The Shuttle Woes

It Seems To Get Better, Then Worse
This NYTimes article came in from the RSS Feeder.

Last Tuesday morning, NASA's contention that it had produced the safest fuel tank in shuttle history was shattered two minutes into the Discovery's mission to the International Space Station. Two spacewalking astronauts tested repair techniques at the station yesterday.

The 0.9-pound piece of foam that fell from the PAL ramp on liftoff, which could have led to another catastrophe if it had ripped away a minute sooner, forced the immediate suspension of future shuttle flights until the problem could be resolved.

How did it happen? In hindsight, it is clear that the effort to resolve the PAL ramp problem was a chain of missed opportunities and questionable judgments, not just since the Columbia disaster but over the life of the shuttle program.

Potentially useful tests were not performed. Innovative solutions were not seriously pursued. Tantalizing clues were missed. In the end, the old engineering maxim "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" trumped vague misgivings about a part that had not shed any foam, as far as anyone knew, since 1983.

"After two and a half years, they should have been able to fix the foam," said Paul A. Czysz, a professor emeritus of aeronautical engineering at St. Louis University and a veteran consultant to NASA.

Well, that last statement seems rather open to debate. There's nothing to suggest that if they couldn't solve it in the 80s and 90s, that there has been a fundamental technologoical breakthrough that allowed them to solve it in the last 2 and a half years.

Anyway, the NYT article goes on to say:

At the dawn of the shuttle program, NASA rules said no foam at all should be allowed to hit the shuttle and possibly damage the fragile heat-resistant tiles that cover its aluminum skin.

But fidelity to those standards was relaxed over time; in fact, foam fell from a PAL ramp in two early missions, including the one in June 1983 on which Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. There may have been many more incidents, but dozens of shuttle missions have been launched in darkness, with no visual record of foam, and the tanks themselves cannot be retrieved from the ocean for analysis.

As the early tank was replaced with two lighter successors, the PAL ramps remained - one a 19-foot baffle along a channel for cables and pressurized lines along the forward end of the tank and the other the 37-foot strip along the flank of the cylindrical midsection of the fuel tank. And as experience showed NASA that shuttles returned safely despite well over 100 nicks and gouges requiring repair on many flights, the concerns abated over time.

Until Feb. 1, 2003, the day the Columbia disintegrated on its way home to Cape Canaveral.
---
After the accident, NASA examined all possible sources of liftoff debris, eventually identifying more than 170. Engineers recognized that they could not eliminate all risk from debris, but they could do a much better job of reducing it.

We of course know what happened after that in the CAIB report. Then here's this little bit:

For many aeronautical engineers, a central rule in developing an aircraft is taking its components beyond the breaking point.

"If you don't break a wing, you just have assumptions about what might make it break," said Aldo J. Bordano, a retired NASA aerosciences chief who was on a panel that studied the agency's analysis of the external tank and foam.

He said that while it was premature to conclude whether mistakes were made, many panel members were frustrated with the lack of physical testing of the foam under liftoff conditions.

In any event, NASA decided that the tank without the ramp would expose the cables and hoses to destructive winds; agency engineers and managers considered alternatives but could not come up with any that inspired confidence.

"The community was very diligent about looking at this," Mr. Parsons said in announcing the PAL ramp problem last week. "We did realize that eventually one day we needed to put together a program to remove this PAL ramp if at all possible. But at the time, we didn't have enough data where we could technically do that and be safe."

So they went with the devil they knew. Now they have to reconsider that bargain.Yet, there's still this problem:

A NASA engineer who works on tank safety issues said other areas of foam shedding from the Discovery's tank were even more troubling than the PAL ramp loss, especially a divot that popped from the vicinity of the left-hand bipod strut, the spot that shed the foam that brought down the Columbia.

"We worked the hell out of that," said the engineer, who was given anonymity because he said disclosure of his name would jeopardize his career. The loss of foam from that spot after so much work to correct the problem, he went on, proves that the problem is still far more complex than NASA understands.

So the space agency is back to the drawing board. Some of the options under consideration have come up before, including the elimination of the ramp, a "miniramp" that shrinks the size of the strip by two-thirds, and a small "fence" on the opposite side of the tray that would smooth airflow further. Another possibility, rotating the tank so the ramp faces away from the shuttle, would take years, engineers say.

It makes one groan with frustration when one reads somebody is scared to speak up because it might jeopardise his career, when 7 astronauts are going up in the craft with the same infrastructure flaws as the ones that burnt up Columbia. So much for the great cause of accountability.

The above is Dr. Soichi Noguchi of Japan, doing it hard in EVA.
Discovery looks like it's going to spend an extra day on its schedule.

The extra day in orbit will allow the crew to get a head start on tasks that could be affected by the suspension of those flights: removal of trash and old equipment from the space station.

Some 11 tonnes of waste have piled up over three years, cramping residents on the space station.

Astronauts will pack it into the Rafaello transport module, which the seven shuttle crew members and two space station residents began on Friday to unload of 13.5 tonnes of food and equipment.

Rafaello is an Italian-built pressurized transport module that rides in Discovery's cargo bay and was lifted to the space station with the help of the shuttle's Canadian-built robot arm.

The spacewalk formally began at 4:46 am (0946 GMT), an hour later than scheduled, NASA said, as Discovery remained moored to the space station.

After depressurizing an airlock between the shuttle and its open cargo bay, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi and American Steve Robinson switched to the batteries of their spacesuits, a procedure that, NASA says, formally marks the beginning of a spacewalk.

They then opened a massive hatch and began making their way into the shuttle's cargo bay to start six and a half hours of work.

The spacewalk, the first of three, included testing new ceramic tile repair methods and work on the ISS.

So they get the Japanese guy to take out the garbage. That'd be right. :)
At least he gets to go to space. Now, to see if he can come back home alive...

Yankees Scratch Out A Win


It was close and down to the bottom of the ninth . The Yankees got out of jail with Hideki Matsui hitting a game-winning double off K-Rod's 36th pitch. You gotta like that kind of fight. At least you don't see the Yankees sending him out to take out the garbage. Still, the Yankees are 2.5 games behind now after a couple of tough losses.

Meanwhile there are rumours coming out of Boston of a Manny Ramirez for Mike Cameron trade .

Ramirez was removed just before Boston's game against Minnesota. The Red Sox said they had no trade to announce and an official involved in the talks said Saturday evening that the sides were still far apart in the much-discussed, three-team trade involving the Red Sox, Mets and Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

After saying he didn't want to talk about the deal, Cameron volunteered that he didn't sleep much Friday night because he'd gotten "calls all day and night long" -- and that he didn't like being the subject of rumors.

"I can't even take it," he said. "I thought I can handle it. I can't."

It sounds unlikely, but you never know. Boston might manage to move Manny Ramirez and his gargantuan contract that was a sort of parting gift from the previous ownership and GM. As onerous contracts go, it's been a very productive one. Except there are strong rumours that the man has asked to be traded for the fourth time in 3 seasons, so it is possible Manny just wants out from Boston, even if he ended up with the Devi Rays - Though that's about as likely as Boston winning a World Series. Oh wait... :)

Today's List

I Used To Do Top 10 Lists
As some of you may remember they were on really obscure topics. Well,
Today, we're talking hitting technique because my sister quizzed me about what I remembered about Boris 'boom boom' Becker and his single-handed backhand and where I placed it in the long history of single-handed backhands.

The Top 10 Best Single-handed backhands:
1. Pete Sampras
2. John McEnroe
3. Martina Navratilova
4. Roger Federer
5. Ivan Lendl
6. Boris Becker
7. Henri LeConte
8. Todd Woodbridge
9. Stefan Edberg
10. Ken Rosewall

And I'm sure I missed somebody. Like Elliot 'URGH!! Telcher.
In this day and age, you'd think more players would be hitting single-handed backhands with these modern racquets, but clearly it ain't so. When you see Marat Safin, a strapping 6'5" tonking back double-handers, you think, "what a limp-wristed sook".

A little more in the way of an explanation of this list...

Pete Sampras by far had the most clean technique of anybody I've ever seen. He modeled his stroke on Rod Laver's, who I did not get to see play in his prime (I ain't that old). He would line his shoulder and elbow and come right over the top of the ball, swinging in line, more with the vertical axis of the racquet rather than across it - A truly remarkable style of hitting backhands. It's not easy to do, because you have to see the ball early, get there, get your shoulder in line and crush the ball.


John McEnroe too emulated Rod Laver's technique and so he too comes through the axis of the racquet, more than he crosses the face. The interesting thing about McEnroe's take-back was how he dropped his wrist and gave himself the option of hitting across or down the line of the court, very late on the ball. He also had tremendous balance even when fielding the most unlikely of shots.



Martina Navratilova was one of those hitters who just banged, nudged and played the ball beautifully. Raised on wooden racquets, her technique applied to modern racquets yielded amazing results. Truly a gifted player all around. Okay, she was a dyke and a crazy Cold-War Era Czech and all that, but she knew what she was doing. One of the safest shots to watch was a Navratilova backhand.


Roger Federer: The best player since Pete Sampras; may be the best ever; except I don't know how he'd play with older racquets. Yet the facts are, Sampras never conquered clay, while this guy is fantastic on any surface, playing almost any style of player. Once again, great technique founded on good, solid balance and a sweet swing. Seems to see the ball and get to it very early, looking like he's got all the time in the world.


Ivan Lendl was a machine. He set match-length records playing US Open finals against Mats Wilander. In other words, he could keep hitting the same shots nearly all day. He was the man who turned tennis into an endurance sport through his ruthless application of repetition. He could hit winners off your shots easily, but he made a point of making you hit more shots to wear you out. Did tennis a big favour y staying away after retirement.


Boris Becker had a great swashbuckling backhand. It's hardly remembered because he preferred to go around and use his cannon of a forehand over his swashbuckling backhand, but all the same he had great technique with his backhand. He could hit all the angles and hit over, flat and under with equal control. He beat Lendl with his ground-strokes from the back of the court and was happy to do it that way. He stopped the machine dead in its tracks. 'nuff said. A lesser known fact is he had great disguise as to whether he was going to come over or under the ball. You couldn't tell from the take-back.


Henri LeConte: This is the first contentious name on the list. Why this guy who never won a Grand Slam? Because he was one of the best flat-ball hitters I've ever seen. On his best days, you dreamed of hitting the ball as cleanly as this guy hit them. He didn't have too many of those days in a row, but in his prime, he dismembered Bjorn Borg and Ivan Lendl, all on the back of his great eye-hand coordination. the man had no mental game, but he had immense touch. And he was irrational and crazy (as all the French players seem to be), which made him totally unpredictable, probably even to himself.


Todd Woodbridge: McEnroe once said his technique was 'almost too cute'. Well, kinda'. That Australian orthodox technique with the right-angled wrist isn't easy to do, but this guy just did it, picture perfect, over and over again and made it look so easy. In fact, of all the Aussie players of the last 30 years, his single-handed backhand technique is the best by a country mile - beats Rafter, Cash, Fitzgerald, Edmonson and Warwick, all of them.


Stefan Edberg: Bucking the trend at the time, he was the lone Swede with a single-hander, who won and won and won. Had a great rivalry with Boris Becker which were magical matches to watch. Great slice and approach thing he had going as well as a cross-court topspin thing he used to uncork. Probably the last grass court player to really work the angles in the old way.


Ken Rosewall: The other single great Aussie backhand that I actually saw. The man was born to hit backhands. Even when he was well past it, he'd find the perfect line to line up a shot and unleash this picture-perfect swing. He was the text book.

WORST PROFESSIONAL BACKHAND EVER: Belongs to Mark Woodforde.
His two hander was so bad that Goran Ivanisevic once remarked that he and his son would sit around watching tennis, "laughing at Woodforde's shitty backhand". Now that might sound cruel, until you actually see it:

Today Is Another Day

Space Shuttle Discovery Does A Backflip

And as it turns out, so does NASA as it suspends further Space Shuttle flights.

"As with any unexpected occurrence, we will closely and thoroughly evaluate this event and make any needed modifications to the shuttle before we launch again," the NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, said in a statement on the NASA Web site. "This is a test flight. Among the things we are testing are the integrity of the foam insulation and the performance of new camera equipment installed to detect problems. The cameras worked well. The foam did not."The foam does not appear to have struck the Discovery, so the decision to ground the shuttle fleet will not curtail its 12½-day mission to the International Space Station, the officials said. But further flights will be postponed indefinitely, starting with that of the Atlantis, which was to have lifted off as early as September.

"Until we fix this, we're not ready to go fly again," William W. Parsons, the manager of the shuttle program, said at a news briefing at the Johnson Space Center here on Wednesday evening.

John Shannon, a NASA flight operation and integration manager, said today that NASA asked the mission management team on Wednesday to think about what they would do differently if the Atlantis does not fly in September.

"That decision certainly hasn't been made," he said. "But we have to face reality, we had a significant problem that we had to go address and fix."

It goes to show 100% safety is actually quite difficult to accomplish. BTW, here's another spectacular pickie from the NYT:


From The Pleiades Cable Wire Service
This came in this morning from Pleiades who keeps an eye on this sort of thing.
The recent police shooting of a Brazillian Electrician in England has some people scratching their heads.

Ok, this thing with the murdered Brazilian is just too much. Why isn't anybody talking about this in what would seem to be an extremely logical deduction. Consider:

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/22/london.eyewitness/index.html

"As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified," said Whitby.

"The next thing I saw was this guy jump over the barriers and the police officers were chasing after him and everyone was just shouting 'Get out, get out,'" Wells said.

"He half-tripped, was half-pushed to the floor. The policeman nearest to me had the black automatic pistol in his left hand, he held it down to the guy and unloaded five shots into him."
------------------------------------

Now this is saying they thought he was a suicide bomber... well is that how you confront a suicide bomber? I mean the man is wearing pounds of explosives, or must be, so is it the best tactic to chase him into a crowded area, throw him to the ground, and fire at his torso five times, exactly where the explosives must be...?

We all know, now, that Menezes was not a suicide bomber. He was just a Brazilian electrician. So why, then, was he so scared or as the witness says "petrified". I mean if the police are chasing you (or just some random 3 guys, as by some account the "police" were plainly clothed) then would you be "petrified"?

You might be startled, a nerved, surprised, ready to defend yourself or maybe scream for help (as he was in a crowded area). But not petrified!

It seems we have both the victim and the officers behaving not at all as they should have been. The police behaved as though Menezes was not a suicide bomber (or at least not one about to blow up) and Menezes did not act as the innocent electrician that we're told he was.

http://rense.com/general67/cops.htm

"Jean was followed from the apartment building where he resided, to a subway station, where he was then accosted by 'plain clothes officers' who chased him down to the train, tripped him, jumped on him, and then shot him five times in the torso."

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/22/london.tube/index.html

Go figure. The rest of the article is as unnsettling as they come.

Yankee Ups & Downs
The Yankees lost yesterday 7-3, to the reigning Cy Young winner Johann Santana and the Minnesota Twins. The game featured this play by Joe Mauer of the twins:



Take a look at Mauer's legs. Not only is he blocking the basepath, he's on the outside of the 3B line. His left leg is actually stretched out practically tripping the runner (which just sso happens to be our man, St. Derek of the Pinstripes) . Technicallly, in any rulebook (even the one used by the Major Leagues) this is obstruction. The runner's safe. But of course in the major leagues, all sorts of things go on. The amazing thing, is, nobody says anything. Nary a comment - which is why I'm taking this opportunity to point it out. :).

I remarked on the Nomo signing yesteerday. here's the NYT take on the signing :

Nomo, who turns 37 next month, will join Class AAA Columbus today and is not a candidate to start Saturday because he has not pitched since July 15. That was his 19th and final start for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who released him after he went 5-8 with a 7.24 earned run average.

"He's got to get some work in, sharpen up and get a feel for it," Manager Joe Torre said. "It's just like being on the D.L. He just needs to get some action down there and have them tell us what they think."

Even if Nomo cannot help the Yankees this weekend, Cashman said it made sense to sign him considering the state of the rotation. Nomo has pitched for six teams over 11 major league seasons, with a 123-109 record.

"He's Hideo Nomo - he's one of the premier pitchers of probably all-time, for what he accomplished coming over from Japan to come here," Cashman said. "You know he's not afraid. He's one of those rare special ones. If you look at Nomo and compare him to some of our other in-house choices, it's a no-brainer."

Goodness. With that logic, you'd bring back Ron Guidry.
More Jeter hagiography as a palette of icons

Emergency starter Aaron Small had his second outing and came up very big today .

Against the Twins, he gave up three runs and six hits in seven innings, walked none and struck out one, retiring his final 12 batters after Jacque Jones' tying double in the fourth. It was the longest outing in the major league career of Small, who has just five starts among his 149 appearances.

Tom Gordon pitched the eighth, and Mariano Rivera finished for his 26th save -- all in a row since failing in his first two chances of the season. New York, with only Randy Johnson and Mike Mussina remaining from its original five-man rotation, closed within 1 1/2 games of idle first-place Boston in the AL East.

Sheffield hooked a three-run homer just inside the left-field foul pole in the first inning off Joe Mays (5-6). After Minnesota tied it on Luis Rodriguez's two-run single in the second and Jones' double, Sheffield put the Yankees ahead for good with a run-scoring single in the fifth. He is batting .396 (38-for-96) with runners in scoring position this year.

So the Yankees still sit 1.5 games behind the Bosox.

A Night At The Opera
I attended a function held by the NSWFTO with Pleiades and Mrs. Pleiades last night. The FTO function was for the regional film fund and the various film bodies in rural Australia. So we got to meet important liaison people from Cowra for our 'Giants at Dawn' project, which of course is starting to gather momentum.

There's a lot of industry interest in this production now that we are talking to a big time Hollywood Agent about a certain star he represents; as well as having sewn up some big names at the Australian end; not to mention the mighty Geoff Murphy being signed on as our director (and he's not fading away!)

We got to speak to people from Northern Rivers; Film Mid North Coast Armidale; the ACT Production Liaison officer; Broken Hill's Tourism Services Manager various FTO officials and they were all very positive and enthusiastic. All in all it was a very encouraging night. Stay tuned for that one too.

Discovery Back In Orbit

I Lost Count In All The Excitement
Here's the space shuttle Discovery back in orbit. NASA is breaking out into a round of back-slapping:

The space shuttle Discovery made an apparently flawless launch from Cape Canaveral yesterday, ending months of frustration for the crew and marking what Nasa hopes will be the start of a safer era of space exploration.
The liftoff at 10.39am local time from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida came two and a half years after the Columbia disaster that killed seven astronauts, and followed technical delays that led some experts to wonder if America would ever get back into space.

"Of those of us who have flown before, that was by far the smoothest ascent we've known," said Discovery's commander, Eileen Collins, adding that she and the crew were "feeling great" after their 62-mile journey to reach space.
The launch ended the most painful period of reflection and rebuilding in the space agency's history. But managers said they would only be satisfied when Discovery returned safely to Earth on August 7.

"Our long wait may be over. So on behalf of the many millions of people who believe so deeply in what we do, good luck, Godspeed, and have a little fun up there," launch director, Mike Leinbach, told the astronauts in the final seconds before liftoff.

NASA administrator Mike Griffin said: "Take note of what you saw here today, not only the power and majesty of launch but the sheer gall, grit and pluck of the team who pulled this programme out of the depths of despair two and a half years ago and made it fly."

Now that they're out there, it's a different story as the crew check for damage:

HOUSTON, July 27 -- The crew of space shuttle Discovery Wednesday spent its first working day in space conducting a meticulous survey of the shuttle's heat shielding for signs of damage, while analysts on the ground tried to determine whether there had been any debris impacts during launch that harmed the orbiter.

The survey marked the debut of the shuttle's 50-foot, Canadian-built sensing boom, whose television camera and laser-imaging devices produced unprecedented close-ups and spectacular views of Discovery in space -- almost as if the shuttle were being filmed from a second spacecraft.

The goal, however, was anything but Hollywood. For at least one more day, and quite possibly beyond, Mission Commander Eileen Collins and the rest of Discovery's seven-member crew will focus on looking for launch damage -- a legacy imposed by space shuttle Columbia's disintegration 2 ½ years ago.

After its manned spacecraft was grounded in response to the Columbia tragedy, NASA spent most of the hiatus working on shuttle safety hardware and procedures. Discovery's mission, the first since Columbia, is a trial of the changes.

"If there's something going on with the vehicle, we like to tell" the crew, said lead Flight Director Paul Hill during a news conference at the Johnson Space Center here, the home of the shuttle's Mission Control. "Has our threshold for damage changed since Columbia? You bet it has."

NASA is claiming the debirs we saw yesterday were the foam insulation falling off. That's if you believe them saying it doesn't matter either because it didn't hit the spacecraft.

Space agency officials also said that a chipped thermal tile on Discovery's belly does not appear to be a danger, and it cautioned the public against overreacting to every speck of damage sustained by the shuttle during liftoff.

NASA expected some debris to fall off during launch. The big question is whether any of it will mean a risk to the crew. The answer is still a few days away, NASA said one day after the ship blasted off on the first shuttle mission since the Columbia tragedy 2 1/2 years ago.

Flight director Paul Hill said it is understandable that people inside and outside the space agency might be alarmed by any hint of damage to Discovery's thermal shielding.

"The last flight ended in catastrophe and we lost seven friends of ours because of damage," Hill said at a news conference. But he added: "We don't make decisions in spaceflight based on that type of emotion. We make decisions in spaceflight based on the data, and we're looking at the data."

And based on what they have seen so far, NASA engineers believe the broken tile is "not going to be an issue," Hill said.

The pictures you see are from the extended boom arm having a look at the craft. It's part of the new mission procedure. Here's hoping the astronauts return safely.

One Shouldn't Scoff

At Least I Shouldn't When It Comes To The Yankees Pitching
One should howl.
The Yankees have trotted out 12 pitchers as their starters this year. They have had a season of injury travails that they haven't had in a long time; gone are the certainties of 2003 where they used to regularly trot out reliables like Roger Clemens, David Wells, Andy Pettitte with Mike Mussina. This year's starters so far have been:

Randy Johnson
Mike Mussina
Carl Pavano
Jaret Wright
Kevin Brown
Chien-Ming Wang
Tanyon Sturtze
Sean Henn
Darrell May
Tim Redding
Al Leiter
Aaron Small

Okay, one understands the first 3 names in the rotation, and when they pitch well, the Yankees ought to be in it with more than a chance. Jaret Wirght's an injury waiting to happen, while Kevin Brown these days seems to be more of a back pain waiting to pitch. Chien-Ming Wang was the stand-out success story for the farm system's pitching program this year; Tanyon Strutze's emergency start was ugly but he's been a much better pitcher in relief; Sean Henn was a Double A guy who got psyched out and mashed; Darrell May and Tim Redding were desperate clutches at anything resembling a warm body; Al Leiter came off the scrap heap from Florida and pitched one good outing against Boston and one terrible outing against LAA. Aaron Small was a sort of punt that worked for one start in a game where Juicin' Giambi slugged 2 homers. .

And now, they have claimed Hideo Nomo off waivers from the Devil Rays and signed him to a minor league deal. There's an old adage over at Baseball Think Factory that goes: "TINSTAAPP" It stands for 'There's no such thing as a Pitching Prospect".
The relative merits of that statement have been dissected to kingdom come, but to date, the Yankees have been extremely wary of promoting their farmhands. In fact, their tattered rotation represents the cumulative decisions not to trust their own youngsters. To whit:

- Randy Johson (41y.o.) came in exchange for Javier Vazquez and prospect catcher Dionar Navarro; but Vazquez came in exchange of Nick Johnson and Juan Rivera, 2 very useful players playing elsewhere. While it is arguable if any combination of the players will amount to Johnson's career value, the value over the next 2 years could be entirely different.
- Moose, Pavano, and Wright were Free Agent Signing, One could quibble with the choices (especially InJuret Wright), but it's the Yankee way to sign F.As.
- Kevin Brown (40y.o.) came in exchange with the Dodgers for Jeff Weaver. The problem there is the Yankees got Weaver for Ted Lilly when clearly Lilly was doing just fine having brought him up from the minors. The Lilly-Weaver trade was so gratuitous it wasn't funny; and we know how Weaver turned out. Right now, this is a series of decisions that really stink.
- Wang, who was a 'pitching prospect' we know.
- Henn is still considered a 'Pitching Prospect', but his bad starts may have tarnished that label.
- Strutze (34y.o.), who was claimed off the scrapheap, we also know.
- May was had for Quantrill. It was a fair trade of spare parts; you get what you buy and they bought crap.
- Redding is a poster boy for TINSTAAPP. It seems like he's been a 'Pitching Prospect' for over a decade. He too came over in the Quantrill deal; and had no business making an emergency start. He was keen, I give him that.
- Al Leiter, 38 y.o., fits snugly into a rotation of guys that are in their late 30s.

So you can see why adding Hideo Nomo, the 37 y.o. Japanese righty with the burnt out shoulder to the above list as their '13th Warrior', is TINSTAAP to the extreme.
I just had to get that off my chest. On a lighter note, Juicin' Giambi seems to be JASON GIAMBI again. he's got an OBP in the .440 range for the season. His OPS for July is 1.500!

"What Are You Working On Now?"

I Get Asked This Often
Just for once, I'm putting up a still image from the promotional video I'm working on.



That blurry thing is a sup-ed up Nissan Silvia hurtling along the stretch at Wakefield Park Racetrack on a miserable rainy day.
As with all these things, Goulburn was in the grips of the worst drought in 90 years. That was until of course Pete and I turned up with a camera to shoot, Of course the drought chooses to break on that very day. Anyway, we managed to get something with which we could go ahead.

CyberBach

Many years ago, a guy going by the name of Josef Sarazen said to me that Bach's music was amazing because it could survive any sort of instrumentation and still be transcendent. In most cases, this is true. If you played Mozart's 'Requiem' on the Xylophone it hardly keeps its dignity, whereas any old Bach Organ work still maintains its vintage Bach dignity and beauty. Don't ask me how this works, but it's a demonstrable phenomenon. Romantic works in particular just don't survive such translations at all - which tells us something about the relationship between timbre and tune.

And so, being a conceptual artist of sorts, I decided to see just how far I could push that thesis, given the tools aat my disposal. After all, the likes of Leopold Stokowski, Isao (Does anybody remember 'sound-cloud'?) Tomita and Jacks Loussier, maybe I could have a hack at conceptually molesting the works of the Great One. Don't get me wrong, I love his work; it's just that I have a secret resentment that I'll probably never be able to play his lutenwerks, let alone keyboard works.

So this is the deal: I'm downloading MIDI files, assigning whatever groovy instruments that take my fancy to build up really odd combinations of instruments and mixing and matching musical styles. Others, I'll try to arrange as dance tunes and pop tunes. It's going to be a little 'hooked on classics' in parts, but that can't be helped. Oh yes, there'll certainly be a beat to which you can tap along, too. Is it good music? You bet it is. Is it still Bach? Absolutely. Is it good taste? Who knows? Will it change your view of J.S. Bach? It just might. So far, it certainly has changed mine.
Stay tuned for when I'll post up the results in iCompositions.

New Beginnings

This is the first 'serious' post on this blog after my diaspora. Appropriately, the Space Shuttle Program is going for a new beginning today. So, once more unto the breach...
2 things have come in from Pleiades this morning.
Debris was seen falling off Discovery as she made her launch today.

Video showed what appeared to be a large piece of debris flying off the external fuel tank two minutes into the flight. The object did not seem to hit the orbiter. Footage also showed what might have been at least two light-colored objects flying off Discovery as the shuttle cleared the launch pad.

Deputy shuttle program manager Wayne Hale raised the possibility that the light-colored objects were harmless pieces of paper that protect Discovery's thrusters before launch. But he insisted it was too soon to say what the cameras may have picked up, and he gave assurances the multitude of images will be examined frame by frame in the coming hours and days.

I guess they went for it with the launch and it still had the same old major problems.

This Is Why We Do Experiments And Trials
This is also from the Pleiades mailbag.
It seesm the trial GM crop genes have escaped into the weed population .

Modified genes from crops in a GM crop trial have transferred into local wild plants, creating a form of herbicide-resistant "superweed", the Guardian can reveal.
The cross-fertilisation between GM oilseed rape, a brassica, and a distantly related plant, charlock, had been discounted as virtually impossible by scientists with the environment department. It was found during a follow up to the government's three-year trials of GM crops which ended two years ago.

The new form of charlock was growing among many others in a field which had been used to grow GM rape. When scientists treated it with lethal herbicide it showed no ill-effects.

Unlike the results of the original trials, which were the subject of large-scale press briefings from scientists, the discovery of hybrid plants that could cause a serious problem to farmers has not been announced.
The scientists also collected seeds from other weeds in the oilseed rape field and grew them in the laboratory. They found that two - both wild turnips - were herbicide resistant.

The five scientists from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the government research station at Winfrith in Dorset, placed their findings on the department's website last week.

A reviewer of the paper has appended to its front page: "The frequency of such an event [the cross-fertilisation of charlock] in the field is likely to be very low, as highlighted by the fact it has never been detected in numerous previous assessments."

However, he adds: "This unusual occurrence merits further study in order to adequately assess any potential risk of gene transfer."

Well, that's really weird.
How does genetic material pass from one plant to another? It sort of suggests that scientists have not done their homework on what this mechanism is; otherwise they wouldn't be getting results so wildly out of line with accepted theory.
How did the genes go from the crops to the weeds so easily?
How did it defy the odds? Maybe the odds were stacked wrong?
How did they end up in the soil to be taken up by the turnips?

Comings & Goings
I'm getting used to doing the rudimentary HTML coding for this blogging thing. Working on the Mac isn't too alienating. Still, I need a wintel box. I've half a mind to get Virtual PC on an external drive instead of getting a new PC. While it won't save too much money, it will save space; and I do need to keep running some software on the Windows platform...

I've been working on a promo for an auto-customising company. It's really cool to be able to work on a corporate video where the central idea is FAST CARS.

Also, I spent a day interpreting for some heavies from Shochiku studios on Friday; something I was going to report on the other blog, but I got sidetracked by 'Newman'. Shochiku are an old entertainment firm that produces Kabuki Theatre as well as movie entertainment. They are a studio in the classic sense. The folks from the company were out here checking out Fox Studios Australia because Shochiku need to build a new studio facility; so it was the Q&A tour of Fox Australia. It was a fun day.

Flame War Recipe

This little nugget came in from Walk-Off HBP.

Post a comment to this blog. The comment should consist of 2 parts; a compliment and a criticism. It is important to keep this first comment fairly rational. You want to suck people in and make them think you might be capable of intelligent discussion.
Stay anonymous! Do not include an e-mail address or (how embarrassing!) the link to your own abandoned blog. If anyone questions this, say you "do not have the time" to set up an e-mail address, or to write your own blog.
The author of the blog will then post a comment back thanking you for the compliment and addressing your criticism. This is great news! You've got someone's attention!
But wait. Aren't you a little upset that this person's blog is more popular than yours was? Yours was clearly superior. Your reply should be very, very critical. Mean, even.
At this point, all but the most inexperienced bloggers will realize what's going on and not address you again.
Don't worry, their friends will come to the rescue, and jump to the bloggers defense.
Get really, really nasty. Launch a personal attack on the blogger, not just the blog itself. Who cares if everyone hates you? You are the center of attention! Bask in it!

Eeeugh!!
Sounds like the Newman of my nightmares. It sort of explains my predicament and reasons for setting up this new page, so it seems quite appropriate that I kick off this blog with this entry. :)

New

I'm running away from an angry fatman who is psychotic with rage. If you've ever seen Seinfeld's 'Newman' character, you've got the picture.
so from today, this blog will fill the space that was once the spacefreaks blog. I shall make no promises what exactly I'll write about, but heck, it's nice to get a fresh start. Maybe I'll be a little more wild and outrageous here. Who knows?
Anyway, welcome to the all new Art Neuro 'flaming horses' weblog: A blog about something.

Fab Four
I saw this in the Herald a few days ago and have been meaning to put it up for days. I never seem to get my rear-end into gear. It helps when one's train of thought isn't interrupted by idiots. :)

- Art Neuro

Weekend Mailbag
Pleiades sent in some interesting links.
The firs is about the suface of one of Saturrn's moons, Encaledus.
There seem to be strange boulders on Saturn's largest moon.

On 14 July, Cassini swooped in for an unprecedented close-up view of the wrinkled moon. Its Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) camera has since returned pictures of a boulder-strewn landscape that is currently beyond explanation. The "boulders" appear to range between 10 and 20 metres in diameter in the highest-resolution images, which can resolve features just 4 m across.

“That’s a surface texture I have never seen anywhere else in the solar system,” says David Rothery, a planetary geologist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK.

Cracks crisscross Enceladus's surface - possibly as a result of the moon being repeatedly squeezed and stretched by the gravity of Saturn and other moons nearby. But Rothery points out the boulders avoid - rather than fill - the cracks. This might indicate that the fracturing took place after the boulders had already formed.

Alien landscape
John Spencer, a Cassini team member at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US, agrees that the images are puzzling. “You would expect to see small craters or a smooth, snow-covered landscape at this resolution," he told New Scientist. "This is just strange. In fact, I have a really hard time understanding what I’m seeing.”

NASA scientists have been locked in discussions since 15 July and are expected to pass judgment on what they think this peculiar surface might be later on Tuesday.

But Elizabeth Turtle, a Cassini imaging team member at the University of Arizona in Tucson, US, warns there will be no quick answers. “Trying to figure out what is going on is going to take a lot longer than a weekend of swapped emails,” she says.

If that's not interesting enough, here's another article from New Scientist on the Huygens probe:

IF LIFE exists on Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, we could soon know about it - as long as it's the methane-spewing variety. The chemical signature of microbial life could be hidden in readings taken by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe when it landed on Titan in January.

Titan's atmosphere is about 5 per cent methane, and Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, thinks that some of it could be coming from methanogens, or methane-producing microbes. Now he and Heather Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, have worked out the likely diet of such organisms on Titan.

They think the microbes would breathe hydrogen rather than oxygen, and eat organic molecules drifting down from the upper atmosphere. They considered three available substances: acetylene, ethane and more complex organic gunk known as tholins. Ethane and tholins turn out to provide little more than the minimum energy requirements of methanogenic bacteria on Earth. The more tempting high-calorie option is acetylene, yielding six times as much energy per mole as either ethane or tholins.

McKay and Smith calculate that if methanogens are thriving on Titan, their breathing would deplete hydrogen levels near the surface to one-thousandth that of the rest of the atmosphere. Detecting this difference would be striking evidence for life, because no known non-biological process on Titan could affect hydrogen concentrations as much.

One hope for testing their idea rests with the data from an instrument on Huygens called the GCMS, which recorded Titan's chemical make-up as the probe descended. It will take time to analyse the raw data, partly because hydrogen's signal will have to be separated from those of other molecules. "Eventually, I hope, we will have numbers for at least upper limits for hydrogen," says Hasso Niemann of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, principal investigator of the GCMS.

So the Huygens Probe is doing its 'thang' nicely.
Also from Pleiades is this article from Rense.com about the dropping of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But this is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US. They are presenting their evidence at a meeting in London on Thursday organised by Greenpeace and others to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the bombings. Looking for peace

New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was "looking for peace". Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

"Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan," says Selden. Truman was also worried that he would be accused of wasting money on the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bombs, if the bomb was not used, he adds.

Most of you know my opinion so I won't go into it here; sufffice to say I'm glad somebody on the Allied side noticed the inconsistencies to the claim it ended WWII. Not that textbooks will change.
So here's the hypothetical. "What happenes if the government of japan organises mass demonstrations on the streeets of Tokyo over this and the US Embassy gets ddamaged; and the japanese say, "Well, it's your fault for hurting the sentiments of our people..."

Shuttle launch Update
The Shuttle Launch is in crisis again. It's scheduled for a tuesday launch, but fuel gauge problems that have not been locked down and fixed still hangs over the craft. Will they, won't they? The suspense is killing them, so to speak.

"We have had a great many challenges preparing the space shuttle Discovery and her crew to get ready for this historic return-to-flight mission. Certainly, that's the cost of creating the safest shuttle to date," said NASA test director Jeff Spaulding.

The latest challenge involves the hydrogen fuel gauges in Discovery's giant external tank.

Mission managers had yet to settle on a strategy for how best to manage the fuel gauges, which forced a launch delay the first time around. One option would be to proceed with liftoff if just three of the four gauges work, which would mean bending a launch rule that was implemented in the wake of the 1986 Challenger disaster.

A decision on whether to relax the rule for this first space shuttle flight in 2 1/2 years was expected by Sunday evening.

Despite exhaustive effort, NASA still does not know exactly why one of the fuel gauges in Discovery's external tank failed a prelaunch test on July 13.

Workers last week repaired faulty electrical grounding inside Discovery in hopes that would solve the problem, and swapped the wiring between the troublesome fuel sensor and another one to better understand the issue if it reappears.

The same type of problem occurred back in April during a fueling test, and was written off then as an "unexplained anomaly."

The fuel gauges are needed to prevent the main engines from shutting down too soon or too late during liftoff. The first scenario could result in a risky, never-attempted emergency landing; the second could cause the engine turbines to rupture and, quite possibly, destroy the spacecraft.

Only two fuel gauges are needed to avoid such dangerous situations, but NASA requires all four to be working at liftoff for redundancy.

NASA has just one week to launch Discovery and its crew of seven to the international space station, before putting off the mission until September.

Well, so much for that if it gets put off to September again.

Getting Prank'd Upon
Over the weekend, as some of you may know, I was at the receiving end of a pretty silly prank from one David Ball. The prank consisted of setting up a false ID here on Blogger, posing as somebody from Louisiana USA and tricking me nto a dialogue whereby he solicited a negative comment out of me about him; and then posting my damning remark up at his blog. Then, on Saturday night around 11pm, I received a creepy phone call which featured a recorded 'evil laugh' at the other end followed by a hang-up. You know, the sort of creepy behaviour you get in some kind of bad movies, which in turn tells you about the paucity of his imagination, but whatever. More bluntly, it's harrassment. It'ss even a little scary when you know his obsessive-compulsive behaviour.

As a result, I've had to re-post some of the entries of the previous days's posts just to get rid of his comments. If you're wondering what happened to your comments, well, I exercised editorial censorship (which does compromise my principles greatly) because I don't think David Ball's behaviour is acceptable in any way shape or form. So dear readers if you feel put out by this, you are welcome to complain, but please understand, my hand was forced by the downright sneaky, petty behaviour of David Ball who operates under many cyber-aliases.

Then I find that David has gone to a couple of my songs on iComposition and posted 1-star ratings with sarcastic remarks, which is fine if:
a) the acts were unrelated to the other obvious cyber-attacks; and
b) they were his genuine considered musical opinion;
c) and if his musical opinion actually carried some weight or credibility
- but clearly they are part of the 'harrassment strategy'. he is undertaking. This is getting seriously petty and infantile. I have no control over his actions so all I can do is tell him to stop. As in 'No', means 'NO'

So, David, stop.
I don't like you any more. It should be no surprise to you that I don't; and I don't know how you expect me to like you or trust you as a friend when you behave like such a fuckturd. There is no case to be gleaned by drawing out negative commments about you from me because it's no secret that I no longer respect you, feel that you are trustworthy; are a friend in anyway shape or form or are worth spending time talking to. I don't like your self-pity and insistence we all fall in line with it; and all the blame you throw around for who your are and what you are today. It's not my fault.
So if you don't want to set the ship right, then stop fooling around and leave me alone. I've been blocking your e-mail since 6th January this year (when you publicly wrote you wished me dead); I certainly don't interfere in your life; I avoid making comments about you even when provoked (which indeed you told Big W you liked doing); I make an effort not to contact you or get into your social circles. So kindly please leave my life, get some counselling help and stay the hell away.

- Art Neuro

The Day My PC Died
I was really attached to it because I picked the parts and built it. It was my brain child, and only 2 years and 7 months into its life, it died. Did I get a lot of use out of it? Yes. Did I achieve what I thought I would with it? Not really - the Mac does what i want a computer to do for me. But the PC was so fundamentally mine in a way that say, a song I wrote and stuck up on iComposition might be mine. Now I have to replace it and I don't have the energy to do the research and parts hunting; I'm just a little bit more weary.

I have to warn you all that until I do manage to replace a PC, I'm not going to link to articles because it'ss actually a lot more tedious in the safari interface than it is with IE5. Blame Blogger and my ennui. Or life. Or my dead PC. Or the fact that my HTML skills are simply not up to scratch to be able to write the code for in-text lnks. So please forgive me; when I get a new PC I promise I'll link to everything.

It's the 5th Wintel PC that died on me: a A Pentium 166MHz, A P3 466MHz, A P4 1.7Ghz, anoher P4 1.7GHz I got from a generous friend and now my 2.4GHz.
That's pretty disturbing considering that my old Commodore Amigas tended to keep working way into their obsolescence, I'm a little surprised by how Wintel boxes tend to be so much more vulnerable. It makes me worry for the future of my Mac, but my friends' Macs seem to do what the old Amigas do, which is keep on working until they are well and truly obsolete that when they go, you don't miss them the way I'm missing my PC right now. That's right. I run both systems and I still think there are a lot of merits to both systems. Still, there is nothing like the grief you get when a PC starts going wonky and then wobbly until it just simply packs it in; diagnosis not withstanding, the motherboard just goes bung. It's a good thing they come relatively cheap.

I spent the day rying to revive the machine, but my efforts were in vain; I ended up taking the data off the hard drives through the firewire drive trays. It took all afternoon - a very long, long, long afternoon. At the end of it, I just moved the dead computer out of my room. Oh yeah. I get to move some of the other computer clutter out of my room. I'm now a 1 computer man, an Apple Macintosh man to boot. How things change.

- Art Neuro

Alex VDP in Wonderland
Baseball buddy and manager of 'Hamo's Warriors' in the Jack Kerouac Memorial Fantasy Baseball League is traipsing across the US of A. It's his big baseball pilgrimmage wherein he visits and watches games at as many stadia as he can muster finance. Good on him.

Recently, he was spotted on TV, by somebody else in our fantasy baseball league; Alex was taking in a game at Minute Maid Park, home to his beloved Astros. I hope he's having fun.

Even MORE Shuttle Delays
Predicatbly the shuttle launch got delayed. now they are saying the launch is unlikely to take place before July 26th.

"Troubleshooting is continuing around the clock," Space Shuttle Programme Manager Bill Parsons said at a press conference yesterday.

"This team is persistent and energetic and we will conquer this problem too. Once the problem is resolved the next opportunity to tank the vehicle would be Tuesday, the 26th of July." Programme Deputy Manager Wayne Hale said.

Hale is hopeful that this week the problem could be identified and NASA managers are still optimistic about a launch within the current window, which ends July 31.

"Right now, I can tell you that we're still looking for the problem," Parsons said. "We've waited two-plus years, 2 1/2 years to be here. We're trying awfully hard to resolve this issue."

I'd really hate to be the astronauts on standby for this mission. This is no way to fly into space.

- Art Neuro

Andrew Denton Interviews Anthony La Paglia
There's this interview transcriptt I've been meaning to post this up for a few weeks now .

Contained in the link is the transcript of the La Paglia interview by Andrew Denton in which the following interaction took place:

ANDREW DENTON: You know, you think a 25 million dollar salary is wrong for Hollywood stars. Have you ever considered...

ANTHONY LA PAGLIA: The actual thing that I say is this: The advent of the 25 million dollar actor has kind of ruined movies, has actually ruined movies. Because what's happened is this, two things. It's affected the quality of scripts. It's also affected the quality of basically the character actor. Now, I don't begrudge anybody getting paid 25 million dollars. That's fine, if that's what you're worth, and that's what the studio wants to pay you, that's fantastic for you. However, what's happened is that the studios then say, "We spent all the money on that guy or that girl and we can only pay you scale."

In the old days, if you look at the movies from the '70s, for example, even the supporting characters had an arc. They started somewhere, they went somewhere, and they finished somewhere. Now you see a character come into a film, have his two little seconds and then they're gone. There's no explanation of where they went, what happened to them, nothing. I know what happened to them - There's no money for them to do anything. It went all on the other person.

ANDREW DENTON: If you were to be offered 25 million dollars to do a film?

ANTHONY LA PAGLIA: Listen, I'm a working-class boy from Adelaide. If someone offered me 25 million bucks, my teeth would fall out. I'd have to think, yes, of course, I want to do it. But I'm also connected enough still to the real world to think this thought - I want the best actors around me because they're going to make me look even better, and to get the best actors around me, you got to pay them more. Therefore, I'll take a chance on the film and I'll take less money, but give me a piece of the back end of the film. If it succeeds, I succeed. If it fails, it's my fault too.

If you're lucky to be born with the gift of acting, with the gift to be able to act and communicate, that's a gift. As you become more successful, it's incumbent upon you to exhibit largesse as a person. You have a lot of power. You make a lot of money for really doing bugger-all, to be honest with you. Acting's not rocket science. It's not. I've never found it difficult. I found some things difficult to do, but it's a joy for me to do it.

ANDREW DENTON: Have you ever discussed this with Russell Crowe?

ANTHONY LA PAGLIA: No. I haven't.

ANDREW DENTON: I would love to hear the conversation between you about this.

ANTHONY LA PAGLIA: You know, I've met Russell on a number of occasions in the past, and I don't know what his feelings would be about that.

ANDREW DENTON: Yes, you do.

ANTHONY LA PAGLIA: Well, I wouldn't venture to... I wouldn't venture to comment on them, you know. Different philosophies. Listen, you know the truth is that Russell is probably one of the finest actors that New Zealand's ever produced. I'm kidding. He's very much Australian. He's spent his most formative years here, and he is one of the finest actors, I think, in the world.

The last bit there was with much laughter between the two men, prior to Russell throwing a telephone.
Now, the bit I want to draw your attention to is the notion of the 25million dollar man on a roster. Any roster whether it be a cast for a big budget movie or a baseball team. Coincidentally we live in a time when A-Rod gets 25million a year and Tom Cruise gets 25million a year (and I flippantly said I'd rather have A-Rod's career than Tom's - BUT I MEANT EVERY BIT) but La Paglia's point highlights that the issue of how much to pay a star isn't isolated to one project or one season or even one field. In a time when stars exist an their crowd-pulling power ergo turns into revenue/tangible outcomes for an organisation, it becomes critical for any General Manager/Producer & Director to weigh up just who they are getting on the team to represent the investors.

Put it another way, you didn't see Superstar-monster-contracts on the 2001 Mariners or the 1998 Yankees, two of the most winningest teams of recent years. The original Star Wars had unknowns play the 3 main roles supported by British veterans, and look at the profit ratio of that film. Management of projects should be putting together projects that finesse disparate parts that makes the whole, great than the sum of the parts. Then again, there's the 'Ocean's 12'/2005 Yankees approach where one grabs hold of every available suprstar and bankrolls it without a concern to the bottomline; and even then the 208million payroll needs the kind of finessing whereby rookies Robinson Cano and Chien-Ming Wang become vital contributors to a veteran team on the verge of collapse. In other words, the kind of role-players you get define the oragnisation or project as much as the star. It's only the casual observer who only recognises the superstar

Clearly the A-Rod contract didn't work for the Texas Rangers for the very reason that La Paglia mentions. Though, to be more precise it wasn't the A-Rod contract per se, but the non-performing, yet almost equally onerous Chan Ho Park contract that ate up such a large portion of their budget. And when a Star-vehicle film flops, well, it could be because they didn't spend enough on the writing or production design or whatever. Anyway, it's probably like management 101 and obvious as daylight to some but the same logic could probably be said for NASA crews, projects and administrators. maybe the Space Shuttle program is like a non-performing big-contract eating up too much of the payroll for very little return?

- Art Neuro

Flight Of The Undead Movie Script
This is in from Walkoff-HBP. Basically it's Paul Byrnes having a whinge about the state of the film industry in general; or perhaps it's just a whinge about the world.

Apart from Dennis Quaid, who was 50 last year and Hugh Laurie, who's 46, most of the actors in the remake weren't yet born in 1965. So what? Well, nothing really, except that I think we may have lost something since the youth market became the dominant force in Hollywood. This began well before Star Wars. Indeed, it probably began with the rise of the affluent American teenager in the 1950s, but it means that now, a great many movies are skewed toward younger actors. I suspect that means we see less of the great character actors who made movies like The Flight of the Phoenix so memorable. By definition, character actors bring a certain depth of life experience, but if you're not allowed to cast many people over 40, you must surely affect a film's dramatic possibilities. The writing has to stay younger, to reflect the audience's range of experience.

The difference can be seen in the approach of these two movies. The first was a taut, entertaining survival story in which an experienced director made the most of a seasoned cast and a solid script. The drama was serious and played as such, with attention to character detail across a dozen or so roles.

I'm not much of a Paul Byrnes fan as far as Australian film critics go. He has a penchent to get all moralistic and really quite self-righteous in spite of his good insights. He was also a phenomenally boring curator for the Sydney Film Festival, so much so he put me off the SFF for life. Having said that, I have to admit that he's on the same page with me on the issue of the increasing 'adolescent quotient' in cinema, sort of dumbing down drama everywhere. So now cinema belongs to the young and the ever-recurring infantile desires. It's only fiction, but it bugs me.

Tangential Thought To The Above
Actually I was thinking about Wendy James and Transvision Vamp (and whatever happened to those inpet musicians?) in the shower this morning. No, I wasn't wanking. I was thinking about the ephemeralness of marketed commodities. You know, the unbearable lightnesss of my counted bean and all that. And how totally incoompetent as rockers those guys in transvision Vamp were. Frickin' woeful. Sort of the Tony Womack of rock bands.

Music used to be hard to organise. Composers wrote stuff down on pieces of paper and you had to find people who could read it and play it; you needed lots of these people depending on the score. If it were a symphony, you needed a whole orchestra. Then, along came Jazz, where the musicians decided to play what they liked and the combos got smaller and smaller: from Dixieland to Bebop, to Trios, the number of musicians kept shrinking. Then came rock'n'roll, where musicians decided you didn't even have to play too much complicated stuff. That you could organise music in blocks of chords andd rhythm and still have a rockin' good time. And while some people still tried to achieve virtuosity, the predominant trend was towards requiring less and less competence to be called a musician. It was only a matter of time before punk and grunge surfaced and laid claims that any kind of competence was a pretension and one was ar more legitimate a musician in one's own incompetence. Until eventually some people invented Rap *music* whereby people just did away with melody. And lots of people thought this was a great breakthrough.
It's all part of a long term trend.

Meanwhile technology has been advancing leaps and bound and it has now gotten to the point that people who sheepishly call themmselves 'non-musicians' can arrange entire chunks of recorded music and poste them up on the internet at iCompositions ("PLEASE CHECK MY RECENT STUFF BY CLICKING ON THE BADGES TO THE RIGHT!!"). A munchkin vocalist like Britney Spears can be turned into a most marketable commodity through the marvels of technology, but also thanks to a generally deteriorated sensibility in an ever increasing, anti-musical audience that for reasons totally unknown to themselves want to participate in 'music', heck, she can be (and IS) a star.
Well, that's like a modern blockbuster film, isn't it? Too much special effects, not enough writing/directing/acting/editing?

So the post-'Star Wars' munchkinification trend we were discussing recently is not isolated to cinema. It's taking place even in music; in fact it has been for a good 255 years since the days of JS Bach's passing. And from this we know, that subsequent generations will be more inept, but with better technology invested, they will look almost half as worthy as generations past. It's a con, really. - The other way to look at it is this: at $120 for a night at the Opera; or at $7 a pop for an LP for rock music;or $20 for a CD of your favourite DJ; it's all about what one expects to get for what one pays.
So for a 'free' download of an MP3, what should one expect? It kind of tells you what kind of times we live in, no?

- Art Neuro

Embarrassment
I guess it's pretty embarrassing that I couldn't tell 'success' was yet another alter-ego of 'David Daniel Ball', a.k.a. DDB; a.k.a. 'DDBall'; a.k.a. 'Conservative Weasel'.
I imagine him to be sniggering up his sleeve like Newman in Seinfeld, an angry fat man who is a captive of his 20year grudges and resentments Well done, boy-o! You got me a beauty! Though, I don't know what point it exactly proves, I hope you're basking in the glory of a clever little point won. Touche!
Yes, I was pretty upset when I found out, you did ruin my day David. Well done. You're the man of the hour!

- Art Neuro

London Bombings Update
Speculation is mounting on the bombers' Modus Operandi. There have been reports that they four bombs were delivered by suicide bombers, though as far as I've checked, Scotland yard are saying no such thing. There's also been an arrest.

Clarke said one of the suspects was reported missing by his family later that morning. That man was on the bus that blew up in Tavistock square 50 minutes after the carnage on the underground.

In the bloody aftermath of the explosion of the bus, police found a gruesome clue: the detached head of a man. This, according to Israeli experts who have experience in such things, was a telling clue that he was the person closest to the explosion. Police believe he was either a willing or inadvertent suicide bomber.

But it wasn't the only clue to the killers. "We have found personal documents bearing the names of three of those four men close to the scenes of the explosions," said Clarke. Clarke also says it's likely at least one of the men died in the blasts, perhaps all four. But he didn't label them as suicide bombers nor did he release their names.

Hmmm. So we don't know if the patsies get hit - but that assumed the kind of conspiracy people are talking about. :)

Jury Duty
I got summoned and so I went. As I approached the table, the crabby looking woman in dark blue with the bogus uniform asked me if I was available for the 2 weeks trial. I said "I guess so. I'm here by summons so I think I must..." - as in, I don't have a legitimate excuse to squirm out of it so I cleared the decks of my schedule (not that there was much). I had my had chewed off by the most rude court officer: "It's not what you think you must; you are required by law to be here!" she snapped. I was taken aback.
I was being polite, damn you stupid woman; not trying to squirm out. I was there because exactly because I believe in civic duties. So excuse me and FUCK ME DEAD YOU SOW BITCH!!!! Really.

What is it about officials who have to ask dumb questions?
You get caught speeding. The officer asks: "Do you know you were 15kms over the speed limit in a 50 zone?"
Errr, now that you mention it after having flagged me down... Yeah.
"Why were you speeding?" they ask.
Like, could there possibly be *any* reason why one should be allowed to speed? Is there a reason on the planet that one could give an officer that would get one off the ticket thing? No, I didn't think so. So WHY DO YOU ASK, YOU DUMB-ASS FUCKING MORON?

See what I mean? Same fucking stupid illogic. Am I available? Well, of course I'm available if I must, excatly because you made me be here for a possible 2 weeks. Don't yell at me for saying I did my best to clear the schedule for you.

Anyway, I sat around for 3 hours, didn't get picked and got discharged. Yay. I just hated the experience and if I ever get summoned again, I'm going to make the utmost effort to get out of it. It might be democracy in action and us ordinary folks participating in the judical system but it's a crock of shit in practice.

ScreenHub
I paid up my subscription for screenhub again this year. They charged me $77 this year instead of $65 of last year. Fuck me dead.

Quickshot Review On 'Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith'
After all the weeks of hoopla passed, I maanaged to mosey on down to watch the final installation in the epic Star Wars Hexalogy. Partly because I was at a loose end and knew there was a 12:30 session straight out of my jury duty discharge; but also partly because I couldn't bring myself not to have seen this film on the Big Screen in the final analysis. Sure, get it on DVD and enjoy it later; but this would be the only only Star Wars film I didn't see at the cinema. So the completist within got a hold of me and I marched into the cinema.

What's Good about it?
Effects and effects and more effects. There are so maany special effects going on the word 'special' seems to no longer apply. The effects come from everywhere and every which direction you kind of get inured to the mass of this stuff. and it gets so overwhelming you stop analysing each shot; suddenly you find you've arrived in the Star Wars universe proper instead of trying to watch it as a film. Now that's interesting because usually one complaains that the effects are the main character in special effects movie, but I don't think I've seen the truth of that observation until I found myself watching this film. It's damn amazing from both a quality and quantity point of view.

Take Yoda, who started out as a muppet in the second film. In this film, he's walking, talking, fighting, interacting with the kind of freedom inconceivable in the first series. The characterisation of Yoda is so good, you forget he ain't *real*. Amazing. And off-putting as it is to see the cloned army of Maoris heck, you just accept it because the action goes so fast and furiously. The film gives you very little timie to pause to think about the contexts of the many light-sabre battles. I think that in the years to come, this film will come to be seen as a watershed in space operas. You simply can't go and make one after this film. It is as if the Star Wars hexaology has totally eaten the genre in the way that the Lord of The Rings trilogy has eaten the fantasy genre whole by being so complete. Now, I'm not ssaying this is the death of science fiction; rather, these films are to their genres what the Empire State Building is to skyscrapers. There will be other skyscrapers, but none will be more culturally important in our awareness as the 'ur-object'.
And maybe that's not such a bad thing either.

Also notable was the relative absence of the comic-relief aspect that plagued Episode I and II. The fights going on were for keeps. Winner take all and death came swiftly to big characters: Count Dooku, Mace Windu and the Jedi council; General Grievous; the trade Federation delegates; all of these folks buy a farm rapidly as the events unfold and truth be told, I liked it that way.

What's Bad About It?
Dialogue. Everybody else has said it; but it can't be said how bad the dialogue is between Padme and Anakin. It actually works to turn these characters into much smaller munchkins than we were led to believe. Even the turning of Anakin that people complain about is bad precisely because the dialogue is so turgid. But how did it get this way?

There are also a lot of arbitrary things about the script as a whole that makes you think 'what the Fuck?!' For instance, Obi Wan seems to readily appear when needed, convenently stowing away or falling fortuitously into water. The thrills and spils are nice to watch, but from a writing point of view, it seems these extrinsic obstacles that are easily surmounted only seem to take up screentime for the sake of showing the action. Even the final duel with Anakin-Now-Vader where Obi-Wan cuts the legs off Anakin, you sit there and think, "Dude, kick him in the river, then complain that he was like brother; don't walk away, man!" but alas, that's what he does.

The directing isn't much better than in the second film, but I have to say it is better than in 'Phantom Menace' for which I am grateful. It sort of sits at B-miuns as an average, but in reality it'ss A+ for the action and the avalanche of effects; it's F- for the interpersonal stuff and logic. IOW, it seems Lucas has re-discovered some touch in this film; a lot of it in the fight scenes, but you take that. It's in the inter-personal material that his inept hand lets down the film. We never get close enough to the intimate space inhabited by Padme and Anakin. They deliver their lines across the room like strangers at a dinner party even when they are in each other's arms. The spectacular backdrops keep eating into the interpersonal space so that the audience is forced to marvel at the sky-line of Corruscant with its flying cars instead of watch the uncomfortable performances of Natalie Portman and Hayden Christiansen. In other words, the focus of the action never seems to narrow down enough to closely observe the emotions of Anakin; and so when he turns to the Dark Side (*gasp*), it seems like it's undermotivated.

Really, fear of future events and a strong desire to stave off tragedy is a good enough motivation. It's old as Cassandra. It's MacBeth, it's any character who has a prophecy placed upon them. - It is reasonably easy to understand the logic of Anakin's actions. but as an audience we have to work so hard to feel its burden because George Lucas as director is counting on our empathy to gauge the mounting value of that choice. Which iss to say, if you can't find the sentiment within, you're condemned to watch the drama as a total outsider. Now this is not a small issue from a directng point of view; however, the tableau that is Star Wars Universe mitigates against the analysis of emotional minutiae greatly. Yet, compared to the subtle, intimate moments played between Han and Leia, or Luke and a puppet Yoda in 'Empire Strikes back', the misc-en-scen (placement in the scene) is terribly clumsy.

However a lot of this is nit-picking. The films together as a whole is a true achievement; the cultural value of which, I imagine, will reveal itself even more through time. I'll post up some more thoughts later.

- Art Neuro

Mailbag Report
As usual Pleiades has been sending in a large number of stuff so I'm going to quickly link this stuff and leave it your judgement. They are lsited here in the order they were sent; not in my perceived order of importance:

1. Here's one on the USA's track record on how it gets into wars. It's a must-read, interesting little analysis.

2. Speculation on a conspiracy surrounding the London bombings.

3. Somebody (in their own words) ranting to the effects that the conspiracy is fact.

4. An interesting article raising some questions that ought to be asked about the bombings' timing.

5. A REALLY SCARY atticle about how security exercsise were taking place exactly on the same day that the business of London Bombings went down. Better cache this or save this before it disappears folks.

The fact that the exercise mirrored the exact locations and times of the bombings is light years beyond a coincidence. Power said the drill focused around 'simultaneous bombings'. At first the bombings were thought to have been spread over an hour, but the BBC reports just today that the bombings were in fact simultaneous.

Mr. Power (pictured above) and Visor Consultants need not have been 'in on the bombing' or anything of that nature for this to be of importance. The British government or one of their private company offshoots could have hired Visor to run the exercise for a number of purposes.

The exercise fulfils several different goals. It acts as a cover for the small compartamentalized government terrorists to carry out their operation without the larger security services becoming aware of what they're doing, and, more importantly, if they get caught during the attack or after with any incriminating evidence they can just claim that they were just taking part in the exercise.

This is precisely what happened on the morning of 9/11/2001. The CIA was conducting drills of flying hijacked planes into the WTC and Pentagon at 8:30 in the morning.

Got that?
Next...

6. An interesting read about some Hollywood directors taking on some interesting projects.

7. A weird blog saying Al Qaeda isn't behind the London Attacks.

Tell me what you think when you've gone through those. :)
Tomorrow, I go in for jury duty. Wish me luck. :)

- Art Neuro

Baseball Won't Be Played At London 2012
In a secret ballot, the IOC members threw out baseball and softball from the schedule at London. Baseball will still compete at Beijing in 2008, but it won't be there at London. IOC President Jacques Rogge says the London Games will be better for the axing of Baseball. He says it's going to be quanlity over quantity. To be fair he's making noises that baseball might be allowed back if the Major Leagues send MLB players and of course the issue of steroids. Mr. Rogge who represented Belgium as a rugby player (something as significant as if I represented Japan in their cricket team) thinks that these things would make baseball attractive as an Olympic Sport.
Yeah well, I don't know about that.

One of the things I have to put forward is that Mr. Rogge is probably one of those athletes who suck at bat and ball sports. Indeed, the Olympics is hardly the place you'd tune into to find expert hitters of any kind except maybe tennis, table tennis and badmington. Well, we know how uncompelling Olympic Tennis can be, and really that sport probably doesn't belong at all either. Table tennis and badmington are such minor sports they probably do well out of the Olympic competition. The rest of Olympic sports seem to be either grunt running, jumping swimming, chucking, mock fighting, or glorified contortions acts. When I stop to think about it, as much fun as Olympic baseball was in 2004, it was only fun because it was international competition - you know, finding out just how good the Japanese professional squad might be. Finding out about the Cubans and all that. To be frank, it had nothing to do with the Olympics or the Olympic Spirit. It was the excitement of international 'ball.

Really, baseball should just forge ahead and work on a better world cup concept. They should also have a world club championship too. The way I see it, when international baseball get under way with any kind of credibility, then it will be the Olympics begging the baseball federations to have them back. I mean the IOC is a hopelessly idiotic organisation from most observers' reports; chances are, they'll invite Cricket in 2012 and kick them out by 2020 (and that's a sport with 1billion Indians watching and following very closely).
In the mean time, I think I'll try out for the Australian tiddlywinks team. Maybe that'll get voted as a sport for 2012.

- Art Neuro

The Shutle Returns To Launchpad
Here we go. It's been 2 and a half years of reports, revisions, investigations, re-engineering and re-design; it's cost US $1Billion; there have been 2 significant delays and it's still unpredictable and unforgiving. But it's on the tarmac ready to go again.

Managers believe they have licked the overriding problem of foam shrapnel, but warn that no one will know for sure until Discovery goes up. Ice from the fuel tank could also prove to be a deadly spoiler.

As for those little shuttle bandages, the astronauts don't trust them enough to ride home with them covering any holes, even those considerably smaller than the one that doomed Columbia.

An oversight group found the remedies to be so deficient that it ruled NASA noncompliant with Columbia accident investigators' 2003 insistence on practical space repairs. The task force also found NASA lacking on two other crucial requirements, shuttle hardening and elimination of fuel-tank launch debris.

I'm really scared for the astronauts. I can't watch these things any more.

The Week That Was In London
I've been a little pre-occupied this week so I haven't posted much stuff.
Suffice to say it was the week that saw London become the fist city to win a right to host the Olympic Games AND get mass bombed by terrorists in the same week. While the events and the images are shocking, and indeed my heart goes out to the victims and their family just as it did with September 11, I am more curious as to just how Scotland Yard intends to bring the perps to justice.

I also have to confess I'm a little bored of the sort of chestbeating done by politicians in the aftermath of each and every incident. Her Majesty the Queen visited the Hospital caring for the victims and quickly got up to make an impromptu speech that echoed her ancestors defiant stance against enemies of yesteryear. While admirable in sentiment, you sort of expect the monarch to do that in such times. And if such predicatble things aren't boring, then I don't know what boring is.

Meanwhile here are people on the planet who celebrate these tragic moments - like the family who were shown dancing on the streets in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. They have reasons to do so; as Jean Renoir once famously observed, "Everybody has a reason". Well Mr. Renoir, the people with minds that hate, really work on having a reason. It seems to me, nothing concrete can be accomplished while these same politicians keep on providing reasons for these people to feel these nasty sentiments. Or maybe it simply is the case that we are living amidst a cultural war that is rending asunder the accomlishment of the Enlightenment. Maybe the current vogue of Medievalist thought, ranging from the sort of blurring of the line between Church and State, the fundamentalist religions trying to stake out a position in politics, the attempt to discredit rationalism, science, philosophy and indeed knowledge that we see almost every day; maybe these things are all symptoms of the same and single problem. Some people just aren't up to the challenge of living in the twenty-first century.

Predicatbly the loonies on the left and right are pointing fingers at each other on boards of baseball to Yahoo to whereever else people ordinarily talk things other than politics. It's a shame really, because these discussions bear no relationship to the hateful mind of the terrorist out there somewhere enjoying his adrenaline rush of a successful bomb or planning his next attack.
So I guess we'll see what Scotland Yard can accomplish in the coming week or months.

More Thoughts on Live 8
Channel 9 played some more cuts of Live 8, some of which weren't shown last time.
I missed a few acts in my last pot-shot review:

U2 plays 'Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band' with Sir Paul - How frickin' naff did that sound?

Annie Lennox observation II - She must be a very difficult person. She kept changing her expression from impassioned to irritated with a vaguely missed not to a sublime 'got it' to a 'WTF' as she played piano and sang. I thought, "Far out, it's not that critical Annie, it's only pop music".

REM - Michael Stipe looked like a freak with a blue band across his eyes. Still dull, tepid and boring after all these years.

Dido - She can't sing. She really can't sing. I can't believe she gets paid. She was so awful I had to walk away.

Pink Floyd - They played 'Comfortably Numb' on the second broadcast. It was cool. They look really, really old, and Gilmour's black strat looked really battered but hey, the leadbreak just cut the audience down; and was that Roger Waters smiling and grooving? They were the very definition the old-fart-ness of the Live 8 but still, they rocked.

Scissor Sisters - Who are these people? They were okay.

Celine Dion - She was doing some weird cabaret act in Vegas. She can sing, but she sure ain't no dancer. Actually, as she's 'matured' her voice has gotten richer. Very nice voice now compared to even a decade ago when she sang the theme for 'Titanic'.

Mariah Carey - She was practically busting out of her tight dress. She can still sing, but everyday she looks like she's headed out towards a Aretha Franklin sort of stature. I can sort of see why Derek Jeter dumped her... :)

The Who - How can they still be The Who when half of them are in the grave? The half-Who belted out 'Won't Get Fooled Again' because, well, Pete just turned 60 in may so they eally aren't qualified to play 'My Generation' any more. At least Keith lived up to the adage, "Hope I die before I get old"... Still, Pete's red Stratocaster sounded just as huge as it did on the 2000 Live DVD. You can see him wind up the output on the retro-fitted active circuit knob and his sytem howls. Most notably, he was on all Fender amplifiers tonight - you notice these things when you're a fan.

Sir Paul - I noted how bad he sounded. They must have re-mixed it during the week because he sounded much, much better in the same performance being broadcast again. In fact, the London gigs over all, sounded pretty crappy last week, compared to the stuff in Berlin and elsewhere. OTOH there was no saving Sir Bob Geldof's sad effort because that one still sounded crap.

It's at the point where some of these boomers are geting really old. Roger Daltrey looked like the local bank manager on his Sunday pub gig more than a rock star. In fact they're so old they are older than the G8 leaders yacking in Scotland. So maybe this is the last ditch effort by the Baby Boomers to salvage something from what has amounted to a really selfish self-serving generation that ate more than its fair share? When I see their slogan 'Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great', I think "certainly ain't mine".

It's a fine cause and all, but the whole thing left me very cold indeed. Maybe I'm too deep in my cynicism.

Yankee Comings & Goings
The New York Yankees are adopting a Youth policy more out of necessity. Since callig up Robinson Cano and Chien-Mig Wang to fill roster spots, the Yankees have shown a bit of spunk. now that Jason Giambi is hitting like a Juicin' Giambi is supposed to, The Yankees felt advneturous enough to elevate a 20 year old prospect into Centerfield. That's right. Melky Cabrera, who started the year as a distant prospect finds himself in the lineup at number 9, displacing Tony 'Woe'-mack to the bench.

While a lot of analysts predict that it is too early to bring up this prospect, it seems the Yankee brass are determined not to overpay for mediocre veterans anymore; certainly not this year. When asked if this was an attempt to showcase Cabrera for a trade, GM Brian Cashman emphatically denied this was the case. So I guess it's warts-&-all-growth-in-pulic-view time for the young Mr. Cabrera, who by most accounts is most probably the Yankee Centerfielder of the near-future.

Win or lose, it's a good sign and suddenly the Yankees are fun again; it reminds me of the 1996 squad that had a rookie Derek Jeter at short, with young arms from the farm Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte and a still pretty young Bernie Williams in center. This could be very promising.

- Art Neuro