May 2010 Archives

At the negative end of the spectrum: Battlestar Galactica.

• Must have been a show that was good enough to care about in the first place;
• Not only fails to resolve long-standing plot and character threads in a satisfying manner, but which resolves them in a manner that is stupid, insulting, and throws into question the events which preceded it;
• Heavy use of deus ex machina;
• Has lots of close-ups of Edward James Olmos' face, which resembles not so much a human face as an English muffin with a mustache;
• You, as a viewer, would have no interest in continuing to follow the characters story where they have been left;
• Is booooooooring;

Score: -10

At the positive end of the spectrum, Angel.

• Provides satisfying resolution to long-standing character and plot threads;
• Unexpected twists and turns;
• Leaves you wanting more;
• Has a dragon;
• Pays homage to one of the great movie endings of all time;
• Displays the testicular fortitude of the shows writers

Score: 10

So, where do some finales rank on this scale?

Seinfeld: 2 (one of the all-time funniest shows went out in a mostly laugh-free episode, although our heroes ending up in jail certainly showed testicular fortitude)

Lost: -8 (here's what I said when I named it the #3 show of the aughts: "This feels a little premature. Depending on the final season, this could turn out to be one of the best shows ever made, or a total disappointment. Such is the highwire that this show has walked from its premiere season. But, as with other seasons, I remain wildly optimistic." Stupid Jesse.)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: -2 (not so much deus ex machina as deus ex Willow)

The Wire: 8 (especially loved the closing "life goes on" montage as McNulty looks out over the city)

The Sopranos: 7 (almost entirely on the strength of the final scene, which, once you can re-watch it without the initial "oh shit did my cable just go out" surprise, is a tiny little masterpiece; also, the Journey song, which is already in your head)

House: 5 (I know it hasn't ended yet, but I'll be so glad when Fox puts this wounded deer out of its misery that it'll be at least a 5 if not higher)

I really had no intention of doing this. I didn't want to be just another nerd on the internet writing a review of the Lost finale. But then I read this, and this - people were actually defending the finale! - and I had to say something. Because that finale - not even the finale, really, but the whole entire final season - was a failure. If Lost as a show was a gymnastics maneuver, then last night's finale was their attempt to stick the landing. What I saw was a faceplant.

The writer's of Lost did more than just not answer a couple of lose ends. They have rendered the balance of the show unwatchable. Who could go back and re-watch it, knowing how little any of it will amount to? Hey, what's with Walt's powers? (I dunno.) What do the Others want with him? (I dunno.) Why can't women give birth on the Island? (Shrug.) What's with the polar bear? (It was brought there for experimentation - although, as the Suze pointed out last night, why couldn't they just use monkeys like everybody else? Also, what kind of experiments?) What's the smoke monster? (It's a dude that fell into a hole, who came out as smoke for some reason. Also, when he's moving, it sounds like a roller coaster going up a hill, because... um...) Why was the ghost of Jack's dad there? (It was the smoke monster leading them to water, because... well, actually, he wanted all of them dead, so why lead them to water, when he could have just waited for them to die of dehydration on the beach, rather than an elaborate ruse to blow them up on a submarine years later...) What are the whispers? (Some dead people.) Why did the Others kidnap children? (Uh... cause they are pedophiles?) Why does everything have Egyptian hieroglyphics on it? (Because the island's effects are caused by the warp drive core of an alien space ship that crash landed their in ancient times, and they are the same aliens that built the pyramids in Egypt. The donkey wheel was their attempt to re-activate it with the primitive materials they could find on the island, and when you triggered it the warp function of the drive would bend the space-time continuum and transport you somewhere else... OOPS! That ending explains something, never mind. No reason for the hieroglyphics.)

None of it matters, because none of it goes anywhere. And the show managed to ultimately disappoint even after I lowered my expectations. The writers of the show basically spent the last week running to every media outlet they could find to say that some mysteries wouldn't be solved, but ultimately they were telling a story about characters, so their resolution is what mattered.

Bullshit. BULL shit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. Bullshit.

Nobody watched Lost because of the characters. The show was a sensation when it premiered because there was a bunch of freaky, interesting shit going on, and the viewing audience wanted to know what was behind it (also it had that one guy from the Lord of the Rings movies). The mysteries were plenty important enough when the writer's used them to hook us into the show in the first place, but when it came time to finally deliver answers, they had none. We get some fucking deus ex machina cave full of light (or, as Kevin called it last night, the island's vagina), Desmond and Jack climb around inside and play around with a rock (or, as I call it, the Island's clitoris), and then, eventually, they all die and go to Los Angeles.

Lost has always had wheel spinning, but delivered in the finales. Jack and Locke looking down into the hatch, the fail-safe key, the first flash forward, the death of Jacob - all great moments, because they were moments of promise of what was to come. But in a finale episode that couldn't just promise, and had to actually deliver, it came up empty.

And one last thing about the final moments. When Lost first premiered, and everybody was speculating about what the Island was, one of the popular theories was that they had actually all died in the plane crash, and the Island was purgatory. No, no, the writers promised. Its not that at all. Because they're all actually dead and this is really purgatory would be a stupid cop-out of an explanation, right? RIGHT?

Rand Paul is not a racist. He's a theorist. As a fellow theorist, I can sympathize with him. Sure, he's a naive, stupid theorist, but everybody has to start somewhere.

Take my pet issue of late, carbon pricing. While, in theory, carbon pricing will reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, I also recognize that, when put into practice, carbon pricing will have unintended consequences. Some of these are predictable: the little old lady on a fixed income will not be able to afford to heat her house anymore. Some are unpredictable, and only experimentation will reveal them.

Take another example: many health care reformers want a single-payer system. In theory, a single payer system will insure everyone and can reduce costs. However, since this theory has been put into practice in other countries, we can observe some of the unintended consequences. A single payer system leaves the consumer of health care no incentive to restrain his health care spending. Therefore, the government must come up with a way to spend limited funds to serve an essentially unlimited demand. As a result, some goofy things happen.

In Rand Paul's theory, the Civil Rights Act was an unnecessary overreach of the federal government's authority. Paul is arguing that, based on free-market theory, segregation would eventually have been eliminated without government intervention. Woolworths discriminates against black people: if you don't like it, you decide not to shop at Woolworths. If we as a country decide we don't want segregation, the market will sort it out for us.

As a theory, that's fine. But his theory relies, as all theories and models do, on a simplified understanding of the the world. The world is complex and messy. A theory tries to distill the world down to an understandable mechanism. But if the theory is overly simplified, then you can miss important information.

In Rand's theory, he's simplified the timescale. Before the Civil Rights Act, there was a history of 200 years of segregation, racism, and worse in this country. The empirical data shows that either the free market was not having the desired effect, or it was not working at a sufficient pace. The time-scale on which the free market was eliminating segregation was insufficient compared to the time-scale of a human life. Or, in other words: while we wait for the free market to kick in, generations of black people live and die in a world where they are treated as less.

A catalyst was needed to increase the rate of a non-segregationist equilibrium. The Civil Rights Act was that catalyst. Theory, experiment, conclusion, action.

A theory is not the end of the scientific method. It is the beginning. Experimentation is just as important. Rand Paul is ignoring the results of the experiment, either because he doesn't understand the scientific method, or he doesn't like the results. He's either ignorant, or he's an asshole. Personally, I'd guess he's both.

That's my theory, anyway.

If you want to really feel the difference that economic impact can have on your decision making, go to the casino (without me there, of course, since I am the cooler) and play a few hands of $5 limit poker. Then move up to the $50 limit table and see if there's any change in how you approach your game.

Economic impact is the primary driver of almost every decision we make. And the we in this case is both you and I personally and the institutions that make up our society. I wrote recently about how the desire to be environmentally friendly got driven out of the decision making process because of the difficulty in evaluating how reducing carbon emissions would impact of a university's bottom line. About the existing cap and trade program for other environmental pollutants, I wrote:

This cap and trade program is able to apply a specific dollar amount to the cost of the emissions. If you want to emit NOx, then you have to purchase credits on the open market. And the cap ensures that only a certain number of credits are available. This means only a certain amount of NOx will be emitted - and its an amount that can be reduced over time by reducing the number of credits available.

This allows the cost of environmental pollution to show up in an economic analysis of a project.

But no such mechanism for carbon exists. [...]  The only way to reduce carbon emissions is to include the externality cost of these emissions into the cost of energy.

And here's another case of environmental benefits being overshadowed by hard economic reality. From a recent Cato institute report making the case against rail transit (via my favorite local anti-rail source, Houston Strategies):

This Policy Analysis uses the latest government data on scores of rail transit systems to evaluate the systems' value and usefulness to the public using six different tests:

• Profitability: Do rail fares cover operating costs?
• Ridership: Do new rail lines significantly increase transit ridership?
• Cost-Effectiveness: Are new rail lines less expensive to operate than buses providing service at similar frequencies and speeds?
• The "Cable Car" Test: Do rail lines perform as well as or better than cable cars, the oldest and most expensive form of mechanized land-based transportation?
• The Economic Development Test: Do new rail lines truly stimulate economic development?
• The Transportation Network Test: Do rail lines add to or place stresses upon existing transportation networks?

No system passes all of these tests, and in fact few of them pass any of the tests at all.

See anything missing there? How about these facts:

25 mpg car: 0.35 metric tons of CO2 per 1000 miles traveled
Bus: 0.17 metric tons of CO2 per 1000 miles traveled
Rail: 0.10 metric tons of CO2 per 1000 miles traveled

How would a carbon tax change the economics of mass transportation? At what cost per ton would the (economically measurable) environmental savings offset the higher costs of constructing the systems?

I don't have the answer, because I haven't done the math (yet - I'm totally going to). But what I do know is that right now, the decisions that shape a transportation system - not only whether or not to build mass transit systems, but whether or not to allow the sprawl that would make such a system less effective - are not forced to take into account the environmental impact that they have. To get back to my original analogy, we're making decisions like we're sitting at the $5 table, but we're actually at the $50 table and don't know it.

The economic case made against mass transit are 100% correct, but an economic case that doesn't take environmental impacts and energy sustainability into account misses the whole point of building the system in the first place.

Or should I say phuck your mom. Cause Phish is playing, get it? The joke, not why I'm attending a music festival where one of the headliners is Phish. Because that I don't get either.

There were more acts that I wanted to see playing on any given day during last year's lineup than I have even heard of in this year's lineup. Maybe that says more about my knowledge of music than it does the lineup, but you know what? It's not a goddamn final exam. Studying should not be required.

The Eagles? Do I look like someone's dad? Do I? Shit, when somebody sings Hotel California at a karaoke bar I want to throw tomatoes at them or punch them in the junk. Now I'm paying money for it.

Did every successful band formed in the last 10 years have a doctor's appointment scheduled that weekend? Did you know The Verve Pipe will be at ACL this year? They haven't had a hit single since I was in high school, and news break: that was a long time ago because I'm getting kind of old. Not The Eagles old, though. Go play a fucking Super Bowl halftime show like every other dinosaur band and leave me alone.

And before you tell me that I should stop complaining because Muse is there, and they are new and hip and modern: I just listened to some Muse on Pandora. Luckily when I dozed off the fall woke me up before I hit my head on my desk. They should change their name to Snooze.

Maybe this will work out for me. After all, I love bitching way more than I actually give a shit about music, and I'll have time to do nothing but during the endless jam wankery on tap for that weekend.

Brian Cushing, Texans linebacker and the reigning (for now) defensive Rookie of the Year in the NFL, has been suspended 4 games by the NFL for failing a drug test. Cushing claims that he has not taken steroids. Then how did the elevated levels of human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, get into his blood stream? Here's ESPN to profer a theory:

One person familiar with testing procedures told Schefter that hCG is contained in seminal fluid and that slightly elevated levels can be discovered in the event that a test occurs soon after ejaculation.

U.S. Anti-Doping Agency spokeswoman Erin Hannan denied that.

"You would not see a natural spike of hCG after a workout or ejaculation," Hannan told The Associated Press. "You would only detect it in urine by actually having taken it."

I guess I'm going to have to be the one to say it. Which I'm not terribly thrilled to do, because Brian Cushing is a large man, and of all the ways I might die, being beaten to death by an NFL linebacker in a steroid-fueled rage is pretty low on the list. But...

It seems odd that the only suggested method by which seminal fluid could raise a testees (that would be one who takes a test) hCG level is for the testee to have recently ejaculated. I mean, if he's getting rid of seminal fluid, shouldn't that LOWER hCG levels?

On the other hand... if he had recently INJESTED seminal fluid...

["Dear Prudence" is published weekly on Slate.com. For the original article, click here.]

Dear Prudie,
I was raised by loving and supportive parents who are both nearing 50. Ours was the house where all my friends wanted to hang out. Until recently, I thought I had as close to perfect parents as possible. Before I left for college last fall, my parents said they had something personal to tell me that they didn't want me to find out by accident. It turns out when my mom was younger, she was a porn star, and pictures of her can still be found on several Web sites. They felt I was old enough to understand and that I should hear it from them. I'm still having trouble with this information. I don't love them any less, but I guess I'm still in shock and denial. I'm so nervous about coming home for the summer, because I still don't have a grip on my feelings, and I'm afraid that I'll do something that will ruin my relationship with my parents.

The Watergate of the truther movement (that is, the movement to call conspiracy theorists "truthers") is the 9/11 Truth movement, which fabulously claims that the 9/11 terror attacks were orchestrated by the government to justify an invasion of the Middle East. (Notable Truthers include failed Texas gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina, Jesse "The Truther" Ventura, and Charlie "Two and a Half Towers" Sheen.)

Now we have the BP Truthers, who claim that the oil spill in the Gulf was a setup by the Obama administration to allow them to back pedal on promises for off-shore drilling. First put forth by human oil spill Rush Limbaugh, the theory really started catching some media attention when it repeated by... wait for it... if you haven't heard already this might make you do a spit take if you have water in your mouth so swallow anything before continuing... Mike "Heckuva Job" Brown.

Via.

This is a worst case scenario. A huge swath of the Gulf coast is going to be coated with oil by the end of the summer. Depending on the breaks, it might get as far as the Bahamas. If a hurricane passes through while the oil remains, the storm surge could push the slick miles inland. Beautiful endangered birds are covered in muck. Dead turtles are littering the shore like discarded bottles of suntan lotion. And the time line for capping the spill - not cleaning it up, mind you, but just stopping the oil from spilling out - is months.

Is your mind changed?