Change Your Image
beartiger
Personal: Born in 1966, with degrees in "biochemistry and cell biology" and "English and American literature". I have worked in the biotech industry since 1991. My hobby is music: I have a collection of approx 6000 classical CDs, and I play the piano in an amateur chamber music group of fluctuating membership (and, hence, fluctuating repertoire). I am married with 2 children. I am a liberal, which, I am convinced, is the only thing a decent person can be in the times we live in. I try to avoid conservatives and work against them in various ways. With one exception, my friends are all liberals.
Film and TV: I particularly enjoy the movies of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. If I had to pick an all time favorite film, however, it would probably be Paul Cox's Man of Flowers, despite its flaws; I think of myself as similar to the protagonist in many ways, though not quite as dysfunctional. I don't currently watch television, but I have come to like two shows on DVD: Xena Warrior Princess and, to some extent, Battlestar Galactica. I own and have seen all of the XWP episodes and most of the first season of Battlestar. Back when I watched television, I enjoyed The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and The X-Files.
Recommendations:
After nearly 40 years on this planet, these are the pearls of wisdom I have to offer you.
1. Have children, if you have the capacity to be a good parent. Teach your children values that will better the world, not just values that will better them.
2. Vote, act, and speak against US conservatives or similar in your own country.
3. Listen to music closely, not as "background " music.
4. Eat vegetarian. It is tasty, healthful, and compassionate.
5. Treat all sentient beings as you would wish to be treated.
6. Make friends who are smarter than you are (for some of us, this is not too difficult).
7. Do not spend money on mindless luxuries that do nothing for your intellect such as cars or jewelry. Spend money frugally on things that give you active pleasure or engage your intellect, and save the rest.
8. Learn to play an instrument.
9. Stop watching commercial TV (which is all TV these days). Commercials are designed to brainwash you, and if you actually believe you are immune to brainwashing, you are already brainwashed.
10. Regularly take long walks (1 hour or two) someplace quiet and beautiful, preferably with people you care about.
If everyone lived as I do, the world would be a better place. Arrogant? Perhaps, but what other way is there to live but the way you believe betters your world?
Quotes
"If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe."
[url]
http://www.democrats.com/node/7362[/url]
"I can accept the democratic principle that the vote of one idiot is
equal to the vote of one genius, but I draw the line at the conclusion
that therefore two idiots are better than one genius". Wayne McDougall, BCNU
"Any important Republican who comes out and says they didn't know me is almost certainly lying," -Abramoff
Bush was not reelected. Period.
I'm sure it comes as a shock that the irregularities of the 2004
presidential elections have received very little attention in the
mainstream media.
A team of statisticians and mathematicians from institutes and
universities throughout the nation have concluded that the difference
between the exit polls and the official results has a probability of
being due to random chance of somewhere between 16.5M to 1.9B to one,
depending on what statistical methodology you use.
Exit polling data is recognized the world over for being very accurate
(usually within a fraction of a point of the official tally in honest
elections). So much so, that it is used to verify the legitimacy of
elections in other countries. For example, the discrepancy between
exit polling and the official results in Ukraine was used as a basis
for overturning that election.
There's an affadavit by a Florida programmer who said he was hired to
rig a crooked voting system:
http://rawstory.com/images/pdfs/CC_Affidavit_120604.pdf
But he's probably just a disgruntled Democrat, right? Wrong. He's a
lifelong Republican.
Areas of the country where untraceable paper receipt balloting was used
correlated with discrepancies in Bush's favor between exit polling data
and the official results. There are startling maps and histograms
here:
On election day New York repu[g]lican Congressman Peter King was caught
on tape saying (on the front lawn of the White House, no less) "the
election's over, we won...it's all over but the counting, and we'll
take care of the counting".
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/peterking.mov
Bev Harris (of blackboxvoting.org) actually went to Volusia county
Florida with a FOIA request to see the poll tapes there. Suspiciously,
she was given unsigned duplicates. The next morning, she came back and
found election workers throwing out the originals. After she literally
wrested the trash bags from their hands, the police were called and she
was eventually allowed to depart with the contents of the bags. Sure
enough, she discovered discrepancies between the originals and the
duplicates. In one case, she found the votes off by hundreds in favor
of Bush:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0411/S00246.htm
There's more, much more. I suggest you read about it here:
Reviews
Searching for Angela Shelton (2004)
"Well, I'll let you get to church...."
I am not a survivor of child sexual abuse (thank goodness), but this movie was emotionally wrenching for me. As a parent of two very young daughters, my heart went out to the women in the movie who had been victims of such abuse, and it drove home the point that how we treat our children has dire effects on them for the rest of their lives. Though these women were largely victims of extreme physical abuse, it should be remembered that even emotional abuse can be extremely damaging. I remember to this day (I am almost 40) my mother telling me, "you are not loved...you are put up with", and those 9 words have colored all of my life, all my successes and failures, and all my relationships. If something so small can wreak such havoc, one can only imagine with horror what the trials these women went through have done to them, and this movie goes a long way toward helping you understand that horror.
The movie suffers only from trying to force a happy ending out of mountains of tragedy. I was somewhat put off by Angela's desire to forgive her father. I don't understand how you can forgive something like that, and their relationship ever after would have been tainted by those memories. It was difficult for me to watch her reunite with and forgive her brother, but that is at least a little more understandable, since he was a minor when these events happened and cannot be as responsible for his actions as his father, and he was also, of course, equally a victim.
The scene where Angela sits with her father on the steps outside his home and he denies the abuse, with the full knowledge they both know he is lying, is unforgettable and almost too uncomfortable to watch. And then Angela tells her father, "well, I'll let you get to church". Exquisite irony like that would seem too heavy handed for drama. I won't give away the others, but there are many such lines in the film, both ironic and pathetic, that will be ringing in your ears for days after you see this.
Thelma & Louise (1991)
Guys can learn from what they may not like about this movie.
First of all, I really love this movie. It is tightly written, has beautiful cinematography, and is incredibly emotionally involving. I know that many men dislike this movie, and I don't blame them. They are placed in the uncomfortable and unfamiliar position of having no role models of their own gender, where every male is the movie is seriously flawed, underdeveloped, stereotyped, and peripheral to the action of the story. Well, guess what? Welcome to the everyday life of a woman watching almost any Hollywood Movie. Consider all the movies out there where every woman is either a sexual fantasy, the hero's rewards for his labors, a middle age corporate bitch, the loving giving woman with no personality or life of her own, a prostitute, etc etc. Women in most movies are serously flawed, underdeveloped, stereotyped, and peripheral to the action of the story. Take the recent horror movie What Lies Beneath (which is excellent, by the way). When was the last time Hollywood made the concerns and fears of a fortysomething woman the central driving force of a story? Do you think Hollywood matches nineteen-year-old actresses with sixty year old male stars because that is what women want to see? I know that the only way that men can enjoy Thelma and Louise is by trying to identify with the female characters (which can be done, but requires an effort). Women would also like to see movies where we don't have to be able to identify solely with the male characters in order to enjoy it. Many men are also disturbed (and rightly so...it was supposed to be disturbing) by the way Louise chose to solve her problem with Thelma's rapist, but were they disturbed by the scene in Total Recall where Arnold Schwartzneggar shoots Sharon Stone point blank and tells her, "Consider this a divorce"? I didn't hear all the public outcry over that mean spirited bit of misogyny. Men are just not used to being treated in movies the way women are treated on a daily basis.
Scary Movie (2000)
Not funny! Poorly written!
This movie was way overrated! It's not clever, it's not funny, and it is full of preadolescent sexual humour. It seeks to be outrageous, but only succeeds in trying your patience. All in all, a less than mediocre effort.