myRig

I’ve recently devoted a bit of effort to setting up a decent practice environment on my iMac. Here are the ins and outs of what’s working for me:

IN: Running my guitar direct into the computer via an Apogee Jam audio interface. It’s a quick plugin and the audio interface doesn’t take up any deskspace.

OUT: Running through any external pedals before the computer.  After several attempts I gave trying to use my multi-effects pedal (BOSS ME70) or loop station (BOSS RC20XL); the sound quality was mediocre (in comparison to Amplitube – see below) and with power supplies and extra leads the setup/packup effort is substantially increased.

IN: Amplitube 3 as a plugin to Garageband 10. I have found Amplitube 3 to be the best-sounding amp simulator for Mac OSX. Using it as a plugin to Garageband 10 requires a hack (which the good folks at IK Multimedia were happy to provide – it involves copying a certain plist file from one place to another). The best thing is, the basic app is free and comes with some great sounding amps and pedals. I am tempted to explore some of the paid add-ons at some point (Marshall, Fender, Orange, and others – together with a huge range pedals), but there’s no urgent need.

IN: setting up a generic project in Garageband with a number of channels for each type of guitar sound I regular want (e.g. heavy rhythm left/right, heavy lead, clean). I use this as a loop station for jamming along to some chord progression or practising a lead over a given rhythm. There is an irritating bug in GB10 which results in noticeable latency in the sound monitoring when first starting up. I find this goes away as soon as I record something in one of the tracks. Any time I end up with something I want to keep, it’s easy to export as mp3 (or direct to Soundcloud!) or save it off as a new project.

OUT: Amplitube’s loop station in standalone mode. The interface is extremely clunky and limited in features. My experience with Amplitube generally suggests that it’s an app that should be heard and not seen.

IN: Anytune Pro for slowing down and transposing songs, to transcribe by ear and play along to. I experimented with a few apps in this space, but this one has by far and away the most intuitive, well-designed interface – it’s simply a joy to use. The step-up trainer, which automatically plays a section repeatedly at gradually increasing tempos is incredibly cool and useful. It also allows you to quickly browse and import songs from iTunes (no more haplessly navigating the folders where the mp3 files live!) and remembers the various annotations and settings you apply. Overall, this app has dramatically sped up my workflow for figuring out songs by ear.

OUT: Amazing Slow Downer. The original program of its kind, but it has the most atrocious interface of any program I’ve ever used for anything, anywhere. Dropped it like a hot potato as soon as I found Anytune Pro.

IN: Guitar Pro 6, tablature word processor. Very nice, intuitive WYSIWYG editor. You enter the tab (with rhythm values) and it generates the corresponding music notation. I don’t really need the notation, but it looks cool. There are heaps of guitar-centric annotation (slides, hammer ons, tapping, pinch harmonics etc) – the end result is very professional-looking. And the best part is that you can play the score once you’ve written it out, so you can see if your rhythmic transcription is up to snuff. Should be very useful for writing out song arrangements to share with the band.

OUT: Lilypond. It’s the LaTeX of music notation editors. I love the idea, but it’s just not a realistic solution for quickly banging out a rough song arrangement.

Movie night

As I've undoubtedly already mentioned at some point, the once-venerable institution of snuggling up for an evening spent watching one or two feature-length movies has been relegated to blue-moon status chez Gekko. It's still unclear exactly why, but among the contributing factors are surely the following: the lack of movie-length contiguous blocks of disposable time; the ascendence of high-quality tv drama series (and their availability for binge-consumption); a dreary dearth of compelling new film content; me just having more of a life than I used to (okay, just kidding).

The exception to prove this rule occurred over the weekend, as I polished off the following:

Under the Skin

Based on the book by Michel Faber, which I read and quite enjoyed a few years back during a sojourn in Dublin (as I recall, it provided some welcome distraction during the write-up of my PhD thesis). Despite that, I couldn't really get into the movie. Scarlett Johansen was excellent, but the interpretation (which, from memory, took considerable liberties with the original) was just too bleak and arty for my taste.

Wolf Creek 2

A mildly entertaining second outing for John Jarrett's memorable slasher from down under, Mick Taylor, who continues to subvert every cherished outback stereotype. But this one descends into straightahead torture-porn fare, and ultimately doesn't really add anything to the original.

The Man From Earth

Interesting low-budget sci-fi flick from a few years back. The premise is of a university lecturer who, at his farewall get-together before he leaves town, confesses to a group of his friends and colleagues that he is actually 14,000 years old and then tries to convince he isn't lying (or crazy). It sounds kooky, but it makes for a strangely gripping and thought-provoking yarn.

Apple TV and tidying up my media library

So the big news chez Gekko is the recent purchase of an Apple TV 3. Precipitated by the timely demise of my 7 year-old iMac, this latest homage to iFanboy-ism was conceived with the intent of streamlining my home entertainment infrastructure and just generally reducing the number of cables within reach of Gekko Jr.

So far, it's working out very well. For the most part, as per Apple's catch cry, everything "just works". AirPlay works really well from computer or iPad (except if you try to stream HD video while mirroring your computer screen --- but of course that's a silly thing to try to do anyway).

One caveat is that everything "just works" a little better if you are able to manage all your media content in iTunes, since you can access your iTunes library remotely (thus avoiding the need to use AirPlay explicitly).

And one problem with this is that iTunes only has truck with a very limited number of video (mp4 or m4v) and audio (mp3,aac,m4a) formats, so if you happen to have a rather sizeable collection of, um, "home" videos in other formats (such as avi, mkv), it isn't at all obvious how you might shoehorn these into the iTunes ecosystem.

To Gekko of course, this presented an irresistibly geeky challenge, one whose chief insights will now be shared.

Converting file formats

Firstly, a fortunate turn of events is that many of the more recently disseminated "home" video content is in mp4 format (where it used to be avi), and this works without problems. So going forward, all is well, and our problems lie primarily with the content previously amassed.

The mkv ("Matroska") format, meanwhile, doesn't work directly, but generally uses the same "codecs" as mp4 (x264 and whatnot) under the hood, so it is a relatively inexpensive task to convert from this to mp4 (a process referred to as "remuxing" in geek speak). There is a very nice (free) command-line tool for this called "ffmpeg". A straightforward remuxing is handled by the following:

> ffmpeg -i Forbrydelsen.S01E01.mkv -acodec copy -vcodec copy Forbrydelsen.S01E01.mp4

The -acodec and -vcodec options are set to "copy" which means they are just being copied without any re-encoding into the new mp4 container.

In some irritating cases, I've found simple remuxing leads to a file with perfect video but no audio. In this case, you want to copy the video, but re-encode the audio. I didn't want to get too bogged down in the quagmire of different options for audio encoding, but the following seems to work just fine:

> ffmpeg -i Transformers.Prime.S01E01.mkv -c:v copy -c:a aac -strict -2 Transformers.Prime.S01E01.mp4

There are some other cases where the audio seems to be in 5.1 surround sound which results in weird echos when played through my stereo output. Again, an audio re-encoding does the trick:

> ffmpeg -i filename.mp4 -c:v copy -c:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 128k -ac 2 -scodec copy new_filename.mp4

Okay, so what about the crappy avi files which unfortunately comprise roughly 99% of my "home" video collection? Well, since leaving well enough alone obviously wasn't an option, it seems that here there was no choice but to roll up my sleeves and re-encode the video. And for this task I found the (free) program Handbrake to be just the thing. The gui version works well but is a bit clunky at first (hint: the "File>Add all titles to queue..." menu item comes in very handy). I've found the command-line version to be much more useful for en masse re-encoding. Example:

> HandbrakeCLI -i 'Blackadder.S00E03.avi' -o 'Blackadder.S00E03.m4v' --preset="AppleTV 3"

Note the handy preset here which seems to give pretty good quality. The resulting mp4 file is iTunes-ready.

As an aside, Handbrake is an excellent tool for importing DVDs in m4v format, although I find myself needing to do this increasing rarely.

I, Subtitle

I have found subtitles to be a perennial bugbear with downloaded videos. Sometimes they're hardcoded, which makes life easy (unless they're in swedish); other times they come in the form of an .srt file or (uselessly) as a dvd-style .vobsub file. As you'd expect, .srt files are no use when dealing with iTunes, and the only way I've to get subtitles working is to use a little app called "iSubtitle". All you need to do is load up your mp4 file, add the appropriate .srt file as a subtitle track using the toolbar/tray on the right, and then save. No re-encoding necessary. Once that's done the subtitles should be available via the controller in iTunes. It's a hassle but the end result is nice because you can switch subtitles on and off.

Managing iTunes library

One issue that I've found problematic with iTunes is managing the physical storage of the music and video files. By default, iTunes wants to create its own copy of every file that you import into it. This means that (1) you have to constantly go back and delete the file you just imported (unless you want to keep duplicate copies); and (2) you have to trust iTunes to manage your files for you.

The latter became a real problem for me when my collection became too large for the local hard-drive and I had to shift to an external drive. For example, if the external drive happened to be disconnected for whatever reason when I imported something, it would go ahead and copy the files to an alternate library on the local hard drive. If left unchecked,this kind of thing could easily cause headaches down the track when changing machine or whatever.

So I've decided to disable the copying on import option (by unchecking "Preferences>Advanced>Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library"), and just manage my files myself. One advantage of this is that I can maintain files on different drives, which allows me to keep music and video that I frequently use on the local drive (whilst relegating more esoteric "I might listen to that one day" content to an external drive).

One cool thing too is that, provided you keep the files on the same drive, you can go ahead and rename them or move to different folders, and iTunes will still know where they are.

Metadata

This is a slightly pedantic issue, but one cool thing about Apple TV (and other media solutions such as XBMC) is that you can retrieve "metadata" about your media files which is then displayed all nicely on the Apple TV.

For my music files I've always managed the metadata manually and, although I've kept things pretty tidy, I've never obsessed too much about it. I admit I do generally make the effort to add the album cover (particularly if it's an Iron Maiden album); but beyond that, really only what's needed to keep things sorted.

For video content, however, I wanted to tap into the rich meta-databases of thetvdb.com and themoviedb.com. There seemed to be several options out there for doing this. None of them, however, were free, so it was only after much research and some experimentation that I settled on "iFlicks 2", a nice little app from the Mac App Store that does a great job. At $25.99 it's a little pricey, but after wasting $3 on the awful "MetaTV" app I can attest you get what you pay for.

One nice thing about this approach is that the metadata is stored in the file, and not away in an application-specific database somewhere (as with XBMC, say). ITunes reads this metadata on the fly, and it will also make it easier if I decide to move away from iTunes in the future.

Command-line power

I mentioned above the command-line tools ffmpeg and HandrakeCLI, which I use on the Mac OSX Terminal app. The great thing about the command-line is that it makes things very scalable when you're dealing with more than a couple of files.

And along the way I've learned a couple of neat Bash tricks that come into play when working with multiple files. The first is "for" loops, which allow the same command to be applied to multiple files. The second is Bash's text replacement syntax, which is an easy way to change file extensions. This example uses both:

> for i in *.mkv; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -acodec copy -vcodec copy "${i/.mkv/.mp4}"; done

"Arse sinking"

One final hack worth a mention pertains to the function "rsync", which is a standard unix command-line utility for backing up filesystems. By default, it works by comparing the files present in source and target directories; whenever they are different and the version in source is newer it will replace the version in target.

I have used rsync for my backup needs for a long time, but in the course of this project I found myself wanting to rsync between two locations where, for whatever reason, the files in the target directory were newer than the ones in the source. (Look, it probably shouldn't happen in a perfect world, but I think I renamed some directories or something and suddenly it wanted to recopy everything.) So a useful trick to know is the --ignore-existing option, which basically does nothing when there is a file of the same name in target (regardless of its size or age). As I say, this probably isn't something I should need in the course of a well-ordered backup operation, but it happened to be very useful when I did!

> rsync -av --ignore-existing TV/ /Volumes/Gekko_2TB/ExternalData/Video/TV

Future proof

So to summarize, I'm pretty chuffed with Apple TV so far. But that's not to say I want to blindly hitch my cart to the Apple bandwagon going forward. For that reason, I think that managing music and video files manually, and storing metadata locally, is the way to go. It means that should iTunes stop being a good option down the track, it won't be too hard to simply take my business, and files, elsewhere. And in the meantime, it makes juggling files across multiple hard drives a lot more manageable.

what gekko watched next

Movies

Jack Reacher (2012): surprisingly entertaining performance from Tom Cruise, and an all-round solid, old-school action hero flick. ****

Skyfall (2012): I enjoyed Javier Bardem but was mostly underwhelmed by the latest instalment of the Bond franchise. **

Oblivion (2013): very good sci-fi yarn, again with Tom Cruise acting up a storm. ****

The Grandmaster (2013): Wong Kar Wai and Tony Leung team up again, though not as memorably as in the excellent 2046. ***

World War Z (2013): pretty decent zombie flick. ***

Shaun of the Dead (2004): the first of the "Three Flavours Cornetto", and the first one that I've seen. Pretty funny. ***

Sound City (2013): Dave Grohl's documentary homage to the studio where many of rock music's most iconic albums were recorded. ***

Les Intouchables (2011): a bit schmaltzy, but the performances of the two leads (particularly Omar Sy) win you over. ***

Seven Psychopaths (2012): okay but not great — for me it felt like an awkward amalgam of Adaptation and something by Quentin Tarantino. Christopher Walken is entertaining as always. **

Too Big To Fail (2011): a blow by blow account of the events surrounding the collapse of Lehmann Brothers in 2008, based on the book by Andrew Ross Sorkin. It's pretty dry fare; for me the highlights were Paul Giamatti's hapless, panicky take on Ben Bernanke and Evan Handler's geeky Lloyd Blankfein. **

TV

The Fall (2013): BBC crime thriller starring Gillian Anderson and soon to be Mr Fifty Shades Jamie Dornan. Filmed in Northern Ireland! ***

The Walking Dead (Seasons 1-4): I lapped up the first three seasons of AMC's hit zombie show. But by the end of season 3 the storyline was starting to flag, and I bailed out shortly into season 4. ***

Engrenages ("The Spiral", Seasons 1-4): excellent cop drama, billed as France's answer to the The Wire. *****

Bron|Broen ("The Bridge", Season 1): interesting bilingual crime thriller set in Sweden and Denmark. ***

Game of Thrones (Seasons 1-3): if everyone else is watching it… *****

Ray Donovan (Season 1): quite enjoyed the first season of this darker take on the Entourage world. Jon Voight and Liev Schreiber are excellent. ****

Dexter (Season 8): a fairly weak last season, with possibly the lamest finale ever. This show had its moments but should have been several seasons shorter, and it was only the excellent ensemble cast that kept it alive this long. **

Breaking Bad: probably the best television series out there. The final few episodes demanded a strong constitution, but the ending was worth it. *****

True Blood (Seasons 1-4): I've been lapping up this bit of vampire porn. ***

Newsroom (Seasons 1-2): fast-paced and entertaining, but patchy and prone to passages of maudlin liberal idealism.  ***

In Treatment (Season 1): interesting little show featuring Gabriel Byrne as a psychiatrist with some issues of his own. The main drawback is the season's length — at 43 x 30 minute episodes, it's not an undertaking for the faint of heart. ***

Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Seasons 1-2): billed as "Seinfeld on crack", it was initially pretty funny but the laughs started to dry up in season 2. **

Tube Enema!

THX 1138: low key early hard sci-fi effort from George Lucas, which I watched because I just read that it was the inspiration for the Toto song "99". If only Lucas had applied a similarly minimalist approach to dialog in his star wars prequels.

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace: 3-part BBC documentary on machines, philosophy and politics in the 20th century. There's some good stuff here: I particularly enjoyed the footage of objectivist whack-job Ayn Rand and interviews with some of her acolytes (sadly, her most notorious protege, one Alan Greenspan, declined to be interviewed). As the series progressed, however, it seemed to be lacking a coherent thesis, and in the end was overly fluffed up with sensational claims and dramatic sound-bites.

Looper (2012): look, given that I grew up claiming Back to the Future and Terminator as two of my all-time favourite film franchises, it was always going to be hard for me not to have a soft spot for any film involving time travel (heck, I even enjoyed Hot Tub Time-Machine!).

The History of the Eagles (2013): excellent documentary featuring extensive, unprecedented interviews with all band members. Pretty much essential viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in the ban or classic rock in general.

Killing Them Softly (2012): reasonably entertaining gangster yarn.

The Hobbit (2012): while it wasn't without a certain charm, it left me rather underwhelmed.

Django Unchained (2012): again, underwhelmed. Some brilliant performances (Samuel L. Jackson's in particular) but overall it didn't quite work for me.

Ted (2012): surprisingly funny.

The Wire: Possibly the last great cable tv series that I'll discover retroactively. Took me a long time to get around to watching it, and it took a while to get me hooked, but once it did I couldn't get enough. Quite simply a brilliant piece of work, with some really memorable characters. It's all in the game, yo.

You Can't Do That On AndroidTube

I've been suffering a bad case of blog-stipation, so let me try to squeeze out a very brief précis of my recent Android-Tubing pleasure…

Super 8: nice little retro alien horror flick. Lots of stylistic throwbacks to the kind of flicks children of the 80s grew up loving.

V For Vendetta: finally got around to watching this graphic-novel adaptation. And rather enjoyed it.

Cocoon: filling in a bit of a gap in my 80s repertoire. If you can get over the weirdness of seeing Brian Dennehy transmogrify into an angelic alien, this is quite a touching, yet cautionary, look at what happens when a fountain of youth is discovered.

Spaceballs: another inexplicable blank in the gekko canon. As a hard-core Star Wars aficionado, it's probably just as well I didn't watch this growing up as I may well have resented seeing my beloved franchise mocked so irreverently. Watching it now, as an only slightly-less defensive aficionado, I found it amusing in parts but pretty cheesy.

The Young Ones: inspired by my long-time admiration of his Lord Flasheart character from BlackAdder (Woof!), I decided to check out Rik Mayall's breakthrough comedy which was co-written by Ben Elton. Has its moments, but hasn't held up anywhere near as well as Blackadder.

Bottom: Rik Mayall's follow-up to The Young Ones, also featuring his comedic cohort Ade Edmondson (Viv from the Young Ones). Pretty forgettable fare; it went for 3 seasons but really wasn't good for it.

Searching For Bobby Fischer: a slightly Hallmark-esque drama about a father and his chess-prodigy son, based on a true story. Lawrence Fishburne has an amusing, though implausible, turn as a street-smart chess hustler.

The Killing (Forbrydelsen): excellent crime thriller t.v. series from Denmark. Blends some of the real-time urgency of the 24 series (in that each episode corresponds to a day), with a dash of Se7en thrown in. Each season (there are 3) deals with a single murder and its implications for a range of unrelated characters.

To Catch A Killer: we had a bit of a Brian Dennehy thing happening, so we went with it. This is a surprisingly good made-for-tv crime drama from the early 90s, based on the appallingly true story of serial killer John Gacy, played chillingly by Dennehy.

The Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes: I was rather disappointed with this attempted reboot/coda of the Apes franchise. The plot unfolded like a join-the-dots attempt to take us from present-day earth to a planet populated by super-intelligent apes.

The Bourne Legacy: speaking of franchises, I actually really enjoyed this addendum to the Bourne, um, legacy. I liked Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker, and I like him again here.

Men Of A Certain Age: probably the highlight of this installment of AndroidTube. By turns funny and serious, the show is about three middle-aged blokes in LA, who are buddies since high school and all going through some sort of mid-life crisis. The big 5-0 may be a ways off for me, but I really related to some of the issues faced by the characters, as they come to terms with where they're at in life, what they've accomplished versus what they had hoped to, etc.

Abandoned: a special dishonourable shout-out to Bad Santa (what was Billy Bob playing at?), and the catastrophic Rock Of Ages.

The Great Wall + Haffertee the Hamster

One of my favourite internet-based time-wasting activities is tracking down childhood books/toys/tv shows etc. I'm continually amazed both by how much of this often obscure material has found its way online and by how, for want of a better word, crap most of it is when I do track it down. (Transformers cartoon series anyone?) But occasionally, I do glean some insight into the true nature of something to which I had been oblivious when I originally encountered it.

Case in point: I was recently looking up a few children's books (with a view to perhaps revisiting them with Gekko Jr at some point). And what I found were two cases of what had seemed like wholesome, innocent stories that are in fact thinly-veiled propaganda materials.


1. "Haffertee Finds A Place Of His Own", by Janet Perkins. I vaguely remembered this as a nice yarn about a hamster who lives in the house of a nice family and makes himself a cosy little living space somewhere (in a shoebox was it?). So imagine my reaction upon finding this on Amazon:

Part of the "Haffertee" series, this is another story about a lovable soft-toy hamster and his friends. As children read the books, they will also learn more about Haffertee's best friend - God - and his care and interest in all aspects of everyone's lives.

Hmmm. Well, I guess on second thoughts nostalgia can go hang: suffice it to say that, loveable as he may be, Mr Haffertee won't be bedding down in the Gekko residence any time soon.


2. "The Great Wall", by Paul White. In this case I admit I already had a fairly strong suspicion that the story had some kind of religious undertones. (After all, the book was a gift from a great uncle who had a tendency to ply my brother and I with god-fearing reading materials: a children's bible and storybooks of parables such as "The Good Samaritan" --- which against I very much enjoyed -- were among his other offerings.)

Anyhow, I am unable to track down the original edition (a lavishly illustrated A4-sized paperback in landscape format), but I did find the text. As you can see, it starts off as an intriguing tale about some unusually loquacious jungle animals, but it gradually turns into something much more sinister:

In an African hospital the story is told of THE GREAT WALL. All the animals were very upset for suddenly this great wall had appeared right through the middle of the jungle. Elephant said, "what can we do?" All the rest of the animals chattered, "We MUST do something about this wall. It is very serious. How can we get to the other side?" Giraffe said, "The Great Wall is very high and as far as I can see it is very thick." Lion roared, "And the best parts of the jungle are on the other side!" Monkey jumped up and down, "We must get through. This side of the wall is desert. It's dry and dusty and dull." "Stop the talk, " snorted Rhino, "Stand back! I will charge through it." And he thundered away towards the wall with the animals cheering him on. BANG!!! The awful wall nearly knocked poor Rhino out and made his face and head bleed! Then Elephant had a go. He tried to push through the Great Wall. He pushed and pushed, and heaved and heaved. But had to admit at the end, "there is no way THROUGH that Wall."

Hyena laughed his spooky giggle. "For animals of great strength and small cunning there is no way through that Great Wall, But... we hyenas are smart and crafty. I will find a way AROUND that Wall." So he walked and walked, all day, all night. Another day and another night. And then the waiting animals saw Hyena coming back at last. They yelled, "tell us quickly what you found." Hyena gasped, "It is no use at all. There is no way around, the Great Wall goes on and on and on! There is no way AROUND!"
Then Snake hissed, "Enough of this! Sssssso you think you are clever and strong, but I am a ssslitherer. I will slither and ssssslide UNDER the Great Wall." Off Snake went, he twisted, wiggled, and squirmed. He disappeared for a long while, and then he came back up. "At last I have found a way under the Wall, " he said. "Pardon me, " said Giraffe, "you are still on the same side, snake!" "What, " hissed snake, "I have travelled many dark ways underground. No animal could have done as much. If there was a way UNDER the Wall I would have found it. There is no way under!"

No way THROUGH. No way AROUND. No way UNDER.
Then monkey yelled, "Look at me, look at me. I can climb anything. I will find a way OVER the Great Wall. Stand back - here I come!" And monkey yelled a giant "WOOOOP!!" and ran toward that wall. He leap on it and climbed and climbed and climbed. Down he fell at last with a crash. Then he got Giraffe to stand close to the wall. And monkey got a good start by climbing first up Giraffe's long, long neck. Monkey climbed and climbed, he tried so hard. Then he fell, and tumbled down with an awful "bump!" Elephant found him at the bottom of the wall knocked right out! He had to blow air into Monkeys' mouth with his trunk to get him to "come to" again. All the animals agreed, "there is no way OVER the Great Wall."
NO way THROUGH. No way AROUND. No way UNDER. No way OVER.

The Great Wall has a name which can be seen by those who understand. The wall is called SIN. People try all sorts of ways to get past the Wall made by their own sin. They try to get THROUGH, and AROUND, and UNDER and OVER Sin. But there is no way we can get past Sin by ourselves. Listen to what God's book, the Bible, says, "Your sin has come between you and your God." But Jesus has broken down that Wall. There is a Doorway in the Wall, and it is in the shape of a Mighty Cross! So that anyone who wants to have nothing to do with sin, who wants to come to God, can. When they come to the Great Wall they just walk through the Cross -Door. Why? Because of what Jesus has done. He shed His Blood for the Sin of the world. Here is what the Lord Jesus says to you and me: "I am the Way ... come to Me."

"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." ( John 14:6).

Crikey, that's pretty heavy stuff to lay on an innocent child; in fact, I'd go so far as to describe it as a load of sadistic bollocks. The tragedy is that it starts off so promisingly --- if only we could read about how the animals then sat down together and somehow contrived a solution to the "wall" problem as a team (don't ask me how -- maybe they invent dynamite or something). Now that just might be a story with a worthwhile message.