Today’s blog post has been provided by Pete, who has graciously ensured that the Big Bad Blog not be empty during Mr. Topp’s vacation. Management disavows any knowledge or approval of the content of the following message.

With Mr. Topp heading out on vacation I figured he could use some low quality filler for his blog. To that end, here I am once again providing you with my amateur reviewer’s opinion. My chosen topic this time is The Hunger Games.

(Spoiler Alert: I don’t want to be limited to what I can and can’t say because someone reading this may not be as up to date on current trends as I am. Seeing as I am practically a Luddite at this point if you are behind me in the times you should be ashamed of yourself. To that end I will be talking about what I have read (which is all three books and associated Wikipedia pages) and what I have seen (which is a few movie trailers) so I might ruin some endings if you aren’t careful.)

(Editor’s note: There weren’t any spoilers for The Hunger Games so in an attempt to preserve the tattered remains of Pete’s integrity we have added spoilers for other books and movies. We wouldn’t want Pete to be a liar.)

Editor’s note: The previous note was just Pete talking to himself. We’re not editing this for him.

Editor’s note: Except to break it into paragraphs. Paragraphs are good.

Editor’s note: And change “ladder” to “latter”. But that’s it. We’re done now.

Why the odd title? Suzanne Collins stated that she comes from a background of writing three act plays, something I noticed before I read that on Wikipedia. If you ignore the chapter and section breaks in the books, it is still very obvious that each book is three parts. Since I haven’t seen the movie I am going to mostly talk about the books, but I am going to mention the movie at the end. (Darth Vader is Luke Skywalkers father.)

I said before that I am a fair bit behind the times so the first I heard of this franchise was the buzz about the impending release of the new movie. Like any annoying buzzing sound I attempted to isolate the source and found that The Hunger Games was a book series that had replaced Twilight as the hot new teen drama. Once I had that fact I was ready to turn my back on the whole thing and pretend I was never interested, there was only one problem. I was still interested.

Something I found amusing about the Twilight series was the near universal scorn it received from anyone I considered a respectable source. The Hunger Games on the other hand was receiving moderate to positive reviews from the same sources. That caught my attention. (The Titanic hits and iceberg and sinks.)

I should come clean about something at this point. I read a fair bit of children’s fiction. As a kid I wasn’t much of a reader. Outside of the books I had to read for school I almost never read for fun until the latter half of high school. The reason for this was I was never given anything to read for fun that was actually fun to read. Adults were encouraging me to read books they thought I would enjoy, but I didn’t, so I just learned that books weren’t entertaining. When I started to have friends who read they were able to recommend books that were actually fun to read and I have been reading more and more ever since. Having missed out on some highlights of children’s literature I have made an effort to go back and see what they were like. Also the really good children’s books make adults wish they were kids again.

(Harry Potter kills Lord Voldemort in the end.)

Given that I am a parent it is somewhat obvious that I don’t have an infinite amount of time and money. So my investigation into The Hunger Games was going to have to be done in a way that fit my lifestyle. Usually I try to see the movie first, and then read the book. It has been my experience that the book is usually better than the movie so if I see the movie first and like it I will like reading the book too. If I do it the other way around I like the book and am disappointed by the movie, giving me one pleasurable experience instead of two. I have been to the movies exactly once since my son was born two years ago so I didn’t want to risk a rare movie going experience on something that I might end up hating, especially when there is a new Batman movie due out this summer. I also didn’t want to buy the books because even if I didn’t hate them the odds of me rereading them were pretty low. The left me trying to obtain a free copy of the books. Again Luddite, I went to the library, only to be handed a new challenge. The upcoming movie meant a lot of people were trying to read the books for free, at a time when the Toronto Public Library was on strike. When I check there were 2400 holds on the first book in the series. When I told my Dad this story he directed me to www.epubbud.com. A website that is self-described as youtube for books. There I was able to find a free, grey market, eBook version, which works well in a house with both a kobo and an android tablet. (Batman is really Bruce Wayne.)

I really enjoyed the first book, it was by far the best in the series. You are introduced to the fictional world by learning about life in District 12. Life in 12 is hard, so you feel sadness and pity for everyone, but you also sort of admire someone making it under those conditions. Once the story moves to the capital and pregame starts you get caught up in it and start to feel the anticipation of what is to come. And then the games begin and you get lost in the action. All in all a good span of emotions that work together to provide an engaging reading experience.

The second book is where the problems start. Book two actually feels like a copy of the first. Life in the districts is bad, prepping for the games is scary, and the games are intense. It seems like Collins wanted the story to be a trilogy so bad that she made a second act that was all filler. There was some information that we needed to learn and characters that we needed to meet, but we didn’t need to do so by going through a cheap knockoff of the first book.

Thankfully Book three did break some new ground. After the ending of the second book it was impossible to keep the same formula so changes had to be made, and change is good. I am a sucker for a good tale of rebellion, and book three hit a lot of high notes. Stirring speeches, fighting impossible odds, vying for freedom, what’s not to love? The climax of the series was a bit of a letdown, but I am used to that by now. I guess a climax is really hard to write because it keeps happening over and over to me. A story keeps getting cooler and cooler until you wonder “how can they top that?” only to learn, they can’t. Oh well let’s sum up and get out of here. The aftermath and epilogue were kind of lukewarm but they were believable. They went to war, there was trauma and loss, and then they had to get on with their banal existence for the rest of their lives. Dramatic or not, it is true. (Tyler Durden is hallucination of the narrator, part of his insomnia and MPD)

That is actually a good summary of how I feel about the series in general. It was very believable. The emotions that you felt, the events that were played out before your eyes were what you should expect from people in those situations. The main characters do grow and develop, but are still flawed like real people and sometimes do dumb things, like real people. I think whether or not you will like the series will be determined by whether or not you like the characters. If you find them annoying you will likely not like the story. One thing Collins does well is vilify the enemy. It is very common in storytelling that you have to make the bad guys “BAD GUYS”.

Personally, I hate wishy-washy villains. If you are going to be bad, then be bad. If you are going to be bad for the greater good, then be an anti-hero. What Collins does in The Hunger Games is take aspects common to decadent western life and push it to a grotesque extreme, and then set them against the poor starving and oppressed. It is an enjoyably stinging satire of the divide between the haves and the have nots, until you remember we are the haves.

(John Ritter is a robot.)

(Seriously I don’t know why I told that joke. It was 10 years ago and there are like 8 people in the world that will get it. At least most of them read this blog.)

I am glad I read the trilogy, I will find the time to watch the movies, but not in theaters, and I likely won’t opt to buy either the books or the movies. I have a feeling the movies will proceed similarly to other recent trilogies. The first one will be amazing, the next two okay but not as good. Think of The Matrix, or Pirates of the Caribbean.

All of that being said if you did ask my opinion, I would suggest that you read the books.

The good outweighs the bad, and who knows, you may find sixteen year olds less annoying than I do and like it even more than I did.

Regular guest blogger Pete wrote the following for the Big Bad Blog, and sent it to me prior to the space shuttle taking off on its final mission.

Mr. Topp

Today is the beginning of the end of an era covering almost exactly 30 years. Today the Space Shuttle Atlantis will launch on the last ever space shuttle mission. I can’t speak for other science and technology geeks out there, but I was struck with a strong sense of nostalgia. The shuttle program really feels like it is “my” space program. Just
like how the Apollo program was the space program for my Dad, and the generation that came before me. Growing up I had at least 3 space shuttle models. I can tell you where I was when I first heard about the Challenger disaster. I know that manned space flight is going to continue, but it won’t be the same. When I won’t be a child when it starts, so it won’t seem quite so grand. All the previous space flights were historical, they seemed far away. All the future space
flights I will be able to understand the technology, in essence seeing the strings behind the magic.

Here are some quick facts for you. The Enterprise flew the first test flight was done on August 12 1977, the year I was born. The first actual mission was on April 12 1981. So we can round off a bit and say the program was 30 years and 3 months long. As nostalgic as I am for the shuttle program you have to remember that 30 years is a long time. Think about the safety and reliability of a 30 year old car, now imagine taking that into space.

Some people criticize NASA as a waste of money, and I have to disagree with them. First off I agree with Stephen Hawking when he said that the only future for the human race is off earth. If we all keep living here we are going to destroy the planet so we have to move out some time. Also here are some more facts for you. The most the US ever spent on the space program in was in 1966 when they gave NASA 4.4% of the federal budge. In 2008 it was 0.6%. A little more than half of one percent. Even if NASA is a waste of money it is a small waste when you compare it to how much the US spends bombing the Middle East.

Even with all I have said so far I still admire Barack for cancelling the Shuttle Program, and it’s follow up, the Constellation Program. At least he acknowledges that the US has some problems at home that they need to fix before they go back into space.

Photo by Trey Radcliffe.

[Today's article is final part of a four-part guest blog by pez_minotaur, and provides a chronicle of his adventures in the Galapagos islands with his wife, Ravynne. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.]

Once again we come back to Day 2, snorkelling at North Seymour Island. You may remember it from Part two where there was the sea lion encounter. These events happened just before that. The plan was for everyone to leave in the two smaller boats, get dropped off and have the currents take us back to the main boat. I was in the lead boat, and spent the ride getting my mask and fins ready. As a result we got to the drop point, and I flipped over the side into the water. While sitting in the water waiting for Ravynne to get her stuff ready the current carried me away from my boat and towards the second boat. When I was about halfway between the two our guide, who was on the second boat, started yelling and pointing. I looked where he was pointing just in time to see a whale’s tale dip below the surface. Excited at the chance to see a whale, I yelled to my boat and just said “WHALE” and pointed. When I turned to look to make sure I was pointing in the right direction when the whale jumped out of the water. Once I could see it I recognized it’s distinct black and what pattern. It was a Killer Whale. I tried diving underwater to see what they look like below the surface, but the water was too murky to see it at that distance. So I did what I believe anyone would have done. I started swimming as hard as I could towards it to get a closer look. This produced some disbelief from the other members of my boat, specifically in the form of a cry from one of the women “What the hell is he doing swimming at the whale?”. The women wasn’t Ravynne, she is used to my antics by now. I did manage to get a closer look at the whale on the surface, but it was too far away moving too fast for me to get close enough to see it under water. However the people who stayed behind in my boat got a pretty close look as it dove under the boat, but only I got to say I swam with Killer Whales in the wild.

Biology Interlude: I realize that I was more likely to be attacked by the sharks than the whales, but since the whales are predators of sharks I think they deserve top spot on the danger scale. Also if the whale had decided to eat me, I’m pretty sure it would have succeeded. The shark wasn’t that big and I might have been able to get away if it felt like eating me.

[Today's article is the third of a four-part guest blog by pez_minotaur, and provides a chronicle of his adventures in the Galapagos islands with his wife, Ravynne. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.]

It was a day like any other. I was snorkelling in the Galapagos at the Devil’s Crown. The Devil’s Crown is just a bunch of pointy rocks in a circle that stick out of ocean. There is a pretty strong ocean current that goes west past them. Our boat dropped us off on the east side of the Crown, the current carried us to the west side where the boat picked us up again. Earlier I had mentioned that I was a scuba diver and the response I got was “Yeah, we can tell”. When I asked how they could tell they said that I could dive deeper and hold my breath longer than anyone else on the boat. We were snorkelling in a large group of about 10 or so people, and our guide pointed said that there were sharks down bellow that underwater ridge. I couldn’t see them from the surface so I dove down the 15 or 20 feet to where the ridge was to take a look. When I got down there, there were indeed two sharks chilling in the shade under this ridge. Now there are three types of sharks in the Galapagos, Hammerheads, White Tip Reef Sharks, and Galapagos Sharks. All I can say for sure was they were not Hammerheads. I couldn’t make out the white tips, so they could have been Galapagos sharks, or it just could have been bad lighting. Now by the time I got back to the surface almost all of the group had moved on. The only person left watching me swim with sharks was Meredith, a nice woman from Australia, who seemed to be the only other person interested in the sharks. After a few more dives to look at the sharks we caught up with the rest of the group and continued to enjoy our snorkel.

Epilogue: If you are still reading this series of me swimming with danger you may have noticed that we are only at part three of four and we are all the way up to sharks. What you should be asking is “What is worse than sharks?” Tune in next time to find out.