a friend sent me a link to wordle.  as a wordie myself, this thing is simply awesome - taking any text you give it, and generating a word-cloud out of it.  it's free, it's clever, it's 2.0, and i love it!

here is one of my current RSS feed... too fun!

- g 

there are many types of fear – but for the scope of this entry, i will consider only two.  there is the kind of imminent, immediate fear that one finds when one is in mortal danger – when one is told that one has AIDS or cancer, or is in a dark street and a desperate person with a gun threatens your life, or a drunk driver on a rainy night swerves into your lane at 225km/h blinding you and threatens to end your life in a fury of twisted steel, flaming gasoline and kinetic energy sufficient to throw only half of your torso or the body of your infant child hundreds of metres through your windsheld.  then there’s the kind of fear that comes from knowing that your financial system is so completely corrupt and broken that no matter what you do, you, your generation, your children’s generation, and even their children will be royally fucked because YOU stood by and let it happen and didn’t rage against the machine sooner to stop this outcome from happening.

less than a week ago, the heroes of the american public, the president, congress, the fed, and the us treasury all told the world that they needed an unprecedented $700 BILLION dollars of AMERICAN TAXPAYERS MONEY just to STABILIZE the crisis that was the american economy.  who told the american taxpayers that there was $700 billion dollars of discretionary funds that they could reallocate at a moment's notice?  if *i* found $700 billion lying around my apartment, you can sure as fuck believe that i would be bloody doing something useful with it!!!!  i can’t even begin to understand the outrage that must be swelling up in the hearts of americans.  while they pay record prices for gasoline to drive them to jobs that they hate to do but allow them to support their children and families – while they watch their government pour trillions of dollars into a war effort they don’t comprehend or desire – while they read about banks and institutions that reward their leaders with millions and millions of dollars of untouchable rewards for exploiting the average joe – they are faced with the ultimate indignity of being asked to pay for the privilege of being fucked up the ass – financially speaking.  watching their children get fucked up the ass.  watching their children’s children, get fucked up the ass.

…

it sickens me.  utterly.  i am physically repulsed and weakened at the realization of what could happen in this state of affairs.

…

i watched the season premiere of “heroes” over the past couple of nights thinking to myself, “this show is crap – this villain is too powerful.  there can be no evil so great and unstoppable as this.  how can you fashion a show about an impossible evil that cannot possibly be overcome.”  what has shifted me from the second mode of fear that i described above to the first mode of fear is that this is all happening RIGHT NOW.  THIS WEEK, changes will be set in motion that will either reward the villain, or … well… not reward the villain but leave him unscathed.

if america wants  a hero, then it should look to this woman, the representative from ohio, marcy kaptur.  if i were barack obama, or even john mccain, i would get THIS woman to get on my side.  she’s got the right idea.

omg.  how can this have happened?

- g

ps.  oh yeah, i almost forgot, while america is busy bankrupting and overextending itself in pursuit of what... making the world a better place? ... no, PROFIT! ... the rest of the world is looking at america like a fatted calf with its hollywood celebretatzzi and mindless agonizing over who is gay and who isn't... the rest of the world has grown lean and hungry and feral and savage from not having controlled the world all these years and you can be bloody well assured that in that battle-ready sharpness, will pick the very very best time to make a decisive move against the lives that we have complacently grown to love and rely upon.  i'm staring at the headlights, but am fairly powerless to turn the wheel.

profit.  there are very few aspects of our lives that the impetus to generate profit doesn’t reach.  sometimes, it can lead us to excel and reach for new levels of excellence and achievement for a mutual advancement of all parties concerned, and other times, it can exploit the darkness of mankind and make wretched all the good things that it touches.

DC-Warner Bros. want to “reboot” superman.  i’ve known about this for a few weeks now, and it has been burning at the base of my spine since i found out.  the last movie that Time-Warner released in the superman saga, superman returns,  “underperformed” the expectations that executives had of it.  true, it cost an incredible amount of money to make (e$timated cost - $270 million) and only pulled in about $200 million at the box-office (although it pulled in over $50 million on its opening weekend – and who knows how much overseas and in DVD sales and post-launch revenues and licensing revenue), making it a clear loser when compared on the balance sheet to something like “the dark knight” which cost a paltry $160 million and, with its incredibly long box-office legs, has pulled in over $510 million (with all the same additional revenue streams).  there is no argument that batman supremely kicked superman’s ass where it mattered most (to profiteers) – in ticket sales and entertainment value on the big screen and popularity among the ticket-buying public.

DC executives have decided that superman was not properly “positioned”  in the market and that the approach to presenting superman needs to be reworked.  here is an excerpt that i’ve been reading and re-reading to be sure that i understand what the problem is:

Warner Bros. also put on hold plans for another movie starring multiple superheroes -- known as "Batman vs. Superman" -- after the $215 million "Superman Returns," which had disappointing box-office returns, didn't please executives. "'Superman' didn't quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to," says Mr. Robinov. "It didn't position the character the way he needed to be positioned." "Had 'Superman' worked in 2006, we would have had a movie for Christmas of this year or 2009," he adds. "But now the plan is just to reintroduce Superman without regard to a Batman and Superman movie at all." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121936107614461929.html?mod=hpp_us_whats_news)

so here is my problem.  superman is a character who embodies uniqueness, selflessness, self-sacrifice for the greater good, and a by-design limitless capacity to pursue that purpose.  everyone knows about the infant orphan, launched from his parent’s doomed homeworld in the very last seconds, to arrive on earth and show mankind how to be nice and good and fetch cats from trees and cower at the sight of phosphorescent green rocks.  how do you retool that to make it “darker” or “grittier”?  how do you take an iconic figure who for 70 years, for generations and generations, has inspired people to try and be kinder or stronger or more caring, and make him more “batman-like”?  what is the cost of turning something that you could look up to and admire and seek to emulate, as unattainable as it is by the sheer impossibility of the target, and make more money out of it?  what does it say about the people who make that decision, or the people who would be gratified by that motive?  what does that say about us – the consumers of that entertainment/inspirational commodity?

for me, the impossibility of superman (not unlike the impossibility of any other messianic figure), the constancy of his convictions to do good and what is right, the strength and will to try because he is compelled to do so, even in the most contrived and fictitious way that pulp fiction can allow, the invulnerability of his commitment to behave in a manner that is helpful and just and honourable (and of course, the wicked cool abilities of flight, indestructibility, limitless speed and strength, and most importantly, x-ray vision) – all of these things make the superman myth too compelling an influence to ignore (well, for me anyway).  now, greedy executives and stockholders want to fuck with that paradigm and make him conflicted, challenged, uncertain, and dark.  they want to make him like any other hero – like bruce wayne, tony stark, or logan, or that banner fellow (who has had more “reboots” than anyone in comic history, i think).  i just cringe at the thought.

one more expert opinion should be heard on the subject.  james marsden, who has crossed comic allegiance boundaries and played in both marvel and DC storylines (X-men and Superman), commented on the relative failure of superman and what that would mean to the franchise:

"Honestly, my theory is that the white bread element of Superman or the virtuous element of Superman wasn't that exciting to young people, the videogame generation. You've got to have some edgy, kick-ass dark side to the character to make people want to be him," Marsden said. "There was something old school, virtuous - which I actually loved - and white bread about Superman that didn't resonate so much. I loved the movie that Brian made. But maybe I'm the anomaly and I don't represent what young fans want to see."

In the end, Marsden doesn't think that Warner's decision to go darker is a good one - but a necessary one, he said.

"[Audiences] want to see darkness and Superman doesn't represent that. I like that about him, but honestly that's the reason why," Marsden continued. "Look at 'The Dark Knight' and Christian Bale. He's the hero but there's a kick-ass darkness to him. Or Wolverine and 'X-Men.' Superman was virtuous and the reluctant superhero. He never told a lie. He eats apple pie. I don't know if that's something the young kids want to aspire to. It's kind of sad to me."  (http://www.supermanhomepage.com/news.php?readmore=5488)

i see people on the street everyday who show their superman colours.  t-shirts, bags, tattoos, ok – mostly t-shirts – but all of them indications that the superman mythos means something to them and that they, like the man of steel, believe in unequivocal goodness and a will to see truth and justice prevail.  the thought that the profit motive is the real puppet master in the evolution of that ideal sickens and saddens me.  it might almost be time to think of a new myth to which to adhere and draw inspiration.  maybe it will be ziggy or dilbert.  or maybe i need to make up my own so that i’m not tied to some external influence that will eventually make me sick.  or maybe i need to realize that it’s just a comic.

- g

song of the day for needing to be saved from your own illusions: save me, remy zero

so today, the scientists at CERN started up humankind's largest, most expensive, arguably most ambitious science experiment ever - the large hadron collider. almost two decades from conception to completion, and costing around $6 billion,

a friend of mine asked me today why this was such a big deal, and i guess it's not apparent to everyone what the enormity of this experiment is. theoretical physics, the science that brought us nuclear energy, the atom bomb, and a plethora of other more benign technologies like nuclear magnetic resonance imaging critical to the advancement of life sciences, has reached something of a plateau.

theoretical models exist to explain why some big sub-atomic particles like protons and neutrons have atomic mass and other particles, like electrons and photons are relatively mass-free. it has to do with particles as they interact with a theoretical construct referred to as Higgs fields and how interaction with these fields affect their kinetic and vibrational energies. i have to admit that the mathematics to understand these theories is completely outside of my capacity for understanding, but i love to take in the coles notes versions of these theories and add them to my superficial understanding of all of the different levels of existence.

the higgs field and its constituent "particles", possibly the Higgs Boson, have never been observed in prior atomic colliders, even though it was postulated last decade that they might be detectable in the Fermilab collider in Chicago. simply put, that collider could not accelerate protons to sufficient states to make these particles detectable.

the large hadron collider in switzerland is an order of magnitude more powerful and promises to provide definitive and exquisitely abundant experimental data that might possibly confirm the existence of this particle or these particles. so what is the higgs boson? well, it just might be the thing that explains how energy and mass relate to one another in a very meaningful way. it might also help us to bridge the gap in understanding between quantum mechanics and newtonian/einsteinan physics work - something that no theory has yet been able to explain. we have heard for almost a hundred years that the energy of something is equal to the mass of that thing times the square of the speed of light, but until now, we've never been able to tell the story of "why".

and that is the reason that the LHC is such a big deal. man has always been able to observe and make up a story as to "how" something happens... it's sunny because apollo is riding his chariot across the sky, water spins down a drain in a certain direction because of this or that rotation of the earth, people get cancer because of erroneous DNA replication that can be caused by ultraviolet radiation. but it's a much more difficult (and costly, apparently) question to ask "why". asking "why" something happens is a reach towards divine comprehension, and man is about to embark on a huge leap forward in that kind of comprehension.

i don't know how the modern world is equipped to deal with this. some people will ask, "how can we monetize this discovery?" will we be able to learn to build cheap and poweful death-ray weapons? will we learn how to travel faster-than-light? will we be able to replicate chocolate sundays? is the world today capable of sustaining discovery for discovery's sake anymore? i am doubtful, but excited that the prospect that this one endeavour demonstrating our race's collective will to ask fundamental questions of "why".

- g