I love this computer-generated series of graphics, apparently growing out of only 4kb of coding (via BoingBoing):
Hartverdrahtet – Akronyme Analogiker
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Colourful walls
Close to the Potterrow Student Union facilities by Edinburgh University there is a section of wall hidden behind some carriageway between the Uni and the back of the National Museum on the other side of the road, mostly just boring concrete and breeze block, which is always covered in graffiti. It seems to be an unofficially official kind of spot for street art in that for years that plain, concrete section behind nicer old buildings has been allowed to remain a spot for street artists to cover. The graffiti on it constantly changes as one new set overpaints older stuff, so every now and then it is worth me having a quick walk past to see if there is anything new. Quite often, disappointingly, it is just large examples of lettering – not bad in itself, some done rather well, but I get rather bored from seeing piles of graffiti that is simply some big 3D lettering, I’d much rather see someone creating some visual art, like these two recent examples I noticed when walking past.
Turing 100
(Professor Jim Al-Khalili signing books after the Turing lecture)
On Thursday night I attended a special guest lecture at Edinburgh University’s George Square Theatre, organised by the Edinburgh Royal Society, with author, theoretical physicist and broadcaster (he’s presented some excellent science documentaries on the BBC and C4) Professor Jim Al-Khalili. It was part of a series of events going on this year to mark 100 years since one of the great minds of the 20th century, Alan Turing, was born. I’ve always been a huge admirer of Turing – the father of computing and Artificial Intelligence, working out systems on pencil and paper before he and his colleagues, along with the GPO’s hugely gifted electronic engineer Tommy Flowers, created the world’s first electronic computer, a device so secret it was classified for decades while publicly others took the glory for ‘first’ computers later. Because they used this to help break the Nazi Enigma codes, without which the Second World War might have taken many more years of hard struggle and countless thousands more lives. He and his Bletchley Park colleagues were, in a real sense, war heroes, just not the sort who carry a rifle into combat, but utterly essential to the defeat of the Axis and the safeguarding of free civilisation. Turing was also a gifted visionary who was able to conceive of using science and mathematics to model thought processes years before others, giving new pathways to exploring both computing technology then emerging as well as understanding more how the incredibly complex human brain works and how that could be applied to machines, if they too could be make to think, each step along that road revealing more about the astonishing complexity of our own minds than that of our complex technology.
Sadly in the 50s Turing, a homosexual man, was arrested, homosexuality being illegal at the time, stripped of his security clearance despite his wartime record and given a choice of chemical castration or prison. He took the former but was never the same; depressed he took his own life with an arsenic laced apple. So little appreciation from the government of the country he had helped save with his genius and dedication and a reminder today when we see some clergy and politicians making unsavoury remarks about gay people how such comments can lead to attitudes and actions which can take lives, to the detriment of all of society… Turing remains one of my scientific heroes, though, and I was pleased that a public campaign a couple of years ago resulted in the then Labour government of Gordon Brown publishing an official apology for the way Turing had been treated back in the Britain of the 50s.
(my friend Jer with Jim after getting his copy of Jim’s latest book signed)
Lucky Luke rides into town
Lucky Luke
Directed by James Huth
Starring Jean Dujardin, Michael Youn, Sylvie Testud, Daniel Prevost, Alexandra Lamy
Lucky Luke, the lonesome cowboy who can drawn and shoot faster than his shadow has been around for a long time – 1946, in fact, since the great Morris first drew his Wild West hero. Over the decades he’s remained popular, being translated into many languages (including, now, a good array of BD albums from Cinebook in the UK) and into other media. Previous filmic outings have never proven as good as the long-running comic though – until now. I actually first saw this live action take on Lucky Luke a couple of years ago at my annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh International Film Festival. I’d decided to go but didn’t have high expectations – to be honest I was thinking it was likely to be around the level of the live action Asterix films from France, that is to say passable but not especially good. I was pleasantly surprised – my friends and I at that Film Festival screening laughed continually throughout the film and spent a good while in the pub discussing it afterwards. All of us agreed it was so choc-full of details it demanded another viewing on DVD at home.
And then a couple of years passed and for some reason it simply never got a UK release, which infuriated me – terrible to see a great film at a festival, tell everyone about it but they can’t see it… I’m delighted to say that now that is being rectified with a DVD release at the end of this month. I was lucky enough to get an advance disc and re-watching the film I found it even funnier than the first time around. In fact it’s one of the funniest films I’ve seen in years (puns and jokes abound even in the closing credits although it might stretch your French a little to get them!). The film is loaded with humour, from jokey dialogue and characters through to more subtle jokes in the background or in the wonderfully detailed sets, which are as close as a live-action can get to re-creating the look of a comic, all the buildings looking like they have been sketched freehand without a ruler, giving Luke’s world an appropriately cartoony appearance while still remaining very Western. Visually it draws on the comics but also from a rich tradition of American Westerns, from the iconic landscapes of a John Ford flick to the Spaghetti Westerns of the great Sergio Leone (with, I think a tip of the hat to Mel Brook’s magnificent Blazing Saddles).
In fact the opening flashback of young Luke witnessing the murder of his parents by desperadoes is heavily indebted stylistically to Sergio Leone (no bad thing in my book). Flash forward again and we have our cowboy hero meeting the President in a special railroad car (comically wreathed in cigar smoke, a jokey nod to the fact our once smoking cowboy now just has a blade of grass in his lips instead of ciggies – better example for the kids!), in a scene that borrows from Leone’s operatic Once Upon a Time in the West. The railroad is coming to unite both side of the United States and make it into a full nation. But before he can drive in the golden rail spike to unite the lines to the coasts Luke’s old stomping ground of Daisy Town has to be sorted out. Once a peaceful haven it is now a riot of outlaws under the leadership of gambler and conjurer Poker; the President asks Luke to clean up the town and so our hero rides in alone to the viper’s nest. He may be outnumbered and out-gunned but Luke, with his trusty steed Jolly Jumper, is in a class of his own and the jail is soon full of villains. All seems well until Poker forces a proper, old school Western showdown in the street. Needless to say he can’t outdraw Luke, and as the shot rings out he falls dead… Luke is mortified, he uses his guns but never kills, and thinking he’s taken a life could destroy him faster than any gang of bandidos…
And I won’t tell you anymore of the plot because I don’t want to spoil it for you. But the story is only one half of the tremendous fun on offer here. The film is quickfire gags and some brilliant characters (Calamity Jane, toughest gal gun in the West, but with a girly crush on Luke under that hard as nails exterior, Jesse James constantly quoting Shakespeare like a true ham, James and Billy the Kid trying to light one of Luke’s blades of grass to smoke it and getting wasted), the cowering locals in Daisy Town will only venture outdoors in barrels for protection, the details in sets and even clothes are just perfect. It’s full of enough humour so that the younger readers the the comics are aimed at will be kept laughing, but it also has plenty of little asides aimed at the adult audiences, not to mention the plethora of references to other classic Western film that will reward the adult viewer. It’s pure, wonderfully played, wonderfully detailed fun throughout and Dujardin, here in a pre The Artist role, is perfect as a live action Luke, although of course when the French cast talk to him he sounds more like Looky Luke! But the French language in such an American genre as a Western actually adds to the good natured humour of the whole film. Unmissable fun and one of the funniest flicks I have seen in years.
This review was originally penned for the Forbidden Planet Blog, where there is a competition currently running to win a DVD of the film.
Women in Comics – Hysterical Women and Graphic Grrrlz in Edinburgh
Last week I was lucky enough to catch a busy talk in Edinburgh’s Central Library, Hysterical Women and Graphic Grrrlz. Heather Middleton from the Glasgow Women’s Library and also a member of Glasgow-based all-female collective Team Girl Comic. Heather was giving a talk on the history of women in comics and while there is no way to fit all of that history into one talk Heather made a very fine attempt to give the audience a good overview that would put that female history of comics into some context that even audience members who weren’t very well versed in the medium (it was a mixed crowd of those with an interest in comics and those more interested in literature and gender studies) could get a decent handle on it and for those of us who do have some knowledge of comics history I can say from my own experience that Heather flagged some works I was familiar with but also managed to bring up some I hadn’t heard of before.
One of the first works Heather brought up was the famous very early comics work Ally Sloper, often credited to Victorian writer/artist Charles H Ross. I had some vague knowledge of the strip – I’d certainly heard of it and Ally himself is a pretty distinctive comics creation, very iconic (no wonder he expanded out into his own comic and was one of the early comics characters to rake in money through widescale merchandising too, such was his popularity). However I had no idea that Ross’ wife, French woman Emilie de Tessier, usually working under the pen name Marie Duval, worked on the strip inking then taking over the art duties fully for many years. And the reason I didn’t know that, Heather explained, is because she has been largely airbrushed out of the Ally Sloper story, right back during the height of Ally’s success, with things going as far as removing her initials from the artwork for collected editions in later years. A women comics creator was pretty unusual in the Victorian era, a woman comics artist who was behind a hugely successful creation that was a pop cultural icon was even more unusual. And yet she was effectively painted out of her own story…
Heather touched on other creators, contemporaries of the likes of George Herriman in the 1910s and 20s but who rarely seem to have achieved the same level of historical fame (or indeed beautifully produced modern archive edition collections that have become such a nice feature of the quality end of comics publishing today) and then the wartime creators, the women who, just like the women who relieved men from the factories by leaving their traditional roles as homemakers to to replace the male works, took over some of the load on strips during the war, including traditionally male strips such as adventure tales. Naturally most were expected to either return to being housewives or, if remaining in comics, to go back to working on more ‘womanly’ strips such as romance tales when the men came home.
Heather brought the history of women in comics up to date with some of the female creators of the Underground Comix days, contemporaries of Crumb et al and how even in those days when there was supposedly a move to equality many of those women found themselves in rampantly sexist situations, treated by the male cartoonists as the ‘little ladies’, often treated condescendingly leading to some setting up their own collectives and working on their own stuff (including the likes of Melinda Gebbie) and even then they could run into patriarchal walls with printers sometimes refusing to print their work for them, claiming it to be ‘obscene’ (some of the same printers happily printed male-based underground comix featuring giant phalluses but they deemed a scene of child birth in a woman-created comic to be beyond the pale, something echoed years later in a male-created comic, Marvelman/Miracleman, where some fans were outspoken about the inclusion of a birth scene but had no problem with the preceding violent scenes).
(Heather during her talk in Central Library, pics from my Flickr)
We came to the modern day with contemporary female comics creators, including the self-published creators and the collectives such as Team Girl Comic (who I saw flying the small press comics flag at Hi-Ex just recently), which Heather herself is a part of. And that brings me to a related topic – Team Girl Comic is running a Kickstarter to raise funds to help publish issue 5, so please do consider giving them some support (and of course, spread the word about the fundraiser).
(Team Girl Comic at Hi-Ex in March)
And on another related note Heather told us that the Glasgow Women’s Library, like many libraries, is very open to the comics medium and indeed they actively encourage donations of relevant work by female creators or female oriented works, including those from the small press, self published scene. I know plenty of such creators read the blog regularly, so when you are next publishing some of your work why not consider donating a copy to be archived at the Glasgow Women’s Library, where it will be looked after and made available for reading and for research. I think it would be terrific if the female creators in our excellent small press community supported that initiative.
(cover design for Team Girl Comic #5 by Colleen Campbell)
This event report was originally penned for the Forbidden Planet blog
Hovis to help unemployed youth and environment
Hovis the well known UK bakers has announced a new business plan they say will help alleviate both the awful current youth unemployment statistics and benefit the environment at the same time, with a side bonus of increasing the fitness of the nation. They are to scrap their fleet of large lorries spewing out diesel across the land as they cross the whole of the UK to deliver yummy fresh bread to stores and reinstate their classic young lad on a bike local delivery system, which was made famous by Sir Ridley Scott back in his advertising days. This will, the company says, reduce carbon emissions, fuel consumption and lead to a mini boom for bicycle manufacturers and new opportunities for unemployed youth to be gainfully employed and to get fit while providing a service to the community. There is a down side – in the Olde Days many children were pushed to such levels of physical exhaustion cycling their bread deliveries up incredibly steep hills they died of extreme fatigue.
This wasn’t a huge problem back then as the streets of Britain then abounded with cheeky, chirpy orphaned ragamuffin urchins who could be used to replace existing cycle delivery lads as they dropped out. It could be a more of a problem today, but with youth suffering most of all from unemployment in the double dip recession it is thought there will still be more applying than there are cycle available to use, and Liam Fox is already consulting with the government on re-writing employment protection laws for under 25s so it is once more legal to run urchins until they drop, as we did in the glory days of the Rule Britannia Empire (cheers, waves flag, salutes picture of Queen Victoria paddling at Brighton while wearing an “I heart General Gordon” t-shirt) – as some Tory MPs have pointed out, when it was legal to work children to death and whip any who complained of conditions Britain ruled a global empire and was king of industry and world commerce, so perhaps we need to get back to those old-fashioned values.
The Big E over the Big Apple
With the shuttle programme – and NASA’s ability, for the moment, to send manned missions into space – now grounded and the surviving spacecraft being sent to various museums around America today there was a very special moment as a modified 747 carried a very special shuttle flying low over New York City for everyone to watch. The spacecraft was the Enterprise. The ending of the shuttle programme is much like the ending of Concorde for many of us – when we were kids they were the future, now they are history and that would be fine, it would be natural, if they were retired to make way for the next generation of craft to replace them, but they’re not. We’ve stepped backwards, it feels, become smaller. But for a final hurrah this was a remarkable one, the Enterprise, her very name resonates for many of us, flying over New York, captured here with Lady Liberty and the Empire State in the frame by Bill Ingalls:
What a remarkable shot, a couple of the great world landmarks with a piece of flying space exploration history. Enterprise was named after NASA called for a public vote to name the first spaceship; the geek community, of course, got together and made sure to vote en masse that she would be called the Enterprise, because she was the first of a series that would boldly go… Enterprise herself never brushed against the hard vacuum of space though, she started her career at NASA riding piggyback just like she was today – she was designed to test aerodynamics, a bit of a new area for spacecraft design at the time because most were odd shaped objects on the end of a rocket but the shuttle, she was meant to fly back down from orbit through the atmosphere like a conventional plane, hence the tests. As a boy I followed the emerging shuttle programme and remember well watching news reports of the Enterprise’s flights paving the way for the first full shuttle launch.
As a wee boy raised on repeats of the classic Star Trek it made me happy to see a real spacecraft being named Enterprise and, Americans being rather good at marking big occasions, when she was first revealed to the public Trek creator Gene Rodenberry and many of the original cast were there to wish her good skies, way back in 1976 (pic below and following borrowed from Space.com):
And here three and a half decades or so on is one of those illustrious crewmembers of the fictional USS Enterprise giving the Vulcan salute – live long and prosper – to his old friend, the shuttle Enterprise, as she heads for the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Musuem in New York. Rather fitting she will be near the USS Intrepid, which any old Star Trek hand knows was the name of one of the other Constitution class starships in the original Trek, the same class of vessel as Jim Kirk’s Enterprise (Intrepid being crewed entirely by Vulcans, if my memory serves):
As I said, like with Concorde, it feels wrong to know that the shuttle are gone, that something that promised the exciting future of space exploration to a young boy is now a historical artefact in a museum and that we didn’t mothball them to make way for a new generation of faster, bigger, more efficient spacecraft. Still, one of these days there will be another Enterprise, I am sure. Larger, with a greater range, this Enterprise A, B or C ships will boldly go further… As Captain Jean-Luc Picard himself once noted when asked if they would ever build another Enterprise “plenty more letters in the alphabet”.
One day, another Enterprise, please, make it so…
(Enterprise comparison chart from Cygnus X-1 site)
Changing light on the landscape
Out with my dad a few days ago, one of those days where we had bright sunlight, rain, hail and more all within minutes of one another. May make the weather unpredictable for going out but it also means constantly changing quality of light, something I rather love in Scotland, it makes even scenes you’ve seen many times before look different. We had driven up and over the Campsie Hills (a range of extinct volcanoes a little north of Glasgow) and coming down the far side towards Fintry we pulled over to watch a band of sun and rain move along the hills and mountains in the north. Above you can clearly see Ben Lomond, the most southerly of the Scottish Munros – a Munro is a mountain over 3000 feet and hill walkers and climbers who try to do all of them and tick them off are known as Munro Baggers – which is in the Trossachs and Loch Lomond National Park, still snowcapped as you can see even in late April, caught here in shafts of sunlight from gaps in the cloud while dark curtains of rain flicker over the other summits nearby.
You can see huge areas such as the foreground in deep gloomy shadows from the heavy clouds overhead, some of the peaks in the distance being hammered with rain, others basking in sun (we watched the sun and rain move along the whole range in a few minutes), if you click on the pics to go the larger images on the Woolamaloo Flickr you can even see some smaller, lower clouds floating around below the actual peaks themselves. All this landscape beauty is just a short drive from Scotland’s largest city – it’s one of the reasons I love living in Scotland, even in the middle of a city you are never far from our landscape. Here where I live in Edinburgh I can catch glimpses of the Pentland Hills from the middle of town, or views down to the might river Forth and the hills of Fife on the other side. Best of both worlds.
Papaye
Geoffrey Godet’s Papaye is a very short but very funny animation, with some very nice use of lighting, texture and background details to give it a nice sense of depth and believability:
Papaye from Geoffrey GODET on Vimeo.
Henri the existential cat
My friend Deirdre put me on to these, somehow she knew they would appeal to me 
Introducing Henri the existentialist kitty cat…
and
The Easter message
Live long and prosper…
Love this photo of the first lady of Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols, with President Obama; nice to see he can do the Vulcan salute too, I suspect his predecessor Dubyah was still struggling with the notion of opposable thumbs too much to be able to do that. I wonder if he asked her about her encounter with Dr Martin Luther King Jr and how he told her to stay on the original show in the 60s even though she felt her character didn’t get many lines because just having a black face – and a woman too – on prime time TV in the US during that turbulent era, let alone one who was a senior bridge officer, was an important, viisble role model for young coloured Americans. And you didn’t say no to King. (via FP blog via Live for Films)
