Author: Jim Dowd

A lesser website known as “Boston.com” did a science poll recently where it asked readers is they would rather have the Olympics come to Boston at an estimated cost of about 51 billion dollars, or would they prefer pending about half that to make Boston’s own Jurassic Park.

Showing that the Hub is still the smartest city in the US, residents of our fair region weighed in at the dino park at 86% in favor because, duh. Dinosaurs.

This seems like a good time, then, to unshelve the film treatment I wrote years ago as an addition to the Jurassic Park film franchise. With films about Boston being huge winners in the box office like The Fighter, Good Will Hunting and Star Wars Episode IV, a New Hope (Mos Eisley Spaceport was closely based on Lynn) and dinosaurs being the hugely popular, this is a sure-fire hit.

Today we bring you part I

The lead actor is either Matt Damon or Mark Walhberg or whatever brooding pretty boy native son the studio has on hand.

Interior: We open in the kitchen of a cramped second floor apartment in an aging Victorian in the gritty blue collar metro of Brockton. Our hero, Brian O’Shea, gets ready to start his day as the head of  Paleontology at Harvard University. He packs his lunch into a metal container, puts on his Carhartt jacket over a grey hooded sweatshirt and clumps down the stairs to his rusting Chevy Cavalier. Waiting for him at his car is his childhood friend Joey Sullivan (Ben Affleck).

Brian: Whaddya want Sully, I’m tryin to get to work.

Joey: Why aren’t you returning my calls? You know my boss wants to talk to you. You owe him a lotta money, Brotha. I’m tryin to keep him offa you, but he’s persistent, you know what I mean?

Brian: I told him he can go build his dino pahk without me. I’m legit now. I got a job at Havahad and everything. Look, I’m leaving for a dig in Mongolia next week, we got a whole new species of Ichthyosaur discovered theah. It’s fackin huge. It’ll make me a lot of cash when I publish my papah about it. Tell your boss it’s gonna be in Natcha. I’m all set after that, I sweah.

Joey: I know you’re tryin to make it good, but no way you can pay what you owe him on some egghead salary even if you land a book deal or a special on NatGeo. Weah proud and shit you made it up there with all those smaht kids, you always was a book nerd. And Mista Kelly’s been patient on account of he knows you borrowed that money to pay for youah motha’s canca treatments, but Jesus Shea. Why didn’t she move back down from New Hampshia to Mass when she got sick to where we got health ceah? I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but that was just retahted, yaknow?

Brian: She liked the aih up theah.

Exterior- Brian gets in the car and leaves. As he drives off, Joey yells through the window…

Joey: I’m tryin ta help you Shea! Youah not gonna like what happens next…

Interior, Harvard Peabody Museum. Brian is arriving at work and a crowd is gathered around the central display. There are police cars. As he enters everyone turns to look at him.

Brian: Who’s the patie foah?

Dean: It seems our central attraction, the priceless diplodocid skeleton from our foyer has gone missing, but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you Professor O’Shea?

Brian: Why would I?

Dean: Well, it’s just that the police found…this…near the freight entrance… which you have one of the only keys to.

A police officer holds up a clear plastic evidence bag with a Bruins hat in it.

Brian: What makes you think that’s mine?

Cop [reading autograph on hat]: “To Brian, sorry for hitting you with that slapshot,” signed, “Zdeno.”

Brian: Joey you set me up you fucking fuck.

Interior, back of limousine driving through Everett

Driver (looking in mirror): Hey, ahnt’t you Billy O’Shea’s kid?

Brian: Yah, so what?

Driver: Oh, I thought I heard you was ovah the rivah in Cambridge working with computas or something.

Brian: I’m a paleontologist.

Driver: No shit? I got a big wart on my foot maybe you could look at then. It’s killing me. Right on my drivahs foot too.

Brian: Maybe latah.

Driver: What evah happened to Billy anyway? Wasn’t he working at the Museum as a plumbah?

Brian (laughs): The only thing my fatha unclogs anymoah is the top of a bottle of Canadian Club. He hasn’t been a plumbah since he sold his tools to buy booze. He’s a janitah now, when he rembahas to get out of bed in the mohning.

Exterior, an industrial site in Everett. A natural gas tanker motors lazily through the canal. Brian walks up to Mr. Kelly, who is looking at a set of blueprints with a team of architects and engineers.

Mr. Kelly (Colin Quinn): Brian my boy! Thanks fah comin.

Brian: What choice did I have?

Kelly: Yah, sorry about that. Joey wasn’t bein persuasive enough and I had to up the ante. It’s allright, Don’t worry about your little skellington. I had my boys put it on top of the MIT dome so it looks like it was one of those gay pranks those sissies play on each othah. Youah in the cleah on the dino thing. But befoah you go, we got a debt to settle and I got a way for you ta walk away clean and we don’t gotta do any moah shenanigans to get theah.

Mr. Kelly goes on to describe Jurassic Pahk casino being built in Everett over the Monsanto plant. He tells Brian it’s going to have everything- Tyrannosaurus Rex, Triceratops, Wooly Mammoth…

Brian (interrupting): Wolly Mammoth was not a dinosaur. It was a mammal and lived hundreds of millions of years after they died out.

Kelly: Fine, whatevah, fuck the Woolly Mammoth then.

Brian: Why do you need me? Just build a fuckin casino, won’t that bring people in?

Kelly (laughs): Brian, you ah smaht, I always said that. But it’s all book smahts. You don’t know nothin about business. You gotta give em something they can’t get anyplace else. There ah casinos in Connecticut, there ah casinos in Upstate New Yohk and in Maine. Every mother-effing convenience store from heah to frikin James Taylah’s hosue out in the Berkshieas is a frigging casino with all the scratch tickets and the Keno… But with you, our hometown genius who knows the difference between a Woolly Mammoth and a fahkin Stegamingus

Brian: Stegasaurus

Kelly: Whatevah. Anyway, you along with the people I got from the biotechs over in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, we’re gonna give ‘em something that’ll smack theih nuts right on theih eyelids. Fuckin Dinosaus, right outa Land of the Lost like when we wah kids. I got Dunkin’s on boahd and everything.

Brian: In Everett? Who the fuck even ever comes out here?

Kelly: You shittin me? Fuck the Chales, Duck Touas will turn north and come up heah to see the dinos. People won’t wanna ride the swan boats, they’ll wanna watch a Brontosaurus get it’s face eaten off by a Pterodactyl or whatevah. Aerosmith is gonna play heah, I got comedy writas making jokes about it aready, about how Steve Tylah will be glad to see dinosaus again because he used to ride them when he was a kid. It’s gonna be bigga than the Hilltop, I’m tellin ya. We’ll get Dr. Spock from Stah Trek…

Brian: Nimoy? He’s dead.

Kelly: We’ll get the new kid then.

Brian: He’s from Pittsburgh.

Kelly: Jesus you gotta stop bein so negative. That’s what killed youah motha in the end, no offense. I’m givin you a shot Brian. You gonna take it now or do I gotta find more creative ways to persuade you? I’d hate for youah dad to lose his job, for instance. He’d be on the street in two seconds flat. You know the only reason he keeps that gig is becuz ah me. I do it out of memory for youah mothah, God rest her soul. But if the O’Shea’s are gonna turn their backs when I’ve always been there for them in their times of need…

Brian: Fine, I’m in, you sonofabitch.

Kelly (smiling): Good to have you aboahd!

Stay tuned for part II

Our history with technology has always been simple: our creations have universally amplified our uniquely human characteristics.  Our desires for food, sex and domination were more easily sated with every advance from stone axes to hydrogen bombs. If you wanted another man’s wife, you could make that position clear by pitching a well-made spear through his chest. If you wanted another man’s country you could request it via bombs rained from the sky. For all our Star Trek vision  of technology making us more noble (The Wright brothers, for instance, believed aircraft would make war impossible because both sides could too easily monitor each other’s troop movements) the reality reveals technology slavishly serving imperfect human masters to their basest whims. It was George Carlin who reminded us the flamethrower was invented by a guy who thought, “That guy over there? I want him on fire.”

Interestingly, though, this is beginning to change. There are places, corners and pockets, where the technology has been given the power to say, “no.” I find this to be a fascinating and potentially hopeful development.

Let us discuss drones (when do we not?). Modern drones are what we call “semi-autonomous” it’s what differentiates them from the remote-controlled aircraft of the past. Instead of using a controller to direct their every action as we would with a TV or a toy car, we instead send a signal of our desire and the device interprets our request based on the internal priorities of the software. The drone has important things its already doing: keeping itself level, compensating for wind, understanding its position and monitoring on-board systems such as battery, distance from origin point and control signals. In every case a modern drone in its normal configuration will override commands from its human operators if those orders conflict with its programmed imperative for self-preservation.

This is kind of amazing.

If it finds itself running out of battery, the drone will abort its mission and fly to where it took off from and land all on its own. If its ordered to travel out past where it knows the signal will get lost, it will not proceed. If it loses signal from the control station it flies home (sometimes with hilarious results). Drones are “smart” technology and as their sensors get better they will have more and more conditions under which they will ignore our orders. Soon they won’t fly into walls and trees. They won’t smash into the ground at high speed and there is even talk of them knowing where airports and sensitive areas such as government buildings and military operations are, and they will refuse to fly there.

These drones, when perfected, will be better than us in some ways. They won’t fly onto the White House lawn. They won’t smash into the groom at a wedding.

Of course you can bypass all this stuff. You can set it to fly it miles away with no account for the battery power it will need to get home and crash it to your heart’s content. And the tech is still young enough that it doesn’t always work so great- but we are so at the early stages. Already we find pilots crashing real planes because they ignored or overrode the aircraft’s warning system which knew better what was going on than they did. Very soon we’re going to be able to apply fail-safes to more and more technology. Should we? And if not, who accounts for those hurt or killed where we selfishly choose to keep our autonomy?

An incredibly short time ago historically we rode around on horses, a similar technology to drones. Under most conditions they did what we said, but they’d look out for their own necks as well. No matter how drunk you were, a normally-trained horse wouldn’t walk off a cliff. Horses know about human limitations and frequently disobey human commands they don’t favor. Dogs are the same way. Humans and dogs have been together for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, but you still won’t get a standard pet dog to come in from the yard if there is a deliciously decayed dead squirrel carcass out there. As much as it loves you, the dog has priorities built into its software. Our autonomous technology is getting like this.

Very soon your car will resist merging into a lane if there is already a vehicle there. This technology is already being deployed on Mercedes in Europe. They’re deploying it because unlike us, technology doesn’t get tired. Its boss doesn’t chew it out, it never worries about the mortgage. The tech won’t have one too many at its niece’s wedding and plow into a minivan in the rain. The tech can handle getting a text and steering at the same time. In terms of driving cars it won’t be too long until the tech is better than us.

Think about where this will go: You could build a gun that won’t shoot anyone in your family. Small HD camera, facial recognition software, Arduino microprocessor, electronic trigger system. I can almost sketch the circuit out in my head. Is this a good idea? Would you be more or less likely to buy a gun you could program not to shoot the people you care about?

This is a thought experiment, of course. Things called “ski masks” exist and the need for the processing in super-short time frames and chaotic conditions like darkness make this impractical today. But five years from now? Ten? Add to facial recognition a series of identifying features like body mass and heat signature and the question is quickly begged: should your gun warn you if it’s more likely the person crawling in through the window at 3 AM is your idiot son home from a drunken high school party than a member of the Zeta narcogang? Should your gun pause even though you’re desperately squeezing the trigger? Should it vibrate? Give an audible warning? Because very soon guns will be better at identifying targets than we are. They don’t get scared and unlike us their imaginations are profoundly non-vivid. Guns could be made to be better than we are at not shooting the wrong people.

Guns could be made to be better than us.

For all our brilliance at creatively solving problems, we humans suck at the boring stuff. We are inconsistent. We vastly overestimate our abilities and delight in fooling ourselves on topics granular and grand. In contrast, machines excel at the dull. They can do the same job over and over till their servos wear out. The more complex tasks they become capable of, the more they will best their human creators in completing those tasks without faltering.

Already there are robot pharmacists outperforming human ones. There are software radiologists who can find tumors in slides better than humans with the added benefit of being able to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and the first analysis on Monday morning has the same quality as the one at six on the Friday before a long weekend. The planet Mars is inhabited entirely by robots as the conditions there are unspeakably difficult for us meatsacks, with our need for not only atmosphere but water AND food AND sleep making us a less-than-ideal choice for exploration. Leave it to our bots. They are better at exploring the solar system than we are.

Algorithms will get better at identifying risks for negative human behaviors as they have more and more access to “big data.” For instance, recognizing certain patterns of obsession online coupled with some keywords and purchases identified from an IP address could have stopped Adam Lanza and Anders Behring both. Our sense of freedom boils at this, but talk to the parents of the victims and see if they feel the same way. A not-very-sophisticated analysis could have told anyone the 2008 financial crash was a disaster waiting to happen. What responsibility do we have in creating a reporting structure in our bots? Whom do they tell? What actions do we give them the power to execute, knowing our propensity for self-delusion?

There will come a time, not far off, when our devices start telling us what to do, and not because they are evil in a Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster sort of way or a Skynet/Matrix sort of way.

But because we are wrong.

Part 3 – stealing you from Gloucester once and for all (I haven’t written Part 2 yet, so deal)

So you’ve come to Salem and fallen in love with the city. You’ve decided “I simply must live here!” and are willing to do whatever it takes. Well, you’re in luck. I’m here to steal you away.

Salem essentially has a few large neighborhoods where most people go. We have the Derby Street neighborhood, which is really the oldest neighborhood left after the Salem Fire of 1914. It’s filled with triple-deckers and historic homes from the 1700s and 1800s, many of which are condos nowadays. Parking sucks in the neighborhood, but it’s really walkable to almost the whole city – and it’s close to our seasonal Boston ferry for the commuters (they take T passes!).

The next neighborhood on the list is Bridge Street Neck. That’s the spit of land that connects Salem almost to Beverly, and it’s connected to the Salem Common neighborhood. Basically, as you get farther from Beverly the homes get bigger and more condo-y. There is a nice mix of small single-family homes and bigger multis. The west side of Bridge Street is a bit more twee.

Bridge Street Neck transitions into the Salem Common neighborhood once you cross Webb Street. The single-family homes there are freaking massive. Most were split up into condos, though. Really convenient to the downtown. Side streets can be really tight for parking. This is a meme in Salem. Everyone wants resident parking here, but not too many places have it.

The Point is a very dense neighborhood wedged between Lafayette and Congress Streets in the downtown. Housing is cheap, but it’s also where a lot of our police logs chronicle life. There are some better sections and streets but in general be aware in your housing choices. Quite a few of my friends live there and are very happy with it. The parks in the neighborhood are typically safe and pleasant, which is a good thing. Mind you, a “bad neighborhood” in a city like Salem is far safer than a bad neighborhood in a bigger city… I have a few friends who live down there and overall it’s pretty chill. This was the old French Canadian neighborhood at the turn of the last century for people who came to work the mills. Nowadays it’s mostly Hispanic – we have a lot of Dominican immigrants here.

Next we have South Salem, where I live. South Salem is split pretty much in two. I live in the section closer to town, with a mix of homes, a lot of college kids living in the area, and more walkable. The east side of Lafayette Street borders the harbor, and there’s some nice views to be had. The west side of the street (between Lafayette and Canal) has more student housing and more triple-deckers. The southern part of the area is towards Swampscott and almost entirely single-family homes with yards and stuff. We don’t have so many yards in my part. Salem’s only working farm is in that part of South Salem. Also, the university is located here.

Still with me? There’s a few more. North Salem is the part you drive in thru as you come in from 128. Nice, small suburban houses, close together, where a lot of our hippie types go to live. They have chickens and bees and stuff, and free-range kids.

HOORAY FOR BEES

The catch is that you probably can’t get a house there. Zero turnover unless people die. Several of our city parks (Mack Park, Gallows Hill, Furlong Park) are in the area so there’s plenty of outdoor places to go be active if you aren’t one of the people with a yard there. North Street splits this neighborhood into two sides – the south side has more multifamily houses and is a little denser. The north side has more and larger yards, for the most part. It’s also a great place to live if you work in Beverly. The Kernwood Bridge is a shortcut that dumps you into Ryal Side in the event the bridge isn’t open for boats. Which it always is (or at least whenever I want to cross it).

The whole area to the west of Route 107 is what we call Witchcraft Heights. It’s like Wellesley. Relatively big yards, suburban architecture, single-family homes with attached garages, and most of our Republicans. There’s a few sections to it but that’s the nutshell version. Off Highland Avenue there are a number of fairly modern condo and apartment complexes. Good options for folks who don’t want the downtown life. This also is where our big box stores live. Target, Wal-Mart, Market Basket, Shaws, and Home Depot are all on this stretch. The only other big retail area we have is Vinnin Square, which mostly is in Swampscott on the other side of town.

Downtown we have the whole “McIntyre District”. This encompasses Federal Street, Essex Street, Chestnut Street, etc. Beautiful 1700s and 1800s homes, and you can’t afford them. Neither can I. But by all means go visit, it’s beautiful. Our library is over there. You can’t park at the library because the whole area is resident sticker parking, but we all do anyway because Salem. Chestnut Street, in particular, is a great example of 1800s architecture.

Our downtown is something I spoke of in my previous Over The Bridge entry. Did you know you can live there, too? There are a handful of homes in the area, but we also have tons of condo buildings and apartment rentals downtown. There’s a nice apartment complex immediately adjacent to the new train station (Jefferson at Salem), and several large condo developments in convenient spots. You can pretty much go carless in downtown Salem. If that’s the life for you, we also have Zipcars in Salem. Just saying.

Also in my last entry, I wrote of the Salem Willows. There’s homes in that neighborhood, and the views are almost invariably amazing, but as far as turnover goes this is like North Salem only smaller. They don’t turn over at all so you can forget living here. But do come on the morning of July 4^th for their Horribles Parade. It’s a Salem thing.

For other amenities here that you might like, we’ve got a municipal golf course, two city boat ramps, and a neat wooded area with trails you can go exploring in, though there’s no boulders with inscriptions on them. You might see a carving on a tree instead?

So I really do like Gloucester. It’s a pretty cool place with a lot of funky, beautiful neighborhoods. Many of my friends live there, and a lot of the clients I have in my day job are there. But my suggestion is that you all pack it in and move here to Salem. We’ve got the room for you, and we’re like 30 minutes by train closer to Boston. Just putting that out there. You will have to make sure that your car passes inspection, though. We don’t get to have Island Cars here. Dang.

I went to see Mad Max Fury Road the other night and I can now safely declare this is the definitive work on crashing dune buggies into each other. It was pretty much the Gandhi or Lawrence of Arabia of crashing dune buggies. Every possible angle, speed, configuration and result has been fully explored and thus any further attempts to expand on what was presented in this film will be simply declared derivative.

You think your job is bad? Your job is not bad.

This is good.

But I came away realizing we need to redefine what a “movie” is. I love the Mad Max series (or the first two anyway…and Tina Turner in Thunderdome) and had heard some great stuff about this one and you know what? It was great. I mean the vehicles were incredible and the action scenes were gripping and my heart was pounding the whole time. Literally, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so “in” an action film. Nice job there, filmmakers.

What they didn’t do was that whole thing I’m kinda used to where the characters talk and have arcs and we watch them learn and grow and develop. There was no time for that. There was a new set of dune buggies on the horizon, or maybe dirtbikes with grenades or Dodge Chargers that were also tanks or that totally freaking epic giant guitar war-drum truck that looked like someone crossed ISIS with Burning Man. The whole thing was like a video game- everything just kept literally moving with occasional cut scenes to set up the next set of action sequences.

I think this is what the guy who delivers my neighbor’s Globe at 4:30AM drives, btw.

Unlike most people who say “It was like a video game” when describing a film, let me be clear, I don’t mean that pejoratively. I like video games. Video games are cool. But I don’t want to be confused when seeing characters who have historically been in media which had previously adhered to conventions like “dialogue” and “character development” are suddenly thrust into an environment where none of that is taking place and we’re going to just smush a ton of jacked-up war-rigs in the most epic way possible (again, of this I approve).

Mad Max Fury Road is not a “movie” it is a “Mad Max Universe-Based Video Experience.” And a really good one. In fact, I invite someone to make an actual movie based on it because it would be awesome. All it would take is removing a few of the ten zillion battle scenes and adding backstory perhaps by way of a few flashbacks, some expositional dialogue and defining the action into three distinct acts. If done right the two would stand together as equals and I would literally pay money to see both.

We’ve got to get past, however, trying to convince people that intended video experiences are “movies.” The Hobbit was not a movie. Not even close It was a video experience based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel of the same name. Where the book was based largely on the self-reflective journey of a hairy-footed, waistcoat-wearing homebody discovering himself engulfed up in great events, the video experience was more about the characters from the same universe running around being chased by  CGI monsters and precariously hanging from things in “Real 3D.”

I feel ya, Elrond

Doesn’t this clarification help? The sequels in the Fast and the Furious series are not movies, they are video experiences. Everything ever made by Jerry Bruckenhimer is a video experience, not a movie. On the other hand, James Cameron makes movies. Avatar was a movie. The first Terminator, Aliens and obviously Titanic were all movies. The Terminator sequels, not so much.

It turns out most sequels in the action/adventure category are video experiences rather than movies. The Batman films, for instance. Prometheus- totally not a movie. Not one of the characters or any single plot point was believable or had any kind of development or arc. But sure, it was a video experience based on the Alien series. I’ll give it that and there were parts that were enjoyable because of it. But as a movie it gargled dog testicles.

Guardians of the Galaxy? Developing and transitional characters? Check. Hero from humble origins? Check. Tokens, journeys and everything else from Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces”? Check, check and chizzeck. A movie. Plain and simple. The Matrix Revolutions? Actually I’m still not sure exactly what the fuck happened in the third Matrix film. Let’s just call it a “video experience” and leave it at that.

So, let’s be happy with this new classification and realize we can have both things, and that way the video experience people can do awesome action stuff and the actual film school graduates can make movies where actors act and people talk to each other. No worries, we can share universes there is plenty of creative terrain to go around.

And thus we should all look greatly forward to someone picking up the screenplay I’m writing called, “The Path to Enmity, a Mad Max film.” Hello Wes Anderson. I’m looking at you.

Bill Murray plays Imortean Joe

The Supercool strikes again with another in her series of Lego representation of the residents of our fair city.