Fūzoku Tenchō Monogatari (風俗店長物語)

I discovered this series a couple of days ago. It's finished now, but it's about fūzoku and it's set in the very familiar environs of Kabukichō. As far as I know, no one has translated it yet. The title can be translated "A Sex Shop Manager's Story." It isn't listed on the publisher's site, so I guess it's out of print now. The artist Tani Kaminashi (上端たに) seems to specialize in this setting. Definitely not for little kiddies.

Jeopardy's All Better

That is, when Mary is awake for it.

Why Jeopardy Ain't Worth It Now

Just realized I missed Jeopardy tonight, but then realized there's little joy in it without playing with Mary (and, I admit, beating her by a honking big margin.)

Closet Bones

Before forcing you to read much further, let me warn you, after the next paragraph, or maybe two or three, there isn't going to be anything about Mizusho, or the other stories I'm writing or have written, or a humorous essay like the one I put up here about B-70 Valkyries and Passenger Pigeons (both of them being extinct birds of North America.)

I'm writing a sort of modern Arabian Nights story which is going to turn out to be either pretty good or, as a couple of characters in that story say, “a big old pile of horse turds.” It's centered around a stranded man in the US military finding a genie in a bottle. But from there on, it is not going to have much resemblance to the old I Dream of Jeannie TV series which, by the way, I watched when it first came out, and now watch occasionally on Hulu. I thought Barbara Eden was Hot Stuff back in 1965 when I was fourteen—and I think she's Hot Stuff now. Yes, I would cheat with her in a New York minute if I ever got the chance.

I really think I should at least tie up my Oh My Goddess fanfic with Mara, Skuld, and Mormons—though I think I've been at least as careful to not say they are Mormons as Big Love's people have to claim that their polygamous church isn't meant to represent the Mormons, or, to use the really proper form, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or LDS, for short. I grew up among the Mormons of southeastern Idaho until I went to live with my mother and her second husband in California and attend a Catholic high school, all-male, though Salesian High of Richmond (or maybe San Pablo) CA is coed now. I rather hoped my niece would go there, but she pumped out three kids instead. Anyway, I'm quite familiar with real Mormons; I spent my summers back in Idaho, and my mother's place in California was half a block from another Mormon church. It's easy to find the Mormon church in any small town in southern Idaho: Just look for the biggest building that ain't a grain elevator or a potato cellar. I sincerely want to finish that story before I die, which might come sooner than I'd like to think since I'm sixty years old, around a hundred pounds overweight, and probably have blood pressure so high the next person to check it will probably cuss in amazement that I actually could walk into his or her joint.

Anyway, this entry really is about skeletons in my families closet. I'm not sure I'll include any of my own, but I'm not sure I won't. Most of these are speculation, but I will try to separate out the confirmed facts from the possible B.S.

I will begin with the most impressive person in my family related to certainly by marriage and perhaps more: The man I got two-thirds of my name from. His name was Thomas Carlyle Young, born in Kansas City, Missouri or some town close to the city. He was literally a giant of a man, much taller than the actual John Wayne, the only actor who could have credibly portrayed T.C. In a movie. He had enormous hands; even when I had my full growth, two-and a half of his fingers would have enough width to cover all four of my fingers. Those were strong hands, too. Two of his fingers were bent and locked from old baseball injuries—or at least that's the story I got from him.

He was a cousin of President Harry Truman's. They shared a great-grandfather. He was also related close enough to another Missouri Young by the name of Brigham to frustrate the local Mormons because unlike Brigham, he stubbornly remained a Methodist. This is not to say I every witnessed Uncle Tom inside any church except to attend a function I was part of, mostly Cub Scouts. The only religious feelings I can confirm is that he really liked to sing at least one the chorus of “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder.” But then again, he also sang a little ditty that went, “More rain, more rest, more niggers in the West” nearly as often, and just once when he was teaching me to drive when I was thirteen (his 1949 GMC pickup was a year older than me) he pointed to a bull in a field and sang:

Oh, Johnny, come milk the bull,

There's only one tit to pull,

There's only one diddle,

It hangs in the middle,

Oh, Johnny, come milk the Bull!

He moved out to Butte County, Idaho following his friend and brother-in-law Sam Paisley. Sam was married to one of Uncle Tom's many sisters. I never met any of them, but his brother Wade lived long enough for me to remember him. Unlike Uncle Tom, Uncle Wade stayed skinny after he passed sixty. A good thing, right? Well, Uncle Wade died at least ten years before Uncle Tom, probably more since I'm so vague on when he did pass on. Uncle Tom didn't depart this world until a little way into 1974, and he didn't really fail in any significant way until the last two years of his life. He lived three or maybe four months after his 90^th birthday.

Now, the connection that put the “Uncle” in “Uncle Tom” is that he was married to my great-grandmother's sister. My great grandmother was one Effie Eugenia Thomas, and from the few pictures I remember of her, I can't confirm that she ever wore any other expression than a scowl. After her one and only husband deserted her but before she gave birth to Grandma Helen, she moved from brother-to-brother, living with each until his wife laid down the law and said something like “Either she goes or I do!” She ran out of brothers eventually and went to live with her sister Oakie Lee, who is always smiling in her photographs. Oakie Lee was married to Uncle Tom; maybe that's why Oakie Lee was always smiling. While I still had those old photographs, whenever I looked at Oakie Lee, I thought I just about remembered her, but it couldn't be true. She died early in the year I was born (I'm a Scorpio, BTW.) She died on the same day as her paripatetic, perpetually pissed-off sister, although they were in different hospitals. It was the headline in the relevant edition of The Arco Advertiser, and I used to have two copies of it at my house, when I still had a house. Somehow Oakie Lee managed to give her face to my mother and then to myself, and to the only sister I know about (My dad was a bigamist, by the way, even without being a Mormon.)

Oakie Lee only had one child, T.C. Young, Jr., a sad little tombstone between hers and Uncle Tom's at the cemetery in Arco, Idaho, the Butte County seat. His birth date and death date are either the same, or not very far apart.

If you've read those parts of The Milk of Demon Kindness I actually wrote and put up at FanFiction.net, Basalt County is a very thinly disguised Butte County, and Arcola is Arco.

Since it's been awhile since I left off the story of Sam Paisley, you can get a book about his life if you ever visit the Craters of the Moon National Monument west of Arco. It's a fascinating collection of varied volcanic formations. Two of the oldest buildings in Arco, the city auditorium and one of the church's that isn't Mormon are built of blocks of black basalt quarried from the region before there was a law against it. Sam pestered the Federal Government into creating the Craters as a National Monument. A visit will remove all doubt that while not every resident of Butte County believes in Heaven, all of them believe in Hell. They've seen Hell with the fire out.

The Butte that gives the county its name is a big and hopefully extinct volcano rising from the fairly flat desert that fills in most of the fish-hook-shape of the Snake River. It's a very large stretch of gawdawful, godforsaken scrub and sagebrush with gramma grass tufts in the very best places and water humans can drink in none. It's a splendid place to stick, say, maybe the largest collection of nuclear waste on the planet, otherwise known as the Idaho National Laboratory, if they haven't changed the name of Idaho's dirty little secret again.

Crossing that sixty or seventy miles, I have often thought that if there was water over the desert—well, it wouldn't be a desert any more, but nevertheless, if what is desert now was the floor of a huge lake or a shallow sea, the Big Butte and the Twin Buttes would have been islands in it. And, big surprise, that's exactly what they were at various times after the glaciers melted but before all the water drained. You can feel it especially strongly crossing the gap in winter; snow all the way, usually.

The last year Uncle was alive, and I was still living with him and my grandmother Helen on the last of his properties, not once but twice we had visitors drop in that might as well have come from Mars or points beyond. Now I don't remember who came first, but that's not important. The first one I'm going to tell you about was a man pretending to be a historian but actually a treasure hunter, who tried to pump Uncle Tom for information on the mystery of the Robbers' Basalt, a particular lava flow near the Big Butte. The mystery is this: in the 1880s, I think, silver from the mine at Mackey in Custer County, the next one north from Butte, was shipped to the rail line running along the Snake River over a wagon road running near the Big Butte. The silver was cast into eighty-pound spheres for shipment, too big and awkward to fit into saddlebags. There were absolutely no roads branching off between Root Hog (which became Arco) and I believe Idaho Falls, seventy miles. Hello, lava fields, a lot of them with lots of volcanic glass that would chop up a horse's hooves even if it was shod. Yet somehow, one shipment was held up. The posse caught one man who promised to lead them to the rest of his gang in return for not decorating the first tree the posse could find (there were and are a few small timbered patches on the Big Butte, and on one of the Twin Buttes.) But just as the light was failing, the robber double-crossing his partners double-crossed them by escaping, and the fate of horse, man, silver, and the wagon the silver was last seen loaded aboard remains unknown.

If Uncle had really known anything to help that bozo, he didn't and never would have told the “historian.” Uncle Tom spent most of the life I shared with him hunting for gold, or silver, or beryllium, thorium, flourite, and, of course, treasure. Until the last decade he found time to bring back enough venison to fill an enormous freezer on our back porch. He used a 30-06, and I never remember a new 20-round box of 30-06 ammo. With no apology to Robert di Niro or to Daniel Day Lewis, T.C. Young could do anything the Deer Hunter or the Deerslayer (hero of Last of the Mohicans) with no stuntmen, no special effects, and perhaps no hunting license every time. I'll tell you for true, Bambi makes for some mighty fine eatin'.

Uncle Tom was nearly blind when this jerk showed up, but that didn't keep the “historian” from pressing the old man for hours, ruining a fine day outdoors sitting in our one and only deck chair. Our house was tiny, but it had these magnificent Northern Cottonwoods around it, five or six of them, at least sixty feet high. We called them silver maples. They were wonderful 50 weeks of the year; the other two, they made the yard look like it was full of snow. The cotton in “cottonwood” the male trees (and they were male trees) grow these sort of wormlike things that in turn burst out with white fibers saturated with male sex cells. Idaho Power and Light paid my grandmother to cut them all down within a few months of his death, ending all threat that they would fall on their power lines—and turning a magical place into one more ugly patch of rural poverty.

The other surprise visit was from my father, Bill. This was the one and only time I remember meeting Grandmother Sewell. She was one of those five-feet-tall, five-feed-around, mostly German ladies from God's country in the middle of Texas. She talked fast, struck me as a straight shooter, and looked a lot younger than her son. Dad was going around mending fences before a big heart operation which he didn't expect to survive. But every time I think he has to be dead, damned if he hasn't turned up again, alive. The only thing that was off about her was the way she rushed off; I'm not sure she stayed for a whole hour. I mean, we could have afforded to feed her and Dad a meal before they took off. But then again, who knows how many sons and daughters and wives he had left to visit before that operation?

Uncle Tom was a Fish and Game Warden in the 1920s, when he blew a hole in a private dam across the Salmon River at Sunbeam to let the salmon run get through, and when he made damned sure famed western writer Zane Grey didn't get out of Idaho with the trophy from the bighorn sheep Grey had shot without a license. It is my guess that if Grey had come to Uncle Tom himself and asked for a little favor, he would have gotten it; the Fish and Game service probably made Uncle Tom a Warden because he was the biggest poacher in Idaho. But instead Mr. Grey sent down one of “his people” to get the permit—that's exactly how Uncle Tom always told the story, one of “his people.”

Then he became the Sheriff of Butte County. He left the office just before my time, but he was the County Commissioner until about 1960, I think, and he put in quite a few of the roads. You could always tell if Uncle Tom put in a road or not because if he hadn't put the road in, there was something wrong with it. At least you'd know if you ever were on the road with Uncle Tom. I don't think the job paid squat, but sometimes Stan would come over with a road grader and either plow out the snow in our driveways in winter, or, once, smooth out the dirt and gravel. Stan became the next CC, and Uncle Tom thought he was a perfect idiot for getting the county to buy two old DUKWs (amphibious trucks) after what will probably turn out to be the only flood in the Big Lost River Valley for a hundred years. It wasn't really much of a flood; Uncle Tom drove grandma and me through maybe the deepest part of it on the main highway in a 1962 Ford Fairlane, which was not exactly a submarine. Stan had a drawl, a cigarette always hanging out of his mouth, and one eye damaged by childhood measles that looked everywhere except straight ahead. If you remember the character actor Jack Elam, you've got most of Stan; make Elam taller and pretty skinny, bullseye.

Not a lot of skeletons so far. Well, I'm not sure any of them belong to Thomas Carlyle Young. I have only two suspicions. The first is entirely based on a very slight connection: I read in his obituary that he had been a member of the Woodmen of the World. Well, maybe he was, if in the same way as he was a Methodist. The only men's lodge in Butte County was and still is the Masons; the oldest building in Arco is either that black stone church I mentioned or the Masonic Temple, right next to city hall and the Sheriff's Department. I remember quite a few gravestones with Master Mason or 32^rd Degree Mason symbols. T. C. Young's gravestone doesn't have any affiliation, and it's definitely not the kind of peculiar headstone favored by the Woodmen. I'd never heard of the Woodmen at all. There are such, but...

The connection that might be is that the two clowns who founded the second Ku Klux Klan after D.W Griffith's Birth of a Nation stirred up the nigger-bashing pot were selling phony memberships to the Woodmen of the World before hitting on this scheme to sell bedsheets at a 2000% markup.

I'd kind of like the second suspicion to turn out to be true, but I have a way to go before it will fall into its logical place.

The other significant Uncle in my life was Uncle Thurmond Johnson. With his wife Vera helping, he owned and operated a restaurant named Uncle Tom's Cabin in Richmond, California. It was at or near the corner of San Pablo and MacDonald Avenues; it might have been the same building that was the Honolulu Cafe for many years and is now a restaurant under new management and a new name. It's one of those long but narrow places. Since I was in high school (late 1960s) there's been a big “Mexican” restaruant next to it called the Hacienda, a pretty ugly building with pretty good food, always a pretty cocktail waitress, and sometimes a piano bar. It's a lot easier to spot the Hacienda than the little restaurant hidden next to it.

Uncle Thurmond was the first person I remember dying on me. I thought a lot of him. Even at three or four I think I felt there was something a little skewed about little old Uncle Thurmond; I sure seemed to wind up in bars with him a lot, even though I don't think he ever got drunk around me. He died when I was either three or four, and I cried for him.

Later, I wish I hadn't.

Aunt Vera was Thurmond Johnson's connection to me: She was my Grandfather Watkins' sister, Grandma's sister-in-law. And to be frank, she was a lot bigger than Uncle Thurmond and seriously beat upon with the ugly stick. But she was immensely kind-hearted, and could she cook. Maybe she was the very beginning of the weight problem I've always had. Howso? Well, I can only remember about six months of living with my father, my mother, and my little sister together, and it wasn't six months in a row. The rest of the time, I was either living up in Idaho with Grandma Watkins and Uncle Tom, or living with Aunt Vera. Funny thing, it was just me who went to stay with Grandma or Aunt Vera; my sister never went, too, never even visited as I remember.

Anyway, I guess I wound up with Grandma and Uncle Tom on a permanent basis because Aunt Vera married a younger man named Frank, or maybe Frank married Aunt Vera's inheritance. Never found Vera's will. I guess Frank was in drinking money for quite awhile.

As you may have guessed, my parents split up. Technically they never divorced because legally they were never married—the “bigamist” thing was not a joke. This turned out to be a good thing for my mom later because it allowed her eventually to marry her second husband in the Catholic Church. He was a very serious Catholic. And this came about from a connection through Aunt Vera: After she sold her wonderful house in Walnut Creek, she moved into a fourplex in Richmond, and across the hall lived one of my stepfather's many sisters. He'd just got seriously and very cruelly dumped, and Aggie and Vera contrived to set him up with my mom. All in all, this was a good thing for me, eventually.

I didn't know my mom had remarried until I was thirteen. She showed up with her far from new husband in a hideously ugly 1958 Impala painted in not one but two tones of puke. Poor Al, my stepdad. Uncle Tom was still going full-steam in 1964. The next day, a little day-trip of, oh, 300 miles or so, with Uncle Tom driving, pointing out the sights as he did—driving along the Salmon river with rock faces inches from the edge of the pavement on one side and twenty, thirty, forty foot drops into the river inches from the payment on the other side. Uncle Tom taught me all the right things about driving; he just didn't do them himself most of the time, such as favoring one side of the road over the other, or paying that much attention to the speed limits. I'm sure the scariest man Al had met until that day was his own father, a man so mean he'd been kicked out of the army. The German army. But Uncle Tom didn't even notice Al was there most of the time, I think. Maybe Jimmy Lee was more of a man to Uncle Tom. After all, Jimmy Lee could hunt and fish and shoot (I can just shoot.) The only manly man thing I ever saw Al do was drink, and he really didn't do enough of it to qualify as a professional or even an amateur drunk.

Long after he was dead, and after my mother was dead, I discovered in a desk a poem Al wrote in high school about Lindbergh flying the Atlantic. It had to have been an assignment, but he'd kept it, and it wasn't awful. It was the one and only time I saw around that armor of responsibility Al had built around himself, and it was too late to do him any good.

Al was an indefatigable worker, pressing on regardless. Unfortunately that just doesn't count in the way our culture rates the manliness of men. Uncle Tom was a consistent failure over the course of his life; Al built ships that were a big part of winning for the right side of the most important war the whole world has ever fought and, Please God, ever will fight. People still talk about Uncle Tom in Butte and Custer, and his name is still up at the head of the road he lived, where it turns off from US 93, thirty-seven years after T.C. Young died. Al is forgotten; the last of his sisters have passed on, and as per my mother's wishes, I scattered her ashes in Butte County, instead of having her buried with Al. I did visit Al's grave a few years ago. I doubt if anyone else ever will. Uncle Tom never went to war anywhere, and yet he still has a better reputation than another resident of Moore, population less than 200, a retiring man, whose name I do not remember and who I do not remember ever speaking with Uncle Tom. But that forgotten man did win the Medal of Honor.

Jimmy Lee was really Virginia Lee Watkins, my mother. I got the impression that Uncle Tom had raised her more like a son than a daughter before Grandma Helen Watkins moved to California with her, living with Uncle Thermond and Aunt Vera. Grandma did have a job, some kind of store, not the restaurant, but she lived with her former or perhaps still legally attached sister-in-law—BTW, neither my Grandmother Watkins nor Aunt Vera Johnson ever said one word to me about me about Grandfather Watkins until the 1970s. Grandma Watkins was the only one speaking by then, Aunt Vera being dead for over ten years. I don't even know his given name; he went by “Ty.”

Maybe I'm stalling here. What happened to change Jimmy Lee the tomboy into the damaged soul I knew was this: Nice little old Uncle Thurmond raped her when she was thirteen, or maybe I should say, started raping her. What's a man to do when he doesn't want to fool with a pregnant woman? Not Aunt Vera; she was barren, or perhaps untouched. I mean my sweet little Grandma Helen Watkins; Thurmond knocked her up while she was living in his house. The “tumor” probably got too big for an abortion; somewhere out there, probably I have or had an aunt or uncle I'm never going to meet and who didn't or won't ever find out I exist.

Maybe Bill Sewell wasn't my dad after all.

I do know Uncle Thurmond didn't do any time, but my mother was in the Juvenile system long enough to marry Bill just to get out of it, according to her own words. My mom hated sex, even other people having it. One day she screamed for me to stop when I was staying over with my girlfriend and we were being loud in our bedroom. I'm still with that girlfriend, BTW; I'm sixty and Mary's sixty-eight now, and this was about twenty years ago. Sorry to spoil any nubile fantasies you might have been starting.

My mother was eighteen when I was born, in 1950. She had my sister in 1955. She didn't tell me my sister had been adopted out until 1970, and my sister had no idea I existed at all. We've never been very close since.

The suspicion I'd kind of like to be true is that Uncle Tom was really my mother's father, not “Ty.” The first time I heard the truth, I had great difficulty accepting it. Grandma? Even after I walked in on her when she was 58 in 1963 and caught her with her hair down out of those tight, twisted braids she always war, and, because she was washing her hair, nothing but a slip on—a memorable day, also, because it was the day of JFK's funeral—I just didn't think of her as sexual in any way. After seeing what she really looked like, and re-evaluating what Helen Dorothy's boobs had looked like, I have to say when she wasn't trying to look like a 120-year-old Chinese three-times grandmother, she wasn't bad at all for her age or for a woman quite a lot younger. But that one is very much wishful thinking, unless I missed out on every single one of Uncle Tom's genes for tallness, large hands, roman nose, really outrageously large ears, complete lack of athletic ability. I'm taller than Uncle Thermond, even shrunken down to 5'5” but once a towering 5'7”, just one inch shorter than the actual Napoleon. But you can put that up to my mother, a little on the tall side for a woman, and better nutrition. All the time around Mountain View, Palo Alto, and around the Bay, I see pairs of Asian women walking together, and I realize the one a head taller is the daughter. I guess there's a faint hope that the smallness of Thurmond Johnson canceled out the expansiveness of Thomas Carlyle Young. But wishful thinking can make you believe almost anything. How else can you explain George W. Bush getting a second term?

Deep Impact Musings

While it was playing I saw Deep Impact about twice a week on my commute home (I was working a schedule that alternated day shifts and evenings, and seeing a movie was an attractive alternative to two hours of heavy late afternoon traffic. I wrote and posted my very first web fanfiction based on the movie, but the site I posted it upon has gone to bit heaven. I saw Armageddon once, and the best I can say of it is that I actually did not walk out on it (there have actually been movies bad enough for me to do that, including a couple that have won Best Picture.) If you don't know yet, they came out the same summer and were both about big things hitting Earth. Mad magazine parodied both movies in the same issue.

The movie has been out on DVD for ages and now it's on Blu-Ray, and you can probably find a torrent for the whole movie that works. So, if you haven't seen it, you can, if you want to. It also shows up on cable once in awhile. If you don't want spoilers, don't read any further.

The gist of the movie is this: A teenager named Leo Biederman is the first to notice a new comet. He doesn't know it's a comet, but he sends the data to a professional astronomer who finds out what it is and where it is going: Close to Earth, close enough so that it might hit.

Cut to a year later and an ambitious young reporter named Jenny Lerner stumbles onto what she thinks is another sex scandal that's caused a cabinet member to resign. But the real reason he quit is that he knows the comet will probably hit the Earth, and he doesn't think anything the Administration is doing will really work to stop it or allow anyone to survive. Jenny gets picked up by the FBI before she gets back to her people, and the President makes a deal with her to keep quiet for a couple of days until he can get together a formal announcement. This is, of course, a big boost for her career, and it makes Leo Biederman suddenly famous.

The President reveals a plan to stop the comet involving using a big spaceship called the Messiah carrying six astronauts and some thermonuclear weapons to intercept the comet. The ship is being built in orbit and is almost ready. It will depart in another two months, and intercept the comet eight months after that--four months before the comet might hit. Most of the country (and by implication, the world) buys into this.

Messiah gets to the comet on schedule and plants four of the bombs. One of the astronauts gets killed and one is blinded in the process. The bombs detonate, but they neither knock the comet off course enough to miss, nor blow it into such small pieces few of them will hit Earth and none will penetrate its atmosphere. Instead, they blow it into two big pieces, one six miles long, and the other a mile and a half. They also mess up their spacecraft enough so they're out of communication with Earth until they get much closer.

After a few hours, with just about everyone everywhere watching, the President announces that Messiah hasn't stopped the comet after all. Then he reveals his backup plans. Basically, the United States, Russia, and everyone else with nukes and big rockets will shoot them off in a last-ditch attempt to divert the comets. But in the "remote possibility" that this doesn't work (it's pretty clear the President knows this is bullshit) the United States has been preparing a complex of deep shelters in the Ozarks large enough to hold a million people and keep them alive for two years, long enough to survive two years of global darkness caused by dust and soot in the atmopshere (and deep enough to survive firestorms, but those aren't mentioned.) 200,000 people have been "pre-selected"; the other 800,000 will be picked in a national lottery only five days before the comets strike.

Leo's family has been preselected. But his girlfriend and her family haven't, so he marries her and petitions to have her family evacuated along with his own. But when the evacuation bus arrives--with a heavy military escort--her family is not on the list. She gets hysterical and refuses to get on the bus without her family, and Leo's parents push him on the bus. Leo's dad's best line in the movie is when he tells Sarah's father "Chuck, we'll work it out when we get there." Of course, when they get there, the military is using machine guns to keep people without passes from getting in. Leo leaves his family and starts hitchhiking back to his home in Richmond, Virginia. His wife's family lives on the same block.

The missile barrage doesn't work; both comets are going to hit. Leo knows this from a battery-operated TV owned by one of the migrant farm workers he's hitching at dawn on the day of the impacts. They stop to watch the President's announcement. Somehow he makes it back to Richmond, only to find Sarah's family gone. But Sarah's dad's dirt bike is still there, so he sets out looking for her on the roads to high ground--realistically, the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are about a hundred miles away. The tsunami from the first comet is supposed to be anywhere from 1000 to 3000 feet high when it comes ashore. Leo actually finds Sarah's family on the road about an hour before the first impact. Her parents give her the baby and send them off with Leo because they are stuck in traffic, along with everyone else on four wheels.

Meanwhile Jenny Lerner is still at her desk in Washington. She gives up her seat on the last helicopter out to a colleague who has a small child.

The smaller comet does hit. The Messiah crew makes a kamikaze attack with the last of the nukes (they couldn't do it earlier because they didn't have the arming codes) and blow the larger comet to bits about an hour from Earth. This means there won't be an Extinction Level Event--just the death of almost everyone along the North Atlantic coasts and inland for hundreds of miles.

The action climaxes with Leo, Sarah, and the baby along with maybe a dozen other lucky people scrambling to the top of a ridge just high enough and far enough back to escape the destruction below and to the east. This was the original end of the movie, but a coda was shot with a final speech by the President to the recovering nation. In this speech he mentions that the wave reached the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, which means it was high enough in the Appalachians to clear the Cumberland Water Gap, Elevation 1600 feet and more than 400 miles from the Atlantic (and about 350 miles from Richmond, Virginia, where Leo and Sarah were supposed to reside.)

Compared to Armageddon, this movie is a science class. We couldn't build anything as large as the Messiah in space in only a year in 1998 or now. Give us ten years and Apollo-grade funding and we probably would. There really was an Orion program which involved using atomic bombs to propel a very robust rocket, and Russia really did more engineering research into the concept. We have actually built an ion drive that works, but it was tiny and didn't have nearly enough specific impulse for the mission described. Our life support technology really isn't up to missions sixteen months long (assuming a return with live astronauts was figured in) but we would be willing to cut some corners. As Dr. Samuel Johnson observed three centuries ago, the prospect of being hanged in the near future concentrates a man's mind most wonderfully. Still, if I was making the movie, I would have nixed the astronauts. Blowing it up an hour from Earth wouldn't have made much difference in reality; it might have even made things worse by baking about half the earth as the atmosphere absorbed all those fragments. The best place for a push from nuclear weapons (or anything else) would have been at perhelion, the comet's closest approach to the Sun. That would been around a hundred million miles from Earth, and about two months before the comets were scheduled to hit.

The comets were supposed to arrive three hours apart. It would be an incredible co-incidence if they both hit Earth that far apart. They would be travelling at around 30 miles per second, which means they would be around 324,000 miles apart. The earth moves about 200,000 miles along its orbit in three hours, more than 25 times its own diameter. The gimmick of the large-and-small fragment was a compromise allowing for an impact but providing for heroic action to save the rest of us from extinction.

The space sequences were quite well done if not entirely believable. I think it would have been a better movie without them. The focus of the film is not what's happening out there but what's going to happen to us down here. Even the director Mimi Leder admits the conflict set up between the veteran astronaut played by Robert Duvall with the younger crew members was a mistake; real NASA people look on Apollo astronauts with incredible respect. That aside, the performances were very good; its just that they distract from what really matters in the story: What happens to the rest of us.

What really stuck in my craw, and not only in my craw, is that at the end of the movie, we don't know what happened to Leo, Sarah, and that baby. If they had ended it with the shot of the waters receding, it would have been all right, but bringing in the coda speech gives us long enough to wonder why they aren't anywhere in that scene. There's nothing left of civilization in sight from their ridgeline, Sarah's dropped the bag with the baby's formula and diapers, and no one else on that ridge even has a backpack. Many cubic miles of seawater have been vaporized, which means very big storms will be coming along soon. The most likely outcome is that these people will all die from exposure unless they are rescued in a day or two, and there are millions of people who need rescuing just as much. If the floodwaters reached the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, they would have inundated every valley in the Appalachians, which means there isn't a usable road network any more, and most of the airports are gone. All they would have had to do is show one shot Leo and Sarah in the crowd listening the speech, or watching it on TV or listening it to it on the radio somewhere, and it would have settled the problem, and it wouldn't have broken the budget.

In fact, although this movie had about half the budget for Armagedden, it was still one of the most expensive movies of 1998 and a lot of the money went into expensive special effects. The biggest chunk went into a spectacular destruction of New York City. It's wonderfully done, and you can find around fifty versions of it on YouTube by now. But it's completely wasted effort. There is only one character in the movie who has any connection to New York City, and Mimi Leder edited so severely it's impossible to notice that he's in the city for any normal human (It's Bruce Weitz playing Stuart Caley, and he's shown for maybe two seconds as the wave hits him. He's the one with the Paper with the headline "Comet to New York: Drop Dead," a parody of a real headline when President Gerald Ford refused to give Mayor Abraham Beame any federal help to get New York City out of a desperate budget crisis in the 1970s.

It could have been a better movie with a smaller budget. Mimi Leder says she spent a lot of time watching On the Beach, but she didn't put enough of Beach in the movie. Without a special effects budget and, yes, without salaries for Robert Duvall and especially for Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell (Neither of which had much screen time), the story could have focused on the President and the government, Jenny and the media, and Leo and Sarah and their families, ordinary people caught up in a crisis they can't do much about. The point of On the Beach was how people would live when they knew they didn't have any hope. The special effects and the glitzy space-rescue part took too much away from that.

My wife hates Tea Leoni and she has lots of company. I'm not a real fan of her work, although I haven't seen too much of it. But I disagree with complaints about her performance in Deep Impact. She was supposed to be playing a conflicted character and that is exactly what she did. He early scenes are wonderful, showing how ambitious she is, how the woman she is working under is holding her back, how excited she is to discover there's more to the sex scandal than she thought there was--and yet, she's also smart enough to suspect that it has to be more than a sex scandal.

Jenny's character really starts to go off track when her father and his new wife are brought in. The lingering problems between her mother and her father are absolutely trivial compared to the crisis. Schell's character doesn't work at all; we don't even know why he lives around Washington; we have no time to build up either sympathy or resentment toward him. Jenny's plea for him to get back together with his mother was an incredible slip. It was even worse in the original script, where it was clear that they had actually been divorced for fifteen years. Editing produced an impression that he had only recently dumped his wife for a younger woman. Leoni acted her scenes very well; the problem is, they just are not believable in context. It's not her acting that's muddled, it's the writing and editing.

Jenny was supposed to have a love interest in the cameraman, Erik Vennakor, but that was edited out, too, and that wasn't a mistake. The scenes that were written weren't necessary and didn't advance the plot or develop Jenny's character. Maybe a better idea would have been to make Jenny a lesbian who is or has been one of Beth Stanley's lovers. That way there could be an extra factor to the resentment when Jenny leapfrogs Beth with her scoop, and it would have added more weight to Jenny's decision to give up her ticket to survival to Beth and her child. Laura Innes was already playing a lesbian character on ER when the movie was in production, and she's never shown as having any personal connection with any males. But, of course, homophobia is still very much alive and well, so you probably couldn't sell this to the money men behind a big production like this one, even today.

Check out Impact:Earth for some real idea of what a comet like Biederman could do. Make the diameter 2500 meters, the density 1500 kg/m^3, and set the velocity anywhere between 40 and 72 km/sec. Set water depth to 5000 meters for an ocean impact capable of raising monster waves. This is more or less the comet strike shown in the movie. If it was actually as close to Cape Hatteras as shown, it would have set most of Virginia and Maryland on fire, besides the Carolinas, but it would have raised negligible waves.

Future Episodes of the Incredibles

• Mrs. Incredible starts menopause; global warming blamed on hot flashes by Fox News; Fox News suddenly goes off the air.

• Dash tells his parents the truth about his very special relationship with Speedy Gonzales.

• Bob gets a thousand-dollar parking bill from the airport, realizes it was his neighbor's car he threw at Syndrome. Fortunately his neighbor, a geeky nuclear physicist, just back from yet another series of tests in the Pacific, doesn't seem to ever get angry over anything. The name of the wimp next door: Dr. Bruce Banner.

• Bob's new car turns out to be made from scrap from Syndrome's manta-ray jet—and his soul! After almost a year of failed homocides and lame jokes, the Syndrobile goes off with a 1928 Porter who talks like Ann Sothern. In the background as they drive away you can see a very young Stephen King with one and then two light bulbs over his head.

• Violet discovers a new power: the Power to Make Boys Stupid. She has fun with it until Helen sends off Bob and Dash to bag some snipes for dinner and then, along with some other members of The Oldest Conspiracy, reveal to Violet that all girls are born with the same power, but must never, ever reveal The Secret to a boy on pain of turning into one. The episode closes with a shot of baby JackJack looking puzzled with the subtitle: “To be continued...?”

• Captain James T. Kirk beams down with Commander Spock, Dr. McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, and a guy in a red shirt who dies before the first commercial break. Kirk beams up with Helen and Violet because they are needed in the future to save the entire universe (and maybe the latest reboot of Star Trek). Spock teaches Dash the Vulcan Nerve Pinch. Scotty runs up some transparent aluminum tampons for Violet. After saying “He's dead, Bob," McCoy gets plastered on Saurian brandy along with Bob, and they get all weepy over girls who wouldn't love them when they were in high school before they pass out. At the end of the show Kirk beams in with the girls and Lt. Uhura; all four are adjusting their hair and their attire. Sulu reappears through the front door and introduces a new neighbor from down the street, Mike Brady. They seem to have hit it off well with each other. Just before the Enterprise crew beams out, Helen whispers to Uhura, “Call me.” Kirk's hairpiece doesn't beam out and falls to the floor when the rest of him vanishes. JackJack crawls through the closing credits dragging the forgotten dead guy in the red shirt, picks up Kirk's hairpiece, and begins chewing on it. The opening notes of the Star Trek theme sound, and the final credit is: “This rug tastes funny.”