Nude Women on Facebook

If I was Casey Anthony, I’d probably be in big trouble again, because somebody would want to know why I was using my computer to search for Nude Women on Facebook, which is exactly the point. What I was searching for wasn’t actually Nude Women on Facebook. What I was searching for was an article about women who post nude pictures of themselves on their Facebook pages, which are then hacked, and the pictures end up for sale somewhere as amateur adult entertainment, which gets sort of embarrassing for Ms.Universe contestants, Dental Technicians, and Supreme Court Justice Nominees. What if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had nude law school photos floating around on the Net. Would anybody take her seriously in that robe? And that goes double for Clarence Thomas.

From the publicity, you would think that women have some kind of Freudian compulsion, or maybe just a compulsion, to post nude pictures of themselves (or pictures of themselves nude) on the first available web page, as if the social expectation of attraction requires validation by visual display. Now don’t get me wrong, in principle, I approve, but as a matter of personal security, I reluctantly suggest this is not a good idea.

People underestimate how fast and how far things can go bad with personal information on the net.

http://www.wesh.com/video/28690471/detail.html

Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=women&um=1&hl=en&rlz=1R2ADRA_enUS393&tbm=isch&tbnid=aTb23Rbd8vt6zM:&imgrefurl=http://video.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/Abyssmia/tag/women/&docid=Ah6Qx5bJuLu9qM&w=1680&h=1050&ei=xH8xTqugKojL0QHbyYSjDA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=126&vpy=161&dur=1716&hovh=177&hovw=284&tx=179&ty=96&page=5&tbnh=128&tbnw=171&start=97&ndsp=24&ved=1t:429,r:18,s:97&biw=1117&bih=713

Whose Wand was it Anyway?

As my previous Harry Potter reviews have explained, I’m not a raging Harry Potter fan (actually not much of a movie fan at all, but my wife makes me, so I’m sort of a reluctant critic, the most objective kind). Maybe my response is best described by the scene in the movie where the loyal defenders of Hogwarts gather and unite in resistance to the evil horde, draw their weapons, and what they raise over their heads in defiance is a fringe of silly little sticks. I nearly fell over laughing.

You have to be somebody who believes in more than the power of market license to make a kazoo wannabee into the convincing equivalent of a giant bug zapper. I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough for the handle of a back scratcher to be the moral equivalent of an assault rifle, even with an automatic flash.

As far as the plot goes, what would be the point? Hogwarts ain’t big enough for Voldemort and Potter. Somebody’s going down. Find the ancient chalice and cut off Voldemort's supply. Oh wait a minute, that's another movie, but the supernatural bank experience was kind of amusing. I see an amusement park ride in the future. No matter. Snapes comes clean. The Snitch of Dumbledore reveals its secret. A couple takes of emerging Hermione gratuitously leaning forward in her low-necked sorceress outfit, but that's as racy as you're going to get in Harry Potter. The acting is about what you would expect.

Speaking of wands, maybe the Potter fanatics out there can explain to me who owned the infernal wand of wands anyway. Early in the movie somebody says you have to kill the owner to really get control of the wand, but at the end that seems to have morphed into something like getting a grip on it. Harry didn’t kill Malfoy to get the wand, and I’m not real clear about where Malfoy got it, or why exactly he wasn’t able to contend for king of the world with it, but the ways of wizards are winsome and weird to us mere mortals. The wand, so it seems, has its own ideas about who or whom it serves, so maybe it justifies its own behavior, like an ATM machine, although wouldn't that would make merely breaking it in half and tossing it out in the yard a bit risky? Suppose it finds itself? After all, Frodo had to haul the ring off to some volcanic eruption in New Zealand to get rid of it. I guess wands just don’t have the durability and determination of rings. Maybe it’s a gender thing.

Never mind the wand. The first half of the movie was a successful action adventure , and the Hogwarts siege had a couple of nice effects. I would have been happy for Voldemort to have Hermione and consider my money well spent for that much, but of course the whole alpha male thing had to be resolved. I’m sorry, but I have a hard time even getting up any antagonism for Voldemort anymore. He’s been named so many times now that he’s got better image recognition than Martha Stewart. The idea of sharing something with Harry was promising, but the expression of it sort of evaporated like bubbles from a cauldron of lizard tails. The whole thing could have ended at the King’s Cross white-out and faded into a hazy glimpse of the future. I think it would have been really cool if the ending credits had run over the actors on the set saying goodbye to each other with a final shot of Radcliffe looking around at the set, laying down his wand on a table and walking out. And how about this? One of the stone statues in the hall is Rowling on a pedestal. At the very end, the statue comes to life, jumps down off the pedestal, picks up the sword and the wand, climbs back on the pedestal, and turns back to stone? Would that just break the spell, or would that send chills up your spine? What I fear most is that the whole franchise has moved irrevocably beyond either spells or fear into the morbid realm of the commercial, but maybe that’s where it really was from the beginning.

Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy

The New Like

I was thrilled when I got an email from one of the discussions on Linkedin to notify me that I had a comment on my post. I eagerly connected with the discussion to find out what kind of response my brilliant education comments had inspired in the professional community. I discovered someone named Amy "liked" my post and left me a link to the thought-provoking publications of a hot lingerie retailer, and I don’t even mean hot like in stolen property hot, although maybe there is a little of that in there somewhere too. Loward knows I do what I can to consume my share of racy women’s underwear, but somehow I feel more exploited than the models. I signed up for Linkedin to find a job, not as a convenient marketing tool for some enterprising juvenile-delinquent, social-media manipulator.

The truth is that the fast and loose, free-spirited exchange of blogging, like the internet in general, is morphing into a giant multi-level marketing promotion, with the marketers using their family connections to promote commercial enterprise. The concepts of social network marketing hardly apply because networks are no longer any more social than any infomercial exploitation. Every business has a Facebook page and a Facebook link. Hell, we even have a Facebook page and a Facebook link at the Office of Information Fluency. Sometimes we even talk about doing something with it, but the truth is also that if you can’t somehow integrate that in your identity, it becomes additional baggage in already complicated lives.

Why complicate it more with commerce? An inevitable consequence, the complexity of life has caught up with the convenient illusion that electronic communication is somehow more sanitary than the people who produce it. Sorry folks, our ideas aren’t much better than we are, at least in application. Conceptually, maybe, but you have to consider who comes up with this stuff and what it is they really want. What they really want is to sell underwear, or whatever it is they really sell, probably Viagra or Botox treatments.

Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy

A Farewell to Ereck Plancher

Okay, aside from the emotional and spiritual aspects of the Ereck Plancher situation that are beyond price, and the challenge of putting money value on the life of a human being, he was was worth ten million. I’ll give you that. Wide receivers are hard to come by in a recession. UCF knew or should have known he was at risk for serious health problems. But at that rate, let’s see. We squandered about 5,000 American lives in Iraq if you only count fatalities, and the truth is that we spent a lot more money getting them going than we spent preparing Ereck Plancher for higher education and athletic greatness, but ten million is a nice round number, lots of zeros. (If it bothers you to think of them as squandered, just explain to me what exactly we accomplished there, please. I wish someone would, someone with something like normal human sensibilities, meaning not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.) The U.S. knew or should have known invasion of Iraq was a risk of fatal injuries. At ten million a pop, that’s (10 X 5,000) million = 50,000 million, or fifty billion, right? My eyes sort of glaze over in the billions, so you have to check my numbers.

Then there are the 75,000 Iraqi collateral civilian deaths. Iraqis aren’t worth as much as Americans, of course, which explains why so many had to be eliminated, and 75,000 is vaguely in the realm of the requisite ten-to-one ratio that we approved for Viet-Nam with a comfortable margin, so for the sake of convenience, let’s do something crazy to humor my challenged arithmetic and assume (at least for financial purposes) that Iraqis are worth as much as aspiring American athletes. 75,000 Iraqi fatalities at ten million each is (10 X 75,000) million = 750,000 million, or 750 billion, right?

You know and I know there is no validity in making our military and those Iraqi civilians equal in value to college football players. The military chose to get involved, and the Iraqis had no choice, therefore, they have no legal recourse and no practical monetary value, but I’m just sort of wondering. You know what I mean? The odd thing is that the total comes out to about what has been spent on “operations” in Iraq so far.

Maybe that’s a good place to stop in more ways than one, so we don’t have to look at it too closely.

Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy

Test the Dangerous People

I have an idea. Let’s have drug tests for state legislators. They get state money. In fact, you have to apply and meet income restrictions for public assistance, but your friends put you in the legislature regardless of how much money you have. Who is the most likely to steal the most public money? An unemployed construction worker looking for a job, or a greedy manipulator with control of state revenue? The answer to that is pretty clear, and the answer is not welfare mothers.

Here's thinking for you,
Iffy

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-hypodermic-needle-image17107497
http://reidreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Rick-Scott-batboy.jpg
http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/04/rick-scott-puts-crony-firms-on-the-state-payroll/

The Crock Heard Round the World

For once I’m about half sympathetic to Sarah Palin’s plight, which for me is going the extra light year or so in the name of fairness. On the other hand, I’m more inclined to laugh at the irony than leap to her defense. The problem, as usual, is Palin’s choice of words. Her sense of history may not be as distorted in this case as even Fox News wants to believe. The truth is that Paul Revere could have actually warned the British about the consequences of rashly intimidating the colonists by occupying their property and confiscating their weapons, but as everybody who went to the fourth grade in US public schools knows, Paul Revere warned the colonists about the British, not the other way around.

Paul Revere was a fairly prominent activist in Massachusetts. That’s partly how he happened to be tasked with surveillance and communications for colonial opposition to unilateral British administration. Whether Paul actually ever spoke directly to responsible British authorities, I don’t know, but it’s perfectly plausible. Suggesting that Revere warned the British, not in the sense of imminent action by the colonists, but warned them in the sense that their aggressive actions were going to provoke a reaction from the colonists if they didn’t cool their jets, would be within the realm of possibility.

In any case they didn’t listen to good advice, and the words “Paul Revere warned” have been forever since indelibly connected in the American psyche with raising the alarm to resist invading red coats, not with a cautionary message to the invaders themselves. Ask any properly programmed American who Paul Revere warned, and they aren’t going to reply that it was the British. To suggest any other application is as un-American as Mohammed, pedophiles, and tofu turkey. No wonder even Fox News has her on their hit list. Facts aren’t an issue for Fox news, but regardless of Paul Revere, you still have to wonder if you want someone for President with Palin’s instinct for word choice. The next thing you know she’ll be cheering on the Seventh Cavalry in memory of Wounded Knee. Well, why not? They got more Medals of Honor than any other US military engagement in history, and they should have. The Indians were poorly equipped, freezing, malnourished, and way outnumbered. That’s the real secret for carrying out any kind of successful preemptive military action. What do you mean that’s not how it’s supposed to work? Didn’t Paul Revere warn them the cavalry was coming?

That’s the best I can do for you, Sarah, and unfortunately, it ain’t much.

Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy

Johnny Depp and the Pirates of the Caribbean Revisited, Revisited, and Revisited, or: Whatever Floats Your Boat

I’m a Johnny Depp fan, but not hugely a Johnny Depp fan, and that’s probably a pretty good barometer for the effect of the latest installment of the adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow. This was a flick, like Penelope Cruz, pregnant with possibilities, but we’ll hope Penelope has a more successful delivery. After two hours I was pretty much squirming in my seat, hoping for a stray musket ball to end my impatience.

As a general assessment, this production suffers from a classic case of sequel effects, the dependence in a rather desperate and incoherent way on misguided ideas about what has worked for you before. The result is an array of boring, stereotypical characters, ambiguous discrimination, mediocre action sequences, and unsuccessful drama, with the exception of the striking visual effects (to which 3-D added little noticeable impact, by the way). A summary of the development is unnecessary if you have witnessed any of the previous installments. Think the original less most of the interesting quirks.

Consider some failed possibilities. The King of England is an intriguing character with a comically superficial manner but hints of underlying intelligence and perception that are never realized. What if the King had turned out to have some more profound personal agenda than simply competing with Spain? Likewise, Blackbeard is a bad guy with no redeeming qualities. He starts out in a promising way, with cynical disdain for the minor inconvenience of general mutiny on his ship, but it turns out he isn’t even gloriously or heroically bad. He’s just bad in mean and petty ways. He tortures helpless mermaids to no purpose, not even his own amusement, and rejects the loyalty of his daughter. The mermaids are just what you would expect, monsters disguised as attractive, predatory Caucasian women who must be controlled. In fact, the whole ideology achieves a largely Anglo-European male supremacist effect. The Conquistadores arrive in the end to wreck the Fountain of Youth in the name of religious faith (only God can give youth), but whether that is theology or spirituality represented by the enigmatic character of the evangelist, or a critical comment about imperialism and disregard for the environmental context of culture, depends strictly on perception. It is not a compelling argument either way. It’s more like a how the hell did all these Conquistadores get here anyway question.

Otherwise the content is about equally divided between missed opportunities and pathetic stock gags such as teeter-tottering in competition to get the chalices on Ponce De Leon’s ship, inexplicably balanced on the face of a cliff in the vicinity of the fountain. What if the motif of hanging from provocative pub signs had been extended, more had been made of confusion about Jack’s identity, or the characters had even paused to respond contemptuously when Jack mentions his spectacular destruction of the lighthouse that attracted the dangerous crowd of carnivorous mermaids? What if the crew had included some memorably colorful characters? What if the Jack Sparrow impersonator had turned out to be the Voo Doo woman on a mission instead of the convenient, anglo-fied fantasy Latina with incomprehensible conflicting loyalties? (And I don’t mean her tattooed boobs.)

In that respect, the narrative had a strong sense of superficial rush job without much thought to the connections. In the end, Jack Sparrow, apparently unable to resolve his sexual identity problems and take responsibility for a serious relationship, abandons his pregnant girlfriend on a deserted island again and escapes in a leaky rowboat while Barbossa sails off in command of a new ship, neither of which indicates narrative finality, so don’t feel bad if this episode didn’t seem to measure up. There will be more to come. My sense is that Disney has not nearly abandoned hope of squeezing the last doubloon out of the fat Caribbean galleon, and as my wife says, take consolation from knowing that with a little effort, even a prominent group of creative artists with a proven concept and virtually unlimited funds can build a boat that won’t float. I’m just sorry they had to take me with them. Otherwise, if Johnny Depp and fine cinematic effects glad you enough, you can probably endure the proceedings comfortably, regardless.

Here's Thinking for You,

Iffy