Andy Cocker

Lost informs as much as it entertains. It seems that it’s not going to be a peaceful time on the island. People are arguing and some of them are hiding a secret. When I become stranded I’m going to need a shocking revelation to hide. Something that’s polemical but that we can all ultimately get over and use as a bonding experience. A drug addiction or a criminal record seem like obvious choices but I want a secret that’s a little more unusual. Maybe I could be a mental patient.

I’m also going to have to practice my flashback face. It’ll need to be brooding, serious and introspective. All the interesting characters have one. I’ll just wait for someone to say something that reminds me of my troubled past and bam! Flashback face. That will get all the hot girls, of which there are three on this island. I’d be disappointed if there weren’t any on my flight. This episode Shannon is wearing a bikini and Kate strips down to her underwear. The girls on this island aren’t perfect though: Kate is a criminal; Shannon is a bitch;[ftn] and Claire is pregnant.

The others have problems too. Meriadoc Brandybuck, or Merry as he is known to his friends, has a drug problem but as he’s found his stash he should be right for a couple of episodes. The air marshall needs urgent medical treatment. Gavin aka ‘that asian dude from Crusade‘ looks like he’s up to something but he’s not as creepy as the guy with the scar over his eye.

Aside from people’s problems, most of this episode is taken up by their attempt to get the transceiver they found to the top of the mountain to send out a radio signal. The episode finishes with Merry saying “Guys, where are we?” and the title screen helpfully replying “LOST”.

The show feels like it is starting to hit its stride in this episode. The initial problems of the crash have been resolved and several of the ongoing plotlines have been revealed. The show looks like it is set for some interesting times ahead. It reminds me of The Lost World with all this trapesing through the jungle and big scary creatures. Admittedly I don’t think Lost will get as stupid as The Lost World but it could have in the wrong hands. I am little concerned that with all the flashbacks and the close ups on characters, the show might become a bit like a soap opera. With the amount of money being spent on this show, I hope it can be avoided.

One other thing that bothers me is that there is little suspense about whether they’ll be rescued. What if the show is extremely popular? They might not be rescued for years. I shouldn’t complain about a show not being cancelled but I feel sorry for the characters if they are going to be stuck on the island for years. It’s the Jack Bauer Syndrome; if only the first season of 24 had been less successful he might have lived a peaceful life.

Footnotes

1. Why doesn’t this not surprise me?

The vote is 197 to 133 in favour of Bush. Things are not looking good. I can console myself with the fact that most of the states for Bush are in the middle of the US. That was to be expected. Hopefully the western states will vote for Kerry.

Let me refresh CNN again. Alright! California with 55 votes has gone for Kerry. 197 to 188 now. This could take a while.

American television makes crap and lots of it. Fortunately here in Australia we are safe from most of it,[ftn] so any shows I hear about are usually top notch. There’s been a couple of interesting series made recently: The 4400 and Lost. They have a common mysterious theme which I like. I think I prefer Lost more at this stage. Although only having seen one episode, the idea of being stranded on a tropical island appeals to me more. Hopefully one day I will be lucky enough to be stranded on island with only my wits to survive and a bunch of nutters and maniacs to keep me company. While many movies about survival strike me as trite and contain many factual errors,[ftn] the subject as a whole fascinates me. I loved the conversation in The Day After Tomorrow about which books to save and which books to burn for warmth.[ftn]

It would make my day to have my plane crash although I’m concerned that I might be one of the ones who’ll die. I’d hate to be killed and miss the exciting survival part. No, I hear you say, you’re clearly the main character and the action would be centered around you. Well, I thank you for those kind words. Still I must be careful where in the plane I sit. The tail of the plane is always ripped off so it would have to be somewhere in the middle. The people in first class didn’t make it in Lost so I’m glad I never travel that way. I’m also concerned about being prepared. You may know that the scout motto is be prepared. It always struck me as being odd because you can’t possibly be prepared for everything; how would you prepare for the streets of New York flooding and freezing over?[ftn] What equipment should one have to deal with emergencies like zombie attacks? There’s a limit to the amount of ammunition one person can carry. The main character in Lost has a mini bottle of vodka which turns out to be handy for sterilising wounds. It’s easy in a computer game. If you can pick it up, you should. You’ll need it at some point and as most games have unlimited inventories you can pick up everything. Mind you, MacGuyver makes do with a pocket knife. I guess a knife is all you really need. Except you can’t bring one on a plane. So I don’t know.

Enough of my survival concerns, back to the show. Lost is about a group of people whose plane has crashed on a tropical island. It’s no ordinary tropical island however. There’s something mysterious going on. Their plane was off-course when it crashed so they won’t be rescued soon. The plot so far makes sense. They’re on a tropical island so they’ve been able to sit around for the first two days without shelter and they’re eating airplane food.

I like all the characters at the moment. I try to resist spotting the expendable characters to keep the surprise in the show but it can’t be helped sometimes. When one of the plane’s engines is still running after the crash, someone is going to be sucked in. There’s no surprise there.[ftn] This looks like it will be a very interesting show. It doesn’t look like the kind of show where they’ll be sitting around waiting for a boat to come past. I’m sure they’ll have many dramas and problems to overcome.

Footnotes

1. and ice ages and zombie attacks but not reality tv.
2. or have idiotic characters. I’d rather the nutters and maniacs.
3. I would be arguing for the valuable books and against warmth. I’d die to save the library of Alexandria. Is this normal?
4. The Day After Tomorrow again
5. I do like a warning before people died sometimes. While horror movies predictably kill from least important to most important character, Band of Brothers was hard to watch because any character could be killed by a stray bullet at any time. I had no time to detach from the character.

THE RED SOX WON THE WORLD SERIES. As a long time Boston fan this makes me extremely happy. To see them win so emphatically after the close call wiith the Yankees is euphoric.

Daniel’s stopped working at his restaurant during exam time so I’m filling in for him. It’s much like working in Banff. I seat the customers, I serve food and drinks, I clean tables, there’s a cute girl called Sylvie in the kitchen who speaks French, the customers are whiney bitches, there’s cardboard on the floor and there’s a pot smoking manager named Craig who likes ice hockey.

Ah, that last bit isn’t strictly true.

Now that Lara Croft is telling people to vote there will be a decent turnout. You can watch the video at MTV.com – Choose or Lose. The link is at the bottom on the right.

It’s a weak song and Lara Croft has a weird voice. I would have thought that 20 year olds are too cynical to fall for this crap. I did like the idea that Sonic plays chess with Scorpion in the park.

I noticed Giles has become the Prime Minister of Britain.

I’ll just come out and say that as a self-appointed zombie expert it shames me to admit that I haven’t seen the original of the Dead trilogy. I know your faith in me is shaken. I aim to rectify this deficiency; rest assured that I have increased my anti-zombie training to 4 hours a day. I decided to watch the recent remake first as remakes are usually worse than the originals[ftn] and I prefer to go from bad to good. Unfortunately Resident Evil 4 has been delayed again and won’t be out until next year, and Resident Evil Outbreak is PS2 only but Shawn of the Dead and Resident Evil: Apocalypse are being released soon so I should be able to keep my training on schedule.

This film opened my eyes to a couple of home truths. For one thing, I shouldn’t assume that zombies are slow moving. Apparently some of them can run really fast.

Another thing: God bless America. They truly are safe.[ftn] When the zombies attack, they just run to the gun store and stock up. What would we do in Australia? No semi-automatic weapons, no oversized military packed to the gills with high explosives. When the dragons awake to reclaim the earth, we’ll have half a dozen choppers to hold them back. America recently decided to let ordinary citizens wield automatic weapons. What progress! What forward thinking! Iraq will be safe too. I pity us poor schmucks here in Oz.[ftn]

This film turned out to be pretty good in the end. The special effects were good, definitely above B-grade standard and there was some decent characters. It’s a fairly standard zombie movie. For no real reason, some people wake up as zombies one morning. They want to feast on human flesh. There’s a group of people holed up somewhere. They decide to leave their safe haven and go on a wacky road trip. They have to kill their loved ones who have come back in zombie form. They make some stupid decisions and they fight amongst themselves. No one wears protective clothing. There’s self-sacrifice. Things go horribly horribly wrong. There’s hot pregnant zombie action.

It’s the little differences that make a zombie movie. The light hearted scenes in the middle were a nice touch. Once the group was established in the mall they were able to relax and enjoy things. These scenes break up the tension nicely. There was a funny scene standing in the elevator listening to the cheery music while running from the zombies.

It was a curious choice not use the word zombie in the film. Most horror films usually have a character early on call the creatures zombies or vampires and everyone says things like ‘zombies aren’t real, maybe he’s just let himself go’ until they actually see zombies climbing out of their graves. Here they do mention that people have come back from the dead but no one says zombie. I liked it at first but it seemed odd after a while.

There was some interesting stuff on how people react to a zombie epidemic. It was subtle and more believable than other movies. The suspicious mall security guards tried to keep people from looting the shops. Dr Pratt refuses to kill his zombie baby.[ftn] No one knows what to do with someone who has been bitten but only has a minor wound and isn’t going to die for a while.

I liked the style of the ending. I thought the film was going to end without the final fate of the characters known but it continued on into the credits showing what one of the characters was filming with a video camera. That way it felt like the rest of the adventure was shown while being cleverly compressed to fit into a decent length film.

Dawn of the Dead is a good film, especially for a remake. It’s a lot more consistent than 28 Days Later which started out good but finished badly. There’s a couple of plot holes in the movie: I don’t know why the guy was waving a chainsaw around in a moving vehicle and they should seriously wear some protection against zombie bites.

I have to go build myself a bomb shelter now. I’ll need about 6 months supply of food and water. That should be along enough time for the zombies to decay.

DVD Review

The DVD some clever extras. Instead of the usual deleted scenes, there’s background footage about the zombie plague. There’s a recording of what happened to the guy over the road from the mall and the news reports from the day of the zombie attacks. There’s also the usual commentary and behind the scenes stuff, most of which focus on how to make zombies’ heads explode convincingly. A worthy goal in my opinion.

Footnotes

1. e.g. Planet of the Apes, Psycho and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
2. Except in the case of natural disasters. They seem to be targeted unfairly. Australia was untouched in The Day After Tomorrow.
3. Now that I think about it, Australia has no zombie attacks. I’d rather be in a country that has no guns and no zombie attacks. Yay for quarantine.[ftn]
4. I knew he was up to no good.
5. John Howard is a hero for keeping out those refugees. Any one of them could have been carrying a zombie plague.

While searching the web for things Dawn of War related, I came across this: Relic Forums – 2nd Edition Rules.

My money worries are over. A man from Nigeria has contacted me with deal to transfer funds out of his country. I’ve already given him my bank details.

Bloody hell. See what happens when I stop posting. I should have been using my influential blog status to stop everyone voting for Howard and counter Andrew’s curse. Is assassination a crime? Suppose, and this is entirely hypothetical, there was this national leader who was moderately successful on economic matters, which seemed to excuse his grave injustices concerning human rights and the environment in the eyes of the people, would it be ethical if said leader caught fire? Accidentally of course. I’m concerned that the americans are going to vote conservatively too. Kerry doesn’t seem to be having a very good campaign.

What else was I going to say? If I don’t post every day, I get like Tom and having nothing to say. So now it’s Wednesday, no Saturday or maybe it’s Monday again. Anyways, how about some gamecube news.

Megatron’s recovered nicely. His stitches are out but we haven’t noticed any increased intelligence yet. Maybe I should give him a slap on the side of his head. It works for the tv.

I might stay with a geeky theme today. Dawn of War is a fun game. I like it better than Warcraft 3 because there’s less micromanagement in fighting and gathering resources. Also, THERE’S 3 CDS IN THE ONE CASE! 3CDS! An amazing feat of modern engineering. Online gaming is sweet too. My win/loss ratio sucks but the beauty of seeing a giant column of orks, space marines and eldar lead by an Avatar storming into a chaos base is beautiful. It’s the best massed army I’ve seen since Lord of the Rings.

The nica audition was good. By good I mean I could do all the stuff they asked of me. I just have to wait until mid November to find out how good. It started at 10 am with some stretching. We were told details of the course and what would be expected of us. We were then told not to push ourselves today, and if we hadn’t done something before then not to attempt it. Which is stupid, because obviously the more skills you can show the better your odds. The first test is flexibility: splits and some wierd lying on your stomach and lifting up your arms and legs as high as they can go. There was only a dozen people there so things move quickly. Next is tumbling: backsaults and stuff. Only one other guy and I can do more than a cartwheel so it didn’t last long. No one else can do handstands. I feel embarrassed by Perth’s poor showing. With some encouragement, Jess manages the 10 seconds required by the manipulation stream. On to strength exercises like push ups and chin ups and v-snaps which are like sit ups lifting the legs at the same time. Then we stopped for lunch and the tv news people came and filmed us. The afternoon consisted of our performance pieces, some impromptu dancing and brief individual interviews. So it all went pretty well.

I’ve got an audition for NICA tomorrow. Wish me luck.

I was bored on the weekend so I operated on Megatron’s brain to make him smarter.

I inserted dual 3 GHz processors into his brain so he should be super intelligent now. The cover story is that he had a small benign tumor removed from the skin on his head.

It’s a relief to know that there are others out there. For a long time I thought I was alone; alone in a cold and unpunctuated world. You can imagine my delight and relief at finding other people who care about punctuation as much as I do, and are willing to go to great lengths to keep the standards up.

This book explains the use and history of punctuation. It’s intended to be more approachable than your average straight-forward punctuation guide. It covers the obvious stuff and sheds some light on the less well-known uses and compares the rules given in other punctuation guides.[ftn] Not having covered much grammar and punctuation in English, I found it interesting; the difference between a colon and a semicolon was most informative.

Equally as fascinating is the history of punctuation and the speculation on the future. Most punctuation didn’t exist until the printing press was invented in the 15th century and it seems to be having a hard time crossing over to the internet. Maybe it’s the lack of editors on the net or the lack of a proper English education these days. The only place I’ve found on the net containing some decent punctuation was while reading reviews for this book.

The part I liked most about the book is, while it gives plenty of examples, the text itself is one big example about how to use punctuation. It explains punctuation while using it. This kind of thing amuses me.³ I liked the comparison between good manners and punctuation too: they’re both invisible when used properly.

As I suspected, the apostrophe is the main problem people have with punctuation. While the Apostrophe Protection Society is a nice attempt to spread the light, this book suggests a more aggressive campaign is needed. We should form a militant wing who hunt down abusers and misusers of punctuation. We are encouraged to “embrace your inner stickler” and join the minority of people who will point out mistakes on signs, on posters, in titles, in newspapers, in letters, in emails and on billboards. Recommended equipment includes big red markers to make corrections with. All we need is a leader to unite us and lead us to victory over ignorance. In Lynne Truss, I believe we have such a leader. Sticklers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Footnotes

1. Made you look, Tom. This isn’t a real footnote. It’s just here to interrupt your reading.
2. One of the funniest things I ever heard.
3. Then again, custard amuses me. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.
4. The second footnote isn’t in the review. It’s just to make Tom look through the article again to find what it is referring to.