Random musings, sentimental maunderings, incoherent thoughts, stress-relieving rants, momentary enthusiasms, big ideas, and occasional awful puns from the complex life and interesting times of Do-Ming Lum.
Six days ago, over 115,000 websites including Google, Wikipedia, Freethoughtblogs, Craigslist, and many other popular websites "went dark" -- effectively went on strike -- for a 24 hour period to protest the SOPA and PIPA legislation that is being considered by the American government.
"...millions of Canadians rely on the legitimate sites that are affected by the legislation. Whether creating a Wikipedia entry, posting a comment on Reddit, running a WordPress blog, participating in an open source software project, or reading a posting on BoingBoing, the lifeblood of the Internet is a direct target of SOPA. If Canadians remain silent, they may ultimately find the sites and services they rely upon silenced by this legislation."
Writer, consultant, and teacher Clay Shirky explains why this legislation is a bad idea even for Americans:
[Thanks to Lorna for pointing out this video]
The day of protest on January 18, 2012 was mildly inconvenient for me, but annoying to many others. That annoyance translated into political action which raised the awareness of American lawmakers and caused the SOPA and PIPA legislation to be withdrawn. But the final point raised by Clay Shirky in the video is still valid -- there will be other attempts in the future to censor and regulate the internet.
There is a story, probably apocryphal, about Sir Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man. There is a scene where Hoffman's character has been awake for a few days and is physically exhausted. So on the day they were to film that scene, Hoffman came to the set in terrible shape, and Olivier said, 'Dusty, you look absolutely wretched!'. According to the story, it turned out that Hoffman had been awake for twenty-four hours and had been running laps around a track, in order to prepare for the scene by making himself sleep-deprived and exhausted. On learning this, Olivier shakes his head and says, 'Oh, Dusty, why don't you just try acting?'
My first introduction to the world behind the stage came from reading Robert Heinlein's Double Star when I was a teenager. I get flashbacks to Double Star from the Olivier story, and from the following video clip where another great actor, Sir Ian McKellen explains his acting method.
Various sources, including Variety, the Japan Times, the Amine News Network, and others report that Nishizaki passed away in a boating accident earlier today, in an ironic twist falling from the deck of a ship named Yamato after his most famous creation. Although rescued from the water, the 75-year old Nishizaki passed away shortly afterward.
One of Nishizaki's final projects was the live action movie Space Battleship Yamato, scheduled for release in Japan in December.
Today -- the 100th birthday of filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (March 23,1910 to September 6, 1998), who among many other films, made The Hidden Fortress, a movie that clearly influenced Star Wars.
Regular readers of this blog (all six of you) will know that I am the father of a bright ten year old, who being a ten year old is subject to all the whims and fads of his peer group. For a (fairly long) while, one of those fads was a card game called Pokemon (link here to Wikipedia entry) -- a game whose arcane intricacy I never figured out. Additionally, there was a television show. And merchandise. Oh yes, merchandise -- enough lunch boxes and knapsacks and figurines and stuffed animals and all kinds of other (expensive) goodies, all designed to separate the child's parent's money from the child's parent. While the game and its surrounding hype were annoying mass media junk, the concept as a whole had a certain elegance in its exploitation of obsessive-compulsive “collect ‘em all” tendencies in children. Not that I would have any understanding of obsessive-compulsive “collect ‘em all” tendencies.
So you can imagine my horror when I learned that by allowing my son to have exposure to Pokemon cards and Pokemon paraphernalia, I have made it possible for him to learn how to enter into the world of witchcraft, how to cast spells, how to use psychic phenomena, how to work supernatural powers against his enemies , and worst of all, how to fantasy role play! I guess it is because "everything in life is real" that I need to take this seriously. Or perhaps not.
The list of Pokemon bad things begins at around 1:15. As a parent, I am pretty concerned about my son needing to work supernatural powers against his enemies. In his one experience with a bully, he was miserable for weeks because he didn't want to punch the other kid, which I am sorry to say would have been my response. He finally got the other kid to stop by talking to him about it, and convincing the other kid through reason that the harassment needed to stop. But I can see how with access to supernatural powers, he would have totally just zapped the other kid instead of applying will and courage and resolve to deal with this problem. Because kids would do that, when they aren't pumping their friends full of bullets with their handguns.
I also had issues with the logic behind why the Pokemon concept was both as corrupting as he says, and was also as effective a training tool as he says. If the latter were true, I would have expected to have absorbed enough of this knowledge during hours of watching Pokemon with my son to have the ability to use this methodology to make myself a superstar of corporate training. The fact that I am not an incredibly wealthy corporate training guru should tell you something.
In order to assuage my concerns, I hauled N1S (Number 1 Son) in front of the monitor, played back the video and watched his reaction, which went from basically neutral to astonishment to outright hostility. His response -- "He's crazy. I know the difference between fantasy and reality. I would never shoot my friends with a real gun. This guy is really stupid."
So, there you have it, from a ten (well, technically almost eleven) year old boy: "This guy is really stupid". I can't express it better myself. I wonder if this guy knows Pat Robertson? They surely belong together.
The truly sad thing about this are the people in the audience, who have all apparently turned off their capacity for critical thinking and for asking questions. Around about the mention of "witchcraft", I would have been walking out. Demagogues of this ilk have existed in every age, but their power comes from those who follow unthinkingly, or who remain silent in the face of nonsense.
Happy Halloween -- take care tonight amidst the ghosts, ghouls, and asorted creatures of the night.
(Thanks to Mike M for finding the images, which are anime/manga fan art. The first in the series was created by Mutsuki Ai, the second through fourth are unknown)
Copies of Tesseracts Thirteen are available from BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto. If you were so inclined, you could almost certainly contact BakkaPhoenix or Edge Publishing for a copy by mail order. You can also order the book from Chapters Indigo, from Amazon, or for our American friends, from Barnes and Noble.
Following are some photos from the launch event and the impromptu (but traditional) post launch gathering at the Wheat Sheaf pub at King and Bathurst.
Somewhere between forty to fifty people attended (it was hard to count numbers in the bookstore) and it wasn't clear that there was a one-to-one mapping between attendees and book sales. However, the one observation that was possible to make was that the pile of books available diminished substantially during the course of the afternoon.
For the second year in a row, our friends Warren, Ann, and their son Aaron came out to support us by buying a book. Thank you very much, and hopefully there will be more events like this!
The post launch gathering moved down the street to the Wheat Sheaf, where the talk (as you might expect) revolved around science fiction, canlit, and publishing.
As the evening progressed, a pool game started. After defeating Dave Nickle, Brett Savory went looking for other victims, and found a volunteer in Corwin.
Corwin demonstrated that he has a better grasp of applied physics than his old man, especially with regard to the consequences of elastic collisions. However, despite coaching from Dave, he too went down to defeat.
Our evening ended shortly thereafter -- apparently there is a law in Ontario that says a minor can't be in a pub after 9pm.
Our thanks to all those who came to the reading or to the gathering afterward. It was a great party, and a great launch for the book in Toronto!
This movie is worth seeing, and probably more than once. We watched this down at the Beaches Cinema yesterday. All three of us thought this was a good movie, although (as usual) I have issues. I had vague thoughts about taking the day off to line up and watch the first showing on Friday, but those never got past the vague thoughts stage. If this were 20 years ago, I would have done it, no question.
Here are some of the issues (possible spoiler warnings) --
Delta Vega is fairly close to the energy barrier at the galaxy's edge, not between Earth and Vulcan.
"Red Matter"? WTF? This substance is used to initiate a black hole collapse. It should have been straightforward to insert a reference to dark matter here.
Replacing a planet with an equivalent mass black hole doesn't create an instant "vacuum cleaner" effect.
Most serious - a supernova explosion won't destroy a planet in the way that it is shown to occur.
However, the rationale behind the "reboot" is well done -- it allows therm to acknowledge all of the existing history without necessarily being tied to it.
We went on a family expedition down to the Beaches theatre on Saturday to see Coraline. It was a fine movie, and despite the fact that it is a true horror film, did not cause any squickiness.
It has been a while since I read Neil Gaiman's (children's) novel on which this movie is based. All of the important elements are present: Coraline's busy parents (whom I seem to remember were computer programmers in the book not gardeners as they are in the movie), the aging actress sisters, the mouse circus trainer. And of course, Coraline's Other Mother on the other side of the doorway. The horror is elegant and gradual, like a slowly tightening web.
Coraline is brave, determined, and intelligent -- exactly what every parent hopes their own child will be. She makes mistakes, but she works to overcome their consequences.
For most of the movies I watch, I generally have quibbles about the story they tell. Usually, writers or directors manage to do something to break my suspension of disbelief. I did not have any quibbles about this one.
We drove by the Art Gallery of Ontario earlier on Sunday. The new renovation has been completed and is open. Seeing this got me to thinking about the neighbourhood. The Ontario College of Art and Design is immediately south of the Art Gallery and the Sharp Centre For Design, part of OCAD, is also a striking piece of architecture -- it is built to resemble a giant table, looming over the other buildings around it.
I first saw this OCAD building a few years back from a vantage point further south, when I was visiting my cousin at a place he was looking after for a friend.
Given that the OCAD building resembles a table, I propose the following art installation:
On the roof of the OCAD building, at each of the sides of this giant table, create a place setting at an appropriate scale, consisting of a plate, a cup, a bowl, a knife, a fork, and chopsticks.
These place settings would be visible from all around the OCAD building - basically, from any structure higher than its roof. Each place setting would represent a particular group - for example, politicians, the economic elite, homeowners, and the homeless. But I propose sufficient ambiguity in the design to allow viewers to create their own symbolic OCAD dinner party.
I can't possibly be the first one to have had this idea -- someone should do it!
Sunday July 8 was Bri's last day with us before returning home. We got her all packed up and her stuff loaded into the car, then went off to see Ratatouille -- the new movie from Pixar.
Although Pixar had faltered a bit with their last release -- Cars -- they got it all back and more with this one. It should be noted that Ratatouille was written and directed by Brad Bird -- who previously did The Incredibles and Iron Giant.
This is the promotional trailer:
This is a longer extract:
We loved the movie. The family consensus is that this movie will be a keeper when it comes out on DVD.
I took Tuesday July 3rd off and went with Corwin and Bri to see the Transformers movie. This was not a good movie, but it was lots of fun. I liked it.
Older Transformers trailer (6 months ago):
Newer Transformers trailer (one month ago):
Corwin is still a bit afraid in theatres - he has a hard time with the combination of overwhelming sound and giant visuals. But once he got past the trailers and into the actual movie, he was fine.
Way back there in the dim mists of time, sometime in the late Jurassic when I was still in high school, I had a couple of classmates and a number of teachers who were deeply committed Christian fundamentalists. These acquaintances believed, among other things, in the idea that that the evolutionary view of the world was wrong and that the biblical view of creation as recounted in the book of Genesis in the Christian Bible was literally true and correct.
Even as a teenager, I had a problem with this.
This YouTube video, a mini-documentary posted by Dave and Karen, two of the Usual Suspects, brings back fond(?) memories of creationism debates. Their topic is Dinosaur Adventure Land, a small theme park built by a man named Kent Hovind in Florida.
When I see the representations of humans and dinosaurs together, that being one of the central premises of the beliefs of Hovind and his Creation Museum compatriots, I am struck but how similar their vision is to the imagery of the Flintstones. But unlike the cheerful buffoonery of Fred and Barney and their friends, the creationist vision serves a darker purpose, whose aim is to keep its adherents tractable through ignorance of the truth.
Okay, so perhaps it's not so secret. But made you look!
Ever since I was a kid, I have loved comic books. Comic books were one of my early motivations in learning to read. I have a childhood memory from Grade 6, of an assignment from a teacher who understood the opportunity inherent in the number of comic books in evidence in his classroom. He required us to each pick one, and retell the story, focusing especially on written descriptions of the action happening on each page, in each panel. At the time, I thought of it as a better than average Reading assignment, but it never occurred to me that I could devote further analytical thought to comic books in general.
My first awareness of comics as something that mattered came when I read Lupoff and Thompson's "All In Color For A Dime" when I was 12 or 13. This book made me aware that comics had a history, and is probably the influence that made me start collecting them, as opposed to merely reading them.
My own collection extends back into the 50s (only a few examples, and all mostly cowboy comics), has some representation through the 1960s and early 70s, becomes fairly strong (at least as far as mainstream publications) in the late 70s and most of the 80s. By the time I met Jill in 1990, I had stopped regularly buying comic books. This happened for sseveral reasons -- first, available time became a semantically null concept as far as my own life was concerned; second, simple economics dictated other priorities; third, most importantly, I lost interest.
However, I have always resisted the notion of selling off my comics. Too many hours of personal history are tied up in those multi-coloured pages. So therefore, it was a pleasure to find a web site that has thousands of comic book covers, many from books that I remember reading.
I am now an occasional comic book buyer. Prices are the most noticeable thing. How do kids afford comics today? The answer is that they probably don't -- the comic book market has shifted so that target audiences are mostly adults, rather than entirely for children. This is probably a development which would not have been anticipated, fifty years ago at the height of the anti-comics frenzy.
My son learned to read over the last year and a half, and I see some aspects of my own early reading experience repeating themselves. Corwin has gotten to the point where he can figure out a hitherto new word, all on his own. This last week, he could often be found with his nose buried inside a copy of "Teen Titans Go!" or the "Star Wars: Rogue Squadron" graphic novel. My nice warm feeling comes when I know that it took no effort to get him to read, and his reading is motivated by his own interest. How much better than that does it get??
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