If you go to Rome, do see the Trevi Fountain at night. It looks more amazing than it does during the day. And the crowds start to drift away around 11pm. :-)

We got home from Paris last night and had about 12 hours sleep. It’s morning and it feels like morning, yay! Here’s a photo from Piazza Navona in Rome.

It always weirds me out when I see lots of new photos being posted to Flickr at this time of year with spring flowers, or around October with autumn leaves. To correct this hemispheric bias, here are some shots I took last weekend.

Well, here we are. I actually had to go out to a shop and buy a copy of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier on DVD, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to write this review. Before making this noble sacrifice, I think I’ve only seen this particular instalment in the movie series twice, once at the original cinematic release, and once on TV. It has the reputation of being the worst of all the Star Trek films, and for good reason.

It opens in Yosemite Valley, where the Enterprise bridge crew are spending shore leave on a camping trip. Kirk is shown free climbing El Capitan, a feat that by all rights should be physically beyond anyone of William Shatner’s physical condition at the time. He is saved from falling to his death by Spock, in a Chekhov’s-gun-setup use of gravity boots. Kirk says he was never worried, since he’s always known that he will die alone.

On the distant planet Nimbus III, we see a wretched hive town. The Romulan ambassador Caithlin arrives at a seedy bar (complete with a catgirl alien), and explains in excruciating expositionary detail to the human and Klingon ambassadors there that Nimbus III is the “The Planet of Galactic Peace”. The peace is short-lived, as a strange mystical Vulcan and his fanatical followers attack the place and take the ambassadors hostage.

The Enterprise crew are called back to deal with the hostage situation, but the ship is in a mess, despite Scotty working full time on it. Basically anything on the ship that could be broken is broken, for no explicable reason. It’s mind-boggling to think a military vessel not actually in combat would ever be allowed to get into such a state – it really makes no sense at all.

We’re then treated to a shot of a Klingon vessel blowing up an Earth space probe, apparently just for the heck of it. The probe looks remarkably like Voyager, bringing up echoes of V-ger from the first film. The Klingon commander (who is a glam rock star, judging by his hairdo) is ordered to Nimbus as well, and starts salivating at the prospect of destroying Kirk and the Enterprise.

The Enterprise arrives at Nimbus and Kirk decides the best way to approach the city is on space-horses. Nichelle Nichols has to undergo her most embarrassing acting scene ever, as she does a fan dance to distract some nomads so the guys can steal horses and ride into the city. But the ambassador hostages have become followers of the Vulcan, who Spock recognises as the renegade Sybok, and they capture the heroes. Mixed up in a fight scene Spock gives a Vulcan nerve pinch to a horse; apparently their physiology is enough like humanoids that it works on them too.

They take a shuttlecraft back to Enterprise (evading the Klingons mentioned earlier on the way) – the shuttlecraft pickup scene has very strong echoes of the landing scene in Alien. When the shuttle lands on the Enterprise, Spock has a chance to kill Sybok and end the entire crisis, but he refuses to kill his own brother. Wait… Spock has a brother?! Half-brother, it turns out, since Sarek apparently had a Vulcan wife before Amanda – something never before (or after) hinted at in any Star Trek canon. Also wait… why didn’t Spock just set the weapon on stun and shoot Sybok? I guess that particular gun only had a kill setting.

Sybok takes control of the Enterprise and tosses Kirk and Spock in the brig. The toilet in the brig has an obvious sign on it: “Do not use while in space dock”. Presumably somebody on the writing team thought that was funny. Scotty busts them out, after warning them to stand back by tapping on the other side of the brig wall in Morse code. The gravity boots reappear as a way to quickly move up and down the access tubes of the ship.

Sybok is taking the ship to the centre of the galaxy, to find the Vulcan legendary world of Sha Ka Ree, where he hopes to find God. They get there and meet a being who looks and sounds like God, and asks to be taken away on their ship to spread his word throughout the galaxy. Kirk asks the only memorable line of the film: “Excuse me, what does God need with a starship?” “God” goes into a rage, Sybok sees through it and sacrifices himself to give the others time to escape. The Klingon ship reappears, but the Klingon ambassador who Kirk and Spock saved arranges for it to fire a torpedo at “God”, killing it. The Enterprise and Klingon vessel part company on peaceful terms, and the heroes head back to Yosemite to finish their camping trip.

Whew, I’m glad to have that one over and done with. About the only highlight of the film is Jerry Goldsmith’s music. It opens the film in fine style, with echoes of the original TV series theme, before segueing into the Motion Picture/Next Generation theme, which sounds much more refined and enveloping than in the first film. Throughout the movie, while cringing at what was happening on screen, I was enjoying the music. There are a lot of bad scenes in this film, and the overall story is simply dull and uninspiring. The best moments are the camping sequences that book-end the film, and the scene on the Enterprise where it’s shown to have an old-fashioned sailing-ship-style wheelhouse room, complete with brass and wood ship’s wheel. Now that’s what a starship bridge should look like! If you haven’t seen this film for a long time, like I had, you’re not missing much.

Tropes: Climb, Slip, Hang, Climb, Catch A Falling Star, Not The Fall That Kills You, Chekhov’s Gun, Tricked-Out Shoes, Wretched Hive, Mr Exposition, Cat Girl, Expospeak, ’80s Hair, Horse Of A Different Colour, Show Some Leg, Long Lost Relative, Canon Discontinuity, Everyone Knows Morse, Armour Piercing Question, No Such Thing As Space Jesus, Heroic Sacrifice, Book Ends.
Body count: “God”, Sybok.

I did a one-day course at work yesterday on creative and innovative thinking. It was fun and interesting, and I think I picked up some good ideas. The guy giving the course told us a few stories.

One time he was talking to a group of a couple hundred or so kids, maybe around 8 or 9 years old. He yelled excitedly, “Who here can dance?!” And every single kid got up and started dancing around wildly.

Another time he was addressing a group of a couple of hundred business executives. He yelled excitedly, “Who here can dance?!” Not a single one of them moved.

His question: When did all those adults forget how to dance?

For the record: If I can’t tell whether your comment is spam or not, I’m marking it as spam without a second thought.

I see that the TV stations here have all given up the ghost on 4:3 aspect ratio. They used to frame things like news and sports broadcasts so that there was no vital information outside the 4:3 framing, so it wouldn’t be cropped off on old TV sets. But now I’ve noticed all of that info has expanded, presumably to fill the full width of the 16:9 aspect ratio, meaning bits of it are now cropped on my TV. Also they’re now framing humans so they’re frequently chopped in half on my screen.

I guess it’s time to bite the bullet and buy a new TV soon.

Just spent a very fun lunchtime at work filming some video.

For a secret project.

Stay tuned.

Got up early this morning to take photos at Collaroy. Sunrise was pretty poor, but I got this shot, which I think turned out well.

An Android app developer is using Darths & Droids, plus the work of many other webcomic creators, without permission or even prior knowledge, and making money off it with advertising. I’ve contacted the developer and asked him to remove Darths & Droids from the app. You may want to spread the word to other webcomic communities.

andare (to go)
I go – (io) vado, vo
you go (inf.) – (tu) vai
he/she/it goes, you go (pol.) – (lui/lei/Lei) va
we go – (noi) andiamo
you go (pl. inf.) – (voi) andate
they go, you make/do (pol.) – (loro/Loro) vanno

A very useful verb, though the conjugation is rather irregular. I’m most familiar with this one from my last trip to Italy, when I went on a guided tour up the volcano of Stromboli in the Aeolian Islands. After each rest break or other interruption to our progress up the mountain, our tour leader would yell, “Andiamo!” – literally “We go!” or idiomatically “Let’s go!”

My Italian dictionary lists both vado and vo for the first person singular present tense conjugation, but it’s not clear to me what the difference is, or when you might use one rather than the other. A couple of other books I have list only vado. Maybe it’s a dialect thing? Or maybe vo is slangy, the sort of talk hip young kids on the streets of Naples use?

fare (to make, to do)
I make/do – (io) faccio, fo
you make/do (inf.) – (tu) fai
he/she/it makes/does, you make/do (pol.) – lui/lei/Lei fa
we make/do – (noi) facciamo
you make/do (pl. inf.) – (voi) fate
they make/do, you make/do (pol.) – (loro/Loro) fanno

This will take some learning. I was not familiar with this verb before now, but it’s another very common one. Looking at my Italian dictionary, this is a verb with a lot of complexity in Italian. Not only does it do double duty for the common meanings of “to make” and “to do”, it’s used in an awful lot of idiomatic expressions. I’ll just have to try and get the more basic usages down first.

One thing about Italian verbs that you might notice is that in the conjugation list I’m putting the Italian pronouns in parentheses. This is because, unlike in English, the conjugations are all different, so they indicate the subject of the verb without the explicit subject word actually needing to be there. So Italian speakers typically simply omit the pronouns:

Faccio pasta. – I make pasta.

You could say Io faccio pasta, but the Io isn’t necessary since the subject “I” is implied by the conjugation of the verb. This is in contrast to the closely related Romance language Spanish (a little bit of which I learnt last year for my trip to South America), where the pronoun is still needed, even though the verb conjugation has to match, and implies what the pronoun must be:

Spanish: Yo hago la pasta.

Here the hago means the subject must be Yo, but you still need to say the Yo. Knowing some Italian helped me with Spanish, because apart from this difference the sentence structures are almost identical, and many words are derived from the same roots, so look familiar. Disclaimer: I’m no expert on Spanish! This is my understanding – I may be wrong. (I’m no expert in Italian either, for that matter, but I’m a bit more comfortable with it.)

avere (to have)
I have – (io) ho
you have (inf.) – (tu) hai
he/she/it has, you have (pol.) – lui/lei/Lei ha
we have – (noi) abbiamo
you have (pl. inf.) – (voi) avete
they have, you have (pol.) – (loro/Loro) hanno

Probably the next most important verb after “to be” is “to have”. You can be lots of things, and you can have lots of things.
Ho una pizza. I have a pizza.
Abbiamo una prenotazione. We have a reservation. (Useful for hotels.)

In Italian, avere is also used for many things that take the verb “to be” in English, such as states of mind or age.
Ho caldo. I am hot. (literally “I have heat”)
Ho fame. I am hungry. (lit. “I have hunger”)
Ha ventuno anni. He/she is twenty one years old. (lit. “He/she has twenty one years.”)

Be especially careful if you want to say you are hot. If you use essere – Sto caldo. – you are not saying the temperature is uncomfortably high, you are saying that you are hot, sexy stuff.

So I’m trying to teach myself more Italian than I learnt last time I went to Italy in 2001. I know enough rudiments that it’s time to start learning some verbs systematically. I originally posted these first two on Google+, but thought I’d transfer them here for longer term posterity. I’ll continue here rather than there. Without further ado:

Verb of the day 1: essere (to be).
The most common and important verb of all, both in English and Italian. Interestingly, I believe it’s the most irregular verb of all in English. Compare:
to walk – to be
I walk – I am
you walk – you are
he/she/it walks – he/she/it is
we walk – we are
you (plural) walk – you (plural) are
they walk – they are
I walked – I was
you walked – you were
he/she/it walked – he/she/it was
we walked – we were
you (pl.) walked – you (pl.) were
they walked – they were

In Italian, essere is also irregular, but does partly follow the basic pattern for verb conjugation endings:
to be – essere
I am – (io) sono
you are (informal) – (tu) sei
he/she/it is, you are (polite) – (lui,lui,Lei) è
we are – (noi) siamo
you are (pl. inf.) – (voi) siete
they are, you are (pl. pol.) – (loro,Loro) sono

I am human. Sono umano.

I pretty much know this verb already, but I thought I’d start at the beginning.

Verb of the day 2: stare (to be)
Yep, Italian has two verbs that mean (almost) the same thing! Or rather, it has two verbs that do different parts of the job that the multi-tasking “to be” does in English.
Essere (and its conjugations) is generally used for things with a degree of permanence, such as characteristics of people or objects:
Sono umano. – I am human.
Il libro è rosso. – The book is red.

Stare is used for temporary states, such as feelings or actions.
Sto bene. – I am well.
Sto cercando la stazione. – I am looking for the station.

Conjugations:
to be – stare
I am – (io) sto
you are (inf.) – (tu) stai
he/she/it is, you are (pol.) – (lui/lei/Lei) sta
we are – (noi) stiamo
you are (pl. inf.) – (voi) state
they are, you are (pol.) – stanno

A common usage that many English speakers may have heard is in the question Come stai? – “How are you”? Though this is the informal form of the question, which should only be used with people you know well. The polite form, for strangers, is Come sta?

Sheesh, what a summer. To any tourist who visited Sydney this summer and expected some nice weather: I’m sorry. Truly and deeply sorry.

It is, of course, pouring rain right now. The 28-day weather outlook is: Rain. Every. Single. Day.

Half the state is either flooded or in danger of going under some time in the next 24 hours, including many Sydney suburbs. Parts of the state have received a third or more of their annual average rainfall in February alone. The forecast for the next 24 hours is up to 140 mm more rain in some areas. Warragamba Dam, Sydney’s main reservoir, is at capacity and expected to overflow within the next few hours. (The stupid thing about this being that a few years ago, when we thought the drought would never break, the government contracted for a huge water desalination plant in Sydney. And now they can’t turn it off because then the government would be liable for tens of millions of dollars of damages for breach of contract to the contractor. So instead we’re paying them to waste energy generating fresh water which is pumped into our water supply – thus making the dam overflow more and generating floods along the river valley.)

And despite all this rain, the weather has finally warmed up. It was wet today, but also 30°C and sauna-like humidity. It felt like Bangkok, seriously. It’s thick, heavy, sticky, steamy, tropical rain that penetrates to the skin despite not even hitting you. It’s 8:30pm now, and I’m sitting here inside my home, and sweat is literally dripping down my face because it’s so damn humid.

I’m reading Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd and enjoying it a lot. I visited Venice briefly back in 2001, and my wife and I are heading there again for a longer stay later this year. I wanted to get some of the city’s history under my belt before seeing it again, and I’m really glad I found this book. Here are some snippets I couldn’t help reproducing (from different chapters):

The concept of the maze or labyrinth is an ancient one. It is a component of earth magic that, according to some authorities, is designed to baffle evil spirits. The Chinese believed that demons could only ever travel in straight lines. It has also been said that the dead were deposited at the centre of mazes. That is why they retain their power over the human imagination. The labyrinth of classical myth is that place where the young and the innocent may be trapped or killed. But the true secret of the Venetian maze is that you can never observe or understand it in its totality. You have to be within its borders to realise its power. You cannot see it properly from the outside. You have to be closed within its alleyways and canals to recognise its identity.

The scheme of house numbers is difficult to understand; in each sestiere they begin at number one and then snake through every street until they finish. They reach into the thousands without the benefit of any reference to street or square. The names affixed to the streets seem in any case to be different to the names printed in the maps of the city. In fact the reality of Venice bears no relation to any of the published guides and maps. The shortest distance between two points is never a straight line. So the network of Venice induces mystery. It can arouse infantile feelings of play and game, wonder and terror. It is easy to believe that you are being followed. Your footstep echo down the stone labyrinth. The sudden vista of an alley or a courtyard takes you by surprise; you may glimpse a shadow or a silhouette, or see someone standing in a doorway. Walking in Venice often seems as unreal as a dream or, rather, the reality is of a different order. There are times when the life of the past seems very close – almost as if it might be around the next corner. The closeness of the past is embodied in the closeness of the walls and ways all around you. Here you can sense the organic growth of the city, stone by stone. You can sense the historical process of the city unfolding before you. There is a phrase, in T. S. Eliot’s Gerontion, to the effect that history has many cunning passageways. These are the passages of Venice.

Anyone who has tried navigating the calle of Venice will understand what Ackroyd is saying there. I found this such a compelling passage that I just had to savour it, keep it, and share it.

And then today I ran across this:

There is no scene in Venice that has not already been painted. There is no church, or house, or canal, that has not become the subject of an artist’s brush or pencil. Even the fruit in the market looks as if it has been stolen from a still life. Everything has been “seen” before. The traveller seems to be walking through oils and watercolours, wandering across paper and canvas.

How wonderful is that? Every chapter is filled with marvellous writing and imagery like this. It’s really getting me in the mood for our trip.

So I was at the shops today and I felt like a muffin. Went to Muffin Break, and discovered they now have the kilojoule content of all their muffins posted. I discovered when I got home that apparently this is a new law in New South Wales – fast food retailers with 20 or more outlets must post kilojoule content of all their products in font no smaller than the prices.

Anyway, I was all prepared to grab a double chocolate muffin. But seeing those numbers on there made me stop. And think. And dither.

A single double chocolate muffin is 30% of the average adult daily recommended kilojoule intake. That’s insane!

I actually contemplated a Weight Watchers approved bran and something-or-other muffin instead. After a couple of minutes of uncertainty and soul-searching – a couple of minutes more than I intended to spend here – I eventually chose a lemon poppy-seed, which was only 24% of my kilojoules for the entire day.

Subway put up these kilojoule counts a few months ago, and since then I’ve steered well away from the meatball subs and the cheeses and sauces, and gone with the lean, mean choices. And now these signs are going to be appearing all over the place.

I think I’m going to be eating significantly less fast food in the future. And working out more. And you know, I’m glad this is going to make me eat healthier.

Like the movie before it, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a direct continuation of the previous instalment in the series. It opens with a recap of the previous two films, followed by an upbeat musical theme over the main titles. This music has distinctive glockenspiel notes in it, twinkling in the manner of stars in space – a nice effect.

The opening scenes show a mysterious black cylinder moving through space past the USS Saratoga, which reports it’s headed straight for Earth, in an eerie mirror of V-ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Then we cut to Starfleet headquarters on Earth, where the Klingon ambassador is calling for Kirk to be extradited and tried for destroying a Klingon vessel and crew (in the previous film). During this accusal we are treated yet again to the Genesis computer graphics created for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and repeated in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, since in 1986 they still looked impressive. Sarek argues in Kirk’s defence.

On Vulcan, Kirk and his crew are banging the captured Klingon bird-of-prey from the last movie into shape for the trip back to Earth to face the consequences of stealing the Enterprise in the previous movie. They lampshade the rather silly predicament that Starfleet hasn’t bothered to send a better ship to pick them up and take them back to Earth for court martial. Spock is still rebuilding his intellect after his brush with death and we see him studying with some computers asking him tricky questions, when one asks, “How do you feel?” Spock is stumped, and his mother appears and reveals she programmed the computers to ask him this, to remind him of his human heritage. Spock takes his leave without answering her and elects to return to Earth to face trial with his colleagues.

Back at Earth, the mysterious probe arrives and starts vapourising the oceans. Things rapidly deteriorate, to the point where the President of the Federation issues a distress call, stating that the probe has “almost totally ionised the atmosphere“! (While this is possible, everything on Earth would be dead already.) When our heroes arrive, they cleverly figure out that the probe is transmitting sound into the Earth’s oceans. Modifying the sound to what it would sound like underwater, Spock recognises it as whale song. They quickly realise that the probe must have come to investigate why the sounds of whales ceased coming from Earth a couple of hundred years ago – when they died out. To respond and stop the probe, they need whales. Thus is hatched a hare-brained scheme to travel back in time to before they became extinct and pick some up!

We are treated to some trippy mind-screw hallucinatory images as the Klingon ship slingshots around the sun and is flung back to… 1986! Uhura reports that she is “receiving whalesong!” One wonders how the whales are transmitting it into space – presumably through the same means they use to communicate with the mysterious probe’s civilisation. They land in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, with the ship cloaked – thus explaining why they had to retain the Klingon ship, since Federation vessels don’t have cloaking technology. Interestingly, in the previous movie, the cloaking device on this same ship produced a rippling effect against the background stars in space that allowed Sulu to see the ship anyway, but now it produces complete and utterly flawless invisibility. Presumably Scotty did some of his magical engineering tweaks on it to improve it.

In town, this being San Francisco, nobody comments on their weird 23rd century clothing, especially Spock’s nightrobe-like Vulcan garb. Kirk is shocked to learn the natives are “still using money”. He sells the antique pair of glasses McCoy gave him at the beginning of Star Trek II. When Spock protests that they were a gift from McCoy, Kirk says, “That’s the beauty of it, they will be again,” implying the glasses enter a stable time loop. The group splits up, Kirk and Spock to look for whales, Scotty and McCoy to find some materials to build a whale tank inside the ship, Sulu to arrange transport for the materials, and Uhura and Chekov to locate a nuclear reactor so they can scavenge some high energy photons to recharge the ship’s warp engines. Scotty also generates a time loop when he teaches a materials scientist how to make transparent aluminium in exchange for some plexiglass. When McCoy protests that he could be messing with history, Scotty rather flippantly dismisses him with, “How do we know he didn’t invent it?” This is dealt with better in the novelisation, in which Scotty recognises the man as the guy who actually did invent transparent aluminium, thus reducing the flippant disregard for creating a time paradox.

Kirk and Spock find some whales at a fictional Cetacean Institute in Sausolito, as well as their carer Gillian. Kirk woos Gillian and eventually tells her they are from the future and need the whales. She rejects him, but comes back to find him when her boss releases the whales into the open sea, where they will be hunted and killed by whalers. Meanwhile, Uhura and Chekov locate a reactor, on board the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise(!), and beam in, getting into trouble when Chekov, a Russian, is caught inside an American naval vessel, at the height of the Cold War. He tries to escape but is injured and rushed to hospital, where the others stage a rescue mission. Then they fly out with Gillian on board to locate the whales’ tracking devices. They find them just before they are about to be harpooned by some evil Scandinavians, beam them aboard into the tank, and fly home to the future.

There they release the whales into San Francisco Bay to repopulate the species, the probe is happy and departs, and the Earth is saved! At the court martial, all charges are dropped due to extenuating circumstances, except the charge against Kirk of disobeying orders, for which he is demoted from Admiral to Captain, and therefore given command of a ship. The Klingon ambassador is outraged and Sarek is smug. Spock tells Sarek to tell his mother, “I feel fine.” The crew head to their new ship… which is revealed to be a brand new Enterprise. Awwww.

This is a very different Trek movie, which played more heavily with humour and light-hearted action than drama. And it worked, it really did. Some of the comedy moments with Kirk and Spock in the 20th century are truly hilarious, pushing but never quite falling into slapstick and ridiculousness. It’s an incredibly fun story, which is ultimately uplifting and hopeful – just what we needed in the dark and pessimistic times of the mid 1980s. Star Trek as it was truly meant to be. Wrath of Khan is a more edgy, dramatic, tense, and probably better movie, but this one is way more fun, and easily my second favourite of the entire series.

Tropes: Big Dumb Object, Ass in Ambassador, Lampshade Hanging, Artistic Licence – Physics, Crazy Enough to Work, Space Whale, Space Whale Aesop, Changed My Jumper, Stable Time Loop, Time Travel Romance, Mistaken for Spies, Time Travellers Are Spies, Adam and Eve Plot, Green Aesop, Unishment, Fish Out of Temporal Water, Everybody Lives.
Body count: None!

Did you ever play or run dungeon module B2: The Keep on the Borderlands? Check out these gorgeous reimagined maps of the Caves of Chaos, by Weem.

The D&D nerd and the cartography nerd within me are both squeeing with glee.