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Good long weekend. I did very little of consequence, but I don’t feel that the time was wasted, I needed the rest. Only a little was spent in front of the TV, especially watching The Hunt for Red October last night, for the first time in about ten years. It looked completely different to what I remembered; I understand a lot more about the technology now than I did then, but there’s also a great story that comes through despite all that. It was the first film adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel, and still the one preferred by Clancy, since he has said that Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of Jack Ryan was far closer to the character than the “hero” version that Harrison Ford created. Ben Affleck? No.

Reading a book is a luxury these days: how the hell did that happen? The book that took most of my time this weekend was Ghost Rider by Neil Peart, who is best known as the lyricist and drummer with the band Rush. I’ve written a short review here.

I guess I must be on a mild Shakespeare bender at the moment, since I spent yesterday evening watching A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. It took longer than it should have, because I was partly following the text at first. I soon gave that up, for now, because some bits are shifted around, others left out. Some of the soliloquies are cut off at their peak, and not allowed to wind down as per the text – but they’re the better for it.

Ebert and other critics have commented that the four “young lovers” in the play are almost interchangeable; so here the director has chosen distinct character actors for the roles, including Christian Bale (Empire Of The Sun, American Psycho) as Demetrius, and Calista Flockhart (Ally McBeal) as Helena, in an enjoyably over-the-top portrayal of a highly dramatic character. Not that it matters when they’re all wrestling in a pool of mud, after Puck (Stanley Tucci) confuses their emotions by drugging them.

Helena spends much of the time passionately chasing Demetrius around the forest on a bicycle, then clashes with Hermia (Anna Friel), who has eloped with her lover Lysander (Dominic West), to escape her father, who insists she marry Demetrius, the son of the local godfather Thesus (David Strathairn), who’s about to get married to Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau). Hermia naturally tries to encourage Helena to win Demetrius over, as a way of resolving the conflict:

Helena: O! teach me how you look, and with what art
You sway the motion of Demetrius’ heart.
Hermia: I frown upon him, yet he loves me still.
Helena: O! that your frowns would teach my smiles such skill.
Hermia: I give him curses, yet he gives me love.
Helena: O! that my prayers could such affection move.
Hermia: The more I hate, the more he follows me.
Helena: The more I love, the more he hateth me.
Hermia: His folly, Helena, is no fault of mine.
Helena: None, but your beauty: would that fault were mine!

I’m not going to describe the whole plot here – but the fact that I could is a compliment to the writers, who turned a slightly confusing play into a well-plotted film. As with Hamlet, Shakespeare uses a “play within a play” as a structural device, this time played as a farce, since Bottom (Kevin Kline) and his friends aren’t very good actors, frankly. Pity the poor actor playing “The Wall” on that stage.

This was my first experience of the play in any form – I’ve neither read it before nor watched it staged. I can see the fascination it holds for many, and how its ideas have been used elsewhere. I can imagine a gritty modern version, where the “fairy dust” spread around by Puck is replaced by Rohypnol…

It’s bad enough trying to figure out who to listen to when it comes to real world events, but if you have an interest in art and culture, well, it gets worse. I’ve had related arguments about this problem with a colleague from work; he takes the extreme position that you can not trust anything written by anybody, whether it’s culture, history, or current events. When we discussed some of the history of India, he nearly blew his top when I consulted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, because in his view even an encyclopaedia is written by people and reflects only one version of events.

I substantially agree with that position, but that doesn’t mean the encyclopaedia should be entirely dismissed. It was the one source available to me at the time, and adequate for a conversation, but he took that to mean that I go to the opposite extreme – gullibly accepting whatever I read and hear. The answer lies somewhere in between, and there are two methods I can use to get what I hope is a balanced view of a topic.

The first is the balancing of multiple sources. Some sources carry more weight than others, though none can be taken as absolute authorities. In the case of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it helps to remember that the articles were written by individuals, and contain some strong opinions, but it’s not hard to see when that happens. The articles have been subjected to peer review and editing, before they end up in print, so some of the work has been done for me. The Internet alone doesn’t carry much weight, and I’m loath to mention it at all, unless it’s backed up by something more substantial. I mentioned it once, in a pub discussion on the Masons – just for fun – and my colleague nearly jumped down my throat. I thought the accuracy requirements were loose enough, at that point, to use a risky source, but I guess I was wrong.

Multiple news sources are difficult to find with regard to current events; in Iraq, we have the US communications centre, giving their own presentations and reports on what is happening, but they only see what they have to. Then we have the journalists: shocked when the war comes to them personally, awed by everything they see, and horrified when the military doesn’t toe the line and follow their journalistic or nationalistic agendas.

The second method is more useful when it comes to culture, politics, or any field where opinions are more important than facts. So much is written on such topics, and it’s impossible to keep up on it all, even if you wanted to. The trick is to leverage your own judgement and experience in detecting and compensating for the bias of a few particular sources. Allow me to use film as an example:

• The Internet Movie Database is a good source for the facts behind a movie – crew, release dates, etc. Its subscribers also weigh in with their opinions and ratings, and they use a well-documented formula to combine these ratings into a single overall score. The results are quite useful, especially when it comes to the great films; there is little disagreement over the position of Citizen Kane in their Top 250 list, though it does contain populist favourites such as The Shawshank Redemption and E.T.
• Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times is probably the most famous living film critic, and the most consulted, since the Sun-Times posts his reviews on their website at no charge. He watches and writes about movies on a full-time basis, six a week or more, and the experience shows, but so does the fatigue. I pretty much agree with his general assessment of movies I’ve seen, though he can pick up positive factors that I miss, and he can thus seem a little too lenient at times. His “Great Films” list, on the other hand, is where he gets highly selective and analytical, and he thoroughly justifies his selections.
• Metacritic is a useful service that I subscribe to on my PDA: it simply combines comments and ratings from multiple sources into a single score – a good way of getting a “quick fix” on a film. It has no review staff of its own, but its entries are based on the US box office, so the offline version isn’t much help with films released here in Ireland months later.
• For offline use, I have a copy of Halliwell’s Film & Video Guide. I find this book to be highly reactionary: not only do its reviewers totally miss the point of some films, giving them low ratings and missing their positive points, it also practices snobbery, by apparently discounting films based on popularity or box-office success.
  Its index of “four star” films also exposes its “golden era” prejudices: the numbers follow a downward trend over the years, from a peak of eleven in 1940, to just one per year since 1997 and none in 2000 or 2002. Has film-making, as an art form, really deteriorated that much over the years? Where’s Kieslowski’s Three Colours, or Speed, Heat, or The Man Who Wasn’t There? The early forties may have produced Fantasia, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane, but Halliwell’s four-star list for that period also includes some very dubious choices. This means that I take Halliwell’s advice with a large dose of salt and compensate accordingly.

Obvious, eh? It is, in a way, when I lay it out like this. As I’ve said before, one of the reasons I write this blog is for the sake of clarifying my position on a topic, for myself primarily, but also for anyone else who may be interested. I think it’s always useful to lay out even basic principles, if it helps maintain a consistent approach.

There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
– Alfred Korzybski

Update, April 2009: This was obviously written before the rise of Wikipedia, and the “one-stop fact shop” culture it has spawned, but I haven’t changed my mind on these basic principles. I still prioritize questions by importance, and find that Wikipedia is a suitable resource for most general questions I encounter. If I’m not satisfied with what I find there, I can look elsewhere, perhaps starting with the links it provides. Yet I still encounter people who dismiss it entirely for cynical reasons, unable to judge when it’s appropriate or not.

Finished Pratchett’s Thief Of Time, on Saturday, really enjoyed it, but it won’t stick in the memory as long as Night Watch will. It did serve to introduce the recurring character of Lu-Tze, the Sweeper. Take a parody of the kind of inscrutable mystic found in The Karate Kid, but one who was never in the inner mystic circle, and kept one foot in the “real” world. The kind of character who, while others theorise and agonise, gets things done.

The Accidental Tourist was shown here last night, and I was glad to see it again. I saw it at least ten years ago, and didn’t get too much out of it, but I have read Anne Tyler’s book since then, and gained a better understanding of the characters involved. It’s about a man, Macon Leary, who went through life without really engaging with it; his son is murdered, and his marriage falls apart, without an understanding of how all this is affecting him and others. His brothers and sister show a similar insularity; even when the sister marries Macon’s publisher, she soon returns to her brothers, and the whole Leary clan seem to be heading off into the sunset without blinking.

It takes something really strange to shake them out of their funk, and it arrives in the form of Muriel, an eccentrically dressed dog trainer with a young hyper-allergic son, who sets her sights on Macon within seconds of meeting him. Dealing with Muriel and her son drags Macon, painfully, out of his shell, to where he can do some good; he is forced to take action for himself, for Muriel, and his future.

There are obvious analogies made between Macon and the travel books he writes, which tell business travellers how to do business around the world without being affected by the places they visit; a sudden funeral is only a minor inconvenience, since you already have the right suit, and any stains can soon be taken care of by travel size packets of detergent or spot remover. At one point he advises “never take anything on a trip that you can not afford to lose” – advice that he dutifully follows, but which works in his favour later.

This is arguably Geena Davis’ finest hour on screen – though Thelma & Louise also takes some beating. She won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar™ for her portrayal of Muriel – a far cry from Victoria’s Secret and Earth Girls Are Easy. She must be the tallest actress working in Hollywood, even beating Sigourney Weaver in height, and also the most genuinely athletic. I’m not referring to time spent in the gym preparing for a role; she narrowly missed the US Olympic Archery team in 2000, and is presumably going to try again in 2004. I’ve also seen A League Of Their Own, in which she is filmed doing the splits while catching a high ball (ouch), and knocking them out of the park. You can tell I’m a fan, can’t you?

I’ve just finished Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, and it’s going to take some time to digest fully. It’s a whole level up from his earlier works, with everything about it improved. The character of Sam Vimes has now featured in several of his Discworld books, and seems to be serving the same purpose as Jack Ryan does for Tom Clancy – an ordinary man placed in extraordinary situations. In this case, he is accidentally sent back in time thirty years while battling a cunning murderer named Carcer, to a time when Ankh-Morpork was on the verge of rebellion against the current Patrician’s draconian policies. The presence of the two invaders from the future complicates matters, as you can imagine, and their knowledge of the events to come places them at the centre of affairs. Not that it helps them that much, since their presence changes the history they thought they knew.

If Night Watch is more “conventional” than Pratchett’s other novels, it’s also more rewarding, illuminating the history of Ankh-Morpork and its City Guard during those days of civil unrest. The city of Ankh-Morpork is also a character in its own right, imposing its own manners and logic on the others. The cavalry, brought in to quell the rebellion, find this out the hard way and play little real part:

“You know what they call a horse in the Shades?” “Yeah, sarge. Lunch.”

The “rebellion” behind all the trouble is led by one Reg Shoe, a cobbler who thinks too much, egged on by a motley bunch of middle class dimwits. Their attempts to formulate their revolutionary demands run up against the pragmatic Vimes:

Reg had a hunted look. He made a dive for safety. “Well, at least we can agree on Truth, Freedom and Justice, yes?”

There was a chorus of nods. Everyone wanted those. They didn’t cost anything.

A match flared in the dark, and they turned to see Vimes light a cigar.

“You’d like Freedom, Truth and Justice, wouldn’t you, comrade sergeant?” said Reg encouragingly.

“I’d like a hard-boiled egg,” said Vimes, shaking the match out.

There was nervous laughter, but Reg looked offended.

“In the circumstances, sergeant, I think we should set our sights a little higher–”

“Well, yes, we could,” said Vimes, coming down the steps. He glanced at the sheets of paper in front of Reg. The man cared. He really did. And he was serious. He really was. “But… well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I’m pretty sure that whatever happens we won’t have found Freedom, and there won’t be a whole lot of Justice, and I’m damn sure we won’t have found Truth. But it’s just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg. What’s all this about, Reg?”

“The People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road!” said Reg proudly. “We are forming a government!”

“Oh, good,” said Vimes. “Another one. Just what we need.”

We also learn more about Havelock Vetinari, who later became Patrician (like a Mayor with weapons), but who was a young Assassin at the time of the rebellion. At the end, in the graveyard on the anniversary of the rebellion thirty years earlier, Vetinari as Patrician thoughtlessly proposes a monument to the members of the Night Watch who died then, but Vimes will not hear of it:

“No. How dare you? How dare you! At this time! In this place! They did the job they didn’t have to do, and they died doing it, and you can’t give them anything. They fought for those who’d been abandoned, they fought for one another, and they were betrayed. Men like them always are. What good would a statue be? It’d just inspire new fools to believe they’re going to be heroes. They wouldn’t want that. Just let them be. For ever.”

Food for thought, in the light of current events.

Well, the USA is now attacking Iraq. Will this be another Gulf War, the one that had Denis Leary describing how he was glued to his TV with a blood-lust hard-on from eating too much red meat?

The events of September 11, 2001 looked awfully familiar to me, since I’ve read Tom Clancy’s Debt Of Honor. In that book, a politically-aggrieved airline pilot crashes his 747 into the Capitol building in Washington DC, killing the US President and most of Congress. In the next book, Executive Orders, Clancy’s character Jack Ryan became President as a result of those events, and had to fend off a major biological attack against the USA. By the end he formulated the Ryan Doctrine, which promised revenge against those who attack US interests, regardless of borders.

I’ve found a useful commentary piece here that includes the text of that fictional Doctrine. Assuming that George W Bush can actually read, I think he’s been reading Clancy too.

“Beware the Ides Of March”, said the Soothsayer. Did Caesar listen? Why should he? According to Plutarch, the main inspiration behind Shakespeare’s Roman plays, a combination of arrogance, fatalism, and a misplaced sense of invulnerability was behind Caesar’s decisions to ignore warnings from sources both supernatural and worldly.

A new theory reported in last week’s Sunday Times, however, suggests that Julius Caesar knew about the plot, and walked into it with open arms. It’s well-known that he suffered from epilepsy, but it’s been suggested that the symptoms included chronic diarrhoea, making his life a misery and seriously affecting his public standing. He may have been off-balance enough to imagine that his death would create a legend, and commit the ancient equivalent of “suicide by cop”. Another researcher has gone to the trouble of mapping out all 23 stab wounds inflicted on Caesar, and pinpointed the fatal one, giving some credence to Plutarch’s report that Brutus did indeed strike the fatal blow. Caesar wasn’t wrong about the legend, though, was he?

Though we had done The Merchant Of Venice before, Julius Caesar was my first real experience of Shakespeare, and still my favourite of his plays. We took a school trip to see the 1948 film version starring Laurence Olivier, while studying it in English class. It’s seriously overdue for the kind of treatment given to Richard III and Romeo & Juliet in recent years; if I had my way, I would relocate the story to some banana republic dictatorship, with El Bruto and Cassiena as flawed revolutionaries who go a bit too far in their attempt to free their country from the aging dictator Julio Cesaro. Or how about the gypsies? “Friends, Roma, Countrymen, lend me your ears…”

Back in the 20th Century, it was 70 years ago today that Adolf Hitler proclaimed the foundation of the Third Reich. Was the date a coincidence, or was Der Fuhrer thinking of another Emperor? No, I’m not a Nazi sympathiser, I just have an almanac on my PC, the same one that tells me today is Ry Cooder’s 56th birthday.

As seems to be an occasional pattern these days, I’m half-watching TV as I type this. The film just finishing is The Client, based on the John Grisham novel. I’ve never read any of his, but I remember seeing the Gingerbread Man movie. This one didn’t look half-bad – a legal thriller with about 5 minutes of court time in a two-hour film, the rest spent watching Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones grapple with a smart trailer-park kid who witnessed a murder, but didn’t know who to trust with the information. OK, but not my thing. The one I’m recording is Burnt By The Sun, a recent Russian film set in 1936, at the height of the Stalin era and the rise of the NKVD. Worthy stuff, and subtitled, so I can watch it at double-speed if required. (Sacrilege!)

I took Tom Clancy’s Red Rabbit to London with me, a borrowed hardback copy, which was a pain to carry around but worth it. It’s not a return to his old style, he’s introducing more subtle real-world detail in his recent books, but he’s clearly had fun filling in a major gap in the story of his main character Jack Ryan, whose CIA career is just starting to take off at the time of the story, 1982. The background is the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, and Red Rabbit is an attempt at creating a “back story” behind the real events. Historically, of course, the attempt did take place.

Without giving the story away, then, Red Rabbit is almost a prequel to Clancy’s later novels, offering a chance to expand on his other interesting characters, most notably the Foleys, the husband-and-wife team that later jointly came to run the CIA after years in the trenches. I’m not sure how wise it was to hook his narrative up to real history, but I can hardly fault the storytelling. Red Rabbit is almost up there with The Cardinal Of The Kremlin as Clancy’s best work, I think. He’s no Shakespeare, but he’s not John Updike or Philip Roth either, two Pulitzer Prize winners that I have found almost unreadable.

Clancy just about passes the British Geography test that American writers can easily fall foul of (see 2 Dec 2002 blog). He has the Ryans living in Chatham in Kent, travelling to London via Victoria station, which is correct. He then blows it by having Jack Ryan driven from near Manchester to Chatham in half an hour – not a chance, since it’s over a hundred and fifty miles, with London as an obstacle that would necessitate taking the M25. Two hours would be a minimum at high speed, more likely three. Close, but no cigar, Tom.

The work madness goes on. Every member of our team is so overloaded with urgent work that we can’t get to the ongoing matters we need to deal with. Part of our brief is training: we can prevent escalation of serious problems to us, by training the phone support people on the products and the things that can go wrong with them. This helps them resolve problems more quickly, and even prevents escalations. It’s a vicious circle – we can’t reduce escalations through training, because we have so many escalated cases to deal with. When we do get round to training, we find that people are prevented from going or even pulled off, because they can’t afford to lose the phone support staff for the duration of the course. Madness, I tell you.

Finally finished Red Storm Rising last Sunday – better than I remembered it, though you can clearly see the literary collision between Tom Clancy, the nominal author, and Larry Bond, the war games expert who played out the campaigns with Clancy. Bond later went on to write books of his own, such as Vortex, about a war in South Africa, and Red Storm Rising has reportedly been used as a text book in some military schools. There will soon be a new computer game based on an evolved version of his war games – Harpoon 4. One to watch out for, I think.

I’m grateful that most communication here in Ireland is carried out in English, compared to what I saw in France last month. There they dubbed everything into French, but I didn’t mention that I also saw a bit of a French remake of “Absolutely Fabulous”, with local actors and a feature film format. Back here, though, we have “The Muppet Show” with all the characters speaking Gaelic, but not the guest stars. At the moment we have Kermit The Frog talking (in Gaelic) to Charles Aznavour, who replies in English, describing how he can say anything to Miss Piggy in French and make her swoon. He goes on to prove it by reciting the phone number of the Paris garbage dump: “neuf trois deux un…”.

That’s it – TV’s going off, and it’s back to my book. I’m re-reading Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond. It came out in 1986 and I last read it over ten years ago. From what I remember, it’s been quite prophetic about some things, and thankfully wrong about others. Middle East Oil plays a huge part, almost foreshadowing the Gulf War, and it was clear even then, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the Communist Bloc economies could simply not continue as they were without something drastic happening. Clancy gets a lot of criticism in the USA for his slightly right-wing views, and has even tackled such questions as tax reform, once his long-standing character Jack Ryan became President. He knows his field, though, and it’s not wise to simply dismiss his work as fiction.

More ominously, Clancy later foresaw the use of an airliner in an attack on a public building. Or, what if terrorists read Tom Clancy novels too? In Debt Of Honor the main target was the Capitol building in Washington DC, and that may have been the target of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001.

Tributes are pouring in for Maurice Gibb, the second of the Bee Gees to die. I know it’s in poor taste to criticise someone who has just died, and I won’t go quite as far as Denis Leary did in No Cure For Cancer after Andy Gibb died: “One down, three to go!” Now it’s “two down, two to go”, but it would have been enough for the band to break up, as long as the “music” stopped. “Here’s ten bucks, bring me the head of Barry Manilow. I want to drink beer out of his empty skull… you write the songs, we’ll drink the beer out of your empty head!”

Ah, Monday morning with the house to myself, I’ve just been lazing around, watching bits of daytime TV and playing Solitaire on the PC. They’re showing All Creatures Great And Small on RTÉ, which I have never seen before, though I did read all the James Herriot books years ago. I also read a biography of Herriot, whose real name was James Wight, which described the effect that his literary fame had on him, his family and associates, and even on the whole of Yorkshire. Since he was originally from Glasgow and not from Yorkshire, he saw a humorous side to the county and its people that had hitherto gone unnoticed. He certainly didn’t anticipate the immense popularity of his books and the way it changed parts of Yorkshire into traps for American and Japanese tourists.

I didn’t go in to work on Sunday – seeing the office would have the effect of interrupting my holiday. One reason why I might go in is to pick up my mail, since I’m expecting my Engineering course results in the post. You would think they would inform me electronically, but we are talking about a UK educational institution, after all. The same ones who insist that students submit work in the form of handwritten papers sent through the post.

Watching the News, it’s amazing how often we hear politicians and others using phrases like the following:

• “The reality is…”
• “The question you need to ask is…”
• “The point is…”

Whenever I hear one of those, or one like it, I immediately switch off from whatever it is they are saying. Those are examples of “spin”, an attempt to control what people are thinking about or questioning, in addition to the usual control of information, which is bad enough.

Quiet weekend, with only some shopping to relieve the tedium. I bought some shirts, and books including A New Kind Of Science by Stephen Wolfram, a mathematician who is best known for developing the commercial software package Mathematica, which I’m still learning to use. This is my new “pottering” book, one I can pick up and hopefully get something out of at any time, joining Rem Koolhaas’ S,M,L,XL, which I’ve discussed already, and which is still filling that position after 4+ years. Both are heavy and will be a pain next time I have to move, but worth it.

Another book purchase: Genius – Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick. It’s interesting, but a little disconcerting to someone who has read some of Feynman’s memoirs in the book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? Gleick draws heavily on that work, but seems to taking his subject far more seriously than the subject took himself. At one point he’s even trying analyze the way Feynman told stories about himself, looking for character flaws. The Feynman stories I have read that are sometimes self-glorifying, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes what-the-hell-just-happened? Personally, I can’t see much more to them than the simple pleasure storytelling affords both teller and listener.

I forgot that I set my alarm to go off 2 hours early this morning, so I was up and dressed by 05:40. I did this in advance of tomorrow morning, when I will attempt get up at 03:00 to try to watch the Leonid meteors. The forecast (as of Friday) is for a good display in this part of the world.