Categories
Stuff

The mushroom people

Warning: some spoilers

I rented Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People and I can comfortably say it is the oddest movie I have ever seen. Directed by the father of all the Godzilla movies, Ishirô Honda, the story is about a group of city people out for a yacht ride who get caught in strange weather and become stuck on an island. They find another ship, obviously abandoned from long ago, full of research equipment and covered in spores. As they look for food, they find mushrooms everywhere, but forewarned by the ship’s logs, try to avoid eating them because they could be dangerous.

They camp on the ship and suddenly one night, they hear footsteps approach their door. Shining a light toward the door, a creature enters, shaped vaguely human but covered with mushroom like growths. That’s the secret of the island: everything eventually consumes the mushrooms, and in doing so, becomes itself a mushroom–including the people from a previously stranded ship.

The story ostensibly focuses on the group trying to survive–trying to find enough food other than the mushrooms, trying not to be attacked by the mushroom people, and trying to find away off the island. More specifically, though, like other of Honda’s movies, the movie is a fairly strong condemnation of the modernization of Japan: the bright lights, night clubs, and other adoption of decedent western ways.

In his review of the movie, Jaspar Sharp writes:

Honda portrays the way in which the rapid economic growth of Japan has resulted in a population divorced from these cultural and natural origins. The rigid mechanical efficiency of a modern society is revealed to be merely illusionary, as the hierarchy crumbles steadily the further this ship of fools is removed from it. Carried away by the forces of nature on a freak ocean tide, the film’s irreversible conclusion is that of evolution turning full circle; man becomes mushroom as he reverts back to the primordial sludge.

Sharp also mentions the almost heavy-handed references to the drug culture that was just beginning to take root in most modern cultures. Not only do the mushrooms turn people into creatures half-living, half-fungus, they also exert a hallucinogenic effect—making the people both fey and dangerous.

Where I may go further than Sharp in the analogy between the perils of the island and the perils of modern society on Japan is the movie’s odd focus on the two women characters. One is a nightclub singer: glamorous, brave, willing to do most things; very uninhibited. The other is a student who is shy and proper; uncomfortable in unfamiliar circumstances, and dressed demurely in soft and quite safe pastels.

In the beginning, when the group was safely at sea and in no danger, the men noticed the singer and her obvious beauty and allure, admiring her boldness. However, once on the island, and as time progressed, the singer became rejected in favor of the studious, ‘proper’, young Japanese woman.

I would say that not only was Honda condemning modern society, he was making a specific point of condemning society’s influence on young Japanese women.

The contentiousness between the crew members, the odd mish-mash between scenes on the island and scenes of the Tokyo nightlife, and the effective background scenery–where no attempt is made to ‘seem’ real–make this a movie that, at a minimum, captures your attention if it doesn’t capture your interest.

Categories
Energy Users Environment

The 2006 “Wish I could drop them off a cliff” award winner

Whatever the feeling nationally, locally there’s one clear winner of the “Wish I could drop ’em off a cliff” award here in Missouri, and that’s Ameren. I imagine that most of us would probably vote 2, 3, or more times for Ameren in this category, if we could.

Black River News points to a terrific editorial in St. Louis Today by Eric Mink, Stormy Past Catches up with Ameren. He finds that paying the board members a $1000.00 a meeting doesn’t necessarily jibe with the company’s skimping on tree maintenance, leading to record breaking outages the last three years. Not to mention the lack of maintenance which caused the Taum Sauk dam to fail.

Did I happen to mention that Ameren also runs a nuclear power plant?

Leaving aside the cost in lost revenue for business, spoiled food, and having to pay hotel bills, there’s also the cost in lives: of people exposed to the conditions of extreme heat and cold, as well as utility workers dying while working long hours in difficult conditions. Luckily, no one died with the Taum Sauk dam failure.

On top of this, Ameren wants to raise rates. Not so it can change its maintenance schedules, or do a better job. No, the company has to pay for those $1000.00 a board member meetings, not to mention all the ‘job performance bonuses’ paid the top management.

Black River News also had a succinct comment to make on the DNR ‘announcement’ yesterday:

This press release was sent out to coincide with the one year anniversary and not much else. My question is does this mean that DNR “blinked” first, stay tuned.

I’d like to see other Missouri webloggers take up these issues, perhaps pass along their own nomination of Ameren in the “Drop ’em off a cliff” award. Perhaps we should make DNR runnerup.

The CEO responds with an extremely unsatisfactory answer.

His response is that they would have to start cutting down trees in order to do better, and that trimming trees once every four years is enough.

I found a study conducted by the State of Massachusetts, which also has a four year cycle, that does incorporate cutting down trees that are at risk. These are trees that have indications of failure, and this type of effort is usually conducted in association with the local communities because it’s in everyone’s interest to do so.

There’s another study by the IEEE, which I unfortunately can’t access, that mentions in its abstract how reducing the tree trimming cycle one year could prevent 0.9 outages.

In other words, why is Ameren going with a consultant when extensive studies and research have already been made? As for cutting down the trees, I can’t imaging that Ameren and the community don’t already have this authority.

As these things go, the power company is here today, replacing poles that are coming close to falling over, trimming trees.

Categories
JavaScript

Same under the skin

The Web Standards Project points to a post, Dear JavaScript Library Developers by Chris Heilmann, which makes some excellent points about the difficulties in using today’s JS libraries.

In particular, I want to point out Chris’ last point:

Don’t play the “mine is smaller than yours” card. It gives the wrong impression to new developers as they might be tempted to think that your short wrapper methods are all that has to get executed. We all know that they have to be converted to native JavaScript and DOM methods before execution.

This is a key item, because many of the new ‘Ajax’ libraries are focused more on making JavaScript look and act like Ruby or Python, than necessarily packaging functionality into easier to use units. Many of the libraries, in fact, are more difficult for new JavaScript developers to work with than raw JavaScript.

There’s an interest in making JS development more robust; to add in new discipline; to bring in the concepts contrived in the ‘real’ languages. What happens, though, is that you may end up actually processing more JavaScript just to get these ‘rigorous’ enhancements, than if you just use simple JS.

Not to say the libraries aren’t good, just that the more we get caught up on the mechanics, the more cryptic our offerings, the more inward looking our results, the less universally useful the end result will be.

Ultimately, all of these libraries convert to native JavaScript and DOM methods before execution. This is the scripting equivalent to we all put our pants on, one leg at a time.

Categories
JavaScript

Peeved at Firebug

I’m really peeved at the Firebug folks.

Here I thought I was finished with the first chapter of “Adding Ajax”. Now I have to edit it to include a section that starts with, Before we jump into how to add Ajax effects to your pages, you’ll need to download Firefox and install both it and Firebug.

In my almost 25 years of being in this industry, Firebug has come closest to being a perfect implementation of a specific functionality.

Categories
Environment

Speaking of Taum Sauk

DNR came out with its proposed settlement package for the Taum Sauk dam collapseBlack River News has more links on the story.

One of the settlement items was DNR’s proposal for Ameren to donate Church Mountain or the Rock Island Railroad corridor, the latter specifically to be converted into a bike/hike trail to potentially meet with the Katy Trail. I find this a little odd, considering the ongoing dispute between the state Attorney General and the DNR as regards the Boonville Bridge. In this incident, the outgoing DNR chief before Childers moved to preserve the Boonville Bridge as part of a historical landmark, as well as part of the Katy Trail. Childers and Blunt, instead, decided to give the bridge to the Union Pacific railroad, so it could use it as scrap steel.

This puts the Katy Trail in a vulnerable state, because the only way that the Rails-to-Trails program works in this country, is that the trails must intersect working railroad lines, so that they can be converted back to railroads, if necessary in the national interest. Removing the Boonville Bridge removes one of only two rail connections to the Katy Trail–the other of which, at St. Charles, is vulnerable to natural disaster.

However, if the Rock Island Railroad corridor is used as the final connection between Katy and Kansas City, extending the trail completely across the state, this might lessen the vulnerability of the trail overall, potentially removing one concern about giving the Boonville Bridge back to the Union Pacific.

As for the deal, Nixon, our State Attorney General, responded with:

While these projects put forth by DNR that are as far as 200 miles from Taum Sauk may be interesting and worthy, this wish list from bureaucrats at this time complicates matters and does not address adequate compensation for those who live and work closest to where the disaster occurred.

Nixon is not in these particular negotiations, as he was ‘fired’ as representative for the DNR because Childers felt Nixon was compromised since Ameren indirectly donated 19,000 dollars to his campaign fund; regardless of the fact that the money was returned to Ameren, and regardless of the fact that Ameren donated at least 17,000 dollars to the re-election campaign for Governor Blunt’s House of Representatives father, none other than the minority whip, Roy Blunt.

However, Nixon’s office hasn’t been all that forthcoming for what’s happening between it and DNR, though it has responded to Lee Farber at Black River News that it would post proposals for how to spend the five million (well, four million plus change) in fines levied by the federal government (which managed to wrangle for itself ten million dollars in fines, regardless of the fact that the agency who levied the fine, FERC, is the same agency whose inspectors had approved the safety of the dam just days before the dam broke).

In the meantime, no, work is not progressing in the cleanup, contrary to what the St. Louis Today article states.

Have I lost you yet? There’s wheels turning within wheels with this situation, and I’m concerned that the state is going to be paying a heavy price when it comes to our natural and civic resources because of the campaign for governor between Blunt and Nixon. We in Missouri are not being served.