General Catch-Up
Stuff:
Dug had a nasty case of Spontaneous Vehicular Combustion the other evening, and in his efforts to find out if anyone else has experienced anything similar, I said I'd spread the word.
Stuart at Hydragenic posted his personal selection of timeless albums last week and invited others to do the same. I was going to take him up on it, but having assembled a list, it suddenly felt not-very-me to do a big posting about music. I will mention that I could easily have filled my list with Kate Bush albums, so much have I loved her music for so long, and so varied is her body of work. In the end I settled for Hounds Of Love, which I'm listening to at the moment - it's *so* good.
I've seen the alternative ending to 24 Season 1, by the way, you know, where you-know-who doesn't shoot you-know-who, and I can I just say, the version as transmitted is *way* stronger....
I found myself awake at insane o'clock this morning thinking about work. It's not unusual, so I'm not exactly surprised, but the conclusion I reached, which unfortunately I can't go into here, did surprise me in that "Well of course, that's the only possible thing to do - why have I even been wondering?" way that the bleedin' obvious sometimes does.
This posting will be the 998th on this blog, which means that probably tomorrow I'll be making my 1000th posting (note that the UIDs are slightly higher because of occasional double postings and tests of one thing or another). Which is a nice round number to leave things on.
No, not for good, but for a week while I go away. As I mentioned last week, as I'm going to be the closest to incommunicado that I'll have been in quite some considerable time, I'm taking a wee break. I've invited a guest blogger to step in and caretake from Monday to Friday (I'll be back on Friday night), and the interesting project is confirmed. It will very much involve audience participation, and so I hope everyone will join in and encourage each other to do so too (as there are clearly circles within circles of my readership). I shall be very interested in seeing the outcome on Friday.
In the meantime, I've been doing some flat-tidying in preparation for Louise Dillon-sitting while I'm away, and having been a bit hectic for the last few weeks, I haven't been keeping on top of things very well - hence, a bit of a duststorm that's triggered a huge sneezing fit that just won't stop. My nose is horribly raw from all the blowing. I think I need to get out in the fresh air for a bit.
Situation Vacant
So - does anyone know of an experienced PHP/MySQL developer with a slot in their work schedule for the next couple of months? If so, drop me a line - I might know of something they could do.
An Old Trick
There's a letter in this morning's Metro from one Anil Gupta, who opens by making the apparently reasonable point that; "If I moved to France, I would not start speaking French in my own home, so why does David Blunkett assert that Asian immigrants should speak English in their own homes?" So far, so reasonable, though there's a leap from the particular to the general that isn't strictly supportable, but we'll let it slide for the moment.
Things start to slip a little with the next sentence though: "However, if I wanted to make a living in a foreign country, learning the language would be a necessity." In fact, this is the point at which things start to go completely off the rails, because even if one did want to work in a foreign country and so learned the language, there's still no particular reason why one would want to speak it at home. In fact, if anything, hanging on to a native language outside of work would probably become more important.
But then - we come to the actual point that Anil wanted to make: "Therein lies the rub - the vast majority of immigrants in this country come to sponge off state benefits and have no need, let alone desire, to learn English. They provide no benefit to our economy and are a drain on our social security system." Ah - so this is the old trick of starting out making reasonable, almost logical points and then shifting in midstream and unmasking the reactionary agenda. Why on earth do people bother? It's not like anyone's going to read the email and think "Hmm, yes - that was a well-structured and reasonable argument. I've suddenly changed my mind and agree with everything said." The fallacies barely need highlighting, but 'the vast majority' and ''no need, let alone desire' both leap to the eye. As does the invisible line "I'm a reactionary git making sweeping generalisations to support an otherwise undefendable argument."
Ah - the spirit of Socratic debate, alive and well in SE8.
Unexpectedly Political
Among one subset of my friends and acquaintences, there is a group who are familiar with 'The Americans'. 'The Americans' encapsulates an extended family of people from the great state of Ohio who have been visiting these shores for rather more years than I've known the aforementioned subset. Every time they come over, it's in a different combination, but the one absolute constant is Gary, who acts as the focal point of the group.
They're here at the moment, and I just got back from meeting them for dinner at Chris's. Good evening - met some new members of the group, and had a few drinks over food with them. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, the conversation turned to politics, and I found myself in a debate about the positive things that the Labour government has done. Blair's speech at the TUC conference last week was the start of it all, because (courtesy of clever speech-writing), he turned the subject around from Iraq/war stuff at the outset to a review of all the positive things that wouldn't have happened without a Labour government (the minimum wage, etc). It was cunning work. I can't help pondering, however, how much more could have been achieved if they hadn't been so scared of failing to secure a second term and had actually dared to be radical. Or even if after they had the second term they had set out to be more than watered-down Tories. I think the phrase "the betrayal of socialism" may have been used....
The Road To…Tom Hanks’ Next Oscar?
I've just heard the first wholly negative comments I've yet come across about Sam Mendes' The Road To Perdition, courtesy of a mysteriously-unidentified 'American critic in London' on BBC ONE's Breakfast News. For myself, I hope it does well, largely because the source material is so good and deserves to be brought to more people's attention. It is, however, one of those films that I've been put off from by means of its own trailer. All of that "Every father is a hero to his son" bollocks is a real turn off, both because, well, because it is such bollocks - countless fathers are total bastards to their sons - and also because it's delivered in such portentous tones that it feels like the film has already decided on its own immense 'significance'.
Plus it's got Tom Hanks in it - rarely a good sign in my book.
D’Oh!
In typical style, I completely forgot to mention that I'd put put reviews of both The Bourne Identity and The Importance Of Being Earnest in the Opinion section at the weekend....
Ahead Of The Emmys….
Well, after last weekend's 'Creative Arts' Emmys, the main event is coming up this week, and I just thought I'd take the opportunity of vague topicality to make a couple of West Wing observations.
For the last couple of years, The West Wing has pretty much had things all its own way at the Emmys, winning almost unheard-of numbers of 'The Television Oscars'. This year it faces its stiffest competition yet in Six Feet Under, which is already ahead of this year's pack both in nominations and actual awards from last weekend.
One of the awards that TWW has won for the last two years is Outstanding Supporting Actress In A Drama Series for Allison Janney. This year, for the same part, in the same series, by some byzantine convolution of the rules, she's up for Outstanding Lead Actress In A Drama Series. And there's a pretty good chance that she'll win this year too, for a couple of reasons:
One is that the Six Feet Under vote will probably be split, as both Rachel Griffiths and Frances Conroy are nominated, and the other is that Aaron Sorkin created a phenomenal arc for her character, CJ, that ran through the latter half of the last season: Humour, romance, tragedy, this one had it all. A third reason, to be honest, is that she's far and away the best thing in The West Wing, and by any normal (pre-Six Feet Under) standards, that makes her by extension one of the best things on TV.
But - and there's always a but - I'd like to add my voice to those occasionally raised to protest the treatment of the women characters in The West Wing. In his book on the series, Inside Bartlett's White House, Keith Topping tracked down a critical analysis of the series by John Levesque of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who noted that Sorkin "is not doing women any favors" both by the situations he creates for the women characters and also by the reactions of the men around them.
Increasingly, I agree. Alongside one of the examples he cites (two women sit on wet paint, and one of them subsequently has to appear on national television without her trousers. Hilarity ensues), I would add that for most of the first series CJ had a crush on a White House reporter, which led to her, among other things, almost leaking him a story, having her professionalism questioned by the men, developing a habit of dragging him into offices and stairwells apparently because she was unable to prevent herself wanting to kiss him, and generally acting like a lovesick schoolgirl, usually to provide comic relief. She's also the White House staffer who most frequently makes mistakes in her professional activities (that's a feeling I get, not a scientific count, but I've heard other people make the same observation - there's a letter in this week's Radio Times about it, actually).
This is all the more annoying, because in throwaway style, Sorkin regularly emphasises exactly how strong and capable CJ is - she created and ran the media strategy that got the White House out of a polling dive, she handles the Press Corps better than anyone else, even her theoretically intellectual superiors, she is more than able to handle any situation that comes along, but still and all, the primary recollection one is left with is of her sulking and getting huffy with crush/reporter Danny because he ran a story she didn't want him to.
Likewise, every other regularly-appearing woman is secondary to a man - *all* of the PAs are women, Stockard Channing is excellent as the First Lady, but is basically only rolled out when the programme needs a foil for the President, and Republican Ainsley served almost as much as comic relief as CJ, despite being able to debate rings round every man in the show. And Mandy, who vanished without explanation at the end of season one, was at one point described as "a major player in the Democratic Party", yet largely existed to quibble with ex-lover Josh and whine about not being taken seriously.
Don't get me wrong - underneath it all CJ is indeed that strong and capable character, and all of the other women, in different ways, are equally strong and equally capable. But the way they're used in the episodes, as John Levesque noted, does women no favours. Which is a pity, because with the *possible* exception of Six Feet Under, The West Wing remains the smartest, most intelligent, brilliantly-crafted drama series coming out of US TV. And with a bit more attention paid to its treatment of its women, it could be even better.
Random Linkage
Empire Magazine have produced an online guide to films adapted from comics which is mildly entertaining and appears to have been written by someone who's at least read the comics they're referencing. Inexplicably, it misses out next year's X2, but you can't have everything.
Concerned parents are finally coming together to encourage us all to Think Of The Children.
[Via Sore Eyes]
Gert points us all towards Green Fairy with the probably prophetic words: "a Damn fine blog guaranteed to piss you off at least once, but well worth a read"
"You can say many things about modern capitalism. One thing you can't do is say that it doesn't replace the jobs that it destroys." Unexpectedly, a comment from an article on the impact of personal computing on our lives.
And with only nine days to go to the start of Series Three of The League of Gentlemen:
we go behind the scenes in the village of Hadfield with BBC News Online.