Sven's life in Oz

Since I got back from the US, I have been rushed off my feet. Work has been mad thanks to the sudden departure of my boss and the merging of my team with the media team. This is a great opportunity for me, but it has meant I have been busier than ever. I’ve barely had time to catch my breath. Of course, this merge means I get more opportunity to move my career in the direction I want, i.e. more writing and less communications strategy, so I’m happy to do it. That said, I was recently told that I take things a bit too far.

“How do you have any fun?” I was asked when I entered into the very rant I am about to transcribe here. I was so perplexed that it was all I could do to stammer out a response with a puzzled look on my face that really didn’t make things any clearer. “Don’t you understand,” I said, “that this is how I have fun?”

Airline grammar

It has long been said – and when I say that I mean: “Every time I go out to eat I say” – that restaurant menus are where the English language goes to die. Every noun has an adjective, every adjective has an adverb; the very worst have verbs in their own right, as though your dinner is capable of performing some activity other than simply being, which is the kind of extant position you would have thought we could assume when placing our order. Whilst nothing can be worse than the lamentable state of the modern bill of fare, there are other places where our language is, if not gasping its last breath, at least clocking off early and taking a breather. I speak, of course, of the airline industry. At the prospect of crossing a border – and I’m including you in this as well, America; you’re as bad as anyone else – English seems to break down, and airline personnel are willing accomplices.

Now, I know several cabin crew members for various airlines very well and they are among the cleverest, most informed people I know. (See also: ’some of my best friends are gay’.) International languages trip from their tongues like Austrian children in outfits made from curtain fabric. They talk like natives of places that I would have to look up on a map. And yet, whenever I am in an airport I can guarantee that I will hear at least one of the following:

• “This is the last and final call for…”
• “If I could have your full and complete attention…”
• “Ladies and gentlemen, at this time…”,
• or sometimes all three together: “Ladies and gentlemen, at this time I would like your full and complete attention as this is the last and final call for…” *head explode*

Tautologies abound! If it is the last call it must be final; if you want my full attention, it must also be complete. As for “at this time”, it is wholly redundant. Re-read that sentence and tell me that it doesn’t make sense without those three little words. What annoys me is not that people use them. I can understand that it helps to distinguish between advance notices such as “in five minutes we will start selling you duty free and robbing you of all your loose change for an unspecified children’s charity”. What annoys me is the way they litter airline announcements like grammatical dog turds on an picturesque linguistic village green. Sentences that begin with: “At this time…” frequently also end with “…at this time”! Sometimes there’s even one in the middle!

I have no doubt that this little phrase is an air steward’s version of an “ummm” – the pleonastic symptom of an attack of stage-fright or a mental blank – but please, for the love of sanity, think before you press “page”. Good planning is the key to successful public speaking. And while you’re at it, put a comma in this, and a question mark at the end:

Thanks ever so much.

I recently read an article over at Airlock Alpha, where Tiffany Vogt bemoaned the cancellation of science fiction programming on American television, asking “Is This The End Of Sci-Fi On Television?”  In a nutshell, Vogt argues that audiences are too impatient to invest in a long-running story arc, demanding immediate gratification at the expense of good characterisation and turning off when they don’t get it. The catalyst for this is the refusal to re-commission Dollhouse and Defying Gravity – two US science fiction shows with failing ratings. They are the latest victims of our abhorrent behaviour, which, she claims, will eventually kill science fiction as a genre:

These days the viewing audience is simply too impatient to allow for proper “homebuilding” (e.g., storytelling). We are the children of the “Me-generation” and the “I want it right now” generation. No patience. It is all about instant gratification. But nothing worthwhile can be achieved so quickly or by taking shortcuts.

Recent examples would be the new television shows “FlashForward” and “V.” It is astounding how quickly viewers turned the channel once they realized they were not getting any fast answers. They wanted it right now, or they just tuned out. It is appalling.

In her article, Vogt quite rightly extols the virtues of characterisation and emotional investment in the story, and though I find her homebuilding analogy shaky, I agree with her assessment of what makes a good story. The problem with her argument is that none of the shows she mentions are any good. Her position seems based on a false premise – that science fiction is inherently good – and we all get the blame for murdering the genre. It gives me no joy to tell you the sad truth: there is a lot of bad science fiction out there, and some of it ought to be euthanised.

Science fiction has always had a tough time of it. Audiences must suspend their disbelief to a far greater extent than many other genres require. Basic premises must be explained in greater detail given that science fiction often happens in a reality beyond our normal experience. From a writer’s perspective, you are making the rules up as you go along, and that kind of freedom can be incredibly challenging. On a practical level, budgets for television are generally quite low and it can be difficult to create a convincing new universe on limited funds. Vogt’s statement that “this is a bad time to be a science fiction show” is tautologous: it’s always a bad time to be a science fiction show, or any show for that matter. TV is not gentle mistress for any programming, and sci-fi is no exception.

I love science fiction. I am an unapologetic sci-fi enthusiast, and I am not alone. If this is a bad time for sci-fi on tv, this is not symptomatic of a problem with the genre. In virtually every other medium sci-fi is excelling. Star Trek and Avatar are among the most eagerly anticipated and successful films of the year. (Avatar’s performance remains to be seen, but it’s a safe bet given the pre-release interest.) Science fiction in gaming is ubiquitous, and comics and graphic novels have never enjoyed a better reputation. The question is not why science fiction is failing, since all evidence points to the contrary. The question is why television can’t make it work. As the saying goes, you can’t polish a turd. I believe, and viewers agree, that science fiction shows right now are just bad tv.

Audiences are not goldfish-brained, explanation junkies. We are quite happy to invest time and emotion into a story that engages us and takes us somewhere. The staggering success of Battlestar Galactica is testament to the level of engagement good stories can engender, especially science fiction stories. The grand story arc in BSG took five years to resolve, and audiences were hooked from the very first moment till the end. Even non-genre audiences loved it – my sister, for example, loathes sci-fi, but watched that show like it was televisual methadone. People watched because it was not driven by science fiction: it was driven by characters. I cared about Roslyn and Adama and the Colonial Fleet. I can remember obscure facts about the characters because I was involved in their story. I can barely remember the names of some characters from FlashForward. Battlestar Galactica was the perfect example of the age-old writers adage: ’show, don’t tell’. We watched the characters, and we saw their story unfold. The series wasn’t about space, that was just where it happened. They weren’t telling us about their world, they were just letting us follow them around inside it.

People turn off their sets when Lost is on, or Fringe, or V, or Dollhouse or Heroes or any show you care you to mention from any genre, because these shows aren’t ’shows’ any more: they are ‘tells’. The island on Lost was mysterious when we were simply watching what it did. When we started being told it stopped being interesting. We enjoy a mystery, but we know that every week in FlashForward we will be fed a pre-determined piece of the puzzle in a pre-determined order. We are not being shown the clues, we are being told where to look. The characters are not individuals, they are orators for the plot. We aren’t in a theatre any more, we’re in a lecture hall. Same layout, different function. We don’t care about the bad fake science in Fringe, we care how the characters deal with life despite it. But you keep giving us more bad fake science, so we go elsewhere. People are interested in people. How did Galactica’s FTL work? Who knows? Now how about that Baltar, eh?

Science fiction is just a genre. It is not an end in itself. Given the choice, I would watch a show with spaceships or time travel or genetically engineered super-plagues instead of a period drama, because I am a sci-fi fan. But if the people fighting off the alien invaders are boring while the scullery wench and the footman are not, then I’m going to switch to bonnets and lace and get my sci-fi fix somewhere else. I want to be shown a good story, and if it’s got a particle energy supergun and a time-bending proto-spanner in it, so much the better; but the gadgets must always, always come second. Character must always be king.

It is rather churlish to blame audiences for turning off science fiction shows and killing the genre when writers and producers seem incapable of giving us what we want. Must we simply accept the B-grade story because that’s what comes with the genre? Are we wrong to expect some human interest in with our spaceborne shootouts and green-skinned women? Audiences vote with their feet and it is wrong to call us traitors to a genre for doing so. We are simply demanding better of our writers, producers and television stations. To continue to produce sub-standard science fiction television would be the real tragedy, and I welcome the cancellation of Dollhouse and Defying Gravity. Perhaps their budgets will be used for other, better, more worthy sci-fi endeavours.

We won’t watch sci-fi simply because it’s there; it must also be good. We may be geeks, but we have standards.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been going to the NSW State Library for a series of talks by published authors, journalists and other successful writery types on how to write comedy for different media.  It’s been an enlightening little series with food for thought, confidence boosts and literary hi-jinks, fuelled by nervous energy and free booze.  (The series was sponsored by Taylors’ Wines, and very nice they were, too.)  As with all these things, there’s always a nervous twenty minutes before the thing starts where you can’t decide where to sit, and then have to make idle chat with a stranger while you wait for the speakers to arrive.  Last week Caroline and I had a lovely chat about the British weather, and this week I was all pscyhed up with some not-so-juicy banter when Steven sat next to me.  He was eating a small mountain of triangular sandwiches so I did the British thing and pretended not to notice him until he was ready to introduce himself.  This was going swimmingly until I accidentally made eye contact just as he shoved the last dainty cheese-and-salad wedge into his mouth.  I had to say hello and introduce myself, then embarrassingly read his name tag while he tried to clear his mouth.  At least we had a little chuckle about it before the speakers started.

No sooner had the first guest taken the stage than Steven sprang into life: out came the MacBook carefully wrapped in a zip-up, felt-lined, laptop sleeping bag.  I was jealous watching him peel that lovely article out of its figure-hugging carry case, open it up and see the screen come gently, warmly into life.  I sat there with my little moleskine notebook and stolen ballpoint and tried not to look too much like an inbred pauper.  I glanced over as he settled himself in, plugged in his Telstra 3G mobile network modem, and connected to the internet.  I did wonder why he needed an internet connection, but not for long.  Just as the speaker got underway, up popped TweetDeck.

I love Twitter, I really do, but not as much as this guy.  For the next two hours he tweeted every quote, every comment, and every joke made.  He tweeted the speakers, he tweeted the venue, he tweeted every book, magazine or television title mentioned.  And it didn’t stop there: he tabbed between TweetDeck and Google so he could look up links for each of his tweets, just in case you were interested in buying a copy of  ’So Feral!‘ on Amazon after learning he was at a speech by the author.  I was amazed.  At first I thought that perhaps he was providing a service for twitterers who wanted to come but couldn’t.  But then he started responding to other people’s tweets about things totally unconnected.  (As you can tell, I had quite a good view of his screen.  And I found his twitter page when I got home.)  He even set up hashtags for his little tweet report: if you want to read anything about the SLNSW on Twitter now, you’ll have to see his thoughts on the other attendees first.

Is it just me?  Tweet beforehand, tweet in the breaks, tweet your thoughts afterward, but Mother Teresa on a biscuit tin, do you have to tap away all through the event?  Am I getting old?  Is this what people are doing nowadays?  Typing away into the internet, making digital notes available to all while the rest of us sit there taking old-fashioned notes in a little black notebook.  Because if it is, then I just don’t think I’m on board.  I like my notebook, I like my biro, and I can’t possibly concentrate on the speaker and the twittersphere at the same time.  And your tappity-tap-tap is quite distracting, too.

Last week, after four years of faithful service, my iBook took one last moment to load a photoshopped image of your truly, before giving up the ghost, rather suddenly, and passing on to the big Apple Store in the sky.  My iBook is officially dead.  I took it for a post-mortem at the local Apple Store and they suspect a dodgy logic board as the cause of death.  They can’t be sure, of course, without a detailed internal examination, but that is the most likely cause.  And it couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time.  I registered for my Australian Business Number last week after I got my first freelance writing job in Australia; I’ve got an article for 3sixty due in a fortnight; and a short story that was starting to fit together was saved on the Mac hard drive.  I even bought a new power lead (not cheap) and a 500GB hard drive (surprisingly cheap, actually) to take the pressure off the poor thing.  Mercifully, all my data is on the new hard drive, but I can’t get at it because it’s formatted for Mac OSX and the only other computer we have in the house is a sinfully slow Windows Vista PC.  Still, looking forward, which of these two options do you think I will be going with?

Replace the logic board for $1300.  The friendly chap at the Apple Genius Bar was quite certain that this was the problem and quoted me around $950 for a new logic board with $350 for labour to get the thing up and running again, but he added the rather ominous closer: “…and that’s if it is the logic board. of course.”  I just don’t think spending $1300 on something that is potentially going to sort out the trouble is a sensible investment, do you?  What if the logic board was doing its job just fine and its something else?  I can’t help but picture the logic board as a micro-Mr Spock, raising his eyebrows at the suggestion that he might be at fault (with acompanying french horn sound track for dramatic effect), before pointing out that the power distribution has been playing up ever since we entered this nebula and it is most likely a problem with the EPS relays.  Those things are no end of trouble and I’ll put money on them as the cause of my current woes, if, of course, my iBook has any.  And if not, well then there’s the problem right there.  Remind me again why I don’t work for Apple?

Buy a brand new MacBook Pro and have all my data moved across, because if the problem is the logic board, then mad old micro-Spock may be having his Bendii Syndrome breakdown just at the worst possible time, but at least the hard drive is still intact.  If I buy a brand new MacBook Pro (for approximately $4,000) then Apple will gladly extract the hard drive from my crappy NCC-1701 iBook for free, and gift it to me to install everything I thought I had lost on my brand spanking new 1701-E.  Spock will be duly dumped in the bin.  And if I’m a student (or have an identity card which suggests I might still be employed at an academic institution, such as I do) then I also get the educational discount (which is roughly equivalent to the tax I would be paying) and I get an iPod thrown in free, too.

Whilst I try to scrounge up $4,000 for a new computer, I’m squatting on Jim’s PC.  If anyone has a spare $4,000 they fancy sending me, I’d be very grateful: much longer using Windows and I’m going to put my head through the screen.

You think you’re healthy?  You think that walking everywhere is exercise?  That eating plenty of veg and not snacking between meals is a balanced diet?  No sweets, crisps or smoking is good?  I’ve got news for you: it’s not.  Or at least, not good enough.   If my trip to the gym this week is anything to go by, you’re probably going to become obese, experience health problems and drop dead before you get to the end of this post.  Sorry to break it to you: you’re fucked.

Last week, after finding a job, I joined the local gym.  I had been putting it off till I could join one close to my new employer and couldn’t think of any new excuses, so I sucked it up and signed on with the local Fitness First.  I know they are a big chain-store gym and therefore the capitalist pigs of the exercise world, but they have all the mod cons and I can use any of their gyms anywhere in the world whenever I like, so I sold out like an unsigned band on an iPod commercial and now I’m a member.  Unlike the gym at my previous job, this one isn’t a company perk so I will actually have to go to make the $25 per week worth it: I often say that the aesthetic standard of the clientele is enough to make me a regular gym-bunny, but I worked for a university for three years with a constant stream of toned, nubile 18- to 21-year-olds getting hot and sweaty all day every day and that still didn’t keep me going, so hopefully the money will be more of a stimulus.  As I haven’t really set foot in a gym for a year, I thought I should have an instructor tell me what to do for the first few sessions to avoid my rolling off the back of the treadmill in cramp-related agony or crushing my windpipe under that bar thingy in the weights room.  But before they tell you how to avoid killing yourself, they have to assess your fitness.  And this is where all the laughter stops.

Monday morning, 7.30am.  (I know, I’m mad keen, aren’t I?)  Stephen, a charming young chap who, judging by his physique, clearly knows his stuff, took me into a little assessment room to do my test and pronounce my fitness levels.  It reminded me of going to ask for a loan.  Why does every business seem to have these little consultation rooms nowadays?  The bank, the post office, the mobile phone shop.  When the kebab van gets a portakabin ante-room extension, do you think we will realise things have gone too far?  Anyhoo, I digress.  Inside the fitness room I was weighed (82kg) and measured (191cm) and I did a quick bit of maths to work out that my BMI is around 21/22 (oh yes – I’m clever like that), so I feel pretty smug that I am well within the ‘normal’ range.  I am confident that this is not going to be a disaster after all: all that trampolining and squash paid off.  Oh, and while I’m on it: people don’t need to be so surprised that I did trampolining, no, I’m not too tall and yes, it is a proper sport.  This information goes into the computer and disappears.  And by ‘this information’, I mean the health data: my rant about trampolining isn’t recorded.

Next up: cardio fitness, or rather cardio recovery rate; this is where things start going downhill.  It turns out I have a high pulse – well, not just high, more “why haven’t you exploded yet?” super-speed, which is not down to the fact that I had one cup of tea before I arrived.  I was running slightly late but Stephen doesn’t think that would cause it to race at 94bpm.  I was a little surprised at this, but poor old Stephen was aghast: did I have a heart problem?  ”No.”  Do I ever feel dizzy?  ”Not really.”  Please don’t die on me! “I’ll do my best.”  After some rather boring exercises involving stepping up and down looking at a blank wall for the longest three minutes of my life, these unsettling figures also went down the fibre-optic highway into digital oblivion.  All that time jumping around on a big springy matress appears to count for naught in the harsh light of the Fitness First consultancy booth.

The following two tests were over quickly enough: I kicked ass at flexibility (natch – I’m as bendy as a 25-year-old and I have the results to prove it) acquitted myself admirably at stomach crunches, but delivered an epic press-up fail.  It’s these spindly slender arms, damn it!  All this was fed into the machine and before I knew it I was staring at my scientifically measured ‘fitness age’.  According to my test results, I have the overall fitness of a 52-year-old.  I nearly fell off my chair.  For one moment I thought it wasn’t as bad as it was but then Stephen said “these are just some numbers and nothing to worry about” which is letting-you-down-gently code for “sheesh man, what the fuck is this? You should be ashamed of yourself”.  There was also a handy breakdown showing you precisely where your train had come off the rails and wouldn’t you know it: my dodgy old heart had dragged the stats up from ‘unfit for your age’ to ‘let me check your date of birth again because this can’t be right’.  But it is right: I have the cardio stamina of a 74-year-old.  Perhaps my heart is doing a Benjamin Button and when I actually am 74 I shall have a 22-year-old ticker?  Stephen says no.

Ordinarily this kind of news would be enough to put me off going back for life, but after some google self-diagnosis it appears that ‘life’ will be considerably shorter if I do that: the best way to reduce a high resting heart rate is to exercise.  So if anyone wants me between now and, say, the end of time, you know where to look: I’ll be in the gym.