‘Once there was a man who had much of the mind, but less of the heart. Being, as such, top heavy, and with little support between his head and his legs, he fell while climbing some stairs and died.’ The old monk chortled, then coughed, then told the junior disciples to consider it while he was meditating. So saying, he entered his chambers.

The junior disciples tittered for awhile, then fell silent, for none of them wanted to admit they did not know what the old monk meant. And so one of the more outspoken (but no less clueless) of them ventured to wake their master. Upon reaching the door of the senior monk’s abode, he paused, for he thought he could hear a rhythmic droning. Surely the master was chanting some scripture.

Overcoming his trepidation at disturbing his teacher during such a holy act, he pushed the door open a crack, so he might have a glimpse of what sacred text the master might be perusing. However all he saw through the crack was the steady rise and fall of an old man’s chest. Smiling to himself, he gently closed the door and retreated to the hall of juniors. His colleagues gathered around him, eager to learn what knowledge the master had bestowed upon him.

Clearing his throat, he told them that their teacher had forbade him to tell them that knowledge, because it was sacred knowledge, which grew less holy with each telling.

And so they regarded him highly from then on, and eventually he himself became an old monk and a teacher, and whenever his disciples badgered him about his considerable wisdom (such did they flatter him), he would gruffly brush them off, and emphasize the importance of sleep in the life of a man.

Lying awake,
On the brink of the little death,
Ecstatic to no end, perhaps
Blitzed on crystal meth.

Not the only cause, of course.
Possibilities abound,
Reasons upon reasons,
That one’s mind is not sound.

However, such reasons
Can only fall under
Certain categories, to be sure.
A few examples:

I. Excitement

Tomorrow’s the big day!
Graduation, marriage, jubilaté!
Time to move on, to ever greater things,
Or maybe that stupid ad was true,
Red Bull gives you wings!
Caffeine, sugar, orgasmic bliss, will
Drape your mind in hypersensitive mist.

II. Insomnia

Staring at the ceiling, listless,
The clock ticks on, lazily,
Your brain weighs heavy, patience thin,
While time spirals away, crazily.
It is hard when you know
There’ll be hell to pay, tomorrow,
Nodding, nodding, dozing at work,
Ratted out to your boss, by
Your co-worker, the jerk.
(Who no one likes anyway.)

III. Fear

The pit of the stomach stirs, and
The sandman shies away,
Why won’t it come to me,
A small voice asks plaintively.
Faster and faster goes
The thumping in the chest,
The fear and the sorrow,
Staying any rest.

There’s no way out,
Lies come to light,
Your doom is upon you
So why don’t you just…
Give up the fight.

Shadows in the room grow longer,
And dawn breaks on stuck-open lids,
For it is impossible, you see,
To sleep when the soul is uneasy.

The morning sun diffuses through the clouds, but it’s still too bright for me to look at directly.

Earlier I watched the dawn from the small, triple-layered Perspex window, over the massive turbojet engine with the double-R Rolls Royce emblem. First a lazy band of purple, then all of a sudden, the first true rays burst through, setting the endless sheet of cirrus ablaze, like iron about to be quenched. Gradually, it settles to a regal yellow, glowing with victory over the night, as always, as far as we can remember anyway. There’s quite a big difference between seeing the sunrise from the ground and from the air. The engine throbs satisfyingly, comfortingly, millions of parts and years of human ingenuity at work, unlike the usual stillness punctuated by the calls of birds in heat.

Now the sun is higher, and the plane lower, so each can’t see the other through the clouds. Looking down, I can’t tell where the clouds end and the ocean begins, they both glitter, and for a moment I wonder whether we could be over sand instead, it seems so still. But no, ocean it is. Because I spot a silhouette, like a crayon cut in half lengthwise, lying on the surface. It is a tanker or container ship, moving at a stately pace, compared to us anyway. We soon leave it behind. No sooner we do than more shadows appear, some as large as the first one I saw, some smaller. The trade lanes of the Persian Gulf provide easy pickings for Somali piracy, after all.

Then, drifting out of the cloud bank in the distance, a peak, no … a range of peaks, dark against the blue. What range is that, I wonder, and promise myself I’ll find out. Turning my gaze downwards again, I see the piers of Dubai’s port stretching out of the cloud, before a mass of light brown joins the white and the blue in my field of view. I notice things I didn’t on my initial journey, Dubai has few 4-way intersections, and many roundabouts, scattered like early crop circles in the uniformly brown landscape, interspersed by carefully planned patches of green. The angle isn’t right, so I can’t see the glint of the sun on the windows, so I have no idea what kind of buildings constitute the blocks that make up the district around the port.

We’re moving fast, still, though the captain’s just reported that we’ve begun our descent. Thickly clustered asphalt and concrete structures give way to squat bungalows and straight highways, both bleached by the sun, sand and the salty air. It is a scene out of a movie, the houses are white, very white, wait, a few brown ones whisks past. Sandstone perhaps…. The amateur geologist of my childhood whispers, but I chide him, sandstone is too soft to withstand these harsh climes. Ah well, they’re gone, without the chance for further observation. A new object below attracts my focus, a large, flat protrusion out of the sand, of the same colour. A plateau of some sort, or possibly the remains of a quarrying operation, though I can’t see any pit which would usually remain alongside. Sandstone? The little voice asks timidly, this time I stay silent, because I don’t know.

Finally, the black bars appear, like thick brush strokes making up the runways and the approach to the airport. The engines are still throbbing comfortably, but a new whistling joins them as the flaps are lowered. One does not get the sense that we’re slowing down at all, the plane is too massive, carries too much inertia for those within to feel the effects on the outside. As one, the passengers bounce as the plane touches down, their seatbelts digging into their thighs (or rolls of flab, as may be), EK 006 has landed.

Today is the 16th of June, and today marks the 46th year that a woman went into space. Suffering from nausea in the cramped seat of Vostok 6 (the last Vostok space capsule), Valentina Tereshkova orbited the Earth 48 times in almost three days. With that one flight, she logged more time in space than all the American astronauts before her combined … I find this amusing. She would be the last woman in space for 19 years.

Just thought you might like to know.

Also, in about a month, 40 years will have passed since Neil Armstrong first walked on the Moon. I think that’s pretty cool.

So, browsing Youtube again… Nothing new there. However, I came across this old video of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, also known as the Ode to Joy.

Now this is a popular piece of music, not far behind that (horribly, horribly) overplayed Canon in D by Pachelbel and Orff’s O Fortuna from his Carmina Burana (damn you X Factor). Yet most people only know of the climax, which falls right in the middle, with no buildup, no resolution, no soul. Before today, I would have included myself in this category. No longer.

I guess I’d like to share this with as many people as I can (hah, how many people do I think will read this…). Anyhow…

It starts off with a short introduction by Bernstein. Did I mention a very young Placido Domingo is the solo tenor?

After all that excitement, here’s a literal version of Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Pupils focus on paper.
Silence falls, heavy.
Failing, achieving, leaving.

A new method of writing onto gold nanorods may provide as much as 10 TB of space on a single DVD sized disc!

10 TB is… it’s unimaginable to the average person. It’s far more than the information in an average library; it’s 521, 000 minutes of music at 320 kbps; it’s 400 Blu-ray discs; if the US Library of Congress digitized all its holdings into plain text, two of these discs could hold all of it.

The full article here:
BBC tech news.

So I’ve just come back from watching Star Trek with a couple of friends, one who is a Trekkie, and two who aren’t. There’s just so much I want to say about it, but firstly, something not about the movie, but about the camera work involved. This will be the only part of this post related to the title, by the way.

Aside: I know, I know, it’s a Sci-Fi movie, what camera work? It’s all green screen, ain’t it?

There was so much lens flare it actually took my attention off Spock’s ears and Uhura’s ass. WHAT KIND OF IDIOT LET THIS COME OUT OF THE EDITING DEPARTMENT? Lens flare is not in fashion anymore, people. In fact, from the earliest days of cinema, photography directors have been trying to reduce lens flare as much as possible! The thing is, it got accepted as the norm by the average moviegoer, and so they kept it around, even artificially adding it as in many, many SF films, including this one (since, I presume, they weren’t able to film in space, where the most gratuitous lens flare abuse takes place).

Okay, now that that’s over with, onward to the review/summary (Beware of spoilers.):

Oh, the rest of this post is rated NC-17 for content, okay?

THE USS ENTERPRISE vs GIGANTIC JAPANESE TENTACLE MONSTER

Okay, the movie opens with some ominous music. We see the USS Kelvin (presumably named after Lord Kelvin, since it appears to be a research vessel, I think), it’s floating around, looking at what appears to be a lightning storm – in space. Yay. Then something appears out of the lightning storm, something big and sinister spiky and… are those tentacles? At first I couldn’t see it very well, because it was set against the backdrop of a star and there was a heck of a lot of lens flare ( I said I wouldn’t talk about it anymore, sorry). THEY ARE TENTACLES. THERE ARE TENTACLES IN MY STAR TREK. At this point I had my first sniggering fit.

So this sets the stage for a hilarious (to me) and high octane movie which is completely unfaithful to its roots.

So we see Kirk’s dad get killed by some time-travelling Romulans on a mining ship (just because they’re from the future, some crappy mining ship can beat the crap out of state of the art Federation vessels, right?). Kirk’s mom happens to be there and she has him while escaping from the bad guys (led by a badly made up Eric Bana, seriously, he looks like the frontman from a death metal band that has no confidence in their act, he has tattoos on his head for god’s sake). Cue some sentimental silliness.

Cut to the future (a bit). We get to see Kirk and Spock when they were little snot-nosed kiddies. Suddenly this reminds me of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, that stain on the wall most Star Wars fans would rather forget. Long story short, there’s another cut to the future, and Kirk and Spock (now played by Zachary Quinto Sylar from Heroes) (and Uhura (who’s pretty hot) and McCoy) wind up on the Enterprise.

Oh, the Enterprise looks really good, if I may say so. It looks… sexy. And there’s lots of blinky lights where the old one had plain off-white hull. Unfortunately I couldn’t see it too well because of all the lens flare. (Stop it, bad alien hand syndrome…)

Then they go off to Vulcan to try and stop the tentacle thing (from here on called Cthulhu) who’s apparently doing something to the planet with a giant laser tentacle drill. The other six ships that were sent get blown to hell and stuff, but  of course no one really cared about them anyway. Then Cthulhu Eric Bana tattooed biker guy demands the Captain (not Kirk yet) go onto Cthulhu for some unspecified reason, otherwise the Enterprise gets blown to hell too.

So the Captain leaves Chekov on the bridge (oh, didn’t I mention, we meet Chekov, whose accent is so strong it’s almost offensive). And he gets Kirk and Sulu (played by a decidedly not-Japanese Korean-American John Cho Harold from Harold and Kumar, he doesn’t even try to talk like George Takei) and some random redshirt (who obviously bites it later) to go and knock out the drill and leaves Spock in charge.

So Kirk and Harold and redshirt parachute out of a shuttle (in space) and go through the atmosphere and try and land on the ‘bit’ of the drill to blow it up. The redshirt’s got the blowy uppy things. So the redshirt pulls his chute too late, overshoots and gets caught in the laser, bye bye redshirt. Kirk lands okay, but immediately gets set upon by an understandably angry Romulan. In twisting said Romulan’s gun away, he shoots some holes in Harold’s chute. Harold almost overshoots but his chute gets caught on something or other.

So he pulls out his Amazing Folding Katana (y’know, since he’s supposedly Japanese and so obviously has training in such weapons) to cut himself free. And then he tries to off his martial arts skill against the second angry Romulan but gets his ass kicked until he pushes said opponent into the backwash of the laser. Then he stabs the first angry Romulan and Kirk and him shoot the thing until the laser stops. Then they get beamed up and Cthulhu destroys Vulcan by means of a black hole bomb and escapes… Yeah, I’m serious. Spock goes down and tries to save the Council of Elders (including his mom and dad) but his mom dies via falling a few hundred feet – cue much angst.

Then Spock has an angsty fit and it turns out him and Uhura have been doing this and that together. What the heck. Following this, Spock has Kirk dropped via escape pod on some unnamed icy planet (remember, Kirk stowed away) that reminded me of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. So Kirk, being Kirk, sets out for the Federation outpost 14 km away despite warnings from the escape pod computer to stay there and wait for rescue.

He encounters a wolf-bear-monster thing and gets chased by that for a bit. Then this thing comes out of the ice and kills the monster thing and starts chasing him too. The new monster reminded me a lot of Starship Troopers and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones in that it’s a giant bug thing. So anyway Kirk runs into this cave, but then… The monster uses its tentacles that come out of its mouth (which looks like an anal sphincter surrounded by teeth by the way) to capture him. Right. So if this scene wasn’t written by some demented Japanese porn director, I don’t know who – oh wait… didn’t George Lucas do something like that in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi? I believe so. Damn.

So then someone comes with a blazing torch and drives it away. It turns out to be Spock. No Sylar-Spock, Real Spock (Spock Prime as listed in the credits). Leonard Nimoy Spock. Oh my god. He says some lines he’s said before in preceding movies (Oh Kirk, I’ll always be your friend, yeah?) and other sentimental stuff. Then they mind meld (Vulcans are telepathic, y’know) and Spock tells him that basically, everything is his (Spock’s) fault. Hardy har har.

Apparently, in the future, some stuff happened, and an unspecified star was going to go supernova, and as a result, Romulus (home planet of the Romulans) would be destroyed. (I don’t know if it was Romulus’ sun, but if it’s not, a supernova would take quite a while to affect it.) Why is it going to go supernova? No clue. Hello, Trek writers, STARS DON’T GO FREAKIN SUPERNOVA FOR NO REASON. Especially when they’re regular yellow stars. Only very old, very large stars have a chance of going supernova.

So Spock promises to save them by – get this – using a black hole to absorb the supernova’s energy. WHAT THE HELL. Using ‘red matter’ (oh you think you’re so smart, don’t you Trek writers?), which is kept in a glass (well it sure looks like glass) canister, and is extracted via SYRINGE, apparently one droplet can create a black hole if it went outside the canister/cartridge. Right. Unfortunately he arrives too late and Romulus goes bye bye. He tries out the bomb anyway and he and Cthulhu get sucked into it, and that’s how they wound up back in our time. IT’S A BLACK HOLE GODDAMMIT!

So I was watching some more youtube videos, and I felt a need to watch listen to some people play Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

So first I went with the old holdout, Cziffra, and I found one vid of him doing it awesomely, with that identifiable twist to things he usually puts into his playing. The thing which made his performance different, he didn’t seem to take the piece too seriously, after all, it’s supposed to be reminiscent of gypsy music.

The above on the Tube.

Then I watched some Horowitz, I find he tends to play things a little too straight at times, but technically precise of course.

The above on the Tube.

Then Rachmaninoff, a really old recording though. Felt a little too slow at points, though props for making that last line roll so well.

On the Tube.

I noticed something suddenly, in the related videos section. Maksim playing this piece has roughly 850, 000 views. WHAT?! Sorry, but I had to see what this was all about. Yes, Maksim Mrvica, in his crotch-crushingly tight leather pants and wristlets (his usual outfit that is), playing Liszt. Well, it’s alright, really, but hey, stop staring doe-eyed at the camera for goodness’s sake… And it really doesn’t warrant how popular it is compared to the Cziffra recording above, which I found far more enjoyable.

The Tube is wacked.

Anyhow, thus began my examination of the number of views garnered by different players of this particular piece.

Cziffra:

Horribly underappreciated, however this may also be due to the fact that there are about a dozen videos of Cziffra playing this, though this seems to be the one with the best audio quality (from my cursory examination).

Then, Horowitz:

Yeah, Horowitz got quite a few. I still think his interpretation is a little too dry.

Rachmaninoff:

Yeah. Audio for this one is pretty bad though, I think this must be quite an old recording.

Maksim:

Okay, he’s got some technical skill, but I just don’t feel his pieces like I do with Cziffra or even Horowitz. Overrated…

However, he is topped by none other than…
TOM AND JERRY:

It’s a little sad, when you think about it. Then suddenly I had an epiphany. What did the Maksim and T&J vids have that none of the previous ones had? COLOUR. Yes, there is some colour prejudice among Youtube watchers! Who would’ve thought that in this day and age we would still have people who don’t like black and white.

T&J on the Tube.

However, my conclusion is dulled by the fact that Buggs Bunny’s rendition is far less popular than T&J’s…

I even used the mouse as a control factor, there are mice in both T&J’s vid and Buggs Bunny’s…

BBs are small spherical objects, for more universal truths, check the Tube.

The only quantifiable difference is that the level of violence is higher in BB’s than in T&J’s. Oh wait, BB’s has dialogue! Hmm… unforseen errors means my research is untenable. I suppose I should go back and start from scratch, but I can’t be bothered to.

FINAL CONCLUSION:
Cats > bunnies.

Oh, have some Cziffra, because he’s awesome.

When I was a child,
I spake as a child.
Now I am grown, yet
Childish thoughts remain.

When I was a man,
I was a fool.
Now a child,
That choice is no more.

When I was a fool,
I knew many things.
Now wiser,
I know I know little.

When I knew much,
I felt strong.
Now I am weak,
Yet content in my weakness.

When I had want,
I thought only of happiness.
Now grimmer,
My wants seem petty.

When I was petty,
Things held my fancy.
Now less fancy,
I see far more.

When I had foresight,
I tripped over myself.
Now I have balance,
But only stare at my feet.

When I am a man,
I will be but a child,
Who will be foolish
Yet wise, and
Know little.

When I am a child,
I will be but a man,
Who will have foresight
But forsake it, and
Be petty.

When I am weak,
I will be content,
And trip every so often,
Yet be not grim,
For I am a man.

-Fin.

Cross-reference 1 Corinthians 13.