Movie Reviews: Almost Human, Orphan

Almost Human
directed by Joe Begos

No this is not the Fox Sci-Fi drama starring Michael Ealy and Karl Urban. It is however a low budget 80s style throwback horror flick that is deliberately reminiscent in credits, style, pacing and formatting of such iconic 70s and 80s films as Evil Dead, Re-Animator, They Came from Within and Halloween. It's a film with plenty of graphic bloody violence including an attempted(?) sexual assault. So if that sort of thing doesn't meet your criteria you know what to do. This is definitely not something that should be watched by people who are only familiar with the shallow end of the horror pool. Nope this film is made for folks who can dive and swim in the deep end. It has a short running time (80 minutes) and leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which for this movie works well. There are a few people who do stupid things, particularly near the ending, but at least some of this is called out in the film itself.
The acting is not super convincing, which is occasionally a serious problem, but by genre standards it's not the worst I've ever seen. Some of the lead actors actually also worked on editing and other behind the scenes tasks. I guess that saved money. The film is set in the 80s. The producer(s) and director did an admirable job in ensuring that sets (mostly rotary phones thank you very much) and automobiles were of a piece with decades gone by. Almost Human is set in Maine. There's a blink and you'll miss it shout out to Stephen King. 
The photography/cinematography is not what I would call crystal clear. Even on a HDTV the film remains rather blurry and in some scenes appallingly so. That could have been a deliberate attempt to put viewers in mind of the aforementioned classics or it could have just been a byproduct of not having the best equipment. Either way I think you ought to take the time to put your best foot forward technically. I don't think this film always did that. So shame on the creators for not doing so. If money was saved on the acting it wasn't immediately apparent that it was being spent on photography and SFX.

Nevertheless, regardless of its quirks and shortcomings this film still has a certain energy and drive that perhaps could and should have been more adequately expressed with a slightly higher budget and a "name" actor or two. But what the heck, we all have to start somewhere. And there's always going to be room in the world for low budget horror films. Under the right circumstances this could be a cult hit. I don't know what those circumstances might be but life is strange, you know? One day you're on the bottom. Two decades later work like this is being revered as ahead of its time and something that was woefully under appreciated in its day.
Ok, all that said what's this film about? Quite simple. Two years prior, a frightened Seth (Graham Skipper) is driving like a madman to his friend Mark's (Josh Ethier) home. IIRC it's left unexplained why Seth was going to his buddy's home in the middle of the night in the first place. Heck my family and friends generally know not to even call me past 8-9 PM unless there's an emergency but that's not important right now. What is important is that Seth has a harrowing story to tell about bright lights, nose bleeds, high frequency sounds and alien abductions. To hear Seth tell it, one of their mutual friends was kidnapped by aliens, right out of the truck. Mark, a much burlier and more aggressive man than the slight Seth, doesn't believe this. And Mark doesn't like the semi-hysterical Seth scaring Mark's girlfriend Jen (Vanessa Leigh).  Although Seth thinks he was followed he-man Mark scornfully dismisses this and marches outside where amid blue lights and high pitched noises he promptly disappears. Mark is brawny but evidently not too brainy.

Two years pass. Seth escaped being charged with Mark's kidnapping by the narrowest of margins. Most people still think Seth knows more than he's telling and shun him. Seth can't remember much and Jen can't remember anything. Jen has married/moved in with another man and doesn't count Seth among her circle of friends any more. When she looks at him you can almost see her brain trying to determine whether Seth is just a LOSER or instead a LOONY BIRD. Either way she would prefer not to be around him. Seth is a slacker at a hardware store. He routinely gets in late, is often sick, and just mopes around. Nevertheless he's starting to remember more of what went down that night two years back. And he's having nosebleeds again. Something's indeed happening, as Seth tries to tell Jen. Unknown to either Seth or Jen. Mark has just returned to this world. Or to be accurate, what's returned is mostly something that is wearing Mark's body. And it wants to reproduce. It can do that in a lot of different ways, as we see. But the remaining Mark portion would very strongly prefer to reproduce with Jen. Her willingness is preferred but not strictly speaking necessary. Carnage ensues as what could have been a true alien invasion story somewhat morphs into a slasher movie. A huge guy with an axe/chainsaw/shotgun/big hands goes on a killing spree.
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Orphan
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

A parasite is a strange being. Usually it doesn't intend to kill its host but attempts to live in a symbiosis. Depending on its needs it might occasionally influence the host to behave in ways that are not necessarily good for the host, but are required for the survival of the parasite. Sometimes of course the parasite's survival or reproduction may require the death of the host. And then you have the cuckoo bird, which often lays its eggs in other birds' nest. The cuckoo baby upon hatching, destroys the eggs of its host and may even kill its host's children, therefore monopolizing the resources of its "parents". This is known as brood parasitism. This is where the word cuckold comes from. Those sorts of thoughts were all brought to mind re-watching Orphan. Other thoughts that came up included how vulnerable we all are to our intimates. I mean if someone in your house goes bad, there's a pretty good chance your guard will be down in a way that would never occur outside the house. Trust is key to maintaining romantic or familial relationships. I thought I had reviewed this 2009 thriller before but a quick search didn't reveal anything. Hmm. So if I did review this film before, my apologies. The local Blockbuster is closing down. As I thought this film worth having permanently, I picked up the DVD for cheap 5 weeks back. I'm generally a Farmiga fan so I decided I'd write something short about this movie here. I thought this was a pretty good thriller. It has a few plot devices of course but nothing which I found outrageous. 

The director would go on to helm Unknown with Liam Neeson. I won't say whether Orphan has any supernatural aspects. It is one of those old school thrillers that can manage to get scares out of something as prosaic as a orphaned child offhandedly showing that she's a skilled concert pianist. I kept expecting Mrs. Blaylock from The Omen to show up and tell the little girl to "Have no fear little one. I am here to protect thee." Orphan is not the sort of movie that would make you welcome unknown children into your life. You won't want to give this kid a pinch on the cheek and take her home. Like the film We need to talk about Kevin, Orphan asks you what would you do if a child of yours was simply no damn good and/or downright dangerous? Like that film, but in a much more extreme fashion Orphan engages in or should I write indulges in some serious psychosexual drama. In both cases it's the mother who sees the danger most clearly while the husband/father thinks that his wife is losing her marbles. In Orphan this might as well come with big red signs indicating FREUDIAN DRAMA RIGHT HERE! YMMV on this. There is a rather significant item revealed about 2/3rds of the way thru the film. It may change how you see things. Some people thought it was lazy writing or was designed to save the film from some rather truly unfortunate implications. Some of the disturbing elements come out of left field at the viewer.

John Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard) is an architect. His wife Kate (Vera Farmiga) is a musician/music professor. They have two children, a son Danny (Jimmy Bennett) and a daughter Max (Aryana Engineer). Although the family is financially successful with a huge home and lands that just barely miss the size cutoff to be called an estate, like most families they have problems beneath the surface. Max is deaf/mute. Danny is something of a jerk. Kate is a recovering alcoholic. The couple recently lost a stillborn child, a daughter. Deep down inside Kate worries that John might blame her for this loss. She still grieves for the child. And John, well, let's just say he's not averse to playing house with other women. So, hoping to recover from the stillbirth, John and Kate visit a Catholic orphanage and adopt a nine year old girl from the former USSR. This girl is named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) Esther is unusual on at least two levels. It's not just that Esther always dresses in very formal, even archaic wear and is never seen without her high/frilly collars or chokers covering her wrists and neck. It's that Esther is far more self-assured, confident and sexually aware than a nine year old girl should be. When the couple accidentally allows Esther to become aware of some of their intimate activities, Kate haltingly tries to explain to her adopted daughter that married Mommies and Daddies who love each other very much sometimes like to spend time together in a beautiful and natural way which is totally private. Esther dismissively replies "Oh you mean you were f*****g." and goes about her business. Kate starts to take a dislike to Esther. 

When a schoolgirl bully who insulted Esther meets with a nasty accident, Kate goes back to the orphanage to check on Esther's background with the head nun Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder). The nun is torn between her professional desire to place this orphan and her personal dislike for the little girl. Sister Abigail tells Kate that accidents happen to people who get on Esther's bad side. Meanwhile, Esther is bullying Danny and Max. Max is under Esther's spell while Danny is too frightened to say anything. But John likes Esther, who gives every indication that she's very happy to have a Daddy. And John doesn't care to listen much to what he's starting to think of as the paranoid ramblings of his drunk and needlessly jealous wife. John is not bright. Although the overlong ending is utterly cliche driven the beginning and middle are interesting and full of ominous build ups. When either spouse is caught doing something wrong by their partner they often return fire by criticizing something else their accuser did years before. Kate doesn't mind reminding John of his infidelity. John is not above measuring the liquid level in whiskey bottles and looking questioningly at Kate. Farmiga and Fuhrman have the meatiest roles. Fuhrman's character is sporadically sympathetic but mostly suitably creepy. Farmiga's character gets to have more range. She does motherly protectiveness and pugnaciousness quite well. That is, once her character stops whining. 
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Feminist Marriages: More Equality, Less Sex?

I wanted to write on this quite some time ago but the person who reviews my paid work had different ideas about my priorities. So this is a modified and much mellower version of the original post. The idea expressed in the post title is something that's been floating around the blog-o-sphere for quite some time. It finally penetrated the firmament of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. When I read this recent article I thought I was in a real life Geico commercial. Because I thought everyone already knew that. It seems that whatever the benefits of "egalitarian" style marriages may be, more sex and less divorce aren't among them. Surprisingly, it appears that heterosexual women may have some unacknowledged preferences for a certain level of well, difference and maybe even virility or dominance (shut your mouth!!!) in their husbands. As this finding very much does not comport with the modern progressive orthodoxy regarding house husbands, 50/50 sharing of chores, lean in bromides and the fiction that men and women are exactly the same except for internal plumbing, some of the people quoted in the article seemed to be suffering from very bad cases of cognitive dissonance.

I wrote previously on how there are some household tasks which are (often arbitrarily) considered more masculine. It seems that some women, or at least some married women agree. Whether we believe that it's mostly biological, mostly cultural, or imo some combination of the two, it appears that men and women appreciate each other's differences and look for a partner that exhibits divergent characteristics. According to the fascinating article quoted below a husband who becomes too similar to his wife or to put it another way a man who is too complaisant and gallant runs the very real risk of discovering what a Stephen King character ruefully noted in the book Joyland : "What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get *****. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen".

A study called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” which appeared in The American Sociological Review last year, surprised many, precisely because it went against the logical assumption that as marriages improve by becoming more equal, the sex in these marriages will improve, too. Instead, it found that when men did certain kinds of chores around the house, couples had less sex. Specifically, if men did all of what the researchers characterized as feminine chores like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming — the kinds of things many women say they want their husbands to do — then couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those with husbands who did what were considered masculine chores, like taking out the trash or fixing the car. It wasn’t just the frequency that was affected, either — at least for the wives. The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.

The chores study seems to show that women do want their husbands to help out — just in gender-specific ways. Couples in which the husband did plenty of traditionally male chores reported a 17.5 percent higher frequency of sexual intercourse than those in which the husband did none. These findings, Brines says, “might have something to do with the fact that the traditional behaviors that men and women enact feed into associations that people have about masculinity and femininity.” 

As Sheryl Sandberg encourages women to “lean in” — by which she means that they should make a determined effort to push forward in their careers — it may seem as if women are truly becoming, as Gloria Steinem put it, “the men we want to marry.” But these professional shifts seem to influence marital stability. A study put out last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that if a wife earns more than her husband, the couple are 15 percent less likely to report that their marriage is very happy; 32 percent more likely to report marital troubles in the past year; and 46 percent more likely to have discussed separating in the past year. Similarly, Lynn Prince Cooke found that though sharing breadwinning and household duties decreases the likelihood of divorce, that’s true only up to a point. If a wife earns more than her husband, the risk of divorce increases. Interestingly, Cooke’s study shows that the predicted risk of divorce is lowest when the husband does 40 percent of the housework and the wife earns 40 percent of the income.

LINK 

Of course studies are like opinions. Everyone has one. And statistics only apply to populations, not individuals. There must be a wife who is ecstatic to have her husband darning socks, fixing dinner, making quilts and cleaning the toilet while she changes the oil in the family car, cleans the gutters or installs the new sump pump. And I know for a fact there are husbands who are pleased as punch that their wife earns multiples of what they do, giving them the opportunity to stay at home with the kids or work for years on the Great American Novel that they somehow never complete. 

Stories like this reinforce why I think the great feminist dystopia "utopia" will never arrive although some people continue to argue that if we just use more corporate and government coercion incentives we'll get there. Although in total men and women are much more alike than we are different, we do seem to prefer different characteristics in our significant others. This is primarily biological in my view although different cultures express it differently. And these different preferences, minor though they are overall, drive marriage, mating, and what sort of jobs people look for.

In other words, women and men bear equal responsibility for how social relations work. It is logically impossible for women (as a group) to want total pay equity in the workplace but continue (as individuals) to be attracted to men who earn more money and/or express more dominance than they do. The incentives don't match. What is good in the public arena of work is apparently not so good in the private arena of relationships. I think that the best that society can do is to ensure workplace equal opportunity regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. Equal results, based on how they are defined, may remain ephemeral. And that may be ok.

Thoughts?

Racism and Ted Nugent: Then and Now

Asa Carter Then:




Ted Nugent Now:

Any Questions?
The enemy is the same as it's always been. I'd like to know where are the Republicans who constantly bleat that the base of their party is not in large part animated by racism. Where are the politicians and media types who hounded President Obama to denounce, disassociate, and differentiate himself from people like Jesse Jackson, Reverend Wright, Cornell West, or any other bête noire of the day? Where are Nugent's high profile friends or media enablers like Mitch Albom or Nick Cannon? Will they denounce such language?
Probably not. I'd like to think that people would reject and shame white right-wingers who say things like this but it very rarely seems to work that way. We'll see.
At the time of this writing the only high profile Republican political operative to openly criticize Nugent's hateful speech is Senator Rand Paul. So far no one else has the stones. Either that or as is more likely they agree with him regarding President Barack Obama. Just as Klansman Asa Carter ultimately lost the fight to keep segregation and ban rock-n-roll, the Republican party is doomed to keep losing national elections unless they separate themselves from the extreme right-wing fringe. There just aren't enough angry white men with fecal matter for brains to keep voting Republican. Nationwide, that is. Texas is apparently a different story.

Movie Reviews: Ender's Game

Ender's Game
directed by Gavin Hood

Ender's Game was based upon the book of the same name by the author Orson Scott Card. I had not read the book so I watched the movie with no preconceptions. There were some people who said they would avoid the movie because of Card's political and religious views but as a fan of H.P. Lovecraft it takes a whole lot to get me to boycott art, as has been discussed before. Although I can't say for sure I think that there was a lot left out from the book. There are a lot of dead ends and things left unexplained in the movie that I imagine might have been clear to me had I read the book. In some very real ways Ender's Game is a morally didactic movie. It definitely has a message of tolerance and understanding. All the same the message is muddled and bent. Perhaps it's the problem of translation from one medium to another. Perhaps it's the danger inherent in having child actors, although I doubt it. The young man playing Ender is pretty accomplished in his field, despite his youth. I also doubt it's the director as he has won Oscars for some of his previous work. Maybe it's just the sadness and a little ugliness in the source material. I'm not sure. I am sure that this was not a must-see film despite its A-list cast and impressive special effects.

In the not too distant future Earth has been attacked by a race of interstellar insectoids known as the Formics. Millions of people die. The Formic invasion is only halted by the self-sacrifice of pilot Mazer Rackham (Ben Kingsley), who just like Randy Quaid in Independence Day, rams his aircraft and its payload into the unprotected belly of the Formic mothership, destroying it and causing other Formic ships to either crash or flee.


Since that time Earth has been obsessed with the possibility of a new Formic attack. It appears that the military has taken political control from civilians and silly little things like nation states have dropped by the wayside. And parents need permission from the state to make whoopie or at least make the kind of whoopie that results in another human being joining this world. I don't know if this is from the book or not but that was my impression from the film.  A new way of war is being propagated. I thought it barely made sense when you think about who spends time playing video games. The new style of warfare requires massively integrated intellectual capacities combined with fearlessness and intuition. These are characteristics which are disproportionately found among children. These children will be trained as if they are actual warriors but their "fighting" is done via computer screens from which they control drones, fire systems and ships with actual adult men and women in them.

So the Armed Forces are always on the lookout for a few good boys and girls. One such boy is Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield). Ender combines a sharp intelligence with an appealing amorality, especially when he's placed in bad positions. He intends to win and will do what he has to do. As a young cadet he comes to the attention of Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) and Major Anderson (Viola Davis) who place Ender in difficult circumstances to see how he responds. Something which appeals to Anderson but irritates/intrigues Graff is that although he can be extremely ruthless and pragmatic, Ender nonetheless has a well developed (and equally well hidden) conscience and just as strong of a dislike of any illegitimate authority. This kicks off a series of set action/drama pieces which sees Ender promoted to greater level of responsibility, have more intense training and have deadlier confrontations with bullies. Ender does not like bullies and does not like being manipulated. However the higher he rises in the Armed Forces the more he runs into both. Interestingly enough, perhaps because Ender is supposed to be even younger than he looks, there is no love interest of any kind. Ender's interest is primarily in ensuring the safety of his older/protective sister Valentine (Abigail Breslin) though he does make good friends with another girl who initially outranks him, Petra (Hailee Steinfeld).

This movie features the slight Ender dealing some serious pain to bullies but at the same time I'm not sure you would root for the character in part because it looks like Ender also has some coldness/darkness within him that he struggles to keep on a chain.  Ender could just as easily be the hero or the precocious kid that uses a graduate level knowledge of physics and chemistry to murder the entire school. Davis and Ford don't have a whole lot to do. Their characters are pretty much defined in the beginning of the film and don't change a whole lot. Davis' character worries about Ender's emotional wellbeing while Ford's role requires that he constantly snarl "I don't give a damn what he feels like. I need him trained!!" Sergeant Dap (Nonzo Anozie: Xaro Xhoan Daxos from A Game of Thrones) has a small role as the drill sergeant who must beat these kids into shape. There is room for a sequel to this film but I doubt there will be one. The big surprise is telegraphed too early. And as mentioned earlier it was difficult for me to empathize with anyone in this film. This kinda bothered me a little but it is what it is.
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Self-Defense In Detroit Home Invasion

A Detroit mother opened fire Monday night when three suspects broke into her home. Surveillance cameras caught it all.The mother tells 7 Action News she "didn't have time to get scared." When she heard the door to her home on Woodrow Wilson being kicked in, she immediately warned the three teenage intruders and then opened fire. One of the teens dropped a handgun on his way out the door. He then tried to get back inside the house a second time, but was again met with gunfire. Once again, he took off and all three were arrested shortly after the incident by Detroit Police.  These young criminals were indeed fortunate that they were not killed as they tried to break into this woman's home. Although incidents like this may indeed be statistically rare if you are the person confronted with this behavior that's small comfort indeed. Notice that the woman defended herself and her children with a scary looking "assault rifle". Unfortunately there are people in this world who are "bad", "warped", "bent", "evil" or whatever other pejorative word you wish to use. Ultimately I suppose you could pity such people but in my view such pity can only be doled out once they're safely behind bars or six feet under the ground. If one happens to be unfortunate enough to run into such miscreants bent on taking something that is yours, immediate and massive counter force is the only thing which they will respect. Incidents like this are why I am unsympathetic to people who tell us we don't "need" guns to protect ourselves or that no one "needs" a magazine capacity with more than an arbitrary number of rounds. As far as I am concerned the only bad thing about this incident was that the mother didn't light up all of the home invaders. Please note that although the police arrived quickly after the fact and arrested the criminals it was impossible for the police to be there at the moment that the thugs decided to break down the door. We are ultimately responsible for protecting ourselves and those we love. Watch video here.

Obama Administration: DHS Proposal for National License Plate Tracking

If you're like millions of other people, you probably woke up this morning, had breakfast, and performed the usual toiletries that clean, psychologically normal and healthy people perform. You then bustled yourself off to yet another exciting day of work, school, raising your children, enjoying your retirement or any other number of productive or leisurely activities. One thing you probably didn't do is stop by your local police station or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office and provide those kind men and women a detailed, hour by hour itinerary of your plans for the day, how long you thought these things would take, who you'd be seeing and where you'd be for most of the day. I know that you're probably pretty busy. Perhaps the critical importance of letting the government and its running dog corporate lackeys know where you were slipped your mind. Never fear. DHS has got you covered.

In a sad reminder of just how far government has sunken and how contemptuous many governmental bureaucratic or law-enforcement types are of a citizen's right to privacy and to be left alone, the DHS confirmed that it is seeking a private agency to assist it in building a database of every US license plate and its real time location.

The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

The agency said the length of time the data is retained would be up to the winning vendor. Vigilant Solutions, for instance, one of the leading providers of tag-reader data, keeps its records indefinitely. Nationwide, local police as well as commercial companies are gathering license-plate data using various means. One common method involves drivers for repossession companies methodically driving up and down streets with cameras mounted on their cars snapping photos of vehicles. Some police forces have cameras mounted on patrol cars. Other images may be retrieved from border crossings, interstate highway on-ramps and toll plazas.

Customs and Border Protection, another DHS agency, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is part of the Justice Department, also have deployed cameras along the country’s borders. But DHS’s effort appears to be the first time a federal law enforcement agency is seeking such extensive access to a broad repository of data capturing the movements and images of American motorists from metropolitan ­areas...

Read the full article here. It's even worse than it sounds. 

DHS Solicitation of bids

If you've read this blog for more than a month or so you know where I stand on civil liberties and privacy. So you can probably guess what I think of this idea. Very simply this is bovine excrement. Wet stinky greasy foul bovine excrement. This is precisely the sort of thing that we read about states like Communist China or the former East Germany doing. A government that tries to know what its citizens are reading, with whom the citizens are communicating via phone, email, letter, and where the citizens are traveling and why is not a government that I have any respect for. It's a government that needs a radical haircut in its powers and so-called authority. If someone from the government wants to know what I did today they could ask me. And I could tell them to go  attempt airborne copulation with a rapidly revolving pastry. Unless I am under formal government control via imprisonment, parole or probation, who I talk to, why I talk to them, who I sleep with, where and why I travel, who my friends are and so forth and so on are none of the government's business. If the government REALLY needs to know, get a warrant. This is most definitely not a partisan issue. The great problem as I see it is that these increasing attacks on civil liberties and stepped up surveillance of citizen movements are sort of a Nixon to China moment. It took a right wing politician to attempt to woo China into the capitalist marketplace and make diplomatic concessions to the Chinese. This neutralized and isolated the rabid right-wing base that would have otherwise fiercely opposed such an action by a centrist or left leaning politician. Similarly if it had been widely reported under a Republican Administration that the FBI/DHS etc were seeking to maintain records of individual travel by all Americans, I suspect that many more left leaning activist groups and politicians might have slightly more than a few mild concerns to express. But because Obama is behind it you won't hear more than a few mumbles from most progressive people. This is wrong. Everyone should oppose these steps.

There are some fair minded people of goodwill who nevertheless still wonder why civil libertarians were so angered by warrantless wiretapping, metadata gathering, email and social network monitoring. They claim that as long as the government keeps us safe what's the big deal. To those people I would say that the big deal is exactly that giving the government a pass on the above activities, as we have largely done, just emboldens the government to take other bites out of our freedom. This really is a slippery slope.  People who come up with these sorts of ideas never ever have enough information. There's always someone out there who may have some fig leaf of privacy left. That bothers control freaks. There are many people who were alleged to have said this but it really is true that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  If you're still not convinced that this expansion is problematic I'm not sure what to say to you. The opportunities for abuse are endless in such a system. We know that the government already targets people with political views that it doesn't like. Is it such a leap to believe that armed with a real time database of people's travels that further abuses would proliferate?  Let's imagine for a moment that there is that is a pugnaciously righteous attorney general or governor of a large east coast state. This man has numerous bitter rivals and enemies among the political and financial establishment. So his detractors monitor his movements until they realize this pompous populist gadfly is spending quality time at a brothel or house of a woman not his wife. So the politician's rivals then try to blackmail this man into softening his stances or failing that charge him with a crime thus destroying his ability to seek higher office or threaten established financial power. Of course nothing like that would ever happen would it? I'm just being paranoid...

Game of Thrones Complete Season Three Offer

Greetings!
We have four copies of HBO's Game of Thrones Complete Season Three. There are two Blu Ray/DVD copies and two DVD copies. Some special features include deleted/extended scenes, introductions to new characters, backgrounds on Westeros/Essos groups, cast/crew reactions to The Red Wedding and interviews with and commentaries by actors, producers, directors and Martin. We'd prefer to give these discs away to regular contributors to thank them for reading our blog. You must have commented on this blog at least twice during the past 120 days. These items will be given away to the first four people (non blog moderators) to send the correct answers to the below questions, along with their blog id, mailing address/name*, and their preferred version (DVD or Blu-Ray) to our email address.  Please use subject line "GAME OF THRONES GIVEAWAY". Answers must be received today before 5 PM EST. Answers should be as specific as possible. Proper names are preferred. A correct answer is "X is so-and-so's brother", not "His brother is that guy with the big nose who dresses in black". Ties will be resolved by blog management. 

If no one is interested or can answer the questions correctly then perhaps we'll just keep these items for ourselves. Otherwise winners will receive their copy within seven to ten business days. Comments are/will be disabled for this post so please don't place your answers here, the contact page or anywhere else on the blog. Doing so may lead to executions bannings. I'm sure as an upright honest person you'd be fine with the Stark honor system. But it might be a tragic mistake to remain honorable and spend precious time searching your fading memory while your more pragmatic Littlefinger type competitors search Google (or posts on this blog) and thus win "your" prize. Well winning isn't everything. It's the only thing. You saw what happened to Ned when he tried to be righteous. Good luck, whichever road you choose. Snicker.
*If you really prefer not to use your government name because the Mob is looking for you that's perfectly ok as long as you can provide us a valid mailing address. PO Boxes are fine.

QUIZ QUESTIONS

1. Including Jon Snow, match each Stark child (living or deceased) to his or her direwolf (living or deceased).
2. Which character is derisively called "halfman" by his allies and routinely threatened with having his manhood chopped off and fed to the goats?
3. Which house uses the song "The Rains of Castamere" as a warning to its enemies?
4. Who was Renly Barratheon's lover (not his betrothed)?
5. Who constantly says "You know nothing, Jon Snow!"
6. Who is the Hound's big brother? Nickname or partial name is acceptable.
7. Which house has the words "We do not sow".
8. Bonus Question: If you get this correct you can get some other questions wrong and still win (if you are among the first four respondents). What is Littlefinger's sigil?