Peter Hodges

They’re nicely summarized in this article.

We’d already heard about the woman with nipple piercings, but now we can add a teenage cancer survivor with a prosthestic leg, a wheel-chair bound senior citizen, and a woman standing up for her rights.

Here’s a nice statistic:

A spokesman said that out of 2 billion passengers screened nationwide since 9-11, there have been only 110,000 abuse complaints.

I’m sure that the Gestapo TSA is proud of this one. After all, as a percentage, it’s much less than one percent. But let’s look at it from a slightly different perspective. That’s the same number as the entire population of Abilene, TX filing official complaints about the treatment they’re receiving at security checkpoints. How many more don’t file complaints?

My recommendation is to make life as difficult as possible for those who interdict our right of free movement guard our nation’s airports. If you have a laptop in the bag, leave it in. Make them ask you to take your shoes off. Respond lethargically to directions. Give them your driver’s license bottom side up. Make sure that your boarding pass is folded in half so that they have to unfold it. If they wand you, give them a lecture about Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick Henry in a polite but firm voice. Everytime you’re given directions, look at them like you don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t be hostile, just be as unyielding and as slow as possible. Ask them if they’re excited about using the new X-ray machine, then elbow them and say: “I bet you’ll get to see lots of boobies!”

It’s about planting seeds. Make people around you see them as unreasonable as possible while going about your business in a polite manner. Most people will sigh at you, some will grumble under their breath, but those with subtlety and intelligence will be heartened by your little attempts at civil disobedience. My Thomas Paine/Patrick Henry/Thomas Jefferson lecture usually gets a few favorable comments from fellow travelers once we’re through the line. In Boston Logan airport it actually got some scattered applause. (It turns out my shampoo was 3.8 ounces and not 3.4 ournces. That made me a prime suspect for causing undue harm to our transportation infrastructure. Who knew?) Eventually, everyone will have enough.

And yes, I meant “aggression” in the title. Don’t ask. Well, maybe you should ask, because that statement was predicated on a discussion initiated by long-time friend Tasuja and fueled by hard liquor. Apparently, I lose the ability to distinguish between the -ive and -sion ending for words, thus mixing adjectives and nouns.

Err… whatever.

This post will serve two purposes.

1.) To test out the audio plugin to temporarily replace podpress.

2.) To act as a vehicle for promotion of a new instrumental based on Pete’s work in “The Alchemist.” It’s a  piece I put together using garage band, so I hope you enjoy. Not to toot my entire brass section, but its a piece I’ve put in the play list that helps me write and play video games.

Let me know what you think, providing the link works.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

• I’m pleased to announce that Taylor Anderson has agreed to do an interview with me here on the site. Author of the Destroyermen series, Taylor is also an expert in naval artillery and a history professor at a local university here in Texas. We’ll post the interview on a Friday in the near future.
• Peter-Hodges.com is on track to have close to 200,000 hits and 6,000 unique visitors for the fifth straight month. You guys are making the community boom. (These numbers do not include bots.) As a matter of fact, during peak times, we’re beginning to have intermittent site failures due to CPU usage and traffic limits. My hosting package is up for renewal in August, so we’ll be looking at expanding our quotas on both.
• Because of the above, I am going to be considering a few, reputable banner ads as a potential revenue stream. I’d like to stay away from Google Adsense of the Yahoo alternative. If you are thinking about advertising on the Web, and you like a market that appeals to fans of science fiction and/or libertarian, right-of-center politics, please feel free to send me an email. I would especially like to consider non-profit organizations who influence policy for space travel or scientific research. Please note that I will not accept ads for products or organizations that I disagree with, nor will I ever, under any circumstances, consider an advertising stream that forces popups or hostile flash take-overs. I’ll continue to pay for the site out of my pocket before that happens.

The Dark Knight is the best movie of the summer.

I went in expecting it to be a bit of a letdown given the sheer amount of hype surrounding the film. After reading countless reviews about Heath Ledger’s brilliance and the the quality of the movie, I felt that too many in the entertainment business were paying posthumous homage to a departed actor.

I was wrong.

Forget Jack Nicholson. Forget Tim Burton. Forget Michael Keaton. This iteration of the Batman story is vital, realistic, and visceral. The action, the acting, and the struggles in the film hit you at a level below the conscious. In the course of the movie, viewers are forced to contend with many of the social issues of today. The film doesn’t shy away from them, instead preferring to confront them head on. Remarkably, they arrive at an answer that I not only agreed with, but also found compelling.

The Joker embodies the ultimate agent of chaos. When literally confronted with a pile of money, he remarks to a group of mobsters that he’d rather have dynamite and gasoline. That says everything about his personality. He’s not interested in material wealth. He’s playing the game for the sake of it. He doesn’t want to ultimately win, and he doesn’t necessarily want to lose. He just wants to keep playing as long as he can.

Harvey Dent, the district attorney of Gotham, provides a memorable subplot as the eventual Two Face. First characterized as Gotham’s “White Knight” (an obvious foil to Bruce Wayne’s “Dark Knight”), he uses both Lieutenant Gordon and Batman to drive his fight against crime to nearly the end. It is his purity of character and the nature of his crusade that ultimate makes him attractive to the Joker. The Joker doesn’t want to discredit him so that crime can flourish in Gotham again, he wants to discredit him because he is the embodiment of Gotham’s best virtues. Dent has succeeded in being the hero that Bruce Wayne can only dream about becoming. He works in the open using the system, and has met a large degree of success.

As anyone familiar with Batman knows, Dent’s eventual transformation to Two Face is inevitable. The events that drive him to it are rooted firmly in pop psychology, but the bit about flipping a coin to determine fate was a little overdone in a movie that lacked traditional gimmickry. It felt slightly out of place given the larger scope of the story, but I can forgive Director Christopher Nolan for throwing this bone to the legions of loyal “purists.” The results of his transformation are gruesome, skirting closely to the edge of an “R” rating. 

If Katie Holmes was miscast as Rachel Dawes, then Maggie Gyllenhall isn’t much better. She seems more confident and less girl-next-door. She wears a sort of sultry sensuality under her good girl exterior (which Katie Holmes lacked), but she still isn’t believable as a crusading assistant district attorney. Her role is sorely under-utilized in the movie, but with a running time of two and a half hours and several large action set pieces, perhaps the writers can be forgiven for not developing her character further.

The ending is bittersweet, but Batman has always struggled with the cost of being the symbol of justice for Gotham City. There is a nice set up for the sequel in the last ten minutes of the movie. My speculation is that the next movie might prove to be even darker and more grim than this one.

The comic book or superhero genres are typically rife with unbelievable acts that rarely have real-world consequences. The Dark Knight has elevated itself above genre conventions and firmly into the role of serious drama. At no single point did the dreaded “Oh, come on!” escape my lips. Whether this is a testament to Nolan’s skill as a filmmaker or my own infatuation with the story and characters will have to wait on a second viewing.

Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog is worth the hype. It stars Neil Partrick Harris, Felicia Day (from the “The Guild“), and Nathan Fillion (Mal from Firefly).

Acts I and II are available now.

Felicia Day is a great discovery. I’ve watched a few episodes of the guild, but seeing her in this, as well as hearing her sing, is a real treat.

If you think you don’t like musicals, go ahead and give this a try for two reasons. First, it’s Joss Wheedon. What more reason do you need? Second, it’s funny as hell.

For some reason, I’ve missed most of McDevitt’s fiction during my tenure as a science fiction reader. I first read some of his short stories in the anthology Breach the Hull, which Mike McPhail of MilSciFi.com provided for my review. I enjoyed his prose immensely, so I decided to see what he had recently written.

I settled on Polaris as my first choice. The book cover is splashed with a blurb that indicates that McDevitt is the “heir to Asimov and Clarke.” Given how much of my formative youth was spent with my nose in their books, I thought this was an auspicious beginning.

Polaris is the story of Alex Benedict and his “assistant” Chase Kolpath, antiquities dealers. In a far future star-spanning civilization, they find and sell cultural relics from the past (past meaning way after our own time) to rich clients. They fill a niche with rich clients that like to have artifacts to show off to their friends or families. They become interested in the sixty year old disappearance of six celebrities from a ship called the Polaris, which was present to watch the collision of a neutron star with a G-type star that supported planets. Shortly after watching the collision, the crew on this ship mysteriously disappears.

When the government opens up an auction of the personal effects from those on the Polaris, Alex and Chase manage to buy several artifacts for their clients. In the process of touring the facility where the items are stored, a bomb, attributed to a local terrorist group destroys the building. It is no stretch of the imagination to note that the bomb was aimed not at the people attending the tour, but rather at keeping the secret of the Polaris disappearances intact.

What follows is a fairly typical whodunit in the Asimov style. I won’t lie and say that I was surprised at the ending. McDevitt is perhaps a little too obvious in the way he provides clues to the reader, but the characters are genuninely likable and the story moves along at a brisk enough pace that I was mostly satisfied at the conclusion. I would say that this novel would qualify as a good beach read.