Ntuple Indemnity

Evidence, as it were, that Toy Story is quotable to the ends of the earth.

You will notice that there has been a marked lack of updates for almost two weeks now in spite of all sorts of dramatic and interesting happenings, from UBC students having the sense to elect Spencer Keys as their new Alma Mater Society President to this year’s round of Oscar nominations.

On the subject of the latter, I do have plenty of analysis on the backburner, but I am holding off on jumping to any conclusions until I have seen Million Dollar Baby, which opened in Edmonton this week. The reason is because there are already plenty of people out there making qualified, statistically-founded inductive judgments on the “will-win” question – Kris and Sasha at OscarWatch, for instance. As much as I feel confident in declaring that nothing can stop The Aviator this year, Tapley figures in his 31 January post that the post-nomination media-killing is setting it up for an upset.

And, well, we all know what media-killing did to my beloved Phantom.

But let’s not make judgments yet. In spite of the nominations being neither insipid enough to denounce or surprising enough to remark upon, there are a number of interesting inclusions and omissions to discuss. That’s where my personal brand of punditry comes in – the “should-win” discussion, you might say. Eastwood’s contender aside, I have caught up with film 2004 to my personal satisfaction. Catching up with writing about it is a different matter, and will probably not happen; paragraph-long capsule summaries will not do justice to the likes of Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Sideways, Finding Neverland and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They deserve commentary of a more rigorous and piercing character. Thankfully, some of them have been sitting around long enough that there is little for me to add from a discursive standpoint, which means I have less to do.

The 2005 film season begins for real with a foreign release, that being Ong Bak starring Tony Jaa. It opens in Edmonton on 11 February. I am unfamiliar with the distributor, Magnolia Pictures, but I assume the release will be subtitled (which, in an ideal world, should be a given when it comes to any foreign release); if this is not the case, I welcome a correction. For those of you who are unaware, Ong Bak is the first major Muay Thai action picture to find its way here. Speaking as a Muay Thai aficionado of sorts, and one who has made the requisite Bangkok boxing ring pilgrimage that implies, this is a big deal.

With that postponement of any and all discussion of recent film out of the way, let us proceed to what this post is actually about, which is Scrabble.

This weekend was, if anything, a recovery. A 8-6 record in the annual 14-round Winter Tournament in Calgary earned this here writer $40 and a possible trip back into the 1300 zone, ratings-wise. Then there was the $10 for QUASHING (a game-winning 122-point out-play in a spectacularly risky endgame), and the $10 for JAVA (an 88-point TWS with the J on a double and some fortuitous parallels). Jeff Smith took the divisional Bingo Ace prize with twenty-one of the coveted suckers; I fell one short, playing twenty.

Strange things happen when you deal with words, especially when they are flowing out like drops of rain into a paper cup, as a certain famous twentieth-century poet would say. Prior to Round 2 I passed the time by reading the sixth Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator, which sees the Baudelaire children end up in the custody of Jerome and Esmé Squalor. In the game that followed, Mike Ebanks played SQUALOR on me for 104 points. Well, that hurt. It held up as the High Turn for my division until Al Pitzel slapped me with AZOTISE for 121 a few rounds later. Of course, I gave that record a sound QUASHING.

The QUASHING play – and more importantly, the endgame move leading up to it – was such a convergence of strategy and undeserved luck that to attempt to describe it without a board diagram would be to do it injury. Unfortunately, the same goes for a crazy, stupid, game-losing play in Round 14 that was about as close to ritual suicide as one can possibly get in a game of Scrabble. There are reasons why you should never suddenly lapse into rank amateurism and play off your remaining vowels, in particular the last U, and draw to an all-consonant final rack with a Q on it. (Until the OSPD4 introduces QI*, anyway.) You should especially avoid doing this with a word like PURGE when there is a perfectly good triple word score behind ESTATES on A9 inviting a back-hook on 8A, that being an R. Or a G, but there weren’t any left. Or a T, but I didn’t know that one.

Paying attention to the board and not making stupid endgame plays is usually a good idea. I’m still not over this one. The overwhelming magnitude of self-defeating recklessness exhibited in that single play, PURGE on an enticing triple, defies proper description short of a reconstruction of the board position. I’ll not do that for the time being.

What I will do instead is close this post, one that a frequent reader would not be wrong to classify as a transitional potpourri – the recitative between the arias, you might say – with a mention of today’s Gateway. You might call this one the video game issue. There’s yet another review of Resident Evil 4; regular readers should be aware by now that I see positive exposure of the GameCube as a very good thing. Dan Kaszor warns the general public of the PSP defects – nothing new to anyone who has actually been following the handheld wars, but the same implicit affirmation as before: if you are the type to buy a portable system, buy a Nintendo DS instead. (Once there’s more than a game and a half for it, anyway.)

There’s also a review of Uwe Boll’s film of Alone In The Dark, which employs a bit of a faulty metonym in claiming that “you could say that 32-bit technology just doesn’t translate well to the big screen” when every cited example predates the 32-bit era. The point still holds, though. If you haven’t read The Foywonder’s interview with Uwe Boll, go take a look.

As much as I would like to see video games develop a reputation as being a substantial storytelling medium – a characteristic that finds reflection in adaptability – it really is quite amusing to see Uwe Boll define himself as “a machine that acquires rights to video game properties and converts them to utter dreck.” I am in a position to laugh because from everything I have read about Mr. Boll, his video game tastes – which, by no coincidence, largely revolve around blood, gore and not much else worth mentioning – are so distant from my own that I scarcely need to worry about him ever coming anywhere close to any franchise I actually care about.

But that’s only because I’m a snob, and he’s not. And for a measure of which camp ultimately comes out on top, I remind you that he is the one in B-movie hell.

I should add, though, that I can see why video game publishers are so eager to sell movie rights to this guy. First, he’s willing to buy them. And as in the case of the horrid misunderstanding of The Avengers back in 1998, an atrocious adaptation can draw attention to the superiority of the original material (where applicable). The murder victim in all of this is the viability of anyone in film, producer or consumer, ever taking video game adaptations seriously. But as a game publisher, why would you care?

The last thing I will point to in The Gateway is Ian Keteku’s debut in the Opinion section. While the article itself is not all that remarkable (especially from the point of view borne by this here zealot who thinks true black culture is Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles, not this overproduced contemporary riffraff), my fellow Churchill alumni are always a welcome sight. The literate ones, at any rate.

Some advice to my regular readers: if I don’t post for a week, it’s usually because of something I call “deadlock”. In other words, there are multiple topics at hand that deserve a lot of attention, and the act of completing a post on any of them becomes an arduous task – especially when the urgency and topicality demanded by some of these end up negating each other. Nash equilibria, kids, Nash equilibria.

First of all, there really isn’t much I can say about my rather disappointing performance at the 12-round New Year’s Marathon, where I went 5-7 (-84). I could harp on such trivialities as how, revealingly, the last word I played at the end of a bitterly long day was CUNT; or how it took until Round 9 for me to get my act together and score a tournament victory in the 500 range (a four-bingo 533-243 wipeout over a decided unlucky Jeff Smith) after a very long drought of not doing so – but neither of them make up for the fact that for the first three rounds, I missed bingos like crazy, and played way too safely for my own good.

A tip for players who want to move up the ranks – and I say this as someone who has learned this both the hard and the easy way: play with confidence. Nothing teaches you what the phoneys are like taking a risk and playing one; nothing is so rewarding as the feeling of playing a word you are uncertain about out of desperation, drawing a challenge and unexpectedly winning it. It’s like what Indiana Jones discovers as he faces the test of the Path of God on his way to the final resting place of the Holy Grail: it takes a leap of faith.

Then again, your stupid words may get challenged off in a jiffy, whereupon you lose.

Regarding my earlier post on Martin Kennedy – I’ve had it verified by numerous sources, including Mr. Kennedy himself, that he was a former World Schools Champion, having claimed victory at the inaugural event in 1988, the same event that Calgary is set to host in February. That year, like the WUDC, the WSDC was also held in Australia. This is also why CUSID history is not the place to look if you want to fill in the gaps in the UADS chronology, because ten to fifteen years ago, there really was no CUSID West – at least, none that counted. Back then, what we now know as British Parliamentary (Worlds Style) was not even hard-coded into the Worlds format, let alone accepted in any capacity by Canada.

Now that we have multiple BP tournaments a year attended by those who aren’t even on their way to Worlds, I’d say intervarsity debating has come a long way since those forlorn days.

Speaking of which, if at this point you still haven’t read the Globe and Mail story on Jamie Furniss, read it.

And now for something completely different. Those of you who are in the Gateway distribution area will have noticed a letter published today in response to Production Editor Dan Kaszor’s picks for 2004’s five worst feature films in Tuesday’s year-in-review issue:

In regards to the Gateway‘s bottom five movies of the year list by Daniel Kaszor (11 January), I was shocked and dismayed to see the list dominated by “urban comedies”.

Mr Kaszor – who I assume is white – puts down these films that were clearly created for an audience that he does not understand. Just because the movies aren’t made for you doesn’t mean you have free license to pan them in the press.

Maybe next time you want to unleash your cultural imperialism on the world, Mr. Kaszor, you should decide against it instead.

Now, being an unapologetic cultural imperialist myself, maybe I’m not the most unbiased person to write in Kaszor’s defence – but there’s a reason why I commonly point to him as one of the very, very few people I have encountered on this campus who not only knows how film works, but knows it damn well. If you read what he’s written on movies in the past, you should know that he is exactly the kind of filmgoer who should be writing about what he sees – in that he appears to value good filmmaking most of all above any trivial genre-bias that you often find proliferated amongst casual audience.

Now, this isn’t to say that I agree with him on every occasion. For instance, I don’t think Alexander is nearly as total a disaster as he describes. But like all the critics for whom I have some respect – that is, people who know what they are talking about – the skill of presenting a value judgment about movies lies not in what that judgment is, but how it is reasoned.

In other words, maybe people who are so quick to defend “movies” such as White Chicks and Soul Plane should realize that the cultural sympathies of an individual audience member do not excuse the narrative failings of a woefully inadequate stinkbomb.

(I rarely use boldface for emphasis in this manner, but I thought that mantra was sufficiently deserving of special treatment.)

There is a reason why “urban comedies”, loath as I am to dignify them as such, generally suck. They are patterned after one another on the momentum of commercial appeal, oblivious to the valid criticisms of those of us who care about the filmmaking art form. Being made by black people for black people, should one be so clueless as to resort to such crass self-applied stereotypes, isn’t enough to justify stupid storytelling by stupid storytellers.

I happen to think that cross-dressing and rap “music” are pretty yucky (especially the latter, though I do admire some of the technical production work that goes uncredited), but I enjoyed 8 Mile and absolutely loved Some Like It Hot. Why? Because they are good films.

And until there’s a good “urban comedy” – and one would think it would need to be a) urban, and b) comedic – films of the genre deserve to be spat upon. The same goes for the mercifully dying fad of the “teen comedy”, which has only ever given us one film worth mentioning, that being American Graffiti (advantaged by a pre-Star Wars Lucas at the helm, fast cars, Ronny Howard, doo-wop music and not being gross). But as long as these “movies” keep imitating each other, they can go ahead and assert their place in the cinematic wastebasket.

I could go into further detail about why critic-bashers are by and large fundamentally ignorant about what good criticism actually entails (but with an admission that bad criticism is certainly out there in droves), but that’s one of those hot-button issues that I am keeping at bay until I can present my philosophy in a way definitive enough that I can just copy and paste from it in the future.

The frankest way to put what I’m saying here is this: qualified judgments of films are not simply matters of personal taste, and those who leap to the defence of works that are so devoid of merit as to be critically indefensible neither understand movies or know how to watch them.

Oh, is it ever bothersome to deal with the proponents of the bottom of the barrel. At this rate, I’ll never get around to finishing my comments on A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Aviator and A Very Long Engagement – not to mention all the other actual movies coming down the pipes.

I also can’t believe it took me so long to stumble upon this website: Who’s Your Scrabble Daddy? It has tournament statistics dating back to January 2003 for every rated NSA player, including “lifetime” win-loss records against specific opponents. I am located here.

Am I really 1-6 against Jessica Arts? I find that shocking, because our games are always so close. I blame this entirely on that one five-bingo game last year that I had in the bag until she played out with CARBONIC on a most improbable lane, but the only one that remained – a beautiful find that stuck me with an X, if I recall, though I will have to go back and find the scoresheet.

Somewhat more encouraging is that my biggest gains of 46 rating points apiece have been against Sue (a 4-3 record) and Wendy (3-1) – not particularly consistent in either case, but fortuitous considering that they are both higher-rated players with a lot more experience at the game.

My record would be a whole lot more consequential if the website in question had started tracking two years earlier; since 2003, my net rating gain has been unimpressive, mostly because of the 140-point tumble I took at Nationals. In the meantime, I am still waiting on Paul to update the ladder statistics for unrated club play in Calgary. It’s been promised for months now, but I trust the end result will be well worth the delays.

Two things, actually. The first, as evidenced by my 6-11 record this weekend, is how to play good Scrabble. The second is that ESPN broadcast the one-hour special of the Wright-Gibson final earlier today, a fact that I was reminded of when I checked my referral logs and found a gaggle of hits from people searching for a definition of Trey’s clinching out-play in Game 3. I’m not positive, since I don’t have my OSPD handy, but I believe a teopan is some sort of Aztec temple.

I missed the show, but you don’t have to. ESPN 2 is running it again at 5:00pm EST on the 14th of October. If anyone satellite-enabled can procure me a videotape or something to that effect, it would be greatly appreciated.

Those of you who get The National Post should look for Dan Lazin’s story on this weekend’s Western Canadian Championship in the Arts section Tuesday or Wednesday – I’m not sure which.

All of my Edmonton readers probably know this by now given that it has really begun to percolate over the last few days, but for the rest of you this may be news: man, Jung-Suk is in trouble.

Isn’t it funny how every time I promise that my next post will be a dissertation on the subject of a cultural monument, I get distracted by not one, but several interjectory events?

Take, for example, this delightful eight-minute Flash film: “Craziest”, by VidLit founder Liz Dubelman – who, while not a former Scrabble champion, certainly tempted me to check to make sure. An anonymous reader dropped the link in the HaloScan comment box of my previous post, but I feel a need to highlight it, as it is a clever and resonant piece that struck me in more ways than one – all of them personal.

For instance, take the moment when expert player Albert Hahn dies of a triple-triple-induced heart attack. Funny that of all the experts that could have been featured in the short, she picked the one from Calgary. Fortunately, reports of his demise are greatly exaggerated (but at the same time, greatly entertaining). I see this as a good thing, because I spent most of the summer near the top of the ladder in the Calgary club where Albert kicked me around on a regular basis, and I do plan to beat him eventually. The closest I have gotten so far is nine points in the red.

There has been a discussion pertaining to “Craziest” on the competitive players’ mailing list, CGP, and it was amusing to see Albert emerge and post a response. That community caught wind of the link last Tuesday, but I somehow missed it completely.

Current listings for the Western Canadians next weekend indicate that I will be the bottom-seeded player in the 14-player Division 2, which means I will be playing all of them in the 17-round main event. Not so for Dan Lazin, who is one of four unrated newcomers in the 35-player Division 4, barring any drops or additions between now and Friday. Dan nearly scored his first victory against me earlier today when he bingoed out with RETOOLER* on a triple word score, only to have it challenged off.

Albert, currently the top player in Alberta with a rating of 1759, is seeded sixth in Division 1. Top-seeded is California’s Ira Cohen (1868), who walked away with two of the three Western Canadian Scrabble Championships that I have attended. No sign of perennial attendee Bill Kinsella (perhaps better known to Canadian literature buffs as W.P.), but we shall see next week.

My other excuse for not getting to writing about the Classic Trilogy DVDs yet – aside from schoolwork, Margaret Atwood and old lace – is that I spent much of the last two days with the annual UADS-hosted high school debate tournament, named for Lieutenant-Governor Lois Hole. At Friday night’s workshop, none of us participating in the demonstration round could remember Michael Wilson’s name. Wilson is the man behind the counter-documentary Michael Moore Hates America, and the case run by Crossman/Jacobs in the demo was that Moore should grant Wilson an interview for the purposes of the film.

See, everyone in the round also conveniently forgot that the film has already been completed and actually had its Dallas premiere two weeks ago.

The tournament itself, which was held on Saturday, consisted of three rounds in Canadian Parliamentary style, Western times. Word is that some of the beginning debaters had trouble filling eight minutes of speaking time apiece, though I did not bear witness to this phenomenon in the rooms I adjudicated. I judged the final in the Open category, where Will McClary and Joshua Sealy (William Aberhart) attempted to prove that “geeks are inheriting the Earth” on the Simpsons-themed resolution, “This house believes that everything’s coming up Milhouse.” While it was a highly amusing case that scored more than a few brownie points on account of its lavish praise of George Lucas, they did a better job of demonstrating why “values” cases (as opposed to “policy”) are such a rarity in impromptu rounds: they are incredibly hard to navigate without plunging oneself into definitional quicksand.

The Opposition team of Morgan Wheaton and Garnett Genuis (Old Scona) capitalized on that, taking the angle that those who make the decisions have a higher place in the world than those who make those decisions possible – in a nutshell, that we do not live in a technocracy. Buried under the rhetoric were some fairly broad and assertive generalizations on both sides of the house, but Opposition ultimately came out on top. Government, however, showed us all a good time.