Five Things I Learned On Arran

1.  Weather reports for the Firth of Clyde are dangerously skewed by local experience.  On Arran "good weather" means that though rainstorms are inevitable, you might get to see a rainbow when it stops for a bit.

2.  During the sky's brief pauses for breath/reloading (depending on your choice of metaphor), the best way to see red squirrels is not, as is suggested, to walk through the woods in total silence.  Instead, creep up to a random hedgerow and begin ranting at the top of your voice.  You're bound to flush something out, and it might even be a squirrel.  My rant was on the difficulty in understanding my girlfriend when she refuses to include nouns in her sentences, but that's probably not a necessary condition.

3.  Further, wildlife observing on the whole island is harder than you might believe.  I saw more species from my bedroom window (swans, white-fronted geese, curlews, oystercatchers, kittiwakes, ducks, crows both common and hooded) than the rest of the island combined (admittedly, there wasn't too much time spent more than twenty feet from the booze supply).  Hell, I saw more naval vessels from my bedroom window than I did species anywhere else.  We spotted at least one Daring class destroyer (presumably the HMS Defender), two more similar ships of unknown class, and what looked like a Vanguard class submarine (though it might have been the Astute, which presumably thought it was somewhere east of Madagascar).

4.  Attack the Block is immensely silly, throwaway fun; Downton Abbey is entirely absurd period melodrama that at least looks gorgeous, and High School 3 Senior Year DANCE! for the Wii is so miserably terrible that I resent the amount of time it took to type the name in order for me to diss it (sorry, Chemie!).

5.  It is not possible to adequately play Mario Kart with one's feet, even if someone is willing to operate as gunner.

The Silent Call

Whilst on Arran, the Other Half and I had a chance to watch the silent-film adaptation of Call of Cthulhu, made by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society ( HPLHS) silent-film adaptation of Call of Cthulhu.  I have to say I'm impressed. There were a number of hurdles that this film had to clear, perhaps more than are readily apparent. 

The most obvious of those is financial, of course, but that's not really particularly of interest.  Years of watching '60s and '70s Doctor Who has pretty much inured me to cheap SFX, as oppose to cheap-looking SFX, or sub-par SFX which have been used as a lazy stand-in for imaginative approaches (see Jackson's King Kong, for a good example of this: close-ups of actors by cliffs do not require that the rock face be CG-fucking-I).

Indeed, the only way in which this issue becomes relevant is in conjunction with a larger and much more interesting consideration: how well does the film recreate the artistic ethos and production approach of the 1920's.  The answer to that, from my admittedly limited experience, is "pretty damn well, actually."  The island of Ry'leh, all unsettling asymmetry and contempt for right angles, looks like it came directly out of German Expressionism.  The heavy make-up and slightly overstated body language likewise is reminiscent of, say, Metropolis (though from the clips I've seen of Rudolph Valentino's work it's just as likely - and intuitively reasonable - that this was a general silent movie trend), and both of us independently thought that some of the lines we saw being spoken were actually German from their delivery.  This ultimately proved not to be the case, but it's interesting that we both had that same reaction, despite The Other Half both being fluent in German and never seen any silent cinema.

In general, then, the illusion is expertly maintained.  The only real problem on display was, as I read it, a difficulty in deciding upon exactly what budget the '20s film they were pretending to make actually had.  This is where the budget issue does become relevant.  The effects of the Emma as she arrives and leaves Ry'leh look desperately cheap, but would probably seem entirely of a piece with say, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.  In contrast, some of the (gasp!) green screen work is both very shoddy (hardly surprising) but clearly intended to give a sense of scale to the Ry'leh sequences that might conceivably have been possible with actual sets had the film been on the scale of Metropolis.  Even then, I'm not completely convinced it would have been feasible.  I was willing to forgive this film almost anything if it had been clearly done in the service of aping its chosen style, but every now and then the film over-reaches itself, and doesn't really have any good reason why.

That's a minor quibble, though.  This is an excellent stab at dramatising Lovecraft's story, especially since - the final hurdle - I've long considered it to be very close to unfilmable.  Three distinct stories, of which only two have real conclusions (and one of those is entirely free of suspense given the nature of the person telling it)?  An ending which is absolutely reliant on the relationship the reader develops with the narrator?  Those are difficulties enough without the extra level of dissociation from the events on-screen that silent movies suffer from, and this is compounded still further by the degree of information that must be imparted to the viewer.

Despite all these potential pit-falls, though, the HPLHS have managed to pull this project off with a truly impressive amount of success.  Definitely recommended, especially for those amongst us who can watch Metropolis without bitching about all those biplanes.

The Complete Set

Senator Lindsey Graham is a worthless, bloodthirsty warmonger.  I don't think I've mentioned him before here, but that's only because he's one third of the American Worthless Bloodthirsty Warmonger Olympic team, and is the least interesting of all three since he neither sold his soul and decency to try to become President, or attempted to block legislation he supported six months earlier and that would save the lives of tens of thousands of Americans just to say "fuck you" to his previous party.

So congratulations, L Grizzle!  You've finally gotten yourself on here by being such a vicious, mindless grave-robber that I couldn't ignore you any more!

If we could have kept American air power in the fight it would have been over quicker. Sixty-thousand Libyans have been wounded, 3,000 maimed, 25,000 killed. Let’s get in on the ground. There is a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya. Lot of oil to be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles.

Note the swivel here.  Literally immediately noting how many thousands of Libyans have been killed or injured in their struggle against a repressive regime, Lindsey recommends the US sends in people to start making money.

I'd also like to add my utter amazement at the idea that an increased military presence by the Americans would have led to fewer civilian casualties. 

I'll grant Gadaffi might have fallen faster with an increased US role.  That would also be true had the States simply nuked Tripoli.  There is no doubt in my mind that whether or not Graham would have signed up for that approach would depend entirely on whether a nuclear explosion would have contaminated the surrounding crude.

Blown Roses

I'm delighted that three quarters of the Stone Roses have allowed themselves to be in the same room for long enough to acquire enormous amounts of cash, but I don't care how impressive a voice actor he is, or how brilliant Spinal Tap was, it's not OK to pretend the whole band has reformed by sticking Christopher Guest in a Squire wig and hoping no-one notices.

Also, I note that Mani is now most of the way through his decades-long transformation from cheeky Manc scamp to the shrunken-headed ghost from Beetlejuice...





That's Bobby Gillespie on the left, obviously.

Friday Filching

Courtesy of Senior Spielbergo, the delightful site of a wonderfully cute penguin robbing its neighbours blind.

What I find hard to believe is the director's description of this activity as "occasional".  The penguins at Edinburgh Zoo are always engaging in a bit of three-toed discount at each other's expense.  Maybe it's something brought on by captivity.  Or, you know, exposure to the Scottish.

Just look at how happy that little bird is with his ill-gotten gains.  Clearly he's more well adjusted than similarly criminally-minded jackdaws, who I've read sink into deep bouts of paranoia that everyone else is as crooked as they are. 

Actually, that might have been Al Capone.

Posting might be very light for the next week, as I'm off on holiday with the Other Half, along with Chemie, Tomsk, Moddy Dhoo and various other members of our less than savoury gang.  Everyone be nice whilst I'm away.

The Chaplain Conundrum

This is an interesting article/interview, about the viability of atheist chaplains in the US military. Farley's brief comment on the idea is interesting as well.  In a sense, Farley's point about definitions is pretty much irrelevant in practical terms (and I don't think Farley is arguing otherwise): if atheist soldiers want someone to attend to their spiritual needs, and if they want to call them "chaplains", then that's pretty much all their is to it.  Unless of course enough other atheists weren't happy with the title, but that comes down to weighing opinion, rather than sticking to strict use of language (I can imagine BigHead reading this and reaching for the shotgun, obviously).

And yes, I very much believe that atheism can have a spiritual aspect.  It doesn't have to, indeed if I were to be asked, I say that I don't think my personal variant does.  That doesn't mean it can't.  Of course, others would disagree, possibly depending on how they view the word "spirituality", and also how they define what it means to be an atheist, rather than an agnostic. Whilst such discussions of nomenclature can be very interesting, though- I've engaged in them myself many times - on the kind of practical level we're discussing here, then I'm not sure it's particularly helpful.  Again, it doesn't really matter whether I'm correct in terms of cold, unyielding definitions (and adjectives of this type must always be used carefully - human experience is a continuum that's generally too complex for these terms to be completely prescriptive), all that matters is that enough people agree with me, then we need to make sure those people are considered when putting together systems of support.

I can see why Farley is asking whether a chaplain without the faith might as well be a counsellor, but (to use anecdotal evidence) none of the counsellors that have guided me over the years ever really came close to discussing my religious views [1].  That's by no means intended as a criticism, I'm simply drawing a distinction between people who don't talk about faith and those who talk about a lack of it.  I think the idea of someone who has been trained to get people through a world without a God is a brilliant idea.  Certainly, to draw once again from my own experience, I wish that I'd had more experience of listening to the thoughts of other atheists whilst I was younger, rather than those of people who were pretty much just anti-religion (Richie D; I'm looking at you!)

Put simply, I can see why "chaplain" might seem like a strange title for such a role (though does it really make sense to talk about Jewish or Islamic chaplains either?), but "counsellor" isn't going to cut it either.

[1] I believe that they all knew I was an atheist, though (except for the counsellor I saw as a child), so for all I know they used different approaches when talking to those with faith.

This Long And Bitter War

One of those rare examples of unambiguously good news, as we learn that science is close to perfecting a malaria vaccine.  50% efficacy isn't brilliant by medical standards - certainly we're a long way from doing to malaria what we did to smallpox, but the number of lives that stand to be saved by this drug is truly astonishing.

Naturally, however, there are knock-on effects. In response to the hobbling of its mosquito foot-troops, the Insect Overlord (currently believed to exist in a blood-soaked wasp hive somewhere in war-torn Congo, or possibly Jan Moir's chest cavity) has struck back by arraying a mighty invasion force of Asian hornets across the French coast, ready to invade at a moment's notice.

I know what you're thinking. We beat the Nazis, we can beat some trumped-up foreign-johnny wasps who've gotten above themselves.  But hornets, unlike Messerschmitts, don't show up on radar.  We may never know when their vespidated take on Operation: Sea Lion is finally launched.

Plus, say what you want about the Luftwaffe, they never sent over pilots heavily pregnant with the next generation of National Socialists.  That may have only been due to ejection issues, but still...