Oh, come on...

Baigent and Leigh are suing Dan Brown over the Da Vinci Code. I still haven't read Da Vinci Code, but even a cursory synopsis of the story reveals how dependent it is on the thesis of Baigent and Leigh's book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (I wonder what Henry Lincoln is up to?) I don't know how strong Baigent and Leigh's legal claim is, since with claims like this it's all in the way ideas are presented. According to the article, the judge suggested that it's harder now, with internet and all, to know the origin of whatever one happens to read. Perhaps that's true, but it doesn't mean that everything online is free for the taking. Also, it's just not possible that Brown could have done any research on the Priory of Sion and not come across HB,HG.

Ah, here's a longer article about the lawsuit from the Telegraph. Apparently, Lincoln is ill. According to this, a character in the book actually refers to HB,HG. So, as I recall, did a character in Foucault's Pendulum. As for their complaint, Baigent says that Brown's fictional work using their thesis makes it "far easier to dismiss as a farrago of nonsense."

So, that's what makes it easy?

It's "old TV stars dying" week

First Don Knotts, then Darren McGavin, now Dennis Weaver. I grew up watching Barney Fife and remember McGavin best from The Night Stalker, less from the short-lived series than from the two great TV movies (the original and The Night Strangler) that used to play often on UHF channels when I was a kid. I didn't watch much of Gunsmoke or McCloud, but remember Weaver mostly from Duel and his brief, memorable appearance in Touch of Evil.

Media Review - The William Shatner DVD Club Month 1

I've been terribly remiss in following up on the exciting, new William Shatner DVD club. I received my introductory 2-disc mailing several weeks ago, but just got around to watching something last weekend.

The first entries follow a lycanthropy theme: Ginger Snaps and Wolves of Wall Street. I've seen Ginger Snaps before, even writing about it and its sequel on this page. As I said then, I liked Ginger Snaps, but not as much as its intense, bleak sequel. I'm certainly not unhappy to own Ginger Snaps, but haven't felt the need to watch it again since receiving it.

I hadn't seen Wolves of Wall Street before, however. I think I've passed it by on the new release wall at Hollywood video, but never thought to pick it up. It's a David DeCoteau movie, which doesn't recommend it to me especially, despite the fact that I think I've seen a dozen or more of the films on his lengthy filmography. Anyone who's done as much work for Charles Band as DeCoteau has is bound to have made a bunch of stuff I've seen. Since he quit Band's assembly line and started pumping out movies for Image, Regent and City Heat I haven't seen much. I think I saw one of the Brotherhood movies and the Mummy movie.

DeCoteau's movies tend to be technically competent despite some thin budgets, weak scripts and short shooting schedules. I had noticed, however, that he favors gratuitous displays of undressed young men, rather than women. Reading reviews of some of his other movies, I gather he's developed something of a reputation for "homoeroticism" in his movies, which is male-horror-movie-fan-speak for buff guys in their underwear, possibly admiring or at least subtly displaying interest in one another. When women do this in horror flicks, it's called "hot girl-on-girl action," but when it's guys it's "homoeroticism." Regardless, on a purely subjective level I'm much more inclined to go for "hot girl-on-girl action" than "homoeroticism."

But, here we are. Wolves of Wall Street is DeCoteau's film of a Barry Levy script about modern werewolves working as stockbrokers. Released in 2002, it came out in the wake of the dot-com collapse, the Enron bankruptcy, and other high-profile corporate scandals. Stock brokerage firms didn't figure prominently in the scandals, but the themes of unrestrained pursuit of profit (even imaginary profit) and loyalty to the firm overriding all others could have been used to give the film much more resonance than it has. As it is, the movie is something of a lost opportunity.

A lot of werewolf movies use lycanthropy as a metaphor for something. In He Said, She Said, Kevin Bacon's character has some pseudo-profound reading of the Lon Chaney Wolf Man that I can't remember, although I think it had something to do with sex. That's the typical reading of lycanthropy, though, as the suppressed predatory sexual impulses lying just below the surface of civilized man. The metaphor has probably never been more keenly exploited than in Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory (just by the title alone.) The Jack Nicholson movie Wolf, which I thought was based on Jim Harrison's novel of that name until I read it, takes the dichotomy between civilization and human nature pretty seriously, but doesn't do as much with it as Wolfen, I think.

Anyway, one thing the classic Wolf Man and other prominent lycanthrope stories have in common is the loneliness of the title character. With a few exceptions, werewolves are lone wolves. In some tales, like Wes Craven's last embarrassment, Cursed, lycanthropes are actively hostile toward one another. Wolves of Wall Street takes a different approach you don't see too often, combining the predatory ruthlessness of werewolf mythology with a pack mentality. This isn't a bad idea, but Wolves of Wall Street doesn't do a particularly good job of working it out.

The movie certainly isn't lacking in atmosphere, although much of it is artificial and a bit silly. Wolfe Brothers, the highly successful cutthroat brokerage firm where protagonist Jeff lands a job after every other firm in New York turns him down, is housed in a sinister gothic-looking space bathed in chiaroscuro, adorned with elaborately ornamented furniture and fixtures like a medieval church, and peopled with obnoxious, vacuous young men who are mostly indistinguishable from Jeff. Their downtown New York is almost entirely vacant and under a constant full moon, apparently. The presumptive leader of the "pack" is Dyson Keller, played by Eric Roberts, who always does a decent job. Still don't know what happened to him after Star 80, though. Anyway, Roberts gives a meaty, almost histrionic performance as the alpha dog of Wolfe Brothers; he even pisses on Jeff at one point to demonstrate his hierarchical superiority. We don't actually see the pissing, luckily.

Despite his early insistence that success as a broker is his utmost desire, for which he would sacrifice anything and everything, he is soon involved with Annabella (blatant Poe-ism, although she's called Annie throughout the movie) who has a history with Wolfe Brothers. Since she initially referred Jeff to the firm, this isn't too ridiculously coincidental, but it only compounds the incredible intimacy of this film's Manhattan. Annie's ex was a broker at Wolfe Brothers, so you can't help wondering what's going through her head for much of the movie. She holds brokers in general and the ethic of the Wolfe Brothers specifically in low regard and seems to like Jeff from the outset, but sends him to the firm anyway. Then, after telling him she's not interested in a relationship, capitulates after his unrelenting pursuit (giving him a silver pen as a gift!) even though he's now working at Wolfe Brothers. Maybe Annie is attracted to the stockbroker type even as she's repelled by their attitudes, but we don't get enough information to make such conclusions. Annie and her relationship with Jeff is depicted quite perfunctorily.

Not surprising anyone, Jeff undergoes certain changes after joining Wolfe Bros. DeCocteau makes an interesting and likely unpopular choice by never showing anyone turn into a wolf onscreen. Given the obsession of horror audiences with FX and monsters, I'm sure a lot of people were disappointed. Despite never seeing werewolves, the lycanthropy theme is more than figurative, as the members of the firm are depicted as having superhuman senses and strength, and they die after being pierced by silver (one guess with what.)

The choice not to show any wolves could have been used as an advantage, to shift focus away from the supernatural dimension of the lycanthropy metaphor and toward the changes that result from joining a corrupting culture, but it comes across more like a result of budget limitations. In fact, Wolfe Brothers isn't much of a culture at all, more like a tribe. There's no substance at all to them other than that they are predatory. If even Pretty Woman could spend a little time dealing with the ethics of corporate finance, you'd think any movie could do so.

I guess I'm guilty of reviewing the movie I wanted to see rather than what I saw, and what I wanted to see, apparently, was some combination of The Howling and The Corporation. Still, the movie I saw has little to be said about it. It's not incompetent, but pretty thin and unsatisfying, even on its own terms.

Netflix throttling

A law prof discusses the Netflix class action suit and settlement in this column. Ramasastry says essentially the same things I've been saying about all this stuff. Even though a lot of the complaints people have been making against Netflix is that throttling is "unfair," the only thing that makes it illegal is that it is contrary to the service contract customers make with Netflix when they sign on. More specifically, it's that their description of terms in advertisements are inaccurate. Ramasastry doesn't mention it, but the strongest claim in the class action suit was statutory, authorized by the Lanham Act (a federal law that governs false advertising and other consumer protection issues) which authorizes private causes of action like this one, but also authorizes the kind of actions she suggests would have been better, like a suit from the California AG or the FTC. Given a choice between the two, I'd always prefer a state agency to sue on my behalf than hire a class-action plaintiffs' lawyer.

Now, Ramasastry isn't completely exhaustive in describing the legal issues surrounding this practice, but I can understand why not. You could characterize what Netflix is doing as a form of price discrimination, but backwards. Rather than charge different prices to different users, they provide different users paying the same price different services because of their estimate of the price elasticity and cost differential of those users. It's a combination of two forms of Pigovian price discrimination: second-order, in which prices are different based on the different costs of providing goods and services, and third-order, where providers estimate that certain users are more sensitive to marginal changes in price than others and act accordingly. As I read Netflix's justification of their shipping priority policy--and as Ramasastry reads it, apparently--Netflix calculates that providing high volume service is more costly than lower volume service, so high-volume service is limited, "throttled," in order to limit the volume of DVDs received to a certain per-unit cost. In addition, they estimate that low-volume users are more likely to drop their service if they don't get higher priority on popular titles and quicker turnaround when they do return discs, so the service is tailored to provide that.

That said, this kind of price discrimination (via service discrimination) is perfectly legal, which is why Ramasastry doesn't bring it up. Or, it's legal as long as it isn't flatly contradicted by Netflix's description of their services in advertising. I've spent the last few minutes trying to figure out how Netflix's price discrimination (or anything Netflix might do along these lines) could possibly run afoul of the Robinson-Patman Act (which prohibits certain kinds of price discrimination) and can't think of anything. You see these kinds of price discriminations whenever you buy a family pack of toilet paper at a lower per-unit price than a single roll or buy a discounted ticket to a movie theater.

On the other hand, I've read a couple of defenders of Netflix's priority policy online (low-volume users, assuredly) argue that the company is not only allowed to throttle users, regardless of stated and advertised terms, but should do so in order to fulfill their duty to stockholders. I read this stuff some time ago and can't find it now. I wish I could; it was really amusing. The argument is, if high-volume users cost too much to be profitable, the service they provide should be restricted to the point at which they provide an acceptable rate of return. This is like saying that, if I'm raising cattle and you pay me X dollars for 300 adult cattle to be delivered after they are fully grown, but my estimate of how much it'll cost to raise them is too low and I can only make a profit by giving you 200 cattle, then I should only give you 200 cattle, otherwise I'm violating my duties to my investors. Of course, recent corporate scandals have demonstrated that many people, inside and outside management circles, have come to believe that if increasing stock value and earnings means having to rip off customers, then by God it's the duty of management to rip off the customers.

It's worth pointing out that Netflix still describes their non-capped accounts as "unlimited" even though the throttling practice probably does impose greater limits on the number of discs one can rent beyond those imposed by the mail. As long as the policy works how they say it works, however, it's legal.

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature... and I won't have it!

In regard to this whole Dubai Ports thing, I'm trying to imagine President Bush giving the Arthur Jensen speech (audio) to Pete King or Chuck Schumer, and I just can't. Maybe we should elect Ned Beatty president.

Quick post for the road

I'm on such a roll I figured I should put up a little something on a Friday evening. A friend just sent me this exercise in unnecessary formalization that I thought I'd share. The solution seems reasonable, and since men like John here are undoubtedly used to doing things randomly, playing a mixed strategy shouldn't come with too much difficulty.

Supreme Court Justiceship - 4 times harder than love

SCOTUSblog has this post on Justice Sam Alito's formal investiture ceremony, which took place this afternoon. The ceremony, Lyle Denniston notes, was four minutes long.

As Tavares informed us years ago, it only takes a minute to fall in love. This means that becoming a Supreme Court justice requires four times the amount of time that falling in love does, and with the simple assumption that effort/time is constant across both activities, that means that it is four times as hard to become a Supreme Court Justice as it is to fall in love.

Of course, per Too Short in "I Want to Be Free (and that's the truth)," "it only takes a second to pop the trunk," presumably to retrieve a firearm of some sort given the context. That means falling in love is sixty times harder (no wonder Too Short never does it) and becoming a justice is 240 times harder than opening an automobile trunk to shoot someone.

Dick Cheney - Hard Target

This Cheney hunting incident is interesting, mostly for the way in which it's turned all of the American newsmedia into the Daily Show, although it was headed that way regardless. The Howard Kurtz column this morning explains how interested parties and commentators aren't sure whether this is just an unfortunate random (and really funny, unless you're the guy Cheney shot) incident involving the VP or whether it says something serious about the administration, in an indirect sense, while on the surface being just an unfortunate random (and really funny) incident involving the VP. Cheney's lack of accessibility and permanent scowl do nothing but compound the indirect significance, curiousness and hilarity of the incident.

Yes, the story does demonstrate in personal, easy to digest terms the degree of secrecy the VP likes to maintain, his discomfort with and distrust of the media, and his surprisingly good aim (that was a 30-yard head shot, after all.) Still, there's something about this incident that still doesn't make complete sense, even with these factors taken into account.

The shooting has been universally proclaimed an accident, but what kind of accident? I suspect that the VP's choice to unload while Mr. Whittington was in the line of fire is actually more understandable than we're being led to believe. I suggest that Whittington made the mistake of wearing a somewhat weathered jacket or a worn out pair of slacks, or had forgotten to shave for a few days and the Vice President reasonably mistook him for one of the homeless Vietnam veterans that he and his wealthy friends usually hunt on these trips. Certainly, that's a mistake we can all see ourselves making.

I anticipate that Lance Henriksen will appear at a press conference later this week, after which the press interest will fade.

Robots are the new zombies

No, this doesn't mean that some group called the Robots have hired Rod Argent (damnit.) Robots are taking over the cultural position that was until recently held by zombies. Zombies seemed to be the metaphor of choice for activists or performance artists or whoever it was doing all that shambling last year, now I suspect robots are moving into that position.

An article in the NYT today covers the new book How to Survive a Robot Uprising (also reviewed today) and a reference is made in the article to the new play Heddatron, which has something to do with Ibsen and robots. Shades of Hamletmachine. It's only a matter of time, if it hasn't happened already, before street theater activists and pop culture leaders take up the metal helmet for other purposes. Of course, some people were ahead of the curve.

A few years ago, The Zombie Survival Guide appeared, offering sage advice for that impending apocalyptic horde of living dead. This new robot book appears to be a transparent copycat volume, although it could be entertaining if the references to Sealab 2021 outnumber the references to that Will Smith movie.

Turns out, though, that instead of actual zombies all we could expect from the last few years was an apocalyptic horde of zombie movies. Despite my enthusiasm for zombie movies, I've been slow to catch up with them all and not encouraged by the fact that a lot of the new celluloid entries in the ongoing story of Raymond Moody's worst nightmare I have seen have sucked.

Just this weekend, I saw the "Sci Fi Pictures Original" House of the Dead 2, which wasn't that bad. Anything with horror movie stalwart Emmanuelle Vaugier is likely to be better than it would be otherwise, but the makers of this flick were kind enough not to take the material too seriously without taking the audience for a bunch of conditioned monkeys who get a banana without fail every time they push a button. The subtitle of HotD2, "Dead Aim," didn't mean anything, but horror movie subtitles so rarely mean anything it doesn't even matter. After a point, subtitles to horror movies are nothing more than randomly generated words to distinguish the chapters in a franchise. In fact, you can establish a hierarchy or evolutionary progression of sorts for horror movie franchises based on whether or not the franchise makes it past the numbering phase to the number and subtitling phase and then to the numberless, but subtitled phase. These progressions are completely orthogonal to the quality of the series, but there does seem to be some reason to the practices of horror movie naming that I will figure out one day.

They should call the next movie in the series House of the Dead: Armageddon Massacre or House of the Dead: Afterlife Mutation or something like that, then the acronym would be HotD:AM. For some reason I think that would be worth the two seconds it takes to think of.

Anyway, House of the Dead 2 is really more "College Campus of the Dead," but I'm sure that's trademarked by somebody. Favorite line? Early in the movie, the order to proceed on the mission to clear out the plagued campus in question comes from a military officer who claims to have received it "directly from the Secretary of Defense, who got it directly from the White House Chief of Staff, who got it directly from the President, who got it directly from the Vice President himself."

Speaking of whom, maybe "Dead Aim" does mean something.

Stevens "can't put up with this shit anymore"?

Wonkette posted a rumor last week that senior AJ John Paul Stevens was considering retirement, allegedly uttering "I can't put up with this shit anymore!" I find it a little hard to believe that Stevens would be getting upset now about being part of an ineffective liberal minority, since he had such a kick-ass term in 2004-5.

She likened the outburst to Howard Beale's, but it seems to me more like a Johnny Paycheck moment: "Take this job and shove it."

Now Wonkette is hosting a contest to pick the most amusing possible context for the quote.

Thinking of an entry now.

Fascinating Fakery

The introduction of a new online journal devoted to "research articles and reports addressing general and specific issues related to plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification" is certainly the occasion for a post about my own long-standing interest in such topics. The journal is Plagiary and is well worth a look, even if you're not in a profession where such deceptions are of central concern (although I imagine there are few lines of work where it isn't of some importance.)

There are only two papers posted so far (Cases of Plagiarism Handled by the United States Office of Research Integrity 1992-2005 and The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story, both in pdf) but a list of working titles (scroll down) looks really interesting. As someone who read Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 1991 I'm especially interested in "The Da Vinci Code as Borrowed Text". Perhaps even more valuable, at least right now, is their news page.

I'm glad that the journal is dealing with more than just the "culture of plagiarism" signaled by the rash of accusations against well-known scholars and journalists in recent years. The most salient encounters most academics have with plagiarism are students passing off cribbed work as their own. It's certainly meritorious to examine why students seem (and I'd like to stress "seem" because I've seen no data to back up the perception) to be more willing to engage in academic dishonesty of various sorts than in the past. However, I also look forward to some interesting discussion of how the general "attitude" that links plagiarism with other types of fraud and misrepresentation (the likes of Hwang Woo Suk, James Frey, and even the ongoing legal controversy over filesharing) and that might reveal the limits of such charges. I think it's possible that we might find that some practices we are inclined to condemn are actually reasonable responses while some things we don't think of as appropriation might qualify.

The State of Genetic Dis-Union

The most interesting thing to me in President Bush's latest State of the Union address was his forceful opposition to "the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos." In part, this just goes to show how uninteresting the speech was in general. Beyond that, though, I'm alarmed at the possible consequences of this government hostility to the most engaging things scientists do, which is egregiously abusive research.

Animal-human hybrids are an unqualified boon to society. Where would the Sci-Fi Channel's "original movie productions" (and especially Nu-Image Films) be without experiments in animal-human genetic hybrids? Quintessential examples can be found in Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy, Mansquito, and Spiders II: Breeding Ground.

I hope he's not opposed to any genetically altered animal DNA. Certainly Donald Rumsfeld's vision for a new, smaller, more mobile, flexible and technologically advanced military includes some role for intelligent or super-vicious sharks, or giant snakes or lizards. As one of the military characters in Dark Waters says (I'm paraphrasing), isn't everybody looking for the perfect biological weapon?

Speaking of Dark Waters (another of many, many, many, many recent movies about killer, often genetically engineered sharks), if Simmone Jade MacKinnon isn't the result of some incredibly successful genetic experiment in Australian redhead technology, I'll watch Jaws: The Revenge again.

Ironies abound in the president's position, of course. Mere minutes earlier in the speech he'd endorsed research to produce hybrid cars. Also, just yesterday, the President outlined a program to invest in research and development of, among other things, nanotechnology. As we all know, nanotechnology is at least as dangerous as genetic experimentation to the human race.

I actually believe that this alarm over cloning and genetic hybrids is merely another attempt by the Bush administration to manufacture an enemy to terrify Americans into closing ranks around the GOP, who will promise to protect them at any cost. I imagine Karl Rove recently saw the X-Men movie and was inspired by Senator Robert Kelly's anti-mutant campaign to create an anti-genetic hybrid hysteria that the administration could exploit. Before too long, we'll see the president publicly denounce Patrick Duffy, the Man From Atlantis, and Mr. Gerbik, the 208 year old uncle of Dr. Octagon who is actually a hybrid of a hybrid: half shark-alligator, half man.

Speaking of the X-Men, I would support a different version of the ban the president is proposing. I haven't followed comic books for nearly twenty years, but whenever I look into what is going on in the world of Marvel comics, it seems like some idiotic plot line having to do with clones or time travel has messed up some title. I would support a legislative ban on human cloning and time travel in comic books, although that might not mean anything since I don't read them anyway.