If Guns Are Politicised, Only Politicians Will Have Guns

From the always wonderful Charles Pierce, and on the continued subject of a Brit's inability to process the American obsession with shootin' arns, comes this little bezoar:

A Republican lawmaker in Idaho had his permit to carry a concealed gun revoked because he lied about a rape case from his youth on the application. But he can carry a concealed handgun anyway, because in Idaho, state legislators are allowed to carry guns, even though ordinary citizens must apply for a permit.  

So, just to be clear: "[lying] about a rape case" (in the sense that he lied about the fact he pleaded guilty to rape) is so bad an action that it invalidates you from secretly carrying a gun.  It does not, however, invalidate you from becoming one of the legislators who decides who can secretly carry a gun, and just to ensure no conflict of interest, they'll let you secretly carry a gun whilst you decide whether you're the sort of person you want secretly carrying a gun.

I'm worried Patterson will threaten to shoot himself with his secret gun unless Patterson votes to allow Patterson to have his secret gun.  Then he'll plead guilty to assault, wipe it from his memory, and Idaho will send him to Congress.

P.S. "I'm sure I never raped anyone, but I can't remember what I did or said because I had cancer" is a defence line they should carve onto marble and hang in the museum of How This Place Got So Indescribably Fucked.

A Pirate's Life For Me

Played it but once I admittedly have, but Libertalia might be my new favourite game, and not just because in artwork and approach it clearly should have been called Hector Barbossa: The Badass Early Years.

The basic idea is pretty simple; you have three weeks to swipe as much booty as possible (with Sundays spent drinking and counting your doubloons, presumably because no-one is out on the high seas that day other than missionaries and old couples in dinghies). The problem is, for reasons unexplained (well, Jamie didn't explain them, anyway), every player's crew is sharing the same boat, leading to something of a scrabble for loot.

There's only four pieces of loot available a day (due to, I don't know, EU piracy regulations, or something), and not all booty was created equal.  It might be worth a great deal, or very little. Worse, it might be actively harmful - cursed Incan treasures are something of a problem, and the Spanish Officer is quite literally a killer. All tokens are face-up, so you know what's coming, but that doesn't mean you can be sure you'll avoid getting cursed or shoved into a gibbet.

(There are also sabres lying around the money and authority figures, that you can use to assassinate other pirates when they think they're safe in their dens of iniquity.)

Each player has one copy of the same thirty pirates, but goes into each round with only nine. These are chosen at random by one player and then duplicated by the other three.  That's over fourteen million combinations, in case you were wondering (I know you were!). Each turn each player plays one pirate face down, which are then revealed.  This motley band of pirates can grab booty, but also have special abilities which are deployed variously before, during, and after the scrum for goodies, or when the week gets to Sunday.

The joy of the game is second-guessing what your opponents will play, and how best to counter them.  Each pirate has a rank. Higher ranks grab booty earlier, as befits their station, but it's the lower ranks who get to go first in the pre-grabbing round, and they tend to have the most powerful abilities, some of which involve punching up, which makes placing your highest ranked pirate down to grab some juicy treasure a distinctly risky proposition. Once the loot has been hoovered up, the surviving pirates return to their den, from which they won't emerge for the rest of the week.

In short, it's kind of like a pirate-themed Top Trumps with perfect information and bizarre extra rules ("My bosun is rank 14, but he murders your captain!"), played over six sets of three phases that inform and interact with each other.  You have to balance ranks versus skills, how much a character is worth to you in the late stages versus what it could be raking in for you whilst in the den, whether to use your high ranks to grab plum booty on good days or avoid disastrous choices on crappy ones, and figure out how all of this will interact with the bloodthirsty drunken sea-dogs to either side of you.  And even that doesn't fully describe how far ahead you need to think, because the pirates you don't play in one week get carried over to the next, along with 6 new ones (leading to an astonishing total of almost four million billion possible combinations over the entire three weeks).

It's a delight both tactically and strategically, in other words, heavy on the kind of conniving back-stabbing one associates (accurately or otherwise) with pirates, and is very pretty to boot. Highly recommended, as the folks from Merano like to say.

Accepting Gravity

Man, this is a film that really, really thinks a lot of itself. There's barely a shot in it that doesn't scream either "is this not beautiful?" or "bey you don't know how we pulled that off, huh?"

Which might be more of a problem if the cinematography wasn't so legitimately wonderful. It wouldn't have been hard to take the kind of dogged devotion to technique which resulted in that scene from Children of Men and turn it into the film equivalent of some pompous guitarist's eight-minute fret-wank.  There are a couple of moments when Gravity threatens to cross into this territory - yes, yes, we all get that any structure in space can be used as a metaphor for the womb, let's not pretend that's a massively clever idea or anything - but for much of its run-time, the film is exactly as impressive as it thinks it.

As a result of all this, there's really not a whole amount of characterisation (and what makes it in steers too close too often to mawkishness), or even really much in the way of plot.  But then, that's not even close to what it's doing.  It's an endurance ride, a close cousin to every popcorn flick shoved into our faces each summer, expect that your not supposed to be enjoying it.  Speaking personally, I don't see how one could eat popcorn at all during this film, if only because the seemingly infinite variety of space-related disasters paraded across the screen makes it hard just to maintain your own breathing.[1]

So it succeeds admirably in its stated aim.  There are quibbles. The incidental music is too loud and employed too often, which for a film about oppressive silence is something of a problem.  The apparently surprisingly realistic portrayal of spaceflight breaks down at the end in the interests of Plot Logic, which is frustrating.  And the delightful relief of watching a sci-fi film (which this in effect, even if it doesn't technically qualify as sci-fi) with a female lead who isn't required to meet men on their own stereotyped shoot-heavy turf (c.f. Aliens) is muted by the motherhood issues tacked on to Bullock's character which she absolutely didn't need.

This, though, is just nibbling around the edges. Gravity is a remarkable achievement; an act of film-making that should have been impossible, and one that ticks far more boxes outside its area of interest than perhaps we had any right to expect.

[1] This might only be my problem. Having been hooked up to a nebuliser for several minutes every day as a very young child, I have a severe phobia of situations in which my breathing is even remotely restrictive. Getting my head caught when pulling off a sweater can set off a panic attack.  There are days I try to avoid doing any driving because the proximity of the seat-belt to my neck makes me horribly uncomfortable.  Basically, don't go to this snack-free and then complain you could easily have eaten a three-course meal whilst Sandra Bullock is screaming about her air supply. 

I Have Hatred In My Heart

Pop quiz, hotshots.  You've been called to fix a tenant's broken stair so that they don't fall down it and injure themselves again.  Do you:

a) Set a time and turn up then?
b) Set a time and turn up hours late?
c) Set a time, decide not to come around at all, and let the tenant or the letting agency know?
d) Set a time, decide not to come around at all, tell absolutely no-one, and when challenged say you're weren't in the area at all today anyway.

If you answered anything but d), congratulations! You're less of a feckless dickchimp than the guy we have to rely on to stop us breaking our legs.  Fancy fixing our stairs?

Update: After some very annoyed phone calls, I was able to impress upon our letting agents that having taken the afternoon off, and with guests around on the following afternoon, coming round the next day was completely unacceptable.  They then arranged to have DC (as we shall now know him) to arrive at five that afternoon.

At seven that evening, he arrived to announce he couldn't do anything anyway, since he didn't have his tools with him (what self-respecting handyman would, after all?), and could he come round tomorrow.

Which is when things got strange.

Handyman: Can I come tomorrow?
Squid: Only if it's mid-morning; we have guests coming in the afternoon.
H: How early should I come? 
S: Shall we say ten?
H: Not sure. How early do you get up?S
: We can be up by nine, no problem.
H: Let us say eleven, then. 
S: ...

Update 2: Ah, 'tis fixed now.  Just so long as your definition of "fixed" isn't so rigid as to insist a stair be parallel with the floor, of course. That much, sir, would simply be too far.

I'll Have Some Of That Guilt Too

I hadn't planned on writing anything about the tragic killing of Renisha McBride here. Not because it doesn't horrify me, but because the circumstances of her death, despite being in obvious respects horribly familiar, has specifics which are little difficult for me to get my head around.

And the way I tend to deal with things I can't quite figure out is to write about them, which in this case feels to me too much like a white guy talking about himself in regards to a black woman losing her life. Which is a problem.

But MightyGodKing is right, I think. White people do need to talk about this stuff, if only to make sure we penetrate the fog of indifference our culture still seems perfectly happy about wrapping ourselves in.  A black person has been shot in America, again, and the police aren't sure whether it's worth arresting anyone, again.  Trayvon Martin died because a man assumed wearing a hoodie whilst on the streets meant he was probably a criminal, and decided to give chase. Renisha McBride died because a man assumed knocking on his front door at 3:30am meant she was probably a criminal, and went to the door with a loaded shotgun.

That is - that has to be - the takeaway message in all of this. That black people in America live in a culture of paranoid suspicion that means that, even when we can't be sure race was the reason they were targeted, they can be damn sure race will be the reason nobody in authority will care.

There are, as I say, a few specifics here regarding gun laws and gun culture which I think might need unpicking, but as I say, it's a white British man pontificating on how a black American woman came to be shot for the crime of needing help with her car.  So I'm putting it all below the fold.  If you're interested, have at it, but if you want to stop reading here, I couldn't come close to blaming you.

Boozing With Brummies

Being an abridged description of our adventures at the local booze convention. As always, my dislike of ale and obsession with cider must be taken into account when reading my shockingly biased 'reviews'.

Delicious Ciders

Blaengawney Rum

This is tough to order without worrying about pronunciation (a thousand blessings to the person who invented pointing).  Once you navigate that issue, it's tasty enough, but other than an above-average sweetness, there isn't anything particularly special here.

Oliver's Perry

This is heavy as hell. It starts off dry, but there's a submerged sweetness that runs rampant across the aftertaste like an enraged sugar-caked wildebeest.  It's pleasingly powerful, as well.  Really the only problem here is that after a few mouthfuls it becomes indistinguishable from cheap squash, albeit a squash that will reduce your liver to burnt blancmange.

Sweet Crossman

Sweet sulphur, more like. This would be the perfect accompaniment to a hot day in Hell (which is all of then), for when the gibbering demons find themselves between scourings and with a thirst to quench.  Mortals, in contrast, should approach with some caution.

Gwatkin's Perry

Smells like port, tastes like unstoppable victory.  And port. I would make a nest in this.  I would marry it, and settle down, and not even cheat on it with cocktails.  Not least because I'd be too drunk to leave the house.  Even finding the front door would cause problems.

Princess Pippin

This is 8% and utterly undrinkable; the latter quality perhaps functioning as a public service.

Awful Ales

Jumping Pirate

Great name, terrible drink. It's like burnt yeast with a Dettol aftertaste. Avoid.

Space Hoppy

Strong, bitter, and not tasting of shit, like I like my women. The label says "pale", but this is amber through and through.

Gunhild

A blank canvas onto which we project our dreams and desires. Or, more likely, not.  But there's nothing else to do with this. Still, we refer you to Puddleglum's First Law of Consumables: "If it doesn't taste like anything, it can't taste terrible."

(This law does not extend to rice cakes.)

Bad Kitty

Vegan beer!  And dammit, it's brilliant.  At last a "chocolaty" beer that lives up to the name. I could have done with milkier chocolate, I guess, but under the circumstances that would probably have been too much to ask.

Foreign Beers

Lindeman's Framboise

This is just fizzy raspberry cordial that gets you slightly drunk.  Which would be an entirely awesome were it not 12p a centilitre.  Some of us are on budgets here, Lindeman!

Einstok Icelandic Toasted Porter.

What are the chances that in an island nation of 320 000 people someone would combine alcohol, coffee and - um, ash, I think? - so well?

(Don't write in. I know the chances. Or I could definitely work them out. Maybe.)

Leffe Ruby

"Red fruits and Belgian beer", it says on the label.  Probably. My French isn't all that good. The result is stronger than Lindeman's Framboise and not quite so sweet.  It's by far the best Leffe I've tasted, but again, you're most certainly paying for the upgrade.

Berliner Kindl Weisse

Well, this is a hell of a thing. I can't exactly say it's pleasant - the closest I can come to a description is "carbonated stomach acid" - but its so far out of the wheelhouse of British beers that it's worth trying just to see how the Germans do it. Which, it turns out, is to make beer taste as much like sour milk as possible.

Friday Talisman: The Only Player In Town

That weapon is a bit of a shapeless nothing, but I guess when you're riding a motherfucking dragon, it doesn't matter all that much what's in your sword-hand. You have to respect a game which is so unconcerned about balance it can have players being leprachauns and minstrels vying for victory with a woman atop a gigantic flying six-limbed firebreathing lizard.