A Simple Favor

[3.5 stars] [IMDb Link]

[Amazon Link]
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We squoze this Netflix DVD in New Year's Eve, waiting for the ball to drop. By the way, I am not sure why we do that ball-drop thing any more.

IMDB genrecizes this as Comedy/Crime/Drama, which is about right. The five-foot-two Pride of Portland ME, Anna Kendrick, plays Stephanie: a seemingly perfect single suburban-CT mom with a mildly popular "vlog" where she perkily shares recipes, crafts, and homemaking tips. Her cute son, Miles, demands a play date with his new friend Nicky, which kicks off her involvement with Nicky's mom… well, let's call her "Emily", since that's her name in the credits, played by the 5-foot-10 Blake Lively. Emily is foulmouthed, hard-drinking, rich, and, uh, oversharing. Significantly, even with her salary as a NYC PR person for a glitzy fashion company, and her hubby's teaching gig at a local university, she claims to be on the edge of financial ruin.

One day, Emily asks Stephanie for the titular "simple favor": could she pick up Nicky from school and watch him for a bit? Fine, but Emily doesn't appear later to pick Nicky up. Or ever. She goes missing. What happened to her?

From there, the story takes a number of unexpected twists. No spoilers here, at least none other than you can get from the blurbs. A lot of R-rated fun (involving, according to the MPAA, "sexual content and language throughout, some graphic nude images, drug use and violence").


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT

Sentinel

The Unlikely Origins of the Statue of Liberty

[Amazon Link]
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I was persuaded to read this by a good review in the WSJ back in November. Somewhat surprisingly, the University Near Here actually bought a copy—no Interlibrary Loan required!

Unfortunately, it was both longer and less interesting than I thought it would be. I crawled through it, painfully, at about 20 pages/day, just sneaking it into my 2018 reading. The author, Francesca Lidia Viano, is from Italy, a young academic now working at Institute for New Economic Thinking.

The book explores the "origin story" of Lady Liberty; its opening metaphor invokes an extremely unexpected parallel: the Trojan Horse. No, the statue didn't make its appearance on Bedloe's Island with a covert cargo of French troops inside. Other than the statue being hollow, the physical metaphor doesn't apply. But Viano argues that the statue's ideological DNA contains a lot of unexpected strands. These are illuminated by the (extremely) detailed biography of the artist, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and his associates. He was French, in the 19th century, a time of a lot of philosophical/artistic/political/international craziness. The folks who bankrolled much of the statue seemed to have messages to send: against British imperialism, for French colonialism, for free trade, against slavery, a healthy component of Saint-Simonism, Freemasonry, … (Ironically, today the main symbolism, thanks to that Emma Lazarus poem, seems to be immigration. That was a late addition.)

I could put up with a lot of that, but 500 pages? Eek!

I would have liked a little more detail on the statue's engineering. In fact, the description of the statue's construction and assembly is crowded into the book's final pages.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

[3.5 stars] [IMDb Link]

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

So, as I type, this movie is #29 on IMDB's Top Rated Movies of all time. Reviews have been rapturous. I went in with super-high expectations, dragging Mrs. Salad and Pun Son along with me, and…

Well, it's not bad. Fun, even. But I don't get all the hoopla. I don't think this would even make my top-29 list of superhero movies.

Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

Anyway, the deal is this: in a closely-adjacent universe (there are little hints that it isn't the same one displayed in previous Marvel movies), there's an African American kid named Miles who gets bitten by the radioactive spider; but there's already a Spider-Man in town, and he's in the process of attempting to foil a nefarious plot hatched by Kingpin and his minions. Said plot involves ripping apart space and time in order to resurrect Kingpin's late wife and son from a different timeline; unfortunate side effect being that the entire world would probably be destroyed.

Anyway, in the first big battle, disaster results. But (side effect) a number of heroic Spider-beings from other continua show up in the aftermath to mentor Miles into superhero-dom and assist him in defeating the bad guys.

A lot of humor, sight gags, apparently Stan Lee's last appearance (his voice anyway), and I didn't fall asleep. But I maybe have an aversion to alternate universes; I don't think much of the gimmick on the Flash TV show either.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT

URLs du Jour

2018-12-31

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  • Kevin D. Williamson has a thoughtful end-of-year essay at NR: New Year: A Time for Choosing, Still.

    The miracle of modern life — modern life itself, really — has one ultimate source: the division of labor. The division of labor is not just a term from a dusty undergraduate economics textbook — it is the secret sauce, the fuel in the rocket engine of capitalist development that has transformed our world. It took about 66 years go to from Kitty Hawk to Neil Armstrong landing on the moon — Jeff Goldblum is 66 years old. In the course of one Goldblum — one Goldblum so far — we went from standing on the Earth and wondering about the moon to standing on the moon and observing the Earth.

    And nobody did that. An enormous number of people each did a little part.

    Because of the division of labor, the people who are searching for a cure for HIV do not have to spend their days baking their own bread — or growing their own wheat, grinding it into flour, gathering the rest of the ingredients, and then, finally, if they haven’t starved to death in the interim, baking their own bread. We like to say that “all work has dignity,” and that is true, and worth remembering. But it is a much more profound observation when understood in the context of human effort as a whole: The team that cures HIV will go to Stockholm to collect the Nobel prize, but the guy who delivered their late-night pizzas, the Uber driver, the police officer, the crew that fixed the potholes in the roads, the laborers who framed and roofed their houses and laboratory buildings — they all play a part. The work we do, no matter how seemingly unexceptional, is what makes the life we live together — this remarkable, wondrous life — possible.

    It's easy to forget, easy to take for granted. Kevin deserves our thanks for reminding us.

    Today's Amazon Product du Jour: a poster print featuring a bullshit quote from Karl Marx, wrong as usual. Well, that broke at some point. Capitalism, right? Replaced with another Marx-related product.


  • An interesting point made by Megan McArdle at the WaPo: The latest journalism scandal proves it: Partisan writing is one way to keep journalists honest.. It doesn't really matter what that latest scandal is; by the time you read this, there may be another one; but this will remain the case:

    The great and obvious flaw of ideological media is that its practitioners are biased. But all editors and reporters are biased; it’s an inescapable part of the human condition. We can and should try to correct for it, but our corrections will never be as good as those applied by someone with a completely different set of biases — the person who says, “That can’t be right” and sets out to prove why it isn’t.

    Of course, those partisans will often be blindly determined to prove writers wrong when we aren’t; often we will waste time arguing the inarguable. We will watch with distress as the readers of our opposition come to believe things we know just ain’t so.

    But we will also watch them curb our own worst instincts, correct the stories we never should have run, force us to be better lest they catch us in an error. However annoying we may find it, honestly partisan writing is certainly better than the alternative, which is more people such as Claas Relotius.

    (Oh, yeah: Relotius is the guy who was caught making up stuff for publication in Der Spiegel.)

    What's the over/under on the number of days before the next great MSM fabrication?


  • Hey, what's that smell? Ah. As Reason's Baylen Linnekin tells us: The USDA’s Final Rule for GMO Labeling Stinks.

    Under the final rule, a food producer marketing a food that is genetically modified (GMO) or that contains GMO ingredients may comply with the rules in any one (or more) of four ways: 1) by clear wording on a food label; 2) by using the USDA's new symbol "BE" to designate that it is bioengineered food; 3) via a QR code printed on a food label; or 4) by giving the consumer the option to send a text message to the manufacturer seeking more information. Food manufacturers will have until 2022 to come into compliance with the rule.

    These silly rules took years to develop. That's largely a function of the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Act, the terrible 2016 law that required the U.S. Department of Agriculture USDA to develop regulations to implement the law. I argued earlier this year that the real reason the rules took so long to write is that the law mandating their creation is pretty much unworkable. As generally happens, a bad law has produced bad regulations.

    The only good thing is that the food nannies are irate that the new rules don't "scare and confuse" consumers enough.


  • This Boston Globe article triggered the Google LFOD alert: ‘Live free or die, but don’t touch that plant’: A clash over marijuana in New Hampshire.

    Live free or die.

    Unless, that is, your idea of freedom involves marijuana.

    New Hampshire’s libertarian streak has long been a source of pride for residents, but for cannabis users, that self-image isn’t living up to reality. With pot legalization sweeping through New England, New Hampshire is now an island of prohibition.

    Our governor, Chris Sununu, is adamant that he'll veto any loosening of the pot laws. He's not wrong that it will cause problems. But they'll be less than the problems we have with prohibition.


  • From the other side of the state (Valley News), Dan Mackie is Predicting the Ups, and Inevitable Downs, of 2019. And we liked his prediction for September:

    A Broadway musical that tries to recreate the magic of Hamilton fails after opening night, disappointing Vermonters. Coolidge employs rap lyrics to capture the life and times of the 30th president, Calvin Coolidge. However, that doesn’t seem to work for the famously taciturn “Silent Cal.” The failure augurs poorly for Pierce!, an extravaganza about New Hampshire favorite son Franklin Pierce, who is rated among the worst presidents by historians. Critics are generally unkind to the off-off-Broadway production. A Union Leader review holds a contrarian view: “The boffo song Live Free or Die won’t leave a dry eye in the house,” it says.

    I bet Lin-Manuel Miranda could write a musical about Franklin Pierce and make it work.


  • Local writer P. Gardner Goldsmith writes at MRC TV: More Than 40 Congressional Dems Salivate Over Ocasio-Cortez’s Pork and Regulatory Nightmare Called 'The Green New Deal'.

    Newly elected NY Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez, 40 Democrats in DC, and many pop media “reporters” seem trapped in a Neverland of perpetual adolescence, an eternal twilight of collectivist “us-we” terminology, soothsaying economics, and mythological “history” foist on them by government-run schools.

    We can only hope that sanity suddenly takes hold when (if?) people become aware of the price tag.

    [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    Ah, but where's… ah, there it is:

    As I have written in my book, “Live Free or Die”, between 1933 and 1940 FDR and his gang in Congress passed 39 devastatingly unconstitutional bills that created new agencies, spent pork for political favors, or strangled private business. The situation was so bad that as economist Robert Higgs wrote for “The Independent Review” in 1997, it created what he called “regime uncertainty” among business owners and investors. They were so alarmed by the FDR “New Deal” policies, that they waited to start new businesses, to invest, to build, or to hire people.

    Mr. Goldsmith's LFOD book is at Amazon.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT