Honey, He's Back... and He Brought Friends!

Beauty May Be Skin Deep, But It's The Only Skin I Got

Five days a week, I drive by a church on my way to work. It has a billboard out the front that rotates a series of pathetic little messages that are supposed to be modern, hip and religious at the same time. They’re about as hip as your grandmother’s joint replacement. Stuff like, “Jesus. Detox for your soul.”

There’s one there at the moment that is so dumb, it’s self-defeating. It features a large picture of someone with absolutely terrible facial deformities. I mean, there’s been plastic surgery, there’s a glass eye, there’s no lateral symmetry, this poor person has either suffered the most awful congenital condition or they’ve suffered an absolutely horrendous accident. I can’t tell because I’m driving at the time but suffice to say, this person is doomed to a life of other people avoiding their gaze and praying that their little children don’t say something too honest within earshot. The large font caption is, “Beauty is in the eye of the creator.” I understand that the church is trying to be deep as a tonic to the shallow beauty-consciousness of the rest of us, but I want to run through the logic of that.

The all-powerful creator, the one that keeps the atoms moving in the correct orbits, the one that designed the universe, its magnificent machinations and all of the laws that keep it delicious for life, Him; every now and then can’t be bothered and makes some basic errors in the construction of some human beings. Or, he does it on purpose.

He also finds it acceptable to leave the poor sod the way he sloppily turned them out. He doesn’t think it worthwhile enacting any miracles to correct the oversight.

He also designed the rest of us to find physical attractiveness very important, to the point that we will pay certain especially beautiful people enormous amounts of money just to appear in pictures (moving or still). This slavish attention to physical beauty will ensure that someone who doesn’t get anywhere near the barest minimum of attractiveness is going to find the world a very hostile and difficult place.

This all-powerful being is happy with this situation. The beauty is in His eye, remember. Doesn’t matter that it isn’t in anybody else’s, He’s happy with a lifetime of misery that He’s foisted on someone for… what reason? Has He ever explained why?

If this God was real, why would you want to abase yourself to something so manifestly cruel and unfair? My “God-given” right as a person of self-determination, would be to rebel and reject this monster with every fibre of my being, even if it cost me my life. Lucky I don’t actually have to put my money where my mouth is on that one.

All the church has advertised, is that He is cruel, capricious and sloppy. It’s actually better to assume that the universe does not care, feels no animosity or joy at your existence and that sometimes awful things happen. Better to understand that and not also be worried about the super-long-term consequences of being born with horrible facial deformities. In the religious mind, the reward for putting up with such unfairness in your temporal life, is to go to heaven. Who the hell wants to spend eternity with such an unconscionable bully?

I Swear I'm Not Doing a Period Drama

It’s absolutely amazing how impressions that are a long way off the mark can be made - and how indelible they will inevitably be.

Yesterday, I traded a Ford Ute for a Jag. At the trading yard I needed to take the remaining 1% of crap that I wanted from the old car to the new one before doing the paperwork. Stuff like the eTag, the old directory and some other items:

1) A doctor's bag. I had a birthday recently and at my request Emergency Contact gave me an antique doctor’s bag. They are unusual in a world full of synthetic back-packs. They are leather, which I like. They have big, gaping mouths that make it easy to fossick around for leads and cords and PC bits and pieces (which I do daily). They are big enough to take a laptop, paperwork, a tablet, and sundry crapola and sturdy enough to keep all that junk protected. They are lockable. They are uncommon and practical.

2) A walking stick. A few years ago, I fractured an ankle. I was on a walking stick periodically for a couple of months as it mended. I haven’t used the stick for years and had forgotten that it was rattling around under the passenger seat of the ute.

3) Dark grey suit. I arrived at the dealership from work, wearing a muted, conservative grey suit.

So, down at the car yard, a tall man in a grey suit, carrying a walking stick and doctor’s bag, got out of a Ford one-tonner, walked over to a Jag and started loading the kit into it.

They yardies stared at me, unable to decide if they were watching the weirdest episode of All Creatures Great and Small or an elaborate car-jacking.

(I wasn’t as amused at their infernal gawping and, removing my monocle with as much dignity as I could muster, I poked one of them in chest with the stem of my hickory pipe and gave the unprincipled scoundrel a piece of my mind.)

Growl

With the arrival of Darth Baby, the ute isn’t so sensible anymore. The baby-agency ladies frowned at my suggestion of just disengaging the airbag and fitting the car-seat in the passenger side of the cabin and they looked at me funny when I suggested facing it backwards in the tray, just on top of the lock-box.

So, with a mid-weight heart, I’ve had to get rid of the vehicle that has supplied so much entertainment over the past few years. Who can forget, “There’s a wet mattress in the back of your ute and the forecast is for two more weeks of rain,” and “I’m sure a cupboard was in there when we left, well that saves carrying it up the stairs.”

It’s time for me to grow up and get ‘family oriented’. I researched four-door, family sedans with good mileage, airbags and reasonable resale. Last weekend, with that knowledge under my belt and sensibleness in my head, economics in my heart and role model in my pants I went and hit the auto markets…  and bought a Four-litre V8, S-Class Jag. 

‘Allo Beastie!

Nothing screams family transport like cream leather, walnut dash, electronic seat memory and a supercharger blowing a decent sized eight, built by the lads in white coats in Coventry. Nothing. Let me explain - Shut up.

I know what I’m getting into and it’s a pretty quick and handy train trip to work. 

Not Even Pretending

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a colleague that I found amusing and instructive:

He kicks off, “We’ve got a delay with delivery”.

“Yeah, how come?”

“We’ve got to change some of the coding for the Chinese.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Chinese Government has told us that we’re not allowed to use 128 bit encryption, they find it too hard to crack. We’ve gotta drop the Chinese version of the software to 64 bit.”

Time Wounds All Heels

Tragedy + Time = Comedy

Therefore:

Comedy – Tragedy = Time

Therefore:

Act serious about something that's actually silly, and you can bend time. That's how Dr Who does it.

Prometheus

Imagine a futuristic flying machine constructed by humans landing on an alien world.

The immediate landscape is a large, desolate depression surrounded by geological features that are ill-defined because of their distance although obviously massive. In the middle of the vast depression is a dome. It could be the result of natural processes but it is more likely built and is evidently very old. It is also forbidding.

The occupants of the craft exit and approach the dome. They are nervous and excited. At the end of their epic journey they wonder whether they will meet proto-humans or perhaps sit at the knees of their makers and learn cosmic truths.

As it turns out, a little from column A, a little from column B. But enough of In the Night Garden (ABC2 for Kids) with the naughty Igglepiggle and the sleepy Tombliboos and on to my review of Prometheus.

One of the reasons it has taken me so long to write this review is that I wanted to include spoilers to make my point and you all should have seen it by now.

The other reason is that I only got around to seeing it myself the other night and I’m now going to try and make a habit of only reviewing films I’ve actually watched.

In the classic sense the story of Prometheus is a sad one. He taught little cave peoples lots of nifty tricks, not least of which was fire. He was not lauded by some of his colleagues for his efforts and wound up in really sub-par accommodation chained to a rock with his innards regularly used as a bird-feeder. Unlike the protagonists in the Ridley Scott movie, he meant no harm. These half-baked clowns (who somehow manage to snag a trillion dollars to go chasing an intergalactic pipe-dream) are the equivalent of graffitists in the Louvre.

The film has some serious problems. To borrow from the inimitable Micallef, the plot has more holes than a machine-gunned piece of Swiss cheese with stigmata. I spent a lot of the time thinking, “Why would you do that?” So, let’s get into some of these occurrences. Bitching is fun.

In any film, when the scary music starts and the woman is alone in the house, we are always mystified by her next action which is to go and check the basement with a busted torch. It’s the same with Sci-Fi thrillers. Why, in the name of all that is creepy and crawly, do highly-trained astronauts and scientists feel the need to take their fucking helmets off at the first opportunity? No sooner is the needle on the dial pointing to “Breathable”, than some bone-head is sighing loudly and unclipping the protective covering on his noggin, intimating that it was as comfortable as a sandpaper g-string. It’s the year 2094, people. The helmets are comfortable, lightweight, have all your comms gear in them, are tougher than an end-of-term assignment and, oh, what is it again? Oh yeah - HELP YOU BREATH.  I’d be showering with that sucker on.

As for the really dangerous looking bit of fauna, here’s a tip from Alien Husbandry 101. Don’t tickle it under the chin. This bit of egregious fauna mishandling in the film is particularly galling. Let me set the scene. One of the scientists, a biologist qualified enough to crack a spot on a trillion dollar interstellar voyage, sees a giant penis dentata type thingy and moves towards it for a better look. The earthworm-alien cross-breed reacts by, now pay close attention here, reacts by spreading the cowl behind its head. The highly qualified biologist has never seen a cobra and thinks that bearing your teeth and rearing up to look bigger is the interstellar language for ‘give us a hug’. He gets a hug, alright.

There are many other utterly nonsensical bits in the film. The music is pretty dire at times, too. But it’s still a good flick. There are dramatic and horrible deaths. The tech is gorgeous. The look is wonderful. The 3D doesn’t feel like a waste and Fassbinder is magnificent as the android who wants to shout “no prisoners”.

There are some lovely tie-ins to other Alien films that I found satisfying and the casting of Noomi Rapace was bang on. She actually looks a little Ripley-esque in some scenes and that provides a nice visual continuity to the Alien series.

The biggest mistake the movie makes is that it tries to insert more meaning into its content than it deserves. I don’t need the big questions and answers in an Alien film. I need people yelling, “Oh, well that’s just great, that is,” and, “Get away from her, you bitch!” and of course, “They mostly come out at night. Mostly.”

I need my pants scared off. I need shootin’ and runnin’ and tongues with teeth. I do not need pseudo-philosophy and matters of faith. I’m going to show my hand as an amateur futurologist (a polite term for someone who makes shit up).

The whole premise is flawed. If we have the tech in 2089 to get that far into space, we sure as hell are not going to need to explore the dangerous dome in the middle of nowhere in person. We will send in our robots and tele-presence devices and do it all remotely. As they suggest in Aliens we could just do it all from the safety of orbit, including nuking it. But, I suppose that’s not really going to make an exciting Sci-Fi romp and that’s really what we were all there for in the first place.

I give it 7.5 eggs that you should never look into, out of 10.

The Fourth Law Of Robotics. (We're happy to help little robots that help themselves)

Curiosity landed on Mars yesterday. I guess he’s on the run after that nasty “cat” incident.

I love a Mars robot rover. I love a little thing beetling about on a distant planet, chirping to itself, picking up rocks, looking at them and then chucking them over their shoulder like Wall-e did with the diamond ring because the box it came in was more interesting.

I also feel for them a little. Don’t you wonder if they might get a little cold and lonely, out there, all by themselves?

Sojourner, who landed in the late 90s, has officially had his case closed with “communications lost” stamped on the last page of his personnel file. It’s more likely he went a little crazy and switched his own radio off, preferring to be a hermit rather than continually hearing orders from the voices in his little mechanical head.

Spirit got bogged*. He landed on Mars in 2004 and like the brave trooper that he is, he trundled around looking for Sojourner for nearly six years before he came to a dead stop in a sand pit. He is going to present a puzzle to the aliens who explore our solar system when they see a little robot that had somehow managed to cross interplanetary space, only to become baffled by some sand.

So Spirit and Sojourner are out there somewhere, having been reclassified as stationary communications beacons or just plain MIA and I see that Curiosity is as large as a decent sized car. That got me thinking.

I am particularly good at remaining stationary inside a vehicle for long periods. All I’d need is a nappy (well, maybe two) some sandwiches and one of those Bladder Buster cups with the straw. The straw is not idle whimsy, it’s a safety device. I’d need to keep both hands on the wheel during re-entry. I’ll go out into the desert in a small vehicle and round up your escaped robots and I won’t even bitch and whine and then go and become Darth Vader afterward.

*(Now something is missing. All the people round here are too bony for kissing. Sing it like the Mentals. It’s more fun that way.)