Operation Thursday Night was entirely successful: lasagne initiates initiated, white sauce didn't lump, giant quantities of food consumed, Wanted watched, bonus dark chocolate truffles with Diemersfontein pinotage fillings. Yum. Wanted is an entirely ridiculous piece of cinema, with quite enough ironic self-awareness of action cliché to almost conceal its total lack of content, meaning, significance or actual narrative logic. It's a blast to watch. Particularly when drunk. My Evil Landlord pours a mean G&T.

As part of my current programme of work-burnout and consequent avoidance (it's fortunate I'm on leave from Monday), I am now completely addicted to Schlock Mercenary, which is a web comic about a 31st-century mercenary group. It's distinguished by violence, nastiness, cynicism, self-conscious framebreaking, succinctness, laterality, good science and very bad puns. (Also, plasma cannons that make an ommmmminous hummmm). I love it. It's thoroughly evil-minded. It's worth going all the way back to the start (circa 2000, so this will keep you occupied for a while) - the early artwork isn't up to much, but it does refine later on, and the story arcs are consistently good.

Earth Hour! Lights off at 8.30pm on Saturday. If we weren't Salty Crackering that evening I'd have a braai-and-candles party.

Bleah. Naturally I ordered the Iron Man DVD the microsecond it came out, and spent Saturday evening introducing the sadly deprived Evil Landlord to it, in callous defiance of his need to play Crysis. But I was swizzed, I was: the pic on Take2 was of a normal box, and the bloody thing arrived with the DVDs housed in a tacky plastic Iron Man mask facsimile which is an active and below-the-belt insult to the shining beauty of the actual Iron Man suit. I'm all outraged. On the upside, the movie's just as much fun the third time, plus added bonus ability to stop and rewind so you can hear all the nifty bits of dialogue that RDJ swallows.

Today's subject line courtesy of the wonderful Fafblog: it seemed appropriate to my linkery for the day, which is all angsty and global-warmingy and stuff. For a start, methane. Specifically, the methane that's bubbling up from beneath the melting ice cap, with the potential to suddenly and massively increase global warming. I always did believe in trigger events that are going to make things catastrophically fall apart on the turn, and this seems a likely candidate. I also like Warren Ellis's take on the situation: "it appears that we’re all going to die from the escape of monstrous planetary farts from beyond history." Dear stock market crash, have a nice hot cup of context.

In keeping with the theme of eco-angst, Warren Ellis, of course, is the author of FreakAngels, a seriously cool web comic about a futuristic flooded England and random telepaths with attitude in spades, which I discovered this morning and upon which I am now hooked, in defiance of all this gosh-darned indexing.

Bleah. Annoying day, possibly sparked by an intense night of unpleasant dreams, mostly about me being needy and desperate and making an idiot of myself, and then wandering beaches in tears when righteously booted out by irritated friends. Also, random sleepwalking in order to, with pinpoint accuracy, dig my favourite sleeping shirt out of the wardrobe; I think I was hoping it would protect me from the giant drill coming through the wall.

Confused by the above, I shall distract myself with linkery.

• Courtesy of Patroclus, apparently Western women are having fewer babies!. Cue me doing a small victory dance from the depths of my overpopulation obsession. I thought it was just the sensible Scandinavians. I know the article is all concerned about the shrinking proliferation of the educated elite, but I figure it's going to be easier to raise the overall average of education when there are a hell of a lot fewer of us, and it'll probably all even out eventually.


• Courtesy of the Very Short List, cool music. David Byrne and Brian Eno collaborate on an album and then stream it for free. Occasional songs sound almost but not completely unlike Talking Heads. The whole thing has that lovely, dense, textured sound which screams "Brian Eno" in a complex, melodious scream.


• Courtesy of tor.com, cut scenes from Iron Man. I think RDJ does playboy sybarite with a lot more conviction than Christian Bale does. Funny, that.

The Sanbona experience seems to have prompted philosophical musings - I think it's all the interesting shapes of the hills, and the way they fit the sky. Or, possibly, the quality of the light, which is clear and plangent and impersonal. Anyway. Things This Weekend Made Me Realise:

1. Despite a sort of ongoing vague sense that my perfectly happy existence as an urban Capetonian for twenty years means I don't really miss The Wilds Of Africa, actually I do. My maddened Zimbabwean childhood entailed a certain quotient of arbing around on Kariba Dam dodging hippopotami, wandering around Mana Pools dodging lion, and drifting about Hwange Game Park dodging elephant. I'd probably seen the Big Five before I was ten. A lot of that experience was camping, in the kinds of camps where elephants and hippos routinely wander through; I remember waking up to the sound of buffalo grazing about ten foot from my head on the other side of the canvas, and sticking my head out the tent to see the elephant standing over our friend's pup tent. Even now, after a long interval severely denuded of game viewing of all kinds, something basic and primitive in me responds with enchanted enthusiasm when someone suddenly gives the happy yodel indicative of game lurking in the undergrowth.


2. My childhood experiences were low-budget: camping rather than hotels, knowledgeable parents and relatives for guidance rather than game rangers, and viewing from the back seat of the family car rather than swanky hyper-designed safari vehicles. Despite all this, it was, I realise, an intensely privileged experience. The environments of the Zimbabwean national parks, the vegetation, water and sheer concentration of animals, were incredible - even now, after sociopolitical meltdown and FSM knows what in the way of poaching, they probably still are. Driving to Kariba was routinely interrupted by long waits while the herd of elephants got the hell out of the way. Various species of buck were so prolific that you could get all annoyed at the herd blocking your view of the interesting species. In Mana, even if you didn't see lion that day you'd see twelve sorts of buck, innumerable birds, warthog, elephants, zebra, and then the honey badgers would raid the dustbins in the camp that evening.
   
   Sanbona is in the Little Karoo. Basically, it's desert.
   
   
   
   It apparently can't support some species such as warthog, there isn't the grass for them, and the animals are few and far between because the carrying capacity of the land is so low. (I'd swear the ranger mentioned giraffe, but I seriously don't know what they eat; possibly they've fitted them with telescoping necks?) The landscape has absolutely its own beauty, the same implacable, self-contained starkness as the Karoo, which I adore, but it makes me realise, if only in retrospect, how fertile Zimbabwe is.


3. Somehow, this makes the wildlife spotting at Sanbona more, rather than less, exciting. Hwange and Mana Pools had the huge advantage of simply drawing a line around an ecosystem, calling it a "park" and, at least until recently, not messing with it. Sanbona has taken a 54 000-hectare tract of overgrazed farmland and proposes to restore it to the state it was when the San wandered the landscape. They are re-introducing absolutely everything they want to see there, at carefully-chosen intervals as the grazing is still recovering. Their lion and other big game wear locator collars so that the rangers can track their movements and hence responses to the environment (although I have to say this is also handy when your game ranger has a telemetry set and you know the lion are in that direction).
   
   This gives my bunny-hugging heart more of a thrill than simply admiring what Nature has wrought in the Zambezi valley. It's hopeful: it says that people are recognising the horrible depredations of human settlement and dedicating themselves to reverse them, and that such a reversal may, although long and difficult, be possible. Sanbona's pleasures are the more pleasurable because they're hard-won.

Phooey. I've just accidentally ordered two copies of the DVD of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a movie for which I have an extreme, guilty, swashbuckling-Victoriana passion despite its almost total lack of actual merit. Free copy going to the first person who asks. (In Cape Town, preferably, so I don't have to send it all over the show).

One of the starlings in our road has learned to make car alarm beeps. When I left the house this morning he was sitting in the tree doing that obnoxious "gosh it's dawn wow yay happy!" thing that birds do (and what's with that? Somewhere in human civilisation we went badly wrong if we can no longer muster the enthusiasm birds do for a new day). His usual "twootle fweeple tweet twee" pattern mutated when I hit the alarm button to unlock the car, to go "twootle fweeple tweet BEEP!" - he had the artificial tone perfectly, I thought for a moment my remote was madly unlocking mother's car parked in the road outside. He repeated the BEEP pattern a couple of times, in a companionable sort of way, and then went back to the "tweet twee" one. I'm not sure why this sort of thing makes me happy - possibly simply because starlings are cute and cheeky, but also because I like to think that not all aspects of human civilisation are necessarily bad for our non-human co-habitants.

So, as the subject line somewhat laterally suggests, mother and I went off to see WALL-E last night. ( Vague Commentary Follows. )

Incidentally, if anyone else caught the rest of the re-enactment poodles bit on the credits for Presto!, please let me know, it's driving me crazy. Teh Internets know not of it. In addition to the initial "Civil War Re-enactment poodles" box there was another one with "Re-enactment poodles" plus two adjectives, and I cannot remember the adjectives. Magnificent? Spectacular? Phooey!

Yesterday I took the adult, responsible, grown-up, sensible decision, and cancelled my teaching for the second semester. This was more or less as a result of having spent the last week trekking my pile of vampire essays between campus, where I don't have the time to mark them, and home, where I don't have the energy, as a result of which I've marked about two and a half per day. I have reached the conclusion that I can probably manage work+research+ill health+sanity, or work+teaching+ill health+sanity, or even work+teaching+research+ill health, but not all five. So I don't get to indoctrinate third-year film students into fairy-tale film, other than the two lectures on Pan's Labyrinth which I have kept because (a) I don't want to let down The Nicest Ex-Supervisor In The World in her current state of frantic acting-dictatorship, and (b) they'll be kinda fun and don't have marking attached.

I am relieved, but sad. Also, loin-girded for this research lark, and determined to finally do something with this bloody Sheri Tepper/Frankenstein paper, which has been jeering at me incomprehensibly from the middle distance for almost a year now. Lashing its feminist gothic. Pulling faces. Uppity thing.

In other news, Earth Doomed. Which we all knew, anyway, but this article lays out the current state of tipping point with particularly disastrous clarity. I am going to derive considerable satisfaction, of the more bleak and depressive not-really-enjoyable sort, from watching the world's political figures scramble around to sort things out when we're actually out of oil, air, food, land, water and hope in a few years, and realise that they really should have taken their heads out of the sand a decade ago.

And, lest the whole tenor of this post become too depressive for words, the head web design person of my Cherished Institution, who has been kindly overseeing my attempt to drag the faculty webpage kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat, thinks that I'm "pretty clued up" in the arena of HTML skills. I blush. bumpycat, you must be so proud.

Rain! I'm all damp, and much less annoyed, and feeling less guilty about not having watered the garden in a while. It was getting all droopy and blasted-heath. Also, my previous medical aid, in a somewhat unanticipated gesture¹, just paid me out enough on my cancelled policy to almost pay off my credit card. (Mother, stop dancing round the house, it's undignified!)

On the orang-utan civilisation front, this, courtesy of Mama Generica, is deeply appealing to my inner jack-booted fascist, particularly the bits of the inner jack-booted fascist which are deeply despairing about the state of the environment. Which is, come to think of it, most of them.

Bruise update: I apparently fell directly onto the edge of the step yesterday, because the bruise is as long as my hand and shaped approximately like a lenticular galaxy, about 5cm wide at the bulge. The purple is now shading, non-fetchingly, into yellow. I look as though someone's slapped me across the rump with a medium-sized lead-weighted cosh. Jocular sod. I can't even pretend to claim it's the result of any dodgily interesting sex-life, either. Sigh.

And, with reference to yesterday's little effusion about Outside, a quick caveat emptor: should the mood strike you for Bowie-acquisition, don't bother with the two-disk second edition. While my affection for the first continues unabated, the second disk comprises increasingly self-indulgent remixes of a couple of the songs, all mindlessly stretched-out beat. Bleah.

Last Night I Dreamed: a sort of subterranean adventure story, in which we dashed through giant underground caves filled with walkways and suspended rooms, trying to (a) collect pocketsful of gems, and (b) avoid the minions of some sort of giant, female, Cthulhoid horror. Eventually we crammed ourselves into a very small car and escaped into the countryside.

¹ I'm not in the habit of thinking of insurance as something that pays me money. They're things you pay money to in return for not having to worry about paying money in the future. Orang-utans, may I point out, would probably never have invented insurance.

Recent cultural consumption: Sheri S. Tepper's latest, The Margarets, which I acquired in hardback in a fit of undelayed gratification. It's an interesting novel, positing the weird, apparently multi-dimensional splitting of one future-Earth girl at various significant points in her life, so that in the end seven different versions of her are taking wildly different paths. The setting is the standard Tepper one of a drastically overpopulated Earth and a supporting cast of umpteen alien races ranging in character from the dopily benevolent to the basically monstrous. As usual, Tepper's ongoing polemical interests thread through the narrative, occasionally stepping forward to dominate when her characters have themselves a little rant about human stupidity.

I enjoyed it, although I found it less accomplished than a lot of her other writing - possibly inevitably given the basic plot, it was scattered and a bit wandery, and a lot of the themes felt recycled from earlier novels. What really hit me, though, was her despair - always present in her novels, but particularly strong here. I love Tepper's writing because she articulates some of the same things that I worry about - overpopulation, violence, misogyny, bigotry, human selfishness and shortsightedness, the horrible sense of the sheer momentum of a technological culture that is rushing towards self-destruction because it hasn't bothered to build in restraints - because restraint is, in our world, a sign of weakness and denies the entitlement and self-indulgence that capitalism preaches.

In Tepper's novels, Earth is almost always trampled under the massed hordes of humanity, its biosphere despoiled and destroyed. If the human race survives, it's as often as not because something from the outside intervenes, usually an alien race or a mythic force of some sort. Anyone, Tepper seems to think, is more likely to save humanity than humanity itself. Some earlier novels allow enlightened pockets of humanity to impose rescue on the whole, for example the tough, pragmatic women of Gate to Women's Country, but generally human action is subservient or incidental to the intervention of larger, wiser, more powerful beings. Even in Gate, human self-limitation is only possible because of radical population reduction after apocalypse. In a lot of her worldspaces, humanity is somehow crippled, missing a vital moral or historical sense which would allow it to function more rationally than it does.

This fascinates me. In a sense what she's writing isn't science fiction so much as science fiction fable, a sort of cautionary bedtime story for naughty children: if you can't play nicely, the grown-ups will take your toys away, and spank you for your own good. This is patronising, demeaning, and incredibly bleak, but the horrible thing is that I can't disagree with her. The likelihood of humanity pulling itself up by the bootstraps out of its morass of indiscriminate expansion and destruction without some kind of enormous catastrophe first is, in my opinion, vanishingly small. I deplore the need for the wise intervening alien even as I admit its necessity. This may, possibly, make me a fascist, but mostly I think it puts me in the same boat as Tepper - sadly and despairingly watching it founder, waiting for the water to close over everyone's head.

Last Night I Dreamed: a sort of hidden fantasy realm, either underground or a dream-world (yes, I've been watching way too many Henson movies). This entailed a group of us (we were children for this part of it) trekking through a scenic swamp calf-deep in water, feeling for snakes through the sludge; and getting lost in a strange area composed of giant broken pillars and cracked, moss-covered paving. There was also an elevated railway on brick arches with a completely peculiar train that travelled in jumps to an exact timetable. Later, someone gave me an absolutely beautiful full-length black coat in a particularly fine and silky fur.

I don't usually have much interest in the Nobel Prize, but this year's are a bit of an exception. Al Gore receiving the Peace prize makes me very happy, if only because it's an indicator of the status of environmental issues in the public consciousness. Not the right public consciousness (the Scandinavians seem to be pretty much in the forefront of ecological stuff and don't really need their consciousnesses raised) but their stamp of approval has to mean something.

I'm rather saddened, though, by the way the award seems to have brought anti-eco feeling out of the woodwork - a lot of sites mentioning the award seem to have a comment trail to the effect that he doesn't deserve it, it's not a legitimate issue, his activism hasn't achieved anything, and climate change has nothing to do with peace, this last causing me to grind my teeth somewhat. (Even some of the usually liberal and intelligent folk at the Whatever are kvetching no end). I honestly cannot see how anyone can deny either the climate change situation in the face of the current evidence, or the effectiveness of Gore's long-term efforts to wave the the issue around like a flag. I'd be a lot happier if humanity were orang-utans rather than ostriches.

The other pleasing award was Doris Lessing's literature prize. I am afraid to say that I have never yet finished a Lessing novel, being somewhat put off by (a) her creds as a Serious African Issue-Driven Novelist, which sparks my auto-bloody-mindedness response, (b) her writing style, with which I for some reason do not resonate, and (c) a very vivid memory of my late maternal grandmother, who knew Lessing in her early days in then-Rhodesia. At any mention of Lessing, Gran would tighten her lips ominously, say tartly, "Tigger Wisdom? She was a naughty girl," and refuse to be drawn further. In retrospect, it is somewhat ironic that I should have allowed myself to be influenced by this, as it refers to Lessing's unhappy first marriage from which she departed at speed, leaving a husband and two children - I think my gran was horrified by the children-leaving bit. I, on the other hand, am fully behind the rights of the individual to escape an unhappy relationship, and given the social mores of the time, could easily see how Lessing might have been pressured into both marriage and children.

It thus clearly behooves me to dig out the Canopus in Argus series I madly bought about a year ago and have never read, and to darned well read them in the interests of both feminist and sf solidarity. I am happy about Lessing's win because she is a highly-regarded "serious" mainstream novelist who both writes deliberately within sf genre traditions, and, unlike rotten weasel-worders like Margaret Atwood, routinely acknowledges her debt to the genre. The world needs more writers capable of exploding the myth that "if it's good it can't be science fiction." A Nobel rather does that. Heh.

Slightly spacey today, after a hectic and highly enjoyable weekend helping the dreaded jo run her Opera InCognito LARP. Good bunch of players, lovely costumes, perfect setting, much hilarity had by all. Stv took some stunning photos, will link to them when he's released them to Teh Internets. Also saw Stardust. It made me happy. Review tomorrow, when I've killed 20 essays and annotated an Honours dissertation. Sigh.

Things that have made me depressed this weekend:

• Watching An Inconvenient Truth. Not because it told me anything new, but because it made me confront the reality that a significant portion of the human race are selfish, greedy, short-sighted and fundamentally unintelligent, as a result of which our so-called civilisation doesn't actually work, not so you'd notice. Not only that, the greedy idiots are the ones who are in charge. Where did we go wrong? It would be lovely to say that I feel proud to be human, but I really don't.
• Subsequently realising that my own response to environmental issues is, at least in structural terms, perilously close to religious bigotry. The truth is so clear, so obvious, the consequences so awful, the self-destructive stupidity of those who refuse to see it so blatant. Obviously we need tough people in charge who'll impose the necessary solutions on the useless multitudes, whether they like it or not. And I'm relying on science, not faith, but in that response I'm actually no different to all the right-wing frothers who want to outlaw abortion or otherwise codify their religious beliefs in law.
• Reading Kurt Vonnegut. "Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on."
• Filling in application forms for academic jobs overseas, which feels horribly like an exercise in futility. My so-called achievements look particularly puny in black and white.
• The intensification of the headache which has been sitting, like a vulture, just over my right eye for the last week. I go to bed with the damned thing rampaging, and wake up with it still sitting there, gloating. I can feel it even through the painkillers. It's a bitch.

I'd love to say that I'm all inspired and enthused by the prospect of seeing the new Spiderman movie this evening, but actually my expectations are not high. Sigh.

Shall shut up now, as extended whinging is fundamentally boring and makes me depressed.