We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Are you ready, DVD Sports fans? Are you ready for Lord of the Rings, Part II?
It’s no good, I should’ve been a film star. Ok, so when I was seventeen I was spotty, overweight, and without any acting talent whatsoever, but I should’ve still been a film star. Under a socialist society I would’ve been spotted by now, for being an immense actor of charisma, talent, and conviction, but unfortunately, with society being still unprepared for my raw presence, under the evil rule of Mr Tony Blair, a hammish actor with only a scintilla of my ability to project compassion, emotion, and downright plain falsity, I was doomed to have to work for a living, to pay his bleedin’ wages. Damn!
Should’ve been a politician. → Continue reading: Lord of the DVDs
The most absurd intellectual property rights claim ever?
With their earthy tones and lizard motifs, Prince Harry’s paintings won admiration at home and last week earned him a grade B at A-level. But his work has stirred anger in Western Australia, where he is accused of stealing Aboriginal themes.
The moral pygmies claiming ‘ownership’ of the images drawn by artists who died hundreds of years ago must be the world’s biggest losers. Inacapable of artistic expression themselves, they demand the unearned greatness of their remote ancestors.
How sad that genuine aboriginal achievements are drowned out by the moochers!
The first foreign cricket team to visit England (in 1868) was comprised entirely of aboriginal players. Subsequently, Australian cricket authorities tried to forget about this as more than a century passed without a non-white player. Are they excluded from clubs, does the welfare system turn an entire race into a dependent underclass?
I don’t suppose that the professional racial-awareness poverty pimps are demanding that aborigines stop getting welfare and solve their problems by economic means.
For the record, one of my French ancestors wore the Crusaders’ red cross on white background in Palestine. Does this mean I should sue England soccer supporters for ‘violating’ my heritage, after all their king only went on the Third Crusade?
Kevin Connors talks about a certain British civil servant with a licence to kill, er, drive
Bond purists know that there are only two ‘proper’ cars for 007 to drive, an Aston or a Bentley. But for many years, while the British auto industry decayed, neither Aston or Bentley produced anything James would be caught dead in (book readers might recall Gardner gave him a Mulsanne Turbo in 1984). But over the last decade, the British Car business has been undergoing a renaissance, riding a wave of American and German capital and technology. The fruits of this are really starting to come now. Two years ago, Aston Martin (now owned by Ford) introduced their beautiful V12 Vanquish, seen in last year’s Die Another Day. But still, relative to the breathtaking Ferrari 575M Maranello, it’s only real competition, most automotive commentators declared it an also-ran. (While the comparison is far closer than that of the classic DB5, introduced in Goldfinger, and the 1964 Ferrari 500 Superfast, to say nothing of the incomparable 250GTO. Even the Lamborghini 350GT and Maserati 3500 GT, would likely have cleaned the DB5’s clock.)
Now, all that is behind us. After many teases, Bentley Motor Cars, (now owned by Volkswagen) is finally releasing their latest masterpiece, the Bentley Continental GT:
It has no competition.
This 4 passenger, 5000lb, W-12, AWD monster does 0-60 in 4.7 seconds, the same as a Porsche Carrera. It tops out at 198 mph, faster than all but a handful of 2 seat super-exotics. All this while coddling the passengers in the lap of luxury.
With plenty of room for Q to hide toys, this is a car Commander Bond would love. Of course, the next car 007 actually drives will be determined by the real world consideration of how much the manufacturers are willing to pony up in product placement money. And, although the producers know the fans want to see Bond in a British car (and not a plastic toy Lotus, even if it does go underwater), If Toyota forked over enough, James might be driving the new Supra.
BUT WAIT!
There’s a new player on the scene
I didn’t consider this at first, because of the leading name on the moniker. However, on further consideration, there’s likely more actual British engineering and manufacturing content in this than the Bentley. Ladies and gentleman, coming in about six months, I give you the revolutionary Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren:
As opposed to the Bentley’s porcine two and a half ton mass, carbon composite construction helps keep the SLR to a svelte one and three-quarters. This, along with slightly greater horsepower (580, not 605 as stated on spec. sheet), shave a full second off the Bentley’s 0-60 time. Top speed is 211 mph. A handful of currently available automobiles are in the performance league with the SLR: the Lamborghini Murcielago (also VW, btw), the Pagani Zonda C12-S 7.2, the Ferrari Enzo, and the Saleen S7. But all these are, to one degree or another, racing cars for the street. The SLR promises to be the first super-exotic that’s also a viable daily driver.
Of course, the SLR costs (before Q-izing) two or three times the price of the Bentley. But, to Her Majesty’s Government, it’s just chump change seeing as they have all those taxpayers to call on.
With Mr Schwarzenegger throwing his hat into the ring of the California Governorship, I thought it was my aspiring libertarian duty to the spirit of freedom, to take in the Austrian candidate’s latest mega-movie, Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines. So I beat a warm and humid trail from a jet-engine air-conditioned hotel in the salubrious Euston area of London, to the fragrant Leicester Square, home to a million and one interesting smells emanating from the great hoi polloi of old London Town.
I managed to scramble about the last ticket sold, for the early evening performance at the Odeon cinema, and only managed to sit down and switch off my mobile phone ten seconds before the opening credits began.
So, first impressions? If there’s a Terminator 4, I’ll be back. (Come on, we’ve got to get these things out of the way when reviewing Arnie films. I’ll try to get all the others in as soon as I can, to ease the pain.)
Second impressions? To hell with what the literati London critics said about this film. I’m a lowbrow and I need regular jolts of science-fiction-style entertainment to get me through this rollercoaster we know as life. And Arnie films almost always do the trick (except for Twins, of course.)
In Terminator 3, Arnold once again delivers the goods. Can he really be 56 years old? I hope I have pectorals like that when I’m 56. Hell, I wish I’d had pectorals like that when I was 23. → Continue reading: Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines
And so, as Jack Bauer ends his ordeal without any sleep, any trips to the bathroom, or any visible form of food other than sporadic liquid snacks sucked at the wheel of the latest stolen car (Sorry Sir, we have to take your vehicle), I wonder to myself…
What the heck am I going to do on Sunday nights, for the next six months?
Is 24 the only program currently on television, which is in any way worth coming home to watch, of an evening? And now it’s not on again, until Season 3, what’s the point of that glassy tube in the corner of the room? Perhaps I should replace it with a neverending loop of The Simpsons?
I won’t spoil 24’s ending, for those with wills of iron who’ve videoed the last episode, and who’re watching it later, except to say the script writers could’ve spent a little more time working on some of the slushier last-reel dialogue. However, except for this single forgivable rewriting lapse, I’ll be there for Season 3, propped up with a glass of Californian red, a cheese board, and a syringe full of adrenaline for heart-stopping emergencies.
OK, so it’s Federal US agents, paid for with coerced taxes, and the US government cabinet is populated with dimwits, fascists, and believers in Medicaid, but what a series! And what a body count! Is Kiefer Sutherland going to be the first James Bond born on the wrong side of the Atlantic? I don’t know, but whatever the weather, and if he can’t do a proper British accent, he’d certainly make a great Felix Leiter, or an excellent villain. (And with a Scottish surname, like Sutherland, surely he can cut the Connery-esque mustard?)
So, as I wander into the night, to prepare for another week teaching 26 people the joys of learning Perl (oh, those lucky people!), I also wonder how close to the knuckle the next series can go? It got really razor-blade sharp this time, with calls for leaders not to go to war against Middle East countries without really conclusive evidence (were you watching there, in Barbados, Mr ’45 minutes, Niger Yellowcake’ Blair?), but Season 2 is going to be a hard monkey to slap. However, I have faith.
Go, Kiefer baby, go!
Aaron Barschak, the loon who thought it was amusing to dress up as bin Laden and gatecrash a fancy dress party hosted by the Royals, has not been able to draw in the crowds at the Edinburgh arts festival this year, according to this report.
The gag is definitely on him. Here’s hoping he crawls under a rock where he came from. Sorry to be killjoy, but dressing up as terrorist is not my idea of a joke.
It certainly is. Says Michael Blowhard:
The time has finally come for traditional artists to give up the fight. To just lay down those clunky old analog tools. What’s the point in carrying on a battle that’s already lost?
Go here and do what Michael says.
This one is my favourite. Mouse click on one of the row of dots at the bottom, and enjoy.
Michael again:
Whew: interactivity, beauty, wit, play, moods. And more art ‘n’ talent ‘n’ creativity on display here than in —
OK, I am raving. Still: pretty darn cool.
Indeed.
Anyone here know of other stuff like this?
The BBC’s flagship radio station, Radio1, has dropped below the 10 million listeners barrier for the first time in its history, as reported in today’s Grauniad.
In a related piece, in today’s Torygraph, Neil McCormick questions the way records are selected for Radio1’s main play-list. Apparently, it’s done in exactly the same way that commercial radio stations do it.
Which begs the immediate questions; what then is the purpose of Radio1? And why are we tax-plebs forced to contribute so much towards it, via the BBC licence fee? In the commercial arena its listeners could easily pay for it via the advertising market they would generate.
I hope the funding, which goes into Radio1, isn’t being used to support an otherwise large and unnecessary layer of grateful lefties, in palatial BBC comfort, to stop them having to work for a living.
And in return for such largesse, I hope these lefties aren’t then broadcasting the continuous message, to all of Radio1’s impressionable younger listeners, that the state is wonderful, in all of its great and holy facets.
I should coco.
One of the few drama series worth watching over at the BBC (sharp intake of breath!) is the programme Spooks, which purports to show how M15, Britain’s secret service, operates. A short while ago, an episode featured how the various operatives dealt with radical Islamic terrorism.
What interested me was the very fact that such a controversial topic would be aired by the BBC at all. The series tended to start off with a decidedly politically-correct slant, so broaching the topic of Islamo-fascist terror was quite brave. Makes me wonder how the script-writers were able to get this episode on screen.
Well, as this story shows, the episide triggered a number of complaints, claiming the programme was racially stereotyped. But then it is a bit difficult to do a programme about spies taking on the likes of al-Quaeda and it not to encounter such an issue, I would have thought.
More broadly, though, this got me thinking about how television and movie dramas have handled issues like this over the years. In the early James Bond movies, for example, the bad guys were either Russians or former Smersh agents, but as the series progressed and got ever more silly during the Roger Moore era, the villains became less ‘political’, no doubt to avoid the kind of complaints that Spooks has encountered.
There have always been a few interesting exceptions, though. Some of the Tom Clancy books adapted for film touched on issues like Northern Ireland, although often not very convincingly.
Do I detect a change in trend? The American series “24”, for example, makes no bones about enormously contentious issues. I think people want a bit more hard-edged realism in their dramas, and if that means upsetting some people, so be it.
However, I am not sure whether 007 will be staging his next adventure in Bagdhad any time soon.
Broken news, from whenever, but I didn’t know. Paul Johnson has written a book about Art. Thanks to Michael Blowhard for the news.
Its American publication date is October, which means it should be available in early-to-mid September. The publisher compares the book to Gombrich, and describes it as a comprehensive history of art that covers everything from rock painting up the present. I seem to remember that Johnson himself is a serious watercolorist and art fanatic, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the art-crit part of the book is as good as the history-telling will no doubt be. I’m also betting that the view he delivers of art history won’t be the standard one, to say the least. I’m especially curious to see how he treats the 20th century — a little birdy has already told me that Warhol gets not much more than one sentence in the book.
Can I wait until it piles up in the remainder shops? No, I don’t think that will happen.
Angelina Jolie, curvaceous star of the latest movie based on mega-hit computer game, Tomb Raider, reckons that the busty, heavily-armed heroine is a role model for women. Hmmm. An interesting thought. Croft knows how to handle guns, is mighty tough in a fight, and is rather easy on the eye (as Ms Jolie assuredly is). The ultimate libertarian heroine, perhaps?
A feature of popular culture in these past few years has been the ascent of the kick-ass female movie/tv star. Think of Buffy, for example; the character Trinity in the Matrix films, or the ladies on Charlies’ Angels. I think the whole thing got started with the likes of Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg in the old Avengers television series, and in some of the better James Bond movies.
One thing all these women have in common is that they are a million miles away from the ‘victim culture’. Nothing passive or helpless about them. It seems that popular culture is diverging increasingly from the political and legal realm. On the one hand, you have superheroes and heroines on the Big Screen. On the other, you have twerps suing fast-food joints for ‘making’ them fat.
I wonder what explains this divide?
Today I received the following email:
Brian,
Brian has started a webring of Brians with blogs. If you would like to join us, go and sign up here.
Brian
What is a webring? If I signed up to it, would the rest of my life be ruined? The Brian who sent me this email seems to be gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, consenting adults, some of my best friends…, I’m personally in favour of gay marriage, blah blah blah. But if I sign up, will I be bombarded with gay porn for the rest of my days?
In general, I feel that it is good that we Brians are getting together, and if a webring is what I think it may be, we can perhaps sit on one, in a circle, perhaps somewhere in the countryside, and discuss the Brian Issue. That is, we can discuss why cuckolded husbands, send-up substitutes for Jesus Christ, etc. etc., in the movies, all seem to be called Brian. Brian is not a cool name, is my point. Maybe we Brians can get together and change that. (The danger, of course, is that by getting together in such ways as these, we might merely confirm all the existing anti-Brian stereotypes, and cause Brianphobia to become even more deeply entrenched.)
Meanwhile, how many indisputably cool Brians can be assembled? I offer two outstanding contemporary sportsman: the West Indian cricket captain and ace batsman Brian Lara, and the Irish rugby captain and ace centre threequarter Brian O’Driscoll.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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