Steamboy

I saw Steamboy with bugsybanana last night. The subtitled director’s cut playing at the Landmark Cinema, not the dubbed and trimmed-down version showing at the AMC. Not that I knew that going in; I chose the venue because I felt like having some Katz’s Deli matzo ball soup.

It’s a Katsuhiro Otomo movie, so plenty of impressive visuals and lots of the old explodo. And it’s steampunk, so you get your FDA recommended allowance for the year of pipes, gears, and other industrial goodies. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what most of the character’s motivations were. Not the protagonist, young Ray Steam himself, the movie does a good enough job of dangling obvious plot carrots in front of him, and swapping them out as needed. And one set of bad guys, the O’Hara Corporation, American arms dealers, yeah, they want to make money by showing off their new weapons to various nations of the world, and so they want to, um, destroy The Great Exhibition. OK, pretty straightforward, but then we’ve got a host of associate enemy/allies. Robert Stephenson, who seems to be representing state power over corporate power. And Ray’s father and grandfather, who spend an unfortunate amount of time in naïve philosophical arguments about the purpose of science.

Hey, has there ever been a major steampunk work that really engaged with the fact that the 19th century was a hotbed of labor activity? Britain made labor unions legal in 1832, the Tolpuddle Martyrs were arrested in 1834, you had the Chartists (some of you may remember them from Freedom & Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull), and in 1864 Marx organized what would later become the First International. Imagine a steampunk version of the fight over the Paris Commune of 1871. (Hm, maybe I need to reread The Difference Engine.)

Pocketful of links

From Steve Lambe: the best picture of Mr Magoo ever.

Greasemonkey is an extension for Firefox that lets you run arbitrary DHTML in viewed pages. In other words you can add stuff, delete stuff, change function, fix bugs, whatever, on whatever pages you want. People have written a bunch of user scripts already that you can install with a simple right-click.

The Lazy Way to Success: “Hard work is passé.” I think I’m doing it wrong.

Top 10 Most Dangerous Locations for Manhattan Pedestrians, 1995-2001. Number 1 is the intersection of Park Avenue and East 33rd Street. I believe it; there’s an exit for the 6 train right next to where the underpass lets out.

Have I mentioned Garlicster already?

Terri Schiavo

I’ve been meaning to write something about Terri Schiavo. I haven’t, largely because I find myself made very uncomfortable by too much about the whole affair. If I were king of the world, I’d have Terri put into her parents’ custody and encourage Michael to go through divorce proceedings. I’d also order Bush to publicly justify his signing the Texas Futile Care Law as Governor, and order that if anyone who voted to federalize this case ever uses “state’s rights” as a justification for anything ever again they’re to be bludgeoned to death with a metal-bound copy of The Federalist Papers.

Some of this discomfort comes from having watched a few of the videos up on the Terri’s Fight website. And some of the discomfort comes from knowing that those videos were cherry-picked out of four hours of footage that I’ll never see, and knowing the wonders that can be worked with that sort of cherry-picking.

Some comes from the very notion of the “persistent vegetative state”. Is anybody else squicked by that term? Isn’t it insulting to compare a human being to a vegetable? Is it too much to ask of our clinical, dispassionate medical terminology that it actually be clinical and dispassionate? And how often are these things misdiagnosed?

And then there’s the fact that the right wing has been complaining about “activist judges” for decades, and I’m worried that this could lead to some kind of wholesale assault on the judicial branch by the legislative and executive.

Other than that just go read what Jim Henley wrote, and know that I agree with about 90% of it.