Speak Geek to Me: BC, AD... MK?
Back in the day, people would mark time by the passage of the seasons. Later, they turned this passage of time into years and months. Some Roman emperor guys came along and tried to change how stuff was counted based on their own vanity, and generally pissed off some mathematicians. After that, since there was no way of being creative with math anymore, people started measuring time using different ways. It seems we cant just leave it alone. Some people measure time based on animal or human evolution. Some people like to measure billions of years at a time based on planetary changes. Others measure by economic changes in a country, wars, or popes. Or wars and popes.
Remember the time of Pope Pius XII? Wasnt too helpful during WWII. Died of hiccups. Yeah, that guy.
I discovered, however, that I have my own way of measuring time now. Eras are defined by releases of Nintendos Mario Kart games.
BMK (Before Mario Kart) was my high school years, a dark time when I only knew of Atari games PacMan, Defender, and yes, E.T. and arcade games. I struggled with my geek identity, attempting to be a pretty high school girl to attract the boys (FAIL) instead of just settling back into my comfy geek personality. In college, I saved up for a SNES and then came year 0 CMKE (Common Mario Kart Era).
It marked my independence: leaving college, getting my first apartment, living with a guy who slept in chain mail (he was my roommate, not lover
cause ow
), discovering Rolling Rock beer, and setting up my SNES to my roommates TV to drive around in a circle, collect coins and weapons and try to figure out why this was the best damn driving game Id ever played. Was it the oversized Bowser in the ridiculously tiny Shriners-type car that made it fun? The ability to hop your car down the street like a pimp? (I found way too much amusement in the bouncing cars.) Or did it matter? These likely are mysteries into which one should not delve too deeply; one should just accept the glory of Super Mario Kart. One does not question miracles.
I began judging people by their reaction to Mario Kart. I didnt judge on an economic level as if they didnt have/couldnt afford Mario Kart, they were lesser beings. My apartment was open to all who would embrace Mario Kart in their hearts. I made some friends just based on the friendly challenge that my Luigi could beat their Donkey Kong Jr. The holy drink was Rolling Rock and the holy throne was my futon, where we played for hours. If someone did not accept Mario Kart, she was dead to me.
As many prophets do, I had a dark point in my life when I turned my face from my true calling. I purchased a Playstation instead of a GameCube or an N64, missing out on the next few Mario Kart releases. I was aware of them, aware of the passage of each era, being something I had to eventually go back to or else be lost. And when I got my DS and was able to go back to the holy charting of time passage, I took the opportunity and didnt look back. Luckily Mario Kart accepted my devotion without question and I drove that hand-held whenever and wherever I could. But I missed the larger, TV console version of the game, I have to admit. So when the Wii version came out, that was the true return to the fold for me.
In the era before now, I was a young woman in college, living in an apartment with four people, enticing others to play Mario Kart with me, drinking the holy Rock of the Rolling, and experiencing true independence for the first time. And I can touch that feeling, touch that era, by playing the Mario Kart Wii. Back in the day of my personal independence, in the days of Clinton in the White House, in the days where CDs of Best Music of the '90s were already being sold on TV (with the decade barely begun) and the Internet still the realm of bearded Usenet fanatics. A more innocent time.
In the era after this one, I wonder what life will be like when Uber Mario Kart comes out for the Nintendo Virtual Reality Dome and Ill think back to now, with the dark days of war, Bush in the White House, unbelievable gas prices, and unemployment, but also the bright spots of my personal life, my family, friends, and teaching my daughter the fine points of Mario Kart Wii.
Some historians measure history by plain old years. Me, I think Im going to measure it by Mario Kart. Im a Nintendo loyalist right now, and cant see missing another release. So as long as they keep releasing the games, Ill keep marking my life by little red shells and banana peels.
Mur Lafferty is a writer and podcaster from Durham, NC. She is host of the award-winning podcast I Should Be Writing and producer and writer behind the zombie audio drama The Takeover. Her first novel, Playing For Keeps, is scheduled for release in August from Swarm Press. She is not a mythical creature.
Tunguska: Curiosity Satisfied?
Imagine yourself in Siberia almost one hundred years ago. On a summer morning at 7:15 AM, you see a blue light screaming across the sky. Ten minutes later, there's a bright flash, and the ground thuds like artillery fire. Shockwaves shake the earth for hundreds of miles. For 830 square miles, the Siberian forest is a landscape of fallen trees. Seismographs across Eurasia record the strange occurence, and for weeks, the skies are still illuminated.
This weird and wonderful bit of history has come to be known as the Tunguska event. The explosion of June 30, 1908 has been estimated to be 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
It wasn't until 1927 that remote Tunguska, Siberia was visited by scientists wishing to study the incident.
To their surprise, no crater was to be found. There was instead a region of scorched trees about 50 kilometres (30 mi) across. A few near ground zero were still strangely standing upright, their branches and bark stripped off. Those farther away had been knocked down in a direction away from the center.
Wiki: Tunguska event
Though the dominant theory since the event has been that it was the result of a meteoroid or a comet exploding a few miles away from earth (due to both the shocks and the extraterrestrial debris found in later investigations), the lack of an impact crater has led to a lot of speculation through the years. Some of my favorite theories: that it was the result of a small black hole passing through the earth (yowch!), that it was the result of a chunk of antimatter falling to earth (double yowch!), or the very best of all, that a nuclear-powered UFO crashed/exploded there (you can always count on Pravda for the best articles) and/or extraterrestrials fired some sort of weapon (Siberia is a huge threat to Zeta Reticuli, you know). There was a pretty good X-Files episode about it. And even Pynchon has weighed in.
As such, I have some depressing news from that great cosmic cockblocker known as Science.
A team of scientists say that they have finally found the primary impact crater.
In their new study, a team of Italian scientists used acoustic imagery to investigate the bottom of Lake Cheko, about five miles (eight kilometers) north of the explosion's suspected epicenter.
"When our expedition [was at] Tunguska, we didn't have a clue that Lake Cheko might fill a crater," said Luca Gasperini, a geologist with the Marine Science Institute in Bologna who led the study.
"We searched its bottom looking for extraterrestrial particles trapped in the mud. We mapped the basin and took samples. As we examined the data, we couldn't believe what they were suggesting.
"The funnel-like shape of the basin and samples from its sedimentary deposits suggest that the lake fills an impact crater," Gasperini said.
Of course, this only accounts for a single large fragment of whatever the space object was that exploded over the Siberian taiga back in 1908. If indeed an asteroid fell to earth, there would be smaller craters also to be found in the surrounding area. The lack thereof leads credence to the hypothesis that the object was a comet (the dominant idea in Russia), whose icy composition lends itself to annihilation rather than scattered debris. Also, the team still has a lot of testing to do, as every other investigation of Lake Cheko has found it older than the century it would have to be to have been the result of the Tunguska impact. So the book is not yet closed on Tunguska.
It's compelling evidence, for sure, though I still like the nuclear UFO explanation (I apply the principle of Fluxy's Razor (also known as Occam's Curling Iron) to all situations: the most interesting/weird/funny explanation is the best).
Regardless of whether or not its mystery is ever conclusively solved, Tunguska is sure to haunt and enthrall us for another century, a sobering warning of how precariously Earth is hung within the cosmos.
"The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire Northern side was covered with fire." -- S. Semenov, eyewitness testimony, 1930
Imagine this over Moscow, or Tokyo, or New York.
Flux is become Death, destroyer of worlds.
Happy Women's Equality Day
Today, my fellow citizens, is Women's Equality Day--the 87th anniversary of the day the 19th Amendment was passed.
WHEREAS, the women of the United States have been treated as second-class citizens and have not been entitled the full rights and privileges, public or private, legal or institutional, which are available to male citizens of the United States; and
WHEREAS, the women of the United States have united to assure that these rights and privileges are available to all citizens equally regardless of sex; and
WHEREAS, the women of the United States have designated August 26, the anniversary date of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, as symbol of the continued fight for equal rights: and
WHEREAS, the women of United States are to be commended and supported in their organizations and activities,
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that August 26th of each year is designated as Womens Equality Day, and the President is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation annually in commemoration of that day in 1920, on which the women of America were first given the right to vote, and that day in 1970, on which a nationwide demonstration for womens rights took place.
If you're a woman, register to vote. If you're registered to vote, fucking do so. The country--and the world--would be different if you did:
single women just don't exercise their electoral power. In the 2000 presidential election, 68 percent of married women went to the voting booth but only 52 percent of single women cast a vote.
That means that 6 million single women failed to vote in an election that hinged on a little more than half a million votes nationally and a few hundred votes in Florida.
The survey showed that single women could have altered the outcome of the 2000 election. Had single womenwho favored former Vice President Al Gore by 31 pointsvoted at the same rate as married women in Florida and other swing states, Gore now would be sitting in the Oval Office.
There are all sorts of reasons single women don't vote, of course. But I think the last eight years has showed us that we can't afford to sit on our butts waiting for the perfect candidate to come along. Whether it's holding up Plan B for months--the anniversary of making it available OTC was Friday, by the way--or cutting funding for women's health or attacking abortion rights or holding children's health insurance hostage, it's pretty damn clear that the right hates women--and I don't give a shit if they do it actively or passively.
Get out there and register. Make sure your girlfriends are registered. And for fuck's sake, when election days come up, get your butt to the polls and vote.
Bitch_PhD isn't kidding.
Chris Gore's Footage Fetishes: Movie-going is About Believing
There was a time when I hated movies. Its true, I absolutely despised them.
I argued passionately that they were all just pretend and not real. And the reason I pointed to as proof of my argument was that no one ever went to the bathroom in a movie.
I was four years-old.
A sight rarely seen in any movie... the toilet.
I learned to read before entering kindergarten, or at least well enough to scan the TV listings in the newspaper for what films were playing on television so that I could plan my busy schedule playing with toys, movie, snack time, movie, nap time, movie, and so on. I fell in love with the fantasy world of the movies, but I was bothered that not once had I seen any of the characters take a break to hit the john. Sure, Id hardly seen many flicks as a lil punk, but I still found this to be troubling. The fact that much of a childs life early on is centered upon going potty, either in ones pants, or at night, or by accident, probably led the pint-sized version of me to make this observation.
I was a stubborn little kid and I didnt know much, but I knew one thing for sure everyone pees and everyone poops. (Theres even a popular childrens book on the topic.) I was dismayed that an activity that occupied much of my time, the mastery of the correct use of the toilet, was never actually seen in a movie. This became a colossal disappointment to me as a child because it was proof positive that everything I saw in a film was only make-believe. I remember feeling betrayed and lied to. Movies were a lie. It was truly devastating. The absence of bathroom breaks in movies rocked my teeny foundation, kind of like when Neo discovered that his entire life was a lie and that all of his experiences were not genuine at all, but resided inside computer world of the Matrix.
My parents were highly amused by my strong views regarding truth in movies probably because I was a movie-obsessed kid who spoke articulately about film experiences while wearing training pants. Whenever a friend or family member mentioned a movie they liked, I would chime in to point out the false nature of films due to the lack of scenes in which Mother Nature plays a role.
Movies are fake. No one ever goes to the bathroom, I said as a four year-old.
Funny kid, is how most dumbfounded adults responded.
Looking back on my thoughts as a tyke, I knew exactly where I was coming from I just wanted to believe that movies were real. I so wanted the stories and the characters to exist somewhere. I wanted to believe that the Jets and the Sharks sang and danced and fought with knives in New York; that Batman and Robin fought the Joker in Gotham City; that Moses did part the Red Sea; that Frankenstein and the Wolf-man had met Abbot & Costello and that there actually was a Dorothy Gale who went to the Emerald City to see the wizard and returned safely to her farm in Kansas via ruby slippers.
I really wanted to believe.
But the noticeable exclusion of a very basic human function pooping and peeing meant that none of it was real. If a complex emotion such as depression could exist in a preschool child, I felt it over my dilemma with movies.
But all of that changed at the age of five, which is my first memory of seeing a movie in a theater. My dad took me to a retrospective screening of Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey. I sat quietly in a second run theater in Berkley, Michigan. The screen was enormous, I had to look up and turn my head to see the entire screen. As this very adult science fiction movie un-spooled before my eyes, it rocked my senses. The experience was overwhelming
it felt so real, almost too real. Like the apes looking in awe at the monolith... I was entranced.
And then, it happened.
Following the spectacular opening with the apes, we see Dr. Heywood R. Floyd on a shuttle trip to the moon. On this trip through outer space, the likes of which Ive never seen, he also goes
to the bathroom. I stood up in my seat. I couldnt believe what I just saw. I was floored. While Dr. Floyd isnt shown actually going, he does read a long list of instructions guiding him through the process in outer space. This sequence resulted in perhaps the only laugh from the audience during 2001. I was frozen. I wasnt disappointed that Kubrick chose to conceal the going part, the mere acknowledgement that a character in a film had to go, was like a release itself. 2001 was already spectacularly real in its presentation of scenes set in space, but this scene added to the realism of as a whole by grounding the characters in this display of a very human urge
the urge to take a pee. My sensibilities were further blown away by the ending, which was confusing to the adults in the audience, much less a five year-old kid. I didnt know what it meant then, but my fathers helpful explanation taken from the book served only to scare the living crap out of me
that weird re-birthed astronaut Dave Bowman returns to destroy the earth. Not very comforting to a kid especially because this film felt more real than any other movie I had seen up to that point.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968 was the first movie I saw to feature a character using the toilet.
As a filmmaker, Kubrick insisted on realism which can always be found in the details. For the curious, here is the complete text from the unreadable type from the bathroom scene in 2001, just read the
If the 555 phone number is something that breaks the illusion of reality in a movie, then a trip to the bathroom is something that grounds a movie in reality. Since the release of 2001 in 1968, countless other films have gone to the restroom for inspiration. Michael Corleone goes to the toilet to obtain a well hidden gun in The Godfather. Austin Powers awoke from hibernation to take a very long pee. In Trainspotting, Ewan McGregor takes a trip deep inside a toilet. And theres plenty of urination in Fight Club.
Tom Hanks has gone to the bathroom in more films than any other actor.
Tom Hanks seems to have an obsession with choosing films which require a bathroom appearance. Hanks has made more trips to the loo in more movies than any other actor. For reasons we may never understand, he either hits the head or makes mention of having to pee in movies such as Forest Gump, The Green Mile (in which painful urination is a plotline) and Castaway.
You might find it surprising that so many mainstream films contain scenes of this nature, but isnt the bathroom the place where many claim to do their best thinking? I could recount more famous scenes, but oddly enough, Im not the only one who keeps track. One web site has dedicated its mission to creating a database of movie moments involving the urge to go. The Movie Poop Scene Database currently has the most complete list of bathroom scenes anywhere on the web and it's conveniently alphabetized. Yet again the internet has proven to be a useful tool for things I never imagined needing.
Kubrick returned to prime form with 1999's Eyes Wide Shut in which Nicole Kidman pees in front of Tom Cruise.
For the most part, critics and film snobs recoil when a toilet hits the screen. They see it as being vulgar or in poor taste or even as potty humor. When I see someone like Nicole Kidman sit down to pee in Eyes Wide Shut, Im reminded of the first time that Stanley Kubrick made me confront reality in 2001. I applaud filmmakers who humanize characters by showing them urinating or defecating. I prefer to celebrate the act of going at the movies because it is real.
Although, seeing one pee on screen often makes me want to go as well.
Gore going... going... gone.
Chris_Gore is an author, a filmmaker and the creator of Film Threat. Chris rarely sees movies without a bathroom break. For this reason, he always takes an aisle seat.
The History of SF in Buildings
Get a free crash course with the American Institute of Architects on the evolution and definition of San Francisco architecture. The new Center for Architecture + Design is celebrating its inaugural show tonight titled Informing the Future of Bay Area Architecture. The reception runs from 5:30 - 7:30 at 130 Sutter Street, Suite 600.
For the lazy or the afar, check out the AIA's architecture podcasts, aka ArchCasts, and get to know the buildings around you.
[The exhibition] highlights important architectural works in San Francisco and Marin county over the last 125 years through the trends and technologies that made them possible, from adobe to glass.
One of the West Coast's only galleries devoted solely to the exploration of architecture and design, the AIA San Francisco Gallery specializes in exhibitions showcasing the best of Bay Area design talent, while also exploring issues of national and international concern. Each month, panel discussions explore the issues and themes presented within the current exhibition.
