Markowitz, the guy who won the nobel prize for his discovery of this and the mathematical proof teaches at my school.

Here’s the question: if it makes the most sense to give all of your money to the market, where it is spread very thinly across many different companies in many different industries in many different countries; where does this become ideologically different than socialism (from a personal perspective)?

Basically your saved labor is stored universally to be usable by you as you determine that you need. In this process you end up owning a small piece of all of the worlds capital and trade.

I feel like Steve Jobs/Jesse James.

And its all thanks to the internet. Thanks internet!

Heath Ledger’s second to last film before death. Heath nailed Joker. I like the revised interpretation of the character as compared to Jack Nicholson’s in the earlier Batman. Ledger’s voice and mannerisms were great licking his lips as he spoke was a great touch, alluding to both severe nervous habits and a need to address leaking cheek scars.

The plot was good, though long. I left thinking that it was really about Heath’s portrayal of the Joker. Which makes sense, filming had completed and editing had not. I read that the director left Heath’s performance intact, cutting as little as possible and not enhancing or altering.

Beyond this portrayal of the Joker, I get a little weary of Hollywood’s continuing strategy to release more and more sequels or remakes of childhood entertainment. Of course we’re going to go see the next Batman, Indiana Jones, Spiderman, Pirates of the Caribbean, Terminator blockbuster! How could we miss it?

What’s interesting? The paradigm has tilted. I remember popular opinion, indeed movie dialogs from Clerks and Scream, belaboring the ridiculousness of sequels. (Except for Godfather movies they claimed). Someone at the big production studios saw through that and realized that if they keep releasing the next serial they will generate larger and larger profits so long as they aren’t complete garbage.

From a transplanted comic book perspective, I can’t comment as an expert. But the movie seemed to fulfill the recent stylistic requirements of the plot as a giant robot wondering through the movie and picking up characters and scenes, peering at them and putting them back down before it drags the main, main characters into the next. You can see the classic comic book angles, the lighting and almost the borders of each frame as plot elements are put together in a static-seeming flowchart consisting of boxes and arrows manner. That plus batman’s gear was bitchin. I loved that during daylight, batman drives a lamborghini beyron or a bright red sport bike.

Favorite scenes? Joker dressed as a nurse tending to two-face, batman driving his night motorcycle, batman absconding with Lau from Hong Kong and the prisoner on the ferry dumping the detonator out the window.

Great film

In fact, my wife changed her own oil before me. (if you don’t count changing my motorcycle’s oil).

This life milestone came late in my life not because it is so difficult but instead because paying someone to do it for you is so cheap! Normally you only save 5-10$ by doing it yourself… And for half an hour’s work? Take your car to Jiffy Lube.

Unfortunately having a car with a diesel engine precludes the $19.95 oil change. Jiffy Lube type shops either won’t change my car’s oil, or will but don’t do the filter, or will and charge me $80-$90.

What to do? Step up to the plate. I bought myself the “Mityvac 7600″. Basically instead of dropping the pan or opening the drain plug underneath your car you suck it out through the dipstick tube. The prejudice is that this method isn’t as effective, but Mercedes actually specifies this method over getting underneath the car.

The mityvac worked like a charm, but I didn’t. I spilled oil everywhere. Next time I’ll get a funnel to use when pouring the oil from the mityvac to the empty oil bottle.

Simo is an Australian Cattle Dog

Australian Cattle Dogs are known as one of the smarter breeds which appealed to us. I like the idea of asking a dog to do something and watching them do it.

So far his favorite things to do are bite our fingers and chase our feet (he is a herd dog afterall).

We bought him a special ball to distract him. It’s as large as he is, he picks it up and carries it around growling at it.

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While she finishes her book, and to compensate for my faster pace in reading I will be carrying two books with me to reading time.

I watched the 1980 something film “Ghandi” recently which is phenomenal. I love learning about history. Ben Kingsley nailed the part. I can’t believe a white guy played Ghandi and made it work…  but the movie jostled my curiosity about India and Indian culture.

So I immediately jumped into a book written by a British Imperialist. What a Jackass.

But that is an interesting point. Rudyard Kipling is known both as a reporter of the colonialists, but at the same time is considered to have been critical of Britain’s involvement in India as well.

Strangely the book is a coming of age/spy novel which was completely unexpected.

Kim grows up an orphan as an Indian street urchin, but is actually the abandoned son of an Irish Soldier in the Indian city of Lahore.

The book deals with his travels with a Tibetan Buddhist Lama that he meets and his eventual training as a spy.

In the book Kim repeatedly asks himself who is… but only when he’s alone. He draws his identity from those around him: As a Sahib at St. Xaiver’s School, As a Priest with the Buddhist Lama and as a spy with his other mentor Mahbub Ali.

This was the most significant point to me. Growing up as a second child I feel that my identity was frequently more flexible than those around me as a way to avoid strife.

I wonder if I would make a good spy?

Since I have only 1 free month per school year (between fall and winter sessions) I want to make the most of it.

I started worrying that I was digesting to quickly to enjoy. I have decided to write short book reports to enforce thoughtful reading.

This time, the helpful mail failure notice sent my way said that my “user spam score” was -5.9 / 7.0.

Obviously the mail delivery program was applying some heuristics developed for it or that it determined through machine learning.

When I reread the email that bounced, I did so with an eye toward what could cause my email to trigger the bounce.

The email in question was a conversation of consecutive replies between several parties. Due to the esoteric nature of our exchange, the words “chills down my spine”, “moods”, “puppies”, “forceful”, “free” all came up.

I am too creative. the robots are going to win.

Is the website of my most comforting radio program.

As a child my parents listened nearly constantly to Public Radio in South Dakota. This is something people do in the midwest- especially the educated people of the upper plains states. Minnesota is probably the lynch pin of public radio in the universe. If you check who writes or calls in to NPR its usually someone from St. Paul, Minneapolis or Santa Barbara.

Anyhow. I remember being utterly bored and suffering terribly from the ultra volume (common talk radio problem on poor speakers: bass frequencies perfectly transmitted, treble not so much. To hear the story you have to crank the volume, thereby subjecting your ears to more damage and so the cycle goes. You can imagine that life-long listeners end up with those ear trumpets, and a chronic condition of the “eh?”s).

As we grow older, so do our tastes tend towards those of our parents. The “right” way to do things was long ago brainwashed into our fragile little heads as we agreed to do anything if the radio was turned down.

Now I listen constantly, as I do spend approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes/day in the car and 88 times longer on the weekends fixing the various 20+ year old parts in it.

At the end of a long drive away from a long day at work, I am usually within 3 miles of home when the programming on NPR switches from BBC world coverage to classical music. At this junction there is a 5ish minute segment called “The Writer’s Almanac” which is spoken by Garrison Keillor and includes brief notes on the day in history as it pertains to writing and writers and a poem.

Garrison’s voice is perfect for story telling (Tales from Lake Wobegon) and more perfecter for poetry.

The combination of truly beautiful images, brilliant speaking voice, time of day and my usual proximity to home and my wife makes this segment reassuring. Coming in from the cold reassuring, parents paying for your dinner/vacation even though you’re old enough to pay reassuring and often makes my day.

And so: “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”

Those of us that have been waiters dream of floundering along helplessly during a “rush”, being perpetually in the weeds being completely unable to give good service to the point of customers walking out, the wrong food being delivered and excessive stress.

I have dreamt the waiter equivalent of dying.

I was working at IHOP again in the middle of the evening (when waiters are usually cut down to bare bones due to low demand at a pancake house) when I got BLITZED. It was the normal dream; I could not remember my server number, was newly back on the job etc. etc. But I kicked ASS. I dealt pancakes like they were cards, I slung omelettes like they were fastballs and I refilled coffee before they could even take a second sip.

I was having such a good time when I woke up, that I intentionally went back to sleep through my alarm just to enjoy the 1 in a million dream.

Of the possible 6 pieces of clothing I could be missing on a first day of dream-school, I was wearing all six. And a hat.