Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and John Perich to overthink the rumored remake of Starship Troopers, the economics of babysitting, and the new world of digital publishing.
Get John Perich’s novel Too Close To Miss
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I find it slightly amusing that you guys talked extensively about babysitting but did not mention Jonah Hill’s upcoming comedic vehicle The Sitter in which he plays a babysitter. I also think it might be the last time we gaze upon the visage of Fat Jonah Hill in a new movie.
“Aliens! Bioduplications! Nude conspiracies! Oh my god, Lyndon LaRouche was right!”
Didn’t Vin Diesel make “Expendable Babysitter Club”? I think it was called “The Pacifist “.
I was thinking of _The Pacifier_ (of which I am mildly fond) while we were podcasting, but the aspect of there being a “club” of babysitters isn’t part of that movie. They have done the action hero babysitter, the buddy hero babysitters, but to my knowledge I haven’t seen the elite commando specialist squad of babysitters. It’s the next level of movie technology.
Question of the week: The thing I’d change is to actually have the writers/directors read the book first, and actually make a movie version of the book, instead of a bad b-movie starring Casper Van Dien’s Chin that has the same title as a completely unrelated book. :P
Um, _Starship Troopers_ cost $100 million to make. That is totally not a B movie. That is first-run money.
Whether you think it is well-done or any good is something we have to settle in the Thunderdome ;-)
Any movie with that chin it is is a b-movie. It might be a b-movie on an a-movie’s budget, but that just makes it all the more sad to me.
At the very least, English teachers everywhere can derive endless amusement from assigning Starship Troopers as reading, and then see exactly how many people thought they could just watch the movie instead of reading the book.
Definitely going to buy the book. Need a kindle first though. Will have to wait until after Satan, er…Santa delivers me one.
Ha! Faustian slip.
You can download the kindle app for the PC! If you have a PC.
Any chance ‘Too Close to Miss’ is coming out in book form? I know you said it’s a bit too short for commercial publishing, but I don’t have a Kindle, and don’t like reading books on a screen anyway.
(Don’t know how long 72K words is, but I bought a bunch of Raymond Chandler books recently and they’re most definitely much shorter than the average novel.)
At one point in the babysitters portion, you mention something like “sector D” labour or economy, undocumented, non-monetary labour like babysitting, raising your own vegetables, etc. What is the precise term, please?
This is also a request for more detailed show notes for those of us who want to look up things.
haven’t heard this name before either but this should be it
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/01/the-black-market-is-the-second-largest-economy-in-the-world/
We’d love to do more detailed show notes, but it would delay the posting of new episodes, which I think is more important…
The comment threads can be a good spot for this. We’re generally more than happy to provide sources – the trick is that our podcast usually wraps taping at around 11 pm on Sundays and still needs to be edited and uploaded, so there isn’t time to do it night-of.
I’ll try to add a few further reading links into podcast comment threads from here out – but they probably won’t appear until Monday.
By the way, the term is “System D,” I believe it is of French origin, and here is the Forbes article we talk about on the podcast:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/benzingainsights/2011/11/07/rise-of-the-shadow-economy-second-largest-economy-in-the-world/
I prolly missed the party, but I’m catching up slowly as I take breaks from final papers and crap. So forgive the non-timely nature of my few, silly comments here.
In Fed #17, Hamilton makes the argument that states have nothing to worry about because people have stronger feelings about what’s closer to them; so they’ll like their state governments and support/trust them more than a federal government. Just sayin’.
If you donate a dollar to the alumni association for wherever you graduated from and then don’t donate again, they’ll spend more on postage and paper mailing you stuff asking for more money within a year. Not that I’ve done it or anything.
As for babysitting v. daycare, this is just me speculating, but… the one-time cost may be more for babysitting than if you averaged out the wages of a professional daycare worker, but the monthly/annual fees for childcare may seem like too much for families to think it’s worth it to pay them. If a parent/ set of parents doesn’t feel they would need care for their kid(s) frequently enough to justify that regularly scheduled fee, they’ll fork out the cash when they sporadically need to go out without the kid(s). And perhaps yeah, they sometimes actually end up spending more that way, but it’s sort of like buying the cheaper brand that will eventually fall apart versus the fancier one of better quality- the up-front cost is too high, so taking what at least appears to be the cheaper option ends up, in the long run, costing more, because of the frequency with which the transaction gets made.
And don’t get me going on how daycare in this country is a regressive tax system, and how undervalued traditionally “women’s work” jobs, like care (child or elderly, nursing) and education (at the primary level) are. Much of the domestic labor done every day goes undervalued, if it even gets paid at all.
I used to play the cello, too, and I prefer a guy named Zuill Bailey over Yo-Yo Ma, especially his version of the ‘Bach Cello Suites.’ Call me a music snob, but I feel like there’s a bit more passion and emotion in Bailey’s performances than in Ma’s. And I like that.
(You made a pun, Mark. “Well played.” At the end of the music discussion, with regards to Fenzel’s clever segue. Nice.)
Perich, at least you’re gentler than the character Jack Nicholson played in As Good as it Gets in your approach to writing females. I was waiting for that to come up as a joke from somebody.