Tim's Bloglet - Sunday 7 March 2010

The Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn't. I hereby renounce Wes Anderson and transfer my loyalties entirely to Owen Wilson, who co-wrote all his good movies. (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums)

This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy moments of it, mostly Ash. It's that it couldn't be bothered to work. There was no craftsmanship at all. It was a fake cardboard movie, poorly assembled. At least Darjeeling Limited was photographs of real people and places. This interfered with the twee but it gave it a sliver of substance-like substance. This was more like a feature length weebl animation.
Also: Wes Anderson's Spiderman. _
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04:59:01 PM, Sunday 7 March 2010

I want to work somewhere that they give out monthly "justified bitterness" awards to the employee who has put up with the most nonsense. _
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05:03:19 PM, Friday 5 March 2010

I find the Salton Sea incredibly creepy. Also the All-American* Canal, and the fact that the Colorado river never reaches the sea. To quote God, "All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." Natural Endorheic basins are bad enough, but manmade ones are, are... unnatural.

*All-American here means 'carefully avoiding Mexico', making it the opposite of Pan-American. _
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01:52:56 PM, Friday 5 March 2010

Is there a zippy, elegant phrase for a crooked politician of the pocket-lining kind? I can't put my finger on one. _
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01:52:28 PM, Friday 5 March 2010

While I'm on the subject, at least 50% of the people who get on the radio and talk about the public option don't have the vaguest clue what it is. Many of them seem to think public option = subsidy, and so if the bill doesn't contain a public option, it doesn't include subsidies for the poor. The rest seem to think it means single payer. _
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04:17:31 PM, Thursday 4 March 2010

Tom Coburn is a twit. The Healthcare division of the Barons are all excited, because he's waving our studies, but the words coming out of his mouth are low-grade gibberish.

“If you look at what Malcolm Sparrow from Harvard says, he says 20 percent of the cost of federal government health care is fraud,” Coburn said. “That’s his number.

“If you look at Baron Baron, when they look at all of this, they say at least 15 percent of government-run health care is fraud.

“Well, when you look at the total amount of health care that’s government run, you know, you’re talking $150 billion a year.

“So tomorrow, if we got together and fixed fraud, we could cut health care 7.5 percent tomorrow for people in this country.”

Medicare fraud does not increase the cost of care or insurance in the private market. It increases the deficit, and eventually increases taxes and means there's less money floating around to expand healthcare. But abolishing all the Medicare fraud wouldn't cut the cost of health care for anyone. If anything it'd increase it, because the tightened rules on Medicare would increase cost shifting. Also, short of nuclear weapons, there is nothing senators could do tomorrow that would fix fraud. Their are useful things they could do, a good number of which are in the bill he's condemning. But Medicare fraud is not responsible for the failings of the private market. It's like blaming bank robbers for high gas prices, because some people use their debit cards at the pump. Pure apple sauce. If he had a brain, he could make an argument against single-payer or medicare buy-in along these lines, it wouldn't be a good one, but it would at least cohere, but those aren't on the table. But with the plan as it stands, or even if it included an unfunded public option (the only kind that was proposed) this is totally irrelevent. But as I say, corporately, we're very glad to see that all those ads in the WSJ have paid off. _
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04:04:28 PM, Thursday 4 March 2010

You can measure my work stress by the life expectancy of my hair ties. _
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03:41:06 PM, Thursday 4 March 2010

They have reached the final stage of demolition: my companies brand is being removed from everything and replaced with what I will henceforth refer to as Baron Baron, since the founders of both companies were granted British peerages for being obscenely wealthy anglophiles. _
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10:51:19 AM, Wednesday 3 March 2010

We have removed the carpet from the stairs. It was coming loose constantly. It turned out this is because the tack strips underneath were all put in backwards. But anyway, carpet gone. The stairs are in good stape. The vertical bits, however, need painting, they're pretty scraped up and have lots of nail holes. The question is, what color should we paint it? SHould we stick with the brown? I quite like it on the trim, but it's a little overwhelming on the stairs. My instincts suggest a sort of celery green, or, if that isn't tacky enough, a slightly different shade of blue on each stair. But this is why I probably shouldn't be trusted with a paintbrush. _
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09:47:45 PM, Tuesday 2 March 2010

I only just discovered that the Robert Bolt, who wrote A Man For All Seasons also wrote the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia. That makes rather a lot of sense, and gives me a list of other movies I want to see. I love that after writing it he managed to get imprisoned for refusing to sign something, but let himself be talked out of it. _
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03:29:41 PM, Tuesday 2 March 2010

Devil's advocacy from A Man For All Seasons. I adore this movie. And it gets to why I will never consider contrarian an epithet. It isn't possible in this world to be both principled and agreeable.

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02:42:38 PM, Tuesday 2 March 2010

modern cat-breeding does not select for sanity.

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01:33:14 PM, Tuesday 2 March 2010

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