Day: February 9, 2010

Snow’s a’comin’

They’re predicting a lot of snow for tomorrow — all that we didn’t get, I guess, over the past weekend and then some — but to hear people talk, you’d think they were predicting the end of the world. My sister, who works in Washington, DC, where they did get a lot of snow already, has been snowed in at home since the weekend and will be lucky if she goes back to work at all this week. We were reminded about our company’s emergency phone number this afternoon, just in case, but snow accumulation tends to be much less of a problem in Manhattan, if only because of all the tall buildings that keep it from getting to the ground (and all the traffic that keeps the ground from being there for the snow that does make it down). The snow on Long Island is sometimes another story altogether, and the railroad seemed almost giddy this evening with the prospect of canceling trains on Wednesday. If it’s really and truly bad tomorrow, just getting to the station or getting a train into Manhattan, I may take the day off regardless.

It’s already started to snow a little outside, but it’s not all that impressive so far.

Beyond the weather, there’s not much to report. I spent most of the day working on test questions for an art therapy research book we’re developing, occasionally posting grammatical questions to Twitter out of idle curiosity and boredom. (“Suppose a sentence like ‘Lions, tigers, bears, etc. are living in these woods,'” I wrote, for instance. “Should there be a comma after the etc.? If so, why? Why not?” I think the jury’s still out on that one.) That’s just the kind of Tuesday it was.

Tuesday various

  • The headline reads, Vegetative state patients can respond to questions. This seems significantly more scientific than some other recent stories in this area. [via]
  • All I can really say to this argument — and to James Cameron’s own insistence that his actors were snubbed in the Oscar nominations — is that hey, if you want sci-fi films to be nominated more often, make better sci-fi films. Avatar an important movie (and so are Up and District 9 to some extent), but Avatar is not a particularly good movie. That’s just my opinion, but I think it’s a defensible opinion and one easily shared by members of the Academy. Maybe these movies aren’t being snubbed out of some lingering genre bias; maybe they’re just genuinely not as good.

    There’s maybe some bias against computer-assisted performances like you’ll find in Avatar, but as Mark Evanier writes:

    There may be a solid argument that in Avatar, Sigourney Weaver is “acting” her role just as certainly as she acts any roles she plays. But you can’t argue that when we see her performance, we’re only looking at the work of Ms. Weaver with the guidance of Mr. Cameron. There are a lot of other people making that character like that…enough to make it feel inappropriate for an award that honors individual achievement. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. But I think that’s how it is.

  • Word to the wise: don’t look at porn while at work. And definitely don’t look at porn while your office computer is on live television. [via]
  • I have to say, I really loved this Previously On Lost 2: Lost In Five Minutes video. Huge props for actually covering all the big moments of the past five years — though also huge spoilers if you’ve never seen the show. [via]
  • And finally, speaking of Lost, Todd VanDerWerff (who might just be my favorite television critic at the moment) explains why, while it’s okay for a show to have a plan, it’s usually better for them to work around it:

    Could you plan out a TV show to the extent that some Lost fans seem to want the series to be planned out? As a matter of fact, you could, but it almost always ends up being a lesser series. Look, for example, at ABC’s big Lost replacement hopeful FlashForward, now off the air until March in hopes that absence will make viewers’ hearts grow fonder. The series’ creators—David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga—entered the series with a hard and fast plan for where all of the plot points would lead and for where all of the characters would go. This was one of the things that made the show so attractive to networks, who’d been burned by serials that often seemed to have no idea where they were going before. In practice, though, it’s been woefully terrible. The plot, confined by the fact that it knows exactly where it’s going and what all of the characters are going to do, can’t make any of the organic evolutions that any TV series needs to make to be successful. Everyone’s trapped and hemmed in by a plan that has no wiggle room. (A similar thing happened to the vaunted ’90s sci-fi series Babylon 5, though unplanned and uncontrollable events there forced enough of a sense of organic evolution onto that series that it had a little breathing room.)