BEE MOVIE; Book preview: Born on a Blue Day

Jerry Seinfeld was in Israel recently where he met the Prime Minister and the President, honors usually reserved for a head of state. He deserves it. This is a man who can do whatever he wants and he has chosen to make an excellent family-friendly film, BEE MOVIE. Mrs. 1OTT and I were the only adult couple in the theater in an audience of parents and children. What a relief it was to see a movie for kids that didn't contain the usually gross-out Shrek-humor that children supposedly enjoy.

I won't give away too much of the plot except to say that Jerry plays Barry B. Benson, a bee who wants more out of life than working in the hive and dying. He meets Vanessa, honey-sweetly voiced by Renée Zellweger, a florist who accepts Barry as the first bee to talk--a violation of bee rules--and the pursuer of justice for bees.

Hilarious Jewish humor abounds around Barry's family and a star turn by a cable talk legend. Nudge-nudge cameos are also entertaining and integral to the plot so don't read too many reviews before you go see it.

I hear people say, "Why should Jerry even work?" since he's so rich. Crosby kept working after his first 100 million and so should Jerry. One can only wonder what the extra episode of Seinfeld planned for DVD would have been like. Jerry said things didn't come together for it to happen, but I suspect the Michael Richards scandal kiboshed it. I saw Jerry's COMEDIAN documentary, showing his return to standup and was amused by it, but BEE MOVIE is a return to form by a comic prince.

Note to Chris Rock fans: his participation is a cameo, but the setup of his mosquito character, Mooseblood, near the beginning of the movie, leads to the funniest line of the movie near the end.


Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet

Free Press has just published the paperback of the British bestselling autobiography of an autisitc savant, Born on a Blue Day. Mrs. 1OTT is a social worker in a school for autistic children and wanted the book for herself, so I bought it, read chapter 1, and was drawn in. The author's love of math and some of his odd habits, such as spinning coins, reminded me of some of my own childhood habits and those of kids I knew and even my own children. But when you put all these behaviors together in one person you have the autism spectrum. I'm trying to learn more about this condition. One OPRAH show with Jenny McCarthy isn't enough to learn everything you need to know. I'd like to think that eventually we'll live in a world where, when a person with an unusual condition like autism enters a bus and acts up, people will have actually learned enough in school to understand what they are dealing with, instead of scowling or laughing. Full review to follow.

I Built It One Piece at a Time: The Amazingly Durable Rio S10; This American Life

I got it one piece at a time And it didn't cost me a dime
You'll know it's me when I come through your town
I'm gonna ride around in style
I'm gonna drive everybody wild
'Cause I'll have the only one there is around.

By Wayne Kemp, copyright 1976, performed by Johnny Cash

March 13, 2003: cnet news reported that a $329.99 1GB SD card will be available in the third quarter.

According to the inverse ratio of the original Moore’s law (roughly, memory doubling in the same space every 18 months) the price of that card should have halved every 18 months. Let’s see, we’re in the third 18-month period since then. Let’s round down 329.99 to 320 because the math is prettier.

1. half of 320 = 160
2. half of 160 = 80
3. half of 80 = 40.

I look forward to 2018, when memory is measured in quads and a 1 GB chip costs the same as a potato chip.

Actually, SD card prices are dropping faster than Moore’s law predicted, like Tiki Barber receptions before Tom Coughlin bought him a jar of pine tar. I bought a 2 GB card (2000 pictures) for $19.99 for my digital camera and remembered that my old Rio S10 from 2002 could take this card too. I had never considered buying an SD card before because of the expense. Now my old $79 10-song mp3 player can play over 300 songs on the same 2 GB card. I bought a new 1 GB card for the camera for $14.99 on the idea that I’ll be okay with having a 1,000 picture capability instead of 2,000.

I had never purchased an iPod so the SD card has opened up a whole new audio world for me. I actually own 2 Rio S10s. My daughter dumped hers after she got her first job and bought an iPod. She doesn’t live by Dad’s strike price of <$100 for technology. My friend Cicero Slim from Chicago calls me the poster boy for delayed gratification.

Rio transferring software is clunky. iPods work easily. You just think about a song and it’s transferred from hard drive to device. [Wireless SD cards just came out so this is almost a reality. You can now transfer pictures from camera to web without cabling into a computer.] Users who own both Rio and iPod claim that Rio software isn’t as elegant as Apple’s, but now there’s 3^rd party software available to make the Rio process smoother. A significant Rio advantage over the iPod is that I can use 1 AA rechargeable NiMH. When iPod internal batteries die it’s soldering time.

What’s on my Rio? Regina Spektor, Wilco, Alison Krauss, Mel Tormé, Sweeney Todd, Harry Shearer’s Le Show, This American Life, Barenaked Ladies, Steely Dan, Bing Crosby, and room for more.

There were a lot of things in the 1990s that I heard about but never got into because I was too tired raising babies. One of the great public radio shows that started in during that decade was This American Life with Ira Glass. The weekly podcast is perfect for me because the content of the show is so high, that I don’t want to miss a word or note and I’m able to rewind. Mrs. 1OTT and I recently enjoyed a show featuring a woman writing a breakup song and enlisting Phil Collins to advise her. It is rare for Mrs. 1 and I to so thoroughly enjoy anything on TV or radio together. She’s Gray’s Anatomy and I’m Scrubs. Another outstanding entry featured violent criminals doing hard time performing Hamlet in prison. Almost every episode is good. I look forward to seeing the TV incarnation of TAL on Showtime (will either wait for the DVD or see via download).

SLAM by Nick Hornby, or Bamboozled!: The Responsibility of the Critic

Page 145 of this 309 page novel confirms the dramatic core of the plot, whether or not the skateboarding protagonist’s girlfriend is pregnant. Too bad I already read the result of the test in the Library of Congress Cataloging in-Publication data on page vi. The promotional copy on the dust jacket doesn’t mention it, so why should the frontmatter?

I once read that a good critic, rather than taking pleasure in easily and totally trashing a work, can make it a challenge and find something in a piece that someone somewhere might like. The recently fired TV critic for the NY Daily News took this to an extreme. When he started writing for the Daily News in the 1990s, his viewpoint was that of a well-rounded individual writing for an equally well-informed audience, of whom TV watching was one of many entertainment choices or intellectual pursuits. If a show stunk, he’d tell us not to bother, to turn off the tube and do something else.

As the TV audience eroded to Internet and video games in the 2000s, I noticed the Daily News critic’s reviews becoming much more positive and less critical, except for the worst shows. He would talk of how a show’s worthiness was great enough for the viewer to devote hours of his or her life to. My first impression was that he assumed people watched TV all night so his job was to get people to watch the least bad shows. Finally I conjectured that he was subversive, knowing that most things on TV are junk, and seeing that if he wrote mostly negative reviews he would erode the audience even further until the position of TV critic would be endangered like radio, book, and buggy whip reviewers, he encouraged people to stick with mediocrity rather than turn off the set.

I found this book to be mediocre. After reading some reviews, I conclude it is overpraised by critics who are rooting for an author who sells a lot of books and keeps publishing afloat.

My only previous direct artistic experience with the author’s work was my viewing of HIGH FIDELITY, a great movie based on Nick Hornby’s first novel. I had no idea SLAM was his first Young Adult (YA) book. The humor escaped me, except for one chuckle where a man pictures himself as a 49-year-old being able to play club soccer with his 16-year-old grandson.

The book will be impossible for Hollywood to translate to an American setting, such as Hornby’s Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, because of the Romeo/Juliet age range of the parents. I’m sure it can be funny but I found it hard to laugh at this version of teen pregnancy. A 15-year-old boy (whose mum was 16 when he was born) getting a 16-year-old girl pregnant can only be the subject of a YA novel if it’s not explicit and this book isn’t. It makes a best case scenario; she has well-educated parents, his mother is young enough to help him, they have a roof over the head for the baby.

There’s even a happy scene at the end where everyone is still young but slightly more grown up, the couple is apart but the baby cared for, and the icing on the cake: she has a new boyfriend and he has a smoking hot girlfriend! By gum, why did I even stay married for all these 22 years? It’s the Gilmore Girls all over again, a world where children don’t need two parents, where they’re better off with just one, there only being half as many adults to screw up their wise-before-their-time teen noggins.

This book offers a lesson in middle-class civility when dealing with misfortune. The girl’s father pulls a little class snobbishness on the teen dad but instantly apologizes for the remark, “Don’t you people ever learn anything?” The book doesn’t get much deeper that this. Is he dreaming about the future or is he time traveling? Is the Tony Hawk poster to which he talks and from Whom he gets advice a metaphor for the Deity? Gimmicky with CGI possibilities, but not well done in the novel.

I found one redeeming feature for you kids out there. Be wise enough to pick good parents who can get you out of life’s biggest jam.

Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 2007.

2 Books: Janey A and Teenage Pregnancy

I can't get Johnny U out of my mind, so much so that when I just finished Jane Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensibility, I thought of her as Janey A and tried to find the comparisons to Johnny U. Let's see, when the Dashwood sisters and Mom fall on hard times, they have to reduce the number of servants down to two and move into a smaller grand estate of a relative. Johnny U helped his poor widowed Mom by delivering dirty bags of filthy coal.

Yet Sense has much to offer. Right up front, Austen lays out the basic plot: Old Man Dashwood dies and, by law, must leave his estate to his eldest son (product of his first marriage). If only Lear had a son he could have died in bed and avoided all that bloodshed. Mr. Dashwood's surviving second wife and their three daughters get nada. All four have to leave the mansion to fend for themselves. The eldest son, at the urging of his shrewish wife, reneges on the father's deathbed charge to very generously look after the half-sisters. He arranges instead, a pittance. This bit of nasty business, made me think long on how much of life is like this, things out of one's control that we can't know about. I remember the story of my father having to wrest his mother's bequest to him from his evil executrix sister. That has to be bad karma to deny your parent's last request, let alone all the other ones.

After Mom and brood are taken in by a relation, the mystery left is whom will the sisters marry? That's the only life destination these ladies can hope for. There is talk of them doing "work" as they talk away the day and I look forward to seeing the 1995 film to see what it is Janey was talking about. There is a scene where the ladies are working, literally basket weaving, and I thought this must be where the joke started about make-work jobs or easy classes for college athletes.

Inverted sentences and double negatives made my reading slow, about a chapter a day. We might say, "His friends would be happy to hear how much you like him," but Janey writes:

"I am sure," replied Elinor, with a smile, "that his dearest friends could not be dissatisfied with such commendation as that. I do not perceive how you could express yourself more warmly."

The characters are fully realized, which means you think you know them, then Janey gives you a jolt of the unexpected. Characters leave without warning, fueling one of the prime activities of this social glass, gossiping. I have read that most real-life dialogue among people today is also gossip so I won't judge 19th c. England harshly.

The teen sister, Margaret, appears so briefly that she's almost not there, disappearing for dozens of chapters at a time and making a cameo in the last scene. Not being an English major I wondered if it this was some well-known literary joke and the inspiration for famous unseen characters of radio and TV such as Duffy of Duffy's Tavern, Norm's wife on Cheers, Niles' wife on Frasier.

Idle talk and speculation and a bit of mistaken identity coupled with a secret romance conspire to make the happy ending. Good character is rewarded and low character is given a comeuppance. The sisters are supposed to represent SENSE (Elinor, the older and proper) and SENSIBILITY (Marianne, the younger and instinctive). My interpretation is a little more didactic in terms of Anglo history. Property rights and orderly transfer of property (SENSE) is the foundation of English and American stability, but it gets in the way of romance (SENSIBILITY).

Up next: Slam by Nick Hornby