Plot synopsis for episode 3.
I love how everything at the end of the story is exactly the way it is at the start of the New Hope trilogy, only about 20 years earlier.
I love how each planet in the Star Wars universe only features one sort of terrain.
I love those names: General Grievous!
Just his name would be enough, but I really love this: "During this battle, Grievous’ arms split in two and Grievous is suddenly wielding four light sabers against Obi-Wan. [because two light sabers just wasn't cool enough.] Eventually, Obi-Wan finishes Grievous off with blaster fire from a gun. While dying, Grievous' eyes are ejected from their sockets."
Ejected from their sockets, folks. Think about that for a minute. The best part about that, of course, is that with his eyes gone, GENERAL GRIEVOUS WON'T HAVE TO WATCH THE REST OF THIS MOVIE.
Again with the 'adopting tactics that are known not to work' thing, but this time we're studying Israel instead of Nazi Germany.
Usually I prefer to link directly to news sources rather than blogs for this kind of thing, but I think billmon is saying everything I would like to, and more eloquently to boot.
Okay, which one of you wise guys signed me up with the Republicans? They sent me a very nice 8x10 of Dubya. I think I'll hang it up on my cube at work and see what sort of reactions it provokes.
I did finish Quicksilver last weekend. Verdict: whatever you liked or didn't like about Cryptonomicon, for the most part you'll get more of the same in Quicksilver. Many reviewers have complained about the large cast of European nobles and their various alliances and rivalries; you can treat most of that as background noise on the first read through, and put together more of the pieces on a re-read, if you like (I had the same problem with both Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon).
(Unlike Cryptonomicon, neither luma's neighborhood in Pacifica nor an office building half a mile from the high school that he and I attended figures in the story.)
The Baroque Cycle is both plotwise and thematically a prequel to Cryptonomicon. There's less emphasis on the depths of math/science/crypto and more on the evolution of Western political/economic/social systems, but Stephenson has always intertwined those spheres in the same way that he intertwines the family lines of his major characters. (Like Schwarzenegger and Shriver trying to breed a bulletproof Kennedy, one has the impression that Stephenson is trying to bring the best of the intellectual, introspective Waterhouses together with the dynamism and daring of the Shaftoes, perhaps to give him a suitably superheroic protagonist for his next far-future SF novel.)
Stephenson plays great games with language, as always; instead of inventing his own Diamond Age neologisms, he uses the neologisms of the period (or, sometimes, those of some other period entirely that were too much fun to pass up). Some he slips in without comment, their evolutionary arc illustrated solely by his choice of spelling ("phant'sy", "'varsity"); others are less deftly integrated, as when he allows a character to coin the word "sabotage" in response to a purely hypothetical shoe-in-the-works rather than an actual one. Still, the linguistic games are most enjoyable when he drops anachronistic bombs with a wink and a smirk - as in the discussion of the wake hydrodynamics of 17th-century sailing vessels, for example.
I'm ambivalent on Stephenson's treatment of female characters - they're generally very strong, but as often as not they seem like the fantasies of male geeks rather than fully realized characters. I have to rank Quicksilver's Eliza as slightly less believable than Cryptonomicon's Amy Shaftoe, or even Diamond Age's Nell (who we at least see has been raised from childhood to be a sort of superhero).
In order to make it look (to the American people, or to the opposing forces in Iraq, I'm not sure which) like we're kicking some ass, our forces have initiated Operation Iron Hammer, which as far as I can tell seems to involve blowing up empty buildings that may once have been used by bad guys.
I know military-operation code names are like internet domain names - all the good ones are taken - but someone should have done a little research here.
As it happens, Plan Iron Hammer was the name of a WWII strategic bombing operation carried out by the Germans against the Soviets, using Rube Goldberg flying bombs made out of manned fighters piggybacked to unmanned planes packed with explosives.
This isn't the only recent instance of us using taking pages from the Nazi playbook. Wouldn't it make more sense for us to instead emulate the people (a) who won the war, (b) who didn't face war crimes trials afterwards (c) whose names aren't synonymous with PURE FUCKING EVIL?
Yes, I know that in one case we're talking about words and in the other case actions. However, seems to me like where "acting like Nazis" is concerned, it's best to avoid both the appearance and the reality. But that's probably just fuzzy-headed liberal thinking on my part.
I swear, this is like The Wave, where at the end the kids find out that they've been led unknowingly into fascism. I'm waiting for Bush to call a press conference where he says "this is your leader", shows us a picture of Hitler, and chastises us for falling for it.
Clark's pretty reasonable on gay rights. I'm not sure what "federal domestic partner benefits" constitutes, exactly - under Clark's plan, could a gay couple file a joint tax return?
I'd like to see gay marriage legalized, of course, but I'm not so fired up about it that I don't see Clark's position as a good thing. One step at a time, people. (Easy for the guy in a hetero marriage to say, yeah...)
We need some kind of outreach program, where we get a list of everyone who's against gay marriage, and match those people up with the nearest reasonably stable gay couple. The gay couple then drops by to borrow a cup of sugar or whatever, once per week. Okay, maybe not. I dunno.
(Oh yeah. Clark wants an anti-flag-burning amendment. I'm not so thrilled with that part. It's like Senator Hatch wanting to remotely blow up the computers of people who illegally download music - how can these people not instantly realize that their positions, however arrived at, aren't compatible with the Bill of Rights? ...so, anyway, hmm. A Dean/Clark ticket is looking pretty damn good right now.)
Sorry about the flood of new entries - Bossanova's Movable Type installation wasn't running for several days, but is now back in business. (I guess you'd call that a backblog...)
We saw A Mighty Wind at the Warfield on Sunday. It's bizarre and surreal to me that three fake folk groups can draw a packed house, while the real thing would be in a substantially smaller venue.
The panhandlers and Street Sheeters are pretty thick in that neighborhood. One woman put a curse on us after being refused spare change. There was one guy holding a sign reading "Will Gladly Accept Verbal Abuse for Spare Change" (the guy didn't look homeless/hungry in the least). Finally, a guy selling Street Sheets approached us, saw us fall into our "no thanks not tonight" routine, and swerved away, saying "yeaaaah, never mind, y'all look kinda Republican".
I told him there was no need to get nasty. And kept muttering "I can't believe he called me a Republican" most of the way to the car, until Robert explained to me that I was not, in fact, a Republican.
Thing is, I've got a heap of spare change at home, and I kinda wish I'd had some handy at least for Verbal Abuse Guy.
The allegations about my involvement in an unspecified scandalous incident are, likewise, wholly without merit.
I missed Protection From Pornography Week. Now that it's over, I guess the lovely wife and I can feel free to wallow in all the smut we can find for the next 50 weeks. Honey...?
Just a day after Bush signs the partial-birth abortion ban, no less than three courts have blocked it. I'm impressed.
From Bush's speech: "This right to life cannot be granted or denied by government, because it does not come from government, it comes from the Creator of life."
In his term as Governor of Texas, Bush presided over the execution of over 100 inmates, including people who were mentally ill and who were convicted as juveniles.
Dubya doesn't want the Presidential records from the Reagan White House disclosed.
Isn't that interesting? Aren't you curious? These won't see the light of day until a Democrat is elected president. That would be a great platform to get elected on, wouldn't it? "Vote for me, and Geraldo and I will open the archives together live on HBO!"
I'm sure there's all sorts of juicy stuff in the Project on Government Secrecy pages. It's part of the Federation of American Scientists site, which I use primarily as a reference for stuff that goes boom.
Maybe it's time to give them some money.
Just as soon as we get Bush out of the White House, I'll go back to my usual levels of political apathy.
From Zbigniew Brzezinski's speech at the New American Strategies for Security and Peace conference on 10/28:
Since the tragedy of 9-11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, "he who is not with us is against us." I say repeatedly because actually some months ago I did a computer check to see how often it's been used at the very highest level in public statements.
The count then quite literally was ninety-nine. So it's a phrase which obviously reflects a deeply felt perception. I strongly suspect the person who uses that phrase doesn't know its historical or intellectual origins. It is a phrase popularized by Lenin (Applause) when he attacked the social democrats on the grounds that they were anti-Bolshevik and therefore he who is not with us is against us and can be handled accordingly.
The issues with computerized/all-electronic/paperless/unverifiable voting are getting out there. This is a good thing.
Is the political stuff getting dull? Should I talk about Ass-Mode, my first pass at writing an automatic musical composition engine? Unlike the other Tiny God projects, I plan to not release it to the world, as it's going to be, uh, instrumental in music I create - a trade secret of sorts. Well, maybe after each rewrite of it I'll throw the discarded husk of the previous version to the masses.
Anyway. I'll just preach to the choir here, as usual. Some good food for thought here. It's really a shame Clinton couldn't keep it in his pants. I don't know that Gore would have been a great president, but at least I wouldn't lie awake at night trying to figure out whether he was Stupid or Evil.