Outliers and What the Dog Saw

I just finished What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventure by Malcolm Gladwell and since it's only been a year since I finished his previous book, Outliers: The Story of Success, I thought I'd just review them together.

Gladwell's first two books, The Tipping Point and Blink, were huge bestsellers. I've not read either but based on the strong word-of-mouth and the interesting conceit of Outliers, I decided to give Gladwell a try.

Gladwell was curious at how society has always viewed geniuses and the very few who become the elites in their field. Outliers digs deeper into what people like Einstein, Bill Gates, and elite athletes have in common.

Almost without exception, everyone who is considered a genius or superstar has not only put in the hard work and practice but has had innumerable things go their way.

Gladwell found that whether a mathematical genius or Wayne Gretzky, to become a master of a discipline requires around ten thousand hours of practice. Of course, it's not as simple as practice. For instance, it also helps to be born at the right time.

If you are a Canadian hockey player who wants to make it into the upper echelons of youth hockey, you better have been born between January and March. Otherwise, you don't make the age cut and you get put in with older kids who are ahead of you physically and have tons of more quality practice time. Coaches tend to give closer attention to the more mature players.

Why did Bill Gates become a computer whiz and one of the richest men in the world? He certainly put in the work but he was also born at the exact right time in this century. He fell into the exact right crowd and attended the one school in the country with a computer not only powerful, but accessible enough for him to spend every breathing second of his formative years programming.

The book is filled with amazing anecdotes ranging from explanations to why Asians are better at math to the very obvious reason why the Beatles became musical geniuses.

I have to say, I now feel much better about not being a genius.

What the Dog Saw is the most recent book by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a collection of his favorite work with The New Yorker magazine. The first section of essays could easily fit into the general theme of Outliers. Gladwell explores different aspects of culture and business to get down to the real reasons why some people have great success and some people fail.

For example, Why is there only one big brand of ketchup? Or, there's the fact that the dog whisperer, Cesar Millan, is more about nonverbal movements versus actual whispering.

In the second section, the author takes accepted notions like all Enron executives should go to jail, homelessness is unsolvable, and advances in mammography technology make diagnosing cancer easier and throws tough questions at them and finds what we think we know isn't necessarily true.

Finally, in the the third part, Gladwell explores personalities and how truly tough it is to know someone. How does a business know it's hired the right person? Is the FBI's revolutionary psychological profiling of criminals as fool-proof as movies like Silence of the Lambs make us think? Is throwing money at the best and brightest really the smartest thing to do?

Gladwell does his homework and interviews experts to come up with some very surprising answers. If nothing else, What the Dog Saw teaches you to question the status quo and to look deeper into things. There's usually an explanation for every success and there's almost always no magic potion to why something works and no single determining factor as to why something doesn't work.

I will be jumping right into the other two books as Malcolm Gladwell has quickly become one of my favorite writers. He can take a subject as complex as tax law or rocket science and make you understand it in a few paragraphs and then relate it to the most mundane of things. It all just works and flows with his easy-to-read writing style and knack for great storytelling.

Blackest Night part 2

With the color corps at war, the dead heroes and villains of the DC universe begin to rise from the grave. They are wearing Black Lantern rings and their main purpose seems to be to piss off or just plain emotionally wreck the living superheroes to the point where their hearts become tasty morsels.

After rereading that last sentence, the whole thing just sounds absurd. Let's put aside the dead, flesh-eating super people for the time being and focus in on the major ideas of Blackest Night.

There is a major baddy in Blackest Night. Revealing his identity is really that important and no need to spoil it here. He wants to wipe out life throughout the universe and he's using his emotionless army to extinguish all feeling and life.

Rather well known heroes and villains die and become part of his undead army. It's up to the different colored corps to stop fighting amongst themselves and band together to destroy the Black Lanterns.

Some of the major DC heroes, such as Wonder Woman, get directly involved in the color ring war and it's rather exciting to see such well-known characters reimagined as ring bearers.

With black light enveloping the universe it was only a matter of time before white light rode in like the cavalry to save the day. The last few chapters of Blackest Night are a fun ride with lots of incredible fight scenes and there are some great moments as long dead heroes and villains come back to the world of the living.

The two main artists for Blackest Night were Doug Mahnke in the Green Lantern book and Ivan Reis in the main Blackest Night title. Both did incredible work and some of two page spreads throughout the series are simply gorgeous.

I haven't done a tremendous job getting across how cool Blackest Night was to read but I think it was one of more successful "events" at either DC or marvel in the last ten years. Geoff Johns is just amazing to me as a writer. His go-to technique is to reimagine a character with a long and convoluted history and make it current and exciting for today's comic audience. He spent years setting up this event and it really paid off.

There was some fluff to Blackest Night. There were way too many tie-in books that had important story elements to completely ignore them and the dead, super-powered zombie of the week story got old.

Overall, it was a pretty great event. Next up for DC is Brightest Day. I can't wait to be wowed yet again.

Blackest Night (comic review)

Ninety percent of those reading my blog can now tune out for a bit. I'm going to review a comic book event.

The DC Comics epic mini-series, Blackest Night, wrapped up recently and since it seems I've been living in this world for a year now I thought it deserved a moment of my time.

I have a feeling this may run a bit long so I'm going to break it up into two parts.

First, a little history is needed. I assume most people have at least heard of the Green Lantern? He's the major focal point of the series. After the Green Lantern movie comes out in a year or so I'm hoping the public will get to know how cool of a character he can be when written correctly.

Green Lantern, real name Hal Jordan, is a member of a intergalactic space policing force known as the Green Lantern Corps.

They wear rings that channel their willpower to create constructs that they use to fight evil doers. For example, hey, bad guy over there, let me think of this giant, ridiculously sized sledgehammer and whack you on the head with it.

Over the course of fifty years of stories, everyone just took at face value that they were the Green Lanterns just because that's just the color they happened to be. In the 1980s — perhaps early 1990s — Alan Moore, he of the shaggy beard, magic, and comic book writing brilliance, — wrote a one-off Green Lantern story exploring how the Green Lantern Corps were but one part of the spectrum of colors on the ROYGBIV spectrum.

The current DC comic book writer, Geoff Johns, took this idea and ran with it. Johns tied an emotion and created a corps for every color on the ROYGBIV spectrum.

To quickly run them down:

• Red - anger

• Orange - avarice

• Yellow - fear

• Green - will

• Blue - hope

• Indigo - compassion

• Violet - love

For a year building up to the Blackest Night event, Geoff Johns and his fellow Green Lantern writers and artists explored each corps through compelling stories and histories. Eventually, an all out color war broke out that further shattered the emotional spectrum and made them all susceptible to an every growing force of death and destruction, the newly revealed Black Lantern Corps.

Obviously, for those of you who keep up on comics, you know I've skimmed over years of compelling stories that stand out on their own without even tying them into the set-up for the Blackest Night event.

The storyline that stands above all the others during the pre-Blackest Night era is the Sinestro Corp war. The mini-series was essentially a battle between the Green Lantern Corps, led by Hal Jordan, and the Sinestro Corps, aka, the Yellow Lanterns, led by Hal's former friend and teacher, Sinestro. It's a brilliant bit of comic book writing and I think, while not essential, it gives a further understanding of the characters and intrigue involved in Blackest Night.

The majority of the color war was contained within the DC family of Green Lantern books. However, with Blackest Night upon the DC universe, the threat is just too big for the space characters alone.

In the second part of my little black review we dive into the Blackest Night event. Every major character in DC Comics will be effected and characters will die, then live, then die, then, maybe, live again.

Everybody's Fine

I'm not too excited to relive this movie so this will be short. Everybody's Fine is a DRAMA. Capital letters intentional. Don't be fooled by the happy people in the poster. You will not smile much while watching this movie.

Is it Beaches depressing? No, it's not that bad. However, if you are reading this review before watching the film I feel I'm doing you a huge service.

I knew there was a chance of some downer moments. It is, after all, a movie about a dad trying to reconnect with his kids after years of not being able to communicate with them.

But, wow, not a hugely upbeat story. Robert Deniro delivers his usual—forgetting The Fan for a moment—amazing performance. He's not a badass mafia member here. He's very frail and it's quite amazing to see him pull off this role.

I'm not going to rehash the story but if you have recently lost a loved one or had a falling out with a parent or sibling, you may want to put this one on the back burner for a while. Everybody's Fine is well made and well directed but the next time I want to make myself this upset I'll just go bash my head into the wall a few times.

80s Some Kind of Wonderful

The trip from Beetlejuice to Some Kind of Wonderful goes like this. The actor, Jeffrey Jones played the dad of the family that moved into the house. You may also know him as the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He was also in another 80s classic, Howard the Duck. By classic I mean it was awfully awesome.

One of his co-stars in Howard the Duck was Lea Thompson and Lea Thompson played the object of Eric Stoltz affection in Some Kind of Wonderful. Now, tell me that circuitous route wasn't fun?

I really love Some Kind of Wonderful. I love that it not only has the time honored movie tradition of the dorky guy going for the most popular girl in school but it also has his best friend, played by Mary Stuart Masterson, secretly pining for him.

It's the classic case of desiring so badly of being somewhere you perceive to be better that you don't realize that what's happening right in front of you is what you really need the most.

I think the stand-out here is Lea Thompson's character, Amanda Jones. In these types of movies, the popular girl of desire is usually shallow and while nice to look at, there's nothing there of substance. The main character usually finds that his dream girl is mean, rude, or dumb and moves on by the end of the movie.

Here, Amanda Jones is a real thought out character and not just a cliché. She's confused. She's torn between the popular, shallow life and what she knows is truer to herself. In a twist of the traditional movie convention, Eric Stoltz's character actually becomes more superficial while Amanda becomes more grounded.

It's really great writing and it's the writer, John Hughes, at the height of his 80s greatness. Some Kind of Wonderful isn't seen as being up there in the pantheon of Sixteen Candles or the Breakfast Club but it should be remembered in that elite company.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll give your stud earring to your best friend as a present. Check it out if you have never seen it or if you haven't seen it in a while go, revisit it. It's a forgotten classic.

American Idol Season 9

So, have I lost the few people that actually checked out this blog with my little hiatus? I hope not or you would be missing this riveting review of the worst season of American Idol.

Whoops, did I just spoil the review? Oh well, there's no beating around the bush and anyone that has seen any of the episodes since we got to the top 12 is probably just nodding his or her head in agreement.

The taped early episodes showed some promise. People who are now in the top 12, like Andrew Garcia, showed potential to be front runners but have been disappointing. Looking at the season realisticly, there is only one person that is going to have a career after this and that's Crystal Bowersox. And, even then, I think she's terribly boring. (See pictures of all the contestants at http://www.americanidol.com/contestants/season_9.)

Don't get me wrong. She's incredibly talented and may make a great album but she just never wows me with anything different or exciting. Some might say that Michael Lynche of the bulging muscles has star potential. For me, dawg, he's just too theatrical and, while nice to listen to at times, I can't stand to look at the TV when he's on.

Everyone else in the top 12, and, yes, I'm including the screeching fan-favorite Siobhan Magnus and the the guitar-playing golden locked, Casey James are 15% good, 45% mediocre, and like 115% cringe inducing. Yes, that's 175%. On my blog I make my own percentages.

The judges aren't helping matters. They really pushed for the contestants to be daring and change up songs. I can see that both the judges and the producers want the next Daughtry, David Cook, or Adam Lambert moment where a well known song is taken and just thrown on it's head in a brilliant way.

It's just not happening this year. All attempts to manipulate songs are making the original version of the songs sound that much better and make the contestants look foolish for altering a classic.

I think the contestant with the most potential at being unique and standing out was ironically voted off the first week. Lacey Brown had a voice different from what you normally hear on the radio and if she had just picked the right song she'd be a frontrunner. Here's hoping a record label snatches her up.

The best thing to come out of this season? You see it right at the top. It's the Pants on the Ground guy. I can't wait to see him awkwardly perform his song at the finale. It will be tremendous. I hope they give him an orchestra.

80s. Pee-Wee leads to...

Last time I talked about how the robot in Flight of the Navigator talked like Pee-Wee Herman. Now, this could lead my thought process to a whole bunch of different places, not all of them pleasant.

The first thing that pops to mind is the obvious, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. I want to dig a little bit deeper than that and direct my attention to the director of that movie, Tim Burton. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure was Burton's first major gig but what really put him on the map is our 80s subject for today, Beetlejuice.

Beetlejuice was one of the first movies I went to see with my friends without any parents. I remember sitting in the theater feeling all grown-up and just enjoying the hell out of the movie.

I think I was around eleven when I first saw it and even then I knew that the special effects were pretty amazing. The special effects and make-up units were pulling off stuff that had not been seen before.

There were people with shrunken heads, Alec Baldwin pulling his face in all directions and popping out his eyeballs, and Michael Keaton turning into a pretty terrifying snake.

How long did my friends and I sing lines like "come Mr. Tallyman tally me banana"? I'm not certain but I'm sure it was probably just long enough for family and teachers to want to kill us.

Of course, this movie also introduced us to Winona Ryder which would lead her to a glorious career in shoplifting.

Next, on the 80s road trip, Beetlejuice leads me directly to the movie, Some Kind of Wonderful? My logic will be revealed. Until next time, beware sand worms.