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Monday

1 August 2005

The Zone Has a New King

But he will rule alone!

Warning:  This movie was screened by professional bad-movie watchers.  Do not attempt to watch it at home.

There are some movies that are disappointing, some that are lacking in some essential element, some that are just plain bad,  some that are obviously the product of a cynical shlockmeister, and then there are those rare few films that are so amazing, so transcendentally, so magically, so awe-inspiringly, mind-boggling bad that they beggar all powers of description to encapsulate their wretchedness.

Such is this year's The War of the Worlds.  No, I'm not talking about the Steven Spielberg epic that is just finishing its lap through the multiplexes.  I'm talking about the Timothy Hines atrocity that went straight to DVD like a Kamikaze headed for a warship. 

Remember that name:  Timothy Hines.  It is one to conjure with.  This is a man who will one day will stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Ed Wood (Plan 9 from Outer Space), Bert I. Gordon (The Beginning of the End), and the infamous Phil Tucker (Robot Monster).  Like them, Hines shares the distinction of making a movie that isn't just bad (that's all too easy), nor one that is incompetent (ditto), but one in which it is painfully evident to the audience that the gap between his abilities and his ambitions is monumental.  I don't mean just that his reach exceeded his grasp. but that he ended up standing on the shore watching his goal floating away toward the horizon like a runaway hot-air balloon. 

This version of The War of the Worlds is touted as being the only authentic adaptation of the H. G. Wells story of Martian invasion.  If "authentic" can be taken to mean lifting the novel page by page and slapping it on to the screen without a single moment of realisation that novels and movies are two completely different media, than I suppose Timothy Hines's version is as authentic as a marble statue of The Barchester Chronicles. 

This film has so much wrong with it that I don't know where to begin and if I were to make an exhaustive list of its faults I would be going on for longer than its three hour running time.

That's right: THREE HOURS.

And this is not a good three hours.  At least two of those three are spent with characters walking.  And walking.  And walking.  And walking some more.  And usually through the same overgrown field.  When the first Martian cylinder lands, for example, we have a good half an hour of nothing but a character walking to the landing site, walking back to town to fetch a friend, walking back to the cylinder, walking back to town, another character walking to the cylinder, then walking back to town to talk to his wife, then walking back to the cylinder, then being sent to walk over to someone's home only to be told that the person in question isn't home, and then walking back.  And we see every step of the way.

Please note that this isn't just this one sequence.  This is the format of the entire film.  Occasionally someone will run or scamper or crawl for variety, but walking is pretty much the theme.

Then we have the CGI work which looks like something out of a Commodore 64.  Hines tried to save on sets by using a lot of green screen ala Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow, but forgot that the makers of Skycaptain knew what they were doing and that green screens shouldn't jump, flicker, or halo, and that you cannot make a convincing night scene by matting a starry sky over a landscape shot at high noon!  Furthermore, if you are going to forego real horses pulling a cart in favour of CGI equines seen from a distance you should not just let the reins obviously flop loose, nor should you do a POV shot that shows that there is clearly nothing in front of said cart.

And the Martians?  The fighting machines look like half a steel ant and sound like someone hitting a coconut with a mallet, the Martians themselves look like something rendered by a more than usually backward first year AV student, and the heat ray apparently is able to not only reduce people to skeletons, but also cause them to continue to writhe in agony after all their muscles and sinews have been burned away.  Even the supposedly horrifying scene of the Martians feeding on human blood is less a moment of terror and more the point in the film when I ceased to be appalled and could only regard it with disbelief. 

Though Hines claims to have shot at least part of the film in England, I didn't see a foot of video that wasn't shot in the Seattle, Washington area.  Indeed, the Pioneer Square district in Seattle doubles for Victorian London.  I never realised before that back then London had globular street lamps, American-style brownstones, coffee shops with chrome-plated furniture, 1950s bicycles, and a population of about twelve.   This from a man who claims to have painstakingly gone over every detail and supposedly had upwards of $42 million at his disposal.

If that really was his budget, then they must have had some incredible lunches. 

But, I hear you ask, there have been zero-budget films with all this against them that have still been able to pull themselves up by the calibre of the actors.

Yes.  This isn't one of them.  Not only is almost the entire cast way too young, but their acting is universally terrible.  I don't mean bottom tier of the casting pool terrible.  I mean bad community theatre terrible.  Watching Hines's cast is like seeing a text book of every way to chew scenery, stand awkwardly, be utterly at a lost as to what to do with one's hands, and being without a clue as to how to stay in shot. I have never seen so much self-conscious mugging, grimacing, and scowling in my life, nor have I ever before seen actors who were supposedly cowering behind trees, but came off looking as if they were having indecent relations with them.  I won't even go into the accents, which were so bad that whenever someone spoke it was like a tour of the British Isles with a side trip to Australia.

To paraphrase Michael Green, a great actor can make a block of wood look like a sword.  This lot could make a sword look like a block of wood.

Though, I can't put all the blame on the actors.  Much has to be laid on Mr. Hines, who doesn't so much direct as start the camera and run away.  For example, I have worked with the lead, Mr. Anthony Piana, and I know him to be an accomplished stage actor with considerable talent, but it is clear that not only is he new to screen acting (No fault.  So was Lord Olivier once), but with his very passionate acting style he is hopelessly miscast as the passive observer of the Martian invasion and having Hines's non-directing does nothing to mitigate.

Mind you, Mr. Piana isn't helped by his makeup.  In theatre there is what is known as the "thirty-foot rule" that states that costumes, props, and makeup are designed with the fact that no one in the audience is going to be closer to the action than thirty feet.  This is one of the reasons why stage makeup is so exaggerated.  It's also the reason that from the moment Mr. Piana appeared on screen I was half expecting the film to turn out to be a gay farce.  His makeup would have been spot on for the stage, but here it was enough to frighten the children.  At least, it would if they could get past his moustache, which is so blindly fake that it staggers the imagination.  It is one of those stiff black things with every hair in perfect parallel and the whole thing looking as if it had been cut out with a stamp and glued to a bit of pasteboard. 

Still, during the more boring scenes I could always amuse myself by watching it come loose at the edges.

Okay, so what is my summary of this movie?  Let me put it this way, half an hour in I dug out my MST3K cut outs and propped them in front of the screen.  This wasn't mockery.  It was survival strategy.

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Tuesday

2 August 2005

Coffee Tables and Burnt Cakes

I'm a prisoner in my own  bedroom.  It was never part of my plan that I'd end up incarcerated with the laundry hampers and the eiderdown.  I lay the blame entirely on my relations beginning with my own flesh and blood, who just turned three last week and carrying on to my silver haired mother-- at least, my mother who would be silver haired if her hair was the sort that ran to silvering in old age, which hers isn't.

In our old flat, before we had Emma, I had my own office.  It was my Fortress of Solitude-- own inner sanctum where no other's foot might tread.   Zen the computer's various components spread about the room so that I could have easy access to them, the walls were decorated with antique maps and naval prints offset by the odd broadsword and kukri, and on the dark wooden bookcase sat a box of cigars and a crystal brandy decanter with a balloon glass at the side in anticipation of a reflective moment.  It was a place where I could retire from the world, idly pull down some leather tome, and compose my thoughts as if in a little capsule of timelessness.   It was by no means my ideal.  There was no dark oak panelling, coal fireplace with cushioned fenders, heavy library table, or overstuffed leather chair, which have always been the essential furniture of my desired study, but it would do and did do.

Then along came Emma and amidst my joy I learned that one of the prices of fatherhood was my office became her nursery.   In our current residence,  Zen's main components are now confined in our bedroom to a small, steel workstation with a very hard plastic "task' chair, my prints and edged weapons are hung on the little wall space behind the uncomfortable workstation, the brandy and cigars are hidden away in a glass cabinet in the living room, and my "office" is now a laptop on a corner of the dining table.

It's not an ideal arrangement, but it does have it's compensations.  The dining table is, I'll admit in the coolest and best-lit corner of our flat, it has a splendid view of the neighbourhood, and the fridge is only a few steps away.  It works.  Unfortunately, such a compact arrangement as our flat requires that everything must be kept in perfect balance for it to work.  If one part of the intricate play of forces is thrown off, then the entire thing collapses into utter chaos. 

In my case, my claim to the corner of the dining table has been struck by the double whammy of my mother coming to visit combined with my daughter having a series of play dates with her little preschool friend whom I shall refer to as "Mr. O."  This has reduced the sporadic and relative quiet of the living room to the status of trying to work in a coffee bar at Victoria station-- possible, but not conducive to sustained thought. 

For several days I made a hopeless attempt to grit things out (Is grit a verb?   I don't think so.). But between my mother having claimed the strategic heights of the sofa to read her romance novels or watch the odd '50s MGM musical and the three-year olds arguing over the best method for constructing a tower out of some patented building block system designed by someone with a Euclid complex,  I decided on a strategic retreat and like King Alfred on a bad day I evacuated to the bedroom where my laptop rests on our old folding coffee table over which I am hunched with my bottom perched on the hard, plastic "task" chair.  It is uncomfortable.  It is far from the fridge.  It is entirely void of brandy.  It is even undignified, but at least I have a chance of getting some work done. 

On the upside it does make me out to be a terribly sympathetic figure who soldiers on in the face of adversity and this, combined with it being my birthday, has made my wife take pity on me and declare that she is taking me out to eat at the place that does all the fish.

Not a bad balance.  King Alfred had to make do with burnt cakes.

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Wednesday

3 August 2005

One Day in Manhattan

Like most New Yorkers, Bobo had never been to the top of the Empire State Building before.

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Thursday

4 August 2005

More Doctor Who

Are you a dyed in the wool Doctor Who fan?  Missing your weekly Tardis fix since the current season ended?  Can't wait for the Christmas special, much less the new season?  Then hope is on the way.   On 6 August at 6:30 PM a new Doctor Who radio series starring Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor is starting on BBC 7.  Set before the Time Wars that wiped out the Timelords, the Doctor travels through time and space battling doomed airships, Cybermen, and invaders from Mars.

Can't get BBC 7 on your wireless?  Then visit the BBC 7 web site where you can listen to the broadcasts live or on demand for up to six days after.

And if you're a Dan Dare fan you can follow the radio adventures of the Pilot of the Future all this week on BBC 7 as well.  It's almost over, but you can access the four episodes directly here.

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Friday

5 August 2005

And Take Your Boots Off!

Luton police instructed to remove shoes before raiding Muslim homes.

In a tacit acknowledgement of dhimmitude, Luton police officers have been issued a memo telling them how to conduct anti-terrorist raids against Muslim residences. 

You just can't parody this stuff.

The memo includes:

• Rapid entry needs to be the last resort and raids into Muslim houses are discouraged for a number of religious dignity reasons.
• Police should seek to avoid looking at unclad Muslim women and allow them an opportunity to dress and cover their heads.
• For reasons of dignity officers should seek to avoid entering occupied bedrooms and bathrooms even before dawn.
• Use of police dogs will be considered serious desecration of the premises and may necessitate extensive cleaning of the house and disposal of household items.
• Advice should be sought before considering the use of cameras and camcorders due to the risk of capturing individuals, especially women, in inappropriate dress.
• Muslim prisoners should be allowed to take additional clothing to the station.
• If people are praying at home officers should stand aside and not disrupt the prayer. They should be allowed the opportunity to finish.
• Officers should not take shoes into the houses, especially in areas that might be kept pure for prayer purposes.
•  In the current climate the justification for pre-dawn raids on Muslim houses needs to be clear and transparent.
• Non-Muslims are not allowed to touch holy books, Qurans or religious artefacts without permission. Where possible, Muslim officers in a state of 'Wudhu' (preparation before prayer) should be used for this purpose.

Good God, these are supposed to be police raids against suspected terrorists, not a polite enquiry about inappropriately placed dustbins! If these had been a load of Lutheran suicide bombers does anyone honestly think that the Luton police would give tuppence about their religious sensibilities? Someone seems to have forgotten that in this situation the function of the police is to protect the British public against being blown to bloody shreds by murdering Islamofascists intent on placing us under a crazed interpretation of sharia law, not to prevent members of a religious minority of dubious loyalty from being given a pretence for acting offended.

Sleep tight, Britain!  You haven't been this safe since the Home Guard were told to avoid making any invading German divisions feel unwelcome.

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Monday

8 August 2005

Summertime and the Living is Bloody Hot

It's high summer again; the time of year that I hate with a passion that I normally reserve for small, cuddly animals.  Drop by any time between late September and mid-July and odds are you'll find me a cheerful individual-- relatively cheerful, that is.  For me.  Compared to Victor Meldrew.  But look me on the days when the Sun rides high in the evening, the stubble is being burned from the fields, and the local beach swarms with sunbathers like a junkyard dog does with fleas and you'll find me listless, ill-tempered, and pining for a thick winter fog. 

The past couple of weeks have been summer at it's most relentless.  The sky is clear and blue-- not the deep blue of a sky that is intent on acting the part of a cyclorama to God's Creation, but the pale, yellow-tinged blue of a sky resigned to acting as a reflector dish to a cosmic rotisserie.  There hasn't been any rain for weeks, the lawns look like shredded wheat, and whether one is in city or country there is a faint dust in the air that clogs the nostrils and grits the eyes.  Appetite is diminished because the prospect of lunch is like that of dining in a steam bath.  Drink gives no pleasure either; aside from frantic gratitude at pouring soda water down one's neck to stave off imminent dehydration.

Even the cool of the evening is an alloyed pleasure, being less relief from the day's heat and more like a chill coming between two episodes of fever.  Just when the thermometer levels out to a decent point and you manage to recover from previous day's roasting enough to snuggle into the eiderdown, up comes the Sun and the whole Kafkaesque cycle starts all over again. 

Worse, the desperate need to cool off means that everyone who isn't a complete masochist keeps his windows thrown wide open twenty-four hours a day.  At more civilised times of the year it's my custom to sit out on the balcony of our flat and enjoy one of my cigars in a moment of thoughtful solitude.  If I do so in the summertime, however, the faintest breeze is bound to waft a breath of cigar smoke into a neighbour's window and I'll be chastised as a murderer who has just shaved 0.00000001 seconds off of said neighbour's chain of days.

I haven't gone into the matter of sweat.  I can be standing still and gallons of the stuff will come pouring out of every square inch of my body.  I don't even have to be doing anything strenuous.  Today I was in a second-hand magazine shop looking for old copies of Analog magazine from the 1960s and as I stood quietly studying the dusty, fraying spines on display I became acutely aware that my shirt was sticking to my body, my spectacles were slipping from my nose, and a rivulet of perspiration was pouring down from my hairline, along my sideburn, behind my left ear and down the back of my neck.   It's a good thing that I don 't breath through my feet, because if the state of my socks are anything to go by these days I'd have drowned long ago.

Sweat, of course leads to showers, but in an August heat wave a shower isn't so much a way of getting clean than of surviving.  In cooler weather, a shower is a luxury.  I adjust the water to a warm, inviting cascade and I luxuriate in standing as if in a steamy waterfall as I allow the tensions of the day wash away with the grime of the street.  But nowadays its more a matter of sluicing off a salty layer of dried perspiration before turning the hot tap off so that I'm caught in an icy torrent that reminds me that I haven't always been in residence on Mercury.

But the most aggravating thing about high summer is that it cuts down my choice of clothes to only those things that are suitable for the tropics-- and I do not mean a white linen suit with a panama hat.   In the wintertime I am happiest with my clothes.  I can layer on the woollens with abandon, I have absolute mastery over how warm I am going to be, and I have plenty of pockets at my disposal to load up with my notebook, PDA, voice recorder, pens, and whatever else I might need.  Better yet, I have discovered that after a certain age I'm much happier hiding the damage of the years behind a sweater and a tweed jacket.  The mere thought of G. K. Chesterton kitted out for a hot day on the beach, and I'm ready to bless the man who convinced the great man to sport that trademark cape of his.

But in the summer I haven't enough pocket to carry small change in and I am reduced to the most miserly and least flattering of attires.  When I dressed this morning I kept the baking-tin temperature in mind and selected accordingly.  However, when I looked in the mirror and saw a 47 year-old man dressed like a nine-year old boy on a shrimping holiday , I rebelled.  I was in shorts, a tee shirt, and sandals.  The shorts I loathed and have always done since I was in school and longed for decent trousers, but I couldn't do anything about them in this case, as part of the day's plans involved Emma going to the wading pool and I'd have to go fetch her from time to time.  I could, however, do something about the tee shirt that was more suited for a less than discriminating squash court than the city street and I abandoned it in favour of a collared button-down number.  It was corduroy, but better to brave a few extra degrees than risk the alternative. 

The real fly in the ointment were the sandals.  For some reason that escapes me, people are always telling me that the great thing about high summer is that you can go about in sandals all day.  "They're so comfortable," they declare.  Perhaps on the planet Zongo they are, but here on Earth it is my experience that sandals are the most appalling pieces of footwear ever devised by man.  Every pair I have ever owned have been ill-fitting monstrosities with soles that are not only with no more cushioning than a slip of cardboard would afford and make an embarrassing slapping noise on the pavement, but are just protrusive enough that they are constantly catching on things and tripping me.  They also have infuriating buckles that take forever to do and undo and clatter like a pocketful of ten-penny nails.  But the most infuriating thing is that they are made of strips of leather that are supposed to let in the air, but tend to do that less than they let in dust, gravel, thorns, sand, and, on one infamous occasion, hot bonfire embers.  Yet for some reason one is not allowed to wear socks with sandals, so not only is this minimal protection denied me, but I end up getting blisters from this supremely "comfortable" footwear as well.

But, my friends say, you like to cook outdoors and you have that beautiful grill.  Don't you know that August is prime barbeque time? 

True, I do like to cook outdoors, but usually when it's cooler.  Standing next to a hot grill when it is in the mid eighties is no fun at all unless you plan to be part of the menu.  And when my  balcony faces due west and I get the full blast of the evening rays full in the face I'm tempted to save on gas and just hold up the meat on little hooks so that the Sun can do the job.  I still grill, but only after it is so late that the Sun has gone behind the trees, which is one reason why I fall on my dinner like a starving hound.  If I must live in a place that does not understand the concept of a meat tea, I'd at least appreciate an earlier supper.

Preferably one not served in a sauna. 

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Tuesday

9 August 2005

Harry Potter and the Formulaic Novel

In a radical departure from the previous six Harry Potter novels, J. K. Rowlings begins the seventh and final book by having Harry's arch nemesis, evil Lord Voldemort, run over by a Number 19 bus in the first chapter.  Harry Potter then spends the rest of the book doing a crossword with the main conflict being his search for a four-letter word beginning with "S" meaning “pork luncheon meat.”

Ms. Rowlings is not available for comment, as she is reported to be in hiding with Salmun Rushdie after a group of irate children placed a fatwa on her. 

We have Harry Potter books the way other people have mice.  At the moment we not only have the entire hardcover set, extra volumes of volumes six and seven, and the paperback offshoots Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages, but I have just received yet another shipment of the first four hardcover volumes in the post and I have a command from my wife to hunt down five, six, and seven so that she can present her niece with the full line up for her birthday.  And then there are the widescreen DVDs of all the extant film versions to take into account.

In other words, we are overrun with the things the likes of which I’ve not seen since I, in a fit of absentmindedness, purchased a paperback remainder set of The Lord of the Rings, a Modern Library edition of Dracula, and a deluxe, illustrated hardcover edition of The Wind in the Willows— all of which proved to be already on the shelves in better editions and therefore surplus to requirements.

The galling thing is that I do not like Harry Potter that much.  In fact, I rate the books on a par with convenience store coffee; all right if there’s nothing else going, but not what I’d willing cross the road for given the choice.  It’s my wife who is the real fan.  She has not only read all the books, but also twice and some of them three times.  For her the films are default viewing if there’s nothing better on the box— or were before Emma became old enough to understand the scarier bits.  She also insists that I preorder the pending books from Amazon at the special shipping rate that ensures that they’ll arrive on our doorstep on the day of publication— and that I order two copies so she can discuss them with me as soon as possible. The last point proved a bit of a fall-down, as I’ve been ridiculously busy of late and while she polished off Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince inside of forty-eight hours, I just finished my copy last week. 

I don’t fault my beloved spouse’s enthusiasm for the adventures of young Master Potter.  I can hardly do so as a man who enjoys old Doc Savage novellas and still has his Dan Dare disintegrator gun.  If someone is getting some genuine enjoyment from their preferred reading, who am I to object?   Everyone is entitled to his own tastes-- unless it’s for something stupid like Star Trek novels, of course.

But having said that, I still think that for all her commercial success, J. K. Rowlings is not that good a writer.  And I’m not just saying that just because her pencil-sharpening budget is twice my annual income.  To compare her to Lewis or Tolkien is as ludicrous as claiming that Robert A. Heinlein was a second Kipling.    Where Rowling’s style is flat and prosaic with a very “and then… and then…” quality about it, C. S. Lewis had a real command of the English language that made The Narnia Chronicles slow going because I kept rereading his sentences for their sheer beauty.  And where Rowlings’s wizarding world is a derivative mixture of Billy Bunter, Star Wars, and Enid Blyton with a strong dose of New Labour sensibilities thrown in to flatten the pudding, Tolkien was a scholar who understood that in creating a world it is necessary to have nine-tenths of it beneath the surface to make the final tenth believable.  And unlike Rowlings who I suspect will wind up the final volume with everyone discovering a valuable lesson about sharing, Lewis and Tolkien were devote Christians with a solid sense of the human condition combined with the poetry to express it.  A funeral in Hary Potter’s world feels forced and the mourning prescribed, but to this day I cannot read about Aslan’s death in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe without shedding genuine tears.  

And on the topic of Aslan, I suppose I’m being churlish, but I must point out that where The Chronicles of Narnia conveys the history of an entire world in less than a couple of thousand pages, the doorsteps of the Harry Potter series have covered six years and scarcely any plot development with each startling revelation having been adequately and fully explained in a brief foreshadowing sentence chapters or even whole volumes previously.  For all the colour of quidditch matches and talking portraits, one quickly notices that as the series progresses we actually learn less and less about Harry’s world as more and more lumber of secondary characters and fanciful beasts are added on.  This is a particular shame, because by the sixth book we are essentially in the middle of the third act.  We should know all we really need to about wizards by now and the visits to Diagon Alley and tedious moments with the Dursleys should be behind us as we book on quickly with the main plot. 

But I think that the one thing I really have trouble with is that it is obvious that Rowlings lifted much of her world from this source and that without thinking them through and forming them into a logical whole.  Her “magic” is despairingly secular and has more to do with first year Latin than with the numinous.  Worse, it isn’t even consistent.  Just what exactly is this wizarding world of hers?  Is it parallel to ours?  Or is it parasitic?  Is it just coincidence that they ape a very egalitarian version of our society?  How many wizards are there?  Thousands?  Millions?  Billions?  Why do they hide from the “muggles?”  And if they use magic to the point where they have difficulty understanding a tin opener, why the deuce do they have 20^th century steam trains? 

But the worst problem that Rowlings has to my mind is that she handles the issues of maturity, duty, mortality, and the rest with all the deftness of someone trying to hold onto a wet cake of soap by squeezing it violently.  Harry Potter is a very vivid character, but Rowlings is much better at defining him as a protagonist to get on with the plot than as a character who grows and matures.  His bursts of temper seem pointless, his romances come off more as if he’s read the script than suffering from genuine sexual attraction, and his conflicts and motivations are staid.  Compared to the remarkable economy with which Lewis was able to take his characters through their moral journeys in Narnia, Harry Potter comes across more as a hero who simply “is” rather than one who “becomes.”

So, will the Harry Potter books become great classics of children’s literature as many claim?  I sincerely doubt it.  Once all the fad and hype have died away it may well be that Harry Potter will be the Blair Witch of publishing; less a matter of quality than aggressive marketing.  I don’t think that Lewis, Tolkien, Ransome, Blyton, et al need look to their laurels.  In thirty years time the Harry Potter movies will be regular fodder on the children’s satellite channels and the books may well be seen primarily as the sort of passing fancy of the sort that once made people think long ago that George Lucas could actually direct.

Now if you will pardon me, I must go and preorder volume seven:  Harry Potter Cleans His Teeth.

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Wednesday

10 August 2005

The Space Merchants

Ever have one of those days?  No, not one of those days.  One of those days.  I mean one of those days that just never manage to get started properly.   These are not days that go in one direction or another.  These are the days that just sort of lie there.

Such has been today.  I had a A-class priority job to do, but unfortunately it meant waiting for something else to arrive first.  Since this was not a job that I could blow off in favour of something of a lower priority and I had no way to juldi things along, I was forced to recall that they also  serve who also sit and wait.   There are, however, only so many times that one can check one's e-mail and after an hour in the small, yet uncomfortably hard, "task" chair I decided to do something constructive, like fry up some bacon and eggs. 

That killed about a half an hour and then I was right back where I started, so I propped up the pillows on the bed, grabbed a paperback and did something I rarely have a chance to do these days.  I had a good read.  This filled the rest of the day, aside from a break for cheese and pickle sandwiches and a vigorous pillow fight with my daughter. 

The book I selected was Frederick Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, first published in Galaxy Magazine as "Gravy Planet" in 1952.  This was by no means a random choice, as I'd already selected the radio version of the novel for this month's radio play and, being the conscientious host that I am, I decided that I'd better reread the book. 

In what is called an "admonitory satire," we follow the futuristic adventures of one Mitch Courtney, senior executive at the Fowler Shocken advertising agency who has been given the job of running a sales campaign to recruit potential emigrants to resettle on the planet Venus.  This is not an easy job, as Venus turns out to be a miserable world with an unbreathable atmosphere and temperatures in the balmy 500s.   There's also a lot at stake because in the future advertising firms aren't just big business, they are the dominate power in society controlling every aspect of life-- including the United States government where senators represent corporations rather than states.  It's a world where complaining about rotten commercials can land one in gaol and advertisers don't just compete for sales figures, they even wage low-level wars against one another.

The satire is a bit broad, what with advertisers pushing highly addictive coffees and trying to figure out ways to beam adverts directly into people's eyeballs, but Pohl and Kornbluth do manage to portray a vivid Swiftian future with an overpopulated world plundered of resources where elite advertising executives are pedalled about in Cadillac bicycle rickshaws while common "consumers" who, when they are not being compelled by adverts to part with their last penny, are sleeping on rented staircases and being coerced into contract labour jobs that make the nastiest plantation system look like Mr. Fezzywig's firm at Christmas.  Opposed to this hideous situation are the "Consies," short of Conservationists, who are determined that Venus will not be exploited the way the Earth has been. 

Time has not been kind to this book.  Back in the 1950s the American public were terrified that Madison Avenue was developing all sorts of clever ways to sell anyone anything anytime and that there was nothing that anyone could do about it.  Half a century on most people know that a lot of advertising is run less by its effectiveness than the conceit of the advertising agencies.  Just recall those "really great" television commercials where you can't remember what the deuce they were selling or the billions that were poured uselessly into banner advertising during the dotcom bubble.  Better still, consider the last American presidential race where the most expensive and aggressive political advertising campaign in history failed to place the charisma-free John Kerry in the White House.  As the saying goes, advertising can help sell a good product indefinitely, but beyond a certain point it can't sell a bad product.

It also doesn't help that at a distance the weaknesses of the plotting become more apparent.  There are holes in it that you could fly a space shuttle through and the Consies come off as far too pure of purpose-- whatever that purpose is, because we are never told whether their goal is secession, revolution or what. 

Then there are the oppressed people of Earth.  They have a hell of a hard time of it, but it isn't consistent with the premise of a world run by advertisers bent on maximum sales.  The idea of an out of control consumer society deliberately keeping 15/16^th of population in abject poverty doesn't make much sense.  Okay, your advertisers can sell them anything, but what are they going to buy it with?  Doesn't if make more sense to encourage a wealthy population with loads of disposable income?  Maybe Pohl and Kornbluth thought of this, but felt that it was more difficult it show the oppression of a well-off people than a destitute one.  Quite frankly, like many books of this sort, Pohl and Kornbluth seem to show a certain contempt for the very masses they are championing.  They seem less interested in liberating the people than in our hero being able to escape them.

Some might say that another sign of aging is the fact that Pohl and Kornbluth pretty much lifted an exaggerated version of 1950's Madison Avenue and projected it a couple of hundred years into the future.  Sort of the man in the grey flannel spacesuit.  Sorry I couldn't let that one go by.  Some modern readers might be put off by this, but I thinks it's part of the charm and an illustrative one.  So many sci-fi writers in the '50s prided themselves on exploring "future" societies, but when you revisit their works a few decades later you find that the only society they are exploring is their own.

Harry Potter Update.

Apparently, the Harry Potter books are the most requested by the inmates at Guantanemo Bay. 

The question now is whether or not the guards are showing the books the proper respect.  Newsweek, get on this!

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Thursday

11 August 2005

The Leaky Fountainhead

Howard Roark insists that the skyscraper be built his way or not at all. Owing to a mistake he made on the plans, it ends up being only four feet tall.

It was another day of waiting, so I passed the time playing with the On Demand feature on the cable box.  As I flicked through the movie lists I discovered that one of the features was the 1949 film version of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.  This I decided was too good to pass up.

I'd first come across Rand, the Russo-American writer and self-styled philosopher, at university where a friend of mine was a big fan of hers to the point of tacking up index cards with quotations from her books on the walls to provide inspiration.  I read a couple of her collections of essays and after I realised that they weren't parodies of Robert A. Heinlein in full pontificating mode I decided that her Every Man for Himself philosophy was the right-wing equivalent at vegetarianism and left it at that.  As to her novels, I confess that I never read any of them, but that was only because I could never get more than two pages in without being seized by an uncontrollable giggling fit.

The Fountainhead is a film that provides two great public services.  First, it is a neat little encapsulation of Rand's ideas that boil down to that the world belongs exclusively to strong, supremely talented individualists who refuse to compromise on anything and that giving a second's thought to one's fellow man makes one a slave and a parasite.  Second, it is a perfect example of why novelists should be discouraged from doing the screenplay of their own works.

The Fountainhead has to be one of the worst, if not the most bizarre films to come out of Hollywood that did not star the Ritz Brothers.  It's about the career of architect Howard Roark, an übermensch played by a far too old Gary Cooper who is such a self-righteous egotist that he dynamites and entire housing project he designed because the client insisted on adding balconies.    Opposite him is the love interest (and willing rape victim) played by Patricia Neal in a romance that plays out more like an over-hormoned fourteen-year old schoolgirl's overwrought sex fantasy.   It can't be that bad can it?  Yes it can.  The first time our heroine meets Roark he's boring into a marble slab with a rock drill and if that isn't graphic enough, the final scene of the film is of her shooting up a construction elevator along the side of a very phallic skyscraper that ends at Roark's splayed legs.  This sort of awfulness is justly impressive.

But what I truly love about this film is that there is not one second of dialogue in the entire thing.  Not one person talks to another.  They don't even debate one another, as you might expect in a movie that is supposed to be about "ideas."  They all take turns making assertions at one another that no one else seems to be listening to.  Not that it matters much, as conversation is a thing for human beings, while every character is Rand's strange little world are either humourless gods, straw-men villains whose every denunciation of Roark is an obvious compliment to him, or snivelling little nobodies who deserve to be ground underfoot.

It's also a film that proves that, contrary to her reputation, Ayn Rand actually did care about other people very deeply.  The studio wanted to cut down Roark's seven minute monologue where he justifies to a courtroom why he blew up the housing project on the grounds that the speech was rambling and incomprehensible to the point that Cooper had no idea what he was saying, but Rand stuck to her guns and insisted that every word must be left in.  So it was and for the audience it was like being in a dentist's chair where after over an hour's drilling the sweet nitrous oxide is finally turned on and they are delivered smiling into the arms of Morpheus. 

What could be kinder?

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Friday

12 August 2005

UN Removes Final Seals at Iran’s Nuclear Plant

What the deuce were they doing there in the first place?

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Monday

15 August 2005

Ghostcyclebusters

I enjoy cycling, though I don't go mad about it.  I've always regarded the bicycle as a simple, yet brilliant invention.  A frame, two wheels, a bit of chain, and a couple of pedals and you're the rival of a man on horseback-- provided you're competing with the horseman on a paved road and not a grassy field.  If it's the latter, then you are for it, old son.

When I was living in Oxford everyone was running about on bicycles.  It was such a practical way to get about town that there were times when I wondered how the bus company made any money.  Cycling was so popular for so long that bicycles took on a life of their own.  In addition to the sleek, new models with the curvy handles, there were the inevitable hordes of push bikes so elderly that one found it hard to imagine that they were still functional.  Indeed, there were about a score of ancient machines dating from before some war or another that had been around so long that they had no actual owners.  People kept nicking them from one another and then leaving them at their destination for the next party to walk off with. 

Some of my fondest memories involve bicycles.  There was the time a friend of mine and I took a cycling tour of Scotland; our route determined by a map we'd acquired of the various whisky distilleries we wanted to visit.  I learned four things on that trip.  First, Scotch whisky is a damn fine drink.  Second, Scotland has some of the most beautiful country in the world.  Third, Scotland is so mountainous that cycling there amounts to pushing your machine up the side of a mountain, coasting down at alarming rate down the other side, blasting through the village in the glen at the bottom at supersonic speed, and coasting to a stop half-way up the next mountain.  And fourth, never go on a cycling tour of Scotland with a man who can talk you out of hooking up with a female yachting crew who have just finished a race around the British Isles where they came in second and are in a definite mood to celebrate. 

Then there was the time I was madly in love with a girl who'd moved to Ripon and I hit upon the cunning plan of hiring a bicycle and pedalling the twenty-five mile distance from York to surprise her and then fall back on my alleged bad knee as an excuse to hang about for a bit, only to discover that she'd taken the bus back to York that day to visit her dentist.  I was damn near crippled by the time I got home that night.

Yes, cycling has a lot of happy and frustrating memories,  but for me the bicycle is a machine which is best appreciated when it knows its place.  I dislike bicycles that rise to the level of fad, obsession, or worse, lifestyle.  I much prefer Amsterdam. where the accepted kit is a pair of bicycle clips as opposed to my current residence of Seattle where every nit of a code writer who can rub tuppence together for a pair of lycra shorts insists on going about town pretending he's Lance Armstrong.

It's particularly irksome when cycling ceases to be a form of transport and becomes a crusade.  And I don't just mean the militant types here in Seattle who demand that the Burke-Gilman cycle trail should be completed immediately even if it requires widows and orphans to be thrown out on the street. 

In a laudable attempt to increase public awareness of bicycle safety in Seattle, there is a local group called Ghostcycle, which paints clapped-out bicycles stark white and plants them about the city with a not very well stencilled sign saying "A cyclist was struck here."

This is all very well and good until you visit the Ghostcycle web site and find that their approach is a bit one sided.  They basically come at this from a purely cyclo-centric (or is it bicyclo-centric?) point of view.  Every single incident of an accident or accident of an incident (none of them fatal or apparently involving serious injury, by the way) is one in which the cyclist is the alleged victim rather than the alleged perpetrator.  Indeed, if you go to the statistics page of their site you come across this quote:

98% of respondents reported they were obeying the law when the accident occurred.

If that isn't the biggest load of bollocks I've ever heard in my life, I don't know what is.  I don't care how sympathetic you are to the cause, I can't see how they can take this sort of thing on face value.   If the police enforced road laws on cyclists the way they do on motorists, or even pedestrians, bicycles would be as scarce as dodos in Seattle.  Given the fact that the reports that Ghostcycle use as their basis are all voluntary, you would think that they would be a bit more sceptical about claims that the cyclists involved were overwhelmingly law-abiding, that they were all wearing their helmets, and that 90% of them were using proper reflectors and lights at night.  You would think that maybe, just maybe, some cyclists might be at fault.  You'd think that Ghostcycle would at least match their incidents against police and insurance reports before carting out their white-washed machines.

 In the years that I have lived in Seattle, I have been nothing less than astonished at how cyclists here have virtually no understanding of the rules of the road or even common courtesy.  It's as if anyone who mounts a bicycle in this town regards themselves as being part of some ecofriendly aristocracy that is so anointed by its lack of petrol burning that they are above the laws of God and man-- at least, insofar as they pertain to motorists, pedestrians, and some of the slower wildlife.

No, what I think we need is not Ghostcycle, but Ghostcyclebuster.  This is an organisation dedicated to bicycle safety by reminding cyclists through education, outreach, and claymore mines, that they are sharing the roads, pavements, and footpaths with other human beings who are sick to death of being smacked in the small of the back with a thin tyre if on foot or feeling that they are an involuntary participant in a suicide attempt if in a motor car. 

The main thrust of the Ghostcyclebusters, however, is to supplement the Ghostcycle white-washed machines with their own symbol: a life-size cut-out figure of Victor Meldrew to mark the spot of an incident involving a cyclist who seems to know about as much about the rules of the road as a packet of breakfast cereal.  What better way to get the message of bicycle safety across than to point out that the best way to be safe is not to act like an irresponsible twit who owns the road, the pavement, and just about any other place that you can squeeze two wheels, a pair of pedals, a ridiculous shirt with pockets in the back, and dark glasses in shades more suited to the hind parts of a death-watch beetle through.

In view of this, I'd like to present my candidates for the first Ghostcyclebuster sites with the following captions:

	Not a single sodding cyclist bothered to obey the stop sign here.
	Not a single sodding cyclist bothered to obey the yield sign here.
	Not a single sodding cyclist even bothered to see if there was a sign here.
	A cyclist barrelled off the pavement, veered in front of an oncoming car and hurled abuse at the driver before shooting off in the direction of Market Street here.
	A pair of cyclists rode side by side, oblivious in chat despite the fact that they were blocking a main arterial road here.
	A cyclist couldn't decide if he was a road vehicle or a pedestrian as he shot off the pavement, into the road, along a pedestrian crossing and back again here.
	A cyclist insisted on shooting along a pavement no more than two and a half feet wide at a speed more suited for the Tour de France with several pedestrians on said pavement and somehow imagined that shouting "on your left" half a second before he overtook them from the rear was more than ample warning despite the fact that he shouldn't have been on the damn pavement in the first place here.
	Not a single sodding cyclist yielded to a pedestrian on the bridge despite the fact that there is a sign clearly requiring them to do so here.
	A cyclist rode at high speed on a narrow bridge pavement and shouted for pedestrians to "get the hell out of the way" here.
	A cyclist tried the same thing with a crowd of several hundred people crossing a bridge after the annual Fremont Solstice Parade without anyone paying a blind bit of a attention to the noxious little git here.
	A cyclist insisted on pedalling up a steep, winding hill road without shoulders and caused a queue of a dozen cars to form for no good reason here.
	A cyclist insisted on pedalling down the middle of the same steep, winding hill on a moonless night without a single light or reflector here.
	A cyclist clipped an elderly pedestrian and carried on without so much as a glance backwards here.
	A cyclist shot across a road at full speed without glancing to either side, causing a motorist to slam on the brakes and frightened the living daylights out of the passengers here.
	A cyclist disregarded a red light here, resulting in a three-car collision here.
	A cyclist and ten of his friends changed lanes on a busy road during rush hour without a glance behind or even the most cursory of signals here.
	A cyclist insisted on going around a blind corner on a narrow congested road despite the fact that a multi-million dollar taxpayer funded bike trail was only five yards to his right here.
	Three cyclists travelled abreast on a bike trail and the clearly marked pedestrian trail that it shared, forcing a man in his early forties to dive for his life into large bush of indeterminate variety here.
	A cyclist disregarded the indicated turn in the multi-million dollar taxpayer funded bike trail and went at an oblique angle through a three-way intersection causing a near collision between a coupe with a small child in it and a cement truck here.
	A cyclist caused a middle-aged British writer to damn near fall down dead of a heart attack when the cyclist said, "No, you go first, sir; you have the right of way" here.
	Actually, the last one is a complete lie.

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Tuesday

16 August 2005

Scarface

My three-year old daughter is the coolest kid in school this morning.  Has she scored some remarkable sporting coup?  Taken the top prize in a music recital?  Set a new fashion trend?

Close, but not quite.  She has stitches, and in a preschooler that ranks somewhere between a bandage and a cast in terms of social cachet.  I have no doubt that by snack time she will be the number-one topic of the Play Dough set and push anyone who has a puppy or a new baby brother right to the back to the queue.

Not that she hasn't earned it-- and the hard way. 

On Thursday the PT Cruiser had a puncture and I got one of those Fix-a-Flat things that pump compressed air and liquid sealant into an injured tyre and is supposed to be able to fix any up to quarter of an inch in diameter.  I followed the directions to the letter and after about twenty minutes I had a tyre that was a bit under-inflated, but seemed to be holding pressure.  This meant, of course, that I was completely uncertain as to whether or not I'd actually fixed the tyre or if I'd merely veered down the cul de sac of a false sense of security that would end with my wife and child stranded in the backwoods of Seattle with a flat tyre and wolves closing in.  Upshot is that I drove straight to a tyre repair centre and killed the entire morning while they inspected my handiwork and pronounced that against all odds I was less thumb-fingered than usual.

So, the good news was that the car was fixed.  The bad news was that I had a morning's work to make up.  No problem.  Friday started out as a good day.  The heat wave had at least partly broken, there were loads of radio shows on the Internet that I was waiting to listen to, I had a fresh pot of tea, and I was ramping up for a roll. 

Until the phone rang, of course.  I should have expected something to happen, but not for it to be that my wife would ring telling me that Emma had cut her head in a freak bubble-blowing accident and had to go to hospital.

I was about as mystified at this as you are until my wife explained that they had been blowing bubbles in Emma's preschool class for the kids to chase and in the excitement Emma banged into another child and on the rebound connected with her eyebrow to a bookcase, which resulted in a shallow yet surprisingly bloody gash.

There was nothing else for it but for me to drive up to the school, collect Mama and Emma, and it was off to Children's. 

One of the very few advantages of being a parent who spends a lot of time in the casualty ward is not that you get used to it-- you never do, even with the "Punch ten holes and get a free visit" cards-- but that you develop a sliding scale of how alarmed you should get ranging from Child Mildly Wheezing (Alarm Factor 1) to Child Fighting for Breath, Turned Beet Red and Coverd in Welts While on a Ferry Boat in the San Juan Islands Without Her Medicine (Alarm Factor 1,000,000+).  On this, a gashed eyebrow doesn't rate that high once the bleeding has subsided. 

On the up side, she was very well behaved and took having stitches put into her eyebrow like a trouper.  The downside was that this was because she was topped to the gills with something in the Valium family and allowed me to be able to say from now on that yes, I have seen a three-year old stoned out of her skull.

It was rather diverting, actually, after all the trauma and anxiety.  While we were waiting to be discharged Emma was pointing at the ceiling and calling out "bears, bears," despite the fact that her bag of Teddy Grahams were sitting square in her lap. 

I presume that it was the preschooler equivalent of "have you ever looked at you hand?".

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Wednesday

17 August 2005

The Indifference is Deafening

Theatre in Seattle got nudged a bit closer to the grave this week. 

As I said in a previous post, the non-union houses in Seattle are being forced by the State of Washington into the impossible task of paying full wages and attendant benefits to all actors and backstage crew-- that or resign themselves to becoming strictly amateur theatres.  Already Taproot Theatre has been through the ringer, and now, according to my sources, Annex Theatre has been ordered by the State to turn over its books for a full payroll audit and have been warned that if they do not make good on all taxes and fees they will face stiff fines-- either of which would break the company.

In other words, it's jump or get shoved off the plank.

In response to this imminent threat, the local theatre "community" has sprung into dynamic action and over the past two months has done what it always does when faced with a crisis: they sat back and nattered at one another in hopes that it would make the whole thing go away.  Even though it is quite clear that the State is serious about turning Washington into a closed shop with the actor's union Equity ruling the lot, the theatre community has taken a very quiet approach with forums, meetings, and the only active move being a planned press release about how wretched the whole thing is that will probably shoot straight to the Arts Editor's junk mail folder.

This doesn't really surprise me.  Theatre in this town has been on a sharp decline for years with company after company closing down and those that remain becoming increasingly tainted with amateurism and apathy dressed up as artistic disdain.  Even the Stranger, a local lefty weekly that is so crass that the only play they ever liked was Poona the F*** Dog, and that only because it was called Poona the F*** Dog (without the *, mind), have woken up and are declaring local theatre to be the entertainment equivalent of overcooked vegetables run by people with the artistic sensibilities of a Renaissance Faire.

This isn't helped by the fact that nearly every extant Seattle theatre company has about as much business sense as a tin of condemned veal, which is a pity, because if theatre in this town is to survive we need some serious money grubbers and entrepreneurs out there to pull in the punters.  I'm talking the insanely capitalistic Mr. Crab from Spongebob Squarepants as the model business manager.

But those are long and medium term problems.  What is really going to kill theatre in Seattle is the short term crisis, because your average Seattle theatre reacts to disasters like the title character out of Sean of the Dead who went through his normal morning run to the corner shop without noticing that Crouch End had been overrun by flesh eating zombies.  It's the sort of attitude that leads theatres to cling to an almost endearing belief that they can rely on an outraged public to rise up at that last minute and rush to their aid as soon as they learn The Truth.

How it plays out in reality is more like this:

© 2005 Universal Press Syndicate

This isn't the first time Seattle theatres have been here.  A couple of years ago the Seattle Fringe Festival went belly up when the organisers stole the box office to pay the festival bills.  The sums weren't much, only a few thousand dollars, but in the theatre world that is enough to sink a company like a ball of shot dropped into a dinghy.  If this had happened in the real world the festival organisers would have faced massive lawsuits and probable gaol time.  And how did the Seattle theatre community react?  With forums, meetings, lots of hand wringing, and one artistic director in a fit of pure insanity donating his company's box office cut to "help out" the organisers. 

The upshot of all this was that a number of companies went bust, the festival was shut down, hardly any of the money was recovered, and Seattle's reputation as a serious theatrical city was wiped out. 

And how did the great Seattle public react?  Where was their righteous fury and demand for action to save a vital cultural asset? 

Most weren't even aware that anything was happening and if they did they didn't really care.  But this isn't surprising in a town where theatre companies have largely forgotten that theatre is a business and have turned their backs on the general public in favour of filling the seats by getting other theatre folk to turn up on the night, doling our comps like water,  or casting an actress because she has lots of friends who will drag themselves in on a weekend.  Theatre had ceased to be about entertainment or even about art.  It had become a hobby shrouded in pretence.

And now it looks like even the pretence is gone.  Goodbye theatre, hello playacting. 

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Thursday

18 August 2005

Percolations

We have a coffee maker in our house-- a little one-cup French press that we bought for my mother's recent visit..  No, actually, we have two, but I tend not to count the other one.  It's a Krups espresso machine that we received as a wedding present and which has pride of place on our kitchen counter, but in all honesty we have not used since we discussed our daughter's baptism with our priest two years ago.  It's not that the machine doesn't make good coffee.  Quite the opposite.  It's just that my wife doesn't drink coffee, I never drink it at home, and using an espresso machine is too much like a Masonic ritual for someone like me who just wants a quick caffeine fix. Hence the French press.  I may be able to make a man of the cloth wait twenty minutes for a tiny cup of coffee, but when one's mother is involved, it is generally wiser to opt for something you can pour boiling water into and press down the plunger on.

I used to drink a great deal of coffee-- especially when I was at university when my need was greatest.  I once went to a little campus restaurant that overcharged me obscenely for a sandwich.  It was the sort of place that would serve coffee in huge thermos jugs that they would leave at the table and refill as a matter of course.  I was so put out by what my lunch had cost that I sat there reading Dostoyevsky and drinking coffee until I calculated that I'd made up the difference.

I did not sleep for two days.

Nowadays, I don't drink nearly as much coffee-- largely because I have no desire to spend my mortal days staring at the lavatory wall.  But I still do drink the stuff.  Living in Seattle you have to, otherwise you're likely to be deported.   When I'm in the middle of a long day's work a walk to the local coffee house makes for a nice break and on the mornings when I take the family out for breakfast it would be churlish to spurn the cup of cheer that the waitress brings.  And nothing tops off a fine evening out than a nice demitasse.

Also, American tea is utterly vile.  How is it that a people who have perfected both the hamburger and the pizza have not yet grasped that the way to make a decent cup of tea is not to dangle a tea bad in a cup of lukewarm water.  This is one of life's great mysteries.

Not that I'm in much of a position to stand in judgment.  American coffee is superb and their tea vile, but in Britain the tea is the finest in the world and the coffee nigh on undrinkable.

Before the invasion of Starbucks, the British way of making coffee could be summed up in one word: Nescafe.  Whether you were at home or in the finest restaurant the story was the same, if you wanted to make coffee, you would boil water, pour it into a cup and add a teaspoon of powder from the eponymous jar.  In fact, I don't recall seeing a coffee machine in the British Isles in the entire time I was growing up with the notable exception of a cafe with a Russian espresso machine with a gigantic brass eagle on it that was so intimidating that I believe to this day that the staff were actually afraid of it and never went near.

Americans, on the other hand are perpetually knee-deep in coffee making machines of every size and description.  Nowadays the market is dominated by various drip coffeemakers which sit dripping, hissing, and splattering on countertops all over the country.  To this you could add all sorts of stove-top models, vacuum flasks, siphons,  things with odd filters and cylinders that worked by principles known only to their inventors.

But the most frightening of these was the electric percolator.

My mother had one of these.  It was one of those '50s chrome-plated affairs that was supposed to e functional, yet decorative, yet turned out to be neither.  Instead it was a hideous chrome-plated affair with a thin spout utterly unsuitable for pouring and the whole thing too tall and thin to project any other impression other than that the whole thing was going to fall over any minute.  On top of the percolator was a small glass dome where you could watch the proceedings as the boiling water spurted up from the heater plate, through the cheap aluminium tube, and over the grounds in the basket.  The real entertainment value was that the small glass dome wasn't so much screwed on as secured by a little nub.  This meant that it was even odds that the dome would work loose during the proceedings and allow the percolator to spray the table with half-perked, yet scalding coffee.

And that is why I prefer coffee as God intended it; with a large brandy and the promise of a cigar afterwards in a restaurant where someone else has taken his life into his hands prepare  it.

One can only make so many sacrifices, you know.

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Friday

19 August 2005

Smart Cars of the Serengetti

A couple of American researchers at Cornell University have decided that we really have to do something about the lack of mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers in North America.  These and other "megafauna" were wiped out by the ancestors of the American Indians 13,000 years ago and the researchers say that the time to act is now before irreparable ecological damage occurs. Personally, I would have thought that 13,000 years was long enough for that sort of thing to take place already, but perhaps I don't have the proper sense of urgency.

The Cornell plan for dealing with this impending crisis is one of those killing-two-birds-with-one-stone ideas.  Africa is dirt poor, run by tyrants who are always worried that they have a dozen less Mercedes limousines than the next bloke, and whose people are more concerned with having a full belly than looking after a bunch of wild animals so that busloads of wealthy foreigners can snap pictures of them.  For your average African peasant, lions are not majestic kings of savannah, they are those sneaky blackguards that keep walking off with cattle and the occasional neighbour.  And the elephants don't inspire as much awe as aggro when they are trampling the maize and ripping up the shrubbery.  So, says the lot at Cornell, since the Africans don't want the walking carpets, let's take them off their hands and release them on the Great Plains of North America where their cousins roamed free in the glory days of the Pleistocene.  Then once again people from Texas to the Dakotas could see roaming prides of lions, troupes of elephants, herds of wildebeests, zebras, camels,  and maybe the odd aardvark thrown in for comic relief.

I must admit that the idea does have a certain entertainment value.  Back in Yorkshire there was an eccentric chap in the last century who brought back some wallabies from Australia with a view toward raising them for profit.  Some of the little blighters got loose and established a colony on the moors that thrives to this day, where you can occasionally see them bounding through the heather like oddly-shaped Heathcliffs to the amusement of the locals and the confusion of everyone else.  It was always great fun sitting in the pub and watching some tourist come in with that look on his face that indicated that he wanted to say something, but didn't know whether he should or not for fear of someone sitting on his head and bawling for a straitjacket.  There'd be an awkward silence, but after a couple of whiskies he'd usually work up the courage to ask one of the locals, "I thought I saw... That is... This may sound silly, but... Do you know if anyone has lost a kangaroo?"

It was even more fun when you came across a dog (also a tourist) who'd chased a wallaby, thinking it was a bunny-- only bunnies don't turn and punch you in the face.  I once saw a foxhound blown clear into the air when a calorgas heater exploded in his kennel.  He landed completely unharmed about ten yards away, but the look on his face was as nothing compared to that of a Labrador that has gone three rounds with a wallaby.

But wallabies are wallabies and lions, I will hazard to guess, are lions and I am sure that the cattlemen and sheep herders of the Americas will not look kindly at the arrival of a lion that can carry off a whole heifer in its jaws, nor an elephant that can do indescribable things to one's Volvo just by sitting on it. 

In many respects, the problems that introducing savage African predators and ill-tempered pachyderms to the Great Plains has less to do with the animals than with ourselves.  Up until about thirty years ago, man had a fairly good grasp of how to deal with dangerous animals; you kept them at a distance and blew the brains out of any that got too close to the village.  Granted, this was often carried too far and that's why there hasn't been a wolf in the British Isles since 1743 and bears have been off the menu since the Tudors.   Okay, I'm one of those who regard this as a plus, so bad example.  Nevertheless, if the lads didn't get too trigger happy you ended up with the local bears, cougars, boars, and whatever having a healthy respect for those odd two-legged creatures that would put your head over their mantle if you cut up rough.  Nowadays with our "bring only a camera, take only memories" attitude the local predators are discovering that suburbs are good source of protein, as some friends of mine discovered when their cats disappeared,  and the locals won't do more than shout a bit if you feel like tucking into the odd hiker.

The other problem is that the car manufacturers are quite literally, or near as dammit, throwing us to the lions.  In the old days, when one came across a pride of peckish lions one was usually inside a great steel and aluminium vehicle that must have been terribly frustrating for the lions.  I'm not referring to these SUVs of today with their mod cons, leather interiors, and GPS moustache cups that leave you in fear of scratching the enamel.  I mean those great old workhorse Land Rovers with the recessed grills and no springs; the ones that you could take apart right down to the undercarriage with a screwdriver and spanner.  If you came whizzing up to a lion in one of those there wasn't much he could do besides screw up the windscreen wipers before sitting on the roof until he got bored and went home.

It's different nowadays.  Every since the Germans introduced their Smart car we have been taking our lives in our hands every time we run up against a lion.  It turns out that where your average lion regards it as a lost cause to go up against a Ford Fiesta or even a second-hand Vauxhall Viva, if a lion takes one look at the little Smart car with its stylish little urban lines he thinks that he's in with a chance.  In fact, recent news stories show that where lions ignore other makes of cars, they will actually chase a Smart car as if it was a particularly fat and juicy gazelle.  Or as Nigel Bunyan put it in the Daily Telegraph,

Compared with most other vehicles it is the closest thing to providing a possible tasty snack: crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside.

This could lead to a frightening synergy.  With higher oil prices and increasing urban congestion, we will no doubt find more and more people opting for the excellent fuel economy and easy parking features of the Smart car as it penetrates the American market.  But if at the same time we start introducing lions into the equation, then I fear that cross-country motoring will take on a new and frightening character.  And I don't just mean that running a deer park will suddenly become a hazardous occupation.   Not only will we all face the threat of tribes of baboons flinging filth and oddly shaped bits of fruit at us, but we will also have to be constantly on the look out for the torn shells of Smartcars that will litter the interstate freeways like so many discarded yogurt cups-- only much larger and with a tendency to obscure all the Wall Drug signs in the Dakotas.  It will be a whole new food chain with the roadside McDonalds on the bottom, the Smart car drivers in the middle, and the lions picking bits of German engineering out of their teeth.

And people wonder why I refuse to move inland.

Going Commando

As part of its on-going efforts to keep Her Majesty's armed forces the best in the world, the British Army has been issued with state of the art combat underpants.  They are anti-microbial, anti-chafing, and come in black so that they are not only suitable for night fighting, but for all social occasions. 

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Monday

22 August 2005

The Common Cold

Out with a nasty summer cold.

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Tuesday

23 August 2005

The Common Cold II

The Szondy family has gone through another of its epic cold cycles.  Emma brought it home from school, she gave it to Mama, who gave it to Daddy.  We are a very sharing family.

They say that summer colds are the worst.  I don't know if this is supposed to be because cold viruses are more robust in hot weather, but I suspect that part of the reason is that when you have a cold in the winter people seem more inclined to let you lie in bed and recuperate, while if the sun is shining and the temperature is in the low eighties they feel compelled to drag you out of your sick bed and make you "do" things.

That was pretty much what happened to me.  I went spiralling down into the land of aspirins and antihistamines on Friday afternoon and I spent a fitful night feeling as if I was being alternately frozen and roasted.  When I woke up the mattress was five pounds heavier with my sweat and there was a white tide mark of salt outlining the sheet on my side of the bed.  Everyone else had recovered inside a day, but I felt like death lightly grilled and served with chive butter and a side of steamed vegetables.

But no problem.  It was Saturday.  I could sleep in.  I could spend the day lying on the settee watching bad movies while Emma played with her Legos on the floor and Mama brought me cooling drinks and smoothed my brow. 

Not in this lifetime.

It turns out that Saturday was the annual reunion for my wife's family.  This always takes place in late August and because her side of the family is spread across the landscape from Puget Sound to somewhere in the vicinity of Idaho they all meet at a central location, which turns out to be a tiny park in Wenatchee, Washington bordered on three sides by the Wenatchee River, an incredibly busy motorway, and a migrate farm-workers' camp.  It's charm is in inverse proportion to the heat, which is like a tanning booth situated in a tandoori oven.  The picnic pavilion isn't there for comfort.  It's a survival shelter.   Step outside of its shade and you're a heap of bleached bones before you can say "knife."

It's also a hundred and twenty miles away from Seattle.  This is a very long drive when you've just gone through what felt like a malaria attack, and is still longer when there is a three-year old in the back seat.  It is even longer when your wife has volunteered your grill and services as hotdog and hamburger incinerator.  So, there I was packing the car at 7:30 AM with nothing to fortify me except a dose of Dayquil.  In went the gas grill, utensils, ice chest, folding chairs, Emma's activity bag, gifts for my wife's niece and nephew, and full-size replica of the Crystal Palace just in case.

Dayquil and its generic imitators are great stuff.   One dose combined with generous portions of petrol station coffee kept me amped up and capable of getting through the whole day with little to indicate that I was harbouring the plague other than a disinclination to play soccer out in the blazing sun with the under fives.  I even managed an enjoyable stop at a fruit stand to stock up on peaches and pears that we use to make homemade cordials for Christmas presents.  It was only when we stopped off in Redmond to stretch our legs that I found that mine had gone all wobbly and that I was going to fall down any second. 

Yes, I had made that basic error.  I had treated the symptom and not the disease.  It was the viral equivalent of shooting a busted ankle full of anaesthetic and going back into the game only to discover later that the joint in question now resembles something out of a meat grinder.   I'd planned to work on Sunday, but the way I felt put paid to that idea.  Even a simple errand to pick up Emma's asthma prescription refills was a major undertaking.  Every time I had a conversation with someone I felt as if I was three seconds behind everyone else.  When I got home, I therefore felt no guilt about pulling out a couple of Bond films to kill the day.  To show you what a low ebb I was at, one of these was Moonraker and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Today I was on the way to recovery; thanks partly to my Sunday rest and partly to a cocktail of cold remedies.  I'd more energy, but most of this was spent on massive coughing fits that made me fearful that I was going to shoot my pelvis out of my throat any second.  Then there was the little matter that when I laid down for a nap after a hard day at the computer my dreams all seemed to revolve around beautiful women who kept morphing to hideous bird and beast things. 

Great.  First it's a viral infection and now my subconscious is having a go at me.

Tomorrow: Bizarre cold medicine interactions and why I shouldn't be held responsible for what happened to the cormorant. 

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Wednesday

24 August 2005

Welcome to Hell

Accordions AND amplifiers?!?   Some people are just sick.  Sick!   Sick!  Sick!

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Thursday

25 August 2005

British Cold, American Werewolf

Day six of my cold.  This is one of those tenacious bastards that hangs on for dear life despite every barrage of cold medicine, cough mixtures, and aspirin I can throw at it.  Though I've managed to drive back the battle lines, the virus seems to have taken refuge somewhere in my bronchial tracks, which means that reading a twelve-page storybook to Emma now takes approximately three hours because of the prolonged coughing fits.  I've also discovered two things: a) prolonged coughing forces air into the sinuses, and b) the human head is not inflatable.  No, make that three things.  At dinner I learned that eating prawn vindaloo while prone to coughing fits falls squarely into the category of hair-raising adventures.

One of the few advantages to having a miserable cold is that I have an excuse to have a bit of a lie down in the evening and either read or watch crappy videos.  Last night it was An American Werewolf in London (1981). 

Believe it or not, I actually went out my way to watch it.  That's because on the Internet I came across an adaptation of the screenplay produced for Radio 1 back in 1997 and I was curious as to how the one stood against the other. 

American Werewolf is one of those films that floats about on the periphery of my cinema awareness.  It's close enough to my tastes that I don't put it out of my mind, like I do ninety percent of what Hollywood produces, but it is too self-consciously part of popular culture for me to really pay attention to it.  It's also  one of those films that I keep thinking of as a "new" movie until one day I turn around and realise that it's been nearly twenty-five years since its release.   I'm the same way with books.  I always think of myself as someone who came to reading Tolkien late in life, only to pause and reflect that "late" was thirty years ago.

Unlike a lot of '80s cinema, American Werewolf holds up pretty well despite the bright red puffy jackets, the now prehistoric rotary phone boxes and David Naughton's feathery haircut.  Director John Landis gets into the action quickly and with economy and he knows how to handle what is actually a very simple story without succumbing to the temptation to lumber it with a lot of subplots.  American David Naughton and his friend are hiking on the Yorkshire Moors, a werewolf attacks them, killing the friend and leaving Naughton gravely wounded.  Naughton wakes up a couple of weeks later in a London hospital where he is having horrible dreams and becomes romantically involved with nurse Jenny Agutter.  Then one morning Naughton's dead and horribly mutilated friend shows up and tells him that Naughton's now a werewolf and you can pretty much guess where the plot goes from there.

I suppose one reason why I never really cared for American Werewolf is because it's a "horror comedy,"  which was supposed to be something new and original in 1981.  In fact, horror comedy had been around since The Boogie Man Will Get You starring Boris Karloff was released in 1942 and reached its peak with The Abominable Dr. Phibes in 1971.  The difference with American Werewolf was not the humour, but that where in previous films the comedy rose out of the characters and situations to produce a very dark mixture, Landis made it seem as if he'd made a straight horror film and a broad romantic comedy and then decided to stitch them together at the last minute.  Where in Phibes, for example, everyone played their roles dead straight and the jokes were allowed to seep through the horror like blood through a shirt front, in American Werewolf the comedy parts were played with that dreadful twinkle in the eye and knowing wink of the American comic who wants everyone to understand that he's "just kidding."  What says a lot about Landis is that he was able to pull this off and make the comedy act as a sharp contrast to the starkness of the horror; a feat that in the hands of his imitators resulted in... what is the word?  Ah, yes.  Tedious rubbish.

Only real clanger in the film were all the pop tunes.  Horror is generally a subgenre of fantasy and as such it relies a great deal on the suspension of disbelief.  An atmosphere must be established, a premise accepted, and the audience drawn in.  Disturb this and you have to start all over again.  American Werewolf for me is the cinematic equivalent of being woken by a slammed car door at two in the morning.  Every time I really got into the story a Moon-related musical joke would whiz by and I was yanked out again.  But there are small blessings.  At least in 1981 the use of pop tunes was still relatively new and not the annoying hallmark of directorial laziness that it has since become.

That being said, what is my overall assessment of American Werewolf?.   Let me put it this way,.  This film has a shower scene with a naked Jenny Agutter, which makes it the Best.  Movie.  Ever. 

Okay, but what about the Radio 1 version?  How can a radio play capture the essence of a movie that is essentially a make up and special effects showcase?  How do you, for example deal with the climactic transformation sequence.

The latter is easy; lots of screaming, creaking noises, and Gorgo roars at the end. 

Actually, I thought the radio version was in many ways superior to the film.  For one thing there wasn't any need for the dream sequences,  the embarrassing Nazi werewolves scene was dropped, and I found that in the scenes where the hero is being visited by the decaying corpse of his dead friend I could pay attention to the dialogue, though the sound effects were nastier than anything moulded out of latex and drenched in Kensington Gore.  It nearly makes up for the lack of a naked Miss Agutter.

The other thing I liked about the radio version was that it filled in a number of holes in the plot and tied up the loose ends.  It answered the questions that the film just rushed by such as,  Since werewolves come from Eastern Europe, how did one get on the Yorkshire Moors?  Why were the people of East Proctor so secretive?  What is their relation to the werewolves?  How did they manage to cover up the evidence of the attack?  What happened to the Brian Glover character after the doctor left?  And do werewolves really have a yen for Radio 1 deejays?  

People with no lives need to know these things!

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Monday

29 August 2005

Stay Tuned and PANIC!

Does cable news overplay natural disasters a bit?

In the face of a hurricane of unprecedented destructive force approaching the city of New Orleans, one would think that the cable news services would show some restraint, not alarm people unnecessarily, and keep the whole thing in perspective for the general audience.  Instead, we get twenty-four hour reports more long these lines:

I'm Todd Paranoid.  Welcome to Headline Vixen Network's coverage of hurricane Katrina, which is scheduled to hit the city of New Orleans like Michael Moore sitting on a moon pie.   True, there has been major progress on the Iraqi constitution, reconciliation of Israel and Palestine, and a cure for all cancers has been announced, but if we covered those we couldn't have reporters standing in front of dramatically wave-splashed water fronts, so who cares?

Authorities are urging calm as this killer storm comes hurtling in with the promise of massive death and destruction of biblical proportions.   Meteorologists put the strength of Katrina at Force 5, though some put it at Force 5.5.  One guy told me it was Force 6 and my friend swears it's going to be  Force 10.   Whatever it is, it is certain to be far worse than the human mind can possibly imagine.

Are the Authorities ready for this?  There is a chance that the levees that protect the city might be breached by Katrina, so it as certain as the the fact that the Moon will turn to blood tonight that New Orleans will be covered entirely by water and end up as the stuff of legend like a modern-day Atlantis.  Currently, the population is carrying out an orderly evacuation, though we expect that as the full malevolence of Katrina is revealed they will instantly descend into an orgy of violence, looting, and probable cannibalism.  Those too poor or wretched to evacuate the doomed city are fleeing to the Island of Last Refuge: the  Superdome.  Everything is peaceful and orderly among these hopeless dupes who are trapped like rats,  but that could change at any moment to a scene of blood-curdling terror if hordes of ape monsters drop from the skies and hurl everyone into the sea.

If you are fool enough to think you can ride this out; don't.   Even if you make it to high ground, you are absolutely certain to share it with deadly snakes  three-feet thick on the ground, and if you're a load of teenagers taking refuge in an abandoned bayou hotel you will be hunted down by a deranged killer with a machete-- especially if you've just had sex.  There is even the possibility that Katrina will cause the undead to burst from their graves and seek out the warm, succulent flesh of the living.

Think I'm making this up?  Look at these computer projections, which I'm going to show you without any context.  Look at the size of this thing!  Look at its thickness.  Look at the huge, throbbing power that pulses from its every sweaty, meaty square yard as it seeks to press and penetrate and...

Sorry.  Got a little carried away there.  In other developments, if you are on the Pacific Coast, you are living in a fool's paradise if you think that Katrina will not rain down the horrors of the Apocalypse upon you.  The oil companies have abandoned their rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico as to a man they ran away like frightened little girls in the face of Katrina's Sword of Judgment.  Not one rig is held down by anything stronger than dental floss and by midnight all of them will be nothing but twisted monuments to man's folly the bottom of the sea.  This will leave  the United States with exactly the contents of one Zippo lighter to meet the entire country's energy needs.  The anticipated shortages mean that inside of two days our cities will be in flames, wolves will stalk the land, pestilence will mow down the people like a scythe, chaos will reign, mothers will sacrifice their babies to appease Katrina the Destroyer (all worship to her name), and the armies of Hell will claim dominion.  I may be in New York, but I'm ready.  I've got two year's worth of food and water under this desk and enough ammo to make those shifty cameramen think twice about trying to take it away from me.  I mean YOU, Spencer!

Yes?  Right. I have on the phone now Ron Hysterical in New Orleans, who will fill us in on the last moments of this Planet of the Damned that is about to be  smashed like an egg by Katrina's divine wrath.  Hello, Ron.  What?  You're not Ron.  Who is this?  WHO IS THIS?!?

Oh, my God!  That was hurricane Katrina.  She knows where I am.   She knows... Trace that call!  Trace it!  I've got to get out.  Got to get out before she gets here.  What?  What?   No!  Sweet Mother of God, NO! 

The call came from inside the building!  AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Next: Sport.

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Wednesday

31 August 2005

Doubling Up

Never wish a cold away; you might get it.  As regular readers will have noticed, the columns haven't been as regular as they should be for the last week.  This is due to the cold that I hadn't been able to shake off.   In fact, it had been getting steadily worse until I nearly fainted last Friday and ended up going to the doctor, who prescribed some major medication with very impressive names and a hint of narcotics to them.  I dutifully took them and went to bed in anticipation of, if not cure, at least relief.

Result?  Not a sausage.  I had another horrible night with barely any sleep, coughing fits so bad that I thought my pelvis was going pop out of my throat, and to round it all off I was now constipated from the codeine in the cough mixture. 

That was pretty much my weekend, so it was back to the doctor on Monday, where I learned that I no longer had a cold.  I had pneumonia.  Great.  Nothing like being told I have a potentially fatal disease to brighten my morning.   I was given new prescriptions and told and if they didn't work to come back in the morning.

I was so ill and exhausted that when my wife and I went to the local megamart to get the prescription filled I was too weak to walk around the shop to help buy groceries while the pharmacist was doing pharmacological things, so we ended up borrowing one of those little electric scooters that they keep on had for the over-eighty crowd; a practical idea, but one guaranteed to make a man of my years and appearance look a proper fool, so while my wife was filling the scooter's basket, I used the classic drunken-driver ploy and tried to avoid crashing into things so as to avoid drawing attention.

Went home.  Took new meds.  Might as well have been sugar pills. 

That night we went to bed and I wasn't in five minutes before I had the Mother of All Coughing Fits and could barely breathe.  "Okay, I said to my wife.  I go see the doc in the morning."  "No chance," says she.  "We are taking you to the emergency room."

So, it was drop off Emma with some friends and off to hospital.  If you're sole experience of casualty words (or "emergency rooms," if you're my wife) is from watching ER on television , then you'll be pleased to know that none of those I've encountered have been anything like that.  I've only caught occasional episodes of ER and its ilk and every time I do I resolve to avoid them in future.  Watching them you get the impression that modern medicine is nothing put dramatic chaos with doctors running alongside gurneys, shouting instructions at each other, and ending every other sentence with cries of "STAT!" and you can't turn around without someone pounding on a patient's chest and snarling "You're not going to die on my watch!".

In a real casualty the thing that strikes you about the place is that it is so unnervingly quiet.  It's like an insurance records office with a really weird dress code.   And running?  No one ever moves faster than a brisk walk-- and that usually means there's an artery spurting somewhere. 

But the main thing about casualty is that it is BORING.  Once you've been admitted to the exam room you spend a long time staring at the wall, then someone takes your blood pressure, you stare at the wall, someone puts in an IV, then you stare at the wall, a doctor thumps you, and so one into the wee hours of the morning.  I was never so pleased to be in a feverish haze in my life.  At least it helped to pass the time.

So, after blood samples, blood cultures, x-rays, and pumping me full of all sorts of steroids and a cough medicine that feels like 99% narcotic, what have we got?

I don't know about you, but I have not just pneumonia, but double pneumonia.  That means I'm pretty much confined to bed and chair for the rest of this week and a month's worth of recuperation.  Normally that would translate to a month's pay down the tubes, but thanks to the Internet and my laptop I can still work after this week (though at drastically reduced hours) from my bed and easy chair.

Lord, this column is reading like some sort of a brain spill.  Ah, well.  Blame it illness and medicine.  At least it doesn't read like some sort of illiterate version of Welsh. 

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