Miss Manners

A couple of days ago Agent J forwarded me a newspaper article that pretty much summed up our combined pet peeves with society today. No, its not that they vote Republican, or are intent to ram Biblical "truths" down our throat, nor event go as onward Christian Soldiers marching as to gas supplies. Indeed it was meerly a call to common decency. A pitiful plee that perhaps we should not revert to spit, blast, shout, and blather our way to hell in a hand basket.

As residents of a city where apparently anything goes, and owners of a retail store where the customer is often as not f**KING rude, well we've seen it all.

More on perpetuity

So KQED Forum was talking about Guantanamo this morning, yesterday it was Your Call Radio on KALW. Forum's pro-Gitmo guy was Robert Kaufman, professor at Pepperdine University and scholar at the Heritage Foundation. This guy who was first defending Gitmo it because there wasn't a declared war so they had to be held as enemy combatants, instead of civilians (terrorists I assume) or military prisoners of war. Later on in the program he claimed Guantanamo could only be shut down when the war was over as declared by congress, just like in WWII. Excuse me, which war are we waiting for the end of, didn't you just say there was no war? Oh, he says, that was the declared war on terrorism - one that one assumes will never be declared over, just like the war on hunger, poverty, ignorance and let face it, the war on blowhard Republican stooges working at the Heritage Foundation.

Furthermore, Kaufman was saying we couldn't send the prisoners home because they would just turn around and fight against us. But yesterday the pro-Gitmo guest on Your Call Radio was saying we couldn't send them home because they would be tried and executed in their home countries - we don't want to upset Amnesty International he said, wouldn't you rather we kept them in a nice clean prison down in Guantanamo? (As if the US doesn't execute people already.)

So which way is it guys? War, no-war? Free at home, or executed at home? Seems like these guys have no clue and are just spreading FUD as normal.

Now we know where perpetuity is

Well thanks to good old team USA we now know where "that danged perpetuity place" is - down in Guantanamo. With the powers that be saying they think they can hold alleged "enemy combatants" in perpetuity, mostly for nothing more than declaring they hate the USA and wish it ill will. I say alleged because you know there never was any trial or due process, and the claim that the prisoners have expressed an enduring hatred of the USA - well if you'd seized during a war, locked up in chains, interogated, maybe even tortued a bit, and then held for years without know what the hell is going on - well just how would you feel towards your captors?

The problem is that somehow the absurbity of this situation does doesn't get through to most Americans so they might give a damn. Most likely because many people believe that Guantanamo is just full of those Iraqi insurgents who are busy killing American soldiers, or Taliban guys who carried out 9/11. Neither of these is true, but your average guy lacks the mental, well how shall I put it, "fidelity", to make the distinction.

What needs to happen is for some foreign power to seize 500 odd Americans and label them as enemy combatants and decide the will hold them in perpetuity. Better make it a foreign power with nukes for good measure, just so Bush doesn't have the easy excuse to start a war over it. How about India, Pakistan, or North Korea or our friends China. Last time I recall any significant number of American military people being held by a foreign was by China at the start of Bush II's reign of terror, and look how badly that turned out. Much ineffectual and inaapropriate huffing and puffing by team Bush that only served to put Chinese-American diplomatic relations back years and required huge amounts of cover up cream (lets call it money and trade concessions) to put right.

So I can only wonder what would happen now if some nuclear power captured a bunch of Americans fighting in their country and did what we're doing to those guys down in Guantanamo. The best thing is that perhaps someone would be able to demonstrate to the low fidelity thinkers amongst us, the plain and simple consequences of pissing on human rights (not even the Koran which seems to be getting better protection than the prisoners themselves). Its called tit for tat chaps and a good number of people find that kind of moral reasoning and logic hard to resist. For a while American could have claimed to have some higher ground but a good number of people, say Howard Zinn for example, might claim it was always smoke and mirrors. Now its plain for all to see - America's message is what is good for our people (Patriot I not withstanding) isn't good enough for the rest of the world - and if you ever cross us may you all rot in perpetuity (providing there's enough room there that is).

The Short Bright Espresso-time of Blog Gently

Today I heard some heartbreaking news, two good friends from the neighborhood lost their son (age 30) in a car wreck over the weekend. I don't use the word "heartbreaking" lightly - my father died when I was 17 and I know how it feels when your heart breaks. The world turns on its head and everything hurts, nothing makes sense and all at once life appears too short, too painful, too messed up and just too meaningless. That's shock, grief and a lifetime of memories messing with you. It's amazing how your brain can affect your body so much - if anyone ever tells you there is no such thing as mind-over-matter they surely have never felt the brutal hammer of grief smashing into their existence.

The reason I mention this is because inevitably such events remind one (or they should do) of our own mortality. It got me thinking that if my only lasting legacy were to end up being this blog I wouldn't want my family and friends thinking that I was this miserable old sod who just whined and moaned on and on (as I often do here) about how messed up life is, and that I really didn't enjoy life that much at all. Hence I'm blogging here tonight, when I should be doing some work, to set the record straight:

My life is good!

So if I die tomorrow for whatever reason I want all those who knew me to remember that. I loved life. I have a great gal by my side who happens to think I'm a swell kind of guy, I have a roof over my head that's at least 50% mine (well it doesn't rain that often here anyway), I got a good education (for free!), had both a loving mother and father for the crucial years of my life, had two great brothers who were fine role models for me, got at least one square meal in me every day until I left home for college (where I lived off toast and coffee), and for the time being I'm enjoying good health - I don't even visit the dentist very often (well I am Britsh aren't I!).

I haven't exactly been a world traveler but I've moved 5,000 miles from home, been to a vaudeville convention in Hawaii, laid on my back at midnight in the Great Plaza at Tikal and looked up at the stars and comet Hale-Bopp, flown like a bird 3000 feet over the Pacific ocean, and swam with the fishes and juggled at 14,000 ft in Hawaii. I've enjoyed a hearty meal far from the madding crowd cooked on rocks around a camp fire and feasted on a sumptuous meal served on fine china in the belly of a bustling city that was over $250 a head. I've slept on a straw mattress above a barn for $1 a night and on fine Egyptian cotton sheets in Manhattan at over $500 a night. I've been filthy dirty for days and jumped naked into an ice cold mountain lake, and waltzed off a ship, across pearly white sand, and into a perfect warm blue ocean. But it was never about how much those experiences cost, and all about who I was with, who much I enjoyed them and valued them later.

I've come close to drowning twice, quite probably almost drank myself to death once as a teenager, nearly fell out of a minivan on a freeway, and yet still, in idle moments, often forget how tenuous our connection to life is, and what brief a flash of light we bring to the world before all becomes dark again. Past thirty-five already I'm reminded my noon day fun is definitely behind me, but I'm hoping twighlight is still a long and lazy afternoon away - if I'm lucky that is.

Do I feel lucky? Of course, given what I've just told you I should feel downright blessed. So let it be put on the record, I love and have loved my life, I love Joanna, I love my mother, my brothers and all my family and my wonderful friends. Its been and I always plan it to be, great.

So just remember, if I left you all tomorrow under whatever circumstances I couldn't think of a more appropriate thing for you to do than hold a good old fashioned Irish wake. Yes party and have a good time in my name - then before the fun is over and people start to drift away, pause a moment to raise a glass , fine whisky or just plain water, you choose - drinks are on me! You wont find my eye to meet yours, or my glass to clink for a toast, but just imagine I'm there and think of the good times we've had together and remind yourself - life is good. My salutation to you, unsaid, unheard will be:

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Its a strange saying from that most gifted and off-beat writer, Douglas Adams. A reminder perhaps, that just because something doesn't really make any sense, there's no reason why you shouldn't just hunker down and enjoy it anyway. So go home, rest easy and enjoy your life while you have it!

Mucking in together

I live in a condo, in a city. My nearest neighbors are about 12 inches of sheetrock and less than adequate sound proofing away. The rest of my neighbors share hallways, rooftop, garage, streets and freeways with me. I have friends who are way the f**k out there. So far it actually gets dark, I mean dark when we drive out to see them in the evening. As best I can tell their nearest neighbors are just a distant light at night, they are better acquainted with the surrounding wildlife than their neighbors (landlord excepted). To be honest I couldn't really tell you which I prefer - having grown up in a detached house in a small village where you could go out at night and be on your own reasonably far from the madding crowd.

But there is something to be said for living in a city. Living in together in a crowded space we hear each others slamming doors and when the neighbors are fighting on the street you can stand by the window and hear every word of the "you said, I said" show (yes, I did that tonight). So we get to share each others experiences to some degree, we get to complain about each others foibles and basically we all have to "muck in together" to get through life, or hit the high road for somewhere else. The only problem is those people who just don't get the "together" part. Even though you might technically own several hundred square feet of a city, you really can't treat it as your own. The boundaries of everyone else's space encroach so far into yours that in reality you barely have space to go to the bathroom in peace, let alone just do your own thing and expect to be uninfluenced by the chaos of city life around you.

I suppose, when it comes down to it, some people need some more breathing space than others. I think crazy, rude, obnoxious, and inconsiderate people piss me off just as much as anyone else, but I just have come to expect that's the average human condition. For that reason I just put up with it. I listen to "their shit" while simultaneously ignoring it. If I caught myself caring too much about it I don't think it would work for me. That's not to say I don't care about anything, everyone has a set of things they care about, its just its a different set of things. Ultimately I may find that the set of things I care about are not getting high enough priority in my life - that'll be the day I might decide to leave my city, county, state or country. To the extent you are more isolated from the powers that be, I suspect country living just gives everyone a lot more elbow room to care about stuff and not be influenced by everyone else's (inherently selfish - its the human condition) cares.

I start to wonder if there is some theory of peaceful human existence. One where we are able to live sustainably, and be in proximity to and being dependent on sufficiently few people that life will be inherently peaceful and stressfree. At such a point will people seek out the maximum distance from their neighbors, or will they still clamor together in cities while trying to maintain some semblance of isolation?

For me living in a city is an exercise of tolerance - you really don't have the option to run away and hide unless you're ready to just ignore the world around you. And if you do choose to complain or try to change your surroundings then you've also got to be ready to face the world around you. The two seems to be about as equally hard to pull off... ignore and never complain about the world around you regardless of what it throws at you, or face the world and meet its complaints on a daily basis. As Gozer said in Ghostbusters, "Choose your destructor!". You could do worse than get the Stay Puft Marshmallow man.

Correction

Okay I admit it, the strawberries weren't actually moldering in the fridge. The were actually waiting to be made into a very tasty dessert (see photo). But I like to think they might have been destined for moldering but for the intervention of my previous entry. None the less it was a very tasty dessert. Mmmmm, strawberries and cream with cointreau...

I miss the weather

Holy Zarquon's singing fish - it's raining in June!

For many people not living in California the exclamation in the above will seem out of place. Sometimes I have to remind myself I spent 27 years living in the United Kingdom where rain is an expected feature of any day. It could rain three times in one day and be hot and sunny in between. In fact after over ten years living in California I'm inclined to say I wouldn't call Californian weather "weather" at all, more like "climate".

Basically where I live the weather is "in the winter it rains, in the summer it doesn't and its sunny 75% to 100% of the day". It would be 100% except for the San Francisco Bay marine layer that causes low cloud in the morning - or all day if you live in some parts of San Francisco. For the most part the daily weather pretty much matches the average climate. Rain here is forecast days in advance and often as not is greeted with ambivalence since it means snow in the Sierras for winter sports, and later on water in the reservoirs for keeping our otherwise sun parched plants green in the summer.

Back in the UK the weather is all over the place all year around. The daily temperatures can be cold or hot, it can rain several times in one day, or not at all. The rest of the time it may be sunny or overcast or foggy or... something else. In fact I even remember it snowing in May. As one person said "you can tell its summer because the rain is warm". Four weeks without rain in the UK would be classified as a drought, over here it is just any month between May and September. In fact the average total rainfall in Oakland California for the entire five months from May through September is a massive 15mm - or a little over 1/2 inch. That's less than half of the average for the months of April or October alone.

So, as you can see, any rain here at all in June, or for that matter any summer month is quite an anomaly. Add to that the fact that most of that 15mm of rain between May and September comes from the occasional thunderstorm (also very rare - I probably see about one a year) then true pissistant [sic] rain over several hours or more is even more unusual. In the UK most areas get at least 50mm (2 inches) of rain per month in the summer, on average it rains about one in three days and in the south of England average summer rainfall is just a half of that in winter, while thunderstorms occur about 12 days a year.

Hopefully from the above you can see how an ex-pat living in California could actually be forgiven for saying "I miss the weather".

Gently's Four States of Household Entropy

Since I've haven't been partaking in the going out to work ritual for some time now (okay, over a year!) I've had plenty of time to sit and home and watch the comings and goings of household entropy. Entropy, being a measure of disorder in a system, is concept highly applicable to households and shouldn't be confined to the physics lab.

State 1: A perfectly ordered household has the least entropy and is the easiest to maintain. Think of Bree's home in Desperate Housewives, or how you imagine Martha Stewarts home to look like - with a place for everything and everything in its place its like a crystal lattice. Stuff just falls into its place, easily with the minimum of fuss. Like a crystal lattice, breaking up such a system releases a lot of energy - usually in frayed tempers and displeasure of its disorder state from the household matre-dee. Needless to say I do not live in such a household, and in reality no occupied household exists in it either. Only virtual TV households and imaginary households do. Imaginary households are those where its occupants don't see an army of servants flitting around from day to day maintaining order - they only imagine they live in a perfect self-organizing household.

State 2: A less than perfectly ordered household requires the most energy to maintain. Like a sauce that never thickens, or a pot that never boils it is never really truly ordered. A constant input of time and energy is required to keep it in a semblance of order. Often such efforts are of the "move it to another pile and dust" kind. Another analogy would be tending a large pile of sand that is just a tiny bit to tall for its width. Little rivulets of excess sand will always fall down the sides in a chaotic fashion and must be constantly moved up to the top again. For the most part I live in such a household, although it periodically progresses to State 3.

State 3: A mostly disordered household receives some energy to maintain its order but not enough to bring it to an ordered state, but enough to prevent it from sliding into complete disorder, otherwise known as chaos. Instead of move it and dust it is mostly maintained by dust-in-place efforts. Over time some piles of disorder attract more disorder and will eventually overcome any semblance of order. Without a periodic injection of unusually large amounts of tidying energy this is just a transitionary state.

State 4: Household chaos. In this state there is no place for anything and hence nothing in is in its place, or from another perspective everything is in its place - anyplace! (Is that even a word?). No tidying effort is necessary, just sling anything anywhere. The probability of locating any lost item are basically that of chance so on average at least 50% of the household must be search to have an even chance of locating it. Like the perfectly ordered household, no real life household actually exists in the chaos state. Some, probably inhabited only by large numbers of children, approach it, but the perfect chaos is reserved for post tornado households where the "lift, shake and spin" has been applied. Or TV crime shows where some obsessive compulsive hoarder has been discovered (usually deceased) in an apartment filled with 142 cats, 34 dogs, 4,681 copies of TV Guide, 1,532 discarded pizza boxes, 423 sacks of trash, and quite probably a couple of dozen prying neighbors stashed in the freezer or under the floor boards.

Three Laws of Fruit Buying

Today I composed the Three Laws of Fruit Buying, partly because Isaac Asimov beat me to the Three Laws of Robotics, but mostly because today I realized there is a bunch of strawberries moldering in the fridge, and then discovered a bag of peaches moldering on the counter, only to discover another bag of distinctly soggy peaches and nectarines underneath it. Oh how the fruit juice loves to eat our zinc counter like alien blood through the space ship hull in "Alien" (sorry, no photo). Still, the remains of the peaches were quite tasty once I'd flushed the rancid bits down the garbage disposal.

Hence, the three laws of fruit buying...

• 1. The riper the fruit, the more one is inclined to buy some for dessert tomorrow
• 2. Tomorrow hardly ever transpires before said fruit have turned to fuzzy green mush
• 3. Tasty fruit desserts are often distinctly low-fruit or entirely fruit-free.

Corollary of the Three Laws of Fruit - dessert is a movable feast, but fresh ripe fruit is not - eat it off the tree, or in the store, but never leave it in the fridge or on the counter "for tomorrow".

All your gas stations are belong to us

So today is the first I've heard that CNOOC, a Chinese oil company, may be trying to buy Unocal. Could this be the first in a long line of aquisitions of US owned gas companies, or does China already own sizable amounts of US oil interests? Certainly they have to do something with their estimated $1 trillion in US dollar assets.

It actually doesn't bother me much if this is the case - I think the more US oil interests are owned by other countries the more incentive there will eventually be for Americans to use something other than oil to power their country. After all, how is it that so much of the world's oil is controlled by US companies anyway? As was said when America invaded Iraq, "How did our oil get under their sand?".

Still, for some I think this news will smack of the 80s when the Japanese economy was booming and everyone was talking about how much of the US the Japanese owned. Normal American paranoia and xenophobia ensued. The only difference here is that China was never decimated by allied forces during WWII, however to the American's who got all freaked about Japanese investments I'm afraid to say the Chinese, for obvious reasons, are painted with the same "dang furners" brush.

Of course China doesn't have to own a single oil company to make a huge impact on oil in this country. After all, that's the consequence of America getting a taste of it own "cure all" free market economy medicine. With China in the WTO it'll be hard to discriminate against them, so long as they are willing to play ball. As the oil peak effect comes into play I wonder how long it will be before a giant squeeze in the oil market will destabilize the WTO? Or perhaps by then, the US will have become too dependent on selling to the 1.2 plus billion consumers in China to have the option to care.

As they say - we live in interesting times! My hope is that in my remaining 40 or so years I can live to see even more interesting times - like America finally kick its oil habit. If it hasn't by then I think its doomed, one way or the other.

Save the planet!

Well looky here, it seems as if someone is finally taking the issue of tracking asteroids a little bit more seriously these days, and boy, they've already found one with a 1 in 14,000 chance of hitting us by 2036. That'll be me mighty handy for solving the social security problem! However it seems no one in Washington wants to cough up $300M track the potential earth splatterer more closely - apparently because its too far in the future, unlike the social security problem which of cause doesn't run out of funding until about ten years afterwards

It seems to me that if the government wont fund such a mission then perhaps some beneificent billion could lob the required hunk of cash in its direction. Its a 1 in 14,000 chance it would make much of a difference, but what a legacy if it did. Just think, we could have Bill Gates as our great saviour - assuming of course the tracking beacon they want to tack onto the asteriod doesn't suffer a blue screen of death before its mission is accomplished.

Hitchhikers review

This is a review, of sorts, of the recent movie version of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I was going to write it just after seeing the movie but in the end, for reasons that will become clear, I just didn't feel like it. A recent email from someone saying "So, did you see it?" prompted me to write the following review... of sorts. A kind of "half-hearted guide to the hitchhikers guide" review.

Lets cut to the answer, the ultimate answer, of life the universe and everything... 42. Yes, that's about what I would give the movie out of 100. It may be a tad low, because I think I'd rather see it than not so really it should be a little over 50% score, okay, so lets say 42 out of 80.

I know a great many other distinguished movie reviewers gave HHGTTG some glowing reviews. Even those I figured would probably hate it. Personally I had high hopes, I really thought this time, they were really going to get it right. Perhaps the movie deserves another look but I have to say I was disappointed, and to paraphrase Marvin, most of the minutes were pretty good, but most of the seconds were pretty awful. Okay maybe not awful, that's too strong, perhaps mediocre and certainly not of the same quality I usually associate with Adams work. I really start to wonder who it would have turned out if he had survived to see it to the finish. We'll never know and that will have to remain as one of the great unanswered great questions.

I think people who have only ever read the books liked the movie more than those familiar with the original radio show. As for people who are not familiar with either, nor Brit-humour-o-philes? Forget about it, they mostly hated it - especially Americans. After watching the movie I checked the Yahoo user reviews and of 1300 over 250 gave it an "F" in all classes - many said they left the movie outright. This clearly wasn't the universallly appealing whacky space adventure comedy like, say, Men In Black, that it was marketed to be. So a lot of people went to see it would probably have never bothered if they'd know it was another Brit comedy that needs brain to be engaged and cellphone set to silent ("what you mean I have to listen to the words while I watch?").

A couple of the best comments from the Yahoo reviews were "If this ever comes out on DVD it will have the words "Don't bother" on the cover in large friendly letters", and the other one was "If the ultimate answer is 42 then the ultimate question must be "How many minutes will it be before you walk out of Hitchhikers?". Clearly at least some of this reviewers were more intelligent than semi-evolved simians and I applaud their consumate humour in face of a disappointing movie experience. Now guys, the secret is to keep banging the rocks together...

The stuff I liked - the Vogons were wonderfully portrayed, although in quiet a different light from their mean callous nature in the original story. Their gargantuan size, inscrutable officiousness (is that a word?) and their fleet of ships - all wonderful. I liked Trillian and Slartibartfast, and the rest were okay, but not outstanding. Marvin was good - a much better imagery of his nature than in the TV show, that huge round head weighing him down really worked as did his voice over by Alan Rickman.

Stuff I didn't like - well the creation of a love interest with happy ending from Arthur's infatuation with Trillian really didn't work for me. I'd love to know if this is something that Adams actually wrote in the original screenplay versions or something that Hollywood jammed in. Plus the whole thing about the point of view gun and stuff which is from a much later book, and busting people out of jail... didn't work for me, out of place, and not terribly funny on its own. I wish they hadn't mangled some of the excerpts from the Guide, I know them too well to hear them edited. I just hope there's a directors cut with the full versions in it. That said The Guide animations themselves were great. I wasn't too fond of Zaphod's second head scenes, although it was an imaginative take on that - and much more successful than the TV show version which was more like a parrot of a head.

I should add the scene following the inifinite improbability drive deployal in which they all turn in the yarn characters - that was a hoot that really made me laugh - inspired imagery I'd say - of the metaphysical kind. If the movie had all been of that quality it would have been a blast - the biggest bang in sci-fi comedy since the big one.

I did like the ending at Magrathea, gotta love "Its a wonderful world" and such, but at the end I had to temper it with my feelings of "Oh well, not again", as in not again, another not entirely satisfactory rendition of the hitchhikers story. But at least this is probably the last, I really don't think there is the impetous or money for anyone to do anything else with it. If they had been smart they could have just stuck to the book and left it open for lots of sequels, but the way the story got wrapped up it was self contained and I doubt there will be enough money to fund a sequel. I'll trade 6 hours with the radio series of any visualization any day.

I think perhaps if they had spent the same money on three 2 hour not so fancy non-movie renditions it could have been a lot better. A BBC sci-fi made for TV kind of thing - sort of the high quality stuff that HBO puts out like Six Feet Under or Sopranos. Quality writing matched with quality production and a bunch of effects, but no Hollywood spoilers involved. A rehash of the original TV series if you wish but with all the modern effects and the original story line - hopefully the radio show one which I always prefered to the book story line. Plus if you stick to the radio script you don't have to spend all that money on script writers and screen writers.

Regardless of whether I've put you off, if you're a fan of The Guide you have to go see it, if only to pay your respect to the legacy of Adams' Life the universe and everything Hitchhiker-ish.

Darwin lives!

Just when I was giving up hope on Darwin I came across Dry-Ice Bomb Won't Explode and Man Leaps From Car to Retrieve Cigarette both in the same day. Now all he needs is a helping hand from Forrest Gump - stupid is as stupid does.

The long dark theater time of the Sith

I'll get it over and done with real fast - I enjoyed Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith. Oh sure it had its flaws but really significantly fewer than I or II. Lets face the movie has quite an uphill battle - only three characters of any real significance: Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Chancelor Palpatine, and has an ending that almost everyone seeing the movie already knows and indeed the movie itself clearly "knows" from the start. So really it did a pretty good job to stay entertaining.

Could it have been better? Well yes of course - ditch Hayden Christensen for someone who can do a convincing transformation from light to dark sides, make Portman less of a doormat who just wants to go home and "get the room ready" for the kid(s) (sheez, don't they have birth control in the Star Wars era?), and maybe, just maybe, run the script by an average person or two (like me for instance) to weed out the worst of the awkwardness. We know Lucas pays amazing attention to the special effects - they are indeed top notch, especially the 100% CG Yoda, but does he and no one working for him just not care about crappy dialog? Didn't the dialog get panned enough in the first two for him to get the message? Well, perhaps - it was definitely better this time - in the first half there was even a line or two worthy of Episode IV or V banter.

It was also really hard not to read in some pretty strong political overtones in a few of the conversations about democracy, the senate and good vs. evil. He stopped short of having using the "you're either with us or against us" line from Darth Dubyous, but only just instead rendering it as "you're either with us or with the enemy". And when Padme watches the Chancellor declare himself Emperor she mutters the question "Is where liberty was lost - to rousing applause?". Sigh, I didn't think this was supposed to be a documentary...

I did like how Lucas managed to work in a good number of retro Star Wars visual themes. From bright white ship interiors, and clunky LED like displays and controls, to the wrinkling of Palpatines face, it all helped to remind us to we were on a journey to familar territory formerly known as Star Wars Episode IV, or just plain "Star Wars". Because back then we never even had an inkling there would be another five movies to follow it, and we never even minded that we were supposedly joining a story that was half way through. Indeed quite why Lucas choose to start the story at Episode IV I'll never know. Just how would it have all transpired it instead he'd stubbornly started with Episode I? Would we have had Harrison Ford as Obi-Wan, Mark Hamill as Anakin and Carrie Fisher as Padme? And would we all been bitching about how crappy Episodes IV and V were but that VI wasn't such a bad rousing finale after all?

Anyway, finally I should say that in the closing scenes where loose ends are not being tied up, but instead being hastily tied into the original Star Wars plot line, well I was definitely thinking back to a movie theater a long time ago in a country far, far away. Back then when I was fresh faced ten year old, my late father had, by some means I never learned (perhaps subconsciously, as if by a force unknown...) tapped into the zeitgeist of the time and decided that all the family should go see this hit new movie called "Star Wars". This was something our family just didn't do - it was rare enough to see a movie at a theater, (remember the late 70s were a very low point in theater going history), let alone drag our entire family to a sci-fi movie, a genre that was barely invented at that time. We had to drive to another town, the line was so huge I felt sure we'd never get a seat, the screen seemed emmense and I had no idea what I was in for. Who would think that almost thirty years on I'd still be going back for more of the Star Wars saga? I stopped collecting the Star Wars cards and lusting after Princess Leia a long time ago, but the fun still lingers on.

And you know what the best thing is about getting out of theater having just seen Episode III? It's that you know you're half way through, the going is pretty good and the best is yet to come. More to the point you wont have to wait another thirty years to get it!

Galloway vs. the Senate

Thanks to the Tin Man for pointing me to a story from the Guardian about Galloway's recent testimony at the Senate subcommittee for homeland security and governmental affairs. Apparently he gave them and the entire Bush administration a right royal tongue lashing in a way that only one versed in British parliamentary no-holds-barred debate tactics could. As they'd say back at the Houses of Parliament, "Hear, hear!".

Update: watch the whole 47 minute testimony video at the BBC or the just the "money shot" highlight.

The book is mightier than the sword

I find it ironic that the Whitehouse has chosen to jump so quickly into the fray over the "alleged" Koran flushing incident at Guantanamo. Where were they when it was an issue of abusing actual prisoners, actual living flesh desecrated? They were busy burying the story in secrecy for as long as they actually could. Now, with no photos and nothing thing to lose they are defending a holy book more vehemently than they defended people. The message from the Whitehouse is "Torture good - book flushing bad".

Yes I know the Koran is a holy book, and the story caused rioting and deaths in Afghanistan, but seriously do you have any doubts that US guards at Guantanamo would even bat an eye before flushing, burning or pissing on the Koran? Do you really have any doubts that now they are no longer officially allowed to humiliate their prisoners in naked pyramids and forced sexual acts, that if they thought that for one second they could get what they wanted with a mere book - that they would treat it with any respect whatsoever? Of course not.

Like I said I think the only reason the Whitehouse has been quick to jump in is because no one ever thought a guard flushing the Koran was photo worthy for the folks back home - "Look mum, there's me flushing the Koran while the prison breaks down and tells me everything about his non-combatant training camp". For that reason I feel confident in saying "alleged" because I feel sure that one time or the other it happened just it never became a Kodak moment to prove it. Newsweek almost certainly had some anonymous tipoffs that it actually happened, but without anyone willing to step forward and admit to it they had to back down and eat some humble pie or risk being labeled un-American and un-Patriotic by hordes of zealous red-staters who would turn to flushing Newsweek instead of the Koran.

Meanwhile the Whitehouse is putting on a "holier than thou" act pretending as if maybe it would stand by and watch a few "bad actors" torture prisoners but no way would it allow religious persecution. But what happens, I ask you, if stories come back that over in "I-raq" they are busy burning and flushing the Bible? Is that cause for rioting here? Will brown skinned folks be dragged off the streets and beaten by irate right wing religious fanatics? Will we declare war on them all over again to find stockpiles of bibles of mass destruction?

Really its all pretty dumb to me. The Whitehouse should have just 'fessed up because sooner or later someone is going to spill the beans. They should admit they have no clue about Islam and they should send all those prisoners back home. Seriously. Just how long can we justify keeping them locked up indefinitely because they hate America and have expressed ill will against us. Or would the Whitehouse have us go to Afghanistan and seize every single America hating rioter and lock them up indefinitely too? And ditto at home - sure we've already got over 2 million of our own locked up, about half for crimes not much worse than getting bored of America to the point where it was preferable to check out of it on drugs, why not add a few more to the penal melting pot?

All aboard the fastrack to sainthood

Now that the vatican has decided to put the late Pope J.P. on a fastrack to sainthood it got me wondering just how easy they are going to make becoming a Saint. Even buying a gun has a waiting period but Sainthood? No problem! We can do that right away. All it needs is someone who is sick to claim they prayed to JP and then recover in a way scientists didn't expect. That doesn't seem to high a bar to raise does it, I can assure you that every day people survive medical emergencies and recover from illness in ways not expected or explained by current medical knowledge.

Is that really where sainthood lies now - some gap in scientific knowledge creating a loophole leading to a stairway to heaven, and with a wave of the current Pope's hand old JP gets a fastrack to the head of the line ahead of all the other saint wannabees. I guess they are expecting that with all those 1 billion Catholics getting sick and praying and all it will be no time at all before unexplained miracles are being worked.

There lies the rub for me - is that all miracles are these days, is that where beatification, sainthood, acts of god are founded - as mere loopholes created by lack of scientific knowledge. No burning bushes, no walking on water, no water to wine - just some "incurable disease" that gets better for no explained reason. Because science has explained away all that other stuff... no wonder the Catholics made such an effort to persecute scientists, they didn't want all their Saintly appointments to be called into question, or to loose all sources of future appointments. But face facts, with progress of scientific knowledge its going to become harder and harder to find miracles to attribute to saint wannabees.

Yes, if I was terminally ill I'd try everything, even a bit of that good old fashioned blackmail praying, you know the sort - "I don't actually believe you exist, but if you really do now is the time to reach down and do some miracle work... please... I'll give you a second chance if you do". So anyone who gets better who actually remembers the "deal" they offered the deity upstairs might be tempted to attribute it to a miracle.

So I have an idea... why doesn't the Pope start focusing on other types of unexplained miracles, like George Bush getting elected - I'm sure a whole bunch of Catholics were praying for that and most everyone expected the old shrub to miss it by a squeak but low and behold he gets elected in declares a veritable "mandate". Surely that's some kind of miracle. Surely some saint dude was up there commanding a host of angelic minnions moving votes around and putting Xs where they neede to be to make that happen. If a huge stash of WOMD turned up in Iraq wouldn't a whole bunch of Evangelists instantly proclaim a miracle (even if they weren't put there by angelic workers but actually by CIA operatives).

Yes folks, every day all kinds of crazy s**t is going on that's completely unexplainable by science or rational logic and this is stuff that affects everyone, not just some sick person with a vested interested in getting well. Why does it have to be someone getting well after illness? Why not the car that doesn't start on the very day you needed an excuse not to come into work. Or the boss that drops dead the day he was going to fire you. Or the mega lottery ticket win - millions to one against, less likely than a lightning strike - that has to be a miracle. There has to be thousands of such events each daya - lets call these people's miracles.

With all these people's miracles happening all the time almost anyone could become a saint, a people's saint. Pray to your favourite dead person - from Einstein, Ghandi to Marilyn Monroe or even Ronald Reagan and sit back and wait for crazy unexplained miracles to happen. One fastrack to sainthood is on its way... "I got out of a parking ticket by passive non-violent resistance, now I pray to Saint Mahatma", or "I flew to Hawaii on vacation and came back feeling ten years younger now I pray to Saint Albert". Why the heck not? Why should the vatican have the monopoly on such things and like I said, with the increasing difficulty in finding "real" miracles (salt stained freeways notwithstanding) why not open up the field to every day miracles we can all relate to instead of having to pray to some crusty old white guy whose main distinguishing attribute is that he rose to the top of the papal pyramid by longevity.

Peace against terrorism?

I was reading an article about a new group called Global Majority formed to promote peace when it struck me how stupid "war on terrorism" sounds. I mean, what if it said "terrorism on war", why should that be any less acceptable? From the perspective of those engaged in "terrorism" (an ill defined and much debated term) they are simply fighting a war against someone else's war against them. They don't have billions of dollars and a uniformed army marching into battle - even if they could afford one they would usually have had their asses kicked or more likely blown off and handed back to them on a plate.

Its true that some terrorists are fighting for a minority opinion - but certainly not always. And sometimes its just other peoples colouring of that opinion as good or bad that leads us to care about them or even bother to label them as terrorists or not. If the oppressed people of the Darfur region in Sudan started suicide bombing, sniping and laying improvised bombs against the gangaweed militia would we declare war on their terrorism? Probably not. More likely we'd (in this case I'm using the "American we") hail the righteous freedom fighters in Darfur and perhaps slip them a few millions and some truck loads of weaponry. Were the French resistance fighters in WWII terrorists? The Nazis must have thought so - if the term was in common parlance then I'm sure they would have been labeled with it. So why then are the Palestinians terrorists and not freedom fighters?

Surely its because they are using violent means against violent means. But why is that other brand of violence against violence - war against terror - not also judged a bad, nay evil thing?

Some people will tell you that the war on terror is not a violent one. Why then the hundreds of millions spent to invade and occupy Iraq? Ditto in Afghanistan? What of the planned permanent detention of people at Guantanamo, purely because they expressed continuing ill will against the USA (a "crime" that hundreds of millions across the world are surely guilty of), is that non-violent act? If you detain a few hundred people in a remote place that's okay, but what if a few thousand, or few hundreds of thousands, or millions? When does a non-violent safety measure against a state of mind become violence against a state of people?

You see there are so many shades of gray and so little, if any, black and white. It depresses me that this as all been simplified, dumbed down for consumption of the non-thinking American masses as "war on terrorism" - which also just strikes me as bad grammar as well as being pretty darned close to an oxymoron from my point of view.

If you want to pit something against terrorism how about peace? Yes to me peace against terrorism sounds a whole lot better and who knows, as some have discovered (e.g. the British), it may take a lot longer but ultimately when the terrorists are fighting for a widely back point of view, it is much more likely to succeed in bringing about peace instead of just more war.

Prison for profit

Here's a thought: if prisons are to be run as private for profit businesses, such as is probably going to happen in Memphis, then what are the market forces driving their "product" demand and hence the price paid to them for their services? Shouldn't it be how good a job they do at rehabilitating prisoners, that is the rate of recidivism of those released from their system? So in a free-market prison system the corporation that does the best at rehabilitating the prisoners will be the most profitable and most dominant. In ideal world perhaps...

In reality I expect that corporations habit of being an externalizing machine will cause it to maximize profit in other ways, ones that do not benefit the community at large. Imagine a prison corporation that ships its prisons to some remote country where they are guarded and fed cheaply, and where if they riot, escape, or just plain curl up and die, well... out of sight, out of mind. The British tried that once with Australia - stuff them on a ship and sail them over the equator - problem solved. I can only imagine that some lesser form of this tactic is at the forefront of every wannabe for profit prison corporation.

The greatest trick the devil ever played...

If you take a Googleplex of links, shake 'em all up, add a splash of hocus pocus and a mischievous employee or two and what do you get? Well Dave over at Chicken or Beef? has found out. Yes indeed, in their directory Google they have cunningly cooked the books to indicate that the Evangelism section has 666 links, which it doesn't.

I'm wondering how long this "anomaly" will stay around once the word gets out, or indeed just how long its been there.