threeoranges

The Khristian Oliver Case

2009-10-21T12:06:27Z

It's a little scary to think of jurors taking the Bible into the courtroom - and then playing pick-and-choose with scripture to decide whether a man should live or die. But it happened in the case of Khristian Oliver:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/15/texas-bible-jury-death-sentence

Somehow they managed to miss Matthew 5:7 ("Blessed are the merciful"). It really doesn't sound like Oliver received a fair judgement. If you agree, maybe a short email to the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, might persuade him to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. (Look, it might. Especially if he gets thousands of protests.)

http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=13213

Ta muchly for reading!

The Bleedin' Obvious.

2009-09-05T05:15:19Z

via yonmei:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick.

If you agree, please post this in all your social networking accounts.

A helping of pretty: Crop circles

2009-06-04T09:02:17Z

... No, I don't believe aliens are responsible for crop circles. Their creators are fiendishly clever, I grant you, but they're definitely human. (Also, why are humans so desperate to attribute such intelligence to extra-terrestrials? Our species discovered electricity, penicillin, dynamite: it's hardly a great leap of faith to assume we can also tump down barley fields at night to create artistic masterpieces.)

The latest crop circle, Jellyfish, is 600 feet long and extremely beautiful.

Even more impressive, however, was the 2008 crop circle in Wiltshire. 150 feet wide and set out in a seemingly random pattern, a retired astrophysicist worked out its true meaning here. Please, go read. You'll be VERY impressed.

Read this article. Just read it.

2009-04-28T11:38:01Z

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/article6169378.ece

And if it disgusts you (and if it doesn't disgust you, CHECK YOUR PULSE) a short email to Colin Green, the chap mentioned in that article, might not go amiss.

He can be reached on colin.green@coventry.gov.uk

I just sent him an email, expressing my warmest sentiments, only to receive an auto-reply that he's out of the office from now until 5th May. Good job I cc'd "chief.executive@coventry.gov.uk".

Tom Paine, the antimonarchist's antimonarchist

2009-02-14T09:11:45Z

Hey, why did no-one tell me how much fun Thomas Paine's anti-monarchist rants were? Or what an elegant prose stylist he was? Found a copy of his THE RIGHTS OF MAN & COMMON SENSE second-hand, and I must say that COMMON SENSE is the most appealing attack on the whole notion of monarchy ever:

... This is supposing the present race of kings in the world to have had an honorable origin; whereas it is more than probable, that could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise, that we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtility obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power, and extending his depredations, over-awed the quiet and defenceless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions. Yet his electors could have no idea of giving hereditary right to his descendants, because such a perpetual exclusion of themselves was incompatible with the free and unrestrained principles they professed to live by. Wherefore, hereditary succession in the early ages of monarchy could not take place as a matter of claim, but as something casual or complimental; but as few or no records were extant in those days, and traditionary history stuffed with fables, it was very easy, after the lapse of a few generations, to trump up some superstitious tale, conveniently timed, Mahomet like, to cram hereditary right down the throats of the vulgar. Perhaps the disorders which threatened, or seemed to threaten, on the decease of a leader and the choice of a new one (for elections among ruffians could not be very orderly) induced many at first to favor hereditary pretensions; by which means it happened, as it hath happened since, that what at first was submitted to as a convenience, was afterwards claimed as a right.

England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath a much larger number of bad ones; yet no man in his senses can say that their claim under William the Conqueror is a very honorable one. A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.—It certainly hath no divinity in it. However, it is needless to spend much time in exposing the folly of hereditary right, if there are any so weak as to believe it, let them promiscuously worship the ass and lion, and welcome. I shall neither copy their humility, nor disturb their devotion.

The first king as "the chief among plunderers" and William the Conqueror as "a French bastard landing with an armed banditti"? How I love you, Thomas Paine!! If you have time, I urge you to read the whole thing at bartleby.com: it's only a short rant, and the above extract should give you a taste of its incisive wit.

What really amazes me is that, despite his defection from his native-born Britain and allegiance to the American rebels, there's a statue of him in his hometown of Thetford, Norfolk. I'd like to think this says something about the British character - that any nation that can raise a statue to someone who contributed to the betterment of mankind, even when that person launched stinging attacks on their own system at the time, can't be all bad.

Also, how ironic is this?

In September 1819, William Cobbett went to Thomas Paine's grave in New Rochelle, New York, dug up Paine's body, and raced the authorities to the docks where he sailed back to England with the corpse. Upon revealing the body to Customs agents in Liverpool, Cobbett announced "There, gentlemen, are the mortal remains of the immortal Thomas Paine." Cobbett's intention was to build a memorial to Paine in England since his memory (and his grave) was being disrespected in the United States. There was just one problem - Paine had been strongly against the monarchy and was still considered something of an outlaw in England. Cobbett's plans were refused. And so, what was left of Thomas Paine was stored in William Cobbett's attic and remained there until his death.

After William Cobbett died in 1835, it is believed his son sold the remains of Thomas Paine in pieces. At one time, a Bishop in England was said to have Paine's right hand and skull adorning his mantlepiece. An English woman claimed to have his jawbone. A man in France claimed to own one of his ribs. Buttons are also said to have been made from his bones. How ironic that this first "citizen of the world" would end up scattered around it. Efforts are underway to have Paine's remains returned to New Rochelle for re-burial. (http://driventotears.com/HTML/ThomasPaine.html)

How the HECK did it happen that the world's foremost atheist got rendered into RELIGIOUS RELICS after his death? Man, that must sting!!

Forgotten But Not Gone: The GWB Photo Gallery

2008-11-09T22:45:19Z

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/3274186/George-W-Bush-in-pictures.html

There's No One As Irish As Barack O'Bama

2008-10-20T20:15:15Z

SWEENEY

2008-08-25T00:43:27Z

Let me be quite clear about it: I adore this musical. I don’t think there’s a stage-musical written in the last fifty years which can match it. A timeless revenge drama, a world-view shocking in its bleakness – and yet every character in it pulses with vivid life, and love often struggles to flourish amid the treachery. The script (based on a play by Christopher Bond) is a finely-honed mechanism, but the addition of the music lifts it to a higher plane. Just the thrilling opening number is worth the price of admission, and from there the score opens up to reveal Sondheim’s remarkable versatility: lush melodies, shrieking atonalism, patter arias, darkly raucous music-hall numbers and heartfelt cries of anguish.

Now, I’m aware the above paragraph may be preaching to the converted, but my point is that when you have a score this awesome, you celebrate it. Or at least, I would.

I certainly wouldn’t eviscerate said score, chop out some of the most stirring musical passages and give the remainder to a cast that largely couldn’t sing.

This cavalier attitude to the singing – hey, we can’t have Johnny Depp dubbed by a trained singer because it might hurt his feelings! – has been the reason I’ve avoided the film until this point. Now, having finally given the film a chance, I’m delighted to report that every single one of my prejudices was bang on the money. Just like Gerard “PHANTOM” Butler before him, Depp takes a pleasant-sounding score and turns it into something to which it is painful to listen. Bonham-Carter fares considerably better in most of her songs, but her frail pure thread of a voice can’t cope with the boisterous energy of her opening number, “The Worst Pies In London”. The result just serves to underline the sort of singer who should have landed the part.

If you can’t understand why I’m so upset, just try to imagine a modern version of WEST SIDE STORY where Depp and Bonham-Carter took the main roles and weren’t dubbed by trained singers. Just imagine their wafer-thin tones attempting classics like “Tonight” and “Maria”. Even if you had never heard the score before and didn’t have the classic 1961 version with which to compare it, you’d be subtly aware that you were being short-changed, wouldn’t you? You’d just know that music this glorious deserved something better than a mediocre performance.

Actually, maybe that’s why some of the lushest sections of the score got axed? There’s a lovely middle passage of “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” which got the chop, seemingly for no other reason than to save space. The “Kiss Me/Ladies in their Sensitivities” quartet, in particular the section starting with “The name is Todd” (starting at 4:08 on the linked excerpt) is often glorious. And, because Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall can only just carry a tune and certainly couldn’t cope with the demands of that piece, out it went - and with it went much of the generally-adorable character of Anthony and Johanna, too. From a rich, full-blooded portrait of Victorian society, this SWEENEY got shrivelled down to a thin, black-and-white engraving of Sweeney, Mrs Lovett and not much else.

Which, in turn, might not have been so bad if Johnny Depp had shown a bit more emotion in what was supposed to be a melodrama. But he didn’t. Just look at the way he delivers “Would no-one have mercy on her?”: it’s a line which should break with the weight of his emotional reaction – he has, after all, just been told of the public gang-rape of his wife - and there he is, screaming “NOOOO!” on cue, yet immediately following it up with a hoarse, withdrawn mutter. “Would no-one (pause) ‘ave mercy on ‘er?” This version of Sweeney has so much self-control that he lets his façade slip for no more than a second before switching back to the role of interested stranger. This Sweeney is so icy that he issues the follow-up questions “Where’s Lucy? Where’s my wife?” in a lifeless monotone, as if he doesn’t really care what answer he gets. For me, that severely lessens the tragic impact of the character – other stage Sweeneys I’ve seen have shown the vulnerability of that moment, not rejected it in favour of a stony demeanour. This Sweeney is a man who’d decided to take the path of revenge and become a killer before he’d even stepped off the ship. “Benjamin Barker”, the loving husband and father, the man with a hope of redemption, died long before this film’s opening credits.

Nellie Lovett – well, of course I found it hard to get over Helena Bonham-Carter’s porcelain-doll beauty! Expecting us to believe she’s a work-coarsened shopkeeper is like a supermodel putting on a ragged dress and expecting us to believe she’s Brecht’s “Mother Courage”! That said, she was perfectly watchable in the role, and I particularly enjoyed her glances of hopeless adoration in Sweeney’s direction. Rickman (Judge Turpin) and Spall (Beadle Bamford), the other celebrities in the film, were adequate at best: the relative unknowns playing Anthony, Johanna and the Beggar-woman were clearly talented, but had their roles shrunk almost to cameos. At least the scarily young Ed Sanders (Toby) was given the space to demonstrate his excellent vocal technique: his rendition of “Not While I’m Around” was possibly my favourite scene in the film.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, I didn’t enjoy much else about this version. Tim Burton’s capable of some great visuals, but the morbid humour leant too far to the “sick” end of the scale in this one. (Were we supposed to laugh at the spectacle of a ten-year-old being sentenced to hang? Or Toby telling us about the “things that happen in the dark” in the workhouse? Yes, Tim, child molestation is just the thing to use for a throwaway gag.) In addition, whenever the scriptwriters changed things, it was nearly always for the worse. Judge Turpin’s invitation to Anthony to come up and see his porn collection** was a very poor exchange for the Beadle’s “songbird” scene (“Get the picture, friend? Next time, it will be your neck”). Besides, who could possibly prefer the line “I’ll be right back to you – half an hour and we’ll be free!” to the original “I’ll be back before those lips have time to lose that smile”?

And as for the ending – could there be any clearer evidence that everyone got fed up and decided to wrap it up without thought for plot or character resolution? “Who cares that we don’t know what happened to Toby, Johanna or Anthony? You know what happened to the principals. Go home; that’s all folks.”

All in all, a waste of awesome material. I just hope it doesn’t put people off Sondheim.

** In addition, the terrible dialogue in that added scene (“You gandered, sir, you gandered, you gandered!”) also provoked the irreverent thought that this must be some private contest by the scriptwriters to insert the names of foreign countries into the script. Since “Tibet” and “Peru” were mentioned in the opening song, I spent the next forty minutes on the lookout for cunning references to “Sam Mower” or “Vinnie’s whaler”. Maybe they tried and got found out? Shame, as in my view a “hidden countries contest” would have improved the script by about 70%.

EDIT, 25/08/08: Just found a review which goes more deeply into the defects of the Burton version. Reading it, I had that rare sensation of being in total agreement with every single point the critic makes:

http://mslaurylsulfate.livejournal.com/593.html

That book meme

2008-06-27T12:15:20Z

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE. 3a) Strikethrough the books you HATE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (unfinished)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling - loved the first four, am MEH on the rest
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (unfinished)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (unfinished)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (read most, but this is unfinished - haven't read the three parts of Henry VI, for instance)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (gave up; bored)
18 The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Plague - Albert Camus (my own addition, as the previous list replicated a Narnia entry here. Awesome book; if you haven't read it, please do)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (loved it... up to that horrible ending. It gets no underlining because of that ending.)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 ~~The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown~~
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (I have to, for the LOST bookclub)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (unfinished when paperback got ruined on holiday; a pity, as I was loving it)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (enjoyed, but just missed greatness)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 ~~Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding~~ (Yes, there were funny bits. Didn't obviate the final message that a woman is pathetic and useless without a man. URGH.)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (read extracts; it's OK, but nuthin' special)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (life's too short!)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (An amazing piece of work, but after that horrific ending I defy anyone to tell me they "love it")
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (two years ago this would have been a strikethrough, but now I can just about tolerate it)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

From which results one may observe

i) I am easily pleased
ii) I want to read EVERYTHING worth reading before I snuff it

I can't help wondering whether this whole meme got started just to see how many people have read the Bible all the way through...