More Martian dumbness: NASA drew a giant WHAT on the red planet?

The other day my wife ordered a latte – which she then had to photograph because of the way the coffee and soy happened to mix, a kind of ‘ooer, that looks a bit rude’ shape, if you looked at it the right way.

The point being that NASA has been getting stick for apparently drawing the same thing. Thing, I did say ‘thing’, didn’t I? A sand drawing, with its Spirit rover, right there on the Martian pud, I mean pug.

Of course, by the time I went to check the JPL site, the pic had been replaced by this one… Public domain, NASA.

Purely accidental. Honestly, officer. (“Pfft, chortle, ooer, that looks a bit rude“).

OK, so if ”paredoilia’ is seeing faces in random patterns, what’s the word when people perceive what in old Devonshire dialect was a ‘tallywag’, outlined in Martian tyre trails (but only if you look at it sideways).

The good news? In 2023, four lucky people will get the chance to see NASA’s – er – artwork in person. Maybe. A Dutch fellow is looking for people to go on a one-way trip. Unlike Denis Tito’s  plan for a couple to spend a 501-day marital sojourn in a Dragon capsule, lining the walls with their own excrement, this one will involve landing on Mars. Also in modified Dragon that, I suspect, would be like living in a 1960s police phone box which, alas, wasn’t bigger on the inside.

Taking off again? Uh…no…

Conceptual artwork by Pat Rawlings of a Mars mission rendezvous from 1995. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Which means the life support system has to last forever. I expect it’ll be made of duct tape. Eventually. Oh – and the voyage’s going to be turned into reality TV.

Would I go? Plus side…

1. I’d be on a different planet from Justin Bieber and his monkey.

2. It would get me on TV along with re-runs of The World’s Greatest Loser.

3. You don’t have to line the walls with your own excrement like Tito’s crew.

4. If I wanted to be called the next Jeddak of Barsoom, I’d be in the right place, unlike now when they all look at me funny.

5. I’d get a front row seat for the next ‘NASA drawing’ on Mars.

But I have to say that the green hills of Earth are looking pretty good about now.

Would you go on a one-way trip to Mars? And what do you think NASA should draw next on the Red Planet?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Introducing the Acme Miracle Editorial Version Tracking Process

Welcome to the Acme Miracle Editorial Version Tracking Process, designed to create the maximum possible editorial confusion while keeping the content as far from completion as possible. As used by civil servants.

1. Insert the word ‘final’ into the filename as early as possible.

2. When it’s edited (again), create a relative qualifier. ‘New final’, as opposed to ‘old final’.

3. Move on to the ‘final FINAL’.

4. Then the ‘new final FINAL’.

5. Then the ‘updated new final FINAL.’

6. Decide the ‘old updated new final FINAL’ is better after all.

7. Ignore the ‘last modified’ date and send one of them randomly to the publisher.

8. Discover they typeset the wrong version, decide to edit one into the other.

9. Make changes. Tell the publisher that’s it.

10. Make more changes. Tell the publisher it’s just two or three little fixes.

11. Look at dozens of random pages, finding something to change every time, each of which is the ‘very last’. Send them, individually, to the publisher at erratic intervals.

12. On receiving the printed copy, open the document. Spot something. Time for a second edition. Go back to (1).

Now, I made this up for laughs…but I have a horrible feeling that it happens, in Dilbertian offices. I hope I’m wrong about that.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

The secret footpath protocol scoring game

Ever got frustrated dodging lunch time crowds on busy city streets?

Don’t worry. It’s all part of the Secret Footpath Protocol Scoring Game, revealed here for the first time.

1. Walking very slowly, randomly drifting from left to right, oblivious to other people. One point for every person blocked.

2. Lighting a cigarette and leaving it burning so as to choke everybody behind in a fog of disgusting carcinogens. One point for everybody who tries to get away from the stinking trail.

3. Drifting to a halt, aimlessly, in front of a shop window, door or ATM machine, waiting a moment, then drifting a little further, oblivious to people. One point for everybody blocked as they try to get around.

4. Walking with iron purpose if anybody approaches from the other direction. One point for everybody forced to dodge (this doesn’t work if they’re trying to score points back the other way).

So now you know. And, of course, as you can’t beat ‘em…may as well join ‘em…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

A howler to remind us how funny language is…

I thought I’d share a few more funny signs for a Monday laugh. Particularly a faded poster on the exterior wall of a Wellington supermarket, 5 metres wide and 4 high.

I didn’t have my camera. ‘Take the photo!’ I urged my wife, who had her phone.

A long standing and recognised profession in New Zealand.

Here in New Zealand a ‘boner’ is a respected profession. These gentlemen, photographed in 1910, were employed to take bones out of carcases. Hence ’boners’.  Don’t laugh.

And, as if this wasn’t enough, a howler. In every sense of the word.

Weekly, this sign seems to generate an endless procession of wandering apostrophes…

I suspect the band doesn’t belong to Howler, despite what the sign says.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Running the zombie Christmas mall gauntlet

it’s Christmas again…and that means a visit to (dramatic chord)… The Mall.

The Zombie Christmas Maul

It’s the same every year. The endless shuffle of zombiefied shoppers, drifting around shiny glass-and-glitz caverns, a mass of humanity with glazed eyes and shopping bags, punctuated by toddlers who lurch aimlessly out from the crowd, shrieking and hyperventilating. There are teenage boys who smell like they’ve just showered with a cocktail of propionic acid and brevibacteria, girls who giggle and text somebody three feet away, just because they can, all endlessly circling like – well, endlessly circling things who like circling endlessly.

And then, in the midst of this glittering temple to the worst excesses of shallow consumerism and the transient disposability of post-industrial A-gen society…Father Christmas. He’s moved here from the North Pole apparently.

There’s something about these places that turns the brain to mush and reduces people to zombiefied numbness. I am not allowed to punk them – you know, do the zombie walk behind these  shoppers and murmur ‘braaaaaiins’. Well, I can, but She Who Must Be Obeyed has to walk on the other side of the mall atrium for a while afterwards.

But honestly!

It’s done deliberately. People buy more if their mind’s switched off. And I have to feel sorry for the poor folks that have to work in these places. Malls are the twenty-first century equivalent of the workhouse when it comes to conditions.

Every mall I’ve been to from North Sydney to Lower Hutt to Bangkok has been exactly the same. The Australia and New Zealand ones even look the same. Is this the unity in diversity beloved of anthropologists?

I’ve got readers of this blog from Melbourne to Florida, from the Netherlands to Cape Town, from Houston to New York to France to Moscow to Dunedin. Am I right that it’s the same everywhere? The look. The raw horror of it all. The commercialism? The mindless advertising. The glitz. The ….the…

“Braaaainnns….”

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012 

Get your Mayan apocalypse insurance here!

In a week, we’re told, the Mayan Long Count calendar is going to roll over to Day 1,872,000, and at that point the world will end.

Earth. An image I made with my Celestia installation (cool, free, science package).

That’s 21 December, presumably Eastern Standard Time.  Apparently some people are buying survival shelters. Others are hoping to stand on mountain tops such as the Pic de Bugarach waiting to be uplifted by UFO’s. Exactly where these have come from is undefined. Remulak, possibly.

The instrument of the apocalypse, apparently, is a gigantic planet named Nburu which has been hiding behind the Sun and is going to dash out and smash us on the 21st. Apparently NASA knows about but has been conspiring to hide the knowledge from us. Or maybe the Apocapyptinator will be a giant solar flare. Or something. There has been panic buying of salt in Novokuznetsk. In Omutininsk they are buying kerosene.

Me? I’ve paid all this the attention it actually deserves. This much attention, in fact:

I have two reasons. One is that there is no basis whatsoever for the fear, even if the Mayans themselves thought an apocalypse was coming, which they don’t. The Niburu idea has been around a while – it was meant to hit us in 2003 but didn’t, and afterwards the ‘apocalypse’ got pushed out to 2012. Of course. This week even the official Vatican astronomer, Father Jose Gabriel Funes, weighed in to debunk the whole idea from the science perspective. The other reason is that I’m not even going to dignify “2012 doom” by trying to engage the particular arguments. (The real science tells me an asteroid shot past Earth on Wednesday – and we didn’t die. I’ll post about that soon).

The more important thing for me is what this tells us about human nature. The notion of a sudden apocalypse seems to be part of the human psyche. Virtually every society has these fears, or have constructed some cycle-with-armageddon/ragnarok into its mythology. Our most epic tales revolve around it.

Today, in the west, we also seem to have an unending capacity to intellectualise our way into believing the apocalypse on the basis of what is meant to be ‘science’, though there is precious little science about most of the arguments.

Does anybody remember 1987? The year Nostradamus, apparently, said the world would end.

Except it didn’t. Or on 6 June 2006 (6/6/06). Or in 1666, actually. Of course there’s always next time…isn’t there…

Still, who am I to complain? So here’s the deal. Announcing the New Age Ultra-Defender Security From The Mayan Apocalypse package. All you have to do is give me all your assets, cash, a legally binding promise of all future earnings, and the stupid nick-nack that some relative gave you three Christmases ago. In return, I offer an appropriate payout if the apocalypse occurs, at my discretion. Large print: the ‘apocalypse’ is defined as the total destruction to dust and random gases of Earth and the total death of everybody on it, including me, at some point between 12.00 am and 11.59 pm, 21 December 2012 NZT, by a large foot descending on to the planet with a large raspberry noise.

Any takers?

Next time: things that actually could destroy us (but probably won’t).

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Why is the name of the seventh planet so funny?

I don’t know why the seventh planet out from the Sun is the butt of so many jokes. Well, I do. and it’s lame, lame, lame. So today I’m going to get to the bottom of it, as it were. More than NASA did; their mission to the back side of that planet was cancelled.

Uranus rising beyond its moon Ariel. A picture I made with my Celestia installation.

The planet in question was first spotted by musician and amateur astronomer William Herschel, using a telescope in the back yard of his home in Bath. Thinking it a star, he decided to name it after the King – Georgium Sidus (“George’s Star”). The result from the throne was inevitable.

Herschel: Mein Konig, I haf named der nieuw star after you.
George III: Hmmn, das ist ein nice name, a bit grovelly, but not too grovelly und zo I present you mit ein Englander-style knighthood, chust in case anybody zinks you might be just a teensy liddle bit from Hanover, ja?

The new planet was the talk of Europe, but calling it ‘George’ really didn’t cut it. Johann Bode then had an idea, which might well have led to the President of the Royal Society having to explain it to the monarch.

Joseph Banks: I am sorry to say that Johann Bode does not want to call it after you, but after Uranus, your Majesty.
George III: Vott? Ze ting vot I sit on?
Banks: No no, I mean the Greek for Kronos, father of Saturn.
George III: You vant to name it after ein alte gott nobody’s heard of except in der public school classics lessons vich nobody remembers anyvay? But it is funny. Ur-anus. Ha ha! I love your Englander sense of humour! You find body parts so amusink. Or is it Urin-us? Ha ha! Das ist even more amusink!
Banks: It’s pronounced Oo-rahn-oos.
George III: But zat’s not even a liddle bit funny.
Banks: Oo-rahn-oos, Sir.
George III: Peep.

George III was mad, you see. The name stuck, and because hardly anybody speaks ancient Greek it’s had that slightly amusing side ever since.

Of course it could have been worse. The planet could have been named after Goofy’s dog.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

OMG a century old? That’s old hat!

New Zealand’s main online news site reported on the weekend that “OMG” – “Oh! My God” was invented 95 years ago. Old hat, I’m afraid. I reported it on this blog last year.

According to the OED, OMG was coined in 1917 by Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher – Lord Fisher, First Baron of Kilverstone – in a letter to Winston Churchill.

Fisher published the letter in his iconoclastic autobiography Memories. I have a copy of the 1919 edition. Here’s my photo of the page.

First use of OMG! Part of p78 from Fisher’s ‘Memories’ (Hodder & Stoughton, 1919).

Fisher was the enfant terrible of the Royal Navy, the man who dragged the service, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. They didn’t call it ‘the fleet that Jack built’ for nothing. He invented the battlecruiser, though perhaps not the dreadnought.  He chaired the committee that invented ASDIC (Sonar).  In 1917 he was involved in the dramatic capture of a spy, spotted by his neighbour Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (that Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon).

Genius came at a price; Fisher was combatative, volcanic, prone to pursuing feuds beyond the point of sense. His time as First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910 was one of the most divisive in the Navy’s history. He was recalled in 1914, aged 73; but only lasted eight months. His game of power-brinksmanship over the Gallipoli campaign triggered  the collapse of the Asquith government; but Fisher’s own career fell casualty along the way.

A volcanic figure. A man who considered himself Britain’s second Nelson – even down to getting a Lady Hamilton of his own. A man whose extraordinary, creative and controversial life is best summed up in three letters – ‘OMG’.

Not too surprising, then, that Fisher also coined it.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

Weirdo ways I’ve been Googled

I’ve decided search engines are weird.* Check out these strings I fielded on Sunday.

“Dieselpunk space art”. Not here. Wish I could draw some.

“NZ Anzac day posters 1950″ – not on my blog.

“BC hydro pole component” – as in the circuitry of 2013 year old hydro-electric schemes? They might mean ‘DC’, but none of that is on my blog.

“Piper Bayard shotguns” – Piper Bayard is a US author (check the blogroll – Bayard and Holmes are very sharp and very funny). I asked Piper if the search had found her blog. She told me Pieper Bayard are a gun manufacturer in Belgium (founder, Henry Pieper). Obviously what the searcher was actually looking for - but not on my blog.

“Harry Potter assassin” - maybe that also explains the Belgian gun maker search. But getting warmer, I’ve posted about Harry Potter - though not assassins.

“U-862″ – twice. OK. This U-boat sailed past my home town in January 1945, and I posted on it.

“Matthew Wright convicts” – fair cop, guv. My book Convicts: New Zealand’s Hidden Criminal Past got saturation coverage Sunday – in the paper and the Stuff.co.nz online news site, and I had a half hour slot on talkback radio about it. That explains “Matthew Wright historian” too, I think.

What are some of the ways you’ve been found on the web?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012

*Well, to be fair, ‘weird’, here, means ‘boolean interpretation of non-boolean input coupled with database-driven algorithms based in part on link-identification can produce spurious results’. Uh. Yeah. I think ‘weird’ sums that up…

Two shades of grey – is fan fiction good or bad?

A few years ago one of my relatives sent me a story she’d written. I was the family’s published author. What did I think?

‘Good story,’ I said. But I had to explain that it would have been better if the characters had names that weren’t Harry, Hermione and Ron. And better again if it had been set somewhere other than a wizards’ school in a magic castle. ‘You need to make up your own characters and settings,’ I explained. Which she then did – the next story was completely original, and also very good.

The thing is, even the Harry Potter pastiche was a good story. Fan fiction is often part of the learning curve for starting writers. But it must always remain that. Apart from obvious points about copyright and plagiarism, authors who simply use the characters and settings of the latest best-selling book or sci fi TV have, to my mind, failed at Step 1 of the creative process. Even if the plot is otherwise original, even if the writing is competent, and even if the work otherwise meets every test that usually defines ‘good’ in a literary sense.

What drives people to write fan fiction? It seems to me the issue isn’t lack of imagination; it’s the intersection between the emotional response of a fan to the work they like and their imagination. Fan fiction is an attempt to extend and explore the sense of satisfaction, reward – and, quite often, sense of completeness – that the book, show or movie inspired.

That explains a lot of the ‘Mary Sue’ plots – you know, the ones where a character proxies the author in a succession of wish-fulfilment fantasies with TV characters of the author’s choice. It seems to me that some of this stuff amounts to therapy for the writer involved. Or escape. But that doesn’t translate into good reading for an audience.

Some fan fiction does work well – however, that doesn’t get away from the fact that it’s using somebody else’s original creativity. Some authors allow it. Others don’t like it. Don’t forget - strictly speaking, fan fiction is plagiarism. And even in a novel where the plot, setting and names are changed to create a new work, it seems to me there’s always going to be that niggly thing about where the original came from. 

So what about that other genre - new stories about Sherlock Holmes and other old literary heroes? Should we call it fan fiction? Strictly, maybe. But these don’t pivot off the latest pop trend, or rip off the imagination of a living author, or act as a device for the author to act out their wish fantasies. These books are inevitably by an established author giving an original spin to one of the stories that have become integral to our culture. They always have that Step 1 creativity point – the author’s own original input on the concept.

Tom Stoppard showed us how that is done with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which could be called Shakespearean fan fiction, except Stoppard simply used the bard’s master-work as background to a play of his own, with his own thoughts and ideas. And as for sensitive new age vampires? Back in the early 1970s Fred Saberhagen took  Bram Stoker’s 1897 thrller Dracula and turned it upside down. Sheer genius, and very funny. The book was called The Dracula Tape. Read it and giggle. At the same time, Anne Rice was working on Interview with A Vampire. Everything else of that genre has followed in their footsteps.

What’s your take on all this?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012