Month: March 2007

So Who Wants to Go See 300?

There’s no convincing the wife of the virtues of 300: I just can’t get her to enjoy entertainment based on stylised violence outside the mileu of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Therefore, I hereby declare that there should be some kind of boys’ night out where we lads go catch 300 at the downtown Paramount. Bonus points for anyone who’ll join me for dinner at the Burger King there, and double bonus points for anyone who yells “Tonight we dine in Hell!” while doing so. Interested? Drop me a line or leave a message in the comments.

Neal Stephenson on 300

Here’s a snippet from It’s All Geek to Me, a New York Times editorial written by Neal Stephenson, a sci-fi and geek favourite author:

Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it.

References to the Battle of Thermopylae in The Uncanny X-Men

In the latter part of Chris Claremont’s first run as the writer for the comic book The Uncanny X-Men — the run that turned the X-Men from a B-list comic in Marvel’s roster to one that became more popular than Spider-Man, he was fond of making references to the Battle of Thermopylae when comparing the X-Men’s struggles against numerically superior foes. The most notable example I could find is in issue 226 (from 1988), Go Tell the Spartans, where the X-Men face the Trickster, the cosmic personification of chaos itself. Here’s the title spread:

The title spread from The Uncanny X-Men, issue 226 (1988), titled Go Tell the Spartans.

Luckily for those who never studied classic battles (but really, North American comic book readers of that era were mostly nerds, who should’ve been Dungeons and Dragons players, who in turn should’ve studied classic battles for inspiration), Claremont uses Wolverine to explain the issue’s title:

A scene from The Uncanny X-Men, issue 226 (1988), titled Go Tell the Spartans.

Here’s the dialogue:

Wolverine: So we’re on our own, as usual.

Mystique: The devil of it is, we still don’t know what we’re dealing with, much less how to stop it.

Wolverine: Maybe we’re the ancient Spartans, Mystique. Holdin’ the line at Thermopylae against impossible odds, buyin’ our fellow Greeks time to raise proper defenses an’ mass their armies. Here we remain, obedient to their will, even unto death.

Mystique: Since when did you become a romantic?

Wolverine: Darlin’, how can anyone be an X-Man an’ not be a romantic?

Wolvie’s line about being “obedient to their will, even unto death”, is from the epigram on the tomb of King Leonidas’ 300, which is often translated as:

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by

that here, obedient to their laws, we lie

For a bar brawler from the Canadian rockies, Wolvie’s a pretty well-read guy.

Changes to the Meaning of the Word “Spartan”?

Damn, that Leonidas guy is cut.

The term “Spartan” with a capital S means ‘someone from Sparta’. Spelled with a small s, one of its meanings is ‘austere’ or ‘lacking in amenities’. For example, a room in a Buddhist monastery or a Ramada Limited motel (which we used to derisively refer to as “Ramada Very Limited”) could be called spartan.

With the popularity of 300, it’s quite possible that “spartan” could acquire a new meaning: possessing incredible abdominal muscles. Even from watching the trailer, I feel like hitting the gym.

Here are some of articles that I found interesting, all of which have to do with health and medicine:

• I Don’t Want Health Care If Just Anyone Can Have It: (from The Onion) “The only reason this is even being considered is because a majority of voters want it. Well, of course they do—they don’t have it! But you don’t see 33rd Degree Freemasons letting any old average citizen into their inner sanctum just because he’s curious. And you won’t catch me sharing my God-given right to affordable lifesaving medical procedures with every bum who’s got a jones for another hepatitis vaccination. It’s undignified. After all, how do I know I’ve made it in this world if I’m not able to enjoy something others can’t?”
• A comment on the aforementioned Onion article in Reddit: “I’m not saying the Canadian system isn’t better, it is better. It’s far less wasteful. I’m saying, don’t pretend Canada is this panacea that it isn’t. There’s a reason many people are pushing for a two-tiered system… one tier where you pay with time, and the other where the impatient wealthy pay with money. There’s nothing unfair about it, it works in European nations, and it makes all kinds of sense.”
• Fighting MADD: (from Modern Drunkard) An article that argues that Mothers Against Drunk Driving has lost the plot — “In October of 1985, MADD’s board of directors, largely salaried male executives at that point, fired Candy Lightner. They claimed she was making excessive demands on the budget, she claimed it was a coup d’etat by radical prohibitionists who had infiltrated the organization. Disturbed by the shift from attacking drunk driving to attacking drinking in general, the founder of MADD later joined the liquor lobby, declaring, ‘I worry that the movement I helped create has lost direction. (The .08 legislation) ignores the real core of the problem. If we really want to save lives, let’s go after the most dangerous drivers on the road.'”
• America’s Drunk Driving Dilemma: “America has had a problem with drunk driving since Ford perfected the assembly line. I know it is a serious danger because I’ve lost young friends to drunken driving accidents. So what’s the answer? Today we continually increase the severity of the laws, strip away individual rights, and arrest over a million people per year. Is it working? MADD says it is, but critics say it isn’t. It depends on which statistics you wish to believe. I personally believe our current strategy is a failure and we could do better by trying to change the American values that lead to the drunken driving dilemma.”

• Facing Life with a Lethal Gene: A New York Times piece on Katherine Moser, who was diagnosed as having the gene for Huntington’s Disease, a rare genetic disease which strikes in middle age, causes degenration of brain cells and is incurable and lethal.

• Without Mouth-to-Mouth, CPR Still Works: “Chest compressions — not mouth-to-mouth resuscitation — seem to be the key in helping someone recover from cardiac arrest, according to new research that further bolsters advice from heart experts. A study in Japan showed that people were more likely to recover without brain damage if rescuers focused on chest compressions rather than on rescue breaths, and some experts advised dropping the mouth-to-mouth part of CPR altogether. The study was published yesterday in The Lancet.”

Here’s a gift for the person who can see the cloud attached to every silver lining: a mug with a marking to tell you when it’s half-empty:

Here’s a little diversion for St. Patrick’s Day — a little quiz where you determine whether some fact is about St. Patrick (who according to legend rid Ireland of its snakes) or Samuel L. Jackson (who starred in Snakes on a Plane). Download Snakes on an Island [1.5MB PDF].

Here’s a video that marries two guilty pleasures of mine: Star Trek and Nine Inch Nails, plus one thing that I find amusing from a distance (sometimes, a very great distance): slash fiction.

In this video, which recontextualizes footage from the original Star Trek series and uses Nine Inch Nails’ Closer as background music, the creators ask the question “What if they hadn’t made it to Vulcan on Time?”.

(For those of you who don’t get the reference, there’s an episode titled Amok Time in which Spock experiences the pon farr, the Vulcan mating urge that they must answer once every seven years. If they don’t mate during the pon farr, they die. In the episode, Spock gets his “seven-year” itch at the same time the Enterprise is called to attend an important ceremony on Altair IV, making it impossible for Spock to get to Vulcan to get it on with the woman promised to him. Hilarity ensues.)

Please note: The background song, Closer contains lyrics depicting the very adult condition of sexual desperation. There’s a brief flash of nudity in the video, and whoever edited the video has done an excellent job of recontextualizing tame-enough-for-TV scenes into something racy enough for “Skinemax”.

So. Very. Wrong.

Yeah, the video’s been up for a while. I have no idea how I missed this one.

Bonus Stuff!

Oh, yeah…the “fight music” from the original Star Trek [1.8MB MP3]. I wanted this played at our wedding, but the Ginger Ninja said no.

The U.S. Air Force’s 509th Bomb Wing were originally based in Roswell, New Mexico, a fact that they use to great graphic effect in this unofficial patch that one of them had made:

Miss Fipi Lele sent me an alternate version, which throws in another reference to aliens by way of a science fiction short story that became one of the better Twilight Zone episodes:

Click to see the image at full size.

Wondering about the latin at the bottom of the patch, Gustatus similis pullus? It’s “dog latin” for “tastes like chicken”.

For reference, here’s the intro to the original Spider-Man, complete with one of the finest themes to any television show:

Here’s a bonus: the intro to an ill-conceived Japanese live-action Spider-Man TV show. Marvel licensed the character to a Japanese TV production company who then took great liberties with the character, such as giving Spidey a giant robot with which to defeat enemies (a trick that would be copied later by the Power Rangers) and changing his origin story so that he gets his powers from a magic bracelet rather than a mutation caused by a bite from a radioactive spider. But oh, how I love the theme music, done in classic Japanese adventure TV show style! As the lyrics to the theme say, “Yeah yeah yeahhhhhh…WOW!”