Category: Science Fiction / Fantasy

Of Chatbots and Cheese

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So, as I was saying yesterday, the kids and the grandkids came over.  And Camera Girl killed the fatted calf, cooked it and then afterward served cake and ice cream to the stuffed survivors.  I skipped all the meatballs and sauce and made my self three sandwiches; a Reuben, a roast beef, provolone with mayo on “peasant bread” and a free form that included mustard, corned beef, lettuce and sweet gherkins on French bread; all washed down with hot coffee.  Suffice it to say I ate too much but have no regrets about it.  Later on, I had way too much vanilla ice cream and pound cake.  About that I do have regrets.  But c’est la guerre.

Today I faced the new day feeling bilious and groggy.  But all this warm weather of late inspired us to head for the state park for a long walk in the woods.  Seriously, I really want to thank whatever climatic forces are responsible for this winter’s mild weather.  I hereby agree to whatever destruction of the planet occurs and with my blessings.  Walking in the middle of February through this park without snowshoes is an innovation that is well worth finishing off those poor devils living at the Equator.  And since our Lizard Overlords are bringing all those people here anyway, at least I can have the benefits of a warmer climate here in Dunwich without feeling bad about it.  So, after the strengthening and revivifying effects of our hike I am restored to health and looking forward to enjoying the rest of this holiday weekend.

During the festivities yesterday I was able to talk with my eldest grandson and he told me he managed to get on the Dean’s List at the college where he is studying computer science.  Apparently, that requires a 4.0 grade point average.  I was impressed.  He is a lot like me.  Which means that studying for any subject in which he hasn’t any interest, is very difficult.  So that means he is displaying considerable discipline.  I attribute this to his parents spending a lot of time stressing the need for conscientiousness.  So, I am impressed with them too.

We discussed the recent trends in computer science.  We both got a laugh out of the recent vicissitudes of the “metaverse.”  The fact that the geniuses at Facebook didn’t realize that people don’t want to walk around wearing virtual reality headsets all the time is ridiculous.  After all, it’s one thing to wear a headset while flying an F-16.  There it’s a matter of life and death.  But in almost any other instance real life is superior to virtual life.  Think about it.  I can go into a field and throw a real baseball around with my grandsons.  Or we can all stand around wearing VR headsets and pretend to throw around a baseball.  That is so lame as to even defy comparison to other lame things.

Then we talked about artificial intelligence and of course ChatGPT.  He was generally very excited, not about the present chatbots, but rather about the potential in the near future.  Apparently, the level of sophistication is still growing quickly and whereas currently the behavior merely mimics human thought he was enthusiastic about it becoming closer to human creativity over time.  I warned him that AI’s ability to replace humans in the workforce might someday even allow it to replace computer scientists and he ruefully agreed the potential is there.

It was a very interesting conversation.  I still think of artificial intelligence as a tool.  If I let a chatbot write an essay for me, I’d use the output as a framework from which I’d insert the creative ideas that I wanted to make.  Facts and figures and even sententious musings aren’t thinking.  They’re scenery.  You have to have a point of view.  Sure, you can tell a chatbot the point you’re making but it still sounds like a Wikipedia entry.  I defy a chatbot to rise to my level of outrage.  And since my point of view is currently algorithmically forbidden to chatbots, by definition, I am immune from their competition.

Afterward, Camera Girl joined with the kids going to a middle school theatrical performance and Princess Sack of Potatoes saw her first live play.  And she was enthralled.  Camera Girl just watched her reactions to the performance throughout and said it was amazing.

And I thought, how is an algorithm going to mimic that?  An intelligent and emotional child “learning” about theater; how will the computer scientists mimic that?  The human brain only has about ninety billion neurons.  I’m sure supercomputers can multiply that number of memory slots almost infinitely.  But can we even define what it means to be a human being.  I’m not sure we currently can.  I’m not even sure we’ll ever be able to.  Lots of people are convinced that consciousness is just a level of complexity.  Once we have umpty-ump petaflops of computing power HAL will wake up and take over the world.  I’m far from sure that’s true.  It’s fun to use in science fiction stories but reality may not oblige us.  How do you program the point of view of a four-year-old girl watching a live play for the first time?  Where’s the slider for enthralled?

So, despite living in the pall of the East Palestine mushroom cloud and the other outrages that the Biden dismantling of America subjects us to, I’ve found fresh evidence that human life still contains transcendent beauty.  We are much, much more than the sum of our neurons and other cellular components.  We are capable of fascinating and remarkable behaviors.  Maybe we’re not quite obsolete yet.  Sure, the Lizard Overlords may take away our modern conveniences like gas and oil and force us back into a pre-industrial lifestyle but it will still be as human beings and that is an amazing simulation to be a part of.

As a Life-Long Science Fiction Geek This is So Damn Cool

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It looks like the modern special effects representation of the landing from Destination: Moon or some other Heinlein story.  Forget about battery cars Elon.  Do more of this.

 

 

 

03FEB2023 – The Dunwich Complainer – Polar Vortex Blues

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As predicted the bottom fell out of the thermometer today.  The surrounding areas of southern New England will be experiencing temperatures as low as -15 degrees Fahrenheit and fifty mph winds that will be blamed on the polar vortex.  Of course, here in Dunwich we have a slightly different climatic event.  The pole that our vortex is generated by is the galactic pole of the Milky Way.  The Supermassive Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* causes a worm hole to open up from time to time in the center of the Dunwich town dump.  Out of that cosmic orifice flows an irresistible plasma of pure neutronium moving at 99.99999% of light speed.  Today the beam punched a perfectly round eight-foot hole through Josiah Whatley’s barn and astronomers believe that it sliced Pluto in half on its exit from the solar system.

But much more importantly, it knocked out the electric power and cable access to First Selectman Cthulhu’s abode.  Now the First Selectman is a big fan of Vanna and Pat.  He watches Wheel of Fortune religiously.  Well, that is if the word religiously can be used at all to describe a blasphemous eldritch creature.  But suffice it to say he was not happy.  I could hear him stomping up the hill toward my house.  You see he doesn’t use a cell phone, he’s got a land line that runs over the same cable so he had to visit me personally instead of calling.

Since he’s a hundred feet tall I could see him coming from several miles away.  Wanting to avoid the possible blowback from Camera Girl sassing this squid-headed town official I went to meet him.  When I got within shouting distance, I greeted him politely and he began to ooze slime from his mouth.  It was quite nauseating and frightening.  “Alright you insignificant morsel of bland monkey meat, I want you to restore the cable before 7:30 pm.  It’s LX week and that means there’s the potential for an extra forty thousand in the bonus round and I hear Vanna’s going to be wearing a sparkly dress tonight and she always looks completely delicious in one of those.  So, make it happen.  Right?”  I said I would get right on it and he let out a deafening bellow that whipped slime into the air.  Then he turned around and plodded back down the hill toward his lair.

I drove down to the dump and sized up the neutronium beam.  I could see that after exiting Whatley’s barn it had taken out a telephone pole that fed the street that ended near the First Selectman’s cave.  It seemed simple enough to have the cable company temporarily bypass around the beam and restore the service.  And the cable company truck was right down the road.  But I could see that the license plate on the truck was from out of state.  Apparently, he wasn’t local so perhaps he had never seen a tear in the fabric of space time up close and personal.  Also he probably had never seen Cthulhu before.

When I reached the truck, I saw a man in his thirties holding the steering wheel in a death grip and staring popeyed at the neutronium beam.  I had seen this kind of reaction by out of towners quite often.  I tried to be casual.  “Howdy friend, how’s it going?  Hey I’m glad you’re here to get the cable working again so soon.  Looks like an easy fix.  What do you think?”

He was hyperventilating and I could tell that he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.  It occurred to me that he probably had seen the First Selectman saunter by.  I reached into the window and pulled his key out of the ignition and opened the passenger side door and got in.  He saw me and his head turned sideways toward me and he made some gurgling kind of sounds.  “Now look here, there’s nothing to get excited about.  You’re a professional and you can’t let a little thing like a hundred-foot squid-headed dragon stop you from providing an essential service to the community.  I’m sure that your company has provided you with the standard sensitivity and diversity trainings.  Well, here’s your chance to put that training into practice.  Cthulhu is a proud American just as are you.  He’s been an inhabitant of this locale for over 450 million years and he is a pillar of the community.  He cheers on our local high school teams and attends the harvest carnival fair without fail.  Sure, he may eat the prize-winning bull from time to time but who doesn’t get a little carried away with all that carnival junk food.  As you very well know diversity is our strength.  Whether it’s transgender women excelling in athletics or undocumented Americans voting in their first election or a Great Old One enjoying a classic American game show while snacking on a really large portion of road salt.   So come on man, buck up and let’s get that cable back up pronto or he’s going to come pounding down that road and eat you and your truck in one mouthful.

The look of horror on his face didn’t disappear.  It sort of twisted sideways a little bit.  It’s hard to describe.  His left eye mostly closed and his upper and lower jaws were a little offset sideways.  But his right eye seemed to focus on me and he made some slightly less incoherent noises and he tried to climb out of his truck.  He fell out and ended up on his back.  But this seemed to have a revitalizing effect on him and he sat up and looked almost sentient.  I said, “That’s the spirit.  Let me help you up fella.  You’ve got this, don’t you?”

Well, by five thirty he had managed to get the cables spliced together and although they were laying on the ground they restored cable service to the draco-cephalopodic occupant of 407 Dagon Avenue.  I told him the polar vortex would shut down in a few hours and a proper repair could be done by the local service crew that was currently repairing other more mundane problems in the area.  At this point most of his hair had turned white and he had a tic in his left eye.  I slipped him a ten spot and told him to have a nice evening.  He drove off very slowly and he may have veered over the divider a few times.  I hope he made it.  Seemed like a nice guy.

I returned home and had dinner and later on while Camera Girl was watching Wheel of Fortune I remarked to her, “You know that sparkly dress really does make Vanna look completely delicious.”  She scowled at me and said, “You need help.”

Women.

Renewable Energy Comes to Dunwich

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The Town of Dunwich was recently ordered by the Colony of Massachusetts Bay to show progress in eliminating the production of greenhouse gases by switching over to renewable energy sources.  As the only engineer in town, or for that matter, the only person familiar with the decimal point among the denizens of this benighted hellhole I was ordered by First Selectman Cthulhu to, “make that happen.”  And since, as in all things ordered by Cthulhu, the penalty for failure is being eaten alive by a 100-foot-high squid-headed flying dragon, I got to work right smartly.

What I discovered was that currently 100% of our electrical energy supply is generated by burning sperm whale oil.  It’s a little known fact that Dunwich, along with certain Inuit tribes is  allowed under treaty to hunt sperm whales and since the market for whale products long ago dried up we utilized the carcasses as a source of fuel.  The carcasses are hauled up on the shore and trucked to the power plant where the oil is drained off.  Then the meat is turned into Dunwich’s world-famous blubber chowder.  And the bones are packaged for resale to Dunwich’s werewolf (or for the politically correct term, lycanthrope) population.

I contacted the DEP to see if this treaty allowed for our whale oil to be grandfathered in as a green energy equivalent but, alas, there was a whale-lover on the staff there so, no soap.  I began to get panicky so I called in a consultant to see what other towns were doing.  The consultant described the latest scams that currently passed for “green” energy.  The favorite was “converting” natural gas to hydrogen to use in a fuel cell.  After looking at the material balance I could see that this process produces almost the same amount of carbon dioxide as combustion does.  When I questioned him about this inconsistency, he waved his hands around for a few minutes while claiming that the science was settled.  Anyway, the price tag for the installation was so high I realized there was no way we could switch over to this particular scam.

I asked him if he had a cheaper scam that we could invest in.  He looked disappointed.  I guess most of his clients aren’t as primitive and poor as Dunwich.  Finally after dejectedly checking through his inventory he noted that he had several generators that were reclaimed from some wind turbines that had fallen down and been carted away as scrap.  He could let us have those for a pittance.  Out of desperation and to buy time I ordered the parts and sent him on his way.

Then I had an inspiration.  We had some old caterpillar treads left over from some heavy machinery that had broken down and some other odds and ends.  I had the maintenance crew rig these up into a gigantic treadmill and hook it up to the generators.  I had the highway crew dig a pit out near the bicycle path that runs through the scenic area of the ghoul haunted forest.  And I had them catch and imprison the biggest shoggoth they could find in town.  It was a big, ugly, smelly, hungry one.  I think we might have lost a couple of the crew that caught it.  Oh well.

The next part of the plan was the good part.  Along the side of the bicycle path, I put a sign leading over to the pit that said “Contribute to Green Energy.”  Over the pit I had built a sound-proofed shed with a revolving door that led into a dark room with a pit trap.  When someone falls into the pit it raises a panel that separated the shoggoth from its dinner.  Once the shoggoth starts moving toward the victim it turns the caterpillar track and begins powering the generator.  As long as the green power enthusiast is able to run on this treadmill and stay ahead, the shoggoth continues to pursue.  But when the friend of Gaia tires, the shoggoth will get its lunch and the treadmill will stop and the power will go out in town.

Of course, this is a problem.  I’ve come up with some improvements.  To improve the reliability, we now run a bicycle race daily in town.  And I’ve hooked up a battery system as a form of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the town between shoggoth meals.  But uninterruptible is probably an overenthusiastic claim.

But the important thing is the First Selectman is pleased.  He’s grown fond of the project and has named the shoggoth Tesla.  He’s tasked me with setting up a similar treadmill for his personal use.  He says he needs the exercise and donating some energy to the town is patriotic.  Also, the town is making a nice profit reselling abandoned bicycles found along the road.

Who knew going green would be this much fun.

What Must a Good Science Fiction Story Have?

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I’ve returned to the land of the living.  My eyes track.  I can walk through a doorway without colliding with a doorjamb.  I can even keep up a conversation without sliding sideways off my chair onto the floor.  Next week I climb the Matterhorn.  Bravissimo!

I looked through the news feeds.  And, so help me, I even considered watching the Georgia run-off.  But there just wasn’t anything the least bit interesting.  I even considered pulling a Jussie Smollett.  I was going to claim that a Canon camera enthusiast sent me a derogatory e-mail making fun of my many bison photos of the day.  But my hard-bitten honesty just wouldn’t let me do it.  I love those bison!

I thought, “I’ll just write about something I like.”  After all that post about nuclear war had some great comments and that stuff really interests me.  Why not do something like that?  So that’s why this is coming out of left field.  I just didn’t feel like beating a political drum that’s already been beaten to a bloody pulp.

So, for a theme I’ll select the question, “What’s the most important component of a good science fiction story?”

Is it the tech?  Is it a good plot?  Is it well written characters?  Or does it absolutely require some balance between the three?

Let’s explore this a little bit.  Start with tech.  I suppose that space opera has lost a lot of support among the modern readers of science fiction.  Stuff like the Skylark of Space, The Legion of Space or the Lensman books are probably disqualified as too naïve and hopelessly early 20th century for anyone under sixty to consider reading.  But is the inexplicable faster than light (ftl) drives of these stories any less plausible than whatever also implausible ftl drives are currently being used by modern science fiction writers?  I’ve got to say I don’t think they’re disqualifications.  I’d say the rule is it just has to be self-consistent with whatever “rules” you’ve made up for the tech.  So, it doesn’t have to be somehow scientifically accurate.  It just can’t be bone-headedly stupid.  What it does have to be is convenient.  The technology has to allow the plot to evolve the way you want.  If space travel takes centuries, then don’t kill off too many good characters by leaving them back on Earth.  Or if time travel can only go backwards then don’t leave your spare batteries for your ray gun in your other pair of pants when you head back to the neolithic.

And the tech should be a fun toy for the reader if you can manage it.  I always loved how Heinlein lovingly designed his “torchships” and made the passenger and service areas of his ships seem well thought out.  But I also know of authors whose tech is basically a black box and for all we hear we could be sitting inside the fuselage of a jet plane.

While tech is necessary (after all it is sf) it’s not the deciding factor whether a story works.

Well, how about characters?  Yes, they are important, in the sense that they must at least exist.  But I’ve read some supposedly classic science fiction where the characters are as flat as pancakes (Asimov and Clarke come to mind).  Now this may no longer be the case.  I’m not sure.  I enjoy a good amount of character development in my fiction and I’ve been able to find it.  But I could easily believe there could be a very good story where character was in short supply.

What about plot?  Well, I could imagine a story that had a strong tech component and interesting characters but the plot was almost minimal.  Maybe like some of Bradbury’s short stories like the one where the Ladies’ Sewing Circle is trying to ignore the impending nuclear holocaust by concentrating on their work.  It’s all character.  But I guess you still have to say there’s a plot or more like a scenario.

I feel like, for the most part, and except for very odd stories, the sine qua non of a good science fiction story is a good plot.  If your tech is passable and your characters are at least bearable but you have a plot that rolls along and interesting stuff happening then you have a chance.  But you can have great tech and witty, erudite, droll fellows populating your world and if not much of anything is happening except talk, then your readers will throw the book against the wall (or the digital equivalent) and go look for something better.  And that’s that!

Now I know there are many sf fans in the audience.  I’d love to hear your comments, especially if you disagree.  I’m always interested in the opinions of sf readers.  The floor is now yours.

Nuclear Armageddon as a Plot Device

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Recently Joe Biden made the news when he reversed a campaign vow and stated that under his administration the United States would maintain the right to nuclear first strike as a military option.  Now the idea of Dementia Joe mistaking the nuclear football for his tv remote and ordering up an all-out nuclear blitz on Russia and China while trying to access some kind of hair fetish programming is obviously concerning.

But really this article is more about fiction writing.  In a story that I have been working on (forever) I reached a point in the story where I considered that the best way to escape from the corner I’d painted myself into was by having thermonuclear war break out between Russia and the United States.

Admittedly, that seems like a sad statement on my writing abilities but in point of fact it provided a definitive solution to multiple plot problems I was faced with.  After all, there aren’t many scenarios that can put the US federal government on its heels.  But three 20-megaton thermonuclear ICBMs detonating over Washington is a leading contender.  So, I will confess that I considered the scenario very carefully.

One thing I noticed though is that the impact of a nuked United States is extremely disruptive to a storyline.  Even the most tyrannical US administration looks quite different after the mushroom cloud sprouts over it.  Because now all of a sudden millions of Americans are dead and the ones still living are stunned, scared and desperate for a path forward.  At that point they’d follow Satan himself if he knows where to get food and fuel.

So, everything in my story is turned upside down.  Instead of the plucky rebels fighting the evil feds in a series of hit and run attacks, suddenly they find themselves wondering how they’ll survive without the now non-existent FEMA agency to save them from starvation and hypothermia.  Now what happens to my rebellion story?  All of a sudden enemies need each other just to survive.  Freedom and independence suddenly don’t mean much when staying alive requires all hands-on deck.

So that’s the change in the atmosphere, the feel of the story.  Does it still make sense?  Can the story survive the change?  Not as originally conceived.  I was looking at a series of stories with the rebels taking on the Deep State one step at a time with the rest of the country sizing up the battle and the balance of power gradually tilting toward the rebels.  But now the battle is over but without the dramatic tension and the action.  Instead, we have a tale of catastrophe and dissolution.

And to make that story work will require a change in emphasis.  Now instead of a slowly building wave of battle we have a nuclear wipe out and a tide going out.  Instead of a war with winners and losers we have the flotsam and jetsam from a deluge struggling to survive and trying to rebuild some kind of patchwork of settlements.  That’s a totally different thing.  It becomes a bunch of smaller stories at the village level.  Instead of armies we have farmers and mechanics, men and women and their children trying to survive without supermarkets and gas stations, even without electricity.  It’s nothing like the story I was envisioning but somehow it makes sense.  Because even though we may have forgotten about the atom bomb it hasn’t gone away.  It’s still there and it has its own internal logic that makes it the executioner of last resort.  If we decide that the arc of history bends in our direction and we can do as we please no matter what, we may find that the arc is just the ballistic track of an ICBM.

So inexorably I think the story is telling me to make a turn.  Even as a fictional plot device it does make one pause.  Imagine the largest fifty American cities reduced to rubble and charred bodies.  Imagine fallout killing off a quarter of the survivors.  And food and fuel gone for the rest of the survivors.  The grimness of such a tale is hard to overstate.  How do you tell such a story so that people will want to read it?

Well, that’s a subject for another day.  But this one has helped me get my thoughts in some kind of order.  Okay, hit all those buttons!

Burn It!  Burn It All!

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Ah, the heady days of our civilizational maelstrom.  As the world we knew is ripped to shreds and flung around us in centripetal chaos I can recognize fragments of familiar things flying by.  Sort of like the images that Dorothy sees in the scene where she is riding in the tornado and sees her friends and relatives float by in a rocking chair or a row boat.

You recognize some normal American ritual or an icon of a former day.  There’s a flash of recognition and it triggers some reflexive emotion or thought.  And then it flies by and is gone and the reality of being spun around in a howling cyclone of fragmented bits of the former reality returns.

But when we’re not fighting for our lives, human beings have to search for the interesting and enjoyable things around them.  Even in hell there must be a coffee break where people gather around the water cooler (or battery acid cooler) and shoot the breeze.  It’s just the nature of the beast.

You know I really enjoyed thinking about the minutia in the giant ant movie yesterday.  Thinking about the characterizations and the movie conventions that they employed back then was the most fun thing that I have thought about in weeks.  And it occurred to me that here is so much substance, so much American-ness in these old silly things from sixty, seventy years ago.  And not because there’s great art on display.  This is a story about giant ants.  Nothing more absurd is imaginable.  Nothing less important exists.  And yet the people who wrote the script and acted the scenes managed to do a good job of creating this ridiculous world that they were employed to create.  The guy who played the booze-soaked hobo in the hospital ward was highly entertaining.  The general working with the cop to operate the bazooka for the phosphorus bombardment of the ant nest was amusing in his portrayal of upper management trying his hand at a front-line task.

Maybe that is what the future looks like.  We’ll be like the medieval monks copying and illuminating fragments of the classical world to preserve something for when the rampaging vandals have run out of places to sack and burn and whoever is left sets about the hard work of rebuilding civilization from what’s left of the wreckage.  So, I’ve found new direction in celebrating whatever fragments and shards of the old order strike my fancy and even any worthwhile new shoots as they present themselves.  Certainly, it’s an uphill battle while the orcs are still busy burning and pillaging all around us.  And from time to time, we’ll have to put down our quills and cap our inkwells and pick up a battle axe and shield to fend off the latest incursion of rampaging savages.

But there is absolutely more sense in celebrating the things that give meaning to life and to enjoy art; high or low, than there is in just bemoaning the destruction and dwelling on how low we have fallen.  After all, no one threw a switch one day and ended the dark ages and began the renaissance.  The knowledge was always there.  It needed people who were willing to apply that knowledge.  It needed human ingenuity and imagination and a little breathing space between them and the nearest barbarians.

So don’t be surprised if I sound a little happier.  Sure, the orcs may win this war.  Our whole civilization may come crashing down in an orgy of death and darkness.  We may be on the cusp of a millennium of ignorance and misery.  But as Hurin said in the Silmarillion, “ Aurë entuluva!”, “Day shall come again.”  It seems inevitable that human intelligence will persevere over entropy and stupidity.  There is in life that which strives against chaos.  I’ll bet on us.

Now, let’s take another look at that giant ant movie.  Have you ever noticed how annoying the girl scientist gets when she’s down in the ant nursery in New Mexico?  She starts yelling at her colleagues, “Burn it!  Burn it all!”

I mean who the hell is she?  Especially since Ben and Bob are going to have to haul her fat butt up several steep inclines by rope to get her out of that cyanide laden death trap.  It’s not like she has the upper body strength to get herself out.  She could at least act a little more polite.  An incipient girl-boss even back then.  Ah well.

Don’t Panic.  Pick Up the Flamethrower

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Facebook crashes and burns, Musk guts the Twitter mafia, the Fetterman debate, Biden continues to spin his tale of a bizzarro world where inflation is low and he’s the most popular man in the world, the State Department muses about nuclear first strike over Ukraine, Chuck Schumer tells Biden the bad news about the Georgia senate race, Oregonians might elect a Republican governor.  And on and on and on.

The weirdness has metastasized.  Even Democrat voters have stopped claiming that “things are alright.”  We’ve reached the Howard Beale stage of things where almost everyone is confused, scared and angry all at the same time.  And I’m really happy about that.  I’ve been waiting for years for the rest of the idiots to catch up to where I’ve been for a decade.  And I count myself as one of the idiots.  Maybe I’m just a little less stupid than the rest of them.  Or maybe I was just a little more involved in what was playing out on the national stage.

The real reason is because I’m extremely vindictive.  I’ve taken personally all the lies I was fed twenty some odd years ago during the War on Terror and I want pay back.  I’m just as interested in seeing Mitch McConnell lose his job as I am in seeing Joe Biden go to jail.

So, it’s a great relief to see so many catatonic Americans open their eyes for the first time in their lives and realize that they’ve entrusted their country to incompetent ideologues who believe in things that don’t exist.

It’s good to see that America is getting a sense of what abandoning petroleum feels like.  It feels like poverty.  That’s a valuable lesson to learn.

So, this week I’m soaking in all of the rage, fear and panic that the Democrats are radiating around them and the confusion and lies that the media is pumping out.  I’m floating on my back in a warm ocean of schadenfreude and it’s wonderful.  There was a great video of a doofus from MSNBC interviewing Republican voters from Western Pennsylvania.  She’s trying to get them to say that January 6th is a terrible thing and any politicians who were there should be shunned.  And they’ll have none of it.  They scoff at her and compare it to the larger riots during the “George Floyd summer of love.”  The expression on the face of the woman interviewing them was a deer in the headlights look.  She couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t let themselves be shamed into condemning the protestors.  It was glorious.

I’m trying not to get too charged up by the good news that seems to come out of every poll I read.  There’s nothing worse than the let down after being subjected to a fraudulent election.  Especially when it’s brutally obvious that massive fraud is slowly being unrolled before your eyes.

But there’s no reason not to enjoy this run up to the election.  Listening to the excuses and bitterness as everything goes wrong for the Left is deeply soothing.  It puts a bounce in my step and a smile in my heart.  Just hearing Liz Cheney talk about how noble and honorable it is for her to sell her party out and support the Democrats makes me feel all the better about her failure to get re-elected and the bigger failure of her January 6th Hearings.  Very soon she’ll be carrying her box of stolen office supplies home from her cushy former office in the Capitol building.  And once the new Republican majority is in charge of the House no one will ever remember who Liz Cheney was.  And the receptionists will let her know that whichever Congressman or Senator she wants to speak to is not available but they’ll be sure to send her a fund-raiser envelope in the mail, have a nice day.

Tonight, I watched my favorite giant radioactive insect movie, Them!  Unsurprisingly James Whitmire (as Sgt. Ben Peterson) is, once again, killed by the powerful mandibles of a giant carpenter ant.  No matter how many times I yell out, “No Ben don’t try to get in the pipe.  Pick up the flame thrower, dammit man pick up the flame thrower!”  But he was too cocky.  When he heard the stridulations of the giant ant, he first lifted the second little boy into the exit pipe and then tried to exit that way himself.  Obviously, he should not have picked up the child but calmly and efficiently picked up the flame thrower that was nearby, pointed it at the murderous mega-insect and charbroiled the wretched invertebrate.  Then he could have exited with the kid at his leisure.

What is it about giant insects that makes otherwise rational public servants so erratic?  C’est la vie.

RoboCop (1987) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , ,

Paul Verhoeven directed this sci-fi adventure movie.  Strangely he made it to be a satire of the violence of law enforcement during the Reagan administration but audiences liked its anti-crime message.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

 

RoboCop opens up on a police precinct in Detroit (Metro-West).  It’s some kind of futuristic present (1980s) where the dystopian crime-ridden Detroit is being addressed with the introduction of robotic police.  The first prototype is being demonstrated at an executive board meeting of OCP, a technology company that surprisingly also has links to the underworld.  Unfortunately, the robot gets a glitch in his programming and kills one of the officers of the company during a demonstration.  This reflects poorly on Dick Jones, the senior vice president and also secretly, the contact for the underworld figures involved with OCP.  The failure of the prototype allows Jones’s competitor, Bob Morton to steer the company toward a different robot cop concept.  Morton’s version is a man whose brain has been destroyed in an accident and whose body can then be retrofitted with robotic limbs and an electronic brain.

Enter Alex Murphy a young cop with a wife and young son.  He’s just been transferred to Metro-West where he’s paired with street smart woman cop Anne Lewis who, of course, has a heart of gold.  They head out to do good and get involved with a criminal gang headed up by Clarence Boddicker (played by Kurtwood Smith, who played Topher Grace’s father, Red on “That Seventies Show”).  Boddicker is Dick Jones’s criminal partner.  He’s also a sadistic maniac.  When his gang captures Murphy, Boddicker personally mutilates him by blowing his limbs off with a shotgun.  Then his men finish him off with their guns.  Lewis escapes and goes for help.

In the next scene Murphy’s body has been converted into a cyborg that has been named RoboCop and assigned to Metro-West.  He has four prime directives

  • Serve the public trust
  • Protect the innocent
  • Uphold the law
  • Never arrest an officer of OCP

Of course, the last directive is a secret one built in by OCP to allow them to break the law with impunity.

Now RoboCop begins to discover the link between Boddicker’s gang and the murder of Officer Murphy.  Although RoboCop is not supposed to have any memory of his former life it does start to creep into his consciousness.  During this time, he captures several of the gang members and discovers the link between OCP and Boddicker.  At this point in the story Dick Jones has Boddicker murder Bob Morton.

Finally, RoboCop manages to arrest Boddicker and his gang but Jones has them released.  Identifying Jones as the OCP link to Boddicker, RoboCop attempts to arrest him but discovers prime directive four prevents him.  Now RoboCop is attacked by the OCP SWAT Team and escapes after being damaged.  Officer Lewis hides him in a factory where she assists him in repairing himself.

The final showdown against Boddicker’s gang includes the use of rocket powered grenades that OCP has provided to Boddicker.  After a drawn-out battle RoboCop kills the whole gang.  Boddicker offers to surrender but RoboCop tells him “I’m not here to arrest you.”  And so, he kills Boddicker in cold blood.  Apparently, his restored memories have superseded some of his programming.

Finally, RoboCop shows up at the OCP board room to expose Dick Jones as a criminal.  When Jones takes the Chairman of the Board hostage RoboCop reveals to him that he cannot arrest any OCP executive.  The Chairman says, “Jones you’re fired.”  And RoboCop immediately dispatches Jones with a full clip of bullets that drive him through the window of the skyscraper penthouse to his death on the pavement below.

RoboCop is a cartoon of a movie.  The villains are cartoon characters.  The hero is a robot almost completely devoid of personality.  Even the good guys are cartoon sketches of cop movie stereotypes.  The violence and weaponry are both over the top.  It’s definitely a 1980s action movie.  But within its genre and its intent it’s an enjoyable cartoon.  Everyone is waiting for RoboCop to finally kill off the sadistic psychopaths that murdered his alter ego who once was a husband and father.  I recommend this movie to fans of the genre.  If you liked some of Schwarzenegger’s movies from that era, like Predator and Terminator you’ll probably like this movie too.  If not then maybe not so much.

The Haunted Election

photog Current Events, Humor, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , ,

Election Day this year is the night of the full moon and I just saw the first wolfsbane flowers in my yard.

 

Even a man who’s pure of heart

and says his prayers by night

may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms

and the moon is full and bright

The damp cool autumnal weather certainly evokes a Halloween mood in my neighborhood.  We have our share of  jack o’lanterns festooning the house and the grandkids are already imagining their trick or treat loot.  But this year even Election Day has an unreal flavor to it.  Outlandish candidates like Fetterman and that creepy old ghoul haunting the White House add an Edgar Allan Poe tinge to even the political page.

Now am I claiming that werewolf John Fetterman will be lopsidedly prowling the woods of Pennsylvania in his stretched out hoodie tearing apart innocent Republican voters in his insane lust to become a United States Senator?  Well, read the poem and do the math yourself!  I’m going to add a little extra garlic to Camera Girl’s sauce this week and hope for the best.