My Avatar Review

Yeah, I know.  I haven’t seen the movie, yet, but they say there are no new stories under the sun, and I’ve seen more movies that I can count. (Really.  I’m not that good at counting.)

There is enough information in the media (if you can believe the media) that I think it’s a pretty easy task to piece this movie together.

First, let’s look at the Director.

James Cameron, being Canadian and all, is going to be polite.  His track record is clear; he makes polite movies.

Look at the Terminator movies. Thought by many to be smorgasbords of excess violence, are rife with politeness.

“I’ll be back.” How polite is that?  No wondering, it’s factual  information of intent.  Beautiful. And helpful to those of us waiting, wondering if he will be back.

–== Ten minutes later ==–

Okay, I just checked the dialogue of almost every other movie he has directed and that seems to be the sum total of politeness. Are we sure James Cameron is Canadian?

Anyway.

This, the culmination of his career (if you are to believe the press), is an allegorical tale of galactic proportions.  Or something like that. (If I can’t count, how do you expect me to know what ‘allegorical’ means?)

I’ve seen the trailer, and while the visuals are stunning, I didn’t actually notice the 3D effect that’s been touted far and wide.  I even tried watching it with my polarised prescription Ray Bans (product placement, guys. Everyone does product placements these days) and still, flat as Kiera Knightly.

The army guys are tough looking, the aircraft are suitably futuristic but I do have one complaint about the movie.

I’ve been a fan of Smurfs for decades and consider myself a bit of an expert on the subject, so I feel confident in saying Cameron’s got them all wrong.  Smurfs are short.  Three apples tall, to be exact, and unless apples are four feet in diameter on Pandora, he’s blundered horribly with this aspect of the story. The Smurfs are still forest dwellers, love adventure and are essentially identical, but the CG has let Cameron down.  They are far too tall and, dare I say it, far too sexy (Smurfs should emphatically NOT look like Neytiri)

Seriously.  Smurf woodies?  No way.

Aside from that, I predict a successful run for this independent feature, pulling in at least $10 million at the box office.  I’ll probably catch it over the holidays, right after I see the kids movie ‘Paranormal Activities, which I hear is a sequel to the Scooby Doo movies.

Catch you later, and grab me some popcorn.

The World Cup 2010

Ah…

Another four years have passed.

The last World Cup, in Germany, was the first for Australia in years, and only the second ever.  The Socceroos qualified last for that World Cup.

They (ahem, WE) got through the Group Stage by luck and Cahill and were snuffed out in the Round of 16 by a cynical dive by an Italian player I prefer not to name.  The resulting penalty, on the final whistle, was heartbreaking.  Three and a half years later and I still can’t bear to watch that match.

This year the Socceroos were the second team of 32 to qualify for the World Cup, close on the heels of Japan.

Australia is in a group with Germany, Ghana and Serbia.  It will be a very difficult group to get through, particularly with the first game being against third ranked Germany.

The tournament will be held in South Africa this time, kicking off on June 11, 2010 and ending with the Final on July 11.

It should be one helluva month.

NaNoWriMo

Wow. NaNoWriMo win.

It took 22 days (I didn’t start until the fifth) but I’ve got my 50,000 words, and then some. 

Some words are in are paragraphs that will need revising to expand to a couple of pages. 

Some of the dialogue wouldn’t qualify for an Ed Wood movie.

But I have a beginning, a middle and an end.  I have good guys that turn out bad.  I have bad guys that turn out good. 

Characters die. Others fall in love.  I tried to make sure that both of those things didn’t happen to the same character.

I’ve written half a dozen short stories and three attempts at novels (not including this one) and this is the first time that I let it flow without using an outline.  The engineer in me always needed an outline.  There wasn’t time to do an outline, this time.

 The premise wasn’t clear until about the 10k mark. 

I wasn’t sure exactly how the crime was committed until the 40k mark, when the second killer described it to a colleague.  He was explaining it to me also.

I had one major character that was either going to die in a spray of gunfire, or go undercover for the cops and feds.  Didn’t find out how that would play out until the second last page.

After I shine this up as best I can and submit it for the Debut Dagger I will write another, and I think I’ll do it the same way as this – no outline, some basic characters, and a crime.

And see what happens.

But for now I need to sleep.

Why Americans should adopt the metric system, or, ‘Do it for the Aliens’

This thought came to me the other day, and I think it has merit.  Not just some merit, but real merit.

Fact number one: Aliens predominantly land their craft in the United States of America. I don’t know why.  Maybe they crave White Castle.  Sure, a few land in Australia, but with all the strange animals in this country, I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody even noticed them.

Fact number two: We all know what happens when the bad aliens visit.  The documentaries ‘Mars Attacks’, ‘Independence Day’ and ‘Plan 9 From outer Space’ were clear. Serious shit will happen.  There’s nothing we will be able to do about that.

This leaves us with the situation that occured to me the other day.

If, no, when, the friendly aliens land, the odds are enormous, HUGE that they will land in the USA. It would be foolish to bet against it.

Listen up Americans! This is how it will go down!

Friendly Alien (let’s call him/her  ”FA” for simplicity) will land on this beautiful blue-green globe somewhere just outside of Roswell, Nevada if past trends are any indication.

FA will be bursting with incredible information, eager to share the wealth of technology from his home planet, like hover-boards, mobile phones with a week long battery life and breakfast cereal that doesn’t go soggy after it’s been sitting in milk for more than 30 seconds.

There is a catch, though.  FA isn’t authorised to share his bounty of technology unless he deems the recipient to be worthy, good and intelligent.

I personally know a lot of Americans.  Six, I think, maybe seven, and based on that broad population base I’m confident that the average American (let’s call the average American AA for brevity) is worthy good and intelligent.

But image how FA will see it.

We pick up the conversation just after AA realises this isn’t a ‘Mars Attacks’ moment.

———————————-

“Welcome to earth, Friendly Alien”

“Average American, thank you and please call me FA.  May I ask you some basic questions so I can understand how this world works?”

“No problem FA, and for expediency you can call me AA.  Fire away.”

“Okay, AA, first things first.  The numbering system you use is…?”

“Base 10.” (AA was a recent college graduate, luckily)

“Okay, so 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and then repeat?”

“Exactly.”

“Fantastic.  So what is the basic unit of distance”

“Oh, I guess that would be an inch.”

“What’s an ‘inch’?”

AA thought and then replied  ”In historical times it was defined as the length of three barleycorns laid end to end.”

FA thought for a second and frowned. “Oh, I see.” He didn’t  ”And the next increment up?”

“That would be a foot.”

FA smiled.  ”So, with the base 10 math you use, a foot would be 30 barleycorns, or 10 inches.”

“No, a foot is twelve inches.”

FA, at this point, would be sure to surreptitiously check the earthling’s hands to see if there were actually 6 fingers on each rather than the 5 one would expect with a base 10 numerical system. He would only see the expected 5 per.

“Unexpected, earthling.  So do 12 feet make the next step change?”

“No. Three feet make a yard.”

“A yard?”

“Yes.  Three feet equals one yard.”

At this point FA is ready to abandon earth and all his inhabitants, but it’s alike a hover-car crash – he just couldn’t pull his three eyes away. “So what do three yards make?  Or is it twelve yards?”

AA would be truly, truly embarrassed for his country at this point.  ”Neither.  One thousand, seven hundred and sixty yards make a mile, the next measurement level.”

FA shakes his head. He sticks he thumb in his ear and speaks into his pinky. “Zaphod?  Yeah, it’s me.  Beam me up. There’s no inelligent life down here.” then he would compose himself for the transport.

AA would no doubt yell out to the shimmering, disappearing form “Be glad you didn’t ask me about time, with 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and a seemingly random number of days  in a month!”

—————————————————————

See, my American friends?  It’s only a matter of time, and if you don’t adopt the metric system before the friendly aliens appear, you will be forced to explain the absolutely ridiculous systems that you have now, and will forever lose the opportunity to have snap-crackley-poppy cereal all day.

And hoverboards

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

My formative years – Summer ‘78

I’ve told you about the first part of the summer of ‘78. I was low slug on the totem pole at McDonald in Regina. Look for a post called Ice Check on 3.

I quit that job, a career, if I was to believe Bob the Manager, when I saw an ad in the local paper (the Regina Leader Post) advertising for healthy younguns (aged 16 to 20, I believe) to join the Naval Reserves.

In the middle of the bald-assed praries.

The pay was almost double what McDonalds paid and frankly that was motivation enough.  My dad was in the military, in the Air Force, but at that time, becoming a military guy wasn’t in my plans.  I was going to the U of Regina at the end of the summer to start an undergrad engineering program, and the summer was all about the moola.

So.

I had to cut my hair short (if you’ve seen my graduation pictures you’ll know that I could have provided enough hair for half a dozen throw cushions), had to wear a uniform, and had to keep my shoes super shiny (thank to Amway, that was an easy cheat).

On the plus side, the group, the Naval Reserve Summer Student Training Program (NRSSTP) was exactly 50% female.

It was also, strangely enough, 50% lefties. Found that out later.

And after a few weeks at the base in Regina, learning that left comes before right, and that we all have to do it at the same time, and that scuffed boots = way too many push ups, we headed out to do real fun stuff.

I learned how to field strip both the SMG (fancy name for a sub machine gun) and the 9mm handgun that the military used. SMG was a piece of cake.  It had three moving pieces, not including the cartridges.  The 9mm, not so easy, but easy enough I didn’t kill myself after I put it together and shot it.

Yup, you read that right.  Had a ball shooting 9mm and SMG’s at a firing range.  Killed so  many paper targets you’d think that Green Peace would be hunting me down.

And we spent many weeks ‘camping’.  Living in tents, learning how to sail, trying to find ways to annoy the hell out of the commander (a ginger-bearded wanker that needed a good kick in the ass, if I remember correctly).

A couple of high points:

First, the attempted kidnapping. The commander, as I said, was a jerk.  Not only did he love getting us up at the crack of dawn on these camping deals, for no apparent reason other than to wake us up, he forbad us from drinking, but we knew he had a stash.

The plan: At one o the nightly campfire, singalong bullshit sessions three of us, me, Steve Vollhoffer (where ARE you, man?) and an Asian guy whose name I think was William (played incredible guitar) snuck out and snagged a stretcher from the sick bay tent. The stretcher had little legs.  William and I were in the commanders tent, digging little trenches to accomodate the stretchers legs.  The air mattress and sleeping bag would go on top and Commander Dickwad wouldn’t notice.  Steve V. was outside on lookout (he had a cast on his nose from a previous ‘fun’ time. Used t as a diversion)

Halfway through digging the trench, the commander came back to his tent. If Steve hadn’t been outside I would have been kicked out that night. William and I sat, petrified both emotionally and physically while Steve managed to draw the commander away.  As soon as it was clear we bugged out of there.

Had we been successful, the commander, after falling asleep in a drunken stupor, would have been strapped to the stretcher and carried to the top of the nearest hill to wake with the morning sun. We all would have been in supreme shit, but it would have been worth it.

Second memorable (sort of) time. Commander Nutbuster declared that on night was a ’social’ night.  A group of reservists would go into the nearest town and secure ‘two beer each, maximum’.

Killjoy.

The aforementioned Steve Vollhoffer was on that duty and he asked me if I wanted to split a mickey (13 ounces, I think) of rum.  I was just learning to enjoy rum and coke, and it sounded like a great idea.

He cam back with the rest of the group, pulled me to one side and showed me the Captain Morgan bottle.  Yippee.

Now we couldn’t sit around the campfire drinking rum and coke of Commander Snotbag had only approved ‘two beers each’ so we ducked down to the lake with the mickey and a quart of coke (all pre-metric days, or just after metric days). Drank enough of the coke to fit the rum in the coke bottle, mixed it in the coke bottle then split it.  In about 5 minutes.

We didn’t want to get caught.

I have extremely hazy memories of the rest of that night.  I remember getting back to the camp fire.  I remember taking a puff on  cigarette and almost barfing from it (or the rum, hard to say but it put me off smoking for the past 32 years), and I remember, dimly, others drunker than you’d expect from 2 beer.

Commander Snakeballs obviously knew that there were many violators of the two beer guideline, and woke us up extra early the next morning.

You know what a bo’sun’s pipe is? That whistle thing they use on ships? There’s a different tweet for every occasion and the low-hiiiiiiiiiigh-low tweet for morning revelry would have been bad enough. But on that extra-special morning he had two sailors blow the pipe.

There’s no way trained musicians could get the same pitch out of two of those. Two hung over sailor reservists didn’t have a chance.  The beating of the two not-in-tune noes coming from those pipes almost brought me, and half the platoon, to our knees.

You could almost see the smile on Commander Poopy-head’s face

NaNoWriMo Update

[Update: I've passed the half way point. Things are building nicely, but I need to add some tension and forestall the inevitable slow bits that fill the middle parts of my writing. A main character (or two, because I'm not sure how the ricochet will travel) will be shot very soon. Don't worry, they'll live, but one may never play the piano again.

Come to think of it, she can't play it now, so no loss.]

————————————————————————————————————–>

Well, this is a blast.  I’m sitting a couple of hundred words behind my nanowrimo scheduled target of 21,667 words.  Need a mental plot break, so I’m going to spend it updating you all here.

This experience has been very cool.  I know I’m not a published writer, bit I am a writer.  I write.  You probably write, and therefore you can claim writer status yourself.

Previous writing experiences have been completely different than this.  I’d sit down, pen in hand, and actually plot out a skeleton of the story, like a wire frame on which I could hang characterisations and descriptions.

But because of the pell-mell nature of NaNoWriMo, it’s growing as I write. Avenues I didn’t even know were on the map are popping up on a daily basis.

I started (five days late) with the name Scary Barry (the title). Had no idea who he was, why he was dead, face down in an alley in Miami.

Since then, his mob connections have come to light, a relationship between the middle aged Detective, Artie, and the delightful Coroner Samantha has developed, an FBI agent specialising in Organised Crime has inserted himself, and Artie’s shiftless brother Simon is poking his nose into things.

Just yesterday I found out that Scary Barry was actually killed with curare, and the brick to the head wasn’t really necessary.

What’s going on here?

I guess I’ll let you know as soon as I know.

Must go now.  Simon needs a beating.

NaNoWriMo

Apparently this has been going on for years.  I just found out about it a couple of days ago.

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNaWriMo.

The objective is to write a novel during November.  Not necessarily a good novel, but a novel.  The guidelines are straight forward.

To recap from the NaNoWriMo site:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time.

Who: You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

As of today, there are over 517 million words written as a part of this contest.  It’s a slam dunk guarantee that not all of them are good words.

I love this idea.  There’s no time to spend on extensive plotting or character development.  It’s just write, write, write.

I was made aware of this contest on the 5th of November on Twitter.  Richard Castle, a fictional charater from a pretty good TV show, posted the following:

If I had started this on the 1st, I’d only need to write an average of 1,667 word a day to get to my goal of 50k by the 30th.  Since I’ve started late, I’ve got a bit of catching up to do. (I expect I’ll be caught up this evening.)

Since it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll be able to neatly wrap up everything on the 50 thousandth word, I’m allocating 2000 or so words a day, once I get caught up, to give me some leeway.

It’s been interesting so far.  What started out as a run of the mill murder mystery has had mob killings, FBI, Witness Protection and a fledgling relationship between the lead detective and the Chief Coroner show up, and I’m less than a quarter of the way through.

Who knows what may happen.

But I will get to the 50,000+ words, and then some, and when I do, I’ll post the final results.

You can follow my progress here.

Mark your calendars and bookmark their site.  Give it a go next year.

Toes Go In First (or TGIF).

Ah, another Friday.  Entry way to the weekend.  And a Hallowe’en weekend at that.

It’s been a very busy week, readers.  A couple of weeks ago I volunteered to be on the committee for my son’s football club.  There was an almost clean sweep of committee members and somebody with web building experience was needed.  I like mucking around with that kind of stuff so I put my hand up.

Last Monday evening was the first committee meeting.  It started at 7:30 and I expected it to go to 9:30, max.  We finished up at midnight.  But man, did we accomplish a lot.

Since then I’ve been going nuts updating the site with trial information, committe members, coaching staff, player development and building templates for the team sheets.  In other words,  having a ball.

If you’re at all interested, the site is here.

And during my day job, the one that puts the food on the table, we’re in the last week of putting tender response information together for a REALLY big deal.  Not that I was involved in that very much, but enough to make the days fly.

So, welcome, weekend.  You’re long overdue.

 

On writing…

This writing thing (which, by the way, hasn’t paid a red cent to my bank account, yet I remain eternally optimistic) produces some interesting surprises.

Like, for example, this short story I was – still am, actually – working on (and will be sending off to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine later this week).

I was stuck for a couple of weeks. No doubt due to the extremely high leveles of codeine and mucus in my system, but, still, stuck.  I knew who did it (the ex-husband), I knew how (it was an embezzelment frame up) and I had a fairly good way of wrapping things up.

But it was too easy.

I needed a few more road blocks to the final conclusion.  A couple of reddish herrings and therefore a couple of additional characters.

The first one, a huge Eddie Izzard fan, was easy to setup, string along for a couple thousand words then summarily dismiss as ‘not the guy’.

But the second one, well, he tricked me.  I set him up as a character that shows up to warn off our protagonist with threats of bodily harm, and ended up with him actually helping resolve the case.  It was weird, like he jumped in and rearranged things without my advanced knowledge.  And I really like they way it worked out.

I had no plans for this guy, other than to provide an additional hurdle, but now, I think, he’s going to show up in future short stories.  He’s growing on me.

So, whenever I get stuck, from now on, I’m going to remember this guy, and just let it flow.

Blogging on the go

WordPress has created an App to allow blog owners (on WordPress, natch) to blog from their iPhone or, as is the case in this entry, from the iPod Touch.

This is just a sample. It’s limited in that it’s not possible to embed photos, or if it is I haven’t discovered how, yet. Plus typing with the iPod pseudo keyboard isn’t the swiftest task in the world.

But it’s free. You can’t complain too much about free stuff.