Back home

I have (finally) got my main blog, Benevolent Misanthropy, back up and working, with lots of old data restored. Today I ported all the posts from this backup blog over there, so this particular URL is going silent until needed again.

Neat!

Found, lost for over 150 years, then found again:

SAQQARA, Egypt - Egyptian archaeologists unveiled on Thursday a 4,000-year-old “missing pyramid” that is believed to have been discovered by an archaeologist almost 200 years ago and never seen again.

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities chief, said the pyramid appears to have been built by King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh who ruled for only eight years.

In 1842, German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius mentioned it among his finds at Saqqara, referring to it as number 29 and calling it the “Headless Pyramid” because only its base remains. But the desert sands covered the discovery, and no archaeologist since has been able to find Menkauhor’s resting place.

Right out of an H. Rider Haggard book, or an Indiana Jones movie.

Good News

It looks like D.C. Thornton is un-retiring himself, and resuming blogging tomorrow.

A script to read

I haven’t been reading as many movie scripts as I really should, but thanks to Simply Scripts, I came across a gem and I’ve got to share it.

I’ve only read most of the first act, but even just that far, I can tell you that Roughshod is very well-written, keeping you interested scene by scene and moving right along. The film is unavailable, so far as I can tell, and that’s a shame, if for no other reason than that it stars Gloria Grahame.

(IMDB doesn’t even have it listed to run on TV(!).)

But anyway, it’s a smooth read, it’s something most people have probably never seen (and won’t have a chance to anytime soon, darn the luck!), so you can read it fresh and just see the movie in your mind. And, while it has some formatting differences from modern scripts (modern scripts are not supposed to call shots, it’s perceived as impeding on the director’s job), it reads very, very well and will give you an idea of how these things work.

Quote of the moment

They’re big on omertà on the left. It’s part of how they survive.

— Peggy Noonan, 30 May 2008

ZOMFG!!!!11! Bush is getting TOTALLY pwnd by his former press sec!!!!!!!

Jay Rosen over at PressThink, never one to hide his biases or check his premises, has gone rather overboard with the upcoming release of Scott McClellan’s new (assertion-heavy, but apparently evidence-free) book, all but cackling and rubbing his hands with glee, the very picture of a fourteen-year-old girl who finally, finally has found someone who will take the Queen Bitch of the eighth grade down a peg or two, and then things will go back to the way they used to be, when everybody liked her, nobody disagreed, and Dan Rather was the most trusted man in America.

His language and diction are choice, coming from an ostensible professional in a profession he supposedly is trying to defend as dignified.

For instance:

The Today Show rocked today…

If I remember my teenage vernacular correctly, “rocked” is higher up the scale than “ruled”, but ranks somewhere below “totally kicked ass”. He goes on to tell you, the reader, that

You have to watch it.

He did, at least, leave out the “ZOMG” and triple exclamation point, so he exercised at least a modicum of restraint.

He also exhibits his typical MSM narcissism, claiming that the way things were run in our republic prior to Teddy Roosevelt are “extreme” and (implicitly) undesirable. The way things were run, of course, was without treating the press like a pre-sainted priesthood that must always be deferred to, a priesthood that not only stands in for The People, but knows the minds of The People better than those dirty plebeians ever could themselves.

It’s all pretty hysterical (as in over-emotional, not funny), overwrought, and ill thought out. But at least he doesn’t call Bush Hitler. Not directly.

(The question to apply to any Rosen rant involving Bush and his treatment of the press is: “If faced with an unremittingly hostile and antagonistic press — a press which has proven over and again that even outright fraud is not to be ruled out when working against you, so long as they think they can get away with it (see Rather, Dan) — how would you treat the press?” For Bush, Rosen’s preferred position would seem to be on his knees, begging forgiveness — if not performing a more Lewinskian act.)

Quote of the moment (environmentalism edition)

The idea of nature’s intrinsic value inexorably implies a desire to destroy man and his works because it implies a perception of man as the systematic destroyer of the good, and thus as the systematic doer of evil. Just as man perceives coyotes, wolves, and rattlesnakes as evil because they regularly destroy the cattle and sheep he values as sources of food and clothing, so on the premise of nature’s intrinsic value, the environmentalists view man as evil, because, in the pursuit of his well-being, man systematically destroys the wildlife, jungles, and rock formations that the environmentalists hold to be intrinsically valuable. Indeed, from the perspective of such alleged intrinsic values of nature, the degree of man’s alleged destructiveness and evil is directly in proportion to his loyalty to his essential nature. Man is the rational being. It is his application of his reason in the form of science, technology, and an industrial civilization that enables him to act on nature on the enormous scale on which he now does. Thus, it is his possession and use of reason—manifested in his technology and industry—for which he is hated.

George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Warning: links to PDF), also quoted in his post “The nature of environmentalism“

Find out when you should die! (You know — for kids!)

I recently said, in conversation, that environmentalism, as a movement and an ideology, is driven by hatred of man, and used a paraphrased quote from David Graber to illustrate my point. The genuine quote is: “Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” I was accused of demonizing, because not all people who self-identify as environmentalists agree with this.

What I was in fact doing was thinking in essentials. When one thinks in terms of essentials, then rubbish such as the following is unsurprising and quite predictible:

This is a site for kids, put up by the Australian Broadcasting Company. Hardly the lunatic fringe of the environmentalist movement.

If environmentalism were not, in essence, anti-man, then putting up such a thing would be appalling, and putting it up and encouraging children to figure out when they should die to save the planet would be unthinkable. But no, a mainstream site programmed this test and put it up for all to see (in 2003, if the copyright is to be believed), and nobody involved in the process saw anything much wrong with it, else it wouldn’t be up.

(þ Wizbang)

And suddenly, I don’t miss John F. Kerry quite so much

Barack Obama, on Memorial Day:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

Quote of the Moment

Places yet remain in the continental United States to which news of the world barely penetrates. Paradise Inn, 5400 feet up the south slope of Mount Rainier, has no Internet connections. The rooms have no radios or TV’s. There used to be a television in the bar, but the bar has been demolished to make way for handicapped-accessible guest rooms (vide infra).

— Tom Veal, 20 May 2008

Demolished the freaking bar? That’s unAmerican!

Quote of the Moment

My Francophilia took a hit this morning when the femme de chambre at my hotel said to me, You want more soap? But I gave you soap yesterday.

— Erica Abeel, Filmmaker Magazine blog, 18 May 2008

Wow

Upon learning the “secret” of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, I thought he could not possibly deliver a movie more heavy-handed, insulting to the audience, or just outright stupid in conception.

Holy crow, was I ever wrong.

I had some small hope for The Happening. But read the part of that review you have to highlight, and you’ll see that any hope at all would be foolish.

I haven’t actually watched a Shyamalan film since Signs. Looks like I might never do so. Oh well, at least I’ll always have Unbreakable.

Upbeat (with no cynicism)

To make up for the previous post, here’s Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Just Wild About Harry”:

If Odeo is being wonky, which it seems to be at this moment, you can download the Vorbis file.

Cynicism (not especially upbeat)

No matter who wins the presidency, we’re going to be saddled with someone who wants to be a fascist dictator.

And the sad thing is, the only one for whom I could vote in any kind of good conscience probably won’t even get nominated, unless she steals it.

Barack Hussein Obama ((and if he didn’t like his middle name, then why didn’t he have it legally changed?)) has no experience, a disturbing sense of entitlement, and handles even the mildest adversity just terribly. Add to that his close ties to Wright and former terrorists, to say nothing of his wife’s disgusting views, and he’s a disaster waiting to happen. Sadly, he’s almost certainly our next President, as well.

John McCain served America honorably and heroically in the Vietnam war, but only himself as a US Senator. Anyone who supported, let alone authored, the direct assault on every citizen’s right of free speech that was the McCain-Feingold bill has no business anywhere but locked in stocks in the public square for daily ridicule, or else wearing a suit of tar and feathers while being given a ride out of town on a rail. The Presidency has had some vile men in it, but rarely one who has been so openly contemptuous of the Constitution before he even takes the oath to uphold and defend it. There is no way in hell I will for McCain.

I could vote for Hillary, despite her awfulness, for the simple reason that while she’s vile, she’s perfectly willing to throw aside any and all principles. That is usually a bad thing, but if America were attacked while she was President, she’d be so personally offended that whoever it was had the gall to attack while she was President that she’d toss aside all the touchy-feely “it takes a village” crap and nuke them back to the stone age. Of the three candidates, she’s the one most likely to do the right thing, however wrong her reasons for it might be. (”Most likely” meaning there’d be only a slight chance, but that’s better than no chance at all.)

But whoever we get, we’re going to be getting a power-lusting, self-aggrandizing potential tyrant who holds himself above the rest of the country, and can not wait to begin telling everyone what to do, how to do it, and start punishing everyone who disagrees with him as rapidly as possible.

The next four years, and possibly the next eight or twelve, are not going to be pleasant.

Disputing a nonverbal response

Instapundit links a post at The Volokh Conspiracy with the following quote, and his only comment is “HMM“:

There are lots of methodologies and modes of thought that are widely acceptable within at least some circles of academia, but would strike an uninitiated outside observer as nonsensical, academically dishonest, or otherwise discreditable.

Anyone who has ever encountered a professor who still maintains that “real” socialism works, it’s just never been tried (to pick but one of an endless variety of examples), would respond to the above quote not with “HMM” but with “DUH!”

About time, too!

Via the Online Books Page I find that a ten-volume edition of The Works of Victor Hugo is now online, which means that, at last, Ninety-Three, arguably his best book, is available for download.

It’s in Volume VII, if you only want to read that.

Now if only Gutenberg would get Frank Spearman’s works up more quickly…

Annoyance

I upgraded to Xubuntu 8.04 a week ago, and things have gone pretty well so far. Firefox 3 Beta 5, for instance, is muuuuuuuch nicer in a low-RAM environment than its predecessor.

How. Ever.

On a lark, I popped in a copy-protected DVD, just to see if the upgrade jogged whatever was wrong before loose, and let me watch it. (I’ve had all the proper codecs installed for some time, but protected discs have never played, and I can’t figure the problem.) I pulled out Sam Fuller’s House of Bamboo because I’d never seen it, Fuller is always interesting, it stars the mighty Robert Stack, and it’s part of Fox’s Film Noir series of discs — meaning if it worked, even once, I’d have a fine old time.

And it did.

I watched the first half or so of the movie, then went to bed.

Next day, not a single damn copy-protected disc will play. Again.

And I did nothing in between (except uninstall Celestia, which I’ve never used, because it’s too demanding of my old hardware — and nothing related to Celestia is related to DVD encodings).

So now I’m stuck with unprotected discs on my computer again. Watched Killers from Space (1954, Peter Graves, “aliens” with ping pong ball eyes; it was pretty entertaining) instead of finishing House of Bamboo.

And once again, I’m restricted to my Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Mega Packs, and Playboy discs. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

UPDATE: Typo corrected, links added.

Quote of the moment

Why would NOT having money make you better than those who have it?

— Herself, showing yet again why I love her.

The Sky People by S.M. Stirling, 2006

I wanted to like this book very much.

No, that’s not right. I wanted to love this book.

I’ve tried reading Stirling before, but never warmed to him. ((The books I tried were both in his Draka series, I think they were Marching Through Georgia and Under the Yoke, but don’t recall for certain.)) But when I read about the premise of this book (first in a series), I thought “Aha, here’s a book I can get into.”

The premise is that the solar system is more or less the solar system of early-to-mid-20th-century science fiction. That is, that Venus and Mars are both populated, and populated wondrously. Not only with primitive humans, but dinosaurs, giant flying birds, and suchlike. This is the solar system of Edgar Rice Burroughs to some extent, but also Robert A. Heinlein, early Robert Silverberg, Leigh Brackett, and countless others. But instead of outlandish pulp adventure, Stirling would treat everything else with rigorous realism, doing his best to keep it hard (that is, scientifically accurate) SF.

As I said, this is the kind of stuff I could get into. And when I thumbnail the plot, or even if I were to sketch it out a bit more than that, it will still seem like something I would love.

But I didn’t. I merely liked it. Somewhat.

In the 1960s, two space probes are sent, one from the USSR to Venus and one, offstage in this narrative, from the USA to Mars. They find life, including humans, and that changes history from that point on. By 1988, the time of the story proper, both the US and USSR have colonies on Venus.

After some time establishing character and setting, a Russian lander goes astray and crash-lands in the area where the first Russian probe landed in the 60s — thousands of miles away from either the Russian or American outposts. The American outpost is closer, however, so a small rescue expedition is mounted to fetch the pilot, if he survived, and any cargo that remains intact.

The expedition proceeds in a zeppelin.

A. Zeppelin.

Have I mentioned that I should totally love this book? Because I should.

Anyway, the zeppelin, made from materials native to Venus, proceeds, and runs into dangers and disaster, leaving its surviving crew to fend for themselves and figure out a way back home across thousands of miles of hostile territory, after finding the object of their expedition.

So it sounds like fun, like a real romp, even in explaining what happens in it. But it mostly isn’t, I’m afraid, and there’s several reasons for that.

The biggest problem I had with it was pacing, and several issues related to it.

First of all, most of the action is at the tail end of the narrative. Now, granted, that’s usually a good thing. The pace should build relentlessly. Unfortunately, as I finished the book, it felt like all of the action was in the last 50-100 pages, at least all of the important stuff. The first sections of the novel are purely stage-setting, with hints of stuff to come later. It’s really, really heavily back-weighted.

Related to this is the mystery. Stirling tells you in the first few chapters that there’s mysterious stuff going on. He keeps reminding you now and then throughout the narrative. But you don’t get any clear grasp of what it might be until halfway through, and there are no real answers to any of the mysteries until the very, very end, the next to last chapter. In which everything gets resolved all at once.

There’s no build to the mystery. No red herrings, false leads, false conclusions later proved wrong. You just are told that something Not Right happened, and only about halfway through do you get any clue at all to what it might be. Which was frustrating.

Another annoyance that I’m going to file under “pace” is probably a personal thing with me, because its a fairly common technique, but I thought it was ill-suited to this type of story. This is a physical adventure story and, if it were Burroughs writing it, each task would be narrated in more or less chronological order, at least insofar as the protagonist experiences it. But Stirling, more than once, skips ahead and then back-narrates the actual work the characters must do. Again, this is not an invalid technique, but in the context of this type of story, I found it frustrating.

For instance, in the latter half of the story, the protagonist and his compatriots need to capture a dinosaur, and have only the most primitive means available to them. The hero comes up with a plan, and essentially whispers it in the others’ ears so that the reader doesn’t know what it will be. Then we jump ahead to the actual capture, with each step presented to us, and then the preparations back-narrated to fill us in.

In Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, which is very far from Burroughs’s best book, or even his best Tarzan book, there’s a scene where a man has to build a door that will keep critters out, and has no real tools to do it with. Instead of jumping ahead in time and showing a working door already built, then sketching in how it was done, Burroughs takes you through the process of making it. You work right there next to Tarzan’s father, the labor leading to the successful working of the door is part of the satisfaction of the narrative. (Good westerns do this, as well. Think of Shane and Joe Starrett digging out the tree trunk in Shane.)

If we’re identifying with our protagonists, as we should be, then their ordeals ought to be ours, and we should endure them together, not have the protagonists go off and plot in a corner, then come back and proclaim “See! See how clever we are?” Doing things offstage is a fine device when used properly, I do it myself all the time. But given the type of story Stirling set out to write here, it was incredibly frustrating to this reader. I wanted to watch that zeppelin get built! I wanted to be in on the plan to catch the dinosaur, not an outside observer who constantly has to be filled in on every little detail.

Stirling does get things right (as I state above, I enjoyed the book; I just didn’t love it the way I wanted to). The little details all feel exactly right. There is a verisimilitude to his Venus that makes you wish it really were that way. From the domestication of a greatwolf to the use of dinos as construction machinery, and dozens of other little details, everything in the milieu feels right, it all seems to fit together.

And the quiet parallels to the stories he takes inspiration from work very well too. For instance, that domesticated greatwolf is second cousin to John Carter’s companion Woola. No big deal is made out of it, he fits naturally into the story, but the parallel is there for those who will appreciate it.

On the other hand, there are some background details that seem to be pure wish-fulfillment, such as JFK’s legacy in this alternate reality. It wasn’t intrusive, per se, but it didn’t ring true either.

What was intrusive was a detail that seemed to have no point. Our protagonist and a female Venusian have dreamed of each other, in detail, before ever meeting. These prophetic dreams don’t really pay off, except that the two each recognize the other (to no end other than easing their meeting a bit). Perhaps more will be made of this later in the series, but in this book alone, it seemed pointless.

I’m going to read the sequel, and very likely the one after that. Because this wasn’t a bad book and, as I said, this is a very cool premise on which to launch a series.

But I’m afraid I found this particular exploration of the premise disappointing.

No mention is made of the color of his shirt

Despicable:

A man heckling First Lady Laura Bush and daughter Jenna outside the 92nd Street Y[MCA] was arrested after he punched a wheelchair-bound girl whose parents had told him to shut up, authorities said Wednesday.

But remember: Bush is the fascist, and his opponents are on the side of all that is right and good.