No, I don’t mean that Charlize Theron showed up to narrate my trip in a preposterous English accent. Rather, my father and I wound up going to see a Friday night showing of Snow White and The Huntsman, starring Ms. Theron and Kristen Stewart (who apparently had some free time after lucking into a role as perhaps the least-inspiring female lead ever in the billion-dollar grossing Twilight  movies).

I go to the movies so infrequently that I wanted desperately to enjoy a “grown-up” take on the venerable fairy tale.* So I am deliberately going to say some nice things about the film before I crack my knuckles and beat it like a Mafia snitch. So here goes.

First, the movie passes the Bechdel test, the incredibly low bar suggested by cartoonist Alison Bechdel for categorizing movies that take female characters even somewhat seriously. For a movie to pass, it must 1) have two named female characters, who 2) talk to each other directly 3) about something other than a man. Stewart’s Snow White (yes, that’s her real name, not a title or a nickname) and Theron’s Ravenna talk at several key points during the film, about things like beauty and vanity and the way that a perfect face and a flawless bustline are really the best way for a girl to get ahead in this crazy medieval world.

Second, it’s at least mildly encouraging that the film features a reasonably strong female character on either side of the conflict. Snow White needs rescuing a bit more often than I’d have liked, but not nearly as much as in the Disney version. She’s resourceful and resilient, and (as writer/researcher Ben Radford noted on Facebook) she apparently has the stamina to run up several flights of stairs wearing plate mail that should weigh as much as she does. And Ravenna is a cruel, conniving monster, a slave to the literal truth that she can only stay powerful if she remains young and beautiful. So she’s either a deliberate comment on a culture that’s obsessed with female youth and beauty, or an attempt to sell makeup products to shell-shocked Twilight moms. I honestly can’t tell.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I’m going to point out that I didn’t say anything about what many other reviews have characterized as a strength of the film, that, whatever one thinks of the the caliber of the story, it was beautifully shot and visually arresting.  The thing is, the film was beautifully shot and visually arresting. And it was almost entirely lifted from other, better movies.

Its most obvious influence, cinematographic and otherwise, seems to be The Princess Bride, but there are scenes that look like outtakes from films as varied as Batman Begins,  Saving Private Ryan, Transformers, Terminator 2, Braveheart and What Dreams May Come, with unimaginatively costumed “medieval” characters greenscreened in as necessary. In nearly every scene, Theron emotes so hysterically that she could be auditioning for a remake of Mommy Dearest.** Take that mixture, force it through a small pinhole carved into the back of J.R.R. Tolkien’s skull, feed it to Peter Jackson, and you could recreate SWATH by transcribing his dream journal. The disparate shots are so obviously cribbed from other films that they don’t hang together, and the jarring transition from set piece to set piece wound up feeling like a liability rather than a virtue.

There really is the germ of a decent story buried in that mess, like a lone rose growing in a landfill. The idea of a competent, capable Snow White, who decides to go kick her evil stepmother’s ass instead of hiding in the woods, is a compelling one, and is the reason why I was curious to see the film in the first place. Unfortunately, casting Kristen Stewart (and the wet paper sack in which she keeps her charisma) as the titular character strangled that story about a clash of dynamic women in its narrative sleep.

I’m loathe to discuss the aesthetics of actresses, who, by virtue of being female and famous, are already subjected to the kind of scrutiny about their appearance that would make an experienced counterfeiter wake up in a cold sweat. Unfortunately, the whole premise of the film, aside from wringing pocket money out of disaffected teenage girls, is that Stewart’s Snow White has, at long last, grown up to surpass Theron’s Ravenna as “the fairest of them all.”

I would like to state in no uncertain terms that I do not want to live in a world where Kristen Stewart is generally considered “fairer” than Charlize Theron. And it’s not about aesthetics. These women have both played lead roles in massive Hollywood films, so they reach a certain ill-defined and impossible to reproduce minimum standard of Hollywood pretty. Whether you prefer the energy of youth to the confidence of maturity, or blond to brunette, that’s your personal preference, and I wouldn’t begin to impinge upon it.

The reason I can’t get behind the idea that Kristen Stewart is more attractive than Charlize Theron, at least in this film, is because Kristen Stewart has all the charm of wet lumber, and her Snow White doesn’t have the brains that evolution granted a small, yappy dog. I stated earlier that Theron’s Ravenna is a monster, and she is, but she’s a calculating, conniving, manipulative monster. She’s sizes up powerful men, figures out their weaknesses (which oddly enough always reside in their genitals) and exploits them. She figures shit out. By contrast, Show White’s flash of inspiration is to get everyone she knows to grab a horse and a sword and go charging off down the beach into a flurry of arrow fire. It’s got a very tiny element of surprise, but on the whole it’s about as subtle as a brick to the face.

It’s made worse by Stewart herself, who seems to have hung  her entire burgeoning career on the ability to breathe dramatically. In a scene near the end of the film, which requires Stewart to look anxious in an off-the-shoulder gown, you can literally see her collarbones disappear and reappear with every heaving gasp. If she could emote half as well with her face and voice as she can with her lungs, she might have been able to pull off the meant-to-be-inspiring, rouse-the-troops-for-a-suicide-mission-speech in an earlier scene, which instead is delivered with all the obvious passion of the teenage manager of a fast-food restaurant encouraging the people at the french fry station to step once more unto the salty, golden-brown breach. Theron only sounds two notes in the film – gale force hysteria and stony silence – but that’s one more than Stewart manages to hit.

“But what of the titular Huntsman,” you ask, mostly because you think “titular” sounds kind of naughty, and you want to see how many times I’ll use it in a single review. Chris Thor Hemsworth is serviceable (and vaguely Scottish?) as the grouchy outdoorsman sent to retrieve Snow White after she escapes Ravenna’s clutches. He isn’t as bombastic as when he’s playing the saucy Marvel deity, which is odd, since Hemsworth seems not to have gotten the memo given to the rest of the cast, which simply read act harder.

At its heart, Snow White and The Huntsman seems like a sincere attempt to rescue the essence of the Snow White mythos from its treatment at the soft, knowing hands of Walt Disney, an attempt that was ultimately derailed by a script groaning under the weight of its own cliché, direction that prizes screaming over subtlety and cinematography too blatantly lifted from other films to create a believable visual space. Although for film buffs, that last part might be a hidden saving grace; a shot-by-shot round of “spot the inspiration” might make an entertaining drinking game.

* I deliberately didn’t use the word “adult,” because we all know that an “adult” version of Snow White would feature a far more genitally-oriented cinematic experience. Although, as it turns out, roughly the same caliber of dialogue.

** A slightly more cynical reviewer might suggest that Theron’s performance must have doubled the film’s construction budget for, since she was doubtless on set chewing on the scenery before the cameras started rolling.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
As I get older, I notice that I keep getting more bald, while you get less bald. Help.
-Hairless in Hackensack

Dear HIH,
It turns out that hair loss is negatively correlated with student loan debt. I have to keep a gas-powered string trimmer in my bathroom just to stay ahead of it. If I skip it over the weekend, by Monday morning, I look like the early-90s version of Nelson. (All of them.)

The Republican Party of Iowa (slogan: First In The Nation) calls this “unelected activist judges attempting to impose their personal views on the public.” (Those crazy judicial activists. They looked at the word “equally,” and forgot the part that says “except teh queers,” which isn’t actually in there, but c’mon, we know that’s what it means, right?) The Iowa GOP has decided that Justice David Wiggins should be removed from the bench, apparently for the heinous crime of disagreeing with them about what the word “equally” means.

Their press release is stuffed so full of boilerplate rhetoric about arrogant, unelected judges that it could have been written by a cliché-heavy chatbot, but I’ll give you just a taste of the magic that it contains. (Emphasis added for later parsing.)

“In 2010 Iowa voters chose to dismiss three activist judges who allowed their own politics to influence their obligation to uphold the Iowa Constitution.  These three were among a handful of judges who chose to disregard years of legal precedent on the status of marriage and how it was to be defined. Instead of allowing the people of Iowa to decide this issue at the polls, these judges instead chose to impose their will upon the state and re-write history without weighing the merits of our laws and values. Regardless of political pressure or the state of cultural affairs at the moment, it is the people of Iowa through our elections that must be permitted to decide this important issue.”

1. Their own politics: The Iowa GOP has just stated publicly that discrimination against homosexuals is a political issue. Voting Republican is a vote for bigotry, folks.
2. Disregard years of legal precedent: This is code for “we passed a marriage amendment in 1998, and the first time it was challenged in court, it was ruled unconstitutional.” So it’s what those of us who care about such things colloquially refer to as “completely incorrect.”
3. Allowing the people of Iowa to decide this issue at the polls: By virtue of living in a constitutional republic, the voters of Iowa have the final say about this issue. Although you wouldn’t know it from this press release, there is already a mechanism for allowing the voters to decide this issue. It’s called amending the Iowa Constitution, and the process is clearly defined in Article X, §1. If you want the voters to decide, get an amendment on the ballot, or STFU.
4. Without weighing the merits: It’s true! The court ignored all the briefs submitted by the parties at the trial stage and in preparation for the appeal, the longer-than-usual oral argument, and the 24 amicus curae briefs submitted on both sides of the issue. The  justices had a vigorous round of Rock/Paper/Scissors to decide the outcome, and drew straws to see who would get stuck writing the opinion. Then Justice (now Chief Justice) Mark Cady (who was appointed to the court by notorious liberal activist Terry Branstad) drew the short straw. Most of the nearly 70 page opinion in Varnum v. Brien consists of transcribed internal musings about what Justice Cady was planning to have for lunch that day. The remaining six justices signed the opinion by email from their beachfront villa in Cabo San Lucas. (A confused Justice Hecht, apparently the only justice aside from Cady to read the opinion, tried to order a Cobb salad.)
5. The state of cultural affairs: In keeping with their statement that the Iowa GOP is committed politically to discriminating against gays, here the party admits that they’re in the minority that is still sore afraid of marriage equality. Which is curious, since you’d think the last thing they’d want is a vote on an issue when a majority of voters disagree with their position. Oh wait, I think we’ve just figured out why they haven’t managed to put a marriage amendment on the ballot.
6. It is the people of Iowa through our elections that must be permitted to decide this important issue:  There’s an important point that shouldn’t be lost in the noise. Voting Justice Wiggins off the court will have exactly zero practical effect. It won’t roll back the decision, or make discriminating against homosexuals constitutional in Iowa. Voting no on retaining Justice Wiggins is a symbolic gesture, that will do nothing more than prove that Iowa Republicans can get voters to the polls merely by appealing to their bigotry and hatred of gay Iowans.

All of which raises the following questions. What does ”equally… to all citizens” mean, if it doesn’t literally mean that everyone is equal? Is it more appropriate for the Iowa courts to be in the business of deciding who’s a citizen and who’s not? Or is that a question that the Iowa GOP has already answered for itself?

If there was a climate change conspiracy, it should be fabricating evidence that atmospheric carbon inversely correlates with male genitalia size. Convince men than burning fossil fuels shrinks their junk, and they’d cover half the planet in solar panels before you could say “look at the size of that hockey stick.”

I’ve given it a little more thought, and I think I was slightly off the mark there. It would probably be more effective to build a case that an individual’s contribution to overall carbon output is inversely related to his genital size. Convince men that a smaller carbon footprint equals an increase in penile length and/or girth. Get them sitting in bars, bragging about how little CO2 they produce, and I’d be willing to bet that humanity could become carbon neutral in a generation.

The premise that this cockamamie (ha) idea is based on, the oft-repeated notion of a cabal of climate scientists, conspiring to overstate (or create from scratch) the evidence for a changing global climate, is absurd on its face. The only halfway-reasonable motivation for concocting such a scheme that I’ve ever heard advanced is the notion that climate scientists are hoaxing their way into continued research funding. Which makes sense for about a second and a half, until you realize that the money, the real money, is being used to seed doubt and dissent, and mislead the public into thinking that climate change is still being debated by anyone who actually knows anything about climate science.

The five biggest oil companies, who have more to gain than anyone from our continued reliance on fossil fuels, made somewhere in the neighborhood of $130 billion in profits in 2011. Any credentialed, credible climate scientist who was willing to make the case that climate change wasn’t real, or wasn’t worth worrying about, would have to be SCUBA certified to not be killed in the ensuing flood of money that would come his or her way. The fact that gaggles of climate scientists* aren’t publishing with oil money says something huge about their priorities, e.g. actually doing science rather than propagandizing for the far more lucrative status quo.

All of which leads me back to my original point, and a final revision of my plan. The real way to get action on ameliorating the causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change is to convince politicians that overall carbon output inversely correlates with votes. Or even better, we could make that correlation real.

*Points will be awarded for the best proposed name for a group of climate scientists. Leave your entry in the comments.

It took less than 24 hours.

Because I live in the future, I’d done some looking online before I left Philly. I was mostly trying to get a sense of what was close to what. What neighborhoods were convenient to my new job, or to bus lines that would get me to useful destinations. I’d even sent a handful of email inquiries about places that looked promising, but hadn’t gotten much in the way of response. (That may have been down to my saying truthfully that I hadn’t yet started my new job, or maybe just a statistically unlikely series of crap ass potential landlords.)

I’d spent all morning in planes and airports, and I had my regular work running the chat room for Skeptically Speaking, so I gave myself Sunday night off from home hunting. On Monday morning, I fired up Craigslist Des Moines, and got to work. I flipped through the listings, sent out a slew of emails, followed up with phone calls and voicemail messages. By 10:30, I’d set up half a dozen appointments for that day and the next.

I went to see one place at noon, and it turned out to be dingy, run down, and nowhere near work, or anything else I was interested in. I stopped at my new office to touch base with my new boss, who suggested that we get together after he was done work and take a tour of some interesting neighborhoods.

I’d originally planned to spend the afternoon walking around the neighborhoods adjacent to the office, looking for For Rent signs and writing down numbers. The triple digit temperatures, and my own innate distaste at drowning in my own sweat, conspired to change my mind, and I chose to avail myself of my rental car and its sweet, rented air conditioning.

My systematic, block-by-block search was about as fruitful as a fig tree on Mars. I found almost nothing available to rent, and the few places I did find were single rooms in large houses. I am too old and too territorial to share a bathroom with half a fraternity, so that arrangement wasn’t going to cut it. The first time I couldn’t brush my teeth before bed because somebody’s pledge buddy was puking up his hazing shots, I’d have bolted all the doors and burned the place to the ground. (If I was ready to buy, I’d be golden. There are a head-spinning number of houses for sale out here. Unfortunately, I’m still dealing with enough student loan debt to cancel out a decent home loan, which makes me a less than attractive candidate to mortgage lenders.)

On my way back to meet my boss, I stumbled on a house for rent, no more than two blocks from the office. The siren song of serendipity clanging in my ears, I pulled over, jumped out of the car and immediately called the number on the sign, only to learn that the house had been rented out just that morning.

“I’ve got another one for rent down there,” said the pleasant-sounding man who’d crushed my fragile dream of being able to see my workplace from my bedroom window. He gave me an address that meant nothing to me geographically, and I dutifully wrote it down, halfheartedly agreeing that I’d call him if I was interested in seeing it.

When my boss finished with his conference call, we climbed into his Jeep, an impractically rough and tumble vehicle that I would bet my eye teeth he got after many sighs and rolled eyes on the part of his wife. We drove around the Sherman Hill area, a surprisingly interesting and (dare I say it) hip looking little neighborhood just west of downtown Des Moines. I took down the numbers of a couple of rental agencies, but I didn’t see anything that looked terribly promising.

We were headed back to the office, when I looked down at my notebook, and noticed the hastily scrawled address of the property suggested by the guy on the phone. I asked my new boss if he knew where it was, and he said that it was right around the corner, so we decided to swing by it before giving up for the day.

The property turned out to be a good sized house, less than half a mile from the office. We walked up on the porch, looked in some of the windows, and checked out the exterior, when I heard a car door slam, and the pleasant sounding man said “hey, did you want to look at the house?”

The landlord just happened to be there to let in some contractors who were putting some final touches on the house before it could be rented. He let us in, and showed us around. It was basically perfect. It had plenty of room, all the amenities and fixtures I was looking for, and it was within walking distance of work. And since my boss was there, it was extremely easy for the landlord to verify that I was employed.

I decided on the spot that I wanted the house. I exchanged contact information with the landlord, he emailed me an application, and the next morning, I drove out to his office to sign the lease.

I don’t believe in fate, or luck, or the guiding hand of a benevolent deity. I believe that the secret of serendipity is paying attention to all the options, even in challenging situations, and being prepared to capitalize on any opportunities that come along. That said, this situation presented me with an inordinately large number of fantastic opportunities, and I can’t help but feel like the luckiest kid on the block. If the rest of the process goes this smoothly, then my longest move (by far) will wind up being one of my easiest.

Luck or not, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Guess what, Philly friends? We were completely full of shit.

Iowa – or Des Moines, at the very least – is actually quite hilly. A lot of the city compares to the Fairmount Park area, but there are sections that stack up next to Manayunk in terms of sheer topography. I haven’t seen anything that would compare to San Francisco, say, and I’m guessing that a statewide average of the state would probably make for a drastically uninteresting graph, but it’s far from being the featureless prairie that we all expected.

So there you go. Don’t ever let it be said that I’m too proud to admit when I’ve labored under a mistaken assumption. Also when pretty much everyone I know has made the same mistake. I’ll admit that all day long.

I’m a guest in the home of a wonderfully gracious colleague, who has generously allowed me to commandeer her guest bedroom while I get oriented and secure living space in Des Moines. (Which has gone almost spookily smoothly – more on that later.) She lives in a lovely little bungalow, that strikes a delightful balance between rustic and modern. The guest room is well appointed, and I have exclusive use of a full bathroom just down the hall.

And I have a minor heart attack every time I go into it.

I’ve been feeling this curious little twinge every time I turned on the light, perhaps a dozen times since I arrived on Sunday. Last night, I finally realized what my problem was. I’m irrationally concerned about someone coming along and turning the light off while I’m using the toilet.

It makes some sense in that it’s possible, and even if my startle response didn’t result in an excretory mess, I’d still have to clean up my business in the dark, or figure out how to get the light back on. It’s irrational in the sense that it happens every time I go into that bathroom, even when I’m in the house alone, or the sun is up and I don’t need to turn the light on at all. Irrespective of the fact that I am 35 years old, I’ve managed to survive car accidents, stomach flus, law school, unemployment and (so far) fatherhood. I should be able to manage not coating the bathroom in urine if the lights go out.

So there you go. If the unexamined life isn’t worth living, mine just got a bit more habitable. Thanks for playing.

In Des Moines, I’m practically John Moschitta, Jr.

I’ve only been here for a few days, and I’ve already cut off, interrupted or talked over innumerable people, both in person and on the phone. Not because I intend to, but because I think that the person I’m talking to has finished speaking, when in fact it’s only a pause between clauses. (Never mind the fact that you could drive an aircraft carrier through some of them.) I moved to a new town, and suddenly I’m a conversational Genghis Khan, sweeping across the steppes of discourse with my verbal hordes.

It’s disconcerting, and not just for the immediate mental image of flaming village(r)s. As a rule, I try to be polite. That way, people really notice when I decide to be rude. Here, though, I’m a furious bull in a china shop of dialog. If I find it necessary to deliberately insult someone, merely interrupting won’t be out of the ordinary enough to make an impact. I’ll have to resort to actual insults, and I’m afraid it’s going to get ugly.

Just like your mom.

See?

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