In Praise of the Almighty Sarlacc

The single greatest moment for me in the Star Wars trilogy is the Sarlacc Pit sequence in Return of the Jedi.  I know for most people it’s the lightsaber fight from Empire or the trench run from New Hope, and that many consider Jedi to be the weakest of the films, but there is one thing all of these people fail to take into account: people are being fed to giant monster in the desert.  There was no greater thrill in my childhood than when that scene came on, which may be indicative of far greater psychological problems that I would rather not get into at the moment.  It’s a massive, gaping maw at the bottom of a pit where people fall in and God knows what happens to them after that.  All you know for certain is that they are getting eaten.  I still chuckle when Klaatu, Barada and Nikto get chucked into the thing (and yes, I know the names of the characters and had the action figures when I was a kid).  There are complaints about Boba Fett dying such an ignominious death as he is accidentally launched into the Great Pit of Carkoon, but to me that serves as the potent reminder that no matter how bad-ass you are, there is always something in nature that just doesn’t give a damn.

Even after seeing the behind-the-scenes footage of how they made that sequence  didn’t take away any of the magic for me. It actually added a whole new level, as now I could either enjoy it as a scene of monster mayhem or take heart in the fact that a talented group of stuntmen were having the time of their life jumping down the gullet of a foam rubber atrocity.  

And then, George Lucas had to try and ruin it for me.  Evidently, someone showed him a definition of the term vagina dentata and his tiny brain couldn’t stand the idea of anyone possibly interpreting the Sarlacc as a sexual metaphor.  So, being the genius that he is, he decided to give the Sarlacc a mouth within a mouth, a little beak that for all intents and purposes could be seen as either a penis or a clitoris.  But that aside, the idea of giving this thing a mouth ruins the mystique.  This is supposed to be an otherworldly being that is unfathomable to us, a truly alien creature that’s true intent is unknowable.  Giving it a mouth (within a mouth, mind you) just makes it look like a generic, hungry creature.  The whole idea of keeping most of the monster out of side adds to the horror of what might be lurking below the sand.  In the original scene, all you know is this thing has tentacles and a mouth.  It has no personality to speak of, and that just makes it more interesting.

The good thing for me is that the damage George Lucas did to the film will never really affect me.  I know what the Sarlacc is supposed to look like and in my imagination and memory, it still satisfies the bizarre part of me that enjoys scenes of people being fed to monsters.  And I can always enjoy my second favorite sequence, the Rancor Pit, in it’s original glory.  

I really should get some sort of professional help for this monster obsession.

An Angry Letter from Me to the Anti-Vaccine Activists

Hello Anti-Vaccine Crowd,

I’ll admit it, right off the bat, that I’m largely writing this letter as a form of experiment.  I’m testing the hypothesis that a human being can have their head jammed so far up their own ass that the person is then able to actually read this letter.  If this is illegible, it simply means that your head is lodged somewhere around the diaphragm.   If you can read this, congratulations!  You may very well be classified as the first living example of a Klein bottle.

Now, I realize that a lot of those terms might seem confusing to you.  Words such as “hypothesis” and “experiment” have probably never come up in your lives.  Don’t be frightened or confused (which do seem to be your normal states) – these are simply terms used in science.  That thing you tend to ignore in favor of your moral indignation and panic.  But don’t worry; there are literally thousands of people who are familiar with this term.  These are the people who have worked for much of their adult lives on the vaccines that have extended human life expectancy by a good thirty years.

Right now, I can tell that you are frothing at the mouth, ready to pounce on “all those so-called scientists” who, in your mind, are nothing more than corporate shills, trying to line their pockets at the expense of your precious child’s health.  And normally, I am pretty skeptical myself of pharmaceutical companies and big business in general.  However, this is one instance in which these scientists and businesses are doing the right thing.  Due to the efforts of the medical community, many diseases that once ran rampant in American society are now incredibly rare.  Polio is on the verge of being wiped out.  Please note the use of the word “verge.”  All of that good work can be undone pretty quickly if kids aren’t getting vaccinated.

Of course the big bogey man in this argument is autism.  That’s an easy fear to allay, if you are capable of critical thinking.  There is no causal link between autism and vaccines. It’s been tested and retested and retested.  Denmark conducted the most thorough examination of autism and vaccines and found no significant difference in the occurrence of autism in populations that were vaccinated and those that were not.  Scientists still have no clue what the real cause of autism is, but the reason for the massive increase in diagnoses is due to improved techniques for recognizing the condition.  A vaccine is very, very unlikely to alter the neurological system of a child.  Meningitis, on the other hand, could completely alter the mental capacity of a child, if the child survives.

I appreciate your right to decide what is best for your child, but what you’re doing is jeopardizing the lives of a lot of other children instead.  To protect the population from infectious disease requires widespread vaccination.  By refusing to have your children vaccinated because of pseudo-science, you are jeopardizing more than just your child.

Thoughts from an American Doctor Who Fan

Being a Doctor Who fan places you on the bottom of the geek pecking order in America.  In a collection of quirky misfits, you suddenly become the quirkiest of the lot.  It doesn’t help that many of us were more or less inducted into fandom in a way reminiscent of a cult.  Some people came across it late on Saturday nights while watching PBS.  Others were raised up on it by their parents, already dedicated converts who wanted to get their kids on the right track to sci-fi righteousness.  Then there was my path into this bizarre world of Daleks and Autons. 

I was always a geek.  I had been ever since I uttered my first word, which was “Batman.”  All through my childhood, I was pleasantly dragged into the realm of science fiction and fantasy by my older brother. Roleplaying games, Nintendo and comic books made up the majority of my social activities.  After college, I was working at a bookstore, like many others who foolishly chose to major in English without the benefit of a trust fund to see us through to a doctorate and tenure.  There were three other guys at the store I tended to hang out with and complain about the customers.  But every so often they would start talking about the Doctor.  I was lost.  My entire exposure to Doctor Who at that point had been a themed pinball machine and a strange collection of toys I saw at GenCon.  These guys would go on about the mythos of the show, bringing up favorite episodes.  And eventually, I had to ask what the hell they were talking about.  And, like the drug dealers they were, they were only too happy to hook me up with a sample. 

Two of the guys, Andy and Pat, invited me to join in on a viewing of Terror of the Autons (yes, my first Doctor was John Pertwee, and I still love the Venusian Aikido and I still try to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow).  We gathered in Pat’s living rooms, along with his girlfriend, and by the time the DVD was finished, I had become a faithful convert.  I joined in on the conversations about regenerations and sonic screwdrivers.  I sat in basements watching bootlegs.  And I was one very happy monkey the day I learned the show was coming back with a new Ninth Doctor in 2005.  By then, I had left the bookstore in Milwaukee for a newsroom in DC, and still had coworkers I could chat with about the show.

But I found myself in a rather odd position.  In social gatherings of a geeky nature, I found myself mostly isolated from the conversation, as everyone else wanted to talk about Star Wars and Star Trek.  Occasionally, there might be a remark about the show, some people knew about it, but no one around had the same passion for it that I did.  It was never their main interest in the universe of sci fi and fantasy, just another satellite orbiting the core planet of Star Wars/Trek.  I was the outcast among the outcasts.

And to be quite frank, it can stay that way.  That’s because I’ve realized something about Doctor Who that, for me, makes it superior to the more mainstream obsessions of American sci-fi fans.  Star Wars had three movies, three horrendous attempts at expanding the films, and a large number of books that are really necessary to keep adding to the story, and yet those books are an absolute muddle of conflicting ideas.  Star Trek had to be rebooted with a new cast as The Next Generation, then again as Deep Space Nine (which, for my money, is the pinnacle of the franchise), then again as Voyager, then again as Enterprise.  Even the films had to be rebooted, until finally they’ve been reborn as a lens flare-laden piece of shit directed by the biggest hack in Hollywood, J.J. Abrams.  True, all of those stories take place in the same universe, but there is no real continuity except when it is unnaturally shoehorned in.  Both series had to do complete overhauls in order to stay relevant (and unfortunately, in the case of Star Wars, those overhauls have almost destroyed the love of that universe that many have held).  But Doctor Who is a constant, never needing a reboot because it has always been about change.  It is a simple story of a man in a blue box who can go anywhere in time and space, and the few people in the universe who have the good (and sometimes horrifically bad) fortune to go along with him.  Its narrative is as boundless as the human experience.