thejakers

[Via: Online PhD]

Love this video. Found over at Collide Magazine.

The Ten Commandments – motion (kinetic) typography from Vit Ryznar on Vimeo.

Did LOST leave you feeling dissatisfied last night? I know it did for me.

Now I promised myself I wouldn’t write a blog post about LOST—or even give the show another thought for that matter—but like Jack Shepherd, I guess I can’t help being sucked back into the vortex. Hopefully it works out better for me in the end.

This morning it hit me why LOST was so dissatisfying.

It broke the rules.

Here’s what I mean. Whether you know it or not, you’re mentally conditioned to expect certain outcomes from a story. I’m not talking here about answering all the questions. I’m talking about predictable outcomes. Since Greek drama and Arisotlian poetics, Western stroytelling really falls into two acceptable categories: The Comedy or The Tragedy (thank God I listened in Shakespeare 101). OK there’s that messy category called tragicomedy, but no one can seem to agree on what that even means.

The simplest definition I’ve heard for comedy and tragedy go as follows: In a comedy everyone gets married. In a tragedy everyone dies.

What you don’t get to do (or shouldn’t do) is write a story where everyone dies and everyone gets married. That breaks the rules. It panders to the everyone and ends up making no one happy.

And that’s the tragedy (to use a pun) of my LOST finale experience. I’m not passionately angry or exuberantly happy. I’m nearly indifferent and definitely dissatisfied. It was a messy mismash of genres that served as a front to generate huge advertising dollars.

And let’s face it, that’s what TV is all about anyway.

So this whole LOST is proof that TV doesn’t have to suck mindset can, well…suck it. This finale made LOST suck big time for me. Because I felt like the writers just gave up and didn’t have the guts to piss a lot of people off—and make a lot of people gloriously happy—by sticking to one genre. Instead they pandered. They mishmashed religions. And they mishmashed literary genres. And they even wrote crappy dialogue. It was a horrible way to end what was such a great and innovative series.

Of course, maybe I’m more angry than I thought!

What was your reaction?

We all know that teenage pregnancy is a big problem. However, I’m a bit mystified by this ad campaign by Candies, which appeals to teens’ inherent selfishness with the line delivered by spokesperson Bristol Palin, “Don’t let a teenage pregnancy take away your freedom. Pause before you play.”

Check out the ad:

This ad gives me the ickies.

What do you think? Does appealing to the “freedom” teenagers have without kids really work as a deterrent for teen sex and pregnancy?

Here’s an absolutely haunting slide show posted originally on The New York Review of Books of the many ruins that are within the Detroit MSA. Ironically, I was just talking the other day with a friend about how much the economy has devastated Detroit. These pictures really bring home the that conversation. My hear goes out for the people living there. It’s truly a depression for them.

Five years ago I graduated from Cornell University with the assumption that the only time I’d ever see any Cornell sports team again would be on the off-chance that I was actually in Ithaca again.

Times have changed.

Tonight, my Big Red are playing against Kentucky in the Sweet 16. I’m not going to pretend we can win this game. But I sure hope we can. Either way, there’s no denying that the Cornell Big Red basketball team is something very special this year.

ESPN did a front page feature on them today. It was fun to see them on the front page, and the article is a great read. Here’s a good snippet:

What Cornell has done this season isn’t just surprising. It’s borderline miraculous.

While the NCAA is busting renegade schools and coaches for slipping backdoor benefits to players, Cornell can’t even slip its players a scholarship.

At Ivy schools it is pay to play in the literal sense, the member institutions of the Ancient Eight holding onto those ancient principles of no athletic scholarships and damning its flagship programs to compete with two arms and a leg tied behind their backs while hopping on the other foot.

The price tag at Cornell this year for tuition, room and board: $50,114. Even though Ivy schools can work out creative financial aid/grant packages, the sticker shock is often enough to turn most families away.

Mix in a basketball budget of $821,000 in 2008 (compared to $8.5 million for Kentucky) and the dollars and cents don’t make sense.

You can read the rest of the article here.

And Go Big Red!

When I was a kid, I saw Tron like 20 times. So, am I excited about this? Um…Yes.

A conversation between my 4-year old son, Liam, and his mom:

Liam: I want a baby sister so I can marry her.
Collette: You can’t marry your sister.
Liam: Then what girl will I marry?
Collette: Some great girl when you’re older.
Liam: What is her name?
Collette: I don’t know.
Liam: We’ll have to ask god what her name is.