/* ** ************************************************************************* ** ************************************************************************* ** The Non-Sequitur Express ** Published at random intervals by Phillip Thorne ** Volume 3, Issue 10: Tuesday, 11 September 2001 ** http://nsx.underbase.org/ ** ** "Perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency -- ** a warning of the things to come." ** ************************************************************************* ** ************************************************************************* */ OBSERVATIONS & C: WTC attacks, "Battlefield Earth" and Fictionwise deals. ERRATA & O+A+A: Ad banners, specie, superheroes, clouds. ANALYSIS: Movie channel repeats. REVIEW: Toonami Special Edition music videos. UPCOMING: "Yu-gi-oh!", "E:FC" dropped. plus Legalese, acknowledgements and opt-in/out instructions. http://nsx.underbase.org/ - back issues http://nsx.underbase.org/index_plus.htm - synopses, reviews, analyses, etc. http://nsx.underbase.org/tv/ - Philadelphia and network TV listings mailto://nsx-discuss-l@underbase.org - post on this issue (if subscribed) http://www.underbase.org/ - additional databases /* *************************************************************************** ** OBSERVATIONS & COGITATIONS ** The World Trade Center attacks and TV disaster boredom ** America: unvaccinated against terrorism ** Of course it could be worse! ** Ubiquitous handguns for anti-hijacking ** "Battlefield Earth" prop auction and Fictionwise e-book discounts ** ************************************************************************ */ "There has never been an act of terrorism on US territory." That line was being used to advertise the latest Tom Clancy novel-to-movie in 1993, when the parking lot of the Manhattan World Trade Center was bombed. Today we had a further demonstration of insults to architectural structural integrity, when a pair of hijacked airliners first crashed into the upper floors of each tower, which merely wounded them; then burned for two hours, which weakened the steel sufficiently to collapse the floors above, causing a chain-reaction overload and wedding-cake killing blow. Of course, some as-yet-undetermined large number of people have also been killed, tower workers who couldn't evacuate and emergency personnel who were caught beneath kilotons of falling debris; but the physical failure modes of humans are well-understood. That probably sounds terribly insensitive, but that's what years of TV coverage (and movie depiction) of natural (and unnatural) disasters does to you -- volcano, flood, earthquake, asteroid strike, falling aircraft; the *cause* isn't relevant to the victims, or to the news crews. It's all spectacle. If a viewer doesn't have a personal stake in the catastrophe, it's just another Bad Thing happening to Someone Else, an outlet for the same morbid curiosity that causes "gaper delays" near highway auto accidents, a welcome change in the daily routine. A Good Person is supposed to *feel* something for the victims, right? Some empathy? And if you don't, you're halfway to being a psychotic, perhaps? I prefer to think that today's mass media is (are?) simply an ineffective medium for conveying tragedy. *** Some news commentators have blamed the as-yet-undetermined terrorists for "destroying America's sense of security". Hello? It's a *false* sense of security, it has been for years; the country has just lucked out till now. People have a short memory, limited attention and more immediate issues to spend them on; that's just psychology. The country's physical and social structures are built for peace, not battle; whether the antagonist be hurricane, power loss, disease or explosive strike. Economy and efficiency mean cutting certain safety margins when they don't seem relevant. Today's masthead is from "Q Who?", the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode in which Q introduces the _Enterprise_ to the unstoppable Borg. "I appreciate the lesson, Q," says Picard afterward, "But could it not have been learned without the loss of eighteen of my crew?" "If you can't take a little risk, then maybe you should run home and hide under your bed," the superbeing sneers. "It's not safe out here, Picard." Later, the captain considers the Federation's record of technological and political supremacy in his corner of the galaxy, and the sudden painful disabusal of that security. *** Mid-day, one CNN on-the-scene reporter extemporized, "I can't imagine it being worse". He was either being diplomatic or terribly unimaginative. Anyone who reads poli-mil thrillers, SF, or security briefings can imagine more dire situations: * The towers are hit a few weeks earlier, during summer vacation, when they're full of tourists. * The second tower is hit immediately after the first, allowing no ten- minute partial evacuation. * The towers are hit at a lower floor, blocking escape routes for a greater percentage of occupants. * The towers topple like trees instead of collapse like cakes, crushing nearby blocks. (Instead, debris and fires have caused nearby buildings to self-collapse.) * Biological or chemical warfare agents are released at the time of the crashes. * Subways are hit. * Major internet nodes are hit. The ancient Chinese curse of "may you live in interesting times" is often cited at moments like this. (That's a truly frightening statement in a society that prides itself on kiloyear stability.) SF fans with more ennui than sense sometimes point at the "interesting" events in their favorite old shows, time-pegged to the current-formerly-remote day, and ask: "Where's Khan Singh and his Eugenics Wars?" (Star Trek) "Why is the moon still in orbit?" (Space:1999) "Why aren't we having the global unification wars after the Visitor crashed?" (Macross and Robotech) *** One of my coworkers has suggested that, were handgun control laws different, and airline passengers were armed, hijackings wouldn't work. Possibly. The counterarguments include: it doesn't matter how bullets riddle the hijacker if he's already killed the pilots. A few bullets in the wrong place and suddenly the plane is a convertible. Air rage is far more prevalent than terrorist hijackings, and a disgruntled drunken passenger isn't likely to consider consequences. *** If you were unlucky, you've seen "Battlefield Earth", the 2000 Warner Bros. SF movie based on the first half of an L.Ron Hubbard novel, in which humans, enslaved for a millenium by the mercantilist alien Psychlos, rebel, retake Earth, and (just for good measure) incinerate the Psychlo homeworld with its flammable atmosphere. If you were very unlucky, you paid for the privilege. Or perhaps you're an optimist and considered it an opportunity to mistify (ie MST-ify, to heckle the film in the style of "Mystery Science Theater 3000"). Regardless, perhaps you've always wanted to own some of the props for the production. Now's your chance! I grabbed this from the freebies table at this past weekend's WorldCon: a flyer for "the official, limited time [online] auction featuring every movie prop available", by battlefieldearth.com and hosted by Yahoo!, on 12-sep- 2001. If you're a costumer, perhaps the boots, rubber space guns, space suits, Psychlo wigs or Psychlo noseplugs (ugh!) interest you. If you prefer SFX, there are spacecraft and city models. Also, fake rats. AND WHAT'S MORE! (ta da!), spend over $100 and get a free softback copy of the novel! (I haven't been able to confirm this on battlefieldearth.net (the movie), battlefieldearth.com (the book and ancillary products), or auctions.yahoo.com. And if you were wondering, yes, Hubbard was opposed to standard psychology and business practice; and he wasn't subtle about it in his books.) Another freebie flyer: through 12-sep-2001, e-bookseller Fictionwise is offering 25% discounts for WorldCon attendees. [www.fictionwise.com/worldcon.htm ] /* *************************************************************************** ** ERRATA & OMISSIONS, ADDENDA & ADMISSIONS ** Web banner ads ** Superman, vigilantiism, chateaux ** Superhero novels ** Clouds, fug, tornadoes ** ************************************************************************ */ Issue 3.8 (14-aug) posits the demise of the Web banner ad as a viable revenue source (and the desperate/annoying measures to reinvigorate it). Reader JA (on 14-aug) has two comments. He first points out that the Web industry is only about five years old --but I reply: according to much- ballyhooed "Internet Time", a count of evolution events, it's *not* that young. JA second mentions that many buyers merely use a website for research, then purchase from a brick-and-mortar store; according to a new recognition of this pattern, a website shouldn't be expected to pay for itself any more than does a *single ad* in a traditional medium. Issue 3.8 relates my golden-dollar-not-accepted experience at a local gelato place. JA did some research (URLs below), and found a relevant statute: Section 102 of the Coinage Act of 1965, which stipulates that "all coins and currencies of the United States" are legal tender for all *debts*. This does not include *goods and services*, point out the US Treasury and the author of the Urban Legends Reference. [ http://www.ustreas.gov/opc/opc0081.html#legal%20tender ] -- "FAQ About the Legal Tender Status of Currency Notes" [ http://www.snopes2.com/business/money/penny.htm ] Issue 3.8 speculates as to Superman's legal justification for imprisoning interstellar criminals at his Fortress of Solitude. JA cites the appeal of *vigilantiism* to Americans. On a separate Super-topic, he continues: There's an interesting parallel between superheroes with their lairs and the aristocracy [...] and their chateaux or, as we like to say in the States, compounds, ranches, or second white houses. For those who enjoy the acts of creation behind the superhero genre, JA recommends Michael Chabon's 2000 novel _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay_; and for those who enjoy serious comic books (excuse me, "graphic novels"), he further recommends Art Spiegelman's _Maus: A Survivor's Tale_. (My high school library actually carried that.) Both are set in WWII and are Pulitzer winners in Fiction (2001 and 1992, respectively). [ http://www.pulitzer.org ] Issue 3.8 continues the exploration of the question, "clouds are usually a phenomenon of the unattainable sky, but do they ever visibly link heaven and earth?" I suggested *tornado funnels* as one variety of cloud that *does*. JA considers *fog* a valid example, but I do not; a fog bank lacks a boundary that resembles a cumulus cloud. (Or more specifically, I myself have never seen such.) The two might appear identical from the *inside*, but pre-tech mytho-science authors aren't likely to flying TWA through the latter. JA continues: It's not clear that a funnel cloud is a cloud: I would say, as a midwesterner by birth, that it's a cloud with a funnel. The lower part is an atmospheric disturbance caused by a thermal inversion, not so much a suspension of water droplets in the air. We may be splitting hairs, if not driving them into trees. A relevant book, mentioned on NPR this Sunday, is science writer Richard Hambyln's _The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies_, a biography of Luke Howard, the 18cen amateur who defined the terms (cirrus, cumulo-nimubs, etc.) we still use. /* *************************************************************************** ** ANALYSIS ** In heavy rotation: movies on cable ** ************************************************************************ */ If you examine the NSX TV listings (at http://nsx.underbase.org/tv/) in Show mode, you'll notice certain movies sentenced to heavy rotation on particular channel. I'm not the only one to note this phenomenon, as an article by Rick Bentley of the _Fresno Bee_ (syndicated in my local paper on 30-jun- 2001) attests. He notes that, for mar-2001: HBO Signature repeated its 65 titles an average of ~5 times, 6 of them 9 times. Starz and HBO each showed one title 13 times. The nine premium channels in the AT&T Broadband (ATTB) lineup showed 1178 unique films, the equivalent of three years output of all the studios in Hollywood. Assuming 31 days, 24-hour programming and 2 hours per movie, the published unique-title numbers imply repeat-counts as below: Number of different titles on each channel (or cluster) in mar-2001: Channel Titles Avg.repeats --------------- ------ ----------- MoreMAX: 214 1.7 Cinemax: 197 1.9 HBO Plus: 111 3.4 HBO standard: 88 4.2 HBO Signature: 65 5.7 HBO total: 264 ATTB 9 premium: 1178 2.8 --------------- ------ ----------- /* *************************************************************************** ** REVIEW: ** Toonami Special Edition Music Videos ** Sat-01-Sep-2001-00:00, 60-min ** ************************************************************************ */ Thanks to Disney's "Fantasia" and MTV, the "music video" has become a ubiquitous modern artform: stirring visuals set to a musical soundtrack, sans dialogue, often telling a story. At animé conventions, the music video exhibition is one of the most popular events. In this variant, clips from one or more animé (or animé-themed video games, etc.) are selected to thematically complement the lyrics of the soundtrack. TCN (The Cartoon Network) has adopted the technique as a promotional tool. Many a commercial break features a three-minute musical interlude compiled from TCN-owned footage -- not just animé, but also American series. (And occasionally there's even original animation.) Whether the schedulers are perhaps just seeking to plug gaps caused by aggressive editing of offensive material, or voids left unfilled by paid advertisements, I can't say. This past Labor Day weekend, a one-hour "Toonami Special Edition" aired, featuring three of the TCN videos from its afternoon Toonami block, plus eight original videos. The program's organization is show below: Title Group --------------------------------- --------- Act 1 Walking Stick (Mad Rhetoric) Toonami Act 2 One More Time Daft Punk New Dynamic Daft Punk Digital Love Daft Punk Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Daft Punk Act 3 Ignition (Advanced Robotics) Toonami Broken Promise (Dreams) Toonami Act 4 Tomorrow Loves Today Gorillaz 19/2000 Gorillaz Clint Eastwood Gorillaz Act 5 Hellbent Kenna The Making of "Samurai Jack" Infomercial --------------------------------- --------- The four "Daft Punk" videos form a coherent story: an alien rock band plays for their fans, then attracts the notice of kidnappers, who are pursued by a fan in his guitar-shaped starship; finally they're transformed into humans with edited memories. The casual viewer will think, "those characters look like they were lifted straight from 'Starblazers'", and "that's a lot of high-quality animation for a music video". The animator was, in fact, the legendary Leiji Matsumoto, creator of "Captain Harlock" and "Space Battleship Yamato". So claims the Toonami website; which also identifies boosts the "hit album" of the "revolutionary electronic music duo". It's a pity the music was awful. The four segments are available online as streaming video, for 56k or broadband. [ http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/toonami/alliance/index.html ] While the four Daft Punk videos at least had attractive animation, the three "Gorillaz" videos were entirely painful, in music, character design and style; their only redeeming moment was an attempt by the four slacker characters to blow up a giant moose encountered on their Hot Wheels-like highway. Whack-a-mole, Nuke-a-moose? The last video was rendered in clay animation (Claymation(tm) is a trademark of Will Vinton Studios). It features a grey humanoid creature in a city of identical grey towers, with his depressing grey life working at a grey factory, building a consumer product called Happy. He has dreams of brightly-colored children on a playground spinner and finally invents a set of goggles that turn the world pastel and paisley (and are powered by the golden sparklies from the furnace in his belly). The goggles are sold as Bliss, he's hailed as the greatest inventor ever, he runs the factory; but he's unhappy again and his belly is dark. /* *************************************************************************** ** UPCOMING ** "Yu-gi-oh!" on KidsWB ** "Earth: Final Conflict" dropped by SFC. ** ************************************************************************ */ For all the critical acclaim American animation fans heap upon Japanese animé, their corporate creators are just as mercenary as Disney or Warner Bros. -- sometimes more so. We complain of "half-hour toy commercials"; Japan keeps rolling out the ads for card games and electronic pocket creatures. An article in the fri-31-aug-2001 edition of _USA Today_ (by César G. Soriano) explains one of the latest imports, "Yu-Gi-Oh!" Five years ago: a /manga/. Then, playing cards, video games, and animé. Mood: darker than Pokémon. Target: preteens to college students. Premise: geeky high school freshman is given ancient Egyptian puzzle by grandfather, morphs into alter-ego, defeats bullies. The second half of the URL translates the first: YugiohKingOfGames.com *** As of last week (mon-3-sep-2001), SFC has removed "Earth: Final Conflict" from their weeknight schedule, replacing it with "Tales from the Crypt". There was no fanfare around the change (just as with the demise "Now & Again"), and the listings at tv.excite.com and my local newspaper weren't notified. /* ************************************************************************ ** Legalese ** Acknowledgments ** Opt-in/out Instructions ** *********************************************************************** */ The set of creative works herein reviewed and analyzed, including the subset {books, movies, TV shows, toys}, are the property of their respective copyright holders. No infringement or endorsement is expressed, implied or intended. The original reviews and analyses are themselves copyright 2001 by Phillip Thorne. In this issue, certain data (possibly not otherwise acknowledged) have been obtained, aggregated and synthesized from: Amazon.com books and videos amazon.com The Warner Bros. movie battlefieldearth.net The book battlefieldearth.com The Cartoon Network and Toonami cartoonnetwork.com Excite TV tv.excite.com Fictionwise e-Books fictionwise.com The _Fresno Bee_ The Pulitzer Prizes pulitzer.org The Sci-Fi Channel scifi.com _USA Today_ If you're receiving this newsletter, you've probably intentionally subscribed to it, or possibly you're interested in special topical coverage, or maybe I've sent you a teaser issue. To subscribe, email nsx@underbase.org with the words "SUBSCRIBE NON-SEQUITUR" in the subject line and/or body. To unsubscribe, use the same address but the phrase "UNSUBSCRIBE NON-SEQUITUR". Capitalization and punctuation are irrelevant, since there's still absolutely no automation behind the subscription process. Publisher: nsx@underbase.org Newsletter: nsx-l@underbase.org nsx-l-subscribe (to subscribe; blank subject) nsx-l-unsubscribe (to unsubscribe) Discussion list: nsx-discuss-l@underbase.org nsx-discuss-l-subscribe (to subscribe; blank subject) nsx-discuss-l (to post) nsx-discuss-l-unsubscribe (to unsubscribe) /* *************************************************************************** ** *************************************************************************** ** The Non-Sequitur Express ** http://nsx.underbase.org/ ** Volume 3, Issue 10: Tuesday, 11 September 2001 ** Copyright 1999-2001 Phillip Thorne, nsx@underbase.org ** *************************************************************************** ** ************************************************************************ */