Early Friday Cat Blogging

HRH The Lady Xanthippe, Feline Ruler of the Universe
examines the spring day
through the curious human thing known as a screen.

I tell ya, there oughta be a law

There I was, taking the obligatory after class nap, dreaming (apparently) of the powerful position I would acquire upon graduation.

I was seated at a big wooden desk, surrounded by multiple screens of data, piles of paper and half unrolled maps.

My assistant's voice announced, "Richard Nixon on line 4,".

As I reached for the phone, my cell rang, awakening me.

Now I'll never know what the hell the rat bastard wanted.

Well Crap....

Our matching system was not able to find any matches for you right now.

My search area: The Whole World.

Pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

'Nuff Said

Thanks ae.

Whatahey?

That sound those of you on the East Coast heard about an hour ago was the top of my head going thru the roof of my building.

There I was, placidly watching my weekly ration of network TV (Boston Legal, if you must know) when a commercial for Fidelity Investments came on. While the announcer smoothly made his case for entrusting my millions to them, Peter Max style Yellow Submarine-ish flowers danced across the screen as Inna Gadda Da Vida played in the background.

The whipsawing cultural dissonance rose quickly to such a roar that my head exploded with little or no effort on my part.

I mean if a stoner song as incomprehensible as IGDV is being used as cultural code for taking care of business, I guess that means the Revolution is officially over.

What's next, using Where Have All the Flowers Gone in a Hummer commercial?

It seems that I am no longer a member of what passes for the dominant culture on this planet, which now that I think about it may not be such not a bad thing.

Either that, or I slipped thru the dimensional door in my sleep again. I really hate when that happens. Just don't tell me that I'm stuck back in that bizarro version of America that elected a chimpanzee as President....

Octavia Butler

Octavia Estelle Butler

(June 22, 1947-February 25, 2006)

was an American science fiction writer, one of very few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards, and was the first science fiction writer ever to be a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant".

In 1984, Butler's "Bloodchild" won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novelette. That same year, her "Speech Sounds" won the best short story Hugo. She won the Nebula Award for best novel in 2000 with Parable of the Talents. In October 2000, she received an award for lifetime achievement in writing from PEN.

Butler moved to Seattle in November 1999. She described herself as "comfortably asocial--a hermit in the middle of Seattle--a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive." She died of head injuries following a fall on the walk outside of her home on February 25, 2006. She was 58. (from Wikipedia)

I had the great honor and privilege to share a long conversation with Ms. Butler at an SF convention in Baltimore a few years back. The first impression was one of being in the presence of a marvelous and encompassing intelligence. The second impression was of her deep interest in what you had to say. Not necessarily the most common of combinations.

We talked for over an hour of our fears for the human race and our common realization that little could be done to save us as a culture and as a species. Global warming, pandemics, racial and religious hatreds, and Peak Oil would all conspire to bring us down, we both felt. And neither of us had found many mitigating factors to our pessimism.

Yet it was far from a gloomy conversation. Her joy at thinking intensely about trying to solve these problems was palpable. She said she still refused to give up even in the face of what she thought was an inevitable future.

I was gratified, in a strange way, to have my thinking verified by someone whose intelligence and knowledge I so highly valued. And she made sure that we had a genuine conversation, one in which I not only had my share of time to speak, but one in which she discussed my points with the same intensity that we discussed hers.

I find it hard to imagine that her voice has been stilled by something as simple as a blow to the head. The world has lost a great voice indeed.

A Few Thoughts About Darren and Carl

from Kolchak:

A few months ago, handdrummer asked me to write something about the attempt to resurrect The Night Stalker television show on ABC. I started to think about how this watered-down, prettied-up version of Kolchak could be taken as the most bizarre monster the original had ever faced. Before I could write anything, though, the new series was put out of our misery.

But it looks like I’m going to be writing about Kolchak after all. Darren McGavin, the actor who originated the role, died on Feb. 25, at age 83.

McGavin is probably best known to modern audiences as Ralphie’s Old Man in the 1983 movie A Christmas Story. He made hundreds of television and movie appearances, however, and, for a lot of us, he will always be associated with Carl Kolchak, the down-but-never-out newspaper reporter who fought relentlessly to bring stories about supernatural menaces to the public.

Kolchak was introduced in a 1972 made-for-TV movie called -- you guessed it--The Night Stalker. Based on a story by a journalist named Jeff Rice, the movie tells the story of how Kolchak discovers a vampire in modern-day Las Vegas. He defeats the vampire but learns he can’t defeat the politicians and business men who run Vegas.

The movie garnered the highest ratings of any made-for-television film up to that point. Horror Veteran Richard Matheson, who adapted Rice’s story, and Producer Dan Curtis made substantial contributions to the first movie’s success, of course.

But it’s hard to underestimate McGavin’s performance as Kolchak. Dressed in a well-worn seersucker suit-- the last suit he owned, according to McGavin-- Kolchak immediately became an iconic character-- hard-boiled, yet devoted to uncovering the truth. He was a spiritual descendent of Hildy Johnson, the lead character in The Front Page. (For years, I thought McGavin must’ve appeared in a production of The Front Page, in order to inhabit Kolchak so quickly and so thoroughly. But all the credit lists I’ve read say he didn’t. He did go on to play other journalists though , including E.K. Hornbeck, --who was based on H.L. Mencken-- in a 1988 production of Inherit the Wind.)

The Night Stalker was followed by a second movie, The Night Strangler, in 1973. It didn’t make as big of a splash as the original, but McGavin’s style--and his relationship with Editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland)-- made the sequel popular. A third movie-- The Night Killers -- was scripted, but was never produced. Instead, ABC went for a television series in 1974.

Many talented people were involved withthe show; along with McGavin and Oakland, there were writers David Chase (The Sopranos), Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) and actors who would go on to star in other series. However, they never did come up with a reliable way to deal with budgetary problems and problems with what tone the series should have. It was canceled after 20 episodes (FWIW, last fall’s trainwreck, er, attempted revival, lasted nine episodes, although 12 were produced.)

That should’ve been the end of Carl Kolchak. Only it wasn’t. The TV episodes enjoyed a second life in a late-night slot on CBS (this was well before David Letterman took over that position.) Now they’re running four or five a time, once every month or so, during the day on the Sci-Fi Channel (who will also be running the newer episodes, sometime this summer.) McGavin’s adventures have collected onto a DVD set, while new adventures, using his interpretation of the character are being published by Moonstone Books. Most of these stories are in comic book form, but Moonstone also released an anthology of text “Night Stalker” stories late last year.

Kolchak has made himself known in other ways, too. Chris Carter, creator of The X Files , regularly said in interviews that he was heavily influenced by The Night Stalker. Carter and his creative staff formally acknowledged that influence when McGavin appeared on two episodes of The X Files as Arthur Dales, the first FBI agent to be formally assigned to the X Files section.

The first of these episodes, 1998’s “Travelers,” is definitely worth looking for. Most of it is a flashback set in the 1950s, with a younger actor playing Dales, but McGavin appears in a framing sequence and narrates the flashback. This was a particularly elegant approach, because it suggested the format of the original TV show and it allowed McGavin to use one of his strongest acting tools, his distinctive raspy voice.

Another post-Kolchak performance of McGavin’s that you should check out is Mastergate, a political satire by Larry Gelbart made in 1992, where he appears as Sen. Fulsom Bunting.

Public awareness of Kolchak may have waxed and waned, but he was always part of my personal pantheon of heroes and heroines. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I was part of a committee--led by our esteemed handdrummer--who put on an annual science fiction convention in Central Pennsylvania. For the costume call at that first convention, I managed to cobble together a recognizable facsimile of Kolchak’s distinctive suit. The suit is long gone, but we still have a photo of me in costume, interviewing another convention goer, dressed as Dr. Frank N. Further, from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

And from time to time, at later editions of the convention, people I would be talking with would pause and says something like, “Oh, yeah, you were the one dressed like Kolchak.” And I know it wasn’t because it was such a professional-looking costume...

I think I still have a copy of a fan fiction vignette I wrote where JackMagee, the reporter who pursued the Hulk through his television incarnation, went to a retired Kolchak for help.

When Gordie “The Ghoul” Spangler (John Fiedler) appeared on the television show as a Chicago morgue attendant, I immediately started to refer to him as Uncle Gordie. I sold an article about The Night Stalker to a nationally circulated magazine called Xpose. And when handdrummer recruited me for the Blatt, he suggested Kolchak as my nom du screen.

Why has Kolchak stayed with me over the years (hell, decades)? I’ve been thinking about that a lot over the last few days, since I learned that McGavin had been hospitalized and was considered “gravely ill.” The answers aren’t particularly original, but here they are:

• Kolchak combined two of my strongest interests: journalism and fantastic literature (I’m including science fiction, horror and fantasy here, although Kolchak’s adventures were primarily horror.)

• And he was a role model for aspiring journalists (though I’m not sure the phrase “role model” even existed in the early1970s.) While he usually scored a victory over the Monster of the Week, he almost never triumphed over the bureaucratic or political power structure of the modern world. He was never a success by the criteria most people would use to define the word. He was considered a pariah on many levels of society. But that never stoppedhim from getting the story. The Night Stalker was primarily about the supernatural, but it was definitely about journalism too.
  

And I know I’m not the only writer who feels this way. Mark Dawidziak, who has written extensively about the character, tells this story in his book, The Night Stalker Companion:

Crossing a newsroom several years ago...I saw one of the newspaper’s finest reporters waving his arms in a manner that suggest a condition somewhere between outrage and apoplexy....

“This,” the indignant reporter shouted as he waved a late edition under the editor’s nose, “is a newspaper. We are a newspaper! We are supposed to print the news!”

If the delivery had not been letter perfect, the lightbulb might never have reached the illumination stage. But I realized he was borrowing Carl Kolchak’s fiery tirade to editor Tony Vincenzo in The Night Stalker.

I got it and couldn’t resist saying so.

“You’re right,” he said, all smiles...”You’re the first one who got it. ...I always thought that Kolchak was the closest television ever came to capturing a true reporter.”

When the original series first appeared, my friends and I used to talk about how there had to be some sort of reason why Kolchak encountered all these supernatural beings. Now, though, I find that a rationale that explained Kolchak’s adventures isn’t as important as it used to be. That’s just the way things were in his world. But it never stopped him. He just kept coming. Maybe that’s why I still think about him.

Darren McGavin left us a large and impressive body of work, but my favorite will
always be Carl Kolchak.

Happy Birthday

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
(1841–1919)
French impressionist artist

Zeppo Marx

(1901 – 1979)
American actor, comedian and inventor

Member of The Marx Brothers.

Zeppo appeared in the first five Marx Brothers movies, as a straight man and romantic lead, before leaving the team. He had abundant comic abilities,sufficient enough to have stood in for Groucho when the brothers performed on stage.
He was reputed to be very funny offstage.

Anthony Burgess
(1917 - 1993)
English novelist, critic, composer, librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator and educationalist.

George Harrison, MBE
(1943 – 2001)
British guitarist, singer, songwriter, record producer, and film producer
Best known as a member of The Beatles.

Happy Birthday

Abe Vigoda
( 1921 - )
American movie and television actor

And yes, he's still alive!

Salarymen In Space

from Kolchak:

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far-- no, wait; let me try that again.

In 1978 (I told you it was a long time ago), a short-lived TV series called Quark ran on NBC. It was, of all things, a science fiction comedy, starring Richard Benjamin as the captain of a starship that collected garbage discarded by other planets. It poked gentle fun at things like Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey and quickly established itself as being too hip for the room. It lasted only eight episodes.

Now, more than 25 years later, there’s another spaceship out there collecting trash. This one, though, is part of the Japanese series Planetes. There are some laugh-out-loud funny scenes in the series, but it also has some very serious things to say about space travel and its cost--social and emotional, as well as financial. The result is a real rarity: a genuine, hard science fiction story, in visual form. In Japan, Planetes received the Seiun Award, which is roughly equivalent to the Hugo in this country.

Created by Makoto Yukimura, Planetes is available here in America both as a manga and as an anime DVD. (For the record: Tony Oliver, writer of theEnglish script and English voice director for the DVD, pronounces Planetes“planet-tis.” I’m going to go with that until I hear otherwise.).

Planetes follows the crew of the Toy Box, a ship that collects outmoded satellites and other, potentially dangerous man-made debris. In this world--roughly 70 years in the future--the human race has a strong presence in outer space. The asteroid belt is being explored, and the first generation born and raised on the moon is nearing adulthood.

At the same time, extremist groups are trying to keep man out of space, sometimes through violence.

As you might imagine, the work done by the Toy Box’s crew, while important, gets little respect. This is particularly grating to Hachimaki Hoshino. As Planetes begins, Hachi (Hachimaki--or Hachi--is a nickname, which refers to the headband that he constantly wears.) is trying to save enough money to buy his own ship.

Before long, though, he decides to apply for the first expedition to Jupiter, which will be captained by his estranged father, in order to earn the money that he wants.

Goro Hoshino is a veteran astronaut, but somewhat lacking as a human being, a womanizer who has all but abandoned his family. He’s not about to welcome his son with open arms.

As Yukimura chronicles Hachi’s journey, he also creates backgrounds for theother members of the Toy Box’s crew. Yuri Malakoff is trying to deal with hiswife’s dying from--and his surviving--an accident caused by space debris. For a long time, the most important thing in Fee Carmichael’s life seems to be finding a legal--and safe--place to smoke on the moon. However, she eventually finds something else to fight for.

The stories in Planetes range significantly in tone. In an early sequence, a well-known resident of the lunar colony walks out on the surface and waits for his life support run out, rather than returning to Earth. In another story, Tanabe--a later addition to the crew-- befriends a young man known as the Baron, who claims to be an extraterrestrial. (Nobody except Tanabe believes this, but nobody thinks this disqualifies the Baron from working in space.)

On the visual side, all the characters in Planetes can be identified as coming from a manga. They look positively naturalistic, though, compared the highly-stylized characters in such recent series as Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Heat Guy J. In addition, vehicles and astronomical scenes are rendered with meticulous attention to detail.

Yukimura seems to have done his research in other areas as well. The story includes numerous references to the history of space travel and rocketry, going all the way back to ancient Japanese fireworks. Also, the fourth and fifth volumes of the American manga--which are labeled 4/1 and 4/2, for the record--have articles that explain the social trends and the science behind the world that he’s created.

The Planetes DVDs makes a lot of changes in the series, both cosmetic and significant. Tanabe is the viewpoint character now. The crew of the Toy Box is based on a space station, rather than on the moon. Hachi and the others are now working for Technora Corporation (they were independent contractors before), which gives the anime’s creators a chance to have fun with Japanese corporate life.

In the first of 26 episodes, Tanabe is greeted by a creature that looks like a pink version of Cousin Itt from The Addams Family. It looks like it could be an alien, but it’s only someone dressed as the corporate mascot.

Several new characters are added to the cast, primarily as comic relief, including two managers and a clerical worker who seems to be a tribute to Janine Melnitz from Ghostbusters.

The anime takes its own sweet time getting to the Jupiter expedition, though. Although Hachi’s father is seen in the credits, the first time the expedition is mentioned is Episode 14. In addition, turning Hachi and Tanabe into a romantic couple takes longer than it has to.

On the other hand, some of the original sub-plots are very similar tothe spirit of the manga. In ‘The Lunar Flying Squirrels,” a group of residents of the lunar colony decide that the moon is a great place to restage scenes from their favorite ninja movies. In “Boundary Line,” the anime’s creative staff takes what could be a mind-numbingly abstract question-- how do Third World countries get access to outer space?-- and turns it into a genuine human drama.

The opening credits show a montage of the history of space travel, reflecting Yukimura’s interest in that aspect of the field, and, ironically, creating a feel similar to the credits of Star Trek:Enterprise.

The visual style of the anime of similar to that of the original, with fairly realistic character and vehicle designs. The space station appears to be a computer-generated image, but the rest of the series seems to be traditional animation.

The DVDs do contain some unique extras. Along with mini-documentaries on real space debris, there are “audio dramas:” scenes performed by the English voice cast and illustrated by still drawings.

I haven’t been able to determine how or why these dramas were created. The best theory I’ve heard is that the voice actors recorded the dialogue for these scenes, but they were cut before the episodes were animated. I have to admit, though, that I haven’t been able to find out for sure.

The Planetes anime is divided among six DVDs. The final DVD in the run is scheduled for release in March.

Happy Birthday

Frederic Chopin
(1810 – 1849)
One of the most influential composers for the piano

Luis Buñuel
(1900 – 1983)
Mexican filmmaker
Master of Surrealism

In the Interest of Furthering the Bitter Struggle

Listen to this festive rendition of "The Internationale" , played by a Japanese klezmer band, Soul Flower Mononoke Summit.


Arise ye prisoners of syncopation!

Poem of the Day

Diagonal Conversation by Loyal F Ramsey


Are you OK over There?
She asked,
Running diagonally through my life.

As opposed to what,
I thought,
More OK over There?

If, as is surely the case,
I am not OK over Here,
Will she fix it for me,
Repair the hurts and wounds
Of a life's careless action?

And, please tell me, why now?
I haven't been OK over Here
For such a long, long while,
That I can't remember the last time
I was OK over Here.

Over There, maybe.
Or perhaps over There.

But never, never, never
OK over Here!

Happy Birthday

By Grabthar's hammer!

Alan Rickman (1946- )
English stage and screen actor

Oh Dear Ghod That I Don't Believe In....PUHLEEEEEEZ!

with thanks to the Folks at AMERICAN AGENDA


It's not too much to ask.

AHHHHHH!!!!!! Make It Stop......

from Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light:

I am informed that The Internationale can be sung to the tune of George M. Cohan's I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy.

And now you're stuck knowing it too.

Jurassic President

from TomPaine.com

Political writer Fred Barnes’ new book, Rebel-in-Chief, includes a remarkable vignette. Barnes notes that early last year, Karl Rove arranged a private audience between the president and novelist Michael Crichton, whose novel, State of Fear , had portrayed global warming as an unproven theory publicized by whacko environmentalists.

“Bush is a dissenter on the theory of global warming,” Barnes notes. He and Crichton “talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement.” Unfortunately, Barnes’ anecdote carries the ring of truth.

The president actually does appear to buy into the “scientific” arguments put forth by a writer of fiction. (The White House press corps has not yet queried whether the president also believes there are dinosaurs running about a popular theme park.)

Shades of Nancy Reagan and the astrologers! This incident would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so dire. (more)

Next thing you know Bush will be comparing fava bean recipes with Thomas Harris.

Black History Month

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
—Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)

Glacier Melt Could Signal Faster Rise in Ocean Levels

from the WaPo:

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 17, 2006; Page A01

Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth's oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said yesterday.

The new data come from satellite imagery and give fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data are mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that rising sea levels threaten widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.

This undated photo provided by the journal Science shows East Greenland icebergs. Large numbers of bergs are calved each year from the fast-flowing terminus of Kangerdlussuaq Glacier, East Greenland. Iceberg production is a major form of mass loss from ice sheets.





(AP Photo/ho/J.A. Dowdeswell, Science) (J.a.dowdeswell - AP)

The scientists said they do not yet understand the precise mechanism causing glaciers to flow and melt more rapidly, but they said the changes in Greenland were unambiguous -- and accelerating: In 1996, the amount of water produced by melting ice in Greenland was about 90 times the amount consumed by Los Angeles in a year. Last year, the melted ice amounted to 225 times the volume of water that city uses annually.

"We are witnessing enormous changes, and it will take some time before we understand how it happened, although it is clearly a result of warming around the glaciers," said Eric Rignot, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.(more)

Outed CIA officer was working on Iran, intelligence sources say

from Raw Story via arse poetica:

Larisa Alexandrovna
Published: February 13, 2006

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program. (more)

Well start warming up the table and the needle for Scooter. Looks like he committed an act of overt treason. Cheney better grab his shotgun and run off to an undisclosed location before they come for him.

The Turd Blossom must be laying little piles all over the White House.