The usefulness of childhood stories

Whenever I'm liquidising something like soup, I remember the story of Paddington decorating his room. He switched the electric paint stirrer on before putting it into the paint, instead of once it was in. I take care not to do this - as a direct result of hearing that story 40-odd years ago.

I didn't take this photo - it came from an Etsy listing. The book is Paddington's New Room.

The incongruity of TV adverts.

"Your plan is flawed. Scorpius will not chase the transport. Because there is one thing he values more than his precious base... Chocolate eggs." 

~ Farscape Season 1 episode 22 / Reese's ad

How to get to Narnia

Just realised that of the five times people from this world accidentally go to Narnia, two involve spare rooms, and two involve railway stations. 

Does this have any significance? Who knows? 

So, along with hands and books, AI can't draw doors.

Sun

~Douglas Adams

Paradise?

 I've been rewatching Death in Paradise. It's a fun detective series set on a fictional Caribbean island.

Officer Dwayne Myers, Detective Sergeant Camille Bordey, and Sergeant Fidel Best

I've also been reading the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano - a former slave who was involved in the British abolition movement.

Olaudah Equiano

 

He spent a number of years in the Caribbean, and mentions several of the islands referred to in Death in Paradise. I was interested to read his opinion of it:

"every part of the world I had hitherto been in seemed to me a paradise in comparison of the West Indies."

I guess you don't look at the Caribbean as paradise when the sun, sea, and sand is combined with slavery, brutality, and injustice.

Fiction and non-fiction

I was standing by the church library while two wee girls were looking at the kids' books.

('Bible Fiction' means historical fiction and time-travel stories about Bible events.)

Child 1: In my school we can choose whether we want to read a fiction book or a non-fiction book.

Me: Which do you prefer?

Child 1: Fiction 

Child 2: Non-fiction, because it tells you about things that are real.

It made me think of that Neil Gaiman quote (where he was misquoting GK Chesterton):

Fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

I did not confuse them by telling them this!

Who decides?

I liked this quote about A.I. from Madam Secretary:

Technology is not the enemy, unless we allow it to substitute its judgement for our own.

(Season 6 episode 3: Killer Robots)

Applies in many more situations than killer robots.

Stargate?

I pass this house frequently, and I can't help feeling that if you walked up the path you might end up on another planet.

(Skeptics may say it's a frame for climbing plants, but it's been there for a long time, and never had any plants on it.)

Atlantis bureaucracy

Two scenes from Stargate Atlantis. Nothing profound, just funny. Spoilers for Stargate Atlantis Season 5 Episode 14: The Prodigal

(This clip switches from the first scene of the episode to the second last scene of the episode around the halfway mark, but it's not immediately clear - the change is when he says 'anyway I just wanted to stop by...')

Old broken stuff

 A fun conversation from the radio sitcom Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully.

An alien commander is complaining that earth is 'a dump':

Zone Commander Ravella: There's old, broken stuff everywhere.
Lucy: You mean like that shopping trolley in the canal.
Zone Commander Ravella: Yes - but also all those old castles. Can you really not be bothered to demolish them?
Katrina: They're our history.
Zone Commander Ravella: I see. We write history down, instead of clogging up the landscape with ugly heaps of useless stone.

Atmosphere matters

I recently rewatched the Stargate Atlantis episode Irresponsible.

The first time I watched it, it felt odd. The climax of the story is the death of a longstanding villain. But it seemed rather perfunctory and anticlimactic, like no big deal. If you blinked you could almost have missed it. He deserved a more dramatic death than that! 

 

But I listened to the director's commentary, and it explains why the episode feels odd - the problem is the setting. 

When it was written, it was supposed to have a bit of a Western feel, and they'd intended to film it in a local wild west village. However that fell through, and they ended up with this place:

 

Not quite the same thing.

So, at the climax of the story, when our hero appears in the nick of time, he should stride down the broad dusty street under a wide open sky, for a dramatic confrontation...

 

 

...but instead he walks a few paces across the lawn in front of some picturesque cottages. 

 

By the time they get to the shooting, the background is cluttered with townsfolk, outlaws and soldiers, who can't be positioned off to the side, because there's no room, or in the distance, because there is none.

 

The director pointed out that if he'd missed he'd have shot his own team, they were so close behind!

They did their best with what they had, but in the director's own words: 

"here comes the standoff: the odd little standoff in the odd little town in the odd little square"

Of course, in reality, a villain can be killed anywhere - under the open skies of a dramatic dusty frontier town, or in a twee and claustrophobic village square. (Or be accidentally run over by a bus for that matter). 

 

But stories aren't real life. 

Interestingly, the same village was used years previously as the setting for an episode of Stargate SG-1 (Revisions). For that episode, set in a cosy little town with a sinister secret, it fitted perfectly.

Atmosphere matters.

C.S. Lewis wrote a lot about this but it's hard to find a decent quote. Here's one from Planet Narnia by Michael Ward, which quotes C.S. Lewis. (He's using the term 'romance' in the old-fashioned sense of an adventure or fantasy story.)

Again and again, in defending works of romance, Lewis argues that it is the quality or tone of the whole story that is its main attraction. The invented world of romance is conceived with this kind of qualitative richness because romancers feel the real world itself to be 'cryptic, significant, full of voices and 'the mystery of life.'' Lovers of romances go back and back to such stories in the same way that we go back to a fruit for its taste; to an air for... what? for itself; to a region for its whole atmosphere—to Donegal for its Donegality and London for its Londonness. It is notoriously difficult to put these tastes into words.'

The Caves of Steel

 

I recently reread The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. I've read it many times before, but I noticed something I hadn't seen before.

It was written in the 50s, but the story happens thousands of years in the future. All of Earth's inhabitants live cheek by jowl, enclosed in giant monolithic Cities. Everything is regulated, centralised and efficient. Food - mostly artificial yeast cultures - is rationed and eaten in huge communal dining rooms. Poor people eat nothing else, but those with higher status may earn the right to a real chicken drumstick - or even to eat at home a few times a week. Toilet and washing facilities are communal - a basin in your own home is another hard-earned privilege. Population is controlled. Houses are small, and the poorest live in grim barracks.

The reason for this? It's the only option, owing to the massive population of earth, which has now reached a whopping 8 billion!

Wait a minute. We're at 8 billion now... 

Cross-cultural persuasion

What are we going to tell them, Teyla? “Listen, kiddies, everything you believe to be true is wrong, and trust us because we've been here for almost an hour.”

~Stargate Atlantis 1:06 Childhood's End

It's amazing that it's taken over 7 years of Gate travel for someone to articulate this. Even more amazing that it's McKay, not exactly known for his humility or seeing other people's point of view, who realises it.

Nothing to do with the quote, but MacKay being babysat by these two is one of the fun things in this episode.

[Edit: he does spoil it a few scenes later when he proposes stealing the power source from their only defences, and then solving the obvious safety issue by deporting them all to Atlantis 🤦‍♀️]

Fictional cleaning

From Front Runner by Felix Francis

How on earth does one do all of that in 3 hours?

Btw, if you ever do want to remove fingerprint powder, Barkeeper's Friend will do it where nothing else will.

Hobbits

Some pictures I did a loooong time ago!

I appear to have misinterpreted the description slightly, and made the soles of their feet hairy instead of the tops 🤦‍♀️. Otoh, I have given them "thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly)", unlike the film-makers...

 

I think the one in the black suit was meant to be Bilbo, but then I drew a whole family. Not sure if they're meant to be modern-day hobbits, or it's unintentional anachronism.

 

 

 

And here's one I did much more recently!

The difference

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - CS Lewis

"His name unfortunately was Eustace Scrubb, but he wasn't a bad sort."

The Silver Chair - CS Lewis

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!"

2 Corinthians 5v17

Movie adaptions

A director cannot fairly make his money of the writings of a man long dead while simultaneously warping the substance of that work into something the dead man would never have agreed to.

~ Travis Perry

Consultation

A character in a fictional world is reading an article in a magazine, detailing some proposed changes:

"They have been published, it seems, for general criticism; and one gathers that in the modern Utopia the administration presents the most elaborately detailed schemes of any proposed alteration in law or custom, some time before any measure is taken to carry it into effect, and the possibilities of every detail are acutely criticized, flaws anticipated, side issues raised, and the whole minutely tested and fined down by a planetful of critics, before the actual process of legislation begins."

~ H G Wells (A Modern Utopia )

A utopia indeed!

Final Stargate episode

Just watched the final episode of Stargate SG1 last night :-(

10 series; 214 episodes!

Actually, SG1 isn't quite finished - there are also two movies, one of which ties up all the unresolved plot of the series.

And of course, I've still got two Stargate Atlantis series to watch (from what I've heard, I won't be bothering with the other spinoffs).

An evening dress - with pockets!

I've been watching Madam Secretary as a wee change from Stargate.

This is a sensible evening dress. Elegant and practical.

Thought I needed a completely frivolous blog post for a change!