More Blueness

Ranting about the Blue Dogs (amongst many other things) reminded me of my favourite political cartoon this year, reproduced below for your perusal.

M. Wuerker's archive can be found here.

Senate Smackdown!

Apparently Linda McMahon (wife of current WWE CEO Vince McMahon, and former CEO herself) has decided to try and get into the US Senate.

Aside from why she'd want the job (the House always seemed like much more fun), the big question is here is how anyone could look at the two current Connecticut Senators and conclude that Dodd is the problem. Apparently McMahon has given money to the Democrats in the past, so people are concerned she isn't Republican enough, but deciding Lieberman is worthy of keeping so much as the capacity for speech should be proof enough (though admittedly McMahon would have to wait another two years to take him on).

Ever since Al Franken was voted in as the Junior Senator of Minnesota (or at least since he was sworn in, after Coleman's wretched, hypocritical and shameless campaign of whining douchebaggery finally received sufficient legal bitch-slappings to force it to stop), Democrats need to be careful about mocking celebrities running for political office (I'd question if McMahon qualifies as a celebrity, but the whole "Can you smell what Barack is cooking?" episode during the Presidential Campaign at least suggests an awful lot of people pay attention to these people), but at least Franken had proven his understanding of the American political system. It will be interesting to see if McMahon can manage that feat also, or indeed whether anyone's actually going to bother to ask her to. I mean, she's already demonstrated an interest in bipartisanship (again, only because political commentators in the States are crazy enough to think that being nice to Joe Lieberman makes a Republican bipartisan, as oppose to just rewarding a turncoat for their treachery [1]) and fiscal conservatism [2], which in the world of George Will, David Broder et al, automatically makes you qualified for public office.

[1] I may sound hysterical over Lieberman, but the thing you have to remember about Lieberman is that I really hate him. The one and only time I ever spoke to Menzies Campbell, it quickly became an (entirely genial) argument over whether or not Lieberman deserved to be beaten with sticks.

[2] Magically, this always translates into "Everything must pay for itself except tax cuts for the rich and shooting foreigners" when people take office. Then everyone pretends not to notice, which is why the Blue Dogs still get to pretend they have a philosophy, rather than coin slots in their spines labelled "Insert $100 000 to shaft the poor".

Tiny Changes To Earth

Some interesting news on the climate change front: we may not see any new evidence of global warming for another decade or so.

On the most superficial level, one could consider this good news, if we work on the theory that this represents an extra ten to twenty years before we reach the point of no return (whatever that actually is), but I suspect that that is an absurdly simplistic viewpoint. Of more interest (and this is definitely in the "bad news" category) will be how many people who have spent the last X years shouting into their keyboards that climate scientists don't know what the Hell they're doing will now suddenly clasp Latif to their bosoms, hailing him as the Almighty Truth-Seeker. Once again we return to the medical analogy; if you've just spent the last six months telling everyone the last 100 doctors you saw said you have cancer and you ignored them because doctors are idiots, it doesn't make too much sense to pop open the champagne when doctor 101 tells you you're in the clear. It especially doesn't make sense in this case, since to continue the analogy in this instance your doctor has told you you do have cancer, but its gone into remission and won't return for ten years (actually, that might be good reason to reach for the champagne, in fairness, but that's just about the difference in life-span of one person and the entire human race and the planet it inhabits).

Monbiot has already found one such person, though I've never read the blog before so I'm not sure how fair it is to single it out as important or relevant, though its apparently in the Right Wing Blog Top 100, which isn't encouraging (he's also one of the endlessly irritating "Being told you are wrong = violation of free speech" brigade, and hates both Sarah Silverman and Stuart Lee, so clearly "contemptible" is a word that doesn't go far enough), but I don't doubt this is going to creep out further into the lunaticohedron. After all, nothing says "truth-seekers under pressure to keep silent" like rubbishing an entire scientific discipline until the instant someone in it tells you something you want to hear (as well as something you didn't want to hear, that you immediately ignore), does it?

Tunnel Vision

Today on Republican Idiocy Watch, your handy five part guide to looking like a fool, as modelled by Congressman Kevin Brady:

Step 1: Vote against the Stimulus Bill because it's Big Government spending;
Step 2: Organise massive rally against Healthcare, because it's Big Government spending;
Step 3: Fail to get everyone to rally, due to inadequate subway facilities;
Step 4: Demand Big Government spend more on subways;
Step 5: Be reminded that the subway is in the process of being improved, using funds from the Stimulus Bill.

So, just to be clear: the US government must spend more money to allow its citizens to more easily reach protesting crowds demanding the US government spend less money. Roger that. Perhaps each subway station should provide magic markers, as well, so that protesters don't have to draw Hitler moustaches on Obama photos at their own expense?

Update: Spielbergo points out that Brady's explicit complaints against the Metro aren't in the above link. They can be found here.

District 9

Spoiler-free review: it's pretty good, but the individual parts sit uneasily next to each other, and if they'd tried harder to maintain the "documentary" feel, or at least eased out of it over time rather than careening between it and standard film techniques, it could have been a lot better. It's also pretty grim, too; you have been warned.

Longer, spoilerised review below.

.

.

.

Anyone with any knowledge of TV sci-fi will already have made the obvious link regarding District 9, so let's start with that: yes, this is Alien Nation with gore and swearing. In fact, the film is so reminiscent of the 1989-90 TV show that assuming the Prawns have a similar relationship to their mothership as the Tectonese did with theirs is the only way the ending makes any fucking sense at all. In fact, signing off with no explanation of why the prawns ended up on Earth when apparently they could have just flown home is symptomatic of how schizophrenic the film is. The drip-feeding of information about the Prawns through documentary footage and TV interviews is exceptionally clever, forcing us to form our own opinions of the aliens (especially nice was the entomologist telling the viewers the Prawns were a worker caste; was that actually true, or just a classic attempt to, forgive the term, "dehumanise" the Other), and if the film had kept that up throughout any confusion and lingering questions would be entirely to be expected. Ten or so minutes in, though, we break from the footage approach and watch three Prawns discussing their plan to escape the planet by draining their own technology of every drop of the precious liquid MacGuffin it contains. If you can show that, then why not explain why the mothership lay dormant with the Prawns trapped inside, only for Christopher to easily reactivate it two decades later?

As I said, much of this can be bypassed by assuming an Alien Nation parallel, that the Prawns were slaves trapped in the hold, and it took Christopher twenty years to scavenge enough tech to be able to return to the ship and actually get in the driving seat (you can also extrapolate from the entomologist's contribution that Chris might be a Prawn "queen", and thus smarter than everyone else), but that doesn't change the weirdness of combining massive gaps in information with (frankly very clunky) exposition, all delivered by subtitles. It doesn't particularly work.

There are a lot of other questions thrown up by the film. How come the world's second biggest weapons manufacturer hire troops that can defeat a single administrator with only one fully functional arm? Why would a fuel source also transform humans into Prawns? What possessed the aliens to create a magnet that works on lead and pigs?

Mainly, though, the question that kept cropping up in my mind was: what is this film trying to say? Is it about the viciousness and nonsensicalness of racism? If that's true, making the Prawns pretty stupid seems like an odd choice, to say nothing of the dark irony (or unfortunate idiocy) of making almost all your black characters machete-wielding flesh-eaters (though as Gooder pointed out, almost every white character spends the entire film trying to shoot everybody they can). Of course, it's hard to see the film as anything else? The instant Wikus begins to become a hybrid, his colleagues and family (well, family by marriage) immediately treat his as no better than a Prawn. DO YOU SEE HOW FOOLISH RACISM IS? the film bellows, as Wikus' former colleagues test his nerve endings by drilling into his arm. Of course, some of the commentary is more subtle, so I guess they were just trying to cover a spectrum, for which I can hardly blame them.

I sound like I didn't enjoy the film, but I did. A great deal, in fact. The central idea is pretty interesting, it was a brave move to set it in South Africa, and there are an awful lot of brilliant moments. Sharlto Coply is great as Wikus, managing to act like a total bastard throughout and yet still engender sympathy (this may have something to do with him reminding me so much of Murray from Flight of the Conchords). It's just hard to watch without focusing on some fairly obvious structural issues, that could have been fairly simply ironed out and turned an already pretty good film into a genuinely excellent one.

On the other hand, though: prawn-shaped mecha. You're going to have to think long and hard to come up with a more awesome idea than that.

Shake #19: The Unshaking

Today's shake: Pineapple

Taste: 1
Texture: 5
Synergy: 2
Scorn: 4
Total Score: 3.5

General Comments: For a few minutes after beginning to drink this shake I was terrified that analysis would be impossible. Apparently, whatever scale exists for the assessment of tastes, pineapple and vanilla lie on exact opposite sides of the centre from each other, and their combination thus tastes of nothing at all. It was like drinking heavy air.

Naturally, this led to an argument over what Taste score to give something that literally cannot be tasted. 0 is not an acceptable answer, for as we know from our Puddleglum, at least if it tastes of nothing it can't taste terrible. Nor can we reach for 5, simply because it is the halfway ground between the best and worst possible tastes (one would surely not give 2.5 stars to a movie with no sound or visuals). There is no proof that taste as a variable behaves linearly, and regardless 5 has already been used as the value assigned to the Control Shake, maple syrup.

Fortunately, this dilemma was eventually resolved when it was discovered that in fact a taste was present, and building up in slivers with each successive sip. Said taste was foul beyond description, so disgusting in fact that the shake was abandoned unfinished, a terrible breach of both experimental procedure and my Yorkshire heritage, but nevertheless necessary. Avoid this shake at all costs.

Adventures With Animals

As promised, further pictures from Munich Zoo.

This duck isn't actually from one of the enclosures, it just looked really cute. One of the major advantages of going to a zoo in another country is that even the local fauna are new to you (I'm still not sure whether the gopher-like). I caught my first glimpse of a red squirrel whilst in Germany, too.

A grey-crowned crane and its nest.

An African hunting dog.

A gorgeous little pony that I was allowed to stroke because it was sooo cute and wuvvely.

The bearded pig (or bartschwein).

The indescribably cute dwarf goat that Ibb and I spent some time feeding, in-between terror raids by the local sheep.