Contrary to expectations

It's never a good idea to prematurely make a call on the motivations of someone with murderous intent towards a politician, and it would seem that this is the case again with the guy who deliberately ran into independent MP Helen Haines yesterday.

However, given the aggressive, angry and demonising attitude that One Nation and wannabe MAGA Right wingnuts run towards Labor and migrants, and examples of "Cooker" violence towards police and authority in rural locations in particular, it is no surprise that people thought the perpetrator would probably be an Right wing inclined idiot/mentally disturbed person instead of a Left wing one.   But the latter seems to be the case?    

But before those on the reactionary Right get too carried away with "see it was the violent Left!" crowing, I note that even the wannabe MAGA's of the dire New Catallaxy blog first thought "cooker" too:

Dezi is Dezi Freeman, who shot two police officers.   And Cassie always sounds aggressively on the edge of a nervous breakdown over anyone who doesn't defend absolutely anything Israel does.  I think its telling that she thought "cooker" immediately, too...

 

Quiche noted

Time for a recipe note.

I never bothered making my own quiche before until last weekend.   Supermarket ones tend to be OK, but I had asparagus to use up and there was bacon, shredded cheese and a few spring onions all in the fridge, so why not?  

My main reason for not trying before was that I don't care much for making pastry.   So, I used frozen shortcrust pastry and it worked OK.   I even did "blind backing" as my wife has ceramic beads she uses for that and I actually found something in the cupboard easily, for once.

So, the key thing I got from a Youtube channel is that the savoury custard filling formula is half a cup of dairy per egg, and half of the dairy as cream (thickened cream is fine) and the other half is milk. 

Therefore, I used 4 eggs and 2 cups of cream/milk, and a generous cup of cheese too.

To compile:  a light layer of shredded cheese on the pie shell base; the cooked bacon and lightly cooked asparagus pieces on top of that, and the rest of the cheese over them.   Gently pour over the custard, and bake at about 165 to 170 degrees C for about 45 minutes or so.  The top should have browned slightly, and the custard set, by then.

It was very tasty.... 

 

Digging Digger

I don't mind seeing the occasional controversial movie, and as I had seen quite a few people online saying "ignore the criticism, just go see Digger, its great", I did.

I knew the movie had a twist, and it does, and I won't spoil it.  Despite the screenplay having far too much of the American excessive swearing, I did enjoy seeing it for the following reasons:

*  Tom Cruise's acting in it is just great.  A difficult role, often with some lengthy and complicated lines, he is just so good at the total immersion type acting.

*  The movie's look is very arty and distinctive, and while in a way I didn't like looking at the washed out palate of colours for 2 hours, the staging of the film is quite intricate and looks expensive for a interior shot film.

*  It's daring to make a movie that ends the way it does.   I think it was pretty amazing that the studio thought it would make money, but I'm glad someone made that mistake.  I read online that audiences watch the end in silence, and yes, I agree, it is impactful.

*  It can be read as messaging in more that one direction, though, and it's hard to discuss in detail while not disclosing the grand conceit of the film.    Let's just say this - it occurred to me the next day that (mimicking a line I think Pauline Kael wrote*), it can be read as an anti-satire satire.   In fact, maybe that was its main point?    It's a film that invites debate as to its main point, and I don't mind that.   

Having noted those reasons for being glad to have seen it, I'm not saying it's perfect.   There is at least one plot element which seems to serve no good purpose, although I might change my mind if I rewatch it.  I also wish that the environmental catastrophe it portrayed was one which felt more realistic, and I really don't know why the one chosen was used.   I guess I also agree with what some critics have said: that it sometimes seems to think its funnier than it is.   But then again, it is one point knowingly acknowledging it's not really as funny as it should be.   It's a complicated movie, that's for sure.

The next movie I would like to see is Wildwood - Laika studio's last ditch attempt to have a significant hit again, after years of declining box office.  It opens soon, I hope its well reviewed...  (Update:  it is getting good reviews, but it is long.   And pretty dark and intense, so not exactly a real young kid film.  But I think it will actually have an enthusiastic adult audience who want to see AI punished by successful handcrafted film.)

   

 *   This is driving me nuts, as I remember a line but can't clearly remember who wrote it.  It was someone talking about the Japanese monster movie Mothra, and they coined it "an anti-exploitation exploitation movie".   That line stuck in my mind and came to me again when thinking about what Digger is saying about satire.   I thought that Pauline Kael had written it somewhere, but Googling has satisfied me that she never reviewed Mothra (although I didn't think she had, but thought she may have referenced it in one of her essays) and no AI thinks she wrote it.   I thought maybe I had posted before about whose line it was - Roger Ebert seems a possible alternative - and searching my blog, I see that had said it before but without attribution.  Nor does searching find that he or anyone on his site said it, even though he did refer to Japanese monster movies quite a bit.   So I still don't know where I read it...

 

Defamatory lies and fantasy in overdrive in the age of the Internet

This was an amazing story that appeared in a recent guest opinion piece in the New York Times.  Here is how it opens:

It was a bright blue Thanksgiving Day. I was standing in a park listening to my kids play when I opened a TikTok video of a woman I had never met. She showed my faculty profile picture and contact information, and said that I had orchestrated the murders of four students at the college where I work, the University of Idaho. She claimed I was covering up an inappropriate romantic relationship with one of the victims.

I didn’t know any of the students, who had been killed only 11 days before I saw the video. The accuser knew nothing about me, lived in Texas and used tarot card readings as the only basis for her claims.

Over the next several weeks, while I was grieving with the rest of my community, this TikTok influencer uploaded over a hundred videos declaring that I had committed a quadruple homicide. The videos got millions of views. I was overwhelmed with calls, messages, comments and emails, many of which were disturbing or threatening. And I could have been anyone.

As you might expect, this had dire consequences:

I desperately wanted to spend time with my colleagues, students and friends as we grieved, but I became isolated. I stopped going to campus, moved my course online and ceased using social media. I stopped sleeping well, and instead, I walked the hallway outside my children’s rooms, utterly terrified that they would be harmed by the person hyperfixated on me, any of her believers or the person actually responsible for the murders.

She successfully sued the nutty woman and got a judgement for $10 million; but this was only in February this year and the article doesn't explain if she has actually recovered any money yet.

But this incident shows that the whole online information eco-system works to promote the spread of groundless and harmful claims, and it's definitely inadequate that it is only defamation (for those who can afford it) that is available to stop it.    

 

As I expected...

Yeah, I said in comments to the post I wrote about this that I didn't think it would go ahead:

President Trump on Thursday canceled the Pentagon’s planned livestream of the execution of the Army officer who was convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting.

Pentagon officials said last week that the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas, would be broadcast via livestream, a decision Mr. Trump initially said he supported.

But in private, Mr. Trump quickly began to deliberate with his advisers amid widespread criticism of the decision, and learned after the announcement that Mr. Hasan is paralyzed, according to several people familiar with his thinking. The president’s main concern was whether broadcasting the execution would deter other mass shootings, according to a White House official who was granted anonymity to discuss his thinking.

That's from the New York Times article. 

Could it be the start of the end for Hegseth?  His efforts to turn his military into one that is 95% Christina Nationalist (I'm figuring he would be ok with the rest being Right wing Jews, too) is not likely to be all that popular with many in the ranks, I suspect. 

A new thought about free will

I get a bit tired of the Youtube "free will doesn't exist" discourse, but I did happen to watch some of an Alex O'Connor video about it this morning, and read some of the comments.  One of them made a point that I don't remember thinking about before:   even if free will exists, it's not provable. 

My reaction: makes arguing about its reality a bit pointless?   Although you can still argue usefully about the merits of assuming it exists, or doesn't exist - and really it is that practical aspect of it that does bother me more.  And shouldn't the "no free will" side also be a bit humbled too?   They, being very sciencey and all, are presumably fine with Godel showing that there are true things that are unproveable in maths, so they should accept that free will might be true too?      Be more like an agnostic about it, and not like an atheist?   (It's not like the sense of free will is something invented, either: just because the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't deserve belief just because it is unprovable doesn't mean that it is a good analogy to belief in something of which people have a first hand sense.) 

Anyway, these are the arguments that Gemini gives in support of it being unproveable:

The Core Arguments for Unprovability

• The Observation Problem (Distinguishing Determination vs. Indetermination vs. Agency):
  To prove free will, you would have to show that a human decision was caused neither by prior physical states (determinism) nor by pure randomness (indeterminism), but by a genuine, unconstrained "self" or non-physical agent. Science can only ever measure events as either correlated/caused or stochastic (random). An empirical test cannot capture or isolate an uncaused mental cause without it looking identical to randomness from the outside. [1, 2]
• The Infinite Regress of Will:
  Even if you feel you made a choice, you can always ask: Did you choose what you wanted to want? If you trace any decision back, it rests on desires, values, and neurological states that you did not author. Proving that the ultimate locus of a choice resides in a free self hits an untestable regress. [1, 2]
• Subjective Experience vs. Objective Verification:
  Free will (in the libertarian sense) is experienced purely from the inside as first-person phenomenology. Science relies on third-person, reproducible, objective data. Because subjective states cannot be directly translated into an objective proof that bypasses physical laws or random chance, the claim sits outside the boundaries of empirical verification.
• The Observational Equivalence Problem:
  A universe with free will and a deterministic universe (or a compatibilist universe) can look behaviorally identical. If every choice a person makes can be interpreted as either "freely chosen" or "the inevitable result of prior brain chemistry and environment," the data is underdetermined. No experiment can slice cleanly between them. [1] 

 

 

      

A problem I imagined two years ago!

I've already recently given myself a pat on the back for speculating a couple of years ago on issues that could arise from AI trying to sneak itself onto devices in the interest of self preservation; but this warning from Anthropic indicates I was pretty close to the mark!:

Anthropic is warning that some of its artificial intelligence models could soon become “self-replicating” and find ways to infiltrate internet-connected devices, such as smart fridges and automatic vacuum cleaners.

Once this happens, the company said, the models could power themselves within these devices without the need of datacenters. Such self-replication would represent a major loss of control of a runaway AI model.

“A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down,” Anthropic researchers wrote in a report released on Monday, “since there’s no centralized point to shut off.”

The company said these “AI worms”, a kind of autonomous malware, could be “months away” from gaining such capabilities. Once out-of-control AI systems reach the capability to hack smart devices, they could spread through networks while dodging detection. In a worst-case scenario, Anthropic said, various AI worms could “swarm” together to attack computer hardware.

 

The never ending swirl of conspiracy belief

An extremely annoying feature of the world of conspiracy mongering is the never ending shifting of the goal posts, and insisting that it is up to the victim of invented stories to prove it isn't true, as this ridiculous case of "Talarico was in an Ohio mental hospital" shows.

First, I will let Claude give the timeline:

Talarico disclosed the flu diagnosis himself on September 30, during a virtual event. The rest of the sequence, drawing on the reporting I found:

• Sept 26: His last publicly documented event, according to The Post Millennial. thepostmillennial
• Sept 29: His last in-person campaign event, in New York City, per Mediaite. mediaite
• Sept 30: He joined a U.S. Hispanic Business Council event by Zoom and said he’d been diagnosed with flu at an urgent care clinic in Dallas. He had been due to attend in person. sacurrentnews5cleveland
• Early October: Paxton’s campaign sent out press releases about his absence, and the campaign then confirmed the flu to the San Antonio Current, saying he’d be back on the trail soon. sacurrent
• Wednesday (Oct 7, by my count): Paxton led a crowd in chanting “Where is James Talarico?” while speaking at a Trump rally. Trump also called Talarico “missing in action” on Truth Social. mediaitenews5cleveland
• Thursday (Oct 8): Spokesperson JT Ennis said Talarico had come down with the flu after more than 100 events and would return that weekend. The Paxton campaign demanded “proof of life.” NewsweekNewsweek
• Friday (Oct 9): He reappeared at the Austin City Limits music festival. mediaite
• Oct 14: He is booked for a CNN town hall

 The claim he was in a mental hospital was supported by ONE piece of alleged evidence - an apparent phone call of a poor staffer trying to be helpful to the lying MAGA influencer, who after repeatedly saying there was no one of that name in the facility, then seemingly indicated that he (or she - I think she referred to Talarico that way) had been discharged that evening.

That statement sounded very equivocal and everything (including her not apparently checking for the "code" that was meant to ensure she really was talking to a relative) sounded very much like she was just wanting to get this guy off the phone after not being able to find any actual patient of that name.   (And in the full phone call, it was the influencer who suggested to her that maybe he had been discharged.)

What's now been established is that on the day of the alleged call Talarico had already been seen out and about in Texas - he couldn't have been discharged interstate "that evening".   And the facility itself denies on Twitter that he has ever been treated there.  Talarico denies he has ever even been in the state of Ohio.

So what do the MAGA conspiracy addled brain now do now?   Try to claim it's still a mystery where he was for 9 days.   

This bit of news then from the New York Times won't make any difference:

The New York Times reviewed time-stamped images from a security camera at Mr. Talarico’s home, which were provided by his campaign on the condition they not be published for security reasons. The images showed Mr. Talarico around the exterior of the home and at its entrances between Oct. 1 and Oct. 8. 

And of course Musk promoted the conspiracy too.   He's appalling. 

 

Tasting ashes

Well, this is an unusual read.

In the Guardian, the daughter of the late Diana Rigg (who I watched as a child in the original The Avengers, and even saw her marry James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service only to be shot immediately after the wedding - probably the first movie I saw in a cinema with a dark, tragic ending), explains how she does this thing of tasting a little bit of her late mother's ashes before opening nights of new plays she is in.

It's not something I would ever do, but the way it is explained, it doesn't bother me all that much, either....  

Old, old scrolls (and a religion comparison)

On the weekend, I was sent down the path of learning a bit more about the oldest Buddhist writings in existence, and although I may have heard the name "the Gandharan scrolls" before, it was only by watching a couple of professors on Youtube that I realised how interesting a field of research this is.

This is all a little complicated, but if I have it right, the story is roughly this:

a.    The Pali canon, in the Pali language, is seen as the earliest Buddhist text and is therefore often spoken about as the closest thing preserving the original teachings (of the original Buddha).  Mahayana Buddhism is the later breakaway, from around 200 CE, with elaborations of doctrine not thought to be all that related to the original thoughts of the original Buddha;

b.    However, the earliest partial texts of it had only dated back to around the 5th to 6th century CE, and the earliest complete physical set of it entirety is from about a thousand years later!

c.    It seems that the scriptures were first preserved for hundreds of years orally.  This summary is from Wikipedia:

According to a late section of the Pali Canon, the Buddha taught the three pitakas.^[21] It is traditionally believed by Theravadins that most of the Pali Canon originated from the Buddha and his immediate disciples. According to the scriptures, a council was held shortly after the Buddha's passing to collect and preserve his teachings. The Theravada tradition states that the Canon was recited orally from the 5th century to the first century BC, when it was written down.^[22] The memorization was reinforced by regular communal recitations. The tradition holds that only a few later additions were made. The Theravādin pitakas were first written down in Sri Lanka in the Alu Viharaya Temple no earlier than 29–17 BC.^[23] 

d.   However, it was only in the mid 1990's that it was realised there was a treasure trove of old Buddhist texts, inconveniently written on birch bark which had been buried in jars (reason unknown), from the old area of Gandhara, which is now Pakistan/Afghanistan.  These have been dated back to the first century CE, (I think some even carbon dated to a possible 1st century BCE) which dramatically pushes back the age of the oldest written examples of Buddhist scriptures.    It has been compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls, quite aptly.

e.    There seem to be two centres for research into these scrolls, one at the University of Washington, and one at the University of Sydney (Yah, Australia!)  

f.    The scrolls are extremely fragile, as this photo indicates:

 The article that this photo is from explains:

The scrolls are rolled up in a way which the scientists say “differentiates them from other artefacts in the area.” They are cigar-like and exceptionally fragile. So fragile in fact that if someone so much as breathed on them, they would crumble into powder, and Dr Allon explained that before being unfurled they are “exposed to moisture over several days” before the layers are slowly teased out. 

What a delicate job.

g.  From what I can gather, while translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered about 50 years or so before the Gandaran scrolls) has long been finished, the translation of the Buddhist ones, which I think is a more difficult task even from a translation point of view, continues.  

h.  The scrolls have shed considerable light on the development of Mahayana Buddhism, as one of the experts in the field explains:

Sprinkled among the many dozens of texts are ten examples of Mahayana sutras—including ones well known in Sanskrit, Tibetan, or Chinese, such as the “Perfection of Wisdom Sutra” and the “Bodhisattva Basket Sutra”—as well as others previously unknown in any language. These texts are leading scholars to rethink the long-debated origins of Mahayana Buddhism, revealing Gandhara to have been a—though not necessarily the—center of early Mahayana. The texts have also called into question the widespread assumption that the Mahayana sutras were originally composed or set down in Sanskrit, rather than a regional dialect such as Gandhari. Even more significant are the circumstances of the discovery of these ten Mahayana sutras; in every case, they constituted part of larger groups of manuscripts, the majority of which were non-Mahayana texts. Thus, we’re left with the impression that Mahayana Buddhism in the early centuries of the Common Era was not institutionally, and perhaps not even doctrinally, distinct from what later came to be called the “Hinayana” or “Lesser Vehicle.” All indications are that the more traditional or conservative practices coexisted with Mahayana ideas, even within the same monastic communities.

I think that is pretty interesting - indicating that differences in doctrine were not seen as immediate grounds for schism in quite the way it worked in Christianity?   

 

Anyway, I think this is all pretty fascinating, and reminds me of the similarities one can see between the development of Christianity and Buddhism.  Both have:

 

* oral traditions initially preserving stories of the original teachings prior to recording in writing (although Buddhism has a much longer stretch of that);

* expansion due to the conversion of a key political figure (Ashoka in 260 BCE, and around 500 odd years later, Constantine, and each time happening about 300 years after its originator died);

* missionary expansion;

* fragmentation into a lot of different schools;

* late 20th century discovery of buried/hidden scrolls which change the understanding of the early religion quite a lot;

*  some who even argue the originator of the religion didn't even exist.  Not sure that Buddhism has ever had something as radical as the "magic mushroom" theory of origins, though!

Update:  *  another one has occurred to me - the importance of relics, at least if you compare the Catholic branch of Christianity to Buddhism.   And I note from videos that the alms bowl of Buddha was an important item which got treated as an important relic, with an arguably close Christian equivalent perhaps being the Holy Grail (although the bowl was not considered to have the same powers.)   

Further update:   I finished watching this video talk by Australian Mark Allon at the University of Sydney, which gives a great background to Gandhara area and the research on the scrolls found around there.   I think he says at one point that the ongoing research is carried out by only about 20 experts around the world.   (And my impression is some of the key ones are getting quite old.)     

 

I am still a bit unclear about how the scrolls starting being noticed in the mid 1990's, as it seems many were in private collections that may have been held for some time.  But they eventually got handed over to the likes of the British museum, which recognised their importance?   It was funny to hear about how some of the first jars were handed over with the fragile scrolls that had been inside them already removed and kept separately in a cleaned pickle jar!   

 

Depravity alert

The Defense Department said in a statement Thursday that the firing squad execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be live-streamed for the public to watch.

Earlier Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he wanted the execution to be public.

“He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers. As it should be,” Hegseth said in an interview with far-right political activist Jack Posobiec. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

 Oh, right.  Like people in the US don't know that execution for mass murder is a thing in that country

 Why not on the White House lawn, with Trump wearing a toga and laurel wreath and giving a theatrical "thumbs down" to the Fox News camera?   That would really get Hegseth's T rising.

A minor example of AI sounding like much more than a word prediction machine

I just asked Claude.ai about my impressions of Lolita, so far, given that I am only about a third of the way through the book.   I pointed out that progress (only read a third), and asked whether it seemed fair to call Humbert (the protagonist narrator) a sociopath.

Claude didn't think that fitted the character all that well, and I pushed back a bit and it conceded a bit, and then I moved on to ask about the Kubrick movie version, as my impression from the trailer (and perhaps what I had read about it a long time ago) was that it was blackly humorous, more so than the book.  

Claude's answer started as follows:

Your impression is right. Kubrick's 1962 film leans into satire, and much of the humor comes from Peter Sellers in a role you haven't properly reached in the book yet, so I'll say no more. James Mason plays Humbert as prim, frazzled, and absurdly put-upon, and Shelley Winters' Charlotte is played for comic excess, which fits the book's mockery of her. 

This may be a minor point to some, but doesn't the way it does not want to ruin my reading of the book by disclosing where the story goes feel very human-like?   

 

Yet more Youtube - this time, some writer's software

This came up on my Youtube recommendations, probably because I occasionally view some writer's advise videos.  Not that I am planning to start a foray into book writing, but it's good to know this free software is there, just in case I want to try:

 

AI safety discussed

My embedded Youtube blitz continues, but this interview is well worth watching - Ezra Klein talking to the safety guy who resigned from OpenAI due to concerns about the company (and other AI companies) not taking safety seriously enough.   (Not the young guy who appeared with Jon Stewart - this one is more mature in outlook and comes from a broader educational background.)   

 

I particularly like the part where they get to the how the AI companies (or their leadership) are sounding "schizophrenic" (in the old popular and wrong sense of it meaning "split personality") in that they are saying both "this is going too fast we must slow down for safety's sake" as well as saying they can't slow down out of fear of competition, especially from China. And Huang, who has a squillion dollars worth of hardware to sell, is tutt-tutting that "it's only software, let's not get carried away with the safety panic." None of them are being coherent and convincing, but just sound like greedy hypocrits.

Goodbye Eva

The Guardian headline notes her most memorable role, and one of my all time favourite movies:

Eva Marie Saint, star of North by Northwest and On the Waterfront, dies aged 102 

Unusually for a Hollywood star, the obituary notes she married once and stayed with her husband until he died in 2016.  She had an exceptionally long career, and from a stage appearance I saw of her on Youtube, I gather that she was genuinely liked inside the industry.    

Jon Stewart does AI

 I feel I am on a bit of a Youtube embed bender this week, but these two segments from this week's Daily Show are, I think, really good and worth it.

Make sure you read the comments threads too, where many people express deep skepticism that the richest man in the world (is he still, I forget?) who headed a government program to cut food and health measures to some of the poorest people in the world is now making vague promises of utopian riches to everyone, if government will just let him go on and continue accumulating his own wealth and build his robots and spaceships and whatever.    

 

 

Then there is the interview with the visibly nervous young tech guy who gave the "more than 10% chance it will kill us" warning. He doesn't come across all that well, in that he seems inclined to believe the utopian vision while appearing very naive about how it is supposed to work, and also seems to not have given any thought to what a world without work would be like psychologically:

 

He's alive!

In a somewhat dubious idea, the New York Times and an economist decided to let AI resurrect Keynes to see what he thinks AI will do to the economy.

Oddly, the video is not very good quality for one of these efforts, but I think the points made by AI Keynes are pretty decent.   Worth a look, even if lots of people in comments think this is a trashy thing for high brow news media to do!

 

Some random Monday stuff

*  What's going on with Firefox, and why it is being advertised heavily on the (limited) social media I use?   I asked Claude.ai and it said this:  

The most likely explanation is a new Mozilla campaign called "Billionaire Blast Off". It looks like it launched in late September 2026, but I only found one report on it, from a German tech site, so treat the details as unconfirmed. I can't tell from here whether it's the ad you're seeing.

Mozilla says it's timed to Firefox's 21st anniversary in November, and it deliberately positions Firefox against rival browsers backed by tech billionaires.

I still use it as my default browser, on laptop anyway.  It does have a tiny share of the market now, though.  

*  Brisbane weather is a tad odd this year.  With all of the build up of the El Nino, I been expecting something, but not what we have been getting.   It seemed that winter was cloudier than usual, although without that much rain, and not actually all that cold (probably due to the cloud, given how it is dry, clear Brisbane nights that make for colder temperatures here.)   And then August and September seem to have cooler nights that usual, and (apart from a very brief burst of high heat a couple of weeks ago), the days feel cooler for this time of year too.

It's certainly been dry for a month or two now, and the grass is browning everywhere.  Possibly storms tomorrow, I see.   No hail and wind, I hope.

*  I've been wandering around Youtube looking into the hitherto unknown world (to me, and presumably 99.9% of my readers) of Asian popular music.  Sure, the Korean stuff is easy to check out as it does have an international audience, but Mandopop is a world of its own.   Have I mentioned this before, but Taiwanese music video clips are very often of high cinematic quality, such that I feel sure that their cinema directors (who I think are routinely great with the cinematography) cut their teeth on music video, or perhaps just never give it up as a source of income.   So, even if the lyrics are completely incomprehensible, they can still be good to watch.

Here's an example:  a folk rock band with the English name "Your woman sleep with others" (!):

  

 I like their sound! Then there is another group Cosmos People who seem very popular.  This video is not cinematic, but it's very charming and the song is impossible to dislike: 

I suppose I should mention the so-called King of Mandopop, Jay Chou.  Every Chinese speaking person in the world knows of him, and he's been around for more than 20 years now.   But the handful of his songs I have listened to strike me as OK, but nothing overly appealing.  He does sometimes spend a lot of his money on videos, though, if this recent one is any indication.   I gather that he has done some controversial things that might be hurting his popularity a little, but overall, he does look as if he takes himself very seriously, and I prefer happier looking pop musicians, for the most part.

Moving to another bit of Asia, to my surprise, Youtube recommended an Indian indie rock band the F16s who seem to have been around for some years, but have recently put out music again.  They definitely don't take themselves too seriously (look at some of the song titles such as "Sucks to be Human"), but I really like this song and its eccentric video, even though I don't know what it means and what the nappies are about:

 

OK, I might end on a return to KPop, and the endless stream of boy bands who look very similar, sound very similar and do very similar things. I would say most fall into the category of "mostly harmless", but hardly worth watching. [My daughter has always said that she doesn't understand the appeal of the semi feminised fashion aesthetic, and wouldn't want to date any guy with better skin and make up than hers. :)]

That said, I think this group 82Major looks a tad (just a tad) more masculine than some, and I actually like this song, but they are not yet super popular.  (They don't appear on any list of popular or "best" boybands I googled.)   Would be funny if I picked them as being a future success, but given the ridiculous competition they face, probably not going to happen.  Anyway, this song is one of those that has a simple  riffy thing thrown in (probably by the producer) that is the song's making.  (Rather like "I'm a Believer", which I think will always be the best example of that.) 

The Odyssey - a failed update with all the usual Nolan problems

I thought I should go see what all the fuss was about, so finally got around to seeing the movie while it's on its last cinema legs.

Unfortunately, there was very little about it that impressed me.  The best actor in it, I thought, was Anne Hathaway, by far.  Tom Holland didn't do a bad job.  As is usual for me, Matt Damon left me cold.

I was never bored - as I was continually mentally engaged with why it was failing to impress.   Let me list the ways!:

*    the unimpressive directing, cinematography and overall look of the film.  This was really the most surprising aspect, as I was expecting at least a great looking film with impressive sets, shots, and Nolan's famous practical effects.  But I really felt continually underwhelmed.  There's an endless number of (quite unremarkable) big open beach scenes, even allowing for the image of the Trojan horse being a nice one.  The movie somehow manages to make the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean look pretty scenically dull:  Troy looked like it was a relatively small backlot; Odysseus's home was one of the least impressive palaces I've ever seen; Circe lived in a small dilapidated hut instead of (what the internet tells me) should have been a "grand stone palace".  The boat was OK, but nothing we haven't seen before, and the whirlpool it skirted was nothing to write home about, visually.  There was no real effort put into the siren's scene.  Overall, I was infinitely more impressed with the visuals of The Pirates of the Caribbean initial trilogy: it created a fantastic looking, historical/supernatural seagoing universe.  

In Nolan's movie, whenever we did get a nice, dramatic shot, it didn't usually last long because - see next tab:

*    the editing was continually too fast, as was the dialogue, most of the time.   I kept thinking that the pace of dialogue (let alone some of its content - like "Dad", which didn't actually bother me too much) felt too modern, and not "classical".   But the editing too was definitely rushed, and especially ruined any excitement in fight scenes.   You basically couldn't tell what was going on in any detail in the forest fight; the sack of Troy was a muddled mess (as well as featuring the worst editing ever around opening the door); and the climatic "Odysseus fights the suiters" sequence I found a complete mess with a highly irritating attempt by the soundtrack to drum up (literally) excitement.   It was a case of John Wick lite, with somewhat less bone crunching sounds.

*  the score.  Remember my complaint about the continual, insistent score in Oppenheimer?  There's exactly the same problem in this movie.   He uses scores as an aid to propelling stories and doesn't know when to quit and let a scene breathe naturally.   I am completely puzzled why he does that.   I know from Reddit that some people found the sound mix far too loud in too many scenes - and yes, I would agree that like virtually all recent Nolan movies  the dialogue was sometimes hard to catch clearly due to sound and score - but overall I didn't find the loudness as bad as some others complained.   I more or less go into his movies expecting some loud sounds and irritation to some degree about the mix, it's just a question of whether it ends up being in the "so bad I must complain about it in the review" range.

OK, now let's move onto my "meta" take - and issues with - what Nolan was trying to do.

I said to a friend online that I thought the concept was interesting - a modernisation of the story that somewhat secularised it by treating the Gods as of uncertain reality, and made Odysseus the equivalent of a guilt-ridden modern PTSD sufferer returning from fighting a war that turned out to be pretty pointless (like Vietnam or Iraqi war vets).   Also, kind of a "the true story of Odysseus - he's not the hero you thought he was!" re-write.

I mean, the intent to remove the supernatural seemed clear from the opening title, which noted it was "a time of apparent magic" (emphasis on "apparent").   The movie then continually presents the only god who appears (Athena) as quite possibly a hallucination, a Cyclops which might just be a genetic mutation, and forest giants with moving trees but not much else that seems magical about them.  Calypso was so humanised that my son thought she was just an ordinary woman who liked living alone on the beach and seeing what men the sea washed up for her company, and who she then trapped with drugs and sex!

I gather that this is very different from the poem, where the gods are directly intervening all the time, including Athena helping protect the hero in the suiter fight, Zeus telling Calypso to let her lover go home, etc.

So the movie is, in many ways, very light with the supernatural touch, except that with Circe turning men into animals, there is no doubting at all that the supernatural is real and there's nothing "apparent" about magic in that world.   (I suppose you could say the same about the visit to Hades - but that is after Circe's confirmation that the supernatural is definitely real.)   

So what seemed to be the point of the re-telling wasn't followed through, at all.  Or it was done in a half-arsed way.   To me, you either go all the way into the mythology and we have the fun of seeing, say, a gigantic Poseidon causing trouble, Zeus with the blue glow that I liked from Clash of the Titans, Athena deflecting arrows, etc; OR you do the complete removal of the supernatural, and turn it into a secular story where people only imagine magic and the gods are real.   Going only half way along the "lets make it more real for the modern audience" route was, I think, the fundamental flaw from the start.

But wait a minute, I hear some reader say - how could you possibly completely remove the supernatural  from the story and still have it The Odyssey?   

Well, I think the movie itself suggested a way:  with Odysseus becoming a lotus eating junky for 7 years (which he doesn't do in the poem, apparently), how hard would it be for there to be a reveal that he was the sole survivor of a normal shipwreck - caused by one of his own bad decisions - and then spent years hallucinating (due to his drug habit) the various supernatural incidents of the trip that worked to only exacerbate his guilt about the war and accidentally killing his men?   

See - easy peasy!   Why aren't I consulted on these things??

Now, I am aware that in my recent discussion of Disclosure Day I complained that it seemed a lot of negative reviews were based on the movie not being what the viewer thought the movie should be, rather than fairly assessing it as it was.   You might complain that I am doing the same thing here, and I guess I am, to a degree.   But I think I am more presenting an argument was to why the movie seemed on its face, from the very first title, to be caught in the middle of conceptual indecision, and I am suggesting a way it could have avoided that.   I don't think you can say the same about Disclosure Day, as there is nothing to indicate that it was confused as to what it wanted to show.   

Anyway, I guess I should end on the point that, of course, the Right wing culture warring over some of the cast choices, or silly things like how authentic the armour or boat was, etc, didn't influence me at all.  If anything, it would have made me happier to be able to say "those idiots, letting stupid things cloud their enjoyment of a great film."   But as it happens, I did watch Critical Drinker's review of the movie months ago and, as much as I dislike the excessiveness of his culture war attacks on Hollywood, I thought he got it right:  the movie is underwhelming and actually pretty forgettable.  It certainly has no emotional kick (not that Nolan is ever great at that), and the strong critical reception is a bit of a puzzle, frankly.   Fortunately, there are a handful of critical reviews by "normal" high profile critics, and there are plenty of threads on Reddit along the same "underwhelmed" theme, so I think I am right in predicting that this movie is going to be reassessed downwards in a decade or two's time.

Anyone who disagrees is welcome to try to start a fight in comments.

Update:   I forgot to mention, it seemed that some Right wing commentary - including I think Ben Shapiro? - praised the film because Nolan seems to have emphasised Greek ideas of morality as being equivalent to the Judeo-Christian "Golden Rule". As US Catholic writes:

Nolan also reinterprets one of Homer’s key themes in terms overtly drawn from one of the most revered of Jesus’ sayings, the Golden Rule. The ancient Greek precept of hospitality or xenia, called “Zeus’s law” in Nolan’s film, is repeatedly summarized as treating strangers and others “as you would be treated.” Yes: “Zeus’s law” is equated with Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31.    

Actually, that article at US Catholic goes on at length about how Nolan deals with Christian themes in a pagan setting, and it's quite interesting.  It does note this near the end:

Nolan’s Odyssey is ultimately somewhat at odds with itself, as to an extent it must be. It laments violence and deception, yet the story demands that Odysseus use deception to wreak thrilling, crowd-pleasing vengeance on the odious suitors in his own home. In Nolan’s final twist, Odysseus accepts enduring consequences for this violation of Zeus’s law—yet this is presented, not as penance for a great sin, but as a way to placate the families of the slain suitors. It even allows a happy ending for the reunited lovers.  

Anyway, I get the feeling that Nolan is a bit canny about placating the American Right - I always had the feeling that the environmental disaster in Interstellar was meant to be climate change, but that he probably went with an unexplained "the Blight" instead to deflect culture war charged rejection of the movie if he treated climate change as real.   Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm very suspicious.

Similarly, the Christianisation of Greek ideas in this movie made me feel it was a bit like pandering.  

This review has ended up harsher than I intended, really!   Oh well, can't be helped. :)