Gods help us all. Whover your deity may be.

Abby & I bumped into an old lady today. It seemed that she had been dropped off at the bus station by a health-centre care-worker who was apparently too busy to actually take her home. Tilly is frail, fragile and having eye difficulties that make it difficult for her to see the edges of the pavement. She’s also clearly in a somewhat bewildered mental and emotional state having lost her husband less than a year ago and been moved from her home into sheltered accommodation whilst she was grieving.

We helped her find her way to shop to buy milk & bread and then walked her most of the way home; she refused to let us take her all the way. I cannot help but think that even as she thanked us profusely for our help that she was still somewhat afraid to let us see where she lived, just in case.

What a sad reflection on our society this is. Tilly is lonely, scared and facing a slow decline into ill-health and dependency on people who would walk away and leave her at a bus stop to save themselves five minutes. It was so obvious to us that she has neither gotten over her man’s death (He was found dead in the street – how must that have added to her pain?) nor been given any real grief counselling since. With no family left other than a niece who is there to help her? To my great shame I did not offer to look in on her or to do anything more to help than I already had. I will keep my eyes open for her and make an effort to see she’s alright if I can. I know that Abby will do the same but not too long ago this would never have happened, especially in a place like Govan.

It may never have been an affluent area, but there was a strong community here. Now, even here, there has been such a strong swing towards having an insular society that a woman like Mrs Brown can find herself like this. I hope that she’s a member of a local church. She was married in the area. Not because I’m religious or have any naïve faith that God will somehow save her but simply because the religious communities seem to be the last bastions of a true caring society.

The friends I have who are church members all have an interest in each others’ lives. Not in a nosey way. Well, not overtly, anyway. But they spend time together and plan ways to help those of their church that are in need of help. There’s a real community spirit. I think soap operas fill that void in our lives now. The things that soap operas seem to have replaced in our lives are all there in them. Even the likes of Desperate Housewives show neighbours dropping in on one another, rallying round to help and so on. There’s gossip to share, which, however reprehensible that might be at times, is another facet of communal life. We no longer know our neighbours or what’s happening to them so we indulge in the lives of fictional characters – many cannot separate the actor from the character - and ignore real people around us like Tilly.
We really are pathetic.

Here we go again.

One of the oft-repeated quotes about today's society is

Everyone has rights, but no-one has responsibilities.

i.e. It's always someone else's fault as far as many of us are concerned. This story http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050527/12/fjx92.html seems to be adding to that type of excuse. How long will it be before some defense lawyer is quoting this as an excuse for some gang-banger's behaviour? "My client may have shot randomly into a crowd of children, your honour, but he cannot be held accountable as, having been exposed to gang behaviour from an early age, he clearly caught the violence from those around him."

It's like this bollocks about addiction being a disease. Addiction is not a disease. It is a state of chemical or psychological dependency, certainly, but you get there by putting yourself into the spiral of addiction in the first place. You cannot catch alcoholism and you don't help addicts by telling them it's not their fault.

The current sorry tale of the woman whose three teenage daughters are all mothers is another example of this blame culture that has developed. All her daughters were having underage sex. One, by the age of 16 had had two miscarriages and an abortion before carrying a child to term. The youngest was eleven when she fell pregnant. But it's the school's fault for not giving them enough sex education. Never mind that this woman was allowing the eleven year-old to sleep with her boyfriend in her home. Never mind that she never had any kind of discussion with any of the girls after the first pregnancy. Why should she? It's up to the school to make sure that her daughters know what they're doing and don't get pregnant. Not that she'll see this (or be able to read it, probably) but listen up, lady: it is the school's job to teach children about the mechanics of the human body and that does include its reproductive systems. It is not the schools' place to be their mother! It is your job to ensure that they are moral, responsible human beings.

If we start saying violence is an infectious disease then no one has any responsibility for hitting someone else. Or stabbing them, or shooting them. Yes, violence begets violence, but it is still within the purview of every human being to make the choice of whether to respond violently or not in any given circumstance. There do exist circumstances in which violence is an acceptable response. I'd suggest some yob turning up at my door expecting to shag my eleven-year old daughter is one very good time when a severe kicking is clearly called for. However, we must all take responsibility for the choice to respond in that fashion.

WTF?

I don't really feel like bitching much today.

I know, this is like fish not wanting to swim, but I seem to be feeling just a little benign towards the world right now.

Maybe it's because I just got cast in a play. Maybe it's 'cos I finally got my hands on a complete set of Space: Above & Beyond and it will even go on the SD card for my PPC.

More likely it's because having seen Revenge of the Sith before it was released I got to go onto the web & piss off hordes of Americans who couldn't give a shit that the rest of us have to wait for Hollywood's releases or that we're sometimes years behind on tv shows when they give out spoilers. I particularly enjoyed getting the son-of-a-bitch who once told me to "move to a civilised country." if I didn't like him talking about things no one else in the chat-room had seen. It was worth making all those memberships & fake ids just to get booted. The argument I had with an admin-drone who couldn't see the irony of banning me when he had refused to ban someone who repeatedly did this was great. The only site I got a chance to argue the toss on, btw. Generally, the attitude is that one a movie has been released in the US then the rest of us lose the right to be protected from spoilers.

Oh, and I'm rapidly getting pissed off again here because my computer keeps dropping the sync with my Axim and not copying over the music I want. Worse; it won't stay hooked up nearly long enough to transfer Space;Above & Beyond to the SD card. Right! I'm off to see what the politicians are up to now.

Technology, eh?

I use a nice shiny new Dell Axim X50v to which I recently switched after breaking the trusty Palm IIIx that I'd been happily using for years. It took me a long time to get over hating just about everything on the Axim. I was aware it was really Microshaft's software I don't like rather than the machine -with the sole exception of the truly lousy battery life, that is. These days I've mellowed out a bit over that (What, you? Mellow? Never!), but I still think everything about Palm OS is better. From the desktop interface - most of your customers don't need all that crap that clutters up Outlook, Bill - to not being able to security lock individual phone numbers. I know some quite famous people -no, I won't be mentioning any of them here- so I want their numbers protected. (I'm not as thick as Paris Hilton.) I don't, however, want to have to unlock my adress book every time I need a number from it.

So why didn't I buy a new machine from Palm? Easy; because just like Tony & co they ignore what everyone tells them. I posted a lot on Palm boards when I had one and they all asked for the same things of a new machine:

1. Better battery life and a replaceable battery.
2. Wi-Fi built in.
3. Silent alarm mode.
4. Voice recorder (god knows why, the Axim has it, I've never used it).

What did we get from that list? Bugger all. Yet PalmOne boasted about how they'd listened to thier consumers and given them what was being asked for in the T5. Those were in order of preference as far as I could make out, by the way, and item#1 is why I decided Palm gould go fish for my money. Just like the i-pod it's a throwaway. The battery dies and you're screwed. Or you have to pay them a bloody fortune to replace it. A £350 PDA is not a disposable and this was supposed to be an upgrade. I got at least three months out of a pair of AAAs in my IIIx, three hours and at most two years life in a T3 or T5 isn't an improvement, people.

Why this rant? As it happens I'm having a bad technology day. I put in a new USB 2.0 card the other day and now my printer won't behave so I'm sitting here downloading about half a gb of new drivers in the hope that they'll make it work. On dial-up. Then today I'm sitting in a great wee pub called The Goat that offers free wi-fi internet access and decide to update my Blog. But this site just crashes my Pocket Internet Explorer as soon as it loads. Great.

The Goat, by the way, can be found here:

1287 Argyll Street, just up from the Kelvingorve museum and not as far along as The Park Bar. Oddly, they don't seem to have a website, but that may just be because I can't find it on Google...

Are we listening yet?

One of the first things ony promised us upon winning the election last week was that he would be listening to what people had to say.

One of the first things he plans to do is to press ahead with a raft of controversial reforms that many of his own party don't like.

Of course, he's promised to listen before. He's claimed that his would be a listening government. Why are you surprised that he doesn't seem to have any intention of listening this time, either?

Revenge of the Sith

(Warning! Spoilers included)

I saw Revenge of the Sith yesterday and actually enjoyed it. I even enjoyed it quite a lot. I doubt that I’ll ever be as taken with a movie as I was by a New Hope and pity all those who didn’t get the effect of the Imperial Star Destroyer as an introduction to what cinema is capable of. I had fairly low expectations of this. Flatulent Menace was dreadful – though I must be honest & say I stopped hating it after a while. Reducing the force from a mystical energy field to a parasitic infection being something even worse, IMHO, than Jar-Jar Binks. I’m not even going to bother talking about how ill conceived he was.

Attack of the Clones was much better. Much, much better. I was disappointed to see the beginning of a pandering to fans by putting in an origin story for Boba Fett. I can tolerate it but I still think it’s only there because fans made so much of Vader’s seeming deference to Fett during Empire. Let’s get this straight people; Fett got to answer back on the bridge of the Executor because he was the only character. The other bounty hunters were extras and props. Needing to have everything explained to you and connected is a sad fan-boy trait that you need to get a grip of. Learn to enjoy and appreciate a bit of mystery.

There’s a lot of really good stuff in RotS. We finally get to see a proper space battle where the capital ships do something other than just float in space. Full-on broadsides (though we’ll ignore the shells being ejected from the breaches of energy weapons between shots), gun-decks, explosive decompression. Fighters firing at the big ships having no effect and getting twatted for their insolence. All the stuff that should have been in the Battle of Endor but wasn’t. I mean an A-Wing taking out a super Star Destroyer? Puhlease!

Don’t listen to the reviews that dismiss Hayden Christensen & Natalie Portman’s performances. They are well measured and delivered and it’s not their fault George writes such clunky dialogue. Obi-Wan & Anakin’s banter is much more natural than before and goes some way towards restoring the humour bypass Episodes 1&2 suffered. Ian McDiarmid is superb as the Emperor. I’ve had the good fortune to see him on stage and was thrilled to see him finally get the chance to show some of that talent in a Star Wars movie. I wonder how many people will connect that he made Anakin? The whole ‘virgin birth’ thing that got ignored in Episode 1 having its resolution in a way that even Anakin doesn’t seem to recognise.

There are problems with it, but they’re mostly pretty minor. At the end 3PO gets a memory (called mind) wipe to protect the twins’ identity and where they’ve been sent, but Artoo doesn’t. Why? Can’t the sith get something to translate an astromech’s beeps? There are a lot of the usual crap physics screw-ups. During the aforementioned space battle, the ship our heroes are aboard rescuing Palpatine gets damaged and pitches forward. Everyone and everything on the ship fall forward, staying that way until the ship is levelled off again. Why’s this a problem? The ships have artificial gravity. This will mean that it doesn’t matter which way the ship orients itself the floor will always be 'down'. Worse, when the ship is brought back under control the lift shaft they’re all sliding down seems to still have the same direction of gravity it had when they were falling. Oh, and if you’re standing still and someone sprays oil over your feet you do not immediately begin to slide around like a bad slapstick routine. Do look out for the continuity error during the Anakin/Obi-Wan fight where Ben is suddenly & inexplicably holding Anakin's lightsabre in one shot. It's in the trailer, so you don't even have to see the movie for this one.

Anakin has a bit of a problem when Palpatine orders him to execute Count Dooku, but accepts it, does it and – despite a wee whinge about it not being the Jedi code – says no more about it and is not angry with Palpatine for giving the order. Later, when asked by Obi-Wan & the council to spy on Palpatine, he completely goes off on one because, yes, it’s against the Jedi code. This is a big part of his motivation for going to the dark side. Added to his odd conviction that Padme is going to die in childbirth and somehow decides that the dark side can save her. Even when he doesn’t get the information from the Emperor, he doesn’t get angry with him.

That brings me to my biggest problem with it. When Padme has given birth she just dies for no apparent reason. She doesn’t have a difficult birth, she hasn’t suffered a lot of damage from Anakin’s force-choke and the medics even say there’s nothing physically wrong with her. She just loses the will to live. When she dies there is no effort made to revive her, not even by Obi-Wan who we saw trying to save her in Anakin’s vision of her death. Hardly the strong, independent woman she’s been shown as up until now. Her husband turned evil and died so she just drops dead? Come on, George. More damage from the force-choke and she wills herself to live to see her children born, yes. She just abandons them? No. Remember Luke & Leia’s conversation about their mother in Jedi? Leia remembers her mother, which gives the impression that she went into hiding with her. That makes things even better. Padme goes into hiding, damaged by the force choke, perhaps, but never really gets over Anakin’s betrayal and dies young. But no, we have to have the entire plot resolved. No looses threads because it seems we’re too thick to figure out something like that happening between Episodes 3 & 4. Given that there’s to be a TV show set in that period it could have been resolved there. Character development has never been a forte of Mr Lucas’. Witness allowing Greedo to fire first. In the original this scene shows Han to be ruthless and determined and at a point where he might possibly have become a villain, but is redeemed by his meeting with the heroes. Luke’s heroism and his love for Leia putting him on the straight & narrow. Now he’s an out and out hero from the get-go and a less interesting character because of it.

Speaking of changing things previously established might I quote Yoda? “A Jedi uses the force for knowledge and defence. Never for attack.” All the Jedi use the force to throw things at opponents, knock them off high places & smash them into walls. It seems, too, that Obi-Wan has decided that having the high ground in a lightsabre fight is an automatic win. He's on a slope up from Anakin and when the latter tries to jump over him he gets his arm & a leg cut off. How come Darth Maul never managed that? Or does it only count when a Jedi is the one above his opponent? I was thoroughly uncomfortable with Obi-Wan just standing watching the, now basket-case, Anakin sliding into the lava & bursting into flames.

And just how fast is hyperspace travel? Palpatine fights Yoda (who gives up & runs away for no apparent reason) on Coruscant & then becomes aware that 'Lord Vader is in danger.' Since the impression is that these two duels are roughly simultaneous how can Plapatine get to the volcano planet in the Outer Rim before Anakin - who now needs a walking iron lung to keep him alive - dies? And when they're re-assembling him why does he get no treatment for his burns? Don't they have bacta? Or even anaesthetic? Have prosthetics advanced so far that just clipping them to his stumps is sufficient?

You'll have seen the shot of the Death Star under construction. I hoped there was to be an impression of time having passed, but there isn't. Are we now to believe that they took twenty years to build Mk I, but got the 10 times larger Mk II done in three years?

There’s far too much reliance on CGI some of it quite poorly done. The wookies are repeated very obviously in their big appearance (The whole wookie thread is a waste of time, by the way.) and things are done just because they can be not because they advance the plot or make things better. For example, why use cg to put a couple of clone troopers behind Anakin & Obi-Wan when it must have been easier and cheaper to put guys in suits there instead? There’s a dreadful shot on Coruscant where the characters seem to glide above the surface they’re walking on. This is, IMO, the big problem with CGI in general. There’s always a failure of interaction between the computer images and the real world. I’ve even seen examples where computer images don’t seem to interact properly where different houses have done the elements. Even Artoo gets the CGI treatment allowing him to take on super battle droids and catch a com-link thrown to him by Anakin. (Didn’t he have one built in by Jedi?)

I know, I know; I’m sounding negative. Put it this way, though: this time I care enough to talk about it. The last two weren’t worth the effort.

One thing I did notice, though, was a seeming reference to contemporary politics, especially American foreign policy. Some very interesting comments about how democracy is won or lost and having the villain quote Dubya’s infamous ‘You’re either with us or against us.’ statement had me wondering if George was making a wee stand.

Results

So, we got Tony's Cronies again. No big surprise there. What has surprised me is the way his own party don't seem to want him any more. Alright, it's people who never got along with him in the first place, but to be described as a liability by your own party after you WON the election, that must hurt!

I am also disgusted that he has, yet again, elevated one of his buddies to make him an unelected minister and there's bugger all protest. It was bad enough the last time he pulled that stunt (With Gus MacDonald from STV) but at least there seemed to be a reason for it. I don't know a lot about this latest appointment yet, but I'm against it in principle. Only the elected should govern us. Or why vote at all?

And all those people who had to resign through various instances of mis-conduct & incompetence back in the cabinet. Having an election did not wipe their slate clean. There may be far fewer NL members around these days, but there are still enough to cover all the jobs without having soiled goods in office once more. Or don't they all agree with you Tony? God forbid you should have someone in a Labour cabinet who's actually a (say it in hushed tones) Socialist!!!

Exercising the franchise

No, not what George Lucas does. Voting, which Abby & I did on the way home.

Anyone who knows me will be able to guess where my cross went, but I was disappointed that we were the only ones in the polling station the whole time we were there. I guess there's a good chance of as low a turnout as many pundits feared.

Not only were voters absent, but so were the party activists. Now, I've never really understood the concept of handing out the flyer you put through everyone's door a few weeks ago at the entrance to the polling station. I seriously doubt that anyone has ever suddenly decided where to cast their ballot just because someone handed them a flyer on the way in. On this occasion the only party represented were the SSP, for whom I have a good deal of respect and who seemed to have conducted a much more traditional, and positive, campaign than the others. Just a pity they had to go and spoil the effect by crowding four people around the gate and getting quite sniffy when given a polite 'No thanks' in return to their proffered flyer.

Coincidentally, I was playing a paranoid schizophrenic all day with much of his background to the psychosis being about being a socialist. I brought in all the stuff about the government colluding, allegedly, with the US in kidnapping our citizens and taking them abroad to be tortured as part of the "War on Terror." Several students thought I'd made that up and were genuinely shocked when told not. Hopefully I cost Tony's Cronies a few votes. It was strange putting my mind into that place, though, on polling day. I could see how someone could go over the edge a bit when you look at the lies and spin that government in this country has descended into during 'Smiler' Blair's tenure. Say what you like about Thatcher - and I have lots to say about what she did to us all - but at least you knew what you were getting with her. She made her decisions, followed them through and stood by them. TB & co react to every passing fad whipped up by the tabloids, dodge, evade and lie about everything and accept responsibility for nothing.

PS I was Nearly sad enough to get up early this morning so's I could post this blog at 5.05 am. But being asleep was more important to me than being a sad twat.

Why not?

I've been reading a few other people's blogs for some time now and hadn't really had more than a passing whim to add my own voice to the blogosphere. But the whole UK election has just got me so riled up I have to do something.

Trouble is, I don't want this to just be a political rant. Oh no. I'm sure I can rant about a lot more stuff than just our lying bastard politicians.

However - and this is just the way our political masters want us- I'm working in the morning and am spending the next two days playing a paranoid schizophrenic, so both of us are off to bed.

I do, however, promise to begin ranting soon and to do other things than rant. I might rave a bit, too.