Rhymes With Mucous
February 11, 2004 // Link
George Lucas finally announced that he’ll be releasing the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD.
To me this is an exciting development. It’s exciting because I’m very interested in language and as far as I can tell this is an original use of the word “original.”
By “original,” of course, Lucas means “new special edition verions.” (“Special” in this case is used in the sense of “he’s so Special he should have his own Olympics.”) That is, our boy George is not talking about the actual original movies but instead new universally disliked versions that were produced many years later.
Isn’t it exciting that our language can develop right before our eyes? I love it when words evolve new meanings or new words are invented. New words like “punkassmotherfuckermoviewrecker.” I’ve been using that one a lot today. It’s handy.
The Star Wars movies will be released only as a 4 DVD set. There will not be an option to purchase A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back individually, nor the first half of Return Of The Jedi. Instead you must purchase the entire trilogy as a set. The fourth disc contains a half hour Making Of movie, a three hour Making Crap Out Of movie, and an original bio-pic called Not A Fan Of His Own Films. The price for the package hasn’t been announced yet because Lucas is still waiting for the contractor estimates on the latest extension to his ranch.
(As a sad side-note, Lucas built a beautiful ranch years ago but his once admired home is now a structurally unsound jumble of wedged-in additions that simply do not suit the original blueprint. And after the last round of modifications it simply had to be condemned. Soundly.)
As I mentioned, these will not be the original movies in their original form. In fact, these won’t even be the “Greedo shoots first” editions which became famous as the root cause of the last big blackout in California (due to the massive power spike during the broadcast premiere of A Newer Hope when Han Solo’s head was digitally jerked to the side and a million nerds suddenly cried out in terror from their parents’ basements and simultaneously fired up their modems to chat about it).
Nope, it won’t be those versions. We should be so lucky. Instead, these are the “Even More Specialer” editions. Some highlights of the improvements (another new definition!) that Lucas has made include:
Greedo not only shoots first, he shoots multiple times. Then he calls over some friends, and they all shoot. Meanwhile, Han dodges all these lasers with sudden sideways jerks of his head. In the end Han pulls his pistol, carefully sets it to “gentle stun,” and cautions the Greedo Gang to lower their weapons or he’ll tell on them. After some “open, constructive dialog” it all ends in hugs and extended therapy sessions. They keep in touch at holidays.
The garbage compactor scene has been replaced by an extended prison escape sequence in which the rebels are chased by storm troopers back and forth across a long corridor lined with doors. Sometimes they get confused and the storm troopers are briefly chased by the rebels. Hilarity ensues.
Luke’s character has been subtly altered through the latest digital technology so that he appears ever so slightly younger. Lucas hasn’t said yet how much younger Luke appears, but insider estimates put him somewhere between nine-and-a-half and sperm.
The Jawas have all been replaced by Ewoks. As have the Sand People. And most of the rebel army. And Han.
All that yucky kissing is gone.
There’s a new all-digital Yoda which, after many thousands of hours of complicated and expensive computer graphics work, is finally almost as good as the old puppet.
Nine new racing scenes have been added. Per movie.
To help the audience follow the new and oh so convoluted racing subplots these new edits conveniently show the number of remaining game credits in the lower corner of the screen.
Han’s sidekick has been replaced by a new digital character called Scooby Chew.
And most exciting of all (gee, an exciting new definition for the word exciting!) these movies will be the first to feature Lucas’s new Digital Insertion technology. Similar to the computers that paint the yellow first-down line on televised football games, Digital Insertion adds new toys and fast food tie-ins to existing movie footage. We’re told that “old fans will get a real kick out of seeing Luke’s speeder covered in bumper stickers advertising web sites and seeing C3P0’s handy new collectable attachments.” It’ll be a kick alright. A kick to the jumblies.
The same Digital Insertion will place small hovering signs on screen to display up-to-date information about local pricing and stock levels for the new collectable movie merchadise shown in every scene. Clearly, the phrase “Digital Insertion” is being used by Lucas in the sense of “pardon me sir, but you seem to have inserted your digits in me someplace uncomfortable.”
Yes, this truly was an exciting week for wordsmiths like me. So to celebrate, let’s play a vocabulary game. Make a sentence out of the following words:
Bite. Lucas. Ass. Can. My. White. Lily.
Answers on a postcard.
The Future Was Flush With Promise
February 18, 2004 // Link
I remember the exact moment that I realized I was living in the future. Not just some boring old normal future, but a real science fiction Atomic Age future like something from a 1950’s movie poster telling me to SEE the city in the clouds and HEAR the roar of jetpack engines.
It happened on a road trip. I was somewhere in the middle of America where the roads are long and straight and indistinguishable from one another save for the occasional world’s largest pumpkin or giant ball of rubber bands. I’d been driving for hours and I pulled into a rest stop on the side of the highway. It wasn’t much of a site, nor much of a sight: just a little parking lot in front of a single small building surrounded by deep woods. Inside the building were a pair of washrooms, some vending machines, and big maps on the walls.
The big maps on the walls let me know not only that I was lost but just how lost I was. They were very specific about it. “You are here,” they said, pointing to a little red dot that looked nothing like me. “But you think you’re here,” they continued, pointing across the room at a completely different map. Of a completely different state.
I was off by two full time zones. That’s what I get for using a small inflatable globe as my navigational system. I’ve always been a firm believer that the only truly useful landmarks are visible from space. I’m quite good at directions like “go that way until you reach Lake Superior, then turn left” but I’m not so good at “take I-165 to the I-156 cutoff, then follow I-615 for 516 miles until it becomes I-516...”
I have an unfortunate habit of going to get bread and ending up in Virginia. A car filled with books on tape is a dangerous temptation for me. In this particular case I started out with the best intentions of going to a movie and I just kept driving and driving until I had no idea where I was.
Wait, where was I? Oh right, a roadside rest stop two time zones over. Like I said, it was in the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere. Just me and trees and a pair of know-it-all smarty maps and maybe bears. But it wasn’t the maps that told me I was living in the fabulous future, it was the washrooms.
At first I’d just gotten out of my car to stretch my legs. I thought it would help me reach the pedals, but upon reflection I decided it would be better just to pull my seat forward. (Buh-dum-pah! Thanks, I’ll be here all week.) Since I was up anyway, I thought I’d head into the little building. That’s when I found the maps, but like I said the maps aren’t the point of this story. The point of this story is the washrooms. I should probably get to that point.
I walked up to the little building in the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere and the door slid open for me. I walked in, frowned at the maps which are not the point of the story, and then headed over to the washroom. The washroom door was also automated like the front door of the building, and it just as happily slid open for me.
Well, I assume it was happy to do so. It didn’t squeak or groan, but its silence didn’t seem particularly sullen either. If not content, it was probably at least resigned.
I approached a urinal, and I played a quick game of melt the white hockey puck. (I scored 15; not a personal best, but respectable.) When I stepped away from the urinal, it flushed itself.
The faucet turned on as I placed my hands in the sink, and shut itself off when I was finished washing my hands. A wall mounted dryer similarly exhaled warm air automatically to dry my hands.
The doors opened and shut themselves again as I left...and then halfway back to my car it hit me: this is the future! There I was in the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere and yet doors open themselves for me, and faucets run themselves for me, and urinals flush themselves for me, and shiny dryers whoosh warm air for my convenience. This is the kind of background technology that’s so pervasive we hardly notice it any more, but it’s the stuff of science fiction from just a few decades ago.
Our remote rural washrooms have doors straight out of Star Trek. We have motion sensors on our feckin’ urinals, fer chrissakes.
Screw the Internet and cellular phones and wireless computing. Forget about vaccines and mapping the human genome. And as for the fact that as I type this article there are a pair of remote vehicles being driven around the planet Mars: pshaw!
If you want a real sense of how much scientific progress we’ve made in the past fifty years, take a moment to pay attention to some of the throwaway technology that’s so common we ignore it. We are surrounded by near invisible technology that would until recently have been the domain of sci-fi writers. Almost all of us live with a level of assisted convenience that wouldn’t have been within reach of the world’s richest person just a few generations ago.
Take a drive out to the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere to pee if you want to fully grasp the fact that we are, right now, living in a golden science fiction age.
So the only question that remains is, where the hell is my jetpack? I’m sure we were promised jetpacks by now. Let’s take some of the big brains off the urinal motion sensor tweaking project and put more people on this jetpack thing, okay? Thanks.
Shrinking Priorities
February 25, 2004 // Link
Just last week I wrote about how I knew we were living in a Science Fiction Atomic Age because of the automation technology we put into remote public washrooms. Then I made the simple, common sense request that we take some people off the urinal motion sensor projects and put them on the jetpack projects.
Somehow, it seems some of you took that too literally. I didn’t mean just the urinal motion sensors specifically, but all the gadgetry one might file under “To Do Right After We Get That Jetpack Thing Worked Out.” I want all the cool toys, too, but let’s have some priorities people.
Why do I bring this up? Because yesterday Panasonic announced plans for the world’s smallest flash memory card. It will be called the “miniSD Card.” (Don’t even get me started about the use of capital letters in that one.)
What is the claim to fame of this miniSD Card? It’s “about 40 percent of the volume of the standard SD Memory Card.”
Yep, 40 percent smaller than those husky old SD cards. Ooh, what shall we do with all that free space once we swap our standard SD cards for these brand- (and monkey-) spanking new ones? I’m thinking of having a pool put in. Or maybe a free range for my chickens.
I draw the court’s attention to the size of a standard SD card, as illustrated in this graph. (Imagine I’m holding up a graph, lovingly hand embroidered, that equates an SD card with something really small like the portions in a French restaurant, my thumbnail, or The Big Print Book Of Reasons To Make A Smaller SD Card.)
Standard SD cards are about the size of a postage stamp and they weigh two grams. Just to be sure we’re all clear on this, I’m going to repeat that last bit: they weigh two grams. Let’s play it safe and repeat the “postage stamp” part again, too: they are about the size of a postage stamp. And once more for that all important “two grams” bit: two grams.
Two grams. Two. Grams. When weighed in grams, the standard SD card clocks in at a whopping...two. When I first read about the miniSD card my sigh weighed more than that.
Don’t get me wrong. I love gadgets and tiny technology. Smaller notebook computers are a good thing. Smaller MP3 players and cellular phones and PDAs are good too. I love my digital camera because it’s small enough to carry with me always, and thus I take many pictures I would miss if I’d bought a larger model. I love my iPod because I can use it as a coke mirror.
I like small, too. I’m an aficionado of small. If small had a fan club I’d write for its newsletter.
But I’m also a fan of reason. Common sense and I go way back, and we both agree that the world did not need a smaller SD card. Nobody in this world had ever walked down any street thinking “this mobile phone is great, but it’d be even better if I could shave a third of a gram off the weight of that darn SD card.”
And never once before this article, in the whole history of the world, has the sentence “the only thing between me and that confounded cure for cancer is an extra three eights of an inch width on my SD card” passed through anyone’s mind.
But you know what? It gets worse. Of course it does. Why the hell wouldn’t it? And what’s worse than a team of highly trained electronic whiz kids slaving for months or years on a flea penis reduction to the girth of stamp-sized SD cards?
I’ll tell you what. At the very same time they announced the miniSD cards Panasonic also announced the cards would all be packaged with an adaptor that makes them fit a standard SD card slot.
Guess what size the adaptor is? Go on, take a wild one. That’s right: it’s the size of a feckin’ standard SD card.
So in a move right out of a Terry Gilliam movie Panasonic has announced the unnecessary shrinking of an already shockingly tiny thing, and bundled it with an all but required adaptor to enlarge it back to the exact same size as before.
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. And I did try, but my fingers figured out what I was typing and they poked me something fierce in the eye as a warning.
There should be a list somewhere that we consult before we embark on the difficult and expensive task of making dubious improvements to our ubiquitous gagetry. Before we get around to things like an even smaller version of an already ubertiny card, somewhere someone should be able to say “Jetpacks? Check. Cell phone that discharges its battery into the ear canal of anyone who answers it in a cinema? Check. Mirror that shows kids the expression they’ll have in twenty years when they see a picture of the outfit they’re wearing now? Check.”
Hell, I’d even settle for “Toaster that works? Check.” But I’m still pulling for that jetpack.