I went to a dress up Halloween costume party last night. Just about 30 years ago two friends and I dressed up as “Pigs In Space”. I don’t think I’ve been to a costume party since then. (We looked great then but I don’t have the pictures handy, though they do exist.)
This year, I didn’t have the funds for a costume until payday, which, was yesterday. And yesterday I had to work. So, after five, I went looking for a scary costume.
Lately it seems that the most frightening person you can hear of from some people is Charles Darwin. In two hours I had him.
At least, I did the best I could.
It was fun. Crystal and Randy did up their house and party with an amazing array of scary foods, movies and costumed people. Also there was a sufficient amount of liquor.
So here we have people, good hard working Americans, who pay their premiums, get sick, go bankrupt … and when they get sick again do they just die because they can’t afford care?
Who are we trying to protect? Right now, it seems all the little guys are crying “No Socialism” and protecting the insurance companies.
The insurance companies, are protecting the insurance companies.
The Congress is protecting the insurance compannies – I just learned that the Insurance Compnaies have an antitrust exemption!
Who’s protecting Mrs Bankupt? We need to protect the people not the businesses. Who is the government for after all?
I wasn’t a huge fan of C.C. Sabathia. I preferred A.J. Burnett. Turns out I got both. Turns out Brian Cashman had a better opinion of Sabathia than I had.
But I’m on board now. As I sit here watching the bottom of the first inning of this 2009 World Series I’m a huge C.C. Sabathia fan. I think he’s a great team mate and a clutch pitcher. He’s got his work cut out for him against a Phillies team with a lot of really fine hitters.
ALBANY — Deteriorating economic factors have propelled New York State’s projected budget deficit to $4.1 billion, according to the state’s comptroller, who warned on Wednesday that state leaders needed to do more to address an increasingly dire situation.
[NY Sate comptroller] Mr. DiNapoli’s bleak assessment came a day before Gov. David A. Paterson … called for budget cuts to close the deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends in March.
MEANWHILE …
Goldman Sachs, which has paid back its bailout money, has said it earmarked $16.7 billion for compensation so far this year, more than $500,000 per employee. Citigroup is paying $5.3 billion in bonuses to its employees and Bank of America $3.3 billion.
I have a solution. Make up the budget deficit for NY State (Which was most badly hurt by the Wall Steet mess) and then you can keep the rest!
Maurice Sendak turned his favorite book, a book he wrote which won the Caldecott Medal for best children’s book, over to an MTV video director who had also directed “Being John Malkovich”!
That took some faith.
And Sendak’s confidence was well placed. In an interview for NPR Director Jonze related that Sendak encouraged Jonze to follow his own vision.
And the visuals were spectacular!
Sendak wrote a charming book about a boy sent to bed without his supper for being a “Wild Thing”. In his room the world changes and he becomes the wildest thing of all. The drawings in the book are uniquely Sendak and are important to the feel of the book.
The look of the movie is spot on. So the feel of the movie is spot on. In that same interview Jonze stated that he knew he had the feel for the movie when he realized how he would expand the book. For a book with a few sentences in total, had to be expanded. He decided that the place where the wild things are, and the wild things themselves were all about emotion.
Now just a few sentences is the first hurdle. The second hurdle is to not recapitulate the book or even to narrate it. The third hurdle is, of course, to keep true to the book.
For a classic children’s book with unique and classic drawings, the style of the movie must look like the book. This one does.
But more than that it “feels” like the book and that’s where Jonze wins! And he wins with sophistication and subtlety. And there’s a lot of bouncing in “Where The Wild Things Are” so of course the three year olds like it. But an older, more jaundiced eye may be more critical.
“Where The Wild Things Are” wins over the old who read it to kids in their day, and the kids to whom they read it (over and over). It wins with feeling.
The story becomes a tale of emotion. Of life’s great joys and little joys, of little disappointments and some larger disappointments. It is a story of love and loss “That was my favorite arm!”, and of working through the pain and fun of childhood. Jonze gives us that. And he gives us that without being sappy, or even moralistic. He gives us sadness and he gives us joy. A truly sophisticated mix for a bunch of monsters from a kids book.
Max Records as Max is great. He is subtle and available and empathetic and pure joy. Katherine Keener as mom is, well, perfect as the loving, if imperfect mom.
The rest of the movie is Jonze. Jonze said he made three movies. The body movie, the voice movie, and the visual effects movie. James Gandalfini (Carroll), Forest Whittaker(Ira), Chris Cooper(Douglas), Lauren Ambrose(KW), Catharine O’Hara(Judith) and all the rest of the cast AND all of the body actors bring to life a joyful, fretful, wired, worried, happy set of monsters with so much soul and depth that anyone who supposes this movie is for kids alone is going to miss out. Add in a touch of Jim Henson Company and the monsters are born in full dimension!
Watch “Where the Wild Things Are”! Start your own wild rumpus.
I just watched a segment of the Rachel Maddow show where she, civilly and respectfully, tore up the president of American’s For Prosperity (Tim Phillips) by naming some of the sleazy things that he or his organization have been involved in and insisting that people need to know that this organization was founded by the 9th richest man (men) in America [David and Charles Koch] who’s money was inherited and is earned in oil and gas.
It is the classic “astroturf” grassroots organization.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t real passionate small town individuals in this organization, it means they were brought together by the power of a person with a lot of money for a political purpose that serves rich industry.
Can we get back to the FISA court for just a minute?
Excepted From Wikipedia:
“The FISC oversees requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States by federal police agencies (primarily the F.B.I.).
…
Each application for one of these surveillance warrants (called a FISA warrant) is made before an individual judge of the court. Like a grand jury, FISC is not an adversarial court: the federal government is the only party to its proceedings. … When the Attorney General determines that an emergency exists he may authorize the emergency employment of electronic surveillance before obtaining the necessary authorization from the FISA court, after which the Attorney General or his designee must notify a judge of the court not more than 72 hours after the Attorney General authorizes such surveillance.
…
It is also rare for FISA warrant requests to be turned down by the court. Through the end of 2004, 18,761 warrants were granted, while just five were rejected (many sources say four). Fewer than 200 requests had to be modified before being accepted, almost all of them in 2003 and 2004. ”
The FISA bill is up for re-authorization and is being debated in Congress right now. Considering that prosecutors already have three days to set secret surveillance against a citizen before they need to even ask a judge for a warrant, isn’t reasonable to make this part of the law a bit stronger?
From the NY Times of today 10/08/09
“The substituted bill contains some improvements over current law. It augments audit and reporting requirements for warrantless searches using often-abused “national security letters.” And an amendment successfully offered by Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat of Wisconsin, shortens the period that law enforcement agencies may delay in giving notice to subjects of so-called sneak-and-peek searches. Although enacted as part of the USA Patriot Act, the sneak-and-peek authority, which gives government agents extraordinary power to break into people’s homes without telling them, is most often used in drug cases and only rarely in terrorism cases, according to a recent report.
Still, over all, the measure taking shape in the Senate committee is far too weak to restore essential constitutional checks and balances. Mrs. [Diane] Feinstein has suggested, without offering any real evidence, that it was necessary to water down the Leahy bill to avoid interfering with the government’s investigation of the case of Najibullah Zazi.
The issue has never been whether the government should vigorously pursue terrorists; no responsible person is suggesting that. The question is what powers the government really needs and how best to balance them with the rights and liberties on which this nation was founded[empahsis added] . It is hard to see how the Zazi case, or any other terrorism probe, could be hurt by requiring that use of augmented surveillance powers be related in at least a tenuous way to terrorism.”
Sneak and peak?
Its a straight up question. How much of our liberties are we willing to give up for safety from terrorists?
Where are all the freedom TBaggers when it comes to the issue of Invasion of Privacy? Is it ever ok for the government to spy on you without a warrant?
I think we need to, each of us seriously, think about what “freedom” means to us and what we’re willing to let other people have, and how much security we want for ourselves. After we decide how much freedom everybody should have – and these rules better be the same for everyone – then we need to determine what we are willing to give up to get that freedom.
Another thing that distresses me is how few people are even thinking about this!
I did get back to Montezuma last weekend. My apologies to those who may have wanted to go along. The weather was variable. I went Friday too, and came back before I got there.
The camera was distressing. I had a pretty good shot at what I believe was a White Egret, standing right in front of me at Mays Point Pool. I took the shot. The camera produced “Error 99″. Two more attempts produced the same result. In fact I had already gotten that message at least a dozen times before. I checked the documentation and it said “Maybe you need to use your Cannon battery and not that cheap Circuit City imitation!” So I changed it and still I couldn’t get the long lens to focus and I kept getting error 99!
Eventually I gave up, tried the 25mm to 80mm lens with a doubler but it wouldn’t focus either.
So I went with just that short lens and got some far away shots.
Driving up to the winery however I saw a Red Tail away in a field on a telephone pole. No point in shooting him with the short lens, so with one more try the 300mm worked! Closer yet to the Montezuma Winery I saw a young Red Tail on a wire at the side of the road. Yes I tried the long lens one more time. Again it worked. I don’t know what made it work, or what made it not work. I was using an ISO of 1600 and tried all kinds of settings including the basic setting, the “P” setting on manual and the “Sports” setting and the “M” setting on manual when it didn’t work.
This time I was back on “P” where I usually shoot, and with a fast shutter speed and Viola’ it worked! {I think I’ll name my camera Viola’ because she’s always surprising me. Though I’d really rather she were reliable} And yes, I cleaned the sensor. Three times actually.
So here is the result of my efforts on a perfectly beautiful fall day in My New York:
Maurice Sendak turned his favorite book, a book he wrote which won the Caldecott Medal for best children’s book, over to an MTV video director who had also directed “Being John Malkovich”!
