Reason tells us that 1+1=2. It tells us that if you leave milk out for too long, it will spoil. It tells us that cars need gasoline in order to run.

But, what if the milk spoils even though we've kept it in the fridge all this time? What if our car doesn't start even though we have a full tank of gas? We might tell ourselves that maybe it's one bad sample, or an issue with our engine. And so we get another carton of milk at the store, and we bring our car in to the shop. But this second glass of milk is spoiled too, and the mechanic says that while our car is a bit nicked up, he has no clue as to why it isn't starting. And so we think to ourselves, what the hell is going on?

Welcome to the financial crisis of 2008.

Reason would tell us that Thursday ought to have been a good day for the markets. The Fed announced that it would cut its short-term rates by 0.5% to 1.5% (a four-year low). Because lower rates diminish the cost of borrowing (thus encouraging liquidity), usually such a move would cause the markets to jump. The last rate cut in April was only 0.25%, and the Dow jumped 100 points the next day. The previous rate cut of 0.75% on March 18 caused the Dow to jump 420 points. So, with Thursday's cut, we could have reasonably expected the Dow to rise anywhere from 100-400 points... or, at the very least, be slightly up.

Similarly, reason would tell us that if a big, blue-chip company hits its earnings targets, the market should respond favorably. After market close on Wednesday, IBM announced that it beat third-quarter expectations and would maintain its year-end target. The stock naturally went up 6% in after hours trading. With this good news, we could reasonably expect that the market would at least calm down on Thursday, and rampant fears about tech stocks would be lessened.

Finally, reason would tell us that if the first two instances occurred (big rate cut, strong earnings from a Dow Jones stock), AND no negative news was reported--then we could expect the market to move up, or at least stay somewhat steady.

But instead, on Thursday, we saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fall 679 points, closing about 7% lower than it opened. We saw IBM rise and then drop, finishing right about where it was before it announced earnings, at $90. Staying flat was good comparatively, however, as the tech-heavy Nasdaq index dropped more than 5%. In the month of October, the broad S&P 500 index has fallen 22%, which means that Joe Six Pack's pension may have just lost a fifth of its value. And all of this is happening on the heels of the $700b bailout that was passed last Friday, which should have moved the market up as well, as it was essentially a capital injection and a government promise to buy up poisonous mortgage-backed assets. So now we're left to wallow in our shrunken net worth, and play guess-where-the-Dow-will-bottom-out.

What is the reasoning behind this recent freefall? According to the Wall Street Journal, "this week's relentless selloff has been driven by deepening fears about the banking system, and the spillover effects it may have on the rest of the economy." So, the market did not mysteriously tank on Thursday because something fundamentally bad was uncovered; it tanked because we think something bad is going on, and our thinking that it's bad has just made it worse. We might be right, or we might be wrong--either way, it's like we're saying that the milk has spoiled because everyone thinks it will spoil, or that the car won't start because no one believes that a nicked-up car can run anymore. Thursday shows us that reason has taken a backseat, and our questions, fears, and now lack of greed are just leading to greater volatility and uncertainty. Furthermore, this dangerous, immeasurable force of fear also has huge implications on what the Fed, the Treasury, and Congress can do to solve this crisis. If the market won't act rationally to potential solutions, then what's the point?

Many in the finance industry would likely agree that our world seems fundamentally different than it was even just a week ago. Pretty soon, 1+1 might not equal 2 anymore. Any guesses on what it might be?

So, there's actually not much of any excuse I can give you, so I'll just go right ahead and post some stuff.

I may have recently gotten a brand new image at the top of the blog, which is a photo of my lucky whistle and glasses, the two items that in theory should stay with me throughout this turbulent gap year.

I am also going to post soon an account of my spending and earnings throughout the month of September, so you guys can see how much of a thrifty saver I've been, especially considering my lack of structured earnings.

Expect lots of political commentry, economic doomsday predictions, and complaining about people who complain about why security is important. Also, a new project I'm working on is a spoken article on Wikipedia, as well as mastering ssh and building my cousin a linuxbox. I have been doing things, just not very many obvious things.

Gas up the Dune Buggy, because Doomsday is the Greatest Movie EVER!

Review in a Nutshell: Imagine a distillation of all the crazy stuff that made eighties action movies so remarkable, now add exploding rabbits and Ren Fair.  That's Doomsday.

This movie contains:

Cybernetic Eyeballs.

Punk Rock Apocalypse Cannibals.

Medieval Knights on Horseback.

Graphical Interface Manipulation Program?

This movie does not contain:

This lady.

COMING SOON:

We need to do something special for episode 150.

Ah, soap.  The yardstick of civilization.

An international space team finds a vital message for all mankind in this sci-fi adventure by East Germany's legendary DEFA studios. When an extraterrestrial object is uncovered in the Gobi desert, the multiracial crew heads to Venus to learn more about the artifact's meaning. They discover that the planet's population was wiped out by a horrific event -- one that could easily occur on Earth.

This movie is reminiscent of the American TV series Star Trek 1966-69 or rather vice versa as The Silent Star was made six years earlier. But the full cast is here in all of their corniness with their names changed and their roles scrambled a bit. The Doctor is a beautiful Japanese woman and the love interest of several of the crew. The Captain Kirk role looks like a Werner Von Braun clone with his early 60s blond hair cut to a super expansive mode. The Mr. Spock guy is just as quirky but without pointy ears. Scotty the engineer crawls around in the various power stuff trying to keep the thrusters and gravity repulsion gear more or less under control. And almost a clone of the Enterprise TV screen of the various things going on outside of the ship like clouds of asteroids menacing the ship.

Once they make it to their strange new world, in this case the planet Venus, and fuss around in orbit for a few scenes, they make a perilous descent to the surface. They lacked a Teleporter and had to actually descend in various spaceship-airplane-helicopter things. The surface is quixotically alien with strange coral tree semi life-forms and it's all radioactive of course with big electric sparks Van de Camping about. There were clouds aplenty and icky fluids too, of many different descriptions, coursing about. They had a fine R2D2 stand-in in the form of a little tractor that talked, played world class chess and usually did as it was told. Except things got difficult then it chose to run over people and crushed their ribs.

This movie was made in East Germany during the Cold War and was loaded with transparent political nonsense. The woman whom all of the guys under age seventy fall in love with couldn't have children because she was a Hiroshima survivor, so by the end of the movie they were leaving her alone. Early in the movie there was a Dr. Strangelove like character but he didn't make it on to the ship's crew so that was a dead end which was taken up later and fleshed out in the American movie with a German doctor Dr. Strangelove which is discussed in my blog, The Doomsday Trilogy - Dr. Strangelove, On The Beach and FAIL SAFE. Another take on Doomsday is the English movie No Blade of Grass made in 1970.

I went to this movie because it is part of my preparation for Doomsday and what can be done about it. The concluding minute was a wimpy plaint that we should all live together in peace and not destroy our planet like the Venusians did. That movie was made 48 years ago and since then the population has way more than doubled and the CO2 level has doubled from its libration level of 1850 and the number of A-bomb possessing countries has doubled. We are clearly on a collision course with catastrophe and it isn't because people were oblivious to the threat; it's because it is one of those types of problems called Tragedy of the Commons where everyone benefits from exploiting the limited common source and the greatest exploiters are the greatest benefactors. Until there is an equitable way for coping with that problem effectively there is no hope of averting Doomsday.

1. If you're in the stock market, move your assets out of there and into Gold and Silver commodities. If you feel that this is too panicky and extreme then you can move 65% of it into the metals and the rest in a combo of Treasury Bills and Swiss Franc Government-backed bonds.

2. You may want to keep only operational money in the banks for payment of bills, utilities etc. Otherwise, get it out of there. With the Fed recent rate cut this morning at 50 basis points, you'd be better off stuffing cash into the "Mattress Account"..

3. Get dehydrated foodstuffs and canned goods. One website here, is a good start.

4. Obtain a good First Aid kit. Family size is necessary. I shop at camping outlets for propane, blankets, backpacks, batteries, shortwave radios, flashlights and more. Radio Shack and Home Depot are good for supplies too. Cannot forget my favorite store, EMS. (Eastern Mountain Staff)
5. Plenty of ammo and a good Rifle. 308 Winchester with a good scope will suffice. A .45 caliber pistol should get the job done as a sidearm as well.
6. A Bible, Koran or whatever source of spiritual strength that will guide you through the tough times.

Keep your head up. We will pull through this. May God bless America.

[wpvideo DghbNM4V]

Lalu Nabi saw. bersabda: "Tidak akan terjadi hari qiamat sehingga kamu melihat sebelumnya sepuluh macam tanda-tandanya". Kemudian beliau menyebutkannya: "Asap, Dajjal, binatang, terbit matahari dari tempat tenggelamnya, turunnya Isa bin Maryam alaihissalam, Ya’juj dan Ma'juj, tiga kali gempa bumi, sekali di timur, sekali di barat dan yang ketiga di Semenanjung Arab yang akhir sekali adalah api yang keluar dari arah negeri Yaman yang akan menghalau manusia kepada Padang Mahsyar mereka".

H.R Muslimi

Keterangan:
Sepuluh tanda-tanda qiamat yang disebutkan Rasulullah saw. dalam hadis ini adalah tanda-tanda qiamat yang besar-besar, akan terjadi di saat hampir tibanya hari qiamat. Sepuluh tanda itu ialah:

1. Dukhan (asap) yang akan keluar dan mengakibatkan penyakit yang seperti selsema di kalangan orang-orang yang beriman dan akan mematikan semua orang kafir.
2. Dajjal yang akan membawa fitnah besar yang akan meragut keimanan, hinggakan ramai orang yang akan terpedaya dengan seruannya.
3. Dabbah-Binatang besar yang keluar berhampiran Bukit Shafa di Mekah yang akan bercakap bahawa manusia tidak beriman lagi kepada Allah swt.
4. Matahari akan terbit dari tempat tenggelamnya. Maka pada saat itu Allah swt. tidak lagi menerima iman orang kafir dan tidak menerima taubat daripada orang yang berdosa.
5. Turunnya Nabi Isa alaihissalam ke permukaan bumi ini. Beliau akan mendukung pemerintahan Imam Mahadi yang berdaulat pada masa itu dan beliau akan mematahkan segala salib yang dibuat oleb orang-orang Kristian dan beliau juga yang akan membunuh Dajjal.
6. Keluarnya bangsa Ya'juj dan Ma'juj yang akan membuat kerusakan dipermukaan bumi ini, iaitu apabila mereka berjaya menghancurkan dinding yang dibuat dari besi bercampur tembaga yang telah didirikan oleh Zul Qarnain bersama dengan pembantu-pembantunya pada zaman dahulu.
7. Gempa bumi di Timur.. Bisa jadi ini mengacu kepada gempa di China, Tsunami di Aceh.
8. Gempa bumi di Barat. Bisa jadi ini akan terjadi di daerah Mexico, Argentina, Brazilia dan negara-negara Amerika Latin
9. Gempa bumi di Semenanjung Arab.. Kemungkinan kasus longsor di Mesir sebagai pembukanya.
10. Api besar yang akan menghalau manusia menuju ke Padang Mahsyar. Api itu akan bermula dari arah negeri Yaman. (Apa ini bahaya Nuklir?)

Mengikut pendapat Imam Ibnu Hajar al-Asqalani di dalam kitab Fathul Bari beliau mengatakan: “Apa yang dapat dirajihkan (pendapat yang terpilih) dari himpunan hadis-hadis Rasulullah Saw. bahawa keluarnya Dajal adalah yang mendahului segala petanda-petanda besar yang mengakibatkan perubahan besar yang berlaku dipermukaan bumi ini. Keadaan itu akan disudahi dengan kematian Nabi Isa alaihissalam (setelah belian turun dari langit). Kemudian terbitnya matahari dari tempat tenggelamnya adalah permulaan tanda-tanda qiamat yang besar yang akan merusakkan sistem alam cakrawala yang mana kejadian ini akan disudahi dengan terjadinya peristiwa qiamat yang dahsyat itu. Barangkali keluarnya binatang yang disebutkan itu adalah terjadi di hari yang matahari pada waktu itu terbit dari tempat tenggelamnya”.

Watching Aftermath, I learned something new for myself. I never knew what would happen after nuclear reactors ran out of power. I naively thought that they would just shut down and the spent fuel and waste would quietly decay in concrete walls with an occasional radiation leak. Nope, no such luck as this teaser kindly explains.

So why the fascination with what will happen to the planet after we're gone? Most of us know that almost no trace of us will be left if any. But yet we watch how our ruins decay in graphic detail, taking in every detail of a macabre doomsday erotica. Could it be a manifestation of our unique ability to realize our own mortality and think about what will happen after we're dead and gone?

After watching the show again, its final note struck me as very bizarre. We've spent about 60,000 years on planet Earth as a species but the place that will preserve our creative and technological legacy for millions, if not hundreds of millions of years is the Moon. If we vanish tomorrow, our greatest legacy will be what was once deemed as a multi-billion dollar publicity stunt of the Space Race. Isn't that something...

The National Archives have released a script, written by the BBC and the government in the 1970's, that was to be aired on the radio following a nuclear attack on Britain.

The cold war was still going strong, and tensions were often high. Nowadays, such a message would be pretty pragmatic, stating simply "This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. You're all pretty much fucked. Good luck with that." The full script is after the jump.

But back in the '70's, the public was often provided with advice that, looking back, is quaint and outdated. Anyone remember the public information films that suggested you take a door off its hinges and place it against a wall, to hide behind? Because we all know that an MDF door can protect you from 1000-mile an hour winds at several thousand degrees, right? But at that time, to a kid like me of five or six who had an air-raid siren on the roof of his school and was used to hearing it be tested every month, it was scary stuff.

The script is perhaps a little more pragmatic than that, but still very BBC in its quaintness, advising you to avoid flushing the toilet until advised to do so, to stay in your own homes as walls and roofs offer substantial protection, and to only turn your radio on every two hours to listen to the emergency broadcasts, to save battery life.

Nowadays, of course, the first thing to go through the countless millions of chav minds that we seem to be saddled with in this Godforsaken country would be either which car they would TWOK first, or which store they would loot. BBC

What is the deal with people not being able to accept something new? I was talking to my brother last night about Smallville & Superman movies, comics, TV shows...etc. He considers it all to be "crap", but what the hell is up with that? He loves the old Superman movies and Superman Returns, but not the newer stuff like Smallville for example or even the animated series of the 90's. In his opinion it's just crap because it's not what he knew as a kid. Apparently all the aliens (Braniac, Darkseid, Doomsday, Martian Manhunter...etc) & Supes shooting fire from his eyes instead of "lasers", blah, blah, blah is all "fake", therefore anything involving that kind of stuff is "not realistic". What he does not know is that these are not new things, he just hasn't saw them before, so he doesn't like it. It's very much annoys me off that people attack something that they don't understand and refuse to even try to understand.

Anyway, that's something I wanted to get off my chest. Tell me, what do you think?

One thing I should say right away is that this novel is not for the light readers.  This is a complex book that just happens to have pictures in every page.  To call it just a comic, somehow it takes away some of its genius.  This story, which was published in 12 issues from September 1986 to October 1987, now gets compiled with additional dossiers in a book-like format.  It's as thick as a small yellow pages book.  Inside, the writer tries to take us thru a trip where we must use our brains to process some of the data that he provides us.  You can get the cliff notes on wikipedia but you would be cheating yourself quite an adventure.

Now, many people will have different points of views on this story, but to understand how complex the man that writes the story, is to understand that not all of his intents can be easily deciphered.  This novel, which Time magazine has catalogued as one of the top 100 of all times, takes us to a world ruled by fear of nuclear war.  It travels thru the characters life spans and manages to provide us with a human version of gods.  I emphasis in the human part since that makes them imperfect and makes things uncertain throughout the story.

In a nutshell, this is the story of five individuals, which were superheroes until a congress act was passed that banned them from dressing and fighting crime.  For some reason, somebody is getting to them, killing some and conspiring against others.  The characters, most of them retired now and living private lives, decide to track down what's happening and solve a mystery that risks taking a little more than their retirement, but their lives.  During this search, their personal lives receive a background search via the different directions they take to solve this crime.  I say crime because the novel starts with the death of one of them.  A man called the Comedian.  One of the main characters and one of the more complex is Rorschach, the only one that did not retire and continued working in the underground and takes it upon himself to alert the others and investigate.  Nite Owl was a partner of him, the second one to take that name after the first one retired.  He is a rich man, with lots of toys and tired of being retired.  Then we have Ozymandias who is a rich, powerful and the smartest man alive.  He retired two years before the act and decided to play the markets.  Lastly there's Jon, aka Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre.  They live together in a government facility.  She, like Nite Owl, is the second person to use the name Spectre, after her mother retired.  Dr. Manhattan is a blue man, who during an accident in a lab back in the fifties, was disintegrated into thin air and later, he put himself together, molecule by molecule.  In the series he is the only one with real super powers.  He's persona has great importance in the development of the story and its subsequent ending.

There are many themes and morals in this story.  We can start by the apocalyptic fear of a mass nuclear war and how that would affect the world's population and its behavior.  This is an interesting point and the way this people behave on their own and as a collective, tells us a lot about how we work in real life.  Another perspective on a similar note, since the book is based in the 1980's in the United States, the fear of the results of the Cold War cannot be ignored.  Just like in the sixties with the Cuba incident, in the eighties, when Russia invaded Afghanistan, all hell was breaking loose and speculators warned of the consequences.  The power of conspiracies is another theme that is played quite a lot in this book.  Conspiracies inside conspiracies and a bigger purpose behind them that would make people with certain degree of moral feel trapped.  It's a demonstration of the abuse of truth and false premises used to keep people in check.   There are plenty more themes in the book but this I'm not dissecting it, just giving a simple review. 

To briefly talk about the author, Alan Moore is a well established and respected figure in the comic/graphic novel industry.  As creator of some of the biggest books out there, such as V For Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Distinguished Gentleman, Top 10, he knows how to write a good story.  Proof of that is that most of his books turnout as movies, much to his dislike.  He has been known to say that the art of comics is that they can't be properly represented in three dimensions sometimes, and that's why the stories work on paper.  But when they are turned into movies, things have to change, and the stories must change, taking away part of their magic.  Since his big days on DC, he has now dedicated to work on more independent work, and sometimes in a more risqué exotic kind of comics such as Promethea and Lost Girls.  He's dislike of what the owners of his work (DC) is such, that he asked to be removed from the credits of the movie as creator or writer, and if you check on imdb or any other place, you will not find his name nearby the movie watchmen.

David Gibbons also started his career in comics very young in the early seventies.  Participated a lot on the ever long series 2000AD.  Also in stories for Doctor Who, Green Lantern and recently work on a new graphic novel titled The Originals. 

In the end, after just one read, I'm not going to pretend I know what the whole theme is, and I will not go around looking for other reviews to catch them until I read it at least one more time.  I will say one thing though; there are a lot of people expecting the movie version (which should come out in March 2009) that might feel like entertaining the idea of reading the novel.  I'm not a person to discourage reading, but it is not an easy read.  In more than one occasion I started it and felt the need to stop.  Of course, once you get thru the beginning, you get into the story and it becomes easier, but don't expect to read it fast.  There are times when the author tries to combine two dialogues at the same time, which although interrelated, are speaking two different stories.  That happens in the newsstand with the pirate comics and most of the time it's comparison with war.  So if you are a comic movies fan and not necessarily a comics/graphic novel fan, then just sit tight and wait for the movie.  Otherwise, indulge in this maze of lives before you see the movie so we can be disappointed together in how they managed to reduce such a thick and elaborated book into a two hour movie.  But don't despair, not all is lost.  I'm sure the effects will be superb.

Here's the trailer for the upcoming movie.

Additional Links:

Allan Moore Fan Site

Interview to Dave Gibbons about the movie at ComicCon

IPCC Topic 3

3.3 Impacts of future climate changes

Food

Crop productivity is projected to increase slightly at mid- to
high latitudes for local mean temperature increases of up to 1
to 3°C depending on the crop, and then decrease beyond that in
some regions (medium confidence). {WGII 5.4, SPM}

At lower latitudes, especially in seasonally dry and tropical
regions, crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small
local temperature increases (1 to 2°C), which would increase
the risk of hunger (medium confidence). {WGII 5.4, SPM}

Globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase
with increases in local average temperature over a range
of 1 to 3°C, but above this it is projected to decrease (medium
confidence). {WGII 5.4, 5.5, SPM}

That paragraph seems to suggest that a couple of degrees of global warming is a good thing to do. And the IPCC study's failure to acknowledge major war and a nuclear winter appears to be an intentional exclusion and not a mere oversight because nuclear winter and its catastrophic effects on climate were greatly feared only ten years ago. NewScientist has a feature article in 03 March 1990 about how A nuclear winter would 'devastate' Australia. Another blog on The Nuclear Winter Game covers the problem This is seven years after Carl Sagan et al published their TTAPS report.

This chart shows their projections of various H-bomb wars upon the global surface temperature. How can we as outsiders know how accurate these figures are? But they were created by some of the most respected scientists of the 1970s-90s period using supercomputers. The IPCC worries about the effects of a 1 degree to 5 degree global temperature shift over a century but the TTAPS report, as seen in the graph above, gives upwards of 30 degrees shift in only a month.

There is an article by Russell Seitz called The 'Nuclear Winter' Meltdown which debunks this chart published in Science Vol. 222, 1983. He claims the obvious, " 'Nuclear Winter' never existed outside of a computer except as air-brushed animation commissioned by the a  PR firm - Porter Novelli Inc." Seitz apparently is a true scientist and would have to shoot himself in the foot to see if that hurts or causes injury. The idea of verification is wonderful but in this case it is undesirable as being a bit too expensive. Furthermore good science is never based on a single example and he would have to perform the experiment several more times before he could be confident of the results. He apparently suggests we wait until thirty thousand H-bombs have been detonated and observe their effects before we decide its a bad thing to do.

The TAPPS projection of a worst case was for 10,000-MT of H-bombs but the current supply is more like 30,000 bombs and some of them are in the 50-MT range although it is reported that most on US missiles are "only" 0.4-MT. The estimate of total energy available in the form of bombs is approximately 1x10 to the 5th Megatons or 100 times more than used in the TTAPS worst case scenario #9 which gives a 35 degree downward shift. But don't worry because Seitz says Sagan was wrong in his assumptions and calculations and we have to wait for a real world test.

That wars have been common for all three thousand years of recorded history, ever since Troy and without doubt far longer, gives one some doubt that they will suddenly stop just because we haven't had one, well a big one, for a while. But the IPCC doesn't consider this even as an outside possibility, when doing 100 year projections, so it isn't even mentioned and all of their projections are complexified and computerized straight line projections based on the recent past. Look at the graph below to see how speculative their projections are.

Food shortage and famine precipitated by the excess human population is another obvious problem which they avoid by simply not mentioning it. The Malthusian collapse is considered to be a phantom because in 200 years it hasn't happened, at least not on a global scale. Humans have always figured out ways to make more food and always will is their observation. That is the kind of standard mythology that drives stock markets to crash every so often. Usually the fallacy is abundantly clear to most people but too many people are making money supporting the lie so it continues to expand until the bubble pops. It is a form of over optimistic speculation that natural processes always bring back to equilibrium and generally far past it. In the case of a population crash it will drop far below that which could be sustained stably.

Pick a number, any number, with projections like this they have everything covered except the obvious—there will be at least one famine and there will be at least one war. A more likely graph will look like the one below.

Note that these are sliding scales with no exact date predicted for Doomsday but with even the best case scenario in the IPCC chart above it the IS92c,d line the population is tremendous and will bring Doomsday on. Even this IS92c,d projection doesn't have a noticeable population decrease for fifty years and where will CO2 be by then? It will be much higher than it is today and growing even more rapidly than it is today if the population is bigger, as they project it to be, even in their best case scenairo. The current world population counter show 6.848 billion which is closer to the worst case IS92f curve. Click it to see where we have come since 02 Oct 08. By the year 2020 their estimate is 8 billion people which just sounds like a number but this huge population must be fed with real food. Even now the food supply depends on a lot of factors being very benevolent. As the environment continues to be stressed, and even more stressed by the growing population at some point these benevolent supplies will be consumed only to be replaced by others which are already over stressed and so they also will soon fail and then the people will turn to other very overstressed things and those will fail even quicker. You get the idea—soon there will be a big squabble over who is going to get the last of the remaining food. It will be an ugly food fight. The green line above shows this food shortfall as a  precursor to a total nuclear war. When that happens the population will fall precipitously as will the capacity for creating food. At some time a new point of viability will be reached but it will be an ugly planet which those people will be forced to live in for the rest of their lives. Later perhaps it might get a little better but never again like the beautiful planet which we are now exploiting to extinction.

A few years after Doomsday hits and the survivors, if any, are rehashing what happened the global warming issue will be seen as a canary in the mine dropping dead from foul gasses in the air created by too many people. Many of the people were trying very hard to be good Earth citizens and save the planet but there were just too many of them. Far too many-!!! I like people and am interested in maximizing their well being but to do that requires a smaller world population living at any one time. What would be better is a much smaller population living in a sustainable balance with the Earth for a much longer time. Presently we have a population bubble which will soon burst. I can not say the time that it will come but if you are young you will live to see Doomsday or see something much much stranger. There is a difference in the Doomsday event's timing between IS92f maximum growth and IS92c,d minimum growth of only a few years because the accumulation of past exploitation is cumulative. But the larger the population becomes the faster this foul accumulation grows.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

I've watched a couple of things over the past week where a seemingly big factual error or strange bit of logic took me right out of the story. Stuff that makes you wonder why no one involved in the production process at any point said "wait a minute".

The first example of which was watching the first episode of BBC's new Saturday evening show Merlin. In the show Merlin is a young apprentice wizard and his mentor figure is played by the Victor Meldrew dude, Richard Wilson. At one point Merlin handed Victor Meldrew a letter to read and he replied he couldn't read it because he doesn't have his glasses on. To be honest, at this point nothing stood out as being illogical in my mind. It was only a minute or two later when I actually saw him putting the glasses on in a different scene that I realised...

Wait a minute! This supposed to be medieval times of knights on horse back fighting dragons. Where the hell did a guy with glasses come from? Did no one think that perhaps this might not be appropriate for the world the story is set in?

To be fair, I only watched the first few scenes before I switched it off; a mixture of being bored and annoyed at seeing the glasses. Maybe if I watched more I'd learn the whole point of the character is supposed to be that he is way ahead of his time, inventing stuff that other people marvel at. But in that case why didn't Merlin ask what glasses were, or ask why he was wearing pieces of glass on his face?

The only other explanation is that the whole show is going to play fast and loose with the "historical" setting, but there was nothing else in that first 10 minutes to suggest it might. The tone of the thing was decidedly straight faced dungeons and dragons stuff. It's not like it was trying to be like A Knight's Tale which famously included several anachronisms like armour having a Nike tick on it, and the crowd singing "We Will Rock You" as the Knights joust.

Did no one at the BBC at any point realise that glasses are not appropriate for that universe? I did, and it made me switch the show off as a result.

I guess that's what I'm trying to get at with this blog post. If you disregard the logic of your own world then you take the audience right out of the story and they might not ever get back into it.

The second example from the past week is from the movie Doomsday, the latest movie by Neil Marshall, the guy behind Dog Soldiers and The Descent. I really liked his first two movies but a few things in Doomsday took me right out of the story.

The film centres around a future where Scotland has been quarantined off with a virus. They decide the best way to contain the virus is to rebuild Hadrian's wall and leave the people with the virus to fend for themselves on the other side. 30 years later when the virus strikes London, this hard as nails elite female soldier is given the mission of going beyond the wall to find a scientist who they believe has managed to survive the virus.

In the scene in question, she meets the squad of army grunts that have been assigned to go with her, and as she meets them they are packing all the weapons and gear they are taking with them. You get a a bunch of really blatant exposition where the squadies explain all the equipment.

The problem I had with this scene is an army guy sets up the armoured transport by saying

They may be ugly, but they move like shit off a shovel. Twin V-12 engines. 2 inch armour plating, they'll take everything from 30mm rounds to chemical weapons.

This wasn't set up as arrogant boasting, this was set up as simple fact - These armoured vehicles can sustain damage from 30mm rounds --- but

Spoiler alert:

Only problem was, a couple of scenes later one of the virus survivors jumps on top of the vehicle when it's in motion and manages to smash the windscreen on the front of the thing with an axe as if it was sheet of single pane glass.

Evidently the taking "everything from 30mm rounds to chemical weapons" doesn't refer to the great big windows on the front of the thing. A seemingly big flaw in the vehicle's design because a few moments after the glass is smashed the driver is shot by a bow and arrow through the now large hole directly facing her, which results in the armoured transport crashing, flipping over onto its side and being rendered useless.

You might think I'm being really picky now since movies are full of conceits that allow the story to move forward, as well as laws of physics which often bear no resemblance to those found in the real world. But come on! You can't have a scene where the character not only talks about the vehicle but actually lists its attributes and specifications in detail and then you totally ignore those attributes a few scenes later because you need a way for the characters to lose the vehicle.

In my mind a vehicle that can sustain 30mm rounds should be totally unaffected by a guy hitting it with a hand-held weapon, including an axe. Where is the consistent screen logic?

It took me ages to get back into the story after this. Something which could have been avoided had the vehicle been destroyed in a way consistent with something that can survive "everything from 30mm rounds to chemical weapons"

/End spoiler

I'm not wishing to pick on Merlin and Doomsday, they just happen to be two things that I have watched in the past few days which threw me out of the story at certain points because of these logic problems. Seeing these two things made me realise just how disrupting it can be to an audience member if something doesn't quite ring true.

The good news is stuff like this is easily fixed if you catch it in time. Fixing a character that isn't working; that is the hard part. Fixing a character so he doesn't have glasses hundreds of years ahead of time; that's a piece of cake. Shame no one realised before it was too late!

Yet here we are, still standing on this day after.   Could it be that yesterday was NOT doomsday?

I knew it.  It was counter intuitive that doomsday would come on such a nice day.  I shouldn't worry so much, except, I suppose, if the weather turns really nasty.

Been there, done that.  We got through that too.

I did hear on the news that this was doomsday.

Congress failed to pass the Wall St. bailout bill.  The stock market was crashing.  All credit has dried up and it is the dawning of a new Great Depression. 

I didn't think it would such a nice day outside for doomsday.  It just goes against my own rational thinking.  Oh well.  What do I know?

SMALLVILLE - Season 8

Episode 2: "Plastique"

In this episode — It's Clark's first day at the Daily Planet with Lois, and the pair are immediately thrown together on a story when a bus explodes outside the office. Clark rescues Bette (guest star Jessica Parker Kennedy), a young girl who bonds with Chloe over their shared meteor abilities, but Bette is hiding a big secret. Paramedic Davis Bloom arrives in Metropolis and is drawn to Chloe.

My spoiler filled review is after the jump. No recap this time. Just a review of the general episode.

- SPOILER ALERT -

Its Clark's first day at the Planet. Big first day. He changes in a phone booth, wears a button up shirt, and gets his first story when a bus blows up outside. Of course he has to save Tess Mercer's life. She's taken over for Lex Luthor so saving her life is obligatory.

The show gets off to a strong start. Clark and Lois' chemistry is really strong and you definitely feel the sparks flying between them. Chloe however, despite being engaged, is definitely making eyes at Davis Bloom. That's gonna cause trouble. All the actors do a great job. Davis fit in pretty nicely. Although he needs to loosen up a bit.

Jessica Parker Kennedy's character of "Bette" is a runaway, problem child, "meteor freak." She's sassy and kind of annoying, and Kennedy pulled it off pretty well. Her explosive ability is pretty cool and the visual effects in the episode were pretty strong. I didn't once believe she was 15 though. Way too hot and sexy and... um... "bouncy." Good thing she's actually about 23 years old, of I'd feel really guilty about saying so.

Clark tries out his investigative skills tracking down the cause of the bus explosion, and Lois is trying to train him the whole time.

Have I mentioned how creepy and evil Tess is? She's pretty hard-core. So far she's doing a great job as a Luthor replacement. She gives me more of a Lionel vibe than Lex. But Lionel was once our main villain so it all works out.

Looks like next week's episode will be Green Arrow's Origin Story. Hmmm... interesting.

In the September 25 episode, Clark (Tom Welling) has his first meeting with  the one and only Doomsday. Just don't call him that to his face. "It's an interpretation of the character," explains Sam Witwer, the actor playing Davis Bloome, a Metropolis paramedic with the worst split personality this side of Jekyll and Hyde. "Contrary to popular belief, we're not trashing the Doomsday backstory that he's this [alien] experiment from Krypton… we're adding to it."

In fact, the story has DC Comic's blessing. "We always work with them really closely," says exec producer Kelly Souders. "They were very much in support of Smallville giving a new spin on his origin story. But eventually it does link up with what people know from the comics."

Introduced as a fast friend of Chloe (Allison Mack), Bloome could be the boy most likely to steal Miss Sullivan's heart. "He's a really nice guy," Witwer says. "But she's dating Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore), so Davis doesn't mess with that." Especially since he's got bigger things to worry about. "He realizes he's missing large chunks of time, so he embarks on a journey to figure out what happens when he's blacking out." What Bloome finds will not only be "horrifying," it may also trigger a battle royale with our hero-in-training.... READ FULL ARTICLE