It has been a really long time since I played the piano. I’ve been feeling the urge lately, so this morning I finally cleared stuff out of the way and sat down on the bench to tickle the ivories.

I am so out of shape, it’s not even funny… but even before I felt tired at all, my inspiration ran dry.

I mean, I only twiddled for about a half hour before I had to give up.

I found that I was tapping into some emotion while twiddling around, however, because I got up from the keyboard with my eyes being rather moist.

As a matter of fact, the songs that were coming out were very simple, and very sad… and very repetitive.

It’s actually kind of interesting. There are never any words that come to mind when I do that, just a stream of emotional consciousness. Today it was a simple, direct sadness that flowed forth. I’ll have to try again sometime soon. Perhaps I’ll record it then (I considered recording it today but felt it was a bit too much effort).

Bill O’Reilly Weighs In On Terrorism

Clicky

Fantaaaaastic! (If you haven’t seen it yet, haha.)

… but this is the first time I’ve ever been cited! It’s kind of exciting and a little unnerving. I mean, somebody took something I did seriously enough to use it as support for their work. For further details, check out http://james.pyrich.com/projects/coins.shtml

For the past few days, I had the desire to watch “The Incredibles,” so last night I sat down and plunked it in the DVD player. I’ve seen it a number of times prior, each time impressed with the art, the writing, and the acting. This time around, however, I noticed something else in the movie. The way the parents–especially Helen Parr/Elastigirl–acted towards the children was rather depressing.

I know, part of the movie was to show how the “supers” were really just like everybody else, how they had exactly the same sort of lives we do except for the minor fact that they’ve got, well, superpowers. Helen lashed out at her children in anger, made ridiculous threats (“calm down or you’re grounded for a month!” in a life-or-death situation), spun lies to her children (“everybody’s special, Dash”). She was the driving force in suppressing her children’s natural abilities, and Violet’s depression and Dash’s “unruly” behavior are to be expected. The argument goes that it would be “unwise” to display one’s powers in public, which is essentially used as a club to beat her children into submission. The premise that “society” as a whole would rise up against the “supers” is pretty shaky, and I’m not sure that, outside of a movie, such a situation would take place.

There’s probably more to say on the topic, but I’d actually have to go back and take notes, I think, and I’m not interested enough in the topic to do that right now. One final note, however: Bob Parr has a confessional, and I’m sure that it was appropriate to a degree, especially considering that he was not making his family his highest priority (though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that his own passions must take an absolute back seat; surely there’s enough room in life to accomodate family and passion, but I’m still a bit unsure on this one). However, Helen never had anything remotely similar. Shouldn’t Helen have had a similar confessional, apologizing profusely for using false pretenses to hold everybody back from realizing their full potential? Shouldn’t she have apologized for meekly bowing to the demands of society instead of standing up for what is right? Even near the end, right before the final battle, she was running roughshod over Bob, who was struggling to find the words to express himself. I’m just not sure that Helen has very many redeeming characteristics at that point, and I never get the sense that she feels she needs to apologize for her behavior.

Don’t get me wrong–I really do like “The Incredibles.” The interaction between the parents and the children isn’t something that’s specific to this movie, so I’m not sure if it’s worth much more analysis. I just feel that, looking back on it, it would have been outstanding if Helen had also shown some growth.

You know that trick where some University released some sort of study which somehow proves something about the wonders of the brain involving the ability to escry meaning from semi-scrambled words? The one where the first and last letters are kept the same, but the claim that the order of letters in between the first and last letter does not matter?

It seems true enough–after all, the paragraph is usually written in this scrambled format, and since it’s still intelligible, it strikes one as true, somehow.

However, there’s more to a word than the position of the first and last letters. If all we needed were the first and last letters, thn it wd nt be a pm to ue oy to ls pr wd.

Oh, but perhaps we need a certain number of letters. Well, txxn we cxxxd jxxt sxxxe oxr wxxxs oxt wxxh txe axxxxxxxxxe nxxxxr of lxxxxxs.

Of less importance to written speech are vowels. Yf wy ryplycy yll thy vywyls wyth a syngly lyttyr, yt ys fyr myry yntyllygbly thyn thy ythyr twy yxmplys ybyvy.

It’s still not pretty, and it takes work, because vowels do make a difference in our language as it is (consider “boot,” “beet,” “beat,” “boat,” etc.). But it’s far easier and far more certain to make out the last example than it is the first two.

Lastly, scrambling the letters would have little effect on relatively short words where there are only a few letters to scramble.

Consider “important” with its internal letters scrambled randomly:

iamnoprtt
imtonpart
ionatmprt
inptamort
itmanrpot
intmporat
impornatt
iormpantt
imptorant
iamptonrt

The most recent incarnation had it spelled this way: “ipmorantt”.

(Oh, and in the above list, the first one was intentionally sorted alphabetically… it’s a possible outcome of random scrambling, but I threw it in there because it was gibberishy enough. Everything else was purely random.)

The random method came close to that, but you can see that the scramblings are all fairly local, that is, within one to three letters of its intended location.

The moral of the story? This anecdote attempts to prove that spelling is not important. However, using their logic, we can see that the order of letters does matter. Hence, spelling is important.

I don’t want to say too much about this movie as it’s only been out a short while. If you’re going to see it, I don’t want to spoil anything for you, although you have probably seen A New Hope, in which case you know that you have to get from a young Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader with the classic black helmet somehow.

There weren’t too many surprises for me in the movie. The action scenes were decent, but I thought that too many of the light-sabre battles were far less than they have been in other films, especially the light sabre battles involving Palpatine.

There weren’t nearly as many “stupid Lucas tricks” in this movie as there were in the other two films (need I even mention the most egregious?), and the acting was certainly much better though it still needed a lot of work. Anakin’s whole staring-at-you-through-his-eyebrows thing doesn’t make him look menacing half as much as it makes you wonder if he slept funny the night before and has got a stiff neck today.

There were a few too many “Oh, let’s show how this happened now!” moments in the movie. They were cobbled together near the end, almost as an editorial afterthought.

Also, CG-Yoda just doesn’t do it for me. Granted, Yoda in the earlier movies (in the chronologically-produced sense) was anywhere from 15-25 years older than in the more recent ones, but that doesn’t mean he was a pinball puppet back then. If Yoda were to use the true power of the Force, that would have been far more impressive to me than a 2’7″ green blob swinging a tiny light sabre around.

Overall, however, I would say that this is one of the few movies that is worth the price of a ticket. You could wait for the DVD, but you’re better off waiting for the crowds to subside and settling down in a comfy theatre.

I saw The Incredibles last night. Good movie. 10/10. Go see it, if you haven’t. Go. NOW. I COMMAND THEE. CONSUME.

Er. It really is good, don’tcha know?

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