Stop. Go. Nutty.
""
 




RSS feed

To talk back:
Send email to my first name at my last name dot com
-Keith Pelczarski

Random Nuttiness
London CallingWhy go nutty?
Recalling London
Drink me
RageBoy Speaks!
More equal
Wonder Woman
Raging King, Fear Driver
31 Flavors
Refreshing?
On the edge?
Good Morning, Sunshine

Where is that post?
Google
Go Nutty WWW

Interesting Voices
Randy Cassingham
Jonathan Coulton
Kevin Fox
Vince Hanks
Mark Hurst
Jason Kottke
Jeffrey Martian
Kerah Pelczarski
Max Pelczarski
Dave Pell
RageBoy
ResearchBuzz
Doc Searls
Tracy Sigler
Oliver Thylmann

Sites of Note
All Music Guide
Boing Boing
Financial Engines
The Fray
Google
Google News
How Stuff Works
Internet Movie Database
Memepool
Metacritic
The Motley Fool
Netflix
The Onion
Slashdot (/.)

 This page is powered by Blogger.
:: Monday, February 16, 2009 ::
Cause for concern with California's High Speed Rail project?

This one is for all the Californians in the house.

Last November, while we were all busy voting for change and stuff, voters also approved proposition 1A to issue almost $10 billion in bonds to fund the initial stage of a high-speed railway that could cost upwards of $40, perhaps as much as $80 billion dollars. When the election results came in, I was bummed that voters had signed us up for more debt to be paid from the state's general fund (I voted against the measure).

Now that more of the particulars are coming to light, I'm becoming increasingly anxious about what might actually get built. You see, the grounds of GoNutty.com Central Global World Headquarters abut the Caltrain tracks that run up the peninsula from San Jose to San Francisco. There's talk around town about what might happen with the tracks and such, and some of it sounds grim. Like a 15 foot wall of concrete to separate the tracks from the grade. I've also heard a much more enticing proposal to run the train through a tunnel.

For its part, The California High Speed Rail Authority site is long on glossy concept stuff, but short of specifics of what this project might mean to those of us who neighbor the tracks. Palo Alto Weekly has used a lot of ink on the high speed rail project, and there's a Yahoo group for Palo Altans concerned about High Speed Rail.

There are a number of meetings scheduled in the next couple of weeks for Palo Alto residents who are concerned about the potential impacts of the project. The first is tomorrow, Tuesday February 17th at 7 p.m. It's a meeting with city representatives and will be held at conference room A of the PAUSD office at 25 Churchill Ave.

There's another meeting scheduled for Thursday, February 26th at 7 p.m. to talk with city representatives AND folks from the High Speed Rail Authority. That one will be held at the Mitchell Park Community Center at 3800 Middlefield Road.

Finally, the Palo Alto city council meeting on March 2nd at 7 p.m. at City Hall will include High Speed Rail on the agenda. There's even a march to City Hall that evening, starting at Lytton Plaza at 6 p.m.

It sounds like the window for public comment on this project is scheduled to close pretty soon (March 6th), so if you have questions/comments/concerns about the project, now is the time.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled nuttiness, already in progress....

:: Keith 20:39 [link] :: ::

:: Sunday, February 15, 2009 ::
Happy John Frum Day!

Every February 15th, followers of John Frum have a parade in celebration of the expected return of their cargo cult god. They're not sure what year he'll return, just that it'll be on February 15th. As one of them said to David Attenborough in the 50's: "If you can wait two thousand years for Jesus Christ to come an' 'e no come, then I can wait more than nineteen years for John."

So, every year they get out their bamboo rifles and march around military style, with "USA" and "TA" (for "Tanna Army") painted on their bodies. Here's an interesting video of the proceedings one year at the village of Lamakara at Sulfa Bay on the island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.



Okay, time to head out to the makeshift control tower I built next to the driveway. Now where did I put my coconut shell headphones?

:: Keith 20:14 [link] :: ::

:: Friday, February 13, 2009 ::
Going Nutty at the Sundance Film Festival

If you've been following me on Twitter or Friendfeed or even Facebook, you already know that I went to Park City, Utah last month for the Sundance Film Festival. If you don't follow me on those sites, well, you know now. I was lucky enough to stay with my ol' college buddies Jake and Sonja, who were gracious hosts and who helped me learn to ski. A lot of people have asked me what I saw while I was there and what I thought, so here goes.

First off, what I didn't see was celebrities. I heard a bunch of directors talking about their films in the Q&A after screenings, and there were a bunch of actors there, but I didn't see any big big stars. That's okay with me, but it seems to be very disappointing to people when they ask about the festival. I did see a moose, which I thought was a cow at first. I also kept seeing a kid who I thought must've been John Krasinski's younger brother, except now that I looked on IMDb it looks like John is the youngest of three brothers. Maybe it was a cousin? Nephew?

Okay, so now you know what I didn't see. What I did see was 14 features in 7 days (and the moose, of course). The number is even higher if you count short films in addition. I'll share some thoughts on each, but won't go into too much detail lest we drift into spoiler territory.

The Yes Men Fix the World
Sundance '09 page | IMDb | Official site
The Yes Men are prankster activists who create mock corporate websites in order to get themselves invited to speak at big conferences as spokespeople for big companies like Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, etc. I gave these guys a standing ovation, not so much because the film was technically great (although it wasn't bad) but rather because they were doing their quixotic best to make a real difference, to point out stuff that's really, really wrong about business as usual. It reminded me of Michael Moore, but felt better going down for me (Moore has started playing a bit too fast-and-loose with the facts). I especially appreciated the Yes Men's honest portrayal of their own nerves and anxiety as they prepared for their pranks. This was not only a highly amusing documentary, but it was also quite inspiring to see the impact that ordinary folks can have if they decide to give a crap. As a special bonus, they handed out a great issue of the NY Times from the future possible.

The Girlfriend Experience
IMDb
This was billed as "An Evening with Steven Soderbergh" but that was a pretty poorly kept secret. Even an industry outsider like me was able to guess what would be screened just by looking at IMDb. This film was shown as a work in progress, so I can't really come down on it too much, but it dragged a bit for me. It was an intriguing concept exploring the world around a high-priced call girl through layers of story revealed out of sequence. The thing that kind of lost me was the amount of redundancy in the clips. That might be a function of it not being finished. If not, it requires a more patient viewer than I. It would be really interesting to see the thing in the straight chronological order without all the timeshifting. I'm not even sure how long it would be. It felt like it might've been half as long without the redundancy, but again, it was a work in progress. Well, it seems as if I've caught the redundancy bug, so I'll quit while I'm behind here.

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle
Sundance '09 page | IMDb | Official site
The title is a mouthful, but the film was a trip. No, really, there were so many hallucination sequences that it felt like I was having flashbacks. That's not to say that it wasn't fun. What's not to like about a ragtag band of janitors getting messed up on chemical-laden cookies? There was a weird, paranoid, yet funny vibe throughout that was reminiscent of "Repo Man." The film touched on a variety of topics ranging from religion to big business to consumerism and more. After the show the director said that he wasn't really trying to make a particular statement so much as just getting a bunch of stuff out of his head into the script. Depending on your own mindset, this movie could give you a lot of food for thought. Me, I just enjoyed the sensation of warm cookies.

Cold Souls
Sundance '09 page | IMDb | Official site
One of my festival favorites, "Cold Souls" is a metaphysical cautionary tale which will certainly draw comparisons to films like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Being John Malkovich." Paul Giamatti played himself, and did a great job. You could really believe that he was Paul Giamatti. Beyond that, the film made you think about the nature of identity, and entertained along the way with a quirky story and good production.

Humpday
Sundance '09 page | IMDb | Official site
I saw Humpday on a Wednesday, but it didn't have anything to do with being over the hump of the work week. No, this Humpday was a comic story about two college friends reunited after years traveling different paths through their lives. In addition to grappling with some awkwardness between them, they both wrestle with their own feelings about their lives since college. All the grappling and wrestling results in them agreeing to do a non-gay male-on-male porn flick together for Hump!, a real-world amateur porn film festival in Seattle. Hilarity ensues, and not the kind of cheap gay porn jokes you might have come to expect from Hollywood. Sure, there are jokes, but they aren't cheap jokes. No, these are high-class dude-on-dude jokes.

Sin Nombre
Sundance '09 page | IMDb | Official site
Sin Nombre is a powerhouse story, chronicling the journey of illegal immigrants traveling through Mexico on their way to the United States. Paralleling and intersecting that storyline is a tale about the brutality of gang life and its impact on two young men. Desperation and hopelessness run through this film, but so do hope and perseverance. It's a poignant mix. Normally, subtitles really get in the way of me getting engaged in a film, but they weren't an obstacle here. The emotions were so raw, so real, that they spoke a language all their own. It was my favorite of the festival.

Mystery Team
Sundance '09 page | IMDb | Official site
Three childhood friends solve crimes. No case too big, no case too tough. Will also work for fruit roll-ups. In the tradition of Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, et al., these kids are detectives. Their early success in mystery-solving didn't translate well to their teen years, but they don't seem to have noticed the world changing around them. This film is the first feature-length production by Derrick Comedy, whose films are usually of the internet short variety. The transition isn't completely smooth, as it felt like the film could've been shorter, but there are lots of laughs along the way.

Big Fan
Sundance '09 page | IMDb
Patton Oswalt stars in this portrait of an obsessed NY Giants football fan who has his loyalty tested. Written and directed by Robert D. Siegel, former editor-in-chief of The Onion and writer of "The Wrestler", the film managed to be both depressing and uplifting in a twisted way. Fandom is an interesting thing; it's staggering the amount of emotional investment that gets put into something over which there's no real control. This picture really holds that up to the light, and holds up well.

Peter & Vandy
Sundance '09 page | IMDb
"Peter and Vandy" examines the rise and fall of a relationship. This one, like Soderbergh's high-priced hooker flick, tells the story in a non-linear fashion. I don't mind that technique per se, in fact I really liked how Tarantino used it in "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs" (a Sundance film back in the day). The thing is, shifting the timeline around doesn't make the story more interesting if the story isn't that interesting in the first place. A lot of the story dwells on the mundane, which I suppose is different than what you get from a lot of films, but personally I don't go to the theater for mundane. There's enough of that in real life. This is sounding a bit harsher than I mean it to. It wasn't a terrible film or anything, but it was a little underwhelming when held up next to all the really kick-ass films at the festival.

Adam
Sundance '09 page | IMDb
Adam is sweet on a woman who lives in his building, and she's sweet on him. Adam has Asperger's syndrome, on the autism spectrum, so there are some challenges there. It's a sweet movie, and enjoyable enough, but it was a little bit Gump-y (Forrest-y?) in spots. (They actually made a joke about this in film when Adam says something along the lines of "I'm not Forrest Gump, you know.") Again, the film isn't as bad as it might sound from my tepid description, but that's largely a function of comparison to all the kick-ass things seen so close to it. For what it's worth, "Adam" did win the Alfred P. Sloan prize “for its credible and moving portrayal of an engineer with Asperger's Syndrome whose passion for science helps him in his struggle to achieve a meaningful relationship.” So it's got that going for it, which is nice.

Død Snø (Dead Snow)
Sundance '09 page | IMDb | Official site
As one of the Sundance staffers said before the midnight show at the Egyptian, "When I say Nazi, you say zombie!" Pretty much all you need to know about this film is that it's full of Nazi zombies. There can't be too many people on the fence about that sort of thing, can there? You're either for the zombies or you're against the zombies. Personally, I am a huge zombie fan, and I wasn't disappointed, even though these zombies weren't nearly slow or stupid enough for my taste. But come on, they're Nazis! Not quite as funny as "Shaun of the Dead" or "Evil Dead" it was still on the funny side of the zombie spectrum. As an added bonus, they warmed up the crowd with a very entertaining slasher short entitled "Treevenge" about what happens when the Christmas trees decide that they've had enough. Ho ho ho!

Animation Spotlight
I had high hopes for the animated shorts program, but it ended up being a mixed bag. The highlights of this program were "This Way Up" (an Academy Award nominee), "Dear Beautiful," "Western Spaghetti," and "I Am So Proud of You." The lowlights won't be named, but my friends and I wondered how the Sundance programmers ended up with this group out of the hundreds of submissions they received.

We Live In Public
Sundance '09 page | IMDb | Official site
This was the Grand Jury Prize Winner for the documentary category. It follows the rise and fall of one Josh Harris, an internet/new media personality who has done a lot of personal and professional exploration of online surveillance and connectedness. It was an interesting, thought-provoking film, though some of the assertions that it made were annoyingly over-general. In particular, I had trouble with the line of logic that went like this: 1) Josh Harris was an internet pioneer. 2) Harris is narcissistic and engaged in some really invasive social experiments. 3) Therefore, every social site is inherently narcissistic in nature. I thought maybe I was reading too much into it, but then the director said in the Q&A that she thought that online community/networking sites are driven primarily by narcissism. That seems cynical to me, and discounts the desire to connect with other people and share something meaningful, not just "look at me, look at me, look at me." The film was technically well-made, with years and years of footage, and was an interesting biopic about Harris. The broader conclusions were a bit of a stretch, though. They looked in the mirror for data, and narcissism was staring back.

Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
Sundance '09 page | IMDb
Not to be confused with the superpower flick "Push" coming out in theaters now, this film won both the grand jury and audience prizes for dramatic film -- high acclaim, indeed. The premise of the film is grim, telling the story of an illiterate teenage girl in Harlem who is pregnant with her father's child (again). Doesn't sound like a feel-good sort of flick, does it? Well, I honestly wouldn't have gone to see it if it hadn't been the dramatic winner at the festival, but I'm glad that I did. There were lots of really strong performances, and a story that was really moving without being cheesy. You probably wouldn't want to have this as a first date movie or anything, but it was worthy of all the accolades.

Overall, Sundance was a great experience and I would recommend it to anyone who loves movies and doesn't mind being challenged a bit. You might not see a bunch of stars, especially if you go toward the tail end, but seeing so many great independent films in such a short span is a real treat. With any luck, this will become an annual tradition for me. A film nerd could get used to that sort of thing....

:: Keith 23:22 [link] :: ::

:: Thursday, January 08, 2009 ::
Breaking and fixing the economy

The New York Times recently ran a great two part op-ed by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn. The first part is entitled, "The End of the Financial World As We Know It" and it's followed by "How to Repair a Broken Financial World." Both are excellent reading for anyone interested in why we're in the mess we're in and what we can do to correct some of the mistakes. Among the best suggestions:
Stop making big regulatory decisions with long-term consequences based on their short-term effect on stock prices. Stock prices go up and down: let them. An absurd number of the official crises have been negotiated and resolved over weekends so that they may be presented as a fait accompli “before the Asian markets open.” The hasty crisis-to-crisis policy decision-making lacks coherence for the obvious reason that it is more or less driven by a desire to please the stock market. The Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the S.E.C. all seem to view propping up stock prices as a critical part of their mission — indeed, the Federal Reserve sometimes seems more concerned than the average Wall Street trader with the market’s day-to-day movements. If the policies are sound, the stock market will eventually learn to take care of itself.
Amen. The ridiculous political theater that we've seen in response to the crisis just makes me sad. It rivals the security theater that we've seen over the past seven years since 9/11 -- sound and fury, signifying nothing. I'm cautiously hopeful that with the changing of the political guard that we might make a little more progress on both. I don't think for a second that we'll see an end to political pandering, but it can't get worse, can it?

:: Keith 00:04 [link] :: ::

:: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 ::
Yes, we can!

It's official. Barack Obama is the President-Elect of the United States of America. The electoral results weren't even close, with Obama winning more than twice the electoral votes garnered by McCain. The collective optimism for the future is palpable, and it feels great after all these years of dread under Bush/Cheney. Have a great night, and a better tomorrow.

:: Keith 22:26 [link] :: ::

:: Sunday, October 19, 2008 ::
Everybody Loves Obama

Colin Powell, a Republican and former Secretary of State in the Bush administration, endorsed Barack Obama for president today on Meet the Press:



The best part of the endorsement starts at the 4:27 mark in the video above, where Powell takes his own party leaders to task for all of their fear mongering about Obama being Muslim. Powell makes the points that 1) Obama is actually Christian, and 2) even if he were Muslim, so what? This is America, and freedom of religion is part of the philosophical bedrock upon which this great nation was built. Religious freedom does not only mean that you have the freedom to pick which form of Christianity you believe, it also means that you can worship Allah or Zeus or even (gasp!) no God at all. Sadly, intolerant, overly zealous members of a number of religions both in America and abroad are giving religion in general a bad name. But I digress....

Colin Powell isn't the only one endorsing Barack Obama for President these days. Obama leads McCain 105-33 in newspaper endorsements. Lest you believe the "liberal elite media bias" it should be noted that Kerry and Bush had basically a dead heat in endorsements 213-205. Obama has been endorsed not only by traditionally Democratic papers, but also many that have historically leaned Republican.

And it's not just Americans who love Obama. The Economist is running a global online poll asking people all over the world who they favor for the next President of the United States. They are tabulating the results as a global electoral map, weighting the results of each country based on their population. As of this writing, Obama is leading McCain by a staggering 8,906 to 38. McCain is only carrying four countries in the poll: Cuba, Moldova, Macedonia, and Georgia. Granted, the Economist's editorial stance is classically liberal, but only four countries for McCain? Ouch.

Who else likes Obama?And as if it wasn't already painfully obvious, Barack Obama receives the highly coveted GoNutty.com endorsement. Regardless of who you love in this year's election, be sure to get out there and vote!

:: Keith 23:11 [link] :: ::

:: Sunday, October 12, 2008 ::
Stop the ride, I want to get off

Here's the roller coaster that we're currently riding:
U.S. Home Prices Adjusted for Inflation 1890-2007



um... whee? Here's how the stock market roller coaster compares to past bear markets.

We've been hearing an awful lot about the bursting sub-prime mortgage bubble and the accompanying worldwide financial fallout. I imagine that by this point you either know a lot about what's going on, or have your head well buried in the sand, but in case you'd like to learn more, I'd recommend The Money Meltdown as a great source for background and news.

If you're like me, though, you'd probably rather watch another video. Here's a great one about the fundamental nature of lending and currency creation entitled Money as Debt:



This American Life on NPR connects the dots on the credit crisis with an interesting piece called "The Giant Pool of Money."

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go find a hole in the sand.

:: Keith 22:49 [link] :: ::