Bachelor Number One

Rodney Alcala had already had been convicted for the 1968 rape of an 8-year-old girl when he appeared on The Dating Game in 1978 — and won:

Mills, who was bachelor No. 2, said he had an almost immediate aversion to Alcala. "Something about him, I could not be near him," Mills recalled. "I am kind of bending toward the other guy to get away from him, and I don't know if I did that consciously. But thinking back on that, I probably did."

Alcala was able to charm Cheryl Bradshaw from the other side of the "Dating Game" wall.

"Who will it be?" the host asked her at the end of the show. "I'll take One [bachelor No. 1]," Bradshaw said, and out strolled Alcala.

If Alcala appeared likable to viewers at home, Mills said he was the complete opposite when they sat together in the show's green room, where the show's contestants waited before going on air.

"He was quiet, but at the same time he would interrupt and impose when he felt like it," Mills said. "And he was very obnoxious and creepy — he became very unlikable and rude and imposing as though he was trying to intimidate. I wound up not only not liking this guy ... not wanting to be near him ... he got creepier and more negative. He was a standout creepy guy in my life."

Within months of his "Dating Game" appearance, Alcala would become a killer, prosecutors said, abducting and murdering a 12-year-old girl in 1979. Before the decade was over, Alcala would claim four more victims, according to testimony at his trial.
[...]
Though Bradshaw chose Alcala as her date, she refused to go out with him, according to published reports.

You can watch the episode, if you're so inclined:



Even without knowing that a serial killer is involved, I feel compelled to cringe at The Dating Game. How can you not worry about our civilization, watching a show like that?

In the 1970s, were they really letting convicted child-rapists out of prison in less than ten years?

(Hat tip to Todd, who knows a little too much about serial killers...)

We must Americanize ourselves

Heinrich Hauser wrote The German Talks Back to explain postwar Germany to Americans — not, Mencius Moldbug explains, from the point of view of a German liberal but from that of a German national-conservative. An excerpt:

The crucial test to which the American government in Germany ought to subject all claimants and lobbyists is, of course, "Just how many followers do you have? How many hale and hearty democrats can you deliver?" An honest question, to which in honesty the non-Nazified functionaries of the old Weimar Republic can only answer: "None. Unfortunately, the people have become estranged from us. The young generation has forgotten us and doesn't care about democracy. After thirteen years of Hitler, what can you expect?"

This is perfectly true, except that for once it is not Hitler who must take all the blame if American ideas don't work out in occupied Germany. That blame must be shared by German gullibility and American gullibility alike. The truth is that the fathers of the present generation ate sour grapes from America, and now the children's teeth are set on edge.

I will spare you the well-worn argument about Wilson's Fourteen Points, and how the Germans felt let down when they got the Treaty of Versailles instead. No: what you have forgotten, or never became conscious of, is that for ten years after the First World War Germany's most popular slogan was "Wir amerikaniseieren uns!" ("We must Americanize ourselves.") Rarely, perhaps never in history, was there a defeated nation so completely enamored of the victor's efficiency as the Germans after 1919. "American matériel has won the war? So then everything American must be superior. Let's imitate them, let's Americanize ourselves." Such was German logic.

Every American who visited Berlin during those reconstruction years will remember to what ridiculous lengths that German logic went: American bars and American-style nightclubs, American jazz bands, if possible with one "real imported" Negro at the saxophone. American cafeteries and American movie houses were ubiquitous. The neatly dressed German wore "shimmy" shoes and a suit of American cut. American cars rolled on the streets with a new and surprising noiselessness, and in if an American asked his way in German he got an English answer. The dollar was the Elite-Valuta — the elite-professionals of the Kurfuerstendamm demanded it from even their German customers. And the first skyscrapers begain to raise their steel skeletons over the trees of the Tiergarten.

We imitated everything. The National Assembly imitated your Constitution, and the Reichswehr your Sam Browne belt. Industrialists copied your production systems, workers adapted themselves to your speed-up systems, and poets sang in praise of the assembly line. We introduced your weekend and your bookkeeping. We blossomed out in Rotary Clubs and poured sugar into our perfectly good wine to ape the sweet tooth of America.

We really meant it all. Sure, the people were disappointed that their Wilsonian dream hadn't come true after all, but then they still clung to their dream of America. What kind of dream?

"If you will only be good democrats and work like hell and be modern and progressive as we are, then you can live like Americans." That was the siren song which in a thousand variations sounded from across the ocean, and the people listened as starry-eyed as ever Hitler listened to a Wagner opera. They dreamed of the electric refrigerator that would one day be theirs, and of the vacuum cleaner, and, above all, of that cheap little car.
[...]
For a time the carrot worked; the ugly 19th-century brick-and-plaster houses of Germany's Main Streets put on pants: facades of concrete reaching to the second floor and framing modern stores with neon lights. Cities built new municipal buildings and parks and hospitals for themselves. Yes, it was done with American loans — to a large degree, at least. Industry modernized itself and installed new machinery. Yes, American money helped do that, too. It looked almost like prosperity on the face of it, and a typical German crowd looked almost like a normal American crowd.
[...]
It must not be forgotten that private enterprise in Germany had suffered a major blow a few years before the Nazis came to power. In 1930, the great depression hit the economic body of Germany, which owing to malnutrition had a low resistance anyway. And the most significant thing about it was that "Wir amerikanisieren uns," the slogan of the 'twenties, backfired on us with a vengeance.

When the United States retracted her private loans, the first establishments to topple were the ones that had taken the loans. These included the municipalities that had gone farthest along the American way of modernity, and the industries that had gone the limit with American production methods, thereby accumulating an unduly high overhead. The workers on the American-style assembly lines were the first to be thrown on the dole. The most progressive farmers, who had invested heavily in modern American implements, were the first to surrender to the sheriff's sale.
[...]
The cheapest kind of amusement, which even those on the dole could afford once a week, which indeed was thrown in as part of the dole, was a ticket to the movies. People thronged the movie houses, partly for the warmth, partly to snatch an hour of sleep in half-comfort, partly to forget their misery, and partly for the show. And the show always included a newsreel and some slapstick comedy from the U.S.A.

Never shall we forget — we, the unemployed of the depression years in Germany — those nauseating scenes that Hollywood projected for us on the silver screen as ostensibly representing the American way of life. Never shall I forget the incredulous stare at first, and then the tightening of lips, and then the gleam of hatred in the people's eyes...

"So that's the way those fellows live over there in America... did you see those brats throwing pie at each other's faces, and all besmeared, and the whipped cream dripping all over?... And the girls in the sexy bathing suits, swimming in a pond full of apples and banging them around... Don't forget the ones who got their buttocks measured by a bunch of fellows — a beauty contest, they called it... And that other hussy in the beauty parlor; got her hair all plastered with yolk of egg. I've seen it. Real eggs, at least a dozen....
[...]
In that other thing, College Fun or whatever it was, did you see how they wrecked the place, smashed up the furniture and all? Did you think that was funny? No, I call that beastly, and I could have taken a stick and smashed their skulls, and never be sorry I did it."

Pre-war Germany and the modern Middle East suddenly seem eerily similar.

Alice in Underland

To enjoy Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, you'll need to accept that it's not by any stretch Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or its follow-up, Through the Looking Glass, David Edelstein says, but a fancy Hollywood hybrid:

Yes, it uses Alice's characters and motifs, but the plot is one part C.S. Lewis to one part The Wizard of Oz. You could call it "C.S. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Narnia with Johnny Depp as the Mad Scarecrow."

Carroll's delicious satire of English logic and manners has been turned into an action-packed, feminist coming-of-age story. Alice, played by the Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, is a young Victorian woman of 19 facing the marriage proposal of an unattractive prig. She falls down a rabbit hole — for the second time, the first time was when she was 6 — and arrives in Wonderland — or, as the locals correct her, Underland — and no one believes she's the same Alice. But if she is that Alice, a number of characters tell her, she has a destiny: to ride into battle on "the frabjous day" against the homicidally petulant Red Queen and her winged Jabberwock.

Batman Beats Superman

Batman beat Superman once again, as a copy of Detective Comics No. 27, Batman's debut appearance, sold for $1,075,500, beating the price paid for Action Comics No. 1, Superman's debut appearance, a "mere" one million dollars.

Chaotic Enough to Be Interesting

Movies are much pinker today than in the past — not in tint, but in the way the cuts resemble pink noise:

According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it. Start with a picture of Penélope Cruz, say, or a flamingo on a lawn, and decompose the picture into a collection of sine waves of various humps, dives and frequencies. However distinctive the original images, if you look at the distribution of their underlying frequencies, said Jeremy M. Wolfe, a vision researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “they turn out to have a one over f characteristic to them.”

So, too, for many features of our natural and artifactual surroundings. Track the pulsings of a quasar, the beatings of a heart, the flow of the tides, the bunchings and thinnings of traffic, or the gyrations of the stock market, and the data points will graph out as pink noise. Much recent evidence from reaction-time experiments suggests that we think, focus and refocus our minds, all at the speed of pink. If you’re sitting at a task, Dr. Cutting said, “sometimes you’re good at it, sometimes your mind wanders, sometimes you’re fast, sometimes you’re slow, and the oscillating patterns that occur are generally one over f.”

White noise is uncorrelated data — like static. Brown noise is a random walk — each step is based on the one before. Pink noise is correlated enough to create a pattern, but chaotic enough to be interesting — like your heart rate.

Ben Hur

The 1959 film version Ben Hur cost MGM $15 million to make — in 1959 dollars, over $100 million in today's money — won a record 11 Oscars, sold ninety-eight million tickets in the United States, and was the only Hollywood movie to make the Vatican’s official list of approved religious films — and thus enjoyed nowhere near the success of the 1880 novel:

Since its first publication, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ has never been out of print. It outsold every book except the Bible until Gone With the Wind came out in 1936, and resurged to the top of the list again in the 1960s. By 1900 it had been printed in thirty-six English-language editions and translated into twenty others, including Indonesian and Braille.

Victorians who swore off novels because of their immoral influence eagerly picked up Ben-Hur — were even encouraged to by their pastors. It became required reading in grade schools across the United States.

For those who considered theater sinful, the spectacle of the Broadway version lured them in for twenty-one years, not to mention the touring show that required four entire trains to transport all the scenery and livestock. More than twenty million people saw Ben-Hur on stage between 1899 and 1920, complete with live horses running on hidden treadmills to recreate the chariot race. One reverend from San Francisco, who had never attended a play, was finally tempted into seeing the much-hyped production. He described the experience as both “delightful and disappointing,” noting the clunky stagecraft and stilted acting. Yet he was won over enough to declare that he would return to the theater again.

The book made Lew Wallace a celebrity, sought out for speaking engagements, political endorsements, and newspaper interviews.

Wallace was an interesting character himself:

“I would not give a tuppence for the American who has not at least tried to do one of three things,” Wallace told a New York Times reporter in 1893. “That person lacks the true American spirit who has not tried to paint a picture, write a book, or get out a patent on something.” Or, he added, “tried to play some musical instrument. There you have the genius of the true American in those four — art, literature, invention, music.”

Not coincidentally, Lew Wallace himself excelled at all four. Besides being a Civil War hero, the governor of New Mexico, and later the ambassador to Turkey, the Indiana native made and played his own violins, sketched and painted with skill, and held eight patents for various inventions, including a retractable reel hidden inside a fishing rod handle. But it was in literature that Wallace truly made his mark. He is the only novelist honored in the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. With a life full of distinctions, none of Wallace’s accomplishments made such an impression as his novel Ben-Hur.

Thoughts on Commercials

Steve Sailer has been watching the Winter Olympics and has some thoughts on commercials:

Speaking of commercials, why don't advertisers make slight variants of their commercials to keep people from completely zoning out the 73rd time they've seen it? They shoot way more footage than they use, so why not whip up alternative versions to keep viewers awake during the Olympics?

Here's an easy way to keep siblings competitively engaged: shoot three or four different punchlines and then make one slight variation in each version's set-up shots. That way, somebody who is paying close attention will be able to achieve dominance over the rest of his family by accurately predicting the punchline. It will drive his siblings crazy, so they will also study the commercials looking for clues so they can beat him to the punchline.

Also, advertising agencies keep missing the sweet spot between too boring and too interesting that you don't notice what brand is being advertised. A lot of prestige ads that run on the Olympics are so expensive, so filled with show-offy scenes from around the world that you often lose the thread before they finally flash the sponsor's logo for 0.8 seconds at the end. I'm sure those kind of ads win awards — nobody loves to give awards to each other more than advertising people — but are they really effective at selling whatever sponsor that's revealed at the very end? Especially when the stylistic theme of countless commercials is exactly the same: Despite, or perhaps because of, global diversity, everybody on Earth loves us.
[...]
Instead, why not borrow a trick from cable networks that keep a small logo up on a lower corner of the screen? Hey, this show is on the Discovery Channel! I'll have to try to remember that. Similarly, put the sponsor's logo in the corner throughout the commercial. Your ad won't win any awards and your ad agency might get sanctioned by the Advertising Council for violating the professional ethics of the advertising business by being overly attentive to the client's interests instead of to your own sense of creative self-expression, but, so what?

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Lent started recently, and, by coincidence, I started reading A Canticle for Leibowitz, which opens with a monastic novice passing his Lenten vigil in the desert — in the 26th century, six centuries after the Flame Deluge has plunged civilization into a new Dark Age:

The text reveals that as a result of the war there was a violent backlash against the culture of advanced knowledge and technology that had led to the development of nuclear weapons. During this backlash, called the "Simplification," anyone of learning, and eventually anyone who could even read, was likely to be killed by rampaging mobs, who proudly took on the name of "Simpletons". Illiteracy became almost universal, and books were destroyed en masse.

Isaac Edward Leibowitz had been a Jewish electrical engineer working for the United States military. Surviving the war, he converted to Roman Catholicism and founded a monastic order, the "Albertian Order of Leibowitz", dedicated to preserving knowledge by hiding books, smuggling them to safety (booklegging), memorizing, and copying them. The Order's abbey is located in the American southwestern desert, near the military base where Leibowitz had worked before the war, on an old road that may have been "a portion of the shortest route from the Great Salt Lake to Old El Paso." Leibowitz was eventually betrayed and martyred. Later beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, he became a candidate for sainthood.

Centuries after his death, the abbey is still preserving the "Memorabilia", the collected writings that have survived the Flame Deluge and the Simplification, in the hope that they will help future generations reclaim forgotten science.

Recently, Robin Hanson called attention to William Grassie's fuzzy-headed far view on surviving such a catastrophe, calling it not just fuzzy-headed but also amazingly wrong-headed, because it suggested that a single impractical book — Maps of Time — could preserve literacy.

That's an odd complaint, I said, given that we know many, many people learned to read specifically to read one such "impractical" book, the Bible, and, as Canticle reminds us, the last time we needed to bootstrap society, we did it with the help of religious monasteries, which had retained many ancient texts and the ability to read them because they were tenuously connected to the Bible.

Today, especially amongst American Protestants-turned-agnostics, we look at the Catholic Church as an enemy of Truth and Progress — the Church silenced Galileo! — but through most of human history it served as a kind of Long Now Foundation, establishing rites and rituals that would sustain the Church and its traditions for generations and giving great thought to Big Questions.

I did not know it at the time, but Walter Miller, the author, had served in a bomber crew that helped destroy the monastery at Monte Cassino during World War II, and he converted to Catholicism after the war. Seen through his sympathetic eyes, the Church is a source of great practical wisdom, with established methods for steering flawed human beings toward productive behaviors — not unlike the Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong crowds, but more experienced, if also tied to a peculiar cosmology.

This ties in with Robert Nelson's Reaching for Heaven on Earth, which, according to TWV, divides many great thinkers into two camps:

He calls his first category "the Roman tradition," after both the empire and the Catholic Church. The thinkers he discusses under this rubric range from Aristotle to Paul Samuelson. "The leading figures of the Roman tradition," he claims, "have not been the great revolutionaries of history, but men who typically saw moderation as a virtue and favored an incremental process of human development" (31). He lists 15 characteristic views of those in this tradition:

1. The world is rational; nature, including man, is guided by the dictates of reason.
2. The material and external world are the original and fundamental reality — not the world of the mind and ideas.
3. Men are in principle capable of discovering and understanding the rationality of human existence.
4. Systematic scientific investigation is required to uncover the rational laws of nature, demanding careful research and studies.
5. Progress is found in gradual movement toward a natural and rational destiny.
6. Valid law is natural law, which should govern humanity.
7. Justice is what is rational, which is common to all.
8. Because all humanity shares the same reason, all men are fundamentally equal.
9. Life is lived to achieve happiness; a utilitarian goal is appropriate for mankind.
10. Society is an organic community steered for the common good.
11. Private property is a beneficial instrument of the common good.
12. It is natural and just to pursue one's self-interest.
13. The poor are deserving: Society has the strong obligation to support them as fellow members of the community.
14. Wisdom is found in moderation.
15. This-worldy, commonsensical, and pragmatic attitudes best serve the needs of humanity.

Nelson's second category is the "Protestant tradition," which includes thinkers as diverse as Plato, Augustine, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer. For these thinkers, the moral status of law is "much less exalted.... Law is necessary in the Protestant tradition, but is merely a coercive device required to keep wicked men from doing still greater damage to one another. Indeed, all government is seen in this light, as a sinful product of man's condition. Nevertheless, its decrees must be obeyed until God — or history — finally opens the way to a happier destiny" (55). Nelson's list of characteristic Protestant views diverges dramatically from the Roman:

1. The human condition in this world is deep alienation from original and true nature.
2. Owing to man's corrupted condition, reason is unreliable, often a source of delusion.
3. Existing law is a corrupted product — like reason — of current human depravity.
4. Justice is not to be found in the rational, but in the iron dictates of God or history.
5. The ways of the world are revealed to men not through reason, but through revelation.
6. True progress demands a revolutionary transformation of human existence.
7. The current world is destined for sin; the triumph of virtue must await a heaven in the hereafter or the arrival of an earthly heaven.
8. Mankind is divided among the saved and the condemned, the superior and the inferior groups.
9. Life is lived not for happiness, but for disciplined labor in the service of God or history.
10. Self-interest and economic competition exert an evil influence in the affairs of man.
11. Communal living and common ownership are the highest form of existence.
12. Government, like property, is a coercive social instrument designed to control sinful and unruly natures.
13. The poor are responsible for their fate; society must not coddle them.
14. Moderation is banality; pragmatism is a sign of weakness.
15. The record of history is not progress, but retrogression, the fall of man.

Again, American Protestants-turned-agnostics tend to see the Catholic Church as similar to the Protestant Church, but with more silly rituals, when the key distinction through most of history has been the conservative, moderate nature of Catholicism versus the romantic, millennial nature of most Protestantism, at least in its origins.

Aretae recently mentioned that Tolstoy's War and Peace helped him understand the entirely foreign worldview of an honest-to-goodness monarchist. I felt that Miller's Canticle gave me a similar insight into Catholic monks — and reminded me that we may have torn down much of what the Church stood for, but we haven't done a good job replacing it — which is why Peter Taylor recommends Yet Another Space Alien Cult. But we'll get to that some other time.

To Badly Go

Don Boudreaux remarks that, to visit DC expecting to find people engaged in serious discussions of economics is like visiting a Star Trek convention expecting to find people engaged in serious discussions of astrophysics:

Perhaps a handful of the celebrities and costumed performers are familiar with real science, but their overwhelming object is not to help their public deal with reality but, rather, to escape it.

I preferred that remark in the original Klingon.

NOVA Extreme Cave Diving

The recent NOVA episode on extreme cave diving in the "blue holes" of the Bahamas struck me as almost over-the-top extreme:

Including the expedition leader, anthropologist Kenny Broad, the dive team has recovered the bodies of more than 100 cave divers. To imagine recovering just one, think of a flooded, crumbling 10-story building at night. There's a dead body in the basement. You have to find it and drag it to the roof. Could you? What if it was a friend? Wes Skiles recovered the body of his best friend from a cave. He also recovered three brothers who realized they were hopelessly lost and out of air. Wes found them holding hands.

Not far into the episode, they find a human arm bone, then a flashlight, and then more remains in a 1970s-era wet suit. They also found some older remains:

At their deepest level, blue holes are anoxic, and this lack of oxygen helps to preserve whatever falls in. Our team was able to recover two skulls belonging to ancient humans, the fossils of vertebrates that are now extinct in the Bahamas, and fossils of birds that aren't just extinct but have never before been described by science. Living within the blue holes are at least one new order of multi-cellular creatures, descended from animals that evolved millions of years ago, as well as single-celled organisms virtually indistinguishable from the first life-forms on Earth. Parts of blue holes are like our planet's first seas, from a time four billion years ago when the Earth had no oxygen. NASA was interested in the expedition because the extreme life-forms found in blue holes are similar to what they hope to find on other planets.

Doctor Who had anti-Thatcher agenda

The Telegraph reports that Doctor Who had an explicitly anti-Thatcher agenda back in the 1980s:

[Sylvester] McCoy, who played the seventh doctor from 1987 to 1989, and Andrew Cartmel, the script editor at the time, both admitted the conspiracy, saying that it "seemed the right thing to do".

However, the secret messages remained a secret to all but Doctor Who insiders. Meanwhile the show's popularity went into freefall and it was taken off air in 1989.

McCoy, now 66, who took over as the Doctor three months after Thatcher's third election victory in 1987, said they brought politics into the show "deliberately" but "very quietly".

He said: "We were a group of politically motivated people and it seemed the right thing to do.

"Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered," he told the Sunday Times.

Cartmel said it was almost a job requirement to detest Thatcher.

When asked by John Nathan-Turner, the producer, what he hoped to achieve in being the show's script editor, he recalled: "My exact words were: I'd like to overthrow the government.

"I was a young firebrand and I wanted to answer honestly. I was very angry about the social injustice in Britain under Thatcher and I'm delighted that came into the show."

His script writing team included Ben Aaronovitch, son of the late Marxist intellectual Sam Aaronovitch, and Rona Munro, who later became a scriptwriter for Ken Loach, the left-wing film director.

Sophie Aldred, who played the Doctor's feminist assistant Ace, said the crew "weren't very happy" with Thatcher being the prime minister at the time, which she described as "a real bonding process".

One three-part programme, The Happiness Patrol, featured a transparent caricature of Thatcher.

Sheila Hancock played Helen A, a big-haired despotic ruler of a human colony on the planet Terra Alpha, whose subjects — called "drones" — worked in factories.

The Doctor calls on the drones to down their tools and revolt, an obvious reference to industrial disputes like the miners' strike.

A year later Catrmel wrote a speech for the Doctor about the perils of nuclear weapons, which was based on material from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

A spin-off children's novel called Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, published under licence by the BBC in 1987, also featured a villain called Rehctaht — Thatcher backwards.

Cartmel lamented that such satire never reached its intended audience.
"Critics, media pundits and politicians certainly didn't pick up on what we were doing. If we had generated controversy and become a cause célèbre we would have got a few more viewers but, sadly, nobody really noticed or cared."

He said nobody further up in the BBC such as Jonathan Powell, then controller of BBC One, knew about their plan.

A spokesman for the BBC said it was "baffled" by the claims.

I've never seen the late-80s Doctor Who, but it sounds like anyone who was watching would have immediately picked up on the ham-handed satire. So, why is this news now?

Erector Set Movie

In 1901, Frank Hornby introduced his Meccano toy set in England. In 1913, it came to America, where it was rebranded as the Erector Set. Now it's getting its own feature film:

Helix Films, an independent film production company based in Santa Monica, today announced plans to develop an original 3-D feature based on the Erector Set, the iconic brand of children’s construction toys.

The Erector film is one of a number of coming 3-D features based on playthings. Disney’s 3-D sequel, “Toy Story 3,” hits theaters in June, and Universal will release a 3-D movie starring “Twilight’s” Taylor Lautner in 2012, based on the Stretch Armstrong doll. Paramount Pictures is currently weighing whether or not to release the third installment of Michael Bay’s ”Transformers” franchise in a 3-D format.

This might be a good opportunity to go back to the Meccano name.

Escape from New York, Again?

In the 1970s, it wasn't hard to imagine a New York City that got so bad they walled it off and made it a prison. John Carpenter's Escape from New York made a certain kind of sense. Now they want to remake it:

In the original, set at the end of World War III, New York City was a husk of itself after being turned into a giant prison, but that kind of destruction gets pricey. So in Escape 2.0, the Big Apple that the as-yet-uncast Snake Plissken is dropped into will be geographically undesirable, but intact: This Manhattan was evacuated and turned into a privately run penal colony after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city.

"It is not a disaster movie," says a source close to the project. "It is an exposé of an ecosystem, if you put a huge wall around Manhattan and then dropped in the most fucked-up, dangerous criminals on Earth." This means New York will still be recognizable to audiences, à la I Am Legend, rather than an entirely new Armageddon Island.

I didn't realize that the original, with its B-movie sensibilities, was expensive to make:

Carpenter and his crew persuaded the city to shut off the electricity to ten blocks at a time at night. The film was shot from August to November of 1980. It was a tough and demanding shoot for the filmmaker as he recalls. "We'd finish shooting at about 6 am and I'd just be going to sleep at 7 when the sun would be coming up. I'd wake up around 5 or 6 pm, depending on whether or not we had dailies, and by the time I got going, the sun would be setting. So for about two and a half months I never saw daylight, which was really strange."
[...]
When it came to shooting in New York City Carpenter managed to persuade the city officials to grant access to Liberty Island. "We were the first film company in history allowed to shoot on Liberty Island at the Statue of Liberty at night. They let us have the whole island to ourselves. We were lucky. It wasn't easy to get that initial permission. They'd had a bombing three months earlier and were worried about trouble."

Some effects were too expensive to do as planned:

As Snake pilots the glider into the city there are three screens on his control panel displaying wireframe animations of the landing target on the World Trade Center and surrounding buildings. What appears on those screens was not computer generated. Carpenter wanted hi-tech computer graphics which were very expensive at the time, even for such a simple animation. To get the animation he wanted the effects crew filmed the miniature model set of New York City they used for other scenes under black light with reflective tape placed along every edge of the model buildings. Only the tape shows up and appears to be a 3D wireframe animation.

Beaker's Epic Burn-ination

Gloat over Beaker's epic burn-ination:

Spirit

The latest xkcd strip, on the Mars rover Spirit, is bittersweet. I find it far too easy to identify with a little, well-intentioned robot.

Para Fuera

If you're feeling complacent, may I suggest watching Nicholas Jasenovec's portrait of Dr. Richard J. Bing on his hundredth birthday, Para Fuera:

Natural and Supernatural

Jerome K. Jerome, a friend of Welsh horror writer Arthur Machen, once observed that the difference between what we call the natural and the supernatural is merely the difference between frequency and rarity of occurrence.

Saved from the Fire

Beowulf, in his old age, faces the dragon and suffers through its fire before the great serpent buries its fangs in his neck. The great warrior, sword broken, lives just long enough to slay the dragon with his knife. Fortunately, the manuscript was never bit in the neck:

When the heirs of Sir Robert Cotton selected a spot to stash the rare-book collector's priceless library, they probably should have known better than to pick a place called Ashburnham House. In 1731, a fire swept through that ill-named residence in London and forever impoverished our literary heritage.

One manuscript that escaped the blaze — just barely — contained an untitled poem of more than 3,000 lines. The flames actually singed its pages and destroyed bits of its unique content. In the centuries to follow, gradual deterioration consumed even more. It's a small miracle that "Beowulf," as the poem came to be called, survived at all.

Nostromo

Nostromo is Italian for "mate" or "boatswain," a contraction of nostro uomo — "our man." To sci-fi film geeks, it's the name of the mining craft in Ridley Scott's Alien.

But it's also the name of a 1904 novel by Joseph Conrad, which, Robert Kaplan says defines and dissects the problems with the world just beyond our own, by examining Westerners and indigenous inhabitants of an imaginary South American country, Costaguana:

Nostromo is neither overly descriptive and moodily vague like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, nor is its ending entirely unhappy. For a civil society-in-the-making does emerge in Costaguana, but it is midwived by a ruined cynic of a doctor who has given up on humanity, a deeply skeptical journalist, and two bandit gangs, not by the idealist whose actions had helped lead to the country's earlier destruction. Conrad never denies the possibility of progress in any society, but he is ironic enough to know that "The ways of human progress are inscrutable", and that is why "action is consolatory" and "the friend of flattering illusions." Charles Gould, the failed idealist of the novel, who believes absolutely in economic development, "had no ironic eye. He was not amused at the absurdities that prevail in this world."

Nostromo is Conrad's best and most difficult work, Kaplan says:

In this media-obsessed age — when "intellectuals" spend their evenings watching C-SPAN and CNN — people may be better acquainted with Heart of Darkness than with Nostromo only because the former is exceedingly short, as well as amenable to skimming, on account of a thin plot and lengthy landscape descriptions. In Nostromo, however, landscape ambiance is a tightly controlled, strategic accompaniment to political realism.

It matters today, because so little has changed in the "developing" world:

It is a tribute to Conrad's insight that his description of Costaguana and its port, Sulaco, captures so many of the crucial tidbits and subtleties about troubled Third World states (particularly small and isolated ones) that foreign correspondents of today experience but do not always inform their readers about, because such details do not fit within the confines of "news" or "objective" analysis.

There are, for example, the handful of foreign merchants in Sulaco, without whom there would be no local economy; the small, sovereign parcels of foreign territory (company headquarters and embassies) to which people flee at times of unrest; and the obscure army captain who has spent time abroad hanging about cafés in European capitals, and who later finds himself back home, nursing resentments, and at the head of a rebellion provoked by soldiers who drink heavily.

There is, too, the "stupendous magnificence" of the local scenery — what Conrad calls a "Paradise of snakes"; the conspiracy theories begot by deep isolation and the general feeling of powerlessness and "futility"; and a wealthier, more developed part of the country that wants to secede because its inhabitants are even more cynical about the political future over "the mountains" than any foreigner. Conrad shows us, too, how bad forms of urbanization deform cultures: "the town children of the Sulaco Campo", for instance, "sullen, thievish, vindictive, and bloodthirsty, whatever great qualities their brothers of the plain might have had."

He describes oscillations between chaos and tyranny, and political movements named after their leaders — Monterists and Ribierists — because in Costaguana, despite the talk of "democracy" and "liberation", there are no ideas, only personalities. He describes "the dread of officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration without law, without security." He describes a port, an ocean port no less, that because of Costaguana's lawlessness is "so isolated" from the world.

His conclusion is of a sort that a novelist can make with less damage to his reputation than a journalist: "The fundamental causes [of the Monterist terror] were the same as ever, rooted in the political immaturity of the people, in the indolence of the upper classes and the mental darkness of the lower." Giorgio Viola, an Italian who fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi and now lives in Costaguana with his dying wife and two daughters, believes, moments after several bullets strike his house and a mob tries to set fire to his roof, that "These were not a people striving for justice, but thieves."

Back to Alien:

In James Cameron's sequel, Aliens, the Marine transport vessel is named Sulaco. (Also in Alien, the escape vessel is named Narcissus, an allusion to another of Conrad's works, The Nigger of the Narcissus.)

Reading racism into pulp fiction

Eric S. Raymond has a scholarly interest in the historical roots of science fiction, which has led him to read — or re-read — the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs — famous for Tarzan, of course, but also for John Carter of Mars — Rudyard Kipling — famous for Kim, but also for As Easy As A.B.C. — and Harold Lamb — famous for his Cossack stories, which, he doesn't mention, influenced Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan.

This leads him to discuss reading racism into pulp fiction:

The skepticism I’m now developing about ascriptions of racism in pulp fiction really began, I think, when I learned that it had become fashionable to denigrate Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and other India stories as racist. This is clearly sloppy thinking at work. Kim was deeply respectful of its non-European characters, especially the Pathan swashbuckler Mahbub Ali and Teshoo Lama. Indeed, the wisdom and compassion of Kipling’s lama impressed me so greatly as a child that I think it founded my lifelong interest in and sympathy with Buddhism.

But I didn’t begin thinking really critically about race in pulp fiction until I read Tarzan and the Castaways a few years ago and noticed something curious about the way Burroughs and his characters used the adjective “white” (applied to people). That is: while it appeared on the surface to be a racial distinction, it was actually a culturist one. In Burroughs’s terms of reference (at least as of 1939), “white” is actually code for “civilized”; the distinction between “civilized” and “savage” is actually more important than white/nonwhite, and non-Europeans can become constructively “white” by exhibiting civilized virtues.

Realizing this caused me to review my assumptions about racial attitudes in Burroughs’s time. I found myself asking whether the use of “white” as code for “civilized” was prejudice or pragmatism. Because there was this about Burrough’s European characters: (1) in their normal environments, the correlation between “civilized” and “white” would have been pretty strong, and (2) none of them seemed to have any trouble treating nonwhite but civilized characters with respect. In fact, in Burroughs’s fiction, fair dealing with characters who are black, brown, green, red, or gorilla-furred is the most consistent virtue of the white gentleman.

I concluded that, given the information available to a typical European in 1939, it might very well be that using “white” as code for “civilized” was pragmatically reasonable, and that the reflex we have today of ascribing all racially-correlated labels to actually racist beliefs is actually unfair to Burroughs and his characters!

It's almost comical to see the programmer-libertarian argument play out against an imagined intellectual-progressive audience: You see, Burroughs doesn't mean white when he says "white" — he means civilized! Therefore, he's not racist.

Raymond's defense of Lamb is similarly unlikely to convert anyone on the Left:

The “brushes with anti-Semitism” lie in Lamb’s portrayal of the Jewish merchants of the time. They sell the Cossacks clothes, weapons, food, and gunpowder and turn the freebooters’ loot into cash. They are depicted as avaricious, cowardly, mean, and quite willing to toady to the warriors and princes they serve. How are we to interpret this in light of Lamb’s sympathetic portrayals of a dozen other races and cultures?

Of course it’s possible Lamb was simply replaying anti-Semitic attitudes he had absorbed somewhere. But in reading these stories I had another moment like the one in which I understood that Burroughs was using “white” as culturist code for “civilized”. It was this: the behavior of Lamb’s Jewish merchants made adaptive sense. Maybe they were really like that!

Consider: The Jews of Lamb’s milieu lived under Christian and Islamic rulers who forbade them from carrying weapons, who despised them, who taxed and persecuted them with a heavy hand. If you were a Jew in that time and place, exhibiting courage and the warrior virtues that Lamb was so ready to recognize in a Mongol or an Afghani was likely to earn you a swift and ugly death.

Under those conditions, I’m thinking that being cowardly and avaricious and toadying would have been completely sensible; after all, what other options than flattering the authorities and getting rich enough to buy themselves out of trouble did Jews actually have?

Lamb seems to have have mined the historical sources pretty assiduously in his portrayals of other cultures and races. Rather than dismissing Lamb’s Jews as creatures of his prejudices, I think we need to at least consider the possibility that he was mostly replaying period beliefs about Jewish merchants, and that those beliefs were in fact fairly accurate. He certainly seems to have tried to do something similar with the other flavors of human being in his books.

Nowadays we tend to interpret Lamb’s Jewish merchants through assumptions that read something like this: (1) All racial labels are indications of racist thinking, and (2) all race-associated stereotypes are necessarily false, and (3) all racial labels and race-related stereotypes are malicious. But it seems to me that, at least as I read Burroughs and Lamb, all these assumptions are highly questionable.

Fear the Boom and Bust

John Papola and Russ Roberts have created a shockingly good hip-hop video about macroeconomics. Really. Fear the Boom and Bust.



Sing along:

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No, it’s the animal spirits

[Keynes Sings:]
John Maynard Keynes, wrote the book on modern macro
The man you need when the economy’s off track, [whoa]
Depression, recession now your question’s in session
Have a seat and I’ll school you in one simple lesson

BOOM, 1929 the big crash
We didn’t bounce back — economy’s in the trash
Persistent unemployment, the result of sticky wages
Waiting for recovery? Seriously? That’s outrageous!

I had a real plan any fool can understand
The advice, real simple — boost aggregate demand!
C, I, G, all together gets to Y
Make sure the total’s growing, watch the economy fly

We’ve been going back and forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No, it’s the animal spirits

You see it’s all about spending, hear the register cha-ching
Circular flow, the dough is everything
So if that flow is getting low, doesn’t matter the reason
We need more government spending, now it’s stimulus season

So forget about saving, get it straight out of your head
Like I said, in the long run — we’re all dead
Savings is destruction, that’s the paradox of thrift
Don’t keep money in your pocket, or that growth will never lift…

because…

Business is driven by the animal spirits
The bull and the bear, and there’s reason to fear its
Effects on capital investment, income and growth
That’s why the state should fill the gap with stimulus both…

The monetary and the fiscal, they’re equally correct
Public works, digging ditches, war has the same effect
Even a broken window helps the glass man have some wealth
The multiplier driving higher the economy’s health

And if the Central Bank’s interest rate policy tanks
A liquidity trap, that new money’s stuck in the banks!
Deficits could be the cure, you been looking for
Let the spending soar, now that you know the score

My General Theory’s made quite an impression
[a revolution] I transformed the econ profession
You know me, modesty, still I’m taking a bow
Say it loud, say it proud, we’re all Keynesians now
We’ve been goin’ back n forth for a century

[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Keynes] I made my case, Freddie H
Listen up , Can you hear it?

[Hayek sings:]

I’ll begin in broad strokes, just like my friend Keynes
His theory conceals the mechanics of change,
That simple equation, too much aggregation
Ignores human action and motivation

And yet it continues as a justification
For bailouts and payoffs by pols with machinations
You provide them with cover to sell us a free lunch
Then all that we’re left with is debt, and a bunch

If you’re living high on that cheap credit hog
Don’t look for cure from the hair of the dog
Real savings come first if you want to invest
The market coordinates time with interest

Your focus on spending is pushing on thread
In the long run, my friend, it’s your theory that’s dead
So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective
Prepared to get schooled in my Austrian perspective
We’ve been going back and forth for a century

We’ve been goin’ back n forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No,it’s the animal spirits

The place you should study isn’t the bust
It’s the boom that should make you feel leery, that’s the thrust
Of my theory, the capital structure is key.
Malinvestments wreck the economy

The boom gets started with an expansion of credit
The Fed sets rates low, are you starting to get it?
That new money is confused for real loanable funds
But it’s just inflation that’s driving the ones

Who invest in new projects like housing construction
The boom plants the seeds for its future destruction
The savings aren’t real, consumption’s up too
And the grasping for resources reveals there’s too few

So the boom turns to bust as the interest rates rise
With the costs of production, price signals were lies
The boom was a binge that’s a matter of fact
Now its devalued capital that makes up the slack.

Whether it’s the late twenties or two thousand and five
Booming bad investments, seems like they’d thrive
You must save to invest, don’t use the printing press
Or a bust will surely follow, an economy depressed

Your so-called “stimulus” will make things even worse
It’s just more of the same, more incentives perversed
And that credit crunch ain’t a liquidity trap
Just a broke banking system, I’m done, that’s a wrap.

We’ve been goin’ back n forth for a century
[Keynes] I want to steer markets,
[Hayek] I want them set free
There’s a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it
[Hayek] Blame low interest rates.
[Keynes] No,it’s the animal spirits

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
F A Hayek
The Fatal Conceit

Download the song in MP3 or AAC.

Trooper in a Strange Land

I did not realize that Heinlein was in the middle of writing his "hippie" classic, Stranger in a Strange Land, when he decided to write his "fascist" classic, Starship Troopers:

When Robert A. Heinlein opened his Colorado Springs newspaper on April 5, 1958, he read a full-page ad demanding that the Eisenhower administration stop testing nuclear weapons. The science-fiction author was flabbergasted. He called for the formation of the Patrick Henry League and spent the next several weeks writing and publishing his own polemic that lambasted “Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense” and urged Americans not to become “soft-headed.”

Then Heinlein made an important professional decision. He quit writing the manuscript he had been working on — eventually it would become one of his best-known books, Stranger in a Strange Land — and started work on a new novel. Starship Troopers was published the next year, and it quickly became perhaps the most controversial sci-fi tale of all time. Critics labeled Heinlein everything from a Nazi to a racist. “The ‘Patrick Henry’ ad shocked ’em,” he wrote many years later. “Starship Troopers outraged ’em.”

What Writing and Reading Used to be Like

To dip into the Decline and Fall is to know what writing and reading used to be like, Robert Kaplan says:

Gibbon's elliptical elegance is rare in an age when a surfeit of information, coupled with the distractions of electronic communication, forces writers to move briskly from one point to another.

Rare, too, in an age of tedious academic specialty are Gibbon's sweeping yet valuable generalizations. When Gibbon describes everyday people in poor nations as exhibiting a "carelessness of futurity," he exposes one tragic effect of underdevelopment in a way that many more-careful and polite tomes of today do not.

Our academic clerisy, I'm sure, could point out factual inadequacies, along with examples of cultural bias, throughout the Decline and Fall. Yet nothing on the shelves today will give readers as awe-inspiring a sense of spectacle as the Decline and Fall: of how onrushing events almost everywhere — Europe, Africa, the Near East, Asia — so seamlessly weave together. At a time of sound bites on one hand and 500-page yawns about a single issue on the other, here, blessedly, is something for the general reader.

(Is it ironic to cite that snippet in a blog post?)

Ayn Rand's Disagreeable Niche

Arnold Kling describes Ayn Rand's niche:

1. In terms of the psychological factor known as Agreeableness, I speculate that people who tend to lean libertarian tend to be low relative to the average person. We place relatively low value on going along to get along.


2. Those of us who are low on Agreeableness really resent situations in which Agreeableness confers high status. When we think that guys are winning approval, status, and girls by expressing nice-sounding political opinions, we get ticked off.


3. Rand makes a virtue out of being low on Agreeableness. This is almost unique in literature. Few other writers, if any, use their writing to express and advocate for low Agreeableness. Instead, most writers either are dispassionate or are strongly Agreeable. When people who are low on Agreeableness encounter Rand, they feel that they have found a rare soulmate.


4. In my own life, I have had to work very hard to overcome my low Agreeableness. I can think of many situations in which I failed to do so, at some cost to my position on the career ladder. To this day, people with very high status trigger my disagreeableness in ways that I cannot really control (see my posts on Jonathan Gruber).


5. I encountered Rand's work relatively late in life. My reactions were mixed.


6. One could argue that my own writing is aimed at the same niche. Perhaps it is all an elaborate justification for low agreeableness.

Robert E. Howard and the Pacific Fleet

Robert E. Howard would have been 104 years old yesterday, if (a) he hadn't killed himself, (b) none of his imagined enemies did either, and (c) he had mastered black sorcery enough to defy the ravages of time.

Unlike many modern fantasy writers, Howard had to read history and historical fiction to sate his yearnings for adventure, and he knew a thing or two about war — as evidenced by his thoughts on the Pacific fleet, which he put down in a letter to H.P. Lovecraft, in December of 1932:

Considering the Philippines — if we were allowed to fortify them, they would be a strength. As it is, they’re a weakness. Instead of being a rifle aimed at the heart of Japan (as would be the case were they fortified and a goodly portion of our Pacific fleet stationed there), they tend to divide our forces, to scatter our lines, and to subject American citizens to danger, in case of war with Japan. I think it would be a point of strategy to abandon those islands entirely, and concentrate our forces about Hawaii. That Japan would gobble them is certain, but I scarcely think they would add much to her ultimate strength, increased as it is so enormously by her grabbing of Manchuria.

A Standard for Literary Bravery

Gibbon's Decline and Fall sets a standard for literary bravery, Robert Kaplan says:

He sought no one's approval and was afraid of nothing. In his day the Church was a sacred cow; he was merciless in his exposition of its evolution. According to Gibbon, Christianity — to use the words of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in his introduction to the Decline and Fall — emerged from a "heretical Jewish sect" to become a "novel cult of virginity" and the most "persistent of the competing new Oriental superstitions," eventually to capture power as a "revolutionary ideology." Concerning the persecutions of the Christians, Gibbon concluded, after exhaustive documentation,

Even admitting, without hesitation or inquiry, all that history has recorded, or devotion has feigned, on the subject of martyrdoms, it must still be acknowledged that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels.

Not surprisingly, the publication of the Decline and Fall met with bitter controversy. Though the book was praised by the philosopher David Hume and others, attacks on Gibbon for his treatment of the Church were widespread and sustained: almost sixty denunciatory books about him were published in his lifetime.

In Defense of James Cameron

Steve Sailer loved Terminator and Aliens, and he's a bit of a contrarian, so I shouldn't have been surprised when he wrote a piece in defense of James Cameron — but calling Cameron a worthy successor to the greatest American science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) strikes me as going a bit too far:

Heinlein’s thumbprints can be found all over Avatar’s pastiche of a plot. For instance, the device that launches Cameron’s scenario — one identical twin must substitute at the last minute for his brother on an interstellar voyage — is also in Heinlein’s 1956 novel Time for the Stars. Moreover, Avatar appears to borrow one of its central ideas — Pandora, a planet where the entire ecosystem is a single living network exchanging information — from the climax of Heinlein’s 1953 book for boys, Starman Jones.

Indeed, Avatar’s main plot — a human soldier teams up with a seemingly primitive but actually wise alien tribe to prevent an evil Earthling mining company from despoiling their sacred tropical homeland — an be found in Heinlein’s 1948 “young adult” story Space Cadet.

This is not to say Cameron is plagiarizing Heinlein. Rather, Heinlein’s ideas are part of the creative DNA of every artist working in hard sci-fi.

Further, Cameron is confronted with the same storytelling problem as Heinlein: they both love giant machines, but audiences don’t want to see the overdog win. Heinlein used a more convoluted variant of the Avatar plot in both Red Planet (1949) and Between Planets (1951). In these, the heroes are human settlers on Mars or Venus who enlist the admirable indigenous aliens in their fight for planetary independence from the oligarchic rulers of Earth.

In Heinlein’s books, it’s as if the American Revolution saw the American settlers allying with the American Indians to defeat King George. (The reality, of course, was closer to the opposite. As the Declaration of Independence’s reference to “merciless Indian Savages” suggests, “democracy” and “indigenous rights” are more antonyms than synonyms.) Not surprisingly, Cameron, who was born and raised through age 16 in Canada, can’t be bothered with Heinlein’s contortions, so Avatar is politically simpler than its sources in the Heinlein canon.

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

The premise of James Cameron's Avatar — a wheel-chair-bound man controlling a genetically engineered creature — comes from Poul Anderson's classic novella, Call Me Joe, while the trite story of a white messiah going native comes from any number of movies, Dances with Wolves most notably. What I did not realize was that the names of the lush planet and its inhabitants both come from a Russian science-fiction series, The World of Noon:

Cinema audiences in Russia have been quick to point out that Avatar has elements in common with The World of Noon, or Noon Universe, a cycle of 10 bestselling science fiction novels written by the Strugatskys in the mid-1960s.

It was the Strugatskys who came up with the planet Pandora — the same name chosen by Cameron for the similarly green and lushly forested planet used as the spectacular backdrop to Avatar. The Noon Universe takes place in the 22nd century. So does Avatar, critics have noticed.

And while there are clear differences between the two Pandoras, both are home to a similarly named bunch of humanoids — the Na'vi in Cameron's epic, and the Nave in Strugatskys' novels, read by generations of Soviet teenagers and space-loving scientists and intellectuals.

Book Of Eli Reboots Zardoz

I have never watched the post-apocalyptic cult-classic, Zardoz — which is infamous, more than anything, for putting Sean Connery in a truly terrible costume — but I was intrigued to find out that Denzel Washington's Book Of Eli "reboots" Zardoz — and arguably misses the point, by changing the "zinger" ending, which the original title hints at.

Space 2099

I only have the vaguest recollections of Space 1999, but now it has been "rebooted" as Space 2099 — unofficially:

A Space 1999 fan named Eric Bernard has boiled down most episodes of the first three seasons of the show into easy-to-watch chunks of 2-3 minutes each. And he's added more effects, attempted to create better continuity, and even edited dialogue so that everybody says they're in 2099 instead of 1999. Essentially, he's made the show addictively watchable again.

For each episode Bernard supplies a summary and explains what he's changed:

This episode contains several modifications the major one being at the crucial moment when the second nuclear waste dump explodes. This event now creates a rupture in the fabric of space sucking the moon into its void and propulsing it into an uncharted area of the universe. At the end, the decision to stay on Moonbase Alpha is now a more obvious one and John Koenig alone assumes responsibility. Fans will also notice that the travel tube has been adapted to look more accurate with the actual studio set and that the Meta signal has been removed to be re-used in another context later in the series.

The Straw Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future

I haven't read much Dickens, and I hadn't read any in years — decades, really — but I recently finished reading a beatifully annotated version of A Christmas Carol that I received as a gift.

Now, even as a kid in school I understood that Dickens was a social reformer — which was presented as an unalloyed good, by the way — but reading A Christmas Carol as an adult, I can't help but dwell on the fact that the whole thing is a transparent effort to prop up a conservative straw man and to knock him back down again — and light him on fire, too, I suppose.

Scrooge is a miser and a misanthrope, and Dickens makes every effort to associate miserliness and misanthropy with conservatives like Edmund Burke, with economists like Thomas Malthus, and with anyone else who might dare to suggest that the world does not run on wishful thinking.

It does not take long for him to get down to it. In the second paragraph of the first chapter — Stave 1, in Dickens' "carol in prose" — he makes a sarcastic reference to the wisdom of our ancestors. That's a not-so-subtle jab at Edmund Burke's Speech on Conciliation with the American Colonies:

I set out with a perfect distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of every speculation of my own, and with a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us the inheritance of so happy a Constitution and so flourishing an empire, and, what is a thousand times more valuable, the treasury of the maxims and principles which formed the one and obtained the other.

Apparently Dickens had a series of fake books made up for his own Wisdom of Our Ancestors library shelf: Ignorance, Superstition, The Block, etc.

When Scrooge's nephew invites him to dinner, Scrooge says that he will indeed come to see him — in Hell. This is censored, of course, but you get the idea:

Scrooge said that he would see him — yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

This is all just a set-up though:

But why? cried Scrooge's nephew. Why?

Why did you get married? said Scrooge.

Because I fell in love.

Because you fell in love! growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. Good afternoon!

In an era before modern contraception — and "loose" morals — not getting married was birth-control, and "sensible" people understood that a man should not marry until he could support a family.

But that kind of cold, economical thinking gets ascribed to a man who tells his nephew to go to Hell for inviting him to Christmas dinner.

We're just getting warmed up though for the visit from the warm-hearted souls collecting charity for the poor:

At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge, said the gentleman, taking up a pen, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.

Are there no prisons? asked Scrooge.

Plenty of prisons, said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

And the Union workhouses? demanded Scrooge. Are they still in operation?

They are. Still, returned the gentleman, I wish I could say they were not.

The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then? said Scrooge.

Both very busy, sir.

Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course, said Scrooge. I'm very glad to hear it.

Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude, returned the gentleman, a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?

Nothing! Scrooge replied.

You wish to be anonymous?

I wish to be left alone, said Scrooge. Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.

Many can't go there; and many would rather die.

If they would rather die, said Scrooge, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides — excuse me — I don't know that.

But you might know it, observed the gentleman.

It's not my business, Scrooge returned. It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!

Dickens seems to feel that the poor are innocent victims and that there's nothing to be gained by punishing them for being poor — which is interesting in light of his own early life experience:

John Dickens's tenuous prosperity as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded a few years of private education of the young Charles at William Giles's School, in Chatham.

This period came to an abrupt end after John Dickens had spent beyond his means in entertaining and otherwise maintaining his social position, and was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor's prison. [...] Dickens later used the prison as a setting in Little Doritt.

Just before his father's arrest, 12-year-old Dickens had begun working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on jars of shoe polish. This money paid for his lodgings with Mrs. Roylance and helped support his family.

Mrs. Roylance, Dickens later wrote, was "a reduced old lady, long known to our family", and whom he eventually immortalized, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs. Pipchin", in Dombey & Son. Later, lodgings were found for him in a "back-attic...at the house of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in The Borough...he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman, with a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son; these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in The Old Curiosity Shop.

The mostly unregulated, strenuous — and often cruel — work conditions of the factory employees (especially children) made a deep impression on Dickens. His experiences served to influence later fiction and essays, and were the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor.

More than anything, he seems bitter that he went from studying to be a little gentleman to working as a common labourer — when it wasn't his fault.

Anyway, the whole "carol" recoils at the conclusions of Malthus, while nonetheless centering on a family without the means to support its many children. Bob Cratchit apparently has no better options than to work for Scrooge — which seems odd, for a finance clerk working in London — and Scrooge does not pay him enough to feed and clothe his family. At his current salary, he cannot afford to keep all six children, including the crippled Tiny Tim, alive and well. Thus, Tiny Tim is destined to die — despite asking God to bless us, every one — until Scrooge has his change of heart and increases Cratchit's pay.

I guess we're not supposed to ask, What if the Cratchits had waited a year or two to get married?, as Scrooge must certainly have suggested. Then they would have had five children, not six, all well fed and well clothed, and we wouldn't have had to wipe away the tears thinking about poor Tiny Tim.

But I guess it's better to feel bad, gloriously bad, about the Poor, than to avoid the problem in the first place. Avoiding the problem is heartless and cruel.

Jimmy Fallon and The Muppets Sing "12 Days of Christmas"

For his Christmas episode, Jimmy Fallon sang "12 Days of Christmas" with the Muppets (and the Roots):

The "original" version featured John Denver and appeared on the album A Christmas Together and on the 1979 TV special A Christmas Together with John Denver and The Muppets — which does not appear to be available on DVD. Sigh.



I miss Jim Henson's voice, of course, but I must admit that I like Pepe the Prawn and Rizzo the Rat.

The song has a number of variations:

It has been suggested by a number of sources over the years that the pear tree is in fact supposed to be perdrix, French for partridge and pronounced per-dree, and was simply copied down incorrectly when the oral version of the game was transcribed. The original line would have been: "A partridge, une perdrix."

Some misinterpretations have crept into the English-language version over the years. The fourth day's gift is often stated as four calling birds but originally was four colly birds, using another word for a blackbird.

The fifth day's gift of gold rings refers not to jewellery but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant. When these errors are corrected, the pattern of the first seven gifts all being birds is restored. There is a version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" that is still sung in Sussex in which the four colly birds are replaced by canaries.

A minor variant includes the singing of "golden" rather than "gold" rings, to avoid having to stretch "gold" into two syllables ("go-old").

John Stossel's Show on Atlas Shrugged

I find it difficult to watch popular commentary shows, even in the rare case, like John Stossel's show on Atlas Shrugged, where I don't despise both sides of the debate:



If you're going to make the case for Rand's ideas, to a popular audience feeling betrayed by Wall Street, I think you need to clarify that the heroes of Atlas Shrugged aren't "the rich" — the Paris Hiltons of the world — but the productive. The villains of the work are wealthy businessmen too — businessmen who use government to their own ends.

White Messiahs in Film and History

David Brooks laments that Avatar is just another White Messiah fable:

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Avid moviegoers will remember A Man Called Horse, which began to establish the pattern, and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. More people will have seen Dances With Wolves or The Last Samurai.

White Messiahs exist in history too, Steve Sailer adds:

By the way, during WWII, anthropologist Carleton Coon was officially assigned by the O.S.S. to be the White Messiah of North Africa, Lawrence of Morocco, if the Germans transited Spain and landed an army behind the U.S. Army. Coon, the kind of two fisted brawler admired by barbarians, was to take to the hills and rally his friends in the Rif Mountain tribes to fight irregular war against the Germans.
[...]
There are more than a few White Messiahs in history, besides Lawrence. Latin American history abounds with White Messiahs. For example, Subcommandante Marcos, the mysterious and charismatic masked leader of the 1994 Chiapas Indian rebellion in southern Mexico, is the Mexico City college professor son of parents who were born in Spain. Originally, Mayan Indians were supposed to be the press spokesmen for this postmodern rebellion, but the Mayans failed to dazzle on the first TV announcement, so the tall white guy in the ski mask took over the airtime and became the face/mask of this movement for Indian rights.

The leader of the Shining Path guerillas in Peru was a white philosophy professor named Abimael Guzman.

Fidel Castro's father was born in Spain.

Che Guevara, who fought in Cuba, Congo and Bolivia, was a half Irish and half aristocratic Spanish Argentine. At the end of The Motorcycle Diaries, Che (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) experiences an epiphany: "We are a single mestizo race, from Mexico to the Magellan Straits." But, Che's father noted: "In my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels. Che inherited some of the features of our restless ancestors… which drew him to distant wandering, dangerous adventures, and new ideas."

100 Quotes Every Geek Should Know

Ken Denmead has compiled 100 quotes every geek should know — and quibble over. Some examples:

1. “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.” — Dennis the Peasant, Monty Python and the Holy Grail


2. “Three rings for the Elven kings under the sky, seven for the Dwarf lords in their halls of stone, nine for the mortal men doomed to die, one for the Dark Lord on his dark throne, in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie. One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring the bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.” — LOTR


3. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” — HAL, 2001: A Space Odyssey


4. “Spock. This child is about to wipe out every living thing on Earth. Now, what do you suggest we do….spank it?” — Dr. McCoy, Star Trek: The Motion Picture


5. “With great power there must also come — great responsibility.” — Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962)


6. “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you oughtta go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it’s not for the timid.” — Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation “Q Who?”


7. “Five card stud, nothing wild. And the sky’s the limit” — Captain Jean Luc Picard, uttering the last line of the series, Star Trek: The Next Generation “All Good Things…”


8. “If you think that by threatening me you can get me to do what you want… Well, that’s where you’re right. But — and I am only saying that because I care — there’s a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing.” — Chris Knight, Real Genius


9. “We’re all very different people. We’re not Watusi. We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A’, huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog.” — John Winger, Stripes


10. “If I’m not back in five minutes, just wait longer.” — Ace Ventura, Ace ventura, Pet Detective

Jimmy Fallon & The Muppets Perform "One"

Jimmy Fallon & The Muppets perform an "impromptu" rendition of "One":

The Long Tentacle of H.P. Lovecraft in Manga

Despite my youthful interest in all things Japanese and my geek-requisite interest in the sanity-blasting horror of H.P. Lovecraft, I've never had much interest in their intersection — that is, in the long tentacle of H.P. Lovecraft in manga, where the New Englander's distaste for slimy aquatic creatures meets up with the modern Japanese taste for shockingly violent and fetishistic entertainment.

Perhaps most shocking to me though is that classical Japanese artist Hokusai — of crashing-wave fame — has a claim to the tentacle-fetish genre, with his own 1820 woodcut, The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife. (East is East, and West is West...)

On a less creepy note, some elements of Lovecraft's work don't quite translate — or transliterate:

One curiosity of Japanese translations of Lovecraft is that, since the Japanese language is phonetic, Lovecraft's intentionally unpronounceable alien names — R'lyeh, Cthulhu, N'kai, Shub-Niggurath, etc. — are unavoidably made pronounceable.

(The Japanese written language isn't simply phonetic; its two syllabaries restrict writing to consonant-vowel pairs — ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc.)

The Art of Golf Course Architecture

Golf course architecture is one of the world's most expansive but least recognized art forms, Steve Sailer claims:

Yet this curiously obscure profession can help shed light on mainstream art, sociology, and even human nature itself, since the golf designer, more than any other artist, tries to reproduce the primeval human vision of an earthly paradise.

What is that primeval human vision of an earthly paradise?

Research since the early 80s shows that humans tend to have two favorite landscapes. One is wherever they lived during their adolescence, but the nearly universal favorite among children before they imprint upon their local look is grassy parkland, and that fondness survives into adulthood.

Richard Conniff wrote in Discover: "In separate surveys, Ulrich, Orians, and others have found that people respond strongly to landscapes with open, grassy vegetation, scattered stands of branchy trees, water, changes in elevation, winding trails, and brightly lit clearings..."

In one amusing study, 1001 people from 15 different countries were surveyed about what they'd like to see in a painting. Then the sponsors of the research, conceptual art pranksters Komar and Melamid, painted each country's "Most Wanted Painting." Even though the researchers hadn't mentioned what type of picture it should be, the consensus in 13 of the 15 cultures favored landscapes and 11 of the 15 looked surprisingly like golf courses.

All over the world, people want to see grassland, a lake, and some trees, but not a solid forest. And they always want to see it slightly from above. The project was intended to satirize popular taste, but it ended up revealing much about about human desires.

So golf courses look like happy hunting grounds, where one might expect to find tasty hoofed animals — with a touch of something dangerous:

The distinction Edmund Burke made in 1757 between the "sublime" and the "beautiful" applies to golf courses. The beautiful is some pleasing place conducive to human habitat — meadows, valleys, slow moving streams, grassland intermingled with copses of trees, the whole English country estate shtick. The sublime is nature so magnificent that it induces the feeling of terror because it could kill you, such as by you falling off a mountain or into a gorge.

Beautiful landscapes are most suited for building golf courses, since a golf course needs at least 100 acres of land level enough for a golf ball to come to rest upon. But golfers get a thrill out of the mock sublime, where you are in danger of losing not your life, but your mis-hit golf ball into a water hazard or ravine. One reason that Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula is so legendary is because it combines sublime sea cliffs with beautiful (and thus functional for golf) rolling plains (My father, though, almost walked off the cliff in the middle of the eighth fairway at Pebble Beach and into the wave-carved chasm, which probably would have satisfied Burke's theoretical rigor.)

White Telephone Movies

Depression-era movies about rich people, like Philadelphia Story, are known as white telephone movies, Steve Sailer says, because only millionaires could finagle a non-black telephone out of the Bell monopoly back then:

Perhaps the contemporary equivalents made by Nancy Meyer (writer director of the aptly named What Women Want with Mel Gibson) could be called Viking range movies because they are heavy on high-end kitchen appliance porn.

Movie stars tend to emerge from tumultuous upbringings

Movie stars tend to emerge from tumultuous upbringings, Steve Sailer says:

For example, I don't know how many current stars spent a couple of years living in hippie communes as children. [Meryl] Streep, in contrast, has always seemed like the supremely professional product of a proper upbringing. This perhaps made her less sympathetic when she was young in a sort of Jack Nicklaus-Peyton Manning way, but she's enjoying the benefits of an improbably long career today.

The Gospel According to James

It's fitting that Avatar arrived at Christmastime, Ross Douthat says, because it's a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message:

It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.

As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.