Category Archives: Rational

Cunning Resolve

Cunning Resolve

Marvel’s promise to “keep taking risks” creatively into it’s Phase Two is already paying off, as relatively untested director Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 crushed it at the box-office AND with critics.  Clinching the second highest domestic opening ever, and pulling in a gross $1,111,096,000 and rocking a 9/10 on IGN, Iron Man 3 is only Black’s second film as a director.  Marvel Studios seems to have a knack for boldly pulling creative gem’s out of nowhere, like they did with Joss Whedon.

NOW IM NOT A MATHEMATICIAN OR ANYTHING: but Shane Black’s average rottentomatoes score as a director with only two films turned out to be 80.5%.  Meaning that if making movies were like high-school, Black got a B.  Pretty impressive.  Equally not impressive: one could argue, is Zack Snyder’s average rottentomatoes score as a director with 5 films at 54.4%.  Meaning that if making movies were like high-school, Snyder failed.  LOLUMADBRO?!?

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A Modern Greek Tragedy of Temperament .. and Gender, revisited.

It is a modern Greek Tragedy of Temperament

… and Gender.

The Fates can be cruel or kind, or boththree-fates-greek

It seems so in this story.  This story is about discovery.  This story is about life and death.

She had worked hard all her life.  She had overcome her circumstance. Latin: Circum– to encircle, stance to take a position, to contend. Yes, it had been a man’s world, she was surrounded by her society and her family who discouraged her from her passion: science. Of course, other women had suffered discrimination before her: Marie Curie and Emmy Noether to name two, but they had their families to teach them, encourage and help them. Nobody had encouraged her, certainly not her family, and still was a man’s world in science in 1952.  She had to rely on herself, so she thought and acted.

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Assembly Required

Assembly Required 1-2-3

Zack Snyder may not be as dumb as I thought he was, as Warner Bros. president Jeff Robinov says Man of Steel will “set the tone” for DC characters “moving forward”.  Let’s hope then that it’s better than Snyder’s LAST film.  Entitled Sucker Punch.  Robinov went on to comment that rumors regarding Christian Bale being cast in Justice League were unfounded, and said that Nolan’s Batman films do indeed “standalone”.

MEANWHILE:

Marvel will “keep taking risks” creatively in it’s Phase Two says Marvel studio head honcho Kevin Fiege:

The official slate of Marvel’s Phase Two is: Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Guardians of the Galaxy, culminating in The Avengers 2.  Word on the streets is a key piece of the Marvel villain puzzle is none other than the Mad Titan Thanos.  Who? Let’s take a look.

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A Man for All Reasons

He is a man of an angel’s wit and multiple learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, strength, and resolve? And as time requireth, a man of marvelous modernity and reasoned enterprise, and sometime of as sad gravity. A Man for All Reasons.

fridtjof_nansen

“His greatness sprang first and foremost from his moral qualities.”

“He was what might be termed a moral genius, an upright and noble personality, a practical idealist, independent, incorruptible, and indomitable, uncompromisingly self-sacrificing, a man devoid of guile and to whom the concept of self-indulgence was entirely foreign.”

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The Double Edged Sword of Temperament

There are always peaks and valleys encountered in one’s life journey in time and space.

national_brother_week

“It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends.
But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy
is the quintessence of true religion”
Mohandas K. Gandhi

“Get action. Do things; be sane;
don’t fritter away your time; create, act,
take a place wherever you are and be somebody;
get action.”
Theodore Roosevelt

“Fix reason firmly in her seat,
and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.”
Thomas Jefferson

“I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain
what I consider the most enviable of all titles,
the character of an honest man.”
George Washington

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Well, the road to the heavens is also paved with good intentions and bad intentions.  Because we never know, and never will know, the side effects of our actions that we in-tend — for our actions are ex-tensions that we can’t at-tend to, by definition.

And all of us have good intentions, in beginning, at least, and many still have good intentions to the end.

However, most people don’t enjoy directly dealing in the negative – they don’t like to think or talk about negative things, about themselves,

and sometimes others

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Crucial Point

It is a popular Western view to say Crisis in Chinese is a simple combination of danger and opportunity.  But that is not exactly correct.  It’s a little more complicated.

crisis_chinese

Crisis

Chinese philologist Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania calls the popular interpretation of wēijī in the English-speaking world a “widespread public misperception.” Mair suggests that  in wēijī is closer to “crucial point” than to “opportunity.”

Nevertheless, They can relate to either interpretation.

They struggled much of their young lives, very close to danger and no opportunity before the crucial pointwhen the opportunity was encountered and made, by hard work and being very smart TOGETHER.

The Danger has passed.  Now, China is the land of Opportunity for those who have the right combination and the right timing  — and…

They do.

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Are you Vivek?

It was an unreported event.

A woman came out of one little home … and looked him over wonderingly. The boy and the woman gazed at each other for a long moment, and then the woman finally said in astonishment: “Are you Vivek?”

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The woman had been trying get her children out of a brothel for years: ever since she had escape the brothel that had enslaved her and her children (a boy and a girl) who were born in the brothel.

“Journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen every day.”  — Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.

meena_and_vivek

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Cutthroat Diversity

Cutthroat Diversity-3

Game of Thrones is back and Thank the Gods:

UPDATE:

For those of you who do not know, Game of Thrones is an HBO series in it’s third season based off  a series of popular fantasy novels entitled “A Song of Ice and Fire”.  Thrones chronicles the violent conflicts and struggles between noble families vying for control of the ‘Iron Throne’.  The unprecedented genre series focuses primarily on political and military strife between four major powersHouse LannisterHouse BaratheonHouse Stark, and House Targaryen.  Just like the real four major powers or Temperaments, these ones certainly have their differences.  Let’s take a look.

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Education re-thought

Only the educated are free.
Epictetus

Think of it.  A free education.

He is thinking of it.

Not for him; no, he learns by teaching.  Bill Gates has seen to that.

No, Sal is going to try to teach the world, for free.

salman_khan

Unfortunately, most will not listen, at least most adults, for they are stupid and not curious.  But maybe some lucky children and some adults will listen.  And learn…

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Super Brawl

JLA - 2

Justice League seems to be in more hot water as WB execs have reportedly trashed Will Beall’s script with several sources claiming “it’s terrible”:

Quote1I’ve now heard from multiple sources that the Will Beall script for Justice League has been scrapped.  The story from each source is the same: it’s terrible.  Some sources seem to think the whole movie is going to fall apart and never happen, while some believe that Warner Bros will keep moving forward, unwilling to lose the superhero arms race.Quote2

WHOOPSY DAISIES.  I’m not a mathematician or anything but aren’t they already LOSING the “superhero arms race”? 

Seeing as The Avengers will assemble at the 85th Annual Academy Awards next week to present an award, while the Justice League doesn’t even exist yet?

Justice League’s saving grace may just be this film:

If Snyder dropped the ball however, WB is screwed.

While these superhero teams may be fictional, they express an extremely important idea: that people are fundamentally different from one another, and that that is a GOOD thing.  Let’s take a look.

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