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About This Author
I am SoCalScribe. This is my InkSpot.
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Blogocentric Formulations
Logocentric (adj). Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics).
Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, many taken from the following places:
Thanks for stopping by! 
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PROMPT: Have you ever taken a road trip? Give us your opinion on the "must see" city/cities to road trip to/from/through.
I've taken many, many road trips over the years. One of the nice things about being separated from your hometown by about 500 miles is that it's just close enough to make driving worth it when airfare is a little (or a lot) on the expensive side. So I've done road trips from Southern California to Northern California dozens and dozens of times. Even when I was living in Northern California, my friends and I would do a mini-road trip to San Francisco or the mountains for a day or overnight every now and then. I've always wanted to go on a much longer road trip... cross-country would be an amazing experience, I think.
There aren't really a lot of "must-see" cities in the central valley of California, but one of my favorite drives has been going up Highway 1 along the coast of California. It's an agonizingly slow drive, but it's simply gorgeous. Highway 1 (also called Pacific Coast Highway) is named for the fact that you can essentially drive from San Diego to Seattle right along the coast of the county, oftentimes literally in the sense that you're on a little winding highway with a sheer five-hundred foot drop into the ocean on your western side.  It's a stunning trip though, and there are so many small beach communities that are really a treat to stop and explore. Going from south to north, I'd highly recommend the following California beach towns: Laguna Beach, Malibu, Santa Barbara, Pismo Beach, Morro Bay, San Simeon, Carmel, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Half Moon Bay, and Mendocino.
The other road trip I used to take a lot as a kid was Northern California to western Montana. The crazy thing about that drive is that it's a two-day trip and it's such an indirect route that it's almost as many miles as driving two-thirds of the way across the country west-to-east.  I can't say that it's a particularly scenic route through Nevada... but the scenery in Montana is spectacular and it's always exciting to see the landscape start to change from desert to mountains to sprawling forests and lakes.
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PROMPT: Tell me about a popular actor/actress you simply cannot stand.
With the exception of animated movies (because, honestly, you can't really fault an actor's voice... and the KUNG FU PANDA movies are awesome), Jack Black has starred in exactly one movie that I thought was good (TROPIC THUNDER). Other than that, you have to go all the way back to his support roles in things like ENEMY OF THE STATE and THE JACKAL before you find a movie where I didn't find him completely intolerable. And honestly, I don't know what it is about him... I just don't think he's the slightest bit funny.
For me, Jack Black suffers from what I also like to call Will Ferrell Syndrome, which is when a comedic actor becomes really popular and then just resorts to doing his same schtick in a variety of different settings. With few exceptions a lot of Will Ferrell's movies are less about the movie itself and more about "Hey, it's Will Ferrell as a Nascar driver (TALLADEGA NIGHTS)!" or "Hey, it's Will Ferrell as a basketball player (SEMI-PRO)!" or "Hey, it's Will Ferrell as an ice skater (BLADES OF GLORY)!" And I think Jack Black is susceptible to the same phenomena where he's been cast as a certain type of comedian and for a long time they've just kept generating movie after movie to service his comedy, rather than having his comedy service a larger story. And hey, once that happened and they did start making his comedy play into a larger story, you get TROPIC THUNDER, and a movie I like again! 
A current example of this affliction would be Melissa McCarthy. I almost picked her today, but I'm still holding out some hope for her. She is a brilliant actress (she was great in THE GILMORE GIRLS and BRIDESMAIDS), but I thought THE HEAT and IDENTITY THIEF weren't great, and her new movie TAMMY looks like more of the same. It's just setting a camera up and recording her comedy routine in a variety of different settings. I think she's going to be great in story-driven and character-driven stuff like ST. VINCENT DE VAN NUYS, just like I think Jack Black is going to be good in a non-starring role like the one he has in the upcoming SEX TAPE... but for now, Melissa McCarthy (and more importantly, Jack Black) are on my list of actors I really can't stand right now.
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PROMPT: Artificial Intelligence: If a "robot" looks, acts, and thinks like a human, but was created not through "natural" processes, should it be considered part of humanity? Give us your thoughts about the future of Artificial Intelligence in science.
I guess for me it really depends on how "human" the artificial intelligence thinks/acts. If it has real feelings and emotions and creative thoughts and quirks, then I think it meets the definition of being human. Where I have a difficult time drawing the line and calling something human is when there's an aspect of the human experience that it cannot participate in. And, to be honest, I'm no scientist, but short of a significant and heretofore un-imagined breakthrough in science, I'm not sure whether an artificial intelligence is capable of the full range of human experiences. For example, would it ever know what it feels like to be insulted? Or would it be able to create an original and cohesive piece of music? Would it be able to empathize with someone who just lost a close friend or family member to cancer?
Artificial intelligence is capable of some truly amazing things, and I think that we're not far off from a point where it might - in many ways - be indistinguishable from humans to all outward appearances. But for me, the definition of humanity also has to include what's on the inside as well. So show me a robot that can genuinely feel emotions and exhibit spontaneous creativity and I might be inclined to include them in my definition of human. But as long as there's a distinction between how an artificial intelligence experiences the world and how we experience the world, I think we're two entirely separate things albeit with some similarities.
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PROMPT: Talk about the moment when a favorite show of yours jumped the shark.
It's difficult to identify a single episode where this series officially jumped the shark, but there were quite a few of them in the works over the years. Initially, it was a great concept; a covert operative is "burned" (identity revealed so he's useless to his agency) and he ends up stuck in Miami with no money, under observation, and unable to leave. So he sets about trying to find out who burned him - and also clear his name once he realizes he was framed for crimes he didn't commit - and get back into the field.
For the first couple of seasons, it was a really well done and interesting show where Michael (played by Jeffrey Donovan) and the few remaining friends he can scrape together end up solving a "problem of the week" in each episode while also making headway on the larger mystery of the series surrounding why Michael was burned. It turns out that a mysterious shadow organization burned him so they could blackmail him into working for them. And I'm totally with it up until this point. But in subsequent seasons, the show basically fell victim to always having another puppet master behind the puppet master. It seems like Carla is the one calling the shots, but then she's kill and nope, it's this guy Vaughn who's the real boss. A season later, Vaughn is dealt with and suddenly - surprise! - Vaughn was just a middle man and the real bad guy is someone new. I think, if I remember correctly, the show went through five or six of those "but wait, there's another guy!" reveals throughout the run of the show... and it definitely started to get old. I get that conspiracies always involve multiple layers and different individuals, but it started to get predictable to the point where as soon as one of these guys was vanquished, we're just waiting around for the teaser that will introduce the replacement bad guy higher up the bad guy corporate ladder.
I still think this is a brilliant show and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good spy show... but I definitely think it jumped the shark a couple of times during its seven-season run, and almost all of those moments involved revealing a newer, badder, more important component of the organization that burned Michael.
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