Preview 3

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Here's a preview page of an ongoing strip entitled Eternal Death ... set in a Victorian-era world where vampires and liches rule benevolently over humans. Gabrielle Harland, a problem solver, becomes embroiled in the politics of those who rule, and those who would challenge that rule.

The artist is Hedda Hasselby, whose manga-esque style lends the story an extra element of style. She is working away feverishly at the first episode when the pressures of real life allow.

History as a Second Language

Where do you go for your Egyptian history? Someone who has a degree in Teaching English as a Second Language of course. Dr Carmen Boulter's 5-part documentary, The Pyramid Code, is currently showing on the History Channel.

Her credentials are rather less than impressive. Oddly enough her university of Calgary website page avoids mentioning her award-winning documentary series (awards for Score, Motion Graphics and Design Package).

The basic premise is that we have all be told lies by 'traditional Egyptology' and we need to re-examine the evidence.

The conclusion Dr Boulter comes up with is that the pyramids are vast electrical machines, now broken, that were part of some sophisticated stellar worship/observation and harmonic healing system.

'Traditional Egyptology' is presented as a straw man, not only laughably wrong but actively trying to hide the real story by misrepresenting, hiding and destroying evidence. Conspiracy theories are wonderful things, as it's always impossible to refute them ... "You must be one of them!" the believers cry.

The arguments presented by Dr Boulter are done so without evidence, and are filled with mystical ramblings about what spiritual life must have been like for the invented star worshipers she posits.

The supporting experts are a motley collection of oddball Egyptian History re-interpreters, the half-baked ideas of which are manipulated to fit Dr Boulter's own claims.

It's simply rubbish. Easily refuted rubbish.

So how did she get a 5-part documentary series, and why is it being shown by the History Channel?

The series is available in bite-sized YouTube chunks, and on DVD, as well as the endless cycle of repeats it is sure to have, if you wish to go look. It's worth a laugh. But that's about it.

No wonder I generally avoid the History as a Second Language Channel.

(More 'almost comics' soon).

A new low for the History Channel?

I just watched a charming little 1979 war movie, starring Roger Moore, David Niven, Elliot Gould, Tell Savalas, Stefanie Powers, Sonny Bono and Richard Roundtree. Quite the cast. The movie is so-so action flick with Roger Moore doing a cod-German accent, Gould hamming it up, Powers playing a stripper, and everyone having fun.

The question is, what was it doing on the History Channel? It has the historical accuracy of a Grandpa Simpson rant. (Now my story begins in Nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" because the Kaiser had stolen the wold "twenty." I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles.)

Nazi super-rockets on a small Greek Island. Only Telly Savalas can save the day, with a little help from some greedy ragtag grifters (a professor, stand-up comedian, stripper, cook, magician, etc.) who end up sacrificing it all for patriotic duty.

Throw in a disco number with the closing credits (Keep Tomorrow For Me by Heatwave) and you have something that was a whole lot of silly fun, but so anti-historical it could have been a right-wing retelling of the Reagan years (the great communicator won the cold war you know).

The History Channel has some utter garbage on it--docos about ghost hunters, Nostrodamus predictions, UFOs, and how the moon landings were faked--but at least the usual lousy fare pretends to be about history. Showing a 1979 comedic war film is a new low. Although I must say, I did enjoy it.

Beta testing over

Our VCR packed it in the other day, so we went on an expedition to find a new one. It was fruitless. It seems that the humble VCR is as dead as the dodo.

None of the stores we visited would sell us a simple video cassette recorder. If we wanted one that came as a combo with a DVD, well that was possible if a trifle expensive. In the end we bought ourselves a DVR, rendering our video library somewhat useless. However, since our video library consisted of a copy of the Phantom Menace and two Marillion concerts it won't be missed too much (especially not by my wife).

So my thoughts turned to the history of the humble video recorder. The idea of recording TV signals onto tape was one that baffled engineers for some time. The tape had to pass over the recording/reading at high speed to accommodate the require amount of information. An early prototype fired a huge reel of tape past the recording head ... 240 inches per second ... for a few seconds of recording time.

The practical solution was simple but revolutionary ... rotate the heads in the opposite direction to the tape. That way the relative speed between them was still high, but the length of tape require was dramatically reduced. The video recorder became a practical device.

The VCR was one of those devices that the marketers were slow to grasp. The recording features of many models were not advertised, as executives could not fathom why anyone would record a TV program. It was assumed the market would be for pre-recorded tapes, which were consequently over-priced and under-marketed ... and under-sold. No-one predicted the rise of the video rental store.

When my parents first owned a Video (we left the CR off ... it was the 80s, we didn't have time to say it all, it was the me generation, not the meh generation.) the only place that rented tapes was the local petrol station. I remember being horribly bummed because they had a copy of Vanishing Point but it was on Betamax. Oh, how I wished we had a Beta recorder.

The whole Beta versus VHS conflict was a lopsided war, because the Beta blank tapes were expensive and too short to record a long movie (with adverts). Who cares which one was better, one was more practical and cheaper. It was the Tiger tank versus the T-34 all over again, but with fewer deaths.

The current file-sharing controversy is very familiar to those who remember the movie industries attempts to outlaw VCRs, through long lawsuits and public statements about the death of movies.

There have been plenty of innovations whose impact was not foreseen clearly by those who created them. The computer, famously.

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- Popular Mechanics, 1949

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

But one everyone forgets that car was also seen in very limited terms by its developers. Cars were seen an expensive luxury items. Basically they were all high-end sports cars. It was assumed cars would only be sold to the few people at the top of the economic pile. The rest of the populace would make do with trucks, buses, trains and so on. Mass transit for the masses. Then the Model T Ford came along and completely changed the market and the world.

I see nothing!

For me, Hogan's Heroes will always be linked with Fish & Chips. Not the TV programs, Fish and Chips, but rather the meal. When I was a kid Hogan's Heroes was televised on a the same night of the week that my family ate Fish & Chips. So whenever I see Col. Klink, Sgt Schultz, or Hogan himself in reruns I can actually smell and taste greasy battered fish and steaming hot salty chips.

Hogan's Heroes was a very repetitive show. The plots tended to be very similar from episode to episode. But it was fun, well acted for a comedy show, and had lines you could recite in the schoolyard to your friends over and over.

It was a fantasy. Prisoners of war helping the Allied cause by spying and sabotaging the Germans. Far-fetched fun, that seemed to go on longer that the war itself. (There's a theme ... tv shows about wars that lasted longer than the actual war they were set in.)

Yet it turns out it wasn't a fantasy. There really were POWs who spied on their captors. There really were hidden transmitters and receivers (in baseballs, for example). There were even secret departments, MI-9 and MIS-X, dedicated to finding new ways of using POWs to aid the war effort; devising letter writing codes, smuggling in cameras, and so on. There were playing cards with secret maps, compasses inside hollow hairbrushes, magnetized razor blades that pointed north, hollow buttons, and much more.

The whole thing was kept very secret, even after the war, as using POWs in such ways was a direct breach of the Geneva Conventions. Even in 1990, when someone finally broke the silence the Pentagon wanted to suppress the story, because it endangered future POWs, and cast deep shadows on the past.

POWs are, under "the rules of war", considered safe, special, immune, and out of play. Spies, on the other hand can be shot out of hand. By confusing the two the Allies were risking the lives of thousands of their own men.

The POWs risked a firing squad if caught spying, the higher ups risked being war criminals, and they also risked upsetting the international agreements on how POWs were treated. If it had become common knowledge that the US and UK routinely operated POWs as spies then the whole raft of Geneva Conventions might have been ignored by all concerned, not just in World War Two, but in later conflicts.

Even basic humanitarian aid, such as the famous Red Cross parcels, was endangered by these departments, as the Allies set up dozens of fake Aid Agencies to ferry their illegal contraband to the prisoners. The Allies always made a big deal about the neutrality of the Red Cross and other humanitarian groups, and publicly maintained that they never used them covertly. While the Red Cross may have been above board, many of the groups it turns out were not. In fact, their sole purpose was to ferry in contraband.

All this contrasts nicely with the recent controversy about labeling captured 'terrorists' as not POWs but 'enemy combatants'. Words are powerful. Now I'm going to associate fish and chips with the Geneva Conventions .... Mmmmmm, tasty, tasty articles.

Perchance ...

Normally my dreams are spectacularly boring. I dream about housework, organizing objects, and so forth. I once dreamed I lived in a house with a bunch of porn actresses ... and I did their taxes for them.

However, every now and then I have an odd, interesting dream.

Last night I was one of a group of friends looking after Winston Churchill's aging mother. He had to leave the country, due to some international crisis, and I was asked to check in on her if I could.

We had a pleasant afternoon tea, where she showed me photographs of herself when young. However, she died while Winston was still overseas, and when he returned we all felt somewhat guilty, even though we knew there was nothing we could have done. There was a tense dinner some days after the funeral where I found it hard to look Winston in the eye.

Feel free to interpret this for me.

Napoleon Cake

On the second day of 1812 Napoleon received news of a major breakthrough that would greatly aid his struggles against England. He immediately rode from his residence for Plassy to bestow an honour on the architect of this success, Benjamin Delessert.

Delessert was overwhelmed by the arrival of the Emperor, and even more-so when Napoleon took a medal from his own chest, nothing less than the Legion of Honour, and pinned it upon Delessert. The Emperor then granted all the workers in Delessert's factory a bonus of a week's pay.

Just what momentous feat had Delessert done to warrant such a display? His factory had succeeded in making sugar loaves from beetroot.

It may seem somewhat comical for sugar to provoke such a response from Napoleon. The idea of fighting and dying for sugar seems ridiculous, almost as absurd as dying for coffee, cocoa, nickel, iron or oil. Sugar, in itself, is not an essential food. Humans can survive without it. Yet somehow it seems essential. My mother has recounted her childhood experiences of rationing in the aftermath of the Second World War and the lack of sugar is at the top of the list of complaints, perhaps topped only by the lack of eggs. Sugar may not be as necessary as meat and vegetables, but it is passionately missed.

So for Napoleon the production of beet sugar was worth getting excited about. Nineteenth century France was a nation of sugar addicts, and world-wide sugar production was dominated by the British with their colonial plantations. The British ability to blockade French ports during wartime meant the French sweet tooth could not be easily satisfied. The creation of loaves of sugar from beetroot was a source of nationalistic pride, and was gleefully trumpeted to the masses. Fear not, citizens ... you may safely rot your teeth, even in times of darkest conflict.

So ... would you care for one lump or two? And a slice of Napoleon cake with your hot beverage?

Walk Like A Camel

Once upon a time you could get some healthy exercise on an electric camel. It would bob up and down in a manner designed to mimic a camel's gait. In 1912 it was the fashionable height of sophistication for a gymnasium to have one--so much so the gym on-board the Titanic was fitted with a camel, as pictured (that's it on the left).

The electric camel went out of style, but it is interesting to note that the Titanic's gymnasium also had a rowing machine and stationary cycles, which remain popular today. It even had separate times for ladies and men to exercise, least it be discovered by men that the fairer sex actually perspired during vigorous activity, or at least during gentle camel bouncing.

I don't get enough exercise. I doubt having an electric camel would help me. I do have a Wii, and the rather fun Wii Fit program. The Wii doesn't have a camel riding game, but it does come with a four-footed electric roadkill-like object called a balance board.

The purpose of the balance board is to show me how unbalanced I am. Who knew it could look into my head like that? It also tells me I'm fat. Yet despite all this I like it, very much. Is it beginning to sound like an abusive relationship to you?

I have never really grokked exercise. Eating, on the other hand, I'm all for. All this typing about exercise has made me hungry, and for some reason I want to listen to Southern Culture on the Skids. "You make me wanna walk ... Like a camel ... Ow-eee!"

More cultured than blue cheese

I'm off to the opera tonight. Rossini's The Italian Girl in Algiers. Thanks to my wife and her family I have been exposed to culture ... in much the same way Chernobyl was exposed to radiation, or how Britney Spears exposes herself to the paparazzi.

I've been told the opera tonight is staged as though it is a modern soap opera, as "the operas of Rossini were essentially soap opera equivalents in the 19th century." (The National Business Review, 11 May, 2009). This does raise an interesting point. What bits of today's popular culture, for opera was once very popular and populist, will future generations deem worthy to cherish?

Is Stephen King going to be turned into Shakespeare's peer by the passage of time? Will the collected recordings of Kylie one day be placed alongside Beethoven by the true connoisseurs of the musical past? Will cinema societies follow up a Buster Keaton season with the films of Will Ferrell?

However, the popularity of something at the time of its release is not always a guide to future status. Much of the classical music that is so championed today was not so beloved when first released. Artists go in and out of favour ... remember the 1980s when you couldn't take five steps without hearing Vivaldi's Four Seasons? Yet Vivaldi was considered 'out-of-touch' and 'uncool' in his later years, much like Vanilla Ice or MC Hammer, and he died a pauper. For painters, being unpopular during one's lifetime is almost a pre-requisite for later success. Books don't have to be read to be considered popular, just purchased ... for example Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time or The Bible.

So maybe the treasured classics will be the overlooked gems of today. Perhaps next to the Complete Shakespeare you might find the Collected Straitjacket Ninja? After all, people misfile things all the time.

Of writing past ...

When I was a wee lad I wanted to be a writer. I started writing an epic novel of spaces battles and galactic conquest which ran to about eleven pages before I gave it up.

At high school my worst subject was English. I enjoyed writing, spent a lot of my spare time writing in one form or another -- particularly once I'd discovered Dungeons and Dragons, a game that encourages the creations of entire universes -- but when it came to being graded my writing only ever got me C and B's. Maths and Science got me A's. So it was bye-bye to English.

I went to university, got a degree in Physics, was unemployed for a while, worked with computers for a few years, and then got a job in a comic book store. One day I asked my boss at the store: "How do you write a comic book script?" He didn't know. It was the days before the internet, so there was no quick and easy answer.

In the 90s some of my scripts made it into various local New Zealand comics. We all started to think we could maybe even make a living in comics. We didn't quite make it.

I went back to university and did something fun. History. Oddly enough the combination of Physics and History got me writing work. I started writing for textbooks and other educational publications on the history of science. I was still a student, but was getting so much writing work something had to give, so I packed in university halfway through a Master's degree and became a full-time writer. The picture above is the cover of one of the many over-priced books I contributed to.

The deadlines were often very tight. Just a few days to research several topics, write them up, and send them off to join the hundreds of other poorly researched articles that would be published alongside.

I became disillusioned at how inaccurate most of it was ... for example, I rang up a university in the UK for information about a deceased professor and ended up talking to him on the phone. II had just read an encyclopedia entry that had listed his date of death. He told me much of my draft article on his work was incorrect, even pointing out in detail the publications that had first got the facts wrong, and how those 'facts' had then been copied into book after book by writers just like me.

The other nagging problem for me was the assumption that since I was a science writer I therefore could be given assignments on any branch of science. Medicine, biology, geology, computer science, chemistry, environmentalism ... it didn't matter that my background was in physics and seventeenth century history, I was given articles to write on nuclear waste, artificial hips, obscure computer terms, and host of other things I had no right to write about.

I wasn't that sad when the textbook work dried up.

So I've tried writing before. Even made money off it. But this time around I get to focus on the kind of writing I want to do. Thanks to my very supportive wife I have a period of grace to churn out as much writing as I can with no pressure to make anything of it. Let's hope her trust in me pays off. She deserves it.

Copernicus calling collect

Window-pane glass is not a liquid.* Despite the number of textbooks that will tell you so, a pane of glass does not obviously ooze to the bottom over time. Some older panes do have a bulge, but that was created in the cooling process when the pane was made, and often that bulge is at the top or side, depending on how the glass was fitted.

Spinach is not packed with iron. It was a misprint in one publication that was slavishly copied again and again. But that mistake did give us Popeye, so it wasn't all bad.

I once talked to a dead scientist on the phone. Spooky? No, his date of death had been accidentally given in a cheap encyclopedia and copied into other publications. He laughed. I turned a bright shade of red, which I could get away with on a phone.

But wouldn't it be fun to live in a world where glass was a liquid? Where spinach did make you strong, instantly? Where dead scientists could be contacted by phone? Where the moon landings were fake? Where gravity could be switched off with a utility belt?

I was recently given a book that is a hodge-podge of bad science throughout the ages. Atlantis, perpetual motion machines, cold fusion, twin earths in opposite orbit. It gave me story ideas, one of which I have started writing down. The others are still wriggling around in my head waiting for their opportunity to fly out one day.

Maybe that's why I like writing so much. It allows you to create worlds where just for a while you can believe the impossible is commonplace. Where fish swim in your window panes, and Einstein is on line three. On Heisenberg's party line you're never certain who's listening in ... and why can't I get caller ID to work for Schrödinger?

* at normal temperatures. It becomes molten only at temperatures higher than 500°C (900°F), usually much higher depending on the type of glass. While glass, like all materials, could be technically said to flow at normal temperatures, it is at a rate so slow that it would take longer than the age of the universe to notice any change.

The Dogs of Venus

I recently watched a TV show that was foretelling the world of the near future. What surprised me the most was how close it all was to the future I had been promised as a kid in the seventies. Flying cars, cities on the moon, and pills to give us all we needed to survive. I just wanted to scream out loud enough so all the current crop of kids who were watching could hear ... "Don't buy it. It's all lies!"

The future of my childhood has become the present, and it has let me down. I was promised a hover car. I was promised casinos on the moon. I was promised a Martian mistress and a Venusian dog. How could they lie to me like that? For the same reasons they do it today. Because they make money out of our hopes and dreams.

I wonder how much money has been spent on the hover car over the years? Do we really want hover cars? Wouldn't they be the most dangerous, energy-inefficient mode of transport since ... well ... the SUV? Hover cars are best left to fictional worlds, where fuel efficiency and motor vehicle accident statistics can be blissfully ignored.

Venusian dogs do seem to be a reality, though. They are a peculiar breed of alien pet that buds from the lining of expensive handbags. They have basic mind-control powers that allows them to take over the brains of the weak-minded and shallow, manipulating them into foolish acts and spending sprees.