Patrick’s Rants

Will Smith plays Chris Gardner, a man at a turning point in his life. As he struggles with his family while trying to sell medical equipment, Smith has to make decisions about the path he is to follow.

I watched this movie with a little trepidation. It has received many great reviews, but a single personal view caused me to watch it just a little more critically. Gardner was criticized for not, “doing everything he had to do for his son”. This was the viewpoint of an idealistic twenty-something. Age has a way of changing your perspective. During the Great Depression, some people would not do work that was beneath them, while others would do anything and everything to put food on the table. The young view of this movie is that Smith’s character should have gotten whatever job that he could - no matter what the pay. (more…)

It is not everyday that an ordinary person such as myself discovers himself in the presence of a published author. Scott Douglas, who drives a school bus here in Flagstaff, is an unassuming character with tired, life beaten eyes. He is as public as a bus driver naturally is and yet there is a certain seclusion about the man as well. His book, Moby and Ahab on a Plutonium Sea: The Novel Which Ended the Cold War is a fictitious account of what might have happened leading up to or following a purported event in 1979.
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Jenny White brings us The Sultan’s Seal: A Novel. This is a book that must not be put down until finished - otherwise you lose track of what the heck is happening. The novel is not written from the classic “one style” approach. Jenny White jumps from first to third to omniscient viewpoints at the flip of the chapter. I found myself wanting to keep a score card of sorts to keep track of whose perspective I was reading and at which point in time. Ms. White jumps backward in time - writing in the present tense is a slightly jarring experience as dead characters are alive for a page before snapping back into the “current” state.

Set in the late Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 19th Century, it begins with the death of a young European woman. While the magistrate in charge, Kamil Pasha, works to solve the crime, he determines that the death of another European woman some years past might be related. The inability to solve the prior crime forced Kamil’s father out of the same position making this all the more important for Kamil to solve. Many of the characters turn out not to be who they first appear to be.

Ms. White writes about the countryside and scenery in a manner that expects them to become more than the two bit characters they really are. I’m not sure that she’s found her niche, she writes in whispers where whole stories could erupt. Her talent seems to be hiding as demurely as a woman’s face behind the veils of the harems she describes.

As I turned the final pages, I found that I was looking forward to the sequel. In proper literary license Jenny White leaves me thinking that I might know some of the answers, but I am less sure of myself than Kamil Pasha is.

Is there anything more boring that watching a movie showing someone giving a slide show presentation - even if that person is Al Gore? A slide show on film? The thing is, it turns out to not be as boring as it originally sounds. Gore has a sense of humor as he presents his evidence that the world is getter warmer and that we are responsible. Gore gives us a picture of a future that looks pretty bleak if we don’t do something about it and gives hope that things aren’t so far gone that we can’t fix them if we (earth’s inhabitants) all work together.

Global warming is going to be a serious issue, it’s been on the lips of politicians running for president and even the current president. Unfortunately we are also finding out that somewhere around 50% of all scientists recently testifying to congress have removed global warming language from their research due to political pressure and threats to remove funding.

An Inconvenient Truth
UN Science Panel
calls global warming real.

When he moves to a new town young Billy Forrester has to face the school bully. Billy, who has trouble holding down his lunch on a good day, makes a bet that he can eat ten worms. It takes a whole day and ten different worm recipes. Ten concotions, ten worms. And he only has until 7 PM to eat them without getting sick. Despite what you might see on the screen, no worms were harmed during the making of the movie.

It’s a little gross, with plenty of kid humor. I was glad to have eaten all of my popcorn before the downing of the worms began.

This was supposed to be a comedy, at least that’s what I got from the commercials. It turns out that You, Me and Dupree is more than just a funny movie. It has a well written script that brings together the comedy that Owen Wilson is famous for with a truly heart tugging story of newlyweds, Carl and Molly Peterson. Carl struggles with his new father-in-law and begins to suspect his down and out best friend, Randy Dupree, of having an affair with his wife. Dupree, of course is not, and in the end Carl and Molly pull themselves together and Dupree ends up with a new career which only hints at itself during the movie.

Part Big Brother, part comic book character, “V For Vendetta” is the story of resistance to government oppression. In a (not too distant) future London, our hero/villian known only as “V” uses terroristic methods to fight facism. V is based upon graphic novels from the 1980s brought to the big screen although it isn’t hard to see a parallel to the current world. Just as we were reminded why we needed to “re-elect” George and the Republicans, the Prime Minister wants to make sure his citizens remember why they needthe government. It is the government that instills fear into its citizens against outsiders who eventually succumb to the insiders.

V manages to “incite” passive protest within the citizenry who have become increasingly distrustful of the government and its reports that continue to spew forth as “news”. Whereas 1984 was mostly about one man who is eventually broken down into a shell of his former self, V is about an entire country finally fed up with the lies and oppression of their self-centered government. Where one man is easily broken down an entire country can rise up. One man may not be able to make the change, it still starts with one man. It is in his ability to inspire others to follow that the difference is made.

In a rare theater trip (I would take more if I got critic passess, hint, hint ;)) the the family and I went to see Night at The Museum and fanciful film starring Ben Stiller as Larry Daley a new night watchman in a museum that comes to life at night. Daley soon learns that an ancient Egyptian curse is to blame for the strangeness that grips the museum at sunset. And he has to learn his history in order to encourage the inhabitants to get along with each other and work together.

Not only is the film fun, keeping the attention of the entire family, it has a not so subtle moral element, getting along.

Updated: 1/08/07 11:10 am

No, this is not the book that inspired the Sandra Bullock film with a similar title (“28 Days”). Instead “24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that Destroyed Faith in Corporate America“ is a third person narrative written by Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller that reminds me of “Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans“.

This is a facinating tale that follows the implosion of Enron from just before the collapse through the destruction of Arther Anderson. The authors painstakingly try to follow the complexities of off balance sheet financing and do a pretty good job. Through the course of the book we see Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow and Jeffrey Skilling, among others, as money-driven individuals who reaped millions from a company that inflated its earnings and hid its losses all while ripping off its employees and the citizens of California.
The authors could have enhanced their descriptions with diagrams that they stated they received in the course of their reporting, but chose not to, leaving the details just a little weaker for doing so. It is much harder to visualize the intricate web of inter-relationships without these visual aids.

With such bizarre sounding names as Chewco, JEDI and Raptor, it is only a small leap to realize that the financing and reporting methods used by Enron were as fanciful as the names of the companies they used to hide their losses and inflate their earnings. About the only thing that we didn’t hear from Enron was the Chewbacca Defense.

In the end the greed that festered inside Enron engulfed their accounting and advising firm Arther Anderson whose fear of lost revenue kept them from advising against the increasingly outlandish schemes to make money out of thin air. It also lead to reforms in the accounting industry that forces companies to rotate the accounting firm that provides book auditing services presumably in an attempt to catch irregularities in financial accounting. And in the long run, it increased the fees that accounting firms will ultimately collect by requiring more and more auditing and disclosure¹. If accounting firms were disallowed from offering advising services to clients whose books they also audited perhaps a fiasco could have been prevented. Firms of this type are often conflicted when they serve too many roles. The role of independent auditor is to scrutinize the transactions of a business to determine if they pass the smell test. That becomes difficult when they are reaping in large advisory fees for recommending the transactions in the first place.

Unfortunately for the book its 2003 publishing date means that recent events, such as the conviction and death of Ken Lay² and Jeff Skilling’s cooperation and subsequent jail term are not included, and contribute to a lower rating on the recommended list. If one is making a collection of the exposé type books this is one to have on the shelf.

1 - This is a huge windfall for accounting firms, especially the “big four” but may cause smaller companies to remain private as well as encourage some businesses to “go private” instead of remain in the public sector.

2 - Allowing him and his estate to beat the rap on having to actually serve a jail sentence and pay restitution.

Although George Orwell’s “1984” has been out for some time I had not read it until recently. In junior high(1985), one of my elective classes worked on the radio play that was to be played on the PA system to the entire school. I don’t remember if it ever happened or not.
After having read “Animal Farm” a few years ago it seemed appropriate to go back and read “1984” for the first time. The basics of the novel were already in my psyche: telescreens that never turn off, shortage of essentials such as razor blades, helicopters that hover to get a closer look at what someone might be doing. The more sinister plot of the novel is not appreciated without a full reading, however. The government is in complete control, watching its citizens at all times, inspiring fear of foreigners, rewriting history to suit its needs, and running a war that will never end. It is at the same time a simple, yet tragic, love story.

Our protaganist, Winston Smith, finds himself questioning the very government that he works for. In his mental rebellion - illegal in itself as thought crime is punishable by death - he finds a beautiful co-conspirator, Julia, with whom he begins an illegal affair (for even non-procreational has been outlawed). One almost forgets that the threat of Big Brother looms over every moment as Winston and Julia pursue their illicit love, finding time to secretly spend time together despite the constant surveillance that permeates modern life.

1984 is a warning against Big Brother - a euphemism for Big Government. Revisionist history, listening in on every conversation of its citizens, creating fear of foreigners, keeping its citizens on edge constantly fearful of attacks to keep and maintain control is what 1984 warns us about. We were to heed these warnings in 1949 when Orwell first penned them. Instead it appears that 1984 has been used as a blueprint for modern times. I will leave it as an exercise for my readers to draw the obvious parallels to 2006.