(no subject)

Pushed out purely because it's sitting in my posting buffer and won't go away until I post it.

One wonders just how many people would like to have done just exactly that. (Seriously, these days, the guy would be considered a creepy stalker.)

PHD Comics: 63% of internet readers will like this comic: in all seriousness, understanding basic statistics will make internet polls and most newspaper surveys drive you right up a wall. For example, "Margin of error" technically does not mean what people think it means (although, according to my stats professor, it's more or less come to mean that, because tha's the way people have misinterpreted it for so long).

Oh, this is not going to turn out well. No, not at all. (You may need just a bit of context to understand.)

Strangely enough, I can kind of see Franklin saying something like that. If not precisely in that context.

random: a weird blast from the past

So I was watching these clips on Youtube of this Italian movie that I'd seen referenced on another weblog. (This NOT NECESSARILY WORKSAFE scene, as it happens) And I thought it looked familiar, and I was pretty sure that one of the video stores I go to had this in stock, so I rented it again. And the more I looked at it, the more I remembered it. I remembered being grateful that it had burned-in subtitles so that I could get through it fast, because it was just interesting enough to want to see what happened but not good enough to want to waste a whole 83 minutes of my life on it. And then I decided to see if there were any reviews out there to help prod my memory.

And what do you know? If you do the search right, it turns out that one of the reviews that comes up on the very first page of results is my very own, of "Uomini uomini uomini."

And I'll tell you what: I was way too kind in that review. It's not that anything I said was wrong; it's that I completely missed what really happens in the first few minutes, which really does tell you everything you need to know about these characters and should set the tone for the film. (It doesn't set the tone, mostly because of the film's lack of any real structure. It immediately goes gallivanting off into unrelated scenes of character exploration in a way that makes you forget how it started.)

These four middle-aged gay guys, with whom we are supposed to sympathize or empathize or whatever, effectively gang-rape a stripper. In the very first scene of the film. One of them gets the stripper into the club's bathroom, where we discover, hey! the stripper's a prostitute! What a surprise! The stripper offers to do the guy for 300,000 lire, and then suddenly the other three guys are there, pretending to be the police in a fairly believable arrest/shakedown to prevent arrest. They all shove him into a stall, saying "You're lucky! Instead of going to jail, you might even have fun!" It's not at all clear how far they go -- it cuts away before anything happens, and afterward, they aren't that specific, saying only, "You can't even have a joke any more!" whatever that means in context -- but seriously, the main characters basically gang-rape a guy to start the film. And I somehow managed not to understand what was going on. I expect that it was meant to be a sort of foreshadowing about what happens with Luca later in the film. Oh, and right after the possible gang-rape, one of them gropes a parking attendant and shoves his crotch up against the guy's butt. When the attendant objects, the guy says that you have to expect such things to happen when you're a guy working at a queer nightclub. Oh, and then the one who happens to be a doctor takes advantage of one of his patients by making him undress when it's entirely unnecessary. All of this happens in the first seven minutes of the film.

Man, I could sometimes be really clueless ten years ago.