Weekly Rochester Events #334: Royal Island

Thursday, June 2, 2005

This week I've been maniacally busy. I took on too much and, while it's not quite too big a bite to chew, I'm gagging pretty badly. I need to finish things up and be ready to set up everything for the The Upper Mount Hope Neighborhood Association garage sale: over 50 households are having sales in my area this weekend, and I promised to put up signs and set up advertising. I'm also trying to get The Bike With 2 Brains painted in the next week to be ready for the ARTWalk (University Ave. from Atlantic to Merriman) Muse-A-Thon on June 11. I need to finish welding everything that needs to be welded, and while I still don't have a seat nor a windmill, I need to remember to add mounting points for them. Also, I'm trying to make enough time to put in some work on The Rochester Outdoor Museum of Art (ROMA) as well since I promised to do that too.

I did get out a bit ... on Saturday I made it to The Bug Jar (219 Monroe Ave.) to see the show there. I just caught the tail end of Baba Yaga but I got to see Stinking Lizaveta put on an excellent show — they do this chaotic culmination of rock-and-roll, and I got in my head that it had a Frank Zappa feel to it, yet I'm not familiar enough with Zappa to qualify it that way — given the state of journalism today, I feel free to make such a statement anyway. Next was Gaylord who did their great "A.D.D. rock," playing chunks of songs then switching to a tangentially related structure and back. Finishing off the night, Dixie Witch delivered their metal-edged power-rock-and-roll.

Then on Monday, I was off to The Little (240 East Ave.) to see the latest in the Emerging Filmmakers Series of New York State filmmakers. There were two spectacular films among them.

Where the Girls Are by Jennifer Arnold and Tricia Cooke was a great documentary on the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tournament formerly known as the Dinah Shore Weekend. In some senses, it's "spring break for lesbians." Women golfers (irrelevant of sexual preference) go to Palm Springs, Florida to play in the tournament, but it has become a haven for lesbians. I think the film gives both opponents and supporters of the surrogate culture fair time, but given my biases, the interviewees (primarily residents of Palm Springs) who are against homosexuality came off sounding like bigoted rubes.

The other film was Kill Your Darlings by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Maximilla Lukacs which is this spectacular treatise on love which explores romantic relationships from beginning to end. It starts from the basis that everyone has this idealistic view of what the perfect relationship is like, and then it goes on to compare that to reality. The film, according to the website, "draws in spirit and aesthetic from experimental silent films and the Czech New Wave."

Aside from that, I didn't have too much time to get to doing very much. However, I did find time to derive this simple formula for the betterment of the world:

It's "The Police Academy Equation" that converts an Internet Movie Database movie rating (from 1 to 10) into an estimate of the sequel to Police Academy that got that rating. See, I noticed long ago that each successive sequel to Police Academy is rated by users to be lower than the last.

As of May 31, 2005, the data in the Internet Movie Database concerning the Police Academy movies is as follows:

I was looking for a function to convert from a given IMDb rating to provide the Police Academy sequel number, and just looking at the data I figured it was some form of exponential function. I took a guess at a structure and punched in numbers until it looked right:

Graph of Police Academy sequels and their ratings

The key information about this approximation is as follows:

• Aside from Police Academy 6: City Under Siege (1989), all the resulting sequel numbers are within 8% of their true values and therefore round-off to the right sequel number.
• According to the estimation function, Police Academy 6: City Under Siege (1989) should have received a 2.5 but its rating is actually 2.8. 4,381 people not only admitted to seeing the film but actually rated it on Internet Movie Database. 8 out of 9 of the "Females under 18" provided a rating of 8 or better; the other one gave it a 4, and aside from that, it's unclear why the rating is unusually high. Steve Guttenberg may be a factor, but he left after Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987). Perhaps his spirit haunted Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach (1988).
• It is anticipated that "Police Academy 12.6" would get a perfect 1. "Police Academy 12" would get a 1.1.
• An input rating of 10 yields a sequel number of 0.047: "Police Academy 0" is a 10.
• Gigli, with a rating of 2.3, is equivalent to "Police Academy 6.6."
• Glitter, with a rating of 2.1, is equivalent to "Police Academy 7.4."
• 'Manos' the Hands of Fate, IMDb's "worst rated film" (with a rating of 1.6) is equivalent to "Police Academy 9.4."