The Game - Neil Strauss

This post may appeal to the smallest subset of my readers so far. Nonetheless I have been claiming that I was going to read this for a while and I finally got around to it. The above image is of a man named Mystery (real name Erik James Horvat-Markovic) who is a pickup artist. He is mostly well known by the fact that he had a show of the same name of his occupation (The Pick-up Artist) and because of this book. A pickup artist is someone who develops certain lines, strategies and skills to be able to attract and seduce women. If this sounds creepy, it is.

The Game is the writer Neil Strauss' introduction to, and development within the pickup community. Strauss is a writer for Rolling Stone magazine and was known before for ghost writing many books for rock stars. He starts out as an awkward average guy, who gets introduced to the pickup society by an article suggestion from an editor. What follows is a description of the characters and methods of the pickup society along with his personal development. I didn't read this book to try to learn the art of the pickup, but read it because I had seen The Pick-Up Artist and found Mystery to be equally ridiculous and fascinating. Just look at his outfits! He is very rarely seen without that large feathery hat, and often comes dressed in goggles, platform shoes (even though he is 6 foot 5), leather pants and various other ridiculous accessories. However he seems to be very successful with the ladies; at least when it comes to initial conversations at bars and clubs.

Most everyone found within the seduction community comes from the ranks of socially awkward computer (or otherwise) nerds. Many of them start off as virgins who have no idea how to talk to the opposite sex. Strauss wasn't that socially awkward initially, but admits to having some problems with the ladies. After getting his first taste of the seduction community, he gets sucked in until it reaches a full blown obsession. It seems that the first thing that someone has to do when entering the pickup community is to get a silly nickname, and Strauss chooses 'Style'. He starts to learn from many of the masters and eventually settles in with Mystery. He then proceeds to start teaching pickup seminars with Mystery and becomes his main wingman. These seminars involve them teaching a handful of young men how to interact with and pickup women. They lecture and give them notes, and then go out with the students into the 'field' and watch their interactions with women to give them further tips. This takes them all over the world (there is a pretty funny series of events that happen in Eastern Europe) and eventually settles them in as the head of the pickup community.

The techniques of the pickup community (at least the Mystery Method) focus on social manipulation of women and groups. The technique that grabs you immediately is their 'peacocking'. This involves wearing ridiculous outfits in order to stand out in a crowd (see above and below for a picture of Mystery and Style) and seems to work. Other techniques involve ignoring the 'target' (or woman of interest) in order to make her more interested in you, giving her backhanded compliments ('negs') in order to lower her apparent worth in comparison to yours, and many more sneaky techniques. The Method also develops a set of 'openers' or ridiculous lines in order to break the ice of groups. Their idea is that it really doesn't matter what you first say to someone, as long as it gets them interested in talking to you. Additionally Mystery himself uses sleight of hand magic tricks to charm women and has aspirations to be a world renown illusionist (thus his nickname).

After Style and Mystery seem to conquer the seduction world, they move into a house together with other pickup artists to make a pickup community called Project Hollywood. The group rent a large Hollywood mansion in order to organize their pickup seminars (in which they make thousands of dollars) and to have a place to party and bring girls. You can imagine what happens when a bunch of socially awkward misogynistic people get together to live under one roof. They almost immediately begin to backstab each other by stealing each others girls, pickup tricks, and just by being all around jerks.

Mystery is a complete mess throughout the book. The reason I decided to read this was because how ridiculous I think Mystery is, and was not disappointed. He has breakdown after breakdown in the book, needs various psychotic medication and has to be taken to a mental hospital multiple times. He also dates completely unstable women which doesn't help the situation. One of these girls causes the breakdown of Mystery and the entire idea of Project Hollywood by falling for one of the other guys in the house.

Because these men are socially awkward and insecure at the core, they are unable to have stable relationships after they get past the tricks and lines that get women to give them their number and on occasion into their beds. As the house falls apart Style starts to see how shallow and empty many of the men are in the community are and becomes distant from the other house mates (other than Mystery with whom he is still close). He starts to desire a real meaningful relationship, rather than a series of hookups and week long stands. After meeting and temporarily boarding Courtney Love, Strauss falls for one of her band mates. Realizing that all of his 'tricks' won't work on the confident guitarist, he acts like himself and eventually gets the girl (it should be noted that they are no longer together).

Although the motives of many of the men in this book are suspect, there may be something useful to be found in the seduction community for awkward men. It teaches them how to approach women, and how to have the confidence to interact with them beyond a predetermined set of lines. The moral issues come in when men use these techniques to bed woman after woman while treating them like objects. The community does frown strongly against using drugs or alcohol to try to pick up women as well as lying (beyond the initial silly lines), but they end up treating women no better than many of the douchebags that picked on them back in high school do.

This book got a little graphic at times so it's not for someone who wants to avoid the occasional sex scene. It's fairly well written for a book about the seduction community, and is broken up into small chapters making it easy to read. The look of the book matches the ridiculousness of the characters within; it has a leather cover with gold rimmed pages and a red satin bookmark, just like the bible. Strauss is able to walk to line between being the journalist who is an outsider, and someone who is ingrained as an important part of this society. He obviously cares about the seduction community, and thinks it teaches mean important things about themselves and others. While at the same time he is able to critique the people within the community and the ways that the techniques that he has helped develop can be misused.

So ladies, when men dressed in ridiculous outfits or accessories come up to you and ask 'if you believe spells work' walk away. Just walk away.

Blue Velvet - David Lynch

A little less than a year ago I started watching David Lynch's films as guided movie watching. I hadn't seen any of them, and knew I was late for the party as a mid 20's movie fan that likes to think he's a little 'hip' and 'with it'. This was what got me started thinking about possibly writing a blog. I liked viewing things in a directed fashion, as if it were the syllabus for a film class, and I especially enjoyed discussing them with Lindsay afterward. I moved on to do the same thing with anime (a little bit of hit and a whole lot of miss), John Carpenter, and possibly in the future David Cronenberg. So far I think the David Lynch 'class' has been the most successful. He has a pretty wide catalog, but not too big as to be overwhelming. His movies are also all worth watching (except maybe Fire Walk with Me the terrible Twin Peaks 'prequel') and also usually elicit a pretty strong response (which may or may not be positive).

Blue Velvet may be the best place to start if you were interested in getting into David Lynch. I first watched Eraserhead which although spectacular in it's own way, isn't really for everyone. The only rival to Blue Velvet in terms of being a good introduction into the world of David Lynch would be his best film (in my opinion), Mulholland Drive. Blue Velvet is probably his most straightforward film in terms of genre and plot. Sure, a fair amount of weird things happen, but the story is mostly a film noir about a young man coming home from college and getting into some trouble with local mobsters.

The young man in question, Jeffrey (played by a young Kyle MacLachlan) comes home to his hometown during a college break because his father is having some health issues. Passing through a field on the way back from visiting his father in the hospital he finds a severed ear. David Lynch uses his patented technique of making the ear much creepier than it should be by having the camera zoom inside the ear, which is accompanied by a loud deafening rumble. After taking the ear to a detective, he decides that with the help of the detective's daughter (Laura Dern) he wants to investigate the case himself. Eventually this involves breaking into a local lounge singer's house (Isabella Rossellini, whose current role is portraying bug sex acts) where he sees some weird shit involving a mobster played by Dennis Hopper, and eventually gets caught up with Dennis Hopper and his crew.

Blue Velvet seems as if it's another piece of media where we are introduced to a small sleepy 'perfect' suburban town, only to realize the horrors that lie just underneath the surface. This is telegraphed right from the beginning when David Lynch (who's middle name is not subtlety) pans from a beautiful well cut yard of grass to the bugs that are infesting the soil that lies underneath. However, this film is not in the same vein as say American Beauty where the suburbs are displayed as a soulless place where everyone is screaming with rage on the inside. There may be crimes and criminals that exist in this 'perfect' town, but not everyone has a secret or is rotting from the inside. Most of the town, including the detective that Jefferey turns to for help as well as the men who work in his dad's hardware store are stand-up people. This may be the result of Lynch growing up in a small city (Missoula, Montana), so he's not as dismissive of middle and small town America as are most artists from the coasts.

Besides Lynch's distinct direction, the thing that really makes this movie is the acting by Kyle MacLachlin and Dennis Hopper. MacLachlin's character seems to be a younger more naive version of the character he plays in Twin Peaks, Special Agent Dale Cooper. He has the same wide-eyed optimism, toughness, and thirst for solving crimes that Dale Cooper does. He also attracts younger women and gives off an aura of collected cool. Jeffrey may be a little wet behind the ears, and a little foolish, but you can almost see how his brush with the evil incarnate Dennis Hopper would push him into the FBI. Speaking of Hopper, holy cow! This was the role that he was born to play. After watching this movie the first time, I couldn't help but think that every other crazy, off the rails, yelling incoherently Dennis Hopper character was just a toned down take of Frank Booth. From his weird sexual desires to yell at Rossellini's crotch while having his face stuffed with a patch of blue velvet, to his drug fueled rage issues and his ridiculous costumes it just seems that no one else could have played this role.

Just the other post, I was complaining about a lack of theaters that show older movies in the way they were originally to be seen. Thus I was really excited when I found out that the Plaza Theatre here in Atlanta was going to have a showing of Blue Velvet. This theater shows lots of indie and small movies, along with having some interesting horror and gore shows if you're into that. I really love that it exists. That being said the crowd really got on my nerves.

The show was sponsored by PBR and thus I didn't mind the promoters giving out free PBR merch/advertisements at the beginning of the show. What I minded was the attitude that the majority of the crowd came in with. This being an independent theater near little five points that was showing a David Lynch movie, I expected a lot of hipsters. I knew that hipsters had adopted Lynch as their movie director, but I didn't understand their reaction to the movie. At the beginning of the movie there was a pretty energetic buzz of the movie, and I was happy to be in a room full of people excited to see this movie. The movie starts out as pretty innocent, with some ridiculous Lynchian lines and shots that are admittedly pretty amusing. Additionally, some of the scenes in the middle of the film with Dennis Hopper are definitely laugh out loud funny. However, as the movie went on they began to laugh more and more even though none of the scenes warranted it. I understand that seeing a movie in a theater is an interesting experience because of the crowd, but laughing because Laura Dern is crying, or because the characters are being emotional on the screen doesn't make any sense. It also kept pulling me out of the movie which had a negative effect on the experience. I know hipsters have to love things only if they're 'ironic' but why can't they just like something in all sincerity? Maybe people in the theater may have really liked the movie, but it seemed like they had to laugh and make sounds because of the developed sense of awareness that being a hipster requires. For once I wish this new group of 'counter culture' could just earnestly like something, without having to laugh or make fun of it in order to still seem 'cool' to the people around them.

My rant being over, I still really enjoyed seeing Blue Velvet on the big screen. It's an interesting movie that is thrilling, dark, and terrifying while still being weird. While it's a little slow and not my favorite of Lynch's films, but it's still an effective piece of cinema that everyone should see at least once.

The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins

(Homo Habilis skull. The oldest known member of the homo genus)

Not only is life on this planet amazing, and deeply satisfying, to all whose senses have not become dulled by familiarity: the very fact that we have evolved the brain power to understand our evolutionary genesis redoubles the amazement and compounds the satisfaction. - Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins gets a bad rap. It is generally agreed by those who read him that he is equally gifted as both a scientist and as an author. However this is not how most people know him. Most people know him by his book The God Delusion and his public appearances following that book. He was so much in the public eye that he was satirized in a multi-part South Park episode that lampooned both him and zealous atheists. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss his other works just because you find his God bashing distasteful. There is something to learn from his writing even if you do believe in a god (as long as you're accepting of the theory of evolution).

The Ancestor's Tale is written as a backward pilgrimage to discover the ancestors of human beings and eventually the ancestors of all life. The structure is vaguely based on Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales but I'm not really that familiar with Chaucer so I won't comment on it. The pilgrimage starts with modern day man and then traces our ancestry back until we reach multiple rendezvous points with other species. The evolution of man, or any species, can be seen as starting from the beginning of life, and branching off in a tree-like fashion as organisms speciate. This forms a tree similar to the one shown below for eukaryotes (plants, animals and fungi). For those interested, this tree was formed using DNA comparison analysis, and the length of the branches roughly marks the difference in the DNA. Note how on this scale humans and chimps don't even qualify as having separate branches.

(Eukaryotic evolutionary tree. Taken from Science issue 199, 1978)

Often Dawkins tries to imagine what our common ancestor (or as he terms it concestor) with another branch looked like. One the chart above this would be the intersection or 'branching point' between two lines. I found this exercise to be utterly fascinating, if occasionally disappointing. Often when trying to imagine what our concestor looked like, Dawkins postulates that it looks exactly like the creature we were joining! When humans (and all those who branched off with us) join the lemurs, he images that our concestor would be lemur! When we join fish, you can guess again what he imagined that concestor to look like.

The most fascinating thing about this book to me, was the order in which we 'joined' other species. Are we closer to reptiles, birds or amphibians? Did we evolve from single celled organisms like you might see today or are they a sister group to us? Did we come from bacteria or again are they sister to us? (Quick note on this one, no one knows!) As new branches and groups of species join us on our journey Dawkins often uses a 'tale' about one of the joining species to elucidate something about the way evolution works, or just to point out something cool. These 'tales' help keep the book from being too technical and really keep it moving.

Dawkins also uses his time to help explain how we determine these rendezvous dates and figure out which other species share a more recent concestor with us. He discusses fossils and radioactive dating in rocks to be sure, but the most interesting technique he goes over is the widely used DNA comparison analysis. People who question how we know any of this stuff, and wonder how fossils can tell us so much about our past, should really try to understand how important DNA analysis between contemporary species is in helping us pinpoint our evolutionary roots. His introduction to this is technical enough to satisfy my scientific interests, but I'm sure it's a greatly dumbed down description. I imagine that this book could be possibly dull for an experienced zoologist or geneticist, but it was perfect for someone with general (but not specific) scientific knowledge.

Although the order of concestors closest (most recent) to us is pretty well known once we start going back into the Pre-Cambrian things start getting trickier. Dawkins makes his best guess, but makes sure to reiterate time and time again that he is making an educated guess. To me this is the difference between the scientific and religious way of thinking, and what makes something like the theory of evolution vastly superior to the theory of creation. Evolutionists will freely admit when they don't know the answer to a particular problem, where as creationists will just once again fall back on their old arguments. I don't want to turn this into another evolution/creation debate but reading books like this that help elucidate the wonders of evolution and nature make it hard not to get frustrated with the creationist point of view. Dawkins offers his (non-inflammatory) feelings in the quote below.

My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.

Space Seed and The Wrath of Khan - Star Trek

'Space Seed'


Like most people my age I had seen The Wrath of Khan many times before sitting down to watch the first season Star Trek episode that spawned the titular character. Although when the movie came out it was almost impossible to watch the old television episode as a refresher (this was before the days of torrents and DVDs), watching them in succession improves them both.

'Space Seed' starts the way many episodes of Star Trek do: there is a rudderless spaceship adrift with seemingly no humanoid pilot. Thus the crew of the Enterprise decide to make an away team to see what's up. This is a very popular plot device in science fiction, another example being the Firefly episode 'Bushwhacked' (which is interesting because the way that Khan disposes of some scientists in the film is reminiscent of the way the Reavers hung up bodies in this same Firefly episode), but this being the original 'Star Trek' series it doesn't yet seem cliche. The Enterprise crew discovers that this ship is from the 1990's (where's my spaceship, 90s!?!) and contains a fairly large crew in suspended animation.

Khan is the leader of the ship and is the first one re-animated. After figuring out his current situation and recovering on the Enterprise, he then quickly starts to plot to overtake the ship and crew. We learn that Khan is the leader of a group of genetically engineered humans who attempted to control the planet back in 1996 (where's my superman, 90s!?!) who then escaped in a ship to attempt to take over some alien races in the distant future. Kirk makes sure to compare Khan to Napoleon at least 4 times so we understand that this guy means business, and that he's bound to try to take over the ship. Khan actually succeeds briefly (with the help of a starry eyed earth historian who has a Napoleon/Alexander the Great jonze) but our captain eventually takes him out with a sweet karate kick or two. Kirk then gives Khan the option of punishments, and Khan takes the 'deserted on a habitable planet to surely cause trouble in the not so distant future' option and away he goes.

Like all Star Trek episodes this one has its amount of camp. Almost all of the scenes with the historian and Khan are pretty ridiculous, and it's impossible not to laugh at Kirk's fighting style. Even so, this episode maintains a pretty heavy tone, which is really helped by Ricardo Montalban portrayal of Khan. Although it is only one episode in the first season, one can't help but feel it was being set up for a sequel (in TV or the movies). One of the final lines, in which the episode title comes form, from Spock to Kirk lets the audience know that this battle is far from over.

It would be interesting, captain, to return to that world in a hundred years, and learn what crop had sprung from the seed you planted today.

The Wrath of Khan


I find it impossible to fathom how The Wrath of Khan got made. It's a sequel to a boring, slow movie that didn't do that well critically or financially, which was itself a spin off from a canceled television show. Furthermore, the end of The Wrath of Khan pretty much demands a sequel, which is pretty ballsy for a franchise in the state that Star Trek was in after The Motion Picture. However it got made it's good that it happened, because The Wrath of Khan is one of the most well known, and influential movies in American cinema (at least when it comes to sci-fi).

I won't go into as much as a plot summary as I did above, because I figure most everyone has seen this film. Having not viewed it in a while, I forgot how smooth it flows and how quick it moves. The movie doesn't feel dated at all, it has the somewhat 70s outfits and old looking spaceships, but the pace and direction feel like they could have come from a movie today. The film is also helped by the fact that all of the actors improved considerably in the 15 years that elapsed. (An interesting side note, I never knew that the crew of the Enterprise was constantly in flux. I was used to TNG where the crew stays pretty constant. Sulu and Chekov were not in the above episode and in fact Chekov is in less than half of the total episodes and Sulu in just over half. That being the case I feel less bad that they aren't given much to do in any of the movies.) In addition, the movie just looks and feels darker than the tv show. The bridge is cast in shadows and doesn't have that bright and shiny feel found in the series. I think this helps give the movie a little more weight which definitely helps improve it from the series. Watching the TV episode on which this movie is based really helps give you a sense of history between Kirk and Khan and really improves the film. Again Montalban's portrayal is excellent as Khan and the war of wills between him and Kirk is very believable because of the personalities involved.

Khan has its share of memorable moments and one of the most memorable movie moments of all time is shown below so you don't have to go looking for it (I know you'd have to look it up. Also sorry for the annoying panning and annotation, there isn't a 'normal' clip out there that I found).





Although this movie is one of the better sci fi movies ever made, and probably the best trek movie it has its share of problems. One of the main problems I found was the multiple plot holes. If Chekov wasn't on the ship on the previous episode, why would Khan remember him when they first meet on his desolate planet? The planet that Khan was stranded on was initially habitable but became a desert after a nearby planet blew up. How does a planet just blow up? When Khan inserts the mind controlling desert slug he claims that it will make them susceptible to suggestion until the slug grows so big and the host dies. Why then does it just leave Chekov's head randomly at just the right time? I'm not one to be a nitpicker so I'll let the previous problems slide, I just figured they should be noted.

Of course I have left off what might be the most moving scene of the whole movie, Spock's death. Even though now we know that Spock obviously makes a return (the existence of the sequel The Search for Spock gives us a hint) his death is still affecting nevertheless. His quote to Kirk 'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one' is one of the movie quotes that has followed me ever since childhood. His sacrifice and the efforts and losses that Kirk goes through to get him back in the following film is what defines the best part of 'Star Trek' to me. Although they are very different 'people', they have formed such a bond that they would do anything for each other. Kirk and Spock might be the best and most pure 'best friends' of all time.

Dead Like Me: The Complete Series - Bryan Fuller

Claiming that Dead Like Me is from Bryan Fuller is a little misleading. As Wikipedia will tell you, he left the show shortly after it started because of arguments with Showtime about where the show was headed and it seems personality conflicts. This is noteworthy because like all of his other works, Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me seemed headed for early cancellation right from the start. Dead Like Me is also similar to his other shows in that it cultivated a small but devoted following, and combined this with moderate critical claim.

But to fully discuss the fate of this show I need to take a step back and discuss the show itself. As the image above hints, this show is about grim reapers. A young college dropout named Georgia Lass (played by Ellen Muth) is hit by a flaming toilet seat that broke off from a space station during the lunch break of her mind numbing temp job. It just so happens that her death coincides with the 'retirement' of the grim reaper that took her soul, and the job is passed to her. She soon meets up with the rest of the 'external influence' reapers in Seattle and begins her afterlife as a grim reaper.

If the above description makes the show sound dark, it's because the premise is misleading. Although it is all about death, the show mostly takes a lighthearted and quirky approach to the heavy subject, even though it does have some serious and dramatic moments. As you can imagine, the 'external influences' death department deals with all sorts of wacky and unexpected deaths (along with the occasional murders) that lets the show embrace its quirk. Normally I kind of cringe when you can tell shows or movies are trying to be quirky, but this show does it in a subtle enough way that it actually works. Trying to figure out how the victim dies in the upcoming scene is morbidly fun. The viewer doesn't know how the person will die, because even the reapers only get a name and a time of death. There are many entertaining scenes in which the main characters sit around guessing in what kind of freak accidents the various people passing by will die.

It's the character interactions that really make this a memorable show. The 'external influence' death department only consists of 5 reapers so we get to know them all pretty well. There is the aforementioned newcomer Georgia Lass, the drug addict/grifter Mason, the badass parking attendant Roxy, the movie starlet wannabe Daisy, and father figure Rube. The best scenes of the show revolve around the groups daily morning meetings at 'Der Waffle House' to get their daily assignments from Rube.

Although many episodes focus on Mason and Daisy, Rube and Roxy are easily the best characters. Rube (Mandy Patinkin, known by many as Inigo Montoya from 'The Princess Bride') is the centerpiece of this show and takes it from being merely entertaining to really good. It might be because he can act circles around the rest of the cast (except possibly Jasmine Guy as Roxy) but Rube brings a much-needed gravitas to the show. It's not that he's overly serious, he has some of the funniest lines of the show while taking every chance to cut down Mason, but his mysterious background and overall enigmatic persona help make the show interesting.

Other characters in the show include Georgia's lamenting family, and her coworkers at her day job. The show cleverly plays with the idea of a dead girl living in her hometown, and has her interact with people she knew while alive. To get around the obvious issues involved here, the show introduces the idea that reapers look different to the living than they did while alive. This lets Georgia hang around her old family to see how they cope with her death and how they move on with their lives. Although this sounds like a possibly interesting subplot, I found the family to be a little dull.

Another interesting aspect of Georgia's afterlife is that although she gets to live for the foreseeable future, she has to pay for rent and other aspects of living with our society. Thus she has to get a desk job at the Happy Time temp agency. Georgia's interactions with her coworkers (especially her boss Dolores and the secretary Crystal) evolve as the show goes on and they develop quite a rapport. This was one area of the show that I felt could have been improved by having more episodes. The cat-loving Dolores and 'more than meets the eye' Crystal had a lot of room to grow and I would have been interested to see where their characters were headed.

The collection contains a straight to video sequel to the show that falls flat on its face. As with the later part of the series, Bryan Fuller had nothing to do with the movie. In addition Mandy Patinkin declined to appear in the movie and the actress who played Daisy (Laura Harris, who played the villainous Marie Warner in season 2 of 24) was busy at the time. Although Daisy was not necessarily my favorite character, the replacement actress (who interestingly enough played Marie's sister Kate in 24) was awful as Daisy. The movie didn't have the humor of the show, and didn't help itself by not staying true to many of the characters and having a sloppily put together plot. Let's move on.

I think Dead Like Me holds an interesting place in television in that it would have been helped by not being on Showtime, but on a major network. The show works mostly as procedural, which is what many networks crave. The best premium cable shows are continuity heavy and require sequential viewing on the network or on DVD. Dead Like Me could easily be casually viewed, and is well written enough to have survived on a major network. I haven't seen his other shows, but I don't think anyone will claim that Bryan Fuller's shows are the best shows of all time. If Dead Like Me is any indication of his other work, Fuller makes fun, entertaining shows that combine the best parts of comedies and dramas, and have a definite place in the TV landscape.

Ida - the 'Missing Link'?

As you might recall, there was quite the hubbub about the fossil named 'Ida' a couple of weeks ago. Many websites along with the twittering public (including myself) proclaimed this fossil to be the 'missing link' and claimed it as a score for evolution in the ongoing battle between evolutionists and creationists. Some people went further and not only claimed it as a win for evolution, but the win for evolution. Some of this commotion has died down, and I think the subject requires reconsideration.

I have been thinking about evolution lately because I am currently reading The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. This book will be featured in an upcoming review so I won't discuss its specifics here, but it has made me reconsider what I know about evolution and what I still need to learn. It's not that I don't know how evolution works, or that I forgot how it works. It all seems pretty clear to me, but these things can get muddled when you go many years without reading an advanced or even intermediate discussion on the subject.

Opinions about this fossil were pretty varied when it arrived, even among my friends. Many people proclaimed 'this is the Missing Link, suck it creationists!', where many other people met it with indifference. Of course there is still the 'dinosaur bones were put in the Earth to test our faith' contingent and you can imagine how convinced they were at this being our ancestor. My new opinion is that everyone in the camps listed above was wrong. The very term 'Missing Link' misconstrues what evolution is all about; gradual changes in multiple species at the same time for them to better survive their current environment. The term 'Missing Link' assumes there is something different about us and the rest of life on this planet, more specifically us and the other great apes. Originally it was thought that we are so different (and superior) to chimps, apes, and all other life that there must have been something about our evolution that we didn't fully understand. These of course are ridiculous claims. There is nothing special about our evolution, or our branching off from the chimpanzees. In fact we are closer to chimpanzees than many other similar looking animals are to each other.

The term 'Missing Link' also denotes the incorrect idea that evolution is a progression. Many people feel this way, and thus incorrectly assume that this progression has led the animal kingdom to the homo sapiens. We are not the 'goal' of evolution. Humans are just one of the many evolutionary branches that happen to be quite successful (we are not even necessarily the most successful, lets ask cockroaches what they think). It's not that chimps are our ancestors, and where they stopped evolving we kept going. We both have a common ancestor that we broke off from and kept evolving. We decided (of course we didn't decide to do anything, it just happened to be advantageous for our situation) to go bipedal, hairless, and grow a bigger brain. This does not mean that chimps are 'primitive' compared to us, in a way they are equally evolved.

This is where Ida comes in. Just looking at the fossil you can tell that she is not the 'Missing Link' between humanity and the apes. She looks nothing like an ape! Ida resembles something like a Lemur, which are our closest cousins after all apes and monkeys. Thus at a point (some 63 million years ago) we shared an ancestor with the lemurs. This does not mean that it looked like a lemur (it could have) and then at that point lemurs stopped evolving and our line kept going.

Ida is not this common ancestor, and most likely is not an ancestor of ours at all. Because the evolution 'tree' branches off very rapidly there are many species that may 'look' like our ancestors but are actually ancestors of some extinct species. This is most starkly seen when we consider Neanderthals. We did not 'evolve' from Neanderthals, our ancestors actually lived at the same time as them! Eventually they went extinct (many people think we wiped them off the face of the Earth) and we now have fossils that look fairly 'human'. Species branch off and go extinct all the time, so it's almost impossible to say if any fossils we have found are actually ancestors of living species. However fossils are useful for us to see what kind of species our ancestors may have resembled, and radioactive dating (among other methods)gives us good dates for these developments. A good description of the way evolution works and how this relates to Ida by an angry and silly nerd can be found in this video.

So what is Ida if she is not our ancestor, or even the ancestor of lemurs or other living creatures? Because of certain bone characteristics it is known that she comes from our side of the branching off from lemurs. Thus Ida can be seen to be a step in the evolution between the common ancestor we hold with lemurs (which likely looks like a lemur given Ida's appearance) and the monkeys, gibbons and apes that follow. She may be our direct ancestor, or is more likely a branch of species that long went extinct.

This does not mean that Ida is not an exciting find. It's a very old, intact fossil that comes from our branch of evolution. It helps to complete the very sparse puzzle that is the fossil record, even though we will never have enough fossils to 'fill in the gaps'. Paleontology is a tough gig, we have to use what we find, and it's often not what we 'need'. Ida is a very exciting discovery, but it won't help to convince anyone who already questions evolution more than previous fossils or the mounds of genetic evidence we already possess.

Star Trek - J.J. Abrams

Although I saw Star Trek about a month ago, I rewatched it last night as part of a double feature with The Hangover (which was fun, but not spectacular) and am using this opportunity to write about it since the movie is fresh in my mind.

If you have been reading my blog, or if you know me personally, you know that I love Star Trek in all of its incarnations. Although I have a preference for The Next Generation because of my youth, I greatly enjoy the original movies (at least the non terrible ones) and have even dabbled in Voyager and Deep Space Nine. I have not seen much of the original series, owing to the fact that I never had cable and now the DVDs are way too expensive, but I am pretty well versed in the characters and Gene Roddenberry's original vision. It's this 'vision' that I will spend most of this review discussing. I don't want to come across as some kind of anal 'uber-nerd' like the comic book store owner in The Simpsons, but I think it's important to discuss what Star Trek' was intended to be, and how that relates to modern sci-fi and more specifically the 2009 version of Star Trek.

First things first, this movie was fun as hell. When I had to describe to Lindsay how I felt after seeing it the first time, I immediately said 'stressful'. Not that it was emotionally draining or tough, but there is just so much that happens you never have a chance to catch your breath. There are few sequences where this becomes overbearing and kind of annoying (the Hoth planet Cloverfield monster chase and the scene where Scotty gets stuck in the cooling system for the engine of the Enterprise) but overall I think the pacing helps the movie. It helps it not necessarily in making it a better film, but in making it more accessible to the public. As much as trekies would like films made specifically for them, the only way large budget sci-fi movies are going to get made is if they appeal to the public en masse and make boatlaods of money. I will gladly accept a less nerdy Star Trek if it means that they keep getting made.

That being said, someties this movie could be serviced by being a littler nerdier. Although some of the previous movies have quite a bit of action, Star Trek at its core was always a story about internal and external discovery, diplomacy, and stargazing. I will have to rely on my experience with The Next Generation here, but most of the TV episodes involve either the Enterprise acting as an ambassador or peacekeeper for The Federation, or crew members experiencing some sort of personal ordeal that leads them to discover something about themselves or humanity as a whole. Very rare are there any spaceship battles or fight scenes, which makes their rare occurance a very exciting thing. I always like to think of Star Trek as Carl Sagan's kind of sci-fi. It's not Star Wars or the new Battlestar Galactica; Star Trek never lived off explosions and physical conflict. Although it could be preachy at times (check out this AV Club inventory list for a couple of examples) I loved the fact that Star Trek was more than just about spaceships and explosions.

This is where the new movie comes in. I'm not someone who cares much about minor or often major continuity issues (even though the plot of this movie gets rid of those problems in an obvious way), but I do care about the 'essence' of the series. This is where Star Trek kind of fails. It's an exciting, fun, and entertaining movie, but in many ways its not really a Star Trek movie. The fact that I was going into this movie ready to hate it, and have actually seen it twice lets you know that I do indeed like it, I just don't think it has the same soul as its predecessors.

The characters are all cast very well. They almost uniformly come off as interesting takes of the familiar characters without resorting to imitations or impersonations of the original cast. I especially liked the fact that Uhura was given something to do besides answer the phone and thought that Zachary Quinto was excellent as Spock. The movie was well shot (even if the cuts were a little quick) and looked great. It's just a little sad that the original feeling of the show had to be lost in order to appeal to the short attention span of our current culture.

The X-Files: Season 1 - Chris Carter

Revisiting things from your childhood is always a dicey proposition. For every Transformers: The Movie that holds up extremely well, there are dozens of shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark that makes you think 'why the hell did I ever like that? This is terrible!' Although The X-Files is not a kids show like those examples, it was something that was important to me growing up as a child. The first season came out in 1993, when I was only 10, and hooked me right away. I would sit in my bed under the covers with the lights off on Friday nights and wait for the creepy (at the time) theme song to play. I didn't know anyone else who liked it, so The X-Files was 'my' TV show. It would also routinely freak me out and leave me terrified in my bed, having trouble falling asleep.

I had watched the first five seasons, and movie that came out the following summer, and I stopped there. I can't really remember why I stopped watching, but after talking to other X-Files fans and reading reviews on the internet, it seems I got fed up with the show at the same point as most people. As the show kept going, the mythology it was creating, and relying on, became more and more complicated and the whole show started to sag under the weight of keeping up. After realizing that the movie didn't answer the questions that I wanted it to answer, and realizing that the creators were going to drag it out as long as possible, I gave up on the show. Not having cable as a child I never really watched that much TV. I would watch some shows with my sister (ie Friends) and then really would have 1 show for myself. After I gave up on the X-Files I moved over to Buffy in the 2nd season and my new allegiance was sworn. Although Buffy was probably my favorite show growing up (even though I also gave up on that after the 5th season) The X-Files was my first TV love.

Going back and watching the first season, I can see why Little Louis loved this show so much. It doesn't feel as creepy as it once did, but most of the stories are at least very interesting, and a little creepy. Because I only watched this when it was on I barely remembered any of the episodes. I had a general knowledge of some of the mythology episodes, and pretty much remembered the entire pilot, but watching all of the monster of the week (MOTW) episodes it felt like I was watching them for the first time. This might have been because I saw the alien/mythology episodes more often on reruns, or because they interested me more, but it was nice to not know what was going to happen in most of the stories.

If you're not familiar with the structure of The X-Files it alternated between overarching mythology episodes, which had to do with the existence of aliens and the governments inevitable cover-up, and standalone MOTW episodes which had to do with varying paranormal incidents. Although the show might be best known for the mythology and alien plots, there are only 5 of these in the first season and thus the show has to stand on the MOTW episodes. It's a good thing then that most of these are of pretty high quality.

Some of the Season 1 highlights include 'Ice', 'Eve', and the character Tooms. 'Ice' is an homage to John Carpenters 'The Thing' and involves Mulder and Scully going up to a drilling station in Alaska to investigate the suspicious deaths of the drillers. They are joined by an all-star supporting cast that includes George Mason from '24', Kenny Bania from 'Seinfeld', and Felicity Huffman. As in 'The Thing' they get trapped due to weather, and there is an alien species that infects and controls the investigators. It's a nice commentary on human violence and distrust and as in all episodes Mulder and Scully make it out alive (their partners are not so lucky). 'Eve' is a creepy story concerning genetic modification experiments, and uses a classic horror move of creepy murderous children. The two episodes that concern Tooms are also knockouts. Tooms is a creepy mutated human that eats livers and squeezes through small spaces. Mulder and Scully end up putting him away early on in the season, but as his parole comes up later on Mulder's off the wall explanation of how he committed the murders falls apart and causes Tooms to be released. This is a common theme of The X-Files. Mulder and Sully come across some crystal clear evidence, only to lose said evidence (they even learned to stop carrying cameras seeing that they were always confiscated) or to be disregarded when grilled by other authority figures.

The mythology episodes at this early part of the show are almost all fantastic. It is commonplace in the contemporary TV landscape to have season or series long storylines, but this was not the case in the mid 90s. The reason people kept coming back to The X-Files (especially in the early goings) was to find out about the possible alien invasion and Mulders battle with the very government that he was working for. As stated previously, these storylines went awry later on but in the early episodes the drive the underlying purpose of the show.

Many people complain that the new series Fringe is just an X-Files rip-off. It may be true that they obviously have a lot in common, but I think this is a ridiculous claim. How many cop, lawyer, and doctor shows are there? Just because the series involves a team associated with the FBI investigating unexplained phenomenon doesn't mean they're the same. First of all, the X-Files is more interested in investigating paranormal activities and myths found in urban legends and ghost stories than is Fringe. Fringe takes a much more scientific approach, and tries to explain every 'unexplainable' event with our current scientific knowledge. The X-Files is much more likely to leave an event unexplained, and with a 'wasn't that creepy!' kind of ending, whereas Fringe leaves nothing unexplained. This is to say nothing of the characters involved or the overarching plots, which are very much different.

I loved re-watching the first season of The X-Files. Not only did it remind me of storylines in which I was previously very invested, it introduced characters that would become more important as the series went on (The Lone Gunmen, Skinner, The Cigarette Smoking Man, and Deep Throat). It also reminded me of what was really the driving force behind the series, the interaction between Mulder and Scully. Although sometimes their interaction becomes a little standard (Scully: ' Mulder there has to be a rational explanation for all this.' Mulder: 'Scully after all you've seen why can't you just believe!') watching them work together become close is at the base of this show. Although there were a few number of misses on the MOTW episodes, the episodes in general were very good to great. The first season The X-Files is still better than almost any show currently airing on television.

2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick

Although I am in the scientific community and love science fiction, I had never seen 2001. I barely even knew anything about it. What I knew is that it contained a monolith, played Strauss's 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' while some apes screamed, concerned a rebellious robot, was pretty slow and might be boring, and somewhere deep in my mind I knew there was a fetus at some point. After watching it I'm pretty sure these will be the things that I continue to associate with 2001.

I won't bother with a detailed plot review because there really isn't that much of a plot. We learn early on that this monolith has helped an ape ancestor of ours to evolve, and that it makes a reappearance on the moon thousands of years later. It is determined that the moon monolith sent a strong EM signal to Jupiter and that there should be an exploration to figure out the destination of said signal. The exploration ship's computer, the notorious HAL 9000, decides that the logical way to achieve this mission is to kill all the humans. However, the captain succeeds in shutting HAL down and hence saving himself. Once the captain makes it to Jupiter he eventually encounters another monolith and the rest is really left up to interpretation. I believe it has something to do with the next step of human evolution, and possible interaction with an alien life-form, but it's pretty open ended.

It's understandable that this movie has inspired such extensive debates and conversations. It's difficult enough to connect the first 20 minutes or so of the ape footage to the rest of the film, but the ending goes off in such a crazy direction that claiming that you know the 'definitive' interpretation would be foolish. Although the novel by Arthur C. Clarke clears up some of the vagueness with respect to the monolith and the ending, Kubrick wanted the film to be open ended. I can respect a director not wanting to spoon feed us explanations (heck, I love David Lynch) and thus have no real qualms with the themes or events in the film.

What I find a little bothersome about the film is the pacing. The shots of space, the colors and mood of the ship, and much of the cinematography are spectacular. For a film made in 1968 the special effects are fantastic. There are just too many shots of slow moving spacecrafts that remind me of 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' in the worst way possible. I realize that forty years is a long time for popular culture. It's impossible to require things that were interesting so long ago (in movie years) to hold our interest just as well now, considering how much stimulation we now have as a modern society. I don't mind slow beautiful shots of the moon or other objects in space, nor do I mind long stretches without dialog or even human beings. However I just don't think that 10 minute shots of a slow moving spacecraft are that interesting.

Speaking of the beautiful camera work, I often see old movies and think to myself 'man I wish I saw that when it came out on theaters.' Although I think seeing any movie on the large screen improves the experience, I think movies like this would really be enhanced. Having the large screen, loud speakers, and big dark room really makes you focus on the film. It's very convenient to be able to watch movies at home, but slow movies (like this one) tend to test one's attention span. Not being able to pick up the computer, or walk around the room makes you pay attention to the movie, and overall I think improves the viewing experience. I wish there were more theaters that showed old movies so that you could experience the original intention of the director.

The themes of human evolution, alienation, the conflict of our rational selves with our irrational selves (which could have been developed more), and sentient robots found in this movie all fascinate me. Almost every science fiction movie ever made owes something to this film. I'm glad that it exists and think that it is an important part of our culture and history. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a seminal film, I'm just not sure if I ever need to see it agian.

Up - Pixar

It's almost cliche at this point to proclaim 'Pixar has done it again!' for their new release every summer. As every other film studio seems to put out more and more ridiculous 'summer blockbusters' that offer more special effects and explosions than you could want, with little in the way of story or characters, Pixar (and I guess Disney) put out heartfelt innovative films that appeal to every age and make. How does a film studio turn out a wonderful movie year after year without any missteps? I don't seek to answer these questions, frankly I have no idea how they do it, I will just continue to look forward to the Pixar release every summer much more than the next installment of whatever franchise Hollywood is pushing on us.

As with most Pixar films, Up is a simple story held together by fantastic animation, great characters and story, and timely jokes. And like their previous superlative release, 'WALL-E', Up goes in a direction that no other studios would dare go. A grumpy old man as the main character? No 'big names' on the poster? A chubby Asian-American cub scout as the only relateable character for kids? There is hardly anything here in the way of merchandising (at least 'WALL-E' had robots), which is why you haven't really seen a barrage of Up advertisements across billboards or fast food and toy commercials. Pixar doesn't seem to care (or they made enough merchandising money with 'Cars' not to have to care), they just want whatever team they have working on the movie to make it interesting, emotional, funny, and fun.

Up starts with an opening sequence that follows a young boy and girl who first get along because of their mutual infatuation with adventure, who then grow up to get married and get old together. This sequence is mostly dialog free and is reminiscent of the first 20 minute or so of 'WALL-E' which A. O. Scott called a 'poem'. I love that Pixar doesn't feel the need to talk down to it's audience and thus can put in large sequences where instead of paying attention to dialog, you take notice of small facial features and body movements which tell the story. I wonder if it is possible that in the future Pixar may work on an almost dialog free movie? Sure it would be a gamble, but if it is anything like these past couple of sequences it might trump anything else they've done.

Seeing that the old man's wife is not in any of the promos can let you figure out what happens next. I had heard that this movie was very emotional, and a tear jerker, but frankly I didn't find it any more emotional than other Pixar movies. After his wife's death, and some other unfortunate circumstances, he sets out to move their house to a tropical location in South America that they as a couple had yearned to see for years. The aforementioned cub scout tags along and they meet a ridiculous (and hilarious) bird and a talking dog along the way. I'll stop there, because I won't give away too much in terms of plot because I figure many of you haven't seen it yet and plan on doing so.

There are some pretty funny recurring jokes (mostly revolving around the dogs) and some pretty terrifying action sequences. This might have just been because as a child I was afraid of heights, but the idea of flying to another continent on a house held up by balloons, and the troubles you might encounter scared the shit out of me. There are plenty of 'oh my god!' moments, but because this is a kids movie you know that the old man isn't just going to trip and fall off his porch thousands of miles to the ground. The talking dogs are pretty interesting as well, mostly in the take on the whole 'talking animals' thing that Pixar has using sparingly compared to the other studies making animated/CGI films.

Up is definitely one of the better movies I've seen this year, and easily the funniest. It was a nice change up from 'WALL-E', mostly because it's nice not to have two movies with heavy morals in a row. Pixar movies tend to have pretty strong themes (like the eco-friendly message in 'WALL-E' or the weird Randian themes of 'The Incredibles') and it was nice to have a sweet, fun movie that was mostly concerned with the life, regrets, and stubbornness of an old man. Go see it!