a sense of joy and then a panic

Fata Morganas (responsible for "The Flying Dutchman," UFOs, etc., named for Morgan Le Fay): "Fata Morgana mirages tremendously distort the object or objects which they are based on, such that the object often appears to be very unusual, and may even be transformed in such a way that it is completely unrecognizable."

For example:

In 1818, Sir John Ross was on a voyage which was an attempt to discover the long-sought-after Northwest Passage. Ross's ship reached Lancaster Sound in Canada. The Northwest Passage was straight ahead, but John Ross did not go in that direction because he saw, or thought he saw, in the distance, a land mass with mountains, which he believed made going any further simply impossible. He named the mountain range of this supposed land mass "Crocker Mountains". He gave up and returned to England, despite the protests of several of his officers, including First Mate William Edward Parry and Edward Sabine.  The account of his voyage, published a year later, brought to light their disagreement, and the ensuing controversy over the existence of Crocker Mountains ruined his reputation. Just a year later William Edward Parry was able to sail further west, through those non-existent mountains.

Ross's second mistake was to name the apparent mountain range after the First Secretary of the Admiralty. Naming what was in fact a mirage after such a high official cost Sir John Ross dearly: he was refused ship and money for his subsequent expeditions, and was forced to use private funding instead.

By an odd coincidence, during a 1906 expedition 88 years after Ross's expedition, Robert Peary gave the name Crocker Land to a land mass which he believed he saw in the distance, northwest from the highest point of Cape Thomas Hubbard, which is situated in what is now the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. Peary named the apparent land mass after the late George Crocker of the Peary Arctic Club. Peary estimated the landmass to be 130 miles away, at about 83 degrees N, longitude 100 degrees W.

In 1913, Donald Baxter MacMillan organised the Crocker Land Expedition which set out to reach and explore Crocker Land. On 21 April the members of the expedition saw what appeared to be a huge island on the north-western horizon. As MacMillan later said, "Hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.”

Piugaattoq, a member of the expedition and a Inuit hunter with 20 years of experience of the area, explained that this was just an illusion. He called it "poo-jok", which means mist. However MacMillan insisted that they press on, despite the fact that it was late in the season and the sea-ice was breaking up. For five days they went on, following the mirage, until on 27 April, having covered some 125 miles (201 km) of dangerous sea-ice, MacMillan was forced to admit that Piugaattoq was right. Crocker Land was in fact a mirage, probably a Fata Morgana.

Song for tonight (for the line "I still dream of Dad.  Though he died."  Although today I was dreaming mostly about Silent Hill and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, of all fucked up combinations):

Some people have commented on the seemingly heavy-handed politics of Monsters - the issue of border-crossing and the Wall and of course, Mexico being an "infected zone" that must be kept at bay - and the most awkward lines of dialogue are the ones that try to straight-forwardly discuss the idea of America building walls and sealing itself in, and how different America looks from the other side of the Wall, and we "forget all this" when we're in our "perfect suburban homes."  But that's extraneous stuff that's not at the heart of the movie.  Monsters goes beyond any current political issue.  It's really about coexistence/extinction/evolution, and the possibility of understanding an alien that isn't a humanoid little big-eyed bugger but looks like Cthulhu. 

Serious kudos to the decision not to make these aliens totally horrific, by the way.  They do kill people, but for them it must be like swatting at flies, and they do other things besides kill - they hang out in lakes with fallen aircraft, they moan plaintively, they lay their pretty glowing eggs in trees that the U.S. military then chemical-bombs, they turn off televisions, they communicate with each other through gentle touch and look like ethereal, celestial beings. 

It's sad that people have said nothing happens in this movie - I'm guessing because aliens aren't popping out every other minute and having fist fights with the main characters - because the movie shows that a great deal has happened since the alien-carrying space probe landed in Mexico and North America is continuing to change.  It's a bottom-up movie, which means we don't see the U.S. president frowning over the situation with his cabinet, and we don't see people living in underground shelters or totally extinguished or anything - because this is about how life went on in Mexico after the aliens landed.  One of my favorite bits was a five-second clip of a Mexican info-cartoon for children showing a happy little Dora-the-Explorer-like girl putting on a gas mask and standing in front of a wall, behind which a googly-eyed, unthreatening squid monster dances around.  Those kinds of details make Monsters remarkable.  

A Mexican port official explains that if you have money, you take the ferry to the U.S., bypassing the alien-infested infected zone, and if you don't have money, then you "go by land."  Third-world-first-world relations continue pretty much as they always have, with passport drama and bribe drama and "why do your friends have guns" drama, as an industry of illegal infected-zone crossing has developed.  In a lot of ways Monsters is more of an "Americans trapped outside America!" movie, but it's a Grade A example of that subgenre, neither making things unrealistically easy or unrealistically hard, and not making it about Evil Dangerous Mexicans threatening the Poor Innocent Americans.  But then there are moments where the movie rises above that subgenre - when the leads find an ancient pyramid that's been grown over by jungle, for example, leading you to wonder if our civilization will also be overtaken by these new lifeforms.  But who can say?  What little we see of the U.S. implies that the American people have an inflated, confused perception of the aliens' threat level, because they don't have to deal with the aliens on a daily basis.  But the people of Mexico have been living within spitting range of the infected zone for six years now (the wall protecting the U.S. from the infected zone is made of brick, and the one protecting Mexico from the infected zone is more like a very tall fence), and they're not going to leave because their work is here, their family is here, as a taxi driver explains.  They've also started to pick up some things about the aliens' life cycle and behavioral patterns, and the aforementioned friends with guns explain that if you leave them alone, they'll leave you alone - this doesn't quite work out because there's so little bridge of understanding between the "creatures" and the humans, but these scenes of altered, adjusted life - after the running and screaming is over, as the director says - is really what I watch sci-fi for, and Monsters hits this out of the park.  I bought this world.  Detailed, believable, and intense.  Nothing like the ridiculousness of Avatar.

Also sad are the comments I've read saying this is just a relationship movie.  I don't even know what to make of those comments, honestly.  So many sci fi movies feature heroes with love interests, but I doubt anyone said that Transformers was a relationship drama.  The two leads develop a bond that can't be consummated, because she's engaged.  Is it because they have actual conversations and think about their lives?  It's not as if the action stops so that they can stare into each other's eyes.  It's baffling to me that anyone could think there was too much relationship drama, but sort of reminds me of a couple discussions in SF/F lately about how if you include a sex scene or too much relationship stuff then a book somehow jumps out of SF/F and becomes romance - yet another "issue" that I cannot wrap my head around (does that mean Updike wrote romance?  it's laughable, the obsession with formulas that some SF/F fans have). 

You'll notice "suicidal mountain-climbing" is on my list of LJ interests, but I'm not sure how much I've talked about it.  I have read the wikipedia List of deaths on eight-thousanders many times.  I am especially partial to stories about K2 - its peril is not exactly a secret in the mountaineering world (and really I should start looking up Annapurna, the mountain with the highest fatality rate: over 40%), but I was surprised to read about K2 in college.  The overriding theme of most of these stories is the question of personal vs. social/communal responsibility: that is, if you pass a mountaineer in trouble on your way to the peak, do you stop your ascent and try to help them down, or do you say "well, he made the mistake of climbing without oxygen/training/equipment, we all have to look out for ourselves"?  See David Sharp.  Sir Edmund Hillary is by far my favorite participant in that debate (Hillary described Mark Inglis' attitude as "pathetic").  Also see the controversial Into Thin Air, which is probably the most famous contemporary mountaineering story.

I think the real reason these stories appeal to me, though, is the surrealism of the whole experience, the time spent "in the company of death," where frozen dead bodies who have been there for years are actually markers like "Base Camp" and "Camp IV."  The surrealism and the incredible desire of these chronic climbers to do something so difficult, so likely to lead to death.  You watch those Everest documentaries and these people just do not stop thinking about 8,000-ers, especially if they've already tried to climb them and failed.  It appears to be their driving purpose in life, one that subsumes family, work, health, finances.  These mountains fucking haunt them.  Then of course there's all the Type-A, competitive aspects of the whole endeavor (that tie directly into the responsibility question) - the "rarr I defy death and gravity and nature" triumph-of-the-human survivalism, the "oh yeah?  well, I'm going to climb WITHOUT OXYGEN" oneupmanship that more often than not leads to death, the extremely bitter disputes over whether the dead people reached the summit or not (I'm guessing it's a question of whether their death was "for nothing").  Note that this attitude does not extend to everyone - Anatoli Boukreev being just one exception: "Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion...I go to them as humans go to worship."

So here I have watched three mountaineering movies.  Touching The Void is a documentary about Siula Grande, in the Andes.  K2 is "based on a true story" about K2 (obviously).  The North Face is "based on a true story" about Eiger, in the Alps.  Touching the Void and K2 are contemporary stories, while The North Face is set in the 1930s.

Touching the Void is a superb movie.  Simpson and Yates are descending from the summit of the Siula Grande.  Simpson breaks his leg and Yates is trying to rappel the both of them down (an extremely tough pill).  Eventually, Simpson is dangling off a cliff.  Yates can't see him and he can't support the weight of them both, so he hopes that Simpson is only a few feet from the ground and cuts the rope (and becomes known forever more as "The Man That Cut The Rope").  Oh dear, turns out Simpson is 100 foot from the ground.  Yates sees this and assumes Simpson's dead, then goes back to base camp.  But Simpson isn't dead, and has to crawl/hop out of a crevasse and onto a glacier and down to base camp by himself.  Touching the Void may have a leg-up on the other two just because it's a documentary.  But it's a well-done documentary that totally captures the hallucinatory weirdness (for lack of a better term) that Simpson experienced on his horrifically painful descent.  It is also very darkly funny - probably the most memorable part of the movie is when Simpson (on the mountain) has the auditory hallucination of hearing "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Boney M, a band that he hates.  And he's like, "Bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M."  My second-favorite part was the guys at base camp hearing this noise that sounds like Simpson crying in the wind but because they're sure he's dead, are too scared to go out because they think it's some undead spirit back to haunt them.  Trufax.  Note also that Simpson has always defended Yates' decision to cut the rope (he reasons that they both would have died otherwise).  Simpson also still climbs mountains.  Really highly recommended.

K2 is not so good.  I don't know what the true story is like, but this felt quite overwrought.  I didn't really understand the motivations of the climbers, and I was totally on the side of the porters that ran away from the Savage Mountain in fear (sherpas, I should note, are incredibly bad ass).  The set-up here is that because the first two guys who tried to go up to the summit fell and died, the two best friends that were "cheated out of their chance" got to go up to the summit despite the great risk of bad weather.  The rest of the group has gone back to base camp and is going to fly away with a helicopter because the one guy has altitude sickness and will die if he doesn't get off the mountain.  But no, the helicopter can't leave!  They must go pick up the two climbers!  Even if the one dude dies of altitude sickness because of it!  Granted this may all be a realistic situation - in which case, quite frankly, it would be a shitty, dire situation exemplifying the tradeoffs and deals-with-the-Devil that people make on 8000-ers - but the presentation was so one-sided, and so straight-faced ("hooray they're dead!  now we can go!"  Huh?), that I found it more than a little eye-rolly.  Besides, the mountain didn't look very threatening - it looked like a tame mountain on a controlled set.  There was no darkness in this movie.  Just triumphant electric guitar.  Give it a pass.

The North Face falls between these two (but closer to Touching the Void).  The main characters are German, and the mountain is in Austria.  The Third Reich is just coming into power, and the German expats are sort of basking in their country's perceived inflation in global value.  Two German mountaineers have decided to climb the never-before-conquered North Face of Eiger, and Germany lets them leave the military to pursue their suicide-dream because it's a good PR opportunity.  Thus the media and onlookers watch them from a little chateau, taking pictures, eating feasts.  An Austrian team is climbing at the same time, and they join forces after one of the Austrians gets a head injury and the Germans discover the dead bodies of a pair that had gone before them.  The mountaineers know both they and their national honor are fucked.  Given these high stakes, they make the profoundly suicidal decision to keep going, lugging up the half-dead Austrian with them, in piss-poor weather.  This movie does not have a happy ending.  It is actually quite brutal, despite the mountain itself being a lowly 4000-er (probably partly because they have shitty equipment).  The movie's also trying to transcend the mountaineering genre and get to something broader - about patriotism, and voyeurism, and living vicariously through a couple sturdy young men who are then thrown around like rag dolls (militarism woo-hoo) - and, of course, about conquest and the predatory state of Nazi Germany.  Also highly recommended.

This song just came on shuffle, and I think it oddly fits [the pretend world being the veneer of achievement and conquest that accompanies these mountaineering missions, and the real world being what actually happens]:

In the pretend world, we all are very awake
In the pretend world, we all look sterile and fake
In this atmosphere we all could chatter for days
In the pretend world, we never admit our mistakes

But in the real world, we're hiding alone and ashamed
And we can't live well because we're addicted to pain
You see I cannot feel this no matter how you try
In the real world, we can't deny

In the pretend world, we gaze into empty eyes
We amuse ourselves with tawdry tales and white lies

But in the real world, where fools tormented for sport
We just stitch up our mouths so we can't admit or retort
You see I cannot say this, please don't ask me why
In the real world, we can't deny

Some thoughts about the guy who flew a plane into an IRS building, killing himself and an IRS worker.  On the one hand he's a "hero" to the Stormfront people (natch) and random people on Facebook who quote Thomas Jefferson and say he's a real American patriot, etc.  On the other hand, he finishes his "manifesto" not with the line that the newspapers are quoting, "Well Mr. Big Brother IRS man… take my pound of flesh and sleep well," but this, "The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.  The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."  He also calls Bush a "presidential puppet" with "cronies."  So are Stormfront and the "anti-tax movement" now also Communist and Bush-hating?  Because that might make them more interesting.

But they probably just didn't read the manifesto.

Meanwhile Littleton, CO just barely avoided another school shooting incident (but this time by a 32-year-old!), and a killer whale dragged a Sea World trainer under and thrashed her around until she died.  And I know I missed psycho biology professor who, until it was revealed she'd already killed her younger brother, attracted a shocking number of comments on the New York Times sympathizing with her killing three of her colleagues because the tenure system really sucks, yo.  Yep, just another day on Planet USA.

Haven't done of these in a while, and since I managed to catch the beginning of "The Host" last night (just before bed!), here's another themed X-Files montage, to demonstrate the awesomeness of the show.  Thanks as always to the X-Files Screen Grab Archive for the pictures.

Episodes featured: Fresh Bones, Bad Blood, Red Museum, Quagmire, Field Trip, The Field Where I Died, Agua Mala, Biogenesis, Ice, Via Negativia, Small Potatoes, Signs and Wonders, All Things, X-Cops, Wetwired, Dreamland, Chimera, Brand X, Home, Alpha, Dreamland II, The Sixth Extinction.

Grizzly Man, by Werner Herzog, documentary about Timothy Treadwell.


Really fantastic movie, very highly recommended.  I almost don't know what to say because Werner Herzog always leaves me speechless.  Summary: Timothy Treadwell loves Alaskan grizzly bears so much that he spends the summer with them for thirteen years - grossly violating the Park Service's rules about maintaining a safe distance and protecting them from would-be poachers (or so he thinks).  In 2003, he and his girlfriend were eaten by an aging, desperate bear (that was subsequently shot and split open to find their remains, totally contrary to what Treadwell would have wanted).  The film is mostly composed of Treadwell's own footage/narration of his experience with the bears (he was a wannabe actor, so all his tapes have a pseudo-nature-documentary feel to them).

It's a plaintive, moving, often darkly comical documentary.  A lot of people say they can't relate to Treadwell, end up angry with him, feel he "deserved" what he got, etc., but I found his character sympathetic if naive.  He and Herzog have very different views of the natural universe, and while I agree with Herzog, I feel for Treadwell's perspective.  On the one hand you laugh at his crying over and incomprehension of death in nature, but on the other hand, I think it would be hard not to be shocked upon finding a detached limb of a bear cub that had been killed by an adult male, or discovering that five days after another cub died of starvation, all that remained was its skull, polished almost clean.  Treadwell does have a very sentimentalized view of nature - probably because he totally cannot relate to human society.  For the Park Service (a.k.a. "those fucking fucks"), Treadwell has a lot of hostility.  For the bears and foxes (and bumblebees and...), it's all "I love you."  One of the funniest parts of the movie is his ranting at God - "Jesus boy" and "Christ man" and "Allah" and "Hindu floaty thing" - because it hasn't rained enough for the fish to make their run down the river, and "Downy is hungry!  Tabitha is hungry!  Melissa is eating her babies!"  Not long thereafter, Treadwell goes back on camera happily to announce that he is God's humble servant, because it rained 1.65 inches. 

The other subplot of the movie is the deaths, of course, of which there's gory evidence (not shown, except for the dissected bear, which was pretty gruesome) in the coroner's office and an even creepier tape - though the camera lid was on, audio recorded Treadwell being attacked and telling his girlfriend to run away, his girlfriend screaming and attacking the bear with a frying pan, then presumably getting killed herself.  The coroner's listened to it as part of the autopsy, and it now belongs to a good friend of Treadwell's (and co-executive producer of the movie).  Herzog listens to the tape in the movie (not heard) and after he asks her to shut it off he's sitting there trembling, and she sees the expression on his face and starts crying.  Herzog tells her never to listen to it, never to look at the pictures, and to just destroy the tape, because it would be a white elephant in her house forever.  The whole thing is really quite awful.  Especially when you consider that the girlfriend was afraid of bears and probably shouldn't have been there at all.  Treadwell's a polarizing character - he himself says that he can't stand the middle ground, he needs extremes - but a very intriguing one, and very Herzogian: one of those humans that just did not seem compatible with human civilization and thus managed to fall off the world.

Suffice it to say Herzog is a fucking genius and a profoundly gifted artist and humanist.  And this is a great movie.

"China Reports Dolphins Foiled Pirate Attack"

From Xinhua: "The Chinese merchant ships escorted by a China’s fleet sailed on the Gulf of Aden when they met some suspected pirate ships. Thousands of dolphins suddenly leaped out of water between pirates and merchants when the pirate ships headed for the China’s.

"The suspected pirates ships stopped and then turned away. The pirates could only lament their littleness befor the vast number of dolphins. The spectacular scene continued for a while."

As The Lede blog was so clever to report in the same article, after Hurricane Katrina "[a]rmed dolphins, trained by the U.S. military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico".