Random Acts of Mind by Dones

Here’s the list of Oscar nominees, underlining my predictions for each. As always, note that I haven’t seen many of these films (still waiting for my screener DVDs to reach me, ha ha); I will indicate the ones I have seen by putting them in italics. If you’re an avid Random Acts reader, you know that you can always find the first Oscar predictions in the blogosphere right here. My ‘every other year’ curse has caught up with me, unfortunately, so here they are a little late. (Note to Oscars.com: Please provide a slimmed-down nominees list without all the producers, if you would please. Formatting is a b****). As I always say, you don’t really need to see all the films to know who’ll probably win. I will update this post to indicate new films I’ve seen as needed, but will not change my actual predictions. The ones I hope to see before the Oscars ceremony? Inglorious Basterds, The Hurt Locker, The White Ribbon, and The Young Victoria.

Impressions so far:

- I would like to thank the Academy for increasing the number of Best Picture nominees to 10 films. This will recognize more deserving films, while silencing any whiners like me that, for example, animated features aren’t included. Case in point: Wall-E should have been nominated for best picture in its day. The jury’s still out as to whether foreign films like my favorite La Vita e Bella (Life Is Beautiful) would have been nominated in a 10-film field, but I’d like to think it would.
- That said, where the heck is Star Trek on the list of Best Picture nominees??
- I thought District 9 was a really good film, but sadly (if deservedly) it will be overshadowed by Avatar in the categories it deserves to win (the technical ones).
- The Hurt Locker probably deserves to win most of these awards, but Avatar will rule. Avatar wasn’t that good, but it was good enough (and far too much of a game-changer) for the Academy to give it the sweep.
- I would also like to thank the Academy for not just taking the 10 Golden Globe nominees for Best Drama & Best Comedy for their Best Picture nominees. I was dying to think that The Hangover might have been nominated…
- This is the year for Avatar, Precious, and Sandra Bullock. Really. Crazy, huh?

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
82nd Annual Academy Awards Nominations

Performance by an actor in a leading role
Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart”
George Clooney in “Up in the Air”
Colin Firth in “A Single Man”
Morgan Freeman in “Invictus”
Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker”

Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Matt Damon in “Invictus”
Woody Harrelson in “The Messenger”
Christopher Plummer in “The Last Station”
Stanley Tucci in “The Lovely Bones”
Christoph Waltz in “Inglourious Basterds”

Performance by an actress in a leading role
Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side”
Helen Mirren in “The Last Station”
Carey Mulligan in “An Education”
Gabourey Sidibe in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”
Meryl Streep in “Julie & Julia”

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Penélope Cruz in “Nine”
Vera Farmiga in “Up in the Air”
Maggie Gyllenhaal in “Crazy Heart”
Anna Kendrick in “Up in the Air”
Mo’Nique in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”

Best animated feature film of the year
“Coraline”
“Fantastic Mr. Fox”
“The Princess and the Frog”
“The Secret of Kells”
“Up”

Achievement in art direction
“Avatar”
“The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”
“Nine”
“Sherlock Holmes”
“The Young Victoria”

Achievement in cinematography
“Avatar”
“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”
“The Hurt Locker”
“Inglourious Basterds”
“The White Ribbon”

Achievement in costume design
“Bright Star”
“Coco before Chanel”
“The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”
“Nine”
“The Young Victoria”

Achievement in directing
“Avatar” -James Cameron
“The Hurt Locker” -Kathryn Bigelow
“Inglourious Basterds” -Quentin Tarantino
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” -Lee Daniels
“Up in the Air” -Jason Reitman

Best documentary feature
“Burma VJ”
“The Cove”
“Food, Inc.”
“The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers”
“Which Way Home”

Best documentary short subject
“China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province”
“The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner”
“The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant”
“Music by Prudence”
“Rabbit à la Berlin”

Achievement in film editing
“Avatar”
“District 9″
“The Hurt Locker”
“Inglourious Basterds”
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”

Best foreign language film of the year
“Ajami” -Israel
“El Secreto de Sus Ojos”  -Argentina
“The Milk of Sorrow” -Peru
“Un Prophète”  -France
“The White Ribbon”  -Germany

Achievement in makeup
“Il Divo”
“Star Trek”
“The Young Victoria”

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)
“Avatar”
“Fantastic Mr. Fox”
“The Hurt Locker”
“Sherlock Holmes”
“Up”

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)
“Almost There” from “The Princess and the Frog”
“Down in New Orleans” from “The Princess and the Frog”
“Loin de Paname” from “Paris 36″
“Take It All” from “Nine”
“The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” from “Crazy Heart”

Best motion picture of the year
“Avatar”
“The Blind Side”
“District 9″
“An Education”
“The Hurt Locker”
“Inglourious Basterds”
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”
“A Serious Man”
“Up”
“Up in the Air”

Best animated short film
“French Roast”
“Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty”
“The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte)”
“Logorama”
“A Matter of Loaf and Death”

Best live action short film
“The Door”
“Instead of Abracadabra”
“Kavi”
“Miracle Fish”
“The New Tenants”

Achievement in sound editing
“Avatar”
“The Hurt Locker”
“Inglourious Basterds”
“Star Trek”
“Up”

Achievement in sound mixing
“Avatar”
“The Hurt Locker”
“Inglourious Basterds”
“Star Trek”
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”

Achievement in visual effects
“Avatar”
“District 9″
“Star Trek”

Adapted screenplay
“District 9″
“An Education”
“In the Loop”
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”
“Up in the Air”

Original screenplay
“The Hurt Locker”
“Inglourious Basterds”
“The Messenger”
“A Serious Man”
“Up”

I logged into Xbox Live for one game this morning before leaving for work. It just so happened that it was my best performance ever in a team deathmatch.

Granted, it’s nowhere near the best anyone has done, but I was so shocked, I had to share my new personal best with the wider world. (see screen photos)

Bottom Line: Jaw-dropping visuals enhance a really enjoyable film.

**Note: If you want to remain totally spoiler-free before you watch the film, please note this review contains none of what I would call significant spoilers. I also intend to keep the comments to this post spoiler-free, so if you don’t want your comment to be removed, please follow my lead. **

Oops. Wrong Avatar.

What? It’s the other Avatar movie that everyone’s been talking about? Well, let me see here…

Ah, much better!

If I would allow myself to be a little less descriptive with the “Bottom Line” above, it would say, “As good as it needs to be.” But that’s a bit cynical, based on the complaints of an unoriginal story (some of them mine) being bandied about today. The real bottom-line, however, it that Avatar is a game-changer: it changes the way we will view much of our content from here forward, and it also changes the way film reviews need to be written.

The 3D is SO MIND-BOGGLINGLY GOOD compared with anything that I have seen before, especially in a feature film, that it will sell many people on 3D technology that heretofore were highly skeptical. We will have 3D televisions in many home theaters this decade, mostly because of the influence of Avatar. The fact that it has already reached a billion dollars will support more 3D feature films to be made, as well as promote the success of upcoming Blu-Ray 3D technology and 3D televisions and TV content. The Discovery Channel and ESPN have already announced they will have 3D content within 2 years; the overwhelming appeal of Avatar will guarantee that the viewing population will be clamoring for 3D content everywhere, as soon as it’s ready. The revolution will be televised, and it will have three dimensions.

But this review isn’t about the 3D viewing experience, which brings me to my second point: Avatar changes the world of film reviews, too. Some films will be created especially with the 3D experience in mind, which affects how they will ‘play’ in 2D. As a result, you’ll probably start seeing some reviewers double up and have a 2D review and a 3D review. The best I can do right now is to split up my review to expose the difference when viewing in 2D versus 3D, but future reviews may have just a separate section for that. In my opinion, 3D technology will eventually become akin to Technicolor: that is, we’ll start seeing almost more and more films in 3D, and the closing of the technology gap in the home will mean that everyone watches 3D content in 3D, and never in 2D. This will make film reviewers’ jobs easier, but in the meantime, we’ll have to pull double duty. Since I want to make especially clear what the technological and experiential differences are between 3D and 2D viewing, I will have a second post reviewing just the 3D aspects of Avatar. Here’s a sneak peek: You’re crazy to see Avatar in anything other than IMAX 3D.

Especially with Avatar winning the Golden Globe this week for Best Drama (thus making it a near-lock for an Oscar nomination), many people who still haven’t seen the film (and many who have seen it) are asking: Is Avatar really worth the award attention?

I hope to use the ratings below to answer that question with a “yes”:

Production value: 5/5 stars. Give me a break. James Cameron has spent some of the largest film budgets in history, and Avatar’s budget (nearing half a billion dollars according to the New York Times) is largely spent on the 3D and CGI technologies underpinning the story. It shows. I may waffle about the return of Cameron’s investment on actors and screenwriters, but no one can ever say I didn’t like the pretty pictures. Everything from the futuristic computer screens to the feeling of life imbued by the fanciful creatures and vegetation on the planet Pandora (where Avatar is set) looks better than CGI: it looks real. A scene with CGI generally looks better when it is all CGI (that is, no real-life actors or objects spliced into the scene), but in this case, it’s all seamless.

If you want me to nit-pick, here it goes: The humans should remain human, and the aliens should remain alien. The humans who have blue Na’vi avatars (no spoiler here, this is how the film gets its title) were imbued with subtle characteristics in their avatar forms that make them appear more human. This may have made some sense to the science fiction junkies who want there to be a difference, but in my opinion, the real Na’vi looked more real than the avatars, especially that of Sigourney Weaver. Maybe it was the side-by-side comparison, but her avatar stood out like a sore thumb to me, and was more in the uncanny valley than Neytiri, the Na’vi huntress we see the most in the film. Also, some establishing shots at the start of the film (all typical James Cameron) were completely forced and took me out of the experience, but that’s the director’s fault more than the budget.

Later, when the action takes place exclusively in the CGI world Cameron and his art directors have created for us, I was completely engrossed. If I had seen this film instead of Star Wars at the crucially formative point in my life when I became a fanboy, Avatar would have been that geek-out moment for me. As it is, the film has been impressive enough for me to see twice in IMAX 3D. When my wife (whom I took to my second viewing) asked about seeing it again, I didn’t blink at a third viewing; I only wanted to make sure we see it again with someone else who hasn’t yet seen this gorgeous film.

Story: 4/5 stars. Really. No, the screenwriters aren’t going to win the big awards for this film, just like in Titanic or Terminator 2 or any other huge blockbuster CGI action film. But that’s not what drew me here. Granted, a case could be made that science fiction films will continue to not be taken seriously because of a focus on the visuals as opposed to dialogue and plot. But this film isn’t as much sci-fi as it is fantasy. The Wizard of Oz didn’t win any awards for screenplay, either (also didn’t win Best Special Effects, unbelievably). But in The Wizard of Oz and Avatar, the stories were both easy enough to follow along, and suspenseful enough that the viewer really wasn’t sure what would happen next. The characters weren’t believable in the strictest sense, but the viewer could identify with the main characters, hate the villain, cheer for the protagonists, and so on. This is where I say that while Avatar isn’t the best-written story out there this year, it is “as good as it needs to be.”

Enjoyability: 5/5 stars: If you can only see Avatar in 2D, I feel sorry for you. However, the people I know who have only seen it in 2D absolutely loved it. There is plenty of eye-candy to satisfy any blockbuster-lover’s hunger for visuals (if you liked the Transformers films, you’ll love Avatar), and the story of the protagonist Jake Sully and the Na’vi is compelling enough to keep the non-cynic fully engaged to the point where you will feel the main characters’ fear, apprehension, exhilaration, and sorrow as they do. That said, I was captivated. I saw Avatar for the first time in the middle of the Christmas Eve blizzard, on a 6-hour break from working over 18 hours in 24–I was fairly sleep-deprived. As such, the film was likened to a waking dream, where I felt as though putting on the 3D glasses transported me to Pandora. When the end credits rolled, I effectively woke from the dream, walked out into the blizzard, and worked an overnight shift. The entire experience for me, then, let me emphasize with Jake Sully’s realization in transferring in and out of the avatar body: “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” Any film that can make me blissfully forget my surroundings and personal troubles for two and a half hours is doing its job admirably.

This film is marketable to a large viewing audience, so the average seven or eight-year-old should be fine watching it, I think. That said, if you don’t like cartoon and/or warlike violence, this isn’t the film for you. Apparently people curse some in the future, but not nearly as much as in a standard action film, and smoking cigarettes is still a habit for a few. Also, the blue people are dressed like, well, like natives in a big hot rain forest. Things to consider if you’re sensitive to such things.

Dones’ Rating: Avatar is a ground-breaking film which must be seen in 3D to be truly appreciated. Even for those who can’t see it in 3D, it’s still worth seeing. Be sure to look for my upcoming review of the IMAX 3D experience.

I realize my last review was several months ago. I am going to see Avatar in Imax 3D for the second time today. I want to provide an extensive review not only of the film, but also of the 3D experience, so I felt I owed it to my loyal readers to watch it a second time, since the first time I just spent 3 hours with my jaw on the floor. (How’s that for a teaser?)

Bottom Line: The best Harry Potter film yet.

**Note: If you want to remain totally spoiler-free before you watch the film (or read the book), please note this review does contain what I would call significant spoilers. It’s also safe to assume any comments may contain spoilers**

Half-Blood Prince

When I read this book, I wasn’t terribly impressed (until the end), and it didn’t become my favorite book of the series, unlike each previous volume that preceded it. In the theaters, however, it was the fifth installment that failed to surpass the previous one in my estimation. Book Five remains my favorite of the series, yet the film version paled in comparison (while remaining an acceptable filmed version of the book. Film Six, however, restores my faith in director David Yates’ ability to finish out the series.

In this film we have the much-anticipated relationships coming to fruition between Ron & Hermione and Harry & Ginny. This was exposited superbly well, though some critics may complain that it takes up too much screen time. I see their point, but disagree: this is what fans like me want to see, it moves the story along nicely, and the lightheartedness of this lifted the film’s mood from its inevitably dark nadirs.

Enough of this, and on with the ratings:

Production value: 5/5 stars. The CG was believable, creative, and at the top of the present state of the art. But that’s not what made this film great. I’m going to talk up the cinematography in this film, which provided much of the tension and chill factor to the darker scenes. The greenish, desaturated pensieve scenes were mirrored by the almost black-and-white final scenes, and the whole sense of creepiness that followed each scene was sublime.  The angles chosen for many shots were spot-on based on the desired feel of the scene.

Story: 5/5 stars. It’s been a while since I read the book, but there was nothing glaringly missing in the transition from book to film. Especially wonderful was how Yates did on film what Rowling did in print, especially in the dialogue-free narratives about Draco Malfoy’s secret project; though where Rowlling mercilessly teased the reader with the mystery of Malfoy’s actions, Yates depicted each last bit of Malfoy’s plan in chronological order with the rest of the story, an artistic choice that pays off very well. The filmed version of these events were far less confusing and appeared far more central to the plot of the movie, as opposed to it being almost a sidebar in the book, at least until all was revealed in the end.

Enjoyability: 5/5 stars: At times I was perfectly giddy, along with the characters; at other moments I was chilled to the bone. I loved this movie!

Dones’ Rating: This film was nearly flawless. I won’t even waste space here to nit-pick. This film demonstrates why the books & films are so great!

Upgrade Wordpress from 2.1 all the way to 2.8.1, which enables a lot of features I have heretofore been missing out on:

- Ajax back end
- auto upgrades, plugin installs, etc
- posting from my iPhone

So now you’ll hopefully see more posts from me. I’ve also decided to more fully integrate my Twitter posts into this blog, so expect some one-liners you have otherwise missed if you haven’t been following me at this link.

In other news, I have a load of dishes to finish, a toddler bed to construct, and dinner to plan. So I’ll catch you on the flip-side…

I understand this is a year old (and I’m posting it a couple days late for the Fourth), but it’s a beautiful message by the Muppets celebrating America in (ahem) their own special way…

Michael Jackson died today. With him, a significant aspect of my childhood has died, too. There are going to some people, like my infant son, who won’t quite get that, just as I don’t fully understand how Elvis’ death might have impacted my parents’ generation. Others are going to look at the controversy and scandal surrounding his personal life, and say, unforgivingly, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” That’s their choice. I choose to remember the good things about Michael Jackson’s legacy, and consider the bad things as equivalent to his death. Let me explain:

As a child of the late 70’s/early 80’s, I first really noticed Michael Jackson when Thriller came out. Oh, sure, I think I probably heard “Rock With You” (still my favorite) and Jackson Five songs before then, but Thriller was a big enough pop-culture earthquake to reach me in small-town Kansas. And my, what an earthquake!

The Thriller album, video, etc. was all encompassed by this hoopla that changed our culture. We had the behind the scenes on HBO of the Making of Thriller, the music video that was more like a film, that gave us insight into the way all subsequent music videos would be created. Thriller is the Citizen Kane of music videos, and despite what Nirvana has to say about it, it will always be the #1 music video of all time. The album itself was really good, including more hits than I can count–and the rest are pretty much ingrained into my psyche, as well, as a function of how good they are. If Michael’d swapped out “The Girl Is Mine” for his other duet with Paul McCartney, “Say, Say, Say”, the album would have been freakin’ perfect. Then there was the jacket, the glove, Billy Jean, Beat It, the Moonwalk, the Pepsi commercial…all resonating in pop culture through movies like Beverly Hills Cop, to Corey Feldman dressing up like Michael, and so on.

I was in 2nd grade and had never heard of the Moonwalk until one morning I walk into my classroom early and some kid asks me if I know how to moonwalk. Caught off guard, I say, “Yeah,” and start doing my best Neal Armstrong impression. This was the first time that I can remember that Michael Jackson was known as ‘cool’ (this event also confirmed that I am a dork). It was all downhill from there, and my younger brother was even more into Michael than I was. This was one of two Michael Jackson posters he had on the wall of his room:

When Captain Eo came out, I was as pumped as I could be. Michael Jackson in a musical scifi fantasy, in 3d? We had the “making-of” for this movie, taped off the Disney Channel, and watched it repeatedly for years, such that when we finally went to Disneyland in ‘89 we already knew 80% of the film and all of the music, but it was the fulfillment of the promise that the behind-the-scenes special had made years before.

Don’t forget ”We Are The World”. How many people who lived through the 80’s can’t sing that song all the way through, even imitating each artist’s unique singing style, and naming off each person in order (more or less). We liked it so much, we bought both versions of the album. Hey, it was for starving kids in Africa, and we did our part.  

I don’t know if it would have been obvious from the outside how much I respected this guy. Here he did charity work, and would hang out with kids, and he always had a big smile on his face, and his music and dance moves were SO COOL! He was wholesome, heroic and virtuous. People called him the King of Pop, and we all hailed him as royalty, devoting our time and treasure and heart to the king.

But this King’s hero journey had not yet ended. Things went Bad from here… Bad was kind of the beginning of the end of the honeymoon for me. The music was great, but some of it was darker and weirder: gone was this innocent 1950’s movie-house faux-horror of the song Thriller, and in was the nearly unintelligible but somehow threatening Smooth Criminal; out was the completely unbelievable fight song Beat It (unbelievable because Michael Jackson wasn’t a physical threat, just a coolness threat. He wasn’t going to kick your butt, but he could win hands-down in a dance-off), and in was the more deadly threat of Bad. No more We Are The World; now it was Man In The Mirror, which was less sympathy for others and more of a guilt trip.

At the same time, we started to hear about Michael hanging out with Bubbles the chimp, and buying the elephant man’s bones, and just doing wiggy-ass stuff. Not to mention the plastic surgery: he wasn’t the cute little black boy from the Jackson Five (probably wouldn’t even qualify to be in The Wiz without makeup, sorry to say), and he wasn’t even this cool black guy with the million-dollar smile from the Thriller album. He was bad, and white, and unrecognizable, and he grabbed his crotch for no reason. The music was great, but the King was a shadow of his former self, at least in my eyes.

I bought the Dangerous album on CD when I was in high school, and it was okay. About 50% good-to-great songs, but the rest were just so-so. MTV just kept on selling him as if nothing had changed, but just about everything about Michael had changed by then. Didn’t he marry Lisa Marie around that time? He had officially gone off the deep end by then, even though it wasn’t fully evident. In hindsight, maybe it was seeing him with Macaulay Culkin that started getting us wondering, but enough of the music was still outstanding, and the music videos continued to be innovative, so we didn’t worry about it.

Until he got in trouble. Officially. Some believe Michael that it was some celebrity witchhunt, but I think most of us could tell there was truth to the accusations. It was around this time that Michael started wearing masks, and I think he lost part of his nose for a while to plastic surgery. It was at this point that I really started mourning the loss of my hero, of my king. This is what I meant in the first paragraph above: the Michael Jackson I knew, loved, and respected in the 80’s had already died in the 90’s, so today I did not shed a tear.

Lately, I have been itching to finally get my collection caught up and buy his music on CD for ripping to my iPod, but I didn’t want any of my money going to that Thing that my boyhood idol had transformed into. Now I don’t have to shop the used CD racks for his music (unless I just want a deal), because now I know my money won’t go to feeding his shell of a corpse that still went by the name Michael Jackson.

That sounds very bitter, but I think it portrays quite accurately how my childhood hero has fallen in my estimation. I do not weep for the overly wealthy yet still hopelessly in debt, insanely weird and self-disfiguring pedophile who died this afternoon. Today, on the day of his passing, I remember and earnestly mourn the man who created iconic music, dance, and imagery that had such a major influence in the shaping of my own artistic and aesthetic tastes, as well as those of my generation. That is the one I remember, the one I mourned for when he fell from grace, and the one I mourn for today, in his own words:

He’s out of my life
He’s out of my life
And I don’t know whether to laugh or cry
I don’t know whether to live or die
And it cuts like a knife
He’s out of my life

It all began when I over-scheduled my day off. Those kinds of days never turn out well. I had a delivery from the furniture store (new range and grill=awesome) and later I had an appointment at the gym. There were full hours away from each other, which would be fine for most people. Not me. I prefer to have one big ‘thing’ I have to do each day. That’s the only way to avoid what happened.

(Warning to those with an aversion to reading about bodily functions: you’re way too sensitive. Regardless, this post may shock your delicate sensibilities. For those who have a sense of humor, keep reading.)

What I didn’t realize until this morning is that I had to do some work to install the stove due to the fact that the old one was hard-wired in. On my trip to take Baby Josh to the hardware store to get the necessary parts, on the way back I decided to get some Taco Bell for the two of us. (I ordered a chicken soft taco for the little one and they gave me a beef hard taco, but we made do.) After lunch, Josh was messy enough from the taco that I stripped him to his diaper, did a once-over with some wipes and stood him in his playpen within sight of my pending electrician’s duties in the kitchen.

In retrospect, I can see that this is the point where all was lost.

At previous opportunities Josh has demonstrated the ability to undo a velcro strap on his diaper when that’s all he’s wearing. But his mommy or I have always been there to catch him before he gets the second strap undone. On this particular afternoon, Josh had a good ten minutes of listening to his father mess with the wiring (and get it fully completed and tested, mind you) in order to complete a project of his own. I had no reason to suspect anything since Josh was making the usual play noises in the playpen. Every parent knows that it’s only when they’re quiet that you have to worry, right?

Wrong.

I was all done with my project and walked up to the playpen to grab Josh so that I could get him dressed and ready for the kids area at the gym, as I had an appointment with a trainer for my complimentary new member session–and there was to be no more appointments today. For the next hour and a half I would be tasked with unwreaking what my infant son had wrought.

My son was looking up and smiling at me, because he was offering me a present. It was his diaper, completely off and dangling from his little hand. I took it for the least terrible thing that could have happened: Josh obviously had to much time to himself and had undone his diaper, and I was very fortunate that he hadn’t whizzed all over everything. All was right with the world. I took the diaper from him and felt it was heavy, so I checked it as a force of habit, and notice there was a slight brown streak visible.

Just a streak. There’s never just a streak. A diaper is either poop-free or it isn’t.

I look up from the soaked and streaked diaper into my son’s delighted, smiling face. Then I glance behind him to another, more substantial brown streak that is suspended in the webbing at the side of the playpen. Then down to the two-foot-long brown streak across the padded floor of the playpen, and back up to my son’s beaming, angelic smile with a grin two miles wide.

Now I can look back and tell you: Man, I love this kid! Although, truth be told, at the moment I wasn’t so sure how I felt about anything.

Uncertain as to the next course of action, I studied Josh for a moment and noticed a fleck of poop on his hand. In a flash, I knew what had to be done. I ran to the bathroom and started a bubble bath, and went and grabbed Josh. His backside was completely covered. After his impromptu bath (with a little shower-head work to get the more stubborn bits) I dressed him (fully, this time!) and put him in his crib to fuss (couldn’t be helped at this point) whilst I returned to the scene of the crime to formulate the next step of my plan. I called the gym to reschedule my appointment and turned to the best, purest source of de-pooping I could think of: baby wipes. I grabbed the end of the old package and a full new one and started going to town. After using about ten of these to get the bigger chunks up, I remembered that we had antimicrobial wipes under the kitchen sink. I set about sanitizing the webbing and padding and making sure that the whole playpen was good enough to eat off of.

So the moral of the story is: don’t overschedule your day off.

If you haven’t already heard, Stephen Wolfram (the creator of the uber-graphing calculator software Mathematica) has recently launched a knowledge engine (as opposed to a search engine like the Google) called Wolfram|Alpha. Instead of being sent out to the internet wasteland as we’re used to, once you type in a query in WolframAlpha the site brings the data to you. In this respect I would categorize it closer to Wikipedia than Ask.com. But Wikipedia it isn’t. The folks at Twit.tv described W|A as “the CIA Factbook on steroids plus a kickass graphing calculator”. Given that the basis of the algorithm is Mathematica’s symbolic language, I think this is probably the best description we’ll get, until we figure out what to do with the darn thing.

That’s really the problem. Mashable does have a list of WolframAlpha easter eggs (also try entering ’hello world’) which are truly awesome from a pop-culture standpoint, but not really the computation knowledge that W|A is promising. It won’t answer ‘How many boroughs in new york city?’ or ‘teenage mothers in 2000′. A query of ‘population of West Germany in 1957′ returns nothing but a suggestion to retry ‘Germany in 1957′, to which it then ignores the year and provides current data for the nation. So maybe I went back in time to far: ‘population of Germany 1990′ provides a data point (79.4 million people) and plots it on a graph with data since 1970. What if I give it two data points, then, and ask the big calculator in the cloud to find the net change? Alas, querying ‘(population of Germany 2000) minus (population of Germany 1990)’ returns ‘(82.31 million people) Subtract[79.43 million people]‘, which is all too small of a step away from being what I would call ‘powerful computational knowledge’. Perhaps I didn’t use the correct syntax, but honestly, for this to work, I shouldn’t really need to bend my query to the esoteric whims of the Mathematica code. The correct syntax, by the way, is apparently ‘population germany 2000 – population germany 1990′, returning a useful answer of ‘2.876 million people’.

So then I ask myself the question, “What would I want WolframAlpha to know?” The simple answer is ‘everything’, but that’s not fair. So below are a few questions I’d like to be able to ask a giant computer programmed by a genius. I welcome commenters to add the questions they’d really like to ask WolframAlpha, if it were everything we want it to be.

1 – Aggregates, like ‘How many cities are named Springfield?’ or ‘How many Main Streets in the USA?’
2 – Blue-sky sorts of questions, like ‘How much money would I need to start a new auto insurance company?’ or ‘How much fuel would a traditional rocket need to take a Voyager-sized satellite to the nearest neighboring star system?’
3 – Future events, like ‘What will be the next 10 years when Christmas Day falls on a Sunday?’ or ‘What is the current payoff date for the US National Debt?’

Okay, maybe that last one isn’t fair, either. but now I put it to you: What other questions would you like to ask WolframAlpha? Please add your comment.