Another memory played itself out as if the entire crowd shared a single mind. Shikujo was meeting his wife for the first time. How nervous he was; how giddy. Another firework flashed, and the memory of his first-born child came. Again and again the fireworks sparked memories of a man who was certainly walking with his head held high into the Lands of the Dead.

If you have any part of Making Light from the last two months open in a window right now, or otherwise resident in your system, please copy it off. If it's elaborate or illustrated, please get the source code and/or the picture file.

I have both conservative traits, and liberal ones. I joined the Army, in the guise of the National Guard, because there was something I wanted to conserve. I believe in the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Constitution, enough that I was willing to risk, as the first of these said, "My life, my fortune, and my Sacred Honor," to defend them. Being in the Guard that fortune part is more true than not as well. Guys who have businesses often lose them (or see them founder for years) if they get deployed. The Active Component often pisses me off when they say, "they knew what they were signing up for," because it's not true. World War 3 is what they signed up for, in that context, and that hasn't happened, again I'm digressing.

So what do I want to conserve? A nation of laws, and a people who are equal under them. The right to be left alone (The Ninth amendment is probably the most significant one in the lot, fond as I am of the First, the Second, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Tenth. The Third isn't really relevant, at the moment, and the Seventh has been; for good reason, put aside; sort of).

I believe no man is above the laws. We don't have kings, or emperors, nor yet do we establish Tyrants to rule us in time of war. We elect a President, and a set of Counsels to him (in the Form of the Senate and the House) who are to advise him, and keep him to the better track. They approve his appointments, and ratify his budgets. They make the laws, which he is both limited by; and enjoined to enforce.

At last. Once a month, our team receives many feeds from other groups within the company. For most of them, our automated processes simply take the feeds and upload them into our database. There is one group though that could charitably be describes as a cauldron seething with awesome incompetence. Almost every month, we've had to manually upload corrections to their information, before we could process the feed. Still, in spite of this monthly cleanup, they managed to let a lot of garbage thru. A project was established for us to do one FINAL cleanup, going as far back as 4 years ago. This is what I spent the previous 2 weeks of my life on, and so did our user I was doing this with, preparing and testing a very lonnnnnnng script. The script has now run, and I'm certain that some minor tinkering will be needed on Monday. Mind you, that is probably what the higher-ups will focus on, not the tens of thousands of fixes that will have functionned perfectly. I guess I'll then fantasize about resigning, until I remember what happens to those who resign:

"Va oltre qualsiasi cosa potessi immaginare," disse Theodora, con gli occhi castani che brillavano.

Cordelia Hardcastle strinse il braccio della cugina e sorrise, anche se non condivideva completamente il suo entusiasmo nei confronti delle numerose attrative a disposizione dei privilegiati visitatori del Giardino Zoologico di Regent's Park.

"It is quite beyond anything I had imagined," Theodora said, brown eyes sparkling in her plain and honest face.

Cordelia Hardcastle squeezed her cousin's arm and smiled, though she could not entirely share Theodora's fascination with the many diversions available to the privileged visitors of the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park.

Should you scroll to the bottom of today's post by Kaja Foglio, you will find a link to a photo of my cat genius Agatha.

I see that fellow Making Light visitor ethan now contributes to movie review site Filmslash.

Congratulations, ethan!

Over the years, I have come to develop a theory that, if you ever encountered someone who worked on the original Star Trek, you have a link to many people who shaped Cinema. You also have a link to some people who messed up History, but more on that later.

The most obvious example is William Shatner(1). To use but one example, he was in 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg, which was directed by Stanley Kramer, and written by Abby Mann. Its cast included, among others, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, and Marlene Dietrich. Among other movies that DeForest Kelley worked on was 1957's Raintree County, with Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint, Elizabeth Taylor, Rod Taylor, Agnes Moorehead, and Lee Marvin. As for Leonard Nimoy, he played opposite Howard da Silva in the original Outer Limits episode I, Robot.

So, just taking the above Three, you reach out to people who themselves reached out to a lot of others in the History of Cinema. And that doesn't include the actors who appeared in Star Trek itself. My favorite example is episode Amok Time.



No, not Lawrence Montaigne, although he was in 1963's The Great Escape, the cast of which wasn't too shabby. I mean Celia Lovsky.



When she was still living in Europe, she is the person who introduced Peter Lorre to Fritz Lang who, in 1933, was offered the job of director of the German Cinema Institute by Joseph Goebbels. Lang accepted the job. And promptly left Germany.

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(1) Very obvious, some meanies would say.

(Courtesy of Susan de Guardiola's site Rixosous)

http://www.rixosous.com/2008/04/our-tax-dollars.html#comment-111550356

"You woke up the baby!"

Thus does HellBoy berate the Forces of Darkness when they succeed in raising Something Big from beneath the Earth in the coming attraction for HellBoy 2: The Golden Army, which I caught on Saturday when we saw Forbidden Kingdom. I liked that movie, but I should have loved it, especially with Jet Li playing the Monkey King. Oh well. As for HellBoy 2, well, let's say that I am eagerly awaiting the late July opening of a movie that asks what if Lovecraft could laugh. The whole gang is back, including Jeffrey Tambor - I guess HellBoy and Liz remembered having left their boss behind in that Labyrinth of Doom back in Russia. Spanish director Guillermo del Toro is back at the helm for a movie that he (fan of Mike Mignola's comic-book that he is) was determined to see happen, and which was originally going to go the direct-to-video route until Pan's Labyrinth got him so much clout in Hollywood that of course HB2 wound up becoming a theatrical release. By the way, it's very interesting to see del Toro easily switching between his Hollywood work and made-in-Spain movies like The Devil's Backbone. Not everybody can do that. Look at what the directors of Amélie did with the 4th Alien movie.

Last year, Sue had some surgery done to one of her knees, but, even after all this time, it was still bothering her. She recently had a followup with her surgeon, who agreed that this was not as it should be, so he scheduled her for an MRI. That was done on Monday. The doc called her yesterday with the results: a knee brace might help, but it looks like she'll have to have the whole joint removed and replaced. If that's the case, she might take advantage of the situation and ask them to put some comic-book device in there, something like an adamantium claw. Seriously though, I am a bit worried. Sure, my mom had her hip joints replaced and she's over 70. It shouldn't be worse for someone 30 years younger to have one knee taken care of. It shouldn't.

One year ago today, I met fellow Making Light people David Goldfarb, Tom Whitmore, and Abi Sutherland for the first time, and Kathryn from Sunnyvale for the second time (first time having been at LAcon in 2006). As this happened in Berkeley, we ate at a Mongolian restaurant not far from the late University Street rep cinema. When Abi flew in from Europe, she brought along something she had purchased for me.

The main character: Abi
The time: April 2007
The place: airport's security checkpoint as Abi prepares to fly to the USA from Europe

"What's this, Ma'am?"
"That's a sonic screwdriver."
"A what?"
"A sonic screwdriver. You know, from Doctor Who."
"Doctor Who? Sorry, Ma'am, but we can't let you thru with strange devices if you won't tell us what the name of this 'Doctor' is."
"It's not a real device. It's just a toy I'm bringing for Serge."
"And how old is this 'Surge'?"
"He's almost 52."
"You're bringing a toy for a 52-year-old man? Joe Bob! Call Homeland Security. Those terrorists must think we're stupid if they use cover stories that lame.”

(My many thanks to Mary Dell for that little PhotoShop surprise!)

My office laptop croaked yesterday. Most fortuitously, at the end of the day on Friday I had received the desktop that my manager had insisted I must have as a backup. Tech-support should have that new machine up and running later today. Until then, I shall be quite absent from the blogosphere. (I'm writing this on Sue's home computer.) By the way, you may have noticed that I said the backup is a desktop. How then shall I be able to work from home, should an emergency arise? That is a very good question, one apparently less worthy of consideration than the cost of a desktop being less than a laptop's.

Penelope Wise, please meet Ezra Pound Foolish.

Considering how badly one did, I am quite surprised that, within but a few short years, someone decided to try again because failure doesn’t usually lead to the spawning of similar attempts.

What am I talking about?



Remember 2004’s King Arthur? It was a retelling of, yes, Arthur(1) as what the real character might have been, positing that he was the leader of Sarmatians working for Rome in Britain. It had an excellent cast, with Clive Owen and Arthur, Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot, and a 19-year-old Keira Knightly(2) as a Guinevere who’s quite handy with the bow and arrows, and yet the film sank like a stone. Sure, there were probably more historical inaccuracies than you can shake a stick at, but would the public care about a historical inaccuracy unless it were biting them in a sensitive placeand they didn’t have a stick to beat it away with? They stayed away from the movie, for reasons unknown. Maybe it’s because, in spite of Gladiator, they just aren’t interested in Ancient Rome. For those who are interested in Ancient Rome, there were stupid things like having the Empire build Hadrian’s Wall to keep out the likes of Stellan Skarsgaard and yet one big-shot Roman set up his little domain smack in the very middle of that Barbarianland. Also, some of the Arthurian elements feel tacked on because, well, they had to be there, such as Lancelot’s love for Guinevere, but it’s brought up in passing and goes nowhere, without any effect on the story. More disappointing is Merlin, basically just a tribal leader of the Woads who befriends Arthur for rescuing fellow tribeswoman Guinevere.

Still, I enjoyed the movie, for the characters, and for the story that happens to them. Alas, too few members of the public felt that way.



That didn’t keep someone else from trying again in 2007 with The Last Legion. It had Colin Firth as a general whose duty is to protect the child Arthur, last legitimate emperor of Rome who lost his job to one of the Empire’s uppity mercenaries. Add Ben Kingsley as Ambrosinus-Merlin as the teacher of the child, and Aishwarya Rai(3) as a warrior from Byzantium. You can’t fail, can you? Yes, you can, even if you ignore the pesky historical goofups. The problem is that the plot meanders a lot until Our Heroes find Excalibur in the Island of Capri and they decide that Arthur will never regain his throne without the help of the last legion still faithful to the Emperor, and it happens to be garrisoned in Britain. The plot spares us most gratuitous arthurian references, but it wanders around some more, invovling some so-so bad guys, until it blunders forward to The End.

Here we have good characters, especially Kingsley as Merlin, but they are in the wrong story. That’s why I consider King Arthur more successful. I doubt there will ever be a third-time-lucky attempt that will do everything right on all levels.

Oh well.

One thing I found interesting in both movies was the attire of the warrior women. It wasn’t designed to show their feminine attributes off to male viewers, but to actually provide their characters some protection in a combat situation. True, Knightly’s body isn’t completely covered, but her character’s main weapon is the bow, and when she actually engages a man in corps-à-corps combat, she jumps him along with other women, reminding me of wolves bringing down a much larger prey. Rai’s character though has her body completely covered. Her outfit is there to protect her when she gets into swordfights with men much bigger than her, but without impeding her speed. The amusing thing though is that Rai puts on about three such outfits thru the story, and they all fit perfectly, especially the cuirasse one, which suggests that she brought them along all the way from Rome. Maybe the director’s cut has a scene of Colin Firth breathing heavily as he drags her trunk across Europe, grumbling that she once again packed in everything but the kitchen sink.

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(1) But not Dudley Moore’s.

(2) Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.

(3) Lizzie Bennet in Bride and Prejudice.