`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

From gyre and gimble to mimsy borogoves, enter the tulgey woods and listen out for the whiffling. Callooh, callay — the trailer of Alice in Wonderland was released over the weekend at the San Diego Comic-con.

It looks like it might be more of the usual bizarre Tim Burton world, kinda in the same magical realm of fantasy landscapes made of incredible perspectives as his other movies movies.

(Don’t get me wrong, I like his shows. Some more than others. I guess, what he does, he does well.)

Johnny Depp’s outlandish characters, just in a different coat and a change of makeup style. Less swagger than Jack Sparrow, more spontaneous than Willy Wonka and Sweeney Todd. Still, it’s his inimitable manner. And it’s Johnny Depp.

What I’m curious about is whether it’ll be like Disney’s 1951 animated feature, Alice in Wonderland, which merged Through the Looking Glass and Adventures in Wonderland.

I’ll see it for sure; I guess there’s always the novelty factor of catching these blockbuster tickets. It is Alice, after all.

I’ll see it for sure, just because I’m curious how they tackle the fantastical storyline and the whole motley crew of characters from the White Rabbit to the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the Caterpillar. All of that, and what the Jabberwock will look like.

Vorpal blades at the ready…

Strawberry Swing stop motion animation

Stop motion is all the rave right now. Well, it never really went away. But the higher tech one end of the spectrum gets, the more there will be a group that will revive something from yesteryear.

Sometimes, they blend lo- and hi-tech. Like the Drench commercial featuring Thunderbird’s Brains, which used the classic Thunderbird marionette together with CGI to achieve some moves which conventional puppetry cannot, no matter how skillful the puppet-master may be.

I’m curious if this video by Shynola for Coldplay’s single, Strawberry Swing was 100% stop motion. Whether the chalk backdrops were drawn out scene by painstaking scene (because the texture of the ground canvas doesn’t move) by.

Stop motion purists, rub your hands in glee. I gotta look out for a making-of.

Pondering how they did it is good and always part of the wonder and entertainment. But in the meantime, also just sit back and enjoy.

Happy Belated Fortieth

I’m a little late posting this, but July 20, 2009 marked the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

On that day in 1969, Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface at 20:17 UTC.

You would be hard-pressed to find someone who’s not seen footage of that historical moment, or images of families gathered around their black and white televisions watching awe-struck.

“We do not do these things because they are easy. We do these things because they are hard.”

I read this in a tweet a couple of weeks ago, where it was wrongly attributed to Neil Armstrong. It was spoken pertaining to going to the Moon, however. As part of a speech by John F Kennedy at Rice University, Texas, in 1962.

A bigger excerpt of what was said:

“But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? … We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

A stargazer’s lot

In 1986, my dad told me to look into a telescope lens and pointed out a blurry spot somewhere in space. He told me that was Halley’s Comet, a sight that passes by earth once in 75 years.

It wasn’t much of an awesome sight — it was more of a smudge, nothing close to comet pictures you see — but it was fascinating nonetheless. Not like Shoemaker-Levy, but I digress.

My inculcation of astronomy began earlier, when Dad pointed Orion’s belt out in the night sky. That led to the rest of Orion. And Canis Major running behind him (and Canis Minor too). And the Hunter’s shield up against the charging Taurus, the star Aldebaran its glinting, angry red eye.

Soon I was checking out Gemini’s Castor and Pollux. Then Scorpio, and its red star Antares. And Sagittarius. And the Southern Cross. And Corona Borealis. And…

By my teens, I was out in the backyard on a good night looking out for the Big Dipper or Bootes. I was more fascinated by the mythology behind the constellations, and though I wasn’t the smartest in the physics, I picked up some of it. I was in the Astronomy Club of what is probably the geekiest junior college in the country.

I’m not the most hardcore backyard astronomy enthusiast today. I kept some of my old astronomy books (out of sentimental reasons, because we have the Internet now), and a star chart in my diver’s log folder but that’s about it.

Though sometimes I look up into the night sky and go, “Hey, that’s Scorpio.” My friends would ask: “How do you see all that?” (Once or twice they said “Don’t do that. Not cool.”)

To answer: Probably, years of staring at the night sky. (And yes, maybe it’s not cool to admit that.)

Anyway.

A few months ago, I started on a project that was celestial and astronomy-related.

I recall thinking: “Great, something right up my alley. You couldn’t have picked a better writer to do this.”

The research was killer, but at least it delved into a topic I loved. Putting in the hours (and leaving this blog quiet for so long) was tiring but it was a labour of love on so many levels.

At the same time, it seemed that I might be in Shanghai in July.

On July 22, 2009, the longest solar eclipse of the century fall over northern India, central China and part of the Pacific Ocean and Japan. If I was in China, I would get to see the event.

(Totality lasted over 6 minutes; the  next longer solar eclipse would occur on June 13, 2132 — you would have more luck waiting for Halley’s to swing by again.)

Never in my life did it ever occur to me that I might get to see a solar eclipse. But at the same time, I knew how things would eventually pan out.

And true enough, when the time came to send the team up, the tech guy and the art director went up. And rightly so. At one point they wanted to send just the tech guy up (it was a tech job), but I did voice out to my boss that if anything, the art director should go up too as it would be good that someone help document what’s happening and other stuff, all of which would be visual-video related. Writers, well, they write from wherever there’s a good Internet connection and send the words over. It’s often like that. On a job with sizable budget, the art guys fly to fancy places to shoot a pack shot while the writer stays behind. I have a friend who wrote easily twenty headlines for a campaign themed along the lines of Restaurants of the World. Guess who went to all of the restaurants and who didn’t.

But that’s how it is. If you’re the agency and you have a limited budget, you’d do the same thing. In a way, I understood why it’s unfair like this.

Still, it sucked. S.U.C.K.E.D.

It sucked big time last weekend when after working all of Saturday I went home and sat alone in my room and the realisation sank in. I felt so down. I felt so down a friend had to hug me from halfway across the world. I felt so down because this would have meant so much to me. Because the others wouldn’t have known or cared about the difference between astronomy and astrology, quarks and quasars, the Horsehead Nebula and the Large Magellanic Cloud, V838 Monocerotis and spaghettification.

I’m glad my colleagues will be there to see it. I just wished I could join them. But c’est la vie. Unfair. You just fight every day in the hopes of being on the winning side. This one I lost. I could write all about eclipses, I just couldn’t see one.

The funny part is, part of what I’m writing, I’m writing like I was there in Shanghai and gushing about how awesome it was. Mind you, the whole thing would have been hard work, but I wouldn’t have minded.

And now that it’s all over, everyone’s celebrating the closure of a successful project. Which I am too.

But somehow, I can’t help but feel like something’s still hanging. I’m not satisfied. Part of me is eager to jump into the next project that would give a sense of a rush of excitement again. Part of me realises that I could spend my entire life in front of a computer screen if I wasn’t careful.

I felt a great urge to get out. Again.

I was so close to the longest eclipse of my lifetime. And yet 3,800 kilometers so far.

Such is a writer’s lot.

To Bluetooth or not?

Are they okay or not? The verdict on the Bluetooth headset is still open.

I thought they were funny when they first came out; people on the street looking like they were talking to no one. I mean, it’s one thing for me to talk to myself. But when people who are talking to other people but look like they are talking to themselves (and sometimes quite loudly)… that’s another matter altogether.

Then the cover of this month’s Wired magazine has Brad Pitt himself sporting a headset.

I’ve grown used to seeing executives on the street wearing it.

But seeing the world’s second most sexy man with a Bluetooth headset, and one of the more functional ones at that (read: ugly), seems totally strange.

I like that little call-out that reads:

Ditch the headset. He can barely pull it off — and you are not him.

Heehee.

Okay, okay, so I am a geek. I’ll admit to that because there’s no point denying your true self. We’ll just settle that I’m a geek in black patent high heels and skinny G-Star Raw.

Back to the issue of headsets.

True, it’s a convenient piece of gadget with a practical use. We were out at an event one Saturday and my colleague had it on so he could hear when calls came in. Which was a good idea. I’ve got my phone set to loud and buzzing and I still miss calls (unless it’s jeans, a lot of my clothes don’t have pockets — it’s a girl thing).

Furthermore, that would mean headsets avoid the mad scrambling and digging of handbag to find your ringing phone (it’s a girl thing) because Murphy’s Law dictates that you’ll locate it exactly 0.312 seconds after the ringing stops.

That said, I’m not rushing out to get one. I may be a geek but that… that thing clashes with everything remotely stylish. Maybe, if one day Agnes b started making headsets…

Anyway, the other plus of this July issue of Wired: check out the geek-style fashion spread with the Inglorious Basterds star, and read the article on New Rules for Highly Evolved Human Being.

I, Geek. Not.

I am so not a geek. Not only do I not hit a decent score, I have no idea what most of these are talking about. So there. Woo-hoo!

Are you in the right place to stop the Sun?

There’s a total solar eclipse next Wednesday, 22 July 2009.

But chances are, you are not in northern India or central China. Which makes it unlikely you’ll catch the total eclipse outside. Which makes it a good thing that it will be shown “live” at this website, SunStopper.sg. (Thank you Internet, yet again!)

In Shanghai, the total eclipse will begin at about 01:30 hours UTC/GMT, which is around 09:30 am local Shanghai time.

This eclipse promises to be a grand one, the longest one this century at 6 minutes 39 seconds. (The next longer one will be on 13 June 2132, so if you’d like to wait…)

Eclipses aren’t all that rare — there are generally two and up to five solar eclipses a year. But not all are total eclipses, and since the path of totality falls along a narrow corridor, not all are seen by a great number of people.

This total solar eclipse will begin in the early morning in northern India, travel through central China then hit the Pacific Ocean to some islands in Japan. That black dot in the animation — that’s the umbral shadow of the Moon passing between the Sun and earth.

If you are in Surat, Varanasi, Patna, Thimphu, Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan, Hangzhou and Shanghai or somewhere in the vicinity of the Three Gorges Dam, you are in luck.

(Insert envious glare.)

The rest of Asia will get to enjoy varying degrees of a partial eclipse, as they are right in the much larger area of the Moon’s penumbral shadow.

I especially like the eclipse countdown clock widget you can download from SunStopper.

It’s the only Sun I get to see these days.

View of the gods

You’ve seen those quintessential volcano pictures from your Geography textbooks. Conical in shape, symmetrical slopes climbing steadily up to the crater peak. A tropical island on its own, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

It doesn’t take much imagination to envision islanders in grass skirts beating drums and hauling up offerings of game and fruit, and the occasional hapless virgin, up towards the fiery lava crater, all to appease the gods.

Well, here’s that perfect volcano as seen by said gods.

Or the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 satellite. The island is Manam Volcano, off the coast of mainland Papua New Guinea, and it released a plume of smoke last month on June 28.

Smoking is bad, but this is a breathtaking picture, nonetheless.

Unrelated and totally off tangent, this picture also reminds me of the 2004 Collection from Prada. (I so need retail therapy right now.)

Humuhumunukunukuapua’a

I learnt something new today: Humuhumunukunukuapua’a.

It’s the name of the reef triggerfish that’s the state fish of Hawaii. How it got to be state fish is kinda like the fish’s name — long and confusing.

In 1984, state Legislature asked the University of Hawaii and Waikiki Aquarium to come up with a candidate for state fish. And they did. The Humuhumunukunukuapua’a won the spot by a landslide, thanks in part to school kids who had learnt of the project in class.

Humuhumunukunukuapua’a means “triggerfish with a snout like a pig”.

It does look like a pig and even makes grunting noises, possibly to warn other fishes of danger. It is slightly aggressive, as many reef triggerfishes are, but Hawaiians still find the Humuhumu (that’s the short name, by the way) endearing enough to place its image everywhere, making it a familiar icon found on anything from tee-shirts to fridge magnets.

For reasons unknown, even though the fish was popular, the method of the poll was deemed questionable and lawmakers limited the title to five years. Naturally, there was no pomp and ceremony when the fish’s title ran out.

Cut to 2006.

Rep. Blake Oshiro, in a conversation with fish-loving six-year-old Joel Itomura, discovered that the Humuhumunukunukuapua’a’s designation was not official. Taken aback, Oshiro did his research and uncovered that Hawaii indeed had no state fish.

And the movement to reinstate Official State Fish began in earnest again.

What the Humuhumu had going for it: its striking markings, cuteness and that it people didn’t eat it.

The biggest obstacle it faced was that it was not unique to the Hawaiian islands.

For that reason, some locals favoured the oopu, a freshwater gobbie found only in Hawaii. However, there is no shortage of fish species unique to the islands; there are thirteen species of wrasses found there and nowhere else in the world.

Game fish like the ulua might be popular, but a risky option if environmentalists come into the picture.

Anyway, to cut the long story short, the Humuhumu’s indignity was swiftly righted by mid-2006, this time with no expiration date. Humu-ray.

Inside a funny man’s mind

He is a funny person though sometimes I find I’m not in the mood for his style of humour. I’m not particularly fond of his string dance. He can be irritating sometimes, with his cackling laughter and just plain irritating-ness (but that can probably be said of most boys).

But I like his impeccable comic timing. His pauses, and the way he uses awkward glances. And I find myself strangely unable to tear my eyes away from his orange and gravity-defying structure that is his hair. I’m also awed at how freakishly tall he is, especially when he stands to greet his guests and they barely come up to his shoulder. (At that height, with that hair, I half expect him to be standing in the North Seas generating electricity from wind.)

And he wrote that commencement speech to the Harvard Class in 2000. For a long time I wondered if it was really by him, but I never should have doubted. I mean, if it’s on the Internet, of course it’s real. That speech that I read when I was still new to writing, and that I still read once in a while, just for fun. Not because it’s by-now famous, or well written, but also because it’s truth well told.

(If you need to ask what speech, *roll eyes*, it’s this one. And in case you’re a still sceptic, I’ll save you a trip to snopes; here’s a video of him giving that speech.)

Two words: The Simpsons.

I guess I have to give it to the man. Part demi-god he may be, but he’s also human after all.

We all have days when we’re just flying, and we have the other days. We have days when we’re all in the zone, and days when we couldn’t write something worthy of a cubicle wall at a greasy truck stop. (Or at least I do.) We just hope for more of the former and as little of the latter as possible.

So, when Conan is funny, he’s funny. And witty. And sharp. And smart. And I like those times. Take a look inside the man’s mind (before the aliens come and take it away for dissection).

This is Conan O’Brien on Inside the Actors Studio with James Lipton.

Another one for the Moments-of-Truth book is the part where Conan talks about what he does (and how it defies rational thought):

“When something’s your job, it’s your job. And they call it that for a reason. When it’s going well, I’d do it for free. When it’s not going well, I would rather do anything else. Because it’s painful. Half my career has been pain management.”