Movie Friday: Witchboard

Happy Hallowe’en, everyone. Well yes, technically Hallowe’en is Monday, but it’s Movie Friday! I can’t rob you of some seriously spoooooky content!

When I was a kid, my sister and I rented one of the corniest horror B movies I’ve ever seen. It has it all – terrible acting, cheesy special effects, a stupid plot, and to top it all off, the lamest twist ending of all time. That movie, dear readers, was called Witchboard:

Warning: This might make you laugh, so maybe don’t watch it at work.

Sadly, the video montage above doesn’t give you what I think is this movie’s most excellent moment. The protagonist, Linda, is becoming more and more connected to a murderous Conquistador ghost through the Ouija board that she foolishly used by herself. In a dream sequence, she wanders through a dream realm until suddenly, there is Malfador! In a stroke, he chops her head off with an axe. I’d describe the rest of the scene to you, but you should just skip to 1:59 of this movie:

Man, that’s some scary shit!

There is a skeptical point to be made here though. The whole premise of the movie is that you’re not supposed to use the Ouija board alone, or you’ll get possessed. Of course the actual reason is because Ouija boards, like ghosts and psychics and other ‘supernatural’ things, require at least two people to work: one to run the scam, and one to give away their money. Using the Ouija board alone would, unless you’re particularly prone to delusion, simply result in you sitting in the dark alone, feeling ripped off. Much like I felt at the end of this movie.

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Movie Friday: Special Investigation – Evolution

One of the things that drives me nuts is when people enter into an argument without actually listening to the other side’s perspective. When I was in high school we had instructions in how to debate, and one of the specific roles we were told to fill on our debate teams was to have someone whose job was to pretend to be on the other team. The idea was that this person would become an expert at the arguments that the other side was likely to use, so we could smack them down in rebuttal.

For some reason (probably because the target audience is not interested in hearing refutation), ‘debates’ that I see between religious people and atheists never seem to use that tactic.

If I ever get invited to debate a creationist or a theist, I have an entirely different strategy to employ – I’m going to go up there and pretend to be even crazier than my opponent. “You think the word was created 6,000 years ago? Absolutely nonsense! It was created 3 months ago by the sneezing of an intergalactic duck! It was just sneezed with the illusion of age! I know this because I read it on the back of this napkin, and I feel the truth of it in my heart.”

But then again, the people who argue the science side are usually trying to teach the audience something important, and consider it worthwhile showing respect to both their opponent and her/his position. I am labouring under no such burden – I just want them to see how stupid she/he looks.

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Movie Friday – Gravity

Those of you who read my intro post, or who have been reading for a while, or who know me personally, know that I play in a band called CROWN. If I could go to the band store and pick out the components of my perfect band, I would end up with something that very closely resembles CROWN. It’s a rare pleasure to get to work with 3 other creative people with no egos or private agendas – all our decisions are consensus-based, and even a big chunk of our song-writing is fully collaborative. I also get to hop around to many different instruments and enjoy both the spotlight and supporting roles.

This past Friday a friend of the band’s* shot some videos and stills at our regular live performance at the King’s Head, which is a restaurant in Kitsilano. She compiled them into a pretty impressive video:

The song playing over the video is one of our original tunes, called “Gravity”**. It’s available on iTunes for download, or you could just come to the King’s Head tonight and buy a CD from me in person. Hope you enjoy the video!

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*Who is a great photographer should you be trying to memorialize some upcoming event
** Yes, that’s me singing lead vocals. Line up single file please, ladies…

Movie Friday: Keep it Clean

For new readers: every Friday, in honour of it being the weekend, I put up a movie instead of a long post. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re serious, sometimes they’re weird. It’s whatever crosses my desk as I wander around the internet, and it’s all for you on a Friday!

As you may know, I am a musician in addition to being a scientist. I began playing violin when I was 6, began singing lessons at 8, picked up the guitar at 14, and have kind of been going strong ever since. My long stretches of 9-5 at a desk are punctuated by weekends full of rawking out. I like to call it my Clark Kent/Superman life – I even take my glasses off.

One of my favourite musicians of all time has to be Dave Grohl. The first time I heard In Your Honor, I nearly lost my mind. I played it on endless repeat, transfixed by the skill and care that clearly went into each song. Sometimes you hear a song that seems like it’s speaking directly to you – every cut on that album (and it’s a double album) did that for me. One By One was also top-notch, and Echoes, Patience, Silence, Grace is a goddamn masterpiece.

This, however, is my favourite thing he’s ever done:

Dave Grohl: epic troll.

I often hear people ask what the best way to deal with the Westboro Baptist Church is. Should we slash their tires? Should we beat them up? Should we counter-protest? Should we point out the errors in their theology? Should we stand up against their hate?

Folks like the loonies in the WBC are like Bobo dolls – no matter how hard you smack ’em, they keep coming back smiling. They are a machine that is fueled by controversy, and the more agitated we get, the more they think they’re winning.

The only sane response to an insane opponent is open, unashamed, joyful and unrestrained mockery. The WBC are a joke. They are self-parody, and the only strength they have is in the anger they can stir up in us. They should be mocked – not because it would piss them off, but because they’re silly! It’s a backwater basement church full of lunatics with weird signs and comically offensive messages. If you put Fred Phelps up on a stage opening for Don Rickles, he’d have the audience rolling in the aisles.

Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters have shown us the truth: once we realize how monumentally silly the Westboro Baptist Church is, all that remains is a bunch of sad, lonely people following a confused and deluded old man in his vain attempt to return to the 16th century.

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Movie Friday: If it please the court

I would never dream of cheating on my one true love, The West Wing. However, its slightly less hot (but still smokin’) cousin Boston Legal caught my eye one one of those lonely, Bartlettless nights and swept me up in its strong arms. I truly don’t understand what it is that makes it so unpopular to have politically-relevant shows that explore the arguments on both sides of issues. They seem to be incredibly popular when they manage to make it on the air, and yet so few of them ever do. While it’s nice to have 30 Rock stroking all the liberal talking points, I’d love to see a drama that explores them more honestly – even through comedy.

That being said, for all its truly funny moments, Boston Legal also hits us right in the heart at times, often through main character Alan Shore’s closing statements in cases. Today’s video comes from S01E17 – Death Be Not Proud:

Please excuse the cheesy song in the background. I cannot fathom why someone would want to ruin such a great speech with such a terrible soundtrack. Take it up with the uploader.

This video should stand as a tribute to the memory of Troy Davis – a man executed under similarly doubt-ridden circumstances, executed by a state that would rather see a man die for a perverted sense of ‘justice’ than to do a thorough job investigating his innocence.

The transcript of the video is available here, but this is the relevant bit:

Alan Shore: I am here. With all due respect, may it please the court, because I have a problem with the State executing a man with diminished capacity. Who may very well be innocent! I’m particularly troubled, 8 may it please the court, with all due respect, that you don’t have a problem with it. You may not want to regard my client’s innocence, but you cannot possibly disregard the fact that 117 wrongfully convicted people have been saved from execution in this country. 117! The system is hardly foolproof.

And Texas! This State is responsible for a full third of all executions in America. How can that be? The criminals are  just somehow worse here? Last year you accounted for fully half of the nation’s executions. Fifty percent from one State! You cannot disregard the possibility, the possibility, that something’s up in Texas.

Judge Lance Abrams: I would urge you to confine your remarks to your client, and not the good state of  Texas.

Alan Shore: Zeke Borns never had a chance. He was rounded up as a teenager, thrown in a cell while he was still doped up on drugs, brow-beaten and interrogated, until his IQ of eighty was overcome, he confessed to a crime he had no memory of, still has no memory of, for which there is no evidence, other than two witnesses who saw him pumping gas around the time of the murder. He was given a coked-up lawyer, who admittedly did nothing.

I’m now before nine presumably intelligent people in the justice business, who have the benefit of knowing all of this. Add to that, you know DNA places somebody else at the scene, and you’re indifferent! You don’t care! Whether you believe in my client’s innocence, and I’ll assume, with all due respect, may it please the court, that you don’t! You cannot be sure of his guilt! You simply cannot! And failing that, how can you kill him? How can you kill him?

How indeed?

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Movie Friday: How to hit on an Asian girl

I live in Vancouver, which is a city that has a very large population of east and south Asian people. Having spent a number of years in Brampton, Ontario, and having done a degree at the University of Waterloo, I am more or less used to being in an environment with a large minority population. Some people, however, seem to have a difficult time dealing with the diversity, and retreat immediately into crude stereotypes when interacting with non-white people. If you think you might be one of those (and you are attracted to women), here’s a few handy tips:

Many people (mostly white people) express a great deal of incredulity when people of colour (PoCs) share stories like this. “How could anyone be so stupid?” they ask. Or, more commonly, “you’re exaggerating”. Life as a PoC in most cities in North America is emphatically not a non-stop barrage of racial insensitivity and adversity. However, it doesn’t take a lot of these kinds of comments to make you feel as though two things are overwhelmingly true:

  1. Your race/ethnic identity is the most important thing people see when they look at you
  2. You are the ‘other’ – a person who is tolerated but not part of the group

Now I don’t get hit on a lot (and when I am, most of the time I can’t hear the comments over the sound of me saying ‘yes’ and high-fiving myself), but it’s a pretty safe bet that when I’m flirting with someone who seems interested, at some point I will hear either “I just love black guys”, or “I’ve never been with a black guy before”. I’ve yet to hear “I’ve never been with a viola player before” or “health economists are so sexy” (and we really are – we’ve done extensive studies proving it through the use of computer simulation). It’s not a huge problem, but it’s just one of those things.

While it’s tough enough for women to walk down the street without being openly and unapologetically objectified by strangers, when you add race to that equation, life becomes even more difficult.

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Movie Friday: Thank You…

It’s my birthday today, and I usually take this time to reflect on the things that have happened over the last year. One of the things I’m most proud of is the way this blog has established itself. Obviously I will take the appropriate amount of credit for the success, but I’m not shy about saying that you readers are a major source of inspiration and motivation. I honestly wouldn’t have been able to do this without you, your comments and feedback, your e-mails, and the fact that there’s more of you every month.

But there’s someone even more important that I have to thank…

Fun fact: the guy who sings this song also sings the theme from Pokemon:

Obviously this is a joke (well, I hope it’s obvious but with some people you never know). I don’t believe in Satan, or any kind of supernatural force of evil. I leave such fantasizing and personification of human folly to theists. I’m not even really a big believer in the Satan of the LaVey church – the worship of the human spirit and individuality as supreme. But it is fun to see someone take the piss out of the cheesy gospel music that gives credit to a different deity for all the good things, without putting the corresponding blame on that entity for the bad stuff. Consistency is clearly not a virtue.

If there is a pro-Satan song that I like on its own merits, it would be this one by one of my all-time favourite bands. I’ll leave you with it for the weekend, and proceed to get my party on.

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A Gorge-ous Monday to you!

So I done messed up.

I usually write posts for the coming week on the weekend. Except I spent this weekend (which is a long weekend – Monday is a holiday here in Canada) at the Washington Gorge in George, Washington (yes, that’s actually the name of the town). I got most of today’s post done, but then I forgot to finish it. Stupid me.

Anyway, today’s post will be late. To make up for it, I leave you with this video:

Mmm, that’s good Hitchslap.

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Movie Friday: Mlodinow vs. Chopra

As not only someone who believes in the usefulness of science as a way of understanding the universe, but who also tries to bring his limited understanding of science to bear in his day-to-day life, there is very little that irritates me more than pseudoscience. Science is elegant in its simplicity, but demands rigor and complexity of thought to implement properly. Pseudoscience is a bastardization of science. It requires nothing more than a smattering of understanding the results of the scientific process, and then the wedding of those concepts to draw a completely erroneous conclusion.

I have personal friends who engage in pseudoscience professionally. I can’t talk to them about their jobs, or I will become so enraged that I risk doing harm to the friendship. Luckily for me, I can draw a bit of vicarious satisfaction from exchanges like this:

Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist who has devoted his professional life to translating the products of actual science into a form that can be grasped by laypeople. Because of how bizarre theoretical physics is, it can be really though to get a firm handle on what exactly the universe is. Theoretical physicist design intricate and brilliant methods for making things that happen far below the level of our comprehension, let alone detection, exert influence that we can see and measure. As someone whose scientific work is incredibly macro, I have nothing but the deepest respect for people who are willing and able to delve into the deepest mysteries of existence, and who are skilled enough to bring something back to share with the rest of us.

To contrast, Deepak Chopra is a mystic. He’s a witch doctor that takes phrases or slices of concepts and twists them 90 degrees to fit into his bizarre world view. One of the most infuriating things he does (all the time) is to attempt to redefine concepts in such a way as to completely divorce them from any coherent usage, like he does with “consciousness” in the video. Saying that “consciousness” is “superposition of possibilities” is a complete nonsense phrase, and Mlodinow aptly and deservedly skewers Chopra for his babbling. Regular long-time readers will know that I’ve had my run-in with Deepak before, and he’s still beating that dead horse of falsehoods that don’t quite reach the level of honesty required to lie.

Of course Chopra has flogged his sideshow of bullshit to the tune of several million dollars, and he has done this by presenting himself as a “deep thinker”, or a guru who is wedding the more esoteric aspects of physics and biology to the ultimate questions of life. What he’s actually doing is giving pat answers to complex questions that fall apart underneath even casual scrutiny. As Mlodinow points out, the phrase “superposition of possibilities” contains words that are comprehensible, but arranged in such a way as to completely negate any semantic meaning. This is a typical Chopra-ism – something he has in common with Ray Comfort.

It takes hard work and diligence to discover the truth. One has to enter with ideas that are open to being corrected by observation, and an ego capable of recognizing when you’re wrong. These are not things that come easily to humans, but are crucial if we want to find real answers to tough questions. Deepak Chopra has none of these – just a slick tongue and a gullible audience.

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Movie Friday: Jamie Kilstein

Those of you who are regular readers may have noticed that my use of language fluctuates from post to post. Sometimes I am crude and direct, other times I am flowery and expressive. Some of this is organic – I am actively trying to improve my writing and I think that repeated daily practice is accomplishing that. Other times it is intentional – trying to match the tone of my words to the topic at hand to elicit emotional impact. Sometimes, I will confess, it is simple laziness on my part.

I love words. I can’t really draw or paint, and while I am a musician my creativity in that department is not exactly exceptional. Where I think my real strength lies in in my use of language. Words on a page, properly arranged, can change the world. While my own personal aspirations are somewhat more modest than global metamorphosis, I do put more than a little bit of conscious effort into these sentences you read here.

Sometimes I run into someone who can knock me on my ass with their use of language. Jamie Kilstein is one such person:

Audio is definitely NSFW, but you shouldn’t watch Youtube videos at work anyway.

Yes, I recognize it’s crude, but I challenge you to find fault in the phrase “fist you into a meth coma”.

I’ve run into these kinds of arguments against gay marriage and gay parenting before. They are, quite frankly, ridiculous. There are heterosexual parents who do a far worse job of raising kids than a gay couple could ever hope to. There are single parents who do do an outstanding job without another person around (I’d offer my own upbringing as evidence of that possibility). Suggesting that a mix-gendered environment is a necessary component of a healthy childhood is easily put to the lie by even the most casual of scrutiny. Suggesting further that every gay couple will do a worse job than every straight couple is an even greater height of absurdity.

Jamie Kilstein does a great job of skewering these arguments with a fast-paced, profanity-strewn and impeccably-delivered 3 minute monologue. Of course, being in front of a sympathetic audience certainly helps the delivery, but even without the accompanying laughter it’s quite something to see.

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