I didn’t read any of the Harry Potters. I shudder at the thought of picking up a stephanie meyer’s book except to use as a wheel chock for when I need to change the oil in my car. I was, however, intrigued by the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. It is impossible to go through a week without someone mentioning it or seeing it on the subway. and since the movie opened last weekend, the Hunger Games have been all people can talk about at work, too.

I was a bit hesitant at first to read the Hunger Games, likening it to the Twilight series – adequately written, aimed at teenaged readers, and incredibly embarassing to be caught reading on the subway. But then I heard about the story:

Hunger Games is written in the voice of sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world in the country of Panem where the countries of North America once existed. The Capitol, a highly advanced metropolis, holds absolute power over the rest of the nation. The Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 from each of the 12 districts surrounding the Capitol are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle in which only one person can survive.

wait a second….

I’ve heard this plot before….

Forty-two students, three days, one deserted Island: welcome to Battle Royale. A group of ninth-grade students from a Japanese high school have been forced by legislation to compete in a Battle Royale. The students are each given a bag with a randomly selected weapon and a few rations of food and water and sent off to kill each other in a no-holds-barred (with a few minor rules) game to the death, which means that the students have three days to kill each other until one survives–or they all die.

school-age kids? check.
government oppression? check.
isolated venue for the battle/games? check.
fight to the death? check.

and I couldn’t help but wonder, is Hunger Games a rip-off of Battle Royale?

hmm. well. I can believe that this is a coincidence – using kids is a great tool to garner instant sympathy from the audience. government oppression is another easy tool to create an overarching antagonist. and fight to the death? well, you gotta pull some heartstrings somehow. maybe Collins was just writing a story that logically made sense. there is a large enough time difference (>10 years) from where BR was published and when HG was printed, so it is possible she may have never been exposed to the relatively unpopular BR.

but what about the other similarities? can they all be attributed to being coincidence? would other writers likely follow the same logical plot progression/twist? or is this a clever re-boot of the BR from a decade earlier?

let’s look at some of the things that jumped out at me – fair warning, there are going to be hints of spoilers as well as direct spoilers, so if you don’t want to know anything, just stop here and go read/watch them both first.

kids were both given resources and weapons at the very beginning of the battle/games.
- at first they aren’t allowed to attack each other (HG: mines. BR: classroom)
- as soon as the kids were freed (HG: deactivated mines, BR: left the classroom), the killing began (HG: cornucopia battle where 13 kids died, BR: teacher kills 2 students off the bat)

teams form
- the large one (HG: the Careers, BR: the girls in the lighthouse, the boys planning the bomb/escape)
- the lovers (HG: Katniss and Peeta, BR: Shuya and Noriko)
- the lone wolves (HG: Foxface, BR: Kawada)
- the ones who volunteered to go to win (HG: the Careers, BR: kazuo)
- the best friend/ally (HG: Rue, BR: Yutaka Seto)

notification.
the use of a PA system (BR) and the more elegant images in the night sky (HG) are a way to notify the players who had died (and who is still out there), as well as re-center the reader as to the overall status of the battle/game.

environmental control.
The HG gamemakers are able to control the weather and have booby-trapped areas of the forest to force the players to move (Katniss and the flames that gave her the burn). in BR, the government is able to declare “forbidden” zones which are mined – an effort to get players to move.

both game parameters require only one live winner, who will go back with honor (BR) or to great fortune/notoriety (HG), in both stories, the lovers survive.

The lovers in both stories did not have a strong love connection at the beginning of the games, but then grew as the days went on – this becomes a way to survive (HG: two winners rule, BR: motivation to survive and make sure Noriko lives).

Older mentors develop in both stories, where Kawada (BR) and Haymitch (HG) are instrumental in the survival of the lovers.

Each story takes a class (HG: tribute class at the training center, BR: Kawada prefecture 9th grade class) to an isolated venue where surveillance (HG: video cameras, BR: micro-phoned collars) is used by the government (HG: Panem, a conglomeration of north america, BR: Republic of Greater East Asia, a conglomeration of asian nations) to terrorize the public into submission to “big brother’s” will (HG: to continue to remind citizens of the government’s power and prevent uprisings, BR: to upset any potential for insurgency).

I do think they are very similar in plot and plot tools but Collins does a good job separating her Hunger Games in two big ways:

1. the teenage romance. clearly this is a book directed at a younger age group. the quickness of the plot development and the lack of writing depth speaks to being less than desirable – especially when trying to describe a dystopian environment of north america, where District 12 is supposed to be (presumably) west virginia or anywhere else along the Appalachians. The same groups that love the Meyers series are good candidates to be HG fans, too. I would have liked more gore and more development of the dystopian society as a whole. It was written like it was meant to be PG-13, and almost written as if it was supposed to be easily adapted into a screenplay. The foreshadowing of Gale and Peeta’s conflict over Katniss’ affections is palpable, and makes me less interested in reading the following two parts of the trilogy.

2. deus ex machina via reality TV. BR wasn’t televised and did not have the audience participation that HG had. I thought this was a nice feature and would be interesting to see if the book delved into how the districts reacted to the occurences inside the game. Collins doesn’t use it this way, instead, the reality TV aspect serves a more of a deus ex machina situation where problems like katniss’ burns and peeta’s infection are magically cured because it was sponsored by the reality tv viewers. it isn’t used much beyond a plot tool – primarily because collins keeps the reader inside the games – seeing what Katniss sees and leaving the rest a mystery.

so do I think it’s a rip-off? I’m leaning towards no. but I can see how the similarities can be drawn together. The entire zeitgeist of Battle Royale is more reality-driven, reminds me of Lord of the Flies in a way. BR is the grim, dark underbelly of how our societal mores are tested when our lives are put on the line. I think BR does a good job of getting the viewer to relate to a character or group, likening it to the viewer’s own personality. are you the kind who wants to preserve all society’s rules like the girls in the lighthouse? are you likely to find the loophole like the boys looking for a way to detach the collars? are you likely to go mad, like Kazuo? or are you going to be the hero for someone you love, Shuya?

in contrast, Hunger Games does not go into the grimness and suffering of District 12. Collins creates a desolate world with a lot of silver linings. There is no empathy for other characters in the games except maybe Foxface (if you’re the run & hide type) or rue (if you’re a capable sidekick). Collins wants you to empathize with Katniss and only her – well, unless you’re a bloodthirsty teen in which case it’s the Careers for you. The Hunger Games seems too soft. Although both Katniss and Shinya did not rack up many kills, Shinya’s innocence is believable, where Katniss seems as hardened as a soldier who just came back from a war-torn tour. I have trouble really believing Katniss is that capable or that unaffected by the environment she was put in.

Is it a rip-off? I think so. The author claims she’s never heard of battle royale and she was inspired by flipping channels and saw reality tv and news on the Iraq war. that’s fine and all for inspiration, but she lacks too much in the writing (which could very well be her writing skill showing) to make me believe she was trying to show something poignant about reality tv, war, or other social norms we take for granted.

the good news? she isn’t going to give a crap because she’s raking in the dough from the movie and likely subsequent movies. but personally, I’d feel a little less satisfied knowing I’m being compared to Stephanie Meyer rather a good novelist. luckily she’ll have plenty of hundred dollar bills to dry those tears.

I realize I’m not the first to do this, but I did avoid reading other comparisons before writing my own. the first link below is a guy who put together a really well thought-out set of essays:

http://www.jonathanlack.com/2012/03/hunger-games-versus-battle-royale.html

and here are some other references for the similarities/controversy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games#Critical_reception

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/faq#.2.1.8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale#Hunger_Games_controversy

so what do you think? rip-off? or coincidence?

this familiar opening is the start of one of my favorite albums of all time, Sinatra at the Sands. I really like the Frank, Dean, Ella, Etta, era of music, but for me, this one is the best. Not only is it full of familiar songs done live, Sinatra has some ad lib dialog with the audience in addition to his two monologues. He introduces the amazing Count Basie orchestra and a certain audience member, Quincy Jones, as well. This album is set up to be one continuous show, where the audience applause starts at the end of one track and goes right into the next, making it as close to the live experience as we can get. I don’t think Sinatra is on a formal stage, because of the way he interacts with the audience, it definitely has more of a lounge-type of feel, which also makes this album unique.

After the quick introduction, Sinatra and the Count Basie orchestra go right into a classic, “Come Fly with Me”, which is not only upbeat, but also kind of hints for the audience to “come fly” with Sinatra. The beginning half of the album has the slower, swoon-ier, serenades like “I’ve Got a Crush on You”, “Street of Dreams”, and “One for my Baby” – which Sinatra describes as a “drunk song”.

“his broad flew the coop with another guy and all the bread”.

This set list picks up with “You Make me Feel So Young” and “Luck be a Lady”, but then oscillates between the calming, familiar haze of the slower “It was a Very Good Year” and the faster “Get me to the Church on Time”, ending with “My Kind of Town”. His banter with the audience and final reprise is a great example of Sinatra’s charm and sense of humor. Have a listen, you just might rediscover an old favorite.

“one more? that’s what I’ll be saying to the bartender”

The solution: use a coaxial cable, some chicken wire, a bit of aluminum foil, and a giant steel pot to fashion an antenna

this surprisingly worked really well – at first the chicken wire sort of did the job, but the addition of the giant steel pot made the antenna contraption work as well as an antenna you’d buy at the store. so when an episode of The Bachelor (sabrina…) is airing and you must see it, get some wire and a giant steel pot and you’ll be watching horrible reality tv in no time!

“Just went from six to midnight”

“andre the giant, out of the shot, please. mutumbo, out of the shot!”

“I bet you think strippers like you, too”

“you sound like you’re from london!”

if you aren’t at least laughing to yourself a little, you need to go see Forgetting Sarah Marshall again. this is easily one of my favorite movies mostly because I can pop it in and the stress just melts away. it stars Jason Segal as the songwriter who is broken up with (while naked) by his girlfriend played by Kristen Bell.

“came here to murder you”

He takes a vacation to Hawaii where it just so happens that Bell is there with her manstress (masculine of mistress?) played by Russell Brand. Hilarity ensues as Segal befriends some of the hotel staff and starts to fall for one of the hostesses played by Mila Kunis.

“oh the weather outside is weather”

As with other Segal movies, Paul Rudd and Jonah Hill make some great comic relief. Bill Hader of SNL fame and Jack McBrayer from 30 Rock just add to the comedic value.

“are those sad tissues, or happy tissues?”

I won’t spoil the end, but I thought it was awesome that the producers teamed up with the Jim Henson puppeteers to create a set of puppets for the play Segal writes in the movie – perhaps a precursor to the Muppets movie Segal co-wrote?

“I need to B my L on someone’s T’s”

anyway, watch it, love it, re-watch it. you won’t regret it.

A map? yes. a map. it’s an MTA subway map, which is always free, but what makes it awesome is that it is a map of the MTA Night Service. even the Village Voice agrees!

What makes this so special is that it is a limited edition map, only 25,000 are distributed. you had to get it at one of two distribution locations, so you can’t just pick it up anywhere. on the reverse side, it also has a big piece of art on it, making it not only highly functional for the new york city night crowd, but also quite beautiful. so good, in fact, it deserves to be framed!

if you were unable to get your hands on a copy, you can get your own pdf version here. but it might be a little costly to have it printed in all its map-ly glory.

what happens when you get 15 people in one house for one week to go snowboarding at Breckenridge? unfortunately, this is not a rant on cramming people into a house, there was no Real World-type drama, but rather an awesome awesome trip with a ton of new friends!

First you have to transport all the people and gear:

After settling in,

you get to riding!

you can even go on a (dangerous, don’t go without avvy gear) hike to find fresh powder with a friend

after a hard day of riding, you can relax with your choice of electronic distraction

or take in some snow sculptures

Breck was a ton of fun, I highly recommend it as one of the great places to go rent a house for a week and ride, ride, ride until your heart’s content. They have something for everyone including difficult bowls, small and large parks, and plenty of long trails across several peaks to satisfy your snowboarding needs. We did cheat a little, though – I was hiking out of some powder (ridiculously hard work) and was winded but recovered quickly thanks to a couple hits of canned oxygen. I underestimated how useful it was – but now I’m a believer.

The comment about the hike to find fresh powder is a real one. we made the mistake of going to the backcountry without proper avvy gear. this is a newbie no-no. you need to have two big things to go out there: proper equipment and knowledge of avalanche emergencies. we lucked out this time, but I’m going to look for avalanche courses and the proper equipment to be ready for the next backcountry experience – maybe even pick up skiing so I have an excuse to get one of those sweet split boards we saw in all the shops.

speaking of shops, I couldn’t post about Breck without a big compliment for the Underground Snowboard Shop. This place is a very unassuming shop located in the heart of Breck village and it is a gem. the guys who work there are very very knowledgeable about everything they sell and they are passionate about making each rider’s experience a great one. they are patient with complex boot fittings, generous with solid advice, and really easy to talk to – they didn’t push you to buy things and were surprisingly genuine. I went in to get my Boa boot laces un-kinked and they did that repair for free – and I ended up buying a bunch of stuff from them in return. if you’re in Breck and want/need some new gear, these guys will be able to tell you everything you need to know.

you can see more photos from the trip here.

this graph kind of summarizes the differences pretty well. It is interesting how the private sector puts a higher dollar value on higher education, where the government does not. this simple stacked bar graph seems to speak volumes to me.

I knew coming to work for the government, I would take a pay cut. I estimated it would be about 20%, and it looks like I wasn’t too far off. What really kind of bothers me is the left side of the graph – where you can infer that the government pays significantly higher for the same job in the private sector. This reinforces an old post on scared govvies, where you get low performers who may know how to work the system, and keep their relatively high paying job. These are precisely the people you don’t want working in the government – their poor work ethic and job-security-hubris does not help progress any part of any cabinet department’s mission.

This is why we have contractors. I’m sure at one time, contractors were an uncommon, if not rare, thing – where you have some remote government location that needs a specialty job done, a local contractor would go do it because it was cheaper than sending a federal worker out to that site and do the job, paying for their per diem, etc. Now, it seems contractors are almost as ubiquitous as the feds, if not more! And contractors aren’t cheap, either. Our current administration wants to decrease the use of contractors and keep federal work to feds – but I don’t see this as a short-term transition as several things get rolling first. I see it as (in no particular order):

- change government pay to be truly competitive to private (lower the left side of the graph, raise the right side of the graph). you have to make the pricing competitive enough where the private sector workers will really want to compete for the job.

- hire in bulk. If you have an opening for 2 workers in a department doing similar jobs, working in a similar area, or working under the same boss – hire 3 workers. This allows room to essentially fire the weakest link (which will hopefully lead to expedient filtering out the “bad” govvies)

- fire in bulk. or at least allow for better evaluation of management. a supervisor I know gave his employee an average performance evaluation, which pretty much excluded the employee from receiving a performance-based bonus. the employee, from what I could see, did not deserve an exceptional evaluation at all. The employee, instead of making an improvement plan and working harder for the next evaluation, decided to complain to HR and the main headquarters. now the supervisor and the employee have to go through a “hearing” and each side needs to present their case, which seems to go in the employee’s favor because it causes such a big headache for the supervisor (who isn’t a bad employee per se, but is in a crappy position)

- document. document. document. the example above could have been easily resolved if the supervisor documented his expectations from the employee and documented how the employee did or did not meet those expectations. for some reason, even in this electronic-centric world, I still get tons of requests and assignments over the phone. I always request they email it to me so I have a reminder (and a paper trail). this makes it so you can always refer to your email for communications if you get into a “he said, she said” situation. go away from the telephone, get on email, it’ll make things more productive overall

I’m sure there are tons more things to happen before we actually decrease the number of contractors the government uses, like adopting a more business-like mentality instead of the stereotypical government mentality. I think possibly the hardest change will be to adjust the pay scales without increasing total costs too much. you’ll have to make the govvies with less education take a pay cut to match market prices, presumably there are more less-educated govvies than more-educated govvies, and take that money and put it towards a more-educated govvie. This would help make the government pay look like the private side – and start to attract some of the private side workers.

This is definitely more complex a problem than I’m sure the cabinet-level management care to acknowledge. this is likely more complex than I can even imagine. The secretary of [cabinet dept here] likely doesn’t realize that the people at the top are likely motivated workers, then you get a smattering of good, ok, and bad supervisors throughout the middle management; and then you have an even wider array of great, good, ok, bad, worst workers on the ground. I’m sure there are tons of falsely positive (type 1 error anyone?) OPM records for employees who are probably bad employees, but just skate on by – or in the case of the worker example above, threaten their way up.

The silver lining? well, the good thing about a disjointed system is that there is a lot of room for improvement. thankfully, I’m in a position where I get to put a lot of simple but effective improvements in place that help improve efficiency and ease of use. this is partially because I’ve got a good supervisor who is open to these “new” ideas (I put the new in quotes because they aren’t new to most internet users) to apply to our aging system. there are a lot of improvements that can be made, and I’d like to think I’m contributing to making it better and, in the long term, making sure our tax dollars (in terms of misused time) isn’t wasted.

1. Abalone
2. Absinthe
3. Alligator
4. Baba Ghanoush
5. Bagel & Lox
6. Baklava
7. BBQ Ribs
8. Bellini

9. Birds Nest Soup
10. Biscuits & Gravy
11. Black Pudding
12. Black Truffle
13. Borscht
14. Calamari
15. Carp
16. Caviar
17. Cheese Fondue
18. Chicken & Waffles
19. Chicken Tikka Masala
20. Chile Relleno
21. Chitlins
22. Churros
23. Clam Chowder
24. Cognac
25. Crab Cakes
26. Crickets
27. Currywurst
28. Dandelion Wine
29. Dulce De Leche
30. Durian
31. Eel
32. Eggs Benedict
33. Fish Tacos
34. Foie Gras
35. Fresh Spring Rolls
36. Fried Catfish
37. Fried Green Tomatoes
38. Fried Plantain
39. Frito Pie
40. Frogs’ Legs
41. Fugu
42. Funnel Cake
43. Gazpacho
44. Goat
45. Goat’s Milk
46. Goulash
47. Gumbo
48. Haggis
49. Head Cheese
50. Heirloom Tomatoes
51. Honeycomb
52. Hostess Fruit Pie
53. Huevos Rancheros
54. Jerk Chicken
55. Kangaroo
56. Key Lime Pie
57. Kobe Beef (technically no, but I have had wagyu before)
58. Lassi
59. Lobster
60. Mimosa
61. Moon Pie
62. Morel Mushrooms
63. Nettle Tea
64. Octopus
65. Oxtail Soup
66. Paella
67. Paneer
68. Pastrami on Rye
69. Pavlova
70. Phaal
71. Philly Cheese Steak
72. Pho
73. Pineapple & Cottage Cheese
74. Pistachio Ice Cream
75. Po’ Boy
76. Pocky
77. Polenta
78. Prickly Pear
79. Rabbit Stew
80. Raw Oysters
81. Root Beer Float
82. S’mores
83. Sauerkraut
84. Sea Urchin
85. Shark
86. Snail
87. Snake
88. Soft Shell Crab
89. Som Tam
90. Spaetzle
91. Spam
92. Squirrel
93. Steak Tartare
94. Sweet Potato Fries
95. Sweetbreads
96. Tom Yum
97. Umeboshi
98. Venison
99. Wasabi Peas
100. Zucchini Flowers

So there are 18 foods I haven’t tried yet, not bad. I would definitley protest the Kobe beef one, because not many people can even get kobe beef – we now have a pretty decent supply of wagyu, which is commonly called Kobe even though it technically isn’t. basically this list sucks. if you’ve eaten at some decent ethnic places, you will have filled out a ton of this list. when I see a “100 foods to eat before you die” list, I want it to have exotic things that are unique or scary to eat. here is the start to my 100-foods list. we’ll see how far I can get:

1. wax apple
2. sugar apple
3. rocky mountain oysters
4. otoro tuna belly
5. skate wing
6. raw oysters
7. branzino
8. squid ink pasta
9. prickly pear
10. the “Elvis” peanut butter sandwich
11. whole steamed lobster
12. crabs of all kinds (alaskan, dungeonous, blue)
13. granita
14. a perfect baguette
15. sourdough bread
16. iberico ham
17. paella
18. nutella crepe
19. belgian waffle
20. schnitzel
21. high end ramen
22. umeboshi
23. sea urchin
24. taro/poi
25. roasted suckling pig
26. homemade marshmallows
27. foie gras
28. macarons
29. peking duck
30. beer can chicken

Now I’m sure there are other foods everyone needs to try, what are yours?

6 years ago, we visited Mont Tremblant in Quebec, CA on a spring break trip made for college kids. it was definitely an experience – we rode the 12+ hours in the Jack Daniels tour bus, the conditions were mostly wet, and we learned quickly that we were easily the oldest ones in the club/bar because the drinking age is 18 or 19. the above picture was taken at the maple shop, where they pour hot maple syrup over ice to help it crystallize and then it had the consistency of loose taffy.

fast forward to this year, and the conditions were more wintry, we had a car to properly visit Montreal, and our snowboarding skills have vastly improved. but we still couldn’t resist taking the throwback photo:

Mont Tremblant was a lot of fun, the trails were really long and mostly superwide, and even the glades were sufficiently challenging/impossible. it is still on my list of snowboarding favorites – but there are still tons of other places I need to ride – maybe Whistler?

6 years ago, my two friends and I went on a spring break trip to Mont Tremblant to snowboard for a week. there were a few things we learned really quick about this ski town located 2 hours outside Montreal: (1) ski town food is really expensive and (2) the Canadian drinking age is 18 or 19, so you have to be super careful (or reckless?) with who you talk to in the bars. this trip was a really fun trip, however it was really warm and it rained a bit – so the snowboarding wasn’t ideal, but still completely memorable.

Skip ahead to this season, and we are back in Tremblant. This time we decided to plan the trip ourselves and fly into Montreal to drive up to board. we arrived with a smartphone with addresses of places to eat we gathered from the past, starting with a pick from Andrew Zimmerman’s show. In true Montreal spirit, our first stop: Poutine at La Banquise

This place was regaled as the mecca for poutine, especially for the late night crowd. This place was no joke, their menu was packed with all kinds of poutine combinations to please any craving.

We settled on the Kamikaze, Trois Viandes, and the T-Rex. a glorious mountainous pile of fries, cheese curds, gravy, and tons of toppings.

Little did we know that this would only be the beginning of the poutine theme for the whole weekend. When we got to Tremblant, we were met with possibly the coldest conditions I’ve ever boarded in, something like -20 C as a low and in the single digits during the first two days.

From the top of the mountain, you could see for miles. Beautiful clear skies and trees completely covered in snow. You couldn’t ask for better conditions (save the temperatures).

The slopes are nice and super wide, and offer a wide variety of complexity for your most experienced boarders, and those just starting out. We stayed in the pedestrian village, which was really convenient to get to the slopes (about a 3 minute walk), however it was kind of uneventful for late night fun. There was untouched powder only in the trees, which ended up being an adventure all on its own. Since the last time we were there, a new casino popped up right on the south side of the slopes. dangerous? yes. fun? definitely.

I would absolutely love to go back to tremblant, it is one of the nicest resorts that give boarders and skiers a great experience with a european feel. I’m going to post more about Montreal later, that’s another story altogether!