Three Films I’d Watch (if anybody made them)

Here are three ideas I’ve had for movies recently. If only the movie studios would stop making pap like Dredd 3D (or as I call it, Judge Dreddful) and take on some of my ideas, perhaps I’d find myself at the cinema more often.

So here are my three pitches:

Knights of the Living Dead

A twist on the Arthurian legends. With zombies.

King Arthur’s trusted White Knight (Lancelot) on a “routine” quest to oust Brandin, a corrupt ruler of a nearby township, who is accused of evil sorcery. Lancelot rallies the townpeople but Brandin escapes to his lair in a cursed cemetery. Lancelot slays Brandin, but – an an effort to decode a riddle Brandin made about the source of his power – lifts an enormous metal plate over a mysterious tomb, exposing the world to a dangerous plague that turns those affected into monstrous zombies.

Knights of the Living Dead
Knights of the Living Dead

Under instruction from the Church, Arthur and his knights set out to find the Holy Grail, which has the power to defeat the curse, questing through zombie-infected lands. There’s lots of hacking and slashing and eating of brains, Lancelot shags Guinevere, Arthur dies a heroic death to let the others escape (hinting at the time that he knows about the affair and wants them to be happy together), and ultimately the knights use the Grail to save the world from the zombie plague.

My Daughter’s Hand

A tale of love, homophobia, and the meaning of family, inspired by a true story.

In the news this week, a Hong Kong businessman has offered the equivalent of £40M to the man who can woo and marry his daughter. The problem? She’s a lesbian, and is already married (although same-sex unions are not recognised in Hong Kong) to her girlfriend of many years.

My first thought when I heard this news story was that she should find a man who’s willing to “marry” her, and split the money between the two of them. Hell: for £20M, I’d fly to Hong Kong and marry her for a fortnight. Where’s my plane ticket.

Hong Kong corporation heiress Gigi Chao (right) with her wife Sean Eav.
Hong Kong corporation heiress Gigi Chao (right) with her wife Sean Eav.

But then I thought of an even better variant on the story. In my version, a (disowned, unless she recants and marries a man) lesbian daughter has her partner dress as a man and pretend to be a suitor. There are slight overtones of the story of Hua Mulan, a legendary Chinese heroine who pretended to be a man in order to take her aged father’s place in the army, during a conscription drive.

In any case, the partner, disguised as a man, succeeds in impressing the father, and the father eventually comes to admire this young “man” and gives his blessing to marry his daugher. But as the wedding approaches, their secret is exposed when they’re caught having sex. However: after much soul-searching the father sees that he liked his daughter’s partner as a person when he believed that she was a man, and so he agrees to accept her into his family as a woman, too.

It’s a story about combating homophobia with deception, I guess.

The Bone Wars

Back when Richard Owen and Gideon Mantell  and were rocking up the early British palæontology scene, in the late 19th Century, their USA contemporaries Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh were embroiled in a bitter rivalry of dinosaur proportions.

Marsh and Cope.
Marsh and Cope.

These gentlemen were in such a rush to get the fame of collecting the most dinosaur bones, that they resorted to ludicrous (and somewhat shocking) measures: using dynamite to blow away hillsides (probably destroying many fossils as they went), spying on one another (to such an extent that they would sometimes operate through fake companies to try to evade each other’s spies), and bribing people to keep quiet about the locations of big finds.

Their rushed efforts led to some ludicrous mistakes. Cope – a neo-Lamarckist – famously assembled his Elasmosaurus skeleton backwards, with the head on the “tail” end, among other mistakes (Wikipedia even has a tag to label naive Victorian-era drawings of dinosaurs, I recently discovered).

I have a vision for a film in the style of A Dangerous Method, which I enjoyed earlier this year, telling the dramatised story of these men and their rivalry. There’s already been a comic book and even a board game about them: isn’t it time for a movie, too?

What do you think? Would you watch these movies?

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Suppose you have a time machine that can only jump to leap days. What’s the chance that a random jump will put you on a Monday? [Maths]

This link was originally posted to /r/puzzles. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

The original link was: http://www.scatmania.org/2012/09/24/leap-machine/

Here’s a puzzle for you –

Like the TARDIS, your time machine has a fault.
Like the TARDIS, your time machine has a fault. The fault isn’t a failure of its chameleon circuit, but a quirk in its ability to jump to particular dates. Picture courtesy aussiegall (Flickr), licensed Creative Commons.

You own a time machine with an unusual property: it can only travel to 29th February. It can jump to any 29th February, anywhere at all, in any year (even back before we invented the Gregorian Calendar, and far into the future after we’ve stopped using it), but it can only finish its journey on a 29th of February, in a Gregorian leap year (for this reason, it can only jump to years which are leap years).

One day, you decide to take it for a spin. So you get into your time machine and press the “random” button. Moments later, you have arrived: it is now 29th February in a random year!

Without knowing what year it is: what is the probability that it is a Monday? (hint: the answer is not 1/7 – half of your challenge is to work out why!).

Dan Q

The Leap Machine (Puzzle)

Here’s a puzzle for you –

Like the TARDIS, your time machine has a fault.
Like the TARDIS, your time machine has a fault. The fault isn’t a failure of its chameleon circuit, but a quirk in its ability to jump to particular dates. Picture courtesy aussiegall (Flickr), licensed Creative Commons.

You own a time machine with an unusual property: it can only travel to 29th February. It can jump to any 29th February, anywhere at all, in any year (even back before we invented the Gregorian Calendar, and far into the future after we’ve stopped using it), but it can only finish its journey on a 29th of February, in a Gregorian leap year (for this reason, it can only jump to years which are leap years).

One day, you decide to take it for a spin. So you get into your time machine and press the “random” button. Moments later, you have arrived: it is now 29th February in a random year!

Without knowing what year it is: what is the probability that it is a Monday? (hint: the answer is not 1/7 – half of your challenge is to work out why!).

Five

Earlier this month, Ruth and I spent a long weekend in the North to celebrate five years together as a couple. Technically, I suppose that we should have celebrated it the previous month, but we were up in Edinburgh at the time: we had, after all, first gotten together during our 2007 trip to Edinburgh, in lieu of actually watching any comedy.

Because of our change of date, we ended up celebrating the fifth anniversary of our relationship… on the same weekend as the fifth anniversary of QParty, the celebration of Claire and I’s relationship. QParty in turn took place five months after Claire and I changed our names, which itself happened on approximately the fifth anniversary of Claire and I meeting for the first time.

In Ruth and I’s case, this five year mark isn’t just a excuse to celebrate our success as a couple, but also to celebrate the success of she, JTA and I as a “vee“. Our unusual arrangement hasn’t been without its share of challenges: many of them challenges that more-conventional couples don’t face. But here we are, looking back on a busy five years and… well… still kicking ass.

She and I have been talking, on and off, about the idea of a party that the pair of us would like to throw, a little way down the line: something to celebrate us as a couple. Nothing quite so grand and enormous as Ruth & JTA’s wedding (what could top that!), but some variety of event. Needless to say, you’ll hear about it when it’s time to!

Review of Shiny EN001/NP01 Pre-Inked Paid Stamp

This review originally appeared on Amazon. See more reviews by Dan.

It’s a stamp. It stamps. Hurrah!

It’s a stamp. It stamps. It looks like it’s going to dry out, but it doesn’t. It works, and it’s great.

The only thing it could have benefited from would have been the word “PAID”, the appropriate way up, on the top of the handle as well as the bottom, so it’s easier to double-check that it’s perfect before you stamp.

Otherwise: a perfectly good product at a perfectly fair price.