The Citizen, 2015-02-26, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2015. PAGE 5.
This is not a really good time for you – I
realize that. You’ve got a lot on your
mind, what with the clown show in
Ottawa, the weather outside and the
obscene messages your bathroom weigh-scale
keeps leaving you. I hate to pile it on like this,
but...
Are you ready for a Carrington Event?
It’s been a while since we had the last one.
One hundred and fifty-six years to be precise.
It was on Sept. 1, 1859 that a British scientist
by the name of Richard Carrington happened
to be peering through his telescope when
suddenly the sun burped.
It was a solar flare, a massive one. It took the
energy punch from that flare (technically
known as a coronal mass ejection) just 17-and-
a-half hours to gallop 93 million miles through
space and slam into our planet, resulting in the
largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded.
For the next two days, auroras – better
known as the Northern Lights – were seen as
far away as Cuba and Hawaii. The glow over
the Rockies was so intense that some gold
miners awoke and began cooking breakfast,
assuming it was morning. In New Hampshire it
was bright enough at midnight to read a
newspaper. A reporter for the Baltimore
American and Commercial Advertiser wrote:
“The light appeared to cover the whole
firmament, apparently like a luminous cloud,
through which the stars of the larger
magnitude indistinctly shone. The light was
greater than that of the moon at its full, but had
an indescribable softness and delicacy that
seemed to envelop everything upon which it
rested. Between 12 and 1 o’clock, when the
display was at its full brilliancy, the quiet
streets of the city resting under this strange
light, presented a beautiful as well as singular
appearance.”
It wasn’t merely a spectacular light show.
Telegraph systems around the world crashed.
Some telegraph operators were showered with
sparks when they tried to operate their
transmitting keys.
The Carrington Event was a solar flare,
albeit a stupendously huge one. Solar flares are
by no means rare. Our scientific instruments
record at least one a week.
Nobody knows when the next solar flare
will erupt, or how large it will be.
The fact is, the earth could see another
Carrington Event, the same magnitude or even
greater... tomorrow.
Ah, but this time the earthly ramifications
would be different. One-hundred-and-fifty-six
years ago the earth was a simpler place. No
airplanes, no telephones, no Internet.
Electricity was a scientific curiosity.
And today? Imagine our civilization not as a
multilingual, many-layered hive tendrilled
together by fibre-optic cables carrying
cyberspatial tweets and Instagrams. Think of
our world instead as a single insect. A
dung-beetle, say – but a dung-beetle that wears
its nervous system on the outside of its
carapace.
Now imagine a second Carrington Event. A
massive solar flare that fries the power grids
from Tanganyika to Tofino. No lights. No
television. No subway or supermarkets. Need
some gas? Too bad, the pumps don’t work.
Neither do your credit cards. Please don’t get
sick because the hospitals are down. And don’t
look to the cops – they’re out of business too,
with all computers no longer working. And
let’s hope it’s not winter – unless you happen
to own a wood stove.
The glittering exoskeleton of our insect has
flickered and died. Everything that used to
work by the flick of a switch or a push of the
button is defunct.
Could it really happen? Could an
electromagnetic solar fireball swell up and
wallop our planet that way? No reason why
not. No reason on earth.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
I’ve written before about how reboots,
retellings and re-imaginings are the bane of
creative storytelling because they ruin what
were once successful, appreciated intellectual
properties but, until I was staring down the gun
of the most recent property to fall prey to a
reboot, I didn’t ask why.
Why do directors, writers and actors re-visit
old properties to try and breathe new life into
them? Why is there so little creativity in the
world that we have to recreate that which was
once successful?
Well, I’ve come up with two answers; the
people in charge of creating this entertainment
are lazy and the people who consume it are
scared of new things.
The entire mass entertainment world (the
one that puts out the films that make
billions of dollars that never see an Oscar and
syndicates old television shows until you can
quote even the episodes you don’t like) are
focused on repeating and recreating what was
once new.
It’s partly their fault and partly ours for
continuing to watch and buy the rehashed
media instead of looking for something new.
The film that inspired this realization is the
forthcoming reboot of Ghostbusters starring an
all-female cast.
I’m going to tread carefully here because
there are a lot of people out there saying
the four women – Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones,
Kate McKinnon and Melissa McCarthy – can’t
do it because the roles of the original
Ghostbusters were men. I’m not one of those
people.
I think that McCarthy and the three Saturday
Night Live alumni won’t do a good job
because, to be honest, they’re trying to fill the
shoes of comedy legends and I just don’t think
they’ve got it in them. It has nothing to do with
gender. I would be saying the same thing if
Ryan Reynolds, Chris Pratt, Will Smith and
Jason Segel were cast in the roles. Their
abilities as actors aren’t at question; their
comparison to Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan
Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson, however,
wouldn’t be favourable.
Obviously, the original Ghostbusters can’t
be re-cast with the death of Ramis, so I think
that the franchise should be left alone.
Unfortunately, as a society, North American
entertainment isn’t content with something
until it’s gone on so long that there’s nothing
new left to discover in it.
Whether we’re talking about a show like The
Simpsons that has gone on for decades longer
than it should or a show like Friends which
was syndicated until there wasn’t a single
episode people hadn’t seen, we just can’t let
the stories and characters of our favourite
shows go.
(Friends was recently put into Netflix’s
library as well, so there’s no chance it will be
going away anytime soon.)
Movie financers, producers and writers
know that people will go see another Star
Wars, Star Trek, Transformers, Ghostbusters or
Indiana Jones movie, regardless of how bad
the reviews are because somewhere in their
mind they remember (or remember being told)
how great the original was.
These films will keep getting made until, as
a society, we start appreciating new intellectual
properties and let the old ones die as successes.
I think, for example, the new Batman movie,
Superman vs. Batman, should never have been
started.
Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea, I like
most of the cast and I’m sure it will be great.
However, The Dark Knight Rises was a
perfect ending to the Batman story. It didn’t
need to be told again.
After a number of reboots, they found the
actors, the writers and the directors to make the
story work and followed it through to a
conclusion. The property should be left alone
as far as the world of movies are concerned.
Unfortunately, it won’t be.
People will keep wanting to see this villain
from the comic books or that sidekick or this
story line and there will always be a movie
studio ready to throw money behind it because,
even if it’s a flop, it will still make money.
Heck, even new television shows are just re-
hashing old television shows.
How I Met Your Mother is a great show. Let
me start out by saying that.
Let me also start out by saying that the show
isn’t an original idea. It features five characters
in their late-20s, early-30 (three guys, two
girls) sitting in a bar (or their homes or
workplaces, but the bar does play prominently)
talking about life and the ridiculous situations
they find themselves in.
Friends featured six people, (three guys,
three girls) sitting in a coffee shop (or their
homes or workplaces, but the coffee shop does
play prominently) talking about life and the
ridiculous situations they find themselves in.
There’s a reason How I Met Your
Mother succeeded and it’s because it’s
an extension of the Friends formula but with
new actors and some fringe characteristics to
the main characters that make it more
accessible.
You could draw parallels between many
modern shows and shows that came before
them. MASH could be compared to Scrubs,
any of the CSI shows could have roots in other
procedural crime dramas and Supernatural and
Sleepy Hollow, while both fun shows to watch,
obviously have to thank Buffy: The Vampire
Slayer for testing the waters of supernatural
shows. (And I’m sure that there are shows that
predate even the ones I’ve suggested, I’m just
working off my collection of pop culture
knowledge.)
The only truly new television is reality
television and that’s because no one is writing
it (supposedly).
We have to stop rewarding Hollywood for
producing the same thing over and over again.
Don’t watch sequels or reboots, give
something new a try. You might just like it.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
Mo’ money mo’ problems
The story of Detroit’s walking man,
James Robertson, and his decade-long
commute from hell hit the news earlier
this year, but it was just the beginning.
Robertson got international attention earlier
this year when the story of his 21-mile-per-day
commute, which he makes through a
combination of buses and walking, was first
reported by a Detroit newspaper. He made the
trip every day to a factory job that only paid
him enough money to rent a room in
someone’s house and to feed himself for the
week.
The story pulled at readers’ heartstrings as
they watched a man who continued to work
and contribute to society, all while the walls of
Detroit continue to crumble around him.
The internet was then introduced to the mix
in the form of a GoFundMe account, started by
a college student who wanted to help
Robertson. A local Ford dealership then gave
Robertson the car he could never afford all
while the account raised $350,000. Feel-good
story, right?
Wrong. In a follow-up story written by
acclaimed Detroit-area author Charlie LeDuff,
this generosity marked the point when things
really started to go badly for Robertson.
LeDuff writes that in a city as economically
depressed as Detroit, the red Taurus gifted to
Robertson may as well have had a target
painted on it.
Since news of Robertson’s “good fortune”
broke, everyone in the community has come to
Robertson with their hands out, and that may
be the best scenario Robertson faces. LeDuff
also reports that a recent winner of a $20,000
lottery prize in Detroit had just been found
stabbed to death, reportedly having never even
cashed the winning ticket.
Robertson has since had to move,
accompanied by police escorts while he
collected his things.
So often, and I’m as guilty of this as
anybody, money is viewed as the solution to all
of our problems. Once I make this credit card
payment, everything will be alright; once I pay
my last bill of the month, I’ll be in the clear;
when my car is paid off, everything is going to
be great; God, why can’t I just win the lottery?
It just doesn’t work that way.
A simple Google search produces dozens of
lists of people who won tens of millions of
dollars through lotteries and then lost
everything. Whether it be by theft, greed or
bad decisions, money just isn’t the fix-all that
people think it is.
On one such list, produced by Time
magazine, is Callie Rogers who won $3
million ($1.9 million British pounds) in the
lottery. It took her six years to lose it all.
“It’s ruined my life,” she said.
Another person on the list was William Post
III, a Pennsylvania man who won over $16
million in 1988 and lost it all in a business
quarter (three months).
“I was much happier when I was broke,”
Post said before his 2006 death.
So just as famed New York rapper The
Notorious B.I.G. sang before his death in
“Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems”, money isn’t
necessarily the key to happiness as many
companies, whether they deal in the lottery or
wealth management, may bill it.
As for Robertson, he seemed happy to blend
into the background for over 10 years, quietly
walking from his home to work and back again
day after day, but it was the day that someone
finally took notice, that everything started to
get worse, all courtesy of the kindness of
strangers, set to a backdrop of desperate times.
Other Views
Needed: An appreciation of art
Keep your sunny side up