The President Needs a Football

Our fearless leader has informed Congress that, "I'm the decision maker." He's of course referring to their move to oppose his decision to send more troops to Iraq. I suspect his next course, if he had a football, would be to pick it up and go home with it.

I really think this guy believes he's in his own game world. Perhaps a football is the wrong idea. Maybe someone needs to get this guy a World of Warcraft subscription. He clearly has a need to play out some fantasy scenario. At least in WoW he can do it without destroying the real world for the rest of us.

I love that the President keeps suggesting that Congress isn't giving his "plan" a chance. He keeps talking about the "plan" as if it's something unique. Someone needs to tell this guy that the rest of us aren't convinced that his "plan" is anything more than a nuance. It's also a nuance we've seen before. It doesn't matter if the names have changed a bit. The story is still essentially the same.

These guys have all been living in their fantasy world too long and the problem is that their fantasy world is our reality. The Vice President was on CNN the other day and looked like a fish out of water. He kept acting like he never said anything positive about the past "plan". I kept thinking that he'd gotten way too used to the fantasy of Fox News and they way they treat him. Mr. Cheney actually had the nerve to now suggest that failure in Iraq is going to be our fault because "we don't have the stomach for it." On Fox they'd all just agree to everything he said and offer no real counter. Of course he's right. He's Republican! What we don't have the stomach for is an administration that doesn't give a damn about the citizenry it represents. It doesn't matter what we think to these people. We're the problem.

So, I'm thinking at this point that we should just tell the President that the football we're giving him represents the policy and we should hand it to him and let him go ahead and take it home. As soon as he hits the door we just all go ahead and do what needs to be done while he sulks at a distance. George Bush has forgotten the one biggest reality in all of this "game". He's not the decision maker; we are and we've spoken as loudly and as clearly as possible on this issue.

I have too much health insurance now?

President Bush has got to be joking. Just when you think he can't pull any more BS out of his backside, he comes up with yet another pile of it. Last night the President suggested that too many of us have health plans that are far more than is needed. I'd like to know what gave him that impression.

I work for a company that provides decent health care with very little collected from the employee in each check. Most people I talk to about my plan suggest it's better than what they have. However, that said, you might recall that last February I broke my tibia while skiing and I'm still recovering nearly a year later. During this time I've laid out literally thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket cash to cover the bills. The plan still has not reimbursed me for the bills I accrued right there on the mountain! Add to this a pile of money we laid out for various aids and equipment and a surprising amount of money in uncovered rehab costs.

Now, based on the numbers I've seen and the valuation of our health care plan, it appears as if I'm going to have to pay tax on my health plan. This is our glorious leader's idea of helping me out. Let me not have enough coverage to cover the costs and then charge me tax on that same plan.

My wife works for a company that offers an extremely basic, extremely limited plan (that we don't take part in) and it costs just under the taxation numbers put forth in the President's plan. That tells me pretty clearly that, once again, President Bush is looking to the middle class to once again foot the bill for his well-off friends and family. Just what sort of tax is he suggesting for cosmetic surgery?

This guy just needs to go. His advisor's are actually trying to suggest that offering a tax break will allow millions to buy insurance that can't now. Just how many people do you know of that can wait until tax time to get a refund and then take that money and spend it on a health plan? Also, what health plans allow you to pay once? Since nearly all of them require ongoing monthly payments, just how many people will get the insurance only to have to let it lapse a few months later? I guess President Bush hopes cancer patients get diagnosed during those early months and go into remission before the cash runs out.

The end result of this setup, if it passes, and I suspect it won't, is that many employers will choose to drop health care entirely. Furthermore the average health plan today offered by employers for a family costs $11,800. Remember, that's the average. Since when has the average health plan been considered good enough? You'll get a tax break of $3,200 which means you'll get an extra couple of hundred bucks, at best, in your return. Just how much supplemental insurance do you think that will cover? My work plan costs nearly double that. Thus, I'll end up having to claim an extra $6,000 in income. Sign me up!

The proponents of the plan have actually said things like, "This approach will encourage employers to offer less-generous insurance plans." They see this as a big benefit. Yep, every single day I run into people who tell me their insurance plans are bloated to the point of excess. Can someone please point me to these plans so I can suggest them to my employer?

Rotten Tomatoes Most Ripe Often Not

I think I need to start looking for another means of finding quality movies among all those released each year. To help cut through the myriad of films I've taken to putting some stock in the online service provided by Rotten Tomatoes. If you don't happen to be familiar with the service, it ranks movies on a 0-100 scale directly tied to the percentage of positive reviews the movie receives. If 50% of the reviews collected rate the movie positively, it gets a 50 rating. Pretty simple. The concept seems, on the surface, to be a very effective way to rate a movie.

However, I've noticed some problems with this approach. While I've yet to see a decent movie that had a hideously low ranking (in fact, we didn't go to see "Happy N'Ever After" when I'd found it was running a rating of 4, or 4% positive reviews), I've found that rankings in the middle of the spectrum seem to be accurate to my tastes much of the time. The problem starts when a movie appears to get universal praise. Friends and I have now become extremely skeptical when this happens. It previously happened with film critic Roger Ebert. Friends and I found that movies he rated 3 1/2 stars, more often than not, struck us as very enjoyable or even great movies. Yet time and again when he'd rate a movie 4 stars most often we'd find very little to like about it. We'd leave the theater shaken our heads wondering how we got suckered in again by the glowing "perfect" review.

With a single reviewer it's easy to chalk that up to simple personal differences. Ebert loves things in movies that us normal folk don't take a shine to. That's to be expected. However, what is the answer when 95% of all reviewers like a movie and it still doesn't go over well with you, your friends or your family, or just about anyone you know?

Two recent examples come to mind. Right before I left for Macworld I saw, "The Children of Men". This was a movie that looked great to me with every preview. Clive Owen, Michael Caine and Julianne Moore star in it. It featured a very unique, very intriguing concept. The icing on the cake was when I noticed Rotten Tomatoes had it holding a rating of about a 94 (each new collected review factors into the rating so they can change a bit and I try not to bother looking until at least 50 reviews are in or even 100).

94% of all the top reviewers out there recommended this movie. Was it terrible? No. It was wonderfully acted and the story was quite compelling. However, as we left the theater nearly everyone was commenting negatively on it. It was slow, confusing (no, we're not just daft people) and just dull in places. Huge plot questions were being asked and no one had answers to them. Basic plotlines were even being openly questioned. The bottom line for this movie is that I have real doubts that anywhere near 94% of viewers would find it worth recommending. In fact, I'd doubt if even half the patrons would recommend it to others. If that's accurate then something is plainly out of balance with movie reviewers and their readers.

The second example is another movie I'd wanted to see for the same amount of time. Previews for "Pan's Labyrinth" started running at the local art house theater here at roughly the same time as those for "The Children of Men". I thought it would be the start of a great run up to the Oscars. "Pan's Labyrinth" looked a bit more risky as it was hailed as being from the same person responsible for "Hellboy" and "Blade 2". I kept thinking, "That's your idea of a solid resume to run on?" Frankly, I should have really let that alone set my expectations. However, I was shocked when I noticed the movie holding firmly at a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. On the entire front page of the listing there was only one negative comment and even that sounded pretty tame and it was from an unknown, at least to me, reviewer. This movie had nearly universal praise behind it. Surely it must be pretty amazing. Comments included terms like, "great fantasy", "spectacular effects", "a triumph", "storytelling from a master at the top of his game" and so forth.

Granted, the movie was interesting. Its look was pretty impressive but overall it was pretty average. I absolutely loved the ending but 2 hours is a long time to wait for solid impact. The effects weren't as impressive as billed. The computer-generated characters looked very computer-generated and whenever the non-CGI characters appeared, people throughout the theater openly giggled at their awkward, out-of-place appearance. Some of the plot elements were so basic that they too were laughable. Seemingly a dozen times one character tells another not to do this one simple thing. I think you can guess what happened. There is absolutely no way that 57% of patrons would recommend this movie let alone 97%.

Another movie came immediately to mind as a parallel. My friends and family all went to see, "The Lady in the Water" back when it was first out in theaters. This latest tale from M. Night Shyamalan shares some of the same allure as "Pan's Labyrinth" and yet it received a 24 rating at Rotten Tomatoes. The irony is that nine of us went to see "The Lady in the Water" and all nine of us liked it. The others in the theater with us seemed to like it or at least weren't walking out laughing about it or just confused by it. The nine of us are completely different people with different tastes in movies and yet our rating would have been nine-for-nine with recommendations.

If someone out there is familiar with a service that has a way to filter out the views of reviewers that continually miss the mark with you, please let me know. I suspect that 50% of these positive reviews came from reviewers who are simply impressed with the art of these efforts due to their film school experience or perceived value of such touches. What they fail to realize is that films are paid for by non-"experts". We read reviews in hopes of finding commonality for us, not to read a review meant to impress other reviewers. As a work of art, "Pan's Labyrinth" is quite a solid specimen. As a movie with mass appeal it would have a hard time proving that it deserves to fly above the level of a rotten tomato.

Macworld Observations

The company I work for is a big fan of Macworld so while most companies were off at CES I spent my week in San Francisco at Macworld.

I hadn't been to San Francisco in about a decade and was pretty shocked to find the city had aged pretty badly in that time. Homeless people were all over the streets everywhere we went. You literally couldn't avoid them. When they weren't lining the sidewalk they were walking around with signs openly begging for money at the intersections. The famed Fisherman's Wharf is a mess. The restaurants are extremely in need of updating. The food is still good but the facilities are in bad shape. My meal at Scoma's was typical. 70's wall paneling was all around and the facility has been expanded so often that traversing it is an experience in itself. The food was very good but extremely overpriced. Surf and turf for $68? A lobster tail for $55? Who are they kidding? At home I can get a whole Maine Lobster, 3 pounds worth, for $20-$30. $55 would get me a 4 pound lobster at one of the best lobster restaurants in the heart of Manhattan. I think the cup of soup I had before my meal was over $10.

The wharf itself was populated by a sparse array of barely seaworthy boats that appeared to be there more to give the impression of a working wharf than the real thing. The smell of rotting fish permeated the area and if you happened to look at the water you saw only a thick green liquid that I wouldn't even dunk a hand into on a bet. The cable cars were noisy, dated and really dirty.

We did have a funny experience at the mall at Nordstrom's. Whoever designed that mall should be locked into it and forced to actually traverse the thing. We were looking for the "restaurant row" that the map says is on the 4th floor. We then went up an escalator and had to walk half way around the floor to reach the next escalator to go up again. This goes on seemingly forever. When we reached what we thought was the 4th floor we found ourselves on the first floor of Nordstrom's with no food anywhere in sight. The floor was called "N1" obviously short for Nordstrom's first floor. We then went up to the top of the mall only to find no food there either. We finally asked someone at a kiosk where these restaurants were and they told us that the 4th floor is actually the N1 floor. Back we went but still no sign of the restaurants. We stopped at a counter to ask about their whereabouts and no one knew what we were talking about. Finally someone came over and said, "Oh, you must mean in the new mall.... That's through over that way around that corner and through the alley." Oh boy.... We headed in that direction and emerged into an entirely different mall area where we ate lunch at a place called Lake Creek if memory serves. I couldn't believe the food we got there. I had the best mussels I've had in years at a mall restaurant.

What bugs me about all this is that I used to really look forward to my trips there and was disappointed that none of the events I go to are there. Now I have to wonder if this is, in part, why those events are no longer there.

Anyway, Macworld was at the Moscone Convention Center and it was a pretty decent event. The show floor was pretty laid back and filled with average-sized booths. It's certainly a major step away from the game shows and larger shows like CES that I'm used to.

The big talk of the show was, of course, the iPhone. People couldn't stop talking about it. I suspect that every big Apple fan out there will jump on it but then sales will start to fall off. It's an interesting phone with some novel ideas but it doesn't seem fully thought-out.

First of all, the battery is embedded into the product and unreachable by the user without dismantling the entire phone. If you need to replace the battery you'll essentially need to send it into Apple for repair. For a device that doubles as a media player, this doesn't make any sense to me. I'll spend the flight playing music only to land and find I can't make a call because I've run the the battery down. With a similar device I'd just pop in a previously charged second battery and be good to go. Not here.

The entire device is LCD-driven. There's almost no hard buttons on it. This presents a few problems. In the home theater remote world this has already played out. Philips has their high-end Pronto remote that's mainly an LCD-driven device. However every new version of it includes more physical buttons than the last one. The lack of any real buttons means that users won't get instant physical feedback on button presses and will struggle to learn where every dynamic feature ends up. The interface they came up with is well thought-out. I just hope the jump into an all-LCD approach doesn't undo all their other good thinking.

The other thing about it that I just don't get is the two year exclusive they've given to Cingular. I'm from the Northeast so that pretty much ruins it for me. Cingular service is hit and miss around my way. Verizon is the dominant player here so I don't expect to be running into iPhones very often.

The rest of the show was pretty much typical. Nothing major came out of it aside from iPhone. My biggest regret is that I didn't make it to the Metreon to see the Titanic exhibition that's currently there. I passed by it every morning and every night on the way to and from the show from my room at the Marriot but was just too tired each night to make it. Oh to be 20 again.