Biden did okay

You don't have to be smart to win one of these things, or at least hold your own. Look at Bush debating Gore. Look at any debate between creationists and scientists. It's a debate being judged by rubes and "low information voters". Sarah Palin did pretty well against Biden when they debated.

Winning a political debate doesn't mean you've actually made coherent arguments for you position. Look at Romney. He didn't defend any of his positions. He abruptly made up new ones and left Obama in the dust.

But Biden did pretty well. He was able to cite enough figures that he seemed to have a far greater depth of knowledge than that wormy guy was arguing with.

But here's one problem.

There was a study that discovered this. A certain percentage of voters are unaware that there are political differences. They don't know that there's any difference of opinion. They think that everyone wants the same thing and that political debates are "bickering". They can't understand why politicians won't stop bickering and just do what everybody wants.

I don't remember what percentage of the voters believe this, but I remember that it was the same percentage that voted for Ross Perot.

It may be, with things getting more polarized, that these idiots are wising up. There may be fewer of them than there used to be.

One Pussy Rioter set free

One of the ladies from Pussy Riot® (now a registered trademark) had the good sense to hire a real lawyer, one interested in making actual legal arguments to get her released. And she walked free, more or less. She's on probation. She'd likely go back to jail if she does any more public orgy videos or uses shoplifted poultry as a marital aid as they did in another video.

The other two are heading for prison. They're still in the local jail, apparently. They say they'll appeal, but if they're using the same lawyers, more interested in making political statements than representing their clients, they're finished.

If you're ever accused of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, don't keep talking about how much you hate the church you're accused of desecrating.

They are now the "winners" of some sort of Yoko Ono peace prize. What they ever did for peace isn't clear.

They've set the cause of feminism back decades.

Feminism has never been popular in Russia. I have a friend on-line, a Russian woman in western Siberia. She seemed to view feminism as man-hating. I pointed out a couple of the things feminists were fighting for----abortion rights, equal pay----but these are things they already have in Russia and have had since the early days of the Soviet Union. The Communists passed equal pay laws in 1919, something the US has yet to do.

"Why would they pay men and women differently?" she asked. She never heard of anything like it.

Abortion there is safe, legal, available in any hospital, and is pretty much free. Feminism just doesn't offer them much that they don't already have.

And now this is the Russian image of feminism. Pussy Riot®. American and European feminists defending and supporting these idiots isn't helping.

And there's Femen, the Ukrainian feminist group, that has been using chainsaws to cut down crucifixes while topless. They cut down a crucifix that was erected as a memorial to Christians killed in the Soviet repression of religion and to the people who died in the famine there in the '30s.

Mumblecore, the New Wave and reverse mumblecore

If I were French and didn't understand English and had to watch old American B movies subtitled in French, I'd probably like them better than I do now.

I don't know why the intellectuals of the French New Wave liked American B movies so much, but I always assumed a large part of it was that they wanted to make movies themselves and they knew that, if they were ever going to do it, they would be working with very little money.

They looked at low budget genre movies and used them as a model for their personal films.

And now we must do the opposite with these "mumblecore" movies.

Watch these plotless, extreme low budget "personal" films and see how you could use the same techniques to make incredibly cheap, well-plotted, carefully scripted genre movies.

And another thing, use digital video. It looks fine, it's cheap and it has image stabilization.

Does analog video have any appeal at all?

There are artists who experiment with the unique optical qualities of the all-plastic Diana camera.

Fisher Price PXL 2000 toy camcorders have long been coveted by artists.

There are people who insist on using Super 8 film instead of digital video.

So what about standard definition analog video? Anybody exploiting its unique visual qualities? Because I love my big giant S-VHS camcorders. I bought them for almost nothing long after they were obsolete. Last time I used one of them, a guy thought I was from the media. I told him I wasn't. I told him several times. But I recorded his message to the governor anyway.

Could analog video be the new grainy black and white? If Open City or Battle of Algiers were filmed today, would it be on S-VHS or Hi8 video?

I doubt it. But these camcorders must be good for something.

Obama's rather poor performance

Still nothing from Ray Carney? A Google search shows nothing new. He's using the strategy Obama did in the debate last night-----just stand there. Romney accused him is cutting Medicare by billions of dollars---repeated this several times---and he stood there like a dolt. Romney accused him of corruption----the "green energy" companies that got government money contributed to his campaign, and Obama said nothing.

Someone pointed out that that was pretty much his strategy in the Democratic Party debates when he ran for the nomination.

Before this, there were some doubts as to whether rich Republicans would keep throwing good money after bad into Romney's campaign when he was obviously going to lose.

Now I don't know if Democrats should bother supporting Obama when he won't stand up for anything.

But the strategy's probably working pretty well for Carney.

1924

When I was about eight, I went to the Museum of the Fantastic in eastern Oregon. One of the things in it was a "death ray" that someone tried to sell to the US government. I pushed the button and it blew warm air on you.

Years later, I was at the library looking through microfilm of the New York Times. I was reading about the Leopold and Loeb case in 1924. The library didn't have Chicago papers. But as I sat there I started reading other news.

"Hey! It's that death ray I saw!" I thought.

It was front page news for several days. A Frenchman was on a ship heading for the US. He had a death ray he wanted to sell. His own government had turned it down. The news fizzled quickly when he got here.

In other news, a man in Japan dressed in a business suit with no shoes scaled the wall of the US embassy and committed ritual suicide with a sword to protest anti-Japanese US immigration laws. Mussolini kidnapped a socialist leader.

Some children took a car on a joy ride and ran over a cop's foot.

A cop was arrested for manslaughter. He said he fired into the air to chase some young children out of an abandoned building. A seven year old boy was struck by a bullet and killed. That kid would have been 95-years-old now.

Some other children, inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case, kidnapped another kid. They beat him, knocked out one of his teeth and broke his arm. They tied him up. They sent one kid to demand a five dollar ransom from his mother, but the kid apparently chickened out and went home. When he didn't return, the other kids went home leaving the victim tied up in the woods. He got free and went home. They're in their late 90s if any are still alive.

Back then, you had to have your parents' permission to enlist in the military if you were under 22. There was talk about changing that policy.

Some workers played a practical joke on a new employee. They told him that a lonely housewife lived in the house over there. Her husband was working far away and if he were to go to her door that night... He did. And his co-workers burst out shouting as if they were the woman's angry husband and fired blanks at him. But one of the guns wasn't loaded with blanks and the young man was killed.

Several girls in a group home were killed in a fire. One of the residents burned it down so the girls wouldn't have to live there and could return home.

Help wanted ads were very specific back then. One company looking for a kid to work in their office wanted a "Negro boy from a good family who wants to learn the plumbing business." They had separate ads for male and female.

There was lots more.

Why am I writing about it here?

Pleasure of Being Robbed again.

Long ago, I watched just the very start of a movie called C.C. and Company. Couldn't stand it. Turned it off. I think the plot had something to do with motorcycles but I didn't get that far. The opening scene was Joe Namath walking through a grocery store. He opens a loaf of bread and takes two slices. He goes to another aisle and opens a package of baloney. He makes a sandwich. Eats it.

The scene was supposed to be cute or funny or something. But Joe Namath was such a big lout. I didn't realize how utterly devoid of charisma he was.

And now----I watched The Pleasure of Being Robbed again. A "mumblecore" film about a young woman running around New York City stealing from people. I've seen descriptions on the internet that say she was a "free spirit", snatching purses, stealing suitcases, breaking into cars. We're supposed to think this is cute or funny.

The movie was made by two brothers, apparently born in the U.S. to Israeli parents. Their uncle is Moshe Safdie, an Israeli architect who is now working on the racial cleansing of Jerusalem. He drew up the "master plan" for a Jewish settler group to wipe out another Palestinian neighborhood. Read about it here. Maybe theft seems perfectly normal to these two.

They attended Boston University and judging from the movie, they were influenced by Ray Carney and his thing for John Cassavetes. Except in the John Cassavetes movies I've seen, either Cassavetes or Peter Falk or some other guy eventually slaps Gena Rowlands. Probably common in "personal" films made by alcoholics. Why didn't anyone slug the horrible girl in this movie?

I looked at the user reviews on imdb.com. One person thought the girl was lonely, wanted to learn about other people but didn't know how.

But another person saw it at the LA Film Festival and really, really hated it. The auteurs spoke to the audience and he really, really hated them, too:

I wouldn't have such a problem but knowing they think the world of themselves just because they went to NYU [sic] & live in some trendy area, living off mommy & daddy's allowance but play it down like "I'm a struggling artist just like you" is completely insulting.

But they're all that way. I heard a radio interview with some young writers, directors and actors who had just produced a new comedy in Hollywood. Each one was the son of a big Hollywood star. But they were hurt that anyone would think this gave them any advantage at all.

And, of course, that comment was written by a guy in Los Angeles. Los Angeles isn't trendy enough? There aren't enough opportunities for the aspiring filmmaker there?

If you don't like a movie, make another movie.