Live from Austin!

The 2001 Remake. Ugh. I’d heard it was a stinker, but Tim Burton’s made some great movies, so I decided to watch it anyway.

It seems from the commentary that Burton was mainly interested in the aesthetics of having a bunch of great actors dressed up in really good ape suits. He does a great job of coming up with a convincing fantasy world of semi-civilized apes; it’s the SF pieces and the plot that make this a stinker. An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters probably could have come up with a script that made more sense.

So our hero (in the least convincing spacesuit I’ve seen since the original Buck Rogers) travels through an electrical storm somewhere near Saturn, and ends up a few hundred years into the future. We can tell this because his spacecraft has a clock that shows the year, and which somehow measures that he’s being whisked through time.

The spaceship emerges from the storm near a planet, and crashes in a lake; the hero wanders into a jungle and encounters a world of intelligent apes, and is captured. He makes friends with a female ape, escapes with her and some humans and a few other apes, and a lengthy chase ensues.

They make it to where the hero’s spacesuit crashed. He retrieves the survival equipment which he apparently hadn’t felt was worth retrieving when he crashed. The radio receiver locks on to a rescue ship, or so he thinks.

They follow the signal through more conflict and chases, and find the skeletal ruins of the space station the hero launched from. The command center is nevertheless intact and fully functional and still recognizes his handprint. He plays back the log, and discovers the space station went after him, crashed on the planet, and the genetically enhanced smart chimps they were using to test pilot the spacecraft (yeah, right) turned vicious and attacked. It’s these apes which became the ape civilization he’s now in, hundreds of years later.

So far, so good. A bunch of stuff happens which we needn’t go into, and eventually the hero leaves the ape planet in a spacecraft to return through the electrical storm back to his own time. The spacecraft clock obligingly winds backwards to 2036 or so.

Arriving back in the past the hero skips Saturn and the space station, and heads straight for Earth. (Why? We’ll probably never know.) His spacecraft is going haywire from the electrical storm, so he chooses Washington, DC as a sensible emergency landing place. (Sure, why not?) He crashes from orbit onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but emerges completely unhurt from the smouldering wreckage. (Cap’n, the audience’s disbelief cannae be suspended much longer!)

But it’s not the Lincoln Memorial! Instead, it’s a memorial to… the ape bad guy from several hundred years in the future. The audience sits and goes “Huh?” as the credits roll.

So if you want to see a bunch of actors in ape costumes in a lush and believable fantasy world, this is the movie to watch. If you want a plot that makes sense, you’d be better off with the original, sad to say.

As a Zippy the Pinhead fan, there was something very important I had to do while I was in San Francisco. So we went to a convenience store, and I bought some Ding Dongs. As Zippy fans will know, Ding Dongs are only available in the western part of the USA; in the midwest and on the east coast, they’re known as King Dons. They’re the same thing, just with a different name (for obscure legal reasons, apparently).

I wouldn’t normally eat Hostess baked goods, but I felt a great urge to eat a Ding Dong while admiring the Transamerica Pyramid. I decided to skip the taco sauce, however.

On Sunday we had lunch at Ghirardelli Square. There was a cool frite and crêpe restaurant with DJ-mixed music; afterwards I picked up a little chocolate (of course). Next, we headed for Fisherman’s Wharf…

If you’re ever in San Francisco, I can thoroughly recommend staying at least half a kilometer from Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a tacky, stinky strip of bad seafood restaurants and stores selling crappy souvenirs. At weekends, it’s also crowded with enough noisy obnoxious tourists to make even the most hardened city dweller feel crowd anxiety. We walked through and satisfied ourselves there was nothing worth walking into, and left as quickly as possible.

The one good thing down by Pier 39 was a homeless guy who was providing entertainment to try and earn his bum dollar; Bill Hicks would have loved it. The guy would crouch down behind two pieces of bush, one in each hand. As a bovine tourist passed, he would leap up and rapidly draw aside the disguise, usually startling the tourists. I kinda felt like giving him money.

I didn’t, for the same reasons I didn’t give money to any of the other beggars: call me unfeeling, but I don’t want to fund their drug habits, whether it’s cigarettes, weed, alcohol, or whatever. So instead I send money to charities that feed the homeless nourishing meals. Sure, giving them the choice between drugs and food is fine in principle, but I figure if they were smart enough to make that kind of choice for themselves they wouldn’t be on the street, would they?

“San Francisco… it’s where the voices in your head kept telling you to go!”

Having said that, I feel I can now admit that our restaurant search for the evening took us to a particularly fine place called Indigo. California cuisine, and quite the most incredible meal I could recall eating in years. A delicious explosion of flavors in every bite. Kinda expensive by my standards, at around $35 per head. Sure, I appreciate really good food every now and again, but I’m more of a diner kind of guy.

The next World Bank meeting is due to be held in Washington, DC on September 25th. However, DC’s police chief says his force won’t provide security coverage unless the attendees come up with a few million dollars to pay for it—as the force still hasn’t been reimbursed for the millions it spent trying to protect the previous meetings from protestors.

Other agencies are also waiting to see if they’ll get paid; having requested 3,000 officers from elsewhere, DC police have only had 700 volunteers…

A man in Oxnard, CA has been arrested and faces felony charges of animal cruelty. He was found to have tortured and dissected his daughter’s pet guinea pig because he thought it was a robot with a hidden camera in the back of its head, and that had been placed in his home by government agents to spy on him.

This curious belief may be related to his being wigged out on methamphetamine at the time.

I’m amazed by the number of people who send e-mail crossly saying that we need to index some database in c:\lotus\notes\data because it’s broken.

Uh, hello? You understand that C: is the hard disk on your computer I hope? I assume so, or you wouldn’t have managed to put a copy of the database there. So maybe, just maybe, you should be wondering how we were supposed to index files on your computer’s local hard disk for you? Especially files that we obviously had no way of knowing you had copied there?

Some days I miss the luser-abuse mailing list.

We arrived at Logan Airport in plenty of time. Given that it was about 35 celcius, I felt it was justified to hire a cab rather than lug suitcases on the T. I did my usual thing and tried to remove all metal from my person and put it in a pocket of my carry-on bag, in a vain attempt to evade the metal detector. Unfortunately, something set off the doorframe detector, and I was given a severe wanding. As mentioned earlier, the security guy even asked me to unbutton my jeans—the buttons at the front set off his metal detector wand, so I think he suspected I might have shoved sharp knives into the front of my underpants. Hey, the terrorists are mad zealots…

The flight was as pleasant as any six hour plane flight can be. They fed us, they remembered that I’d asked for vegetarian food, and there was coffee. So that’s three points for United, zero for American.

We got a shared van ride to the hotel. We were taken on a delightful tour of south San Francisco. It turns out to bear a startling resemblance to Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 3… in fact, SF in general reminded me of Liberty City, right down to the hilly Italian district, the maze of tunnels and bridges, the subway, and the look of Chinatown. Our hotel even had dubious looking clubs nearby offering “adult” entertainment. (San Francisco Tourist Office may use the above endorsements in advertising.)

Yes, as you can guess, some corners had been cut in the hotel department. We were at a Holiday Inn on the edge of the theater district, which is one of the seedier parts of town. Also, I’m told, one closest to some of the best restaurants. If the bums had been aggressive, like their East coast counterparts, it would have been unpleasant. Fortunately San Francisco’s homeless seem to be a mellow Californian type, and pretty much leave you alone. Anyway, point is, it was the only place near all forms of public transit and less than $100 a night, so I wasn’t complaining.

Public transit in SF is pretty good. There are abundant buses, which run until 01:30 or so, followed by “night owl” services. There are also trams, which are mostly authentic old streetcars that have been repaired and put into service as a tourist attraction as well as a form of transport. Below ground is a network of more trams; and of course, there are the famous cable cars, which climb some of the more picturesque hills. A $15 pass got us unlimited travel on all of the preceding. To go further afield involved the subway, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). Aimed at commuters, it heads out to Berkeley and Oakland and the delights of Contra Costa County.

I’m not sure when I first became aware of California. Maybe I saw it on TV. Or maybe on a box of raisins.

No, I think it was the Beach Boys. I was a young boy at a seaside resort in England, and music was playing. It spoke of a far off world, a mystical place where people stood on polished wooden boards and somehow rode on the waves. I’d never seen waves like that on an English beach—or at least, not on a sunny day. Waves like that ought to mean the gale force winds and torrential rain of an English summer.

Ironically, decades later I learned that Brian Wilson was morbidly afraid of the water, and would never go near the ocean.

Clearly this “California” was a strange and marvellous place. People threw plastic discs at each other through the air, and they sort of hovered. I found one in a seaside shop and tried to interest my family in the idea, but they didn’t seem as inspired by it as I was.

At some point in the 70s I must have seen The Streets of San Francisco. All I remember is the way the cars would drive really fast down a hill, hit a crossroads with a thump, and launch slightly into the air.

I don’t think we’ll be trying that.

My young mind gradually came to understand that California was more than one place. In fact, it was three places: San Francisco; Hollywood, where TV and movies came from; and Disneyland.

Years later I got SubLogic Flight Simulator for the Atari ST. The default start location was a runway at Oakland airport. My first and favorite route was to take off, fly across the Bay Bridge and over Alcatraz, and dive for the Golden Gate Bridge. After New York City, it was the most impressive scenery in the game.

The point of all this is that my strongest associations with San Francisco have always been unreal ones. That’s part of why I wanted to confront them with reality.

I am moderately relaxed. I’m more or less packed for San Francisco. I’ve discovered that it’s possible to squeeze the SLR and the camcorder into one camera bag, as long as I’m willing to make do with just the 50mm lens for the camera. I’ve programmed the watch with tidal offsets for SF and Monterey Bay, loaded the camera with film, checked all the batteries in various gadgets… Just have to choose a book for the flight now.

I think we’re gonna have to spring for a taxi, as I’m not dragging suitcases through the subway in this weather.

Given how nervous travel can make me, it’s amazing I’m here; you’d think the experience of emigrating would have killed me. It’s even more amazing that I’ve been to places like Russia and East Germany. Maybe repeated travel is wearing down my panic reactions.

From The Boston Globe:

Cut $9 billion from the Massachusetts budget and watch what happens: Doctors would make frequent and free house calls, the homeless would be sheltered by churches and private charities, and hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created.

Yeah, and winged monkeys would fly out of my butt, and Satan would start skating to work.

All this according to Carla Howell, a Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, who helped lead a successful drive to put a question on the Nov. 5 ballot asking voters if they want to do away with state income taxes.

You know, I kinda think they should do it. If it’s voted through, the politicians should call the voters’ bluff and shut down the schools, stop repairing the roads, stop collecting trash, shut down UMass, and so on. Leave it for six months and let people see what happens, then have a second referendum to let them vote on whether it’s an improvement.

Then we’d finally be able to say to the right wing libertarians “Look, we tried it, and it didn’t fucking work. Now shut up with your whining.”

Sure, it would be an unpleasant six months, but I think the end result would be worth it.

I’d like it even more if they did it in New Hampshire, though.

Ever wanted boxer shorts patterned with pictures of gonorrhea bacteria? No, me neither, but you can buy them anyway.