Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Afghanistan for kids

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I’m one of the parent volunteers helping out with the 6th grade book club, which is part of Project Cornerstone, a YMCA-driven project in Santa Clara County not only to promote reading but to promote stories about values and questions kids might have. Project Cornerstone is really cool, and in middle school they create book clubs that offer lots of young adult novels with nary a vampire in sight.

This month’s book is The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis. None of the kids has had a chance to read the book yet, so today we had a discussion of some of the background of the book, which concerns a young girl in Afghanistan who pretends to be a boy in order to support her family. Since we didn’t know anything about the book, we did some fun stuff, like marking off a 10-foot by 10-foot square in the middle of the carpeting to show the size of the place the protagonist lives in, and we discussed the subject matter.

This is what I learned:

  • Some kids hadn’t heard of Afghanistan.
  • None of them knew where it was, although Sophia came closest with “near India.”
  • Some kids had heard the word “Taliban.” They didn’t know what it meant, though.
  • A few knew there had been a war there recently. Even fewer knew that the US had been involved.
  • A couple knew that the predominant religion there was Islam.
  • Almost none of them knew anything about the conditions for women there.
  • Almost all of them tried the hummus I made, and several tried the dried fruits that another mom brought.

We had a discussion about the title. None of the kids knew what the word “breadwinner” meant. We discussed why bread was slang for money, and why bread is so important. (I’m guessing not many of these kids have had to recite “Give us this day our daily bread” too often.)

I have no idea how atypical I was as a child (okay, okay: I was very atypical), but I watched the Evening News with Walter Cronkite every  night with my dad. I didn’t always understand what “Vietnam” or “energy crisis” or “M2” meant, but I had some exposure to the news. A lot of these kids — from very well-informed, very successful families — are not getting this. I only point this out not to rag on these kids (they’re in 6th grade, after all) but to point out that it’s never too early to start talking to your kids about world events. Or to use big words like “breadwinner” with them. They were really, really interested! They want to know this stuff!

I have high hopes for book discussion next time.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol: the review

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The rest of what I have to say may come off as damning with faint praise, so let me say up front: I had a blast watching this movie.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is a very fun, very stylish action flick that has that rarest of all elements, a story that’s fairly easy to follow. I’m not going to say the story makes any damn sense, but you always know what in the hell they’re doing and how it’s all going so terribly, awfully wrong.

Tom Cruise is back as…what the hell, you know the drill: secret government ops, betrayals, spies, sale of nuclear secrets. Amazingly beautiful on-location cinematography in Moscow, Dubai, and Mumbai. Tom Cruise has three assistants: Simon Pegg (the nutty computer guy), Paula Patton (the cool, beautiful agent), and Jeremy Renner (who’s just an analyst…or is he?). The four of them all have things to do (hey, Cruise is pushing a still-in-very-good-shape 50, he can’t do everything) and together they take down the bad guys. Amazing stunts and action work — the scene on the Burj Khalifa is pretty amazing, even if you don’t see the film in IMAX (which we didn’t).

Every action movie — and I say this as someone who WUVS the genre — suffers from the “Wait…what?” problem. You know, you’ll be watching a movie and they’re doing X, Y, and Z and you find yourself saying, “Wait…what? Why are they doing that?” I’m not even talking about stuff like how the Mission Impossible team is stranded and alone in a train car in Moscow…and then suddenly they’re fitted with matching Armani suits and gliding into a hotel in Dubai. No, we can buy that — they had secret Visa cards or something. No, I’m talking about when something integral to the plot happens and you’re like, What the hell? The most famous example of this that comes to mind was when Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep and asked novelist Philip Marlowe who had killed Owen, the chauffeur, and Marlowe admitted later, “They sent me a wire … asking me, and dammit I didn’t know either.”

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol moves so fast and gives you so many things to watch that eventually pay off (watch and learn, action movie makers, the overall story has to make sense, even if it isn’t realistic) that it’s not until the movie ends that you realize they had an awful lot of cool elements and scenes that don’t hold water at all. And you don’t care! Because it was cool! And it felt like it belonged! It wasn’t until we were walking out that we said, “So who were the guys with the guns on the quay in Moscow?” (Are packs of guys with AK-47s allowed to roam in Moscow like that? Not to mention…who shot the US Secretary? And…a US Secretary being assassinated right after the Kremlin got bombed wasn’t enough to tip off the Russians that, oh, I dunno, something major was going on?)

There’s other stuff like that — including an extended scene in which a highly trained operative turns out to be someone else…who wouldn’t be expected to have those mad skills. So…what what the point of having the highly trained operative involved in the first place? This particular plot point led Darin to say, “This movie is super villain cosplay.” If I hadn’t been driving the car — again, the nonsense of that plot point didn’t dawn on either of us until we were on the way home — I would have tweeted that line right then.

Like I said, it sounds like the movie was a mess, but this is actually very fun, very put-together stuff.

Other Notes:

  • Am really glad they didn’t do the obvious thing with Jeremy Renner’s character.
  • Am really glad that all of the IMF agents were competent — I was deeply afraid they were going to make Simon Pegg bad at doing anything except computers, and all that does is call into question the standards of the IMF organization.
  • Tom Cruise needs the Russian cop (or whatever he was) there at the end because…?
  • I kept really hoping that, in the final scene where Cruise was talking to Renner, that everything Tom told him was a complete lie. But that was probably one level too deep for this flick.

Anyhow. Not a bad way to spend two hours in a theater, and the cinematography is definitely grand scale stuff.

Organizing my note-taking life

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I never got Notes syncing working between my Mac and my iPhone. To the best of my knowledge, no one ever has. Notes on iPhone wasn’t great anyhow: Marker Felt? Seriously?

But I’m always taking notes. Things to keep track of, lists of restaurants I might want to hit in Paris, various phone numbers and info I might need to access quickly. General note taking stuff. I keep my shopping list in a different set up (Splash Shopper). To Do (aka, the world of GTD) is in other apps.

Option 1: Notational Velocity (Mac) and SimpleNote (iOS)

This is the combo I’ve been using for a while. I think it was probably the one recommended by John Gruber of Daring Fireball.

Pros:

  1. I already have it set up.
  2. I already know how it works.
  3. It works seamlessly.

Cons:

  1. Notational Velocity is just a list of notes. There’s no hierarchy, no organization. It’s just a notepad! I could tag every note or something to organize them better but…I’ve found no really simple way of doing it, and I now have about 100 notes, most of which I haven’t looked at in a long time.
  2. It’s easier to see how notes are grouped in SimpleNote, but only if I have every note tagged (I can look at a list of tags). If I don’t, I can’t find the notes I’m looking for that way.
  3. NV has no easy way to create a new note. Sometimes I just want to create a new note and start typing. I haven’t found the “New Note” capability. I can easily “Paste as New Note…” but I don’t always want to have to paste something to get started. I just want to type. I have often gone over to SN, created a new note there, and had it sync back to NV so I could type the info in via my Mac.
  4. When you create a new note in NV, the first line of the note becomes the name of the note. Changing the name of the note is not immediately obvious. (You don’t do it in the note itself. Even if you change the first line of the note, the name remains what it was when it was created. You have to go up to the list of notes to change it.)
  5. Syncing happens through SimpleNote’s site, and I think I paid a yearly fee for that. Possibly this fee was merely to remove ads, because I am all about no ads on either machine.

Option 2: Evernote

This is the one it seems like everyone uses. Nina told me she loves it and uses it for everything, although she said it’s “more useful for long term notes rather than just short term lists”

Pros:

  1. The Mac and iOS versions are both very good-looking. Yes, style counts.
  2. Hierarchical organization is simple on both versions.
  3. Syncing appears to be instantaneous.

Cons:

  1. The ability to access your notes while offline–say, while on a plane–is only available to premium subscribers ($45/year). I don’t doubt that Evernote needs to make money, and being able to use your notes anytime you want to is a pretty killer feature.
  2. After Con #1, does there need to be a #2? I haven’t used it enough to see about more cons. I don’t want to get really involved, unless the whole shebang is so awesome I need to double-down.

Option 3: Any straight text editor (Mac) and WriteRoom (iOS)

By “straight text editor,” I speak not of its sexuality (what any editor–text, human, whatever–does on its own time is its own business) but an editor that just handles text. Default save is to a .txt file. Not a word processor illed with the funky stylistic goodness. No, an editor that just does text: BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextEdit, or even WriteRoom for Mac (which has the advantage of being a full-screen, dedicated writing environment).

WriteRoom for iOS ($5, universal) is a gorgeous app, very easy to use, and has easy organization. The free version is called PlainText.

Pros:

  1. I really like the way WriteRoom on iOS looks and feels. Very simple, yet still elegant.
  2. I have several dedicated text editors on my Mac already.
  3. Syncing via DropBox is relatively easy. (I had a terrible time getting it set up, when I’ve never had a problem before with DropBox…and then suddenly the whole thing worked. No idea what happened there.)

Cons:

  1. All these various combinations and possibilities… Is this the best combination of applications and apps? I don’t want to get invested in a new setup only to  move to something else.
  2. There’s no way to sort other than the folder hierarchy — no tags or categories or anything like that.
  3. Syncing via DropBox: the whole kerfuffle last year over DropBox’s change in its TOS makes me nervous about it. I wish more apps offered an iCloud alternative. I wish iCloud were better enough that it was a reasonable alternative.

So. Those are the three list making setups I’m considering at the moment. Any suggestions for better setups? To head off the obvious: No, I’m not going to use whatever “notes” setup Google offers. We don’t have to get into it here, but…that’s not happening. I also need app setups I can use offline.

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I also need to straighten out keeping a journal and keeping a list on the computer/iPhone setup too, but I’ll save those for future posts.