Reading Week: "Please put all electronic devices on airplane mode."

Saturday morning in Vancouver, and Karli and I are sitting on the tarmac at YVR, waiting to start a one-week getaway in sunny Palm Springs, a welcome break from the uncertain weather of British Columbia in the spring.

Although I do a lot of casual travel reading on my iPhone, I like to have a paper book for planes - flight attendants seem to be happier if you're not using your phone at takeoff, airplane mode or not, and it's also a good opportunity to catch up on some reading.

My seatmate on the aisle side is perusing The Untethered Soul, a New York Times best seller from 2007 -  not exactly current, but a far cry from my 1960 vintage Badger Books paperback copy of The Brain Stealers*, by Murray Leinster, which I pulled out of my tsundoku stack for the trip, along with a couple of other selections that caught my eye.  By some standards, this might be a valued antique, although it's hardly in mint condition, and only cost me a pound or thereabouts last year at a used book store in London's Portobello Market.

As is common with books from this era, the cover has absolutely no relationship to the story:** I have no idea who the glowing woman is supposed to be, and the villains are globular pink bloodsucking alien mind parasites (think Wilson with little fangs).  The hero of the story protects himself from their mind control powers with a cap made out of coiled iron wire while he builds a brain jamming machine to defeat them - tin foil has been available for hat creation since 1910, but you can't always depend on being in the kitchen when crunch time hits.

Looking casually around the plane, it occurs to me that you rarely see anyone reading a notably old book in public.  I can't be the only person with a nostalgic affection for classic novels, but even being a bit of a collector aside, I don't think I've recently seen anyone on a plane flipping through The Godfather, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Hotel New Hampshire, or any of a hundred different best sellers from the past.  It may just be that fame is fleeting, and that the general public will read a book once on vacation and then donate it to Goodwill or a book donation bin for hospital libraries, or maybe drop it off at a used bookstore, where someone like me brings it home to complete the circle twenty years later - or, in this case, 59.

- Sid

* Which, oddly, contains four pages of advertising, including a fascinating opportunity to purchase Joan the Wad, "Queen of the Lucky Cornish Pixies", and offers to both increase and reduce your bust using a "harmless vegetable cream" - well, two different creams, to be clear, it would be asking a lot for one product to provide both of those services.

**  There's actually a sound economic reason for this.  Pulp magazine and book publishers would often contact an artist and order generic paintings in bulk, then somewhat randomly assign them to covers.

"Gentlemen, we're history."

"I believe our adventure through time has taken a most serious turn."

Ted, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

There is nothing worse than an incomplete trilogy.  Imagine if The Matrix had been a stand-alone film, Tobey Maguire hadn't made Spider-man 3, they'd skipped the third Terminator installment, or The Hobbit had only been long enough to make two films rather than three.

Hmmm...

Okay, maybe not the best examples, but still, it's important to have closure, and as such it was both a pleasure and a relief to learn that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are finally re-uniting to complete the Bill and Ted Trilogy, as per the world's least pretentious YouTube™ movie announcement a couple of weeks ago.  Production on Bill and Ted Face The Music is slated to begin production this summer, with a tentative release date of summer of 2020.

The events of the second film don't really leave any room for a follow-up, but as we all know, time isn't a strict progression of cause to effect, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.  As such, Bill and Ted's future is not set, and there is no fate but what they make for themselves*.   In other words, anything can happen, which is a pretty bodacious position to be in when writing a movie.  If reunited creators and writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon can match the unexpected depth and quality - dare I say excellence - of the first two movies, the results could be just as much fun.

However, "fun" may not be a given, and the story could easily take a most serious turn, as per the opening quote. There's a bittersweet aspect to the whole idea of revisiting the Wyld Stallyns:  in the real world, it's been 28 years since William S. Preston Esq. and Theodore Logan had their Bogus Journey, and in spite of the running Internet gag about Keanu Reeves not aging, both he and Winter are obviously not teenagers any more. Given that the plot precis says that they still haven't written the song that will unite the world in peaceful harmony, how depressed and frustrated must Bill and Ted be at this point in their lives?  Not to mention the fact that at the end of Bogus Journey, they both have children -  given their own parental experiences, have they remained true to themselves, or have they unknowingly become their own fathers?  (Hopefully not to the extent that Bill is now married to Missy - although, when you think about it, that's actually not a bad plot hook.**)

Similarly, there's been a lot of water over the dam since Winters and Reeves made their debut as Bill and Ted - will they be able to summon up the same light-hearted exuberance that they effortlessly brought to their characters in the first two films?   Alex Winters has spent more time behind the camera than in front of it since Bogus Journey, and Keanu Reeves hasn't exactly been noted for his fun-loving movie roles recently - it's a big jump from John Wick to Theodore Logan.

Really, though, it should be simple - all they need to do is remember to be excellent to each another and party on.  If they've forgotten that, well, that would be a pretty good place to start the script right there.

- Sid

* Terminator reference, but oddly enough I don't have a posting to link to.

** It's even more of a twist if Ted is married to Missy.  But really, they should still be with Joanna and Elizabeth, the princess babes.

Geek chic.

Ah, and what does the well-dressed geek wear for a late Saturday lunch at the Storm Crow?

NASA cap - check.

Forbidden Planet t-shirt - check.

Academie Duello longsword apprentice green cord - check.

Book Nerd pin - check.

Table for two, please...

- Sid