The other day I woke up listening to the clock radio, and I could've sworn they were interviewing a guy who said global warming might be a good thing, because how can you be sure, and that anyone who says otherwise is being "arrogant". And although I was half asleep, it sounded like this guy was the head of NASA or something.
Nah...
Well, maybe growing up to be an astronaut wouldn't have been that great anyway.
SPARKY'S GALLERY OF SHAME has gotten a little out of date - we didn't get any photos in May (mostly due to good behavior... mostly) but here is some crime scene evidence involving an ex-pigeon(?). Viewer discretion advised.
Everyone I know who is currently in an end-of-school-term situation, whether as teachers or students, should be aware of how this is done. (Thanks to Pharyngula.)
p.s. I'm fairly sure that guy was in my 5th-grade class, no kidding. Seems like he's done well.
I love the Frances the Badger books and I really love this discussion of how one of them works. This stuff about why people tell each other things is challenging enough for me now - I really don't get how I picked it up as a kid, or how any kid does.
(thanks to Chris Bell on the Kraken list)
I finally finished coloring this thing here. It's an ad, such as one might find in Skymall, for a set of mammal/clothing accessories for ambitious dinosaurs with inadequate limbs. Posters will be available at some point. Scientific accuracy is not guaranteed.
Thanks to Becka for the very silly discussion that prompted this, and for making me draw it for her. Her obsession with those damn meerkats was contagious. Daphne contributed to the silliness too & will get a hand-tinted copy because no way am I drawing this twice.
Yes, those proposals we hear now and then that we should have to show a special magic ID at all times to prove we're Americans (lately from Rudy Giuliani of course) do have a pretty creepy subtext that should scare the crap out of Christian fundamentalists - at least the unfortunately large set of them who think, per Hal Lindsey, that the Book of Revelation is a prediction of the Antichrist taking over America and branding everyone with a 666.
But I've never really gotten why those people think it's such a big spooky deal that John wrote about people having to get an evil mark to do business, and then 1900 years later we have bar codes/credit cards/RFID/etc., so he must have been foreseeing our crazy new technology, so these must be the End Times now. Ever since Hammurabi there's been a tension between individualism and bureaucratic control; the "mark of the Beast" story would make sense to anyone who'd ever been hassled for documents or tribute by some obnoxious city official. You might as well get all excited that Nostradamus predicted "a leader will be elected, and he will not be very smart", or that the Mayans knew about masturbation (so they must've learned it from the UFOs).
Anyway, whether you believe in devils or not (I do), there have always been people whose aspirations for control over others seem to be based on our dreams of supernatural power, omniscience and invisible influence - and we all suspect deep down that we're not angels - so it should be no surprise that as our technology gets better, we look even more like the prophet's nightmare.
This really happened today: I took the big dumb yellow dog to the park and I threw the ball. The dog ran after the ball. I threw the ball again. The dog ran after the ball. I threw the ball again real fast and low to the ground. The dog ran after the ball and as the ball jigged and skipped across the grass, a hawk dove straight down out of nowhere and tried to catch the ball as if it were the weirdest little neon-colored rabbit ever, and about six feet before this medium-sized hawk reached the ball it noticed that there was a big dumb yellow dog barrelling straight at it, and the hawk zinged off to one side at such a sharp angle I couldn't believe it kept all its wings on, and it flew away with a not so dramatic style, wobbly, maybe a little embarrassed. The big dumb yellow dog did not notice. She got the ball!
So this is the first in a ridiculously long series of reviews where I talk about everything I read and saw this year in random order, until I give up.
The Screwfly Solution
TV movie for Masters of Horror on Showtime
based on the story by Raccoona Sheldon aka James Tiptree, Jr.
directed by Joe Dante, screenplay by Sam Hamm
made, 2006; seen, yesterday
If you don't know, this story is sort of a sacred text in 1970s science fiction, and Tiptree readers have been hoping TV wouldn't fuck it up. It's about a shift in men's sexual wiring so the presence of women (or men, if they're into men) makes them distraught and then homicidally angry; some other writer would've had them turn into a bunch of foaming zombies, and the horror would all be about the killing. But instead, being thinking beings, they make it into a mystical fascist ideology; half of society carries on convincing themselves that they're saving the human race instead of wiping it out, and the horror is that we can use our minds that way.
So: this was an unusually well done adaptation by TV standards, not brilliant but I'm glad it was made. The DVD commentary says these Masters of Horror pieces are done in ten days, for peanuts, with a lot of constraints on casting and locations... so although I wouldn't pick Joe Dante to do this story based on the style of his movies, if you want something to look good on a shoestring it makes sense to get someone who used to work for Roger Corman. And Dante & Hamm really seemed to get the story and respect Tiptree's ideas; Dante was also candid on the DVD about finding the usual Masters of Horror fare a little cheesy, wanting to do something smarter and more disturbing, but giving it enough B-movie trappings to satisfy the producers and the stereotypical horror-geek viewer.
The script ditches the epistolary form and uses a straight-ahead thriller structure: mysterious murder scene, introduce main characters, ominous rumors, local horror at army base, infodump to skeptical officials, horror reaches our heroes, chaos & escape, doom in the wilderness. Most of the invented scenes just expand on stuff Tiptree referred to in passing; apart from losing the South American part because they had to make the whole thing in Vancouver, and adding some clumsy business with the aliens at the end, the content is about as faithful as it could be. The main subversive ideas—that male sexuality is tied to violence already, that men are oblivious to the threats women face in normal life, and that religious systems may be rationalizations for the things we don't know why we do—are presented unapologetically, although they're defused a little by being part of the aforementioned infodump. Nothing was really "updated" from 1977, except a decent little bit where some government guy insists it's only Muslims who have bad ideas about women. The only place I felt like the screenwriter dropped an important ball was when he had the heroine say about her dangerous infected husband, "that's not him any more" or something like that—which would be the foaming-zombie version; the heartbreaking thing there is that it is still him.
The directing is... OK. Dante has no great visual flair, and his handling of the actors is kind of distant (literally—not a lot of close-ups) compared to the very immediate voices of the story. He keeps it moving along and builds tension well, especially in the army base scene and the beginning of Anne's escape. The violent scenes are brief, graphic and appropriately impulsive, even though when the crazies are talking they often come across as smooth movie villains—it loses track of the idea that they're driven by an awful discomfort. Some of the best parts are underplayed little urban encounters where average bad behavior seems creepier in context: angry driver, leering hardhats, etc. Generally the tone is 75% mainstream and 25% Tiptree—I think to really convey her strange mix of passion, cynicism, introversion and epic doom, you'd have to get David Cronenberg to do it—but the story is so strong that it plays weirder than they're playing it.
Jason Priestley was kind of blah. Kerry Norton as Anne I liked a lot. The teenage daughter was probably pretty good, played too dumb though, maybe badly directed. Linda Darlow, a Canadian actor I don't know, has a brief role and steals all her scenes. And I LOVE Elliott Gould and it's about time he got to play a big gay scientist uncle.
If you spend too much time in Internet gab venues, you come across various folks whose special skills don't really translate well into out-loud conversation. There's the guy who just walks into the party and insults everyone there and pees on the rug and then stands around laughing at how those people are so easily provoked. There's the guy who keeps backing up the conversation to insist that you abjure the sloppy wording in that thing you said 10 minutes ago, because otherwise you're not a serious person. There's the guy who says "I call bullshit on you" and then just sits back knowing he's destroyed your credibility forever.
But these are usually self-limiting activities. If what you want is to get people talking all the time and never be sure what they're talking about, you have to develop a special kind of infinitely flexible and self-assured innocence. This distilled example is based on a certain guy who hangs out at a certain place; let's call him Plato.
Plato: I hate it when dogs try to act like cats. I see all these dogs meowing all the time, and they're always coughing up hairballs, and some of them have three legs, and they're always drinking water too. Why can't there be some dogs who are just dogs?
Other people: What the fuck are you talking about? Dogs are supposed to drink water, having three legs has nothing to do with being a cat, and they don't do those other things at all.
A somewhat interesting discussion ensues between other people about the qualities of cats and dogs
Plato: (calmly) You don't understand. My whole point was about the basic nature of mammals. They're totally different than reptiles—for instance, they have ears.
Repeat as needed
Fred Clark (Slacktivist) connects the dots between crimes abroad and the war zones we build at home, where we don't need to have prisoners abused by insane Marines or deport them to Syrian dungeons—we can just let other prisoners do it:
If I had a dollar for every time I heard jokey remarks about how some sleazy guy will get what he deserves when he meets his new cellmate Butch, etc., I'd have a lot of vomit-covered dollars.
Some things are wrong because they're wrong, but a pure utilitarian who doesn't agree about the moral part might have an argument why they're OK. But some things are just wrong even if you look at them with your most cynical eye—they just don't even achieve the goals you might say you want—so the people who keep defending them are being driven by something actively sick, not just a lack of scruples.
The whole "is torture worth it" thing is like that: someone says "But what if it's a bad guy and you really need information because Jack Bauer has to find the bomb in 20 minutes"; someone else points out that when you torture people they'll say all kinds of things, and you'll never sort out the truth in a short time; and the response is something like "Well it must be effective because otherwise why is it so popular" or "It's worth maiming 1000 guys if it has even a 0.01% chance of working" or "I suppose you have a better idea?" The defensiveness, against even the most value-free facts, is so consistent that it shows they didn't try to think of something that would work and picked this; they picked this and wanted it to be OK, somehow, because otherwise we'll all have a lot of explaining to do.
The "if you don't want to get raped, don't go to prison" thing is the same. You can say that it's not just thugs and child molesters that this happens to; "Yeah, but if everyone just obeyed the law they'd have nothing to worry about." You can say that some people are falsely convicted, or did things less serious than many of us get away with; "Yeah, but it's still good for people to be really afraid of jail." You can say that this happens to women too and no one thinks that's OK; "Yeah, well then get better guards for the women, but men are just animals." You can say that people do eventually get released and they'll bring rage and diseases back with them; "Yeah, but that's why we should just throw away the key." And you can even point out that if everyone knows a prison sentence isn't just being locked up but may include beating and violation and AIDS and death, some criminals will be less likely to get locked up when they should be because we're not really sure they deserve all that; I guess the answer to that one would just be to lock up everyone. A commenter to Fred's post, Rebecca, said it better:
"The more horrible prison becomes, the greater the barrier against accusing and convicting the respectable; while the easier it becomes to put away those against whom one is prejudiced. For instance, it works against molestation *victims* twice— once by putting an appalling moral burden on them; and again by making everyone much less likely to believe them (because of that same burden.)"
I think all the evasiveness about this isn't because people are really comfortable with having millions of people in hell-pits; but no one wants to look soft, or no one wants to be the only one who's not laughing, or no one wants to think about having millions of people in hell-pits because it's scary. Or maybe they think we can concentrate all the horror into one place, so no matter how unjust it is, somehow we won't have any horror left on the outside. Or—if you think the whole system is awful and corrupt—you might think the more visibly awful we let it get, the sooner it'll all fall down... even though there's no evidence that anything has ever worked that way.
Anyway, what can we do? We can stop laughing at those stupid jokes, that would be a start. And check out these guys, who know what they're talking about way too well; they actually got Congress and Bush to take this seriously four years ago, but that doesn't mean anything will happen unless people visibly give a shit. More generally, the American Friends Service Committee does a lot of prison work, and tries to get people to see prison as a real place with people in it who still have some connection to life, not some kind of metaphysical garbage dimension.