This is a warning sentence in case you’re jumpy.

So anyways…me and Uncle Jim saw The Dark Knight last night and I have to say it was a riveting movie. It was a bare-knuckle, gritty take on Batman that — under the skillful direction of Chris Nolan — again puts the franchise where it belongs, namely AWAY from the campy crapfest that was “Batman Forever” and “Batman and Robin,” and at the same time reintroduces the world to The Joker, who, in this film, regains his street cred. This is the film’s greatest strength without a doubt.

Instead of a convoluted plotline that involves laughing gas, balloons and “this-plan-could-only-work-in-a-world-without-radar-and-the-military,” Nolan’s (and more specifically, Heath Ledger’s) Joker is a modern day terrorist who deals in anarchy, chaos and with each heist, he manages to reduce humans to their most base instincts (the ferry boat plan towards the end of the film demonstrates this best, I think).

What is most frightening about the Joker in this film is that he really has no agenda other than to “watch the world burn” as Alfred put it in his very telling parable. He creates panic, creates unrest and in this film proves a truly worthy adversary for both Batman and Gotham’s authorities.

That said, I think the films weakest point is it’s third act. The first and second acts of the film honestly could’ve just about completed it, and I honestly thought it was quickly on its way to a denoument.

I was wrong.

The third act really seemed like the beginning of a third movie involving one of the Batman series more interesting characters, Two-Face. In one scene (and not a long scene at that) Joker convinces this once-upright man of the law to become a murderous criminal, and then proceeds to let him go on a killing spree to avenge the death of Rachel Dawes (told you this was a SPOILER!).

His death, however, seems like a waste of such a GREAT character. His reign as Two Face lasts only 20 minutes or so before he’s killed in a fall. I really believe that the Nolan brothers could have done so much more with a script involving Two Face and Batman, but this ended any notion of that.

Who knows? Maybe the third Batman film (which I’m certainly assuming based on the grim ending of The Dark Knight) will revive an even more interesting character? Maybe Bane (not the Frankenstein version introduced in “Batman and Robin” but the South American mercenary who almost killed Bruce Wayne) would be a good way to end it…though a morbid one.

Aside from my criticisms here, I will say that the script was brilliant. Chris and Jonathan Nolan really peer into the soul of humanity and find interesting — sometimes even biblical — allusions to paint their story.

Joker’s repeated schemes that force others to kill or be killed; Batman’s fear that he has inadvertently “raised the bar” of criminality in Gotham; the many allusions to the corruption of power, most notably in Bruce Wayne’s “sonar experiment” that allows him to find anyone by using cell phone signals (a quick nudge-nudge at the Bush administration, I would imagine); and finally the power of terrorism and the panic that it brings, and how that can be exploited by someone strange enough to wield it. The themes aren’t trite and the solutions aren’t easy.

I was especially interested in Jim Gordon’s line as Batman decides to take the blame for the deaths that Two Face causes. He said, “[Batman] is the hero Gotham deserves.” It echoed the story of Israel in the Bible. They wanted a king, wanted a protector and wouldn’t trust God to be that for them, so they begged God for a king. Then he gave them a king. The king’s name was Saul, and he kept Israel in war for years. Don’t know if that was the point, but it rang true anyway.

Overall, the movie is one of the best Batman adaptations for the big screen ever made. I honestly just wish it would’ve been a little tighter and in this particular case, a little shorter.

Maybe I’ll like it better when I see it with the missus this week.

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I’ve been “dinking around” (a technical jargony term for all you newbies) with rss feeds today, mainly because I’ve never used them and I finally got the point of actually CARING about them when I wanted to add my recently played tracks from Last.fm.

That FELT like a run-on sentence, but wasn’t.

At any rate, I first came upon SimplePie.org, which is a simple rss reader for your websites. I went through the tutorials, uploaded it to my site, and then added it to the wordpress header file. Upon putting this in the page, I got a series of error messages (most of which I didn’t quite understand) that freaked out wordpress, and I really wasn’t making any headway (did you catch the pun?) and was about to give up.

My friend Brad, an infinitely better programmer than I am, even when I’m dreaming, pointed me to Wordpress’ built-in rss function, called simply, wp rss. Gotta admit…never knew it was there, and more importantly, didn’t really care…until I needed it…craved it, of course.

I plugged in the code in literally about five minutes, tweaked, seasoned with css and went my merry way with a last.fm custom recently played tracks thingy on my site.

I would LOVED to have known how to do all this with javascript and the last.fm api, but I’m just not there yet. If I could only have played around with programming more…you know…when computers were Commodore 64’s and all…

Second.

I’m still ruminating on this whole “24 Hour Party People” thing I mentioned earlier…

If you are going simply on the recommendations of these respected critics, the movie is a triumph. A triumph, that jumps, skips avoids real character development except when it comes to the main character, which is understandable I guess, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s trying to give watchers a glimpse of a music scene.

And while both Joy Division and Happy Mondays are great artists in their own right, I don’t think it’s fair to hang the entire “madchester” scene on their backs.

In fact, The Smiths (the bloody SMITHS) are mentioned ONCE in the film, at the end, when “god” visits Tony Wilson, informing him that he “should have signed” The Smiths.

Apart from that, it just felt incohesive. One could argue that when you’re doing a movie about a drug-fueled music culture, cohesiveness is what you’d avoid, but when you’re dealing with biopics, it seems more apropos…in my opinion, anyway…be that what it may.

So, why all the fuss?

I don’t know, ask them.

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There were lots of “Man, the last time I saw you was…” and “I was probably a teenager the last time we talked…” and “So, tell me what you’ve been doing for the last 20 years!”

It was really good to reconnect with so many of them. Time had really aged some of them. There were uncles and aunts that looked so frail compared to my memories of them. It was a stark reminder of how time passes silently…always passing while we read or while we take a shower…while we work, and while we sleep.

The day ended as many of those types of get-togethers do, with promises of visits, invitations and “let’s make plans.”

Sometimes you get the chance to follow through, but most times life seems to get in the way.

The generation shift has been profound, too. When I was younger, we often visited my grandmother and grandfather, and my uncles and aunts were there with my cousins. We got together a lot.

When we returned to the Savannah area a little over a year ago, I lamented how we didn’t do that anymore, but after thinking about it, I realized that now my mother is the grandmother. My sisters the aunts. Their children the cousins.

It’s as if the extended family has a way of tightening as that family multiplies, and the extended family of the past becomes further extended.

I keep fighting the trend, and I think my extended family is closer than most, but it’s never the same.

Maybe that’s what’s so unsettling about it. It’s just not the same…and never will be again.

WOW. That was totally morbid.

SHAKE IT OFF, PEOPLE…SHAKE IT OFF…

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I keep going back and forth about how I want this blog to look, and I can get so worked up about it that I just end up stepping away…or, more recently letting Blueprint CSS do all the work for me.

Then I got to thinking about how my life right now is all about getting down to the essentials…getting rid of all the fluff and getting down to what’s most necessary…most useful. Something blank and ready to accept what it’s given…I don’t care about style as much these days as I care about process: the stuff that’s getting me to where I am. I don’t even want to know if my latest work is showing that, but it’s where I want to be…especially in a place like this where I can play and create and experiment.

I don’t know…just kind of thinking out loud, I guess…and you know you’re a geek when you’re waxing poetic about Cascading Style Sheets, comparing them to LIFE and all…

That’s where I am, people. That’s where I am.

And didn’t you love that completely weird and sort of obtuse headline? What does it even MEAN??

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Coolest. Thing. Ever.

I want to be Derek when I grow up. No, seriously.

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There are many times that I’ve designed a logo, fully expecting that the first and strongest idea was going to be “the one”. The client says, “awesome” and it’s done. It’s not just that it was pretty good, it’s that I felt really good about it, even days after it was done. You know that feeling?

Brian Scott, Minister to Students at First Baptist Albany had a really good idea of what he wanted the student ministry to portray. Namely, that “The
Student Ministry of FBC Albany exists to impact students with the challenge
of full devotion to Jesus Christ everyday, everywhere, and everyway.”

Clear enough…and a dream for a designer. It’s rare to get someone with such a solid idea of what they want.

So after the first few sketches, I came up with the comps below. These ideas really tried to grab hold of students impacting other students and impacting their world. I thought I’d captured that idea in a few of these drafts.

I LOVED the “impacted” logo at mid left, where the letters were cut into the ground visually. It was something I hadn’t seen or tried before. If that one didn’t fly, I thought, surely the “radio waves” in the lower center were a sure winner…simple idea, minimal. I thought both of them were good visual representations of making an impact on the world. I sent them off thinking we surely had our logo done.

Not quite. Brian had some visual ideas, asking for something more bold than thin, and something that relied more on an icon, which neither solution did.

I thought I might take the “radio waves” idea and take it somewhere else, maybe something with a bit more passion, a bit more abandon. I thought, too, of painting or ink, and how it “leaves a mark” on paper or whatever else it touches. So after playing around with a font that provided a nice anchor for an icon element, I arrived at this version:

Again…thought I was totally done.

Not just yet.

Brian asked if we could combine some of the iconic elements into a text icon…something that would be a bit more unified, specifically the T of impact into a cross element and the ink/paint/radio waves icon into more of an oval shape, with the text overlaying it.

That’s when we arrived at this:

Both Brian and I felt we were most likely done at this point, but he wanted to check with his students and get their feedback. I figured the kids would likely respond to the grunginess of the logo and the rough, unfinished edges, etc. I mean, this would look great on a t-shirt, right?

I underestimated the youth at FBC Albany, apparently.

Their first question about the logo was, “Is this representing something? What does it mean? What does it say about us?”

I was a little taken aback, and pretty impressed, too. The kids wanted to see more of a literal interpretation of the world in the logo…something they could point to as a mission. I was happy to oblige, and by this time, Brian had sent over a few swatches of the colors in the youth room to incorporate into the logo.

So the final product looked like this:

I don’t know if it’s the best “solution” for the group or the most original, but the cool thing is that the group took ownership of it, you know? And that’s a cool thing to be a part of. I really enjoyed working on this one. Hope you like it, too…

Oh, and a special thanks to Adobe Illustrator’s artistic brushes, without whom this would’ve taken INFINITELY longer than it did.

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That said, I’m geeking out on the blog here, too, at the moment.

Though still fairly blank, this blog is now sporting the Blueprint CSS Framework. It’s something I’ve been eyeing for awhile, and have finally decided (along with the resuscitation of this here blog) to at least try it out.

Oh, and for those of you who quit reading after “CSS blah blah blah”…sorry, there…can’t really help myself…

I have to say, for as flexible a CSS framework as it is, it’s remarkably lightweight. I honestly thought I’d see thousands of rows of code to handle most html tags with addendum after addendum to handle specifics.

They’ve really taken a zen approach to the code, and though I haven’t added much to it yet, I imagine I’ll serve up my custom styles through an additional stylesheet that’ll just cascade below the Blueprint code and add to what’s already there.

My idea is to add a custom body background to the site every once in a while, and then for the custom fonts, headers, etc. I can serve up a separate stylesheet (just for screen — I won’t enable IE6 users and print shouldn’t be messed with anyway) that has layer-specific rules for text etc.

For instance, if I want the header to be a background image or something instead of the simple font in Blueprint, I can just serve up something like:

.span-24 h1{text-indent:-999em; background:url(some/image/here.jpg) no-repeat;}

This way, I can allow Blueprint to remain as is, but then tweak it to my liking as well, without having to edit the code. It could get dicey with the span areas that have more content, but I think I can get it to flow well.

I’m suddenly realizing that EVERYONE probably already does it this way, and that I’m not really giving somebody anything new…so if this is a “no duh” moment for you, reader, let me claim complete and total lack of originality and hope that the internet offers you something infinitely more interesting to read…

and that you tell a joke that NOBODY finds funny in the near future, and that it’s HUMILIATING.

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Or…did I just..

DANGIT!

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Ethan Gabriel Cave was born today at 9:05 a.m. Mountain Time. He was 18 inches long and weighed in at 7 lbs. 3 oz. (the smallest of the Cave children at birth). Click here for a slideshow of the photos.

Jess and the baby are doing great…and I think our prayers have been answered with this one.

This boy came out of the womb not making a sound. He got a little irritated with the doctor who kept suctioning out his mouth, but only cried for a moment before getting back to sleep. The nurses were trying to wake him up, but he wouldn’t have it. One nurse gave him a shot, thinking he’d liven up. No dice. He just rested right through it.

It wasn’t until she lay him on Mommy’s chest that little Ethan livened up. The smell of Mommy and milk apparently moved him quickly from lethargy to physical conniptions of desperation. He just about rolled himself over trying to get to the milk.

After a few eating stints, however, it was back to sleep.

Later, a nurse came to give him a bath. We’ll hear some screaming out of him now, I thought. Not a sound. He woke up some time in the middle of having his hair washed…looked a little irritated when dunked in the warm water, but before the nurse could finish getting him into his pajamas, he’d already fallen back into dreamland.

Now THAT is mellow, people.

The power of prayer demonstrated.

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