Inflation (Again)

Inflation has been in the news lately... again. I say "again" because it popped up as a news item about 4 months ago when Social Security announced a benefits increase of 5.9% after the Department of Labor announced a 5.4% increase in the consumer price index (CPI) over the previous 12 months. Since then I'm not sure inflation actually ever went away as a news item. It certainly hasn't gone away as a fact of life most consumers are noticing every day.

If anything inflation has gotten worse in the past few months. News from last week showed the CPI increased 7.5% in January versus one year earlier (CNN article, 10 Feb 2022). This has led to a lot of wailing, gnashing of teeth, and political finger-point for blame, as the 7.5% annual inflation rate is higher than the US has measured in 40 years.



There are a lot of things I could say about this, ranging from my recollection of what high inflation in the 70s and early 80s was like (I was a kid at the time but remember the high rates), to my opinion about what's causing this spike, to how long I think it will last, to what its impacts are on consumers. For now I'm just going to talk about the latter, impacts on consumers; particularly first-hand impacts.

As I wrote back in October, inflation isn't hitting me too hard. Yet. My biggest monthly expenses, the mortgage and a car payment, are fixed. The costs of other things are going up, but fortunately they're not a huge part of my budget. That said, the way prices of everyday items are going up is noticeable.

I've observed these grocery items getting more expensive over the past 12 months:

• Chicken, up 50%
• Steak, up 30-40%
• Ground beef, up 10-20%
• Cheese, up 20%
• Sodas, up 15-20%

These are informal figures based on doing most of the grocery shopping for my household and being in different stores 3-4 times a week.

It's interesting how these increases I'm seeing in basic grocery items are way higher than the CPI figure. That's one common criticism of the CPI— that it understates the amount of inflation on basic necessities and thus underestimates the impact of inflation on poorer people who spent a large fraction of their income on such things.

The Poorly Writen Book of Boba Fett (S1E7)

Goddammit. I do not want to write this blog. I have been putting off this blog entry for over a week. But now I am making myself do the distasteful task of writing it to get it off my backlog. What's so wrong? We watched the season 1 finale of The Book of Boba Fett last week. In a word, it sucked.

What sucked about it was the poor writing. And when I say "poor writing" I mean crummy, downright amateurish writing.

It was obvious all season that writing was not this team's strong suit. The first 3 episodes jumped back and forth between 2 narratives, Boba Fett's time among the Tuskens recovering from his ignominious supposed death in the original movie trilogy, and the present day when he sets himself up as a warlord on Tatooine. Just about the time the Tusken story started to really pull together, it was over. The Tuskens were dead. And just as the present-day story sorta began to come together in episode 4 the writers switched over to writing about Din Djarin "The Mandalorian" in episodes 5 and 6. Boba Fett appeared in all of, like, one scene, with throwaway dialogue, in his own titular show.

Then the writers dropped a complete turd of poor writing in the form of episode 7.

Early in the episode we're treated to clunky exposition from various characters. It's clunky because it's so obvious... as is the "irony" that part of what they say in their exposition is immediately shown to be inaccurate as another character comes bursting through the door with contradictory news. It's like, "Hello, stupid TV tropes!" Seriously, do the writers think this is the 1950s, when audiences are buying TVs for the first time and only have 3 networks of programming to choose from? These jokes are decades past their sell-by dates for still being funny.

Then there's the other 2/3 of the episode. Oh. Em. Gee.
( Episode 7 spoilers... )

The answer to all these rhetorical questions I've raised is "Because weak writing". All the stuff that didn't make any logical sense within the parameters of the story happened when it did because it made emotional sense. The writers knew how long the episode needed to be, what scenes they wanted to have in it, and just wrote whatever nonsense was necessary to string it all together to fill the allotted time.

Space-Horse Opera

In the past I've characterized The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett as Space Westerns. This is a fine category to be in. Westerns and Scifi are known and respected genres. Space Western is the crossover between them. The Mandalorian was an excellent Space Western. Firefly years ago was an excellent Space Western.

With this final episode the series degenerated to a Space-Horse Opera. That's a combination of Space Opera and Horse Opera. Neither of those are good categories. Both disparagingly indicate that the writers give up a core component of the other genres— their gritty realism within the norms of historical or sci-fi settings— and replace it with nonsense devices and plot holes to achieve cheap emotional plays.

Moreover, this series fails in virtually any category because it doesn't develop sympathetic main characters.

Writing 101: Characters Matter

It's taught in Writing 101 that a story can be about three things: the Setting, the Plot, and the Characters. Of these, Setting is the hardest; it requires strong Plot to develop meaningfully. Plot can carry a story for a while, but to be truly engaging and to rise above simplistic themes like "shoot-'em-up"... or "porn"... it's got to have interesting Characters. Thus to be good, stories have got to develop characters the audience cares about.

Within the range of character development there are two basic arcs. A) a character overcomes long odds through skill and determination. B) a character grows emotionally. In both cases the character has to be sympathetic. (A) has to have more redeeming qualities than the foe or challenge s/he overcomes, otherwise the audience won't care. (B) can start out rough but develops appealing qualities. The Mandalorian did both A and B. On the surface each episode had an Arc A; the whole season had a long-running Arc B. Arc B is what made it a good story.

I warned in TBoBF episode 1 that the series was failing to make its characters compelling. It only started to achieve that for the title character in episode 4— right before it made him irrelevant for episodes 5-6 and frankly an idiot in episode 7. And in Fennec Shand, portrayed by the otherwise capable actress Ming-na Wen, there was pretty much nothing but wasted potential. Ultimately the series failed with characterization. The main characters never became appealing people, and the little the was accomplished with showing them overcoming challenges was undone by the ridiculously lame plot devices in the finale.