J.D. DeLuzio's Blog

Battle for Planet Earth

"If we can all stand together, those tentacled fascists are finished!"--Captain Protean

So, about The Battle for Planet Earth.

(Watch the trailer here).

Before we get there, let me state that I do not use AI in my writing. I have no plans to do so. I suppose I cannot discount some hypothetical future experimental story in which I incorporate clearly-identified AI passages in order to comment on the use of AI.

I am also a party in a lawsuit involving AI, because a book of mine was among numerous books to train a particular program. Again, I do not write with AI.

But I am fascinated by AI, even knowing the damage it is doing, both environmentally and culturally. The internet is awash in AI slop, and the data centers creating it are awash with water that would be better used elsewhere.

(Though, in fact, not more so than many other things people aren't currently upset about).

Currently, we're seeing what people will believe, even when a government isn't in control of the media, other sources of information are available, and the false statements being made are hilariously preposterous. What more will we believe once the technobarons perfect AI?

I have experimented with AI to generate images and, about a month ago, I decided to explore various programs and platforms that generate video. I wanted to compare them, and see what each could and could not do, and what the limits are, at present. I needed a fun project to focus my interest and thus was born The Battle for Planet Earth.

It’s a trailer for the sort of movie I might have made when I was, say, nine, a composite of the media that I thought was cool. It would include the stuff that I actually consumed, superheroes, science-fiction, and kaiju. Johnny Socko and his Flying Robot, manifestations of the martial arts craze, and tv and cartoons about adventurous teens and rascally anthropomorphic animals. It would also include stuff we knew from trailers and posters and schoolyard rumour, chop socky flicks and blaxploitation action movies, things I would mostly see much, much later, but that we all knew were cool. The trailer, I knew, would be created, of course, with adult eyes, one-third nostalgic, one-third ironic, and one-third aware.

Problematic tropes weigh down both the old media and the new.

And so I developed the backstory and the guidelines for a trailer for the best alien invasion /superhero/kaiju/kung-fu/blaxploitation/giant robo movie, with a side order of Scooby Doo.

Most of the work took occured over the last month, with morning coffee.

The process proved instructive, both in examining media and examining AI.

I made heavy use of Bing Image Creator, because it’s free. I couldn’t save characters, the way some pay services allow. However, the results I’ve seen even there can be inconsistent. Rotate your character, and they might become someone else. Fortunately, in a trailer of a hypothetical film with a large cast of characters, no one has to appear too often. I found methods, often just brutish force. If you describe a certain character the same way, repeatedly, you get images that are “close enough.” AI still works, it seems, with a broad range of human types. The process still required repeated prompts. Many of the results were off-the-mark, bizarre, or just awful.

I’ll be posting a video in the near future featuring some of the generations that I didn’t use. These range from "not close enough" to, "why are their feet on backwards?" which at least answers the question, "why are they walking backwards?"

I also exploited free trial offers.

I only paid briefly for one site, one of those proliferating on the web which advertise bringing photos to life. The pay site produced some excellent results for personal use, and one or two images that appear in the trailer. That said, this particular service engaged in what struck me as shady practices, and I did not use them for long. Besides, most of the media that inspired Battle for the Planet Earth was cheaply done, by today’s standards. It followed that my trailer should be equally cheap. Honestly, this project really should have visible wires in it somewhere.

I hit certain limitations.

Most generators restrict violence. Those restrictions appeared to become more extensive, even over the course of one month. I had to accept “close enough” for the final war zone shot. For a shot of Lady Knight (a female superhero-- they were on a bit of an upswing in the 70s) punching down a door into a high-tech room, I could only get her punching towards a door. I then had to generate multiple shots of a door falling into a tech room (harder to describe to AI than you might think) and edit judiciously.

The daikaiju character, Grifuto, really should have had his own distinct look. However, in order to get somewhat consistent results across platforms, I had to describe him as a dark green allosaurus.

Some elements developed in the process.

Most of the characters had backstories from which I could work. The Scooby-Gang-like support group did not. They were never intended to be in my notional tale. They developed as work progressed and I realized that Bing could give me a fairly consistent silver-grey 1968 Volkswagen bus. I decided to make the future Lady Knight one of them; she gets her powers at sixteen, and only later establishes herself as a superhero.

Getting consistent teens was a challenge. I wanted a diverse group of teens, and this still presents a problem. AI tends to default to Caucasian, unless you specify, say, Asian or African-American. Then, often, that's all it gives you. In short, non-white people get ignored, until one forces the issue. Then, suddenly, race is all that matter.

Striking, that.

In addition, some oddly problematic depictions turned up whenever I put the two teen girls together, despite giving innocuous prompts. What images, exactly, was Bing trained on?

I abandoned the plan to give them a dog. Current AI has trouble with dog breeds.

Ditto the kids who find the robot parts. I originally imagined them finding these closer to their current ages. The AI gave me little kids, but the images of them with giant robot parts looked great. In the end, it worked to my advantage. Their tween selves only had to superficially match their little kid versions.

Setting, also proved a challenge.

Initially, I didn’t think much about when this movie took place. I was using a lot of old tropes, however, and the project’s world quickly grew anachronistic. I leaned into that, and started creating a deliberately anachronistic, stylized world. I would have rather not have included cellphones. Boon to and bane of contemporary life, cells also wreak havoc with traditional narratives. But it's not as though I had to develop an actual coherent movie script, so I incorporated cells and vintage American clothing into crowd shots. Imagine, as you will, that this is a past with more advanced tech, or a present that more closely resembles the past. It looks like the sort of place that would have metahumans, actions heroes, and a giant robot.

The project is not entirely AI-created, and not just because I directed the generations, selected bits, layered and combined results, and edited. The narrative voice-over belongs to one Bryan Thompson. The music is stuff licensed for use with Adobe Premiere, which I used to edit. The sound effects come from a range of places, and most of it I acquired over the years for other projects. Much of the sound was commercially available. Some I recorded live. I also filched a line from a fondly-remembered 1970 Japanese kaiju movie, a fact which I address in the video's credits.

I enjoyed the results, and I learned a lot about the process. It's unlikely that I will do other large-scale projects. I couldn’t help but think that it would be much more fun to have done this project with real actors, creative shooting, and practical special effects. Of course, if I had that kind of money, I’d have better things to spend it on.

Nevertheless, the results may be the most perfectly ridiculous, dumb thing I have ever created.

And, if it were real, I’d watch the hell out of this movie, even now.

Home Movies

I've been busy with a number of projects and a road trip that we took. In place of a blog post (it's not as though it gets many readers) here are some videos.

For the curious, here are three short videos: a writing event, the Bruce, and a bunch of other stuff, including the London Punk Market from Saturday:

Fantasy Forum (Book Event at the Grove, Western Fair, London, Ontario)

The Bruce (for non-dwellers in the Great Lakes Basin, that's the very large peninsula that separates Georgian Bay from the rest of Lake Huron).

Everything Else (Including a Punk Market and the Taxi Girls)

A reminder that I caved on conventional social media and can be followed now at Instagram. I won't be reconsidering Facebook or X, but I may also set something up at Bluesky later this year.

Small Town Barista

The only gas station in town had been closed, temporarily, for some time. It shared a plaza with a traditional family restaurant, also closed.

The rest of the town looked well-kept. Most of main appeared to be thriving. A contemporary-style coffeeshop and café occupied an yellow-and-red brick building with radius windows on one corner. It had a trendy-sounding name and the decor wouldn't have been out of place in some big North American city neighbourhood at any point after 1994. We'd hoped to fill up the tank after eating. I figured that it would be better to ask a local than trust the map app. Cars were plentiful, and therefore, everyone must know where to get gas.

I posed the question to our barista, surely as worldly a person as one would find in a town with fewer than a thousand residents.

She thought a moment. "Are you heading this way (she pointed one way down main), or that way?" (she pointed down the other).

I indicated a third direction. "We're going that way."

"Oh, I don't know." She furrowed her brow. "I've never been that way."

Helping AI, Encountering the Famous, Buying Comics to Jazz, and Ranting at the World

So apparently, Anthropic's AI used my collection, Live Nude Aliens and Other Stories, to train itself. Granted, it falls among a lot of texts, but, as affronts go, it's an odd sort of compliment. In an American lawsuit, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion in damages to authors whose books they scraped from pirating sites for the purpose of training their generative. The settlement only applies to American authors, but a Canadian lawsuit may follow. My sister Jo (whose book Just Gone: True Stories of Persecution for Love and Life was also among those scraped, along with one of her academic papers) and I have both filed our names, in the event of a Canadian settlement coming through within our lifetime.

The American settlement (which would amount, reportedly, to about $3,000.00 for each book used) has already encountered obstructions.

And then there was my passing encounter with "Canada's second-greatest rapper," my online entanglement with a celebrated best-selling author, and my trip to a small con and jazz festival while unsettling developments continued across the globe.

Also, what did Brenda Lee get up to during her junior year?


Passing Encounters with Fame

Okay, the rapper-related one really goes nowhere. I substitute-teach sometimes at nearby schools. One of these has a common high school name. If you live in North America, there’s likely some version of a Central Secondary near you.

Brenda Lee—not the pop singer whose career started when she was 12—but the titular heroine of Chuck Berry's 1964 breakaway B-Side, attended a Central High. The song follows her academic career, from ninth grade, to soph year, when she's second in her class, to her successful final year. She leaves with the promise of great future success. Reporters take pictures of her walking out of Central High! Whether her "handsome guy" died in 'Nam, or she ever recorded hit songs, as her famous namesake did, remains a mystery.

So does her junior year. But we'll return to that.

I was at a Central High on Monday. So was Shad, the man CBC once called Canada's "second greatest rapper." Some might consider the designation fishy. I don't know about his following outside of this country. He seems, thus far, to have ducked the level of international fame and controversy of Drake.

In the late 1990s, he attended Central High, and had returned to his alma mater for a photosession.

I passed him in the hall.

Anticlimax.

But then, that very night, I received a message from a noted internationally best-selling author. She had given Live Nude Aliens a perfect 5/5 score at Goodreads, and sent me a personal message! As much as I appreciated it, I recognized a bunting of red flags. Her comments resembled an AI-like assemblage of existing online commentary. Some of what follows has been excerpted, modified, and redacted from my side of our actual conversation, and that wasn't the one at Goodreads.

I contacted her through her official website and her Instagram. She replied the next day to my email, from her official site.

She thanked me for bringing the hijacking of her account to her attention, and I replied with the full story.

After the five-star rating, I went to the author's account. I noted that the it had just that day listed around sixty books that she, supposedly, had read. They were from a bewildering range of genres, and included many by lesser-known writers. Some of them had just friended her, suggesting that they, too, had received messages.

The message to me ended with a question, the answer to which would be known to anyone who had actually read the book. Out of curiosity, I responded with an innocuous answer, after notifying the author's site and her Instagram account.

Back at Goodreads, "she" replied to my innocuious answer with a message that was in an entirely different style. It sounded like a real person, and was curious about my activity.

By the time the actual author responded to me through email, her Goodreads account was back under her control, and its recent history, expunged.

I have no idea what the hacker's game was. A long-term catfishing plan? Loneliness? Mental instability?

Noted Best-selling Author said that I should message her if we're ever going to be at the same convention or event, and that a friend of hers, a different Pulitzer-Prize-winning author with whom she was hanging around at the time, loved the title of my collection.

So, no five-star review, but an interesting interaction overall.


That's Not What Dante Alighieri Meant by "Comedy"

Friday my wife and I attended a performance of Dante's Inferno, redacted, and some other bits from and commentary on Divina Commedia, one of those essential but frequently problematic texts.

It features Daniele Bartolini, an artist and actor from Dante's home town, reading the selected pieces in medieval Italian. It was subtitled, but even someone like myself, who has been exposed to contemporary Italian but cannot speak it, recognized quite a few phrases. He read with operatic intensity, which, given some of the passages, became unsettling, disturbing. Try to read Dante's description of the Torre della Fame without growing uncomfortable. Nancy wished he had been more nuanced, with more variation in tone, which seems to me a fair response. As a soprano, she is keenly aware of the criticisms sometimes made of classical singing.

Dante scholar Donato Santeramo, the show's Virgil, provided context and commentary in English. A musician, Andrea Gozzi, looking very much like a club DJ behind their station, underscored the performance with instruments electric and acoustic.

Hell is on tour. I recommend it, assuming you have some interest in Dante's work.


Full-Colour Jazz

Saturday I headed to Guelph, Ontario. A small con and a jazz festival were running the same day. In particular, I wanted to see Jason Loo, since I'd missed him at the Toronto Fan Expo in August.

The venue looks great. Mostly, though, this is a seller's market and an industry and indie meet 'n' greet.

Signed purchases: The fourth TPB of Jason Loo's The Pitiful Human Lizard, and Loo and Zdarsky's The All-Nighter, Emilia Strilchuk's Be Yourself... Not Like That! (a gift), and Kevin Mutch's Fantastic Life. By the time I made my way back around to the Mutches' booth, they'd sold out of their new work, a Victorian/Edwardian-type SF/Fantasy adventure, minus the colonialism, racism, classicism, and sexism.

I also discovered Strawberry McFluffin Makes a Friend, a home-made comic sold by the young daughters of a woman with a craft booth. They charged $1.00 / copy. I bought two and would later put one in the Little Free Library on our street.

I also listened to some street jazz in St. George's Square, across the street from the convention.

Brenda Lee wandered back to mind. Did she get pregnant in her junior year? In the early sixties, that would have been a public disgrace. Perhaps her parents send her to tend to a sick aunt, which was the sort of thing put about when a young woman left town to live in the schools designed to house and conceal pregnant teens until after they'd borne their child and handed it over to adoptive parents.

Likely, Berry just had to keep the song short to meet the expectations for a hit record, pre-1968, and didn't write or removed any account of the eleventh grade.

Things have multiple causes and effects, and judging too quickly leads to further grief, especially in difficult times.


The State of the Globe, Seriously Abridged and with Highly Biased Commentary

A month ago, I went to Nepal. I found the people friendly, the city fascinating, and the monkeys cute, but annoying. I am glad that I am not in Kathmandu now, in the wake of last week's riots.

Things in Gaza are, most decidedly, not settling down. Neither are Russia's attacks on the Ukraine. Literal wars represent one of the few times where I fully endorse the killing of one's political opponents. Aerial bombardment and tanks aren't opinions.

Opinions can be dangerous. People should expect to be challenged. No one should die for expressing them.

While I attended a small convention and listened to jazz in St. George's Square, two rallies took place, with similar themes, on different sides of the ocean. London, England saw over 100,000 people gathered to oppose immigration (or, at least certain kinds of immigration) to England, in a far-right event stoked further by the digital appearance of supervillain Elon Musk. At least 5,000 people turned up to oppose them. Twenty-six police officers were injured, some of them seriously.

In Toronto, a similar rally occurred in Christie Pits park. The organizers' choice of locale had to be deliberate. Christie Pits, a pleasant place where families gather, friends play games, lovers walk.... you get the idea... is the site of a notorious race-based riot in 1933.

Short version: in 1933, the recently-formed Swastika Club had been causing trouble for anyone deemed insufficiently white. They started a conflict at a baseball game being played in Christie Pits between an Italian and a Jewish team. The situation erupted into a full-scale riot, with the pro-Nazis on one side and the Italians and Jews joining forces on the other. Others became involved. It's an ugly one that most Canadians would like to forget but should not. That said, I find one thing in it that makes me smile. Two groups of people, organized on ethnic grounds, out to beat each other at baseball, joined forces against people who didn't consider them real Canadians.

Pay attention to early warning signs.

On Saturday, those gathered in Christie Pits wanted less open immigration and called for mass deportations like the ones happening in the U.S. A few dozen of these protestors encountered a few hundred counter-protestors.

Police arrested at least ten people.

And nothing can be said about last week without including mention of the probably-political murder of a controversial figure I really didn't like, but who had the right to voice opinions I find offensive without losing his life. I would go even further here: Charlie Kirk wanted to talk to his political opponents, which is more than can be said about the current American president.

His murder has had a variety of responses, many of them unhelpful, unhealthy, and dangerous. I do not celebrate the murder of people merely because I disagree with them. Nor should you. But neither should their assassination become an excuse for disingenuous actors to move the west further towards fascism.

Look, this terrible culture we have created means that every event will be marked by online twits making cruel comments, sick jokes, and inflammatory calls to action. But pretending that online "left-wing" or the "right-wing" (a simplistic dichotomy that, I've argued elsewhere and often, have outlived their uselessness) trolls can be taken to represent entire swathes of the political spectrum or specific political parties helps no one.

Elected officials making cruel comments, sick jokes, and inflammatory calls to action, is another manner entirely.

The current incarnation of the American Republican party had markedly less to say in June about the assassination of Minnesota Speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman, in her own own home, than they have about the recent murder of a political activist. Hortman's death prompted more than its share of incendiary, stupid, vicious comments online, without the broader outrage we're seeing at present. President Trump made no demand for lowered flags. Utah Senator Mike Lee, who mourned and expressed understandable outrage over the assassination of Kirk, responded to Hortman's death with an offensive joke and unfounded conspiracy theories. Kirk himself initially posted a quip about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband by a hammer-wielding lunatic, though he soon thought better of the post and removed it.

Florida representative Anna Polina Lunaposted that "EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU WHO CALLED US FASCISTS DID THIS"-- that is, murdered Kirk.* Apparently she doesn't consider that viewpoint protected, even though it pales beside decades of elected Republican politicians and right-wing influencers calling her political opponents Satanists, pedophiles, and murderers. Or equating slight left-of-centre views, socialism, Marxism, Soviet-style communism, National Socialism and therefore, yes, Fascism, and using these disparate ideologies as political cudgels. They're demon-crats, right?

Again, we're not talking about the usual dumbasses, smartasses, and trolls online. We're talking elected officials and the individuals who have their ears. And that's a very different thing.

The current American president—the person who should most be calling for calm reflection on the state of things—once expressed the opinion that "Second Amendment people" should deal with Hillary Clinton and, more recently, that right-wing extremists only want law and order. Really? Like they did in Oklahoma City in 1995?

And sure, Not All Republicans. Senator Thom Tillis has called out and condemned people who are misusing Kirk's tragic death to incite hatred and violence. The governors of Utah and Arizona pleaded for calm, and, of course, the bringing of the killer or killers to justice. On these specific points, they earn my applause.

Those giving into their darker angels follow patterns that should be chillingly familiar.

Weaponized, misplaced outrage became a key tool of the historic fascists. **

Dante damned his ideological opponents to his graphically-detailed Hell.


From There to Here

I've recently watched documentaries on the crack epidemic and how people in government and media misled the public,*** on the rise and fall of Jerry Springer, who now repents his hit show, and a third on the rise and fall of Girls Gone Wild. Of this specific media juggernaut, I only knew the commercials and always thought, "oh yeah, the video series where drunk college girls flash their breasts." Turns out that it became a far darker scene than I'd ever imagined.

All three shed interesting and uncomfortable light on the past and the present—but light nonetheless.

Maybe there will be a doc series that will make sense of our times that we can catch on our screens in 2042.

Perhaps the tale will be told in cave paintings, or by an elder teen reciting from atop the mashed metallic guts of a 777X engine.

By then, Brenda Lee's hypothetical love-child, if alive, will be turning seventy-nine.

Hell, the Canadian branch of the AI lawsuit might even be settled.

.

*She then went on to make a number of hateful and offensive comments about Democrats. How come she gets to abuse her opponents, but they cannot? Finally, opinions and facts are two very different things. One should be based on carefully considered evidence. The other requires it.

**There has been some movement away from canned outrage as a smokescreen for our worst political impulses. Hearts can break, but heads can cool. Perhaps it's the walking-back on some statements about the suspect, whose apparent motives remain unknown. Some of the evidence against him seriously muddies preconceived notions about him or why he may have acted as he did. But again, reality is messy.

***Of all of these documentaries, the one I recommend the most is Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy. See it. The other two may be of interest, if only for how not-fun the ride turns out to be.

Toronto Fan Expo 2025

Crowded and crazy-- but I had a good time, mostly avoiding celebrity-related lines and talking with fen of various sorts. I wish there had been more of the intellectual sort of writing panels, of the SF Con variety. They did well enough the last time I was there, in terms of attendance, and they provide another, (mostly) quieter activity, amidst the appearance of famous names and the sounds of dollars being made. These latter elements make the money and keep the Expo going-- but many people came mainly to cosplay and hang with friends. This portion of fandom attends events, certainly, and checks out the dealers and artisans (the artisans always interest me), but it's really more of a social event.

One young woman called it the "ultimate safe space."

Anyway, here's my obligatory video.

Instagram

I have generally avoided conventional social media. I joined Instagram some months ago soley because someone I knew wanted to show me her artwork, and her Instagram posts were private.

I largely ignored the site (or whatever Instagram is), though I occasionally "followed" someone when the system emailed me a list of people I should follow, and one or two of them were people I actually knew.

I decided this week to play with the site, post a few things, follow more people.

Alas, I followed too many people too quickly, and the bots accused me of being a third party that I contacted in order to increase my "likes." I do not care about "likes," though it would be nicely ironic if people "liked" this post.

I had to change my password (because I had, according to the anonymous bots, given it to some imaginary third-party) and I still cannot "follow" anybody new for the time being.

So: I supposedly sought "likes" (which drives social media) and I tried to follow people, which seems rather important here, judging from the still-ongoing recommendation of people the site thinks that I should follow-- and I was penalized.

And while I have made two posts today, my attempt to post this diatribe were blocked by an "unknown error." Then it posted it three times.

Hopefully, the two-step authentification I've enabled will help a bit. Thus far, however, I face certain restrictions.

As I have posted elsewhere, Instagram, for a variety of reasons, serves as an excellent example of a certain term recently popularized by Cory Doctorow.

Kathmandu, August 2025

"The one in Nepal?"
--The response of two different friends who heard that I was going to Kathmandu

1

While drinking my morning coffee on Thursday, I received a phone call asking if I could be in Kathmandu by Monday night. A guide with the surname "Sherpa" would meet me at the airport.

Yeah. I know. It sounds like the plot of a bad movie or a Tintin adventure. There were reasons to go. Also, I'd never been to Nepal, and I'd miss the production of Anne of Green Gables for which my wife had bought tickets.

It's not that I dislike Canada's favourite orphaned ginger, but I didn't feel the need to see her heartwarming story onstage once again, even if, or perhaps especially as, this was a somewhat divergent production.

My wife could go with a friend.

I had to fly to Kathmandu and I had little time to prepare.

One of our nieces had been living and working in India, near the border with Nepal. The embassy informed the family that she had turned up in Kathmandu, in medical distress, a couple of weeks ago. The hospital had deemed her medically fit to travel, but they were uncomfortable releasing her on her own and, under their law, they could hold her.

She'd been in the country because her work visa had expired, and she had to reapply from somewhere other than India. Kathmandu was a logical place to go—lots of history, familiarity with westerners, and places to stay. She had done so once before. This time, things went south, medically speaking.

Two of us who were in fair health and able to drop everything left for the Himalayas.

Sherpa is, I learned, a comparatively common surname in Nepal, especially among the Sherpa people. It otherwise designates a cultural group from the mountains, and only means guide by virtue of the fact that an outsider who climbs in the Himalayas without local assistance is either the most skilled climber ever or a tremendous fool, and almost certainly the latter.

This Mr. Sherpa would turn out to be a person of significance. He led a rescue team after the 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanche, and he often works with westerners who have encountered difficulties. Like, say, ending up in an emergency medical situation. He proved instrumental in getting us around the city.

2

Sunrise on the way to Pearson was full red rubber ball. We arrived in plenty of time and met with our first issue. The machine that prints out boarding passes claimed that the name on my ticket differed from the one on my passport.

The machines were correct. The airline had misspelled my first name.

Cathay Pacific was unconcerned about their error and, in any case, I was clearly the person on my passport. Other than waiting in a second line to get a human being to print out the boarding pass, all was fine. The matter never came up again.

Over the next week we would fly, literally, around the world.

Outbound we headed north and west. The view outside shone clear blue like a movie scene of winter shot through a filter. Northern Ontario from air looks like thousands of islands or thousands of lakes. Windmills became grade-school projects. Landscapes swirled into artistic abstractions.

That grows old quickly. It's a small world, my ass. True from a cosmic perspective. A puny human crouched too long in coach realizes just how freakin' large it is. Still, Cathay Pacific has some amenities. All but one of the meals qualified as acceptable fare for, say, a cafeteria-style restaurant or an all-you-can-eat buffet.

We had access to CNN and BBC on the tiny eyeball-desiccating screen set in the back of the seat in front of me, and we flew over totalitarian Russia as Texas tried to arrest Democratic Representatives.

The passenger in front of us could be seen through the seats doomscrolling. The person across the aisle watched Marvel movies. I finished reading Killers of the Flower Moon and then caught Thunderbolts. A film about third-rate wannabe heroes trying to step up seemed apropos.

We stopped over at Hong Kong International Airport: vast and futuristic, intemperately sterilized and organized. Multilingual robot voices remind us to hold onto the hand rail and watch our step.

We settled into a lounge. A child ran by with pinwheels in her hair.

The next plane, the one to Kathmandu, had many empty seats. We each could take a row and recline our seats. A baby with powerful lungs challenged our exhaustion, but I fell asleep.

Upon arrival visitors must purchase a visa. The web site told us to bring along fresh passport photos. The people at the airport ignored them and took their own. One must wait in three lines at three different locations in the airport to receive an instant visa.

No one would ever look at them again.

P. Sherpa met us outside, with a driver. He placed khatas on our shoulders, scarves traditionally offered to guests, symbols of respect, purity, and good wishes.

Our hotel was near the airport. We could have walked; we appreciated the ride. Rooms were clean. The washroom was also the shower stall, a type I've encountered before while travelling but to which I will never adjust. Still, a shower.

3

We would not meet our relative until shortly before the flight out, and we spent the next day touring Kathmandu.

People overall were friendly. Beggars were persistent and aggressive, but eventually moved on if they did not receive a favorable response.

While we would encounter many monkeys, our first views of urban wildlife were the street dogs. People feed them but do not treat them as pets. In the city, they cause little trouble—most of the ones we saw were asleep. It's a different matter in the mountains and countryside, where wild dogs sometimes form packs.

A Buddhist monk texted on a cell phone outside the great Boudha Stupa, which contains, according to believers, relics of the Buddha. It may well—I cannot say. I'm nevertheless reminded of the relics in medieval Europe, which displayed enough pieces of wood from the True Cross to build Noah's Ark.

The roof—the undomed part—offers a good view of the city. I was told that I could climb that far and walk around, provided that I did not film from the front of the Stupa. A raven landed atop a statue just as I arrived, and sat there for the exact amount of time it would have taken me to get out my camera, focus, and film it cawing and then flying away.

That image remains only in my mind. You won't see it in my video.

Traffic is mostly on two wheels, electric scooters, motorcycles, bicycles. Riders weave between the outnumbered vans and cars and crowded minibuses, short-cut across sidewalks. Horns peep and peep as they do in traffic jams depicted in movies. The law allows three on a scooter or bike if at least one is a child. They sit between parents, in front of drivers, or on the back. Some passengers cling to the person in front. Others check text messages, unconcerned about the vehicles careening around them. Drivers negotiate traffic patterns that would lead to massive deaths in the west-- and, to be honest, the death toll by traffic accident, while it is lessening, remains a problem in Kathmandu. Every block appears to have a small garage for the repair of two-wheeled rides. Webs of electrical cords hang from poles like the nests of tent-caterpillars. Stoplights are rare, but traffic cops in light blue help matters along.

We also visited the ancient Pashupatinath Temple on the Bagmati River, and the Nyatapola Temple in Bhaktapur, both UNESCO heritage sites. A lot of children visit from schools, each in some kind of uniform, and we encountered many tourists from around the world, but India, in particular. Hindu festivals were underway related to the month of Shravan.

The riverbank has active pyres. Swimmers and panners search the river for gold and other valuables thrown in with the ashes.

A child hands garment from roof of a row of tiny businesses on the outskirts of the temple complex. A motorcyclist drives through the crowd of Nic Academy kids who are grouped with brightly-coloured shirts. I scale one of the climbable ancient structures and observe the kind of middle school silliness one might see anywhere, though I do not know the words here. Two girls from a group call out a boy's name. He tosses a wad of grass at them and they laugh and he laughs.

One of the street dogs is not asleep, but dead.

A couple of students who could speak some English asked us where we were from. They were, perhaps, eleven or twelve. Canada sounded as exotic to them as Kathmandu to us.

The people here are generally shorter than in the west; I'm no basketball pick but I feel tall in Nepal.

An excellent, traditional dinner for three went for the same price as a deli sandwich in downtown Toronto.

The only air-conditioned place we entered was the coffeeshop in a more affluent end of town. It looked like a trendy hipster joint anywhere on Terra 2025. The shop served trendy drinks, caffeinated and otherwise, international in flavour. Piano music flew into variations, at one point becoming "Caramelldansen." Gör som vi/ Till denna melodi.*

We learned there about our guide and liaison, a Buddhist Sherpa who attended Hindu school and spent part of his life in Tibet. In addition to his role in the 2015 rescue efforts, he also appeared in a movie about those events.

Those events took his brother's life.

He proved a generous host. पाहुना भगवान हुन्, he explained, a well-known Hindu phrase. Atithi Devo Bhava. Treat a guest as one would a god.

4

A nurse attended us to the airport, but was not needed. My niece was fine and thrilled to see us. We spent too little time in Nepal but that was not our main purpose, and our main purpose we achieved. All of us returned safely.

They flew us over Japan and the Pacific and then across Canada to return us to Pearson in Toronto so, as I stated earlier, we flew around the world.

Perhaps next week someone will want me to go to Bangkok or Angkor Wat.

Or Prince Edward Island. I could visit Green Gables!




*According to the translator:

हामी जे गर्छौं त्यही गर / यो धुनमा

Travel Video

A more detailed account will appear soon. Short version: an unusual set of circumstances sent me with a relative to Kathmandu, Nepal, quite unexpectedly and with little time to prepare. We did get some time to tour, assisted by our remarkable guide and liaison, Mr. P. Sherpa.*

Meanwhile, here's a short video.

The video’s opening and closing include shots of Hong Kong, where we had a brief stopover both ways. These include the interior of Hong Kong International Airport and a stretch of the famous Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge/Tunnel.

The Kathmandu (and area) shots include the Boudhanath Stupa, the ancient Pashupatinath Temple on the Bagmati River, and the Nyatapola Temple in Bhaktapur.

While most of the audio was gathered live, it also includes brief fragments of Nagendra Rai’s instrumental cover of “Sapana Bhai Aankha Ma Aune” (Kushum Gajamer, Tulsi Ghimire, Ranjit Jagamer), the 1990s Nepali hit song made famous by Sadhana Sargam.

*Note to other westerners: This sounds a little too on-point to us until we realize that “Sherpa” is a not-uncommon surname in Nepal, especially among the Sherpa people.

This was an unusual week.

I just returned from my unexpected trip to Kathmandu.

Much more later.

Namaste.

Yesterday's Hero

"The youth of this country have only two heroes, Ralph Nader and Billy Jack."
--Tom Laughlin, filmmaker, actor, and paragon of modest self-assessment.

Like every other kid in the 70s, I saw Billy Jack (1969-1971... Later rereleased in 1973) and was impressed. I managed to avoid the reviled sequels (though I'm told that The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) grossed more, at the time,* than either Godfather II or Young Frankenstein, before it vanished from the culture). I also was aware that the character first appeared in an exploitation flick, Born Losers (1967), though I never saw it.

I finally watched it, and this led me to take another look at Billy Jack, which I had not seen since the 70s.

Born Losers revisits the plot of The Wild One (1953) from the town's point of view, with Billy thrown in to deal with the thugs. Billy Jack desperately wants to be a message film. Unable to decide upon one timely message, they toss in all of them.

The Billy Jack of Born Losers is basically a likeable local tough guy, a biracial ex-Green Beret who just wants to be left alone. He changes his attitude when an evil motorcycle gang invades town and causes trouble for everyone. Only gradually, and with the aid of some sympathetic cops, does he make any headway.

In Billy Jack he's movie-mythic, essentially a superhero. His character lives.... somewhere... and protects the local Rez, the wild horses, and a free school run by Carol, played by Laughlin's wife, Delores Taylor. They'll let any kid in, including runaways, so long as they carry their weight and avoid drugs.

Both films share much with the 70s series Kung-Fu, including the trope of a mixed-race hero played by an obvious Caucasian, whom white racists immediately slam with the appropriate racist slurs, despite his complete lack of anything that would indicate that ethnic heritage. The second film replaces Laughlin's standard cowboy hat with what would become his trademark Navajo hat, what sources online identify as a Natani Nez, so he has some kind of ethnic signifier. The villains of the first film have no idea who he is at first, but they identify him as an "Indian," usually using more offensive words. Pretty much everyone knows Billy in the second film.

Odd sidenote: one of the town racists in Billy Jack calls a First Nations character a “greaseball.” As a person of Mediterranean background, I take great offense to that. That racist slur is reserved to insult my group. If you want to be an effective racist, please consult with the group that you wish to abuse regarding the appropriate slurs. To really get good at it, practice these while standing, unarmed, surrounded by angry members of that group.

They won't be offended. Trust me.

To unironically continue:

Both movies overuse rape as a plot device. Yes, violent men tend to use sexual assault as a weapon, especially against girls and women. Its use in these films becomes excessive and exploitive. It becomes even more problematic when virtually every nude scene involves sexual assault or abuse.

Also, according to Billy Jack, the appropriate response to attempted sexual assault is to make the would-be assailant drive his Corvette into a river. Or I suppose not, since that just means he returns later, more determined.

Both films lean anti-Establishment, though both feature at least one decent cop who respects and assists Billy. He and the town share common cause in the first film. In the second, most of the townsfolk mistrust him, but some come over to his side.

Each film has some unexpected casting. Born Losers somehow convinced Holllywood legend Jane Russell. Her glory days now behind her, she plays a small but significant role.

Billy Jack features the future Dr. Johnny Fever.

Billy gets sidelined for much of the second movie by improvised scenes involving the kids at the school that he is protecting. Actually, that's among the things that I remembered the most about the movie. Some of those scenes hold up, in a slice-of-the-times sort of way. During the rewatch, I was surprised to realize that Howard Hesseman plays one of the teachers (billed under the name "Don Sturdy"). Hesseman actually had genuine credentials in the counterculture and in guerilla theatre, so Johnny Fever has some history of which I had been unaware.

Actual kids play the kids in Billy Jack, which always impresses me. They have authenticity, and most of them are better actors than much of the cast of Born Losers.

Alas, this generally positive aspect turns really uncomfortable in the scene where one of the villains, Bernard, is caught with a thirteen-year-old prostitute. The scene features brief but full nudity. I suspect that, in this case, the unidentified actress is probably not a minor (I doubt she's thirteen, certainly), but I could not say that for certain and, in the 70s, that would not have been a given. Shades of he whole groupie culture of the 60s/70s, Jeffrey "Yes, we're still talking about him" Epstein, and, well, actually, the entire history of sex trafficking. In short, making her thirteen-- whatever the performer's actual age-- is on-point, but seriously disquieting, particularly given the number of teens and children involved in this movie.

Billy, of course, has an adult love interest.

Billy develops a relationship with a young woman in the first film, and they leave together. She vanishes in all subsequent films, replaced by Carol. We must assume that something happened between the two movies.

Born Losers identifies Billy Jack as part Caucasian and part Indigenous. He consequently faces some racist attitudes. However, his background isn't much more relevant than that.

Billy Jack gives great weight to that background.

The credits indicate consulation with actual First Nations groups, but that applies only to a couple of early scenes at the school. We see, for example, a Paiute Friendship Dance, performed by members of the Paiute Nation.

The rest of the "Indian" rituals involve a culture with visual elements of both Plains and Navajo groups (as best as I can determine), and a lot of Laughlin and Jung. Billy Jack, garbed like the messianic figure Laughlin is now playing, engages in an invented ritual involving a poisonous snake.

The Billy of Born Loser is a fighter, but Laughlin had little martial arts training at that point. He trained intensively in Hapkido between the films, and his teacher, Bong-soo Han, acted as consultant and stunt double in the martial arts-heavy Billy Jack.

Which brings us to the film's violence.

Everyone has discussed the contradiction between Billy Jack's pro-peace message and the titular character's violence. The film never really resolves the tension between the two. I can only say that it discusses that tension, and the paradoxical pairing proved a major reason for the film's success.

Billy Jack is not great cinema, and Born Losers is pure period drive-in exploitation. However, the character became a hero to numerous young people, and the second film remains worth seeing, at least for its better moments.



And then there's the rabbit hole I did not expect.

The theme song to Billy Jack, "One Tin Soldier," was everywhere for a spell. Even my mom learned to play it. It actually was first released, separate of the movie, in 1969, by the Canadian group, Original Caste. Other covers followed. The film version was performed by someone named "Jinx Dawson," the singer for a group called Coven.

Coven was an early adopter of the occult trappings later popularized by heavy metal, and the kind of onstage theatrics better known through later acts such as Alice Cooper. They also allegedly introduced the "sign of the horns" to pop culture. Their first and most successful album features a song called "Black Sabbath" and their bassist was named "Oz Osborne." Shortly after this album came out, the nascent British band "Earth" changed their name to "Black Sabbath" and their lead singer, one John Michael Osbourne, adopted the stage named "Ozzy Osbourne." Yeah, that guy. RIP.

The members of Sabbath have always claimed it's all a coincidence. Coven later took heat and their album was pulled by many distributors because a widely-read article on the Manson Family murders referenced them as an example of dangerous occult overtones within the counterculture. Now effectively linked to Manson, they limped along and disbanded. Perhaps they can take some solace in their occult role in pop music, and in presaging the entire 80s Satanic Panic debacle.

Okay, perhaps not.

Jinx formed a new Coven in the early twenty-first century.

Tom Laughlin died in 2013.



*Other sequels: Billy Jack Goes to Washington, a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, barely saw release of any kind. Laughlin began filming The Return of Billy Jack in the mid-1980s. That film was never completed.