Just for a laugh, I published an album today.

Here it is. All instrumentals, so you don't have to worry about being afflicted by my voice, and I'm fairly sure there's at least one that hasn't been available anywhere before. Maybe even two.

If you know anyone who might be interested, maybe you'd pass the word...

If I say we enjoyed watching Bonekickers again, all my credibility's going to go goggle goggle, uggle oof, down the drain, isn't it?

Oh well, so be it. We did. I know they're not proper archaeologists, but then again the True Cross isn't buried under Bath either (as far as I know), so there are obviously some fictional elements here. it was fun. Plus, being localish, we got to spot locations. I could have happily watched another series, if not more.

I could also have done with more of Jekyll, though I realise that's hardly on the cards now, and it's arguable that the story's been locked off in a way that doesn't allow much in the way of continuation. Shame.

And now I am about to submerge myself in water, in preparation for fun and music with V and C. Yay.

It's become a commonplace for anti-creationists to remark that such and such a characteristic of civilised man (loyalty to a group, submission to authority, building elaborate nests out of reeds and trapping passing small animals in one's sticky fronds) is merely a development of an impulse that has been observed in several species of animal and therefore was not a gift of any kind of deity. (catsittingstill did it most recently to my knowledge, here.)

Not to register any serious disagreement, but two points occur to me. One is that this seems somewhat reductionist. There seems to me to be a difference of kind, not merely of degree, between, say, an anthill and the palace at Versailles, even though both may have been products of the same animal impulse to get out of the wet; between the standardised mating calls of the blue tit and Beethoven's seventh symphony, even though both may be roughly translatable as "Aaaargh! I want sex! NOW!!!" In other words, if one wants to postulate a divine gift of inspiration, or intelligence, or imagination, that separates man from the animals, it seems to me that there is ample justification, and to claim that there isn't, that everything we do can be accounted for in terms of what animals do, seems to me perhaps a touch disingenuous.

The other is...who is supposed to have created all the animals?

(Please note all the "seems to me"'s up there. I've been very careful not actually to say anything. I Am Not A Creationist Nor Do I Support Creationism In Any Way. Void where there is no matter. Please do not strike matches on the piano player.)

Turns out a lot of my further thoughts on the godsense came out in comments, and the rest I've forgotten. So, back to the telly-watching, and last night and today's treat was the Reeves and Mortimer remake of Randall and Hopkirk Deceased. Great fun. I loved the original series, and this was in every way a fitting successor to it. Vic and Bob played it mostly straight and were therefore the funniest I've ever seen them, Emilia Fox was a true Jeannie for the modern age, Tom was divine as he always is, and the effects technology was used sparingly and sensitively. The scripts were more reminiscent of The Avengers than the original R & H (D), but as such they succeeded in recapturing, for me at least, a sense of innocent fun that was characteristic of that kind of telly in those days and that I thought long lost.

Would that all remakes were as good, or as faithful.

We've now moved on to RTD's Casanova, in which Tennant's portrayal of the lad himself is only distinguishable from his Doctor by virtue of the fact that he has plausibly to turn into Peter O'Toole at some point. But then, since I have no investment in any previous depiction of the character of Casanova, I don't much care and can enjoy the show for what it is.

Following a series of links from a Tom Tomorrow cartoon, I came across this question in an article:

"Is faith a matter of choice? Is it an act of will? Are we therefore to be held accountable for the presence or absence of faith in our lives?"

The article was based on a letter (whether genuine or not I couldn't tell; I don't know the writer of the article) from an atheist feeling alone and alienated in a strongly Catholic (and conservative) family, and the article writer answered the letter to the effect that if the family truly believed that faith was a miraculous gift of God, they should accept the letter writer's lack of faith as just as much a "miracle" as their own faith.

This is, of course, based on the principle that anyone who can believe in a god must automatically be so credulous that they will believe absolutely anything no matter how inane, which I find somewhat problematic. (You believe in a God whose son died on a cross? Why won't you believe that the rain is caused by little goblins with buckets standing on the clouds? Oh, you're just being awkward.)

My own belief on this is that faith is a thing of two parts. On the one hand, there is, I think, a sense that some people possess and some don't. I don't think this sense conveys any actual detailed information, just a feeling of something vast and omnipresent that those who feel it identify with the deity of their choice. I don't have it myself, so I'm speculating in a vacuum, but people who I think do have it have told me that they do, and I don't see any compelling reason to disbelieve them. The other part of faith is indeed a matter of choice and an act of will, and it's whether or not you choose to acknowledge this sense. It's entirely possible that some have it and prefer to believe that it's a delusion, or just part of the normal background noise of their brain.

Thus we have four possible stances:

1. I have the godsense, and believe it gives me contact with my God.
2. I have the godsense, and believe it is of no significance.
3. I do not have the godsense, and do not believe in any God.
4. I do not have the godsense, but believe in a God anyway.

More on this when I come back from Richmond Fellowship appointment.

The Countess wants to watch the nuWho, but I got the time wrong (not intentionally) so we will be catching the repeat on Wednesday. pbristow predicts that I will hate it with a fiery passion; I do hope not. From what I've read it sounds like more of the same stuff we've had since 2003, so hopefully it will leave me just as cold as I am now.

In the meantime, we finished the run of Lexx, which made a good end all things considered, and watched Zatoichi which had some nice music at the end.

Did you see what I did there? I can't remember who taught me, if indeed anyone did, that it's incredibly stylistically inept to have the same word* two or more times in a sentence unless you're creating a deliberate effect with it. Whoever it was, they obviously didn't teach Peter Anghelides, because he does it over and over again in his Torchwood books, and it jars, my friends, I'm here to tell you it jars.

And so to bed.

*Significant word, obviously. "The" and "and" and so on don't count.

matociquala links to this. I've heard the argument before--when CDs came in there was an outcry to the effect that they were Teh Death Uv Rock Un Roll because they weren't scratchy enough, or something like that--and I'm not convinced.

( In which Zander fails to be convinced, at some length... )

I'm not planning to watch it--I missed "Planet Of The Dead" and the sky didn't fall, so I think I'm clear--but I'm intrigued by the fact that ( Possible spoiler ahead. )

This amuses me on a number of levels.

Weird show. Weird weird show. Kind of like Red Dwarf if it had been imagined by someone who'd met H R Giger and Jean-Paul Sartre at a party once and couldn't decide which of them was more inspiring.

There's a lot to like in Lexx. The writers have certainly taken on board the idea that flawed characters are more interesting. The narrative world they start out with is marvellously textured and has lots of implied depths to explore. The look recalls European comics and cartoon films in the same way that The Fifth Element does, though on a somewhat cheaper level, obviously. The dialogue occasionally has that touch of strangeness that suggests to me (rightly or wrongly, and if I'm wrong it's very well imitated) that it's been written by someone for whom, though utterly fluent, English is not the first language. (This is not a criticism: I find it fascinating and magical to hear my native tongue from a different angle.)

( Some negative points, and also spoilers, behind here... )

( Cut to spare you the tedium... )

dickgloucester posted a Siegfried Sassoon poem, and added below it:

The last World War One veterans are dead. In their honour, could we please stop doing this?

And my answer got too big for a comment:

If by "this" you mean fighting each other, I'm afraid the chances are slim to none. I can imagine a world in which no-one is allowed to fight, or to be angry, or to rally round a cause or seek a better life or try to avenge a perceived wrong, but I can see people raising all sorts of footling objections if I or anyone else tried to make it happen. Freedom, which we seem to value, includes the freedom to fight and all the rest of it, and war, suffering and death are among the consequences of our having that freedom. Let's face it, we tried stopping other nations fighting amongst themselves a while back. So did the Russians, and the Americans, and the French and the Germans and all the way back to the Romans. (We may have had other intentions, but it worked just the same, at the time.) And funnily enough, nobody ever thanked us.

On the other hand, if by "this" you mean holding ceremonies and reliving old wars and telling ourselves in the teeth of the evidence that it's making the world an atom more peaceful, then yes, absolutely. Honouring the dead, yearning for peace, is something we each decide to do, or not to do, for ourselves. Like prayer. Like choosing not to fight today, or mastering our anger, or seeking a reasoned compromise or allowing yourself to forgive. It doesn't matter that Armistice Day is now Veterans Day in America. You choose what to celebrate in your own heart, and that's what matters. The fact that we need a day to remind ourselves of the horrific human cost of our freedom, to remind ourselves that we would really like to be seen as the sort of people who believe that killing other people is wrong...just illustrates my first point.

Yes, I said "to be seen as." It's all show. I'm sure that on this day in America, if you want to, you can watch President Bush laying a wreath somewhere, bowing his head with a solemn and prayerful expression, and mouthing all the clichés about "never again" and "our boys" and "the good fight." And if you think it's anything more than an empty gesture for him, then welcome back to Earth and how was the last eight years for you on Pluto? Anyone can lay a wreath. It takes more than that to choose not to fight. That he, and those like him, can do that, can pretend to care about peace just by dumping some foliage on a lump of marble, cheapens and soils the whole thing, and makes it meaningless to me.

I do honour those who fought and died to protect my freedom. It's more than I would ever do: well, the fighting part that is, the dying I can do all right. But I also honour those who fought and died to take it from me, because they were just as brave and true and honourable, and they all died because other people chose to be stupid and greedy and mad. That's not going to change any time soon. And till it does, "a world without war" is a dream we'll never get close to achieving, and there will never be a shortage of dead people to honour.

Dicky, I see your Siegfried Sassoon and raise you Chris de Burgh:

Up here in heaven
We stand together
Both the enemy and the friend
Till the end of time.

Up here in heaven
We are forever
There is only one God up here
The God of the world.

And that works whether you believe in one God or none, whether you believe in Heaven or not. In the end, we all go to the same wherever, and what we fought for presumably ceases to matter to us. (Unless it's something like Valhalla, of course. That's a thought.)

And that's probably enough.

( Another Torchwood plot bunny I'll never use )

Good grief. We seem to have found a Torchwood novel that doesn't contain the word "snot." We were beginning to think it was a condition of the contract.

We're also nearly through with the Wardstone books by Joseph Delaney (The Spook's Apprentice et al), which are good to read aloud and have impelled me to try to distinguish an actual Lancashire accent rather than do my usual cod Northern. This page from the BBC is very interesting in this connection.

( Spoilers for the latter series, in which a worry is voiced... )

If you don't agree with me on the above, though, you may enjoy these books. The Countess does.

nancylebov linked to this. Fair warning: I haven't experienced it directly, for a couple of reasons*, so if you're interested please do.

She summarises the central idea as follows:

you need to leave out a lot (mostly the messiness of the real world) in order to make a compelling story, and that while you can't give up stories (they're built into human nature), it's worth developing dubiousness about getting engaged in them.

It's certainly true that stories, like statues, are to some extent subtractive: once you know what your story's going to be, it's a case of chipping away everything that isn't the story. It's also true that you can't give up stories. If Mr Cowan is actually saying that you should treat stories with respect, then I agree with that too. If he's saying that stories can't be trusted, then I absolutely and totally disagree.

I would like anyone reading this who was not brought up on stories to put up their metaphorical hand. Given the generally wonderful nature of my readers, I could rest my case right there, but perhaps the argument deserves a tad more development.

Stories do not tell us what the world is like. That's a given. We have other things for that. Stories can contain facts, which are always useful, but that isn't what they're for. Stories are supposed to tell us (or, perhaps, lead us to discover what we believe about) what the world should (or should not) be like. That's if they tell us anything and don't simply beguile an hour or more in an entertaining fashion, which is also a perfectly valid justification for stories.

We live in a world where the news is lies, the food is poisoned, the air and water are polluted and anyone we meet on the street could be a mugger or a drunk driver or something. We have plenty and plenty to be cautious about. I would say that, within the bounds of reason, stories are one of the few things we can rely on not to betray us. As long as we play fair with them, they will always play fair with us. Destroying that bond of trust doesn't strike me as a good thing to do, in a time when it's a vanishingly rare resource and one we depend on more and more. In fact, the idea makes me quite angry. Plus, of course, stories are what I do, and readers getting engaged with them (enjoying them, finding them worthwhile) is about the only good that can come of what I do, and someone telling people not to do that is directly threatening the only purpose I've found for my life. Hence the heightened hackles.

If I have misunderstood based on the summary, I am sure someone will be swift to correct me.


*Oh, all right. One is that I know from the summary that I'm not going to be persuaded, and the other is that I'd rather keep my ears uncanned in case I get called or the phone rings or something. I've been doing music most of the morning and have used up my headphone time.

Hygienist visit today. Rather more painful than the filling, but worth it.

It's remarkable how many people who support gay marriage seem to want to change what marriage is rather than let the people who want it have it as it stands. It's a tired old truism that no human institution can be perfect, but there is, I think, a preference among people in general for the things that have grown up along with us, as opposed to the new plasticky alternatives that individuals come up with. This is why we're not all speaking Esperanto or having our food in pill form.

It would certainly be possible to remove marriage from state control, or strip it of what religious connections remain...but there would still be people who would want the state to register their marriage as valid, or would want to go the whole dearly-beloved-we-are-gathered-here route, and it seems to me they would feel a little as though they'd asked for a pony for their birthday and got a Sinclair C5 Because It's Better. Also, of course, this would be a huge concession to the people who are trying by any revolting means necessary to prevent gay couples getting their hands on "their" concept of marriage, and I don't think any concessions are due to those people. Not one.

Give the car some pet-er-i-ol (edited: can't remember when I last had enough to fill it),
Pay a bill or two-oo,
Buy a bag of grocer-eyes,
Pop goes the weasel.

It's a good thing I don't have any particular urge to drink, isn't it?

I've had a filling. My gods it didn't hurt at all.

It's going to take me a while to stop clenching up when that chair goes back, but I think I could be on the way.

I didn't make myself clear in the previous post: obviously it's a question of balance between laughs and seriousness in all Shakespeare's comedies, and I wouldn't suggest that Malvolio's treatment at the end should be entirely laughed off as negligible. The text doesn't support that kind of interpretation.

However, I think this production strayed too far away from the root of that plot, the whole Lord of Misrule trading-places thing that (I believe) used to be traditional on Twelfth Night. The audience would be familiar with the idea of masters being temporarily dislodged from their ascendancy, and while to do that to Orsino or Olivia would have got in the way of the other plot, Malvolio (as I remember it) comes across in the early part of the play as very much the master of Olivia's house, both in fact (since she is too busy indulging in her grief, as Orsino wallows in his romantic languishment) and, as we see later, in his own mind. In fact, thinking about it, the play begins with the "masters" already self-displaced, and Malvolio's ordeal serves to jolt them both back into an awareness of their proper roles.

That said...I still think too much was made of Malvolio's sufferings under what an Elizabethan audience might surely have seen as simply a prank, and his final utterances, while given superb emotional intensity by Richard Briers (who was for a long time one of the most underrated actors we have, I think), could have been played as simply a childish tantrum by someone likewise rudely jolted out of his own self-absorption and arrogance; a servant, like Maria, who has been allowed to drift out of his proper sphere and become too accustomed to the perquisites of power. It seems unlikely, on the face of it, that anyone, even the Duke, would be able to "entreat" this man "to a peace."

I can see the phrase "proper sphere" raising hackles among my more egalitarian friends, but what I mean by it is the sphere in which we all must live. There was no way Shakespeare, living when he did, was going to suggest the dethronement of Dukes and the setting up of an anarcho-syndicalist commune along Bakuninist lines, but all his audience would have been familiar with the concept of the jumped-up bugger giving himself airs because he gets to wear a fancy chain, and would, I think, have been prepared to laugh whole-heartedly at such a one being put in a darkened room for a little while. And this is the point that didn't come across, to us at least, in this production of Twelfth Night.

Or "What? You, Will?"

We watched the Branagh telly production of this, with Richard Briers as Malvolio. I vaguely remember seeing other versions in my youth, and still others of about the same vintage as this, and it seems to me, based on these rather tenuous recollections, that a sea-change has come over our perspective on this play. Not so much with the forgettable cross-dressing lovers and mistaken identity business (pirated from the Italian, of course), but with the subplot involving Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria and the aforementioned Malvolio.

I remember Malvolio, you see, as far more of a bully and a tyrant, as befits his name ("ill-will"), and far more deserving of his come-uppance; Sir Toby as far more of a sympathetic roisterer, and far less deserving of Malvolio's contempt. These days M seems to be portrayed more often as a somewhat serious-minded but conscientious servant, who is led on by Sir T's gang of sadistic (and largely aristocratic) villains and then heinously tortured for no reason at all. Leaving aside the vexed and irresoluble question of what Shakespeare may or may not have intended, it's really hard to see how this new attitude serves the comedy. Indeed, the Branagh production in particular seems designed to be as unfunny as possible, which given that the play contains some of the Bard's most obscure jokes ("I did impeticos thy gratillity; for Malvolio's nose is no whipstock...") verges on the perverse.

While I accept that comedy means something different now from what it used to mean in Will's day, I do incline to the view that he meant them to be laughed at. If anyone knows of a funny production of Twelfth Night available on shiny disc, do let me know.

So, American Gothic. The series, that is, not the painting or the Bloch novel or any of the other things that bear that name.

I remember watching it when it came on TV, and being perplexed towards the end of the run, because the story arc came to its climax over three powerful episodes, and then suddenly the series seemed to slip backwards into standard story-of-the-weekishness, with a lot of the arc changes reset, and petered out after another four episodes leaving me at least confused and unhappy with it.

We've just watched it on disc, and having looked it up on the net I discover that the order the episodes were shown in was (possibly deliberately) messed up: two episodes weren't shown at all in America, and two others were shown out of sequence after the arc had finished. Given that they contained elements which were essential to said arc (e.g. one character had seemed to go instantly from hating another to being in lust with hir, another had undergone a complete moral turnaround) it's hard to see what purpose this messing around could possibly have served, other than to disorient and confuse the audience so that ratings would drop and a cancellation could be justified. (This is probably me being paranoid again and attributing to malice what is perfectly well explained by sheer indifference. The fact that when it comes to telly studios and networks I don't distinguish between indifference and malice is doubtless grossly unfair of me.)

It was a good series, well acted and on the whole well written*, with some funny moments and some shocking ones, and it would have made so much more sense and been so much more satisfying if they had shown the damn episodes in the right order. It might even have made it to a second season.

*Even without the arc disruption, there are moments when some of the characters seem to be acting strangely out of, erm, character, but subsequent seasons might have revealed reasons for that.