Teranu takes a vacation!

Hello faithful readers!

Just want to let you know I'm taking a brief hiatus from posting here, as I'm going on vacation to Europe! I know you'll all be lost without my daily insights into movies, literature, and life in general, but hang in there--I'll be back on September 2nd, with tons of pictures and witty commentary on European life.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a pleasant 2 weeks, and I'll talk to you when I get back!

--Teranu

Secondhand Lions

I was at my brother-and-sister-in-law's house two weekends ago, and as we were all sitting around playing video games, someone suggested that we watch a movie. A number of suggestions were made, all of which got shot down, and then my brother-in-law said, "Well, we did just get Secondhand Lions from Netflix. I don't remember putting it in the queue though..."

None of us had seen it, and the more cynical in the room thought it would be crap. It's the story of a young boy--Walter--who gets dumped on his two bachelor uncles, who allegedly have millions of dollars hidden away somewhere. Haley Joel Osment plays the kid, with Robert Duvall and Michael Caine as the eccentric uncles.

Surprisingly enough, we all liked it. It's a pretty simple story, but it's heartwarming and makes you wish that you got to grow up like this kid does--on a farm, with two crazy uncles who buy a lion.

It's also reasonably thought-provoking, which was a pleasant surprise as well. One of the biggest themes in the movie is that of lying versus telling the truth. At the beginning of the movie, Walter's mother tells him she's going to court reporter school, and she'll only be gone for a few months. Shortly thereafter, Walter tries to call the school to reach his mother, only to find out that they have never heard of her. On the other hand, he asks his one uncle why the other uncle stands looking at the pond every night, and the first uncle starts to tell him this fantastic story of wars, Africa, and sheiks in the Middle East. These backstory parts are filmed very much like The Princess Bride, where they look more like a fairy tale than an actual historical event. At a key moment in the film, Walter is asked to decide whether he thinks these stories are real or made-up, and it's quite poignant. Overall, the themes and issues at stake here reminded me a lot of Big Fish.

In short, I really enjoyed the movie, and I think it would be a good one for families to enjoy together. There's some mild violence, no sex, and everyone seems to like it. I'm still not sure about the ending--I think it might make Walter's choice seem less important in the long run, but hey, I'm never going to complain too much when Josh Lucas shows up on screen.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Holding Reservations, aka, why U--Haul sucks

Remember that Seinfeld episode where Jerry goes to pick up his rental car reservation, and the woman tells him that there are no mid-size cars available? Here's the clip, in case you've never seen it:



U-Haul has the same problem as this rental car agency. A few weeks ago, my husband and I, along with his brother and sister-in-law, bought some new furniture. We got a pretty sweet leather couch; they got a coffee table, a bedroom set, and a new mattress. Since we all got the furniture from the same outlet store, and since we live 5 doors down from each other, we thought we'd rent a U-Haul, use it to bring all our stuff back from the store, and split the cost of renting it, instead of trying to get things home separately.

We went to the U-Haul website to reserve a 10' truck for the next day. We weren't sure what would be available, since it was only one day's notice, but the website gave us all these choices: how long do you want it? where do you want to pick it up? what size truck do you want? We were able to select the size truck that we wanted with the impression that we could have it at 10AM the next day. It looked like everything was going smoothly, and those of us making the reservation were impressed with how easy the whole thing was.

The next day, my sister-in-law gets a call from U-Haul. "I'm sorry, but we don't have anything available for you." "But we made a reservation!" "Well, our website doesn't guarantee any actual rental." "What's the point of a reservation, then?" "We might be able to make something available after 4 pm." "No, thanks."

As Jerry Seinfeld might have said: "The reservation makes sure that there's a truck here. That's why you have reservations." "I know why we have reservations." "I don't think you do."

U-Haul is correct in that their website doesn't guarantee anything. The small print on one of the first pages says, "The number of hours you request is noted as your preference. Because many families have already made reservations, the number of hours that can be scheduled for your rental is subject to availability. When a reservation is made, our regional office will handle your scheduling."

Ok, fine. You put small print on your webpage. But that does nothing to counteract the effect of all the slick drop-down menus, multiple options, and ease of choosing what kind of truck you want--all which suggest that any of U-Haul's trucks will be available for your disposal. Yes, you can point people to the small print (which none of them will read), OR you can change your system. Here are a few of my suggestions:

First, you could change what you call this form. Rather than a reservation form, it's a request form. That would certainly clear up the possibility that it's guaranteeing someone an actual truck when they want it. It makes the statement, "I'm sorry, we have nothing available" a lot less stupid sounding.

Or, the option I would prefer seeing, is to change the was reservations are made, so that some database actually keeps track of which trucks are reserved for which times, and then when a request is made, a computer system searches the database to see what's available. Especially since so much is done on computers already, how hard can that be? (Thousands of computer programmers now hate me, I'm sure, and I don't mean that writing the program would be easy. But I'm sure it could be done, and I think it would be easy to integrate into U-Haul's existing rental system). At any rate, then when someone went online to make a reservation, it would work like Travelocity, or some such site, where it gives you a list of trucks that are available at the times you want near where you want to pick it up. And if nothing is available, then you would get, "I'm sorry, but no results matched your search."

Honestly, would either of these options be so hard? It would deceive a lot fewer customers, and especially with the second option, make life easier for U-Haul employees in the long run. And it would do wonders for customer relations. Because when this happened to us, we heard 2 other stories about why U-Haul is so awful, and we've now resolved not to try to rent from U-Haul again. Sooner or later, the word's going to spread far enough that this policy is going to seriously hurt their business--why not change things before it does?

Battlestar Galatica

As should be painfully clear from this blog by now, I'm a big nerd. I play video games, I read fantasy literature, and, oh yeah, I watch Battlestar Galactica.

Which all makes me totally awesome, of course.

My brother got me started watching BG over Christmas break, when we had a marathon session for 3 days where it seemed that we did nothing but watch the entire first season. I thought it was a lot of fun, with interesting characters in addition to being set in space.

I didn't have time to catch up on all the back episodes, though, and when I briefly watched one episode after Christmas, I realized I was woefully behind and wouldn't enjoy it as much without understanding what was going on. So I gave up until I had time to watch season 2. Which I'm doing right now, in preparation for season 4 this winter. And yes, I cheated. I read the summary of the last episode of season 3, so I know all about the Cylon speculation around the major characters.

At any rate, I just finished season 2.0, and am now cursing myself for not seeing ahead and making sure I had the first disk of season 2.5 on hand, because I really want to know what happens in this confrontation between Adama and Cain.

Adama is the commander of the fleet, whom everyone loves and who's this wonderful father figure; Cain is the admiral of the recently found Pegasus who outranks Adama and is proving herself to be a real, well, you know.

This pause between seasons 2.0 and 2.5 is giving me time to think about what makes Admiral Cain so effective as a "bad guy."

My initial thought was that it had something to do with gender. Cain is female; Adama is male. Perhaps we don't like/aren't comfortable with the leader of the military operations not being an older, experienced man. Although Cain has the rank and the title, because she's female, when she (rightfully) expects to be treated with the respect and obedience her title deserves, she comes across as power-hungry and "evil." It's the Hillary Clinton syndrome.

Then I thought that perhaps I was looking to pick a gender-based fight with the producers of BG, and maybe I should give it a rest. And so I started to think about other reasons she's so awful, and it became clear that her presence challenges everything that we like about Battlestar Galatica and its crew. We like that the crew is like family--she thinks that's wrong and breaks up the teams that have come to mean so much to us. We like that Laura Roslin has proven herself to be a very effective leader; Cain turns up her nose at the Secretary of Education. We are starting to become quite uncomfortable with the idea of Cylons as mere machines, and the word "toaster" is starting to sound racist; Cain has no problem torturing and condoning the rape of female Cylon prisoners. On every front, she challenges some aspect of the show that the viewer has come to enjoy or appreciate, and I think that regardless of whether or not her character were male or female, we would still intensely dislike her.

That said, I think the directors knew what they were doing when they cast a younger woman as Admiral to Bill Adama's Commander. In the original Battlestar Galactica series, the same character in a similar episode is played by Lloyd Bridges, a man. I think that the change in casting really is effective; we dislike Admiral Cain for how she treats the crew of Battlestar Galactica, but that dislike is heightened by the discomfort we feel in a younger female bossing our beloved Adama around. Although they're not the primary reasons for our dislike, age and gender make us come to this conclusion a lot faster.

At any rate, it was something to keep me busy until the next disk gets here. Hurry, Netflix, hurry!

Gold Farmers in the World of Warcraft

Slate.com today features a moderately interesting article by Luke O'Brien about cheating in video games, and how it has evolved from the classic "left, left, right, right, up, down, up, down, B, A" to things with real-world implications, such as gold farming in the World of Warcraft.

For those of you unfamiliar with this term, gold farming is when players spend hours working to earn as much gold as quickly as possible--rather than being interested in getting really good armor or leveling up. They then sell this gold to other players for real world money (such as U.S. dollars) so that these other players can buy super-expensive items in-game. Often, these "gold farmers" are workers from China, working in sweatshops to earn as much gold as possible as quickly as possible.

And yet, when people talk about the cheaters in World of Warcraft, they don't talk about those who buy the gold, or even the companies that profit from gold farming--they complain about the "Chinese farmers." This has led to a disturbing trend of racism in the game, where those who don't speak perfect English (on US servers, at least) are accused of being farmers and then shunned from groups.

This can be seen in O'Brien's Slate.com article:

Compare Contra with World of Warcraft, the 9-million member online game, where a hue and cry has ensued over the practice of gold farming, in which players, many of them Chinese, earn virtual gold through drudging labor (by killing the same monster over and over again, for example). The farmers then sell their gold to lazy players, many of them American, who use it to acquire coveted weapons and armor they don't have the time or dedication to earn the hard way.

Most gold farmers haven't hacked the game. They're only doing what any player could do, given the time and inclination. But their efforts foul up the game's economy, and Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind World of Warcraft, has banned tens of thousands of them.

What makes me really angry about this whole situation is that it's the farmers who are portrayed as the "evil cheaters" in the World of Warcraft, rather than those who buy the gold. If you read the rest of O'Brien's article, he talks about "Easter eggs" and hidden levels put in by developers as things that are kind of cool; the player is the one who has to decide whether or not to use them and cheat. This completely reverses the logic of his arguments about WoW, where it seems that those buying gold have little or no choice about buying gold--it's completely the fault of the farmer. It's "their efforts" that "foul up the game's economy," rather than the choices that players make to buy the gold.

Pardon my French, but what bullshit. If this were any other situation, there would be an outcry about the working conditions or wages of the gold farmers, or a rally against the company, or even, a call for people who use the product to boycott it until the working conditions are fixed. For products like clothes, coffee, and soft drinks, working to improve the working conditions of those who make the product or challenging the customer to use some other product seems to be the SOP, rather than vilifying the workers for making such cheap products.

I think the language of O'Brien's article is particularly telling, as well. Americans are described as lazy, and the Chinese farmers are "just doing what any player could do." Yet the farmers are the ones who are in the wrong.

Yes, I know there's the terms of the EULA, but that works against both the farmer and the player who buys gold. I have a really hard time coming down hard on someone who's just trying to do his job, put food on the table for his family, and have a place to live. I think that more of the focus of the discussion on gold-farming needs to be put on the "lazy American" who chooses to disobey the EULA and buy gold. These are the people who are the ones who are really destroying the in-game economy; if they stopped buying gold, there would be no market for the companies who farm gold.

If we're going to call someone in the World of Warcraft a cheater, let's make sure that we think it through, and place the blame where it belongs--with the consumer who chooses to buy gold, or the company that makes money off of sweatshop labor, not with the individual farmer who's just trying to earn a living.

Harry Potter, Part II

Sorry for the delay! Here's the (hopefully) long-awaited follow-up to my original post about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
This post is going to address more thematic issues in the novel, and one that really gets developed in Deathly Hallows is the issue of parental love. In books 1-6, we hear over and over how it was Lily's love that saves Harry, almost to the point where you want to say, "Ok, we get it," but Rowling really expands the theme nicely in this novel. It's no longer only Harry's mom who loves him--Draco's mother, Mrs. Weasley, and Luna's dad all put themselves in extreme danger to save their children. This has the additional benefit of adding some gray to the novel--Luna's dad, who we would normally consider a "good" guy, tries to sell out Harry, Ron, and Hermione to save Luna. And Narcissa Malfoy risks her life and her standing with Voldemort to find out if Draco is still alive, making her a much more sympathetic character.

But the theme that really interests me the most in Deathly Hallows is the blatant Christian imagery, particularly at the ending. I've had little patience throughout the series for those who say it's "Satanic" or try to get it banned because of the elements of witchcraft in the novels. The themes of love and sacrifice have always been key to understanding Harry Potter, and although these are not themes exclusive to Christianity, they certainly can be read along with it, rather than against it.

But Deathly Hallows takes the Christian elements to a whole new level. In Chapter 16, where Harry visits his parents' grave, the inscription on their tombstone is "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death," which is a quote from 1 Corinthians 15:26. And then, of course, chapter 35, which is entitled "King's Cross," essentially describes Harry's death and resurrection. Harry as a Christ figure who willingly and selflessly gives his life to save his friends is accompanied by Dumbledore as a sort of "God the Father." The added complexity of Dumbledore in Deathly Hallows makes thinking of him as the Father particularly interesting, since he is no longer the omnipotent, unquestionably good headmaster that we've known from the first 6 books of the series.

What interests me the most about this is that no one seems to really be talking about these themes. Reviews I've read talk about parental love, friendship, and how everything gets wrapped up nicely, but very few seem to bring up the Christian elements or the complex way in which they're developed. Newsweek had a brief blurb about it, but it in no way addressed the theme in any depth. It seems to me that this is a theme with a lot of potential, and I really hope that scholarship on Deathly Hallows in the future takes advantage of this.

Megabus=Mega-awesome?

Hey folks! Sorry about the brief hiatus. Last week was crazy, I was too lazy to think up amusing things to post, and then I got stuck in Chicago for two days. Luckily for all of us, the "stuck in Chicago" story should provide excellent fodder for today's blog post.

So, on Friday, my husband and I took the Megabus from Minneapolis to Chicago. If you're not familiar with the Megabus, it's a budget express bus service that runs between major US cities. It operates mostly in the Midwest at this point, although it's slowly expanding to the West Coast. The hook for this company is that they sell tickets on a sliding scale based on when you buy them, with the first tickets for any trip selling for only $1. Only $1 to ride from Minneapolis to Chicago? No way! Of course, the prices go up after that, but they still level out at a max 1-way price of $25.

Considering gas prices and the fact that you get to sleep, read, or even drink beer when you normally would be driving, that's a pretty sweet deal. My husband and I managed to score $20 tickets each way, for a total trip price of around $80 (there are taxes and very nominal reservation fees).

How did the trip go? The pick-up place in Minneapolis isn't the most convenient, so we had to ask my brother-in-law for a ride there. We were told to be there 15 minutes early, but the bus only barely showed up by 11, which is when we were scheduled to leave. This made us 20 minutes late getting out of town--not a big deal in the big scheme of things, but it ended up being a problem at the other end. The people we were visiting don't live in downtown Chicago, but in a suburb--one that is reachable by the Metra (the commuter train). If our bus had been on time, we would have been able to catch the Metra to their house, but because we were late, we missed it and would have had to wait an hour for the next one. So, they came to pick us up. If you live close to the pick-up spots or have reliable public transportation, Megabus works great, but we felt that we inconvenienced a lot of people on both ends of our trip.

The trip back was the biggest pain, and not really the fault of Megabus. Our bus left to return to Minneapolis Sunday at 2, which meant we should be at the pick-up place at 1:45. The Metra left at 1, which should have gotten us to downtown Chicago by 1:25. The Metra, usually so reliable, was 38 minutes late, meaning that if we had taken it, we would have missed the bus. By the time we realized this, it was too late to drive or take a cab, so we decided to not even try and just catch a later Megabus.

Here's where Megabus could have been slightly more accommodating. We called and tried to switch our reservations from the Sunday at 2 bus to a later one, and they said that no, we would have to buy new tickets. We also asked if the Megabus was running on time, thinking that if it was as late as it was in Minneapolis, we could make it no problem. However, we got brushed off with a "of course it's on time" which didn't really give us much information. The soonest replacement tickets we could get were for Tuesday afternoon, which in the end turned out to be fun, since we got to extend our trip by several days. But we had to pay twice for the return trip, which wasn't ideal.

Would I take the Megabus again? Probably, particularly if I did a little more research and found public transportation that we could take on either end that would be more reliable or give us other options if the first didn't work. It was nice to be able to sleep, even if not very comfortably, and I imagine it's a greener way to travel than driving yourself. Plus, it feels like an adventure :)

35W Bridge Collapse

For those of you who didn't hear, a major bridge in Minneapolis that runs over the Mississippi River collapsed yesterday evening at around 6:15 pm, right in the middle of rush hour. Particularly for those of us who live in the Twin Cities, this is an extremely awful event, and not more than a little disconcerting, since I drove over that bridge on a regular basis. Thank you so much to all the family and friends who have called or emailed to make sure we're ok--your concern means so much to us.


Please continue to keep the victims of this accident in your thoughts and prayers.