Book review – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Wow.

I’ll say that again.

Wow.

Ms. Rowling, you have concluded Harry’s tale in fine form.  Thank you.  I have enjoyed the ride, and will again for many years to come.

Life, and things like it

Wow.  It’s been six years since I sailed away, and I just made Halifax yesterday.  Well, not quite that long, but I realised that there’s no point in having this blog unless I post things on it, so here’s a random sample from Life As I Know It.

New stuff:    New job.  Yay!  Still doing the law thing, but with a different firm.  New computer.  Runs Windows Vista business, which has the disadvantage of being a Windows product, but the advantage of enticing me into playing around with and learning how the OS works.  Also nifty is Openoffice, a free alternative to MS Office.

This year, I’ve also re-discovered just how much I enjoy gardening.  Vicky and I started with a front lawn and a gravel pit out back.  Three years later, the front lawn is mostly replaced by flowerbeds, rock gardens and a bog garden.  The back, while substantially still rocky, has a lawn that we planted ourselves (no sods), and rockwalled flowerbeds nourished by the compost from our two bins.  Snowpeas, squash and spinach are nestled alongside the house.  There are at least 7 different colours of iris.   And we did it ourselves, we and our friends-and-relations to good-natured to say no to our invitational Dirt Parties.

I can look out my front window down to the wetland at the bottom of the hill, where you can see/hear ducks, ducklings, frogs, loons and who knows what else.  I’ve even seen osprey fishing there a few times.

The sun has just about gone behind the hill. Katherine and the dogs are all asleep.  There’s a soft breeze coming in through the window and there are birds chirping outside.

This is a good life.

Bad Movie Night – Nine Deaths of the . . . . .

Sorry I’ve been away for a while – just started a new job and the cluing-up of the old and the beginning of the new has been more than a little Chaotic. But I threw caution to the winds last night and got together with the illustrious members of the Bad Movie Bunch, one of whom had just taken delivery of a brand-new Big-ass Flat Screen TV.

(Bwah hah hah hah hah)

To really put this this piece of technological whizz-bang through its paces required something special; something so Truly Awful that its very pixels would shiver in disbelief and horror as they cringingly reorganised themselves into uncomfortable positions. It couldn’t be just an ordinary bad movie; it had to be a putrescent specimen of a ineffable genre.

What to choose? Even with those criteria, the field is very large. Then it hit me. It couldn’t be anything else.

Walk back with me for a time, if you please, slightly more than two decades ago. Michael Jackson is at the top of his stride. Madonna is little more than a Material Girl. No one’s even heard of Britney Spears (whew). That’s right. It’s the 1980s.

In a decade that had leg warmers and Valley Girls, Miami Vice and Bruce Willis as a pop star, one burst of cinematic endeavour stands out as a brief glorious blaze, a screaming paean to all that is kitschy, cheesy, shallow and formulaic in film.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you. . . . . the ninja movie.

Bursting into the mainstream Hollywood scene with Enter the Ninja (1981), the ninja craze lasted only a few years, but in that short span, managed to create a body of work that is admired, parodied, panned and guiltily celebrated the world over.

It’s perfect material for us. We can even celebrate it without feeling guilty.

Right in the middle of the ninja movie era came Nine Deaths of the Ninja (1985), our selection for this outing. Basically, a trio of crack(ed) commandos must foil the Evil Guy, who’s hijacked a busload of important Americans.

What’s awful about all this? Where to begin? Let’s start with Our Heroes.

Leading the intrepid threesome is none other than Sho Kosugi, the star of just about every ninja film made. While he’s a talented on-screen martial artist, this is NOT one of his better endeavours. He’s much better as a grimly silent, noble man who, reticent about his ninja past, unleashes his skills only at need and then retires to the shadows once more. . .

Oh dang. I just spoiled the plot of every martial arts film ever made. Sorry.

Then there’s the Stallone/Norris/Olivier clone, an all-American testosterone machine with a great big. . . . . machine gun. He also tramps through the jungle with a full backpack of beer. Don’t we all?

Rounding out the team is a buxom blonde woman who doesn’t really do much except show up in every scene demonstrating all the different ways one can jazz up those boring green fatigues with snappy accessories. Like a cream-coloured Stetson. With a pink bandanna. No I’m not kidding. I wish I was.

Sorry about the Olivier reference back there. Didn’t really mean it.

Then there’s the Villians. These guys are better than the Heroes. Meet Alby the Cruel, a wheelchair-bound homosexual paranoid-delusional drug-dealing neo-Nazi. If that’s not a combination guaranteed to offend, I don’t know what is. His accent waivers between fake German, fake Italian, and probably genuine Brooklyn, although it’s hard to say.

His partner in ickiness is Rahji, an almost invincible terrorist who, as far as I can recall, as no lines except a manic chuckle, repeated every three-point-two minutes, for effect. He’s almost invincible because Sho Kosugi’s in this movie, remember?

Their female partner has the best name in the whole film. You thought Alby the Cruel was good? Meet Colonel Honey Hump. She is to gay women what Alby is to gay men, complete with with scary-ass eyeshadow, an 80s-hairspray-filled-out-to-here ‘do and a delightfully unhinged laugh. She commands a trio of Jungle Jane Sisters in Arms, whose talents not only include high-velocity weaponry, but also dancing the polka. Colonel Hump’s dedication to her gender slips a little at one point, for while in one scene she’s exhorting a poor hostage “to see what a woman’s touch can do for you”, a bit further on, she promising one of the Janes to the man who fights hardest against the evil tyrannical government forces. Hmm.

There are several high points in this movie, but three in particular stick out.  The first is the Midget Fight Scene at the Museum of Asian Culture.  No, I`m not joking.  You can`t make stuff like this up.  Sho, staking out some Bad Guys, is set upon by four unshaven midgets, all in Blues Brothers sunglasses and hats.  And just as if to prove that there is no depth of bad taste to which this film will not sink, there’s midget tossing.

The opening credits are (un)worthy of note as well.  It’s sort of a David Bowie video meets James-Bond-title- sequence-on-acid, featuring a barechested Sho waving his ninja sword around whilst the Hotlegs Dancers (yes that’s really their name, check the end credits) cavort, spin and pirouette, burdened by some truly impressive eyeshadow.  The sad part is that about half-way through the song, Sho runs out of maneuvers and starts his routine all over again.  Sigh.

The award for Most Inexplicable Scene goes to Madam Woo-wei’s Floating Palace, where Rahji goes for relaxation after he’s been sprung from jail.  If he’s gay, why go to a female-filled brothel-on-a-barge?  If you’re two Heroes flying a helicopter right over the barge, why can you land it in a jungle(!), swim out to the barge and climb on undetected?  Why, when you’ve been discoverd and dive overboard, will ripping the bikini top off (Gratuitious Nudity Shot!) one of your deadly scuba-wearing, spear-gun-wielding prostitute-cum-assassin make her retreat in helpless confusion and apparent embarrassment?  Why?  Why?

This scene, however has one redeeming feature.  Sho Kosugi, ninja, master of a thousand martial arts, takes down a bad guy with nothing less than the Vulcan Neck Pinch. .  He even arches an ironic eyebrow.  It’s sheer poetry

Then there’s the Gratuitous Ninja.  Our Heroes are sneaking along to the bad guys’ lair, when all of a sudden a whole truckload of ninja jump out to get slaughtered.  We’ve never seen them before.  We don’t know why they’re here, except perhaps that  the director realised that the movie had ninja in the title, but just about nowhere else.

Finally, the Award for Most Unpredictable Death goes to Alby the Cruel, who, fleeing in his motorised wheelchair from Mr. Kosugi, bursts out of the jungle onto a wide grassy field.  Gunning his engine, he races across the greensward, not realising that Sho has attached a cable to the back of his chair.  It pulls taut.  He’s catapulted forward.  Lying helplessly on the ground, he looks up in terror at his onrushing doom.

And is run over by an entire team of polo players.

Treasure trove

Lately, I’ve been enjoying good books on my daily commute. This newfangled autopilot for cars is a great invention. . .

Seriously though, I’ve discovered a lovely way to pass the time en route to and from work. I got a little 1 gig mp3 player for Christmas and along with it, a gizmo that broadcasts whatever I’m playing on a very short-range FM band. And I do mean short range; it’s about ten feet. The car stereo picks it up and hey presto! No more gawdawful commercial radio.

Now all I needed was something to which to listen. Music works some of the time, but what I’ve found most entertaining are audiobooks. It’s about a 20-30 minute drive to work, usually good for a chapter or two each way. Well-narrated by skilled voice actors, these are a wonderful way to wake up and unwind to and from the office.

Best of all, they’re free. Go check out www.audiobooksforfree.com. Their “bearable quality” download I’ve found perfectly fine for the car and pretty good at home too.

So far, I’ve listened to Dracula, Dracula’s Guest, The White Company, Sir Nigel and The Flying Dutchman. All excellent.

Students of phrenology

R.E. Wolf, over at Bone and Shadow, has a fondness for drawing skulls.  He’s an amazing artist and you need to go now and browse through his work.  Come back later.

All done?  Good.  You may have noticed that he gives me a little credit for pointing him in this direction.  Entirely unintentional, I assure you.  Highly nifty, but it’s not like we sat down and had a little tete a tete on the subject.

Sorry.

Anyhoo, in his affection for things cranial, R.E.’s in very distinguished company.   None other than the great Sherlock Holmes has both engaged in, and been the subject of, phrenological dissertation.

From The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, in which Holmes has just rattled off a series of deductions based on his inspection of an abandoned hat to an admiring Dr. Watson:

“How did you deduce that this man was intellectual?”

For answer, Holmes clapped the hat upon his head.  It came right over the forehead and settled on the bridge of his nose.  “It is a question of cubic capacity,” said he; a man with so large a brain must have something in it.”

From The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Dr. Mortimer, a country doctor and amateur anthropologist visits Holmes and Watson:

“A dabbler in science, Mr. Holmes, a picker up of shells on the shores of the great unknown ocean. I resume that it is Mr. Sherlock Holmes whom I am addressing and not –”

“No, This is my friend Dr. Watson.”

“Glad to meet you, sir. I have heard your name mentioned in connection with that of your friend. You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocpehalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”

Doesn’t get much classier than that, does it?

Karate – Tips for Gradings

There was a grading, aka a belt test, at the Ye Old MUN Dojo tonight. Two yellows, two oranges and two greens. A very even mixture that yielded very mixed results. It was an interesting experience for this Humble Chronicler, as the last grading I attended was my own from brown to shodan (first-degree black). That lasted at least three hours, at the end of a full-day seminar. There were over a dozen candidates and only four of us passed.

This grading lasted an hour, but was no less intense for its participants. Observing, a number of thoughts crept into my tiny reptilian brain and so, with only a little further ado, are some tips that might come in handy for any of my Illustrious Readers facing a test in karate, or any martial art, for that matter.

Disclaimer – these are coming from a karateka whose black belt is red-tinged from the rust that’s being scraped off. In no particular order:

In the weeks leading up to the grading, concentrate your training on the basic techniques you need and the basic movements. Punches, kicks, blocks. Practice your stances in elevators. Crescent-step your way across your bedroom. If your basics are good, you’ve got a solid foundation from which to throw that fantabulous backwards spinning thrust kick.

Practice your kata too. Practice it some more. Repeat. With your eyes closed. Go fast. Go slow. Do it once for timing, once for power and once for form, then once for all three. Do it again.

At the grading itself, pace yourself. Don’t go flat-out in the first few minutes because you’ll collapse like a wet blanket half-way through. Karate is about power, not strength. Power comes from crisp, focused techniques, concentration and proper body dynamics. Work on those, and power and speed will come naturally and you’ll have enough resources in reserve to dig deep for those last few kicks.

Don’t rush. For God’s sake, don’t rush, either kata or basics. A lot of people get nervous and speed up artificially. Let each technique come out in its own time, then move on to the next one. If you have two techniques to do in quick succession, make sure the first one is drop-dead gorgeous. The second one will look after itself. If you rush the first to get to the second, they’re both going to stink like three-day-old roadkill.

Kiai.  Make them big, loud and fill the room with a scream worthy of a slasher-film victim, except without the terror.  All too often, one sees good technique, good kata, accompanied by a tiny little “eep” or “yah” that wouldn’t startle a hamster.  You should be thinking, “I am Green Belt (or whatever)!  Hear me roar!”

Commit yourself. Put your whole heart, spirit and focus into each technique. Whether you’re punching air, the makiwara (punching bag) or someone else, if you go at it with the mind only to succeed in that technique, the results will undoubtedly be better than if you’re worrying about your form or what the instructor is thinking.

Live in the present. If you screw something up, don’t dwell on it, or you’ll screw up the next thing you do. Forget it, don’t do it again and move on.

An extension of this is peculiar to kata. If you forget the next move, you’ll stop dead for a split second. If it doesn’t come to you in the next half-second, do something. Anything. A punch, a kick, keep moving. At least in the MUN Dojo, if you do that, the instructors are more likely to give you a second chance to do the kata again. It shows commitment and determination, as opposed to a defeatist, giving-up attitude.

Use the buddy system. When you’re sparring, especially in the limited attack/block & counter variety, you both look better if the attacker throws a clean, precise technique, which gives the defender a chance to show off his best block and counter-attack. You’re not in a competition with each other and you’ll both shine the brighter for helping each other through good-quality technique. For example, make a aim a high punch at the nose. That means the upper block will catch it clean. Aim a middle punch at the solar plexus. Aim it at the upper chest or throat and chances are, the middle block will swipe the air under your arm, you’ll have to pull your punch to avoid hitting your partner and you’ll both look like idiots, windmilling your arms around when you should be standing like rocks, glaring fiercely into each other’s eyes.

And finally – Keep your perspective. There is no penalty for not passing a grading test; it’s simply a sign that you need to train a little more. So keep going. Just like a little white-clad Energizer bunny.

Book review – Lessek’s Key

Here, boys and girls, is the second book of the Eldarn Sequence, which I’ve just finished. Here’s my review of Book 1, The Hickory Staff.

Lessek’s Key marks the emergence of Scott and Gordon as maturing writers. Their prose is tighter and better flowing, their plotting is crisper and much less clunky and their dialogue is less forced and more sophisticated.

Happily enough, the continuing adventures of Steven Taylor, Mark Jenkins and Hannah Sorenson are just as hair-raising as ever. There is much cliff-hanging, derring-do and spell-slinging, as the characters grow more comfortable in their new world, sorcerers increase in strength and acid rain takes on a whole new meaning.

The practice and theory of magic is developed further, as are the concepts of world-spanning travel, portals between universes and morally relativistic archery.

Lessek’s Key has many features familiar to the heroic fantasy genre, but one original twist is the almor; a water-elemental-demon-beastie that can manifest itself in any body of water. Imagine a pipe inside a wall suddenly exploding in vitriolic hatred as you pass by, or having the life sucked out of you just because you stepped in a puddle.

Anyhoo, things end off with Big Nasty Evil Guy confronting Fledgling Sorcerer and various things happen to sundry people.   Read it to find out the details.  I highly recommend it.

The Larion Senators promises to be the third and final book, making this “sequence” more of a “trilogy.”

What’s the difference between a sequence and a trilogy anyway?

Karate – kata talk – Kanku Dai

When last we met, I blathered about Bassai Dai. Now it’s time for the kata I’m currently learning, Kanku Dai. As before, here’s Cory Searcy’s move-by-move description and a video (scroll down) from www.natkd.com.

Kanku Dai is perhaps the longest of the Shotokan kata, weighing in at a hefty 65 moves. The name, which I’ve seen translated as “looking at the sky” comes from the opening moves, in which your arms are raised, hands together with forefingers and thumbs forming a triangle through which you look before breaking your arms apart in a wide circle.

Remember how I mentioned last time that there were two basic styles of kata, the one solid and powerful, while the other is lighter and faster? Kanku Dai is the definitive kata of the latter school. It contains several sequences of combination open-hand/kicking techniques, with rapid changes of direction and ends with a spectacular and extremely difficult two-level flying kick. Each change of direction indicates a new opponent, who is dispatched with a series of swift, sharp strikes.

It is also the kata from which the five Heian kata were developed. These are the basic kata learned as one moves from the beginner’s white belt to the intermediate blue belt. As a result, I’m finding many familiar techniques, often set into slightly different combinations, make this an intriguing form to learn. In addition, not having to concentrate on learning the actual techniques as much means that this is a good kata for training in application, form, timing and power.

It’s a hallmark of shotokan and I’m looking forward to further exploring it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY VICKY!!!!!

Happy Birthday to you,

Happy Birthday to you,

Happy Birthday dear Vicky,

Happy Birthday to youuuu!

Bad Movie Night – Cowboys and monsters

There was a loud belching noise and the members of the Bad Movie Night Club looked up from their computers, tools and tasks, immediately recognising the Call to Arms.

We gathered in Larry’s basement and picked over the collection, before finding one that we had to watch just for the title alone: Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter.

A 1966 endeavour, this film stars nobody important, except Jim Davis, who went on to fame and fortune as Jock Ewing Sr. on Dallas and probably tried to get all the prints of this picture destroyed.

JJMFD displays many qualities we look for in a bad movie. Permit me to enumerate.

The premise is that JJ, on the run from the law, holes up with a Goliath-sized Sidekick in an old monastery in middle of Arizona inhabited by none other than the grandson and granddaughter of the original Dr. Frank.

That’s right. You spotted it too, didn’t you? The title refers to Frank’s daughter, not his granddaughter! Continuity errors right from the get-go! What fun!

The people who say things in this movie (You can’t call them actors. Actors act.) grimace, pound on tables, gesticulate wildly and project all the emotion of ten-day-old noodle soup. The ones who play the dead bodies are actually the most convincing.

The special effects budget obviously came from the director’s leftover lunch money. In one gripping scene, as we’re introduced to the Frankie siblings (ostensibly, both are Viennese, but he speaks with a Spanish accent and she wavers between fake Transylvanian and fake British), the evil duo stare out of a window into the teeth of a ferocious thunderstorm. The wind effects are howling and the window shutters are banging wildly. So wildly in fact, that they move in different directions at different times at different speeds. Best of all, they stop altogether whenever anyone speaks!

Larry noticed a really low blood budget. Guys get shot in the heart and their shirts stain a little tiny bit. When the shirts are opened to treat the wound, glory be! There’s no more blood to be seen! Either cowboys clotted really fast or they all wore super-absorbent shirts.

Evil scientists get the coolest gear, too. Before the discovery of usable electricity, they’ve got equipment with switches and lights and widgets, all of which are powered, in true Frankie-movie style, by random lightning strikes. Best of all are the hats. You see, in order to awaken a Frankie-monster, you need the vibrations of a living brain to activate the artificial brain that’s been implanted into the victim. To get those good vibrations, our lucky participants wear metal baseball-batter hats painted in red, yellow and green stripes with two-foot-long beeble-boppers stuck to the top. Seeing a mad-scientist-gal wearing one of these while intoning “I am Dr. Maria Fronkenschtein! You vill do as I kommand!” just defies description.

It is, of course, the Big Dumb Sidekick who gets turned into the monster. He starts off life as Hank Tracy, but apparently, it’s just not stylish enough to have a monster named Hank. Dr. Maria changes his name to “Eegor! Your name ist Eegor! Remember zat!”

Remember the artificial brain? The bad guys take out Hank’s brain (“For sale! One brain! Low mileage! Hardly used!”) and replace it with one that Dr. Frank cooked up and that needs to have Epson salts dumped on it before it will wake up and start twitching like a defibrillated heart. At the very end of the movie, the Igor formerly known as Hank recognises his old compadres and refrains from squishing them. Question – If his brain was removed, how did he remember anything of his previous life? There were many theories bandied about after the movie. My two favourite are “Necessary plot gap,” and “Hank had a second, dinosaur-style brain at the base of his spine to work his lower limbs and the bad guys didn’t notice it.”

Topping almost everything else in this corndog are the Gratuitous Indians.  The Heroine goes to the lake to get water.  She’s dragged into the trees by an honest to goodness fringed-buckskin-wearing, howling, knife-wielding, bush-lurking Indian.  Jesse springs to the rescue, there’s a short little fight and the Indian gets it.  Then Jesse looks off-camera, says uh-oh and everyone ducks.  Cut to a wide shot of about a dozen Indians riding hell-bent across the frame on pinto ponies, waving their rifles in the air and ululating wildly.  I think some of them were even wearing war-paint.  Jesse and the girl pop up again after they’ve passed.

That’s it.  That’s all we see of them.  One fight and one wide shot.  One single, solitary scene that serves absolutely no purpose.  They don’t show up again to rescue anyone, scalp anyone, become blood brothers with anyone, or any of the things that hideously stereotypical Hollywood Indians do.  They were just there because if you’re filming a Western/monster movie in 1966 on a budget of $18.47, you need Indians and that’s all there is to it.

And really, who are we to argue with the director’s vision?

Come to think of it, we probably are qualified.  We’ve seen more bad movies than he has.

For all its shortcomings, however, for all its flaws, one facet of JJMFD works.   One aspect of this little movie leaps out to the viewer in a shining, transcendent burst of sublime joy.  It’s the very last scene.  The monster’s been laid to rest and the camera closes in on his grave marker.  There, in rudely chalked lettering, is the epitaph, “Hank Tracy.  He was Jesse James’ friend.”

We screamed.  We cheered.  We stamped our feet.  They couldn’t act.  They couldn’t find good direction in a toilet.  They had the goofiest props and the lousiest special effects on record.  But they put the goddamned apostrophe in the right place!

And that’s enough for me.