Bonus: Memebase Failed Picture

I was trying to make a meme on Memebase.com the other day, and for some reason it wouldn't let me post it; I tried three times and struck out. So I said fuck it, took a screencap and am posting it here.

How Not To Tell A Story

So it’s Pirates of the Caribbean, movie 3, and grim times are ahead. The evil, law-abiding British East India Trading Company (which has for some reason expanded its reach worldwide) is headed for a thunderous showdown with the murdering, lawbreaking, good-guy pirate hordes.

Our Heroes spend most of the movie preparing for the showdown: first they have to go grab Jack Sparrow and the Pearl from the ditch the last movie stuck them in, then they have to all assemble at Pirate Stronghold Of The Week to convene the “Brethren Court”. After deliberation and argument up to the ceiling, they finally manage to convince the assembled Pirate Lords to elect a Pirate King, as according to the Pirate Code, and they all ride out and prepare for battle against the BEITC.

This is no small deal. There are (racist caricatures of) Pirate Lords from every (stereotyped) corner of Earth. There are battle flags being raised from all the great historical pirates of antiquity. Absolutely everything the pirates have is here on the table. And on the other side is a fleet composed of everything the enemy has, literally hundreds of warships ready to fight. 

So, to summarize: The characters have spent maybe the past 70 minutes of screen time getting to this godforsaken place, convincing the pirates to all assemble into one united fleet, and getting them to ride out and meet the enemy head-on. Two enormous fleets are ready to go. A humongous battle is clearly in the cards.

And we get… the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman duking it out for a solid 20 minutes.

Don’t get me wrong, that fight is pretty excellent. But what about the fleets? What about, you know, the fleet we spent the last hour and change assembling?

Well, the next time we see the pirate fleet is them celebrating at the end of the battle, which they took zero part in. As for the BEITC goons, the Dutchman and the Pearl combine to sink their flagship, and then they all go home.

Just like that.

The entirety of that time spent building up the fleet meant absolutely fuck-all in terms of the plot. They could have shaved off that hour of screen time, cut out those stupid scenes with multiple Jack Sparrows for good measure, and had more space for actual decent storytelling where the fat used to be!

And the Dutchman could've retired to the Bahamas a long time earlier than it did.

One Hundred Fireworks In The Night

Yesterday evening, I found myself on a US Airways jumbo jet, bound from Phoenix, Arizona to Milwaukee. For a long time, I had dreamed of flying over the country on the night of July 4th and seeing all the fireworks below. I brought binoculars and a camera with video capability. The following are the notes I scrawled in my copy of The Elegant Universe, in the margins of Chapter 4 where Brian Greene talks about quantum probabilities. 

 Huge, perfect circles of light that would bloom into being for a second or two and then disappear forever. Some were small, barely visible even at short distances; others were plainly visible and enormous, the size of my thumbnail in the binoculars even at hundreds (probably more like 12-75 at most) of miles' distance. Up close, they must have been hundreds of feet wide.

Sometimes, the town was totally invisible to the naked eye, noticeable only by the brief flashes of white and red brilliance. Tiny sparks and balls of light coming suddenly into being and disappearing without a trace of their passage. (I saw at least two towns that way, streetlights visible only upon examination with binoculars.)

If all the conditions were right, the town near to me and the fireworks large, I could see astonishing details. One giant ball, as big as the Moon from the Earth, turned bright red and sparkled for five or six seconds before succumbing to darkness, its remnants crackling and popping in the air like cosmic glitter.

Smaller towns usually had just one or two sources of light, but larger cities could have 4, 5 or even more. One large city had at least eight, twinkling dots that flickered on and off like fireflies. One massive city had dozens! Dozens of sources flitting in and out of existence like luminescent ghosts. Flashing and popping all over the city.

Another enormous city boasted at least forty point-sources, flickering all at once like a perpetual grand finale. As each borough or suburb or municipality sent up its own fireworks, the cumulative effect was indescribable. (It reminded me of watching meteor showers on Washington Island, random rays of light streaking across the sky, appearing and vanishing like heavenly blind-man's-bluff.) The entire city was sending up bursts of radiance, on and off throwing their messages out into the dark. I think we passed through the "finale zone" as we were going over that city, where everyone in the entire place was sending up their final celebrations at about the same time. It was a cacophony of light, silent and beautiful and full of joy.

Independence Day

Today, I was not arrested, charged with a crime, threatened or beaten. I was not molested in any way. Rather, I continued to enjoy the ability to travel where I wish, to say or do whatever I want (without excessively harming others) and to live in a free society. Let's give thanks for that.

If I end up as a journalist, I will enjoy the freedom to question whoever I wish, to investigate and catalog and relay news to the public without fear of reprisal or punishment. There are a lot of countries where this is not possible, as close to home as Mexico and as far away as Afghanistan. I give my thanks for that.

Happy 4th of July, U.S.A. Let's make this country as good as it can be.

Notes from Das Rheingold, Die Walkure and Siegfried

Some brief highlights from this production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, which featured a sort of postmodern American interpretation of the Ring:

Loki being a wonderfully smarmy asshole in Rheingold. He’s actually a pretty complex character, but he had some wonderful scenes where he’s taunting the gods with the last golden apple. In particular, he wanders up to Fricka (who is fearing she has aged) and tricks her into looking a mirror; she freaks out and runs away, and he sits there chuckling. But at the very end of the opera, he has this great little blurb where he says in so many words “I hate the gods. I’m ashamed to even be related to them. Perhaps I should start a tremendous fire and burn them all. I don’t know. Who knows what I may do?” and then exits. That was fabulous.

The Ride of the Valkyries, dressed as aviators, was everything I hoped it would be.

The giants Fasolt and Fafner are not only eight or nine feet tall, but they have enormous mechanical hands.

The producers go out of their way to set up the gods as more corporate CEOs than rulers outright, who try to oppress the little guy (the giants, the working men). This doesn’t always work, but it makes for some cool sets; the battle between Sigmund and Hunding takes place under a bridge, with trash all around, and Siegfried and Mime live in an abandoned trailer that’s presumably in the middle of some dump. In Siegfried, Wotan and Alberich and Mime are all dressed as bums, and the visual cue helps you understand their status and how it has changed.

Fafner is a giant robot dragon. Or more accurately, in this production he builds one and pilots it himself.

The forging scene in Siegfried and the fire scene in Die Walkure were both utterly fantastic, in their stage direction and in the way they were played/sung. And the scene where Siegfried awakens Brunhilde was beautifully done. Incidentally, we lucked out in the production we saw; Sieglinde was the understudy for her part, but was absolutely wonderful, and Brunhilde was a first-time Brunhilde. Talk about finding talent in the right places!

The conductor summed up Wotan pretty well in his pre-concert talk: he tries to do the right thing, but he can’t even play by his own rules. He cheats, lies and tries to wriggle out of his obligations whenever he has them.

Stage direction surprises 1, 2 and 3: at the end of Rheingold, the Rheinmaidens run up to the gangplank and beg Wotan to give them the ring, which isn’t scripted but worked excellently. In Die Walkure, when Brunhilde is telling Sigmund about the glories of Valhalla and its population of fallen heroes, about 12-15 soldiers march slowly past in the background. The stage is flooded with golden light and the heroes, who are all dressed in Army uniforms from various states and time periods, are carrying giant portraits of their own faces. It was incredibly effective.

Finally, Siegfried’s plot depends heavily upon a random songbird who appears out of nowhere and tells him the secrets of everything. Usually, the bird is offscreen, but in this production she came onstage and was following him around. She had some hilarious gestures (trying to take dictation before they can understand each other, waving her hands in the air when Siegfried fails at playing the flute) and also had an amazing voice. Best. Bird. Ever. (That's in any field; this was by far the most helpful avian I have ever seen in any medium.)

The Least Interesting Man In The World

Awhile back, xkcd published a comic about the Least Interesting Man In The World. Whether the man in question could ever actually exist is a fascinating thing to think about; briefly, it depends on the terms of the question and on the definition of ‘interesting’.

If we accept that ‘interesting’ means ‘would draw interest from a normal, human observer by some intrinsic or displayed quality’, then there can never be a Least Interesting Man In The World.

Take the individual from the original xkcd. Let’s say that all his character flaws and uninteresting habits—his general dullness, in other words—have led to him being named the LIMIT (omitting the W to make the acronym look better). Immediately upon being named the LIMIT, he would become a curiosity in his own right (based on the conjecture that advertising anything as the extreme end of a spectrum—worst person in the world, best maple syrup in Vermont, etc—causes interest in that thing) and thus no longer be the LIMIT. And as soon as he stops being the LIMIT, he would lose the added interest of his position as the LIMIT, and instantly become the LIMIT again, and lose it, again. He is a walking paradox, and can never remain stable long enough to enjoy his title as the LIMIT.

Unlike, say, this fellow.

 There are several ways to get around the paradox. We might separate intrinsic interestingness from the added interestingness of the position as LIMIT, allowing the LIMIT to exist in both states (as LIMIT and as LIMIT-plus-LIMITinterest) simultaneously. We might hypothesize an individual so massively uninteresting that he retains his title as LIMIT even despite the interest the LIMIT brings; this view involves imagining interestingness as an objective quantity that can be overridden by a greater force, in a manner analogous to gravity.

 Or, and this is my favorite, we could assume that the least interesting man in the world is forced into this paradox involving the title of LIMIT, and that he would be effectively unobservable from there on. In other words, the LIMIT would be trapped in a kind of singularity of interestingness and uninterestingness. Since he would switch roles as many times a second as he could be observed, the case could be made that no one would be able to observe the effects of the paradox. The title of LIMIT--call this one LIMIT-B—would then pass to the second least interesting man in the world, who would ascend to the top spot by virtue of his predecessor’s descent into unobservability. It’s an open question as to whether the paradox would claim him as well, or whether he would simply acknowledged as being as close to the LIMIT as man can get while still remaining visible.

Alternatively, the entire issue might just vanish into a black hole.

I Am The King Of All Stupid People

Many Chinese dishes use spicy red peppers to flavor their spicy foods, like kung pao chicken or szechuan beef. The peppers are there purely for flavoring purposes; you're absolutely not supposed to eat them. I didn't know this yesterday and, guess what, I am now QUITE familiar with the principle!!

 You're not supposed to eat even one. Dried peppers are more potent than the fresh version (something about the venom having time to congeal and get stronger), and eating one whole will cause your face to turn bright red, your nose to run and your brain to jump out of your head and run away screaming.

However, if you are so colossally stupid as to eat one of these things, for the love of heaven don't make it two.

I learned after the fact that peppers are cumulative. Eating a second pepper will cause the ghost of the first pepper to return from beyond the grave and haunt the flaming hell out of your mouth. Apparently there exists some sort of extradimensional spiritual pepper multiplier from Hades, which will make Pepper No. 2 logarithmically worse than the first one. It's a "The Beast and his minions will rise from the Pit to make war against God" kinda thing.

So... yeah. Side effects of multiple peppers may include snotting like a pneumoniac, temporary loss of the sense or memory of the sense of taste, blushing bright red like you just got turned down on a date, tear ducts throwing their own personal Mardi Gras and a devout wish for the sweet release of death. In related news, I am the dumbest person alive. Hear my wishes, ye mighties, and grovel before my will to perform utterly stupid activities! HAAA HAHAHAHA!!!

David Tennant casts a jaundiced eye at the above paragraph.

You want to know what the worst part was? Even after all this nonsense above with the second pepper, I had this insane urge to eat the third and final pepper just to say I'd done it. I am reasonably sure that that would have made my eyeballs leak out through my ears, but I still had this idiotic urge to do it. Why do I even have that part of my brain?! Why is that there?! 

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a Deadpool moment. For the love of god do not do what I have done. Also, I'm setting up my Kingdom in downtown San Francisco, from which I shall rule as Chief Moron over all other stupid folk. My brain apparently wants me to.

This is what society does for you. Two million years ago, my kind would have eaten the poison bush and been unceremoniously ejected from the gene pool.