Review: Walk the Line

Walk the Line is the story of the life of Johnny Cash as he started his singing career, wrecked his life, and found salvation in God and June Carter.

Joaquin Phoenix did a good imitation of Cash's look and guitar strumming, and his voice imitation would be hard for anyone to improve on - only two of the songs in the movie are Cash recordings. Yet his performance struggles to get beyond imitation. You can't blame Phoenix. Johnny Cash was almost certainly one of the five greatest American musicians of the 20th century (I made that up; don't ask for the names of the other 4). He was an extremely strong and distinctive character, and Phoenix had gigantic shoes to fill. Also, Joaquin is distinctive in his own way - maybe it's just his face, maybe something deeper - in a manner that makes it hard to see him as his character. This also interfered with his performance in The Village.

The story was good but not compelling. World complained that it didn't do justice to the factor that Christianity played in restoring his troubled life. While I don't know enough of his bio to say, I don't think it was as bad as they say. His religion is most widely seen through his songs, which came through the movie between his gospel beginnings and some things he said later in the film. And it certainly didn't capture my larger-than-life ideal of Cash.

His divorce and remarriage interested me. God hates divorce and remarriage - Christ calls it adultery. Yet June Carter Cash apparently was a big factor in Cash's recovery from drug abuse and depression. Another story I just read today has some similarities, showing that good can indeed come from a bad thing.

Altogether, while the movie doesn't seem compelling enough for a big Academy Award showing, it was good and I'd recommend it to anyone mature enough for its themes.

Social implications of RSS readers

Reading your blogs with an RSS reader comes with consequences. The blog-reading seems less personal, less like a conversation with the author and others of his friends. I encourage you, at least when on your good friends' blogs, to click the little link to see the whole post with comments, so you can read and leave comments on the blogs you read. It turns the blog from a news service to an interaction.

Read 35 blogs at once

I should have set this up long ago, and you should set it up today. It's a RSS/ATOM feed reader - a program that grabs updates to blogs and news sites you like and displays them for you without the effort of visiting each site individually and checking for new posts. The interface is much like an email reader - it shows the number of unread posts and everything. It's like a daily xanga subscription report, for those of you that use those, except it's much simpler and useful.

FeedReader is especially useful since I have bookmarked 35 blogspot blogs - far to many to check regularly for updates. 2 of my sites seem to have disabled their feed, so I have to check them manually. Unfortunately, xanga doesn't support syndication, and I have maybe 50 or 60 of those. It seems Livejournal does, so I should add those next. No, wait: it seems that even xanga supports RSS. Sweet.

Here's how to set it up:
Download an RSS/ATOM reader program. There are many out there; I used the program FeedReader. It's GNU/open-source, which means it's simple and there's no restrictive licensing to agree to. Download it here.

Install, run, and add your feeds. FeedReader comes with some news feeds pre-loaded; I deleted most of them, but some were useful. The hardest part is finding the feed. Blogspot feeds are the address plus /atom.xml - for example, http://quaerenssapientiam.blogspot.com/atom.xml

LiveJournal feeds are at http://www.livejournal.com/users/exampleusername/data/rss or http://www.livejournal.com/users/exampleusername/data/atom ; for some other features, see the LiveJournal faq.

Xanga feeds are at http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=americansamerican

Go for it - it's such a timesaver. I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner.

Online Freedom of Speech Act

I'm something of a skeptic when it comes to how great the Republicans are and why you should almost always vote for them above Democrats, but this votes like this keep hope alive for the party. This vote was for the Online Freedom of Speech Act, which excludes internet communications from the onerous McCain-Feingold speech restrictions. The act says in its entirety,

Paragraph (22) of section 301 of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (2 U.S.C. 431(22)) is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: “Such term shall not include communications over the Internet.”.

The vote was as follows (see voting list by congressman here):

Yeas Nays PRES NV
Republican 179 38 13
Democratic 46 143 13
Independent 1
TOTALS 225 182 26

The act failed on a motion to suspend the rules and pass, but should suceed on the next vote if it is not amended to death.