Recently, I and my fiancee signed up for a PNC joint account to manage our wedding expenses.  Little did I know I was signing up for the positively worst online banking experience I have ever encountered, perhaps the worst online experience period.  PNC drives new users into something they call “Virtual Wallet”, which is supposed to be clever and hip and fun.  It’s a buggy, busy, clunky mess that obscures more than it reveals.  It is slooooow, even on a big pipe on a new machine.  Since it’s coded in Flash (yippee), it takes down my browser from time to time.  In any event, the Flash doesn’t talk to the enclosing web page, so after fifteen minutes, you get booted for “inactivity” even if you’ve been using the site continuously throughout that time.

When I first wrote this review, PNC rejected it because I dared to mention competitors.  Then they suggested I revise it — but provided no link and no obvious way to do.  The second time, the site froze on my and crashed my browser.  So I’m posting this on my blog as well as on the PNC site, so maybe the word can get out.

Rating: 3 out of 5 (meh)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a Michael Bay film.  That pretty much sums up exactly what the movie is, and you don’t really need to know any more about it.  It’s not a bad film, exactly, and it’s not a good film (definitely).  It’s a film, a Michael Bay film.

Spoilers follow.

Lots of stuff blows up.  (OK, it is a Michael Bay film, so that’s not really a spoiler.)  Interestingly, very little blows up in the first half of the film.  This means that Mr. Bay — to reach his contract-specified density of cordite use — has to really pack the last half, which is a numbing non-stop explosionfest that involves Chicago (for reasons the film never adequately explores, or indeed, mentions).  There is much loud boomage and lots of robots turning into and out of their vehicular disguises, again for little explained reason.  There is a brave assault by the humans, who nonetheless come off looking like ants attacking two children wrestling on a beach.  For most humans, it ends up about as well as it would for the ants.

Shia LaBeouf is, well, Shia LaBeouf.  He seems more or less stuck in the same place.  His Sam Witwicky is far less engaging than in the first movie.  (I did not see Revenge of the Fallen.)  Somewhere along the line, Megan Fox’s Mikaela dumped him, and it’s hard not to sympathize with her.  Sam is self-absorbed and a bit whiny.

Rosie Huntingly-Whitley plays his romantic “interest”, Carly.  Apparently Ms. Huntington-Whitley is a Victoria Secret model.  She is not an actress.  In fact, she is the most robotic character in a movie about robots.  As made clear by the rear-end lingering establishing shot (itself taken from a Victoria Secret commercial, I expect), her primary purpose is eye candy.  She is also of course the romantic MacGuffin (that is, hostage) whose capture “motivates” Sam for some fraction of the movie.  (Because, apparently, he wouldn’t go save the world and all unless he had a direct personal stake in it.)  Finally, she is also there to play a pivotal but silly role in reminding Megatron that he is, in fact, a bad guy and nominal leader of the Decepticons — a realization that leads to him backstabbing the Autobot who back-stabbed Optimus Prime.  This makes Megatron this movie’s Starscream, and he does an even worse job of that than the actual Starscream (who eventually meets exactly the end foreordained for that type of character).

Optimus Prime takes a level in badass for this movie.  I know the character starts out pretty bad-ass, but in this one he becomes pretty dark — very nearly an anti-hero.  For one, he outright lies to his best human buddy Sam, when the latter asks him what his plan is once the Autobots are exiled from Earth (again).  Optimus tells Sam there is no plan, which makes the subsequent destruction of the Autobot’s spaceship all the more emotional.  At least it would, if it wasn’t telegraphed better than Western Union ever could that this is not in fact the end of the Autobots.  They hid in the first stage, you see, and played dead while everyone wept over their destruction.  So, on the one hand, +10 bonus points for the Autobots being genre savvy and realizing the Decepticons would, well, be deceptive and betray them.  On the other hand, -1,000,000 for bald-face lying to the only human who’s ever been totally on their side.  But on the gripping hand, +2,000,000 because said human — that is, Sam Witwicky — was in fact betraying them at that very moment, spying for the bad guy. (That’s the whole MacGuffin/hostage thing mentioned above.)

Anyway, back to Optimus.  He not only straight-up lies to Sam (of whom, remember, Optimus should have no suspicion whatsoever).   Optimus also allows the Decepticons to ravage Chicago, more or less to teach us humans a lesson.  When he eventually decides to intervene, he tells the Autobots “Kill them all”.  He’s talking about the Decepticons but still, that’s cold.  He eventually beats up his mentor Sentinel Prime (who, to be fair, had just betrayed Optimus and all they had ever fought for) and kills him by shooting him in the head with a blaster.  Earlier, after Carly’s improbably reverse-psychology trick, Megatron swoops in and disables Sentinel Prime.  He tells Optimius that the two need each other.  “What would you be without me?” asks Megatron.  “Let’s find out,” replies Optimus — and he rips out Megatron’s spine. Wah??  This is the good guy?

In fact, by the time the movie ends, Optimus is giving off a deeply disturbing psycho vibe — which, in honesty, would be a way cool path to take the next movie: The Autobots have lost their world, been betrayed by their greatest leader, and been thrown off Earth no fewer than three times by the soft bags of meat they’ve decided to ally with.  Who could blame the ‘bots for getting tired of the entire scene?  Maybe it’s time for some Autobot-mandated order here.

By far, the best human is former agent Simmons (played by John Torturo).  Simmons was a surprising breakout character — not only because he’s been transformed (get it?) from an obstructionist bureaucratic man-in-black to an O’Reilly Factor-appealing obscenely wealthy conspiracy-theory author whose wisecracking and over-the-top outrageousness is genuinely funny.  He’s the surprise breakout character in that he is a character, an actual human being who stands out from the mass of fleshy targets that define the rest of the breathing cast.  Also, his assistant Dutch is played equally well by the always-stellar Alan Turdyk, who steals every scene he’s in despite the tremendous dearth of lines.  I was mildly disappointed that Dutch never said, “I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar” but I understand.

I’d describe the climax of the movie but it would really be lost in print.  Plus, it doesn’t really matter.  It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t really follow from what came before, but plot isn’t why you see a Michael Bay movie anyway.  In this case, you have to sit back and let it wash over you.

A final note:  While the special effects were good, the 3D was a complete waste.  Not a single scene benefited from it.  I’ve heard that Mr. Bay wasn’t keen on adding them but his backers insisted.  He should have stuck with his intuition.  One nice side effect, though, is that the technical requirements of 3D forced Mr. Bay to use wider shots than is his wont.  Unlike earlier Transformer movies, in this one you can actually see the Transformers.  It makes a difference and makes them a least little more relatable.

Is this a good movie?  Yes, for certain values of the word “good”.  It’s a decent summer blockbuster; in fact, it might be the quintessential one.  If what you’re looking for is soggy-cardboard thin plot just about barely holding together a string of explosions and fights, you will not be disappointed.  If you want something reaching the higher reasoning centers of your cerebrum, this won’t be it.

Rating: 3 out of 5

I picked up Perdido Street Station because I was looking for a good steampunk novel, especially after Dreadnought, and the reviews were strong. This book was supposed to b amazing, sweeping, and alluring – a detaile new world to explore. After finishing it, I felt the praise was overblown. The world is complex and involved, but the steampunk setting was wildly inconsistent. Though the book starts as hardcore steampunk, it eventually decomposes into low fantasy – all the trappings of industrial magic but no clear concept of what that would mean. Though much of the setting is explicit in using steam, there are “aetheric flows” and, for some reason, literally miles of insulated cabling in a society that seems to have very little electricity. There are zepplins, of course, and steam-driven automatons. But it all seems, well, lazy.

The story is OK but hardly epic. Its initiation and its resolution both depend on astonishing coincidence, of the sort that sinks high school writing. The characters have moments of depth and substance but never really take off. Character threads start and trail off to no resolution. The first part of the book is quite slow. The middle third is well-done and sets up situations and themes that offer much promise. Once the actual action starts, though, it all goes out the window and the plot lurches to its frenetic end a complete mess.

My overriding impressions is that China Meiville bit off way more than he coukd chew, and left us with the partly-masticated glop that was left over.

Being a geek of a certain age, I of course went out to see Tron: Legacy as soon as it opened in the theaters. And being a geek of a certain type, and having listened to Wendy Carlos‘ ethereal soundtrack to the original Tron, I also purchased the soundtrack to this one as soon as it was available. This was my first introduction to Daft Punk, whom (I must admit) I first even heard of when their role was announced to much rejoicing. On receipt of the CD (yes, I still buy physical goods from time to time), I learned that they had worked on the orchestration with Hans Zimmer, a composer whose other cinematic work I do know and enjoy.

I say all this to make clear that I cannot evaluate the album as to its “Daft Punkness”. On my first listen through, I was underwhelmed. Wendy Carlos notwithstanding, I am not much of a fan of techno, and this album is certainly that. But having spent the cash I gave it a few good listens, and then I noticed that I was replaying the music in my head throughout the day. That’s just about the best recommendation you can give an album: it’s something you want to keep listening to. It evokes the movie (which I very much enjoyed) without being dogmatically tied to it. I’ve played these tracks for more than anything I’ve purchased in the past year or so.

That’s not to say the album is perfect. Again, bear in mind that all I know of techno is an outsider’s impression; it’s not my cup of tea. But the soundtrack encapsulates why it’s not my cup of tea. Daft Punk is very good at mood-setting and crafting almost subliminal music cues and then building them up. But this album is too much crescendo and too little climax: Too many tracks simply don’t pay off, dribbling away into subtle but ultimately disappointing whimpers. To be fair, this is a criticism applicable to most movie orchestration; after all, the music is fundamentally infrastructure on which a scene is hung. It’s not supposed to attract your attention and it isn’t telling the story itself. Especially in a visual medium such as movie-making, there tends to be an emphasis on crescendo: The scene wants to build tension which is generally then released abruptly with transition to the next scene. (Certainly the action genre, of which Tron: Legacy is an example, follows this pattern.) So the music builds for the big reveal, and then dashes to the next cue.

All of that said, it is this no-there-there quality of most tracks that I find most dissatisfying about the album. Daft Punk does a nice job with the rising action and are masters of the building overlay, where the same riff is repeated many times, but each repetition adds a new instrument or variation. By the tenth or so cycle, the output is quite complex and rich. But once the end of the scene comes, the payoff is usually just one abrupt transition to a fadeout; and that is unsatisfying, especially when encountered over and over.

Nonetheless the soundtrack worked its way into my brain and I found myself often putting it on when I needed instrumental music in the background. It turns out that this album is far more effective when heard out of the corner of your ear, rather than faced directly head-on. Once I got past the newness of the genre and made peace with the crescendo/climax issue, I was able to appreciate the subtleties. One surprise, for me, was that the bombastic big-picture stuff is not the album’s strengths. There are some quite gentle and quite beautiful pieces to be found, such as “Adagio for Tron” and “Father and Son“. They serve as nice counterpoints to the more driven mood music of the rest of the movie. They also allow the audience to come up for air and find the emotional core of the movie, which is always at risk of being lost among the neon action.

It is fair to say that the album succeeds in capturing (and creating) the mood of its progenitor film. After listening to the album for nearly a month, I went back to re-watch Tron: Legacy in the theater. My familiarity with the music definitely enhanced my experience of the film. Daft Punk does seem to have a cinematic intuition; the music evokes the action, as it should. Despite not knowing the soundtrack, it still did not drown out the film. It lies safely underneath what is happening on screen, the audio substrate but not a distraction, just as it should be. Perhaps the only place where that really fails is during the End of Line Club scenes, wherein Daft Punk appear as digital versions of themselves and their music on this album is closest to the club-thumping techno for which they’ve earned their fame. Maybe I’m just a oldster but this is the least engaging part of the movie and of the soundtrack.

Being versed in the released album also let me notice the musical cues that aren’t to be found on the CD. Clearly there are always artistic choices to be made and decisions to face. I did discover the haunting “Father and Son” interlude, cut from the album but happily available online via the Apple iTunes store. I wonder if the decision was artistic or commercial — perhaps they wanted to tap multiple revenue stream? In any case the omission lessens the official soundtrack. Likewise, there are apparently tracks available on an import CD but not in the States. I’m a big Tron fan but I’m not spending another $40 to get five tracks.

Daft Punk have said that Wendy Carlos was a major influence on their own style, and that comes through. No one would mistake this soundtrack for hers, but then, no one would mistake Tron: Legacy for Tron, so that’s OK. Much like the visuals of the movie, the soundtrack has been updated and evolved. I do wish that, perhaps, they had included just one or two more direct homages (all we get is a brief rendition of the iconic Tron motif by Kevin Flynn) but that is really more nitpicking than anything else.

Final verdict? This album was definitely worth the time to listen and the money to buy. It’s already worked its way into my rotation of instrumental/soundtrack playlists and I expect I’ll be replaying it for a long time.Православни икони

Last night, Annie and I attended a show by Marc Cohn with Suzanna Vega at the Town Hall NYC.

Playlist

• Ghost Train
• Perfect Love
• The Calling (Charlie Christian’s Tune)
• Dance Back From the Grave
• 29 Ways
• Listening to Levon
• My Sanctuary
• Walking in Memphis
• Into the Mystic
• Only Living Boy in New York

We stayed for most of Suzanne Vega’s act.  I don’t really know Ms. Vega’s work so I didn’t capture an accurate playlist and I can’t really comment on her performance.  I was reminded that for me (and I’ll apologize to any Vega fans out there), I like her songs on occasion but couldn’t really listen to a whole album of them.

Marc Cohn’s portion of the show was everything I’d hoped for, though.  (It was a little short for him, but that’s the result of the double-billing.)  I was a bit taken aback by the realization that this month marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Marc Cohn, his debut.  He’s probably getting a little tired of reciting the story about Muriel at the Hollywood.    His band was excellent, including as always the amazing Shane Fontayne on guitar.  I found the playlist interesting, as there were some rarer bits (“My Santuary”, for example) and some missing favorites (such as my personal one, “Dig Down Deep”).  He played surprisingly few from what he jokingly calls his “Greatest Hits album, released first”.

He did two from Listening Booth: 1970.  While I like the album well enough, I am less excited to hear other people’s songs than Cohn’s.  But he put a really nice spin on “Into the Mystic”.

It’s been too long since I’d been to a Marc Cohn show — this past summer, it seemed like he would play a city only after I’d left it — and it was a nice refresher.

Billy Goat Tavern
430 N Michigan Ave., Chicago IL

Billed on several sites as home of “Chicago’s best cheeseburger” and made famous by a skit on early Saturday Night Live (“cheezborger! cheezborger! cheezborger!”).

As part of our very-intermittent plan of sampling “the best of…” in Chicago eateries, Annie and I decided to stop at the original Billy Goat’s Tavern on the way back from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

What can I say?  Meh.  The burger wasn’t bad but it was far from the best I’d ever had.  Heck, it wasn’t even the best I’d ever had in Chicago.  (That goes to the Jona’s burger we had at Jacky’s on Prairie yesterday.)  The Billy Goat burger was, well, ordinary.  It was quick and it was priced right.  But I think that all the raves reflect more on nostalgia than quality.  If I happened to be out and about near the Tribune building, and I happened to be hungry, and someone happened to suggest Billy Goat’s Tavern, I would not be opposed.  But it’s not the sort of experience that makes me want to plan a return outing; it’s not the sort of burger that demands a second sampling.  The tavern has a real working-class ambiance and the place is decorated with more Chicago history than you can imagine…  but the burger?  Just OK.

Metatropolis Edited by Jack Scalzi Rating on an arbitrary 5-point scale: 4 out of 5

Metatropolis is a science fiction anthology exploring, as it claims, the “future of cities”.  That’s not strictly accurate. It’s really a collection of stories that explore the question: If we as a species are going to survive the mistakes of our forebears (particularly ecological mistakes), what will human society have to look like?  It’s pretty clear that we won’t be able to ratchet up world living standards to the stereotypical 2.4 kids in the suburbs mid American ideal.  Resources are too finite and indeed running out.  If our profligate carbon society doesn’t right itself soon, if we face a Century of Judgment, then what will emerge from the drowned coasts and droughted interiors?

The five authors (Jack Scalzi, Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and Karl Schroeder) don’t really offer blueprints and white papers, of course.  They off five distinct tales, appropriately interdependent, that explore a possible future.  This is a shared world on the model of Aspirin’s Thieves’ World, though not quite so sprawling or tightly woven.  It is clear that the authors spent considerable time together thrashing out their shared world — though, in keeping with the theme, much of that might have been online and virtual.

So, does the book succeed?

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Addressing craft first, I’d have to say Yes.  The stories are uniformly well-written and engaging.  They each contain a nice mix of philosophizing and action, abstraction and characterization.  Each story has its own voice, as might be expected of an anthology; but even within a story the characters seems multidimensional and believable.  The slow-drip despair of the mid-to-late 21st century comes through nicely.  The world is running down and, for most of the main characters, that is their primary experience of it.  Each story includes a glimpse at what might replace the worn-out consumerist world; each story is a voyage of discovery.

As to the ideas behind the stories:  Most of the time, that works too.  While the thrust of each story is sustainability, there is no myopic utopian fantasies here.  The authors recognize that survival will come not from going back but going forward. In contrast to the environmental dystopias of, say, the 1970s, these authors understand that a call to abandon all technology will not be heeded by the mass of humanity; and, realistically, billions will not lay down and die to redress a balance they did not themselves upset.

Nonetheless, the citizens of these zero-footprint enclaves invariably come off as a tad, well, smug.  Perhaps they have the right to be, since they have unlocked a key to survival while most of the world burns and drowns.  But to present-day ears, it sounds a bit thin.  There is a steady undercurrent of derision and mockery for the “big society” thinking that got the world into the mess it’s in.  One story calls it big capital; another, corporatism; an third, consumerism.  Uniformly they denounce the past few centuries as a mistake run amok, a blight to be rejected and corrected.  This rankles me just a bit, because the actual proposed societies can only exist because of the larger, expansionist, consumerist, big-science world.  Without the technologies spawned by the governments and the markets, there would be no Cascadia with its reputation-based economy or New Detroit with its skyscrapes reclaimed for vertical agriculture.

The philosophy of the book is unsatisfying, because the new societies are every bit as parasitic as the one they strive to replace.  These new worlds feast on the carcass of the previous one (ours) and seem deliberately oblivious to it.  In the end, that didn’t ruin the book because, in my mind, that is very human — exactly how a new vibrant society would have to view its predecessor.  We all need myths of a heroic age.

The preachiness varies a lot from story to story.  It is worst in the introductory piece, by Jay Lake (“In the Forests of the Night”) and seems to dribble off from there. That might be a structural artifact; the need to explain the new world and hook the reader drives some of the choices Mr. Lake makes.  Even allowing for that, I found it to be the least successful of the stories

The second story (“Stochasti-City” by Tobias Buckell), on the other hand, is probably my favorite.  On one level it’s a more straightforward action tale with a unified narrator.  (Mr. Lake attempts a fractured, multifaceted narrative along the lines of Stand on Zanzibar; but he lacks John Brunner’s dexterity.) The big idea seems much more achievable and realistic, as well as something real people might actually attempt.  Of course it’s just my opinion, but Buckell does a better job than Lake in selling his reality.

“The Red in the Sky is Our Blood” by Elizabeth Bear works pretty well, too.  Like the previous piece, it’s about an outsider gaining access to the hidden new cities that underlie the collection.  In this case, the narrative is perhaps a little too linear, though the characters are well-drawn.

John Scalzi’s contribution (in addition to being editor) is “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis”. It means “use everything but the squeal”, referring to a maxim about the high efficiency of pig.  And it is a pig story.  But don’t let that fool you, the way it does the narrator (at first).  It’s still a clever, if workmanlike, exploration of the role of labor in the new cities, which can’t base things on ever-increasing consumption.  I have a soft spot for the story, since it deals in no small measure with education and its impact.  But it must be admitted that it is probably the least adventurous or ambitious of the stories in the collection.

These middle three stories have the advantage of hanging together very well; they mesh to make the shared future world believable, whereas the bookend stories feel more shoe-horned in.  There’s an irony in the fact that Cascadia — the virtual, zero-footprint city that springs up in the Pacific Northwest — is more real and believable in the three stories that mention it obliquely, than in the one that describes it in detail.

The final tale is “To Hie from Far Cilenia” by Karl Schroeder.  Compared to the others, it’s right off the map.  (There’s a bit of a pun in that sentence but — I’ve decided to be spoiler-free.)  The earlier tales all split their focus between technology and sociology.  Not only do the authors explore what sort of devices we will need to survive the Century of Judgment; they also pick about what must change in our social interactions.  But Schroeder goes far deeper than that.  He ponders whether near real-time resource mapping will open up the unexpected vista of a whole new reality — or, at least, of a way of perceiving the world that is so radically different from what our monkey brains are used to, that it might just as well be a new reality.  I’m not sure he really succeeds at making this clear, but I’ll have to reread the story before I could say he failed.

Overall, the book is well worth the time spent in reading it and pondering its questions.  Although the prose is modern, its spirit harkens back to the early days of science fiction, where authors used grand visions to explore unseen possibilities.  Metatropolis is light years removed from the pulp fiction of the 1930s, but it aspires to some of the same larger purpose: to serve as a sort of handbook of the future, helping us navigate its unseen shoals by throwing a light on what might be.

Inception
a Christopher Nolan Film
Arbitrary 5-Point rating: 5 out of 5

Inception is a weird, ambitious, action-packed sci fi thriller-cum-heist flick.  It is, in its own way, as ambitious as The Matrix and suffers from the comparison only in that it didn’t come first.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Tom Dom Cobb, a thief of a singular kind: He can enter the dreams of others and “extract” information they’re trying to keep secret.  On the run for (at first) unspecified horrible crimes, he parlays his skill into a lucrative, if high-risk, lifestyle.  But in the end all he really wants to do is get to go home again and pick up the shards of his former life, including two small children.

More detail, and spoilers, to follow, but in short, this is a fantastic film that’s better than it has any right to be.  The pacing is superb, the acting is above-average, and the setting and technology are remarkably well fleshed out.  Although everyone draws comparisons to The Matrix, the real spiritual ancestor of this film is The Thirteenth Floor (which, ironically, came out at the same time as — and got lost in the glare of the hoopla of — The Matrix).

Spoilers ho!
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Any movie that involves dream technology is going to mess with the audience’s perceptions, and this is no exception.  By the end of the film, we’ve delved three levels “deep” : a dream within a dream, itself within a dream. And the film ends by (of course) going one further and asking, Is this the real world?  Or is Tom Cobb just locked within another nested level?  Has he returned to reality?  Was he ever there to begin with?  By transparent design, the question is left open.  Within the movie, we are told that every dream adventurer must fashion his or her own “totem”, an object he/she can use to assess whether the current setting is real or someone’s dream.  Arthur uses a loaded die, whose balance only he knows.  Adriadne makes a chess piece (a bishop). Cobb uses a peculiar top.  (It belonged to his deceased wife Mallorie, and would keep spinning forever in a dream world but flop over in a real one.)  You can’t share your totem because then someone else could simulate it in one of their dreams and you’d be lost.

The totems raise a couple of questions.  For example, while it might tell you you’re in someone else’s dream, could it tell you if you were lost in your own?  Cobb warns Adriadne that one must never use whole memories in building a dream world, because you might lose grasp of the distinction and never find your way out.  But you can, of course, perfectly dream your own totem — so it must be useless in distinguishing your dreams from reality.

Adriadne’s totem never comes into play, oddly enough, considering the screen time spent on explaining its purpose and on her fashioning it.  But the top is crucial.  At several places, after Cobb begins to get drawn more and more obsessively into the dreams they are making, he uses it to reassure himself that he’s still got a handle on reality.  There’s something almost heartbreaking about this process, because by the very rules of the game, he must check his sanity alone.  You can never share the thing that keeps you anchored.

But the most important — if most glaringly telegraphed — use of the top comes at the end of the film, after Cobb has rescued the sponsor of the last job and so gotten his life back. He sets the top to spinning, but is distracted by the arrivial of his children.  For the first time he (and we) can see their faces, and he moves off to their embrace.  Behind him the top keeps spinning.  Just before the camera cuts, it starts to wobble, but we never see it fall.  So… is Cobb in the real world?  Or has he fled into yet another dream, one he fashioned himself, so that he can have the life he’s been missing?  (This is even set up by a projection of Mallorie, that asks him whether his actual life — chased by shadowy agents of an unseen conspiracy — is true or just another psychological immune reaction.)

To me, the far more interesting point is:  The top was Mallorie‘s totem.  That fact is mentioned repeatedly, in important scenes.  But you can’t share totems … so why does Cobb think it’s valid for him at all?  Every one of his reality checks is suspect, not just the final one.  We might be far more than one level “down” at the end.  There are hints, I think, that the nesting is infinite.

It’s been a while since a movie had me thinking this hard after the credits rolled.  I heartily recommend it.

Via Ezra Klein, a wll-argued piece by Timothy Lee on the recent flap over the forced resignation of Dave Weigel from The Washington Post.  If none of those names mean anything to you, then this is unlikely to be very interesting…  Lee’s thesis is that reportorial objectivity is more a function of the economies of scale of a major newspaper than any unquestionable principle of High Journalism.  And now that the economics of reporting have shifted, so too must our understanding of what is appropriate.

And yes, I didn’t link to the Post because I happen to think they’re wrong on this one and I’m just petty enough to deny them the infinitesimal traffic I might contribute.

I was cruising TechDirt and saw a neat post on “Is The Federal Government The Most Interesting Tech Startup For 2009?“  The idea is that the recent data.gov initiative has led to an outpouring of with-it and effective apps allowing anyone to get a handle on the vast trove of information compiled by the federal government.  If you haven’t checked out data.gov, give it a whirl — it’s pretty astounding.  After a week of hearing about ludicrous claims of “death panels” and “keeping government’s hands off my (government-run) Medicare”, it was nice to be reminded that good people working hard can produce tremendous work — that government can serve a positive purpose and isn’t intrinsically evil, corrupt, or incompetence.

Some of the nifty apps I saw (via the techdirt link) were

• This We Know:  Info on communities and towns, all in one place.
• House Scorecard: Track the House process.
• data.gov time machine:  Visualization tool to see trends in a time series.
• Fly On Time: A tool to find the most on-time route between two cities.

This isn’t quite the level of Star Trek (“Computer, rearrange known data into a new theory of physics”) but it’s a step in the right direction.    And if the survival of democracy requires the active participation of an educated and engaged citizenry, then cataloging what is actually known can help secure the health of our republic.  For all the noise and thunder of the 24-hour news cycle, this is where the action really is.