My Oscar Ballot

Here’s what my revamped Best Picture Oscar ballot would have looked like:

1. Up
2. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
3. The Hurt Locker
4. Avatar
5. Up in the Air
6. Inglourious Basterds
7. A Serious Man
8. District 9
9. The Blind Side
10. An Education

An Education

I finally saw the last movie on this year’s Best Picture list and I’m quite underwhelmed.  I’m not saying it’s a bad movie, on the contrary, it’s quite enjoyable, but Best Picture material?  Hardly.

The only justification I can come up with is that An Education is a nice throwback to a long gone golden era when scripts and performances were what mattered most, while the technical department only played a supporting role often largely ignored by the audience, and perhaps many Academy voters wanted to acknowledge and reward that.

Ironically, given that what I prize most in a movie is a good script followed by good acting, I should be thrilled with the Academy (and other awards bodies) for recognizing this movie.  I just didn’t find it very memorable, that’s all.

I also have to admit that I’m a sucker for the technical aspects of movies, whether it be great costumes, intriguing sound effects, wonderful set designs, or, above all, mind blowing visual effects.  As long as all that “stuff” is used in the service of the film as a whole and is not all there is, then I love it.  Unfortunately, nowadays it’s more likely that Hollywood will serve us a flick chock full of expensive visual effects loosely wrapped in a script so unimaginative and unoriginal that the end result is oftentimes simply pitiful.

An Education tells the story of a young English girl at a crossroads: she wants to pursue a higher education in a prestigious college, mostly because that could be her ticket out of an ordinary life, and then she falls for an older man who is unlike anyone she ever met.

The script is slick and solid and the acting is very good on the part of everyone, including Carey Mulligan, who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, which also puzzled me.  Yes, she is good, very good, especially at making us believe she’s a teenager, but her performance was several orders of magnitude below Meryl Streep’s in Julie & Julia as well as Gabourey Sidibe’s in Precious or Sandra Bullock’s in The Blind Side (I haven’t seen Helen Mirren in The Last Station yet).  I really have to wonder at how she ended up on this shortlist.

So all things considered, An Education is a good movie showcasing great acting and a good script that unarguably benefited more than any other film from the Academy’s decision to widen the Best Picture field by doubling the nominees.

Grade: 7

Altered

I picked this totally unknown movie from the list of horror movies on Netflix’s streaming service.  Altered wasn’t bad but it wasn’t terribly original either.

The story: 4 guys had been abducted by aliens many years ago.  The 3 survivors are now reunited by the need to deal with the dangerous abduction of one of the aliens.  Who will make it out alive?

While the acting is reasonably good and the visual effects are well done, the script is a little too weak to really hold the whole production together, which is a pity because this could have certainly been a better movie and as horror movies go, it has its moments.

Grade: 5

Shooting oneself in the foot

That’s what we do when we release toxic chemicals in the environment, because it looks like they come back to us on our dinner plates, sooner or later.
From Raw Story:

Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.
A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.
"These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean," said biologist Roger Payne, founder and president of Ocean Alliance, the research and conservation group that produced the report.
"The entire ocean life is just loaded with a series of contaminants, most of which have been released by human beings," Payne said in an interview on the sidelines of the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting.
Ultimately, he said, the contaminants could jeopardize seafood, a primary source of animal protein for 1 billion people.
"You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species. I suspect this will shorten lives, if it turns out that this is what's going on," he said.
Though it was impossible to know where the whales had been, Payne said the contamination was embedded in the blubber of males formed in the frigid polar regions, indicating that the animals had ingested the metals far from where they were emitted.
"When you're working with a synthetic chemical which never existed in nature before and you find it in a whale which came from the Arctic or Antarctic, it tells you that was made by people and it got into the whale," he said.
How that happened is unclear, but the contaminants likely were carried by wind or ocean currents, or were eaten by the sperm whales' prey.

Now, the real question is, Didn’t the people in charge of all the factories that produce those chemicals and dump them in the ocean or the atmosphere -- without catching them first and cleaning them up -- think that they’d eventually be ingested by the same animals that later on would be eaten by them, their families, and their employees?
I wonder if all those chemicals (and pesticides) will actually end up altering our DNA so that in hundreds of years our bodies will function in radically different ways.
In the meantime though, a lot of people will get cancer or other illnesses that will kill them.

Toxic rain coming to all of us

Looks like we might be in for several years of toxic rain all over North America:

When you pour more than a million gallons of toxic chemical dispersants on top of an oil spill, it doesn’t just disappear. In this case, it moves to the atmosphere, where it will travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles from the site of the BP oil spill, in the form of toxic rain.
BP’s oil spill-fighting dispersant of choice is Corexit 9500. It has been banned in Europe for good reason. Corexit 9500 is one of the most environmentally enduring, toxic chemical dispersants ever created to battle an oil spill.  Add to that the millions of gallons of oil that have been burned, releasing even more toxins into the atmosphere, and you have a recipe for something much worse than acid rain.
The European Union Times reports "A dire report prepared for President Medvedev by Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources is warning today that the British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico is about to become the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with “total destruction”.
[…]
Oil in the environment is toxic at 11 PPM (parts per million). Corexit 9500 is toxic at only 2.61 PPM. But Corexit 9500 has another precarious characteristic; it’s reaction to warm water.
As the water in the Gulf of Mexico heats up, Corexit 9500 goes through a molecular transition. It changes from a liquid to a gas, which is readily absorbed by clouds and released as toxic rain. The chemical-laden rain then falls on crops, reservoirs, animals and of course, people.
It is futile to believe that we can keep ‘Corexit rain’ from occurring since it has already been released and the molecular transformation has begun. We have set off an unprecedented chain of events in nature that we cannot control.
By releasing Pandora’s well from the depths and allowing it bleed into the sea the unimaginable becomes material.
Yet unlike a bad dream, we will not wake up from this nightmare and find it gone. The BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill will be touching millions of earth’s life forms for uncountable years.

Tragic and unfathomable.

Iceland joins the club

I can’t believe I missed this, but last month Iceland passed a gay marriage law.  Unanimously!!

From Reuters:

Iceland, the only country in the world to have an openly gay head of state, passed a law on Friday allowing same-sex partners to get married in a vote which met with no political resistance.

The Althingi parliament voted 49 to zero to change the wording of marriage legislation to include matrimony between "man and man, woman and woman," in addition to unions between men and women.

Iceland, a socially tolerant island nation of about 320,000 people, became the first country to elect an openly gay head of state in 2009 when Social Democrat Johanna Sigurdardottir became prime minister after being nominated by her party.

The article goes on to say that “the prime minister's sexual orientation garnered far more interest among foreign media than in Iceland, where the attitude toward homosexuality has grown increasingly relaxed in the past two or three decades.”

How very enlightened Icelanders must be.

The Doomsday Scenario: a sinkhole

I honestly don’t know how far fetched the possibility of something like this happening really is, but if it did happen, it would surely qualify as the biggest man made disaster in the history of the world.
From Pam’s House Blend:

There has been speculation that the rapid outflow of oil from the underground reservoir is setting things up for a sinkhole. If that happens, it is almost certain that tens of millions of gallons of petroleum and tons of natural gas will be released all at once.
With this new evidence, the estimated amount of the spill has been upped to as much as 70,000 barrels a day. That is almost 3 million gallons every 24 hours.
There is, as yet, nothing to prove that the seeping oil is related to the drilling or the explosion. It is very likely that there is a causal relationship, however. At these depths (over a mile down, remember) sediment and rock behave differently than they do closer to the surface: rocks that are normally brittle are held together by the immense pressure. Disturbing that rock -- drilling, vibrations caused by drilling, an explosive release of gas, the sudden loss of pressure beneath the rock as oil and gas are removed -- can weaken its integrity and cause massive cracks. This is a well know scientific fact, one of the many that British Petroleum ignored in their greedy quest for profits.
In addition to oil coming out of the seabed, observers have noticed a rapid increase of already high amounts of methane (aka natural gas) in the outflow. From the Associated Press via Yahoo:
     It is an overlooked danger in the oil spill crisis: The crude gushing from the well contains vast amounts of natural gas that could pose a serious threat to the Gulf of Mexico's fragile ecosystem.
     The oil emanating from the seafloor contains about 40 percent methane, compared with about 5 percent found in typical oil deposits, said John Kessler, a Texas A&M University oceanographer who is studying the impact of methane from the spill.
     That means huge quantities of methane have entered the Gulf, scientists say, potentially suffocating marine life and creating "dead zones" where oxygen is so depleted that nothing lives.
     "This is the most vigorous methane eruption in modern human history," Kessler said.
Methane is extremely flammable in the presence of oxygen; it is believed that a sudden outgassing of methane is what caused the Deepwater Horizon rig to explode. As microbes "eat" methane for energy, they remove oxygen from the water, meaning that large quantities of dissolved methane usually results in vast anoxic regions where most life cannot exist. In other words, the outgassing is expanding "dead zones" and creating new ones. And, methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas: when the gas begins to seep into the atmosphere, we will see a rapid increase in global warming and resultant climate change.
Even if the well were capped today and its outflow brought to zero, and even if the integrity of the rock is not further weakened and there is no sinkhole, oil and methane will continue to seep out through the sea bed for a very long time.

The blogger refers to what’s happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico as “ecological Armageddon.”
I cannot but agree with that assessment.

Criminal conduct

Sometimes the stuff you read is just mind boggling:

It may be hard to fathom, but even with gallons of oil spewing every minute from BP's broken well head in the Gulf of Mexico, not all the oil pollution in the Gulf is BP's fault.
[…]
But even though many millions of gallons of crude oil have leaked into the Gulf, much of what is washing up on beaches near in and around the Gulf is not from the Deepwater Horizon spill.
"We've done a number of tarballs from Florida, Key West, Miami and so forth, none of which so far have matched the Deepwater Horizon," Gronlund said. "The tarballs that have been found on the beach in Florida are fuel oil."
Fuel oil -- that means the oil comes from ships, not crude oil from a broken deep sea oil well.
[…]
Why might other ships spill oil? Coast Guard officials said some may have an undetected leak. Others, officials surmise, may be purposely spilling waste oil and dirty oil-laced bilge water into areas already fouled by a major spill hoping not to get caught. Dumping like that is cheaper than having tanks pumped out and cleaned properly according to government regulations when they get to shore. But if they are caught illegally dumping they could face fines above $1 million.

[…]
And the dishonest shippers do often get caught. Coast Guard inspectors will board ships when they come into port. They will obtain a sample of oil from the ship's tank, send it to Gronlund's lab where his scientists can compare the oil in the sample to the oil found on the shore. If they match, it doesn't matter why the oil leaked out -- accidentally or not. The ship's owners are responsible. Gronlund's chemists often have to testify in court about the oil they test.

Willingly dumping oil into the ocean, where countless creatures live, just to save money goes beyond being reckless.  That’s just criminal.  I sincerely hope that they catch all those bastards and make them pay.

Despicable humans

Watch this sickening video:

It’s heartbreaking to see something like this happening in this day and age, when we should have stricter laws protecting endangered and iconic animals such as these and when hunters, proving they are worse then their prey, should stop following their most barbaric instincts and hunt down animals just for fun.

From TreeHugger:

Shockingly, it's still OK to hunt polar bears, as Brian reported in March. Back then, a proposed ban on the international trade of polar bear skins and parts was shot down at a United Nations Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species. The opposition at the CITES meeting was led by Canada. The United States pushed for the ban because (duh) international trade is damaging populations that are already endangered by habitat loss due to climate change.

The video is apparently from the Humane Society of the United States. The narrator says the footage comes from a commercial hunting video, and features American hunters tracking down and killing a polar bear on Canadian soil. "Yahoo!" one of them yells after their slaughter of the "beautiful, big polar bear." They pay up to $35,000 to kill one.

The video was recently posted at TrendHunter.com: Imagine if polar bear hunting becomes a trend. About 20,000 of the animals are left.

Heartbreaking.

The Dirty Dozen

That’s what the Environmental Working Group calls the fruits and vegetables that are so loaded with pesticides that they are more likely to do you harm than good.

This is what they’re reporting:

If you're eating non-organic celery today, you may be ingesting 67 pesticides with it, according to a new report from the Environmental Working Group.

The group, a nonprofit focused on public health, scoured nearly 100,000 produce pesticide reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to determine what fruits and vegetables we eat have the highest, and lowest, amounts of chemical residue.

Most alarming are the fruits and vegetables dubbed the "Dirty Dozen," which contain 47 to 67 pesticides per serving. These foods are believed to be most susceptible because they have soft skin that tends to absorb more pesticides.

The group suggests limiting consumption of pesticides by purchasing organic for the 12 fruits and vegetables.

"You can reduce your exposure to pesticides by up to 80 percent by buying the organic version of the Dirty Dozen," Rosenthal said.

Not all non-organic fruits and vegetables have a high pesticide level. Some produce has a strong outer layer that provides a defense against pesticide contamination. The group found a number of non-organic fruits and vegetables dubbed the "Clean 15" that contained little to no pesticides.

So here’s the list of The Dirty Dozen :

1. Celery
2. Peaches
3. Strawberries
4. Apples
5. Domestic blueberries
6. Nectarines
7. Sweet bell peppers
8. Spinach, kale and collard greens
9. Cherries
10. Potatoes
11. Imported grapes
12. Lettuce

I hate celery, but I love peaches, strawberries, and cherries.  I also like spinach, peppers, nectarines, grapes, and lettuce, so I guess I’m in a bit of a pickle am I not?

And these are The Clean 15: 

1. Onions
2. Avocados
3. Sweet corn
4. Pineapples
5. Mango
6. Sweet peas
7. Asparagus
8. Kiwi fruit
9. Cabbage
10. Eggplant
11. Cantaloupe
12. Watermelon
13. Grapefruit
14. Sweet potatoes
15. Sweet onions

I guess I’m lucky here because there isn’t a single item I don’t like on this list, but buying organic for the others, when available, would still put a big dent in our wallet.