Day(s) of the Triffids

 If you go down to the woods today, you're sure of a mild surprise.

 Alright, so it's not very catchy, or even particularly alluring, but it's more honest than promising teddy bears that live in the forrest hanging out in their furry little gangs. George Lucas explained what woodland teddybears get up to in 1984 and it's a hell of a lot more violent than eating sandwiches.

Never forget...

 When I went out in the woods near Brecon recently, my fiancee noticed a tree which had grown to almost totally swallow an old sign. I thought it was mildly interesting and so naturally took a picture and posted it to the Reddit page /mildlyinteresting.

 Twenty five thousand upvotes later, and I can cross "front page of Reddit" off my bucket list. I've also been bombarded with comments saying that it looks like a vagina/butthole (it does), comments mimicking Jeff Goldblum's "life finds a way" line in Jurassic Park, and above all else, comments asking what this mysterious and almost-vanished sign actually said.

 First and foremost, the tree in question is on private land, so I couldn't exactly grab an axe and try to excavate it - at least not legally. Luckily, another group of Redditors began to try to crack the code, the best guess being from a user named busy_yogurt who suggested that the original text might have read "HORSES HAVE RIGHT OF WAY, PLEASE MAKE ROOM FOR THEM."

 This seemed like a pretty solid guess. I had no way of telling how old the sign was - the paint was still in pretty good condition but the letters had serifs - the little extra lines at the edges of letters. Nobody prints modern public information signs with serifs (I imagine because it saves on cost to exclude them) so the sign couldn't be that recent. I had no idea how old the tree was, or what species. The leaves looked to me like maple, but that's only because they looked like the Canadian flag, and that level of expertise should prove I'm no kind of arborist.

 Today, prompted by my own curiosity and that of the internet, I went back out to look at the sign again. The first thing that struck me was that the font used didn't look as antiquated on close inspection as I'd first thought. Also, careful viewing from different angles showed that it almost certainly contained "MAR-" and "-ATH." My guess was that this was therefore something about sticking to the MARked pATH.

 I walked a mile or so until I came to the nearest farm to see if they owned the path in question and if they could shed any light on things. I made my way down the drive and came across the farmer, dourly pouring red diesel into a lawnmower that was ten years older than me and at least as rusty.

 "I wonder if you could help me," I began in my best cheerful tone. "The path on the other side of the river, the one that says Footpath Only, do you own that?"

 "Yep."

 This was not by any stretch the least talkative farmer I'd ever met.

 "There's a sign at one end of the path that's been almost completely swallowed by the tree behind it..."

 "The one that says 'No Path' ?" he said. It wasn't quite a question. One sign at the far end did indeed say "Private - No Path." The gate at the other end bore the slightly more accomodating legend "Private Land - Footpath Only."  That whole section of the trail had done a perfect job of keeping the public slightly unsure of whether or not they were even allowed to be there, which I'm sure was the point. They could legally walk there, but weren't totally welcome.

 "No..." I said, "the other end. There's a red sign."

 He looked at me the way all farmers look at people - in a way that says "Why are you wasting my time with this? I have farming to do..."

 "...I took a picture of it and posted it to the internet," I explained. "Since then a lot of people have wondered what it used to say?"

 "It was about sticking to the path," he nodded.

 "Right!" I said, encouragingly. "I thought I could make out something about 'Marked Path,' maybe? Like 'Please stick to the marked path' ...?"

 "Yep. I can't remember the exact wording, but it was to tell people to keep to the perimeter path."

 I thanked him for his help and left, considering as I did so that the perimeter path was hopelessly overgrown and that everybody had been ignoring that sign and traipsing through the middle of this guy's field since long before the tree grew over it.

 It was as close to solving the mystery as I was ever going to get - if I went back and chopped a lump out of the tree to get to the exact wording, that farmer was going to have a pretty short list of suspects.

 I can only hope that he never figures out who came back later and did this:

"Killer Magic" : Deadly Stupid.

 If the job of a magic show is to astonish, BBC Three's "Killer Magic" did the job. My jaw was on the floor within five minutes.

Not over the magic, you understand, but over the show itself. I defy you to find a program so hacky, irresponsible and sexist without resorting to Saudi Arabia's version of Jackass.

This is a show which aimed to pit top magicians against one another, but then seemingly ran out of time or money or ambition and instead hired four middling performers to do the sort of tricks you can buy for a tenner on most magic websites.

Then, the producers decided to shamelessly lift the writing and editing style from "Now You See Me," the godawful magic/heist movie from 2014.

For those who have mercifully been spared from watching the film, it focuses on four magicians, each of whom is a specialist in one "type" of magic. Mentalism, card manipulation, etc etc.

"Killer Magic" attempts to replicate this, except none of the magicians on the show seem particularly good at anything. Consider card manipulators like Chris Ramsay and then wonder why, if that's the level of YouTube talent available, the BBC went with these four losers.

Three losers, actually. Some sympathy should be spared for Jasz Vegas, a woman magician in what is traditionally a painfully male-dominated game. She has almost certainly had enough shit to deal with to get anywhere at all in her career. Not that the BBC cares about this - whilst the three male performers are introduced as set personality types - "The Charmer," "The Goth" - Jasz Vegas' intro mines new depths of lazy sexism by introducing her as "The Girl."

That's it. That's the best anyone on this embarrasing dumpster fire of a show could come up with. "The Girl." One can't help but wonder what the hook would have been had one of the magicians been black...

Putting the astonishing feats of sexism aside to focus on the middling feats of magic, we somehow run into something even more offensive. The hook for each episode is that the four magicians (or three magicians and "a girl") will compete at challenges and whoever is judged to have come last must attempt a dangerous stunt.

This is utterly morally bankrupt.

Penn & Teller, James Randi and Brian Brushwood have all written and talked extensively about the morality of "dangerous" magic. Penn & Teller in particular are known for seemingly dangerous stunts, but have always adhered to Houdini's maxim that no magic trick or feat of escapology should really be more dangerous than sitting at home on the couch.

Even magicians like Penn & Teller or The Amazing Jonathan who sometimes do incredibly gory set pieces adhere to the same slapstick rules as Road Runner cartoons or Monty Python's Black Knight; horrible, traumatic injury should be treated as a painless embarassment or an awkward faux pas.

Magic should never actually trade off of danger. Only the semblance of danger.

The thinking goes something like this: In a standard trick, a magician does something which seems impossible but which actually isn't. It's a trick. The spectator shouldn't see HOW it's a trick, and should be left baffled and - hopefully - entertained by witnessing something impossible.

Escapology and "dangerous" magic work the same way. The performer does something supposedly life-threatening, but it actually isn't. It's a trick. The audience can't see how it's a trick and so are entertained by the appearance of danger.

For "Killer Magic" to openly trade off of the idea that their final stunt is genuinely dangerous is stupid and morally wrong. It says that it's okay to endanger the lives of performers (spoiler: it isn't) and it makes the audience morally complicit. If an audience wants to be excited by a seemingly dangerous stunt, that's one thing. But drawing an audience on the premise that someone might be in real danger is lazy and gross and puts you on the moral level of the creepy guy who asks kids if they want to come and see a dead body.

Using the magic angle is also disingenuous. Imagine a series in any other genre where contestants were potentially killed for not scoring enough points. It's downright dystopian. The fact that it's a magic show and therefore nothing is real is only an excuse if you acknowledge that it's a magic show and nothing is real. When your title is "Killer Magic" you dispense with that important caveat, dishonestly, right at the top of the credits.

I see from the internet that "Killer Magic," now available as a boxed set on BBC Three, was made in 2015 and only lasted one series. This means, ironically, that the series which traded off the potential early demise of contestants was brought to a sudden and messy end. And that actually does feel like a demise it's okay to enjoy.

Edit: It's since been pointed out to me that there were actually five magicians on this show. Or four and a girl. They made so little impact that there might as well have been fifty of them.

Movie Review: Avengers - Infinity War

  It’s been ten years since Marvel launched its cinematic universe in earnest with Iron Man, a movie in which the then-unbankable Robert Downey Jr. became a superhero most people had never heard of. The past really is another country.

In the interim we’ve had Norse gods, frozen supersoldiers, the guy from Sherlock learned to do magic and we really did believe a raccoon could talk. Finally, then, we arrive at Infinity War, a film which tries to tie all of these elements together. Does it succeed?

...Not really, no.

I’m writing this in the honeymoon period that every giant movie seems to enjoy, but I don’t think this is going to be one that suffers the sort of enormous backlash that, say, Phantom Menace did. It’s not a terrible film, it’s… an okay one. Which is about the best that can be hoped for when you consider that the task was probably impossible.

Much was made of Marvel’s claim that this was “the most ambitious crossover event in history,” but it was probably true.

I said "probably."

Unfortunately, however, ambition is a poor substitute for coherence. I was one of the cynics who didn’t think that The Avengers would work (Norse gods and Iron Man? Impossible…) but I was proven wrong by a terrific movie made by Joss Whedon.

Infinity War directors The Russo Brothers are not Joss Whedon (very few of us are...) but even if Whedon hadn’t jumped ship when the studio pissed him off with their meddling in “Age of Ultron,” there is now just too much going on in the Marvel Universe for even a Whedon level skill with ensemble writing. “Spider-man: Homecoming” ended on a cliffhanger that goes totally unaddressed, “Thor: Ragnarok” made huge changes to the character that this film spends a good chunk of the runtime trying to correct (via possibly the greatest nerd culture cameo ever), and we have to deal with flashbacks, long-vanished characters returning, outer space, New York City, Wakanda, the mystic arts, nanotech, introducing Thanos (and his unamed and underwritten henchmen) and somehow, ANOTHER appearance by Gwyneth Paltrow. She's like the herpes of the Marvel Universe - every time you think they've finally got rid of her she crops up again. Even if Paltrow weren't relentlessly bland, it's hard to concentrate on a performance by a woman you suspect of having a stone egg in her vagina during any given scene.

Even if there had been a smaller cast, lower stakes and a less convoluted backstory, the film has flaws entirely it's own. For several movies now, technology has been getting ridiculous in the Avengers franchise, and Iron Man's new nanotech suit basically turns him into the T-1000. Spider-man also dons a suit that Stark Industries made for him, giving both characters ill-defined powers that really feel like they were dreamt up with an eye to selling as many different action figures as possible.

Spider-man supposedly does whatever a spider can - we have a whole song about it - so giving him a robot suit seems strange and pointless. The Avengers made much out of the point that Iron Man is nothing without his armour. To take a character who IS superhuman and reduce him to another, slightly different suit of armour is just dumb.

Dumb is actually one of the biggest problems with Infinity War. Characters constantly make plans to defeat Thanos and then fail to stick to them, or do something stupid to sabotage them. Audiences like characters who are smart and capable. Marvel used to have a lot of those, but in this film they're reduced to idiocy for the sake of plot convenience.

[[[[[SPOILER SECTION HERE WITH MORE DETAIL: Why would Gamorra ask the one person who is least likely to kill her to be the one to kill her?! Rocket or Drax would probably have done it. Why did Vision decide to leave the operating table for a fist fight when the universe was hinging on him staying put?! Why did Dr. Strange give up the Time Stone to save the life of a man he spent the entire film not getting on with?! Why is nobody on Earth surprised to see a talking, heavily armed Raccoon arrive?!]]]]]

There are good parts of the film. It has some genuine laughs (although nothing to match Hulk's "puny god" moment) and Josh Brolin is great as Thanos. And then the ending... well, the ending is far and away the best thing in the film. Try to see it before anyone ruins the shock of it.

It's not a terrible film. I was consistently entertained. It's also not a great film, except for the great ending. The Russo Brothers genuinely seem to have done the best they could when faced with a daunting number of plates to spin. That they don't quite pull the trick off was perhaps inevitable. Maybe someone else would have done better, but it’s doubtful that “Infinity War” could ever have lived up to its own hype.

Seriously, though, it's worth it for the ending.