She used to own one of those damn necklaces, too.

I don't know about you, but I intend to write a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about all of this.

Jack Dawson, Titanic

A recent conversation with Laurie brought up the following question:  if you could travel in time, where (or more accurately when) would you go?

Laurie expressed her desire to travel on the Titanic, with the unexpected codicil that she'd like to be one of the survivors. I can certainly understand wanting to see the Titanic during its heyday, but I'm not sure I'd want to go so far as to experience the accident itself, although I'm relieved to hear that Laurie wouldn't want to go down with the ship. She went on to explain that she'd be a rich heiress, at which point I stopped her. 

"Wait, how would you become a rich heiress in 1912?  From whom would you inherit your riches?"

Travelling back in time and experiencing historical events in person is an interesting idea, and something that I think would appeal to a lot of people, but the practical aspects of arranging that sort of a first person temporal holiday are daunting, to say the least.  I don't object to someone wanting to be a rich heiress - no one wants to travel below the waterline, especially in this case - but how do you introduce participants from the future into a well documented, dead-end scenario like the death of the Titanic?

Let's lay down some ground rules first.  Changing the timeline is completely verboten - no going up to the bridge and holding the crew at gunpoint to make them change course, but even smaller Butterfly Effect changes have to be avoided.

We also want to make sure that there are no twonkies. In the parlance of time travel, a twonky is an anachronistic artifact, like a Coke can in a medieval midden - the name comes from a 1942 short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.  Avoiding possible twonkies in this situation is especially important because we already know that James Cameron is going to be all over the place in a submersible with an Imax camera less than a hundred years later.  So, Laurie, my apologies, but just to be safe, no iPod. No iPod, no earbuds, no camera, no bottled water, no protein bars, no pantyhose, no running shoes, no Tylenol, no tampons, no hand sanitizer:  roughing it, in other words.

The passenger list of the Titanic is a known historical fact, which either already includes Laurie's name (indicating that she makes the trip into the past from her future timeline) or does not.  But even if she's not on the list, that doesn't mean that she can't go.  Because we know who was on the ship, Laurie could just find someone with a ticket*, whack them on the back of the head, and take their place.

That might actually be the best option, given the difficulties of laying hands on sufficient legal tender for the time period to allow for a ticket purchase.  A top of the line First Class Parlor Suite on the Titanic weighed in at £870, or $4,350**, which is a lot of antique money to find, let along buy. Alternatively, you could haul a big stack of gold back in the time capsule and sell it in 1912, but given that the price of gold in 1912 was about $21, you'd need to take about 210 ounces of gold - that's about $350,000 in today's market.

Other options include counterfeiting the money, or even just making a preliminary trip and robbing a few banks, but again, it's important to avoid making ripples in the time stream.

However, a little research reveals that although there are several Smiths on the ship, they all appear to be married couples rather than heiresses.  (There are also a couple of Trouts, but that's an inside joke.)  So if Ms. Smith is going to be on the Titanic, it's either under an assumed name, or as a stowaway.

Being a stowaway is an interesting solution, in that it avoids all of the issues with passenger lists and money and so forth.  On the other hand, you have to find a place to sleep without being noticed, and discretion is equally important while exploring the ship.  After all, it would be a very bad thing to be locked in the brig without your time travel ticket when the ship started to sink.

This is all based on the assumption that Ms. Smith is the only person who would want to add the ultimate cruise experience to her resumé.  As previously discussed, easy access to time travel allows an infinite number of visitors to arrive at Shakespeare's childhood home if they so wish. Similarly, everyone who has ever or would ever want to be on the Titanic has to show up during that narrow four day window. The joke is that eventually the entire Titanic passenger list would consist of time travelling visitors rather than any of the actual people who originally bought the tickets.***

And me?  Oh, I wanted to see the Beatles in concert in 1965.  A modest ambition, I realize, but at least I don't need to practise treading water in a cork life vest - just in case.

- Sid

* A rich heiress, presumably.

** To be fair, this is a worst case scenario.  A first class berth accommodation was about a quarter of this price, but after all, we are talking about rich heiress territory.

 *** In this scenario, the ship doesn't need to hit an iceberg.  It sinks under the unexpected weight of a million temporal tourists.

One giant leap.

"A bit of history for you…

Do you know how many people are watching this live on the telly?  Half a billion.  And that's nothing, 'cause the human race will spread out among the stars, you just watch them fly, billions and billions of them for billions and billions of years, and every single one of them at some point in their lives will look back at this man taking that very first step and they will never ever forget it."

The Doctor, The Day of the Moon

Neil Armstrong died yesterday at the age of 82.

 * * *

It was, in fact, just one small step.  And I acknowledge all of the people who contributed, all of the ground work, all of the other small steps necessary to make that final small step possible.  But to be that person at that place at that time makes Neil Armstrong a unique figure in human history.

In many ways the potential offered by that moment has been wasted.  Dreams of moon bases and Mars landings have become just that, dreams, as fiscal issues and changed directions diminished the focus on space exploration.

None of that matters.

The instant when Neil Armstrong's foot touched the surface of the moon on July 20th in 1969 changed humanity forever.  It opened the doors to the universe - it made us infinite and immortal.

You just watch us fly...

- Sid

Old school.

I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world - or no longer of this world - yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

"The putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation" - now that's what I'm talkin' about, baby!

- Sid

 

Have Space Suit - Will Travel.

Well, I might as well just come out with it - I'm thinking about building a space suit for Hallowe'en this year.

The company that I work at places a large amount of importance on employee involvement in shared social activities (to the point that we have an Employee Engagement manager) and for the last couple of years, I've maintained my standing by showing up on October 31st in some form of costume.  Two years ago it was my infamous zombie outfit, and last year I took the easy way out and wandered around in a life-sized version of my port pass badge - with my actual face in the space for the ID photo.

Having won the Best Costume prize both years, I was thinking that I might legitimately skip a year in the interests of letting someone else take the prize, but I stumbled across a site that was selling transparent acrylic domes, and I got to thinking...

After all, take a look at the various spacesuits in movies and TV shows (and at NASA) and you'll immediately see that an awful lot of them rely primarily on a padded coverall and a helmet, plus whatever amount of greeblie dressing the designers felt like sticking on.  How hard could it be?

Yeah....

And now I've been foolish enough to put it in writing...wish me luck.

- Sid

 

Eye candy.

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.

Warhammer 40K

My spare time for the last month has been almost exclusively dedicated to a large work project with a short deadline.  Happily, I finished writing and laying out the first portion of the project at about ten o'clock last night, which gave me Sunday off to relax.  (Well, I have to do laundry and clean and go to the gym and so on, but after a month of doing nothing but write content on how to take cargo containers off ships, trust me, that's relaxing.*)

As part of my R&R for today, I took some time to get back into a game that I purchased on the Canada Day weekend - Space Marine, a third-person shooter set in the Games Workshop Warhammer 40K universe.

For those of you unfamiliar with Warhammer 40K (ie, everyone but Donovan, and Colin a little bit), it's one of those almost stereotypically über-geek multi-player games that involves a fistful of 20 sided dice, rulers, and painstakingly assembled and painted miniatures. Originally launched in 1987 as a spin-off from Warhammer, a fantasy-based game in the same style, it has in some ways eclipsed its older sibling.

The interesting thing is that unlike most entertainment involving dice, tabletops, and arguments over whose turn it is, games like WH40K have developed a deeply complex and involved back story to support the gaming experience.  Checkers, for example, has no plot.  Chess, which is one of the oldest strategy-oriented games on the planet, doesn't bother to name the pieces.  And, as much as you may enjoy Monopoly, would you really expect to find Amazon.ca selling novels about the brutality and squalor experienced by the race car during its time in Jail?  (Without passing GO or collecting $200.)

WH40K has all of that, and that's much of the reason that Games Workshop dominates the tabletop marketplace.  The universe in the 41st millennium is portrayed as a place of constant conflict, as Space Marines and the Imperial Guard, loyal to the godlike Emperor, struggle against hordes of brutal green-skinned Orks, life-stealing robotic Necrons, the ancient Eldar and their perverse cousins the Dark Eldar, the expansionist alien Tau, and the forces of Chaos, including the Chaos Space Marines, former fellows in the armies of the Imperium who have been changed and distorted by the Warp. Each of these groups is supported by reams and reams of what is technically known as "fluff": documents, maps, descriptions, diagrams, novels, iconography and histories - everything that anyone could possibly want in order to enrich and deepen the gaming experience far beyond the movement of painted plastic on a table.

I've never gotten involved in the tabletop gaming experience (although I had a near miss with Dungeons and Dragons back in the 70s) but the WH40K phenomenon is just one of those known factors in the geek continuum.  I was quite pleased with the PC strategy simulation version of WH40K, ending up with all four of the expansion modules, and as such when Space Marine and all its expansion content went on sale for $14.99, I thought I'd give it a try.

Ironically, compared to games like Fallout 3 or Bioshock, Space Marine does not present a complicated gaming experience.  It's very much a linear dungeon-style game, and to date there's been nothing elaborate in terms of quests, challenges or puzzles - so far it's all pretty much just an excuse to kill orks in a variety of gory and graphic fashions.

However, full credit for the manner in which the feel of the Imperium has been translated to the game environment.  The Space Marines are very close to a monastic order, and their world is presented as a dark, gothic environment full of memento mori and religious symbolism.  Space Marine presents a gloomy, atmospheric environment full of towering bastions, flying buttresses, ornamental skulls and massive reliquaries containing weapons upgrades.  For me, this has more than made up for any shortcomings in terms of intellectual challenges in the levels.

So, back to the game - I've gotten out of the sewer complex beneath the Manufactorum that contains the mammoth War Titan, reunited with my brothers of the Ultramarines, and I am eager to return to the struggle with the Ork invaders.

After all, I fight for the Emperor - and I WILL KNOW NO FEAR!

- Sid

* On the other hand, I'm a bit sceptical about my decision to follow up a month of intensive writing by catching up on blog posts...

 

Spoiler follows! Or maybe not.

I saw The Amazing Spider-Man last night, and I have to say it was a surprisingly bittersweet experience.

You see, I know how Gwen Stacy dies.

I'm not special in that regard, a lot of people know.  Gwen Stacy died in 1973, although, in the fashion so common among comic book characters, death has not been a barrier to subsequent appearances in Peter Parker's life.  Regardless, that moment 39 years past when Peter cradled his dead girlfriend in his arms is considered to be a critical event in the history of comics, the end of the Silver Age and the beginning of a changed world not only for supporting characters, but for the heroes as well.

The question is, what do the producers of the Spider-Man reboot have in mind for Gwen?  Unlike any of the other comic movie franchises, The Amazing Spider-Man doesn't feature the hero's nemesis, deciding instead to go with another villain from Spider-Man's catalogue of foes.  The Lizard certainly occupies a strong position in Spider-Man's mythology, but I have to say that I don't consider him to be a first-line villain.

But I can guess at the strategy behind the decision to start the show with Curtis Connor's cold-blooded alter ego.  By connecting Connor's experiments with Oscorp and Norman Osborn, they're setting up the elements for Osborn's appearance behind the mask of the Green Goblin in a future movie.  I'm impressed that they'd gamble on the success of the reboot by refusing to lead with trump, so to speak, and I think it augurs well for the next film.  (Or pair of films, trilogies seem to be the standard for super-hero movies.)

Similarly, I can see why they went with Gwen Stacy for Peter's love interest.  Gwen was Peter's first love, and it was widely believed that Marvel was working their way up to marriage for the happy couple, at least until the events of Issue #121.  As such, she's a better canon choice than Mary Jane Watson for Spider-Man's return - in fact, in the comic version it was shared mourning over Gwen's death that began the process of Peter and Mary Jane becoming a couple.

But does that mean that Gwen Stacy is marked for death?  They've made some minor alterations in Peter's backstory for the reboot, but the major events in his life remain the same.  On the other hand, they've already made a substantial change in the Gwen and Peter continuity by having Peter tell her about his dual lifestyle - in the comic, she died without ever knowing Spider-Man's true identity.  On that basis, I'll be paying a lot more attention to subsequent movies in the series to find out whether or not Ms. Stacy's relationship with her friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man has started her down a path with only one destination.

- Sid

Asimov to Zelazny?

It's funny that I don't talk more about books here considering how much reading I do.  Not a day goes by when I don't read a e-book or a paperback or a hardcover, and my daily round trip commute gives me at least an hour of reading, regardless of what else is on my schedule.  My brother John once asked me if I read while eating - I laughed and replied, "John, I read while I'm brushing my teeth."

However, I'm not buying as many books as I used to.  Part of the problem is the fact that I'm out of shelf space again - it's not just a case of buying another shelf, I need to reconfigure my apartment in order to find room for that new shelf.

I'm also torn between on-line shopping and the more limited opportunities of retail outlets.  The down side of physical book shopping is that, quite frankly, I no longer remember each and every book that I own. This has not been helped by the e-book phenomenon, which has resulted in confusion between books I own on paper, downloaded, or which I may have borrowed from someone to read and never owned myself.  As a result, I sometimes find myself purchasing books that I already own, which is counterproductive. Online shopping allows me to check possible purchases against existing stock, so to speak.

Unfortunately, I seem to experience some sort of basic disconnect in the online browsing experience. Something in the manner that Amazon in particular has set up its system completely disagrees with the way in which my mind processes information - or at least the way that it browses for books.

All other issues aside, unless I'm missing something incredibly basic on their website, they won't let me look at their inventory in alphabetical order!  I realize that alphabetical order is an obsolete holdover from the pre-digital age, but you know, Amazon, I think you'll find that a lot of people still sort their books by author's name.  In fact, you still do it in your stores.  Would it really be that hard to add a "Sort by author" to the options?

Oh, and if anyone's curious, I'll be happy to do a posting on how to brush your teeth while holding a book and turning the pages with the other hand - but trust me, don't try it while you're shaving, there are some things you really do need to watch in the mirror.

- Sid

 

Aren't we all?

Purchased at Kimprints in Gastown on Saturday. The button, that is, I've had the windup robot for decades. In fact, it was one of the centrepieces on my wedding cake...but that's another story.

- Sid

 

With great power comes great responsibility.

"I mean, Marvel has certain hard and fast rules, like about the spider bite — you have to have Peter get bitten by a radioactive spider, and Uncle Ben’s death has to transform Peter Parker into Spider-Man, you know what I mean? He has to learn a lesson by that. But I’m trying to find new inflections and new context so that the story feels new. Because I do think the character is different; you want to honor the iconic elements of Spider-Man but you also want to reinvent the world around him so that it feels interesting and new, and that’s a tricky line to walk."

The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb in a Movieline interview.

All evidence would indicate that the Spider-Man reboot is going to be a big success à la The Avengers. I've read positive comments on line, it's doing well at the box office, all well and good, but hints in the previews suggest that the script has taken some liberties with the traditional version of Peter Parker's accession to arachnid abilities.

Sam Raimi's version is completely faithful to the original, simple, iconic version:  a radioactive spider bites Peter, bang, done.  (And Tobey Maguirre's WTF experience when he wakes up the next morning and looks in the mirror is a great little moment in the first movie.)  But the previews for the reboot hint about a deeper, darker aspect to this transformation, suggesting that Peter's parents had somehow genetically modified him in order to create the potential for his wall-crawling abilities.

 Sigh...as with the now-infamous plan on the part of Michael Bay to reboot the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as aliens, why do these people want to mess with success?  After all, Spider-Man's origin isn't really the radioactive spider bite - it's actually the moment of trauma when his actions cause the death of Uncle Ben, that discovery of consequences and responsibilities.  Why diminish that moral epiphany?

On the other hand, I have to give credit to Marc Webb's comments in the opening quote.  Isn't the whole purpose of doing a reboot is to "find new inflections and new context" - otherwise, why bother?  Sadly, the answer to that question may also be "in order to make millions of dollars by springboarding off a proven box-office commodity that may have another mile in it."

Regardless, I'll undoubtedly catch The Amazing Spider-Man in commercial release, so that I can experience it in 3-D, and see what they've actually done to the story. And who knows, maybe I've done the film an enormous injustice.  After all, it looks like they went back to the original web-shooters, so they're not completely evil.

- Sid

 

The Campbell Brothers strike again!

Well that's not fair...what about the people of Ralph?

- Sid

(Excerpted from The Pirates of Zan, by Murray Leinster)

Okay, I added the eldritch green misty bits.

I could not help feeling that they were evil things - mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

H. P. Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness

I recently visited Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia, and in one of those odd little coincidences happened to be reading a collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories as we flew over the astonishing panorama offered by the Coast Mountains - specifically, At The Mountains of Madness, a story of antarctic exploration, horrifying discovery, and distant, alien ranges of mountainous terror.

- Sid

Future Shock.

I've just finished reading The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner - it's a dystopian novel in which government has devolved into an amoral end-justifies-the-means system based around totalitarian control over information.

The protagonist was recruited to a government think tank as a child, but escaped after discovering the hidden agenda behind the group.  A master programmer, he conceals his true identity under a variety of aliases - he's skilled enough that he can program a new persona into the net using just a phone screen.  His ID hacking is safeguarded by a worm that circulates through the Net eliminating any traces of his previous identities.

At this point, you're probably thinking, "Okay, well, that's somewhat plausible, but not excessively imaginative."

It's more imaginative than you think.  The Shockwave Rider was written in 1975 - for the children in the audience, the original IBM PC was released in 1981, one year before the introduction of the standardized TCP/IP system that allowed for the development of the Internet.  On that basis, Brunner's novel is insanely prescient.  Not only does he predict the global Net as an everyday part of life, he introduces the idea of viral worms that would circulate through the sea of interconnected data deleting information.  (Not to mention being able to interface with the Net using a phone.)

And then he throws it all away by having the hero set up a referendum-like program that offers everyone on the planet the option of voting in favour of eliminating poverty, disease and inequity, and also having him create the tools to make that change possible.

Now THAT'S an unlikely prediction - unfortunately.

- Sid

"I admire its purity."

I was in the middle of developing another project, and this script dropped on my desk.  I read it in forty minutes...and bang!  The script was simple and direct:  it was the reason I did the film."

Ridley Scott on the script for Alien, The Book of Alien

In the wake of my disappointing experience with Prometheus, I decided to revisit Alien:  the original ten-little-Indians-on-a-spaceship movie that started the franchise.

On paper, the two movies are very similar:  enigmatic alien spaceships, bad planetary weather conditions, hidden agendas, villainous androids, and, of course, slime-covered alien monsters.  However, that similarity is deceptive.  Alien is a much more elementary film - as Ridley Scott says, simple and direct.

The movie is a beautifully crafted piece of work.  The art direction had input from some of the top fantasy/science fiction illustrators of the day:  Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) and of course Hans Rudi Giger, whose biomechanical illustrations provided the perfect starting place for the design of both the alien spacecraft and the Alien. 

The script, as Ridley Scott points out, is simple and direct, but it's also full of little moments of realism - of humanity, one might say.  Ripley's panic when the dead facehugger falls on her; the awkward sick room camaraderie when Kane has regained consciousness; the moments that Brett spends letting the condensation drip on his upturned face just moments before his death; Dallas momentarily knocking his headset loose in the air duct, and fumbling for a moment to get it right way round when he puts it back on.

I've always thought that the most brilliant of those moments is at the end, when Ripley is undressing in preparation for hibernation, only to discover that the Alien is in the lifeboat with her.  (It's easy to classify that scene as gratuitous, but I see it as a tactic designed to make Ripley as vulnerable as possible in her final confrontation with the creature. Ideally, she should have been naked, but you can't have everything.)  Ripley's responses are exactly what you would expect under the circumstances, making the ending much more effective than the sort of heroic dialogue-driven posturing that most action films are prone to.

I think that Prometheus wanted to have that feel of realism, of actual life, and that may well explain some of the odd little diversions in the plot.  Unfortunately, those diversions ended up feeling artificial, rather than part of the natural flow of events.

Of course, both movies share the basic lack of judgement that always predicates the action in this sort of science fiction horror thriller.  Doesn't anyone ever decide to disobey protocol in favour of common sense?  Think how much shorter these movies would be if the captain's log read as follows:

Stardate: 43205.6 

Discovered alien spaceship - no signs of life, crew died from unknown causes, cargo hold full of unidentified organic cocoons.  

Took one look and buggered off at warp nine.

- Sid

Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing.

It is with a heavy heart that I announce that I dodged the bullet was unable to see Piranha 3DD with Laurie on Friday, due to the fact that P3DD only lasted two weeks in commercial release.  (A DVD rental/iTunes download option is being cautiously negotiated.)  In its place, we saw Prometheus, a movie which I had been looking forward to with somewhat more anticipation than the boobs-n-blood piranha experience.

High concept science fiction films are somewhat rare. There are lots of science fiction horror films, more than enough science fiction action thrillers, plenty of comic book adaptations, but not many science fiction films that attempt to create a thought-provoking experience for the audience.  Examples would be Blade Runner, District 9, Solaris (either version), 2001, Soylent Green, Inception, - perhaps Moon, if you're feeling generous - and I expected to be able to add Prometheus to the list.

Sadly, that's not how it worked out.

On paper, Prometheus should qualify automatically.  In 2089, archeologists find evidence that humanity is the creation of an alien race - not only that, but they also discover the point of origin for these Engineers, as they call them.  The archeologists convince the elderly head of Weyland Enterprises to fund an expedition to that point of origin in hopes of finding either proof of the existence of the aliens, or the Engineers themselves.  The expedition is accompanied by an android, who acts as a metaphor for the experience of being a created entity.

This is good solid stuff: the opportunity to stand before the creators of our species and ask them why we were created, what our purpose is as a species, and perhaps to form a bond with these long-lost parents of humanity.

Or not.

In spite of the enormous potential of the concept, Prometheus fails under the weight of the numerous inconsistencies, dead ends, moments of illogic, and lost opportunities that dominate the script.  Characters die pointlessly, plot details are introduced that offer nothing to the story, there's no sense to the flow of events, and important story points seem to just pop into existence rather than developing logically.*

To be fair, the actors all do good work, and there are some very powerful individual scenes.  The art direction is excellent, and of course Ridley Scott knows how to point a camera and light a scene, but none of those things are enough to redeem the flaws in the script.

I really wanted to like this movie, but after seeing it, I have to consider Prometheus as an ambitious failure, a film which, like the prop conduits in the original Star Trek series, goes nowhere - and does nothing.  Near the start of Prometheus Charlize Theron's character introduces herself by saying, "Good morning. I am Meredith Vickers, and it is my job to make sure you do yours."  How unfortunate that no one performed that role for the makers of this movie.

- Sid

* I can post a long list of specific examples if no one cares about spoilers.

Is that all you got?

So, having missed a week of Continuum, the new SF series on Showcase, I tuned in to see if the bar had gone up or down while I was doing other things.

As part of the plot of the latest episode, one of the terrorists from the future decides to set a trap for the cop who was thrown back in time with them.  The terrorists are killing people with a specific genetic tag and stealing their pituitary glands in order to create a super-soldier serum, and the forces of justice follow planted clues to find the next potential victim, one Herbert George, only to discover that it's a setup. 

Oh, honestly, Herbert George?  For the non-literary types in the audience, it's an obvious homage to a famous Herbert George, who more commonly went by H. G. - as in H. G. Wells, who introduced the whole concept of time travel to the general public in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.

And that's the best you could do?  Out of the myriad of time travel references you could have picked, you went with H. G. Wells? Instead of something cool and obscure that would have made the bad guy look like a clever psychopath rather than a douche*?  What was your second choice, Marty McFly?  It was painfully obvious - I felt like Admiral Akbar, sitting in front of the television shouting, "It's a trap!"

And even more sadly, none of the main characters got it?  Not even the computer geek who is probably going to invent the damn time machine that they used to escape the future? 

Okay, we'll give these clowns one more week, and then we decide if the circus is leaving town.

- Sid

* Just for the record, I have never before stooped to the use of this particular term in public discourse, that's how unimpressed I was by this whole thing.

Better late than never.

When Monsters Versus Aliens came out in 2009, I pretty much just didn't care. Whether it was because of what I felt was an unimaginative title, bad marketing, or just not having time, I didn't bother to pay the going rate to see it in commercial release.

However, last night while I was putting the finishing touches on Laurie's updated web site, I switched on the small TV that I keep beside my computer - yes, I've kept the childhood habit of watching television while I do my homework. Instantly deciding that I did NOT want to watch - good lord - Jersey Shore Shark Attack on Space, I hopped around the channels until I was stopped by the image of an epic array of military might surrounding a giant Cyclopean robot that's about to be greeted by a Kennedyesque president.

To my intense amusement, the choice of first contact protocols was the Re, Mi, Do, Do, So alien theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, nervously (and incorrectly) performed by POTUS on a Yamaha synth, followed by the spread-fingered Vulcan salute. When this display of intergalactic brotherhood is greeted by indifference, the president falls back on Harold Faltermeyer's Axel F theme from Beverly Hills Cop, which naturally results in a robotic rampage that the armed forces are unable to stop.

I was hooked.

To my surprise and pleasure, it turns out that Monsters Versus Aliens is a comprehensive and entertaining homage to every creature, blob, giant insect, ancient horror or THING that ever terrorized an unsuspecting 1950's American suburb, up to and including the 50-Foot Woman. It also riffs off Dr. Strangelove, E.T., The Fly, Fire in the Sky, Independence Day, and other SF mainstays, as well as indulging in moments of just random off-the-wall brilliance.  The mere fact that they tapped Stephen Colbert to be the voice of the President is a strong indicator of the mentality behind the creation of this film.

Meanwhile, Space showed a really bad shark movie…guys, I thought I made myself clear on the whole shark movie thing?

- Sid

P.S. Coincidentally, I designed porta-potty signs for exactly that style of giant robot just last month - who knew?

 

Sith don't Tweet.

We're just in the final stages of doing some updates for Laurie's web site.  Previously it was very much focused on strength training, but since she's gotten interested in yoga, meditation classes, and training techniques involving body weight rather than barbells, we thought that her site should reflect the kinder, gentler Smith Training Systems - different logo, more contemplative colour scheme, and so on.

However, I think it's important that people remember where they've come from, and as such I decided to create a sub-site, a sort of shadow site if you will, to allow Laurie - or La'ri - to continue to service both of her target client groups.

And yes, there's a link to the subsite carefully concealed somewhere on the new Smith Training pages - I have every confidence in the ability of potential Dark Side apprentices to use the Force to discover its location.

- Sid

Sidney's Zombie: Part One.

Last week's face-eating incident in Florida left anyone with a hint of foresight anxiously awaiting the emergence of zombie hordes created by the usual relentless pyramid scheme of the undead. Yes yes, I know that the whole thing has been blamed on some sort of new drug, but honestly, would you buy a drug that made you eat people's faces?  Certainly not my idea of a good time. 

Obviously the whole drug story is just part of the usual cover-up.  In fact, this is exactly how the end of the world starts in all the books and movies dealing with that as a topic: first denial, then escalation.

But you have to wonder a little bit about the whole zombie thing.  After all, the very concept of the walking dead is contradictory - how do you logically explain the whole idea of dead people strolling about in search of brains?  So, after some thought and consideration, I give to you mortis ambulatus: colloquially (and utterly without modesty) Sidney's Zombie.

*  *  *

Let us consider the humble virus.  Interestingly, rather like zombies, viruses are not really alive by standard biological standards, but persist in performing activities that mimic life, like doing their best to go forth and multiply.  Given the manner in which zombies are created and operate, let's assume that the zombie "disease" is a viral phenomenon, like ebola or AIDS.

Like those two diseases, the zombie virus is best served by existence in as many hosts as possible - if not strength, there's certainly survival in numbers.  And, like its colleagues, the zombie virus relies on exchange of biological material to infect new hosts.

All three of these diseases are fatal if left untreated - and in many cases fatal even with treatment. Ebola is a fast killer - in fact, almost too fast to be efficient. Ebola basically liquifies its host, turning flesh and organs into a big juicy bag of skin filled with ebola vectors, but does it so quickly that the host loses the ability to move around and infect people. AIDS, on the other hand, gives its hosts a lot more time (relatively speaking) for infection.  Either way, once the host is dead, both these viruses are pretty much finished if they haven't already managed to make new friends.

And there lies the superiority of the zombie virus. The untreated fatality rate seems to be 100%*, but unlike its siblings, the zombie virus doesn't let death stand in the way of finding new victims.  One can only admire the evolutionary development that led to such a brilliant solution to this fundamental problem.

I'd like to keep this discussion readable, so we'll take a little break, and then come back and look at how the zombie virus does its job.

- Sid

* Generally zombie movies don't discuss the idea of treating victims because most people who are infected through zombie bites die as a result of the wound - or wounds - and don't really have enough time for the virus to kill them.  However, the first Resident Evil movie includes a drug that treats the zombie "disease".

DISCLAIMER: I'm certain that other people have speculated as to the science of zombies, but I've deliberately avoided doing any research.  As such, my thoughts on this topic are unsullied by any sort of accurate scientific knowledge.