Eric Johnson – Page 96 – Catholic Light

Apropos of absolutely nothing: Gladiator

If you consider yourself a movie fan and have never seen www.moviemistakes.com, you’ll find it fascinating. They pick apart movies’ errors with meticulous care — to the point that it might ruin a film for you. Gladiator[1].jpg
This is great fun for a crap-fest like “Titanic,” which, among, other atrocities, invented the stinking lie that the men on the ship were all cowards, except Leo the man-child. If you’ve ever sat through any movie, bewildered at the liberties Hollywood takes with real events, places, and objects
(“Hey, did Picasso’s ‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’ really sink to the bottom of the Atlantic? I swear I saw it when it came to the Met”), you’ll enjoy rifling through the entries.
“Gladiator,” one of my favorite movies from the last few years, has more “mistakes” than almost any other. Some of them are examples of criticism gone too far, like:

Factual error: The snake with red-yellow-brown skin you see in a night-shot in Rome lives only in deserts in North America.

Ooooh! Ridley Scott must be ashamed! Then there are the mistakes that aren’t mistakes:

Just before the battle with the germans begins, while the germans are taunting the romans [sic], there are many arrows in the trees and in the ground. Twice we see this. Problem is that the disciplined romans had not fired a single arrow at that point and no skirmishers, which could have been authorized to shoot before the order to “loose”, can be seen in the open area in front of the defensive position.

Maybe they’re right and the filmmakers didn’t intend it, but there’s an easy explanation for this. The Romans had ample time to prepare the battlefield before that scene, and one thing they would have done is to test the range of certain parts of the battlefield. Archers would have loosed a few arrows to gauge the distance, and so they’d know how to shoot when the battle began. The technique is used today by professional machinegunners, who will fire bursts to test the distance of objects on the battlefield, if possible.
One of the worst aspects of the Web is that people can get too carried away with all the scoffing and debunking, because there’s nobody to reign them in. On the other hand, it’s good to have a medium with which to take down the proud a notch or two.
P.S. If you get the DVD of “Gladiator,” you can see two deleted scenes with explicit Christian references, including a Christian family about to be devoured by lions.

Dean, on the right side of one thing

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-Camelot) has found something about which to disagree with Governor Howard Dean (D-Berkeley). The issue, oddly, is guns. Dean doesn’t mention it much, but in order to win statewide office in Vermont you have to be pro-gun, and he’s received top NRA ratings throughout his tenure as governor.
To a Democratic primary voter, this is almost as bad as running as a pro-lifer. Recall that the 100%-pure pro-abortion Algore attacked the 100%-pure pro-abortion Bill Bradley in 2000 for being insufficiently zealous about the abortion license. Dean doesn’t mention his pro-gun past, but expect that to come up more often if it looks like the establishment Dems are going to lose.
Kennedy — one of the dimmest members of an overhyped family — comes up with this tasteless attack on Dean:

“This is a personal issue with me, and I’m very disturbed at the fact that people are not paying attention to Dr. Dean’s record” on guns, said Kennedy, nephew of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, both of whom were assassinated by guns.

I wonder if he considers statutory rape to be a “personal issue” with him, since his late campaign manager/brother admitted to sex with a babysitter over five years, beginning when she was 14 (though to be fair, after five years she was no longer underage.) This is the Kennedy equivalent of “waving the bloody shirt” — trotting out the corpses of John and Robert Kennedy to remind the public of the Kennedys’ “sacrifices” for their lowly subjects (that’s us).
The extended Kennedy family has homes scattered around North America, all guarded to keep the cruel world at bay. What kind of weapons do the guards carry? Sharp sticks, perhaps?

Is academia a scam?

The further I get from being a full-time student, the more I’m convinced that higher education has become a scam.
Think of education as an industry like any other. The industry’s leaders have convinced taxpayers to subsidize their industry by telling them the product improves future workers, and thus the economy. Then convince employers that any job paying more than $8 an hour should be filled by people with a certificate from your industry. Then show teenagers (and their parents) that unless they want to work retail, or — horror of horrors — do manual labor or learn an honest trade, they need to spend between $20,000 to $120,000 to get the industry certificate.
These thoughts are occasioned by this article in the New York Times detailing the amenities that universities offer their students today, and how much money is being spent on them. Remember that whether a university is public or private, it’s your tax money being spent because of our middle-class welfare system…er, federal student loans.
I graduated from a slightly above-average state university, whose president was mainly known for getting drunk with frat boys and convincing legislators to dump loads of money into our campus. The most bewildering thing about the whole experience was figuring out that 80% of the other kids had almost no intellectual curiousity. I’m not saying that’s a virtue, and I’m sure there are plenty of saints in heaven who never cracked a book. However, when you’re shelling out $11,000 a year for an “education,” you’d think more people would act like they’re interested.
I have had some outstanding professors, and I greatly benefited from them. By that I mean that I felt wiser after taking their classes. To say that a college degree ought to mean more than a job qualification is dorky or incomprehensible to most people today. But what other real justification is there? If your understanding of God, man, and the universe is unaffected by your classroom time, then that’s at least four irretrivable years of your life gone by, and in reality you’re not even a better worker bee. You’re just a worker bee with a fancy certificate.
[The Academy Girl, whose blog I just discovered, voices related thoughts on her blog.]

New Tattoo Revue

I’m going to get a new tattoo soon, and it will look something like the image on the right. Normally, I would not solicit opinions about something this personal, but I’m curious about others’ opinions on this one.
The tattoo will be on my left bicep, and will be covered by a normal short-sleeved shirt. I have another one that says “USMC” on my right bicep in the same place. The cross itself is a variation of the one worn by the Knights of Saint John, a.k.a. the Hospitallers, a.k.a. the Knights of Malta. A colloquial name for it is the Crusader’s Cross, which is why I like it — in a sense, every Christian is a crusader, right?
While I like the cross itself, I have a few concerns, namely:
— Is the shield outline too much?
— Does the design remind you of a nurse?
— Does the design remind you of the Luftwaffe?
Both nurses and the Germans used a modified Maltese cross, though they are distinctly different than this one, which I found in a book on the military religious orders. (I hasten to add that the cross used by the Germans in WWII, called the Iron Cross, predated Hitler by a century and a half.) What do you all think? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life saying, “No, it’s not a Nazi symbol,” or “I’m not a nurse, darn it! Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

Experts everywhere

Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post’s best columnist since Michael Kelly died (man, do I miss that guy!), chides commentators for imagining they could run the Iraqi occupation better than the Bush administration.
Since I returned from the Middle East, I’ve run into a lot of people who are similar experts. Our company’s chief accountant told me things were “pretty bad over there.” Actually, I replied, things are only bad in a small portion of a very big area. He laughed condescendingly and said, “Well, I don’t think so.” I wanted to yell, “Really? How much time have you spent in Iraq recently?” but I refrained.
I’ve had similar conversations with other people who are shocked to hear that the vast majority of Iraq is relatively safe, and public services are operating mostly at pre-war standards (which, granted, were not that high). Let me say again that I’m not an expert on Iraq either, but I do keep up with events over there, and I pay attention to sources I trust. Or rather, I learned that most news organizations are untrustworthy, so they can be safely ignored.
Krauthammer alludes to the most persistent criticism of the Bush administration: they are not clairvoyant. The most likely problems never materialized, and other problems occured. Now, the most likely problems (population displacement, mass starvation, mass murders) were worse than what’s happening right now, but don’t expect the Democrat presidential candidates to point that out.
And if by some calamity one of them gets elected next year, they’ll find that they’ll have to rebuild Iraq just as much as a second Bush administration would.