Librarians: Defenders of Information, Privacy, and the American Way

According to an article over at Ars Technica, the American Librarians Association is raising money for a campaign to inform the public about United States laws that affect the privacy rights of citizens.

The ALA’s new campaign wants to 1) educate people, and then 2) turn them into activists. The education component of the three-year program will make people aware, for instance, that “checking out a biography of Osama Bin Laden could prompt seizure of their library records” or that “online searches create traceable records that make them vulnerable to questioning by the FBI.”

The very concept of a library is something that makes me love humanity. A library is a place where knowledge both arcane and relevant, stories both great and small, and all sorts of other printed media are gathered together for distribution and access for the population. And librarians are the guardians of that knowledge and the ones who help to ensure that access to said knowledge and stories remains unfettered. A library is a wonderful place, whether it is your neighborhood public library or the ponderous stacks of a collegiate research library or the majestic and seemingly all-encompassing Library of Congress.

Wordle

Wordle is a neat little web app that creates word clouds based on user submitted text, or RSS feeds for websites. The application allows for a variety of word orientations, fonts, and colors, so there is a wide range in outcomes as it randomly places the words in the cloud. The words are sized based on the number of times they occur in the text.

The Dark Knight - Heath Ledger’s best movie

Granted, I’ve yet to get around to seeing Brokeback Mountain, but I firmly believe that if Heath Ledger were still alive, and he never appeared on a television or movie screen again, that his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight would have cemented him into the pantheon of actors who gave true definition to a character they played. When I first heard that they were reintroducing the Joker, I wondered how they could do anything to surpass Jack Nicholson’s version from the original Batman movie. Now I know.

Jack Nicholson played a crazy guy. Heath Ledger played a psychotic genius. And he stole the show from his co-stars. In a movie laden with talent — Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, and Morgan Freedman — Ledger dominated the screen. His presence was formidable. You absolutely felt him to be, as he described himself in the movie, an agent of chaos. You never were sure what he was going to do. Nicholson’s Joker was iconic for the last 20 years. Ledger’s will be iconic as long as we have movies.

The three-way balance of main characters — Bruce Wayne/Batman, the Joker, Harvey Dent/Two-face — and the tension between them as they maneuvered and tried to find their positions in the world of Gotham was palpable. Going into the movie, if you’re familiar with the Batman mythos, you know that the Joker exists because Batman exists. Without one, you can’t have the other. They are living representations of primal aspects of the world, chaos and order. Their interactions show that the balance is razor-edged. To put it into gaming terms Batman is Chaotic Good, Joker is Chaotic Evil. Their methods are almost identical, their goals are diametrically opposed.

Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-face and subsequent descent into madness is also known to anyone familiar with Batman. Aaron Eckhart was brilliant throughout his transformation. As the idealistic DA, he was (to return to the gaming analogy) Lawful Good, but with the willingness to work through non-lawful characters such as Batman. And the interaction between Harvey and Bruce/Batman is really intriguing. Seeing Bruce struggle with his desire to shed his mask and cape in the face of the destruction of the city being orchestrated by the Joker coupled with the public face of fighting crime in Dent shows that he is a very reluctant hero. But as Gordan says at the end of the movie, Batman is the hero that Gotham needs, though not the one which it wants.

In the end, I left the theater stunned. The Dark Knight was a combination of brilliant writing, amazing acting, great action, serious philosophical and moral questions all combined in such a wonderful dynamic that I doubt I’ll see a movie like it any time soon. Now I just need to go catch it on IMAX.

Update: 2:35 pm - Jami Noguchi has his review up.

The comments there brought up some interesting thoughts. If/when they make another what villains would you want/expect to see? So far, they’ve had two bad guys per movie, though they had varying sizes for the roles. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were to continue. I think that Two-Face could pretty easily return, though they are just as likely to introduce someone else. The main bad guys left are the Riddler and the Penguin. David Tennant’s name is floating around in rumors on the internet as a possible name to play the Riddler, and I think that would be a great match. A long shot for the role could be someone like Hugh Laurie. I think that the second villain would have to be female because there is now no female lead since Rachel was killed. That suggests either Catwoman or Poison Ivy. I also think that Robin would have to be introduced as well. I don’t know how many of these movies Christopher Nolan wants to make, but he can’t stop without presenting Robin. Especially if he ever wants to do a future-Batman movie, along the lines of the comic The Dark Knight Returns to which he owes so much of the grittiness and dark themes of the Batman story.

Update: 4:21 pm 7/23 - Mad Minerva has her review up, and I must say, it’s a beaut. Very well analyzed, and makes some very good points about some of the weaknesses of the film. I agree with her for the most part. We’ll see if I have more to add about it when I watch it again.

Krav Maga - The pain, the gain, the fun!

So, this past Monday, I headed up to Chinatown after I got off work and took an introductory class in Krav Maga. I first heard of this combat style while watching The Ultimate Fighter on the History Channel last year. I’ve long had an interest in martial arts and hand-to-hand combat, though my only first-hand experience is limited to childhood schoolyard fights and McDojo summer camps as a kid.

Krav Maga is a close combat (which is the translation of the name from Hebrew) fighting style in which the primary objective is “real life” threat neutralization. The action is hyper-aggressive and sometimes shockingly brutal. The earliest form of Krav Maga was developed in the 1930s by Imi Lichtenfield for Jews in Hungary and Czechoslovakia to resist Nazi capture. After WWII, Lichtenfield joined the Israeli military and further developed the style for use by all members of the Israeli military. As such, it was developed to be effective regardless of the gender or size of the person who was using the moves. After he retired from the military he continued to develop the style and opened schools in Israel to train people who were not serving in the police or military. In the 1980s, several instructors traveled to the US to set up schools for US military and police forces as well as gyms for the general population. Since then, it has become increasingly popular as a self-defense course as well as for general fitness purposes.

I got into it for the thrill of hand-to-hand combat and for getting into shape. And I am horribly out of shape as I haven’t exercised regularly in nearly 7 years. A few weeks back I started playing ultimate frisbee out on the Washington Mall on Saturdays. That first Sunday afterward, I woke up and could barely move. So going to the first lesson, I was rather worried about how I would feel afterward. The first lesson (and the subsequent 7) at Krav Maga DC are essentially conditioning classes in which you are taught the basic fighting stance, jab, cross and kick. After that, you go on to begin learning the basic actions of Krav Maga with regard to other strikes and how to react to chokes, bear hugs and other grapples. 6 months of that leads to more advanced techniques including ground combat and later dealing with opponents armed with guns and knives.

I have a feeling that after 6 months I’ll be in the best shape of my life. At the moment though, after 2 lessons, I can barely move my right arm without pain. Punching uses muscles my body didn’t know it had. The left arm is sore too, but since it is my default jab hand, it doesn’t get as stretched as much as my right/cross hand. The day after the first lesson, I was only somewhat sore throughout my body. But two days later my shoulder was really killing me. And last night’s lesson did nothing to alleviate the soreness. I’ll just have to work through it. But it’s a lot of fun. Taking out aggression on the pads is quite enjoyable. And the cardio workout from the hour long session is fantastic in itself. If you’ve been looking for something beyond just a gym work out that’ll give you a whole body work out, check to see if there are Krav Maga classes near you!

Meads! Part 2

So, I finally got around to trying the two meads my father had sent me. The delay was mostly my lack of a corkscrew for the second bottle. The Redstone Meadery’s Traditional Mountain Honey Wine was a standard mead, and I wasn’t very thrilled with it. It pretty much tasted like a very dry white wine. I don’t like wine, especially dry wine. The Bernardy?ski Royal Mead was a chokeberry melomel, and the presence of the fruit was quite noticeable. The flavor of the berry was a bit bitter for my taste and the overall texture was quite dry. I think that future meads that I try will be melomels with fruits that are known for their sweetness and metheglins.