Movies: So far this summer I have sampled three films. "The Patriot" with Mel Gibson was engrossing although did not inspire me emotionally as much as Braveheart. The history portrayed was much less familiar than the typical Revolutionary tales centered around George Washington. My knowledge of the Revolution in the south was aided by personally visiting South Carolina several years ago and touring Charleston and nearby Fort Moultrie. The swamps north of Charleston reminded me of the old "Swamp Fox" tales starring Leslie Nielsen broadcast by Disney when I was a child. But Disney's Tarleton was not nearly as vicious as the Gibson character's antagonist Tavington, based on the real Tarleton. The real Tarleton was extremely brutal according to a History Channel presentation about the making of "The Patriot" and this viewpoint was repeated in another THC presentation I saw "Frontier: The Decisive Battles: The Battle of Kings Mountain". One of the things that really surprised me was the statement that the Battle of Kings Mountain actually changed the course of the Revolutionary War. The narrator pointed out that Washington had lost most encounters in the north and had not yet lost the war simply because he at least had the common sense not to engage the English in an all out battle but instead engaged in a series of skirmishes. However, when the frontiersmen from the Carolinas and surrounding areas overran and massacred British and loyalist forces entrenched on Kings Mountain, the defeat was crippling. That defeat plus the final arrival of assistance from the French spelled the end for Cornwallis.

I have increasingly become disenchanted with the "father of our country", George Washington. I think the thing that bothers me the most about him was that he engaged in parties and social gatherings with other wealthy colonists while his men were starving at Valley Forge. He turned in lengthy reimbursement requests for every little expenditure he made that he felt was connected to any of his military activities while common soldiers went unpaid for long periods and did not even receive the 160 acres of land that was promised to them upon enlistment. Every time I see the Stanley Kubrick film "Paths of Glory" and watch the French officers in World War I living in splendor planning their glorious campaigns while the common soldiers lived in muddy trenches and were ordered to charge German machine guns as if their lives meant nothing, I can't help but compare their conduct with Washington at Valley Forge.

For my birthday on July 4th (yes, I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy!), I went to "The Perfect Storm". This film from the director of another of my favorite war films "Das Boot", was extremely well done and would have been very tense and exciting if I did not already know every event that was going to happen. I had watched a Discovery Channel special about the incident well over a year ago and then saw their most recent special about the storm and the making of the movie so the only surprise I had in the whole film was the "catching the shark" sequence. The cast did a good job although I was surprised that Mark Wahlberg's characer seemed to be more at the center of the drama than George Clooney's character. Of course the computer-generated effects continue to astound me. Although the storm of 1991 was severe, local papers here published articles reminding those of us that lived through the Columbus Day Storm in 1963 that we had actually endured the worst typhoon to impact the United States. I was in the seventh grade then and when the storm struck I was in a classroom with a glass exterior wall. I was taking a social studies test and the wind was just howling. The windows were vibrating and debris filled the air. All of a sudden a huge cypress tree behind the school snapped like a twig. First the teachers had us retreat behind the row of lockers that formed the partition for the hall in case the full length windows shattered and then we received word that school officials were sending us home. The busses came to pick us up and as we drove across town we saw downed trees, businesses with their roofs blown off, huge signs uprooted and tumbling across the highway and broken power lines sparking and snapping in the wind. When we got off the bus, we had to dodge broken power lines as we tried to pick our way five blocks up the street to our home. We were without power for almost a week. Friends of mine who lived along the beach loop, a road running along the shoreline, actually had to climb over and under fallen trees for several miles to get home since the road was impassable. Several weeks later, my family journeyed over to the Willamette Valley and I saw farmland covered with mud to the height of the top row of the barbed wire fences.

The week following my birthday I went to "U-571". For some reason I have always been intrigued by submarine movies and "U-571" was suspenseful and very tightly written. Roger Ebert complained that there was not enough dialogue but when someone is in a tense or dangerous situation they usually aren't going to engage in familiar chatter. Especially in a military environment where commands must be heard and obeyed quickly to avoid disaster. If the film had been a little longer perhaps more character development could have occurred but it ran less than two hours compared to "Das Boot"'s three. We saw "U-571" in the morning and that evening saw an old Cary Grant submarine movie "Destination: Tokyo". Ebert may like that film. The whole crew including the captain were just one big happy family. The film had so much dialogue and so little action you almost forgot it was supposed to be a war movie. I had also read a review criticizing "U-571" for portraying Americans capturing any Enigma machines because the machines were actually captured by the British who were not represented in the film. However, the film was not based on a true incident and was meant to be entertainment not history. The film's ending credits clearly recalled the incidents in which the British recovered Enigma machines and the incident when Americans recovered several Engima machines from the U-505, now on display in a museum in Chicago. If a film critic is going to criticize a film for historical accuracy, he should at least be accurate in his own historical references.

Readings: As I continue to research ancient Rome for my "virtual Caesar" project, I ordered two books written by Allan Massie. Although "Augustus" is on backorder, I received "Antony". Massie's work is written as a fictionalized autobiography. However, Massie's "Antony" is not quite the sensual and generous man portrayed by Margaret George in her "Memoirs of Cleopatra". He is portrayed as overtly scheming and politically "rough around the edges", obviously lacking the keen intelligence of Julius Caesar. However, he is also shown to be more understanding of his client population in the eastern provinces and he explains that he takes on the role of Dionysis, not because of Antony's love of wine and revelling (usually emphasized by other historians) but because Dionysis is a god that cares about the plight of common men. Antony tries to repair the political damage caused by the outrageous demands for tribute exacted by the conspirators, Cassius and Brutus, (before the fateful battle of Phillipi) by enacting reforms and granting privileges to client kings and nobles. His courage and willingness to risk everything at the battle of Phillipi is dually noted as is the military incompetence of Octavian. It will be interesting to see how Massie portrays Octavian in the novel centered on him. Another different viewpint expressed by Massie is Antony's apparent genuine love and admiration for his Roman wife Octavia, the sister to the future Augustus. Massie takes the position that Antony dallies with Cleopatra purely for financial and political reasons because Octavian fails to send the legions he promised Antony for the invasion of Parthia.

I am also listening to the unabridged audio version of Antonia Fraser's "The Warrior Queens". Although I have found listening to a historical treatise requires much more concentration than a work of fiction, I have learned about several ancient women rulers that I have heretofore not been aware of. In explaining the "voracity" syndrome, the tendency for society and history to attribute voracious physical appetites to female leaders, Lady Fraser mentions Semiramis, a Babylonian queen of the 9th century B.C. Semiramis supposedly selected robust soldiers from her army each night to satisfy her physical appetites then like a black widow spider would have them put to death in the morning so they couldn't tell tales about the queen's desires. In explaining the "appendage" syndrome, the tendency for historians to refer to female rulers as appendages to powerful husbands, fathers or sons, she mentions a Bosporan queen Dynamis. Dynamis obtains her kingdom through alliances (and subsequent betrayals) with a series of powerful husbands and/or lovers. Of course, being British, Lady Fraser's heroine is Boudicca (sometimes referred to as Boadicea), the Queen of the Celtic Iceni tribe who battled the Romans in 61 A.D. As a student of Roman history, I have read brief references to the Boudican revolt so she was a little more familiar. Just this week I saw a History Channel presentation about "Amazon Women" which reenacted incidents from Boudica's life, portraying her as a robust, rousing woman with wildly flowing red hair. It said she was equally ferocious and merciless in battle after being scourged by Roman soldiers and witnessing the rape of her two daughters. I have been following with keen interest the discovery of actual Amazon female warrior graves in Kazakstan. As more and more archaelogical discoveries prove the validity of what was previously considered Greek myths it makes me speculate about the physical existence of Greek "gods". Historians scoff when real historical figures like Caesar and Antony refer sincerely to their descendence from Venus and Herakles (respectively). What if Venus and Herakles actually existed in antiquity? I'm sure many of their mythical attributes like shape shifting are merely fictional embellishment. But these legends do not eliminate the possibility that the individuals actually existed. If someone in the future read the story of Dracula they would assume a being who can change shape at will is obviously a concoction of someone's fantasy but Count Dracula, known as Vlad the Impaler did actually exist. It makes me wonder about who the Olympians may have been.

Technology: In my ongoing quest to find virtual character building software, I reviewed a product offered by Extempo. Their product sounds very similar to Artifical Life's Web Guide software that I used for my virtual Caesar and virtual assistant. However, I continue to be frustrated by AI firms that place such excessive prices on their authoring tools. Extempo charges an annual fee per agent of $25,000. Although they are willing to discount their software up to 50% for education applications, the price is still not economically feasible for developing individual intelligent agents for distance education courses - at least not for courses with less than 100 enrolled students. I also emphasized to their Vice President of Business Development that the lion's share of the work in developing an intelligent agent is the hours of programming required in collaboration with the content expert to develop the agent's knowledgebase. Extempo is providing only the Natural Language Processing Engine and character backstory for the annual fee. The hundreds (or even thousands) of hours required to develop the actual expert system driving the knowledgebase is above and beyond the annual fee.

I was pleased to review the progress of Haptek's Virtual Friend software. They have now developed hundreds of characters (I honestly thought the first few characters were ugly but now they have some very interesting ones), offer a web plugin to embed the characters in a web page and an interface to Ergo Linguistics's Chatterbox Natural Language Processing engine. The only thing lacking is the client-server architecture that permits the logging of interactions so they can be studied to improve the programming of the virtual character. Haptek's pricing is also outstanding. They charge only $24.95 for Virtual Friend, $49.95 for the web plugin, and only $10.00 for the NLP engine.