Superhero comic books can be fickle things. They continuously shift from one interpretation to another I believe to adapt to the times and conditions in the “real world.” One of the greatest villains in all of superhero legend is The Joker . However, it has never been stated definitively how he came to be or even what his backstory is. There have been multiple interpretations involving a vat of chemicals that he falls into that gave him his distorted image with that ever-present maniacal grin, green hair, and pasty-white face. For purposes of plot alone, the 1988 Tim Burton directed Batman suggested that the caped crusader was ultimately responsible for the fiend’s condition. Some comics stories suggest that these interpretations are nothing more than lies concocted by the Clown Prince of Crime himself and that we will probably never know the real story. In fact, in the graphic novel,Batman: The Killing Joke , the villain does not seem to remember just how he came to be. “Sometimes, I remember it one way, sometimes another…if I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice.”

Over the years, the Joker has been the instrument in two major tragedies in The Dark Knight’s history (or three if you are going to follow Tim Burton’s interpretation). In the aforementioned The Killing Joke, he shoots Police Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, Barbara in the back rendering her paralyzed and ending her career as Batgirl. However, Barbara later returned as the heroine Oracle who uses her computer expertise to aide in the fight against crime.

Another incident involved Batman’s closest ally, Robin the Boy Wonder. After Bruce Wayne’s “youthful ward Dick Grayson” matured he became known as Nightwing and left the Batcave. A new Robin was introduced in Jason Todd. In Batman: A Death in the Family, The Joker captures Robin, beats him to a pulp and locks him in a warehouse set to explode minutes before salvation arrives. In a twist, the comic writers allowed the public to determine the new Boy Wonder’s fate. One 900 number would have him be saved; the other would bring his end. Ultimately, reader’s brought the life of the young sidekick to a close. So, the Joker was the catalyst but the public killed him. This incident only intensified Batman’s desire to apprehend his arch-nemesis and put him away for good. Now where is the fun in that?!

On Friday, audiences will see a new, even darker, more sinister Joker as portrayed by the late Heath Ledger. Who knows what interpretation will be presented for the villain. For more on the history of one of the best characters in comic book legend click on the link

The Dark Knight : Enter to win a trip to Hong Kong!

Well I just saw the movie, now I’m going to explore some the science (or lack of it) involved in this journey. In Jules Verne’s original book, the center of the earth is a large cave like area with some sort of electro magnetic field producing light. Same in the movie.

Current Science views the center of the Earth as a molten metal core, mostly iron. This would be well above the temperatures that humans could survive in. But just for arguments sake, lets pretend there is a large cave with volcanic vents that connect between Italy and Iceland. Why would we have prehistoric dinosaurs and other animals living there. What could be the possible connection. I can’t really think of one, maybe my loyal readers could.

One other small problem, at least for the movie. The biggest plot mover in the movie is that temperatures will soon rise to unsurvivable levels. It is also indicated that it happened 10 year prior to this visit. How did the animal life stuck in the center survive, if it was so crucial that the intrepid explorers got out very soon. Must be something really special in the water that was going to evaporate in less than 3 days. I don’t think I can believe the quantity of life in the center of the earth if every few years it is going to become an oven.

I guess since they went that far with the science, that God is having a hand again in matters here on Earth or in this case under the Earth, a running a new version of creation every 10 or so years. That would explain everything. Hmm, I guess I’m saying that there isn’t a lot of science in the movie.

However, since I didn’t start thinking about this during the movie, it really didn’t matter. It took a while for it to settle in my brain.

I have a book for people with little or no background in Astronomy.  It is called quite simply “The Stars — A New Way to See Them” by H. A. Rey.

I learned my constellations by the  having start charts with lines connecting the various stars in a group (constellations and asterisms) and except for a very few, they looked nothing like what the name given.  Then there were other books that put drawn pictures around the stars, but they did nothing to connect the stars in any reasonable fashion.  Enter H. A. Rey with his book.  He made simple stick figures with the stars that look surprisingly like the names of the constellations.  He also uses English names for the constellations so you don’t have to know Latin to figure it out.  Neat stuff for the beginner.

This book is designed for naked eye viewing.  You don’t need a telescope or binoculars to use it.  As you get comfortable with the stars, he does point out things to look at with either binoculars or a small telescope, but this book is designed more as a major road map, not something that gives you all the little tourist stops.

I will admit that even though I’ve been into Astronomy for over 30 years, I never really took the time to discover or remember the constellations.  I know the major ones, and can use my star chart to find others, but this book will help me to remember ones I don’t know at the present time.   It will be nice to know my way in the sky without having to consult a map every time I look at something I don’t know.

If you struggle with what star is what, I give this book a very strong recommendation.

Currently (as I write this), my top read posts contain two posts I wrote about books. If I look at the posts from the last 10 days, I find posts about books take 4 of the top 10 spots. I just found this fascinating. In fact one of my best few days in blogging (most visitors in a 24 hour period) came after I wrote about my favorite books.

This got me thinking. If I’m not in a play, I tend to read a great deal. Recently my tastes have been stuck in Science Fiction and Mysteries, but I will read different things at different times. Really different at some times, during my high school days I read 4 different encyclopedia sets from A to Z. Ok, one of them was a children’s set I read again, but I did read it during High School.

Anyway, I was thinking I need to take my reading in a new direction. So if you have a book you really like, please respond. I’m going to try to read as many as I can. I’m a quick reader, so depending on the list, it may not take too long.

Yes, this is another one of those posts designed to change lurkers into responders…..

Recent books I’ve read ….

Why did it have to be Snakes (Mysteries of Indiana Jones) Lois H. Gresh and Robert Weinberg

The Early Asimov — Isaac Asimov

Sherlock Holmes and the case of Sabina Hall L. B. Greenwood

and re-reading A Morbid Taste for Bones — Ellis Peters

Sort of…

Years ago, one of my favorite things to watch was the series “Mystery” on PBS. I’m not even sure they have that on anymore, but I enjoyed it when it was on. This series generally brought classic fiction mystery novels to television. Hosted at one time by Vincent Price and then Diana Rigg, this series brought to the screen books and stories like Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and a favorite of mine Brother Cadfael.

I had not read any of the Cadfael mysteries before seeing them on TV. I had read most if not all of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and quite a few Miss Marples and Poirots. Since I knew the good treatment the BBC gave the other mystery stories, I was pretty sure that Cadfael would be no different.

As a pleasant surprise, I found that I was correct. I read the many Cadfael novels starting with “A Morbid Taste for Bones”. This was the first PBS/BBC show I saw on Cadfael, and it was also the very first book. Good of them to keep the chronology of the books. After that first show, and reading the first book I tried to read the books before watching the shows on PBS. Generally a very good match of book story to TV story. The characters had the same depth in both instances. They did add a little thing here or there, but it didn’t affect the story telling or change the feeling and meaning of the original story. If you can find these shows (I’ve seen them on Cable every now and then) check them out. If not check out the books from the library. The author is Ellis Peters.

Now what brought this all up? Well the topic of one of my previous posts reminded me of the first story. I just had to read it again. I may finish it tomorrow when my daughter is at rehearsals.

In case you read or see the series. Good reading or watching….

Ok, it is late at night, early in the morning again.  I had about 1/2 hour nap earlier today, and I’m wide awake again…  So my list of favorite books.

1 – 4  The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings Trilogy  — Tolkien

5-11  The 7 Harry Potter Books  — Rowling

12-14  The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Trilogy  — Donaldson?

15 – 20    Maybe more, but since I’m going by memory…  Isaac Asimov’s  Robot/Foundation Series  He went and tied many of his books together, I like all of them

21 A Christmas Carol  — Dickens

22 Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe

23 Complete Sherlock Holmes  — Doyle

24-26  Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant  — Donaldson

27-28  Mirror of Her Dreams/A Man Rides Through  — Donaldson

29 Isaac Asimov GOLD

30 Isaac Asimov Silver

31  Chronicles of Narnia — Lewis

32  Ring World  — Niven

33  Journey to the Center of the Earth  — Verne

34 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — Verne

35 A Wrinkle in Time  —  L’Engle

That’s a start, I can add more later

Stole this one from Tanja’s site. It looked like fun.

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, estimates that the
average adult has read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
How about you?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (multiple versions)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Partially)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (Not Yet)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Marte
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure -Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’sWeb – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I counted 41 read from this list. Some of them I had to read for High School or College,
and can not remember them. Others on the list I’ve looked at but
could not get through the first chapter. Some I haven’t even heard
of. The list is lacking Science Fiction, not even Jules Verne or
Isaac Asimov. I feel both authors have better books than the Dune
Series by Herbert

I commented on something in another site, that got me thinking about time travel, instantaneous travel, and relativistic travel. Some heavy thinking for this late in the day, but I’m here now.

Time travel has been in our collective stories for centuries. The early stories were all using magic or wishes to go back in time. This was used to correct mistakes, make different choices or somehow get something you missed out on. I don’t have any of the myths and stories available to me at the moment, but I seem to remember a common theme. It generally didn’t work out the way it was planned. That doesn’t always mean bad things happened, just not the planned things.

In 1895 H. G. Wells published a book where a machine was used to travel back in time. The Time Machine was one of the early science fiction works on time travel. Many other authors have written works on time travel, and there have been many movies and even a TV show or two about time travel. As these stories progressed, the time travel paradox was brought up. What would happen if you went back in time and prevented your birth sort of thing. This stuff can get deep quickly, so I’ll leave it for another topic. I was just thinking about the time travel stories..

Then we have instantaneous or faster than light travel. Used in almost every Space science fiction story known this type of travel was invented by the story tellers out of need. They needed to get from one end of the Galaxy to the other without writing about long voyages or worse yet relativity. Transporters on StarTrek were made to save money on the effects of a shuttle craft landing. If you ever noticed the when a shuttle craft was used in the original series, it was always a plot device, and that justified the cost.

But of course, Einstein said that the Universe has a speed limit, the speed of light. That gets rid of the instantaneous/faster than light travel, but again brings back the time travel story. Space ship captain goes away an some high fraction of the speed of light, comes back to earth and finds out many many years have passed on earth and his twin brother is now a very old man…. I remember a story or two like that, but I don’t recall them at the present.

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head, so I can relax and get some rest….

Well, to his creator anyway. Ian Fleming was born May 28, 1908. WOW… that would make him 100 years old today… of course he passed away many years ago. Ironically, he left the world mere months after the release of From Russia with Love on the big screen in 1964. The centennial of the author’s birth is being celebrated in at least two ways. Today sees the release of the newest James Bond novel Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks. In November, the 22nd film in the Bond franchise Quantum of Solace will be presented on the big screen with Daniel Craig reprising the role of British Secret Service agent 007.

In total, Fleming wrote 12 Bond novels and two collections of short stories. Following his death, other writers have taken up the mantle. Although most of the plots for the books and the movies have very little in common, fifteen of the movies take their titles directly from the books. The novel From Russia with Love was high on President John F. Kennedy’s favorite reading list which prompted the production of the second film. Below is a list of Fleming’s 12 Bond novels and 2 short stories and the order in which the movie was released which are not synonymous.

Casino Royale (21)

Live and Let Die (8)

Moonraker (11)

Diamonds are Forever (7)

From Russia with Love (2)

Dr. No (1)

Goldfinger (3)

For Your Eyes Only (12)

Thunderball (13 sorry… 4)

The Spy Who Loved Me (10)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (6)

You Only Live Twice (5)

The Man with the Golden Gun (9)

Octopussy (13) and the Living Daylights (15)

(GoldenEye takes its name from Fleming’s Jamaican home where he wrote the stories)

Fleming’s writing was not limited to the world of the spy. He also penned the children’s book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

James Bond Novels

I took 2 of my daughters to see Prince Caspian tonight. While I enjoyed the movie, but couldn’t help but feeling that it wasn’t quite flowing with the book. It has been years since I’ve read the book, so I couldn’t be sure. I will have to read the book again to determine if my feelings were accurate.

As far as the movie. I was entertained. I think that I will want to get the DVD. I think I would just rent this to see it again in most normal instances, but since I have the first movie, and the books, it will add nicely to a collection.

I’m not sure I would take younger children to this movie unless they have a good idea that movies are “make believe”. This movie was a little more intense than “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. There are two major battles, and a couple of more intense chase scenes. So while a good movie, you may want to watch it first before taking the young ones.