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.

Dr. Huh-uh

I'm a sucker for almost any science fiction show that shows up on TV. Even the really bad ones, like Lost In Space and Land of the Giants. I even watched Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, even though there seemed to be something indefinably wrong with the show. There still is - reruns of it give me the uneasy feeling that there's something wrong with it, that I shouldn't like it.

I even liked the SF shows that Sci-Fi Channel used to run, before it changed its name to Syfy (what the hell is a siffy anyway?) and clogged its schedule with bullshit ghost-hunting shows. Things like Farscape and, uh, well, Farscape.

Here are some of the SF TV shows I've watched and liked:

UFO

Star Trek (in all its various forms)

Babylon 5

Battlestar Galactica

Lost in Space

The Time Tunnel

The Starlost

The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr. (not technically SF, but it DID have an orb)

Space: 1999

Buck Rogers in Whatever The Hell Century This Is

Farscape

Firefly

Space: Above and Beyond

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Land of the Giants

I liked all these shows, and some of them I liked an awful lot.

I mention this mostly to demonstrate that I'm not some realist literary type who thinks science fiction is mere "pornography of ideas", as someone once said (it might have been me, upon seeing the cover for the Space Plumber novel. It wasn't called Space Plumber, but that's what the hero was. I wonder if a plumber in a spacesuit would exhibit butt-crack. But never mind.) I mention this so when I say that there are two wildly popular SF shows that I don't like, never liked, can't like, never could stand, you understand that I'm not exactly a hater of the whole genre.

The first is The X-Files. Honestly, the whole men in black government conspiracy grey aliens Zeta Reticuli business wears itself out on me very quickly. Like Brylcreem, a dab will do me, and for quite a while. Since I don't really dig that whole dark gummint UFO conspiracy business, I didn't really dig the show, and was always kind of mystified by its wild popularity. And it isn't because there were aliens and UFOs in it. Got no problem with aliens and UFOs - for years I had posted on my office wall certain choice quotations from G'Kar, and I think personally it would be really cool if there really were alien spacecraft at Area 51. But the whole conspiracy thing quickly turns into drudgery for me.

The second is Doctor Who. The wild popularity of this show remains a complete mystery to me. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I was supposed to do some reading before watching the show. But man, is it ever tedious and uninvolving. Back in the days when Tom Baker was the Timelord, people at work used to change their work hours so they could get home in time to catch it on PBS in the afternoons (this was before TiVo, obviously). I tried to catch the wave, and failed utterly. I could list a whole series of defects, like the fact that the Daleks were the least convincing villains in the history of television. I mean, come on, you could stop the Daleks dead in their tracks by spreading a little gravel on the sidewalk. They'd get high-centered, spin their wheels, and that would be that. But fundamentally, I didn't like the characters and didn't care if they lived or died. And I got really tired of people at work blathering about their sonic screwdrivers and debating the significance of Dr. Who's scarf. To paraphrase an alleged quote of Dr. Freud, sometimes a scarf is just an affectation. The only good thing that I could see in the whole tedious mess was, frankly, Elizabeth Sladen.

So that's that. I never got into the whole paranoid conspiracy theory angle of The X-Files, and Doctor Who never convinced me that I should give a rat's ass what happened to anyone in the show.

I'd much rather watch Space: 1999 than either one of those clunkers.

I am forced to withhold judgment on the whole Stargate business. The movie was kind of goofy but worth watching a time or two, but I have no idea what the show is like. As a matter of principle I don't watch "Syfy" much anyway. If they're that embarrassed with the label "science fiction", they probably wouldn't want me hanging around their channel anyway, what with all my Star Trek models and Alien mission patches and G'Kar quotes.

Just to give you a taste, here's my favorite G'Kar quote:

G’qon wrote that the war we fight is not against powers

and principalities, but against chaos. There is a greater

darkness than that which we struggle against, and

worse than the loss of life is the loss of hope.

-- G’kar

News From The Cancer Front

I went to see my oncologist Monday, and he's still happy with me. And when he's happy with me, oh, I'm happy too. I do a pretty thorough "lump-check" on my body every few hours on my own, and lately I haven't found anything untoward. But it's always a comfort when he does it and he can't find anything untoward either.

I'm due for a PET scan in a few weeks, but it's for monitoring, not diagnosis. So far - fingers crossed - I have no active cancer going on.

My only real complaint has been the persistent swelling of my left leg, which the experts believe to be caused by the scar tissue and general destruction in the left side of my groin, some of it courtesy of chemotherapy and some of it courtesy of radiation. But I've noticed in the last week that the swelling seems to be abating somewhat. It doesn't look any different, at least not unless you know exactly what to look for, but it certainly feels different. My shoe is getting looser instead of tighter. I can bend my knee through a larger angle. It's easier to get in and out of cars.

Conduct this experiment: bend your toes downward, and notice the way wrinkles tend to form on the sole and side of your foot. For a long time I couldn't even bend my toes downward, and if I did, there were no wrinkles - my leg was so swollen it was like an overstuffed sausage, so tight that wrinkles never formed at all. But I'm starting to see wrinkles again, and I can bend my toes.

As victories go, it probably doesn't rank up there with the big ones - Trafalgar, Pharsalus, Kursk, Midway, Waterloo, the Battle of Britain, Vicksburg, Actium. It doesn't even rank up there with the not-so-big ones - Pea Ridge, Empress Augusta Bay, even French Lick. But it's a big deal to me personally.

This leads me to wonder what the most significant battle in human history was. I think every battle is hugely significant, if only to the poor bastards that had to fight it, and a lot of battles that are considered "great" were in fact meaningless. Cannae comes to mind in this regard - yeah, sure, Hannibal inflicted a terrible defeat on the Romans and killed umpteen thousand legionaries, but in the end, what did it get him? The Carthaginians still lost, Hannibal still went into exile, and today we recognize Roman notions of civilization as the underpinnings of modern civic life, not Carthaginian notions of civilization. For all the good it did Hannibal, Cannae might as well not have happened at all. Another one is the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Huge naval battle, full of stories of sacrifice and courage, especially on the part of the men of the escort carrier group Taffy Three, but even assuming the US Navy lost the battle, Japan would still have lost the war.

I usually vote for the Battle of Poitiers, also known as the Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel and a bunch of grubby Franks defeated Abdul Rahman. It is said that this battle finally ended Islamic invasions of Europe. Maybe, and maybe not. But it did cement the primacy of the Franks in western Europe and paved the way for Charlemagne, and that's pretty dang significant.

The most significant battle in modern history, I think, is the Battle of the Atlantic. I've written about this subject before, but I'll repeat just a little. Given the power of the US industrial economy, and the vast scale of US and Canadian resources, the only hope the Germans had in World War Two was severing Britain and the Soviet Union from their principal sources of supply (points not often noted in the books I've read is how the massive infusion of US-built trucks gave Soviet tank armies considerable mobility in the later years of the war, and how vast supplies of US and Canadian grain allowed the Soviets to draft far more men off their farms than they could have otherwise, not to mention how most of the high-octane av-gas burned in all those Lancasters and Spitfires came from Texas, or how many of those Lancasters and Spitfires seemed to have Canadians at the controls).

So, if the Germans were to have any hope of winning the war, they had to win the Battle of the Atlantic. This comes basically down the question of whether German U-boats could stop Atlantic convoys, or if the escorts could get the convoys through on a reliable basis. And it turned out, they could. Some of my more patriotic associates don't like my notion that it was largely British and Canadian convoy escorts that won the war, but it seems inescapable to me. This is not to say that the United States had no role to play - look at how many of the Royal Navy's escort carriers were US-made, or how many US aircraft the Coastal Command operated. But the point is that the campaign against the U-boats was for the most part planned and executed by the British and the Canadians, though perhaps using a good deal of US hardware.

Besides, it seems obvious to me that the US Navy was always chiefly interested in defeating Japan, not Germany. And it must be said that US Navy fast carrier task forces and submarines went about that task with great and terrible efficiency.

And that, me buckos, is one gigantic digression.

Stuporcars

Lately I've been watching Top Gear on BBC America. The one-word review? Fun.

I know squat about supercars, and I really don't want to know. I can hardly tell everyday cars apart as it is, let alone half-million-dollar Italian supercars that I'll never see in my lifetime, let alone actually drive. So that part of the show is lost on me - the breathtaking news that Jeremy Clarkson doesn't like the Porsche 911 is about as meaningful to me as the news that Captain Kirk doesn't like left-threaded sideways manipulators in the deuterium injection matrix (all the more true considering that a Porsche 911 is a better car than any car I've ever driven).

But other parts of the show are fun. I like the "celebrity laps" where various musicians and assorted glitterati thrash a little blue economy car around the track, sometimes so vigorously that the car sheds wheels entirely. That's fun. Jeremy Clarkson's advice, apparently well-taken for all I know, is "Never lift."

I enjoy their senses of humor. Clarkson can be a bit biting at times, but that's okay. He doesn't seem to care for Americans very much, but that's okay too; there are a lot of Americans I don't care for very much either. I remember the time he had been tasked with building an amphibious automobile, so he mounted an enormous outboard motor on the tailgate of a Toyota pickup truck. He later said something like "The outboard alone weighs almost 600 pounds! That's almost as much as the average American!" I would have laughed out loud if I hadn't been shoveling Cheetos and Fiddle-Faddle into my mouth.

But the best part is the way the three hosts ("presenters", I guess they're called in the land where people drive on the wrong side - yes, I said the wrong side - of the road) hector one another. In a recent episode, Richard Hammond and James May were racing Jeremy Clarkson from London to a ski resort in Switzerland. Richard and James did it the proletarian way, using buses, trains and an airplane. Jeremy went the regal way, in some high-endish Ferrari gran tourismo machine. Beats me what it was. A Ferrari Rigatoni, I don't know. The point is that Jeremy got pulled over by the French police, and James May did the honors for the camera. "Jeremy is here," he said, pointing at a spot on a French road map, "talking to a gendarme. In a few hours' time, he'll be here." He then pointed at Paris. "In a place called la Bastille." Once again, I would have laughed out loud if I hadn't been cleaning my guns with pork fat. (The outcome, if you're interested: Richard and James got to the town first, but Jeremy got to the hotel first.)

But the best part of the show is the observation that driving should be fun, no matter what you drive, or where. All three of them would likely have unflattering things to say about my car, a dusty green Hyundai Elantra, and one imagines that Jeremy Clarkson's comments might actually be interpreted as rude by those with delicate constitutions. But I always enjoy driving my dusty green car more after I've watched Top Gear, even if I can't tell a Porsche Blitzkrieg from a Ferrari Minestrone.

A couple of thoughts on the UK. Once I flew to London on business, and when the driver picked me up at Heathrow, he inquired with earnest concern whether I'd been shot at on my way to the airport in America. What exactly do they think America is like? I personally only get shot at when I go to the local store; the airport is fine, perfectly safe. One of the guys I worked with asked me how many guns I owned, and seemed almost unsettled to find that I owned none at all. He probably thinks all Germans own a pair of lederhosen and all Argentinians like to invade the Falklands too.

And a final note. The British shouldn't be too fond of their "driving experience", because I found driving in England (I only drove in England, so I'll only blame them) a miserable experience. It isn't because they drive on the wrong side of the road, though they do. And it isn't because the weather was constantly wet and foggy, though it was. And it wasn't because the roads were very busy, though they were. It's the fact that once you get off the motorway, there isn't a single straight road anywhere in England. They do more winding and meandering than my small intestine, and seemingly for even less reason. And the signs! I'm used to America, where roads are generally marked by signs indicating the name of the road. In England, it seems that the roads are marked by destination, not name.

I was trying to find a hotel in Basingstoke, but the map and the road signs never seemed to agree and I kept ending up on the road to Aldermaston. Who knows, maybe Aldermaston would have been more fun; I should have tried it. I hear they do nuclear research there.

Lately I've been watching Firefly, the one-season science fiction show from the mind of Joss Whedon. It's quite nice. You'd think a show that didn't make it a full season would stink, but it actually doesn't. It inverts many tradition science fiction themes and tropes and maybe its deliberate blurring of the line between science fiction and western rubbed critics the wrong way. For example, it has no aliens, no faster-than-light drive, no blasters or other energy weapons, no swooshing sounds when ships zip by, and no particular emphasis on military matters. At one point the ship ends up carrying a herd of cattle as cargo; how often do you see that in a Star Trek episode?

Firefly feels a lot like the old role-playing game Traveler to me. If you mentally block out the Third Alliance, jump drive, and any non-human intelligent species, it's pretty close in general feel to Traveler. Not that I'm implying that one was cribbed from the other, merely that Firefly feels a lot more like the Traveler game than any other science fiction show I've seen.

Which is good.

Traveler fails to do Firefly justice in some areas, though. Traveler was, even in its earliest incarnations, overtly militaristic - characters were almost always military veterans and were not infrequently in their thirties or forties, and I don't think the system could produce characters like Kaylee, Simon, Inara or Book. The technologies don't line up either. In some areas Firefly seems pretty advanced technologically, and in other areas it seems fairly primitive. And the show is a study of characters, while characters as such in Traveler tended to be pretty vanilla - good players could work up their own motivations, but the rules themselves don't cover such things. (Deliberately, I'm sure - Traveler could be hugely complicated when it came to things like designing starships, but in actual play the rules were pretty short and sweet.)

But the odds that I'll ever dig out my old Traveler books and dink with them are just about zero. There are too many other things to do and I'd have to win the lottery to ever find enough time to do that. But it wouldn't be an uninteresting exercise.

Bleep Rights!

One or another of those cable channels has been advertising the daylights out of the "First Amendment Comedy Tour", or whatever they're calling it. And they have the comedians (and I use the term guardedly) express their ideas of what the First Amendment means. One said something like "It means I can say whatever the bleep I want, however the bleep want to say it."

Actually, that isn't what it says. It merely says that the government cannot infringe on your rights of speech, press, religion and assembly. But it doesn't mean you have the perfect right to tell me, as a private citizen, whatever the bleep you want to say.

In other words, the First Amendment doesn't give you carte blanch to be a bleep, you bleeping bleep and bleepity-bleep bleepitude.

But since I have no intention of watching the show anyway, it's immaterial. It isn't that foul language bothers me, or that their edge "challenges me" in some way. I just don't think any of the stuff on the previews was funny, and since I reason that the best jokes always appear on the previews, the lack of yuks from the previews don't augur well for the show itself.

But I am not historically a big fan of stand-up comedy in general. There have been a few stand-up comedians that I thought were quite funny - Mitch Hedburg comes to mind, who should be immortalized for the forklift joke, if nothing else - but by and large, stand-up comedy leaves me cold. (I am reminded of the antacid commercial where the guy in the audience gets up because his heartburn is killing him, and the comedian lays into him. Meantime the poor sufferer stands there in the spotlight while the git on the stage mocks him. Just keep walking, you moron, there's no rule that says you have to stand there and be made fun of, especially when you're in pain. Geez. I had no idea stand-up comedy was such a minefield of angst and despair.)

Meantime, I'm too busy watching Firefly episodes to pay any attention to unfunny comedians who can't say "water fountain" without throwing in a few expletives. Firefly is pretty good. I missed it when it was on actual TV (and thus I was an unwitting accomplice in the poor ratings that got the show canned prematurely) but now I've decided to go back and catch up, and it's good. It's like Star Trek, only grimy. This isn't your clean, tidy, Utopian future; this is more or less Deadwood in space, though without E.B. Farnum's operatic manner of speaking.

It's good. Better than the First Amendment comedy crock, I bet.

Crystal Blue BS

Once again, I wasn't paying attention and missed the memo. But apparently a new order of being is upon us - the "Indigo Child", whom we are assured is the next step in human evolution. Here is a list of "indigo child" traits as listed on the website www.indigochild.com:

As a summary, here are the ten attributes that best describe this new kind of child, the Indigo Child

• They come into the world with a feeling of royalty (and often act like it)
  
• They have a feeling of "deserving to be here," and are surprised when others don't share that.
• Self-worth is not a big issue. They often tell the parents "who they are."
• They have difficulty with absolute authority (authority without explanation or choice).
  
• They simply will not do certain things; for example, waiting in line is difficult for them.
  
• They get frustrated with systems that are ritually oriented and don't require creative thought.
  
• They often see better ways of doing things, both at home and in school, which makes them seem like "system busters" (nonconforming to any system).
  
• They seem antisocial unless they are with their own kind. If there are no others of like consciousness around them, they often turn inward, feeling like no other human understands them. School is often extremely difficult for them socially.
  
• They will not respond to "guilt" discipline ("Wait till your father gets home and finds out what you did").
  
• They are not shy in letting you know what they need.
  

And these are their good traits? Geez. Where I come from, someone with a royal sense of entitlement, impatient inability to get along with others, and the belief that the rules don't apply to him isn't an Indigo Child. Where I come from, such a person is just a plain old asshole.

But if it makes you feel better to call yourself an Indigo Child, knock your socks off.

The Loser Channel

Remember when TLC used to stand for The Learning Channel? And when there were arts and entertainment on A&E? All these channels stink these days.

What's on TLC but shows that feature loudmouths screaming at one another, or people who are famous for having lots and lots of kids? Sorry, doesn't sound like anything I'd ever want to learn.

And what's on the other "educational" channels? Crap about bullshit paranormal activity, UFO hunters, crypto-zoology (in the kooky sense), the alleged 2012 apocalypse, Nostradamus, conspiracy theories, ghost hunters, Bible codes...

So what do we "learn" from these shows? That it's okay to scream and yell like some kind of baboon? That if you have enough kids, someone will give you millions of dollars? That pseudo-science is not only good, but cool? I guess the ideal would be a show about a loudmouthed ghost-hunter who heaps verbal abuse on his hapless assistants and how Nostradamus predicted that he would take his 239 kids to get ice cream in New York City.

I believe I'll pass, thank you very much. You think Nostradamus predicted that?

When Did That Happen?

I've been working nights for a while, which means I'm on my way home somewhere around midnight or a little later. It means, primarily, that I can't listen to NPR, because the NPR station changes to incomprehensible jazz at some point in the evening. (I know it's un-American to not like jazz, but I don't. Four guys all playing four separate songs at the same time isn't "innovative", it's just plain irritating.)

So I've tried listening to the local FM radio stations, and I don't know when it happened, when the change came, but man, they suck!

I don't know who established the formula for modern FM rock radio stations, but whoever it was needs to be punished, and by that I mean in the Frank Castle fashion. KUPD establishes a new low, as its "DJs" just sit around and talk about bodily functions and sex acts. No, they don't. Talk implies an exchange of ideas and information; they might as well just sit there and read lists of "bad words" for all the communication that goes on. Feces. Anus. Coprophilia. Oh, what fun. What, do 15 year old mallcore aficionados listen to this nonsense and think that it makes them macho? Whatever the case, it isn't meant for me.

And the music! Good heavens. I never thought I'd live to see the day that they made "metal" music that was whiny and spineless, but there it is. I don't know what kind of metal it really is. I don't think it's metal at all, because it violates the Basic Precept of Metal, which is this: Metal Doesn't Whine. I think I'm going to refer to it as "mallcore". Take ye a metal tune. Dumb it down and take out the hard, technical stuff. It's best if you can somehow turn it into a single monotonous riff that goes on and on and sounds really heavy but is really just kind of dumb. Add to that some scratching from rap, and some electronic effects from God knows where. Make the lyrics whiny. Dwell on the hideousness of your 15 year old white middle class lifestyle. It isn't even real hideousness; it isn't real pain or loss or suffering. It's the bogus bullshit suffering of some clod who bought a t-shirt at Hot Topic and then had an emotional meltdown because he saw some clod wearing the same t-shirt. It's hard for me to take very seriously the suffering of a high school kid whose parents give him a car, a cell phone, and enough money to buy Slipknot t-shirts at the mall. But oh, how they suffer. Woe is me and my affluent lifestyle, I ran out of eyeliner and my brother Timmy ate the last of the Cap'n Crunch ::cries:: I'm sure that someone one or another of these hideous bands is writing a song extolling the virtues of self-mutilation as a means of dealing with the pain of second period PE.

It's like emo, only loud. And worse. At least I could tune emo out. Oh no, another Dashboard Confessional song; well, at least I can not listen to it and amuse myself by thinking about neutron stars. But not this stuff.

I have got to get a car that my iPod will plug into. That's all there is to it. Between the vile (not to mention screamingly unfunny) FM DJs and the whiny mallcore, I'm fixing to go clean off my feed. Better to just the radio off and listen to the wind.

(And I haven't even started on the stupid FM radio commercials.)

The only bright spot in any of this is the late-night show Alice Cooper does on KSLX. The music isn't much to write home about, but at least Alice can assemble words into intelligible, occasionally funny and sometimes even reasonably interesting sentences. Compared to the hooting simians on the other radio stations, whom I imagine are easily flummoxed by bananas hanging on strings just out of their reach, he's a breath of fresh air.

Deep Time

Reading about cosmology can be kind of depressing. I don't see right off-hand how any of the possible outcomes are in any way pleasing. If the universe is sufficiently massive, expansion will slow down and stop, then the universe will begin to contract. Everything gets mashed together, ordinary light gets blue-shifted, X-rays and gamma rays bombard everything, and then everything gets compacted into a singularity in the so-called Big Crunch.

That's not so fun. Are there alternatives?

If the universe is insufficiently massive, the expansion continues forever, even accelerates under the influence of dark energy. Galaxies recede from one another and eventually pass from view entirely, stars die, everything becomes cold, dark, and impossibly far removed from everything else.

Well, that's not so fun either. Anyone got any other ideas?

Maybe expansion will accelerate to the point that space itself fails, ripping apart like a too-small latex glove on a too-large hand, in an unimaginable cataclysm called the Big Rip. I can't begin to imagine what that would be like, having space itself rip apart, but I don't think one needs to be The Amazing Kreskin to guess that it would be bad.

So where are the cosmological outcomes where everything remains more or less groovy in perpetuity? I confess that I always preferred the Steady-State Universe model on emotional grounds, which at least offers the notion that the universe is eternal and continually renewed. Too bad that it turned out to be wrong - among other things, it can't explain the cosmic microwave background or the Hubble constant. But on strictly emotional grounds, it seems a lot more palatable than any of the extrapolations of the Big Bang, all of which are about as cheerful as the movie Event Horizon. Without popcorn.