I’m already a fan of the NYT film critics A O Scott and Manohla Dargis, but after reading the opening of his review of One to Another, I’m developing a new appreciation for Matt Seitz. It’s funny, pithy and tells you exactly what you’re in for.

The notion that French cinema consists mainly of pretentious soft-core pornography is an ignorant cliché, but “One to Another” does little to disprove it. This drama from the directors Jean-Marc Barr and Pascal Arnold aims to be a disturbing account of young love, friendship and murder. But it plays like a remake of Larry Clark’s muckraking thriller about youths, “Bully,” as directed by Diane Chambers, the intellectual barmaid on “Cheers.”

While my iPod is probably my favourite gadget, it was the repurposing of musician’s in-ear monitors as consumer-level accessories that made it life-changing. Not only is the sound quality fantastic, but because they fit snugly into the ear canal, they also act as ear-plugs. This makes them invaluable at my gym (which plays awful, awful music), certain noisy coffee shops where I might be trying to read, and on the bus, especially the busses to and from UBC when school’s in session. They are my insulation against inane cell-phone users and muttering crazy people and drunken frat boys loudly boasting of their sexual conquests. All of whom seem to delight in sitting directly behind me. And so I block them out with my Etymotic ER-6is and Westone UM1s. I have no regrets.

However, these are not necessarily robust items, and every 6-to-8 months, they break and I send them back to the manufacturer, who always quickly and politely replaces them, as long as the warranty lasts. (Seriously: Etymotic and Westone both have excellent customer service.) Like right now, for instance. And for a week or two, I am exposed to the sounds of day-to-day life. It’s interesting how much it affects my thoughts. No longer living in my earphone bubble, I spend a lot more time thinking about the people around me: who they are, what they’re doing, and what all our places in the world are. And it makes me more able to engage in random conversation — I don’t have to snap my mind from a pre-verbal state to give directions to a tourist or joke with a cute barista.

But mostly, I’m reminded what of an introvert I am, and how my perfect world might not actually have a whole lot of other people in it.

Apparently, among my offenses: ‘fuck’, ’shit’, ‘godfuck’, ‘bomb’, ‘murder’, ’sex’, ’sexy’, ‘zombies’, and many, many uses of the word ‘fucking’ — though I wish to emphasize, only as an adjective, never a verb.

I wonder if all the swearing is really artistically necessary. Couldn’t I communicate the same things using family-friendly substitutes? I guess it’s true: obscenity is the last resort of the inarticulate motherfucker. I mean, “melon farmer“.

Incidentally, I found this link via the really rather awesome Sergio Leone and the Inflield Fly Rule, which you should check out if you like film criticism much smarter than mine. I know I do.

This made me laugh out loud when I saw it on Bad Science. It’s the abstract of a peer-reviewed paper (Bengston and Moga, 2007) from The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, which appears to be about as respectable as a journal in that field gets (though I could be wrong on this, I’m just going by hits on Google).

ABSTRACT
Classical experimental design presupposes that subjects, randomly separated into experimental and control groups, are independent and distinct. … In four previously reported experiments on anomalous healing using “healing with intent” on mice injected with lethal doses of mammary adenocarcinoma (source, The Jackson Laboratories, Bar Harbor, ME; code, H2712; host strain, C3H/HeJ), a high percentage of both experimental and control mice exhibited an anomalous healing pattern, most often passing through stages of tumor ulceration to full life-span cure. … In order to explain tumor regression of control animals, I posit the formation of “resonant bonds,” which can link spatially separate groups. Healing given to the experimental animals can result in an unintended treatment to the control animals, producing anomalous healing akin to placebo effects.

To sum up: the authors poisoned a bunch of mice and waved crystals over one group and didn’t over another. But similar number of mice in both groups got better. The researchers conclude that the the “resonance” of the crystal power is magically healing the mice in the control, and in fact, that the whole scientific principle of using controls in medicine is wrong. Because there’s couldn’t possibly be anything amiss in healing mice by waving crystals over them.

The abstract concludes: “[r]esearchers are invited to reanalyze past data in light of resonance theory.” Gosh, thanks. Think I’ll pass.

Also, how do these experiments get ethics approval? I need to spend weeks filling out forms and justifying my work before I can let a few people to click buttons on a computer screen. These guys are killing 200+ mice for this paper.

cloudwatching, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

It took me two years to find an area of research, two months to turn it into a research topic, two weeks to write a proposal, two days to write a proposal talk, two hours to defend it, and two minutes to pass it. But now, I’m a PhD student no more: I’m officially a PhD candidate. With all the rights and privileges thereof. Which is to say: none, other than calling myself a PhD candidate. Which I plan to, often and repeatedly. Oh, and I can teach a course now if I want.

The proposal defence is one of several milestones on the road to doctoriality. It consists of presenting an outline of what you intend to do for your thesis and what you’ve done to date, and then a fairly gruelling defence session where you stand in front of a committee of professors who take turns interrogating you. Possibly for hours (mine went for about 90 minutes). It’s not exactly adversarial, but it’s not what you’d call “friendly”, either. Though for me it was ultimately just exhausting.

Tomorrow, I will present and defend my PhD thesis proposal to a committee of professors, and whoever else shows up. While I’m not particularly worried about it (according to local legend, only one person in the history of the department has failed outright), I really hate giving talks. Actually, that’s untrue: the talk isn’t so bad. It’s the writing of the talk, thinking about what I will have to say, and trying to preempt the questions and criticisms that sets me on edge. Will this be the time I’m exposed for the fraud I am?

One of the perks of being a PhD student in my field is being one of the daytime idle. While I usually work either in my room or in my lab, when the weather’s nice and no deadlines loom, I’ll toss my PowerBook and some papers into my messenger bag and spend the afternoon working in some hipster coffee shop on Main Street. Thanks to the magic of screen, I can even run experiments on the department machines.

The thing I always wonder, though, is who are all these other people here on a Wednesday afternoon? Turns out I’m not the only one who wonders that. A San Francisco journalist dealt with the question the old-fashioned way: by asking them.

Everything should be more-or-less functional now. Which is to say, if anything looks obviously broken, please let me know (by emailing me, or leaving a comment).

Also, how do you all like the new site design? Here are a few of the review highlights I’ve received already!

It’s good. You don’t want it to look like you spent too much time working on it.

–Peter

The categories at the top. When you try to scroll down to get to something lower than the banner it’s broken.

–Janelle

Is it supposed to look like that?

–Maryam

I’ve managed to get the basic functionality back after last-night’s hosing of this here blog. I used this opportunity to make a few changes, such as updating to WordPress 2.2. I’m probably going to make a few changes to how I maintain this blog, too, such as posting my movie reviews as articles, instead of burying them half-way down the sidebar. I’m thinking about also periodically posting lists of links that I don’t have the time or inclination to properly write about. In the “immediately apparent” category, I’ve switched to a new look, using the Water 1.1 theme. It’s a much cleaner theme, though I’m not sure it suits my writing style, which tends to be a bit more chaotic, even though, swear to Bob, I’m trying to be concise (I hate long, rambling blog posts just as much as you do). It also has those cool drop-down menus above the banner, which I will turn to my own purposes.

The new banner is from a picture I took on my trip to Southeast Asia. The phones are actually underground, in a massive indoor shopping center in Bangkok. A bomb had gone off on the block a few days before, so it was nearly deserted. I’m not sure setting the rest of my colour theme to match the phones is going to work out, though. Orange and green still look too much like Christmas.

Anyway, site’s still a mess, so don’t bother telling me things are broken until I tell you I don’t think anything’s broken. Because things surely are broken.