The movie, on it’s own merits, was pretty good. The pace was snappy, Jackie Chan was his usual awesome self, and the cinematography looked like a travelogue. Almost too much like a travelogue – they managed to force half the monuments in China into the training montage. Olympic Village, Check! Great Wall, Check! Ancient Temple – Check!

I want to like this film but I have big complaints about lost opportunities… Jackie Chan has an amazing introduction scene where he dodges and deflects the blows of a bunch of bullies attacking him, and they end up accidentally beating eachother up. It’s excellent, and they make a big deal about how kung-fu is about defence and avoiding conflict. And then the kid is in a tournament where he has to punch other 12-year-olds in the face to win. You remember in the original, where Mister Miagi does the screaming death fist move at the end but just honks the evil teacher’s nose? In MY version of the ending, when I get to re-make this film in 20 years (again), Dre will go into the arena and never throw a punch, earning his points by honking noses and bumping the kids into garbage bins.

The end kick – you know, the one that was supposed to be as iconic as the Crane Kick? It’s like this crazy backflip kick-to-the-head nonsense that no kid in any schoolyard is going to be able to reproduce without breaking their neck. It’s kindof a shame, because we had lots of fun crane kicking and feeling awesome as kids. Which is probably why they made it impossible this time around.

I shouldn’t poke too much fun, because I love weird ceremonies, and my grandfather was a member of the royal guard in Ottawa. But when they marched the goat out at the beginning of the changing of the guard, Natasha and I looked at eachother with raised eyebrows, and re-checked the tourist guide to be sure we were in the right place.

Really? A goat?

(There’s two conflicting sources naming the goat – Vandoos.com claims it’s Baptiste- meaning Baptist, La Citadelle’s website claims it’s Bâtisse – meaning ‘fortress’. The first mascot goat was given to the Vandoos by the queen in 1955, subsequent goats, including Baptiste X, are direct descendants.)

Like most bees at work they were totally docile and ignored me while I poked my lens in their business. They seemed pretty comfortable in front of the camera and let me snap away for 10 minutes in the front yard. What the neighbours think I’m up to is anyone’s guess – I’ve been out there with my paparazzi lens taking pictures at funny angles on a few occasions now. 

The game:

Everyone places at least the minimum bet on an area of the table called the pass line.

As the round begins a shooter (dice roller) is chosen. The shooter hands the dice to the left on subsequent rounds.

During the “Come out” phase, the shooter makes one or more rolls. If the shooter rolls 2, 3 or 12, the dealer takes all the pass line money and the round ends. If the shooter rolls 7 or 11, everyone’s money on the pass line is doubled. If the shooter rolls a 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10, this number becomes “the point”.

Once a point is chosen, point bets can be made or rescinded by placing your wager into boxes numbered 3-11 (without a 7). Any subsequent rolls by the shooter will double the money of anyone’s bet in the corresponding number. If the shooter rolls “the point” number, everyone’s money on the pass line is doubled. If the shooter rolls a 7, the round ends and the dealer collects all the money still on the table.

The goal is to wager on numbers that the shooter will roll before a seven comes up. There are a bunch of special-case rules (one-off bets, rare odds bets, etc) that don’t significantly change the structure of the game, but change from table to table depending on the rules you’re playing by.

The results:

The math in Craps is neat and tidy. You’ll quickly see that it’s a losing game – like most casino games there’s no case where the odds are in your favor. You have marginally better odds playing the 6 or 8, which are second only in rolling frequency to the 7. Wikipedia have a good breakdown of various bet odds, and they’re all bad. It’s telling that they include a section devoted to calculations of “Loss per hour”.

It didn’t take me long to blow through my pile of funny money, while watching people around me get lucky breaks all evening. My strategy was to cover 6 and 8, usually two at a time, but our table threw a statistically improbable number of 9s, making the superstitious folks with bad math skills at the table filthy rich. Mathematicians make terrible gamblers, I guess.

The game ended when a guy who’d won big at the poker table descended on our game late in the evening and bet everything he had on number 5, and it came up for him, bankrupting the dealer and pretty much finishing off our game.

It’s actually a fun game, with lots of minor winning going on while your chip pile slowly bleeds to death. You’ll have a slight edge if you’ve ever puzzled out dice-rolling odds during a tedious game of Dungeons and Dragons. If you’re looking to actually win money, though, you’re almost definitely better off playing Poker or Blackjack. (…or bet it all on the 5!)

I usually “ding” people with my bell if they’re walking dogs or they have little kids running around, but I don’t bother if I’m going slow and it looks like there’s lots of room (I make enough noise wheezing and panting). So as I stood up and took my first hard pedal to pass him, I wondered to myself “What are the odds someone’s coming around that bushy corner?”

Turns out 100%. One of those 10-speed velo-drone racer types going full-out through the woods in his full-body spandex racing outfit came whipping downhill out of nowhere. I veered back into my lane (and off the other side) and jammed on my brakes, my tires locked up and chirped loudly while I skittered up alongside the poor walking bugger who was minding his own business. I apologised profusely and he later seemed fine, but you should have seen the way he leapt off the road and dove for cover. Bad judgment call on my part. I literally only saw one bicycle on the entire ride in to work, and it was right at the moment I couldn’t see ahead in the lane. Good thing I was going slow.

Anyhow – for scaring the bejesus out of an old man this morning – I feel some Karmic Punishment coming on.

Bike picture stolen from Joe Tordiff, snarky dialog bubble by me.

And even worse – he told terrible jokes. A comedian! What a nightmare!

During the bus-ride scene after the first fight, Ramona explains to Scott that he’ll have to defeat her seven evil exes. Look at the street lights moving past in the background!

What’s going on here?

When a lens focuses on something in the foreground, the background gets blurry. Photographers call this “depth of field” and it’s used all the time by portrait photographers make their subjects stand out. Film directors use it to help you know where to look. This blurryness has a name: “Bokeh” .

Usually you don’t notice bokeh in the background because it looks smooth and continuous, unless your light source is tiny and bright.  Bokeh around a point light usually looks circular or octagonal – think about any blurry pictures you’ve taken of Christmas lights. The circular shape isn’t natural – it’s caused by the shape of your lens aperture, the little hole behind your lens that helps your camera focus and control light.

I want to do the Scott Pilgrim Lens Effect!

There’s two ways to accomplish this effect – the easy analog way, or the (sneaky) even easier digital way.

The analog way is as simple as cutting a shaped hole into a piece of construction paper and taping it over your lens. It looks crazy, but it works! Basically the hole becomes an aperture, and its shape gets projected onto your sensor. Take a picture in “Portrait” mode, or crank your aperture way wide, and take a shot. Because you’re limiting the light coming into your sensor, and probably taking pictures at night, you’ll almost definitely need to use a flash on anything in the foreground that you don’t want blurred.

(This picture is from DIYPhotography.net)

Using this cute heart-shaped cutout, you can take pictures like RottieLover on Flickr, who grabbed this adorable snap of their critter friend.

The digital way requires some software that will do “Shape Blur”. Back in the day the trick was to make an enormous filter matrix and apply it to your image using custom software. The new versions of Photoshop have it built in (since CS2 I think) and now you’ll find it in After Effects, Digital Fusion, and a bunch of other packages.

Start with a 16-bit picture (8 will work too, but for mathematical reasons you’ll get better results with a raw image) with really sharp well-focused point sources of light (street-lamps, christmas lights, ferris wheel bulbs) and then run a “Filter->Shape Blur” on the part of the image that you want the custom bokeh effect to show up in. Depending on your initial image and the size of the shape you do, you might need to brighten the results for them to be obvious. (Blurring spreads out the light) If you have a foreground subject you’ll have to be selective (using a selection, or a mask) so you don’t blur your dog or your Scott Pilgrim.

Some Christmas lights on my living room floor

Shazam! Cute hearts!

Or better yet – XMAS SPACE INVASION! OH THE HUMANITY!

So how cool is it that the Scott Pilgrim photography unit (or, more likely the VFX post unit) are using bokeh as another tool for storytelling? I’ve never seen it done before in a film – only in hokey experimental photography. So clever! I expect to see this making it’s way into all kinds of subliminally dreamy movie sequences with little point lights. Be on the lookout!

Hanville Svetz, the time-traveling extinct-animal rescuer from the far-future Institute for Temporal Research travels back and forth through time & space (and fiction) in an increasingly elaborate series of jumps to save both planets. I think what I appreciated most was Larry Niven’s wanton disregard for the standard sci-fi time paradox rules, which allows Hanville and his friends to take liberties with laser blasters and mess up the timelines of various Spanish conquistadors and Martian saucer pilots. This is all explained away by a rectifying force that ensures the timeline comes together (mostly) the way it had been planned. Fun stuff.

The style of the novel is weirdly nondescript – Niven half-describes locations and then sets scenes in them without any context. Prepare your imagination to do a lot of filling in because he doesn’t do any of the footwork for you. I found this frustrating in parts, in particular a standoff against some kind of beast in a crystalline Martian home that made no sense whatsoever the way I’d envisioned it.

In “The Nasty Bits”, he’s put together a series of quirky weird essays that span from career advice to bragging about luxury resot stays to scathing teardowns of Woody Harrelson. This is a chef who’s words are sharper than his knives, and it’s alternately hilarious and depressing to share his observations of the cooking industry. Definitely worth reading, although a lot of it is addressed directly to a professional cooking audience and not the broader audience at large.

Medium Raw, on the other hand, was a disappointment, at least in terms of underhanded provocation. His exceptional writing is still on display here, but as a follow up to his scathing bestseller “Kitchen Confidential” he basically apologizes, chapter after chapter, for all the nasty things he’s said in the past. I appreciate that he’s grown mellow with success and he has to work with a lot of the people he took pot shots at in previous books, but I think the apology to Rachel Ray was entirely unnecessary. And Jamie Oliver, who he skewered publicly in previous essays for all his “matey, mockney bullshit”, is back in his good graces for his charity work.

There’s a good mix of fascinating autobiography in this one – Anthony is a guy who’s struggled with a lot of demons, and some of his stories about his shady drug-addled past are really laid bare. I respect that he put all of that down on paper, and I imagine it was really tough to dredge it up. It makes for a really fascinating read. But don’t expect the sardonic nasty wit, until you hit the chapter “Alan Richman is a Douchbag”, which is somewhat incredible. I never want to cross this guy.