Freckles & Doubt

Tra la la, it's January, and Seasonal Depression, as usual, has gripped me, since I'm clearly deeply contrary and insist on getting this in the depths of summer rather than winter. Work starts tomorrow and will be hell for two months, the weather's horribly hot, my neck's still itching, Avatar is being mean to Appa, and Roswell has just handed me Liz and Max breaking up and that stupid slut Tess seducing Max. Terry Pratchett is now Sir Terry, which is equally amusing and wonderful and doesn't at all make up for the Alzheimer's. And the BBC have cast a complete unknown as the next Doctor. I was very sold on the Patterson Joseph rumour, I'm narked. The new guy looks way too young, and rather dweebish.

Phooey. It's bad when even my fangirling distractions fail me. I shall go and punish myself for an hour and a half at the gym instead. Possibly medieval monks had something in the mortification-of-the-flesh department.

So, you wander into an upmarket Cape Town restaurant in the usual end-of-month ritual, with the usual three bottles of wine for the four of you. The maitre d' looks down his nose at you and remarks, "I see you've brought your own wine" in a tone of profound disapproval. Five minutes later the sommelier (they have one) arrives and tells you that, despite the R50 per bottle corkage fee, they usually only permit one bottle per table of four. As a great concession, her manner says, you will be permitted two.

The waiter has a French accent, I suspect from the Congo or such. He asks if you want still or sparkling water. In keeping with a unanimous Salty Cracker resolution you always ask for a jug of tap water on symbolic ecological grounds, in protest at all those bloody unnecessary plastic bottles. Waiter looks taken aback, but agrees and wanders off. Two minutes later he arrives with a bottle, announces "Still water for the table", screws off the lid and starts pouring. He is miffed when you call him on it and re-specify the jug. You are, however, eventually given a jug, which to his credit the waiter is assiduous in refilling.

You are forced to admit that the food, while good, is not in any way up to either the price, or the seriously unpleasant atmosphere engendered by the fact that the staff clearly feel you don't take your food seriously. You amuse yourself somewhat by listening to the pretentious wine-talk from the sommelier guiding, from on high, the next door table through their dining and wine experience, and by picturing the cowed basement existence of all the muted little slave-girls who clear the tables. You decline dessert in a marked manner and tip below ten percent. You are forced to conclude that you are not, in fact, in the market for the experience the restaurant is selling.

Then you blog it. Because you're nasty, you include the name of the restaurant. Aubergine, in Barnet St. in the city bowl. Avoid like the plague, people, unless you like your ambience at seriously low temperatures. Jo's full review snarkage at Salty Cracker sometime soon.

Last night, by way of celebration at having my life back and having vaguely enjoyed the AD&D cheese of the first game, I installed Neverwinter Nights II on my computer. The installation process also installed the .net framework version 2.0. (without, may I add, asking permission or giving me a chance to abort the install). Said framework clearly rifled through my hard drive, discovered my Age of Wonders install, decided it was illegitimate, deleted all the save files, and password protected it so I couldn't load it. It also, for no adequately defined reason, uninstalled Windows Media Player. Then, by way of an encore, it declined to load Neverwinter Nights on the grounds that the version was bundled with drivers for the Evil Landlord's graphics card, which I don't have.

I cannot adequately express how angry this makes me. It's intrusive, insulting and unbelievably rude; it says I'm buying a product which then dictates not only how I may use it in my own personal context, but which other products I may use with it. It's like buying a sofa and placing it in your living room only to have it open a hitherto unsuspected, giant, carnivorous maw and eat the carpet because it's decided it doesn't match.

It is also the apotheosis of the delusional belief held by software producers that their products aren't actually sold to you so much as lent, grudgingly, in a contract hedged about with conditions, limitations and the most narcissistic set of assumptions about being able to have a hissy fit at any moment and take it all back. More than that, they rely on your lack of ability to control them, so that you can neither discern nor prevent the processes by which they act unilaterally on your computer. Our society is predicated on a system which defines itself by the value of products to the corporations who produce and control them, rather than on the notion of creating things which are actually of value to the people who buy them.

I swear, if someone gave me Magrat's fairy godmother wand, but set to orang-utans rather than pumpkins, I would spend the rest of my life waving the bloody thing until our useless so-called "civilisation" actually started making some sense. (Come to think of it, I might actually get with the waving even if it was still set to pumpkins.)

Last Night I Dreamed: an interesting and frenetic post-apocalyptic adventure in which I dodged through exploding cities, underground complexes, hospitals and mansions in the company of Agent Doggett and, for some reason, wytchfynder, trying to avoid equal quantities of X-files supersoldiers and the alien race who actually had the nasty military tech to take them down.

Today's Rant List:

1. Vague students whose idea of curriculum advice is to plump down in the chair in my office and tell me that they want to study computers. They are entirely unable to tell me which aspect of computers, or even why they want to study them. Also, we're the Humanities faculty and don't even offer computer studies.
   
2. Distressed parents who cry in my office because daughter isn't doing as well as hoped, and who continually interrupt my careful reassurances to engage in further hair-tearing which demonstrates only too clearly that they haven't been listening to a word I've said.
   
3. Scratchy contact lenses. Bloody expensive scratchy contact lenses.
   
4. Admin. The thing I most hate about this damned admin is that it's all little, scrappy bits of thing that skitter away from my attention. Give me a good, solid, hefty chunk of project and I'm fine, but this bitty approach is like being nibbled to death by invisible ADD mice. Then again, one major indexing project coming up, so possibly I should be careful what I wish for.
   
5. Students are clogging the bandwidth again. Soon they will be clogging it with their blood! Then I can view gossip blogs in peace.
   
6. Parcelforce. (Because I promised Scroob, and gestating ladies need moral support).

I shall console myself with linkery. Has The Large Hadron Collider Destroyed The World Yet? (Nicked from first_fallen. Hee.)

And Jane Austen's Batman, an exercise in voice which leaves me paralysed with admiration.

Still X-Filesing, since I'm having hissy fits about my Evil Landlord's apparently complete inability to tell me that he'd like to watch Farscape: he stands around in the middle distance and looks puppy-dog instead, a particular form of non-communication which is giving me a strong desire to kick him, and is also causing me to bloody-mindedly watch X-Files until he damned well asks me not to. On the upside, I'd forgotten about Bruce Campbell guest starring in that one about the demon babies. Beautifully cast: he has the perfect combination of square jaw and not-quite-real emoting for the role.

I shall also console myself with dalmatians. I am Not A Dog Person, but I grew up on Dodie Smith, who is, as you all know, she says threateningly, the author of not only I Capture The Castle, the perfect novel of the adolescent viewpoint on life, love and family eccentricity, but The Hundred And One Dalmatians, made famous by the Disney adaptation, and its practically unknown sequel, The Starlight Barking. I'm fond of Dalmatians because of its comfortable, slightly dreamy, hyper-correct English tone, and of course for Cruella de Vil, absolutely the perfect villainess, with her drawing room panelled in red streaky marble like raw meat, her half-white, half-black hair and her Absolutely Simple White Mink Coat. But I love The Starlight Barking because it's more or less hallucinatory in feel. The hundred-plus dalmatians, living happily in an English country house with their devoted owners the Dearlys, wake up one morning to find out that all humans and other animals are fast asleep, only dogs are awake. Also, random canine telekinetic and telepathic powers appear to have manifested. They travel up to London, where the runt of the original litter, Cadpig, is now the Prime Minister's dog. I love the slightly satirical scenes of the dog cabinet, run by all the ministers' dogs, as they try to come to terms with the suddenly narcoleptic country; I also love the happy, dreamlike enablement of all the new powers. The books have always offered a slightly twee sense of animal identity, but the characters have a great deal of charm and the book's moral lesson is more than somewhat heart-warming. Mostly, though, I love this book because it's simply weird.

Wheee! My shuffle just hit the Manic Street Preachers cover of "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head," which is deeply appropriate. Cape Town has been solidly rained on for several days now, great fat rain with, last night, a small and slightly diffident thunderstorm which cleared its throat a few times and then shuffled off, embarrassed. There are huge puddles everywhere, including one entire lane in the middle of the shopping centre this morning, and a young lake outside our front gate. I am a happy, happy rain-worshipper, as stv can testify, having laughed at me as I headed out to work this morning with a silly grin on my face. Also, I'm having to restrain a more or less continuous impulse to jump in puddles, or drive the car through them in a dashing arc of spray.

Atmospheric pressure is doing the right things, but this is not going to stop me from a rant, possibly a necessary counter-balance to yesterday's unashamed Doctor Who fangirling. In a moment of mild interest, or possibly complete mental aberration, the houseguests and I watched Jumper on Saturday. We were ... stunned. Stunned and unable to parry.

Hollywood traditionally does awful things to science fiction movies - I think it's a tragic disease, or possibly a christening curse. Ideas and narrative cliché are badly mismatched bedfellows, leading to strangely twisted and uncomfortable sex. The premise of Jumper - young man discovers he can teleport, leads life of indolent bank robbery and sightseeing until hunted down by mad anti-jumper organisation - is rife with promise and implication, absolutely none of which the movie fulfils. It operates, instead, as an exercise in surface, a sort of going-through-the-motions gesture at narrative, plot and psychology, but with each of its elements completely unconnected to any of the others and devoid of any actual value or significance. It exemplifies more than any other recent film I can call to mind the script malaise currently at the heart of the blockbuster. It's as if the writers thought, okay, we need a main character, an antagonist, an antihero, a love interest, family angst, some jumping around and some conflict, and proceeded to put all of the above into a blender and give them a whirl. The result isn't actually fractured, it's just bland, featureless and perfectly lacking in flavour or meaning.

Apparently the huge drawback of teleportation as a superhero power is that it turns you into a drivelling idiot, or, in extreme cases, into Hayden Christensen. As an actor Christensen is characterised mostly by petulant woodenness¹, but here you can't even blame him: even an actual actor wouldn't be able to do much with the complete absence of motivation, consistency or logical response which the script presents. He more or less bumbles around achieving a string of actions variously characterised under "no apparent reason", "seemed like a good idea at the time", "vaguely stupid" and "too stupid to live", while Samuel L. Jackson is Baaaaaaad! (in both morality and acting technique) in his immediate vicinity and various parents are absent and illogical. His girlfriend sticks confusedly around with him despite an absolute lack of reason to do so. The whole shambling mess totters to a halt without resolution, and expires in a morass of badly-motivated loose ends. In a snowdrift.

We watched in a sort of stunned silence for the first twenty minutes or so, as it was gradually made apparent that in indulging in normal expectations - that this DVD contains an actual film - we had been royally swizzed. Then we watched the rest in a steadily-increasing abusive rage, shouting imprecations at the screen - "Noooo!", "Why???", "Now is not the moment!" and "Just tell her!" When the film did occasionally allow interesting ideas to briefly manifest - fun games with momentum on teleported objects, for example - they were still-born, strangled within seconds of their presentation by stupidity, disinterest or wanton disregard for cause and effect. The obvious limitations of the lead actor's wooden consciousness aside, the film itself failed for even a microsecond to examine the implications of its premise, the moral issues attached to the freedom and flexibility of the teleporter.

Absolutely the best thing one can say about Jumper, apart from its provision of a quality opportunity for ranting, is that some of the scenery was rather pretty². As jo said, the cinematography wasn't bad. It's a wholly appropriate epitaph. Travel great distances to avoid this film.

¹ I draw your attention to the Bowie lyrics with which I head this post: "They say / he has no brain / They say / he has no mood / ...They say 'Jump'..."

² Including, at the moments when he took his shirt off, the lead actor.

Please to imagine a sort of frenzied "FWOOOOOOOSH" noise here as I blow off steam. Because today has been very, very irritating. Oh, yea and verily has it inspired me with the desire to maim, worry, growl at and kill people and things. Day, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

1. Took ill in the middle of dinner with jo&stv last night, feeling pale and weird and nauseous, which was a direct blow to the cosmic solar plexus on account of how stv's cooking was at the top of its already fine form last night, and I could only eat half my usual amount. Still feeling ick today, headachy and weird.

2. Couldn't send off the finished Miéville paper over the weekend, because the EL's computer is stuffed and my patience is not up to the careful timing of reboot, wait for mystic Windows boot processes to ruminatively complete, login, wait for mystic Iburst processes to ruminatively complete, and send in the five minutes available before the whole thing crashes. Forgot to send off paper when I arrived this morning, so suffered reproachful visit from the editor mid-morning, causing me to feel useless as well as ill.

3. Then, spent an hour and a half swearing at XP because it suddenly couldn't find the memory stick (containing said paper) it by gum found perfectly well on Friday. Turned out it had randomly and spontaneously renamed it as F:, and identified it as a network drive, which is why I couldn't find it to rename it. I snapped pencils in the course of this little episode, and scared one poor, hapless student very, very badly. I assume this is something to do with automatic Windows updates, to which we are subject will we or no, and how much do I hate this? Oh, so very, very much.

4. The students are being unusually annoying. The last date to change their courses was Friday. A metric buttload of them are wandering into my office and being variously angry, shocked, horrified, annoyed, accuatory or tearful when I tell them they're too late.

5. The voicemail system, which is an ornery dinosaur with very little in the way of actual functionality, insists on ringing me back about a voicemail which I don't want to hear, and I haven't had time for the 43 keystrokes, swearing, and sacrificial goat necessary to make it stop. I don't want voicemail. My life is complicated enough without voicemail. There is no actual way to switch it off. This causes me to steam gently at the ears.

6. The internets, always painfully slow at my Cherished Institution, are falling over momentarily and randomly at intervals, just because they can.

7. The milk for my tea is off.

8. PMT.

On the upside, Tin Machine has suitably angry lyrics.

First, a rant. Grrrrrr. My Cherished Institution, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to rethink its attitude to internet usage on campus, taking for its model and archetype Orwell's Big Brother with a touch of bureaucracy from Kafka. Accessing any website outside of campus now requires the entry of one's username and password into a pop-up window. Initially Firefox was saving the login, meaning that any one web page only needed three to six enter strokes to get rid of the pop-up windows before loading. (I can't work out if this is because the system requires reassurance that I absolutely mean to load this particular page, or because it keeps finding new and interesting bits of sub-page, image or linkery upon which it feels impelled to comment with cries of glee). However, the pop-up window is set up in such a way that it automatically puts the active cursor in the login box, which means anything you're typing (and I type fast) overwrites your login before you can stop yourself, so you have to retype it each time.

I cannot sufficiently stress the extent to which this is driving me bats. Great, huge, flapping flocks of bats. And I don't see it being tenable in the long run - I actually have computer suss way above the level of your average humanities academic, and even knowing what's happening, it's maddening and dislocating. Given the extent to which my esteemed colleagues regard computers with a superstitous awe which will probably not lead them to try the "hit enter until the problem resolves or the key pops off and hits you in the eye" approach, this is going to reach an irritation threshold where hordes of maddened academics are going to descend on the IT building, waving pitchforks and demanding blood. (Memo to self: acquire pitchfork. And blood).

Of course, it doesn't help that I had about six hours of sleep last night, owing to over-eating, over-drinking (both jo&stv's fault, they claimed to be "full" and the Evil Landlord and I had to take up the slack) and a sudden demented need to research David Bowie for an hour and a half before I went to bed.

As my characteristic Sudden Mad Enthusiasms go, this one is going to occupy me for a while. Itunes categorises my David Bowie compilation primly as "Genre: Unknown", although I suspect a more accurate entry might read "Genre: Yes." Is there anything this man hasn't done? Early proto-Bowie is folky. Early seventies is solid, quirky, madly persona-driven rock (probably my favourite period of his work, and not just because half of it uses sf idioms or I'm currently obsessed with "Life On Mars"), and he seems to have more or less invented glam rock. Late seventies, he hits soul/funk/fusion sounds, with occasional forays into jazz and reggae. Then he sells out to cheesy electro-pop in the 80s (some of this is catchy, actually, and somewhat nostalgia-inducing). Then there's Labyrinth. Then there's the rock resurgence, and the electronica. Then my head explodes.

It's a weird experience, immersing myself in an artist whose work I only really enjoy about 50% of the time; the rest of it infuriates, irritates, alienates, confuses, occasionally revolts me. But it's never boring, the sheer chameleon nature of his expression endlessly fascinates. As does, in fact, the weird and wonderful range and breadth of tonality of which his voice is capable.

Also, early Bowie works surprisingly well as workout music. Go figure.

There's been a massive increase in spam from this LJ address over the last few weeks - I must be deleting 10-20 penis enlargement ads on a daily basis. Irritation value aside, this makes me obscurely grateful to be female and thus exempt from the insecurities which presumably give this kind of ad a fractional chance at success. (Although inevitable reflections arise on the kind of size insecurities to which women are prone. It says a lot about our state of contemporary culture that men worry that they're not big enough while women worry about not being small enough. See the Amazing Shrinking Woman! She fully internalises the sense of her own relative unimportance!)

Mostly, however, these ads make me worry for the status of science in our culture. A good half of them brandish subject lines which variously claim that 90% of women prefer a bigger dick! or 93% of women do not mention small penis size, for fear of upsetting their partner! or 85% of women will be 100% more satisfied by your 60% penis enlargement! This is one step further than the kind of wilful statistical misreading so ably pilloried by Language Log: instead of misrepresenting actual studies, often to say exactly the opposite to the statistical claim, these sorry examples of shamelessly unintelligent media exploitation follow the entirely new and original method of simply Making Shit Up. (Absolutely 100% of the women I have ever seen respond to the Size Matters issue firmly state that it doesn't, often while getting a sort of wistful, nostalgic gleam in their eye which suggests fond memories of a particularly memorable employment of technique).

Science, poor abused lady that she is, here takes on the status of a sort of shimmering chimera, what I would, were I being pretentious, call a Baudrillardian simulacrum. It suffices that the mere ideas of science, statistical analysis or actual research exist: the concept somehow legitimates the spurious numbers as if the reality of scientific method actually had anything to do with their generation. Look, these ads say. Shiny, reassuring numbers! Science is out there somewhere! Look how these gleaming percentages back up everything you were ever secretly afraid of anyway! You can trust us, we do Science. Not actual science, but its beguiling image.

Bleah. Also, pshaw and tchah!, and possibly phooey.

Last Night I Dreamed: things mercifully untainted by hallucinatory giant penises, for which I thank Morpheus. Instead, the family home of my high school days was under threat from a sort of creeping line of malevolent influence, which inched its way slowly up the garden leaving dried, charring vegetation in its wake. Panic ensued.

If this bog-rotted pest-raddled abortive jerk-off tripe-vortex of an Iburst connection does not stop wigging out in drunken waves so that I have to click "Refresh" 20 times on a page before it will actually condescend to load, There Will Be Violence Done. Violence. I mean it.

Possibly to me, on the grounds that at least the pain will stop.