Eccentric Flower:201003/Pointy Bits
From Eccentric Flower
Pointy Bits
I suggested on Twitter earlier today that I had enough material for three journal entries, but now I needed to convince myself that writing a journal entry wasn't a pointless activity. As you may deduce, I am not at an especially high point in my emotional cycle right now, so the whole universe is feeling pretty pointless. (I need creative fulfillment, but am feeling too tired/lazy to go make myself any.)
A Foreign Correspondent replied, "Could not this be reason to write a pointy universe of your own to balance the pointless one outside of you?"
In English "point" has become an overloaded word; even though its meanings came from common ground, they have diverged. When I say my essay has a point, I do not mean the same thing as when I say my pencil has a point. Although my Foreign Correspondent surely meant by a "pointy universe" one containg lots of points (ideas), an American hearer would likely interpret that as containing lots of points (Burmese tiger pit).
Still - it was a good insight, because it makes me wonder if being pointy (spear) isn't enough point (thesis) in and of itself to make a stand against the pointless.
So here are some pointy bits, which may or may not also have a point.
I am chagrined, but pleased, to observe that Slate has been gradually improving itself from its rest-energy state (which was zero) in recent years. I have almost, but not quite, stopped flinching when I link something at their site that's actually good. Their series on public signage, why it sometimes stinks, and the difficulties of making it better has been excellent so far (I link the first installment of six, but it's worth reading the lot).
A couple of the items got me thinking and not in positive ways. (A lot of my thinking these days is not positive.) For example, part four, "Do You Draw Good Maps?" made me ponder the many maps of online spaces I have made over the years - I am a compulsive mapmaker - and a strange thing which happened with me relating to the virtual world Onverse a week or two ago.
You see, I am a programmer and a programmer doesn't do the same task four times. When a programmer has to do a task a fourth time, instead she says, "No, I am not doing that again," and writes a script/program to automate it. This is, in some ways, the defining mark of a career programmer, this, "Isn't there a script for that? Well, there should be" impulse.
So when I get lost in a confusing environment three times, the fourth time I bring pen and paper. As a result, I have made a number of online maps over the years, most of which are now obsolete. (I recently took my There island map off my bulletin board and am debating how to give it a reverent disposal - RIP, There.) Generally, if I think these maps will be useful to anyone else, I clean them up and I post them somewhere. They do sometimes get used. Therein lies the rub.
I note, for example, that my annotated map of the Old Forest has been viewed 186 times, which is pretty good for something that has not been promoted other than my mentioning the URL in the chat channel of my LOTRO kinship. When my There map was available online it was virtually the only one of its kind (this was back in the early days of There), and it got several hundred views. Even my modest annotation of the route for the Villainy of Galrath quest in Guild Wars has gotten 81 views, and it was never mentioned or promoted anywhere. People do read them. But you will also notice that the Old Forest map, like the Galrath map or the Nan Wathren map, has no comments. This is typical.
I don't take it personally, because I don't think people are in the habit of thanking people for maps. I think maps, like the Slate article points out about signage, are a thing we inherently don't notice or appreciate until it isn't there or it stops working. I think we are just naturally disposed to take maps for granted.
I think that people will thank map providers in aggregate. TheBrasse's LOTRO maps, for example, which I don't like*, do get a lot of thank-yous - but the thank-yous seem to be to TheBrasse for collective effort, like a lifetime achievement Oscar. Not for particular maps so much.
* (TheBrasse's maps are beautiful, detailed, and accurate. Unfortunately, they portray areas in ways that don't match any of the in-game maps - so it's difficult to synchronize that information to where the game is telling you you actually are at the time. My Old Forest map is ugly, but it is overlaid on the actual map from the game - which means you can check your visible location in-game against it. TheBrasse's Goblin Town map is the best around - and is wholly useless for actual in-game navigation. My Goblin Town map, by the by, is not online because I haven't bothered to scan it.)
Anyway, so, I was in Onverse, which is a very There-like online social world that has great potential but a long way to go, and I was exploring a maze in an alien pyramid (don't ask), and it struck me: For various reasons, it's likely players are going to have to negotiate this pyramid more than once. Ooh! An excuse to make a map. So I made a map, and I cleaned it up, and I made bad scans of it (I need a new scanner) and posted them, and in the Onverse forums I noted where they were.
And people thanked me. In fact, the developer thanked me, joking that he built the damned thing and still got lost in it himself.
I'm not sure why this should be different from the norm. Is it a function of limited population? (The crowd of Onverse regulars is still quite small.) Is it a cultural thing? (People on the social VRs tend to be politer than the ones in the game worlds, in general, except for Second Life which is anomalous in all things.) Dunno.
Another thing which emerged from the Slate series - this in relation to the fifth segment, on the controversy over exit signs - is that I really don't care for pictorial signage. In fact, I consider it a failed idea. And, oh, by the by, this exposes one of the places where I sort of lean toward what passes for the right wing in this country.
Here is the thing about pictorial signage: the idea that it is intrinsically easier to understand than verbal signage is an outright, but well-perpetuated lie. As far as I can tell. The only reason some pictorial symbols seem to be easier to understand to you is becase you have learned the code, internalized it so well that you don't think about it anymore. Why does the sign for a public toilet contain a little picture of a man or a woman? By rights, it should contain a picture of a toilet - or, if you are overly delicate about such things or Canadian*, perhaps a sink. Have you ever even bothered to consider how nonsensical these symbols actually are? Nor are they as cross-cultural as their advocates would have you believe. The universal symbol for "food here" is not very universal. It's a fork and a knife. This plays well in Europe and North America, but have you ever considered its applicability in the hashi or eating-with-fingers sectors of the world?
I posit, perhaps controversially, that it is almost always better to label something in the native language, with a word. This leaves no room for doubt, no guessing. The problem is, what if the people using those signs don't all speak one language? And this is why in some very multilingual places - airports, notably - we are reduced to squinting at a little icon and trying to figure out if it leads to Customs or the car rental.
Of course it's too late to save airports, although I would personally prefer to see things labelled in the seven or eight languages it would take to achieve written understandability in the majority chunk of the world's population.** It wouldn't take up as much space as you think.
But when it comes to other places within one's country, well. I realize I'm going to get some flak from people who think I sound too intolerant or who think this also means I am anti-immigration (which, as it happens, I am not), but: As far as I'm concerned, the USA has an official language. If you are an adult who is not able to speak and read English with reasonable fluency (say, enough to get around an airport or a grocery store), you don't deserve to be a citizen. That's just all there is to it. And I think signs intended primarily for American users should be labelled primarily with American words. I don't go to France and expect signs to be in English. (Well, I don't go to France at all, but you see my point.) If I go to Spain I had better be able to get by in Spanish or I was a fool to go to Spain to begin with. And in America, we speak American, so punt the little symbols, or at best use them as an addition to the words, not a replacement for them. You don't hear anyone lobbying for bilingual American highway signs, do you?***
* (This is not meant to imply that Canadians are delicate in that direction, but is a reference to their habit of saying "washroom" for the toilets. Not that "bathroom," the usual Americanism, is any better. cf. E. Izzard.)
** (I would go with Chinese - with written Chinese dialect doesn't matter - English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, and Hindi/Urdu. That will achieve some reasonable familiarity - for example, if an Italian can't dope out what he wants from the French and the Spanish, he's not trying hard enough - for a majority chunk of the world, although how much of a majority I'm not sure. I'm having trouble finding the right data to do the math. Anyway, as a proportion of people likely to be travelling - e.g. when you factor in income/mobility - it goes much higher. However, this list could be nitpicked for weeks. For example, do we need to make a case for Bengali? For Portuguese, which is on the "most spoken" list primarily because of Brazil? And so on.)
*** (That said, I'm sure there's someone somewhere in a state with a large Spanish-spoken population arguing in favor of this right now - which, in practice, means someone in California or Texas. Strangely, bilingualism as a political issue in Texas does not split in predictable ways along right-left lines, but has more to do with where you live and what you do for a living - but that's a topic for another day.)
Anyway, so, the bottom line is, while the point about it not being red is a good one, anyone who seriously wants to replace the EXIT signs with the little running man in the USA is just plain crazy. And if you're a foreign tourist and you're staying in one of our hotels: EXIT would be a good first word of English to learn (he says remorselessly).
(How hard is it to learn basic words like "exit," "stop," "food," and so on in ten or twenty languages anyway?)
Moving right along (I have listened to you folks who say, "Why must you post these omnibus entries once every ten days instead of posting three or four small ones which each confine themselves to a single topic," and I sympathize with your point, but my response at this time remains, "It's this or nothing," so live with it).
Here's an article from Ars Technica on why ad blockers are killing the sites you love. Their points are well made, and I think they are right - within a narrow window. That is, they are right when considered inside their rule set - but ... well, let me extract an imaginary dialogue from their comments page, okay?
And so on and so forth.
I feel for the editors, because I am not one of the people who believes the web runs on pixie dust and all content should be free to everyone forever and ever amen. The bills gotta get paid. But.
Although I am not generally opposed to web advertising (I don't ever run any sort of ad blocker, myself), even when the user has not - in effect - Tivo'ed it out, it still mostly doesn't work. No one is releasing hard data on clickthrough rates/leads generated for web advertising that I can find, but if my browsing experience is even vaguely similar to the norm, people are just ignoring them. They've become background noise.
(And yes, I understand that the rates are largely based on views and not clickthroughs, but advertisers eventually stop paying for anything that doesn't deliver results, so how long is that going to last?)
Now the fun part: On the web, paywalls also don't work. It isn't just a shortage of people willing to pay the fee, although that's certainly a factor. The bigger problem - as I have griped about The Economist's recent paywalling several times - is that paywalls inhibit linking, and linking is the true life force of the web. I would have loved to have referred you to many Economist articles in past weeks, but what is the point of linking an article you can't read? After all, I'm not linking Economist material for Economist subscribers - they already know about it! I am linking because I believe the material is of interest to people who otherwise would not have seen it - and those people are exactly the ones who will be unable to read it.
Teasers work somewhat better, but anyone remotely ethical will still be bothered about linking something where the reader will have to buy in to see the full item.
So the bottom line is: If advertising doesn't work on the web, and paywalls don't work on the web, what's left? How will web content creators pay their rent?
Micropayments-with-teasers would help. It is nothing less than a travesty that all these years later, despite sensible people having agreed we need it urgently for a long time, we still do not have a micropayment system which is viable and reliable and trustworthy and has consumer protections (either of the latter two clauses rules out the despicable PayPal, so don't bring them up).
But even then, the "here's a sample, now pay a small amount to read the whole thing" approach will only work best with long-form and less ephemeral content, like fiction. Not news articles. Not commentary.
The gift-shop approach - make no money on the content but sell souvenirs - has been proven viable, but only for certain types of content.
Pay-extra-for-bonus-features works only if you have an audience that's very dedicated/completist and you have the manpower to reliably keep up a stream of bonus goodies in addition to your main content stream.
I can't think of anything else.
Please draw your own conclusions. Share them with the world. I wouldn't want to lead the witness, but I warn you I'm going to keep returning to this theme until either everybody gets the same answer, or some genius is inspired to come up with a new and better one.
And speaking of not being able to link The Economist, it might be a blessing this week as its cover story is on the nations of the world where there is a deliberately-created shortage of girl babies. I know, this isn't new news, but it isn't getting any better. They figure there's now a shortfall of about 100 million girls. You probably are better off without the tales of the just-born baby girl being thrown into a chamber pot to die, and other fun stuff like that.
This is a tragic, grim, foolish and shortsighted trend by any standard - but to me, a career man-hater, it's even worse. Given that I consider men to be the major blight of society, and harbor various untenable and unprintable fantasies about what the ideal balance of the sexes should be (no, really, you don't want to know), to me this is a travesty I don't even have words to describe.
You may think I am being too harsh on the nature of young men, but The Economist does not:
I would like to be able to comfort myself slightly with that quote, to take a grim made-your-bed-now-lie-in-it satisfaction, especially in the case of India*, but honesty compels me to quote the rest of the sentence:
See, that's the problem with men. If they'd just kill each other off, it would be different, but no, they have to go after everyone around them too.
* (Let's see how I can put this without sounding racist. I have never felt any innate bias against Indian males, and indeed I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. But every single one I have ever had to interact with has had a personality so personally odious to me - a strange mix of passivity, rudeness-disguised-with-politeness, and entitlement - that I have begun to get a little gun-shy, and now find myself dreading and/or disliking them on sight. An India with an imbalance of males strikes me as a place I should like to flee as quickly as possible.)
One thing The Economist will still let you link is its "special report" inserts, including its ever-amazing Technology Quarterly. The most recent quarterly contained a whole slew of articles I wanted to call to your attention, but now I'm too exhausted. I realize if I don't blurb them you'll never get around to reading them, but oh well. Suffice to say that I think you would find them Quite Interesting, and if you don't read them, your loss.
The whole thing is always worth perusing but this quarter's standouts are
Chick sexing - it's surprisingly difficult and labor intensive, and some folks want to improve it
Broadcasters and peer-to-peer - why they're experimenting with it and how it's gone so far
Ever-deeper oil drilling and the tech needed
Quantum-dot lighting, the next technology after LEDs
An artificial-limb pioneer and the questions of human enhancement
And there you have it. I gripe at length about the bad stuff and run out of steam when I get to the good stuff. Think of it as the dessert you get for having eaten all your spinach.
Except that I like spinach. Think of it as the dessert you get for eating all your quinoa. (Useless stuff, quinoa.)
(I will now get ten comments about quinoa and nothing about any of the other material in this entry.)
("I will now sell five copies of this cassette.")
(OK, I'm done now.)
P.S. Gabourey Sidibe was robbed!
Paying for content---the idea I have may only work for some sites, not all (and it might work well with the Economist) is to have a paywall for "recent" content, but anything past a certain age (a month, say) flips over to the free side. Most (all?) news only has worth in relation to its immediacy, and those that need the information will probably pay for that immediacy. Having the information slide off into freeland after a bit will serve as advertising to those not subscribed that yes, it may be worth to subscribe to get the latest news now.
Micropayments are tough, and I suspect it really needs to be part of the browser (much like viewing secure sites is part of the browser). The site can send down a 402 response (Payment Required---and yes, it's already part of the HTTP spec) with an amount required. The browser can then toss up a dialog box to confirm, and maybe let the user select from one of multiple "PayPal-like" accounts to use, then the request back to the server with the proper incantations to debit the proper account. But until it's part of the browser, all we'll get are half-hearted attempts that don't work well.
On maps, I love maps, but *loathe* GPSes. Go figure.
-- 22:13, 9 March 2010 (GMT)
You talked about quinoa in this entry? I thought it was about micropayment maps or something.
-- 22:14, 9 March 2010 (GMT)
I'll have you know I read all the articles you linked to, but not in that order. I read the Quantum Dot piece, the heat-scavengin piece, then chick sexing piece, then the oil-drilling piece, then the prosthetic piece, then the broadcasting piece.
Have you ever had Jag's quinoa? It will convert you.
Do you honestly think I can speak to micropayment architecture for the web?
-- 22:24, 9 March 2010 (GMT)
Robert: Really, I would have been happy with anyone but career hack Sandra Bullock winning. You didn't see me repeating Josh Fruhlinger's post the day after the Oscars:
But I think Sidibe deserved it most, especially given that I share your opinion of her future career prospects. Unfortunately.
Ad blockers are exactly what you speculate they are. As a page loads, your browser can see what the URLS of the individual bits of the page are, and the ad blocker has a list of URLs which it simply won't fetch content from. So the ads on the page show up as empty spaces.
SPC: My impression was actually that the limitation was not the technology but fees. Credit card processors charge fees which would be prohibitive if levied on each of a steady stream of, say, one-dollar payments. Of course transactions could be lumped together in various ways, but that causes processing delays. Or I favor that explanation because I believe that the transaction houses make way too much money in fees as it is. MasterCard services could be charging a penny a transaction and still be making an obscene profit.
Marc: SPC can talk about micropayments, and you can talk about quinoa.
Actually I was thinking about you on the way home. It strikes me that my comments about pictorial signage are fairly verbal-brain-intense - because I have one of the most nonvisual brains ever made, and you - who have one of the most nonVERBAL brains ever made - might well consider me totally off base on that. Still rethinking. But on the whole, I would still rather have verbal internationalization than pictures. Jeremy Clarkson griped about an American car on Top Gear a year or so back, pointing out all the informational labels on the dash were words - "because Americans think everyone speaks English." These days it should be easy to relabel a car's controls for each market, or better yet, use displays which can change language with just a flip of a software switch - ping! it speaks Spanish now, ship that puppy to Madrid. I find that a much better approach to the language barrier than symbols. How about a sign where you touch the flag of your country and it instantly changes to show you the information in your own language? We have this technology NOW.
-- 22:52, 9 March 2010 (GMT)
But quinoa really is nice! Make it with broth, that's the thing. Mostly people make it with water. Broth and dried sour cherries and pecans and bang, you've got a really fine pot of quinoa.
I read very quickly. I would not have made the argument you're making because it would feel entirely likely to me that I was not taking into account how long it would take perfectly intelligent people who read more slowly than I do to read the signs. Even though I am wholly in agreement.
So instead I will tell a story about signs and an obscure relative of mine, so you will know this comment is really by me and not an impostor!
(Great-)Aunt Jenny is old and kind of a mess, and when Aunt Kathy was on painkillers after her shoulder surgery and couldn't drive herself, Nana went into the hospital. So Aunt Jen was dispatched to get Aunt Kath and drive her to the hospital to see Nana. Same hospital that family has always used, and Aunt Kath and Uncle Bill have lived in the same place for my entire life. So they're driving along, and Aunt Kath says, "Okay, now you're on the right street, just turn right for the parking sign at the hospital." Aunt Jenny says fine. Shoots right past it. Aunt Kathy says, "Aunt Jenny! You missed it!" Aunt Jen says, "You can't expect me to drive and read signs at the same time."
Still. On. The. Road. This was at least six years ago. And Aunt Jenny is still, despite my best efforts, driving.
Uff da.
-- 23:26, 9 March 2010 (GMT)
Thank you. Sadly, I have nothing of interest to add to the discussion, but as usual, I am glad to have read it.
-- 02:39, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Mrissa: This has come up reasonably often in the local paper - the issue of people too old to drive safely and whether there should be much stricter restrictions on their driving and what kind. Needless to say it's a very contentious subject, especially for people who feel you are taking away their independence.
All that said, your story made me laugh.
-- 03:17, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
P.S. Sour cherries and pecans in quinoa. What an interesting idea. This bears investigation.
-- 03:36, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
I haven't much to ad, except that you reminded me of one of the funniest signs I've seen anywhere. The Umpire Room at SafeCo Field in Seattle is labeled in English and... braille.
As an after-thought, I used an ATM at Chase Bank, t'other day, and there was a list of about ten languages from which to choose, many of which I couldn't even identify. They used symbols, Chinese, Japanese, some Arabic, I haven't a clue. Also, my brother, who lives in a Navy town (Bremerton, WA) has, among his ATM selections, Hmoob. I ask you.
-- 06:43, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Mel:
I would just like to say that I really like the Slate piece. Apparently I am the odd person who's always been interested in signs.
-- 09:26, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Bunny, it's possible that state or federal law mandated the Braille signage. I know I see it a lot in elevators, the subway, etc. in NYC.
What's Hmoob? It sounds like a language Lynn Johnston made up.
-- 15:53, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Bunny & ProfRobert: I'm sure the signage included Braille due to ADA requirements. Braille signage is typically a requirement of all new construction.
-- 16:14, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Joy:
Quinoa is very good in tabouleh.
Also, I know about the Rheo Knee! I talk about it in my cognitive psychology class. It is very very cool.
Can't wait for advances in lighting to come to my lamps. I'm holding out against cfls because I cannot cannot cannot stand them. I try to get mostly longer-life halogens in my lights, but I'll still take a full-spectrum incandescent over a halogen in the living areas. (CFLs are in the garage and basement, although I understand the energy savings barely register if the lights they are in are not actually used very often.)
-- 17:05, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
My great-uncle had been driving around last year even though he could hardly see -- my great-aunt sat next to him and "saw" for him. Every time I heard this, I felt chillled. He's bedridden now, which is awful, but at least the streets of Covington are a bit safer.
Sandra Bullock is a mighty savvy businesswoman -- she produces most of the film in which she appears, owns two Austin businesses, and does a lot of charity work (she helped rebuild and reopen Warren Easton High School in NOLA after the floods, etc.). She's not getting any younger and her romantic comedy years may be on the decline, so I can understand why she wants to move into Serious Oscar-Lovin Drama. I had no opposition to her winning the Oscar, although the movie she won it for bugged me a bit (the message that the African-American community can't care for each other and needed rich white people to do it was hard to ignore).
I run a website that I would love to earn money from, so I can at least pay my contributors, but I have no idea how to do it successfully. I believe we are too small for micropayments to work unless they are an accepted fact of life on the Web. We are Amazon affiliates, which earns me a whopping $5 or so a month. I don't think ads are going to help much either. It's extremely frustrating because at some point we're all going to get tired of working so hard for free and that'll be the end of the site. Maybe we should have a Pledge Week like public TV does? Hmm.
-- 17:20, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Iain:
And in America, we speak American, so punt the little symbols, or at best use them as an addition to the words, not a replacement for them. You don't hear anyone lobbying for bilingual American highway signs, do you?*** *** (That said, I'm sure there's someone somewhere in a state with a large Spanish-spoken population arguing in favor of this right now - which, in practice, means someone in California or Texas...
Or Arizona. Or Illinois. Or Nevada. Or Oklahoma, depending on where you are. Or New York. Or, most particularly, New Mexico, which got slapped down at the Supreme Court level for declaring both English and Spanish to be official languages of the state. (The decision was that an individual state had no power to declare official languages -- said power being reserved to the federal government through some bizarre alchemy, as the Constitution is absolutely and utterly silent on the issue -- but that the state could, in fact, require official state [but not federal] documents to be published in any languages it liked. That approach has led not only to all state documents and official signage in New Mexico being in both English and Spanish, but also to official documents and signage in Chicago being in English, Spanish, and Polish -- Chicago being the largest Polish city outside Warsaw, you see.)
(I have listened to you folks who say, "Why must you post these omnibus entries once every ten days instead of posting three or four small ones which each confine themselves to a single topic," and I sympathize with your point, but my response at this time remains, "It's this or nothing," so live with it).
For some reason, this keeps making me think of various legislative decisions of various legislative bodies -- mostly of states and almost always to do with abortion -- which keep getting smacked down by state supreme courts because their laws require bills to keep to a single subject. I just have this strange mental vision of We The Readers as the Supreme Court of Col (in fetching black robes, of course, except for those who will insist that other colors are more interesting). Not that we have that authority, of course.
Although I am not generally opposed to web advertising (I don't ever run any sort of ad blocker, myself), even when the user has not - in effect - Tivo'ed it out...
Strangely enough, it turns out that a not-insubstantial minority of Tivo users actually do NOT fast forward through the ads. (Myself, I think that 90% of that is people who get somewhat distracted by something else -- they're watching the program, but the kids want something, or the dog urinates on the carpet, or you're multitasking and using the TV primarily as visual background noise, etc. -- and then just forget to fastforward through them.)
Leaving aside your specific comment about Indian males -- I don't think I've had the same experiences you've had -- an interesting sidebar is that China and India seem to hate each other kind of a lot. It would not surprise me to see the governments of both countries engaging in some (comparatively) low level provocations so that they can send a few million of their excess men to kill each other on some border brushfire wars. They need to be rather careful about that; two nuclear armed states trying to rid themselves of a few excess men could get to a very nasty level very quickly. That, and unofficially encouraging an unsustanably high level of emigration. (Unsustainable because the countries taking the brunt of the emigration would eventually say, "OK, that's enough of THAT". Again.) Of course, the difficulty is going to be that the more educated and socially mobile women might well be the first to flee, thus exacerbating the problem. And it's going to be difficult for countries with a history of not valuing women to say, "No, really, stick around!"
P.S. Gabourey Sidibe was robbed!
Well ... maybe. I kind of agree with the "it should have been anyone but Sandra Bullock" sentiment. And I think she's going to wind up being more or less like Halle Berry post-Oscar; aside from a once-in-a-lifetime role that comes along, she's never going to find another role that's both a fit for her talent and the Oscar expectations. I do think, within a narrow range, Bullock is a perfectly good actor. Unfortunately, that range does tend to fall in the "crappy romantic comedy/action movie" line. (That said, wildly improbable technology written by people who were clearly utterly clueless aside, I actually liked her in "The Net." If it's tuned to her strengths, she can carry other types of film -- despite it being kind of profoundly stupid.) And she actually works in "Murder by Numbers", where she ought to be wildly miscast.
-- 17:39, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Iain, I left out all those other states down at the bottom of the country where there's a lot of Spanish, because I didn't expect that they had a significant political bloc of people who would care to push for bilingualism in any respect - whereas I know that California and Texas do. I stand corrected.
(But how did Illinois get into that list?)
-- 17:53, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
You know, Columbine, it occurs to me that YOU were the one, back in the day, who urged me to watch "Speed" because it co-starred this actress with excellent comic timing who could be our next big screwball comedy heroine. I was the one who called her the modern-day Carole Lombard. And while I love Lombard's movies more than anything Bullock's done, I realize that if Lombard hadn't died early, she might have had a very similar career to Sandra Bullock. "The Proposal" was rather annoying (I hate mean comedies) but Bullock was good in it -- she does a limited number of things extremely well, and why are those things less worthy of Best Actress than a dramatic -- or melodramatic, in the case of "Precious" -- role?
(I like to compare "Precious" to "Stella Dallas" but that is a whole other conversation.)
-- 17:53, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Jette: I hate to contradict you, but you MUST be confusing me with someone else. Simple proof: I have never seen Speed and would never endorse it to anyone.
In fact, I have Ms. Bullock's filmography according to IMDb in front of me, and I have never seen any film where she physically appeared. There's a reason for that. I imagine she's reasonably good at playing a particularly narrowly-defined character type, which unfortunately tends to be in a sort of film I won't watch. But I look at that list and I see no Oscar material in it, unless you know something I don't. People should not win Oscars for a career of lowbrow, semi-idiotic romantic comedies.
(P.S. I didn't not see Speed because of her. I didn't see Speed because 1) it was below my intelligence threshold for action films, which is saying something, and 2) because I had already given up Keanu Reeves as a hopeless cause by then.)
-- 18:00, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
(Winning an Oscar for a highbrow, intelligent romantic comedy might be different - if only they still made those.)
-- 18:03, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Iain - I can't find a reference for the SCOTUS decision vs. New Mexico you talk about. Do you have a link? The closest I've heard of the SCOTUS taking up a state's language issue (recently, at least) is Arizonans for Official English v. Arizona from 1997. The SCOTUS ruled that the federal court had no authority to rule on the dispute, pushing it back to the state courts. English-only advocates always try to list this case as "SCOTUS says English-only is constitutional", but the court expressly did not consider the merits of the case.
Certainly there are many US states (28 or 30, depending on who's counting) with English as their official language. Hawaii is officially bi-lingual, I believe. Several states are de-facto bi-lingual. Here in Massachusetts, a 1975 ruling said the English requirement has always been in the state Constitution.
-- 18:03, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Okay, now I'm worried that my memory is turning on me in my old age. Stupid brain. Sorry about that.
-- 18:11, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Iain:
Iain - I can't find a reference for the SCOTUS decision vs. New Mexico you talk about. Do you have a link?
Jweader: I can't find it now, either. I think may be misremembering something from my youth; this would have happened in the late 70s or early 80s. I'm fairly certain that it went into the federal courts -- it was an early conservative pushback against early multicultural initiatives -- but it may have been resolved in another way. I seem to recall that part of the issue was jurisdictional; the state was trying to require something that federal regulations didn't, so there may have been a supremacy issue buried in there as well. Something has changed since then, anyway; there are now states that have English listed as official languages, according to Wikipedia, but since that wouldn't necessarily run counter to anything the Court or the federal government has said, that may not be the same issue.
(But how did Illinois get into that list?)
Col: Because Chicago has a freakin' huge Mexican and Puerto Rican immigrant community, given the size of the city. And they've recently been slowly spreading out into the other major cities of the state.
(I like to compare "Precious" to "Stella Dallas" but that is a whole other conversation.)
Jette: ...Well. Yes. Quite. It definitely would be that. Wouldn't you have to stick a few other mothers in that continuum, though? I mean, the distance from "complete monster" to "someone who starts out bad but then winds up being excessively noble and self-sacrificing" is kind of ... large.
-- 19:23, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
People should not win Oscars for a career of lowbrow, semi-idiotic romantic comedies. People shouldn't win an Oscar for a career of anything; they should win for a singular performance that was better than anyone else's performance that year. And yes, I realize that's a very naive statement, but if we're talking in shoulds, I've got some of my own). And if you've never seen a Sandra Bullock movie, let alone the one she won for, I have to say I am not going to give your argument much credence.
I haven't seen The Blind Side either, but by all accounts she stepped out of her usual shtick and actually acted. And her acceptance speech was funny, touching, and generally awesome.
-- 20:13, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Well, two things - first off, half the time an Oscar which is supposed to be for an individual performance turns into a sort of referendum on their body of recent or even lifetime work (viz. Jeff Bridges, whose award this year wasn't just for his Oscar-bait performance but widely regarded to be more of a career reward). I don't like it, but if that's the rules the Academy is apparently playing by, then I don't think Bullock's corpus is very reward-worthy.
While I have a lot of fun picking on movies I haven't seen, and I agree that deserves very little regard, I think I have a case here. As I said to Jette separately, it's not that she's had a career in romcoms, it's that she's had a career in DUMB, badly-written, and generally badly-reviewed romcoms.
That said, I gather her performance in The Blind Side is not in its usual mold, and good for that. I'm sure I am letting my distaste for the film color my opinion, and I shouldn't, but frankly, this year felt like the slate of White People Save the Poor Colored* People films and it's still annoying the piss out of me. I suppose I should allow more wiggle room for Good Performance in Odious Film.
* I use "colored" here because I am being literal, not evasive; one of the colors involved is blue.
-- 20:25, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Iain:
Well, two things - first off, half the time an Oscar which is supposed to be for an individual performance turns into a sort of referendum on their body of recent or even lifetime work (viz. Jeff Bridges, whose award this year wasn't just for his Oscar-bait performance but widely regarded to be more of a career reward). I don't like it, but if that's the rules the Academy is apparently playing by, then I don't think Bullock's corpus is very reward-worthy.
Fun fact: they don't play by the same rules for women as men in the two big categories.
The Venerable Beeb did a study of the matter, although that's not the one I remember seeing earlier. In any event, typically, the woman's award really is for the work at hand; they're more likely to win on their first nomination, for example. Sandra Bullock was unusual, mostly because by Oscar terms, she's damn near antique for a best actress winner. The women do get the "hey, you've been around forever, have a career award" Oscar, but far less frequently than the men; they're actually more likely to get the "we should have given this to you a year or two or ten ago, so here, have an award that's almost entirely undeserved for the performance at hand" Oscar (see: Judi Dench for a three-minute performance in Shakespeare in Love instead of for Mrs Brown; Elizabeth Taylor for Butterfield 8 instead of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Raintree County or Suddenly Last Summer (she had one hell of a four year run, there) -- though that was more the "oh my goodness we thought you were going to die, here, have an award while we still can" Oscar; Whoopi Goldberg for Ghost instead of The Color Purple, etc.)
this year felt like the slate of White People Save the Poor Colored* People films and it's still annoying the piss out of me.
Well, that's also very traditional. (See also: Dances with Wolves)
-- 23:52, 10 March 2010 (GMT)
Iain: I'm not sure how one would distinguish between "hey, you've been around forever, have a career award" and "we should have given this to you a year or two or ten ago, so here, have an award that's almost entirely undeserved for the performance at hand."
-- 00:18, 11 March 2010 (GMT)
Robert, I'm certain the Braille signage had ADA written all over it. I thought the idea that umpires are blind was hysterical, is all. Don't you think that's kind of a hoot? There's Braille everywhere at SafeCo, but I thought that umpires' door was hilarious, just on general principles.
Here's Wikipedia on Hmoob:
"Hmong (RPA: Hmoob) or Mong (RPA: Moob) is the common name for a group of dialects of the West Hmongic (Chuanqiandian) branch of the Hmong-Mien/Miao-Yao language family spoken by the Hmong people of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, northern Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos."
They say there may be as many as 200,000 Hmoob speakers in the U.S. Most of 'em must be in Northern Washington State, as I haven't seen Hmoob listed on any other ATM anywhere else. Not that I've been everywhere, of course, but 200K is a reeeeally small percentage of 300 million, don't you think?
-- 02:01, 11 March 2010 (GMT)
The Hmong (sometimes spelled Mong, which is also as close as a Westerner can get to saying it right) are an ethnic minority from the mountains that cross the Vietnam/Laos/Burma area. They have a long history of having been discriminated against in their various home nations and as a result many of them have fled to other countries. Although Laos (the worst case) has tried to welcome them back, many of them understandably don't want to give up new lives they have started elsewhere. They tend to form enclaves of their own and not spread out and assimilate so much - they're not insular, but they prefer to live in proximity to one another. So what you're seeing is that bank knows they have one of those pockets of Hmong customers, but there might not be another pocket closer than, say, California or Wisconsin.
By the by, RPA is really odd, but the B is not actually a B, it's a tone marker, and the double vowel isn't what you think it is either. Basically, near as I can tell, "Hmoob" in RPA is pronounced, um, "Hmong."
-- 03:12, 11 March 2010 (GMT)
Iain:
Iain: I'm not sure how one would distinguish between "hey, you've been around forever, have a career award" and "we should have given this to you a year or two or ten ago, so here, have an award that's almost entirely undeserved for the performance at hand."
As far as I can tell, the first group is distinguished by more than one nomination without winning, or, oddly, having no prior nominations at all, but having had a relatively high-profile career that lasted forever and ever and ever. (See: Jeff Bridges, Jack Palance -- though, to be fair, the Supporting categories have their own weirdnesses, but the "congratulations for your lovely career" awards seem to come from there more than in the main categories. That's also why it can sometimes be really shocking when the expected "lovely career" award winds up losing to the deserving performance instead -- Juliette Binoche over Lauren Bacall, or Kim Basinger over Gloria Stuart.) If she ever does win again, Meryl Streep's next Oscar might actually straddle both categories. Maybe she'll get the Oscar version of the Susan Lucci "please win the goddamn thing so we never have to nominate you again" award. (In a non-acting category, Kevin O'Connell, a sound mixer has the record of most nominations without a win for any category. Seriously, you'd think that after nominating the guy 20 years in a row, they'd give him something. But no, they just stopped nominating him. Poor guy.)
-- 04:27, 11 March 2010 (GMT)
I find that the Supporting Actress category tends to have more of the "wow, we haven't given you an award yet? here you go" Oscars than Best Actress, but that is entirely based on my faulty memory. Not sure if that's true of Best Actor and in fact, I remember several years where the expected "memorial" winner was beaten out by someone else.
Comparing Precious and Stella Dallas: I was thinking more about the shape and structure of movie melodrama generally than about the two moms, although that would work too. Maybe we could stick Mommie Dearest and Female Trouble in there too, just for fun.
-- 17:15, 11 March 2010 (GMT)
I know of the Hmong -- indeed, I went to a Hmong village in '91 when I was in Vietnam and had a glass of their equivalent of white lightnin' with the village leader. I didn't know their language was called Hmoob.
-- 18:13, 11 March 2010 (GMT)
ProfRobert:
You mean Meryl Streep was robbed.
I was cringing during Oprah's tribute about how Gabby's about to embark on such a wonderful career. Yeah, because there are SO MANY compelling roles written for black women, let alone really fat black women. I hate to say it, but if she has Esther Rolle's career, she'll be lucky.
What are ad blockers? Are they the same a pop-up blockers? Or is there a technology that scrubs ads out of the side of the page, too?
-- 22:07, 9 March 2010 (GMT)