Cunnel Quaritch

Heap Big Numbnuts

Just so we're on the same page, I'm referring to the character, not the actor. I don't know if this will be Stephen Lang's favorite role when he gets around to making a final summing-up of his career, but he, Stephen Lang, was certainly good in this role.

Cunnel Quaritch, on the other hand, is a complete numbnuts.

Proposition 1: The Navi have a single target they must defend. It's not just a high-value target, it's a maximum-value target.

Proposition 2: The Navi have no means of defending said maximum-value target from orbital bombardment.

Proposition 3: Cunnel Quaritch has at his disposal a groovy VTOL shuttle that is capable of not just exo-atmospheric flight, but actual orbital operations.

Proposition 4: Dropping a suitably large inert mass (say, a bulldozer) on the maximum-value target from orbit may not destroy it the first time around, but if you repeat it about 20 or 30 times, the job can eventually be considered done.

Proposition 5: There's more than enough cheddar in the ground to pay for all of this.

So what does Quaritch do?

Well, I guess it wouldn't be much of a movie if they did it the the way I think they should have. It would be more like the closing scenes of Metaluna in the movie This Island Earth, with those doggone Zagon meteors smashing everything flat, and we'd have to listen to Barber's Adagio for Strings as the Navi come to the belated understanding that sometimes even the fanciest flying dragon is no match for a seventy-ton bulldozer traveling at oh, say, 20,000 miles per hour. Physics be physics, man, whether you're flying the Hero Dragon or not.

My point is that once Quaritch and The Company (was it Weyland-Yutani, as in Aliens?) had decided that matters had degenerated into a "shit-fight", Quaritch made one serious operational blunder after another.

German generals made a sort of second career after World War Two at blaming everything on Hitler. It was Hitler's fault the British Army got away at Dunkirk. It was Hitler's fault the Luftwaffe was unable to subdue the RAF. It was Hitler's fault that the Red Army handed them their hats at Stalingrad. It was Hitler's fault that nobody could come up with a good answer to the USAAF and RAF bomber offensives. It was Hitler's fault the cream of the German Army got plowed into the topsoil at Kursk. It was Hitler's fault that German radar research was so bad they never realized that the British were using high-frequency centimetric radar against German U-boats. Of course, this wasn't all Hitler's fault, but when you've got an opportunity to offload blame on someone that nobody will stand up for and defend, you take it. (If I were Iraqi, for example, I'd blame my fallen arches on Saddam Hussein, and who would argue otherwise?)

But in the case of Avatar, Quaritch owns all the command mistakes.

People occasionally accuse me of siding with the Company in the movie. That's not necessarily true - my own feelings on the matter are complex, but somewhere in amongst them is the understanding that the Company could give me electricity and the Navi could not, and that's a pretty powerful argument in favor of collaboration. But in any event, my real point is that contrary to the "life lessons" people think they've taken away from the movie, naturalistic spiritual harmony counts for exactly squat in the face of extremely high kinetic energies.

There You Have It

Figure 1: Sports Fan

Figure 2: Star Trek Fans

I trust that no further commentary from me is necessary.

By Grabthar's Hammer

The forgotten (well, not so forgotten) classic, Galaxyquest. One thing I have to say for Star Trek fans is that, on top of being generally amiable and peaceable sorts, they're good sports. Galaxyquest spoofs the whole Trek "thing" fairly relentlessly, yet Trek fans (of which I am one) roll with it. Maybe we even see a little of ourselves in the movie, though in my case I'm more like the kid building the model than any of the actors (my sole acting experience involves being a Russian second lieutenant who takes a lead pill and collapses sideways into a bush - slim pickings as an acting resume).

Be it known, however, that a model of the NSEA Protector is now available, many years after its due time. But I hear that it's made out of ABS plastic or something of that ilk, not good old fashioned styrene. What up with that?

Week Off

I've been off for a week. The whole plant closed for a week - a "furlough", they called it, but it amounts to everyone being laid off for a week. Which is fine, I guess; I had plenty of advance warning and saved money for the unpaid week.

And in truth it was nice to have a week off. Now that I feel pretty good (for the first time in a few years) it's nice to get around to fixing all the things I'd been sort of neglecting. The lawn tractor wouldn't start. The big tractor had a flat tire. The garage was full of junk that needed to be sorted through and, for the most part, chucked. I had shelves to build, a barbecue to fix, rubber mats to move around. The essence of the matter is that for the first time in about three years I feel "normal", whatever that means, and it's such a hoot to do things again.

It's so much fun I actually manage to forget for days in a row that I had cancer, and may still have it. The thing that keeps reminding me of the real situation is my PET scan, scheduled for Wednesday. I'll be having PET scans for a long time to come, and I have no reason to believe that they'll actually find anything, but I still kind of tighten up at the thought. The worst stress is when I'm waiting for the results. The test itself is next to painless and I almost always fall asleep inside the machine, but the week-plus of waiting for the results isn't always a lot of fun.

But, I have no reason to believe I have cancer. No lumps, no bumps, no weird B-symptoms, no unexplained pain, no sudden fatigue. If anything, I keep feeling better, not worse. So I'm hopeful. I feel good enough, actually, that I think it's time to start thinking seriously about some kind of exercise program. I think I've regained all the strength and energy I'm ever going to by pursuing daily activities, and now it's time to move up to the next level.

I believe I'll start with a single 12-ounce curl, and see how that goes.

Had This Been An Actual Post...

Had this been an actual post, it would have contained something of merit. I'm really just testing the "tag" feature to see if I feel like sticking with it over time.

Three SF Horror Movies

Here are three science fiction/horror movies that I happen to like. Not the only three, by any means, but just three, picked more or less at random.

Pandorum

I've seen this movie a few times, and I'm still not entirely sure I know what it's about. The short version is that a bunch of humans are dispatched to a habitable planet in hibernation aboard a starship that looks like a bunch of Hula-Hoops. Things proceed downhill from there. There's racial degeneration, paranoia, blatant insanity, cannibalism, amnesia and no end of technical difficulties. It's dark. It's grim. It's frankly kinda confusing. It's gory. But it's atmospheric as the dickens, has more plot twists than a whole year of X-Man comics, and Antje Traue is no hardship to look at either (see above).

John Carpenter's The Thing

Scientists and various hangers-on at an Antarctic base sally forth to explore something they found buried under several thousand years of ice, and things go very badly indeed. It's a pretty good adaptation of Campbell's famous story Who Goes There? Better than the movie with James Arness was, anyway. It's way graphic and way gory, and the startling thing is that the effects were achieved practically, for the most part; there's no CG in the movie at all (other than a by today's standards laughable animation of alien cells taking over human cells) and I don't recall seeing any stop-motion work. I like the writing and acting (Kurt Russell - see above, regarding a frozen Norwegian - and Keith David in particular), and the spider-head alone is worth the price of a rental. But it's nihilistic in the end (if none of your actions matter, why bother to do anything at all?) and even I, a fairly seasoned horror movie watcher, am occasionally undone by the sheer grossness of it all.

Event Horizon

The spacecraft Event Horizon goes out to test a new kind of gravity propulsion system. It's supposed to open gateways to various other locales in our universe, but it opens what amounts to a portal to Hell. When it returns, it comes back with more aboard it than when it left, if you get my drift. It's easy to dismiss as a cross between Alien and Hellraiser, and the last third of the movie suffers; it stops being weird and turns into just another hero-versus-monster movie, and not a particularly good one at that. But when it's being weird and atmospheric, it's tastily weird and atmospheric. Event Horizon is like a bag of Cheetos - it isn't very good for me, and it leaves a residue that can only be removed with athletic hand-scrubbing, but I still indulge from time to time.

Four SF Movies

Four of my favorite science fiction movies, presented in no particular order and with no particular rhyme or reason.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

This was a surprisingly faithful retelling of the famous novel, though with certain exceptions, such as the fact that Friday apparently hails from Alpha Centauri and I personally do not recall slavers in manta-ray ships cruising around in the novel. I mostly remember the rather dramatic backgrounds (matte paintings, but good ones) and the sense of menace when the alien slavers in their ships (which look like recycled War of the Worlds props) appear in the black sky. The matte paintings and the locations give Mars a certain scale and presence that I quite like. Some detect in it the malign hand of European imperialism, but come on, sometimes an SF movie is just an SF movie.

2001: A Space Odyssey

My dad hated this movie. Hated it. From the moment we first watched it on a hot summer night at a drive-in theater he hated it, and referred to the entire genre from that point forward as "science friction". Dad was an otherwise honorable man, though, so we smile benignly at his lack of respect for what is truly a landmark in science fiction. Its special effects remain good to this very day, but mostly I like its sense of purpose and calm rationality - it presents a near future where policy is made by rational people with huge brains, not dominated by the sleazy doings of a bunch of celebrity idiots who wouldn't know a magnetic anomaly if one bit them on the ass. It also captures some of the mystical element I detect in some of Arthur C. Clarke's novels, and I for one wasn't bothered by the "confusing" ending. And the scene where Dave "lobotomizes" HAL remains pretty disturbing, almost half a century later - I still don't know why I feel sorry for a murderous computer, but I do. Its sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact abandoned much of the Utopian rationalism of 2001 and portrayed a world poised on the brink of annihilation at the hands of squabbling child-like Superpowers, but it isn't bad either. Not at good as 2001, but not bad.

5,000,000 Years to Earth

Another classic from the mid-1960s. Here, engineers digging a new tunnel for the London Underground find what they think is an unexploded German bomb from the war. Turns out it's something much more interesting: an ancient telepathic spacecraft from Mars that can change colors, makes funny noises, and causes a giant electrical mirage of one of the telepathic Martian mantis-creatures to loom over London like a bad omen. There's a lot to like about this movie, not least of which is the fact that the hero is a middle-aged scientist with a beard and a tweed jacket (see above) who may or may not actually be mad. It has it all. Science versus the military-industrial complex, paranoia, telepathy, ancient astronauts, ethnic cleansing, demon possession, mysterious substances, and a hero holding a teacup (again, see above). And how many times do you see a movie where the alien menace is terminated with the assistance of a giant crane? 'Nuff said.

Alien

Truly one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, it retells the (grim) adventures of the crew of the Nostromo after the ship is re-routed to investigate a rescue beacon. Turns out (Aha! Corporate malfeasance!) it's a warning beacon, and things don't go well from that point on. Critics complain it's more of a conventional horror movie than a science fiction movie, and maybe that's true. But it had a spaceship, so I think it's SF. If the future of 2001 is clean, orderly and rational, the future of Alien is grubby and workaday and kind of corrupt - probably a more accurate model of the future than 2001, now that I think about it. The Alien of title fame turns out to be a really tall, thin guy in a rubber suit, but the movie nonetheless manages to generate a very real sense of Lovecraft-style terror. By the standards of the 1970s it was a fountain of gruesome gore, and it still has moments that can make me writhe, but compared to the Saw franchise it's about as gory as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

New Religion

Every time I see an ad for the "Booty Pop" on TV, I think I should come up with a new religion, a religion whose first commandment is Thou Shalt Not Play Booty-Pop Commercials On TV While William Is Watching. I don't think that's an unreasonable commandment at all.

And while I'm on the subject, why, why, "Booty Pop"? It sounds like something you'd get from the ice cream man. "I'd like two bomb pops, a Fudgsicle, and a Booty Pop, please." What flavor is a Booty Pop anyway? No, don't even think about it. Think about something else. What kind of washing machine does Iron Man use.... Anything...

But maybe it would be fun to develop a new religion anyway, even without Booty Pop commercials. Not that I have any particularly deep spiritual insight to offer - the best I can come up with is the vague statement "Try not to be a butt-head all of the time." People seem to think that being a cancer survivor gives you some kind of ineffable insight into the human condition and the nature of the soul. If so, I'm still waiting for my package of insight to arrive in the mail; as near as I can tell, I'm not any more advanced spiritually now than I was before cancer came along.

But having said that, the tax-exempt status of being a religion is tempting, isn't it?

I used to be something of a hobbyist of bogus geek pseudo-religions, of which there were several, including the Church of the Sub-Genius and Discordianism. But lately (meaning within the last ten years or so) trips to the Sub-Genius website leave me feeling a little uncomfortable. It's so odd and so forced; it's like being the only sober person in a room full of drunks who are all screaming with laughter at a joke that just isn't that funny. In the words of Michael J. Nelson, they pulled up a stool next to that joke and milked it for all it was worth, and then some.

Okay, here's another potential commandment: Thou Shalt Not Make Movies That Have Fight Scenes In Slow Motion.

I'm open to suggestion.

Is That A Behemoth?

Is that a Behemoth on your iPod, or are you just happy to hear me?

I am utterly fascinated by my deep and abiding liking for metal music. It's so strange and unexpected. And it keeps getting worse. I note among many of my friends a tendency for musical tastes to mellow over time, and I catch them saying things like "Yeah, James Taylor really rocked out at the concert last night." Not that there's anything wrong with James Taylor. I just can't figure out why all my peers seem to mellow, and I find myself sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire of underground metal.

Not that I go to "shows" or try to blend into the "scene", or whatever they call such things these days. Metal as a fashion statement is pretty hideous, and metal as a lifestyle is pretty unappealing. I just like the music; I have no particular use for its accessories. I don't even own any metal t-shirts, which are apparently obligatory if you're to fit in, and I often find myself in the position of listening to extreme underground metal while wearing button-down shirts and white sneakers. I don't have much hair, and I can't even head-bang without getting dizzy and staggering around like a hugely oversized Weeble.

The whole black metal "thing" gets particularly silly. I don't know if the musicians still use corpse-paint makeup and adopt odd nomes d'metal like Count Grishnakh or Quorthon or Euronymous. But the whole over-the-top Satanism of black metal seems particularly affected, trite and dumb to me, and I don't think that has gone away. There are black metal bands that I enjoy listening to, but the whole cultural edifice erected over the music is pretty silly, if you ask me. (If you want to know, I prefer Mayhem to Emperor, so you know where I come down on the whole "symphonic black metal" question.)

I really don't inflict my metal on anyone else. I've posted one or two links to Insomnium songs on Facebook, but I can't see what good could possibly come from trying to get anyone I know to listen to Amon Amarth, Mayhem, or Vader. (I don't care for music videos in general, and I generally hate metal music videos. The other day I watched the video for the Metallica cover of the old Bob Seger classic "Turn The Page" and it was some strange business apparently involving prostitution and domestic abuse, neither of which have anything to do with the song. It may sound pretentious, but I generally prefer my own mental images to the quotidian nonsense the director slaps together.) And while I might like the music to "Gods of War Arise", my friends might listen to the words and say "You know, they're not sending a particularly good message there..." And they aren't. So I don't listen to the words, and I don't ask anyone else to listen to the music.

Tonight I'm listening to the album Evangelion by Behemoth. I think it's of a form called "blackened death metal", sort of a combination of the musical style of death metal and the vocal style and (goofy) thematic elements of black metal. It's pretty good - pretty heavy. And it's another milepost on my personal road to perdition: it's Polish. Most of the metal I listen to is either British, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish or Polish. Where's the American stuff?

American metal seems to me to take three forms these days, none of which I really care for. There's metalcore, which I can stand in small doses (though, curiously, I never seem to get tired of the album "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet" by Avenged Sevenfold, a commercial mainstream metalcore act that should make my flesh crawl). Then there's nu-metal, which I really don't like at all. And then there's industrial metal, made most famous by Marilyn Manson, but the only industrial act I really like is Rob Zombie.

So I have to go to Finland to get my metal these days. Or Poland. One curiosity of the metal world is why German metal is so bad. No offense to the Vaterland, but geez, how many power metal bands does one country need? And why do they always sound so happy?

One exception the never-make-a-friend-listen-to-metal rule is the album "Swansong" by Carcass. Carcass started out making grindy brutal death metal, including two albums that are pretty much must-owns for a death metal fan ("Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious" and "Heartwork"). I guess this got old, or they wanted to do something else, so they did the album "Swansong." Old-school Carcass fans apparently hate it - it moves away from the grindy dissonance of the earlier stuff and sounds somewhat more mainstream - what Iron Maiden would sound like if they had a vocalist that growled. It's a combination of death metal and mainstream rock and roll that I like to call "death and roll", even though this label was apparently claimed by Entombed with their album "Left Hand Path".

The point is that I've played the song R**K The Vote off the "Swansong" album to a few people as a test. If it disgusts them, there's no need to go any farther into the dark forest and the experiment stops there. If they can hang with that one, I play them The Hive from the album "Whoracle" by In Flames, which is a little more metallic but not extreme by any means. If they're still with me, then we move on into darker realms.

So far, nobody's even gotten past R**K The Vote.

Early Literature

I've been trying to remember the first science fiction story I ever read. And honestly, I don't remember. The first book I can remember reading had something to do with pumpkins and autumn leaves. The first book I can remember in halfway concrete terms was a kid's biography of the seven Mercury astronauts.

But the first science fiction I ever read that had a distinct impact on me was Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night. It impressed me so much that soon I had dredged the family's old Royal typewriter out of the closet and was hammering away, using a ribbon so worn out the letters were no more than ghosts. I'd guess I was about twelve, but that's just a guess. The highest praise I can give a book is that it makes me want to write something equally good. The worst condemnation I can give a book is that it makes me think I could easily write something better. Against the Fall of Night definitely is of the former variety.

I've been a fan of Clarke ever since. I remember there was a lot of argument about the Clarke school of science fiction and the Asimov school. I was definitely a Clarke partisan. I liked Asimov well enough (though I never actually made it all the way through the hefty Foundation business), but if I had to pick one author to have dinner with, it would have been Clarke. I particularly liked the fact that his science fiction has all the usual technical elements, but it also had a strong metaphysical component, something that I thought was lacking in the Asimov/Niven tradition. That metaphysical element was present in Against the Fall of Night and would eventually reach fruition in the masterful Childhood's End.

It doesn't seem to me that science fiction today has figures like Arthur C. Clarke any more. It seems that everything I've read lately (meaning, since about 1985) falls into one of about four categories:

1. Hard science fiction in the manner of The Integral Trees, which is interesting as an intellectual exercise but not very much fun as a story. This also includes the later Ringworld novels, which I didn't find very compelling.

2. Cyberpunk stuff, where the authors try to imitate the power and style of William Gibson's short stories Burning Chrome and Johnny Mnemonic and fail every time.

3. Alternate history stuff of the Harry Turtledove ilk, which I find interesting for a little while, but these "what if Julius Caesar had a Piper Cub" speculations are a bit like shoestring potatoes - good at first, but I don't want the whole can, and they aren't good for me anyway. (Curiously, I had a cat that loved shoestring potatoes and got pretty good at hooking them out of the can with an extended claw. Maybe she would have finished the World At War series.)

4. Avant garde stuff that tries so hard to be "unconventional" I can never seem to figure out what's going on. Such stuff often takes on weird textual forms - multiple levels of indenting, lack of capital letters, strange out-of-context sentences that may well be snippets from a Maytag washing machine manual for all I can tell.

Where are the novels like Childhood's End these days?

It's That Time Again

It's that time again, where I gripe about dumb things I see and, particularly, dumb phrases and expressions I wish would just die.

Item 1: Baby Bump, always uttered in a sentence like this one: Dimwitted celebutard shows off baby bump! We have pictures! I guess saying Dimwitted celebutard is pregnant just isn't cool or chic. And I really don't want to see the pictures either. I don't even care.

Item 2: Keep it real. What on earth does that mean? I like so-and-so because he keeps it real. As opposed to what? Keeping it unreal? Imaginary? Fantastical? As far as I can tell, people who use "keeping it real" as a justification for saying things are just rationalizing the fact that they're thoughtless bastards.

Item 3: Status Shuffle. Apparently some people can't come up with snarky, sarcastic Facebook updates on their own, so they go to some application and pick one. Usually more than one. Five or six. In a row. Arrrrrgh. And as if that isn't enough, someone who's apparently been sniffing too much model glue comes along and says "Ur so funy!" It reminds me of the movie Life of Brian, where Brian shouts to the crowd "You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!" And the crowd shouts back in unison "Yes, we're all individuals!"

Item 4: Speak truth to power. American politics is chock-full of worn-out aphorisms, but this one is one of the more worn-out. Plus I think it's grammatically incorrect; shouldn't it be speak the truth to power? Or even Say things that are true to people who are in positions of authority? But never mind, we're too busy giving it to The Man, speaking truth to power, to be bothered. As if The Man gives a shit. And if someone is "speaking truth to power" and I happen not to agree with them, where does that leave me??

Item 5: Trustworthy. If speaking truth to power is a worn-out motto of the Left, trustworthy is a worn-out motto of the Right. The implication is that liberal things are by their very nature untrustworthy. A good example is Conservapedia, which bills itself as the "trustworthy" alternative to Wikipedia. Someone apparently decided that Wikipedia is a seething cesspool of liberal thought. One of their data points? The fact that some of the people who write Wikipedia entries may not - gasp - be American! I guess you can't be trustworthy if you happen to have been born in Iceland, Japan, or Australia, to cite just a few of those awful, untrustworthy non-American countries. I'm particularly amused that they are bothered by the fact that some people use spellings like "colour" or "flavour" or "tyre". There it is, prima facie evidence of extreme untrustworthiness. There are other words for that, by the way, like xenophobia and Amerocentric jingoism and plain foolishness.