Saw, and liked, School of Rock on Friday. The word Rock generally means whatever people want it to mean; in the movie Black's character makes it out to mean a certain kind of vigorous, defiant, theatrical, exuberant vitality; which is as valid a definition as any other I can think of, and which I liked, so on balance I liked the movie and (for some reason I feel I should be faintly embarrassed at this, but whatever) took the overall message to heart. I never used to understand what they said about bass players being sexy, but the girl in the band playing bass was only ten years old and yet as soon as they put a bass guitar on her (complete with very fetching skull-and-crossbones guitar strap) she was Hot.

On Saturday I went to an arboretum which was nice. It was very steep and taxing and I got badly sunburnt; we came across a native frangipani bush/tree/whatever whose blooms smelt lovelier than I thought any flower could. On the drive back I had a long conversation about whether the extended battle scene at the end of Attack of the Clones was well-fought by the Republic army. The rest of this post goes into detail on this so you can just stop reading here.

Given the composition of the Republican force, one wonders whether the approach they took in attempting to prevent the escape of the Federation cruisers into space was the most prudent - specifically, they dropped a lot of foot troops together with walking troop transports a good long way from the positions they needed to overrun and let them walk in. Their walkers were cut to pieces by the enemy autonomous missile platforms, and overall the troops' rate of advance was so slow that they couldn't hope to reach the enemy lines in time to prevent their enemies' escape. Republican artillery was placed suitably to attack the escaping ships, but wasn't massed in sufficient numbers to bring down more than one ship. The artillery design (employing beams) was such that it was incapable of firing indirectly (a failing shared by the armament of the walking troop carriers), which meant that the only effective support fire was provided by the gunships, which filled the close support / air superiority / ground attack / troop carrier roles, and very effectively at that. Squadrons of bikes would have been particularly appropriate in a fast attack role, but peculiarly weren't deployed by either side. The Federation army even used such vehicles in Episode 1 (STAPs), but they were nowhere in evidence here.

Incidentally, I'm not quibbling that Star Wars wasn't 'realistic'; I'm just doing this for the simple joy of idle speculation. Of course most of this is covered in Star Wars: Galactic Battleground (the game), and probably fairly well (I suck at RTS, not even going to try). Pity it's not canonical.