The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

I know that there are a number of comic book/sci-fi/pop culture aficionados among my readership, so this one’s for you guys.

Here’s a page I like from the Iron Man comic book miniseries Hypervelocity. Iron Man (a.k.a. wealthy and powerful industrialist Tony Stark) isn’t exactly the star of the show in this one, as he’s been sidelined by a critical injury (a high-velocity railgun shot). The real star of the show is “Tony Stark 2.0”, a personality construct based on Tony’s own neural patterns that took control of the suit when he was taken out of commission. The construct isn’t a perfect copy, as it lacks a lot of Tony’s long-term memories, but it does act, react and “think” like Tony does.

Here’s a page from the book that I rather liked, titled Tony Stark 2.0’s Top 5 Positives About No Longer Possessing an Organic Human Body, a piece transhumanist enough for me to call it either “Gibsonian” or “Cory bait”:

If you’re a follower of the “cyberpunk” genre, this page (as well as the rest of the comic) should be giving you a sense of deja vu. That’s because the Iron Man comic has always been about ten years behind the times in terms of concepts, technobabble and pop culture. Consider:

• The tune he’s listening to: Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry. Dude, that’s from late 1991. I know, because I was a DJ back then, and had the regulars of Clark Hall Pub moshing to it by early 1992.
• Really dude, only 5,096 tunes in the super-advanced Iron Man suit? Let me get this straight, this suit has a battle computer and is capable of housing a personality construct and yet you’ve only loaded just over 5,000 MP3s? Dude, I have a machine at work that’s barely qualified to run Vista, and I’ve got 6,000 tracks in iTunes.
• The whole techno-transhumanist obsession with “transcending the meat”. That was an obsession of the cyber-freak magazine Mondo 2000 back in the ’90s (who in turn copped it from a concept often used by William Gibson in the 80’s).
• Later in the book, Tony Stark 2.0 gate-crashes a rave held by the “Mecha Underground” held in a secluded location: deep underwater. Also another late-’80s/early-’90s thing, if you forget the mechanized dancers and the bit about being underwater.
• He finally ditched having just the moustache and added a goatee. Also very ’90s.

I’ll give credit to the writers for using the “2.0” thing. Although it’s old school to us computer geek types, using “2.0” as an expression meaning “new and improved” has only recently entered the mainstream.

In spite of these quibbles, I find it a fascinating read. More on this later.

I can’t help myself!

If you’re:

• Short on money and looking for a gift to give on the cheap
• Looking for a little something to add to a gift to “punch it up” a little
• Just into buying things at greatly discounted prices

…then you might find JungleCrazy.com to your liking. Its slogan is “All the best Amazon deals in one place”, and that’s basically what the site is. It simply scans Amazon.com and reports any item whose price has been discounted by at least 70%.

The front page shows the most popular items in their list:

All the items in JungleCrazy.com are “tagged” with descriptive text, which makes it easier to see if a certain kind of item (for example, check out the items tagged with “musical instruments” or “digital camera accessories”). For the most hardcore of bargain shoppers, there’s a special one cent bin — you get three guesses as to how much items in the bin cost.

So Who Wants to Go See 300?

There’s no convincing the wife of the virtues of 300: I just can’t get her to enjoy entertainment based on stylised violence outside the mileu of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Therefore, I hereby declare that there should be some kind of boys’ night out where we lads go catch 300 at the downtown Paramount. Bonus points for anyone who’ll join me for dinner at the Burger King there, and double bonus points for anyone who yells “Tonight we dine in Hell!” while doing so. Interested? Drop me a line or leave a message in the comments.

Neal Stephenson on 300

Here’s a snippet from It’s All Geek to Me, a New York Times editorial written by Neal Stephenson, a sci-fi and geek favourite author:

Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it.

References to the Battle of Thermopylae in The Uncanny X-Men

In the latter part of Chris Claremont’s first run as the writer for the comic book The Uncanny X-Men — the run that turned the X-Men from a B-list comic in Marvel’s roster to one that became more popular than Spider-Man, he was fond of making references to the Battle of Thermopylae when comparing the X-Men’s struggles against numerically superior foes. The most notable example I could find is in issue 226 (from 1988), Go Tell the Spartans, where the X-Men face the Trickster, the cosmic personification of chaos itself. Here’s the title spread:

The title spread from The Uncanny X-Men, issue 226 (1988), titled Go Tell the Spartans.

Luckily for those who never studied classic battles (but really, North American comic book readers of that era were mostly nerds, who should’ve been Dungeons and Dragons players, who in turn should’ve studied classic battles for inspiration), Claremont uses Wolverine to explain the issue’s title:

A scene from The Uncanny X-Men, issue 226 (1988), titled Go Tell the Spartans.

Here’s the dialogue:

Wolverine: So we’re on our own, as usual.

Mystique: The devil of it is, we still don’t know what we’re dealing with, much less how to stop it.

Wolverine: Maybe we’re the ancient Spartans, Mystique. Holdin’ the line at Thermopylae against impossible odds, buyin’ our fellow Greeks time to raise proper defenses an’ mass their armies. Here we remain, obedient to their will, even unto death.

Mystique: Since when did you become a romantic?

Wolverine: Darlin’, how can anyone be an X-Man an’ not be a romantic?

Wolvie’s line about being “obedient to their will, even unto death”, is from the epigram on the tomb of King Leonidas’ 300, which is often translated as:

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by

that here, obedient to their laws, we lie

For a bar brawler from the Canadian rockies, Wolvie’s a pretty well-read guy.

Changes to the Meaning of the Word “Spartan”?

Damn, that Leonidas guy is cut.

The term “Spartan” with a capital S means ‘someone from Sparta’. Spelled with a small s, one of its meanings is ‘austere’ or ‘lacking in amenities’. For example, a room in a Buddhist monastery or a Ramada Limited motel (which we used to derisively refer to as “Ramada Very Limited”) could be called spartan.

With the popularity of 300, it’s quite possible that “spartan” could acquire a new meaning: possessing incredible abdominal muscles. Even from watching the trailer, I feel like hitting the gym.

Here are some of articles that I found interesting, all of which have to do with health and medicine:

• I Don’t Want Health Care If Just Anyone Can Have It: (from The Onion) “The only reason this is even being considered is because a majority of voters want it. Well, of course they do—they don’t have it! But you don’t see 33rd Degree Freemasons letting any old average citizen into their inner sanctum just because he’s curious. And you won’t catch me sharing my God-given right to affordable lifesaving medical procedures with every bum who’s got a jones for another hepatitis vaccination. It’s undignified. After all, how do I know I’ve made it in this world if I’m not able to enjoy something others can’t?”
• A comment on the aforementioned Onion article in Reddit: “I’m not saying the Canadian system isn’t better, it is better. It’s far less wasteful. I’m saying, don’t pretend Canada is this panacea that it isn’t. There’s a reason many people are pushing for a two-tiered system… one tier where you pay with time, and the other where the impatient wealthy pay with money. There’s nothing unfair about it, it works in European nations, and it makes all kinds of sense.”
• Fighting MADD: (from Modern Drunkard) An article that argues that Mothers Against Drunk Driving has lost the plot — “In October of 1985, MADD’s board of directors, largely salaried male executives at that point, fired Candy Lightner. They claimed she was making excessive demands on the budget, she claimed it was a coup d’etat by radical prohibitionists who had infiltrated the organization. Disturbed by the shift from attacking drunk driving to attacking drinking in general, the founder of MADD later joined the liquor lobby, declaring, ‘I worry that the movement I helped create has lost direction. (The .08 legislation) ignores the real core of the problem. If we really want to save lives, let’s go after the most dangerous drivers on the road.'”
• America’s Drunk Driving Dilemma: “America has had a problem with drunk driving since Ford perfected the assembly line. I know it is a serious danger because I’ve lost young friends to drunken driving accidents. So what’s the answer? Today we continually increase the severity of the laws, strip away individual rights, and arrest over a million people per year. Is it working? MADD says it is, but critics say it isn’t. It depends on which statistics you wish to believe. I personally believe our current strategy is a failure and we could do better by trying to change the American values that lead to the drunken driving dilemma.”

• Facing Life with a Lethal Gene: A New York Times piece on Katherine Moser, who was diagnosed as having the gene for Huntington’s Disease, a rare genetic disease which strikes in middle age, causes degenration of brain cells and is incurable and lethal.

• Without Mouth-to-Mouth, CPR Still Works: “Chest compressions — not mouth-to-mouth resuscitation — seem to be the key in helping someone recover from cardiac arrest, according to new research that further bolsters advice from heart experts. A study in Japan showed that people were more likely to recover without brain damage if rescuers focused on chest compressions rather than on rescue breaths, and some experts advised dropping the mouth-to-mouth part of CPR altogether. The study was published yesterday in The Lancet.”