So ….

Since I came to the Middle East, I have been very much enjoying my Kindle.  It’s perfect for exercise time, since I don’t have to hold it open.  As I mentioned above, I downloaded The Hunger Games, by Susan Collins, as it was on sale.  I finished this morning in the middle of a four-mile power walk on the treadmill.

Short summary:  set in Panem, a dystopian future America, the story concerns teenager Katniss Everdeen, who volunteers to take her conscripted sister’s place in the Hunger Games, a gladiatorial contest pitting youngsters from around the country in a grisly battle to the death, until only one remains.  Katniss is plunged into the Games, with nothing but her bow-hunting skills and wits to save her.

What did I think?  Well, it was a mixed bag.  On the plus side the characters are believable and varied.  Katniss has a lot of turbulence under the hood and Collins lets the veneer crack at just the right times.  The melodrama never felt overbearing and I think the pace was dead on.  There was little deus ex machine; with only one real exception (a forgivable one in context), the characters mostly thought or fought their way through the plot in plausible ways.  I thought the world-building was thorough and was revealed in manageable chunks for the reader, to let the true nature of the society sink in.  And I can’t deny that it was a quick, pleasant read.  As light entertainment, it appealed.

In the neutral area, I can see the young adult appeal.  The writing style is quick and tumbles loose the way an adolescent thought process might.  It’s written in present tense, which tends to exhaust me reading-wise but after a while, I got used to it.  I don’t think the book gains anything from it, though.  I’ve read any number of “lessons” to be drawn, criticizing religion, godlessness, femininity, feminism, capitalism, and communism, and the Iraq War.  I think you will take away whatever you want.  Dialogue was passable.

On the downside, I saw the major plot twists coming a mile away.  That’s not necessarily bad (I am as much a sucker for cheesy entertainment as everyone) but it did lessen the suspense.  At no time did I think Katniss would die.  Also, the populations of the Districts seemed too small (District 11 is said to have something like 8K pop) to sustain themselves, let along others.  A dozen districts with similar pops and a capital full of useless choads would have had a total pop of 200K or so, which isn’t enough to sustain the industrialized wonder that is the Capital.  I am sure I am overblowing it but those kind of details tend to annoy me.  Finally, while the book has – as someone else put it (forgive me for not citing) – “it’s own cultural baggage,” the idea itself is derivative enough.  It’s been compared to the Japanese book Battle Royale (which I haven’t read) and the Stephen King books The Long Walk and The Running Man, both of which, in my opinion, were a more adult treatment and deeper character explorations.

Overall, I would call it a slightly above average – maybe a “B-,” if I were forced to give it a grade.  I know there are two more books (here and here for those who care).  I'll watch the movie once it makes its way over here.

I’ll probably read the others ... you know, if they come on sale.

Snake on a plane forces Aussie pilot to make emergency landing

Published April 04, 2012

DARWIN, AUSTRALIA –  If only Samuel L. Jackson had been on board.  Indeed.  This might have been a story of bad-assery, instead of just funny.

An Australian pilot was forced to deal with his own "Snakes on a Plane" drama after one of the slithering reptiles crawled out of the cockpit dashboard in mid-flight.

Air Frontier pilot Braden Blennerhassett was 20 minutes into a flight from Darwin to the remote community of Peppimenarti in far northern Australia on Tuesday to drop off cargo when the snake suddenly appeared.  Peppimenarti?  Really?  Peppy Menarty?  Sounds like a Jersey Shore girl.  That has to be the most unfortunate name of a town since Fucking, Austria.

If that was not enough, the reptile was chasing a tree frog that had also stowed away underneath the front passenger seat of the small plane, the Northern Territory News reported.  Who the hell does quality control on the security in these planes?  Next time I am on a plane in Australia, I am keeping my feet in my chair and bringing a stun gun.

Blennerhassett made a mayday call and returned safely to Darwin.

"I have heard of crocodiles being loose in planes but not snakes," Air Frontier director Geoffrey Hunt told Australia's national broadcaster, the ABC.  Wait, what?  Crocodiles?  Are you @#$%^& kidding me?

Snake catchers were called in but the reptile has not been found. Hunt said the aircraft remains grounded and he hopes the plane will not have to be pulled apart to find it.  Not found?  How is that possible?  You shut down the engines, start opening panels, and smack whatever is still moving with a shovel.  (This is, incidentally, Mrs. Axe's approach to our sex life.)

"Until we find the snake, it's not good for business," he said. You think?  Their press people must be related to the security people.

Hollywood star Jackson starred in the cult 2006 action thriller "Snakes on a Plane," where he played an FBI agent forced to take on a plane full of poisonous snakes.

Stranger.  Than.  Fiction.

Yikes, I got lost somewhere since last time.  I'm overdue for Part II, so here it is.

Previously, I discussed the sun-space parameters that set up the success for the world.  As before, it is usually just simpler to assume an earth-like world:  year-long revolution around the star, 24-hour day, 23.5 degree tilt for the seasons.

As an aside, you are correct:  this does involve a lot of assumptions.  But the world is supposed to flavor and add to your story, not be the driving factor (unless it is).  Assumptions are okay, as long you are internally consistent.  (If you think that's wrong, ask your favorite physicist if they have ever assumed a spherical cow.)

1) Start with the discussion of Hadley cells.  Hadley cells basically postulate a conveyer-belt effect of airflow in the atmosphere:  heating and rising at the equator (the spot of most consistent heating), settling around thirty degrees north and south of the equator, and rising again around sixy degrees north/south.  What this basically means is that you have continual low pressure at the equator – meaning lots of convection (i.e., rain) - and high pressure in the sub-tropics (+/- thirty degrees latitude form the equator).  More on that in a moment.  You can read more on Hadley cells here.

2) We move on to the Corilois force.  Again, you can read up on more of the physics here, but the net effect involves the rotation of the Earth resulting in a right-hand curvature of motion in the atmosphere.  This is the effect that gives us the different prevailing winds at different latitudes.  Between roughly thirty and sixty degrees (on the north side, that encompasses most of North America and Europe), the prevailing winds are westerly - meaning that weather systems move from west to east.

It's worth pausing here to revisit the first entry on the subject.  You can now see how some of those interactions might change.  Say you want your sun to rise in the west.  Spin your world in the opposite direction, the Corilois force moves in the opposite direction and BOOM, the prevailing wind will be the opposite of our world.

Okay, so now that we've done that, what next?  You need to place your major landmasses and determine the geographic features that aren't dependant on weather patterns.  In this case, I would be talking about mountain ranges and dry land versus ocean land.  In the large scale, mountains work independent of rain; plate techtonics drive the formation of mountains and either raise continents or drive them into the drink.  Barring supernatural/magic drivers or cataclysmic events (a la the movie 2012 or the mountain being thrown on the city of Istar in the Dragonlance series ), land mass formation is hyper-slow and once you place them, feel free that throughout your history, the land won't change that much.

Now, you've placed your land masses, determined prevailing winds.  What next?

Currents.

In the absence of land masses, the currents would basically follow the winds.  You don't have to get hyper-anal about this, but just use real-world guidance to come up with something realistic.  (This will become important in part III.)  For example, around North America, the water tracking from the equator up to the northwest enters the warm Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, flows up the east coast, then across the Atlantic, creating the ... wait for it ... Gulf Stream, the warm water that keeps western Europe somewhat warmer than other locations at that latitude.  Conversely, on the west coast, cold water flows down from northern Pacific, which is why the water off San Francisco is significantly colder than off Virginia Beach, even though they are at approximately the same latitude and receive about the same amount of solar radiation in a year.

(Caveat:  I am not an expert on current dynamics, so like I said, just looking for a common-sense answer.)

Okay, so we have the rock in space, with some parameters set.  Now we've added prevailing winds, land masses, and some water flow.  What's next?

That lifeblood known as water.  What does it do?

That's what we'll discuss next time.