Good Old Victor F.

I was wandering through my movie collection t'other day and it struck me just how many Frankenstein movies I have.

I've got the Universal release from the 1930s, with Boris Karloff playing the monster. I've got the Hammer version, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. I've got Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein (which is still one of the funniest films ever made). I've got the sequel to the Hammer picture, I've got a copy of the not-very-good one with Brannagh and DeNiro in it. And I have a copy or two of the book, plus some of the various literary riffs on that theme.

Why? Well, mostly because it's an ace tale. A very early science fiction cautionary tale in a style that later writers like Crighton would adopt; Frankenstien says, loud and clear "look what we can do! Do you think we should?", with the undercurrent that of course we bloody shouldn't because we really have no idea what we're doing.

It's the sort of cautionary tale that can be applied to every kind of advance, from cybernetics to genetic engineering. The monster of the book is very different to that of the various movies, although following an image as startling as the Karloff makeup for the Universal release, which seared itself into the world's imagination, is this surprising? Monsters put bums on seats, not morality.

Over the years, things have changed a bit. My latest encounter with Victor and his mad science came in Dean Koontz's books; he depicts the Baron as a callous, amoral, cold scientist who has artificially extended his life and is intending to replace the human race with one of his own, much improved, design. Against him stand a couple of New Orleans cops and his original creation - now calling himself Deucallion. The books make undemanding reading, perfect for killing time in an entertaining manner. However, t'other night I came across something rather unexpected.

It's a movie known variously as "Flesh for Frankenstein" and "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein", the latter being why it drew my attention. Andy Warhol? He's not listed anywhere on the credits, but Udo Keir is. So I watched it.

In some ways, I wish I hadn't. In others, I'm so glad I did.

For one thing, quite a lot of time was spent on the look of the thing. Castle Frankenstein is labyrinthine and baroque, with plenty of places to hide and spy on people. The Baron's laboratory is a huge space complete with anatomical statues and lots of things floating in jars, but none of the electrical thingammies that we've come to expect. The costumes are interesting; filmed in the 70s, the period evoked by the look of the clothes is anywhere between 1890 and 1930 although the villagers are your standard Euro-peasant, stuck some time in the early 1700s. Because of the relaxation of censorship laws for stuff rated X, there's a fair bit of nudity and it's not limited to topless females.

In fact, the UK title (Flesh for Frankenstein) says exactly what the movie is about. It's sex. Victor's wife/sister (the two titles seem interchangable) just wants to get laid. A lot. Victor has an unhealthy fascination with internal organs and is creating two people from bits of other people. He intends them to be representatives of some off-kilter racial purity, and wants them to breed in order that he can replace the current crop of humanity - which he regards as trash. Aha, Mr. Koontz, I see where you got the idea!

It's a very visceral film, with much time spent staring at assorted guts and gore, and as stylish as it is, from time to time it becomes unintentionally funny thanks to a script which doesn't seem to know what it wants to do. We go from Victor Frankenstein, brilliant surgeon to Victor Frankenstein, amateur phrenologist. We also have Victor the gut-shagger who declares "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life...in the gall bladder!". This, and Victor's unhappy choice of a gay head* for his male monster, ends in disaster and the one genuinely chilling scene of the entire film, right at the very end, in which the surviving adult ends up in the hands of the eerily Addams Family/Midwich Frankenstein kids. Two kids, silent and intense for the entire film, alone, in Victor's lab, with scalpels, and a man dangling by his wrists from a crane. A situation like that...well, it just can't end well, can it?








*possibly not gay, but definitely not interested in women of any sort, even before it was removed from the original body.

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#Amazonfail

Most of you will have noticed the furor on Twitter, and elsewhere, which was linked to the #amazonfail tag. I don't need to describe what happened because the BBC have some reportage here.

What I'm interested in is: do we dare call it Conspiracy?

Well, no. From my position inside Tinfoil Hat Central (a bunker deep in the desert), I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

For one thing, people have a tendency to trust technology when they absolutely shouldn't. It very often does exactly what we tell it to, which is why the IT industry coined terms like PEBKAC and the infamous ID-ten-T error. It is remarkably easy to screw up even the simplest set of instructions and take out your own website. How easy? Forgetting which naming convention is important for your webserver, for one. Like if your webhost runs 'nix servers and you built your website in a Windows product, and save the opening page as "Index.html". 'nix is case sensitive, so if all the other references to your index page are for "index.html", it won't show up. It's the simplest error in the world.

Something of that magnitude, a cockup that looks like a conspiracy, happened to Amazon. I'd put money on it. Human error is so very much more likely than Amazon trying to sneak a bit of censorship past us; for one thing, it failed immediately. For another, had this been a deliberate policy by Amazon.com they must have realised on some level that they were lining themselves up for an online arse-kicking. They must have known that an issue like this wouldn't simply blow over. Right now, one imagines, they are feverishly trying to sort out whether the guy who made the goof is a malicious twat or just phenomenally unlucky.

Of course, the stigma of Conspiracy simply won't go away. People have already concluded that Amazon tried to slip a piece of grim behaviour past them and their perceptions will not be changed unless Amazon does something to placate them. The thing is, there isn't anything that Amazon can do.

If I'm right and it's a cock-up, they've already owned up to it. No more need be said.

If I'm wrong and it was the failed implimentation of a draconian anti-GLBT policy, it crashed spectacularly and there's no way they can say sorry.

My own feeling is this: no matter what the cause, support your local bookshops. Go and buy books from shops, make friends with the staff and if you have a local bookshop that isn't part of a chain, cherish it, love it and spend lots of money there. Then you won't have to worry about what Amazon are doing, a group of people you know will be more than happy to order you any book you might want to read.

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The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Terminated?

It's not hard to imagine that this show isn't going to get another season. Fox, home of misplaced Sci-Fi, is bound to have noticed that the show has failed to find an audience. This may be partly because Fox is also traditionally the home of Clueless Program Planners; if you're aware of how Monty Python railed against program planners, and how the Browncoats blame the Fox network for the death of Firefly, you might be expecting a rant about the inability of a network to give a show a good home.

Not so.

If T:TSCC is going to die, it's because it has been a bit too intelligent for it's own good. This is a conclusion I've come to after sitting through most of the last season.

During the last 20 or so episodes, we've seen John Connor grow up to realise who people think he is and what he's going to have to become in order to lead humanity's rebellion against the machines. "Future John" is a lonely, isolated person. Everyone he loves dies, generally to protect him. John has learned about who he can trust and the price he pays for trusting the wrong people.

We have seen the Connors coping with the results of their actions - and this is a bit of a first for a show like this; the premise of Terminator movies seems to be that stuff explodes, covering up the fact that the movie series asks questions about free will, the nature of intelligence, emotion and emergent behaviour. The TV series has asked similar questions, has also dabbled in fate, destiny...wyrd, in a word. More, it has stared long and hard into the repercussions of the life that the Connors lead. For example: John kills a man. Well, every hero kills sooner or later and although a hero never feels good about it, it never slows him down.

It slows John down. It grinds him to a halt. He blames his mother for his having to take a life to save hers. For a while, he hates her.

If you like your entertainment to not only make you think but to do a little thinking of it's own, then this might be the show for you.

Here's another good 'un: Sarah Connor discovers a factory apparently making Terminator type flying robots. Part of the fall-out from this discovery is a terminator stalking the factory and killing everyone in it.

The next week, rather than brush all this under the carpet and move on, we go to the funerals of all the people that died. Yes, we might discover something unsettling about the whole operation that's germane to the uberplot, but we still see a small town devastated by the loss of two dozen people.

Part of the joy that this show brings me is that it has been developing very slowly and carefully; the audience wanted it paced rather faster, but I think they might have missed the point - we're seeing John Connor undergo his last temptation and his hours in Gethsemane. Hey, I'm allowed to point out the biblical links - his initials are J.C. and he's going to save the human race by being something other than human. Not in a sci-fi way, in the most human way possible - by isolating himself from love, kindness and joy so that he can be the most effective leader and commander that he can be. There's a really good reason his best friend is a Terminator called "Cameron".

This is so worth watching, as good as Battlestar ever was, but with far less RDM-wank. People want to watch something on Friday night now the toasters are gone? They're on Fox.

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The Perils of No TV

I don't have a TV. I don't really miss it, other than for watching Doctor Who in full-on surround with a HOOOOJ screen.

It does mean I have to wait for a couple of days to see most of the interesting TV shows to turn up on Hulu. Some I don't get to see at all. But generally I could, often by going to the network's site for the show and catching up on stuff there.

It oh-so nearly works almost all the time.

I have had "Better Off Ted" recommended to me; it's on ABC, and is apparently something I will find funny. Since I don't mind watching ads in between American TV shows, I stroll over to ABC.com and click to see the latest show. Good! I'm only 3 eps into the season, the sample seems to play fine and shows every indication that I will enjoy the full show.

So I click. It tells me I need to install a plugin.
...
....
ok. Sure. It's a site I should be able to trust and it's going to slot into Firefox, which means I can remove it whenever I want.

It installs, I accept the usual license agreement, it shows me an advert and then errors out saying it couldn't find a decent video renderer.

Of course, it renders the ad perfectly.

It allows me to continue anyway, indicating that there really isn't a problem, and then asks me to decide between Standard and Streaming HD. Well, bearing in mind the load on the apartment complex wifi I go for standard. It buffers. For ten minutes.

While I'm waiting I have a look at Twitter (Neil Gaiman has pictures of sticks. See what you miss if you're not on Twitter?), check my mail, fire up the USEnet client and, just for fun, see if I can find Better Off Ted. Ahhhh, alt.binaries.tv has all three episodes in HD. A mere 200mb each file, too. Well, that'll take me all of about...15 minutes to download and reassemble. Half hour to watch, just in time for bed.

Moral dilemma: I don't want to condone piracy. On the other hand, I'm going to watch the pilot, ad free, and then I'm going to delete it. No, I'll just check back with the ABC movie viewer...it's exactly where I left it. Still buffering. In the same spot.

OK, a race. USEnet vs ABC.com
I leave the ABC.com viewer where it is, because that's a 30% head start, and pull the .rar files from USEnet. And, like Clarkson driving the Veyron, suddenly I'm in the grip of POWER!

It's ten minutes later. The ripped version is down, watchable and ready to go. The official, ethical version is stuck.

Odd, how people make it harder to be good than they do to be bad, isn't it?


Update: In the end, I decided to bin the downloaded file and make the ABC thing work. Tomorrow, though. Maybe. I know they're looking at TV shows watched online as part of the ratings and I would really like to see this show - but I have run out of time to watch anything fun tonight.

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Work E-Mail

I was having a spring clean of the "sent items" box, and found this: it needed a little reformatting.

The Original Mail:

Good Morning!!
It is not provided on init form. Can you please confirm with the EE whether he is married or single?
Thanks, Savita.

My Reaction:

Oh, the potential responses.

Version 1
Dear Savita,
Thank you for your request for clarification. I was not aware that EMR required that level of detail to set up a cost management record, so let's be exhaustive and try to provide you with as much as possible.

Mr R. remains a confirmed batchelor, although his mother hopes that this is just a phase he's going through and he'll one day Meet The Right Girl. He wears a size eleven shoe, parts his hair on the left, dresses to the right and votes based on issues rather than party affiliation or personality. He doesn't take sugar in his tea and prefers to avoid caffienated beverages where possible, but like so many of us he just can't seem to get started in the morning without at least one cup of coffee. He prefers Columbian, and whole milk. He stirs anti-clockwise, although when at home in Australia this is, of course, clockwise due to coriolis force.

Mr. R. enjoys the challenge of crosswords and has a fondness for the works of John Le Carre, the famous author of spy thrillers. He loves Christmas, which we all find very endearing in a man of his stature, having taken to heart the lesson of Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" at a very early age. His favourite colour is duck-egg blue - which may be one of those peculiar decorating misnomers because I can tell you, I've studied duck eggs and one thing they aren't is blue - and he has a fondness for soft furnishings that is quite at odds with his engineering background. One might assume that he loves comfort, but in other parts of his life he's quite austere. His kitchen is particularly spartan, mostly stainless steel with only the odd wooden container to soften the impact of all that metal and recessed track lighting.

Version 2
Dear Savita,

We do not speak of Mr. R. The emotional scars are still too fresh.

Version 3
Dear Savita,

We contact Mr. R. to recover the information you requested but his response was in Australian language. We're awaiting a translation.

Version 4
Dear Savita,

Mr. R. declined to comment, but his colleague Mr. Dalliard is single and wants to know if you're available on Thursday night. He says there is a "darling little bistro" he's been wanting to try. Can we give Mr Dalliard your contact details?

Yes, I swiped Mr. Dalliard from "A Bit of Fry and Laurie", which I undersand is available on DVD.

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Blog Announcement!

Game: if you're commenting, and I do love it when people comment (validate me! validate me! I have no existence unless I am observed by others!), you might notice the "word verification" thing that ensures you are not a spam-bot.

At the end of your post, define the word that the verification gives you. There will be an actual prize, eventually (by Xmas, I think), for the best one. I have shamelessly stolen this idea from the blog of David Brin.

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Kindles, Text to Speech and Audiobooks, oh my!

Cory Doctorow wrote this in the Guardian (and turned it into a Tweet, which is how I found it), which made me think about four things at the same time -

1: That settles the Kindle issue. I'm not buying one. If I own technology, it does as I say and does not run home to mama whenever mama decides it should.

2: I'm not actually surprised that Amazon have revealed they can do this. At some point in the development of the Kindle, after the boffins and geeks had worked out what it could do they let lawyers loose on it. The lawyers saw what the Kindle could do and then proceeded to work out what it could do that they could end up in litigation over. Once they knew that, they very sensibly advised the boffins to install an "off" switch.

3: Now that we know the Kindle can have a feature disabled (by code in the e-book, I assume) it's a matter of time before someone hacks it*(. Were e-book readers interesting before?

4: Audiobooks are a separate product, at least in my mind. So someone, somewhere, is potentially misjudging the audience. If, or generally when, I buy an audiobook it's because I want to hear the book being read by a specific voice. After an appalling experience with an audio version of "Ender's Game" I was reconverted by the performance - best way to describe it - of "Coraline" by Neil Gaiman. How cool, to have the author read his own work?

I would pay really quite a lot of money to hear an interesting voice read an interesting book, but I will pay no money to have a machine read to me. I want the performance, not just the sound.

Now, admittedly, there is something to be addressed about some people being unable to read a print edition, for whatever reason, and therefore buying an audiobook as a replacement for a print copy or e-edition; the kindle would cut down on that market. Audiobooks tend to be more expensive because of production costs, one assumes.



*wait...let me leap to a conclusion. If the Kindle runs code that interacts with hardware, and that code is based in the e-book, how long before the e-book reader becomes a target for malware of some kind? What sort of malware would a Kindle attract? Adware, one assumes, or if the Kindle connects with a PC it might be an vector for getting code past the normal defenses.

And if i've thought of it, I'm sure someone else will.

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