PAgent’s Progress

Anyone who is a passionate fan of Terry Pratchett’s excellent ‘Discworld’ books has, while reading one or another of them, thought to themselves “This would make SUCH a good movie!” followed almost immediately by the sad thought “But there’s no way they could get it right.”

I’ve watched the 1997 animated mini-series “Wyrd Sisters”, and thought it was pretty good, actually. At the time I remember thinking to myself that the only way the Discworld stories would ever be made into movies would be via animation. There’s simply no other way to do it.

I’m very pleased to say that I was wrong. Last night the family and I watched “Hogfather”, a 2006 made-for-TV adaption of the Discworld novel of the same name, and it was excellent.

I’m sure it didn’t hurt that Terry Pratchett himself was involved in the process, but they nevertheless managed to make a movie that was incredibly faithful to the novel, and more importantly, to the spirit of the novel. The main characters of Death and his granddaughter Susan were portrayed beautifully, yes, but so were the myriad minor and beloved characters that populate the Discworld, from Archchancellor of Unseen University Mustrum Ridcully to The Death of Rats.

I think anyone, whether they are already a fan, or merely want to know what all the fuss is about, is well-served by this movie, and I urge you to put it right at the top of your Netflix queue.

My apologies for the dearth of new material here. I was struck down by the Respiratory Virus from Hell, which then spawned some mutant form of bronchitis. I missed almost four days of work (which is unusual for me) and spent the better part of a week wavering in and out of lucidity.

Now I am back and nearly recovered, and how better to ease back into the routine than to post another guide to the best recent posts on flotsam?

Barclaycard: A bank card commercial featuring the best commute EVER.

World Builder: An incredibly moving short film that shows a man building a street for the woman he loves.

Only For Mythbusters Fans: A fairly self-explanatory pic. I still laugh every time I see it.

30 Shorts: A selection of five from thirty very funny short-short films by Adam Phillips.

Truth in Advertising: Don’t tell PETA.

After two days of delirium, I struggled into work this morning. It’s not that I’m feeling a whole lot better, it’s that there are Things that Must Be Done. Deadlines are deadlines, after all, and there’s a limit to what you can ask someone else to do for you. My plan is to leave just as soon as I reasonably can, so my hacking cough doesn’t disturb my neighbors any further.

Around lunchtime I saw a posting on twitter that there had been a major earthquake in Fiji. Huh, I thought, that’s the kind of thing that would generate a vicious tsunami. Since I have a friend in Australia right now, I thought I’d check and see where Fiji was in relation to where he was.

And it turns out, Fiji is pretty close to Australia, with a clear stretch of open ocean between the two. I looked at the time, and it was just about time for my buddy to be climbing out of bed. I jumped onto a chat application, and sure enough, he’d already logged in.

“There’s been an earthquake in Fiji!” I typed. “Head for high ground!”

Of course, I had no proof that there had been any such earthquake. People who go off half-cocked based on internet rumors are (deservedly) the target of much derisive mockery. So, I started looking for independent confirmation. And I found it.

Crap. The USGS said it had been a magnitude 7.9 quake (which is HUGE), located near Tonga. Now I was getting concerned. The quake had been recorded about 35 minutes before I had heard about it, and it can take hours for a tsunami to propagate, but I wanted my friend to be SAFE, regardless.

I gave him the bad news, and while I had known that he lived near Sydney harbor, he in turn informed me that he lived disturbingly close to sea level.

I couldn’t very well tell him to drop everything and run for the hills. Actually I could, and did so, but I couldn’t expect him to take me seriously without some additional information. So now I started looking for information on tsunami warnings. And I found it.

The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre had posted a notice regarding the earthquake, but was indicating NO threat of a tsunami. Oh thank God.

So, it’s somewhat humorous that I can go from zero to panic and back in just a few minutes, but it’s also starkly amazing that sitting in Portland, I can hear about an earthquake on the other side of the planet, contact my friend over there, confirm the earthquake, and then determine whether or not there is going to be a tidal wave, all in about 10 minutes.

Way back when I was a kid, this kind of global information access was strictly the stuff of science fiction. I mean, I grew up looking for books in the library by flipping through stacks of 3 x 5 cards that had biblio information hand typed on it. (It was called a “card catalog” children – look it up.) It always shocks me a little to actually realize just how far information technology has come since then. This global internet is truly amazing, and I believe it has the potential to let our species grow and develop into something better than it is now.

If we can stop wasting that potential on pictures of Britney’s hooha and stupid chain emails, that is.

I’m sick. It’s a cold this time, or possibly the first feeble stirrings of the flu. In any event, my brain isn’t functioning at top speed. In fact, my brain is wheezing along in first gear and stalling often. Nevertheless, my adoring public awaits! All three of you! And once again I must sully a nice white screen with my words.

I was exceptionally social last week, which is highly unusual. I not only attended the OurPDX.net authors meetup at Blitz-Ladd but I also went to the tweetup at the new KGW studio in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Blitz-Ladd was interesting, as the decor leaned rather heavily toward bare fiberboard and exposed insulation. Mind you, I don’t mind that in a bar. Not at all. It just jarred rather heavily when compared to the fancy outfits being worn by all the folks who were there for the Schmooze.

A fair number of authors made it, but not so many readers. If you ever have a burning desire to meet the authors at OurPDX.net, you should make a point of attending one of our meetups. It’s a good time.

As for the tweetup, it was a real blast. We got to meet Steph Stricklen in person (she’s much prettier, and much more obviously pregnant, in person) as well as producer Aaron Weiss. Aaron, incidentally, successfully diagnosed a wireless router problem I was having a while back. Over Twitter. Nice guy.

The studio itself is a miracle of modern telecommunications technology. I think us laymen were most impressed by the fact that the cameras were operated remotely, and thanks to a machine vision system, could place themselves accurately anywhere in the newsroom. Very cool.

It got a little surreal as I was leaving the studio, and stopped to speak briefly with a KGW executive who was manning the studio door. We chatted briefly about the studio, then it got a little awkward when she asked me which KGW broadcast I watched. I hemmed and hawed, and she started asking if I watched OTHER stations’ broadcasts.

This is no reflection on her, and no reflection on KGW, but the fact is I don’t watch the news. Well, almost never, but certainly not on a regular basis. I get all the news I need by seeing breaking news tweets via Twitter. If I see a story that interests me, I’ll click on it. I think Steph and Aaron get that, and that’s why Live@TheSquare is more personality- and community-driven. I’ll tune in to see the goofy folks that hang around the square, but I don’t need another conventional news source. I really appreciate the way the Live@TheSquare people are embracing twitter and other online tools, and it is for that reason that I dropped by.

By the way, KGW is going to start broadcasting from the nifty new HD studio under the square tomorrow, March 17. You might want to tune in and see it in action.

Strange Trip continued…

If you have no idea what this is, it’s an ongoing attempt to record my trip to grad school, and perhaps beyond. Entries are few and far between, and so your patience is appreciated. When last we left our hero, he was in a hotel in Missoula, Montana, wondering exactly what he had gotten himself into.

It was my first morning actually on the road, and things looked better than they had last night. Montana was beautiful country, and I’d already come quite a ways into the state by driving to Missoula. I figured I would jet across the rest of the state in a day. There was only one flaw in this plan.

Montana is big.

I mean, it’s really freakin’ big. In a way that you can’t appreciate looking at a map. You can only truly understand how big Montana is by driving across it, hour after pitiless hour.

Montana also has a low population, which meant for most of those endless miles you were looking at, to put it politely, “rural” areas. There was nothing out there. I began to see highway signs at exits cautioning “No Services for 75 miles.” Or 80, or 120. And remember, I was driving a used car of unknown reliability. The idea that I could break down 50 miles from the nearest gas station was a sobering one.

Montana was also the first place that I saw interstate off-ramps that ended at a dirt road 100 yards from the freeway. That dirt road would typically then arrow off in a dead straight line toward the horizon, or climbing a nearby set of foothills. There were people out there, but they were definitely out of sight.

In fact there was a genuine lack of traffic in Interstate 90. About the only vehicles on the road between towns were long-haul truckers, who were incidentally some of the politest drivers I have ever encountered. They never failed to yield to me when I was entering the highway, and always gave me plenty of room when passing, and consistently thanked me whenever I flashed my lights to indicate they had cleared my little Mazda.

At this time the official speed limit in Montana was 55 mph. The reality, however, was that a speeding ticket amounted to a $5 “energy conservation” fine. Rumour had it that those long-haul truckers kept a stack of $5 bills tucked into the sun visor to expedite traffic stops. But I digress…

After an eternity spent driving under The Big Sky, I reached the turnoff point for I-94. I could have chosen to take the northern route, through North Dakota and on east. Instead I opted to stay on I-90, and turned south into Wyoming.

Now, the drive thus far had been desolate, but still scenic. After entering Wyoming, things started changing. Beautiful forests began to thin, and greens faded to browns. The presence of humanity became even more sparse, to the point that when I stopped at a rest stop I discovered that it was an experimental solar-powered model, because it hadn’t been practical to run electricity that far out.

I reached the city of Gillette, Wyoming as dusk fell. Exhausted, I checked into a motel off the freeway and went looking for a restaurant. As the sun set, all of Gillette looked faded and worn. Everything around me was gray and dusty, and a constant wind blew the dust into my eyes. There was nothing green and growing in sight. It felt completely foreign, like the back side of the moon. It felt like a million miles from anywhere. It felt like the ends of the Earth.

To be continued

I have recently been rereading the excellent Empire of Man tetralogy. It’s Space Opera, but it’s precisely the kind of Space Opera I love.

I’m on the third title now, “March to the Stars”, and while I’m enjoying it at least as much as the first time I read it, I am unfortunately consistently being distracted from the experience.

You see I’m reading a copy from our local library, and throughout the entire book wherever the phrase “God damned” occurs in the text some previous library patron has very carefully taken a ballpoint pen and completely blotted out the word “God”.

This bothers me on several levels. First and foremost, someone has vandalized a library book, which is a flogging offense in PAgent’s Big Book of Corporal Punishments. Second, whenever I hit one of those carefully blotted out patches of ink, it yanks me right out of the story and irritates me anew. But finally, I just find it incredibly offensive that someone out there feels justified in forcing their narrow moral view on every other user of the Washington County Public Library. And furthermore, instead of trying to make a public statement, or get the library to stop loaning the book (a tactic which presumably they realize would fail), they are employing a loathsome and underhanded method of censorship.

After all, this isn’t random destruction, this is neat, tidy, and carefully chosen. Someone out there doesn’t think anyone should read the phrase “God damned”, even if most of the speaking characters in the novel are battle-hardened career soldiers. Although the book contains other cursing, heavy drinking, gambling, and scenes of incredible violence, all that is left alone. But the determination has been made that the word “God”, in that context, I shalt not see.

I have no idea if this vandal is young or old, male, or female, black or white. But in my imagination they are an older woman, with hair up in a bun, and a pair of reading glasses hanging from a librarian’s strap around her neck. Her face is permanently lined by the puckered and disapproving expression she habitually displays. She has the self-righteous conviction to force her morality on others, but is lacking the courage to do so publically and accept the consequences.

Well, to this small-minded self-appointed guardian of public decency, let me just say this: God damn you, sir or madam. And God damn your willingness to choose for me what I can and cannot read, after you were given the freedom to make that choice for your own self.