Monthly Archives: September 2008

Our Google, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name..

My assimilation is nearly complete. I love Chrome. I love Chrome. I love Chrome.

I love Google Calendar.

I love Google Mail.

I love Google Spreadsheets.

I love Google Analytics.

For this I am branded heretic among my pagan colleagues. They fear Google. They believe Google to be an angry God.  And so I bear the mark of the Google Faithful.

Google’s ways are strange indeed, for Google hath smiteth such content as China found offensive to it.   And verily, we all, like Job, have suffered at the whim of Google and cried out “WHY?”

But such blessings abound for those who stand fast in the radiance of Google! For we can turn our back upon the false God of Microsoft, who can not but grant a blessing without a rain of curses. And we can turn our back upon the forest god of Linux — whose blessings, while vast, are only available by installing an infinite regression of missing dependencies.

Google smiles upon us.  Google peers into my heart and knows my needs. And truly, Google knoweth all.

We of the faithful shall walk through the  valley of death, we shall bear being thrown to the lions. For unto Google  is granted the kingdom and the power and the glory — the place where ask is answer, where knock is open wide.

Amen.

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My bone to pick with Batman

Frank Miller reinvented Batman as the Dark Knight — the millionaire hero conflicted over Robin’s death, his own motives for vigilantism, and suffering the caped crusader equivalent of a midlife crisis. The Dark Knight was a subversive — counterpoised against the all-American Superman, who was hired by the CIA to take out the Batman, because he was making local law enforcement look bad and had the audacity to challenge their authority. His real subversion, of course, was that he represented an alternative American Dream — what? Something to be strived for beyond being a millionaire? What weird Commie garbage was this?????

That was the comic I loved. But is that the movie that got made? Nope.  The gorgeously imagined Robin plot, in which a young female punk Batman groupie decides Batman needs a Robin successor, and she’s it,  never appears. We got the performance of a lifetime from Heath Ledger as Joker.  We get an incredibly brave intact replication of the opening scene of Jack Nicolson’s Batman movie. We got great explosions, dizzying heights, fantastic gadgets.

But most of all, we got an admirable attempt to move the relevance of the script away from the Cold War reality in which the Dark Knight was written to a post 9/11 context. And there’s the rub. We got only an attempt. One with a pulled punch,  and a pulled punch that reeked of someone like Superman hovering over the script and demanding it come out with a heart warming message about the American Way.

If you haven’t seen the movie, stop here. Spoiler ahead. Continue reading

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