OF A GOLDEN AGE

A.O. Scott’s movie reviews for the Times are entertaining even when I couldn’t care less about the movie:

Remember “His Girl Friday”? “Bringing Up Baby”? “Holiday”? (If not, it’s never too late.) “The Bounty Hunter,” with its whirligig plot and incessant squabbling, shows some genetic connection to those sparklingly silly battles of the sexes. But it is also the latest evidence that, when it comes to romantic combat, we live in a more coddled, a less insouciant and also a more thoughtlessly brutal age than our ancestors did.

Some enchanted evening
Someone may be laughing,
You may hear her laughing
Across a crowded room

The girl in “Some Enchanted Evening” may as well be me, because I am virtually always the loudest laugher.

Until a certain age I laughed quietly, and also never smiled with my teeth showing, because adolescence is a mental illness whose logic does not hold up to scrutiny. But things change, and in my case for the better, as related on last weekend’s Car Talk:

While exact caloric expenditure is not yet known, it is thought that 100 good laughs equals some of the physiological benefits of 10 minutes on a rowing machine, even though it doesn’t boost aerobic fitness.

I cannot praise Chris Jones’s deep, magnificent profile of Roger Ebert (in the new Esquire) enough. It moved me in every familiar way and some I never expected. Ebert’s passion for his life’s work shows in every detail:

Ebert scribbles constantly, his pen digging into page after page, and then he tears the pages out of his notebook and drops them to the floor around him. Maybe twenty or thirty times, the sound of paper being torn from a spiral rises from the aisle seat in the last row.

Jones also cleanses the palate of the notion that Ebert has gone soft in his reviews — Yes, he assigns higher ratings to more movies, but Ebert has explained that he judges movies based on what they’re aiming for, not where they fall in an objective continuum of all moviekind. Jones also makes it clear that Ebert’s changing life of surgeries, illness, and steely resolve has effected if not his taste then his attitude. As in all cases, I support people’s publicly changing opinions as their circumstances change, and I appreciate without bounds anyone who is willing to admit a change of heart.

I thought the Jones piece was the end of it, and then Ebert wrote an equally magnificent response. He is more gracious than can really be believed and it is a suitable end to the story Jones began.

I realized recently that we had a little turf war between my childhood home and my best friend’s house across the street. We had a Nintendo and he had a Sega Genesis: On my side of the street was a neverending carousel of Excitebike and Super Mario Bros. and when I crossed over it was strictly Sonic the Hedgehog.

(Of course, Nintendo brought them all together in the new Super Smash Bros. Brawl. +1 cooperation!)

My brand allegiance to Mario goes way back. Even today, when I look through the NES catalog, the only games I can even play for more than a couple of minutes are the Super Marios — they’ve aged well because of strong pacing, clear design, and easy controls. My friend Nathan lured me into the treacherous world of RPGs starting with Super Paper Mario, a delightful platformer-RPG hybrid that was the beginning of the end for me. Even in elementary school, a frend’s Super Nintendo, and Super Mario World, kept our friendship alive longer than it had any business doing. And we all know my feelings about Mario Kart.

But when he got and played through Super Mario Galaxy, the latest incarnation of 3-D games starting with Mario 64, all it did was give me vertigo. The answer for old-fashioned schmoes like me is New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a classic 2-D side-scrolling platformer enhanced with the more powerful graphics and capabilities of the Wii. New features include some Wii-catered controls:

• Platforms which tilt based on your controller’s positioning
• Bonus round in which you aim and shoot a cannon with your controller
• Several applications for which you shake the controller

Sometimes the two means of control interfere with each other. Holding the controller at an angle while doing other things with the buttons is confusing even at its easiest, and I don’t play video games to test the limits of my hand flexibility or prehensile strength.

Another good and bad addition to the game is the expanded multiplayer mode. Instead of alternating turns between Mario and Luigi, or choosing one of four playable characters in the Surrealist weirdoworld of Super Mario Bros. 2, New Super Mario gives you multiple characters on-screen at once. Not only that, they interact with each other and present new possibilities for multiplayer moves. Also, if you’re like me and you’re the weak link, a more dominant player can sort of carry you in a bubble through difficult parts and bring you back afterward. Yeah! Loopholes to avoid failure!

I have triumphantly weaseled my way through almost the whole game without help, and with only a medium amount of infuriation and controller-hucking because of my own ineptitude. The game is wonderful and challenging and gets moreso in bursts: Some levels in the earlier worlds were incredibly difficult for me, and some levels in later worlds seemed bizarrely easy, but overall the play gets tougher as you move forward. There are a few levels that stood out to me as nonsensically difficult, and I’m sure there will be more to come as I finish world 8 and attempt world 9.

To that end, the game builds in a new feature: the Super Guide. If you lose 8 guys while attempting one level, an alert box appears and offers to show you an example video of Luigi completing the level. I didn’t ever use this, although it appeared in at least half a dozen levels because I am not particularly gifted at video games. If you choose the Super Guide and watch through to the end, you are given an option to skip the level completely, which some purists (code for “able-fingered meritocratists”) criticize as a dumbing-down of the franchise.

Well. Those people should know by now that without some kind of safety net, people like me would simply have a nerdy friend over, pass the controller, and say, “Beat this for me.”

The New York Times reported that Kim Peek died of a heart attack a week before Christmas. Peek was a savant of nigh unprecedented abilities and the inspiration for Raymond Babbitt in the movie Rain Man:

Mr. Peek had memorized so many Shakespearean plays and musical compositions and was such a stickler for accuracy, his father said, that they had to stop attending performances because he would stand up and correct the actors or the musicians.

“He’d stand up and say: ‘Wait a minute! The trombone is two notes off,’ ” Fran Peek said.

(This is, I think, how my friends imagine I feel when I see typos or grammar errors. They’re wrong, by the way.)

The article is a lovely tribute, and the contrasts in Peek’s mental state — brilliant in some ways, completely incapable in others — create moments of dark humor:

When Kim was 6, another doctor recommended a lobotomy. By then, however, Kim had read and memorized the first eight volumes of a set of family encyclopedias, his father said.

Rain Man is one of my family’s favorite movies, something from which we quote incessantly. Raymond — the character inspired by Peek — communicates almost entirely through nonverbals, and Tom Cruise’s character must learn to read between lines that aren’t present. He undergoes a now-classic Cruise transformation from crass to humbled, from uncaring to involved.

When the economy flounders and so many talented people find themselves out of work or underemployed, I think it can be tempting to lament that we aren’t all a certain way or haven’t followed a certain path. I love Kim Peek’s story because he spent most of his adult life giving presentations and making public appearances, helping to shore up the self-perceptions and confidence of other adults who faced challenging mental circumstances.

With great brain power comes great responsibility, usually at the sacrifice of some other part of one’s life or personality: our most beloved artists, scientists, and any of those who make important waves for humankind have discovered this firsthand.

As I flipped through my Google Reader this morning, an alarming trend stood out.

• XKCD gets us started, bringing to mind the Simpsons where Bart accidentally goes to smart kid school. When asked to give an example of a paradox, Bart says, “You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.”

• Goldblog cites an astonishing editorial from Garrison Keillor that wrecks my warm opinion of the man:

If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”?

Really, Keillor? Pulling out the ol’ red herring of cultural elitism? Get bent.

• design mind took a different approach. Does Gordon Ramsay threaten to undo his small jerk empire by acting personable in a new show? I agree with the author that it might:

Gordon, stick with what you do best, before you set your brand back a decade. Go back to being an f-bomb dropping a-hole. Please.

Is this what the holidays are for? Abrupt nonsensical role reversal? Jerks run amok?

Obama heavyweight and hometown hero David Axelrod made a funny as a guest on George Stephanopoulos’s first episode of Good Morning America:

[Stephanopoulos] questioned Mr. Axelrod about the health care bill; the president’s plans to badger “fat cat” bankers about bonuses; and the economy. Mr. Axelrod presented him with an alarm clock permanently set to 3:30 a.m., a gift from, as he put it, “your friends in the White House.”

And apparently something’s rotten in the state of cohost rapport between Stephanopoulos and Robin Roberts:

After noting that surveys suggest that women view Mr. Woods less favorably than men do, the new anchor said dryly, “Well that’s a shocker, huh?”

Ms. Roberts, using a “Romper Room” tone that suggested that she didn’t realize he was kidding, replied, “We’re learning something new every day.”

With a name like Robin Roberts, I can see why this person may lack a sense of humor.

Five games I didn’t love at first:
1. Mario RPG
2. Street Fighter
3. Super Smash Melee
4. Sonic the Hedgehog
5. Chrono Trigger

After several hours of too-slow plot play and several months of bored hiatus, I returned to Chrono Trigger and it finally won my sustained attention. I still don’t love that there’s no separate battle screen (stupid Final Fantasy games, ruining me for everything else) but I do love the music, the graphics, and the entire conceit of the game.

This weekend I watched a sixth grader play this insane-looking game Nazi Zombies (no, really) and the graphics were so real it kind of made me sick — I don’t want to see some real character’s head get blown off, or some real character without legs dragging around on his elbows. It reinforced that I am an eight-bit girl when it comes to my favorite games, and I will play Super Nintendo games indefinitely. Nathan thinks it has the best games of any console to date, and I agree.

Five games I ended up not loving:
1. Super Smash Brawl
2. Final Fantasy VIII
3. Super Mario Galaxy
4. Final Fantasy X
5. Super Mario Bros 2

Five games I loved immediately:
1. Final Fantasy VI, VII, IX
2. Paper Mario 1, 2, 3
3. Super Mario Bros 1, 3, and World
4. Mario Kart Double Dash
5. Katamari Damacy

Reading Cary Tennis’s column Since You Asked makes me happy, always. He is fighting cancer right now and this lends additional pathos to his writing, but he is always provocative and thoughtful. A few years ago a reader asked for any advice Cary might have on dealing with a death in the close family and Cary began:

You know, considering all that our poets have said about death, I do not feel all that eloquent either. What small observations I might add are like little scraps of paper on a heap of gold.

I have long believed in little scraps of paper!

Not only did the Swiss-housed Large Hadron Collider break a record set by Chicagoland’s own Fermi Lab for proton acceleration.

The Swiss also voted to ban the construction of minarets, a recognizable symbol of Islam similar to the steeple for Christian churches but with added religious significance.

Advancing in costly abstract molecular technology? Restricting freedoms of specific minority groups?

GET OFF OF OUR CLOUD, SWITZERLAND.