Chrononautic Log

November 30, 2003

Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD box set:
****

On the one hand, they’re obviously saving a lot of good stuff for a hypothetical volume 2: What’s Opera, Doc?, Robin Hood Daffy, most of the Roadrunner & Coyote opus. On the other hand they’ve given us Rabbit of Seville, The Scarlet Pumpernickel, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, Hair-Raising Hare . . . plenty enough to keep you entertained while you eat enough Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs to make yourself very, very sick.

Bugs (sheepish): Mechanical.
(Pause. Then, defiant:) So it’s mechanical!

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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
****½

A creditable exercise, Mr. Weir. I could find some faults with it if I wanted to, but by and large I think the film holds true to the spirit of the books; on top of which it’s a fine character drama and a jolly good adventure movie. (The best Star Trek movie ever made, as J. Bradford de Long says.) Apart from his height, Russell Crowe makes a plausible Jack Aubrey; and apart from his height, Paul Bettany makes quite a fine Stephen Maturin — I very much look forward to seeing him get to explore more facets of his character in further O’Brien films — of which I assume, given the success of this one, there will be at least one or two.

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The Two Towers Extended Edition
****

Whereas the added scenes and lines in Fellowship were simply nice to have, the additional footage for Two Towers makes it a far, far better movie. We now spend enough time getting to know the House of Eorl to actually give a damn when Theoden weeps over Theodred’s tomb — and Eowyn singing a funeral dirge in Old English doesn’t hurt, either. We now get enough of the Treebeard plotline and the Faramir plotline for them to make sense — and to mean something, too. Since the rest of the film no longer feels rushed, the Helm’s Deep sequence no longer drags. I still wouldn’t have chosen Walsh & Boyens’ solution to the filmic problems Faramir’s character presented; and I still think there’s no way even the Rohirrim, even led by Gandalf, could charge down that sixty-degree gravel slope into those pikes and live. :) But never mind — any lingering doubts I might have had that Fellowship was a Matrix-like flash in the pan are now dispelled, and that’s what counts.

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2001
*½

Just rented this with the intention of finally watching it all the way through for the first time — I’d seen it several times over the years, but never made it farther than about the point where David Bowman starts yanking out HAL’s brains. Now I know why, and this time I only survived due to the miracle of DVD chapter selection. Sure, it’s beautiful, but my God, could Kubrick and Clarke have made it any more dull if they’d tried? 2001 is the moral equivalent of a bad summer blockbuster: all special effects, no screenplay. The film is a disservice to hard science fiction. What’s sad is that it wouldn’t have taken much — no changes to the plot, just a little less classical music and a lot more dialogue. I think about what a competent Hollywood screenwriter — William Goldman, say — could have done with it, and it makes me want to cry.

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2010
***½

So that’s why Bob Balaban seemed so familiar! Yeah, I was planning a double feature. I don’t think I’ve seen 2010 since it was in the theatres, but I didn’t have any trouble staying awake. It might be a little thin, it might not have broken any new ground the way 2001 did, but it’s got plot, it’s got acting (Helen Mirren! John Lithgow!), it’s got tension, and the special effects hold up pretty well. Actually everything, except (necessarily) the computer screens and the Cold War and (unnecessarily) the synth-heavy score, holds up pretty well. Plus, it uses real physics, something you almost never see in a space movie; and it uses real SFnal ideas, not recycled horror or men’s adventure. I blame 2001 for the fact that there aren’t more SF movies like this.

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November 26, 2003

Sometimes Google serves up the weirdest stuff:

Long viewed as a symbol of communistic repression and a threat to the West, the flag of the Soviet Union, with its Hammer and Sickle, attests to the prophetic destiny of God on this great nation.

• Hammer: “Is not my word like fire and like a hammer that shatters the rock?” Jeremiah 23:29
• Sickle: “Thrust in your sickle and reap for the harvest of earth is ripe.” Revelation 14:15
• Star: “Until the day dawns and the Morning Star arises in your heart.” 2 Peter 1:19
• Red Flag: “The blood of Jesus.” He has redeemed every nation . . . every nation shall serve Him. 1 Peter 1:19

— Jay Rodgers, “Mikhail Gorbachev: The True Meaning of the Soviet Flag”, April 1991.

Comrade Rodgers is apparently also the distributor of the educational videotapes “God’s Law and Society” and “The Beast of Revelation Identified”.

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Remember the good old days, when you and your transhumanist mates could amicably disagree on such pressing topics as the name of your crypto-currency, the ocean your data haven nano-atoll would float on, and whether or not you’d let your other post-singularity instantiations join a hive-mind? These days, that precious techno-consensus has shattered. Brother against brother, Stross against Raymond; people don’t even agree which Political Compass quiz to take any more. We’re still trying to map out this new reality (so much more tedious than the new realities we thought we'd have by now). But an announcement this week seemed to peg out the scale a little for us: the techno-libertarian Cato Institute arguing with techno-socialist Bill Thompson over whether Google should be a public utility. As diverse a viewpoint as you could muster, and just as realistic a discussion as those “what colour will you dye your solar system” chats we had all those years ago.

——NTK, 11/21/03

As a science fiction writer, I have to say I’m mighty relieved to see the Wired magazine egoistic extropian consensus future breaking down. All that eschatological rigor was really harshing my mellow.

(Courtesy of Bruce Sterling again.)

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November 25, 2003

There is a vale between the mountains, that dureth nigh a four mile. And some men clepe it the Vale Enchanted, some clepe it the Vale of Devils, and some clepe it the Vale Perilous. In that vale hear men often-time great tempests and thunders, and great murmurs and noises, all days and nights, and great noise, as it were sound of tabors and of nakers and of trumps, as though it were of a great feast. This vale is all full of devils, and hath been always. And men say there, that it is one of the entries of hell. In that vale is great plenty of gold and silver. Wherefore many misbelieving men, and many Christian men also, go in oftentime for to have of the treasure that there is; but few come again, and namely of the misbelieving men, ne of the Christian men neither, for anon they be strangled of devils.

——The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, book XXXI

Mandeville might have been a charlatan and a plagiarist and a fictional character, but he sure could write.

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While we’re talking interstitiality, the Guardian has posted undersung genius Christopher Priest’s top 10 slipstream books list:

1. The Aleph and Other Stories, Jorge Luis Borges
2. Crash, J.G. Ballard
3. The Passion of New Eve, Angela Carter
4. Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
5. The Sea Came in at Midnight, Steve Erickson
6. Light, M. John Harrison
7. Ice, Anna Kavan
8. Being There, Jerzy Kosinski
9. The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, Steven Millhauser
10. The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz

Interestingly (to me, anyhow), I haven’t read any of these — though I’ll bet I’ve read most of the stories in the Borges collection. I did try to read Light, but gave up a third of the way into it — sorry, Mr. Harrison! Ballard’s short fiction I’ve enjoyed, when it doesn’t too quickly date itself, but I’ve been slow on catching up with the novels. As for Coupland, while I dug Generation X and Microserfs, back in the day, I couldn’t get into Shampoo Planet; and I lost interest in Girlfriend in a Coma once I found out that it was actually about, y’know, the narrator’s girlfriend, like, in a coma.

Most of the rest on Priest’s list I’ve barely heard of, if I’ve heard of them at all. Anyone know more?

(Courtesy of Bruce Sterling.)

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November 24, 2003

BUDAPEST (Reuters) — Police on Friday removed the corpse of a man believed to have hanged himself at least a year ago after builders and students at Budapest’s University of Arts had initially mistaken it for a modern sculpture.

The body hung for a whole day in a garden building that had been re-opened for repairs before onlookers realized what it was and called the police, local media said.

The building, in campus grounds crowded with different types of sculpture, had been closed five years ago pending reconstruction work.

(Courtesy of Charles Stross.)

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November 22, 2003

Not only does Megafauna divide extinct mammals into much more useful categories than does your local paleontologist — Woolly and Huge, for instance, vs. Strange and/or Massive — the site provides a handy set of size charts:

Figure 1. Extinct dog, Osteoborus cynoides (“dog-like bone-crusher”). Described as “small.”

Figure 1. Extinct camel, Camelops hesternus.

Figure 1. Indricotherium transsouralicum, the largest mammal ever to walk the Earth.

My fondness for giant extinct mammals dates to the day when, as a small child, I first stood beneath the full-scale model Indricotherium (then known as Baluchitherium) in Lincoln, Nebraska’s Morrill Hall. Next time you need to hold a private function in Lincoln, consider renting their Elephant Hall. It’s worth it.

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November 18, 2003

All this time you probably thought we invaded Iraq because we wanted to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or because we wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East, or because Saddam Hussein was a world-class bastard, or so we could get control of Iraq’s oil before we hit Hubbert’s Peak.

Apparently you were wrong. Apparently we were tricked into invading Iraq by the Iraqis themselves. Apparently those greedy little buggers have been after that fat reconstruction package from the beginning.

Or so Salon’s Michelle Goldberg reports from Restoration Weekend.

The self-regarding humanitarianism that the right wrapped itself in before the war with Iraq is beginning to fray and chafe. At Restoration Weekend there was anxiety about the postwar situation, and anger. Senators and congressional representatives avowed their faith that Bush’s fabled steadfastness made victory assured in Iraq, a stance they struggled to reconcile with the White House’s recently announced decision to expedite the transfer of power to Iraqis and scale back the occupation by election season. Meanwhile, the right’s intellectuals and activists had largely scrapped talk of democracy. Some suggested that the Iraqis themselves are our enemy, that we owe them nothing. [Conservative ideologue Daniel] Pipes referenced “The Mouse That Roared,” the 1959 film in which a poor country declares war on America, hoping to lose and be rebuilt like Germany and Japan. The implication seemed to be that Iraq is both lucky and greedy.

Apparently, if we rebuild Iraq, the terrorists win.

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November 17, 2003

So I broke down last week and ordered a copy of the A Shoggoth on the Roof cast album, and now I’ve got “If I Were A Deep One” stuck in my head.

If I were a Deep One
Blub-blub blub-blub blub-blub-blub blub blub-blub blub-blub blub-blub-blub
All day long I’d swim beneath the sea
If I were a De-eep One

I should have known better than to start, as Nanny Ogg would say, paddlin’ with the occult . . . Yaa Cthulhu! Cthulhu F’thagn!

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November 14, 2003

The Strange Horizons November fund drive is under way. They’re not assaulting your eyeballs with interstitial advertising. They’re not ringing your telephone during dinner. They’re not going door to door. They’re not interrupting their regularly scheduled programming to have the staff members with the shrillest voices harangue you about how they’d really like to get back to their regularly scheduled programming only they need five more donations in the next fifteen minutes. They’re just publishing really good speculative fiction, and they need your support.

Plus, if you give them money, you get cool stuff.

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November 11, 2003

I don’t know why I need one of these, but I do: a gas-powered one-horsepower home steam engine that works as a combination water heater and electrical generator, from UK power generation company Powergen.

Not like there’s room in my apartment, but still.

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November 10, 2003

Someone at Electronic Gaming Monthly — probably someone about my age — had the bright idea of turning loose some of today’s twelve-year-olds on yesterday’s video games, with predictable results:

TIM: My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball.] Whoops.

You’d think at thirty-one I’d be starting to get used to the generation gap. Kids today. I mean, I was never that good at Pong.

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November 7, 2003

More interesting stuff from John of John & Belle, in this case a review of David Frum’s Dead Right. I fully sympathize with John’s curiosity as to what

conservatism looks like in all its glorious and unalloyed philosophical ideal purity, scoured clean and purified of blemishes, flaws, errors, compromises, distortions due to human weakness, money, K Street, the usual suspects.

I also, however, fully sympathize with his dismay at the possibility that Frum’s thesis might be the best modern American conservatism has to offer.

John paraphrases:

”It’s the economy, stupid! We need to bury it under ten to twelve feet of snow so that we will be forced to cannibalize the dead and generally be objects of moral edification to future generations.“

I think we are beginning to see why Frum feels that his philosophy may be a loser come election time.

As John says, it’s not that Frum — and the great mass of American conservatives — really think this. It’s that they don’t think at all, at least when it comes to thinking through their premises to their logical conclusions. Have a look.

(Courtesy of Electrolite.)

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The incomparable Tim Pratt has graciously accepted a story of mine for publication in Flytrap #2. The story is about a certain upstate New York post office box that some of you may have heard of. It’s called “The Ideas”.

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November 5, 2003

John & Belle, who have a blog called John & Belle Have A Blog, have found a fantastic example of why, despite postmodernism’s several useful ideas and techniques, I can’t be bothered to keep up with the state of the art.

“What if . . . one should precisely throw out the baby with the bath water and renounce the very notion of erratic affective productivity, and so on as the libidinal support of revolutionary activity?“

I say: hasta la vista, erratic affective baby! Limp on, revolutionary activity!

(Courtesy of Making Light.)

Okay, let’s be honest: I just like saying erratic affective baby.

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In honor of Guy Fawkes’ day, some folks at the University of Aberstwyth have done the math on the Gunpowder Plot:

Using explosion physics the team deduced that streets up to one-third of a mile from the centre of the palace of Westminster would have suffered severe structural damage and windows would have shattered within a radius of two-thirds of a mile from the centre of the blast.

Pretty impressive, for Shakespearean technology.

The BBC has done the politics. Not good news for the English Catholics Fawkes was trying to help.

Protestants who were hearing of the atrocity in the capital and the uprising, aware that Catholics were responsible for both . . . would have taken up arms in a panic, turned upon the Catholics in their respective areas, and imprisoned or slaughtered them, in an English equivalent to the wave of hate and fear that had driven the French Catholics to massacre the Protestants there on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. . . .

[Charles I] would have revered the memory of his murdered parents, and almost certainly have acquired an abiding hatred of Catholicism, and tended instead to the evangelical wing of Anglicanism. This would have made him much more popular in both England and Scotland than the Anglo-Catholic policies that he adopted instead. . . .

In short, had Guy Fawkes succeeded, the British state would have turned into a Protestant absolute monarchy as Sweden, Denmark, Saxony and Prussia all did in the course of the 17th century; but much stronger than any of those. As such, it would in turn have paid the price of this achievement, as its powerful monarchy collapsed in revolution in modern times.

Now there’s an alternate history novel waiting to be written.

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November 3, 2003

Now that you all went to the small press party at World Fantasy and picked up your hard copies of the All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories guidelines (You did pick them up, didn’t you? Otherwise, what were you at WFC for?), naturally there’s a change. The UPS Store just called to tell me they accidentally gave me a box that was already in use, so I’ve had to change the number. (Grrrr.) The new address is:

David Moles, Editor
All-Star Stories
3518 Fremont Ave. N. #524
Seattle, WA 98103-8814
USA

Of course, anyone who’s already sent anything is asking to have it lost in the mail, in fact actively destroyed, but still, it’s annoying. Even if I did get three months’ free box rental out of it.

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