Blessed by the Potato

This will likely be a multipart post since I’m probably going to want to cover a lot of ground and dig up a lot of figures, but just don’t have time right now. For now, a quick point to make:

“Switching to ethanol [to fuel cars] was a big thing, until they realized they are starving people.”

[clarification for context mine]

This is just one representative quote (from an off-hand comment on Preet’s site) of a sentiment that I’ve been seeing a lot lately. There is some sort of food crisis happening right now, and it’s snowballing astonishingly quickly. There are food riots in poorer countries, and even in the States there are the beginnings of rationing on rice.

I’ve got my doubts about the ultimate utility of ethanol production, but I also think that it’s far too easy to blame biofuel production for the current food price spike. From what I can find, about 20% of the US corn crop went into biofuels last year, and it’s pretty much the only food crop that gets diverted to that stream. 20% of the crop looks to be within the normal range of crop yield variances, and last year was a record crop to boot. It may be a factor, but I have to say that something else is leading to food price inflation and starving the world…

After a long hiatus due to the writers’ strike, Battlestar Galactica returned for another season this week. One thing I noticed is that the delay seems to have given the animators more time to render the first big battle sequence, “spiffifying” it to a degree I haven’t noticed in previous seasons. Before this episode aired, I was speculating with some friends at work about what this season might have in store, which I will discuss after the

Spoiler warning!

So at the end of last season, we found Col. Tigh, the mechanic guy, and two other meat bags hearing music in their heads, and deciding that they were Cylons. I figured that there was no way they could be Cylons; or rather, no way Colonel Tigh could be a Cylon, since he had been with Adama since before the Cylons started their hybrid/humanesque experiments in the last war. While it’s pretty clear in this episode that the humans suspect that the Cylons might have the ability to copy a real human and make a damned bloody machine out of them, as far as we know the Cylon technology only allows them to grow a very limited number of humanesque Cylon models. Models created de novo. That aspect is even mentioned when discussing their suspicions about Starbuck: if she’s a Cylon, it must mean she was always a Cylon. Since it seems impossible that Colonel Tigh could have been replaced (especially under the watchful eye of Bill Adama), then it must mean that he’s not a Cylon. One guy at work agreed, also saying that “it would just be too goddamned easy for the writers to make Tigh a Cylon. It’s an easy out for them after all the prickish inhuman things he did in the resistance. If he’s a Cylon, he’ll never really have to answer or come to terms with that.”

That lead me to conclude that the musical four must instead be some kind of nascent prophets. There is, after all, plenty of religious and quasireligious events in the series, including numerous visions by various main characters, include Madame President herself, so I figured it stood to reason that the god(s) of the humans had selected those four loony bins to help guide the fleet towards Earth (which only part of me hopes is not trapped 1980), or find a way to negotiate with the Cylons (perhaps by leading them to think they were Cylons, and thus open up a dialogue), or to find a way to bring the holy fire of vengeance to bear against those godless (er… godfull) machines that nuked the 12 colonies of Cobol.

Of course, that line of reasoning looks to have been shot down as Anders looked straight into the red eye of a raider (who bleed this season, by the way; wonder if that’ll be retconned into some of the DVD releases) and had a response… of some sort.

Anyway, it promises to be an interesting season. And we can thank the writers’ strike for potentially opening up the summer months to new episodes for the first time ever. Hopefully that’ll stay and we’ll get more episodes per season of our favourite shows (that, or that the networks will decide to continue to air other good series through the summer instead of reruns and filler crap).

We just watched the Steve Carell movie “Dan in Real Life“. I had to make Wayfare watch it since even though I had it, she didn’t want to waste the time to watch it since it looked so bad from the previews. I don’t know who put the previews together, but the movie is nothing like they suggested. It’s actually quite well written, and very heartfelt and warm and fuzzy and sweet. They did a very good job of showing a family interacting together in a big get-together and building up the “love at first sight” relationship with the main character. Moreover, Steve Carell didn’t suck. I don’t typically like him as an actor since in so many roles he comes off a such a complete dufus that you have to wonder if he’s from outer space (though oddly enough I end up really liking what he’s in: the office is funny, despite his over-the-top stupid manager; the 40 year old virgin relied on him being a bit of a freak, and had a good supporting cast, in addition to hitting a little too close to home to not like it), but in Dan In Real Life he actually came across as likeable, normal guy. In fact, I nearly lost it in the talent show scene (damn you Wayfare, I know you’re pumping me full of estrogen while I sleep and it’s fucking with my emotions! I don’t usually get emotionally involved in movies!!) where he’s all opening up for the first time after his wife died and torn between singing backup for his brother and singing directly to the girl he likes…

While I liked it as a romantic comedy that was very down to earth, Wayfare seemed particularly drawn to the huge happy family getaway fantasy. “Oh, I want that!” she’d exclaim as they got together for charades, or played football on the lawn. So of course now that means that if we know you in real life, you’re going to get sucked into charades, football, pancakes, and possibly a talent show sometime in the near future. Possibly on PEI, since that seems to be the sort of magical place where this sort of thing could actually happen.

I never read Stephen King’s The Mist, so I managed to be pretty well surprised by the movie. For starters, I went into it thinking that “the Mist” was that mist that turned people inside-out like the Simpsons mocked in one of their Treehouse of Terror episodes. Not to spoil anything, but it’s not. Aside from seeing it pop up in the list of movies at IMDB, I hadn’t really heard about this movie — no advertising for it managed to penetrate my consciousness, if there was any.

Spoiler warning!

It’s a pretty decent B-list horror movie. There are monstrous space aliens to boldly fight (or run shrieking from) and a slow die-off of the characters trapped in their less-than-safe haven. There are gross-out sequences (such as the soldier who gets put up in a web and finds alien spiderlings spewing forth out of his body), blood, and action… but it’s not a typical monster movie. The movie is really a psychological thriller about the desperation these shut-in survivors face as they ponder the prospect of never being rescued, of never returning to normalcy, and of course, being eaten or otherwise horribly killed.

Some of the characters are a little cardboard cutout-ish. The next-door neighbour started off with a very workable personality and some hinted-at old issues with the main character. Then, he started to come together with the main character in their common struggle to recover from the storm damage and the story seemed to be leading us towards a nice arc where they become reluctant friends… until the Mist comes and brings with it the tentacled space aliens. The neighbour refuses to believe that there are space aliens out in the Mist, even refusing to play along with the games of the people who want him to come back to the loading dock to see the severed purple tentacle. Even after some more people see it and are convinced, he refuses to believe, thinking the town people are playing a joke on him. To be fair, it was a little suspicious of the main character to approach him alone first, thinking that since he was a well-spoken out-of-town lawyer, that he’d be able to best break the news to the rest of the people shut into the store.

Spoiler warning! Seriously, I’m about to talk about the end now!

It was interesting to watch as the crazy biblical lady brought so many under her spell and started to preach about the end of days and the need for human sacrifice. On some days I have a fair bit of faith in humanity; on others I can be pretty cynical. I didn’t really doubt that she could form her own little cult there in the grocery store after a couple of days of being isolated within an alien haze and scared absolutely shitless while people were dying. However, I was astonished at the number of people willing to follow her down the path of human sacrifice (the soldier? yeah, ok, there was bit of a reason underlying that… but the movie started to go beyond believability when so many people were reaching to sacrifice a child), and that no one tried to counter her craziness with something from the bible about god no longer demanding human sacrifices or something like that.

The most power and most fucked-up part came right at the end. After escaping the madness of the grocery store crowd and driving until they ran out of gas and never finding an end to the mist or alien devastation, the group of mostly-rational people lead by the main character fell into despair and decided to end it all quickly by the gun, rather than wait around to be eaten by some tentacled nasty (or worse). However, the gun doesn’t have enough bullets for everyone, so the main character volunteers to pull the trigger on all the others, and then walk out to his own less pleasant end. He shoots them all, including his own son, and leaves the safety of the SUV… only to shortly thereafter find that the low rumbling taken for the humming approach of one of the larger aliens was actually a tank plowing through — humanity had triumphed, rescue was here, and he was saved. The weight of it all hit him, and he fell to his knees wailing.

That was a very powerful moment, however I think it was more from the sympathy of the situation than from the performance seen on screen. It was a decent portrayal or suicidal despair, I suppose, but I don’t think Thomas Jane will be winning any awards for it. Compare that with George Clooney in Michael Clayton. I actually didn’t like the movie Michael Clayton very much at all, and if I were to rewatch one or the other, I’d probably go see the Mist again. However, there’s a minute right at the end where George Clooney hops in a cab and you see this look on his face. This holy fuck look, this I can’t believe I just did that and I’m totally crashing off my adrenaline rush right now expression. That look right at the end almost makes watching the rest of the movie worthwhile (almost). I didn’t get that same resonance at the end from the Mist, although the situation itself was so powerful.

One minor detail that threw the ending off for me was when the tank came rolling through, it came from the same direction as the land rover full of survivors. That SUV wasn’t moving very fast through the Mist (with visibility at maybe a couple of feet), but the tank would have had to be moving even slower if it was stopping occasionally to engage the aliens or add to its large convoy of rescued civilians. So the survivors really should have passed the military on their journey before they ran out of gas. Of course, it’s possible that they ran right by the rescuers in the Mist without ever knowing it, like two ships passing in the night; it’s also possible that they waited in the SUV after running out of gas for more than the few minutes it looks like it took for them to decide to end it. The Mist, which engulfed the town at supernatural speeds, also cleared very quickly as the convoy moved through, so it’s also possible that the Mist was retreating along with the moving SUV, allowing the military to move quickly with clear visibility to catch up to them… but I think it would have been better for my suspension of disbelief if the tanks simply rolled out of the Mist from another direction.

I set out to get caught up on the new Terminator TV series after seeing some commercials for it that told me (a) it’s made it past the first few writer’s strike fill-in episodes, and (b) kinda actually decent looking. Trying to get caught up with “free episodes on CTV.ca” didn’t work: the episodes required activeX to watch, and even after firing up internet exploder to watch them, there were only two available, each split into 5 parts, not sorted in any logical order down the menu pane, and DRM’ed to boot. Thankfully, it was more convenient to get them via my bittorrent PVR (hey CTV: check out the CBC, which is awesome — ok, downloadable could bring perfection, but still, I’m proud of our public broadcaster.)

Anyhow, fully caught up and I’m happy with the show. The plot seems to chug along merrily enough, the actors all seem to do a decent job in their roles, and pretty much everything seems to fit well enough into the Terminator universe so as to not drive me crazy. It’s a worthwhile show to watch in a fairly sparse writers’ strike wasteland. Of course, I do have some minor nitpicks:

Sarah Connor doesn’t seem hard enough, but I suppose that’s ok because we’d probably get tired of watching ultra-intense “I’ve just escaped from a mental hospital and they shot me up with steroids in the ass every day” Sarah Connor. I thought it was a shame that Summer Glau has been typecast so early in her career, and there can’t be too many more roles out there for socially awkward human superweapon, but then Wayfare pointed out that being typecast into that role at least means she can go to SciFi cons for the rest of her life now and always have some kind of cult following, so I don’t feel too bad for her.

Spoiler alert!

Some of the physics of the show drive me a little nuts, and some of that crosses over from the movies. The Terminators are really incredibly tough killing machines with futuristic alloy armour plating. They’re really goddamned tough motherfuckers. Walking tanks. It’s what they were built to be… but they’re not invincible. I mean, sure, a 9 mm handgun or even a shotgun or assault rifle is not going to do a lot of damage, especially if the bullets are ricocheting off the armoured plates or their head… but they’ve also got a lot of actuators, joints, moving parts, and sensors that can’t possibly be as battle-hardened. The protagonists of the shows and movies love to pump bullets into Terminators, and I can’t believe in their minds that it’s something they do just to show how tough one is. So, really, the stupid things shouldn’t be completely impervious to bullets (and if they are, the resistance fighters should figure that out and stop carrying guns so they can run unencumbered). Every now and then, someone should get lucky and hit a soft spot. Maybe that doesn’t stop it, but you know, give it a glitch in a movement, a limp, a dead eye. At the very least, we did see an arm get torn off by a speeding truck, but I’d like a little more return for all the bullets shot at them than to just peel off skin.

The gimmick of the headless Terminator also really bothered me on a number of levels. First off, the idea of the head waking up and remotely controlling the body that’s lain dead for 8 years to come get it really didn’t jive with my understanding of how Terminators worked. Secondly, that head should have stayed in the past. The reason Sarah Connor couldn’t hold on to her wicked cool gun or clothes through the time jump was that nothing could go through the time portal that wasn’t wrapped in skin. The head, its skin burned off by the futuristic nuclear-powered electric discharge gun, was all metal and robotic. It ceased being a flesh-encased cyborg and thus should have been annihilated by the time transportation nudity bubble. That same time jump also didn’t seem to bug the other people in the world as much as it should have. Sure, with some good cosmetics middle-aged Sarah Connor might not look to have aged a day in 8 years, but John Connor disappeared at age 15. When he shows up again in Dixon’s life, Dixon doesn’t seem to think anything of John being the same age as he last saw him…

I was pleased to get a glimpse of how the skin gets grafted on to that endoskeleton, and doubly pleased to see in the flash-back to-the-future a glimpse of an early model Terminator with fake-ass rubber skin. That homage to Reese’s first speech about the unstoppable killing machine was exactly the kind of rewarding experience I had hoped the show would be… even if the robot prison was a lot more ghetto than I had thought even besieged SkyNet would settle for.

They also made a stupid error with the blood typing. Sarah, it is revealed, is 0-, the universal donor. “But this guy needs at least 3 units of his own type, AB-” John stands up and asks to be tested… but with a mother who’s O-, he can’t possibly be AB- without some serious genetic mutations going on.