Whe the experience dealing with the ad heavy uber corporatised theater sysyem really gets me down, I have had yet another pleasant content experence.

Stranger Than Fiction is an hilarious and thoughtful movie. The actors obviously enjoyed playing the roles. Maggie Gyllenhaal was articularly scrumptious as a baker of confections. I suggest this movie for a group of friends or family or perhaps as a date movie.

I have just been to see Casino Royale, the newest film in the James Bond franchise staring Daniel Craig and IMHO, it is perhaps the best ever. It is more real, gritty and well, credible than almost all other James Bond movies and for the first time in the series, the film has moved away from mindless mass market plonk and back towards character driven action with a story line that is not insulting to the little grey cells.



I read all of the Ian Fleming Bond books when I was 15 and even then I knew they were pulpy action books for exactly my demographic. Shortly after this I watched each Bond with passion, ignoring the occasional stupidity and getting into the spirit of things. I know I watched the Tim Dalton movie but I don’t remember it and after watching the first Pierce Brosnan flic, I knew the franchise was no longer for me. It had been 100% Americanised, and not in a good way.



On a plane from Brisbane to Los Angeles in Aug 2005 I saw Daniel Craig in Layercake. In this movie a reluctant drug trafficker gets in over his head and used his natural skill and aplomb to kick ass and look great in a suit. I knew that after blowing $200.00 in new clothes I had a new man crush. Move over Jeromy Irons. I saw Graig again as a steely WWI English Sergeant in The Trench. Again, blown away. He had me at “(silently look stern and enigmatic with a side of gravitas).”



This James Bond is cast just in this same mold as the heroes of these other movies. Stern, strong, reasoned and deadly. Exactly what a secret agent should be. Goodbye to the ineffectual, inaccessible snarky puff boys. This Bond can take a punch.

Blogged with Flock

Blogged with Flock

This city is at the same time very livable and very hard to live in. It is a beautiful city with great people but part of what makes it so interesting, also makes it, well, unnerving.

Their are bicycles everywhere. They are strapped to every tree, locked to each lamp post and crouding every intersection. The handsome (and beautiful) Dutch whizz around the city silently with excellent posture as they make thier rosy cheeked way to their final destination. The other side of this eco-pefect reality (enjoyed by young and old) is that if you are a pedestrian or a motorist, you are either constantly worrying about hitting a quickly moving cyclist or being slammed into by one of Amsterdam’s silent, two- wheeled assasins.

The Canals are perfect. I love them and the presence of water traffic and the possibilities for exploration and transportation are fully exploited. Further, the canals beautify the city and divide the different sections of town from each other so it is all a tidy series of connected worlds. The need for canals on the other hand, combined with the many cyclists and cars (mostly parked) means that the pedestrian is constantly squeezed out of what ever space was available and has to resort to leaping from 1m x 1m brick islands between bike paths and traffic lanes to avoid being hit by one of the aforementioned land hazards of Amsterdam. Add to this the Metro stations and the tram lines and the adage “spoilt for choice” becomes “too many cooks in the kitchen…”. With so many well thought out transportation modes to participate in, the limitations of space and the mutability of human life impinge on the full enjoyment of getting around in this city.

The Red Light District lends the otherwise meticulous Dutch an air of excitement in an otherwise visceral-free zone. Stimulation in the rest of the city will tickle your brain and your purse, even your creative juices but for true excitement, go directly to the amygdallic brain-stem people: the Red Light District. While possibly not visited by choice by Dutch over 25, the Red LightDistrict of Amsterdam is busy, vibrant and, well, full of smoke and, well, windows. The smoke is emmitted by visitors of a youngish demographic and the windows are the dwelling places of sex workers (or tourist landmarks) displaying a wide variety of genetic variability and generally trying to look sexy and bored at the same time. From a citizen’s point of view (and Amsterdam is a city of its citizens) the clientelle this district attracts (think frat boys and soccer hooligans in particular) effectively excludes a portion of the city from use. If I lived in Amsterdam, I would probably never go there.

There you have it. My 2 Euro cents on the subject. Hello to you all from the City that the Dutch took back from the Sea.

A beautiful day in Holland means beautiful pictures in Amsterdam. Here, close to the flower market, a residential building shows off its many windows over the canals in the center of the city.

Blogged with Flock

And Kevin in Calgary (Kevin!) writes his agreement with the Provisio that: “the first person that I thought she looked like was Diana Krall”.

This is true, in addition to Nicole looking like Ali Larter, also looks like Diana Krall. Excellent excuse for my webstats too. At this rate, all we would have to mention is Terri Hatcher and the world will beat a path to my door (blog).

My pal Nicole, pictured here at our wedding in September, has just birthed her first babies! That is right my pluralisticly minded readers! Two little boys Cole and Aiden. Congratulations to you Nicole and your little, squirmy family!

On a related note, I was recently struck by the resemblence between my friend Nicole and the TV actress “Ali Larter” from the (very good) TV show Heroes. As I have all of this nifty tech before me, I present for your comparison a photo of Ali Larter so that you might judge for yourself if the resemblence I reckon they share is in fact or in fact is fiction…

Now I am not bringing up this ancillary topic just to artificially boost my site viewer numbers. Bree and I really disagreed on this until I saw the show again. My mind is made up. Doppelganger. But you know what is funny? I didn’t even ask her yet if the twins were identical…

Well sort of..

While I started thinking about the United Independents in 2002, I did absolutely nothing about it. Daniel Rosen is doing it, right now, in Nevada. I caught word of this in the November issue of Wired Magazine. I could not find the article online so the link is just to the Wired homepage. In the hard copy, the article reads in part,

…But did the founding fathers really mean for America to operate like ancient Greece? Doesn’t representative
democracy mean placing trust in, well, representitatives, who read the fine print for us? “No one in congress ever reads the bills their voting on, ” says Rosen, who trails badly in the polls…” how can you read a bill if you are busy meeting with lobbyists to raise money for your next campaign?

I honestly wish him success. If that good fortune can not happen to him in his bid to win a seat in the US House of Representitives, then I wish him well anyway.

Hey,

Thanks Joss for that last comment. I too am stunned by the small amount of people that are willing to get informed and participate - or even form opinions- on political issues and current events. I can’t help but think however that a riding represented by a “mercenary MP” would get supercharged with participation. Not all issues are important to all people, like stem cell research; maybe a hard core environmentalist or tax reform person would not really care, but those who did care would be way more likely to make their voices heard. And for once, their voices would matter.

Under the circumstances, lets say only 5% or registered voters cared enough to make their views heard on an important issue. With a riding office making information known and urging people to register their opinions, this rises to, lets say 10%. Add those who then “vote” just because they know others with opposing views will (15%) and another portion just for sugar and giggles and you have 20%.

Some issues will not have a big turnout, some will have more. Lots of people may have views or not but the willingness to register one’s views is a low enough bar to determine who is and who is not a stakeholder in any particular issue. If it meant that much to them, they would have given their opinion. I think the kind of turn out you would get with this process would be enough to form a sample of the ridings electorate as a whole. I do stand behind the sampling idea on this. But it is not just about the sampling. It is more like saying “60% of the riding’s voters who were informed and gave a damn, would vote XYZ.”

As for the lack of telephones and other statistical hurdles, while it is a problem for social research, it is not a problem for excercising franchise. The participation is from registered voters. There is a list and the list is verifiable and updatable. Where the list is a bad list, ths process would clean it up. Voters could “vote” via phone, internet, inperson, mail and each vote would be manually and electronically verified to the voter.

On the subject of the Tyranny of the Majority (thank you John Stewart….Mill) I have to say that our system of government already provides it’s citizens with a social contract that makes the Tyranny of the Majority idea impossible. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms means if a riding votes 100% to bar Athiests or Japanese people or Baptists from public office (or etc) it simply does not have the power to override the charter.

The more I talk about it the more I like it. Check out the next post…

Congratulations Paul! Your Emeritus self is too shiny for my eyes!