Breathin' more easily

Off this afternoon to see The Proposition with Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone and Emily Watson, with a script by noneother than Nick Cave. Although set in a raw and brutal colonial period Australia it has much of the Western genre about it, albeit the more violent, dirtier and grittier Westerns which descend from Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch on through Unforgiven. It is an interesting contrast of family values (three of the outlaws are brothers) and loyalty versus dreadful crimes such as murder and rape, the stunning sunsets over the deserts of Australia versus the filth of the frontier town (which is supposedly representing 'civilisation' coming to this land, although since this take the form of government forces murdering Abrogines the viewer is left wondering who, if anyone, is civilised here). Despite colours of the outback however the film I was most reminded of was another low budgt Indy Western movie, the black and white Johnny Depp movie Dead Man. Like Dead Man is has an unusual and cool soundtrack, some beautiful visuals, an unusual take on life and scenes of scenic grandeur suddenly punctuated by brutal and bloody violence.

Wandered down to my local watering hole at the Caley on the way home (got to replenish my fluids after yesterday's blood donation you know) to enjoy a couple of nice afternoon pints and a quiet read (Adam Roberts' new book Gradisil, quite excellent so far - you can read what Adam himself said about it over on the FPI blog). Always something nice about being off and just sitting in a pub in the middle of the day, occassionally glancing out the windows and watching the world go by. And it is so much better now there are no bloody smokers in the pub! The ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces came in to effect in Scotland on Sunday, which means I can now enjoy a drink in the pub and come home without smelling like an old bloody ashtray from second hand smoke.

Before any smokers start on about how this law is cruel to them and denies them their right to choose can I just say blow it out your bum. I'm generally all for indulging vices but smoking around other people is such a damned selfish thing to to. Some smokers I know have tried the old chestnut about personal choice, their point being if I don't want to breathe second hand smoke and stink like an old packet of Malrboroughs then I shouldn't go into the pub, but I chose to go there so should put up with it. Excuse me, but I chose to go to the pub to enjoy a chat with mates and a DRINK, not to be gassed to bloody death by a minority of folks who don't care about what their habit is doing to other people. They had the choice to go to the pub or not too and they had the choice of lighting up or not, so actually smokers had two choices (until Sunday).

Now, I delight in pointing out to those same folks the exact same argument they used on me - hey, you can choose to go to the pub or not, so your choice and mine are both available. And you can still light up if you choose, you just can't do it inside, but if you are so pathetically addicted that you would rather stand outside for ten minutes in the cold and rain having a fag than be inside a warm pub chatting to your friends then that too is your choice - get your cancer-causing breath out of my face and stop whining about it. You had decades of being able to inflict your habit on other people against their wishes, even though you know it is not only disgusting it actually physically harms people, so don't complain about restriction of choices now.

Maybe we should just have a Smokatorium like they did in the early Judge Dredd strips - smoking is illegal everywhere (even your home) in Mega City One except the Smokatorium, a huge dome full of so many smokers that you need to wear a helmet with a special filter on it for your ciggy to go through. When Dredd catches two kids smoking on the streets rather than lock them up he sentences them to two minutes in the Smokatorium without helmets. Kids are put off for life. A good shock tactic to get folk off smoking was used by my old BB captain back in the 80s. his two boys took up smoking and he knew there was no point telling a 20-year old guy he is wrong because he won't listen. So he calls in a favour from a police mate, who gets him and the lads into a police pathology lab where they saw a post-mortem during which the pathologist gleefully removed the lungs from the cadaver who had been a heavy smoker and showed them to the boys. Once they got through puking they found they had lost any notion of smoking.

I also recall some show which was either one of the newer Twilight Zone or Outer Limits shows or something in a similar vein which had a guy attempting to kick the habit with little success. He turns finally to some sort of therapy which turns out to be run by mobsters, who monitor him all the time. When he has a crafty drag when he thinks no-one is watching he gets kidnapped and bundled into a room with a large window through which he can see his wife who has also been snatched. She is barefoot on a wire mesh floored room which then has an electric current put through it, a new take on aversion therapy. I wish I could remember what that show was and how it ended now - anyone remember that one?


Movie fest

So far I've only been to see three movies on my week off (Mel and I caught Spike Lee's new movie - joint as he calls them - Inside Man on Sunday which I thought looked awful in the trailers but was actually a brilliant heist film), although I reckon I need to see Eli Roth's new horror flick tomorrow - his last, Cabin Fever, was terrific fun; not exactly original as such, but great to see a proper nasty horror flick again, but I have been catching up on some DVDs, enjoying some good late night film fun. I got partially into the Indy Western mood for today's outing to The Proposition by rewatching Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, one of the few combinations of the Western and the Vampire genres and one I've loved for years (please, Kathryn, make another movie soon), especially enjoyable as it is the special edition with a good documentary with most of the cast as well as Kat herself; Lance Henriksen's anecdotes about the making of the movie were especially amusing.

I've been on a bit of a vampire-themed DVD jag actually; apart from Near Dark I had an urge to rewatch Neil Jordan's lush adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire (ah, the old days when Anne still wrote good books), then Coppola's Dracula (Keanu's accent is still hilarious but has Winona ever looked more gorgeously biteable than in that red, Victorian dress and long dark hair?) then the original Tod Browning 1930s Dracula, which despite its classic status is a terribly static film, largely saved by some intersting design (the Count's castle) and, of course, Bela Lugosi's hypnotic performance. The incredibly cool series Ultraviolet demanded to be watched once more as well too, then I think it is back to the 30s again for a double bill set I was given with Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein together this evening. When I was doing my interview for Radio Scotland about V For Vendetta the other week the interviewer commented she was very impressed by how well Hugo Weaving acted through a mask.

She was correct, but it is hardly something new - look at Karloff in Jack Pierce's incredible make-up in the Frankensetin movies (make-up which created an iconic look everyone now recognises even if they have never viewed the films) and the sheer humanity he invests in the monster through all of those prostethics ("We belong dead."). And even earlier than this in the 20s was Lon Chaney Senior (who would have been Dracula but he died unexpectedly and the role passed to an Eastern European actor called Bela Lugosi) - anyone who has watched his performance in the amazing silent version of Phantom of the Opera will probably agree with me (famously he created some of the make-up effects himself, including painful rings inside his nose to create the effect that his nose had rotted off).

In more recent years both Brent Spiner and Rene Auberjonois in and Star Trek the Next GenerationDeep Space Nine respectively gave wonderful performances not only through their heavy masks of make-up but often made the mask a part of the performance (something Japanese theatre actors would understand). And of course a good actor is always acting through some form of mask - even in a film where they are not in special make-up and the face looks like their own, the good actor, through a thousand tiny non-verbal signals, creates the illusion of their face being not their own but that of their character, unlike a star who is really just themselves in every film. V himself addresses the issue of the mask directly in the film, when he tells Evey that yes, of course there is a face beneath that mask, but it is not him, any more than the muscles below that skin are him or the bones are really him. We all wear masks of one sort or another although they may portray aspects of us, they are not actually us. But it does give me a good excuse to quote Tori Amos' Happy Phantom from the Little Earthquakes album:

And if I die today I'll be the happy phantom
And I'll go chassin' the nuns out in the yard
And I'll run naked through the streets without my mask on
And I will never need umbrellas in the rain
I'll wake up in strawberry fields every day
And the atrocities of school I can forgive
The happy phantom has no right to bitch
oo who
The time is getting closer
oo who
Time to be a ghost
oo who
Every day we're getting closer
The sun is geting dim
Will we pay for who we been

So if I die today I'll be the happy phantom
And I'll go wearin' my naughties like a jewel
They'll be my ticket to the universal opera
There's Judy Garland taking Budda by the hand
And then these seven little men get up to dance
They say Confucius does his crossword with a pen
I'm still the angel to a girl who hates to sin

oo who
The time is getting closer
oo who
Time to be a ghost
oo who
Every day we're getting closer
The sun is geting dim
Will we pay for who we been

Or will I see you dear and wish I could come back
You found a firl that you could truly love again
WIll you still call for me when she falls asleep
Or do we soond forget the things we cannot see

oo who
The time is getting closer
oo who
Time to be a ghost
oo who
Every day we're getting closer
The sun is geting dim
Will we pay for who we been

Kaloogian the Lying Klown

A Republican Congressional candidate with the unlikely name of Howard Kaloogian has been caught out by bloggers for indulging in the same sort of misleading (or what most of us would consider downright fibbing really) propoganda masquerading as fact which US and UK governments used to justify the war in the first place. As right wing nutters are wont to do , he rubbished media coverage of the violence in Iraq and produced a photograph of downtown Baghdad to illustrate how peaceful it actually is. Except resourceful bloggers identified the picture as being downtwon Istanbul in Turkey, which the unfortunately named Kaloogian has now admitted, but of course, he personally didn't have anything to do with it being posted on his campaign site, even although he used it to demonstrate how peaceful he found Baghdad... Draw your own conclusions, but is it a surprise to find a politician - or even a wannabe politician - is somewhat economical with the truth.

Poled

According to the Edinburgh Evening news around 20, 000 Polish folks have taken advantage of EU membership to move into the city to work in the last ten months, which is an awful lot of people in a pretty small city. Which may expain why I've gone from seeing one car with Polish plates on it in my street (usually incredibly badly parked) to numerous cars with Polish plates round town. Not to mention hearing more folks wandering around talking Polish - especially in Lidl where you can do your entire grocery shopping without actually hearing anyone speak English. I don't mean that as anything bad, just an observation since Lidl - at least the one nearest me - seems to be constantly full of migrant workers or foreign students shopping and I have literally gone right round it without hearing English spoken until I got to the checkout, where there was English, albeit it rather accented. The fun of the melting pot society!

Thanks to multiculturalism I can listen to couples arguing over which breakfast cereal they prefer in ten languages. I am intrigued by the Polish deli which opened recently but have no idea what Polish delicacies they sell and if they are suitable for veggies - guessing a lot of it probably isn't. I do wonder at the double standards of society though - can you imagine the outcry if 20000 Asian or coloured folks settled in Edinburgh? Funny how one kind of immigration is fine and others draw flak, when at the end of the day most are here to do jobs we either have a skills gap for in Scotland or to do something no Scot wants to work at, but still the colour of the skin on an immigrant affects how people see them.


Bang goes the ball

Bus drivers back from their one day strike which forced us to cancel the book club last night (thank you, LRT, so nice to have you out on strike again so soon after your strikes last year too - do I get a credit on my bus pass for that day??) heading into town this afternoon to go to the blood donor clinic and I can see on the busy main road ahead a bunch of idiots in sports clothing arseing around with a football. Bouncing it off the walls (which just happen to be people's apartments) and just missing the windows, laughing I wait for one of them to do the inevitable and let the ball go off the pavement into the traffic. Of course it does happen and one of the aforementioned eejits runs right out into a main road to retrieve his ball, naturally without actually looking.

Barely back on the pavement he demonstrates his cranial capacity for learning from stupid mistakes by doing exactly the same again but this time as he jumps right into the road he hears the bus approaching and jumps back. Luckily for his stupid ass the bus driver was watching and had obviously figured this was going to happen and had slowed down. From the top deck I can see the ball now rolling right into traffic, bus driver tries to avoid it but a double decker isn't built for sudden turns and suddenly there is an almighty BANG as the big wheels go over the ball. The idiots, all red faces and shaved heads, howl abuse and gesticulate at the bus because obviously it is the driver's fault that they were so reckless and stupid (maybe he should have run over the guy instead). And no, this wasn't a bunch of 12 year olds, they were all grown men in their late 20s or early 30s by the looks of it. Needless to say after watching their antics I laughed out loud when their ball got burst.

More photo fun - abandoned church

This sad-looking abandoned church is right by the canal side, in a strange location, being behind the gardens at the rear of blocks of Victorian tenement flats rather than actually on a road. I have no idea what it was called, when it was built or when it was closed down. I wonder if it was originally open to the street and then the tenements sprung up around it afterwards in the 19th century? I'm not religious, but it is rather sad to see it in this bricked up state with what looks like junk from old cafes lying around it when once upon a time it would have been a place where the community came together. Mind you, if you had plenty of money to spare you could convert it into an incredibly cool designer home right by the waterfront.

Photo fun

The first day in a week when it hasn't been pouring with rain, so on the way back from donating blood I walked along the canal and played around with the camera. Actually on the blood donation front, they actually phoned me because they were running short on my particular blood group and needed more ASAP, so if any of you have been thinking about donating some of the red stuff, or you used to but kind of slipped out of the habit it looks like they could really use it and it would be a good time to start. Half an hour sitting on my Magnificent Celtic Ass donating a pint makes a change from me sitting on my Magnificent Celtic Ass drinking a pint. And there's always a choccy biccy at the end of it :-) Now having completed my good deed for the week I can dedicate the remains of my week off to my evil plans for world domination.





















These are all bits of the Leamington Lift Bridge on the canal where it comes right into the middle of Edinburgh. As part of the regeneration of the canal it has been restored to working order and rises up to let barges through so if you are having a break on one you can tie up your holiday barge only a few minutes walk from the Castle.

















A couple of handsomely painted barges are moored at the basin at the end of the canal at Tollcross all the time now, so it looks like some people are not just visiting on their break but actually living on them, which is pretty cool. I wonder, if I sold my flat at the inflated Edinburgh prices how much would it give me to buy a cool barge instead, live on it like MacLeod did in the Highlander TV series. Of course, I might blow any profit from the sale on swimming lessons and kitty-sized inflatable vests for the cats. Still a lot of work going on on both sides of the end of the canal where old brownfield sites are being reclaimed and turned into apartments and offices. Getting nicer already - in another couple of years it will look even better. The huge brownfield site of the old S&N brewery nearby is all due to be redeveloped too, which isn't going to hurt the value of my humble dwelling either and certainly make the whole area look a lot better.

"Long live the knife"

The BB of C's website has an interesting article on the 18th and 19th century castrati singers of Italy, where at one point some 4, 000 boys were being castrated to protect their singing voices from breaking in later life, which is a lot of balls. There is even an online file of a very old gramaphone recording from 1902 of one of the last of the castrati (not Farinelli, made famous to more mdoern audiences by the movie a few years ago though).

I'm not sure, but it sounds like the one that Arman Leroi played in the Channel 4 series Human Mutants when he was discussing how hormones - or the lack of them - affect the development of the human body. Castrati, like the eunuchs of the Imperial Court in China, were often preternaturally tall and thin with limbs out of proportion to their bodies due to the lack of testosterone and other hormones telling their bones when to cease growing. Leroi's award-winning book Mutants also has a section on the subject as well as a range of fascinating although often disturbing (but never ghoulish, always addressed with respect for humanity) examinations of human development - my old review of the book is still on the Alien Online here.

Yesterday's Science Fiction, tomorrow's Science Fact

The digest from the latest issue of New Scientist has an interesting article from Ian Stewart (not sure if this is the same Ian Stewart who has done much to make science accessible and fun with books such as The Science of the Discworld or not) where NASA engineers discussing the easiest ways to travel through space are drawing on science fiction, arguing it is easier to travel by tube. The article draws on the old - EE Doc Smith - and the contemporary writers - the quite excellent Peter F Hamilton - to discuss creating wormhole networks not for transporter beams or starships but for a form of trains.

Peter had a wormhole-train network in his recent two-part tale Pandora's Star and the sequel Judas Unchained (both huge tomes as Peter's books often are and both excellent as Peter's books usually are), marrying 19th century technology with the far future as people moved from one side of a planet or across entire star systems by going to the station and boarding a large train which would then pass through a wormhole gate and pull into a station at the destination world. No rockets, no warp drive, no deflector screens to protect from radiation and micro-meteorites. Mind you, neither the SF or the NASA engineers mention the trains running late and the staff walking out on strike, so you can tell we are still in the realms of fiction for the moment.

V



I'll no doubt talk about the movie adaptation of V For Vendetta some more at some point soon - just caught it for a second time last night as Mel hadn't seen it and I was only too happy to go along again - but since I was in Photoshop fixing up some new pics I felt like playing around and did this semi-Warhol image of Dave Lloyd's great artwork. For the second time I found the section about the lesbian actress Valerie in the 'resettlment' camp choked me up and had me blinking furiously to avoid tears. I always thought that one of the most intensely emotional scenes in the original book and every time I re-read it it got to me - I was probably most worried about how it would be handled in a film version. I needn't have worried, it was handled with utmost respect for the source material. After 20 years it still gets me; me reading about Evey, a fictional character, who is in turn reading a message written on toilet paper slipped through a crack in the wall of her prison cell by another fictional character, telling her tale and yet I totally believe in them both when I read it:

"I don't know who you are. Please believe. There is now way I can convince you that this is not one of their tricks but I don't care. I am me and I don't know who you are but I love you... Perhaps I won't be able to write again, so this is a long letter about my life. It is the only autobiography I will ever write and oh god I'm writing it on toilet paper... It is strange that my life should end in such a terrible place but for three years I had roses and I apologised to nobody. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world that's worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us... Within that inch we are free."

It is almost as if Alan Moore and Dave Lloyd were giving a voice to the untold millions who died slowly in the concentration camps, the chambers of the Inquisition, the Disappeared of Junta-era Argentina, the victims of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugolsavia (so ironic Milosovic would die along and unloved in a prison cell) the millions of often anonymous victims who have suffered and died in the prisons of dictators (or the prisons of supposed democratic liberators for that matter) and so many other dark places. Valerie spoke for them, a fictional character speaking for the ghosts of those who were once real and laughed and loved.

That's one of the reasons when someone gives me their igorant, uninformed comment "oh I don't read comic books" I show them V For Vendetta. If there is one thing I know it is good storytelling, so, all false modesty aside, believe me when I tell you I find a book so good that I have re-read it time and time again for nearly two decades it is a damned good book. If you are a person who never touches graphic novels and you decide to pick one up and try it, pick V. It's also one of the reasons I am a stubborn git when it comes to my freedom of expression or anyone elses. Most of us won't face what those characters go through or the real people they represent and speak for, but in times when democratic governments want to restrict more freedoms 'for our protection' it is more important than ever that we don't let them take that inch.

Just for a change, a pic with no snow in it!

March brings Mad Hatters but no Mad March Hares






Anyone for an un-birthday party? Where is the Mad March Hare? Not mad enough to venture out into the bloody freezing Scottish spring,perhaps? Or is he off hanging out with his good mate the Easter Bunny?

Spring comes to Edinburgh






What a beautifully Christmas-sy scene... Except it is late March! Spring in Scotland!




Snowdrops in the snow









Meanwhile snowy Budhha takes it in his usual calm, collected manner. Not pictured the snowy Monkey, Pigsy and Trippitakka :-)

Freeze or burn

This news item is a little sad perhaps but also, if you are a twisted bugger like me, kind of funny in a delightfully sick way: two of the founders of the cryonics movement have been cremated after their freezers broke down. Apparently dead humans, like food in your domestic freezer, come with a "if thawed do not re-freeze" label.

This is up there with the Simpsons episode where Roger Meyers Jr loses the Itchy and Scratchy studios and can no longer keep his dad's head in the cryo storage so chucks it in a picnic cooler. And going back to the 80s and early 90s there was an Alex cartoon (the self-centred yuppie businessman who thinks money is everything and would almost certainly be a donator for honours to the Labour Party today) where he persuades his friend Clive to sign up with him to be frozen after death for future resurrection. As Alex points out for selfish bastards like them it is perfect - if there is a God and an afterlife they get the chance to come back and make up for their life of selfish greed and avoid eternal damnation and if there isn't then they can go on with their current lifestyle...

Warren Ellis did an interesting take on cryonic resurrection in one of my favourite series, Transemetropolitan. He has a woman who had been a cutting edge photo journalist in the 60s and 70s having her frozen head defrosted in the far future. Of course the freezing process itself mae a mess of her chilled brain, but with future technology they manage to recover most of her memories, clone her a new body and decant her into it. Success! Except her husband isn't there as they planned because he died on a foreign holiday too far away from the cryo company's lab. The second problem is that once the future society has honoured the cryo company's contract by bringing her back they just toss her out on the street where the poor woman suffers instant future shock from the bizarre future society and ends up cracked and living in doorways...

Mind you, for sheer nastiness one of the worst eras of the old Doctor Who (Colin Baker's time, yeuch) pulled off a nice line in sickness when the Doctor goes to a 'funeral' at a gigantic building which is actually where rich and powerful people are stored for future resurrection when their death cause can be cured. Except the rich and powerful alive today have no interest in bringing back competitors and the galaxy can barely sustain the people alive now without bringing more back from the dead. So secretly Davros, the nasty creator of the Daleks, uses many of the frozen bodies as the basis for a food stuff (a la Soylent Green.... Mmmmm, Soylent Green....) and the remaining ones he mutates to use in his new cyborg nasties! Basically, the theme of cryonics tends to end in tears in SF and, from this story, looks like it doesn't do much better in reality.

Keeler



I thought the recent death of former disgraced minister John Profumo offered an excellent excuse to post this now-classic picture by Lewis Morley of the woman at the heart of the affair, Christine Keeler, partly because it became a 20th century photographic icon. It has been repeated and referenced and homaged and pastiched countless times since - the movie posters for Basic Instinct 2 (lord save us) have Sharon Stone in a clear imitation of this pose even today - fictional characters such as Lara Croft have been pictured this way. And the other reason I thought I'd post it was that it was a simple but effective photograph and, frankly, she looks quite gorgeous there, an almost perfect combination of sexual allure with vulnerability and shyness.

Pssstttt, guv - want to buy a peerage?




The Prime Minister attempted to curb media speculation over the incredibly obvious dontate or loan money to the Labour party and get yourself onto the Honours roll scandal today by doing away with secret loans and the entire shady backroom operations of fatcat businessmen who donate or secretly loan money to his party and then weeks later, by total coincidence, find their names put forward by Tony Blair for a peerage. To overcome this and create what the PM called a 'transparent' system from now on bids for peerage, knighthoods etc will be conducted publically in the new online auction site labourebay.gov.uk. This will at least end anonymous cold calling, when people are rung at home by Labour Party Call Centre officials and asked if they are interested in purchasing a place on the Honours roll, although in contrast to other forms of annoying cold calls at home the callers are looking for the respondents to offer them a low cost loan.

This approach had not been terribly successful and the Labour party thought on following many UK banks and others by outsourcing its cash for honours call centre operations to India, but it is thought the new auction site will be far more cost effective and, given the British people's passion for bidding online it should be highly successful. Society and fashion mags are already predicting that bidding online for honours will be the birthday or anniversary present for spouses to buy each other. CBEs and OBEs are considered suitable for minor birthdays and other events, while a Knighthood or Damehood is what the loving husband or wife should give to each other on special occassions such as silver wedding anniversaries, with peerages for gold anniversaries. Mr Blair is thought to be pleased with this, seeing it as part of his attempt to give everyone (with money and who agrees with him) a chance to take part in the life of the nation.

Radio V

I was interviewed for BBC Radio Scotland this afternoon for their Radio Cafe arts and culture show's At The Movie segment. This Friday's coverage of new releases will include V For Vendetta, which apparently was due for the usual quick review but after seeing the previews they decided it needed a bit more coverage (a good sign, as is the fact my mate Padraig who was a preview in Dublin with Leah Moore this week and is an expert on Alan Moore's work thought it was excellent). So I found myself being asked questions about the original graphic novel and about comic to movie adaptations in general. I deliberately chose some of the more unusual examples since the superhero, big-budget movies are a bit too obvious and kind of what people who don't read comics (or actively disdain the entire genre, usually without knowing anything about it) expect from a comic book movie.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy those superhero flicks too, but I thought it was worth trying to show that comics are an incredibly diverse medium - in the last few weeks I've added graphic novels to the FPI sites which take in superheroics, humour, erotica and even an autobiographical comic about spousal abuse and that's just a tiny selection from recent weeks new entries. So I used the likes of Ghost World, American Splendour and the Oscar-nominated A History of Violence as well as showing that comics and movie cross-breeding is nothing new by producing one of Checker's lovely reproductions of Alex Raymond's 1940s Flash Gordon strips. I don't know how much of this will actually make the cut, of course, but it was nice to be back talking about books on the radio again instead of blogging! Much as I've enjoyed that I much prefer talking about books and graphic novels and films and pre last year's events I did several radio appearances to talk about them. The show is on Radio Scotland between 1.15 and 2pm on Friday 17th - like most BBC radio programmes it can be heard via the web and will be archived for a week.

I also had a nice surprise today when a chum at Rebellion, publishers of 2000AD, emailed me a paragraph from one of the founders of that comic about the new Complete Judge Dredd Case Files - yep, British Comics God John Wagner (who wrote the aforementioned A History of Violence) who is Dredd's co-creator. Its a new series reprinting every story in chronological order from the very beginning (which I remember reading in that then-new 2000AD comic in the late 70s) so it is a nostalgia trip for some of us and quite a surprise to see the differences in the early character compared to now (its like watching any early parts of a TV series, like early Friends or early Star Trek and finding the characters don't seem quite right because you are now used to the evolved character).

I added John's take on this very welcome new series of reprints to the entry on the site (a feature called What The Author Says, where the writer can give a personal insight into the work, which is something I like seeing myself) and then despite having a ton of new books to add to the site just had to use it as part of a post on the series on the FPI blog. It was only a paragraph, but it was a paragraph from John Wagner - I've grown up reading John's work so I was over the moon. Any guy my age who read 2000AD in the 70s will know exactly where I am coming from here. Add in a brief recording of a spot for a comics podcast on top of a slew of new books and it was a pretty varied day!

Consent

The new government campaign advises men to ensure they obtain clear consent to sex. While I'm all in favour of men being a bit more responsible there seems to be a bit of a problem with this approach: without having such consent witnessed then how could anyone prove it either way? A man could say a woman he met in a club had consensual sex with him and she could claim it was rape - either could be telling lies, without some form of proof or witnesses you would still have the exact same problem you had before this new campaign. Men could be wrongly accused by a vindictive woman and sleazy men who violated someone who was vulernable when drunk could still get away with it.

So the obvious answer is to have lawyers and notaries in nightclubs. You could discuss the idea of some post-imbibing consensual sex over your drinks, then when you go to the cloakroom on the way out you visit the notary and have your agreement to a drunken shag formally documented so then the man is totally safe. Of course this has to go both ways and women could take out related documents which allow her to complain if the quality of the drunken shag is below acceptable quality or duration (or both). Further documentation could be taken out pertaining to who agrees to sleep on the wet spot and for consent to make breakfast the next morning.

All of this may take some of the romance out of things of course. And the government guidelines aren't too clear - is this aimed at casual, drunken flings or does a husband need to get a solid and clear agreement before a romantic tumble with his wife? Or with someone else's wife for that matter? Does the wife need to get permission too? Or is it considered bad for the husband to pressure her for sex but alright for her to demand sex when the poor soul is engrossed in balancing beer cans on his belly while watching the football?

Overall though I can't help but think these rules are more than a little redundant - after all, most straight men spend a lot of their time trying to get women to consent to sex with them already.

Gigging with the Jets

My mate Paul in Leicester sent me details of their new rockin' gigs on the 25th March at the Half Time Orange and on the 22nd April at the Shed. Details and sample music can be had on their site and the new gig poster has gone up here.

Blogjill

I just received this from my mate Curt at the Committee to Protect Bloggers, part of a campaign to try and secure the release of the journalist Jill Carroll who has been held in Iraq for many weeks now. It seems like a good idea to me and it is something very simple for any blogger to do - just add it to you blog and try and think some positive thoughts, you can make it your good deed for the day:

Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter working for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper, was kidnapped in Baghdad over two months ago. All indications are that she is still alive. The Monitor has started a campaign, using Iraqi television, to distribute a video asking for Iraqis to help find and free Jill.

Jill is not a blogger but she's got that spirit. She's an independent intellect who is fascinated by the world and has a desire to speak what she sees. So let's not leave it up to the newspapers and television stations. She's ours as much as theirs.

So, I would like to ask every blogger who gives a damn about individual human life and the individual human voice, to post a link to this video on their blog, to blog about Jill and to pass along our concern to friends, family and other bloggers. Of greatest import are Iraqi blogs and blogs in the Arabic and Muslim worlds that may be read by people in a position to do good for Jill.

Here's a link to the Jill Carroll video.

Let's tag these posts "blogjill."

Technorati Tags: blogjill, jillcarroll

Adam Roberts speaks

Top British SF author Adam Roberts shared some of his thoughts on his new novel Gradisil (due very soon) with me over on the FPI blog, makes for very interesting reading. Adam's books are always high up on my list of must-read when they come out - a fascinating and very clever writer. The blog piece also has links to some of his book on the FPI main site where Adam has added himself to the What The Author Says feature, where I'm persuading writers to post a short piece giving a personal insight into the book that is listed to go alongside the actual webstore entry - I think it gives a nice touch for readers. Well, I enjoy reading them!

Harry goes to Hell

Oh dearie me... The top Vatican exorcist Gabrile Amorth has condemned J K Rowling's Harry Potter novels for leading poor innocent little children into the waiting arms of Lucifer:

"By reading Harry Potter, a young child will be drawn into magic and from there it is a simple step to Satanism and the devil," he said.


What century does this fuckwit comes from? Presumably a couple of hundred years ago he would have the Inquisition rounding up Potter readers and torturing them for the good of their own soul. It is nice to see the Catholic church still has that mature and informed viewpoint that equates any form of magic with Satan: I doubt most Wiccans and other magical practicioners would agree (especially since Pagan-based magical rituals predate Christianity and therefore can't owe any allegiance to Satan since he is a Christian invention, or at least adaptation from older belief systems).

Also seems odd to me since the Bible is full of events which appear to be the working of magic - that neat trick with the loaves and the fishes, raising someone from the dead, water into wine, transubstantiation and of course the time Jesus escaped from a water filled tank in under two minutes. Oh, I think Yvonne is going to have something to say on this...

Tibetans for Tigers

The Dalai Lama has called on Tibetans to stop fuelling the illegal and reprehensible trade in wild animal furs by buying so many of them - huge amounts of leopard, tiger and other animals have been slaughtered in India to supply Tibetans in recent years, pushing them to the edge of extinction, especially the tiger (surely one of the most magnificent animals in the world?).

His words seem to be having some effect with some Tibetan burning old skins, but this has lead those nice Chinese people who are 'liberating' Tibet (using the same system Bush used to liberate Iraq: roll in with huge armed forces and install your own puppet regime) apparently getting angry because - get this - burning skins looks like expressing support for the Dalai Lama... Perhaps given the piss-poor record China has on trading in endangered animals (often killing for only one small part of the animal) should give them pause to rethink that.

Then again, if they hadn't invaded another nation and steam-rollered them into their own province they wouldn't have to worry about the Dalai Lama's 'dangerous' messages to his people. Oops, now Google, Microsoft, Yahoo et al will automatically censor this blog from Chinese browsers! Oh no! Still, saves the Chinese despots the trouble of having to censor free speech themselves when giant info corporations will happily do it and lick their ass clean at the same time. Hey, I just thought on a solution to both problems! Feed the heads of these self-censoring companies and the Chinese despots to the remaining wild tigers!

Glasgow Vaudeville

One of my colleagues is taking part in the Vaudeville Cabaret Club this week in sunny Glasgow at Favela, 17 John Street (phone 0141 552 3505 for details). You can go along on Friday 10th and enjoy the cabaret from 9 to 11pm for £7 (with dancing afterwards till 3) or you can have a entire evening starting from 7pm with dinner in a candelit cavern and then the cabaret for £25. Vaudeville bill themselves as "Scotland's premier cabaret night for circus, comedy, burlesque, performance poetry and mind bending experiences of weirdness" which sounds like a good night out to me.

I knew it!

According to the Register beer fights heart disease! I knew it! Taken with the research that shows red wine and strong chocolate have anti-cancer properties I must have an incredibly healthy lifestyle! Hey, Dr Atkins - get it up you, I'm following the beer, wine and chocolate diet. Of course you cannot live just on beer, wine and chocolate; that's why I have single malt whisky too. Well, you need to balance these things.

"We're on a mission from God"

Voters and the media in the UK have been taken aback by Tony Blair's interview on Parkinson this weekend where he basically said all of the deaths of British troops and Iraqi civilians was okay because his good chum God had told him it was fine and since He was the one who would judge Blair it was fine to go an play with George. Electorial officials were somewhat bemused because this God person doesn't seem to actually be a registered voter in the UK and are therefore wondering how he can judge the PM's actions since, traditionally in a democracy, that is the role of the electorate and not the deities of any particular religion...

Can't help but think this perhaps explains a part of the mystery as to why an educated person like Blair would ride into this disasterous war so eagerly with God's other mate, George Dubyah; did they meet at one of their mutal Friend's parties perhaps and hit it off? It would also explain the reports that on Blair's last visit to America he and the president 'borrowed' a police cruiser while wearing black suits, black hats and sunglasses before driving it in the direction of Chicago declaring they were on a mission for God...

RJ Mitchell's baby on its 70th

The superlative Spitfire roared over the south of England today as it did seven decades ago, marking the 70th anniversary of RJ Mitchell's elegant creation. I still remember the movie First of the Few, made during the war so containing a fair bit of propoganda, but still a classic British war movie. Mitchell, knowing his time was limited by his growing cancer, feverishly finishing the design of his masterpiece with the line 'they are going to need it soon' and the touching scene where the test pilot (an impossibly young David Niven) flies her (because all Spits are 'hers') over the dying Mitchell's home to show her in her full glory.

That line may have been inserted as war-time propoganda, but it doesn't change the essential truth of it - the Spitfire was needed. And therein lies the reason why this anniversary was being celebrated - not just because the Spitfire is a design classic, mixing function with a simple elegance, not just because it was probably the best fighter plane of the war but because that distinctive silhouette with the gorgeous, elliptical wings, is built into the British DNA. Despite the fact the redoubtable Hurricane made up most of the RAF's numbers during the Battle of Britain it is the photogenic Spitfire which is imprinted into our collective memories as one of the symbols of British defiance of Nazi tyranny.

There may be multiple layers of mythologising added onto the Spitfire, but it doesn't detract from the fact that it is an image of that 'finest hour' when a desperate free world was shown that a few determined people in a small group of islands could and would stop the seemingly irresistible advance of the Nazi forces marching across the world. For the first time in the history of the world a battle was fought entirely in the air with the Nazi hordes outnumbering the RAF vastly, the British relying on the home ground advantage, the new device called radar and well-designed aircraft to beat back that monstrous evil. And the people who built them and the young men who flew them - as Mitchell himself said, with his customary humility, without a pilot even a Spitfire would just be a piece of metal.

Today when we are embroiled into a moral mess of international conflicts which we struggle to define let alone prosecute the Spitfire reminds us of a time when we faced a far more dangerous foe but a danger far clearer, good against evil; outnumbered and isolated by an enemy who wanted nothing less than world domination, the eradication of freedom and democracy, the crushing of free civilisation and the extermination of anyone seen as diffrent. A clear cut struggle between the hordes of darkness and a small but determined group of good guys who wouldn't let them win. Makes you nostalgiac for a time you never even knew, doesn't it?

Besides, since I was a boy I've always wanted to fly in one. Go on, be truthful - how many guys reading this are thinking just that? Some childhood dreams you never grow out of; I still want to be an astronuat, I still want to see a living dinosaur and I still want to fly in a Spitfire.

Bill Cosby - is he an arse?

Bill Cosby has put his lawyers onto a blogger who did a parody of his show online. The mere fact Cosby has been parodied and lampooned time and time again on the mass media in shows like the Simpsons and Family Guy and never batted an eye just makes it more bizarre that he would try and deny a web creator the same right - parody is fair use and not an infingement of copyright; if it was not then half our comedy shows would cease to exist.

I never got why Cosby was seen as such a comic genius myself - I've listened to his standups which are rambling, desperately unfunny and, to my ears, often incoherent (the man mumbles like a stroke victim half the time, for goodness sake) and his old TV show, beloved by millions, I thought tiresome, predictable and saccharine. But at least, I assumed, he had a sense of humour about himself and how he is perceived since he was so often lampooned on other popular shows and took the knocks. Now, as well as finding him as funny as a deceased halibut in my bed I'm left with the impression that he is an utter wankshaft

Snow day

The weather which has been hammering the north of Scotland came down on Edinburgh today. First thing in the morning it was clear, blue winter skies and sun with the chilly wind straight from the Arctic Circle coming right up the Forth estuary. Then suddenly the sky turned slate and small flakes fluttered gently down; minutes later and it was a heavy blizzard. Alas much of it was gone by the time I finished work but I did manage to snap a few pictures.

Too young

I was quite shocked to see the comedian Linda Smith's obituary by her friend and fellow performer Jeremy Hardy appearing in the Guardian the other day. I've enjoyed Linda's wit enormously on a variety of TV and radio comedies, not leas of which is the evergreen radio show Just A Minute. Only 48 and gone already...

This came hard on the heels of the news of the accident which robbed the literary world of the wonderfully gifted Octavia Butler who died unexpectedly last week after hitting her head in a fall, aged only in her 50s; who knows what books lay unfinished within her? Fortunately we have those she did complete, a small part of her which endures eternally.

World Book Day

I almost didn't realise it was World Book Day today, so a happy WBD to you all. That's WBD, not to be confused with WMD or indeed OMD, who sung about WMDs in Enola Gay, but that's neither here nor there, although it could be at some quantum state in-between. Some colleagues and I posted a short bit on some of our current and recent reading over on the FPI blog (and no, they weren't all SF!) to mark the day. Language must be one of the most remarkable faculties of human beings and the ability to turn that language into a solid object such as a book which can then go off far beyond the person who originated the thoughts, ideas and words within it is both astonishing and endlessly fascinating to me.

Language and thought are so intertwined in the human condition. As Lorien observed in Babylon 5, you cannot have thoughts without a language to construct and express them, but without thought there can be no real language; it is one of those chicken and egg conundrums which could drive you made if you thought about it too much. I was prodded into thinking more about it this week because this month's Book Group meeting on Tuesday was to discuss Samuel R Delany's classic Babel-17, which explores how language is not only used as a tool but can shape thought processes and perceptions.

Its not really surprising since language is a clever system of symbols and metaphor - after all the word tree is not actually a tree, just a word-symbol for a tree - and humans have been using some form of these symbols since the dim, dawn days of our existence. Before we had written words we painted on walls, not just as art but to tell the stories of our world and also to try and use those symbols to not only explain but to shape, partake in and control aspects of that world. Millennia later shamans, magicians and priests would all use the symbols and metaphors of icons and words to the same end; in both magical ritual and much religion the exact form of words is vital to any ceremony for them to have their effect.

To the modern scientist attempting to create a mathematical model of the universe the principle is not so very different; the writer too seeks a form of words which will rise from a page and create the desired effects when another reads them. In the beginning was the Word; thousands of years later that Word would be one of the first books to be mass printed by Mr Gutenberg's new moveable type printing press (the most world-changing invention in human history) and it would alter people's perceptions and thus the world around them.

In the beginning was a dream time and the world was sung into being; today the Abroginal people of Australia still use their remarkable, living paintings upon the rock to tell the tale of their past, their present and keep the songlines clear for the future. Those of us who may never see these first-hand can admire them in printed collections, making this knowledge local and global at the same time.

In the beginning was a bang, a huge outpouring of radiation, particles, fluctuating energies which would give birth to planets and birds and stars: everything. And then much later would come attempts to explain and model this event in languages of words and mathematical symbols, as arcane to most of us as magical symbols are but sharing with them the attempt to understand and ultimately shape reality.

It is all language and the book is one of the finest expressions of that language. Little paper ships of thought sailing an ocean of metaphors, with ideas swimming in the depths like whales, the ships dock in the port of the human mind as the book is passed from person to person. If language is a part of us then books become an extension of us; we should never take them for granted.