Caught something interesting on Oprah today – a story about a single mom who became a stripper to support her family.

Now, the story on Oprah tried to be fairly even-handed…  Wasn’t terribly sensational or scandalous…  But I find it interesting that this a story at all.  I find it interesting that the assumption is that you wouldn’t want to be a stripper, that there’s something wrong with you – the name of the story is “How far would you go.”  The whole idea seems to be that stripping would be a job of last resort.

Now, I can certainly understand that some people probably wouldn’t want to dance around naked in front of an audience – I dislike audiences enough with my clothes on.  But why does stripping have such negative connotations?  Why is it that folks look at you funny if you’re a stripper, but not if you’re a musician?  What is it about sex work that is so horrible?

Last night I cracked open a new book – Burning Chrome, by William Gibson.  The first story in the book was Johnny Mnemonic, which I’ve been dying to read for a few months now.  I was very surprised…  It’s almost completely different from the movie.

I assumed there’d be differences, there always are.  And after reading Neuromancer I didn’t think the relatively nice guy Keanu plays would survive very long in Gibson’s world, so I figured there’d have to be some substantial differences.  But the story was so different…

It was much shorter than I expected.  I knew it was a short story, that Burning Chrome was a collection of short stories, but I expected Johnny Mnemonic to be much longer.  I expected it to have some more substance to it.  Neuromancer was such a rich and lively world that seemed to stretch out in all directions…  And somehow they managed a full-length movie from Johnny Mnemonic…  But the story itself was only about a dozen pages.  And the narrative is just as brief.

You meet Johnny, Molly shows up, they run off to the Lo-Tek hideout, meet Jones, Molly kills a Yakuza assassin, Johnny becomes a Lo-Tek.  That’s really it.  There’s some more description, some dialog, some internal thoughts…but not a whole lot more substance.  All that stuff in the movie about Takahashi and the AI construct, Spider and Dr. AllCome, the Preacher…  None of that makes even the briefest appearance.

It was a good story…  I enjoyed reading it…  And it was really the perfect length for a quick read before bed…  But I was very surprised.  I honestly expected more substance to it, and I expected it to at least vaguely resemble the movie.

A few weeks back we were clicking through the TV channels right before bed and stumbled across something interesting on the Sci-Fi Channel – The Lost Empire.

It’s some kind of made-for-TV miniseries that was originally produced back in 2001.  The acting wasn’t very good…  The special effects were pretty unimpressive…  The pacing and storyline were downright odd…  But it immediately caught my attention anyway.  There was something magical and dreamlike about the whole thing.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

But, unfortunately, The Lost Empire was a four-hour miniseries and it was 2:00 on a Sunday night – so I didn’t get to see the whole thing.

I woke up the next morning and immediately put it into my Netflix queue, and bumped it up to the top.  And that’s when I noticed the truly horrible ratings and reviews everyone else has given it – not just on Netflix but on IMDB as well.  Now, I’m not one to normally put a whole lot of stock in what other people say…  I’ve loved plenty of movies/books/TV/whatever that other folks hated…  But it always makes me wonder where the incredible disconnect comes from.  I always wonder if I grabbed the right movie, if we’re all actually talking about the same thing, if I mis-heard a title or something.

Well, we got The Lost Empire from Netflix the other day, and last night I watched the rest of it.  I still love it.  I was honestly expecting the last couple of hours to completely ruin the rest of the movie, therefor justifying everyone else’s reactions, but that didn’t happen.  I enjoyed the last half just as much as the first.  And I’m still left wondering where the disconnect is.

Granted, it is not the most wonderful piece of cinema ever created.  As I stated – the acting, special effects, plot, pacing…just about all of it could use some work.  But it isn’t bad, it’s just a little weird.  The whole thing had an almost dreamlike quality to it… It reminded me an awful lot of The Wizard of Oz (a movie which I never really liked, but everyone else seems to).

I finished Snow Crash last night.  No, that’s not right…  Snow Crash ended last night, very abruptly.

Planes were in flames, people were bleeding, The Raft was in chaos, ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

Just like that.

I guess the main storyline was properly resolved…  The bad guy was defeated and order was more or less restored…  But there was absolutely no resolution at all.  I’m dying to find out what happened to Y.T. and her mom, what happened to Hiro and Juanita, what happened to Uncle Enzo, Raven, Ng, Mr. Lee…all of them.

Unfortunately, it looks like Snow Crash is a stand-alone title, not part of a series.  Nothing really comes before or after it.  Diamond Age can apparently be interpreted as taking place in the same world as Snow Crash 60-80 years later…  But that’s about it.  So it looks like my questions are going to remain unanswered.

Big story today about McCain allegedly getting a little too friendly with a female Lobbyist.

I won’t lie – I find this whole thing pretty amusing.  I don’t like Republican policies, and I like McCain even less.  I’m really enjoying seeing Huckabee grabbing a few votes here and there.  I’m enjoying seeing McCain squirm over the allegations of impropriety.  I don’t know if anything horrible actually happened, and I’m not sure I really care.  I didn’t want him as President before and I don’t want him now – that hasn’t changed at all.

But I find the Republican reaction to this whole thing to be pretty interesting.  Republicans like to claim that they’re socially conservative.  They’re always talking about family values and looking out for your children and the sanctity of marriage.  And yet they don’t really seem to practice what they preach…

I don’t know how many times stories have come out about Republicans screaming to outlaw gay sex one day, and then being caught boinking some gay lover the next day.

Which isn’t to say that Democrats are some kind of pillars of decency, there’s plenty of scandal on the Democratic side of things as well.  But we don’t generally try to tell other people how they should be living their lives, so the scandals don’t normally seem quite so hypocritical.

In typical form, the Republicans are crying more about exposure than the alleged scandal itself.  They’re complaining that the New York Times is running a smear campaign.  Nobody really seems to care whether McCain actually did anything wrong, they’re upset because he got caught.

Again, I don’t really care too much about McCain.  I was never going to vote for him, so this alleged scandal really doesn’t matter to me.  But if it were a candidate that I was considering, I would personally really like to know what had actually happened.  I would be very concerned about whether the candidate had actually done anything wrong or not.  I’d be very concerned about whether they were actually a candidate that I wanted to vote for. 

And that just doesn’t seem to be the case for a lot of Republicans.  A lot of them don’t want to know.  They would be happier if the New York Times had never published that story, regardless of whether McCain has actually done anything wrong or not.  And that just blows my mind.

Looks like the military managed to shoot down the dying satellite last night.  I am impressed that they managed to hit such a target.  I don’t want to slight our military prowess or technology…  But a falling satellite is a relatively small and fast-moving target.  I doubt if there would have been an opportunity for a second shot if the first one had missed.

It sounds, from all the reporting, like the hydrazine tank was breached as they were hoping.  I’m really not sure what the benefit is to spraying the hydrazine all over the upper atmosphere as opposed to across the ground…  I guess it’ll burn up or disperse so widely that it doesn’t matter…

And you’ll be happy to know that Terri was not struck by any debris.

Last night was the MacGyver MythBusters special.  I’ve been eagerly waiting for this show to air for months.  I loved MacGyver back in the day, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed MythBusters, so this special sounded like terrific fun.

And it was fun.  There were a couple good explosions, some tomfoolery, and some interesting builds.  But I’m not terribly satisfied with the end result.  I think they picked a couple pretty lame MacGyver myths to bust.  There was a nifty science-y solution to some problem in literally every episode, and the two they picked to test were the bamboo plane and the sodium bomb.

Everyone knows that sodium reacts with water, but I doubt if anyone seriously thinks that just one gram of anything is going to blast a hole in a concrete wall.  One gram isn’t much.  In fact, I’d be very surprised if there is any explosive substance out there powerful enough to blast a decent sized hole in a concrete wall using only one gram of the explosive.  So it seems kind of silly to bust that myth…

The bamboo airplane is interesting, and potentially a good myth to bust, but I don’t think they did it right.  They did not duplicate the plane that is shown in the MacGyver footage.  The MacGyver plane has much flatter wings but the MythBusters built them up into airfoils.  The MacGyver plane had much bigger tail panels, and the MythBusters made them smaller.  I don’t know if any of that would matter…  I know very nearly nothing about airplanes…  But they were no longer actually testing the airplane that MacGyver built.  And then they didn’t even test it properly.  The MacGyver footage shows his plane dropping off a huge freaking cliff and more or less gliding away…  The MythBusters dropped it down a fairly steep pseudo-cliff that wasn’t nearly as high as the one MacGyver used.  Would it have mattered?  Probably not…  But again they didn’t replicate the circumstances of the myth very well.

I really hoping that they’d test more of the “I can’t believe that really works” MacGyver myths that they showed as teasers…  Like using a chocolate bar to plug a hole in a leaking bottle of acid.  Seems utterly impossible.  Seems like the acid should go right through the chocolate.  But it works.

I guess what I’m saying is that I generally assume that what I see on television is fiction.  I don’t really believe that MacGyver or Star Trek or the A-Team are scientifically accurate.  I’m not surprised to find out that you can’t really teleport down to the surface of a planet, or that we can’t really travel faster than the speed of light.  I would be more surprised to see things proven true, rather than proven false.  It would have been a far more interesting episode of MythBusters if they had tested some MacGyver myths that had turned out to be true – rather than busting them all.

I was also rather annoyed at how short the special was.  I was kind of hoping for another two-hour show, especially considering just how much MacGyver material there is out there.