The Twilight Report

Thinking about Babel, which as mentioned in the previous post I saw yesterday. I’m not giving anything away by saying that the story is divided into three largely unrelated stories. The connection between the stories is tenuous, but they drive each other. The central characters for two of the stories have been nominated for best supporting actress: Adriana Barraza for her character Amelia in Mexico, and Rinko Kikuchi for her character Chieko in Japan. I wonder how unusual it is for a picture to receive two nominations in the same category like that. Anyway, the nominations, and the award if it follows, would be well deserved for either. Kikuchi (26) delivers a particularly believable performance of a deaf teenager.

It makes me wonder though, why “supporting” and not “starring”? It seems mainly because they aren’t Brad Pitt or Cate Blanchet, who received top billing. Their performances were good, but not brilliant by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to me the Mexican and Japanese stories are just as important, and much more interesting than the Moroccan (American centric) story. Making the American and Australian actors the stars and the supporting actress nominations for the non-native English speakers reinforces the belligerent Ugly Americanism of Pitt’s character, who sees the world revolving around himself.

Somehow, in the boredom of waiting for the timer to finish its timing run, I stumbled across a thread on Wikipedia dominated by the internet vs. Internet debate. I would say obviously some people need to find better things to do with their time, but I am apparently no better because I actually read through about half of it, by which time I had gone through several identical argument cycles (cycle where the same people make the same arguments as though they had not just been made at all); so I am no better.

I never even really thought of this as controversial. To me, you capitalize the Internet where we check our mail and browse the web every day, whereas I do not capitalize the internet of computers which sits behind my firewall at home operating semi-autonomously (many such internets exist). Apparently, however, it is controversial to some people.

So I ask the question: what is in a letter? According to Lynne Truss, in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves about punctuation, she mentions that the word "I" in the English language was original capitalized to make it stick out and be more readable. The German language is infinitely more strait forward in its capitalization rules - all nouns are capitalized - and yet even there, there are some funny rules, Sie the formal form of you is capitalized, whereas du the informal you is not. Some languages don't even have capital letters! I wonder what they do with all the free time they have on their hands due to the near const absence of capitalization arguments.

What goes almost unnoticed in the discussion page of the Internet Wikipedia entry is that there is a whole section of the article which is blatantly biased, inappropriate and offensive; not to mention the fact that it violates the neutral point of view policy of the website. This is so typical of Internet discourse. People waste their time arguing the relative merits of emacs vs. vi (I use pico or nano instead, I don't think that harms anyone else) or who would win if the Enterprise took on an Imperial Star Destroyer (I am pretty sure both are fictional). Surprisingly enough, which type of ship would win usually has a lot to do with which one the author finds most aesthetically or artistically pleasing (ie. is a fan of).

It is so easy to forget that there are actual problems confronting our society. It isn't really an Internet phenomenon either. As a nation we were so caught up in the President's penis, and debating whether he should be impeached, that we totally didn't notice that the "bad guys" were sneaking up on us. Oops. Too political.