Sixty seconds of Sergio

Not sharing Eli's hesitation about blogging on subjects beyond my expertise, I thought I'd fix the dearth of spaghetti western blogging here at Rabett Run:



I've been watching the above clip for more times than I can count as part of a little project I'm working on.  It's the climax from Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the second best of Leone's westerns, and the best climax.  The rest of this post is all spoilers, of course.

The part that really interests me is the final 60 seconds of the face-off, starting about 6:30 in the video.  Watch it once and it seems to end in a swirl of faces and a gunshot.  Watch it a couple dozen times and you get a story.

A timeline:

6:30 Angel Eyes starts inching his hand over to his gun.

6:33  Blondie looks at him, and he brings his hand back

6:49  Blondie looks at Tuco and gives him the slightest nod.  Now we who know the outcome also know there's no direct reason for Blondie to give a signal to Tuco - Blondie had tricked him and unloaded his gun.  It's what happens next that shows the reason - Angel Eyes saw the nod and flickers his view back and forth, unsure if there's a plan against him.

7:01  Unnerved, Angel Eyes starts slowly reaching for his gun, looking for Blondie to spot him moving.  Blondie never looks at him again, staring straight ahead at Tuco.

7:16  Angel Eyes takes an almost-last look at Tuco, hand inching closer.  Tuco's starting straight at Blondie.

7:17 - 7:27  Confusing closeups accelerate.

7:28 - 7:31  Tuco finally glances at Angel Eyes.
                  Angel Eyes nervously shifts his view between both opponents and makes his move.
                  Tuco sees the move and begins drawing himself (not that it matters).
                  A shot rings out, and Angel Eyes falls.  Blondie shot him without ever looking away from Tuco.

We learn later that Blondie had tricked Tuco by emptying Tuco's gun, so Blondie never had to really worry about Tuco.  Only by watching it closely do you see that Blondie also tricked Angel Eyes with the meaningless head nod to Tuco, and then by seeming to not pay attention to Angel Eyes, while watching him with peripheral vision and waiting for him to draw.

Nice.  Really nice.

Couple other points:  I had trouble with Angel Eyes walking across the line of fire between Tuco and Blondie earlier in the clip, but I finally realized it helped conceal his draw from Blondie even if it made the hand more visible to Tuco.  Maybe he wasn't quite as worried about Tuco.

At 7:32 you can see Tuco shooting his empty gun at Angel Eyes, i.e. not at Blondie.  Maybe it was just a response to Angel Eyes, but it might have been a choice.  Maybe that had something to do with Blondie's decision to spare Tuco at the end of the movie (not in the clip).

Speaking of the movie's end, Blondie tortures a guy with a fake execution/near strangling and he's "The Good"?  Maybe it was less jarring in the days before enhanced interrogation.  That's just one more good thing about re-electing Obama.

In the preceding movie, Angel Eyes was a good guy.  Nice climax as well, clip here.  Interesting how much swarthier Leone made the kind-of same character and same actor when he was The Bad.

I started watching this clip over a month ago, and immediately started getting lots of Romney ads on YouTube.  I thought that was amusing.

The housecleaning:global climatic disruption analogy

I've been giving this analogy a lot of thought.

Current housecleaning situation: not bad. Everything I own is scattered on the floor, where it's easily seen and retrieved. I just release whatever I'm currently holding and no longer want, and pick up the thing I do want.

The problem is this isn't sustainable into the future. I know to a near certainty that if I don't do something to mitigate the floorhouse covering, then Global Housecleaning will occur, and I'll be forced to adapt. Adaptation is definitely suboptimal, because things will be Put Away where I can Never Find Them Again.

The analogy to climate mitigation also works, because I can avoid Global Housecleaning through the mitigation step of putting things away myself, which results in a slightly better chance of being able to find them. However, I don't like doing this, and I still have trouble finding things that are put away, so even though I know it's better for all concerned to lead with mitigation, what I end up with is often adaptation.

I suppose I could be mitigating right now, instead of blogging. Or maybe I can do that tomorrow.

Projecting global trends from small sample sizes

Here are global trends I've detected, based on admittedly small sample sizes:

1. The emergence of househusband-politicians (sample N=3, possibly 4)

2. Older mothers can't emotionally separate from their juvenile/young adult children as readily as younger mothers (sample N=2, one of them a chimp).

This is still more statistically valid than anything the climate denialists post at Watts Up.

With that profundity, little/no posting for the next week or so.

Weekend climbing in Yosemite

I can't let William have all the climbing fun, although he did beat me by taking climbing pictures with actual climbers in it. Anyway, centered here against the skyline is the big, old-time climb we did last weekend in Yosemite, called Arrowhead Arete. It begins in the shadows above the green band of trees and more or less rises on what looks like near-white rock from this distance, going all the way up to where the white rock disappears into a shady pinnacle. Six rope-length pitches no harder than 5.8, according to one guide book, but what the old-timers thought was only 5.8 and what I consider 5.8 are very different things.

I don't know how the heck they did it in 1956 with hemp ropes and thick hiking boots that wouldn't fit into the thin cracks that ran the route. OTOH, the guys that first did it were incredibly strong and incredibly good, and there we diverge.

My partner is a much better climber and led the hardest parts, but I did lead two 5.6 pitches on the route, including the seventh pitch of 5.6 traversing that our book neglected to mention. It was easy stuff, but on a knife edge ridge less than two feet wide in a few places. We also exceeded expectations by taking longer to hike there and to climb than the book anticipated, which meant descending mostly in the dark, including four rappels in darkness and two of them under a waterfall from a small stream (not as nice as it sounds).

Great climb though! Other climbers I don't know took good pics. Here's one of the knife edge, and another of the downward looking view (including Arrowhead Spire that we didn't climb).

We did some other, easier climbs as well. Nutcracker, which I climbed once before and took my only significant lead fall three years ago. No lead fall this time, although I did have to rest on my protection gear and also had to whine about a few parts that were wet. (Pics by various peoples here.) And another called Doggie Deviations that was very nice.

Nicest of all - no climbing crowds! That's a weird thing for Yosemite.

All your astrophotography are belong to us

Here begins my career as an astrophotographer - I took this picture of Saturn by awkwardly jamming my cell phone alongside my telescope eyepiece. I'm sure I'll be beating out the Hubble in picture quality in no time.

Tricked by the Girl Scouts

Coming out of the grocery store today, I saw the Girl Scouts sitting at their table and figured I could violate the diet for once-a-year cookies. Only after I came up and talked to them did I realize it's not cookies they're selling now, it's trail mix.

While I could safely avoid them with only a slight twinge of guilt by keeping my distance, the level of potential guilt in refusing to buy anything is inversely proportional to the distance between us, and it squares if you actually talk to the girls. In this case the potential guilt was reduced by the two girls' being older than the ones that are usually selling, but the reduction wasn't enough.

So I now own a can buttered peanuts, and have to wait for January for Thin Mints and Samoas.

Hiking the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island

My wife and I just returned from an 8-day backpacking trip on Vancouver Island's West Coast Trail, sometimes considered as one of the best backpacking trails in the world. That may be true, but whether it's the most enjoyable depends on weather, tides, and your physical fitness. Don't count on ordinary good fitness to get you through this trail with no problems. The first half of our trip rained crazily, and going up steep, mud covered hillsides was incredible slow going.

We would have quit at the half-way point where you can escape, but the weather then turned great. If you can go when tides are extra low during the time of day you're hiking, then a flat sandstone shelf emerges from the water and provides easy hiking after a few hours drying (we got only a taste of that).

Still, the rain forest life was amazing. Every tree covered in moss, and often with ferns and huckleberries growing out of any tiny crook. It rivals (or according to wiki, exceeds) the amount of life I've seen in tropical rain forests.

If you go, get the tides right and go in July or August, probably. Or be in incredible shape. And bring one or preferably two hiking poles, and a backpack cover to protect your pack.

I'm happy to talk to anyone who's interested in more info.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention our visit to a British Columbia parliament session in Victoria, which was memorable. Same left-right issues, but in a different and more raucous context.

Thoughts on our buying a condo

*Alan Greenspan manipulated credit markets not to help the economy but to make more people homeowners and supporters of his personal ideology, capitalism. In a sense, it's worked on me - it's now a lot harder for me to support ending the regressive and environmentally destructive mortgage tax deduction. I'd still support a gradual phaseout though. Otherwise, though, I don't feel any more inclined to Greenspan's stupidity than I did before.

*There's a large tax credit for first-time home buyers that we'll get. Thanks, taxpayers! While we're not wealthy, I think there could be better uses of the money. Along the lines of Jonathan Zasloff's consideration of whether straight supporters of gay marriage shouldn't be married until everyone can, I suppose we could refuse the tax credit. As with marriage, I don't think that's going to happen. Maybe we should up our donations some, though.

*Fannie Mae charges a fee of 0.75% of the mortgage if you're buying a condo instead of a house, waived only if your downpayment is 25% instead of 20%. While I'm sure they have their financial reasons, it's a disincentive to smart growth.

*I believe increased residential mobility is environmentally beneficial, as in several years ago when I moved to cut my work commute to one-tenth the time. On the other hand, I've just been reminded what a complete time-wasting pain in the neck it is to move, one that gets worse as you get older and hoard more stuff. I'm not planning to move soon.

*We decided to clean our old apartment ourselves rather than spend several hundred dollars. Over forty hours work later, I'm not sure that was a great idea. Still can't figure out how it could take so long.

Recommending Papa John's whole wheat pizza crust with light cheese

I love pizza, and it's terrible for you. Apparently Papa John's is the only major pizza chain that offers a whole wheat crust, which they only started two months ago. I ordered one with light cheese and a few other toppings (IMPORTANT UPDATE: by "light cheese" I meant "not much cheese", not the dreaded low-fat stuff), and it was really good. Baby steps in the right direction.

Unfortunately they don't give nutritional info for whole wheat or light cheese. I know the light cheese helps alot, and whole wheat has got to be at least a little better that white flour.

Back, back, back from Madagascar

So we're back from the honeymoon - 25 days in Madagascar, the first week doing some volunteer work, and the rest checking out the sights. An amazing country, well worth visiting.

The lemurs were the same highlight for us as for everyone else. They seem otherwordly in a way that monkeys don't. Part of the reason is the big eyes on the small face looking at you. The large lemurs in particular seemed strangely even more like us than monkeys, as they move bipedally through trees, leaping 30-feet gaps while standing upright. The ghostly white lemurs (sifakas) in the south, and the tailless, crying indris in the east were the most striking.

Environmentally though, the vast majority of the country is nuked. A naive observer might not notice it, thinking the countryside has always been rice paddies, grasslands, and scrubby forests. What we see is what replaced the original forests, and even the scrubby trees are Australian eucalyptus and Chinese pine with no ecological value. One of our guides said "Madagascar used to be the green island, but now it is the red island from all the erosion."

We volunteered with a Malagasy NGO, Man and the Environment, which is participating in efforts to develop ecological buffer reserves around national parks where resource extraction is compatible with the ecology. We tried to do some GPS mapping of clearings in the reserves - I hope it'll be helpful but I'm not sure it will be. In the middle of nowhere we came across land owned by Genentech. Even more strangely, it was a clearing instead of virgin land that I'd guess would have more biotech prospects. More mysteries.

The good news is that the forest does grow back aggressively if given a chance. We saw lemurs in 20-40 year old secondary forest. All that's needed is the economic opportunity.

One place in particular raised an interesting carbon offset question. We did a five-day trek in the country's largest national park, l'Isalo. In past centuries it had been 80% forested, but now was only 10% forested, a figure that our guide said had not changed since the park was established in 1961. It seems that more manpower to patrol the park to stop illegal burning is all that's needed to help the forest grow back, and manpower is cheap in Madagascar. Arguably they should be doing it anyway, but they're not and haven't for nearly 50 years, so it seems like spending money on better management could meet the "additionality" test of offsets. I'm sure l'Isalo isn't unique in developing countries in this regard.

I'll do another post or two about the people, and on the standard, we-went-there-and-did-that stuff that's all so fascinating.

Instructors must love students like me

I'm taking beginning French in an adult education class. Teacher going over an exercise asks me to choose one of two possible grammatical constructions for a sentence. No idea. I choose one. It's wrong. She continues around the room asking folks and finally reaches me again. "We will give you lots of time for this one." I take lots of time - still no idea. I choose one. It's wrong.

Later she tells us the other class is proceeding more slowly than we are. Those people must be really stupid.

My superpowers

Not boasting, just being informative:

*I don't get ice-cream headaches. Ever.

*Songs don't get stuck in my head, something that I understand to happen commonly among the little people of the world.

Got anything better, you mortals?