The Good, The Bad, And The Ridiculous

As I type this there's only fifteen minutes until the final season of Lost starts, so let's get this week's Being Human musings out of the way quick-like.

THE GOOD

Annie. Everyone with any taste in this world agrees with me that the best line in the pilot by far was Annie asking Mitchell whether he ever told George about how the moment of death involves entering a corridor filled with men armed with sticks and rope. In a show that started out, and to be fair in many ways continued, offering comparatively little in the way of original takes on the supernatural (which isn't to say the show itself is unoriginal), that line was the first major suggestion that there might be something genuinely unique coming.

In some ways it's a shame it's taken more than a season to get back to it, but here we go. Something very, very bad lurks on the other side (apparently we're calling them Gate Keepers now, though I don't know why), and it's targeting ghosts who refuse to lay themselves to rest (which at least explains why they didn't show up in the first season). Having Sykes show up as a miserable Yoda might have been mighty (and intentionally?) suspicious, but it worked pretty well in both moving Annie's story on and filling in the ghosts' world a little more. In fact, by biggest complaint is that it at least appears as though both Sykes and the Gatekeepers look like they may both have been wrapped up far too quickly, though it's entirely possible future developments will prove that implication false.

THE BAD

Mitchell. I get what's going on here, I do; see how far Mitchell will go down the road to becoming Herrick before he realises/cares. Fine, in theory. It's been done to death, but fine. But the very instant Mitchell successfully blackmailed the coroner into once again faking death certificates for vampire victims, his pressing need to convert the vampires went away. Things could just get back to normal. Now sure, normal wasn't really very good, of course, but he was perfectly happy with the idea three episodes ago, and gave no real sign of being pissed off with it for the decades he spent under Herrick's reign. All of which makes his sudden insistence that he keep Ivan on-side by setting up a one-girl blood farm in the basement completely ridiculous. If you're going to sell us on the idea that one of the main characters has his feet planted on the first step of a spiral staircase to moustache-twirling villain-hood, you need to make his plight absolutely cast-iron, and this is some way away from that.

Having said that, though, it is at least an interesting story.

THE RIDICULOUS

George. Seriously, werewolf-induced Tourette's? Honestly, Toby Whithouse? Werewolf-induced Tourette's? Why you gotta make me slap you, Toby? Why you gotta do that?

Worst "Worst 10 Films Ever" Ever?

I had a quick think about the Top 10 Worst Film list the Guardian has up on its website, and I'm somewhat unconvinced. I certainly can't quibble at Batman and Robin being at #1; that film is certainly the worst I've ever seen at the cinema, and I can't think of anything more execrable I've seen on any other medium, either. Highlander II is certainly a baffling mess, and I'm entirely prepared to believe, sight unseen, that Epic Movie deserves its place on the list, though its inclusion raises the question as to whether we could just fill all ten slots with the last half-score Wayans brothers movies (which would be, what, their 2009 output?) and have done with it.

Heaven's Gate, though? Really? I know it bankrupted a studio and set back the massaging of directors' egos by a few decades, but this is the first I'm hearing of it being anything but a severe disappointment considering the money poured into it. And it's about time people started working out the difference between disappointing and bad. Q fell into this trap a few years ago with their "50 Worst Albums" feature, which contained such ludicrous choices as Beck's Midnite Vultures, with a description that read along the lines of "Not actually too bad, but a definite disappointment after Odelay and Mutations promised so much." You're honestly going to try and tell me that there aren't 50 actually shitty albums throughout the entire course of human history? Bryan Adams could fill out 22% of the list on his own, for God's sake!

Once again, I digress.

Oh, also: people need to stop crapping all over M. Night Shyamalan. Sure, The Village and Lady In The Water were disappointments, and The Happening almost impossible to recognise as being from the same director as The Sixth Sense, but there is simply no way that there are only seven worse films in existence than Shyamalan's sixth effort (which is, at absolute worst, a two-star feature). Partially, I suspect it's on the list for the same reason pointlessly mediocre fare like the Arctic Monkeys keep showing up on "Bestest Albums Everest", because people have remarkably short memories and tend to choose what's fresh in their mind. Mainly, though, I think it's because Shyamalan is an arrogant git who makes it very clear that he thinks both film critics and those that dislike his work in general are incompetent morons (though in his defence he made Lady In The Water the most clear broadside against critics missing the point of their job he possibly could, and said critics still managed to miss said point, proving him right), and people tend to vote him down pretty harshly because of it. Can't say he doesn't deserve it, but The Happening doesn't; certainly not to this extent.

Still, I'm mainly here to talk about entry #10: The Room. I have to confess, had it not been for Chemie, I wouldn't ever have been made aware of this particular slice of monstrous anti-genius. The Room is not a bad film, as most people would understand the term. Bad films fail; they attempt to reach a certain level, to hit certain targets, but for whatever reason, they come up short. The Room, on the other hand, succeeds entirely. It doesn't put a foot wrong in its unstoppable march towards its goal. It just so happens that its goal is to be the worst film in the entire cosmos, known or unknown. If a tribe of cannibalistic primitives without a written language and possessed of the unshakable belief their God resides within their own anal cavities stumbled upon a camcorder whilst out of their mind on hallucinogenic frog venom, they would put together something more dramatically coherent than Tommy Wiseau's first (and most surely only) feature. Everything about this film is wrong. The acting is terrible, the plot makes no sense, the prop and make-up department can't do anything so complex as prepare the right pizza or keep a woman's hair-do constant from shot to shot, respectively. Characters randomly appear and disappear (apparently one actor quit - surprise - and was replaced, but the replacement is never referred to by name in his scenes). Also, the soundtrack doesn't work, the overall message is both pathetically self-indulgent and at least slightly misogynistic, and the only reason why the sex scene that hits you in the film's early moments isn't the worst one ever committed to celluloid is because the exact same scene is used fifteen minutes later, to diminishing returns.

Feast your eyes on the horror, my friends. A little context: the guy with the beard is supposedly Johnny's best friend, but he's sleeping with Johnny's fiancee. I wouldn't want you to not understand the dramatic irony in the scene. You might also want to note that the guy playing Johnny (who looks like a cross between Harvey Keitel and a lizard wearing a horse's tail) also wrote and directed the film, and took the opportunity to portray himself as the greatest man ever to walk the Earth. This is what he considers the zenith of the human condition:



There are other snippets on youtube, but I warn you: I cannot be legally held responsible for the consequences of watching more.

The Pontiff Pontificates

Another day, another barrage of bigotry from the Supreme Pontiff:

The Pope has urged Catholic bishops in England and Wales to fight the UK's Equality Bill with "missionary zeal".

Pope Benedict XVI said the legislation "violates natural law". Supporters of the law see this as a wish to keep a ban on gay people in Church positions.

Actually, I think this needs some unpacking, because I think this is one of those issues that doesn't quite work the way a lot of people think it does.

First of all, for the record, and none of this should come as a surprise, but I want equal rights for gay people, and whether they're sexually active or not is absolutely none of my damn business, nor anyone else's. Whilst the Pope has as much right as anyone else to object to new laws (and as a long-standing meddler in American politics, I can hardly argue his opinion be automatically be discounted on the grounds of him being all foreign and stuff), it's clearly ludicrous to suggest that a secular society should discriminate against non-Catholic citizens (not that all gay people are non-Catholic, obviously) indefinitely, rather than risk the Catholic Church maybe having to change its stance or compromise its hiring practices at some point.

Clearly, that's the first place where the Pope has gone wrong. He's arguing that the development of an entire society can only take place at the pace set by the religious views of a small fraction of its citizens. Even for a guy who believes himself to be the mouthpiece of God, that's some pretty stunning arrogance right there.

My main point lies elsewhere, though. This latest papal proclamation has led to a large amount of spluttering about equal rights, and the idea of a fair society. Now, as above, I am entirely in favour of both those things. What needs to be understood, though, is that this isn't necessarily directly an equality issue. That is to say, whilst clearly the Pope's desire to quash this law would adversely affect the degree of equality this society can lay claim to (which is why we should fight against him getting his way), those that support the Pope don't see themselves as arguing against equality, but against sin.

Let me once again bring up healthcare, by way of analogy. Whilst I truly believe the Republican Party is a blight upon the soul of humanity, and a clear force for misery across that country and - when they can get away with it - the globe, I wouldn't say any of them were arguing for death, even though part of the reason healthcare reform is so badly needed in the States is that 20 000 to 45 000 people die a year from a lack of health insurance. They were and are ignoring the direct cost in life that will result from getting their own way, but even I don't think those deaths were the aim of their objection. Sure, I called Lieberman a murderer, but not because I thought he wanted people to die, simply because he had absolutely no coherent explanation, not one, on any level, as to why he opposed reform he had championed so passionately in early life. Republicans were allowing people to die for their own political gain. At least "we need to get back into power and this is the fastest way to do it" makes sense as a motivation, as much damage as it's doing to their own country. Lieberman was allowing them to die simply to gain revenge on the democrats of Connecticut, which is to say he was prepared to allow tens of thousands to die to make himself feel good. But I digress.

The trouble with with framing this in terms of equal rights, and comparing the struggle for gay rights with the struggle for women's rights, or the rights of non-whites, is that generally speaking this viewpoint makes sense only to those people who don't think there's anything wrong with homosexual activity in the first place. For those that do, though, the rest of us appear to confusing what people are with what they do. To the Pope and his supporters on this matter, we might as well be demanding equal rights for adulterers. This is why the terminology "practising homosexuals", which as far as I can see sounds to many people like a way of getting out of looking like Catholicism has a problem with homosexuality itself (and that might be true in some instances), is so important.

All of which means that the question to be employed when calling the Catholic hierarchy on this isn't "Why can't you recognise homosexuals and heterosexuals are clearly equal?", it's "What other forms of sin are you already prepared to accept in those you hire?".

The big problem with Catholicism in this context isn't really that they consider homosexual activity a sin. For sure, it's a terrible and hurtful stance to take. Even when I was a Christian, I thought it a BS call to refer to love as a sin if it occurred between two adults who happened to not have compatible sexual organs. Frankly, when you have a book as frequently smart and persuasive as the Bible, to say nothing of 2000 years of expert scholarship and philosophical thinking on the subject, doggedly clinging to those parts for which the assembled might of justification boils down to "It just says so, for some reason" is kind of pointless.

But right now, that's not the issue. The issue is the sheer vehemence with which the Catholic Church condemns homosexuality. I've spoken about this before, but to reiterate: it seems completely insane to me. The degree of condemnation they heap on abortion I can at least understand; even if I strongly disagree that it's murder, I can understand why those that think it is get so outraged about it. But homosexuality? Really? That's what we need to focus our attention on? 'Cos this seems like kind of an odd hill to make your stand on. [1]

My point is this. If the Catholic Church dismisses anyone from their employ when they discover they've lied, or been mean to their mother, or screamed "JESUS CHRIST!" after dropping a paperweight on their toe, then their argument here would actually make some sense. If you want to be in the club, you follow the rules. For some reason, though, despite the above three examples all being violations of the Ten Commandments, which I seem to remember being quite important (though that might just be Charlton Heston's delivery of them), it's kind of hard to imagine any of them being firing offences. Certainly - though I'm not up on my employment law, so I'm happy to be corrected - one imagines that trying to fire someone once you realise they've lied about something (that didn't materially effect their job, of course) isn't something you'd put much money on working.

The only partial defence of the Church's position would be to point out that the above trangressions could be atoned for; that those who commit them would then seek the absolution of the confessional, whereas a practising homosexual would neither stop sinning nor apologise to God for what they've done. Again, though, there are clearly sufficient Catholics in the world who defy the words of the Bible and do not believe they need to atone for it (wearing two types of cloth, working on the Sabbath, you know; insert appropriate West Wing scene here) that this defence essentially comes down to "We've decided which bits of the Bible to ignore, and which ones to follow so fanatically that we'll allow no-one to violate them within our employ, irrespective of the law of the land or the clear inoffensiveness of the trangression in question".

The Catholic Church is wrong by our lights for believing homosexual activity is wrong. But it's wrong by its own lights, or at least wildly inconsistent in an area (crime and punishment as defined by Almighty God) where coherent positions are probably pretty important, both for choosing a baffling order for the severity of sins and for its inconsistency in how it enforces Biblical law amongst its employees.

I think it's that latter part that they need to be reminded of.

[1] Perhaps unsurprisingly, this latest reminder that the muckety mucks at the Vatican don't want teh gays to have any fun has led to a number of people (on internet forums, at least, so I don't want to imply it's gotten any further than that) that any organisation so plagues by accusations of child abuse might want to STFU about what is and isn't moral. Well, the Catholic church's attitude to those allegations - and the attendant evidence of their accuracy - is justifiably considered a disgrace (and more on that below), but even so I get nervous around the argument that this automatically implies nothing the Catholic Church says about morality is worth listening to Again, to understand the situation you have to understand the Catholic viewpoint. A pederast who confesses and repents is forgiven. A homosexual who refuses to confess continues to bear the mark of their sin. That much is entirely consistent with their own particular slant on the world, so to argue it invalidates their pronouncements on morality purely because they have starting precepts that differ from ours seems a tad unconsidered.

No, what erodes the church's moral authority isn't that the Catholic Church believes that homosexuality is a sin, it's that they apparently believe that priests who commit sins that are also illegal should be protected from legal punishment once they atone. The fact that homosexuality is viewed as wrong is baffling. The fact that the Catholic Church prefer repentant pederasts to defiant homosexuals is ludicrous. But only the fact that the Church believes itself above the laws of society strikes me as moving past non-Catholic vs. Catholic philosophies and into objectively and disgustingly immoral and wrong. You don't get to skip out on jail time because you don't think God is pissed at you any more. Even so, though, my point in all this is that whilst their attempts to shield such priests from punishment is clearly wrong, it isn't actually inconsistent with the way they view sin and punishment, so whilst they really need to knock this cover-up shit off right now, I'd be careful about suggesting that they automatically can't know morality from a hole in the ground.

Deep Thought

Having watched one half of an episode of The Cleveland Show, I'm wondering: what would be less unwatchable? The pathetic shell of a TV program that The Simpsons has become in the last ten to twelve years, or a different animated series that shameless recycles Simpsons jokes from back when that show was at the top of its game?

Presented Without Comment

Which isn't to say I wouldn't have any, of course. Polling data from 2003 self-identified Republlicans:

His Truth Is Dumber Than His Fiction

It's a slow news day here at Squid Towers, so let's throw in some meaningless and outdated mockery of Richard Littlejohn. This is four or five months old, but I missed it the first time around, so here is a delightful slice of Littlejohn's total inability to grasp the most basic requirements of professional journalism (h/t to Chris B from GeekPlanet):

Reader Nick Paterson-Morgan drew my attention to the following announcement in The Times:

My first reaction was that this must be a wind-up, probably placed for a bet by someone at the swine flu hotline with nothing better to do. We rang The Times advertising department and they assured us it was genuine.

There’s no mention of a Mr Pong, or any father’s name for that matter. If true, which I still doubt, somewhere out there in Shropshire is a single mother called Kate Pong with quins, variously named after an American pop singer, a model and the U.S. President.

You couldn’t make it up.

We'll leave aside exactly what Littlejohn's problem with naming children after celebrities or world leaders is - I guess it was a slow day at The Foetid Floridan Swamp of Littlejohn, too [1]- and why exactly the concept of five children being born to the same mother apparently strikes him as too outlandish to even be conceivable within the realms of fiction.

No. Let's go straight to a picture of the mother herself.


It's a chocolate labrador. Littlejohn must have been kicking himself. Not because he managed to so totally humiliate himself once again in the national eye, but because the fact she's a brown dog could have afforded all sorts of opportunities for borderline offensive race-based "quips".

Still, Bighead pointed out that labradors might not originally hail from Britain. I looked it up, they were originally Canadian, which makes Kate an immigrant from the Commonwealth, a status Littlejohn presumably hates almost as much as immigrants from the Eastern EU (who themselves are only faintly preferable to gypsies or homosexuals).

And here they are, spewing out babies and taking our jobs. There's a guy in our department who's usually accompanied by a labrador trained as a hypo-alert dog. Aren't there any British dogs that can fulfil that function, huh? This poor thing:


has been unemployed since we first got her ten years ago. All she asks for is a chance to prove herself. "Give a dog a fish", and all that. Though in this case, you might be better giving her a sheep, I guess. Though she is scared of sheep. And fish.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes, Richard Littlejohn is some combination of an idiot, a bully, a borderline xenophobe, and a dog hater. And, since most of his broadsides against those who don't love (his entirely fictional version of) England enough are written from inside a gated in Florida, a hypocritical prick. A hypoprick, if you will. Admittedly, etymologically that word looks like a diagnosis of an abnormally small penis, but that's a risk I'm prepared to take.

Update: I've fixed the picture of the original Times article so that it can be seen in its entirety. This process actually led to me stumbling across Littlejohn's own blog. I note he hasn't bothered to print a retraction. You could argue the article isn't worth one, but he was the one who decided it was newsworthy...

[1] Imagine a retelling of Shreck, only with a more annoying voice, and replacing Myer's obsession with scatalogical humour with a truly disturbing obsession with each and every variation of homosexual copulation imaginable. There's something Littlejohn presumably wishes he could make up, though since one of his novels involves a man being sodomised with a truncheon, we should at least note that he's giving it a go.

Shake #34

Today's shake: Ricicles

Taste: 7
Texture: 7
Synergy: 8
Scorn: 1
Total Score: 7.75

General Comments: This one works almost as well as the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes shake, and for much the same reason; it's like drinking the milk from the bowl once the cereal is gone. In fact, it's so close to being as good as the aforementioned CNC shake that I was hoping I'd have lowered my scorn enough in recognition of their obvious similarities that this shake would actually come out ahead. This would infuriate BigHead no end to learn that weaker shakes were scoring more highly than stronger ones purely because I was getting smarter at deciding what works ahead of time. I imagine he would consider this a betrayal of maths, or something (I wasn't really listening).

Alas, it was not to be, and the Ricicles shake must be content to slot in just behind those shakes who still rule the roost with eight points apiece.