Friday 40K: The Motley Crusade

After getting my Tyranid army up to 2500 points, and completly re-basing both it and my Tau force, I thought I'd go for something at least a little different, so I've set about finishing painting up the Space Marines from the Assault on Black Reach box.  I've now gotten through the tactical squad, which combined with its equivalent from Battle for Macragge, and a Sterguard Veteran and old-time Veteran Sergeant, has given me the beginnings of a Space Marine Crusade army, which for those who don't remember the term, just means "a shitload of different Chapters who all show up at once."

(For those of you who remember the Space Squids back-story I started putting together - and which I still intend to complete, though that's true of about eight different things at this point - the dark-skinned individuals above were born on Four Feathers.  The Kringrimmi will have a different skin tone, but none of those that remain will be likely to be sergeants, or at least not without Terminator armour as well.)

Meanwhile, at the paint station:

That Dreadnought is destined to join the ranks of the Salamanders (who are looking somewhat under-represented just now).  But what are those two things that look like tiny ironing stands?  For those who don't recognise them, I shall give you a clue: the only reason they haven't progressed beyond the undercoat stage is that I've run out of Regal Blue.

Pope-ulation Control

Oh, for the love of God.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony in that statement.  I don't believe in the Catholic's concept of God, or anybody else's.  But I'd like to think that, if the Christian God were (or is) real, he might be a fan such things as basic logic.

Listen up, Benny: there are seven billion people on this planet.  Seven.  Billion. Seven zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero (85% of which aren't Catholics, by the way).  The things that threaten humanity itself are, in no real order; asteroid strike; nuclear war; super-charged flu pandemic; and a shadowy international conspiracy of murderous leopards.

And running out of room.  The natural world can offer plenty of examples of species and local populations who plummeted to their extinction just after reaching their highest ever numbers, because they eat all the food, drink all the beer, and generally carry on with no more thought to tomorrow than Bill Murray in Groudhog Day.  The human race isn't there yet, of course, but we're a damn sight closer to it than we are to being wiped out if gay people get to tie the knot.  At least when your predecessor banned in-vitro fertilisation, that was a move in the right direction, cold-hearted and nonsensical though it was. [1]

I'd actually have more respect for the Pope if he just came out with "Dudes, it's in the Bible.  Go check that shit out."  That raises other questions, of course, but at least it would be honest.  Trying to dress up common-or-garden homophobia as a principled attempt to save humanity is the highest form of bullshit, and it's cowardly as well.

[1] Perhaps this whole thing is a two-pronged attack to ensure The Forever War never comes about.  I can't imagine the Catholic hierarchy getting along too well in a world where overcrowding issues have been solved by growing all new people in vats, and turning the entire population gay to prevent pregnancy.  It's a neat idea, and demonstrates conclusively that being the only straight man on a planet filled with lesbians isn't nearly as brilliant an idea as Nuts might want you think.

Just Checkin'

How time flies.  It's already been three weeks since I delivered the Christmas quiz to a room full of confused drunkards and sarcastic barmaids.  It's always strange how different your former local feels after you've been away for a while, and when circumstances demand you stay sober.

Ordinarily it would be past time for me to put the answers up to the online transcript, but since takers were pretty thin on the ground this time around (maybe everyone was too busy trowelling on the brandy butter, or maybe I've just gotten out of practice and lost my quizzing mojo), I'll wait another week, in case anyone feels like having a go.

Li'l Ludo Is Also An Option

News that there's a Labyrinth comic book prequel in the works is nothing to be sniffed at, obviously, but two important questions spring immediately to mind. 

First: isn't the whole idea of a prequel to that film kind of missing the point?  Given that the crux of it is that it doesn't really matter whether Sarah's adventure was real or not, so much as the process of going through it?  And even if it was real, the power of the central metaphor is sufficiently strong that I'd be leery of trying anything else with the franchise once that idea is excised.

Secondly, and far more importantly, if you're going to do a Labyrinth prequel, why in the name of all that's holy are you basing it around Jareth, and not Sir Didymus.

Here, let me show you how awesome that would be:

Plus, you get to call it "The Adventures of Diddy Sir Didymus."

You're welcome.

Progressive Dementia

George Will is not a good writer.  He is a hack; a man who uses every ounce of the intelligence he has (or had) to disguise shameful lies as reasonable points.  He is a man who claimed there was no global warming in the '00s, because the hottest year on record was in the '90s.  You know, like how black musicians aren't increasingly being listened to and enjoyed by white people, because no single album has outsold Thriller, and that came out in '82. 

Not only is he a poor commentator and a mendacious charlatan, though, he's also horrifyingly dismissive of people who do not share his opinions, or his lack of journalistic standards.  On top of all of that, he has a stupid face, as though Bill Gates were constantly meloncholy and also an owl.

All of this has been true for a while (and indeed mentioned here more than once). So why am I going back to this particular well?  Because of this:

For the indefinite future, a specter is haunting progressivism, the specter of abundance. Because progressivism exists to justify a few people bossing around most people and because progressives believe that only government’s energy should flow unimpeded, they crave energy scarcities as an excuse for rationing — by them — that produces ever-more-minute government supervision of Americans’ behavior. 

Imagine what a horror 2011 was for progressives as Americans began to comprehend their stunning abundance of fossil fuels — beyond their two centuries’ supply of coal. Progressives responded with attempts to impede development of the vast, proven reserves of natural gas and oil here and in Canada. They bent the willowy Obama to delay approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry oil from Canadian tar sands; they raised environmental objections to new techniques for extracting gas and “tight” oil from shale formations.

An all-purpose rationale for rationing in its many permutations has been the progressives’ preferred apocalypse, the fear of climate change.

Following this outburst, I can longer bring myself to believe that Will is merely a peddler of low-grade bullshit.  He can only be completely, irreversibly out of his fucking tree.  That last line, admittedly, is Will's bog-standard outrageous lies: the Keystone XL pipeline was campaigned against because it would risk the extinction of several endangered species, and the principle objections to the new extraction techniques are that a) we haven't had time to ensure they're safe for nearby people, and b) they seem to have a nasty habit of poisoning surrounding water supplies.  The discerning reader might also ask why, if the US has two centuries of coal reserves remaining, it really needs a massive oil pipeline from Canada, when Will's children and his childrens' children can play safe and free under the harmless coke clouds belching forth from Middle America until the twenty-third century.

The rest of it, though, is just the ravings of an id that's collapsed under the weight of its own suppressed shame.  Decades of ignoring and misrepresenting his political and philosophical opponents have left Will unable to even comprehend the letters, symbols and sounds that issue forth from the hated hippies. Instead, he's concocted an amazing conspiracy theory in which we're so obsessed with the idea of making life harder for everyone - including ourselves - we've put together the Biggest of all Lies.

Here's my question, though: if we really had forged a massive deception in the fires of Mount Doom ivory towers of the intelligentsia, with the specific aim of hobbling the march of civilisation, why would we choose a scenario entirely at odds with the richest people and countries in the world?  Why not come up with something aimed to strike against the unwashed and downtrodden?  Like, I don't know, the idea that organised labour isn't a necessary counterbalance to management, but a con trick designed to stifle innovation through the application of Big Government?

If in November Republicans capture the Senate... only weakness of Republican will can prevent, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Labor Relations Board from being unconstrained instruments of presidential decrees. 

See?  That's how you make shit up in order to force other people to live the way you think they should!

New Thoughts On the Snow Job

So, George R R Martin has updated the "sample chapter" page of his website, offering us the first taste of The Winds of Winter.  It's a short one, and unsurprisingly one which will appear early in the book (indeed, chronologically speaking, it takes place before the final events of A Dance With Dragons).  Nevertheless, it does offer some tantalising scraps of additional data to those formulating theories as to one of the questions the latest book left us with: how much of that letter was actually true?

Because such attempts to piece together theories always interest me, even when the events in question are entirely fictional, and because I've been discussing this over at the SFX Forum in any case, here are my thoughts on what this fascinating new evidence suggests.  Obviously, spoilers follow.

Hiyeemuhcuff!

It is an observation so obvious and well-worn that, were it to issue forth from the lips of some worthless low-brow comedy hack (or Michael McIntyre, but I repeat myself), the man himself would excoriate them for it, but Stewart Lee has always (or almost always) had a tendency to sharply divide opinion.

My good and dear friend, the mighty Dr L, for example, once told me she found his routines impossible to watch because of the arrogance she felt oozing from his every pore. And given that Dr L does not exactly lack for self-confidence or strong opinions, married a man who lacks those things still less, and is right now being described in these very words by a friend so entirely in possession of those properties he's only prevented from sinking into total narcissism by being too lazy to try not be fat anymore, one has to assume her understanding of and tolerance for bullet-proof self-assurance must be stronger than most.

As it happens, Lee is arrogant, by his own admission (though it's sufficiently obvious that fessing up to it is probably little more worthy of credit than his willingness to concede that he is white), and that's not the only reason some people dislike his work.  I don't think I heard a single word of praise for the first season of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle amongst my friends when it was broadcast (for the record, I thought it was fairly uneven, mainly because it really didn't play to his strengths, but frequently funny and occasionally brilliant).  His monotone, disinterested delivery, combined with his habit of endlessly repeating the same few phrases (which the casual punter could be forgiven for assuming was an attempt to make up for a lack of actual material, Dark Place-style), and there was a general feeling of bafflement as to why people (including me) spent so much time heaping praise on the man, even if everyone agreed that  - to paraphrase a paraphrase - no man who hates Richard Littlejohn can be all bad.

Of course, if Lee himself were here, he'd probably want me to search out the source of the original line, along with its first paraphrasing.  This obsession with ensuring everything is properly attributed is occasionally irritating (which is why I chose the title I did for this post - it's a blatant misappropriation of a Richard Herring riff, and thus amuses me).  Does Lee really want to moan about someone else using the "winning this award is not unlike being declared the world's tallest dwarf" line, for instance?  Hell. I've come up with that one, though it's possible "I'm the largest element in a set defined by conditions describing only small values" is a uniquely obvious joke to a mathematician.

Far more often, though, this search for the origins of jokes makes for fascinating reading.  Especially when combined as it is here with Lee's meandering (by footnote standards) tales of his experiences within the world of comedy which, due to the books format, which is chiefly comprised of three annotated routines, are mercifully untethered from anything so prosaic as chronology or coherent theme.  For people like me who have already seen these routines played out (multiple times in the case of the first two), these brief forays backstage are the real joy of the book.

I use the word "backstage" with some trepidation, because I realise what the phrase has often come to mean: gossip and bitchiness.  This is not the case here (Lee is almost never bitchy, though naturally he is frequently rude, curt and dismissive, and not always for the sake of comic exaggeration, I think).  Lee's interest is not in how comics behave behind closed doors, but how comedy itself is crafted, just out of view.  Whatever one's opinion of Lee as a performer or writer, his genuine love for the history and development of comedy is clear.  Put in this life, then even that arrogance that truly belongs to him (rather than being summoned on the stage as part of a carefully crafted act) can be partially understood - a man who has spent a decade studying the art of sculpting pottery, for example, could perhaps be forgiven for snorting at those novelty mugs that when warmed remove the underwear from the woman emblazoned thereon.  Whether or not said master of theory can so much as slap together an ashtray, of course, is a different matter.

In other words, then, there's plenty of reason to read this book [1] even if you know all three routines: Stand-Up Comedian, '90s Comedian, and 41st Best Stand-Up Ever, by heart.  Even if you do, it's worth reading them on the page.  I'm not entirely convinced by Lee's insistence that doing so is a completely different experience to seeing him deliver it (on DVD, I mean, rather than live).  Whilst in general he certainly has a point, I'd argue that there's less reason to feel one's missed out having read a transcript of a Lee routine than there would be for almost any other comedian - so much of Lee's approach could be thought of as(simplistically speaking) "anti-delivery", I'm really not sure it matters to simply read the piece to yourself.  Of course, it's possible I'm sufficiently familiar with the material to mentally substitute in his rhythm in any case, though my comparative unfamiliarity with 41st Best..., which I've seen only once, during its initial tour, makes me dubious.

If you're familiar with Lee, it's a brilliant book.  If you know little to nothing about him, then it will be at the minimum a very interesting read (even if the angry, bawling mob of footnotes plays havoc with the flow).  If you hate his stuff (and not just because of Comedy Vehicle), then this probably won't change your mind. 

Everyone, though, should read the penultimate appendix, featuring a five thousand word poem written by Lee [2], which starts off as something seemingly semi-autobiographical and self-indulgent, becomes progressively more involving and character-driven, and finally becomes unexpectedly touching and poignant from entirely out of nowhere.  Brilliant.

[1] I haven't even mentioned the anecdotes that spring up from time to time, some of which are brilliant.  I'm torn regarding my favourite of the bunch; it's either the Cluub Zarathustra device employed on-stage which projects the word CUNT onto heckling audience members, or the occasion Lee wrote an extended rant about the mawkish, unthinkingly sentimental and suffocating nature of March of the Penguin's traditionalist Christian subtext in order to demolish it in front of a crowd at the Brighton Picture House, only to find the version being screened had cut all of the dubious stuff out, leaving him forced to periodically launch acerbic abuse at what everyone else in the theatre believed was an entirely harmless film about how penguins are cute, and sometimes fall down.

[2] Apparently the editors of the book for which he wrote it rejected the piece, purely because they didn't think poetry was going to work as part of the overall volume.  He therefore knocked out the commas and resubmitted it as prose, and was accepted.  Lee does not share what he believes this outcome signifies, but I'm left wondering if it is further proof that timing and delivery is not necessarily quite as important to his work as he believes it is.