On Rain

The rains have finally come to Tucson and as always their much needed water also brings mayhem and destruction. I ended up stranded at work for about 2 hours when the rain all of a sudden poured down in a mighty deluge obscuring all vision and rendering umbrellas and windshield wipers useless. I would have been SOL in a car so riding home on my bike was literally suicidal; aside from the high winds and raindrops that feel like little fists, the Tucson bike lanes double as storm drains. But it gets better, the woefully inadequate drainage system meant that the sidewalk was also submerged after a few moments. One of my coworkers regarded my reluctance to bike home in those conditions as foolish, claiming "a little water never hurt anyone". This was of course before some poor guy tried to bike across the street and was knocked down by a wave from a semi.
That aside, when you're not stranded because of the rain or suffering from power outages, the monsoon season is an amazing spectacle to behold. The awesome power of the rain itself is astounding, as is its quick and brutal nature. It unleashes its might upon the earth, uprooting trees and turning major streets into impassable rivers, then stops as quickly as it started. It may even rain heavily while the sun is still shining brightly, or the rain may pour relentlessly on one side of a house while the other side remains utterly dry.
I have been in over twenty countries and about ten states but I've never encountered rain that smells as good as here. Even the sound of rain isn't as good as it is here. Everywhere else is used to it, the grass and trees expect the rain and take it for granted. In the desert, the very ground rejoices in creaks and hisses as it slakes its thirst. Though it is blessed with overabundance it cannot consume all the water at once and the rest is washed away where it will all be soaked up by the desert floor many miles away. Other places are frequently visited by rain clouds which gently and delicately shower the landscape. Rarely is there lightning or thunder in these places. Thor was the mighty lightning god of the Vikings but he clearly never displayed his true strength in Sweden. His arsenal can, however, be realized in Tucson where giant arcs of lightning stretch across the sky and bombard the ground relentlessly while thunder rumbles around you constantly; each clap replaced by a new one before subsiding. In these moments, all the science of lightning and the dry safety of one's home is forgotten as the storms instill awe and humbling admiration of the forces of nature.

Mystery and Horror

The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksson. Murder mysteries are not my cup of tea so I can't really compare it to anything else in the genre, but overall it was a good read. The main reason for me reading it in the first place was because it takes place in Uppsala. There is that nice subtle satisfaction of being able to visualize exactly where one of the characters is in a certain scene. Little things like the person who found the body lived in Feifei's apartment complex or the killer walking past the theater where I saw Harry Potter. That didn't happen nearly as much as I had expected, though, since most of the story takes place in the industrial sector of Uppsala which is evidently very shady and dangerous (by Swedish standards, I assume). The reason I never spent much time there was because it was literally on the wrong side of the tracks; I almost never ventured south of the train station except for my residence permit or capoeira. According to the book there are two Uppsalas: the academic, clean one (where I spent almost all my time) and the uneducated, brutish and gritty side full of immigrants and thuggish high school dropouts. That said, I do kind of wish I had made time to go visit the southern part of Uppsala, just to appreciate the town I love that much more. But anyway, the characters were an interesting bunch, again they live in an Uppsala I am not familiar with though the personal issues they dealt with were much like those of the Swedes I did talk to.

The Descent with Shauna Macdonald and Natalie Mendoza. Ah, now here's a good horror movie. Gets you with the gore, the jump factor of monsters suddenly appearing, the psychological terror of the situation and it leaves you wondering what actually happened at the end. Props to the director on all counts. Now as for the underlying themes and messages in the film, one can go on and on in many different directions. I'll just throw in my opinion that the fact that it is an all female cast is very important especially when considering the mostly male monsters they are fighting. But rather than going for the beeline militant feminist "men are monsters and women are trapped in a man's world" theme I think it warns against this very concept. When it becomes a matter of life and death, the women become more and more monstrous themselves until their own behavior and actions become worse than the monsters they are fighting (who are, from their perspective, only trying to survive against hostile creatures in their home). It's not unlike the question of whether or not female combatants are really more vicious than their male counterparts or if it's only because of the contrast of the peaceful, nurturing female archetype.
I also must mention the blooper reel was quite funny, particularly since you don't get many funny moments in horror movies. Had I watched the opening bit of the blooper reel before the rest of the movie, I would never have been able to take the monsters seriously.

And two interesting facts:
-the MVD at Broadmont can give you a new driver's license within ten minutes of you walking in the door.
-Cops on bicycles use their handcuffs to lock their bikes.

Evolution's Starfish

Blindsight by Peter Watts. Yet another excellent read from one of my favorite authors. The plot and concepts would be scary on their own even if Watts hadn't done his homework and based nearly all of it on real data. The book is a bit dense in the technical jargon and I admittedly had to read it with my browser on Wikipedia just so I could figure out what the hell the characters were talking about. The thought that went into some of the ideas that were very prevalent in the book is surprisingly detailed and the exposition of one aspect in particular is so fascinating in and of itself that it might merit a movie.
There were aspects to it that reminded me of Ian McDonald's Evolution's Shore, (which I regret not having written a review of) particularly the notions about alien thoughts and some aspects of the physiology, not to mention the whole unstoppable alien thing. But whereas McDonald's story is cautiously optimistic, Blindsight has a burningly calm pessimism which can only be described as 'Wattsian'. Just as a final comparison, I enjoy how Watts described the aliens, even though he laments how he "crapped out on the whole unlike-anything-you've-ever-seen front" as opposed to McDonald's once-too-often claim that the aliens were utterly indescribable.
There were a couple of interesting parallels to the Rifters trilogy which make me wonder about what Peter Watts is like in person. I suspect he secretly wanted to be a psych major in college given the degree to which the plots and character development in both the trilogy and this book hinge on cutting edge theories about the mind. He especially seems to like sociopaths. If Watts is as pessimistic as his writings suggest I would probably not be able to stand an intellectual discussion with him, which is rather saddening. Lastly, according to his website's timeline, Blindsight does not take place in the same continuity as the Rifters trilogy. But the settings are sufficiently far apart chronologically where it could be possible. Not to mention there's a single, wonderfully sly quote that hints that they might be part of the same microcosm.

Randall can kiss my ass.

Transformers with Shia Labeouf and Peter Cullen. The naysayers will say nay and forever hate upon Micheal Bay for sins of the past, but I liked this film a lot. The action was definitely not lacking in any form, the balance between human screen time and robot screen time was struck rather well. The only major flaw I can see is the lack of character development of the Transformers, especially the Decepticons. Now granted, Megatron has never been the most subtle and complex character, but a deeper look at his personality would have helped quite a bit. The plot was not as shabby and hard to follow as some people think (I am referring to Slate who guffawed at how unnecessarily obvious the expositions were and then complained about how they didn't know what was going on) but it is entirely independent of previous Transformers franchises so you don't have to be a fanboy to get what's going on. There were several things I did not expect which happened in the movie, namely the human body count, which as Keith pointed out was simply unheard of in previous Transformer incarnations. I was pleasantly surprised by how not helpless the humans were in the movie. Seeing A-10's and F-22's duking it out with Decepticons was pretty sweet, I gotta say. Yes, there were some cheesy lines thrown in that were very blatant nods to G1, but if they weren't there you'd secretly wish they were. It is a summer blockbuster movie and as such you can't expect a deep and profound plot or a mind warping psychological thriller. It's a very well done movie for what it is and I'm definitely excited about the eventual sequels.

King

1408 with John Cusack. A very nice scary movie. The people next to me seemed to disagree, but I think people nowadays think horror movies aren't any good unless you have things jumping out at you every eight seconds or show someone ripped apart with power tools. It was more psychologically terrifying and used the jumping moments to augment the fear rather than relying on them exclusively. What I thought was a very nice touch was one particular scene where Cusack's character is trapped on a ledge on the outside of the building simply because that's almost exactly like a recurring nightmare I had as a child. But as Keith observed, Stephen King presents everyone with their nightmares and if he hasn't yet, he just hasn't gotten around to it. The statement near the end of the movie that it's all a matter of free will was especially chilling. The only thing I was left wondering was how much of what happened in the room actually happened and what was an illusion caused by the room. The ending seemed to answer the question but a lot of the stuff on the tape would still suggest it wasn't all real.