the corner office

Being a month or two behind the rest of the world, I finally tootled off to see Avatar. My thoughts.

Wow. Visually, amazing. Wow. 3D movies, a whole new world. Avatar itself, stunning. From the jungle to the creatures to the character animation to the sci-fi to the battle scenes.

Naturally a bit cheesy, and in some places a little too obvious ("shock and awe", c'mon). The storyline wasn't bad (my missus disagrees), but let's be honest, all you need is a something *resembling* a plot to provide an excuse for all the rainforest pr0n.

In 3D. Did I mention 3D? Wow.

I could ramble on about the moral contradictions and ambiguities and the ironies-upon-ironies inherent in the 'message' of the movie, but I won't.

I walked out of the movie thinking about how movie-making has progressed in the past 10 years. By the time my son is old enough to go watch movies, what sorts of amazing things will he be taking for granted?

I feel very sorry for the family of the trainer who got pulled under and drowned by a Killer Whale. At the same time, the media does try to froth things up a bit. The lady trained KILLER WHALES. KILLER WHALES are not vegetarian and even if they were, they're still big enough to squish humans with little effort.

What's more, if you've ever seen footage of KILLER WHALES playing with and throwing baby seals about before killing and eating them, you'd be forgiven for not wanting to be near them unless you were getting serious danger pay.

Kid's been in nursery for less than a month and he's contracted chicken pox. Household is on battle alert. Poor lad thinks it's cool half the time 'I got chikkenpox' and the other half rather unhappy that his body is crawling with itches. Mother frazzled and sleep deprived. Poor kid, poor mom. Woe.

Father consigned to the spare room while Master L dosses down with mom. Father grateful; the spare room is become a haven of peace.

Last week it was all about Gordon Brown blubbing in front of Piers Morgan and what a loving dad he was, this week it's how he's a bully (when it's the Guardian leading the story you have to know there's some weight to it).

Even if he wasn't a bully, or even if he wasn't apparently the World's Greatest Dad™, it doesn't change the fact that he's a pretty lousy prime minister. Given that, it amazes me that the UK could still end up with a hung parliament. The Tories certainly haven't done much to inspire confidence, but still, there are other parties to choose from.

In South Africa people would despair about how two thirds of the country voted ANC no matter how obviously incompetent and corrupt, and in the UK a third of people vote Labour no matter how obviously incompetent or corrupt.

The Euro was never a good idea, for the same reason that a bunch of pro cyclists and 40-fags-a-day weekend hobbyists going on a round-the-world bike tour would never be a good idea. Left to their own pace, everyone might get to where they're going, eventually, but keeping everyone together could only end in tears (and most likely for the unhealthiest).

This article is an interesting round-up of last week's wrangling. Now, I don't blame German citizens for wanting Greece thrown out of the Euro, but I also don't blame Greek citizens for being a little bit upset at what's expected of them, given that no other country would dream of doing the same thing if they were in the same boat (and let's be honest, many European countries including the UK aren't far off).

What it boils down is that, as usual, citizens across Europe have been conned and shafted by their politicians. Then again, they elected them.

Update: Bah, that's neither fair nor true, really. I'm just being a grump.

Father and son sitting in the bedroom playing with wooden train tracks. Father is getting in the way.

"Daddy MOOOVE"

"Hey, that's not nice, what do you say?"

"Daddy MOOOVE please"

I read this article about Black Sabbath which prompts a post which has been brewing for a few days.

This is 40 years old but I think it sounds as heavy now as it must have done back then:

I was recently digging around an obscure YouTube playlist, and came across this, which is a little less heavy but a whole lot more disturbing:

Nelson Mandela was released twenty years ago today. These are things I remember:

• in the build-up to his release, one of the things people were most curious about was what he looked like. Since he was "banned," or whatever the term was, nobody was allowed to publish pictures of him. He'd been completely censored out of our lives. The rest of the world had the iconic pictures of him as a younger man, but we didn't even have that. Even then, after they announced he was to be released, all they could show were the old pictures, because there had been no new pictures in 27 years.

• I remember that long walk down that dusty road and Winnie and the TV commentator jabbering away.

• I remember a school teacher saying that the ANC would be really upset that he was free since he was worth a lot more to them in jail, propaganda-wise. She predicted he'd be assassinated within months, either by whites or by blacks.

• I annoyed the same schoolteacher some time after that by saying that I'd rather vote for the ANC than a conservative white party because no matter how bad the ANC turned out to be, at least we'd be living in a democratic country. It might make no sense in this day and age, but I recall that this teacher was probably one of the most liberal teachers we had.

• 1990 was before the 1992 referendum, it was before the Codesa negotiations, and all the things that slowly culminated in elections in 1994. There were a lot of people worried about how far away a night of the long knives would be.

• the weekend after he was released I caught the train into Joburg with some friends. The train from Carletonville went through Soweto, and when we got to Kliptown (was it called?) cops came onto the train and walked through the carriages, there'd been some unrest in the township. Kliptown was dusty and poor and run-down and I remember thinking that if we got caught up in a riot we were screwed. After a day in the centre of Joburg, we were waiting on a train platform to go home, only a handful of white people around, and a group of blacks two platforms up from us started toyi-toying. It was the first time I'd seen toyi-toying in person, and I was pretty damned nervous.

I don't think anyone could've imagined the tolerance and dignity that Nelson Mandela showed in the years that followed. Now, I think it's hard for the world to imagine how different things could have been.

All done. Not such a great exam run this year. What I'm doing now boils down to maths and more maths, and if there's one thing I should know by now, you can't cram maths. Cramming is a strong word, though, I've been working near flat-out for almost 3 months. Still, it was too little too late. Getting a cold two days before the first exam didn't help either.

I suspect the papers wouldn't have felt as difficult for people who've come through an undergrad Decision Sciences degree - comparing to my Com Sci honours exams, I realised you develop a feel for what a department's papers are going to be like, what lecturers are going to ask and how they're going to do it. The first two papers were disasters - I'd focused on the wrong stuff, expected the wrong styles of questions, I hadn't anticipated the sort of pace you're expected to work at, misjudged what 'open book' would imply, even silly things like having my calculator programmed for grunt work. By today I had a good sense of what to expect though, went in ready and it went OK (I hope). Pity about the first two papers, though...

Regardless, I still want to finish this thing off in 2010, and it's going to be a push. I've registered for this year's subjects already, and after a bit of R&R, it'll be back to the grindstone. Slow and steady is the plan, a repeat of this past year's drama is likely to see the missus phoning up the university and deregistering me.

Arnold Kling:

Ultimately, I think that democracy is a very unreliable friend of economic freedom. The ability to vote with your feet is more valuable than the ability to cast a ballot.

Gary Becker:

Despite the claim that ignorance induced many consumers with few resources to buy houses during the boom, consumers who bought a house then with almost no down payment and low interest rates were not displaying ignorance, but good sense. They put little of their own resources at risk, and annual mortgage payments were cheap, especially in an environment where housing prices were expected to continue to rise at a rapid rate. Lenders, the Fed, and others who made these loans, or helped keep interest rates low, made the mistakes and look foolish, not consumers who bought the houses.