Poldergeist

In the post-Cold-War era, have your geopolitical concerns pivoted to focus on the Dutch threat?  Then work day and night to ensure this doesn't happen.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: First Impressions

I just finished watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a contemporary web video + social media version of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, so here are some first impressions (snicker...).  There might be small production-specific spoilers below, so proceed with caution if you care about such things.

There are pluses and minuses to the reduced cast.  Mr. and Mrs Bennet, Lady Catherine, the Gardiners, all but one of the militia, and most other secondary characters, do not appear at all, or if they do, it is only through Lizzie's costumed caricatures.  (The caricatures themselves, on the other hand, are uniformly wonderful.  I especially like the cleverly tossed off one used for Georgiana.)   In particular, I missed Mr. Bennett and Lady Catherine.  The A&E production, for example, got a lot of fine mileage out of the interactions between Elizabeth and her father.

I also thought that the substitute for (what my kids always called) the "Lady Catherine de Bourgh Argument" was a weak spot.  The book and the A&E production wrung that incident for much more force than does LBD.

The choice to turn Kitty into an actual cat was appropriate, since in the book Kitty Bennett is pretty much nothing but a slight foil for the wit of the other characters.  Teasing the cat had much the same effect.  Turning Anne de Bourgh into a puppy followed, I suppose, but in any case Anne has no major dramatic impact in any version.

Turning Mary into an emo cousin worked very well.  It avoided the clutter problem of having too many sisters in the house, while still affording her plenty of screen time.  As it happens, I discovered this production because Mary is played by Briana Cuoco, Kaley Cuoco's sister, and of course I knew of Kaley from Big Bang Theory.

It just occurred to me (duh) that only relatively young actors appear.  Perhaps simple logistics explains the elimination of the elderly characters I mentioned above, and the enhanced roles for Mary, Maria, Charlotte, Fitzwilliam, and Georgiana.  The handling of Charlotte, in particular, gave plenty of well-used room to explore the "best friend" relationship with Lizzie.

The casting of the three sisters was near perfect, although I'd like to know if the actors used hair dyes to get the various shades of red-brunette to match their personae so well.  Lizzie was a bit too frantic, and Jane a bit too ditzy (at least before "New Jane") for my taste.  Lydia nailed it right down the middle.

All along I was wondering what they were going to substitute for the tragic seduction of Lydia.  Obviously in a contemporary setting, a simple seduction of an overt (and adult) Party Girl was not going to have much of an impact.  The believable modern "incident" actually used instead both surprised me, and provided the right level of social threat.

Scattered throughout are various shout-outs to P&P and other works, mostly from Austen, but a few from others of the period.  I especially liked the "muddy dresses" line, Georgiana's recommendation to Darcy about how to relax, and the subtle mention of "first impressions."

Overall a great addition to the genre.  I'd rank this one just below the A&E production.

Final note: If you watch this, note that there's a LOT more than just the sequence of Lizzie's videos.  You might skip some of the extras in Twitter or Tumblr, etc., but must not skip the interspersed videos from other characters.  You can see the complete list of main story-line videos in story-time sequence here.

More later...

Dr. Who: Undercover with the Daleks

"Exterminate!"
"Exterminate!!"
"Exterm - Hey, where's Bruce?"

Only a few Daleks were made in Australia

"If he says 'There is NO rule 6' again, I'm gonna Exterminate him myself!"
 

Senator Durbin is wrong

As noted by many e.g. Scott Shackford, Senator Durbin seems to view the US constitution through a lens made out of government licenses.

Durbin is wrong.  Orwell was right:

Rule of Law, not Rule of Men

I just crawled out from under another sink replacement.  There's nothing like plumbing in a moderately old house to remind me of Drinkwater's Law, to wit:

You're never done until you've used every tool in the garage.

This law was formulated circa 1978, when I found myself using one soldering iron to solder a connection in a bigger soldering iron.  A motley collection of other tools lay about me.  I had originally set out to tighten a loose chair leg.

Unfortunately for us tool-freaks, there's an even more depressing corollary:

Buying new tools makes things worse, not better.

These and their co-conspirators lead to Hofstader's Law, with its lovely self-reference:

Everything takes longer than you think it will, even if you take Hofstader's Law into account.

So you have to make another trip to the HW store anyway, since (naturally) one and only one of the six  faucet connectors you bought is a half-inch too short.  There, starting in the parking lot, you are reminded of this fact (attributed to various, but I like the claim of Einsteinian origin):

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity.

The surround of Stupidity leads to musings on yet another rule:

Ignorance can be cured; Stupid is forever.

Thoughts of ignorance and the possibility of its cure drive one on, to this variation on Parkinson's Law, suitable for parents of a certain age:

Tuition expands so as to slightly exceed the family budget's ability to pay it.

Parenting issues remind me of a failed law, one of the very few:

One child takes up all your time.  Two children take up all your time.  Therefore, it's the same amount of work to have two children as to have one.

(I claim to have also invented that one, but since Drinkwater's Law already existed, it remains nameless.)

The numbers One and Two lead naturally to Three, and therefore to:

The three most useless things to a pilot are 1) Runway behind you, 2) Fuel left in the fuel truck, and 3) altitude above you.

(Damn.  I wrote that line just a day or two before the Asiana 777 "landed" very short at SFO.  Memo: go to BCP to donate blood.)

Thoughts of flight remind me of a more soothing bit of advice, not a rule exactly, but good advice:

Try to fly in the soft middle of the air.  Avoid the edges where it can be hard and jaggy.

Fine all-purpose advice for avoiding life's little reef's and lee-shores (to mix metaphors a bit).
 

UFO over Mountain View

So the wings got broken and then glued on at the wrong angle, they forgot to put in a real cockpit, the landing gear are obviously from another plane, and what's that black thing at the tail?

Early 1960's.  No Shoreline, no Google.

In real life, it was the Ryan VZ-3 Vertiplane.  But to a handful of Mountain View and Sunnyvale residents with access to telephones and the local police phone number, it was an alien spaceship.

On the ground, that's NASA Ames at NAS Moffett Field (mostly out of picture at the bottom).  The Ames hangar is the building with the wide black opening (and wow, there seem to be no airplanes on the ramp.  Odd.)  The large weird structure that appears just above the plane's nose probe is the 40 x 80 foot wind tunnel.  That tunnel had the 80 x 120 upgrade added in the early 80's, and the bigger tunnel is probably the most prominent feature when looking at Ames from the north, comparable to Hangar 1.  Here's a sketch from the NASA history page showing the 80x120 attached at a slant to the original structure:

135,000 horsepower (in the fan section where the two structures join)

 That's what Big Science looks like if you are not doing high-energy physics.

Family time, pt.2

Another Reason Why We Stay In CA Despite The Craziness:

I'm usually hesitant to take friends and family on the water, since SF Bay summer winds can really kick up, and I'm always using a rented, unfamiliar boat.  But this day was picture perfect, maybe 10-12 knots, and I finally got Terry comfortable at the wheel.  (Thanks to my brother in law for this nice photo, which he framed and gave me for Christmas that year.)

Plug for Serengeti Pilots.  Those sunglasses survived getting hit by a winch handle.  I was lucky; the handle struck me right on the eyebrow, and the glass lens did not break.  It was a very hard but glancing blow. The skipper of that boat had a strange expression on his face later, while we were chatting about startups, which I eventually realized was due to the fact that I was dripping blood on his deck.  He was probably worried about being sued (this is California, after all) but it was totally my fault.  Never be casual around unfamiliar machinery, because it might bite.

Plug for Ericson yachts.  For entertaining non-sailors on the Bay, I prefer them for their well-behaved heeling, sail balance, and tendency NOT to stall the rudder under high loads.  Sadly, my favorite charter marina, Cass in Sausalito, is out of business.

Plug for Mariners Point.  They have an excellent youth golf program, or it seemed so to me.  Only Terry golfs in my family, so I suppose I should really ask for his opinion.  [He just agreed.]