Armistice Day, once again...

It's Veterans Day. Thank you veterans, for your service, for your sacrifice, for your courage, for the wounds you bear. I hope healing comes soon.

At the same time, I wish to express a profound desire that we make no more combat veterans, wound no more people. That some day soon, we can gaze into the eyes of our war dead and say with a clear conscience, that their lives were not wasted.

Remember When We Supported the Troops?

It was easy to support the troops when they were far away. Now they're back. And according to the Veterens' Administration last year, they're killing themselves at a rate of 22 a day. Don't just say you care about vets today. Talk with them. Make sure they're OK. And do it for the other 364.

Suicide in the Trenches
By Siegfried Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

And now...

I submitted a story today. It's a good story, one I've been working on for two months, and I think should go well with the anthology's theme. It's been nearly two hours since I submitted, and I'm anxiously checking my email to see if the editors liked it. This is silly. They'll take some time, probably a month, since the deadline isn't until the 31st of this month. And so I do what all writers do, move on to the next story (the werewolf one in this case). And try to put the waiting out of my mind. But what I'm really doing? Is waiting.






And waiting

Armistice Day, Yet Again. What Have We Learned?

It's Armistice Day, or Veterans' Day, depending on your personal point of view. Some people have the day off, and there's probably a big sale going on.

Just take a moment and think about what today is for. Remember those who have served in the military. What did they see, what have them done? Remember those who didn't come back, whose mothers and brothers miss them. And remember those who didn't come back whole, those with post-traumatic stress disorder, or brain damage. Remember those missing an arm, a hand, or a leg. Make sure you voted to send them out for something worth that.

I don't usually post songs, but Carbon Leaf's "War Was In Color" is a good, solemn tribute, and appropriate for the day.

Chilling Screen Moments #2: You Want What?

The Dr. Who spinoff Torchwood has tried to straddle the line between action and horror, and to my mind, succeeded in being neither.

That stopped on the third season, the five-episode miniseries called Children of Earth. This series is concentrated nightmare fuel.

The aliens come down, and they aren't friendly. Unlike most Dr. Who-style aliens, we don't see what they are. They breathe a poisonous, opaque atmosphere, a very good counterpoint to the "show the monster" in The Host. The aliens are capable of wiping out humanity (shades of colonialism and War of the Worlds), and they can control our children. Children all over the Earth stop what they are doing and start chanting things. It starts with "We are here."

In Episode Four, we get down to brass tacks. A government representative negotiates with the alien, who speak with a breathy, synthesized voice. It's good and creepy. But the script really shines as the humans negotiators come to realize exactly what the aliens want.



In Episode Five, we learn why, and it's worse than we thought. It is one of the most horrible, chilling revelations I've ever seen put on film. The slow negotiation builds up the tension incredibly well. Brilliant and frightening.

Chilling Screen Moments #3: It’s Not The Monster That Frightens Us

In many monster films, the driving source of tension is created by allowing the audience to glimpse the monster, never truly seeing it. This works quite well in Cloverfield and Alien. A monster movie truism has been that once the monster shows up on screen, the tension is gone; we know what it is.

The Host completely ignores this trope. We get a good long shot as the monster runs past us, in broad daylight, fourteen minutes into the film. Although this is a monster movie, writer/director Bong Joon-Ho knows that it’s not the appearance of the creature that is threatening, but how it acts. With photorealistic CG effects, render farms, and experts at translating concept to screen, it is much easier to create a credible monster than in the past.

The film's narrative is much more akin (and this is acknowledged by Bong Joon-Ho in his commentary) to a crime thriller than the standard monster film. A child is in peril, and her family must fight the government as well as the monster’s unpredictability and inhuman strength to get her back.

Early in the film, the monster smashes through a crowd, shredding people and creating panic. Park Gang-du grabs his daughter Hyun-Seo and runs, dragging her behind him. He falls, grabs her hand again, and takes off running again. After eight more seconds of panicked flight, he looks back... and he’s grabbed the wrong hand. The girl behind him isn’t Hyun-Seo.



We identify the most with human moments, with emotions we understand. Gang-du’s blank expression conveys his stunned incomprehension, and for a few seconds, he’s too shocked to even be horrified. It’s a gut-wrenching moment of loss, and an presage of terrible things to come.

Chilling Screen Moments #4: Hans Beckert Confesses

In Fritz Lang's M, Peter Lorre plays Hans Beckert, the screen's first serial killer. Beckert preys exclusively on children, a crime so heinous that the Berlin's thieves, safecrackers, and murderers band together to catch him.

And find him they do.

Lorre's Beckert is the polar opposite of the modern, urbane serial killers such as Hannibal Lecter or Dexter Morgan. Beckert is tortured, half in denial of the things that he does. His trial, even before a kangaroo court of criminals, finally gives him the opportunity to get it out, even if his audience are likely to be his executioners.

The speech he gives defined Peter Lorre's career for the rest of his life, and it's not difficult to see why. Lorre's portrayal runs the gamut from broken to manic in the course of one dead riveting, completely chilling, three-minute speech. Serial killers have become pretty old had old hat, but Hans Beckert's mad, harrowing speech remains a chilling landmark in cinema.

Chilling Screen Moments #5: Finally Watching Samara At Work

Structure is not an aspect of film that is often praised. Yet in a suspense, mystery or horror film, it's vital. Not just that the story itself be interesting, but that it be presented in a way that obscures exactly what is going on while keeping the viewer interested.

One of the major challenges to a ghost or monster film is how to build the tension without giving too much away. When should the terrifying entity be shown, and how can it be presented in such a way that it's not disappointing. Very often films fall down when that thing that's been chasing everyone around is suddenly revealed to be a giant carrot, or a dwarf in a rubber suit.

The Ring does this perfectly. The tension increases throughout the film, leading to many great, chilling moments. There are three "shock" moments in the film, but they are buttressed with enormous amounts of tension-building subtlety. The mystery is complex and strange, and the investigation is extraordinarily well handled. We glimpse pieces of the ghost's sad and terrible history even as we see the horrifying effects it has on the world around it. The Ring's story manages to push so many buttons; the images of a child along in a sterile medical environment, cruelty to animals, an isolated community, technophobia, medical testing, the hints that home is not as pleasant as we want it to be.

The structure of the film, the way the audience gets hints about what's going on, works beautifully. There is no Basil Exposition telling us what happened. The viewer, like the characters, piece what's going on from interviews, observations, and strange experiences. We get glimpses of frightening consequences without knowing what triggered them, except that there's a videotape involved, and people who watch it die. This lack of clarity gives the story a lot of impetus.

This all comes very terribly clear at the end when we watch what happens when someone watches the videotape we have only seen glimpses of. Who we thought was only the victim turns out to be the tormentor, and she crawls out of the television to do her horrible work. It's a hugely chilling moment, as we look at everything we've learned for the past hour and a half in a different light.

Chilling Screen Moments Moments #6: Tokyo in Flames

Anyone can take a bucket of blood and splash it on celluloid. While I enjoy the occasional gore flick, the red stuff is often at the expense of plot and interesting characters. A film (or a miniseries) that spends time and effort on building atmospheric dread interests me more. In the lead-up to Halloween, I present six screen moments that still make me catch my breath.

#6: Tokyo in Flames: Godzilla.

The original Godzilla is very much a different genre from the daikiaju genre it spawned. It is a disaster film, only the disaster happens to be a giant lizard. Unlike most other films in the genre, this concentrates not only on the giant monster wrecking the city, but what it leaves behind. After Godzilla stomps Tokyo, the camera pauses to view the the devastation, and the city in flames.



It's a very powerful moment as director Ishiro Honda concentrates on the human suffering in Godzilla's wake.

ANZAC Day

As far as I can tell, ANZAC Day is the last memorial day specifically dedicated to World War One. Which is sad. Nothing defined the Twentieth Century more than WWI: The rise of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and WWII, and the arising Cold War all have their roots in the the Great War of 1914-1918.

Most of us would rather remember WWII. It was a more clear-cut war, with the Nazi atrocities making the opponent easier to demonize than the Central Powers of World War One. The victors could feel good about winning WWII. But the Great War was a quagmire, an enormous mess that scarred the "lost generation" and wiped out entire British neighborhoods, thanks to the Pals Battalions, sometimes in a matter of hours. Ah, the glory of war.

Rather than my usual mournful trench poetry, this one is a touch more playful:

"The General Inspecting the Trenches"
by Alan Herbert

The General inspecting the trenches
Exclaimed with a horrified shout
'I refuse to command a division
Which leaves its excreta about.'

But nobody took any notice
No one was prepared to refute,
That the presence of shit was congenial
Compared to the presence of Shute.

And certain responsible critics
Made haste to reply to his words
Observing that his staff advisors
Consisted entirely of turds.

For shit may be shot at odd corners
And paper supplied there to suit,
But a shit would be shot without mourners
If someone shot that shit Shute.

The Small Traditions Are the Important Ones

Did you have a merry Christmas? A happy season? A delightful Festivus?

As usual, I had too much to do and not enough time in between them. A lot of driving around, and few days in which I do not have a responsibility to be somewhere. Work is pretty heavy, and that's good for the store, but it takes a bit of a toll on me. The writing has fallen by the wayside, and tomorrow I head down to Massachusetts to be with friends. We'll see how much writing I'll get done.

But rather than concentrate on the negative, I'll put up some of my stranger Christmas traditions. Every year, for example, we go to the World's Best Grinder place and get an awesome grinder.

Those of you who do not live in the New England area may not realize that a sub is a grinder in these parts. Dunno why. But the important thing to realize is that the sandwiches made by Elmwood Pizza are without a doubt the best in the world. I don't know why. It may be the Polish tradition that adds a special mix of spices to the oil. All I know is that their grinders are incredibly savory. The meat is acceptable, the veggies nothing to crow about. But every cold grinder we have gotten there has been a treasure. The Queen of Science and I get one every Christmas (I put a six incher in her stocking one year. The smell of it permeated the car and gave me away), and they are as excellent as we remember.

For me, it's a little treat that's the taste of Christmas.

Armistice Day

On 11/11/1918, the guns fell silent.

War is a quintessential human sport. It is such a tremendous undertaking, so inconvenient and difficult that if we did not love it so much, it would never happen. And when we wage, we want to keep the reality of it from the people in whose name we do so. Strange, isn't it?

The Secrecy News website found or assembled a PDF of this report on why certain photographs from the Great War were censored. It's quite an amazing read, loaded with pictures and explanations of why such pictures were not released. What great pains militaries take to make sure that those who are not involved in the fight do not see what soldiers do, see how soldiers die. Even as they act in the name of those who should not be exposed to these horrors.

The Big Four Oh!

April 7, 2009. The weather is cold, the rain is interspersed with snow and sleet. I am officially forty.

And it's awesome.

I've recently learned that I am not the only child of the eighties who thought I would never be this old. Reagan's hawk posturing (later softened) led me to believe that there was going to be at least a 'limited nuclear exchange' at some point in the near future, and I would be dead before I was thirty-five. If you didn't live through the eighties, read Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, watch Quiet Earth or read the rulebook for Gamma World. In school, we read Benet's By the Waters of Babylon, and The Planet of the Apes was a regular on television. So according to my inner seventeen year-old, every day after thirty-five has been a bonus.

But that's not the best reason to celebrate today. This morning I received a miscellany of comments from friends, organized by the Queen of Science. If an individual's wealth is measured by the friends he has and the company he keeps, then I am rich beyond Gordon Gecko's wildest dreams of avarice. I have the best friends and family in the world, and I married an incredibly wonderful woman. I am both humbled and moved by this gift of love. Thank you, my friends.

Just Another February 29th?

So you’ve survived the innocuous extra day that gets tacked onto February once (almost) every four years. Leap year is something most people don’t really think about. Which is kind of too bad. We’ve made it very easy to overlook something rather extraordinary—the fact that the rate at which our Earth revolves around the sun is not in precise agreement with our 24-hour day.

Early solutions to this observation were admittedly rickety. The pre-Julian Roman Calendar is as delightfully complex a calendar as you might find. Every other year, the short month of Intercalaris was inserted toward the end of a truncated February (most scholars agree) on a roughly alternating schedule as to whether Intercalaris was 23 or 24 days. Since the “standard” Roman year was 355 days, and the “special edition” year was 378 or 379, it averaged out reasonably well as long as someone paid close attention.

However, the office of the Pontifex Maximus, the most powerful priest in Rome, was in charge of a lot of things, including the calendar. Of course, if he was busy, say during a Civil War, or the Second Punic War, the Pontifex Maxiumus might not get around to properly assigning the year. Or it might be that the current Pontifex, an elected official, might want to assist his political cronies by making the transient month arrive sooner rather than later, extending their term in office.

Unsurprisingly, the calendar did not always work as simply as it seems in print. Julius Caesar, setting up reform and establishing the Julian calendar extended the year 46 BC to 445 days in order to bring the following year back into seasonal alignment. To do this, he inserted the usual Intercalaris in February, as well as another 23 days into November, and 22 more into December. After that, he established the familiar 365 day calendar with a leap year tacking an extra day onto February every four years.

In light of the Julian reform, the Roman Calendar looks cobbled together, but it was a calendar based on observation and constant attention. It worked as long as it was properly maintained. Like a lot of the side-projects of the high and mighty, time and attention were a problem. What Julius “Shakespeare wrote a play about me” Caesar did was to simplify the calendar so that anyone who knew the leap-year rule could make their own calendar, rather having it issue from a specific office every year.

And the Julian calendar worked pretty well for fifteen hundred years, but it hadn’t been worked out to enough decimal places to be eternal. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar (named for Pope Gregory XIII), instituted a new refinement. The Julian calendar declared that all years divisible by 4 were leap years. The Gregorian rule is a bit more complex, stating that every year that is divisible by four is a leap year, except for years divisible by 100. Centuries that are divisible by 400 are leap years. Thus 1600 was a Gregorian leap year, while 1800 was not. However, because the Julian calendar was now some ten days off meeting solar equinox with calendar equinox, ten days would have to be lopped off the current year of any country that adopted the Gregorian calendar.

And of course, European countries wanted to display their allegiance or defiance of the Pope and his newfangled calendar. So there is a lag of some 300 years during which Western Europe slowly converted to the Gregorian calendar. The Orthodox church still hasn’t, which is why Eastern Orthodox holidays are celebrated some twelve or thirteen days after Catholic and Protestant ones.

The delay among countries adopting the Gregorian calendar has resulted in some interesting quirks of calendary. For real giddy fun, consider that Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date (April 23, 1616), even though Cervantes predeceased Shakespeare by ten days. Spain was using the Gregorian calendar at that time, while Britain was using Julian.

So the apparent simplicity of the additional day of February that makes little impression on you has been the result of a lot of hard work, finagling, and political chicanery. There is absolutely nothing sinister about this. Unless you count in the fact that Feb 29 is Tim Powers’ birthday, which makes it just a touch suspicious.

Happy birthday, Tim.

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

It's 11/11, Armistice Day, or Veterans' Day, depending on your sense of history. So I present you with a poem by WWI soldier Wilfred Owens. To some, Dulce et Decormum Est is an old saw, something we studied in school. Personally, I've never been able to escape the hard imagery of the poem, the haunting despair, the vivid sense of the narrator's exhaustion, terror, endurance, and humanity in the face of the overwhelming.

Writing is memory, and there are something we need to remember, even if it's on a single day out of the year. World War One was an colossal, senseless mess in which some nineteen million soldiers were sent to their deaths for little or no gain, and perhaps ten million more civilians died. As an event, it overshadows the rest of the twentieth century. The Second World War and the Cold War, the two great conflicts that dominated world politics for the latter half of the twentieth century, both have their roots directly in the Great War.

Not that the author, Wilfred Owen can tell us this himself. He was killed a week before the war ended. It is said his mother received word just as the church bells rang out to celebrate the Armistice. Many poets died in the Great War, just as I must assume great politicians, scientists, surgeons, and inventors did. But we'll never know, because they died young.

On this Armistice Day, I reflect that should be more careful with peoples' lives.

Dulce et Decormum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.