Tag Archives: Philosophy

You, statistically speaking, are completely impossible and have amazing cosmic significance

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It may be slightly cliched but the size of the universe is truly inconceivable. Proxima Centauri is the closest star and only 4 light years away, yet even our fastest spacecraft (say the Voyager probes for example- zipping along nicely at a breezy 11 miles a second) wouldn’t reach Proxima Centauri for tens of thousands of years.

In about 40,000 years, Voyager one will pass AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis.

A million years to cross the backwaters of one spiral arm of a galaxy which is merely one of hundreds of thousands of millions just like it.

Are we insignificant? Probably.

Although, there is a chance that right now we could be the only way that the universe is aware of itself.

Which would mean mankind has amazing cosmic significance.

You, personally, are a massive anomaly, a statistical outlier on an enormous scale. With 23 chromosomes in the human DNA significant for reproduction, even assuming none were mutated in any way, the chances of you getting precisely the ones you got from both parents is 1 in 16,777,216. The chances of either of your parents getting precisely theirs was identically low.

Go ten generations back and you, personally, are such a statistically insignificant probability that calculating your personal likelihood of existance would be a fool’s errand, a waste of time. Forty generations back and you, as an individual, are less likely to occur in the exact manner that you did than the entire population of Australia is to collectively be struck by lightning sometime in their lifetimes. Humans have been around in a similar form to now for over two hundred thousand years. That is, making a few really safe assumptions, approximately 1,000,000 generations. At that point, you are best regarded as impossible. But that’s not all.

The statistical chances of the centillions of breeding pairs throughout all of evolution leading to this point being exactly as they were is even worse. All of this has been conducted in a vacuum, but it can’t be. We have to add in the likelihood that any given one of your heptillions of ancestors would meet a grisly end before reproducing. Slim margin, that. Even worse, the chance that life will form at all.

Then we have the statistical likelihood that our star will gain a planet with our orbit, our size, our makeup, and our atmosphere. Then that our precious star, Sol, will form at all. The milky Way, also, is a matter of chance. Perhaps the universe, even, is a matter of likelihoods and odds. Standing in the only point available at the time, roughly 13.7 billion years ago, and looking around at the rapidly expanding forms around you, nobody, not a single person on this earth no matter how precise or how exacting, would judge you for even half an instant for saying that you, statistically speaking, are completely impossible.

Nothing ever in the history of existance has ever been as improbable as the current state of affairs in the universe, and in a haptosecond it will be several orders of magnitude less likely to have occurred. But it did. So no matter how improbably, no matter how unlikely, there is a very real probability, more real than the probability of your existance 13.7 billion years ago, that tomorrow morning, round seven fifty three AM, I will turn into a dinosaur.

Alternatively, there’s the view that we aren’t at all existing by mere chance, and that the world was created for a purpose, and that we have been placed here on this particular world, at this time in particular, for some particular purpose.

We can forget it for you wholesale

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My memory has ways of pulling tricks on me in ways that are most embarrassing at completely inappropriate times. I was out at the shops last weekend with my wife and kids. We’re in the car park finding our car to load our loot and go home, when I hear a voice yelling out my name. I knew instantly who the voice belonged to. We’ll refer to her as “Alice”. Not because I forgot her name, mind you, but more to protect the innocent.

So I hear a voice calling out “Oi, Hoover!” from across the car park. My mind lights up bringing the name “Alice” to the front of my brain. As I’m turning around I mouth the words “Oh, that’s Alice“. Only Alice would yell out my name like that in a public place.

We come closer together, give each other a bit of a hug and start with the general chit chat about what we’re currently doing, where we are currently living, what our jobs are like etc etc. Now, it has been a while since I saw Alice and I’m not sure if she has met my kids, so I introduce them telling Alice their names and their ages.

Next comes the tricky part, and the point of this post. As I’m about to introduce Alice to the kids, my mind starts to freeze. I have the words centered at the front of my mind, written in nice big friendly letters.

I open my mouth to say “And kids, this is….” But the name has disappeared. Where did it go? Inside a quarter of a second I’ve gone from being able to confidently introduce my kids to an old friend to panicking about looking like a douche because I forgot her name. I just had it a few seconds ago! The word will still be there if I close my eyes and look really hard. Oh no, I’m taking too long. Better cover up and buy myself more time by continuing “… an old friend…” But her name doesn’t reappear. What am I going to do? I can’t very well ask her to introduce herself. I just posted something on her Facebook wall the other week. Perhaps if I try to visualise that post I’ll get it. Not coming, need to buy more time. “… and her name is…”

By this time the jig is up. My kids are looking at me expectantly, my wife is giving me “that” look and Alice, bless her, isn’t making eye contact with me at all. “I’m Alice” she says directly to the kids. I slap my forehead and swear under my breath. “I didn’t really forget your name”, I say. “I just had momentary lapse of memory! I know who you are! I talk to you on Facebook all the time! You were at our wedding!”

This happens more than I care to admit. I have this weird mental block when it comes to introducing people I know to others.

Yet for some reason I can remember my Tax File Number (who the hell knows that off by heart?), my Curtin Univeristy student number from 1988, what historical figures each King playing card is named after and other obscure numbers and facts.

And it’s not like I forgot her name, anyway. I even said it out loud as I heard her voice. But somehow there’s a mental block designed to maximise my appearance of being a douche when I mostly need to appear cool. Anyone else experience this? Does it have a name?

Top 10 things my kids will never know, but I will never forget

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I’m what you’d class as Gen X, and I had kids fairly late in life. It saddens me to know that there are a lot of things I grew up with during the 70s and 80s thinking they were normal which my kids will never know or experience. On the other hand, it’s a relief to know there are a lot of things I grew up with thinking they were normal which my kids will never know or experience. Some of these are just a nostalgia kick for me, but some are legitimately things that the generations being born now will have absolutely no frame of reference for.

  1. Life without the Internet. My kids aren’t going to live in a world where reliable data and information isn’t instantly available. Back in the old days, we needed to read things called “books”, most of which we got from “libraries” where you could borrow them for a short amount of time. They information was all stored in writing and diagrams on bound planes of a biological material called paper.
  2. No mobile phones. I watched a movie with my wife a couple months ago called “American Gangster“. You know, the one with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. What amazed me about the plotline of the movie wasn’t the lengths that some badguys are willing to go to in order to accumulate power and wealth. Rather, it was the fact that these guys were able to set up and manage an international crime syndicate without having the use of mobile phones. The idea that I can almost instant contact almost anyone in the world via the use of a little square thing in my pocket without any wires is still mind blowing.
  3. Grey static. I wrote about this in another post, but the idea that turning on the TV and finding a horrible grey static snowstorm screen and loud white noise instead of your favourite cartoon because the aerial has been disconnected or the TV is tuned to the wrong channel is foreign to youngsters today. Instead, they’ll get a nice bright soothing medium blue screen, possibly with a menu asking what channel they want to get. I remember rolling out of bed on a Saturday morning to watch Autobots or Top Cat or something, still half asleep. When that wall of noise hits you, it sure wakes you up!
  4. Diesel Trains. Before the Perth train system was electrified they were all diesel. Loud, smelly and obnoxious. The passenger carriages were old, tattered, dirty and squeaky. But on the plus side they had windows which you could open and hang out of, or at the very least you could rest your elbow on the ledge. The exciting parts of the trip to the city was in between Bassendean and Maylands which was the fastest part of the journey and where you’d usually meet a train coming the other way. Boom! The sound of passing another train going at 80km/h in the other direction without any warning was quite startling, and would set most babies off crying. But the best thing about these old clunkers was the lack of automatic doors. The doors could remain open the whole way! This provided quite a bit of entertainment when you’d watch someone running for the train as it took off, as well as when it pulled into the station. I’d often see people fall flat on their faces by alighting before the train ground to a full halt.
  5. Milk BottleMilk in bottles. Yep, we had milk in bottles, kids. Glass bottles. And they were delivered right to our door. It became a bit of an issue during the summer if both parents were working and you weren’t as diligent in your collection duties as you should have been, but it was a pretty good system if you worked with it. But we hardly ever did. You were supposed to put your empties out regularly, and you were supposed to pay for the milk regularly but we’d usually let 20-30 bottles collect before we put them out and I’m fairly certain the milkman was close to blacklisting us because we wouldn’t pay him until he threatened us. When a new bottle was opened, you get this 1-inch layer of cream under the foil top to dig out with a spoon or, if you were less refined, your finger.  Do milkmen even exist any more?
  6. Life without remotes and motors. In another article I wrote about my daughter’s first encounter with a medieval window and a winder that you had to physically rotate like you were some sort of middle age peasant.  She had no idea that they even existed. Likewise, kiddies today are missing out on TVs without remote controls (you gotta get off your arse and walk the whole way to the TV to change channel) or even garage roller doors you had to manually open and close. Actually, we never had a garage in the house I grew up in but the first house I bought had a Rolladoor without a remote or a motor so I’d have to get out of the car in the rain and unlock the door and life it up, jump back in to the car, drive it forward 4m, get out and then lower and lock the door. Now it’s all push-button convenience.
  7. Computer sounds. Like a modem handshake. Or a screen degauss. Or a dot matrix printer sending you deaf. LCD and LED screens nowadays don’t need maintenance, and thermal or inkjet printers are near silent. I loved the sounds of a 56k modem because you knew shit was about to go down.
  8. Camera FilmCameras with film. Our family camera was a Pentax something-or-other. It used real film, usually with 36 or 24 shots if I remember correctly. None of this point and click stuff with auto focus, red eye reduction and other high tech stuff. No instantly being able to see your shot in a minature LCD screen and deciding if you wanted to keep it or not. You’d have to make every single shot count because it’d often be weeks until you got the prints back. Once you used up your 36 shots, you’d manually wind the film back into the canister and then take it down to a photomat to get it developed. The price usually included either double prints for the cost of singles or a free replacement film. If the photomat guy was especially helpful, he’d go through every photo with you and tell you where you screwed up and how he would have made the shot better. I never got to take that many photos myself when I was young, and most of the ones I took were rubbish but it was fun. Hell, I even did a photo and animation course at some college when I was 13 or so for kicks and we did a pinhole camera among other things which is about as low tech as you can get. We got to expose some film and develop it using all the different chemicals, then we hung them out to dry! I want to do another course for because my photo skills are crap.
  9. Planet Pluto.
  10. Things built to last. This was a lament of my dad and even his dad, I think. Both of them could identify quality goods, rugged things built to last no matter what you threw at them. I guess this has rubbed off on me a bit because instead of a calendar with pictures of cats or some band I gave a friend a sizable chunk of rock and metal and 2 minutes worth of lessons in how to use it. It was a perpetual calendar and would last until 2038. She recently told me she still has it, more than 15 years later. Consumer goods today seem to have a built-in designed obsolescence or even a perceived obsolescence where it’s desirable to have the newer thing because…. it’s just newer. Most of the toys I’ve bought my kids in the last ten years are either broken or neglected, but I’ve still got toys from my youth in storage which, though worn, still work as well as the day they were opened.

Honorable mentions: video game arcades, the Soviet Union, MTV with music videos, rotary phones, a good work ethic (wait, did I ever have this?), block cheese that’s not pre-grated, riding your bike out on the street without supervision or a helmet until after sundown.

Top 5 movie school bullies

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Nobody likes bullies. In all seriousness, bullying is a form of abuse, and usually comprises physical or emotional attacks over time and can lead to trauma or even suicide and nobody should have to deal with bullying. Movies can deal with bullies and bullying more light-heartedly, portraying them ultimately as weak, insecure individuals who always get their comeuppance. Here’s a list of my favourite movie schoolyard bullies.

Biff Tannen from the Back to the Future series (1985-1990). Biff comes from a long line of Tannen bullies. We saw Great Grandfather Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen in Back to the Future 3, and Biff’s grandson Griff in Back to the Future 2. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree as all three Tannens use brute force and intimidation. The timeline changes (hey, it’s a time paradox movie) and in part of the movie, at least, he gets humbled but inthe beginning because Biff isn’t all that intelligent he only gets through highschool by forcing George McFly to do his homework. This bulling continues through adulthood as Biff becomes George’s Supervisor at the same company using the same strategy of bullying George into completing his work and taking the credit to get promoted. Like most bullies he’s braver when he’s backed up by thug friends, but crumbles when someone stands up to him.

Johnny Lawrence from The Karate Kid (1984) Johnny is probably the most mindless bully of these five. He’s a Karate expert, leader of his gang who are all members of the Cobra Kai martial arts dojo, and protégé of John Kreese, a Vietnam veteran with no time for feeble concepts like restraint or compassion. “Strike First, Strike Hard, No Mercy” is his motto. Johnny is the most one dimensional big screen bully and just lets his fists and feet do the talking. If you have something he wants, then he’ll beat you. If he doesn’t like you, then he’ll beat you. If you get up, he’ll beat you again. There’s no way you can beat Johnny and he knows it. Unless, that is, you have a humble, mystic Okinawan immigrant father figure named Miyagi on your side to teach you that belts should only be used to keep your pants up. Johnny redeems himself, somewhat, when he loses the final battle in the conflict with Daniel-san by handing him the tournament trophy himself.

Chris Hargensen from Carrie (1976) Chris Hargensen is beautiful, rebellious and manipulative. She’s the opposite of the timid, plain, inexperienced Carrie and takes great delight at initiating a humiliating and frightening ordeal for Carrie in the showers. Chris is forced to serve detention and is also barred from attending the upcoming prom as punishment and the rest of the movie revolves around plotting revenge on Carrie by manipulating her friends and the school hunk to set her up for a shocking prank at the prom. This is a different style of bullying to most of the other characters. None of  it is physical, it’s all behind the scenes and unknown to Carrie.

Regina George from Mean Girls (2004) With girls like Regina stalking the halls of our modern schools, all I can say is that I’m glad I attended high school in the 80s as a male rather than in the 2000′s as a girl. It would be easy and simplistic to describe Regina as a bitch. She’s so much more than that. She is pure evil in the form of a hot blonde. She wields multiple bullying weapons in her reign of terror. In fact she has stocked up on the whole arsenal: verbal sniping, emotional sieging, tactical threats and intimidation, nuclear tipped slander and other devious or more direct bullying methods to put others down and keep herself on a pedestal where she can hog the spotlight. I’m scared of her.

Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter series (2001-2009). If you had a name like Draco you’d be have a chip on your shoulder too. Even his surname makes it sound like he a maladjusted little prick. He’s the main antagonist in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince employs bigotry and snobbery in addition to devious, cunning use of magic to make life hell for Harry, who he feels isn’t of the right lineage to attend Wizard school. The son of Lucious and Narcissa he was raised to believe in the importance of “Blood Purity”, and Muggle-born wizards and witches simply do not belong at Hogwarts and should be denied education in magical practices.  He uses psychological means and verbal taunts to demean and denigrate his victims rather than physical thuggery, which he leaves up to his accomplices.

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The Internet makes you stupid

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I dare ya, I double dare ya mother fuckerI’ve been thinking lately on my online patterns of behaviour. I spend a lot of time online. I work in IT, and Internet is critical to the job I work in and the customers I serve. I research solutions to technical problems using various intranet and extranet resources, and have the ability to remotely log in to customer sites all over the world to perform hands on support. This week alone I have digitally “visited” sites in all six inhabited continents, managing servers as if I was sitting at the keyboard.  Outside of work, how much time I spend online depends on who you ask. I think I’m fairly restrained in my usage, and don’t feel the need to spend a great amount of time in front of the computer when I come home, since I’ve already spent 9 hours at work.

I hear about Internet addiction all the time. I’ve read interviews about people, mostly kids but sometimes those more mature, who go through a withdrawal if they’re away from their digital life for more than a few hours. The moment they wake up they’re on their computer checking Facebook or other social media sites. On the way to work they’ll be tweeting like their life depended on it. If it’s not Twitter or Facebook, it’s Texting. You’ve heard of Tennis Elbow? Try SMS Thumb for size.

It’s not until people get to work that the full cost of peoples seemingly endless appetite for distractions is realised. I must say that I don’t observe this at my own work place (hi guys!) but I know people who spend more time on Facebook than they spend on their duties when at work. Between Facebook, Twitter, Texts, Instant Messengers and emails it’s a miracle they get any work done at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the social media aspect of the Internet and often hit up Facebook at home and even at work. Unlike some people, though, I do all this in moderation. I can’t even say I really enjoy Facebook all that much, as there’s sometimes a very low signal to noise ratio.

Having said that, there are other online distractions to tempt you. I compare the Internet to a large Newsagent which has magazines on every subject you care to name. I have absolutely no interest in about 90% of the mags I find at these news stands, and there’s about 1 in a hundred I would find indispensible and would buy without thought if I had the money. Browsing the Internet is like flicking though the rest of  the “fringe” magazines, the ones that aren’t central or vital but catch your eye and pique your interest enough for you to reach out and open them up. You quickly turn the pages, skimming the titles and articles for something interesting. You look at the pictures and graphics for something attractive and meaningful. You might quickly cover the whole magazine by flicking through it in under 15 seconds but you may spend a minute skimming one or two articles which seem interesting. You never really spend the time to sit down and read the mag from cover to cover, at least not without the owner kicking you out.

So it is with the Internet. Any web page has text and pictures, and may include other rich media covering the subject at hand. But there’s also handy hyper-links to other related articles which lead on to yet other pages. Hell, even at Wikipedia you can get completely distracted from your original train of thought or research and wind up at completely unrelated articles before you can say “six degrees of Kevin Bacon“. I find myself doing this all too often.

What I have noticed is that this has effected the way I think. I’ve change the way I use my brain and how I focus on tasks. Rather than being able to focus on one particular task for any amount of time, I find that my focus switches from one task to another in rapid succession, often coming back a number of times to the same task to progress it a little more before switching to another new task. This seems normal to me now. I’m distracted by emails, phone calls, alarms and instant messages, but these are all evil necessities in being able to perform my duties. While writing this very article, I’ve checked Facebook, the current Commonwealth Games medal tally, the latest Formula 1 Grand Prix news, how F-Duct technology was developed, tonight’s TV schedule, when the next episode of Caprica will be available for download, what other movies Eric Stoltz has been in… and so on. It’s why I found it so difficult to sit through a trial when I had jury duty. There was nowhere to escape. There was no control. I had to sit there and focus on one tedious subject for a few days and it was hard.

At work I can be working on many different calls on different subjects at any one time, and I have to switch between, say, hardcore VB or C# coding to a  more artistic user interface design solution and anything in between very quickly. The range of products we have is hard to keep up with, and when you introduce new versions of these products each with new features and sometimes new bugs I find that I am swamped with too much information, too much stuff to remember.

Internet makes us (well, me, at least) think broad and shallow, rather than narrow and deep. I can’t tell whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, really. It could be argued that this is the way of things, now. To live in the 21st Century is to think fast, move from task to task, have many transient and temporary relationships as opposed to a few deep and lasting ones. It means rent rather than buy, and to be a jack of all trades and master of none. To know lots of facts and have many experiences, but to understand little and have few meaningful memories.

What do you guys think? Leave a comment if you can pull yourself away from Farmville long enough.

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Hey Richard, what’s the time?

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I had a friend at Uni called Richard who was quite a character. He’d sometimes sit there barking like a dog for no reason. Sometimes he’d purr like a kitten simply because he was tired of barking. He’d go through periods where he’d take everything literally. But above all he was always very precise with his language. If you were to ask him:

Brian Hey Richard, what’s the time?

Time is the continuous passage of existence in which events pass from a state of potentiality in the future, through the present, to a state of finality in the past.

Brian No no. What is the time?

The time is the continuous passage of existence in which events pass from a state of potentiality in the future, through the present, to a state of finality in the past.

Yes, Richard was a bit of a dick but he still was a great guy.

Lately I’ve been thinking on time. What is time? What is the time? Is time good for you? What can you do with time? Is time even real?

Well it turns out that time can do a number of things. Time is like money. In fact, a lot of people confuse the two. I don’t know the current exchange rate, but you can save time and you can also spend it. Too bad I can’t see my current balance, but if I wanted to give someone my own time then I could if I wanted.

Despite what Douglas Adams wrote, time isn’t merely an illusion although time is relative. I’m often asked, “Hey Brian, you got a minute?” and from experience this minute that I give to someone can end up being more than a couple hours, so what you might think to be one minute might appear to me to be very much longer. I think it was Einstein who came up with that. “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

Time flies. Yes, time can actually get airborne. Maybe that’s how Long-jump and High-jump athletes and Michael Jordan seem to defy gravity. They spend a lot of time training, so it helps them fly. Time seems to be more efficient if you’re happy because people say that time files when you’re having fun, and athletes tend to be a fairly jovial lot.

You’ve got to be careful, though, how you handle time. Time is something that you can serve, I’m told. And if you serve time, the time isn’t going to fly because you aren’t having fun. Doing time is similar to serving time so if a friend asks you if you want to do some time, just say “no”.

But time also seems to have medicinal properties, so it can’t be all that bad. “Time heals all wounds”. Thankfully, time doesn’t wound all heels or we’d all need crutches. JFK warned against this when he said “We must use time as a tool, not as a crutch,” which means we should use our time to accomplish our goals, not as an excuse when we fail. So if you don’t have time to exercise, then make some! Yes, you can actually make time! You usually make time for things that are important to you.

Time moves in mysterious ways. Time can be “up” but I’ve never heard of time being “down”. It’s usually “over”, but never “under”. Most people are behind the times, few people are ahead of their time. So I guess if you’re out of time then you need to keep your head up and look ahead and you’ll eventually find some time, probably flying overhead.

You can tell time, but time also tells. What does it tell you?

Bad kids movies: The case against “The Clone Wars”

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This is an article I wrote at a Star Wars collecting forum in September 2008, discussing the release of The Clone Wars animated movie. I’ve been reflecting lately on the quality of what my kids watch and comparing it to what I used to watch. With my kids now coming to better appreciate Star Wars, should I introduce them to The Clone Wars movie and the animated series? Read on!

If you can't make it good, make it 3DKids shows are often written poorly, and the excuse is that kids don’t need good plots, just smarmy messages. And if they aren’t exposed to quality stuff, then they pretty much expect everything is supposed to be that bad, and think of it as normal.

When you consider how many kids (including me) were raised to think so many bad shows from the 70s and 80s are “classics” despite them being essentially just advertising disguised with some minimal plot elements, it shows part of the problem that film goers and TV audiences accept the poor state of film and TV writing as normal. They simply do not know any better.

Which, I suppose, is part of the point. Why would you invest in decent shows and writers if you didn’t have to? Why break away from the formulaic style if people don’t expect anything different?

Yet, then we decry the state of TV, and the horrible films, and the tissue thin plots and barely cognizant themes. People are willing to accept bad film and television, because they just don’t know that there can be anything better. Part of the problem is also Political Conservatism. Kids movies can’t have swear words now, or nudity let alone an intricate story line. Some of the best movies of my childhood have naughty words and boobies.

Childrens’ literature is fine wire to walk. You have to have plots and characters that resonate, and that are understandable, and expose kids to good writing. Reading well, they will be able to have a bar set to shoot for themselves. Same with TV and film. If you hold that bar low, that’s what they’ll shoot for. They may extend beyond it eventually, but the bulk is going to be mediocre at best, and if the bar is set low to begin with, then that is where it will stay.

As far as the animation goes, Pixar and old-school Disney (the original movies up to the early 90′s. None of the direct-to-video sequel garbage, certainly almost none of the new stuff) prove that childrens’ movies can be excellently made on almost all levels. When the possibility for quality is proven, it leaves studios no excuse for sub-standard crap, even if it’s sub-standard crap for kids.

Compare the Pixar movies to the Dreamworks /everyone else releases that inevitably copy them. Both studios ostensibly make kids’ movies, but Pixar produces wholly excellent stuff like clockwork, while Dreamworks’ films are all over the place and are sometimes quite amazingly shitty.

Clone Wars comes from Lucas’ inability to put together a compelling narrative or create characters we can sympathize with. It’s just another example of Lucas losing all track of what made Star Wars great to begin with. That Lucas used the same excuses for Clone Wars as he did for the prequel trilogy, and that the Clone Wars suffers from the same weaknesses as the prequel trilogy, indicates that it’s a failing of a movie as a movie, not just as a childrens‘ movie.

Maybe we all look at the original trilogy through rosy glasses, but I can still watch the first three films and enjoy them, and also the prequel trilogy though I accept some can’t stomach them. The special effects hold up, the lines are more memorable, the pacing is generally better, and it generally just felt… more cohesive. Not some hastily cobbled together mess which turns Star Wars into a horrendous whirling abyss of sulphurous feces. I maintain that the six movies by themselves are great. It’s every other SW movie which is bringing things down – Ewoks, Caravan of Courage, The Holiday Special, and the special editions. Those animated Cartoon Network SW CW cartoons do have some merit, at least for me.

You could argue “Well, you’re an adult. Your opinion doesn’t matter because it was made for kids.”

In conversations about movies, there is nothing that pisses me off more than a statement like this. (Well, if you were to say Keira Knightly is unattractive you’d see me go all Hulk on yo ass). What you’re saying is that if a movie is made for kids, then nobody need bother trying to make it good as long as kids enjoy it.

It’s this attitude that leads to cheap, crappy, mind-numbing, toy-selling Saturday morning cartoons and pure shit movies like “Shark Tale” and “The Country Bears” that have no standards beyond keeping kids still for 90 minutes.

Anyone setting out to make a kids movie should be aiming for Pixar/”The Iron Giant” quality. If you don’t get there, at least you tried. But the people who make kids movies without any ambition toward doing quality work that stands up to scrutiny are just out to make money off the fact that most parents have very low standards for their children’s entertainment.

Of course, in a world where “reality” shows and talent competitions dominate pop culture, these same parents clearly have low standards for their own entertainment too.

The point is, kids are not dumb, and adults shouldn’t underestimate their intellect. Being a “kid’s movie” is no excuse for lazy movie-making, something Pixar has proven over and over again. Dreamworks frankly just doesn’t “get it” – they think the key to success is running formulaic franchises into the ground (Shrek 3 anyone?). But Pixar enjoys massive commercial and artistic success by purposely avoiding formula, being inventive and original and talking to kids like real people (something Walt Disney used to do). I find it difficult to truly classify their movies as “kid’s films”, because actually, they’re not – they’re just great films that also happen to be very kid-friendly. Maybe that’s the example Dreamworks and Lucas should follow.

As for George Lucas, I give him all the credit in the world for being a great visionary and bringing the original Star Wars to life. At the same time, it’s very clear he’s lost his way these last 20 years, and he’s only a shadow of the artist he once was. In a funny way, the independence he so boldly sought was his undoing once it was granted.

Mandurah train station: more fun than rats in a maze

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Typical Mandurah line patrons

People who get on and off the train at Mandurah are a strange lot. I don’t mean to imply that all people who live in Mandurah and surrounding suburbs are less intelligent than average, but if you were to go only by activity you observe at Mandurah train station then you might be forgiven for thinking that there is something in the water inhibiting cognitive abilities. For those of my non-Perth friends, I’ll give a bit of background first.

The Perth to Mandurah train line opened around Christmas 2007. It connects Perth to Mandurah, which is WAs second largest city located about 70km south of Perth. It also provides light commuter rail services to the southwest suburbs with train stops are large centres like Cockburn, Kwinana and Rockingham. It was quite a significant and costly undertaking, and almost doubled the total length of commuter rail in Perth. It takes about 55 minutes to travel the full length.

The Mandurah line has been going now for about three years, but am still not sure people down in Mandurah have the hang of it yet:

  • As the train is pulling into Mandurah, there’s naturally people there waiting to get on it. During peak times, it may take 4-5 minutes until it’s ready to turn around and leave. During non-peak times they usually run every 15-20 minutes. What I don’t get is that as the train pulls into the station, people will walk or hurriedly skip along the platform beside the train to remain in proximity to some particular door, continually pressing the button in a vain attempt to open it. Often the total length walked will be longer than two carriages, each of which has two doors. Don’t these people understand that you can simply wait in one spot and let a door come to you? Sometimes I’ll be standing on the platform and one of these over enthusiastic mouth breathers will crash into me, and then look at me as if I’m something they’ve stepped in. “Dude, why are you standing there? Can’t you see I’m trying to get on the train? Let me past!”
  • In the evening on the way home from work, people will get up from their seats and wait near the door a full 3km from the station (I’ve measured it on google maps). It takes another 4-5 minutes for the train to slow down and come to a stop on the platform, but there’s always a bunch of people crowded around the door waiting to get out long before the train is anywhere near the destination. Why is this? It’s not like Mandurah is a particularly busy station, and there’s usually not that many people getting off which might contribute to a bottleneck at the exit gates or in the car park exit. Also, people seem to walk along the whole train so they’re right near the very end door, as if walking through the train will save them having to walk along the platform. It doesn’t make it any quicker to get off because so many people attempting to disembark through one door causes a bottleneck.
  • The exit turnstyles are another source of puzzlement for me. Like most places we’ve got gates which open and close to let one person through at a time after reading their electronic tickets. To cater for people in wheelchairs or with prams or luggage and also for travelers without electronic tickets there’s a wider exit with no gate. It does have an electronic card reader, but is also staffed by transit guards who check that people going though the exit either possess a cash ticket of correct value or swipe their electronic tickets. The strange thing is that at least two thirds of people exiting the station prefer to use this wider, non-gated exit. I can’t understand why, for two reasons. Firstly, I’ve observed that around half the people going through this exit actually possess electronic tickets. To cater for wheelchairs, the ticket reader is closer to the ground and angled in such a way that it makes it inconvenient to use if you’re able bodied. So you usually end up with a queue of people bending over to swipe their cards and then bobbing up and down to read the feedback on how much credit they have left on their cards. Meanwhile I calmly walk through the gated exit without queuing or breaking stride. Secondly, Mandurah is the last stop on a very long train ride and cash fares are almost 9 dollars. Electronic tickets give you an automatic 25% discount so I would have thought there’d be less people with cash tickets at Mandurah. It’s always the same people with cash tickets paying 1/3rd more than they should. For the stations closer to Perth, a 25% saving of a cheaper fare isn’t much at all, but the discount sure helps with a higher fare.

On the plus side, I haven’t experienced any violence on the Mandurah line like I used to on the Midland line, so there’s that.