The license plate game

Since I was a kid I've played a little game when I'm a passenger in a car (or even a driver sometimes), to while away the minutes or hours. It's quite simple: find a license plate with three letters, then find a word that has those three letters, in that order, in it. They don't have to be adjacent, and it doesn't have to start with the first letter. For instance, if you see ETY, some possible words are PETTY, ESTUARY, ETYMOLOGY, and YEASTY. Standard Scrabble rules apply: dictionary words, no proper nouns.

There's no formal rules for scoring, but the best words to find are:

• As short as possible
  
• Interesting and unusual, not everyday
  
• Don't start with the first letter
  
• Avoid as much as possible having the provided letters adjacent, especially doubled letters (e.g., ANN is better solved with CANYON than BANNED)
  

Of course if you get really hard letters like EQX you'll consider yourself lucky to find any solution. Sometimes seemingly easy letters will turn out really hard; for instance, DTF took me a while to come up with DETOXIFY.

There's rarely a drive, even a short one, where I don't do this at least once. It's almost a twitch. Of course in Vermont the game is somewhat limited since the plates that are three letters and three numbers are only up to starting with F or G, so your first letter is somewhat limited.

By the way, for the pictured plate, I'd probably use BACKWARD or PACKAGE.

Socks swimming in the reservoir

My daily exercise for Socks involves a bikeride round trip of about 1.5 miles that includes a stretch up a hill and back down, which gets her pretty well exerted. After that part, which is near the middle, we stop for five minutes at a creek that's flowing into Dix Reservoir, so she can sniff, dig, do her business, drink, and since she's a lab, inevitably swim, and through all these, catch her breath before the trip home.

Dix Reservoir is a beautiful lake (pictured here) that is also the Barre town water supply. As such, it has very limited recreational use. There's one designated fishing area, plus another (near where Socks and I stop) that also allows fishing at certain times, and that's about it. No swimming, no watercraft.

While Socks isn't actually in the lake itself, she's in a creek feeding directly into it for those few minutes, so I have to be sure that this isn't in violation of the restrictions or their intent. Once, I even had one jerk (who was busily littering at the time) bitch at me for letting her swim in the reservoir -- but that he was a hypocritical jerk doesn't invalidate the question. On consideration, I'm fairly confident that letting her swim in the creek (or even the lake) violates neither the rule nor its intent, because there's two main reasons why letting people swim in the lake is a whole different thing from letting a dog swim in it.

First, a person dipped into a lake is going to release all kinds of contaminants. The person's body is covered in soaps, shampoos, skin creams, hair gel, bug spray, medicines, perfumes and colognes, tanning lotions, antiperspirant, and who knows what else. His clothes are full of even more cleaning chemicals. By contrast, the geese, beavers, deer, etc. that regularly visit the lake (you could hardly stop them) bring essentially nothing that isn't already in the lake -- what's on their fur is what's in the trees and soil and rain. A domesticated dog might not be quite as all-natural as an otter, but pretty close. Even if your dog gets bathed, it's probably once a month, not once a day, and probably involves a lot less soap that won't stick around as long, and no perfumes, tanning lotions, laundry detergent, or any of the rest. And while dogs might have a flea and tick prevention medicine or cream, that's also going to be far less than any human. A dog's impact on the water purification process will be a tiny fraction of a human's, and barely more than that of a few geese.

Second, letting a dog go for a five-minute swim a day is not going to cause a huge pack of other dogs to come cluttering the place up. But if you put up a sign allowing swimming, every sunny day you'll have a hundred humans, so that much greater impact will be multiplied by a huge number. Plus they'll be bringing their trash and failing to pack it out (or even put it in receptacles, if you provide them and send someone to empty them regularly). They'll be coming in cars which need to be parked, which means parking lot runoff and leaking car runoff, which will hurt the water purity more than everything else combined. They'll be dropping actual trash into the lake while swimming, and making plenty of messes. They'll be doing damage to water quality just through the act of erosion that far exceeds all my dog, despite her love of digging, can do in a lifetime.

So a person does many times more than a dog to the water, and allowing people would mean hundreds as many as allowing dogs, so all in all, the impact of one dog is trivial -- far less, I'd guess, than the difference caused by one extra rainfall, or one extra visit by a flock of passing geese -- while the impact of humans would be tremendous. I really don't think I need to deprive her of those five minutes of cooling off in the water. And I don't think I have to feel bad about it.

Superhero movie stew

One thing I liked about the Iron Man movies, compared to the original comic book source material, is that they make more of an effort to root themselves in the real world while still bringing along the fantastic. In the four-color comics, people throwing cars around the street is so commonplace that we focus almost entirely on the epic-scale battles between these vastly superpowered beings, with "normals" being barely more than set dressing and suitably vulnerable tokens of value to be fought over.

Tony Stark (the movie version) lives in a world that is much like ours, and reacts like ours would, but in which a very few people do some very amazing things -- amazing, but also explicable, even feasible. Yes, there are no arc reactors; but if there were a news article tomorrow about how Stephen Hawking, or the people at CERN, or even Google, had a breakthrough in energy technology, you would not conclude you were being pranked. Tony Stark's world reacts to him the way we would.

And Tony Stark's world is not (yet!) full of a dozen equally amazing and entirely unrelated origins for fantastic things. As of the end of the second movie, all the events which are beyond what our world expects are all consequences of the same set of scientific and technological advances created by a few geniuses, and a lot of people being extremely well trained in things people can actually do (Black Widow's martial arts may be better than anything you or I can imagine doing, but it's not significantly farther beyond an Olympic athlete than Tony's engineering is beyond the stuff they're doing at Sony).

We get a similar effect from the recent Batman movies, especially The Dark Knight, where the biggest plausabilty issues we have to face are logistical issues of how the villains find henchmen and funding, more than how there can be so many odd origins for "supers". Even the much-disliked Daredevil movie, which posited one almost-"supernatural" origin story for one character (but left everyone else simply "the best humans can be") stuck to a real world setting. (Its sequel, Elektra, cast that aside without realizing what it was giving up, more's the pity.)

I've always found the spandex-cape four-color version of the superhero genre a little harder to swallow, and most entertaining when it's being spoofed (as in The Incredibles or Mystery Men). It can be palatable if you provide a reason why, fairly recently, a world without "superpowers" suddenly got some, so everyone's origin stories are related, and there's a good reason why the world hasn't had a chance to react to the world-changing nature of this event by, well, changing the way it would. But if a superhero story isn't going to have that, it should just leap into its story and try to avoid dwelling on the oddity that simultaneously a bunch of people independently found amazing powers, but the world around them still remains familiar.

So as much as I've enjoyed Iron Man's recent incarnation in the movies, I'm nervous about the Avengers storyline that's clearly coming. I never read the comics, and frankly, always found the idea of Iron Man and Thor being on the same team as kind of incomprehensible, the sort of thing that works only because the writers keep the story moving too fast for anyone to stop and say WTF? But the comics-movies are heading that way.

The various Marvel-comic-based movies are all so far being treated like they're in their own universes, so no one needs to say, "wait, in one place someone's made a giant green monster with radiation and in another, someone's built a super-suit... why not get these guys together!" There's been a few tiny hints otherwise, but they're so small, things like news reports on screens in the background of shots, that you can easily ignore them. But once they change that and make it official that the Hulk and Iron Man are in the same world, things start getting wobbly. Throw Captain America and Magneto and Spiderman and the X-Men into that world, and all the previous movies start making no sense retroactively -- how could the events of any one of them not have been impacted by the existence of the others in that same world? Then, toss in an ancient Norse god, and all bets are off.

They could try to explain away all those questions, but that would likely create a big hairy pile of boring exposition that wouldn't really satisfy me, but would also drain the fun out of the movie. Or they could just strap us into the roller coaster and hope to keep us moving so fast we never got around to caring, which is the better approach, but I suspect it's still going to keep the movies from being as fun -- particularly on repeat views -- as the ones we've already had.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Avengers movie is going to be great. But I think for me, at least, the best of the comic book movies have happened, and we're on the edge of a transition into a new era of comic book movies that will be flashier and full of more gee-whiz but ultimately less satisfying and less enduring.

MAME status update

Progress report on Project MAME.

• The controller pack has been ordered, no word yet on whether it's shipped (they probably have to build them since they're so customizable).
  
• The computer itself is here and I've taken it through basic Windows setup, just enough to make sure it all works.
  
• The wireless mini-keyboard is very cute and I suspect we'll be "borrowing" it to use with netbooks -- though that'll leave me one USB port short (the keyboard and mouse share one, and the controller will take three, but if I switch to a regular keyboard and mouse, I'm one short. Reviews said that hubs don't work well with this computer, but who knows if that's true when you're just using it for a mouse and keyboard?
  
• It includes a mounting bracket to allow it to be affixed to the back of an HDTV, which is cool, but I won't be doing that. Instead, that mounting bracket will also be great for mounting it to the inside of the cabinet, up off the ground, in much the same location that the computer boards are usually mounted in original arcade games, as it happens.
  
• The computer is absolutely quiet, and runs cool. It's ideal for this application. The Wifi seems to work fine too.
  
• I haven't spent much time on it, but so far, the video quality's not too good. I can't get the built-in video to support the HD resolution that my monitor offers, which is odd -- the monitor supports all the 720 and 1080 resolutions, and the computer has an HDMI port as its default output, so it ought to be plug-and-go.
  
• I haven't installed MAME on it yet, or really done anything but walk it through the twelve billion Windows updates, enough to be sure the computer itself is okay. (Don't want to leave it in a box for two months and then find something's wrong when it's too late to return it.)
  
• I can't finalize the case plans until I have the controller, so for now, I'm just stuck waiting. I should have ordered that controller before going to the UK.
  

Screen and stage

Filmmaking evolved from live acting, so it has inherited a lot of methodology and mythology from that source. Over the years, cinematography, screenwriting, production, directing, and especially stunts and effects, have evolved away from those theatrical origins. There's no question that these arts in filmmaking are a distinct entity, certainly related to the theater yet distinct enough that no one would question that they are their own disciplines.

It seems to me that acting has not separated as much. Certainly, if you speak to actors, or those who teach acting, they'd be inclined to disagree by pointing up the many differences of technique they study for theater versus film. But I think these differences are treated far more like refinements of a common base of technique, like the differences between watercolors and oil -- or maybe more like the differences between watercolors and charcoal sketching, or watercolors and digital art. But not like the differences between watercolors and sculpture, or between watercolors and violin. But I suspect most actors who are studying acting techniques study a core set of techniques, probably for a fair amount of their education, before they even start to get into the differences in much detail.

Specifically, there's an assumption that anyone who can act in one format can probably work in the other. Certainly some actors prefer one or the other. And maybe some people are better at one than the other. Theater requires more skill at improvisation, and requires acting to be more holistic -- you have to be emoting, hitting your mark, remembering your next line, listening for your cue, dealing with props, etc. simultaneously and in real time, while in film you have some opportunities to split these things up and think about only some of them at a time. Film requires more of certain kinds of emoting and voice quality due to the close-ups and two-shots, more dynamic movement in some genres, more fluidity of dealing with a story out of sequence, and lots of adaptations to effects and cinematography considerations. But anyone who's good at one should be serviceable at the very least at the other.

Actors often assume that theater is the more unforgiving and thus more challenging. One usually assumes that a well-respected actor of the stage can do the screen with only a bit of retraining, but when an established screen actor (particularly those that seem to be getting by mostly on their looks!) tries at the stage, we wait and wonder: will they do okay (and thus prove they always had the acting chops all along) or bomb (and thus prove they were just coasting on how much "easier" film is)?

I wonder, though, if there are actors that have some genuine, powerful, rare talent for the kinds of acting you do on a screen but who suck on the stage for reasons that have nothing to do with a lack of talent, who are getting short shrift merely because of the historical legacy of acting coming from the stage. Acting is such a delicate art; no one really knows why it works when it does. How hard is it to imagine someone with an awe-inspiring talent who happens to also be very shy about people, so has their talent drain away on stage because of the proximity of the audience, not because of the more demanding timing of stage acting? Or someone whose finely detailed nuances of expression show up nicely on the two-shot but are completely lost from the third row?

What's worse is, are there people with that kind of talent, people who might be the best film actors in the world, who didn't make it that far because their initial exposure to acting usually comes from theater, or from an education that assumes learning stage acting is part and parcel of acting. Is it possible today to grow up and become an educated, trained, skilled actor without ever having to go through stage acting? And even if you did, would being terrible at the stage make you looked down on so much that an awesome talent on the screen would be overlooked?

My guess is that actors and non-actors would have opposite reactions to this post, and will chide me for being ignorant in opposite ways, and both of them would tend to assume their reaction is the only logical one to have.

Zombieland

Overall, I enjoyed Zombieland, but it felt like about a 45-minute movie padded out to two hours. They filled it out with long pauses, with set pieces that didn't always add anything, with uneven pacing, and with lots of gratuitous gore.

It's hard to be critical of the movie because it was very intentionally over the top in some things, winking at the audience, playing lots of meta-humor, and enthusiastically choosing not to take itself seriously. So any criticism risks the response, "but that was on purpose." When they went over the top on the gore, particularly in the first ten minutes, they went way over the top, pulled out all the stops, made it clear that they were doing it to make fun of the very premise of gore in this kind of movie. And yet it still went past funny into "okay, that's too much, now let's have something funny again" to me.

And that's how a lot of things in the movie felt. But there was still a lot of good stuff, enough to make it a worthwhile idle entertainment. The best parts were the characters and their interactions, and the main character's rules for survival (and how they kept coming back up). Those moments when they went over the top and spoofed themselves and did so in a brief form were also uniformly good, with some of them providing surprise laughs.

I don't know if they could have made it less uneven, given the premise, and the goal of appealing to an audience mostly made of people not much like me. I suspect that some of the over-the-top stuff would have been funnier to fans of the "serious" zombie genre (which I am not). But this wasn't just spoofing the genre (Shaun of the Dead already did that), it's more of a try at riffing on the spoof once the basic spoof has been done, and that's where some of the unevenness comes in, and that's why I don't think being a big zombie genre fan would have changed it nearly as much as you might think. I think it's just more whether you appreciate the "taking things too far" metahumor of taking a metajoke too far.

What if Jim Morrison had gotten help?

I recently watched the episode of American Masters that retold the story of the Doors, and once again I find myself thinking about those artists whose creativity seems to come from being broken. It's tempting to conclude that Jim Morrison couldn't've been all the things he was without also being on a path to destruction. Is that because his heedlessness of his impending doom was what gave him the freedom to make expressions he might not otherwise have been able to make? Was it because it was the very act of him plunging like a falling star towards an inevitable crash that made him so compelling? Or were his expressivity and his self-destruction separate effects of a common cause, whether that was an aspect of his personality, or the simple acts of indulgence?

This question came to me by a different method during the show, when it was mentioned that at one point, when things were getting bad but before they got irretrievably bad, that he went sober for a week, and his lifemate Pam urged him to get therapy, and he went to one session. I started getting all Harry Turtledove and wondered, what if he'd gotten help, and it had helped? What if he'd come out of it clean and sober?

It seems likely that in this scenario he'd probably still be alive today. (Perhaps Pam would be too.) Maybe there'd still be Doors concerts today. (Maybe he'd've dropped music and focused on his poetry, but it seems inevitable the pressure to do a reunion would eventually get to him.) But the big mystery is, could he have retained the spark that made his performances what they were? Would a clean and sober Mr. Mojo Risin' also be a boring, uninspired one? Would we be bemoaning the new Doors album the way we do so many artists that stay past their prime?

Or would Jim find some way to stay in touch with his poetry, or perhaps take it to a new level, in the post-destructive era of his life? Maybe they could keep the magic. After all, while we all recognize that Jim's spark and charisma were key to the band's appeal, one shouldn't dismiss the amount that the other band members brought to the party. Many of the songs we love were written by Jim, sure, but Robby wrote plenty of them, too. Maybe Robby could have kept things going long enough for Jim to find a new voice?

I think knowing the answer to this question would in turn shed some light on that facet of the creative process that seems correlated so highly with self-destructive tendencies. It's easy to be glib about it and brush it off with platitudes. ("The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long." Sure, but why? That's an analogy, not an explanation.) The correlation between creativity and madness, self-destruction, and being broken, doesn't even suggest which one is cause and which is effect (or if they're both effects of some common cause). If we can't even figure that out, we can't really ever understand this aspect of creativity.

(Of course, plenty of people would prefer that we never do understand creativity, but that's just the "merely" fallacy about which I've written before. Once again I'll let David Brin answer that concern: "The same folks who decry that the beauty of a rainbow is diminished if we penetrate its secrets to discover that it consists of ten trillion floating watery lenses, all brilliantly refracting, in perfect synchrony, rays from a stellar fusion pile, burning with ancient, furious constancy, millions of miles away." Or perhaps Catherine Faber: "The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.")

Watching a train wreck

Consider the TV show House. Unquestionably, House's private life is strewn with disasters in the offing, but there's never a sense that they're inevitable; one can also hope for positive outcomes and they do sometimes come. And not merely "just enough to temporarily stave off catastrophe", but genuine positive turns. In any case, the bad things in his private life are backdrop and backstory: they both demonstrate and explain the real star of the show, his irascible, curmudgeonly ways, his knack for saying what no one else can get away with saying. Plus the medical Sherlock Holmes story.

Contrast the show Nurse Jackie (which I don't watch, but I am often in the room while Siobhan watches it). The overall theme of that show is that a mostly-unlikeable (though with a few redeeming moments) character starts out on the path to imminent catastrophe, and just barely averts the worst happening. Over and over, though while still conveying a sense that it's always nearer than ever. And that's about all. She's as unlikeable as House in the sense that you wouldn't want to be her friend, but from a safe distance (the other side of a TV screen) House is likeable to watch, but not so Jackie. We're not watching her, we're watching the inevitable disaster looming towards her. That disaster is what the show is about.

I don't mean to pick on Nurse Jackie but just to use that show as a contrast to House (since they're both also medical shows). It seems as if this is the formula by which those TV shows that run on cable channels are made: unlikeable characters largely devoid of redeeming qualities, even the "always right" quality that almost justifies some of House's prickliness, with whom we sympathize only to the extent that we worry about the catastrophe they are hurtling (intentionally or not) towards. The United States of Tara is another good example: while that at least has another story (Tara figuring out why she is like she is), most of it seems to be watching the train almost go off the rails and wondering if they'll survive another day.

Even Dexter, which I do watch and enjoy a lot, uses this quite a great deal. Dexter is about a lot more than the imminent disaster that haunts him, but that is unquestionably a plot element that they play with, and have built whole seasons around. Though one big difference there: at the end of the season, when by some miraculous chain of events Dexter dodges the disaster, it's resolved. When Nurse Jackie avoids her life of lies falling to tatters today, the same threat hangs over her head tomorrow, and not even in a really new form.

Generally speaking, throwing your characters into peril and watching them narrowly escape is of course a part of almost all fiction, and has been around forever, and there's nothing wrong with it. What's key to this pattern is that that's pretty much all the show is about. It's that moment of falling off the cliff, barely catching yourself, and then a few seconds to set up the next fall, and repeat. The only reason you care about the character is that she's falling off the cliff and you would probably rather she didn't, but otherwise, you wouldn't give her a second thought; and if she did fall off, you'd figure she deserved it, too, so it wouldn't be too bad. It's like eating a big bowl of spices, without anything for them to be spicing.

Was there some greatly successful show that set the standard of watching characters plunge off the rails as a form of entertainment, explaining this trend?

Screening in the deck

I've written about the trouble I have with my dog digging up the ground next to the house and I think this problem's finally solved. Not by preventing the dog from digging; you can't really do that, save by taking away the opportunity by not leaving her outside alone, which is absurdly impractical. Some breeds of dog just need to dig, and I don't mind Socks making my lawn a bit of a warzone, as long as she's not hurting the deck or house doing it.

In the backyard, I dug up a trench alongside the house, about six inches square. Into this I put a piece of wire meld fencing, curved with the convex side facing up. I then filled the trench back in. That way, if she digs there, she hits the fencing very soon, but she's unlikely to dig in such a way as to hit the edge of the fencing. Since I did that, she's almost completely given up digging there, and the few times she has, she stopped immediately. She digs other places now. Mission accomplished.

The front yard wasn't quite as simple. First, the edge of the house is under the deck in a spot where there's mere inches of clearance, so digging there is impractical. Second, I also want to keep her from digging around the posts that hold up the deck. There's a third factor: her getting under the deck inevitably leads to her tangling herself up in her line. Here's how I solved all of these considerations:

Actually, I hired a neighbor to do the actual work of affixing the lattice pieces. He dug out a trench at the bottom of each one and attached a bit of the wire fencing to that edge, to prevent her from digging her way under the lattice.

I ended the lattice before the end of the deck because that's beyond where she can reach on her line, and that leaves the part of the deck that's highest up still available to me to use as shelter for things like the lawnmower (I've had to do this with a tarp to make room in the garage temporarily before).

While we were at it, I also put on a much stronger hoop to affix her line to. She'd been able to either pull out the eyebolts I'd been sinking into the wood, or bend them up, and either way, get free. So now I have a solid welded zinc ring, about three inches across and quite thick, affixed to a base of zinc held in with four wood-screws. If she manages to pull this out somehow, next we're going to hook her up to an SUV and see if she can win a tug of war.

Cop Out

After watching The Book of Eli on the plane, I wanted something a little lighter. So I gave Cop Out a try. This isn't something that, based on the poor reviews, I would have watched under most circumstances. But I wasn't doing anything else on the plane, so why not?

The movie is a buddy cop comedy and it sets out to be today's answer to the comic cop movies of the 1980s -- they even got the composer who did the Beverly Hills Cop movies to do a similar score for this one. There's about a half hour of good material in this movie, which mostly comprises the times they are directly alluding to other movies and their themes; and then, there's another hour and a half of movie, which ultimately fails to be either a good cop movie or a good comedy, but instead lurches back and forth between these. I don't know if I could have captured the magic in a bottle that made Fletch and Beverly Hills Cop work -- especially without Chevy Chase or Eddie Murphy to work with. I'm not sure what specifically made the balance of comedy and plot, and their interweaving, work, but then, I'm not a filmmaker. Kevin Smith thinks he could do it. Turns out he couldn't.

That said, as idle entertainment during a long flight, it's not bad. It had a few good moments and jokes scattered throughout it. Ana de la Reguera's performance was surprisingly amusing given that she got little to do and never got to speak English other than "hi" -- in part, her ferocity and conviction come across very well. Bruce Willis is coasting, but only because that's the right thing to do in this role. Tracy Morgan gets some of the best lines, but when they work, it's in spite of, not because of, his delivery -- he's perching midway between the Wayans Brothers and Eddie Murphy, and that's a bad midway point to stand at. And he's just not convincing as a seasoned cop, not at all.

Seann William Scott's character serves almost no purpose but to be annoying. They bring him in as a plot device, and then bury him after fifteen minutes of tedious stretching out of two jokes. Then when we've managed to forget about him, they dredge him back up for another ten minutes of reprising those same jokes. Turns out the second use of him as a plot device is ultimately futile: the reason they brought him out doesn't pan out, and the story advances as if he hadn't been there. Almost as if the filmmakers are pinning a light on this fact, the character gets removed in the most anticlimactic, facepalm-inspiring bit of nothing imaginable. Then they refuse to ever come back to the consequences of that moment. There's absolutely no reason not to edit him right out of the movie, except that it would come out a half hour too short that way. That's what too much of the movie is like.

In all, the movie's best laugh comes in the first ten minutes, and it's a breaking-the-fourth-wall moment that happens in the middle of a long string of deliberate quotes of other movies, buried in a meta-joke about the role of "homage" in movies. That long string of quotes itself goes on way too long and takes way too many turns into least-common-denominator-ville. Tracy Morgan really can't carry it off -- he takes the cheap path of gross exaggeration almost every chance he gets. It's a great laugh to play with Bruce Willis's character not recognizing a catchphrase from one of the best-known Bruce Willis franchises, but it's also the kind of cheap joke that earns the filmmakers no credit at all.

I also found the final scene a great letdown. What I suppose we were meant to see as a comeuppance for a pompous, pretentious character actually comes off as a compeletely unjustifiable and unfair dirty trick. Bruce's character agrees to do something -- he wasn't forced to at gunpoint, so he must have done so because he felt like he had to -- and then in the last moment someone else arranges that he simply gets to back out of that agreement. There's nothing in how it was done that actually changes anything about why he agreed, so it's just a roundabout way of having him refuse again. It is, both from the perspective of the characters and of the writers, a cop-out.

But I suppose that's okay, since the movie is named that. In fact, all the movie's shortcomings are cop-outs, but since the movie is named that, maybe we can forgive them all. Unless that, too, would be a cop-out. Maybe it is. And maybe we should forgive that one, too.

If you're ever trapped on a plane and there's nothing better than this, watch it. Otherwise, watch the first ten minutes, then go watch Beverly Hills Cop again. You'll enjoy it more, and even if you've seen it ten times, it'll still have more suspense.

The Book of Eli

On the flight back from the UK, since the airline provided a number of free movies, I passed the time watching a couple, to save battery power in the Archos for the seven-hour layover. (Turns out Siobhan didn't use the Archos at all on the trip back, though.) The first one I watched was The Book of Eli.

I'm going to try to avoid spoilers, but most of what I'll say won't spoil plot elements, only things about the premise and very general stuff. (There'll be a bit at the end that discusses an unambiguously spoilerish revelation, though, but I'll warn you before that comes.) Still, if you are sure you want to see the movie it might be best to stop here, just to be absolutely careful.

Boy, was this a moody, atmospheric piece. In some ways, it reminded me of Children of Men: grim and dark, set in a sort of post-apocalyptic world, and using in some cases similar cinematographic techniques. There are even scenes which are directly reminiscent, such as a scene near the end with a wounded character paddling a tiny boat through a misty body of water towards presumed hope. There are thematic similarities, too; both stories tell of a journey undertaken by someone who is protecting a new hope from the world since lost that might be the world's restoration.

In a much more complete and overt way, though, this was a story about faith. As someone who does not have faith, and who considers Dan Barker's maxim a profound truth ("Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits."), this could have been annoying. But it really wasn't. The film's creators probably intended the movie as a moving testament to the power of faith, intended to teach us all a lesson. Religious people watching it probably feel like it's going to help strengthen faith, and challenge those of us without it.

But it really doesn't. The movie is simply set in a world where that faith works: where there are, eventually, demonstrable results to having had it. It proves nothing more than me writing a story which starts out with one character saying "if you always wear a pink pixie pin, eventually a pink pixie will give you a grilled cheese sandwich," and being doubted by everyone around him, and at the end of the story, a pink pixie gives him a grilled cheese sandwich, thus proving him right. Sure: if he'd succumbed to doubt and taken off the pin, he wouldn't've gotten the sandwich. But all this tells you about is the state of mind in the imagination of the author. It's no great revelation that faith only lasts until it stops, and if it turns out to be, by coincidence, right, happening to stand by it turns out by coincidence to have been a good choice. But that's all it proves. I feel no more motivated to be religious after watching this than I was after watching Dogma, or than I felt like taking up the techniques of the Force after watching Star Wars. I don't live in the world of those movies.

Nor does that fact impede my ability to enjoy those movies. There weren't even many moments when The Book of Eli got preachy, either, despite the message throughout. It mostly stuck to the story which was full of interesting turns and explorations. It was slow, but not in a bad way. The long, lingering shots of clouds really seemed to contribute something for once; though they looked like someone being too artsy and pretentious, they were the exception that proves the rule, that sometimes that actually does something, that all those artsy pretentious people are at least trying to do something real (even if 99% of the time they fail to do so).

The action was surprisingly compelling even when it was over the top and even though there wasn't nearly as much of it as the trailers made it seem. The explorations of this post-apocalyptic world were even more interesting, and the movie avoided the pitfall of so many post-apocalypse movies, where the first half hour exploring how you survive in this world is the best part, and then the "actual story" that follows is a comparative let-down (I Am Legend was a particularly bad example there). Here, they were spread out through the whole movie, and the "actual story" was also interesting. About the only place where the movie fell into that pattern was in the end, when the "place of hope" I alluded to earlier was simply presented with little explanation -- but even there, the explanation wasn't particularly needed, and would likely have been a distraction from the point. We just don't really know much about the apocalypse, so it seemed a little convenient.

One odd thing that gradually emerged from the movie is how Denzel's character is supposed to be old. He's referred to at many points as "old man" by other characters, but I took it as just something about how people in that world call each other. It later comes out that the apocalypse is supposed to have been thirty years earlier, and he was, presumably, an adult at that time, so he's supposed to be at least fifty. But while Denzel himself is, in fact, in his 50s, he sure doesn't look it, and especially in this movie. He looks decidedly less grizzled or rumpled than many of the people calling him "old man". So while I can buy that he simply ages well (after all, if Denzel can, why not Eli? even if Denzel's got a better life than Eli, Eli has his advantages too), I can't buy that everyone around him recognizes him on sight as an "old man".

Denzel gets a lot of credit for being a great actor. Well deserved, I'm sure. This was not a movie to really show that off. His character is a great character, and in particular, he's got a level of confidence (without being swagger) that is breathtaking. Surrounded by gunmen, he is as matter-of-fact as can be that he'll be walking out as he declines the "invitation" he's being given at gunpoint, and then turns and walks away as casual as you like. You love the character, but really, Denzel isn't stretching here. There's nothing he could have done better; there's just not much that required an actor of his caliber.

There are not many laughs in this movie. And most of them that do come are so tiny that repeating them would make the movie sound awful. But in the middle of the mood they're occuring in, they are very impactful, eliciting those odd kinds of laughs that are as much out of relief as amusement, and that don't really break the feel of the scenes around them, just sharpen them through contrast. There are more than a few moments when it seems impossible for the story to continue, and then it does anyway, and (apart from the general tone of Eli being inexplicably bad-ass) few of these come off as contrived or unbelievable. And there are quite a few moments of potent emotion: fear, triumph, and bittersweet mixtures of these and other things.

The one big spoiler follows after the break. Stop now!

At the very end, it is "revealed" that Eli has been blind the entire movie. The IMDB trivia page claims that when you go back through the movie, there are clues throughout about this. It does answer one thing that I had earlier thought was a little filmmaking mistake -- the time he feigned having left his glasses inside to trap Solara, and was outside without them and with his eyes open.

But I wonder, if I go back and re-watch the whole movie, will I really buy that he was able to do everything he did? Even if you buy the myth that blind people develop superior hearing and other senses (they actually just get better at paying attention to them, but they gain no actual acuity), I have a hard time believing that I won't find moments where there's no way he could have known something he clearly knew. A few of these jump right out at me as possibilities already. Maybe if I watched it I'd be able to plug them all, but I doubt it. I think we'd have to conclude that the voice in his head -- presumably God -- was telling him things all along. In which case, him being blind really doesn't matter much, does it?

All in all, I felt that this revelation was a let-down. The whole point of it, apart from the artsy element of making him a "blind prophet" and thus following in the historical and mythological precedent of Tiresias and others, was that the book was in Braille all along, so Carnegie could never have used it. (And yet, one of his coterie was a blind woman who knew Braille -- or so I took it from the look on her face during the brief moment she touched the book. So it being in Braille isn't even why he couldn't read it; it was only because his injuries and losses by that point had undermined his power to force her to read it for him.) This would have been just as well served by having Eli being sighted and still able to read Braille. In a way, that would be cooler -- a "failsafe" to his protection of the book.

This is by no means a slight against the blind, or any other form of disability or handicap. It's just that, as a storytelling device, making him turn out to be blind but making this a surprise puts too much strain on the story. It's like the surprise at the end of The Sixth Sense done wrong. In The Sixth Sense, the moment you got it, you realized with a sudden rush that it was absolutely true, unquestionably, that it explained so many things, that it all fit. But at the moment of revelation in The Book of Eli, you just feel (or at least I just felt) dubious that it really works, that the movie would still make sense. While it might turn out that I could explain every scene if I rewatched it, there's no sense of the inevitability, no reaction of "of course he was blind, it all makes sense now" like that in The Sixth Sense.

Then again, maybe this is another point about faith. Maybe those with faith would feel like the revelation works perfectly and don't need to go back to rewatch the movie to verify that. Maybe only those of us who find doubt and proof more meaningful than "blind" (pun intended) faith are the only ones who'd find this a less than satisfying resolution. If so, did the moviemakers set out to undermine the movie's apparently-intended (but ultimately doomed) message about faith specifically amongst the people they most wanted to (but never could) reach with it?

I don't think I care nearly enough to go watch the movie's commentary tracks to see if they talk about this. I'm not even sure I care enough to rewatch the movie to see if the blindness thing works. I'm happy I watched it, but I don't know that watching it again would be worth the cost of whatever else I might have done with those two hours. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.

Credit card fraud

While we were in the UK we were using a particular credit card (provided by Chase and linked to our Amazon account, such that purchases on it got us free Amazon gift cards) in order to simplify the handling of British currency and to help me make the costs of the trip fit into our budget (by spreading out paying for it a little). We don't use the card very often; most of the year it's only used for Amazon purchases and paid off immediately, just to get those gift certificates, so many months go by without it being used at all. But in the last couple of weeks it's been used a lot -- first, to cover some unexpected expenses associated with the car damage and repair, and then for the trip. Those latter ones were unusual in that, since we couldn't tell the currency conversion rate that would be in effect at any given moment, nor the foreign transaction fees, I couldn't record the transactions as I went; I just had estimates, and intended to transcribe from the online activity into my register on getting home.

When we went through the mail, we found a curious thing. Apple sent us an invoice for iPhone 3GS repair, already paid. Note that we don't own an iPhone and never have. On closer examination we noticed that the invoice showed our address (but with a different name) on the Bill To, but a different address, of a woman in Massachusetts, on the Ship To. The transaction was for $29 and was dated the day before we left. And sure enough, there was a $29 item in my activity on that very same credit card.

Normally a transaction like that would jump out at me since there wouldn't be anything else there, or just one or two. But due to the fantastic coincidence of the timing, it was buried in scores of transactions, and even the total balance being a number I didn't expect wasn't a sign of anything wrong since I had no idea what balance to expect.

There are many puzzling things about this. First, how did this woman manage to get our credit card number and address. Second, even though this is a transaction for a repair, it must have been done online (she didn't have the physical card!), so shouldn't she also have needed the CCV code? Third, is there anything to the coincidental timing of this happening when it did? (If it had happened after we left, everyone would assume the card got lifted while travelling, even if that assumption wasn't true.) And fourth, perhaps biggest of all, this woman got our credit card number and address, but all she could think to do with it is a $29 charge on something where we would then get an invoice... an invoice that has her home address on it?

Apple was little help. One hopes that, while they wouldn't tell us anything, they're at least flagging the woman's account. If the iPhone is in their repair center, presumably she won't get it back. If not, maybe they can disable it remotely.

The police have been even less help. They're supposed to call us back. A day later they haven't yet. You'd think that, given we have the woman's name and address, this would be something to jump on. Maybe that it's only $29 makes them less interested.

Chase was quite helpful in their way. They credited us the $29 immediately and without question, though they warned us the vendor might try to resubmit it and we might have to re-dispute it. However, they seemed little concerned about the fact that not only did this person have our credit card number but also our address and possibly CCV. They made it out like this was probably a "transposed digits" problem, and we had nothing to worry about. I insisted, and they closed the account and issued new cards which we should get in a few days.

Unfortunately this meant I could no longer access the account activity since the web site no longer shows me the now-closed account. So I had no way to get all those transactions settled up in my records. Eventually we were able to get Chase to fax (not email, they wouldn't do that) the transactions, and I had to do a lot of squinting and cross-referencing to get the dollar amounts and match everything up. But I have only estimates on a few of the transactions that hadn't finished clearing. (I wonder if those transactions will carry through, as they were authorized before the closure, or if they'll get stopped, and we'll have to re-pay those people eventually.)

I also have to muse about the coincidence that the last time we travelled, we returned home and spent a lot of the day we intended to spend recovering from our travel dealing with a fraudulent transaction -- that time it was on PayPal, and in both cases, the fraud had nothing to do with the travel, the timing was just coincidental. But I'm going to be superstitious about it next time we travel.

A nice day for a white wedding

Now that I'm back home and back in the swing of things, it's time to catch up on what happened on the UK trip after I could no longer keep up with posting to my blog from there: that is, the day of the wedding.

I struggled to find a way to pack our things on the previous day so that we could do the next morning's clothes change, then change into the wedding stuff at the venue (possibly in a tight space without easy access to the luggage), then change back before heading on, then into night clothes that evening, then into the outfit we'd wear for the trip back. That's because we were leaving too early to put off the packing until that morning -- mostly to satisfy Siobhan's paranoia about being late. (Despite several amusing mishaps, still to come, we were the first to arrive at the hotel.)

The train trip to Marsden was pretty straightforward despite two train changes, and the luggage wheel breaking off again -- the makeshift fix didn't last, oh well. Before we'd left, I'd gone online to search for taxis in Marsden. The only hit I found was one called "Marsden Taxi" so I noted their phone number, in case when we got to the train station, there wasn't a taxi break or any listings posted. And there weren't, so we called. The guy there seemed puzzled at the idea, and had no idea where the train station was in Marsden; the conversation was so confusing and unhelpful that a friendly, helpful passerby took the phone from Siobhan and tried to talk to the people at the other end for us, figuring it was an accent or culture problem, only to find even he couldn't make sense of the guy on the other end. Eventually, he concluded they'd be there in about ten minutes, and left our phone number.

Twenty minutes later, we called, to find them saying "that's too far away, we're not coming." When I look into it now, it seems that Marsden Taxi is not actually that close to Marsden: it's in Nelson, west of Leeds. So indeed they are too far away: one wonders why they are named for a town they're not even close to. Maybe it's a family name. I suppose the website I'd searched on made the same mistake. But what's most ridiculous is that the people there couldn't explain this and didn't bother to call us back to tell us they weren't coming.

Fortunately, the pub across from the train station (named "The Railway") was open, and they were related to someone who owns a taxi company in the next town over, so we got a taxi in short order and made our way to the hotel. There, we had two hours to kill in a lounge, after the owner tried to charge us a night's room lodging just to use their bathrooms to change into our wedding clothes -- the woman who runs the weddings quickly put that right, but in all, the hotel's owner was eager to find anything at all to charge anyone for.

Other than that, it was a nice enough venue. The weather, which had been perfect our whole trip, had changed to windy and threatening to rain, so we decided to have the wedding indoors, in a rather nice room called the Stone Room. There wasn't any food at the pre-wedding reception after all, so our decision not to have lunch on the way started to seem like a bad idea. At the last minute, the bride decided to risk the rain and have the ceremony outdoors.

The ceremony itself was interrupted by the occasional bit of goofing about or a stumble here or there, but nothing that had the slightest negative effect on the whole. It really came out lovely. Siobhan is nervous about public speaking usually, but all that fell away and her delivery of the ceremony was nearly perfect, with great intonation and projection. Not bad considering she hadn't started rehearsing until the train ride over! Both groom and bride started crying a bit during their vows. I think they found excused to kiss maybe three or four times before the "you may now kiss the bride" moment. And the rain held off throughout.

Then came the endless photography where every one of the 2²⁵-1 combinations of guests had to be arranged and photographed. This got cut off midway through due to the rain gradually picking up, so many of the photos were done later, or indoors.

Then came the "wedding breakfast" -- this is what they call it even though it happened at 4:30 and looked just like a dinner. It was during this that we had the toasts. I'd been rehearsing my best man speech for days; in keeping with my speech style, I had written a full speech, word for word, with no intent of actually delivering it, but instead went from an outline (which I never actually looked at). Instead, I improvised it, and it never came out the same, but this kind of improvisation requires me to also have written it beforehand to work.

I started out very rocky for the simple reason that, since my speech wasn't first, I couldn't prepare for it. If I had been, in the minute before my speech, reviewing how I was going to start, it would have been smooth as silk. But that would have required not really listening to the speeches before mine, and that would be rude. So when it was my turn, I wasn't entirely ready, and my first two or three sentences were slow, fumbling, and stilted. Then I got the rhythm and the rest of the speech went very well. Laughs at the funny bits, which were spaced out well, and a few improv bits bouncing stuff off the other guests. It wasn't a hallmark of public speaking or anything, but it went just about how I wanted it to, apart from those first few lines.

The "breakfast" ended with the cutting of the cake, but somehow, the serving of the cake never happened, so we never got to try any. The cake itself was beautiful and I can't wait to post a picture of it. Instead of the usual stacked tiers, it had three tiers that were separated from one another and joined by little plastic stairways. The bridesmaids were on the lowest and largest tier, with a big bouquet; the best man and maid of honor on the middle tier; and the bride and groom on the top tier. Too bad we never got to have any. Maybe it eventually got served hours later after we left.

By the time we got into the reception, and other guests started to arrive, and the DJ arrived, we were all getting quite tired, and I was also getting very uncomfortable, having been in a tuxedo for many hours. Those shoes are pretty awful, the pants were quite uncomfortable, and perhaps worst of all, not being able to wear a hat for hours gives me a headache, and the headache was in full force just as the DJ decided it was a crime that people could still barely hear each other over the music, and heroically decided to set the situation right. And being an inherently antisocial creature surrounded by about 80 people, of whom I knew about a half-dozen, I was having a tough time of it. I feel bad about not being part of Al and Janice's party, but I really couldn't do anything else but go sit in a corner and wait.

We left around 9:30, with the party still going strong and likely to go on until the wee hours. They'd only just started putting out the buffet and Al got us a few to-go containers full of nibblies to take on the taxi. We left as "early" as we did (though that was actually quite a bit later than we'd originally intended to leave) because we had an early start on a very long day the next day -- we had to be at the airport early to secure seats, and besides, no matter how early you go to bed and how desperately you need a full night's sleep before heading into a marathon of 20+ hours of travel, Suri's not going to sleep past 6, and I'm not going to be able to sleep after she wakes up when we're sharing a small hotel room.

No dealing with taxis and trains on the way back, thankfully. A local taxi company had a flat rate to get to the airport which was less than the cost of the train tickets, let alone the train tickets plus taxi fare, and the driver was amusing -- a "cheeky monkey" -- who kept up with Siobhan in the stream of patter they exchanged the whole trip. The hotel was fine (despite a vending machine that stole four pounds from me trying to get a diet Coke), their shuttle service was efficient, and we managed all the luggage shuffling.

The flights back were not nearly as draining for me as the ones heading out. Part of that was a longer layover, and getting to do the harder trip first, before my knee was aching. I also learned from the previous trip and did a better job handling my carry-on. It can't have hurt that we got to the airport without having had any long drives or large struggle with packing to do beforehand. Customs was lengthy but no real trouble. That long layover was pretty boring, especially since JFK does not have free wifi and its restaurant choices weren't great and were overcrowded; that it was 97 degrees outside didn't help either, as the air conditioning couldn't keep up with it. The final flight to Burlington was at a time when we were dragging pretty badly, but otherwise it went fine, and I even had that rare luxury, an armrest on the aisle that went up. In all, despite the crazy-long layover and the way the time zone change hit us, the trip home wasn't too bad. And it's nice to be home, in my own bed, on my own sofa, with my dog, and no luggage to lug.

Reviving a dormant movie franchise

A movie, or series of movies, comes out and is popular and well-received, then after it's played out, many years pass. Long after, another movie is made which is not a reboot or remake, but another chapter in the same story (usually a sequel, sometimes a prequel). Has it ever happened that this movie, which revives a dormant franchise, was well-received?

In recent years, I can think of four times that this has been done. The most notorious, of course, is the three Star Wars prequels. But in this case, we can very plainly see reasons why the second set of movies don't live up to the first, though there's debate about which of the reasons are most telling. (To my mind, the biggest problem with them is that something about how George Lucas works seems to thrive on the limitations he used to have to endure. His actual vision was something which was ponderous and ham-handed, but he couldn't achieve it. By happy chance, the effort of forcing himself to fit into what was technically possible forced him to avoid the more indulgent excesses and replace them with more human moments, which connected all the grand mythology back to the audience. Without those constraints, he goes off on self-indulgent castle-building and never remembers to bring us along.)

Another recent example is Terminator: Salvation. James Cameron says the franchise is played out, and in a way he's right, but it never stopped him. T2 already forced him to outgrow the premise of T1, and T2 was still a great movie. T3 was better than people gave it credit for, but still a pale shadow of its predecessors, in large part because it tried to stay too close to the formula of T1 and T2. Wisely, Terminator: Salvation steered away from that formula and became an entirely new movie set in the same history but with a different feel, a different tone, and a different story. Unfortunately, that story didn't quite come together as well as it could; the movie was entertaining but the story itself was kind of forgettable. I think it's possible to write interesting stories in that world which are not retreads of the first two movies, but Salvation didn't really prove my point.

The fourth Indiana Jones movie ranks about the same: it was an entertaining movie, but a bit forgettable. People tend to point at the execrable refrigerator scene, but that's not what was wrong with it. Had the movie been good, we would have forgiven it, the way we forgave the corny deus ex machina that ended the first movie. But the fourth movie made many of the same mistakes as the second, and the good things about it are too easy to overlook when thinking of the bad things.

I never saw Wall Street and won't likely see the new sequel, but I wonder if it might be that contrary example. The timeliness of the sequel, the appropriateness of how Michael Douglas's character's aging fits the timeline instead of being a problem to be solved, and fact that it's a non-genre film might exempt it from the pattern we're seeing from the previous examples.

But is there a pattern or is this not significantly different from how sequels rarely live up to their originals? Is there any case where a long gap between movies didn't produce a markedly inferior movie?

I sure hope Tron Legacy proves the answer is yes. The trailers look great.

Interpreting dice rolls dramatically

When you're GMing a roleplaying game you will often need to make your players make dice rolls for skill checks and challenges. Following the rules usually leads to a fairly static set of possible outcomes. If you're trying to drive across town quickly, a low roll means you get there at such-and-such a speed (or don't get there at all), a high roll means at some other speed. Period.

But if you're playing a more drama-based game with looser rules, you need a different guideline for how to interpret rolls, and there's a very simple one. The worst roll should produce the worst outcome that still lets the story progress in a satisfying way. The best roll should produce the best outcome that still lets the story progress in a satisfying way.

For instance, you're driving across mid-day traffic through downtown to rush to where the bomb is, and there's only minutes to spare before the terrorists will be able to program the launch codes to detonate the bomb, destroying the whole city. There's no other way to stop it but to get there. Now it's up to the wheelman to make his Drive roll. If he rolls badly... "Well, you didn't get there in time, the bomb blows up, and everyone dies" is just no fun.

The worst outcome that still is satisfying probably means you get there literally at the last possible moment, and along the way, you bashed up your vehicle, injured the passengers, wrecked some of their gear, picked up a cordon of police chasing you, and maybe did some damage to city landmarks along the way which you'll have to deal with later. So, that's what that roll should be. Something which lets the story continue, and even adds interesting complications, which gives the characters a tactical disadvantage, but doesn't end the challenge entirely.

Does that drain away the suspense? I don't know: when you watch an action movie, does the fact that the heroes are likely to survive and even triumph, one way or another, drain the suspense? No, because it's not just about the final score, but also about how we got there, and what it cost to get there.

In the same way, a roll that's too good can just as easily render the story anticlimactic. A lucky hit that kills the villain early into the story can really be a bummer. Don't take away a victory, earned either through skill or luck; just change it to a victory that lets the story continue. Hurt the villain, give the characters an advantage in their next meeting, and the villain more reason to hate them. Reveal a key clue about what the villain is doing in the way the villain escapes to continue his plan. Ensure someone else will be able to carry on the plan in the villain's absence. Just keep the story going.

Though it's important not to let yourself be blinded by this. Sometimes the story resolution that the characters and the dice bring is better than the one you had in mind, even if it cuts the story off short. If the outcome would be better in the movie, go with it. I once had a GM steal a tremendously dramatic, character-changing moment caused by a really good roll on a very risky move, in order to preserve a different ending that probably sounded good on paper, and was bigger and splashier, but less impactful than the one he threw away, and it really undermined my appreciation for that game thereafter.

But the important thing is to keep your goal in mind. If you're running the kind of game where your goal is a dramatic, exciting, satisfying story (which is usually the kind I run), make your dice rolls serve that just like you make everything else serve that. Just remember, players aren't rolling to succeed or fail. They're rolling for the difference between the best and worst outcome that still keeps the story interesting. Calibrate your interpretations accordingly and you'll find preparing adventures is a lot easier, and running them a lot more successful.

District 9

Before watching it, I had only a vague notion of what to expect from District 9, and I think that was for the best. I did know that it wasn't a "feel good hit of the summer" kind of movie, and that it was going to cover harsh depictions of harsh subject matter. (I wasn't quite prepared for how much visually gross stuff there was, though, but that didn't bother me much -- it was never even slightly egregious). And I also knew that it was critically acclaimed, in part for achieving so much with a shoestring budget and no major studios backing it, but also just because it was a well-made film.

There's not a lot one can say about the movie without spoilage. This is not the kind of movie where you won't want to be spoiled because of the reveal of some big mystery. However, it's the kind of movie where you simply won't know where the story is going to go, and you'll appreciate it more if you stay that way until you're being taken there. So all I'll say above the break is that it's a very well made movie and well worth watching, but probably don't watch it on a day where you just want some light entertainment. Spoilers below.

I had heard that a lot of the movie draws some sharp parallels to specific incidents in South Africa (which led to the country having some sharp words to say about it), but coming in, I chose intentionally to not look for them, to not think too hard about them, to let the story wash over me as it was. I suppose if I rewatch the movie one day I'll start drawing some parallels. They're not too hard to see -- I read that the slums in the movie were real slums in the Johannesburg area, and the residents were being evicted just like in the film at the time of filming, and some of them were still there during filming. But I felt like watching for those things during the movie would pull me out of the story, so I elected not to.

It's really amazing how the main character changes over the course of the movie without there ever being a step that doesn't seem to happen in a very natural, believable way, in a way that makes you feel like you might do the same if forced into the same situation. It's remarkable how fluidly this happens despite the movie having a lot of other ground to cover along the way. Kudos to both the actor (who, apparently, didn't even intend to be an actor) and the director.

Surprisingly some aspects of the movie seem set up for a sequel that I suspect is not coming. They even give us an excuse for the sequel to be given the otherwise-nonsensical, but obvious, title District 10. Really, the movie just doesn't come across as the kind of movie that would have a sequel. Yet there are some dangling plot threads that point squarely at one -- notably Christopher's claim that he'd be back in three years, and to a lesser extent, the ending's suggestion of Wickus's fate. But there's no indication I've heard that anyone involved is even working on a sequel.

Perhaps that sequel is why the movie sets up the mystery of who the aliens are and then never answers it. It's a howlingly big mystery: an alien ship with technology far beyond ours, yet populated by malnourished, disorganized aliens who seem bent on rooting through trash and squabbling with one another. Is it some kind of prison ship gone wrong? A medical problem that crippled the ship's crew? Were they just playing at being uncivilized, uncouth near-savages? Are they truly a caste-system-like biology and we were seeing a drone or worker caste without its leadership gone amok? So many possible answers, and it feels like this is not the kind of question where the answer wouldn't matter so they don't distract us from the real story by dwelling on it -- it seems entirely germane to the question of Christopher's plan, and what was really going on all along.

That mystery being teased and then left unanswered is the only thing I found unsatisfying. Otherwise, I felt the story held together, and more than that, sustained something that's hard to do in a movie like this -- I almost never could see where it was going next. About the only part you could see coming was in the middle, where recovering the fluid required a break-in (and I guessed it would be more "frontal assault" than "heist") and you could glimpse that this might be leading towards a resolution. (And yet, it didn't really lead towards that resolution. And yet, it did. And yet, it didn't. This movie never lets you take much of anything for granted.)

Speaking of that break-in scene, tomorrow when I get to work, I'm amending our security policy to say that we suspend accounts and change passwords not just when an employee leaves, but also, any time he becomes a human/alien hybrid. (Better throw in zombie, cyborg, and vampire, just to be sure.) You'd think MNU would have thought to have that in their policy. I bet their IT manager gets a stern talking-to.

Mind the gap

As predicted, Saturday's been a quiet day with a light load, leaving us plenty of time to rest up and get ready for the non-stop flurry of activity that's about to start.

About all we did was a visit to the National Railway Museum. It's a very nice museum and you can't beat the entry price (free!). It's a huge space, or rather several huge spaces, converted from old rail garages and roundabouts and such, crammed full of trains, scores of them. It would probably have been breathtakingly cool if I hadn't just been to the Smithsonian museums a half-year ago. I think I may be a little bit transportation-and-technology-museumed out. In any case, it's not fair to judge any museum by a comparison to the Air and Space Museum, but NRM really does surprisingly well even judged in that harsh light. I was just a little too tired to really revel in it.

We were thinking of making one more outing to do some clothes shopping, but so tired were we that we ended up just heading back, with a stop at Red Chilli again for lunch -- with enough leftovers for dinner, too.

This leaves us plenty of time for pre-packing and flat-cleaning, which is good because we have an early start tomorrow. We have a one-hour train ride, and the wedding reception starts at 1:30pm; so logically, we have to get up around 7:30am and be out of the flat by 9am, so we can be early to arrive at the train station for a trip that lets us arrive even earlier at the hotel. So we can be hurried and have time pressure in the morning. So I have to do my best to pre-pack today so we have very little to do in the morning -- which is challenging, and makes everything a lot more work, due to the number of things that are needed until the last morning.

Making things more complex, we also have to bring our wedding outfits along and be prepared to get changed after arrival. No way I can get into a tuxedo first thing in the morning and wear it for hours and on the train before we even arrive. So I need to pack for the flight out, but also be prepared for no less than three changes of clothes and two showers to happen in between the packing and the flight.

The flight... don't remind me about the flight. Thankfully we don't have a train ride the morning of the flight, since we have an overnight at a motel at the airport. But then we have two and a half hours checking in, followed by a seven and a half hour flight. At least that one won't be the overnight flight -- because it's impossible to sleep on those. Hopefully it'll be a lot less uncomfortable to do it during the day (by the body clock) than overnight. After that, we have a seven hour layover at JFK. On the upside, that gives us absolutely no worries about the amount of time we'll spend going through customs and re-checking-in. On the downside... that's a bloody long layover. I hope we can find some comfortable seating near a power outlet. It'll be like making base camp. We should have brought a tent. (Imagine the way airport security would react to that.)

In between, of course, there'll be the wedding. I've been rehearsing my best man speech. I wrote it out, but I won't be reciting it: writing it is just a way to affix it in my mind, but I'll be able to improvise it from the outline and from my many runthroughs. Siobhan's got a lot more to cover, and has to do it from a script, but I don't think she has to memorize it; she'll be able to read along as she goes. That none of this will have been rehearsed as a group makes me worried: it's a production involving a lot of people, and no one's even tested out the cues. Guess that's not my problem though; I've done all my best-man duties.

All of these things in the coming days are why you probably won't be hearing more from me until I'm safely recovered back in Vermont. Instead, after this post appears, my blog will go back to scheduling publication of posts I wrote two weeks ago or so. I don't even remember what they'll be about. Hopefully they'll be more interesting than this rambling travelogue has been!

Adventures in merchantry

The place: York. The time: Friday. The mission: exchange time and money for entertainment and goods. The outcome: only partially successful.

One unexpected success: We dropped off the suitcase in the morning at a small luggage shop, and in afternoon, picked it up, repaired, for only £5. They didn't think they'd be able to, since the sizes of parts used in the US are different from everywhere else (of course!) but they were able to force a fix in. The repaired wheel doesn't turn quite as easily as the others, but it'll certainly get us home.

One unexpected 'failure' (so to speak): Despite several hours browsing Newgate Market, the Shambles, Coppergate Centre, Marks & Spencer, and other shopping venues, we actually bought nothing. Suri picked up some yarn, but Siobhan and I came away with nothing. I suppose it's not really a failure to not have spent money we could certainly stand to use elsewhere! At the same time, I was hoping Siobhan would find something she liked, since she enjoys that. And we do have enough budgeted for her to buy a few pretty things for herself. She just didn't see any she liked.

We'd actually put off most of this shopping until today just because of the farmer's market, only to find that there wasn't one today. But on arriving at Newgate Market, we found that despite the lack of the farmer's market, there was quite a lot of produce, meat, and fish to be bought, and now we wish we'd come here at the beginning of the week. It wouldn't entirely have displaced the supermarket trip, but it would have gotten us better food, and what remained might have been shuntable to a local pharmacy ("chemist") which would have been a lot easier to get to.

The food explorations of the day were a mixed bag. For breakfast, we checked off another one of the "English experience" checklist items: a "full English breakfast". That is, eggs, sausage, rashers (bacon), beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, blood pudding, toast, and marmalade. Siobhan and I shared one (and even at that, we left behind some of the beans and tomato, and most of the mushrooms). My conclusion: there's nothing mystical about that particular combination that synergizes or anything. Blood pudding's okay, but nothing I'd miss if I didn't have it. I like bacon well enough, and the sausage was okay, and I always like eggs and toast. The other things that we rarely have at breakfast didn't really add anything, or feel like they fit in, to me.

Lunch was going to be at the Danish Kitchen, but on getting there, we found it not nearly that appealing. The food didn't seem that fresh and nothing really seemed appealing. The most appetizing things were also ordinary, familiar things like BLTs. So we went out wandering and ended up at a carvery. We should have shared a single plate, though I bet they wouldn't've allowed that (given that, apart from the meat, everything is 'all you can eat' -- though that everything is mostly veggies, potatoes, salad, and the like). The pork was very tender and everything was fairly tasty, but nothing special, and nowhere near the costs. But when it comes to costs, £3.50 (thats about $5) for a pint (that's 16 ounces) of Diet Pepsi is something that should only be said by people wearing a pirate's hat and eyepatch. (I decided to just have water.)

Dinner is going to be a reprise of last night's dinner at Red Chilli, that is, reheated leftovers.

In between all the shopping outings, we stopped by the Merchant Adventurer's Guildhall. This is a building that dates to the 13th century (and has been in the same ownership the entire time), and is the guildhall for the Merchant Adventurer's Guild -- that is, a guild of merchants (the "adventurer" part is more analogous to the word "venture" as used in the phrase "venture capital" than it is to the way we use "adventurer" these days, though trading goods between seaports was certainly rife with danger, from weather, pirates, and bankruptcy, to name a few).

The guildhall is an impressive bit of architecture and history, and is filled with an interesting bunch of things, such as banners of various guilds, lots of silver and art, an evidence chest dating to the 13th century, some stained glass with rich provenance, and other goodies. The audio tour and displays tell the tale of how guilds and merchantry worked from the 13th century to the present, and how shifts in politics affected them, all very interesting stuff, though for Siobhan and me, mostly stuff we already knew. All in all, it took us about an hour, with us taking our time and being as complete as we felt like. So while I enjoyed the visit, £5 seems a bit much for it.

We all returned a little early to the flat to rest, take some baths, and try to work off the accumulated fatigue, foot-ache, and back-ache (and in my case, knee-ache) from all our travelling around. Not sure how much we'll do Saturday -- probably the rail museum, but more than that, I don't know what. Might be a light day to help us prepare for the big press of the following days. Sunday we check out here, take the train to Marsden, go to the wedding, then another train ride to Manchester and checking in at an overnight stay. Monday starts another two-day air travel adventure, including a seven-hour layover in JFK. So if Saturday ends up a light day, that might be for the best.

Home and Garden -- the God issue

Thursday's exploration in York focused on two places: York Minster, and the gardens at Yorkshire Museum. Along the way there was a bit of shopping (including a new SD card for my camera, a bookstore, and some pastries), and a lunch at Wacker's.

I had Yorkshire pudding and bangers and mash -- thus checking off two more must-have British experience meals at once. The pudding was in the shape of a bowl as far across as from the tip of my pinky to the tip of my thumb when I spread my fingers; it took up most of the plate. It was full of three sausages swimming in a brown gravy full of onion pieces. The mash was on the side with more of the gravy and onions. It took several iterations of eat, digest, eat, digest before I got through enough of it to feel like it was okay to stop there (I did leave about half the pud and most of the gravy behind). Overall assessment: it's all right, but I feel no grave need to replicate this back home. The girls had fish and chips with mushy peas and tea; I am told the fish was great, and the batter was lighter than at the previous day's lunch (which to them is better, not so much for me). The peas were apparently the right consistency too. No one seemed overly enthused by the chips, and I have to admit, when I make chips at home following what I have been taught as the British method (salt water soak, two fryings) I like them better than any I've had here.

York Minster is a cathedral which is the third iteration of a great house of worship on this spot dating back to Roman times. It can call itself a minster since this building dates to Saxon times, and it's not Gothic revival, it's plain-old Gothic, most of it dating to 13th century. There's not much I can say about it that won't be the same superlatives you undoubtedly already have heard. It's really huge, it's very old, the architecture is impressive, the collection of monuments and memorials and gravestones is dizzying, the organ is bigger than a Volvo, and so on. I kept thinking, if this is God's house, then God must be overcompensating for some perceived flaw. I am suitably impressed by the amazing feats of architecture and restoration, the humbling acts of reverence and devotion, the sheer audacity of the engineering, the artistry, the crushing weight of history. But I also can't help but wonder, while it's amazing that people could do all those things, at the same time I wish they'd invested all that industry in something else.

I will note that I didn't go up the umptyleven steps to the top of the tower to get the apparently breathtaking view of York, but Suri did, and assured us that it's good we didn't. At times she barely fit; at other times, she was so out of breath she could barely proceed; and at several more, she feared for her life. But she's glad she persevered because the view was amazing. Still, if she had it that tough, I, with my knee still sore from the bike spill and back still sore from compensating for my knee, couldn't've done it, even discounting the narrow quarters.

Incidentally, God has a really nice house, but He should consider investing in some improvements to His privies. They were awful. And better privies really help with improving resale value, any realtor will tell you.

We also spent a short while in the gardens of Yorkshire Museum. That's maybe not the best name for them, because most of them, at least what we saw, were a pleasant, spacious park, comprised of lawns, a few trees of impressive canopy but no special provenance, and interspersed bits of ruins (no doubt some of them Roman era, and others more recent). There were certainly patches of formal garden here and there displaying various unusual pieces of flora, but they were a fairly small part of it. Most of it was just a charming, relaxing, pretty park of the sort one expects to find in a city. Which was quite a nice thing for us at that point in the day. There might have been a lot more to it, though. It started to rain, and while the trees offered fine shelter, the threat it might get worse combined with our being generally weary (especially Suri from her harrowing climb) led us to head home.

Dinner was at Red Chilli, a Chinese restaurant with some nice (if a bit surreal) decor, and very generous portions of tasty foods. The menu is about ten million items long, and none of the descriptions tell you what the dish will be (even more than at most Chinese restaurants, which is saying a lot). But the actual dishes turn out to be good, and neither skimpy nor excessively padded with bamboo shoots and water chestnuts. We all shared around all our dishes, as is the way, and got through not even half of our main courses.

Visiting the (slightly recent) past

Siobhan wrote about Tuesday's adventures. Today (Wednesday), we set out a little late, having slept in to recover from Tuesday.

Our first stop was the York Castle Museum. Despite the name, it's not really a castle, or about castles, or really having anything to do with castles. Its claim to the name comes from the fact that it's in some huge public buildings built on the site of a former castle (and one original tower from that castle still stands on a hilltop overlooking it, but it cost extra to go in, and didn't seem worth it). Instead, it's just a history museum.

And like all the other history exhibits I've seen here, it focuses quite heavily on recent history. There was one exhibit about the Civil War (late 17th century), and everything else was Georgian or later, with a big focus on Regency and WW2 eras. I think there were maybe two sentences in the entire museum that referred to anything before the Enlightenment.

I don't know how much of this is regional, but it seems the Brits have a great fascination for only the last few centuries of their lengthy and rich history. When I, as an American, think of England and history, I tend to imagine a mix of about equal parts Rome, Middle Ages, and everything after that (notably the story of the monarchs and religious reform), with side orders of stuff about the Vikings, Celts, and colonies. But the history museums here seem to focus almost entirely on a very narrow slice of that. The Middle Ages never happened, neither the romanticized King Arthur kind nor the "nasty brutish and short" kind. You'd think that when visiting castles, you'd get a hint of the medieval era, but nope. I suppose there are places in the south where you'd get a huge helping of swords and armor, just like you'd get overdosed on Shakespeare in the Stratford area. But at least in Yorkshire, you might as well imagine that England was founded in the mid-1700s.

Unfortunately, all the pictures I took of the exhibits in York Museum were lost. The camera's batteries had run out, so I bought a few AA batteries, since the book that came with the camera said it could use AAs as a replacement for the CRV-3 lithium battery in a pinch, and since the CRV-3s were so expensive, I settled for AAs for now. Well, they didn't work so good. They were running out very quickly. I made them last longer by switching to the viewfinder instead of the LCD, but it was touch-and-go to keep it going through the whole day, until I could get some CRV-3s. It kept shutting down mid-picture and requiring multiple startups, and at one point it lost its pictures -- fortunately that was only about seven shots, so I just went back for them. But when I got the CRV-3 in, the card was dead. In fact, I can't even format it, it's dead; I need to buy another one tomorrow.

That also includes all the pictures of the York walls which we explored. We didn't do the whole two and a half miles, only about a third of them, but after a while, they're all the same. We explored a few gatehouses and barbicans, and walked along the walls, observing the crennelations and murder holes and such. The gaps seemed a little low in places, but then I remembered that in the time these things were built, I would have been considered tall.

In between we had a simple lunch; Siobhan had fish and chips (though not from a real chip shop, just from a restaurant, so she's not expecting it's any reflection of proper fish and chips, she just got it because it sounded okay and was a good price), and I had a burger with a sauce made from Stilton, Shropshire cheese, and spring onions -- the sauce was really good, but there should have been more of it.

Dinner was at Akbar's. Seeking to use the opportunity to experience what "curry" means in Britain (and particularly, how that differs from what it means in India), I had lamb vindaloo. It was pretty darned spicy; just how I would have wanted it, save that I should have had something like lemonade to cut the heat when it built up. All I had was naan; we got a "family naan" which comes on a huge rack, and it was at least three feet tall, and good thing too as I needed a lot of it to cut the heat.

Incidentally, we're halfway through the week and I've had very little food that is "British cuisine" -- particularly the kind of cuisine that I can't get anywhere else, or when I do, people will say it's not the same. Things like proper fish and chips -- but not actually that, since I don't like fish. (I did like the batter on Siobhan's fish.) But I'm not sure what should be on that list, after you subtract the things I don't like. Curry was one of them, and that's checked off. I had a Cornish pasty. A full English breakfast is still on the list. I've had "chips" a few times -- admittedly, always from places that a true Brit can tell me weren't the good stuff -- but enough to give me to thinking that when I've made them myself via the British method, I've been getting as close as I need to get to the real thing. So what else? Steak and kidney pie? I doubt I'd like that. What else? I'm open to suggestions.