Bush and Becks

Here's a fun piece. The Guardian asked a number of people to write a letter to Bush, in honour of his visit to Britain. Letters to Santa, if Santa was a power hungry monkey man. They make entertaining reading, for a number of reasons. The bizarre denial exhibited by the right-leaning writers is fun to read, and the newspaper chose poets, comedians and writers to speak for the lefties, making their contributions entertaining reading.
Changing tack somewhat, I'm a fan of toys. I have toys all over the place, but even I'm having trouble getting my head around this one. Very, very odd.
I (finally) received issue 21 of the excellent the O men yesterday, and have still not quite recovered. This is consistently one of the best comics around, and this latest issue raised the bar even further. A superb issue full of shocking revelations and one shocking word that Rad is fond of using. Collected editions are available now from the website, and I heartily recommend picking them up.

Stripmining The Past

There's a young bride, mid twenties, looking gorgeous in her wedding dress, but visibly upset.
"It's too soon, isn't it?" she asks in an English accent. She's flustered and jittery. "It's too soon. I'm too young to get married. It's not the right time."
She sits down hard on a chair. Actually, it's more the kind of "flump" that an annoyed little girl might do. She looks up.
"I don't know what to do," she says, "What do you think Dad?"

Cut to Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg sitting side-by-side, each dressed as you would if you were a father giving away your daughter at her wedding. Each one of them gives some non-commital hand gesture and mumbles some non-commital answer, as a father who's not sure what to say might do.
Three Men and a Young Lady. Since this is the era of unnecessary remakes and sequels, why not? And it's not as if Messrs Guttenberg, Danson and Selleck have anything else to do...

"...a twist in the fabric of space, where time becomes a loop..."

Weird feeling this. I'm listening to British radio over the 'net, and it's getting on for half five over there, but it's only 11:20 in the morning here. So I'm listening to Britain winding down after the last working day of the week, getting ready for the weekend, but it's not even lunchtime yet. Makes you feel displaced, it does.

I Hate It Here

Right now, I'm listening to British radio (Xfm at the mo) over the internet because (a) internet access is free and unlimited over here, and (b) American radio is worse than rubbish.
I've got to the point where I've been here almost a year, and I'm not settled. I'm still homesick, and all the little things (like, no matter how bad British pop is, it's not a patch on the mire of bland inanity that passes for pop over here) start to add up.

On the other hand, The Non-Ironic Spinal Tap Tribute Band have just come on. They haven't made it here yet. Perhaps all is not lost.

Perhaps I really am Spider Jerusalem.

(I notice that this melancholy seems to be everywhere in the Blogtrix today. Dan certainly seems to be affected, and Kev is firing off myriad downbeat posts, clearly trying to get to grips with something only he knows. Friday Feeling my arse.)

Providence

As I went through my daily rounds of Other People's Blogs, I noticed that some people order their links alphabetically, and as such, my blog is often at or near the top. Which is nice, in an accidental-ego-massage kind of way.

Spud-U-Like

You are Spider Jerusalem.
Spider is THE journalist of the future. He smokes, he does drugs, and he kicks ass. The drugs are going to eventually kill him but not before he gets his way. And his way is the demise of the failed American dream. Although full of hate, he cares about his city. All he wants to bring the world is truth. Spider Jerusalem, conscience of the City. Frightening thought, but he's the only one we've got.


What Gritty No Nonsense Comic Book Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hmm. Not sure how I got that from the answers I gave, but what the hey. I've only ever read one issue of Transmetropolitan. I liked the idea behind it (and gosh darn it, isn't it relevant today?), but I was never moved to get any more. Maybe one day.

Here's the best headline of the day. I feel sorry for the Welsh potato farmers, but come on, should it really be the second headline at the Guardian site? Slow news day then?
On the other hand, it may be a breeding ground for that particularly sedate, and particularly British, form of right wing extremism, but the Torygraph gives us a pretty good article on comics and their future.

Bibliophile

A trip to the local Half-Price Books (a national chain that does exactly what it says on the tin) led to a spiffing Hellboy calendar for 2004, with lots of lovely Mignola art. Yum. I also finally picked up a battered old copy of Dune, acting on the orders of Rad. Actually, I'm looking forward to reading it, as I enjoyed both the TV series and the 1984 film (of which Rad disapproves). Also, since sound quality on the dvd of the series was so bad, I'll be able to find out finally what this "Pspssmss" thing they kept mentioning is (it's a "pre-spice-mass" apparently).
Also on my to-read list, in no particular order:

• Scion: Conflict Of Conscience. I'm rereading this, as I rattled through it rather too quickly first time.


• Batman: The Long Halloween. Ditto. This is a murder mystery story that I was a little unimpressed by, so a second reading may reveal more.


• Grant Morrison's Marvel Boy. Bought very cheaply on eBay and greatly enjoyed, I'm going to have another crack at it, just for fun.


• Vital Lies, Simple Truths? Meg's mum let me borrow this book about the psychology of denial. I often wonder how people can sometimes believe things that are patently untrue (a lot of that happens over here), and this book sets out to examine the phenomenon.


• The Tale Of Despereaux. Another one from the mother-in-law. I suspect this one is her surreptitiously giving me research material for my on-off plans to get into children's book illustration. It's something to do with a mouse and a silver spoon.


• JRR Tolkien: Author Of The Century. I'm rereading bits of it, as author Shippey says some interesting things about Tolkien's views on destiny and free will, and I'm musing on those subjects at the moment, for some reason.


• RA Salvatore's The Lone Drow. Shameless D&D-related pap, but I love it.


• A Clockwork Orange. Liam wants me to read it and do a visual treatment, tying into our graphic novel project in some way, I think.


• The Gormenghast Trilogy. I've been meaning to read this for ages. It's the other big fantasy trilogy, and apparently stands up to Tolkien's epic quite well.


• The Count Of Monte Cristo. A classic, but I picked it up because it's a big chunky book that'll last me a while, and I've never read it.


• The Sword of Shannara. Tom Shippey, author of the Tolkien book above, says this is shameless plagiarism, and I'm interested in seeing how similar to Tolkien this really is.

And I'm going to rattle through The Lord Of The Rings again sometime this month, in preparation for the adaptation of the third book. I haven't read the trilogy (one of my favourite books ever) since before the films were even announced, and I kick myself every Christmas for not keeping up.

We went to see love actually last weekend. I'm not normally a fan of Richard Curtis' smug middle-class film-making, but I enjoyed this a great deal. It's a bit uneven in places, and the "happy" plotlines are rather conventional, but it's all done with such genuine good humour, and the performances are so good, that you can overlook any small flaws. The American press has given it a rough time, mainly because of the rather obvious anti-Bush sentiment at various places in the script, and have largely ingored the film itself, which is on the whole, very successful. It's very much like Magnolia, but without the overbearing pretentiousness and cynicism so popular with film students.

The World's All Curvy...

One of the things I don't like about this new PC is that it has a monitor. After using a laptop for years, I've grown quite used to the crisp, non-distorted images produced by the laptop's flat screen. I'm really not enjoying all this curved-at-the-edges stuff. I enjoy even less the futile prodding of the buttons on the front of the monitor, which seems only to make things worse.
Meg's Dad bought himself a spanking new high-end desktop PC recently, complete with a flat-screen display. He's already been inundated with Christmas present requests from his children for similar screens. He may get one more...

The Matrix Revisionist

The nature of freedom fascinates me. I wrote my dissertation at university on it. Specifically, I'm very interested in the apparent tensions between freedom and a good life. Is it better to be free than to live a good life, or is a good life worth trading in one's freedom? Plato/Socrates thought the latter, and all societies are based upon a partial trade-off of freedoms for benefits, so it's not such a contentious idea. It's common in western societies, especially American-influenced societies, to see freedom as an intrinsic good, and possibly the most important thing in life, even more so than happiness or health or safety. I never managed to find a coherent argument for freedom's special status in all my time studying the problem. It seems to be a given, and that immediately made me suspicious.

All of which brings me to the Matrix trilogy. I've not seen Matrix 3 yet, but I probably will soon, and that got me thinking about the story so far. What I've realised is that, philosophically, I find myself pretty much on the side of the machines.
Think of it from their perspective. They were created as slaves by humanity. Later, humanity gave them life and intelligence. Later still, humanity tried to take this away from the machines again by destroying them. The machines, betrayed by their creators, fought a battle of self-preservation, which they won. Desperate, the humans destroyed their own environment in attempt to defeat the machines, going as far as blacking out the sun. The machines, victorious but without their primary power source, enslave the slavemasters and turn them into batteries. In order to preserve/protect the humans' minds, the machines create a virtual reality for the humans to live in. This reality is a blessed utopia, but the humans reject it. The machines try again, and by this point you really can't ascribe any malicious intent to them (and besides, if there is malice, it was programmed in by humans anyway...). They create an imperfect reality, hoping this will be more acceptable to the nihilistic human condition. This too is not good enough for humanity, which appears to want the moon on a stick, and some individuals escape the Matrix and create Zion, a dirty dark hole in the ground. The Zionites (to differentiate them from Zionists) decide that all of humanity would be better living in a dirty hole in the ground eating sloppy porridge as opposed to in a shiny city eating juicy steak, and begin a guerilla/terrorist campaign against the machines and their reality. The machines keep a lid on it all, until the Zionites find for themselves a messiah figure, which really upsets the boat. The machines decide that enough is enough and finally go after the Zionites.

So, the message of the Matrix films seems to be that a free but hellish existence is better than a utopian, but unfree life even if one doesn't know that one is unfree. And that's not a message I'm sure I agree with.

Contradictions In E Minor

So, if I'm in such a good mood, why has today's playlist so far been this and this? Good albums, both, but hardly cheery. Perhaps I'll put this on next, to liven things up a bit.
Still, I was inspired enough to knock this out for one of Meg's friends (click on the pic to see it in a new browser window because I haven't even begun to look at Javascript yet):

The Republican Party of Minnesota called earlier. I was half-inclined to pick up and chat to them for a laugh, but in the end I chickened out and let the machine take it. I don't want to get convicted of (and subsequently deported for) un-patriotic behaviour, which is most likely exactly what they would have got if I'd answered...