Still Trekkin' at 40

Star Trek premiered 40 years ago on NBC in the US (and 40 years ago yesterday on CTV in Canada... proving once again that Canada is ahead of the curve... but I digress...)

The Dark Tower Diaries -- Day Three

Now
Has this ever happened to you?
You're reading a book at work. It's going to be a photo finish to see which finishes first, the book or your lunch hour. You find yourself skimming quickly, trying to squeeze every last second of readable time out of your break, a desperate race to beat the clock. But in the end, you just run out of time (much like Jake did a couple of pages back).
That's where I am with The Gunslinger. Page 292 out of 300.
Maybe I can sneak a quick glance at the book at my desk. It's not like I have any real work right now. Wait -- is that the boss? Gack!
It appears that the end of The Gunslinger is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. I know this because Roland says it, the man in black says it, the narrator says it, heck, I think even Jake says it.
Thanks to the man in black's explanations (of which he has not yet finished -- curse that lunchroom clock!), Roland appears to live on a parallel earth, one that may have suffered some sort of plague, possibly man-made. Hmmm, some tie-in to The Stand here? Anyway, it appears that Roland's quest will take him to the Tower, some sort of nexus point of all these parallel universes.
Well, d'uh. The series is called The Dark Tower, after all.

Later
Okay, I've finished off The Gunslinger and moved onto book two, The Drawing of the Three. At 463 pages, this is more like a typical length for King, as opposed to The Gunslinger's rather scant (scant for King, anyway) 300 pages. And it reads like a more typical King book. Drawing was published in 1987, five years after Gunslinger, and seems less stylish and more assured in its narrative voice. King had also just finished an amazing run of releasing four novels in a year, including two of my favourite King novels, It and Eyes of the Dragon. The other two were Misery, not exactly a slouch itself, and The Tommyknockers (as Meatloaf might have said, three out of four ain't bad).
Anyway, I'm not too far in. Roland has just gone sleepwalking in the surf and has had bits of himself eaten by the giant lobster.

The Dark Tower Diaries -- Day Two

Now we're well into the meat of The Gunslinger. In the second novella, The Way Station, we officially learn that he is called Roland -- he is no longer the gunslinger with no name. While continuing his pursuit of the man in black, he encounters a boy named Jake. Here King drops all kinds of hints about the connection between Roland's world and ours. Jake lived in "our" world, until he was killed by the man in black who pushed Jake out into traffic. Jake is slowly forgetting his connection to our world, only through hypnotism can Roland learn Jake's story. And we flash back and experience an incident from Roland's childhood, where we learn that the mysterious Cort alluded to earlier was Roland's teacher who talks like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. Roland seems to have some knowledge of "our" world as well. It will be interesting to see how all this is tied together.
This is an early King novel, his eighth published, but one of the first he started writing and it will be also interesting to see how the novels' voice changes over the 30 years he took to write the series. (That makes me feel old, imagine how old that makes King feel!) King also made me go "Ick!" over one line of dialogue as Jake remembers his accident. I've read a lot of King; there isn't much that can make me squirm anymore, but he managed to at the top of page 114.
Today I finished off the second and third novella (The Oracle and The Mountains) and got into the fourth one, The Slow Mutants (no, it's not about Star Trek fans). We keep learning little things about Roland's past --Cuthbert and the horn, Susan Delgado-- but also more things about the strange world he lives in. An underground railroad with talking hand-cars? What is going on here?
We also get the first mention of The Tower. Some sort of nexus in time. And time has gone soft here, as Roland says.
And more numerology. I assume that King is using "nineteen" because he was 19 when he started writing this, but the oracle mentions the number three (which I assume plays into the next book, The Drawing of the Three), and then the oracle mentions that another number will become important later.
But now Roland has just had his first conversation with the man in black. Back to the book!

The Dark Tower Diaries -- Day One

One day in and I'm well into the first book. Volume One is called The Gunslinger and is divided into five novellas. (Disclosure: I should point out that I am reading the 2003 revised and expanded text.) I've finished the first novella, the longest in the book, which is called (surprise!) The Gunslinger.
King seems to have a fascination with "Nineteen." I wonder what that's about.
This is our introduction to Roland the gunslinger. King is doing a good job at slowly constructing his world, a strange Sergio Leono western-world that seems lost somewhere else in time and space, yet clearly has some connection to our own (with the bar patrons belting out a boisterous version of "Hey Jude.) It's these little details that King has always excelled at. We don't even know Roland's name at this point, yet King has dropped tantilizing little hints at his back story and his pursuit of the man in black. And who's Cort? (Named after Bud Cort, I'm guessing.)

Freddie Mercury...

...would have been 60 today.
I saw Queen in Vancouver in 1982. Awesome show. What a great band! There can be only one Freddie.

Sunday Paddle

I found a cave while kayaking on Sunday.

A lone seagull stood sentry...

..as I moved in slowly.

I made it in.

It's actually not much of a cave, more like a very very small cove.

The seagull is still watching.

It was a fun little spot to explore.




And look - seals!

The Dark Towers Diaries - Prologue

Many years ago I knew a fellow who would buy all the books in a series in hardcover and not read them until the series was complete. I thought this was interesting because at the time we were reading the same five-book series, The Incarnations of Immortality by Piers Anthony. I used the word "reading" rather loosely here; I was reading them in paperback as they came out, he was collecting them in hardcover to read when the entire five-book series was published. I asked him why he was doing this, and he said something about reading them all in one go like a giant novel so that he could enjoy the subtle nuiances that are lost by reading each one a year apart.
"Subtle nuiance"??!? It's Piers Anthony! His writing style is about as subtle as W's smirk!
Anyway, I bumped into him again just after book five, the final book, came out in hardcover and he was merrily reading the series and enjoying it very much. He was having such a good time reading it that I didn't have the heart to tell him that Anthony had gone to another publisher for books six and seven.
And I guess he's still hasn't cracked the spine on any of his Robert Jordan books.
(For the record, The Incarnations of Immortality series was a nifty idea and the first couple of books were great, but it became progressively less great as the series went on. And on.)
Okay. I'm going to do something crazy. Starting today, I am going to start to read all seven volumes of Stephen King's Dark Tower series in a row.
I've never read a completed series all the way through in one go. (The clever dicks among you will now realize that I've never read The Lord of the Rings all the way through. Loved the movies, hated the books. Couldn't make it through Fellowship. If those stinky little hobbits had stopped for another meal, I'd have killed the little fucks myself.)
I've read the Dune books, but Frank Herbert was still adding to the series when I was reading it so it wasn't complete when I read it. (And it still isn't, apparently. There's so many Dune prequels and sequels coming out these days. Fishmonger of Dune is the latest, where Paul learns that to catch the legendary sandfish of Dune, he's going to need a mighty big worm.)
I have no illusions that I'll finish all seven books in seven days. That'd be really nuts to expect that's gonna happen. But with lunchbreaks at work, I should get through them at a fair clip. Except that the last one is 1072 pages. In paperback.
Call me nuts if you want. Better people than you already have.

De-Criminalizing Bush

According to this story at Counterpunch, Bush et al are planning to enact legisaltion that will retroactively "protect" Bush from war crimes charges.

"Under the Nuremberg standard, Bush is definitely a war criminal. The US Supreme Court also exposed Bush to war crime charges under both the US War Crimes Act of 1996 and the Geneva Conventions when the Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld against the Bush administration's military tribunals and inhumane treatment of detainees.
"President Bush and his Attorney General agree that under existing laws and treaties Bush is a war criminal together with many members of his government. To make his war crimes legal after the fact, Bush has instructed the Justice (sic) Department to draft changes to the War Crimes Act and to US treaty obligations under the Geneva Conventions.
"One of Bush's changes would deny protection of the Geneva Conventions to anyone in any American court.
"Bush's other change would protect from prosecution any US government official or military personnel guilty of violating Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Article 3 prohibits "at any time and in any place whatsoever outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." As civil libertarian Nat Hentoff observes, this change would also undo Senator John McCain's amendment against torture.
"Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice says that Bush's changes 'immunize past crimes.'"

Fascism. It's the New Terrorism.

According to this CNN story, "President Bush in recent days has recast the global war on terror into a "war against Islamic fascism." Fascism, in fact, seems to be the new buzz word for Republicans in an election season dominated by an unpopular war in Iraq."
Rumsfeld is also using the word. Click here to see a video where he describes the rise of “a new type of fascism'’ and compared critics of the Bush administration’s war strategy to those who were Nazi appeasers in the 1930s.
Merriam-Webster Online describes fascism as:

1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

Sound like anyone we know?
Perhaps Rummy and Bush mean "fundamentalism," described by Merriam-Webster as:

1 a often capitalized : a movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching b : the beliefs of this movement c : adherence to such beliefs
2 : a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles, ie islamic fundementalism

I can understand how Bush makes that mistake. He's Bush. D'uh.
But how can such a learned man as Rummy make that mistake? Then again, he might be confused. After all, he's a fascist surrounded by fundamentalist fascists.
So let's recap:

Osama Bin Laden: fundamentalist

Saddam Hussien (r): fascist.
Donald Rumsfeld (l): fascist.

Seals of Approval

Here's some pics I took on Sunday of some seals in the water off of Witty's Lagoon.







Today I brought along my 35mm film camera which has a monster zoom lens on it. I shot almost a roll of film just of the seals. Can you tell which pictures are with my digital and which with my film camera?





I could've spent all day taking pictures.

Four Years Ago Today...

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth."
-- Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002

Is it crow-eating time yet, Dick?

Super-Duper-Size Me

A friend recently received a new Lands' End catalogue. As I looked through it, I realized that this must be an American company as they advertise men's clothing available up to size 5XL.
Strangely, they have no 5XL-sized models. But I digress.

Why They Hate Us

If anyone in the West needed a concrete example of “why they hate us,” one really needs to look no further than the acts of terrorism being carried out by the Israeli government in Lebanon.
First, let’s be clear. Israel has the right to defend itself. But what Israel is trying to do is affect a political change by using violent action against an unarmed civilian population. And that’s terrorism.
Pure and simple.
And here’s the rub for Arabs. When an Arab country, Iraq, invaded Kuwait, the whole world was up in an uproar! The UN passed resolutions denouncing the invasion, and the West lead an attack to repel the invasion based on those UN resolutions. One of the justifications for the 2003 Iraq invasion was again Iraq’s apparent flouting of UN resolutions. (It turns that they weren’t. But I digress.)
Yet when Israel invades an Arab country, the West seems strangely silent on the matter, except for the US, which has pointedly not called for an immediate cease-fire, only for a cease-fire once Israel has secured its position. (Of course, it’s not like Bush can complain… he’s doing the same thing in Iraq. But I digress again.) Further, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice appeared to actually condone the attacks with her preposterous and naïve comment that the invasion was the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Israel has occupied foreign territory for 40 years in contravention of numerous UN resolutions, and has invaded Lebanon – again – but the West does nothing but sit back and fret. And there’s not much of that going on, either.
The ultimate irony is that Israel will never achieve its security goal with this action. This is just what Osama bin Laden and his Islamists want. They want to see Israeli and American soldiers stomping over the region like bulls in a china shop. Right now, Israel is doing more recruiting for Al Qaeda than bin Laden could ever hope to do.
For every Hezbollah terrorist taken out in this offensive, dozens of civilian families have suffered casualties and perhaps gained a new appreciation for the Islamist cause. Some may even become jihadists. Burying family members has been known to radicalize people.

Observations and Other Delusions

I'm very fond of self-depricating humour.
The trouble is that I don't do it very well.

BloodRayne

It’s not often that a film will come along that is so bad not even I will like it. BloodRayne is one such film.
The plot is derivative, as is most of this movie. Kristianna Loken stars as Rayne, a Damphir, part human-part vampire. She is being pursued by a vampire overlord (played by Ben Kingsley, who must be paying off a lost bet by being in this), and some human vampire hunters led by Michael Madsen. Along the way, she learns secrets about her past, gains special powers, confronts her father blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda.
This film looks like it had a budget equivalent my allowance when I was eleven. The vampire make-up looks like Buffy leftovers. This film is filled with bloody violence that is about as realistic and comical as the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Oh, wait – BloodRayne isn’t a comedy!
Madsen is horribly miscast in this, but so is everyone else, too. Loken has some screen presence, but nothing can save her in this mess, and no-one else brings anything to their parts. Except for Meatloaf, who, in his only brief scene, deliriously chews on the scenery and swallows it whole. (He clearly is the only person who realizes what a piece of frommage he’s in – he’s billed in this film as “Meatloaf Aday.”)
Avoid this film at all costs.
Please.

Blame the Victim

So far, Israeli shelling in Lebanon has killed eight Canadian citizens, including one UN peacekeeper.
And what does our Prime Minister have to say? Not much, other than he's sure it was an accident and that everyone's really really sorry.
Hurling ordnance into cities is never an accident.
Talk about blaming the victims....

I Don't Get It

William Kristol says it again here, and it's a statement that deserves some scrutiny.
(Kristol also says that all the problems in the world are the fault of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, sorting of glossing over that the reason for the Islamists' popularity was the American-backed coup of the democratically-elected Iranian government of the early 1950s and the installation and American support of the Shah's 25 years of brutal dictitorial repression. When Bush rambles on about how a democratic Arab nation will change the Middle East, remember that there was one 50 years ago until the West overthrew it. But I digress.)
While talking about the current war in Lebanon, Kristol says, "Better to say that what's under attack is liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now happens to be the United States."
I don't get it. How do you quantify the statement that the US is the leading representative of democracy? They're sure doing a good job -- Be Nice To America or They'll Bring Democracy to Your Country!
What about that other chestnut that America is the "freest nation on earth." Again, how is this determined? Does Time publish some sort of "freedom index"? Is it determined by a straw poll of Fox News correspondents? Don Rumsfeld's tea leaves? Or by reading the pattern of buckshot left in Dick Cheney's hunting victims, er, partners?
It is a strikingly American perception that somehow the USA is rightfully the leader of the democratic world. Only in the US is the President often referred to as "The Leader of the Free World," and it is done as if it was the obvious natural order of things.
I don't recall when this was decided. Did I miss a meeting? Was I on vacation that week? If we're in the free world, and the free world has a leader, shouldn't there be a vote or something like that on who leads us?
I know I didn't vote for him.

Linus Health Update #10

Linus's BP seems to have stabilized, so the vet seems pleased at the moment. So we will continue with the current course of meds. Linus doesn't have to return to the vet for three months.
(Yeah, I know. It's a pretty flimsy update. Actually, it's really nothing more than an excuse to run another picture of Linus.)

Linus Health Update 9

Linus's new blood pressure medicine seems to be working well. His BP is in the 150-160 range, which is still high, but lower than the 220 it was hanging around in earlier.
Linus even had that rarest of treats, a housecall. We've discovered that he really doesn't like visiting the vet and his BP becomes quite elevated during his visits. So last week a tech came by the house to check his BP and catch it (and him) in a relaxed state.
Can't wait to get that bill!

A Crazy Diamond Shining On

It's hard to figure why the death of Syd Barrett has knocked me down a peg or two today. I must admit that I am not a big fan of Pink Floyd's brief Barrett-led period. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn has never been part of my music collection, although Ummagumma did provide some musical reference to the Barrett years.
The story of Syd is what compels, the musician boy-genius who walked the fine edge between genius and insanity and finally fell right over it. Maybe I'm feeling sad now that the story has ended.
Or maybe it's the continued reminder that my childhood idols are becoming old. Becoming mortal. Running over the same old ground.
What have we found? The same old fears....