Transformer the last knight

I watched Transformers the Last Knight on my cellphone yesterday. The movie was released last year and from what I have read, the movie sucked. 

Saw the last four movies in the series and to tell the truth I can not remember much about the stories except Megan Fox. Sorry about that.

Maybe viewing the movie on a 5.99" screen does not give me the right to criticize the cinematography but even at that screen size the CGIs do not blend with the environment and the human actors.

They are cartoonish and  they stick out. Even the lighting do not interact with them realistically. Enlarge that to a giant screen and you could see the details.

Anyway, my main gripe is the story line. It started in a dystopian sci-fi fashion, then morphed into an Indiana Jones story with humor a-la-Marvel franchise interspered here and there, then it tries to forced the Arthurian legend into the cybertronian resurrection story.

The thing is the transformers are giant robots. Why in the hell did the writers choose the chivalric King Arthur to prop up the story, the bacground myth? The central theme in King Arthur story is the search for the holy Grail. It would be more convincing or smoother to use myths that contain references to beings that correspond to the transformers size and powers. 

King Arthur and the transformers, unfortunately for me, don't mix.

An artists renedition of a Greek Titan.

Greek mythology for one. There are titans and Giants in the hellenic saga that could do well to give justice to size and power of the cybertronians. Primitive people would treat them as gods.

Norse and even biblical myths could do as well. 

But I guess the writers saw that these are overused too. 

I think the writers had stonehenge at the center of the story.

Also, the humor did not work. 

The movie is boring even with all the explosions and the robots. I quit after one hour of watching. 

Maybe, I'll continue when I'm in the mood 

Afternoon Classes/ SF stories

Dep Ed Divison of Rizal held a clinic for its student journalists for the upcoming regional schools press conference. It was a two day affair from Friday September 28 to Saturday the 29th. An emergency class was declared by the school head which meant there was no morning classes for us. 

My classroom was reserved to be used by the guests fortunately it was not, it was used on Saturday. I was waiting the whole morning and to pass the time I opened the e-book files on my cellphone and read classic SF short.

The first one I read was "The Shroud." It was a short story about the shroud of Turin. The Shroud of Turin was believed by many to contain the body of Jesus Christ, and although skeptics have challenged it's authenticity, many still held on to the belief that it was the proof that Christian savior existed.

In the story, the shroud was accepted as true and that the cadaver wrapped in the cloth was undeniably Jesus. A Eucharistic or nondenominational order was established to keep the shroud and to make sure it was open for all and not owned or kept by one of the many Christian denominations.

One scientist was allowed to study the DNA in the shroud and he found out, thru the analysis of the chromosomes, that the crucified subject suffered from a disease that shrinks the brain which results to delusions.

Of course the mad messiah was one of the theories used by theologians to explain Jesus and his messianic claim. Even the Romans said that to the man claiming to be the son of God. There's nothing new about it but the impact of such discovery to Christianity is unimaginable, or maybe not. I mean no one can dislodge a fanatical believer from his faith.  

I was smiling when I finished reading A.C. Clarke"s "Stroke of the Sun". I mean, watching a football and you noticed the opposing team's fan were all holding a foil like tabloid sized souvenir given by politicians. When the team was cheated by the referee and the team's fanatics, together with the planted people who knew the purpose of the souvenir focused them on the referee, it obliterated the referee, burning the poor guy to ashes.

Although these classic sci-fi were dated ( Asimov's computer was called Multivac becuase vacuum tube were the tech used in computers in the 50's and 60's) the story especially the twist was entertaining. 

Of course the science is not important, the story was and its what I like about the classics, it is not overburdened by technicalities and the need to get scientific but the idea was there.

I was so entertained that I didn't noticed that I had read twelve of short stories.

Living Space-Isaac Asimov

Silly Asses-Asimov 

The Jokester-Asimov

The Parasite-Arthur C. Clarke

Second Dawn-Clarke

The Stroke of the Sun-Clarke

A Walk in the dark-Clarke

The Nine Billion Names of God-Clarke

Green Hills of Earth-Robert Heinlein

From Sci-Arizona (www.scifi-az.com) 

Dream world

Duty-Honor-Planet

The Shroud

 I do miss the time when I could read an entire novel in one sitting. 

Stranger things and the strangest thing of all the strange things in this strange thing

A couple of days back, I saw the pilot episode of Stranger Things on Couchtuner. (Do be careful when opening this site. It contains a lot of links that could lead to some nasty sites. Exit the false links first by clicking on the "x's" before clicking play) I was not hooked by the first two episodes because my impression was that it's going to be a stretched version of Spielbergs' Super 8 or  ET or something like that. 

I had this idea that the series is going to be about an alien that escaped a government facility and will end up being befriended and protected by a group of kids, and so on and so forth, and in the end the alien is reunited with its family back on its own planet somewhere out there in space. 

How do you stretch a story like that when the theme has been explored and has been expended by tons of movies and series about it. I guess, in the long run the series would fizzle out then be cancelled.

Last night, thanks to the abnormally fast internet speed, I was able to watch the whole of season 1 and I was hooked. 



I guess interstellar aliens and interstellar travels are becoming passe and more films are exploring the idea of inter-dimensional travel. The problem with interstellar travel is the vast distance between galaxies hence a conventional faster-than-light travel still poses a seemingly unsolvable problem since speed is subject to time, and even at FTL a star or a system billion of light years away would still take a very long time to reach their destination. 

 So a new method of interstellar travel had been proposed, and that is through wormholes. And wormholes, since the idea is to bend time and space, could result to inter-dimensional travel so that instead of travelling distances, what could happen is that the traveler could end up in the opposite plane, that is if time-space is a fabric, or to another parallel or opposite dimension as expressed in the multi-world interpretation of quantum theory. (This wayward travel from inter-stellar to inter-dimensional travel is explored in the movie Event Horizon.)

Stranger Things explores the idea of inter-dimensional travel. The mysterious character "11" possesses psychokinetic abilities which allows her to move things using her mind but her most interesting power is her ability to travel outside her body which gave her the ability to listen to other people's conversation making her a human "bug". But in her out of body forays, she comes in contact with an alien that inhabits the dimension.  

The government scientists studying and manipulating her abilities encourages her to make contact but in the process she accidentally opened an inter-dimensional portal that allowed the aliens to enter our dimension.

In the small town of Hawkins, strange things starts to happen. People disappears and the police are surprised when the disappearances are solved by state troopers. But when Will Byers disappears, his mother, brother and friends searched for him. The Hawkins police chief becomes suspicious and investigated Byers cadaver which lead to the discovery of his fake body and the government conspiracy to cover up the disappearances.

"Eleven" escaped the government research center where she ends up in the small town of Hawkins and befriended three kids who helped her. She reveals who she is and that it was she who opened the portal. The season ended with Bill Myers being rescued from the alternate dimension called " the upside down" and with Eleven closing the portal. A month later, Myers, in the bathroom, coughs out a slug and then experiences flashes of the upside down.

Some stuff...

Okay, so Eleven or El is able to travel between dimensions but how does she do it? Theoretically a lot of energy, some theoretical physicist even say it requires the power of  a star, is needed in order to create a worm hole. First, time and space must be warped and then a controllable black hole must be created in order to create a worm hole between the warped space-time fabric. 

In the traditional space-tech sci-fi this is usually solved by warp-engines but in Stranger Things, inter-dimensional travel is achieved by a different means, though the power of the mind. The background story is that in 50's a lot of experiment  was done by the US Government using people with ESP or with potential ESP with the help hallucinogens like LSD and sensory-deprivation-tanks in order to expand the abilities of the mind. And it is this scenario that Eleven's ability is introduced, she is the daughter of one of the subjects of the experiment and she is abducted or adopted by the laboratory to be its subject.

I guess it difficult to overcome the idea of thre separation of the body and the mind.

Anyway...

The concept is interesting, though this is not the first time this idea is explored because most horror movies i.e. if you removed the religious references, is really all about inter-dimensional crossings. 

Is it possible then that the story is a sort of a brain-in-the jar experiment and the whole reality or universe is just a virtual reality created by an organic computer, Eleven's brain. This is one explanation that I guess would satisfy the physics because if one mind could affect reality in such a way that it could open portals, think of the implications of having two or three etc. minds with the same abilities and the chaos it could create.  

Of course, this is sci-fi and I don't expect any real-life rules to work in it but it's supposed to make one to sit down and think about the unexplored part of our existence whether it be dark or upside down because there so much more to this life we live in than what we experience.

Interstellar the Movie

I saw "Interstellar" on Putlocker a couple of days ago. Although the slow internet and the quality of the video was stressful for me (made me want to throw the keyboards out the door), the story did manage to hook me despite of everything.

1. 1. 
      
   2. In Earth's future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are 
   3. slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable. Professor Brand
   4. (Michael Caine), a brilliant NASA physicist, is working on plans
   5. to save mankind by transporting Earth's population to a 
   6. new home via a wormhole. But first, Brand must send former 
   7. NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and a team of 
   8. researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find
   9.  out which of three planets could be mankind's new home.

The movie is slow and more of thinking movie than a techno-action sci-fi.

1. Time Dilation 

There are many movies that featured Einstein theory of relativity, but this film did great in showing the effects of time dilation. When Cooper, Doyle, Amelia and robots TARS and CASE landed on Miller's planet, a water planet, to investigate if it could support life, they were caught off guard by giant waves that killed Doyle and marooned the shuttle for an hour or so and when they returned to their ship Endurance 23 years had already passed..

The time dilation was due to the strong gravitational pull of the black hole Gargantua. The stronger the gravitational pull, the slower time ticks. And according to Einstein's theory, inertial and gravitational mass are the same. That's why when an astronaut is in a speeding vehicle like say a rocket nearing light speed, his time slows down compared to the people on earth. Speed increases mass, and mass is relative to gravity: the larger the mass the greater the gravity. black holes have massive mass and gravity that light could not escape from it. That's why they are called black holes, by the way. Hmmm...obvious enough.

Bending time and space.

2. Wormholes.

Distance is the main problem with interstellar travel. Even if a ship that could travel as fast as light, it would still take years to visit the nearest star and hundreds and even millions of years to explore our galaxy.

So, instead of inventing an engine that could move a vehicle or a spaceship from point A to point B at great speed, scientists have this idea of bending time and space. It's like driving a car from Taytay to Cebu but instead of the vehicle moving, the whole of the Philippines was bent allowing the car to get to Cebu without leaving its position, its the roads under the car that moved! Of course,this will take massive amount of energy and according to a physicist about the power of a star.

In the movie, a wormhole appeared near Saturn (or Jupiter) and NASA sent probes and later astronauts to search for habitable planets for the emigration of the survivors or the genes of the survivors on Earth.

3. Fifth Dimension

We live in a three dimensional world. 

3 Dimensions: L,W and H.
spatial dmension

2 deimensions: L and W

Easy to understand think of movies. 2 D movies have length and width or lines: plane. One Dimension is line and the other is plane. Now with 3D movies, depth is added: space. The third dimension is space. these are spatial dimensions. This is how we are able to coordinate location .

4 Dimensions 3 spatial dimensions+Temporal
Dimensions.

Fourth dimension is time. In three dimension we could place location but with the addition of time as fourth dimension, it is now possible to locate "events". Think 3D movie again, but since we are outside the 3d movie, we could go to and fro through time in the movie.

In the movie, Cooper  sacrificed himself so that Endurance and Amelia could survive. He was sucked into the black hole and later found himself floating behind his daughter's multi-level bookcase. with each level, he could see events in the past. He was later able to manipulate objects to send messages to her daughter in the past. In the  present, Murphy, Copper's daughter, realized that it was her father who has been talking to him in codes from the past. She discovered that the data on gravity was being transmitted by her father in morse code through his watch which was given to her before Cooper left for space.

The tesseract (3 dimensional representation of time-space) collapsed and Cooper was sucked into the future rescued by a NASA space station travelling towards Edmund's planet. Cooper was reunited with his daughter Murphy who was 120 years old then.

There will come a time when humanity will
surpassed the limitations of biological bodies
brain and move on to the next level: the Singularity

What's the fifth dimension then? Cooper was outside space and time. Sapce-Time was represented in 3 dimensions where Cooper was able to move about inside looking out at temporal locations. This is the fifth dimension.

4. They.

Humanity was saved by entities called they.  They created the wormhole that enabled NASA to travel interstellar and they, according to Cooper, also allowed him to go into the fifth dimension. Who are they? They are us from the future.

Needlephobia and alternate Earth story

Needles are also notorious because
they are used by mangkukulams
to inflict pain on their victims.

Sewing needles used to scare the hell out of me.

There's a story to it.

When I was still in pre-school, my mother hand sewed a lot of stuff. She patched holes on shirts, pants; repaired tears on pillow cases, curtains; nip the edges of our short pants to make it shorter, etc. She did a lot of hand sewing,  like, I guess, most housewives did.

I was the last of of the siblings then (Dadai was still on the way), so I was the one left with my mother at home. She was busy and so was I. She sewed, I sewed too. And of course, sharp objects and little children did not sit well and it usually resulted in pricks, blood and tears.

My mother told me that I should not play or even touch needles or pins. "Needles kills," she told me. Well, not as blunt as that but basically that was what she meant.

The thought of  needles
travelling through my body
unnoticed, scared me.

"Look at these sharp needles, feel the sharpness. Once you are pricked by it, and it entered your skin, it will travel through your veins carried by your blood stream up to your heart. Once it reached your heart, it will prick your heart and burst it killing you in the end." I mean, this scared me big time. My imagination was already running wild. I had this vision of a spear running through my veins seeking out my heart to stab and rip it apart, and the excruciating pain that goes with it...   

This fear was reinforced by the fact that many adults, like my lola Moning, had the same thing to say about needles. "Be careful with needles. You might seat on one and without noticing it, it might already be in your bloodstream going to your heart." So, from that moment on, I had this child's illogical (well, my mother's explanation and authority then made it logical for me) fear of needles. Of course,   the fear was gone when I'm already in grade school. 

I guess adult minds work that way. I mean, I do that now too. I scare children with traditional and sometimes made up stories instead of explaining things scientifically to them which they may not understand or learn from. Or they may understand but it may not affect their emotions the way stories do. Children's imaginations are more powerful than their intellects. Hold their imagination and you have a hold on them.

Stories (or myths) are not lies for they are not meant to deceive but they are also not truths the way scientific laws and logical truths are either true or false. Stories are responses to situations that invites a particular response from the hearer. 

Multiverse or alternate universe is a hypothesis
that there exist an infinite number of alternate
universes.There is also an infinite number of earths
 which is similar to ours but with slight
variations or could be so different from ours
that the laws of physics may be opposite of ours.
There are earths where there is no life because
 the evolutionary process did not grant it
the condition to spawn life.
 It is Darwin's evolution
on a cosmological scale.

How about an alternate story? (In a slightly different alternate Earth (Earth 2) where my mother was a doctor of medicine and I was a pre-school tot)

My mother(2): " George, don't play with needles. They are not sterilized. They may have the bacterium Clostridium Tetani. Once the bacterium entered your bloodstream, they will multiply and attack your central nervous system. The process may take a few days but the symptoms are mild spasms in the jaw muscles—also known as lockjaw or trismus. The spasms can also affect the chest, neck, back, abdominal muscles, and buttocks. Back muscle spasms often cause arching, called opisthotonos. Sometimes the spasms affect muscles that help with breathing, which can lead to breathing problems...*"

Me(2): (Playing with needles and pins)"Who cares...I can't understand a word you're saying mother. Tell me the story about needles that George's mother from Earth 1 told him. Please..."

Me(2): Oouuucchhhh...what the Fraggernestein!

  * (wikipedia)

So bad it was good: Nazis at the Center of the Earth

So bad it's good!

I watched Nazis at the Center of the Earth this afternoon and it was so bad that I could not stop from watching it.

Just before the WW II in Europe ended a group of Nazis led by Dr. Josef Mengele (an attempt at historicity)escaped from Germany to a secret base in Antarctica. These   Nazis survived by regenerating their bodies by harvesting organs from captured people.

Hitler being transported. Of course, at the beginning of the movie I did not think this was Hitler. I thought it was a bomb or a virus or something.

This guy's skin was ripped off and then transplanted to another Nazi.

Then there's a group of scientists in  a research station in Antarctica led by Dr. Adrian Reistad played here by Jack Busey, the only actor in the film that I knew, who was captured by the Nazi's. Unsuspecting, these group scientists later found out that Reistad was part of the Nazi conspiracy to revive Hitler or what remained of him, a head on a mechanical body, by injecting stem cells into the Hitler-robot.

The operation to get the brain stem cell was quite primitive, no anesthetics and no  sterilization. But the stem cell of an adult did not work.

Dr. Reistad found out that his girlfriend was pregnant. He got an idea, why not use a fetus' stem cells. So, here he vacuumed the fetus out of his girl friend's ovary  to obtain   the stem cells.

When Hitler was revived, the Nazi's fly out of Antarctica using the Orion (maybe with reference to Project Orion) the Nazi flying saucer (there were NAZI experimental flying saucers) to re conquer the world by releasing flesh-eating bacteria that Dr. Reistad brought with him to the Antarctica station.

Hitler giving a speech to the Fourth Reich composed of around twenty people.

The Nazi flying saucer: Orion

Of course, as expected: the breast exposure.

The Nazi flying saucer was destroyed by a grenade and Hitler was killed by injecting some chemical into his terminal or outlet or something.

Anyway, the plot was a spoof. The CGI was bad. But this movie had no pretensions of anything but fun.

Cowboys and Aliens, American Idol Tra-la-la

One may be confused by my last post, but be not: I saw Battleship and Cowboys and Aliens (bootleg and downloaded of course) and I fused them into one sort of a criticism to save bytes. Battleship was one visually good movie but the story was starchy-corny while Cowboys and Aliens was one veerrryyy long movie about alien gold prospectors--2 hours for that crap....the movie gave me sore eyes. Why did Harrison Ford...really...two hours for that story! Really its more like Twilight Zone episode that was stretched too long. For what? Indulgence...

________________________

I could be wrong and I want to be wrong! Jessica Sanchez made it into the top 5, and the guy that I thought teen-age girls would vote to be this year's American Idol, the guy with the weird hair, Colton Something was eliminated. I think the judges' drama (of course my gut kept telling me it was a staged drama or something) paid off: the climbing into the stage and saving Jessica made the voters realize that the search was about talent and not about hmmm...face value. (It's so hot today that my butt was sweating.) 

But...butt...my man is Joshua Ledet. I have nothing against Jessica, I mean she's Filipino and whether a person or any creature has 100% Filipino blood or .000000001% Filipino blood, Filipinos are supposed to root for them. I mean, this is our way of showing our love for our country and our race and our nationalism and our hopelessness. Just look at our national football team. Anyway...Jessica's style is too diva and too predictable: heard one, heard em all.

But there's something about black musicians and singers; They have this hmmmm....unexplainable something, pain, or persecution, or this primal energy or emotions of some sort that wants to come out. Listen to Joshua sing a Percy Sledge song "When a man loves a woman." (This song is not a Michael Bolton song!) so you may have an idea what I'm talking about.

I was disappointed to find out that Elise Testone was eliminated. 

Elise's performance of Led Zep's "Whollata Lovin" was the best rock performance. I mean, she rocked!

Here she performed a Jimi Hendrix classic "Bold as Love. I have to say that Hendrix' songs were not meant to be contest pieces for American Idol or any of that cheezy-corny talent stuff. Hendrix's songs were meant to be performed with the guitar and most of them told something of a confused-hallucegenic-melancholic emotions, but Elise's impressive vocalizations of Hendrix' power (which was for vocally challenged Hendrix expressed through his guitar playing) drove home the point (whatever that is). Anyway, she's too rough or too rock for AI. I was hoping that Dave Mathews clone Phillip Phillips would be eliminated because he was not that good vocally and performance wise. 

__________________________

I am giving Showtime till the end of the quarter. The hosts are starting to sound like broken records.

Anyway...am supposed to prepare a sermon for tomorrow. Ciao!

Battleship

Saw Battleship the movie on the bus en route to Baguio. Judging from the quality of the sound and the video, the DVD was obviously pirated (or bootleg DVD if you're a native English speaker). Anyway, the movie was interesting but though the writer/s tried to put emphasis on the story of the protagonist Alex Hopper played by Taylor Kirtsch, the movie was really about the retired battleship USS Missouri and some old retired US Navy personnel who went back to active service to man the old-vacuum tube-analog battleship in its campaign against the aliens. Of course, the movie was also about a group of stupid scientists who sent signals into an earthlike planet not thinking that there maybe some hostile lizard-like aliens with superior technology and superior insecurity living out there bent on mining gold and fighting cowboys and destroying the earth by  kidnapping Indians and cowgirls  and terraforming the planet by venting out farts.

The signals sent by the scientists were received by the aliens, but since they could not speak English nor did they know binary machine language, they thought they were being threatened by cowboys. They sent ships to recon the planet. The aliens had superior technology and what was worse was that they were also hostile. So, the aliens attacked and tried to destroy humanity but one old vacuum tube-analog ship manned by retired Korean War veterans, some cowboys and a few Japanese, the USS Missouri, was able to destroy the alien mothership using its big guns. Incidentally there's some sort of historical play in the movie like including Japanese characters among the crew of the ship. The Missouri was the ship were the Japanese signed their surrender to the US.

Anyway, the movie was entertaining enough. The special effects, even through the bootleg disc, was good. Well, about the sound, I could barely hear the movie...What the? Why am I talking a bootleg DVD? Not fair...this is illegal!

Missouri was ordered in 1940 and commissioned in June 1944. In the Pacific Theater of World War II she fought in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and shelled the Japanese home islands, and she fought in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. She was decommissioned in 1955 into the United States Navy reserve fleets (the "Mothball Fleet"), but reactivated and modernized in 1984 as part of the 600-ship Navy plan, and provided fire support during Operation Desert Storm in January/February 1991. (Wikipedia)

The movie had a touch of Japanese something in it. I didn't know if it's only me but the movie was reminiscent of the seminal  old Japanese anime called "Space Battleship Yamato" or its English version "Starblazers."

Yamato, lead ship of a class of two 65,000-ton (over 72,800-tons at full load) battleships, was built at Kure, Japan. She and her sister, Musashi were by far the largest battleships ever built, even exceeding in size and gun caliber (though not in weight of broadside) the U.S. Navy's abortive Montana class. Their nine 460mm (18.1-inch) main battery guns, which fired 1460kg (3200 pound) armor piercing shells, were the largest battleship guns ever to go to sea, and the two ships' scale of armor protection was also unsurpassed.

Anyway, just thought about Yamato when I saw USS Missouri fighting it out with an alien ship. Anyway, Harrison Ford's and David Craig did a very gooey job in the movie. Why did Liam Neeson agreed to play a cowboy in the first place? He's better off playing an admiral or something....

Dreams and Zuckerberg

I had the strangest dream this morning: I was cleaning Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s house. The dream was quite vivid. When I woke, I sat up inside the mosquito net thinking about it for a few minutes; I was quite disoriented. I had this strange feeling that I just traveled back from an alternate universe (too much “Lost”) and was suddenly pulled back into this reality, sort of a multiverse psychic connection..

According to sleep experts dreams are most vivid in the morning which is quite true and could be verified by asking any teen-agers whose hormones are starting to pump testosterone and other libido-promoting substance into their systems (a natural process that's built into our animal system to assure the survival of the human race); times when fantasies and dreams make the teenagers sleep quite troubling and ecstatic; times which had already passed a middle aged human being like me. I am already thinking of Viagra, heheheh.

Anyway, where was I?

So there I was in the dream cleaning Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg’s house. In my dream, Zuckerberg had a house in Midland Subdivision, Cainta, Rizal, Philippines. Midland Homes was a very small subdivision that caters to mostly working class. The place was a little better than our neighborhood. This subdivision was near San Juan Elementary School Unit 1 where I finished my basic education. In the dream, I kept asking myself why did Zuckerberg had a house in this neighborhood? He was famous but he was not rich. I saw him only once i.e. in my dream, Zuckerberg was with another guy, a business partner, or maybe in my dream he was gay or something. His house was so dirty like it was never lived at. Weird really...

Heaven’s why I dreamt that dream when Zuckerberg was one person I was never interested with. I was not and never am his fan though I am Facebook person. Maybe in the other multi-verse or other reality, I am one of Zuckerberg's cleaning guy or something.

Dreams are powerful and according to the philosopher Niethszche, fear generated by dreams is one of reasons why we have this idea of God. Does not necessarily mean I subscribe Nietzsche’s idea. I mean, I don’t want to be misinterpreted as subscribing to an atheist-humanist-existentialist-hairstylist philosophy. I mean, God created the paper tree, Lucifer and Guttenberg for us to enjoy.

Anyway, I was trying to analyze myself; a task I found difficult to do in the morning where my mind was somewhere between waking and sleeping state: Twilight Zone time. Anyway, this is nonsense.

I there fore conclude that I have been watching too much sci-fi, and its now time for me to watch more and more romantic shows so that I could have romantic dreams rather than have these weird dreams.

DVD series

I have been watching sci-fi series on DVD as a sort of an escape. I mean, I don’t drink nor do I take drugs and watching sci-fi is the next best thing to flying out into the atmosphere for fun. Anyway, it seems that most of the theme of today’s sci-fi has to do with time travel, entanglement and alternate reality.

Last night, I watched the final episode of “Lost”; and to tell the truth, I really loved the show. The series was about the survivors of a plane crash that landed on a mysterious island. I bought the DVD without googling about the show so I had no idea what it was all about. But after watching the first few episodes, I got hooked and addicted to it. I thought it was a simple human drama about human drama, but then the episodes got crazier and crazier especially the season enders that got me hooked and drove me crazy looking for the DVD of the next season up to the point that I had to beg the bootleg DVD vendor to get me the complete collection of the series. Also the series was done using flash back and flash forward  which was kind of weird because I already knew what happened but still I had to find out how it happened. There was also an alternate reality part which was like watching a series within a series which was a little confusing but once I got the hang of it, quite enjoyable.

Anyway,   what I liked about the series was it’s mixture of drama, psychology, love story, mythology, physics etc. and I really had this connection with characters especially John Locke. I also noticed that a lot of the characters were named after philosophers and many of the themes tackled in the series were very much philosophical and theological.  

Flash Forward is also an interesting series that unfortunately lasted only one season because of low ratings. The premise of the series is that the world had a planet wide black out (or the planet had a world wide black out) for 2 minutes and 17   seconds which during the black out the whole world had a glimpse of six months into the future. Investigation were made and they found out that these glimpses were all interrelated and that each individual recollection of the glimpses during black out could be pieced together to construct the world six months from now to figure out how or what caused the black out and to prevent another similar future event from happening. So, the psychological effect of knowing that the future is already determined is one of the main theme of the series—sort of a determinism vs. freewill thing. 

I am now into the 4400. Four thousand four hundred people disappeared abducted by a beam of light from 1946 to the present. These were thought to be alien abductions. Then into the present, a comet appeared threatening the planet. The comet was intercepted but the missiles did not destroy it. It continued on its trajectory and deposited the 4400 returnees.  Well, anyway...still watching the series.

Bronchial Asthma, Lost etc.

February 13, 2011. It was raining. I didn’t mind the rain. I strapped on my helmet sans my raincoat which I did not bring, rode on my motorcycle and left the school. I enjoyed the cold rain drops beating down on my face. It was cold because it was still February and the weatherman from the hopeless PAG-ASA, the country's weather bureau, kept on telling us that the tail end of the cold front was still on us, whatever that meant.

Anyway, I was wet and cold but enjoying my ride home. When I arrived, my wife gave me dry clothes and hot coffee. I sat down and rested for a while, and then it began: I started coughing. It was a little cough which I did not mind at all; I cough a lot because I have allergies, all that mucus and other yucky stuff. Things started to get weird when I went to bed: I started coughing really hard because of abnormal mucus secretion; my throat was constricted; I was cold but sweating. I was not able to sleep the whole night. 

The day after, I went to see the doctor. The diagnosis: bronchial asthma. I was given asthma medicines and anti-biotic, but the best of them all--not that I like being sick--I was given a three day rest which counting the weekend, meant I had five days of rest. I spent Valentine's day sick.

But things didn’t go that well. I didn’t know if there’s some connection or something because when I woke up yesterday, my ankle was hurting and when I looked at it, my ankle bone was missing--my rheumatism or gout or whatever this inflammation of the ankle joint Is called was acting up again. Heaven’s when it rains it pours! Asthma and rheumatism they do come hand in hand. (I really don't know if I had rheumatism, or arthritis, or rheumatoid arthritis, or arthritic rheumatism or arthritic-rheumatoid-rheumatism-arthritism...) I don't know if its psychosomatic or some sort of..anyway..I do need to take care of my diet now.

Age is what it is…I used to hate the smell of Efficascent Oil, or Omega Pain Killer Extra Strength, but now that I frequently used them, and  I have become used to their smell, now, I mean...in the bedroom, sort of a love scent or something...aromatic-aphrodisiac...hmm sort of.

Anyway, what did I do with my five days rest?

I read book, played guitar and watched DVDs.  

Here’s the strange thing: every time or most of the time when I am reading a book and I am interrupted to go to the comfort room, when I come out of the comfort room I forget where I put my book or sometimes I forget that I am even reading a book. So, I end up looking for the book which usually I just slam on whatever surface page-open-faced-down. When this happens, I end up picking up my guitar and playing some pieces that I knew, but I can’t concentrate because I am still thinking where I put the book that I am reading.  

When not looking for the book, I find them in the strangest places like upstairs on the bed, or on the aparador with the cracked mirror, or under the plastic sofa hidden by the throw pillows that looked like rugs now, on the motorcycle seat and sometimes even on top of the dog’s cage.. Hmm…weird, I sometimes think there are naughty gnomes living in the house.

Still learning Bach's Gavotte en Rondeau on the guitar for almost a year now. A happy guitar piece--I like Bach's music because they are happy. Gavotte is a French Folk dance which explains why its a happy, lilting, jumping music and rondeau means round: ABACA form. Anyway, just learning it because it's beautiful music..

My wife complains that she is better off when I am at work because then she does not have to deal with the clatter (bootleg DVD jackets, books, guitar scores, banana peels, cotton swabs…) I leave wherever I sit.

Anyway, I am now in season five of Lost! Great, great series to watch. Just one complain though, I hate the 360 degrees camera sweep. I mean the camera starts from the face, then to the ear then to the nape, then the other ear, then back to the face again, cliche.

Project Orion and why the Bozanian did not attack Earth

Project Orion was an ambitious and may I say crazy project planned by American scientists in the 1950's. The project was a top secret  military space program planned to do a preemptive invasion of Bozania . But the US military would not admit this.  

The spacecraft was an ambitious project. Here are the specs from Wikipedia:

	"Energy Limited" Orion	"Momentum Limited" Orion
Ship diameter (meters)	20,000 m	100 m
Mass of empty ship (metric tons)	10,000,000 t (incl.5,000,000 t copper hemisphere)	100,000 t (incl.50,000 t structure+payload)
+Number of bombs = total bomb mass (each 1MT bomb weighs 1 metric ton)	30,000,000	300,000
=Departure mass (metric tons)	40,000,000 t	400,000 t
Maximum velocity (kilometers per second)	1000 km/s (=0.33% of the speed of light)	10,000 km/s (=3.3% of the speed of light)
Mean acceleration (Earth gravities)	0.00003 g (accelerate for 100 years)	1 g (accelerate for 10 days)
Estimated cost	1 year of U.S. GNP (1968)	0.1 year of U.S. GNP

Orion's diameter was 20 km; a Nimitz class aircraft carrier has a length of 330+ meters. The gross tonnage of the space ship was 10 million tons for the limited edition (did not know what limited means, did not read the whole technical thing about the project); a Nimitz class aircraft carrier has a displacement of around 100,000 tons.

It was supposed to be powered by 30 million-1 megaton atomic bombs. To imagine this power, the atomic bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima had a 13-18 kiloton yield. This meant that this spaceship's fuel could destroy an entire galaxy.

The project was estimated to cost a year of the United States' GNP. During the 1950's the US GNP was .35 trillion dollars, adjusted to today's US GNP, the project would cost around 15.27 Trillion Dollars. In figures that would be 15,270,000,000.000.000.000. Give or take a few zeroes.

Simple mathematics would show that the Orion spacecraft was not a simple ship, it was in fact a city--it could contain hundreds of aircraft carriers plus other smaller ships. It was a ship designed to battle it out with the Bozanian skull ship Sky Rook. 

When NASA intercepted a Bozanian transmission on its planned invasion of the planet Earth, top US scientists scrambled to assemble a spacecraft that could meet the challenge of an interplanetary invasion. Though thetechnology available then was crude, but it sure was powerful and destructive.

 It was planned that Orion would be propelled by Nuclear pulse propulsion. This meant that a series of atomic bomb would be set off in intervals to move the ship. This is like like putting thousands of extra-super-explosive-powerful dynamites under a house to lift it into the atmosphere.

Anyway, the initial take off alone would create a nuclear fall out and could fry, irradiate, sterilize and blind people for miles around. Though global warming was not an issues then, the series of atomic explosions could block the sun for months resulting to irreversible changes in the earth's atmosphere. 

The project was given initial funding but was later stopped when the Bozanian backed out from their planned invasion. A floating radio active city is too much for them to take. It was later found out that their horns contained their sperm cells and naturally were sensitive to nuclear radiation. Mere proximity to the Orion could sterilize a Bozanian, and Orion, even just it debris landing on Bozania,  it could sterilize the whole male population of the planet. The fear of a ship carrying 30 million atomic bombs scared the excrement out of them.

Orion was scrapped. The project was later declassified and though the information the military gave to the media was baloney, the Japanese knew the real score.