Disorderly Content

I mentioned back around the New Year how excited I was that the Reduced Shakespeare Company would be back in the Bay Area in June, this time at San Jose Rep. While placing my order, I noticed a play called Souvenir that I'd noticed (but not seen) on one of my trips to New York. Don't know why I didn't see it there, but this time I decided it sounded like fun, so I placed my order and sat down to wait.

That wait ended yesterday afternoon. Souvenir is a somewhat faithful retelling of the musical career of one Florence Foster Jenkins, a wealthy early 20th century matron who somehow got it into her head that she could sing. Opera. And who had the money and the society friends to indulge her fantasy, which went from annual performances at the Ritz to one grand finale at Carnegie Hall. A few of Mrs. Jenkins' arias were captured on record, and are available on CD. As for the play, it might be called a musical, but only if you are being kind.

But what I find fascinating about Mrs. Jenkins, at least in this dramatic version of her, is that she was a triumph of confidence and determination and pure enthusiasm over anything resembling talent. She was a joke, one the audience loved, but it's unclear she was in on the joke. And that's what makes me wonder: is it better to know your strengths and your limitations if it keeps you from doing something you love? Or is it better to be deluded, and to take joy in the activity for which you are supremely unqualified. At a younger age I was certain I knew the answer; now I'm not at all sure. No, I lie; I am becoming more and more certain that the doing, and the pleasure to be derived therein, are far more important than actual competence. And if people laugh at you, well, maybe they aren't the ones getting the real joke.

Check out http://cubo.cc/ and see if you don't agree.

Good news travels fast. We've been waiting impatiently for the option-holder on my friend Barry Eisler's books to lift the veil on their attempts to get a movie made based on Rain Fall, the first of Barry's John Rain thrillers. And now the word is out: according to an article in Variety, Gary Oldman is in negotiations to play the less than savory Holtzer for the Japanese language production. Which is great news, and not just because it gives me an excuse for that Harry Potter pun in the title. (Because Oldman played Sirius Black in the Potter films, you see. I told you it was clever.) And if the Japanese film turns out well, maybe we'll see an English language version while we're still young enough to enjoy it. One can only hope.

Macs are wonderful when they work. When they don't work, well, suddenly I'm less enamored. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

And today was one of those times. When I got up this morning, Software Update had detected and downloaded two... ummm... software updates. One is a new version of the Safari browser, the other a collection of security patches. So, once I'd dealt with all the important stuff and could move to the work laptop, I let the update... ummm... update.

Except it didn't. It just sat there, with a thermometer with only a little virtual mercury. I let it try to update for a while, until it was pretty clear something was broken. So I powered off, and back on, and let my Mac boot back to its unpatched state. I tried running Software Update again, but it hanged the same way.

My next thought was to determine which update was causing the problem. (By this point there was a third one, for Time Machine.) I applied the last update first, which worked fine. Once the Mac rebooted, I applied the Safari update, again with no problem. And finally I tried the security update, and it was hang around doin' nuthin.

Finally it was time to look for help. Nothing useful at MacFixit; nothing at The Mac Observer. Finally I did what I should have done first: check the Apple support forum. And I discovered that I wasn't the only one with a hanging Mac. Turns out I'd been the victim of a corrupted download. All I had to do was delete the update from /Library/Updates and tell Software Update to check again. This time it installed without even a pause.

Oh, and this is why I love my Mac: even when something's wrong, it doesn't get hidden in system repositories. Delete a few files and try again: easy! (Once you know which files to delete, of course.)

Last night saw the return of CBS's Monday night block of comedy shows. I liked the first season of How I Met Your Mother (both the show and Canadian teen pop sensation Robin Sparkles are among my MySpace friends - yes, I have fictional characters as friends), thought season two was okay and am still not sure about season three. So I was curious to see how they'd do after their strike-enforced hiatus. The answer: good, bad, clever, funny, a little dull. But nothing that made me want to blog.

No, I owe the impulse to blog to Two And a Half Men, and a small subplot involving Charlie trying to wangle an introduction to a cute girl for his nephew, the ever less charming as he gets older Jake. The mother of said girl is hostile, Charlie is oblivious, she takes action and pepper sprays him in the eyes. And I'm pissed.

Yeah, I know it's a comedy. But I have to ask what's funny about an unprovoked assault? Not that Charlie wasn't being a jerk, which, by the way, was seriously out of character. It was obvious the woman was getting angry, and Charlie was always presented as aware of women's vibes, even if he chose to ignore them. But my bigger problem was with the woman, and with the lack of consequences. Since when is it permitted to attack someone because they won't go away? Does this mean that the next time somebody pisses me off in the supermarket I can borrow someone's cane and beat the miscreant over the head with it? In the world I live in, pepper spray is for defense; actions like Charlie's demand calling the manager, or even a cop.

What I think makes me even more incensed is that HIMYM had a somewhat similar scenario that played out completely differently. Ted somehow decided the Universe was rewarding him for doing bad things. At one point he sneaks a couple of bottles of champagne onto somebody else's bar tab; the owner of said tab punches his lights out. Puncher gets arrested; punchee manages to avoid arrest himself over the ill-gotten booze but realizes that he's been acting like a total prick. Not so funny, but at least it comes from a world I vaguely recognize. 2.5 Men, not so much.

Meanwhile, I'm feeling better for having griped to you nice people. And wondering what next week's episodes will bring. Oh, and hoping any women I meet either missed last night's episode or know that pepper spray is not a proper way to say go away. Just in case it should come up.

I was using the Merriam-Webster dictionary site a moment ago, in response to an online debate about whether an assassin is evil if he enjoys killing rather than merely goes ahead with it. I wanted to draw a distinction between a psychopath who enjoys killing and a sociopath who feels nothing either way about the life of another. So imagine my surprise to discover that at least according to M-W, there's no difference: they define sociopath and psychopath as synonyms, and sociopathic as covering both antisocial and asocial behavior. Live and learn, I guess.

But that's not what caused me to blog. No, that was the McCain For President banner ad taking up a lot of space on the listing for sociopathic. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

This used to be a lot easier.

I'm in Cambridge, Mass this week for the day job, just across the Charles from Boston. Got in late Sunday night and have been suffering a combination of insomnia and general discomfort ever since. Okay, maybe it started on the plane; sitting in the cheap seats of a fully loaded 757 for six hours'll do that. But it's gotten worse instead of better.

Some of it's jetlag, I guess. But it's more than that. Like what's with all the overheated buildings around here? When it's 40 outside, does it really need to be 75 inside? Or maybe it's the dry air. Whatever it is, I feel like I'm gonna jump out of my skin. Only three more days and I can get on the plane for home...