Omaha metas The Daily Show

Omaha showed me an interesting compare and contrast on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show this morning. First, she showed me the January 13th episode in which Stewart mocked Bush's farewell address, chastising Bush for saying that most of his failures were about political stagecraft: he wouldn't have done the "Mission Accomplished" banner, or he could have handled his Katrina-period press conferences better. He also mocked Bush's use of the word "disappointment," as if Bush were "disappointed" in the failures of others, but he himself did well. Stewart echoed my own observation that there may not be enough of a man "there" in George W. Bush to recognize just how deep the failure of his administration may have been.

Then she showed me the episode the day before. On January 12th, Stewart tried to mock Obama's press conference of the day before, and his only hook for doing so was to mock the competency of it by comparing it to a Bush press conference. He interspersed clips of Obama calling on reporters by full name and association, as if they were members of a respected institution, with Bush's use of dismissive nicknames and contemptuous, clumsy bon mots at his own press conferences.

Once we don't have Bush to kick around anymore, it's gonna be a tough four years for comedy. I'd say we could mock the ridiculous Impeach Obama crowd, but making fun of the mentally handicapped is so inappropriate these days.

Why Doom 3 was a success, and Resurrection of Evil a failure

There's a very simple reason, I think, for why Doom 3 was a successful product, and yet the sequel, Resurrection of Evil, was a complete failure. The reason precisely echoes the failure I saw in Bloodrayne 2, and it's a simple failure: Resurrection of Evil has absolutely no sense of humor.

Doom 3 had it. There were moments in the story where the incongruous contrast between the relentlessly cheery propaganda of the UAE playing in the hallways and reception areas gives you a jolt of comedy, a moment of humor. The same is true of the various PDAs you pick up along the way. There is a sense in Doom 3 that there is life on Mars, that the people who live there were trying their best to survive against difficult circumstances. As you read the emails left behind, you read about poker games, and missed families, and someone losing their lucky dice just before a D&D game, and offers to go target shooting out on the surface.

There is absolutely none of that in Resurrection of Evil. The Mars of RoE is relentlessly inhuman. Everything is grim and dark, even before Hell was unleashed. The people you meet along the way have no reason to be there other than that you need them to accomplish the next goal. There is no sense of a living, vibrant world; only a set piece through which your character picks his way, a rat in a maze.

Cooking with the kids

Last night, I had fun with the girls teaching them how to cook their favorite meal: macaroni & cheese, the real stuff straight out of Mark Bittman's book, How to Cook Everything (absolutely a fabulous book, recently re-issued, and probably the best textbook ever for actually doing implementing Michael Pollan's prescription: "eat food, not too much, mostly plants").

Since the recipe calls for making a white sauce, boiling elbow noodles, and creating bread crumbs from leftover bread, it involved a bit of kitchen machinery. Yamaraashi-chan prepped the boiling water while Kouryou-chan got the milk measured and the bay leaves together. Then Yamaraashi-chan melted the butter and browned the flour while Kouryou-chan grated the cheddar and Parmesan cheeses.

It was fun how well they worked together, trading off. "It's my turn to stir the sauce," was about the only complaint Kouryou-chan had the entire night. They had worked well together, Yamaraashi-chan stirring the white sauce while Kouryou-chan slowly fed it milk, and then all the cheddar. She traded off with her sister, whose job was to grease the casserole dish, and then they switched again so she could tear the last of the french loaf into small pieces and feed them to the food processor. Yamaraashi-chan mixed the noodles and the cheese in a large bowl, then helped me pour the mix into the casserole. They both spread the crumbs over the top of the casserole.

I put the casserole dish into the oven, and took it out fifteen minutes later, and it was perfect.

I'll have them cooking proper meals yet.

Take the Children Bowling

Omaha and I took the kids to the bowling alley this morning, to have a family outing. After a quick breakfast in our freshly cleaned kitchen (Omaha joked that yesterday "The Cleaning Elf" visited-- funny, I don't feel depressed, and that's usually when I have an impulse to do a massive cleaning), we drove out to the bowling alley.

I noticed that the rules on the door had changed. Two things were noticable: first, the rule banning "do-rags" had been removed. Second, the rule stating that the entire place was "adults only" after 10:00pm had been removed. I guess that in these hard times, trying to exclude anyone from the premises was a really bad idea.

Anyway, we played two games, and I managed to break 100 on the second round, which is far short of my all-time high of 217, back when I was in a college league. Kouryou-chan bowed out of the second game to go play in the arcade, which turned out not to be all that much fun without the rest of the family along. We're thinking of discouraging Yamaraashi-chan from using the automatic bumpers next time, since she's almost good enough to bowl without them.

Remembering Ricardo Montalban in a silly way: Khan Night!

So, Omaha and I, as a fun way of remembering Ricardo Montalban, decided to have "Khan night." We took the kids out to Khan's Mongolian Grill, and then rented Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

I had forgotten just how good that film was. It has an 80's aesthetic, but it still holds together well as an action-adventure, as a space opera, and as a Star Trek film. Listening to the costume, set, and ship designers discuss how they negotiated with the director, who was basically doing Horatio Hornblower because he didn't know squat about SF or Star Trek. Ricardo Montalban is glorious as Khan. It was fun to watch the interview after the flick where Montalban talks about the "Khaaaaaan!" scene. He described how he did his scene alone, without Shatner, and Shatner's lines were read by a "sweet-voiced script girl who did not act, and should not act. And here I am trying to be so... It was very hard."

It was fun. The girls thought it was a good flick, although Kouryou-chan was full of questions. "Why this," and "Why that," and so on. But we had a great evening.