The Greatest of All Time, Sort of

I'm no boxing expert, but I do like ranking things, so I thought I'd compare three heavyweight fighters whom I consider the best of their eras to determine who reigns supreme. I should note, the nominees are just my sentimental favorites, and completely omit the contemporary era as well as the earliests.

The first is Mike Tyson. In his prime, Tyson was a vicious, highly skilled and well-trained fighter, the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history, who demolished most of his opponents in an average of 3.5 rounds. Tyson was unique because he possessed devastating power, but also lightning fast hand speed. Combined with his punching accuracy, he was an overpowering fighter with animal-like aggression. Here he is, at his peak, taking on undefeated champion Michael Spinks. It must have been a real letdown for people expecting this internationally-hyped heavyweight championship fight to go the distance.

Michael Spinks vs. a Wild Animal:



When Don King took over Tyson's career and fired his original trainer, he stopped bobbing and weaving and using his jab and combinations, instead looking for one punch knockouts. As a result, he started losing, first to Buster Douglas in what's considered the biggest upset of all time. He never got up from a knockdown, and when his fights went into later rounds as they did against Holyfield and Lewis, he became far less dangerous. But Tyson in his prime would have a good chance at beating anyone from any era.

Muhammad Ali was a true "boxer" - meaning he relied on technique and ring strategy rather than going toe to toe with opponents - with incredible speed and agility. A man of great conviction, he proved he could take punishment when he fought Foreman and Frazier, but more importantly, knew how to avoid it. After a long career, the guy's face shows no damage.

A bad, bad man:



Beause he wasn't a power puncher, he relied on flurries of shots to wear down his opponents. His habit of backing up while throwing jabs was a good defensive technique, but also weakened his power. Ali was a gutsy, talented, and intelligent fighter. He was an Olympic champion and won the title three times.

Rocky Marciano was a hard-hitting brawler with incredible stamina. He's the only undefeated champion in heavyweight history, and suffered only two knockdowns during his professional career. Marciano would be a light heavyweight in the modern era, but he had knockout power on par with some of the strongest punchers in history. His stamina meant that he would continously attack opponents, bombarding them from every angle without letting up. Marciano was a relentless warrior who beat everyone he fought to a pulp.

Marciano hurting people:



Marciano could also fight through massive punishment, winning one fight with his nose literally split in half. In an era when fights were allowed to become much more dangerous than they are today, he proved to be a fighter of remarkable toughness. Nearly every fight in the above video would have been stopped much earlier by today's standards.

Marciano's weaknesses included being a wild puncher, not caring what he hit. He also lacked speed, and was a slow starter, with most of his fights going several rounds.

So who's the best? For the sake of this discussion, I'm going to assume we're talking about these fighters in their primes. In Tyson's case especially, after his peak, he wasn't nearly the same fighter. Also, as a disclaimer, I'm not even considering the earlier eras of boxing which would feature Jack Dempsey or Joe Louis.

Tyson vs. Marciano: The key would be the early rounds. If Marciano could survive Tyson's initial onslaught, he would have the advantage in later rounds because of his superior mental toughness. Tyson proved to be weak mentally when really challenged. Tyson is kind of like a scared animal who lashes out violently at first, but whose weak psyche wilts if faced with strong resistance. Marciano is a somewhat sentimental choice, though, and my head tells my that Tyson's movement, power, and accuracy would end the fight early.

Ali vs. Marciano: there was a cool computer simlation done in the 60s that determined Marciano would win. Ali and a then retired Marciano were filmed doing a simulated fight. Afterwards, Ali said that his arms were left bruised from Marciano's punches. It would be a long fight. I'm going to agree with the simulation and go with Marciano for his stamina and guts, wearing down Ali over a long fight.



Ali v Tyson: Ali defeated two of the hardest punchers in history in Foreman and Frazier. I imagine against Tyson, he'd be able to dance and stay away from him in the early rounds. Again, I'd bet against Tyson in a 12-15 round bout.

Tyson was once asked about how he'd do against various opponents from other eras. He replied that without actually having to face them in a fight, one could never really know, a wise answer I think.

The Kids Are Damn Good

When I first saw the trailer for The Kids Are All Right, my initial reaction was one of despair. At the time, I was shopping my own comedy spec about a sperm donor who's discovered by his sperm children (in my script, there were 412 of them), and suddenly found myself in a jam. The director who'd attached himself to the project was no longer interested, and I was stuck without many places to go. So for several weeks, I avoided seeing the film, but the buzz was so good I knew I had to see it before it left the theaters.

It turns out that The Kids Are All Right is the best film I've seen all year. I enjoyed Inception, but its lack of character development kept me from becoming strongly invested in the story. The Kids Are All Right has an honest script that lets things play out realistically, flawed characters who drive the story by their choices and mistakes, and an incredible cast. I've never liked Julianne Moore or Mark Ruffalo as much as in this film, and Annette Bening is top notch as usual. And because it's ultimately more about the family than the sperm donor, it's different enough from mine that I still may have a shot. So I forgive you for making a great film.

Mark Olson's Gritty Prettiness

Mark Olson, founding member of the seminal alt-country group The Jayhawks, recently released his second solo album, "Many Colored Kite." It's a great album, gentle and beautiful. Admittedly, Mark's nasal, wavering voice and decidedly unslick songs are an acquired taste. But since his days in The Jayhawks, Olson has proven himself to be a premier Americana singer/songwriter.

Mark's music is earnest, unflashy, and favors expression over musicality. His melodies often sound constrained, and he revels in such simplicity that sometimes it's hard to hear a strong melody or musical hook. But when the songs are embellished with harmony vocals, bass lines, or additional instrumentation, the full beauty of his music is revealed. When he was in The Jayhawks, bandmate Gary Louris had the more pleasing lead vocal, but the soul of the band was Mark (which is why The Jayhawks became a mediocre pop band when Olson left). All the same, I think Olson sounds best when paired with Louris or his girlfriend Ingunn Ringvold's crystal clear voice to compliment his gravely sound and bring out the song's hidden beauties. Mark may not have the best voice or delivery, but what he does provide is a rock solid foundation for great songs.

The GOP and the Mosque at Ground Zero

The GOP’s outrage over building a Mosque at Ground Zero is more revealing of their simple-minded bigotry than any accusation I could make. The simple problem with their position is that they equate Islam with Al-Qaeda. Islam is one of the world’s largest religions. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist network. We see this all the time from the GOP though, and there’s a word for it: intolerance.

Certainly, Al-Qaeda would not approve of this Mosque, because they accept no form of Islam other than their own. And for all the GOP’s talk about freedom, what about religious freedom? Typically, they only support freedom when it’s for their own beliefs. But the real indication of freedom is allowing it for people different from yourself.

By the way, there’s already a Mosque at another 9/11 site: there’s one inside the Pentagon.

Prodigal Sons and the Academy Awards

I haven't seen many movies since the beginning of the new year because there really haven't been many I've been interested in seeing, but last night I stumbled across a unique documentary that demonstrates how truth can be stranger than fiction. Prodigal Sons begins as a story about a transexual's return to her rural hometown in Montana, but it becomes more about her relationship with her estranged tragic brother, and explores universal questions of identity, sibling rivarly, and nature versus nurture. Paul was valedictorian, class president, and quarterback of the high school football team, but after graduation, he moved to San Francisco and became Kim. Marc is Kim's older adopted brother, who was held back in preschool, didn't graduate from high school, and suffered a brain injury at 21 that left him severely emotionally unstable. While Kim tries to leave her past as a man behind her, Marc only wants to live in the past, and find out who his real parents are. In one of the strangest twists I've ever seen in film, Marc learns that he's the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. A film about two brothers dealing with identity shifts while hoping to reconnect with each other, this film is continually engrossing and unlike anything you've seen.

http://www.prodigalsonsfilm.com/

The Academy Awards continues to confound me every year. How did The Hurt Locker, a film which is essentially a series of bomb set pieces, win the Oscar for Best Screenplay? Here's a story with no character arc, which blatantly states its theme in the opening credits, and is mostly an exercise in suspense. It also bugs me that people praised the film for NOT making a strong statement about war. Why is that a good thing? Ironically, I think the film actually DOES say something about war, namely that it can make people crazy, so the fact that right-wingers have embraced the movie because they think it doesn't have a political message indicates their frequent inability to understand art. At any rate, I expect a Best Picture winner to be a revelation, which The Hurt Locker isn't. I would have given the Oscar to An Education.

Dad Unleashed!

I got this e-mail from my father after he watched Inglourious Basterds. I love a fired-up negative review so much, I just had to post it:

Finally watched Inglourious Basterds this week. What an incoherent mishmash of other, better movies (for Nazi parody see The Producers, for undercover silliness see Top Secret, for cinematic conflagration see Cinema Paradiso, for gratuitous and pornographic violence see something else by Tarantino or Peckinpah, for rewriting history, see Fox News or a Republican press conference). Pitt's character was an insulting, simplistic stereotype. I was really put off by using Aldo Ray as the name-inspiration for this guy; Ray was a decent actor who actually served in the Navy in WW2 - a "frogman," predecessor to the SEALs. He saw action at Okinawa (BTW, did you know that this battle resulted in 50,000 US casualties and 100,000 Japanese? Compare to D-Day - 10,000 casualties for all allied forces?). For his war service alone, Ray earned better homage than this crappy movie and cartoon character. Mostly the movie doesn't ever figure itself out. It starts with a credible, tense and terrifying scene, then wanders all over the place and violates its own promise, resorting to gore when it wants to "get serious." Its one redeeming feature is the actor playing the German officer, but his deal-making at the end is totally inconsistent with the rest of his choices. His self-interested choice is more like one a 21st century wall street banker would make. Overall, it seems like something that could have been written and directed by a 15 year old kid just making things up to fantasize an altered outcome for history and have fun with creepiness.

Even though I liked the film, I have to agree with his points. I think I was too entertained to care while watching, but the "eye for an eye" attitude towards Nazis did bother me. And I did question the German officer's deal with Pitt. But now I'm all fired up to do my own crushing review! I've been trying to stick to movies I really like to avoid being negative, but there's nothing like an impassioned, rip-it-to-shreds diss!

My iHate

I don't ask much of my computer. I don't need it to perform complicated, high end tasks. All I want it to do would seem to be a simple, common need: to transfer music from an iPod to iTunes. Yet, the designers did not include a way to do this, and there seems to be no simple solution without purchasing software from a 3rd party or doing lots of disc-burning. And I'm boiling over with frustration.

Before my old computer bit the dust last year, I moved our iTunes library onto my wife's iPod so we wouldn't lose the thousands of tracks we'd uploaded and purchased. (Okay, I'm really feeling like a sucker for using their branded spellings when their shitty devices cause so much trouble, so from now on I'll just refer to them in lowercase.) I figured I'd simply move the tracks onto the new computer. But I quickly realized Mac does not allow this, presumably to limit illegal file sharing. But every person who buys a new computer will encounter this basic problem. What are they supposed to do when they want to rebuild their itunes library? Moreover, if users don't change their synchronization settings with their new library, itunes will ERASE the files on their ipod when they sync it up, as the new library is empty. It doesn't make sense to have a one-way transfer road when itunes has so much more space and is supposed to be the library. The ipod should be able to move things back and forth as needed, to replace old tracks with new, and to free up space.

Sure, I could leave all the music on the ipod. But what if it runs out of space? What if I want to swap out old music for new? My main problem is that the ipod with all the music is my wife's, while I have my own ipod. (I had to buy a new one after my first one failed, which is another story of frustration. Mac handheld devices are so fragile that if you simply drop one you can't expect it to work again) Until mac provides an efficient way to transfer files from her ipod to itunes, I can't put any of our old library on my ipod, nor move my music off of her device. Believe me, she really loves it when she uses shuffle and a death metal track comes on.

Some users discovered a "back-door" way to copy the music back to itunes. But alas, if you keep up with the itunes updates, this is no longer possible in the new version. However, itunes 9 does provide a way to transfer files from ipod to itunes, PROVIDED YOU BURN THEM ALL TO CD FIRST AND THEN UPLOAD THEM. Like I'm going to do that.

The only other solution I've found is to use 3rd party software I've found online, but unless you purchase the full versions, they only allow transfers of one file at a time. For a library of thousands, that is not gonna work either. Finally, it seems as though Mac will allow transfers of MP3s purchased through itunes, but ultimately this is to their benefit because it encourages users to purchase itunes MP3s instead of CDs. Forcing users to use what I consider an inferior and ever dwindling music format is sad for music itself, but I can talk about that later.

So I'm stuck with our complete music library on my wife's ipod, and only newly added music on mine. I think I'll start carrying around a discman again; at least it functions as one would expect.