MAGIC         PORK

A while back, I saw the movie Caché. It’s about this couple that find a videotape left on their doorstep. The tape is of their house, just filming them coming and going and such. But who made it, and why? More tapes get left throughout the film, secrets get revealed, and so on. Some major questions go unanswered at the end of the movie so you leave the theater scratching your head, wondering what the hell that was all about. Yeah, one of those movies. Oh and it’s in French with subtitles. You already know whether it’s a movie you’ll be interested in.

After thinking it over, I came up with a theory that I thought made it all work. In fact, it made so much sense that I thought there must be lots of people online that came to the same conclusions. After poring through discussions on IMDB and other sites that I found, I didn’t see anyone reach the same conclusion as me. I thought either I’m crazy or I’m brilliant! Those two aren’t mutually exclusive, but I decided that I was brilliant and left it at that.

Then I read a Roger Ebert “Answer Man” column where someone wrote in about some theory they had. I always read the Answer Man column. It runs every 2 weeks. Ebert just lives & breathes movies. I have a lot of respect for him. I don’t always agree with him of course, but very often I do, and he’s a great writer. In Answer Man, he’ll respond to reader’s questions. Sometimes they’re just questions about his opinion on something and other times it’s a specific question about a movie. It’s not uncommon to see a question about a movie and he’ll reply “I wasn’t sure so I asked the movie’s director, Martin Scorcese…” or “well back in 1992 I was having dinner with Robert Altman and he said…”. It’s like whoa, I guess that’s one way to find out!

Anyway, so someone wrote in with a theory about Caché and neither him nor Ebert had it right! Now I just had to write to Ebert and enlighten him as to what the movie was really all about. I imagined him reading it, thinking “This man’s a genius! Why didn’t I see that?” Maybe he’d be so impressed, he’d invite me to dinner if I’m ever in Chicago. I’d tell him to bring Richard Roeper along. I’d have to study a few films really hard and steer conversation to them so I can sound like I know what I’m talking about. Maybe I’d start by commenting on how I like his “Great Movies” articles about 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Birth of a Nation. Then I’d probably be the millionth person to tell him how wrong he was about Napoleon Dynamite and Fight Club. Then I’d turn to Richard and say how I read every column he writes, even the ones about athletes that I’ve never heard of (I don’t follow sports… at all) and tell him how awesome it was when he devoted two columns to ripping apart the “facts” of Ann Coulter’s book. But I’d say he was very wrong when he said on Ebert & Roeper that Camilla Belle is a thousand times more beautiful than Lindsay Lohan. Please. Lindsay Lohan is precisely 1.286 times more beautiful than Camilla Belle. End of subject.

Well that was over a month ago that I wrote to him and I figured he had hit the delete key but I was at least hoping that he had read it. Then I’m reading his latest Answer Man column today and there I am! My e-mail was greatly edited down and I think it makes me sound like a bit of a kook because of that, even though it does a pretty accurate job of capturing the gist of my argument. But he apparently didn’t see the genius in my theory on the movie.

First off, publishing it six weeks later makes it sound like I’m bringing up an old subject when I wrote to him the day after he answered a question about the movie. But more importantly, he doesn’t really address my theory, which makes me think he must be dismissing it as just another wacky theory he’s heard. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to play the part of the misunderstood genius. At least he found my e-mail worthy of addressing, and maybe some other people out there will flood him with e-mails telling him how I cleared it all up for them.

I’m not sure who is going to want to read the rest of this post, because I can’t imagine many of you have seen Caché, and therefore none of it will make sense to you. But here it is.

** Spoiler warning ** if you think you’re actually going to watch the movie.

First, here’s the previous question someone else asked, and his response. (Copied from here.)

Q. (Spoiler warning) My wife and I attended a screening of “Cache.” Everyone in the theater was puzzled by the last scene. Does the last scene at the school reveal the identity of who had been doing the tapings? Someone in the audience said they thought they saw the two sons talking to each other as though this provided a possible answer.

Al and Pat Ralston, Fullerton, Calif.

A. “Cache” has struck a nerve, and is doing surprisingly good business in the United States and Europe. I’m asked about it constantly, as if there is an answer. The last scene does indeed show the two sons talking, and there should be no way they know each other. But what does that explain? Does it account for the videos? Consider that the film’s last shot is exactly in the style of the videos that were received. Is someone else behind the camera? The film offers no possible closure.

Note how he says there is no possible closure. Not true, as I try to point out. Again I’d like to state that this is edited down from my amazing, astounding thesis. I wish I had kept a copy of the complete e-mail I sent to him but I had to fill it into one of those online forms instead of going through my e-mail client so it’s gone for good. It really went into a lot more detail, but I don’t feel like writing all that up again and I doubt any of you really care. (Copied from this week’s column.)

Q. No one in Michael Haneke’s “Cache” made those videotapes. The culprit is us, the viewing audience. There’s even a scene early in the film where Georges tries to figure out where the camera could have been, and can’t figure out how he could have walked right past it without seeing it. That’s because from his perspective, the camera wasn’t “there” at all. I took the film as a commentary on how voyeuristic our society has become. Whenever the movie switches to the videotape point of view, we stare, waiting for what’s going to happen. We become the voyeurs. I usually don’t go off on crazy theories like this, but you can’t take the movie literally. You mention that it doesn’t make sense that the two boys would be talking in the last shot; why couldn’t they know each other from school? They could even be unaware of who each others’ father is.

Kevin McMillen, Rochester, N.Y.

A. “Cache” is the movie people will not stop devising theories about, and although I’ve discussed it several times in the Answer Man, the subject is apparently not closed. I’m at the Cannes Film Festival, where I got into a discussion of “Cache” with the director William Friedkin. He told me: “I was talking to Barbet Schroeder, one of the producers on the film, and he said that after Haneke screened it, everybody told him he was crazy, because 99 percent of the audience would never see those two obscure kids in the upper left hand corner of the final shot. So he re-edited it, put in a closer shot so you could see it was them, and put in the dialogue of what they were saying to each other. Then his psychiatrist in Vienna told him, ‘No, no! Do it the way you wanted!’ So he took all that stuff out again.”

What were the kids saying? I asked.

“That,” Friedkin said, “I don’t know.”

Here’s two short conversations I overheard recently that I thought were pretty funny. They might not be able to compete with the ones on Overheard in New York (warning: site contains uncensored conversations) but this is Rochester, not New York City.

I walking around the Lilac Festival (it’s a festival we have here in Rochester) and there was a man with his kids. There’s all these booths with stuff for sale and food and the like, you know, festival stuff. His daughter starts complaining that she wants to eat something. The man says:

Did you know you can survive two weeks without food? Did you know that? A person can go two weeks without food.

This is day one.

The other conversation that I heard happened today. This young man is talking to another man. I should note that, unlike the previous conversation, there was no hint of sarcasm in his voice. He said:

Stiches are a waste of money. I’ve never gotten stiches. Tape works just as good. I mean, as long as stuff’s not falling out. I gashed my hand open once and just taped it up.

I missed most of the rest of what he said, but he was talking for another minute or so. I overheard the “stuff’s not falling out” line again. The man he was talking to seemed to be agreeing with him. Then I heard the last thing he said before moving on to another topic, apparently in reference to something the other man said.

Yeah, duct tape does the trick too, if you don’t have Band-Aids.

Actually, now that I think about it, it wouldn’t be that funny if the man just doesn’t have health care and can’t afford to get stiches. But it seemed that he just didn’t see the point in it. Unless stuff’s falling out, that is.

I’ve been getting comment spam for a while now. It’s a little annoying but hasn’t been so bad that I’ve felt the need to do something about it, other than just moderating the comments. Those of you that haven’t posted a comment may be unaware of this, but every time you post a comment, it gets e-mailed to me and I have to approve it before it shows up on the site. So if you ever post a comment and it doesn’t show up on the site for a while, it’s either because I haven’t checked my e-mail since then or I didn’t like what you said! So far I’m glad to see that everyone has been on good behavior and the only posts that I’ve had to delete have been from spammers.

I’ve been tempted a couple of times to just let a spam comment go through, because I get a kick out of some of them. They’re the most favorable comments I get so if I just edit them to remove the links to whatever crap they’re selling, it would look like I have some huge fanbase out there. It’s amusing how they’ll word the comments in a generic way so that it could apply to almost any post. Amusing up to a point, but then I just get sick of it.

I sifted through my e-mail trash and found some spam comments that I’ve received. I’ll present them here for your enjoyment. I’m also doing it because I get a sort of twisted pleasure out of posting the spammer’s comments but stripping out the part that they really care about, the links.

From “Anny”:

Best site I see. Thanks.

You’re welcome, Anny.

From “John”:

Very good site. Thanks for author!

Glad you enjoy it. I’m thankful for the author too.

From “Kelly”:

It’s my first visit to your website. After just a quick browse, I’m really impressed!

Well come back for more, Kelly!

From “Edd”:

Hello admin, nice site you have!

Thanks Edd! But feel free to call me Kevin (that’s one ‘n’).

From “Shawn”:

Just whant to say HI! I love this place!

HI Shawn! I lhove this place TWO!

From “Lemat”:

Great website! Bookmarked! I am impressed at your work!

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, Lemat! Keep reading!

And my favorite comment spam yet, from “jennifer”:

I really love this page. I also agree, hey I am upside down or even right side up :-). You made my day.Blog away!.

I shall, jennifer. I shall.

Last week, I was flipping stations in my car and on 90.5 FM WBER I heard some totally kick-ass song playing. I thought “this sounds like Tool… yes it’s definitely Tool… this is a new Tool song I’ve never heard before!!” I had heard they were working on a new album but I didn’t know that it was about to come out and that they had released a single.

I’ve been disappointed with WBER in recent years. It used to be my favorite radio station but these days when flipping the dial (does anyone actually have a dial any more?) I usually end up not caring for what they’re playing and skipping right past them. Is it just me? Is there just less good music being produced? It’s pretty sad that I end up listening to 106.7 KISS FM more than WBER. Five years ago, I would sometimes look at the Billboard Top 10 and not recognize a single song. Now you’re more likely to see me singing along in my car to “I’m N Luv (Wit A Stripper)” than listening to WBER. Hey, the chorus is really catchy.

WBER is the station that used to play the hell out of Limp Bizkit’s “Counterfeit” back before anyone had heard of Limp Bizkit. They played Insane Clown Posse’s “Halls of Illusion”, Disturbed’s “The Game”, etc. Not that I only like those sort of hard-edged songs. I also appreciate artists like Ben Folds, of whom they’re big supporters. But just seems like if they still play heavy songs, I’m missing it when I flip the dial because all I’m hearing are some whiny singers. You gotta mix it up a little.

So I was pleasantly surprised to hear WBER playing the new Tool song. I remember when Ænima came out in 1996. They played “Stinkfist” throughout the day and you could call when you heard the song and try to win the CD before it hit stores. I tried a few times but wasn’t successful.

In 2001 (the year they released Lateralus), a friend and I bought tickets to see them in Madison Square Garden. They were playing MSG two nights in a row. The concert was scheduled for mid-October. Then the attacks on September 11th happened, and things were getting shut down everywhere so we weren’t sure what was going to happen, but the concert went ahead as scheduled.

The opening band was Fantomas. Mike Patton from Faith No More was the lead singer. Maybe if I had heard them beforehand I could have appreciated the music more, but it was very odd music and just wasn’t doing it for me. But I sat quietly and let them play, unlike lots of others in the audience. Right after 9/11 I was hearing all this stuff about how nice New Yorkers are, and I was thinking “really? That’s not the stereotype that I’ve heard.” Well I don’t know if I can blame the fact that it was New York City, or maybe it’s just that there are a lot of rude Tool fans, but that was the rudest audience I’ve ever been in.

People were booing and screaming “YOU SUCK!”, “GO HOME!”, “GET OFF THE STAGE!”. They’d sometimes take a break during the songs but as soon as a song would end they’d start up again. Then there were the few Fantomas fans that would start screaming back “NO, YOU RULE! DON’T LISTEN TO THEM!” I was wondering if I was going to see a fight break out. Near the end of their set, there was a moment of relative silence in between songs. Must be the critics had tired of screaming. Mike Patton taunted the crowd by asking “So… got any suggestions?” Immediately the place erupted with boos again. They just listened to it for a little while before starting another song. I thought that was pretty funny. I only knew it was Mike Patton because I had looked up the band before going there. I bet most of the people didn’t realize that. I wonder if they would have treated them the same.

The next day we decided to walk to Ground Zero. I had only been to NYC once before and had never been to the World Trade Center. I think my friend had, but wasn’t sure how far away it was. So we just set out walking in the direction of it. Well now I know that Times Square (near our hotel) is a long way from Ground Zero! Although it wasn’t our intention, I think that made the experience more memorable. Even though we weren’t sure where it was, we could tell we were getting closer because streets would be blocked off, more police and emergency vehicles, military, and then we’d see buildings that were blackened and damaged. That was surprising to me because of all the images I had seen on TV, I hadn’t seen any of the buildings surrounding it.

They would build a platform later, but at the time people would be huddling by the intersections where you could see between buildings. I’m sure it annoyed some New Yorkers to have all these tourists inundating the place. We had to ask a cop for help figuring out which subway line to take back to our hotel, and he didn’t seem too pleased. Can’t really blame him.

Sorry for that tangent. It was a bit of a downer. Back to Tool! About a year later, WBER was giving away tickets to see Tool in Buffalo and I won! They were excellent live both times.

Now they finally have come out with another album, 10,000 Days. I’ve listened to it a few times and it’s super duper Tool-rific! (I got it for $9.99 at Best Buy.)

WBER is having another fund drive (they’re a non-profit station). I donated last time they had one, but was thinking I might not this time. But just because they still play Tool, even though more mainstream stations like 94.1 The Zone do too and that usually means WBER won’t touch them, maybe I’ll give them a little something.

I played some Texas Hold’em at Bellagio. Boy have things changed since I was last in Vegas. Poker wasn’t being televised on TV back then, so it wasn’t the phenomenon it is now. Most casinos that had poker tables had just a few. When I played at Mandalay Bay back then, I remember one Texas Hold’em table and one 7 Card Stud table and I’d have to put my name on a list to get seated if it was busy. Now there’s huge poker rooms. You still have to put your name on a list, but I got seated pretty much right away both times.

That was the only “thinking” kind of game I played. I used to be into blackjack, knew the basic strategy down pat, and even learned how to count cards (but only the simplest strategy). For blackjack, unless you’re counting cards, there’s always one and only one correct move to make for every hand to maximize your chance of winning. That’s what basic strategy refers to.

So once you know the basic strategy, it’s just pure memorization. There’s no decisions to be made. Dealer is showing this, I’m showing that, this is the action I take. If you follow basic strategy, you can greatly decrease the house odds, although of course the house still has an advantage. If you’re counting cards, you can gain an advantage over the house, but it’s a lot of work. It’s really hard to get an advantage when playing with six decks, especially if they put the cut card two decks from the bottom, and now they have automatic shufflers at lots of tables which makes it absolutely impossible.

I used to enjoy trying to count cards just because I had the basic strategy so well memorized that there wasn’t any challenge in that. But it could get to feel like work. Couldn’t drink or have a good chat without losing concentration and if you slip up even a little, you could end up making things worse for you than if you weren’t counting cards at all. So anyway, this time when I went to Vegas I didn’t play blackjack except for a few hands, because I had forgotten all of that and didn’t prepare myself ahead of time.

By the way, many people have the misconception that “counting cards” means you’re doing some sort of Rain Man type thing where you are keeping track of what cards have come up. It simply means you’re assigning point values to certain cards and keeping a running count of the sum, and when the sum is within a certain range, you modify the basic strategy and bet either greater or lesser representing the greater or lesser chance of getting a card with the value of 10. More advanced strategies use more complicated point assignments or keep a separate count of Aces, things like that. I don’t really want to get into it, but if you’re interested, I recommend the book Million Dollar Blackjack by Ken Uston. It’s a little outdated now but I thought it was a fun read and it effectively teaches you a very simple strategy. A lot of people are familiar with the book Bringing Down the House about some MIT students that worked in card counting teams to win big time, but Uston invented team play and discussed his techniques well before that book came out.

OK, one more thing about blackjack. I was only going to briefly mention it but now that I’m on the subject, I might as well keep going. The dealer is usually trying to help you. They want you to win because it’s not like it’s coming out of their pocket. Happy gamblers tip more and most of them are just nice people and like seeing people win. So if they suggest you take a certain action, they’re doing it because they think it’s right. For most cases, they might be right, but in my experience rarely does a dealer truly know the basic strategy. In just the few hands I played this time in Vegas, I got wrong advice. I had an Ace & a 7 and the dealer was showing a 3. Basic strategy says to double down on that but almost every dealer I’ve ever had will look at you like you’re crazy and tell you you have 18 and you should stand. You should not. But I don’t get into it with them, I just tell them what I want to do and then put up with the “see, you shouldn’t have done that” if they win. One more quick tip: NEVER take insurance.

Moving on… Since I hadn’t prepared for blackjack, I played some completely mindless (and more house-advantageous) games. It was fun. I could just sit back and have some free drinks and have fun with my friends. OK, wasn’t too much fun when I was losing money but overall the amount of money I lost for the four days I was there was a decent price to pay for my entertainment I think. That’s how you have to think of it.

I mostly played Mini Baccarat and Casino War. Casino war I was almost embarrassed to be seen playing, it was so amazingly stupid. Remember playing war when you were a kid? It’s just like that. You get a card. Dealer gets a card. Whoever has the highest card wins. The way the house makes their money is when there’s a tie you have to double your bet to do a tiebreaker and the house doesn’t, so you’re risking twice as much. Yes, stupid, but I wasn’t in the mind for anything complicated and had fun.

The other game I played was roulette, which is also mindless, there’s just more options for you to pick. Now I don’t want to insult anyone by stating the obvious here, but the number of seemingly intelligent people that gamble on roulette that don’t understand this next concept leads me to believe that there are a bunch of you out there that could benefit from this. If black comes up 5 times in a row, it does not mean that red is more likely to come up next. I know, they have a scoreboard showing the numbers that have come up. It’s meaningless. They’re just pandering to your misconceptions.

There’s a term for that misconception. It’s called… get this… gambler’s fallacy. I’ll quote the definition from my old Social Psychology textbook, just so I can say I got some use out of it since college:

Gambler’s fallacy: Failure to recognize the independence of discrete chance events. The tendency to believe that after an unusual series of events (such as tossing several “heads” in a row) a less extreme pattern will follow.

The little ball rolling around the roulette wheel doesn’t remember where it landed last time. That’s all I’ll say about that. If there’s still any confusion, refer to the link above.

So, other than gambling, we did some quiet bible study, discussed the effect of America’s foreign policy on the third world, volunteered at a church handing out food to starving illegal immigrant crack-addicted orphans, you know… typical stuff.

I took a trip to Las Vegas this last weekend and met up with some buddies from college. We’re all strewn across the country now - Virginia, Georgia, Arizona, and of course I’m representing the ol’ RIT turf. Fun was had by all, but you know the Las Vegas slogan: “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Nevertheless, I’ll share some stuff with you.

My flight arrived around 11 PM, which for me was 2 AM. By the time I waited to get off the plane, waited to catch a tram over to the baggage claim, waited for my bag, waited for a taxi, and rode to the hotel, it was past midnight by the time I got there. That taxi line was absolutely unbelievable. I don’t even know how to estimate how many people there were. I’d guess 500. It moved pretty quickly though, so it took about half an hour.

I’ve visited Las Vegas twice before, but it was back in 1999 & 2000. Flying into Vegas at night is a sight to behold. There’s nothing but blackness beneath you because you’re over the desert, then out of nowhere there’s a humonguous flat expanse of lights. Then as you get closer, you can see the Strip and the tall buildings jutting up out of this sea of lights. Then closer still, you can make out the individual casinos.

Leaving Las Vegas (I can’t say that without the Sheryl Crow song coming to mind, and I don’t even care for that song), it’s also impressive because I left during the day so that time I saw the beautiful mountains. Dry and dead looking, but beautiful.

On the flight from Atlanta (my stopover) to Las Vegas, I decided to have an alcoholic drink. I see now why people drink on airplanes. It was very relaxing. I thought the price was reasonable: $5 for a gin & tonic and there’s a decent amount of gin in those little bottles. I could have made two drinks from those small cups if they had given me more tonic, but instead I just had a nice strong drink. Plus it wasn’t some no-name gin, it was Tanqueray. I don’t fall asleep easily on airplanes, but that helped me at least relax a bit more. I get sick if I read on planes, so the iPod was my friend (plus Mr. Tanqueray).

I have to give credit to someone I know that’s a fan of gin and posted about it on his blog. That got me thinking about a gin & tonic, which I’ll occassionally have but not that often. That was a nice, light feeling drink so I stuck with it all weekend and it treated me well. I know, I’m making it sound like I’m a lush - but remember, it was Vegas! Drinks are free while gambling (well, I’d tip $1 to the waitress), I wasn’t driving, and I was on vacation, so yes I took advantage of that. I also had a Tanqueray & tonic on the flight back to Atlanta and was going to just have the one, but the two 40-something ladies next to me were ordering their second vodka & tonics so they and the flight attendant convinced me to go for a second one. They joked “come on, everyone’s doing it!” Maybe I should go back to elementary school and watch those videos about peer pressure!

OK, enough about drinking. Weather during the day was around 90 degrees, and it goes without saying, clear and sunny. Even at night it was still around 80 degrees or high 70’s. I thought it was going to be cooler because I think the other times I went the temperate dropped more than that at night. So walking the Strip during the day was pretty brutal but pleasant at night. We took taxi’s pretty often. Buildings can look deceptively close when they’re quite far away. Also, at least on the southern end, you can’t usually walk a direct line, you have to zig zag around, crossing the streets where there are foot bridges.

Speaking of taxi’s… I love cabbie stories. (See my Cleveland cabbie post.) Thursday night, the night I arrived, we were at Caesar’s Palace (I think) and took a cab back to Luxor where we were staying. It was around 2:30 AM in Las Vegas, which for my Virginia friends & me was 5:30 AM. So I was pretty tired to say the least. The five of us get in the minivan taxi and without saying a word, the driver starts BLASTING Metallica. I’m talkin’ old school Metallica. He was a middle-aged white guy, wearing sunglasses. At night. He had it on CD and would jump between tracks. I have to admit, it was pretty cool. But there was something very surreal about cruising down the Strip with Metallica blaring at what was, for me, 5:30 AM. I think what made it especially funny was he didn’t give an explanation. He just started playing it like it was the most normal thing in the world. I don’t know, maybe you had to be there but it was very funny. When he dropped us off he said that they don’t make music like that any more. They sure don’t, friend. I don’t think they make cab drivers like you any more either.

I saw Blue Man Group while I was there. I saw them the first time I went to Vegas, and the show was mostly the same, but it had been so long that I forgot much of it and thoroughly enjoyed it.

There’s two questions everyone asks when you return from Vegas so I’ll answer them now:

1. Did you eat $2.99 buffets? No. Yes there are cheap buffets, but you have to seek them out. They aren’t at the nicer casinos on the Strip that we were gambling at and just weren’t worth the inconvenience for me.
2. Did you win money? No. I lost money, but it was within the budget I had set for myself.

This post is getting pretty long so I’ll cut it off here. In my next post, I’ll discuss the gambling.