I haven’t seen Borat yet but I’ve read over a dozen reviews of the movie, which makes me superbly appropriate to post a few comments about it.
1. The movie’s website is a work of genius. The site looks exactly like what you might expect from the Ministry of Information of Kazakhstan but, moreover, it looks like the best of what I’ve called, for a few years now, “dirty design.” The site, with its poorly rendered typefaces, flying flag, discombulated “controls” on the movie, flashing blue text, missing images, non-matching photos, bad grammar, and poor line breaks is a case study in web design done in the 1996 year of internet. Further, the HTML code sitting behind the site is equally bad and wonderful.
2. While I appreciate that no venal stone is left unturned and the film is non-stop funny-funny, I’m not sure what the true underlying politics are. (My semiotic theory studies are old and rotten at this point.) On the one hand, Borat could be seen as a tall-tale deriviative of Mr. Bush and his friends and colleagues. A confident boor and a collegial misanthropist, Borat could be said to represent the worst tendencies of the current Administration, the fierce inanity that directed the country to go to war because of hyped pretenses. Here, the sendup is aligned with the left, as Borat dismantles the monopoly of stupidity we have witnessed. On the other hand, Borat could be seen as a highly reactionary impulse, a schmuck who can be likened to someone in contemporary blackface that seems to think that insulting minorities (and everyone is a minority) is a right. By taking on the disguise of a less recognized Caucasian (and therefore legitimate) culture, Borat can smile at the inherent divisions created by our clouded social vision. In this case, he could be seen as a manly return of the repressed, a social revulsion by those in power who largely enjoy the class, religious, and ethnic divisions we experience daily.
3. The movie has received some criticism by various reviewers because news anchors and journalists have succombed to interviewing Borat in character. I tend to agree that news producers have no excuse for perpetuating free entertainment on their news programs. Their responsibility, unfortunately for them, is to present the news, the reality behind the screen, to the public. By interviewing “Borat,” they do a disservice to the field of journalism.
And so ends review of movie-film Borat in blog by man not seeing yet movie-film.
All posts by Andrew Boardman
Every Breath You Take.
The average adult human breaths 12 to 20 breaths per minute.
The average income of an adult human in the US is about $24,000.
1 year = 525,600 minutes
Therefore, every breath earns an average adult human living in the US about half a penny.
Borat's Politics Are Mine Now.
The funniest thing I’ve seen in months.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8kifHPPjno]
A New American Order
It’s hard to believe, but after all these years in the desert, the Democrats took it (almost all, waiting for Virginia) back today. I’m amazed and excited for the country. It’s obvious and corny but nonetheless true: American democracy is a privileged and imperfect system but it astoundingly tends to work. The country’s health, measured by yesterday’s election, is stronger not because of who got elected but because they were elected and because change is considered a good thing in America.
I think the Democrats should gloat, grin, shake their fists, stick out their tongues, moon the pundits, and sing heroic “We Are the Champion”-type songs. It’s deserved and Howard Dean should get loads of credit. A Muslim was elected, a black candidate was elected in the South, a woman may soon be House Speaker. These things are not trivial. A shout should be shouted.
But then I hope that the Democrats roll up their newly pressed sleeves and get to work. A lot of the world is poor, malnourished and living in fear and there’s not a lot of time to lose.
The Last Drop Drips.
I have to hand it to the editors and publisher (Conde Nast) of the New Yorker. While print journalism is increasingly going “walled garden,” allowing only paid subscribers to access their content, the New Yorker continues to publish its often superb pieces online. I’m a long-time New Yorker subscriber, even here in Winnipeg, and though it’s expensive ($90 per year!), it would take a lot for me to give it up.
In last week’s issue, Michael Specter wrote a frightening article called “The Last Drop: Confronting the possibility of a global catastrophe.” It’s worth in its entirety and reviewing it in detail will not do it justice. But, essentially, Specter makes a provocative yet realistic assessment of the world’s coming shortage of water. We’re in trouble. Here are just a few quotes from the first half of the piece:
There is no standard for how much water a person needs each day, but experts usually put the minimum at fifty litres. The government of India promises (but rarely provides) forty. Most people drink two or three litres—less than it takes to flush a toilet. The rest is typically used for cooking, bathing, and sanitation. Americans consume between four hundred and six hundred litres of water each day, more than any other people on earth. Most Europeans use less than half that.
China has less water than Canada and forty times as many people. With wells draining aquifers far faster than they can be replenished by rain, the water table beneath Beijing has fallen nearly two hundred feet in the past twenty years.
If a large bucket were to represent all the seawater on the planet, and a coffee cup the amount of freshwater frozen in glaciers, only a teaspoon would remain for us to drink.
As people migrate to cities, they invariably start to eat more meat, adding to the pressure on water resources. The amount of water required to feed cattle and to process beef is enormous: it takes a thousand tons of water to grow a ton of grain and fifteen thousand to grow a ton of cow. Thirteen hundred gallons of water go into the production of a single hamburger; a steak requires double that amount.
Frontline's Kiva.
I just saw a 15-minute special on Frontline that blew me away. An organization, based in San Francisco, called Kiva (site is currently overloaded), had the absolutely brilliant idea of allowing individual Americans to provide micro-credit loans to individuals in developing countries who have expanding businesses.
One man who was interviewed on the program said he could, in a small way, be much like the Gates or Rockefeller Founations. If his lendees paid the money back, which they typically do, he could then reinvest the money in another business. With grantees able to reach computers in their communities, “progress reports” are more like personal correspondence as account managers on the ground handle the day-to-day administration.
I saw the effects of Grameen Bank style lending when I was in South Africa ten years ago when i worked at the Rockefeller Foundation. (Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi that founded the Grameen Bank in 1983 just won the Nobel Peace Prize.) The country was just about 4/5 of the way through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings and blacks had finally, finally won some freedoms after apartheid; mostly, those freedoms were political – rarely economic. We visited a slum in Johannesburg that was filled with people, all working away at whatever they could – selling sodas, fixing tires, building houses. One business was raising chickens to provide eggs to the town and there was a largish building housing thousands of chicks; the building was paid for, in part, by micro-credit. I saw, with my own eyes, the power of micro-lending: people gained financial leverage, social clout, self-confidence, better cash flow, and technical skills to manage their funds (all of which, interestingly, I could myself use).
I wish I had invented Kiva. Congratulations, Kiva.
Parallels and Virtual PC for Mac
There’s a ton of information out there about installing Windows on an Intel-based Mac using Parallels Desktop for Mac. Essentially, one loads Parallels on one’s computer, follows the instructions via PDF et voila, Windows on your Mac while you’re running OS X.
There’s very little information out there (actually, none) about what one should do if one has invested previously in Microsoft’s now-unsupported Virtual PC for Mac. A few years ago, I bought Virtual PC so that I could be sure that the sites I was creating looked and worked well on 90% of computers (e.g. Windows). It was a necessary investment.
It turns out that Microsoft, in its semi-finite vision, bundled the Virtual PC application with Windows XP Professional. There’s no way to unbundle them; they live together on a few, unusable, CDs in my office cabinet. I found an old Windows XP install disk to try to load with Parallels and it worked. Except, when I re-booted XP and was asked for my Product Key, the key from my old (legitimate) Virtual PC disk was useless or, at least, not recognized by the new XP just loaded. Microsoft gave me a way to purchase a new key, for USD 200.00, but I already own a valid copy of Windows XP and I don’t want to pay an additional $200.00 for XP. I’m going to call my friends at Microsoft and I’ll see what they can do for me.
Postscript (10/31/06): It turns out that you cannot upgrade from Virtual PC for Mac to a plain old, vanilla version of Windows XP Pro. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with three different Microsoft tech/sales folks, and, alas, that’s the story. For those of you with Virtual PC for Mac and who are now going to use Parallels with Windows XP, you’ll have to buy a new version of XP, straight out. While I understand Microsoft wanting to make money on a newer operating system, the company really should have an upgrade path for semi-dedicated Mac users who are committed to ensuring that Windows, well, works.
Davids.
In Judaism, David is an important, if not critical, figure. David is a warrior, a king of the Jews, a human willing to fight the largest of giants; moreover, he is the precursor to Jesus Christ for Christians and, for Jews, an ancient ancestor of the true messiah, who will arrive one day.
Over the past six months, I’ve become enamored of three musicians named David. All of them are somewhat kindred spirits, men with beards who crawl through the world they love to see grace and dishonesty more clearly. In their songs, this grace takes on the form of infatuation and uncertainty while the dishonest part comes through knowing that grace is a shadow of utter beauty. The modern world does not allow us too often a glimpse of earth’s inherent gloriousness but, when it does, we distrust our own eyes.
David Berman of the Silver Jews is fantastic and untouchable. A founder of the famed band Pavement, I’ve heard that Stephen Malkmus (the lead singer) pretty much quit Pavement after hearing the album Bright Flight in 2001. Check out the awesome Silver Jews’ videos.
My next musical favey Davey is David Bazan. Formerly of Pedro the Lion, his new album, Fewer Moving Parts, is lonely, depressive and glorious. The album contains two, equally great, versions of the same songs: electric and acoustic. He looks like a lunatic at his MySpace page. He’ll be playing New York on November 3. I won’t be there.
The final David is a secret.
New To-Dos.
I’m absolutely fascinated by to-do lists apps, task managers, Getting-Things-Done applications, and online software that help you be productive in less time with less effort, better thought-processes, more focus, stronger results, and more successful completions. I love the idea that you enter a lot of information into a manager and then have it organized and presented to you for production and completion and then repeating tasks and groups of tasks can be repeated to secure one’s place in the workaday world.
None of the ones currently on the market do this. Mostly, they’re just fun to play with. I enter information that looks like this: “This is a task” or “I need to do this” or “I wonder if this thing will crash” and then see how I categorize it. Then I’ll end up being dismayed by a particular oddity of the program and give up on it for six months until there’s a new version out. Repeat as needed. I go back to my large piece of paper that lists all of the most important real tasks I have, such as completing a design, calling a client, or sending a proposal. These are organized in a flat structure (currently there are about 30 tasks that need completion within the next few days). The paper is full. I cross out an item when I’m finished doing it. Then, when that piece of paper no longer feels useful, I re-write the list, which takes me about 5 to 10 minutes of thought and care.
Oh, so what are the new applications I’ve been trying? For what’s it worth, they are the nicely designed Ajax-based Remember the Milk, the wood-styled and potentially useful Midnight Inbox, and the note-taking application aptly called myNotes. The esteemed folks at Omnigroup have publicly announced an application they’re working on called Omnifocus, but there is no release date in sight. I still prefer Paper.
Life Span, Animals.
Two moths beat their wings against our kitchen window today. Our daughter asked if we could let them in. It’s coldish – about 45 degrees right now – and our daughter asked if we could let them in. We could not. It made me wonder what about the life spans of different animals, besides us.
Wikipedia has an entry, listing elephants (80), birds (15), and corals (100,000). Moths, it turns out, live one to two weeks, like most butterflies.