Blessed by the Potato

I went into this movie figuring it would be a very juvenile concept comedy (two people get drunk and married in Vegas!) and would be pretty dumb. But my sinuses were full and I just wanted to put something on while I went to the “nothing box”. Now, this opinion was doubtlessly helped by the facts that 1. I had zero expectations for what this film would deliver and 2. I had taken a lot of cold medicine, but I actually liked it.

It was exactly what it was pitched as: a silly situational comedy where two people get hitched and then have to live with each other. There were a few cheap laughs, but they didn’t resort to over-the-top gross-out stuff, it seemed to stay fairly tasteful and funny. And towards the end, it actually turns into a pretty sweet rom-com. It was surprisingly good (not as surprisingly good as Stranger than Fiction or Dan in Real Life turned out to be, but certainly “not bad”, which is way more than I was expecting). I don’t know if I should bother for a movie this predictable, but…

spoiler warning…

… So these two people get married, and win the jackpot in Vegas. Now with $3 million to split they end up going through divorce rather than a quick annulment, because each wants to claim the new marital property. The judge (Dennis Miller) goes on a bit of a rant about how it’s not the gays that are ruining the sanctity of marriage, but people like them who get hitched in Vegas and want out the next week. So he denies the divorce and sentences them to “6 months hard marriage”. If either of them gets caught not making an effort of making the marriage work, they lose their share of the $3 million.

They start off nearly at each other’s throats, playing silly little pranks, and trying to get the other to break the marriage. As can be expected for a rom-com, they start to see each other’s points of view and start falling for each other. Now the point where this movie really started to work for me was right where we can see that they’re actually starting to make it work, and they’re in a hotel room for a getaway, and there’s actually some chemistry, some spark in the air. So as they get undressed for bed there’s this tension, and you figure ok, this is a Hollywood movie, so this is the point where they’re going to sleep together and have a happily ever after. But they don’t — after a meaningful glance, he goes to sleep on the couch, she on the bed. The divorce goes through the next week. Finally free of each other, they then seek each other out again to start over, properly, slowly. I found it to be a very satisfying ending, it seemed a lot more real and meaningful to me than the quick and easy ending that I saw possibly happening in the hotel room.

I thought I sent this to Netbug a while ago, and thought that maybe he’d do a whole blog post thing on it, since it seems like it would be up his alley, but maybe my MSN wasn’t working right at work that day or something… Anyway… It seems that modern CDs have been reducing the dynamic range to make the overall track seem louder, which lessens the overall experience since there’s less highs and lows (less kick to the drums, etc). This has been termed “the loudness war“. Anyway, I thought it made for an interesting read, and also made me wonder if that’s the reason why some audiophiles have such a fondness for vinyl: nothing to do with digitization or the “authenticity” of scratches and pops, but just that tracks mastered for vinyl had better dynamic ranges so the music had more soul.

It is, I’m lead to believe, not terribly difficult to download movies from the internet these days. Like music in the 90’s, piracy threatens to significantly impact the movie industry. And just like then, locking content up and making it more difficult for paying customers to access their content is not going to work. Instead it’s going to be all about pricing: the buck-a-song price point was the magic point where people (ok, people with money — there’s not much you can do about students) would just as soon buy a song legally as go to the trouble of downloading it peer-to-peer. So the same logic should hold true for movies — there’s going to be a price point where people will pay to buy/rent a movie digitally as long as it isn’t stupidly restricted.

I was playing around with my Xbox 360 and saw that there is the ability to download movies from Microsoft Live. 440 “points” for a new release like the Dark Knight (in standard def — high def has a further premium). The “points” system obfuscates the price, by design, but that works out to $6.30 (plus tax). This is for a “rental”, which tells me that there’s going to be some weird limited usage DRM on there, and I can’t say I find that price point the least bit competitive with even movie rental stores, let alone piracy (ok, it might be competitive with Blockbuster which I haven’t been to in over 5 years, but not with the smaller places).

Netflix and Zip.ca are getting closer. You can’t be as spontaneous as with the corner video store or video-on-demand, but you can rent a movie for less than half the cost of the Live service, or depending on the turn-around time for mailing DVDs, perhaps a tenth of that cost. For myself, I’d happily max out my internet connection renting movies to my Xbox if the price point was somewhere closer to $2/movie, assuming the implementation was reasonable. At north of $7 after tax that’s gone right past stupid into crazy; it’s not even pretending to compete with regular rentals now (as much as even people like my parents hate having to return movies, even they would balk at that price) and is somehow equating your Xbox “experience” with going out to the theatre, at least in price.

Well, right on schedule, Rogers is forcing through another egregious price hike, in the face of a recession to boot. They’re increasing the price of most services, including bizarrely enough the price of basic cable, by 5%, much higher than the rate of inflation. Basic, analog cable that they are actively trying to phase out. Yes, I suppose increasing the price might get some people off of it (which is their goal, since digital is a cash cow for them), but it makes these price hikes seem like even more of a kick in the pants, since they haven’t put any work into basic cable for years now (at least with the internet they can claim to “add value” every time they hike the price and cut the cap).

I’m getting really sick of it, especially since I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Unfortunately it looks like we’re stuck with Rogers. I figured I’d be fine cutting the cable and going back to over-the-air TV as long as we got a half dozen stations (CBC, City, CTV, Global, maybe a few american stations if we’re lucky)… but we just borrowed a UHF antenna and only one channel came in — and it was A-channel. Ugh. I found that surprising. Maybe it’s something to do with London (I know in Toronto we can pull in most of those stations without an antenna, the signal is so strong), or maybe it has to do with the fact that we’re in a little bungalow with a series of giant apartment towers blocking any signal to our south side. It feels like we’re completely at Rogers’ mercy here.

That’s made even worse this year by the fact that I’ve just gone over a day without cable service — a whole day without internet! Right there that takes Rogers down to “zero” nines for reliability: 99.7% uptime and getting worse the longer I’m sitting here…

I am continually amazed at the lack of critical thinking in the general population and the media. I know that I’m a scientist and am therefore, you know, a perfect human being, blessed with capabilities mathematical and analytical in addition to citation searchical. Ok, maybe not quite perfect, but I will acknowledge that I perhaps possess a leg up in the critical analysis department due to inclination, training, and experience. Nonetheless, I’m amazed at some of the nonsense that floats around there in the ether.

For instance, the CNW “study” that just. won’t. die. Here’s where the big disconnect between common sense and reason lead to a meme that endures. The “study” in question claimed that a Hummer used less “energy” in its total lifetime (from design to daily driving to disposal) than Prius. That is something that goes against our common sense, kind of makes us sit up and take notice. Now, what’s supposed to happen is that one’s critical thinking and reason is supposed to kick in and say “hey, this really goes against our common sense: how does a vehicle that costs more money and uses more materials up front, and also uses more gas in an ongoing fashion, possibly use less total energy? I should check this out to see if it’s a neat factoid or total bullshit.” Then a quick fact-checking mission demonstrates that this is, in fact, total and complete bullshit and the thing dies there, and anyone who brings it up is mocked as a rube. Instead, the rubes pass it on without questioning it, and the illogic only serves to help draw attention to it. “Wow, Prius sucks, I’ve got to alert the Intertubes!” Whatever happened to extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence?

I can forgive people for reading too much into patterns sometimes. For instance, nearly anyone who bothers to know anything about fuel economy knows that cars (regular cars — not talking hybrids here) are more efficient on the highway than in the city. But they have real trouble believing that driving slower on the highway saves fuel. After all, doesn’t going faster, like on the highway, save gas compared to going slower, like in the city? Ah, you point out, but there’s a point where the car is most efficient: 90 km/h, say. Going faster than that actually uses more gas. They think for a second, and the light goes on behind their eyes “Oh,” they say in a condescending way “I’ve heard that before, that’s why the speed limit was 55 in the States during the energy crisis. But that was for old cars. New cars are much better and can go faster.” Which, I have to admit, is exactly the right thought process, just the wrong result.

Likewise, for about 4 years there, housing was the best investment one could have: better than the stock market, briefly better even than oil. So you could forgive someone for lusting after a house, repeating nonsense like “priced out forever” and “renting is throwing your money away” or “real estate never goes down”. You might even forgive the same person who scoffed at the “payback period” for a hybrid car not running the same calculation for a house. The media didn’t even surprise me with their house porn and almost exclusively positive coverage of the bubble. I was, however, taken aback by the actions of our government, especially by easing the “margin requirement” (down payment) for a house. I know that they’re dumb promise-breaking neocons [ok, I won’t go there just now] and all, but still, someone should have known better. Then, as the real estate slowdown looks to finally be under way, a study comes out about the most over priced markets from UBC… and the markets it says are over-priced are not the ones people would think are over-priced. This is because of how they did their analysis: they included in their valuation a measure of how much a market has gone up since the last cycle: markets that went up more are not considered to be “bubblier”, but rather, more fairly priced in their estimation since they’re counting on further rapid increases. So the cities with the most rapid increase in prices are supposedly the ones that are less overvalued…

I recently chewed into Netbug about a post of his on environmentalism. He was arguing that man couldn’t cause global warming because, as a documentary that aired on BBC4 argued, we can’t compete with the sun. That’s just the sort of thing that’s great at misleading people (even otherwise smart people capable of Googling, like Netbug) — it has just enough ring of truth to it to make you believe it. This documentary makes a number of points which are true, but not important or worse, wrong-headed. Then it sprinkles in some minority opinions, a fair helping of conspiracy theory (global warming is a conspiracy by Maggie Thatcher to break the unions! Scientists take the dirty british money, but not the money of oil companies — no, if they did, they’d be richer and wouldn’t be doing some slumdog documentary film!) and some selective editing to sucker people in. Then Netbug finished off his post with a statement about how stupid the environmentalism movement has gotten with a clip from Penn & Teller about circulating a petition to ban water at some green rally, and all the people who signed it. Of course, that says less about the environmental movement in general, and more about people’s willingness to sign something they didn’t fully read or understand while at a rally.