Disaster!

It has been a bad weekend.

As should have been evident from my previous post on the topic, I went into the competition yesterday expecting a disaster. So, you would think the outcome couldn't depress me, right?

Except it didn't work like that. Instead, we went on, played really well, and came off feeling quite optimistic. Seriously, it started well, it ended well, and the bit in the middle was good. Basically, it was far better than I would have hoped for even in my wildest bouts of enthusiasm.

Now, last year we came 8th, out of 22 bands in our grade. This year, there were also 22 bands in our grade, and the feeling we should come in at roughly the same position. Which would have been ideal.

We came 21st.

But that wasn't the worst of it. I could have handled that, except that the judge's comments, which might have shed some light on what he'd felt was wrong, and that we could therefore use to fix the problems, were maddeningly vague. "Integration is slack" means what, exactly?

The pipe major of the band puts this all down to politics, which are horribly rife in the piping world. The vagueness of the commentary, and also the fact that local bands always score disproportionately well, would seem to play into this. However, I disagree. The reason local bands do better is that they play better having not had to travel for a couple of hours to get to the contest, and when they're playing in front of a local, and therefore supportive, audience. And while a judge might be somewhat influenced by his not liking the tunes chosen, or the smartness of the band's uniforms (which shouldn't be a factor... but the reality is that appearance always matters), or whatever else, I refuse to accept the notion that a judge will deliberately skew the results against a band out of malice. Perhaps that is just naive of me.

So, we probably just didn't play as well as I thought we had.

To add injury to insult, I also managed to get really badly sunburnt. The weather in Falkirk was poor, so in the morning I didn't put on any sunblock. However, I did put in contact lenses, which meant that I couldn't then put on sunblock without immediately washing my hands afterwards (since it would get into my eyes, under the contacts, and thus blind me). Of course, when stuck in a field with poor toilet facilities (and especially poor facilities in this case), that was not an option. So I'm now bright red.

Anyway, I went home after the competition, ate an absurd amount of pizza, and watched Doctor Who, which was fantastic. It's always good, but last night's episode was particularly excellent. Then I watched Pushing Daisies, which was okay, but seems to be losing its charm rather quickly.

Then today I watched "The Andromeda Strain", a new two-part adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel, which I had thought might be quite good. Oh, how wrong I was.

(There are lots of spoilers coming, so if you really want to see this abomination 'clean', stop reading now.)

The thing is, I'm quite used to Hollywood getting science completely and utterly wrong. I accept that that is just going to be the way of things. And I have even come to accept the fact that characters in TV and film are going to act in utterly stupid ways at key times. So, can just about accept the idiocy of the Staple Heroic Guy handing over his keycard to a colleague before falling to his horrific demise, even though that same colleague had explained not two days previously that the override required both his keycard and SHG's thumbprint. That's just par for the course.

But it was the blindingly obvious engineering idiocies that made me want to batter my head against the wall. Firstly, there was the emergency alert indication which, in a custom-built lab designed for a team including a guy with serious light sensitivity, included an annoying bright flashing strobe. Fantastic idea!

And then there was the emergency system itself. In the event of possible contamination, it would nuke the whole place after a fifteen minute timer. Fair enough. In order to override this failsafe, the SHG would have to enter his keycard and thumbprint at any one of the security terminals. Of course, as soon as this was mentioned, I immediately thought: "Ahah! Something is going to happen to SHG. Either he'll go insane, and try to nuke everyone, or he'll get knocked unconscious, and they'll have to drag him to a terminal."

What I didn't foresee, although I probably should have, is that in a secure environment full of compartments that would seal tightly to avoid the risk of contamination, the engineers would decide to only have one such terminal on each isolated level. Of course, this led to Light-Sensitive Guy being blinded by the strobe, falling over, and smashing the terminal to pieces. This in turn required SHG climbing to the next level (though a chute full of improbably falling objects), and consequently heroically falling to his death.

Frankly, the whole thing had been an insult to my intelligence even before that point. Once we got to this nonsense, it became embarrassing. Still, at least it didn't feature any annoying teenagers using a UNIX system to defeat evil velociraptors. Or my personal favourite - using an Apple laptop to defeat invading aliens.