Voyage begins

So maybe I'll restart this blog with an ending.

Sarah and I finished watching Star Trek: Voyager a couple nights ago. It didn't catch my interest while it was on. I distinctly remember my college roommate Rob watching, I think it was the black-and-white pulp episode.

Like all the Star Treks it had highs and lows. There were truly sublime episodes, like the one where two people are fused into one joint body and personality by a transporter accident, or the one where the crew go to work on a factory planet, or the one with the perfect prison, or the one where the crew is observed by aliens through the eyes of the doctor. And there were truly stupid ones, like the one with the big ball of water, or the space race, or the one with the self-aware ship. I actually called the entire plot of that last one from the cold open, you have to admit it's completely predictable.

I just noticed a pattern here. I loved all the doctor episodes (and more) and hated all the Tom Paris episodes. Similarly, loved Seven and Janeway episodes, hated B'Elanna and Chakotay episodes. Tuvok, Neelix, and Kim were somewhat hit or miss.

It was Star Trek, so there were Borg episodes and Q episodes and special appearances by the crew of the Next Generation and lots and lots of time traveling. And the techno-jargon got to me this time. I can't remember how many times I guffawed at officers solving problems by "trying a recursive algorithm". (For non-computer-scientists, this is a very fundamental way to write extremely simple functions.) There was a lot of reversing of shield polarity, subspace and gravimetric distortions, tachyons, and warp signatures. I even found a website that generates the babble.

I would up or down episodes early, and almost always be right. This annoyed Sarah immensely.

I had so many problems with the technologies the crew did and didn't have that I made it a personal snowclone: "They don't have X in the 24th century?" And tried to work it into every episode. It wasn't hard: body armor, personal shields, independent power sources, file permissions (there's one episode where Tom Paris rewrites a holo-novel written by the doctor without authorization), backups, lifestreaming, surveillance systems. These simple technologies, presumably ubiquitous, would have broken entire episodes.

Sarah's (or my) personal favorite was an episode where the ship shut down the warp core and main power and wandered around with flashlights stuck to their hands. So I said, "They don't have glowing glow globes in the 24th century?" Everybody knows, of course, that a glowing glow globe is a ball that floats in the middle of a room and sheds light on all angles. It has an independent power source and can float and glow for a long time. But I think all Sarah really heard was that I had said three different consecutive words that all start with 'glo'.

Despite these disadvantages (or lovable hangups), every two or three episodes one would come along that blew your socks off. And that's what Star Trek's really always been about.

At its warm heart, the show was about adrift people trying to get home, and their personal voyages of self-discovery and growth. It worked on that deep level for me most of the time. Sarah and I miss it already.

The end of Lost (with obscure spoiler alert)

I was fooled. I really thought in the last episode we were going to learn the golden light held a nanobot cloud from the future, trapped on the island by The Incident, which became sentient when the nameless one floated into the cave. And the crash was intended to unwind the events folded in and out of time, so that one timeline didn't happen (explaining the parallel time streams). Et cetera.

The masterful head fake when they flashed back to Season 1 finding the stones in the cave led me to believe we were coming to a final clash of good and evil of King-ian proportions, one that had indeed been planned from the beginning. In other words, a genre story. But instead, they punted on all the major story elements in cussworthy fashion.

The comparison to The Prisoner is apt. Remember when Rover takes off in the rocket ship? I thought we were going to see the smoke monster do something very similar. And Sawyer says "I'll be seeing you" in the last episode too (apart from the credit sequence, probably the single most quotable and quoted line from The Prisoner). But the difference is that The Prisoner was episodic and every storyline resolved in the space of one hour. There is debate about which order to even watch the episodes in because there is so little continuity.

There can't be any such debate about the right order to watch Lost in. It was all so plotted and deliberate, or really (now) deliberate-looking. It was building. But in the end the climax fizzled out.

So on the one hand, I think people will be studying Lost the way they study great art. But I take it as kind of a failed experiment in making art without catharsis, and ultimately without the unities.

Neverwhere on Wii Netflix Streaming

I watched the mid-90s BBC miniseries version of Neverwhere tonight. It's six episodes written by Neil Gaiman, one of our great writers. The story is about the under-world of London Below, and what happens when Richard Mayhew is dragged into it as a result of an act of kindness.

I had read the book first, so I knew how it went, but it was still good. Sure, you have to look past the cramped scenery, the dingy lighting, and the constantly panning camera so characteristic of the BBC, but you also have to give credit to the fine British tradition of surreal, fantastic (in both senses) television.

I got to watch this gem on my Nintendo! We received a disc for Wii that allows us to stream Netflix to our television. Alex is watching the complete run of Blue's Clues. As I might have mentioned, I caught up on Lost this way. There's 30 Days, Mythbusters, Monty Python...

The only bummer, and it is a major bummer, is the major missing feature: search. Onlline, Netflix streaming has search that will get you to any title available. On the Wii, it doesn't exist. The best workaround is to put stuff in your queue when online, then use the Wii to watch it. I suppose you could use Wii Internet (and this probably will basically work), but it feels pretty clunky.

Adventures in Media I

I'll try to put my adventures in media all in one place, so you can skip them if you like.

The Prisoner
Where have you been all my life? Seriously, I am glad I ran across this last weekend. I haven't finished them all, but this is my kind of show. It's creepy, surreal, inventive, epic.

It's strange because I recognize a fair portion of the motifs from a Simpsons episode where Homer is taken to a sinister island because, as Mr X, he publishes an internet rumor that shows that he knows too much. The constant drugging, the replacement of number 2, even a cameo by the star.

You can see it on demand if you have Comcast. They provided all the episodes as a teaser for the AMC remake miniseries (looks like 6 episodes, starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen).

If you have been waiting for an excuse to buy a Blu-Ray player, it looks like they've remastered the entire series in surround sound, and since it was originally filmed in 35mm, in high-def as well. It's coming out tomorrow at my fair employer.

Anna Karenina
In the words of Apu, "Mmmm... that's some good adultery!"

I have been rereading the epic novels of my youth lately. Dune held up, no surprise there. The Belgariad actually suffered a bit on my reread, somewhat to my surprise. The Eye of the World, also surprisingly, remains pretty cracking good.

And then there's Anna. My copy is twelve years old now and it's a bit the worse for wear. I have to retape the preface again because the pages have ripped off and are falling away from the binding. The page edge is covered in transferred ink from fingers and hands that rested too long on the words. It's got six colors of ink on the pages. By any standards, I've defaced it beyond recognition.

What keeps me coming back? As I've grown, I've found this novel growing with me. Now that I'm a family man with a young son, the pressures and paradises of married life stand out more starkly to me in Anna. I continue to see myself in her and Levin.

Anna escapes from her bourgeois life into a more dangerous one. For that much, she has to be admired. The part of us that cries out for more than the world around us must be listened to. But what we escape into must be carefully decided. Anna's passion and lack of wisdom leads her down a dark road, but it could could have been otherwise.

Thom Yorke at the Orpheum
Thom Yorke, the lead singer/songwriter of Radiohead, has been touring with a rock band, including longtime producer Nigel Godrich on keyboards and Flea, the bassist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass. They are performing Yorke's solo material, including The Eraser album in its entirety, Radiohead B-sides and some new songs.

The new stuff will require some more listening (read: it's difficult, live)... but what they are doing to The Eraser is really fascinating. A somewhat methodical, bleeping and blooping "apocalyptic dance" album is transformed into wild rock.

I picked up the mp3s for one of the shows, so if you have trouble finding them, let me know and I'll post them.

Meanwhile, here is a study in contrasts. This is "The Eraser", the first song on the solo album, from the album, from a solo performance, and from this latest one with the band.


Album version


Live at Latitude Festival, solo


Live at the Orpheum, with the new band

Back

I have been lost in contemplation for the last month or so.

Christmas break was good, just very full.

How sweet that inauguration was. I watched it on Fox News at work (the channel of the TV cannot be changed) with forty other people. I only laughed once. President Obama was talking about restoring the rule of law, and Fox cut to former President Bush. The latter had this look on his face. Otherwise I was kind of on pins and needles. The last week has been pretty riveting for me.

It's not because the president is a liberal president. I feel a profound sense of relief that we might have truth, justice, science, and the American way back on our side again. Changes in tone like that come from the top. It has been good so far.

Sarah and I finished watching Six Feet Under. Every six months or so, we happen across a TV show and we decide to watch it together, cover to cover on DVD.

It's a hard show to watch in many ways. I would rate this show adults only for all the regular adult reasons, it's a hard R at the minimum (D L N S V and so on). But that's not what was hard for me. It challenges your sense of balance, your emotions, your personal meaning of life. It reaches from the vulgar to the sublime, the hilarious to the heartbreaking. 

I think I mentioned before it's about a man who returns to his boyhood home when his father, a funeral director dies. Little by little, he decides to become a funeral director alongside his brother, and to rejoin his family. The show juggles all their stories deftly, and has many surprises in store along the way. It is just about note-perfect television.

I have never dealt well with death. Whenever I've encountered it, it has always been an occasion for soul-searching and pain. I didn't become a Christian because I was frightened of dying, but the deaths of friends and family in high school set me on the path of thinking and living that led to my Christianity.

While I talked to Sarah about it, I noticed suddenly that I had, for a long time, been using my Christian belief as a way to ignore my fear of dying. I found things like the following comforting:

I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

"Where, O death, is your victory?

Where, O death, is your sting?"

-- First Letter to the Corinthians

And I do still find such beliefs comforting. It's just that I don't want to use them to avoid the grieving and the pain that also come with death. As the show's creator said in a retrospective on Six Feet Under, yes, the title of the show is about burial, but it's also about the emotions that we shove below the surface of our behavior and our consciousness. As the funeral directors say repeatedly in the show, sometimes people like to view the body of their loved one to feel a sense of closure. Similarly, our emotions and our pain need a viewing before we lay them to rest.

If you can bear it (and you'll figure out pretty fast if you can), I recommend this show as highly as possible. It's basically perfect.

I'm heading back to Seattle for two nights only on Thursday, for Dad's 50th birthday. It sounds like we are blowing the doors off on Friday night, not sure what's happening yet.

Oh, and my personal data was involved in two major breaches in a week, on a website and compromising my debit card. So far I do not appear to be the victim of fraud. However, this goes a long way toward explaining how quiet I have been on Facebook. If I can get over it, I'll start updating my statuses (statii?) along with the rest of you.

Hope you had a nice hiatus over your break as well.

Code folding in emacs

I wrote a regular expression today that got my C++ major mode in Emacs to play nice with outline mode. For the first go round, I am just collapsing down to comments. We are using Doxygen so the structure is predictable.

It helped me double-check that I'd done the comments up to our standard, which was useful and productive.

Customizing Emacs has been a bit of a ride, but there is enough material on the internet to do quick fixes. My job isn't really paying me to learn an editor, but I'll spend a little time to get things like this in order.

One thing that's caught me a little off-guard is how little I depend on an IDE to get stuff done at work. I definitely recommend that the programmers out there wean off Visual Studio and Eclipse, and just put a good editor in their toolbox.

I saw The Simpsons' "Worst. Episode. Ever." again tonight. It's a meta-episode about how the Simpsons' writers are running out of ideas, so they have to recycle old plots, make ridiculous running jokes, crappy dialogue, and default to implausible coincidences to resolve the story. It's one of the funniest things they've ever done.

For those who don't know The Lewises, we have about 15 hours worth of Simpsons episodes on the DVR right now. It's the 800 pound gorilla, the monster show, undefeated champion of the world. It's twice as long as Seinfeld and still going. The quality is still running surprisingly strong.

Best. Sitcom. Ever?

Still more entertainment

I read The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick this week. He's the (departed) guy maybe most broadly known for writing the stories that got made into Blade Runner, Total Recall, Paycheck, and Minority Report, and more recently, you probably didn't see A Scanner Darkly and Next.

This book came out in 1962. It's the alternate present of America in 1962, 15 years after the Allies lost World War II (owing to, among other things, the assassination of FDR). The west coast is run by the Japanese, the east coast is run by the Germans, and the middle of the country has become a shadow of its former self. It's well-depicted and eerie. More than that, it's a novel about the Tao and about living inside and outside the flow of the world. It's also a novel about art, where the characters all seem to be reading an alternate history bestseller, banned in the Nazi countries, called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which depicts the Allied victory in World War II. It's also a stylistic tour-de-force, with each focus character narrated and talking in their own dialect and from their own peculiar points of view.

This truly appears to be my year of the novel. I also picked up a novel omnibus by Ursula K. LeGuin. If anybody has some more recommendations, I am all ears.

Vince brought up recently that our reading lists do not intersect much because I read a lot of fiction and he reads a lot of non-fiction. I love stories. I don't necessarily learn facts from them, but consider this: facts are true, but often irrelevant; theories are relevant, but often untrue. That is my philosophy of science, cribbed from a linguistics professor in undergrad. One day he was trying to explain a fundamental problem with Chomsky's linguistics and he put it this way: they keep trying to extend the theory to cover more and more cases, but by doing that, they lose the power of their original generalizations.

This appears to be a fundamental problem of the pursuit of knowledge: knowing how important the details are. This is so important that researchers routinely eliminate as many details as possible, by controlling the environment. To find important implications, you have to match valuable behavior with significant control.

Living as a human being, perhaps fortunately, does not provide us with similar control of our environment, with similar eliminations of variables, except perhaps to the insane, the Wall Street executive, the alienated... but I repeat myself. Instead of tearing our lives into constituent parts, I am convinced we try to tell ourselves a story with some integrity, some unity of action. And reading fiction, or even non-fiction stories, I think, gives us a chance to respond to our world, to another human being, not with a little part of ourselves, but with our hearts in our teeth, our minds engaged, our blood pumping through the pages. I have rarely been shaken or moved by non-fiction, or rather, by arguments. But I want to be moved when I read. I want to be someone else when I'm done.

Madeleine L'Engle said recently about Harry Potter that there's no underneath to the stories, and I think there is something to this. The Harry Potter books are interesting depictions of flawed heroes, and they are epic and fun, grand and entertaining, but ultimately, they are not meant to shake you up the way I'm talking about. They do not point to deeper meanings, do not exploit the power of ambiguity. They are safe. Impotent. Sterile. I hope for JK Rowling's sake that instead of writing the Harry Potter encyclopedia (she is currently suing a website that plans to make a similar product with her characters) and getting stuck in the safe world, she sits down with her pen and her knife, and creates a new story with a few more razorblades sticking out of it.

If you watch TV, point yourself toward the other best show on television. Yes, yes, there's Heroes, which you should still be watching (first season on DVD, quite poignant and epic, dangerous and potent), but the antics of the cheerleader have gotten boring, and the dead hand of the painter that depicts the future is choking the plot. All in all, things are a bit tedious at the moment. So why not watch a show about a dude who brings people back from the dead.

It's Pushing Daisies. In Pushing Daisies, Ned, a pie-maker in his mid-twenties, has been living with a strange power for more than a decade: touch a dead thing (animal, person) once, and it comes back to life. But touch it again and it's dead forever. Also, the catch, if the reanimated thing is not returned to death within a minute, something else dies in its place.

The backstory: when the guy was ten, he discovered his power when his mom died by accident, he brought her back to life. His girl-next-door's father died when, 60 seconds later, he hadn't returned his mom to death. Then his mom touched him anyway, and she died again, this time permanently. Afterwards, Ned's dad sent him to boarding school, but he never forgot Charlotte Charles, nicknamed Chuck, the childhood sweetheart whose father he had inadvertently killed.

The front story: Ned, now a full-time pie maker, falls in with a private investigator. The PI solves mysteries by talking to the dead for 60 seconds, using Ned's ability. Charlotte (Chuck) gets killed on a cruise and Ned goes in, ostensibly to touch her and solve the mystery of her death. But when she comes back to life, he is unwilling to see her dead again. So, 60 seconds go by and a grave-robbing funeral director nearby dies in her place.

Charlotte (Chuck) and Ned fall for each other instantly, but they cannot touch, or Charlotte will die. Nevertheless, they make the most of their second chance together, and therein lies the story. It is completely spell-binding. It's an urban fairy tale, still more evidence that the geeks have won. It is by turns surreal and kooky in the extreme, darling, hilarious, philosophical and heavy, and heartbreakingly romantic and beautiful. And, I just saw the episode where they do a They Might Be Giants song, which, unexpectedly, is germane to the content.

You can watch the show online if you like. ABC's player contains all the episodes to date; just click on the link that says "Watch Online Now."

Last off, here's a Radiohead concert in two acts. If you want to hear what they're all about, get it while it's hot. It's from Berkeley in 2006, so they play stuff from most of their catalog, including their newest album, excluding their first album. One thing that might impress you is how different the songs sound, even though it's always and only been the same five guys. They are a bit paranoid about contemporary Western society, but I for one am glad that someone is. It's dense, poetic, symphonic music.