h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Miah is in and is somewhat subdued. Susan is off at work.

I start writing draft one of the thesis tomorrow - this is stuff that WILL go to the supervisor and in respect of which comments WILL be expected.

I have my pot o' cawffee sitting next to me.

I had a lot of £££ work yesterday - telephone support stuff.

Last night's quiche turned out rather well, the lesson being to use more egg and fewer other ingredients.

We watched episode 1 of season 1 of (2004) Battlestar Galactica. You buy a Season 1 box, you don't expect to be dropped into the middle of a story. What I saw looked good but it was a case of catch up if you can.

We also watched the first two eppys of Season 7 of the X Files. SUsan said that there must have been a new costumes team for the season as all the women had been shoehorned into wonderbras. I am above noticing such details. I get the sense of the series being past its best by Season 7 but may well be proved wrong.

I never rated Sonic Youth first time round but now acknowledge that they're rather good, in a Jim O'Rourke/Tortoise kinda way.

I see that the stoning of you woman in Iraq has been stopped - hopefully permanently. I dare say that now she'll be slowly abused to death in some Iraqi gaol. I read a report about stoning in Iraq in the Times yesterday, and it felt, as I was reading it, like I was in a lift that had suddenly shot town two floors. I had a physical sense of freefall in the pit of my stomach, and drifted off into fantasies of being teleported into a stoning with two Uzis and lotsa spare clips...

(Charteris says keep violence in the mind, where it belongs - see Barefoot in the Head).

I mean, how can anyone do it? Ritually wash a living person then sew her up in a shroud? Bury her up to the chest in the earth, then throw rocks at her for a half-hour or so until repeat concussions finally kill her? Killing people I can kinda understand, on an instinctive level, but if 'twere done, best 'twere done quickly. To protract a killing is monstrous. It is bestial. How can anyone stand and throw rocks at another human being for a half-hour and ever again assert any claim to humanity? Religion can make a person do such things. And ideology - I have long been of the view that fascism and communism &c are nothing more than secular religions; they substitute living gods who are mortal for immortal gods who have never lived - in either case, if the mythology can get spun out for long enough it becomes institutional. SF is good at treating themes like this - Canticle for Leibowitz &c.

Apparently, issues like this (how the perpetrators of gross inhumanities can come it an accommodation with themselves through self-deception) are debated in a fairly recent book, now in paperback - The Kindly Ones. It was well-reviewed, tho' not without caveats, in the LRB. Maybe I should hunt out a copy in the second hand shops.

Blathers.


Douglas

They had an absolutely splendid woman being interviwed on BBC R4 Today this morning, at about five to nine - President of the Folklore Society Jacqueline Simpson. It is worth LA-ing just to hear her voice. I will force Susan to listen to her tonight. The end of the interview was just splendid. SHe is a Brit, but Oh! that accent - it reminded me of Mrs Bunz in Ngaio Marsh's Off With His Head.

The Folklore Society has an excellent website http://www.folklore-society.com/


Douglas

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/10568651.stm

Age 15. Must serve a minimum of 23 years.

When I was 15 I was watching the Sweeney and may even still have had my Chopper. I read the Victor and liked Cresta (it's frothy, man) and Aztec bars. There was this telly series being touted set in Space in the inconcievably far distant year of 1999. I hadn't seen one single solitary zombie movie. By the time I reached 38 I had long since left home, got a degree, worked in several proper jobs, and had been married to Susan for nearly 14 years. We were in our third home together. We had a comnputer, but there wasn't much you could do with it. A lot of water had flowed under the bridge since the Cresta days...

He will have lost his youth, his prospects, his freedom. He will have become completely institutionalised.

Good. The girls he burnt alive aren't having much of a life either.

Anent punishment - I abhor capital punishment. There's the wrongful convictions argument. There's also the view that capital punishment coarsens and degrades and taints the state and those who have to administer it. Hangmen must be really really damaged people.

There's a rather good book by the Scots crime writer Stuart McBryde - Halfhead. It is a soft SF cum crime dystopian novel set in a future Glasgow in which the state lobotomises and surgically disfigures serious criminals and puts them out onto the street to empty bins &c. It's McBryde's best book.

An idea I had was that life should mean life - i.e. that the state actively sets out to keep the murderer alive as long as possible, 70, 80, 90, then on ventilators on a bed attached to electrodes and plugged into drips, 150, 160, 170, until the flesh rots, the organs liquify. OK, it's a fantasy, and a sick one - I don't dwell on it. It'd make a good idea for a short story or radio play. Killers would do their best to off themselves rather than getting caught. The police &c would strive diligently to catch their suspects alive.

Hmmm... Life Means Life, the Afternoon Play on Radio 4, sometime in 2012? New playwright Lucy Dalrymple (my pen name, OK?) makes her radio debut with a challenging...

Lucy (or Lucinda) Dalrymple will also write Mills & Boon Regency Romances. I have commented anent these in the past. Soft pron writen by American Fine Arts graduates, rattling good fun but full of clunkers - "Sir Roderick offered Ameila his hand. She stepped unsteadily down from the carriage onto the sidewalk..." and the such like. Lucy could do better. She's a spunky lass, full o' pep and vigor.

The plan with the Regency Romances, by the way, is to get the hero and heroine into a state of throbbing turgidity/sopping heat ASAP and keep them in that state for 22 chapters. This is why it is hard to imagine them as pop up books.


Douglas

http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/books/historical.htm

I think that M&B will do quite well out of the recession. I'm quite serious about wanting to have a go at one some day.


Douglas

I see it reported in today's Times that the US said that it was deeply troubled by the reports of the proposed stoning execution of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani in Iran and that it regarded stoning as "a form of legalised death by torture."

Ahem...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_Ray_Rector:

Or

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32864140/

The Times also notes that Iran has merely cancelled the stoning, and might yet hang Ms Ashtiani.

What was it that River said - "Some days are special. Some days are so so blessed. Some days nobody dies at all. Now and then, every once in a very long while—every day in a million days when the wind stands fair and the Doctor comes to call—everybody lives. "


Douglas

Oh, last word for the day...

I do feel kinda sorry for those 'sleeper' Russian spies who have just been sent back to Russia as past of a swap. Can't imagine they'll relish the change one little bit...

Two good leaders in today's Times. Can't link to them, though, cos' the Times has had a wee blue hairy mentaller anent its website edition and you can't link any more.




Douglas

"What was it that River said"
I thought it was "Hello sweetie"?

I also liked the line before that:
"Everybody dies one day - but not every day"

I take your point, though I think your idea would probably count as cruel and unusual punishment. I don't think you read Iain Banks, but the baddy in "The Algebraist" has some novel ideas about keeping defeated opponents alive: one is reduced to a head only and is used as a punch bag.

In W*terst*nes yesterday and noticed Penguin have issued a set of collected works of HPL. And some other publisher has republished the original collections.

Have a nice weekend

PJ's OH