Ten Second Movie Review: Star Trek

Start to finish thrill ride. And it’s good to see the Orions have been emancipated.

Ten Second Movie Review: Juno

Funny, heart-warming, delightful. Except all of the parts with Juno, which were insufferable.

On the Fence

You know, when I was an undergraduate I didn’t want to go out on a limb and make any strong statements in papers and tests (much less in class) because I was so keenly aware of my own towering ignorance and didn’t want to say something ass-backward and sound foolish. So I’d sometimes write in an indirect fashion or qualify my point away. That’s why I understand when my students write things like this:

Huntington’s theory may have some truth, but it is easy to refute with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Sen’s approach to development is universalistic but subjectively so.

Criticism for each can often fall in opposing camps, but for many there are problems for both that the other cannot fulfill.

With much more time invested . . . a very good, distinct answer could be given, at least in a general way.

It still sounds absurd, though. At least in a general way, and there might be overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Perfidy!

It’s the end of the semester, which means I’m in for a week or so of sturm und drang (for the untraveled and unworldly, that means storm and stress in German [I know a lot about languages and stuff]). I’ve already had to handle breathless students on the verge of a meltdown and the perpetually perplexed who just can’t turn in their paper on time because they’re unable to find my office after sixteen weeks of classes. What are they supposed to do when that happens? I mean that’s nobody’s fault. I’ve also had to field several requests to guarantee a certain grade before I even calculate them. Since students don’t usually get to request the grade they’d prefer to take home that might sound presumptuous, but these students all assure me that they would only ask such a thing because they have good reason to, usually that they’re graduating this or some future semester and just have to have a certain grade in my class. And they’re always quite flexible; it’s not as if they’re asking for an A, just a B or B minus, unless of course they really want an A.

Most of all, though, the end of the semester means grading papers, which in turn means keeping constant vigil for punctuation that undergraduates don’t use, complex sentence constructions, tongue-in-cheek asides, and for nuanced interpretations of identity politics in the Balkans, any of which signals the Big P. Nobody escapes scrutiny. I assume everyone’s trying to make a sucker out of me. I might sound like Torquemada keeping everyone under a veil of suspicion like this but when you get accustomed to a certain style of communication, departures from the barely literate just cry out that something is amiss. I also have a long history with plagiarists in my classes. I don’t know if cheaters just run amok on campus or if I seem like the soft-headed simpleton who’ll let anything past, but these plagiarists think they can play me like a violin.

I already have three confirmed cases of plagiarism and one more suspected with another twenty five or thirty papers to go. So now I’m stuck with the dilemma of what to do with them. And it’s a real dilemma, you know the kind with two equally bad alternatives. I can turn them in to the university people and have to deal with the paperwork and legal procedures and all the efforts to keep the cheaters from suing for slander, or I can just deal with it myself by failing them, which doesn’t necessarily give them the greatest disincentive to cheating again in the future. Exhibit A is one of the plagiarists I handled unofficially two years ago and has now turned up in a colleague’s class doing it all over again. A while ago I pledged to turn everyone in but that was before I was facing the prospect of setting up three “mediated discussions” in a non-threatening environment of equals to mutually come to an agreement on the appropriate action to take.

Fred Thompson Out, But Whither America?

In a bombshell announcement that has left the political establishment in upheaval, Fred Thompson announced his withdrawal from the presidential race today. His stunning move comes just as he was poised to sweep the remaining caucuses and primaries to become the Republican nominee and likely victor in November’s general election. His unforeseen decision leaves the remaining candidates in both parties scrambling to retool their campaigns in the wake of the heavyweight’s departure. Baffled Republicans who jockeyed for the vice presidency must now attempt to position themselves as worthy replacement candidates, while Democrats see their odds at winning the White House move from the astronomical to the plausible.

The race is now up for grabs, as indeed is the country’s future. While it is impossible to say what could have motivated Fred’s decision, we can only assume that it was in the best interest of the nation. In his brief statement Fred had this to say: “I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort.” We have Fred. I only pray leaving was the right choice.

Movie Review Review: Cloverfield More Like Crapperfield

I’m sorry to report my deep disappointment in the reviews for the latest blockbuster film by J.J. Abrams and some other guys I’ve never heard of. Ever since mysteriously untitled posters and deliciously cryptic teaser trailers started to generate excitement I’ve been eagerly awaiting the chance to read the critic’s appraisals of the disaster epic Cloverfield. Due to my modest income, rising ticket prices, and movie theaters’ profoundly offensive practice of showing commercials before frequently crummy movies, it’s very seldom that I’ll risk blowing a stack of Georges without first having digested the critical consensus and then passing judgment on that consensus. So while I haven’t seen the movie, I have read a lot about it and can say with some certainty that if I had seen it I would have wished that I hadn’t. Mind you, this isn’t just making an up or down call based on the Tomatometer, it’s a careful analysis of what the critics say, who says it, and how they say it.

Even though there’s a good deal of positive ink for this one (from no less than Roger Ebert, even), my disappointment stems from the uninspired city-smashing reptile formula with the illusion-busting implausibility of the camcorder recording conceit stuck on top, and none of that is in dispute among the various critics. I expected a lot more than another giant lizard from Abrams, something innovative and mindbending. But from what I read all you get is vapid hipsters and stomach-churning shaky cam. So while it might be a perfectly pulse-pounding and terrifying seat-gripper, that just ain’t cuttin’ it and I’m keeping the three dollars I still have safely in my pocket. Maybe in a couple of months I’ll watch a matinee at the dollar theater and review the movie itself.

Discovering New Knowledge Of Russia That Does Not Lack Facts

Well, it’s been a good three months since my last post, and that’s a pretty long time to go without making fun of students. Since it’s the end of the semester I’m in the midst of grading reams of tests and papers. This is mostly mind-numbing but it does afford a little comedy now and then because the students have to draw on what they’ve learned and articulate it on paper, giving them ample opportunity to sound ridiculous. So for this special holiday entry I’ve picked a few of the choicest insights from their essays which, for some reason, all pertain to the transition from communism in Russia:

It can be argued that russia invented communism through one of its organizers, Karl Marx, who laid out the blueprint for communism. Communism in Russia was not invented as a solution to democracy, but as a solution to communism.

Russia transition from communism started with the death of Lenin in the 1920s. Glasnost did not believe in revolution and tried to revive the communist party, but he was kicked out.

Aside from [the Hungarian uprising of 1956] radicalists like Yeltsin were willing to go so far as to blow up parliament and draft a new Constitution . . . After Yeltsin’s failed cultural revolution and the fall of the USSR Putin took over.

To be fair, most of these kids were toddlers when communism collapsed. But to really be fair, that’s why we have books. And why they were assigned to read them.

Fred Thompson, The Next President Of The United States Of America

Fred Thompson has finally entered the race for the Republican nomination as an official candidate, and I just don’t think I could have held my breath any longer. The interested reader of 8 Dollar Days and some folks who might decide to google “sticks a knife in your throat man” will recall my endorsement of Thompson, or what might better be called my endorsement of skipping the painfully lopsided pantomime of an election that we would witness with as rock solid a candidate as Thompson in the race.

To illustrate, Fred is already–on only the first full day of his campaign–leaving the other lame-os shamefaced and stupefied with his airtight policy proposals. Clinton, Obama, Giuliani, and McCain and the rest of that uninspired band of bozos have had months to craft concrete and actionable plans to address our nation’s ills, and what have they come up with? Zilch. They stand up and blah-blah every day feeding us a bunch of vapid rhetoric that’s supposed to make us feel warm inside but doesn’t actually offer us anything of substance. Fred, on the other hand, has already outlined his plan for an honorable victory in Iraq, AND the rest of the world. In Iowa he announced,

We have to demonstrate to friends and foes alike that we are determined and united as the American people to do whatever is necessary to prevail, not only in Iraq but in the broader global war.

Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be a candidate in that race either. Republicans and Democrats alike drone on in their narrow-minded debates about the performance of the Iraqi government, about whether to withdraw troops from Iraq, how long it would take and what would happen afterwards, while Fred has demonstrated he has an unimpeachable plan to win the whole global war! It’ll take some more time to work out the details, but I think his plan will work with healthcare and immigration, too. So, with Fred having elaborated his “whatever is necessary” proposal, the only thing for the other candidates to do would be to withdraw in his favor. But will they? I doubt it. I just hope that Fred can find a way to let the losers keep a shred of their dignity after he totally wipes floor with them.

Me And My Big Mouth

I’m usually very circumspect in what I say; I tend to choose my words carefully in the interests of being precise and of not cheesing off the wrong people. That’s why I often surprise myself by what I say in class in front of dozens of people. Sometimes students ask a question about which I’m not certain, but which I answer with the apparent authority of Mr. Wizard. These answers sometimes extend into mini-disquisitions of several minutes duration, and after class I wonder where in the world it all came from. It all sounds plausible as I’m saying it, but I shouldn’t really speak of the Russian party system in more than a speculative way.

I can even say things that might qualify as less than tactful if taken out of context. On the first of day class last week, for example, I found myself devising an off the cuff class system for the English speaking world: the aristocratic British, middle class Americans, and tacky lower class Australians. I’ve never thought of anything like this before and koalas are as cute as can be, but it just sprang to mind so I said it. At least I made sure there weren’t any Australians in the room beforehand. Of course it could be offensive to others as well since the Irish and South Africans and whoever else must by implication fall  outside the class system altogether into a group of untouchables. I guess in these days of hair-trigger litigation I should monitor myself more closely, lest I be accused of discriminating against people with funny accents.

The Joy of Learning

I’m back from Mexico and getting ready for the upcoming semester, which for me means shuffling through piles of dusty papers looking for hardcopies of my class notes because some jerkwad stole my USB memory stick/jump drive/flash drive from my backpack, presumably in one airport or another. Said wad also stole my ipod Shuffle, but since my USB drive housed every bit of work I’ve done in the past five years it’s far more valuable to me than any mp3 player. Not because it was exemplary work, of course, but because it saved me from having to do any reading or investigation as preparation for class lectures; even though I’ve long forgotten on what authority the information in my notes rests, I figure it must be accurate if I bothered to write it down.

In any event, in my search for notes I came across some notes that I took myself in a graduate class. They’re on a handout illustrating a problem in one of the statistics courses I had to take to fulfill my degree requirements (see below). For those of you who don’t know, I study politics, not statistics or economics or anything like that. You’ll notice that the problem concerns transportation choice in Australia, an issue to which generations of political scientists have devoted their careers, sort of like the search for dark matter among astrophysicists. We think we may be on the verge of explaining why some people in Melbourne take the bus, thus closing a chapter opened by the great founders of our discipline like Aristotle and Machiavelli.

This imminent breakthrough notwithstanding, sometimes I think a lot of political scientists spend way too much time on math problems and not enough on, you know, politics. These folks do some really sophisticated stuff, way beyond the quadratic equations I was able to do in high school. In fact, I don’t understand anything they’re going on about, and as the professor was discussing this particular logit (don’t ask me what that is) I was busily daydreaming the class period away. And you’ll see at the bottom that I had calculated the number of seconds in the class, which was many more than I thought I could live through. I really pity the past me who went through that.