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.”

Attilla the Hun

I've been watching the deleted scenes in the Avatar collectors edition--the DVD version, since the Blu-Ray version is so ferociously protected it won't play on either my Optiarc BD drive or my Samsung BD player, defeating all firmware--another great anti-piracy feature, although everything on the Blu-ray Collector's discs is already up on Pirate Bay for you lucky pukes with high-speed broadband. Anyway, one thing that was cut was a bit where Grace says to Jake after he comes back from his first one-on-one with Colonel Quaritch:

"What did Attila want?"

For those of you who can't tell your Atillas from your left fields, Attila the Hun was a “barbarian” king who started out hiring his tribe to the Romans, then conquered or intimidated a lot of other “barbarian” tribes to make his own empire, and successfully hit up the Romans for regular payments of protection money. Then he got an offer he couldn't refuse from Honoria, sister of one of the Roman Emperors of that time (the middle 400s) when there was a Western emperor and an Eastern emperor. The offer was: “Help me dethrone my idiot brother Honorius and I'll marry you and we'll rule the Roman Empire together, or at least as much of it as we can grab.” In the 1954 Italian sword-and-sandal movie, Attila was Anthony Quinn and Honoria was Sophia Loren.

Attila was not Mr. Nice Guy, but as horse-barbarian conquerors go he wasn't so bad. He didn't level any cities and divert rivers over the ruins, or make pyramids of skulls, or impale thousands of people on wooden stakes, or nail their hats to their heads. All he did was murder brothers and cousins to secure his inheritance, kill lots of people in battle, take slaves, loot and plunder and lay waste, and the like; perfectly acceptable and civilized behavior for centuries among the ruling Romans (and Greeks, Persians, and Chinese.) Besides clinging to his barbarian ways, he remained stubbornly pagan. Rome was properly (Roman) Catholic by then, giving Romans another reason to look down on the barbarians (all non-Romans except for the better classes of Greeks). Some or most of the Germans were Christians by now, although mostly “heretical” Christians who followed the theology of Arius, and didn't follow the orders of the Pope and, worse, didn't pay tithes to the Bishop of Rome and taxes to Rome's emperors.

Since most of the history we have from this time and place was written by Catholic monks, Attila gets some very bad press for dissing his Pope and stealing the plate from various churches, cathedrals and monasteries. This is why the Almighty struck him down, although passing out from too much wine and drowning from a nosebleed also had something to do with it, if that's how he really died—he may still have at least one living relative who wanted to be king.

Attila's biggest battle was at Châlons on June 20, 451, which I often see listed as one of the decisive battles of history. Well, it was big for its time and place, and it was probably interesting in a military sense, but monks aren't generally interested in military stuff, so they didn't write down much useful detail. Attila had a big army, mostly warriors from subject tribes and most of them German. Both a large Roman army under Flavius Aetieus (made up largely of German legionnaires and auxiliaries) and a large army of non-Romanized Germans under Theodoric I, king of the Visigoths, were fighting against Attila. According to the monks, the Christian coalition won.

Atilla invaded Italy the next year, possibly because he thought Gaul was looted out for the present, but Aetius decided to solved Hun problem in much the same way the US Army handled the Souix, Comanche, and Apache problems. Instead of chasing the after the warriors, Aetius hit the Huns at home, slaughtering or enslaving the women and children and old men. Atilla pulled out of Italy back to what remained of his people, and died the next year before launching a new campaign. Then his makeshift empire melted away like snow on a hot stove.

I don't think Attila matters much, historically speaking. He's interesting, but he was just one charismatic and competent leader from a tough but small tribe who saw his opportunities and took them. We're not even sure what modern languages Hunnish might be most closely related to. The language is not only dead; it is forgotten; we have only a few words written down by unfriendly foreigners, and they have to be distorted. It would have been much the same if Attila had made himself a Roman Emperor, even if he had founded a dynasty, his grandchildren would have been speaking the Latin or Greek the locals spoke, and his people would have melted away into more sophisticated foreign cultures and larger foreign populations, exactly as they did in the history they got.

About half of China's dynasties have begun as barbarian conquerors; “Barbarians may enter the Middle Kingdom, but they are not permitted to leave.” That is a cryptic way of saying China is never really conquered because any conquerors quickly become Chinese. Rome had a similar power to integrate both conquered and conquerors. The German Franks were soon speaking the local Latin dialect, which discovered itself to be French in a few more centuries; the German Visigoths and the German Vandals who conquered Iberia began speaking the local Latin dialects, which became Spanish and Portuguese. Attillus Augustus Imperator would have just made for more modern-day Attilas, Attillos, and, possibly, Adelles--and Edsels.

The Edsel, named after Henry Ford's only legitimate son, might as well have been named the Attila because “Edsel” is one of the Germanic versions of the name, which had somehow become traditional in at least one family of Fords, perhaps another Viking legacy to the Irish to go along with Dublin and trial by jury. Ford should have gone for the original version, both for the car and the son—although Henry Ford was much more of an Attila than Edsel. Maybe the man who put America on gasoline-driven wheels was more of an Attila than Attila. Hitler kept a bust of Henry Ford in his office.

I'm in love, I'm in love,
With Attila the Hun,
Attila the Hun,
Attila the Hun.
Though he pillaged my village
And killed everyone,
I'm in love with Attila the Hun.

--Lyrics of a silly song I heard on the Dick Van Dyke Show as a kid, at least the way I remember it.

Fanfiction Follies

I've added another chapter to The Milk of Demon Kindness, but much luck in reading it on Fanfiction.net. Nobody's stories seem to be available for reading right now. I raised the rating to "M" for "Mature" but if you're looking for porn, you'll be disappointed.

Mizushō Fanfic

I've put up the first twelve chapters of a fanfic I call The Milk of Demon Kindness on Fanfiction.net.

Two Extinct Birds of North America

The Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius)

This may have been the most numerous species of bird that ever lived on Earth. It was larger than the rock dove, a once-rare species that has established itself in cities around the world, what almost any North American thinks of when hearing the word “pigeon.” Ectopistes migrated from place to place in enormous flocks, nesting and feeding in the deciduous forests—the forests that weren't made up of pine trees. At least a quarter of North America was covered with deciduous forests when the first European settlers arrived. It may not have flown quite as well as the smaller pigeons that are often raced by hobbyists, but it could fly over any tree. Despite that, it nested on the ground. This doesn't sound like the best strategy for making sure enough of your eggs become descendents instead of breakfast, but it worked for a long time.
In 1878, one hunter in Michigan shipped about three million dead Passenger Pigeons to eastern markets. In 1890, no hunters shipped any Passenger Pigeons from Michigan because there weren't any left.
Pigs also played a part in the decline of the market for Passenger Pigeons. Continuing the practice from prehistoric times, immigrant farmers from Europe turned loose hogs in woods to forage. The hogs actually came back from the woods because hogs are smart enough to be trained like dogs to return to the sound of a horn, or a whistle, or a Slim Whitman CD if you feed them to that sound when they are piglets. It is not known who first discovered this, but it's pretty certain his or her name wasn't Pavlov or Slim Whitman.
It isn't known exactly why all the Passenger Pigeons are gone now. We're pretty sure that white people had something to do with it, and pigs which nearly all got eaten by white people because white people have more money to buy pork products, and because pigs haven't gotten smart quite smart enough yet to figure out that the man or the woman feeding them now is planning on eating them later, or selling them to someone else to eat to get enough money for the next Slim Whitman CD. But white people, with or without their pigs, have put some serious hurt on other species and so far most of them are still around, even if they're harder to find now. Quite some time before the last of the Passenger Pigeons were gone from the wild, professional Passenger Pigeon hunters either found new work or starved to death because getting money for not working wasn't invented until the 1920s in the United Kingdom, where there were never were any Passenger Pigeons (and it was way to far to swim there) and wasn't imported to North America until the discovery in 1932 that people with no money living in their cars ("Hoover Chariots") or in clusters of cardboard boxes ("Hoovervilles") or in vacuum cleaners ("Hoovers"), or even sleeping on the ground under discarded newspapers ("Hoover blankets") could vote for someone who wasn't Herbert Hoover ("Hoover"). The professional hunters did not finish off the Passenger Pigeons because the average expenditure to stay breathing long enough to find a Passenger Pigeon plus ammunition to kill it was less than you could get for the Passenger Pigeon, and the hunter couldn't even break even if he (or she) ate the damned thing. White people who could afford something else don't seem to have eaten Passenger Pigeons, even if they ate pigs that ate Passenger Pigeons, Passenger Pigeon eggs, Passenger Pigeon poop, or even Passenger Pigeon hunters. There's more than one reason you shouldn't sleep with a pig.

Pigs went right on eating anything they could get away with, of course, but before the Passenger Pigeons were all gone, people in North America had pretty much stopped letting them run around loose. White people in cities like New York finally got tired of all the pig shit on their shoes and passed laws against letting pigs run around without a leash, or even with a leash, and also against letting pigs vote. So did Chicago, although (of course) in Cook County the laws against pigs voting have never been enforced, even on dead pigs. Folks out in the country noticed there weren't a whole lot of deciduous forests for their pigs to run around in--only the ones who could spell "deciduous," but the ones that couldn't got tired of waiting for their Slim Whitman CDs to arrive, so they penned up their hogs and fed them corn (when it wasn't worth selling), garbage (until they could sell it on Ebay) and wandering professional Passenger Pigeon hunters, all of them graduates of the Hoover Correspondence College, founded by Herbert Hoover's ("Hoover") vice-president, the only Native American to hold the office, Chief Running Joke. Okay, actually Hoover's VP was Charles Curtis.
The last Passenger Pigeon died in 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha. What's left of her is on display at the U.S. Museum of Natural history.

The North American Valkyrie (Dies irae)

While a nearly complete specimen of this species is preserved and is on public display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, its ecology is largely a matter of conjecture. It was a migratory predator, probably too large to hunt other flyers, although it was capable of bursts of speed up to Mach 3.08. Its feeding grounds were extremely restricted, no more than a few committee rooms in the District of Columbia. It's nesting grounds, however, were much more extensive, including Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Havana, and possibly Hanoi. No observations of the North American Valkyrie laying its eggs have been confirmed, but the prevailing theory is that it laid one to four parachute-retarded thermonuclear eggs of 1 to 30 Megatons at the end of its high-speed dash and then abandoned them, completing its life-cycle. Since it surfed on its own shock wave, focused downward by its downfolded wingtips, whomsoever was under its final flight path would have been pretty sure that the Wrath of God or something close to it was overhead.

A closely related species has been confirmed from remains found in Russia. The Eurasian Valkyrie (Yakovlevius copii) was somewhat smaller and had different nesting grounds (except for Beijing). Possibly it was smaller because of the more restricted feeding available in the Kremlin in its time. It may have laid a larger egg.

One Page of Negima

Here's a page from Period 295 (Translation courtesy of cnet128):