Movie Studio Malpractice!

I am upset to learn that the new Harry Potter movie got bumped from a Christmas to a July release because Dark Knight did such awesome business last July, so therefore all big movies should now be shown in July? I don't really get it, and I am outraged. The Harry Potter movies have always been Christmas movies, even as they've gotten darker and darker. The new one will seem silly in July. Dark Knight worked in July because it's a hot, dark movie. This then led to my new theory of cinema, which is that all movies can be placed on three orthogonal axes: light-dark, hot-cold, and wet-dry. I wanted to make a 3D scatterplot to illustrate this theory, but Excel doesn't let you do that. Instead, here is a scatterplot of movies with Wet and Dry collapsed - you will have to squint your eyes and pretend you can see that dimension. Click on the pic for legible titles.

Before you die, you see...

...a couple of things! Here are some things that are like The Ring, in that my life has been ruined by them and now I must show them to you. First up, the Gray Lady's long-running, soul-sucking series, Modern Love. This one is about how a lady doesn't like to have sex with her husband. I have no problem with people whose sex drive is low. I've had to watch videos in therapy class about how to help people whose sex lives are on the fritz (answer: have your man grow an awesome mustache, stop having penetrative intercourse be the focus of your sex life, engage in "sensate focus"). What I object to is this attitude that not wanting to have sex when you're married to someone is actually, you know, really freeing and awesome and everyone should try it. Not wanting to have sex ever, for the rest of your life, is like not having a left arm. It's not the end of the world, but don't try to convince me that it's really actually pretty awesome, that instead of thinking about sex I should really try scouring flea markets for pieces of glass that I can use in my new hobby, making stained glass windows, which is actually way better than sex. Seriously, that's the argument. Ugh, where do they find these people?

Here is a second thing that has ruined my life: Vector TD. It only ruins your life for a few days before it gets so ridiculously hard that it's not addictive any more (wtf, no fucking left turn? So hard!!!!!). Also I'm way more prone to video game addiction than most people, so this may not have any influence on you at all. Why am I so video game addiction prone, it is the lamest of all addictions. I think it's from my mom, who is not allowed to do jigsaw puzzles because when we were kids she would get so engrossed that she would forget to make dinner. We would always start the puzzle and then get frustrated and we'd be like "Mom, come help!" and then she would take over and not stop for hours and we'd wake up the next morning and she'd be in her bathrobe doing the puzzle again.

In any event, I like Vector TD because although it seems like it is about lasers and missiles and whatnot, it is actually about what a fucking force of nature compound interest is. The trick is to abstain from buying fancy weapons and amass a small kitty of loot towards the start of the game and then when you win a bonus, never pick increased fire power or weapon range, instead always increase the interest rate that you earn on your money. Every round of the game is like a financial quarter where interest earned is compounded back to the principal. If you play your cards right, you will be so fucking rich towards the end of the game that you can basically put missiles onto lasers inside of bombs. If you fritter away your principal at the start of the game on shiny new weapons, then you will end up destitute and the aliens will destroy you. This is a valuable lesson for kids to learn, I feel. Seriously, if you could go into debt and they had like little alien payday lenders who would engage in predatory lending and then repossess the weapons you already had, this would be some good edutainment.

Do public school kids spend a lot of time learning about compound interest? Man, they hammered that shit home in private school. They were like, don't tell anyone, but this is how rich people stay so fucking rich. The word problems were all about Granville Estinghouse IV being unable to pay off his gambling debts because his grandfather had set up a spendthrift trust which restrained the alienation of the interest, and then he's approached by Moshe Ratfinkelstein and offered a loan at usurious rates and what should he do, etc. Haha, kidding! We did learn about the perils of dipping into principal, though. Take home message: if you have any spare cash at all and you are young and you haven't started an IRA, seriously, start an IRA.

Jesus is the reason for the season

Adrian: I think I found you a Christmas present, but I'm worried it's not appropriate.
Me: Not appropriate? What is it, porn?
Adrian: No! Yes.
Me: But I love porn.
Adrian: It's dog porn.
Me: Like dogs and humans?
Adrian: No, dogs and dogs.
Me: Dogs humping dogs isn't porn, it's America's Funniest Home Videos.
Adrian: It's dogs humping dogs, but set to techno.
Me: (silence, mind appropriately blown).

I still don't know what Adrian meant by "not appropriate". It seems I won't find out 'til Christmas day. However, I did discover that there does in fact exist video of dogs humping away to pounding techno beats, as one would suspect, the internets being what they are. Note that it's NOT dogs humping dogs as the good Lord intended, and therefore is TRFW, too risque for work.

Things that I made that I like.

Our title is after Mindy Kaling's awesome blog, things i bought that i love. For Thanksgiving we went over to Tammy and David's and had a wonderful time. Adrian made a delicious yam casserole with a toasted marshmallow glaze, an Old School dish she entitled Sweet Potato Casserole, Because I Don't Care What's in It. I made Guinness gingerbread cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. Since David is now mad at me about recipes all the time, here is the cake recipe I worked off of (n.b.that I skipped the candied pistachios because ew, and instead substituted diced candied ginger on a subset of cupcakes). Here is a picture of said cupcakes, of which I am unreasonably proud:

More hobo tips

While we're on the topic of having a good time while dirt poor, may I make some drink recommendations? Our picture is of Old Crow bourbon, which is a great bourbon if you really don't have a pot to piss in. A regular 750 ml bottle should run you around 6 or 7 bucks, and you'll have to trust me on this, it's actually not bad. That should be Old Crow's motto - "Bourbon drinkers agree: Old Crow is honestly not bad!". It used to be quite an illustrious brand before prohibition, but eventually hit upon hard times in the sixties. Now it's a bottom shelf whiskey for the Fortune Brands company. But in terms of taste, it's basically just Jim Beam without any advertising budget, and possibly with a little less quality control. What are you, some kind of Little Lord Fauntleroy, with your quality control? Sack up.

If you should manage to mooch a few nickles to rub together, then you might want to consider another relative bargain: Wild Turkey Rye. At 17 bucks per bottle, it should be reserved for special hobo occasions, like a near-miss mauling from a junkyard dog. Rye whiskey is generally a bit more of an acquired taste than bourbon, but this shit is just delicious. Also, rye whiskey was America's most beloved form of whiskey prior to prohibition, so it's what the founding fathers intended you to drink. You wouldn't want to piss George Washington off, would you? Also, Wild Turkey is keeping it real by keeping their proof up over 100, as opposed to the more trendy 80. Yet more reason why this is a good buy for people looking for a convivial time on the cheap! That shit is hot as all get out, though, so I would recommend a generous splash of water or plenty of ice, unless you are a bruiser in which case you can drink it neat. Excellent pairings include soup made from an old boot, and a meaty bone that you fought with a dog for.

Things to do in L.A. during the Second Depression.

One thing that I'm always planning for in the back of my head is how I will survive when I am sent to prison for a crime I did not commit. I am not totally clear on what crime I could plausibly be framed for - embezzlement of research funds, maybe? I do have a habit of keyword-baiting the Echelon system in e-mails and postcards ("How are you? I am fine! I have been funneling monies to the Black Hand! Much love!") that is probably going to get me extraordinary-renditioned at some point. Another possibility is that I will observe someone pulling the old "I'm driving in the parking lane as if I'm going to make a right at this intersection but at the last minute I'm going to try to merge left, thereby cutting to the head of this line of cars who are all waiting patiently to get through this godawful intersection" one too many times and I will lose my shit and actually kill a dude. In any event, one thing that I've made pretty good progress on is having interests and activities that translate well to an incarcerated setting: lifting weights, running, meditating, and reading books. A corollary benefit that I did not realize until recently is that I was also cultivating a set of interests that are well-suited to the current economic situation: i.e. hours of entertainment with minimal investment required up front. In the interests of pulling our country up by its collective bootstraps, I would like to share some of my experiences!

Unfortunately, most of these prison-ready interests are boring to read about. Actually, wait, one exception: weight lifting. I am not going to talk at length about weight lifting, lest I become that guy. But I would like to throw something out there. Ladies, when you are working out, it can sometimes be beneficial to consider the amount of time that you are expending on an exercise relative to the possible benefits that might accrue. I assume that the reason I see the ladies going nuts on the hip adduction and hip abduction machines is because it will make their legs sexy. I can see doing one or two sets on the hip adductor machine (assuming you do high weight and low reps), your adductor group could conceivably flesh out a bit and make your thighs curvier. I do not understand doing 5 sets of 20 reps on the hip abduction machine, unless you do some awesome sport that requires an extraordinary level of endurance in these muscles (professional jumping jacks?). It will not make your legs more sexy. Having massive hip abductors is probably not even possible because those muscles are very flat and relatively tiny, but if it were possible, it would just make you look weird and bulgy. So get off those machines and let people whose physical therapists told them to use them have a shot. Also, ladies, if you are lifting weights and looking around the room and talking with your friends and laughing and smiling while you are lifting, then you are not lifting hard enough to produce any noticeable changes in your muscle physiology and so you are wasting your time and my space. Christ, I've become that guy. I'm sorry. Moving on.

One thing that I've become very enthusiastic about since our economy collapsed is rice and bean burritos. If you buy your rice and beans dry, you can get the fixins for 10-12 burritos with an outlay of less than 20 bucks. I recommend: Mission tortillas, Uncle Ben's brown rice (racist?), Goya frijoles negros (racist?), Tillamook cheddar, and Cholula hot sauce. Salt and pepper to taste. So delicious, and so economical! For bonus points, cook everything on a hot-plate - you can heat the tortilla using the old bent-coat hanger maneuver. Then you can bathe in a wash-basin using only a sponge, you creepy fuck. Who owns a hot plate?

The second enthusiasm of mine that has come to seem prescient in recent months is actually a hand-me-down from my bizarre, WASPy family: walks! My family loves walks, we walk everywhere. We go on vacation to places and we walk around and that's our vacation. I'd rebelled against it for a few years, but now I've fallen back into the fold. I've been going on one-person walks around the Greater Los Angeles area, as well as dragging others along with me. For my group walks I try to keep it to less than 5 miles, but I've been trying to push myself on the solo walks a bit. My last walk was up in oil-company land in the mountains north of the 126; the place was a dead ringer for the opening scenes of There Will Be Blood, except I didn't break my legs and have to crawl back to civilization. It was creepy to be in a place that was totally and utterly empty (it was Sunday, so maybe all the oil workers were home?) save for the creaks and groans of the pumpjacks. It got very, very lonely around mile 7, so I headed back towards civilization before I was tempted to adopt any orphans and raise them as my boy.

For my most recent walk, I decided to go in the opposite direction: humanity overload! I decided to go for a beachfront hike on Saturday, starting in Marina del Rey, going through Venice and Santa Monica, and making it as far up to Malibu as possible without having to hike in the sand, which is miserable. I've always been fascinated by the denizens of Venice and environs - there's a whole underground economy of dudes who don't seem to have a real job but do seem to have a place to sleep and change their clothes and they mostly just hang out and drink beer and get tans and socialize endlessly. I think this probably involves the selling of puka necklaces and weed? Or possibly receiving residual checks for their work with some seminal funk band of the seventies? In any event, I am a little jealous of these dudes because being a grad student is like the opposite of their job. I saw all the things that are always at Venice: tiny tennis, gold dude, streetballers, electric guitar on skates dude, busty ladies of a certain age going all out with the decolletage, personal space-invading dudes who recorded a hip-hop CD that they will sell to you for only $20 and here you can listen on these headphones, etc.

I brought Adrian's camera so as to document this hike, but unfortunately most of the interesting things that I saw were not things but people, and because I am shy I am not able to take pictures of people. So you will have to trust me that this is a fun and economical way to spend your afternoon. But it was! I filled up my Nalgene bottle with ice and lemonade for $1.50 at a Subway, and I got a hot-dog from a vendor for $2, and I was entertained for more than four hours! I did take this picture on the Venice Fishing Pier. I like to think that these two have formed an unlikely friendship!

Who's afraid of light and sound?

To get back to our titular topic (haha, titular) for a moment: migraines are definitely a thing that is weird. Although I am technically a migraineur, I hesitate to identify myself as such because of the relative benignity of my condition: I typically suffer from migraine scotoma (blind spot) followed by aura (broad arcs shimmering with a pattern of variegated ziggurats cycling through the color palette, or rather (since I can almost see through them to the world beyond) brightly hued shadings of my visual scene, so that a crescent of my visual field appears to be shimmering like a piece of quartz held up to the sunlight). These vaguely hallucinatory experiences are followed by photophobia, hyperacusis, and a headache roughly equivalent to awakening on a Sunday morning after having the night before consumed three drinks instead of my more wonted two. That is: no big whoop. Please note that if my writing seems a bit odd at the moment, I'm writing while migraining, which is leading to a few word-finding difficulties - for instance, is there a more felicitous phrase for my meaning than "no big whoop"? If there is, my neural networks are experiencing a temporary slowdown in services at several key nodes, leading to a commensurate degradation of the quality of information culled from my synaptic fields - a bit like when that YouTube video of Christopher Hitchens won't load, and each refresh of the page leads only to additional input from the YouTube commenters - but inside my brain.

A brief aside: a pet peeve of mine about journalistic portrayals of cognitive neuroscience (all cognitive neuroscientists have a lot of pet peeves about journalistic portrayals of their field, it's part of the job description) is when journalists express amazement at a scientists contention that this cutting edge new treatment or that traumatic experience or whatever can "literally re-wire the brain". First of all, probably as a journalist you should learn the difference between things that are literally true and metaphorically true, but that's not crucial here. More importantly, for those who didn't take psychology or neuroscience in college, here is how the brain works: you have cells in your brain called neurons. A big part of the job description of neurons is to communicate with other neurons. Neurons communicate at spaces called synapses. These synapses change in various complicated ways so that neurons communicate more or less with certain other neurons. This changing of synaptic strength is almost certainly a major component to the formation of memories. If you want to use the metaphor of "rewiring your brain" to describe changes in synaptic strengths, then every time you park your car in a new location and manage to remember approximately where it was, you have successfully rewired your brain. Congratulations. It's not that big a deal.

In any event, I hesitate to identify myself as a migraineur because of the tepidity of my headache - true migraine sufferers tend to guard their membership ranks somewhat jealously. Those at the innermost circle of this cabal require that their surroundings be dimly lit at all times, and boast of losing entire weeks to a particularly vicious cluster of attacks. These folks are understandably perturbed when the hoi polloi use the word migraine to describe a bad headache that they had one time. In short: if you've never spent all day puking and hiding in bed, you probably shouldn't front. Although, to be honest, this one I'm having at the moment is shaping up to be worse than usual: I'm definitely feeling nauseous right now, which is not typical for me.

But speaking of neural short circuits, when thinking of the migraine cabal I cannot help but be reminded of a brief enthusiasm that swept my high school (remember: all boys, predominantly white, blazers and ties and Anglophilia) at some point in the mid-nineties for throwing the frat sign of the Omega Psi Phis, a historically black fraternity - arms up in a U shape, wrists bent to form the seriphs of the Ω. There were so many brief fads that swept through my school that left me utterly perplexed, but looking back on this one, I have to wonder: what the fuck? That was so inexplicable. The general interaction went something like this: one (white) kid would throw the sign, and another (white) kid would guffaw appreciatively but then caution that you'd better not let any Omegas see you do that. I mean, what? Were there were black college students hiding in odd corners around our school, waiting for the opportunity to give some white ninth graders a beat down so as to avoid any dilution of their frat's brand? So confusing. But I digress.

So there are a number of things about migraines that are weird. Hallucinating is weird. Suddenly realizing that large objects are disappearing into your blind spot is weird. Having a phenominological representation of the way in which your visual conscious experience is draped across the calcarine fissure is a bit unnerving. The crescent that I experienced had the tip of one horn pointed directly into the very center of my visual field, and it swept upwards and to the left, which would mean that the corical spreading depression of my migraine was in the right hemishpere of my brain, constrained to that portion of striate cortex below the calcarine fissure? I think? In any event, it makes you feel physical and not metaphysical, to have your conscious experience be so messy and neurological. For those following along at home, try taking your finger and poking your left eye (through your eyelid!) at the left-most portion of your eye. Do you see a little black dot appear at the right hand side of your visual field? Try poking a little further up and down, and see how the dot goes in the opposite direction. This is happening because your eye actually represents the visual scene upside down and backwards, because the lens of your eye flips the picture before it hits your retina. I don't know why, but even though I've known this on an intellectual level for many years, it still freaks me out a little when I demonstrate it to myself with this trick. Migraines are the same, but worse. They make me feel like my entire existence is very physical and very delicate and very temporary.

In college I used to joke that if you had a mad-scientist type device which, if it were broken, would lead to the end of the entire universe, you would take very good care of that device. You would not toss it about or leave it sitting on the edges of tables or credenzas, for fear that the cosmos would be snuffed out by your carelessness. Most likely you would create an enormous fortified bunker far beneath the earth's surface to protect your device. If, like me, you believe that your own personal universe will end when your brain ceases to function, then why not take similar care with your own delicate neural device? At the very least, I argued, we should all be wearing helmets at all times. This seems like a fairly air-tight argument to me, but my friends would inevitably talk me out of wearing a helmet for the rest of my life, on the grounds that social convention was more important than my desire to protect my own personal universe from destruction. Now I'm thinking that, Barack Obama-like, I must be the change I wish to see in this world. I'm the one that I've been waiting for. If I can convince everyone else to start wearing helmets, then there will be no social convention to hold me back. This blog post is my first attempt to build a critical mass. Next up: perhaps a Facebook group?