Author Archives: Bob Evans

Movement, but not much

So instead of waiting a full week to see if the polls have moved after the vice-presidential debate, I’m taking a look at them today as to remove any effect of the second presidential debate.

The numbers as they stood six days ago on 10 Oct 2012

RCP: Romney +1

TPM Polltracker: Romney +2.4

Pollster: Romney +1

Intrade: Obama + $2.57

The same measurement today:

RCP: Romney +0.4

TPM Polltracker: Romney +1.1

Pollster: +0.3

INtrade: Obama $2.37

So three of the indicators moves in Obama/Biden’s direction, while the fourth moved in Romnny’s. What movement there was in Obama’s direction was weak and hardly indicative of a major change in the electorate, which seems to be the case in the movement towards Romney after the 1^st debate.

Unless something breaks, this looks to be a tight race. There are only three weeks left before election day and for team Obama the stumble in Denver is proving to be one that is dogging their heels. With a weak recovery following a financial crisis they had little room for error, and yet still went into the debate wholly unprepared.

I had read that the debate stand for Romney was John Kerry. Really? That’s a poor choice in my opinion, one I think that might have been a factor. (But certainly not the sole and or prime factor.)

Welcome to post 1000

This is post number 1000, and being human I thought I’d celebrate this pointless achievement.

I’ve had this blog for just over 1200 days, starting it way back in May of ~~2007~~ 2009. So I am averaging a post every 1.24 days or so. The posts have generated 1040 comments, so I am averaging just north of a comment per post. Nearly all from three core commenters, and then a smattering from others.

129 posts have been marked with the ‘politics’ tags, so I don’t appear the be a one trick pony, though politics will always be an interest if mine.

Movies in general are tagged 197 and 95 tags for Sunday Night Movies.

There has been a whopping 91,926 attempts to post spam as comments. Given that this blog is really a low traffic sight, primarily read by family and friends, I found the amount of spam truly staggering. Luckily the plug0in Askimet handles the filtering duties with real effectiveness and power.

When I started this blog I had hopes of breaking into novel publishing, and while that did not occur as quickly as I would have wished, it remains a steadfast goal that I will achieve with the love of support of my sweetie-wife and close friends.

Here’s hope that the next three years will continue to see growth and publication.

Quick Impressions from the vice-presidential debate

I think that this was the first time I have watched, front to back, an entire vice-presidential debate. This has proved to be a volatile election and in this environment the side-show has the possibility of effecting the center ring action.

My quick impression is that Biden won the debate, he kept Ryan on the defensive most of the night, though this was by no means a blow-out like the first presidential debate. It was also close enough that partisan from either side will claim victory.

One – of many- exchanges that caught my attention was Ryan on abortion. I am pro-choice, I do not agree with the concept that conception is the point at which we should be legally bound to recognize full human rights. Ryan’s answer though went beyond simply the mine field of abortion and into the nature of religious thought and its place in government. It goes too far into mixing the two.

RYAN: I don’t see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do. My faith informs me about how to take care of the vulnerable, of how to make sure that people have a chance in life.

A Critical Stumble

Well it has been one week since the first presidential debate between Obama and Romney and boy did that shake up the race. In my post about the debate I suggested that a Romney gaining more than three points would be ahistorical and very bad news for President Obama.

So let’s take a look at some numbers. When I suggest that Obama had the wind at his back here are the number I used to support that contention.

9/29

RCP poll of Polls        Obama +4.3

TPM polltracker       Obama +3.9

Pollster                       Obama +4.4

INtrade Obama+ $5.71 (7.85 vs 2.14)

Things looked good for the president, but in the debates Obama fumbled his diplomacy roll (Yea, I know skills rolls don’t have fumbles, but he still managed to do it.) Romney pivoted to the center and pulled off a very good debate performance.

Here are those same metrics as of today.

10/10

RCP Romney +1

TPM Polltracker        Romney +2.4

Pollster                       Romney +.1

Intrade                       Obama +$ 2.57 (6.34 vs 3.77)

That’s a 5.3 loss in the RCP averages, 6.3 in the TPM polltracker, 5.4 in Pollsters aggregate poll. This is frigging huge. The race is not over, but there is less than a month until the election and this is a very bad time to throw away your lead. Liberal partisan have been wailing, Andrew Sullivan going into full President Palin Panic, while the conservatives have been as giddy as a fanboy on a date with Natalie Portman

What I find curious is that the state by state still favors Obama, but not by much. Frank.ly I think this increases he chance of another misfire, where the popular vote and the electoral vote go north and south.

My November 6 party may run late after all.

This is the Convention that Was.

So the past weekend was Conjecture, the autumn SF convention here is sunnySan Diego. As my earlier post had indicated, this time I was participating on a number of panels, 1 on Friday, 3 on Saturday, and 2 on Sunday making this the heaviest lifting I had ever done as a panelist. What was my feeling on this after such a busy time?

I loved it.

No doubt in great part because I shared my panels with a dazzlingly bright array of fans and pro, who had smart, intelligent, and polite points of views to share. My gods, even the panel on ideology in fiction did not break down into squabbling over political events. We had a good spirited, but always courteous discussion on ideology in fiction. I did not spend the evening hours at the convention, being that we live just a couple of miles from the hotel, my wife and I retired back to our home for board and card games each night. I can honestly say though this was the most fun I have ever had at a small convention.

The only down side was that there were presentations I was forced to miss and I really wanted to see those, including new presentations from my friend Bridget at JPL about the Mars and asteroid missions.

However, I did get to see some things and what I saw I enjoyed, including a 15 minute fan film from 1940s that was a travelogue through the dead cities of Mars. It looked surprisingly good, both in terms what they two brothers achieved and the state of the film after so many years.

I look forward to doing more of this at local conventions.

Sunday Night Movie: Village of the Damned

After a weekend at a science-fiction convention it seemed quite right to watch a classic SF movie, and given thatVillageofThe Damnedis a short SF film that made it double-plus good.

VillageofThe Damnedis a film adaptation of John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cockoos. John Wyndham wrote a number of interesting and thought provoking SF novels including The Day of the Triffids. The Midwich Cockoos is equally jammed packed with ideas and concepts, many of which were ditched from the film simply because a film cannot be an extended discussion of evolution, not if you want to entertain the audience. Continue reading →

My convention schedule for Conjecture 2012

Friday

4 pm- Energy Futures (Eaton)
Fusion power has been ten years away for half a century. Renewable energy creates problems as well as solving them—for example, raising the price of corn and causing global hunger—and renewable energy projects such as wind farms now often face legal opposition from environmentalists (http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/123656). Natural gas from oil sands and shale has a lower carbon output per megawatt than coal—but its low cost encourages us to use more energy. Where are the technology, economics, and politics of energy going in the 21st century? Robert Mitchell Evans, James H. Hay, Lynn Maudlin, Bob Mogg

(Sadly I will miss the 4pm due to day job commitments.)

6pm-Believable Evil (Garden Salon 2)
What makes a good villain? How do you go about creating a believable evil character? Authors will discuss their favorite evil characters from their and other works and discuss what makes them work. Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Lise Breakey, Robert Mitchell Evans, M Todd Gallowglas, Nancy Holder, Robert Pritchard

Saturday

11am-Political SF: When Ideology is a Character (Garden Salon 1)
When political philosophy permeates a work of SF, it can be as much of a character as the people (or AIs, or aliens) in the narrative arguing over its merits and carrying out its precepts. When does it work and when does it just get in the way of the plot? Who does it particularly well? Consider recent books by Dani and Eytan Kollin, Charles Stross, and Cory Doctorow, and other winners of the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award. On the other end of the spectrum, there is China Mieville and his list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read, which includes books by Ken MacLeod, Iain M. Banks, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Michael Swanwick. David Brin, Robert Mitchell Evans, Dani Kollin, Eytan Kollin

12pm-Cold Sleep & Generation Ships: Interstellar Travel Without FTL (Garden Salon 2)
If you don’t have faster-than-light travel, your options for getting to the stars are a) suspended animation (Niven, Pournelle and Barnes’ The Legacy of Heorot) and b) dying of old age en route, but raising children to continue the mission (Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky). Both options create interesting directions for narrative. With option B, the crew tends to lose sight of the original mission… Robert Mitchell Evans, Dani Kollin, Eytan Kollin, Gary Westfahl

2pm-SF and Horror Musicals from Rocky to Dr. Horrible (Garden Salon 1)
What makes a genre musical work? Some become cult classics — The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Shop of Horrors, Repo: The Genetic Opera, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Both Lord of the Rings and Star Wars have been done as musical theater. Then there are fan projects: the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s Shoggoth on the Roof (published and recorded, but never performed in public); the MIT “Star Wars Trilogy: Musical Edition” (entirely composed of filked Broadway songs); and the HMS Trek-a-Star of 1960s fame. Marc Biagi, Brian Bielawski, Robert Mitchell Evans, Andy Lowe

Sunday

12 pm-Fantasy (and SF) of Manners: When Culture is a Character (Garden Salon 2)
Long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was a twinkle in Grahame-Smith’s eye, writers were marrying the tropes and styles of comedy of manners with science fictional and fantasy worlds and cultures. Consider Alexei Panshin’s Villiers books, Walter Jon Williams’ Drake Maijstral novels, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman’s Riverside books, and Patricia C. Wrede’s Lyra series. While fantasy often treats the setting as a character, and SF often treats technology as a character, literature of manners treats culture as a character. Robert Mitchell Evans, M Todd Gallowglas, Dru Pagliassotti, Patricia C. Wrede

1pm-Do the Old Doctors Need a Facelift? (Garden Salon 1)
New audiences brought into Doctor Who fandom by the 9th, 10th, and 11th Doctors, who had decent production values, simply can’t get past the horrible SFX and colorization of what many consider to be classic Doctor Who episodes. Should we upgrade them for new audiences or leave them intact? Marc Biagi, Robert Mitchell Evans, Patrick Harris, Dani Kollin, Eytan Kollin

Thoughts of the first Presidential Debate

It is hardly a secret that I am not a supporter of the Mitt Romney or of the current incarnation of the national Republican Party. That said my impression from watching the debate Wednesday night was that Romney had a good night and that Obama had a fairly bad one.

Romney, in Federation Commander, terms executed a perfect High Energy Turn, placed himself on a course for the middle of the electorate and began erratic maneuvering, reducing Obama’s incoming fire to shield-scorching inconsequential attacks.

I did note that Romney still avoided specifics like a vampire dodging the coming dawn, and he campaign is still one that seems reliant upon the idea that the economy is bad and therefore Obama should be tossed. It remains to be seen if this will be a winning strategy. As In noted a few posts ago, the wind had been at Obama’s back and Romney at that time was still playing to the right side of the field. In a week I’m going to take another good long look at the number from several sources and see just how much this has moved things in the Republican favor. (I don’t doubt that there will be movement, the question in my mind is how much. Less than 2 points leave the race close but unchanged, 2-3 points will be good for Romney, but not commanding, above 3 will be ahistorical and possible very bad for Obama.)

Personally I thought Obama had more facts on his side, he detailed more policy, and was less manipulative of the truth than Romney, but he looked tired, distracted, and unwilling to engage and in a battle of perceptions he clearly lost.

Movie Review: Dredd 3D

Way back in the mists of time, the 1980’s, there was a subversive British comic book called Judge Dredd. Set in an apocalyptic post-nuclear world of MegaCity 1, it was a boo about police states, crime, and judgement. Violent, satirical, and uncompromising it was a cult hit.

In 1995 a film veriosn was released upon the world – apparently we did pull off all five sacrifices properly that year – with Stallone as Judge Dredd, and aside from some of the art direction, nothing of the book survived into the horrid screenplay or onto the screen.

Now we have a second attempt at translating the world of MegaCity 1 to the big screen, an adaptation that doesn’t not rely on big names, or huge budget, but instead tries hewing closer to the intent of the original stories. Continue reading →

We’re about to hit the home stretch

So September is coming to an end and election day is rapidly approaching. (When you consider early voting, election day is, for all practical purposes, already upon us.) There is little time left and from where I sit it looks like Obama has the wind at his back while Romney is still patching up and assuaging the relations with his base. This is not where you want to be in the final weeks ofUSpresidential campaign.

If I were forced to make a prediction today I would bet on Obama winning the election. This, of course, is hardly a done deal and a surprise or two could upset the race, but the odds of such events are dropping with each passing day. I doubt the Democratic arty will take the House, that is a tall hill to climb (Pun intended), but they hold the senate if the momentum continues growing for them. Certainly the republican Party thinks so, hence their cautious overtures to return to support Todd ‘Legitimate Rape’ Akin in his Senate bid, despite the toxic effect this has had on the women’s vote.

Oh my party in November is going to be interesting.