Author: James Aylett

Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippe have separated after seven years of marriage. The figures on Oscar winners’ marriages aren’t great, are they? I’d like to see a comparison with other, lower profile but still high stress, positions – CEOs, politicians and so forth. I doubt it’s specific to actresses, no matter how tempting that is as a simple explanation.

On Saturday, one of my best friends got married. Thinking back, there weren’t actually wedding bells, but there were all the staples of weddings past, present and future:

• traffic jams, pubs and poor directions resulting in various people getting to the church late (but fortunately still in the right order)
• a best man looking more stressed than the groom; to his credit, Andy did a fantastic job (and even managed to get up at seven the following morning to walk round the hotel gardens – which were incredibly beautiful)
• cars that haven’t been used for anything other than weddings in more than fifty years
• the father of the bride being more tearful than he’d like to admit, and occasionally closer to the bone than he perhaps originally intended
• the mother of the bride realising she wasn’t allowed to fret about her daughter’s life any more (and so fretting about her other daughter)
• meeting entertaining members of family (and family-to-be), and people you haven’t seen for ages (sometimes at once)
• unexpectedly deep and serious conversations
• children, crazy people and other live entertainments
• lots of alchohol

Perhaps predictably, one of the readings was from Ecclesiastes, as ridiculed by James a few days ago. What James failed to point out is that the following line ends “and a threefold cord is not quickly broken”. There are several lines about two being better than one, and suddenly we get three into the equation. Who is the third? The priest? The mother of the bride? Solomon? And if three lie down together, can they all keep warm, or does that only work in twos? And if so, which one gets cold?

These are questions for couples everywhere to explore themselves. To Michaela and Darren: good luck in finding your answers.

He’s talking right now on Newsnight about the BBC’s report on Wednesday about Afghanistan, where they interviewed leaders of the Taliban. Fox is claiming that this is not objective reporting; he seems to think that objective journalism only contains information from and statements by the side that the prevailing opinion believes is in the right.

This is, quite simply, utter crap. If he believes it, he is the worse form of complete fucking idiot. If he doesn’t believe it, he’s a political weasel who deserves screen coverage less than those he is seeking to censor.

Quite simply, we cannot sustain a democracy unless the public has a reasonable amount of information to go on. That includes statements that may be complete lies, from people who may be our utter, implacable, enemies. The people must make these determinations: they cannot be pre-decided by people like Liam Fox. Any belief that this is not the case is arrogant, and a worying public admission. That it is not unexpected is perhaps the most searing indictment of our current political system.

Liam Fox does not deserve his seat in parliament. If David Cameron supports him, he does not deserve the leadership of his party, and his party certainly does not deserve to form a government.

That this leaves us with the option of an immature party that cannot decide whether to stick by its beliefs or to chase votes, and a party split by the already-made decision to ignore its history to cynical win victories, should be an indication of the mountain we have to climb to achieve any kind of real democracy in this country.

You might expect me to laud the BBC for sticking up for its reports here. I don’t simply because its reporters don’t have the balls to call Liam Fox on his unacceptable propaganda – precisely what he is complaining about from the other side.

While I’m here: Amnesty International’s campaign against online censorship.

Here at Talk To Rex, we don’t have any of those newfangled things that technology has brought us recently. Okay, so we’ve got a blog. But we don’t have digital telly – in fact, the other James doesn’t have a telly at all. As a result, I didn’t get to see Torchwood on Sunday, when it showed on BBC 3, but instead had to record it off BBC 2 on Wednesday night.

Just in case you were wondering why we hadn’t commented on it yet.

Anyway. I sat down with a very nice lamb dinner to watch the opening two episodes, and my main impression at this point is pretty good. The dark mood doesn’t feel forced, the two main characters feel real (the others are a bit more cardboard, but there is scope for them to develop and round out), I quite liked the music (which means it wasn’t too annoying or foreground), and although the design was sometimes a bit chunky (the Torchwood vehicle could be more cool, frankly) they’ve got the cool gadgets and they battle aliens.

But … but, but, but. There were a couple of bits that reminded me too much of the parts of Doctor Who where the writers can’t find an explanation for what needs to happen, so just come up with a magical explanation for it; that Russell T Davies turned Doctor Who from sci-fi into fantasy was grating, but for him to set up Torchwood as fantasy not sci-fi as well just suggests that he’s in completely the wrong job. And, although they manage to do more per episode than Doctor Who, it’s still a bit slow for my taste.

That’s pretty minor, though – but I do have to wonder whether we really need a low budget X-Files set in Cardiff.

I don’t really have anything to add to what James has written. Catherine was always friendly, keen and a pleasure to work with and be around. She will be much missed.

So. Did I really have a conversation with someone about how annoying Dan Mazer is, or did I dream it?

This is quite clever – spam that says “hi, you’ve got some new content on MySpace”. What a neat way of tricking vulnerable idiots (ie: children) into click-click-clicking on random links, and down-down-downloading random viruses.

Except that anyone under sixteen thinks email sucks and wouldn’t read it in the first place. So maybe not that clever.

So this morning I got some spam which started with a quote from Paul Carr. And my first thought was: wow, spammers have got really specific in the random passages they use to get past spam filters. How clever of them to choose to spam me with words from my publisher.

Then I remembered that Paul is pretty good at doing this himself, and is usually more amusing. So we don’t need spammers after all.

From the A Word A Day mailing list:

The word buccaneer reminds me of a story I heard a long time ago back in
Scotland. On Guy Fawkes night (British equivalent of Halloween) a little
boy was visiting his neighbors dressed as a pirate Captain, complete with
tricorn hat and eyepatch. He knocked at the door of a little old lady who
lived down the road. “Oh my goodness!” said the LOL, “You’re a Pirate!”
Then she asked, “But where are your buccaneers?” The little boy looked her
in the eye, shrugged, and replied, “Under my buccan hat!”

Erm … Guy Fawkes night is the British equivalent of Hallowe’en? Surely Hallowe’en is the British equivalent of Hallowe’en? Come to think of it, wasn’t it a Celtic festival for thousands of years before it arrived in the US?

My favourite bit from that article, by the way:

In England it is said that elves rode on the backs of the villagers’ cats. The cats had fun but the villagers did not and would lock their cats up so that the elves could not catch them.

Awesome. Cats always have fun.

On Thursday I went to a prom, which The Telegraph was good enough to review so I don’t have to. I’ve never been a huge fan of Mozart in the way my mother is, but then again there’s no Mozart I can think of that I won’t quite happily listen to. Except for that performance, which I unhappily listened to, trying to figure out why the pianist was being paid.

The Bruckner was, well, Bruckner. What do you expect? The man was clearly deranged.