Ephemeral Isle
Archives
Thursday
1 July 2004
Great Moments in Jurisprudence
Mr. Philpotts worried that the judge was beginning to suspect that his client had jumped bail.
Friday
2 July 2004
For Your Nose Only
Agent 004 suddenly found that Dr. What's "fartbot" was no laughing matter.
Saturday
3 July 2004
Happy Fourth of July!
"Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival."
- Winston Churchill
I'm indulging in the local holiday of American Independence Day, so it's another family-time break. Back on the 6th!
Tuesday
6 July 2004
No Good Day Goes Unpunished
If the good time that one has can be gauged by how horrible one feels the next day, then I had a phenomenal time yesterday.
Owing to the vagaries of publishing, “yesterday” for me was the 4th of July, known in these parts as American Independence Day. It refers to some altercation stemming back to 1776, but that’s colonial politics, so I shan’t bore you with the details. At any rate, the Szondy Family decided that it was a good excuse for a prolonged beach day, so we packed up the gas grill, loads of food, beer, and bucket and spade, and made for Seattle’s Golden Garden Park.
Normally, beaches are the dullest places in the world for me. When I lived in Polynesia I hated them. They were empty reaches of sand with the sun blazing down on them like narrow strips of the Sahara and booming blue surf that was often as lifeless as it was active because all that churning water generally left about as much chance for marine life to grab hold as setting up house in a Cuisanart. I am also nothing like a Sun worshipper. To me, the Sun is something hot that spews out UV rays and is best avoided. I never could see the sense of being bored to death while lying out on hot sand as the hot sun blasted down on me like I was a portion of a mixed grill. Small wonder that my usual drill when visiting the beach was to walk from one end to the other as quickly as possible to get it over with.
Golden Gardens beach, or at least the portion where we encamped was different. It was cut across by the outlet of a small stream that poured into the sound and was one of the reasons that the beach was so popular with children, who would spend hours playing junior engineers and constructing dams to hold back the stream before releasing it in spectacular floods.
The other thing I liked about this beach was that the tide fall is a good fifteen feet on a good day, and at neap tide the waters recedes to reveal an area of grey sands, tidal pools, seaweed beds and scatters of rock from the seawall that form a wonderful area to explore. My wife has lived in this area her whole life and has never done any serious rock pooling, but she suddenly I was married to Dame Josephine Banks. We spent hours wading through the pools looking at starfish, grunion, eels, crabs; being squirted by gooey ducks; digging up scallops; trying to identify various bits of flotsam and jetsam. Once, we found a large red starfish with more arms than seemed decent and I placed a scallop in front of it. When the starfish reached out an arm and touched the scallop, the latter responded with vigour that I didn’t think possible for a bivalve. It opened up, out popped a foot twice the length of its shell, and the scallop launched itself a good ten inches away from the starfish. It may not have been much by crustacean standards, but for a mollusc it was Olympic grade panicking.
Meanwhile, Emma was enjoying how warm the pool water was and had a running feud with the seagulls that stole her potato crisps, yet wouldn’t let her feed them a handful of mud. Needless to say, she spent a lot of time chasing after and scolding them in irate baby talk. She also took such a delight at digging in the sand that she didn’t notice that the tide was coming in until she was sitting in half an inch of water and reacted with supreme indignation as only a toddler Canute can.
Things seemed to be going rather nicely, though, and I anticipated sitting back for an hour or two with a volume of P G Wodehouse stories while Emma and Mama napped. In ideal world, i.e. anyone else’s, this would have been a simple day for relaxing and playing, but my days at the seaside tend to come off more like Omaha beach. First, the Sun came out and our nice little vantage point became a sand oven in short order and we were forced to move back behind the trees after lunch, and again a few hours later when we misjudged the movement of the light as the afternoon progressed. Easy to write, but when you have the sort of oddball collection of clobber that parents and toddler drag along to the beach, you’re talking major logistics. Then there was the matter of Emma cooperating on the nap front. Having been played with, read to, listened to as she pretended to read, and walked from the beach to the fishing pier and back, she wasn’t so much sleepy as down and out cranky. Worse, Daddy in his infinite short sightedness had forgotten to pack either bottle or bunny, which Emma would never nap without. Normally, I would have driven home to get it, but we were afraid that if I left I’d never get another parking spot, but seeing as we were less than a mile from home as the crow flies why not just walk? If I had any sense, I’d have answered that it’s because that less than a mile was one bloody long flight of stairs and by the time I reached the top step I was thinking that it was even money that my wife was going to be a widow.
You would have thought the trip down would have been easier, but those are very steep stairs and I suffer from vertigo, which made the return trip physically easier, but infinitely more terrifying.
Naturally, when I got to the bottom I discovered loads of parking to be had, and that we’d run out of buns, soda, and beer, so that I had to make a drive anyway to pick up more.
After an early supper of hotdogs, I thought I’d finally get to my book when a party of drunken Koreans nearby blasting off fireworks on the footpath worried my wife and we broke camp for home. I thought that she was being overly cautious, but I changed my opinion when I was carrying a load of gear to the car and was hit square in the face by a bottle rocket. It was only by the miracle of a long fuse that it didn’t explode in my face or I’d be writing this from a hospital room.
That was the end of a perfect day… or was it. No. We had been very careful to use sun block on every inch of our child and on everyone’s faces, but we’d forgotten my wife's back and my legs. By bedtime, she was in agony and I could barely move my legs and we were both feeling like we had low-grade fevers. That was twenty four hours ago and it has not been a pretty day. Trying to get a full nights sleep with a toddler in the house is hard enough. Adding body parts that look like something off of a boiled lobster (ummm…. Lobster) and you can kiss any chance of rest goodbye. Worse, today was a workday for both of us. You try crawling under a desk trying to fix a computer set up with burned legs and see what that does to your morale.
Let’s just say that the office banter between my wife and I was less than scintillating.
Wednesday
7 July 2004
Notes While Watching a Well-Fermented Kaiju B-Movie
An alien spaceship approaches Earth on a mission of subjugation. As it enters orbit, it encounters a gigantic space faring monster that attacks and as the invaders are destroyed they send a message back to their home planet requesting back up forces to come and wreck terrible revenge. Fade to opening credits of this epic of cosmic destruction and in the background swells… HAPPY FUNBALL MUSIC!
Yes, it must be Destroy All Planets (1968). I hadn’t actually planned to watch this load of bilge. No really. I was going to watch Rocketship (1936), but the mega bargain jumbo DVD pack o’ crappy sci-fi that I picked up at the half price shop had mislabelled the contents list and the second feature of the twenty four films on the programme was one of the wrong 'uns and I got this Gamera battling aliens flick instead.
I never got into the Gamera subgenre as a kid. They always struck me as being substandard cod Godzilla imitators; and that’s because they were. True, they were popular with the less discerning element of the under ten crowd for whom a jet-propelled sabre-toothed tortoise was brilliant, but from my experience they were also the crowd that couldn’t wield a decent conker, which just goes to show. Where Ishirô Honda was able to take the absurdity of a giant lizard attacking Tokyo and turn it into an allegory of nuclear war and human fortitude in the face of overwhelming disaster (okay, I’m talking about the instalments before Megalon et al), Gamera and his foes were always a patent load of rubber suits with flat heads, dead eyes, and way too many flame thrower effects for the crew’s nerves.
Destroy All Planets seems a bit grandiose a title, as it only involves one planet and no destroying of same involved, much less the other eight in the Solar System. Dent One Planet might have been more accurate, but then, this is a Gamera flick.
Gamera is also notable for always being followed about by a pair of obnoxious brats who are so aggravating, pushy, yet lacking in anything resembling individuality that you really start rooting for the aliens. Vis:
Kid: “Hey, scientist, can I joy ride in your deep sea submersible.”
Scientist: “No, it’s broken.”
Kid: “Oh, come on! I can fix it.”
Yup; Obnoxious and with a degree in exotic metals and how to weld them. Despite this, Gamera shows tremendous fondness and loyalty to these little creeps, despite having no readily apparent connection to them beyond bumping into them on the beach one day.
Back to the flick.
Oh, this is ridiculous! I’ve been watching this film for forty-four minutes and thirty-five of them have been filled with nothing but flashbacks of fight scenes from previous Gamera movies! Huh? Was that a fox cut? I have no idea what’s going on. I haven’t seen so much padding since those 1970s Universal Studios TV movies where they would relate every second of the hero’s dramatic car parking. Worse, it’s all badly edited flashbacks. They don’t even bother to cut out characters and plot points that have nothing to do with the alleged current movie.
Did I mention that Gamera is friend to all children? If you watched enough MST3K you’d know that. He’s certainly not very discriminating when you consider that he holds off turning the second wave of aliens into sashimi after they kidnap the brats referred to above.
Hmmm. That’s interesting. The aliens are all dressed as French onion salesmen. I suspected as much. Given that their technology seems to be based on croquet balls, I think I see a pattern here. Could it be that they are from the Planet of Normandy Holidays?
Okay, the story so far. Gamera attacks the aliens. Credits. We are introduced to the brats (Unfortunately). Second alien ships shows home movies of Gamera’s previous gigs. Aliens kidnap brats to control Gamera. Brats wander around the spaceship. Aliens get fed up with brats wandering around their ship and tie them up. That took one hour. Lord, I’ve seen French films with faster pacing. Oh, now Gamera is destroying, uh, something at the alien’s bidding. Okay. It’s a dam. I’ll give them some credit for making a splash.
Ah ha! Now they’re off to destroy Tokyo! I never saw that coming. Finally; some major and pointless property damage. And the Tokyo tower bites the dust for the umpteenth time. The authorities are hesitating to counterattack, however. Why? Because the aliens are still holding the brats and the authorities are afraid of hurting them. Have they met these two? Evidently not. They’ve surrendered the Earth. Give me that button, dammit! I’ll do it!
Oh, wait. It’s all due to an order from the UN. Explains a lot.
God, these aliens are idiots. Not only do they not bother to guard the brats, but also they fell for the “Ooo! Look at that!” gag and the brats take control of the ship, sabotage it by swapping two boxes around (sabotage or mixing up lunches; you decide), and escape. Maybe that explains the onion salesman look.
Ha ha! The aliens have made their one fatal mistake. Sure, they could order Gamera to burst a dam, destroy Tokyo, and engage in a campaign of genocide against the entire human race. No problem. But when told to the attack the brats? That was too much! Sure, wipe out two billion men women and children, level the Earth, and exterminate an entire civilisation, but do a number on a pair of smart mouthed kids Gamera only met that morning? Have you no shame, you extraterrestrial fiends!
And we find out that the aliens are really squid monsters for no other reason than that it gives an excuse for them to all merge into one giant squid so we can have some kaiju action as a climax with the brats kibitzing the whole time. Can’t Gamera just step on them by accident, maybe?
Mind you, the aliens seem to be doing better in squid mode than in onion seller mode. Why do aliens always save the kaiju stuff for last? “Hey, we have a superweapon? Why don’t we just use it first thing and be done with it?” “Fool, haven’t you read the manual?!”
Sooooo… if you drop a giant space squid into the ocean from a great height that turns it into so much calamari? Why should that work any better than any other part of the thumping that Gamera has been doling out without results? Anybody stop to check for a body? Nope. That’s the end credit and Gamera is off to despoil fishponds everywhere.
Remember: Gamera is really neat. He is filled with turtle meat.
Thursday
8 July 2004
£431 Million for This?!?
A Real Parliament
A Happy Fun Ball Parliament
I’ve just had a look at the photographs on the BBC web site of the new Scottish Parliament buildings and I have been once again confirmed in my belief that the past century has done nothing for architecture except to systematically destroy six thousand years of progress. Where once buildings, civic ones especially, were the embodiment of the values and aspirations of a society executed by men who were masters of their craft, architecture today is nothing but an insanely expensive indulgence of the egos of incompetent poseurs who inflict their unintelligible cod theories on the rest of us in all too concrete a form. If you don’t agree with me, then have a look at that Horror at Holyrood and tell me with a straight face that given the opportunity Sir Christopher Wren wouldn’t have gone after that blundering hack Enric Miralles with a t-square.
Completed three years behind schedule and costing £431 million (a 400% cost overrun!), the Scottish Parliament is less a building devoted to the serious business of government and more like the offices of a trendy advertising firm or a bubble-era dot com that burned through way too much capital before going bust. I’m sure that it went down well at the club. One architect, who wisely remained nameless, called it "some of the most strange and beautifully crafted interiors in Britain for many years". Strange, yes. Beautiful? Only if you think egg cartons make for great civic architecture. The outside has a message for the people who paid for it, which is “screw you, suckers.” Not to mention that parts have a suspicious resemblance to that previous excrescence at public expense, the Millennium Dome, and the interior is like being trapped on the set of a ‘20s German expressionist film; and not a good one! The last thing that any serious government committee wishes to do is to hold its sessions in a room that is “playful and organic.” No wonder there’s a singular lack of right angles. It’s a beautiful statement on a parliament that cannot keep even its basic duties straight, but prefers to fritter away the treasury on the likes of this. Personally, I thought the whole devolution scheme was nothing but a dangerous folly, but even if I’d supported it, I’d be up in arms about this pile of crap.
It’s not only crap, it’s Eurocrap. The debating chamber follows the European style of giving each member an individual desk; as if they deserve it! These are set in a semi circle of pseudo "unity" rather than the much better English model of having MPs sitting on benches separated by an aisle with too few seats for all members at once. The latter is the design for a parliament of work and active debate. The former is one of sitzfleisch and reading pointless speeches to empty chambers. Naturally, there is a garden lobby with no plants designed as an “informal meeting space” that is so inhospitable that it will probably be used for nothing except to hurry through as quickly as humanly possible. But remember: the purpose is not governance, but ego massage for the architect and a warm feeling of modernity for the People's Rulers, so good design has no importance when measured against sticking one to the bourgeoisie; even if they are footing the bill.
If there’s a prize for the weirdest thing in this fun house, it has to be the MSP offices, which sport a load of jutting window seats called “think pods,” though they bear greater resemblance to a Lego block that got mixed up with a collection of Ikea cast offs. These descend into the utterly ludicrous. 109 of them were built at £17,000 a pop! They are supposed to be where MSPs “contemplate and come up with ideas,” which is a dangerous thing to encourage in politicians at the best of times. If these “pods” don’t become collection points for dispatch boxes, file folders, old magazines, and gumboots; then the MSP in question is not working hard enough.
You would think that being set next door to the Tudor majesty of Holyrood Palace, this 21st century blight would slink away in well-deserved shame, but in Blarite Britain shame is an outdated concept.
Friday
9 July 2004
King Arthur Goes Down the Braveheart Memory Hole
I never thought I'd say this, but come back, John Boorman; all is forgiven.
We all learn from our mistakes, so I am definitely not making the same one I did with Braveheart, which, as an archaeologist, I suffered weeks of heartburn after sitting through. That’s why I’m giving King Arthur (2004) as wide a berth as I’d give a burning munitions ship.
Arthurian films have never had a good time in Hollywood but at least most of the filmmakers understood that they were making a movie about King Arthur and not a cheap Gladiator knock off, and none of them showed utter contempt for both legend and history the way Arthur, King of Thieves… sorry, King Arthur does and none of them did so while billing their efforts as “the true story.”
I’ll
admit that I haven’t seen this piece of tripe, but just from the synopsis
and the publicity photos, I know that I don’t have to. Let’s see... What
have we got going on here? First up, we have Xena, Warrior Princess… sorry,
I mean “Guinevere,” who runs about in a skimpy leather outfit while wielding
a bow that my two-year old daughter could pull in what is the worst idea
since Arwen was lumbered with a sword in The Fellowship of the Ring
while sporting that beautiful little scratch that accented her cheekbone so
nicely. Are scriptwriters so insecure in the status of their leading ladies
that every female has to be a seven-stone waif in a kooch dancer’s outfit
who can cold-conk a berserker? Yeesh!
Then we have Arthur, who is not a Briton, but a half-Roman centurion (in an officer’s helmet!), who leads a load of knights with STIRRUPS (!!!!), who were all press ganged in Central Asia (how a French Lancelot du Lac fits in with this, I have no idea) and is riding around a 5th century countryside with the least romanised Romano-Britons I’ve ever seen, which is surprising, as the Britons grabbed on to Roman culture with both hands after they were conquered four hundred years before. Of course, Merlin is a Pict. Why? I don’t know. I thought Merlin was Welsh. Oh, yes. Guinevere is his daughter* and my brain hurts.
By the time I saw the 14th century swords I just gave up. It looks bad when you can give Monty Python higher points for accuracy.
Plot? It has ab-so-lute-ly nothing to do with anything that you may have read or seen about the King Arthur of either fact or fiction, and that’s why I’m not even bothering to mention how the film wipes its feet on Sir Thomas Malory, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Howard Pyle, and T.H. White. Hell, even Mark Twain gets a shot in the eye by this thing. Not to mention Christianity, which is treated as a form of proto-fascism.
In their defence, such as it is, the filmmakers said that they were trying something new and get away from all the fantasy elements. Yes! New is Knights of the Round Table (1953)!
Look, if you want to see a real story about King Arthur without the fantasy elements, yet has respect for real history, pass up this drek and hunt up a VHS of King Arthur, the Young Warlord (1975), which chronicles the efforts of a twentysomething Arthur trying to forge alliances in a Britain that is little more than bunch of huts among the Roman ruins. Brian Blessed is in it, which is good enough for me.
*Huh? does Leodegrance know about this?
Saturday
10 July 2004
Bronze Age Contracting Cock Ups
"What the...? Did you guys order these? I didn't order these. Who ordered these? This is weird."
Sunday
11 July 2004
Tinsel Town Department
In
December, Miramax will be releasing Martin Scorsese's The Aviator; a
biography of Howard Hughes. This film has sparked considerable
controversy because Scorsese was able to get the rights to Hughes's life,
but not his moustache.
Monday
12 July 2004
Spider-Man 2
I finally got a chance to see Spider-Man 2 the other night. That’s the sort of throwaway statement that covers about as much back-story as “We invaded Normandy this morning.” When you have a two-year old, something as simple as Mama and Daddy getting a night out at the flicks requires at least a week of forward planning with show times, sitter drop offs, diaper bag deployment, jammies selection, allotted travel time, and emergency contact info all sorted out to the nth decimal point. I know, because we dropped the ball on the last Harry Potter film and ended up with a farce where my wife bought and abandoned tickets three times over a fortnight period before she got to sit through the thing. I won’t even mention our anniversary dinner parking disaster.
Anyway, we got there in plenty of time, were actually able to find good seats and were even able to get popcorn without a frantic dash, so I think we must finally be getting our act together, unlike a group I encountered at the cinema who stood staring dumbfounded at a full row of seats as if trying to convince themselves that the occupants were really holograms.
With Spider-Man 2 I had the sort of experience l that I expect out of a movie; I wasn’t disappointed and I was pleasantly surprised. Normally, sequels are the open manholes of movies; you step into one expecting a stomach-churning drop. But Spider-Man 2 was anything but a drop. In fact, in many ways it was an improvement on the first, because it didn’t have to establish all the characters and origins rot that tends to eat up screen time in the superhero genre. Instead, we got right into the story and, refreshingly, the story was character-driven with the first part of the film dominated by Peter Parker’s personal life going down the tubes because of Spider-Man. True, the Web Head is cleaning up the streets, but all that web slinging is eating into Peter’s study time, making him late for class, getting him fired from his job, alienating him from his best friend, and has sent his love life South faster than my loan applications. The stress gets so bad that Peter’s spider powers start to suffer from hysterical paralysis and he can’t shoot his webs reliably (first time this happened I thought, “Never mind; it happens to every superhero now and then.”). Eventually, Peter gets so fed up that he decides to chuck the mask, try to get on with a normal life, and (hopefully) reconnect with Mary Jane Watson, who he’d rejected in the first film out of superheroic self-sacrifice. Trouble is, there’s a mad scientist with robot tentacles welded to his body on the loose bent on destroying the New York. It’s like showers and telephones, I tell you.
In lesser hands, this sort of plot could have been a disjointed mess or a saccharine nausea fest, but Sam Raimi has really cut his chops on the superhero film since he’d proved what he could do with Darkman. Raimi not only has a strong sense of visual style and a talent for staging action sequences that are thrilling without losing a sense of coherence, but he also has a strong knowledge and deep love of the comic book world. He understands that the way to make a superhero film is to treat the story seriously; remain true to the original material; don’t mess with the iconography; use the techniques of cinema to translate the comic book to the screen instead of fighting with it; and to take “camp” firmly by the neck, place it on the ground, adjust his size 12 hobnail boots, and stamp hard until it can’t ever get up again. The result is a film where it is possible to suspend disbelief and for two hours get completely caught up in this ideal New York populated by wise-cracking superheroes, crazed villains, and damsels in distress. It’s entertaining, and that’s as good a piece of praise as any movie can hope for.
It’s also unafraid to have as its theme the sort of virtues of heroism, sacrifice, and courage that too often elicit eye rolling from those so unworldly that they imagine themselves to be sophisticated. Maybe it doesn’t set well for those who worship “nuance” and seek “root causes,” but I for one find it refreshing to see a movie that extols heroes who give up their dreams to help others.
Heaven knows it inspired me. Sometimes I wonder if I should carry on with these columns. Sometimes I become so discouraged that I consider emptying my inkwell and putting my quill pen away, but now I have resolved to carry on because I have learned that with great power comes great responsibility, and that a web site is not a privilege, but a gift to be used for the good of all humanity.
Tuesday
13 July 2004
Medical Daze
It’s another one of those Badge of Courage days. Yes, Emma is back in hospital again with an asthma attack that was strong enough to have her admitted last night. This always seems to happen when she catches a cold or some other viral infection. We thought we’d become experienced enough at spotting the signs and starting her nebuliser treatments early enough to catch them, but this one seems to have slipped by. Not for lack of trying on our part, as we were dosing her in the wee hours of Sunday morning, but for some reason she took exception to the nebuliser mask and fought us the whole time, so she obviously didn’t get a full dose of medication. At any rate, we had a very unhappy baby come late afternoon and while we were driving her around Magnolia in hopes of getting her to nap we realised that even when she dozed off her breathing wasn’t getting any better, so it was off to hospital; do not pass go, do not collect £200and blow through the red lights; hoping that a cop sees you so you can press him into giving you an escort.
Inside of an hour, we are inside of a very familiar casualty ward room with Emma on the mask and her oxygen levels back up to 99% from a scary low of 85. Once she was stable, it was time for Daddy’s usual routine of heading out for magazines, sandwiches, and an irresponsibly large coffee. All the while I was fervently praying that Emma was okay and that we wouldn’t be pulling another all nighter. Naturally, the latter is exactly what we ended up doing. Emma was admitted and once we were encamped in her room my wife did her best to keep Emma calm and entertained while I ran home for the crash bag, our computers, and an assortment of Emma’s books and toys.
Everyone was very helpful and Emma responded very well to her treatments. Soon she was her old cheerful self; taking great delight in her Warner Brother’s cartoon characters gown and getting into everything that she shouldn’t.
You would have thought that that was the end of the adventure, but you’d be wrong and revealed as someone with no kids. Emma only slept for two hours, which meant that Mama and Daddy only slept for one, and then she wanted to be cuddled for the rest of the night, so Daddy sat up in the rocker with Emma in his lap while watching some of the most wretched cartoons ever to spew from the drawing pen of man. At 5:30 AM, I was dragging myself through empty corridors lit by dawn light in search of breakfast only to encounter the one time out of 24 hours that the cafeteria is closed and I returned with only more vending machine coffee for my troubles.
By midmorning, we were in the worst stage of the hospital visit. We were worn ragged, operating on hastily snatched lengths of sleep on the folding sofa, a fast early morning shower, and a thoroughly disgusting cafeteria breakfast. All my wife wanted to do was sleep. All I wanted to do was sit and read while the caffeine jag wore off. And Emma was feeling much better and wanted to get down on the floor and play, but as she was hooked up to a bank of monitors, so all she could do was sit behind the bars of her bed and scream in frustrated outrage. By this point, we were pretty much ready to join her.
Naturally in the middle of all this we realised that with all our meticulous planning we’d forgotten my wife’s pills, so I had to drive back across town for them. As I arrived home, I had a neat little cursing fit as I’d forgotten to bring the laptop with me, so I couldn’t download today’s e-mail
Small wonder I have come to regard hospital visits as our family equivalent to the Dieppe raid.
At the moment, I’m having a bit of rare peace. Emma and Mama are asleep and I’m downstairs in a coffee shop banging out the column and wondering whether or not we’re going to get to go home tonight. At the very least, I don’t expect to see home before late. Then it will be a fitful sleep as my body tries to throw off a coffee hangover followed by everyone running around frantically as we try to catch up on precious time lost.
Whatever happened to childhood illnesses that required little more than propping the kid up on pillows in front of the telly while feeding her ginger ale, saltines, and soothing words? One with Nineveh and Tyre, I suppose.
Wednesday
14 July 2004
Great Moments in Cinema: Taxi Driver (1931)
“You talking to me? All right, yes. Sorry to bother you.”
Thursday
15 July 2004
Perfect Casting Department
Bridget Moynahan is Susan Calvin
I have never seen a more stunning example of spot-on casting as choosing Bridget Moynahan to play Dr. Susan Calvin in the new I, Robot film. Yes, one look at her and I thought, "My God, this is the perfect woman to play a plain-looking, misanthropic, acid-tongued, middle-aged robopsychologist."
Tomorrow: Exclusive! John Goodman: the new Man of Steel?
Friday
16 July 2004
Tourism Department
The good news about Seattle is that there aren't very many bugs. The bad news is...
Saturday
17 July 2004
Reader Request Department
Here at Ephemeral Isle, we are dedicated to giving the public what it wants. And so, in response to your overwhelming, spontaneous, and frankly baffling e-mail requests, we present for your pleasure: a KOMODO DRAGON!
Sunday
18 July 2004
Vintner's Department
Photo: BBC Online
"Personally, I prefer a dry champagne"
Champagne from a cache of 20,000 bottles lost in the English Channel in 1955 were recently recovered. The fifty-year old bubbly was described as "pongy."
Monday
19 July 2004
And you thought Cold War films were paranoid!
So, they’ve remade The Manchurian Candidate and this time the villains have been changed from Communists to… American businessmen! Of course; so obvious a reworking was just waiting to happen. In the 1962 version, the story revolved around an American GI who was captured during the Korean War by the Communists, brainwashed, and returned to the US as a sleeper agent to assassinate an American presidential candidate. In the 2004 remake, the Korean War becomes the 1991 Gulf War. Fair enough. And the Iraqis capture the GI? No. Terrorists capture him? No. Iranians? No. It’s (ominous piano chord) an American pharmaceutical company! Ah, well. It could have been Teutonic Neo-Nazis again, so we should count ourselves lucky.
Let’s see, we’re at war, we have real enemies who are trying to kill us, there are plenty of nasty countries that would gladly hand terrorists a nuke if they could keep their fingerprints off it, so it’s only natural that Hollywood chooses businessmen (not foreign ones, of course) as the murderous gangsters. That makes perfect sense, because we all know that American corporations routinely advance their interests by kidnapping, brainwashing, political conspiracy, and assassination while the like of bin Laden, Saddam, Assad, the Iranian mullahs, and Kim Jong Il would never hurt a fly. We wouldn’t want to saddle them with a bad rap.
In the spirit of this enlightened Hollywood attitude, what other remakes can we do? How about:
- The Longest Day: Allied forces land at Normandy Beach to liberate Europe from the clutches of General Electric.
- Titanic: The world’s largest passenger liner is sunk when the Exxon Valdez deliberately rams it.
- Lawrence of Arabia: The charismatic T. E. Lawrence leads an Arab revolt against Halliburton.
- The Maltese Falcon: Hard-boiled detective Sam Spade hunts down the fabled jewelled bird, which is coveted by the nefarious Ken Lay.
- Star Wars: Bill Gates tries to take over the universe.
- Excalibur: Good King Arthur ushers in a golden age only to be confronted by Morgan le Fey, a property developer who wants to turn Camelot into a theme park.
- Born Free: The Adams release their beloved pet lioness Elsie into the wild, only to learn that McDonalds is hunting all the lions in Africa for their new line of Leo McNuggets.
- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold: A burned-out British spy tries to retire, only to be betrayed into a death trap by a vengeful Martha Stewart.
- The Day of the Jackal: Enigmatic professional assassin The Jackal is hired by General Motors to kill Jacques Chirac.
- Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: Apocalyptic black comedy about an all-out nuclear confrontation between Gateway and Dell.
- Failsafe: The Disney Air Force accidentally nukes Six Flags. In an effort to forestall Armageddon, Michael Eisner bombs New York to make amends.
- Pick Up on South Street: A pickpocket inadvertently lifts a strip of microfilm that is sought by a murderous Citicorp agent.
- Jaws: Paul Allen goes on vacation at the beach and starts devouring swimmers for no good reason.
- The War of the Worlds: War machines from Wal-Mart invade an unsuspecting Earth.
- Dracula: The CEO of King of the Undead Ltd. sucks the funds out of innnocent pension accounts.
I see Palme de Ors for everyone!
(By the way, if anyone wants to actually use these ideas, I expect a cut!)
Tuesday
20 July 2004
Great Moments in Fatherhood
Mr. Cho was finding his daughter's imaginary friend singularly annoying.
Wednesday
21 July 2004
Meanwhile...
Chief Umbeke was aware that at this range there was a one in a hundred chance that McTavish wouldn't shoot himself again.
Thursday
22 July 2004
Blair, Brown, & Hoon announce the latest round of defence cuts.
Government Announces Massive Defence Cuts
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Royal Navy to lose 20% of frigate/destroyer force.
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Army to lose four battalions.
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RAF to be cut by one quarter.
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Bases to close
God, this the sort of news that depresses me. We're at war, troops are stretched to the limit, so you cut the budget. I could understand this sort of nonsense back in the '90s when you could blather on about the end of the Cold War and the "peace dividend," but the vacation from history is over. We are in the middle of a shooting war with a load of crazed fanatics and vengeful dictators who would like nothing better than to turn London into radioactive slag. Is this really the time to slash forces so insanely that the Royal Navy can't even provide fighter cover for itself just so Gordon Brown can hand over the dosh to a dinosaur of an NHS or whatever chimerical monstrosity that the railways have morphed into at the moment? Did it ever occur to Blair & Co. that the first and foremost duty of government is not building toll roads, but protecting her majesty's subjects from being turned into briquettes by crazed zealots?
I can never be failed but be astonished at how the government treats our armed forces. They do sterling work on a shoestring, they pull Downing Street's chestnuts out of the fire time and again without baulking, and their reward from every post-war government, Labour and Tory, has been to suffer cut after cut. Oh, they'll say that since the defence budget is going from from £29.7bn this year to £33.4bn that it's really an increase, but considering what this war has cost and our desperate state of our forces, this is a cut any way you look at it. The fleet is a shadow of its former self, regiments consolidate and vanish, the entire RAF can be outgunned by a single US supercarrier, and we turn away recruits because we can't afford to retain them. Meanwhile, money continues to be poured down welfare state rat holes that even the most fervent socialists admit are a failure and our soldiers and seamen are sent off to every hotspot on the globe without even adequate battle kit.
Keep this up and one day our defence will be left to a cranky boy scout with a pen knife.
On the Flagship:
"Stop complaining, Bosun. We all have to live with the fleet reductions"
Friday
23 July 2004
The Road to Dystopia
"Uh, anybody know where I can find a 2.4 GHz 802.11b point? Anyone?"
I'm off on the road over the weekend, so whether there's going to be a daily feature will depend on how many WiFi cafes there at the caravan stations along the fabled Silk Road to Samarkand. If they're as rare as I suspect, I'll be back on Wednesday.
Wednesday
28 July 2004
Air Travel and Other Nightmares
I remember when air travel was comfortable, relaxed, and even glamorous on occasion. I remember a time when airports were comprehensible and were staffed by courteous, helpful people who did everything they could to make your trip more enjoyable. I remember when the only scrutiny your baggage had to deal with was weight and customs related and your person was sacrosanct. I remember that there were proper restaurants and bars in airports where you could get a decent meal and a drink. I remember skycaps who would deal with your baggage, so you never had to lug anything heavier than a raincoat; and the stewardess would hang that up for you. I remember aeroplanes with proper legroom, in-flight meals with real plates and cutlery, and when your plane was diverted because of weather an anxious man with a clipboard would meet you on the tarmac andwould direct you to the hotel that the airline had laid on for you gratis. I remember a time when air travel was as comfortable as rail travel at its best; only much faster and unrestricted by little obstacles like the Channel.
Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t a jet setter or anything even comparable. I don’t recall flying first class until I was in my twenties and there were plenty of times when I rode supercargo on RAF transports or puddle jumped in tiny prop planes. Also, air travel in the old days had its drawbacks. The planes didn’t have the range of today, so even the largest jetliners might have a layover at Gander or Shannon or some God forsaken Third World watering hole. Tickets were often staggeringly expensive and unless you lived near London, a longish rail journey might be involved just to get to the airport. And in this post-9/11 world I don’t have to remind anyone that airliners back then weren’t part of the front lines in the war, so there was no need to scrutinise everyone’s shoes and handbags for bombs.
That being said, I still contend that the balance is still on the old days. True, air travel is a marvellous innovation, but the way in which it has evolved into the primary long-range travel system of whole continents has to rank as one of the most ill advised developments of the modern world. I don’t mean that it has no part to play. Quite the contrary; I can’t think of a better way of making the jump from, or to shrink the imponderable distance between London and Tokyo, but as the background of an intercity service it is the height of insanity. The technical and economic problems of air travel have resulted in overcrowded air corridors, ticket prices that are as hard to understand as the US tax code, and schedules that are about as reliable as anything gleaned from a crystal ball. Small wonder we have airports that are more like up-market coach stations and cramped cabins that are breeding grounds for air rage.
And I am not speaking from a theoretical point of view. On Friday I went through one of those air travel episodes that make me resolve never to fly unless it’s in a nice short-range prop job. Anything further than that & I take the train or ship. I wasn’t headed for Kuala Lumpur; I was going from Seattle to Minneapolis with my wife and daughter. I’d already resigned myself to having to get to the airport several hours early; not because of security, but because of the God-awful traffic and parking problems around the terminal. I also expected having to haul all of our luggage the better part of a mile to the check in desk because skycaps are as scarce as ring-tailed lemurs these days. I did not expect my wife to be barred from getting on the plane because her driver’s licence had expired. Given that this was a last minute trip that was not a holiday, but family business, the prospect of having the whole thing cancelled at the last second was more maddening than disappointing. We thought of going back home for her passport; which was also expired, so was probably no solution, but ended up hunting down a notary public in the airport so that I could sign an affidavit swearing to my wife’s identity.
That first portent of doom passed, we were rewarded with the joys of struggling with two laptop bags, a Strawberry Shortcake rucksack, and stuffed bunny, and a two-year old through security (screams as bunny is separated from Emma so it can be irradiated), sitting on the floor by the gate because there weren’t enough seats to go around (such luxury!), munching on a sumptuous breakfast of Starbuck’s coffee and a scone, and capping it all by being told that our flight has been overbooked. The final bit got no reaction from me other than a curled lip, because in this day of computerised reservations this sort of thing is due to nothing more than the air line wanting a full plane.
The flight to our Denver stopover was pretty typical of modern travel. Where once airliner builders talked of planes with lounges and observation pays, modern liners are as close to treating human beings as cargo as you can possibly get without stamping barcodes on their foreheads. You’re jammed into as tiny a portion of cubic feet as can be devised and with the sort of leg room that you assign to a weasel. Only Emma with her car seat showed any sign of satisfaction with the arrangements. The drink service was minimal as minimal can be. Since it was a morning flight, I opted for lukewarm coffee in a paper cup. Had I known what was coming, I would have chosen a double scotch instead.
On the plus side, the airbus were on was equipped with chair-back televisions and a direct satellite feed, which meant that we could keep Emma entertained and things were as tolerable as could be expected until we made our approach to Denver. On the television there was a travelling map of our progress. It was like the heartening progress bar of a long download, but when the little plane on the map stopped heading southeast and began curling north and then west and then south I had a sinking feeling. Yup, there was a thunderstorm at Denver and we ended up being diverted to some hole called Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
Now, when there’s a delay on a train you can walk the corridors, visit the buffet, or pop into the smoking car for a quick cigar. If you’re on a coach you can get out and glare at the cows. On a airliner, however, you’re stuck in your seat waiting for fatigue to set in. The stewardess did their best (I know it’s not PC to call them that, but I’m not in the mood). They distributed what was left of the pretzels and let the kids on board visit the cockpit. One stewardess even held Emma for a bit, giving us some relief. Despite this, there was no getting around the fact that we were stuck on the tarmac for four hours without even the satellite feed, which had cut out when we landed.
Eventually (that word covers a glacial epoch), we reached Denver. Happy ending? Only if you regard jumping off the fantail of the Titanic as a neat resolution. There was no one at the gate to tell us where to go to reach our connecting flight or anything else to help us along. Nope. We had to go to the customer service desk, stand in the queue for an hour, be told that there wouldn’t be another flight until 3:30 PM the next day, be directed to the wrong luggage carousel in the baggage claim, call all over town to find a hotel, spend fifty dollars on cab fair to get to said hotel, and then have to wait over an hour for room service to bring our first meal that we’d had all day.
At least it wasn’t a Northwest flight, so we avoided being kicked in the groin as well.
You would have thought that would have taken up our full quota of trouble, but no chance. My wife often says that she has never met anyone who has had as much misfortune as me and that now she’s sharing it. I suppose what we went through at Denver airport shows how much she actually loves me. It looked like a good sign when we had free WiFi at the hotel lobby while we waited for the free shuttle to the airport, so I could get a bit of work done. It also looked like a good omen when we played one of those grab claw machines to keep Emma entertained and won three dollies in a row for her. And I was almost optimistic when we found kerb side check in at the airport. Little did I know that I should have read the squeaky luggage cart as a portent of doom.
I don’t know what the original design of Denver airport was supposed to be, but I suspect that it was based on the Labyrinth at the palace of Minos, because it’s just about as hard to find your way around and the designers clearly though that providing clear signage was cheating. The main hall with all the shops and restaurants is nearly comprehensible, but the new security arrangements have made up for that by dropping a huge dollop of aggravation smack in the middle of the place. There is a huge jerry-rigged area of glassed enclosures and crowd control tapes that, of course, have no clearly marked entrance or other explanation of how to join the insanely long queue. You are also not allowed to bring trolleys into the security area or the concourses, which makes perfect sense, since if you’re hauling laptops, diaper bags, a car seat, and a toddler who wants to do nothing more than sit on the floor and colour through a twisting security check, down an escalator, on to a train, and then along a quarter of a mile of concourse to the very last gate, why would you want to be further encumbered by something to help you carry it all?
Let me put it this way, I was literally gasping for breath when we got there and the flight was delayed an hour.
The flight to Minneapolis was short and uneventful, but at this point we were all so strung out, stressed out, and keyed up that it might as well have been a weekend getaway at the Black Hole of Calcutta.
Of course, our ride from the airport was late.
Thursday
29 July 2004
Public Health Warning
Coffee: Know your limits!
Friday
30 July 2004
Surgery
I have one of those medical conditions that, like gout or the jumping cooties, elicits no sympathy: an ingrown toenail. Okay, since I've decided to whinge about it I've revealed myself to be a big blouse, but in my defence I'll point out that all the stomping about the past few days while hauling luggage through various airports has jammed the offending spur right into a nerve and is causing bodily fluids to seep that have no business seeping. On the whole, its rather like having a Frenchman taking up residence in my foot. At any rate, I shall be going under the knife tomorrow to remove the problem or the toe, whichever is easier, and will be on some major painkillers afterwards, so there may be a distinct lack of spleen in tomorrow's offering, as I shall be higher than a kite.
Saturday
31 July 2004
The Toes of War
I've had my ingrown toenail looked to. It was one of those procedures that is infinitely more painful to prepare for than to go through. Before the offending spur of toenail could be removed my toe had to be anesthetised so I wouldn't be in any discomfort. This meant sticking me with three needles right in an area with lots and lots of nerve endings (grinding the tip around in the joint for good measure, of course) and then a fourth injection right under the nail. On the first injection I was gritting my teeth. On the second I was grunting with pain. On the third I was yowling a bit. On the fourth I was telling my doctor that the invasion was landing at Normandy.
This took the better part of an hour. You would have thought that after that the operation would be a bit dramatic. Instead, the doctor pulled out the scissors, I felt a slight tug and that was it. The up side is that my toe feels much better; at least, as good as it can with half the nail missing and the vestiges of the anaesthetic eking away. On the down side I didn't get any of the pain killers that I'd expected, so I still have to do the post office and bank runs this afternoon. On the other plus side, Emma is in school, so I have a bit of peace to recuperate in for a few hours.
I haven't been following the American political conventions very closely. Ever since they became carefully orchestrated infomercials I haven't really seen much of a point. I did, however, read the transcript of John Kerry's speech from last night and I am firmly convinced that this is no longer an election that Kerry can win, but only one that Bush can lose. There are a number of points I could make to support this, but I'm not a political animal, and especially not an American one, so I'll confine myself to two of them.
First, Kerry is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, he has a base which is passionately, nay rabidly, moved to defeating Bush. That's all well and good, but he is also a politician who must woo large numbers of suspicious swing voters if he's going to have any chance in November. That means he can't be some sort of anti-Bush who spouts vitriol incessantly. He has to appear the statesman. But he can't tell his supporters to knock off the Bushitler stuff and still throw them red meat at every time they howl for it. Kerry cannot sit at the top table with Michael Moore and pretend he has nothing to do with what Moore says. If he tries that wheeze he'll end up being regarded as a traitor to the cause by one side, a liar by the other, or a hypocrite by both.
Second, with the economy improving the only issue that is truly going to matter is the war and whatever his pronouncements, Kerry's record as an antiwar protestor and as a senator has left him with a reputation of being, at best, soft on defence. What I came away with from in Kerry's speech is a man who would indeed defend his country, but only in extremis and for whom 9/11 is a tragedy rather than an atrocity. His strategy for the war on terror will likely be that he will continue to help Iraq, but will undertake no new military initiatives or stand up to the French. He will instead quickly and quietly relegate the war to the back burner. "War" will become a rhetorical word and it will be a matter for diplomacy and law enforcement. We will see the odd special forces raid; a missile strike or two; deference to Chirac; embracing of the UN; all sorts of new commissions, committees, and conferences; resolutions and treaties aplenty will be signed; but the end result will be a Munich Accord with the Axis in return for promises to behave so that the West can return to the status quo of the past five decades. Meanwhile, the terrorists and their sponsors will do as they please knowing that no one will seriously bother them.
What I see is basically this: assuming that nothing new happens in the next four years (no new strikes against the Axis or spontaneous regime changes), if George Bush is re-elected we will face a ten to one chance of a major terrorist strike against the west. By that I mean one where we lose 50,000 people in an WMD attack (If we take out Iran or North Korea the odds shoot to a hundred to one). If John Kerry is elected, we face even odds of getting hit. This is because, whatever his failings, Bush knows that we are in a real war with real villains who want us dead or enslaved and our enemies know that Bush will kill them. Kerry gives the impression that they are just a problem to be managed, and that is an impression that is one of dangerous folly.
With this in mind, Bush has the initiative. All he has to do is speak honestly about what he believes, what he has done, and what he will do and the electorate will have a fair measure of the man. With Kerry you have a man who is without the support of his antiwar supporters if he speaks true, will not fight if he is false, and would hit soft either way.
Okay, but maybe Kerry's antiwar base is so anti-Bush that it makes up for that and that somehow the entire country will be so sick of war by November that it will turn on Bush. Maybe, but if it becomes a pro or anti war question, Kerry is in even deeper trouble. Remember, this is not a war that the West entered into by choice. It has been thrust upon us by an enemy that yearns to kill as many of us as they can. They will not sit still if we abandon the fight. They will come again and if it is as bad a scenario as I fear, then the loss of the population of a small city will result in an America so enraged that we will witness a call for retribution that hasn't been seen since Carthage pissed off Rome. If Kerry is going to win, he has to prove, and I mean prove, that he can prevent such an attack. Otherwise he isn't an alternative, he is a gamble.
And I doubt if there are that many who are even rabid Bush haters who would take such a gamble.
Ephemeral Isle