I saw The Golden Compass yesterday and enjoyed it for the most part.  One scene was very good, very creepy.  Little kids are being kidnapped for unknown (but nefarious) purposes by a totalitarian regime called The Magisterium.  The scene takes place where the children are being held, in a Jules Vernish fortress in the middle of freezing fucking nowhere.  The kids are shown in a room writing letters to their parents and a very creepy nurse is instructing one of the boys to write something or his parents won’t get a letter (which the watchers know they are never going to get anyway).  It’s effective, chilling, and doesn’t treat viewers as stupid, showing the nature of the place and the regime holding the kids in an oblique but powerful way. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up until…until I saw the chairs. 

This is supposed to be an alternate Earth (yes, the standard sci fi interpretation of the “many dimensions” aspect of physics, but I like it so don’t care if it’s been used before).  Apparently on this alternate Earth where people’s souls live outside their bodies as animal manifestations that talk, they also have a Design within Reach.  Must be right next door to the Magisterium HQ!  The creepy kid torture factory was filled with Eames plastic molded chairs.  If you’re going to make a fantasy film, DON’T use a well known design object in it, it’s destracting!  For God’s sake people didn’t you have 60 million dollars or something–design your own friggin chairs!  I know you’re busy and all but I didn’t see any Globus chairs in Lord of the Rings.

I got an ITouch for Christmas and it is the most delightful and intuitive piece of hardware joy I’ve ever had.  Thank you Apple.

I have an odd sense of humor.  There are two people in the world that share it completely.  One is my brother (apparently sense of humor is genetic), and one is my husband. How do I know we have an odd sense of humor?  Because when we go to movies there will invariably be certain parts when we are the only people in the theater laughing.  We all share a very, very dark sense of humor.  A good example of this would be the remake of “War of the Worlds” with Tom Cruise. 

Tom and his kids in the movie have just escaped a horrific Martian attack and they have found a small town on the edge of a river (or lake, can’t tell) where a bunch of people have gathered.  They are bedraggled and spent.  Then they hear the sound of normalcy….a train whistle.  Ah, at last something is normal right?  The gates come down and the train rushes past.  It’s on fire.  The three of use broke out in loud laughter to the horrified stares of other movie patrons.  Here’s my top 15 list of funny movies/shows

1. Tie. The Simpsons.  Selma’s Choice.  The episode where the name for this website came from. And Raising Arizona “Ed’s father set us up in a home in suburban Tempe”–it’s in the middle of nowhere (I’m from Arizona).

2. MXC.  Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.  Pure Brilliance.

3. Futurama.  Space Pilot 3000. The brick.

4. Robot Chicken. The Star Wars Special.  

5. South Park. The save the rainforest episode.

6. Evil Dead 2. When Ash sits on the chair and it breaks underneath him

7. Heavy Metal. “She had beautiful eyes”.

8. A Fish Called Wanda.  Kevin Klein. “Dissapointed!”.

9. Blazing Saddles. “Let’s play chess”.

10. Young Frankenstein. “Get me the hell outta here!”.

11. Ace Ventura. “Your gun is digging into my hip….oh god….”

12. Monty Python. “Would you shut that bloody dancing up!” and “It’s just a harmless little bunny rabbit“.

13. Chasing Amy. “Black RAGE!!!”.

14. Airplane. “You ever seen a grown man naked?”.

15.

My neighborhood is filled with Gen Xers, and my fellow generational cohort Jenny has authored the guest blog post below about….wait for it….her review of the recent Poison (yes, the 80s hair band) concert:

Jenny says………………

It was a beautiful evening in Denver Colorado, the sun was setting and the smell of illegal substances wafted through the air. Love songs like, “I Hate Every Bone in Your Body. . . Except Mine” played from the speakers while couples swayed back and forth to the sweet melody. It’s been 21 years since Poison first set foot on the Denver soil, but it seems like just yesterday. Those black leather pants and bandanas never looked so good. Guitar solos, drum solos, headbanging–it doesn’t get any better. The evening ended with a personal invitation (for me and several thousand others) to the X Saloon for some good “clean” fun.

Last night my husband and I were watching a new series on ABC called “Masters of Science Fiction”.  It’s hard loving science fiction so much, because the people who write it need to be as smart (preferably smarter) than you are–and Hollywood is not very obliging in that respect. 

The show starts with the discovery of an unidentifiable life form at the crash site of a helicopter in Iraq–potentially interesting right?  There’s all sorts of interesting things that could happen here.  None of them did.  Move to a government facility where they are examining the life form, bunch of stern looking dudes with lots of chest ribbons say they need to call back Captain so-and-so from retirement to deal with this, screen fades.  My husband says, “he’ll be fishing on a lake”.  Sure enough, cue completely hack scene of gruff military man weary of the world but with a good heart…..fishing at the side of a lake.  Hello…people?…screenwriters?  Yeah, have you ever seen Stargate SG-1?  Please.

We should have turned it off right there, but unfortunately we wasted another 40 minutes on a show about angel looking humanoids (presumably aliens although they DNA typed as humans sans gender of course, none of which was explained) basically telling us we better all just get along or else. 

There needs to be a specialist in Hollywood-a Science Fiction Cliche Master–who reads all these scripts and removes the cheesy crap (unless it works, but it’s a fine, fine line).  The brilliant series “Firefly” and “Farscape” get cancelled and this is what we get instead?  It’s a sad, sad time to be a television sci-fi fan.

There’s a subgenre of horror/fantasy films that revolve around the Devil, and there have been some pretty good/amusing characterizations of the cloven hooved fallen angel on film, here’s a list of my personal favorites.

1. Al Pacino in Devil’s Advocate.  (1997) A subtle, charming, somewhat grizzled Satan with the ideal job (for a really manipulative evil bastard that is): running a legal firm specializing in getting off the really guilty and skeezy.  He sings Sinatra and wants to breed the anti-Christ.  Best line:”Free will, it is a bitch”.
2. Tim Curry in Legend (1986). Really spectacular make up and sets creates a surprisingly hot 12 foot, red, rip-chested Prince of Darkness who wants to kill the last living unicorns so the sun will never rise again.  Best line: “We are all animals my lady”.
3.Linda Blair. The Exorcist. (1973).  I have a kid, and sometimes they do act like Satan and vomit an amount that seems to have been improbably contained inside their little bodies, but Damn, at least her head never spun around and she didn’t exit the stairs like an inside-out crab. I don’t remember if the main character here was said to be possessed by the Devil himself, or just a demon, but either way, creeeeeepy. Best line: I can’t bring myself to type it, but my brother does the FUNNIEST impression of it while making motions towards his crotch.
4. The Swirling Can of Satan in Prince of Darkness (1987).  Mix the cock-eyed Asian dude from Big Trouble in Little China, some silly metaphysics, a dude with a cheesy 80s mustache, and can of liquid Satan in the basement of an abandoned church and you get this movie. It’s silly, but oddly disturbing, especially the scenes of the future trying to contact the main protagonist in (apparently) what is the easiest method of time travel: an in-dream preview of life on Earth if they don’t put some Drain-O into Can O Liquid Satan in the here and now.
5. Harvey Stephens [AKA that creepy British kid in The Omen]. The Omen (1976).  Now, Damien (forever now in the vernacular as a synonym for “nasty little brat”) is technically not the Devil, he is the anti-Christ, which I thought I understood as being different from the Devil, so to make sure I Googled the term “Satan antichrist what is the difference”.  Let me tell you, you get some really fucking weird results with those terms together. 

A confession: I am a hard core science fiction fan.  Not hard core as in attends conferences dressed up (although scarily I can see the attraction), but hard core as in I read almost exclusively science fiction books and watch every decent science fiction movie and television series that comes out, and, like any good science fiction fan, now hate George Lucas for as I believe Harry Knowles put it, “raping my childhood”, with the production of the three crapfest prequels he put the Star Wars name on (now really, we all knew it was going down the crapper back in the 80s when the toy “cum-characters” of the Ewoks showed up, but I still had clung faintly to hope that was residual from “Empire”).  As a kid I watched the original Battlestar Galactica and in an eerily prescient action demonstrating why I would never have a prom date, I named my stuffed toy bear “Muffet” after the robotic dog in the show. 

Enter the new Battlestar Galactica now being made by the Sci Fi channel.  It started out very promising; a scene in the pilot episode showed an adorable little girl picking the petals off a daisy in the atrium of a large space ship.  Cut to space with a missile headed for the ship, then black screen.  I thought “ooohhh they have balls, they aren’t afraid to be dark, perhaps this is promising, and the characters are very good.  The show goes on, we watch every episode but I have this one, very serious problem when watching science fiction–I HATE IT WHEN THEY DON’T LOGICALLY EXPLAIN SHIT, even if they just make up a half lame explanation, if it has some sense and I like the show, I’ll be willing to suspend my disbelief.  So my main problem with Battlestar: They have never explained what the human Cylons are at all.  Believe me, if any half intelligent person was among the 45 K or so survivors, they would have cut that shit up in half a second to determine what they are; are they clones, are they cyborgs, WTF?  They can interbreed with humans (of course, this aspect of sexual exploitation is in an ingredient in EVERY sci fi show, at least they’ve moved on from anal probes).  So in this universe they have space travel but no electron microscopes, gel electrophoresis, or scalpels?  Hello!  And I don’t think there is much of a morality concern here: if some organism killed billions of humans you can sure as shit bet no one would think twice about taking it apart bit by bit to see what kind of threat they were dealing with.  All I’m asking for is some logical order, or some excuse why this logical order can’t be followed (a virus destroyed all our medical equipment, they have acid for blood etc…).  Sometimes I regret having 7 years of scientific training.  I think I would enjoy things a lot more if I wasn’t so anal.

Hi,
Welcome to my blog–the place where I put all the stuff I like to write about but no one else is interested in (or wants to pay me for).  I have a very diverse set of interests including all areas of science, especially ecology (not environmentalism, that’s something else), reptiles (keeping and breeding them), new urbanism, home and community design, interior design, modern architecture, gardening, science fiction, dark humor….and almost every thing else.  I am incurably curious. I think the world is full of wonders without count (I’m stealing that from someone else but can’t remember who, Carl Sagan?), and I’m going to write about some of them here.

To start out with, I also like to make lists of strange things and here is one of my favorites:

The Top 10 Good Movies with Unhappy Endings

Sick of all those Hollywood happy endings?  Want characters in movies to just die? These movies will satisfy your inner misanthrope.

1.  Miracle Mile. 1988. Gatta love a movie that starts as a cheesy romance, ends with nuclear holocaust and the main lovebird characters drowning in the La Brea Tar Pits.

2. Beneath the Planet of the Apes. 1970. Intelligent apes plus not so intelligent, but telepathic, underground mutants who worship an atomic bomb.  Ends, “In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” Black Screen.  No one in Hollywood would have the balls to end a movie like that nowadays.

3. Brazil. 1985. Yeah! you defeated your bureaucratic enemy and escaped with your dream girl, naw you are just hallucinating from torture.

4. The Thing. 1982. Save all humanity from alien that will kill and copy everyone, but burn down your Antarctic lab in the process.  It could have been worse, you could have been turned into something with oozy, dripping psuedopods instead of freezing to death.

5. 12 Monkeys. 1995.  What’s more depressing than watching yourself get shot while wearing a bad wig? Terry Gilliam has made this list twice.  He’s a genius but might need some Prozac.

6. Being John Malkovitch 1999. You get to spend the rest of your life trapped in a body you can’t control watching your wife and the girl you wanted live happily ever after, together.

7. Jacob’s Ladder.  1990. Your life is in your head, you are actually in the last minutes before death, psyche.

8. Donnie Darko. 2001. Want to save the world?  You have to choose death by sloughed jet engine.

9. The Ring.  2002. The spirit just wanted to be heard, no wait, she’s pissed off and just wants to kill people.

10. Memento. 2000. You can’t remember things from five minutes ago, like the fact that you’ve killed a bunch of people who weren’t your wife’s killer.