Erik Emery Hanberg

(500) Days of Summer is a very good movie. Legitimately funny with sweetness and remorse.

It's also a wonderful piece of filmmaking, with creativity in its creation, storytelling, and visuals. And yet for all that, it's well grounded in real emotions, and doesn't betray its characters or emotions.

Zooey Deschanel, who I thought was great in Elf and Almost Famous, can't really hold up to the character's description (after all, how many people can legitamately be described as drawing "18.4 double-takes per day" while also looking like a normal person who could be someone's secretary.) She's good. It's a very tricky role and I don't know that she always nails it.

But Joseph Gordon-Levitt proves himself, yet again, to be really wonderful. He was 13 in Angels in the Outfield ... and good. He was caught in a Shakespearean/Tacoman plot in 10 Things I Hate About You ... and was good. He was a teenage male hooker in Mysterious Skin ... and was good. He was a teenage film noir detective in Brick ... and was great. And again good here.

He just seems to be all around good. And he's 28. I hope he'll continue to be in a lot of movies.

The movie does end with a suckerpunch of a joke. It's at about the level of a joke I would write in a movie. But it still works.

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Mary had an inspired idea to watch Jurassic Park, as a sort of summer blockbuster in the heat of summer. We had a great time re-watching it--and it makes me want to pick up the book again, which I haven't read since 7th or 8th grade.

Here's a pretty great "adaptation." I remember this was on TV long ago, although I don't remember the context.

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Good luck to my senior year college roommates who are going across the world on new and interesting programs this year!

Joe is leaving for England, where he'll be taking on a year-long Masters program in publishing. He's promised not to become a Kindle-hater.

And Caleb is going to work for something called the Human Terrain System, a project of the Army (though involving civilians) where he will serve as a liaison between the army and the community they are in (possibly in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Africa). The description from the site is: The near-term focus of the HTS program is to improve the military’s ability to understand the highly complex local socio-cultural environment in the areas where they are deployed.

Both have told me they'll keep blogging at the links above.

Cool stuff, fellas!

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... would Barack Obama be President today, 20 years after that event?

The last idea in the last post that the eruption of Tambora was the indirect cause of Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein gets to one of those fun games of alternate history. Maybe I'm just a sucker for them, especially after my readings on randomness.

But here's a thought experiment:

1. Barack Obama was able to run for President because he was a Senator and not still in the Illinois State government.
2. He was able to win his Senate seat in part because Republican candidate Jack Ryan withdrew from the race.
3. Ryan withdrew from the race because his divorce papers revealed that he had asked his wife, Jeri Ryan, to perform sex acts in public with him at sex clubs.
4. Jeri Ryan met Jack Ryan as a celebrity blackjack dealer in 1990.
5. She was a celebrity because she was crowned Miss Illinois the year before.

Does Jack Ryan marry someone else, perhaps someone else who agrees to his requests? Without a divorce, and the record of the reasons, does Jack Ryan win his Senate race against Obama, leaving Obama in the Illinois Statehouse while another Democrat tries to grab "the mantle of change."

Of course, no one can really know. And I think when it comes to Jack Ryan ... if he had found a partner willing to do what he wanted to do, it's very likely he would have had a scandal coming down the pike anyway. Perhaps Obama could have beaten Ryan without the scandal. Or perhaps Jack and Jeri were fated to meet, and fated to divorce, whether he met her at a charity event or not.

I'm fascinated by those small little twists of insigificant history ...

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

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This is a well-produced video about the "myth" of overpopulation.

I agree with its message ... to a certain extent.

I think that those like Kunstler who predict widespread devastation (whether as a result of overpopulation or a dearth of oil) are wrong to ignore future  technological innovations. There's a reason we didn't all die of in 1890, or 1970, and that's that we got a lot better at growing things and getting them to the people who needed them.

On the other hand, consider what a major natural disaster could do to our system. Take the year without a summer in 1815, when Mount Tambora--the largest known volcano eruption in 1,600 years--caused historic lows and killed crops all over.

I would argue that even if we aren't overpopulated, we haven't really prepared ourselves for a major worldwide (or continent-wide) disaster. I know I should not underestimate our capacity to adapt and find new ways. In fact, it's our greatest skill. But even a cursory (ie, Wikipedia) reading of what happened after Tambora's explosion should give someone pause to consider our systems.

On the other hand, Wikipedia cities the eruption as a cause for Mary Shelley to stay indoors with her friends and write a scary story, giving us the novel Frankenstein ... so who knows, maybe a super volcano explosion will give us the next Shakespeare.

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I finished Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book Fooled By Randomness. I'd previously read The Black Swan by him. Even though it's his second book, I would refer it to anyone before Fooled by Randomness.

Fooled is a dense book, as close to a philosophical treatise as I will probably ever read. I appreciate the content, though. Taleb uses anecdotes, hypotheticals, and his own experience as a trader to argue that when it comes to areas with a lot of uncertainty and randomness (the market, etc) that success is not necessarily indicative of actual merit. (He also argues that there are many places where randomness doesn't affect success. A good chef tonight is probably a good chef tomorrow. A good dentist is probably a good dentist. But a good trader today may not be a good trader tomorrow.)

One of his many thought arguments: if you take 10,000 traders and had them trade randomly every year, while eliminating everyone who loses money at the end of the year, in 10 years you will have a handful of people who made money every year. The trades were random, so the handful left were just lucky.

His point: how is that distinguishable from our current marketplace? Is Warren Buffett who he is because he is so good at investing, or because out of thousands and thousands of traders, someone was bound to get it right? And if we can't tell how good a trader is, why are we giving them our money to manage?

I enjoyed the book, thought it took awhile to work through. Again, I would recommend The Black Swan as a better look on the idea of randomness and our reaction to it before this one.

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Once again, I revisited A Prairie Home Companion, and once again, I came away with a profound respect for Altman, Keillor, and the cast.

I don't know why this movies gets me the way it does, but it always succeeds. It's got music, comedy, fart jokes, Lindsey Lohan, fictional characters, Minnesotans, angels, and is still somehow a beautiful meditation on death. I'm always touched when I see it.

If I were ever to write a critical analysis of a film, I think I'd probably choose this one. ... either this or Death Proof (no foolin', I think Death Proof, for all its flaws deserves a good critical study).

Glad to watch this again, 3 years after it came out and it still grabbed me like it did that first time at the Grand.

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I just finished "The River of Doubt," a history of Theodore Roosevelt's exploration of the unknown River of Doubt (since renamed Roosevelt River). A really great history!

After reading McCullough's Mornings on Horseback, I now have an interesting sense of Roosevelt. I've read his biography up until he was 27 or so and started to come onto the national stage, and then a biography of him after he failed to be re-elected in 1912.

Judged by everything but his Presidency in the middle, he's a magnetic character. Incredibly likable, he has traits I sincerely admire, most notably what McCullough calls "a life lived intensely." If he was going to do it, he was going to do it all the way. I am also impressed by his love of science and nature, which would seem to be better suited to an earlier President like Jefferson.

And for a former President to cast himself into the unknown waters of the Amazon in a dangerous and taxing venture ... well, imagine if Bill Clinton said he was going to be one of the first colonists on an American moon base and devote himself to exploration and scientific research. That's about the best parallel I can think of for Roosevelt's exploration of the river.

Of course, these two books leave a gaping hole: the Rough Riders during the Spanish American War, fomenting revolution in Panama, and all of his Presidency, which--as far as I can tell so far--was a weird blend of progressive politics, conservation, all combined with military adventurism. I'm fascinated by Roosevelt, but I think reading about his Presidency will be a big step toward completing my picture of him.

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