More Star Wars ponderings (completely spoiler-free!)

I wonder what Lucas's intentions gave Padmé and Anakin a five-year age difference?

It's a hurdle to their relationship that was never addressed. Five years isn't that much for adults, but when Padmé and Anakin first me, she was functionally an adult and he was a child, so they would both be quite aware of the age difference. When they are reunited at the beginning of AotC, Padmé clearly still thinks of Anakin as something of a child, but that just vanishes, it's never addressed.

If Lucas didn't intend their age difference to serve any purpose, he could quite easily have made them closer in age (Padmé was already extremly young to be a queen and Anakin was already too old for Jedi training, so they could have made them both 12 without changing a thing), or he could have quite easily not had them meet until AotC, where they both appear to be grown adults and have plenty of time alone together. That might even have made their falling in love more believable, because the audience wouldn't be sitting there going "What about the age difference?" They're both young attractive people and spend a lot of time romping around on Naboo, that would be enough to convince the audience. But with the age difference, I found myself feeling unsatisfied that nothing in particular happened to make her think of him as a grownup. So what was its purpose?

Budget passed

Budget passed, no election, pass it on!

I've never watched the H of C on TV before - it's really interesting!

What if...

Suppose the opposition defeats the budget tomorrow, calls for a vote of non-confidence, and triggers an election.

Then suppose the election results in a Liberal minority with a precarious balance of power, much like we have right now.

Then what would happen?

Mmmm....politics....

Thoughts about today's political events:

The bad:

- I disapprove of MPs changing parties without the consent of their constituents. I vote for the party, not the individual, and it makes me very grumpy indeed that that can be changed on a whim.
- The Liberals seem to have a whole "Defect from the Conservative Party and get a free cabinet position!" offer going on. This is rather ill-advised on their part, as it doesn't do anything to make them look less corrupt.
- I also think it's inappropriate for media outlets to be speculating/reporting on Belinda Stronach's and Peter Mackay's relationship, whatever form that relationship may take.

The good:

- I rather like the idea of a millionaire making political decisions based on social as opposed to economic principles.
- But the main reason I was moderately asquee today is because this makes politics SO much more exciting! The score is tied one all and we're into sudden-death overtime!

Other:

Apparently the Conservatives are running an ad campaign trying to convince people of the necessity of an early election. Shouldn't they be responding to the will of the people rather than trying to change it?

Quibbling over semantics

The Crown is appealing the sentence of a mother whose toddler died of dehydration after she left her home alone overnight.

Crown prosecutor David Wright had asked for an eight- to 12-year sentence for what he called her "unspeakably evil" crime.

Call me callous, but I don't think that's unspeakably evil. I think you could get a lot more evil than that. Basically she killed her daughter through neglect. It would have been a lot more evil to kill her through a deliberate action, or to torture her, or killed more people, or something else that I'm sure people who are more evil than me could think of. I think it's maybe right on the borderline between evil and horribly selfish/stupid. Maybe I've been having too much RotS lately, but I think you've got to do a lot worse to be unspeakably evil.

Characterization of Padmé (SPOILERS for Ep. 3)

Upon rewatching Phantom Menace yesterday, I realized why Padmé's characterization in Ep. 3 bugs me. There are ten years between Ep. 1 and Ep. 2, but the character of Padmé doesn't mature significantly during this time.

Not that she's IMmature - she never was immature, she was Queen of a whole planet at 14! In Ep. 1 she showed that she was capable of being tough and making difficult decisions and holding her own with a blaster. However, she was still vulnerable and inexperienced, as demonstrated in the scene where Palpatine manipulated her into calling for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorem.

Fast forward 10 years to Ep. 2, and she's still essentially the same person. There's
nothing that shows she's grown, matured, gained more political savvy, or improved herself in any way. To be sure she was sufficiently grown, mature, and savvy in Ep. 1, but 10 years a huge amount of time when you're only 24, and some personal growth and self-improvement should have happened during that time. But we didn't see it. She was exactly the same person, and her relationship with Anakin changed only because puberty was extremely kind to him

One might even argue that she grows more and more vulnerable as the trilogy progresses. I'm not entirely sure this is true, because as the trilogy progresses we also see her in increasingly intimate contexts. Our first view of her is in all her Queen regalia; our last view of her (which I'm going to rot13 because it's a major spoiler) is qlvat va puvyqovegu, univat orra orgenlrq naq zheqrerq ol gur ybir bs ure yvsr. You simply cannot compare a person's vulnerability in these two contexts.

However, we also see enough of her external self, the self she shows to the outside world, that we should have been able to perceive some significant growth, experience and maturity as compared with the first episode. There simply was not enough of this growth in the movies to do justice to the character.

St00pid consumer products!

Dear Revlon,

How DARE you cancel my powder without telling me? What am I supposed to do now? There simply is no comparable product on the market! Fuck you!

Sincerely,

Blotchy


Dear La Senza,

Why the hell don't you have any bras in black or nude? And if you're going to change the colours of your bras every season, you could at least design the bras so that they can easily be sewn back up when the wire starts poking out. What am I supposed to do now? Neon colours are fine for the bedroom, but some of us work outside the bedroom and need more subtle undergarments that won't be glaringly noticeable through our blouses.

Sincerely,

Unsupported

I am very happy with my Polish mark

It's not polite to gloat, (and my classmates wouldn't agree that my mark is gloat-worthy), but I'd just like to quietly say "I win!"

That is all :)

Family Guy

This season's Family Guy is not nearly as good as previous seasons. It's so not living up to its potential, and that makes me v. v. grumpy.

Phantom Menace redux

I just watched Phantom Menace because it was on TV, and I wanted to see how felt knowing the exact plot of the entire trilogy. It's a better movie when you know what's going to happen in the following two, because you know what's important and why. It doesn't work nearly as well when you have to wait three years to see why various things are important. Jar-Jar is more tolerable when you know he has a purpose, although there's still no good reason for him to be characterized so stupidly. The other problem (stop reading this entry here if you don't want a minor spoiler for ep. 3) is that they didn't show Qui-Gon passing into the force, and they really should have for the purpose of continuity of the next five movies.

But other than that, it's better as part of a trilogy than as a standalone movie.

Strange ways to train your dog

Seen in front of the post office at Yonge & Eg: a big fat bald man with a little tiny chihuahua dog sitting on his shoulder like a parrot.

A poll

How many people do you know personally who have had to use homeowner's or renter's insurance to replace possessions that were stolen or destroyed in a fire or some other disaster?

Wherein road rage is transformed into a serendipitous burst of music

Two cars are honking at each other outside. Their horns harmonize quite nicely - the harmony is a bit dark, but definitely not dissonant. Unfortunately I've never developed the skill of aurally identifying harmonic intervals, but if I had to guess I'd say it's a minor third.

How to find homes for all the orphans in Kenya

A few days ago there was this adorable news story about a dog who had rescued an abandoned newborn and taken it home to her puppies. Apparently hundreds of people all around the world offered to adopt this baby. So here's the plan: contact every one of these people privately. Tell them that they can adopt the miracle baby, but they have to keep it secret so she can grow up without media attention. Then send them some random Kenyan orphanage baby who needs a home. Repeat this process every time there's a miracle baby somewhere that a bunch of people want to adopt.

Building a better brothel

Recent thoughts about the legalization of prostitution got me thinking about how prostitution could be legalized without having a negative effect on the quality of life of residents who are neither an employee nor a client of the sex industry. I have no problem with legalized prostitution itself, but I think having it all over the streetscape would devalue the whole city. I'm quite proud of the little urban niche I've found for myself, and I would be ashamed if it if it were suddenly flooded with gaudy neon like a Montreal strip club, or if they started having prostitutes standing in display windows like those patties they sell at 7-Eleven à la Amsterdam, or if cars started pulling up alongside me while I'm walking home minding my own business. Prostitution is so much classier if done discreetly.

So I got thinking: how do you fit something into the urban landscape without people noticing unless they're looking for it?

Well, what element of the urban landscape don't you notice unless you're looking for it?

Office buildings! All they have to do is model brothels on office buildings!

The first step is to make sure brothels are called brothels. Maybe not the word "brothel" because it's rather old-fashioned and may be disrespectful, but some word that isn't used for anything else. No spas, massage parlours, holistic centres, nightclubs, etc. Escort services maybe. Just make sure it doesn't have the same name as something that also exists as a non-sex-related service, so people don't accidently wander into a brothel while looking for a watchmaker or something.

Then the building itself has to be set up like an office building, as opposed to a storefront. You walk in, there's a lobby with a reception desk or signage directing you to the various services available, you go to the specific suite you're looking for, and then once you're inside it can cease to look like an office. They could make zoning rules so that certain buildings are sex-work only, much like there are office buildings that contain only medical offices. The outside of the building would have a discreet sign (no neon XXX or anything) stating in the standardized euphemism what kind of building it is. The building could have some kind of designated indoor smoking area or be set back from the street so that people leaving don't congregate on the sidewalk (if people who have just been to a prostitute are anything like people who have just been to a strip club, I wouldn't want to have to walk by clumps of them outside the building). If they feel a discreet sign isn't enough, they can advertise by mentioning their street number (or maybe even put it in their name like Club 279), and put a really big street number on their building.

This way the locations of newly-legalized sex work can be as unobtrusive as possible, so people who need nothing to do with it can just walk by without noticing it any more than you notice an office building that you never need to go to. This will help keep NIMBYism from hindering the legalization of prostitution, give sex workers (and their clients) more dignified working conditions, and make our streetscape much classier overall.

"...due to a personal injury at track level"

Conventional wisdom is that news media don't report it when people commit suicide by jumping in front of a subway train, because they don't want to glamourize it. However, I think is policy may be having the opposite effect. Every time anyone hears an announcement citing "personal injury at track level", they assume it's a jumper. That is a sensible assumption, but if the TTC really wanted to cover up how many people jump, wouldn't they say something else or just not cite a reason? I remember one serious delay caused by a "personal injury at track level" turned out to be a lady who slipped in a puddle of spilled coffee and fell onto the tracks. Yet hundreds, if not thousands, of people who were in the subway that evening but didn't bother to read the little blurb in the GTA section of the next day's Star went home thinking it's a jumper.

This idea of a mass cover-up of an unspecified number of cuicides seems to have developed a certain mystique. My classmates were speculating on the number of suicides per year, and the numbers they were throwing out were so high that statistically someone in that room must have had a friend of a friend who had seen an actual jumper. In another milieu, I once encountered someone who was completely convinced that all the PA codes to call supervisors and janitors ("299 Sheppard 299 Sheppard 299 Sheppard please call") were actually a way of communicating that there had been a suicide. I think if the TTC wants to deglamourize the idea of commiting suicide by jumping in front of a train, they need to do something about their policies for handling suicide before it reaches urban legend status.

Random questions that occur to me

1. Why on earth would anyone own a pager in the 21st century? Cell-phones can do the exact same job, plus you can use them as a phone!

2. What exactly is wrong with ankle bracelets? The general consensus seems to be that they're tacky, with the tacit implication that the wearer is a whore, but I don't understand why. For me, they evoke no more visceral a reaction than a normal bracelet or a pair of earrings. Were they once some kind of secret code to indicate that the wearer is up for casual sex or something?

Logistical question for parents

When people use cloth diapers, what do they do with the dirty diaper when they change the baby somewhere other than at home?

You know you're getting old when...

You know you're getting old when you start envying students their summer jobs.

He clearly doesn't remember being a student too clearly. This article makes me gleefully rejoice in all my adult responsibilities because they mean that I don't have to work with the public, I can work in air conditioning, I can wear whatever I want, and I don't have to worry about financial security for at least two years.