2012

Here we are. The year is ending once again. What did this year hold for you? Think back to the beginning. What did you want to accomplish? What did you swear you'd do, or stop doing? What has changed?

I learned a lot this year. I got through the hardest, but most rewarding 9 weeks of my life teaching kids at a summer camp. I learned how to build a computer (and did it). I learned how to drive a car. I finished Geometry in school, which I've got to say was the most fun subject I've ever studied. I learned how to work for a political campaign and spend four days doing so. We lost, but that's OK.

2012 was a reminder that each year always tops the last one. We saw revolutions, innovations, democracy, and breakthroughs. We elected a president. Again. Some of us mourned, others rejoiced.
We watched athletes from all over the world come together and compete so that we could find out which ones were the very best at their sport. We laughed as the world didn't end on December 21st (at least, not that we know of.) We cried when disturbed individuals with guns killed innocent people for no particular reason. We stood with mouths agape as a song by a South Korean guy we'd never heard of was listened to by over a billion people on Youtube. We watched countries fight for independence. We saw the revolution in Libya. We saw floods and earthquakes and tsunamis. We helped New York recover from a hurricane.



2012 was a hard year, but...

We made it.

Read More

Fake Stuff

Don't ask me why, but I've always had a strange fascination with forged documents. Passports, ID's, birth certificates and checks can all be forged. And while some people do use forgery for bad purposes such as theft, fraud or other social no-no's, others see forgery as a kind of art form. I can see the validity of getting good enough at faking something that it is passed off as the real thing. I made a fake press pass a while ago. It's not super-convincing, but there isn't much of a standard for press passes and I imagine that it would get past a barely trained minimum wage dude working security at a concert.

If you laminate it and stick it on a lanyard thingy, I'll bet it would work. You'll notice that I look a little different in this picture, that's because I heavily edited it to add a few years to my apparent age. The lower jaw is wider, and there are slightly more wrinkles. As I was doing my google-ing for this post, I found that the technical definition of forgery is "The creation of a false written document or alteration of a genuine one, with the intent to defraud." So I guess you could make an extremely realistic five dollar bill, but rather than using it as cash, if you were to frame it and hang it on a wall, then it wouldn't be forgery. It would be Art. With a capital "A". 

That's what a guy named J.S.G. Boggs did. He would make an amazingly accurate one-sided drawing of a bill, and he would buy lunch with it in restaurants  Only rather than spending it, he would sell it to the waitress as Art. So I guess, even though it wasn't actually currency, the "forged" $20 bills became worth even more than $20. Boggs was arrested in England for counterfeiting, but was later aquited of his "crime" because he was not trying to spend the bills. He sold them as Art pieces.

You can see the level of detail in this dollar bill. That takes a lot of skill and time. And when something requires skill and time to make, then suddenly it's worth something! 

Read More

Les Misérables

It took me forever to get that little slashy thingy above the "e". I hope you appreciate it. I'm here to review the movie Les Misérables which I saw last night.

I'm not going to go into the plot much at all in this review. Let me just give a basic outline: Jean Valjean is a convict, he gets let out on parole, becomes a new person when he tears up his papers, and befriends a poor factory worker, caring for her daughter after she dies.

The beginning of the movie wasted no time diving right into it, I almost felt like it was moving too fast to make an emotional connection with the main character. They make up for that, however, by  the fact that the movie is really long. It's over three hours. The rating is PG-13, although quite honestly I would have given it an "R" rating. The fact is that certain suggestive themes are unavoidable parts of the story. To omit them would be to ruin the whole point of the plot. The factory worker, Fantine, gets fired from her job. After selling her hair and some of her teeth, she adopts... Another profession. There are two or three scenes in connection with that where you will find an excellent opportunity to go refill your popcorn. Yes, they were an integral part of the story, however they could have been done much more tactfully. That's Hollywood.

This movie is an emotional one, and it will wring the tears out of your eyes. One interesting fact is that all of the singing was actually recorded live, rather than dubbed over. The songs were great and I still have "Can you hear the people sing" stuck in my head. I especially enjoyed Daniel Huttlestone's performance as the young revolutionary Gavroche. He also played the same character in the Broadway production of Les Miserables.

Overall, I think this was a great film, stunted slightly by the several explicit scenes. This is not a family film, so parental discretion is advised required.


Just remember to bring tissues.

Read More