Tuesday, 12/16/08
A few weeks ago I bought a shiny US Robotics V.90 modem on eBay, as the one connected to the office's space-age phone system had failed. (By space-age, I mean I'd think was designed in the 60s if it wasn't running OS/2.) I would have appreciated being able to have the modem delivered to the office, but the seller would only ship to "confirmed" Paypal addresses, which for me was home. So I lost a day on the delivery, and had to stay home to sign for it.
Persuading Paypal to accept my work address as valid consists of them sending me a letter via US Mail with a code in it. The code, when it arrived last Friday in one of those tear-on-three-sides security envelopes, was twenty digits long. "This seems excessive," I observed to myself as I typed it in. That was not the end of the process. Entering the code delivered me to a new page, containing a portly barcode, which Paypal instructed me to fax to an area code in Omaha. Fax! And I'd thought the US Robotics modem was obsolete technology.
But I did it, naively expecting that some friendly robot would read the barcode and I'd get the confirmation email within the hour. Four days later, that email arrived:
This message confirms that we have received the documents you sent to PayPal. [...] We review documents in the order in which they are received and generally require 3 to 5 business days to process these documents. Once we process your documents, we will contact you about the status of your PayPal Account.
So much for friendly robots -- but wait! The followup arrived a scant four minutes later:
To confirm your alternate address we need additional information.
- A valid photo ID (driver's license, passport, or military id).
- A copy of a utility bill or a credit card statement or a bank account statement.
If the address is your place of employment, please send a pay stub or business card showing your name and the alternate address you wish to have confirmed.
When submitting this information, please make sure your name and the alternate address you wish to confirm appear on the statement.
What, no notary? I don't think I'm willing to jump through that many hoops without a wetsuited trainer tossing fish into my mouth. Meanwhile, it'll be far less work to briefly change the billing address on one of my credit cards, which Paypal idiotically trusts. 10:23PM «
Saturday, 12/13/08
All the howling about the shortcomings of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" made me doubt my recollection of Temple of Doom. So I re-watched the latter, under near-ideal big-home-theater circumstances, and I defy anyone to name a Spielberg movie that's any worse.
I'll stipulate that Crystal Skull features excessive George Lucas, a cavalier use of the Ark warehouse, a moderately annoying adolescent sidekick, parallel roads in a rain forest, a poor grasp of both atomic weapons and magnetism, and superfluous aliens. But it also has Karen Allen, Cate Blanchett, and Ray Winstone, who make up for a lot of ills. I saw Crystal Skull with my dad, 19 years after the two of us saw the previous installment, and we had a fine time.
Temple of Doom, after stumbling through an opening sequence that would have been cut from Big Trouble In Little China, comes right back with cavalier use of Dan Akroyd, a pre-adolescent karate-kicking orphan sidekick, parallel unsafe trolly tracks, no conception of which cultures subscribe to voodoo, and a lazy deus ex machina rescue, which would have insulted the audience even if it didn't consist of delivery from Indian brutes by the British Empire.
Did everyone somehow forget the dining sequence, with the creepy kid-Mararajah? Larry David couldn't conjure a worse audience embarrassment, and it only fails to stop the movie cold by making Indy too distracted to eat. Lucas' decision to weakly retread his own trash-compactor scene just six years after Star Wars would have been inexplicable even without putting Harrison Ford in it. And for the Thuggee zombie-juice to be instantly reversible by fire, in caverns where fire is the only light source, makes even less sense than the aliens in Signs besieging a planet that's 71% covered in water.
And then there's Kate Capshaw, whose role is so shrilly unappealing that as a ~12-year-old boy seeing this for the first time, I not only couldn't figure out what Indy liked about her, their continued relationship seemed like a black mark against heterosexuality. To go from Marion Ravenwood to Willie Scott is like breaking up with Formula One and having a fling with a Costco parking lot.
It's a tribute to the quality of Raiders that the franchise didn't die with this stinker. I'd sit through Hook, A.I., and Jurassic Park 2 all back-to-back before this again. 04:43PM «
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