One Quick Comment...

...On the lads-mags-in-bags furore currently tearing Twitter apart (or at least the parts of it I inhabit).   Lacking the necessary learning on the subject I'm not inclined to jump in with both feet on the topic of whether magazines should be allowed to show attractive women in various states of undress on covers where people might be able to see them.

I'd just like to point out in passing that "Should a society be OK with generating such pictures?" and "Should a society be OK with seeing such pictures?" are two different questions, and not nearly enough effort is being made to separate them.  Leave them entwined, and you get the ridiculous sight of people arguing the best way to fight an outdated view of women's sexuality is to drag our conception of sexuality back into the Victorian age.

Let's make sure the discussion here is about how best to ensure a child doesn't develop sexist attitudes.  The discussion about how best to ensure a child doesn't develop sexual awareness isn't one we should want any part of, unless it's by way of shutting it the hell down.

Adventures In Sundays

So yesterday morning at about quarter past eleven our neighbour started hammering on our door, asking in panic whether either of us were a doctor.  Figuring she probably didn't want someone to check out some data for her, we said no, and then followed her out into the street, where people were gathering to try and help out a cyclist who'd managed to throw himself head first through the windscreen of a parked Citroen just feet away from our drive.

Somehow, despite not wearing a helmet, the cyclist had only minor cuts to his head, but his jugular was millimetres away from jagged glass, so there was a woman in the car holding his head with a stack of towels and a man holding the cyclist's torso from behind.  Meanwhile, a couple of other people were stood at each end of our section of road, politely asking oncoming traffic to turn around rather than trying to pass a guy who could end up with his throat cut if so much as a strong wind showed up.

You really learn a lot about human nature when you're asking drivers if they'd mind spending two minutes driving across to the road that runs parallel to ours to get where they're going rather than risk - not by much, but risk - a guy's life by continuing on.  Turns out fully one fifth of motorists need to be beaten to death with spiked baseball bats with angry scorpions glued to them.

(In fact, our road is constantly plagued by shitty, shitty drivers, who constantly drive past at over fifty miles an hour, despite it being a thirty zone, and despite there being an A road two minutes away which would add minutes to their journey without threatening my life every time I try to pull my car out.)

This state of affairs lasted long past the paramedics arriving, but once a pair of fire engines arrived and blocked off the street, people started getting the message.  Well, most of them did; one woman decided the best course of action was to just sit there with her hazard lights on whilst she left the car to go do... something, I don't know, which then meant the next paramedic who showed up had to swerve round her on his way in.   Nice work, nameless woman! Take your place in the queue for the scorpio-bat room!

Anyway, forty minutes after the knock on the door, the cyclist had been extricated.  By that point he was standing and talking normally, extremely embarrassed about the whole thing - I think when the helicopter arrived and couldn't find anywhere to land (I'd have voted for atop that lady's abandoned car, personally, but I suppose the necessary balancing act wouldn't have been fun or easy) that he felt things had maybe become a little ridiculous.  He rode off in the ambulance, just to be on the safe side, but he seemed pretty much OK, considering the damage he'd done to the Citroen's windscreen. 

How he'd actually managed to get into that predicament in the first place remains unknown.  Were I to guess, I'd say he was swerving to avoid a driver acting like a cock.  Not often you'd lose a bet like that down here.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #45: Luvver Boy

Welcome, one and all, to the sad tale of Jonothon Starsmore.

Writing about Chamber as an X-Man is no easy task.  I mean, I don't have the world's best memory, but can anyone remember anything notable Chamber has done as a member of the senior team?  About the only storyline that's coming to mind is "Poptopia", but that was a) over a decade ago and b) shit.

Even in the late noughties and early teenies (shut up, those are the names), an era in which Marvel writers seem to be putting more effort into characterising their minor roles than ever before, Chamber can be fairly summed up as a walking artillery pierce with an embarrassing English speech pattern (seriously, you'd think British writers have managed large enough inroads into the US comics industry for this kind of ludicrous over-egged rubbish to have fallen by the wayside).  No-one seems to have the first clue what to do with him, as demonstrated by the kind of major re-jigs of his basic nature (he has no face!  He has a face!  He's Apocalypse-lite! He's a man with a sonic weapon strapped to his chest!  He has no face!) that seem to dog characters who combine significant fan nostalgia with current writers' complete inability to use them sensibly (see also: Moonstar, Dani).

There is, of course, a reason for all of this, and it stems from Chamber's very beginnings.  Consider the ultimate fate of the characters that, like him, were either introduced in Generation X during the early '90s, or who are most associated with same.  Husk has rocketed between being utterly side-lined and appearing in stories so bad one wishes desperately she was side-lined for longer.  Jubilee has gone through the same repeated extreme make-over process, with no more pleasing an effect.  It took years for anyone to use M effectively, and given Peter David's reputation for rehabilitating limited and forgotten characters, her starring role in his revamped X-Factor is more damning with faint praise than anything else.  Mondo has long ago disappeared, and Skyn only reappeared after years in exile so Chuck Austen could kill him with breathtaking cynicism.  Hell, Synch was pretty much the only character to not suffer post-Gen-X ignominy, and that's because he was blown to pieces before the book was.

So what is it about these super-powered teens that made it so difficult to spin stories out from them after their own title ended?  To answer that, we need to think about what exactly Generation X was, and what it was supposed to do.

Friday Randomness

Randomness indeed.  I don't know what's weirder; the fact that you can buy this:

or that inquisitive penguins were exactly the medium I've frequently used to describe my probability-based PhD thesis to inquisitive lay-people.

It Is Always The Living Who Are The Problem

A few thoughts on last night's Walking Dead episode, "The Killer Within".  Below are spoilers not just for the episode (and if you haven't seen it yet, turst me when I say the spoilers in question are absolutely gigantic), but for the first eight volumes of the comic book as well, which will almost certainly spoil later episodes of this season, too.  You have been warned!

Stronger Cases

A few days ago BigHead pointed out in comments that I shouldn't be so quick to snigger about the Texas legislature banning tampons in the galleries, but not guns. Basically, he says, it's not unreasonable to ban items based on their likelihood of being used for disruption, as oppose to the damage they could do should they be employed.

Which... OK, yeah.  It was a throwaway comment of mine, and it doesn't get into the really ugly visuals of a bunch of white men telling women they can't have their sanitary products nearby unless those men decide women are behaving responsibly enough.  But on the gun crack; fair cop.

(The only fair cop you'll hear about in a story involving Texas, I'll bet.  ZOOM!)

Anyway, it's not like it's hard to find ludicrous stories from America about gun use.  Let's all stare in horror at this story, for example:

Republicans in the US House Appropriations Committee yesterday voted down an amendment that would have permitted the Justice Department to block the sale of guns and explosives to suspected terrorists on the terror watch list.

It is better to let one hundred terrorists walk free with automatic weapons than it is to leave one innocent man unable to accidentally shoot his toddler at a family BBQ.

There are days that I think those Founding Fathers not pure enough to get into heaven must spend their eternal torment being reincarnated, over and over again, as congressional staffers.  A crueler fate is not easy to imagine.

(via Rising Hegemon, who also brought me this horrible gem.)

At Last The Truth!

Excellent news, comrades!  Gay marriage has finally become legal in the UK!  And we all know what that means!

It means our true goals can now be revealed!

Man, it's been hard keeping this inside for so long.  All those long months of listening to far-sighted voices on the right arguing this was all just a preamble to ensuring it was legal for a man to marry farmyard animals, or their own children, or both at once.  Everytime someone insisted we only really wanted to tie the knot with our favourite pets, I was terrified they'd finally figured out our nefarious aims.

Have you any idea how hard it's been keeping secret my desire to marry four or more tortoises and a domesticated ocelot?  Fliss in particular has been asking awkward questions about the amount of lettuce I've been buying, and why I always come back from the garden shed with a huge grin on my face.  I feel kind of bad that once our new goal of enshrining bestiality in law is complete, she'll have to go, but I'm sure she'll find someone else.  Dogs always seem to take a shine to her, for instance.

I'd like to thank every foolish liberal-leaning sucker who's put so much effort into ensuring this day has come, when we can finally stand up in public and say "If it can be Adam and Steve, why not Adam and Sudanese Red Sea Swallow?"  And let me say how happy I am for everyone who can now finally get married to people with matching sexual organs.  Obvisously, I'm not sure I even want to end up with someone with a matching blood heat, but whatever floats your boat.