THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
03/12/10 -- Vol. 28, No. 37, Whole Number 1588
C3PO: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
R2D2: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Science Fiction Discussion Groups
Color Diet (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
End of the Line (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
AFGHAN STAR (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Pi and Powers of 10 (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
This Week's Reading (THE MARCH OF FOLLY, THE FRODO FRANCHISE,
and "Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations")
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Science Fiction Discussion Groups
March 18: JOURNEY THROUGH GENIUS by William Dunham, Old Bridge (NJ)
Public Library, 7PM
March 25: STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS Old Bridge (NJ)
Public Library, 7PM (postponed from February)
April 8: THE ILLUSTRATED MAN by Ray Bradbury, Middletown (NJ)
Public Library, film at 5:30PM, discussion of film and book
after film
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TOPIC: Color Diet (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The new ideas for diets is to get a variety of colors in your diet.
(See http://tinyurl.com/CBS-color.) The idea is that if you have
a variety of colors in your diet you will get a better balance of
nutrients. It is very healthy. I am going out right now and buy
myself a large bag of M&Ms. [-mrl]
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TOPIC: End of the Line (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I saw a documentary recently. It is called THE END OF THE LINE.
The topic is overfishing of the world's oceans. I remember years
ago the claim was that the oceans had enough fish to feed the
world's population for thousands of years to come. I think that
must have been with the then current fishing methods. Humans
fortunately and unfortunately are very clever. Fish have value as
food and the more fish that can be caught the more the load is
worth. If you catch twice as much fish you can make considerably
more money, maybe twice as much. And the odds are good someone can
make a big profit hauling in a catch. With that money new and more
efficient means can be found to catch more fish and make more money
and catch even larger catches.
So today there are much more efficient ways to take fish from the
sea. With bigger boats and bigger nets and electronics and just
plain human ingenuity more ways can be found to pull fish from the
oceans and turn them into money. On the face of it that sounds
pretty good, or at least might have in the 1950s.
However, it is obvious where this is going. Overfishing is
severely depleting populations of fish in the oceans and driving
species extinct. If not stopped, it will be very bad for our
future. The film makes a compelling argument that that is exactly
what is happening and all too fast. I could repeat the salient
points of that case, but it is not the point of this article and I
could not do justice to the case even if I tried.
THE END OF THE LINE is just one of many current documentaries that
are in many ways very similar. The Oscar-winning THE COVE is about
harvesting of dolphins. Then there is AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH about
global warming. And there is FOOD, INC., about degrading food with
factory farming. And this is just scratching the surface. They
are all on the theme that someone is making a lot of money--legally
or illegally--and is not worrying about the damage that is being
done to the world in the process. There is a subtext that they are
getting away with it because the general public is for the most
part just too apathetic to do anything about the situation. The
films are intended to remedy that situation get people involved.
It sounds like I am being cynical about how similar these
documentaries are, but the fact is that they tend to be well-
documented and most seem to be pretty dead on. In each case
something needs to be done. Activists are needed. I do what I
can, but there are a lot of such causes, and I cannot put energy
behind all of them.
But that is really the problem, isn't it? We sympathize, we want
to do something, but second only to greed in these issues the
problem is apathy and even self-delusion. People have lives to
lead and worry more about the mundane. We hope something is being
done on these problems, but that is about the best we allow
ourselves to do.
A relative read an article about somebody making money from
recycling something, and she concluded that saving the planet would
actually be a profitable enterprise and everyone can do very well
by doing good. I told her that was a little too optimistic. There
are just too many trends that are going to be very painful to stop.
It is going to take a lot of sacrifice. And some of these problems
are just too far-gone to fix.
We carry our groceries home in cloth shopping bags and are told and
tell ourselves we are saving the planet. The effort to shift to
cloth shopping bags is a long, long way from what would be
necessary to "save the planet." Well, truthfully, the planet will
survive. I am less sure that that people will. The world will
probably be a great deal different in the future and I expect it
will not be very pleasant.
The problem is the people who are making the money doing the damage
have the funds to fight the people trying to slow the destruction.
The "Greed is Good" crowd have what it takes to lobby government
and stymie efforts to preserve what we have. Even those who want
to do something are fed misinformation. I am not saying that money
is the root cause of all these problems, but it is for a lot of
them. Money is not the root of all evil, but it makes a pretty
good it.
The problem is that we have reached an age of power and
empowerment. People can do more for themselves than at any time in
history. In the 1940s the fish still had a fighting chance, and
that meant populations survived. Technology has essentially taken
most of the failure risk out of the enterprise of collecting that
fish. If you want to get a huge catch of fish, the technology
tells you just what to do. Without some restraint the fishers can
now take huge chunks out of the sea life populations and not leave
enough for the populations to survive. I doubt that as a people we
have the resolve to do what needs to be done.
We desperately need that resolve. [-mrl]
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TOPIC: AFGHAN STAR (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Just as Americans have their television program "American
Idol," since 2005 Afghanistan has had its own popular music program
"Afghan Star." It is the same and not the same. The difference is
that religious fanatics like the Taliban can at any time decide
singing a song is a capital crime. This is a country torn apart by
those who want to bring in modern international ways and those who
want to seal off the country with a fundamentalist fascism. This
documentary follows four contestants on "Afghan Star" and what they
experience risking their lives for a singing competition and for
freedom. Havana Marking directs. AFGHAN STAR will be shown on HBO
on March 18, 2010. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
It is hard to imagine an image more incongruous than "American
Idol" together with the strife-ridden country of Afghanistan. Yet
Afghanistan does have television and they have their own program
inspired by "American Idol" (itself inspired by an early television
program, "The Ted Mack Amateur Hour"). In 2005 the Tolo Television
network premiered the TV show "Afghan Star". On the face of it
that might not seem like such a courageous action, but everything
that happens in Afghanistan is overshadowed by the extremism of
Islamic fundamentalists who freely murder to enforce obedience to
their fanatical interpretation of Sharia law. A television show is
particularly dangerous. In 1996 it became a crime to listen to
music, to dance, or to watch television. These restrictions were
removed in 2004, but the three actions are still dangerous. The
Taliban tentatively allows the singing, but any sign of dancing
can--and in the course this documentary does--lead to more serious
repercussions. Countering the fundamentalists is the overwhelming
attraction of Music.
Popular music is a very strong force in the emerging Afghanistan.
There are some people obsessively loyal to songs. Where else in
the world would you find people explaining that music brings
happiness and that it is worth fighting for? Mobs of people try to
get to be the audience for the program's broadcasts. In addition,
the viewing audience votes for who should win. For many in
Afghanistan this is their first experience with democracy, the
first time they ever could vote for anything. Some Afghanis are
also being surprised to find that they are actually supporting
people from other ethnic groups. People make the point that the
lessons learned with the program could bring deep changes--social
and political--to the country. They say they want to take the
country "from the gun to the song."
Marking's cameras follow four contestants. Rafi is a handsome
nineteen-year-old who says his goal is to help his people to awaken
and find a little joy in life. Setara is two years older. She
wants to adopt Western and Indian ways. Hameed trained to be a
singer of Afghan classical music but easily made the transition to
popular. He is from the persecuted Hazara minority and hopes that
his popularity will help his people. Finally there is Lima. She
had taken secret music lessons, which in itself could have had her
killed by the Taliban. Now she also likes Western ways, but is a
little more cautious than Setara.
The film is both optimistic and depressing. Afghanistan is in a
state of constant change, and the viewer can only hope that it will
be change for the better. This film is about a real war with real
deaths that is going on in Afghanistan and one of the battlefields
of that war is a pop music contest on television. I rate AFGHAN
STAR a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10. This film is in
Pashtu, Dari, and some English, and it is entirely subtitled in
English.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1334510/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/afghan_star/
[-mrl]
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TOPIC: Pi and Powers of 10 (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
In response to Mark's comments on pi and powers of 10 in the
03/05/10 issue of the MT VOID, Fred Lerner writes, "Supposing your
twelve-fingered aliens, or my eight-fingered ones (they look like
us, but don't count thumbs as fingers), also amused themselves by
working out the value of pi. Would the expansion of pi in base-12
or base-8 (or any other base--leaving out base-pi!) produce any
more significant or interesting patterns than our decimal
expansion?" [-fl]
Mark responds, "Probably not. Xenomorphic probably would not be
any better than Anthropomorphic. There is no reason pi would like
species with twelve fingers any better than species with ten. But
to explore it as a continued fraction is at least species-neutral."
[-mrl]
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TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
THE MARCH OF FOLLY by Barbara Tuchman (ISBN-13 978-0-345-30823-8)
was the February book for the general discussion group. While I
found her book THE GUNS OF AUGUST excellent, and Mark recommends A
DISTANT MIRROR, I found most of this book less than enthralling.
The best part was definitely Chapter One ("Pursuit of Policy
Contrary to Self-Interest"), and overview of the subject. The
topics examined in detail include the Trojan Horse, the Renaissance
Popes' provocation of the Protestant Secession, the British loss of
America, and the American loss in Vietnam. But Tuchman has a
problem with them--she needs to pad each of them out enough to fill
a hundred pages or so, but not enough to fill a whole book. The
result is less than ideal; the British-lose-America chapter in
particular is very hard to follow, with many digressions about who
had which livings to give out and what the personalities of their
ancestors were.
[Had we delayed reading this book one month, it could have also
been the Folly of March. -mrl]
THE FRODO FRANCHISE by Kristin Thompson (ISBN-13 978-0-520-24774-1)
is not about the film trilogy "The Lord of the Rings" as about the
whole phenomenon that grew up around it, and how it changed
Hollywood. For example, when they started filming it, the only
actor with any real web site was Ian McKellen (McKellen.com).
Studios and movie producers had no idea of what to do on their web
sites. Harry Knowles of "Ain't It Cool News" said, "When I
consulted with LucasFilms on StarWars.com, they asked me, 'What is
it that fans really want?' And I said, 'Fans want to know if
you're using Phillips head or flat-head screws on your set, don't
you understand!? Fandom wants to know *everything*. There *isn't*
enough information you can give them.'" I'll add that as proof of
this, this book will be bought by lots of fans with only peripheral
interest in the business end, but who are as completist as their
budget allows. DVDs were just getting started; what extras to
provide and how was a question still unanswered.
Something somewhat peripheral to the LOTR phenomenon was the
comment made by an anonymous Disney executive when asked why so
many leading directors make R-rated films when PG-13 films are the
most financially successful: "You can't get directors of the
caliber of Anthony Minghella, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin
Tarantino to work on movies designed to get kids to buy toys and
drag their parents to theme parks. And these are the directors who
win Academy Awards."
We're watching the Teaching Company course "Human Prehistory and
the First Civilizations", taught by Prof. Brian M. Fagan. It is a
good course, but 1) it could use more maps showing the topography
at various times, and 2) someone needs to go over pronunciation
with Prof. Fagan. He mispronounces a lot of words, including
skeletal, motif, archetype, and diaspora. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power
of conversation but not the power of speech.
-- George Bernard Shaw