UbuntuCat

You know when a movie or TV show is uncensored and makes sense, and then gets re-released for network TV and is censored and makes no sense?

My wife is a fan of the movie The Wedding Date, and she got really excited when it aired on TV. So we DVR’ed it (off TBS, I think) and watched it… or tried to watch it. Throughout the film, she kept exclaiming, “Wait! They cut out that whole bit” while I was exclaiming, “This movie makes no sense.” I think they cut about a half hour out of the movie to make way for commercials. Why? Why not just make the runtime longer to put more commercials in? Or just not show the butchered movie at all?

Just as bad as censorship-for-time-constraints is censorship-for-prudishness. Hey, I can be as much of a prude as the next person, but when prudishness takes the humor out of TV, that’s just wrong.

This prudish censorship makes Sex and the City unwatchable for SatC fans (I realize non-fans already think it unwatchable—whether it’s censored or not). In one scene, Miranda calls Skipper (while he’s having sex with another woman) to see if he wants to get together, and Skipper likes Miranda better, so he breaks up with the other woman. In the original dialogue, the woman says, “You’re breaking up with me while you’re still inside of me?” In the censored version, she says “You’re breaking up with me now?” Yeah. Hilarious.

Another great prudes-take-the-humor-out moment is in the censored version of Return to Me. Like Return to Me is just so risqué. At one point, Bonnie Hunt’s character is arguing with her husband (James Belushi’s character) and says, “Great. You taught him hell. That’s great.” He gets all defensive and suggests that it’s possible their child might have learned the word hell from the mother, who replies “I never said hell, you son of a bitch.” All the irony is lost in the TV version, of course, in which she says “I never said hell.”

Well, thank God for HBO and Showtime. They may cost a bit more than the regular channels, but they’ll at least keep the laughs in.

I often find typos in books and newspapers. I understand that copy editors are human and can make mistakes. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle Letters to the Editor section goof is unforgivable, though. Whoever does the copy editing on that should get a firm scolding, some unpaid time off, or a firing. Yikes!

Or perhaps they’re wondering if his lightness and grace of movement that make a dancer appear buoyant can be popped. Doubt it.

It was actually quite a while ago that I first installed Skype. It seemed okay, but most of the people I want to talk on the phone with I can call on my cell phone, and I don’t really talk on the phone that often, anyway.

A while ago (it feels like years), my wife and I tried chatting with a former bridesmaid from our wedding who happens to live in Europe, and we had trouble connecting. Well, she’s in New Zealand now, and my wife has a new computer, and we were able to connect to her last night—see what her place looks like, meet her fiancé, show her our apartment, and talk what seemed almost like face to face.

I realize people have been using Skype video chat for years, but for me this is a new thing, and it’s cool! I dig it. It’s good to know, too, that if I or my wife is sent away on business, we can Skype video chat cost-free. Ah, the wonders of technology…

I was quite looking forward to this new Iron Man film adaption. I’ve been a big Iron Man fan for decades (particularly fond of the alcoholism saga and armor wars of the 80s and 90s).

Well, last night, I saw an advanced screening of it at the Balboa Theater. I love this theater. With the special deal of advance-purchased tickets, my wife and I saw this film and had a “small” (what most movie theaters call “large”) popcorn with real butter, a jumbo hot dog, and a small (what most theaters would call “kids”) soda—all for US$23. The management gave out free posters to everyone and welcomed us at the beginning of the show, had two trivia questions with prizes, and apologized for the terrible Louis Vuitton commercial we had to sit through before the previews. It’s sad that independently-owned theaters like this are falling by the wayside in favor of megaplexes like the Metreon. The Balboa has personality and affordability. More importantly to me, it has a good mix of mainstream and artsy films. But I digress…

In terms of remaining faithful to the spirit the comic book and in terms of thrilling action and laugh-inducing jokes, the film is a success in spades. What is up with the sexism, though? I cannot imagine a film about a billionaire woman who is drunk all the time, sleeps around with and uses men like tissue, and is so incompetent that her personal assistant must do everything for her being doted on and admired by said personal assistant with the basic attitude of “Well, she may be a mess, but she’s my mess, and even though she’s kind of an asshole, I love her.” Who would watch that?

Of course, most people don’t really care if a male character is an asshole, as long as the film has laughter and well-animated violence. It just made me angry how the (terribly miscast) Gwyneth Paltrow assistant character is so pathetic. She’s basically Bond’s Moneypenny but without the wit and the sex appeal. Instead of Moneypenny, she’s a bit more like Sandra Bullock’s character from Two Weeks Notice. The only other prominent female character in the film is the sorority-looks-with-a-liberal-conscience reporter whom Stark has a one night stand with and then basically ignores.

My first reaction was to think, I thought we’d made some progress. I thought this was 2008. What is this? The 1940s? Then, I thought again and realized that roles for women in 1940s films were much better. You had the fast-talking Katherine Hepburn types and the film noir femme fatales. Most personal assistants and secretaries in films of those days had sass and could banter. Now we get the “You’re so bad and undeserving but I adore you. Tee hee!” women? I hope this backlash will abate soon, and third-wave (or are we on the fourth one?) feminism will come back in full swing.

Is it a sin to want an enjoyable action film with humor and just a little less sexism and misogyny?

There’s a rather famous poem by Robert Frost called “The Road Not Taken.” Most people who read it tend focus on the end and admire the fact that he went in a direction most people didn’t go. The idea is that he is a pioneer, a nonconformist, a rebel, a risk-taker. I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.

Well, that’s not what I focus on. It was what I focused on when I read it in high school English class, but what I focus on now is the first bit: And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler

I recently saw a little-known but rather well-done movie called Seeing Other People, in which a newly engaged woman with very little sexual experience witnesses spontaneous stranger sex at her engagement party and then decides she wants a temporary open relationship with her fiancé to sow her wild oats (and allow him to re-sow his, just to be fair). In the end, you’re left wondering if the couple might have been better off not having tried the experiment, or was actually better off for having tried it.

This is how life is for me. I, like Frost, am sorry I cannot travel both roads. I chose to avoid illegal drugs. I chose to not drink until I was of legal age. I chose to do (relatively) well in school. I chose to be a smartass to my teachers. I chose to become a teacher. I made a decision to quit teaching. There are various paths I’ve taken, none of which I regret. I’ve never thought, “If only I had been a druggie drunk academic delinquent who didn’t talk back to teachers and never was employed; then, my life would be so much better.” That line of thinking, that kind of regret means you still had to choose one path but simply chose the wrong one.

What I’m sorry about is not being able to travel both roads. I know people who want to try everything and experience everything, but you can’t experience everything, because sometimes the lack of experience in something is an experience itself. George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life thinks he’s missing out on all these world travels and exciting parties and war glories his brother and others get to experience. He thinks he’s stuck in a small town not getting any experience, but he is getting an experience. He’s experiencing what it’s like to be in a small town and be a fundamental part of that community.

I’m equally fascinated by both people who have traveled all over the world and lived in many different countries, and people who have lived in one town for decades and been one of many in a long family line who have lived in that same town. I want both those experiences and everything in between. I want to know what’s it’s like to be faithful to my wife until one of us dead. But I also want to know what’s it’s like to feel the pain of one of us cheating on the other. The two are mutually exclusive. And, no, being faithful for only a decade or two and then cheating isn’t experiencing both—it’s really just the latter.

I loved going to one college all four years. But I’d have loved to have gone to another college as well for all four years. No, transferring every year for four years is not the same experience. As they say, “You have only one life to live.”

What’s even more psychologically frustrating isn’t that, like Frost, you can’t go down both roads; what’s even more frustrating is that there really isn’t a road that is not taken. If you can think of it, someone’s done it. As Eccelesiastes says, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” You think you’re a crazy sex maniac who has slept with 1000 people. Well, there are other sex maniacs out there. You think you’re a crazy chaste maniac who has slept with nobody and never will until you die. Well, there are other virgins-till-death out there, too. “New” in this life basically means new ways of doing the same thing or pushing the limits of quantity (running the same distance but more quickly; running a slightly longer distance).

So what do I do about all this road business? Well, first of all, I don’t pretend anything is new. I’m content to go down roads others have gone down before. More importantly, I find the next best thing to travelling more than one road. I don’t know if C.S. Lewis actually said this in real life or not, but in the movie Shadowlands, Lewis says “We read to know we’re not alone.” I think the implication of that is that we want to know others have shared the same experiences we have, felt the same feelings, thought the same thoughts. That can be one reason to read. I read for the opposite reason: I read to experience vicariously what I have not experienced. I read to know that we are varied and to take advantage of that fact. This is why I’m mainly drawn to non-fiction. I love hearing people’s stories.

A multitude of roads diverged in a wood, and I got friends and strangers together and said, “Hey, let’s all go down different roads and then meet back up and share our stories.” And that has made all the difference.

I’ve always considered myself a good speller. Whatever that means.

I won the spelling bee in 4th grade, and I was bummed to have been eliminated in the pre-trials in 5th grade by the word necessary. The representative from our homeroom who did get necessary correct (after everyone else had already exhausted the other logical possible spellings of that word) lost in the finals on the word hexagon. Yes, she was a smart person in other ways, and she turned out in high school to be an excellent swimmer (far better an athlete than the runner I was). Still, I was quite resentful at the time (Hexagon? Hexagon?!).

I pride myself to this day on not using spellcheck in word processors or web browsers. I don’t want a program to automatically flag words as misspelled that I should know how to spell, but I will deliberately look up the spelling of certain words I’m not sure of. Disingenuous, for example, is one I can never remember the spelling of.

Of course, despite my bravado and hubris, I’m more or less an average speller when it comes to college-educated folk (that’s university-educated, for you readers outside the US). After watching Spellbound and Akeelah and the Bee, I realized just how mediocre my spelling skills are. Those kids are spelling words I don’t know the meanings of—words I’ve never even heard of, words I would doubt are in the English language if they didn’t have dictionary entries.

But not only am I a mediocre speller for my demographic, ultimately; I am, in fact, deficient. I misspell constantly. In fact, I just wrote mispell just now and then corrected myself. That isn’t my usual kind of blunder, though. Usually, I don’t misspell the appropriate word so much as spell correctly a wholly inappropriate but vaguely similar-sounding word. For example, if I intend to write something like I like the way my cat smells after a bath, I might actually type I like the weight my cat smells after a bath.

From an English teacher’s perspective (I used to be one), this is a rather odd kind of spelling error. Most people who misspell do not substitute in correctly spelled wrong words; they use the right words and just spell them incorrectly. For example, you might see a phonetic speller spell imagine as emagen or spell segue as segway. Not being a learning specialist, I don’t know where this comes from, but in my unprofessional opinion I’d guess it stems from people not having read enough. The more you read, the more familiar you become with the way words look and are spelled, and (even if you don’t know the exact spelling of a word) you grow to recognize quite quickly if a word doesn’t look right.

In fact, if anything, people who read a lot have the opposite problem of those who do not read as much—the super-readers tend to have an extremely large vocabulary but not actually know how to pronounce all the words they know the meanings and spellings of. I had a friend in high school (one of the top-ranked students in our class who went to top Ivy League schools for undergraduate and graduate schools) who didn’t know until junior year that the word rebels is pronounced REbuls and not REEbuls. I myself have had that problem. I learned the words deny and renege from a comic book called Power Man and Iron Fist, but I thought they were pronounced DEnee (instead of deeNAI) and REnegeh (instead of reeNEG). If you watch the movie Trekkies, you’ll see one Star Trek-obsessed fan make this blunder several times during the documentary.

The acquisition and application of language is a fascinating thing, and I’ve loved writing about it. Now, let me go back and proofread this sucker…

Our cat probably has at least another decade left in him. He won’t be dying any time soon. Nevertheless, I keep thinking about what I’ll miss about him when he dies. I think I’m trying to cushion the blow as much as possible, because I know I’ll be absolutely devastated when he goes.

When I was younger and had less sentient pets (hermit crabs, for example), I couldn’t understand why people were so upset when their dogs or cats died. Well, even though he hasn’t died yet, I now know why I’ll be upset when he does finally kick the kitty litter. First of all, we have a relationship. Yes, one can imagine a relationship with one’s hermit crabs, but really how much affection is shown (Oh, it poked one claw out of the shell today—that must be an expression of love!)? Secondly, dogs and cats just live longer. Indoor cats can live up to 20 years. That’s a long time to be spending with another being.

Well, it’s entirely possible my wife and I would eventually get another kitty, but here are some things I think might never be replaced:

• He does “the monkey hug,” where he’ll wrap one front paw around my neck when I hold him.
• He lets me clip his nails holding him upside down, and he actually appears to enjoy it, sometimes purring and kneading while I do it.
• He will let out a few meows when I first put him in, but he doesn’t seem to mind baths (he just walks around the tub while I shampoo him).
• He lets us manhandle him more than any other cat I’ve ever seen. We can pick him up in pretty much any position, hold him upside down, put his paws over his face to play peek-a-boo. Yes, we are cruel, but in a playful, nice way. Not enough for people to sic the SFSPCA on us.
• He moos. Yup. Like a cow. Sure, he also meows, but most of the time he sounds like a cow mooing.

I have friends who work from the morning until midnight five days a week. I know others who are traveling every week for their jobs. When I was a teacher I felt as if I were working every waking hour of the day (except summer vacations). But now I’ve turned into a workaholic lightweight.

I usually have to be convinced to leave early, but working on weekends gets me down. I just worked part of Saturday and felt I had to use the rest of the weekend to recuperate. I probably don’t have a right to complain since I’ll have reduced hours during the summer.

I just feel a little tired. I’ll say the cat certainly got a lot of snuggling time the past two days.

If you have followed tech news closely at all within the last ten years, you’ve probably heard the phrase year of the Linux desktop before. This is the year that Linux makes a breakthrough with home users, and suddenly Microsoft’s dominant market share comes toppling down. I believe people have been proclaiming various years as the year of the Linux desktop since as early as 1998 (possibly even earlier).

Sometimes the writers will say the current year will be the year of the Linux desktop. Sometimes they’ll be a little more conservative and say some year a few years from now will be the year of the Linux desktop. For example, if I were one of these writers, I would either write 2008 will be the year of the Linux desktop! or with the progress we’re saying right now in 2008, it’s likely that by 2011, we’ll see the year of the Linux desktop.

Did we see the year of the Linux desktop? Nope. That, at least, I think most of us Linux aficionados can agree on. But some naysayers go a step further. Through a leap in logic, they decide that the fact that none of these previous predictions have come true precludes the possibility of a future prediction coming true. In other words, the extrapolation goes something like this: Oh, come on. For years, people have been saying such-and-such year is the year of the Linux desktop, and it’s never come. It’s never going to come. Microsoft will always be on top. Just deal with it.

I would contend that we have no way of knowing whether that year will ever come or not. Just think of the fable “The boy who cried wolf.” In it, the boy tells the village that a wolf is coming. The village gets all up in a panic and then realizes the boy was lying. He cries wolf a second time, and a second time the village is in a panic and realizes the boy was lying again. The third time he cries wolf, there really is a wolf, but no one in the village believes him any more. That’s what’s happening with this whole YOTLD business. These writers who keep proclaiming that some year is the YOTLD are losing their credibility every time the year doesn’t come. But it also means that it’s possible the year might come, and no one will believe the writer who really does get it right.

So I guess it boils down to two things: 1. If you’re a writer who wants to proclaim that such-and-such year is the YOTLD, don’t even bother. Even if you’re right, no one will believe you anyway, as people have been saying that for years. 2. If you one of those people who thinks the YOTLD will never come, you have to come up with other reasons than “They’ve been saying that for years.” After all, I could say every year that I’m going to die that year, and I may be wrong most of the time, but one year I am going to be right. Whether I say it’s going to happen or not has no bearing on the actual outcome or occurrence.

I’m just beginning now to read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which talks about the moment when there’s a huge sociological change (crime rates dropping, fashion trends being adopted, new technology going mainstream), and it’s made me change my mind on Linux adoption. I used to think the growth of consumer Linux would be gradual and stay gradual indefinitely, but there is a tipping point, and if we get to that point (maybe about 15%), there will be a huge flood of new users. I’m not going to speculate on what year that might be, but it clearly happened for cell phones (as Gladwell points out) in 1998, and it also happened for iPods in 2003, and Firefox in 2005. It won’t necessarily mean the end of Windows’ dominance on the home user’s computer, but it could mean a lot more third-party support for Linux—the kind that Macs currently enjoy.

Which year will be the YOTLD? No one knows. There very well still could be one, and it would probably be a year and not a decade.

This is a boring account of my life with running. I just felt inspired to write it after assistant coaching and coming back from a track meet, which made me nostalgic and reflective of my own running experience. If you don’t like self-indulgent crap, please read no further.

Never before I was in high school did I ever imagine I would be a runner. Runners were athletes. I was not an athlete. It pained me to have to run for the Presidential Fitness Awards. It pained me to run even half a mile, and I got cramps like nobody’s business.

Well, after sixth grade, I decided I was no good at soccer and that soccer was getting to be too big a time commitment (after all, middle schoolers have so many places to go!), so for seventh and eighth grade, I was sportless.

Once ninth grade rolled around, though, I thought I should probably do a sport, since it would look good for college admissions (I don’t know if it actually did), and knowing I had terrible hand-eye coordination, I opted for running. Cross-country seemed like suicide, so I waited for winter track (aka indoor track). It was only after I signed up for track that I realized that all the other freshmen who had done cross-country during fall were in much better shape than I was. I was definitely the slowest person on the track team. At first, the coaches stuck me with the girls, but I couldn’t keep up with them. It took me a while to run a mile without stopping, and I think the only reason I stuck it out was the encouragement and good modeling of my teammates.

No matter how good they were, no matter how much better runners they were than I was, everyone on the team (superstars to solid runners to slow runners who were still faster than I was) congratulated me on every small bit of progress I made and showed me through their actions how to be serious about training and competition while also having fun. The coaches knew my skill level and gave me appropriate challenges for my body’s condition (i.e., out of shape).

I did make progress, though. I set a goal for myself to run a sub-six-minute mile by the end of the year, and I did (just barely—I think my time was 5:58). I also made a commitment to try cross-country to be in better shape for winter and spring track of my next year. The payoff came in the middle of winter track my sophomore year. I was in the middle of what felt like an extremely long run (somewhere between four and five miles). Suddenly, in the middle of the run I just felt like Hey, I have energy. I think I can run a little faster. I think, actually, I could run a lot faster! And that’s what I did. I caught up to the faster runners on the team and run with them to the end of the run. It was a huge turning point. I finally felt as if I was making big improvements. Unfortunately, all of the improvement was in my body and not in my mind. Throughout high school, my coaches and teammates kept telling me running was 20% physical and 80% mental, and I couldn’t believe it. Not believing it had a negative impact on my races. Sure, I was keeping up with “the big boys” in practice, but my race times were improving only marginally. My spring track coach thought I could easily go sub-five in the mile by the end of the season, but I didn’t. He thought that come my junior year I would be the number three runner on the cross-country team.

I had consciously agreed with him and had high hopes for myself, but my unconscious was still saying You’re slow. You can’t keep up with these guys.

During preseason before junior-year cross-country, we had some pretty hard workouts, and I was keeping up with our top two runners (who eventually broke our home course’s longstanding course record—together). My coach still had it in his head that I would be the number three runner. When our first meet came around, he told me to go out with Mike and James at around 5:30 pace for the first mile and then see how I feel. I couldn’t even keep up with them for the first mile. I got passed by most of the varsity squad during that race, and as the season progressed I moved down in the rankings until the coaches couldn’t, in good conscience, keep me on varsity (I was below the top seven runners).

Somehow, I managed to earn a varsity letter in winter track that year, but that was it. The other three varsity letters I got were the ones they automatically give seniors who’d been running track all four years of high school. By the time senior year rolled around, both of my track coaches were visibly disappointed in me. They saw me race and were just scratching their heads. They saw what I did in practice and knew I could race better than that. I was probably the worst racer on the whole team, even though I wasn’t the slowest runner.

The problem, from their standpoint, was that I was the biggest waste of talent. The problem, from my standpoint, was that I enjoyed running but didn’t enjoy racing and didn’t have that killer instinct, that drive to win. Good racers feel the pain and say “I’m going to fight through the pain.” Good racers say, “This runner’s better than me, faster than me, but I am not going to be passed. I am going to win this thing. I have decided I’m going to win.” My mindset was “Let me give this an honest effort. Ouch. This really hurts. I think I have to slow down a bit.”

Do I have any regrets? Well, it’d be easy to say in retrospect that I should have tried harder, adopted a different mindset, become more competitive. It’s hard to say whether my mind and willpower were in the right place at that time to do that. I definitely don’t regret running. I loved the camaraderie and loved being in shape. Given how out of shape I was to begin with, it’s amazing how my coaches and teammates were able to help me improve so much. Even now, sluggish non-athlete that I am, running maybe two times a week and then walking the other days, I still consider myself a runner at heart. I won’t ever probably be a racer, but I do love the track and the rush of the runner’s high.