wolves howling in the distance

Dearest, Most Knowledgeable and Musical Genie,

I am looking for a great set of speakers for my laptop. I basically want to turn the computer into a DJ for a party in a fairly large room, so the sound quality has to be very good. I'd also like to be able to plug in a microphone for announcements. Does any such creature exist?

Thank you for your kind support

I finally figured it out. This is like Orpheus walking Eurydice down the tunnel and bidding her farewell at the River Styx.

Somehow, understanding this makes me feel better.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/07/massachusetts_h_3.html

From the Boston Globe.

The 10-member commission, which includes key legislators and members of Governor Deval Patrick's administration, voted unanimously to largely scrap the current system, in which insurers typically pay doctors and hospitals a negotiated fee for each individual procedure or visit. That arrangement is widely seen as leading to unneeded tests and procedures.

Instead, the group wants private insurers and the state and federal Medicaid program to pay providers a set payment for each patient that covers all that person's care for an entire year and to make the radical shift within five years. Providers would have to work within a predetermined budget, forcing them to better coordinate patients' care, which could improve quality and reduce costs.

I think it is fair to conclude from this that the Massachusetts health reform plan, which in some ways is the model for the plans currently under discussion in Congress, was a failure. Thanks to Mark Ambinder for the pointer.

Maybe the commission's proposal is a step in the right direction. Even if it is, I would suggest that perhaps no expert knows how to design the health care system. We may need a lot of trial and error. Government takeover means that you try something new every few years...maybe. Your choices are limited because entrenched interests preclude many options.

With markets, trial and error takes place continuously. A lot more things get tried. Failure gets weeded out more ruthlessly.

Of course, no one on the Left believes that. The core belief there is that experts know best, and that experts are only thwarted by evil corporations and stupid conservatives. The notion that no expert knows very much, and that the evolution of market processes produces better outcomes, is too threatening to contemplate.

When you're sitting in your living room, it is remarkably hard to judge whether a movie can be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. The cult of a terrible movie is barely the film itself - it's roar of the crowd as they shout insults at the screen and fling cheap props into the air. For me, it ain't RHPS unless I'm dressed in a corset and high heels, trying to navigate my way down a theater aisle slippery with wet rice and mulched newspaper, looking at the psychos making out in the corners and slapping hands with other sweet transvestites.

You do not get this watching it on DVD. No, not even with the special features.

But people want another RHPS. Oh, they've tried, starting with Rocky's sad sister Shock Treatment, then moving to the brief flare of Showgirls razzings, and even Batman and Robin. But there's been one film that has, over the past six years, achieved cult status:

The Room.

The Room, a vanity production of producer/director/lead actor/promoter/overemoter/crazed philosopher Tommy Wiseau was already infamous for having this glowering visage of Tommy Wiseau on a prominent LA billboard, glaring down at traffic with disproportionate eyes, causing some people to check it out. And the film is staggeringly bad from start to finish; while it was initially promoted as a Tennessee Williams-style drama, Tommy Wiseau has later attempted to retcon the awfulness of The Room by saying, "I meant it as a black comedy." Nobody believes him. It is the Citizen Kane of terrible films - to the point where the midnight showings have gotten out of control as people show up to razz it.

This is normally where I'd sharpen my writers' knives and start slicing the movie apart, but the miracle of The Room is that it's impossible to parody. Everything about it, from script to acting to special effects to directing, consists of such bafflingly bad choices that it's almost as if it was directed in some parallel dimension where Ed Wood is worshipped as a god and people have motivations that have been implanted in them by the Fungi from Yuggoth.

I can tell you that it's ostensibly about a love triangle between the overly-trusting Johnny, his scheming fiancee Lisa, and his best friend Mark. Johnny is played by Wiseau, who works out a lot but is still so old his ass is wrinkled - which I know, because in the three Skinemax-style scenes that start off the movie, he is naked in two of them, dropping rose petals on his wife. In fact, his two love scenes (which are punctuated by cheesy 80s-style music that sounds like a South Park parody) are clearly the same scene, cut up into two different shows, and they're about as erotic as watching a dog lick peanut butter off of Roseanne Barr's thighs. There is respite, however, because the camera keeps losing focus, and occasionally it mercifully ducks behind a waterfall, as though even an inanimate lens cannot look upon the naked form of Tommy for too long without finding some form of shield.

Wiseau wants to act well as Tommy, but is hampered by a thick, vaguely Teutonic accent and a complete misunderstanding of how humans react to stimuli. Lisa is summarized best from the Wikipedia article: "She spends much of the film seducing neighbor Mark and fighting with her visiting mother. She claims not to love Johnny anymore, but oscillates between insulting him behind his back and listing his many, many accomplishments and positive traits."

Johnny and Lisa are going to get married "in a month," but though the movie appears to span about three months, they never actually get married. This is actually not a problem, because the script is fuzzier than the camera focus. Characters are brought on screen without introductions, baffling anyone seeing the film for the first time; characters dramatically announce they have cancer, or are addicted to drugs, and then these subplots vanish like Tito Jackson's career. At one point, inexplicably, everyone dresses up in tuxedos and plays football in an alleyway.

When they began to play football, I paused the DVD and said to Gini: "Now. Will something overly dramatic almost happen, or will this turn out to mean nothing at all?" These are the choices you face when watching The Room: either the characters flip out and almost do something nuts, or the movie gets bored and wanders off without explaining a damn thing.

And, of course, there's the acting, which is so terrible but so heartfelt that it feeds this feeling like you're watching a performance from another dimension. The line that everyone seems to react to is when Tommy, baffled by his fiancee's overly-elaborate plans to destroy him, tells her how he's feeling:



Oh, and for no apparent reason, the characters all go up onto a roof periodically, but the roof is actually a poorly-done greenscreen effect. No one knows why Wiseau didn't just use, you know, an actual roof.

The thing about The Room is that like most awful films, it gets pretty boring watching it without a crowd. There are long, dull segments - and for those, you need a crowd of hecklers to provide the entertainment. Alas, I didn't have those. I think one of the reasons that RHPS has lasted this long is that RHPS is a bad film, but a) it's visually fascinating, and b) the songs are actually really catchy. The Room takes place in four locales, and 80% of them are a) the iconic room or b) the greenscreen rooftop, so it gets pretty tedious.

But I don't know. Thing is, after it was done, we did watch the extras, and I spent a lot of time doing Google lookups on Tommy Wiseau, who is such a fascinating character that even in interviews he manages to amaze. (He keeps referring to the reporters by name, wanting so badly to make a connection. In my own way, I adore the man and his unstoppable optimism, and I've never even met him.) There's a certain fascination to this film, and now I want to get about ten people in my living room and see what happens. I'm pretty sure magic would emerge.

That said, is The Room the next Rocky Horror? I don't know. For an $8.99 investment, it's certainly a lot better than most active comedies out there - but I'd need to have a midnight showing in Cleveland before I could make up my mind. So instead, I'll just end in Tommy's description of The Room:

"Keep in mind that I have only 99 minutes to present all the obstacle life. And I think we did. From the pregnancy of a woman, if you really think about it, to cancer, to drugs, to behavior, to betrayal, to relationship between two is better than one, or three is better than two, or vice versa, two is better than three—you know, when Denny says, “I like to watch,” look at kids today. I have nephews myself. And I say, what are you doing here?"

Today:
High 71/Low 56

Tomorrow:
High 73/Low 58


Now THIS is weather I can get behind! :D

Last night, I dreamt Thomas Jefferson had just bought me, liked me quite a bit, and then I was having a three-way with him and his new wife when I rolled over and woke myself up. Unlike most dreams, there was actual sex-stuff happening. cool beans.

Then I dreamt I was visiting old homes in Virginia and the places we were staying kept serving crappy food. I was trying to collect rubber bracelets off the bottom of the pool and Simba was trying on more commie hats.

well, at least the first half of the dream made perfect sense.

Best of all, I slept for over 8 hours. How cool is that??? It was my first time in weeks. Wish I knew what caused it so I could do it again; I'm guessing good company (and exhaustion). I'll take more of the former.

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Original: craschworks - comments

wermadeofCARBON by =roseonthegrey on deviantART

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/07/geoffrey_miller_2.html

One of the best passages in Geoffrey Miller's Spent shows economists at our worst:

My crisis point came at a 1999 conference that I organized in London on the origin of people's economic preferences.  We psychologists thought that economists would enjoy hearing about our preference experiments, so that they could develop more accurate and sophisticated models of human economic behavior.  How wrong we were.  It became clear that economists still followed a "revealed preferences" doctrine, which holds that consumer preferences are psychological abstractions - hidden, hypothetical states that cannot be measured or explained apart from the purchases that they cause.  If preferences are revealed only through purchases, and not through questionnaires, interviews, or focus groups, then it is redundant to study preferences apart from actual consumer spending patterns, to speculate about the origin of preferences, or to conduct market research on preferences for hypothetical products... So the economists gradually drifted away from the conference, leaving the psychologists to nurse our bruised egos, in the company of some strange-looking folks we hadn't seen before.

These folks weren't like the academics at the conference... They were the marketers, and they were hot for psychology.  They actually cared about people's preferences - where they come from, how they worked, and how to profit from them.  I talked for hours with them, and a new world opened up.

This anecdote rings true.  Many - perhaps most - economists would scoff at Miller's search for the origin of preferences.  Why?  Because it's not economics.  And why isn't it economics?  Because we don't do it.

To any psychologists who have encountered this mentality, all I can say is: We're not all like that.  I found Miller's questions immediately fascinating.  I furrowed my brow when I realized that economists usually leave these important questions to a field I know only by name - "marketing."  There's no excuse for it.

After I read this passage, I was eagerly expecting Miller to give economists a primer in marketing.  But the chapter on "what economists should learn from marketing" never comes.  Instead, Miller quickly starts giving marketers a primer in intelligence and personality research!  It's a confusing rhetorical strategy:

Step 1: Tell economists they need to learn about marketing. 

Step 2: Tell us very little about mainstream marketing research. 

Step 3: Tell marketing people that they need to learn more psychology.

Frankly, Miller barely seems more interested in actually listening to marketers than the typical economist.  Still, this would be easy to forgive if Spent showed that intelligence and personality research made mainstream marketing research obsolete.  As I'll soon argue, though, Miller dismisses mainstream marketing far too quickly.  Intelligence and personality research may be able to supplement standard approaches, but they can't credibly replace them.

That's my wife.

For me, it's the happiest place on earth because of how much she enjoys it. Getting to experience her experience of it -- that's priceless.

I can't believe how wonderful my life is. I'm shocked when I think through the illogic of how much good luck I have and how little it results from the things I work for. I mean, it's like I aim at a target, shoot, I believe everything should work just right, I miss the target drastically and manage to knock a tin can into a Rube Goldberg machine that pours me a Latte and sticks $1000 in my pocket. And my life seems to be a maddening continuity of this event happening about three times a week.

I only realized at the end of that paragraph that they made a movie like this once: Forrest Gump.

Which completes the circle, doesn't it? If you ever asked me which movie protagonist I most resemble, you wouldn't expect Forrest Gump to make the top 100, would you? But there it is, a box of freaking chocolates.

Oh, she simultaneously wrote a post about Disneyland and beat me to the punch of using that photo. Hey -- I got that photo in ONE SINGLE SHOT. I mean, she walked up and said - "wait! I want you to get a photo of me jumping in the air", she gave me about one second and jumped, I snapped, and that was the output. The previous and following photos are totally different locations.

Ha. So sometimes I shoot and get exactly what I want. Still, that Forrest Gump insight is frightful in its accuracy.



I told her in a chat message, "You CANNOT use that photo to blog, it's MINE, I'm using it!" and she didn't see the chat, she walked in at that second and handed me her laptop with her post written in it, for me to preview, and I started cursing as I saw the image because I wrote the chat too late.

See why I refuse to buy a Kindle?

To sum up, the publisher of the electronic edition of Orwell's 1984 (yes, that's right), decided it didn't really want the electronic edition to exist anymore. So it pressured Amazon into not only taking the file down and not selling it anymore, but also into deleting it from the Kindles of everyone who'd already purchased it.

I wish I could find the article. I was listening to the Montana news on the radio while driving today and there was mention of a guy who used a running chain saw to fend off a mountain lion attack. No word if he said "Hail to the king, baby" afterwards.

But, come on, how utterly cool a story is that going to be?

"No shit, there I was, cutting wood, when this mountain lion....."

designed (but didn't yet implement) 'obstacle/barriers', one for each function, which would block access without the player having that function. i don't want to do *too* much of it, for the reasons discussed here, but a certain degree is necessary and enhances exploration, particularly in the starting / central areas