Home Sweet Home

We have several friends who are in various stages of progressing from renters to homeowners at present. My wife and I have been homeowners for a couple of years now, and I’ve come to learn a few things about owning a home (although our friends may not appreciate this insight). Much like grief, owning your own home is accompanied by predictable stages. We all go through them - they just look different with each individual homeowner. For the sake of simplicity, I’m just going to use the five Kubler-Ross stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) to describe the experience of each stage.

It’s not that far of a stretch.

Denial - In the context of owning a house, denial is actually the blissful beginning of your home-owning life. You are flushed with enthusiasm over the most adult purchase you’ve ever made. You are thrilled with the opportunity this home represents. You are convinced that your home will look exactly how you pictured it when the realtor took you on that first walk through. You are certain you are not paying too much and that the bank rate you got is completely reasonable. You are totally in denial.

This period can begin as early as the first glimpse you get of your new house, and almost certainly by the time you close on the house and pick up your keys for the first time. But the end of this phase is somewhat less predictable. Sometimes it’s as early as the home inspection (lucky you!) and you can bail on this particular house and the process begins again with the next. Sometimes its move in day. For a precious few, denial may not come to an end until many years have passed or perhaps at all. These people (a) have purchased new, quality construction (rare!), (b) have low expectations, or (c) have someone upstairs looking out for them in a big, big way. Inevitably, over a long enough time line, your purchase is going to disappoint you in some significant way, even if it is just the typical psychological response to any big purchase known as “buyer’s remorse” and nothing more material than that. When that finally happens, the happy, oblivious homeowner progresses to ….

Anger - You found out the sprinkler system was leaking by getting a $4,000 water bill. You hire a chimney sweep who tells you the chimney cap needs to be replaced before your siding is permanently rust-stained. The property taxes got raised. Again. You spend every weekend of the summer missing out on the lake, the pool, the camping, the whatever because your manicured lawn has to be mowed regularly or it will choke itself. You forgot to get HSA approval before having the fence put in, and it doesn’t meet spec. You found out your home, according to some obscure source, is worth about 75% of what you committed yourself to pay for it.

Owning a home is a lot more work than renting under most circumstances. Even assuming you live in the middle of nowhere and can let the exterior of your house go to pot, there is a certain amount of work that must be done in order to keep a dwelling livable. If you rent, that work consists in calling the landlord or super when something breaks. If they are slack, or just a slumlord, you may have to deal with uncomfortable circumstances for some period of time, but legally repairs and maintenance are their responsibility (unless you’ve contracted otherwise). If you own, you have to track down the appropriate contractor and pay them, or do the work yourself.

The chimney cap thing - that was our first big surprise expense with owning our own home. We’ve had more such surprises since, but we’ve been fairly fortunate about surprise bills (in terms of both size and quantity), all things considered. Even so, I have had to learn a lot about basic Do It Yourself (DIY) home repair - plumbing and electrical mostly - to keep our checking account from getting too thin on occasions. And some non-essential repairs have been indefinitely postponed. DIY blogs and books are your friend. Even with a semi-manageable maintenance workload (your home is your new hobby, by the way), the combination of unexpected expenses and inevitable buyer’s remorse will almost always drive a homeowner to …

Bargaining - Maybe if you throw enough money or time at it your home will treat you better. Maybe a different house would be easier to deal with, or big enough, or small enough, or have the floor plan you really wanted in the first place. Maybe you should downsize altogether and go back to being a renter somewhere.

The “grass is always greener” mentality is pretty normal in my observation. You try and come up with some way to “fix” whatever frustrations you are having with your home through a greater investment of resources or a significant and probably unnecessary change in circumstances. We went through a brief and unsuccessful bid to sell our house about two years after we bought it. We tried to achieve this by moving out of the house and into a small apartment. Our primary motivation in selling was to cut our expenses, but I’d be lying if I said this “bargaining” mentality wasn’t part of the equation. The thinking goes “if we can downsize our life, pay off some things, save up for others, things will be simpler - i.e., better.” Yeah. Except if you’ve already grown into a house, moving a house full of stuff into an efficiency condo is a little like getting a polar bear into a cat carrier - even if you are successful you are going to be very uncomfortable. And so is the polar bear. After four months (and about that many people viewing our house) we decided we were better off keeping the house than living indefinitely in cramped, miserable limbo. Even if our “bargaining” had been successful, we would have eventually ended up in another house, and the cycle would have started again. It’s only by plowing through that you move on to the next phase of the cycle....

Depression - The futility of it all has finally gotten to you. The forty year mortgage that seemed like such a great idea is stretching out into a subjective eternity. That landscaping you spent the first three years nurturing has died in the oven of a South Carolina summer. The garage door opener shorted out again. The HSA has decided to fine you because you left the garbage can in front of the house too long. It’s just too much.

There comes a point where you throw up your hands in frustration or hang your head in disgust. A house is the most expensive purchase most people will ever make – it’s kind of no wonder it comes with more frustrations than any other purchase as well. But, like any other form of depression, there is a good prescription to treat the symptoms of home-owner ennui, until you can move on to the final stage of this process. The prescription is simple, but unique to each home-owner: Pick an aspect of your house that you like, and actively enjoy it. Ignore the grass in the front yard and cook something in the kitchen that had everything you wanted from the first time you saw it. Forget about the peeling wallpaper in the guest room and spend an hour in the garden tub that made you want to buy the house in the first place. For me, this prescription usually involves grabbing a beer and a pipe (yes, I do know exactly how pretentious it is for someone younger than fifty to smoke a pipe. I don’t care.) and sitting on my back deck, enjoying the somewhat overgrown but uniquely mine backyard. It’s good therapy.
Eventually, you can lay aside your frustrations and move on to …

Acceptance – At some point, you realize that your house is never going to be perfect, or stay in good repair indefinitely, or stop needing regular infusions of time and energy. You will realize that, despite what developers wanted us to believe at the turn of the most recent century, your house is not really an “investment” in the financial sense. In all likelihood, your house is not going to be in the local parade of homes, or grace the cover of Good Housekeeping or Home and Garden. Because, if you are doing it right, your house is not just a building, but a home – a place where people live real lives, break things, get dirty, and have community, and that doesn’t typically happen in perfect little idealized spaces we build for ourselves in our mind.

Acceptance doesn’t mean you still won’t occasionally get angry or frustrated with the problems of owning a home, but it probably means those little annoyances don’t define the way you view your house. You are far more likely to see the good than the bad. You can stop noticing all the flawed, scrawny trees, and pay attention to the pretty nice forest you’ve got going on. You can, more often than not, simply enjoy being home.

I’m not pro-owner or anti-renter. Whatever is right for you is right for you, and there’s an arsenal of considerations either way you go. Just know that the buckets of frustration that come along with owning a house are normal, at least in my estimation. And I think usually, the good outweighs the bad. And, whether you’ve owned for years or are just considering taking the plunge, that is my unsolicited two cents about it.

Celebrity Deathmatch! Death Star versus Borg Cube

This post goes a little beyond geeky, into pure nerd territory, but there’s a good reason why I consider the questions relevant. To give you a little context: This question represented a long running point of contention between my wife and one of her best college friends, who for the sake of anonymity we’ll call Karen. In point of fact, it was a debate amongst all the members of my wife’s social circle in college, but my wife took the unenviable and (for years) solitary position that the Borg cube would win such a confrontation (all things being equal, and no Jedi involved), despite the naysayers and pooh-poohers to the contrary.

Enter me, on our first pseudo-date: her college graduation party. I was invited by another friend of hers a few nights prior, and really only knew about two people there, but this hot babe who would one day be my wife was going to be there, so I was going dammit. I arrived, and had not even managed to say hello to the pretty lass before a girl I had never met before (Karen) abruptly demanded:”Which one would win - Death Star or Borg Cube?”

Now, the vast majority of those who even understand the question would probably answer “the Death Star.” Their primary argument would be “It’s the Death Star.” Valid point, but it fails to take all the variables into account. My response, off the cuff, was “Borg Cube, and here’s why....”

This, as my wife tells it, was the moment she knew she was really in trouble. The fact that I played along at all was all kinds of brownie points, but getting the right answer (read: her answer) got me super sexy bonus brownie points. Thus begun a love affair for the ages. Judge me all you want - you just wish your story started that cool.

Nonetheless, my feats of logic in determining that the Star Trek baddies would beat out the Emperor’s brazenly flawed LEGO project did not persuade the rest of her circle of friends. I think the fact that I was willing to play ball impressed some of them, much as it did with my wife, but they were not swayed in their convictions. Undoubtedly, many of you will disagree with me as well.

The primary reason I went with the Borg over the Death Star is that George Lucas is a moron, and Gene Roddenberry is (was) not. Roddenberry’s science fiction was, by and large, based on good science (very early episodes and techno-babble dialogue notwithstanding). Gene’s best friend, after all, was the brilliant Isaac Asimov, of both science-fiction and science-science fame.

George Lucas, on the other hand, wrote the line “It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.” If you don’t get why that’s dumb, it’s okay. Google it and come back. We’ll wait.

Later on, Lucas gave us midichlorians...

I will never. Let. That. Go.

In any event, what this comes down to is the technical thought process behind the different technologies. What technical specs there are out there for the two fictional ships probably had little or nothing to do with the creators of the two franchises - I’ll concede that. Still, I remember once a long time ago seeing a pretty dated set of specifications for the “turbolasers” that Lucas’ Star Destroyers had on board. The range was kind of pathetic. Whether the specs came from Lucas’ people or not, whoever wrote them essentially designed a weapon that couldn’t reach much beyond the nose of the ship they were on. What specs there are for Borg weaponry bear no such obvious defects. I know I’m getting into some incredibly nerdy minutiae here, but I’m not the one who asked the question. I just answered it. Correctly.

Anyhoo, these “turbolasers” are the same weapons that played support roles on the Death Star (the guns that really only worked to shoot at small Rebel fighters flying a few dozen meters off the surface). Oh, and the Death Star also has a complement of relatively frail fighters and bombers. The Death Star’s main weapon, which is apparently the only thing it has that can reach a distant target, is limited to a 180 degree targeting range, since it obviously can’t fire behind itself. This targeting range is a best case scenario- it’s not even clear from the movies that it has that much targeting flexibility. Could it hit something directly in its peripheral range? We’ll never know. A few small fighters managed to blow it up. Twice.

In any event, any ship on the back side of the space station with a decent ranged weapon could spend all day blasting away from a distance, and adjust position as the main weapon turns to meet the aggressor (or tries to, anyway). Let’s face it, the station took an eternity to get clear of Yavin Four - it doesn’t turn on a dime.

Even when a target is in range of the Death Star’s main weapon, it appears that the target has to be completely stationary to be truly threatened. What did it actually manage to blow up? Alderaan and a completely unprepared Mon Calamari Cruiser (yes, that’s right - the fish-faced alien race of Admiral Ackbar’s people is called the Mon Calamari. Let’s give it up again for Lucas’ originality).

Most people counter all of this by saying “all the Death Star needs is one shot.” Maybe. The Borg Cubes can operate with about 75% of the ship completely destroyed, or something ridiculous like that. For the sake of argument I’ll concede that an ambushed Borg Cube would probably lose to the Death Star. But that’s not assuming all other things being equal - that’s assuming a massive advantage to the Death Star in the form of the element of surprise. Another massive advantage I’m assuming the Death Star does not have is the presence of any Jedi - Sith or otherwise. Force users on the bridge mean all bets are off.

Obviously the Death Star is huge, so destroying it through bombardment would be a task, but if the main weapon can’t hit an enemy that can hit the Death Star, and the TIE fighters are no threat to that enemy (and really? to the Borg? Please) then it’s really just a matter of time. Probably not that much time either. Seriously, if the engineers overlooked such a material flaw as an uncovered exhaust port the size of a womp rat, do you really think that was the only structural defect in the whole machine?

That’s my take on it - Borg wins by default. The Death Star was a great strategic weapon - a world destroyer and a symbol of power. But it was a terribly tactical weapon - unwieldy and incapable of quick, decisive action. And that is how I landed my wife.

Having an informed opinion about all things geektastic never hurts.

The Final Countdown

If you saw an image of Gob Bluth throwing colored hankies awkwardly into the air when you read that post title, you've come to the right place. But this post has nothing to do with Arrested Development. That was just a cheap ploy to get you here.

We are quickly approaching the point where our first child’s birth is days away rather than weeks (hence "The Final Countdown"). It has become apparent, as the philosopher once said, that this sh** is about to get real.

I am looking forward to parenthood. I hope that truth comes across in my posts. I am incredibly excited to meet our daughter, and I look forward to watching her grow up and become an intelligent, beautiful, talented smart-ass just like her mom and dad (okay, so my intelligence, beauty and talent are debatable).

But obviously, something as significant as parenthood comes with a generous side order of change, even above and beyond the extra tick on the census tally of your home and the extra tax deduction on April 15. There is the obvious lack of sleep from having a newborn in the house. There is the financial pressure of providing for a child’s health, education, and overall well-being from birth until (ideally) 18 or (realistically) 27. There are decisions you didn’t need to make when it was just two adults living together. And at some point, you will probably drive a mini-van. If your pride or vanity just can’t handle that, you’ll drive a mini-van that calls itself an SUV.

All in all, it’s a big shift. The closest life change one can draw an analogy to would be marriage. Marriage and parenthood don’t really have a lot in common - I’d like to think the former would come before the latter in most cases (I’m old fashioned) but besides the obvious relationships between the two concepts, similarities are hard to come by. In marriage, two individuals (adults?) go from making decisions that impact only themselves, to making decisions (hopefully in concert) that impact both. In parenthood those two people, who quite likely haven’t completely figured out the first part, now have to make decisions for a completely helpless brand-new human being whose only contribution to any given debate will take the form of a piercing cry, or if you’re lucky a gas-induced giggle.

Both marriage and parenthood involve change, but you only get a big party for one of them. Whatever you may say about baby showers - good, bad, or indifferent - I don’t qualify them as parties. Yes there are gifts and food, and you may even have a good time if you manage to avoid the inevitable “guess the baby food” games, but I just don’t think they qualify as “parties.” No one ends up dancing naked, making out with the dog, or going home in the back of a squad car. Not usually anyway. With a marriage, on the other hand, you often get a wedding reception (which can be a real party depending on the circumstances) and a bachelor/bachelorette party.

Bachelor parties.... well here’s the thing. I don’t know the history of bachelor parties as a concept. Maybe it’s a holdover from the days when wedding celebrations were week-long affairs. I don’t know. This isn’t an academic examination of modern wedding culture. What I know from my observation is that bachelor parties as popularized in movies and television have it exactly wrong, and fortunately for me, most of my friends have got it pretty right. In popular culture, bachelor parties are mostly about haranguing the groom-to-be for what he is losing: ostensibly, his freedom, by which we mean his freedom to sleep with anything that sits still long enough, his freedom to throw money at half dressed women named Bambi who are just paying their way through college, and his freedom to drink himself into embarrassment. Most of my friends who have had bachelor parties have treated them as celebrations of what is being gained. Yes, there may have been some good natured ribbing, and yes, copious volumes of alcohol may have been consumed, but it was all in a spirit of camaraderie and encouragement that doesn’t exist in movies or on TV. Yeah, I’m old fashioned, and I’m actually pretty proud of that. I did go to one bachelor party where the groom-to-be kicked a party-goer in the face as we all attempted to tie him down with duct tape, bury him in the sand on Folly Beach, and put makeup on him. But that’s a story for another day..

...Actually, that was the entire story.

But I bring up this concept of bachelor parties because I am curious: what would the concept of a bachelor party look like if it were changed and applied to a couple on the eve of becoming parents? Unless you are celebrating before you start trying to have kids, you’re probably not hitting the bars for a drinking binge. People frown at resting your beer on a baby bump. Clubbing? My wife and I have never been much for the dance club scene (such as one exists in Columbia), but I’ll admit the image of the two of us on a dance floor during her eighth month of pregnancy with “Techno Chocolate” blaring in the background is kind of hilarious. More specifically, the image of the likely reactions we would get is what gets me laughing. Even more innocuous, nontraditional forms of celebration are limited either by the condition of pregnancy or by the absurd heat of South Carolina summer. I tried to convince her that go carts were perfectly safe, but that was a non-starter. Same with paint ball, though the look she gave me was almost as painful as a paintball welt. The golf balls on the putt-putt course literally melted when they hit the cement. A midnight movie? We’d both fall asleep. Maybe that’s the most practical form of celebrating/preparing for being parents. Sleeping. For about 48 hours straight.

I don’t know the answer. So I put it again to our Constant Readers - particularly those of you with kids - what would you do if you had a night (or dare I say, a weekend) without the responsibilities of parenting? If you could go back and celebrate the the transition from pre-parental life to having a child, how would you do it?

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two

I’ve given you a week to catch it, but some of you may be waiting for this weekend to go see it, so here’s my Great Big Giant Spoiler Alert: I would assume anyone inclined to see this movie has also read the book, or at least knows how the story ends already. Obviously, if you don’t know how the story ends, this post may have some surprises you don’t want to read yet. But more importantly for most Potter fans is that this post discusses some of the (in my opinion, significant) liberties the movie script took with the source material. IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE YET, I WOULD ENCOURAGE YOU NOT TO READ FURTHER. I don’t know how much plainer I can make it than that. My blog will still be here after you’ve seen it, but I don’t want to spoil anything for you or change your expectations. Moreover, even after you’ve read it, this review is really only useful to explain what I thought about the movie - so if you aren’t really interested in that, then skip this post and read something about what Beagle has done lately. Really, I don’t mind.



Good?




Very well. Most of this post is being written on Friday morning, July 15 after a post-midnight showing. These are some of my immediate impressions. I make this point because, at the time of writing this, I don’t know when I will actually post this to my blog, but it will almost certainly be a week or so after the movie premieres. By then, I may not have the same thoughts and impressions, as I have from time to time been subject to more reasonable thinking after a period of reflection. For example, immediately after I saw Phantom Menace, I thought the movie was okay - maybe even pretty good. It was only after some intense reflection that I realized what a total crap bag that movie was and that I was in total denial because of my attachment to a franchise that had in many ways defined my childhood. I didn’t want to acknowledge that George Lucas was destroying everything good he had ever built. My full thoughts on George Lucas and the downfall of the Star Wars franchise are likely to be a post for another time, but I use this to illustrate that I have occasionally been subject to snap judgments on movies and later thought better of my initial opinions.

Harry Potter did not have the same impact on my imaginative development as Star Wars, and I have been painfully aware of the shortcomings of some of the Potter movies in the past. That said, this is still a series I have loved, and in some ways my reading the series as an adult (albeit a completely geeky adult) gave me greater objectivity than the childlike perspective I had in watching Luke, Leia, Han and Chewy long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. I would never elevate Harry over Han - the two franchises are just too different - but Potter had a lot to offer, even to a reader that was somewhat older than its target audience. This movie is the penultimate culmination of that series - the high-budget, visual telling of the final installment of a great novel that ended a great series of novels. I had high hopes, and that may color my comments some, so please take my review (and anyone else’s) with a grain of salt.

So, there’s that. Disclosures over. Let’s get to it.

This was probably the worst Potter movie of them all.

I realize what a bold statement that is. Any objective fan can recognize that many of the movies fell far, far short of the source material - a problem not at all uncommon for movies based on books. I make this bold statement with a caveat - it is the worst of the Potter films, all things considered. Order of the Phoenix was probably the most painful to watch overall, but it was based on the weakest of the books (in my opinion). In this, the eighth installment of the movie series, the directors and writers had some of the absolute best, most emotionally rending and iconic source material of the entire series. And they pissed it away.

I have to constrain my comments to a few key areas of the movie because otherwise I’d be here all day. First, there’s the significant rewrite that Voldemort is suddenly aware when he loses a Horcrux. Point of order: Why didn’t he notice when the amulet was destroyed in Part One of Deathly Hallows? Why didn’t he already know the Diary was gone? And Harry can hear horcruxes? Interesting. Okay, I guess I can accept that this twist at least reduces the amount of narrative explanation for how he finds the diadem (which was in the wrong place in the movie, btw - Rowling put it where it was for a reason). The confrontation between Snape and Harry immediately after he arrives at Hogwart’s is an obvious and incredibly awkward departure from the book, as is the fact that all of the member’s of Dumbledore’s Army, despite apparently living together in hiding in a secret room (that is not (!?) the room of requirement(!?)) are still active participants in the day to day goings on of Hogwarts? I’m sorry, what? Are we to believe they are in hiding at night, but go about unpunished to their daily classes? Or are they merely having a slumber party, complete with hammocks and representatives from three of the four houses in another common area of the castle, with Snape’s blessing?

I can forgive the minor departures, like Harry never going to Ravenclaw Tower, and Malfoy taking Crabbe and somebody other than Goyle (I guess the actor who previously played Goyle read the script and took a pass on this movie) into the Room of Requirement. Even the failure to utilize the Shrieking Shack in the final movie can be forgiven for the sake of expedience and moving the plot forward. But there are the big changes to be considered. The conversation between Harry, Hermione, and Ron before he leaves the castle for the woods was a huge, glaring error. I call it an error rather than a rewrite for a reason. Obviously this was another intentional departure from the book, but this is one which gets 180 degrees away from the underlying characters of all three of the primary heroes of this story. Harry intentionally avoids talking to his two friends in the books precisely because they would never, under any circumstances, let him go alone to face Voldemort. Here, Hermione pats him on the back with a few goodbye tears and Ron stands there looking like a lump on a log.

That brings up another problem - one which has nothing to do with the script. The three principles utterly failed to show up for most of this movie. Maybe they were emotionally exhausted - I know each of them is capable of decent acting, but you wouldn’t have known it here. The only actors who really seemed to try at all were the young men playing Neville and Draco whose names I am too lazy to check for on IMDB. Oh, and Alan Rickman in the Pensieve scenes, though I was somewhat disappointed with his performance elsewhere.

The piss-poor acting and bad editing decisions collided together into a black hole of suck in the scene in “King’s Cross Station.” In the book, this is maybe the most important scene in the entire series, explaining virtually everything that has not already been resolved, and bringing some emotional catharsis to Harry after spending so long wondering about the true character of his mentor, Dumbledore. Obviously, the studio, the directors, the writers, or someone made a decision to forego most of the major “is Dumbledore who we think he is?” subplot in Deathly Hallows: Part One (a gross miscalculation in my opinion), so a lot of that conversation would have made no sense if it were included in Part Two. Still, Harry meets his lost mentor again in this scene of the movie and we see them feeling.... nothing. This was the coldest, most mechanical scene of the entire movie and at the worst time imaginable. I never liked the replacement Dumbledore, but I thought after the sixth movie he might actually understand the character. Wow was I wrong. Or maybe he does understand the character, he just doesn’t bother to put forth much effort unless he gets at least thirty minutes of screen time. Also, minor note, but as long as I’m dissecting this scene - with that massive budget, was that the best visual background Warner Bros. could give us for King’s Cross? I expected something I couldn’t have designed with Photoshop, but I guess they needed the extra dinero to make Harry and Voldemort fly together later in a totally unnecessary ploy to rake in more bucks on the 3D showings.

The climactic battle was ripped into separate confrontations to stretch the drama, and that might have been okay if they didn’t screw up some of the major elements. In her fight with Bellatrix LeStrange, Mrs. Weasley comes off less like an angry mother defending her child than an incompetent witch who got in a lucky shot. The drama and intensity of the book were totally lost. Neville does come across like a warlock from Mars with fire breathing fists -as he should - but the rewrites ignore the primary effect of Harry’s big sacrifice - that Voldemort’s curses can no longer really hurt the people Harry sought to protect. That was kind of significant. Or maybe I’m the only one who thought so.

In the final battle between Harry and Voldemort, I just have to point out - the only reason their wands were able to lock together in that fashion previously was the twin cores. There’s a reason they don’t do that in the book version of Deathly Hallows. At this point in the story, neither one is using their original Phoenix feather wands (and don’t get me started on the failure by Harry to repair his original wand - that would have added maybe ten seconds to the movie?), so I’m guessing Warner Bros. never bothered to hire a consistency consultant.

My final beef - at least of those I plan to write about - is mostly just to point out some moral ambiguity that didn’t sit well with me. In the early scenes of the movie, the three heroes break into Gringott’s bank with Griphook the Goblin, and Imperius curse one of the senior goblins into being a cooperative git. In a departure from the books, that senior goblin is killed by the dragon in the vaults below the bank, primarily because he has been imperiused and is too stupid to get out of the way. None of our heroes seem terribly concerned about this, including Hermione who has spent the better part of seven books fighting against the oppression of other magical races by wizards. What? Didn’t occur to any of you that this particular innocent death was sort of your fault? Or have we just decided that goblins really are a lesser race?

Any one of these particular flaws standing alone could almost be forgiven. No movie is going to be 100% faithful to a book it is based on, and expecting that is unreasonable. Moreover, I am very aware that much must be sacrificed to make sure the story - the main story - moves forward at a reasonable pace. This was the second part of the final book and still clocks in at two hours plus, so asking for more is somewhat unreasonable. BUT, consider the example of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) Trilogy. Peter Jackson had to cut a metric ton of source material in order to make three still extremely long movies. Despite the inconsistencies and omissions, LOTR still made a damn good movie series, and many people who never read the books have loved those movies. Potter, while being one of the best and most entertaining book series I’ve ever read, failed to come close in more than half of the movies. The vast majority of people have either read the books or are dragged by people who have read the books. And good thing - you would undoubtedly be completely lost if you hadn’t read the books beforehand.

I will say this for the final Harry Potter movie: it gave me what I wanted. Something still felt missing after reading the last book, like I wanted the story to go on a little bit more... or maybe it was simpler and I just knew there were a few more movies to come so it wasn’t really over until then. After seeing this, I know it’s really over, and while I may have to go read Deathly Hallows one more time to purge this experience from my memory, I don’t have any immediate need for something new from the Harry Potter Universe.

Harsh, I know. Feel free to leave your flaming feedback. It’s just my opinion.

Iconic Moments in Growing Your Inner Geek

I would never presume to write a definitive list of “things you must do to be a proper geek.” The reasons for such discretion are primarily practical - I don’t want to deal with my Constant Readers’ “constructive criticism” that I forgot this or that, or should not have included something else. Also, there is the fundamental disagreement amongst interested parties as to what precisely constitutes a geek (as opposed to a nerd, dork, dweeb, etc.) and exactly what type of geek a particular person is. Eventually, we will have to have some sort of U.N. sanctioned international summit to resolve this question (as if the U.N. ever resolves anything - political zing!), but until then I will go with a fairly broad definition of a geek as someone with an inordinate interest in one or more areas of popular or niche culture which have nothing to do with athleticism. “Geek” is in no way mutually exclusive from the other terms mentioned above - one can be a “geek” and a “nerd” - but one is not the same as the other (though I and others may occasionally use such terms interchangeably out of literary laziness).

Understand, when I use the word “geek” I (a) paint myself with the same brush, and (b) do not mean it as a derogatory term in any form or fashion. Urban Dictionary (yeah, I know - I need a new source) describes geeks as “the people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.” I think the spirit of that definition is accurate more often than not, as geeks tend to be people who think outside the box, and are non-conformists in some sense other than the really annoying teenage angst sense where “no one understands me, so I’ll go listen to Modest Mouse and grow out my bangs.” Geeks are well served in later life by being their own people, while often being ostracized in early life because they didn’t conform to some arbitrary standard of interests, hobbies, or fashion.

One can be a geek in a single category, as in someone who is well adjusted in most respects but has an unhealthy fascination with all things Disney. Not that I know anyone like that. Ahem. More often, geeks tend to hold interests in multiple “geek” categories - sci-fi, fantasy, role playing games, video games, comic books, etc. These are the more well-rounded geeks, but too many geek interests can counteract the constructive aspects of being a geek by making one a lazy slacker.

One can be a geek about a specific movie, TV, or book franchise, or one can get geeky about a more mainstream hobby - band is a great example. You knew them in high school, and may have been one yourself - there were kids in band, and then there were band geeks. Many of my friends are proudly self-described band geeks. I myself was a theater geek in high school. My parents wouldn’t sign the permission slip for me to warm the bench on the football team, so I had to do something, and that was where I found my niche. In the old days, AV clubs were havens for geeks, and though they probably aren’t called that anymore, any high school club involving computer based design, film-production, or audio/visual editing of some other kind is probably filled with geeks.

So, like I was saying, there’s a lot to take into account when discussing the general concept of “geeks,” so a definitive list of geek behaviors, or key moments in geekdom would be hard to pull together. That said, I am a geek and I know a lot of geeks, and there are many, many common experiences shared in and amongst those geeks I’ve known over the years. Herein, I offer a short list of Iconic Moments in Growing Your Inner Geek. Most people will not have had all of these experiences (I myself have not had all of them) but most well-rounded geeks will probably have had more than one. Enjoy.

Watching the Original Trilogy - The capitalization is not poor grammar, as there is only one Original Trilogy. Not all geeks are Star Wars fans, though it is a rare geek who truly dislikes episodes four through six in their original format, and an even rarer geek who has not at least watched these three films (cough cough *wife* cough cough). Star Wars was a defining cultural achievement, both for cinema special effects and sci-fi in general, as it allowed the concept of “space opera” to be part of popular, as opposed to niche, culture. Besides, if you can’t whip out a convenient Yoda quote when someone sets you up by saying “I’ll try,” you are socially crippled. I grew up in a generation that had “lightsaber duels” with broom handles almost as often as we had “sword fights.” From a distance they look the same, but the sound effects are miles apart. More importantly, we grew up innocent of such nonsense as Jar-Jar Binks and pod-racing intergalactic dictators. Needless to say, my early memories of the Trilogy are strong in the Force.

Mocking the Prequel Trilogy - No one hates like an old-school Star Wars fan scorned. Unlike the Original Trilogy, however, one does not need to have actually seen the movies to establish this geek bona fides, as popular culture, Youtube parodies, and RiffTrax have given us multiple ways to appreciate the finer points of the best franchise ever squandered without actually sitting through seven+ hours of excruciatingly painful “entertainment.” Midichlorians... George Lucas, you jackass.
In the same vein as this experience, but eliciting slightly less rage, is mocking the alterations to the Original Trilogy added in the “updated” versions. Among the more egregious - Greedo shooting first, the awful CGI Jabba, and the mighty “rings of doom” exploding outward from the two destroyed Death Stars. Unlimited resources and that was how you “fixed” the explosions George? Poor show old chap.

Rolling Dice- Depending on what phase of life you first experienced table-top role playing games (RPGs), you may today deny ever having had the experience, or avoid conversations where the subject comes up, but you’re just denying your inner geek. Many of us have known the joy, at one point or another, of sitting around a table drinking heavily caffeinated beverages until three a.m. and pretending to be a level seven half-elven ranger with a Ring of Sustenance, whose actions (and the outcomes of those actions) are ultimately determined by the roll of a twelve-sided die and the whims of a Game Master, or GM. And we’ve also experienced the boredom of putting up with the player at the table whose role play side-story took two hours to resolve with the GM while the rest of us grow more and more sleepy and likely to take our dice and leave. Table top role-playing is a rite of passage for many geeks, whether its the traditional medieval sword and sorcery variety (i.e., Dungeons and Dragons), or something more contemporary, or even futuristic. There are RPGs with themes ranging from western to pirate, space to other dimensional, ancient past to ridiculously unlikely future.
The big problem most people have with table top RPGs is the speed of the game, as calculating results by hand with the aid of dice is time consuming, and arguing over fine points of rules with a GM or other players is tedious. Video game RPGs (Final Fantasy, for example) eliminate that element but take away much of the social aspect. Enter Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, which have become intensely popular in recent years, even drawing in the advertising credentials of significant (and less than significant) celebrities. These games allow you to be social - ostensibly - by playing online with friends or people you have never met, but have nothing like the social experience of sitting at a table with a few friends and going old school with paper and pencil and a few dice. Hopefully, as big as World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs have become, they will not replace the table top experience for the next generation of geeks. That’s where it all started, and there’s still a place

Reading LOTR and/or Harry Potter - No, I do not think the two are interchangeable. In my view, both have a great deal of merit, but I include them together because they are exceedingly popular, exceedingly geeky book series, and each to some extent defines a generation of readers. In the sixties, LOTR (Lord of the Rings, for the uninitiated) fans scrawled “Frodo Lives” on subway walls in New York, and took pilgrimages to the home of J.R.R. Tolkien. Apparently, Mr. Tolkien did not understand what all the fuss was about, but was generally quite pleased at how well received his books were.
In the last decade, Potter fans have clogged bookstores for midnight BOOK releases (think about that crazy sh**), often wearing costumes. I’ve seen five year olds devouring the eight hundred page tomes of the Potter series, so clearly there is something to these books. I myself destroyed The Deathly Hallows three days before taking the bar exam, and threatened anyone who wanted to dissect the exam with me after the fact with spoiling the end of the story. It was very effective (shocking, that law schools would be full of geeks).
Both book series have inspired incredibly successful movies (of varying quality), but nothing about the movies replaces the first experience of reading the books themselves.

Utilizing Star Trek in everyday conversation - Whether it’s a direct quote, an homage to the Shatner’s broken delivery style, analogizing a situation to an engineering problem Geordi LaForge had to overcome, or simply testing a possible love-interest with the query “Death Star versus Borg Cube - who wins?” (this is a story for another time), the first time one references Star Trek in everyday life is a special occasion indeed. Like with Star Wars, one does not have to be a Trekkie (or Trekker) to be a true geek, but also like with Star Wars, it is a rare geek that doesn’t have a passing familiarity with some of the characters, situations, and actors of the iconic series. A certain amount of mocking is to be expected, as most fans acknowledge the original series had weak points, the first few seasons of TNG were terrible, and Voyager might as well take a long walk off a short pier. But unlike with the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, most Trek fan ribbing is good natured, and for the most part the bad is enjoyed right along side the good.

Attending your first “Con” - “Cons,” or conventions, generally implies either a thematic convention of small to medium stature (for example, a Star Trek convention in Akron, Ohio, or a Comic Book Convention in Charlotte, NC) or one of the much larger geek meccas which occur throughout the year in major U.S. cities which have no particular theme and seemingly cover all things geek (Comic Con in San Diego - going on right now! - or Dragon Con in Atlanta later in the fall). Cons are all about fully embracing whatever it is that has drawn you to the Con, which inevitably is some incredibly geeky side of you. Whether it is an interest in gaming (board or role play), anime, sci-fi, fantasy, comic books, the latest project by Joss Wheedon/A.J. Abrams/Chris Nolan/Marvel Studios, the Dresden Files, or just fishing around for fellow cosplay aficionados (if you don’t know, you’re better for it, and I’m not explaining the concept), there is a Con or Cons for you. Think what you will about the people who show up in wizard robes and chain mail - you are only in a position to judge at all because you are at the same Con. Embrace your geekdom and put on your Spock ears.

Having your first midnight movie hangover - Off the top of my head, I cannot think of movie that had a midnight premiere that doesn’t qualify as a geeky movie in some form or fashion.* The latest round of Batman films, Harry Potter, the Star Wars Prequels, the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot - the only So if you’ve ever been to a midnight showing of any movie, the odds are good your have some geek in you. Depending on your age at the time (midnight movies tend to be dominated by high school and college age geeks) you may have bounced back easily, but the mignight movie hangover is an experience unique to the fully formed, post-college geek. There are no more excuses. You’re old enough to know better. You’re still out doing this crap. You are Geek. Go roar, or something.


* Although the Twilight Saga had midnight showings, and every self-respecting geek I know despises Twilight fans almost as much as they hate Jar-Jar Binks, there is no denying that if you have an affinity for werewolves and vampires, you are probably harboring some geeky tendencies. Therefore, I grudgingly include even this detestable franchise and those who stayed up to watch the premieres in this discussion. Losers.

These are just a few iconic geek-oriented experiences that may help you identify whether or not you are, in fact, a geek. If you recognize yourself in some of these experiences, congratulations - you may be a geek. Keep doing what you’re doing and let your geek grow. If you haven’t had any of these experiences... what the heck is wrong with you? Even “cool kids” get references to Kirk and Spock!

Registering

The difference between creating a gift registry for a wedding and creating a gift registry for a baby is the difference between an autumn drive in the mountains and having a cheese grater rubbed over your knuckles while someone threatens to kick your dog. The foliage tour may not be your cup of tea, but it need not be unpleasant, and can actually be quite enjoyable. The latter, however, is both immediately painful and causes you immense disquiet for the future well-being of another creature which is dear to you.

In the context of wedding registries, the following questions, statements, and lamentations might be made:

“Do we really need formal china?”
“Who in our family is going to pay for a $300 pillow, let alone a set of two?”
“Hell yes, register for the bar kit!”
“Do you need to make ray gun noises every time you scan an item?”
“No, beer and video games are not appropriate registry items.”
“This is kind of fun.”

By way of contrast, the following might be said while registering for a new baby:

“What degree of impact has this product been tested for?”
“How many times has this product been recalled?”
“Why are you implying my child will die if I don’t by this?”
“What is this? What does it do? Who would need that? Why? Can you start over please?”
“There are different kinds?”
“This is mildly terrifying.”

The difference obviously is that the wedding registry is all about the wants (framed as needs, no doubt, but wants all the same) of two individuals who presumably resemble adults and are able to fend for themselves. The baby registry, while full of wants and whims, is primarily about the needs of a helpless, squealing newborn, and is being overseen in most cases by those same two presumed-adults, a year or several down the line, who are slowly realizing they don’t have a clue what adulthood and responsibility are all about. There is immense pressure to choose correctly, to cover every base, and to do everything in your power to protect your new child from Entropy - that is, the scientific principle that the universe is out to kill us all.

We put this pressure on ourselves, completely ignoring or forgetting that thousands of years of human history have passed with human infants wearing strips of cloth or nothing at all, sleeping on hay, and playing with sticks and rocks in order to get all of us here. We defy history, choosing instead to give our own children better than one in ten odds of survival by buying the latest and greatest gear rolled out by Graco, or Britax for the big spenders. The pressure is not eased at all by the overt upselling of the big-box baby stores, where the employees will pass you from department to department on your introductory tour, give you intense demonstrations of the high end products and not quite tell you that your child will be killed or maimed if you buy a lesser product. The big-box stores not geared specifically for babies are no better, since they just hand you the registry gun and assume you know what is best for your baby. Right.

All of that is a meandering preamble to the real reason for this post: listing and mocking some baby oriented products. These products were chosen more or less at random for usefulness, ridiculousness, mock-worthiness, or sheer oddity. And because I was able to find them with a simple Google search.

1. Waste Disposal bags - the official description needs no help: “One for really hard-core greenies in keeping with current trends to cut down waste and keep in tune with natural rhythms. The idea is to monitor Baby’s bowel movements, and, instead of clothing them in diapers, let them do their thing whenever and wherever they please. The trick is to always have your 100% bio-degradable ‘baby poop scoop’ bag at hand to ensure their waste doesn’t become the planet’s.”

Yeah. It’s just like what you use when you take your dog for a walk. For your kid.

2. Pee-Pee Tee-pee - Doesn’t take much imagination to figure these out, but here’s a hint: my wife and I won’t need these disposable items for our daughter.


3. The Zaky Pillow - Pillow designed to look and feel like disembodied hands holding your baby in place. Have to admit, I found this on a fellow father/blogger’s site, and I have to agree with his assessment. Creepiest kid product ever. See picture if you don't believe me.

4. Milkscreen Test Strips - Brilliant little invention changes color if your breast milk is above a specified concentration of alcohol. Because let’s be honest, after nine months, no one gets to see the damn kid without bringing mommy a bottle of wine.

5. mamaRoo - Hi-tech “swing” features numerous movement setting designed to sooth your baby, including (inevitably) the setting for which it is named - the gentle hopping of a kangaroo. This device probably works wonders, seeing as it take advantage of the soothing genetic memory every human child shares of riding around in a marsupial’s pouch.

6. Any item, clothing or otherwise, ever featured on Toddler’s in Tiaras - Your three-year old doesn’t need high heels, diamond earrings, or anything made by Louis Vuitton. Especially if you are buying her formula with WIC vouchers.

What’s the most ridiculous baby-oriented product you’ve run across? More importantly, for us future parents, what’s the most useful?