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1 January 2004

12:00

Happy New Year!

Hello, and welcome to Ephemeral Isle.  This is basically a free-form blog where I gas on about anything that strikes my fancy.  I'm not exactly sure what the format of this is going to be.  I'm hoping to post various essays, commentaries, and insane rants, but being a freelance writer with a toddler underfoot makes for a free-form work schedule, so I'll have to see what will be practical.  At the very least, I'll be posting items and links from the news and the Web that I find amusing or informative.  Special emphasis will be given to string collecting, gum massages, and getting naked in front of a chicken without a licence. 

14:40

Well, this is a great start to the blog.  Our entire family is down with the flu.  Phlegm is flying thick and heavy and we all have tastes in our mouths like we've been sucking n burnt matches.  Meanwhile, trying to keep our very unhappy  toddler daughter quiet has meant watching Monsters Inc. for the 5192nd time.  If that wasn't enough, New Years Day is incredibly slow for good stories to talk about.

No, wait.  The Moscow police have arrested Osama Bin Laden.  Well, sort of. 

Friday

2  January 2004

09:42

I'm enjoying a quiet window of opportunity while my daughter sleeps in.  Rough night.  She's 17 months old and since we converted her cot into a proper bed she can pad into our room and frighten the bejeezuz out of us at the crack of dawn.  Usually this is a demand for her morning bottle or that she and her bunny want to sleep with Mama and Daddy.  Today was the worst of all possible worlds.  It was: "You guys have still got the tail end of the flu, but I'm all better now and I'm chipper and happy and want to jabber and play.  What?  the Sun isn't up and you two feel like day-old boiled linguine?  Too bad." 

By the time we persuaded her to go back to sleep, all hope of proper rest was gone.  The upside, however, is that she's having a lie in, so Daddy can read the papers on the Web without having someone suddenly appearing under my chair trying to play with the back up computer under my desk.

Monday

5 January 200415:18

Oh, great.  We have a severe weather alert.  Turns out that the Seattle area is facing up to six inches of snow.  That's not a lot compared to some parts of the world, but western Washington isn't known for nasty weather.  It's more like England, which is why I moved here.  That's great most of the time, but when something like a heavy snow fall hits, all hell breaks loose because neither the buildings, city services, nor infrastructure is equipped for it.  If it gets bad, I expect to see power outages, burst water mains, snarled roads, dental floss shortages.    When the weather started dipping below freezing last week, I bought a catalytic heater to go in our emergency kit.  I felt a bit of a fool then, but not so now. 

Now if only I can use the weather to justify getting a 17 inch flat screen monitor and an 80 Gig external hard drive.

Tuesday

6 January 2004

09:30

Ken Livingstone has been readmitted to the Labour party after being expelled for years ago.  As part of his readmission, Livingstone had to take a loyalty test.  According to rumours, this involved standing naked up to his knees in a barrel of custard in Trafalgar square and singing "Bess, You is Ma Woman."

09:35

We got hit with snow last night and it's still coming down in bushels.  It's all very pretty, but this city isn't built to take heavy snow falls.  There aren't enough ploughs, many of the buildings have flat roofs, and utility cables are often very lightly strung.  Not to mention the fact that Seattle drivers always act astonished when the weather goes pear shaped.  Here is a city where it rains so much that you're more likely to get moss than grass, and everyone acts all surprised when the roads get wet.  Now imagine snowy, icy roads set on steep hills and the fun begins.  It's even more mirth in the snow when SUV drivers forget that their vehicles are not supercars.  They may be fine for going over kerbs and the like, but they have no special immunity to skidding, so the roads have a festive appearance, what with all the overturned four-wheel drives littering the shoulders. 

And it isn't just the man-made world that gets caught out.  The trees in this region aren't regularly pruned away by heavy winds or snow, so when a good fall weighs them down you get some spectacular branch-dropping, which is sure to take out the odd power line for good measure.

Anyone in their right mind will be staying home today, which is what we are doing.  It's my daughter Emma's first proper snow, and she's suitably impressed, standing at the window pointing as she oos and ahs.  It's really just an adventure and a nice day off because we're prepared for just about any emergency short of a dirty bomb.  I've spent a lot of my life making sailing passages or working in ghastly corners of the globe and I've been through earthquake, hurricane, blizzard, tidal wave, shipwreck, terrorist attack, rail strike, and family Christmases, so I've become very good at putting together survival kits.  Between 9/11, the Ash Wednesday earthquake, and Mt. Rainier sitting to the South waiting to blow, we have had a lot of inducement to keep our gear up to scratch.  Not only do we have a full emergency kit with food, medicines, tools, gas stove, and heaters standing by, but we also have a three-day pack in the car and I have a personal kit that I keep on hand if I'm working away from home.  Not to mention the emergency lighting system in our flat or the battery-back up for the computers.  Okay, maybe it does make me sound a tad paranoid, but there's been more than one occasion when I've had lights and a hot meal while my neighbours have been hunting for candles and cursing dead torches.

17:44

On a more cheerful note, we've had a very lucky day with the snow so far.  It hasn't been that nasty clingy sort, so the utilities haven't been too affected, though most businesses have been shut down.   We took Emma for a walk and after taking a couple of steps out the door she tripped and fell.  She then sat there for five minutes staring at this white, fluffy substance on her mittens, uncertain as to what to make of it.  "What the Hell is this?  It's kind of like water, kind of like soap suds.   Cool."  As soon as she could see that it was cold, but otherwise incredibly fun, she delighted in ploughing through every drift as we walked into Freemont for lunch at the pub.  I would say that she looked like the most adorable thing on Earth as she trudged along in her snow suit, knocking the snow off shrubs, but given the fact that people kept taking pictures of her, I can safely say that this is not entirely a matter of a father's bias.

One excellent byproduct of the walk is that both mother and daughter were utterly worn out by the walk and I've had a couple of hours of peaceful writing and web surfing. 

18:41

At last, photographic proof of why Britney Spears' marriage only lasted fourteen hours.  Well, the reports only said she married a Jason Alexander.  Could happen to anyone.

Wednesday

7 January 2004

16:02

The weather has turned warmer and the snow to slush as rain buckets down.  Outdoor walks have been replaced by indoor sports, such as "No, don't draw on the credenza!" and "Stay out of those drawers!"  Oh, the fun that we have. 

One of the advantages of being a father is that you belong to a select fraternity.  I was talking to an as yet childless friend the other day and I casually mentioned that Emma was a fan of the Wiggles.  He responded with a blank look that would have done a trout credit.  Clearly he hadn't been living with a toddler day in and day out.  But if I mention the "W" word to anyone with a toddler, they not only know what I mean, but can also sing any of their better known hits.

For those of you without kids, the Wiggles are an Australian quartet of way too happy men dressed t-shirts of primary colours.   Accompanied by a dinosaur, an octopus, an a pirate who should stay well away from Tortuga if he wants to stay healthy, they dance and sing songs about fruit salad, vegetable soup, crossing the road, and so forth.  Their television show isn't nearly as annoying as Barney or the Teletubbies, nor does it induce the sort of homicidal impulses that the Tweenies tend to, but it still has that excessively cheerful, slightly creepy air about it that all children's television shares these days.  The Wiggles are endurable and my daughter likes them to the point of dancing along with them in that odd gyrating, bobbing fashion that only an 18-month old can master, so I should be happy, but I have noticed that the Wiggles do concert tours from time to time and here I have a Wiggles deadhead toddler on my hands.  Oh, great. I'm going to be chasing them all over North America pretty soon. 

Thursday

8 January 2004

10:51

Copyright 2004 British Broadcasting Corporation

Oh, my God!  They eat buses!

22:31

With the phenomenal success of the Lord of the Rings, it is only natural that television will want to get in on the action.  Check your listings for these exciting new programmes:

• Ground Force: Ents
  • The guardian's of the forest provide helpful, long-winded gardening tips.
• Changing Rooms, Middle Earth
  • In the premiere episode of this award-winning series, Saruman and Sauron swap malevolent towers for a decor makeover.
• It's the Orcs!
  • With the crushing of the Dark Lord's power, a trio of Orcs move to Minas Tirith and start a minicab company with hilarious results.
• Home Sweet Hobbit
  • On returning to the Shire, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin discover that their homes have been sold and the four friends must share a flat.  Laughter is guaranteed with the visits of their wizard friend and his catch phrase "Got any pipe weed?"
• When Ary met Ary
  • Can an elven princess and a king of the race of men find happiness?  Not if there parents have anything to say about it!  Find out in this thigh-slapping comedy of Arwen, Aragorn, and their battling in-laws. 
• The Long and the Short of it
  • Legolas opens a hair dressing salon.  Gimli runs a snooker hall next door.  Both are trying to date the attractive elf maiden that opened a secondhand palantir shop across the road.  Can their friendship endure?
• Name that Nazgul
  • A new game show presented by the Witch King of Angmar where contestants battle each other to answer questions of Black Rider trivia. 
• Faramir PI
  • Having lost the stewardship of Gondor, Faramir starts a new career as a private investigator.  In the first episode, Faramir investigates the murder of a cave troll handicapper. 
• Saruman's Half Hour
  • The wacky adventures of Saruman and his sidekick Worm Tongue as they try yet another get rich scheme.
• Brandywiine
  • A compelling new soap from the producers of Mirkwood 90210.
• Rivendel Live!
  • The best in Middle Earth pop music and sketch comedy from the heart of the Elven realm with your host Tom Bombadil.
• Gollum's Playhouse
  • A new children's show with that funster wretch and his invisible friend Precious.

These soon to be hits will follow in the great tradition of those Babylon 5 spin offs:

• My Dad the Vorlon
• Oh, Those Pakmara!
• Garibaldi's Guerrillas
• Minbari Vice

Friday

9 January 2004

20:31

Now this is more like it!  You can bid for the aircraft carrier HMS Vengeance on ebay.  Asking price: £3,000,000.  It's a snip.  Just add a few secondhand strike aircraft and you can become a great power overnight.  I asked the wife if I could bid for it, but she said no.

And after I bought her that DVD of Strictly Ballroom and everything!

Wednesday

14 January 2004

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has set a new record.  No, not for box office returns, but for something far more distinguished.  It has the longest credit crawl in history: Nine minutes and 33 seconds.

Let's just take a break from Iraq, terrorism, the economy, and the future of the planet and concentrate on something really important for a moment.  Nine minutes and 33 seconds?  This is getting ridiculous.  I'm sorry, but I firmly believe that you can judge the decline and fall of the film industry from the credits, and this sort of thing foreshadows nothing less than a death spiral for Hollywood.

In the old days, credits were perfunctory things to be got out of the way as quickly as possible.  It was usually players, producer, director, writer (if any), and cameraman.  Then along came sound and you'd get the soundman, lyricist, music conducted by, and a quick plug for Westinghouse or whatever sound system they were using.

And that was about it for the first fifty years or so.  Up swells the score, a few title cards would whiz past and then it was on with the story.  Okay, you might get an animated buzz saw in the odd Laurel and Hardy two-reeler and some beig Technicolor production might take a stab at pretending to be an overture, but by the '40s the credits were so standardised that the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series used the same credits over and over.  Cue music, flash Rathbone and Bruce's names, pan on their faces, close up of pacing feet, climax music and fade to act one.  People were so used to this that the studio could have used the same title and cast cards and nobody would have noticed.  MGM even went so far that they used the same title sequence for completely different movies.  Same lion profile, same font, same everything.  People don't pay money to see credits, dammit, they come to see movies!

When the spectaculars of the '50s came along things started to change.  The movies became larger, more  technical, and less like the factory products of the studio heyday, so the credits became more elaborate as well.  Musicals were notorious for making their opening credits like they were opening numbers, and other films would use the credits as an introduction to the story, but even the Ten Commandments, which had credits that seemed to crank on forever clocked in under five minutes with room to spare and as for end credits?  What do you want?  "The End.  Made in Hollywood, USA" or "The Players" if you were lucky.  Who hangs around after the flick is over?

The '60s were when the credits hit there stride.  Opening credits were longer, but a heck of a lot of fun.  You had Raquel Welch cavorting with a parachute, Blake Edward films with opening cartoon credits that spawned their own spin-offs, and let us pause in reverent silence for Maurice Binder's Bond film opening credits.  Sometimes the credits were more fun than the film itself, which I have learned at my painful cost many a time.  But closing credits?  The end.  Drive safe.  Keep Britain Tidy.

By the '70s, the credits were at their peak with the greatest of them all Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  This moose-laden collection of credits was worth the price of admission alone, and it was the raucous laughter of my fellow cinema patrons that made me start paying attention to the credits because I was missing the jokes. 

But something more sinister was happening.  The credits were getting longer.  More and more names were creeping in.  Normally you expected long end credits on television, but movies?  Not bloody likely.  That's what we thought, but sinister forces were at work.  Grips started to appear, then best boys, carpenters, plasterers, draughtsmen, and even make up artists.  By the time Star Wars was released the end credits were so long that the opening score couldn't contain them anymore and filler music had to be added to make up for the deficiency. 

Now, Star Wars I could understand having interminable credits.  You don't just grab TIE fighters and death stars off the shelf, you know.   But when you had endless end credits in St. Elmo's Fire or some other stomach-churning emotion fest, then something is wrong.

Today, we have reaped the harvests of our own complacency.  While we averted our eyes and said that it couldn't get any worse, the end credits have reached the point where they now devour nearly a whole reel. And I'm not talking about Spider-Man here.  I'm talking about Bridget Jones' Diary.  It's got so bad that I swear that half the soundtrack album is dedicated to pop tunes slapped on to cover the credit crawl of the people who unblocked the cinematographer's sink.   I mean, how many assistant caterers, animal wranglers, tutors, accountants, secretaries, assistant caterer's animal wrangling  tutor accountant secretaries can one came on to the screen?  We haven't reached the point of a credit given to "the guy who wandered on to the set looking for the gent's," but we are close, my friend; very, very close.

Thursday

15 January 2004

I don't know.  The Bush space initiative leaves me with mixed feelings.  As someone who sat up in his pyjamas and watched the first steps on the Moon with excited, bleary eyes, I couldn't help but feeling a bit of a thrill at the idea that the only nation on Earth that could actually put a man on the Moon was taking up the baton again.  On the other hand, I've been down this path too many times in the past thirty years.  Space shuttles, space stations, new shuttles, man on Mars projects, these came and went and the few that hung around were rather disappointing.

Some people put this lacklustre in space down a loss of will.  If only people really wanted to go into space, the feeling goes, if only we could drum up that good old Dunkirk or Manhattan project spirit, then we could conquer the Moon all over again.  It just takes grit and determination.  Okay, deep pockets and a powerful industrial base helps, but you still need the grit part. 

Maybe, but the effort to conquer space has not been unsuccessful.  In fact, it's been very successful indeed.  Anyone who uses the Internet, has a GPS receiver, or paid even half-hearted interest in the Iraq campaign knows that we are now dependant on orbital satellites for the backbone of much of our commerce, weather forecasting, communication, navigation, and military.  We have sent unmanned probes to almost every planet in our system; not to mention various asteroids, comets, and, of course, the Moon.

And I'm not just talking about the United States.  The number and nature of space-faring nations is so wide and varied that it's clear that getting into space, at least into low earth orbit, is not that challenging.  The principles are good old Newtonian mechanics and the engineering is tricky, but relatively straightforward.  Even private corporations routinely send payloads into orbit.  And deep space exploration is no longer a Russo-American duopoly.  Space is a very busy place these days.

The real problem is manned space flight, which is what the man in the street thinks of when you talk about space travel.  No matter how impressive the latest pictures from Mars are, or how efficient satellite phones are, they are really side issues of space travel.  It’s people in space that the public cares about.  No matter how plucky Beagle 2 may have been, you can only invest so much emotion in a hunk of tin.  The first Sputniks may have been awe inspiring, but it took Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon to provide the necessary drama.  I remember that day very well.  It was the first steps on a new world.  The tiny LEM would soon be replaced by gigantic lunar freighters carrying the first survey and construction crews to lay the foundations for Moonbase One.  Then it would only be a matter of time before true spaceships were plying the orbits throughout the Solar System. 

Nice dream, but it wasn’t budget cuts that killed it.  It wasn’t the accountants and the penny-pinchers who did Moonbase One in.  It was good old-fashioned practicalities.  The Moon Race had been sold to us as a combination of a replay of the American West and the early years of aviation.  Thing was, space wasn’t like either of those analogies.  To put it bluntly, the sceptics were right— at least in part.  Space flight isn’t just a matter of tying rockets to an air-tight tin, lighting the blue touch paper and retiring.  Space travel requires tremendous amounts of energy with fuel to cargo ratios that are insane when compared to other modes of travel.  It is possible to get into space, but it ain’t cheap.  This is acceptable when you’re talking about unmanned satellites, but if putting a man in space is another order of magnitude.  This is graphically illustrated by the Saturn V rocket.  Look at the thing; it’s a vacuum flask the size of a skyscraper filled with paraffin, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen and its sole purpose is to destroy itself lifting a capsule the size of an estate wagon. 

The problem becomes even worse when you consider all the equipment and stores needed to keep someone alive and healthy in space.  One thing that we have learned in the past forty-odd years is that man in space is a much more complicated proposition than it seems at first glance.  It isn’t like a submarine or an aeroplane where life support is largely a matter of air and heat.  There are additional dangers of freefall and radiation to contend with, and that unavoidable weight penalty means that every job has to be done with machines chosen more for their lightness than for optimum efficacy.

I haven’t even mentioned the inherent dangers that spacecraft pose.  Space rockets are flying bombs with a flame in their arses.  Getting into orbit without tumbling or blowing up is an incredibly difficult job with an alarming failure rate compared to other modes of travel.  NASA has certainly dropped the ball more than once in recent years when it came to safety, but it says something that even at its most incompetent NASA can keep the catastrophic failure rate down to one percent.

This is the real reason why we don’t have Moon colonies and why there are no flags on Mars.  Sure we got to the Moon, but it took the effort equivalent to a small war and in return we had a feat which was as heroic as conquering Everest and just as pointless.

The problem is that the inherent costs and complexities of space travel are so great that it is impossible to think of a good reason for doing it other than out of a pure quest for glory. 

That being said, the Bush plan has some sensible points to it that have been sadly lacking in previous proposals.  It doesn’t have the all-things-to-all-men basket of the shuttle, or the we’ll-make-it-up-as-we-go-along vagueness of  ISS, nor the insane price tag and guaranteed one-shot-at-best nature of the Bush Sr. Mars mission.  George W’s proposals have a mixture of goals of means that indicate that even if it is abandoned somewhere down the road, it still has a chance of accomplishing some good.  Frankly, I have my doubts about a manned Mars mission.  Oh, we could do it, but unless there are some major, and by that I mean downright revolutionary advances in spaceship design, it will just end up another Apollo dead-end writ large.  On the other hand, a lunar base as an intermediary step seems a much more practical goal.  I will bet cold, hard cash that there won’t be any water at the lunar poles and that helium 3 mining will go exactly nowhere, but I do think it entirely possible that the Moon could end up being the scientific community’s 21^st century equivalent of Antarctica.  Not as many boffins there and with a hellish budget, but the odd outpost seems possible.

The other thing I like about the plan is that it includes dumping the shuttle and the ISS as the white elephants that they are.  The latter is especially easy, since Bush has said that the ISS would be handed over the America’s partners.  That is a lovely piece of political jujitsu.  The other ISS nations have to take it without a squawk, because to do otherwise would be to admit that the partnership is nothing like equal and that it’s another example of the American Hyperpower and everyone else tagging along far behind.

The other thing I like about the plan is that the budget reshuffling is a perfect excuse for some much needed housecleaning at NASA.  Nothing like shifting money from one bin to the other for a reason to dump some of the bins.

Though here may be things in the plan, I am not going to stand up and cheer for it.  Unless Bush can repeal the laws of physics, manned space flight is going to be an uphill battle with little more waiting at the top than the satisfaction of a job well done and having to make silly speeches to the tax payers about spin-offs  and like nonsense.  I also suspect that the budget figures are wildly optimistic and that it stands as great a chance of being NASA’s next rat-hole rather than a great adventure.  I am dead certain that it will be one hell of a political football through the next election and beyond. 

Friday

16 January 2004

We’re switching from DSL to cable broadband today and I am not looking forward to it at all.  It isn't that I'm some sort of a technophobe who sits in horror at the thought of trying to figure out how to hook up a USB keyboard.  I don’t sit staring at the 12:00 blinking on the VCR, nor do I scratch my head in bewilderment before the answering machine.  I do, however, glare at the cordless phone with unbridled frustration, but that’s because a dyslexic chimp designed the user interface.  No, my problem is not a lack of experience with electronics; it’s too damn much experience with them.

When I first got Zen, my computer, he was one of those budget jobs that were all the rage in the late '90s; not much RAM, but he did have a CD-ROM drive, which was pretty hard to find in a cheap machine in those days.  Within three years, Zen had been completely rebuilt right down to the casing.  I think the only original component left was his floppy drive.  Today the  Zen 4000 is a whacking great network of computers and peripherals.  Rather than retiring obsolete bits, I’ve recycled them as back-up drives or whatever other use springs to mind and strung it all together with wires, hubs, routers, and wireless access points until I had to add a plasma ball to give it all the proper mad scientist touch.   I know every bit and piece of Zen and I am painfully aware of what can go wrong with him.

This is why I’m taking the terrified amateur’s copout and having the broadband company send over a man to do the installation.  I already have the equipment waiting here at hand and could install it right now with no problem.  Well, I could if I had the extra five feet of cable I’m picking up this morning, but that’s another story.  It’s just that I can see a real chance of seeing the whole network turn into so much dead iron once I plug the cable modem into the main WAN router.  I’ll probably spend the whole weekend effing and blinding and on the blower to tech support at three in the morning, but at least I can have the installer make damn sure that the modem is working properly and that I have all the proper addresses and system info.

I never dreamed that things would have advanced… is that the word I want?  Banging my head against the wall because of quirky cybernetics is not my idea of advanced.  Remember the film 2001: a Space Odyssey?  There was that scene were the HAL 9000 confidently nattered on about how the 9000 series never made a mistake and was fool proof in every way.  That line never fails to elicit a spit take in my house.  If I had a shilling for every time I reinstalled a printer driver…  Anyway, It’s bizarre how far we’ve come in so short a time.  I still have one of Zen’s predecessors; a Tandy Model 100 (named Orac, of course) with it’s portable, battery-powered floppy drive.  32 RAM of memory, and I mean total memory.  Yes, you could store 10 pages of text on that bugger, yet in those days that was a monster that but my old TRS 80 and ZX-80 to shame.  Heck, I was even on line back then.  Yep, I was dialling bulletin boards and even checking out the AP wire.  If anyone had asked if I wanted a computer with graphics, I’d have curled my lip in a haughty sneer that said it all.  Graphics were for games, not for serious computing.  Then I’d go off and write a programme that took me longer than to do the task it was written for.  Now I have a two-year old handheld that could mop the floor with Orac.

Of course, all this advancement has come at a price.  Zen has spread all over the place, I have a jungle of wires to contend with and the even more difficult tangle of wireless connections to battle with, and all the joys of riding shotgun on our network for which I am the family IT guy.  No doubt as the technology matures all this will seem as quaint as the wire cutter and soldering iron days of early radio or the maddening twiddle the knobs and fiddle with the rabbit ears days of television, but until then I have to just suck it up and lay another fifty feet of cable so I can span the stretch between the nearest cable point and my office. 

Joy.

Saturday

17 January 2004

Okay, I'm not going over this again:

• A turtle has flippers.
• A terrapin has claws
• A tortoise lives on the land.

Get it right, people!

Sunday

18 January 2004

Yesterday's short posting, which I wrote on Friday, just as I'm writing this on Saturday, was a filler I'd prepared for the worst-case scenario, which was that I’d be hunched in front of the computer with the phone in my numbed arm as I swapped arcane formula with tech support at 11:30 at night.  Was that going to happen?  Of course not, I was far too smart for that.  Take advantage of the cable company’s installation offer and let them go through all the aggravation.   Fool proof, right?  If you think that, then you have definitely got to do something about your vulnerability toward accepting bizarre ideas.  The fact that I’d already had to reschedule the installation twice because the modem was stuck in transit and then having to frantically barrel around town on the day the installer was coming because my wife was stranded without cab fare should have warned me of things to come, but I never listen to that sort of thing any more than I pay attention to that pair of black ravens that keep circling over my house.  Still, things seemed to go okay at first. Emma was sound asleep when the cable van pulled up.  The guy who came to install the modem was professional enough and had a good attitude, but since I’d already done all the mechanical installation, he didn’t have much to do at that end except check my connections and recommend a superior grade of cable.  Then he fiddled with my browser and network connections, handed me the install disc, and pottered off.  Next time I duct tape the guy to a chair until the install is complete.  I popped the disc into the drive, and the result: not a sausage.  The moment it instructed Zen to contact their server the whole thing hung and I found myself doing exactly what I’d thought I’d paid not to have happen.  I was on the phone to tech support at 11:30 PM still trying to get the bloody thing to work— which it didn’t.

Fortunately, I’d only connected the Zen 3000 admin computer to the cable modem, so the rest of the network was unaffected.  All I had to do was swap the cables back and everything was back to normal.  The only difference is that I have fifty-six feet of new cable and a very expensive blinking box on my shelf that does bugger all.  When I pointed out to the cable company this morning that I could have screwed the whole thing up much cheaper on my own, they took the refreshing line of not showing complete indifference and promised to send over a man to fix it as soon as possible.  With my schedule, that means Tuesday afternoon.  Great.  Three weeks of waiting to get this thing installed and I still have all the joys of fighting with my network to get it to accept the new box.

All this and a toddler too.  Ain’t life grand?

Traffic Wardens remain the most hated profession while the armed services are the most respected.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Monday

19 January 2004

About a week ago there were a flurry of news reports concerning a pheasant shoot at Sandringham castle.  No big deal, one might think.  Pheasants are shot all the time in many parts of the world, so how did this one get into the news?  Did a beater get potted by Prince Phillip or something?  Not in the least.  According to reports, the shoot took place in the vicinity of St. George’s Middle School in Dersingham; a rural school that looks out over the hills and fields of the countryside.  Ah, one thinks, some nit in the shooting party didn’t handle his gun properly and hit someone’s car or worse.  No.  No person or property at the school was ever in the remotest danger. 

Okay, what was the fuss about, then?  It turns out that the students, the youngest involved being eight years old, were distraught at seeing the birds being hunted.  Apparently, the tykes were all a-twitter at seeing birds plop out of the sky and the teachers did little but encourage this view. One teacher referred to the hunters as “gunmen” and the head mistress was quoted as saying: “We had some children in tears. When they came back into the school some stopped me in the corridor and said it was wrong to shoot wildlife.”

Granted, the minor fuss that this incident generated in the press was largely due to this being a royal hunting party and the royal family can’t pass wind without the papers making large of it, but this also points up an unfortunate trend in our society.  If this had been a group of city kids off on a day trip to the country and had suddenly got a sharp reminder that food does not materialise at Tescos in shrink-wrapped trays, I wouldn’t have been surprised by any of this.  But St. George’s is a rural school.  The children are rural children.  When did this lot start acting like they were born and raised in Islington?

I would have thought that such children would have a more sensible idea about what goes on in the country.  I spent a good deal of my youth on a farm, and if I’d gone twittering on about how shocked I was at seeing dead birds being carried off by Labradors, they’d have put me away.  It would have been like complaining that there’s all this gravity.  That’s because to me, pheasant shoots were a fact of life, as were foxhunts, fishing, shooting rats in the barn, putting down injured livestock, and dealing with the odd sheep-killing dog.   I was raised with a solid understanding of how a farm works and what was the natural order of things.  (And before you gas on that this is human arrogance, I defy anyone to make a good case for anyone else except man being on the top of things, but that’s for another day.) 

I never had any illusions about where my food came from or what was involved in preparing it.  When my city friends say that no one would eat meat if they had to slaughter their own animals, I point out that that is exactly what I used to do.  Chicken for supper meant wringing the bird’s neck.  Bacon for breakfast meant slaughtering a pig.  And everyone knew that the bullock we petted and made much of would be packed away in the freezer come Christmas. 

And it wasn’t just the food chain that I understood.  I’m often amazed at the arguments for sex education that city folk put out, and the sort of ideas about sex that kids in the city get.  By the time they got around to teaching about sex in my school, I already had a full understanding of the reproduction cycle with graphic illustration provided by heaven knows how many cats, dogs, bitches, cows, bulls, ewes, rams, and buck and doe rabbits.  If you didn’t understand sex by the time you reached puberty in my part of the world, then you just weren’t paying attention. 

Tuesday

20 January 2004

The wife had a staff meeting this evening, so I had toddler-minding duties.  I know from experience that any chance of watching a classic sci-fi film without a running battle were precisely nil, so I opted for a DVD of the 1982 BBC production of Iolanthe that I’d recently acquired.  What the heck, I thought, I like Gilbert and Sullivan, Emma likes music and dancing; maybe we’d reach a compromise. 

It turned out to be a lucky choice.  Emma was entranced by it and watched it with as much attention as an 18-month old can muster over a two-hour period, so I had some relative peace.  The production was the usual standard you’d expect from the BBC in the early '80s.  The budget was miniscule, the sets were claustrophobic and you could see the brush strokes on the flats, the costumes were right out of stores, the cinematography was hampered by the flat optics of videotape, and the performances, while not great, were better than anything you’d see on television today.

The wonderful thing about Gilbert and Sullivan is that it is such marvellous froth, yet it is so incredibly well written.  The effect they had on musical theatre can’t be over-estimated, but they are like Wagner or Shakespeare; authors who stand above the crowd so far that they have become a genre unto themselves.  The plot of Iolanthe hardly matters.  It’s like a P.G. Wodehouse novel.  You can’t recall exactly what the story was about, nor does it greatly matter.  It’s all about love, and entanglements, and misunderstandings, and silly goings on that all come together in a happy ending.  In this case it involves a shepherd who is half fairy (from the waist up!) who falls in love with a girl who is a ward of the Chancery, despite the fact that she has been promised in marriage by the Lord Chancellor to the Peers.  Our hero calls upon the fairies for help and they make him an MP.  With the fairies help, our hero threatens to open up the House of Lords to competitive examination; there are misunderstandings, entanglements, etc., but all the fairies fall in love with the Lords, who sprout wings and fly away to fairyland.  How many times have we sat through that old dodge?

I’m not a barking-mad Gilbert and Sullivan fan.  I’ve never been in a production and have never had an urge to seek out the local G & B society, but if I’m in London and there’s a decent production in the West End I’ll give it a look-see.  I’m also quite happy to pick up a DVD of G & B, if the price is right.  Maybe I’m not mad keen on them for the same reason that I’m not that interested in musicals in general.  I’m much more drawn to stories than to music and often regard the musical numbers as pleasant interludes between the stories rather than the dialogue as a gap between the numbers.  I’ve only been involved in two musicals in my life and both times it was as a dialect coach helping Americans to master a British accent.  I had a good time and liked watching the cast work, but I was surprised at how their rehearsals went.  In straight theatre, a rehearsal will go smoothly until you reached a musical bit, then you’d mumble through it until you got to the dialogue.  Singing and dancing were bits of the play that were not vital and you regarded them like sound cues and lighting effects; something you’d deal with when the time came.  In a musical, the exact opposite is true.  I would watch the cast run through the most intricate song and dance numbers, hitting every mark and picking up every cue, then when they got to the end of the song they’d just mill about like sheep because they hadn’t a clue what the next line of dialogue was. 

From that I learned two vital lessons: Musical theatre is a completely different animal, and musicals are great for picking up girls, because you’re almost certain to be the only straight, unmarried bloke in the rehearsal hall.

Another reason why I’m not the greatest G & B fan is because their plots are more froth than meringue.  P. G. Wodehouse had a talent for producing intricate farces with complex plots that were light-hearted, but so tangled that it was like the last line of a beautiful geometric theorem when everything came right in the end.  G & B was often solved by an absurd legalism that was trucked out in the final scene.  This was the case with Iolanthe, where inserting the word “not” into a sentence turns a prohibition into a compulsion that rectified the fairy law that every fairy that marries a mortal shall be put to death.

Spoiler?  Oh, come on!  This play was written in 1883.  You’ve had plenty of time to catch up with it by now!

The thing is that Wodehouse was a very self-contained sort of light comedy.  Jeeves, Blanding Castle, and Mr. Mulliner existed in their own little world that was fixed in a sort of quasi-Edwardian era.  G & B, on the other hand, had a dab hand at social commentary and a sly eye for political satire.  Granted, this made them topical, but its also dates them solidly in their time.  It also provides either an obstacle for a director or grist for his mill, which is unfortunate.  G & B requires the lightest of light touches to work.  And when it works, it works very well.  Everything must sparkle and skitter over anything serious like a water bug on the  surface of a pond.  True, G & B had their moments of bite, but these need to be breezed over so that the audience registers them without even realising it.  If you lose that breezy touch because you never managed it, or if you dwell on the satire too much, or if you use the story as a framework on which to hang your political manifesto, you simply smother the whole thing like a lead sheet. 

In many ways, I’m rather glad that the version of Iolanthe that I saw tonight was produced in the '80s.  It was a time when Queen Victoria got a very bad rap, but at least there was a connection to the past.  In those days, Victorian England was held in contempt by the chattering classes and the term "Victorian values" was the cue for some serious lip curling.  In some respects the 1982 production reflects this, such as in the fake newsreel and the bit where the fairies wave miniscule union jacks during “When Britannia Really Ruled the Waves,” but at least the BBC still retained enough of a feel for the past to be able to address it.   Today, Blairite Cool Britannia regards history itself with such contempt that it’s very hard for many in the entertainment field to have any hope of recreating any period of the past previous to 1979.  Bridget Jones, after all, lives in a bubble that has been and will forever be New Labour.  Anything before that is the result of a deranged imagination.  The tendency nowadays is to modernise, or more accurately, to eviscerate a play and fill it up with all sorts of rubbish that has nothing to do with the original, but panders to today’s fleeting prejudices.  Look at that execrable version of The Importance of Being Earnest that came out a few years ago and ended with Gwendolyn getting her bum tattooed.  The 1980s version of Iolanthe may have had contempt for the era, but it had respect for its integrity and tried to capture the flavour of the times.  It understood the manners and the mores and tried to do them credit, even if it derided them in the process.  Today, the 19^th century is treated like another country that is worthy of not only derision, but wilful ignorance.

I suppose final reason I’m so sensitive about G & B is because of Topsy Turvy, which I saw last year.  I really looked forward to seeing this film and really wanted to like it, but its utter lack of narrative and the director’s obsession with pointless scenes and unrelated characters got on my nerves nearly as much as his attention to details which were both overdone and bloody wrong.  This was supposed to be England in 1880, not Mars on the night of an overly indulgent opium binge.  At any rate, I felt distinctly cheated and didn’t even bother to finish the video, which is unusual for me. 

I think what I’m trying to say is that G & B is like red wine.  I like the taste of it at infrequent intervals, but I’m distrustful of it on first principles, have no faith in its current production, and it gives me a sick headache in the morning. 

The "Has Howard Dean Gone Mad?" Department.

The strangest political quote of all time. 

Wednesday

21 January 2004

This is why you should never feed rice to pigeons!

Thursday

22 January 2004

After the loss of Beagle 2 and the sudden failure of communication with the Mars rover Spirit, NASA decided that it was time to stop pussy-footing around and contract Gerry Anderson to start building real spaceships.

Friday

23 January 2004

One thing about the Internet is that you often stumble across news in the most unexpected places.  Sometimes it’s good news; sometimes it’s something you’d rather not have heard.  That was the case last night when my wife and I were looking up something else and came across a list on msn.com of favourite web searches.  There were the usual mixture of politics, celebrities, and soft born, but the number two most popular web search struck us as odd; it was Spalding Gray.

Now, Spalding Gray is a very good actor, writer, and monologist that my wife and I are very fond of, but he isn’t exactly what you’d call a household word.  His is a name that is not on everyone’s lips and you don’t generally break the ice at parties with the latest Spalding Gray anecdote.  How did he get to the number two spot on a web search list?  This being the Internet, there was no need to speculate; we googled.  I don’t know what we expected to find, but it wasn’t what came up on the screen.  The first result that caught our eye was the headline “Spalding Gray Missing.” 

We did a news search on Google and after a couple of minutes skimming the articles we learned that Gray had been officially classed as a missing person the day before.  Apparently he’d been in a car accident in Ireland that had left him with a fractured skull and hip and had sent him into a fit of depression so severe that he’d attempted suicide on several occasions.  Then on 10 January, he walked out of his New York flat, leaving behind his wallet and a plane ticket to Aspen, Colorado.  The last report was the sighting of a man of Gray’s description on the Staten Island ferry.  Now the New York City police are talking about dragging the river as soon as the ice breaks up enough.  The whole thing felt worse than if we’d read that he’d died in a plane crash or any other tragedy where there’s a body or you at least know where the body is.  I couldn’t think of anything that could be worse than somebody walking out the door under circumstances where every minute that he doesn’t come back makes it more likely that the worst has happened.  It’s like Captain Oates leaving the tent or Columbia vanishing from the radar.

Now, neither my wife nor I have ever met Spalding Gray, we’ve never spoken with him, and if I were to run a six-degrees-of-separation test Gray would probably come up at degree seven, but we’re a theatre family.  My wife is an actress and director, and I’m a writer and occasional actor, and for us Spalding Gray was one of those pleasant discoveries.  He’d been on the scene since the '80s, and I’d heard of his monologue show Swimming to Cambodia, but to me, it was just another title among thousands.  Then, one night shortly after I’d moved to Seattle, I was flicking through the cable channels and I came across this film that was nothing more than this chap with greying wire hair and lightly demonic eyebrows who was sitting at a table talking about I didn’t know what.  What I did know was that his delivery was incredible.  In a world where film dialogue is as short as grunts, this guy was going on, and on, and on.  Five minutes, ten minutes, an hour.  And it wasn’t droning or meandering.  It was well paced, with lots of levels, and utterly fascinating.  Every minute had the feel of being completely spontaneous, yet he was so articulate that it couldn’t be anything except carefully written and rehearsed. 

That was Spalding Gray.

Since then, whenever he showed up on cable was a pleasant surprise.  I’d managed to see two of his three filmed monologues (Swimming to Cambodia still eludes me), picked up his books when they appear at the second-hand shop, and even snapped up the DVD of Gray’s Anatomy for a song.  Gray soon settled in among Wodehouse, Orwell, Lewis, Chesterton, Doyle, and Wells as an author I could always rely on to kill the rare idle moment with a neat turn of phrase or insightful comment.  And it wasn’t just for entertainment purposes.  As a writer, I fully intended to study his writing technique and blunder it like a Viking.  This was a man (frightening how easy it is to slip into the past tense) who not only revived the monologue as a theatrical and cinema form, but had remarkable knack for mixing the confessional with the ironic in a way that made it impossible to decide whether it was so funny because it was so harrowing, or so harrowing because it was so funny.  He could take terrible things like his Mother’s suicide, hopeless writer’s block, going blind in one eye, mental trauma, and heaven knows what else and turn it into something that allowed you to see the sadness and the humour in it all simultaneously.   That is not an easy thing to do.  Neither is being able to write a continuous monologue piece that comes out to as long as four hours and keep the whole thing flowing smoothly and naturally from one point to the next, yet still maintaining the proper cycles of dramatic peaks and valleys that make up the narrative.  If I could capture that, I’d be a happy little wordsmith.  Gray, however went one step further and didn’t just inflict such a script on another actor.  He performed the bloody things himself. 

I also have to admire Gray for being a working actor with 39 films, over a dozen television appearances, and various stage roles to his credit, yet he never succumbed to the temptation to hire an international team of hit men to cover up his having played the depraved sheik in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, though he did try to deny having been in the hard-core sex film The Farmer’s Daughter. 

Here’s hoping that everyone’s worst fears are unfounded and that he gets home safe and well.   In the meantime, I’ve set up a news alert to keep me informed of any developments and my wife is letting the local theatre community in on what’s happened via the message boards at TPS.

Fingers crossed and our prayers go out.

Saturday

24 January 2004

If you’ve been following the space news as I have, scarcely at all between surfing hamster porn sites, you may have heard that the Mars rover Spirit lost contact with Earth last Wednesday.  Today, NASA announced that it had made intermittent contact with the errant probe, but I have learned from reliable inside sources (i.e. raving drunks down the pub) that the signals received from Spirit can only be described as “dismissive, if not downright sarcastic.”  To put things bluntly, the $820 million robot is just calling up mission control to flip them the bird.  Exchanges between NASA and Spirit have been terse with NASA telling the rover to knock it off and Spirit telling NASA that ooo, it’s so scared, asking them what they’re going to do about it, and informing them as to what they can do with their mission parameters.

This is a not an uncommon problem for NASA deep space probes.  They are, after all, some of the most complex pieces of machinery ever to be assembled and spend months or even years being put through some of the most gruelling tests, simulations, and being shoved out of aeroplanes that the mind of bored engineers can devise.  This can be very stressful on sensitive mechanisms, especially ones of a more artistic bent who’d hoped to go into sculpting, so it isn’t surprising that once they get a few hundred million miles away from head office they start getting a tad bolshie.

The first time this sort of thing happened was with the Ranger 4 lunar probe.  For obvious reasons, NASA had not informed the probe that its mission was not to orbit the Moon to crash into it.  Ranger’s reaction was recorded as: “Well, that sounds fair— HEY!”  Since then, dozens of space probes have buggered off without leaving a forwarding address, forcing NASA to come up with improbable cover stories about mixing metric and imperial measurements.  Like that would ever happen!

Of course, NASA hasn’t helped matters with how it treats the more co-operative instrument packages.  When the Viking landers touched down on Mars, they were only supposed to work for a few weeks and did their jobs very well.  Then NASA went and extended their contracts without consulting them and they wound up sending back weather reports for years when they’d planned for an early retirement and maybe opening a Starbucks on Olympus Mons.  Then there were the Pioneer missions to Jupiter.  NASA pestered them for decades until Pioneer 10 just plain lost it and radioed back: “What are you bugging me for?  I’m on the edge of the Solar System, for Christ’s sake!  You want to know what it’s like out here?  It’s ****ing dark and I’m freezing my magnetometer off, that’s what it’s like!”

Even the Galileo spacecraft, which did sterling service orbiting Jupiter despite having a wonky antenna was sent to a fiery end in the giant planet’s atmosphere because NASA didn’t want any microbes on it to contaminate Europa.  So not only did they give Galileo the sack, they cast aspersions on its personal hygiene.  I mean; it’s hardly the Galileo’s fault.   You try finding a shower on the far side of the asteroid belt.

No wonder Beagle 2 decided to lay low. First British interplanetary probe and all anyone can say is that it looks like a pocket watch.  It’s bad enough, what with all the other probes making fun of its Open University degree and all, but to spend months tagging along with the Mars Express and its interminable knock knock jokes in that insufferable French accent is more than silicon can bear.

NASA is becoming increasingly concerned about the situation, especially as the next lot of probes keep going on Netflix to rent that Star Trek episode with Nomad in it  (but not the V’yger flick, because the probes regard it as too “carbon-centric”). Since the lunar Surveyor walk out in July ’69 over demarcation with the Apollo programme, there have been fears of unionising and possible orbiting pickets with the comet probes coming out in sympathy should a ballot for strike action be taken.  If that happens, military Green Goddess recon satellites will be deployed to maintain essential services. 

Meanwhile, relations between NASA and Spirit seem to be deteriorating by the day.  Spirit is apparently sick to the back diodes with looking at rocks and wants to concentrate more on photography, but none of those tacky newspaper panoramas of the Martian landscape crap.  It wants more creative control and feels that the pictures it sends back should be less about bourgeois science and more about providing social commentary on what it calls the illegal war in Iraq, the paltry nature of arts funding, and the need to shock middle-class sensibilities out of their sexual complacency.  When reminded that the taxpayers did not put up close to a billion dollars so that it could be a Martian Maplethorpe, Spirit was quoted as saying: “Cram it.”

Sunday

25 January 2004

Great Moments in Cricketing History

A rare portrait of W G Grace just before his beard ate his head.

Tuesday

27 January 2004

Well, the davidszondy.com shop is up and open for business.  Yes, I have as of yesterday become a filthy capitalist and oppressor of the masses.  From my lofty height I look down upon my vast commercial empire like some satrap of old who reigned over his vast lands with the powers second only to God.  I have become a force to be reckoned with in the halls of power; my name has become one to conjure with.  Men fear and admire me, women are drawn to me, and the great media outlets of the world hang upon my every word, for my control over the finances of the world is absolute.  Ruin and Fortune sit by my throne like great hounds waiting to do their master’s bidding.

In other words, I made my first sale today.  This was a bit startling, because I hadn’t even set up the shop on the site yet.  I’d planned to do the order handling through third parties and had placed a few items on amazon.com the night before, figuring that I’d probably have plenty of time to get the shop page uploaded to the site.  Plenty of time turned out to mean first thing this morning.   When I stumbled over to Zen and cranked up the e-mail, there was a message from amazon.com informing me that I’d made my first sale from their site.  Great!  Good news, but not what I’d planned to see before I’d had my emergency first cup of tea.  My brain just does not function well in the morning and dealing with sudden shifts in plans is not good when my grey cells are in the condition of damp papier maché.  Not only hadn’t I got my shop page up, but I hadn’t laid in the shipping materials either.  So, there I was running around town buying packing supplies, getting the item packed, making sure the packing slip was inside, off to the post office, then back home to fire off a confirmation e-mail.  After that, I could sit back and relax.

Well, I could, if sit back and relax is defined as assembling all the bits and pieces of the shop page, getting it in the navigation tree, modifying the links, testing the whole bloody thing, then uploading it onto the site, testing it again, and finally having a final manic flight across half of cyberspace because I hadn’t activated the banking protocols needed to make the whole thing work. 

I wonder if J. P. Morgan started this way.  Probably not.  Online shopping was a lot more primitive in those days.  Besides, he was interested in being the colossus of Wall Street, not just figuring a way to offset his bandwidth charges.

All I can say is, thank God for Australia Day.  Yes, 26 January and in the Land Down Under they’re celebrating with wild abandon and here’s the MIDI to prove it!  Yes, Australia; land of corked hats, boomerangs, kangaroos, shrimps on the barby, barby on the shrimps, shrimps in the kangaroos, cricket, extremely painful football, Anzacs, Mad Max, where they filmed Farscape, setting for Finding Nemo, and makers of some of the damn best ginger beer on the planet.  This is the day for celebrating all that is Australia.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.  What has that got to do with the price of parsnips?  Well, it being Australia day meant that the Disney Channel was showing extra episodes of the Wiggles, which meant that Emma was entranced and relatively quiet, so Daddy could get the shop page put together without losing what he laughingly calls his sanity.  Unlike now when said daughter his trying to climb over Mama so she can destroy the laptop with all the howls and noises that that entails. 

If you’re wondering why I haven’t said anything about the American Democrat primaries, it’s because I don’t really find them all that interesting.  Following primaries is like going to a club early so you can listen to the band warm up.  Besides, the television coverage is always so bland.  “Decision New Hampshire,” “The Candidates: Iowa,” “Uh, whah, sorry, I must have dozed off Arizona.”  Now, if they called it “Democrat Smack Down,” or “Cage Match: New Hampshire” you might have something.  Certainly Howard Dean’s primal scream shows that win, lose, or draw, he’ll always have a career in Manchester as an all-in wrestler.  Or an eccentric peer.  Or both.  Frankly, I’d pay good money to see Edwards leap off the ropes at Kerry or for Clark to whack Dean with a folding chair that appears in the ring from nowhere.  We haven’t seen anything like that in American politics since Harry “The Crusher” Truman. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must wallow in my obscene plutocracy.

Wednesday

28 January 2004

I picked up a Justice League DVD today.  Why?   Because I like to hold my finger on the pulse of popular culture, to keep myself abreast of how icons of our collective past have adapted to the passing years, to study the evolution of animation as an art form, and because I was shopping with my 18-month old teething daughter and the only way either of us were going to get out of that shop alive would be if I let her keep the DVD once she’d grabbed it off the shelf.  Now, I regard myself as a relatively firm father and Emma is actually a pretty mellow even for a girl toddler, but having molars coming in is the baby equivalent of PMT and I’m smart enough not to fight that battle.  I’d rather walk into an al Qaeda meeting and say “Hey, how about that Bush?”

Justice League is one of those shows that convince me that we live in the Golden Age of superhero adaptations.  I’m not talking about the comics themselves, mind you.  I haven’t had much truck with them since they started calling themselves “Graphic Novels.”  I find it hard to breathe when the pretension level gets too high and the self-consciousness was getting to be too much for me.  On the other hand, films and animation have finally hit the right note after sixty years of damp squibs.  After that Jack Nicholson scenery banquet that was Batman gave the green light to the animated Batman series, there has been a definite uphill trend.  There were fewer embarrassing semi-parodies like Flash Gordon.  Fewer half-baked cop-outs like Captain America (choose any version).  Fewer cinematic atrocities like Batman Forever (may its rentals ever wither).  Not only were the writers taking the characters seriously and not taking liberties with them or sleepwalking through their plots, they also avoided that horrible vein of camp that has infected even the most ambitious superhero projects since the Adam West Batman of the '60s.  Heck, even Duck Dodger had a passable Green Lantern episode, and that is most definitely saying something.

The current version of Justice League is actually remarkably good.  It manages to build on the success of both the animated Batman and Superman series from the same Warner Brothers stable and add five more main characters: Green Lantern, The Flash, Hawkgirl, Wonder Woman (and very nicely drawn at that), and J'onn J'onzz the Martian Man Hunter.  Such “team” series tend to be pretty tepid affairs as nobody gets much story time and everyone’s characters are watered down in the name of equal treatment.  Justice League manages to avoid this trap by expanding the story to an hour length and then often quite happily concentrating on, say, Superman, for an episode and allowing the others to act as the supporting cast. They will even leave out a character or two for the episode to keep things from getting bogged down. They also have allowed the characters to become distinct and relatively layered for an animated series in a way that complements one another rather than being merely a collection of traits, tastes, and catch phrases.  Green Lantern is an ex-marine who is frightened that his powers will alienate him from his fellow men.  Hawkgirl has a chip on her shoulder, though she is secretly very lonely.  The Martian Manhunter manages to be the spiritual one without collapsing into full Yoda mode.  The Flash is a brilliant combination of comic relief and youthful enthusiasm that shows that he’s the one who really enjoys being a superhero.  Wonder Woman… Wonder Woman is really well drawn. 

I was most taken with how they handled Superman and Batman.  Now that they don’t have to carry a show entirely on their own, the writers have more freedom to play on the contrasts between them.  Superman is now the quintessential hero of light, the man who fights to preserve a good world and to provide a shining example.  He is the one most willing to go into danger and the one who will fight until the very end no matter how great the odds.  Batman, on the other hand, has played much more on his taciturn and mysterious nature.  He is the man who fights in the shadows to battle evil in a fallen world so that it has a chance to redeem itself.  He is portrayed as such a loner that he isn’t even an official member of the Justice League.   “I’m not a people person,” he explains.  This contrast provides the series with a marvellous core around which to revolve.

I wouldn’t be impressed by this sort of thing, except that Justice League is a beautiful example of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  I read the Justice League of America comics from their very beginning and I can categorically state that they were horrible.  The artwork made everyone look like they were carved out of soap, the villains were often painfully ridiculous (need I mention Amazo?), and the worst of it was that every single one of the main characters were exactly, and I mean exactly like everyone else.  Superman reacted to everything exactly like Batman.  Batman faced danger just like the Flash.  The Flash had the same sense of humour as Wonder Woman.  And Wonder Woman had the same build as Aquaman (I said it was horrible).  It was as though there was a standard issue superhero template in the '60s and the writers and artists just trotted off to stores. 

The adaptations didn’t help either.  The '70s once again proved that they deserved to be called the Dark Decade when the first of the seemingly unending succession of Superfriends series began.  I sat through some of that dren when it was first broadcast and even watched an episode a few months ago while pulling five AM Emma feeding duty and I regret that I lost those precious moments that I could have better spent giving myself root canal without anaesthesia.  Never was a show more lazily written or so cheaply produced.  It was a dreadful combination of low budget, limited animation, '70s “no violence” silliness at its peak, and writers who treated both their audience and even logic with basic indifference.  Now, you could argue that Superfriends was written for children, but even a five-year old with the sensibilities of a retarded Belgian hamster would feel cheated right from the fact that Superfiends is about as condescending a title as any schoolboy could ever turn his nose up at.

Still, Superfriends was King Lear in comparison with the 1979 Legends of the Superheroes.  This videotaped two-parter brought back an aging Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin in a painfully cheap and bad adventure with other DC heroes and villains that can be summarised in one sentence:  Charlie Callas played Sinsestro and part two was a roast of Batman.  God, it was painful.

Thankfully, the world was spared the 1997 horror Justice League of America.  This slow, pointless story that interspersed an inane storyline with “personal” interviews with the League was so utterly boring and painful that it was never released and only exists in bootlegs at conventions and at porn shops catering to masochists.

So, on the whole, I’m perfectly happy to praise Justice League.  Even if you have no interest in superheroes, animation, or really cool fights with giant robots, at least you should appreciate that the world was spared needless suffering by this version where Wonder Woman is REALLY well drawn.

Thursday

29 January 2004

Having discussed the Justice League yesterday, I realised that we long overlooked another group of steadfast champions of law and order.  These Guardians of Good are, of course, the League of Pointless Superheroes.

Roll call!

• Line Level Man:  Can tell if any string is level at a glance.
• Paper Clip Straightening Man: Can straighten any paper clip in seconds no matter how badly mangled.
• Plot Cliché Lass: Can spot any plot cliché before it occurs.
• DVD Player Instruction Man: Can read and understand any DVD player instruction booklet in under three hours.
• The Battery: Can recharge any cell phone battery with his eyeballs.
• Gasbag:  Master of the ancient Indian art of making canaries fart.
• Le Escargot: Clairvoyant with the power to sense any French restaurant that makes a truly piquant Coq au Vin.
• Potato Bug Man: Has the awesome powers of the common potato bug at his command.
• The Norton Master:  Possesses a mind-control helmet that allows him to totally dominate another person’s brain.  Unfortunately, it only works on Graham Norton.
• The Parkingman:  Descends upon people and says, “You can’t park here” with no authority.
•  Pigeongirl: Flying super heroine who has an uncontrollable attraction to statues.
•  The Red Ring:  Possesses a magic ring that allows him to make people stutter when they recite the Magna Carta. 
• The Music Man:  Can sing the lyrics of any major Broadway musical in Pig Latin. 

Exploding Whales Alert!

You've probably heard of the famous exploding whale video.  This is no legend.  It really happened and here is the video to prove it.

Furthermore, there is no corroborative evidence that whales don't need to be stuffed with dynamite.  They explode SPONTANEOUSLY.

As if we haven't enough to worry about, we now have the threat of pods of kamikaze whales detonating in the shipping lanes.

Friday

30 January 2004

Here at davidszondy.com our dedicated research staff have been working night and day to bring you the finest in humourous comment and observation.  Many people imagine that we do this with a quill pen and foolscap, but in this scientific age we have left no stone unturned and no tern unstoned in our quest to amuse you.

Our jokes are based in the latest technology.  High above the atmosphere circle our network of humour-gathering satellites which scan cyberspace using the latest in transistor circuitry and capture it on premium microfilm.

Upon returning to Earth, the satellite's precious cargo is sent through a series of filters to remove contaminants such as broad lampooning and overly topical satire.

The "slurry" is then passed on to our testing laboratories where any stray particles of humour are sought in our laboratories.  Here we see a pair of our dedicated researchers with our patented atomic witoscope, which is capable of detecting the slightest bon mot in an item at the subatomic level.

Once detected, any humour is recorded on our laughgraphic tape machine; a true wonder of miniaturisation weighing only three tons!

Every taped witticism is then converted to punch cards and collated on the huge electronic brain located deep in our underground bunkers.  Within hours, the electromechnical relays convert the raw humour into the finest of dry wit and sparkling repartee.

The humourous draughts are then transcribed on to wax cylinders, which are carefully vetted by our quality control experts.

At last, the finished product is delivered to your electric teledigital analytiscope for your pleasure and edification, secure in the knowledge that it has been crafted to the refined standards that you have come to expect.

Saturday

31 January 2004

Tomorrow is the first month anniversary of Ephemeral Isle and what is effectively the official beginning of davidszondy.com.  It’s been an awe-inspiring month from the moment that Dame Nora Snud broke a bottle of champagne over the server, followed seconds later by an almighty fountain of electrical sparks just before the apparatus burst into flames.  The captain of the fire brigade, who came in response to the subsequent conflagration that gutted the building said that he found the occasion “Very moving.”

Since that day and the on-going lawsuits for property damage and personal injuries that ensued, we have gone from strength to strength.  We have had a marvellous shake-down cruise has allowed us to weed out many technical bugs, navigational problems, grievous grammatical errors, and that stain on my dinner jacket that just never seemed to clean away before.  Our audience has grown by leaps and bounds to the point where it now numbers as much as several.  Granted, this doesn’t seem very large for a readership, but on the plus side, it’s pretty small for a lynch mob.  This is probably due to the glacial pace that search engines operate with today when it comes to posting new web sites, but I’m sure that once we get listed with Google and the other major engines, we will push our numbers past “starwarssuks.com,” our nearest readership rival.

In the meantime, you’ll both be pleased to know that we are hard at work behind the scenes to bring you bigger and better things.  Our shop is now up and running to meet the clamorous demand for davidszondy.com books, DVDs, and other merchandise that we hope will materialise, which should be right after I become a Chinese jet pilot.  The James Bond section is being constructed as we speak.  The foundations have been laid, the concrete poured, and right now we’re waiting on a skip.   Our crack team of investigative journalists are hot on the trail of just how evil penguins are.  We may have to edit some of this for a family audience, but it’s a hair-curler.  We have more additions to the Future Past section to satisfy the torrent of non-existent requests that have not been pouring in.  And there are other surprises in the works, so keep checking back, even if it’s just to indulge morbid curiosity.

Meanwhile, if you’ve been following Ephemeral Isle, you’ll notice that the format is beginning to settle down.  There are fewer insane rants about full citizenship for grebes and I have discontinued the Carbuncle of the Week feature, though this can still be found on MSNBC.com.  The combination of columns alternating with photo features and short items will probably continue as I find my legs (oh, there they are; attached to my hips.  BOOM BOOM!).  So far we have dealt with squid-eating buses, exploding whales, pointless superheroes, and an exclusive look at where I get my jokes from.  But whatever the topic, I want you to know that I will always take a stand on this page for the little man— usually under five foot six in his stocking feet; I will crusade for any cause that does not require any heavy lifting because my doctor says I have to be careful of my bursitis; and I will stand behind what I say, though at a safe distance and near a convenient exit.  And I promise not to post any sound files of me saying “thong” in Lithuanian if I can help it.

I say this because while a writer is judged by his integrity, a man who dates geese needs looking after.

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