Music! In! Spaaace!

Via Warren Ellis: Design and Implementation of the 1^st Theremin Concert for Aliens

Abstract
The idea and project of the 1^st Theremin Concert for Aliens were stated in the Arecibo Proposal “One-Dimensional Radio Message for Blind Aliens" (AP number Zaitsev000704074140) on July 4, 2000. Unfortunately, this Proposal was not accepted by Arecibo reviewers for realization because of their misgiving that such interstellar radio transmission may be a dangerous affair. Next, the ground and description of this Project were presented at the SPE-2000 Conference in Evpatoria on September 11, 2000, in order try to transmit this Concert from the Evpatoria Planetary Radar (EPR) as a part of the SPE events. But only the third attempt to implement the Theremin Concert was successful – music for potential Extraterrestrial was firstly broadcasted from the EPR to 6 nearby Sun-like stars on August-September, 2001, during transmission the TAM (A Teen-Age Message to the Stars at the http://www.setileague.org/articles/tam.htm).

A review will be given of the theory of interstellar musical radio transmission, the collaborative processes between scientists, engineering, musicians, amateurs of astronomy, as well as, the plans for future development.

Of course a theremin. You cannot make this stuff up.

Decisions

I first ran across Newcomb's Problem when I was a teenager. Eliezer Yudkowsky at Overcoming Bias describes it thus:

A superintelligence from another galaxy, whom we shall call Omega, comes to Earth and sets about playing a strange little game. In this game, Omega selects a human being, sets down two boxes in front of them, and flies away.

• Box A is transparent and contains a thousand dollars.
• Box B is opaque, and contains either a million dollars, or nothing.

You can take both boxes, or take only box B.

And the twist is that Omega has put a million dollars in box B iff Omega has predicted that you will take only box B.

Omega has been correct on each of 100 observed occasions so far — everyone who took both boxes has found box B empty and received only a thousand dollars; everyone who took only box B has found B containing a million dollars. (We assume that box A vanishes in a puff of smoke if you take only box B; no one else can take box A afterward.)

Before you make your choice, Omega has flown off and moved on to its next game. Box B is already empty or already full.

Omega drops two boxes on the ground in front of you and flies off.

Do you take both boxes, or only box B?

Me, I take only box B, no doubt. But this is a pretty vexing problem in decision theory. Mr Yudkowsky describes the classic arguments thus:

One-boxer: “I take only box B, of course. I'd rather have a million than a thousand.”

Two-boxer: “Omega has already left. Either box B is already full or already empty. If box B is already empty, then taking both boxes nets me $1000, taking only box B nets me $0. If box B is already full, then taking both boxes nets $1,001,000, taking only box B nets $1,000,000. In either case I do better by taking both boxes, and worse by leaving a thousand dollars on the table — so I will be rational, and take both boxes.”

One-boxer: “If you're so rational, why ain'cha rich?”

Two-boxer: “It's not my fault Omega chooses to reward only people with irrational dispositions, but it's already too late for me to do anything about that.”

He goes on to observe something I didn't know.

“Verbal arguments for one-boxing are easy to come by, what's hard is developing a good decision theory that one-boxes” — coherent math which one-boxes on Newcomb's Problem without producing absurd results elsewhere.

I can see how that might be. He then goes on to dig into what the heck we mean by rationality in the first place, and to quote Miyamoto Musashi. Very cool, if you like that sort of thing.

Scary

Stan Winston
1946-2008
Monster maker

He was the best creature and make up effects guy in Hollywood, with an endless bag of tricks using latex, wire, and a hundred different kinds of goop.

He was one of those better-than-everyone-else-put-together guys.

The Terminator, Predator, Jurassic Park, Edward Scissorhands, and a hundred bad movies where the only good thing was Winston's effects. Plus John Carpenter's The Thing, the yardstick by which creature effects are measured.

They use computers for all of that stuff now, and while he did some of that, he also knew when doing it the old fashioned way was just better. I'm going to miss him.

Kiwi

Animator Dony “Madyeti47” Permedi made a little video about a kiwi bird and published it on YouTube. It's good, and a zillion people have watched it.

Don't click that link just yet.

Because YouTuber BlueInfernoDisco came along and understood this cartoon better than Mr Permedi did, and thinks, “I've got an idea for a song that would go perfectly with this video.” It's not an entirely original idea, but it's a very good one. The result—Kiwi—is a poignant little gem. I strongly recommend that you watch that version first.

It makes me think about the nature of artistic creation. The second version of Kiwi is obviously really there, waiting inside the original. But I don't think Mr Permedi knew that; dig this interview with him in which he's awfully unreflective:

Kiwi is not based on any personal experiences that I know of yet ... at least I know I wasn't reaching into my soul or anything for this story. Who knows, maybe I may relate to this Kiwi someday. Really, I just wanted a story that would allow me to be expressive and play with different emotions like happiness or sadness. I decided on this story, because I wanted to create a character that people will like, and then do something to that character, and see if the audience reacts strongly to it.

I saw an earlier, cruder, stranger effort of Mr Permedi's, Pony. It's a very dark little fable. But again in the interview, he shows he's not terribly articulate about it.

He's obviously very talented, but I suspect that he would really benefit from finding a smart collaborator who knows how to help turn his instincts into fully realized work.

Just when you thought it was over

The “Journal” story on xkcd is back.

It spoils it, just a little bit, to tell you that there are five of them. They didn't come out all in a row; I assume that each was intended to be the last, but he just kept having ideas ...

Journal 1 2 3 4 5

That last panel in 5 is a killer.

The Voice of God

It turns out that San Diego isn't a total cultural wasteland. I spent last Sunday afternoon at a performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor.

When I was a teenager my folks took me to a performance of it by the LA Philharmonic and some enormous choral group. Awesome, in the proper sense of the word. This week's show was a small orchestra using period instruments and just about two dozen singers. Vivid, beautiful, and moving.

I'm inclined to agree with the folks who say that Mozart was the greatest of the Western composers. And I actually spend more time listening to Vivaldi ... Gershwin ... the Beatles ... Chuck Berry ... Portished ... and countless others. But only when I listen to Bach do feel the awe of it seeming impossible that an actual human being could have just sat down and invented something so perfect.

They recorded the performance, and you can hear it on the other side of the link.

En garde!

You know how you'll sometimes read something a little wrong, getting a bit of brain poetry? I just misread this gem:

mind-body duelist

It gave me this image of René Descartes roaming the streets of Paris bearing a sword inscribed with the word corpus and a dagger inscribed with the word mens ....

Dice and bad acting

Somehow, I missed this one. If you don't get it, never mind.

Favorite FRPG:

• Real Men play original Dungeons & Dragons
• Real Roleplayers play RuneQuest III
• Loonies play Toon
• Munchkins play anything by TSR

Favorite SFRPG:

• Real Men play Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game
• Real Roleplayers play Space Opera
• Loonies play Teenagers From Outer Space
• Munchkins play anything by TSR

Favorite Post-Holocaust RPG:

• Real Men play Twilight 2000
• Real Roleplayers play The Morrow Project
• Loonies play Paranoia
• Munchkins play anything by TSR

Favorite 1920's RPG:

• Real Men play Gangbusters
• Real Roleplayers play Call of Cthulhu
• Loonies play a variant Spawn of Fashan
• Munchkins play anything by TSR

Lots more if you follow the link. And more seriously, I think there's more than a bit of an anticipation of Ron Edwards' seminal GNS theory here.

Also, the games referenced remind me that I'm an old man. Those White Wolf games that are now passé had not been invented yet when this list was compiled. I particularly like that “Real Roleplayers” favour games with badly designed rules that I once loved.

That magical time of the year

Neil D Paris has an instructive perspective on Mercury retrograde.

If life is about balance, how do you know if you're IN or OUT of balance with this particular phase?

Mercury Retrograde is quite simply a ‘reversal of thought energy’.
....

Your mental energy starts becoming your worst energy. Everything forces you in some way, big or small, to SLOW DOWN. That's when you get the infamous COMPUTER CRASH, plane/train/bus/car delay or breakdown. Your cell phone cuts out.

And notice what you do — you keep calling, you keep pushing, you become frantic and your mind continues to buzz. Who knows — it's possible your own mental electricity causes the malfunctions to begin with — computers are very sensitive to their regular users.

More breakdowns ensue forcing the necessary reflection that you didn't NEED to get there on time, you don't NEED to send that email, that it is best to wait, and that you need to chill the *&%! out and breathe.

Hmmnn.

Before I go sit zazen to quiet my mind, may I offer some Mercurial snark guessing that Mr Paris is reminding us to look on the bright side because he, too, is having a rough Mercury retrograde?

Bee

Grace under pressure.

Good news

My soul sister is fond of telling a story about the winter and spring of 1993. We were sharing a place and working boring McJobs, and I'd often pick up the San Francisco Examiner to read on my BART commute home. (Back in those days, the Ex was a real newspaper. Not a good one, mind you, but at least a real one.)

We were lefties (still are) and Ronald Reagan had been elected President when we were in Fourth Grade, so often I would get home waving the newspaper. “Look,” I'd say, pointing to a story about something the new Clinton administration was doing, “there's good news.”

The honeymoon didn't last, but it was a heady time. Certainly the Recent Unpleasantness makes that era look like a garden of roses, in retrospect.

She's been telling that story a lot, since it looks like we really will see a Democrat in the White House again. It won't look like the parallel universe in which Al Gore is President or like Google Good News, but still ... what's the word ... ?

Two Buck Chuck boycott

Via Elusis, a boycott on Charles Shaw wine:

Maria Isabel Vazquez died May 16 in hospital after severe heat exhaustion and heat stroke caused by unsafe conditions on West Coast Grape Farming Vineyard in Farmington CA. She was 17 years old, and 2 months pregnant. She is survived by her mother, father, and fiance, who all tried to get her help without the foreman’s original assistance.

West Coast Grape Farming made workers labor in 95 degree weather without water for over 4 hours on May 14, 2008. When water was finally provided, it was in a stationary location at least 10 minutes walk from many of the workers, including Maria.

West Coast Grape Farming provided no shade for workers either. Nor training on heat exposure for workers or their foremen.
....
What You Can Do:

• The United Farm Workers have set up an online system to offer your condolences to the family. Please take a moment to send Maria’s family your support by clicking here.
• DO NOT BUY “Two Buck Chuck” from Trader Joe’s, as this is made by the same wine company responsible, and ask Trader Joe’s in your area to pull the wine until there is justice for Maria and ensured compliance with state mandated working conditions for all of Bronco Wine’s employees.
• Please also take time to write the company about their work conditions and failure to provide adequate safety or care. West Coast Grape Farming is owned by Bronco Wine Co. Address your letter to Safety Director Debbie Barry (see what I mean about not all women being for all women’s rights) and Fred Fanzia, the CEO of Bronco Wine, the 4th largest wine company in the US. contact info: address: 6342 Bystrum Rd. Ceres, CA 95307 phone: 209-538-3131 or flood the fax: 209-538-4634
• Donate to the family to pay for Maria’s return to Mexico and her funeral. For information, contact her uncle, Doroteo Jimenez, at (209) 329-3692 or Luis Magaña, an activist with Proyecto Voz, at (209) 465-4265.

I know it's tempting to go a little nuts with boycotts. I remember the big push to get Coca-Cola products off my college campus because of their South African investments ... as though PepsiCo were the Good Guys. But this one certainly seems worthy.

Where's my jetpack?

At Modern Mechanix (“Yesterday's Tomorrows Today”) I find a glimpse into the world of 2008 according to 1968:

2008 transportation is among the most important factors keeping the economy running smoothly.

... or not-so-smoothly ...

Private cars are banned inside most city cores. Moving sidewalks and electrams carry the public from one location to another.

Whaddaya know, the clogged Edge City was not impossible to anticipate.

The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest. At preset times, each meal slides into the microwave oven and is cooked or thawed. The meal then is served on disposable plastic plates. These plates, as well as knives, forks and spoons of the same material, are so inexpensive they can be discarded after use.

Hmmnn.

Housewife?

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities.
....
To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies “buy,” and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.

Whoa! Spot on!

Except about how this will be achieved ...

Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs.

And, of course, the capper:

People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours.

Okay, not so much.

Reading stuff on that site makes me think of science fiction writer and critic Samuel R. Delaney's thoughts on four root science fictional settings.

W.H. Auden makes the point that you have four modernist world views: one Auden called New Jerusalem. New Jerusalem is the technological super city where everything is bright and shiny and clean, and all problems have been solved by the beneficent application of science. The underside of New Jerusalem is Brave New World. That's the city where everything is regimented and standardized and we all wear the same uniform. The two may just be the same thing, looked at from different angles. It's not so much a real difference in the cities themselves as it is a temperamental difference in the observers. In the same way, Auden pointed out, you have a rural counterpart to this pairing. There are people who see rural life as what Auden called Arcadia. Arcadia is that wonderful place where everyone eats natural foods and no machine larger than one person can fix in an hour is allowed in. Throughout Arcadia the breezes blow, the rains are gentle, the birds sing, and the brooks gurgle. But the underside of Arcadia is the Land of the Flies. In the Land of the Flies, fire and flood and earthquake—as well as famine and disease—are always shattering the quality of life. And if they don't shatter it, then the horrors of war are always in wait just over the hill to transform the village into a cess ridden, crowded, pestilential medieval fortress town under siege.

But once again, Auden points out, fundamentally we have a temperamental split here. Those people who are attracted to New Jerusalem will always see rural life as the Land of the Flies, at least potentially. Those people who are attracted to Arcadia will always see urban life as some form of Brave New World.

For some years, I thought SF could generally be looked at in terms of a concert of these four images ....

Obviously most of the predictions of the past are trying to describe a New Jerusalem, but my eyes read them seeming a lot more like the sterile Brave New World.

HETFET

Film director Guillermo Del Toro, of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy fame, has joined HETFET, Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Faires, Elves, and Trolls.. In a press release, he says:

HETFET methods may seem extreme— but their raids to medical labs have libertated more pixies and Tooth Fairies than decades of negotiations with the Food and Cosmetics industries. Troll skins fetch extraodrdinary prices in the Eastern European black market and this money finances illegal Troll Farms and many sordid activities perpetrated on the Fairy Folk. On the other hand, every time HETFET manages to have a fundraiser, their tally comes up to a pittance. Their only resort is activism. We must not rest until the last Troll can feel the moss of the Old Country under its webbed feet, in freedom, in acceptance and in peace.

If I was given to wearing t-shirts, I'd go for a Stop Tooth Fairy Cruelty or a Support Troll Markets t-shirt.

Che

Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez have made a film, Chevolution, about what may be the most popular photograph in the world. Amy Reiter of Salon asks:

I'm kind of curious about all the man-on-the-street interviews with people wearing the Che T-shirts who have no idea who he is. I'm wondering about the process of finding those people. I'm guessing it wasn't very hard to do.

Ms Ziff responds:

We went to gathering spots. At Venice Beach, we waited about five minutes for a Che T-shirt to come along. Maybe we were very lucky, but they happened pretty quickly in London, in different places. What happens is once you become sensitized to the image, you hate it, because you start seeing it everywhere. You realize our world is saturated by Che T-shirt wearers. So it wasn't that difficult, but it was interesting the level of ignorance.

I would say it's culturally specific, too. Because if you were to walk through the streets of Belfast or Dublin or Mexico City and you ask people “Who's on your T-shirt?” they'd know. I think it's quite culturally specific to the United States and to education in the United States and what people are taught and not taught in the States. It's quite mind-boggling as a non-American.

On my way to New York for the festival, I sat next to a Tibetan monk on the plane and I was looking at some of the early reviews with the Che image on them. He leaned across and he said, “I see that man in so many countries, but not in my country, not in Tibet. Is he a musician?”

Witty image via horrifying conservative t-shirt store Those Shirts.

Wow

Ganked whole and entire from Bad Astronomy:

Emily has what is simply The Coolest Picture Ever. It is that simple.

That is exactly what you think it is: Phoenix descending to the Martian surface underneath its parachute. This incredible shot was taken by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can easily see the ‘chute, the lander (still in its shell) and even the tether lines!

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling that world, both of them acting robotically, and both of them hundreds of million of kilometers away.

Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.

Head On?

Apply directly to forehead?

Seth Stevenson at Slate explains. Sort of.

When news breaks

The Project for Excellence in Journalism takes a long, hard look at The Daily Show. No joke.

My favourite bit:

“My students tell me they read the news for facts, but they watch Jon Stewart for the truth,” Professor Steve Lacy of Michigan State University has observed.

Eros and Thanatos

I haven't the foggiest notion if any of my readers who aren't also San Francisco sex-positive feminist fellas of my generation will find it at all compelling, but Thomas Roche's rambling brief memoir and reflection Panic for Satan: How I Learned to Freak Out and Wrote Lots of Porn Anyway hit me right where I live.

My own life misadventures match Mr Roche's in no specific particulars ... save a shared mortification at seeing the Ms. magazine cover story. But the fundamental story, of trying to figure out how the heck a responsible, feminist, girl-crazy fella lives a responsible and fulfilling life, rings true.

Enough already!

Utah Phillips
Harvey Korman
Bo Diddley
Bob Justman
Dick Martin
Sydney Pollack
Yves Saint Laurent
Paula Gunn Allen

Impermanence. I get it. Now can we take a break?

Mercury in retrograde

Aha!

At 15:49 UT (Universal Time), on Monday, May 26th, 2008, Mercury the cosmic trickster turns retrograde in Gemini, the sign of the Twins, sending communications, travel, appointments, mail and the www into a general snarlup! This awkward period begins a few days before the actual turning point (as Mercury slows) and lasts for three weeks or so, until June 19, when the Winged Messenger reaches his direct station.

Astrologer Rob Tillett goes on to say ...

Mercury retro in Gemini tempts us to leap into something new and untried, or to escape to some other place. Although Gemini is the sign of the mind and of communication, the retro period can see us swamped in a mass of detail, especially if matters that should have been completed in the past return to haunt us. An unduly fluid state of mind can lead to indecision and confusion, mainly through a breakdown in communication, or related equipment such as phones, computers, fax machines and the like. Judgements are unclear and fickle, and it's hard to know good value when you see it. Frustration arises in connection with information and ideas that come your way. Resist the temptation to take offence at criticism, especially if it wasn't meant to be taken personally.

Preconceived opinions can damage business transactions and consultations of all kinds, especially with salespeople, lawyers and advisors. Be very sure to check the fine print and do not sign important contracts unless you are absolutely clear on what they entail. In particular, matters connected with literature, media, sales, draftsmanship, linguistics and music are inclined to be blocked in some way. Writers and salespeople can experience significant blocks to their energies. It's a good time to chill out.

It's a good thing I don't believe in astrology, else I'd be spooked by how this corresponds to my last few days' misadventures.

Bride of Frankenstein

In the course of a terrific essay about Bride of Frankenstein, Neil Gaiman describes the strangest, most beautiful scene in this strange, beautiful film.

Ernest Thesiger's Dr Pretorius, a far madder scientist than our Henry, strides into Henry Frankenstein's life, like a man bringing a bottle of absinthe to a reformed addict. Dr Pretorius, waspish, camp,unforgettable, trolls in from a world much more dangerous than Henry's. He's sharp and funny, steals scenes, and has a marvellous sequence with bottled homunculi – lovers, a king, a priest. This has something to do with his own alchemical researches into creating life, and, I find myself thinking whenever I watch it, nothing at all to do with the film at hand. It sits in the mind like a dream, inexplicable, a moment of movie magic. I find myself fancying director James Whale as Pretorius here, the homunculi his actors, ready to lust or lecture or die as he desires.

Of course, you can see it on YouTube.

Else we should grow too fond of it

Via Ken MacLeod, I learn that The Yorkshire Ranter reviews Watching the Door, Kevin Myers' memoir of the Troubles in Ireland. It reminds me very much of Chris “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning” Hedges and Norman O. Brown's Love's Body.

Myers admits that his younger self, the RTE journo in Belfast, was at worst little better than a war tourist getting off on the bang-bang, the gangster glam of the paramilitary underworld, and the sexual opportunities the war provided. Not just that — but he admits that he happily let actual journalism slide, in favour of attending to his own self-obsession.

On the other hand, though, what are the accepted moral standards in a society like early-70s Belfast?
....
It's also a book about youth; when you're young, shame, scepticism and responsibility are not particularly big concerns. They weren't for Myers, for his many girlfriends (like the one who let the IRA know his car registration after an unsatisfactory threesome), or for the new men of the paramilitary world. One thing that stands out is how many of these people were enjoying themselves — the transition from ordinary routine, Catholic morality or Protestant propriety, to intrigue, violence, and nervous hedonism was clearly a liberation for a lot of people. In many ways, it was yet another version of the 1968 generation; just conditioned by history to be a peculiarly horrible one. Here, under the combined influence of sectarianism, a particularly dense conservative power-structure, and an existing thug culture, the liberation turned out to be the liberation from freedom that militarism has always offered directionless young men.

Plame again

I thought I was done with my little obsession with l’affaire Plame, in which the White House retaliated against Joseph Wilson for calling bullshit on their claims of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program by blowing the cover of his CIA spook wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, through White House aide Scooter Libby.

The trail went cold when President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence for his participation … and unwillingness to testify about who was involved. It seemed that we would never know exactly how Bush and Cheney were involved, though we have good evidence that Cheney gave the order to Libby. That commutation of the sentence should have been grounds for impeachment — since it was the President using his pardoning power to protect himself — but you know how it goes.

I thought that was that, but now, via DeLong, I learn that Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel just caught Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary, revealing something important.

I learned that the President had secretly declassified the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for the Vice President and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters [⋯] I walk onto Air Force One and a reporter had yelled a question to the President trying to ask him a question about this revelation that had come out during the legal proceedings. The revelation was that it was the President who had authorized, or, enable Scooter Libby to go out there and talk about this information. And I told the President that that’s what the reporter was asking. He was saying that you, yourself, was the one that authorized the leaking of this information. And he said ‘yeah, I did.’ And I was kinda taken aback.

I’m kinda taken aback too. This is slippery, since it’s in the context of talking about the leak of the National Intelligence Estimate. But. We know that Libby leaked both the NIE and Plame’s identity to journalist Judy Miller at the same time. It’s not hard to connect the dots and conclude that the President of the United States authorized his lieutenants to blow the cover of an American spy who was working to prevent nuclear proliferation.

Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Okay, so in retrospect, I was kinder to this movie at the time than most folks were then and I would be now. Sue me. It was refreshing to see Spielberg just having fun, and I still think I was right about the charms it does have.

---

Nothing really needs to be said beyond what you’ve doubtless already heard: yeah, it delivers the goods.

No, it doesn’t measure up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that was simply a charmed film ... and in my own case it benefits from having first cast its spell over me when I was ten years old. But Crystal Skull is fun, it gets the important things right, and it gave me the thing I wanted most. (I’ll get to that last.)

Sixty seconds into the movie it reminds you that Mrn Steven Spielberg really knows how to move the camera. All the gripes that cinephiles make about Spielberg are true: his tendency to drift into schmaltz, his incapacity to understand women, the deliberateness that squeezes out any interesting ambiguities, the lack of story sense, and so on. But I think the real reason for all the kvetching about Spielberg is resentment that these weaknesses are yoked to his uncanny talent for putting the camera where any normal director would think it shouldn't be ... and making it work.

Likewise we see George Lucas’ great strength on display as well. Like many, I curse Lucas’ many deficiencies, but the man knows how to get magic out of his production designers. All of the stuff in the picture is delicious. There’s a scene in a sort of a rocket lab that I wished was longer, just so I could enjoy looking at the set. Mutt’s motorcycle is the stuff that biker dreams are made of. And the picture’s one sequence with real satirical bite, commenting on ’50s suburban culture, works in large part because the production design is so spot-on.

All of the action scenes are brisk and fun, though I had a couple of quibbles. First, though Mr. Spielberg has crowed about resisting the temptations of computer generated effects, favoring real stunts with real people — including an awful lot done by an impressively spry Harrison Ford himself — there’s still more CG in the picture than there should be: grubby matte paintings and miniatures are part of the look of the Indiana Jones, for me. Second, there are a few bits that violate the compact of “realism” I felt was kept in Raiders: Indiana Jones’ acts of derring-do may be wildly implausible, but should never feel impossible.

The crystal skull itself is a bit of a departure in tone from the mystical artifacts of past pictures. (There’s a bit of a possible spoiler there that I’ll resist, though the picture gives it away pretty early.) I was happy to roll with it, since I felt it was still in keeping with the the pulp tradition, but I can see how other folks might feel otherwise. What can you do? The Ark of the Covenant is pretty much the best MacGuffin ever, so nothing else is going to fully satisfy. I think I was sustained in large part by the hint of the Lovecraftian about the Skull's story ... which made me dream of going all the way to Indiana Jones and the Fish Men of Innsmouth or Indiana Jones and the Mountains of Madness. How cool would those be?

The actors are all having a hammy good time. It’s still a pleasure to see Harrison Ford in the hat; his greatest talent has always been his screen presence, and we still believe him as Indiana Jones ... though in every scene he communicates the old joke about “I’m getting too old for this” without having to spoil things by saying it in so many words. Just about everyone else in the picture is also pretty keen. Cate Blanchett manages to be more weirdly, delightfully inhuman than she was as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, if you can believe that. Shia LaBoeuf gets a role that’s almost as big an opportunity for embarrassment as his part in Transformers and makes it work. Likewise Ray Winstone, who keeps it together in a part that was obviously originally written for Daffy Duck. The movie doesn’t give the mangificent John Hurt enough to do, but then no movie ever could, so he quietly chews the scenery just the right amount.

Which brings me to the real reason I wanted to see the movie.

When I was ten years old I fell in love with Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood, and I’m not too proud to admit that I’m still carrying a torch for her. George Lucas insisted that like James Bond, Indiana Jones should have a different love interest in every picture, but in my heart I have always known that Marion was Indy’s true love. When they revealed at Comicon that Karen Allen was back (you can see it at 3:00 on this video) Im told that the assembled crowd broke into hysterical applause, so I guess I’m not alone. It’s said that Frank Darabont’s attempt at a script for Indy 4 played her as Indy's equal partner in adventure, and I’m peeved that in Crystal Skull she’s mostly reduced to looking gorgeous and driving the car. But Harrison Ford plays Indy as giddy at the sight of her, as he should, so I walked out of the theater a happy man.

Green cities

I went to college at the University of California at Santa Cruz. It's a strange and beautiful campus, with vast meadows and classroom buildings peeking out between trees on forested hillsides. I'd often see deer pass within a few yards of me while on my way to class. There was a strongly hippie-ish student culture there, and it was easy to dream utopian dreams of a world like the campus: great cities woven gently into nature, filled with bicyclists stopping at little restaurants to enjoy an organic salad on their way home from work.

But David Owen, writing in The New Yorker, has a different idea.

My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn't have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.

The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51^st in per-capita energy use.

Owen's article is long and fascinating, and I recently learned that CNN reports that he's right about energy use.

These days I no longer dream of forest cities like UCSC, but of tall steel arcologies alive with people riding its railcars, sitting in the teahouses on the breezy balconies, walking the twisty boulevards of the core that are dappled with sunlight streaming through the superstructure ...

Literalization of metaphor

Nailing Jell-o to a wall.

Herding cats.

And my new favourite:

Drinking tea with chopsticks in zero gravity, which means “something which sounds absurdly, impossibly difficult but turns out to be the easy right answer.”

Gender

This long passage from “The Roads Round Pisa,” one among Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, is for three of the most beautiful women in the world, all of whom I know to read this blog: one who goaded me to this with Simone Weil, one who recently wrote about a game of dress-up that made me ache with longing for home, and one who recently lent me an excellent book containing lore about a gentleman's handkerchiefs.

Behind a cut, because it's long ....

The reader unfamiliar with Isak Dinesen may find this passage informed by a few observations:

• Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen's first book, was originally published in 1934.
• “Isak Dinesen” was a male nom de plume which Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke adopted, fearing that as a woman she would not be published.
• The passage takes place at a roadside inn in Pisa sometime hazily around the late 19^th century. “Count Augustus von Schimmelmann, a young Danish nobleman of a melancholy disposition” has been talking to a young Italian carriage-driver. “The boy seem to feel that he had here met a brother of the unhappy Danish Prince [Hamlet], and to open his heart to the stranger on this account.“ At this point, the two have been talking about the Italian's reasons for abandoning poetry in favour of the study of astronomy.

---

“.... I want to turn to the infinity of space, and from what I have heard it seems to me that the roads of the planets and stars, their elipses and circles within the infinite space, must have the power to turn the mind into new ways. Do you not think so, Signore?”

Augustus thought of the time, not many years ago, when he had himself felt the spheres his right home. “I think,” he said sadly, “that life has its law of gravitation spiritually as well as physically. Landed property, women—” He looked out through the window. On the blue sky of the spring evening Venus stood, radiant as a diamond.

The boy turned toward him. “You do not,” he said, “really think that I am a man? I am not, and under your favor, I am happy not to be. I know, of course, that great work has been achieved by men, but still I think that the world would be a more tranquil place if men did not come in to break up, very often, the things that we cherish.”

Augustus became confused to find that he had been treating a young lady as a boy, but he could not apologize for it, as it was not his fault. He made haste to introduce himself and to ask if he could be of any assistance to her on her journey. The girl, however, did not alter her manner toward him in the least, and seemed quite indifferent to any change in his attitude toward her which her information might have caused. She sat in the same position, with her slender knees crossed under her cloak and her hands folded around one knee. Augustus thought that he had hardly ever talked to a young woman whose chief interest in the conversation had not been the impression that she herself was making on him, and he reflected that this must be what generally made converse with women awkward and dull to him. The way in which this young woman seemed to take a friendly and confident interest in him, without apparently giving any thought to what he thought of her, seemed to him new and sweet, as if he suddenly realized that he had all his life been looking for such an attitude in a woman. He wished that he could now himself keep away from the conventional accent of male and female conversation.

“It is very sad,” he said thoughtfully, “that you should think so little of us, for I am sure that all men that you have met have tried to please you. Will you not tell me why it should be so? For it has happened to me many times that a lady has told me that I was making her unhappy, and that she wished that she and I were dead, at a time when I have tried hardest to make her happy. It is so many years now since Adam and Eve”—he looked across the room to a picture of them—“were first together in the garden, that it seems a great pity that we have not learned better how to please one another.”

“And did you not ask her?” said the girl.

“Yes,” he answered, “but it seemed to be our fate that we should never take up these questions in cold blood. For myself, I think that women, for some reason, will not let us know. They do not want an understanding. They want to mobilize for war. But I wish that once, in all the time of men and women, two ambassadors could meet in a friendly mind and come to understand each other. It is true,” he added after a moment, “that I did once meet, in Paris, a woman, a great courtesan, who might have been such an ambassador. But you would hardly have given her your letters of credence or have submitted to her decisions. I do not even know if you would not have considered her a traitor to your sex.”

The girl thought for a time of what he had said. “I suppose,” she then said, “that even in your country you have parties, balls and conversazione?”

“Yes,” he said, “we have those.”

“Then you will know,” she went on slowly, “that the part of a guest is different from that of a host or hostess, and that people do not want or expect the same things in the two different capacities?”

“I think you are right,” said Augustus.

“Now God,” she said, “when he created Adam and Eve”—she also looked at them across the room—“arranged it so that man takes, in these matters, the part of a guest, and a woman that of a hostess. Therefore man takes love lightly, for the honor and dignity of his house is not involved therein. And you can also, surely, be a guest to many people to whom you would never want to be a host. Now, tell me, Count, what does a guest want?”

“I believe,” said Augustus when he had though for a moment, “that if we do, as I think we ought to here, leave out the crude guest, who comes to be regaled, takes what he can get and goes a way, a guest wants first of all to be diverted, to get out of his daily monotony or worry. Secondly the decent guest wants to shine, to expand himself and impress his own personality upon his surroundings. And thirdly, perhaps, we wants to find some justification for his existence altogether. But since you put it so charmingly, Signora, please tell me now: What does a hostess want?”

“The hostess,” said the young lady, “wants to be thanked.”

Good news

I read the news today, oh boy.

There were whoops of joys and hugs and tears among scores of gay rights advocates and same-sex couples this morning outside the California Supreme Court building in San Francisco as word spread that the justices had cleared the way for gay and lesbian marriages.

Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, a gay rights group, ran out of the building on McAllister Street and screamed, “We won!”

I also cannot resist re-linking Mark Morford's celebration of marriage from four years ago.

I was there. I saw the lines, the smiles, felt the intense emotional energy. It was simply irrefutable: These are people in love. These are couples who have been together for years, decades, who have started families and raised children and set up homes replete with dogs and dinner parties and antiques and regular shopping excursions to Safeway and the mall. You know, just like "real" Americans.

These are couples who are willing to go the distance, to commit and connect, and who are eager to prove to themselves and the world that their love is something true and real and momentous, something that, in truth, can only serve to reignite and reunite our stagnant, fractured, contentious, 50 percent-divorce-rate nation. Hey, we need all the help we can get.

And one other thing was very apparent: It was a situation in which you simply could not imagine anyone hurling gobs of intolerant hate at it. It would have required a serious amount of nasty, inbred ignorance and appalling nerve to march up to any of the passionate and committed couples waiting patiently in line for their marriage ceremony and say, you know, God hates you for this, you immoral disgusting sodomites, and it's intolerable and unacceptable that you wish to love and honor each other till death do you part.

I'm sorry I cannot be in my city to celebrate today.

Pride Flag Flying Over the Armory (where ordinarily they fly the Jolly Roger originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Iron Man

io9's review of Iron Man, by the radiant Charlie Jane Anders, is spot on.

Iron Man is the first comic-book movie that's actually better than its source material. That's partly because Iron Man is one of the most boring characters in the history of comics, but it's also because the movie manages to transcend its source.

Oh, and don't make the mistake I did by leaving before the end credits finish; rumour has it there's a rockin' monk's reward.