Ephemeral Isle
Archives
Archives
Friday
1 July 2005
Happy Fourth of July
Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
-Winston Churchill
It's a long Independence Day weekend in the States, so I'm off for some solid family time, beachcombing, and sacrificing meat to the grill god. If you're doing similar, enjoy and I'll be back on Tuesday the fifth.
Tuesday
5 July 2005
One Day in the Parlour
"Father... Deirdre... I'm afraid that penguin is back."
Wednesday
6 July 2005
Own Little World Department
Captain Jennings had his own way of dealing with what he called "smelly" people.
Thursday
7 July 2005
The Roast Beef Strikes Back
One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad - after Finland, it is the country with the worst food.
Jacques Chriac
French President & Twit
That
is how Chirac characterised
British
cooking to Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin at Kaliningrad, Russia
two days before heading off to the G8 summit at Gleneagles to enjoy the
hospitality of Her Majesty's government. In one unguarded moment of
honesty with the other two pillars of the Axis of Weasels, the French
president has chucked that "we're all good Europeans now" tosh into the
dustbin and returned France and Great Britain to their traditional
relationship of deep-rooted hostility.
And after we went out of our way at Trafalgar 200 not to point out that his country lost the battle and the war.
To
make matters worse, Chirac made the major blunder of insulting the noble
haggis by calling it an "unappetising" Scottish dish that is the source of
NATO's problems. Do that just before you get on the plane to Edinburgh and
you can kiss the Auld Alliance goodbye. I for one am going to study all the
news photos and videos coming out of the G8 "summit" for tell-tale signs of
splashed gravy and bits of haggis on Monsieur Chirac's jacket that indicate
that a Scots waiter served Chirac by dropping his plate in front of him from
a height of ten inches.
As usual, the BBC leapt to the nation's side with this backhanded defence of British cookery:
Twenty years ago, he would have had a point. Ten years ago even, the British culinary cognoscenti might have raised a submissive white napkin in the face of France's vastly superior epicural heritage.
Somehow
saying that British cooking isn't as bad as it used to be is less a defence
than an apology. It's as much as saying, "Well, yes, dash it,
Jacques, you're quite right, but it isn't all tripe and onions these days,
you know." This is unfortunate because quite frankly I don't think
Britain has anything to apologise for in the gastronomic department.
British food is amongst the finest in the world and you don't have to stray
into cilantro-heavy territory of Jamie Oliver et al to prove it.
The trouble is, too many people have developed a deserved prejudice to
English cooking thanks to ghastly institutional cafeterias, incompetent
railway buffet cooks, indifferent landladies, and a mindset that thinks that
vegetables have to boiled to death. Yes, it does happen and some of my
closest friends are the sort that when presented with the finest cut of meat
that Smithfield's can provide will proceed to leave it in the oven until it
resembles a lump of hot shoe leather.
But simply because a load of townies have thrown a phalanx of overcooked peas around the British Isles doesn't mean that decent nosh can't be found if you know where to look, and it is not in the fusion restaurants of the West end.
That's because British cooking is a product of the country, not the city and the best cooking is found close to where the raw ingredients come from. The secret of good British cooking is not a matter of sauces, intricate steps, and arcane spices. It is based on one simple rule. British cooking, and English cooking in particular, is about fresh food simply prepared.
Consider that monarch of the British dining table: roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. What could be simpler than to select a properly hung cut, stick it in a slow oven with a pan of batter below to catch the drippings and remove both at the appropriate moment when the pudding is golden brown and the inside of the roast is still red and juicy. Add a few roast potatoes, some lightly steamed vegetables, back it up with some freshly grated horseradish from the garden, and top it all off with a glass of burgundy and you're away.
Then what about the humble ploughman's lunch? A thick wedge of cheddar cheese, fresh crusty bread, a slab of butter almost as large as the cheese, a bit of salad, and a pickled onion all washed down with a proper pint in a proper glass. Made for the yeoman, yet fit for the gods, I tell you.
And
let's not forget the great English breakfast. Spurn the biscotti and
latte while running for the tube. Take your time and smell the fry up.
Embrace the eggs, bacon, sausages, kidneys, baked beans, fried bread, and
grilled tomato with lashings of HP sauce. Welcome the kippers.
Salute the boiled egg in its tiny woollen cap surrounded by its rows of
soldiers ready for dunking. Now that is the way to set yourself up for
the rigours of the day.
The list goes on and on. There's piccalilli; good, strong English mustard; Worcestershire sauce; mixed grill; fish and chips; black puddings; Scottish salmon; Lancashire hotpot; Welsh rarebit; Scotch woodcock; Cornish pasties; the haggis, of course; single malt whisky; splendid apples; stout; steak and kidney pie; honest cheeses like Cheddar, Stilton, and Wensleydale; pork pies; ham and chicken pie; rice pudding; cream teas; clotted cream; thick-cut marmalade; trifles; and the only decent cup of tea on Earth.*
I haven't even mentioned the dishes of Empire that we brought back and made our own such as kedgeree for breakfast and volcanic curries guaranteed to clear the sinuses.
And
it isn't as though the French have had it all their own way in the scullery.
I would be the first to admit that French cooking is a delight and my copy
of the Escoffier Cook Book has pride of place on my shelves. I
regard the omelette as a work of art in edible form and am willing to
tuck into a healthy portion of Supręmes de
Volaille Villeroy with the best of them. But French cuisine
is not without its faults; especially where breakfast is concerned.
A Continental breakfast is a recipe for starvation, as I can attest from my
sojourns in France where I have on more than one occasion nearly perished
for lack of sustenance in the hotel sale ā mange
without a spot of protein to be seen amongst the pastries.
There is no way one can get set up for the day on black coffee and
croissants no matter what they tell you. Then there is the Breakfast
of the Disaffected in the cafes, which seems to consist entirely of
cognac and Gauloises.
And if you survive breakfast, it must be admitted that there are times when having lunch in a French restaurant is a bit like popping into a book shop for a bit of light reading only to discover that the only thing available is Marcel Proust's Ā la recherche du temps perdu.
Let's face it, sometimes you just want a cheese and tomato sarnie and a bottle of ginger beer.
The piquant sauce to this whole brouhaha is that almost on the day of the news breaking about Chriac's cookery remarks the Olympic committee awarded the 2012 games to London instead of Paris, so it looks like a lot of bacon butties and sausage rolls are going to be scarfed by Continentals in seven years. Granted, having the 2012 Olympics in London is a ghastly prospect, what with how it will send property costs through the roof, bring public transport grinding to a halt, and after several months of anarchy lumber us with a load of white elephant sports venues, but if it annoys Chirac, it'll be worth the price.
Bon appetit.
*For more info, have a look here.
Friday
8 July 2005
Never Surrender
We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.
Sir Winston Churchill
Today started in an ordinary, banal fashion. A cheerful Emma pulled me out of bed because she was already awake and wanted to watch Spongebob Squarepants. I turned on the television and grumbled because it was tuned to CNN and that meant having to hunt for the remote before I'd had my tea. What a hard life I lead. Then the headline on the screen registered and the bottom dropped out of the world. London had been hit by multiple terrorist attacks. Three had gone off in the Tube and one on a double-decker bus. At least 30 killed and hundreds injured.
I woke my wife up and of course she was filled with questions I couldn't answer because I'd switched channels to Spongebob so my daughter wouldn't see the news pictures and I was still trying to get the laptop on line. As I hunted down the details from the news services, my wife tuned in the BBC on the bedroom television and between the two of us we had as solid an idea as anyone of what had happened.
As I waited for the kettle to boil, I alternated between reading on line and watching the news and I was literally shaking with grief and anger as I read the tally of the dead and injured and listened to the eye witnesses. Meanwhile, my wonderful and understanding wife dug out our union jack and asked me where I wanted to hang it.
"I told them this would happen," I muttered. "I said that if the government keeps treating terrorists as a police matter rather than as war to the knife, then people in the middle of London are going to get killed."
Now I was being proven right and I didn't take one moment of satisfaction from it. I'd much rather have been wrong.
And eerily, like 9-11, it was a beautiful day out.
One thing I was sure of was that I didn't want sympathy. I did not want the world to be offering up a cup of tea and saying "We are all British now." I wanted a stiff brandy and hear, "Who do we hit back?"
The pictures coming out of London were harrowing. I saw footage from a video cell-phone showing a nightmarish evacuation of an underground train. I saw a man with his eye covered with bandages and a woman being lead by an ambulanceman as she pressed a mask made of gauze over her face. I saw a bus so ripped apart that I couldn't believe that anyone got out of it alive. I saw Piccadilly deserted and one of the great capitals of the world brought to a standstill.
Yet among this were encouraging scenes. There were Londoners going about their business and sticking at their jobs with the cheerful truculence that is truly British. I saw the useless chaff of the past four years swept aside as the world leaders at the G8 conference acted like grown men and stood together as one in their determination to fight and defeat this evil that plagues our world.
Even from the Muslim community there were rays of sunshine and decency such as from Sir Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain who said,
These terrorists, these evil people want to demoralise us as a nation and divide us... All of us must unite in helping the police to hunt these murderers down.
Well done, Sir Iqbal and let's have more of the same. Show us that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding citizens that want nothing to do with these animals.
But I also heard nauseating things from the usual suspects such as the Oswald Mosley of this war, George Galloway MP who called for unconditional surrender saying,
We urge the government to remove people in this country from harms way, as the Spanish government acted to remove its people from harm, by ending the occupation of Iraq and by turning its full attention to the development of a real solution to the wider conflicts in the Middle East.
Only then will the innocents here and abroad be able to enjoy a life free of the threat of needless violence.
No, Mr. Galloway. Britain will not surrender. Nor will the rest of the civilised world. We will fight on. We will hunt down these murderers whatever hole they try to hide in. We will confront those who harbour, arm, or bankroll them and give them the choice of ceasing or being removed from power. We will win.
But it won't be easy. So many in the West have grown complacent and imagined that we were safe from further atrocities. They ignored what happened in Bali, in Jakarta, Beslan, and Tel Aviv. They forgot about the plots foiled in London, Paris, Rome, Gibraltar, Damascus, and Berlin. They forgot the beheadings and tried to make us forget how the towers fell on that horrible day. They started to believe that the war was just another political football that could be kicked down the road and not be taken seriously unless it could be used to score points against the opposition. We saw and did nothing about the treasonous alliance that has grown between extreme leftists and radical Islamists who have set aside their hatred of one another in cynical favour of their greater hatred of Western civilisation. We have bent our knees at the bloody altar of multiculturalism as we censor ourselves and pass laws against "religious hatred" while artists are murdered in the streets for daring to offend the Islamofascists. We have allowed too many Muslim groups in the West to slide along on the border between their host countries and our enemies without demanding that they give up their game of equivocation and either swear allegiance or leave.
We no longer have that luxury.
One thing that I hope comes out of this tragic episode is that Tony Blair learns that Islamofacists cannot be treated as a police matter. We cannot go through the motions of preparing trials in civilian courts as if we were dealing with something as trivial as the Mafia. These people have declared war on us, and that is not a figure of speech. It is the literal truth. Half the duty of the law is to protect the rights of defendants who are innocent until proven guilty. What we often forget is that the other half of that duty is to defend the lives and property of the public from those who seek to harm them. This is not a matter for the courts, but for the armed forces and the intelligence services to deal with. If terrorists are captured, treat them as the Geneva conventions define them. For the sake of mercy, reject that terrorist's blank cheque called Protocol I. They are spies and saboteurs. Put them in front of a military tribunal to determine the legitimacy of their status, and then lock them up for the duration of the war just as we would a POW.
Quite frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing a British version of the internment facility at Guantanamo Bay. Only I wouldn't put it in the tropics. I'd put it on South Georgia Island. There's a disused whaling station there that would be just perfect.
And speaking of Guantanamo, if any of the former inmates who were released into British custody and then let go because there wasn't enough evidence to try them in a civilian courts turn to be in any way connected with the Underground bombings, I hope and pray that the resignations of the Defence and Home Secretaries are demanded five seconds later.
I also hope that the self-serving political blather is at an end. The stakes are too high and the price of losing is in innocent blood. Don't pretend that Syria, North Korea, and Iran are upstanding members of the international community to be negotiated with. They are bloody criminals holding their own citizens hostage who should be dealt with by ultimatums backed by the certainty of force.
And let's stop all this bleating about Iraq. It isn't about OOOIIILLLL or Haliburton or Bushitler's daddy. It's about fighting the terrorists by jabbing a strong dose of liberty into a region sick with tyrants. Despite leftist mythology to the contrary, Saddam was a monster who invaded his neighbours, gassed his own people, spent twelve years giving the British and Americans just causes to attack him on a daily basis by shooting at their planes, and was involved in terrorism and WMDs up to his ears. Taking him out was as much part of the war against the Islamofascists as the United States responding to Pearl Harbour by taking out Hitler and Mussolini before turning attention on Tojo. The Islamofascists know this and by their own words have declared Iraq the front line in their war against us-- and which they are fighting by murdering scores of their co-religionists for the heinous crime of wanting to be free.
And to the callous lot who say, "What's the big deal about London? That many innocent people get killed by insurgents in Iraq every day and nobody gives a fuss about that," the response is, "Some of us do give a fuss. That's why the Coalition is there and don't you think that the people of Iraq recognise the 'insurgents' for the terrorists that they truly are?"
On and below the streets of London we've been given a reminder of who we are up against and what we are fighting for. We face an enemy who hate us not for what we have done, but for who we are. They hate us not in spite of our freedom and democracy, but because of it. They see the tolerance that we cherish as a sign of our decadence and they wish to kill and enslave as many of us as they can. They are monsters who look upon the horrors of the Taleban as the model for a paradise yet to come and they don't care how many innocent people they have to kill to obtain it.
We are in the middle of a long, hard war that may not end in our lifetimes, but we have no choice but to win it because our enemies cannot be wished away.
God protect those who were injured and killed today.
God save the Queen.
Monday
11 July 2005
Great Moments in Superhero History
The Human Torch's original catch phrase was something of a non-starter.
Tuesday
12 July 2005
Thank You, SciFi.com
Tales of Future Past has been chosen as Site of the Week by SciFi.com, the web site of the SciFi Channel.
Hello and welcome to SciFi.com visitors. Explore and enjoy!
Different Drummer Department
Malcolm had always regarded himself as being something of a free spirit.
Wednesday
13 July 2005
Reality Check Overdue
Note: Since we have a lot of new readers showing up this week, I think I'd best explain about today's column. I normally don't touch on serious topics in Ephemeral Isle, but there is one thing that I feel very strongly about and that the war against the Islamofascists and this is one of my rare stern rants. If you don't mind a bit of politics, then read on. If not, then come back tomorrow and I'll have something about poached fish or obscene Barbie dolls.
Don't you know
there's a war on? Evidently some people don't. Even with bombs
exploding in the London Underground and splattered blood being washed off
the front of the BMA offices, we still have people who think that the
terrorists are some sort an abstraction who are only important when they
impact on domestic politics.
In fact, you aren't even allowed to call them terrorists anymore. The BBC, in a wholesale flight from reality, has not only decreed that the killers of 7-7 must be henceforth be called "the bombers," as if they're some sort of American roller derby team, but they have even gone back and re-edited existing reports to remove the T-word else it offend.... Who? Terrorists? Terrorist supporters? God knows.
Right. So we've just suffered the worst mainland terrorist attack in British history and the country's premiere news service can't even call the enemy what they are. Sorry, but as a previous director of the BBC once said, "Some people deserve to be offended" and people on the Al Qaeda employee newsletter mailing list fall firmly into that category. Quite frankly, if the BBC says that I can't write this or that because it might offend someone who thinks that London "had it coming," or that it's an honour to shoot schoolgirls in the back then I say, "Why the blazes shouldn't I offend them? I would think it's a positive virtue. We shouldn't just be calling them terrorists, we should be calling them creepy little girlie-man terrorists."
This sort of thing comes from not taking this war or our enemies seriously. It doesn't come from opposing the war effort, which reasonable people can do, or from disbelieving what the government says, which is a healthy attitude regardless of who is in power and whether you agree with them or not. It comes from not believing what the terrorists say themselves. It comes from not believing them when they say they have declared war on us, that they are still cheesed off about losing Andalusia during the High Middle Ages, that they think that Jews are pigs and monkeys, or that killing infidels is an honour. It most definitely comes from ignoring everything that these lunatics have been doing since 1979 that shouts in large, frightening letters that THEY ARE NOT KIDDING.
It also takes a blind spot the size of Jupiter for the BBC to put out a story like this one that describes "the nightmare scenario that nobody in British society wanted to face."
What was the "nightmare scenario?" Having four bombs go off almost simultaneously in the centre of London? Learning that at least one was a suicide bomber? That at least three of them were British nationals? That a generation of young British Muslims are being indoctrinated in radical Islam and turned against their host country? That the latter highlights the possibility that there may be as many as 16,000 radical Muslims in Britain who are ready to strap on a bomb belt and that it puts paid to any hope for fighting a defensive war?
Nope. The nightmare is not the threat that these murderers, (who, according to the article, are the product of anti-terrorism laws, support for Israel, and the Iraq campaign) pose as a fifth column on British soil, but that they might cause a rise in ill-will against Muslims. So serious is this threat that apparently a master plan has been in place where churches, mosques, and the police have girded their collective loins against the danger of a British public who dislike being blown up. Quote the BBC,
That plan focuses on keeping communities together by very publicly and loudly saying all that can be said to differentiate between British Muslims and those who would seek to use a faith to justify atrocities.
All very well and good, but it unfortunately it not only puts the cart firmly before the horse by ignoring the reality that these terrorists are, in point of fact, Muslims and that that must at some point be addressed squarely, or that it raises the question as to whether the Muslim community's condemnations of the terrorists are sincere or are merely placatory noises meant to deflect criticism, but in the long run it is sure to cause more harm than good.
Now it is understandable that law-abiding, moderate Muslims who really do despise Bin Laden and his ilk have no desire to be caught in the metaphorical cross fire of this war, but the way to do this is not to assume that the British public are a barely restrained load of racists and Islamophobes waiting for a flimsy excuse to torch a mosque or that the best way to deal with this is by making pre-emptive complaints about abuse. The cult of victimhood may work in peacetime, but when the police are picking bits of real victims out the Piccadilly line, that tactic falls flatter than an Al Qaeda training camp under a daisy cutter.
If the Muslim community in Great Britain really want to avoid a "backlash," then they have to remove themselves from the no-man's land between us and the terrorists. There is no safety in equivocation or in talking about terrorism with a load of "yes, buts" in every sentence. There is absolutely no safety in turning a blind eye and keeping a still tongue while their young men are recruited by radical clerics and at university to go off to Iraq and Afghanistan to take up arms against their fellow countrymen. If most Muslims in Britain really do believe in democracy and rule of law, if they do reject the misogyny, the murderous attitude toward homosexuals, the hatred of freedom, and the lust to impose sharia on the globe by self-appointed caliphs, then they must realise that they are already marked for death by our enemies.
If the Muslim community continues to act as a screen or as passive apologists for the terrorists in our midst, then they face a very hard road ahead. The harsh fact in the post 7-7 world is that the polite fictions that we have lived under since 9-11 have been exposed and that the current situation is incredibly unstable. The brutal reality is that we have God knows how many fanatics in our towns and cities who would gladly press the button on a suitcase nuke tomorrow and unless the sane majority in the Muslim community stop paying lip service to condemning the terrorists and start actively fighting them, things could get very harsh.
And I don't mean anything as mild as graffiti, nasty phone calls or even riots and the odd fire bomb by National Front supporters. We are now faced with a threat within to the lives of everyone and unless everyone, and I mean everyone pulls together to defeat them, we face a long, bloody time where the Muslim community will come off the worse. No matter how benevolent or PC a government might be, I can't see any prime minister who would put the safety of the nation behind the feelings of a minority. And if that minority acts as a hiding place and recruiting pool for those who wish to destroy British society, then that minority has only so much political good will to count on. Worried about a "back lash?" Try a revival of Enemy Alien status. Try travel restrictions on immigrants and British subjects of origin from hostile nations. Try mass deportations of illegal or even questionable aliens. Try very hostile reviews of immigration status. Try a ban on all asylum applications. Try the shutting down of mosques, Islamic banks, and Muslim charities-- not for suspicion of terrorist involvement, but as blanket policy. That's what a truly threatened British government might do and that's a mild version of what could happen.
Do I want to see that? God, no. It would be terrible and I think it would harm British society on the whole as much as it might protect it in the short run, but it does no good to leave society with no choice but the worst choices. A Muslim community that goes on about its rights rather than its responsibilities risks that.
During the Second World War the Roosevelt administration interned many (not all) Japanese Americans from certain (not all) parts of the United States who were feared to pose a security threat in the face of a possible Japanese invasion of the Pacific coast. This was a terrible injustice, but the Japanese Americans did not react with boilerplate denunciations and complaints of victimhood. Instead their young men voluntarily joined the US armed forces and formed the 442nd Infantry that proved their loyalty by serving with honour and courage in Italy and beyond against the Axis forces.
If the Muslims of Britain really want to avoid the "nightmare," then they must do their part by not just saying they condemn the terrorists, but by standing up and being counted. They must choose clearly and forthrightly which side they are on. They must prove it by damning the terrorists in Arabic as well as English, rejecting the poisonous propaganda of the Islamofascists, offering their services to the MOD and intelligence forces, driving the radicals from the Mosques, closing the madrassas, denouncing the Islamofascists at the universities, turning in those who plan or advocate murder over to the authorities, and instead of acting as a fertile field for the terrorists, become dry and fallow ground where none of their poisoned seeds can hope to sprout.
Then, at the end of this war, we can say "we won this together."
Thursday
14 July 2005
The Curse of Magicthighs
I've always had a fondness for stories about bizarre little shops. You know the sort. Our hero is strolling through the tangle of back roads off of Fleet street, taking a short cut through the bowels of the Seattle Public Market, or makes a wrong turn in Edinburgh Old Town and the next thing you know he's standing in front of some dusty curio shop tucked into some unfrequented corner. Its nearly opaque window is filled with strange, dusty wares, and the ill-fitting door looks as though it has allowed in more rat catchers than customers to pass over the years. Despite, or perhaps because of the dilapidated look of the place, our hero enters and is greeted by a wizened, polite little old man, possibly Chinese in origin although this is not mandatory, who proceeds to chat with our hero for a bit before selling him a monkey's paw, or the jewelled eye from the idol of some evil oriental god, or a cursed tea cosy, or something of the sort.
I'm reminded of this precisely because what happened to me the other day had absolutely nothing to do with such a shop, yet by all rights it should have, which only goes to show that real life has no sense of the dramatic.
On Saturday, my family was casting about for how to spend the afternoon and having rejected Daddy's suggestion of Mama and Emma going off to play while I kicked back with some beer and a couple of DVDs, we decided instead to go out to a favourite restaurant at the University Village shopping centre. After a meal where Emma spurned the chips in favour of spooning up ketchup like it was tomato pudding, we went for a walk around the shops to aid the digestion.
Naturally, this lasted all of fifty feet, as the restaurant in question is practically next to a play area set up by the shopping centre to preserve the sanity of overwhelmed parents who need a break. My daughter made a beeline for the little plastic cars that she likes to scoot around in-- or sit still and watch the other children in other plastic cars doing the scooting as the mood takes her. Meanwhile, Mama and Daddy took it in turns having a quick browse in the nearby shops while the other made sure our offspring didn't reek havoc on the local population. I opted for popping into the Barnes & Noble while Mama preferred a children's ware cum toy shop to look for some dresses for Emma.
When my daughter got bored with miniature motoring we joined Mama in the children's' shop where Emma, of course, vanished into the toy section. There followed some time of my being split between my wife asking me what I thought of this or that outfit and explaining to Emma about why a Spongebob Squarepants snowcone maker was not a wise purchase for a girl of two point nine years, which was a pity as this back and forth distracted me from looking at the toys that had attracted my own attention. Having convinced Emma that she couldn't have roller blades, a miniature doll set guaranteed to end up embedded in the soles of my feet, and a plastic object of indeterminate function, she finally came up with the one thing that she knew I couldn't object to because I'd said yes to three of them already: a Barbie doll.
I'd never had much to do with Barbies before I became a father, and having spent a fair portion of my mortal allotment since then chasing after tiny pink shoes under the sofa and trying to tie ribbons in hair shorter than my little finger, I'd gladly have as little to do with them in future. I do not understand Barbies. Having now seen several of the them at close quarters I now realise what peculiar things they are. I'm not talking the boilerplate feminist rant about their unrealistic body proportions (the Barbies, not the feminists). I know enough about matters of scale to know that the long neck, thin waist, and sleek build of the common or garden variety Barbie has less to do with promoting an unhealthy body image than it does with the fact that on a figure the size of a Barbie even the sheerest silk sits on it like coarse-woven burlap, so Barbie's waist has to be wasp-like if she isn't going look as if she's wearing a maternity dress. What I'm talking about is the fact that Barbie goes about on perpetual tip toe, that her elbows are completely non-functional, her knees operate on alarmingly stiff ratchets that make bending them feel like you're abusing an arthritis patient, and that while her body is as solid as a carving knife handle, her head is downright squishy. Furthermore, no matter how lovely they look in their boxes, inside of day they end up on the floor half under the settee looking as if they'd spent a wild night with a load of drunken sailors. That's why Malibu Barbie is nicknamed Valley of the Dolls Barbie around our house.
I do not wish to deal with these things and had I a say in the matter I would prefer something less perplexing, such as Legos or a Noah's ark or better yet, a Meccano set, as I've been wanting to have a go again for years. That, however, seems unlikely, as there seems to be a genetic predisposition of little girls to adore Barbies even as little boys will always bend them at right angles so that they can serve as makeshift firearms.
Despite this, I thought I had at least a basic understanding of what a Barbie is-- at least until the new one showed up, which is the reason why I brought up the whole weird curiosity shop thing. Ever since the new Barbie came to stay with us, I have been back to square one.
The box said that this was a "Crystal Fairytopia Barbie." Well, nothing too bad there. We already had Mailbu Barbie, a Ballerina Barbie, a Beatrix Potter Barbie, my wife has a collectible Fray Wray and a Lord of the Rings Barbie and Ken set, and I have even seen a Wonder Woman Barbie in the shops that seemed a bit lacking in vital assets (I hold my Wonder Women to a very high standard). I was therefore unfazed by seeing a Barbie made up as a fairy with baroque plastic greaves, a breast plate/brassiere, snap-on butterfly wings, and a two piece skirt that clipped on with a sort of plastic girdle that came apart at a touch and you needed an advanced degree and several years of hands-on training to reattach. The only bright spot was that there were two of these sub-Xena outfits, so at least Emma's Mailbu Barbie is no longer lying about the place in the all together like the fallen woman that she is.
That was all about par for the course. So was having the Barbie so wired and pegged into her box that I would have resorted to gelignite had any been ready to hand. What I did not expect was that I would find a little flesh-coloured button situated in the vicinity of her seventh cervical vertebrae. I pressed this and suddenly Barbie's midriff lit up a bright blue. I have seen many strange things in my time including an archaeologist volunteering to buy a round of drinks while sober, but I can honestly say that I have never seen a Barbie with what appeared to be radioactive intestines.
I could have handled even that if it hadn't been for the sequel. After Barbie's abdominal region was illuminated, her thighs suddenly lit up bright red. Worse than that, they started to blink in sequence!
It's a wonder I didn't drop the thing. It isn't everyday you come across an obscene Barbie doll. At least not one that forces you to a single conclusion-- and an utterly bizarre one at that. Granted, there was the alarmingly homosexual Magic Earring Ken of 1993, but that at least fell into some sort of a category. This is a woman whose loins blink like some sort of in-built bordello sign. "Hey, she's got light-up thighs!" What am I supposed to make of that? I was dating during the '70s and even then I never came across the like. By comparison, those women in strip clubs who launch ping pong balls look positively conventional.
Thank heavens this Barbie comes equipped with glued on knickers. God only knows what's going on under there and, quite frankly, I'm not inclined to find out for myself.
Friday
15 July 2005
Lowering the Tone
Despite their acknowledged criminal acumen, the Southend Tubas were regarded by other street gangs as something of an embarrassment.
Monday
18 July 2005
War of the Worlds
I've been pretty much The War of the Worldsed out this year. Between writing up the Dystopia section article on it, preparing the Orson Welles broadcast for the Radio Plays section, following the Dark Horse comic book version on the web, listening to the 1960s BBC radio serial and the Jeff Wayne musical, rereading the 1898 novel by H. G. Wells, and sitting through the 1953 George Pal film, I figured that I'd seen about as much of the Martians as I really wanted to for this year-- at least, until it gave me a great idea for a radio project that I'm going to keep dark for the moment.
Still, it was all good preparation to steel myself for going to the new Steven Spielberg version, which I finally got to see last night. It wasn't a good movie or a bad movie; it was a Spielberg movie. The man isn't so much a director as a subgenre and in the final analysis, how you feel about this film depends on how you feel about Spielberg. Personally, I regard the man as the most sentimental and manipulative director in Hollywood and I prefer my Wells without so much Spielberg in it.
Despite the fact that the H. G. Wells novel introduced the idea of alien invasion and did it so well that all its literary children pale by comparison, no one, save for a pair of comic books and Jeff Wayne's album, has made an adaptation set in the period that the story was written in. Instead, each generation creates a new version of The War of the Worlds for its own time. The 1930s put on the radio and set it in New Jersey. The 1950s put it on film and set it in California. The 1970s gave it a miss because it was just that sort of a decade, and now we have Spielberg who has updated it to... Nowhen.
As Mark Steyn pointed out in his review of the film, one of the most striking things about it is that Spielberg, unlike Welles and Pal, has deliberately avoided any topicality with his Martians. Where Welles included fears of Nazi aggression and Pal that of the Communists, Spielberg has made a version that simply floats unmoored in history. You could take the script as it stands and reshoot it for any time from 1970 on and you wouldn't need to change a thing, which is a pity because that makes the film rather pointless and if H. G. Wells was anything, it was that he was a man who never wrote a piece that didn't have a very arch point to it. His novel was a sharp commentary on the British Empire as seen from a coldly Darwinian point of view. In 1898, the Empire was the uncontested supreme power on Earth and many an Englishman came to regard this as not a function of industry, military acumen, science, or skill, but as a reward for moral worth. Britain was top dog because it deserved to be so. Wells thought that this was nonsense and he introduced his Martians to show that just because you've got the Royal Navy and the Maxim gun doesn't mean that somebody else isn't going to come along with something better. Wait long enough, and you're certain to go from top dog to battery hen in the food chain.
That point is totally lost on Spielberg. In fact, if you haven't read the book it is very easy to come out of the cinema wondering what the deuce the whole invasion was about. In novel, the Martians (the film doesn't even have the courage to grasp the nettle and refer to the invaders as such-- perhaps for fear of offending Martians) are a race millions of years ahead of us in evolution. Mars, being an older world, is now dying and the Martians are forced to migrate sunward to our green and fertile planet if they are to survive. To them, mankind is not an enemy to be vanquished, but an inferior species to be subdued and relegated to the status of livestock. Their plan is to terrify the Earthlings, crush all resistance, establish a bridgehead around London, and then proceed to conquer the Earth. In Spielberg's film the only place where this comes across even faintly is in Morgan Freedman's opening narrative lifted from the book. If you weren't paying attention to that part, you'd have no idea what is going on. You wouldn't even be sure that they were from outer space. In the film's narrative, the alien fighting machines literally burst out of the ground and start wrecking death and destruction without rhyme or reason.
Making the hero a dockworker was a sheer genius of bad writing. Okay, having the main protagonist as a scientist might be a cliché, but at least if our hero is a nuclear physicist or an astronomer he can bring the rest of us up to speed as to what's going on and who's doing it, whereas the speculations of a guy who runs a crane are less than helpful.
Part of this is obviously intentional on Spielberg's part. His grand vision for this picture was to show a dysfunctional family (this is Spielberg) lead by an improbably cast Tom Cruise as Everyman that is caught up in the fog of war. As civilisation literally crashes down around their ears, they flee New Jersey in terror and confusion; never knowing what is going on as they seek to survive and bond as a family (like I said, Spielberg).
The problem with this approach is that it is one thing to show a family plunged into a confusing nightmare of death and destruction. It's another to plunge your story in it as well to the point of losing all plot, context, or even a sense of narrative flow. Indeed, the atmosphere borders on the nihilistic The film feels less an account of a terrible invasion than as a series of sadistic vignettes with each one topping the next as to how to keep a small girl screaming non-stop for two hours. From the moment the aliens go on the attack we are frogmarched from crowds being raygunned to, cities being laid waste, a suburb having a 747 dropped on it, rivers filled with corpses, trains on fire, ferryboats being capsized, armies immolated, and (worst of all) being locked in a cellar with Tim Robbins. These scenes are all effective and well-done (Spielberg is a skilled and talented director) but they are pointless. Any scene in the entire movie could have been cut out and no one would have noticed. Worse, the ending is changed from Wells's portrayl of a silent London with the narrator as the sole inhabitant to a denouement slam-bang shoot out that is telegraphed, tedious, and pointless followed by a final scene that is Spielberg at his sentimental, eye-roll-inducing worst.
Even this could be forgiven if the Cruise clan weren't so annoying and dislikeable. I never cared for them for a moment and Spielberg is so keen on making it clear that they are dysfunctional by labouring us with scene after scene of their whining and fighting that I was beginning to wonder if the director had entirely forgotten about the alien invasion. This not helped by the endless crowd scenes that reek of potato people as they are herded from point A to point B with here and there someone doing some meaningless character bit that sticks out like a sour thumb and proves once again that Spielberg may have his strengths, but he should avoid crowds.
The final problem is location. New Jersey was neither original nor relevant to the theme. Wells did not set his novel in the Home Counties by accident. He wanted to show the Martians striking at the heart of England at its most secure and complacent. He wanted to show a people who believed themselves insulated from all trouble forced to confront the realities of a harsh world filled with ruthless enemies. If Spielberg wanted to recreate this effect in modern times he shouldn't have chosen New Jersey.
He should have chosen Beverly Hills.
Tuesday
19 July 2005
Comic Book Wrong Turns
It is universally agreed that Tubaboy was the worst superhero sidekick in history.
Friday
22 July 2005
Apologies
Sorry about the lack of a new Ephemeral Isle for the past couple of days. I was updating the look of the site and hit a snag that required a lot of hands-on tinkering.
Great Culinary Moments
Eric and Timothy's researches into perfecting the waffle knew no bounds.
Friday
22 July 2005
Apologies
Sorry about the lack of a new Ephemeral Isle for the past couple of days. I was updating the look of the site and hit a snag that required a lot of hands-on tinkering.
Monday
25 July 2005
Great Culinary Moments
Eric and Timothy's researches into perfecting the waffle knew no bounds.
Tuesday
26 July 2005
Great Sartorial Moments
In later years, the Invisible man cultivated a more dashing appearance.
Wednesday
27 July 2005
Luncheon Follies
Watching Mr. Renfrew check the bill made lunching with him a stressful experience.
Thursday
28 July 2005
Mr. Kapek, Call Your Office
Repliee Q1
She's the one on the left.
The world took one step closer to Bladerunnerdom as Japanese scientists at Osaka University unveiled a "female" android named Repliee Q1, which they claim is so advanced that it can be mistaken for being alive. But then, so can Al Gore.
According to its co-creator Professor Hiroshi Ishiguru, Repliee Q1 has a skin made of silicone rather than hard plastic and has 31 actuators in her upper body that mimic human movements. That's from the waist up, in case you haven't sussed it. From there on down Repliee Q1 is pure department store mannequin. Still, what can move is pretty impressive, which reminds me of a girl I used to date, but of that we shall not speak. Professor Ishiguru and his colleagues mapped and analysed the movements of real people so that Repliee Q1 can flutter its eyelids, shift in its chair, and even block a slap realistically. Whether it can give a convincingly blank stare when told that square shoelace tips are better than round ones is left open to speculation.
The scientists also say that their android is so lifelike that it can fool an observer into mistaking it for a real person for as long as thirty seconds. I can't say that this impresses me much. I've been known to confuse a coat rack for a real person for twice as long in poor light and once in vigorous conversation mistook a potted palm for an archbishop for twenty minutes after several unusually stiff gin and tonics.
The trouble with Repliee Q1 isn't that its creators overreached themselves, but that they didn't reach far enough. One can understand why they chose a woman as the model for their android. Aside from the obvious geek fantasies about improved blow-up dolls, that is. As many a CGI artist has learned, the fact that women have smoother skin and wear cosmetics eliminates a lot of hurdles in creating a lifelike android. Trouble is, it places one firmly in a tradition of female robots that is rather hard to live up to. Ever since Fritz Lang sprang his erotipsychotic robot on an unsuspecting public in 1926, every female robot since has had a hefty blend of sexuality and extreme violence to live up to and being an android that sits in a chair fluttering its eyelashes just doesn't cut the mustard. You need to step up and deliver out and out fembots complete with .38 calibre mammaries.
Surely the Japanese, who seem so dead keen on female androids, should be up to the task. Not only are they masters of electronics and cyber technology, but they have a strong tradition of absurd giant robots going back to Mechakong of 1967; a taste for violent, sexually-explicit cartoons; and an utter lack of fashion sense that surely can all be combined to rival the finest of feather-haired killbots in flare-pants jump suits and kicky neck scarves as ever menaced Steve Austin and Jamie Sommers while making John Houseman wish he'd stayed in legitimate theatre. With all this going for them, they can surely do better than a coquettish wallflower hooked up to a pneumatic compressor. I expect to see the Japanese turning out fembots capable of doing Daryl Hannah back flips and lifting Minis in slow motion with one hand and cheesy sound effects.
At the very least I expect some Stepford Wives action with severe cleavage and big floppy hats.
I mean, isn't that what technology is all about?
Friday
29 July 2005
Life's Little Lessons
Oscar soon learned that, no matter what their size, sherbet sticks are not an aphrodisiac.