Book Review: Flood, by Stephen Baxter

It took me a while to pick up Flood, though not for lack of trying.  After it was listed on Stephen Baxter's website as available in the fall of 2008, I kept an eye out for it at my local Borders, and even checked out both the Borders and Barnes and Noble in Santa Barbara one day on an unrelated outing.

On a semi-related note, I searched for it one day in Borders in...oh, November or December, and it was listed as not-yet-released.  I looked it up on Amazon, then and there on my iPhone, and it was absolutely available.

So, I eventually did order it from Amazon.

I have an interesting reader's relationship with Stephen Baxter's books.  Some of them suck me in from the first page or two -- The Timeships, say, or Evolution, which I recently finished as well.  Others, like Conqueror or The Light of Other Days, were slow going at first but engrossing once I'd gotten into them.

Spoilers below, obviously.

I struggled more with Flood, and I'm not really sure why.  Perhaps because I'm not a fan of the global disaster genre as a rule -- though I found the young adult novel Life as We Knew It engrossing in the extreme.  (It might be useful to note that I was a fan of Susan Beth Peffer's older novels as a teenager.)

The story is simple enough (if you're a hard sci-fi fan): there are vast subterranean oceans that -- due to climate change or the Gaia hypothesis -- suddenly release, setting a horrific catastrophe in motion: Earth's oceans begin to rise, first by meters a year and ultimately a meter a day, until the entire surface of the Earth is covered in water.

The story begins in Spain, with hostages of a religious fundamentalist group, and their rescue.  This serves as a reason to tie the main characters together throughout the book -- a sometimes flimsy excuse, it seems to me, but I'm willing to engage in a little suspension of disbelief.

When Lily returns to England, she finds that London has already endured several flooding events.  The story follows the former hostages through the next several decades of their lives -- ending as a flag planted atop Mount Everest drowns -- as humanity struggles to cope with the changes.

I'm not certain how to read the end of Flood, where Lily and another character discuss the Gaia hypothesis, and whether it's possible for humanity to survive on rafts indefinitely.  There are several mentions of the children who are born after the flood, and how they are at home in the water from a very early age.

Perhaps because I finished reading Evolution fairly recently, that struck me several times as a vast untapped aspect of the story, and may have something to do with my ambivalence regarding the ending -- in which Lily, aging and somewhat senile, suddenly asks, "I sailed on Ark Three, and I saw Ark One fly off...but what is Ark Two?"  Paraphrasing mine, emphasis on the last Baxter's.

It's striking to me that I didn't clue into that being a lead-in to a sequel until I read an article about it -- either on io9 or Sci-Fi Wire, I forget -- because I am far more interested in whether humanity will survive.

Note: I said humanity, not civilization.

By the end of the book, several generations have passed -- the characters note that children are having babies younger and younger -- and there have been references to raft kids that could swim to depths of 200 meters or more.

Which leaves me wondering -- could natural selection operate on the remaining populations quickly enough to allow some remnant of humanity to survive?

And, if so, what characteristics would be desirable?

Clearly increased lung capacity is one, to enable people to dive for fish and other goods.  Webbed or fused fingers or toes would suddenly become desirable, rather than something that suggests immediate surgery.  Quick thinking would likely be selected for -- but more than that, a sensitivity to changing pressure would warn of impending storms, hypercanes, or waves.

And so on.

I suspect the sequel will center on Ark Two, or perhaps answer the question of whether Ark One was really a spaceship setting off for parts unknown, but I would hope that we get at least some glimpses of what life on Earth has become.

All in all...I give Flood a hearty "meh."  5 out of 10, which is a shame because I am generally an avowed Stephen Baxter fan.

Various Fannish Stuff

Okay, first, a few words about Dollhouse.

The majority of reviews that I've read online have been...anemic, at best.  People who were expecting snappy Buffy-esque dialogue were disappointed with the (heavily-tinkered-with-by-Fox) premiere.  Many people see no potential in the show because Echo is "not a character" (read that on a blog; don't remember where).  One Fandom!Secrets post complained that Dollhouse is the last nail in the Joss-isn't-a-feminist-after-all coffin.

I was, I'll admit, a little surprised at the...well...normality of the dialogue in the premiere.  There was no creative use of tenses, word forms, or sentence structure (just look at the Wikiquote Buffy page, if you don't know what I'm talking about) such as "But not for me the furrowed brow."

The thing is...this isn't Buffy.  Or Angel.  So why does it have to sound like it?

(To be fair, in the second and third episodes, there are a few turns of phrase that I found quite reminiscent of both, but it's not like it's an hour of Buffy-esque dialogue tricks.)

Now, as for the "Echo isn't a character" thing -- I'd argue against that, strenuously.

(Spoilers below for the first three episodes.)

I'm not sure that Echo, in her non-imprinted state, has much to do with her pre-Dollhouse persona (whose name I have forgotten) but I'm fairly certain that something is lingering even after wipes.  Whether that has to do with the flashbacks she had when crazy-hunter-guy was stalking her, or whether it's just a flaw in the process (which the existence of Alpha and of the other doll recognizing Echo at the end of the third episode suggest), I'm not sure.

The fact is, they have shown Echo wandering around where she shouldn't be, out of curiosity, remembering other dolls when she shouldn't, interacting with them in a way that suggests she knows she shouldn't let on that she recognizes them (shaking her head at Sierra), and so on.  I think Echo is a character -- and, what's more -- I think that Echo is going to develop as a character over however long the series lasts (or however long Joss has planned, if by some miracle its ratings go up and it lasts more than the few episodes that have been ordered already) into the main character of the show.

And, yes, I mean that as literally as I wrote it -- it's not going to be the "tabula rasa" show -- it's going to be the Echo show.  The question is, is it going to be about Echo taking down the Dollhouse from within, or is it going to be a more morally murky situation?

Much is being made in the show of Echo's ability to build something above and beyond what she's been imprinted with.  Dr. Fred suggests -- likely because they suspect that's what Alpha did -- that that is a bad thing.

So is Alpha going to be the moral opposite of Echo?  The doll that took all the bad bits and pieces and created for himself a persona that seems clearly evil.  Or is it?  Was he, perhaps, trying to put the dolls out of what he perceived as their misery?

And, say Echo becomes fully self-aware, in between imprinting sessions.  Does she retain that after being imprinted?  Does she, ultimately, become Echo who is also a ninja fighter?

Personally, I find the possibilities fascinating.

So, say, at some point in the show (I think I remember reading that Joss intends for it to be five seasons) Echo escapes from the dollhouse and becomes a fugitive.  Who do you trust?  How do you know that the person you're talking to isn't a doll sent to set you up, like Agent Ballard in the third episode.

Incidentally, I could do without the Agent Ballard thing at all.  I've just never gotten the fuss over Tahmoh Penikett, even as I rooted for his character on Battlestar Galactica.  Someone, though, perhaps on an io9 discussion, suggested that he might be Alpha, and I find that intriguing -- that perhaps the Alpha persona is only part of the character.

Now, based on past history, the fact that I enjoy a Fox sci-fi show with mediocre ratings suggests an early end, a la the much-lamented Alien Nation.  Oh well.

Meanwhile, having been inspired by a re-read blog on Tor's website, I have decided to try, once again, to re-read The Lord of the Rings.  I've tried three other times before, but was heartened by many, many comments by folks that are now clearly die-hard fans who also made several aborted attempts (all failing very close to where I gave up -- somewhere between Bree and Rivendell) to try once again.

I have no real explanation for why I've never made it through the books -- the rather high-brow language doesn't really trouble me -- but my suspicion is the rather long info-dumps that happen with prodigious regularity in the book.  Peter Jackson said once that getting the prologue to Fellowship the right length was an arduous process -- he had to try to give audiences info they needed to know, without having a 23-minute-long prologue.  Tolkien, to my observation, showed no such restraint.

So we'll see.

Is This Cool or Weird?

Okay, I loved the mid-80s TV movie version of Alice in Wonderland, which, of course, prominently featured "The Jabberwocky."

I also like filk music, at least older stuff (classics like Julia Ecklar's stuff, Leslie Fish...that kind of stuff).

This sounds like a filk recording of "The Jabberwocky," but I'm not sure if it's cool or not.  Something about the phrasing or pacing, especially at the beginning, seems a
bit...off:

Personally, my favorite nonsense phrase was always: "the vorpal blade went snicker-snack."

Bad Nerd

So, somehow, I missed the fact that Amazon was going to announce the Kindle 2 today.

(Did we know that Amazon was going to announce the Kindle 2 today?  I looked for Kindle 2 rumors on a whim about a week or so ago, and everyone agreed it was imminent, but I don't recall a date anywhere.)

Let me start by saying that I have owned both the first generation Sony Reader (the 500) and the upgraded 505.  I don't own the third generation, touch screen, backlit 700 -- and after the firmware upgrade to the 505 that gave additional font sizes, I don't really see the 700 as a compelling upgrade.  Judging from the unit I played with in Borders, the back light, even when it's not on, decreases the contrast of the display -- and if my batteries are going to run out, I'd rather it be the user-replaceable book light batteries than the Reader's internal battery.

Let me also say that I've always been a voracious reader -- and a voracious re-reader.  There are novels, as well as a select few fan fiction stories I've found on the Internet, that I've read at least 10 or more times.  One of the most challenging things for me as a teacher is that I rarely have the mental wherewithal to read in the evenings.

So having the Reader, which I can keep in my purse to grab a few pages here or there -- not to mention bringing weeks' worth of reading material on trips for less than a pound -- has been a real boom.  It's been as transformative to my life and how I enjoy reading as the iPod was to how I enjoyed music.

The Kindle 1 would never have won any design contests, at least in my opinion (though I'm willing to admit that perhaps I'm biased towards the first device I own -- and am perhaps corrupted by the Apple minimalist design philosophy) while the Reader -- especially the 505 -- has always been slick and sleek.

But the things that kept me looking for Kindle 2 rumors, the things that had me wondering if, somehow, I could scare up some tax refund money, were two simple things: (1) you can buy books on the fly, using Sprint's EVDO network; and (2) Amazon's Kindle store has a number of older, classic Star Trek books (before Paramount moved in, took editorial control, and basically said that nothing was allowed to change by the end of a novel) that I really, really like and would really, really like to purchase legitimately.

Of course, they are available on the Internet for those of a mind to find them, but I try to be honest in my dealings.

(Remember that thing above when I said I'm a voracious re-reader?  If you counted only Spock's World, Q-In-Law, Dwellers in the Crucible, The Vulcan Academy Murders, Doctor's Orders, The IDIC Epidemic, The Entropy Effect, Uhura's Song, The Romulan Way, and Vendetta, I would imagine that would account for something like 150 novel readings in my life time.  The bolded ones alone probably account for 50.  Also, pardon me for not linking, but that's a lot, and Google is your friend.)

So when I checked Twitter tonight and found Molly Wood tweeting about a Kindle 2 review, I was...flummoxed.

The Kindle 2 sounds like an incremental upgrade, at least from the CNet review I read, but that's rather what I expected.  As you can tell from the generation numbers, the second generation (505) of the Reader was a "mere" +5 from the original 500, while the vastly redesigned 700 warranted a +200.

In other words, think software updates.  Way, way back, long ago, upgrading from Netscape 3.3 to 3.4 was a very minor change, while Netscape 4 became something totally different.

If I'm remembering correctly, the actual readable screen size of the Reader and Kindle are the same, but the large plastic casing around the Kindle makes it seem smaller to me.  Perhaps that would change if I could actually play with one for a few minutes, but one of the disadvantages of Amazon being an Internet-only operation -- as useful as it is in most situations -- is that there are no brick and mortar stores like the Sony Style or Borders stores where I've seen the Reader.

I like the fact that the buttons have been rearranged slightly, but I don't like that the Kindle 2 has no expansion slot.

(That said, my Sony Reader will play mp3s as well, and I've never loaded a one -- I would never want to drain my reader's battery by listening to music (that's why I have an iPod and a 9V battery pack for it) and I've never come close to filling up either its internal memory or the 1GB SD card I added to it, and the Kindle comes with 2 GB.)

The Read to Me feature is awesome, though.  I've used my own computer's text-to-speech capabilities to make "audiobooks" of certain things but it would be nifty to have a device that could read something to me on the fly -- especially DRMd books, which are exceedingly difficult to make work on my computer.

I'm ambivalent about the keyboard.  When I had a Rocket ebook reader (yes, I've been an ebook early adopter for years), it had a pen and limited handwriting recognition, and I did occasionally look up words in the dictionary (sward, for instance, is one I remember getting the gist of from the context but wanting to know for certain).  But I can't really say I've missed it on my Reader.  Obviously, it's necessary for browsing for books on the fly, but I think it adds to my impression -- again, probably psychological and almost certainly false -- that the Kindle's screen is smaller than the Sony Reader's.

The photos here show that the Kindle is nice and thin, and I like the styling on the back -- which makes me wonder if the people designing the front and back ever talked to each other.  I'm not sure I can articulate what I don't like about the front...and I might not feel that way if I'd ever seen a real one...who knows?

Six text sizes is nice, but a recent firmware update to the 505 increased the options for that as well, so that's not as compelling a feature as it used to be.

According to this review, the Kindle 2 now reads .doc and .pdf files -- I'll have to investigate more to see if it's natively (and, if so, how you get them on the device -- see below) as about 2/3 of my content is non-DRMed .rtf files such as my own stories, stories I've downloaded off the Internet, and so on.  If that's the case, that's a major deletion the "minus" column in my mental comparison scale for the Kindle.

Finally, we hit one last thing.

The Sony Reader does not work with a Mac natively.  There are 3rd party options, but they do not work with the Reader's DRM, which means that I can't purchase a book from Sony and put it on my Reader unless I boot into Windows -- and, if you've been reading my tweets, you'd see that my latest attempt to do so is not going so well.

So, there again, until I someday upgrade my laptop -- to, say, one of the nifty new unibody Macbooks -- and then install Windows, I don't buy or add books to my Reader as nearly as often as I would like, and am completely unable to do so, say, on a long trip.

So where does that leave me?

Unfortunately, back where I began.  I'm slightly tilting more towards the Kindle side of the equation -- because, usability issues aside, I feel more secure in Amazon's support for Kindle long-term (because its business is so huge and diversified, it can afford to support a niche market product like the Kindle, where I'm not sure how long Sony would be able to do so), and because Amazon actually carries a lot of books that I would buy, that are not available from Sony's store.

Huge draws:  Read to Me (text-to-speech) and WhisperNet (on-the-go buying).

Minor draws:  Long term, it might be safer to buy proprietary-formatted, DRMed books from Amazon than from Sony.

Drawbacks:  Clunky design (though Kindle 2 is a step in the right direction), already have a Sony Reader (is switching worth it).

Now, if I won the lottery, this would all be a moot point -- I'd just buy a bigger purse and have one of each. :-)

Internet, How I Missed You

It's been...quite a week.  You may have read on Cat's blog that one of my students was hit in our school parking lot.  Turns out she has broken toes and something is wrong enough with her ankle to require a visit to an orthopedist.

Plus, my Internet connection went out, about which I whine frequently on Twitter.

However, while trolling around the Internet, trying to accomplish the last three things on my to-do list before winter break (with the goal being to leave school stuff behind for an astonishing two weeks), I found this compilation of clips of famous speeches.

I was pleasantly surprised that Picard's "This far, no farther!" speech from First Contact was included.  That speech packs more emotional punch for long-time fans -- because we know Picard's history with the Borg -- than the oft-quoted "how many does it take, Admiral!" speech from Insurrection.  Both are classic HERE COMES THE MESSAGE moments, but the first strikes a deeper chord, I think.

Also...Bastian.  On Falcorn.  From the end of Neverending Story.  Not a speech, but...yay!

And Azeem, from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.  (SOOOO not a Kevin Costner fan, but I do love that movie.  Largely because of Azeem, now that I think of it.)

I only recognized the clip from The Great Muppet Caper because Patrick nearly wore out that tape when he was little, and I don't get how it's a "great moment," but whatever.

(I now have "The Happiness Hotel" stuck in my  head.  Nifty.)

Charlie Brown of course, and I'm pretty sure Brad Pitt (as Alexander the Great? Or was that from Troy?) snuck in there too.

But what intrigued me, from a fandom standpoint, was the choice of Aragorn's speech to his troops from Lord of the Rings.

Why?

Well, to my mind, there are three iconic moments in Return of the King.  The first is Sam's Moment, with a capital M:  "Come on, Mr. Frodo.  I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you!"

The second two are fascinating to me from a psychological standpoint.

Yes, a psychological standpoint.

I think a lot of The Two Towers and Return of the King, at least from the films' standpoint, was a contrast in Aragorn and Theoden's leadership styles.  In TTT, Theoden refuses to ask Gondor for help in their battle, but then refuses to help Gondor in RotK because they didn't offer help themselves.

When the battle seems lost and Aragorn suggests one final stand, Theoden responds with "For death and glory!" while Aragorn replies with, "For Rohan.  For your people."

Basically, I think the goal here was to show that Aragorn is thinking of others, thinking ahead, while Theoden is focused on himself.

Then, before each person's big battle in RoTK, they each muster their troops.

Theoden does it thusly:  "Forth, and fear no darkness!  Arise!  Arise, Riders of Theoden!  Spears shall be shaken!  Swords shall be splintered!  A sword day, a red day, ere the sun rises!  Ride now!  Ride now!  Ride!  Ride to ruin, and the world's ending!  Death!  Death!"

You might notice a certain...fatalism in the above.  It's basically, "ride to your deaths, but don't be scared!"

Meanwhile, King Aragorn (because by this point, he is King Aragorn) circles his nervous troops as they rear back in fear from the army coming out of the Black Gates:  "Hold your ground!  Hold your ground!  Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers, I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me.  A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.  An hour of wolves, and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day.  This day we fight!  By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!"

In other words, "I know you're scared, and so am I, but today, we are going to show our courage, in the name of everything we love."

It's this speech that always -- always -- gives me chills, even (good Lord) five years later, and it's this bit that is in the video referenced above.

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

(Incidentally, I've tried to read the novel several times, but the farthest I've ever gotten is when they take an injured Frodo to Rivendell.  Something about Tolkien's information-dump style of writing is just very off-putting to me.  I admire the sophisticated world he essentially invented to explain the history of the language he'd invented -- I just wish he'd written a companion book to go with the actual story.  But I've always wondered how those three moments are rendered in the book.)

It Begins Again

For the uninitiated (ha!), the Harry Potter series consists of seven books slowly but inexorably building to a final showdown between the eponymous (I love that word) hero and the most evil wizard ever (tm).

Before each book came out, there was speculation that it would be OMG DARKER AND SCARIER THAN THE PREVIOUS ONE!  MAYBE OUR LITTLE BOYS AND GIRLS SHOULDN'T READ IT.

Um.

Remember that "slowly but inexorably" thing?

Remember how Lord of the Rings started with a relatively innocuous thing (Bilbo disappearing at his birthday party) and ended with "The End of All Things?"

When things slowly but inexorably built towards BAD THINGS, they slowly but inexorably get...

...badder.

This should not be rocket science, folks.

The same thing, of course, happens as trailers trickle out for each subsequent movie, to my continual irritation.

(Surely, if you're going to see the sixth Harry Potter film, you've read the books?  I could forgive, perhaps, having not read the book before seeing the first, but wouldn't that pique your interest?  More to the point, in a (ahem) post-Harry-Potter world, you surely know that....  Oh, never mind.  I give up.)

Anyhow, imagine my reaction when I saw this:

Sinister twist.

A 'darker' Harry Potter.

I just -- I just --

Okay, let me try to be rational.

Kids who grew up on Harry Potter grew with the books.  If they were 11 when they read the first, they were adults when Deathly Hallows came out.  I think adults could handle Deathly Hallows, don't you?

A kid that read Sorcerer's Stone for the first time (yep, I'm American...sorry) at 11 two months ago is in a different spot.

But here's the thing.

YOU'RE THE PARENT.

IF YOU ARE WORRIED ABOUT WHAT YOUR KID IS READING OR WATCHING THEN WATCH IT YOURSELF.

I mean, for crying out loud, people.

On another similar but related note, a couple of weeks ago, our News-2-You topic was the Country Music Awards.  Because the paper had a bit on the history of country music, I hopped onto YouTube, violated several copyrights, and made a video showing the growth of country music over time, with 30 second-ish clips from each decade of country music.

Johnny Cash being Johnny Cash showed up in two of them.

Three of my students -- including my youngest, Bart (fourth grade boy P), who just turned nine a month ago -- said, "Oh, that's that guy from the movie with the drugs!"

So we let an eight year old boy (with special needs, but even so) watch Walk the Line, but we angst that the sixth movie in a series of...well, eight, really...movies that are building to a giant confrontation with a REALLY EVIL BAD GUY...is...darker?

Walk the frelling Line.

I weep for society.

Yikes

Note: I have not read Twilight, nor any of its sequels. Yes, I did read the whole Harry Potter series.

However.

Ouch.

I kinda laughed at the review in a few places, but...ouch.

Quotes of note:

"Educators, readers and parents have all made much of the fact that the Twilight series promotes a wholesome version of teen love for its dreamy, predominantly female readership, citing how the books' protagonists practice abstinence (as opposed to, say, the lewd excesses of Harry Potter's cohort, or those out-of-control Pevensie kids)."

Um.

Lewd excess? I hope I'm right in reading that as hyperbole for effect.  'Cause I kinda remember Ginny having a couple of romances, and some talk about...Dean?  Seamus?  And, of course, there was some snogging, but none of the descriptions went past, well, snogging, which is what 16ish year olds do.

I student taught at a high school.

Trust me.

However, this cracked me up. Possibly because it's late and I'm tired and yet trying to get myself to write a little.

"It gets worse: Breaking Dawn has a childbirth sequence that may promote lifelong abstinence in sensitive types."

I feel kinda bad for the author, except that I've read some examples of the prose in the stories, and it reminds me of stories I wrote in high school that -- for a reason -- are no longer available on the Internet for your reading pleasure.

Which is not to say that I have the talent to become a published author, so I probably should shut up where I'm ahead.

Note to Self

Dear me,

Next time you are in Powell's and see volumes 3 and 4 of the series of books you've brought to bring along on your trip sitting on the shelf...remember what it was like to go from Borders to Borders on a futile hunt for number 3, okay?

No love,
Me

For the record, I have an interesting relationships with Stephen Baxter's books.  I was first introduced to him while reading a collaboration he did with the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke, and quickly sought out more.  I read The Time Ships in...oh, within a day and a half or so (having not yet read The Time Machine, to which it is the only authorized sequel).

I now own the majority of his books.

(Also, can I just say that I love the way that page is laid out?  Separated by series, with the books' covers shown in series order below?  Awesome, Mr. Baxter or webmaster.)

The funny thing is, I often have to start a book two or three times to be sucked in.  Once I am, I'm left devouring whole books in a matter of hours -- but that doesn't always happen on the first attempt.

That's what happened with book 1 of the series I referenced above.  I'd read part of Emperor but stopped -- which is funny, because I've currently been on the look-out for good alternate history fiction.

Note "good."  That's, apparently, more difficult than it seems.

Anyway, on the trip, I started reading Emperor one night when we stopped kind of early.  By the end of the trip, I was two third of the way through book 2, and began to look for book 3.

Yeah, every store I went to had book 4...but no book three.

It's now been ordered from Amazon, but still...

Book Review: The Andromeda Strain

So, I think I said before that I picked up The Andromeda Strain after watching the eponymous miniseries -- or, trying to -- to see how similar it was.

First things first:  The plot of the book is much less...I don't want to say complex...it's much more focused in the book than in the miniseries.  For instance, there is no intrepid reporter hiking through the deserts promising God he'll never, ever again get high.

(Seriously.)

So, let's start with a brief plot synopsis -- of the plot in the book.  Keep in mind, it was written in 1969, with 1960s technology in mind.  Also keep in mind that, being published in 1969, it was written in the era of manned space flights but before Apollo 11.

The idea here is that there are likely organisms living in the upper atmosphere that humans would have limited or no immunity for -- rather like what happens when long-separated populations meet again.  Simple things can be very, very deadly.

To study this, NASA sends up satellites that "scoop" material from the upper atmosphere (thus, Project Scoop) and bring it back to Earth to examine.

One of the Project Scoop satellites comes down outside Piedmont, an isolated town in Nevada.  Within hours, everyone in the town except one old man and one infant, is dead.  Most died instantly, the blood in their body congealed into flaky, dusty stuff.  Some went insane and killed themselves in weird ways.

So, a bunch of scientists who had previously signed up for Project Wildfire are called into action.  They work in an underground lab that sounds an awful lot like Stargate SG-1's Cheyenne Mountain.

Their goal is to discover the source of the contagion and to eliminate it.

After much back and forth and drawn-out explanations of things we all take for granted today (seriously, he explains electron microscopes), they come to the stunning conclusion that it has mutated and is harmless.

Seriously.

Okay, stuff happens in between (turns out the folks that survived it survived because their blood chemistry was messed up -- the old guy had acidosis from an untreated ulcer and the baby's blood was too basic because (I absolutely kid you not) he cried too much and had too much CO2 in his blood), but basically, the conclusion is that it's not made of protein, it is in regular hexagons (so it's probably a crystal) and that it mutates.

So, let's get into comparing the book with the movie.

Things the book did better:

* The plot is almost largely contained in Piedmont and within the Wildfire installation -- we're not having to follow government agencies, army units, and some reporter guy detoxing in the desert

* The science is more believable -- there is no time traveling, there are no wormholes, there are no buckyballs...it sticks with the one premise that this is something weird and something alive that may or may not have come from outer space

Things the movie did better:

* ...Individually, all the scientific things they talked about in the movie (wormholes, time travel, buckyballs) are things I find intellectually fascinating (though presented all at once, it...strained credulity)

* The end.  Well, rather, the solving of the Andromeda puzzle.  The keeping of Andromeda on the International Space Station?  Not so much.  (I mean, really....)

Things the movie did worse:

* Um...most of it

* No, seriously, most of it.  The plot was a mangled, overwrought, overcomplicated mess.

Criticisms of the book:

* I had to read the ending three times to actually believe that after the whole frelling thing, everything was okay because Andromeda itself had mutated and wasn't dangerous anymore

   **  I mean, Andromeda is more or less the "bad guy" here -- and it just dissipates harmlessly on the wind

* I don't buy that the very smart scientists made the errors that Crichton made them make -- like not dissecting the lab rats that died from Andromeda.  These guys are supposed to be the best in their field, and they are supposed to be trained to deal with a threat that could come, literally, from space.

   **  It's not so much the errors -- is the number and frequency of them, and the fact that they are all the critical errors that make the whole thing last longer (not that it matters, 'cause Andromeda reforms itself and stops killing people...sigh).  It's too convenient.

Overall, it's a serviceable story, I suppose.  And, I realize that part of the point of the story is that we can't predict organisms that live in the upper layers of the atmosphere, or in outer space, etc. etc. etc.  But from a dramatic point of view, there's no climax.

The seals around Andromeda break down, and this guy is hyperventilating in order to try and stay alive, and, oh-my-gosh, everything's okay, 'cause Andromeda doesn't kill people anymore -- and we know that because it's already over Los Angeles and no one is dying or going crazy.

What the heck?

I mean, that's...that's the equivalent of Voldemort fading away in a puff of smoke just before the Battle of Hogwarts, never to bother anyone again.  You gear up for this showdown -- you think, "Oh, yay, they've got it!  They've figured it out! All they have to do is mess with the blood's pH...make everyone take antacids, and it's all good!" -- and then Crichton says, "Oh, ha ha, never mind -- I made the problem fix itself."

Until the last fifteen pages or so, I actually really liked the book, in a mindless, Angels and Demons kinda way.  It was a puzzle that I didn't take as literal fact, but I enjoyed following along as we tried to solve the puzzle, if that makes sense.

Final grade: C

(It would have been a B if not for the ending.  Grr.)

The Green Drop Drink

Congo.

It's the only Michael Crichton book I have ever read, even though I enjoyed (the first) Jurassic Park very much -- I think because of all the science in it.

(Though my nitpicky soul cried out at this exchange:

Mr. Hammond:  It's just a delay; that's all it is.  All major theme parks have delays.  When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked.

Dr. Malcolm:  But, John, if the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.

Ahem.  Disneyland opened in 1955.  And Pirates didn't exist until 1967.)

Anyway, I had seen the movie (for some reason, I allowed a friend to drag me to a variety of gory movies at the time...Congo was pretty gross, but Outbreak was the worst).

Shakespeare, it was not.

And what I remember most was Amy the gorilla, who was terrified of flying, and who had been fitted with a glove that voiced her signing, repeatedly asked for a "green drop drink" (a martini).

Now, at the time, I had very little understanding of how ASL differs from Signed English, how much facial expression and hand position affect ASL, nor even really an understanding of how very different word order can be in ASL, and I thought that it was a pretty neat idea.

(I still do, but the software would have to be seriously upgraded.)

In any event, that was about the last of it.

Then, of course, A&E produced its heavily marketed (at least on the Discovery and History channels that I primarily watch) Andromeda Strain miniseries.  So, like a good sci-fi fan, I TiVoed it.

Now, in the interim, it had been pretty roundly panned by critics and bloggers alike.

Also -- it took me three days to watch.

And I think the writers may have had too many green drop drinks.

Okay, it was earnestly acted by people that seemed good at their craft.  I was particularly amused to see Ted Atherton play yet another FBI-government-agent type, plus former SG-1 annoying guy Maybourne as...well, another annoying guy.  Eric McCormack was good, but I didn't really get what his character was about.

And then, there was the plethora of sci-fi cliches, all plugged into one movie: bucky balls, time travel, wormholes, aliens, killer viruses, mutations, surviving the virus because of something random, X-Files-like conspiracies...I'm sure I'm missing some here.

So, tonight, I went to pick up a copy of the book to see if all of that was actually in there.  (Did they even know about bucky balls when Crichton wrote the novel?)

ETA:  Googling says, "No, not by a long shot."  Huh.

Anyhow, Borders was out.  Weird.  I'll try to remember to update after I read the book...and find out what else was...err...enhanced.

Anyway, I did, because I'm a nerd like that, buy two other books.  I can't remember the last time I've entered a book store and left without a book....

Remakes, Reboots, and Re-Imaginings, Oh My!

I wasn't going to watch Battlestar Galactica (the miniseries) when it first aired.  I had a nostalgic affection for the original (not the abysmal Galactica 1980, mind) and it seemed...wrong...to take it in a new direction.

I remember all the hullabaloo -- OMG!  Starbuck is a girl!  OMG!  Apollo isn't really his name!  OMG!  Tigh isn't black!  And so on and so forth.  Original series star Richard Hatch was adamantly opposed to it (likely due in large measure to him working on a continuation/sequel of his own).

Eventually, I decided to TiVo it and see what I thought.

And, of course, was riveted, from the very beginning when Six walks into the space station with the poor ol' Colonial guy and asks him if he's alive, with the red strobe lights of the Centurions looking on.

But, you know, whether it's because of Ron Moore at the helm (I don't think it's a coincidence that Deep Space Nine was my favorite Star Trek series and the one that he co-executive produced), the cast (Edward James Olmos is awesome, as is -- especially in the first season's "Act of Contrition" -- Katee Sackhoff), the writing, the camera work, the additional drama of the human-form Cylons hiding amidst the fleet (witness the early destruction of that ship)...I don't know.

For every BSG, though, there's a Bionic Woman, Knight Rider...I could go on.

I don't know if it's because BSG dared to veer so far from the original canon (though the only thing Bionic Woman shared with the original, from the one episode I saw, was a lead character named Jaime Summers who was hurt in an accident and whose boyfriend talked people into bionicifying her) -- which allowed it to tell its own story -- or that it retained enough of the original to be interesting, or just that the stories it tells are so human- and character-driven that they can be in a similar universe and exploring totally different territory.

I am very, very, very leery of the forthcoming Star Trek movie, for a variety of reasons.

1.  It'd be Star Trek 11.  An odd number.

2.  The people involved in Enterprise did not give me much faith in the current crop of Star Trek's folks to do a prequel well (I mean, bumpy-headed Klingons?  C'mon.), at least until the fourth season when the Reeves-Stevenses came on board to help out.

(Ironically, I've never much liked their Trek novels.)

3.  No one -- and I mean no one -- will ever, ever be able to play Spock like Leonard Nimoy.

4.  (Not to mention, the current crop of Trek writers don't write Vulcans well at all -- at least, not in the form of Tuvok or T'Pol.)

5.  Seeing Eomer (actually, I never got past "Caesar, Julius Caesar") on the Enterprise is just....weird.

I might see it in theaters; I might not. But I'm not at all convinced this will be the second coming of The Wrath of Khan.

So, now, I read that Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards are going to have cameos in the re-imagining (reboot?  remake?) of Escape to Witch Mountain (one of my favorite movies as a child).

Most people don't remember this, but they already tried this once, in 1995, with a TV movie called (get this) Escape to Witch Mountain.

Now, neither movie bears much resemblance to the eponymous book (gee, a Disney movie stretched the canon it was based on...I'm shocked....) but the latter was....  Hm....  Let's just say...it was weird.

(Seriously.  Purple glowing crystals weird.)

Disney has a history of cameos like this.  In Lindsay Lohan's The Parent Trap, the girls' dad's fiancee's mother is played by the fiance in the original (along with borrowing the simpering, "Hello, Pet" from the original soon-to-be-step-grandmother).

And it might suggest that the remake is...semi-decent -- but, of course, the actors haven't exactly worked a lot, and you wonder if it's just about a job.

After all, Leonard Nimoy is in Star Trek, and I'm still iffy about that.

I don't want to sound like a fandom snob -- really, I don't.  I don't want to be one of those people who gets it in their head that things should be a certain way ("I'll boycott Babylon 5 if they don't get Claudia Christian back!" or "I'll never watch Stargate if Daniel Shanks isn't in it!").

Really, I don't.

But, I do wonder this:  why remake stuff?  Why not, in Star Trek's case, introduce another ship, another bad guy, something?  If you want it to be more mainstream, isn't that a good way to do it?

Or, in Witch Mountain's case, why not skip forward a few generations, or tell the story of the original exodus from their planet?  Something?

BSG proved it can be done well -- but BSG is a good show, whether or not it draws on the original's canon.

I dunno.

(This post was sparked by reading about the Witch Mountain thing, but I've been wanting to talk about the whole re-imagining thing for a while.)

In school news, I am so not popular again, for daring to suggest that maybe leaning on top of Bulldozer and moving his foot might have been why Aide J got hit.  ("But I was just moving The Boss's chair," she said.  Uh...yeah...from on top of Bulldozer.)

Also, New Boy started today.  And you thought The Boss was stubborn....

Human Error

"These kinds of problems have cropped up before, and they have always been due to human error."  -- HAL 9000

I'm not sure Arthur C. Clarke would want to be remembered, or eulogized, by a quote from 2001, but it's the only one I can think of off-hand, and fits that first thought you sometimes have when you hear someone has died:  That can't be right.

For years, despite being an avowed sci-fi fan, I mostly read tie-in novels -- Star Trek, Babylon 5, X-Files, and the like.  The few sci-fi books I'd read just hadn't captured my interest.

Turns out, when it comes to my reading material, I like hard sci-fi.  Science-based stuff.  The probable made possible.

His was some of the first I read, after I'd discovered that Fahrenheit 451 just didn't do it for me (the message was chilling; the book...meh).

I started, amazingly enough, with 2001.  There was an excerpt from it as a training passage for Dragon Naturally Speaking, which came installed on Sparky Junior.   Most of his novels were riveting -- Rendezvous with Rama, for one; some of his sequels were...meh, not so much.  His collaborations with Stephen Baxter were excellent, and led me to Stephen Baxter's solo work -- my favorite of which being The Timeships...which, in turn, led me to read The Time Machine.

It's sad, in a way, that Arthur C. Clarke is mainly being mentioned in reports of his death, as the acclaimed science fiction writer.

He was also a very intelligent man, who is credited with the idea of a space elevator (for which there is now a prize) and with spreading the notion of a communications satellite.  He'd written as many scientific papers as novels.

For the sci-fi community, it's a sad day.  I think I'll start to re-read 2001 over the break.

(Incidentally, for those of you who have seen -- and puzzled over -- the movie, the book makes it make much more sense...the two were written concurrently.)

Unfortunately, the only other quote I can come up with is, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

Book Review: Burning Dreams

Once upon a time, I read every Star Trek book published.

Then a funny thing happened.  The Bigwigs declared that, essentially, nothing could change from the beginning of the book to the end, so as to stay In Canon.

(Except, of course, that the books were never supposed to be canon, which is why Spock could have a kid, among other things.)

Well, when nothing important is allowed to happen, books become...boring.

But I have fond memories of those early books: if history writers could present history as vividly as Diane Duane did in Spock's World and The Romulan Way, more kids would love the subject.  Margaret Wander Bonanno's Dwellers in the Crucible is one of my favorite books -- note, not "Star Trek books" but one of my favorite books -- ever (though I gather it's controversial).  The Wounded Sky (because any book that invents something called "creative physics" is awesome), The Three-Minute Universe (because appearances can be deceiving), Uhura's Song (because "Eyebrow on stun, Mr. Spock!" still sends me into fits of hysterics).

Then, around the same time as the Edict From On High said that nothing important could happen in the novels, Margaret Wander Bonanno wrote a sequel to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales), but (according to her, to be fair) it was 95% re-written.   She and Pocket Books / Paramount / Star Trek parted ways.

Then, a while back, she announced that she'd written Catalyst of Sorrows, for the series of "Lost Era" books that covered the time after the end of the Star Trek movies.  I bought it, but for some reason never read it.  (I probably will find it and read it now.)

And after that, she wrote Burning Dreams, which is essentially The Christopher Pike book.

Christopher Pike was the captain in the unaired pilot of Star Trek called "The Cage;" he reappeared in a two-part episode called "The Menagerie," which used some of the unaired footage during a court martial.  Without going too much into the story (if you're reading this review, I assume you at least know who Chris Pike was), after giving up command of the Enterprise, Pike is grievously wounded -- paralyzed and able to communicate only by indicating "yes" or "no" -- but is eventually taken back to Talos IV, where he can live a life of illusion.

What always fascinated me about Pike was the depth the character was given in just the few minutes we saw him.  He's passionate, dedicated -- and tortured by the memories of the people who died under his command.  When I came across filk in the late 1990s, and found "The Price of Command," it immediately and irrevocably became my Christopher Pike song.  If I thought I could find enough footage, I'd do a vid with it.

In any event, Burning Dreams is the story of Chris Pike's life -- and the story of what he does with the life of illusion he's been given when he returns to Talos IV.

It's very different in both tone and style -- with the exception of flashback and present being heavily intertwined -- than Dwellers in the Crucible, but that befits Pike, I think.  Dwellers is about an archaeologist and a linguist -- not to mention a human and a Vulcan -- so the narration matches the characters.  Pike is many things, but he's not flowery.

The back story that Burning Dreams develops for Pike makes sense, though it seems to me to be a little melodramatic -- especially his very early years with his mother and stepfather.  The story of his horse Tango, though, was heartbreaking.

The story of his initial acclimation to Talos IV -- wondering where illusion ended and reality began, especially with Vina, rang true.  Despite his injuries, I can't imagine Pike -- especially the one developed in Burning Dreams -- just giving himself over entirely to fantasy easily.  That he's aware enough to wonder whether he's really with Vina or if he's with an illusion of Vina rings very true to character.

Pike's injuries themselves take on an even more horrific context than they did originally, given his past.  Pike is a tragic figure, who spends most of his life beating himself up for not being good enough, strong enough, to prevent the death of someone he cared about.  It makes his reaction to his crewmens' deaths that much more poignant.  But, it makes you wonder: how did someone with that predisposition to take everything so personally make it through the psychological testing you'd assume a Starfleet captain would be subject to?

The end -- the part of the story set in the "present" -- of course carries its own flashback, as it explains Spock's overwhelming loyalty to Pike (while still qualifying it with the proviso that it's Kirk who held the "top spot," so to speak, in the Spock-Loyalty-Hierarchy).  That part seemed...a bit off.  From Pike's perspective, the events were interesting and illuminating -- but why they translated into Loyalty Forever on Spock's part was...confusing.

Interesting to me was the lack of cameos; at least one character from Dwellers (generally Cleante, but with mention of T'Shael) appears, to my recollection, in all of Bonanno's early books; I'd have to read Catalyst of Sorrows to see if she appears there.  I wonder if they were expressly forbidden or if Bonanno has simply moved on from the characters?

I was surprisingly taken in by Burning Dreams.  I had some quibbles -- being the nascent disability rights activist that I am -- with the language used to describe Pike after his injury, but by and large I was able to engage my suspension of disbelief and just go with the story.

To me, Pike remains a sadly tragic character, but Bonanno was able to give him a worthy ending.

It's not Dwellers or Spock's World or The Romulan Way -- or even Chain of Attack or The IDIC Epidemic -- but it's been a very long time since I was sucked into a Trek book the way I was with Burning Dreams.

"And What Rough Beast...

...its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

-- "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats

(Which you should read -- aloud (all poetry should be read aloud) -- for the strange juxtaposition of the beautiful cadence of the language and the images they're portraying.)

In any event, I've begun to sense impending Drama lurking just out of sight from my classroom, "slouching" towards us to be born in a day of utter insanity, even as Bulldozer has better and better days. Why?

Well, for one thing, I may snap and descend into blissful loopiness after the four hundred thousandth time in ten minutes Bulldozer says, "Bathroom? Eye?" (translation: Can I go to the bathroom and clean my artificial eye which is really not dirty but provides a reasonable excuse for the two minute walk/break I really need?)

Or, Boy J (henceforth known as PH for reasons known only to Cat and myself...these are not his initials) and his laugh may send me over the edge to rock and cry in a corner.

Or, the wrong person will be walking by my classroom when M, having been asked if her stomach hurts, will shriek, "Ow, you hurt me, hurting me, bleeding!"

(Translation: "I've got whole impaction constipation issues that make my BMs so hard and big that they hurt terribly and make me bleed." But, yeah, passersby don't know that.)

Or, Aide J will turn just that little bit more green with envy that E (henceforth known as Elastigirl because her arms seemingly stretch to gigantic porportions if you have placed something seemingly out of reach) smiles at Aide T or, you know, works for me and doesn't hit or scratch me.

(Aide J has taken another job at a group home. It is not good. She's burning out but quick. What I thought was her "A ha!" moment has gone away quickly; she has forgotten that Elastigirl is trying to get her attention and, I think, is jealous that Elastigirl seemingly loves Aide T and is hitting and scratching her.

Except, of course, that her reaction -- which has become the appropriate ignoring and moving away last week -- has reverted to "Ow! Elastigirl, that hurt!" Which, you know, just encourages her.)

And that, I think, is really and truly where I sense my impending doom. Aide J is very territorial and very jealous when it comes to Aide T -- because when she first started, Elastigirl and Aide T had been joined at the hip because there was no other option, and because, you know, Aide T is good at her job. So, like I had with the aide before her who lasted exactly two days, I said that she should just observe Aide T and Elastigirl for a week to get the idea.

Since then, she has resented Aide T.

(Which, of course, is one of the main reasons I am leery of one-to-one aide support. Aides -- especially the motherly types -- get too attached and begin to think of the child as "theirs.")

Problem is, with Superhero and Bulldozer and M all having issues right now, and PH and The Boss having minor ones occassionally, I can't afford the tension in the room of having adults fighting with each other...or even, as is the case here, one deciding the other is not good.

So we're "turning and turning in the widening gyre" and hoping the "rough beast" can still be turned away.

Meanwhile, here's a little tidbit: the word "wherefore" means "why" -- as in the saying "the whys and wherefores."

So, in every sitcom in television history, when the teenagers do the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, EVERY SINGLE ONE of them inflects the balcony scene wrong...because they say:

"Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore ART thou, Romeo?"

(As in, "Oh, Romeo, Romeo, where are you, Romeo?")

When in reality, it should be:

"Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"

(As in, "Oh, Romeo, why are you Romeo Montague?")

Pardon the pronunciation -- and, yes, I'm doing this by memory to all you Evil Leprechauns out there -- but the scene is:

Oh, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name; or, if thou
wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I'll no longer be a Capulet.

(So if you read the rest of the speech, Juliet is actually saying, "Romeo, why are you who you are? Why are you a Montague? Disown your father and leave your family. If you don't, just tell me you love me, and I'll disown my family.")

I have no idea why that rant showed itself now -- I've been wanting to write it for a while -- but I suspect it was the poetical bent of the post. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Wow

Huh. I'd forgotten how...well...crazy Willy Wonka is portrayed as in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (I'm up to summarizing chapter 20 of 30 -- I haven't made comprehension questions for the whole thing, because I can't quite predict what the class will be able to do, but it's nice to have the text almost done). Wow.

I always wondered where Gene Wilder pulled the...well...crazy bit from when he sings:

There's no earthly way of knowing
In which direction they are rowing
There's no knowing where they're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing

In the movie, he has this crazed, maniacal glint in his eye that was the only part of the movie to ever scare me. Now I get where he pulled it from. Yikes.

However, once this is done, I'll have our classroom novel done until Christmas! (I'm moving it from every day to 4 days a week, and adding a day of poetry.)

Another Non-Spoilery Comment

Having had time to reflect, the casualty that bothers me most is the one that's buried on the cliffs by the sea.

This surprises no one more than myself.

Also -- if you want to take anything from this book, it's the power of a little kindness.

Edit:  There are now spoilers in the comments.  You have been warned.

No Spoilers Here

Having just finished a marathon reading session in which I read 2/3 of Order of the Phoenix (I started re-reading it after seeing the movie but had only managed about 1/3 as of yesterday afternoon), all of Half-Blood Prince, and all of Deathly Hallows (phew), let me just say:

That was singularly satisfying.

And...it's nice to be right about a few things.

The Night Before

So, my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows arrives tomorrow.  I have not read any spoilers.  I may even convince myself not to glance at the last page and see what the last word is now that it's not "scar."

I may post non-spoilery reactions after I read it (it took me about 14ish hours to read Order of the Phoenix, so I expect to be done by tomorrow night) but it'll be a while before I do a full review -- not only 'cause I want to digest it, but because I'd kinda like to re-read the whole series and get it in perspective before I either praise or condemn it.

In other news, it was the last day of summer school today, which is always a weird, bittersweet, anti-climactic thing.  The whole school year builds to culmination; we have the whole ceremony, R's mom even smiles at me, and so forth.  Then the kids come back for four weeks, only to just quietly get on their busses on the last day and go home.  It's...weird.

Order of the Phoenix Review

Come back later for my adventures with the DWP.

Go back now if you don't want to be spoiled.

I'm serious.

No pun intended.

Also, I have at least one theory related to Deathly Hallows that stems directly from this movie, and things I've read about it.  You are thus doubly forewarned.

Before going too in depth, let me just say something: unscientifically comparing my copies of Order of the Phoenix and The Lord of the Rings reveals that the two are more or less the same size.  LotR was made into three 3-hour movies and still took flack for leaving out Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire, among other things.  Order of the Phoenix was made into one 2 3/4 hour long movie.  Stuff had to be sacrificed.

All in all, I think they did a reasonably good job deciding what to keep and what to sacrifice.

For the record, the major plot points that I can recall and pinpoint as being sacrificed are, in no particular order:

• Weasley is Our King: Quidditch
• Ron and Hermione being Prefects (note that they may have obliquely referred to this for just a tiny moment)
• Percy (also obliquely referred to by having him show up twice with Crouch)
• Most of Kreacher's storyline (see below)
• Luna's role in the Quibbler is much reduced here
• Meeting Neville's parents (who are referred to but not shown)
• Firenze teaching Divination

Things that were abbreviated or shortened:

• The Weasleys' Revolt (though what it shown is awesome)
• Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes
• Harry's angst at the beginning
• Grawp
• The Torture of Professor Trelawney
• Sirius chafing at his enforced confinement at Grimmauld Place
• Harry and Cho
• Mrs. Figg being a squib and looking out for Harry all along

Things that seem to me to be different than in the book:

• I don't recall Cho being the one to betray Dumbledore's Army, even under Veritaserum
• Likewise, I don't recall Filch camping out in front of the Room of Requirement waiting for the DA to leave

Things that rocked:

• Professor McGonagall:  "Oh, there are quite a few things I would like to say to you, Sybil!"
• The Weasleys' Revolt.  Just 'cause.
• Fred and George comforting the boy that was in detention.
• Believe it or not, the Occlumency lessons.  I liked the visuals.
• The thestrals.  How cool are they?  I would just liked to have seen the others' faces after flying to London on animals they couldn't see.
• Ginny destroying the Department of Mysteries with one spell.  Heh.
• Hermione flattening Ron, and the twins betting on it.
• The poster of Fudge getting shredded during Voldemort and Dumbledore's battle.  I just liked the symbolism.
• Harry's angst.  I defended it when the book came out, and I defend it now.  The kid had been through a lot and was entirely entitled to be cranky.
• The acting, especially from the Trio.  While still not Oscar-quality actors, they improve with each film.  In this one, Emma Watson seemed to show the most improvement.

Things that were okay:

• Sidestepping showing Neville's parents by having Sirius and Neville both speak about it.
• Luna.  The actress was good, but not great.
• The visual effects.  Some were awesome, some not so much.  I particularly liked the Veil; I particularly disliked the obvious replacement of Emma Watson with a CGI'd image when Grawp picked her up.
• Mr. and Mrs. Weasley.  "Daddy's home?"  Mwuah?  But on the other hand, the enduring affection they have for Harry -- off-screen, you can hear Mrs. Weasley saying something like "he's like one of our own" -- is lovely.
• Dumbledore.  I just can't buy the new Dumbledore.  He's too...forceful.  At least he didn't grab any kids this time.
• The Snape-James incident...the point of that was what it taught Harry, and that got left out entirely.

Things I didn't like:

• Bellatrix.  I admit that this is the first Harry Potter movie I've seen without re-reading the book, but I don't recall her being so over-the-top crazy.  I recall her more as being...well...quietly, scarily crazy.
• Shunting McGonagall off to the side...I really didn't like that they didn't show her part in the Wesleys' Rebellion.  But given that I recall production stills show her sitting, exhausted, in a wheelchair, perhaps she couldn't handle more than her role was.

Overall, I thought this was a very successful film, though it takes the film franchise further from the story in the books, particularly in regards to secondary characters.  Ron, especially, has suffered from the parts that have been dropped.  But, like Lord of the Rings, these films are creating a universe separate from that created in the book.

They're related, certainly, and they tell the same essential story, but the narrative is focused on Harry and Voldemort almost exclusively.  While the books are written from Harry's point of view, their focus is broader.

But that brings me to a point of speculation.  Sci-Fi Wire had an article a while back that said that while J.K. Rowling isn't greatly involved in the movies, she does offer suggestions and information, including a sketch of the family tree in Grimmauld Place, and suggesting that they not remove a character from Order of the Phoenix because they would have trouble when they made the film version of Deathly Hallows.

My suspicion, based on how little both are in the film, is that the character is either Kreacher or Percy.

Kreacher is suspect, of course, because of the Black family's history as Dark Wizards, and because he has already betrayed the Order of the Phoenix once.  I can envision many roles for Kreacher to take in Deathly Hallows; of course, I won't know for a week.  But the fact that house elves are powerfully magical makes him a suspect.

The other is Percy.  Percy is shown very little in the film, and the drama with his family is largely ignored.  Unfortunately, I don't see his story ending well: he seems solely focused on procuring power.  He's also seemed to be very suggestible and not very savvy.  When Percy is shown in the film, he's acting directly against Harry, and is always shown with Fudge and members of the Ministry.

It could be that Percy plays a prominent role in the last book -- and therefore film -- and that J.K. Rowling felt that it was important that his shift in attitude at least be briefly addressed.

Ironically, despite the almost ritual reports now of people complaining that Order of the Phoenix is just getting too dark (there was even a Yahoo! headline a few days ago to that effect), I found it less intense and certainly less scary than Goblet of Fire.  The scene in the graveyard in the latter was so well-done, and the atmosphere itself so frightening, that it outdoes the Department of Mysteries in my mind.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a good book that moved the plot of the larger story along, but it lacked the introspection of Prisoner of Azkaban or long-awaited answers of Half-Blood Prince.  It's a good, but not great, book.

I'd say the same of the film.  It's a film that had to happen to progress the story into the coming climax.  It's good, but not great.

I'd say, ultimately, give it a 6 or a 7 out of 10.  I may change my mind after seeing the Department of Mysteries stuff in 3D (the IMAX theaters were sold out).

Finally

While nowhere near as momentous an occasion as Cat finishing her computer class, I am currently typing the last chapter of Little House on the Prairie into Writing With Symbols.

One thing I've noticed re-reading this book as I've done it with my class is the deeply loving relationship that existed between Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Though the book is written through a child's eyes, it's very apparent, both through actions (e.g. Pa's buying Ma some calico to make a dress) and through descriptions (the way Laura describes Ma's reaction to the gift).

Of course, as an aide in my classroom said, she'd have to love the guy to follow him across open wilderness...without getting a 'convenient' divorce by leaving him for hostile Native Americans! :-)

By the way -- I've not seen Memoirs of a Geisha, but Charmax has made an absolutely breathtaking vid for the movie. (The link is to an imeem stream; I recommend going to her site and downloading the actual thing).