Simply Irresistible

Continuing with my X-Files theme on earthly people the duo is faced with. As promised here is my blog about Donnie Pfaster. The episode opens with the funeral of a school girl and then cuts to the funeral home where a character is cutting the hair on the corpse of the school girl. This is Donnie who is played with chilling realism by Nick Chinlund who also starred in Con Air with Nicolas Cage and company.

The pair is called in when the agent in charge of the investigation brings them to a graveside desecration, and he suspects that there are super natural forces at work. But Mulder quickly realises that a person is responsible. This is the first time we witness Scully's fragility and humanness. I don't no where the inspiration for this episode came from, but around the time this episode was written there were cases of bodies being stolen from graveyards, for reasons that were never determined.

Mulder quickly tells the man in charge to issue a city wide warning that there could be an escalating fetishist operating in the area. Who may go from defiling the dead to carrying out homicide to aid him in his perversion of cutting the hair and nails from the dead. Sure enough Pfaster does exactly what Fox had predicted and he kills a working girl for his evil intentions. Chinlund plays this character almost like a child who is searching for something but does not know what. He is studying at night school and gets arrested for attempting to attack one of his classmates. And Agent Box thinks he has the perpetrator in custody after a working girl had cut his face with a blade. Here in the lock up Pfaster sets his sights on his next victim who turns out to be Agent Scully.

Scully returns to Washington with body of the dead prostitute to see if they can pull any prints from it. They find a latent print on the fingernail and Scully returns to meet up with Mulder and Box to continue with the manhunt. As she leaves the airport in her rental car she is forced of the road by the maniac in question and abducted. At this point Scully starts having flash backs of her abduction experiences. She sees Pfaster as one of the aliens, a grotesque looking demonised character that he actually turns out to be.

After some research Agents Mulder and Box discover that Pfaster is driving around in his mother's old car and that she has a property in the area. They then go and raid the place and find that Scully is trying to fight of her attacker. This episode is one of the most disturbing because it depicts us at our most primeval. Displaying man's most basic and primitive instincts that show our true animal form can be realised and indeed personified.

This episode, as with the episode about Toombs has another well defined soundtrack, composed by Mark Snow. It also has one of the best Mulder monologues at the end of the episode where he tries to explain Pfaster's motives and how he became the monster he is. Simply saying "The only thing extraordinary about Donnie Pfaster was his ordinariness"

A Speeding Fool

The Christmas Movie

Last night the BBC showed the film speed. And even though I must have seen it a dozen times or more, I had to watch from start to finish. The cast was excellent. Keanu Reeves is watchable in all the films he does. And Sandra Bullock played her character well, but I think the standout performance came from Dennis Hopper.

This film had all that you would expect from an action movie of the early nineties. It opened with the hostages caught in the lift and this sequence was well executed by Jan De Bont. I believe this was the first feature film he made, but he had a good background in this movie genre because he was John McTiernean’s director of photography on Die Hard. And he also made Tomb Raider II which was better than the first Tomb Raider film. The highlight of the opening sequence was when Reeves was lowered down the elevator shaft and attached the hook to the car. Then there was that bit when he and Jeff Daniels face off with Hopper in the corridor.

But the film is most famous for its bus sequence which had it all, Reeves chasing it down the freeway and then boarding it at high speed. Then there was that bit when the bus had to make that hard right turn and went round that corner on set of wheels. It also had the bit when the driver was taken off the bus and then Hooper blew the step out and killed that woman who was trying to get off. The best part of this section of the film was when the bus had to make that jump across the unfinished section of the freeway.

Once the bus left the freeway they entered the airport and Reeves then tries to deactivate the bomb whilst the bus is still in motion. He gets on this cart thing that is being towed by a truck and goes under the speeding bus. He obviously fails, and gets caught under said bus and ruptures the fuel tank. He then gets dragged back into the bus.

Once all of the passengers have been removed from the bus it’s time to evacuate Bullock and this is done by turning on of the buses inspection covers into a sledge and her and Reeves lower themselves out from under the bus and flee the scene to relative safety. The bus then crashes into a plane and gets engulfed in flames.

At this point the movie loses its way a little and the action moves to one of LA’s subways and basically recreates the bus sequence but underground. But apart from this, this movie was an all round enjoyable action adventure.

Keanu Reeve

The film also benefited from having it's script reworked by Joss Whedon of Buffy fame. This movie really did exactly what it said on the tin. So my Christmas day was finished off well, with this entertaining movie.

Lost in Space

Top Fives

If you ever got stranded in space and there was little hope of rescue what five items would you least like to live without? I have been thinking about this a lot recently and have compiled five items from three different lists. The First being gadgets you can’t live without. The second five books that you must have. Your five favourite games.

Gadgets you can’t live without.

1. MP3 player because I would go insane without being able to listen to music.
2. Laptop with wireless internet just so I could send a mayday message and check my email.
3. Mobile phone so I can tweet on the go, when I’m wandering around my spaceship.
4. Alarm clock
5. Digital camera to visually document the whole caper.

Five must have books.

1. Apollo 13 The Lost Moon. As a reminder that rescue and safe return could be possible.
2. Any Sherlock Holmes Novel. Just because they are good reads.
3. The Bible, no reason just might need something to read as a last resort.
4. The Warren Commission Report. The best work of fiction ever written.
5. Of Mice and Men. Will have enough time on my hands and might eventually find out what happens at the end.

Five must have games

1. Monopoly because everybody has it in their collection
2. Chess so I can learn to play properly
3. Pool or Snooker
4. Poker set with cards included
5. Scrabble

I deliberately did not include top five must have albums because if you have an mp3 player I would presume you would have your favourite music on it anyway. That’s what I would do. There are other categories I could have chosen but I decided on the above because if I were going on a long distance voyage and the items listed would be what I would miss the most.

The X- Files

After having re-watched a host of American TV shows, my televisual marathon has brought me back to one of my favourites from the 1990's. The one that stars messers Duchovny and Anderson. I had forgotten just how good the writing was on the show. It kicked off with the pilot episode, which was as good as any pilot I have watched. But the outstanding story of the first four episodes is the one called Squeeze.

It is set in Baltimore and features a truly gross theme. About a mutant who hibernates, then after thirty years sleep, he wakes up and goes on a killing spree. Extracting the livers of the poor people he kills. He then eats his victims livers. Now this is truly as gruesome a storyline as you can get, not Silence of the Lambs gruesome, but certainly a 6 on the barf factor scale. But the bad guy that Mulder and Scully are chasing is also genetically freaky. He can contort his body so he can navigate air-conditioning units and chimnies etc. The bad bastard the heroes are chasing is Eugene Victor Toombs played by Doug Hutchinson, who has played strange characters in other series as well. There was an episode of CSI where he stalks Nick Stokes. Hutchinson was excellent in the roll of the mutant.

Doug Hutchinson as Toombs.

But not only is the story well written and acted it is made even more chilling by the excellent music written by Mark Snow. He captures brilliantly the mood of the episode. I must have watched the episode at least a dozen times but it hasn't lost any of the suspense that I remember from when it was first aired. It is also visually very good especially when Toombs is stalking his prey, the victim stays in colour and the background goes grayscale. Also Toombs's eyes goes this horrible luminescent yellow green colour. Which just makes him seem all the more weird. But in Xfiles lore he achieved his own status as one of the best baddies the heroes chase and has a return episode before the first season had finished. The only characters I can think of who reappear in season 1 are Cigarette Smoking Man and Deep Throat.

Then something I had also forgotten about the Xfiles is the child at the end of the credits who says I made this. But that doesn't have any bearing on how good this story was. It was also the first episode in which the story isn't about chasing little green men, and that the very thing they were chasing was slightly more down to earth. In writing this I have just reminded myslef about another one of those more down to earth charaters who is just as un-nerving as Toombs, Donnie Pfaster who stalked women so he could wash their hair. Perhaps I will give him a blog all his own at a later date. Probably will be after I have watched that particular episode.

Space The Remaining Frontier

A History of Space Travel

Continuing with my space related blogs here is a brief history of mankind’s voyages into the farthest quests for knowledge and discovery. Ever since Jules Verne wrote about all kinds of travel we have had an urge to make sci-fi a reality, and this is so true when it comes to space. The world looked up to the skies in 1959 when the Russians launched sputnik one. A simple device that orbited the earth emitting a simple beep-beep sound. A sound that could be heard on any transistor radio. But this wasn’t the only thing the Russian space agency contributed they were the first to send an animal into space a dog called LIKA, who actually died during re-entry, a fact that didn’t come out until after the fall of communism. Then Yuri Gagarin made history by becoming the first person to be launched into orbit, a ninety minute voyage that put him in the same class as Columbus, the Wright Brothers and Charles Lindbergh.

The first Eva or spacewalk was also done by a Russian proving that work in space could be possible for a person outside the safety of an orbiter. The American’s always seemed to be playing catch up when it came to space. Yes they did make it to the North Pole before anyone else, developed the first weapon of mass destruction and pioneered much of supersonic travel. They built a plane that could fly higher than any other. But they did drop the ball when it came to space travel. Then in 1961 they laid down the gauntlet and announced they would make it to the moon before 1970.

It was this challenge where NASA set the standards. The Gemini program was ground breaking; docking with other vehicles in space, both manned an unmanned. Firing people in to space for days to see if there are any long term effects on the body during periods of weightlessness. Then with the Apollo program more developments were made. They built a lunar lander nick-named the spider. Apollo 8 circumnavigated the moon ten times. Apollo 9 mission proved that the LEM worked and could make a rendezvous with its command module. Then on Apollo 10 they took the LEM to the moon and performed manoeuvres in near lunar orbit. Then on July 20th 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren became the first men to step on another world. And the famous “One small step one giant leap for mankind speech”. But I actually prefer the words of the Apollo 12 commander when he first stepped on to the moon “YIPEE”. It was on this mission they placed laser mirrors on the surface of the moon, which are still used today. They show us that the moon is getting further away from the Earth. They fire a laser at them and record how long it takes to receive it back. The best thing NASA did as it proves the landings were not faked.

But the Apollo program did have its setbacks too. The fire on Apollo 1 during the plugs-out test that killed Gus Grissom Richard Chafee and Ed White. Also the ill fated mission of Apollo 13 that almost ended in tragedy, when an o2 tank exploded shortly after take off. For this mission NASA had to improvise a way of getting Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert home safely which they did. They also sent four more manned missions to the moon. Apollo 14 went to Apollo 13 destination. And Apollo’s 15 16 and 17 made their contributions too.

Then there was Skylab and the Apollo Soyuz space meeting. The shuttle program developed in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Not forgetting the Mir Space Station. The probes that have been sent all around the solar system, including the robots that landed on Mars. The Giotto probe that took scientific measurements in the tail of Hayley’s comet.

This brings us up to date. There is the international space station, satellite communications. The Hubble Telescope.

Is Australia Good?

The following brain rant is about the great things Australia has contributed to modern popular culture. But I couldn't think of any great contribution that the boys from downunder have made, but the only exception I can think of is INXS. But Michael Hutchins didn't no how to fasten his belt properly. We do have to thank them for Danni and Kylie, not for their talent, but because they are really good window dressing.

Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe and Eric Banner and that guy who played Jim Robinson have made it big US of stateside. But they can never be forgiven for giving us Neighbours and the slightly worse Home and Away, which sounds like a program for wife swappers. Then there's that Donavon chap, you know the bloke who was in Joe's Coat the Lloyd-Webber musical. But Australia can be thanked for accepting to take our b-listers letting them loose in the jungle, and have them performing humiliating tasks for food. It is the modern equivalent of watching monkey's playing with tools. Only less entertaining.

Then there is the way in which they have ruined our native tongue, for instance calling University UNI, the bastsards. At least our American cousins have kept the language nearly the same even if they spell the words incorrectly and don't get irony.

Then the sports they play, Australian "NO" rules football. That's the game where the umpires are dressed like English butchers. They do also play rugby and cricket quite well. There two of the most widespread sports played which we invented and don't seem to be too good at. Yes this is sour grapes. But it was gratifying watching the Aussie PM having to present our rugby team with the winners medals and Webb Ellis Trophy.

Then they have got those fucking huge jumping, leaping things, I mean what do they do, they hop around the countryside and get shot by farmers. Then there's emus and ostriches the fastest creatures on two legs and what do they do when the dingoes come a hunting do they leg it like any creature with survival instincts would do. No. They say to themselves "Oh look a dingo, I'm the fastest thing on two legs, I could run away, but I think I'll bury my head in the sand." Then what happens, that's right they get mauled by a bunch of savage wild dogs. They deserve everything they get. Koala's there is another species that gets my blood boiling. Cute things.No. They spend their lives eating eucolyptus leaves, stripping trees of thier folliage and adding to the destruction of the forests, and speeding up the demise of the planet. Can you imagine what their farts must smell like, it doesn't bare thinking about, eucolyptus smells rank at the best of times.

I know that I have completly lost the thread of the title of this rant, because I know nothing about Australian culture. The morale of the story is clearly do your research, then I might have had something coherent to say on the matter. But still Never mind. Onwards and upwards.

How things look from a different perspective

Here a few pictures of things we see everyday taken from a different viewpoint.

A car looks strange from above.

A mug looks massive from this vantage.

I think this mouse looks like a weird plastic Ayres Rock. Has anyone else got any pictures of everday objects as seen from a less than norm perspective.

CSI Fact or Fiction

How Accurate is CSI

This edition of brain rant was going to discuss the accuracy of the above franchise television series but researching it was a quagmire of scientific jargon and would not really be all that relevant to what is essentially TV drama. So I will focus on only a couple of items of interest for this article.

1. The speed in which DNA can be analyzed and interpreted in the real forensic world and compare it to the television program.
2. The clothing that should be worn at a crime scene, and what the actors wear.
3. Compare the speed at which ballistic evidence can be interpreted from actual world to the dramatic world.
4. Do the real American CSI’s actually carry side-arms?

I choose these four points because they feature heavily in all three versions of the show. I do understand that the shows are heavily constrained to time limitations and do have to use a little dramatic licence in telling the story in a succinct manner for the viewer. And that the science used is an abridged version of what happens in actuality. But they still have to make it accurate because science is in fact the lead character in the show; the actors are the ones who have to bring it to life.

Point 1 DNA.

As we all know DNA can be taken from blood, hair, saliva, and other bodily fluids including vomit and semen. The larger the sample found the quicker a DNA profile can be made. With smaller samples it can take up to a month to produce a DNA profile. It is here that the show uses the most dramatic licence because their profiling is in done in minutes but the way in which they produce a DNA profile is accurate below describes how it is done:-


1. Separate white and red blood cells with a centrifuge.
2. Extract DNA nuclei from the white blood cells. This is done by bathing the cells in hot water, then adding salt, and putting the mixture back into the centrifuge
3. Cut DNA strand into fragments using a restriction enzyme.
4. Place fragments into one end of a bed of agarose gel with electrodes in it. Agarose gel is made from agar-agar, a type of seaweed that turns into gelatin when dissolved in boiling water.
5. Use an electric current to sort the DNA segments by length. This process is called agarose gel electrophoresis. Electrophoresis refers to the process of moving the negatively-charged molecules through the gel with electricity. Shorter segments move farther away from their original location, while longer ones stay closer. The segments align in parallel rows.
6. Use a sheet of nitrocellulose or nylon to blot the DNA. The sheet is stained so the different lengths of DNA bands are visible to the naked eye. By treating the sheet with radiation, an autoradiograph is created. This is an image on x-ray film left by the decay pattern of the radiation. The autoradiograph, with its distinctive dark-colored parallel bands, is the DNA profile.



Point 2 Clothing worn by CSI’s

The real scene of crimes investigators actually wear white polyester or cotton all in one coverall. They also wear a hairnet and that is covered with a cap. Over their shoes they also have covers made of the same material as the coveralls. This is done to avoid contaminating a crime scene. The kits they carry for detection used in the series are also wholly accurate. So the CSI’s in the series are not dressed correctly but the audience does need to see the characters, otherwise the show would resemble that scene from the Woody Allen movie Everything You Wanted to know about sex but were too afraid to ask, you all know which scene I am referring to.



Point 3 Ballistic Evidence

Ballistic comparison is a time quick thing to do. Guns have rifling in the barrels which cause a bullet to spin as it leaves the barrel; this is done to increase accuracy and range of the bullet. These machining marks that are in the barrel are then transferred to the projectile as it leaves the firearm. This is called striation. Different gun manufacturers have different rifling characteristics which allow experts to narrow down the scope of investigation, and can tell which manufacturers use those characteristics all they need is weapon to compare it to. When they have a suspect weapon it is test fired into a tank of water or into a canister filled with plastic balls. This is done to avoid damaging the bullets striation. Then the test bullet is compared to the bullet recovered from a body or crime scene under a microscope and the result is instance, either a yes or no answer. The show is correct and accurate in it’s depiction of ballistic evidence.

Point 4 Are CSI’s armed?

The answer to this particular question depends on where they are based. If they are sworn in law enforcement officials then yes they are, which is true for the Miami and New York shows, their real life CSI’s do pack heat. As for Las Vegas I couldn’t find out the answer to that question. Some police departments use outside contractors for crime scene investigation, they are not armed but do carry pepper spray. In these cases the scenes are guarded by law enforcement officials.

25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

To celebrate the anniversary of the rock and roll hall of fame in America, Rolling Stone Magazine commissioned this cover. But couldn't they have picked some people we have heard of.

I mean Mick Jagger what has he ever contributed to Rock music? Then there is St. Bonio. How "IN THE NAME OF LOVE" did he get picked for this particular gig? And of coarse Bruce "E Street"sting, might have been born in the USA, but he is the only Yank there.

Does that say something about American music? Or as I suspect most of the best music is in fact made in The United Kingdom of Great Rock and Roll and Northern Ireland. Has music in America reached an all time low? Next they'll be telling us Bob Dylan's gonna release a Christmas record.

OH HE IS?!!

Britania Rocks all over the world. But on behalf of this small island I would like to apologise for giving the world Status Quo, Simon Cowell and Pierce Morgan and The Spice Girls, The X-factor, Britain and America's got Talent.

But on the other hand BIG UP BRITAIN for:- The Beatles, The Bouncing Bomb the Jump Jet Harrier and imposing our language on all five continents and for the first spoken broadcast from the Lunar Surface. Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Charles Dickens, The Birmingham Six and The Guilford Four. Television, Telephone, and the World Wide Web.

Thankyou America for:-Your Boston Tea Party and Treasonous War of Independence, Doctor Crippen, Mark Chapman, George W. Bush, The Scary Movie films, Jerry Springer. Your greenhouse gas discharges, and starting the most unwanted war in history(congrats on that one George).

Should We Go Back To The Moon?


With the latest findings from NASA that there is water on the moon, is it now appropriate to revisit the lunar surface with manned missions? A number of possibilities exist, the obvious one being a permanent space station on the surface of another world to see how viable extra-terrestrial colonisation could be sustained. This would clearly lead if successful to colonising a planet similar to our own such as Mars.

With the existing technology we have at the moment would manned missions be easier than they were forty years ago. Those boffins at NASA had major obstacles to overcome in a very specific time frame set out by the then President Kennedy of putting a man on the moon before the decade was out. These being:-

1. Getting men in to near earth orbit and keeping them there for a set time to see if work in a zero g environment was possible.
2. Extra Vehicle Activity namely space walking
3. Docking with another craft in space
4. Escaping earth orbit then firing objects into lunar orbit.
5. Disengaging a craft from the command module and then rendezvous again.
6. Finally landing a craft on the lunar surface and launching the LEM back to the Command Module.

All of the above was achieved within ten years of the challenged being issued in May 1961. But this endeavour had to be more fluid than just getting a man to the moon; the Americans were in a race against the Soviet Union. Apollo 8 was never meant to go to the moon, that was intended for a later mission, but just before Apollo 8 was due to be launched the Russians launched a satellite and put into lunar orbit. So NASA’s next move had to be better than the Soviets last move. So that Christmas for Jim Lovell and Co. was spent doing laps around the moon. It was like an inter-stellar game of chess going on between the super powers in the cold war era. But the Americans won that game and sent twelve men to the lunar surface and got them all back safely to the Earth.

But I think the question should really be why shouldn’t we go back to the moon? There is nothing to stop us, there is no political incentive or sabre rattling, that needs to be satisfied in the post cold war age. There is the financial question as to viability of such a scheme. But with cooperation on a global scale there is not limit to what can be imagined and then realised.

When Columbus reached the new world that wasn’t the end of voyages of discovery it just opened another chapter in the story. If manned missions had continued a lot longer we would have a greater understanding of the universe its make up and how better to preserve it.

The only obstacle we have is the inability to imagine what is possible. Let us not forget that Victorian science fiction is now scientific fact. Jules Verne fantasized about getting men to the moon, and it is this type of creative thinking that has made space travel possible. It is a progressive pattern that started with the ability to create fire, making weapons for hunting etc. Starting with little baby steps got us out of the trees with the logical ending of travelling beyond the confines of our own planet and getting to the moon. The answer to the title in this transmission is a clear and unequivocal yes.

If you wish to follow the American space program visit the Nasa Homepage it really is well worth a look.