Redhead Roots

I was chatting with Denise the other evening, and lamenting how recent developments in Prison Break have meant that 'My life is deprived of redheads to the extent now that I have to watch repeats of The West Wing and Buffy.'

In consolation, Denise suggested that I track down How I Met Your Mother, Alyson Hannigan's new show, into its third season at this point, about a guy in 2030 talking to to his kids and looking back on how he met their mother twenty-five years earlier. Despite sounding simple, she said, it's both clever and humorous, which was all the excuse I needed to go on the hunt for it online. I've watched the first episode, and while not blown away by it, certainly enjoyed it, not least because of the charming presence of Ms Hannigan.

It must be said that I approve of Alyson Hannigan, who I saw on the stage in London a few years back, treading the boards in Meg Ryan's footsteps as the eponymous heroine of When Harry Met Sally. She did a fine job, unlike her co-star, whose performance had a rather wooden quality. But then Alyson has a gift for comedy, as Joss Whedon observes in -- I think -- more than one of the Buffy commentaries. I remember him saying in his commentary on 'Hush' -- where she's hilarious -- that with her hugely expressive eyes she'd have been a fine actress in the silent era.


Ravishing Reds
I've raved about Willow in the past, back on my old blog (although cunningly reposted in the archives of this one) when I commented on the modern televisual symbolism that uses red hair on girls as an indicator that there are serious brains at play.

While I think I was onto something in that one, I may have been a bit off the mark when I attributed this decidedly positive trend to the influence of one Dana Scully. For starters, friends of mine opined, how about Beverly Crusher, chief medical officer in Star Trek: The Next Generation -- she's highly intelligent and a redhead? I had to concede that she was, and then started to think afresh.

I wondered for a while if Maid Marion may have had something to do with it, at least as played by Judi Trott back in the 1980s Robin of Sherwood? In the end I decided that this didn't really work -- while Trott's auburn Marion was as intelligent as she was beautiful, she was never really cast as the brains of Robin's outfit, and doesn't even seem to have had much impact even on subsequent portrayals of Marion.

I don't want to talk about the BBC's current effort. It's too depressing. Both the show in general and Marian in particular are deeply disappointing.

Well, if not Marion, how about pushing this right back to the titian teen detective Nancy Drew, who's been thwarting evildoers for decades? You could definitely make a case for that, especially in her television incarnation as played -- in the main -- by Pamela Sue Martin, but I think a powerful blow to any notion that Nancy influenced people to think of redheads as clever gets skewered by the next teenager television crimefighter to be blessed with red hair, being the inimitable Daphne Blake. As long-time fans of Scooby Doo will recall, when it came to smarts, Daphne was no match for Velma.

Batgirl was a Librarian!

No, as a few people have pointed out to me since my theory was first outed, the roots of this lie in genre fiction even more outlandish than adolescent crime fiction. Yes, we're talking about superheroes.

Jean Grey stands out, of course. Call her The Phoenix if you like, or else think of her as the rather more placid Marvel Girl, but there's no denying that she's an intellectual powerhouse, and not merely because of her phenomenal telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Granted, she's immeasurably powerful in that regard, but judged purely as a person, rather than the only class five mutant, she's fiercely intelligent and exceptionally strong. And, em, she looks rather good when played by Famke Janssen.

Jean may well be the answer here, making her first appearance as she did back in September 1963, in Kirby and Lee's very first issue of The Uncanny X-Men. That's more than three years before Barbara Gordon made her comics debut - but Babs does have the advantage of being on TV by 1967, played to good effect by Yvonne Craig, that kind of leads me to think that she may have had the greater influence. I guess it's between these two, at any rate.

You don't know Barbara? Well, according to Businessweek, she's one of the ten smartest comicbook superheroes ever - and the only female to make the list.

Barbara Gordon is Batgirl. Or she was, at any rate, back while she was still a librarian and before she was permanently crippled by the Joker in a bid to drive her uncle insane. All it ever takes -- argued the deranged master criminal after showing the captive police commissioner photographs of his niece's agonised, naked, wounded body -- is one bad day to drive the sanest man alive to lunacy.

Since then, however, she's been reinvented as Oracle, as whom she's been played by the rather minxy Dina Meyer in the T.V. version of Birds of Prey.

It seems that Barbara Gordon has a genius-level intellect and a photographic memory, which must be useful, especially when linked with her phenomenal skills with computers and, um, as a librarian. You can kind of understand, then, why as Oracle she's become indispensible to the crimefighters of the D.C. universe, and why she's the person Batman turns to when even his resources fail him. Wheelchair-bound as she is, she's become an avatar of the precept that 'knowledge is power'.

I'm sorry, have I just geeked you out? For the record, nearly all of this I've had to look up. Thanks to Redhead Fangirl and the ever-reliable Wikipedia, though, I haven't had to look very far.

Talking Snakes

The On Faith discussion section at the Washington Post is often interesting and usually worth a glance, although its contributions and comments vary from the informative and enlightening to the ignorant and drearily predictable. This week's discussion topic relates to America's apparent obsession with sex scandals, and asks whether sex outside of marriage is a sin, whether it's a public matter, and whether it's forgiveable.

Richard Dawkins, whose views on the God of the Old Testament were described a couple of weeks ago by the German bishop Wolfgang Huber, leader of Germany's mainstream Protestant churches, as 'an expression of anti-Judaism', weighs in with a hefty piece beginning with:

'Of course sex outside marriage is not a public matter, and yes, of course it is forgivable. Only a person infected by the sort of sanctimonious self-righteousness that religion uniquely inspires would apply the meaningless word 'sin' to private sexual behavior. It is the mark of the religious mind that it cares more about private than public morality.'

There's a certain irony in the fact of the entire article being saturated in Richard D's own brand of sanctimonious self-righteousness, not least in that sweeping generalisation about what Dawkins regards as 'the religious mind', his certainty that adultery is a private matter, or his musings on what he sees as our obsession with monogamous fidelity.

For all that, though, he does raise interesting questions about whether the religious beliefs of our elected representatives should be a matter of public record. 'Shouldn't we refrain,' he asks, 'from prying into a politician's private religious views, just as we should refrain from prying into their private sexual behavior?'

Even given the questionable assumptions on which it relies, it's a fair question, to which I think Dawkins gives the right answer for entirely the wrong reasons.

Skipping over the week's revelations of Tony Blair's apparent reluctance when Prime Minister to speak openly of his faith for fear of being labelled 'a nutter' -- something which raises a few questions of its own, some of which I'll surely return to another day -- Dawkins cites a recent article by Christopher Hitchens and homes in on Mitt Romney instead. Romney, in case you've being living in another world, is one of the contenders for the Republican candidacy in nexy year's Presidential election in America. He's also a prominent Mormon, something which earns him a severe kicking in the eyes of Dawkins and Hitchens, who believe that he has questions to answer about his 'cock-eyed view of reality' and the 'bizarre beliefs' of his Church.

I think it's a bit unfair to single Romney out in this regard, since I'm fairly sure that Dawkins and Hitchens believe pretty much all religious people have a cock-eyed view of reality and hold to bizarre beliefs, which roughly equate to beliefs other than their own. Mind, perhaps the didactic duo are simply arguing that other American politicians regularly talk about their religious beliefs, and that Romney shouldn't be let off that particular hook.

Anyway, regardless of the motives of the Waldorf and Statler of militant atheism, I couldn't help but be a bit surprised to read of some of the things in which Mormons supposedly believe. I'm afraid that my knowledge of the Mormons is rather limited, so I was somewhat startled to discover that they apparently believe that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri.

The Brother used to live in Kansas City, so I asked him about this. He was well aware of it.

'Talking snakes ten a penny there?'
'Actually, they're a dime a dozen,' he replied.
'Even better value, so,' I mused.

And then, wondering whether this was the case, I did some quick sums. If you can get ten snakes for a penny, well, that would give one snake for 0.1 pence. Allowing for current rates of exchange, and assuming we're talking about a British penny, which may not be a safe assumption, that means each talking snake works out at roughly 0.2 cents a snake. A dime, on the other hand, is a ten cent coin, it seems, so a dime for a dozen snakes means that snakes gives us just over 0.8 cents a snake.

Clearly, like Superman, I can't count.

About as stable as Audrey Hepburn's head in a helicopter

I was chatting last night with my fairy blogmother (ret.), and somehow the subject of the Topsy Tipping League™ came up. I can't remember how, though I have an inkling that it may have been in connection with the toppling tendencies of myotonic goats.

Anyway, to explain, said fairy blogmother, despite being built on a decidedly dainty scale, appears to have an absurdly high centre of gravity. So high, in fact, that it takes but the merest of nudges to send an offguard Topsy flying into a nearby hedge. Having discovered this some years ago, Technically Rachel indulged this penchant to such a degree that that others wished to join in, and demanded a system for keeping score. Thus it was that the Topsy Tipping League™ was born. In the interests of keeping the game alive, not to mention comedy at the expense of our precarious friend, I'm sure the Technical One won't mind me quoting her at great length.

Topsy Tipping League™

2 points for a general nudge and small stumble
4 points for a significant stumble
6 points for complete loss of footing across the pavement with general arm flailing and little yap for help

Add 1 extra point to your score if:

• your attempt provokes a 'tut' or a swear word
• your attempt induces high-pitched and general "I'm so abused!" mutterings
• she gets really mad and goes all pink and yells "What is your problem!"

Minus 1 point from your score if:

• she spots you coming and you miss her - you'll look stupid, and she'll be smug
• she's wearing high heels - it's just too easy
• she's pissed - once more, too easy
• she falls right over - whilst we at Topsy Tipping™ agree this would be highly amusing, the Topsy is an endangered species and shouldn't be too abused (but if a bush breaks her fall, you can have your point back!)

Rules

• You may only partake in one "Topsy Tipping" a day
• The Topsy's safety must be considered at all times - as should the comedy of the moment
• Be gentle - she topples REALLY easily
• Players partake in this league at their own risk - the Topsy is a little blonde species and is liable to small explosions. The proprieters accept no responsibility for injury or damage caused at the hands of an angered Topsy.

At the end of the league, ratios will be calculated for differences in height and weight from the Topsy, as will an average of time spent with the Topsy.

All interested members please register on the talk back

Happy Tipping from the Topsy Tipping League™

No doubt you'll be reading this with a grin, wondering which badly balanced buddies of your own can be enlisted - almost certainly against their will - in such hilarity.* You'll find it great fun, though your beleaguered friend might not, and a game which, while designed for two players - a Topsy and a Tipper - has permutations of immense potential when played in groups, as an instant debate on the Founder's site made clear:

TTL-002: If two or more Topsy Tippers are walking with it, what is the procedure if one player attempts to Tip the Topsy and another moves in from the opposite side to bolster the Topsy, effectively "blocking" the attempted Tip? That is to say, are points awarded for defensive moves that thwart other players, denying them points?

TTL-005: I think that the second player would be doing themselves a favour by not allowing the first tipper to have a clean shot at the tip, therefore it would act as a basic defence and thus any advantage gained would simply be that of not having conceded a point to another player.

TTL-001: TTL-005 is right, the benefit comes from denying another player their points.


TTL-003: But what if the Topsy is merely starting the stumble - a basic 2 points for tipper number one - when tipper number two, rather than bolstering the Topsy, adds momentum and positively a change of angle, therefore changing a basic 2 point stumble into a maximum 6 point fall, possibly with up to 3 bonus points? How would those 6 or even 9 points be divided?

TTL-001: I think tipper no. 2 would be allowed the extra 4 points for showing such timely skill - any further points would be split equally. If it is a planned team effort, all points should be split equally. I hope this has answered your question.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of all this is that some years ago at a wedding a friend of mine marvelled at the Topsy's ability to sashay across gravel and rough grass in high heels while carrying several drinks and without spilling a drop. 'Four inch heels off-road?' he exclaimed, 'Keep her!'

Little did he know that it would have taken but the slightest breeze to send her flying.
____________________________________________________________
* Unless, that is, you're frowning and thinking this is rather a contrived way to justify pushing someone into a hedge.

Found difficult and left untried

One of the most lovingly worn books on my shelves, read and re-read by me, borrowed and devoured by half a dozen friends, is The Secret History, Donna Tartt's elegant and cynical tale of classics, murder, madness, and fate. I was reminded of it earlier today when pondering the storm that's building over The Golden Compass.

There's a scene in The Secret History where Julian, teacher and mentor to the narrator and his friends, expresses some concern that Bunny - one of his pupils - might be considering some kind of religious life. Richard, the narrator, believes that despite his affection for Dante and Giotto, Julian secretly regards Christianity as no more than a degenerate cult carried to extravagant lengths. Julian wonders whether Bunny's girlfriend Marion might be somehow to blame, and asks Richard if Marion is a Catholic. Richard replies that he thinks she's a Presbyterian.

'A Presbyterian? Really?' he said, dismayed.
'I believe so.'
'Well, whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe. I could accept that kind of conversion with grace. But I shall be very disappointed indeed if we lose him to the Presbyterians.'

You might wonder what this has to do with Philip Pullman, and the row that's brewing over the film that really ought to be called Northern Lights. Give me a minute. You'll see.


'There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction'
Just to sketch in what's been happening, and in case you've been asleep over the last while, The Golden Compass is the first part of a putative trilogy, based on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. It seems that in America the Catholic League is urging families to boycott the film, claiming that it's bait to lure children to the book upon which it's based, where they'll come under the sway of the author's 'pernicious atheist agenda'.

Pullman's response has reportedly been a mixture of indignation and disgust - he's dismissed the League's leaders as 'nitwits' and wondered where they've gotten the idea that he's a militant atheist. The League President has responded by quoting interviews where Pullman says that his books are about killing God, that Tolkien would have deplored them, and that C.S. Lewis would have thought he was doing the Devil's work for trying - as he claimed - to undermine the basis of Christian belief.

As it happens, it's a bit unfair to call Pullman an atheist; his unbelief isn't absolute, as can be seen when, for instance, he says that 'If we're talking on the scale of human life and the things we see around us, I'm an atheist. There's no God here. There never was. But if you go out into the vastness of space, well, I'm not so sure. On that level, I'm an agnostic.'

So he's not quite an atheist, but he's openly stated that his books are largely written with a view to undermining Christian belief. Okay. So why then has Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury been singing their praises and recommending that they be taught in religious education classes?


'These are human things which human beings have constructed in order to wield power'
Well, commenting on the staged version of the trilogy a few years ago, with reference to the books, Williams agrees that the story is about killing God, but asks which God is it who gets killed, and whether any Christian would find Pullman's 'Authority' recognisable as God. The Authority, after all, is a created, fallible, mortal being that had merely arrogated power to himself. And as Williams points out, the Church in Pullman's world -- or at least that of Lyra Belacqua, his heroine and the protagonist of Northern Lights -- is a church without Christ, well aware of the Authority's failings, and trapped in a perpetual and murderous anxiety about the fate of its 'God'. In effect, Williams says that if God were as Pullman presents him we would have to kill him, and that if the Church were as Pullman describes it it ought to be destroyed.

And, having read the books myself, albeit not for a few years, I think he's right, up to a point.

The Archbishop observes that it's pretty obvious that the Church evidently strikes Pullman - most of the time - as being a desperate and oppressive tyranny. The question, though, is surely 'Which Church?' The Archbishop's own Church of England? One of the Orthodox churches? Maybe one of the tens of thousands of Protestant churches? It can hardly be an invisible church of the Elect, can it?

At first sight the answer would seem to be 'The Catholic Church'; the Magisterium of Lyra's world - the world in which the first part of the trilogy is set - certainly resembles it. 'Magisterium' is a Catholic term, after all, referring to the Church's teaching authority; so too is 'oblation', a term we see in the General Oblation Board, the villains of Northern Lights. Pullman's Magisterium has cardinals, bishops, and priests. Granted, this is a variant of the Catholic Church in which John Calvin had become Pope and moved the headquarters of the Church from Rome to Geneva, but it's still the Catholic Church, isn't it?

Well, yes and no.


'I am a Church of England atheist, and a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist...'
I read the three His Dark Materials books, as I said, a few years ago, borrowing them from an Anglican friend who's now training to be a vicar. His feeling about them was that they were brilliantly written but that their theology was 'all over the place'. I loved the first one, finding it a heady mix of Milton, C.S. Lewis, and Michael Moorcock -- and the Moorcock influence is palpable in all three books -- but felt that following the first book's rather troubling climax Pullman began to lose control of his material. The Subtle Knife still worked for me mainly because I found Will a rather more interesting and sympathetic character than Lyra, but The Amber Spyglass, for all the plaudits with which its been showered, struck me as a mess, its story having being sacrificed to the author's clumsy and overbearing agenda.

One thing I really noticed about it at the time, though, was that there was no way that His Dark Materials, for all its apparent digs at the Catholic Church, could have been written by anyone who had ever known the Church from within. This certainly wasn't the work of an embittered ex-Catholic -- I've read enough of that! It just didn't feel Catholic enough. You can spot Catholic writers -- and that term in this respect encompasses those who've rejected the Church as much as those who haven't -- a mile off.

And indeed, if you do any checking at all, you'll find that Pullman's background is not Catholic. His grandfather, in whose house Pullman spent much of his childhood following his father's death, was a Church of England clergyman in Norfolk. Pullman says that to a great degree he was brought up by his grandfather, which involved lots of going to church, going to Sunday school, listening to Bible stories, and -- he says -- not questioning anything.

That explains a lot. It explains why he's able to conceive of an apparently Catholic Church without the apostolic authority and unifying force of the Petrine ministry, why he seems unaware that the Church has always thought of Jesus as a second Adam and apparently thought of Mary as a second Eve for almost as long, and above all why he clearly doesn't get that for Catholics, stuff counts.


'Every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling'
So what? Well, Pullman tends to claim that his main objection to institutionalised religion is what he sees as its tendency towards tyranny, and insists that:

'It's not just Christianity I'm getting at. The reason that the forms of religion in the books seem to be Christian is because that's the world I'm familiar with. That's the world I grew up in and I knew. If I had been brought up an orthodox Jew, I would no doubt find things to criticise in that religion. But I don't know that world as well as I know Christianity.'

But the thing is, the 'forms of religion' that Pullman caricatures in his books are Catholic forms, and yet it's quite clear that he's anything but familiar with Catholic Christianity. So why then is he setting up the Catholic Church as the villain of his tale?

The Catholic Church is the natural villain of the piece for the same reasons that it's the villain of The Da Vinci Code and for countless other potboilers, and I don't just mean that it's largely down -- although it surely is -- to centuries of ingrained and ignorant anti-Catholic prejudice within Protestant culture.

There's a more fundamental and intuitive reason than that for casting the Church as a villain. Take a look at that quote from The Secret History again: 'whatever one thinks of the Roman Church, it is a worthy and powerful foe'.

Can you think of even one other religious organisation of which that could be said, one other that proclaims the lineage, that makes the claims, that has the reach of the Catholic Church?

Looked at in the wrong light, this could almost be taken as a complement.

Survival of the Faintest

Friday night saw me round at a friends' flat marvelling at a rough cut preview of the latest Soyabean production -- I'll explain another time -- and in stitches as I was shown this hilarious clip.

I can't believe that I'd never heard of myotonic goats before, and if you haven't either you really ought to watch the clip. I'm not joking. It features some fine umbrella action.

These zoological absurdities are a scream. Myotonic goats, also known as wooden-legged goats, stiff-legged goats, Tennessee scare goats, and fainting goats, have a tendency to faint at the drop of a hat. Or anything else, I gather. It seems these poor fellas suffer from a condition called myotonia congenita, which basically means that any shock causes their legs to seize up for about ten seconds. Even the slightest bit of excitement can cause them to keel over - the prospect of dinner, say.

How they procreate is beyond me.

Perhaps even more remarkably, considering their congenital vulnerabilities, their average life expectancy is generally between twelve and fifteen years. How? Seriously, how?

Their lineage sounds like the stuff of legend. Apparently a reclusive farmer named Jon Tinsley, who may have been from Nova Scotia, turned up in Tennessee in the early 1800s accompanied by three fainting nanny goats and a billy that was anything but gruff. He sold the comical beasts to a Dr H.H. Mayberry, who bred the feeble creatures. Aside from being an easy source of meat and -- I presume -- entertainment, they proved useful to shepherds, who would deploy a few fainting goats amongst their flocks. The thinking was that the goats would freeze if the flocks were attacked by wolves or other predators; becoming easy prey they would distract the predators and allow the sheep to flee.

What the hapless goats felt about this, sadly, is not a matter of record.

And speaking of sheep, which I so rarely do, I was informed today of a whole series of Aardman Animations that have somehow slipped my notice. It seems that Shaun the Sheep, scenestealer extraordinaire from A Close Shave, is now the star of his own BBC series, with forty seven-minute episodes already made. And some of them are online.

Granted, it's not Wallace and Gromit, those notorious corrupters of youth, but what is?

What's that coming over the hill? Is it a monstah?

Having had the line 'And I WILL kill your monstah!' stuck in my head for the last few weeks, it was only ever going to be a matter of time until I went to see whether Mr Carder was right to damn Beowulf as he did, so I went along last night, having heard good things in advance from a couple of friends and from the Brother, who had enjoyed it despite being troubled by the occasional eerie blankness of the characters' eyes.

I loved it. Sure, the weaknesses of motion capture are most obvious in the quiet moments when people are talking and it's as though you're watching a rather dull computer game, but the scenery is breathtakingly beautiful at times, the action scenes are utterly exhilarating, and there's one heartstoppingly horrific moment where Beowulf wakes to a scene more nightmarish than that from which he's woken. And perhaps most importantly, it's a fine story.

I can sympathise with people muttering that it's not the same as the poem, that Beowulf should kill Grendel's mother rather than sleep with her, and that he should return to his own kingdom rather than inherit Hrothgar's. But the thing is, that's kind of what the film is about.

Much as I'd like to, I haven't read Beowulf: the Script Book, but even from watching the film once it's pretty obvious what Gaiman and Avary are trying to do: the film's a study in myth-making, implicitly purporting to tell the real story of Beowulf but showing the forces that will transform that story into the canonical version we all know.

Watch the ritualised dramatisation of Beowulf's fight with Grendel, noting how it's pretty much identical to the poem, and compare that with the fight as shown in the film. Think of Beowulf's description to all and sundry of his battle with Grendel's mother, and consider how Beowulf himself would have been the sole source for the story. Mightn't he have embroidered it somewhat? Bear in mind that he brought back no trophy to prove that victory. Look at Wiglaf's absolute loyalty, and his determination to preserve Beowulf's reputation no matter what, even if that means refusing to listen to his lord's attempts to remove the lustre from his legend. And finally, pay attention to the sprouting seeds of Christianity which will in time overcome this world of pagan heroism.

Certainly, the film is different to the poem. But it doesn't so much contradict it as encompass, foreshadow, and explain it. Referring to these differences on his blog, Neil Gaiman expressed disappointment in the official educational pack that had been done to accompany the film.

Part of the point of the Beowulf movie that Roger and I wrote is the places it diverges from the story of Beowulf, and the ways it explores the relationship between a person and a story about a person. I don't think they should be putting the stuff we made up on material intended for schools -- it seems like a way of justifiably irritating teachers, who have enough to put up with when they try to teach Beowulf without us making their lives harder. It would have been much more interesting to have put up either the original, or one that talked about the differences -- I'd absolutely encourage high schoolers to see our version and talk about what changed and why.

I'm hoping that when the DVD comes out it'll have a running commentary with the writers, who'll be able to explain along the way what they changed, why, and how. That'd be priceless..

After all, while Alexander is a spectacular pile of tosh, the DVD commentary with Oliver Stone and Robin Lane Fox is invaluable from an educational point of view; it's amazingly instructive to listen to the film's director and historical advisor try to justify their film's rather flexible attitude to historical orthodoxy. I can't imagine teaching a credible course on cinematic representations of the Classical world without having that as required viewing; I'm curious as to whether the DVD of 300 has any similarly mitigating features that might justify my purchasing that farcical bloodbath.

Beowulf is a far superior film to Alexander, but I'm pretty sure that a decent DVD commentary would be just as fascinating and no less useful than that which -- to some degree -- redeems Oliver Stone's classical trainwreck.

Wales beat South Africa!

No, not really, but the headline probably caught your eye, didn't it?

It certainly caught mine when I read it on the main BBC news site earlier on. I gawped on seeing it, as when I'd last glanced the score from within the welcoming surrounds of the Porter House, Wales were losing by about twenty points, and there hadn't been much time left on the clock at that point. Had Wales made a impossible comeback?

No.

They lost 34-12, as I discovered when I clicked on the link. I've no idea whether the link's misleading nature should be classed as mischievous or mistaken, but either way it was wrong.

Less misleading, though no less improbable, were the headlines about Everton's 7-1 drubbing of Sunderland. I'd gawped in the Porter House on seeing that we were 6-1 up, and stared again when word came in that Osman had made it seven. Extraordinary, really. It seems this was Everton's hundredth win of Moyes's reign, and the first time in eight years that Everton have managed such a big win - and indeed the first time in eleven years that they've managed seven goals. The BBC called it a 'dazzling attacking exhibition' - having done some checking, it seems that in this respect, at any rate, the Beeb had it right.

A good day, all told.

And now I'm off to watch Ray Winstone kill a monstah.

Snakes and Splinters

As you'll have probably noticed, if you've not just arrived, I'm a huge fan of Alan Moore's work. If you've not heard of the bearded sage of Northampton, you could do worse than watch this fine tribute which begins as follows:

'Alan Moore is a writer and magician from Northampton. He's a stranger to hairdressers, and worships his very own god in his very own way, blurring the lines between religious belief, magic, and the power of the creative imagination. If you film him from strange angles, you can make him look very sinister.'

As NMRBoy confirmed to me the other day, yes, that opening passage is spoken by Stewart Lee, specifically from his 'Don't Get Me Started' episode about religion. While I'm afraid Moore's own beliefs rather baffle me - they have the virtues of creativity and tolerance and the failing of, well, being patently barmy - he makes some good points about others' beliefs, notably about what he refers to as 'nineteen thirties tent-show revivalism'.

The show in general is worth watching, because even if Lee doesn't quite hit the mark with regard to the rightness of religious belief and practice, he's far sharper on how it can go wrong: 'at their worst, religions have been used to excuse the most vicious aspects of human nature, legitimising persecution, genocide, slavery, and war. When religions embody immorality and irrationality they must be open to criticism.'

That's the kind of claim that tends to inspire Pavlovian reactions - nods of assent from militant atheists, snorts of derision from aggrieved believers, and smug shrugs from those all too willing to point the finger at followers of faiths other than their own. It deserves a bit more thought than that.

For starters, Lee isn't claiming that religion poisons everything, or that it's the cause of much of the world's evil, as the likes of Christopher Hitchens maintain; rather, Lee attributes the evil to human nature itself. His point is that religion can provide a pretext or a veneer of legitimacy for how that evil plays out. He never says it's the only thing that does this.

For all that, though, it is painfully true that religion has all too often legitimised all manner of abominations, and it's worth learning exactly what sort of horrors have been committed in the name of God. We shouldn't hide from this. The very earliest Christian document we have exhorts us to test everything, after all, and to hold to what is true. It doesn't ask us to shut our eyes. As I've said before, it's innocence that we're called to, not ignorance.

Of course, we can easily finish our studies with our smugness intact. Genocide? Slavery? Human sacrifice? Holy war? The inquistion? Surely not I, Lord? Hopefully not, but I suspect we treat people like things in more prosaic ways far more often than we realise. As Chesterton's most famous creation observed, the only real spiritual disease consists of 'thinking one is quite well'.

He may well have been thinking of the Gospel reading from just a few weeks ago.

Anyway, rant over. In an ideal world I'd end this post by linking to the YouTube clip I was sent during the week of the latest episode of The Simpsons, which features not merely Alan Moore himself but also Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes too.

Alas, copyright rules mean that it's no longer online - and indeed shouldn't have been in the first place - so you'll have to find another way to listen to that midlands rumble in 'Husbands and Knives'.

Sorry about that.

On a scale from 'Sin City' to 'Mary Poppins'

Having seen - via Neil Gaiman's journal - the ChildCare Action Project's Movie Ministry's damning review of Beowulf, I think it's safe to say that Sweeney Todd won't be getting a pass either. After all, it has all the ingredients of a bad film by the CAP's lights, and not least because its subject matter concerns revenge, murder, and cannibalism. Throw in quasi-incestuous desires, references to rape, suicide, sex, masturbation, drunkenness, and theft, cruelty to animals, and vengeance being referred to as a deity and it's a dead certainty.

The CAP, according to the oh-so-reliable source that is Wikipedia, is a fundamentalist Christian media analysis service, based in Texas and headed by one Thomas A. Carder, which vets films to see whether or not they're suitable for children, judging them by his own rather idiosyncratic scriptural critera.

Whether Sweeney Todd will be ranked lower than Beowulf by the CAP is an interesting question. I suspect it'll not beat it, seeing as only a handful of films have managed that, notably Freddy v Jason, Scary Movie, American Psycho, and Sin City, none of which were deemed to have any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

You can have great fun working your way through the list of films vetted by the CAP, and stare as you see how Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit can be docked points for its rampant violence, sexual innuendo, flatulence, and even a male character having a purse with a floral pattern. A suggestion of flatulence loses Finding Nemo marks, while the recent live action and animatronic version of 101 Dalmatians earns frowns for excessive cleavage exposure and 'gross examination of a dog to determine its gender'. Babe: Pig in the City suffers for, among other things, featuring a glimpse or two of adult underwear and more alarmingly a dog undergoing a near-death experience and resurrection without the involvement of Jesus! I'm afraid the Harry Potter films get it in the neck as being, it would seem, offensive to God, as are, apparently, the three Lord of the Rings films.

It's worth having a glance at how Mr Carder casts aspersions on C.S. Lewis's faith in his analysis of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, especially when he speculates on what might possibly be described in Lewis's novel, which has somehow eluded Mr Carder over the years. It also gets into trouble for its cast of half-human characters and for such actions as scenes of air war with consequences on the ground and for 'children striking out in wintry woods unsupervised'.

The CAP analysis of Big Fish - a film I loved, for the record, although it perplexed my Mum no end - is particularly intriguing, not least for how Mr Carder justifies his 'objective' analyses:

But the CAP analysis model [...] is not subjective and gives no more weight to one sin over another. The CAP model gives minor weight due to severity, but not to one sin over another. Neither does God. Any sin, if unforgiven, can cast the sinner into the lake of fire, no matter how bad or seemingly slight the sin may seem to us. There is another "verse" to that. No sin can keep one out of Heaven IF forgiven. Once one has accepted Jesus as Lord and resurrected Saviour and has asked forgiveness believing, all sins whether past, present or future are forgiven (Rom. 10.9) and we may be assured of our rightful inheritance to a place in the Kingdom of Heaven forever.

I reckon I'd not be the only Christian to quibble with that for all sorts of reasons, but I have to admit that thanks to the CAP I've learned a lot from Mr Carder, notably how it would seem that Mary Poppins is an even more troubling lacuna in my personal cinematic experience than I had hitherto realised. It is, after all, one of only four 'perfect' films according to Mr Carder's schema.

One thing puzzles me, though. Mr Carder has big issues with 'the three/four letter word vocabulary'. But what are 'three letter words'? And? But? Dog? Cat? How? Why? Who? Sin? God?

He'd seen how civilized men behaved...

I have a weakness, as I remarked to a friend the other evening, for stories of redemption and revenge. I'll take either any day, and both together given a choice.

Both? Well, yes. revenge may be a dish best served cold, but it's rarely filling. In the end, revenge is empty, as Inigo Montoya realised having finally slain the six-fingered man - redemption beats it hands down. Think of Orestes, or the Beast in whatever version of the fairy tale you care you sample, or Darth Vader, or best of all Edmond Dantès, the eponymous antihero of The Count of Monte Cristo. Yes, for all that that masterpiece of nineteenth century pulp fiction is focused on revenge, it ultimately gains much of its power from Edmond's eventual rediscovery of the humanity that he had lost in the darkness of the Château d'If. It is only through learning how to forgive and remembering how to love that he finds peace.

But sometimes, sometimes, you can get a hell of a story just focused on revenge. Or justice. There can be times when it's difficult to tell which is which. That's just one of the ways that friends come in handy - if you're in danger of losing your moral compass it's useful to have a few stars to navigate by. Life without friends can be as perilous as it can be dull.

All of which leads me neatly to the great Stephen Sondheim's greatest masterpiece.

Sweeney Todd, due to be hitting our screens in a month or two, depending on where you are, and surely not to be missed, is an astounding story of a wronged man who, consumed by a desire for vengeance, becomes a monster.

By turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and horrifying, it is about as profound a study of greed, hypocrisy, and obsession as you'll ever see. It's magnificently written and thrillingly scored, and features at its centrepiece what must be the finest and funniest attempt at linking cannibalism and capitalism in the history of music.

(I've no idea if there are others, but if so, I'm confident they pale next to the wonderfully witty wordplay of 'A Little Priest'.)

To say I'm a fan of the show is to put it mildly. I've seen it twice in Manchester, the first production there being probably the best thing I've ever seen on the stage, and twice just a few months ago in Dublin, a production described by the Guardian as a 'miracle'. Not content with occasionally seeing it in the theatre, though, I have a DVD of a 2001 concert performance, and two versions of it on CD.

Yes, I know, I've yet to acquire the DVD of the show with George Hearn and Angela Lansbury as Todd and Mrs Lovett, but I'll get round to it eventually. There's no rush.

With so much invested in the show, I have to admit that I've been a little bit worried about the prospect of the film. Granted, all the ingredients seemed fine - I can't imagine a director better suited to this than Tim Burton, and the likes of Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall look perfectly cast. Even Sacha Baron Cohen could prove an inspired choice as Pirelli. But what of Jonny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter? They look great, and can certainly act, but can they sing? That's where this will stand or fall, after all, as unlike the kind of musicals I grew up hating on telly, Sondheim's shows don't involve people strolling along chatting and then unaccountably bursting into song; they're almost entirely sung, with only the occasional bit of spoken dialogue bridging the songs.

I'm not worried anymore. The early word is good, and the trailers look encouraging. I have a feeling that this is a tale we can look forward to attending.

"Nooooooo!" he wailed. "I don't want to be a waiter!"

I was chatting the other evening with a friend of mine, off in the distant Borough of Lough, who was telling me how she'd seen Mirrormask earlier that night. She loved all of it, she said; utterly entranced by Dave McKean's brilliance she kept raving about how the light in the film was incredible. It's a fair statement - the Brother last year described the film as sumptuous, and my nieces, who saw it only a few weeks ago, have watched it three or four times since.

McKean's stuff is really a treat on every level - and if you're not familiar with it you should either rush out and buy something now or at the very least have a thorough rummage around this site.

I've been a fan for years. Sitting on my shelves now I have not merely the book of Mirrormask and the illustrated screenplay to the film, as well as the film itself, but The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish, The Wolves in the Walls, Black Orchid, Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, Mister Punch, the 'Hold Me' issue of Hellblazer, The Sandman Dustcovers, and the BBC video of Neverwhere, for which Dave did the credit sequences on his Macintosh, much to the astonishment of the more seasoned professionals.

If any bells are rung by that list, there's a fair chance that they're being rung by Neil Gaiman, with whom McKean has collaborated time and time and time again, never with results that were anything less than interesting and occasionally to profound effect. For my money, though, it's The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish that stands the best chance of withstanding time's ravages.

Gaiman's hand is involved in almost everything I have by McKean, with two striking exceptions. Cages has fair claim to be deemed McKean's masterpiece to date, a magnificent example of just what comics can be at their best. It's definitely one of the supreme examples of what can be achieved in the form. Grant Morrison's Batman book, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is, on the other hand, a book about which McKean has never felt comfortable. The character of the Batman, he says, meant nothing to him and he simply didn't like drawing him; oddly, this ambivalence led to one of the book's visual triumphs, as McKean's Batman is shadowy, amorphous, and indistinct.

And it's with that in mind that I'd like to point you towards this remarkable fanfilm, a real trailer for a non-existent film, the film being Morrison and McKean's Arkham Asylum. It does a hell of a job of bringing McKean's terrifying and murky visuals to life. I have no idea who Miguel Mesas, its creator, is, but I hope people start throwing money at him soon, as he has a real gift for showing how comics could be adapted to the big screen while staying true to their illustrative roots. Seriously. Check out his interpretation of Pat Mills and Simon Bisley's exotic if cumbersome Sláine: The Horned God just so you can see that the Arkham Asylum film isn't a fluke.

While I'm on the subject of Dave McKean and YouTube, it's probably worth pointing out to you that someone has posted the Quay Brothers' eerie, sinister, utterly spellbinding Street of Crocodiles up there. I attended a Q&A session with McKean following a showing of Mirrormask at Manchester's Cornerhouse last year, accompanied by a Brightonian friend of mine who I'd asked along as I thought she'd enjoy the film, not least because some of Mirrormask's action takes place in her home town. At the Q&A Dave raved about 'Street of Crocodiles', and now that I've seen it, I can see why.

If you like his work, you shouldn't let this pass you by.

Shyness is nice and shyness can stop you...

Well, having emulated Amanda and done a quick test, it seems that my blog isn't suitable for children. Apparently there are far too many mentions of death, torture, and hell on it. Oh well.

For what it's worth, yes, I'm aware that this Ratings Sticker ought to have been red, but I've become accustomed to this blog being rendered entirely in shades of grey. And you guys have probably gotten equally used to squinting at the screen. If you haven't, you obviously haven't watched Bladerunner or Angel nearly enough, and should remedy the situation by either watching said film and show, or by highlighting any chunks of text with which your feeble eyes might be struggling. Try it. It works.


Anyway, I was a bit disturbed to read an article today, in between working and telling people not to worry about how, about how - to a certain extent - the field of psychiatry has been corrupted by pharmaceutical corporations in search of new markets and applications for their products. I couldn't help but be troubled by the story of how, back in 2002, GlaxoSmithKline recruited a famous Miami Dolphins running back to confess on the Oprah Winfrey show that he suffered from crippling shyness.

In this instance Cohn & Wolfe [The PR arm of GSK], whose other clients have included Coca-Cola, Chevron Texaco, and Taco Bell, was using an athlete to help create a belief that shyness, a common trait that some societies associate with good manners and virtue, constitutes a deplorably neglected illness. Given the altruistic aura of the occasion, it would have been tasteless to have Ricky Williams display a vial of Paxil on the spot. But later (before he was suspended from the football league for ingesting quite different drugs), a GSK press release placed his name beneath this boilerplate declaration:

"As someone who has suffered from social anxiety disorder, I am so happy that new treatment options, like Paxil CR, are available today to help people with this condition."

This isn't to say that depression isn't a real and truly debilitating condition, but I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that it is overdiagnosed nowadays, and this tendency to overdiagnose is almost certainly exacerbated by clever marketing by pharmaceutical companies. In the U.K. this has reached a point where national figures seem to indicate that as many as six million adults of working age suffer from depression at any one time and where in England 31 million prescriptions for antidepressants were issued in 2006 alone! Can so many people really be seriously ill? Isn't it possible that some of them are just, well, sad? After all, when an overstretched health service means that countless diagnoses are made in just a few minutes, there's a fair chance that more than a handful of them are wrong, surely?


There was a fine article in the Irish Independent a few weeks ago, reprinting an old interview from the Telegraph with the late Dr Anthony Clare. Somehow I've contrived to never hear Clare on the radio, but I've found Depression and How to Survive It, his popular analysis of clinical depression - and indeed manic depression - co-written with Spike Milligan and illustrated with reference to Milligan's own illness, to be fascinating, enlightening, and utterly harrowing.

As I was saying, the interview is certainly worth a look, not least because in attempting to explore what constitutes happiness, he says a lot - implicitly or explicitly - about sadness, depression, and unrealistic expectations. And under pressure he gives a seven-step guide to life.

"Okay. Here goes. Number one: cultivate a passion. It is important in my model of happiness to have something that you enjoy doing. The challenge for a school is to find every child some kind of passion -- something that will see them through the troughs. That's why I'm in favour of the broadest curriculum you can get.

"Number two, be a leaf on a tree. You have to be both an individual -- to have a sense that you are unique and you matter -- and you need to be connected to a bigger organism -- a family, a community, a hospital, a company. You need to be part of something bigger than yourself. A leaf off a tree has the advantage that it floats about a bit, but it's disconnected and it dies.

"The people who are best protected against certain physical diseases -- cancer, heart disease, for example -- in addition to doing all the other things they should do, seem to be much more likely to be part of a community, socially involved. If you ask them to enumerate the people that they feel close to and would connect and communicate with, those with the most seem the happiest and those with least, the unhappiest.

"Of course, there may be a circular argument here. If you are a rather complicated person, people may avoid you. If, on the other hand, you are a centre of good feeling, people will come to you. I see the tragedy here in this room where some people sit in that chair and say they don't have many friends and they're quite isolated and unhappy, and the truth is they are so introspective they've become difficult to make friends with. Put them in a social group and they tend to talk about themselves. It puts other people off.

"So that's my third rule: avoid introspection.

"Number four, don't resist change. Change is important. People who are fearful of change are rarely happy. I don't mean catastrophic change, but enough to keep your life stimulated. People are wary of change, particularly when things are going reasonably well, because they don't want to rock the boat, but a little rocking can be good for you. It's the salt in the soup. Uniformity is a tremendous threat to happiness, as are too much predictability, control and order. You need variety, flexibility, the unexpected, because they'll challenge you.

"Five, live for the moment. Look at the things that you want to do and you keep postponing. Postpone less of what you want to do, or what you think is worthwhile. Don't be hide-bound by the day-to-day demands. Spend less time working on the family finances and more time working out what makes you happy. If going to the cinema is a pleasure, then do it. If going to the opera is a pain, then don't do it.

"Six, audit your happiness. How much of each day are you spending doing something that doesn't make you happy? Check it out and if more than half of what you're doing makes you unhappy, then change it. Go on. Don't come in here and complain. People do, you know. They come and sit in that chair and tell me nothing is right. They say they don't like their family, they don't like their work, they don't like anything. I say, 'Well, what are you going to do about it?'

"And, finally, Gyles, if you want to be happy, Be Happy. Act it, play the part, put on a happy face. Start thinking differently. If you are feeling negative, say, 'I am going to be positive,' and that, in itself, can trigger a change in how you feel."

The professor slaps his hands on his desk and laughs. "That's it."

"And it works?"

"Well, it's something for the fridge door. Try it and see."

I don't think there'd be room for that on our fridge. There are too many magnets on the cursed thing. Let's just say that you wouldn't want to be our kitchen with facial piercings.

Superhero Secrets and Authorial Authority

Usually, when I start babbling about canonicity, you can grimace and return to what you were doing, safe in the assumption that I'm about to start ranting about the Jews of the diaspora, the Septuagint, Marcion, Irenaeus, the Muratorian fragment, Origen, Athanasius, Pope Damasus I, the Synod of Hippo, and a couple of Councils of Carthage, possibly with a casual nod to the Second Council of Nicea, mentioning along the way the reservations of Jerome and the closure of the Jewish canon, whenever that happened.

But not today, as a certain fictional psychiatrist once said.

I was talking yesterday about how J.K. Rowling caused a bit of a flurry recently when she revealed how she had always thought of Dumbledore as gay, and I ended by observing that this raises interesting questions about authorial ownership. A friend of mine got rather put out in the summer on my telling her of how Rowling had revealed the fates of so many characters in a long web chat, just a few days after the publication of the last Harry Potter book. She didn't want to know. It was pretty clear that she owned the characters, in some sense, and that she had her own ideas about what happened to them afterwards; she didn't want the author spoiling things by telling her. I'm sure there must be loads of people who share her view on that, seeing how the Harry Potter books are apparently Britain's most reread books!

(Oddly, she's rather taken by the recent revelation of Dumbledore's sexuality. Didn't Wilde describe consistency of mind as an admission of failure? Something like that, anyway.)

The issue, I think, concerns whether something an author has in their heads should be considered canonical, if it's not expressed on the page. Do revelations in interviews, websites, and posthumously published collections of notes really matter? Do authors get to define their characters after they've released them? Who owns Albus Dumbledore?

What got me thinking about this the other day was my rediscovery of this hilariously puerile site, which you should explore at your leisure and contemplate, among other things , the precise nature of Batman's relationship with the Boy Wonder.

If you rummage through the site you'll quickly gather that most of the panels are just funny out of either narrative, historic, or cultural context, and there are few jokes there that would have been wildly out of place in a 'Finbarr Saunders' story in Viz.

What exceptions there are look like cases of creators having a joke, trying to see what they could get past the code, so sniggers there are fully justified, which leaves this page - and the comment below it - looking even more out of place.

Yes, it's what it looks like. Spider-man is telling a young boy how he was abused as a child. You didn't know that, did you? No, neither did I. I wonder if NMRBoy did, him being an old fan of the wisecracking webslinger.

You can get the backstory by reading about Skip Westcott, the villain of the piece, but what I found most interesting when I quickly did some googling to get a handle on this, was that the story has been discreetly forgotten about by Marvel since its publication, with some fans arguing that it's non-canonical. The 'thinking' seems to be that as it was published by Marvel in association with the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, it's not part of continuity.

I'm not sure. I mean, it's hardly in the same league as Death and John Constantine showing how to put condoms on bananas, after all, and it is published by Marvel. And Marvel does own Spider-man.

So what? Well, think back to my allusion above to there being questions about Batman's sexuality. It's something people with even more time on their hands than me have pondered over the years, but I think Andrew Wheeler pretty much demolishes speculation by the cunning use of common sense:

So is Batman really gay? Of course not. He's a DC trademark, and DC's not going to dilute the marketability of one of its biggest licenses. DC is so adamant about the character's heterosexuality that even as recently as 2000, the publisher was rejecting requests by academics to use copyrighted materials in articles that discussed the character's sexuality. [. . .] The reason people look for gay subtext is because it isn't there in the text.

So in short, Spider-man is an abuse survivor, Batman's not gay, and Dumbledore - well, you can make your own mind up. For the moment.

J.K. Rowling may yet write a prequel, after all.

Let's not even get onto Aberforth's goat

I'm getting rather concerned about the number of my friends who are starting to worry about me. I'm afraid I may be giving them the impression that I've not really assimilated Nietzche's advice on battling monsters and gazing into the abyss.

I'm fine, really. I've been working on my research, and reading the Apostolic Fathers, and failing to read Bleak House, and writing letters, and dispensing alcohol to the good people of my parish, and today I had lunch with an old friend and wandered around the National Gallery with her, after which I browsed bookshops with another old friend. So don't worry. I'm not just brooding over the few fascinating fragments of fact or fiction that have made their way to me of late. My life and thoughts are pretty full.

Anyway, one of the things I wound up thinking about the other day was the revelation of Dumbledore's sexuality by J.K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall a few weeks back - something that got rather more attention than her comments just a few days earlier about Christian imagery and symbolism in Harry Potter.

I'd never picked up on any suggestion in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, let alone any of the earlier books, that Dumbledore was gay. I'd assumed that Dumbledore's youthful adoration of Grindelwald was based on hero-worship rather than desire, which is basically how I see the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Well, in the Iliad, at any rate. There's no hint of a sexual attraction there, although there's certainly no indication to the contrary, and perhaps, at least in the case of Dumbledore, we should look on this as being akin to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.

Neil Gaiman was talking about this recently, in response to a letter quoting someone who had argued that writers confident in their powers shouldn't feel the need to announce details such as this, and said:

'You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get onto the page. Pages are finite, and the story isn't about giving you all the information about everyone in it any more than life is. Things the author knows about characters (or at least, strongly suspects -- it's never really real until it hits the page, because the process of writing is also a process of discovery) that don't make it onto the page could include the characters' backstory, what they like to eat, the toothpaste they use, what happens to them after the story is over or before it began, and what they do in bed. That something didn't turn up in the books just means it didn't make it onto the page or wasn't relevant to the story.

[. . .]

And, truth to tell, sexuality tends to be such a minor thing, if you have several hundred characters running around in your head. You know more than you've written.'

All very well, perhaps, but this does raise questions about who really owns the characters. Does the author? Do the readers? Can anyone - even the author - really definitively say anything about them that's not in the books themselves? Does it matter if they do?

No permanent friends, only permanent interests

So yes, I was saying yesterday that I have a suspicion that the excessive thrift that's the hallmark of current European defence spending points towards a winding down of individual countries' ability to conduct individual defence policies with a view to discreetly creating an effective common defence policy so that we can stand on our own two 900,000,000 feet. The game, I think, is for the immediate future about complementing NATO and minimizing duplication. That's why I find reports such as this interesting, especially in that the emphasis is on the structures by which Europe's navies will relate to each other in the future.

Look at the Royal Navy, for example - and it's only an example. Contrary to what you might think, it's in serious trouble.

Only a couple of days back the First Sea Lord was warning that without significant investment the navy was in danger of becoming inflexible and incapable of fulfilling its various missions. That might seem a histrionic way of putting out the begging bowl, but if anything he was understating the problem. I realise that sounds far-fetched considering the amount of money The Times reports is being spent on the navy at present:

The Admiral is overseeing a hugely expensive equipment programme, including the building of two large aircraft carriers, at the cost of £3.9 billion, six Type 45 destroyers at £6 billion, four Astute class nuclear-powered submarines at £3.7 billion and a replacement for the Vanguard class Trident ballistic missile submarines, which could cost between £15 billion and £20 billion.

But the thing is that although that sounds impressive, the figures are meaningless out of context. They need to be looked at more closely, and done so without getting into the vexed question of the extent to which the navy is, or is expected to be mothballed. There are no clear answers on that one.


To start with, the carriers might not have any planes to carry, considering that even now there's only one naval squadron in operation and that's busy in or on the way to Afghanistan. The HMS Illustrious and HMS Ark Royal have effectively become little more than enormous helicopter landing platforms, available for use by foreign aircraft when need be. Assuming that money is found to put planes on the carriers, their capacity for launching sorties probably won't be nearly as impressive as is being claimed:

Senior officers say the maximum sortie rate from a CVF could be more than 360 per day (each available aircraft making around 10 flights every 24h.) for a five day surge - six times higher than on the Invincible-class carriers. [P 29-30]

This looks unattainable, to put it mildly. If you accept the Rand model of sortie rates, where

Sortie Rate = 24 hours / (Flight Time + Turnaround Time + Maintenance Time)

then it's difficult to see how the new carriers will be able to manage more than a hundred sorties a day.

Leaving that aside, the Astute submarines have run shockingly over budget, the carriers look set to do the same, and it's a safe bet that whatever replaces the Trident vanity project is going to be mindnumbingly expensive. The only way to make these books balance without more investment is to start decommissioning ships and cancelling orders. This, of course, is what happens when you simultaneously fight two wars and try to do so on the cheap. The money needs to be saved somewhere...

So what will go? Will more orders for the astounding Type 45 destroyer be scrapped? Or shall it be frigates or minesweepers that feel the accountants' axe? Won't the new carriers be a tad vulnerable without the smaller ships to protect them from submarines and mines?

But to be honest, that's not even the problem. The navy has built hardly any ships over the past decade, and isn't building nearly enough ships now, allowing for the fact that British destroyers and frigates are built with an assumed lifespan of twenty-five-years. If you do the maths you'll discover that the Royal Navy is heading for a situation where it'll have perhaps as few as a dozen and at best a total of eighteen destroyers and frigates in its escort fleet, significantly down from the current twenty-five. It's possible that it might not be possible to deploy more than one carrier group, or that it'll be able to deploy two carrier groups, but only at the cost of limiting amphibious capabilities and the patrol duties that are the bread-and-butter functions of the Royal Navy.

Unless, that is, you divvy up the navy's police role with your European neighbours, which looks like being on the cards.

Hmmm. What a bleak couple of posts. I shall be less earnest tomorrow.

All for One and One for . . .

All the news from Pakistan seems a tad on the surreal side at the moment, not least because of the political resurgence of Benazir Bhutto, who I'm afraid I always think of as the most famous person to have ushered me through a front door.

I was at a conference and at that point was at the residence of the American Ambassador in London. Having been ushered in by Ms Bhutto, I strolled about, vaguely disappointed that there wasn't a Ferrero Rocher to be seen in the place. A sign of bad taste, I couldn't help but feeling. That marked the real start of a funny few days, with me slipping away from a conversation between Roger Bannister and a couple of Nobel-winning physicists to talk to Olivia De Havilland, without quite finding the nerve to tell her hat my Dad had admired her from afar one day in Dublin when he was a child, with Bertie Ahern chatting to me before dinner, with me disagreeing forcibly about an issue of jurisprudence with a former head of the F.B.I. as we chatted on a bus, and with Mikhail Gorbachev rubbing off me. Not in a kinky way, I should explain, just squeezing past me while making his way to the dinner table.

Other highlights of the weekend included embarrassing Zahi Hawass with the fact that I've spent two summers working on digs -- both in the field and the labs -- in Greece, while he was spouting nonsense about why basically everything in the world should go back to Egypt, chatting away with the Google founders who were down as student delegates like myself, discussing Churchill and Wellington over lunch in the Palace of Westminster, and listening, rapt, to such people as Stephen Jay Gould, Frederick Sanger, Murray Gell-Mann, and Martin Rees.

Shameless namedropping aside, the highlight of the whole shebang in a lot of ways was a panel discussion chaired by Wes Clark where the topic of this missile shield malarkey came up. He asked Joe Ralston to explain it to us, and so, the then Supreme Allied Commander, Europe carefully explained to us why it was a good idea. Put simply, he said, if London or Paris were threatened with a nuclear attack, America would be more likely to come to their aid if New York and Washington, say, would not be threatened in turn.

Later that evening, in conversation with several others who'd been at that discussion, this sank in. America, the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, would be more likely to abide by its obligations under Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty if she knew she would be safe than she would if her safety was in doubt? In other words, there are circumstances in which America might decide to leave endangered allies to their fate?

And that night, pondering further, it became blatantly apparent to me that the whole 'nuclear umbrella' spiel as peddled by the likes of Robert Kagan is, frankly, a myth. But this raised a serious question: if even students such as I can see this, then surely European politicians, the bureaucrats, soldiers, and other policy-makers of one sort or another must be able to see it too. So what are they doing about it?

In truth, it's pretty obvious that a common defence policy is on the cards, the only real questions being when and how this will happen. I've long suspected that the feeble amounts spent by Europeans on their defence budgets reflect not an unwillingness to invest in national defence, but a recognition that individual national defence won't work anymore, and that what's needed is a coordinated European defence.

More on this tomorrow. I'm sure you can't wait.

The Greatest Comics Panel Ever?

I feel a bit embarrassed about yesterday's post, which was in some ways just an excuse to post two of my favourite comic panels ever. Embarrassed? Well, yes. You see, these are just panels, when you get down to it; no matter how brilliantly they're composed and executed they're not intended to stand alone. They're not comics - they're parts of comics.

(To be fair, the panel from Ed the Happy Clown is in some senses a comic in its own right, at least if you accept Scott McCloud's definition of comics - as I do in principle - but that's a separate discussion, and one I'll look forward to getting into soon.)

For all that, though, if you've been intrigued by how different and yet remarkable the panels by Brown and Sienkiewicz are you may have been tempted to follow the link to what is almost certainly the most famous panel Brian Bolland ever drew in his time working for 2000AD. As far as I can recall it won a poll a few years back when readers were asked to vote for their favourite 2000AD panel ever, and Warren Ellis declares it the greatest comics panel of all time. So there.



To be fair, 2000AD's most iconic panel is explosive enough in isolation, but to really get its full impact you need to see it in context - read a couple of episodes leading up to this, or at least the two pages leading up to and following this.

And then go and buy Judge Dredd Case Files, No. 5, because it contains not just this story but also the epic that was 'The Apocalypse War'.

And marvel, when you do, that those breathtaking Brian Bolland illustrations in 'Judge Death Lives' and 'Block Mania' were all done with a brush. Not a pen. A brush. I learned that from an interview with him in a 2000AD annual when I was a kid - I learned much else about him besides, notably that he had a human skull on a shelf in his studio, which he would grin up at from time to time and address as 'Uncle'.

All of which is a decidedly cumbersome way of leading you towards Brian Bolland's website, which I stumbled upon last night. There's some fantastic stuff there, not least his lessons section, where this master of the brush explains how he constantly manages to pull off the same trick on his computer.

In the gallery section there's a lovely sketch which I first saw in Bolland's portfolio at a convention years ago. It was an idea, ultimately discarded, for 1994's Death Gallery, a DC Comics collection under its Vertigo imprint of a series of stand-alone paintings and drawings of Neil Gaiman's Death.

No, not his death. His Death. The sister of Dream? The second of the Endless? From The Sandman? Oh, look it up. I told a friend about her today, describing her as a very cute, very sexy, very smart, and very sensible Goth girl; her response was to remark that she looked cool and wanted her to be her friend. Oddly, that's not too far from what Neil Gaiman had in mind when he created her: he wanted the kind of death he'd like to meet, someone nice and sensible, rather than someone bleak and forbidding, like Terry Pratchett's, say, or Ingmar Bergman's.

Which brings me back to my point. In the end, Brian Bolland's contribution to the Death Gallery was a picture that, well, although professional and polished like everything Brian does, lacks the wit and charm of the idea he'd discarded.

Ah well. I wonder if the original is for sale...