Month: March 2010

Waihopai Linky

This week’s linky named in honour of the inexplicably innocent domestic peace activist terrorist activists vandals for peace.

Twilight: the Manga – a review, which is also a clear demonstration of how *not* to do lettering in a comic. I’m flabbergasted by how bad this is.

Book envy begins now – from the Jet Simian, Neil Gaiman’s library

Carrots are orange because of politics

Piano improv dude pwns Chatroulette:

Have I linked yet to anything about Brenda Braithwaite’s boardgame Train? I know it’s come up in several email conversations in the last few months. Anyway, Luke sent me this article, which is a good overview of this unusual, confrontational game/art piece.

Two from Dangerous Minds: Unusual and surprising bodypainting and a UK lookalike agency

This is one seriously big house of cards

Did you watch that amazing DICE presentation I linkied last month, on the Facebook-isation of everyday life? One throwaway mention in that presentation was a professor who uses an experience point system to grade his course. More info on that is here.

Dan at the Podagogue talks about whether podcast novels are a viable strategy for a writer looking for professional success; plus good comments section

And finally, via StarlaJo – some Bundy madness, as dance anthem

Waihopai Ploughshares

I’d also like to add my voice to all those expressing bewildered delight that the Waihopai Three were acquitted. They were three nonviolent peace activists who broke into a secure base and deflated the canopy over one of the Echelon system‘s monitoring dishes.

I have no idea how the jury found them not guilty; the defence were running a pretty unlikely line. I can only conclude that the jury respected their actions and fudged the decision to avoid punishing them.

There might yet be an appeal. I feel the Crown might decide not to, though, as they probably know they’d be on a hiding to nothing pursuing the case – better to let it sink into history. One can only imagine what will be going on in the diplomatic backchannels about this, though.

Anyway. Crazy outcome.

Lost – up to s3

As previously blogged, I’ve been watching Lost. I mostly watch it in a little window in the corner of my computer screen while I do other stuff. I’ve just finished season 3, which was the half-way point for the series.

I’m enjoying it, most definitely. It ain’t as slow as it used to be, and it’s helped having people tell me when the dumb bits of the series are gonna hit.

It meant I finally got to read and appreciate John Rogers’ You Uncurious Motherflickers piece about season 1 Lost. Yeah man.

It meant also that I feel the pain of missing what was surely one of the greatest bouts of hilarious show-mocking evar on the internets, the “Waaaaaalt!” meme. Like this.

Here’s an example of everything that is both amazing and terrible about Lost. There’s a character who says “brother” a lot. In season 3 they reveal that he used to be a monk. That’s such a refined and pure kind of dumb that you’ve got to love it.

And yes, none of it really makes any sense, and all the characters are either incapable of investigative strategy (ref. “uncurious”, above) or incapable of telling the truth, and show likes to just throw in big moments of WTF now and then just because (foot statue I’m looking at you). But the thing that frustrates me is that none of the antagonist characters act like human beings. They are completely impossible to believe in. And after devoting s3 to revealing much about the antagonist community and way of life, they continue to be utterly implausible.

But, but, but. I’ll let that slide, because there’s lots to like. Show’s energetic devotion to mystery is engaging and it really does seem to be going somewhere. So Imma let you finish, show. But Twin Peaks was the greatest inexplicable weird-ass drama of all time.

(Thanks to Jon B for loaning me Lost DVDs, too!)

Pantheon of Plastic: #3

He was a carpenter with a bad attitude, and then he became a movie star, and then he became two separate plastic figures – a pretty good approximation of the American Dream. The 1982 inductee to the PoP is Harrison Ford.

Han Solo, Star Wars
(movie, 1977; figure released 1977 by Kenner

Orphan. Smuggler. Wookiee stroker. Han Solo was the hard man of Star Wars — rough and uncompromising, but willing to subvert his principles if the price was right. His crucial intervention at the battle of Yavin (without him Yavin would be an asteroid field and Luke would be a stain on the equatorial trench) seemed proof of a mellowing of character. Was Han a nice guy after all? And while he could justify Yavin as an act of rugged mannish loyalty, the ass-freezing months on Hoth couldn’t be explained so easily. Even Chewie knew the truth – he was a bad man hung up on an unattainable woman.

And then something went horribly wrong. Maybe all that time in carbonite gave him some time to think, because he came out a changed man. He softened up. Mr. Rough-and-Uncompromising turned into Mr. Upset-When-Leia-Paid-Luke-Some-Attention. He let himself be captured by Imperial officers and he didn’t kill a single Ewok. He went on to marry Leia and popped a pair of L’il Jedi. He even tells that old Greedo story differently now. Sorry, Han – we liked you more when you were dangerous.

(Ever notice how the planetary environments in the Star Wars movies reflect the Han-Leia love story? The regimented Death Star when neither Han nor Leia would let down their guard, Hoth when Han and Leia were on frosty terms, Bespin when they were floating and flirting, Tatooine when they were just plain hot for each other, and finally a happy cavort among the priapic trees and diminutive satyrs of Endor.)

Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark
(movie, 1981; figure released 1982 by Kenner)

If you’re anything like us, you probably already know that Indiana Jones’ first name is, in fact, Henry, and that he received his pathological fear of snakes from a mishap that occurred when he was a wholesome boy scout in 1912, before his well-documented demise into drink and drugs, resulting in his death from drug-induced heart failure outside a fashionable LA night spot in 1993.

You’ll also know that his father, the noted archaeologist Henry Jones, Sr, spent many years as an agent for Britain’s Secret Service, thwarting the plans of SPECTRE and SMERSH, before being captured by the CIA and held prisoner in Alcatraz, before breaking out, and, yes, breaking back in, in order to save the free world.

But here’s some real knowledge: when a female student writes a message on her eyelids so she can flirt with you in class? Going on indefinite leave to Nepal is, in fact, the proper response. Girls like that are NOT TO BE TRUSTED.

[I think we both had a hand in this one. This is the last piece of PoP from a decade ago, but I’m not gonna stop here – I’ll see out the first five inductees at least…]

Nicky Hager and the Emails of Doom

Speaking of the political rhetoric and its disconnect from understanding…

Author Nicky Hager accuses the prime minister of being “cranky” and of coming up with “wacky” conspiracy theories. Hmm. – Liam Hehir, Palmerston North

Backstory: investigating journo Nicky Hager came into possession of a lot of internal emails from the National Party, and used them as the basis of a book called The Hollow Men that essentially rolled Nats leader Don Brash out of politics.

Nats attack dog Matthew Hooton went ferociously after control of the story with the lede-friendly counterattack line that those emails were stolen not leaked, probably by high-tech computer hackers, and that made Hager a criminal, and never mind the substance of the book because he’s a criminal and they were hacked! HACKED I SAY!

Cue endless discussion over whether or not the emails were hacked (the media reports all use this frame even though none of them really seem to know what “hacked” means). Meanwhile, things that came up in those emails remain ignored by every media commentator and most politicos. John Key, current Prime Minister, was an important liaison between the Exclusive Brethren and the Nats machine; he denies this vehemently even though the Hollow Men movie has a clip showing him entering a meeting with the EBs. Does anyone challenge him on this? Apparently not. The only story is whether or not the emails were HACKED, i.e. whether Hager is an outright criminal or just a very naughty man.

So, there are two police investigations into the allegations of hacking. Hager maintains “no, they were leaked to me”. Police say, twice: no evidence at all of anything like hacking, whatever that means.

John Key’s response: “Bollocks.” Nice one, P.M., stay on message there. So in the face of two police investigations you’re just going to stick to your story? Of course you are, because your story is a strategic position adopted upon advice from media advisors, and is not in any way connected to anything real. Nats insider/advisor Richard Long, who might be the very one who helped John Key come up with the response line to this story, enthusiastically supports the bollocks line in his completely independent political commentary column in the DomPost.

And so we get the letter to the editor by Liam Hehir, who helpfully demonstrates how effective this media management has been. In Hehir’s world, it’s Hager who’s the wacky conspiracy theorist and John Key who’s the reasonable and sensible one. Sorry Liam Hehir, but you’ve been sold.

I can only point at the media on this. John Key has basically said the police investigations were flawed, and discounted their conclusions. On the basis of nothing much at all he’s pushing a line that says Hager’s entirely reasonable claim of “leakers at work” is a lie, and Hager is a thief. No-one pushes back on this. And certainly no-one pays much attention to the dirt that the emails in question throw in Key’s direction. Media as stenographers to the powerful, as Glenn Greenwald likes to put it. The result is Liam Hehir’s letter. Come on, DomPost and others, do your jobs will you?

Captain America #602

What with Spider-Man and Wolverine and Iron Man being some of the biggest movies of the last ten years, everyone’s a comic-book superhero fan now. Or so I thought, until the huge controversy over an issue of Captain America erupted a month or so back.

SHAKOOOOOOM!

Story goes like this: in this comic, this dude Captain America and his long-time buddy the Falcon go investigating an anti-government group of villains called the Watchdogs. (None of these characters are new. Cap came along at the start of the 40s, Falcon in the 70s and the Watchdogs in the 80s.) Cap and Falcon carry out surveillance on an anti-tax rally in a middle-American town.

Big group of people holding signs like “America 4 Sale” and “Stop the socialists!” and “Tea bag the libs before they tea bag YOU!” Says Falcon, who is black, about the prospect of infiltration: “I don’t exactly see a black man from Harlem fitting in with a bunch of angry white folks.” So they come up with a plan: Falcon pretends to be an IRS man turning up in a bar threatening an audit, while Cap pretends to be a roving trucker who punches out the IRS man and wins over the locals.

KRAKOW!

Then the blogs got involved! It started here:

So, there you have it, America. Tea Party protesters just “hate the government,” they are racists, they are all white folks, they are angry, and they associate with secretive white supremacist groups that want to over throw the U.S. government.
Bet you didn’t know that when you were indulging your right as a citizen to protest your government that you were a dangerous white supremacist that wants to destroy the country, did you? Bet you didn’t realize that your reverence for the U.S. Constitution was a subversive thing to do, did you? And I’ll also bet that you never imagined that you’d scare the little blue panties off of Captain America!

GANOOSH!

Soon the entire rightosphere was raging with animus and fury, overcome by a frightful and all-consuming hunger for vengeance! Rich Johnston has the overview. Even Glenn Beck, crying, screaming superstar of the political rightiest, devoted some airtime to the comic. Fox News grabbed the story and made much hay out of story writer Brubaker’s left-leaning Twitter-expressed politics. Faced with this uproar, Marvel hastily damage controlled to say “it’s part one of the story, give us a chance to show you the whole picture” and “we didn’t mean for it to specifically be a tea party rally”.

SMACKASH!

Meanwhile, comics people cashed in their copies of the suddenly-in-demand Cap 602 for easy cash money.

KACHING!

And now the whole storm is gone and forgotten, except not by me because I found a copy of Cap 602 and of course I bought it. Because I had to see for myself what the fuss was all about. And here’s the thing: there isn’t much to get fussed about, here. To the extent there is, it’s in the plan to get in with the anti-government extremists by punching out a black civil servant. Even in the shorthand and broad-strokes storytelling of comics, that’s kinda weak.

What I like about this whole saga is how perfectly it encapsulates the way popular politics works in the U.S. right now. (Similar patterns are apparent elsewhere, but in the U.S. this process is very well-established.) The network of conservative blogs, always voracious for content, grab on to anything that emerges in their network and start howling enthusiastically. When enough of them do this, it works its way through to the radio hosts, and if it gets play there it finally surfaces into the Fox News circuit. If it still has legs, it will go on to all those mouthpiece shows Fox has clogging its broadcast schedule. The fundamental narrative is always one of conservative victimization.

It’s an amazing system with a slick and efficient beauty. To use the jargon, the Republicans have figured out how to crowdsource their propaganda machine. I have to admire it. But it is horrible, too, because it’s all sound and fury with no real thought or analysis. Everyone grabbed on and started whacking without much care to check the validity of the initial complaint. Indeed, the bit of the original post that had some merit (the supposed subtext of racism to the IRS agent scene) fell by the wayside immediately. The story just became about that one picture of the tea party rally, evaluated solely in the context of frothing blog posts. Such is the nature of this machine – it generates noise and anger and emails and phone calls, but it doesn’t generate anything remotely like understanding.

Which has been to the amusement of those who’ve followed the Captain America character, whose writers have an unsurprising history of making none-too-subtle political points with their work. In his first ever appearance, he was punching out Hitler on the cover of his new comic – which was remarkable because the U.S.A. wasn’t even in the war at that stage.

And then (as the Slog notes) there was the time Cap found out Richard Nixon was involved in a criminal conspiracy, and watched as Nixon shot himself in the Oval Office.

Or the time Ronald Reagan turned into an evil snake-man.

Shutter Island (USA, 2010)

Saw this a week ago, still haven’t talked about it. It was very enjoyable. It’s a grand operatic noir, an unnerving psychological thriller that doesn’t make much sense (do any psychological thrillers make much sense?). Great intensely-imagined visuals, gripping and moody atmosphere, pitch-perfect performances (heavily stylised and just OTT enough). The film offers very few surprises but is a great ride nonetheless.

It’s a big screen film, but probably not worth the big screen ticket prices unless you’re a particular fan of Leo DiCaprio or Marty Scorsese or Michelle Williams or Mark Ruffalo*. So watch it on your home cinema with surround sound, or go to the fillums on cheap night.

To its enormous credit, the film absolutely nails its very final scene.

* Hah! No-one in the world is “a particular fan of Mark Ruffalo”!**
** I stand corrected

New home linky

It’s Friday linky time, first one at the new hosting site. Groovy. I’m gonna go into the depths of the linky file, pull out some stuff that’s been sitting there for aaaages without ever being grabbed up into a linky. Nothing fresh! Everything old! Come and get it!


Gahan Wilson cartoons!

From ScienceDaily via Karen, Acts of Kindness Spread Surprisingly Easily: Just a Few People Can Make a Difference

From Blaise, a while back: If you want to catch a liar, make him draw

Play classic Games Workshop strategy board game Space Hulk, live online.

The Day Tripper photos were taken by a new arrival in Wellington, of random folk he met on buses. They got a little bit of media coverage, but not much, because the Flickr set only shows a few hundred views. Take a look – nice slice-of-life photography. And if you’re a Wellingtonian, you might see someone you know – I did.

Via Sally – balloon monsters

Psychological violence as depicted in British comics for girls – Tammy, Jinty and Misty won’t ever seem the same.

The King of Shreds and Patches, a novel-length work of Cthulhu-inspired interactive fiction

This blog, LOLcat’d! LOLcat your blog!

Charles Upham – badass of the week!

And finally… that horn sound

Pantheon of Plastic: #2

In 1978, Lorne Green became the inaugural member of the Pantheon of Plastic.
One year later in 1979, he was joined by the second inductee into this prestigious panoply of plastinated personalities. Ladeez and gennelmen, I give you the 1979 Inductee… Boris Karloff!

Boris Karloff (inducted 1979)
(Boris Karloff’s IMDB entry)

Karloff is unusual for the Pantheon of Plastic for two reasons – he had passed away long before his induction, and his two iconic plastic-commemorated roles were nearly fifty years old when the action figures were released. But action figures they were, and so Karloff can add PoP membership to his voluminous CV!

Frankenstein’s Monster, Frankenstein
(Movie, Universal, 1931; figure released 1979 by Remco)
Karloff as the Monster

Jack P Pierce was responsible for the distinctive look of the Monster, but Karloff was enthusiastic about the makeup, offering to remove his bridgework to give the monster freaky cheeks. It was a combination of Pierce’s wizardry and Karloff’s unnerving performance that made this such an iconic role, worthy of being turned into a plastic figure to stomp around the sandpit with a generation of little kids.
Karloff once played baseball wearing full Monster make-up. Buster Keaton was the catcher. Read about it, and see the photo, here.

The Mummy, The Mummy
(Movie, Universal,1932; figure released 1979 by Remco)



Another Pierce/Karloff joint. Imhotep! But does anyone really care about Imhotep? Really? This would’ve been a way cooler movie if they’d gone by the original idea of making it about Cagliostro. That dude was crazy.

Wellywood Sign

So, Wgtn Airport is gonna erect a sign right by the airport. WELLYWOOD, it will say.

I am suggesting that it would be a great idea if they put an oversized exclamation mark on the end.

Or if they used comic sans!

How would you modify the sign to make it better?

Overseas readers/potential tourists – do you have an opinion about whether this sign makes Wellington look awesome or foolish?

Make your own Wellington sign here:
http://wellywood.skullandbones.co.nz/