I was very, very drunk...

 "Bruce Springsteen," she said, as an opener.
 She chose well, because that's the two word phrase most likely to get me to prick up my ears and stand to attention, after "free porn!" and "more beer?"
 "...I don't get it," she continued. "Whenever I hear him, I just think 'Give the man a Strepsil."
 Now, I'm used to getting shit for being a Springsteen fan.
 I'm used to getting shit from people who think he's an "80s act," and I'm used to getting shit from people who think "Born in the USA" is about patriotism.*
 So I'm no stranger to defending my fandom, and at the time, I rolled with it, with some good grace, not least because I respect the person who was texting those thoughts to me.
 Being a Springsteen fan requires some fairly specific socio-economic conditions, in my mind. You have to be poor enough to know what it's like to be poor, but smart enough to know what it's like to imagine NOT being poor.
 These criteria do not include, for the record, people who are middle class, went to uni and became poor, and now think they are "poor" as a description.
 That's not poor.
 Poor is having worn a high-viz jacket more working days of your life than not.
 Poor is knowing that you can eat or smoke, and you'd better figure out which one you want most.
 In possibly my favourite passage in his entire work, Springsteen explains the issue with typically astute stoicism.
 The song is called "Racing in the Street," the title a deliberate nod to Martha and the Vandellas. The melody is, similarly, a nod to the Crystals, singing "And Then He Kissed Me," although the piano refrain from that song has been slowed to the point that it is no longer a celebration and has become an elegy.
 Against this background, Bruce sings that "Some guys? They just give up living. They start dying little by little, piece by piece. Some guys come home from work and wash up, and go racing in the streets."
 That's all of working class life, in a line.
 Whatever you do, after your shitty job is over, whether it's going to the pub, whether it's reading the classics, whether it really is racing in the streets, you have to have something that makes the rest of your life bearable. Without your own personal salvation, it's all for nothing.
 With that in mind, I'm watching a documentary on Amy Winehouse, who I wasn't a big fan of.
 And she, in turn, is saying she didn't like Ella Fitzgerald.
 I'm sure there were people Ella didn't like.
 Ultimately, however, it doesn't matter who you like, or what you like, or what it means to others.
 Find something that makes the rest bearable. Good music is good. Funny jokes are funny. Bad music and not-funny jokes aren't worth it, but the beauty of life is that nobody will ever fully agree on what's good, what's bad, what's funny, and what isn't.
 Let's just all have fun with it. Find a thing you like, and that keeps you sane, whether it's Amy Winehouse, Ella Fitzgerald or Jack Daniel's.



*It isn't.

Superheroes - Idiots in Tights.

 I've been doing that thing again; y'know, thinking whilst watching TV.
 It's never a good idea.
 I've already discussed how the day-to-day living of my life makes me feel like I'm automatically better at other peoples' jobs than they are. A recent example is from KFC. I don't know how much Kentucky Fried Chicken paid the person who came up with the line "There's a little bit of the Colonel in every one of them," but you could have paid me less money to come up with something better.
 "Something better" in this case being "anything that doesn't make you think that KFC food contains bits of elderly corpse."
 In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I only noticed that line in passing in an ad the other day. Having just looked up the ad on Youtube, it turns out that the line is referencing the many cooks employed by KFC, and that by following the Colonel's recipes, you could say there's a little bit of the Colonel in every one of them. Which makes me think about cannibalism AND sodomy, so I still think I could write a better ad.
 Anyway, my "I could do better" mindset has begun leaking out of reality and bleeding into fiction, recently.
 I guess it started with "Skyfall," in which Bond goes rogue to protect Judi Dench, and takes her to his old, remote house in the highlands.
 I'm not one to argue with fifty years experience in shooting people and banging models with funny names, so I'm hesitant to say I'm a better spy than Bond.
 What I AM going to say is: Really?!
 That's it?!
 That's his plan?!
 I would have hoped MI6 trained its people a little better than that. When your master plan involves re-enacting Straw Dogs with a couple of septuagenarians, you might not be the sharpest operative in the business. If you ever find yourself in a situation where your assets are "two pensioners and a shotgun" and your opponent's assets are "Apache gunship full of mercenaries" you might want to reconsider pretty much every decision that has led you to this point. Bond, it turns out, is a fucking idiot.
 Same thing with Batman.
 Batman is trained by the League of Shadows who are, when analysed, the worst ninjas in the world. (I'm not sure if the League of Shadows is an actual league, like in football, but if it is then the Himalayan branch would definitely be fighting relegation somewhere in the Autoglass division.)
 First of all, this is an organisation that is trying to influence the running of the world, covertly. Why the fuck do they do it from up a mountain in the arse end of China?! It's not like you can spring into action when it's a three day hike to the nearest paved road. Deploying highly-trained ninjas should really never have to involve hiring a minicab.
 Not that they can be THAT well trained, because the film implies that their chief techniques are to get people high and dress alike. They'd presumably develop massive penis envy at even the ropiest branch of Fitness First.
 "What do you train with? Weights? Smith machine? Nautilus?"
 "Nah, big jug of LSD and some pyjamas, mainly..."
 Of course, Bruce Wayne wouldn't have been able to destroy the place had they not kept a frankly "asking for it" amount of gunpowder right in the middle of the dojo, for some reason. There must have been somewhere else to put it, surely? Do ninjas not believe in sheds?!
 And then there's Iron Man. I watched that again, recently, and noticed something that's been driving me crazy ever since: Before he flies off for his boss fight with The Big Lebowski, Tony Stark tells General NotCheadle to "Keep the skies clear," before having a badass faceplate-closing, turn to camera moment...
 ...And then smashing a hole through the roof of his garage.
 Seriously, go back and watch the movie. Instead of leaving the garage he is standing in via the actual exit - which he his seen using earlier in the film - he just flies straight up through the roof and smashes a big hole through it.
 Why?! Why would you do that?! There is a demonstrably easier way to leave than blasting a big hole in your living room floor. Even when he's as far as the living room, he then has to presumably blow another hole in his roof, or fly through the window. Either way, he's going to be putting in a call to the insurance company in the morning for absolutely no fucking reason. (Probably the same insurance company that just got through sorting out that fire at the League of Shadows.)
 Tony Stark is supposed to be a genius. He can build a flying battle suit that travels faster than the speed of sound, but he doesn't have a clicker for the garage door, apparently. It's baffling.
 In summation, I'm a better spy than James Bond, I'm a better ninja than anyone who works for the League of Shadows, and I'm better at flying an Iron Man suit than Tony Stark.

 ...Why can't I get a [better] job?!

Guns DO Kill People. (So do maniacs.)

 Having a fairly sterling crack at ruining the holiday season, a man reportedly walked into a primary school in America today and shot a bunch of people.
 Although this is a horrible thing to happen, it's depressing that it feels barely newsworthy. "Mass shooting in America" is such a common opener that several newscasters use it as a way of saying "Hello."
 To say American gun politics is complicated is laughable. Basically, everyone can have guns, and you're a Communist if you argue with that.
 My personal views on gun control in the states are a little more nuanced. Whilst I think that a blanket "let 'em all pack heat" policy is probably unwise, I would, in all honesty, probably buy a gun if I lived in America, purely because I don't want to be at a disadvantage. There are quite obviously a lot of crazy people in that country, they're all armed, and I would want to have something to defend myself with that wasn't punching if one of them opened fire at me. I honestly do have some sympathy with the viewpoint that if everyone had a gun, there would be fewer spree killings.
 I also, for the record, feel that there would be no spree killings at all if they worked harder at the whole "don't give the crazies firearms" end of things, but, again, that makes me a liberal, homosexual baby-killer in the eyes of about 50% of Americans.
 The inevitable non-debate will start in the next few days, and at the end of it, nothing will be resolved, but I've been wondering if perhaps America isn't having the wrong debate in the first place.
 The (gun)ship has sailed. There will never be a way to put America's ballistic genie back in its bottle. There are so many guns in America that there will effectively always be guns in America, and there's no point in trying to change that now.
 Except that that shouldn't matter.
 Because what nobody seems to notice is that there's a more fundamental question to answer, here: Why is everyone going so fucking crazy?!
 It may sound flippant, but it seems that there are some psychological issues that really need to be addressed in all sections of American society.
 We've already seen that postal workers and high school students seem prone to fits of murderous violence, and I'm intrigued to see what the background of the latest spree killer turns out to be.
 Something appears to be deeply, inherently broken in the national American psyche, and gun ownership doesn't really factor into it.
 As an illustration, look at Moscow. A city where there are more guns than people, and a higher percentage of alcohol-per-head than the Pogues annual concert at the Priory.
 Despite everyone being drunk and armed (~450,000 guns to ~400,000 people, fact fans) Russia as a whole features only ONCE in the top 45 results for spree killings in the "Workplace/School/Political/Religious" category of so-called "Rampage Killers." America, by contrast, has 12 of the top 45 results, including six of them in the top fifteen "workplace" killings. That's pretty astonishing, considering that the playing field consists of every nation on Earth.
 To stick with the statistical sample above, in terms of the top fifteen non-specific rampage killers (ie: people who didn't go into their office/school/church and who just went crazy wherever the mood took them) Russia crops up twice, and admittedly claims the top spot for all of Europe. However, that particular top-scoring massacre took place in 1925, which means that Russia had a period of 76 years where nobody shot a bunch of other people in a random location.
 This is, I should stress, Russia as a whole. Moscow, where the gun-per-head concentration is through the roof, doesn't even rate a mention.
 Neither does Switzerland, a country with an exceptionally high level of gun ownership. (They score about the same as Russia on the spree-killing stats.)
 Clearly, access to firearms is no barometer of the likelihood that a spree killing will occur in any given nation.
 So, once again: What the fuck is wrong with Americans?
 I don't have an answer, for once. I don't have a glib, ill-thought-out hypothesis or a silly idea.
 I just think a lot of bloodshed could be avoided in the future if Americans could work out what kept driving these people over the edge, and try to nip it in the bud.
 Or, y'know. Do the sensible thing and not sell lots of guns to people who are noticeably deranged.

Happiness Ruins The Blues...

 A little over a hundred years since it was first reported in the wild - on a lonely train platform by a bemused white journalist - the blues seems to have finally vanished from the popular music scene.
 Sure, there are the odd traces of blues DNA left in almost everything from Kanye West to the X-Factor, but real, honest blues music played by well known contemporary artists is a thing of the past.
 It wasn't always this way; any major band of yesteryear you can name owed a lot to the sound of poor black American men, from the Rolling Stones (named after a Muddy Waters song) to Led Zepplin (named after something Ringo Starr said, but we'll ignore that) to Beatles tracks like "Revolution."
 There was a time when any guitar hero worth his plectrum was steeped in the blues, from Jimmy Page to Jeff Beck to Joe Walsh. (It also helped, apparently, if your name began with "J".)
 Even as late as the 1990s, Eric Clapton was a major global star, and went triple-platinum with the blues covers record "From the Cradle."
 So what went wrong? Times change, granted, but something as important to the foundations of modern music as the blues should surely still be making its presence felt, right?!
 Maybe it's that everyone is happier and living longer.
 Look at the first people to record the blues: poor, disenfranchised, discriminated against, often with some sort of notable medical ailment. If you heard of an artist called Blind, Limbless McGee or Balding, Toothless, Arthritic, Impotent Jones, there wouldn't be much doubt about which section of Fopp you'd find their records in. The blues was a genre for people who had it almost cartoonishly hard in life. Poverty, borderline slave-labour in cotton fields, social injustice, an early grave - these were the expectations of the healthy, let alone people like Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Cripple Clarence Lofton (who actually began life as a tap-dancer, because the only thing more lacking in 1930s Mississippi than good eye care was a stringent enforcement of trades descriptions legislature), Peg Leg Howell, the list goes on and on.
 These days, nobody has it that hard. Even people with physical ailments (Jeff Healey is blind; Dr. John had his finger shot off in a bar fight) have modern medicine to rely on. Nobody is as utterly miserable as black people living a hardscrabble existence in the depression era South - nobody is even as miserable as the average person was in the 1950s, when bands like the Stones were coming together and artists like Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters were big news in the states.
 Nowadays, things are easier and people are happier. Even Eric Clapton has settled down late in life and had children, meaning that he hasn't made a good record since... Well, since the 90s. His last three efforts were an overproduced covers album, a duets album with J.J. Cale on which he contributed only one impossibly twee song about his kids, and the album "Back Home," a record so bad that I only listened to it once because I couldn't afford to keep buying my speakers rape councelling.
 Other blues players are still out there, but they're usually at least seventy and never likely to trouble the charts.
 The overall happiness and progress of the human race is going to lead to a dearth of great blues performers. Eddie Boyd raged that he "worked five long years for one woman" who had the nerve to throw him out; the most John Mayer can complain about is that he spent five long months shagging Jennifer Aniston, something for which most men would willingly sell their souls.
 That brings me to another point: Selling your soul to the devil just isn't done anymore.
 For those who aren't aware, briefly, Robert Johnson, one of the earliest and most influential artists in the blues genre, was a talentless nobody who would occasionally hang around juke joints attempting to play harmonica. He disappeared for six months and when he returned, he was one of the greatest guitarists ever recorded. His music is still awe-inspiringly complex, often involving Johnson simultaneously playing two tunes on the same guitar. He died at the age of 27 (don't they all) under mysterious circumstances.
 Son House, a contemporary of Johnson's, made a passing remark in 1966 that Johnson had "sold his soul" to learn to play, and from this throwaway metaphor, a legend was born that Johnson had met the Devil himself at a crossroads at midnight, and struck a Faustian bargain to obtain his supernatural playing ability.
 Which probably isn't true, according to everything we know about reality, ever.
 Still, Son House's initial comment - taken as intended - has weight. Johnson must have studied night and day to get that good, just as Jimi Hendrix would years later. (Hendrix would, according to friends, take his guitar everywhere, including to the movies.)
 Nobody is doing that kind of thing in the modern world, for two reasons.
 One, as already explained, we're all happier and better adjusted than we used to be. The shut-ins and loners of the world are fewer and farther between, and therefore there are fewer people who will at any one time be obsessively learning an instrument as their only means of recreation, and two: Even if there are still obsessive, lonely people, there's no longer such a thing as an "only means of recreation." In the 21st century, all anyone needs is a computer and a wifi connection and you can amuse yourself with all kinds of things for hours upon end. Dedication to one single hobby is basically a thing of the past, not to mention the fact that tormented, howling, unrequited love - the foundation of so many great blues songs - can usually be patched up by ten minutes on youporn.
 This is why there has been a slow dying-out of the blues-influenced guitar god. Fewer unhappy people means fewer blues musicians. Fewer blind people means fewer blues musicians and more unwanted labradors. The ready availability of the internet and all its distractions means fewer dedicated music students and, ironically, more blind people.
 With the improvement of living conditions for all people, increased tolerance and the march of technology, we're never going to get good quality misery again. Which is probably for the best, but in it's own weird way, it kinda gives me the blues.

Five Horrible People Behind Heart-Warming True Stories

 Every so often, I pitch an idea to Cracked.com, and every so often, they politely decline it or ignore me totally. In the spirit of this quaint tradition, here's one I didn't even bother trying to pitch, but still wanted to write.

 Anyone capable of even a little bit of critical thinking knows that "based on a true story" at the start of a movie doesn't mean the same thing as "This is all completely true, we swear."
 Sometimes, however, the events in popular films are so completely contrary to what actually happened that film-makers would be better off with a title card that said "Here's some shit we decided might have happened."
 Such as...

 5. American Gangster.


The Movie: Denzel Washington stars as real life drug dealer Frank Lucas. Having worked his way up from a mere limo driver in the underworld hierarchy, Lucas uses a combination of brutality and strategic thinking to dominate the heroin trade in 1970s New York.
 An intelligent, business savvy black man, Lucas is able to out-plan the competition and obtain his heroin direct from South East Asia, smuggling it in the coffins of dead G.I.s, whilst using his calm, philosophical exterior and the dismissive racism of the time to remain under the police radar.

Stupid Reality: Whilst all movies employ a "pinch of salt" mentality when claiming to be based on the truth, people who knew Lucas - or, indeed, any of the principle characters involved in the story - have put the movie's accuracy rating at a healthy "one percent." That's an estimate from people intimately involved with the real events the movie is based on. It also means "American Gangster" is probably less accurate than "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
 Starting his life in the criminal hierarchy as a humble "guy-who-robbed-bars-at-gunpoint," Lucas was described by associates as a brutal, impulsive and functionally illiterate flunky.
 Rather than the suave, contemplative and sympathetic figure epitomised by Denzel, the real Lucas succeeded in crime because he was the nastiest rat in the shit-house. Not only is there no evidence of his ever using coffins to smuggle drugs, but most contemporaries agree he simply wasn't smart enough to come up with the business model he is credited with. The only source for these facts about Lucas' life? An interview with Frank Lucas from a few years ago.
 Turns out violent heroin dealers from the slums can't entirely be trusted. Who knew?


4. Braveheart. 

The Movie: Mel "he wasn't crazy yet" Gibson plays Scottish folk-hero William Wallace, a simple man who wants only the quiet life until, typically, he is PUSHED TOO FAR. Atypically, he then instigates a national uprising and begins a war that eventually sees Scotland gain independence. (Apparently, there are some occasional wars that aren't caused by Jews.)
 Wallace is  martyred in an emotional scene before he sees this come to pass, maintaining his stoical dignity and everyman demeanour even in the face of torture.

Stupid Reality: Also, he was a pumped-up giant who committed a slew of war crimes.
 Seriously.
 Whilst Mel Gibson stands a normal 5' 10", most scholars agree that in reality, Wallace was a giant, estimated to stand at an absolute minimum of six-feet-six. When the script for the movie mentions that Wallace is rumoured to be seven feet tall, it's not actually kidding.
 Also, he was far less a noble savage forced to take arms, and more a savage savage who liked taking arms off of other people. At the shoulder. With a big fucking sword.
 After the battle of Stirling Bridge, Wallace - whose forces had routed the English - personally skinned the corpse of the Scottish treasurer and had a long strip of his hide made into a strap for his sword.
 Following this victory, Wallace invaded England and was reported to commit acts of ethnic cleansing, his men raping and murdering anyone they came across with glee. He was also said to burn down schools with children inside, and have monks drowned for his entertainment.
 One can only assume those scenes were extras on the DVD.
 Wallace has spawned a thousand Scottish tattoos, remembering him for patriotic slogans like "How can I be guilty of treason when England is foreign to me?"
 His other famous line, "Because Fuck Monks And Children!" has yet to catch on.


3. Erin Brockovich.

The Movie: Julia Roberts plays Erin Brockovich, a spunky female lawyer, because for a few years in the early 2000s, approximately 30% of our entertainment involved spunky female lawyers. 

                                      Not all of them were hot, and not all of them made the sequel...  


 After getting a job as a legal secretary, plucky single mother Erin notices a file on a small town where there are a disproportionately high number of cancer cases, and, through her amazing talents of hard-headedness and large-boobedness, manages to sleuth out the cause: A local conglomerate poisoning the water table and, by extension, the people of the town.
 She then champions the cause of these poor downtrodden folks and eventually brings the evil corporation to justice.

Stupid Reality: Alright, fair enough, Erin Brockovich wasn't an illiterate heroin dealer who burned children alive like the other entrants on this list.* But the happy ending of the movie is far from accurate.
 In the film, Brockovich's street-smarts lead to the case of the townspeople being considered in private arbitration, which means that it is reviewed by a judge or judges without the need for a trial-by-jury.
 This is fine in theory, but legal scholars have begun to fret that the rise of private arbitration runs the risk of creating a two-tier legal system and rampant cronyism.
 In the case of the Brockovich trial, the judges who arbitrated were wined, dined and taken on cruises by the lawyers for the conglomerate that poisoned the town, which does tend to put paid to the idea of impartiality.
 A lot of the residents of Hinkley, California were aghast at the story portrayed in the movie. Far from a happy ending, many of them had to wait months for their settlements - without ever receiving the interest that had accrued - and felt that their compensation was nowhere near high enough. And some claim to have never received their money at all.
 Residents have even attempted to sue their own lawyers for, in layman's terms, "doing a shitty job."
 Still, at least the company that was poisoning the water has been forced to mend it's evil ways, right? Not according to a 2010 article it hasn't, no...


2. Bonnie and Clyde.

The Movie: "They're Young, They're In Love, And They Kill People," proclaimed the tag-line to the sexy, devil-may-care crime movie with the tragic ending.
  Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (played with ridiculous attractiveness by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) embark on a Robin Hood crime spree, never harming the innocent or robbing the working man. They're playful, good looking and really don't mean any harm, only killing in self defense and at one point taking playful pictures with a kidnapped lawman. Sort of like "The Beverly Hillbillies," but with more larceny.
 Eventually, hubris and the harsh nature of the world catches up with the young lovers, and their former lawman hostage, enraged at the ignominy of his treatment, tracks them down. Betrayed by one of their own, the unarmed lovers are cornered and share a final, passionate glance before being torn apart in a hellish, unending maelstrom of gunfire.

Stupid Reality:  To say that the real-life experiences of depression-era outlaws were grittier than the movies make out is like saying that the Holocaust was less fun than Julie Andrews made it seem.
 Clyde Barrow, whose first arrest came from not returning a rental car on time, was a killer long before he met Bonnie Parker, having beaten a man to death in prison after the man repeatedly raped him. Embittered (for some strange reason) upon his release, Barrow began a one man war with the forces of law and order in Texas, seeing every crime he committed as an act of personal revenge on authority.
 And the whole Robin Hood aspect? The Barrow gang were responsible for the shootings of nine lawmen, as well as a smattering of shopkeepers, who were killed for items such as "twenty-eight dollars and some groceries."
 As for the glamour of outlaw life, the gang's notoriety left them afraid to approach public areas, meaning they invariably bathed in cold, outdoor streams and ate around campfires, if at all.
 Having narrowly escaped capture by the awesomely named Sheriff Smoot Schmid (sheriff Smoot Schmid sold sea shells by the sea shore on his days off, fact fans) the two murderous hobos were finally brought to ground by Frank Hamer, who was far from the bumbling victim the movie portrayed.
 A big, powerfully built man who was semi-retired at this point, Hamer was a legend in Texas for doing things his own way, cracking heads and getting results. He was known for his disdain for authority and an obsession with his own personal ideas of justice. Before Barrow and Parker, he had personally shot fifty-three suspects, and been injured in the line of duty seventeen times.
 That's right. Bonnie and Clyde, who were the bad guys, were taken down by Dirty-fucking-Harry.
 Hamer had never met the couple before his posse killed them, but far from being the un-armed sweethearts hollywood gave us, Bonnie and Clyde were found to be in possession of machine guns, shotguns, rifles and pistols, and a few thousand rounds of ammunition. Of course, by the time these weapons were discovered in the back seat of their car, the couple had been shot so many times that the coroner couldn't find a way to keep the embalming fluid in the corpses.

 
1. The Hurricane.

The Movie: Much like the song Bob Dylan wrote about the same subject, The Hurricane is a story of racially motivated injustice in 1960s America. Denzel Washington (again?!) plays Rubin "The Hurricane" Carter, a young black boxer on the fast-track to the middleweight title.
 Having already been wrongfully jailed for attempting to defend his friends from a pedophile, Carter is all set to put his past behind him when the spectre of racial discrimination rises again, seeing him first denied his rightful place as the world champion, and then arrested for brutal murders that he had nothing to do with.
 Imprisoned but unbowed, Carter spends years fighting the corrupt white system, becoming an icon of racial injustice, before mounting a last-ditch appeal that sees him exonerated of his crimes, finally allowed to walk free after nearly twenty years of wrongful imprisonment.

Stupid Reality: First off, Carter wasn't on a fast track to anywhere, much. Although a ranked middleweight contender, Carter was already past his prime and slipping down the rankings by the time of his fight with middleweight champ Joey Giardello. Giardello won the fight not by deignt of racist judges, but with the classic boxing trick of "handing Rubin Carter his ass for fifteen straight rounds." Giardello sued the movie producers, who were forced to admit it was bullshit and pay him off.
 As for Carter himself, he was far from the embattled saint depicted on screen. He had spent time in juvenile detention, but not for protecting his friends from pederasts. He was instead convicted of "protecting" a man from his own wallet and wristwatch in a mugging - mugging being one of Carter's hobbies. He assaulted and robbed numerous people, black and white, with impunity.
 Whilst spending time in detention centres, he was frequently noted for his habit of blaming everyone else for his own wrongdoing. Even when caught red-handed in a misdeed, he would always strenuously protest his own innocence and claim he was the victim of various conspiracies against him.
 In June of 1966, two black men - one short and stocky, one tall and thin - entered the Lafayette bar and grill in New Jersey and shot three people dead. Witnesses say the shooters left in a white car. Rubin Carter was subsequently pulled over whilst driving his white Cadillac, and, when police recognised him, he was immediately LET GO.
 Far from being discriminated against for his race, Carter was let off the hook because of his celebrity.
 As reports became more detailed and specified that the shooters had left in a white Cadillac with butterfly tail lights, Carter was stopped again (still driving his white Cadillac - which had butterfly tail lights) and arrested.
 In the car were Carter (a muscular 5' 7") and his friend John Artis (who was taller and thinner.) Also in the car were a shotgun shell and a .32 caliber pistol round. Both a shotgun and a .32 were used in the Lafayette shootings.
 Convicted and sentenced, Carter began a long campaign of protesting his innocence, eventually leading to a re-trial a decade later. This time - with two black jurors in attendance - Carter was found guilty again.
 During the period of his re-trial, incidentally, Carter was released on bail just long enough to savagely assault a female supporter in a quibble over a hotel bill.
 Carter was eventually released, as in the movie, due to the efforts of a Canadian religious sect that, in reality, Carter has since severed all ties with. His convictions were never oveturned; it was merely decided that a third trial, twenty years after the fact, was not in the public interest, and that Carter should be released on the basis of time served.
 If all of this weren't damning enough, during his re-trial, Carter was offered a deal: Take a polygraph test. If he passed the test and it agreed that he was innocent, the result would be included in his defense. If he failed the test and it made him look guilty, it would be ignored.
 Carter still refused to take the test.
 Also, Denzel Washington REALLY needs to start screening his parts a little better.




*That we know of.

Be Careful What You Write.

 I've been a cigar smoker since I was eighteen.
 Like pretty much everyone who turns eighteen and isn't Amish, there's a sudden thrill of new things that you're actually, legally allowed to do.
 In fact, when I was eighteen, you could still do a lot of things that you can't do now, and one of them was "smoke in a bar."
 So I took up cigar smoking, because cool people did it. Y'know, like Wolverine from X-Men.
 I probably looked fucking ridiculous.
 I probably still do.
 But I was surprisingly gratified to find that I really enjoyed it. This wasn't something I suffered through for the sake of affectation. I liked it, I still like it, and I still do it.
 I could bang on and on about why it's so great, but I won't. Cigars are just a thing that I'm into.
 Which is why I was browsing around related things on the internet earlier, and came across something in the "I can't add much to this, it's just funny" column, similar to my recent post about Sly Stallone's press release.
 This is a quote from Cigar Afficianado magazine, in 1993.
 I want to stress, this is a full five years BEFORE the Lewinsky scandal broke.
 With hindsight, though, it's fucking hilarious:

 "President William Jefferson Clinton may have comfortably adjusted to the ban on smoking in the White House--it seems he doesn't light up ... anymore. In effect, he hasn't been banned from enjoying a cigar, just smoking it. In this way he can avoid any accusations of inhalation, and he is still able to savor some of a cigar's more relaxing elements."


 Smoke if you got 'em.

I Read the Booze Today, Oh Boy...

 Drink up, folks, the party is over.
 The writing is on the wall, the jacks are back in their boxes and the queens have gone to bed. The jig is up, the fat lady is singing, and the band is playing their last number.
 The government - bastards that they are - are going to introduce a minimum price for alcohol, based on the number of units contained in a recepticle.
 That minimum price, they tell us, is now likely to be forty-five pence.
 Or, as the drinking world knows it: "Hahaha, you-fucking-what?!"
 Let's backtrack.
 Alcohol is measured in units, these days, based on an arbitrary scale that means nothing at all.
 For example, in the UK, one unit is defined as ten millilitres of alcohol, whereas in Australia, it is defined as ten milligrams. In practical terms, this means that in one hour, a human body metabolises 95% of a UK unit, but only 75% of an Australian unit.
 This is one of many, many reason why Australians can usually be found in bars.
 Still, once we understand how much a unit represents in a given country, we can extrapolate how much it is safe to drink, right?
 Can we fuck, straw man.
 The guideline amounts for people in the UK were "plucked out of the air" by doctors who admitted they had no hard evidence, but felt obliged to say something to justify their pay.
 So, we don't know how much a unit is, objectively, and we don't know how many of these non-objective units are really going to harm us.
 Based on this, the government decided to impose a hard limit of 50p per unit of alcohol per drink.
 The average bottle of spirit contains 700ml of liquid. Purely in the interests of research, I decided to see how much booze I could buy for fifteen pounds.
 Three days later, with a tattoo I don't recall asking for and a nasty rash, I decided that maybe the best way to work this problem out was with solid maths instead of field research.
 Assuming a volume of 700ml, that means each bottle of booze contains 28 shots.
 Once again, if we assume that a spirit is 40% alcohol by volume, which is standard, we arrive at about one unit per shot, meaning that there are 28 units of alcohol in a full bottle of spirits, and at fifty pence per unit, that bottle will cost fourteen pounds.
 Assuming that ASDA is the cheapest UK supermarket (and the ad campaign keeps assuring us that it is) then, as of their website tonight (29/11/12), a bottle of Jack Daniels costs fourteen pounds.
 Or, to put it another way, it costs exactly as much as the government is trying to make it cost, already.
 How much is Gordon's gin? An admittedly under-priced twelve pounds. Only slightly under-priced, however, as Gordon's is only 37.5% ABV, and thus the new guidelines would mean it should cost twelve pounds and sixty pence.
 A staggering 60p increase.
 Smirnoff Vodka? ABV of 37.5% again, meaning it's 40p over-priced at £13.00.
 I could go on.
 In fact I will, because, in light of complaints from the National Association for Drinking Like Old People Fuck (or similar) , the government is now watering-down the law* so that shops only have to charge 45p per unit of alcohol, meaning that nothing will change at all, ever, except that the government will be able to say that they made a law to change things, without actually having to change anything.
 I'm picking generic, brand name booze because anything fancier would automatically cost more, but there are, admittedly, products out there that sell for less than the proposed 45/50p per unit limit.
 These are the sort of products you see on the bottom shelves, with blank labels that just say "Gin" and "Whisky" and "Vodka."
 These products are almost exclusively bought by alcoholics and the homeless, and even then, are not that much cheaper than the government proposal would force them to be.
 Richmond Gin, for example, is the cheapest gin product on the ASDA website and costs £9.65. With the proposed increase, this means the price would jump less than two pounds.
 What difference would it make?
 According to today's BBC report, these price-per-unit increases would save 700 lives annually.
 Again, let's work out the numbers.
 With 70 million people in the UK, this means that we'd be saving 0.001% of the population from death, and, objectively, it's the drunkest 0.001%.
 Forgive me for being hard-hearted, but the drunkest 700 people in England (Scotland is working a different scheme) are probably not the ones who are ever going to contribute much to society.
 As a frequent, heavy drinker myself, I'd like to point out that I'd have to give it some serious fucking welly before I became part of the drunkest 0.001% of the population.
 Even if we were determined to save these people, they're hardly a first priority.
 A quick search of NHS shows that, in terms of annual mortalities, 700 people clocks in below many other fatal things, like, for example, murder. (Murder takes out 970 people per year, apparently.)
 So, provably, the government is more worried about the price of a drink than it is about the murder rate.
 Maybe - hell, demonstrably - the government should really be spending its efforts on more important things, like policing, before it worries about increasing the price of a drink by a pittance.
 Either that, or they should at least raise the cost of stabs per murder, concurrently.

*Geddit?!

Cry If I Want To...

 As the title implies, this is my blog, and therefore I get the sole say about content. So this is just going to be a late-night reaction to the news that Ricky Hatton has lost his comeback fight and retired.
 Non-boxing-fans can probably skip this one.
 Ricky Hatton is, by nature of his sport, a solo artist. He's not part of a team that has just lost; he takes everything, winning and losing, defeat and glory, upon his own shoulders first and foremost.
 Whilst any solo athlete (tennis players, snooker players, track and field athletes of all shades) can lay claim to this honour-cum-burden, almost nobody can lay claim to have captured the public imagination like Ricky Hatton.
 Few athletes, if any, have become so loved by the people. And it is precisely because Hatton has always been a man OF the people that he is so beloved. A humble, likeable everyman with an extraordinary gift who fell on hard times as his glory days deserted him, he was both a superman under the limelight, and all too human once it faded.
 Many decried his decision to return to the ring after a four year absence - an absence plagued by depression, desolation and drug problems. Personally, I didn't think this return was necessarily wise, but I understood it completely.
 Jerry Boyd, the great cut-man who wrote "Million Dollar Baby," prefaced his second and final book with a quote from the Illiad. Hector, knowing that his death at the hands of Achilles has been foretold, prays only that he can have some measure of glory before his end. "Let me not die without doing some great thing that men shall talk of hereafter," he implores. The same line becomes the preface to Boyd's book.
 This burning desire to be more than nothing is what forges athletes, and fighters in particular. For all of his telegraphed punches and hackneyed sequels, Stallone understood it perfectly in "Rocky." Having seen the venue for his improbable fight against impossible odds, Rocky, crushed under the weight of reality, returns home to bed and stares into space as he tells his wife that he cannot possibly win. That he knows the task ahead of him is beyond his means.
 "But you've worked so hard," she protests.
 "That don't matter," he shrugs, "It really don't matter if I lose this fight. It don't matter if this guy opens my head, 'cause all I wanna do is go the distance."
 That desire to prove self worth is what has driven many fighters. To prove, as Rocky put it, that someone "wasn't just another bum from the neighborhood" drives many young men into gyms, and many young men into fights, both sanctioned and illegal. The need to fight for one's own dignity is a universal constant of the human psyche, from professional athletes to suicide bombers.
 It is what drove Hatton to put his crippling depression and substance problems behind him, to shed his bloated frame and return. He would rather have died on his feet than in a drug-addled daze. Rather meet his end in a fight than in his bed.
 He lost, of course.
 Miracles are so rare, and time so unforgiving, that there was little chance for an over-the-hill fighter to come back and make history.
 Hatton's loss hurts the fans who love him more deeply than any football team's failure, more than any blip in the history of an endless saga. He takes his defeats alone, and yet we, as fans, feel the pain with him. We wanted to believe the impossible. We wanted to see hope overcome the odds. We wanted to believe, just once, that a man could conquer his demons and return as good as new; that the past could be re-written. We wanted to watch, as a champion of the people, like Scrooge, sponged out the writing on the stone of time.
 He can, of course.
 Hatton's career might be over, but the very fact that he could even return to the ring after becoming the bloated mess he once was proves that the human spirit can overcome enormous odds.
 With his fighting days behind him, he could still become one of the all-time great trainers. Any young man in the country would crawl over broken glass to train with a legend of his stature.
 Sure, we didn't get the fairytale ending. We didn't get the improbable pay-off where Ricky becomes champion and the recession ends and we all walk off into the sunset with a supermodel, because this is real life. And in real life, you can't beat the odds. But you can, as Ricky Hatton proved, beat your demons. You can beat your past. And you can make a future, if you're smart enough and tough enough.
 I really hope he knows this, but I think he does. I think he's given his all and can walk away knowing that he did so, and maybe forge a future full of hope.
 Ricky Hatton is one of the most loved fighters in British history. He deserves to win in life, even if he lost tonight.

Let Them Eat Cake...

...Or anything else, really, except pussy.

 I don't know if anyone has ever cracked my impenetrable shell of Fonzie-like cool and noticed this, but I'm really quite geeky.
 I know, I know. Take a moment to let that sink in.
 I'm sorry, I should have broken it more gently. God, this must be what women felt like when they found out Liberace was gay...
 If you've recovered from the shock, I'll continue. I'm quite geeky, and as such I always have half an eye on the nerd scene, or half a finger on the pulse of geekdom, or some fraction of a body part on the relevant metaphorical measure of dork-ness. This is how I came across the below article from the New Statesman that deals with the always-tetchy subject of women in geek culture.
 To summarise a fairly long article, comic writer Tony Harris (that's "comic" as in muscular men in tights, not as in "funny") has gone on a long, misogynist rant on facebook and everyone hates him for it.
 There are plenty of good reasons to hate him for it, too. Aside from being unpleasant and nauseatingly sexist, it shows him to be a whining, petty asshole and - perhaps most heinous in my eyes - a paid writer who can't understand where punctuation is meant to go.
 As a side note, I think I take umbridge at this because there's no excuse. If you're a sheltered or embittered loser who hates women, that's not necessarily your fault. Sure, you're wrong, but moreover, there's something wrong with you. On the other hand, everyone in the western world spends years and years of other peoples' tax money learning where capital letters go. This isn't a matter of ill-thought-out opinion or an unfortunate symptom of some psychosis, it's just a case of getting things wrong, and it's annoying, especially coming from "writers."
 But back to the sexism.
 Harris' point seems to be that women who hang around comic conventions dressed as hot characters from fiction ("cosplayers," for the unaware) are a group of evil harpies who are ugly anyway, and he totally didn't even WANT to have sex with them in the first place because they're probably all lesbians and don't deserve to be there with the real geeks.
 If a lemon rolled itself in salt and joined a convent, it still wouldn't be as bitter and un-sexed as this jackass.
 Sadly, it's by no means a minority viewpoint in geekdom. There seems to be a genuine sense of wounded pride when attractive people with breasts partake in nerdy, male activities. Like these alien, menstruating beings couldn't possibly find geek stuff entertaining, so they must all be phonies and posers.
 It's not hard to see where this all comes from. The kids who played Dungeons and Dragons in school or who went to the chess club or who were no good at sports (there's a lot of overlap on that Venn diagram, in my experience) didn't get laid very much. By which I mean "ever."
 Maybe things have changed since my day; maybe the whole "Harry Potter" thing meant that kids with coke-bottle glasses and an interest in wizards got access to hot and cold running titties in their formative years, but it sure as hell wasn't that way for my generation.
 So there's a lot of bitterness and resentment towards women in the geek community, and to a certain age, it's justified. Smart kids tend to have things like "personalities" and "a sense of humour," and this is what females claim to want. It makes for a frustrating and lonely life. After the age of about seventeen, however, the karma seems to even out and most geeks end up in stable, loving relationships. Women, I like to think, finally realise that a guy who can make them laugh and program HTML can probably figure out the clitoris better than the guy who is good at lighting his farts and thinks Irving Berlin is the Jewish part of Germany.
 A lot of this karmic balance, however, involves give and take. I was never, for the record, into Dungeons and Dragons, and I can't write HTML for shit, which is why I still only use the qualifier "quite geeky" for myself. One thing that does stand out, however, is that I got laid a lot more often after I lost some weight and stopped being such a whining, bitter asshole.*
 So maybe this is the problem. Maybe the true, super-geeks never quite make the jump into functional society well enough to meet some girls and chill out.
 Maybe people who go into things like hardcore gaming (I'm talking "World Ranking" type gaming, not just playing "Batman: Arkham City" for eight hours because you're too hung over to move like the rest of us) or, say, full-time comic writing are the people who never bothered to develop even the rudimentary social skills of an internet blogger who is currently wearing Spider-Man socks.

                                           Journalistic integrity is everything around here...

 So, the reason there's so much misogyny in geekdom is because the hardcore geeks still hate women for not having sex with them.
 And y'know what? Good! Fuck 'em. (Not literally.)
 If you're so stupid that you hate women for not seeing how smart you are, and immediately propositioning you, you don't deserve the female attention you so obviously crave in the first place. If you're simultaneously that smart and yet so dumb that you can't learn to come out of your shell and stop treating women as a separate species, then you have no right to an opinion on gender relations.
 And ladies? Don't be mad about it; don't be offended or intimidated. Just don't have sex with these people, like you're already not doing.
 Nothing could be a better revenge than that.
 (Well. Nothing except sex with internet bloggers who have a whole range of comic book socks...)

                                           I really want the Wolverine ones. I'm not proud.


*Marvel, for a moment, at the fact that I used to be more of a bitter asshole.

Get Your iForks and Torches Ready...

 It's been a great few weeks for the tiny fraction of the population who like their headlines to be about rodents and pederasty.
 First, Freddie Starr, he of hamster-eating fame, was accused of kiddie fiddling and then Phillip Schofield, having caused outrage by eating a guinea pig while on holiday, handed the Prime Minister a list of suspected paedophiles that he'd found online.
 If you ever predicted that so much of the news would be taken up with rodenticide and child sex, you're either a liar or some form of time traveller. Or a witch, who must be burned.
 The whole "eating rodents" thing I don't really care about. The old Starr/Hamster headline was obvious tabloid bullshit, and what Philip Schofield does while on holiday in a culture that habitually eats guinea pig is really none of my concern. Although it does make me wonder why we haven't heard from Gordon the Gopher in recent years.
 Internet vigilante justice, however, is a little more interesting.
 Sure, on the surface, Phillip Schofield's actions were childish and ill-thought-out; we don't need to listen to "who the internet thinks is bad" to form a system of criminal justice, not least because the main Google result for "childhood" and "raped" is probably going to be George Lucas.*
 None of this is news, except the surprising fact that people look for hard-edged, well thought out journalism on a breakfast show presented by the bloke who used to host kids' telly from a broom cupboard.
 Somewhere under the surface of it all, however, there's the faint glimmer of an idea.
 What would happen if we DID listen to the internet about matters of the law?
 Obviously, first and foremost, police would spend a lot of wasted time looking into alleged incidences of pwning, reported by people with names like DaveBigcock321.
 Underneath all that, though, there's a serious point: The internet is, for better and worse, a largely un-governed entity.Nobody edits or censors content, or at least not in any immediate sense. Things can be taken down, sure, but nothing can be stopped from being published.
 This means that there is no such thing as an internet injunction; no such thing as bribing people to keep quiet. Once information hits the net, it never truly goes away. This makes crimes increasingly tough to cover up.
 Demographics are also worth looking at.
 The internet, generally speaking, is populated by the young.
 Young people tend to be idealistic and left-leaning and reactionary.
 Whilst reactionary kids shouldn't necessarily be handed any power at all, I can't help but wonder what would happen if we put them in charge of the law.
 People like George Bush would get arrested for war crimes; Rupert Murdoch and David Cameron would almost certainly be arrested for perjury. Donald Trump would be arrested for harassment, wasting legal time and at least four billion counts of being an unutterable cunt.
 Scores of slippery, odious, corrupt people who have flouted the law for years would finally be brought to justice because there would be nobody left to hide behind. You can't pay people to look the other way when "people" means everybody, and they're looking from every direction. You can't bully cyberspace as a whole into letting you get away with things, because it is comprised of everybody and nobody at once.
 Most importantly, angry young men (and women) are hard to stifle.
 This doesn't mean, of course, that there is any truth whatsoever in Schofield's magic list of bad people.
 On the other hand, if there does prove to be anything verifiable in that list, it's going to be an interesting wakeup call to the legal orthodoxy.
 In the same way that the internet is slowly strangling print journalism, and a good many other forms of media besides, might it one day play a part in the justice system? In an increasingly digital society, can the will of the governed finally force its way to making a difference through the internet?
 Probably not. Most likely, the awful things about the internet will prevent the great things about the internet from ever achieving their true potential; the most we'll get is a positive but diluted outcome. Some progress, but not a revolution.
 Still, there are glimmers. Ten years ago, Ian Tomlinson would have been a newspaper vendor who died of a heart attack, because the police said so.
 Ten years ago, the students at various "Occupy" protests would have been maced because they were dangerous or threatening, or so we'd have been told.
 And for thirty years, child molesters would have been seen as upstanding members of the public.
 Now, we don't believe any of that, because we all know better. We've seen the evidence on youtube.
 The internet is all of us, and if all of us know something, sooner or later, it comes out.
 Maybe one day, if all of us know someone is guilty, they won't be able to sweep things under the rug.
 Just maybe, internet justice could be a force for something good.
 As long as we don't leave it in the hands of that bloke from "The Cube."
 


*That was intended as a throwaway joke; I then Googled it out of mild curiousity to see if it was true. All I got was some terrifying, terrifying cartoons from Japan.

Remember, Remember...

 Yes, it's that time again.
 November, a month of burning people in effigy (including, hilariously, disgraced cyclists) and spending money on things that you're going to set fire to and gain three seconds of pleasure from.
 It's a stupid fucking month, objectively, and what's making it stupider is Mowvember.
 Let me backtrack, a little.
 For the three people left who don't know, Mowvember is a sponsored charity event that asks men to grow a moustache - or at least not shave their upper lip - for thirty days.
 It's all done in the name of prostate cancer charities, which is a fucking good cause. How could I possibly object to that?
 Don't worry. I have this covered.
 I have nothing against the concept of Mowvember. It's admirable. What I have against it is the dilution of a good idea by mass acceptance.
 Here's me, two years ago, with a moustache for the month:

 Yeah, I look like a fucking dickhead. But that's the point.
 When the whole idea started, it meant five percent of the male populace had to look stupid for a good cause. It was under-the-radar and unique.
 These days, Mowvember has just become an excuse for any dickhead to grow a moustache. In 2012, if you see a person with a laughable moustache, you'll just shrug and say "Oh, that guy's doing Mowvember."
 The whole point of doing something for charity is that it should involve effort or hardship of some kind.
 Back when nobody had heard of Mowvember, this meant the hardship of looking like an absolute cock in public.
 Now that it's become widely recognised, it's just an excuse for people to try a new look.
 Charity shouldn't be about fashion, or about people who don't have the balls to attempt a moustache unless they have a pretext.
 Lately, I feel Mowvember is the equivalent of a band I liked before it was cool.
 People aren't doing it to humiliate themselves for charity, but just to join in with something popular.
 Mowvember used to get you laughed at. Now everyone just ignores it.
 And that, ironically, makes me bristle.

From The Man Who Wrote 1976's Best Picture Screenplay...

 Although nobody except me could ever be aware of it, this blog, like an ice-berg, is only ten percent visible.
 Hidden in the "drafts" section, there are usually half a dozen pieces that never make it to the light of day, because I struggle to find a through-line; I struggle to find a coherent message that justifies their inclusion.
 Granted, quite often I'll get drunk and publish them anyway, which I hope goes some way to explaining the often-patchy logic around here.
 This brings me to something I read today. I can't find anything to say about it, I can't make it part of a bigger picture, I can't really do ANYTHING with it, so I'm just going to hang it out here, all pink and naked for the world to see.
 Below, please find Sly Stallone's recent post about the upcoming and inevitable Expendables 3.

 "We are preparing the film with the same passion and commitment as the previous two. We have confirmed Nicolas Cage, a master actor who gives a veneer intellectual group. Hopefully we can realize to Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes and Mickey Rourke. That is the great mission of the producer. We will continue with the same narrative scheme, the agility and the frenzy, which are inherent to the saga. What will definitely be the last? I can not guarantee. In principle it would be two deliveries, but the affection of the people encouraged us to work on a third. I guess as long as we amused ourselves by offering fun and people, we can continue playing 'The Expendables'. For now we are not as expendable as it should and as some critics want."

 I'm not sure what any of that means. At all.
 It could mean that, shockingly, thirty years of injecting elephant hormones into your neck has an adverse effect on the brain.
 It could mean that Sly's secretary had a stroke right around the phrase "previous two," but soldiered on with the dictation anyway.
 It could mean that sending messages via Siri is not a good idea for someone who mumbles as much as Sly does.
 It could mean that Stallone's hair plugs have finally reached his brain and are playing merry hell with his sentence construction.
 Or it could just be more evidence of my long held theory that anything involving Nicholas Cage automatically turns to shit.
 Incidentally: Nicholas Cage?!
 Seems like they were out of A-grade action stars to recruit, so they had to go for the B's.
 Not the B's!
 NOT THE B'S! AAAAGH!!




 

Thoughts on Skyfall

 [I know I covered Bond recently, but I've just seen the new one.]
 
 A few days from now, a nice man from MGM will come to your house and informed you that there's a new Bond film out.
 That's because this is the only way left that they haven't already tried to tell us there's a new Bond film out.
 So, again: There's a new Bond film out. It's new. And in the cinemas.
 I'm not saying it's over-hyped, but under the category "News About Adele," her theme song for this movie warranted more fanfare than her firstborn child.(Incidentally, congrats to Adele on the birth of little MGM Skyfall Bond Bondington Bond Vaio Laptops Bond New Bond Bond. ....Junior.)
 Now that the hype has died down, what are we left with?
 Honestly, I'm not sure.
 On the one hand, we have an exciting, well-put-together movie (for the first two thirds) that feels in many places like classic Bond, without ever being overly silly.
 On the other hand, we have an awful third act and a film that feels like we've seen it all before.
 Briefly: Whilst searching for a disc of stolen information, Bond is accidentally shot in a way that he immediately recovers from, and swims to a pub. 
 Returning to London via the same magic, security-free, ticketless, "no passport or money required" airline that Bruce Wayne used to get to Gotham in "Dark Knight Rises," Bond interrupts M in the middle of pouring some of the brandy that she already said she didn't like in "Goldeneye." (I'm sure Courvoisier paid good money to be in this, but M emphatically told Pierce Brosnan that she preferred bourbon to brandy.)
 Apparently now completely useless after his two weeks off, Bond is shown missing a target and struggling through physical and psychological tests. We're reminded that Bond is getting older, but M decides to sign off on his mission anyway, as soon as he's met Q, who is played by one of The Inbetweeners.
 There's a bit of fighting and shagging and some Komodo dragons, before Javier Bardem turns up and allows himself to be captured, before revealing that he is, secretly, one of the best disfigured bad guys in the series' history.
 Because nobody at MI6 has had time to see any movies lately, nobody realises that Bardem has got himself caught on purpose as part of a master plan, like pretty much every major bad guy over the last few years. He then escapes, obviously, and goes after M.
 Bond gives chase by sliding down the stainless steel divider in the middle of the tube station escalators, something which you definitely cannot do.
 This was a moment of genuine annoyance for me. I'll buy into your cars-with-ejector-seats and your hand print reading guns, but anyone who has ever seen the London underground knows that there are little metal fences welded onto the escalator dividers to make sure nobody slides down them. You can even see these same metal barriers behind Bond on a different escalator in the next shot of the film. One of those strange little details that I couldn't get over, and ended up yelling about to a bemused barmaid in the pub afterwards.
 Meanwhile, back at the movie, Javier Bardem has cornered M in court, and is laying waste to what appears to be an endless line of black policemen. (Seriously, there's this one black copper who I swear turns up and gets shot twice in a row.)
 Bond arrives and decides to go rogue, abducting M and spiriting her away to an entirely different fucking movie.
 I really can't recall the last time a film had such a shuddering, lurching gear change as "Skyfall." For two thirds of the movie, everything is espionage, exotic locations, sexy broads* and private yachts.
 Then, apparently due to an unspecified head injury, Bond decides that the best way to protect his employer is to take her to his family's ancestral home, Skyfall Lodge, in the absolute bug-fuck middle of nowhere in Scotland.
 The entire tone and palette of the movie change in one scene, and once we arrive at the bleak, grey mansion and start wishing the movie was back in Macau, we meet Albert Finney, who has been cast as Scruffy, the Janitor.
 Scruffy prepares to fight the bad guys alongside Bond.
 I think, tactically, this is a mistake. I'm not one to pass judgement, but Scruffy has been living in an abandoned mansion for many years now, and he hasn't shown any signs of normal human behaviour.
 Realistically, if the owner of the mansion you worked in disappeared one day, after a few years, you'd probably move in. In fact, by the time Bond pitches up again with M in tow, the most likely scenario is that he'd walk in to find the place decked out in zebra skin and full of drunk hookers, with Albert Finney looking sheepish as he's caught in the middle of slipping the last of the family heirlooms into an envelope marked "Cash My Gold."
 Instead, Scruffy has just sat in an empty house for years on end. This isn't the sort of person I'd willingly give a weapon to, because he's either one typewriter away from re-enacting "The Shining," or else he's some sort of robot. "Welcome home, Master Bond. I will protect this human woman with you," I kept expecting him to recite, tonelessly.
 After a final shootout, some spoilers happen, which I'll put in red below. Skip past them if you haven't seen the film.

 In a move that absolutely everyone saw coming, M gets killed.
 This is a real flaw with modern movie reviewing: They tell you that there are spoilers, but they don't tell you what they are. Personally, as soon as someone says "There's a big plot tiwst in this one!" I immediately start trying to work out what it's going to be. I can't help myself, and it ruins the movie for me in a lot of ways.
 As soon as early reviews started talking about plot twists and spoilers, I thought "Well, they'll probably kill off Judi Dench, because she's winding down her acting career." I was right. It's not that the "twist" isn't obvious, just annoying that people mention it at all. STOP SPOILING SPOILERS, movie reviewers.
 And now back to your regularly scheduled ranting.

 ...With the Klingon Warship heading straight towards Bond, all seems lost until Iron Man harnesses the silicon in Posh Spice's tits. (Sorry, but it was a HELL of a plot twist back there.)
 Kidding aside, the whole movie ends on a note that can best be described as "business as usual," and that's probably my chief objection.
 Daniel Craig won fans and critics over by taking Bond in a new direction; the end of this movie essentially dumps the character in the same rut that Craig worked so hard to pull out of.
 By the end of "Skyfall," we have Q, we have Moneypenny, and M is a middle aged man again. By necessity, this means the next installment will essentially be indistinguishable from a Connery or Moore film.
 Some fans may want that, but I can't escape the feeling that the franchise has painted itself into a corner and left itself with no new worlds to conquer.
 The oft-mentioned age issue is strange, too. By acknowledging that Bond is getting older, and then surrounding him with a younger supporting cast, we risk some awkward scenes in a few years time. Daniel Craig is signed up for two more movies, by which point he'll be about fifty. The last thing we need is Bond slowly becoming Roger Murtaugh, griping that he is "too old for this shit" as his adolescent co-stars track the bad guys from their newfangled smartphones.
 It's guaranteed that "Skyfall" is going to be a huge hit, and it is an entertaining film. It manages to walk the fine line between recent, more serious efforts and the slightly comic-book qualities of the character.
 I really want to like it, but ultimately, the movie left me with a sense of foreboding about the future of the franchise. I guess we'll just have to trust that the powers that be know what they're doing.
  


*I don't know why I'm talking like James Cagney, either.

Give Up and Let Them Lose.

 We're all agreed on certain things in life. Don't negotiate with terrorists. Don't give in to bullying or threats. "Never," as Churchill had it, "in anything, great or small, give up."
 Well, I've got a better idea.
 I think we - humanity, all of us - should have a sponsored month of giving up. Just thirty days or so of caving in to the most powerful, insidious, effective force on the face of the planet.
 I refer, of course, to whingeing.
 I'm pretty sure that no matter how many piss-poor VHS tapes Al Qaeda releases, nobody is ever going to kowtow to their plans. No matter how many times the Westboro Baptist Assholes show up to protest a funeral and complain about god hating fags, none of us is ever going to turn around and say "y'know what, okay, we'll listen to you and act on your ideas."
 Nagging, on the other hand, is a different ball game. We all know what it's like to just sigh and give up to the relentless, irritating pressure of a nagging child or spouse, and I think we should apply this policy to the wider world, because it would be an effective way to (eventually) get a lot of people to shut the fuck up.
 Take the meditation crowd. The people who think that all the world's ills are caused by a lack of Buddhist chanting.
 According to hippies with bad websites, if 1% of the population of the world meditated regularly, there would be no more wars and everything would be hunky dory. They've been peddling this shit for years, so why don't we just do it? Give in to their whining and do it.
 One percent of the world's population (assuming a population of seven billion) is seventy million, which is coincidentally about the population of the UK. So, I say we all take the week off work and genuinely try it.
 We'll all sit at home for a week, light some candles and meditate, and it'll solve precisely dick all.
 Worse than that, it'll deepen a recession and we'll all lose our jobs, but the net gain is this: The hippies will shut up and we can take their ideas off the table forever. We tried it your way, Moonbeam Unicorn Jnr., and it didn't work. Now piss off.
 Next up we can deal with the libertarians and the hardcore right-wing capitalists. This won't require missing work, but it might be worth calling in sick to watch, if the whole thing is caught on camera.
 Libertarians and ultra-capitalists claim to want no government oversight on business, no government interference in day-to-day matters (including healthcare) and freedom to run a business in any way they want to.
 So, a few commandeered planes would be enough to send them all somewhere that already has those conditions, like, say, Somalia. No government interference, no rules, knock yourselves out. It's a dog-eat-dog world in places like that, just the way you want it.
 Come dinnertime, of course, it'll be a person-eat-dog world because you'll all be starved past the point of dignity.
 If they realise how badly they fucked up and call to come home, we'll let them. But we'll charge through the fucking nose for it, and maybe they'll learn their lesson.
 Which complaining assholes are next? How about bigfoot hunters?
 There are all kinds of idiots running around the wooded areas of... shit, everywhere, really, looking for giant ape men.
 If they're so convinced there's something out there, why don't we take a few hundred people - a few thousand, if necessary - and create a human chain around an area of alleged bigfoot habitat. Then we all walk towards the middle, and shoot everything we come across that's bigger than a squirrel.
 A little cruel, sure, but at the end of it, as we sort through the bear carcasses and start cooking some nice venison, one thing we'll probably notice is that none of the bodies we've come up with are those of a heretofore unknown missing evolutionary link.
 Also, again: Free venison.
 And in the unlikely event that we DO catch a yeti, then science benefits. Granted, not the branch of science that does a lot to improve your life - I doubt shooting a sasquatch will do much to improve your 4G connectivity or diminish the lines at airport check-in desks, but it'll give the biologists something to talk about, bless 'em.
 These are just three random examples of how we could deal with the more annoying sectors of society.
 Don't give in to threats or demands, just give people enough rope to hang themselves with.
 Obviously, things like Islamic fundamentalism couldn't really be rolled-out worldwide on a trial basis, so we'd have to let them fuck that up for themselves on smaller scale.
 Except they already did; it was called the Arab Spring.

C.G.I-don't-have-to-do-anything...

 I'm not sure when the movie going public first became aware of CGI, as a concept. Obviously, with hindsight, the water tentacle in 1988's "The Abyss" was done with computers, but I'm not sure how many people realised it at the time.
 Audiences in 1993 almost certainly assumed that all the dinosaurs that escaped from the shoddy fences in Jurassic Park were robots or puppets.
 Whenever it was, ever since CGI became part of the public consciousness, people have been complaining that it's ruining movies.
 I'm no stranger to this myself. Bad CGI breaks the spell of a movie like nothing else I can think of. It's the 21st century equivalent of a boom mike dipping into shot, or a corpse cracking one eye open to see if they're still in shot.
 Even the good stuff, however, comes under fire for ruining an entire generation of films. I disagree with this, but I do think it might be ruining a generation of actors.
 First and foremost, movies are about spectacle. Anyone who says otherwise is deluded. Whilst dramatic, dialogue-driven entertainment can be fantastic spectacles in terms of acting, the simple truth is that cinema surpassed the theatre as the most popular form of entertainment because you can do more things in a movie than you can on a stage. In terms of the give-and-take, you can film "12 Angry Men", but you can't have a stage play where giant lizards crush Tokyo.
 This need for spectacle has been met in different ways for different generations. Initially, the very idea of moving images was a draw. A single train moving towards the screen was enough to excite a roomful of terrified Frenchmen, or, as they're historically known, Frenchmen.
 Then came sound, and colour, but even before that, the limits of technology meant that the cinema had to rely on something unique for spectacle: Talented stars.
 I don't want to drum up sympathy for the rich and famous - especially as the rich and famous have a habit of being assholes off screen - but look at what stars of yesteryear were put through: Buster Keaton once broke his neck throwing himself off a train for a comedy bit, and ignored the injury for so long that when he found out about it, it was already healed. Yakima Canutt got himself run over by horses so often that his blood type was sugar lumps. It continued for decades. For one dance number in Singin' In The Rain, Debbie Reynolds danced so long and hard that she ruptured blood vessels in her feet, at which point Gene Kelly decided she still wasn't good enough and over-dubbed her tap moves himself. In the same movie, Donald O'Connor was required to do a scene in which he ran up three walls in succession, completing a backwards somersault at the top of each one. An 80-a-day smoker, he collapsed after filming the scene and, a week later, was told that they'd lost the negative and he had to do it all again.
 As better effects eventually came in, stars could impress with their realism, as much as their physical abilities. Increasingly, it became a case of one or the other.
 Either you were Al Pacino or Bruce Lee. Ten years later, you were Robert DeNiro or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
 Nowadays, however, you really don't have to be anything, and it's all the fault of special effects.
 Shia Laboeuf is the greatest living example of this. He's not a dramatic powerhouse, known for his brilliant performances in taxing roles.
 He's also not physically capable of anything more impressive than the next guy.
 But he's a gazillionaire, chiefly because he lives in an era where you can have giant robots punching each other through skyscrapers all around him, and all he has to do is stay out of the way.
 Same with superhero films - Mark Ruffalo, who is admittedly a talented actor, doesn't have to do anything when he becomes the Hulk. He can just toddle off to the catering truck while someone with a Mac creates merry hell with his green-skinned alter-ego. And even though he is talented, nobody is going to see that movie because Ruffalo would have made a decent "Hamlet."
 It doesn't even have to be the big stuff that's all done in post-production, either. It's child's play these days to have a stunt man perform a scene and then digitally glue an actor's face onto him afterwards. You often don't even need the stunt man, as he can be added later on. With the actor's face.
 We're already ten years past the first movies where all actors have to do is say the lines, and someone else makes a CGI person to go on screen and say them.
 In an age when celebrity exists as a sort of self-perpetuating symbiote of stupidity, where morons are famous in the eyes of the stupid for being stupid morons, it's hard not to long for a time when stars could act, or sing and dance, or do anything other than stand there while someone renders pixels around them. Or, in some cases, in place of them.
 Sadly, the best way for non-entity celebrities to get movie careers is going to involve a lot of talented computer guys, and the second half of a deal with Satan that many of them have already clearly signed. Think about it: Would you see a movie with Jedward in it?
 Course not.
 Would you see a movie with Jedward in it where photorealistic dinosaurs fought robots on the surface of Mars?
 Probably, yeah.
 With CGI cataclysms drawing the people in, actors don't need to have any talent anymore.
 It's not the movies that are getting worse because of computer graphics. It's the lazy actors in them.

Condoms Condemned

 In the vast pantheon of things that I don't like, you'd have to go a long way to beat condoms.
 It's not just that they're objectively ridiculous, although I've never found a sexy way to get through that whole "hey, wait there a second" mood killer. I hate pretty much everything about condoms.
 Technologically, they're laughable. In an era when we get live updates on the robot exploring mars delivered directly to the small communication device in our pockets, the way to make my penis less fertile should surely be more subtle than "wrap it in something."
 Sartorially, they're inept. They look stupid, and they're a terrible fit for pretty much anybody. I don't know who designed the modern condom, but I'd be scientifically intrigued to see what his junk looked like. All the attempts at making them more interesting through textures and flavours are redundant, as you can get vibrating sex toys in the average pub toilet these days that appear far more interesting, which again brings up the technology argument.
 Finally, though, what I hate most about condoms is buying them.
 It's not embarrassment at the idea that I have to tell other people I have a sex life; it's embarrassment at how arrogant that makes me feel. Buying condoms feels like I'm shouting "Hey, look at all the sex I'm having!" and that makes me feel, somewhat ironically, like a massive dick.
 All of this is old news, of course. I learned to bite the bullet and accept these little annoyances years ago, but it wasn't until today that I realised just how badly I'm being ripped off by condoms. (In fact, I always thought that process was supposed to work the other way around, but hey...)
 First of all, a few months back, I found out that the "everything for a pound" shop near my house sold prophylactics.
 This filled me with suspicion, but as I was out today and needed to stock up, I decided that for once, the medieval nature of condoms was in my favour. They don't need microchips or bluetooth capability, I reasoned. They just have to be made of something watertight. I'm pretty sure you can manufacture a small, watertight pouch for under a pound, so all should be well.
 Disappointingly, the pound-shop has apparently stopped selling condoms (due, I'm forced to assume, to a spate of local pregnancies) so I went to the supermarket.
 After buying a few things to camouflage the purchase (again, buying nothing but johnnies makes me feel somehow like I'm hitting on the checkout girl) I went and found the relevant aisle, and was stunned to see that a box of ten condoms was £10, but then you could get another, additional box for a pound extra.
 This means that Durex have apparently adopted the "double up for a pound" idea first used in Wetherspoons, which is both bizarre and fitting, as the Wetherspoons offer is how I usually manage to get laid anyway.
 Still, how badly are we being ripped off as consumers when condoms are clearly carrying a 90% markup as standard? Aside from the enjoyable irony of being fucked by a condom company, I'm quite annoyed.
 Clearly, the pound shop had the right idea, and my reasoning was sound. All these things are is small, latex sheaths, and as such they're dismissively cheap to manufacture.
 So, on top of all the other reasons to hate condoms, the price is apparently the final insult.
 I still bought the extra box for a pound. I didn't feel so much like I was hitting on the checkout girl at this point as actively announcing myself as a sex offender, but hey, my cheapness often trumps my neurosis.
 As a final note, by the way, buying twenty condoms apparently gets you bonus points on the "vouchers for schools" programme.
 Here's a hint: I don't have kids...

What I Reckon About... Bond. James Bond.

Sky Movies has launched an "All James Bond, All The Time" channel.
 No idea why; I can't find anything about Bond in the papers, or on TV, or on buses and in magazines and alright fuck it, look, it's a shameless ploy and we all know it.
 It also means I've been watching a lot of Bond films lately, because there's not much else on.
 Turns out - and forgive me if I'm late to the party - that Bond films, by and large, are shit.
 I just watched "From Russia With Love," often voted as one of the best Bond movies of all time.
 I'd seen bits of it before, but coming home after a long day's work and feeling quite detached, I watched it objectively and realised that it's fucking stupid.
 In one scene, Bond deduces that Robert Shaw's character is a Russian spy when Shaw orders red wine with fish at dinner.
 How many people who were just not-very-good-with-wine did Bond have to kill before this tactic paid off?!
 Presumably, this is why we never see Bond throwing a party for friends and co-workers. Everyone would sit, rigid and petrified that a lapse in manners could be their undoing.
 "What happened to Felix?"
 "Oh, he used a table spoon for his soup so James lasered his face off with a wrist-watch."
 It's the same reason Bond saves the world every other month, but never gets invited to the palace. It's not that the government isn't grateful for his effort, it's just that they can't take the risk of him lunging over a table and garotting an ambassador for using the wrong knife.
 Back to the movie: Bond battles a female assassin who has snuck into his hotel room, disguised as a maid. She then springs her lethal trap: Knives on the front of her shoes!
 Either through poor casting or the limitations of 1960s maid uniforms, she doesn't try to kick anywhere higher than Bond's knees, presumably because really badly cutting someone's shins is the most surefire way to ensure they'll die, later on, in an accident on the stairs on their way to the front desk to ask for plasters.
 Seriously, the woman was already in the room. She could have killed Bond easily with a small, concealed pistol, or even a non-shoe-related knife that you can use to stab someone above the waist, where their organs are.
 Later in the series, in "Diamonds Are Forever," the two scenes are combined.
 In this movie, Sean Connery's Bond (who, by virtue of being Scottish, seems to have aged about thirty years in the 48 months between movies) is told by the fake waiters aboard a cruise ship (who are really henchmen bringing a bomb disguised as a cake to Bond's room) that the wine with the meal will be a Mouton Rothschild. Bond says he would have expected a Claret instead, and the waiter apologises, at which point Bond points out that Mouton Rothschild is a claret, and then throws the waiter over the railing of the ship, along with his cake bomb.
 I've dealt with many snooty wine drinkers over the years, and it's usually best to just agree with them. Once again, we face the prospect that Bond has been killing and brutalising waiters for years, just for humouring him.
 "...All I did was sigh and agree that the Gallo wine was the best on the menu, and he yelled 'A-ha!' and threw me out of a window. And then he threw a cake after me and dived for cover, for no reason..."
 All in all, then, Connery's Bond films were just too stupid for me to ever take them seriously. If you don't agree, here's a clip of Bond with a seagull on his head.
 I tend to ignore the Roger Moore entries in the series, because I can never understand what they were trying to do.
 As I understand it, Roger Moore is a super-spy who must save the world from grave peril and evil masterminds, but has some sort of disease where he has to crack cheap knob jokes every few minutes. I can only assume there was a paperwork mix-up that led MI6 to hire a jobbing, end-of-the-pier comedian to carry out these missions. Meanwhile, somewhere in Blackpool, a lethal hit-man is grinding out tired Mother In Law jokes to a bored lunchtime crowd and wondering when he's going to be told who to kill.
 Timothy Dalton gets a lot of brownie points for being Bond when I was a kid, and for being the best film incarnation of the character that Fleming wrote. Dalton's Bond is hard-hearted and troubled, a burned out government asset with a conscience that he can't quite silence.
 Which isn't much fun, if you're a fan of exploding cake and nudge-wink humour.*
 Divisive as Dalton was, what's inarguable is that the plot of his first effort, "The Living Daylights," is a mystery to anyone without a degree in political science. If an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters create Shakespeare, this movie was written by throwing an infinite number of monkeys at one single typewriter until it produced something about the Cold War that also featured Gimli from Lord of the Rings.
 To compensate, the plot of the next movie, "License To Kill," involves Bond being mad at someone for feeding his mate to a shark. Also, Bond temporarily loses his License To Kill, in case you really needed things dumbed down. You do? Okay, Bond's friend Felix Leiter gives him a cigarette LIGHTER as a present, which becomes a plot point.
 (Years later, Leiter's replacement, Arnold Blowtorch, gave Bond a similar present that nearly took his fucking eyebrows off. Bond was even less fond of the American NSA liaison, Gerald Exploding-Cigar.)
 By this point in the series, anybody who had been working on the production staff since the first movie in 1962 was either too old or dead to continue, and with "License To Kill" getting slaughtered at the box office by Tim Burton's "Batman," the series took a hiatus for a few years and came back with Pierce Brosnan.
 On paper, Brosnan is the best Bond of them all. Handsome even by Bond standards, he could be as cruel as Dalton, as smooth as Connery and as relaxed with broad comedy moments as Moore.
 Sadly, Brosnan's films were mostly shite. "The World Is Not Enough" was easily the best of the series, a good movie and arguably the last "proper" Bond film ever made, but generally, Brosnan films were all style and no substance. "Die Another Day," a movie about Halle Berry's tits helping Bond stop a Korean diamond smuggler played by a ginger Englishman, is standout for featuring CGI so awful that it couldn't ruin your immersion in the movie any more completely if it just cut to a shot of Pierce Brosnan on the weekend, scratching his arse in his pants and drinking a can of warm Stella whilst reading "Razzle."
 I don't think Daniel Craig can be judged yet because he isn't done with the series, although I like his entries more for taking the action seriously, even if they do still have annoyingly silly moments like Bond having a heart attack and then immediately going back to his card game.
 I guess this whole long piece has been about me trying to find my opinion on Bond, because everyone seems required to have one, especially right now.
 I guess my opinion is this: I like Bond as a concept.
 And so does everyone else.
 Everyone has their own idea of what Bond should be, as the character has spread beyond literature and even beyond film, becoming the sort of cultural touchstone onto which we can all project something, whether it's Dalton's jaded, icy killer, Moore's "Mr. Nudge in a tux" incarnation, or Fleming's snooty, misogynist original.
 I'm not a fan of the films, because a lot of them, as I've pointed out, are stupid.
 But I'm a fan of the character, the way he exists in my head, and it's probably the same for everyone else. The only good films are the ones that give you the character you have in your mind's eye, whoever that might be.
 Just, for Christ's sake, don't order the wrong wine.



*I'm not, so I really like Dalton in the role.

[At least some credit for this article belongs to my cousin Sam, who doesn't have a blog or anything else I can plug in this acknowledgment. Still, most of this article is based on a conversation we had last week.]