Day 587: "Unchaated" Territory

I am losing the plot.

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Once again, I overstayed my welcome at Fusionopolis today. (At 7pm, the lights and air-conditioning go off. The former can be switched back on manually, if you stagger dumb and blind between enough switches and poke limply at the wall, but the latter is a not-so-subtle hint from on high, which cannot be reversed until the next working day.) I always used to tell myself that I would never do this, as it would most likely only make certain things worse...not least what I regard as an evolutionarily-sound aversion to being roasted alive in a Singaporean building without air-con. Nevertheless, it's an increasingly frequent habit that has become necessary in this pre-conference results-free zone that some of us occupy. In fact, the only thing that compelled me to leave today was the deflating realisation under the microscope at half past six that my latest experiments have spectacularly failed, too! 28 working days until 'The Conference'...

For my desultory dinner of dejection, I went to a food court in the adjacent building that happens to do passable South Asian cuisine. I eat there often because it's a taste of the familiar, especially after a horrific day. The vegetable biryani goes down a treat with an ice-cold glass of calamansi juice. As I got up to leave after my meal, I was summoned back by the Indian lady who runs the stall. At first, I didn't think she was calling to me; I had already paid. Only when the cries of "Sir!" got louder did I turn around to see what the commotion was.

"Free chaat, sir!" she shrieked, waving a yoghurt-smothered spoon above her orange hat like a windmill.

"Oh! For me?"

"Yes, yes, sir. Here. Take this. Sit down."

And she sounded like she meant business, so I did as I was told. I took the bowl of chaat in yoghurt and the well-aired spoon, and sat back down in the same seat.

Chaat is a fried snack served with potatoes or chickpeas. I don't normally buy it, because it costs extra, so it was my first time trying it from this stall. The biryani had been quite a generous helping – maybe I looked like I needed it! – so I didn't get through the freebie, but it was delicious.

I like to tell myself that they gave me the free snack because of my loyal custom over the years. Never mind that they were about to close for the night and were getting rid of the leftovers. Nobody needs to know that, and you didn't hear it from me.

So, what can I say? It was another day of almost comically bad results and increasing agitation/desperation as my PhD continues to sputter and stumble backwards into the knackers' yard. But I got a small bowl of finger food out of it, so I guess it's the kind of day that passes for an unparalleled success overall at present!

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By:

The Imperial Orange,

8th May 2017

Randy Days

I haven't written anything in a few months, but a recent news item about a long-dead Russian brought back memories of a 2014 experience. It's a short one today. I reference the article, of course: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/10/new-age-ayn-rand-conquered-trump-white-house-silicon-valley

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Before starting my PhD, I spent a summer in the somewhat cryogenic care of a Dr Ilya Kuprov, stationed in the crosshair of his all-seeing Russian sniper's eye. Mostly, I passed my time just as I do now (trying in vain to figure out how to escape), but otherwise I was working on some kind of coding thing about NMR. As it happens, he and Prof Malcolm Levitt solved the problem quite speedily themselves without any intervention at all from me, and to this day I believe my only purpose there was to demonstrate the inadequacies of "socialist" British education.

While combing lines of code that Ilya had written, I would often come across the points where he got bored by the simplicity of it all. These points he embellished with commented life advice, such as the following:

IK has compiled, over the years, a list of literature that allows one to successfully withstand the oftentimes toxic social atmosphere of academic establishments. In the approximate order of reading, the books are:
- Ayn Rand, 'Atlas Shrugged'
- Ayn Rand, 'The Fountainhead'
- Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Beyond Good and Evil'
- David DeAngelo, 'Deep Inner Game'
- Ragnar Redbeard, 'Might Is Right'

In case you, like Ilya, found four-dimensional quaternion simulations so insultingly childish that you developed a lunchtime hankering for early 20th-Century philosophy, you would be in luck, because he kept copies of each of these books on the office bookshelf alongside NMR textbooks and coding manuals.

And it occurs to me now that in another life Ilya might have served as the inspiration for the main character of 'The Fountainhead':

"It tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect dedicated to the pursuit of his own vision – a man who would rather see his buildings dynamited than compromise on the perfection of his designs. All around him are mediocrities, representing either the dead hand of the state, bureaucrats serving some notional collective good, or “second handers” – corporate parasites who profit from the work and vision of others."

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By:

The Imperial Orange,

12th April 2017

Indomitable Christchurch & Other Nice Things – Part II

It's the second part of my tale in New Zealand, and this yarn focuses on the fellowship's camping trip from Boxing Day to New Year's Eve. You could say it was the one journey to end them all...

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You learn many uncomfortable truths when you go camping. Firstly, wet rooms are a test of acrobatic skill. It's hardly a way to conduct sleepy, morning bathroom routines. I already knew this from my experience of house-hunting in Singapore, but it never occurred to me that you mightn't be given a choice in the matter. After our first night camping, in Oamaru, about 80 miles north of Dunedin, I managed to get around this by hanging my clothes over the towel rail, pointing the shower at the toilet, jumping precariously around it, and at the end tiptoeing my way out of the room while clutching my belongings like Indiana Jones taking a leap of faith to nowhere. And I'm still here.

Oamaru is an unusual little town. It has grand avenues and whitewashed buildings reminiscent of Italian piazzas or the Indian Raj, but there's nobody there...which is something of a national theme in New Zealand. The wide roads almost seem wasted on a population of barely 14 thousand. I guess it doesn't take them very long to get around the place. That's just as well because they have to be quite timely to catch a glimpse of the penguins that turn up at exactly the same spot on the coast to nest every night (see pictures). Clever penguins, that lot. If you go at 9pm, they will be there, surfing USA on the incoming tide. I rather enjoyed that they were half-an-hour late when we went to watch them. Perhaps they are Singaporean penguins. Other main attractions in Oamaru are the Steampunk museum and the public gardens (see pictures).

We spent the second night in Dunedin, which means "Edinburgh" in Gaelic. South Island's second city was designed as a deliberate nod to Scotland's capital. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the city centre, dominated by a statue of a seated Robert Burns, who watches over the city's best-laid plans as far as the hills (see pictures). Today, the two cities are twinned. The old city certainly borrows from Edinburgh's recognisable Palladian architecture, and it evens sits atop a hill, but the new suburbs around it have deviated from this and developed their own style. There is a large population -- large by South Island standards as there is hardly anybody outside Christchurch -- in the south of South Island that has Scottish ancestry, and this is obvious from place names such as Glenorchy, Invercargill and Dunedin. Some Scot long ago must have thought, 'I'm sick of Scotland. I want to go somewhere else!' And then he went to live in a place that looks just like Scotland and built a city called Edinburgh. Dunedin overlooks the pristine waters of Otago Harbour, which makes for the kind of view that people use in memes ("Insert inspirational quote here"). The Maori name for Dunedin is Otipoti, which holds the distinction of the best Maori name I came across during my trip, because it sounds like Swedish Chef offering you a meat stew. I really liked the city, but unfortunately we didn't have long enough to see all the sights, as we had to move on to our base near Milford Sound in time for our tour of that picturesque bay on the west coast of South Island. The original Speight's brewery will have to wait for another day...

Christchurch (population 385 thousand) and Dunedin (118 thousand) are the only major cities I visited. You can tell they are small, even at their best. Singapore is small, but it doesn't feel small. It is a bustling and busy metropolis of over five million people, with skyscrapers that light up the night. In fact, I note that the population of Singapore is greater than that of the whole of New Zealand, and it's a running joke that there are more people living in Hampshire than on South Island. Make of that what you will! The New Zealand outside of the massively-overpopulated city of Auckland is largely devoid not only of skyscrapers but of any multi-storey buildings at all. Auckland is an interesting case. It's population as a proportion of New Zealand's population is equivalent to London having 21 million people, New York having 96 million or Shanghai having 416 million mouths to feed. The overpopulation crisis is now so bad that the local government is offering people money to leave the city and live elsewhere, and New Zealand's points-based immigration system awards points to newcomers who choose to settle in other cities. But in the rest of New Zealand, they have no need to build upwards, because at this rate, they will never run out of space. What's more, everything shuts down at 6pm. For many people, of course, that is among New Zealand's most attractive qualities.

On our way from Dunedin to the southwestern region of Fiordland, at the base of the Southern Alps and the setting for Sir Peter Jackson's Middle Earth in 'Lord of the Rings', we drove through Otago. I could best describe Otago as the miscellaneous box of New Zealand, a Bible-thumping region of old-fashioned farmers with curious radio habits, rickety barns and rolling hills that stands out from any other part of the country. In the distance but clearly visible are the Southern Alps, and every so often you come across a gravel road, but you can't tell where it goes. Dotted about the roads are tiny villages and hamlets, some of which seem to exist only because people stop off there for petrol and a coffee. That's how all the horror films start, too.

Well, the second home truth about camping is that no matter what you think, you are not born with toilet etiquette. It is a learned quality. What are you supposed to do in the queue for the portaloo? Do you speak with the other people? Is it considered impolite to stare silently into the mud? Should you attempt to huddle for warmth like penguins? Would your fellow campers like some soup...or a shave? Do they require help swatting sandflies? An instruction notice stuck to the side of the toilet would be very welcome. The only time I had to use one during the trip was the night before the Milford Sound cruise, when we were camping in near-freezing conditions near the west coast. In my case, I don't think I had to bother much with conversation, though, because I frightened the bleary-eyed competitors off with a torch. Even if you did speak, they’re bloody hard to understand. New Zealandish is not a phonetic language, and you should be particularly careful of vowels. Take the simple request that you might hear at a café: “Please can I have a regular cappuccino with a muffin?” Waiting for my transfer at Auckland airport, I heard this: “Please kin I hiv a rigular kipucchaino wuth a maffun?” It continued thus for 11 (“alivven”) days.

New Zealand is the only place in the world where you can go directly from Scotland to Wales with nothing in between. Milford Sound, named for Milford Haven, west Wales, is a pristine glacial fjord of crystal-clear water surrounded by ice-capped mountains on the west coast of South Island. Flowing into the Tasman Sea, it has been proclaimed as the world's top tourist destination and Rudyard Kipling once declared it the eighth Wonder of the World.

On the chilly morning after the chilly night in the mountains, we set out for our Milford Sound cruise at 08:55, and the sound is every bit of the wonder that Kipling proclaimed it to be (see pictures). As we pulled out of the harbour, bottlenose dolphins appeared from below and swam in the boat's slipstream all the way out towards the sea. On either side were some of the country's most famous mountains: the 5500-ft Mitre Peak (so named because it looks like the Pope's hat) watches over and prays while the 4300-ft Lion faces the 5000-ft Elephant ready for battle on the other side. In fact, Mitre Peak descends right down to the bottom of the fiord, another 1000 feet, making it one of the tallest mountains in the world to rise directly out of the sea. The Welsh theme continues with the 6600-ft Mount Pembroke, set behind the picture-perfect Harrison Cove (see pictures). What's most striking about 5000-ft sheer drops is their propensity to dwarf even the largest objects around you. This is the case when you look at the sound's two waterfalls, Lady Bowen Falls and Stirling Falls, which spring out of the cliff faces. Bowen Falls is 531 ft high, Stirling Falls is 498 ft high, and they are separated by a distance of over five miles. And yet they look as though they couldn't be half that size, or half as far apart when framed against the backdrop of the mountains with nothing but water in between. Between the two waterfalls is a seal colony that likes to sleep atop a rock in the water. Lord knows how they slap their way up there with those tiny flippers of theirs, but they probably deserve the nap afterwards. Not only that, but Milford Sound is home to a colony of Fiordland penguins. They must have been busy fiording while were we there, as we didn't see them.

Our last stop on our southwards journey was the pretty waterside town of Queenstown, not to be confused with the pretty inland town of Queenstown in Singapore. The New Zealand incarnation might be the best place in the country for reckless abandon. It is a hub of adventure sports, has a thriving nightlife and hosts a small wildlife park where they hatch birds out of kiwifruits. I was up for an adventure sport or two myself, but had to recklessly abandon the idea upon discovering the extent to which bungee-jumping would eat into my remaining funds. So, another one for next time. They don't call it bungee-jumping. They call it "bungy-jumping", so I'm not too upset about missing it, because I do not presently have sinus trouble, so they probably wouldn't have let me do it anyway. We did have a go on the luge, though. You can get a gondola right to the top of the hill and the views from there, of the sprawling town climbing down from the hills and meeting the blue waters of Lake Wakatipu, are astounding (see pictures). From the top, the luge will get you down in about two or three minutes, but fear not, for you can keep going to enjoy the view all over again. We went up five times!

Queenstown is the third-largest settlement on South Island, but it's considerably smaller than Christchurch and Dunedin. It's so small that I think the residents only have one hairdresser between them. I had this thought when I saw the same woman walking around everywhere. It took me a few attempts to realise that it was a different woman each time -- and on one occasion, it was a man -- but that they all had the same haircut, late-coalition era Theresa May. Now it may well be that there are many hairdressers in Queenstown, all of them offering the chance to look like the British Prime Minister. Given the omnipresent feeling of a time-lapse that follows you around New Zealand, I wonder if they have just received the news that she's been elected an MP...

Queenstown crowned, it was back to a more solid bed in Christchurch in time for the New Year. Some folks know how to have a good time down there, despite the occasionally sleepy nature of the place. The nightlife is concentrated around Hagley Park, the city’s main public common, complemented by the greenery of the nearby Botanic Gardens. As we walked around the place on New Year’s Eve, my favourite sight was a group of made-up, middle-aged lady friends strolling down the road with each other, laughing and having the time of the year! Most people were headed to the free concert at Hagley Park, where they also had a fireworks display set up (see pictures). The concert comprised local musicians performing a variety of original and cover songs, mainly rock music. At 23:30, the acts changed, and the lead singer of the band coming on announced that their job was to see off 2016 in the right style. Accordingly, I wondered if members of the band were going to drop dead suddenly throughout the set! Fortunately, it was not that literal of a style, and they instead performed some rousing classics to see us into the New Year, pausing only for the fireworks at midnight!

And it was the following day, the final day, New Year’s Day, that we went to Akaroa (see pictures), and it was there, at long last, that I finally found the golden Speight’s I had been looking for, the one beer in all of New Zealand that was better than Singapore’s Speights. There it was, in this hotel pizza bar in a sleepy town next to sleepy (and extremely hungover) Christchurch. But find it I did, and so I could tender my resignation and fly out of New Zealand the following day a contented man.

Over the last couple of days of the trip, I did have time to buy one or two mementos. On that note, does anyone know any nice things to do with Mesopotamia blue? It's not souvenir paint; it's cheese. And it's not from Mesopotamia; it's from a shop next to 'Subway' in one of those miscellaneous Otago hamlets.

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By:

The Imperial Orange.

12th January 2017

Indomitable Christchurch & Other Nice Things – Part I

I promised a blog post about my expected journey to the nether regions. Even if I didn't promise it, you knew it was coming. Here is part one, focussing on my hub for Christmas, the city of Christchurch, and my important mission...

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I had been told many a-time that Speight's does not travel well and that New Zealand's own is better than Singapore's imports. Well, how can I resist a challenge? I arrived in New Zealand determined to put long-held beer-swilling wisdom to the test.

Of course, it was Christmas time. I had never spent Christmas in summer before, but it was something I wanted to tick off my bucket list. As Air New Zealand flight 523 approached Christchurch Airport, Christmas music blurted through the speakers, but it was not Christmas music as I had ever known it before. They have their own, and it is, naturally, topsy-turvy. When you think about it, it makes sense. How could anybody in New Zealand or Australia sing about "walking through a winter wonderland" at Christmas? It would be unimaginably confusing for them. For the delicate task, Air New Zealand hired the former pop star Ronan Keating, who crooned about "strolling through a summer wonderland", while, I imagine, suspended from the studio ceiling like a bat. This rendition was a portentous warning of the music that was to come over the next ten days. I have often heard it said that the Antipodes are about 20 years behind the UK culturally, but still they won't back down, as Tom Petty repeatedly sang in virtually every location I visited. I must have heard that song seven or eight times, but it could well have been lurking in other places, just out of earshot.

Well, anyway, below are the results of my Speight's-testing experiment in the Upside Down. I've given the date and location of each practical run. The number is a mark from 1 to 10 against the Speight's at our much-loved Prince of Wales pub in Singapore, for which I have chosen a benchmark of 7.

24th December, Christchurch: 4.

26th December, Oamaru: 5.5.

29th December, Queenstown: 7.

31st December, Christchurch: 6.

1st January, Akaroa: 9.

The final Speight's (a creamy mid-strength ale from a pizza bar in Akaroa, a seaside town about an hour's drive out of Christchurch) was the best Speight's and the only NZ one that I would rank higher than Singapore's. There are two Speight's breweries, one at the company's headquarters in Dunedin and a North Island hub in Auckland. I wonder if Auckland's Speight's fares better than its South Island counterparts! There was a third brewery, in Christchurch, but it was lost to the 2011 earthquake.

We all remember the headlines that followed that fateful moment at 12:51 on 22nd February 2011 (11:51 GMT on 21st February), but I had not come close to comprehending the scale of it until I saw for myself the decrepit shells of buildings and piles of mangled debris that still lie around the heart of Christchurch, and the large tracts of bare, overgrown land where rows of houses gave way to liquefaction (a process described as a bit like the ground turning to quicksand) have now been cordoned off ominously as "red zones". This was the fate that befell the AMI Stadium, Lancaster Park, once New Zealand's preeminent cricket and rugby venue. Only now have people come to realise that the ground was too soft for buildings to survive. You can come upon the red zones suddenly while walking through the city centre, but access to these large, conspicuous gaps between buildings is virtually forbidden. The magnitude of the earthquake was 6.3, but the vertical ground-shaking that the city experienced remains the most violent earth movement ever recorded in a major population area. Some estimates of the damage to Christchurch state that 70 percent of the city was destroyed; others say 80 percent.

The earthquake was only the first hit that Christchurch has taken of late. In the subsequent year, there was a mass exodus of its residents, who fled in fear of further shakes. That migration was apparently so large that it led to Christchurch being displaced as New Zealand's second-largest city by the capital, Wellington.

And so it's a testament to the resilience and community spirit embodied by the people of Christchurch that they banded together to work with what they had left and reignite the city. This boldness has allowed Christchurch to start resembling its old self since reconstruction gathered pace in 2014. The population level is recovering, Christchurch is again the economic hub of South Island, and it is becoming the pinnacle of earthquake-proof architecture in Oceania.

Natural disasters have a weird habit of galvanising people. Buildings that might once have been described as soulless fell in the quake, and some, like the City Mall, have been replaced by developments that illustrate the ingenuity of the city's people. The Re:START mall, so named because it typified Christchurch's renaissance after the earthquake, is a shopping centre constructed entirely out of shipping containers. It was what they had, so they used it. By October 2011, the shopping centre was open again. It has since become an iconic symbol of post-earthquake Christchurch, popular with locals and tourists alike. The phoenix-like rebirth of Christchurch was one of the most striking things about my whole trip. The city will be an unforgettable part of my holiday for that reason.

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By:

The Imperial Orange,

7th January 2017

Day 396: The Postman Barely Rings Once

My scary adventures trying to get a Hallowe'en costume together...

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It's my second and last Hallowe'en party here in Singapore. Last year's German Porno Gandalf outfit seemed to go down quite well with the punters. This year, however, my costume has gone through several spooky revisions.

I had settled on something terrifying and topical. I ordered my Donald Trump mask and 'Make America Great Again' baseball cap on Lazada, Southeast Asia's answer to Amazon. I ordered early last week, safe in the knowledge that it couldn't possibly take that long. I was going to complement these items with my suit and the Donald's usual Republican Red tie. In the meantime, I had been perfecting my impression and coming up with some Trumpisms to wow the audience at tonight's party. However, my best-laid plans went agley once again. Yesterday, I was at home to take delivery of my items, but the postman put a delivery slip under the door, rang the bell and then was off like Fatima Whitbread. In the few seconds or so it took me to reach the door, there was no trace of him, only the delivery slip. Today is a public holiday for Diwali, so there was no prospect of collecting my items from the Singapore Post delivery office. I then discovered that the speed-of-light postman had just one of my items, and that the second had only been shipped on Thursday. I'll be able to collect them next week, but there will never be a chance to wear my Donald outfit again before he loses the election and slithers away back to his lair. So, to compound this horror story, I had the task of trying to salvage something from this wreckage; I had just one day to re-costume myself...

Fortunately, the suit premise is not so hard to adapt for other characters. For instance, one of the great horror film actors of the 20th Century was Vincent Price, and his distinctive look posed a manageable challenge to reproduce. But then I thought, who would have a hope of recognising me as a long-dead actor from such a niche genre?

And then I wondered if it was even worth the effort at all. Perhaps I could go with the suit and open-necked shirt combo, a la The Man In The Suit, John Reece, of 'Person of Interest' fame. Maybe he's not so scary unless you're a crooked cop, but he's also not challenging for these can't-be-bothered moments. I put him away as my back-up plan.

Gomez Addams wears a suit and poses just a manageable challenge by way of make-up. With a simple modification of the tie from red to black, I could make it work. But then it occurred to me, who is Gomez without a Morticia? I could just as easily pass for anyone without a lady to be my Morticia, so then I decided it was not worth the effort of having to correct people every time they mistook for me an undertaker. Lurch? Now, he also has a suit. And unless he marries Wednesday -- or Pugsley, I suppose, in these more enlightened times of ours -- he's unlikely to need another on his arm. The biggest problem with Lurch is that my haircut does not respond well to being flattened out. It's much too disobedient and looks too misshapen for a passable Lurch.

So here I am now, about to make my appearance upon the fifth revision of my costume, after a whirlwind shopping trip to cobble stuff together. I guess I look like a cross between Gomez, Lurch and Cousin Itt, but the logical extension of this is that, in the right, horrifying light, I figure I could still pass for Donald Trump...

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By:

The Imperial Orange,

29th October 2016

Day 316: Apple to the Noggin

A disappointing evening turned strange and then disappointing again...

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After being too unwell to go to last week's lesson, and in dire need of stimulation, I was determined to go dancing tonight, but I got held up by some lost shopping. As yesterday was a public holiday for independence day, I used my day off to go to the Mustafa Centre to buy some new clothes. I took my bag to the quiz with me and was clearly so overwrought by our victory (two in two for Arvo 2 now!) that I left the bag on the table. The folks at the pub know us quite well, so they knew Loyal Hamid would be back to collect his morsels of consolation soon enough and they saved the bag for me. By the time I sorted that out, it was too late to make the hour's trip to the dance studio all the way in Yishun. I had been looking forward to the light relief so much that I started to feel an "episode" coming on as my best-laid plans went agley again.

By now, I have become quite good at trying to mitigate the worst of these episodes by squeezing something vaguely satisfying out of bad experiences -- with mixed success, it must be said. Also, I am a do-as-I-do kinda man, so I followed the advice I gave to all of you by going to try a new hawker centre, Newton Food Centre, for another of my silent and solitary dinners. Newton is one of the biggest and most renowned hawker centres in Singapore. I got there at just about half past seven, and it took about 15 minutes to explore all the stalls. There's plenty of choice there, but probably seafood was the most prevalent cuisine. It's the kind of place where they are accustomed to tourists and are on the lookout for anyone who looks like an ang mo, whom they will then shout at in an attempt to get Western custom. I am not an ang mo, but in a certain light –  such as hawker centre beige – I can do a passable impression of one.

I settled on a Thai place with a reasonably long queue, and the lady taking the orders said it would be a 15-minute wait. It's not Michelin-guide levels of hankering, but it's certainly a much longer wait than people would normally settle for, so I thought it must be good. Anyway, I was in no hurry, so I ordered the green curry and went to buy a cold drink while waiting. It didn't really work, though, the enjoyment was spoiled by my lack of appetite. I got through most of the rice, but didn't enjoy it as much I should have done.

Defeated, I resolved back home to seek solace in my final salvation (tea) and, on the way back into my condo, was accosted by a German who spoke with a French accent (and looked like Zlatan Ibrahimovic). He asked if I lived there. Suspicious, I answered that I did. He then asked for the block, but I asked for an explanation of what he wanted. He said he lived in block 6 and that his friend was coming to see him. To prove this, he showed me an exchange of messages on his phone, which was in German (that's how I knew that the German who spoke with a French accent was, indeed, German). He told me his friend's name, but it sounded like he was saying "Boulangerie". The German conversation was not all that helpful to me, so he took it upon himself to translate the exchange into English (he could have been saying anything!). His problem, I was told, was that he had to get into a taxi and leave before Boulangerie got there. Some friend, I thought. He then tried to hand me his door keys, saying that I should go up to my apartment and drop the keys out of the window when Boulangerie arrived so that he could let himself in while the German who spoke with a French accent was out. All this was undermined by one fatal flaw, which the German who spoke with a French accent had not yet considered. And then he screeched, "Drat!" (like Dick Dastardly). "You don't have internet!" That was a tad presumptuous, I felt. What he meant was what I would not know when Boulangerie arrived, which side of the apartment I should toss the keys out of, or if it was even the right person I was aiming for! Then he walked off in search of a less impractical solution to his problem. I guess that waiting for Boulangerie before making off in a taxi was not an option.

I'm at home now, being salvaged by tea. And all I can think now is that I should have called in at a boulangerie on the way home, for a sweet pastry to have with my tea...which is depressing.

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By:

The Imperial Orange,

10th August 2016

Day 268: Re-Thermalising Plasma Cells

Here is my review of 'Independence Day: Resurgence', which made its debut in Singapore this evening. (No spoilers.)

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Not since 1997 has Jeff Goldblum had the pull to draw millions of people to the cinema to watch him save the world. Over the next few weeks, he will taste that sweet power once more, as he reprises his role as the sharp-tongued intellectual mothership David Levinson in 'Independence Day: Resurgence', the long-awaited sequel to ID4...that's 'Independence Day', not 'Independence Day 4'.

How fitting that this film should invade cinemas around the world on the day that could forever be known as the United Kingdom's independence day if a certain vote that everyone keeps talking about goes one way.

Anyway, I don't know if I would last very long in the ID universe, because I have no patience. Rather than waiting for the re-thermalised plasma cells to heat up to whatever temperature they're supposed to get to, I'd want to chuck 'em right at the scaly space invaders as soon as I could get my hands on them! How about that for cold fusion? Then again, it is a ubiquitous flare for near-suicidal levels of impetuousness that wins the day in films like these, and that seems to be a prevailing theme in 'Resurgence'. How can a race of even the most technologically-advanced psychic aliens possibly hope to defend themselves against a species that doesn't even know what it is doing, let alone its attackers, and behaves in ways so unpredictable that not even the world's leading diviner, the First Minister of Scotland, could fully account for its actions? Luckily for the Earthlings, the aliens have been taking shooting lessons from Star Wars stormtroopers, and they must have bought their weapons off the Galactic Empire, too.

Perhaps it was with this suicidal flare for impetuousness that I turned out with my troupe to watch one of the very first showings of the film in Singapore. Ever the impatient man, I was not prepared to wait for absent friends who are presently out of the country but who want to see the film when they get back. No! I will not be sated until I have seen it. More than anything else, I will not have the film spoiled for me, so you'd be a fool to rival any one of the characters if you didn't take your chance as soon as it was presented to you.

Of course, no science fiction film is plausible without plausible but fictional science. And there's no shortage of that in 'Resurgence'. The re-thermalised plasma cells were one example of many. (What do you suppose a thermalised plasma cell is? Does it come with a warning saying "Do Not Reheat"?) But by far the most stunning of the sci-fi discoveries was cold fusion, a technology supposedly possessed by the aliens in the first film, and which we harvested from them. Yes, the aliens are apparently so good at cold fusion that they can't do it...you discover this contradiction if you know what you're looking for. You're not supposed to think about that, though. The fictional science is technical words jumbled together into gibberish. It's supposed to confuse the viewer unless you know it's gibberish. Either way, you will think it gibberish, so I guess it works.

I'm not sure they could have come up with cheesier lines if they had hired Ken Dodd to write the script. But then at some other points, it was quite slow (maybe those bits were written by Alan Yentob). Levinson was on top form with the dry one-liners, but some characters spoke only in cliches, and other characters were walking cliches, none more so than President Hard-Nose. Such a cliche was she that just about the most shocking thing about her unintentionally-comical character is that she didn't unzip her skin to reveal that she was Morgan Freeman all along. (Some of you who pay attention to Hollywood disaster films might have been expecting that to happen, but I don't think that technically counts as a spoiler). Well, that's Roland Emmerich for you!

I imagine we should be grateful that in this film, unlike in the original, we see glimpses of a few choice non-American cities before they are reduced to rubble. But, dear reader, how much did the French government pay '20th Century Fox' for that scene? And you may ask yourself the same question when you get there. What you must remember, though, is that once those non-American cities are reduced to rubble, their populations apparently either all die in unison or become positively catatonic in their passivity, for we hear nothing of them again. Once again, our non-Freeman heroine of a US President must bear the burden that her utterly toothless allies have unwittingly forced upon her by agreeing to appear in a Roland Emmerich film and being reduced to nothing more than glorified talking buddies. Well, that's Roland Emmerich for you!

Don't expect 'Resurgence' to be a masterpiece in screenwriting, for it is riven with plot holes so big that not even Boba Fett could fail to hit them. One of the first things we must inevitably conclude at the start of the film is that David Levinson, or the people working for him, are not as sharp as they lead us to believe they are. In the original, the most significant stumbling block to the eventual human victory was the aliens' invisible shield, which all of their ships had. And all of their ships still have it. The only trouble is that, despite -- one assumes -- not having forgotten how they defeated the aliens the first time by having to disable their shields, everybody seems not to notice or care about this very much. When their memory is jogged by some meaty suicidal impetuousness on the Moon base, they simply carry on not caring about it much. When the uber-alien fleet arrives at Earth, there is, at first, some incredulity that they once again failed to notice a 3,000-mile spaceship sailing into the Solar System, but rest assured for this incredulity soon turns to casual apathy, too.

It is not all bad, though. The sense of foreboding of the terror that is about to come is created very powerfully in the first half-hour of the film, with fleeting but casual peculiarities and the odd occurrence that makes you shiver. One of the most terrifying lines of the film is when a butt-naked Dr Brackish Oaken (played by Lieutenant Commander Data) stumbles into a top-secret secret meeting at Area 51 and sees the security footage of imprisoned aliens suddenly going wild. "Why are they screaming?" asks Mae Whitmore. "They're not screaming," replies Data. "They're celebrating."

What 'Resurgence' does not lack is action, plenty of it. The original romped home with the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and I absolutely expect that 'Resurgence' will be nominated, too. The CGI has come on leaps and bounds, and is now both seamless and convincing for the most part.

1996's ID4 will always have a special place in the cold, black hearts of misanthropes the world over, but 'Resurgence' is brash, nonsensical fun. The sense of the spectacular is always strong with Roland Emmerich. Say what you like about his scripts, but you will not leave the cinema without a customary rollercoaster ride.

Expect another sequel. The original mothership was, as one suit put it, "one-fourth the size of our Moon". The 'Resurgence' "harvester" that was really in charge of the original fleet is 3,000 miles wide. You can be sure that somewhere out there, lurking even further away, there is a Solar System-sized Alex Salmond, who is royally pissed off that independence day still hasn't come.

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By

The Imperial Orange,

23rd June 2016