Who’s Cruz?
At school he will lose:
For his name, they’ll treat him like a churl.
And now I muse
Perhaps out of Loos
Cruz might have turned out a real girl.
[Yeah, yeah, you don’t pronounce “Cruz” like that. But you try rhyming it with anything that isn’t Spanish.]
A number of years ago I rather foolishly left my old college scarf on a train between London and Cambridge. I don’t have a history of leaving things on trains (well – actually I once left a piece of parchment on a train, prompting my great aunt to write to what may possibly have been the Magna Carta exhibition, but might as well have been any London museum, and con them out of another one), and I was rather upset when I realised. I was scarf bereft for a number of years, before finally taking the plunge and buying a couple of rather nice woolen scarves last year. They were scant comfort, however.
Yesterday, Mary gave me a squidgy package that, when opened, revealed a shiny, brand new, Clare college scarf. I am therefore officially the happiest James in the country.
This entry is probably of no interest to anyone other than myself. But I don’t care, because I’ve got a college scarf again. Yay!
So Charles Clarke has put his foot down. Positively no more immigrants – unless they have useful skills. Surely this is tantamount to saying that we’ll take advantage of other countries having better education systems than us? – a strange thing for a Home Secretary to say, and stranger still for one who was until recently Education Secretary.
Beardy beardy,
Oh so weirdly,
How does your country grow?
In Belmarsh jails,
While justice fails,
With bleeding hearts all in a row …
With bleeding hearts all in a row.
“The Friday Night Project”, starring the execrable non-human Jimmy Carr, also features Lucy Montgomery of Population:3. Unfortunately, much as I like Lucy and her work, nothing will bring me to deliberately watch the smug bastard. Not unless he’s being burnt at the stake as a witch, a witch, an evil witch, let him burn in hell for eternity while devils play Abu Ghraib soldiers-and-inmates games on his flabby body. And even then, not on a Friday night when there are frankly much better things to be doing than watching TV in the first place.
They have such great conversations. Years ago, a revue I co-wrote had an entire subplot based on a fragment of a conversation between two Americans that we’d overhead: “I don’t give a damn who he is – unless, of course, he’s Howard”.
Just now, walking to work, I overhead an American loudly proclaim into his mobile: “This is coming straight from the source, okay?”. I wonder what that will inspire me to …
I don’t know why everyone is so shocked at the pictures of British soldiers apparently abusing Iraqi detainees – about which some idiot on C5 last night said “[the British army] knew that people would call it ‘the British Abu Ghraib'” – which we probably wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t mentioned it.
Vapid verbal posturing aside, there’s a deep problem with the media’s coverage of this. Did we learn nothing from the Stamford experiment? We shouldn’t be surprised that people do these things, and we certainly shouldn’t be appalled by human behaviour. Oh, hang on – that’s just more posturing. We aren’t ignorant of our natures, we aren’t ignorant of what we, as human beings, are capable of, of our desires, our bestiality. Morality isn’t innate – if it was, we wouldn’t need books or gurus or the police force, or to talk about it. If morality were innate, we wouldn’t have the Daily Mail.
Everyone has felt the urge to do real violence at some point; many of us have given in to it. Our surprise at the latest photos of wartime abuse, then, is either feigned or – perhaps more worryingly – an indication of our unwillingness to accept ourselves. Humanity, clothed in red.
Which isn’t to say that people should do this sort of thing – or even that they shouldn’t avoid doing it, although that’s a more complex issue. If nothing else, it’s probably unwise for soldiers sent to pacify a region in order to reduce terrorism to use terror tactics on anyone in the region, be they terrorists, insurgents or whatever. But let’s not blame those on the ground for mimicking their seniors – it is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.
Although, for the record, I prefer chocolate. I get the feeling that General Sir Mike Jackson would have, too.
Former Labour MP Lord Janner, who is a high profile member of Britain’s Jewish community, branded Harry’s action’s “stupid and evil”.
Stupid I might agree with (no, actually, I wouldn’t: it’s foolish, not stupid), but evil is a word too far. Or, indeed, a Labour peer too far, as he goes on to emit the amazing sentence, “I would send him in the army as fast as possible.” Is British English actually this guy’s first language? According to his biography, he’s Welsh, but he seems to speak English like he’s French. But then according to his biography:
He is a member of the Magic Circle and the International Brotherhood of Magicians.
Which makes me rather worried about criticising him. He might turn me into a newt.
I’ve just seen the Lemony Snicket film, which is probably the prettiest thing I’ve seen for a long time. It’s no doubt common for people to compare it to Harry Potter, so I certainly won’t – and mostly because Lemony Snicket should not have been a film. It was crying out to be a TV series being, as it is, a series of unfortunate events. Great fun though it was, it did the road movie thing, which is to say everything goes wrong in one place so they move somewhere else in case that’s a bit better.
Also, if it had been a TV series, they probably wouldn’t have got Jim Carrey. It’s not that he’s bad in it – indeed, I can’t remember seeing him better – it’s just that he’s outclassed by everyone else (except perhaps Billy Connolly). Yes, I’m sure the character is hammy and ridiculous in the books, but hey, this is a different medium, and while the visuals were great, he just took it a bit too far on a couple of occasions.
Three books went into this film – there are going to be thirteen books in total (apparently), although they’ll surely run out of not-quite-relatives before then, meaning that the Baudelaire children will come out from under the shadow of the adults at some point. A bit like Return Of The Jedi, without Mark Hamill.
Actually, why didn’t they get Mark Hamill to play Olaf?
Well, several dresses, really – last night I saw the Old Vic pantomime, Aladdin. Which very much has Ian McKellen as the pantomime dame. (Note that this is in no way worse than Aled Jones singing O Holy Night – it’s entirely possible that Ian McKellen is a better singer than Aled Jones, although probably not a better dancer.)
It’s actually been some time since I went to a pantomime – years, in fact – and although it was heavy on the innuendo and celebrity references, it was still very much a children’s pantomime. Actually, thinking about it, children’s pantomimes are always full of innuendo and celebrity references. Fun for all the family, providing your family knows about sex.
I really want to see the script, though, because there was a scene to music where Hanky and Panky covered each other in wallpaper paste, and I’m convinced that in the script it just said “lazzo”.
Anyway, that’s not the point. Ian McKellen in a dress, on stage at the Old Vic, in a wonderfully camp pantomime. Who’d have thought?
I woke from a dream of teaching Willow improvisation. I offered to share a taxi with her from her house to school, but apparently her laptop wouldn’t fit. I pointed out that “taxis are, like, quite big these days”, but she wasn’t convinced by my pretending-to-be-Oz antics.
Also, related to the impro workshop (no, really), Xander was drawing things on a tree, although it turned into a whiteboard when Oz started drawing happy clouds. I had to show him how to use the board eraser though, so I feel pretty good about things.
It’s just occured to me that I might have been Buffy, which is quite disturbing. Maybe I was Giles, though, which would be good.
In real life, there’s a guy at the station who looks a bit like John Goodman. The dream world was still better, though, and the happy clouds were really cute.
Talk To Rex 