Big Blue Arndt: August 2008 Archives

I saw Star Wars The Clone War opening week and overall I enjoyed the movie, but I'll make my thoughts known in a post later in the next seven days. It needs being said that what I did not like enjoy about the movie is far easier to articulate and is much more interesting.

What the AP has written about Anakin's new sidekick being a more interesting romantic component than the ever-dry and stand-offish love interest he already had bears reading. Of course, this sort of statutory pursuit is definite Dark Side.

My favorite part?

From there, she exhibits enough battle pluck and witty repartee to win over her brooding mentor - he warms quickly to the idea of having a young assistant (who Mark Rahner of the Seattle Times describes as "a tiny girl with huge eyes and a tube-top who looks like a slutty Disney character." Fair enough).

Ultimately one wonders what Anakin will say when he, as Darth Vader, hacks this child to tiny Lolita pieces. Would something that is inappropriate to the general themes of the franchise (as tattered as they all may have been left by the morally-vacuous prequels and the mongrel Expanded Universe) be ultimately beneficial to the combined narrative? That is not relevant as even Darth Vader will not engage in romantic action with a child character. Is the Padawan intended to be a child character?

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson was watching Three Kings (starring George Clooney) recently.

Three Kings, by my reckoning was made in the nineties, but more relevantly the movie was made before the 9/11 terrorist attacks and reflects a different ethos that popular culture had towards Iraq and our country's prior invasion and occupation. Nowadays the idea is that we did too much by deposing Saddam Hussein from power. President George Walker Bush, Bush 43, is wrong.  Three Kings presents everything as if President George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush 41, was/is wrong.

The idea is clearly presented that we did too little by leaving Saddam Hussein in power.The only common denominator between not doing enough in Three Kings and doing too much in Redacted, Syriana, Rendition, etc. ...seems to have been that whatever the U.S. did was always wrong — whether too little or too much.

I think it is a fair question whether Dr. Hanson is onto something or not.

The better question I want to ask is whether Three Kings was persuasive.

The Truth Product does a very rough overview of John McCain's time in, around, and for the Vietnam conflict. My favorite part is the encounter of Bud Day.

McCain shared a cell with Medal of Honor winner Col. Bud Day, a man who escaped the Viet Cong with a sprang knee, lived in the jungle on berries and uncooked frogs, swam across a river with an arm that was broken in three places and was captured AGAIN by the Viet Cong… where he met none other than John McCain (why is this not a movie?)

Indeed why is it not a movie? It sounds like a very epic story to me, however dark and even sad at times. Very few see the life and experiences of prisoners of war as adventures, let alone really exciting stories. I am among those. With very few exceptions I find the accounts depressing rather than greatly entertaining.

If John McCain was not a Presidential candidate, and at this point a politician among politicians, his young life as a soldier and hero is a good story.

MInd you, Bud Day's is more exciting.

Warp drive in Star Trek essentially works by harnessing massive amounts of energy through matter/anti-matter reactions regulated by Dilithium crystals and using that energy to create a "warp bubble" around the starship allowing the vessel's mass to remain constant or even decrease instead of decrease allowing the ship to travel as superluminal speeds without the accompanying increase of mass which is what makes faster-than-light travel prohibitive in the real world. Obviously in the fiction that is not all there is to it, but I figured awhile ago that said "Warp Drive" did not involve literally warping space. The result, of course, is the same however you define the technobabble, treknobabble, or describe it at all: the Starship Enterprise manages to travel from one Adventure Planet to another.

In some stories space battles are even viable events between the relatively static settings.

In real life a deliberate purposeful control of an object's physical mass is a less viable option. As far as I know, and I am not a scientist, it is impossible.

Scientists actually declare that "Star Trek warp drive" is a possibility, according to the UK Telegaph. By which those scientists mean that the effects are the same. They obviously do not mean that their warp bubble is an element or tool for mass-shifting effects and there is no method with the prerequisite of synthesizing or discovering anti-matter elements in substantially massive quantities. This is fortunate. Fortunately the idea of warp drive involves literally warping space, and relying upon past scientific discoveries and ideas. In other words the science fiction idea reminds me of what used to be science fictional concepts which were just variations, deviations, and expansions of existing technologies. Unfortunately the use of string theory concepts in technology is not as far along as I would like it, but who can complain. The theories and ideas are dark energy, responsible for the expansion of the universe, and the 10th dimension involved in string theory.

Now Dr Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics.

In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could "warp" space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.

By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds.

The theories of the speed of light are only effective speed limits at "unwarped 'flat' space." Space itself has no speed limit and if a "spaceship can sit "at rest in its small [warp] bubble of space" it can skim and coast along the flow of space as the universe expands.

In the scheme outlined by Dr Cleaver dark energy would be used to create the bubble: if dark energy can be made negative in front of the ship, then that patch of space would contract in response.

I'm oversimplifying but the scheme cannot be put in practice yet anyway. I might also be muddling whether the ship is in the bubble or on the bubble. The bubble is a metaphor anyway. As it is the key to warping space in this manner is putting stuff that was in front of the ship behind the ship; it is changing the size of spatial dimension 10 that alters the energy that would "propel the ship faster than the speed of light." Does anyone have an engine or mechanism to alter the 10th spatial dimension described in string theory?

Most know Isaac Hayes as a singer, or as the creator of the Shaft theme. Probably slightly more will know him as Chef until Scientology finally invaded the humor centers of his mind.

I recall him from Truck Turner and as a fan of and character in Stargate SG-1.

Issac Hayes died yesterday, quite young, and I shall miss him.

Bernie Mac, the least annoying actor in Transformers and Charlie's Angels, and more importantly, and on a serious note, the actor and stand-up comedian who starred in Ocean's 11, Ocean's 13, and in his own television sitcom, passed away August 9th from complications of pneumonia.

My father passed away from similar illness.

My proper obituary will be forthcoming in a few weeks.

I missed it the first time. I did not get to see it. The original plan was for it to be sold on iTunes and then DVD after being removed from its three-day run on the original website.

Hulu.com is hosting the sing-along blog, and I believe this is legal.

I cannot watch it now. I hope it will still be on when I can watch it later.