THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/23/09 -- Vol. 28, No. 17, Whole Number 1568
C3PO: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
R2D2: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Acknowledgement (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Easy Mistake to Make (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Prime-Time Westerns (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE STONING OF SORAYA M (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Digital Science Fiction Conventions (letter of comment
by James E. LaBarre)
Water on Mars and the Moon (letter of comment
by Greg Frederick)
This Week's Reading (Edgar Allan Poe) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Acknowledgement (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This week's MT VOID is brought to you by the Pre-Owned-Humvee
Owners Exchange. Buy a used Humvee today. Let the world know
who's the boss. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Easy Mistake to Make (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Healthcare opponents at Investor's Business Daily claimed, "People
such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the
U.K., where the National Health Service [NHS] would say the life of
this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is
essentially worthless." Of course Hawking, who is British, did
grow up under the National Health Service claims that he has
received excellent treatment. But it was an understandable mistake
for Investor's Business Daily to make. It has to be that Stephen
Hawking speaks without any trace of a British accent. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Prime-Time Westerns (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I cannot help but notice that at one time we had a lot of Western
films being made. The Western movie has been an enduring tradition
in American cinema and television. At one time there were a lot of
Westerns being made both for the wide screen and for television.
When I was growing up I think you could see a Western every night
on television and just about every week at the movie theater. The
public loved this American myth.
As time goes by there not so many Westerns being made. The best
days of the Western have come and gone. There are no true Westerns
television series being made. The number Western films being made
has become less and less with the passage of years. Some years
seem to have two of them close together. Other years don't seem to
have any. But the stream of them does not stop entirely. It just
seems to trickle out with less and less of them. But there are
always more being made. You just have to wait a year or two.
Recently we had APPALOOSA with Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, and
Renée Zellweger. There has not been a last one. The number of
Westerns, if suitably spread out, is going asymptotically to zero.
I was thinking about this and suddenly I realized what was going
on. It was staring me right in the face. The frequency of
Westerns that the film industry makes decreases with time, but does
not go to zero. That rang a bell. Production of Westerns seems to
be distributed like prime numbers. In the low numbers there are
lots of prime numbers but as you look further out in the natural
numbers they too become less and less. But they do not peter out
entirely. In fact if one graphed the number of Westerns made
before a certain date, it would be increasing as t increases, but
it increases about like k*t/ln(t), with a suitable scalar factor k.
And that is exactly what prime numbers do. This formula does not
tell you exactly where the primes will be, but it gives you a feel
for the distribution. Similarly the model does not tell you when a
Western is going to be released. That is really asking the formula
to do too much for you. But it does tell you about how over the
long term the Western film will peter out.
Now some Westerns tend to be real rip-snorters and some do not.
Some go for a more subtle and realistic approach. The big brash
ones seem to correspond to the Mersenne Primes. Those are primes
one less than a power of two. The John Wayne Westerns mostly seem
to correspond to the Mersenne primes, for some reason. But now
this is interesting on one level. So do Tom Mix Westerns. I have
not seen a lot of Tom Mix Westerns. You do not see them so much
because most are from the silent film era. It is hard enough to
get people to see black and white films these days. So Tom Mix
Westerns are not all the easy to find. But you can verify that
2,147,483,647 is a prime and one less than 2^31, so I suspect the
Tom Mix Westerns may be better than I had realized. I will have to
see if Netflix carries them.
I know that some of you out there are asking if the really exciting
Westerns correspond to the Mersenne primes, if there is any
correlation between some types of Western and the Fermat primes.
It is a good question. But I frankly do not have the computing
power at my disposal to properly answer that question. No
characteristic of Western that I can find corresponds to the Fermat
primes. I assume I could try a regression analysis to find some
sort of characteristic of Westerns that correlates to those films
that correspond to Fermat primes. The truth is I just happened
onto the Mersenne connection. If I had to do a regression analysis
to find that there was the rip-snortocity that corresponded to the
Mersennes, I might still be looking. The truth is that I just do
not have the computing power to handle the regression analysis.
But still the connection that I have been able to find is much more
than I was expecting. It is fascinating to know that we do, in the
last analysis, live in an orderly universe.
If we have two major Westerns released in 2019, and if one of them
is set in Nevada, I may have a proof for the Gauss conjecture.
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A boy with emotional problems finds himself on an island
with large fluffy animal people. Spike Jonze co-writes and directs
this adaptation of the popular 1963 children's book. While the
book works fine for the younger set, the film tries to be too much
an Alice-in-Wonderland-class story for all ages, but it rarely
works for both young and old at the same time. Rating: high 0 (-4
to +4) or 5/10
The Caldecott Medal Winning children's book WHERE THE WILD THINGS
ARE by Maurice Sendak is thirty-seven pages and only 338 words.
This does not give very material to base a feature-length film
upon. Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers have fleshed it out into a
screenplay for a live action adaptation. That required a lot of
invention on their part and the result does not entirely work.
Max (played by Max Records) is a boy with problems. He seems to
have no friends and has a very short fuse. Only his mother seems
to like him and then not all the time. He is reduced to
threatening fences to support his sense of being someone. When his
older sister's friends destroy his igloo he tracks snow into her
room and jumps on her bed. Finally his anger boils over and he
puts on his animal pajamas and runs away from home. Taking a small
boat and sailing for open water he finds himself swept to a magic
island inhabited by large animal people. He tells them that he is
a king and they believe him and let him rule them.
As their king Max has all sorts of exciting plans for his people
starting with the building of a mighty fortress. Unfortunately, in
the animals he sees many of his own attitudes. Animal people with
his own faults ruin the wonderful kingdom he had planned.
In some ways this film is a throwback to the TV show
"H. R. Pufnstuf". As with that show it was decided that a film or
movie could compete with animation by putting actors in cartoon-
like costumes. It would not surprise me to find out that some
places hand puppets were used, but for the most part the animal
people are people in suits that had mechanical controls to provide
facial expression. The result has gotten a whole lot better since
the days of "H. R. Pufnstuf", but so has the animation competition.
The live-action renderings really capture the images created by
Sendak, and children may well enjoy the visuals created. But the
enchantment wears off. I saw the film in a full Sunday afternoon
crowd. Some of the older children might have been enjoying the
film but the five-year-olds in the crowd were restless. It is not
clear that even the older children would have known what to make of
lines like "happiness is not the best way to be happy." (Come to
think of it, I am not sure I get it.)
In addition, the film has a high level of cartoonish violence.
Nobody is seriously hurt more than a boo-boo. But there is a fair
amount of heavy animal roughhousing. One cannot count on a whole
lot of emotion continuity in this film. Characters who do not like
each other in one scene may be friends in the next sequence. Other
sorts of continuity are missing also. We have the ground covered
with snow in one sequence and without much feel for passage of time
the snow seems to have entirely gone away the next time we look.
There are several familiar voices for characters. The animal-man
closest to Max is Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini). Catherine
O'Hara voices the character of Judith. Chris Cooper does Carol's
best friend, the birdman Douglas. Forest Whitaker takes the role
of Ira. With top-notch actors like that one would expect
characters that the viewer can come away feeling he knows. Sadly
that is not the case here. Human-animals remain cryptic. They
talk like normal people, but not so that one can feel he knows any
of them. Their lead is Carol who seems like a spoiled child. But
we don't know him much better than that. It may have been a
mistake for Jonze to direct his own screenplay. He knows what
emotions he wanted the characters to be conveying, but he probably
is not seeing the result as an outsider and realizing that they are
just not connecting with the viewer.
This is a story that meanders and loses much of its audience, young
and old, but perhaps not in the same places. I rate WHERE THE WILD
THINGS ARE a high 0 on the -4 to +4 scale or 5/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0386117/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/where_the_wild_things_are/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE STONING OF SORAYA M (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: The harrowing true story from Iran. An Iranian woman
became "inconvenient" for her husband who wants to trade her for a
younger wife. He frames her for adultery, connives to have her
found guilty and sentenced to death, and participates in her
execution. We see the stoning in horrific detail. The story is
simple and compelling and the title leaves no doubt where the story
is going. This is a powerful film for those willing to see its
extreme violence. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
Soraya Manutchehri was an Iranian woman who was married at age 13
to a petty thug, Ghorban-Ali seven years her senior. In 1986,
after twenty-two hellish years of beatings and infidelity from her
husband he wanted to take a younger wife. He could not support two
wives so he decided he had to be rid of the first wife. He frames
Soraya for adultery with the help of a corrupt local mullah. As
Islamic law was practiced at that time the burden of proof was on
her to prove her innocence and with false witness testimony against
her she had no chance. It is an easy matter to have her found
guilty. Then, pulling few punches, the film shows graphically an
execution by stoning.
The film is told mostly in flashback the day after the execution.
The mountain village, Kupayeh, is visited by a journalist in need
of a car repair. He is played by James Caviezel, who was similarly
martyred in THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. A woman wants to talk to
him, though others tell him she is mad. This is Zahra, (Shohreh
Aghdashloo of HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG), the aunt of Soraya M (Mozhan
Marnoand) who tells him the story behind the stoning.
It would be easy to identify the husband Ali (Navid Negahban) as
the villain of the piece, but there is more than enough fault to go
around. One judge displays a little conscience, but allows himself
to be overruled. He is the only man in the village who is shown to
have any objections to the proceedings. On the other hand when the
village of men go to rock-throwing only one woman in the crowd
seems to be enthusiastic about the killing.
The film has many images that may seem strange to an American
audience. The mountain village of stone buildings is an odd
juxtaposition with the modern sports car that Soraya's husband Ali
drives around to impress his intended new wife.
Though the film is mostly in Persian, it is actually an American
film. Cyrus Nowrasteh directs a screenplay he co-authored with his
wife Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh from the book by French journalist
Freidoune Sahebjam. The film they have made is strongly affecting
with the stoning sequence lasting twenty minutes all by itself.
The director is pulling no punches. This film grabs the emotions
of the viewer, particularly anger and pity. But the film is on a
strong subject. If the viewer is not angered by the situation the
film has not done its job. Perhaps not wanting to leave on just
the note of the martyrdom there is about ten minutes after the
stoning sequence with a little action that might seem to be anti-
climax.
The fact that there was one sociopath in the country, Soraya's
husband, is not much of an indictment against anyone but him. But
the fact that he could so easily get Islamic Fundamentalism to
become his accomplice raises very disturbing questions. The film
is a warning about what can happen when a people delegates their
private consciences to someone else's interpretation of a book.
Perhaps the most important resource that any community has is their
collective private conscience. When people abandon it for promised
rewards in the afterlife, the result is disaster. I rate THE
STONING OF SORAYA M a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1277737/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/stoning_of_soraya_m/
A discussion of the issues of this film:
http://tinyurl.com/oak4rr
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Digital Science Fiction Conventions (letter of comment by
James E. LaBarre)
In response to Mark's comments on digital science fiction
conventions in the 10/16/09 issue of the MT VOID, James LaBarre
writes:
The problem with that is that conventions have been an opportunity
to meet face-to-face with other fans. An Internet con wouldn't be
any different than IRC, discussion mail-lists, etc.
I'd suggest a more "clusterized" method. Have regional sub-
conventions, perhaps with teleconferencing to allow a panel to
occur at multiple locations simultaneously. Small art shows at
each location, with digitized displays of the artwork at the remote
locations, which the sub-con attendees could view. The dealers
room wouldn't be near as fun, though. [-jel]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Water on Mars and the Moon (letter of comment by Greg
Frederick)
[This mail was received a few weeks ago, but got misplaced in the
wrong folder. That is why things in the past are phrased as if
they are in the future.]
In response to Mark's comments on water on Mars and the moon in the
10/02/09 issue of the MT VOID, Greg Frederick writes:
I read your article in the MT Void about water on Mars and the
Moon. Pretty interesting stuff. I have been following the Internet
articles about this and read where the molecular O-H bond was
detected on the moon by the Indian spacecraft with a NASA detector
onboard. They think that besides comet impacts bringing water to
the moon, the sun sends hydrogen atoms streaming at very high
velocities (a large fraction of the speed of light) into the oxide
rich lunar rocks and soil. The oxygen in the rocks and soil are
bonding with the hydrogen atoms from the Sun forming water and
possibly hydroxl molecules. NASA has been developing a microwave
device to extract water directly from rocks. They have been
successfully testing this device on Earth oxide rich rocks which
contain water. This technology does not require drilling. I guess
you know that on Oct. 9, 2009, the double impact of the LCROSS
lunar spacecraft will occur at a southern lunar crater. The
impacts will create dust plumes which Earth telescopes and the
other NASA lunar spacecraft (LRO) orbiting the Moon will scan for
evidence of water ice. The LRO and LCROSS are the two NASA
spacecraft launched a few months back to the Moon. These impacts
should be viewable with a small telescope.
Scientists have developed a laser technology to scan ice that will
cause organic life (bacteria) to become fluorescent when detected.
This was successfully tested at a frozen lake in Antarctica The
next robotic rover to Mars may use this technology to hunt for life
or the evidence for past life there.
This is great time for robotic exploration of the Solar system. I
wonder though if NASA will have the funding needed to get humans
back to the Moon by 2020 as is the current plan. [-gf]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
"All reading is not migrating to computer screens. So long as
books are cheap, tough, easy to "read" from outside (What kind of
book is this? How long is it? Is this the one I was reading last
week? Let's flip to the pictures), easy to mark up, rated for safe
operation from beaches to polar wastes and--above all--beautiful,
they will remain the best of all word-delivery vehicles." [David
Gelernter]
In honor of Edgar Allan Poe's 200th birthday this year, our book
discussion groups both read several Poe stories. The non-SF group
read "Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Gold Bug", "The Purloined
Letter", "The Masque of the Red Death", "Hop-Frog", "A
Predicament", and "The Philosophy of Composition". Conveniently, I
had also just read Hillary Waugh's GUIDE TO MYSTERIES & MYSTERY
WRITING, which was more the former than the latter and devoted a
full quarter of the book to Poe and his creation of the detective
story.
Waugh analyzes the various elements that Poe brought together.
These include "the transcendent and eccentric detective"; "the
admiring and slightly stupid foil"; "the well-intentioned,
blundering officials"; "the locked-room convention"; "the pointing
finger of unjust suspicion"; "the solution by surprise", "solution
by putting one's self in another's position"; "concealment by means
of the ultra-obvious"; "the staged ruse to force the culprit's
hand"; and "even the expansive and condescending explanation when
the chase is done."
Not every detective story has all of these, of course. "Murders in
the Rue Morgue" has the first six elements; "The Purloined Letter"
has the first two and the last four. True, Holmes had his Watson
for all but one story (and that is considered the weakest of the
batch). But Poirot did not have his Hastings for many of his
stories, and Jane Marple had no "admiring and slightly stupid foil"
at all. Not every story uses a locked-room, and so on. But all
these are standard tropes of detective fiction, and all were
invented by Poe. Well, one could argue that "the transcendent and
eccentric detective" and "the admiring and slightly stupid foil"
are really just variants on the hero and his sidekick, a pair of
characters who have been around considerably longer. In fact, one
could argue that they were so stock by the 17th century that
Cervantes could satirize them by making the sidekick the smarter of
the two. (And P. G. Wodehouse followed in his footsteps.)
And Dupin's reconstruction of the narrator's train of thought at
the beginning seems incredibly forced and makes the narrator seem
somewhat more than "slightly stupid." If indeed, walking on a
pavement of "overlapping and riveted blocks" must bring to the
narrator's mind the term "stereotomy", and that in turn forces him
to "atomies", hence Epicurus, hence nebulae, hence Orion, then the
narrator is a very dim fellow indeed, to have such a constrained
mind.
That Poe at least somewhat identified himself with his detective
Dupin is fairly clear from the following exchange in "The
Purloined Letter":
"You might have spared yourself this trouble," said Dupin.
"D--, I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not,
must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of
course."
"Not altogether a fool," said G., "but then he's a poet,
which I take to be only one remove from a fool."
"True," said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from
his meerschaum, "although I have been guilty of certain
doggerel myself."
In "Murders in the Rue Morgue", the detective draws an important
conclusion based on a series of statements in which five witnesses
each say it was not their native language, but think it was another
(named) language--which they are actually unfamiliar with. For
example, the Englishman says it was not English, but he thought it
was German (although he understood no German). And so on. (When
done in the 1932 Universal film, this was reduced to three
languages and a shouting match among the witnesses added, which
just seemed foolish, but in the story it was much more
straightforward.) But I have to take exception with Dupin's
conclusion, correct though it may be. He says, "You will say it
might have been the voice of an Asiatic--of an African. Neither
Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris...." And orangutans do?
John T. Irwin (in A MYSTERY TO A SOLUTION) writes that mathematics
was one of Poe's best subjects and that surely he knew that the
"merely general reader" is indeed correct in this scenario and the
narrator wrong, and that therefore Poe is creating an ignorant or
unreliable narrator rather than actually making this claim. I am
not sure I am convinced of this. Consider this from "The Purloined
Letter":
"I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who would be
trusted out of equal roots, or who did not clandestinely hold it as
a point of his faith that x**2+px was absolutely and
unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way
of experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur
where x**2+px is not altogether equal to q, and, having made him
understand what you mean, get out of his reach as speedily as
convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down."
This reminds me of a line from LITTLE MAN TATE that Mark is fond of
quoting as designed to demonize scientists: "I'm working on
experiments involving lasers, sulfuric acid, and butterflies."
In addition, one has to say that Irwin's knowledge of mathematics
is shaky, since he also says, "By definition a number is odd if,
when the number is divided by two, there is a remainder of one.
And by that definition the first odd number is three." No, the
first odd [natural] number is one. Firstly, one has to assume that
by "number" Irwin means "positive integer". There is no "first"
odd number if one includes negative integers, and the terms "odd"
and "even" are meaningless when applied to non-integers. But even
when restricted to positive integers, Irwin has ignored the plain
fact that one is odd. One suspects that he confused being an odd
number with being a prime number, a category from which one is
excluded.
In "The Purloined Letter", I would say that one big problem is the
time the Prefect says he spent to search for letter. Even though
he says he spent an entire week of nights searching each room
(minus any nights the thief was actually home), the degree of
thoroughness seems hard to accept. (For example, he says that his
men turned every page of every book.) I was reminded of the many
stories where robbers steal a huge amount of gold in fifteen
minutes and a Volkswagen that in reality would take several days
and a fleet of trucks.
"The Gold Bug" seems the obvious inspiration for the Sherlock
Holmes story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men", though it suffers
from being related pretty much after the fact rather than revealed
as the story progresses. (The question of whether the gold bug is
a live bug or an artifact seems strangely inconsistent as well.)
Of course, for critics (and everyone else) hindsight is easy. It's
foresight that is hard. For example, H. Douglas Thomson (in
MASTERS OF MYSTERY: A STUDY OF THE DETECTIVE STORY [1930]) is very
convincing in his analysis of stories already written. But then
you read this: "Miss Marple is an incorrigible Cranfordian, a
spinster and a gossip. The neighbors disliked her because 'she
knew everything,' and because 'she always thought the worst.' ...
In a mild way we are prejudiced against Miss Marple on her first
appearance, and one cannot help thinking that she is not the stuff
of great detectives. Inquisitiveness will not always come off, and
intuitions are cheap in these days. Moreover, Miss Marple can only
hope to solve murder problems on her native heath. If Mrs.
Christie is planning a future for Miss Marple, as is very likely,
she will be bound to find this an exasperating limitation."
Well, I guess we know how that turned out. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
One old friend is better than two new ones.
-- Yiddish proverb