Ramblings of a Constipated Mind

Cool experience of last week: I was at Barb's when Lucifer attacked.

By Lucifer, I mean a snake. And by attacked, I mean slithered around and looked menacing.

Barb and I were getting ready to head to a local thrift shop to hopefully find me some furniture. I was following her around seeing if there were any last-minute things to take care of, when she walks into her room and out of nowhere exclaims, "It's a copperhead!"

Of course I, being the kind of person who grew up reading everything he could on snakes, immediately thought, "There's a poisonous creature in the house! I must go stare at it!" and rushed to see.

She was right. There was a snake slithering across the middle of her room, minding his own business. He clearly didn't seem to find anything wrong with his actions, or seem to realize that he had stumbled into a house. And not just any house, but the house of Barbara Trent, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker and liberal activist. A person who is quite happy traveling to war zones, exposing possible government conspiracies, and squashing any slug that would be foolish enough to munch on her vegetables.

The snake was lucky that Barb won't hurt any animal as long as it doesn't hurt her plants - not even bugs. However, that didn't change the fact that she's not the kind of person to go running and screaming from a snake.

Barb immediately called animal control while I kept an eye on the snake to make sure it didn't hide. Then she decided it would be a good idea to try and trap it; because, well, why not? So she pulled on some boots and we both grabbed a larger plastic container. By this point the snake had crawled into a pile of blankets to hide, so we just chucked the whole thing over the pile and that was that.

The animal control guy was cool. He just pulled out his snake wrangling stick, grabbed the thing and put it into a little box. It was pretty awesome. The snake kept striking and trying to bite him. I always told myself if I ever did anything with animals, I'd want to be a snake wrangler. This experience just confirmed how cool playing around with venomous harbingers of death can be!

Turns out it was a copperhead, not very young and not very old. We have no idea how it got into the house. Her dogs and cats definitely didn't bring it in. And the only entrance we could find was the cat door, meaning it had to crawl up stairs, through the cat door, through the lengthy kitchen, around a corner, through the parlor and into her room. All without being seen.

One thing's for sure: now whenever I'm at her house I'll be checking the floor for snakes whenever I get out of bed. Ah, good times.

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GG/NG Episode 3 was released a few days ago. We talk about evolution and intelligent design. It's a pretty decent discussion, though looking back I wish I had brought up some other points. Our audience is gradually growing, and we're starting to get a trickle of feedback, so that's good.

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Wall-E = best movie so far this year. See it. Love it. Save the planet.

George Carlin is dead. 71 years old. Heart failure.

I haven't heard a lot of his comedy, and what I have has been hit-and-miss, but the dude will go down in history. I'll always remember him as the cardinal in Dogma. He was very honest and outspoken in his opinions, and did a great job of pointing out the humorous, offbeat and at times nonsensical things in life. Not to mention raising several worthwhile issues.

I don't have a television show or a radio program (maybe I can get Kyle to say these on the podcast), but I do have a blog, and so, Carlin, this goes out to you...

Shit
Piss
Fuck
Cunt
Cocksucker
Motherfucker
Tits

You said you were here for the show, I hope you enjoyed it. Rest in peace.

Work's going fine. Lately I've been watching and summarizing a ton of news clips from the past few months. Bush should be impeached, or at least investigated. Seriously. When you see all the stories lined up one-by-one that indicate there's probably a great deal of lying and corruption going on, there's not much room for doubt. If Clinton can get impeached for lying about a blowjob, surely Bush can at least be investigated.

I need to stop procrastinating and knock out this study abroad promo. If I haven't made serious progress on it by the end of this week, I am going to cut myself off from television and the Internet until I have.

Posted a fairly in-depth response to that anti-Christianity documentary over at the Good God/No God website.

MovieChatter episodes on Indy 4, Kung Fu Panda, and The Incredible Hulk have been released. Our Get Smart discussion should be up. You can also expect a new feature in which Erik and I have a heated debate about a movie one of us loved and the other hated. Fun stuff.

I mentioned a few posts ago that I've been listening to a lot of atheist and Christian podcasts, both to know the various sides of arguments so I'm better prepared for Good God/No God, and also for my own personal benefit and knowledge.

Today I watched an anti-Christianity documentary for similar reasons. I had heard it was pretty good, and they interview Robert Price (the "Bible Geek" guy from the Jesus Seminar), so I was optimistic. I went into it hoping that it would bring up a lot of really good, interesting points that I could research to see if they had any merit. Random thought: is it weird that I was actually hoping to find some legitimate evidences against Christianity? Yes, I believe it is.

Anyways, the movie totally sucked. There was only one decent argument in the whole thing (the one made by Price) that I'm going to have to look into. The rest of the movie was pure propaganda that goes the common route of attacking fundamentalists and their beliefs rather than moderate Christianity.

I'm going to post a point-by-point response on the Good God/No God website. Seriously, it's not worth watching, no matter if you're a theist or atheist. I'm not even a scholar or have credentials in apologetics, and with the exception of one argument all of the director's points are very flimsy.

The things I sit through in the name of pursuing knowledge and learning more about my faith...

I just finished watching the mid-season finale of the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica.

Though it had a few small flaws, this was overall a great episode. I had predicted how it would end from the very beginning of this season, but the final seconds threw in some interesting details I hadn't expected. I think I'm finally starting to understand what is meant by the show's oft-repeated phrase, "This has all happened before, and will happen again." We'll see if I'm right...

Overall, the first half of Season 4 has been very good. Not quite up to the level of Seasons 1 and 2, but much better than Season 3. However, I'm slightly worried about the fact that there are ten episodes left - they could probably wrap up all the remaining plot and character threads in three or four really good episodes, and it'll be a shame if they make the same mistake they did in the last half of Season 3 and make it mainly character-focused filler that has little to do with the overall story. Then again, maybe I'm oversimplifying things in my head and it would take longer to develop everything to its full potential.

Anyways, though it's had ups and downs, this is still a great show, and I'm pissed that I'll have to wait until 2009 to find out how it all ends. Stupid WGA. To quote Cartman: "You go to hell and you die!"

Found an interesting article adapted from a longer work published by Barbara on independent filmmaking in a capitalist society. She goes into a lot of detail about her experience in Panama filming The Panama Deception. Check it out here.

Crashing at her place for 2-3 nights starting tomorrow. I'll be away from my Mac and won't have a television in my room. Maybe I can use my time there (when I'm not working or gardening) to catch up on some reading or do some writing. I've had a couple random ideas pop into my head that I might try to develop.

I saw a tape of the segment we filmed a week ago that was aired on HITN (the huge Spanish network). It turned out pretty well. Unfortunately, it's not on the website so unless you caught it on television you probably won't be able to see it. Bummer.

In other news, I just saw the trailer for Bill Maher's documentary, Religulous. I will definitely have to go see this movie, and maybe talk about it on the podcast. As far as I know, Maher has never directly claimed to be an atheist, so I'm not quite sure what his angle is for this. From the trailer, it looks like he's just going to be picking on the easy targets (the extreme fundamentalists), a strategy more and more religious skeptics seem to be taking. I guess I can always hope the final film will be more balanced and actually get into the good things religion is responsible for, but the trailer doesn't give me much to go with.

This looks like a movie that will send Christians into an uproar. Don't be surprised if as we get closer and closer to the October release date, the marketing campaign really starts to kick in. If the studios are smart they will milk this thing for all it's worth, and do whatever they can to increase the controversy. The Passion of the Christ made hundreds of millions off of controversy, and this could do the same thing if promoted properly. The only danger is that they risk alienating too many conservative Christians who will boycott it... but I guess the plan is to put more atheist butts in the seats to take their place.

This is the first documentary I've seen advertised in years that looks like it could have potential to surpass Fahrenheit 9/11 in terms of the box-office draw. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

My apartment is starting to come together. I've got a full-sized bed, a recliner, a computer desk and a chest of drawers (with tv on top) in my room. And I have space to walk around. This is so much better than living in a dorm room. The other day I found a bookshelf in prime condition that someone had just left out by the dumpster. It is now sitting in my closet (might as well use it for something) with a few books and video games on it. I love free stuff.

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Work is going well. I'm almost done with transcribing interviews from one of the film-in-progress. All I have to say is: I now hate Bush more than ever, and I have serious doubts that the United States will ever fully recover from where we're at now. I already knew stuff about how the administration has been taking away civil liberties, engaging in illegal acts of torture, getting rid of habeus corpus, etc. But when you hear people that actually know a lot about the details of what's going on (ex-CIA and government officials, for example) explain the specific details of laws that have been passed and in other cases broken, it's pretty eye-opening.

As a side note: It looks like Obama is now officially the Democratic nominee. A.K.A. our next President, if there is indeed a God in heaven. If McCain gets elected I might actually go back to being a pre-millenialist, since he will clearly be the Antichrist.

Today some of the intern's went over to Barb's house to watch one of the movies they've made recently. This one was called Soldiers Speak Out, and it's a 30-minute short meant to be shown in schools and anti-recruitment seminars and whatnot. Basically, it's a bunch of veterans from various wars talking about what it's like to be a soldier and how different it is from all the propaganda the government and culture likes to put out.

I'm sleeping over at Barb's tonight. I'll probably end up doing that twice a week to save on gas money to and from Raleigh. After the screening I helped her out in her garden, spraying for bugs and stuff. Barb's got a great little farm going on, complete with chickens (fresh eggs for breakfast!), cats and dogs living in harmony together. There are a couple other people living with her - she really has a heart for others. Also, because of her "contribution to the industry" she is a member of the Academy, meaning she gets to vote on the Oscar winners every year. That means that around October/November she gets a ton of screener DVDs sent to her of all the big contenders, regardless of whether or not they've been released yet. In other words: she's one of the few people I've met who has a DVD collection that rivals my own.

She's a total child of the 60s and 70s, probably the closest I've come to meeting a hippie. Her garden has a variety of vegetables in it, from greens to turnips to onions to garlic to lettuce, etc. The whole place just screams "eco-friendly", and I know that's something that's something she's really into. For dinner we had salad, grain, greens and salmon. All of her vegetables are entirely organic. It was probably the healthiest meal I've had in ages.

After dinner we went back out into the garden and I helped her pick garlic and kill slugs. We were out there until around 9:00 or 9:30, so I'm pretty exhausted. It's kind of nice to be out of the city, though. Gardening's hard work, but I'm betting I'll do enough of it while I'm here that by the end of the summer I'll want one too. I told her a bit about my passion for film, which eventually led to conversation on the morality in films these days, particularly all the violence. I get the impression she really doesn't like much violence at all, even in fiction - a true pacifist. I on the other hand think that there is a time and a place for violence and sex in the movies, though I agree often times it's way too gratuitous. I also don't agree with the notion that violent movies and video games cause violence, though Barb pointed out that the media and entertainment do have a great impact on the culture. It's a chicken-and-egg scenario, I guess.

I mentioned the argument that watching violent images, regardless of the entertainment factor (which I think is important when dealing with film), is often a cathartic experience and can be an outlet for anger and violent impulses. She commented that that's a good point, particularly since she feels the same way about pornography and sex drive. I had never thought of that. I've heard some people say that masturbation is an outlet, but that pornography is immoral and unnecessary. Why is it that there is a double standard here? Pornography is often not considered an appropriate outlet for sexual desires because of its degradation of women (an opinion I happen to hold, but that's a discussion for another time). But violent images are okay as catharsis for violent impulses, when I suppose it could be argued that when you watch someone get killed you are watching a form of degradation. Thinking about it in this light, violence in film seems much more immoral regardless of how it is portrayed. Hmmm. Ponder this further I must.

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Over the weekend I went to Greenville to help a woman I met at Full Frame film her documentary. It's about a Christian family and various people that have been affected by them and their beliefs/work. Saturday night their daughter was getting married, so we helped film it. It was amazing. I don't go to a lot of weddings, but it was just about as perfect as it could be. I can only hope if/when I get married the ceremony and reception will be that fun while retaining such a feeling of intimacy. Everyone laughed, everyone cried, everyone danced, good times were had.

Sunday we followed around a 19-year old Mexican-American guy named Edgar, who is one of the coolest kids I've ever met. He's basically a clone of Kenneth from Seguidores. Not kidding. If he keeps it up he's going to have a great impact on people. Anyways, we followed him to a local church where he had been asked to play drums for the worship service. We filmed them practice. It was pretty hardcore - basically a bunch of skateboarders on electric guitars and drums letting loose. It was an interesting combination of fairly traditional contemporary worship songs with very loud, deafening music.

Hopefully I'll get to go back a few times during the summer and get to know people a bit better. The feeling of community I got just from being there 24 hours was phenomenal.

On Monday I went with David on a film shoot that ended up lasting until around 11:00 at night. In the morning we went to a latino community in Durham and filmed some interviews on the street about what it's like to be an immigrant in NC. Then in the afternoon we had to drive to Winston-Salem to interview a woman in her home. This was a freelance job, so we had to FedEx all the tapes to the network by 9:30. We barely made it. It was pretty frustrating - the FedEx center was right near the Greensboro airport, but the Google directions failed to mention that to get to it you actually have to go into the airport and follow the cargo lanes. We drove around in circles for ages, and finally found it with around 5 miles of gas left to spare. We knew that even if we ran out of gas it was more important to get the tapes in on time... it was close. So yeah, it was a long day and there were some frustrating parts, but I learned a lot by watching David work so hopefully he'll let me go on another shoot soon. The segment we shot is supposed to air on HITN (one of the big Spanish networks) tomorrow. Hopefully it will appear on their website and I can link to it.

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So yeah. I'm staying busy. Hopefully I'll have time to watch a few movies this weekend. Speaking of which, don't see the new Indiana Jones movie. It sucks. For my more detailed thoughts/rant you'll have to wait for the next MovieChatter podcast.