Fantasy

There's really only one male fantasy... that the woman is into it.

--Athol Kay

Suddenly, stars

Today was cold and grey, with a steady rain all day. We finally got a band of clear sky this evening before the next line of clouds came in. When I went out walking the mutt, at first all you could see overhead was Venus shining bright, with Jupiter beside her. And then five minutes later, as I was coming back, there was Orion surging over the housetops, and Taurus with the misty Pleiades, and more.

Happy Military Day!

March fourth!

Funds March 1

Values per share from Jan 3 and now. I'm putting this in because "paying attention to funds" is one of my goals for the year.

• Akre Focus (AKREX): 13.45 > 14.59 = +8%
• Artisan International: 20.33 > 22.75 = +12%
• Cullen High Dividend Equity: 12.99 > 13.24 = +2%
• American Funds Europac R5: 35.95 > 39.78 = +11%
• UMB Scout International (UMBWX): 28.77 > 31.68 = +10%

Thor

I watched Thor on DVD, and am pleased that I got it out of the library for free rather than paying $10 to the theater.

Good points first: Tom Hiddleston made an excellent Loki, particularly in the early part of the film where you can see Loki subtly manipulating the people around him. Chris Hemsworth (from Melbourne, be it noted) portrayed Thor, and probably did as good a job as could be done, given what he had to work with. And the scene with him sitting in the rain next to Mjollnir was good.

But I must have missed the soul searching scene where Thor decided to be purely defensive. When Loki is about to blow up Jotunheim--well, it wasn't that long ago that Thor was just fine with that, and we didn't really see a reason for him to change from "happy Norse berserker" to "wait, bad guys deserve to live too". It would have been nice to see a little moral quandary at that point. "Blow up Jotunheim? Sounds good! But wait, dear old Dad never did that. He'd probably say it's unjust. And Mom would probably say that if you're unjust to your enemies, you're going to be unjust to your allies sooner or later. And, you know, the whole blow them up with the Bifrost Deathstar Cannon thing is kinda cowardly. So, I tell you what, Loki. You want to go down and take on King Laufey and his thugs mano a mano, then I'm good with that. But nuking the whole realm of Jotenheim is a bit too much, and if you keep trying to do it, I'd have to, you know, whack you in the head with a hammer."

Overall, it didn't feel like a complete movie. Yes, it's part of another six or ten or however many movies for Marvel, but it still felt a bit thin as contrasted with Iron Man or Captain America.

On the other hand...it's a comic book. Maybe I shouldn't be expecting too much complexity.

Memory

I saw an article on Instapundit to the effect that neuroscientists have something of a handle on the chemistry of memory, leading to the possibility of selective memory erasers. Just some random thoughts arising from that--treat these as story seeds for the next science fiction novel:

• does it become possible to treat PTSD? Do you only treat those people who are completely shell shocked and nonfunctional? If not, where do you draw the line? For crimes like rape, assault, and burglary, where there's a sense of violation, are the victims treated with memory erasers? How about consensual statutory rape--if the victim gets memory erasers, does it still deserve to be a major crime?
• If war and violent crime are bad, shouldn't we leave the memories so people have the emotions that, yes, these things are bad? If we can make them less bad by alleviating the memories, does that mean that people will make less effort to avoid those events and they'll happen more often?
• How about making other people take it? If you have an evil neighbor, the sort of person who is spiteful and petty, and she takes offense at something and starts a feud...are there circumstances in which you can legally compel her to forget the incident that started it?
• if you're in front of your peers and do something stupid, you can take an eraser, but you can't make everyone else take it. You could find that you don't remember the impromptu stripper act you did when you were drunk at the company New Years party, but everyone else does. Is that better than if you did remember it? Do you tend to seek out strangers, because that way if you do something embarrassing, you can forget it and they won't be around to remind you?
• To what extend could memory be modifiable? Can you erase your entire memory of a person--your ex-husband, for example? Your mother? How about if you then want the memory back?
  

Saint Angel

Dinner tonight: a thick slice of French bread, with Saint Angel cheese. Saint Angel is a French triple cream cheese with a thin white rind and creamy texture. It's similar to Brie, but a bit softer and more of a buttery flavor.