Monday 30 June 2008

Dead Pool June Update

We're halfway through the year now and on the downhill run to the finish line.

With the scores still nil-all, it's anyone's (or possibly even no-one's) game.

The month began in a big way, with the death at 71 of legendary designer Yves Saint-Laurent on the 1st, and legendary bluesman Bo Diddley on the 2nd at age 79.

The 8th saw the death of actor Robert J. Anderson, who played the young George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life. He was also, of course, briefly immortalised in Tom Black and the Caesars' legendary video Tahoe . . . timecode 2:09 for those playing at home.

On the 10th it was reported that Paul Newman had been diagnosed with lung cancer, causing him to drop out of directing a stage version of Of Mice and Men.

On the 15th Stan Winston, Academy-award-winning special effects genius behind the Terminator films, Predator and AI: Artificial Intelligence. His swansong was the truly excellent Iron Man, so he definitely went out on a high note.

The 17th saw the death of actress and dancer Cyd Charisse, after a heart attack the day before. She was 86.

On the 18th Fidel Castro appeared on an official video, again putting to rest rumours that he kicked it two years ago. Many remain unconvinced.

On the 21st puppeteer Kermit Love, longtime associate of Jim Henson and designer of both Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus passed away at the age of 91. Astonishingly, his name is just a coincidence.

On the 22nd Jane McGrath, wife of cricketer Glenn McGrath, passed away after complications from cancer surgery. She was 42.

Finally, and also on the 22nd, legendary comedian George Carlin died of heart failure at the age of 71. He will be sadly missed, but his influence on the world of comedy, and his seven words, will live forever.

100 Years Ago Somewhere in Russia . . .

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event, the day something (probably extra-terrestrial) exploded in the air above a remote region of central Russia and flattened everything for miles around.

It's an event that has fascinated everyone from conspiracy theorists to serious astronomers, and we still don't know a heck of a lot about what really happened.

The story got a resurgence in the 90s when it became part of the alien mythology in The X-Files, but apart from that it's remained in the realms of Weird Moments In History.

So the question arises: could it happen again? Well, yes it could.

Not knowing what it was though, it's a little hard to tell how frequently this sort of thing might go on.

Hopefully it's only a one-in-one-thousand year type of event.

Yeah, it probably is.

Sunday 29 June 2008

ID Goes South

Here was me thinking that all this Creation v. Evolution nonsense was restricted to the religious wingnuts in the US.

But no . . . Christian group "Focus on the Family" has been active in New Zealand, sending CDs and books promoting Intelligent Design theory to schools.

Bring it on, I say. The NZ chapter obviously missed the memo saying that this turned into an embarrassing failure for their compadres in the US a few years ago.

It'll be interesting to see if our local Christian lobby group "Family First" decide to get in on the act. Part of me hopes they do. It's hella fun watching people like that get debated into the ground.

Ah, it's nice having tangible facts and evidence on your side.

Saturday 28 June 2008

Coming Soon




Joss Whedon directing Evil Doogie Howser and Captain Tight Pants punching stuff.

I ask you, what more could we want?

All Heil the FCC

The US Federal Communications Commission (you know, the geniuses behind the media beat-up of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction) have had another brilliant idea.

I know, they've said . . . let's auction off part of the broadband spectrum to anyone that will provide free Internet without pornography! Or, in their words, a "network-based filtering mechanism...in order to protect children and families."

Recognising this as just one more step back into the Victorian era by a crowd of fascist Luddites, the reaction from the technological crowd has been one of bemusement and muted giggles. The reaction from potential bidders has been more or less non-existent.

Remember when the Howard Government, thinking along similar lines, offered free home-based content filters? Yeah. It took a sixteen-year-old less than 24 hours to crack it.

Hopes and dreams of moral crusaders notwithstanding, the technology required to achieve this just doesn't exist yet. What's more, it's many years of intensive development away.

So here's what will happen:

First, there will be a lot of discussion about freedom of speech from bloggers, and a lot of resistance from the dominant telcos (AT&T etc.). They won't be worried about about the filtering, of course, but about someone providing net access for free.

Then there will be a few parties interested in the auction, but not many. The ultimate price paid will be less than impressive.

Finally once the dust has settled, the costs associated with providing the required porn-free access will blow out massively. Kids will download porn from that spectrum just to show it can be done, and the FCC will be bombarded with complaints from their parents.

The strawman company set up to run the thing will be weighed down by lawsuits and declare bankruptcy, a lot of well-meaning but ignorant creditors will lose their money and the whole project will be summarily abandoned.

Or, there might be a sudden outbreak of common sense and the whole thing might be dropped before it begins. But I wouldn't count on it.

Wednesday 25 June 2008

New Comment Format

I've integrated the comments on the blog with a site Disqus.

In theory it'll make it easier and more streamlined and yada yada yada.

Not sure if it's a good idea or a bad idea at this stage, but we'll see how it goes.

If it all goes pear-shaped, we will resume normal programming directly.

Monday 23 June 2008

Space Classics

Hamer Hall, Melbourne.

Saturday night saw a performance by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra of their Space Classics programme, celebrating the music of Space . . . mainly space movies.

There were nerds dressed as stormtroopers, and one as Darth Vader, wandering around the foyer when we arrived. And that was a portent of things to come.

After opening with Thus Spake Zarathustra from 2001, we went straight into the theme from Star Wars, from whence it more or less turned into the John Williams variety hour.

However, Williams' bombastic brass (Close Encounters, E.T., Superman and yet more Star Wars) was occasionally interrupted for selections from Holst's beautiful Planets suite, some themes from Star Trek (although not Voyager, much to my wife's dismay) and an awkward bit of audience participation on Thunderbirds are Go!!

It was all highly entertaining, and it is great to see this sort of music played live by a world-class orchestra.

Even the Star Wars theme, which we think we know so well, is revealed in all its complex glory when detached from the images of that Star Destroyer and R2D2 and C-3PO running through the halls.

Magical stuff, although we could have done without the stormtroopers standing in front of the stage eyeballing the audience at the end.

That was just a bit weird.

Saturday 21 June 2008

Manufacturing Controversy

Recently the Religion vs. Science debate has popped up again in the US.

After being roundly defeated in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in 2005, Creationists have regrouped and are again trying to make it okay to teach Intelligent Design in science classes.

The passing of Louisiana senate bill SB 733 is going to make this possible, although not to teach ID directly. That's now clearly and legally understood to be unconstitutional.

The idea now is to "teach the controversy". That is, to promote ID as an alternative to evolutionary theory based on (acknowledged) weaknesses in evolutionary theory. This "controversy" has been manufactured by the proponents of ID.

The implication is that those evil scientists are trying to banish religion from our lives and claim, by teaching evolution, that there's no God.

But that's the thing. Science has precisely nothing to say about the existence of God, for or against.

To quote myself from a comment in an earlier post:
The point is that science is only concerned with examining and interpreting what can be observed and measured.

In that sense, the existence or non-existence of God is simply not a scientific question. It can't be, because there's no objective evidence to examine or measure or test.

From the scientific side there is no controversy, because Intelligent Design is not science. It's religious instruction posing as science. If the proponents of ID were a little more honest, they'd be upfront about that.

But the rejection of ID in science classes is not a rejection of religion, because science has nothing to say about religion.

The rejection of ID in science classes is just a rejection of bad science teaching.

Thursday 19 June 2008

Top Ten Sci Fi Movies

The American Film Institute has named its Top Ten Greatest Films of All Time in various categories.

Pleasingly, science fiction got its own list. And here they are.

10. Back To The Future (1985)

Certainly a worthy entry. Successful in bringing time-travel stories way into the mainstream, and still plays well two decades on.

9. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

Inspired by the looming threat of communism and still pretty creepy. Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake is arguably better, although last year's remake The Invasion was unquestionably worse.

8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

No argument here. A quantum leap in science fiction movies, action movies and special effects wizardry. Still looks better than most of the imitators that came after it, including Terminator 3.

7. Alien (1979)

Again, no argument about this one. The perfect blend of horror and science fiction and some of best art design ever seen anywhere.

6. Blade Runner (1982)

Many fans would put this at number one, but I'd argue that it's not really worthy of a spot here at all. Intriguing story and ground-breaking in its time, but it hasn't aged well. Top twenty, maybe.

5. The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

Classic anti-nuclear movie that still resonates today. It'll be interesting to see if the impending remake (starring Keanu, of all people) manages to live up to it. I suspect it won't.

4. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

I love this movie deeply, although I'm not too sure about its classification as science fiction. What the hell. I'll take it.

3. E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982)

Oh, bugger off.

2. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)

Predictable entry. Two problems. First, it can be argued that this is fantasy, not science fiction. Space is just a little too noisy in this far-away galaxy. Second, Empire is a much better film.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Well, of course. This movie doesn't just show you space. It makes you feel it.


So not a bad list overall. I would have included Forbidden Planet and maybe Things to Come. Some more recent flicks like Twelve Monkeys and Donnie Darko might also be worth considering.

But hey, I'm only a fan. What do I know?

Wednesday 18 June 2008

The Happening

Someone needs to tell M. Night Shyamalan to cheer the hell up.

He of the inexplicably bizarre plotline and signature Killer TwistTM seems to be drowning lately in a sea of his own moroseness (morosity?).

I know Night's plotlines lend themselves to a dark mode of presentation, but criminy . . . after sitting through The Happening for a (mercifully brief) 91 minutes I felt like cutting my fringe on the diagonal and listening to A Perfect Circle.

It's not just that The Happening is dour event after dour event, watched grimly by a group of dour protagonists. No. Everything about this film just screams downer. The plot, the script, the understated acting, the wandering direction and even the washed-out colour scheme all seem designed solely to bring down the mood.

The one moment of levity (which I don't need to point out . . . you'll see it) stands out so much it seems to have been tacked on as an afterthought.

Now I'm all for depressing cinema . . . Requiem for a Dream is one of my all-time favourites . . . but there's got to be an interesting story arc to support it. Here the presentation is all too muddled to even give you a decent and tangible emotional slump. All you're left with is a slightly unsettled feeling and a vague sense of angst.

Admittedly Night's made a rod for his own back with the subject matter. It's a decent enough idea, but would have taken a filmmaker far more accomplished than him to pull it off.

It doesn't help that the resolution is unsatisfying, the cast seems lost in the plot and the script was cranked out of George Lucas's patented Awkward-Dialogue-O-Matic.

If you're going to saddle your story with an invisible enemy and a hopeless mission, then you really need some great characters and characterisations to carry the film. And The Happening just doesn't have them.

On the upside there are good set-pieces, a few very suspenseful moments, some nice cinematography and a superb score by James Newton Howard.

But after a promising start it soon wanders off into a depressing nowhereland.

2 out of 5

Sunday 15 June 2008

Haiku Testing

Beep. This is a test
Beep. This is only a test
Please do not panic

Saturday 14 June 2008

Bill Maher in Religulous

Behold the trailer for Bill Maher's new film Religulous.



Hopefully this will be good.

I'm not a huge fan of Bill Maher's particular brand of liberal arts-college smartass, but you gotta love the subject matter.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens can churn out book after book. They're great and all, but nothing gets discussion going like a decent feature treatment.

It's out in November. Can't wait.

Tangled Up In Quanta

After that last post I got all depressed and went looking for some funky science stories to cheer myself up.

And I found one.

Quantum entanglement is a truly bizarre phenomenon, even by the way-out-there standards of quantum physics.

The idea is that if two photons of light become "entangled" at a quantum level, then the state of one will instantaneously affect the state of the other, even if they are separated by thousands or maybe even millions or billions of miles.

The potential applications of this, from faster-than-light communication to quantum cryptography, are staggering.

The state of each photon is not set until observed (in line with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, or if you prefer, Schrödinger's cat), so observing one photon affects the state of the other.

All lab experiements to date have supported the theory of entanglement, but having both photons Earthbound introduces a potential loophole, whereby the observation might have been in advance, and therefore the effect not truly instantaneous.

The solution? Send one of the entangled photons to the International Space Station and leave the other one on Earth.

Due to the relativistic movement between the two photons, an observer on Earth and an observer on the ISS could both claim to have measured their photon first.

That's truly exciting. Nobody knows how this will turn out.

Now if only we could get some funding for further study of boredons.

Friday 13 June 2008

When Creationists Attack

In an awesome blow to science education in the US, the Louisiana House of Representatives has approved senate bill SB 733.

Have a read. Looks innocuous enough? There's lots of talk about critical thinking and objective discussion and all that good stuff.

Don't believe a word of it.

This is nothing more than a cynical and underhanded stealth attack on science education.

The sole purpose of this document is to allow Creationism to be taught as scientific theory in public schools.

Of course there's no mention of Creationism, or even its modern equivalent Intelligent Design.

But note that the bill makes specific mention of
" . . . evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

That seems like a rather specific list.

And then, the kicker is in this paragraph:
"A teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard textbook supplied by the school system and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, as permitted by the city, parish, or other local public school board"

What?

So if the school board is stacked with creationists, as is often the case in the US, then The Book of Genesis will be taught right alongside the standard science textbook.

And guess which one will be given more weight.

This is a science class. Surely we should be teaching science. And therefore listening to scientists. Only.

This stuff isn't a matter of opinion. It isn't a matter of theology.

It's open to debate, of course. But debate on rational, logical and scientific grounds. Not some manufactured debate of Religion vs Science designed solely to make the local ministers look like heroes to their parish.

I'm deeply disturbed by this.

Superstition

Question on Sunrise this morning, leading in to a story about Friday the 13th:

"Do superstitions still have any power?"

Let me see.

God created the world
God is watching everything you do
Prayer to God can heal the sick
God will judge you after you die

Yes, I would say they do.

Sadly, I suspect the story will only talk about breaking mirrors and walking under ladders.

Thursday 12 June 2008

ClearPlay

Here's an interesting idea from the Land of the Free . . . ClearPlay.

It's a modified DVD player that will play regular DVDs, but edit them on the fly based on downloaded templates. It'll remove violence, sex scenes or profanity, depending on what you choose to find offensive.

A quick glance at the list of movies available has some surprises: Fight Club and Saw are both there, and presumably run for about five minutes each.

I'm genuinely ambivalent about this.

While I find it offensive that someone's art can be arbitrarily cut up by some prudish hack, I appreciate the argument that a consumer should be able to choose what they see.

Mostly I feel sorry for people who would willingly rob themselves of the breadth of feeling you get from films like Pan's Labyrinth. If you take out the sickening violence, you miss the contrast with the childlike innocence at the heart of the story, and you might as well be watching The Little Mermaid.

Imagine if this catches on. Rather than a movie being rated PG, M or R, studios will release a different cut corresponding to each rating.

More cinemas be built to cater for the multiple versions of blockbusters. A new breed of auteur will arise that refuses to make multiple cuts.

And George Lucas will use it as an excuse for yet another special edition of Star Wars.

So what do we think, kids? Good idea or bad idea?

As I Was Saying

Continuing on the same train of thought as yesterday, we're starting to see some of the growing pains of a cultural shift to less car use.

Sydney is wrestling with the idea of car pooling.

With the continuing rise in petrol prices, this is inevitable in a town with a dense centre, outer suburban sprawl and substandard public transport.

Sound familiar? Yeah. Expect similar discussions about Melbourne real soon.

In Wellington they've introduced car lanes for use only by cars with at least three people. And of course, people are using love dolls, mannequins, and probably even artful combinations of doonas-and-pillows in an effort to get around it.

Seinfeld, of course, covered this fifteen years ago.

We really are behind the times down here.

Wednesday 11 June 2008

And in Science News

A group of thirteen national science academies today released a joint statement calling on the Governments of the world to do more to fight climate change.

Emarassingly, Australia was not one of them.

But this is hardly surprising. We're still very behind the times with all this stuff.

It was announced today that Toyota will be producing the new hybrid Camry at their Altona plant, to begin production in 2010.

Here's my tip:

Not long after 2010 we won't be interested in hybrids anymore. The race to produce the first mass-market electric car will be well and truly on. This decision will be seen as the one that put Australia on the back foot, by encouraging our car industry to huddle under its warm and cosy Government subsidies instead of getting out there and earning its keep.

You heard it here first.

The Chaser's Age of Terror Variety Hour

The Athenaeum, Melbourne

In September last year the respected but relatively obscure Chaser team found brief international fame when they pulled their Osama Bin Laden stunt at the APEC conference.

Now that that's all been quietly swept under the rug (presumably so as not to further embarrass those in charge of APEC security) they've gone back to being relatively obscure, and doing what they do best. Being smartarses.

This new live show follows much the same format as their TV show War on Everything with lots of short sketches and songs, but freed from the shackles of Your ABC they've turned the "inappropriate content" knob way up.

Highlights were a quiz show featuring two members of the audience vs. Craig Reucassel (Q: "Who should be arrested for displaying images that exploit children?" A: "Terri Irwin"), Chas Licciardello talking about his explicit adventures in fake internet dating, and in a moment of surreal comedy gold, Chas (again) being guided through an awkward audience interaction by a Navman GPS system.

It all comes off very much like an undergraduate revue, albeit a really really good one.

If you're into that kind of thing . . . think The Late Show circa 1992 . . . then it's well worth seeing.

4 out of 5

Witty Blog Title

For the last couple of days my lovely wife has been in Cape Town, South Africa, presenting some of her design work to various bigwigs and making quite the impression.

Apparently the words "world class presentation" are being bandied about. Well done, babe.

While stuck here in Melbourne, I've had at least one (well, one) text asking why I've not blogged yet, given the scads of free time I obviously have.

Well Shannon, of course I had every intention of using this time productively, and blogging at least once a day. But obviously I've found better things to do.

And this is what they are:

On Monday after I drove Kate to the airport I came home and finished a jigsaw. It's another one of those picture-on-the-box-doesn't-match-the-picture-on-the-puzzle jobbies.

So for posterity and to prove that I finished it, the picture on the box is this:


And the puzzle picture is this:


The second picture is the same scene 50 years on. Or after a geriatric bomb exploded. Oh, the hilarity.

On Monday night I played Guitar Hero with Toby from next door. Toby, of course, being a professional musician in an ARIA award winning band, but I still managed to wipe the floor with him.

This just goes to prove that Guitar Hero is not about playing music.

Furthermore, speaking as someone who has played both the guitar and the piano accordion in real life, I can say authoritatively that Guitar Hero is more like the accordion.

So it's definitely not about playing music.

Then last night Spoon and I went to see The Chaser's Age of Terror Variety Hour at the Athenaeum. Great show. Review to follow.

After the show we had beers in a couple of pubs and argued about the sort of stuff we usually restrict to blog comments. It was very entertaining, and I'm sorry you all had to miss it.

It was nice to do it face to face, but part of me missed the exhibitionism of doing it in a public forum.

For God's sake don't read that last sentence in isolation. Context is important.

Happy now?

Friday 6 June 2008

Bolt Warms Up

Andrew Bolt has really irked me today. He's still banging on about climate change being imaginary.

Look, I understand that climate change is a difficult problem. I understand that people want it to just go away. I do.

But closing your eyes and putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "LA LA LA LA LA" won't make it happen.

I'm not sure if it's pride or ego or wilful ignorance or all three, but Mr Bolt is revelling in his supposed status as last-man-standing among the climate change skeptics.

His self-image is of a man standing tall, head high and proud. He doesn't appreciate that he's actually the last person on the tiny desert island in a 1950's cartoon (you know, 1 metre across with a palm tree in the middle), staring fixedly into space so he can't see the water lapping at his ankles.

The amazing fervour with which he clings to any piece of evidence, however slight and however manipulated, that climate change might not be real is sad. So sad.

I'll leave aside his insistence on continuing to refer to the phenomenon as "global warming". Presumably this is so he can use it as ammunition when climate models show that parts of the earth will cool as a result of climate change. Memo to Mr Bolt: that's why we changed it to "climate change".

His rant today was simply a reheat of the old chestnut that average warming levels flattened out in 1998, so what are we so worried about? After all, it said so in the New Statesman, so it must be true!

This argument has been going around for months now, and has been comprehensively debunked over and over again . . . for example here, here and here.

The fact that this argument is still getting recycled clearly shows that the anti-climate change brigade is really clutching at straws.

So anyway, I left a comment. It was published, but I reproduce it here for your enjoyment. I begin with a reference to Bolt's statement that many people are skeptics of climate change, some of them prominent scientists.

It's interesting that you say "some of them prominent scientists . . . ". How many of these "prominent scientists" are climatologists? None, I suspect.

I also suspect none of them are statisticians. Your argument, Mr Bolt, is based on a convenient selection of statistics that happen to tell your story.

The fact is that 1998 was an oddly high year for temperature, because it was at the peak of the El Nino cycle. If you cherry-pick 1998 as the starting point, then yes, it can be made to appear that warming has stopped.

But this is noisy data. You can't look at one isolated section and draw any meaningful conclusions.

If you look at the decades-long trends in the data, then it's painfully clear that 1998 was an anomaly, and it's painfully clear that the temperature is still going up.

Now let's have no more of this nonsense.

Thursday 5 June 2008

Science Groupie-ism

I've been playing around with the details in my profile and the side bar of the blog . . . adding a few extra links and such.

One of the things that's been notably lacking is a decent blog description, so I've added one. It's repeated here for posterity, as it's reasonably likely it will change at some point:

"The adventures of a science groupie and atheist lost in an increasingly superstitious world."

I think that's a reasonable summary.

The superstitious nature of our culture is up for discussion, of course. And my atheism is something I've been happy to explore here.

But science groupie-ism?

What I'm trying to express is my somewhat inglorious position as a fan of science, who never actually does anything particularly scientific in his working life.

I completed a general science degree at University, majoring in Maths and minoring in Chemistry, but in my third year I dropped everything else to fill my timetable with every Maths subject I could find.

This was followed by an Honours degree in Maths and finally a job doing Actuarial work, essentially the statistical analysis of insurance products.

So mathematics has played a big part in my academic and professional life. But maths, while used for science, is not itself a science. It's really an extension of pure philosophy.

It just happens to be one of those rare branches of philosophy that occasionally stumbles upon something useful. (Cue angry retorts from Logical Positivists).

But the point is that even though I'm not doing science, I'm still a big fan of science.

I love the excitement of scientific discovery . . . the examination of clues, the dissection of evidence and the proposal of theories and models to explain our often very strange reality.

I love reading about palaeontology and astronomy and quantum physics.

I love celebrating great scientific achievements, like landing the Phoenix on Mars.

I get all excited about the possibility of devices like the Large Hadron Collider, due to go online in August and hopefully reveal all sorts of amazing things.

So I'm just a science groupie. I'm happy to be the guy cheering at the sidelines, and happy to bask in the reflected glow of great achievements.

And if Stephen Hawking comes to visit, I can't promise I won't be the guy chucking my knickers calculator onto the stage.

Again.

Sunday 1 June 2008

Dead Pool May Update

Celebrity deaths were thin on the ground in May, although there were a few lost souls for whom their work is more famous than their name.

On the 5th Irv Robbins, co-founder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream chain, passed away at the age of 90. His partner Burt "Butch" Baskin had died in 1967 aged 54.

On the 8th Murray Jarvik, co-inventor of the nicotine patch passed away. Irony requires that he died of emphysema or something.

But no, it was congenital heart failure. So no comedy gold there then.

On the 10th Jessica Jacobs, the 17-year-old star of The Saddle Club was tragically killed when she was hit by a train.

On the 15th we farewelled artist Will Elder, a long-time contributor to Mad Magazine and creator of one of the best self-portraits I've ever seen:


On the 24th comedian Dick Martin, star of iconic comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In died at the age of 86.

Also on the 24th young British actor Rob Knox, who will appear as Marcus Belby in the forthcoming Harry Potter and Half-Blood Prince, was killed in a street brawl in London.

The 25th saw the death of J.R. Simplot, founder of the company that provides more than half of the potatoes for McDonald's French Fries. He died at the age of 99 an incredibly rich bastard.

Finally, on the 26th we lost actor and director Sydney Pollack at the age of 73. Pollack was the director of classic films Tootsie and Out of Africa. And he was great in Eyes Wide Shut. Remember that? 'Course you do.

And that's it for May. No points yet for our entrants, but we continue to hope.