Adbusting, Iraqi Insurgent Style

Author and game designer Allen Varney pinged me this evening with a wild story from Sky News: apparently some Iraqi insurgents are Photoshopping ads for Hollywood movies and turning them into creepy psyops about the slaughter of American soldiers, then peddling instructions on how to propagate them across the American webscape.

This includes predictable fare, like the Owen Wilson-Gene Hackman fighter pilot flick "Behind Enemy Lines"...



And Mel Gibson hero pics "The Patriot"...



...and "We Were Soldiers"...



As well as less intuitive choices, such as "Fast Food Nation"...



And "The Animal" (Rob Schneider=W?).



You heard it here first.

Free prize to anyone who can locate one of these busta-memes in actual covert placement on the web.

Ethan the Skiffy Narrative Slayer

Over at Do the Math, jazz pianist and cultural omnivore Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus has a No Fear of the Future-worthy encyclopedic post regarding the Tom Baker years of Doctor Who, the full run of Buffy, and the unexplored overlaps between the two. How Ethan manages to crank out bunker busters of the brain like this while touring the world to promote his band's new album, Prog (which you must buy if you haven't already -- totally ass-kicking piano trio covers of Tears for Fears' Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Rush's Tom Sawyer, along with some Bowie, some Bachrach, and bassist Reid Anderson's percussive masterpiece Physical Cities) only his nutritionist knows.



Especially brilliant is his disquisition on the strange pleasures of reading overthought analytical works regarding our favorite pop cultural comfort food:

'We all have guilty pleasures. One of mine is reading the analytical books about TB and BTVS. This is from chapter four, "Send up: Authorship and Organization," from Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado (this is the chapter about TB):

"The disagreement over audiences and dramatic values between [Graham] Williams and [John] Nathan-Turner itself raised quite dramatically the ways in which and institution like Doctor Who can vary according to different production and professional practices. This chapter will look at ways in which variations within professional ideology materially affect production practices; and further, at ways in which professional values that are ostensibly identical can themselves be inflected differently according to pressure from within and outside the television industry."

'And this is by Neal King, from his essay "Brownskirts: Fascism, Christianity, and the Eternal Demon" from the anthology Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale:

"The quasi-fascist philosophy that justifies Buffy's slaying concerns me in my next discussion. I will outline the show's cosmology and by doing so, set up my imaginary Buffyverse, just to make my point about the show's potential for fascism. I conclude with a better solution to this problem, one that stretches credulity less and eliminates the show's nasty streak of racism. The important characteristics of the existing Buffyverse that prime it for fascism include elements of a Manichean racism (tempered by an Augustinian division of the world's evils), adherence to primal and state authority, and formation of citizenship in ritual combat. I consider these in turn."

'These are absurd pursuits, but nonetheless, if you want to keep me quiet and absorbed, just give me a new book of TB or BTVS analysis and you won't hear from me for several hours. In fact, that chapter in the Tulloch/Alvarado is one of the most interesting things I have ever read. The book as a whole is swollen with overly turgid prose, but in that chapter the great Douglas Adams is interviewed extensively in counterpoint with producers Williams and Nathan-Turner, and it gets quite gritty and revealing! As far as Buffy and fascism goes, I have never studied philosophy. Someone who has will undoubtedly protest that I need to actually read Augustine for real, but, I assure you, that is not going to happen. Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale is the closest that I am ever going to get.'

Check it out.

http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2007/07/modern-mythic-t.html

Black pearls on a Zinnia

After reading the post at Boing Boing the other day regarding the use of the iPhone camera as a microscope, I took a stab at some amateur macro to document the splendid string of black pearls (some sort of insect eggs) I discovered on a Zinnia snipped from my garden and now sitting in a vase in my kitchen.



Very cool.

Centennial

Today would have been Robert A. Heinlein's 100th birthday, had he been as immortal as some of his characters.

It's no secret that, unlike some Heinlein fans I could name, I don't believe the man could do no wrong. He was too complex for that, and I strongly disagree with some of the things he said and wrote. I detest Farnham's Freehold and The Day After Tomorrow, was bored by I Will Fear No Evil and Time Enough For Love, and haven't even attempted to read The Number of the Beast or To Sail Beyond the Sunset (though I have recently been ploughing through his early attempt at a novel For Us, The Living, an intriguing if plotless diatribe written after his unsuccessful attempt to enter politics as a polyamorous nudist supporter of Upton Sinclair's EPIC. No, I'm not joking).

That said, if he'd written nothing but 'All You Zombies', 'The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag', and 'The Man Who Traveled in Elephants', he would still (IMHO) be deserving of his Grand Master status. And as well as these gems, he also gave us 'The Long Watch', 'The Green Hills of Earth', 'The Man Who Sold the Moon', 'Requiem', Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Between Planets, Glory Road, and many other works that I've enjoyed reading and re-reading. While I'm no fan of Starship Troopers, I acknowledge its importance to the genre, if only for the "responses" and outright piss-takes it has inspired and which I have enjoyed.

His influence on the sf writing community has been immeasurable: to cite just one example, I am pleased and grateful his philosophy that the sf writers who he helped out in times of crisis (and there were many of them, some of whom disagreed fervently with his politics at the time), should not pay back these favours but "pay them forward", has been adopted by many others in the field.

Take him for all in all, the world would be a much poorer place had he never lived, and I can think of no higher praise for anyone.

Another Green World

There's a fun brain-popping (and compelling) bit of science nonfiction from Freeman Dyson in the July 19 issue of The New York Review of Books, titled "Our Biotech Future." Among his talking points:

- Biotech will blossom into something bright and beautiful once it undergoes a Small is Beautiful domestication similar to what the computer industry experienced from 1981-1999, and kids and hobbyists are practicing genetic experimentation in their playrooms. As an early telegraph of this trend, he suggests, see the recent appearance of brightly colored genetically modified tropical fish in pet stores.

- Linear Darwinian evolution, in which species progress and differentiate through time like the branches on the tree of life, is a kind of anomalous interlude. Most of Earth's biological history was a golden age of synthetic rather than reductionist biology, in which horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist, and a similar period is now ascendant: "Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared...And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented." Quoting microbial taxonomist Carl Woese (who sounds like he's been reading Rudy Rucker's gnarly blog):

-- "Imagine a child playing in a woodland stream, poking a stick into an eddy in the flowing current, thereby disrupting it. But the eddy quickly reforms. The child disperses it again. Again it reforms, and the fascinating game goes on. There you have it! Organisms are resilient patterns in a turbulent flow -- patterns in an energy flow...it is becoming increasingly clear that to understand living systems in any deep sense, we must come to see them not materialistically, as machines, but as stable, complex, dynamic organization."

- Green technology that results from these trends, such as silcon-based leafy plants that more efficiently photosynthesize to generate energy and grow edible parts, is the key to ending rural pverty and restoring equilbrium to the North-South balance of power.

A provocative synthesis of various ideas and a fun read. Not sure I buy the socio-economic optimism, but it's some crunchy food for thought.

Rocking SF power chords

In the August 2007 issue of Asimov's, cyberpunk grandmasters Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling collaborate on a hilariously fun story that dollops out duelling SF power chords like the genre equivalent of a riff-off between Frank Zappa and Joe Walsh. "Hormiga Canyon": take one part Jan-Michael Vincent dirt biking across the post-apocalyptic desert in Damnation Alley (with a wonderfully incongruous strand of Renaissance Faire DIY chainmail), one classic cyber-trickster, mix them with the Mythbusters guys, then throw them into a gnarly southern California desert that discovers the Calabi-Yau lurking beneath the milieu of Carlos Castaneda and the Warner Bros. backlot of Them! Yes, it's a giant ant story.

"A colossal ant burst from a ticket of manzanita, bearing three fierce-looking natives. The riders were clutching the ant's insectile bristles like Mongols holding a horse's mane. They were deeply tanned men with filed teeth, floppy hair, and bizarre patterns painted on their faces. Original Californians.

"The Tongvans sprang at Jayson and Stefan; second later the boys were swathed in woven nets, wrapped up like pupas side by side.

"The largest Tongvan leaned over Stefan. He was a wiry, dignified gentleman just over five feet tall. He'd painted an intricate pattern of fern-like scrolls around his eyes and mouth. He had a deeply skeptical, highly judgmental look, very much like an overworked immigration officer at LAX."

Highly recommended -- the perfect smart silly summer matinee for your favorite sofa, a buttered popcorn path to the Nagual. Check it out. The first third of the story is up on the Asimov's site for your reading enjoyment.

Fred Saberhagen (1920-2007)

This just turned up in my in-box. Rotten, evil news that Fred Saberhagen has died. I knew he'd been fighting cancer for several years, but you always hope those afflicted are able to lick that nasty disease.

Fred Thomas Saberhagen passed away in his Albuquerque, New Mexico home on Friday, June 29, 2007. He was 77 years old.

Fred Saberhagen was the author of over 65 historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy novels, including such series at the Dracula and Berserker series. His first published story was "Volume Paa-Pyx" which appeared in the February 1961 issue of Galaxy, and his first published novel was The Golden People in 1964.

Before starting his writing career, Saberhagen served in the US Air Force, worked as a civilian electronics technician, and wrote and edited articles on science and technology for the Encyclopedia Britannica. He was born and raised in Chicago, but lived for many years in Albuquerque.

A memorial will be announced for later in the year. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to any of the following: Doctors without Borders. Catholic Relief, SFWA Emergency Medical Fund, or John 23rd Catholic Church in Albuquerque. Saberhagen is survived by his wife, Joan Spicci.

I first met Saberhagen back in 1991, when he was gracious enough to be my writer guest of honor at Aggiecon 22. And a more cooperative guest I couldn't have asked for. He was friendly and accomodating to all the fans and con workers there. Privately, myself and several other concom began affectionately referring to him as "Yoda" after seeing him sitting in various areas in the university's student center outside of the convention events, silently observing all the students going to and fro. Around midnight on Friday we found him sipping coffee in a mostly-empty food court. He had a serene, dignified air about him, just like a Jedi Master should have.

I'd encountered him occasionally at various conventions in the ensuing years, and he always had a kind word for me. Once I started publishing interviews, he was always on my short list of people who I wanted to sit down with some day. Alas, I waited too long, and that day will never come.