I watched most of the Democratic National Convention last night and I was really impressed by Kerry’s speech.

On the negative side, I thought that they went way overboard with the Vietnam stories… WAY too many references to that. Especially “reporting for duty”… that was too much. Honestly, we get the point after your band of brothers sings your praises about how you led them in battle. We get the point after half of your Spielberg-produced biography is spent talking about your time in the war. We get the point!

I think it was really smart to portray him as a war veteran, nonetheless. I figure that the campaign people know that the left-wingers will vote for Kerry regardless of how he is portrayed (except for those evil Nader-lovers), so why not try to appeal to the moderates and the swing-state voters? It’s really a good idea. All in all, his speech was excellent! I liked how he wasn’t afraid to stick it to Bush on many of his issues and I also like the “stronger at home, respected around the world” motto. Kerry really appears presidential. His demeanor reminds me of old-fashioned presidents and he seems like a really good guy.

One last thing: one of the CNN analysts pointed something out that actually made me feel more confident about November. He said he can’t imagine that the states that Gore won in 2000 won’t be won by Kerry this time around. All we need is a couple more swing states, and Kerry’s won the election!

I had heard that Brave New World was a legendary, fantastic, and brilliant novel. So I bought it I’m happy to report that the rumor is true. It should be easy to compare it to another antiutopian novel, 1984, but honestly it’s been so long since I read 1984 I don’t know if I can. Brave New World is a story about a hypothetical future where society has been literally engineered for stability. This qualifies as a sci-fi novel due to the… um, the science… and the fiction, but it is so eloquent that it is easy to forget.

I want to cover the bad stuff first so my review ends on a good note. Although the premise is brilliant, the story leaves a lot to be desired. It was not exciting or thrilling, and the characters seemed fairly juvenile and cardboard… but maybe that was intentional (it does make sense in the context). Regardless, the book had a pretty weak plot. It was the concepts that kept me turning the pages. I should note that I was always happy to open the book each time I returned to reading it; it was never a drag.

I have to stress, this book was written in 1932 and it is striking how ahead-of-its-time it manages to be. Although occasionally some of the devices in the book reek of antique origin, most are fairly timeless and believable. None are outright unbelievable, and that is very commendable. On the other hand, I think it is pretty much impossible for the world to actually reach the state described in the book because I can’t imagine the path to reach it. Like any evolution, society gradually changes most of the time and is punctuated with occasional sudden shifts, but I just can’t imagine that path here. Fortunately, I don’t care! It’s a book, and I’m perfectly willing to enjoy the hypothetical because it is a truly fascinating portrait.

However distant and hypothetical, this portrait of society and individuals hits pretty close to home. Huxley pretty much spells it out for you, too. I actually wish he hadn’t addressed certain things so explicitly, and left some things to the imagination, but I suppose Huxley had a message to get across. Nonetheless, you will be inspired to think about people and how they fit into today’s society. It’s hard not to recognize the frightening similarities between the real world as we know it and the one in the book. I would love to give this book 5 stars, but because of the weak plot I am only giving it 4 out of a possible 5 brave new stars. Read it anyway!

Meatsauce is the first thing I ever learned to cook that involved more than putting something in the broiler and flipping it over 7 minutes later, so I’ve been working on different varieties of meatsauce for about 2 years now. I felt this new one was good enough to put on the web site!

This recipe is for meatsauce that is heavy on the meat and has a nice spice taste. It’s not “hot” spicy, but it does have a little bite. This serves me 3 times, so it probably serves 4 regular pasta eaters :^)

Required Equipment:

• 1 Large (12″), deep skillet/saucepan
• 1 cutting board, chef’s knife
• 1 stirring spoon

Ingredients:

• Almost 1 pound of ground beef/lamb
• 1 8oz can of Hunts tomato sauce
• 1 6oz can of Contadina tomato paste
• Almost 1 box of Pomi chopped tomatoes
• 1 small red pepper, diced
• 1 small garlic clove, minced
• 1 very small yellow onion, diced (don’t even use all of it)

The following will be used in very small quantities:

• Balsamic vinegar
• Olive oil
• Salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, basil, turmeric

Procedure:

• Put the pan over low/medium heat.
• Chop up your garlic and onion.
• Once the pan has heated up, put a moderate amount of olive oil in the pan… enough so that when you tilt the pan around it can get a thin coating of most of the surface.
• Chop up the red pepper.
• Once the oil is hot enough, throw the garlic in there and shake it around, making sure the oil is coating the pan and the garlic.
• Shortly after, add the onions and stir them around with the spoon.
• Next, add the red peppers and stir them around.
• After about a minute, throw in a splash of balsamic vinegar and stir that around so it gets distributed.
• After about another minute, take the meat and scrape it out onto the pan. Using the spoon, break up the meat into tiny pieces. Keep stirring it and chopping it up until the meat has become tiny scraps. There should not be any large clumps. It should cook until it is all light brown and there is no more pink/red visible.
• Take the box of pomi chopped tomatoes and dump in most, but not all of it. Add it slowly, as it will sharply lower the pan temperature.
• Crank up the heat to medium-high and let the watery stuff from the tomatoes simmer off for about 5 minutes. Stir occasionally. Throw in a dash of salt at some point during these 5 minutes.
• Stir this occasionally, for a total of 7 minutes. It should be simmering.
• Add the tomato sauce and stir it in. Let it simmer and bubble for about a minute. Then add some tomato paste and stir it in. Use half the can. Let it simmer and bubble for about a minute.
• Now it’s spice time. Add a large dash of salt and stir it in.
• Add and stir in: a few turns of pepper, a dash of oregano, a small dash of basil, a tiny bit of turmeric and a small dash of thyme. The proportions of each spice should be adjusted to your taste. I hardly put in any turmeric or basil at all.
• If you’re cooking pasta, now is the time to put it in the boiling water. Stir the sauce occasionally while your pasta cooks. This is probably between 7 and 11 minutes. You should lower the heat on the sauce so it doesn’t bubble violently any more.

I made this sauce with rigatoni and grated some fresh parmesan cheese over it. It was fantastic! You should adjust the spice levels to your taste. I used beef, but I’m sure it tastes great with ground lamb as well.

Azumi is the story of a team of teenagers who were raised as assassins pursuing their mission.

Let me get straight to the point: I think this was probably the worst Samurai movie I’ve ever seen. It was cheesy, remarkably inconsistent in style, and very much confused about whether or not to take itself seriously. I had not a single drop of sympathy for the poorly acted characters and I didn’t care about their mission at all. The dialogue was run-of-the-mill, bland, and cliched. The characters were not at all believable. A group of fun-loving, emotional samurai? Please. This would have been okay had the movie not tried to take itself seriously, but there were several scenes where the mood is forceably pensive and serious. There were characters with very modern hairstyles and others with hairstyles from one hundred years ago. The movie was set about a hundred years ago, unless I’m mistaken.

The music was like bad video game music. A kind of techno-rockish twang that really fit with the “teenage” target audience I guess. The action sequences were all over the place. Some were kinda cool, but most were very low-budget and you just wanted to skip them. The villains are wacky but I didn’t hate them enough for them to be effective villains. The climax of the movie is 100% ridiculous and I just couldn’t wait for the movie to be over.

Just so this review isn’t entirely bad, I’ll say that there were some surprises along the way, but nothing truly shocking or meaningful. There were also several cool shot sequences that were commendable and very satisfying. Also, Azumi and another female character were very attractive.

Overall, Azumi is simply a waste of time. If you want a wacky samurai adventure, there’s probably some great anime out there. Check out Ninja Scrolls. If you want to see a real samurai movie, see Seven Samurai. Even Tom Cruise’s movie The Last Samurai was really enjoyable and worthy of much respect. I give Azumi 1 Ninja star out of five.

Last night after a great night out, I took a taxi home. This is very rare for me, as I don’t usually like throwing away money when I could simply wait a little bit and take the bus. However, I would have had to take two busses or a subway and a bus and it was already 2:20 AM. Somewhere during the ride, disaster struck! My cell phone slipped out of my pocket! I didn’t notice until I got home and was getting ready for bed.

I had never planned for this. I didn’t think it was possible! Even though my phone has slipped out of my pocket in taxis before… I always noticed and got it before getting out. I did not have a backup copy of many of the numbers in that phone and thanks to the modern miracle that is the cell-phone phonebook/speed dial, I don’t know anyone’s number by memory! To make matters worse, I had no house-phone. No landline.

I went to a payphone to call my phone. I left myself a very sad message like “Hi Eric, it’s me. You lost your phone. Please call me back. Thanks.” My phone will do a short split-second beep thing every ten minutes until you acknowledge that you missed a call. I was hoping that someone would hear that obnoxious beeping and pick up the phone. I called back ten minutes later and the phone was going straight to voicemail! I thought maybe someone had turned it off then. I couldn’t do anything, so I just went to sleep.

Today I went to my mom’s house to use her phone and make some calls. I didn’t want to suspend my phone service because someone might want to make some calls using the phone to try and locate me. It turns out I was right! The people that found my phone not only called my work number and left me a message, but they also called my mom’s cell phone! They left it with their doorman and I picked it up. I left them $10 in an envelope with a thank-you message. I was so happy to get it back!

On the way back I decided to walk through the park. I went through Sheep’s Meadow, past the Bandshell, past the fountain overlooking the Boathouse Pond, past the sailboat pond with the Alice and Wonderland sculpture, and out onto 76th street. I went to 79th and decided to check out the Ukrainian Institute. I didn’t really know much about it except that I thought it was a museum. I was correct They had some really great exhibits today. The artists were Mykola Zhuravel, Sergiy Hai, Oleh Denysenko, and Yevhen Leshchenko. The Leschenko works were just stunning. So full of life it was amazing. Although the Zhuravel works were very ugly for the most part, his combination of media produced some really unusual and fantastic effects. Sergiy Hai was very cool, but it was “messy” art. Kind of an angry impressionist. The Denysenko was a small collection of intricate lithographs reminiscent of the style of ancient maps. Pretty interesting. I highly recommend seeing this exhibit before it goes away. Check out their horrible web site here: http://ukrainianinstitute.org/

I didn’t really know much about this movie before I saw it, except that it was about lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is when you dream but you are fully aware that you are dreaming, and in some ways you can control what you do in the dream. I think this movie qualifies as an art film, mostly because the plot is extremely loose and not much happens. It is mostly (okay, completely) a series of philosophical arguments and discussions given by a random bunch of people. Some of the arguments are pretty interesting and thought-provoking, but overall this movie never really grabbed me. I found it to be pretty boring most of the time, actually.

Boring dialogue/monologues aside, the technical effects in this movie are jaw-dropping. They filmed the movie regularly and then used custom-made computer software to turn the film into an animated movie. Each “scene” is animated by a different team or person so each is slightly different. Some of the styles are just plain awesome. It is rare that I am completely at a loss for explaining how a certain movie effect was achieved but I was at a loss for most of this movie! I wasn’t sure whether or not to give it 2 or 3 stars, but I’m going to give it 3 stars just because it was so original, so technically marvelous, and it gave a lot of food-for-thought. 3 lucid stars!

Spiderman 2 was awesome! I know I sound corny here, but it was the most fun I’ve had in a while! It was really well-written, had some great action scenes, great character development (for Peter and MJ anyway), and it was just a blast. Yes there were flaws but if you let them ruin the movie for you, you need to seek help because it was a comic book movie! The head of the newspaper is absolutely hilarious and Alfred Molina is fantastic as Doc Oc. I don’t want to ruin the movie, so all I’m going to say further is that you must see this movie ASAP (in the theater)! 5/5 spider-stars!

I decided to read this book because I found it on my old bookshelf at my mom’s apartment and realized I had never read it. It turned out to be very interesting.

I enjoyed the old-fashioned dialogue and artistic (but not overly so) narrative. The book is a good example of a microcosm of social behavior. Certain characters are more important than others, but you get a sense of the dynamic between many of them. Children are interesting in general because they are kind of like “raw” humans in that they haven’t been overly socialized and they are more in touch with their true selves than we “grown-ups” are. There are a few plot twists that you may or may not see coming, but it was an enjoyable read and it’s just under 200 pages, so why not check it out? I give it 4/5 stars.