Five odd movies

Jerry Coyne has put together a list of his 20 most favorite movies, and invited us all to join in. I can’t. I just don’t believe in it. There is no such thing as a best movie, just movies that some of us like a lot. I also can’t list 20, so you’ll have to settle for an idiosyncratic 5 movies that aren’t the best, but made me happy anyway.

  • Zardoz : One of those movies where I just sat there with “Wait, what?” on an infinite loop in my head. Giant flying heads spewing guns, immortals and barbarians, Sean Connery in a diaper, Charlotte Rampling in nothing at all, Beethoven’s Seventh, just weird, weird, weird. At first I was thinking that it was one of those movies I should be stoned to appreciate, and then it sunk in that I was getting stoned just watching it. Plus, Charlotte Rampling.

  • The Incredible Shrinking Man : I saw this one as a young kid, and I quite enjoyed the main character getting smaller and smaller and facing greater and greater problems, like avoiding the cat and fighting off a spider with a needle. But it was the end that surprised me: he’s facing certain doom, he knows there’s nothing he can do to stop the shrinking process, and he has no idea what will happen as he gets to the size of a bacterium or an atom…but he’s looking to his fate with curiosity, not fear. And then it ends. But wow, for a movie with no salvation, what an optimistic ending.

  • The Goonies : The best way to watch this kind of movie is with a child. Way back when we lived on Clark Street in Eugene, with our first boy, I’d put him in a little red wagon and we’d take the footbridge across the Willamette (we’d always stop there for a bit so he could throw rocks in the river) to the theater in the mall, and we saw this movie there. My little guy was so enthusiastic — he wanted to go looking for pirate treasure right away, make friends with a monster, and we absolutely had to get a plastic sword for the wagon ride home. I don’t care if the movie was crap, it was the experience.

  • Children of the Damned : I saw this in a drive-in theater, the El Rancho between Kent and Renton, way back when I was about six years old. Ah, the drive-in — the whole family bundled up into the station wagon, Mom making bags of popcorn to bring with us, playing on the swings in the dusk before the movie started, those clunky old speakers we’d have hanging from our car window, and of course, Dad would fold down the back seat so we kids could lie down in blankets and sleeping bags and watch the show. That’s the way to do it. I don’t remember much about this movie — creepy alien kids with psychic powers, glowing eyes, and British accents being born in and taking over a small village — and I didn’t see the ending at all, because in the middle of the movie my mother went into labor and we had to leave. We kids went home, the parents went away, and next thing you know, I’ve got a baby brother named Mike. Whose eyes, fortunately, did not glow.

  • Attack of the Monsters : Awful, cheesy, terrible, cheap. Not a good movie at all. But back when I was in high school, I’d watch the late night creature features on the television on Fridays (what? You thought I’d be out on dates?), and my father, who’d usually be exhausted after work, was starting to show the signs of the heart disease that would eventually kill him, and one of the things he suffered was insomnia. And this one time he joined me on the sofa to watch whatever was on, and there was this movie about a rubber-suit giant turtle that would shoot fire out of his butt and fly through space. We laughed.

    Hey, isn’t that enough? Laugh with your dad while you’ve got him.

What did you expect? The Godfather movies? Everyone picks those.

Poor Painter of Light

I’m sure many readers here are fans of Thomas Kinkade — how could we not love a hack who used his pious Christianity to woo franchises into paying him buckets of money to sell his kitsch? — so you may be saddened to learn that his Signature Gallery stores are dying like starving puppies and he’s being successfully sued for million dollar judgments to such a degree that some of his companies are declaring bankruptcy. You’ll be appalled to hear that some people are saying rude things about him.

“Kinkade is a … deadbeat,” said their lawyer, Norman Yatooma, who accused the artist and his Los Angeles attorney, Dana Levitt, of “breaching their agreement” to pay up. “Kinkade’s word is as worthless as his artwork. His lawyer is no better.”

Awww. If Kinkade folds up completely, though, where am I going to get an original of his masterwork?

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Now that’s art!

Local fatwa envy

We have another flaming authoritarian cretin of inexplicable popularity here in Minnesota: Bradlee Dean. He runs an outfit called “You Can Run But You Cannot Hide Ministries”, which trundles about the region bringing the word of god and Bradlee Dean to kids.

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He actually gets into the schools, despite the fact that he’s a hateful sectarian weirdo. The scam they run is to claim that they’ll entertain kids with a rock concert and bring an anti-drug, anti-sex message…neatly omitting any mention of evangelical proselytizing.

You might be wondering what “controversial issues” that aren’t for the “faint of heart” he might be talking about. He also has a radio program, so we know what the subject most dear to him is.

He wants to kill gays.

Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America. This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination.

This kook is so far out and so hateful that even Exodus International, the gay conversion ministry, has distanced itself from him. That takes some doing.

Who hasn’t dumped him is just as telling: Michele Bachmann loves Bradlee and prays for him, and EdWatch praises him. EdWatch, by the way, is our local right wing group that would dearly love to get control of the Minnesota board of education…and if they should ever succeed, Minnesota would make Texas look like a beacon of the enlightenment.

Maybe I should offer a course in Born Again Christianity

After all, if the New Life church in Yorktown, Indiana can offer a course in the New Atheism, I must be qualified to discuss all the nuances and fluff and crazy beliefs of Christianity. I am most amused, though, by their choice of instructor. It’s some fellow named Jim Spiegel, who derives his authority from having written a book about atheism.

The title? The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief. Yeah, he has credibility.

I wonder if that guy who made Reefer Madness ever published a textbook on neuropharmacology…

The house of cards is falling down

It almost makes one feel sorry for Andrew Wakefield.

Retraction: Enterocolitis in Children With Developmental Disorders

A J Wakefield, A Anthony, S H Murch, M Thomson, S M Montgomery, S Davies, J J O’Leary, M Berelowitz and J A Walker-Smith

Am J Gastroenterol 2000; 95:2285-2295

On 28 January 2010, the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practice Panel raised concerns about a paper published in the Lancet by Dr Wakefield et al. (1). The main issues were that the patient sample collected was likely to be biased and that the statement in the paper, that the study had local ethics committee approval, was false. There was also the possibility of a serious conflict of interest in the interpretation of the data. The Lancet has now retracted this paper (1). This paper in the American Journal of Gastroenterology (AJG) (2) also includes the 12 patients in the original Lancet article and therefore we retract this AJG paper from the public record.

I said “almost”. He’s still a despicable fraud who has caused the deaths of children.

I get email

Just for something completely different, here’s an email I just got that isn’t threatening me with death or causing me to choke while laughing because of its absurdity.

Dr. Myers,

Over the last several years I have been “converting” from a once very strong evangelical faith to atheism. It was a long road and involved many different facets, one of which was a steady tide of atheist reason and thought I received online. And my main source, well none other then you, Dr. Myers. My first movement towards rationality came when I started researching evolution and what do you know, it was true. While I was still an evangelical, I started tracking the creation and evolution controversy, which often through a link landed me on you blog as you are very prominent in the discussion. I would read a post about evolution and learn something new and then stay awhile and read another post hear or there and cringe and you tore into my religion. I was threatened by you, most prominently because I often had no good answers for your criticisms. I won’t write out my entire deconversion story but I’ll summarize you’re role in that over the last several years I have spent more and more time on your site, reading and thinking. You are now the only blog I follow and I read everything your write. I write this note as encouragement that your persistent defense of rationality and reason does make a difference.

So, how do you come by all these different stories to comment on? Are people sending you links of things they might think you will find interesting? I have long suspected that most of the polls you have us trash are being sent to you by readers who happen to stumble upon them as they travel around the web, that or you have developed you own poll search engine.

That’s good news, and I should mention that I get half a dozen messages like this a week — they’re more common than death threats, but not quite as frequent as the crazies. It’s also fairly typical (not to diminish the writer’s clear commitment to reason) in that I don’t get stories about epiphanies and ‘road to Damascus’ deconversions, and I’m glad of it, because that’s not how one should come to atheism. It’s usually a long, difficult process of thinking for yourself … and I can’t honestly take credit for it, as if I were some sort of evangelical missionary for godlessness, because all I do is provoke and, with luck, jump-start some critical thinking. Like the writer above, sometimes it works because I get someone angry and they go off to prove me wrong, and when they actually look at the evidence, reason unfolds slowly and painfully in their cranium, puncturing old preconceptions with its pointy bits and sharp edges.

To answer his question, yes, I get a flood of email every single day with hundreds of requests (and sometimes demands) to post something about X, Y, and Z. Sometimes I just click randomly into the inbox and throw up something about it; sometimes a story just tickles me. I can’t address it all, of course, but it means all I have to do is tap into the collective outrage and humor of the community of readers here, and presto, I’ve got something to write.

I am so glad I’m not the only one

We’re always hearing about these amazing profilers who work to describe the culprits, sight unseen, in serial killer cases. They get highlighted in books and movies and television, and the media just slurps it up with gullible glee. I’ve always found them unbelievable. The noise they’re making is pure cold-reading, and there’s nothing different between them and psychic detectives — it’s an embarrassment that our law enforcement agencies still use them, along with lie detector tests and handwriting analysis.

So I was glad to see this critical article from Malcolm Gladwell, written several years ago. He makes the same argument, that these analyses are pure bunkum. Among many examples, here’s one about one of the first profilers, James Brussel, who was touted as incredibly insightful for making so many predictions about a serial bomber in New York in the 1940s.

James Brussel didn’t really see the Mad Bomber in that pile of pictures and photostats, then. That was an illusion. As the literary scholar Donald Foster pointed out in his 2000 book “Author Unknown,” Brussel cleaned up his predictions for his memoirs. He actually told the police to look for the bomber in White Plains, sending the N.Y.P.D.’s bomb unit on a wild goose chase in Westchester County, sifting through local records. Brussel also told the police to look for a man with a facial scar, which Metesky didn’t have. He told them to look for a man with a night job, and Metesky had been largely unemployed since leaving Con Edison in 1931. He told them to look for someone between forty and fifty, and Metesky was over fifty. He told them to look for someone who was an “expert in civil or military ordnance” and the closest Metesky came to that was a brief stint in a machine shop. And Brussel, despite what he wrote in his memoir, never said that the Bomber would be a Slav. He actually told the police to look for a man “born and educated in Germany,” a prediction so far off the mark that the Mad Bomber himself was moved to object. At the height of the police investigation, when the New York Journal American offered to print any communications from the Mad Bomber, Metesky wrote in huffily to say that “the nearest to my being ‘Teutonic’ is that my father boarded a liner in Hamburg for passage to this country–about sixty-five years ago.”

The true hero of the case wasn’t Brussel; it was a woman named Alice Kelly, who had been assigned to go through Con Edison’s personnel files. In January, 1957, she ran across an employee complaint from the early nineteen-thirties: a generator wiper at the Hell Gate plant had been knocked down by a backdraft of hot gases. The worker said that he was injured. The company said that he wasn’t. And in the flood of angry letters from the ex-employee Kelly spotted a threat–to “take justice in my own hands”–that had appeared in one of the Mad Bomber’s letters. The name on the file was George Metesky.

Brussel did not really understand the mind of the Mad Bomber. He seems to have understood only that, if you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous. The Hedunit is not a triumph of forensic analysis. It’s a party trick.

I also cannot abide Sherlock Holmes, in either book or movie form, because it is such hokum. I’m always growling to myself, “Wait, you cannot derive a simple linear chain of inferred causality from a single observation of a phenomenon with many different possible causes and variables! Holmes, you fraud!”, and then I end up throwing the book away or turning the television off. Even the latest film version with Robert Downey Jr., which was entertaining because they turned Holmes into a brawling thug, was infuriating whenever Holmes would get into a fight and calmly calculate exactly what was going to happen in the next 10 seconds. Yeah, right.

Local loon

We’ve got ’em. A St Cloud minister took out an ad:

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Oooh, it’s the usual fear-mongering. I had to do a double-take when I saw Dennis Campbell’s summary of the Islamic Strategy, though…

Moslems seek to influence a nation by immigration, reproduction, education, the government, illegal drugs, and by supporting the gay agenda.

…because when I think “gay friendly”, I picture the Taliban.

I’m also wondering if Pastor Campbell thinks that a good way to oppose the influence of immigrating Muslims would be to counterbalance it with more immigration from those Catholics south of the border.