The Two Sweetest Words In The English Language

Happy Halloween, everyone!  May your spooky fun be/have been of the very highest quality.  Also, look out for zombies.  And leopards.

Caution: costume may contain spoilers

Not pictured: the bottle of cheap wine I won at the pub quiz for best costume.  Entirely by default, admittedly, but the booze will surely taste no less sweet for that...

"Furthermore; Some Hot Chicks!"

Not much to report from this year's spooky activities at SpaceSquid's Seventh and Final Halloweenapalooza; this time around I only watched one new film: Horror of Dracula (hey, it's new to me).  It's a deeply odd beast, bizarrely re-worked from the Stoker original (Harker changes the most noticeably, going from prim solicitor to undercover vampire-hunter, who is engaged to Lucy rather than Mina, and is not so much the hero as a tasty aperitif), and not so much a driving narrative as a series of events which presumably happen in the right order. 

There's not much to say about it, at least outside the context of a drunken afternoon's communal heckling.  On the other hand, the trailer is fascinating,  It's always interesting to see techniques you've invariably seen employed ironically being played at face value.  I'm not sure what amuses me more, being warned that Dracula will hold me "IN A GRASP OF SHOCK!", or the stunningly chauvinistic introduction of the main characters.



Also, nice use of owls.  More things in this world should involve owls.

"The Dwarves Delved Too Greedily And Too Deep"

We. Are. So. Fucked.

Still, not to worry.  The magic of the Free Market will save us any second.  After all, every company knows that people will stop buying their products if they break the fucking planet.

Radio Fridays: JEW

Grabbed myself a copy of the new Jimmy Eat World album on Wednesday, and so far I'm really enjoying it.  A lot of it sounds close in approach to "Closer", the stand-out song from the Stay On My Side Tonight EP, and demonstrates that their sound is getting more mature with each release, without them totally losing sight of what made them great in the first place. JEW was one of those bands that I figured I might grow out of when I got into my thirties, but so far they're holding their own.

I don't think the lead single is too representative, though; it's far from the best song on there, and also the video is the twisted bastard lovechild of Lady Gaga and Blake's 7, with '70s era Top of the Pops as it's crazy uncle.  Listen to this instead, an acoustic version of the first song on the album: "Heart Is Hard To Find".



Oh, and since I mentioned it, and because it's a truly brilliant song:

Natural Conclusions

Two weeks ago the world was treated to the latest attempt by a powerful representative of that distinct subset of Christians who can't stop worrying about homosexuals to couch the most offensive ideas possible in the most reasonable language they can think of (rather than, for instance, stopping to wonder why people find what they say so utterly unacceptable in the first place):

In the book, a journalist asks Leonard if he believes AIDS to be a punishment from God. He says no, but adds that just as nature reacts when we abuse the environment, "when we mistreat human love, it ends up perhaps getting its revenge". 

Let's leave aside for the moment how strange it might seem to hear an archbishop draw a distinction between "God's punishment" and "Nature's revenge".  Let's also bypass the fact that Leonard apparently doesn't want elderly priests held to account for child abuse as long as they've given up on it -not sure where Gaia's Vengeance is over that one.  Leonard's bizarre suggestion got me thinking about an old intellectual stomping ground of mine - what is it about homosexuality that makes so many people think it's so massive a deal - in a new way. 

First of all, I asked myself whether there's a difference between unnatural and sinful?  I lack the theological chops to know whether all things natural are by definition non-sinful.  It seems easy to assume that anything unnatural is sinful, but sin is after all inherent to our nature.  Does that make some natural acts sinful?  On the other hand, sins are rebelling against the word of God, which is exactly what we're not supposed to do.  I don't know which way Christianity comes down on the subject, or even if all denominations work on the same principles.  But if all sins are unnatural, why isn't nature striking everyone down with AIDS?  Or something similar, at least?  Why doesn't, say, stabbing someone in the chest lead to a heart condition? 

Seriously, why aren't murderers getting themselves struck down with some horrendous malady that makes AIDS seem like a particularly irksome paper-cut?  Is brutally slaying your fellow man more natural than being attracted to someone whose genitals match your own? Maybe it feels that way the world can seem when viewed through the prism of our particular obsessions in fiction, but truly?

It doesn't seem like considering the natural/unnatural divide is going to get us anywhere.  In the process, though, I think we stumble across something important.  Why does Leonard believe nature is out to slap around the gay and the promiscuous but not the slayers of their fellow man?  Is it because we're already dealing with them ourselves?

This has never really occurred to me before (I've no idea why).  I've written plenty of posts on how baffling I find the Christian Right's Javert-like obsession over homosexuality, but for some reason the penny never dropped.  The issue isn't over how important a sin it is on the continuum of defying God, it's about how important a sin it is on the continuum of transgressions society has no interest in punishing.  I'm not just talking about legal punishment, either.  We haven't cut out people's tongues for lying for quite some time now, but we still drum it into our children that it's a bad thing to do.

In other words, I think this is a reaction to an attempt to, in their eyes, attempt to normalise a sin, to wipe away all stigma attached to it (as, indeed, is the aim of people like me).  All this time I've been arguing that homosexuality shouldn't be considered a sin in any case, and that if it is it makes no sense to consider it as grave a sin as it is, without realising that my position itself is fuelling the madness.

Obviously, none of this cuts to the heart of the matter, which is that promiscuity, unsafe sex and drug use are things we tell our children are bad, and since that's what spreads HIV in the first place, it kind of undermines the idea that nature needs to take a hand like this.  There's also the point I mentioned above about Leonard not believing former child abusers should be punished by society; it's difficult to credit the idea that he believes this action will create some kind of paedo-plague which will take care of the problem for us.  In other words, he's still an arse and a hypocrite; merely one whose thought processes I think I can follow slightly more now. Lucky me...

A Brother Goes Down

Apologies for (internet) radio silence; I was at a job interview today, so all my energy has gone into not looking like an idiot (achieved!) and acquiring money for next year (maybe not so much).  By way of apology, you can check out the latest It All Adds Up over at Geekplanet.  Don't see it as a favour to me (though if you felt like offering some appraisal by way of star count, don't feel embarrassed), think of it as a way of honouring Paul the Octopus, so cruelly taken from us.  Doubtless he's randomly assigning soccer superiority to random teams in Heaven as we speak.  My money's on the Seraphim.

X-Quz

So, I figured it might be fun to run a more specialised quiz this week.  The idea is simple.  Each of the twenty-five comments below makes reference to a specific X-Man amongst the thirty-six I've discussed so far. Some are obvious, some are not.  Some, indeed, have been referenced in the posts themselves.  All I want from you is which X-Man - codename or real name - goes with which comment (which, of course, means the quiz will get easier as we go along).  I'm going to limit each player to two guesses per comment, to prevent answer-spamming, and to just one answer at a time, so as to stop someone with as ludicrous a degree of obsessive knowledge as me just swooping in and taking all the goodies.

Right, get to it!

Good luck!

Update: There seems to be some confusion regarding the rules; mainly this is my fault for not being clear.  I'd like one answer per comment in the comments section, and will allow each player only two guesses overall at each numbered comment within the post.

Sorry to have been so confusing!

1. Became one of the many iterations of Apocalypse's "Death", a process which turned their skin black and their hair white. Gambit (Mozz)

2. Orphaned at age five or six and raised both by and as a thief. Storm (Llama God)

3. Once targeted for assassination by way of an explosive robot, disguised as a lisping toddler named Elsie Dee (get it?) Wolverine (Chris B)

4. Had both legs crushed fighting an alien warlord calling himself "Lucifer". Professor X (Christopher)

5. Was at one point brainwashed by the mad assassin Arcade into believing himself a capitalist-hating superhero named The Proletarian. Colossus (Anonymous)

6. Lost a duel for leadership of the X-Men to a depowered Storm. Cyclops (Ste)

7. The only X-Man to retain any memory of the Age of Apocalypse, in which he spent several decades following the time-altering murder of Charles Xavier. Bishop (Gooder)

8. Stabbed to death by Wolverine aboard a decaying space-station to save them from a slow, agonising end. Jean Grey (Llama God)

9. Calls Logan "Wolvie" to his face and gets away with it. Jubilee (Allen)

10. Attempted to counteract the effects of M-Day by grafting superpowered genes into humans, with horrific results. Forge (Jamie)

11. Betrays team to the Super-Adaptoid, only to change sides again when they learns their new master intends to destroy all life, including them.

12. Got set on fire by a mad island, and burned to death. Wore green. Petra (Jamie)

13. Got set on fire by a mad island, and burned to death.  Wore purple. Sway (Pause)

14. Impersonated Professor X whilst the latter prepared for invasion by the Z'Nox.  Died whilst still undercover. Changeling (FireStillBurns)

15. Once tried busking as a juggler to raise money for a plane ticket to Europe. Iceman (Chris B)

16. Spent several years living in a lighthouse and pretending to be a pirate. Nightcrawler (Mozz)

17. Spent the Age of Apocalypse with a chip on their shoulder and a black bar-code on their face. Havok (Brutal Snake)

18. Fell arse-first onto the talisman of the Ru'tai Pilgrimm, breaking it and banishing the demons. Cecilia Reyes (Brutal Snake)

19. The only X-Man to have dropped the N-bomb. Kitty Pryde (Anonymous)

20. Had their mutant power activated by their exposure to the nuclear wasteland of Hiroshima.  Sunfire (Brutal Snake)

21. One of the rare examples of an X-Man losing their powers on M Day, a fact they hid from the squad for several days in an attempt to seem useful.

22. Spent years under the impression that they were one of a race of immortal mutants, before everyone suddenly forgot about the idea. Cannonball (Chris B)

23. Can bake a lemon meringue pie with their feet. Beast (Chemie)

24. I got myself a PhD to prove this character could never possibly exist. Longshot (Chris B)

25. Died of the Legacy Virus and was never mentioned again for over two decades. Revanche (Mozz)