Sympathy for the Devil

This Halloween was a generally pleasant and uneventful holiday. The kids picked their costumes, we overstocked with candy, Carly did a great job with decorating the house. Everything was pleasantly normal. Our neighbors came by, Carly took the kids and a couple of families from less trick or treat friendly locations (one country, one townhouse) out around our little island of a block.
I frequently speak of being the outsider or abnormal one here in the bible-belt, but this Halloween I got a sense of being on the other side. As many locations have to deal with political correctness in the form of Holiday Trees, and Spring Egg Hunts and the like (we get that a bit too) Halloween is interesting because it tends to divide two groups of Xians. The majority enjoy Halloween in all of its mischievous, sugar coated, mask wearing goodness--Just like us! But a decent sized minority (probably comparable to the number of non-religious people) does not celebrate Halloween. Their reason is not pious austerity, or austere piety, which might earn them some rspect in the way Monks and Nuns get brownie points for dedication, but good old fashion Devil fear.
In their own congregations they are probably quite comfortable and pleased with themselves for their rejecting this evil celebration, but in the bright light of community they are less boastful. They quietly admit that their children will not be dressing up, that they would prefer there be no decorations or costume parties at the school, or elsewhere. There is a real sense of palpable shame.
And the Norms do nothing to alleviate this. Oh your kids can't dress up? They can come with us to go trick or treating, or our kids can share their loot, etc.. This doesn't have the effect of bringing them into the fold. And for those quite moderate people that innocently don't already know the dark reason behind this boycott of Halloween, a simple inquiry leads to more hilarity. Otherwise quite normal and sensible people feel duty bound to admit that they don't celebrate Halloween because they think it glorifies a powerful and dark being that truly does exist and can wield power and temptation over us. Our innocent children can be swayed into darkness by these temptations. These explanations are typically greeted with a kind of pitying quick change of subject. Both sides are clearly uncomfortable with the discussion, and it is troublesome to see a person who is otherwise so normal reveal these beliefs.
Now I am quite familiar with the pitying brush off. As one who rejects anything supernatural, I am frequently on the receiving end of it. My internal response is usually either anger if they are insulting, bemusement if they ask silly questions (why do you go on living if you don't have Heaven and Hell to motivate you?), or self-irritation when I have the esprit d'escalier and think of a snappy comeback only after the moment has passed. I wonder what the fundies feel when they realize that those around them are not in accord with them?
This really ought to make me more sympathetic, but instead I feel a schadenfreude for their comeuppance. I wish I could say it was from pure compassion and empathy that I might pull one of them aside and in sincere solidarity say " I know just how you feel, I'm an Atheist, and I get those looks all the time." But, there might be something else going on as well. ;)

ReligionFlowChart

ReligionFlowChart
Originally uploaded by hedwig_the_owl

Wow. This so totally works.

Revenge of the Xianites

Today I watched my kids fly out of the house with a glee reserved usually for desserts or TV to play with the neighborhood kids. Now that Fall is upon the leafy walls which have kept us apart, the muggy mosquito filled airs which have deadened our senses, the camp, and pool and other summer fun which exhausted us, have gone away. And through the woods behind our house a glimpse of other kids playing and their siren like voices have seduced our children from their dark playrooms.
So far, so good.
After twenty minutes or so, Will returned to remove something from his shoe (why did he need to return inside to do so I don't know).
"How is going out there?" I inquired. "Playing Star Wars?" One of the neighborhood boys (age 7) has worn the same Clone Trooper mask on his head since Halloween last year.
"No... we're just talking about church... I don't really know much about it, so I'm not very interested." uh oh.
"Well.. have fun..." I say rather limply as he runs back.
A few minutes later, both kids return, saying that the neighborhood boys told them that if they don't pray right now they will GO TO HELL!.... Great.
Then, those same boys come over as well.
"Will, won't pray. And he said you don't believe in God."
"Okay" I say, diplomatically. "And?"
"If you don't pray you'll go to the fire of hell." (six year old berating me).
I am doing my best to be calm. He is young, these are our "good" neighbors.
"Well. I think differently. It is good for people to be different, right?" This seems to stall him. He wants desperately to say "no" but he senses that is the wrong answer.
There is a bit more banter where the kids tell us how to pray, and how easy it is. I am firm. "We don't do that."
Then the kids went on to tell us to remove our witch and ghosts from our front yard. Who is this guy the HOA? I tried to explain that EVERY house in the neighborhood has Halloween decorations up.
"But their one's aren't scary!"
"It's fun to be scared on Halloween." I invite them to take a closer look. They do, and seem satisfied that our stuff isn't too scary.
We nervously allow the kids to go play again. Again, our kids return after the play turns into the other kids shouting at our poor kids, Will is stunned and scared. Again the kids come back. I let them know that they are scaring our kids, and that they can't play with my children unless they will do something else.
There is a short burst of play. Then the neighbors go inside and I retrieve mine from loitering outside their house (we have a rule, no going into other people's homes without us).

We like our neighborhood. We like the families of these kids, and they are just kids. But, the tension here is getting pretty thick. I don't want a confrontation with the neighbors. We rode our the election without any problems despite our competing signage. Maybe we can ride this out.

I will give them one more chance, then it is time to talk to the parents, not something I really want to do. I did tell the kids I was proud of them no doing something that didn't feel right. Peer pressure can be hard enough, especially when the bigger kids can do all sorts of fun things (go into each others houses, ride bikes around the neighborhood unsupervised, etc..) I do want them to trust their instincts on this sort of thing, another reason I don't want to DEAL with this as a parent. If they can manage it, they might as well learn now, since this won't be the last I am sure.

I wonder how my neighbors would respond if my kids were to so much as speak their beliefs (about angels, unicorns and elves) to their kids, much less threaten them. I hope they'd be as tolerant.


Parenthetically. Our kids are very interested in churches, mostly from an architectural standpoint. They are intrigued by the steeples (rarely seen in other buildings). Carly usually tells them about the historical importance of church as town hall, social center and the like. I often refer to the olden days when people were afraid of ghosts and goblins and used to hide inside those buildings. (Okay so I am not entirely unbiased.) I am tempted to remind the kids about how afraid the big boys were of our ghost and witch decorations in connection with that story. Of course, I won't, but I am tempted.

Gotcha!

Gotcha!
Originally uploaded by carly scholz

I wanted to get a photo of the whole mouse, but I also didn't want Hanta Virus from touching it. And Carly wanted me to be gentle with the poor traumatized little guy.If you squint just right you can see that little line is its tail.

Mouse Trap 2.0

Mouse Trap 2.0
Originally uploaded by carly scholz

Here is the updated version. Note the lip of cardboard to prevent climbing and make jumping out more difficult.

GM versus Mouse

The Trap
Originally uploaded by carly scholz

UPDATE! We caught a mouse! Maustraap V2 was a success. (I will get pictures up soon.) Sometime between 7pm and 10pm our mouse decided to try again for a little peanut butter and cracker dinner. This time, it was not able to escape. The new version was deeper (about 20 inches total) and I built a lip around the top so it had a much smaller entrance/exit. I'd like to believe that made it more difficult/impossible to escape. It is possible that I caught it soon after it fell into the trap, for the peanut butter was still in the tube. But, there was its tail sticking out of the tube. Pretty big (four inch tail maybe). I took the whole trap to the nature trail near our house and release the thing. The tube (with mouse aboard) rolled onto the path, and with a little prodding the BIG mouse (3-4inch + tail) took off like a flash. No wonder the first version didn't work. It was probably able to leap out of the other trap.
I plan on setting up the trap again tonight, just in case we had more than one. Hopefully, we will find it empty tomorrow.

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So we have a Mouse (or Meeses) in our Garage. It appears to be surviving on the crumbs left in strollers and whatever it can find clinging to the recycling.
We don't really want to kill it, for a variety of reasons, both humane and practical (do we want the kids to find a dead mouse, or have it be poisoned and die in some corner stinking up the garage?).
So I did a quick check on the internets and discovered a fairly simple DIY mousetrap. It used a 2 gallon soda bottle, but lacking those, I tried the same idea with a cooler.
As a GM practiced in the art of imagining traps for intelligent players, I should be good at this.
So here was attempt 1.
Ramp leads to tube balanced precariously on the edge of the cooler. In tube is bit of peanut butter and a cracker. Mouse goes in the tube. Tube tips over into the cooler, mouse is trapped.
Well... It was a partial success. The trap was sprung. There were mouse dropping in the cooler, and the bait was gone. This suggested the mouse did go into the cooler. But I guess mice are better climbers than I gave them credit for.
Attempt 2 will have a deeper trap, and a lip around the top of the trap to prevent it from climbing out. More later...

Movie Review - District 9

Okay two movie reviews in a row and a month apart is not exactly keeping this an active blog, but you get what you pay for. I was prepared for District 9 in a way I wasn't for Star Trek. I saw the commercials but I didn't read anything about it, I was not intentionally keeping myself ignorant qua Mssr McCandless, I just was not that interested to read reviews or of info. I also had a couple of beers beforehand. So I was prepared to enjoy the film even if it were a fluffy sci fi pic.

The commercials do not really give you a good idea what to expect from the film.
I was expecting something like Aliens meets Transformers.

I guess I liked it as I watched it, it was a visually interesting film. But immediately upon leaving I was disappointed. The film has a quasi-documentary style to it. Interviews, documentary style film footage, even fake cctv images meant to give the impression we were seeing the real events unfold unedited. And that was effective if a little hard on my poorly focusing eyes.
As I said the visual effects were very good. The CGI aliens "prawns" were believable and lifelike in their behavior and seemed to interact seamlessly with the actors. This was more impressive than say the Star Wars prequels where it looked like the human actors were in different rooms from the CGI critters. But like Jackson's LOTR Gollum, they were more or less believable.

**SPOILERS**


The Set Up was oddly reminiscent of the cult film Alien Nation, Aliens come to Earth as refugees and find themselves the oppressed minority living in squalor. The idea that this was in the relatively distant past (20 years movie time) and so relatively mundane to humans in proximity was effective. Though the time-scale was never clear, was this set in an alternate present day, or the future or what? That was a little distracting and required some buy in. The aliens have been here long enough to get past the OMFG Aliens! stage, and for us both to learn the other's language, but virtually no effort was made to explore the mothership, backwards engineer the weapons, etc... What is the UIO, is that a United Nations Analog? Unclear. The Aliens spoke their own language, humans in the film could for the most part understand them, and the aliens could understand the humans (we got the alien dialogue in subtitles). Placing the alien camp in Johanisburg was a little heavy handed but effective -- oppressed beings living in camps, not free to wander the streets, etc... However, the set up seemed to be doing too much. It is clear that there was considerable mood setting going on. And with the bug-like aliens, the feeling was that things would go bad with the evil aliens, disease, or death was clearly foreshadowed (but..) I think that was an interesting red herring, but distracting. The filmmaker wanted to keep some of the truth secret and reveal it as the movie progressed, but never really carried through with that. The origin of the aliens for example, or why they are on Earth, or why they were stuck on Earth in the sorry state they were in was never explained at all. And this lack of information was not necessary or helpful to the plot.
The actual plot was a bit thin and familiar alien-human hybrid tries to rescue himself and new siblings from the evil corporation seeking to weaponize him. That part was fine for what it was. It keep the plot moving, provided for some good special effects and some surprises. But the effort put into studying him could have just as easily been put into training the Prawns to be soldiers since they were in general readily willing to follow orders and had limited morality.
The more interesting stuff was more subtle. The similarities between the aliens and humans in similar situations. The slow building up of the aliens as intelligent beings. The 'realness' of the main alien character (who was an actual character) was developed in surprising and fun ways, although the film did stray into the realm of buddy action flick like a Lethal Weapon towards the end, almost comically.
I think the plot suffered from too many holes that were needlessly left there. They had ample means to fill these holes without sacrificing much. The pseudo-documentary format would have allowed 'expert' opinion to fill in some details, or the dialogue between alien protagonist and his son could have served the dual purpose of 'humanizing' the aliens, and filling in some details. A simple exchange like "Dad, why are we stuck here on this lame planet?" or "Why did we come here in the first place" could have helped a bit.
The epilogue's reference to the new location for the aliens "District 10" alludes to the obvious sequel, and perhaps they hoped to keep some secrets for that, but this story doesn't really have the demand for that in the first place. I prefer secrets revealed, or if there is to be A secret, make that central to, rather than outside the plot.
Like many sci-fi films, the lack of continuity and consistency with technology plagues this film. At one point the baby alien activates both the alien mothership and robots to help his dad, but somehow this ability was forgotten earlier in the film, and why only one robot when we've seen more? The mystery 'fluid' is a both a desert topping (instant alien-transformer) and a floor wax (.5 liter fuel source for the mothership and smaller craft to return to the home planet). If they had this ability why not use it earlier, why hide the thing instead of bring it into the ship, etc.. The presence of hundreds of alien and human weapons in the alien camp, but almost zero use by the aliens of this technology, was a little odd. Presumably District 10 will explain all that if the box office permits. Again, the film could have answered it without resort to a sequel.

So... ultimately unsatisfying, but interesting in parts.
I liked the main character. His sort of Arthur Dent meets Ripley was a novel idea.
I liked the way the aliens personalities and intelligence was slowly revealed.
The documentary style was a good one, though the shaky cam got to my eyes after an hour or so.
I felt a little cheated by the constant bait and switch genre jumping. Is it Aliens? is it 28-Days Later? is it ET? is it Blood Diamond? But, part of me admires the film for playing on my expectations that it should fit into a specific genre and denying that to me.

Movie Review - Star Trek

So maybe I am a Trekie at heart. I don't know. I haven't watched any Star Trek in years, Enterprise wasn't very Star Trek-like to me. Voyager was a bore. I liked some of DS9. The movies have gotten worse and worse over the years. So when I heard about the 'reboot' by J.J. Abrams I was dubious. Still, something in me wanted it to be good, so I kept myself ignorant about it.
But the reviews came out. 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (that is pretty darn good). Claims that fans and non-fans alike would love it. So last night, a month into its run I went to see it.
The Good:
I thought the cast was good. They were able to do the original cast pretty well. Particularly the uncanny Spock and McCoy picks.
I've never been impressed with visual effects, so that didn't impress me, but the use of 'original series' looking ships and shuttles. They looked both realistic and canonical, I particularly liked the USS Kelvin.
Aliens. Good introduction of non-humans in various positions, although more as scenery than characters.
The Bad
Time-Travel.-Alternate Reality There has never been a good time travel movie (Back to Future was pretty good). I hated this story. It made little or no sense, like most time travel stories. So, something happened to Romulas, and Spock offered to help. He was too late, but decided to do it anyway. (Why?) Then the black hole he made took him and Nero back in time. When did Nero decide he needed to get vengeance? Nero's and Spock's stories don't sync up. The rationales for the characters, the plans, and the solutions were all lame. The Romulans can time travel, but rather than go back in time and save their families, they choose to go back and punish Spock? Who is Nero? Why not use an actual character from any of the myriad Star Trek stories? Maybe something that Spock or Kirk actually did in their past? It just didn't seem to be taking advantage of the rich resources available.
I understand the idea of creating a reboot in an alternate reality, which is fine, but this one is way lamer than the original .
Kids in Space. Okay young and sexy actors were needed to replace the aged originals. I get that. But the idea that these kids Chekov is 17? and the rest are fresh out of the academy and already the senior officers on Flagship of the Federation? I know they need to be the Enterprise crew, but how about explaining that. In Wrath of Khan a perfectly serviceable explanation for a cadet crew was given, why not do that in this movie?
Scene driven plot: Lots of movies fall victim to this. I can imagine a story board presentation at some briefing where a scene is demo'd, then the plot is twisted to make that necessary (surfing Legolas in LOTR?) The skydiving scene made for good commercials (I guess) but it made almost no sense at all in the movie.
Why did the "drill" need to hang from a long chain over the planet? Why did they need to get onto it in person? Why not just shoot the darn thing with phasers or a photon torpedoes? The element of surprise couldn't have been any better with people since the Romulans knew they were there.
What is up with the Romulan ship? Crazy inefficient weird ship with a layout unsuitable to any use at all. And leaving the vulcan ship with it's door open and keys in the ignition? Again, there could have been explanations for it, but none were given.
Changes to the Canon: I can appreciate wanting to make a break from the canon, and potential ire of trekkies around the world. But the changes seemed odd to me. Why not have Pike suffer the damage he had in the show? Why make the ships so much bigger than they were in the show? Why kill Kirk's dad and Spock's mom? I see how it fit in the story, but such things were not necessary to the plot. Why destroy Vulcan?
Failed Characterizations: I think the guy playing Kirk was probably fine, but he missed the opportunity to really capture Kirk's personality. Kirk was the optimist, the character was not. Shatner was able to be both confident and self-depreciating at the same time, this guy less so. Kirk's past, in the show, was not clear, but it seemed likely that he had some experience to draw on, the new one not so much. He also wasn't as funny as Shatner. The Uhura/Spock thing was interesting. But why not take advantage of the really interesting arc in the show of Spock dealing with his emotions and logic. They tried to set up the conflict between logic and emotion, but they didn't really do it. Spock was freely emotional throughout the movie.
Overkill Syndrome: This is not unique to this movie, or this Trek film. But the idea that you need dozens of ships destroyed, whole planets, whole races destroyed. That is not necessary. Star Trek TOS and to a lesser degree TNG was very localized. A small story with a good plot. The idea that you need a BIG threat to justify the movie is false. The best Trek movie by far, Wrath of Kahn was ultimate a battle wits between two people, and the threat was personal, not galactic.

In general, I've got pretty low expectations of movies in general, and Star Trek movies in particular. This movie seemed to suffer for the general Star Trek movie problem (focusing too much on visual effects, not enough of character). I didn't much care for this Kirk, why not make him a sympathetic character? He is supposed to be a genius in this movie, but apart from the Kobiashi Maru scene (which seemed like an 80s nerd movie) he didn't really demonstrate any genius, or even prowess of any sort. Nero never made any sense. Who is this person, a miner? A really mean miner? That's the villain? If this were the beginning of a new TV series, I'd say. Alright! Give it some shake down time, and this could be great. But as a stand alone movie, ugh.