Bronies With Guns

Gordon Campbell writes:

I hope this doesn't qualify as the kind of investigative journalism likely to inflame the military mindset, but the weirdest story of last week had to be the one about the infatuation of certain serving members of the US armed forces and National Guardsmen with….My Little Pony. Yes, the same superpower killing machine that brought you Predator drones and Kent State has spent part of its time last week debating whether US servicemen can attend My Little Pony conventions in uniform, or can wear My Little Pony badges and decals when they’re out on military manoeuvres. Reportedly, the US service personnel in question are called “Bronies” and there’s a news website about Bronies in Uniform here. There’s also a Facebook page for Military Bronies here.

I first came across this debate in an article on the US Air Force Flightlines website that cites the US Army blog Outside The Wire, which goes into far more detail about the phenomenon in a story entitled “Military Bronies Love Their Rifles And Their My Little Pony.”

[At the] recent “BronyCon Summer 2012” at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in New Jersey…a special lunch for service members at BronyCon got a visit from Tara Strong, who voices the magical pony Twilight Sparkle. No sooner did Strong praise the men as “twilightlicious,” than they broke out in a baritone of Twilight Sparkle’s signature song: “T-W-I-L-I-G-H-T, and ain’t no other pony troll down like me. I’m twilightlicious!”

In an odd parallel with the US military’s former “don’t ask/don’t tell” stance towards gays, bronies wonder about how alone they are, and how visible they can afford to be:

On the Military Bronies page, one poster was worried. How common are bronies in the Army? He was about to join and wanted to know how open to be. “Hard to say,” was the reply. “Best advice I can give is be subtle about it. Those who share your interests will notice, and you may even make some battle buddies that way. Best of luck to you as you launch your Army career!”

- Gordon Campbell, 'Bronies With Guns', Scoop.co.nz, 29 July 2013

A passionate interest in healthy eating

A man caught with a prostitute in his car told police she was there to show him where to buy tomatoes.

West Midlands Police said officers found the woman sitting inside Muhammad Ikhlaq's car while he withdrew £20 from a cash machine, which he said was to pay for tomatoes.

Ikhlaq, 39, of New Street, Dudley, was found guilty of soliciting and fined £400 at Walsall Magistrates' Court.

He was also ordered to pay £665 in costs on Wednesday.

- 'Tomato excuse for prostitute in car in Walsall', BBC News, 25 July 2013

[Via @GraceDent]

Twin peaks

Snowy Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu, viewed from the port side of an Air New Zealand Bombardier flight NZ8307, flying from Hamilton to Wellington on Monday afternoon. Plus a shot of the heads at dusk, swinging around for a northward approach to Wellington airport.

Ngauruhoe

Ngauruhoe

Ngauruhoe & Ruapehu

Ruapehu

Ruapehu

Wellington's south coast & Bluebridge ferry

How one book made every Hollywood film feel the same

If you’ve gone to the movies recently, you may have felt a strangely familiar feeling: You’ve seen this movie before. Not this exact movie, but some of these exact story beats: the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes (Star Trek Into Darkness,Battleship); the villain who gets caught on purpose (The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star Trek Into Darkness); the moment of hopelessness and disarray a half-hour before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6).

It’s not déjà vu. Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.

The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster film-making since the late 1970s.

When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.

Indeed, if you’re on the lookout, you can find Snyder’s beats, in the order he prescribes, executed more or less as Snyder instructs, in virtually every major release in theaters today. Yet once you know the formula, the seams begin to show. Movies all start to seem the same, and many scenes start to feel forced and arbitrary, like screenplay Mad Libs. Why does Kirk get dressed down for irresponsibility by Admiral Pike early in Star Trek Into Darkness? Because someone had to deliver the theme to the main character. Why does Gina Carano’s sidekick character defect to the villain’s team for no reason whatsoever almost exactly three-quarters of the way through Fast & Furious 6? Because it’s the all-is-lost moment, so everything needs to be in shambles for the heroes. Why does Gerard Butler’s character in Olympus Has Fallen suddenly call his wife after a climactic failed White House assault three-quarters of the way through? Because the second act always ends with a quiet moment of reflection—the dark night of the soul.

Watching poorly executed movies with Snyder’s formula in mind can become a tiresome and repetitive slog. How many times can you watch a young man struggle with his problems, gain new power, then save the world? It’s enough to make you wonder: Is over-reliance on Snyder’s story formula killing movies?

- Peter Suderman, 'Save the Movie!' (excerpt), Slate, 19 July 2013

Big business in little New Zealand?

Like me, you probably didn't know that the disreputable megacorp Goldman Sachs has (or had) over a hundred subsidiaries registered in New Zealand. This comes as a surprise because this website visualisation highlighting the Byzantine complexity of big companies' ownership arrangements mainly depicts no-doubt-legal but still questionably tortuous chains to countries famed for their loose control over high finance, like the Cayman Islands (739 GS subsidiaries), Luxembourg (202), and the UK (122). But there are also 155 New Zealand subsidiaries connected to Goldman Sachs, including such impenetrable titles as Hauraki Private Equity Fund No.2 Limited, TTPE 07 No.25 Limited (de-registered in January 2013, actually), and innocuously-sounding, the Tourist Hotel Corporation of New Zealand Limited (dissolved in 2000). For the latter THC listing, the website lists a control chain as follows:

GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP, INC., THE > GS HLDGS ANZ II PTY LTD > GOLDMAN SACHS AUSTRALIA GROUP HOLDINGS PTY LTD > GOLDMAN SACHS AUSTRALIA INTERNATIONAL PTY LTD > GOLDMAN SACHS NEW ZEALAND HOLDINGS LIMITED > GOLDMAN SACHS NEW ZEALAND MANAGEMENT LIMITED > PORTFOLIO CUSTODIAN LIMITED > TOURISM HOLDINGS LIMITED > WAITOMO CAVES LIMITED > TOURIST HOTEL CORPORATION OF NEW ZEALAND LIMITED

Got those 10 steps straight in your head? Me too. And of course I'm sure it was all 100% legal and above board. Te Ara notes that 'in 1990 the government sold the Tourist Hotel Corporation to US-based South Pacific Hotels Corporation', and in the 1990s it seems to have wound up owned by GS.

I don't know much about high finance, but I'd be interested to read why New Zealand features so prominently in Goldman Sachs' ownership structures, and what that means for our economic sovereignty. Is this just a by-product of a generation of state asset sales to overseas investors, or should we be more concerned about the strength of our company laws for international investors? Is the prevalence of outdated or expired listings in the New Zealand register significant?

Goldman Sachs ownership via OpenCorporate

The OpenCorporate blog indicates that perhaps New Zealand's strong presence in the visualisation is due to the principles of open government:

The shareholder data from the New Zealand company register, for example, is granular and up to date, and if you have API access is available as data. It talks about parental control, often to very granular data, and importing this data allows you to see not just shareholders (which you can also see on the NZ Companies House pages) but also what companies are owned by another company (which you can’t). And it’s throwing up some interesting examples, of which more in a later blog post.

In other words, New Zealand is prominent because elsewhere in the world the company listings are far more opaque. From an earlier blog post in April, OpenCorporate cites the New Zealand register as a potential exemplar for other countries seeking to open up to proper public scrutiny:

So which company registers perform well, and which perform badly, from a public-purpose perspective? Well, the stand out is the New Zealand company register, which makes everything freely available, without any significant exemptions, and in our dealings with them have been clear in their position as a public register with a public purpose. That’s not to say there are no problems with New Zealand companies, but we suspect that one of the reasons they come to light is the ease of access.

Clive James on Dan Brown's 'Inferno'

[The hero, Robert] Langdon, though an American, still favours English tailoring. It must be easier to run in. Running beside him is Dr Sienna Brown, described as a “pretty, young woman”, in keeping with Dan Brown’s gift for inserting the fatal extra comma that he or one of his editors believes to be a sign of literacy. And indeed I should perhaps have written “the fatal, extra comma”, but something stopped me: an ear for prose, I hope.

Dan Brown has no ear for prose at all, a handicap which paradoxically gives pathos, and even tenderness, to his attempts at evoking Sienna’s charm. He has no trouble evoking her brains. She has an IQ of 208 and at the age of four she was reading in three languages. You can picture the author at his desk, meticulously revising his original sentence in which, at the age of three, she was reading in four languages. Best to keep it credible. But how to register her beauty as an adult? Here goes: “Tall and lissom, Dr Brooks moved with the assertive gait of an athlete.”

Would that be the assertive gait of a Russian female weightlifter? Probably more like the assertive gait of the British pentathlete Jessica Ennis. Anyway, as usual with a bad writer, the reader has to do most of the imagining [...]

I had better not reveal how it all comes out: there might be a few readers of this review who have not already read the book. But just in case you haven’t, let me suggest that it ends the way it began, as a fizzer. Your enjoyment will eventually depend on how much you, in your role as a symbologist, can revel in the task of decoding the text to lay bare the full extent to which the author can’t write.

- Clive James, 'The heroic absurdity of Dan Brown', Prospect Magazine, 11 July 2013