Groundhog Day

I'm not much of a Bill Murray fan in general, so I didn't get interested in this movie until I read more than once that it had a lot of fans in various spiritual communities, which made me very curious. And so it was that "Groundhog Day" found its way onto my Netflix list.

I thought I remembered this being marketed as a comedy for theatrical release, and while there are definitely funny parts, that's not truly accurate. The spiritual component comes from this guy starting out as, well, not a nice guy, to say the least, and through the course of the movie you watch him change. He tries all of the crap any of us would probably try under similar circumstances. It rings true, or the movie simply wouldn't work. You know where it's going all along, and yet you feel as though he's earned it by making all of the necessary mistakes a thousand times (probably literally) until he finally learns how to truly build a good life.

There are plenty of laughs along the way, especially if you find Bill Murray funny in the first place. I loved him in "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters", and found him annoying in everything else I've seen him in before this. No, I haven't see "Lost in Translation" yet, but it is on my Netflix list. So the bottom line is, "Groundhog Day", highly recommended. I watched it twice in a row (second time with director's commentary), which says it all.

"Thank You for Calling Big Honkin Corporation. I'm So Effin' Happy You Called that I Could Just Scream...

This call may be monitored or recorded for Bad Things to hold against me in my annual review. How may I help you?"

How does that sound to you? With a few alterations to protect the identity of my employer (and allow me to keep my job), this is the length of the new greeting I'm now required to use at work. You've probably heard similar greetings if you have any reason to call a sufficiently large company. I don't know about you, but hearing this lengthy run of drivel doesn't leave me feeling warm and fuzzy about the company I'm calling.

I knew this was coming because I'd had reason to call the Even Larger Corporation that owns the Very Large Corporation that I work for, and heard this sort of greeting when I called them. I figured it was only a matter of time before we shared the joy as well, and I was right.

So why do we have such a ridiculously long greeting? Well, the "monitored or recorded" part is supposed to be a legal requirement, even though there's supposed to be a pre-recorded message saying the same thing that callers hear before they get to us, so it sounds like duplication to me. My guess is that there was a committee talking about what to put in the greeting, and everybody felt they had to add something to show they were participating in the process. And I'd also guess that not one of them read it out loud even once.

Does anyone really think such a greeting sounds friendly or natural? And if not, why require it?

This is just the tip of a particularly goofy iceberg. More on that another time...

Violent Sports and Buddhism

My favorite sports (football and hockey) are also among the most violent, which obviously presents a problem from a Buddhist perspective. It's hard to reconcile peaceful intentions for all beings with cheering for your favorite NFL linebacker knocking the opposing quarterback into next week. Not to mention reveling in a good ol' hockey fight.

Well, I'm not going to try to reconcile it. While I don't fully embrace the idea of two hockey players pounding the heck out of each other the way I used to, I still enjoy those sports the most, and that's just the way it is. There's still beauty in a completed 50 yard pass or a series of quick passes between hockey players resulting in a goal. One of my favorite things in sports is seeing a goal coming in a hockey game moments before it actually happens, and that's skill, not violence.

I know there are less violent sports, but honestly, I find most of them boring as heck. Maybe in time the violence will bother me more and my tastes will change, or maybe not. Maybe I'm just not going to become that spiritually developed during this lifetime. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to enjoy the excitement of the NHL playoffs. :-)

NHL Playoffs - A Way of Life

I've been a Philadelphia Flyers hockey fan since the late 70's, and I've never discussed it here because there hasn't been anything worth discussing since I've been blogging. Until now.

The Flyers were the worst team in the league last year, and painful to watch. As I type this, they've won their first seven game series, and are leading their current series three games to one. They have an upsetting tendency to blow two goal leads, but their goalie has gotten hot at just the right time, and they've been pulling rabbits out of their hats at the critical moments when they most need it.

The only problem with the NHL playoffs is that they tend to become a lifestyle because of the sheer number of games, especially while you have a rooting interest. Happy as I've been, it's been very hard to get anything done for the last couple of weeks. My wife has said that she's happy that my team is winning because it makes me happy, but on the other hand, she really wishes they'd lose so I could get more done around the house.

After suffering with cheering for a lousy team the last couple of years, the house can wait just a little longer. :-)

Dexter

I've been renting the first season of the TV series "Dexter" through Netflix, and wanted to put a big recommendation out there for those of you who may not have seen it.

This series is about a serial killer who works as a blood spatter specialist for the Miami police department. He was raised by his adoptive father, a police officer, who gave him a moral code to live by to keep him undetected. He only kills murderers and other people who've been up to something nasty (and only then if there's definite proof of their activities), not because he sees anything wrong with killing other people, but because it's a relatively safe way for him to indulge the urge. He's a reasonably functional sociopath. This of course raises the question of whether he's a bad guy because he kills people, or a good guy because he only kills bad people. I know my own answer to that question, but others might not agree with my answer, and that's what makes this fun.

The resulting series is very unique stuff. Dexter comes across as a likeable guy, even though you know he doesn't actually feel anything for anyone else and is just trying to figure out how to fit in well enough to survive. I think they stray a bit, actually, because he does seem to care for his adoptive sister at the very least. I can make a reasonable argument that his other human relationships are nothing more than cover, except for her.

Science fiction series often use an alien character to comment on the human condition, and "Dexter" does the same thing in its own way. There are scenes in this show that you simply won't see anywhere else. One of my favorites is when he's about to slit the throats of a captive married couple, but pauses to ask them for relationship advice to help him deal with his girlfriend. I also love the bit where the police call him to inspect his own crime scene, which turns out to surprise him in one very key respect.

The supporting cast is also consistently interesting and entertaining, and their characters come off very much as real people, with positive and negative aspects to their characters.

I have one disc (four episodes, I think) to go to complete the first season, and I'm looking forward to it. Very good stuff.

Mindfulness - Modern and Monastic Life

I'm finding that there's something I really need to work on. I seem to be balanced and mindful at home and at work (though there's still plenty of room for improvement), but when I break my routine I often fall right back to my old bad habits. It's not a big deal, and in fact I'd be very surprised if I had achieved that kind of balance in every environment so quickly and easily. At least I know what I have to work on.

I still don't fully understand the idea of becoming a monk. To me, it seems like stepping away from conventional life in order to better cope with it, then never coming back. Couldn't you do more good for the world by being more involved in it? I guess if I understood, I'd be a monk myself.

National Health Care Plans

We've been hearing a lot about the two Democratic candidates' national health care plans, with the Pennsylvania primary being hotly contested as I write this. I don't think anyone is going to argue that, in a country as relatively wealthy as ours, someone in desperate need of health care should have to go without medical care only because they can't afford it. But my primary question about health care has remained seemingly ignored by all of the candidates. My question is: what are you going to do to control rising health care costs? Any national health care plan that doesn't address that problem is only shifting costs when the real reason that a national health care plan is so desirable to so many people is that health care is increasingly unaffordable.

I suspect that there are several reasons for this, the main one being that nobody has an answer, and if they do have an answer, it'd be very unpopular with a lot of powerful people. A lot of people would like to blame the insurance industry, but that argument fails quickly. The insurance industry doesn't increase health care costs; it merely has to figure out ways to pay for whatever costs exist.

So what needs to change to stop spiraling health care costs? Some doctors point the finger toward insurance companies because of their rapidly increasing malpractice insurance costs (which means that the doctors in turn must charge more), but that's a short-sighted view. Malpractice costs are high because those dollars used to pay high malpractice suit settlements have got to come from somewhere (and yes, the insurance company will make their profit, as all businesses do). So what is generating those large malpractice suit amounts? Simply put, it's the juries that award them. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be large awards for cases that merit them, but I have to question how many of these large awards are truly justified. We've all heard the story of the elderly woman who won millions in a court settlement by taking McDonald's to court for hot coffee she spilled in her own lap in a drive-through. There are medical malpractice cases that are the equivalent of that.

Bringing medical care costs under control is going to require cooperation at every level of the process, and frankly, somebody's golden goose (and most likely several golden geese) is going to have to be cooked to do it. It's going to take someone with courage and power to accurately identify the real problems and address them, and I don't know what it's going to take to enable that person to step up.

I do know that the candidates aren't going to address the real problems during the primaries, because what the voters want to hear is that someone is going to pay their medical bills, and they don't care who it is as long as it doesn't sound as though it has to be them.

Haftas

I've been quiet lately because so much of my time in the last week has been spent on haftas (as in things I "hafta" do, rather than things I want to do). Not that that's been all bad. In fact, it's been productive and not all that unpleasant. It's just not terribly interesting for anyone else to read, so I haven't bothered writing about it until now.

And so I'll go back to being quiet until I have something more interesting to say. :-)

Mister Twister

After the second slot of PoliCon, most of the group went out to a diner together. I spent most of the dinner break with Teddy, one of the players from my Sorcerer game, and her husband Josh. It turns out that Josh entertains at parties by making balloon animals. I hadn't known that there was a word for people who do that. They're called twisters.

Josh had just come from a job, so he had his balloons with him in a sort of customized apron. He started making balloon animals while we were at the diner, and as it turns out, the con's guest of honor is a twister as well, so before too long, both of them were making various things out of balloons. The waitress received her tip in the hand of a balloon version of Sesame Street's Elmo, and several people who weren't part of our group left the restaurant that day with a balloon animal in hand.

The cool thing about this was watching everybody else in the diner. For the cost of a few bucks' worth of balloons, the whole room was full of smiles, and I'd be willing to bet that most of the people there brought those smiles home and told their families about those guys who were making balloon animals in the diner that day, spreading those smiles even further. It's a Very Good Thing to bring so much joy into the world so cheaply.

PoliCon

I had the pleasure of attending PoliCon yesterday, which was very enjoyable as usual. Don did his usual good job of organizing the show, and I'll tip my hat as well to our host Matt, who supplied the house where we played.

I was finally able to try Prime Time Adventures in the Firefly TV series setting for the first lost of the convention, and was even able to play the Mal Reynolds character. Good stuff. I'd like to be able to try PTA in a season format to really get the full effect.

I was a GM for the second slot, running a four player game of Sorcerer. I hadn't run a playtest for this one, and unfortunately it showed. I definitely have some work to do on this scenario before running it again. It didn't help that it's been a little too long since I've run Sorcerer, so I was a little rusty, and none of the players were familiar with the system. On the plus side, three of the four players had a very good time, and even the fourth seemed to enjoy himself well enough. It was good to identify some rough spots so I can improve the scenario for DexCon.

In the third slot, I was able to try an indie game called Shock. I hadn't heard of it prior to this past week, but it seemed the most interesting of the games offered in that slot and I was definitely not disappointed. The game begins with the players setting up a big change in the world (not surprisingly called the shock) and issues associated with that change. Each player then creates a protagonist based on one of the issues and an antagonist for someone else's protagonist. Then you play out a series of scenes for each protagonist, rotating through each in turn. The best science fiction is written around a really interesting idea. This game sets out to duplicate that and does quite a good job of it. I'll have to buy this game when I get a chance, most likely at DexCon.