job, even though they might sympathize with the lawbreaker on some level.  It’s rarely a black-and-white case of good cops catching bad criminals, there’s a lot of thought that goes into the motivations behind it.

The acting is excellent, I’m especially appreciating the work done by Tsukaji Muga who plays the often-comedic Suda Saburo, who starts the series as the victim of some unspecified injury that has him hobbling around on crutches for much of the show.  He’s done some excellent work in previous shows that I’ve really enjoyed including Galileo and Densha Otoko.  Suda, while very competent at what he does, gets some of the best funny lines, even though he plays them very straight and unintentionally comedic. The only other familiar face in the cast is Sasaki Kuranosuke, playing chief clerk Asumi, who was also in the highly recommended series Triangle earlier this year.

If you’re a fan of police drama, and I don’t mean crap like CSI, I mean actual cops going out and solving cases with their wits and insight, this is definitely one to look into.

(4.5/5)