Sunshine

Watching Sci-Fi movies about outer space brings to one’s awareness the conventions of Hollywood Space.  Ships make sounds as they travel even though we know that sound transmission is impossible in the vacuum of space.  All ships seem to generate full gravity fields.  And the outer hulls are always fully lit although I can’t believe that actual space ships would so waste limited resources.  Just who could possibly run into them?  Given the speeds involved evasive maneuvers must be taken long before an obstacle gets within visual range.  Only young, handsome people become astronauts—if we exclude Space Cowboys.  And given the closed nature of the venue Space movies involve small casts and a single set.  The money goes for special effects. 

 

There is Science Fiction writing that is possible as soon as the time and money is spent on research, there is writing that will become possible once the technology is developed but is centuries or even millennia in the future, and there is Sci-Fi that just plain disobeys the laws of physics.  The present movie is of the third genre.  Our sun has sufficient nuclear fuel to last up to 5 billion years.  At that point it will swell to become a red dwarf encompassing the orbit of our earth.  Reigniting it is outside the realm of possibility.  If you make that jump of suspension of disbelief this movie is still a rather clunky entry as there are many other holes in its science. 

 

Somehow there is too much going on within the scope of this movie and not enough time spent developing any one storyline.  For one thing we don’t get to know the crew well enough to care about what happens to them.  These dissatisfactions build over time and leave us feeling uneasy.  We get little sense of how the various bits and pieces that get thrown at us fit together as a cohesive whole.  As a result of this our willingness to suspend disbelief gets continually shattered by the glaring holes which science cannot support.  At times the special effects look clunky at best. 

 

The actors may give reasonably good individual performances but for a cast limited to eight by circumstance there is no sense of ensemble.  The lack of a cohesive storyline often leaves them and us without a sense of their motivation for the things they do.  I would rate this movie a tolerable time waster only.  Had Future Shop not offered it at $12.99 I would not have picked it up.  It is certainly not worth the $35.00 Amazon wants for it. 

Carping about Windows Vista.doc

If Bill Gates built cars, they’d break down more often after a major overhaul. I spent more than half a day last week installing Vista Service Pack 1 and although I didn’t notice any immediate differences it’s thrown me a few curves since. This weekend for the first time in over a year I encountered a Blue Screen of Death—just why I’m not entirely sure and later the computer just plain stopped working. Today for the first time since I owned it my laptop came close to freezing up completely. I managed to invoke a reboot but the process took nearly 15 minutes. Since I discovered the joys of using two screens I’ve had problems getting Windows to remember where to keep my taskbar, my sidebar, my calendar, or decide where it wants to display my various programs. Now, however it can’t seem to remember my settings or even the order of the elements on my sidebar. During the update process it also forgot most of the settings for Quicken my financial software. I wonder why people resist Windows updates.

Spring arrived last week? Not! This evening we’re getting treated to the dog’s breakfast. For the last hour in an absolutely schizophrenic mix of weather we’ve enjoyed a switch from ice pellets to driving rain to wet snow, then white-out conditions, followed by rain and more ice pellets. Could the maestro just make up his mind? The snows of winter are slowly melting and the snow banks are releasing a six-month accumulation of garbage carelessly thrown. Snow plough operators are loathe to get out of their warm cozy cabs hence the thirty-foot high mountains pushed up in mall parking lots are starting to release their archived collection of twisted shopping carts carelessly left behind by shoppers. I suppose we’ll be thankful if those are the only corpses that emerge.

A Commentary on Canadian Race Riots

When our neighbours to the south fought their battle of Independence our British forebears offered freedom to any slaves who would turn on their masters and when the Americans won boatloads of those freemen were transported to the southern tip of Nova Scotia and the Halifax area. For over two hundred years those ‘freemen’ worked as railway porters, domestics and menial laborers. Just over 50 years ago when it was decided a bridge was needed between Halifax and Dartmouth an entire neighbourhood was bulldozed to make room for the Halifax end of the Angus L MacDonald Bridge. That loss still ripples through the Afro-Canadian Population.

There are still bars in Halifax where you’re not welcome if your skin is the wrong colour. Transport that sentiment to a suburban ghetto plagued by unemployment, alcohol, drugs, and boredom and you get Cole Harbour where yesterday fights broke out yet again in the local high school. These people aren’t recent immigrants; their ancestry goes back almost to the founding of Canada as a nation. Changing attitudes it seems though, takes even longer; and prejudice breeds strongest among the uneducated and disadvantaged. The sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons.

The Futility of Censorship

Today is the birthday of Lawrence Feringhetti who, unlike most of his fellow Beat Generation Poets, still lives and is entering his 10^th decade. A publisher as well as a poet he became famous unintentionally when he published Alan Ginsberg’s Howl and had the San Francisco Police attempt to ban its release. The resulting trial served to make the Beat Poets overnight celebrities and spread their work worldwide. All this brings me back to a theme I’ve visited before, does censorship truly do what it sets out to accomplish?

Attempt to buy Mein Kampf at Indigo-Chapters and you will learn that Heather has banned its sale in her stores. Mind you she also bans the distribution in her stores of Xtra, a gay publication, along with EYE, NOW and in what I consider a counter-intuitive move the Montreal Review of Books. However a visit to Amazon reveals no less than a dozen offerings and a visit to Project Gutenberg allows you a choice of versions downloadable for free. Did the prosecution of Ernest Zundel do anything but serve to give the anti-Semite clad in his patented yellow safety hat a platform to publicize his hate? In the end it was his German citizenship and their request for his extradition that got him; not any effort on the part of our own courts.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t condone the promulgators of hate; I just believe that they should be allowed to rot in obscurity. In the end Ferlinghetti got the last laugh and went on to a long and successful career as a publisher and Howl made Ginsberg a celebrated poet. You can read it here:

http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Ramble/howl_text.html

Spring has Sprung?

Thursday, March 20, 2008

 

Overnight I upgraded my operating system to Vista Service Pack One and so far everything seems to be working.  The update went smoothly if you discount the time involved:

 

1. Half an hour to run checkdisk on the drive
2. Twenty minutes to run System File Checker
3. An hour to back up all my files
4. An hour and a half to download the update—things went slowly last night even at 1 AM
5. Half an hour to initiate the installation
6. Then three reboots and an hour to complete the install including a DOS System File scan.
7.  And finally two more reboots to get the system to function properly. 

 

 

By my count that’s a five-hour update.  I hope it was worth it.  By my calculations that cost $100.00.  The first two steps are necessary to ensure a smooth update, the third was insurance.  One is also advised to update all one’s drivers before one starts though it is considered inadvisable to update a video driver unless it’s giving problems. 

 

I’m somewhat more gruntled than I was at this point yesterday, Wednesday, and discovered that after spending at least four hours getting my apartment ready for the plumbers to change the shut-off valves in my apartment I came home to discover that the work hadn’t been done.  To add insult to injury the task wasn’t accomplished because the plumber was diverted upstairs because the imbecile in the unit directly above me who has been making all his neighbour’s lives uncomfortable with his eternal renovation for the past two years had broken something.  You might say I went postal. 

 

Holy Saturday

 

Or so the day is designated in the church calendar.  Didn’t get around to writing yesterday.  This week marked the death of Arthur C. Clark the visionary behind 2001: A Space Odyssey and author of more than seventy books at the age of 90.  Also the sudden death of the 54-year-old Anthony Minghella after surgery in London. 

 

I seem to be catching up on my unwatched movie collection as the number of recent new reviews in my sister blog will indicate.  On Monday I managed to get to my local grocer’s to replenish my pantry.  That leisurely stroll took 2 hours the challenge of finding the items I want in a store where things continually get moved about making the job take longer than I’d prefer.  When I got home unpacking took another two hours.  At least I got to listen to podcasts and eat supper while I unpacked and put things away.  When I finally got to sit down fell asleep in an upright position and slept for nearly four and a half hours with the TV on but not playing and lights blazing. 

 

Tuesday I dropped by Future Shop and picked up the movie Atonement on my way home from work.  Ended up spending much of the evening writing two letters. 

 

Got up early Wednesday to get my apartment readied for the plumber as noted above.  Ate out on the way home to ensure they’d be finished when I arrived.  So much for that. 

 

The installation of Vista Service Pack 1 seems neither to have repaired nor impeded the operation of any system on my computer that I’ve been able to detect so far.  At least it appears to have been a benign procedure, for which I’m thankful.

Beware the Ides of March

Luckily my name isn’t Julius, I’m not an emperor, I don’t know anyone named Marcus Brutus, and I feel no need to go out today. I just spent some time exploring my Blogs online. I’m approaching the second anniversary of my blogging venture and have made 310 entries to date or one every other day. Apparently 165 people have visited my blog. I write most of my entries in Microsoft Word 2002 and post them by E-mail using Windows Mail—formerly Outlook Express but my laptop is blessed with Vista. When I take the time to see what happens when the entry is translated to the blogger I am mystified as to why a single document manages to get translated using different fonts, sizes and even colours for the text. When I add pictures to my movie reviews even weirder things happen. Oh Well, I hope my readers are more tolerant than the one commenter who posted an obscene rant I promptly deleted.

Just checked the weather. If I manage to overcome my trepidations about meeting men with daggers there may be some sun in the offing today. With rain featuring in the forecast for next week I suppose I’d better enjoy the sun while it lasts. We have indeed broken a 1939 record for snowfall in the Toronto area. Somehow it seems like a dubious accomplishment.

After waiting nearly twenty years to have the shut-off valves in my apartment replaced so that I may deal with my dripping faucets and plumbing I was bemused this week to learn that it will finally get done because water is dripping into a neighbour’s ceiling. Guess I should have thought of that one years ago. Whatever it takes I suppose.

Yes, I realize this is no longer the Ides of March but I ran out of steam. I also neglected to wind my striking clock so it too needs attention. I noticed today that one of my calendars still reads February—if I wait I can switch it to April and save the bother. Outside the sun is peering out through a hazy sky and the temperature is hovering around the freezing point. Not a temperature calculated to make our mountains of snow disappear anytime soon but a comfort to those concerned over the risk of flooding. With heavy rain predicted mid-week those in low-lying areas still have cause for concern. If I pay attention to where I place my feet it should be safe to take a walk today. After all, if you believe MacLean’s Magazine, Oakville is one of the safest places in Canada or indeed the world to live. But that’s another blog.

Elecro-Convulsive Shock Treatment

The history of the treatment of mental illness is one of closets and fads.  Whether it be Mrs. Rochester confined to the attic at Thornfield Manor or the inmates of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; the arts have followed the trends of the times.  Although confining a person in restraints to a small dark room may no longer be considered humane and lobotomies are no longer performed the use of trauma in the treatment of depression has a long tradition because it works and does so almost immediately.  The larger issue has always been at what cost in terms of long-term side-effects to the patient involved. 

 

Cold showers may well snap a catatonic out of stasis temporarily but are not effective on a long-term basis. Insulin Shock Treatment may also work but has other dire consequences.  We know so little about how our minds work that finding treatments when they malfunction is very much an inexact science.  We have all heard about the placebo effect which uses the power of suggestion to affect a therapeutic result. Shock however applied introduces blunt trauma which serves to reconcentrate the mental processes on other things.  If you leg is amputated the blister on your finger may well stop throbbing.  If your house burns down that leaking tap will no longer be an issue. 

 

Electro-Convulsive Shock Treatment seems to have a polarizing effect on those in the mental health profession; one is either enthusiastically in favour or vehemently opposed.  My second-year university Abnormal Psych Professor spent nearly a quarter of our class time inveighing against its use.  Watching a patient who was formerly a crack-a-jack cribbage player rendered incapable of telling a Jack from an Ace leaves a lasting impression. 

 

The rehabilitation of ECT as a treatment for depression seems to have coincided with our current shortage of doctors and in-patient facilities.  The current thinking tends toward the rapid re-integration of mental patients back into the society at large.  This has led to the closure of many long-term care facilities.  Psycho-therapy whether one-on-one or in a group setting is a long-term proposition which carries attendant economic considerations.  Pharmacology suffers from the problem of compliance—how do you make sure the patient takes his medication on a regular basis?  ECT, whatever you may think about it, is effective because it enables a health-care provider to quickly discharge a patient from hospital. 

 

Would I willingly consent to its application to my body—Emphatically No!  Should it be used as a treatment of last resort—Maybe.  The sad truth is the fact that we have not been able to find an alternate treatment that is as rapidly effective in treating a disease that affects so many. 

Weekly Rant 2008-03-07

"Democracy is the worst form of government... except for all the other forms that have been tried,"

--Winston Churchill

Made the mistake of listening to the news this morning. Reports of the American Presidential Primary System lead one to some rapid conclusions. First off, if this is the exercise of democracy; democracy is available, just as is justice, only to the fabulously rich. Secondly the amount of mud-slinging that goes on leads one rapidly to a sense of distaste for the entire process. If this is what it takes to get elected to the presidency then anyone who would aspire to the job is by definition insane and should be disqualified from holding the office.

Southern Ontario is again under a sever weather advisory; snow plough operators are fighting a losing battle to keep our roads clear. Maybe the bears have it right—lets all hibernate until spring. This being winter break thousands will be making like the birds and migrating south.

A judge in Brampton, Ont., rejected a human rights challenge to an Ontario law on Thursday, ruling that motorcyclists must wear helmets while riding because safety concerns outweigh religious rights. So goes a news item on the CBC website. There are those who might say if they want to kill themselves let them do it; problem being that the rest of us would have to foot the cost of the medical care and rehabilitation for those who don’t manage to kill themselves outright. For once the law may actually make sense. If only it were possible to as quickly settle disputes over Christian prayer in schools, kirpans, Sharia Law, and the hajib. Is it racist to wish that those who come to our country would not insist on attempting to rewrite Canadian Law? Are those who flout Moslem Law in Moslem countries treated with as much indulgence and leniency as we exercise in the West? Who is being abused here?

Today is apparently Woman’s day. Let’s begin by getting two statements that are now considered politically incorrect out of the way. “A woman’s place is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.” “Feminism is an excuse to put ugly women on Television.” I like a Nova Scotia prelate’s take on the matter: “The Holy Catholic Church will be truly universal when a black pope is pregnant in the Vatican.” In Sharia Law we see an extreme take on the rights of woman. The legal rights of woman have progressed in the last century and a half. They are considered persons and are allowed to vote and own property. They may incur debt in their own names and own businesses. On the other hand their salaries still lag behind those of their male counterparts in the same professions and the glass ceiling is still very real. When it comes to elected office equality is still a thing to be aspired to and all too often it is people of their own gender who hold the most severe prejudices.

My Weekly Scribble 2008-03-02

Once again the paparazzi dog the House of Windsor. It is ironic that having been implicated in the death of his Mother; the press has now threatened the life of Harry, her son. Prince Henry has been serving on the front line in Afghanistan since December in an undercover operation honoured by the British Tabloids but his cover was blown by the Australian Press this week and his unit was forced to return to England for their own safety.

Once again the public’s right to know and the freedom of the press are pitted against the safety and security of a public figure. Those of us who buy and read these publications are equally to blame for providing a market for these tabloids in our insatiable desire to know the minutest details of a celebrity’s life. Modern technology has made it impossible to hide anywhere from those who would snoop. It is impossible for an athlete to scratch an itch on any part of his body without risking the threat of it appearing on the evening news or in the morning paper. The list of political careers wrecked by an off-the-cuff-remark made near a mike that shouldn’t have been open is endless. Telephoto lenses, parabolic mikes, wiretaps, eaves-dropping devices, and satellites in space make it impossible to hide anywhere. The chambers used by the College of Cardinals to select the next Pope used to be bricked in so that their only contacts with the outside world were the plumbing system and the dumb waiter used to supply their meals. The sign that a new Pope had been elected was the wet straw added to the fire when the ballots were burned. In our modern world this scenario is laughable.

Cell phones, text messaging, and the internet make it possible to be constantly in touch instantly with what is happening anywhere on earth. A mountain climber dying of altitude sickness on Mount Everest at an altitude too high to be reached by rescue helicopters used a satellite phone to call home to say good bye to his wife. Whether or not she appreciated this last communication from her husband the irony of the situation does not escape me. Just last week Fidel Castro used the internet to announce his resignation. Does this constant connectedness to the outside world actually improve our lives? In an office setting the constant ringing of phones, the arrival of new E-mail, faxes, and the beeping of cell phones make it impossible to get any work done. Concert halls, hospitals, and meeting rooms find it necessary to ban these devices. Do we really need cell phone service on our subways? The disconnect is best illustrated by a pair of executives on a businessman’s lunch busy talking on their cell phones to other people or a mother who texts her son upstairs in his bedroom that dinner is ready. In all this mass of communication we have lost human contact with those around us.

Just as it is now possible to keep a body technically alive for years after the individual inside it is clinically dead; the fact that we can be constantly electronically in touch with the world at large doesn’t mean that it is necessarily a good thing that we actually do so. Too much information and stimulus can lead to intellectual and emotional overload. We need time for quiet reflection and contemplation. Why else would oriental practices that teach this be so popular? We need sleep so that we may dream but wakeful day-dreaming is equally healthy. The fact that it is possible for us to learn what Tom Cruise had for breakfast doesn’t make it right or necessary for us to have this information. Technology continues to outpace philosophical, theological, and legislative thought on its use. Celebrities’ rights to privacy and by corollary those of ordinary citizens will become more and more burning issues in the years to come. Does the fact that their fame fuels their salaries make it right for the public to stalk Sports and Entertainment Stars 24/7? I think not!