Author Archives: Jean-Paul

Movie Review: Dallas Buyers Club

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Living with AIDS in the 80’s SUCKED.  You should read “And The Band Played On” by Randy Shilts to find out how much it sucked.  Matthew McConaughey and, especially, Jared Leto were fantastic.  Government can really suck sometimes.

Another true story movie.  This one is about Ron Woodroof, a hard drinking, fast talking, drug addicted, womanizing, homophobic cowboy/electrician.  You know, a Texan.  Ron discovers that he has AIDS after an electrical accident and is given 30 days to live.  After first rejecting the diagnosis, Ron quickly comes to his senses and starts stealing the trial drug AZT which he quickly overdoses on and almost dies.  Ok, maybe he doesn’t come to his senses so quickly after all.  After the overdose, Ron starts learning all he can about the disease and starts a club that gives away non-FDA approved medicines that do help prolong the lives of AIDS patients.  He quickly gets in trouble with the FDA and must fight them as well as his disease as he tries to help AIDS patients and make a bit of money.

The 80’s were a really scary time for HIV patients.  Not only did they have a disease with no known cure, but they were also demonized by the populace and the government.  I highly recommend “And The Band Played On” by Randy Shilts if you want to know more about this dark time in U.S. history.  It is a great accompanying piece to this movie.  The amount of history that we live through and know nothing about is mind-boggling.

This movie has some top rate acting by Matthew McConaughey as Ron Woodroof and Jared Leto as the cross-dressing eventual business partner, Rayon.  They both also go through quite the bodily transformation as their AIDS progresses.  Jennifer Garner as Eve Saks, a doctor sympathetic to Ron’s plight as he tries to bring an ease of symptoms to his club members is less effective.  I found her acting in the beginning of this movie annoying, but she did grow on me a bit in the second half.

I think I should say something about the drug AZT as it and the FDA, are the main villains in the movie.  There was a quick splash message at the end saying they eventually lowered the dosage of AZT to reduce some of the severe side effects of the drug, but you can easily come out of the movie thinking that AZT is bad.  It is not.  The FDA, on the other hand, is.  Or was.  Important lessons were learned from the HIV epidemic and changes were made to protocols when dealing with emerging viral threats.  We’ll see how well that works the next time an outbreak that predominantly effects a disaffected minority occurs.

Most Fulfilling Job Ever

What is your ideal for the most fulfilling job you can think of?  I think partly just because you would consider something a job means there is something unfulfilling about it.  A completely fulfilling job would likely then be a beloved hobby that you happen to be lucky to get paid for.

Since we’re living in fantasyland anyway, I am going to go off the reservation a bit and just make up a job as my idea of the most fulfilling job.  My most fulfilling job would be taking DNA samples of white supremacists and letting them know how many black people they were related to.  It would be extra fulfilling if I could tell them they were related to Barack Obama.

Book Review: Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Imagine if Heaven were managed, not by God, but by a bureaucratic quagmire of Angels and committees only slightly more effective than the U.S. Senate.  It certainly would explain a lot.  Welcome to “Mercury Falls”.

The Apocalypse is nigh.  Again.  Poor Christine.  She is assigned to cover cult after cult that thinks they have identified the End of Days and the disillusionment that follows on End of Days + 1.  This time, though, it’s actually happening and Christine is an unwitting major player in the unfolding Apocalyptic events.  Through her travails, she runs into Mercury, a disillusioned angel who is not terribly keen on his assignment in the Angelic bureaucracy.  He tries to fight this by very actively doing nothing.  But no matter how hard he tries to do nothing, something keeps getting done.  Oh well, might as well team up with Christine and save the world and the dickweed Antichrist from destruction.

I had never heard of “Mercury Falls” or it author, Robert Kroese, before my (favorite) aunt mentioned it to me.  She said that reading it made her think of me and that I would enjoy the humor and irony in the book.  It’s hard to pass up a glowing recommendation like that.  I am happy say that she was quite right.

This book was incredibly charming.  Good humorous fiction is hard to come by and “Mercury Falls” is certainly up near the top.  Robert Kroese has an acerbic1 wit and a talent for ironic writing.  Kroese’s humor is such that a comparison to Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is almost obligatory.  I was unsurprised to learn that Douglas Adams was one Kroese’s inspirations for writing.  Kroese has a knack for capturing wryness as well as Adams did.  The context of the story also reminded me slightly of “Good Omens” by Terry Prachett Neil Gaiman which is another comedic must read.

If you like angelic incompetence, if you delight in demonic misdeeds, if you have ever lost a loved one due to having to wait in line at the Department of Miracular Vouchsafing, “Mercury Falls” is the book for you.  “Mercury Falls” is also the first book in a trilogy and you’ll be able to read about the next books soon as I’ve already picked up the other two2.

1 Little known fact.  No one really knows what acerbic means.  It is, however, a requirement that wit be described as acerbic.

2 These footnote jokes are even funnier if you’ve read the book.

Two Websites To Rule Them All

What if I were to tell you that two websites accounted for over half of all Internet traffic?  Which two do you think it would be?  The answer?  Netflix and YouTube.  That is astounding.  There also seems to be a correlation between Netflix’s and YouTube’s rise and Bit Torrent’s fall.  Bit Torrent, for those of you who don’t know, is a piece of software responsible for a very large portion of the illegally downloaded music and movies.  Make movies and TV shows easily available for people to legally consume and they will legally consume them.  Don’t and they will steal it.  Simple as that.

That reminds me of The Oatmeal graphic that was recently posted:

movie

What Happens To Dirty Laundry From Space?

Chris Hatfield, the coolest astronaut ever, was recently on the Conan O’Brien show and Conan had a vexing question that Chris was able to answer.  What do they do with all of their dirty laundry?  Chris’ answer is awesome.

[youtube http://youtu.be/C1j6KLP492E]

It’s too bad Chris has flown his last space mission.  At the same time, it’s good to see NASA using him to promote space even in his retirement.  Chris was on NPR’s Fresh Air show this weekend and he is an incredibly effective communicator.  He spoke about the Columbia disaster and its effect on space exploration and about how he spent years learning Russian just so he could someday pilot a Russian space ship.  He is a fascinating man that comes from a fascinating profession.  You don’t get the two together very often.  And, just because I can, here is Chris Hatfield singing ‘Space Oddity’ from the ISS.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo]

Huh?

Language is universal.  Words are not.  Well, except for one word.  Huh?  That wasn’t a question, that was the word.  Huh?  It’s the universal expression for “what did you just say?”  Don’t believe me?  Watch this short video:

[youtube http://youtu.be/OnlvPsPyPKk]

Pretty cool, huh?  But it’s not just a quick video that proves this.  A recent study posted on PLOS ONE goes into all of the details and explains the methods followed to achieve this conclusion.  How is it 2013 and we’re just discovering this universally uniting language nugget?  Well, “huh” really isn’t a word.  Not in the dictionary sense anyway.  It’s more of a verbal tic thank anything else, used to express emotion and those words don’t normally make it into the written language.  And written language is what is most often used to study similarities between languages.

But why now?  My best guess is because of the Internet.  Sites like YouTube have allowed linguists to study hundreds of languages all from the comfort of their own home.  Someone probably noticed “huh?” pop up in a few and then decided to investigate further.   And a greater understanding of that which unites us was achieved as a result.  The world is truly a remarkable place.

Adventures In Obamacare 6: HealthSherpa To The Rescue!

The biggest problem about healthcare.gov is that it is nigh impossible to get to the point where you can actually look at plans and how much they cost.  A trio of young geniuses decided to take it upon themselves to fix this.  The result is healthsherpa.com.  All you need to do is enter in your zip code and age and smoking status of each person to be covered and you are presented with a list of all of the plans available in your area and their cost.  And you can do this for any zip code you want!  You can also enter in your salary and it will figure out your subsidy as well.  Pretty cool.

It is, admittedly, a bit limited, but you can do more on the site than on the government site. It would be nice if they were able to provide more information like deductibles and copays and such, but it’s a great start and it should give individuals a pretty good idea of the range of options available in their area.  This is something that healthcare.gov has failed miserably at unless you were lucky enough to get through the cumbersome enrollment process.

Simple.  Efficient.  Robust.  *golf clap*

Some Great Movember Mocking

I was sent this video a week or so ago and loved it and promptly forgot about it.  A conversation about Movember and how silly it is reminded me.  I present to you, for your viewing pleasure, Decembeaver!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp3Bns-bCv4&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

Epic Song Cover Of The Week

There are probably billions of song covers on YouTube.  None are as epic as this cover of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” by Russia’s Red Army Chorus.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P08B_lBUL0E&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

Movie Review: Thor: The Dark World

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Don’t expect to like or understand the story unless you’re a comic geek.  As with the first Thor movie, the scenes on Earth steal the show from the special effecty Asgard scenes.  Kat Dennings is hilarious.

So, you see, there are these Elves, right?  And they like Dark and stuff, ok?  And they once tried to bring Darkness back to the universe by harnessing this stuff called Ether which can, like, totally bring Darkness back.  But they were resisted by the Asgardians who fight with swords and axes against the Dark Elves who have these super destructive beam weapons and stuff and the Asgardians totally decimated the Dark Elves and hid the Ether in the deepest regions of the somethingorother where it could never be reached again.  And the Dark Elves?  The Asgardians totally made them extinct and stuff even though a bunch very clearly got away in a massive space ship right in front of a whole bunch of Asgardians.

Yeah, we’re talking real comic book setup here.  But it’s ok.  You’ll survive it.  The rest of the movie is quite fun.

Like the first Thor movie, the scenes on Earth are much more compelling than the Asgard scenes.  A lot of this can be attributed to Darcy Lewis played by Kat Dennings.  I don’t think there is a single scene that she was in that wasn’t at least wryly amusing.  Exiting the movie, I asked how Kat Dennings wasn’t in more stuff only to find that she’s been in quite a few things, most notably the comedy “Two Broke Girls”, of which I have seen about five minutes before I gave up on it.  Maybe I should give it another chance.

This movie is closer to what Thor is supposed to be like than the first.  The one thing you should know about Thor is that he is supposed to be a pompous ass and kind of a moron.  Wait, that was two things.  His pomp was solved in the first movie, but his sheer stupidity was really missing from it.  In “The Dark World” we get to see a bit of his lackwit nature with him coming up with the brilliant idea of taking his Ether-toting girlfriend, Jane, from the massive defenses of Asgard to a barren planet which will draw away the very limited Dark Elf army so that he can fight them all himself and defeat the Ether by…something.  Thor is the Underpants Gnome superhero:  1.) Fight the enemy.  2.) ???  3.) WIN!

But, of course, win is what Thor does.  And this win is quite entertaining.  With the worlds aligning and portals to other worlds appearing everywhere, Thor battles uber-Dark Elf, Malekith, and they batter each other through portals and across worlds.  If you’ve ever played the Portal video game, it’s kind of like that only without the orange and green glowing portals.

Marvel has quite a knack of making perfectly entertaining movies that I have absolutely no interest in seeing again.  This one is slightly better than those.  I probably will never want to see it again, but I would not complain too much if I happened to do so.