Haiku Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Everyone in Jamal’s life sucks

So is everyone in India an asshole?

According to “Slumdog,” they are

Oh, Microsoft

Oh, Microsoft. Of course “The Breakfast Club” came out in 1985, duh! This minor controversy masks how awful this ad is — it’s like search engines are this new thing, like people haven’t been killing time Googling (ha, Googling) meaningless shit and gleaning questionable info off Wikipedia pages for years now. And, while I’m bitching, this whole we’ll-decide-shit-for-you is condescending — like they’re the ones I’d want to make decisions for me.” The real tag should be, “From the people who’ve made using your computer convoluted as fuck — a new convoluted search engine!” Honestly, I haven’t given it a try yet. I’ll write a review someday. But, also, Bing is a dumb name for a search engine.

Haiku Review: Doubt

Fingernail priest touches alter boy

Or at least the nuns think so

Why so certain? So suspicious?

Totalitarian soldier turned artist

Huh. Interesting story. Of course, Tiananmen never happened, so.

Haiku Review: The Girlfriend Experience

Porn star cum mainstream actress

Ambitious hooker loathes economics talk after sex

Beats waiting tables and abstinence

And this is why Kentucky fails

Bring your gun to church day!  What could go wrong? Except for 90-percent of the world deciding that the entire state teems with backwards-ass violent and mindless hicks, what could go wrong?

Sigh Alert: Shop Class as Soulcraft

The first in the series Sigh Alert: Reviews of Book I’ll Get Around to Reading, Someday:

 Matthew Crawford earns a Ph.D. in philosphy and — surprise! — finds the rigors of the underside of academic distasteful. It’s apparently difficult to find steady work teaching philosphy at noted universities. So he gives up, sets up a motorcycle shop and announces that the problem isn’t his choice of an academic pursuit synonymous with saturated applicant pools and fierce competition and scholarly inanity, but the whole gosh darn system. It’s all broken, damn it! He opens a motorcyle repair shop, doing what he loved to do as a kid, and now thinks that a sizable cohort of would-be scholars would be better off in trade schools, fixing cars, wiring electricity and laying bricks. And maybe he’s right. My father-in-law knows how to do all sorts of tasks with his hands, and I’m envious — I’d love to hang drywall or woodwork and such. Sure, fixing cars and building things has brain-power expending components, but you’d have to be a pathetically helpless weenie to not know this. It’s a shame schools are cutting shop classes, as Crawford claims; it’s absolutely true that many of these non-college jobs pay much better than office jobs. But the point of an education isn’t just to find a job. The point of an education is learning how to process information, how to critique it. Motorcycle mechanics don’t need college classes to learn how to fix bikes — but they might need a college education to learn how to engage civically, how to relate and tolerate others, how to adapt, adapt, adapt in society that changes by the decade and, these days, but the year. Otherwise, we’ll have smooth-running motorcycles on roads occupied by seriously clueless people — sort of exactly what we have now. If Crawford’s contention is that office work is menial and degrading, so why not just work with your hands, then he’s missing a big fact of existence that makes me take him less seriously: Most jobs suck, at least sometimes. I bet if you ask 100 motorcycle mechanics — not the ones who own shops like Crawford — they’d tell you their job sucks sometimes.

J.J. Abrams hates ‘Super Mario Bros. 2′

So did I, when I was like 8. I didn’t like that the characters were entirely different (it’s a long story) and that the game was just really fucking hard. It’s sort of like how I didn’t like “Star Trek,” because the Kirk character was so different — that is, so douchy — and because the logic behind the story was just really fucking stupid. Then again, years after first playing and failing at “Mario 2,” I finally got to the end screen and decided that it wasn’t so bad after all — in fact, it may be my favorite Mario game on NES. It was challenging, colorful and a courageous and complete rethinking of its predecessor; it was Talking Heads Plus Eno, a good thing that made  itself into a great thing. I was a brand loyalist when I was a kid — I liked Nintendo, not Sega; Marvel, not DC; Nirvana, not Pearl Jam. In college, I was The Guy Who Loved Coca-Cola. Now, I’m that hipster who loves his iPhones and ridicules  Blackberries. Because there are people like me, the people with the awesome/ful responsibility of protecting these brands have to be utterly careful that they don’t dilute their precious through unwise tinkering that puts off the loyalists. Without the loyalists, what’s left? Fleeting moments of hype, followed by eternal obscurity. (See: “X-Men” film franchise.) The loyalist can be wrong, per the “Mario 2″ example. But, the difference was that “Mario 2″ was a quality game that just didn’t adhere to aesthetic expectations. J.J. Abram’s “Star Trek,” aesthetically, is brilliant. A total upgrade on all “Trek” movies — but the quality that might someday win over Trekkies is missing. That is, a story that respects the mystique of the characters and also the intellect of the loyal fans.

Letterman vs. O’Brien

Interesting thought: Do David Letterman and Conan O’Brien have the same comedic sensibilities? Perhaps, but Letterman is a bit more cutting, O’Brien a bit more absurd. I’ve always preferred O’Brien, but more than anything, my opinion is based on a profound distrust of old people generation bias. Still, I’m not convinced O’Brien’s a slam dunk on “The Tonight Show,” especially once Jay Leno hits primetime. It’s an answered prayer for oldies: unwitty, lame and subtly bigotted humor, but without conflicting with 11 p.m. bedtimes. Honestly, O’Brien is probably screwed, at least ratings-wise. Let’s agree that, sure, O’Brien and Letterman have similar stylings. O’Brien’s demo is more likely to TiVo, more likely to watch online the next morning. He’ll get a bump for the first few weeks — hell, Katie Couric got a bump — but he’ll trail Letterman by the time Leno’s new show starts. It doesn’t matter how good his show is; old people, like “The Hills,” have a way of asserting themselves just when you thought they’d gone away forever.

Air France Sad

This is aweful and a tad odd, but the first thing I thought of after reading about the missing Air France flight was this stylistic and haunting commercial.