This Sunday was our customary trip to the San Diego Zoo and I am continuing to gain familiarity with my new camera. (It’s a used DSLR but new to me.) I came away with three photos that I particularly like.
This Polar Bear.
This Bee Eater. (I Like the composition of this one)
And this pudgy little Weaver
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There are fandom fights fiercer that than those found among the fans of Star Wars and Episode 3, Harvest, of Season 2 Andor provoked a fine one.
Bix (Adria Arjona) and a couple of compatriots, on the lam from Imperial Security, are hiding out on a distant agricultural planet. She comes to the lecherous attention of Imperial Lieutenant Krole (Alex Waldmann). Bix rebuffs his advances and when his attempt to coerce her under the color of authority also fails, Krole attacks Bix with intent to sexually assault her.
The story element ignited furious arguments among fans.
One faction defends the plot point with the clear and undisputed historical truth that this is precisely what takes place in fascist regimes. Petty evil people abuse their positions of power and control for their own selfish satisfactions including sexual assault becoming quite common.
The counter argument raised is that in the universe of noble Jedi Knights, mystical magical forces, and valiant rebellions against tyranny such real-world ugliness has no place. Star Wars is a vehicle for escape from reality’s nasty brutishness and need not reflect it back at the escapees.
As with the best disagreements, truth, in some form, lies on both sides of the discussion. Fascistic systems attract and generate the bullies, the thugs, and the rapists to them for the opportunity to wield unchecked power and authority free from social or legal accountability. Traditionally, Star Wars is a fantasy beyond its reality of transcendent forces with clear moral codes that translate into ‘light’ and ‘dark’ sides but well into the realm of social political forces. The rebellion against the galactic empire is presented as unblemished by ethical compromises. They do not prey upon a population to steal resources, they do not commit acts of terrorism to drain away imperial support, nor do they engage in revenge driven bloodbaths after their victory. The rebellion in how it operates in the field and after overthrowing the government acts in a matter as fantastic as a Jedi’s telekinetic powers. All this makes the attempted sexual assault far too ‘real’ for how traditional Star Wars presented itself.
There is another factor why that scene rubbed so many traditional Star Wars fans the wrong way.
Star Wars, traditionally, is quite chaste.
While romance imbued throughout the originally trilogy including the charged triangle of Luke, Leia, and Han. What those first films did not have was potent real sexuality. Star Wars, though produced in the late 70s, has more in common with a pre-code feature in terms of sexuality than its cinematic compatriots. Nearly a decade earlier broadcast television was more sexually charged that Star Wars. When Captain Kirk, sitting on a bed is slipping his boots back on and Deela is fixing her hair in a mirror everyone understood that the couple had just completed sexual relations. Not only is there no such scene in the first trilogy of Star Wars movies, but it is also clear that any scene even approaching that is wildly out of tone with the ‘fairy tale’ nature of the productions. The Empire Strikes Back would never introduce a scene where Lando walks into a room where Han and Leia were together under the covers of a beautiful bed. Sex, in traditional Star Wars, is an abstract existing only in a conceptual form.
Andor is not traditional Star Wars.
Tony Gilroy’s conception with this series is something much more informed by our actual reality than our sanitized fairy tales of nobles knight and virginal princesses. His creation of emotionally complex and competent agents of the Empire, his depiction of a rebellion riven with factions and not above assassination shows that this is not the pristine and unmuddied forces of good that Lucas showed us in the 70s and 80s.
From Luthen’s willingness to use and abandon his own people as a means towards a victory he expects he will never see to season 2’s quite explicit echo of the Nazi’s Wannsee conference where the eradication of Europe’s Jewish population was decided Gilroy is reflecting our real world back at us through the distorted mirror of a Star Wars story. In that respect Krole’s assault on Bix is very much in keeping with the tone and the intention of the production as much as it conflicts and is at odds with the films released by Lucas.
Both camps are right in their reactions to the scene. As I have often said in my writers’ group, ‘no honest critique can be wrong.’ That said if the more real world inspired tone of Andor is not to your taste, then Andor is not for you and perhaps the more traditionally aligned products are where you need to find your enjoyment.
Personally? I adore Andor.
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Generative A.I. is not without decent and good uses but there has been a lot of terrible things as well, the scraping of artists’ work to feed it, my own novel has been fed into at least one A.I. to ‘train it, the enormous amounts of energy used to power it for so far little practical benefits, the dangerously destabilizing effect it could have if not carefully introduced in the economy. All that said last night I discovered yet another reason to hate the wide-spread and easy access to artificial ‘intelligence.’
After watching the programs of interest to us my sweetie-wife and I relaxed by scanning trailers on YouTube. Some were interesting, some were not but then at the end of the line produced by the search lay a trailer for The Odyssey.
Christopher Nolan began filming his adaptation of that classic story in February 2025 and it should hit theaters in the summer of 2026 so it is possible that some form of teaser trailer had just been released.
Nope.
Some forking dipshirt had prompted generative A.I. to make a trailer and it was among the most idiotic and terrible bit of video I have ever witnessed. It was evident within a few moments what sort of garbage this was, and we stopped watching, disgusted with the thing.
It is bad enough when fans make fake trailers; I still recall how hard it was to find a legitimate trailer for The Return, ironically enough also adapted from The Odyssey when the internet was overflowing with fan-made trailers using clips from various movies starring Ralph Fiennes. A.I. doesn’t even resort to clips, it just lies and throws crap into the world.
There are some very funny and creative fake trailers out there, such as Must Love Jaws which is created to make Jaws look like a buddy comedy when misfit friends Brody and Hooper have to stop the evil Quint from killing their shark friend. You would never mistake this for the real trailer, it’s a work of creativity and love, things A.I. does not possess.
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Movies have been central to my life for literally as long as I can remember. I have vague hazy memories of a Hammer Horror film that make up some of my earliest recollections. But even with a lifetime of cinematic treasures there are sometimes moments that stand out for the experience that came to me in darkened theaters. Here is a small sampling, be aware these have spoilers.
Towering Inferno:
I saw this at the Sunrise theater in Ft. Pierce Florida with my friend Brian Hardman. Brian, a somewhat rebellious early teen lit up a cigarette and got us both thrown out. It was years before I learned how that finally put out the blaze.
Hereditary:
Ari Aster phenomenal horror movie of cults, witches, demon gods, and family dysfunction was a terrific film to see in the theater. The transition from Act 1 to Act 2, where Charlie is killed was so sudden, so shocking that for several minutes I convinced myself it was a dream sequence. It was not. Once the reality of the plot became undeniable I knew I was in the hands of a writer/director that was fearless and that made the rest of the film so much more terrifying.
Dead & Buried:
A non-traditional zombie movie, I saw Dead and Buried at one of the grindhouse theaters that used to exist in downtown San Diego. In the film a hapless photographer is lured by a beautiful woman to a secluded spot with a crowd of quite ordinary looking people who slaughter and burn him alive. His burned body is place in a staged auto accident but when authorities reach and touch the corpse, he screams. That remains in my opinion the most effective jump scare in cinema history.
Alien:
20th century films
Staying for scripts from Dan O’Bannon, I watched Alien on its initial release and it was then and remains an astonishing film. Slow deliberate tension that mounts and mounts. With that said I had an idiosyncratic reaction to the conclusion of the ‘chest buster’ scene. For most of the sequence where Cain dies his terrible and horrible death I sat as shocked as the rest of the audience. However, once the Zeta Reticulian parasite raised itself up from his corpse, looked around the compartment at the characters in my head all I could hear was a tiny high-pitched voice saying, “hello.’ It’s not that scene failed but rather I think my brain had simply overloaded and retreated to humor to deal with it.
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When Reagan ascended to the Presidency in 1980, he often described the Republican party as a stool with three legs to describe the major divisions of the movement as: Family Values, Fiscal Conservatism, and Anti-Communism.
One can argue with aspects of any one or all three elements, but I do think that description pretty much told you who and what made up the GOP at that time. There are some deluded fools who think it still has bearing but the legs of that stool have long since been replaced with three new ones.
Cruelty to the Queer, Looting Public Funds, and Isolationism marbled with a rich vein of white supremacy are the new legs.
What little compassion for others in the old ‘Family Valuers’ crowd, and there hadn’t been much to begin with, has boiled away with its concentration in the homophobic transphobic, and woman-hating stew it has become.
Fiscal conservatism, however, it may may have erred with ‘supply side’, now makes no pretense at sane or rational monetary policies or decisions. The last Republican president, who is also the current one, ran the debt and deficit to insane amounts and now wants to add trillions more to it with additional tax cuts for the very wealthy.
The isolationism of the new GOP is unmistakable, democracies are derided and left to suffer invasions from militaristic and expansionist neighbors while the deep and binding commitments of the post war era are abandoned. The white nationalism is plain when books about racism are removed from the Naval academy, but Mein Kampf is left for the cadets to read.
From 1980 through about 2003 I was a registered Republican, but the mark of true wisdom is not being free of mistakes but recognizing when you have made them.v
Because I came to this streaming show on Max late, I had the chance to catch up by watching an episode a night. Not quite a binge but certainly not having to wait a week between episodes was nice. Though I still think a weekly release is a far better model for programming because it allows interest to build, as it did with The Pitt.
Now that I have finished the season, I want to touch lightly on characters that provoked the strongest emotional reactions.
Dr. Melissa ‘Mel’ King, played by Taylor Dearden. Emphatic, smart, understanding how to
Max
communicate with people even as she herself struggles with presenting undiagnosed on the ‘spectrum.’ She is my screen crush, a sweet baby that like Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer you dread anything bad happening to.
Max
Dennis Witaker, player by Brit Gerran Howell, is the character I most identify as, though I am not bright enough to be a physician. A farm boy with an accent that identifies him as coming out of rural America, Whitaker feels things strongly and tends to blame himself needlessly.
Max
Dr. Trinty Santos, player by Isa Briones, irritated me though most of the season. Confident and often crosses the line into cocky she actually knows what she’s doing but her hard sharp personality makes her a difficult teammate. Her tendency for hanging unwanted nicknames on people is the thing that it very hard for me to warm up to her. I despise such things, but the finale revealed a softness she often hides and that went a long way to making me like the character.
Max
Dr Cassie McKay played by Fiona Dourif, daughter of Brad Dourif who appears in one episode as Dr. McKay’s father. McKay is the oldest of the student doctors, a woman who has seen some of the unpleasantness of life and with those battle scars is a little better equipped to help patients struggling with issues beyond the mere medical.
Max
And last but by far not least, Charge Nurse Dana Evans, played by Katherine LaNasa. Dana exhibits calm, cool, collected command as she runs the emergency department for the doctors. her authority doesn’t come from her position but her nature and years of hard-won experience. Dana Evans is my favorite character and when she got punched, hard enough to crack bones, by an asshole patient it ignited my strongest emotional response in the entire season.
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The weekend has ended and it’s Monday morning with another work week stretching out before me.
All in all, this past weekend was decent, but I did not manage to do everything I had hoped. Between running my tabletop Role Playing game Saturday night and a writers group meeting Sunday evening I did not find the time to get out and see Sinners a horror film that fascinates me. It is so nice to see movies that are just another episode of a franchise and a horror movie that isn’t just another masked deranged killed slicing up wayward teens.
Sadly, my long COVID cough continues to hamper my life. The game session lasted a mere 90 minutes before the spasms became too intense to allow me to continue. The days of 3 hours runs are clearly in the past.
The writers group was easier to navigate since for the majority of the two hours I can be quiet, eat cough drops, and listen to people read from their selections, minimizing my talking time. I even had enough endurance to read myself, and it was decently received, and I got useful notes back.
I have no Sunday Zoo photos because my replacement camera came with just one battery, and I failed to have it charged. Of course, that mean a few of my favorite subject were more active and or closed to the walls of their enclosures providing photo ops that I had no decent camera to use.
Still, I can’t complain and remain overall happy.
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January of 2024 after nearly four years of dodging the virus I finally contracted COVID. Because I take medication that tunes down my immune system response as a treatment for psoriatic arthritis my doctor proscribed the Paxlovid therapy to keep the COVID from becoming very serious.
That worked wonders. My run with this disease, which killed a good friend of mine nearly four years earlier, was quite mild, hardly more than an intense cold.
After the disease ran its course however I discovered I have a fast new friend, a persistent cough. At first, I simply waited for the damaged tissue in the airways to recover and the cough to leave me.
That did not happen.
The tissues recovered but the cough persisted. Treatment after treatment was tried and none managed to dispel the cough from my system. I didn’t cough all the time, most of the time it simply wasn’t there, but prolonged talking, like running a tabletop game, always brought it out. Eventually I learned to just live with and try to avoid irritations that provoked such spasms.
Last month while researching at the City Library I discovered that strong aftershaves and perfumes provoked an intense irritation. After the three hours in the presence of those scents I wound up coughing for 12 hours.
Yesterday I got another lesson in airborne irritants. Heating my lunch in our tiny breakroom a new employee to the building came in with a modestly strong perfume. My exposure lasted only six or seven minutes but something in this scent proved terribly adapt at irritating my airway.
Soon I was coughing nearly uncontrollably and after nearly two hours threw in the towel and went home. The air at home is free of all perfumes and after another six and a half hours I finally felt my airways open up again.
This is long COVID, a persistent effect from my infection but I know people who suffer it far more intensely than myself. Brain fogs that make thinking difficult, exhaustion that make everyday activities nearly impossible. While this cough is troublesome and curtails some aspects of my life, I know that all in all it could have been far far worse.
In 1986, seven years after the release of Alien, the sequel, often lauded as one of the best sequels of all time, Aliens released into theaters to critical and commercial success.
20th Century Films
In 1999 with the release of a boxed DVD set featuring the franchise’s films, a director’s cut of the movie was included, a version that many fans find superior to the theatrical release. I am not one of them.
According to director Cameron, on the audio commentary for one of the releases, the film was coming in long and as non-linear editing had not yet been widely adopted and the production was running out of time, performing numerous small edits here and there throughout the film to shorten it proved to be insufficient to the task. Producer, and then spouse to Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd noted that the entire reel containing all of the colony material prior to Ripley and the Marine’s arrival could get dropped without impacting the plot. A simple, fast fix that allowed the production to meet that rapidly approaching deadline. When given the chance to re-edit the film with digital editing tools for the box set, Cameron restored the reel and several other scenes that had been excised from the theatrical release.
In my opinion, the longer, less focused, run time damages what was a nearly perfect film in two major ways.
The first is in perspective. With the time spent on the colony meeting a few of the colonist, Newt prior to her horrific experiences, and such dilutes the powerful telling of Ripley’s story. This story is about Ellen Ripley, her post-traumatic stress dealing with the terrors she encountered and the guilt of her survivorship. She is the character the audience invests their emotional capital with, and it is her pain and suffering that makes us tense hoping and praying for a happy ending. To take 10 or 15 minutes away from Ripley for characters we scarcely know and are not at all emotionally invested in their stories. This dilutes the film’s power. Aside from Newt, how many colonists can you name from the director’s cut?
The second issue I will admit is more pedantic, but it is one that bothers more and more when I watch the film.
Each alien drone/warrior comes from a single impregnated victim, and it’s stated that the colony on LV-426, — and don’t get me started on the colony name — had a population of 158 person. 158, that’s a small movie theater’s worth of people. I have never counted but it looks to me, particularly in the Director’s cut that there are a lot more than 158 aliens that attack the characters in the siege. A favorite sequence for many in the extended version is the automatic guns, set up to guard the tunnels leading into the base where our heroes have barricaded themselves. The guns firing automatically cut down waves of alien drones. Even after all that there remain scores that make the final assault and even still more in the nest to threaten Ripley and Newt’s escape.
Especially in the director’s cut there are simply far too many aliens something that chips and erodes away my ability to suspend disbelief for the movie.
Your opinion may be different and that’s part of the beauty of art, but to me the theatrical is the best version of Aliens.
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While as a child I was raised with moderate Southern Baptist beliefs and attended at least a smattering of Sunday School classes, the faith never really took hold. It is a truism to me that from the outside all religions look preposterous, but it is a very human thing to believe in them.
In my opinion, there is no soul, no spirit, nothing that existed that is ‘me’ prior to my birth, nor will there be anything lingering after the biochemical reactions that power my flesh cease. When I die, that is it; that is the end of all thought and all sensation. No lake of fire or endless clouds await me. This one brief passing moment in the nearly limitless expanse of time is all that will comprise my existence. For all of us, this is it; this brief, fleeting, flickering moment of consciousness is all we get.
Does that mean life is meaningless, without purpose or value? Fuck no! It means that the value life has, the purpose life has, is determined solely by each and every one of us for ourselves. We create meaning, and that is the center of a life that is our own.
It is because I hold these beliefs that I deeply despise the ‘social conservatives’ and their spiteful domineering of other people’s lives. You want to believe that sexual relations with people of the same gender is wrong? Fine, go ahead and refrain from it all you wish, but don’t tell others how to behave. Believe that life divides neatly into binary states of existence? Foolish, but that’s okay for you, but don’t tell others how to live.
We get this one tiny moment to live, and as long as it is not harming another, you should get to live your life in the manner that brings you joy in this painful, passing existence.