It's a Small World After All

I love miniatures. Small things. Compact models and machines artfully designed. Doesn't really matter what it is, to me, if it's little, it's cool. When I was a kid I loved going to the museums and looking at the models and dioramas. I had a giant bin full of green army men. And countless legos. I loved them for their smallness.

I also used to walk a mile by myself to Woodcraft Hobby Store to gaze longingly at all of the plastic model kits I couldn't afford. I'd spend what seemed like hours studying the packages and looking at the dioramas. The Tamiya models were the best. God, they were well-made. So detailed, so perfectly sculpted. On the rare occasions that I could get one of those kits, I build them with great care and pleasure, though I never felt that I did them justice. Assembled and painted by professionals, I was absolutely entranced by their beauty. They were fucking sublime. I'm tearing up just thinking about them. Forget that "Big is the New Small" bullshit. Mini is magnificent!

Which brings me to my other early passion: Japan. Tamiya is of course a Japanese brand. Japan held a curious place in the minds of Americans in the 1970s. The war generation looked upon Japan with racism and disdain. The baby boom generation looked at Japan as a source of cheap products. I think my generation was the first American generation to start actually appreciating Japanese things. Japan held a fascination for me that lasted throughout my childhood - I loved Godzilla, I loved anime, loved the samurai knights, loved the...

But I digress. Where was I? Miniatures. All this talk about miniatures and Japan helps me to justify to myself why I have gotten so geeked up about this really cool car. I've been obsessed with this snazzy little baby for weeks. I even bought a lottery ticket hoping I would win, so I could buy one. Dammat, Powerball! That was my $240 million! I NEEDED that money for my new ride! Hook me up!

Now, I've never considered myself someone who nurtured a passion for automobiles. As a boy I thought formula one cars were cool and I thought James Bond had a sweet ride. Also, I loved the gull-wing doors on the DeLoreans. My brother and I had the orange matchbox tracks, and we were mad about the Tyco racing sets. But as a teen and young man, vehicles and motor sports were lost on me. They still are, really. I couldn't care less about NASCAR, and I don't really need a hot car to get around in. Being a practical cat, I am content with my Subaru wagon (incidentally, Subie turned 130 thousand today, bless her!).

But this Honda Civic is so rad! I love all of the fine details and the precise sculpting. I love the curves, the cute yet punchy attitude of the body. The exterior has a smart, sleek look that says visually, "fun, cool, zippy, tough." And the interior is a gadget lover's dream. Lights and knobs and toggles galore. The seats look incredibly comfortable and inviting, and I love the mixed-material upholstery.

Damn, that is one fine automobile. I need a cigarette.

Professional Crastination

I've been watching movies at a pretty good clip lately, probably owing to the freezing weather, my diminished health, and an overpowering desire to escape my earthly woes. A quick inventory of the films I have seen but for which I have not yet scrawled some words:

• Pan's Labyrinth
• Idiocracy
• Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
• Beowulf and Grendel
• Y Tu Mama También
• Flyboys

Six reviews behind. How do real movie critics do it?

Two-Fisted Tale of Tony vs. Paul

This is an excellent video ~ I insist that you check it out right now!

Blogger Blows

I noticed something this weekend that annoys me: every time I edit a post, my blog automatically adds to each label count under which I have my post listed. So, if I edited this post 4 times, there would be four new posts under the label "sucks." Even though I'm writing only one essay about how much blogger sucks. LAME!

I suppose I shouldn't complain, because this is basically a really cool web tool, and it's free! But c'mon, an essay counter that can't count? That's Microsoft-esque.

Misery

I feel fine, more or less. Except my head. My head feels awful: I've got a headache, my throat is dry and sore, my lips are chapped, and my face is filled with some unholy agar. But the worst part of this damnable cold is the itch in my nose that refuses to cooperate. It makes my eyes well up and my face flush and my breathing labored, but I am denied the simple satisfaction of release. Why does this cold mock me so? If you please, oh Lord of Sneeze, how may I appease?

I've watched a total of five movies this weekend: two excellent, two good, and one hardly worth mentioning. I've managed just one review so far, a rather clumsy, rambling affair. But I do recommend that film; I count it among the excellent. Anway, that leaves my backlog of film reviews in this space at five. I'd better get on the stick. But not tonight. Tonight I find comfort in the bottle. At least I hope so.

Triumph of the Will

It's freakishly cold out, and it hasn't been this bad in a while. Plus, I'm fighting an annoying cold. Time to warm up the DVD player! Last night I spent about forty-five minutes in the video store, wandering up and down the aisles in a torpor while my daughter grew increasingly agitated with me. That hasn't happened in a few years either. After much consideration and some drooling, I came home with four films.

"I have two sons, and I will allow none of my children to serve in the United States military. If you join the military now, you are not defending the United States of America. You are helping certain policy-makers pursue an imperial agenda." So says not some fringy, leftist malcontent, but retired Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, toward the end of the documentary Why We Fight. She would know better than most: she served in the Pentagon in the first years of the Bush Administration under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. On the eve of the Iraq war, she left the Pentagon and the military in disgust.

The film takes its name from the series of famous WWII propaganda films by Frank Capra, and traces a straight line from President Dwight D. Eisenhower's prescient warning against the military-industrial complex to the present day. Now that was a remarkable speech, one that deserves a fresh look. The film seeks to do just that, and using archival footage, new interviews, and a wide-angle view of the American presidency, paints an ugly portrait of the defense industry's entrenchment into American domestic and foreign policy.

A friend of mine wryly pointed out to me a few weeks ago something that we chuckled about, but is profoundly true: one thousand years from now, no one but egg-headed scholars will remember George Bush's or Saddam Hussein's name, or what was the reason for going to war, if ever there was one. Perhaps these historians will speak of the declining power of the United States and its insatiable need for natural resources.

The masses and the schoolchildren, however, will remember the more benign fruits of our times, the inventions and the innovations: that in the late 20th and early 21st century, the microchip came into being, that we traveled to the moon, that we plumbed the human genome, that we landed robots on Mars. These contributions to humanity will endure. War is just a tired backdrop to the entire tapestry of human civilization.

Maybe that is the question we should be asking of ourselves and our leaders: do we want to make the history that truly lasts, or do we want to confine ourselves to the trivial, forgettable policies that serve merely a narrow interest now, and serve no interest whatsoever to our legacy as a species?

The Genius of the Criminal Mind

I work at a large bank on anti-money laundering software. Yesterday I came across some brilliant reasons for filing suspicious activity reports on our customers...

"Customer often makes cash deposits into two accounts for $4,500 each. I asked the customer, 'you always make deposits for $4,500, right?' Customer's response was, 'yes, because you'll report everything else.' He added, 'you have no idea how much I make.'"

"Customer has constant inquiries about how to avoid a CTR (currency transaction report)."

"Customer's average account balance is 96 dollars. Made a $27,000 wire transfer to Honduras."

"Customer and her husband make $9,000 cash withdrawals almost everyday."

"Customer regularly comes in with a duffel bag. Bag contains a large number of small bills totaling four to five thousand dollars, customer exchanges them for hundred-dollar bills. Money tends to smell like marijuana."