Defining Bureaucracy

To all who follow this blog - and I know there really aren't that many - this post refers back to my accident in my 5-Series BMW in January of 2006. Today I think I have found a very good definition of a bureaucratic nightmare. I received in the mail a copy of the accident report from January 2006, from the Port Authority of New York, along with my uncashed check for $10. The report is dates 01/27/06, Two Years, Seven Months and 3 Days ago. I am quite curious as to the person who sent it, it makes you wonder - did they pull it out of some file, look at it and send it, or did they just send it. In fact I no longer even have the car, having ditched it for a 2006 C280.

Long awaited catch up post + Stupid Scary Movies

Well it has been quite a while since any posts on my behalf. Quite a lot has happened in the past year, I switched jobs – I now work for Deloitte & Touche, having made the switch last summer. I still focus my efforts on Security & Privacy, although I have made the switch to spending more of my time focused on privacy related items, more so than security. On the family side there has been a lot of transition. My older daughter Kristie graduated cum laude from Rutgers with a double major in Spanish and French and is right now getting ready to start her Teach for America assignment in Brownsville TX. Rhoda and Kristie spent 3 days driving from NJ to Brownsville and she spent 6 weeks training for the program. She’s about to start teaching 5th grade elementary school. She is qualified as bilingual and has already met some of her students and their parents in preparation for the new school year. Younger daughter Kellie has taken up pole-vaulting in addition to her gymnastics – she lettered in both sports last year. We found a pole-vaulting club not too far from our house and she has been going quite regularly during the summer. The school year is about to start, so she will focus more of her time on gymnastics rather than pole-vaulting. She is now a junior in high school and is starting to look into colleges. She is interested in math and science so I am hopeful that with her grades which are quite good, and her athletics she can obtain some scholarship funding. I’ve started what’s called a micro-blog to allow me to make casual observations on the universe. I have a few folks there that I follow. To know what’s happening at the moment take a look there.

On to the meat of the post for today – Stupid Scary Movies. As I mentioned above my younger daughter is now a junior in high school. Over the course of the summer we have rented a few movies, some good, some mediocre, some bad. Three scary movies we watched were: Vacancy, Untraceable, and Prom Night. Each of these scary movies had various degrees of stupidity involved with their characters and story lines. For those who have not seen these movies and want to, you may want to not continue as I’m confident this will spoil some of the movie for you. The above list was listed in order of stupidity. I’m not too good with character names, so this may be a bit vague, but the stupidity will ring true.

Vacancy – overall this movie was good, there was a lot of suspense. Towards the end the stupidity involved the couple finally making contact with the police and them sending an officer to investigate the situation. He ultimately manages to get himself killed, and therefore obviously doesn’t check back in with HQ. This should have been a sign that perhaps something was amiss. However, no additional resources are sent for further investigations. As the movie closes they once again call the police, to which dispatch responds: “We sent someone there last night”. Interestingly they didn’t find it odd that he never returned, called, or in any other manner checked in to say everything was ok.

Untraceable – again overall I would rate this good, there was an interesting plot, and the concept of using the Internet viewership to kill people was dramatic. Now for the stupidity – and there is quite a lot of it. After the first two people are killed the FBI is unintentionally portrayed as quite unable to conduct an investigation. The first two men worked together. Clearly the lines of investigation should have centered on looking into the things they worked on together – and they should have had a much earlier line into the killer. Then we get to the FBI agent being snatched. I think a base quality of an FBI agent is ‘not an idiot’ – the way in which he is lured to his eventual death is a bit hokey. Also, foreshadowing of the blinking Morse code was lame. The ending became quite stupid on a few levels. First Diane Lane’s character – somehow ends up in a deserted part of town, don’t quite remember how this happened. Her car, cell phone and all other electronics cease to work. After doing some amount of wandering around the bridge, using the emergency phone, and such she decides – ah well look my car’s lights are back on – I bet I can just go get in my car and everything will be fine. Needless to say the killer is there and snatches her in a setup for the ending. In the lead up to her being snatched her friend / boyfriend is the only police / FBI in the area and he must spend untold minutes racing in vain to try to help her. Really seems as though there should have been someone else close that could have responded to help her.

Prom Night – we just watched this one last night. I would give this a mediocre. The suspense was good, and there were a few good shocks as doors and closets were closed and mirrors revealed surprisingly scary things again and again. The movie was right to the action with several killings in the opening scene, which had stupidity to spare – wherein the girl comes home to her house and she never realizes that her father is laying in front of the television with his skull bashed in. Fast forward three or so years and it is as the title claims – Prom Night. Once things move to the prom the stupidity really starts. The killer manages to convince a cleaning lady to let him into his room because his card is damaged. I would hope that the hotel workers are instructed to not randomly let people into rooms with damaged keys. Also – on the “this guy just looks wrong to be here” factor – he rates a ten. Wearing a baseball cap, sport-coat and jeans, unshaven and continuously hiding his face. She gets killed and he has her master key for easy access to kill at will. Back at police HQ they learn of his escape from “maximum security mental institution” which should, I would think, be a bit more difficult to escape from and not have a suspended ceiling in a jail cell, to climb up and out of. The detective in charge heads to the prom to watch over things. A girl who has been waiting to be crowned prom queen all night decides to leave 5 minutes before crowning to be with her boyfriend in the hotel room. She bumps into the killer on the elevator, he returns and kills her after a lengthy chase involving quite a lot of clumsiness, tripping, slipping, clunking and falling. Ultimately they learn the killer is checked in, and decide to evacuate the hotel. He does this by pulling the fire alarm and having everyone exit. Off scale high on the stupid-o-meter – the target of the killer – shows up with alarms blaring and voices announcing “Alert, you must exit” and states rather flatly: “I left my mother’s shawl in the room, I need to go get it”. She states this a few times – lest we miss it – and proceeds to return opposite the flow of the masses up to the room to find her shawl. Several stupid things happen and the killer doesn’t get her. The police then conduct a floor-to-floor search and don’t find the killer because alas he has killed a bell-hop, stolen his clothes and quietly left. The main target has now returned home. One detective and one uniformed officer are “on watch” at the house where they are sure the killer will return. Rather than posting a dozen or more cops, which being a big-city should have been an easy task. Just as in Untraceable, we are treated to the one key detective racing to save the day – rather than using the resources of the department to secure the location. After a stupid dream sequence, which replays almost exactly in real-life involving a remarkable amount of stupidity of getting a drink of water, taking a pill and having the killer appear in the mirror when the medicine cabinet is closed. The killer kills the boyfriend, snatches the girl and pulls her into the closet. Just as the detective is about to reach into the closet, someone screams and he runs to check out what happened 30 feet away. She then elbows the killer and begins to scream and run away – oops some tripping ensues to make it more dramatic, and the detective 30 feet away doesn’t respond for a full two minutes entering just in time to shoot the killer once, twice, maybe three times. He falls dead and the detective states: “Its ok”, well it clearly isn’t – three of her close friends are dead, her boyfriend is laying on the bed five feet away dead, but well – she’s alive so I guess it is OK.