General Roundup

The Current Book: Snowcrash

Again. To be honest, I am a sucker for cyberpunk and virtuality but even more of a sucker for the core of the book- the concept of language as a virus. One thing that always grips me is a book with a powerful idea at the core, which is why I spent so much time with Hard SF and why books like Snowcrash keep me coming back to see if there are any bits that I have missed.

I also read The Government Manual for New Superheroes which has been sitting on a shelf feeling unloved. I went through a phase of collecting small and not very serious books like that a while ago and, given the rather obvious nature of the book itself, it raises the odd smile here and there.

The Current Tunes: A Tribute to Chairman Humph

A Radio 4 tribute to Humphrey Littleton, one of those people who's contribution to life you really don't assess until they're gone. The tribute, narrated by Stephen Fry and with contributions from the likes of Barry Cryer, Jack Dee, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor et al, painted a vivid picture of Chairman Humph as a person and as a gentleman. Most telling of all, an anecdote about the man himself on VE day, being wheeled around London in a cart and playing his trumpet. Amazingly, a BBC recording of a commentator overlooking the scene at the gates of Buckingham Palace captures Humph playing the trumpet. In amongst the crowd noise and under the terribly serious tones of a BBC voice long gone, you can make out the sound of "Roll Out the Barrell" and of a crowd singing along.

The Current TV: No Heroics

Since I seem to be on a superhero kick, I thought I'd do a little digging and see what all the fuss is about.
I must be getting old.
The amount of profanity nearly put me off, until I tuned it out. It's...crude, sometimes funny, with large chunks of pathos and some genuinely amusing moments; superheroes can't get their lives together either, it seems, and are as ill-adjusted and uncomfortable as the rest of us.

I knew this.

Well, when you grow up reading reprints of Marvel comics (and Spiderman in particular) the concept that a superhero is all coolness when the mask is on and yet as tenative and insecure as real people in day to day life is simply not news. For the rest of the population who are currently superhero aware thanks to the likes of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and who have no real investment in the genre, it's probably funnier.

Mind you, there was this anthology...a while back...with contributions from people like Gaiman and David Langford, called Temps. I feel sure that the writers of No Heroics are familiar with it.

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Heroes, Season 3, again

At last, Heroes seems to be attempting to tie things together into one coherent plot and with a bit of luck that will make for some interaction between the various characters and stories.

They are still doing the "and now, twenty seconds with Suresh! Followed by eight seconds of Sylar!" thing, which is still getting on my nerves. I would love to spend more time in the company of Hiro, or any of the characters really, because as it stands the nature of the show means I really don't know most of the characters. Developing powers have replaced developing characters.

For example, Nathan Petrelli (the flying politico) started out the season convinced, utterly, that his power was a gift from God. That idea has been rather brusquely discarded, in favour of a more scientific explanation and Nathan's character has likewise reverted. What if, even faced with the truth about the source of his power, he continues to believe? As it stands, Nathan Petrelli seems to have shaken off his brush with God in short order; to me this says that he was never that convinced about it in the first place, so can I trust anything about this person? Who is he, really?

The story, such as it is, now appears to revolve around the Petrelli family and an internal feud between mother and father, tugging the kids (Nathan, Peter and Sylar) in different directions. The good news is there are indications that Sylar, now recruited by his Dad, isn't playing the same game as everyone else; the analogy is that while Mr and Mrs Petrelli are playing chess with the assorted characters, Sylar is now playing Poker and has been smart enough to mark the cards without telling anyone.

Peter Petrelli has been a bit of a headless chicken since the start of the season and is still hyperventillating his way through scenes. I feel that if he would just stop for a moment and catch his breath, and perhaps do some actual thinking, he might be a bit more interesting and a lot more useful. As it is, he lurches from one crisis to the next without ever really having a plan. This is all good stuff if you want your hero to be a reactionary mess, complete with knee-jerk responses that seem to come out of nowhere, but less good if you're hoping he might be a character you identify with and want to see succeed. He's outplayed and outclassed by everyone else, never seems to catch a break and instead of being the audience identification character is more a sort of mobile punchbag.

Is it good, though?

Well...yes, sort of. I do hope they wrap this story up, though, because I'm not sure it's good enough for a Season 4.

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Superheroes come to feast...

Superheroes are being gleefully strip-mined by Hollywood and just about everyone else.

Adrien Veidt would point out that in times of economic hardship, we turn to symbols of strength and solidity as well as escapism for entertainment. After the glut of Reality shows, perhaps we as consumers are ready for things to be more fantastic and less about the humdrum?

It helps that Hollywood seems to have picked some decent projects and seems to want to take them seriously - at least for a given value of "serious". A case in point, "The Dark Knight", which has the advantage of being about normal humans. Strip away the Batman stuff and you have a good, soild, mob thriller. Get rid of Batman and the Joker, and the idea of the movie playing out with Harvey, Rachel and Jim Gordon in the spotlight still works. Nolan's use of real locations gives the movie a grounding in reality that Burton's Gotham didn't have, and I'm pretty sure that Gotham was always based on an uneasy amalgam of New York and Chicago anyway.

Adding Batman and the Joker gives the movie another layer, pushes it into interesting and mythic territory. And let's be honest, the ongoing twisted romance between the Joker and Batman is the one relationship in the film - and the one relationship in the comics - that the fans really care about. I was pleased that Nolan allowed the Joker to say it in such loving terms, turning the idea of being completed by another person firmly on it's head. Bruce Wayne wants to be completed by Rachel, sees her as his safe haven, his Penelope.

The moment we know that Rachel is what Bruce is looking forward to is the moment we should realise that she's doomed. It's almost a war movie cliche - the war weary soldier drawing strength from the knowledge that the girl he left behind is still waiting for him.

Coming up, of course, is the Other Great Graphic Novel: Watchmen.

It's going to make an interesting movie. The characters, in their graphic novel form, are not the superheroes we're used to seeing. Batman might be an extremist, but he still has rules and he's still recognisably human. Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, even The Comedian and Ozymandias are already a long way away from that state when the story begins. The other characters are even less of the heroic norm, which makes me wonder whether the movie will use Dan Dreiberg as the audience identification character.

Frankly, if there are still people out there who think Rorschach has an identifiable point of view, I don't want to know. Even the happy nihilism of the Comedian is uncomfortable.

This might be why it's taken so long to get the movie made. Not all of the issues in turning that book into a motion picture are to do with the technology and the technique. Alan Moore created a dense, literate, intelligent story that should more or less defy translation and, like a lot of "the movie of the book" situations some of it certainly will.

Perhaps the way to think about this is to look back at Stallone's "Judge Dredd". Without judging the man too harshly, one of his reported comments was that he didn't understand where the humour was in the script, felt that a comic book of that nature ought to be more broadly funny, which might explain why the movie captured some of the look but none of the edge. What didn't translate was the idea that you shouldn't like Dredd, that Dredd was, in fact, the embodiment of everything that is wrong with MegaCity One, and that he's a cold, mudering bastard.

That people liked him for it is perhaps a bit of a tragedy, or just shows that what Pratchett said about humans getting carried away by any new idea which includes a uniform and a slogan is true.

Dredd, Rorschach, the Comedian, Batman, the Joker...they all have something in common.
They believe. Utterly and completely, they believe in something. It can be hard to disagree with their point of view when it's presented in such a stark fashion, and there is something about that steely belief which lends them a charisma that they shouldn't have, or at least bends our will far enough out of shape that we begin to find their dissonant views harmonising with ours. Yeah, criminals. They probably deserve a kicking. Or shooting. Yeah, torture. Justified, as long as we're only doing it to bad people, and only to get information to prevent worse crimes. Yeah.

So perhaps the current infatuation with Superheroes is more of a reflection of the times than we thought?

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Heroes, Season 3

I have to admit, I want to like Heroes simply because it's a show about superheroes and, for at least a season, seemed to be doing it properly.

I think it probably says a great deal that my favourite comic books were V for Vendetta, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns et al - fundamentally, stories about someone very unusual in a fairly ordinary world.

Heroes had that going for it, but as the population of people with powers multiplies you run into the issue of spending too little time with the characters that matter.

For example, Season three now has storylines running about Suresh, Hiro and Ando, Matt Parkman and a new female character that Hiro believes is his nemesis, about three escapeess from Level 5, HRG, the Petrelli brothers, Sylar, Mama Petrelli, Claire's adoptive mother, Claire's biological mother, another prescient painter (and Matt, and Hiro), the character played by Malcolm MacDowell, whom I have probably spelled all wrong, and a bunch of other stuff that I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around let alone caring about.

The individual stories are interesting - Sylar appears to be on a redemption arc, which could be an exceptional story, and Peter has learned Sylar's ability so now he also shares Sylar's twisted hunger. This, in itself, is cool. At last, we get to see something of what it must be like to be Sylar, but from inside the head of someone we already know. How will Sylar's demonic need to feed affect Peter? Well...

...it gets him put in a medical coma while we trot off to find out what the other eleventy plot threads are doing. This is infuriating.

Likewise, the early promise of Hiro and Ando's tale - which stems from one of those "the character has to be a moron for the next five minutes in order for this to work" situations - is on rough ground because so little time is spent with them. If you missed it, basically a time travelling Hiro sees his own apparent death at the hands of Ando. This is a wonderful idea, because the two had been inseperable and worked well together. Instead of drawing this out, teasing the breakdown in their friendship or leading us down the path that leads to either Hiro going bad and Ando taking him out, or Ando going bad, it seems to have been taken care of in about three episodes.

Damn!

There was even room for a twist there, which might have already been foreshadowed.

So, having gone from something approaching Marvel's "New Universe" experiment, we're almost in X-Men territory where everyone appears to have some superpower and no one therefore appears all that special or interesting.

It could be better. It should be better. I watch the online reruns instead of kicking the kids off the sofa and making it Monday night viewing, which should in itself be telling.

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Political Gubbins

Not that I have an axe to grind or anything...

One of the allegedly key issues in the local Arizona elections this year is that perenial favourite Gay Marriage. There's quite a lot of nonsense being spouted about marriage being defined as "between a man and a woman".

I think that turns up in the Bible, which isn't part of the US Constitution, no matter how hard some people believe it should be.

There's a human cost to this, and I wanted to mention it in passing. I can't use real names, naturally.

Ms Smith and Ms Jones have a problem. Ms Smith is a world class scientist, a real asset to her company and a genuinely nice person. She loves Ms. Jones, and would like to spend the rest of her life with her. Ms. Smith was born in another country. Ms. Jones is a US Citizen. If they could marry, the LIFE act would keep them together and ease Ms. Smith's immigration paperwork. However, since they are both women they can't be anything more than domestic partners. I can chunter on about this, but here's what it comes down to - neither lady has hidden their gender preference, their families are good with it, their friends are good with it, but now Ms. Jones is being forced to make a tough decision: when Ms. Smith's visa runs out, she has to depart the USA and Go Home. Ms. Jones can attempt to go with her, but there is no guarantee of the immgration process to Ms. Smith's country being kind or enlightened.

These two people love each other.
If one were a man and the other a woman, there wouldn't be an issue.
There wouldn't be an issue even if they didn't love each other. One quick civil ceremony and Ms. Smith could fade into the background*.
The likelyhood is that they will be spilt up and may find it very, very difficult to maintain their relationship.

This isn't a question of "devaluing marriage" - and let's be honest, with the divorce rate at over 50%, those of us who can marry are already doing a brilliant job of destroying the sanctity of marriage - and it's not a question of sneaking immigrants in who have no skills and who want to sponge off Welfare. It's a question of being fair, and it's a question of seeing marriage for what it is: a union between two adults who want to make a lifetime committment to one another.

Anything else is just silly.






*True story: I was driving back to Phoenix from Tombstone. We had to pass through a Border Patrol checkpoint. The car in front of us contained two people we knew - one gentleman of Latino extraction, born and raised in Cali. The other, an Essex lad on an expired visa. The one the border patrol asked for ID was not the pale and nervous Essex lad. It is not the first time I have seen that happen, either.

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Joe the Plumber - working class hero?

Joe the Plumber.

Hannity, currently protraying himself as a wild-eyed loner on the last freedom moped out of Nowhere City (baby), had Joe the Plumber on the show today.  It proved interesting.

Joe is apparently an ordinary guy; he has money troubles, an estranged wife and son in said wife's custody.  He's studying to better himself, he's working hard and he just happened to be in the right place at the right time to ask Senator Obama a question.

Everyone has since started flapping like a good'un. 

The basic answer should have been that if Joe earned $260,000 a year his first quarter million would be taxed at 36%.  The next ten g's would be taxed at 39%.  This would mean that Joe would have had to withhold $93900 to pay his taxes, leaving him with a measly $166400 to live off.  So he might have to hold back on buying a Bugatti Veyron that year.

The real question is how Obama's tax plan affects Joe's business, because Obama is planning to put up things like Capital Gains tax and so forth, but if the business is going so well that it can afford to pay Joe over a quarter of a million a year, it can certainly afford a decent accountant.

In retrospect, Obama did not answer the question at all well.  In fact he couldn't have caused more glee in the Right if he'd said he was going to nationalise plumbers (or set the guy on fire).

Joe's question is hugely important, not because it wasn't well answered but because he asked it at all, and the media attention the poor guy has since caught has been completely out of order.  This is a country where you should be able to ask your presidential candidates just about anything (and good lord, it was an economic question and nothing to do with extremist connections or Islam) without fear of having your life dragged through the mud afterwards.

The Right has been screeching about how the Journalists are under the thumb of the liberal media elite, and this sort of behaviour plays directly into their hands.  Joe's personal finances are not a matter for debate or discussion here, nor is his private life a matter of public interest.  He's not a celebrity, he's not a candidate.  But by their treatment of him, the media has turned Joe into a poster-boy for the Republicans.  Joe is, by all accounts, just a hard working guy trying to make his way in the world.  Now, he's a minor celebrity.

Was it planned?  Oh, I hope not.  If he was a McCain plant, I fear for National Security under a McCain presidency.  He couldn't have chosen a less good spokesman for people's tax fears.

Never mind.  Colin Powell has endorsed Obama and cited Sarah Palin as one of the reasons he can't support McCain.  I think, unless John McCain does something really special, this one might be all but over.  Still, we find out in two weeks.

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That Darned Election

1: Acorn.

They have been accused of enthusiastically registering people to vote.  Perhaps too enthusiastically, given that we hear of them registering people multiple times (one homeless guy allegedly 72 times), registering the under-age (as young as seven), businesses (as in the actual building) and the dead.

It's nice that all these groups should be represented in the democratic process, although registering multiple personalities and the inanimate is taking things a bit far.

Not that any of these people could actually have voted.  Or at least one would hope not.  So it's not actually electoral fraud being perpetrated.  Actually, it's just monumental stupidity.  Don't employ Acorn, folks, they couldn't find their corporate arse with both hands, a road map and a satellite imaging.

My feeling is that somewhere down the line we're going to find out that the company was being paid to register voters -per voter-, which is just an opportunity for any qualified scamologist to ply their trade.  Someone will have pocketed the money and be off across the nearest border while the bewildered and somewhat challenged folks now being pilloried on Fox News have had a chance to work out what went wrong.

Voter registration should be really simple.  The IRS knows how many people pay taxes and the DHS knows how many of those people are actual citizens, so why not work out your list of voters from there and mail them a happy little card that says "would you like to vote this year?" along with a return envelope.  It seems to work for Netflix.  Or is that too easy?

And apparently my initial thoughts might be wrong.  Have a look at the accusation from the dear old Guardian that it might be a Neocon Put Up Job

2: Right Wing Media.

It is at once disturbing and comforting to listen to what the various conservative broadcasters are up to.

Robert Anton Wilson, a very smart man who said a lot of interesting things, once suggested that you should always read at least one publication that you disagree with, to see what the other side are thinking.  I think he might have been asking us to test our assumptions and give our prejudices a kick, too.  So I do this by occasionally watching Fox News and listening to KFYI 550.

The current propaganda can be boiled down to:

• Barack Obama consorts with known terrorists.
• His associations with Acorn mean that he is in some way responsible for their behavior.
• He has radical and anti-American friends.
• Journalists are not telling the whole story when they report from Republican rallies.
• Journalists are not telling any story about Democrat rallies, which are filled with hate.
• Sarah Palin is being judged unfairly.
• Obama will raise taxes and make you poor.

They're fearmongering, and stating that their listeners should not trust journalists.

Of course, no one should trust a journalist; journalists don't necessarily tell the utter objective truth all the time, look at Hunter S. Thompson.  However, some journalists are better at producing facts than others, and some are better at suppressing their naturally subjective filters than others.  Our yardstick for which is which generally turns out to be "this voice reaffirms what I was already thinking, therefore I trust it".

But if you know this about journalists, and you know this about people in general, then you can read nearly anyone and draw some measure of truth from what they say.  This is a skill that you learn and have to practice.

The Conservative Broadcasters - they aren't journalists, they're just people with microphones airing an opinion that they then don't have to support with facts - you know, like gradeschool children who have been taught that it's wonderful to just have an opinion and this makes them special and wonderful.

Part of their game is something rather cunning.  They "go to the phone lines" in order to create a sense of Vox Populi.  Typically, the Populi that attempt to Vox are allowed to say how wonderful the host is, and then they are allowed to say something short about the topic of the day. Normally, the host then cuts them off and runs a speil on that same topic, hitting a short list of talking points (generally the same list for each call) and loading up with jingoism.  The effect is quite clever: the host appears to be talking to the country, appears to be engaging with the population and appears to be fielding their questions and comments.  That he appears to be is a piece of craftsmanship on the host's part. Let's not underestimate how good they are at it, either.

Sean, and those like him, are not telling us anything new.  Instead, what they provide is a form of reinforcement.  Listeners and viewers are tuning in because they already agree with what's being said and want to feel OK about it.

This takes nothing away from Sean.  He's still a very effective broadcaster and, to be honest, he's only doing what other media outlets on both sides of the debate are also doing.

Hang on a minute.

This two party system in the USA, and in other parts of the world: thesis and antithesis, really, isn't it?

Where's the synthesis?

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The US "Life on Mars"

I missed it, and I am cursing myself.

For one thing, I wanted to see how Harvey Keitel handled the Philip Glennister role.  Gene Hunt is so closely linked with his manner and mannerisms that I wondered whether the character would work for me when played by someone else.

By all accounts, it's good.  Better than the first pilot.  Yes, let's be honest, it'll have to go some in order to be better than the original - but Ashes to Ashes had to work for a similar place in my affections and it managed it.

The thing that makes me want to watch the show, though, is how they handle the basic question.  Is Sam Tyler mad?  Back in time?  In a coma?  If they follow the story as set out in the UK version, we know the answer.  But if they do, there are elements of the show that might not work and I am fascinated by the prospect that they might have decided to take one of the other two routes.

Here's why:

In the original, Sam Tyler comments that he's just going to walk until he can't make up any more faces.  His theory, at that point, is that if his mind is coming up with his 70s Manchester surroundings there must be a limit on the details and complexity that his brain can generate.  It's a good point.  One of the things about the original LoM was the occasional and apparently deliberate inclusion of anachronisms.  If Sam is really making it all up as his brain struggles for life, he's be bound to get things wrong.  Plus, it explains Gene and the Boys - as Sam grew up he would have watched TV shows like The Sweeney (and say what you like, Gene Hunt is definitely in the Regan mould); Sam's brain papers over assorted cracks in his memory and mental landscape by filling this stuff in with whatever it can.  It strip mines his memory for "70s stuff" and that includes Regan and Carter.

Historically, the Sweeney were a response to the changing face of crime.  At the end of the 60s there were far less old London Gangsters and far more small groups of armed robbers turning over banks and the like.  The Flying Squad, and the TV show based on them, were a response to that change of playing field.  Prior to The Sweeney, the most realistic TV depiction of policing had been Z Cars and the two shows were poles apart.  For one thing, The Sweeney was cooler, but the important thing is that it couldn't have happened at all without definite changes in the real world.

Does LoM America have the same kind of backdrop?
How does the American Sam paper over his mental gaps?  Assuming, of course, that he's not mad or back in time?

The cop shows of the time included Charlie's Angels, Cannon, Starsky and Hutch, Police Woman and Kojak.  If Sam is still in '73, he's a year too early for The Rockford Files (which is a shame, because if they'd stuck with L.A. we might have seen Sam living in a trailer near the beach).  The landscape of police shows is very different to the on in the UK at the time.  How will the American production team cope with this?  Which direction will the show move in?

For once, an American remake which has already risen from the ashes once, has a lot to offer; a genuine sense of "I wonder how they're going to pull this off?"

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This is a test. No, seriously.

I'm posting this with ScribeFire, which is an addon for FireFox.
I used to use an offline stand alone piece of software for this sort of thing, but it's been so long since I posted to my LiveJournal account that it seems silly to fire that back up just to get to Blogger.

Besides, I seem to spend more and more time with FireFox these days.  If it had a word-count and a simple text editor, I think I'd probably uninstall MS Office.

The intention here is just to see whether it works and how it looks.  Is it easy to use?  Is it clean and simple?  Does it function as I need it to?

The answers so far are "Yes", which is comforting.  I even have an option here to "monetize" - which I will explore shortly.  The interface seems to be working pretty well with 'Fox, including the dark theme I've got the browser using.  I also have options to link from YouTube and Flickr, as well as the normal hyper and image links.

This might come in handy.  It's also nice to be able to slap F8 when I have an idea and be able to post something to the Blog.

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Sarah Palin

I'm English, I'm intending to remain so and I live in the USA. I am not a citizen, but I do pay taxes and that - whatever some Americans think - at least allows me to air an opinion on the current political process.

Sarah Palin, whatever her abilities and her real skills as a politician, is a satirists dream. Tina Fey's caricature of her on SNL is very, very funny. So funny that you start to wonder whether it's all a bit too easy. People are saying she's dangerous; I've been invited to join a group on Facebook that claims she's the most dengerous woman in the Western world, or somesuch hyperbole.

I don't agree that she's dangerous. The reflex of the American political system is to Fearmonger as soon as something unexpected happens. We're seeing it with the Right's insistent harping about Barack Obama's links to "unrepentant domestic terrorists" and "extremists", and with a variety of people drawing undue attention to the possibility that there are root vegetables (long the bane of Vice Presidents) smarter than Sarah Palin.

Fine. She's not bright. We were spoiled by President Bartlett.

She is also far too easy to satirise. I don't think it's a good idea to have politicians who are this easy to make fun of.

Not because we shouldn't satirise our politicians. That's our right, and as an Englishman I have come to regard it as a sacred trust. We put them in power and we should do our utmost to remind them of this at every single opportunity to keep them honest and humble. They do not deserve our respect or admiration, they need to be called on every decision and every utterance, until putting the interests of the people ahead of their own becomes second nature.

Nope, it's because we shouldn't be thinking about the personalities in this election at all.

The human race is, and this is a technical term so brace yourselves, in the shit.

I could take the time to rattle off the things that are looming over us right now, but if you watch the news (oh please, do watch the news!) you already know what those things are.

OK, if you're an American, please watch something like CNN or somewhere with international news, instead of depending on Fox and Local news.

Anyway. You should know what's looming over us. Given that all this stuff is definitely looming, but has not yet reached the "oh *^$@!!!" point where it tips over and becomes a doom, we need to know what our darling politicos are going to do about it. I haven't heard too much about that, as yet.

I feel we should be told.

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