Good Fun

     Marvel has spun, well, webs with all the permutations of their "Spider-Man" character.  The core character was popular with my male peers in Junior High and High School: here was this wisecracking kid like them, except he usually knew the right thing to say and he had superpowers!  I thought he was fun, if implausible.  Given similar powers, the zit-faced boys I knew were unlikely to rise to his level of heroism -- or verbal cleverness.

     I admit it: I was never a huge fan of comic books, not even when they started to call themselves graphic novels.  The horror/SF comics were screamingly derivative, often "borrowing" SF plots or entire stories without so much as a nod to the original and I found that offputting.  For pure mindless fun, "Doc Savage" reprints were a better value for my money.

     But Spidey was his own thing, not a sanctimonious stuffed shirt.  Not a millionaire, or invulnerable, or a rebooted Norse god, just Some Guy who stumbled into superpowers, and that was kind of cool.  The thing is, he kind of wasn't entirely original; he had a pulp precursor, much darker: The Spider was the alias of the entirely human (if slightly gadgety) crimefighter Richard Wentworth, maybe the number three hero pulp after The Shadow and Doc Savage.  The Spider ran to greater moral ambiguity (and bloodthirstiness) than the other two and gave rise to a movie-serial version of the protagonist with a much more spidery look, and between the pulp and the films, helped inspire the later comic-book hero.  The teen angst was all from Stan Lee, though, and that's really the emotional driver of the graphic novel character.

     All this is to set up writing about the entirely entertaining Amazon Video streaming series, Spider-Noir.  It's spun from the "Spiderverse" notions Marvel's been shoveling through a kaledeoscope in recent years, but what's come out this time* is a back-crossing between the modern-day four-color hero and his pulp ancestor that's half film noir and half graphic novel (and about ten percent Republic-type serial).  Seedy PI Ben Reilly struggles to make a living, having put away his past as a costumed superhero after personal tragedy, and then....  Then, of course, plot happens.  It's not any more plausible than any other superhero tale, or most film noir for that matter, but it's as engaging as any of them, with a reasonably good take on the 1930s setting and nice acting, cinematography, effects and editing.  It's good fun.  They've managed to explain or at least lampshade most of the incongruities, too.  It's unlikely to alter your worldview, but it's at least as good a value for money as an old pulp magazine or a modern graphic novel.
__________________
* They'd already done a similar thing, "Spider-Man Noir," in print and animation, the latter with the same actor (Nicholas Cage) as the TV series.

When An "Idiot Plot" Isn't, Maybe

     Writing -- and chairing the critique group -- has me in the habit of taking a critical look "under the hood" of books and TV/movies/radio shows.  One of the gotchas is what SF writer (and critic) Damon Knight called an "idiot plot," though he gave credit to James Blish for originating the term

     Simplest form, it means a plot that only works if one or more of the characters ignores something that is obvious to the audience.  Now, that's one thing if the plot is just an excuse for razzle-dazzle (the Ginger Rogers - Fred Astaire film Top Hat is often cited, but nobody cares: you're there for the dancing), and something entirely different in a serious work.

     No spoilers, but-- The most recent season of For All Mankind has a crucial plot development that only works if a very smart character misses a point that should be entirely clear to the audience and perhaps the other characters involved, based on past behavior.  They miss it, and keep on missing it, several times.

     Now, the individual involved has been set up as a deeply focused and somewhat neurotic person, probably neuroatypical* and everyone else in a position to work out what happened has a vested interest in staying mum -- so is it really an "idiot plot," or were the writers playing a deeper game?

     Flip a coin.  Much as I love the big, rich story, I've got to admit I'm there for the sets and the characters, for the broad sweep of an alternative history, one in which the Space Race went on and on.

     Moral?  You can get away with it -- if you're as quick on your feet as Fred and Ginger, if you're that gifted at choreography (in the broadest sense), if you're willing to subtly lampshade it, if you've got the sets and costumes and skilled photographers and editors (and/or literary chops) to pull it off.  I think For All Mankind managed the trick, but it's there if you look for it.
______________________
* It's not original with me, but inclinations and skill sets that make for good scientists have a lot of overlap with some autism-spectrum behavior patterns, so much so that it has often been pointed out that while there's zero evidence that vaccines cause autism, there's a pretty good case to be made that autism causes vaccines.

Seen In A Glass, Darkly....

     There's no darker glass, at least in metaphor, than a monitor or TV screen.  I had occasion to rewatch the film Civil War recently and, juxtaposed with radio and video coverage of the current mess in the Middle East, especially Israel's ongoing invasion of Lebanon, it makes for sobering viewing.  And the movie's deliberately incoherent conflict (it's about war correspondents, after all, not war) looks less and less so as time goes by.  Even the alliance between Texas and California as the "Western Forces:" if you had told an American or Russian in 1932 that they were going to end up fighting on the same side of a major war within a decade, they would have laughed at you.  A separatist California and a Texas "taking back its Lone Star" might find themselves with as much in common as Churchhill and FDR did with Stalin.

     The United States of Civil War aren't united. Some regions are in denial; a vast sweep of states are, apparently, largely untouched.  Others are less fortunate, crowded by internal refugees or wracked by war, buildings bombed, populations decimated, civil government gone or powerless.

     The second Trump administration has shown a marked propensity to route FEMA disaster relief (and similar aid) to GOP-supporting states and cites, and not to Democrat areas.  This is entirely aside from any overall reductions in aid: whatever there is to be had, you're a lot less likely to receive it if you live in a blue region than if you live in a red one, no matter how you chose to vote.

     ICE and CBP enforcement has shown a similar pattern, leaning more heavily on cities and states with Democrats in power and far less where the Republicans hold a majority of elected offices.

     Depending on where you live, it's life as usual, and what's all the fuss about -- or it's anything but usual.

     Civil War?  You're already soaking in it, in the slow, nightmare preliminary steps.

     There's still time; we may yet wake up, get a sip of water or take a trip down the hall, and return to blissful rest.  Or the nightmare could turn for the worse.

     None of us can be sure how this movie, these very American dreams, will play out.

     The 2026 and 2028 elections are crucial.  Choose wisely.

The Ipcress File...Again?

     I found Len Deighton's not-quite-Everyman spy Harry Palmer the long way 'round and in reverse, starting with the book series by Charles Stross, a crossover between British spy novels and Lovcraftian horror,* The Laundry Files.  That led to Deighton's books (well worth reading) and from there to the films starring Michael Caine (well worth watching), and when one of our streaming services offered a preview of the updated, reimagined TV series version of the first novel some months back, of course I watched it.

     But it was one more streaming service, and expensive at the time, and there wasn't much else on it I wanted to see, so--  Maybe later.

     Much later, AMC finally re-released the series 1990s Remember WENN, (set in a small, independent radio station between 1939 and 1941 or so) and the first two seasons were available with ads on a free streamer.  I watched those, found it to be just as good as I remembered and wanted more.  The last two seasons were only on a couple of pay services, and one of them seemed like a better deal than the other.

     It wasn't until I'd signed up for it and saw their line-up that I realized why: they've got the TV series version of The Ipcress File, too.  So I've been watching it.

     The director and actor's Harry Palmer isn't Micheal Caine's.  The plot isn't exactly Deighton's either -- but he hadn't bothered to name the character to begin with, and the new guy is as delightfully competent and cynical as his predecessors in print and on film.  It's very stylish fun, set in a lovingly recreated 1960s (minus a few anachronisms most viewers will never notice) and I'm not entirely sure many of the reviewers figured out we're getting Harry's take on the story -- and Harry's looking up from fairly low on the class-system totem pole, with a complete lack of respect for the people who are supposedly his betters.  This is very much not James Bond, without bothering to sneer at the Bonds of fiction; Harry's much too busy to bother with that sort of thing.  He'll leave it to the empty suits who came from proper families and went to the right schools.

     They've taken such liberties with the plot that I'm not sure how it will end -- and I'm looking forward to finding out.
_____________________
* And also between computing history, a bit of math theory and a stack of D&D-type gaming, as things go on.

There Is Still No Antimemetics Division

     I read and enjoyed There Is No Antimemetics Division in both text forms, and it turns out there's a short film, as well.

     It's well done, and if you enjoy this sort of thing, here you go.

House-To-House Incivility

     I saw the film "Civil War" last night and...wow. Reviewers got it wrong; they focused on the lack of clarity in who's rebelling and over what (we barely know the first and never learn the second*).  Genuine soldiers on both sides come off okay; the danger is always from combatants with no flag.

     On one level, the basic plot is "A Star Is Born" with street combat; on another, the divided future, with real war burning, people far behind the lines ignoring it, power cuts and water shortages nearer the lines, with quiet atrocities and fighters hardened to them feels only too real and only too likely.  This is the future some of our fellow citizens think they want, bloody, divided and lawless, where "what kind of American are you?" is a life or death question and it's fatal to be too foreign in the wrong place at the wrong time.

     Arguably, the ending is a little too easy -- but it's miles and years from the ending of the larger (and, I hope, fictional) story it is told within, a story whose beginnings we never learn but can see all around us, a story written in blood and fire and loss.  This deadly chaos is the enemy, even more than the politicians and fools who long for it.  If it comes, it will leave damage for generations afterward.† I'm no longer sure we will prevent it but we had damned well better try.
___________________
* There are vague hints that suggest water issues in the states mentioned as seceding -- California, Texas and Florida -- and the film shows water shortages in New York city; but water appears plentiful elsewhere and prolific water use sets the tone for a visit to a town largely untouched by war.  While Washington, DC is said to be a place where journalists are shot on sight and the movie's President is apparently a bad guy, we only hear him uttering broad and harmless platitudes in speeches while refusing to hold talks with advancing secessionist forces.  Who started the fighting, over what, and who made it worse rather than negotiating an end is simply beside the point of the story.
 
 † Most American lack recent experience of war, or even recent experience of the scars warfare leaves behind.  Most of the real Civil War's battlegrounds are softly eroded and grown over, a century and a half later.  Look at Ukraine, look at Gaza; look and ask yourself what it's going to take to fix just the physical damage, if and when.

"Blue Channels"

     Action, meet reaction.  The Committee for the First Amendment is getting a relaunch.  Considering how the first launch went, it's a little surprising: in 1947, a bunch of prominent Hollywood types banded together to speak out against McCarthyism -- and then found out some of their friends were, indeed, communists.

     "It was a different time," as they say, and the Soviet Union had managed a remarkable degree of control over their public image in the U.S. (and the West generally) from the end of the Russian Civil War through the Spanish Civil War (though many volunteers, like George Orwell, came away disillusioned about the Soviets) and right up through the The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; when Hitler turned on Russia and they joined the Allies, it brought rehabilitation.  All kinds of political notions took root in the U.S. during the Great Depression, and communism developed a following among writers and actors.  Some of them were quite serious about it; others went to a rally or two and then moved on.  After WW II, HUAC, McCarthy et al went after all of 'em, inflating the numbers a few genuine Reds by adding in anyone who had ever admired the Soviets or spoke approvingly of Marx in public.  They painted with a very broad brush.

     1947's Committee for the First Amendment waved just as broad a brush back, with predictable results, like Humphrey Bogart's 1948 article, "I'm No Communist" explaining his involvement.  

     Defend freedom of speech, and you find yourself in the middle of a howling pack of people speaking freely, many of them espousing ideas you do not agree with.  That's how it works.  But it's not at all comfortable and it may be terrible PR.

     And perhaps that's something the 2025 Committee for the First Amendment understands.  Anyway, they're out there trying, and that's not nothing.  The current Administration is certainly flapping a broad brush around and they're overdue to get brushed back at.

     I'll leave the last word to the United States Army, in 1945's Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet/Number 64:
     "Many fascists make the spurious claim that the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as 'communist' everyone who refuses to support them. [...] Any fascist attempt to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work under the guise of 'super-patriotism' and  'super-Americanism.' Fascist leaders are neither stupid nor naive. They know that they must hand out a line that "sells." Huey Long is said to have remarked that if fascism came to America, it would be on a program of 'Americanism.'"

     Real Americanism knows the answer to speech you don't like isn't suppression but speaking up yourself, and that the marketplace of ideas only works when it is a free market.

Match Cuts

     Tamara and I have been enjoying the current season of The Lincoln Lawyer.  (The TV series; I have yet to see the film, with a different cast.)  Taken from the novels starring criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller by mystery writer Michael Connelly, not only are the stories first-rate, they're brilliantly shot and edited.  One of the best parts is the use of "match cuts," in which scene-to-scene transitions go from one similar thing to another.

     The simplest is a sky shot: characters are conversing, the camera tilts up to the sky, there's a quick dissolve to another image of the sky and the camera tilts back down on a new scene.  A little trickier is the not-quite-match: famously, in Lawrence of Arabia, the camera goes in close on a lit match (a literal match, and there's your double pun) and as Lawrence blows out the flame, the film cuts to sunrise on the desert horizon.  It's easy to overdo,* but the best match cuts are as smooth as silk.  In an example from the TV series, a group of attorneys around a conference table in their office discussing trial strategy cuts to them at the Defense table in court, using those strategies -- a leap that covers days if not weeks, and keeps the story moving.

     Scenes in the series are carefully composed and lit, and often lushly shot, moving to a more documentary style when the action happens in a prison or low-rent lawyer's office.  The visual style is as deft and inevitable-seeming as a dancer's movements.

     One of the most interesting things to me is that while Connelly's plots are intriguingly twisty and his storytelling is more than adequate, he's not a bowl-you-over prose stylist.  He was a newspaper reporter and he writes like a reporter, without fuss or flourish.  The TV series is very much on their own hook with the cinematography and editing; trying to show Mickey Haller's world, they have picked up a visual style that suits their protagonist and his Los Angeles like a well-tailored suit.
___________________
* There's a version in which dialog carries across the cut, one character's sentence finished or answered by another, often to dramatic effect.  Occasionally, a film or TV show will cut back and forth between two parallel scenes multiple times to build tension, but it's difficult to pull off without being too obvious.  The animated spy comedy Archer frequently plays carried dialog for laughs.

Dr. Zarkov? Dr. Huer, Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard?

     My reference to "Dr. Zharkov" yesterday prompted a response -- I'd combined Buck Rogers with Flash Gordon!  It wouldn't be the first time those two science fictional universes have crossed paths; parts of sets and costumes from one character's 1930s serials showed up in the other's.

     For the record, Buck Rogers gets his fancy tech from Dr. Huer in the books and TV show; Flash Gordon's scientific wizard is Dr. Zarkov, no h.

     Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine and Dr. Howard?  I'll let them answer for themselves.

Television Has Not Always Been Here

     "Kids today..."  Thanks to the Web (what you know as "the Internet" is mostly the World Wide Web, and we had an Internet long before that), thanks to streaming, thanks to handheld devices from smartphones to pads, it seems as if instant visual media has always been a thing.

     It hasn't.  I'm old enough to remember when TV told us about the big stories at six p.m., and added "film at eleven" for most of them; behind the scenes, a continuous-process developer was running at full speed and photojournalists were splicing the still-damp film, betting the edits would get though the projector without coming apart.  Live remote broadcasts were few and usually scheduled far in advance, microwave (or Bell Telephone) technical magic requiring engineers at both ends just to get the connection running.

     In 1945, few American cities had a TV station.  A couple had two or three, and stations in Philadelphia, New York City and Schenectady had linked up via Bell Telephone coaxial cable to present live coverage of the 1940 Republican Convention; the Democrats held their convention in Chicago that year and the video lines didn't go that far.  (In 1944, both parties held their conventions in Chicago, away from the coasts -- and any possibility of widespread TV coverage.)  Going into WW II, TV set sales had been disappointingly low: they were monumentally expensive, and most people lived outside the range of the existing stations.  Once the war began, manufacturing of consumer TVs was shut down for the duration.

     So when I had podcasts playing for background noise this morning and NPR's Ari Shapiro opened Consider This by telling me, "On August 6, 1945, a stone-faced President Harry Truman appeared on television and told Americans about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima," I was....puzzled.

     There was a TV station in the nation's capitol in 1945: Dumont's W3XWT got on the air that May, running a test pattern and a recording asking viewers to call the station.  No one had done so until Japan surrendered in August,* when Dumont's Thomas Goldsmith wrote "War is over" on a slide that replaced the test pattern, and the U. S. Navy picked up the phone to ask what all this TV stuff was about.

     Sorry, Ari; that video of a grim-faced President Truman telling Americans about the atomic bomb is from a newsreel, and most people didn't see it until they were at the movies, days or weeks after the bomb was dropped, by which time they'd already heard the news on the radio or read it in the newspaper.

     You -- and I -- grew up in a world of television. of images from all around the globe that have steadily become more immediate and vivid.  I could make a live video call to Tasmania or Mumbai right now, as easily as I'm typing this blog post, and it's no big deal.  But it wasn't always that way.  There was a time when hardly anyone had a glowing screen in their home (let alone their hand!) and the few who did, didn't get much over it.  And it was only a long lifetime ago.

     The NPR piece is about the descendants of the people who were downwind (and unwarned) of the Trinity test, families with long histories of cancer -- and zero compensation from the government.  They deserve better than to have their stories undermined by a lack of attention to detail.
_____________________
*  Announced on 15 August, though not formally signed until 2 September.

What A Relief

      The voicemail from my zoologist friend was rushed, so I'm pleased to find out that while he is indeed now working in the motion picture industry, his title is definitely not "Bee Strangler."

2023 Waltzes Away

     The year is ending in waltz time.  Have a look at the calendar: today is 123123.  Can't say this year's got much to dance over, other than the COVID-19 pandemic receding to a persistent hazard, especially for those still avoiding the vaccine.  We're a lot better off now, with effective treatments, but the damnable virus is here to stay, right next to the flu.

*  *  *
     Politics remains a worry.  Gone are the days when I could poke fun at the tail-chasing ineffectiveness and occasional dangers of the Federal government, secure in the knowledge that it would all work out in the end, while keeping legislators, the Executive branch and a wide array of bureaucrats busy and out of worse trouble.  Nope, they've managed to screw that up and now I watch 'em warily, waiting for them to find a new next shoe to drop.  It turns out they have as many as a centipede, and the current crop of office-holders hurls them with heedless abandon.

     I'm not impressed.  All systems of government are bad, compromises we make to avoid the necessity of having to go to war with the next city over, or those awful people down the street, but some are a lot worse than others.  Ours has been one of the least bad for a long time, and a good many people appeared to be trying to make it even less bad.  A lot of them have given up; some of them (ahem, Republicans, mostly, though the Dems have still got a Senatorial Menendez to yeet) have decided they'd prefer it to be even more bad.

     It's got me voting regularly -- voting against crummy candidates and incumbents, mostly, rather than for, but I'm certainly not going to pass up the opportunity to chime in when so many people are pushing for autocracy and the mailed fist.

*  *  *
     With all this talk of waltzes and hard times, the Boswell Sisters offer something different, close harmony and a willingness to fiddle with tempo and key that reminds me our country -- our fellow citizens -- can manage chaos pretty well.  Sometimes brilliantly.  We may get through this yet.

     See there? Some good things have come from Louisiana. It's not all Kingfishing.

Better -- Also, The WGA Strike

      After spending nearly 36 hours in bed with occasional recourse to a heating pad, I'm feeling much better.  Not a hundred percent, but I can draw a deep breath, sneeze and even turn my upper body without a spike in pain from my lower back.  The dull ache has faded -- not gone but much, much less.  Considering that at one point Monday evening I went to lean over and reach out from a seated position and ended up crashing over on my knees, this is a considerable improvement.

      I'm going to spend some time lightening my purse and briefcase.  There's a lot of odds and ends in each -- useful, most of it, but not all of it needs to be lugged around every day.

      One source of weight: I carry two small laptops -- an old Surface Pro (much heavier than you'd expect) and a MacBook Air (which is indeed lightweight) -- and the only reason for the Surface these days is that my employer has never managed to come up with an old laptop or desktop on a cart to do the control interface for a number of devices we run at the North Campus that don't have control panels and only occasionally need to be got at.  They have their reasons: proper security requires official company computers must have current, updateable operating systems and protections and if they can't, they are discarded.  But it's inconvenient.  It appears that a Raspberry Pi will do what I need and satisfy the security gurus, so I may be able to retire my personal Surface and ensure anyone filling in for me will be able to get at the virtual meters, knobs and buttons.

*  *  *

      On Twitter and elsewhere, many writers have proclaimed their support of the Writer's Guild of America strike.  WGA are the boys and girls and etc. who write scripts for TV and film; their last agreement with the people who make such entertainment predates the Golden Age of Streaming by over a decade and as a result, they aren't seeing much of the gold.  The issues are complex, the sides are far apart and I hope you're got some older programs in your to-be-watched queue, because it looks like they'll be a while sorting things out.

      As for me, I can proudly proclaim that I have not been writing screenplays for more than 60 years and I expect this trend to continue.

      "Writing is writing," I suppose, but screenplays diverge considerably from other forms of fiction -- and are sold differently, too.  If you write a novel or short story and a publisher "buys" it, you effectively lease it to them, retaining copyright for later sales. A screenwriter doesn't get to do that; turning a screenplay into a film or series takes a whole lot more creative work from other people once the writer is (mostly) done, so the screenwriter receives a paycheck and (maybe) a piece of any "residuals," rerun money (and that's a big part of what they're striking over), but does not hold copyright.  No few talented writers of printed fiction have gone off to Hollywood (and related locations) and burned right out.

      "Scabbing" at screenwriting might not burn a writer out, but it'll burn a bridge: the WGA bars membership to any former scabs.  Harsh?  Yes.  And that's Hollywood.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Hey Isn't That Benedict Cumberbatch?

      I'm not quite halfway through the film and I never read the book, so I can't tell you if they did justice to the plot.  (Critics are divided -- it's from the John le Carré book and he's known for twisty stories.)  I can tell you that the 2011 production of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a pitch-perfect 1970s spy movie.

      The film came up as a no-extra-charge suggestion on Amazon Prime Video.  I had enjoyed the mid-1960s "Harry Palmer" spy films with Michael Caine as Len Deighton's originally nameless British espionage agent, as well as 1975's Three Days of the Condor, with Robert Redford up against a complex conspiracy.  I recognized the title.  The artwork suggested more of the same as those movies.  I'd made myself a little dinner and only half-watched the opening credits as I ate; once the film was underway, much of the cast looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't put names with their very much in character faces.  It fit right in with the older films, right down to having a nice shot-on-film look and late-1960s - 70s color.

      And then a young actor with a thick mop of blond hair and Benedict Cumberbatch's face showed up....  My first inclination was that I didn't think he was that old, followed by the realization that he couldn't possibly be.

      I started checking background details.  One or two anachronisms showed up (air-conditioning hardware*) to confirm when the film was shot, but that was all.  The costumes, props, sets and location settings have been given a great deal of careful attention to keep the film on target.  The cinematography and editing is very much in keeping with the time in which the film is set.  The reviews I have seen don't point it out; all that work is background, invisible, seamless -- but the film so far is an artifact out of time, and stands very nicely next to the older examples of the genre.

      ETA: I woke up in the night and couldn't get back to sleep -- I'm still dealing with back pain, etc. -- and watched the rest of the film.  It's good all the way through, and remained consistently a 1970s spy movie.  Well worth watching.
__________________________
* Small "split system" units showed up in Europe before they arrived in the U. S., but not as early as the 1970s.  The outside portion has a distinctive look.  It probably takes a geek to see this stuff (ask me about the U. S. electrical outlets on the wall of a Russian dance studio in White Nights) but the wrong detail can break an audience's suspension of disbelief.

The Mandalorian And The Implicit Promise

      Science fiction and genre fiction generally tell stories with a clear conflict between good and evil.  Good typically triumphs.  There's usually a hero and a villain, "good guys" and "bad guys," and the good side succeeds.  Some genres modify these basics: evil wins in most horror fiction (if good wins, it's a thriller instead), noir detective stories blur the lines between good and evil to a greater or lesser degree, and satire often inverts the trope.

      Strip it down to the basics and you're left with the kinds of stories that poets sung to appreciative audiences in Ancient Greece: Heracles takes on impossible odds and succeeds; Odysseus returns home by perseverance and wit; the all-too-human gods struggle among themselves.  (Most ensemble-cast SF and other genre fiction closely models the Greco-Roman pantheon, from Star Trek to Mission: Impossible to Firefly* and The Expanse.  Wagon Train and Rawhide are at least partial fits to this model.)

      The Mandalorian hews to type, with good results.  The initial Star Wars films were meant to recall the old movie serials, filled with action and derring-do and ending on a note of triumph.  But they fell short in one significant way: there was a new episode of the serial every week.  Star Wars came along in large lumps at long intervals; that's how movies work.  The episodic serial moved to TV, with storytelling conventions -- and budgets -- that owed more to radio drama than film.

      Or it did.  Modern digital effects have made much of the sweep and action of movie-making affordable for the small screen and The Mandalorian (and associated series) has pushed it as far as possible.  The result has gone full circle: the movie serial is back!  Grander than most TV; perhaps not always quite as overwhelming as longer, bigger-budget feature films, but bursting with larger-than-life excitement.

     All fiction makes a promise to the audience in the opening scenes.  Successful fiction fulfills that promise in an emotionally satisfying manner.

      Tam and I started on the most recent season of The Mandalorian over the weekend.  We're enjoying it.
_____________________
* Firefly is notable for giving us both Ares and Athena, though the Hephaestus analog of the series is notable for being "lamed" by youth, inexperience and gender instead of physical disability. Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite and possibly Poseidon fill out the cast.  This way of looking at such stories makes the casting of war-wounded James Doohan as Scotty on Star Trek doubly meaningful, not only the "Scots engineer" trope of nautical fiction but the lamed artificer of the gods.

"Of Course You Know, This Means War."

      World War Two was an all-out war -- even Merrie Melodies cartoons went to war.  You can watch a fine example free for nothing, thanks to Wikipedia: The Fifth-Column Mouse.  Just click on the thumbnail at the link and it will pop up.

      Do we have Fifth Columnists these days?  Coullllld be....  The present European conflict is mostly a proxy war for us, and we just might have a few proxy appeasers, too.  Make your own list. 

The Universe Is Not Locally Real

      At least at a certain level it's not "real" in terms of having inherent characteristics until you measure it; and it's not "local" thanks to quantum entanglement: stick a pin in a photon here and one waaaaaay over there says, "Ouch!"

      What this means is the physics insights of the philosopher Charles M. Jones were correct: when Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff, he is perfectly safe until he measures his state by looking down -- and then it's too late.  It also explains why the Road Runner can anticipate the coyote so well, and make things go wrong for him with nothing more than a quizzical look: the "spooky action at a distance" the theory implies (and which everyone suspected all along was breathing on the dice and making toast fall butter side down) is hard at work.

      This now joins the Frederic Bean "Tex" Avery theory of subjective reality, in which our perceptions show us not the real world as it is, but an image of it deeply affected by our own notions.  Maybe you did jump out of your shoes with fright (and right back in).  Maybe it only felt that way.  Maybe you'd better check.

      Just don't look down.  You may be higher up (and less well supported) than you think.

Widdershins

      It's the old word for "counterclockwise."  And here, it is a tale of routine, romance and revolt:

So My Movie Ends, And...

      I have been watching the Peter Jackson films of "The Hobbit" a little at a time and I finished the middle one last night.  It's innocent enough so far, essentially what you'd get if you turned a bunch of bright, High School-aged, D&D-playing Tolkien fans loose on the book with a big budget and instructions to not get too far from the basic plot while expanding it: lots of action sequences, many only tangentially related to the original; a kind of a love-story sub-plot; more orcs (and uglier); increased foreshadowing of the later books and so on.

      Like the current Amazon series, either you're happy getting some extra time in a version of Middle-Earth or you aren't -- and if you aren't, go do something else you like better.

      As the credits rolled, I stopped the stream and realized there was a loud, rattly motor running outside.  I went to the windows to look and it was a single fire truck, all lit up.  This had me worried about our next-door neighbor, but no, the firemen were walking around a house across the street and a few doors down, shining bright lights around and generally checking the place out.  As I watched, they started straggling back to the truck, slamming doors as they climbed aboard.  When the last one boarded, they drove away, leaving the house pitch-dark.  I have no idea what that was about.  The place looks fine in the morning light.

Useful?

      In case you were wondering, Ukrainian for "Wolverines!" is "Росомахи!" according to Google.