Web Logs
4/10/2005 - Catching Up - part 1
There are so many things I missed while working on the album I want to take a few post to catch up...
Duran Duran
Duran Duran put on an excellent show last night. Far better than the one I saw a few years ago. Yes, the old material is always better, and some of their "we a bunch of funky white boys" moments were wincable, but overall the show was strong. I was particularly pleased that they played one of my favorite tunes: Tiger Tiger. Ah, If only Double-D had gone in more in that direction in 1986 we'd probably remember them in a very different light...
Media Death-Fest
The morbid media circus around the passing of Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul has pretty much driven me away from any televised news coverage for the last two weeks and insured the permanent removal of cnn.com from my bookmarks.
And what the nutty "life at any cost" crowd don't seem to get is how ever-increasing that cost is. You see, keeping people alive at death's door is a product of that wonderful anti-mysticism know as science, and unlike mysticism, science is always improving. There will come a day when it will be able to sustain people in vegetative, catatonic, or just downright painful states pretty much to the limits of human life-span. Then what? If doctors had come to the Pope days before he'd died and said: "Fine, don't resign you office, we can keep you alive in a vegetative state for another 40 years.", would he have accepted?
Credit Where Credit is Due
I loved the Incredibles and thought Brad Bird did a great job, but I wish he'd give a more honest answer when asked in interviews where he got his ideas. A truthful reply might sound like:
I took the Fantastic Four, set them on a James Bond-style mission, and threw in every family drama cliche that worked (mid-life crisis dad, anchor-of-the-family mom, bratty son, insecure daughter, etc.). Add in a heavy dose of Simpsons-style irony and viola!
