Recently I expressed some concern at the look of the new film adaptations of the Earthsea novels by Ursula Le Guin. She’s not a happy bunny either, as she explains at Slate, under the title “Whitewashed: Earthsea How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books“.
Have you got any hardcore? Y’know: Naomi Does Najaf?
No, sir.
Maybe some stuff with, er, children? Like the Pilger one in the paediatrics wards or that Moore one with the kids flying kites?
I’m afraid not.
I bet you like a bit of amateur, though, dontcha? You must have “The Best of After Hours Indymedia: Moonbats by Moonlight“?
Absolutely not. I think, sir you have come to the wrong place. You have, perhaps, confused us with the London Review Bookshop.
Oh. Right. Well, since I’m here, have you got The Corrs versus Destiny’s Child Naked Lookalike Celebrity Deathmatch Mud Wrestling?
Might have.
The uncut snuff version?
It’ll cost you an extra pony.
No problem.
Sorry for the thin posting here lately. I have a lot of music-making and Christmas socializing going on. As if to shame me, a PooterGeeker I’ve never met before read my Amazon wishlist [over there ->], noticed that one of the books on it was no longer available to buy new, and sent me an old copy. Now that‘s what I call service. Thank you.
I long for the day when there is no longer any hiding place for the bastards—instead of a vast system of “international” “law” to shelter their fiefdoms from reason, liberty, mercy, fairness, and universal suffrage. In the meantime, let’s raise a glass to the continued imprisonment of these guys [do you think their “snacks” include pretzels?] and the fresh arrest of this guy. And guess what happened a year ago today? Woohoo!
It was confirmed yesterday that the recent striking changes in the appearance of Tony Blair are indeed the result of poisoning. Sources close to Mr Blair have suggested that the poison may have been administered during a dinner with Prime Minister-elect Gordon Brown at the north London restaurant Granita.
Ringing people from your mobile on public transport to tell them “I’m on the train” is so nineties. Now you email people and tell them “I’m on my mobile”. Thank you, Anthony. I’m on my Linux box. You’re back on the ‘Blogroll.
As if to prove that not everything about post-modernism is bad, I have stumbled upon something that all but defines the term as applied to the arts. I sincerely hope that you have Java on your computer so that you too can experience Pac Mondrian.
[For those of you who haven’t got Java installed you are missing an implementation of the classic arcade game Pacman, played on the surface of Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” to the sounds of old boogie-woogie piano—sounds that mutate according to the state of play. Utterly inspired. Yes, there are powerpills in the maze, but you have to figure out where they are.]
It’s a shame that casualsavant didn’t send me The Metrosexual Guide sooner. The chapter on sex in particular has been a revelation. I understand now, for example, where I went wrong with that Canadian girl who told me she was “really into” Ralph Fiennes:
“Uniforms and situations involving authority figures can be fun, though it’s probably not advisable to show up unexpectedly on your lover’s doorstep dressed as a Nazi.”
I also now appreciate with painfully clear hindsight the book’s warnings against crying afterwards and attempting carpentry before getting dressed again. No, I am not making any of this advice up.
I discovered this week that a man for whom I have immense professional admiration possesses a comb-over of apocalyptic awfulness. It is not so much a hairstyle as a standing test of his subordinates’ loyalty; an oxbow lake of glossy, hypnotising vanity skirting the rear of his polished head as if in mocking apposition to the wisdom stored beneath it. God forbid that I should ever meet him at some point in the future when it has become a still greater monument to his state of denial, and my wilful baldness a mightier affront.
[You can tell that I am only a matter of months from the end of this job of mine—and quite possibly from the end of my sorry excuse for a career.]
On Tuesday, Harry Hutton of “Chase Me Ladies“‘s Killer Fact was that “P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler had the same English teacher.” I suspect my dad might have had the at least two ring leaders of future military coups in different West African states study under him, but it’d take some doing to compete with a register like that.
“Wodehouse?”
“As healthy as a horse, sir!”
“Chandler?”
“Ain’t dead yet, mister!”
Yvette Cooper—who used to live next door to me at Balliol—was responsible for a government campaign to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies. According to the statistics collected, its effect seemed to be to make things ever-so-slightly worse and then ever-so-slightly better. These days there’s a whiff of desperation about the issue. Today I discover via Backword Dave that Stephen Twigg—who was in the year above me at Balliol and remains one of the nicest blokes there is in a nasty business—is the schools minister who launched the anti-bullying campaign whose child supporters themselves became victims of bullying.
Teenage pregnancy and bullying are extraordinarily difficult and deeply embedded problems in this country and I doubt if even the cleverest government initiatives could reduce them much. Setting the media up for conspicuous disappointment stories isn’t good politics though; it makes it harder to persuade people to pay for further attempts. I also suspect that, if Balliol graduates are going to try to re-engineer society for the better (as tradition dictates), it might be useful to encourage them to get real jobs first and meet some ordinary people—that is, not journalists, politicos, or academics. I write this as someone who has spent his life trying to avoid both a real job and real people whenever possible.
Boris bloody Johnson’s one of ours too, and Michael Jackson’s spiritual advisor (no, seriously). Of course Balliol turned down Blair and Clinton, didn’t it…grumble, moan, grunt, mumble… There’s always Hitchens, C to be proud of, I suppose. And these hot chicks.
I had dinner this evening with a nice Filipina post-doc yeast geneticist who, like all of her countrywomen when newly arrived in a location beyond their islands, was carrying something on behalf of another Filipina, in this case a gift from casualsavant for me. Now that I have a copy of The Metrosexual Guide To Style to go with my gay trousers my life is complete. Thank you, Maoser. I will pass on the sticker to She Who Cannot Be Named.
(The title is from the list of celebrity metrosexuals helpfully provided in the book’s introduction.)
Despite my never having posted anything tackling this crucial question, I am top hit on Yahoo search for “how to look cool when going bald”.
Eric The Unread has taken Backword Dave‘s Jedi morality/foreign policy post and run with it. If you are familiar with the Star Wars films you’ll have a good laugh.
A reliable source of cheap laughs here is the sometimes daft electronic media output of the Labour Party machine. I joke about it as only a fully paid up member can. Today, just for a change, I wandered over the the Conservative Party Website to kick the horse while it’s down. It’s so easy I almost felt guilty about it. Mikey‘s face staring at me from next to the throbbing button inviting me to “PLAY” their latest party political broadcast helped put me back in the mood though. (Dontcha just love the “not waving but drowning” photo of him they have chosen to display immediately below the “Michael Howard” title from the link above?)
I’ll get to the message soon, but first A FEW RANTY CAPITALS about the medium. It’s clear that the Tories, like one of the recent hecklers here, have completely missed the point of the Web, as envisioned by its belatedly and embarrassingly over-honoured British inventor Tim Berners-Lee. ANY DOCUMENT SHOULD BE READABLE BY ANYONE WITH ANY WEB BROWSER ON ANY OPERATING SYSTEM ON ANY DEVICE. The World Wide Web Consortium specifies free and open standards. Everyone who puts a page on the Web should follow them. That way everyone who reads stuff on the Web can access it from their mobile phones, via their Braille interfaces, on their personal computer monitor screens, in their telephone kiosks, and on their fridge displays. So what do the Tories do? They put their supposedly punchy and simple policy promises in PDF documents which are orders of magnitude bigger in size than the raw text they contain and require an extra program to be seen. Let me just repeat that again because I was on the Web before you all and, no matter how many times I say it, I never tire of repeating it: ANY DOCUMENT SHOULD BE READABLE BY ANYONE WITH ANY WEB BROWSER ON ANY OPERATING SYSTEM ON ANY DEVICE. THAT IS THE POINT OF THE WEB.
YES, I KNOW I AM SHOUTING, BUT I AM SHOUTING IN UTF-8 SO EVERYONE WITH A STANDARDS-COMPLIANT BROWSER CAN EXPERIENCE THE LOUDNESS OF THESE LETTERS AS IT WAS INTENDED, INCLUDING DEAF AND BLIND PEOPLE AND SENTIENT CARROTS ON THEIR WAY OUT OF THE CHILLER CABINET AND INTO THE STEAMER.
(And yes, I know my own Webpages aren’t one hundred percent standards-compliant, but they are near enough—and a hell of a lot nearer than the Tories’.)
The Conservatives promise “LESS TALK. MORE ACTION”. (Given that the creator of this slogan considers “less talk” to be a sentence, then a semi-colon in the middle of the tagline and a full-stop at the end seems better punctuation to me, but let’s skip that quibble and get to the beef—in a wholly un-Tory kind of way.)
What do the Tories’ bloated PDFs contain? Well, to save you downloading them, here are some of those “action” points in your Web browser (and bugger me if I didn’t have to type them out by hand because they aren’t in standards-compliant HTML). On tax:
The Conservatives will stop Labour’s third term tax rises and give people value for more money by slimming down fat government
That is, they will act by not doing something Labour haven’t done yet. Now I’m as skeptical as the next man about Gordon’s laughing-gas optimistic Pre-Budget Statement forecasts for a bump up in tax income, but hoping people won’t notice the hypothetical nature of the threat of tax rises is pretty feeble stuff. Even more feeble is to resort to the old “we will cut Whitehall bureaucrats” claim. Everyone uses this one when they have absolutely no idea what to do to reduce public spending and daren’t threaten Good Things like nurses. Civil servants are, of course, Bad. Still, despite their public consensus on the Badness of Chartered Diversity Facilitators, politicians in power always find it almost impossible to get rid of any of them.
There’s more inaction to come as we move onto point two (another link, another Adobe Acrobat document), “Action on schools”:
“The Conservatives believe that teachers, not politicians, should run our schools. We will cut teachers’ paperwork, restore discipline in schools and give parents the opportunity to choose the best for their child.”
Now, I’d have thought a solid vote winner would be to have a go at the corduroy-wearing, Guardian-reading, child-centred, educationalist-worshipping 60s throwbacks supposedly indoctrinating our “child” with homosexuality. Suddenly they’re the salvation of our education system. Weren’t parents supposed to be the customers? Isn’t the customer always right?
How are the Tories going to hand the power back to the teachers that all that paperwork was meant to take away from them?
“Within the first day of a Conservative Government, we will set out plans to give head teachers the power to expel disruptive pupils.”
Presumably capitalized because such a concept is Completely Gobsmacking, a “Conservative Government” will “set out plans to“. How’s this for an opening to my next grant application?:
“As soon as I am given a billion pounds by the Medical Research Council I will set out plans to give doctors the power to cure cancer.”
“Action” like that’ll have Colin Blakemore popping down to see me in person to open his cheque book. The bullet points continue to strike: “Within the first week, we will begin to abolish the restrictions…”, “Within the first month, we will include in the Queen’s Speech…”. When are you actually going to do something? Then they have a nerve to slap another “LESS TALK. MORE ACTION” at the bottom of the PDF—with the Conservative Party logo chopped off at the corner. One of the few advantages of a PDF over a Webpage is that it gives you complete control over layout and they somehow use the medium to screw up their own image. Unbelievable.
Under “Action on hospitals”, they’ll be letting “NHS professionals” run them. The customers, the patients, will be given “opportunities to choose”. We’ve heard that one before. The Tories will do this by (taking each bullet point in turn) “abolishing targets…”, “making it possible for people to have access to information about…”, and “publishing legislation to give people the opportunity to…”.
“LESS TALK. MORE ACTION”. The irony is delicious. It’s as though their copywriters are competing to get further and further away from an actual verb that someone with power might be held accountable for by horrified citizens over the weeks after they discover they actually voted the clueless shower in. By the time we get to crime, the Tories are promising that they will “announce plans to prevent police officers having to fill in a form every time they stop someone”. Let’s go through that: they promise that they are going to tell us about how they intend to stop agents of the state from having to tell us about how they stopped other citizens from doing something.
Here’s my new slogan for the Tories. I’ll be announcing it’s availability for download as a nicely formatted PDF from this site very soon after they ask me for my help in their next election campaign, but here’s a plain text preview:
“The Conservatives: We’ve got some policies. Honest. And we’ll tell you about them and how they’ll stop putative Bad Things from being done once you’ve elected us. Very shortly after you’ve elected us in fact.
We mean it.
“Cut”—that’s a verb, isn’t it?
Please tell any blind people you know what we promised as well because they might find this file a bit difficult to read without a proper plug-in for their browser. Thanks.
I know. We’re shit. We’re really, really sorry.”
Even when disagreeing with me, anti-war Backword Dave has always shown commendable respect for the moral basis of my pro-war Leftie stance. Yesterday, however, he cited the words of Yoda, a Muppet no less, in criticizing Tony Blair’s foreign policy. If Tony reads it he’ll probably have to resign.
I am a hypothetical man with an even more hypothetical woman. She doesn’t enjoy having sex with me. Chance that this is because:-
Tomorrow: the chances that a hypothetical man suffers from the emotional dysfunction “commitmentphobia” and the chances that a hypothetical woman can cure him by “accidentally” getting pregnant.
Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I called David Blunkett “Herr Blunkett” last week because I had been having lunch with a German friend who complimented the British on their relatively relaxed attitude to rules. No one has done so yet, but there’s no need to invoke Godwin’s law. I don’t admire Blunkett’s fondness for new legislation, but I certainly wouldn’t be pleased to see him go in the unlikely event that his affair brings him down.
I have a nice handbuilt touring bike. When I bought it nearly ten years ago with a tax rebate, I paid more for it (even in absolute cash terms) than the car I now drive. Unlike my car, it has probably paid for itself, mainly by getting me around London for several years, when I lived in The Smoke. I still can’t believe that I used to ride that thing flat-out through the pre-Livingstone capital and that I remain in possession all of my limbs. Bicycles either take fifty years off your life in an accident or put five on by conditioning your heart and lungs. I don’t ride it much now and have let it fall into a terrible state. Puzzlingly, I still seem to have the quads of a small horse and ugly knees to match.
This morning I had an important letter to collect from the sorting office (a letter the postman had actually tried and failed to deliver while I was in yesterday). I decided, grudgingly, not to go to the sorting office early, but to stick to my usual exercise routine, jump on my bike and cycle over there, to arrive just before they close the doors, then go on a bicycle tour with the letter in safely my rucksack.
I arrived over ten minutes before the sorting office was advertised to close, but three minutes after they had decided to lock the entry gates (a new policy) and was turned away. (A twentysomething girl who arrived after me was in the process of fluttering her way past the leery blokes manning the gate in as I gave up pleading and left.) As I got back onto my bike to return home I found I had a flat. The valve on my inner tube was buggered and there was nothing I could do with my pliers to fix it. In my rigid-soled cycling shoes I walked like a duck to the nearest cycle shop, which (three weeks before Christmas) couldn’t help me because it was staffed by one man. At the next cycle shop they agreed to replace the tube.
When I returned, no longer dressed head-to-toe in spray-on lycra, but wearing a cardigan and jeans, I couldn’t get the man behind the counter to give me my bike back. He didn’t recognize me.
Science fiction nerds might remember Umpty Candy, the confection that tasted so good its sale had to be prohibited and inventor blasted into space where the secret recipe inside his head could no longer be accessed. You probably know that I cannot speak of “organic” foods or “Fairtrade” products without a pair of sneer quotes to hand, but Green & Black’s milk chocolate is the ichneumon larva to my natural theology, the Lithia to my Catholic dogma. The many (women) who complain that I can work away at my computer with a small bar of chocolate at my elbow, its wrapper unmoved, the contents half-eaten for days at last know revenge. This is my Umpty Candy.
Do you think any of these Arab writers stand a chance of getting a regular gig at The Guardian? [Thanks to Judith.]
Like Herr Blunkett, I have had access to one of Her Britannic Majesty’s rail warrant thingies—in my case for going about the country on Medical Research Council business. If I’d known I could use it to send my girlfriend first class, I’d, er, have got myself a girlfriend. I would so. I could have one any time.
Do you think they need a tea boy at The Spectator?
I suspect that, “beta” release or not, I am late to the wonderfully odd resource that is NNDB. If you have not already been there yourself I must warn you now that, if you follow the link, you may be some time.
“NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a “Who’s Who” where a noted person’s curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts.)
“But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person’s otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been hanging out with.”
So, for example, you can marvel at the people who Madonna has slept with, dated, or married; you can pity the woman whose main claim to fame is that she has been on the arms of O. J. Simpson, Michael Bolton, and Dolph Lundgren; and you can note that Paula Yates wrote Rock Stars In Their Underpants. You can discover that Michael Powell, Colin Powell’s son, is Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; confirm that Robert Baden-Powell was likely so suspicious of wanking because he was busy being bisexual; and marvel that Colin Firth‘s grandparents were Christian missionaries to India and that he spent four of his childhood years in Nigeria.
[Unfortunately, I can’t explain what’s amusing about all of the site’s content being “copyright Soylent Communications” without giving away the plot of a famous movie, but those who know will smile smugly.]
Gosh! Wow! According to the Beeb, women eighty years ago were writing diaries similar to Bridget’s! It’s like they were ahead of their time! Or, or…
Cool. [via Slashdot]
If you can get hold of a copy of today’s International Herald Tribune there is a superb and surprisingly beautiful front page photograph illustrating an item about the pink locusts in the Canaries. It was taken by Carlos Guevara for Reuters.
Here’s a special lunchtime bonus.
It’s been said before that big studios often release the same story two or three times within a couple of years: Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, Armageddon and Deep Impact, The Others and The Sixth Sense. Over at Apple’s trailers site, the latest Hollywood obsession seems to be women dealing with the disappearance or reappearance of lovers, husbands and/or children. Trailers for Birth, P.S., and The Forgotten are all showing simultaneously.
In a similar way, someone wants to cash in on Rings-mania by attempting to make a TV movie based on Le Guin. I’ve hardly opened a Tolkien, but I read and re-read books in the Earthsea Quartet as a child, seduced by them, despite barely understanding them. You could argue that the Earthsea books are more about psychology and culture than magic, but the stills of the film version look worryingly low-budget.
Last week me and Sparky Andy were giving Leasey a hard time about her taste in cinematic men, forbidding her, on behalf of all straight males, from finding Patrick Swayze attractive. Below, connoisseurs of the finest in Anglo manhood (of all sexes and persuasions) can browse the PooterGeek gallery of frontrunners in the race to be Bond, James Bond, now that the bookies seemed to have closed betting on the race. Follow all the links in the list, Leasey, for a lesson in bathos:
I am not at liberty to reveal who has been chosen for the role, but let’s just say that many will regret overlooking the dark horse on the right of this photograph.
Losing candidate Colin Farrell has been the subject of much mockery lately. I can’t watch any trailers for the disastrously received Alexander without laughing at the terrible, terrible hair they have given him. (Terrible hair, incidentally, is one of the reasons why you ladeez are not permitted to find Patrick Swayze—or Kevin Costner, or Wesley Snipes—appealing.) Alexander is one of those movies that film reviewers not-so-secretly relish: it’s so bad they can finally deploy put-downs they have been saving for months. I enjoyed this quote from the New York Times review (via Judith) about Angelina Jolie’s performance as Olympias:
“As the young marauder kills and enslaves peoples from Egypt to India, Mr. Stone repeatedly returns us to Olympias, snakes coiling around her body and chastising her absent son in a bewildering accent, part Yiddishe Mama, part Natasha of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” fame: “You don’t write, you don’t call, why don’t you settle down with a nice Macedonian girl?” or words to that effect. Rarely since Joan Crawford rampaged through the B-movie sunset of her career has a female performer achieved such camp distinction.”
but the following, from the review in the mighty East Valley Tribune is my favourite to date:
“Not content to direct a mediocre historical epic, filmmaker Oliver Stone marshals all of his talent as a provocateur to direct a colossally bad one in “Alexander,” starring Irishman Colin Farrell as the legendary Macedonian warlord.”
“It’s a shame, too, because mediocrity is so tantalizingly within the director’s reach.”
(And another thing: I have listened to confused patrons have the 50 First Dates/51st State disambiguation discussion in my local video shop three times now. It’s getting boring.)
Bugger. I have no problem with picking up a copy of Playboy or Penthouse from the newsagent’s, but Good Housekeeping? I could always hide it between the pages of the latest Asian Babes.
Recent Comments