Pitch Perfect Ruins Star Wars

More specifically, The Empire Strikes Back. This is for all of you who are amped up over Star Wars.

Without trying to spoil things, in that movie where the kid sees dead people, I realized what was going on way too soon, so the ending was not a surprise to me. Shrug. 

Twilight Bad Lip Reading

In celebration of the new Star Wars movie, I was going to post a bad lip reading of Episode IV. But it wasn’t funny. So instead, here’s the bad lip reading of Twilight.

“Dude. You slapped a fish.”

Heat Lamp

So the heat lamp in the overhead fan in one of my bathrooms burnt out. While waiting for a Barnes & Noble to open, I went into a large Fred Meyer’s and found one. Then when the bookstore opened, I bought two books:

Too High & Too Steep is the true account of the reshaping of Seattle’s hills. The hills in Seattle used to be steeper than the hills in San Francisco. Immense hoses were used to wash the earth from the tops of the hills into Elliott Bay. More earth was moved in these efforts than in the digging of the Panama Canal.

Inherit the Stars looked interesting enough to buy in paper form. The themes sound like fantasy, but it’s science fiction. Obviously, I’ll have to read it first to tell you what I think.

On my drive home, I could hear this soft, occasional jingling sound. It was definitely from the right and behind me, and outside the car. Oh no. It wasn’t constant, nor did it seem timed to a set revolution of the wheels. I pulled in to a McDonald’s to investigate.

A short inspection showed nothing unusual on that part of the car. Nothing was loose in the trunk. Then I had the oddest idea.

I tipped the heat lamp on the seat next to me on its side and put a plastic bag with something else inside against the top of it. I took off again.

Sure enough, I could hear the jingling sound again, but now it was muffled. It was the filament inside the bulb. In a heat lamp, the filament is so large, I could hear it making that jingling sound from the car’s motion. The sound must have been reflected off one of the car’s windows, so I thought it was coming from outside. 

So I stopped at another McDonald’s and had an ice cream cone to celebrate.

Book Review: Internal Dialogue

Internal Dialogue by Marcy Kennedy is a good primer on its title subject: Internal dialogue. This is not just about how to show it. I suspect most writers understand this. It also shows the basic techniques of when and how to use it.

An added bonus was a section titled “Alternating the Focus of Paragraphs.” This gave invaluable advice on a certain pacing or balancing of the paragraphs. I won’t repeat it here; you’ll have to get Kennedy’s book, as a kind of reward to her for this.

I understood the pacing of words within a sentence, and the pacing of sentences within a paragraph. I also understood the pacing of chapters and overall story structure. Internal Dialogue supplied an essential piece that was missing from the middle. 

The Jazz Misfits at Crossroads Mall

While I was writing recently at the Crossroads Mall, a group called The Jazz Misfits played on the center stage.

This was a pleasant background to the art of writing. Especially since I was practically killing myself trying to get a short story done for a contest. I thought the deadline was December 15. It turns out the deadline is January 15.

So I’m glad it helped relax me. 

Book Review: Virtues of War

Suppose your troops have managed to retreat to a tree line in the dark of night. The automated troops who chased you have found the range of the tree line with their rockets. But they stay outside the range of your grenade launchers, and your troops’ bullets do not harm them.

What do you do?

If you’re Lieutenant Katja Emmes, you charge forward out of the tree line, ordering your troops to do the same.

When she gets twenty meters forward, she targets one of the automated soldiers, and her troops destroy it with grenades. Ditto for the next and the next, while the enemy rockets harmlessly hit the tree line behind them. They send the enemy reeling back, but have to retreat themselves when artillery fire comes down around them.

  

  

Virtues of War is one of the best military science fiction novels I’ve read in a long time. Set far enough in the future for there to be major colonized worlds that can challenge Earth, yet close enough to our time that all the human interactions are familiar, Bennett R. Coles was written what may be an instant classic.

Assigned to the fast attack craft Rapier, Lieutenant Emmes punches her way through brutal fighting, whether on a planet or on board an enemy ship. Although brave to the point of taking on suicidal risks, she is not immune to the emotional baggage of war and the internecine backstabbing that comes with it.

Coles describes with gritty detail the physical shocks that Emmes and a few other main characters endure when going to and from combat, much less from the battles themselves. This is no rah-rah book; he throws in our faces some of the morally ambiguous acts performed during war. And the machinations of an intelligence officer puke can really mess things up.

Overall, Virtues of War features fully-realized characters hurtling into one gritty situation after another. Bennett R. Coles was an officer for fourteen years in the Canadian Navy, and it shows. 

Movie Analysis: The Host

The Host was the 2013 movie based on a Stephanie Meyer novel about Melanie, a tenacious young woman whose body has been taken over by an alien named Wanderer, but who will not give up on reuniting with loved ones who are resisting this conquest of our world. 

Just as my analysis of Inception showed its characters were based on familiar ones, so this will show that The Host is essentially:

Teenage kissing meets The Wizard of Oz

Since this is an analysis and not a review, it is composed entirely of SPOILERS.

The Host’s main characters correspond to the ones in The Wizard of Oz (for both, I’m referring to the movie versions), though the stories are very different—Melanie wants to find the remaining members of the human race, especially those she loves, while Dorothy is trying to go home. However, the plots have striking similarities.

The Host begins with Melanie fleeing the alien Seeker. We find out through flashbacks that she was doing this to protect her little brother, Jamie. Melanie has a huge, terrifying fall. This establishes Melanie as a Dorothy figure, with the Seeker as the evil teacher/wicked witch, and Jamie as Toto. It is true that Dorothy is plucked up by a tornado, but then she falls down quite a ways.

A Healer (played by a black actor) coaxes Wanderer into Melanie’s body. Just remember this when we get farther along.

Along the way, Wanderer/Melanie picks up companions. They are in reverse order from The Wizard of Oz, but they correspond just fine. In flashbacks we see Jared, an emotionally impulsive young man. Melanie hits him the face when they meet. This establishes Jared as a Cowardly Lion figure, but a lion who has already found his courage. He will continue to be emotionally impulsive throughout the story.

Next, Wanderer/Melanie meets Jeb, who almost constantly has his rifle on him and uses it to protect Wanderer/Melanie. He is a Tin Man figure who has already found his heart, and he is compassionate towards her from start to finish.

And Wanderer/Melanie meets Ian, a more thoughtful young man. He is obviously a scarecrow figure who has already found his brain. He is able to think things through about the nature of Wanderer.

An interesting plot point is just after Wanderer/Melanie encounters the seemingly impossible wheat field, the Seeker almost spots them from a helicopter. This is kind of like how Dorothy encounters the talking apple trees, and the wicked witch then attacks with fire.

From here on the plots diverge widely, since they really are two different stories. But they converge interestingly enough when Wanderer/Melanie goes to the city and gains a great talisman—a silver pod that the aliens can live in. This corresponds to Dorothy gaining the wicked witch’s broom. And Wanderer/Melanie gets rid of the Seeker in a surprising way—by coaxing the Seeker into the pod, just as Dorothy gets rid of the wicked witch by the surprising use of water.

But Wanderer cannot or will not leave in the same way, just as Dorothy misses out on a balloon ride. The good witch tells Dorothy the secret to going home is in the ruby slippers she gave Dorothy at the start. Even so, Doc (who is played by a black actor—remember the Healer described above) secretly gives Wanderer and Melanie a happy ending by coaxing Wanderer into a different young woman’s body.

Is this analysis overly-speculative? I say no. What clued me in was the scene towards the end of The Host, when Wanderer contemplates dying. She tells Ian, “I’ll miss you the most.” I thought, “What? That guy is a scarecrow figure?” This was the movie giving a wink and a nod to the audience. From there it was a matter of backtracking to see who corresponded to what.

Even if you think I’m stretching things a bit, this is an interesting way to have the bare bones of a story to start, and then filling in from there. What’s needed is an astounding scene in the middle of the story. In The Wizard of Oz, it was the revealing of the great and powerful wizard, with plenty of smoke and fire, and the lion doing a pratfall after that. In The Host, it was Ian and Jared taking turns kissing Wanderer/Melanie, to figure out if Melanie was in there. Reportedly, this was when teenage girls in movie theaters went wild. And Melanie shows she’s there by biting Jared on the lip. So find a corresponding scene that will be a big hit with your audience.

Public domain

Issaquah Salmon Days 2015

Issaquah is a suburb to the east of Seattle, where they celebrate the return of the salmon to spawn in the first weekend of October. Obviously, the salmon are constantly returning this time of year and don’t care about our calendars, but that’s the festive time to go.

Just as I saw in 2011, they’ve made their Issaquah Salmon Days into quite the street fair.

People can get so preoccupied with the craft and food booths, they can forget the hatchery. Salmon swim back from the Pacific Ocean up Issaquah Creek.

The picture above is not exactly of a fish ladder. (I think my shadow at the bottom is third from the left.) This part was purposefully designed to be too steep for the salmon to leap over. After they get tired of trying that route, they discover a side entrance to the hatchery. Much of it has glass windows for public viewing. 

It’s hard to see because of the reflections, but the middle of the picture above shows a large salmon, building up its strength to leap to the next level to the right.

If you live in the area, this is a good outdoor activity. If you have kids, let them see how real the salmon are.

SCA Win!

In Indiana, Karen Dolley woke up to find a male intruder. She punched him several times, then kept him cornered with a Japanese sword until the police came.

photo by Jean

Okay, it didn’t look exactly like this

Read about it here.

This is great, and not just because a forty-three year-old woman crushed the thirty year-old intruder. She’s a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. So if you spend time with this or similar accoutrements, you can point out this article to skeptical relatives to show how practical you are.