Category: Hobbies & Interests

Other things that interest me besides the “big ticket items”

Back on the Bike

After a trial ride over the weekend, I got back on the bike today and rode into work. The newest reach of the Stevens Creek Trail opened a few weeks ago, and it makes my ride when I choose to take the trail a lot easier, since I can avoid one of the more complicated intersections on the route. Very nice! (I have two other routes I take to work, too, but it’s nice to ride on the trail when it’s convenient. Except for going over the bridge over Central Expressway whose wood-slats are slowly eroding and splintering, but that’s another issue.)

One unusual site was biking past a cul-de-sac road and seeing a large (German Shepherd-sized) dog lying on its back in the middle of the cul-de-sac. I hope it was just lying in the sun and rubbing its back on the pavement, and not that something bad had happened to it, but stopping to investigate didn’t seem advised.

As usual for the first ride of the year, my legs are wobbly and I’ve been ravenously hungry (and trying to resist doing things like gobbling down chocolate-dipped croissants). It’ll take a couple of weeks for my body to adjust to the shock of all this sudden exercise. 🙂

Feels good to get out again, though.

Battlestar Galactica: The End

It seems like we just started watching Battlestar Galactica a few months ago – in fact, it was not quite a year ago – but here we are at the end.

The spoiler-free version is this: The series finale was quite good. It pulled together more of the ongoing plot threads than I’d expected, and featured many of the character, action, and philosophical elements which made the series enjoyable. It was annoying that not everything was revealed – or, at least, not to my satisfaction – but on the whole it was a solid conclusion to an ambitious series and a fond farewell to the characters.

The spoiler-filled review is after the cut.

Continue reading “Battlestar Galactica: The End”

Dollhouse

I’ve never been a fan of Joss Whedon. I don’t particularly dislike him, either, but my exposure to his work has been limited. I never watched Buffy or Angel because by the time it registered that they might be worth watching, I’d finished catching up on several other series and didn’t feel like catching up on yet more series. I watched five episodes of Firefly and hated it (stories boring, setting ridiculous, characters unlikeable). And I’ve never read any of the comic books he’s written.

But on Friday, planning already to watch the new episode of Battlestar Galactica, we decided to watch the first episode of Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse.

The premise is that an agency is able to wipe peoples’ memories, program them with new personas and skills for particular assignments, and then restore them when they come back. The lead character is one such agent, Echo (Eliza Dushku).

As has been mentioned elsewhere (e.g., in the Boston Globe and by Peter David), the series’ basic flaw is: If you need a professional negotiator, or secret agent, or whatever, why not just hire an actual professional rather than someone “programmed” using some fictional technique? It’s a solution looking for a problem. (I’ve heard that Whedon’s original concept was less adventure-oriented and more intended to explore issues of enslavement and control, which makes more sense as a premise. Rumor is that Fox demanded the series be overhauled with their input, which helps explain what we got.)

The interesting thing about the opening episode is really one of story structure: It’s organized to make it as routine as possible. We have the obligatory introduction to the agency and the obligatory non-adventure to show Echo in a “programmed” role. Then we have the takes-only-2/3ds-of-an-episode adventure with some suspense and action. And then a fade to black amidst a few lingering questions that have been raised. So much set-up and plot mechanics get packed into the episode that there’s no room for characterization or depth, so it ended up being quite bland.

A much more effective approach – which itself isn’t original, but would have made the episode more interesting – would have been to start with Echo in the middle of an assignment, and to have us build up an empathy with her character. Have her really focused on where she is now, and only in the final act peel back the layers to show that she’s acting on behalf of the agency, and finally that she’s not even who we think she is, but is a fake persona. Make her real self very different from the one we’ve gotten to know, and we have some stake in the fact that the woman we knew doesn’t really exist. And not only is there less exposition about the agency, but the nature of the agency gets left as an open question, making us want to come back to find out what it’s all about. To be sure, some of this is known to anyone who read about the series before it aired, but I think this approach would have been far more effective in introducing the set-up while making the opening episode intriguing on its own.

So the overall premise is somewhat interesting, but presents some big challenges to keep us invested in the characters going forward. And the opening episode rates only a “meh”. So they’ve got a ways to climb to make me want to come back every Friday.

(The new BSG wasn’t one of their best, either, but then it was a “calm after the storm” following the excitement of the previous few episodes, so I can understand that.)

Our Long National Nightmare is Finally Over

I think the best thing we can say about the Bush presidency is that America survived to see the end of it. Although, looking around at the economic carnage we’re experiencing, it was a pretty close thing, and certainly we didn’t get much help from the administration itself.

Two recessions – this one often called the worst since the Great Depression. Two overseas wars, one of them ill-advised from the outset and largely irrelevant to making the US safer, and both of them quite expensive in both blood and treasure. The utter failure of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. The ongoing gutting of the nation’s schools thanks to projects such as Leave No Child Behind. All adding up to a presidency which seemed to care little (if at all) for ordinary Americans, and was only interested in making a splash and further enriching its already-rich friends.

Has George W. Bush been the worst President in history? Perhaps not, but certainly he’s among the worst. The usual joke is to ask such a character not to let the door hit him on the way out, but honestly I’m okay with the door hitting him.

I’m not as enamored with Barack Obama as many are, although certainly I agree that he has the potential to be a great President. (I don’t think we’ve seen a truly great President since at least Kennedy, maybe Truman.) I hope that people can temper their expectations to account for the fact that his administration has a long way to climb to dig us out of this economic hole before they can really start building on the foundations again. That may lead to some disappointment in the next couple of years. (One almost wonders whether the Bush administration helped engineer the recession to make it that much harder for their successors to get anything done, or undo their disastrous policies. That’s maybe a little too cynical for even me, though.)

Still, the first step on the road back is to throw out the people who brought you to this place and elect someone reasonable. And it looks like we can put up a “Mission Accomplished” banner for that part.

However, the hard part has barely begun.

The Doctor and the King

Pop culture tidbits from teh Intertubes:

First, a two-page spread of all ten Doctors by Kelly Yates, from an upcoming Doctor Who comic book. (via The Beat) Nice idea, but the art isn’t a style I’m into, and something about the figures seems rather off: arms a little long, legs a little short, faces not quite right…

More ridiculously, here’s Warren Ellis, King of the Internet. (via Warren Ellis)

Regarding the Economic Free-Fall

I almost never write about economics: Not my own finances, not anyone else’s, not the economy. I leave that stuff to J.D. But economics is fascinating in many ways, and never more so than these days, given the economic free-fall that many of the world’s economies are undergoing.

A couple of years ago I started getting suspicious about all the subprime lending going on. My own finances are in pretty good shape – I play things very conservatively, mostly out of laziness – but I’m not very comfortable getting an ARM due to the uncertainty it introduces, so it seemed to me that people in riskier financial shape than me were taking out mortgages a lot riskier than ARMs, and that once they reset, they were probably going to default on them. I suspected that once that happened the housing market would take a plunge.

I’m not the only one, as you can see in this YouTube video which is a series of clips from 2006 and 2007 in which Euro Pacific Capital president Peter Schiff repeatedly warns of the oncoming economic crisis, and is scoffed at – sometimes outright laughed at – by other talking heads in the shows. It’s like he was the only person on the shows who was even paying attention. (via BoingBoing.) Joe Nocera has further comments in response to the video here.

(These clips also show what an ass Ben Stein is, but we already knew that.)

If I a little smart for seeing the problems two years ago, honestly I figured that there would be 2 or 3 years of defaults and a housing slump – rather like what happened during the Dot Com Bust – and then things would be back to normal. But it looks like the recession is going to go on much longer and deeper than I’d have imagined. If I was so right, why was I also so wrong?

Because I didn’t really understand the depths of what was going on. But some people had an inkling. Take a look at Michael Lewis’ article at Portfolio.com, “The End” (of Wall Street as we know it). Lewis is a fantastic writer, and he’s in top form in this article, which follows a small group of analysts figuring out how royally screwed up things have become on Wall Street in the last 25 years. Every page is fascinating.

Lewis concludes his article by laying much of the blame for the mess at the feet of a system which has divorced the people financing the risk-taking from the people actually taking the risks. In other words, the people taking the risks aren’t risking their money.

What’s plastered all over Lewis’ article, but not really addressed head-on, is how Wall Street for over two decades has continually come up with new ways to package and repackage and sell their ‘products’, phantasmal constructs which represent real wealth and money, but which are so separated from them that a canny (or even clueness) manager can position them to mean something very different from what they really represent. For example, the class BBB loans in Lewis’ article that gets repackaged as tranches in which a fraction of the loans become rated class AAA. It’s like this famous Sydney Harris cartoon:

Then a Miracle Occurs by Sydney Harris

It’s the miracle of high finance.

While all very clever, not only does it seem at best a delaying tactic – sooner or later you have to come down from the tree and then the tigers are going to eat you – it got to the point where no one really understands how the delaying tactics work. People started to tweak the edges, but had no idea of the ramifications of what they were doing, and worse, they didn’t even know that they didn’t know what they were doing! (I suspect this goes on a lot more than people think in industries with complicated business practices; I wonder how many people who work in managed care in the health industry really understand how it’s supposed to work, never mind how it actually does work?)

I’m generally in favor of regulation of big business, but in this case I wonder whether regulation could even have helped, short of simply prohibiting many of these practices because they were incomprehensible to the regulators. Or maybe if there were regulatory oversight that forced businesses to really understand what they were doing, that might have helped forestall the crisis.

It’s not that I don’t mind companies taking risks, but I think they should understand what the risks they’re taking mean, and the risk-takers should bear the burdens of those risks if they go poorly. Unfortunately I think our society has been set up to minimize the risks to the people who reap most of the rewards of those risks. And that’s a recipe for disaster no matter how you slice it.

(Coming soon: The credit card debacle.)

Barack Obama and the Supreme Court

One thing I’m surprised didn’t get more attention during the Presidential campaign – honestly, I can’t recall it being mentioned more than in passing – is the impact the next President will have on the US Supreme Court. Consider the ages of the Justices now that Barack Obama has been elected:

  • John Paul Stevens, age 88
  • Ruth Bader Ginsberg, age 75
  • Antonin Scalia, age 72
  • Anthony Kennedy, age 72
  • Stephen Breyer, age 70
  • David Souter, age 69
  • Clarence Thomas, age 60
  • Samuel Alito, age 58
  • John Roberts (Chief Justice), age 53

Unfortunately 3 of the 4 more right-wing members of the court are age 60 or under. But I wonder if John Paul Stevens has been waiting for this election to retire, while the other 5 Justices are certainly at the age that they might consider retiring in the next four years the way Sandra Day O’Connor did. And if Obama wins reelection in 2012, well, it’s conceivable that he could end up with 4 or 5 or maybe even 6 appointments.

(Okay, honestly I expect Scalia will remain on the Court until he croaks, but we can hope, can’t we?)

Given the disastrous results of the Reagan and Bush appointments to the Court, it would be wonderful if Obama had the opportunity to transform it back into something more reasonable.

Election Day

I voted this morning. My polling place is 3 blocks from my house, so I always take a nice walk down there in order to vote and enjoy the weather. That one can take a “nice walk” there in early November is a clear sign that I live in the Bay Area and not in Wisconsin any longer. Anyway, there were 5 people in line when I got there, and I ran into both one of my neighbors and one of the guys I play Magic with. I guess we have a fairly quiet district. Or maybe everyone votes after work.

My political leanings are somewhere to the left of the mainstream Democratic party, but I’m not especially enamored with any of our small parties, so I typically vote party-line Democratic. I think Obama will make a pretty good President; the bar isn’t set real high for him to be our best President since LBJ. (I’m not hugely enamored of LBJ, either, but he was a President who did some great things and some awful things, which is still a step up from everyone since, who have generally been mediocre-to-awful.)

Although I voted party-Democratic in the national and state elections, I wasn’t real enthusiastic about doing so. I’ve been disappointed in the Pelosi/Byrd Congress, who haven’t really stood up to the Bushies. I’m not real fond of the California state legislature, either, although to be fair I think California’s state government is basically screwed: Federal mandates and an extremely-difficult-to-manage budget make it practically ungovernable except during boom times. The problems are partly structural (a 2/3 majority vote of the populace is required to raise taxes, and a 2/3 vote of the legislature is required to pass a budget), and partly because I think California is just too big and too diverse to govern at the state level. I think California would be better off if it were split into two states, probably along north/south lines. But that’ll never happen.

We had some interesting state propositions this time around:

  • I voted against the “anti-freedom” propositions, 4 (parental notification of minors seeking abortions) and 8 (outlaw gay marriage). These measures are both just plain evil, rolling back freedoms and rights for many citizens. I think anyone who supports Prop 8 should also have their right to marry revoked – it seems only fair. I suspect 8 will fail, but I’m concerned that 4 will pass.
  • Prop 1 is a bond measure for high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I voted against. I generally oppose bond measures as less efficient than passing new taxes, but I will occasionally vote for a county bond measure with a critical goal in mind. I also don’t think high-speed rail between the two cities will be more than a novelty. Plus, I’m very concerned with what it would do to the rail corridor on the SF peninsula, where I live, which hasn’t been worked out. I don’t know how this one will turn out, though.
  • Prop 5 reduces sentencing for certain nonviolent crimes, while Props 6 and 9 strengthen law enforcement and impose tougher penalties. I think we lock up far too many people (over 1% of the US population is presently incarcerated) with far too little attention paid to rehabilitation, so I voted for 5 and against 6 and 9. (I suspect 5 will fail, 9 will pass, and 6 could go either way.)

County measure B is a tax increase measure to bring BART to San Jose. I’m really on the fence on this one, as I think BART is a good system which is well-run, but which is also very expensive due to poor design at its inception. I like it a lot better than “heavy rail” alternatives than CalTrain, though. But it’s expensive to extend. I ended up voting yes, although I suspect the measure is going to fail.

Anyway, I’ll be watching the results tonight. Five Thirty Eight is currently projecting a 98.9% chance of an Obama victory. One of their more interesting posts recently has been What a McCain Victory Looks Like.

I’m not as excited as some Democrats about an Obama Presidency, mainly because I think the Bushies have left the country in such horrific shape that the next President is going to have some huge hurdles to overcome just to hold things together. If the Bushies hadn’t screwed things up so soundly then I think it would be a much more exciting time. As it is, I’m just hoping things can turn around soon enough that the Democrats don’t lose control of Congress in 2010.

Still, getting the Repugnicans out of the Oval Office is a great first step forward.