Justin Cecil's Blog

The 2006 film "Eight Below" is a story based very loosely on real events, about a team of scientists living in Antarctica who, in an emergency, end up having to leave their dogs behind, and come back to rescue them. Overall it's a pretty good movie, filled with good characters, great cinematography, and moments that are oftentimes either thrilling or heartfelt (and of course there are the dogs, which let's be honest, is the main draw of the film). However, there is one thing that I'm baffled by every time I've seen this movie. Before the main characters end up having to leave their dogs behind in the cold, unforgiving wilderness of the South Pole, a scientist named Dr. Davis McClaren shows up in order to study a meteorite that has landed nearby. While settling into bed for the night at the Arctic base, one of the characters states that he's a cartographer. The intelligent scientist who has just travelled to the bottom of the world to study a meteorit...

I've been reading a lot of articles in the news lately about the gap between the rich, poor, and middle class. One thing I've noticed and thought about is the fact that if you're a multimillionaire or a billionaire, you can do stuff that, if you were poor or even homeless, would make you look insane; people will instead refer to you as eccentric. People will celebrate so-called eccentric behavior that a billionaire might do, that they would look down upon if a homeless person did it. Here's an example. The late Steve Jobs, despite his contributions to our modern world (although from my understanding Steve Wozniak was more of the actual computing genius while Jobs was much better at the business aspect, but I digress) an extremely eccentric person. He was not only a vegetarian, but ate strictly only certain types of fruits, which would make the average vegetarian do a double take. At least during his early years Jobs went about barefoot in the Apple offices (and at Ata...