June 2020 – Political theory and practice

The Case of the Ancient Astronauts

The Case of the Ancient Astronauts, BBC Horizon (1977) and PBS Nova (1978).

IMDb meta-data is 50 minutes, unrated.

Genre: Documentary

Verdict: Gravity is not a matter of opinion.

This episode offers a root and branch refutation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Researchers for the production company visited each of the places and sites EvD asserted as evidence of mysteries that could only be explained by alien intervention and refuted his childish claims point by point. Accomplishments that were beyond ‘these primitive people’ (a favourite EvD phrase) were readily and easily explained. Throughout his main argument is: ‘What other explanation could there be?’ To find out what other explanations there were the producers went to those sites and showed how it was done. Building pyramids required a stick and string to make a false horizon, water (hot and cold), mallets, and pegs to quarry stones, sand dunes, well organised work gangs with incentives (but not Cecil B. DeMille’s whips), and a broad social commitment. These combined with the close observation of nature to equip those so-called primitive people to do the work.

The Nazca lines, Easter Island Moai, Palenque slab, and more are considered, including interviews with scholars who have made each subject a life’s work. Every time they found that the unfathomable mysteries that EvD attributes to aliens arose from human ingenuity and social organisation, and sometimes compounded by the megalomania of a ruler and ruling class.

The Nazca lines, for example, expressed the ambition of the ruler to placate the gods with the images, as many other rulers have done with animal and human sacrifices. In other words, he had it done because he could. Sound familiar?

Such was EvD’s confidence in the gullibility of his audience that he agreed to take part in this program. When confronted with simple alternative explanations he declared them to be beside the point, the term ‘fake news’ had not yet been coined. He simply asserted that it was not done that way, as though he were an eye witness. When he pointed to an object as evidence of alien artefacts, the Horizon researchers produced the local artisan who had made the very exhibit that EvD used, which he then dismissed as an example. His confidence in the credulity of the audience is, well, incredible. And, accurate.

But he was right, was he not, i.e., about the credulity of the audience? Remember that Time-Life promoted The Chariots of the Gods (1970), and published the companion books that were sold in supermarkets far and wide, one source puts the sales in the 1970s as eight million. No doubt many more millions have been sold since. For the current state of play see the Wikipedia entry which is edited almost daily in a low-level Wiki war.

Others have since also tried a hand at refuting this nonsense.

As late as 2018 EvD was dining on the credulity trail, speaking at conferences on aliens, and signing his books. In Pasadena three thousand people paid to hear him lie to them. Meanwhile, Season 13 of Ancient Aliens was aired in that year, and is available on Amazon Prime. He collects royalties from this series; he is proud to say.

There are many You Tube videos about EvD, and reading the comments they elicit is depressing. There is so much idiocy, despite more than a century of free public education, it is quite impossible either to correct, disabuse, or fathom. Alas, stupidity seems to be a virus that is ineradicable.

I came across my copy of this video (which I acquired decades ago thanks to the diligence of a librarian) on the office shelf when looking for something else, and watched it again while munching lunch. The quality of the video I have is terrible but I noticed that it is available on Amazon Prime in the USA (in what I hope would be a better video quality) by Nova on PBS but not here. Tant pis for me.

I fear that the effort the librarian put into finding this obscure film for me was at the expense of the KPIs, which would not have included investing so much time on one customer’s inquiry when there were so many meetings to attend about customer service.

Ellery Queen, 1929 +

Ellery Queen (EQ) started work in 1929 and has little rest since then. Frederic Danny and Manfred Lee wrote more than thirty novels and scores of short stories featuring Ellery Queen until 1971. Then ghost writers took over the franchise. Then there have been radio, film and television adaptations. These are puzzle mysteries, locked rooms, disappearing items, and the like.

Confession: I have not read word one. I know Ellery Queen only from the air.

Radio:

The Adventures of Ellery Queen 1939-1949 on CBS, NBC, and then ABC voiced by Hugh Marlowe and others.

Here are some of the television series:

The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950-1952) with Richard Hunt/Lee Bowman/Hugh Marlowe

The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen (1958-1959) with George Nader

Ellery Queen (1975-1976) with Jim Hutton

Films:

The Spanish Cape Mystery 1935 Donald Cook

The Mandarin Mystery 1936 with Eddie Quillan

Ellery Queen, Master Detective 1940 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay

Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery 1941 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay

Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime 1941 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay

Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring 1941 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay

A Close Call for Ellery Queen 1942 with William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay

Enemy Agents meet Ellery Queen 1942 William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay

A Desperate Chance for Ellery Queen1942 with William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay

Ellery Queen Don’t Look Behind You 1971 with Peter Lawford

Too Many Suspects 1975 with Jim Hutton

Nor should we overlook the Ellery Queen(‘) Mystery Magazine (1941+). It started with the possessive comma which it has since shed. It seems to be digital as well as print now, but it continues with an official web site where officiating occurs.

I rather liked best the sophomoric enthusiasm of Eddie Quillan. He projected energy, wit, and tenacity. The staging of Hutton’s television series was engaging and some episodes can be found on You Tube and Daily Motion.

Iowa’s Margaret Lindsay played Ellery Queen’s typist seven straight times and steals the show when the opportunity occurs. She is bright, energetic, and engaging unlike the catatonic Ralph Bellamy and the comatose William Gargan, but in the conventions of the time, often she is confined largely to the screaming and fainting duties.

Nota Bene, Ralph Bellamy is credited with keeping the ravening beast HUAC off Broadway later during his tenure as President of the actors guild. The easy success of dividing and pillorying Hollywood for headlines tempted the cannibals of HUAC turn east for more flesh to eat but Bellamy secured a nearly unanimous front of Broadway actors, producers, directors, and investors to refuse to cooperate. That must have taken some doing among all those enemies, rivalries, and egos. Read the details in his biography on Wikipedia.

Miss Pinkerton (1932)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 6.1 by 406 cinematizens

Genre: ODH

Verdict: Whoosh!

Firecracker Joan Blondell plays a nurse in an Old Dark House inhabited by odd balls from the hunchback butler to the squinting, sinister maid, and the suspicious looking doctor (C. Henry Gordon who always looks dyspeptic). The Nurse’s Secret (1941) was a re-make almost word for word, and is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

Blondell gets top billing and dominates the camera, as usual, as she gathers the pieces of the puzzle. The plot is…., wait, what plot? Nor is much made of the ODH, more is the pity. While there are plenty of menacing shadows to rouse a scream, there are no sliding panels, hidden chambers, eyes moving on portraits, ejection seats, or any of that good stuff. Instead we have repeated shots of those shadows. Oh hum.

Indeed, it is a vehicle for the winning ways of Miss Pinkerton, as she is nicknamed.

A prize goes to the viewer who can infer what the dying statement of the mother revealed, because it is not revealed in the film, though much is made of it.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000) by Charles Seife.

GoodReads meta-data is 248 pages, rated 3.96 by 8432 litizens.

Verdict: Nada, nil, zilch, zip, nada, goose egg,….

This is a book about nothing and how important it is. Get that, and get it straight! Lear was right about nothing. Something times nothing is nothing. See? Yet nothing is always with us.

Babylonians with their sixty-based number system counted with abaci and started to use a space holder(s) to distinguish 1 on the first line from 10 on the second from 100 on the third, etc. They used slashes (/) to indicate the next line so 1 is 1, 1/ is 10, 1// is 100/,etc. Thus, like the numbers, zero came from the East to the West, and some of that passage was vexed.

Arabic numbers, derived from India, combined with zero (0) are much more efficient and effective than Roman numerals. Ever tried multiplying Roman numerals? Long division? Even writing them down shows that: Arabic 678 is Roman DCLXXVIII. And because there are fewer characters the margin of error in transcription is reduced. Plus the Arabic numbers are more distinctive one from another than the numerals with fewer inscription errors.

But nothing, zero, has metaphysical and mystical connotations that disturbed many. The Pythagoreans regarded it as a sign of the beast or hit-and-run and tried to keep it locked up. To some zero represented both nothing and everything. Both ends of that continuum were threatening. If there was nothing, where was it? Could nothing be anywhere?

On the other hand, it represent infinity, everything, say in Zeno’s paradox about going half-way to a goal ad infinitum and never getting there. Once infinity is considered, well, there is a lot of that to think about and our place in it must be pretty small.

When we are born are we one-year old? No when were are born we are zero-years old and twelve months later we are one year old. Everyone, even Republicans, well, maybe, knows that. But…., what about the calendar? There was no year zero there: 1 BC and 1 AD are adjacent with no intervening zero, which is one of the many reasons why the calendars of different civilisations vary as they do.

Zero became a number in India. When 2, a number, is subtracted from 2, a number, the result is 0 which, being the product of two numbers zero must itself be a number. Indian mathematicians accepted this logical result sooner and more easily than those to the West who resisted this obvious conclusion with some Olympian mathletics for nearly two millennia.

When zero (0) was a placeholder as in the Babylonian system it was put to the right of the numbers 1, 2, 3, ….9, and 0. But when it was promoted to a number it becomes the base 0, 1, 2, 3, …9. Ah, but that is counterintuitive. We do not count apples starting with 0 and then 1, and 2. We have three apples but only count up to 2 if we do, and we don’t (do that). So it went back to the right side of the sequence where it is on keyboards today. Although in England and Australia the ground floor of a building is in effect zero (0) and the second level is the first floor. Go figure. I still stumble over this fact.

The Indians were so phlegmatic that they also accepted negative numbers. When 3 is subtracted from 2 the result is -1. This conclusion was resisted to the last ditch in the West even to René Descartes’s day and age. In his determination to resist the negative, Descartes denigrated such numbers, e.g., the square root of negative number, as imaginary. See the Wikipedia entry for more mist and fog on the topic.

What a change since then. Nowadays everyone brags about Zero Tolerance.

The vanishing point in art also gets a look in. (Get it?) Leonardo was just one artist who saw mathematics in painting perspective. So does the elliptical orbit of planets from Johannas Kepler. Wide ranging indeed.

Then along came set theory, thermodynamics, string theory, a Cepheid variable, the Kelvin scale, the Casimir effect, cosmic Doppler shift, Mack the Knife, the Golden Ratio, and even rational numbers. For nothing zero has stirred up a lot somethings. Even the Black Hole comes into the equation. Is nothing sacred? Zero is everywhere and everything!

The book considers everyday examples like the Year Zero above, but also abstruse mathematics (e.g., projective geometry) , and even more abstruse metaphysics (infinity, as above) that I found it tough going, but, being tough, I kept going.

All in all, the book is Much Ado about Nothing. (Yuk, yuk.) But surely Jean-Paul gets the last words with his Being and Nothingness. For the the fraternity brothers, let me explain: zero is something, so it has being; zero is nothing, so it has nothingness. Sartre could have called his book Zero and been done with it. (Maybe he feared a shelver would get it mixed up with Zorro.)

But wait there is more, the book ends with an appendix in which it is proven that Winston Churchill was a carrot. See for yourself…., if you dare.

In the Temple of the Muses (1992) of John Robert Maddox’s diverting SPQR series the protagonist Decius encountered an Egyptian mathematician, a woman, who is onto zero and spends all of her time, according to the jaded Decius, talking about nothing when there is much else they could do together that would be something.

Clovenhoof (2012) by Heidi Goody and Iain Grant.

GoodReads meta-data is 374 pages, rated 3.92 by 2710 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Whoosh!

It had to happen! McKinsey management has made it to the afterlife, and there, after a 360-degree review accompanied by all the mod clichés of corporate-speak, Satan’s performance has been found unsatisfactory. St Peter has mined the data on his computer tablet and there is no denying the optics of the spreadsheets: things in Hell are bad, but no thanks to Satan. Well, things are so bad many condemned souls cannot even get into Hell so long are the poorly managed entrance lines, but must abandon even that hope. Yet that is one of Satan’s core competencies.

His KPIs are no longer scalable, indeed, they are no longer visible. No amount of thinking outside the box, colouring outside the lines, corporate values, empowerment, leverage, over the wall(ness), bench-marking, peeling the onion, breaking down the silos, pushing the envelope, increasing the bandwidth, paradigm shifting, data-driving, closing the loop, low-hanging fruit, return on investment, SWOTing, or reaching out can take Hell down to the next level. When asked if his management of Hell represents best practice, well, what is Satan to say? Who’s is better?

After the usual collegial backbiting, some of it literal, Satan appeals this decision because St Peter is sending too many souls to Hell for parking in disabled zones, DVD copying, nose picking, unreturned library books, and the like. But the review committee to hear his appeal, packed with angels unlikely to be sympathetic with the Lord of Darkness, is implacable: Satan is being out-placed. G-o-n-e.

He is condemned to live on earth as an earthling! This is, indeed, for him a fate worse than death. Hell is certainly other people, vide Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.

And where is he sent as an alternative to Hell? Birmingham England that is where. A place, it seems, where there is no respect for evil incarnate, and it is forever cold and wet.

There he adjusts slowly to the new circumstances, and seeks out Satanists to worship himself, but finds them useless poseurs who have never pitch-forked writhing souls into the Lake of Eternal Fire. He’s got nothing to learn from them. Then by chance he finds his métier in Heavy Metal music and for a time is a sin-sation. But even that grows boring: shouting damnation at dunderheads who pay for the privilege is fun and profitable but the amusement wanes. That low boredom threshold may have been his problem in managing Hell.

In an effort to fit in with his new neighbours Satan prepares a dinner party, like nothing anyone has ever had before. (Did I mention that he had a part-time job – more of a hobby to remind him of the old days – at a mortuary?) Then there was the flamethrower, he does like fire, for the crème brulée. It did not end well.

In time he discovers his dismissal was rigged in a management coup and finds unlikely allies (including Jeanne d’Arc) to put things back to rights, er, well, wrongs.

It is a cackle and since there is a murder (followed by a resurrection) it is classified as a krimi above. Well, two of each to be technical.

When we were planning a trip to Birmingham I found a few novels set in Britain’s second largest city, this among them. Though that trip was cancelled, by then I had the book sample on the Kindle and when I started reading it, there was no stopping. It is the first title in a series and I have already finished the second which has more twists and turns than a dean at a budget meeting and started the third in which eternally young and bored Jeanne goes on an away mission. In the fourth, yes I have read that one, too, we learn where work-weary demons go for a quiet life. And I am now up to volume seven, ah hmm, eight.