Return of Suspense, Laughter, Violence, Hope, Heart, Nudity, Sex, Happy Endings... Mainly Happy Endings

So here's the thing.

If you had driven past the Michael Fowler Centre carpark at 6 in the morning on Tuesday, 23 June 2009, you would have seen a car, driven off the road and up onto the forecourt, in front of the ticket office. Now, this is not an area where cars will normally park. In fact, I have a strong suspicion this car was probably parked illegally. But there this car was, parked straight on to the doors of the ticket office, with maybe three metres of space between the doors and the front of the car. The only reason the car wasn't any closer to the doors was because of the concrete column in front of it. And sitting in this car was one person, seemingly sleeping.

And standing in front of the doors to the ticket office, in the cold, wrapped up in a jacket and gloves, was myself, waiting patiently for the doors to open at 9am so that I could buy tickets to the 2009 Film Festival. I was second in the queue. The guy in the car was first.

Now, I admire the determination of the guy in that car, who apparently arrived at 5.30am. Hell, I share his determination, since I also arrived in Wellington at that time. The difference is that I parked my car elsewhere, and then walked to the ticket office. Because that's what you do. Because just because you arrive first doesn't mean that you get to do whatever you like. I would like to have driven up and parked on the forecourt - it would have been more comfortable and warmer sitting in a car than standing in the cold for three hours - but I didn't, because it's not what you do. Besides, if I had arrived first and driven my car up onto the forecourt, then they park there as well, and pretty soon the entire forecourt would have been filled with cars, and the whole thing would just be messy.

But there's another thing about this. He was clearly of the view that he was the first person in the queue. Now I believe, under most generally accepted rules of queuing, the queue starts at the doors of the place that you're wanting to get into, not a few metres away. It's not like the rules of shotgun, you can't claim the start of the queue if you're the first person to see the place you're wanting to enter, you actually need to go up to the doors, and this guy had not. Therefore, in my view, he was clearly not in the queue.

Now, it's at this point where I should point out that this was not the first year this guy has done this. I've queued for tickets for the last three years, and each year the car has been parked there. The only difference was that, in the past, I've arrived later to an already formed queue that had clearly accepted the car's presence and the validity of this guy's claim to his spot. This year, however, I was that person, I was in the position to having to consider whether or not to accept his place in the queue.

Anyway, 15 or 20 minutes pass. About the same time as a third person joined the queue, a friend of the guy in the car turns up, and sits in the car. Which again annoyed me, because I knew the guy was going to claim he was saving the spot for his friend. So now we have someone who's not actually in the queue letting someone else come in to steal my rightful spot.

So, time passes. It was getting close to 8am when they decided they finally needed to move their car. The car that they wouldn't have needed to move to begin with if they were behaving in the way they were supposed to according to the rules of common decency. So they both leave, completely gone, for a few minutes. They didn't even consider asking anyone "can you save my place" or anything like that, they just leave and assume they will still be entitled to their place when they get back. And when they do arrive back at the ticket office, they stand by me as though that, rather than the back of the queue, were their rightful place.

Now, here's where I hate myself. I said nothing to them. I thought about it, I really thought seriously about it, and I should have told them to go to the back of the line. I should have told these guys how obnoxious and just plain wrong their behaviour had been this morning. But I was too afraid to, so I just stood meekly and let them into the queue. After a couple of minutes, the one guy said to me, "You do know that you're third in the queue, right. We're one and two." And here, for an instant, I developed a partial backbone. I didn't challenge the first guy's right to first spot (which I should have), but I did point out that I was there when his friend arrived, so I was definitely before him. But the guy said that they arrived together, and that the friend had gone off to check out the St James. Now, if you're in a queue, there are acceptable excuses for leaving the queue and getting someone to save your spot. If you need to use the toilet, that's okay. But leaving the queue for half an hour or more so you can wander around half the city is not an acceptable reason to have someone save your spot. By all reasonable points of view, he lost his spot. And I should have said that. But instead, I meekly acquiesced, and let the friend take my spot. Because I'm pathetic.

In the end, it didn't really matter too much. Once tickets went on sale at 9am, the two of them went to the same terminal to be served (which raises the question of just why they were so careful to point out to me that the friend was second in the queue), and since Ticketek finally learned this year that they needed to have more than one or two terminals open when festival tickets go on sale, all of us that were there by 6:30am were able to be served immediately. But the fact that it didn't ultimately matter doesn't affect the fact that what these guys were doing was pretty bloody awful, obnoxious, and selfish. And I just wish we'd actually summoned up the courage to tell them so.

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Anyway, I have my tickets, for 20 films this year. And the films are:

* Louise-Michel
* The Baader Meinhof Complex
* An Education
* Red Cliff (a John Woo historical epic - unfortunately it's apparently an edited 140-minute version of the 5-hour 2-part original, but it should still be good on the big screen)
* Ponyo (the new Miyazaki! Yay!)
* Largo
* In The Loop (I once watched one episode of The Thick Of It, didn't like it, but have heard a lot of good things about it, so I'm giving it another shot with the film version)
* Moon
* The Chaser (I'm seeing this solely because of one single three-word phrase in the description: "slacker serial killer")
* Che (the complete 4-hour 2-part Steven Soderburgh-directed biopic of Che Guevara)
* Departures (won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film)
* Wendy and Lucy
* Mother
* Samson & Delilah (probably would have ignored this one, but I caught the last five minutes of an interview with the director on Kim Hill, and it sounded interesting.)
* Tyson
* Adventureland
* The Limits of Control
* The Black Pirate (a silent film, with live piano accompaniment, plus the film itself is a early colour film using two-strip Technicolor. And it's supposed to be a fun film.)
* Broken Embraces
* The Cat and the Canary (this year's Live Cinema film, an interesting-sounding silent horror film with a live orchestral accompaniment)

[5 July 2009 - I've since added another film, OSS 117 - Lost In Rio, to take the number of films up to 21.]

Obviously last year I failed in my efforts to write about all the festival films I saw - it just takes so long to write each post, and once I hit November with 7 films still to be written about, and memory of the details of each film fading, I gave up. So this year I'm not even going to try. If I find myself particularly inspired by a particular film, I'll probably write about that film, but don't expect even an attempt at absolute festival coverage this year.

(Incidentally, I was originally going to call this post something like Suspense, Laughter, Violence, Hope, Heart, Nudity, Sex, Happy Endings... Mainly Happy Endings 2: Electric Boogaloo. But in the end I couldn't find a way to make it clear that I was actually referring to the "Electric Boogaloo" joke itself in a sarcastic way (rather than being sarcastic about the sequel to Breakin'). Some Film 2: Electric Boogaloo has become the default joke title for any unnecessary and unwanted sequel, and I kind of hate it. It was only a mildly amusing joke to begin with, now it's more overused than a Little Britain catchphrase, and it ceased being funny a long time ago. So I wanted to make fun of that joke, but unfortunately there was no way I could think of to do so without seeming like I was embracing the joke.)

Yes, yes I do

So here's the thing.

I'm in town the other day, and I walk past the local optometrists. Glancing in the window, I notice a sign that was particularly prominent, and it occured to me that they're really not marketing to guys. Or, at least, not guys like me.

"Ashley, it's just that I love you so much, it scares me!"

So here's the thing.

I love Amazon. I generally try not to think how many thousands of dollars I have spent there over the past decade because the thought of all that money actually makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Why, just this week, I've received a package from them containing season 2, season 3, and season 4 of Saturday Night Live, as well as a non-fiction book, The Corner, by David Simon and Ed Burns (who created the "I didn't realise television could be this good" TV series The Wire), as well as the HBO miniseries adaptation of that book. Meanwhile, from Amazon UK, a seperate package arrived containing a Marx Brothers DVD box set and the Blu-Ray of Persepolis.

And to me, that's the type of shop Amazon is. I remember first shopping at Amazon back when it just sold books, CDs, and VHS tapes. And other than the fact that we're now two generations later for prerecorded movies (purchasing DVDs and Blu-Ray discs these days instead of VHS tapes) there's no change in my purchasing patterns. Amazon is a place to buy books, music, and movies, and in my mind that's all.

But the interesting thing about Amazon is that that's not all there is. In fact, it seems they're not content until you can buy everything from there. Mattresses, groceries, lingerie, televisions, drum kits, refrigerators, whatever you want, apparently Amazon will sell it.

So the other day, out of curiosity I found myself exploring the site, trying to find out exactly how wide the site's range is. And best as I can work out, they don't sell houses or cars, and I think that's all. Pretty much anything else I could think of was available. And then I stumbled across one product that truly surprised me, a product that I had never really even thought about even needing to be purchased, and certainly not from Amazon. But there it was, listed almost for the sole purpose of stating "Yes, you really can buy anything from Amazon".

I'm just disappointed they won't ship it to New Zealand.

Counter-Clockwise

So here's the thing.

I don't do time very well. No matter how hard I try, I just can never actually get myself organised enough to ever be comfortably on time for anything. On the rare occasions that I actually arrive somewhere when I'm actually supposed to, it's because I had to speed or run, and I'm becoming surprisingly skilled as a parkour practitioner simply because I have to be.

But on Friday I was doing surprisingly well. In fact, I was rather proud of how well I had done. I had parked my car at the train station, put my car keys in my pocket on top of my phone, and was now walking unhurriedly on the overbridge that crossed the tracks. I could see the train leaving the earlier station, it would arrive in about 90 seconds, I was able to just amble along knowing I would arrive on the platform right as the train pulled up, in what was possibly the first example of perfect timing in my life.

As I'm walking, my cellphone goes off. And, since I wasn't running frantically at the time, I was able to reach into my pocket and pull the phone out. A second later, I heard a distictive sound prompting me to turn around. "That's odd," I thought. "I could have sworn I heard my keys falling out of my pocket, but there's nothing there." Check my pockets, no car keys. So where are they? There's definitely nothing that I can see. Then I had a horrible thought. So I glanced over the bridge railing, and there they were. They'd obviously hit the ground right on the edge of the bridge and fallen through the small gap at the bottom of the wall, coming to rest on one of the tracks. Now, fortunately this was not the track the oncoming train was on, but nevertheless the question remains, who drops their car keys onto the train tracks?

Now obviously my instinctive reaction was to break out the free-running, leaping off the overbridge, rolling as I hit the ground, scooping up the keys and dashing for the station, propelling myself in front of the oncoming train, and seamlessly landing on the platform. However, I remembered the $20,000 fine for crossing the tracks, so I thought it was probably not a good idea to do that right in front of an oncoming train and a full platform. That would just be inviting trouble.

So instead, I walked to the platform, watched as the train pulled up, and sat and waited as the train pulled away. The strange thing is, being the "live life on the edge" person that I am, and knowing the next train wouldn't come along the tracks for 25 minutes, I was surprisingly apprehensive going out onto the tracks. In fact it took me a couple of minutes to find my keys, simply because I was so busy looking down the tracks worrying about being run over to actually look at the ground to see the keys. And once I did find them, I had to face the fact that I had a close-to-half-an-hour wait for the next train.

But the main point of this story is that this experience has taught me that I should never be on time. Had I been running late and dashing for the train, as I normally would be, I would have just ignored my phone, thus would not have lost my keys, and would therefore have caught the train I was trying to catch. As it is, I was 25 minutes late precisely because I was on time for the first time in my life. So, lesson learned: if I want to avoid being late, I just have to ensure that I'm always late.

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ADDITIONAL: 8 June 2009

So here's the thing.

I've been thinking a lot about this post over the past few hours, and I'm tempted to just take the entire post down because I don't think it works, at all. But I've decided to leave it up, although I do apologise to you all for wasting your time with it.

Part of the reason why I've decided to leave it up is that I think it's interesting to look at why it doesn't work. I'm not a big fan of much of what I've written on this blog - occasionally there might be the odd piece that I'm actually proud of, but it mostly makes me cringe. But there's nothing else quite as monumentally disasterous as this one.

There are a lot of reasons why it doesn't work. Firstly, there's the fact that there's not a lot to the story. Ultimately it comes down to "I dropped my keys, so I was late for work". Which isn't that interesting a story. I only decided to write the post when I told the story to one person, as a "this is why I was late" explanation, and they made an "only you" comment. So I initially decided to do it as a self-depreciating post. You can still see traces of that in the comments about "who drops their keys on train tracks" or my terror at stepping onto the empty tracks (which was absolutely true). The problem was, it didn't really work. I couldn't make it substantial enough to sustain a post.

So I kept adding to it. The most problematic element I added was the whole parkour idea. That was largely because I've been playing parkour-based PS3 game Mirror's Edge the last few days (great game, by the way), and I was amused by the idea of imagining someone like myself, who is significantly out-of-shape, being a parkour expert. The problem is, it just feels like a not-that-amusing joke in its first reference, and the second reference, where I claimed to consider diving off the bridge to get my keys, just doesn't work. The other problem is that it actually acts against the post - wait, I'm this big fearless parkour expert but I'm nervous when crossing empty train tracks? - and while I did try to hang a lampshade on the problem, I should have abandoned it as a joke that just does not work.
Unfortunately I didn't.

In the meantime, I was having trouble finding an ending to the story, because there really is none - I picked up my keys and waited for the next train. The End. I did toy with explaining how being late was a good thing - it meant I arrived at work literally as the alarm was going off for a fire drill, so I avoided the hassle of having to walk down the stairs - but that was just an additional irrelevancy that didn't actually offer much improvement to the ending of the story. I nearly abandoned the post at that point, until I had the realisation that the whole thing only happened because I was on time that day. I decided that would make an interesting moral to the story, to comment on how being late would have allowed me to be on time, and I reworked the post a bit to incorporate it and make it feel like there was a bit more substance to the post.

The problem is that there were now at least three ideas underpinning the post (none of which would sustain a post by themselves), and so it feels like it's actually three different posts, depending on which sentence you're reading. And because the ideas are all very different and are all intertwined in the course of the post, it becomes uneven and ionconsistent. It's all just terribly messy.

And then there's the title. One of the things I love about writing this blog are the titles for my posts. There have been times when I've had posts written and sitting around for literally weeks while I think of the perfect title. And with this post, I found myself giving up and putting a half-hearted title, "Counter-Clockwise" on the post. It's not that it's a bad title, in some ways I quite like the idea of adding to my Monty Python references a reference to a John Cleese film. It's just that I can feel the whole "let's just get this post over with" element in the title. There are posts where I'm actually proud of the titles, posts like "Juju-flop, Swut, and Turlingdrome", or "Babette Ate Oatmeal", or "9906753", or my favourite, "Dustbustering at the Olympics". There's even a post I'm toying with writing that I probaby will write just because I love the title I've decided on, something along the lines of "Ashley, it's just that I love you so much, it scares me!" Compared to titles like these, "Counter-Clockwise" really is just an "I can't be bothered" name, especially when it really only relates to the one-third of the post where I discuss my habitual lateness.

So as you can see, this post was a complete mess. Still, since my explanation about why the post doesn't work is longer than the initial post was, I hope you found this insight into my severely insecure and indecisive thought process around blogging to be interesting.

I fall on the floor and I'm laughing

So here's the thing.

A few months ago, an announcement was made that Simon and Garfunkel would be travelling to New Zealand for one concert, in Auckland. And I was excited. I remember in 2003, when the duo reunited and went on a US tour, thinking how incredible it would be to see them perform live, and how sad it was that I would never get to have that experience. But now that experience was there, it was possible. And I was thrilled.

On 17 April 2009, tickets went on sale for the concert. And at 9am on that morning, I was sitting at my computer, hurriedly refreshing the Ticketmaster website as fast as possible, waiting for the "tickets are not yet on sale" screen to change to the "make your selection" screen.

Then it happened. Tickets were now on sale. Quickly I selected my options, made sure I was ordering the $150 tickets, went through the security check intended to separate humans from automatic systems, waited while it conducted a search, and then told me it couldn't find any tickets for my criteria. What? Tickets only went on sale one minute ago, they'll hardly have sold out the whole arena already. I tried again and again, with no result. After a few minutes, I stopped searching by price. Just give me anything. And after ten minutes of searching, it offered me a ticket. A $350 ticket. I nearly bought it, but with the clock in the corner of the screen counting down until the tickets would be offered to someone else, at that moment of pressure, I decided not to buy the ticket. I like Simon and Garfunkel, but not that much. I continued to try and search, for literally an hour, hoping it would offer me something in a cheaper price range, but it never did. I later learned the show apparently sold out in 19 minutes. For the last 40 minutes, I was just wasting my time with no chance of achieving my goal.

There were rumours that an announcement about a second show would be made in the next few days, but the announcement never eventuated. And eventually I moved on, pausing every now and then to kick myself. I should have bought those tickets when I had the option. They're never coming back here. It's literally a once-in-a-lifetime show, the only chance I'll ever have to see them. And I'm not a music person at all, there are few groups I would even consider going to see live. But Simon and Garfunkel are one group that I would love to see. And I turned it down because it might cost me a mere $200 more than I intended? What was I thinking? There were times when I found myself going back to the site and searching, just on the off-chance that tickets may appear. They never did.

Then, yesterday, long after I had given up on the announcement ever occuring, it was made. A second show, the night after the first. Tickets go on sale next Tuesday. I was excited, until I realised the date. With work commitments in the following week, the time I would need to take off to go to a Sunday concert rather than a Saturday would be difficult to justify. Dammit. But then, things changed again. For long and complicated reasons that I won't go into, something unexpected happened, and suddenly it looked like I could actually make a Sunday concert work with my job requirements. Hooray! Now I just need to get the tickets.

So it was that today, I went onto the Ticketmaster website, just to confirm the information about when tickets go on sale. And there it was, the second concert, sitting right beside the offer to search for tickets to the first concert, with no indication that show sold out a month ago. What the hell, I thought, and did a search for tickets to the Saturday concert, although I knew it was pointless. The show's sold out, I thought as I passed the security check. I'm wasting my time, as I sat there watching it conduct the search. Hey, that's different, as the search result came up with a screen that didn't tell me there were no tickets to offer. Instead, it said it had a ticket for me, a $350 premium ticket for me for the Saturday concert.

And immediately, I was unsure. Should I just wait and see if I can get cheaper tickets to the Sunday show. I actually closed the webpage down, and immediately started berating myself. You bloody idiot, I yelled at myself (in my mind - I'm not insane). You've just spent the last month angry at yourself for turning down tickets, and now you're turning them down again in the vague hope that you might be able to get something a bit cheaper in the future if you're lucky? What are you thinking? You're right, I responded to myself. I am an idiot, I will buy the ticket. You'd better hurry, my mind advised me. Every second that passes, someone else may find that ticket and snatch it up, and then you'll be annoyed with yourself all over again.

Now I was in a hurry. I knew that ticket was there, I just needed to get to it before anyone else. Every click on the website became agony, as I waited for the page to load up, but every click brought me one step closer to my goal (or further away, since at one point I clicked the wrong link and found the site offering to sell me tickets to the Pussycat Dolls and Disney On Ice - quite a variety of shows at the Vector Arena). Finally I made it through, got my tickets, somehow managed to make it through the purchase without messing it up, and now I am going to Simon and Garfunkel.

Although, $350. That's a lot of money...

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And this seems like a good opportunity to share the best Simon and Garfunkel joke I've seen in the last few weeks. Okay, it's the only Simon and Garfunkel joke I've encountered in the last few weeks, but it's still a legendary joke.

From How I Met Your Mother, 4.22, "Right Place Right Time"

Humanity reaches its peak

So here's the thing.

This may be the greatest news story ever.

You see, KFC have introduced a new product over in the States. Believe it or not, it's Kentucky Grilled Chicken, "marinated and grilled to perfection for that five-star, fall-off-the-bone taste." And looking at the photos, it really looks awful. I'm pretty much the prime market for KFC, I go there way too often (although at least I hate myself for it afterwards), so if I'm looking at the advertising photo that is supposed to make the product look its best and most appealing, and I'm thinking "that looks awful", then it must look pretty bloody revolting.

Anyway, to promote the release of the new chicken, they've put coupons for free grilled chicken up on a website. All you need to do is download the coupon off the internet, print it off, and then take it in to KFC. In return, you get two pieces of non-original-recipe grilled chicken, two sides, and a "biscuit" (which is what the Americans call a kind of scone/bread roll). The coupon was only available to download for two days, but it could be used for two weeks, although for some reason they excluded Mothers' Day from the offer. Which was wise, because otherwise they would be inundated with mothers looking to spend Mothers' Day getting ghastly-looking chicken with a free downloaded coupon.

So what happens? Well, firstly, everyone in America apparently tried to download the coupon. As you might expect that they would. Which means servers crash, and people have real difficulty downloading the coupons. In one of the more intriguing comments on the website, someone wrote "I WAS JUST NOW ABLE TO PRINT THE KFC COUPON! IT TOOK OVER 3 HRS."

Now, let's put a bit of context on that comment. Simon and Garfunkel are coming to New Zealand next month, so a few weeks ago, I tried to buy tickets on the internet as soon they went on sale. I spent an hour trying unsuccessfully to get tickets before giving up. We're talking about tickets to what will probably be my only chance to see an important iconic music duo that I really enjoy, and I gave up after one hour. This woman spent three hours just to get $10 of revolting-looking KFC chicken. Isn't that a bit crazy?

But at least that's just people being inconvenienced while sitting at their computer. It's all in the privacy of their own home. I mean, as long as the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people who actually succeeded in downloading the coupons don't then have to all converge on a limited number of places to claim their free chicken, then no-one else should be inconvenienced, should they?

So what does happen when hundreds of people turns up to a KFC store demanding free chicken? Well, in one New York store (that I'll randomly select because this was the store where everything happened that prompted me to hear about the story in the first place), the manager understandably decided "Enough. We are not accepting any more coupons today." But if you offer people free chicken, be prepared to give away lots of free chicken. Otherwise, irate customers may feel ripped off, and decide to start an impromptu sit-in, refusing to leave until they get the free chicken that they were entitled to. Let me say that again: these people had nothing better to do with themselves than sit in a KFC store all afternoon. Their afternoon was valued at $10 worth of horrible chicken.

But clearly this reaction wasn't enough. So the hundreds of people crammed into the store took the next logical step to express their disappointment. They rioted. One report has "racial epithets ... being spewed" and the manager running from a "screaming horde". Now, don't forget, this is over chicken. And not even good chicken, but KFC Grilled Chicken. I keep looking at this story, trying to find the point where this behaviour makes sense, but I can't find it. Who are these people, and why are they acting like this?

But there's one detail that I haven't mentioned yet, one detail that stops this story from being merely an amusing story about a misguided promotion and a weird chicken-loving populace, one detail that lifts it to the level of "the greatest news story ever". What website was it that the coupon was posted on? What website partnered with KFC to make this offer available, and thus inflict all that trouble on the world?

Oprah.com

Yes, people were angry and frustrated and irate, people felt cheated and ripped off, threats were made, impromptu protests occurred, riots broke out. And the woman that caused it all to happen in the first place, the woman whose actions led directly to this pain and suffering and misery, was Oprah Winfrey. I have to say it again. Oprah caused a riot to break out in a New York KFC restaurant. And I think that's pretty damned funny.

Memo to Oprah: For future reference, screaming hordes are good when the people have been given free cars. But that doesn't mean screaming hordes are good in every circumstance. You may want to be more judicious in future with your giveaways. Just a suggestion.

Mirror, Mirror

So here's the thing.

For many years in geekdom, there was a well-known, authoritative rule that you could absolutely rely on. This was the "even-numbered Star Trek film" rule.

The basic principle of the rule was simple. The even-numbered Star Trek films are all excellent, or at least very good. If you're watching an odd-numbered Star Trek, it will be at best an average film, at worst it may make you lose your will to live.

Think about it:
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Terribly slow and tedious, with a pacing closer to 2001 than Trek (and I do love 2001, but it's an entirely different thing to Trek). Plus, the climax doesn't even involve the original characters at all.
- Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan - The standard by which all Trek films are judged. Just brilliant. And it has one hell of an ending.
- Star Trek III: The Search For Spock - Probably the best of the odd-numbered Trek films, in that it's pretty average rather than actually bad. It's not bad, it just is.
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - In my view it's the least of the even-numbered films (it's preachy, the fish-out-of-water comedy is frustratingly broad and obvious at times, and it is terribly dated these days), but despite that, it's a very enjoyable film.
- Star Trek V: The Final Frontier - No. Just no. ... No.
- Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - The end of the Cold War interpreted through Trek. Complete with a murder mystery, some great action, and some nice commentary. An all-round excellent film.
- Star Trek: Generations - Who cares about the rest of the film, we were only watching for Kirk to meet Picard. Instead, Kirk vanishes ten minutes into the film, and only reappears right at the climax, where Kirk and Picard make breakfast before Kirk dies in a bridge collapse. Major disappointment. And the rest of the film is pretty average as well.
- Star Trek: First Contact - The Borg. On the big screen. And time travel back into Trek's past but our future. And James Cromwell is in it. What is there not to like?
- Star Trek: Insurrection - Just bland, a film made solely for the purpose of making a Trek film. There's no cinematic scope to the film, nothing to distinguish it from dozens of Next Generation episodes.

And then they had to go and ruin such a perfect pattern by releasing Star Trek: Nemesis, a bad even-numbered film. I rewatched it recently, just to see if it was as bad as I remembered, and it really was. The film felt like an exercise in cynical filmmaking, as though throwing a bunch of explosions and space action was enough to fool us into believing we were watching a good film. The film itself is well-made, but the core of the film, the script, just felt underdeveloped and empty, with a collection of potentially interesting ideas that never go anywhere. In the end, the film just lacked a soul.

And, if that wasn't enough, early reports of the new Trek prequel film, Star Trek, sound like this could be a great odd-numbered film. And if that proves to be true, it puts a final end to the even-numbered-Trek rule.

But back in 1999 I noticed a much more interesting pattern developing in the Star Trek films, even though that pattern was, by its very nature, only half-developed at the time. The pattern was, to me, more interesting than a simple odd-number-bad-even-number-good rule, largely because it draws on the core plot elements and character motivations that underpin the different films. Over the last ten years, as another two Star Trek films were released, I've looked to see whether the pattern would survive. And it's a pattern that, with the release of the new Star Trek film, has reached its completion. To the best of my knowledge, I'm the only person to have ever noticed this pattern. I've certainly never seen it referred to anywhere else. Which is a shame, because I find it rather interesting.

Think of it as "The Mirror View of the Star Trek Films".

The basic idea is that every Star Trek film (with the exception of Star Trek VI, for a particular reason) reflects one of the other Star Trek films in some fairly fundamental aspects.

Let me explain. The reason why Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country doesn't reflect any other Trek film is because it is the mirror point. The pattern is revealed by moving backwards and forwards film-by-film from Star Trek VI. Make sense?

Here's what I mean. If we start at Star Trek VI, the film before that one was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. In that film, the villain was on a quest to find God. Now, at the same time, the film after Star Trek VI was Star Trek: Generations. In that film, the villain was on a quest to find the Nexus. Which means nothing, until you realise the Nexus was a place where people live forever, happy and content in a wonderful perfect paradise. Basically, the Nexus was a non-theistic heaven. So basically, in one film, the bad guy is trying to find God, in the other the bad guy is trying to find heaven. In my view, there's a pretty strong similarity to those central ideas.

Let's move along one step. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek: First Contact are the time travel films. In both films, the crew of the Enterprise deliberately travel back in time to prevent the destruction of Earth in the future. Given the fact that (with the exception of the new film, which reportedly uses time travel in a very different way) these are the only two time-travel films in the run, again, that seems like a strong similarity to me.

As I say, I first noticed this pattern in 1999 with the release of Star Trek: Insurrection. In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Enterprise crew deliberately defied a Starfleet order. (This was not a minor plot point - it actually led to them having to steal the Enterprise as a result.) Plus, the film revolves around the Genesis Planet, a planet that actually brought Spock back to life. In Star Trek: Insurrection, the crew of the Enterprise also deliberately defy Starfleet orders (not a minor plot point either - it's actually reflected in the film's title, Insurrection), while the film revolves around a planet that has life-rejuvenating, fountain-of-youth-type properties. Life-giving planets, open defiance of Starfleet orders? Yup.

Having noticed this pattern, I eagerly awaited Star Trek: Nemesis, to see if the pattern would hold out. And it did. The climactic point of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan had the most logical member of the crew, Spock, choosing to sacrifice himself to save his crewmates. But, before he dies, he implants part of himself in Bones' mind, which allowed him to come back in the later films. In Star Trek: Nemesis, the most logical member of the crew, Data the android, chooses to sacrifice himself in order to save his crewmates. But, earlier in the film, he downloaded all his memories into the Data-prototype android B-4, offering the obvious suggestion that Data could be recovered. (Indeed, in the recently-released Star Trek: Countdown comics that acts as an official prequel to the upcoming film, we discover that this has indeed happened.)

And so we come to the new film. And where Star Trek: The Motion Picture was the first film for the original crew of Kirk, Spock, and Bones (as played by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley), the new film, titled simply Star Trek is also the first film (indeed, the first adventure) for the original crew of Kirk, Spock, and Bones (albeit played now by Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and Karl Urban).

Plus, here's the really great thing. I was always a little worried by this pattern because it breaks down after 11 films. After all, there's no film for the 12th film to reflect. But instead, based on reports of the new film (which I obviously haven't seen yet), the appearance of Leonard Nimoy as the older Spock acts as a perfect finish to the existing films, while the time travel element reportedly establishes this in a different timeline to the original series. In other words, the mirror pattern applies only to the films that relate to the original Trek timeline, and this film puts a fairly definitive end to the pattern. I don't need to worry about whether the 12th, 13th, 14th Trek films will reflect the other films, and how that will damage the pattern, because in my mind at least, there is a definite break between those films and any future Trek films.

Anyway, that's the mirror Trek pattern. I think it's quite cool, I'm rather proud of noticing it, and I hope you found it interesting.

And that is all that love's about, and we'll recall when time runs out

So here's the thing.

Given my current responsiblities at work, I probably should be a bit more conscientious about saving the planet, and ensuring that we preserve this world for the future. The problem is, I don't really care. It's not that I'm actively trying to destroy the world - it's a very pretty place, and I would be sad if it was rendered unlivable. Or at least, I would be sad if I weren't dead because of the unlivable state of the world.

It's just that I'm fundamentally lazy, cheap, and selfish. This is the reason why I work in a green sea of empty V bottles on my desk. I never used to accumulate empty V bottles, because I used to have a rubbish bin by my desk that I could throw things into. It was easy to keep my desk clear of rubbish, and I did so. (This meant the only things I accumulated on my desk were several days worth of used dishes that I couldn't be bothered taking to the dishwasher and couldn't throw away.) But then they took my bin away, instead expecting me to use the various recycling bins by the kitchen to dispose of my rubbish. That's a full 24 steps for me to take to reach the rubbish bin, and another 24 steps back to my desk. 48 steps! And that's an intolerable distance for a lazy person to go. So I only gather up my empty V bottles and make that trip once my manager has told me for the third time this week to get rid of the bottles. Now, once I'm there, yes, I dispose of my bottles in the glass recycling bin, because it's no more effort to throw the bottles in that bin than the general rubbish bin (well, you do have to wash the bottles, but I don't mind that because playing with water is fun), but in general, if they didn't force me to recycle, I probably wouldn't bother.

Honestly, yes, I should recycle, yes, I could care about the extinction of the whales, yes, I should eat free-range eggs and chickens. But recycling is a big effort, I'm actually a little curious what whale-meat tastes like, and while I'll admit free-range eggs and chicken do taste better, it's not the three-times improvement required by the price increase, and since I'm not the person being hunted to extinction or kept in a tiny cage, I'm not really bothered. It's so much effort to do the right thing, especially when it's so easy to do the wrong thing. I mean, why bother going to a rubbish bin when it's so simple to wind down my car window and drop things out as I drive along. Hell, with electric windows, I don't even need to go to all the effort of manually winding the windows down, I just press a button and whoosh, the rubbish is gone.

So, yes, I guess I am destroying the Earth. Oh well, it's not like I'm the only guilty party - there are lots of other people that are doing much worse than me. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go and watch Wall-E, because those Pixar films are very good. In the meantime, I found this week's Basic Instructions strip particularly funny.

Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-schlitter-crasscrenbon-nürnburger-bratwustle-gerspurten-mitz-grandlich-grumblemeyer von Hautkopft of Ulm

So here's the thing.

As someone whose home town is the city of Wanganui, which is divided by the Whanganui River, I'm very much aware of the challenges that can attach to correct spelling of placenames. Naturally, I'll be following with interest the process by the New Zealand Geographic Board to potentially change the spelling of the city's name, and am curious what the final outcome will be.

But today I learned that, H or no H, it could be worse.

Officials have agreed to correct spelling errors in road signs pointing to a central Massachusetts lake with a 45-letter name.

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in Webster has one of the world's longest place names. It's been spelled many different ways over the years. Some locals have given up and simply call it Lake Webster.

But after researching historical spelling combinations, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester said local Chamber of Commerce officials agreed that some signs were wrong. There was an "o" at letter 20 where a "u" should have been, and an "h" at letter 38 where an "n" should go.

There are many stories and legends about the origin of the Indian name. One popular myth - later debunked - holds that the name translates roughly to 'You fish on your side, I fish on my side, and nobody fish in the middle.'

And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future

So here's the thing.