Binned Pages and Ink Stains

Twitter says this is totally a thing: the You Are The Reason hashtag

2012-01-31T23:04:00.000Z

So, Twitter says this is totally a thing- a very popular trending hashtag, You Are The Reason... (insert banal experiences here). And in keeping with the custom now of pouring out any fleeting thought or opinion, no matter how private, people have been pouring all and any into the toilet of human condition. I think the idea of this particular hashtag is that it lets people vent publicly, or pour out their hearts to certain people, or act as a sort of confessional. The problem being that as a confessional it's about as leak proof as using a colander for a submarine; the sentiment to others, while genuinely nice, probably means bugger all to anyone else so such a public airing seems weird; and in getting vocal about the things that really grind your gears online, especially in such a concise manner as 140 characters, things might get lost in translation and you'll unwittingly or wittingly come across as someone you're not.

As Mr Charlie Brooker so brilliantly put it in a recent CiF piece for The Guardian this week, "Online, you play at being yourself". You might be a grumpy person in real life, like I am. That might extrapolate as the only feature of personality through comments online, as it sometimes does for me. At the same time, wildly exaggerated comedy anger vented through this hashtag might be picked up on as hilarious or banal, when you're neither or both in small parts.

And yes, I understand the irony/ hypocrisy of passing any comment on an online occurance by creating a larger version of those tip-tap-typings that inspire such resignation and grumpiness. But it's my blog, so I'll do what the hell I want. It isn't that I abhore change. I just want the things that people talk about, whichever way they choose to do so, to have quality, be necessary and interesting enough to abide. The same qualities I expect from people's conversation- people can be exceptionally verbose about naff all. And I'm right, so there.

So here's to you, internet- #youarethereason I despair that perhaps twenty years down the line we won't speak to each other any more, just laugh, chuckle, sigh, smile knowingly, all in relation to the ridiculous if prolific spoutings we pin to the world's biggest, most dog-foul rooted lamppost and expect anyone to care about.

Graphic Novel Review- Catwoman: Crime Pays

2012-01-25T11:00:00.028Z

Sticking with the powerhouses, this week we're with DC, and a graphic novel collected from Catwoman issues from a few years ago- Catwoman: Crime Pays, written by Will Pfeifer, pencilled by David and Alvaro Lopez, and coloured by Jeromy Cox.

Selina Kyle's having a bad day. She's shipped her daughter off, with the help of a mystery financial backer (guess who, he has a mansion and Bat-everything), to stay out of harm's way. Then her flat blew up, and she escaped half-Catwoman-ified, half barefoot, maskless, terrified. To make matters worse, whoever it is knows about her enough to take the back-up suit and mask stored in a place she told no-one about. She's tried to be a mum, to balance who she is, and in the opening pages all of this has happened, leading her to cut her hair short and take her counterpart's suit. She's back, and angry.

What follows is a cracking little story, which doesn't fall into any of the massive cliché ravines as it weaves its way across the precipice of being interesting. The idea that Catwoman has 'come out of retirement' doesn't feel tired as she wasn't really inactive, just acting differently (being all goody-goody, which has never been part of the character's appeal- quite the opposite, she's known for and respected for always being a grey area). The hunting down different people who know tiny bits of information in order to assess what's going on doesn't, even though it should, feel like a storyline comics readers and cinema-goers have seen a million times before, even though they have. And it's all backed up by brilliantly drawn and coloured panels, made use of in telling the story visually with a lot of detail and the right detail shown to the reader.

Somewhat rarely for a comic series, with this collection (volume eight of the current continuity run, I belief) at the heart of it is character rather than adventure. Instead of the fanboy-fap material of filling a whiteboard with character names, a vs sign and then bending the 'story' improbably to fit, all the way through Crime Pays (and, as it's the same chief writers and certain bits of important plot have already happened, I would think all the way through the current run) what happens to Selina Kyle/ Catwoman dictates what happens next. It isn't just an endless string of 'battle to battle, finish up with a boss'.

One of the core aspects to Catwoman in this volume is the acceptance of and begrudging attitude towards the fact that she is always playing second fiddle to the character whose series she came from, namely Batman. Not perhaps in as meta- a way as that, but the fact the Bruce Wayne/ Batman has to help her out so much, with her daughter and crime-fighting/ solving/ committing, is a sticking point for the independent woman Kyle. And quite right too, as she was initially just another colourful character created to fill the void of villains to go against the Caped Crusader, but has become such a popular character she's synonymous with the series, and in-story having a Wayne-shaped safety net that the writer can deploy every time Kyle gets too cocky or trapped or in real trouble takes away a lot of tension.

Which is solved here, as Catwoman is very much on her own and Batman, when he features two thirds through, isn't what he seems.

The rogues gallery middle- and back-pages get a look in, and the traditional coupling of Lex Luthor and Superman falls by the wayside as Kyle ends up being his anti-hero companion. It feels, remarkably for such a huge and revised universe, nice and almost fresh. The take on dopplegangers and alternate realities has a nice reveal as not quite what you'd expect from the company who have Infinite Earths to play with, just in case they need a world where the Batsuit doesn't have bat-ears or to have Cat-man.

Above all, the fact that Catwoman is not a superhuman, superhero or even really a vigilante constantly on the white side to the black occupied by Harley, Tigress et al really shows through, with the more emotional needs and deeper character securities and insecurities powering the story. And when the reveal comes, the world she's been on makes a lot of sense and teaches us that perhaps not all cats have the imperial confidence you'd think.

Twitter says this is totally a thing: Zombie Poetry

2012-01-23T16:00:00.072Z

Okay, so, Twitter says this is totally a thing- Zombie poetry. It was trending on the social networking site and one of the publishers I follow- I forget which, but I think it might have been Random House- was asking for suggestions of famous poems re-hashed for the zombie age. Which got me thinking, after firing off a couple of tweets in reply with off the cuff couplets. So.

Here are my first two offerings to the great altar of undead verse, not originals, but re-workings in the vein of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and Sense & Sensibilities & Sea Monsters- Be glad your nose is on your face, adapted from the Jack Prelutsky poem of the same name, and Oh, Zombie on a dais, a riff on Shelley's Ozymandias. Feel free to read them, rip them apart with a couple of chainsaws strapped to a canoe paddle, and throw the offal-shaped criticism and opinion my way. Ta.

Oh, Zombie on a dais

I met a traveller from a city of war,
haunted by "two grey and lifeless legs of bone
and flesh standing guard. And on the floor,
half hid, a rotted head had rolled, whose smile
and lidded eyes revealed the beast it had been.
Frayed rope still round its neck from where it hung
as sentry, warning of horrors unforeseen
in the corpse-ridden, colossal urban wreck.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'I am a zombie on a dais,
look on my kind, ye living, and despair!'
Nothing moves for miles. Then, inside the haze
of smoke and fog, a roar. From what? And where?
Any man would have run, as I did, here."

Be glad your nose is on your face

Be glad your nose is on your face
not in some others' chewing place,
for if it were in such a maw
soon you would shout an undead roar.

Imagine being bit on it
or nipped upon the toe,
it matters not how small the bite,
it would still be a source of woe.

Your nose would be a source of dread,
were it to spray out drops of red
or black, and should your hair
begin to shed, then just despair.

A bite or sneeze can pass it on.
You'd feel quite ill, but not for long.
Quite soon you would just slip away-
what comes back then joins the free range buffet.

Your features should, through rain or shine,
be flawless, un-torn, all the time.
Don't rest, keep watch, don't even doze-
You'll die if they just nip your nose.

Passing Comment- 'Corrie' complainers to feel the back of my hand

2012-01-18T21:18:00.001Z

I would like to say that I have a lot to say about this issue, and that my first reaction to the story that cropped up on my Yahoo! news feed was eloquent, succinct and profound. Unfortunately I can't say that as it isn't true- reading the story, my first reaction was "Oh, fuck off!"

Before we go any further, for anyone who missed the soap's Monday night episode or (like me) doesn't watch Coronation Street, this is what is causing such kerfuffle. A single soap-star slap on a ten-year-old character's legs in retribution for killing the pet fish.

Heaven forfend that any teeny bit of discipline can be shown on TV now. When people are being arrested for smacking their children to tell them off, and charities are getting up in arms about every little thing- see the recent, ridiculous ridiculous leprosy-gate Aardman has had to put up with.

Without getting into this whole 'offence culture' that authorities have bred, as so many people this week have commented on that already, I will say this. How is it that we're able to be offended at anything and everything now, and can complain that something has set off our sensitivities therefore it is abhorrent and the very definition of bad, and get away with being such a pain in the side of anyone who is writing, making, saying, singing, drawing or believing anything? If these jumped up tell-tales and trolls got a good clout once in a while, and we were allowed to do it now so that parents wouldn't be scared of clipping a kid in public and therefore these people had seen it as commonplace, maybe they'd get out from their entrenched position, leave the artillery unmanned and actually do something themselves instead of complaining about everything anyone else does.

One reason we've got so many lippy kids and ASBO-bearing, truant troopers is that no one is or has given them a light licking to enforce discipline. I'm not talking beatings, bamboo in the fingernails, thumbscrews and the like, but a whack on the backside ten years ago could have stopped the eight-foot chav squaring off against the policeman in every town in the UK. Or the masses from having a go at anything, the media making that in itself a newsworthy event, and the ridiculously misnamed 'authorities' just bending and folding on everything because people have said so. Just a thought.

Graphic Novel Review- Iron Man: Demon in a Bottle.

2012-01-18T11:00:00.047Z

This week, to get back into the Marvel powerhouse and take a look at a storyline the internet and fans alike seem to agree has to be read if you're a fan, we're looking at Iron Man: Demon In A Bottle, written by David Michelinie and Bob Layton, pencilled by John Romita Jr with Carmine Infantino.

It's not a bad story, establishing Stark as a businessman worried about his company and his private life as an Avenger and hero, but the fact that it's not a bad story doesn't really weigh against everything else. The three-pronged threats of alcohol, Justin Hammer and stock sales for a controlling share in the company all feel a little lacklustre, and could perhaps have been made more of on their own rather than in conjunction.

I'll be honest, and hard-line purists out there won't take kindly to this, but Demon In A Bottle's artwork is a bit too seventies for my liking. The flares, Stark's fashionable pencil 'tache, the lurid colours- it's the exact same problem I had with Frank Miller's rebellious mutants in The Dark Knight Returns, but this time around it's with everybody. It hasn't aged well, in my mind at least, but that may be because I am one of these 'fake fans' who were introduced to the genre through films and cartoons of the characters before getting into comics and graphic novels in a big way. Either way, the seventies sheen sort of takes me out of it as a reader because it's so unfamiliar, which seems an odd thing to say when it's a story about an alcoholic billionaire with an invincible suit of power-armour, but there you are.

In fact, even the dialogue and storytelling felt a little shallow. It's a bit too pacy and dips in and out a bit too much to really be a great graphic novel in my mind, but there's the rub- it's a collections of issues, not a one-shot, and each episode from separate issues has a distinct silver-age feel, despite being released at the very end of that era. The covers are very pop-art, grab-your-attention affairs, the kind that you hear in your head being read in a 50's American radio announcer's voice, and always have to end on a cliffhanger. "Tune in next week to see how, if the man of wonder will survive!"

And having been written in a different era, before the darker landmark comics signalled a turn at the end of the eighties and through the nineties, the issues of a womanising alcoholic are perhaps less realistically portrayed. But the balls to even go there, to show Stark as at once invincible and fallible, make it a great story even if the method of telling the story is a bit too spasmodic and quickly resolved in largely unseen fashion.

The attempts to make Iron Man a sort of Marvel Batman equivalent, with polar characteristics in one man, doesn't really gel- Stark, who I always find much better off in the modern manner of never making any bones about the fact that he is Iron Man, doesn't really work for me being so flamboyant and bombastic while hiding, in such a poor fashion that it's alarming no one has worked it out, his secret identity.

While everyone seems to rave about it as a must-read graphic novel, Demon In A Bottle left me feeling a bit cold. Used to gigantic crossover crisis points such as Civil War, where reading the main release only gives half the story, I expected something a bit less flimsy in terms of plot. All that said though, and even with the art work and dialogue all conspiring to create a silver-age emulation as gaudy as they come, the balls to take an "all-American hero!" and even attempt to flesh out serious flaws in him is inspired, and inspiring. Written at the beginning of the turn for comics, from the light and fluffy heroes saving the day week in, week out to the brooding and nuanced emerging characters from both Marvel and DC, you could say it's among the few that gave us the darker popularity the genre enjoys today. And without it's seed of character diversity being planted, I'm pretty sure Iron Man and Tony Stark would not be the characters they are now.

Passing Comment- Antony Worzel Thompson-gate

2012-01-11T21:21:00.002Z

Or how the dwarfs delved too greedily, and too deep.

Here's Television chef Mr Worrell Thompson.

He caused kerfuffle over Christmas by shoplifting goods from his local Tesco with the ingenious plan of not swiping them at the self-service machines. He then released an apology, saying- "I am not the first, and I certainly won't be the last person to do something without rhyme or reason". According to the Metro he said "'I've been racking my brains to think why on earth did I do it and what was going through my mind at the time, but I just don't know.'"

He doesn't know- to the point that he also said "“I’ve got to face up to it and that means seeking help – psychiatric help.”"

Well I do. Because he could. If you can, why not?

I say this as a man who had a similar situation. Scanning bits and bobs for a BBQ last summer, I had to ask a staff member five times to confirm that each item had been scanned as the machine decided not to play along. The girl in question, who clearly didn't want to be there shepherding the brainless towards screens that took her job and don't do it well at all (and why should she) saw me look in askance on occasion six and came over. She swiped her gizmo, turned and said "just the one, is it?" referring to the item in my hand. After the stress of using the machine, I forgot the other two of said item already in the bag. The woe of those machines every time I went in, I figured I was owed those two free minuscule items. We'd all do it.

Problem is, wine and cheese? He's gotten away with it a few times and aimed too high With me, it was a lucky break on one day. Mr WT made it a habit to go after, and it went wrong.

Short answer, Mr WT- you did it because you could. There's no great mystery here- stop the media questioning, the media judgement and the shrink you're looking for. Read this- I've just saved you the thousands you'd have spent on a couch looking for an answer that isn't there.

Here's the Metro's take on the statement, and here's
BBC's.

Graphic Novel Review- Sandman Vol.4 Season of Mists

2012-01-11T12:11:00.062Z

Sticking with Vertigo this week, to give the Marvel and DC powerhouses a rest, and again because Stevenage Library has a shockingly poor selection in its graphic novel ~~section~~ shelf. Not to say the odd gem isn't there- it just means that dipping in and out of series, normally habit of mine, is now enforced, and I have to start in the middle with most things. As I have here, with Volume 4 of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series, Season of Mists. I picked it up with a little trepidation and annoyed that I couldn't start with the other three, but it is a great largely self-contained volume so I needn't have worried.

My sole exposure to The Sandman has been people continuously pointing out ho much some rather half-formed ideas and short stories I worked on at university held similarity to it, something I resented at the time, firstly as I had never read the series and despite or because of saying as much people didn't seem to believe I wasn't plagiarising and secondly because I knew enough people were saying it for it to be true and to have completely ruined any chance of what I was writing standing up to comparison. I wasn't wrong, and neither were they.

At the start of Vol.4, Season of Mists, Gaiman has the character of Destiny call a family meeting of his brothers and sisters, all deified concepts and abstracts with their own vastly distinguishable personalities, each a guide and presence in mortals' lives, and each master of their own ethereal plane as a realm or domain. The basic idea is that all ideologies, deities and abstracts exist as their own beings and can interact, love, fight and build among each other above and beyond and outside mortal worlds. Above all of these are the 'family' around which Gaiman writes the series, the Endless, an alliterative brood of Destiny, Death, Desire, Dream, Despair, Delirium and Destruction (who has absented himself for some reason in a previous volume- the issue with not having read the series is apparent here but not really elsewhere). These are the characters who gather at the beginning after the Fates, the Grey Women from Greco-Roman mythology, appear to Destiny and warn him that 'a king will forsake his kingdom, life and death will clash and fray'.

They talk, and fight, and Dream decides to return to Hell where he has banished a woman he loved, as she spurned him. Again, not having read the previous volumes, I just had to roll with it but these are the only two things I didn't follow. Anyway, he's gone to the Hell, via the Fates indication to Destiny and Destiny's arrangement of a family meeting that must come to pass, having traced time and what must happen in his book, a tome embodying everything that is destined. It's all a bit complicated, ethereal omnipotence, flitting between planes, that sort of thing, but if it's your cup of tea (as it is mine) then you'll be glugging it down. It's very easy to follow from panel to panel, and Gaiman is a master of weaving recycled and reclaimed characters from the old alongside and around his own creations.

The story moves to Hell,to the mortal plane, to Dream land, where Morphues, lord of Dream, has to make a judgement over who to give great power to (I won't spoil what it is, as the concept and baton he has to unwillingly accept and pass on is a corker). This is where the meshing of his worlds and the ancient and existing ethereal netherworlds and spiritual planes comes into its own for Gaiman. Dream holds a feast attended by envoys from all worlds who want the power he must grant- Norse gods from Asgard,the Egyptian gods, God's angels, fairies, a contingent of demons, a Buddhist offshoot with a cardboard box deity the Lord of Order, every and any conceivable figure in lore, parable or religion. The depictions of Thor, Odin and Loki are particular highlights, so different to the Marvel versions many know, and so much closer to the root myths of trickster and brainless brawn, and the takes on devilry and angels, their roles and their regrets, is incredible.

The characters of demons, humans and angels are all thoroughly thrown into relief by this volume. Questioning what we are, what it is to be guilty and belong in Hell, and what it is to rule Hell as though a demon and guilt-ridden monster, everything is questioned. New ways of looking at the figures of order and chaos, God and the Devil, as influences or names or figures to attempt to emulate but never be directed by, never have the hand forced by, is a fresh take on an exceedingly old polar adversary arrangement. While it's not a reworking but rather a new look at the people behind such constant figures, it does show one thing- that the Endless Gaiman writes are the few constants that we have, and the anything else is just interpretation, image, retelling. The introduction to the volume by Harlan Ellison, while largely dry and boring, holds one line I really think sums up the story in Season of Mists- that what we read from Gaiman is 'new, is of consequence, and isn't as transitory [...] as most of what is done day-in-day-out in comics'. There's a real meaty story here, and it shows.

At every turn the distinctive art work more than backs up the words and the story, each locale and character distinctively pencilled and coloured, and the realms of Hell, Dream and the mortal world about as different as they could be.

Season of Mists has lit a fire in me for better storytelling in the comics I read rather that the week by week further adventures of heroes sixty years old, doing the same thing still. To this point I will definitely, when I've got some money together or the library have an injection of issues, be finding out what happens next and what happens before. Because if you can see the whole story whenever you want, who says you have to see it in the 'right' order? But I will undoubtedly be seeing all of it, and soon. You'd all do a lot worse than having a look too.

Back with a vengeance

2012-01-09T21:28:00.000Z

This post's title refers to two things- the first is the activity of this blog, which as Gandalf Greyhame might say on entering unto it, "is somewhat lessened of late"; the second is the all-consuming, omniscient latching-on capabilities of Hell's Eyeballs, formally known as Facebook. Recent developments, changes and releases have changed the site. As users for many years, the vast majority of us shouldn't be and probably aren't alarmed or even surprised that these changes have taken effect. And why should we be? The site has been undergoing unannounced changes since it's popularity made it what it is, and it's not as if the Timeline feature wasn't announced. But should we worry? It's now possible, for the first time ever, to stalk people more effectively than ever before.

If you want to know anything about that girl you've watched from behind your cubicle partition in the office, that man who's always been cooler than you to the point where you've not plucked up the courage to be his mate or your current/ex- girlfriend/boss depending on where your intimacy boundaries lie in the workplace, you can.

Introducing new Timeline, the all-new system from Facebook!

Want to uncover the appalling turn of phrase which can be interpreted as racist if the sarcasm is ignored because it's typed, uttered by your squeeze in May '08? You can!

Need to remind yourself of that photo? Just scroll on down to August '07 and see it in full dual-glory until we sort out the kinks that mean it shows up side by side, on in each column.

Want to get the inside scoop on friends and acquaintances from school and uni that had until now been unreachable and, because the all-seeing site hadn't presented many facts about them to you personally, boring? Go ahead, pick up the scoop and haul it through the ice-cream of their life at will, dragging backwards in time to find globules of cherry sauce, fragments of pure ice, air pockets and temporarily straying into the carrot cake mentality!

All because of Timeline, the handy little stalker-encouragement and heavy-breather-training system courtesy of Facebook! Need to brief a government agent on someone? Check the target's timeline. Want surveillance of a suspected cheating cad's movements? Check their timeline. Want to know when they wiped their arse with the greaseproof paper on a roll which that restuarant flaunts in it's loos as a violation of human rights three years, four months and eight days ago? Check their god-damned timeline.

Now I'm not really one to halt change, I tend to begrudgingly accept it after a while or greet it with excitement intense enough to make people doubt if I'm clean. But do we need a record of everything anyone does to be so immaculate, so complete and accessible? This vertical scrolling record of existence can only end badly if the concept reaches it's natural, progressive conclusion. Facebook's power over us, perhaps forgotten in recent times (particularly the last year and a half, with the more sinister Google Street View, etc being in the spotlight) has returned ten-fold, with the revelation that when they said they were keeping everything on us, every wayward slip of the tongue or rough photo of dodgy facial expressions the afternoon after the weekend a week before, they had actually kept it all and were about to wheel it out, to the point where we had joined THE COLLECTIVE, or before that if you counted that it gave you the information fed into it, along with the silhouette of an extremely cold or Na'vi baby to note the event, the sole event in the internet's eyes that is worth remembering from before any use of the Book of Faces.

I don't want such a permanent record of my life to be so publicly available, on a purely personal note. Plus, I don't want everyone else's activity to be so readily at hand to be laid bare to me on a whim. That's how the internet is built- let any resistance down for a second and you're hooked. For a person as curious and with as varied a strength of self-control as me, it's a slippery slope between checking up on a good friend and tracing, through some wayward comment on said mutual friend's photo or wall, an acquaintance's actions, dating, party attendance and successive driving test failures for the whole of last year. If you get pulled into one of these stints, as I did the other day killing time on other people's public diaries of meaninglessness, ~~once you get out~~ if you get out you feel slightly guilty, subversive, perverse. No one should have all of that information so ready to judge, live vicariously through, plant jealousy in your heart or be invaded by nosy people who want to read conversations with a third party they've never met.

It's like watching one cat video on YouTube and by a single degree of separation being shown Socks' or Whiskers' entire mouse-raiding, private-bit-licking existence. Here's a thought, though. For a website with so many walls, I've never known anything to so completely and blatantly laugh at and remove boundaries to the point where we accept it as much as Facebook has, does, and will do to a greater extent in future.

Failure to lunch

2011-12-01T08:58:00.000Z

Basically, November has been an unmitigated disaster. In the sense that nothing spectacular has happened, and the huge goals set for the month (complete a draft of a 50,000 word novel for NaNoWriMo, grow an exemplary moustache raising loads of Moula for charity, get closer to a solid plan set for the 'top secret I've told everyone I'd love to do it' Route 66 bike dream) have all passed me by in an unnassuming and mediocre fashion. I've fallen into the middle ground of unexciting but bearable and pretty easy life, being mediocre and happy to let that happen. I've raised £26 for Movember. Reached just over 35,000 words for NaNoWriMo. And put together lists, sorted budgets and planned dates by which certain things have to have happened for the trip next year. But they're all just 'alright' things. There's been no huge leap forward or giant, spectacular event to really get them going. Why? Life.

I've been busy. Busy to the point where reading, writing, going in and out of work on extended hours to get as much money as possible and also trying to keep fit, healthy, play my instruments once a week and keep up with TV are impossible to combine with sleeping and eating. I haven't even kept up the commitment I made of blogging more regularly, especially about the efforts of the month. It's easier, when you're on the dole, to do five to seven posts a week, I suppose. And to keep up with eating regularly (hence, after a lunch hour spent in town, this post title).

Anyway, I have read a few books this month, and I reached a bit the other day in Engleby by Sebastian Faulks where the protagonist returns to writing the diary we're reading after some time. It summed up the first month and a bit of working full time with other things I was desperate to keep going perfectly.

'Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals". Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived. Although people complain of it- another year gone, where did that year go?- tacitly, they're proud. Otherwise they wouldn't do it: you put your time where your priority is.
Suppose, though, you're not sure that what you're doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you stumbled into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It's easy, it pays quite well. But really it's a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing.
[...] This "busy" thing isn't a commitment, it's an evasion.'

My Movember Diary (Or 'It's not just dirt above my lip honest')- Day 7

2011-11-08T22:22:00.000Z

Day 7

The "Is-that-even-hair?" face

Okay, so the idea of a day to day photo diary of my Mo journey was well and truly shot down when, on days two through to five there was very little change in the smooth surface of my face. So it'll be coming a week at a time.

I haven't put a photo on my actual MoBro page yet- so unworthy a 'tache it is. And I've raised a grand total of £0 so far, as many people at work have mentioned ( and I agree with this idea) that money will come my way when a)they get paid and b) there is something mighty enough on my face to be seen. So stay tuned for next week, when it'll be properly visible.

Donate here- http://uk.movember.com/mospace/1901064/

Our engineers are working hard to resolve this problem...

2011-11-06T23:41:00.002Z

Hello again, all. Due to a recent increase in my daytime activities thanks to gainful communicative effort in a society of business and the commencement of involvement in a national social event there will be no Sunday Evening Read review on this day.

Basically, I've been buggered for time trying to up my wordcount for NaNoWriMo this weekend after work. So I haven't managed a book review. Don't worry, I've already got the book in mind, read and re-read it recently and have plenty to say, so it will be up next Sunday. Here's a hint- it's horror, written by a modern author, and involves the Moon somewhere in its title.

In the next seven days I promise I'll have it written up and scheduled. In the meantime, happy November! If we all wish it enough, it might finally start getting frosty and cold 'dahn sahf' like this time of year should be.

We apologise for this interruption...

2011-11-02T20:10:00.000Z

There will be no Graphic Novel Review today. In between the determined concentration behind trying to force hair out of my face so I don't look like a fraud for Movember, the flurry of words, keys and pen against paper that is NaNoWriMo, and a few other things, I haven't had time to finish reading Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists.

So, I'll get to reading it in the few moments I have free now, and normal service will be resumed next week with a review of it. It might be worth a wait, I couldn't say just yet

In a messed-up wo-o-orld...

2011-11-02T00:15:00.001Z

Hi everyone, cheers for popping by- this is a second quick update between the pub, NaNoWriMo and sleep, but I feel it's important to post because it's pretty disgusting yet phenomenal that people would go as far as to do such a thing.

I direct you to this link here, featuring real life Barbie Feet.

I don't want to go into the why's and wherefores, the contexts and containing features, the reality and the "what if?"s and the wonderings. I'll just spread word, via io9, via this link, of the horrifyingly real pedicural, perambulatory problems being pushed on owners of feet everywhere. They might not exist yet, but when they do...

Support this as & when you can- http://mobro.co/ChrisHousden

Tolkien didn't just write- he drew, too

2011-11-02T00:00:00.000Z

Hi everyone, cheers for popping by- this is a quick update between the pub, NaNoWriMo and sleep, but I feel it's important to post because it's pretty cool. Like Tolkien, and the histories he wrote? Take a looksie...

Never seen original concepts of the Lonely Mountain before?

It includes loads of great artwork you'd never see anywhere else, unless you paid phenomenal amount for books with artwork. Surely worth a look?

My Movember Diary (Or 'It's not just dirt above my lip honest')- Day 1

2011-11-01T18:32:00.000Z

Day 1- Bare-faced

Shaved it all off and I'm now clean shaven, a blank canvas upon which to grow a masterpiece.

Donate here- http://mobro.co/ChrisHousden

The November Experiment- see you on the other side

2011-11-01T00:33:00.000Z

So I graduated a few months ago, I've got around to the pay-off of weeks of soul destroying job hunting and a naff unpaid placement in the form of a pretty sweet job, and I'm starting to plan properly a trip somewhere abroad which I've had in mind for ages to take place next year.

Things are looking up and up. And tonight sees the end of October. It heralds the beginning of November. A month in which two organised, month-long events are held which I have, in the past, ignored or shied away from as taking up too much time or being "not for me". Well, no more. As of tomorrow I'm correcting the imbalance of writing I've been doing by embarking on NaNoWriMo.

I'm also shaving my beard and 'tache off, for the reason of getting a clean slate for Movember. From that blank canvas a mighty handlebar shall grow. I may end up looking like Rufus Hound. Or being beaten up.

If I'm not dead from trying to write a novel in a month or from attackers objecting to the facial hair I shall cultivate, I'll see you on the other side.

Also, you can check up on the writing here- http://www.nanowrimo.org/, searching for CJMK2

and can donate to the cause for prostate and testicular cancer research here- http://mobro.co/ChrisHousden. Please give, even a little.

Catch-up TV Triple- Spooks and the Smiley series- why le Carré is wrong to snub the show so.

2011-10-31T01:13:00.000Z

Spooks finished this weekend, culminating a storyline of intrigue, subverted Cold War tradition, intelligence and action with an episode which drew on double-takes and the embittering of those involved to deliver a stunning, intelligent and un-secondguessable outcome.

Le Carré vocally derided the show about a month ago as juvenile and not at all like the intelligence services that he depicts in his fiction or that he was a part of professionally.

Following on in the vein of arguing against Margaret Atwood's ill-informed assessment of science fiction and attempt to redefine it so she could categorise her work as realist, literary fiction, I'm inclined to disagree with le Carré's assessment of Spooks. I'm also inclined to have a bit of a ~~rant here~~ discussion over just what is so different, in his eyes, between the popular show and the popular books, stopping off at a little point wondering why yet another author is so disinclined to be associated with a sub-genre of entertaining fiction and wants, instead, to be revered as the ultimate high brow incarnation of that sub-genre to the point where it is absorbed into the literary fiction which is all that is worthy of being read in the author's mind.

I'll keep it brief, because I'm tired, I've already written a lot today and I think the less I say on this, the more the few potent facts might be worth. Let's just say the differences (car chases, CSI-style computing, movie-tech CCTV and communications, and agents carrying guns) are far outweighed by the similarities.

First off, you've got the spy masters themselves, George Smiley and Harry Pearce. Okay, so, Pearce isn't as reticent as Smiley. He's still a tough, indiscernible cookie to crack, having carried out operations in Russia and a dozen other European countries. Smiley has carried out operations in Russia, East and West Germany, France and a dozen other European countries, directly and indirectly.

Soviet and Cold War values and sensitivities drive both stories. Apart from some of the more current and contemporary storyline inspiration, such as Somali pirates and such-like, the Russian/ British & American feeling has always underpinned the series even if not explicitly in ever minute of it. The same can be said for Smiley's activities in the books.

Both are about intelligence first and foremost. When computers are nicked, or when intelligence is hacked, The Grid panics. If any information from The Circus was taken, that too would be enough cause for alarm to put everyone on alert. The idea that Spooks didn't treat itself as an intelligence show was rubbish, it just had a different medium to fill- that of TV.

Old nemeses are brought together by both. Smiley vs Karla. Pearce vs Gavrik. Enough said.

Old habits die hard. Almost as if to prove that it wasn't completely out of touch with the old ways, information drops and message conveyances were carried out by real people in real places hiding info in book spines, in the cracks of stone on benches, that sort of thing, in Spooks. Le Carré had his members of The Circus perform similar paper-drops.

So there. I reckon Spooks is every bit the worthy watch as le Carré is a worthy read, because even though we now have gadgets of convenience to do a lot of intel work for us, and even though it's on TV which forces it to drop some of the more illustrative sequences of intelligence-based operations, namely caution and research, they are at heart cut from the same stone. A sharp, flinty, spy slate.

Catch-up TV Triple- Too soon for a storytelling? Biopics on 20th century talents

2011-10-31T00:48:00.000Z

Why biopic recent history to the point where the character or focal personae are still alive? I recently saw Frost/ Nixon and, more recently, Holy Flying Circus. I've also seen the original programmes of Frost interviewing Nixon and pretty much all of Python that's available. It made me start thinking- is either film worth doing? If so, what's the point in them changing things?

I'll say this- like with so many of my posts, this isn't going to have a definitive answer. To the point where I've actually said as much before we go on.

Dramatic licence and creative adaptation are all well and good. But when it comes to Frank Langella shouting "When the president does it, it's not illegal" while the real Nixon merely stated it as quiet fact in the true interview, all for the purposes of a crescendo, a turning of the tables in the dramatised debate, is it really worth it? If you want that, then have it. But make a political drama, write a new story, in which such an event occurs. Don't change history. More importantly, don't change what was a great, subtle moment in the undoing of Nixon by Frost. It cheapens the very interview it was inspired by.

It was a similar affair, but much more widely and liberally apportioned, with Holy Flying Circus. This 'dramatic re-telling', as it was marketed, of the furore around The Life of Brian felt as though it was trying too hard to be Python-esque in the weird and whacky but organic way that they were, in the same way that Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing tried to hard to capture the absurd humour of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Trilogy (of Five). The end result was something forced, a bit of a mess.

The one thing I will say the film got right was the casting- well, in the most part, but I'll explain the exception later. The actors picked to play the Python crew were spot on, with Charles Edward, Darren Boyd and Rufus Jones in particular standing out as Michael Palin, John Cleese and Terry Jones respectively. Steve Punt as Eric Idle and Tom Fisher as Graham Chapman were good in support, while Phil Nichol was okay as Gilliam, though we saw just little enough for him to not mind too much- the luck in casting the weakest actor as the least visible Python can't have gone unnoticed.

The one piece of casting I had trouble with was Mark Heap as Andrew Thorogood, the main protester (in this film, at least) against the film who makes it his mission to whip up a frenzy about it. Heap is perhaps best known for playing Brian Topp from Spaced, and the shame is he plays exactly the same character here, minus the goatee. It's like a bizarre alternate-universe Star Trek episode where the evil, goatee sporting Brian becomes the good, goatee-less Andrew. And Thorogood's two companions with Tourette's syndrome and a stammer between them, just for the purpose of carrying on the 'tradition' of taking the mick out of speech impediments, a vein of comedy tapped by Life of Brian, noted as having had the mickey taken out of it in LoB by HFC, and therefore attempted to be continued by the latter for no other reason. It wasn't that they were offensive, or crude, or even edgy. They just weren't funny.

While we're on the subject of Channel 4 comedies, I hope Graham Linehan watched this and is ready to sue their boots off. If the TV boss of Friday Night, Saturday Morning wasn't ripped from Denholm & Douglas Reynholm from The IT Crowd then I've never watched telly before. Ever.

Then there were the pop culture references, such as the completely unoriginal lightsaber
sequence. Or the all-too-knowing nods to original Python material. The scene in LoB where the crowd repeats, in unison, that "we can all think for ourselves" is funny. The same joke with different words, written into HFC as a crowd of Christians and protesters telling Michael Palin that "We are not sinister or intimidating. We are merely following you and watching you" as he addresses them, Graham Chapman-/ Brian-like, from his bedroom window, just isn't.

The final straw for me was the way this 'dramatic re-telling' ruined any point it could have had, burying it in a surreal Palin nightmare sequence far-too-similar to the flashes of The Monk's mind shown in the Vinnie Jones vehicle Mean Machine for their own good. In the debate at the end of the programme the writers have Palin get up an smash a jug in the bishop's face. Then Cleese begins a series of Funny Walks, it descends into a brawl, and it all returns to normal again in time for us to see the end of the interview.

Now, if we're going so far as to change what happens on screen and fill it with creative licence based around the events, why not have the revelations that the bishop hadn't seen the first 15-20 mins of the film happen on stage? Sort it out that way, with the audience back then reflecting the opinion of audiences now, decades after the debate?

Perhaps they were hoping that the few good gags in the ninety minute film, a lot of which come after the debate when we get a great fourth-wall rip featuring Palin and Stephen Fry as God, would distract the audience from such things. It didn't, and the film felt flat, unfunny, oddly paced and wasted.

So, was this film: Necessary? No. Entertaining? In patches. Worth it? I wouldn't say so, no.

And, to tack on to the end of this querying grumble, Shirley. This recent drama biopic about Shirley Bassey, who also is still alive, falls into that other cliché minefield of musical biopics (think Dreamgirls, Ray, Walk the Line and dozens of others) in rags to riches-ness. It's a whole other story, which I won't get into. Although it did manage to avoid the drug addiction cliché trap; whether or not that was because the producers/ writers wanted to emphasise the mothering instinct of Bassey as a woman, a bit different to the male-centred musical biopic genre (Ray, Walk the Line, The Rocker) rather than any decision to stick with or not elaborate on the truth for dramatic effect I'm not sure.

I do know, though, that with all three of these I would rather watch the originals, all available for free in this wonderful age of the internet, and read about their stories in biographies or even on Wikipedia than be told something "true" in such an adaptation and come away with the wrong idea. Original is always best.

Catch-up TV Triple- Is it me, or are House and HIMYM losing their edge?

2011-10-30T21:54:00.002Z

Okay. It's a definite "yes" that HIMYM is not the show it was for, arguably, the first three series of its run. It's dipped, the way Friends did, the way Scrubs did, but this time I don't think it's going to "pull a Scrubs" and haul it back for a good couple of series to finish it all (the reboot-esque series nine doesn't count). But having tried to keep an open mind as the sitcom opened onto its seventh series that it might rally, its only dropped further. The inclusion of Kal Penn as main character Robin Scherbatsky's therapist-cum-boyfriend Kevin is frankly appalling. Overacting masterclasses could be run by him, as evidenced by his delivery of almost every 'comedy' line he has, the pinnacle of which has to be "Without laptops". And this reaction.

Talking of Kal Penn, he was pretty good as Dr Kutner in House, which too has now run into strange casting decisions. Including the new Japanese member of House's "team" (consisting of two women, as of the third episode of the series) Dr Chi Park, who is the "nerd" for the series, as the student Martha Masters was last series.

What is it with these shows? Do the teams behind them just get sloppy? Do the characters they have not entertain them any more, to the point where they delve into extremes of derivative, basic or caricature characters to support broad un-laughable comedy or extremes of complex, socially inept and bizarrely demographically assembled characters to give their protagonist fresh meat to react to? I ask, genuinely, interested in the way these writers let their greatest works slip into the greyness that they eventually mire down in before slipping silently away in front of the last few dedicated, constantly disappointed fans in some poky corner of TV hospital.

At least with House the death, should it come, will be quick- all reports indicate, wisely so too, that this will be the end of the show at the end of the series. And knowing when to pull the plug and wrap it up is a talent money-grabbing TV bosses don't seem to get.

Sunday Evening Reads- The Deep Range

2011-10-30T14:00:00.051Z

This week, a bit more on time than last week's idiocy- and oversight-delayed Smiley's People review, some thoughts on The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke.

Really, it's a rubbish title. As Clarke's titles go, this describes very little of what the book holds- 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous With Rama, they both encapsulate the story within them, the concept. With The Deep Range, Clarke misses most of what happens, and doesn't bookend the story inside; that, though, is probably because for once he isnt writing a high-concept populated by machinery masquerading as character. For once, he manages a story, with emotions, fleshed-out characters, not just ciphers and types used to illustrate the alienness of the story's focus.

The Deep Range follows Walter Franklin across three parts, The Apprentice, The Warden and The Bureaucrat, introduced to us in the first few chapters as a bizarre stranger taken under the wing of veteran submariner Don Burley to train as a sub pilot. We follow Franklin as he passes his training with exceptional speed and suspicious familiarity with the concept and controls of the equipment used at the whale and algae/ plankton farms and sanctuaries, deals with a 'mysterious past' deftly handled and bearing an unexpected horro, as he builds relationships, rises through the ranks, and faces the nature of the sea with all its beasts and awesome creatures, nemeses and faithful mysteries.

As it's Arthur C. Clarke from the 50s there are still a few traces of typical Encounters of Strange fare, with the presence of a near-future extra-terrestrially sprawling mankind. This rears its head a little with the revelations of Franklin's past, his earth-bound status and his odd-affinity with the idea of the crushing vacuum of the deep sea, but not in any unforgivable way or without skill. Clarke here takes the high-concept and uses it as occasional backdrop to a human-factor tale of beginning again.

The idea of a love story, that obligatory lynch-pin of sci-fi perhaps more than most genres, also seems to smack a little of 50ssciencefictionwriteritis. Indra, the particular object of Franklin's affections and desires, is the usual mix of alluring, young and pretty to the point of nubile, with hints of what the author thinks make them interesting, edgy and dangerous. A marine biologist whose speciality, as Franklin finds out when he bumps into her for the first time, is gutting sharks to look at their digestion, Indra is a perfect storm of sci-fi wrtiers' romantic interests initially. As the story goes on though her presence, albeit more and more infrequent, diversifies and grows nuanced. Almost, but not quite, enough to undo her 'Maria' status in the first few chapters as the mystery man allures and stays distant, damaged.

As you'd expect with Clarke, there are dangers and losses, peril and alien hazards as commonplace, drawing the plot on interestingly and tensely- because with more real characters, the situations actually mean something. Much more than the deadlines for survival in Rama or the disobedient HAL in 2001, the consequences of which have little meaning for the reader save the deletion of two-dimensional astronauts fulfilling roles of efficiency, not of character.

Also as you'd expect, as a book about the sea, whales and creatures beyond the largest aquatic mammalian life, there are more than a few nods and references to Moby Dick, as well as the meta-references with almost everyone in the book having read Melville's tale, quoting it and understanding their jobs because of it. I wouldn't make such fuss about this inclusion except for the fact that with the more fleshed-out characters and a much broader world outside of its concept, allowing such mentions as classic texts like Moby Dick, it becomes a fuller, better read than many of the more purely idea-driven Clarke works that surround The Deep Range.

The dedication at the front of the book reads 'To Mike, who led me to the sea.' I've no idea who this Mike is, but as the sea turned out such a grounded story and truly speculative science fiction concept based on actual science and projects in both our and Clarke's eras, I'd like to thank him too.

Passing Comment- Vincent Tabak and Jo Yeates

2011-10-27T22:40:00.001+01:00

Oh good. So once again, Media on murderer Wham! home some point or other. Altogether now- "Last Christmas a girl was murdered, and the very next day the papers had their say". Remember this real-life audience participation murder mystery? It seems the media aren't finished with it yet.

I thought all of the really morbid "come and watch with us" stuff had finished. Not so. I'm looking at you, BBC.

How sensationalist can you get? With a headline like Vincent Tabak 'viewed violent web porn' it's really going to avoid the whole culture of trial by media, isn't it? That helps, honestly, it really helps.

It's not just the BBC guilty of this either. Here's Yahoo!'s take on it- that he 'should hang'.

Ooh, so he was a bit quiet as a kid, was he? Guess what? So was I. So are loads of kids. Daydreamers, late developers, early developers mature before their years, shy kids, kids from broken families or bad homes who nevertheless go on to be pretty damned normal and successful, they're all quiet and unforthcoming and "introverted". Don't use that as a catch-all for "liable to become murderers" or even as an excuse, a "that explains that". You're doing quiet kids insult, injury and injustice.

This is a bit more acceptable, surely? So it is possible to think up objective headlines.

And how, in God's name, can they find so many pictures of one man looking so thoroughly like a murdering squinting psychopath? Does he look like this all the time? I hope he doesn't, simply because finding the murderer would have been as easy for the local constabulary as it was for audiences to spot the "evil one" in Rohan in The Two Towers- could he be the sallow, raven-haired one in a land of golden- and flaxen-haired beauty?

Graphic Novel Review- John Constantine, Hellblazer: Scab

2011-10-26T23:22:00.002+01:00

This week, time for something completely different- Vertigo Comics's John Constantine, Hellblazer: Scab, written by Peter Milligan and illustrated by Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Landini (Scab arc), and Goran Sudzuka and Rodney Ramos (Regeneration arc). It also features the very short story The Curse of Christmas, which Eddie Campbell (who most sites cannot mention without From Hell coming up- has he done anything else?) illustrated for Milligan.

As with many of the reviews I've looked at this evening for Scab, to see what other people thought of it, this wouldn't have been a graphic novel Id have thought of looking at. I'm told it collects the issues at the beginning of Peter Milligan's tenure overseeing the Hellblazer title, which is neither here nor there for me, but I had been meaning to get into the Constantine world for a while- so what with it being the Hellblazer title the public library have here I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Aside from an awareness of John Constantine being a Brit, a Scouser, gritty, a smoker and a walker of the line between urban realism and demons, magic and curses, and the general nerd knowledge, coming with being a film geek and frequenter of the internet, that Hollywood screwed up the whole thing with Keanu 'Stoneface' Reeves and the abominable 2005 flick Constantine, this was my first foray into his story. It was a mixed experience.

The plot over both Scab and Regeneration was pretty solid, although the tacked on story The Curse of Christmas felt like exactly that and was pretty throwaway. The ghost of an MP has been following Constantine for a year after he and two others died at exactly the same time the Christmas before, and he wants to know why. There's no tension at all and the revelation over who killed them is plucked out of the ether with no working by Constantine- plus, after two proper volumes Scab and Regeneration with distinct political agendas yet more MPs and politics felt like overkill.

In Scab there is, quite literally, a scab on the loose, a skin condition that begins to bubble to the surface of both Constantine's chest (and later back, neck and arms) and the skin of a 'scab' from the 80s who took a gigantic bung, as most people see it, for some great betrayal. This scab prowls on the guilt and shame, repressed, unrepressed, embraced or accepted, of both Constantine and the 'scab', and even begins to prey on the past emotions of the latest girl Constantine is convincing himself he can get close to, Phoebe. This first volume is definitely the more horror-related of the two, with imagery that is not for the squeamish and a really nightmarish idea that this 'skin condition' (complete with a rancid, putrid treatment remedy) can become the terrors you didn't know you feared, and embody them, becoming incarnate through scab tissue.

Politics comes into play here, the first hint that perhaps Milligan has a bit of an idealistic axe to grind (is Constantine normally such a devout Old Labour bloke? I genuinely don't know). We see the 'scabs' of the 80s and talk of Thatcher, along with disdain for Blair-ite Britain and what has come after, and aside from being in the middle of a story but not revelatory or crucial it seems a bit of an end to the means of the comic, and to hard-pushed. The banking crises from the last few years are also slammed into the spotlight from time to time, jarring with the human story of guilt and corrupting influences.

The artwork in the first arc is good, drawn cleanly by Camuncoli and coloured very well by Landini, but it is basic and cartoon-ish compared to the Alex Rosses of the comic world. The gritty tone of Constantine as a character isn't reflected in the chiselled, cleaner cut Camuncoli designs, and it is only through the shading and detail added in by Landini that any sense of that plays out. That said, the illustrations of the scab incarnations is, oddly, quite detailed and expressive, despite being in the same style; I still wonder, though, what impact would have been made if a more realistic drawing style had been taken. The reveals of the scab creature in various panels, for one, would have been all the more jarring.

In Regeneration the art from Sudzuka and Ramos is better, with Ramos inking more subdued, less garish colours with a softer approach and more subtle range, so that the cartoon effect of blockier colour is dampened, and the basic shaping style of Camuncoli is refined to more realistic sketching by Sudzuka. Having said all that, it still isn't as strong as it could be, and with art from Steve McNiver and Alex Ross as the benchmarks for grit in the comic world it falls a little short.

The plot here similarly runs with two intertwined time periods, though the difference is that they are not connected by people from both; rather, spirits from the plague in 1660s London share common ground with the regeneration sites for the 2012 Olympics. This felt really jarring to me, such juxtaposition between stuff that is actually happening and the fictional but hardline and urban fantasy elements of Constantine, which is just about the extent of my knowledge of the series. But perhaps it's just the fact that it is so contemporary that bugged me, and older issues of Hellblazer would be more to my liking.

Either way, the agenda of capitalist vs communist, rich vs poor harped on about and thrown in the reader's face from the start of Scab comes back into play, with plague doctors and politicians being pitted against the poor in both eras of the plot. The result was the axe being ground by Milligan became huge, but incredibly one-note. And there isn't a happy ending, but then I didn't expect there would be- I'd actually hoped for Scab to be a bit more creepy and grim than it turned out to be

The other issue is that because it was quite a few issues collected into one it did feel as though it moved a little fast in places, without the time between each issue to adjust to the previous developments. For example, events in Constantine's relationship with Phoebe seem to run on into each other when they're actually quite a while apart, and it ends up feeling like a bit of a glut. You can blame me for reading it in one, but I personally reckon that a good comic arc should stand up to being collected at the end and definitely in terms of pacing should account for that to try and combat any such 'squishing'.

So, all in all not a stellar graphic novel by any means, but entertaining. And if the good elements of it are what the best Constantine stories are made up of, I'll definitely be dipping in again soon- perhaps to the black and white line drawn one-shot written by Ian Rankin, recommended to me by a friend months ago. And of course, when I've read it, I'll review it here- because what else am I going to do?

PS- any recommendations for good graphic novels are welcome, Constantine or otherwise. Sling them in the comments, but please, no manga/ anime- I've got enough on my plate at the moment without trying to understand/ get into Japan in any big way.

Sunday Evening Reads- Smiley's People

2011-10-24T19:30:00.001+01:00

Right, I'm sorry this has gone up on a Monday evening instead of a Sunday, as it should be- truth be told I committed a brilliant bit of idiocy yesterday and, after piling in all the necessary HTML for links and shiz, previewing and re-previewing, I left this review sat as a draft. Then I went to bed, went to work, and came back to realise that far from being published where it could only be seen by the wayward, the confused and the imaginary people that make up my readers, it was in fact buried in the bowels of Blogspot, where it could never be seen by anyone. So sorry about that, senior moments get at even the most youthful 21-year-olds. Here you go.

This week we're I'm looking at the third in John Le Carré's Karla trilogy, Smiley's People.

Following last week's discovery of the minimalist, similar-to-sketching style with which Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms it's revealing to return to Le Carre's portrayal of the eponymous Smiley, written in a similarly muted manner. The novel itself airs on the descriptive and possesses a certain flair, too much so to be compared to Hemingway, but the key to Smiley's People, as is true of both the prequels to it, is the way in which Smiley is written. You have to read him as though you are in the room with him, each little tic, gesture or look that Smiley gives, or the absence of them and the stillness of the passive listener, has to be taken on board. He doesn't speak to say what he wants to say most of the time. It is read by the other characters by observing him. And it is blinding, the amount that goes on under the surface of Smiley's slight furrowed brow and rotund, unassuming figure.

Set-up forms about seventy per cent of the story, the good news being that you don't have to have read the other two books worth of back story (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, if your were wondering) to get your teeth into this. It's a sprawling, undulating plot, covering decades of Cold War and post-WWII intelligence tension across Russia, Germany, Britain and France, flitting back and forth between ex-spies, current spies and ex-assets deftly and slickly. At some points the plot can feel a little too much like a whirlpool, with you as the reader at the centre of it, but then the slow burn revelations peppered throughout the story offer up another slight change of direction, and you're dragged back in.

To attempt to describe much of the plot here would cheat you out of letting it unfold for you, with the occasional prompted raised eyebrows and constant whir of second-guessing that it brings. Suffice to say that intelligence is passed, or not passed, between the Circus and a third party they rehabilitated into London, attacks begin on seemingly unrelated and completely separately located normal people and an information drop is made on a boat in Eastern Europe. From there, threads and sinews begin to stretch towards The Circus, and the identity of a dead man becomes key in halting or at least discovering something, though they are not sure what. And that's how bewildered you'll be for at least the first half, but only through forming opinions on what is happening and then reasserting them again and again, trusting no one and no information Le Carré deems to give you, to the point where you can see why Smiley mutes himself and tries merely to absorb what happens around him until he knows anything at all.

Smiley, brilliantly, never feels tired to the reader. Clearly, he is tired, beleaguered and wearied by The Circus and the years he has spent turning people on each other and their countries, but to the reader he doesn't feel like a flagging or overrun character. This is pretty good, given that he is older now and more jaded with emptiness than ever, and the beginning of his involvement comes as an old-man, ex-professional coming out of retirement for one last job trope. Le Carré's deftness with the plot, the various Russians, non-Russians, killers, informants and taxi drivers of the late seventies intelligence world put paid to that trait, however, and despite comments to the effect that Smiley's age is making him slip up over time, it never feels like a tacked on story.

As endings go, this is not a race to the finish for the series. It boils and simmers, checks, rechecks and plans its last act brilliantly, racking up the tension in a final battle of wits, political and Circus-based pawns between the two old spy masters Smiley and Karla, and wraps up incredibly neatly. Which isn't something I like in books, often, but that is because it is pretty much always too neat, clearly manufactured, whereas the showdown of defections and continuing/ burnt assets that begins to form is fitting, not forced. Not suitable for those whose spy showdowns feature guns, shouting, sex and quips.

Passing Comment: Dale Farm

2011-10-19T23:03:00.001+01:00

Okay, I'm tired and still have a fair few things to do before bed and getting up to go to work again tomorrow, so I haven't the energy to go into a full-blown serious post about news stories, about which I have quite a bit to say but most of it is boring guff. Which struck me with a brilliant idea. I'll hit it at a glance like a branch and see what conkers, startled birds and dead spiders fall out, in a section entitled Passing Comment- because, obviously, it's a hilarious pun lightning-bolted into my brain by inspiration. You know, because I'll be making a comment, but it will be fleeting...? Never mind.

Topic of the day? Dale Farm.

I've followed this loosely in the news. I knew it was happening. Nothing seemed hugely odd about it. I flicked through this slideshow just now. Flick through it now, before reading on. Done that?

Now some things have struck me as odd. I want to know some things.

1) You are protesting that this is your home. You live in these caravans. Why are you burning them?

2) On the subject of burning, did you ask your son before throwing his toy car on the fire? He might want it back. Also, it's plastic. I don't think it will fuel your barricade for long.

3) Why are you waving a crucifix at the police? It isn't anything to do with religion, you're on illegal ground. End of. Also, why burn the plastic car and your own home before the big wooden crucifix or wooden effigy of Mary? Just sayin'.

4) Why are we calling the lunatics who cover their faces and erect barricades around a site that has nothing to do with them 'activists'? They are not championing a cause other than illegal squatting. And know that, else they wouldn't cover their faces. Someone get them some jobs, then the idea of "nothing better to do" than fight police over land disputes for the sake of fighting/ sleeping on scaffold balconies in close to freezing temperatures won't be so appealing.

5) A genuine question- are the legal tenants, who are also travellers, with or against their illegally plotted companions? I really can't tell if it's a full on 'communal cause' or if it's just the cause of those being evicted. If it is the whole lot of them united, does it strike anyone else as stupid?

Answers on postcards (hopefully, novelty seaside postcards with large-bottomed women speaking entirely in quotations and puns).

Hopefully there will be something else pretty noticeable in the news that I can treat to a flit-by with words for bullets soon. If not, this Passing Comment tag will die on its feet. Ta-ra!

Graphic Novel Review- The Dark Knight Returns

2011-10-19T18:30:00.051+01:00

The Dark Knight Returns, written by Frank Miller and pencilled by him, too.

In short, I love it. But there are some things I could stand to see improved. Or, you know, done differently.

The panel art would be one. Not necessarily the art, but the panel structure, the sequential layout of some pages, mostly those showing television broadcasts. I just got distracted by the frame by frame linear layout, in such small panels it felt a bit like poring over a strip of negative film, and because of when the graphic novel was published the artwork wasn't as detailed as it could have been, which doesn't go well with small panels. The pages where action happened or something other than the televisual commentaries on the plight of Gotham broke out of that mould, which was good, but I'd have liked to see less of the story told through TV. Year One, also penned by Miller and reviewed here, didn't have this problem being masterfully pencilled by David Mazzucchelli, but as Miller takes it on himself to pencil The Dark Knight Returns it just falls a little flat in places.

On balance, the choice of villains (or villainous population) could be given a bit of an overhaul. As uprisings go, mutants in Gotham is a bit far-fetched. Alright, so mutants per se not so much, see Killer Croc or Clayface or a dozen others, but a fairly unexplained population of mutants en masse... seems a bit Marvel, not gritty Miller. But hey, he gave us The Goddamn Batman too in All-Star Batman and Robin, so he's obviously mental. It's just that the mutants are so very... eighties.

See?

Secondly, continuity, the lack thereof, or the mess when anyone mentions continuity, comics and the resulting explosion of heads.

I'm not a die-hard, hardcore, completely immersed comics follower/ fan. I put my interested amateur approach down to two things- one, the amount of money it would take to actually follow all of the expansive, fluid mass that is a comic universe, and two, little gimmicks and money spinning ploys like DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, essentially giving them free reign to rewrite possibilities with the handwavium-structure of infinite alternate universes. This means that some storylines are not canon, officially, which is a shame. The Dark Knight Returns, where it leaves Bruce Wayne, his future plans and Gotham City's law enforcement, would fit brilliantly with Kingdom Come, for example. But they exist on different Earths, apparently, notwithstanding a rather large plot point concerning the Joker that makes it all chronology impossible. As spiritual and thematic siblings, however, they both fit exceptionally.

On that note regarding the Joker, there are so many villains we don't get to see in the stead of what is a tired adversary across all Batman titles now. The same old Batman vs Joker has been going on forever. We get Harvey 'Two Face' Dent for the first book of this graphic novel, but that's it. The Joker and the mutants takeover as the antagonists, and it's a bit tired, really.

And in terms of continuity, Carrie Kelley is a pretty good Robin, making it a real kick that she isn't a canonical Robin after Dick Grayson, Jason Todd and Tim Drake. She was the first female Robin we saw, not Stephanie Brown, and it's a damn shame this plucky kid with parents too stoned to notice she's gone isn't in the real or official Batman lore.

The story itself is pretty good, with Batman pitted against a Gotham City Police Department who want his guts, no longer protected by Jim Gordon who retires, fighting more and more criminals than before, older and slower having come out of retirement himself and, at one point, on a god damned horse. An image I've no idea how to feel about- it's as awesome as it is bizarre.

The set up books are what makes this graphic novel, with the reasons, setting and process of Bruce Wayne becoming the Batman again building mysteriously and tersely, and resulting in the rediscovery by the criminal underworld of what Batman can be. A shadow, slipping around and knocking you down before you know it. The first few attacks, on lower-peg lowlifes, has a nice nod to the first few Batman attacks in Year One, down to the pimp being a target for backhanding his whores.

Overall, it's a good story but it's far too heavy on the Cold War that the eighties' comics were ~~so fond of~~ oddly fixated on. It felt a bit too much like Watchmen, complete with a Reagan-esque President instead of a Nixon-esque President, and an oddly emasculated and cow-towed Superman provides the superhuman opposition, in a plotline that never quite feels less than contrived. Against the police, Superman and these new mutants and criminals, Batman simply returns to pit himself and them in battle.

Which is fairly simple, really, and heads down very few of the multitude of clichés surrounding coming out of retirement. So kudos there. It's a gripping story, with flaws because it hasn't aged or dated well, but it's still pretty core in seeing the deeper and gritter Bruce Wayne-caging-a-maniac Batman that seems the rage now.

(PS- don't even get me started on rebooting the whole universe back to issue one of every character they decided to keep. Makes no sense to me at all. An amateur I remain.)

Finally- we might have lift off.

2011-10-18T14:00:00.007+01:00

Or at least, a countdown isn't far off as ignition lights the boosters.

Really nothing to say here except that you can find out why the links below are relevant in these typings, where I have bemoaned at length a great many things space- and space program-related.

NASA and Virgin Galactic discuss collaboration on a new model of spacecraft, fuelling my hopes (and those of many around the interweb) that privatised space programsaren't an impossibility.

The world's first (of, hopefully, many) commercial spaceport opens.

Sunday Evening Reads- A Farewell to Arms

2011-10-16T17:00:00.025+01:00

After the (relative) success of the Graphic Novel Wednesday reviews launched a few weeks ago, I'm setting up a book review a week to go out on Sundays. And much like the Graphic Novel segment it won't be all about reviewing brand new releases, brilliantly cutting edge texts or specifically those regarded as classics- I'll be reviewing books I'm reading, whether they were released last week or last century, whether they were huge hits or are largely ridiculed, or anything in between. I've got a horribly eclectic taste, so you probably won't like many of the titles, but you never know, you might spot something you fancy having a peruse of yourself. Why Sundays? Well, what better day of the week to curl up next to an imaginary fireplace on an evening with a good book?

The first review, then, is Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

It's the first Hemingway I've read apart from a short story entitled A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. And coming to Hemingway for the first time took a fair bit of adjustment. His sparse, bare-faced style of prose just didn't draw me in initially, not holding my attention with a lack of with its lack of description, a lack of adjectives and adverbs that made it seem incredibly simple and, if I'm honest, a bit boring. The fact that his narration is pure and efficient was lost on me, with simplistic sentences such as "The light shone on their hats" being too abrupt and too frequent for an eye used to skipping through chunks of poorly written exposition or unnecessary details about the building in which the characters are stood in order to glean the important points.

With Hemingway though, as I realised after about forty pages, everything is important. The swiftness with which I normally read slowed in order to take in such fine detail completely.

The story, once the way in which Hemingway tells his stories has you acclimatised, is equally gripping. It's the First World War and an effectively expatriated American Lieutenant is serving on the Italian front as an ambulance driver. He is introduced to a nurse, Catherine Barkley, and his relationship with her throughout the harsh campaigns and eventual collapse of the Italian front drives the story, with grim realities as a backdrop and antagonist to their romance and events in their relationship. So far, so seemingly simple- though I can see now why so many people rate Hemingway so well. He not only sets up on of the bleakest environments in which to throw lovers, he does so with deft restraint, only implying certain important points but fuelling those implications, framing them, so effectively that the reader cannot miss them. Hemingway writes like a line pencil artist draws- strokes of detail here and there, building the frame, the silhouette, into which he occasionally cross-hatches, but mostly leaving the characters to be white space filled by the reader based on his thick and thin sketching.

Frederick Henry, the name given to the semi-autobiographical lieutenant or tenente, is wounded and spends time in a field hospital where his relationship with Catherine grows, and finally they embark upon a companionship dealing personal tragedy to them among the desensitising terror of the front. The book becomes so much more than a mere romance, with the two protagonists discussing life, planning futures and falling fully for one another convincingly, written with soft and delicate understanding rarely seen in the obligatory love sub-plots now thrown into the majority of novels across all genres.

Hemingway finds a way to make turning the page feel like you are Frederick, living out those moments, unsure of what it is around the corner. As he himself lived out many of the moments and encounters he depicts this is hardly surprising, but A Farewell To Arms is more than semi-autobiographical. A friend of mine told me I might find it refreshing, and she was oddly right. Though in the closing act neither Frederick nor I as a reader wanted to know the the outcome, I turned the pages anyway just as he returned to Catherine, because no knowing was worse. Though the culmination of the story so thoroughly beats the reader down with the bleakness of war and life, I did ironically find it refreshing, because in doing so I still wanted to read on and that is a hard to find quality in so many books from such a presently saturated market.

As books go, I now rate this as a favourite- stick with it past twenty pages and Hemingway somehow makes the emotions, horrors and people found at the front more real than most would with pages of description as their method, and he does so almost without writing a single word to colour or shape them in your mind's eye. They just are, and he only needs to say so, nothing more.

The Great Wine Conspiracy

2011-10-15T21:02:00.000+01:00

In recent weeks I have made a few purchases on Amazon using portions of the £50 I have been donated every week by Her Majesty's government in return for being a bum. Nothing extravagant, just T-shirts and such like. Vouchers from two different wine companies offering me 50% plus off a crate of their wine. Incidentally, or coincidentally, or perhaps no great coincidence at all, On Monday I start work at the Stevenage-based nationally renowned cooperative known only as The Wine Society. What if there's more to this sudden influx of winery, vino and generosity? What if there's a network, a grapevine on which the powers that be have begun an offensive?

I say this not only as a fan of spies and having the eternal little boy inside my head who wants to be Bond, but I set to wondering after a few friends over the last few years have joked around that I'm some sort of international man of mystery. Secretive is not something I'd describe myself as, but apparently I am. These observations weren't helped by my "expressing an interest" in MI5 near the end of our last year of university, oh so many moons ago (a few months). So maybe my writer's imagination and this skew towards secretive industries is fuelling this little whimsy that is being typed out here.

Any ~~suspicion~~ hope of The Wine Society being this way comes fresh from the business newswire situated in Fleet Street which, it occurred to me almost a week into the time I gave over to the slavery I was delivered unto, was perfectly placed to be a cover for some sort of suspicious goings on. Nothing illegal, but perhaps hyper-legal, eyes only stuff. I mean, the company had a bland generic name, like Universal Exports or Transworld Consortium, containing the word solutions, for crying out loud. If there were ever an office I'd been in that could have been involved in surveillance and hits paid for by the government, this was it. Minutes away from Whitehall and the corridors (subterranean corridors, with automatic doors and retina scanners, for all we know) of power, running a website looking at oil, gas, mining, banking and other industry sectors, this seemed a perfect cover. But then maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Back to wine. What if Stevenage's own hub of industry, Gunnels Wood Road, had such cover offices on? It's been host to BAE (British Aerospace) in the past, where I'm told weaponry programming and other military activity took place. It still has an EADS site (just behind the cinema complex, actually, so make of that what you will) which, among other things, was pivotal in the manufacture of the Mars Beagle. You know, the one that was "lost" right after it landed on the Red Planet. Why wouldn't such a site need nearby covert intelligence? Perhaps they think that I've already become a member of their enlightened halls and these vouchers being delivered in Amazonian packages are secret codes, orders, or conditioning through subliminal patterns ingrained on the paper? Who knows?

None of this is allegation or even remotely indicated by what you would call evidence, just a crazy "what if-?" notion. It might find its way into a book one day, if the mood holds me. I'm not raving, seeing conspiracy everywhere, I just think it's interesting that life throws up things like these coincidences can be tied to, weaving a wire framework of fact that people like me (and, y'know, Dan Brown) can then paper mache over with narrative, tying it all together into fictional but plausible ideas, if a little imagination is applied and it's all viewed through squinting eyes and a slightly tilted head.

That's why I write, after all. To be part of something bigger than whatever things I'm part of in real life, just through the people I try to make real on the page. Who doesn't want to be part of something exciting like that? Wouldn't it be cool if something like this was going on along that bleak dual carriage-way?

I'm reading too much into it. Just know this- if you're expecting a present from me this Christmas, it will likely be a bottle of wine.

Graphic Novel Review- Civil War

2011-10-12T19:10:00.000+01:00

Firstly this week I'll address something- for the pedants among us, I'm aware that in reviewing some one-shot series alongside collections of issues all relating to one storyline arc but published across different in-universe series I'm playing fast and loose with the term graphic novel. However, according to Wikipedia, [Show]

So there we are. I'm going to keep using it to apply to both collected works and one-shots, which is just as well as this week we're back to Marvel, for there big in-universe crossover collection Civil War, written by Mark Millar and pencilled by Steve McNiven, who incidentally produced Old Man Logan reviewed a few weeks ago. The Civil War storyline doesn't just span the seven issues collected in the main graphic novel but has subsidiary issues based around several of the players in the storyline, creating a gigantic sprawling fixed point similar to DC Comics' Crisis crossover. For the purposes of this review, though, we're concentrating on the seven issues collected into one volume. If you don't like politics in your comics, look away now.

As the title suggests, the storyline revolves around a schism that splits Marvel superheroes into two factions, who fight it out both physically (leading to some pretty awesome artwork where both parties, essentially armies, clash) and intelligently, with the issue that's polarised them being a political, moral and social minefield. Civil War is definitely a thinking man's comic. It's essentially a "what if?", where superheroes have become so commonplace that that everlasting curse of the 21st century, reality TV, follows a bunch of obnoxious kid superheroes around as they fight crime- only to have it blow up in their faces, literally, as the villains they are trying to detain prove they outweigh the talent and level a huge area of a city, killing hundreds of people.

From there the US authorities, already worried about having to watch mutants, decide to up surveillance on all superheroes and push for a registration act to hold them accountable. The two sides set themselves up behind faction leaders Tony Stark or Iron Man and Steve Rogers or Captain America. Stark, guilt-ridden after a confrontation with a dead child's mother angry over the incident and the carefree attitude teams like the Avengers have had to their power, argues that unmasking and registering as an official enforcement team is the only way forward. Rogers, having been turned on by SHIELD when he refused to forcibly bring in those who won't register, feels that it's more simple- the superheroes fight the supervillians and politics is outside of that.

The set-up is familiar to anyone who knows anything about comics, sharing similarity with Watchmen, several DC crossovers and one-shots, and, possibly the most exposed instance, the X-Men (seen in the third X-Men film, which was a disaster but used the Registration Act as plot, as well as in several games, most cartoon versions and in the comics preceding Civil War). Incidentally, it's because of the fact that the Sentinels are still watching the X-Men and other mutants even while all available superhumans are engaged trying to rescue people from the initial accident that they decide to stay out of it, leading to one of the few flaws I saw in the graphic novel- Wolverine sits it out along with the rest of the mutants at Xavier's School. Which pangs a little, because adding Logan to the fray between Thor, Cap, Iron Man, all the members of the Fantastic Four and dozens of others would have been interesting.

The story goes on from there fairly predictably, in terms of its direction, but with unpredictable moments of detail (who sides with who, who switches sides, etc). And make no mistake, this graphic novel is for all fans of Marvel, casual, expert, all the way up to professional geek. The cast is a veritable who's who of pretty much every Marvel hero, hidden away in groups and crowds in panels. The lucky ones get mentioned in passing, but can be picked out elsewhere, like Luke Cage, Wasp, the Falcon and loads more. This gives the story the scope needed to not just be another registration plot, but literally splitting the whole Marvel universe of heroes in two, where every major fan can see their favourite character joining the fight no matter how small-time they are in continuity.

The artwork is incredible, a style that, really, is probably my favourite. It's colour rich, realistic and incredibly detailed, and compared to the more traditional patchy work inspired by original comics where printing wasn't able to include as much detail it really is more of an artwork. McNiven really brings his game, populating crowd scenes brilliantly and using the panels and the characters in them to tell the story, not just facilitate the words, meaning plot points get the weight they need. And there are a lot of them, including Peter Parker making a decision that shapes the rest of the storyline and gives us one of my favourite J Jonah Jameson moments ever (spoilers)- [Show]

Now who can say that wasn't well drawn?

The two niggles I have with Civil War are minor but, I think, fair- the ending seems rather an abrupt realisation, perhaps because I haven't read the surrounding "expansion pack" titles that give a bit more story to the main casts' motivations; and, also tied to the satellite titles, at points it does feel as though the plot has taken a large leap forward in time and you have to catch up with little hint at what has happened, again I assume detailed in the other issues.

That said, as either an entry into the Marvel universe for readers to see what it's all about or for hardcore fans of any title or character, Civil War is an excellent read and builds up what could have been a tired rehashing with style and skill. Using 21st century concerns as its edge, reflecting social anxieties of the surveillance culture and with thinly veiled parallels to terrorism, human rights and imprisonment for national security, it becomes something more adult than the beleaguered "mutants are dangerous" argument and delivers a very grounded "what if?" question.

Margaret Atwood- science fiction should be fantasy; I do not write fantasy, therefore it is not science fiction

2011-10-12T14:15:00.002+01:00

I'm no expert in science fiction, not a professional of the history of the genre or anything like that. I've not got degrees in the thing or been asked to be a talking head on Newsnight Review. But I have read a lot of science fiction, I have read a lot of fantasy, I've watched films and TV shows that fall into the categories, seen documentaries on both, and honestly know a fair bit about it. Seeing as I've got all that behind me I'm hoping that this post doesn't come across as just some ignorant, angry man behind a keyboard but strays somewhere close to a legitimate, well informed line of argument. Basically, I'm going to rant but it's got some good stuff in there so slug it out and read the damn thing. Pretty please.

Margaret Atwood has written some profound and enduringly popular books during her career, not least my favourite of her works, The Handmaid's Tale. I read The Handmaid's Tale around the same time that I read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Children of Men by P.D. James, two highly regarded dystopian novels revolving around society's breakdown or fatal flaws. They are both regarded as science fiction, to greater or lesser extents, as most dystopian works are- the "hard science" of social experimentation and social science is the basis, however loose, for roughly half of all dystopian fiction, sharing the genre with disaster/ accident/ catastrophe (which, incidentally, then fuels a socially focused story, after the cause of the current state of affairs). At the time I couldn't help grouping these three books together in my mind- similar themes ran through all of them, and they all felt largely the same.

Even now they come as a set in my mind when I refer to them, and it's little wonder why; I probably picked them up in the library as a group because of their very similarities. So why is the author of one of them, The Handmaid's Tale, keen to inform everyone that it is in fact not science fiction, and wouldn't be unless it was entirely implausible and possibly had dragons?

According to this article from the lovely io9 folks here Margaret Atwood is arguing exactly that in a new essay she has written on science fiction, her works, and the spotty fan-boys that make up possibly 25% of the genre's audience. Never have I seen an author who has so grounded themselves in a genre and sub-genre try to escape it so fervently. Atwood's argument goes a little along the lines of "if it could possibly happen, however improbably and however far into the future or far removed from here, then it is not science fiction". However, "if it contains dozens of impossibilities, sword wielding heroines, dragons and secret islands, particularly if they're illustrated on the cover, then it is science fiction".

Both of which are statements that essentially go against many hard-set definitions of science fiction, and ruin the distinction (which is already blurred) between fantasy and science fiction. H.G. Wells, one of the grandfathers of science fiction, argued that any science fiction work (or scientific romance, as he christened them) had a saturation point of one impossibility- if your story had more than that, it was not scientifically based enough. And it rings true- The War of The Worlds, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man, all of them have on impossibility which acts as the first domino of the story- everything after the existence of Martians, the existence of time travel, the ability to experiment on the nature of life itself and the ability to make man invisible is feasible and a perfectly understandable set of reactions from human characters. To use The Handmaid's Tale as an example, you could argue that Atwood doesn't even achieve that one impossibility- it is a series of improbabilities woven together, but still possible. Societal changes have happened that aren't necessarily probable now, but are not impossible given the conditions of the world Atwood creates. It is therefore science fiction.

Atwood argues, however, that it is not science fiction, and by doing so she implicates that almost all known hard science fiction should in fact fall within another genre of realistic stories while the accepted definition of fantasy is retrofitted onto the name science fiction. In Atwood's argument, if I've interpreted it correctly, impossibilities such as elven races living among urban human cities, dragons existing in realms and kingdoms and magic being inexplicably present all classify as science fiction. Which means, in turn, that while current science fiction texts would be without a genre, current fantasy would steal their name and fantasy, by its very nature required to be fantastical, would be an empty genre.

And all this for what? It seems Atwood wants to distance herself from the genre, and eagerly and insistently wants to argue the point against decades of debate and definition surrounding the two genres. I don't think I've ever seen anyone so keen to escape a definition because of a misguided prejudice- she seems to see stigma where there is none. Or rather, sees stigma where there is much less of one now. Given how mainstream (to sound awfully like a hipster for a second) science fiction has become, in TV, film and books, the idea that the average reader views the genre of science fiction as an area of Comic Book Guys debating the separate meanings of the three Klingon words for axe while trying to remember the last time they had a shower doesn't ring true,except to Margaret Atwood. She seems to be labouring under the illusion that genre fiction is Bad, always has been, always will be, with the sort of English Literature attitude that ruins some people- Literary Fiction is not the only thing worth reading. For every Sebastian Faulks state of the nation book there is an equally good commentary in genres, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I won't say much more, except that Atwood nails her own coffin shut when she starts citing a discussion she had with a science fiction fan, and takes his view as representative of all readers of genre fiction. First of all, she says "let's call him Randy- for that is his name", which is not only unnecessary but such a smugly self-aware attempt at intimacy and humour that it is infuriating. She then argues "For Randy-and I think he's representative- sci-ﬁ does include other planets, which may or may not have dragons on them. It includes the wildly paranormal-not your aunt table-tilting or things going creak, but shape-shifters and people with red eyeballs and no pupils, and Things taking over your body." Which is possibly the most basic, juvenile and dismissive definition I've heard for the genre. Whether Randy himself thought this, or Atwood's view of the stigma informed and moulded his arguments into this sentiment I'm not sure, but if it was his view she had the luck to find just one portion of genre readership. If it wasn't his view and she heard what she wanted, I think that speaks for itself.

What does everyone think? How would you define science fiction, and how would you separate it from fantasy? Most importantly, is Atwood right, wrong or neither?

Graphic Novel Review- Batman: Year One

2011-10-05T22:00:00.001+01:00

I missed a week, yes, only two weeks in. This should explain why- I was too knackered to do anything other than eat, spend hours looking for work, go to bed.

Taking a break from Marvel this week with the first review foray into DC for this segment. At a time when the gods that be have just decided to completely reboot all DC titles from issue 1, completely retconning many details that identify their characters from the last 60/70 years, and when a distinctly bizarre new Batman cartoon has been announced (what I assume will be the typical nerd reaction can be found here, a more measured response is here), it seems as good a moment as any to take a look at the world's greatest detective.

So, we're going back to the "beginning" of one of the greatest characters comics to have been created- Batman. That is, the birth of the character continuity-wise, not the first appearance in an issue of Detective Comics from the 30s. And yet, Batman: Year One (written by Frank Miller, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli and coloured by Richard Lewis) is more about James Gordon than the eponymous caped crusader. Confusing? A little. But is it worth a look?

Now, even a layman to comics knows Batman's basic origins- God knows, it's shown at some point in every single cartoon and film he's in. The play where Bruce Wayne as little boy sits with hsi parents, leaving early, taking an ill-advised walk down Crime Alley where the Waynes get shot, pearls scatter, a rose falls, etc. Bruce as a young man travelling the world, gaining skills and learning martial arts. Returning to the manor, applying himself to science, technology and fitness, brooding and hating criminals. Then- bosh! In comes a bat through the window and Bruce has his eureka moment.

That much has been set in stone, in various degrees of explanation, since the very beginning of Batman. In Detective Comics issue 27, this happens-

But after that came decades of adventure, crimes to solve, victims to save, Boy Wonders to raise, train, say goodbye to or lose. An entire rogues gallery grew up, with men and women responding to the odd, winged-mammalian suit and the mental but cheery man inside it, and reacting in kind with their own personas.

What Miller does is meld the jolly, Golden Age idea into a much darker, much more modern Batman. Grit and gloom are the watch words, with Mazzucchelli's stark and unassuming pencilling sketching out the shadowy shapes of Gotham without over-detailing them, and Lewis' inking reflects that, with patches of light and dark, a muted palette daubed over the efficient drawing style. It isn't the realistic, photo-finish artwork that comics like Kingdom Come have, nor is it the cartoon-y, basic 30s designs, but somewhere in between, much like the story. It takes the origin of Batman and uses it as a foil against which James Gordon, struggling to gain ground in the corrupt Gotham City PD after a transfer, can play out his story. Through Gordon, Miller tells us more than we could ever be told by Batman/ Bruce Wayne about the state of Gotham. Instead of a Dark Knight watching over but involving itself in the city, we get first hand the issues, and then the Bat swoops in to begin sorting them out.

The progress throughout that first year is well paced. Increasingly advanced fighting, increasingly advanced gadgets (a hang-glider is used at one point, pre-empting the Batwing but in response to Alfred's flippant comment that Bruce would be flying "like that fellow in Metropolis"), and the marks of this graphic novel being a definitive work in the canon are clear. Moments of "Batman behaviour" are pinched from Year One and included across Batman games and films. That genius moment of cover in Batman Begins where bats from the Batcave flock to a summoning frequency from a device in his boot? You saw it here first. Gordon's kids being kidnapped? Yup, here. Harvey Dent, attorney, being introduced as a white knight to Batman's dark knight? Here again.

The story is almost all set up, but that isn't a criticism. It has to be. It's a much neater and more condensed version of what sprawled, previously, over a lot of story arcs in different comics across a few decades. Miller takes the character and instead of changing him makes the reader know him more. It's about his effect on the city more than anything else. The police run scared of him. The crime bosses get a rude awakening when he crashes their feast. The whores and pimps and thieves become fascinated with him, in particular a prostitute named Selina Kyle who sees her pimp beaten up by Batman's first forays into fighting crime and follows him closely, becoming Catwoman with the reasoning "why not a cat, when there's a Bat?".

There is some resolution, and it isn't a spoiler to say that Batman wins but gets his licks along the way. The crime bosses get their first beating, and in a very neat and character defining (or re-defining) way Batman is born, ready to fight his rogues gallery across the years. If I had one criticism it would be that it felt a little abrupt in ending, but then maybe it would always, as it has to end somewhere and there's so much more to follow it. The only solution would perhaps be to have introduced another villain or even a little more development among allies, but that would perhaps be rushing what is after all just the first year of a decades long tenure.

Definitely one to read as a definitive beginning, even retroactively, to the Batman titles.

Incidentally, DC are releasing a straight to DVD animated film of Year One soon, featuring the "cute bad boy bloke" from The OC instead of Kevin Conroy as the Bat. Make of that what you will, but from the clip released so far I'd say it's not a bad job. Better than Christian Bale's throat infection and tracheostomy, anyway.

Another small step, or fear of the Frontier?

2011-10-05T21:32:00.001+01:00

Last week NASA published a report, which probably took thousands of man hours and millions of dollars to research and compile, telling the US government that were the market to be opened up to the assistance of industries and businesses, the private sector could operate a space program a billion times better than NASA is doing. Broadly speaking. It found that were there competition among private companies and cooperation among others the vessels and craft we use, the technologies applied to travel both to and within the vacuum or near vacuum of space and the costs involved would all be improved upon dramatically, in relatively short time.

Now, yes, I have a bit of a history of following headlines about space and then ranting and rambling. Naturally I've got a few things to say about this revelation. Mainly that it's what I've been saying all along.

Here, here and here are the previous posts talking about the need for a viable space program, in particular one that isn't run off the back of the Russians'. It'd be like the scene from Armageddon where the US boys meet the haggard and slightly mental cosmonaut to refuel, and would probably work about just well as that did. It seems bizarre that the US, tying itself into knots with red tape and endless to-ing and fro-ing between the million and one committees and boards and coalitions that make any single decision, should need a multi-million dollar report to tell them this. We can't rely on war, or the need to beat the Soviets, but competition can be had without either of those outdated threats. Generate it, and we might end up with a Honda/ Virgin orbital shipyard within fifty years.

I know that this all sounds a little whimsical, but it's really not that fictional. Plans are underway, and the sooner science fiction is tied in with the most cutting edge speculative science theory we have, the sooner we can achieve progress and get a little closer to the hard science fiction that seems to have been lost over the last thirty years for, to use Pratchett's term, "fantasy with bolts on".

Which is also the view of Neal Stephenson, outlining the need to write a future. He argues that sub-genres like dystopia, steampunk and post-apocalyptic worlds have clouded the duty of science fiction writers and smothered any real speculative fiction, the J.G. Ballard/ Arthur C. Clarke/ Ben Bova approach. Now, I don't know about duty, but certainly it's always been an inherent part of the science fiction canon and has fallen away in favour of sweeping tropes and situations that have, unfortunately, become much of a muchness in the saturate book world we exist in. And NASA itself is looking to collaborate with authors to write scintillating prose and stories based on proposed projects they have, anchored in hard science once again, even if they haven't the money to enact any of them. The idea seems to be "get kids interested in space again", but so that they can help build a better programme rather than move into an existing one.

Conversely, there's been a development in the insistence that we keep staring at the heavens from our Earthbound perspective. It's only about a third complete, but is already the most powerful telescope we've got, and given the reluctance of some governments to continue getting off the rock and actually going to the phenomena, it'll have to do. At 5,000 metres about sea level, you could do a lot worse.

It's called the Atacama Large Millimeter/ Submillimeter Array, or ALMA in the tradition of seemingly naming seafaring ships, computer databases and machinery after ladies. 66 dishes or antenna span a plain in Chile, a tool heralding a "golden age of astronomy", giving incredible images. It works in collaboration with the Hubble telescope to deliver clearer and more precise images than ever before. Here is what ALMA sees-

What ALMA and the Hubble see together, when their images are factored together, is this-

As these pictures of the Antennae Galaxies clearly show, we can now spy even further afield and even further into the past than ever before, which can only be a good thing. We're nowhere near travelling to these depths of space, so in the meantime observation is all we can rely on, and improving that a thousand-fold is incredible. However, we shouldn't just abandon any chance of getting there. We have to start small, a step outside of the comfort zone, before we can flit all the way to other systems, even galaxies, and keeping a close eye where we're going is crucial. But start to get there we should.

London Jaunt- When in doubt, use your fancy dress as bedding.

2011-10-05T19:05:00.000+01:00

St. George's University, Tooting. An SU in a hospital. England winning rugby against a good Scotland. The works.

Thankfully at the time of writing no photographic evidence of myself in a toga or attempting to dance in said toga had come to light on the old book of face. It may yet, but until then in blissful denial shall I remain.

Lessons for the evening included: turning up when you're supposed to is good, else you have to strip off while downing a pack of Carlsberg and throwing on a toga in about thirty seconds; downing a pack of Carlsberg in that short a time will give the best of people a chronic pocket of gas for the rest of the night; and safety pins in the hands of a rushing and hastily lager-guzzling man who's never put on a toga before, no matter what they tell you, are in no way safe.

The added benefit, and you can have this for free, is that you don't need one of these

if you're at a toga party and kipping on a friend's floor or sofa. Just take off the costume and ta-da! Bedding.

That's not, however, to say you can do away with shelter completely. It won't substitute one of these, for instance.

The next morning I woke up at eight. In the annoying way that when you don't need to be you can be really chipper and full of beans, but when it's time for work you have to have a clone physically drag its likeness from the bed. England were playing Scotland in the World Cup, it was being shown in the SU, a few people were going, I was invited to join them, aside from my boxers the rest of my clothes were upstairs in a bedroom somewhere. Cue the least sneaky attempt at retrieving shorts from a girl who has decided they are a pillow that has ever been made.

Out into absolutely blinding sunshine and on to the SU, we made a quick stop at a greasy spoon called Rosie Lee's, which I was told was the best around. I don't know about that, having not been to every greasy spoon, but I can't say that it's far wrong. An egg and bacon butty to die for, if it weren't for the fact that I got it all down me. Yes, the yolk was on me. Yes, I had egg on my face. Yes, I poached this humour from my dad.

England played fairly poorly. But we won in the end thanks to Mr Ashton. The SU looked incredibly clean and tidy given what had occurred the night before. After the game there were many cups of tea had back at the house, the girls who would be taking the train home took forever to look alive, due to a) being in various states of hangover and b) deciding to make spaceship out of a cardboard box, with balloons and felt tips and tin foil. I may have attracted a bit of sniping by trying to "back-seat spaceship design". So, more tea, then the tube and train home in time to shower and not lose all daylight.

If you know anyone at George's and think a night out would be fun there, it is. Go to it.

Headlining Fleet Street: Time, gentlemen.

2011-10-03T18:30:00.006+01:00

Well, after last week's confession that I was getting bored by it all, and having worked a week more, I came to a decision. There will be no more posts in this series, no more Headlining Fleet Street. I packed it all in. I feel a little bit like a quitter to have done that, but there you are- it wasn't worth my unpaid, desperately-in-need-of-earnings time.

Sometimes, you rush into things without asking anything about them and then wonder why it's all a bit naff. I was so happy to be offered anything that I did exactly this. I was misled. And have since started and failed to continue in a position that was unrelated to anything.

Led to believe I'd be helping write and edit their daily business newswire, in reality I was an unpaid glorified record-keeper updating a back catalogue of company profiles. Those of banks. Internationally, to the point where I was wading through annual reports awash with percentages and figures and German, or Spanish, or Portuguese. Indecipherable was the watchword. I felt a bit like I was trying to read the Matrix and figure out what was going on, and then when I realised what the numbers meant I had to find a dozen fresh ways to say "banks are buggered".

It's a damn bloody shame. I wanted to be part of something related to what I want to go into, in the broad area of online news, writing for websites, learning about new things. Instead I went to Fleet Street and became an unpaid bank researcher. So there we have it.

Manchester Jaunt! (Jaunt series special!)

2011-10-03T18:29:00.000+01:00

Including a guest appearance by the lovely locale known as "Marple, as in Miss".

Folks, I've never been to Manchester before this. I've been through it, got off and sat at Machester Piccadilly before, in first year I even had a pretty good meeting with someone looking for a writer at a hotel just next to the station, but they don't really count, do they? So it was with a little trepidation (and the hope that the weather held) that I ventured back up north after the summer to attend the birthday drunkenness of my dear friend Mr A Taylor. A man of wordiness and wit far beyond mine, who also shares a love of whiskeys, and who was turning 23.

When I got on the train at Euston the announcer may as well have just said this-

"You've boarded the weekend service to drunken fun. Calling at- Chez Taylor, Joshua Brooks, The Factory and returning to Chez Taylor, where this service terminates."

Because that's pretty much what happened. The journey up was pretty good,with Virgin Trains once again proving they're better than any other service I've been on in the UK, and sharing a four-seat table with two chatty and pretty pretty girls. One of who tried to dupe the ticket inspector into thinking she'd got the right ticket by batting her eyelids. He resisted, which was an achievement. Marple, by the way, is a bit in the back of beyond, with a tin box on wheels for a train service, but it's nice.

It all started off well with beer pong, arrogance (basically higher or lower, but with drinking) and ring of fire. I had a nerdy rant about Batman films at the other Chris. (NB- at any given party or place if you are called Chris, there will be another one. It is a rule of nature. Someone should go back in time to the late 80s and tell everyone that Chris is not a name to call your children). Drink flowed. One of the rules that was made up involved the lads all wearing socks for gloves, which was lovely after a day of travelling in the heat. Then we piled into the taxi and shot off.

The pub/ bar of Joshua Brooks, the bit we went into because you had to pay to get into the downstairs club area, was pretty roomy, a bit dull and dim in terms of lighting, but it more than made up for it by serving pints in traditional dimpled beer jugs. I felt like swilling ale and singing Chas and Dave.

It was also in Joshua Brooks that we were caught up with by a great friend who'd been out with colleagues from Waterstone's (all the best people work there at some point, it's elite), who looked as stunning as ever and made any attempts at dancing later on easier to deal with by just dicking about.

After Joshua Brooks we made the incredibly arduous and extensive journey across the road to The Factory. And my word. It's an interesting place. Firstly, there was Motown!. An entire floor dedicated to it. Which also made the "dancing" I committed a bit more bearable. Secondly, I think there are secret passages, as looking for the loo turned into somehow being on the top floor even though we'd just gone in on the ground floor and down some stairs. Thirdly, the drinks were mid-price to expensive, and fourthly, the loos were appalling.

Then, y'know, took a taxi home, sat out in the garden with whisky and a smoke, went to bed and were awoken by Mr Taylor's step-dad running a hedge-trimmer loudly outside the window the next morning. Brilliant stuff. A fried breakfast, bit of F1 watching and then it was time for the train home, feeling a bit stunned after such a heavy weekend. I'd gone a little bit yellow, to be honest, after the combination of The Factory and the Friday night pintage I'd indulged in. But it was worth it, and I found myself facing a Monday 6:00am start and hoping I got to do something more interesting in the next few days before heading to another drinking event.

Headlining Fleet Street: That Friday Feeling (a pint thereof)

2011-10-03T18:27:00.002+01:00

Oh my god. It's been a mad couple of weeks, which seem to have been spent mostly on trains. Let me take you back to the beginning. I've been keeping it all up to date in fragments but it's not been presentable(-ish) until now.

Hastily sketched out on Friday 23rd September- No sign of fainting girl- for those the missed it, my moment of shining glory can be found here. Should have seized the moment and ridden the rescuer vibe when I could, I fear. Onto the actual role- good God it's boring. Banks are not my cup of tea, it seems, but I can swallow any bitter medicine should it make me better or get me money, to extend the metaphor. This won't do either, so I think the days of my time there are numbered. A job, anything involving money, is needed over an internship at the moment, methinks.

Written in first free moment since then-
As mentioned above, this internship isn't entirely what I thought I'd be doing. I suppose nothing ever is, especially when working for free. Still, I'm going to have to see how it goes because I'm sat in the corner, lugging a computer in and out every day when they have company laptops, changing digits in word documents. I'm a record keeper, sort of, but it's more like data input. About banks and the American lending situation sending everything up shit creek.

Like most workers, then, I was in a pretty desperate mood to get my drink on on the Friday. So it was just as well I'd arranged just that- a good old fashioned series of pints with a mate from uni. Step up to the plate, Rob Higson, and take a bow. We met in The Hole in the Wall, a cracking establishment built into the arches under the bridge at Waterloo Station. I'd been there once before, when meeting Mr Higson for a drink before we shuffled to the IMAX to use my free ticket and plus1 to see Inception before it was released at a press screening. That was during the last internship I subjected myself to, last year, so it seemed a pretty fitting place to start. It's got character, and really decently priced beer given that it's next to Waterloo Station.

From there we shuffled on to The Anchor and Hope, which neither of us had been in before. It's covered in signed photos of actresses and actors inside, and after a bit of research that's because a lot of them apparently go in there, a lot. It's nice in there, a real dark wood and bar stools kind of place, with pretty good beer on. A bit more costly than the Hole in The Wall, though, and being Friday it was full of people who'd just finished work.

We then took the perhaps unwise decision to go to The Crown, a British pub done up like an American grill. It's a weird mix, with light wood furnishings and Poles behind the bar, serving buffalo wings and British ale, and unfortunately it doesn't quite work. It was reasonably busy, but that might have been because people needed their drinks. It was Friday, after all, and it was nowhere near "bustling".

Which can also be said for The Stage Door, right behind the actual Stage Door of the Old Vic. However, it was nice in there. Dark wood again, really dim light, and it looked almost exactly like The Winchester from Shaun of the Dead from outside. The barman was great, the beer was great and even though it was only about a fifth full (if that) it felt like a good place to sit and have a good few drinks.

The Fire Station, our last stop, was not so empty. We'd passed it on the way to The Crown, and passed on it as it was heaving out of the door. The bouncer had looked at us a bit shiftily, and we weren't sure, as Rob put it, we "looked cool enough". But in the end we breezed right through to the bar, got a couple of pints in, and Rob threw in chips for good measure. The restaurant section was empty, but the bar was packed. The one thing that really bugged me was the place didn't seem to know what it wanted to be called- Fire Station or Fire House. The uniforms and signs all said different things.

Now, I should probably mention that having had no money for a while I hadn't been to the pub in a good few weeks. It was only when I was sat on the train home from Kings Cross that I realised how out of practice I was. Nine pints + no dinner wouldn't normally have slaughtered me. It did, however, and I had to be up early the next day to do everything I'd meant to do that week before heading to Manchester.

Also saw the Wellington, which I'm told is great pub but was clearly too good with the locals for us to get into as it was heaving, and what Rob tells me is the latest in swanky chic restaurants, Imbibe, which was absolutely empty when we wandered past, and the sign for which apparently read Bar Restaurant Garden, but looked like it had been designed by someone squinting and then manufactured by seismograph.

I found myself continuing the aforementioned Friday feeling, oddly, on the next Monday (when, I'm told, you should be fresh-faced and sharp), as the commute took a downward turn as I was homeward bound. A cracking weekend where I hadn't actually got any rest had occurred between severe pintage (elaborated on here). I was therefore shattered and therefore not happy when the train stopped just as we were accelerating out of Kings Cross.

Turned out a "signal failure" across all signals from Finsbury Park resulted in being sat on a train going nowhere after about thirty seconds of movement. Cue everyone grumbling, and the fifteen percent of us who weren't on the phone when they got on the train reaching for them. It was like a call centre or something. But I got some writing done in the old Moleskin. Looked like a pretentious knob, but there you are.

Headlining Fleet Street: Call me Florence Nightingale (no, really, call me. Please?)

2011-09-22T20:31:00.004+01:00

Day two of the News-based Internship!.

Firstly, I'm convinced Idris Elba was driving our Tube today. When he apologised over the intercom for the delay, “due to a train… on the section ahead”, I fully expected him to start berating someone called Alice.

Secondly, I should probably learn first aid or something. When a girl fainted on me on the train into our beloved capital, I calmly made sure she was okay, held her up when she couldn’t even sit and asked if anyone nearby had any water. Loudly. While telling people to move back, give her room etc, maybe offer her a seat. Cool and collected on the outside, but on the inside I was alternating between screaming “Medic!” and wondering if I should launch into a series of stringent neurological tests, getting her to count fingers in different bits of her vision, state the date etc. I didn’t, thankfully. I was debating asking for her number, as she was quite pretty and I’d been trying to find an excuse to talk to her before that episode, but I didn’t do that either. Maybe I should have.

Who knows, maybe I'll be able to check up on her tomorrow if we get on the same train, or at some point over the next six weeks. Maybe. I'm not one who goes for this romantic notion of people meeting fleetingly and all that, so I'll put it down here just so I've got a reminder as it's a nice feeling and probably won't be around tomorrow. At any rate, after the last "romantic siege" attempted by someone else against Fort Housden through internet warfare (see the saga: the Battle of the Poke and the Poke Revolt), it was refreshing to have someone physically throw themselves at me. Albeit the advance was less of a throw, more of a flop. It'll have to do.

Good God I'm sad and lonely.

What was that? I wasn't there to be hero to floozies? I was there to work? Oh, yeah. There is that. It might seem a bit of an afterthought, but then it is and that's fitting, as I was a bit of an afterthought today. The big boss was away on a sightseeing day to the park with the business partner, apparently, so it was just the editing chums and I in today. Cue a bit more of a laugh, bit of a chat (I'm still not integrated, but small talk has arisen a few times and no one seems repulsed by what I've had to say yet) and some mutual grumbling.

The actual work proved that I really don't know what I'm doing, but none of the guys knew what I'd been asked to do yesterday by the big boss man, and I had hoped to get a couple of foundation pointers this morning when beginning, but there you are. It means I won't have to face the music until tomorrow, which is fine, because I'm going to the pub afterwards for a bit of a London Jaunt, and then intend to obliterate it all with a special, guest episode in the jaunt series to Manchester! There's also potentially a London Jaunt next weekend, too.

As for the Headlining Fleet Street series, I'm going to keep it to one a week or every few days at a maximum, unless colossally interesting things keep happening to me. Any progress on swooning women or indeed reappearances of The Swooning Woman will classify as such. Stay tuned!

It's rude to point. Don't point your finger at me, don't know where it's been.

2011-09-22T20:00:00.016+01:00

Before going any further, read this. That way what I'm about to say will make sense.

DISCLAIMER- I will acknowledge/ allow that in light of certain other huge changes Facebook wheeled out over yesterday and today (depending on when Zuckerberg changed yours) the removal of one button pales into ridiculousness. Still, there you are.

As I was saying, I was shown this the other day, because I clicked on a link to it after a Twitter-user retweeted someone's re-tweet of a link to a blog. Confused? Such are the gateway times we live in, internet user. Anyway, it got me thinking about the elusive, mysterious "Poke".

It reminded me that I never concluded this lovely little missive, relating love, life and the excellent advice to never go after a woman who lists "teethwhitening faketaninjections" as a friend on the world's greatest spy-network, Facebook. I never told anyone who cared and didn't hear it from me in real life (I do, contrary to popular belief, have one) how the episode ended. In the words of Ted Mosby- "Kids- *generic entrance to a long-winded but entertaining story here*"

The "Poke" button, first and foremost, is an evil contraption. In this story, either: a rogue glitch from the website sent a "Poke" from her to me; she did it then denied it either for a dare to befriend the geekiest person they could (probable), because she wanted to befriend me for some reason then thought better of it (initially unlikely, then understandable), to just mess with someone (not likely, she didn't seem malicious); I found her by trawling through the friends of the one mutual friend we have in common and picking her out, despite not knowing the mutual friend well at all (which makes me sound creepy and pervy, and would only ever have occurred were I blind drunk to the point where my fingers wouldn't work the keys, rendering the exercise fruitless- I'd hope). So, the game was afoot.

Now, I was recently informed that there exists an abbreviation, DTF, that stands for "Down to have-a-lovely-time-with-me-in-states-of-undress". It's possible that you could replace the idea of her wanting to befriend me then thinking better of it with this motive, in which case it would initially be ridiculous and the change of mind would be a moment of clarity. I certainly doubt it, despite some people telling me it's possible.

Either way, I replied to her assertion that I had "poked" her, when I don't think I've "poked" anyone first in my life, with an airy "aha, no I didn't", assuming this was part of the game, the cat and mouse "let's just move on from Odd Avenue and find ourselves at the cross-junction of Small Talk Street and Getting Along Famously Boulevard, and hope we don't take a turn onto That Was A Waste Of Time Drive".

It wasn't. I haven't heard from her since, which isn't an entire loss, but when it became clear after a few months that I wouldn't be hearing from her she fell victim to a routine Facebook friend cull on the grounds of Unknown Tease. And this, in summary, is why I dislike the "Poke". And women, but only few and only sometimes. Generally they're alright, bordering on the searched for.

Of course, all of this is perhaps by-the-by when you consider that Facebook have, among the myriad of changes for which they've been royally bollocked by their users, taken that button and hidden it- away from the witless who are tempted to use it for everything, and removed from the sight of people like myself who really used it as much as a puce, deliberately bobble-strewn jumper received as a present from an elderly relative allowed out for the day. Food for ravenous brains- the only brains that would stoop so low as touch this cuisine.

Graphic Novel Review- Wolverine: Old Man Logan

2011-09-21T23:30:00.025+01:00

That's right, after last week's Wolverine: Origin we're here at the end, Wolverine: Old Man Logan, written by Mark Millar with art by Steve McNiven. You can catch that review here, bub.

Story-wise, it actually manages to do something original with the idea of an old man coming out of retirement for one last job, a trope which frankly does my head in whenever I see it now. This is especially true when it's not even old men doing one last job any more- just look at the trailer for Fast and the Furious Five. The key thing is that Logan here has decided to retire himself, living out his days on a farm with a family and never popping his claws again, for reasons that are refreshingly different to simply being "too old for this shit".

The reason for his abstinence from violence, *SPOILERS* having murdered every last X-Man and X-Woman under the illusion they were supervillains taking part in the uprising thanks to Mysterio, is so ingrained in the Marvel Universe it doesn't feel tacked on, but rather character-driven and meaningful. "They broke me, bub."

It doesn't mean that when, inevitably, Logan has to break his vow to get out of s sticky situation and when get a page-sized panel reading, simply, "Sniiikt!" it doesn't feel awesome. The set up of Logan as a pacifist who gets dragged kicking and screaming back into the feral, violent life he used to lead which led to the death of any friends he had brings an excellent pay-off for the rest of the story. Retribution is swift as Logan tours the rest of the broken United States, divided among Red Skull (now president), Hulk, Kingpin and Magneto, leaving a trail of blood and dismembered corpses in his wake.

This isn't a graphic novel I'd let kids read. The art is excellent, McNiven really capturing each location (be it dustbowl, rundown metropolis or ruined capital city) and each character, but it's realistically drawn to the point where the gore would get a bit much. Case in point-

I can't tell you what's going on here, it'd spoil the story, but you can probably work it out. The "old" versions of familiar characters are pretty epically realised.

News-based Internship! Breaking the business, take two

2011-09-21T23:01:00.001+01:00

So, I've landed an internship at a news wire. It's in London, Fleet Street to be precise, and it's a bit like a deja vu where you know the last time you did it wasn't as good as this one, inexplicably. I felt much less like a fraud standing on the underground platform a year on, maybe because I've matured, maybe because of my slick new haircut. Maybe because it's a bit more of a serious stab at getting into the business. That said, I still felt a bit of a fraud, looking around at all the worn down commuters in suits and faces pinstriped with age, only much less of one.

After a bit of a round-about wander via a coffee shop from Farringdon station, I found Fleet Street. Very nice building, 107-111 Fleet Street. Ornate, on the corner, old. Better than the cuboid of peeling white paint I was visiting in Kentish Town just over a year ago. Another bonus over last year's internship is that it's going on for more than just a couple of weeks, and I'll be shown all sorts of bit and bobs to do with the business side of it too- even today I've had the two white boards covered in what looks like enough algebra to make a new-age Enigma powered hyperdrive explained to me. The third bonus? I'm actually getting expenses paid so I can travel in and out, not being expected to land myself in debt to work for free.

Once again though I was sat for quite a while with nothing to do. That was a combo of me being too shy and timid to chat to anyone about doing something else and it being a slow news day apparently. The majority of the articles "wot I writ" were taken off of the freelancers who said they couldn't do them today.

Come lunchtime I wasn't faring a whole lot better. Managed to get a little bit lost as I wandered around between St Paul's, Blackfriars and Temple for a lunchtime stroll, but righted myself almost immediately. I then had the misfortune to witness a lady breastfeeding her child in Cafe Nero, which wouldn't have been so bad in itself except for the fact that the simplicity of that sentence is a lie. What I witnessed was a woman with what I can only imagine are the largest natural mammary glands known to man beating her child around the face with one- and it's clearly had an effect, as this poor bugger's face looked like that of a forty-five year old Irish farmhand who indulged in a bare-knuckle boxing addiction. I almost choked on my espresso, once I'd worked out what was going on.

Most embarrassingly I managed to get lost in the building by forgetting what room I was returning to after said lunch, and had to ring them from down the corridor.

A positive end to the day came with the big boss man Ed saying I'd successfully negotiated a very sharp learning curve for myself with regards to their style guide (which, frankly, was very different to what I'm used to, being thrown together from international business B2B consistency, The Economist and The Guardian- a bastardised version of The Guardian style guide, hacked and cut where the powers that be saw fit, was the gospel at SCAN) and the promise of getting into a meaty project editing and updating company info. I'm looking forward to tomorrow- got a lovely smart red jumper to wear, to follow on from my impressive teal shirt today and convince them that yes, I am capable of fitting in with smart-looking people. And the work is interesting- today I covered the American and Chinese real estate markets, worldwide Skype security breaches and huge money-guzzlers buying each other.

"There shall be wings! If the accomplishment be not for me, 'tis for some other."- Da Vinci

2011-09-21T20:00:00.000+01:00

It turns out that the future of space exploration may not be as dead in the water as previously indicated.

Coming Soon- "Promised Manned Mission to Mars, Or how a giant rocket will make everyone forget about the Moon missions and the current lack of any space program".

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/biggest-ever-rocket-man-mars-160357782.html

After the interval- "One Year Until First Commercial Space Flight, Or Branson reckons billionaires will be whizzing about quicker than holidaymakers fleeing mansions on fire".
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/virgin-aims-first-space-launch-within-044339875.html

All jokes aside, why not have a sort of privateer space race? I'd like to see more independent companies beginning space programs. Imagine the development Honda could do, for Christ's sake! Privatised space travel would force government agencies such as NASA to compete. A sort of space race for peace time. I wouldn't go so far as to say that focussing on space travel will bring world peace, but some experts have said as much. I'd say that while the technology powerhouses and scientists are focussed on the great "out there", at least they won't be concentrating on new ways to blow people up.

If anything, it would give us a little bit more of a hold on this stay our species has booked at the Hotel Universe- as Robert Heinlein said, "The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in." And if nothing else, it would encourage other designs and shapes of craft to be drawn up and, hopefully, take over from the spindly-winged Branson-Batwing. I still reckon it looks stupid.

Graphic Novel Review- Wolverine: Origin

2011-09-14T23:35:00.008+01:00

A quick defence of the genre and medium, before we begin. Sometimes (quite commonly) people sniff at graphic novels and turn their noses up.

If done properly it’s the ultimate visual medium. Even silent films had sound effects and hurdy-gurdy music played live on location. With a graphic novel every detail of the story, including the characters present, the plot developments, the mood of the moment, all of them have to be recognisably drawn into the panel or written into the dialogue. At least 60% of the story is told by the artwork.

So seeing as I have a small amount of money injected into my account every fortnight and the freedom with which to set my own reading agenda instead of having Woolf inflicted upon me I am reigniting my passion for graphic novels. I will be reviewing one a week, with the reviews being posted every Wednesday to try to give the blog a more permanent structure. I hope that for the people reading this measly drop in the ocean of personal blogs on the planet Internet it is interesting and perhaps a little enlightening, and maybe convinces you to have a go at broadening your own reading outside of the medium of purely written storytelling and into something a little more diverse.

Now, I don’t have anywhere near enough money to get as many graphic novels as I’d like or even enough to accurately represent even a tenth of the entire genre, so I’ll be buying things according to my taste rather than trying to cover the “greats”. Sometimes the two will inevitably overlap, but this feature will be more or less a rogues’ gallery of things I thought worth a pop.

And so we begin with Wolverine: Origin, written by Bill Jemas, Joe Quesada and Paul Jenkins, and pencilled by Andy Kubert and coloured by Richard Isanove.

Storyline-
Jemas, Quesada and Jenkins take us all the way back to the beginning here, as the title would suggest, with the childhood and teenage years of one James Howlett, a boy whose sickly episodes necessitate the presence of a governess, a girl called Rose. James' parents have already lost one son, and his father, master of quite an estate, is thought of as soft and unable to run the household by the fierce grandfather. There is also a suspiciously familiar-looking groundskeeper called Thomas Logan, who sports gruff mannerisms and black mutton chops to die for.

So far, so 18th Century Canadian manor.

It gets interesting, humanly gripping when Thomas Logan's son, who he refers to as Dog, joins the young governess and the drippish heir to the estate as unlikely sort-of friends. There is always a seperation, as each day ends with Dog returning to his abusive, alcoholic father in a hut and his companions head up to the big house. The human development of the three children, what they grow up into and how that plays out is the core of Origin- make no mistake, Wolverine as an X-Man, part of Weapon-X or remotely referenced against the Marvel Universe this ain't. Because he heals so well, Wolverine lives a long, long time, as any casual geek knows, so there really wouldn't be that much to reference to anyway should he come across other mutants or superbeings.

Tensions run high between the groundskeeper and the master of the house, pitting the boys' fathers against each other until finally Thomas Logan is removed from service and the grounds. He breaks back in, an altercation occurs in which James' unnatural-ness peeks through and the claws make an appearance, with terrible consequences. At this point, Rose (who is starting to echo Jean Grey more and more in appearance as she matures, intentionally according to the writers) takes him away and they set up life on a Canadian mining facility with other rag-tags. To give any more away would be unfair- it's an interesting, rollicking story, with a young James Howlett taking on a new name and maturing into a lean, muscly and angry, mixed up young man.

I will, however, say this- it's one of the many graphic novels where twists and storytelling really are told through the artwork. At no point is the paternity of James Howlett, or the elder son, discussed in the dialogue. The appearance of Thomas Logan, though, is enough to suggest infidelity at the household, and without the artwork the one line of dialogue that hints at an affair ("It's me, Thomas. Remember?") would be adrift without meaning.

Art-
Pencilled by Kubert the panels are clear, deliberate and grittily, edgily sketched, with the cartoon element of some artists' work removed. The panorama scenes are well composed and incredibly detailed landscapes, not just concentrated on the focus point of that panel but fully fleshed out to the border, and the character detail, particularly facially, is subtle and refined. It does what good graphic novel art should, adding to and complimenting what is typed into those little blank bubbles.

The colours chosen by Isanove perfectly accompany such artistic style, with muted and realistic tones used in favour of gaudy or cartoonish, bright panels. The grey-based tones of the panel above fit us perfectly in a night time setting, but also keep the focus on the touches of colour, drawing the eye from bottom-left to top-right across the most important figure in that shot. Meanwhile, even the brighter panels such as Dog talking to the Howlett grandfather below or the children watching a sunset on the farm are given a muted and gritty treatment by Isanove, with what could be a bright and clashing scene still based in grey variations of the colours- the orange of the firelight, for example, or later the lush green of the Canadian forests, are still daubed with darker and less intense colours.

Overall, setting up Wolverine was going to take quite a bit of doing. As with so many graphic novels I must admit I felt a little disappointed at the length and thought the open ending, which was inevitable, could have been followed with a few more encounters before finishing the story. That said, hints and origins of all sorts of aspects of Logan's character are placed throughout, from the names he takes on to the mannerisms he adopts and even a first time he encounters someone saying "Bub", all while weaving a decent story that feels appropriately cruel for the birth of Marvel's most messed up hero.

If you're sole exposure to Wolverine has been the films, or you've ever wanted to know what makes him so mean and gritty, I'd definitely give it a read.

Next week- bookending Logan’s life at the other end with Wolverine: Old Man Logan

"Are you sure you buried Heather all in one place?" ITV Drama Review- Appropriate Adult

2011-09-13T22:45:00.010+01:00

ITV and Channel 4 turn out some great drama based on things that have really happened, the extremes of the human condition. Compared to the stories BBC occasionally create that glimmer among the diatribe of soaps and "continuing drama" like Waterloo Road, they tend to be about true crime or disturbingly written dramas such as Red Riding, pushing what can be done and told on TV.

More than a few echoes of Longford, in which Jim Broadbent shone, as he always does. Perhaps it was the continuous prison visitations or just the sense of someone who should know better being drawn into the web of lies and seduction woven by a serial killer as Longford experienced with Myra Hindley and Leach found with Fred West, or the nature of the crimes, but they mirrored well. Standing up in comparison to Longford, Appropriate Adult unfortunately fell a little short.

The first thing to say about Appropriate Adult is that it is a "period piece" in that it perfectly, one hundred percent captures the early nineties, 1994 being the year in question. Everything is dour, drab and dowdy, from DC Hazel Savage's glasses to West's jumpers to the cold, grey, almost washed out palette that it was shot in. Whether it was a directorial decision to shoot through such a "grim" colour filter for dramatic effect, implying the sense of skin-tightening horror that would probably grab you were you in on the interviews too or for another reason, such as to appropriately "age" the event in light of criticism that perhaps this drama was coming too soon after the fact I'm not sure, but it's certainly effective. In much the same way that the last three Harry Potter films have employed an almost greyscale palette to denote grit and adult themes, such was the effect here.

And what adult themes they are. The programme isn't for the faint of heart. To hear Dominic West so flippantly and calmly, almost jovially, talk about dismembering bodies and burying the separate pieces in the back garden, all through a creaking, gravelly West Country accent that disarms the ear with it's bumpkin-like connotations is quite chilling. The dialogue in the interviews, much of it lifted from what was actually said, is seepingly horrific, made worse by the fact that it takes a few seconds to process and then the realisation of what is being said hits home. Lines such as "I closed her eyes first- well, you don't want to cut your daughter's head off with her looking at you, do you?" slip in and surprise you.

The first half of the programme really sets out its grim, menacing atmosphere, and while the second half lost some of that sense of the terrifyingly surreal attitude of Fred West it still concluded quite well. Some of the possible fabrications, such as the suicidal thoughts of Janet Leach (the eponymous appropriate adult) because she "missed" West were jarring, in that her timid presence in the interviews never really showed any feeling toward him. It was always going to be difficult portraying the strange relationship between the two of them, the casually confessing West who was only there to "get it all sorted out" because any police investigation was a bit of a nuisance for his beloved family and the prim, quiet family woman who eventually became an eager confidant, and I'm not sure that that duo quite came across convincingly.

The programme did feature,for me, two stand-out performances- those of Dominic West as Fred West and Sylvestra Le Touzel who, as Detective Constable Hazel Savage, manages to completely capture the dreary early nineties and a dogged, stoic policewoman faced with a repulsive, toying confessor. Though we see very little of her in either episode, slightly more in the second, Monica Dolan deserves a lot of praise for bristlingly portraying Rose West, her tantrum-like outbursts and stony silences dripping equal feral menace. Had we seen more of her she would have been the stand out cast member.

All in all, it was honestly probably a little long. Had it been a one-off, hour and a half film in the same manner as Longford then it probably would have worked better, but at over two hours it seemed to drag in places. Not that it was watched particularly for the excitement or intensity, rather the drawn out effect of thinking you'd be helping a special needs offender and being offered Fred West, the first interaction with whom has you listening to the man recount chopping up his flesh and blood while "Rose was out, shopping. She 'ad nothin' to do with any of it."

For someone who was only five at the time that all this was going on, I really knew nothing about the Wests other than that they killed people, and as such the detail in this drama was perhaps more entertaining, through catharsis rather than enjoyment, than it would have been to older viewers of just one generation before. As a piece of TV, West's performance as West was exceptional, and having seen him flap about on The Hour on BBC One recently it was refreshing.

That said, he has himself spoken of dreaming of Fred West in nightmares, pulling him down, and in the role he is so convincing that I can't say for sure I wouldn't be slightly disturbed meeting him in real life. If the show were all about Fred West, as Infamous, based on the true crime murder of a Kansas family and what made their killers do it, it would have been more successful. As a study of the appropriate adult Janet Leach, however, it seems to focus elsewhere and doesn't convey the same sympathy even as the character of Hindley induced in Longford.

A home from home that's too big, a bit too hot and sticky- the old, budget hotel of planets, then.

2011-09-13T18:30:00.018+01:00

News just in this afternoon- there is an exoplanet that has been discover which is probably habitable, though not very easily. It would be like living in a sauna, apparently, and while that'd be great for your complexion for a while it would eventually be terrible for any buildings/ semi-permanent settlements. For shame.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't at least look at it, though, in case we need to leave within the fairly small interstellar window of the next 250 years. As many scientists and sci-fi authors have said, the future of the human race is not on one planet, and probably not this one. So, onwards! To the catchily named HD85512B!

The gravity there would be a problem, with it being 1.4 times that of Earth, but with the exoskeletons in development today both for military and medical use that wouldn't be too much of an issue. And it's even been hinted at that, if it was supporting life of its own, they would be brilliantly alien rather than the Star Trek staple of bipedal humanoids. So let's open our arms and welcome these squat strange creatures, eh?

Of course, there's not that much more that can be said about it without visiting, taking some samples, maybe seeing what sort of make-up the ocean and atmosphere are and perhaps why they're that way? From that, it might even be possible to deduce elements necessary for terraforming other exoplanets within the Goldilocks-zone (the principle being it's not too hot/ cold, close/ far from a star, but just right). If only we had an active space program with which we could begin to plan such an excursion. Mr Obama, do we-? Oh, you abolished it because of funding. Cheers for that.

We'll just sit and look at it from afar then while we fill up, burn, spray oil all over and blow up our own planet. Sounds like a plan.

"Kids, sometimes a TV show can be a bit different"- How I Met Your Mother, the series so far

2011-09-13T18:00:00.022+01:00

I recently had the ~~opportunity~~ spare time, solitude and, despite my best efforts, nights of insomnia after days spent monotonously applying for job after job after job with which to indulge in a little catching up on recent television. I caught a couple of episodes of a series called How I Met Your Mother, and despite not getting into it before I decided to begin at the beginning after a couple of series four episodes tickled my funnybones.

I have since seen all six series, and found them incredibly refreshing among the relentless Everyone Loves Raymonds, Accidentally On Purposes and Just Shoot Mes of American situation comedy. Which has been timed brilliantly, as series 7 is being aired from the 19th of September (next Monday) on CBS in the States*, so what better moment to post a rundown of the things that make the show a little bit different and give it such quality?

There are five main reasons I can think of as to why the show is consistently funny, quality and makes you want more of it.

Refreshing storytelling structure- The key to How I Met Your Mother is the fact that it is essentially one gigantic flashback peppered with narration by Old Ted in 2030 (Bob Saget).
This leads not just to plenty of in-jokes, such as calling an old flame "Blah Blah" because "it's been 27 years, I can't remember all this stuff", but also clever tricks on the part of the writers allowing intelligent storytelling that surprises the audience, making both incredibly funny moments and incredibly moving ones. In Three Days of Snow, for example, the finale of the epsiode (it really is a finale) comes from some deft playing around with the implied timeline of the episode. Sometimes up to three periods of future and two of past are being shown side by side, such as when the group compare being hooked or "the hooker" in previous relationships or the rules of dating in previous relationships to prove to one another that a current relationship won't work, at which point Old Ted normally chimes in that it didn't, they were right. And yet it is understandable, simple enough to follow and makes you think. Slick and clever, the structure of the show probably holds the key to it unlike something like Friends, which dragged on and on for no real apparent reason and in the same vein, with no change to the status quo and no goal in sight, far beyond its quality years.

It's also very in-universe, with story arcs constantly present in each episode. It makes you want to root for the characters a little more. Some of the more drama-based episodes can feel a little closed off if you haven't caught the previous happenings, but in my opinion that's what's so great. You want to find out why the things are happening- at least I did, hence watching from the beginning.

Feeling new despite the bare bones being sitcom standard-
there are established sitcom tropes and techniques within the show, such as the group of friends all regularly meeting in a coffee house/ bar in a big American city, the "apartment set" being a regular feature etc, but there are enough locations for it not to feel stagnant and due to the nature of the story, with tonnes of red-herring women potentially being the titular mother the choice of settings change swiftly.

The character focus raises it above the empty formula of Friends/ Everybody Loves Raymond etc. Drama and humour mix together well because the writers try to flesh out the characters as more than just people who spout set-ups and punchlines at each other with ridiculous speed a la Gilmore Girls. From the first series there's the single protagonist Ted, who is ironically the least well developed of the main characters; his best friend Marshall and his long term girlfriend Lily, the "perfect couple" with some clear divisions and issues that come to the fore; Barney, a womanising bravado-core with fleetingly shown deeper issues and sadness under the superficial suit; and Robin, who we first meet as Ted tries to date her but who then becomes a well-rounded individual in her own right within the group, with ambitions and history that the writers draw on for continuing series.

Having an end in sight-
this kind of ties into the structure of story telling, but it's a point in it's own right because from the outset there has been an ending in play, almost ensuring that the series don't run on too long. They've been signed for series seven,starting soon, and series eight, but nothing past those. The calibre of the writing and the cast would suggest that they would end at a suitable point before hitting the Simpsons stage, the Friends flop-in-the-middle or the Scrubs-stall. Not to say that some series aren't weaker than others, but because it's constantly been interwoven with flashforwards to significant points, some of which have been caught up with by now, the flagging points always have the benefit of brevity and are reasonably infrequent. There isn't a series yet that the audience seem to feel they could do without, unlike with, for example, Friends or Scrubs where the fact that they were/ are respectively repeated ad nauseum on Channel 4 and E4 with notable exceptions prove that some sections acted as dead weight pulling the show down (normally midway through the show's run). It also allows some of the less believable, more blatant sitcom moments that obviously came about after brainstorming ridiculous situations for characters to find themselves in to slide, as it's a guys memories and embellished stories. Several times older Ted recounts that one of the other characters "swears this is what happened next", and in the stories he himself exaggerates many times and is caught out embellishing the truth many times, so the story is not to be taken entirely seriously.

Pop culture references-
How I Met Your Mother is an albeit slightly closeted geek show. Barney's Star Wars paraphernalia, the episode Slutty Pumpkin where Top Gun is referenced by flight-suiting up at a Halloween party, and Three Days of Snow where the film Cocktail is riffed on all heavily bring the pop-culture of America to the fore with brilliant effect.

But there's more. The show is peppered with sharper, wittier and blink if you miss it moments of reference. The intervention for Marshall's hat, which makes him look like Dr Seuss' cat, has Robin read her letter: "Dear Marshall, I do not like that stupid hat. I want to beat it... with a bat. Or maybe stab it with a fork. It makes you look like such a dork." Other references, where the pay off is much greater because the audience know what the joke is, are scattered throughout the show- my favourite has to be referencing Lethal Weapon, where Old Ted censors a quote in telling the story to his kids- "stuff. He said stuff."

Having a type that isn't a type-
this could almost be included in the section about character and feeling above a sitcom, but it deserves a bit more examination- a "Joey Tribiani" Barney Stinson is not. Why? Because he's been a character not a type from series one. Prime example- Joey falling in love with Rachel after nine series of womanising vs Barney finding he has feelings for Robin after five series of womanising with occasional moments of profound depth and exchanges with Lily/ Ted/ Marshall about serious things happening in his life. Barney is almost believable, as a seriously damaged guy escaping that through sleeping around and ebing a bit brash and cocky to cover it all up. No disrespect to Matt Le Blanc (all blame goes to the writers- Le Blanc was great in Episodes, for example), but Joey Tribiani is not believable. He has one catchphrase which is obviously a catchphrase, the "How you doin'?", which pulls people away from being involved. Stinson's catchphrases "What up!", "Suit up", and "Legen- wait for it- dary!" and the many variations upon those themes are more like a set of in-jokes between friends that can be played with to suit the day out/ night in/ current event in a fun way because that's the guy he is in the group.

*As yet there is no air date for series 7 in the UK, but it won't be far off- E4 is on series 6 now. And if you can't wait that long, there's a sneaky thing called the internet with, I'm told, many ways of procuring certain... merchandise.

My family went to Italy...

2011-09-11T16:08:00.006+01:00

And all they brought me back was this lousy... Oh, wait. It's actually pretty nice.

Yes, breaking tradition with the typical stick of rock, I Love Romans t-shirt or Sistine Chapel fridge magnet, I received a very nice quill set. A choice of three nibs, a handle moulded from Morano glass with bronze and copper inlaid, and a wax-sealed bottle of ink. Lovely.

Even the wrapping paper was pretty immense- a neat rectangle detailing the many archetypes in traditional Italian theatre, including Scaramuccia and Pantalone.

Italian theatre and its eventual evolution through comeddia dell'arte to the slapstick silent movie and farcical one act comedy routines is a hugely untapped and untold of discipline for many in Western Europe still, despite it's incredible influence on modern comedy, and the fact that it recognised that characters at their basic root are set in types despite the best efforts of the greatest storyteller was very forward-thinking and meta for its time. As such a rich vein for storytellers, and as a reminder of this fact, it has pride of place on my wall, framed by clashing lime green wallpaper. I hope the maestros of that art don't mind too much.

Incidentally, the quill came with a bookmark of the same design of the wrapping paper. I have since mislaid it, but am about to turn the whole room over looking for it as it is a) really nice and b) the only intact bookmark I won, with the rest being so well thumbed they're more or less shredded.

Valuev searching for long lost brother

2011-09-10T10:45:00.005+01:00

Yes, folks and folkettes, this rare dip into commenting on the sporting world concerns the recent news that Nikolai Valuev is going to lead an expedition to find that rarest of cryptids, the "Russian Yeti".

Possible sighting of the Kazzbuss yeti.

He's going to Siberia for two days to hunt the beast, also known as the Kazzbuss yeti after a local town. I have one question- what good will two days do? In the years people have spent searching for all manner of cryptids (beasts/ creatures that exist in urban myth but are doubted in reality due to their bizarre nature), when has anyone found one? And he'll catch one in two days?

On Wikipedia, the Possible explanations section for the Yeti lists three types of bear, a monkey and an extinct giant gorilla as potential sightings of the famed Yeti. It also states it could be a human hermit, too, which is acceptable only if the hermit is Yeti-esque. Take a good hard look at Valuev. It could be family.

There is an everlasting allure with cryptids, though. Why are we so interested in them when now we can pretty much gaurantee they don't exist? You can trawl Loch Ness all you want, with as much sonar and 3D imaging kit as possible, and find nothing. Take thermal cameras to the Siberian forests and see no abominable snowmen. Sit on a pick-up truck's tailgate in Mexico with a rifle across your legs and shoot a grandmother, not a chupacabra.

Perhaps, as Valuev has stated that he'll be undertaking the exhibition in a period of recovery from bone-based and other injuries before training hard again, he's actually taking the approach Rocky took when fighting Ivan Drago and going all natural, running up mountains, lifting logs and battling the elements while growing a beard. Who knows?

The Wikipedia page for the Yeti is here- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeti

Lifting the gay blood-giving ban- "a step in the right direction", but not there yet

2011-09-08T15:23:00.003+01:00

This news woke me at seven this morning. In my dozing, bleary state I acknowledged it with a smile and remember thinking that it was pretty monumental, given that yesterday there was no mention that such a decision was being made and that it was the fourth or fifth item on the bulletin. For almost thirty years any man who is gay and sexually active has been banned from donating blood, and finally the realisation has dawned on the health care professionals constantly pleading for more donors to step forward that "the ban could no longer be justified", according to the BBC.

I read up on the story on the BBC website, and have so say that while it makes an excellent soundbyte, the fact that "the life-long ban on gay men donating blood has been lifted" doesn't really address or cover the story. There's much more to it, and it's not necessarily as huge a leap forward as is perhaps being made out by "snippet news." It's worth reading the BBC story before reading any further here- it can be found at:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-14824310

Done that? Read on-
From November gay men in England,Scotland and Wales will be allowed to give blood. But only on the condition that

And Northern Ireland (Norn Iron) is expected to make a decision soon.

The worry is that there is still a division between heterosexual and homosexual donors in the way that they are treated.

Now, it's effectively saying that gay men may donate, so long as they are chaste for a year. Which seems an unreasonable amount of time, and frankly for a lone pint it strikes me as inefficient. A year of chastity and then multiple donations the standard sixteen weeks apart would mean four pints of blood per two years of chastity, while heterosexuals can donate eight pints over two years and still have a sex life. Does it seem fair to you? And does it seem worth it, at a time when the NHS are scrabbling for as many donations as possible? The BBC article ran the following:

Sir Nick Partridge, chief executive of the Terence Higgins Trust, a sexual health charity, said the new rules were "necessary, fair and reasonable".

However, he said it was impossible to say how many men would actually be able to start donating blood as "the vast majority of gay men are still [sexually] active".

Now I know the arguments that oral and anal sex carry a higher risk of infection through the indelicate fact that tearing can occur on the skin. And I know that, in terms of evolution, that is because the "evolved and appropriate" orifice for insertion is in a female boday. I'm not interested in the nature/ nurture, are they born that way debate- for what it's worth I'm fairly sure that it's a prefectly natural orientation- but in terms of evolution hundreds of thousands of years are against the gay man. Does this justify such a restriction? Not really, I don't think so. Anal sex, and certainly oral sex, have been demonised since the 1980s as high-risks of infection with shaky reasoning- a womanising playboy may have recieved oral sex from a double-figure of women in one year and be allowed to give blood while a monogamous gay man in a year long relationship would not. There are so many nuances that could be added to the vetting process, option questions I'd like to see added in to get better detail and establish who can and cannot give blood.

From the BBC article:

chief executive Ben Summerskill said there would still be tighter controls on low-risk gay men than on high-risk heterosexuals.

"A gay man in a monogamous relationship who has only had oral sex will still automatically be unable to give blood but a heterosexual man who has had multiple partners and not worn a condom will not be questioned about his behaviour, or even then, excluded."

Of course, such questions may be called for to be implemented for everyone so as not to discriminate, which would cause problems. The NHS constantly bleats about its shortage of blood donation, so I doubt it would never in a million years implement stringent questions for all orientations. How many 20-30 year old males with "player" lifestyles or simply on the dating scene in the promiscuous modern era would end up being turned away, knocking overall donations? Yet the superficial slackening of restrictions with no real raise in attendance is a huge leap forward?

According to the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs, if there were no limit on sexually active gay men donating there would risk of one infection in every 3.48 million donations. One in 3.48 million. I'd say, given the advances mentioned in the BBC article in blood testing, that that's a pretty good set of odds, wouldn't you? If there's a system that detects infections such as HIV 99.9% of the time, it would catch pretty much every one in 3.48 million that falls into the stockpile. And if there were perhaps more stringent and thorough checks put in place for all blood, why not lift the chaste period? Perhaps one or two terms of blood-giving, 16 or 32 weeks? That would be seen as less discriminatory and probably quite reasonable, I feel. Of course, it may still be viewed as unnecessary by some but I doubt any perfect solution can be found soon.

It's a very good decision, finally alleviating the culture of fear and demonisation of certain prospective, healthy potential donors, but will it stop there? The only way that this can have a very good outcome is if it is the beginnign of a series of steps, not just a token gesture.

We don't have the technology, we can't rebuild... your face

2011-09-05T15:24:00.003+01:00

Listen up marketing and advertising gurus of the TV world. There's a gigantic bone I'm going to pick, with all of you, right now. So pay attention.

We do not have nanobots at the beck and call of every cosmetics company. So seriously, stop telling me that every cream, facepack, deoderant,shampoo and toothpaste is full of patented technology, illustrated by an animation in which cells or spheres move autonomously across the skin/ teeth/ hair. It doesn't happen, and won't happen within our lifetimes. Even if scientists are working on developing nanobots, they won't come to fruition for espionage, medicine and warfare for at least fifty years, according to leading experts, and even then they'll be very basic.

So- stop with adverts like the following. They are ridiculous.

And shame on Weisz for doing such an ad.

There's an advert for a Sure deoderant for women airing at the minute which claims to contain "motion sensitive technology". So there are, what, minute spirit-levels and circuitry in the fine, slightly white spray that then release hidden capsules are there? No? Didn't think so. It might be a temperature/ heart-rate sensitivity, sure, in which case it could release extra anti-juice over time, but it isn't what they claim.

Stop assigning extremely specific parameters to what your product excels at, too, if you don't mind, and definitely don't do it by claiming they "target" or specifically "hunt out" grey hairs/ blackheads/ drops of sweat/ appleskin between your teeth. The product may well be exceptionally adept at doing those things, but it isn't "deciding" to do so while mid operation.

A la-

Remember, above all esle- scenes like this-

never happen in your shampoo lather.

Why do we need that sort of thing anyway? So long as a shampoo can succesfully claim that it won't make my hair fall out in one go, and a toothpaste won't melt my gums and preferably tastes of some sort of mint, I'm happy.

Oh, and one other thing- Sominex. They've started running adverts for it again, but was it named something else at some time or another? I'm sure it was, but can't for the life of me thing what, or find it online. Am I getting old? Do we have a cream to put in my ear full of memory-restoration bugs? That'd be handy.

Bobbies getting beats if thinktank has its way

2011-09-05T12:04:00.002+01:00

We don't live in an era where that's safe any more. Of course we don't. If coppers were to leave the house in full regalia and get the train, most people wouldn't bat an eyelid. But there will be the few, the few who see that one of their neighbours or a local man is leaving his house as a policeman, the few who see a lone copper on the train and taunt him as he's not on duty. The elderly and other neighbours would, perhaps, treat them with the respect that matches the respect villagers in Dock Green treated the proverbial Dixon, but only if they knew them. It's not much of a surprise any more that people don't know their neighbours.

Whoever thought this would a good suggestion plainly doesn't understand the awfully-phrased "national feeling" at the moment. In an interview I conducted with ex-Home Secretary Charles Clarke in May, for the student newspaper I was working on at the time, we discussed public sector cuts and the effect they would have on law enforcement. While he advised that more officers patrolling alone would be beneficial, I can't say I agree. A single police officer stumbling across a group of, typically, four or five people who then panic because they've been caught in the act of whatever can't end well, can it? Even teaming them up with a PCSO, the use of which I'm not much of a fan of either given the fact that other than a being a visual deterrant through presence, would be better than sending officers out alone. And that's saying something.

Then again, maybe I'm being far too cynical. I know that while the thinktank have advised this the police have stated they will not be implementing this suggestion, for the reasons I agree with, but perhaps we're both wrong in judging the situation.

For light relief, how adorable is the wee lady copper?(Picture Bimal/Gautum/Demotix/Corbis)

Perhaps they're being cautious. If, for example, a bit of planning was implemented and a sort of "train share" or "travel share" scheme was put in place, where coppers attending the same shift travel in together then there wouldn't necessarily be a problem. Maybe I'm misjudging everything and lone officers would be safe in public, but even if that is true for the majority of the time the first time a single officer gets attacked, robbed or otherwise involved in a confrontation on their commute in the press would rip the scheme to shreds. Hence, I suspect, the caution.

And it's not just police officers being victims. What if they, as I said, get "involved in a confrontation" as an IPCC statement could possibly describe it in a way to keep the piece, and got a little over eager? What powers would they have as off-duty but still visibly a police-officer? Would a third stage of reduced powers, between off- and on-duty, be necessary to protect both the copper and the local police service from criticism as to how they act when technically not on duty?

I think it's probably going to be a long while before this suggestion is put to the police again, and with good reason. It's a hell of complicated thing- perhaps the "travel share" idea could work, though.

And all this on the day that the very same thinktank has announced that almost £150 million is wasted by the police each year in getting officers in offices rather than letting civilians do that while the police actually police. Shocking.

Story on the £150 million per year waste from Yahoo!-here.

Story on the uniform commute idea from The Guardian-here.

Incidentally, this is my 100th post on this blog. If ever there was a time to look back, re-read posts, maybe hit up some you missed or passed over, and comment like crazy, this would be it. 100 posts, people, and three comments so far. Prove you read something by saying "hi" or telling me how wrong I am about something. Ta.

"I don't do violence and guns." BBC Drama Review- Page Eight

2011-09-04T21:56:00.018+01:00

Now this is more like it. BBC drama that actually entertains, breaks a few boundaries and doesn't sit in a nice little familiar niche. Yup, Page Eight was brilliant.

Intelligence officer Johnny Worricker, and possibly sinister neighbour Nancy Pierpan

In a nutshell- Old school espionage, relying on information and intelligence rather than clues garnered from the top secret computer, the password to which was guessed by looking at the penthouse address or super-villain's favourite book. Less adventure-based than current fare and yet more tensely put together.

Starring a cast of extremely talented actors including Bill Nighy, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, BBC Films have put together a terse, tense and exciting drama in Page Eight. Ahead of the soon to be released Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy film, and as I am currently reading the last in the trilogy of Le Carre's novels based around George Smiley and realising how good that atmosphere is, it was a welcome breath of intelligent, devious spy work rather than the action-based, gritty parkour-fest that the genre has become.

The plot revolves around a single intelligence report, page eight of which indicates highly placed corruption in the British government, and what happens to it after the sudden death of MI5's director general Benedict Baron (Gambon).

The untimely death, after the sensitive nature of the report has been made so clear in a meeting with the wonderfully hard, woman in a man's world outlook Home Secretary (hardbitten Saskia Reeves), is enough to get Worricker (Nighy) to suspect foul play. He goes to the house where Baron died and examines the body in one of the key pivotal scenes, taking the drama back to true espionage roots. There are no close up shots of forensic evidence so heavy-handedly hinting at murder. No smoking gun is found. Just a man who has had an apparent heart-attack setting alarm bells ringing because of the convenience of the timing for certain people.

The document, held aloft by soon to be deceased Director General Benedict Baron

The subplot with Nancy Pierpan (Weisz), whose brother was killed unlawfully in Israel, weaves itself wonderfully into an equal sitting with that of the government report, and Nighy's deft performance trying to work out his conveniently placed, perhaps too coincidental foreign activist neighbour in the scenes they share is excellent, gripping stuff. The red-herring of her possible deliberate move to hunt him out troubles both Warricker and the audience until an unlikely and odd companionship springs up as he turns to her when he needs to disappear.

Worricker exudes confidence placed in experience and age, to the point where the perhaps unlikely Casanova-figure of Nighy actually convinces. He is suave, measured and quiet, and because of this his familial wrongdoings and the complicated life he lives are excusable and accepted as a mere drawback. The power play, pitting a lone, maverick PM against the secret service's lone, steadfast Worricker is identifiable in the current climate, and the biting, sharp dialogue is quick and refreshing.

Have we seen too much of Fiennes' villainous faces recently?

The one thing I would say is that both Nighy and Fiennes, perhaps because of recent over-exposure in so many shows and films or perhaps as a shortcoming on their parts seemed very familiar, not so nuanced and far removed from other recent roles as perhaps they could have been. Would it kill Nighy to maybe put on an accent of some sort every once in a while in a straight drama? Or perhaps try a different hairstyle? Or even something simple like stop just gesturing with/ making use of solely his fore- and middle-finger and use his whole hand?

As for Fiennes, he just reminded me of his mob-boss character Harry in In Bruges acting slightly restrained. A little too malicious and obviously shifty.

On the whole, writer and director David Hare has said he would like to continue with his soft-spoken, jazz-loving intelligence officer in other films if it's received well. I for one would love to see more. Catch it while you can on iPlayer.

Creepy, predictable and ultimately over too soon

2011-09-04T11:47:00.000+01:00

There are two things that immediately bring that triumvirate of descriptions to mind: nighttime fumblings with Piers Morgan and the latest episode of Doctor Who, "Night Terrors" by Mark Gatiss. One of them is going to be reviewed, discussed and rated here as I've experienced it. But which?

No, I haven't had an affair with the flabby-faced ex-NOTW ed. I have, however, been disappointed by the TV, which hurts a bit more. Now don't get me wrong, I love Mark Gatiss probably an unhealthy amount. His particular brand of macabre interest in all things Victorian and creepy has taken me through Crooked House, A History of Horror, The First Men in The Moon, The Quatermass Experiment and his previous Who episodes, not to mention the Fear on Four radio series. And yet I felt that this episode was lacking something- the creepiness was lost due to it feeling rushed, and the ending was tied together far too quickly without much explanation or even enough time to really understand the reasons behind the story.

As an episode, it was definitely long enough and equipped with enough substance to be a two-parter episode. And oh, how quickly it all came together. I know it's for kids, but really? Dolls in the trailer, a glass eye in the drawer, a wooden "copper pan" and an "olde" gas light that is in fact electric? That's enough clue to put anyone on the right track, and even if it wasn't there are enough individual reveals to be spread out a lot further as Rory and Amy explore the dark house, which wasn't entirely dissimilar to the orphenage they left Melody, their daughter, in.

Oh, and talking of Melody- after the Melody/ River Song festival that was "Let's Kill Hitler" (or, due to a lack of Hitler, "Let's Give Birth To River Song"), it was extremely jarring not to have any reference to Rory and Amy's lost baby at all. No sadness on their part, no mention of River Song's bad/ good/ smug anti-hero arc in the last episode, nothing. Why? It was deliberately left as a stand-alone and was intended for the first half of the series, when none of the aforementioned had happened. Which felt very weird.

I could have done with being more scared. Gatiss is an incredibly clever writer, and if he'd used a little more skill in pacing the reveals, had had two episodes to work with and was prepared to add in a bit more creepiness a la Crooked House, as he is more than capable, it would have truly been equal to the Weeping Angels episode Blink and The Empty Child. And there's the issue.

The show needs to decide if it's for adults, with overarching plots and emotional difficulties designed for them, or kids, with gimmicky creatures and enclosed, adventure of the week plots for them, and stick to it. Or at least cater adequately for both. I was unsurprised that "Mels" turned out to be Melody, with the Hollywood entrance Moffat shoved down our faces in Let's Kill Hitler, and was left cold by Night Terrors because it flipped between audiences rather than simultaneously entertained both.

The benchmark Night Terrors failed to reach

The moment that pulled me out of any creepiness/ involvement was the "comical" old-lady-being-pulled-into-the-bin-bag-pile scene. It was unnecessary, and all too nicely fit together- why would the old woman hear a noise and immediately respond a) why are you, assumed person in the pile, trying to scare me? and b) that's you, isn't it George, the only child we see on this sprawling estate. Convenience ripped any disbelief I could suspend out of the crane it was held in, unfortunately.

And finally, as I mentioned, the "rhyme and reason" behind the episode felt very cobbled together in a Doctor info-dump. There was very little explanation as to where the baby had come from, the nature of its mimcry of the human form, and altogether sudden acceptance from Daniel Mays character when we hadn't seen any real struggle in him towards what he had thought was his son. They were left by the Doctor with no further explanation which fit well with the idea that they should accept him as theirs, but unfortunately it meant so was the audience.

I'm becoming disillusioned with the hit-and-miss nature of this series, and would like to see it come back on form, soon.

Oh, and having caught about ten minutes of the behind-the-scenes series (Confidential) for this episode, I'm doubting really if Moffatt has it all there. His description of Gatiss' nursery rhyme penned for this episode lauded it as genius, but it seemed a little cobbled together. Brief- must hint at Doctor's death. Hm... "Tick tock goes the clock, even for the Doctor" is a good line, let's use that. Hm.

Life Update- Haven't got a job yet

2011-08-23T15:24:00.006+01:00

I don't normally do progress reports on things that have happened in my life. This blog was designed to be mainly about current affairs and things that I have come across, books, plays, films and the like, and then to use those as the substance which my witty cynicism and occasionally misplaced dislike is a foil to. I can't really stand talking about day-to-day stuff, or reading other "personal blogs".

That's because I don't generally like the idea of people being exhibitionist enough to fling their equivalents of diary entries around willy-nilly across the interwebs for every Tom, Dick and Harry to stumble across. It's depressing that some people are vapid enough that they feel such a thing has a place on the internet, as 90% of the things they report on doing are mundane and frankly not worth reading about. In my opinion, that is. If a person wants to write a diary then I'm not saying they shouldn't, I just don't think everyone should be offered a glance- there's being open and then there's unashamedly craving attention.

Anyway, I am writing a small update piece now, simply because I was giving this blog the once over the other day and realised the description written for it by myself still reads "of an already jaded undergrad", which at this point in time is spectacularly false because it is, sadly, redundant. I am no longer a student, one among the heaving masses of learning, partying and procrastinating young people who make their parents proud by not telling them a lot of what they are doing. I am now what some refer to as unemployed, and what I am currently telling myself in the mirror is actually a lazy tramp.

As such this blog will be changing. A friend of a friend has done this with hers, and I think it's a good idea- from now on there will be set days when specific categories will be posted. There's nothing set in concrete yet, but reviews of books, films and graphic novels will all be present each week, as will a current affairs discussion and possibly other features. Keep your eyes peeled- it may not kick in for a while, as I'm having trouble motivating myself at the moment, but it will happen soon. The reason for the delay?

Currently I'm on my own. The 'rents/ folks/ duo who you can blame for bringing me into this world took themselves and the younger spawn off to Italy on Monday. It's cloudy and grey and pretty much eternally England here, meanwhile, and I'm waiting on a reply from a job I interviewed for a week and a half ago because no decision has been made yet. I know this, because that's what they told me when I called to check, twice, after the ever-shifting date I was to get a call on passed. Twice.

P.S. If you found 90% of the things reported here mundane and frankly not worth reading about, sorry. I'll do better with some actual stuff to review/ discuss soon.

London Jaunt- Metropolitan, dahlings. I'm too important to walk that far.

2011-08-21T13:47:00.013+01:00

It was a friend's birthday this week, the friend who showed a mutual friend of ours around London for their first time (with my help/ goofing about) the other week in the first of these London Juants. Therefore, this weekend, there were cocktails to be had at a swanky, "in" bar in the capital. Capital!

It was called Be@One. I'm reliably informed that there are several establishments under this bar's umbrella dotted around London. I can safely say I'd never been in one before, but it's charmingly welcoming in that it is tiny, everyone seems to be happy and friendly in there (happy hour lasts from 4:30, opening, to 7:00) and they serve a killer Vesper that would make anyone think they were Bond, James Bond.

Incidentally, it seemed to be a great place to pick up girls, should that be your thing, with conversations starting easily at the bar as they ask you what it is you've just ordered, what's in it, etc. An upside of it being in the capital seems to be that plenty of attractive, confident, clever and funny people were in there.

The downside is that it is in the capital, and as such there are plenty of metropolitan people in there who think that they are attractive, confident, clever and funny, sometimes without reasonable cause. The "in crowd", if you'd like to call them that, or as I think of them "wankers".

It's these same successful people, I'm sure, who are responsible for the second-most lasting impression on me from those 24-hours. The Dockland's Light Railway journeys I took, cutting from Bank to Mudchute and back again a few times, convinced me that the precious people heading to Canary Wharf and its subsidiary office district or shopping centres are far too self-important for their own good.

How close together do the stops have to be? We were slowing down and starting again more frequently than a bus, literally going 100 metres or less between some stops. Here's an idea- get off and walk a bit, "wankers". Burn the calories you ingested quoffing cocktails every weekend and shouting out the names of your friends like "Wilbert" and "Anthony" with the "th" pronounced as in "thong", all the while guffawing and staring at my friends all evening.

That said, the DLR is awesome, clean and swift compared to the tube. And hey, it's in London- what's not to like about London?

London Jaunt- It's life, but not as we know it

2011-08-11T23:44:00.018+01:00

The British Library has two exhibitions on at the moment concerning things that are made up, speculative fiction and typically ancient literary traditions. One is the Out of this World science-fiction exhibition, while the other is the more permanent display of the British Library Treasures, its collection including: great religious texts from around the world such as gospels, bibles and Qu'rans; Chinese scrolls and texts; tomes of early poetry and Chaucer; Jane Austen's writing desk and manuscripts; a whole lot more, including Beatles notes.

They are both well worth looking at. I went the other day, in another London Jaunt to make myself feel better/ drag me out of my room and away from the relentless job application process, and it was immense. The best part- it's free.

There's not that much I can say about the collections that won't tarnish the moments when you see it yourself. Suffice to say, Out of this World ties the great literary genre of science-fiction together nicely and shows it as that, not just some tacky 19th and 20th century genre-fic. And it has a tripod, from the War of the Worlds.

The Treasures collection is just as good, with really old works and beautifully embellished, historically crucial masterpieces. Go to it, it's incredible. One thing though- you cannot take photographs in either collection, a bit of a downer.

The science fiction collection isn't around now for very long, so hurry down over the next month or miss out! It finishes on the 25th September.

On a lighter note, I also had my first ever Wagamama's. It was great, especially because of the sense of achievement and triumph at eating the whole thing with chopsticks. And because it was a lot of food for a pretty good price. And because it was sort of hidden away. There was a doorway, with a sign, and then down some stairs and along a corridor and through two sets of doors... the cellar kitchen/ dining room! It was quite utilitarian and bohemian, in a way.

Also, panning for jobs in the great river of detritus and telesales, I may have finally gleaned a nugget. More news to follow.

Keeping busy, moving along

2011-08-10T00:54:00.005+01:00

I wrote a post a few weeks ago now about how people use their time now that the vast majority of us have descended from "student" to "unemployed bum".

I've settled a bit more into the routine of not having much to do other than collect dole, look for work, create things for self to do. I can't say I like it much, but there we are.

Things I am doing to stop myself going mad without an authority figure giving me work are:

Teaching myself to play guitar. I've got an old, 3/4 size acoustic my dad owned, with five out of six strings, three of which are about as old as the parent I ~~was given it by~~ picked it up after seeing as he was done with it. Progress is painfully slow. I can stiltingly play the intro to I Walk The Line. Still, got plenty of time on my hands and who knows, I might treat it to some new strings.

Teaching myself to play harmonica. I bought one. With dole money. It was £6, so no major guilt about it.

Re-teaching myself Spanish to a basic level. I've kind of already said that I have a basic understanding on some job applications. Nothing where I'd actually need to use the fact that apparently hablo espanol but I hate the fact that in five years I've forgotten pretty much everything from GCSE days with the Peruvian menace we had as a teacher.

Buying and reading books.

Buying and reading graphic novels, some of which I've read (and am buying to fulfil my habit of collecting copies of everything I've ever borrowed, got rid of or got out of a library) and some which I've been ogling for the last three years while never justifying buying them while there were proper books I was being told to read. I'm starting with some perrenials, including Batman: Hush and my favourite Batman series, though I only have one issue of it, War Games. Reviews to follow.

Very recently, over the last three or four days, I've had a spike in my Twitter usage and live news access- that is, the staring at the screen in despair mode I've been adopting. But this will pass, hopefully, and I'm posting about something unrelated today to alleviate all the crushing "what?" from this week.

What about you lot out there in the big wide world? Got lists of things you're doing to stave off boredom/ the crushing realisation that a degree being good for you is a lie?

And it makes you laugh and it makes you cry, when London falls and you're still alive

2011-08-09T01:06:00.003+01:00

So, last week I posted a rather long rant and carefully assembled ribbing of the fact that we're hosting the Olympics in London in a year and haven't got enough transport for the people coming to watch the sports as well as the people who actually live there. The solution that Transport for London suggested was for a set percentage commuters to stop using the Tube for three weeks and work from home. Which, of course, has so far been ridiculed. Now, though, it shouldn't be a problem. There aren't going to be anywhere near as many people wanting to attend the games after all, if any. And that's because of the panic in the streets as hooded youths jump on the back of a protest that went sour on Saturday and decide to do a bit of looting and pillaging instead of having a kick about.

The current state of damage in London looks like this-

with the widespread and untold spats included.

Whoever put this map together deserves credit, especially given the amount of sites not reported by the BBC, Sky or the local police to that borough.

Without getting into it in depth, or taking political sides in this eternal Conservative/ Labour war with frankly entrenched bigots on either side, I will say this. There is something very, very wrong with this country. It's undeniable, and for the first time we're seeing truly mindless violence and looting seemingly because kids are off school, bored and in want of something to do. There isn't even a remote connection now to the trouble that started in Tottenham, except that the pictures mirror each other. And with word coming in twenty minutes ago from Merseyside Police to officially confirm that there are mimics in Liverpool, as has been broadcast by people speaking over Twitter and Facebook for at least an hour, it's going national.

How many cities are going to fall under the bored teens' greed and hormone-induced, adolescent bravado being whipped into a mob mindset? Birmingham's had it, London has clearly had it more widespread than the official lines admit, Liverpool... Where next? A little hop from Liverpool to Manchester? Then Leeds? Newcastle, Southampton, Preston? Maybe filtering down to towns like Milton Keynes and Luton?

Having been at Millbank when the few turned a peaceful protest into a seige of an empty building, endangering themselves, the peaceful and police, I saw hesitant coppers. Having seen footage, more than the TV channels put out, of the G20 and other protests turned into media-styled violent mobs, I've seen the cruel and the disproportionate in police response. Here, though, they seem almost powerless. They are standing, for the most part, stretched and cowed, emasculated as an unrespected authority. To hell with it. Give them army backing, get water cannons to go in and instead of "facing off" by just standing in a line as a warning, just cut loose on these jumped up thugs in kids' bodies. The G20 action may have been cruel punishment, the student protest perhaps hesitant, but in the face of all this deliberate, organised "anarchy" that these people have jerry-rigged and tacked onto the conveniently-forgotten-as-commercial-and-capitalist aspect of getting the best Reeboks out of Footlocker, the authority response has to be swift and punishing. Punch them in the chest with the water cannon, charge the runners down on horseback, make the people who think the only response is going to be a few CCTV blurs a la Crimewatch being aired at six really fear and respect police, their neighbours and society again.

I cannot sum it up better than Reid Wason, a guy I know from university. He simply put this as his Facebook status; "rant time: there's nothing good in this, not the rioters, not the deprivation they come from, not the police failures that started it in Tottenham, not the government failures that have lead us to be unable to control this, not the media blackout of Newham and anything Olympic, everything involved is fucked up and answers are complicated. just keep safe everyone."

Something very wrong.

London Jaunt- Sightseeing with a newcomer

2011-08-07T10:07:00.029+01:00

It's always nice to show someone who has never been to it around a place you love. It's even better when they seem to genuinely enjoy it and grow to like that place too. I've been the novice before, being showed as a wide-eyed wonderer around Oxford, sitting in The Eagle and Child pub where Tolkein and C.S. Lewis sat, and soaking up the city. Recently, a friend from university, who was staying with a mutual friend of ours as she does "the season" in my favourite city of all time, London, became that novice as the three of us set off around the surprisingly compact network of sights to see in the city.

We met in Covent Garden. I was sat in a nice pub just off the actual square, down a side street a little way, called The Roundhouse. I was waiting there because, both being girls who take a lot of interest in clothes they had taken a detour to Chancellors Wharf where they shopped. One of them was wearing a just-bought summer dress which looked great, mainly because the most I could tell you about it was that it was incredibly yellow. They took delight in a branch of Ben's Cookies and a shop selling "really nice" but expensive tea-sets. I took more interest in the various drinking establishments here, there and everywhere.

We stopped at a tiny place on a corner, Charles Dicken's Coffee House. It looks not unlike a greasy spoon, and has what we all agreed was perhaps the nastiest toilet cubicle any of us have been in in London. Still, it did have pictures of Dickensian characters as portrayed by contemporary artists, and the names definitely didn't age well. Among them was a Dick Swiveller.

Then we decided to wander towards Trafalgar Square, one of many places the newcomer (her local city, which she loves, is Manchester) had never been. Through there, with a few photo opportunity's, we headed towards Buckingham Palace.

On the way we saw Gagarin's statue. It's smaller than I had imagined, more hidden out of the way, in a corner at the end of Horseguard's Parade, and not really a patch on either of the gigantic monuments they have to him in Moscow.

In London

It was still a nice touch, seeing where it fit into the oh-so-crammed tapestry of tourist topography the capital has become.

And in Moscow.

From the palace it was on to Parliament, where we sat in front of the river for a while, then headed to the Southbank for more coffee and cake, then wandered around for a bit by Leicester Square (dug up and boarded off) and Piccadilly Circus (with the signs scaffolded over). It was a nice day out, and for only £10 to get into London from where I am (admittedly with a 16-25 railcard) I'll be having a few more London Jaunts soon, just to a)keep my sanity being currently unemployed and b) having something to write about.

As Benjamin Franklin puts it- “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

And the fan-boys are revolting.

2011-08-05T15:28:00.007+01:00

Both in the sense that they go ape-shit over the least deviation from their beloved version of a character, and in the sense that many of them look like Comic-book Guy and smell, that is.

But this post isn't about fan-boys being so anal and pedantic about characters who by their very definition as comic-book characters cannot have a definitive version. Not per se. It's more about the crazy things that movie studios do to evoke such backlash, mostly internet-based as they rise up and arm themselves with keyboards, memes and abbreviations which only they understand. It's the antagonism of the studios in releasing a saturation of preview material for their films which I wish to pick a bone with.

Today, for example, the first official picture of Anne Hathaway (smoking hot) as Catwoman (smoking hot and sultry) was released. And the fans went wild. Not with congratulations or positivity, mind, but with a sort of collective "eh...". Apart from the small percentage that, first, moaned "ungh..." after some brief one-armed exercise and who subseqeuntly had a lie down. They'll get around to the "eh..." reaction later.

The reason? Christopher Nolan has decided that she should look suitably gritty and realistic in the film, as he decided with all the character including Batman himself, and has therefore done away with the cat-ears. In this photo, anyway, which appears to be a single frame from a film which will undoubtedly have a running time pushing two and a half hours.

This comes just a day after the first official look at the new Superman, Henry Cavill, in the new Superman suit. It has a texture to it reminiscent of fish-scales and the recently announced new Spider-Man suit with a basketball bobble texture, and there are camps around both suits calling them awful and grabbing their torches and pitchforks.

Then there's casting announcements, where just this week Perry White was announced as the not white actor Laurence Fishburne, cueing many pun-based headlines. And the shit-storm around the announcement casting Idris Elba, who many people know I really like, as "the whitest of the gods" Heimdall or Heimdallr in Thor was huge enough to make it onto proper news at six.

I'm using comic book films here as they are the most volatile in terms of changing anything, no matter how insignificant. There will always be someone who preferred the 1992 Bob Bobberson art for The Flash where he had three stripes of yellow on each boot toe rather than two, and will cry blasphemy if it doesn't make the cut. But the root of the problem, and indeed the outcry at such announcements, aren't genre-exclusive. The casting of Tom Hanks as Robert Langford, the recent casting of Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher despite looking nothing like the extensively described character in the novels, even massively deviating plot points in many films adapted from John Grisham bestsellers are all examples of the issues inherent in the studio system.

There is a simple solution to all of this. Stop giving things away. That's all they need to do. Stop releasing pictures a year, a year and a half before the film will be released. Announce who is in the film but not who they'll play, unless they are the protagonist. Stop running trailers with every gag in the comedy film, with the twist in plain sight, with the entire synopsis revealed and read out in gravelly American baritone. We need more films like Black Swan, where you don't know what you're getting into when you sit down but you know it'll be good.

If every aspect of a production is leaked onto the internet, or as it is happening now officially announced by the studio, the novel approach that may have been taken will be lost on the audience in the cinema. The speculation mill will go over and over with fingers flying in a fury over keyboards and the anticipation for the film will go up and down while people don't realise how much of the film will not be new to them. A few movie posters a few months before release- fine. But stop releasing every last detail, if only to save me from spoilers. Bank on the fact that internet users and fanboys are like the rays in Ghostbusters. If they cross, all sorts of disasters happen- mainly because they're all dicks and won't think twice about revealing the recently revealed whatever to a host of as yet blissfully ignorant fans who would rather wait for the film's release.

To go back, before we finish, to the photo of Catwoman, it is a single frame from the film with probable explanation. Has Nolan bastardised the character? Is that what he wants people to believe? Is it possible that this is pre-Catwoman Selina Kyle gathering bits and pieces before her full assumption of the person? After all, we saw a certain Mr Wayne in various stages of Bat-suit undress (not a phrase I saw often)in Batman Begins, did we not?

And how many people cried "what, Nolan's Batman has no cowl?". Not a one. Because we didn't see it. So stop sampling the film and throwing it around out of context and let us enjoy the surprises and the story when it comes out. A film is a film- not a half-made jigsaw we have to bring the rest of the pieces to after collecting one a month from uncle Warner Bros to see where they fit.

30,000 heaved from under LC (London City)

2011-08-04T00:06:00.013+01:00

Utmost apologies for the pun in the title. Honest, couldn't think of a better one, and I wanted to concentrate on the bulky bit with actual words instead.

Transport for London (TFL) have been bandying about a statement left, right and centre asking ever-so politely if 30,000 commuters wouldn't mind awfully not using the Tube for three weeks next summer. There's a big version of a sports day on, you see, with lots of parents and uncles and aunts coming to see it, and apparently the headteacher-types or governor-types forgot to send a letter around last term, so they haven't had enough time to get the extra ice lollies. Or trains.

All of this is ridiculous, of course, but it is a nice, heart-warming tale in one sense. The stoic, brilliant response of the average British commuter asked about their intentions for next year, whether they will work from home as the government ask or ignore the, ahem, suggestion from TFL. So far it seems there is a fat chance that the commuters will pay attention. It's been, oh so acutely and cunningly, observed and labelled by the BBC as a big, terrifying "scare tactic"- and so far, it's just inspired obstinance. Fair play. Why should they shift aside?

Let's look at the, ahem, suggestion. Work from home. Well, there are issues with this idea, I'm not going to lie. I'm unemployed and have the problem that I'm sat around all day. What if I was at home with actual work to do? Procrastination would ruin the world. Even if people acquiese to stay at home, self-discipline or the lack thereof will render the three weeks of the Games worthless. Plus you'll get a lot of people who can't work from home and therefore won't be doing so. And productivity for those who "video conference" their work will be in the shitter- scheduling half an hour with Bob from Ideas won't come anywhere close to three hours chatting to Bob from Ideas as he works opposite you, with three or four possible plans coming together nicely.

As British reactions go, I like this. I say stay strong. Although, if enough people decide not to flake out and write off three weeks' work, there will be issues.

Every morning there'll be feral commuters and tourists trapped in the system leading each other in choruses of this-

Crucially, though, how has this happened? How have TFL out of the blue said "X amount of thousands of people need to stop using the trains across these dates, k thx bai"? This should have been dealt with when London made their initial bid for the Games. There were only three things that should have happened at that point, all three of which would have removed this idea that the locals and commuters should have to cut their daily routines apart. One- whoever was in charge of the bid proved that London had an infrastructure that could handle the influx of spectators and fans. Two- whoever was in charge of the bid proved that, while at that present moment there wasn't sufficient infrastructure in place for the influx there would be by the time the games were here, and work was already imminent. Three- the Olympic leaders(Olympians? Or were they a sub-group of ancient gods?) should have awarded the bid elsewhere on the grounds of insufficient preparation and incapability to host the Games.

This instance where the infrastructure clearly can't cope, the bosses apparently knew it couldn't cope, and the public are being informed that they will be the ones quite literally kicked off the train at such short notice should have been stopped at that point. It wasn't. And you know what will happen?

This time next year, mark my words, there will be news bulletins at six in the evening and ten at night leading with a story similar to this. "Ninety four delegates from the Arab Emirates, America, Taiwan and the Netherlands were delayed on the Underground for an hour and a half, rendering their delegate tickets useless when they reached their event." And why should they get there faster than us? They've already got the roads, with green lanes for buses and Olympics business only.

Normally I despise little vox pop, talking head moments on televised news. Today, though, they were pretty welcome, showing the attitude of poe-faced "not us, thank you" camaraderie uniting everyone. It shows that this time next year we'll be relishing these little daily failures in the infrastructure, and they will be daily. I know I will. I'd direct you to the rerun of Twenty Twelve being shown on BBC2 on Tuesday evenings- satire and the biggest project London has faced go hand in hand brilliantly. It will be the same in real life, too. There's nothing the Brits love more than it going a bit wrong.

And just in case you're interested, here's a series of links to a whole bunch of news stories, not just the BBC (who I have grown to distrust of late) but others too. Enjoy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14420229
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14392867
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14216438
http://www.peach-report.com/Latest/737286/2012-olympics_chiefs_warn_of_london_disruption.html
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-olympics/article-23975631-how-olympic-games-gridlock-will-hit-roads-and-tube.do
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-olympics/article-23975122-londoners-urged-to-travel-differently-during-games.do

Addiction, death, and superstar martyrs

2011-07-27T00:26:00.005+01:00

In light of the death of Amy Winehouse there have been so many hours devoted to it on the news that you'd be forgiven for thinking she was well into her dozenth album, had toured into double figures and was far older than her twenty-seven years. Instead, as it has also been widely reported in most stories about her as a positive thing, she had only released two albums. These may have sold excellently, far and wide helped along by the digital age we live in, but they remain two.

Two albums regarded much more highly than perhaps they should be. Though it now appears to be a worse crime than telling many of the dark Sickipedia jokes that have sprung from this (e.g. What was Winehouse's biggest hit? Her last) for her lifelong and posthumously outspoken devotees, I'll fly against the wind. I didn't care for her music. Not the genre, because I love jazz. Not the band, who were great. I didn't care for her voice all that much, she wasn't bad but not the heavenly instrument people made her out to be and have for the last few days insisted upon. It's not a popular opinion, but it's not a cruel one before anyone tries to tell me otherwise. I just don't think she was that good.

But there's the issue. She was a goddess who was as invincible as she was flawed and troubled in many people's eyes (and ears), and that made her a glamourous bearer of burdens. Her music "spoke to people", in that hackneyed way that people without the imagination to express themselves resort to spouting song titles instead of their own feelings, usually with the word "totally" repeated ad nauseum. It's not fair on her to have her memory so beatified in the public eye. She was troubled, no one helped her, she paid for it. The desire to have a Billie Holiday, a Janis Joplin, whose presence in the public eye and latterly lack thereof made her appear unstoppable backfired dramatically, and the unexpecting "fans" who cultivated the recreational pharmaceutical timebomb were shocked that the creation in their minds wasn't real.

It doesn't just stay there. Celebrities almost endorsed the behaviour with a sort of "it'll be alright" attitude until the moment when she died, when it clearly wasn't alright but then turned her into a saint. Russell Brand's treatment in his Culture piece for the Guardian (

here.

) painted her as a "genius" with a blemish of suffering. The public on the evils of Twitter and Facebook have pooled out in support of this woman who at best, as far as I could ever tell, sang about as well as a lot of pub singers and at worst, the very, very worst being her performance in Belgrade, like a recently lobotomised Amy Winehouse. Through the wonders and disgusting facelessness of the internet, since her death videos of that performance have been uploaded hastily by people who had been sitting on them since last month. They have a huge hit rate. And they portray someone who clearly isn't drunk but caught in the throes of drug addiction, staring and scratching at her arms, lolling her head, covering her eyes and mouth and hugging herself. She's unsteady, and in the next second telling her backing singer quite forcefully "You do the words" halfway through Some Unholy War.

There's more to this story, though. All of this has happened in an age far different to the era in which many other addicted musicians performed. Both Ray Charles and Johnny Cash battled addiction and forced themselves to stop. Winehouse's Belgrade gig should have been her wake-up call, so reminiscent it was of the performances Cash recounts in his biography Man In Black, particularly around Vegas. Musicians could get clean back then and leave rehab. Cash did it, Charles did it. After that technology and global media kicked in. Which is where the beginnings of this culture of tortured musicians with drug-addled "genius" bestowed upon them by the public lay, in the first musicians in the so called 27 Club.

The 27 Club is a group of musicians who all died at 27. Simple as that, except that they were all (or at least, the ones most readily associated with it-

see here.

for a full explanation) revered for their talent, and that awe grew with their deaths. It is a sad state when someone with evident, undeniable talent is lauded as genius by the public more for the age they stop living at than for the work they produced, but that is the fickle public. Work doesn't gain credit, something inexplicable attracts fandom- just look at who in their right mind would like Jedward.

A death is unbearable for the family and friends, and upsetting for fans, but outpourings have to stop where they're not warranted. Princess Diana was an example of what is perhaps the ultimate bandwaggon boarding anyone can perform- devoted fandom immediately after they no longer exist. How many people gave a care for her before this unexpected death? The question applies for both women, as Winehouse had more or less disappeared from public life, no news definitely seeming to be good news in that there were no more arrests, no more drunken acts caught on camera to run alongside international issues at six o'clock. There's nothing really more to say here, except that it is upsetting that someone who was at least doing what she wanted then has such fraudulent legacy laid upon her before she's even cold. The public are not remembering this singer as an average singer who sold very well with her first and only pair of albums. They want to carve her into a legend she never was.

NOTW eclipses other, better space-happenings and farewells

2011-07-22T00:59:00.039+01:00

It's a sad day today. The reasons for this, much like the reasons for the box, are threefold.

Today, I graduated from university, and it sort of forced me to realise I'm not going back there. Maybe for a few flying visits to see friends in other years or guys and gals who are doing Masters courses or (hats off to them) medicine degrees, but those three years of being immersed there are gone. It's a little more sobering and sad in that because of the university's collegiate system, and the fact that unlike at Oxford and Cambridge college places aren't largely assigned by subject, faculty or discipline, the majority of the people I graduated with I didn't know well and the majority of the people I'd have loved to have seen for a last hurrah were saying their farewell in a silly hat and gown on different days. The few who I knew well and will miss "terribly, everso" from the college were great to chat to, but if all the people I shared a trio of years with could have been there it would have felt a bit less surreal and open-ended, I feel.

So that's the mushy, soft-hearted reason number one out of the way.

Reason number two is that, sat a nice double bed in my hotel room, sipping on a nice Scotch and thinking about the day I turned on the news and was reminded that the Space Shuttle Program is coming to an end because all of the funding for missions is being pulled to be pooled into "research" instead. Because it's so much better to conduct research on hypothetical terms rather than collecting raw, hard data from specimens by going somewhere. The man with the telescope is better than the man with the microscope, apparently, even though the man with the telescope "saw" and drew detailed plans of canal cities on Mars while the man with the microscope was able to tell us that there was water under the surface as a fact, and point out where and how it got there.

This lack of interest in funding space travel for the next foreseeable decades doesn't mean that America, the bully of the world, will stop going up there though. Oh no, they just won't pay for it, hitching a ride to the ISS with their cosmonaut cousins. The arrogance of this is ridiculous- if you want to go somewhere, and you're the best superpower to do it financially, infrastructure-wise and experience-wise, bloody do it yourself. The soundbyte actually says they'll "have to rely" on other existing space programs, like it won't be the luxury they're used to. Don't demote yourself to it, then, if that's how you feel. Get Obama to pump money back in. As Mills says in Taken, "your arrogance offends me".

The third reason for it being a sad day is the fact that the aforementioned loss of the Shuttle Program was relegated to the tail end of the BBC News hour, in favour of the so called Phone Hacking Scandal (or #hackgate/ #omnigate/ #everythinggate or a dozen other monikers it's trending under) being flogged to pieces for the first half an hour, and then followed with less positive and less revelatory items all prioritised over the last mission of the Atlantis.

More important than the future of mankind in the universe?

Atlantis and the entire program deserved a better death than that which Obama has given it, and a better memorial than that which the media provided. The ratio of disinterest and ignorance afforded it by the media in spite of people's interest is astounding. As was stated in an interview with one of the Shuttle Program leaders on the Radio 4 midnight news just now, anyone "who ever admired a space shuttle has taken the journey with us".

The news is always so negative. Why not celebrate something amazing once in a while instead of treating every new little piece of information in an unfolding saga that will probably be with us in the news for months as a "revelation", and calling it such? That doesn't help in the slightest, each new line that is decoded from an email endlessly being pored over by the 24-hour rolling news culture. Put it away, when there's a bunch of news tell me, I don't mind waiting and missing the "scoop" that there were eight members of staff who had coffee with the editor on the day of that meeting rather than seven. I'd like to know what the meeting was about before I know who was there.

Chuck all that guff out of the way and pay a bit more attention to the positive things that have happened and the catastrophe that comes from the fact that some are over.

Ein experimenten- Ze varied wunderbar effects of having nuzzing to do after university

2011-07-19T13:59:00.000+01:00

It's great how different people have reacted to the sudden lack of grounding that is our release from the woes of higher education. I should state in this first paragraph that all of these following observations have been made by myself in both real life and, unfortunately, through the great universally accepted spy-network Facebook , on which I have spent a fair deal of time after my sudden casting out from the coop and into the great open sky.

There are, largely, two camps. Those who do and those who are perfectly happy not to do anything at all. And they hack me off no end. How can people do nada?

The cardinal sin, and I'm sorry to say that a few of my friends have taken to committing this one, is updating the world with your every thought, feeling, mood change, minor mundane mishap and planned activity over the evil that is Facebook.

Myself? I've been looking for jobs, writing, reading,creating blog posts, creating a LinkedIn profile like a professional busy body, and riding a tram along the road to recovery. I'm almost at the junction between settled down and eating properly, you'll be glad to hear. You will, bcause I'm telling you. If you're not happy about my Lazarus-esque recuperation then I will hunt you down and inflict it on you.

I've recently been bedridden due to crippling gastrointestinal pain, irregular movements, consistencies and generally discovering a new state of matter in the toilet bowl somewhere in between plasma and solids in my toilet boil. Therefore, I have at least a small amount of ability to identify with those who do nothing all day. I think within another week I would have murdered myself or at least hacked off a leg to make things a bit of a challenge hobbling to the loo just for something to do. There is only so much TV that can be watched and tolerated, even in this day and age with all the channels available and no excuse not to watch soemthing intelligent. There is only so much Numb3rs, James May engineering awesomeness, Chuck, Luther etc that a mind can take.

To quote Mr Holmes, "my mind rebels at stagnation".

"Strangers don't last long here"- Rango review.

2011-07-12T17:21:00.010+01:00

Rango,the first Nickelodeon animated feature film in the same vein as Pixar and Disney have been making for over a decade, comes out on DVD this Friday. Which is good, because it means I'm able to finally publish my review of this exceptional film, the one I started when just after I'd seen it in the cinema months ago. So, seeing as it's high time to give Rango the going over it deserves, let's get started.

Any initial quality of the film that you infer from the size of the audience when I went to see it (I was one of only two people in the cinema, let alone the screen, and the second person was that one I'd gone to see it with) should be thrown away. The lack of an audience can be put down to the facts that the only showing that week was at 10 o'clock in the morning on a Friday, when most kids would be in school, and that as poor students we'd both been waiting to have the money to go, so we were five or six weeks past its release.

Now, if you happen to be a cynical person who believes that a pastiche of a Western, particularly one aimed at a younger audience, will never work, one fact is irrefutable- the frontier never grows old. Not only this, but the storyline is very good (as originality goes among Westerns, just watch the endings of Shane and Pale Rider side by side). Rango isn't just a pastiche, it is really a proper Western, with stereotypes fleshed out to be characters in their own right. And let's face it- even some of the best Westerns from the last fifty years were relying on much flimsier leading casts.

Scuppering the cynical argument completely, though, is the fact that this is not a film written for the kids that you might think Nickelodeon are aiming for. The wise people among film studios, including the top dogs at Pixar, aways say that you should never underestimate the intelligence of children. They write films for adults and children together, without the jokes and references for adults and the jokes and (the more infrequent) references for children being mutually exclusive. Now, Nickelodeon haven't underestimated their audience's intelligence at all- rather, it may be that given the source material, the wealth of Westerns that already exist and that are riffed on in the film, they've rather overestimateed the knowledge that kids have and the links they'll make.

Take, for example, the meeting of Rango (in a beleaguered, dehydrated and semi-ethereal state) and the Spirit of The West. Rango has strayed into a sort of vision-like episode in the baking desert. The first connection is that it is a Johnny Depp character in a white wasteland being a bit crazy- as he did at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean 3 when Jack Sparrow was in Davy Jones' ~~limbo~~ locker; this is evoked almost frame for frame at times. Instead of a huge shadow falling over Johnny Depp cast by a moving ship, it falls on him from a golf buggy. Would kids spot this reference between two films made with a young audience in mind?

And out steps the Spirit of the West. To adults, he is instantly recognisable. The hat, the poncho, the chiroot between thin lips. That squint. This man is Blondie. He's the Man With No Name. He's Preacher. It is Eastwood incarnate, and all kudos should be made to Timothy Olyphant for voicing such a stellar impersonation.

However, to kids he's just a cowboy, maybe that cowboy in the thing Dad likes. He's not instantly recognisable and the jokes that he carries a metal detector (the modern method,obviously, that would be used in prospecting and panning for gold, that staple of the Western and the frontier) and collects glinting gold Oscars (the reches reaped by Eastwood's directorial and acting abilities) are easily lost on the kids who don't know him. However, it is worth noting the bravery of being so 'meta'.

Sure, the film has its share of universal humour; Beans, the female lead and love interest, has a defense mechanism of freezing mid-sentence; Rango belches all over the Ray Winstone-voiced thug and then later drops his gun belt when told to "Make your move", even the blind prospector and his idiot boys lifted from Chinatown and Pale Rider are reduced to a comedy trio. The mariachi band narrating the film will be lost completely on younger views as anything but the funny birds, too, which is a shame.

On top of all this, the film is dark. Given the opening quarter of an hour of Up, which features life, love, youth and death, and the places other Pixar ventures have taken their audience, kids films and the darker aspects of life have been tied for quite some time, and so they should. Roald Dahl never shied away from it. The question of where to stop, though, is perhaps key, and while censoring is wrong and I stand by the fact that the terrifying forest scene in Snow White is simultaneously the best and most scarring piece of cinema I watched before I was five I would say that Nickelodeon push it here. Which is a very good thing, and gives the film its edge over other studios, but it is worth mentioning as it may not be for everyone to let their three year old see. An armadillo with a tyre track through his middle greets the newcomer to the desert. His next encounter sees a rock toad killed by an eagle. The antagonist gunslinger, Rattlesnake Jake, is genuinely sinister (a good turn by Bill Nighy, who lately has seemed to be obviously him in most roles, be it voice work, CG-laden or live action- that changes here).

By the end of the film, good triumphs and all that, but the evil turncoat mayor who welcomed the newcomer Rango then, in a twist pulled from Chinatown was revealed as the villain (voice by Ned Beatty, someone who recently played an evil turncoat patriarch fluffy pink bear call Lotso, who welcomed newcomers then was revealed to be behind the dark things in the day care centre- ringing any bells?) is then left by Rango to Rattlesnake Jake's mercy. We don't see if the gunslinger snake eats the turtle or not, but still. A bit dark?

It needs to be said, in a bit of an aside to the rest of this review, that as a whole the film stands up perfectly well against the more giant animation studios like Pixar. The animation is top notch, grittier, more down and dirty with its designs while still being clear and crisp and flawlessly fluid. The voice acting too is solid, with a foundation of performances worthy of being in the next Pixar blockbuster. What it all amounts to, really, is that should Nickelodeon want to be a bigger part in the cinema of animated films they can be, and Pixar would perhaps finally have some competition in their little private corner.

Which brings us once again to the plot riffing on Westerns which the kids won't understand. The close is a good parallel to the lonely gunslinger trope that shot Eastwood to fame, not to mention Wayne and many others in the fifties and sixties before the Spaghetti Western revived the genre, and pastiches it perfectly. Without prior knowledge of the genre, though, would Rango be as good a film? I'd say no. Simply because so much of it works by relying on you as a viewer to be aware of what it is trying to mimic, joke about, in short do. Which is one reason why I'd say it is, while marketted as a kids' film, really and not so secretly for us adults.

My advice- teach your kids the ways of the Western, then get them to watch it again. They'll thank you for it. Having done that, they'll see Rango for the eight out of ten it deserves to be, not the six out of ten it is for the uninitiated.

Film review- The Adjustment Bureau

2011-07-10T13:24:00.004+01:00

One of the benefits of being back at my parents' house is that they like to rent DVDs most weekends. That means that all the films I've seen pass by the cinema and thought "I really ought to see that" are now re-emerging and I'm working through them.

Did I know how many there were? No. Not until I was wandering the aisles of Blockbusters with my dad and started picking up case after case, telling him what each of them was about, pointing at others, assessing whether they've been rumoured to be critically good or not.

The first film rented was The Adjustment Bureau. It stars Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, but I think the person who steals the scenes they're in is from the supporting cast- one Anthony Mackie as Harry Mitchell, a member of the bureau who is disillusioned with their work and helps Damon's character, politician David Norris. It's no small feat to be the stand-out actor in this film, however- both Damon and Blunt offer solid and nuanced performances, Damon in particular, and the supporting cast from which Mackie rises includes the cornerstone actors Terence Stamp and John Slattery as Mitchell's seniors within the bureau. Despite that, he still stands head and shoulders above his colleagues.

It is worth noting that, in watching this with my parents, the concept behind the film is exceptional, brilliantly mind bending and yet easy to follow, as evidenced by the fact that my mum didn't stop once to ask what was going on. As yardsticks of overcomplicated narratives go, Mum is top-notch. If an audience won't get it, mum says so. However, having followed the premise that every single person has a Plan written for them to control their Fate along with the less strong Chance and Free Will (used for minor decisions, such as "your toothpaste, or what beverage to have with lunch"), Mum then stated the film was "creepy and mades you feel funny". In that the ideas behidn the film made her question if such a thing could happen with that sort of thing. Don't worry, it's not going to have that affect on you, it's just a hypersensitivity she alone possesses- me and my dad were fine. It's a cracking premise, though, and as I've said, the performances are more than worthy of carrying it.

Which is why, as is so often the case now, the resolution and the third act really just disappoints. It had so much that went before it to run with and, in a neat and hastily resolved quarter of an hour (if that) threw away any chance of being exceptional and daring with it. Which is ironic, as Mitchell states that the humans who the bureau have diverted away from greatness could have been so much more, were it not for the unquestioning execution of the Plan for each of them. Had the script not been so blindly followed and a more daring, deviating conclusion been thought up it would have been an exceptional film, deserving of the quote the DVD cover and TV adverts are repeating ad nauseum. "Bourne meets Inception" it wasn't, but could have been.

A Summer's Afternoon in a Meadow

2011-06-13T22:11:00.005+01:00

A relatively long post today, but hopefully succinct. Choosing To Die finished not quarter of an hour ago on BBC2. Sir Terry Pratchett exploring the nuances of being able to tell when you want to go, weighing it up against guessing when you will no longer be able to do it yourself, trying to be dignified in dying- an outstanding programme, with exceptional people. Peter Smedley and Andrew Colgan were two outstanding gentlemen who knew that it was all they had left, in the time left when they still could, to end it before they were no longer able.

I have always been so assured of my own immortality. I turned 21 not six months ago, and waste some time in quixotic planning of things I may or may not ever do with my life. The one thing I do know is that, as for me death is the end of it and there is nothing on another side or in another world, I would never, ever want to give up.

And the thing is that these men haven't given up. They're just fighting in a different way. To give up they'd need to be in a position where, due to their degenerative diseases, they could not move, were unable to administer the lethal dosage to themselves. And so they fight the terrifying thoughts they must be experiencing in choosing to gain the dignity everyone deserves. While the last moments before Peter Smedley fell into sleep were perhaps not as dignified or clean cut as some would have you believe (with a Dignitas escort wiping dribble from your chin as you gasp for air and ask for water) it is a hundred miles away from being in that state twenty four hours a day and unable to change that.

What shocked me the most is that we die. That sounds infantile, but I firmly believe that by the time I'm eighty we'll be able to keep OAPs alive through medicine into their hundred and twenties. I never consider myself as a fifty year old checking out early- you don't. As humans we're designed not to dwell on it. but it could happen.

And so I appreciate the pot of tea I just made and the writing on the pad in front of me all the more. At the end of that hour of television I immediately felt I should get up, do things, experience life. I am currently sat ready to embark on what I hope will be many hours of short story writing this evening.

There are no funny pictures with this post. It would be indecent. There is no need to embellish the taboo any further. If I were not in such a reflective mood, I would be hammering on the keys right about now with expletives streaming across the screen at the fact that immediately after that poignant programme a series of talking heads who will hold no sway over the laws around assisted death have been ushered in to debate it ad infinitum on Newsnight. But now is not the time to be angry or callous.

The one thing that struck me the most is that we all do go, eventually. One thing more than any other phrase Sir Terry Pratchett uttered caught me. I, too, would want to go to sleep outside in the sunshine. Preferably in a meadow, on a hillside, overlooking someplace I had grown to love over many decades of a full life. But in the sunshine none the less.

'Blank Blankerton' has skewered you. Return fire?

2011-06-11T15:17:00.014+01:00

Ah, social networking. That dangerous wasteland of procrastination, of studying other people in a manner which would be considered not just an invasion of privacy in real life but also downright sexually delinquent, of an oxymoronic name given the readiness with which the rules of social engagement go out the window.

(Poor pun number 1- on one level, people disregard the social rules; on another, you're viewing the website in a window. Har har.)

I, recently, changed my esteemed and oh-so-nurtured Facebook settings so that the langauge everything is written in is "English- Pirate". Almost a year ago I did much the same thing, which lasted all of about a month before I changed back to regular English, sick of the amount of things I could no longer understand. In the time between both of my forays into social network Privateering it appears I've got my sea legs and sea lingo a little more sorted, and therefore the first instance of anything I didn't understand or deduce the meaning of occured only two and a bit months in. I was informed, among the masses of notifications about messages in bottles, scrawlings on planks and other such peg-legged punnery, that I had been skewered.

The confusion with which I met this notification was, initially, purely language based. However, once I had established that it meant somebody had "poked" me, an act that in either linguistic setting I don't think I have ever partaken in because I don't see the point, I then turned my attention to the person whom had done the skewering unto me.

It's a girl who I have one friend in common with. This in itself was probably more confusing than if I was notified in ancient runes, let alone slightly outdate/ retro-fitted stereotypical English. A little dumbfounded and being stared at impatiently, accusingly, by the question "Return fire?", I did what any bold as brass pirate would do in such a situation surfing upon the high seas (poor pun number 2, right there)- I left it to sit and bob about on the waters.

I would, incidentally, like to point out at this point that at no point in my extensive fan-boy years of the swashbucklers of old have I ever come across tales of swords, which I believe are the best/ most likely implement or weapon on a frigate or somesuch with which to skewer somebody, being launched from cannon, which I believe Facebook is insituating with its insistence that they are fired. Honestly, Zuckerberg, sort it out- some sort of phrase along the lines of parry/ strike at the heart of yon scurvy dog would surely be more apt?

At any rate, having left it awhile, I was then confronted unexpectedly by said notification again just scrolling down the page in the typical daily review of Facebook's events that so many of us engage in. In a slightly intoxicated state, never having met the girl and only being vaguely acquainted with our "crew in common", I decided to throw chance to the winds (poor seafaring pun, 3rd in all- apologies) and decided to make use of the wrongly phrased button.

Thus began my first, and probably only, "poking war". I say war, I'm not entirely sure what to call it. Have I engaged this girl in some odd form of new-age communication? Am I performing an electronically delivered equivalent of ruffling colourful plumage and prancing on a branch? In short, is this flirting? (Mind you, I have enough difficulty sussing out what is and isn't flirting in the real world, thank you very much.)

As a consistently unobservant worrier on all topics, I found myself troubled a little by this apparent olive branch- why not just send a message to say hello? Why poke, skewer, stab or impale at all? While I'm not in the habit of taking stereotypes seriously (although I take mentioning them in abundance and making light of them when I do very seriously), I have run once again into the obstacles of subtext and the secret language of women, which I have never known a man to crack.

The best thing I can use here to illustrate what I mean is this video, courtesy of Seth McFarlane.

At any rate, that would have been that, except for the fact that my fear of what sort of Pandora's link I may have opened was confirmed as she returned fire (still shooting swords) unto me. Now we're locked in to this stalemate, and before I perform any more irresponsible artillery operations with foils and sabres as ammunition I decided to make use of the other great and terrible ability Facebook bestows unto us- the pure and oddly venerated act of the Facebook stalk.

This girl, however, is wise, or intensely private so as to be sly in the poking game she has begun, and as such photographs and information are not readily available. A very sage decision, allowling me very little intel while I ruminate on how exactly to proceed on what is now inevitably a field of some sort of misunderstood battle. All was not lost, however, as I was able to employ the strategy coined, I believe, by A. Nonymous- that the measure of a man (or, I would reiterate, woman) is the company he (or she) keeps.

So a cursory glance over her friend list was in order. It seemed a usual, standard motley crew, ranging from possible relatives with the same surname to the friend who had to be that bit special with a ridiculous photograph they feel they can walk off embarrasment over in company but can't, or with the oh-so-witty nickname in inverted commas such as 'Randy' or 'Sparklehorse'. The measure of this girl may be worth a second return volley of large silverware, thought I- until I saw some of the other "friends" she has.

One such was 'Teethwhitening Tanninginjections' from Manchester, either a baby who grew from a brick to a building under the care of incredibly cruel parents to name it so or a business which seems confused over what it provides as treatment and precisely what is used to perform each procedure. Any girl who even flirts with the possibility of asking for a spray tan which is then injected into her using a syringe only that morning oozing teeth is surely a little worth steering clear of?

With this development in mind, I have yet to launch any more sharp implements over the side of my internet bound sailing vessel to skewer her. From her profile picture it certainly seems that skewering her in the real world would be far from the most unpleasant experience I would ever have, but at this point in the course plotted across such turbulent waters we are engaged in a still sea, far from any breeze to push us in any direction towards a choice.

So, with all this to consider, should anyone read this post, I am leaving it up to you. Dictate my next act as the rear-admirals you are and it shall be done. Also, comment on whether or not you think I'm right about anything I've said here social network relating, all of it, none of it, or somewhere in between. Ta.

This was a triumph.

2011-06-03T23:03:00.008+01:00

This post is unique for several (read many, many, many) reasons.
First- I am no longer, technically, an undergraduate student. Huzzah! And poignant goodbye to what has been.
Second, out of almost eighty, this is the first post in which I have succeeded in embedding a video- and that video is, indeed, plenty apt and also "cracking".
Third- it's prose heavy. I'd apologise, but it's meant to be.

Here is, from Portal (Portal 2 was released recently, buy it) the end credits "Still Alive" written by Jonathan Coulton. It sums up these two days, and these three years, and (effectively) these fifteen years of education, in my honest opinion. This has, well and truly, been a triumph.

Today has been, all in all, pretty good. To the point where there is too much to mention should I be trying to record an entire day's activity in a single Facebook status or "tweet". Everything except blogs have word limits.

So the day began with a really early morning start, in typical insomniac and scalding-shower-alertness style at just before eight. A cup of tea followed, along with much recital of quotes I would, it turns out, not need or forget in the exam.

The next stage of the day, or significant stage, was either realising how sunny and nice it was as I left the house before eleven or the reason I was leaving the house at that time- to sit in The Novel Cafe and review notes and themes etc with the esteemed and beautiful Kristina Roberts and Kat Haylock. Both of these women got me through today, no word of a lie.

Having done all that it was time for a brief trip on campus and a brief spell of about half an hour on a triangle of grass in front of the George Fox building (he was a quaker, dontcha know- I was a quakin' for my second and last final). I ate a bacon and egg sarny. It would have been a salami roll, but while I deciphered the text up close with my faulty eyes a hand, belonging to a beautiful red head, swiped the product away. I protested by way of complaint, and haven't stopped going on about it all day, including the "diary entry" post being written now (considered this evening).

Between then and the next notable event in this post some sort of exam happened... Oh, wait, it was my last exam ever. Oh well. I finished it with twenty minutes to spare and decided, after a debate, to walk out early. The reason? I'd never done so, and wanted to feel the "thrill" (that's right, Haylock, mock all you want) of it just once.

The Writers' Society hoodies arrived two days ago, and this evening we got to see and collect them from the resplendent Laura Dallison, Social Secretary. They look awesome.

Then there was the drinking, and the Writers' Society meeting. We held it outside in the brilliant sun. I read a poem, like a girly girl, which was corrected by my peers and encouraged. Ta. Then it was back to the bar.

On returning to the bar, we ran into the stoner crowd again, those who will waste their lives on substances not substance they've been part of and will probably die forty years before us. The good news? Haylock hadn't returned home, and fled them to talk to us. Cracking. After merriment, an evening spent fighting, drinking and making our fathers proud, we returned to town and home, via two places of distinction.

One- the ice-cream shop that has recently opened on campus, with every flavour under the sun including rum and raisin, which I partook in. Then, to wind up the evening, myself and a burgeoning, potential writer in the form of David "The Prospero" Helm ventured towards The Stonewell Tavern, where I had never been. In terms of what's on tap and the music they had in tonight, it's on a par with The Dalton Rooms and The Robert Gillow. And I had a free pint. And they played James Brown's "I Feel Good", which I said I was likely to break out of when in the bar after the exam.

So there we are- a day, after two or three (I'm not sure) days of rough sleep and shit cramming and worry over examinations, in which everything tied up. It all came together, it all ended, and, hey- I'm still alive.

Getting rid of the voice saying 'Don't make me do stuff'

2011-05-16T15:16:00.010+01:00

Experience and epiphanies come in all shapes, sizes, places, states of undress, degrees of sobriety, degrees of intoxication and shades of fatigue. They can strike you, with short term frustration, during the first-thing wake-me-up solo fumble under the bed sheets just as equally as they can pause you mid-sip of your fifteenth 'cup o' joe' and just as potently strip away any other thought or factor you were paying attention to.

In this aspect they are like ruthless and inexplicably succesfully efficient toddlers. The other thing they share with the fledgling, wailing, sticky-fingered semi-humans is that once they have your attention whatever they are trying to show you is often incredibly and insufferably annoying, if only because you should have seen the life milestone/ dead amphibian in your kids hand (and, imminently, mouth) a lot sooner.

Such an epiphany hit me recently. Everything I have known so far is almost over. The thought came to me while I was doing three things (well, three things of consequence which I can say related to the epiphany, anyway)- drinking a pint, reading the closing chapters of Bill Bryson's nostalgia and comedy tour The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and listening to Frank Turner's Love, Ire and Song album playing in the bar. At the precise point I began to have my enlightening vision the eponymous number, Love, Ire and Song, was slowly drifting along in it's nostalgic, melancholy way. I think the lines that got me thinking were 'Then where's the harm spending an evening in manning the old barricades?' Got to love Mr Turner.

Anyway, these three things made me realise a single truth- I'm getting older (well, not, that wasn't it exactly), I'm coming of age, moving from Bryson's so-well-named Kid World to Adult World, a big scary place, and I'm bored of the town, the scene and some of the people I'm stuck with here, will be returning to soon and have no hope of escaping for at least the next year while I do whatever I can to get some money together. What a thing to be struck by of a Friday afternoon.

It drilled into me the need, more than ever, to have a definite plan in place, an idea of what I want to do, where I want to go, how I can go about making sure these things come to pass (not making sure they happen to me, making sure I happen to them). So, I've set in stone what I will do. I'm putting it here so that I can, in time, either look back with content success or stare at my failure and punish myself, but also because I often find one way to get motivated is to promise a deadline to someone and then you're letting someone else down if you fuck it up. Hey, it's a theory, and for three years I've tried and tested it with great success.

So, the plan is-
Get a job.Doing whatever I can, preferably in London, preferably writing, but I'll take PA and reception work, cleaning, greasy spoon cooking, anything.

Save money. Pretty Ronseal, but with goals in mind, namely-

Learn to drive. Again, Ronseal.

Buy a bike. A motorbike, that is, not a kid's tricycle. I need to do this, because without it I can't-

Learn to ride. The bike, not a horse or something else. And only by knowing how to ride can I-

Travel in style. Cruising around after about a year of working to save the money to do it, hitting a route I'm planning through the South of the USA following the old Route 66 for a bit and making sure I cut through Arizona and Utah for Monument Valley and the Valley of the Gods. On the way, who knows, I might write a travel book. I'm undecided. Which leads to-

Really thinking about (and working on) what I want to try to get published. Just as a nice additional income to whatever jobs I get, so I can find somewhere decent to live, eventually managing to-

Settle in London.

So, there we have it. Motivation starts here. In two years time, if I haven't done at least three quarters of this, I'd better have a pretty good reason lined up for myself. Paralysis or something.

Why don't you all have a go at making your own 'Determination Rosters'? It's very soothing, and hey, it feeds the Procrastination Monster no end.

On the replacement of skill with luck in the modern gameshow

2011-05-16T15:14:00.000+01:00

Right, prissy and pretentious 'essay title' style heading aside, let's got on with this shall we? You haven't got all day.

Gone are the days when you could win money for knowing things or being good in a field such as retaining knowledge/ intelligently matching answers with answers popular with the public/ intelligently deciphering a clue or puzzle or catchphrase. This sort of actual skill, brain power, concentration and logic has, unfortunately, been sidelined to National Lottery spin off shows, normally on air while people leave the TV alone to have dinner, the gap preempted by Doctor Who and any number of talent shows and closed by Saturday night dramas and the film at nine.

Now you have to rely on, without fail, luck, a completely useless skill, or fitness and endurance in Total Wipeout or other shows. And there are already competitions for those sorts of people. It's called sport.

Some quiz-style shows still exist but have to based around a ridiculous gimmick, such as the recent show in which an automoton leporid tries to collect plastic carrots (because you are what you eat) while you try not to startle it, called Don't Scare the Hare. It's on before Doctor Who most weeks, if you don't know it, although you would be forgiven for thinking it actually was a seasonal episode of Doctor Who featuring a reinvented chocolate-bearing BunnyBot bounding around Berkshire bludgeoning bewildered broods of innocent children. It would fit a lot of Moffat motifs.

To get back on track, though, some such 'skill is luck' shows are the perrenial favourite Golden Balls (winner of the ITV pitch of the century on the name alone) and world-dominating Deal Or No Deal. The important thing about both games is that they are extended lotteries which the presenters, a lot of moody music and a pretend man on a red phone stretch out for their duration. You do not win correlating to the game that has been played. There is no game. There is the toddler-achievable goal of picking one. Lou and Andy could play as convincingly as the Rain-man, simply sitting and saying 'I want that one.'

In days of yore, with the much remembered Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, you were guaranteed to win 32,000 in just ten goes. In Deal Or No Deal or Golden Balls you can play the whole game and walk away with 1p (next to nothing) or, literally, nothing. Through no fault of your own.

Why has this happened? There were cars (sorry, family four-wheel-drive/ saloon vehicles) on offer for Catchphrase and Family Fortunes. Holidays, cruises laid on by the channel. Millions on offer each year for feats such as answering a question correctly. Where are they now? Were they paying out too many times? Why now, when my generation are old enough to take part, are we offered only a televised scratch-card rubbing with a bearded man in a shirt made from a curtain telling us that we need to 'feel' the boxes?

We genuinely stand a chance, as the most higher-educated generation in years, perhaps ever, at getting through to the million pound question with Tarrant. So why stop it? Could we have bankrupted ITV by all taking part?

The curse of a good book

2011-05-16T14:49:00.011+01:00

Reader, I apologise for being so abesnt over the last months. I promised myself that I would not, could not allow anything so pithy as a degree and the work I had to undertake thereof to stall my frequent harranguing of the proverbial ears you lend me. Clearly, I was wrong.

However, had I not been so Preometheanly chained to the rock of higher education while my coursework pecked at my internal organs, there is no way in which I would be able now to nejoy the respite with any way near as much gusto. It is this freedom, the liberation to read and write what I like now while merely dabbling in this strange trifle called revision, which bring us our next topic of grumbling.

I have a, at times unfortunate, love of books. Can't help it, that's that, it's the way my mother put my hat on (cheers Rob), etc. And now that I'm free to read what I want, I am- with some brilliant and some more tarnished results.

Over the past weeks I have read Girlfriend In A Coma, The Wind-Up Girl, Room, A Week in December and Bill Bryson's The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Of these, four have been brilliant and one has been brain-numbing; three have come to a prefect onclusion for their own stories while two have left me wanting more than is given; four have ended when the book ends and only one, the one that I was enjoying the most and not page-counting my way through (an awful habit I have), only one decided to employ the cruel trick of padding itself with more pages than there actually are in the book that I paid money for.

This was, I am both sad and incredibly happy to say, Bryson's Life and Times. Now, I am happy in that it has reawoken in me a love of both reading and Bryson's humour that I laid to rest a while ago in the knowledge I had to slog through the dreaded Set Texts for three years. And yet I am disappointed that such a cheap trick of publishing houses is deployed all the more regularly to bulk up to 400 pgaes by including a chapter or two of teaser for the next book or, in this case, the first or second of that author's works.

As it was, given the extra fifteen pages in between my right forefinger and thumb, I was gutted, cheated when the last chapter finished and I was looking on to read more.

I believe a large part of knowing a book is about to close is feeling a book is about to close. If there is still a chapter-sized set of pages left, the reader doesn't adjust accordingly to an early ending. As such, Bryson's last line fell flat, despite its poignant potential, as I thought I'd turn the page and read on for another closing. The impact of his words was lost because of a printing house's error in judgement to conform with the now done thing.

The subsequent pages hold description of his other bestselling titles, including Neither Here Nor There. So, given the quality of the book just read, the quality endowed upon the other titles by the esteemed reviews (The Times, The Observer etc) and the punchy, wit-alluding blurbs written by the publishers to illustrate how good his other books are (all similarly punchy to the blurb encouraging Bryson novices to read the book they are in), it's surprising that the chapter sample is from his second book, Neither Here Nor There.

There's no denying it's quality as an opening chapter, but given the two-decade gap since it's original publication, there's every denying it a place as a tantaliser for more of the original words I bought the book for, and every denying it the space I was readying myself to read having never seen it before. I'm issuing one simple plea to the publishers of this world- stop ruining the ending of good books with an unfulfilled promise of more. It's oddly deflating, and before long we'll all hate you.

Cut the head off the snake and find it's a hydra?

2011-05-02T11:04:00.008+01:00

Negativity isn't normally what I set out to broadcast to people, honest. Personal pessimism, maybe, but negativity isn't my default setting. I just try to point out the glaring flaws in a lot of peoples' celebrations sometimes, with a touch of what I like to call common sense.

I should note, before I go any further, that I am not talking about, nor will I mention again, the mass hysteria with which 24-hour rolling news would convince us the nation was gripped in the run up to Friday. Most people don't care and were sick of it, so I'm going to leave it well alone.

This morning I awoke, having spent last night sat in a pub which advertised a quiz (there was no quiz), watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead and my perennial favourite Stephen King film Misery and then spending hours writing because I was unable to sleep, in a sort of fuzzy haze. My stereo alarm was blaring at me at the regular time of 6:30 despite being on a volume of 5, and the grey dawn filtering through my skylight was burning into my corneas. It was that sort of stumbling, fumbling wake-up, until I heard a news story which snapped me right into conciousness and alert attentiveness.

Osama Bin Laden (not to be confused with one of the perpetrators of his downfall, President Obama- I'm looking at you, Fox News) has died after an American military operation in Pakistan. People are happy with this, as they should be, it's a good day for symbols of hope, a blow has undoubtedly been dealt to the organisation he founded and then operated as head of for over twenty years, yadda yadda yadda.

I'm as willing as the next guy to say that this is a good thing. It's great that with a certain amount of intel there was an operation which moved from the hills of Afghanistan to another country and eventually found him. However, announcing so quickly that he has been "buried at sea" may not have been the wisest of moves given how most of the world users of the internet, about 70%, part-time as conspiracy theorists and will make much of the apparent lack of a body as proof.

Then there's the Americans themselves, and the reflection of their unbridled celebration and frenzy which the Brits are showing on that oh-so-exceptional measure of public feeling, Facebook. Within minutes of the news breaking, the New Yorkers surrounded the 9/11 site and have been there since in some sort of hysterical vigil. British students and other people on the social networking site previously mentioned have also "gone mental", devoting statuses and posting pictures to illustrate that Bin Laden's death is the greatest victory we (because every keyboard activist is actually on the frontline of SWAT ops, dontchaknow) could have achieved.

Perspective may be necessary here, but I am correct in thinking Bin Laden is one man, aren't I? A man who was small enough to be believed to be hiding in caves, even though he was actually in a military style compound. A man who couldn't afford a decent DVD or Blu-ray recording facility so sent VCR recordings. And he has probably not left the Afghan/ Pakistan region. He hasn't, for example, visited England, or America, where his atrocities were carried out. He operated as the head of the organisation, certainly, but how directly? Was every plan approved by him? In the same way that there is doubt among historians and people who read all the material surrounding the Final Solution as to how much of the plan was Hitler's idea, action and order, is killing Bin Laden and still being surrounded by student cells, a minority of militant mosques and an interwoven culture of terrorism hiding around the world really as huge a day as it is being made out to be?

There are others, second-in-commands, hundreds of people who subscribe to the Al-Qaeda mantra and believe in that cause. The head, in this case, was relatively small, and the remaining body of the snake is huge and possibly writhing violently in metaphorical pain. What will it hit out at blindly, or indeed calmly?

At the risk of falling into the trap of sounding like a fear-mongering Fox News man, and at the risk of sounding as exaggerated as Glen Beck in particular, I just think we should watch out. The country apparently had its much needed spirit-/moral-boost this weekend when some vows were made by two people the population had never before cared about. Adding the death of a leader who can be easily replaced to that with exaggerated ideas of what it will actually achieve is not on.

The rise of the rhyming advert

2011-04-25T20:26:00.006+01:00

Twenty two days without a post? Blimey. Anyone who thought the recent summer glory would have mellowed me, sorry, but I return with a resounding fanfare of two words. Stop it.

Here's a quick list of those involved so far- Jenson Button, Harvester, a 118 radio ad, that stupid dog training TV show after extensive research, it is called A Different Breed- I'm not sure if that's in reference to the dogs, the team behind it or the owners), and Cuprinol's 'Wood Preservation society'. Also, the "For dogs who BLANK a lot" dog foog ad- Oh, Philip Glenister, how could you?

Fuck off. If you want to sell things or encourage people to watch or use them, sell them, show them, tell us why we need them and make sure we know they're great if they are. Don't make up a stupid bleeding rhyme.

For once I'm not going to over-emphasise and let something other than my motor-mouth of anger (should that be motor-fingers?) do the talking. I am posting the adverts which so adversely afflict me here. Watch them, and understand my annoyance. I do not ever remember the products they sell, let alone want to spend money on them. If anything, when I occasionaly hypotehtically have a flashbulb memory of the horrors here, I'll be more inclined not to spend money, as they annoy me so. Tsk.

Just what the hellis going on?.

I've never been this partial to fences.

If I'm hungry this would just hack me off in a restaurant.

Jenson Button proves he should stick to driving.

Here, Philip Glenister rhymes a lot in a Winalot ad.

Unfortunately, I cannot find the audio for the Classic FM broadcast 118 advert online. The best I can offer is the wavelength (100-102 FM), the website (www.classicfm.co.uk), and the assurance that if you give yourself a couple of hours you'll hear it.

And now, as a bonus, a non-rhyming but equally stupidly executed advert. This genius JML painting pointer thingy- make it easy, not fun. Painting has never been so fun. One- I bet it has. Two- I don't want it to be a thrill. Three- you've completely missed the point of this genius product.

Again, I can't find the original advert online. However, I can assure you that if you give yourself a couple of hours to watch Channel 5 (now, apparently, just '5') in the daytime you'll be told about it.

'500,000 on sick are fit to work'

2011-04-03T10:22:00.006+01:00

Oh, dear god.

If this is true, as one minister suggests, then every single one of these 500,000 people need to get going. Or move abroad so we don't have to deal with them sitting around and cheating everyone else out of what they could be doing.

I'd like to turn to a recent piece I wrote to be published in my college magazine, The Bowland Lady. If you're ever in the North West of England, seek it out. The piece was entitled

Grit your teeth and get on with it- that ridiculous sense of entitlement in the job market

and I think it's a bit relevent here. It reads as follows:

Fine, we’re going through a recession. The chirpiest optimist with the sunniest outlook on life can’t really pretend they’ve not noticed that. And yes, with a recession comes redundancies and poor job prospects overall. But it’s not the end of the world. In my third year now I’m starting to look at the fact that the job market for graduates looks bleak. Gone are the days when, twenty years ago, there weren’t many people with the all-hallowed Degree and it was basically an access all areas pass into whatever career you chose, because, hey, you'd earned it big guy.

Now it’s more like a scene from Braveheart, where degrees are about as common as woad was on their faces in this battlefield. It’s not longer a piece of paper that entitles you to do whatever you want instantly. And everyone is getting all upset about it.

Really, though, is this not an opportunity for people to see the world as it really is? Unfair.

Ball-breakingly unfair, and hard, and difficult. If you believe that you are supposed to be able to just drift into a cushty job just on the merits of three years that the whole world is going to forget about then god help you. Personally, I believe that if you work your arse off for something for long enough then you’ll end up getting it, but even that’s a bit shaky. And it’s this sense of entitlement, this sense that the world owes you, that forces people to bitch and moan about how they can’t get any work at all.

Bull. Shit. There is always work. When people say there’s no work going, you might start to picture men heaving against the gates down at the New York docks in the twenties, begging to be allowed to lift really heavy things for fifteen hours a day. Instead, the picture you should be thinking of is thousands of people behind laptops looking at jobs and finding a reason not to apply for any. “Too far” is one such complaint, practical, often legitimate. “Not what I want to do” is another, and coupled with “not good enough” it’s the root of the problem.

A job is a job. If you’re working, you’re earning. Regardless of whether you think that factory work will be beneath you, at some point you have to get off your arse and start working. There is a common misconception that working a shit job after you graduate and looking for work are mutually exclusive. Guess what, genius. You can do both, if you want to. The other misconception is the idea that graduate job shortages are the worst thing in the world and every graduate is doomed. Not so. I came to university to get a degree, but I’ve learned a lot more. I’ve acquired the dreaded s-word of skillset. You can apply yourself to anything, and do anything.

So grit your teeth, grin almost, and get on with it. Just because your dream was to be organising fashion shoots for Grazia and now you’re sat behind a desk as a receptionist for a doctors’ surgery, or looking increasingly likely to end up somewhere similar, doesn’t mean that one day you can get to Grazia. University isn’t a pass into dreamworld. With or without a degree, in the real world, you have to work. And you, and I, have to realise we can’t afford to sit on our Laurels and wait for something to come along, because it won’t.

Now, I'm aware that it was tailored for university graduates, or at least people who have recently escaped their studies, but it still applies. If you are one of these people who is sat around pretending to be ill it's probably down to the same reasons- laziness, or the fact that you have been crushed out of hope by the dissilusionment at not getting the jobs you dreamed of, and so you stopped trying. And that is no reason to fraud the hell out of everyone else who actually works and pays taxes; it should be punishable by death, in my humble opinion. Or they should be forced into military careers where they may, finally, do something worthwhile.

Either that, or realistically, we should stop bankrolling people to sit on their arses. People complain about the fact they have to bankroll the students who are studying to get better careers, but seriously, get a grip. The idle fat chavs and "geniuses" who'll never get caught with their fake limp or other cunning ailment are the ones you should worry about. The state bursaries and benefits should be halved. You can live on so much less than they get, and that would give them an incentive. If they don't get work, or don't want work, they don't deserve luxuries. Simple as.

If I wanted to take part in a scrum I'd have gone to a midnight rugby game.

2011-04-03T00:44:00.007+01:00

This is a shout out to all the shitheads out there who love to make queueing at the bar a physical war. I do not want to go to a nightclub to get my upper body workout, or any sort of exercise for that matter, aside from occasional "dancing" which may cause other people on nights out to question both my sanity and whether or not I've got some sort of permanent problem with my nervous system. I want to drink copiously, bellow along to songs which should have been left in the past and generally have a good night.

Having to take part in the ebb and flow of people that becomes a gigantic, braced scrummage with dozens of individual three and four man teams all heading in the same direction and, apparently, attempting to widen the club twenty metres by pushing the bar and back wall away is not my idea of a great way to spend twenty minutes.

And the upshot of it all? When you (I) do get to the bar, there's a phenomenal wait while I apparently discover an inate ability to turn invisible. You see, there are reasons why I don't get served.

I am not a girl.

I am not hugely burly.

I am not a classical good looker.

These three reasons mean that I will have to stay pinned with ribs against the cold metal in front of me for at least ten minutes while the orange ladies either side of me keep moving along at speed, getting drinks and being replaced by others of increasingly cheap appearance.

I like to think I have a decent amount of "stand your ground" about me. Yesterday I tripped a dickhead on his way back from the bar, having pushed through to the front past loads of us, so that he ended up with half the drink he paid for. Due to the fact that there are so many like minded people as him about, the opacity of the crowd allowed me to get away with it, and he just shouted a bit in general to everyone in the area before buggering off. Win.

In the same evening, I managed to secure a friend's friend, who is only five feet tall bless her, my spot once I had got my drinks. I did this my exerting my not exactly considerable strength and holding back the man behind me as I backed out, pulling her into the space I was leaving, and generally making a lot of noise in the bloke's direction. As a side note, he was wearing one of those t-shirts with the collar missing so that your pecs and clavicles are allowed out to air because half of your top has been stylishly removed. Whether or not that has any bearing on this guy's character is up to you, I'm just saying what I saw in the vapid, crew cut sporting bronze chunk of solely physical magnificence and capability.

Finally, I would like to say one thing. I have never "tended bar", and I'm guessing it's quite hard when it's the end of term, it's hugely busy and your in the dark and noisy places that nightclubs tend to be. But please, when you know it will be busy, put more than three people behind a bar trying to please the hundreds along its shiny twelve metres. Or, don't complain and look put upon when the people who've been stuck for forty minutes trying to catch your eye a) act a bit impatient and b) order more than one or two drinks.

Ink-redible idiocy or deliberately printing money?

2011-03-23T16:50:00.007Z

A minor gripe inducing piece of stupidity occurred to me today as I was sat, working away like a good little boy on my essay rather than heading outside into the sunshine which has decided to grace us and bake the interior of the library. I was tapping away at the slightly tacky keyboard as you do and decided to print out what I had of my essay so that I could hand write the links required and refine my argument somewhere away from a computer screen. I can't think when I'm staring at one, not a bit. And it was hot. Really hot.

It then occurred to me I might not have enough printer credits to print off all three pages as I needed to. With this worry in mind, I realised that for every page someone cannot print in the library, in what has to be the most cost effective move since Noah building the ark out of sponges, the printer will print a page with huge black font all over it telling me I can't print. The ink and paper I would have paid to use, and couldn't pay to us, have now been wasted. And we wonder why we're paying a stupid amount to print things. Because they regularly print warnings "for free" using more ink than I'd have used in the first place, and then tack the wasted paper and ink onto the price for what you actually use.

I mean, how hard can it be to set it so that if you haven't got enough, a pop up window will let you know? They've programmed the network to throw up that fecking Message Of The Day pop up whenever you log on, which no one reads. Put some effort into a little "no credit" pop up. Or, better yet, give me a book of HTML or whatever programming language is used and I'll have a stab at it. I'd need a week, a pot of coffee and lots of food, but by buggeration would I get it done.

Oh, and stop programming the network to let absolute wankers lock their computers so they can walk away and the only person who can sign in is them. That's exactly the sort of thing that exacerbates the attempts of a few to stop dickheads from hogging workstations. Divert the energy and time put into changing the settings to allow people to annoy everyone to death into removing this stupid money making scheme. Thankyou.