this is champagne comedy, colonel...

Indeed it is, Graeme.

Laugh yourself silly :)

(via a commenter, lost somewhere in the jungle that is Friday Q and A, over at Fitsy's joint. Do yourself a favour!)

you make me feel like... walking?

Leo Sawyer walks out of the Celebrity Big Brother house in the UK! Well, I'm using "celebrity" very loosely here. Leo's one of only three or or four genuine has beens on the show. Dirk Benedict, Jermain Jackson, Ken Russell and Leo.

The rest don't even qualify for wanna-be status.

Anyway, on with the prison break :)

it's not the same thing...

When will folks get it through their thick skulls that just because some who claim to be Muslims commit acts of terrorism, that not all Muslims are terrorists. Why is that this flawed logic, this blatant breakdown in deductive reasoning has taken become so widely accepted?

It just doesn't follow, people. It just doesn't follow!

Just because some men beat their wives, therefore all men are guilty of domestic abuse? No, that doesn't follow. A Doctor diddles a patient while they're under anaesthetic, therefore all doctors are sex offenders. Nope, no truth there, either. Yet somehow it is acceptable to claim that all Muslims are terror threats, simply because of the actions of some.

I think one of Islam's "PR" problems is they don't have a formal "command" structure like the Catholic Church does. There are respected local leaders who effectively take the title Immam (sic? excuse my ignorance) from no greater authority than the respect of their peers. As far as I'm aware there is no process of ordination or formal authority. Everything is decentralised.

This leaves them open to so-called "journalists" describing every nut who opens his mouth as a "muslim leader". Generally speaking, they're no such thing. The closest analogy to the Christian world would be the over-zealous young who frequently claim, say and do the oddest things in the name of their religion. These young zealots, though, are routinely ignored, written off by the media as over-exciteable youngsters. Yet somehow these same overexciteable youngsters of Muslim faith are deemed to speak for their entire religion.

Then you get nuts like Cr Paul Donovan, saying straight out that Islam is a violent religion. I heard him call in to 774 ABC yesterday morning. There is no transcript I can find, but apparently his views are well known. He claims that the Koran contains a number of "war chapters".

Well, newsflash, Councillor and all you other holier-than-thou types. There's a fair bit of violence in the Holy Bible, too. You don't get to pick and choose which parts of your own holy volume you choose to live by, while holding another religion to every archaic verse in their book. So, in honour of all those Christian types who want to hold Islam to every verse in the Koran, I introduce to you a new, regular segment:

"Ancient, Hideous Verses in The Bible".

Join me as we shed some light on some of the things that apparantly all Christians must agree with, since it appears in their sacred text!

it's amazing what you can find on youtube :)

I haven't managed to embed directly from youtube yet, but in the mean time please use the text link.

fields of experience...

I work in hospitality, so it goes without saying that I work with a lot of young people. My department is about eight people, one female about 40, myself and another male each about 35 and the other handful are all female and average about 22. The whole hotel, about 65 people and including managers and all, probably averages about 23.

I know what I'm about to say is just about different fields of experience. I know full well there are things others would find self-evident which would receive a similar response from me. But all that aside, what follows made me feel something. Whether that feeling was very old or a little snobbish and superior, I can't in all honesty say!

When I got to work Sunday night, after having been out at the movies instead of sleeping, my colleague commented on my visible tiredness.

"Yeh, I didn't get much sleep. I went to see 2001 at the Astor"

*blank stare*

"You know, classic science fiction movie. One of the best known films of all time"

*blank stare*

"Stanley Kubrick. {me affecting HAL accent} What do you think you're doing, Dave? {me humming theme music}"

*blink and shrug* "Cool ,well as long as you had fun"

Bugger me!

movie time!

C and I went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Astor today.

Two of the stars of the film, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, were there for a Q and A and they were signing stuff. They weren't really the draw card, I have to say. It was more to see it on the big screen. And may I say, wow! But them being there kind of added a "this won't come around again factor".

Somewhat surprisingly C enjoyed the movie. Although she's spent the greater part of her social and dating life hanging around with nerds, sci-fi geeks and sundry other film buffs, comic book fans and "cult-following" types, she'd never seen 2001 and has only reluctantly sat through Star Wars and the like! But I digress.

General spoiler warning, if by chance you, also, have never seen it!

Firstly, the music. Well, the sound in general, really. Such a mood is created that you could pretty much follow the film with your eyes shut. Naturally, the big anthemic pieces most associated with the film are powerful. I've posted earlier about my love for big, bold orchestral pieces. When the sun rises over the Earth at the very start and the boom kicks in! Very cool. I'd never heard that piece over the big speakers before. It's quite moving.

But there is also the silence. The shots of the Earth* and the emptiness of the deserts. The way its framed somehow fills the scene with tension. It's not a peaceful day we're looking at. The notion of survival is somehow drawn out of what is essentially nothing more than a series of still shots of a rocky canyon-like environment. Such tension that one is not remotely surprised when the cat comes from nowhere and attacks the ape.

The silence in the space scenes is also telling. And realistic, too. Seeing metal objects bump and crash into each other and make no sound is offputting, especially as we've been so conditioned by our earthbound experience and unrealistic films where space explosions make noise! There are scenes, when Bowman and Poole are EVA (spacewalking) and the only sound is their breathing. C was left feeling claustrophobic! As I said earlier, you could watch much of the film with your eyes shut and not miss that much.

Of course, there is that seminal moment when it dawns on the ape that this bone can be used to break things. It's probably one of the most famous moments in film history and for good reason. Right there in that almost accidental discovery is the whole human condition and the strongest possible statement in support of evolution.

What follows, though, is something I'd never noticed before and is rather more disturbing. We see an ape teaching its off-spring to employ the bone as a weapon. That really struck me this time.

The moon scenes, ironically enough, are a fairly innocuous part of the film. I say ironic because that is the only part that is actually based on Arthur C Clarke's original short story, The Sentinel. In that short story, they find the monolith on the moon and, as in the movie, it emits a signal which is presumed to be some kind of message to whoever placed it there. Keir Dullea described it today as a kind of cosmic alarm clock, which is a good analogy. I guess it's kind of stating the obvious a bit, that the monolith was placed somewhere we could only find it when we'd advanced enough to be of interest. I've always been a little confused as to when it was placed though. I get the impression from the Earth scenes that the apes woke up one morning and it was there, so were the Moon and Jupiter ones placed at the same time?

The short story leaves the question open as to who is receiving the message that the Moon monolith emits, whereas the film follows the signal to Jupiter and beyond. Although by the end the question is no less answered for the journey, which is for the best.

You can take the rest of the film any way you like, really. From a simple story about a malfunctioning computer and a film director on serious hallucinogens. Right through to, oh, whatever you like, really :) The power of the film lies in what isn't expressly shown. In what is left to the imagination. That may be in part in deference to Clarke's original story being so open ended, or Kubrick's preference for doing the same. Perhaps its both. Perhaps that's why the two were such a good fit.

C actually made more sense of the trippy lights at the end than I ever have. Now, she wasn't aware of the foetus at the end. Even though it's on the posters and so forth, but as I say, she'd never seen it. But, even without that knowledge she'd spotted birth, rebirth and creation type themes through the light show. Apparently some of the images were rather phallic and others rather gynaecological. In her words, Kubrick was in part a dirty little boy who was continually amazed how much he was able to get away with!

Dullea had some interesting things to say about the scenes in the room at the end. He felt it was something this alien intelligence had picked up from his mind as preferred habitat. Whereas, of course, that wouldn't have been his habitat, perhaps his character had been to the museum recently and that's what they'd picked up on. In other words, it was their attempt to make him comfortable while they did whatever they were doing.

Anyway, we had a good time I think. But one comment on the appearances of Lockwood and Dullea. While they had their well rehearsed shtick going on, as I watched them sitting at those tables, signing autographs and posing for photos, I have to say they looked rather sad. Imagine having such long and successful careers as both performers have, but all anyone wants to talk to you about is one role from 40 years ago. I couldn't imagine anything worse!

So that was my day. Hence very little sleep. Hence (again? can you roll one hence on top of another like that?) I'm a little bit tired at work tonight :)

* It's easy to forget that one doesn't need to specify prehistoric Earth to make clear the scenes involved. There are no contemporary scenes set on Earth in the film.