This one’s for Brad (and totally NSFW)
Author Archives: Bob Evans
My CPAP wisdom
It was a little over four years ago that I received by diagnosis of severe sleep apnea. It came as a surprise; though I snored and had issues with being tired I had not expected that this would happen. I started CPAP therapy and this gave me my life back. So now that it has been four years I thought I would put together a small post sharing what I learned about making this therapy work effectively. Before we continue, these are simply my personal experiences. I am not a medical professional and you should always consult with a medical professional about any therapy you are engaged in.
1) The Right Mask
First and foremost in getting the most of your CPAP therapy is finding the right mask for you face and your sleeping habits. Personally I started nasal pillows, which isn’t even really a mask. This was a device that affixed right under my nose and plugged directly into the nostrils. I thought it might work best because of the small profile, however I tend to open my mouth during my slumber, and this dropped my pressure below therapeutic levels. Even with a chinstrap I couldn’t keep my mouth closed. (A symptom I am sure many would say it equally true when I am awake.) This also ruled out the nose only masks. I tried several nose & Mouth masks before I found one with a gel form that sealed nicely against my skin without requiring too much pressure.
So if you first few masks don’t work for you, keep looking. There are all sorts of masks with all sorts of materials. Keep at it until you find the right one.
2) A Clean Mask
Most instructions that come with the masks advise cleaning on a weekly basis, but this may be too infrequent. Each night you use the mask oils from your skin become affixed in a thin layer on the contact surfaces, degrading the seal. I have found that by purchasing CPAP mask wipes, I can clean the contact surfaces each night and improve the seal. This reduces how tight the mask needs to be when worn, and improves the general effectiveness of the therapy.
3) A Shorn Face
If you’re male, and particularly if you are hirsute and given to ‘five o’clock’ shadow, it would be prudent to shave before bed. Just like gas masks, sleep apnea therapy masks do not function well with beards and unshorn skin. You see a common theme appearing in my advise, getting a good seal. The point of the therapy is raising the pressure in you airways so that you have unobstructed breathing and you can keep properly oxygenated. A good seal is critical to obtaining that needed pressure.
4) The Right Accessories
The mask and your skin are the most critical elements in securing good therapy, but making your sleep comfortable can sometimes be a matter of the correct ancillary devices. I myself tumbled and turn in my sleep, when I first started my CPAP therapy I often woke myself either tanged in the hose or by the roar of air escaping the machine after I had pulled the tubing free of the connectors.
I found a hose stand on Amazon that works well for me. The base slips between the mattresses and it hold the hose overhead, much like an IV stand does in a hospital, allowing me to toss and turn with little restriction.
I hope that this sharing experience helps someone out. If you think you may have sleep apnea I cannot stress enough the need to be tested. I didn’t think this applied to me, but during testing they discovered my blood oxygen levels were dropping in the high 80’s, and as I understand it, anything under 95% is considered dangerous. If people tell you that you snore and stop breathing, get thee to a doctor. If you wake up constantly through the night, get thee to a doctor. If when you stop moving you find yourself falling asleep, get thee to a doctor.
The First Beta Read Results
Saturday afternoon I held the beta-reader lunch for my latest novel. I had a pretty good turn out and there was a lively and illuminating discussion.
These sessions are not for me, the author, to defend or explain my choices, prose, or assumptions, but to hear from readers, some who have come totally cold to the piece, what they took away from my work. It can be very difficult not to fall into an explanatory spiral. After all things that seemed so clear to me that I feared I was hitting my poor future readers with clue-by-fours can turn out to the be vague and vaporous hints to my actual readers.
I shan’t go into the details of our discussions. It would be terribly dull for anyone not familiar with the work and for those distance beta readers still working on the project I’d hate to contaminate the process.
I can say that at this moment I have a ten bullet point revision document generated. Some of the changes are rather major – at least one massive plot hole was exposed in the discussion – and several are minor, and some come down to find and replace to make character names more distinct from each other.
Hopefully my distance readers will get me their final feedbacks in the next couple of weeks and I can drop myself fully into revision mode.
The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1940s
So here’s the next and in many ways the toughest essay in this darned series. Why is this one so bloody tough? Because there really are no notable SF films, from around the freaking world, that was produced during the 1940s.
For most of these essays my task has been to chose, from a number of influential SF movies, just two and name these as the most influential of their decade. Certainly the next decade up, the 1950s, will prove a challenge. What a treasure of rich, interesting, and diverse films to selection from, but the 1940s? There isn’t anything here, sister.
I am not going to leave this entry empty handed. I am going to find at least one genre movie that had a lasting impact on films far beyond the scope of the picture or its box-office.
My selection is 1949’s Might Joe Young. It has been called, and rightly so in my opinion, a King Kong knock-off. It is the story of a young woman and her pet 12 foot tall gorilla. They are brought out of the wilds of Africa to the wilds of Hollywood as entertainment for a nightclub. The ape goes mad, there is destruction and terror in the streets of Los Angeles. All in all not a terribly original story line, it features one of the stars of the original King Kong, a truly influential film, and the special effects were headed up by Willis O’Brien, the technical wizard who did the effects for Kong.
None of this makes this film particularly important or memorable, the O’Brien supervised the effects work, which were primarily performed by Ray Harryhousen .
Harryhousen’s influence on special effects and film reverberates to this day. In the Final Episode of season 4 for Game of Thrones, when the skeletal wraiths attack from the ice, that scene is pure Harryhousen. Brendan Fraiser fighting the mummies in 1999’s The Mummy is a direct homage to Harryhousen work in the Sinbad movies. Clash of the Titans, 2010, is a remake of Harryhousen’s Clash of the Titans 1981. It is nearly impossible to over state the impact on film and special-effect that this one man had, and his first big break was on this fairly forgettable film, Mighty Joe Young.
busy work
This saturday is the lunch/discussion that will be the live feedback for the beta read of my novel. To keep myself occupied and not thinking about it, I have started work on two projects.
One is a film noir SF novel. One part Maltese Falcon, one part Double Indemnity, one part Dark City, and the rest all me. It’s quite dark, and quite cynical.
The other project is a push-your-luck dice game base on the public domain movie: The Night of the Living Dead.
Can the players survive the zombies and each other to escape the farmhouse?
I’m pretty happy with the core mechanics but of course we won;t really know until it’s played,
Sunday Night Movie: Logan’s Run
So last night I settled in for something a little meaty and without a lot of the fast paced editing, pointless explosions, and gratuitous action that so plagues genres films today, Logan’s Run.
Logan’s Run is a 1976 Science-Fiction film made before that great behemoth Star Wars derailed Science-Fiction films for a generation. The film, based on a novel of the same name written by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, is set in a utopian 23rd century. Crime, disease, hunger, war, and pollution, are all problems of a literally forgotten past. The story is set in an unnamed city, protected from the war-torn hell that scars the Earth by massive domes, where the citizens lead lives dedicated to frivolity and hedonistic pleasures. Families no longer exist, and people are raised in crèches without ever knowing their parents. All their needs are met, the city is government by a benevolent computer system called the Network, and it all works seamlessly.
Of course if it all worked seamlessly there would be no conflict, no plot, and no story. Logan 6, the main character, is a Sandman. He is a Blade Runner long before that term ever came into existence, except he doesn’t hunt down wayward androids with dreams of electric sheep, he hunts down people who refuse to willing die on their ‘last day.’ You see this perfectly machined society works in total balance because everyone dies at thirty. The crystal in your hand flashes and it’s time for you to ride the carousel, where in theory you have a chance or resetting your clock, but in reality it’s where you die. If you don’t ride the Carousel you run, and then the Sandmen chase you down and kill you.
The system isn’t as perfect as everyone accepts and Logan is soon charged with finding the hiding place of over a thousand runners who have successfully evaded the Sandmen and vanished from the Network’s omniscient eye. To do this He’ll have to play the part of a runner, that most dangerous of assignments for any cop, undercover with the enemy.
The movie stars Michael York as Logan 6, Jenny Agutter as Jessica 5 a woman who knows something of the hidden runner (and I saw her in a feature film just this year, can you name it?), and Richard Jordan as Francis 7, Logan’s best friend and fellow Sandman. While many of the effect are truly dated, this is a film that has something interesting to say. It is a film made during that time when SF was growing up in Hollywood and many of the plots stopped being for children or teenagers and turned to truly adult themes. Sadly that period ended under the crushing weight of Star Wars’ box office take.
The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the 1930’s
So here’s the next in my continuing essay series. Before I dig into the two films and my arguments for selecting theme, let me talk for a couple of moments about definitions.
Science-Fiction is the genre of literature in which a development, advance, or change in scientific knowledge is critical to the plot, and that the removal of that elements renders the plot impossible.
Influential I touched on lightly in the first essay, but I want to expand here by detailing who and what is influenced. I am not speaking about the general public at large, thought that will nearly always be true as well, but that these films I have selected had an outsize impact on future filmmakers, often for generations.
So let’s get into the next decade, the 1930s.
My first selection is a well-known film, a classic know by huge numbers of people around the world;
Frankenstein – 1931 – James Whale
Certainly this tale has been around a hell of a lot longer than this 1931 film from Universal Studios. The novel by Mary Shelley was published in 1818 and has been adapted to stage and screen many times. In fact the 1931 production was not the first. Thomas Edison made a short based upon the novel (And knowing the man I’m willing to bet no royalties were paid,) that featured a creation scene done with a paper-mache monster burned to ash and run in reverse.
However it was James Whale and Universal’s Frankenstein that set the tone and standard for so many films to follow. It is unquestionably a science-fiction film because Dr. Frankenstein explains about visible rays, X-rays, and his discovery of a ray that generates all life. It is harnessing this ray, not sheer electrical power that revitalizes the monster’s corpse-like construction. This film is the granddaddy of all mad scientist movies. The lone inventor/scientist, working in some ruined, desolate, and gothic locale, that’s this Frankenstein and through this film German Expressionism. This is a film that continues to be referenced years and decades later, inspiring filmmakers to this day.
Things to Come – 1936 – William Cameron Menzies
This is a film that is not very well known outside of genre fans, but it is a critical film in the history of science-fiction movies, Based up the works of and with screenplay by H.G. Wells, this movie was a serious attempt to peer ahead and not only see what may be possible but also explain how we move from the present day to that fictionalized future. These days that is old hat in Science-Fiction films, but with this movie it was fairly revolutionary. Metropolis never explains where the city is, how it came to be, but merely waves it into existence and sets the story in motion. H.G. Wells, always the historian, loved plotting about the connecting dots between his times and his imagined futures; in effect he created the concept of the future history. Movies ever since Things To Come, if they were set in the future, have felt a pressure to explain how that future arrived. Things to Come was also the first post-apocalyptic movie and many to the tropes and plot devices of that genre were first established here. Two final aspects that influenced film making for decades, Things to Come gave us the clean art-deco city of the future that lasted all the up to Logan’s Run, and it gave the idea that people in the future would wear terribly silly fashions.
I think the climate is changing
And I mean the political climate.
Yesterday’s SCOTUS decision was a bad one in my opinion. It’s already having repercussions beyond the Republican obsession with the ACA. (Apparently at least one employer is already wanting to use the decision to discriminate against gays. This was totally predictable.) Now, I am not going to go into why the decision was wrong headed. I already did a post/essay on how I think you slice that gordian knot or individual religious freedom and public accommodation.
What I want to say is that this is really, I think, going to be bad news for the Republican Party when it comes to Presidential Elections.
Here is a graph I made of the female vote for all presidential elections since Reagan. (I selected 1980 because I think that is the point where a new republican started started to be born.)
Seriously, How is what happened at SCOTUS July 1 going to help that red line get any closer to that blue one? It won’t. Add the hispanic votes walking out the door and the youth vote giving the conservative party the finger and I think things look nasty for the Republicans in presidential elections.
The Two Most Influential Science-Fiction Films of the Silent Era
This will be the first in hopefully a lengthy series of essays as I yammer away about which two SF films of each period I consider to be the most influential. Naturally ‘influential’ is a quite subjective measurement and you are welcome to comment, argue and suggest films that you think had a greater impact than the ones I suggest.
I will start with the silent period, covering basic 1890-1930, but after that I intend to tackle the question decade by decade.
A trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) – 1902 – George Melies
I consider this one of the most important SF films from the silent era because this is really the movie that kicked off SF as spectacle. The science was ludicrous and no one making did so under the illusion that this was a reality based adventure. This was about the wondrous and magical effect that the motion picture camera afforded the filmmakers. This is a short film, just 13 minutes long, but it cast a long shadow across the landscape of cinema. This film is the birth of special effect and special effect from this moment onward would remain at the heart and soul of SF cinema.
Metropolis – 1927 – Fritz Lang
Director Fritz Lang is a towering figure in film. The visionary man behind such classics as ‘M’, the film that made Peter Lore an international star, Lang always had a deep and sincere love for Science-Fiction. (In fact it was Lang who convinced Robert A. Heinlein to start writing Young adult novels.) I would argue that Lang’s better SF movie was 1929’s Woman in the Moon (Frau in Mond.) Woman in the Moon is less didactic and pays a closer attention to scientific details while delivering a better story and adventure. (This film was also a favorite of Werner Von Braun who saw it as a teenager and right up through Apollo copied the paint schemes for rockets from this movie.) However, Woman in the Moon simply has not impacted to trajectory of SF films in the manner that Metropolis did.
Metropolis, a sprawling massive production set in a future city divided between the exploited poor and the extravagantly wealthy, set design and social models that were to be copied for decades, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner look and feel can be trace directly back to Metropolis. The sprawling, towering city of the future was born here in this film.
The original print was lost for decades until 2010 gave us a restored version that is close to the original running time, but not quite. 1984 gave us a version where musical Giorgio Moroder revived the film with a soundtrack that included Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Adam Ant, Pat Benatar and many others.
Your thoughts?
Hillary the Inevitable
In the 2008 primary season we were treated to a barrage of opinion pieces that proclaimed the inevitability of Hillary Clinton in her quest for the Democratic Nomination. Of course we have the advantageous position of historical high ground to see just how wrong all those predictions turned out to be.
Here it is 2014 and without the mid-term election yet resolved the opinion are flying fast and furious about 2016. Those opinions are as rooted in serious thought as the Fast and Furious films were dedicated to realistic physics. Naturally one of the most persistent memes is that Hillary is once again the inevitable Democratic Nominee for PotUS.
‘Inevitable’, you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means. Hillary is no more ‘inevitable’ in her aspirations than any particular character is inevitably going to survive their encounter with George R.R. Martin’s bloody word processor.
It is certainly true that Hillary (It is no disrespect to refer her by her given name to prevent confusion with her equally famous spouse.) possesses tremendous advantages going into the fight; her name recognition, fund raising ability, a deep well of contact and connected supporters, all play an important part in a candidates odds of success, but other factors matter as well.
Hillary is a spectacularly poor campaigner. Like Mitt on the Republican side, she has actually won only a single electoral contest. She has displayed a gross inability to connect with voters, has a notoriously thin skin criticism, holds grudges with a tenacity unseen since Nixon, and has approached the nomination process, both in 2008 and 2016, as though it were a coronation.
None of this means she will not be the nominee. Just as Mitt was able to achieve victory in the Republican Primary field of 2012 she could pull it off, but I think it would take a similar dynamic.
Mitt faced a Party that did not trust him and was further to the right than what seemed his natural position. (Personally, I am not convinced we know what is Mitt’s true position. He was always the salesman and in a predominantly liberal state he played up the moderate and in a conservative primary he switched colors faster camera-equipped traffic light.) Hillary faces a party that is becoming more populist and more liberal while she herself has a difficult time selling that message. Mitt survived because there were plenty of not-Mitt candidates to split the vote, allowing the distrusted Romney to claim the Republican Iron Throne. Clinton would be best served by a pack of not-Hillary candidates who could split the more liberal voter of her party, allowing her a similar path to victory.
The rise of popular and decided liberal politicians such as Elizabeth Warren is a major threat to Hillary and only time will tell if she can survive and once again fail while being declared inevitable .