Sharon Stone is getting divorced. Not good news for Sharon but a significant chunk of the rest of the planet rejoices at the news she is ‘back on the market’.
45 years old and still hot
Update: As a commenter reminded me… “Consider that a divorce”
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Some weeks ago I saw a clip of an old Bogart movie and it started me thinking about the type of film it represented. That old Raymond Chandler thing: dark streets, smoke filled rooms, double and triple crosses, collaborators shot in the night… I forgot about it until a few days ago when Kathryn Hepburn died. Her obituary mentioned the classic movie “African Queen”. We are in a perfect age for the return of Film Noir. Imagine a Bogart-like character in Baghdad. Think of the plot possibilities! You’ve secret caches of billions in gold, diamonds and dollars. There are buried hordes of poison gas, anthrax and smallpox. We can stretch reality for Hollywood’s sake and toss in an operational nuke or two, soon to be sold to a high ranking al Qaeda. The Russians didn’t hold a candle to the Nazi’s for pure evil. Films about them didn’t have that stark manichean good versus evil quality of the era surrounding WWII… or of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. You have perfect villains, with no redeeming human qualities, in the members of his inner circle. The escaped Arch-Villain Saddam in his secret hideaways is the nearest thing to a Fu Manchu class villain we are ever likely to see in reality. Here’s a starter for our Hollywood readers (and I know you are out there Brian). Bogart, a grizzled US Army veteran working in civil reconstruction, becomes involved with a beautiful Iraqi woman. Her brother is under threat by the Saddam Fedaheen and she wants Bogie’s help in extricating him. Our hero gets drawn deeper and deeper into a dark plot that sees him wandering the streets of old parts of Baghdad at night, shots flashing in the night, the occasional dead bad guy…. We end up in a finale with Bogie trying to save the girl and stop the nasty utterly evil guys from doing their utterly dasterdly deed against total innocents. This stuff would sell like hotcakes in the US right now. July 2nd, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 As part of my continuing vow to be as nice as humanly conceivable towards our neighbours in France, I refer the readers of this blog to the following news item, purely for the purposes of conveying information, and not out of any desire to gloat over, denigrate or otherwise annoy the French.
Heh. July 1st, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Usually when we feature pictures of posters in the London Underground the news is bad. But here is some good news, in the form of a poster advertising Steven Pinker‘s The Blank Slate.  The book itself probably doesn’t need much plugging here, but I’ll plug it anyway. It’s about true and false (as in the “Blank Slate” of the title) views of human nature, and about how they affect politics, education, aesthetics, and so on. Summarising brutally, if you think that human nature is something that a political system can simply shape at will, you’ll tend to say that your preferred political system should shape away, sometimes with murderous consequences. To me the encouraging thing about this book is that here is a mainstream publishing event, so to speak, which is full almost to the point of saturation with references to the literature of liberty, of classical liberalism and of anti-collectivism. If you were a regular reader of the publications of, say, the Libertarian Alliance, or of the Reason Foundation, or of the Cato Institute, you’d find references to any number of debates and discussions and personalities which would ring bells with you. Among the many names, for example, listed in the References section are: Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Robert Nozick, Kenneth Minogue, Ferdinand Mount, Wendy McElroy and Tom Wolfe, to name just a very few such. I suspect that the Reason foundation may deserve particular kudos for helping Pinker’s thinking along these lines. When I first spotted this poster, there must have been quite a few of them around, but when, digital camera in hand, I went looking for it again yesterday, I had nearly given up when I found one still on view. Presumably this campaign was timed to coincide with this competition, for which The Blank Slate was shortlisted. (Pinker has been shortlisted for this prize three times, but has yet to win it.) Since this is Samizdata, let me also mention that the lady in the poster to the left of the Pinker poster as we look at it is Eliza Dushku, star of the movie Wrong Turn. “A brutally exciting, savage shocker. Shriek, jump, enjoy!” Ah, human nature. June 29th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Johnathan Pierce did a piece on Tuesday about this book by Tyler Cowen. And if you follow that link to amazon.co.uk you find that paragraph one of review number one goes like this:
So globalisation is good, culturally as well as economically. But the Saddam Hussein reference does rather make me want to rethink my attitude to My Way. This song may indeed be a hymn of praise to individualism and individual liberty, but Saddam Hussein wasn’t (and still isn’t?) averse to individualism and individual liberty – he was/is after all an extremely liberated individual – provided that it’s his individualism and individual liberty he’s singing about rather then anyone else’s. The “My Way” critics would appear to be vindicated. But although bad news for anyone who thinks that only Hayekian liberals sing this song, this is not exactly good news for collectivists either, for when someone like Saddam sings this song, he is ramming home the lesson that collectivism, rather than installing any sort of collective virtue into power, merely ensures the triumph of all the vices of one vicious individual, who ends up doing everyone in, and doing it “my way”. You have to admit that the world’s nastiest despotisms devise their own uniquely ghastly ways of killing and torturing people.
Concerning Saddam, let’s hope so. June 26th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
From what I have observed over the years, one of the things in the world that annoys lefties more than almost anything else in the world is a somewhat drunk and somewhat old guy singing My Way, the song made famous by Frank Sinatra. The reason people sing it is because they understand freedom and what freedom is all about. The right to do things your way, your pride when you have, the fact that this will involve mistakes, but so what? That’s what the song is all about and we all know it. And that’s why lefties hate it so. For them, it is the sound of defeat. It is the sound of people who have consciously and deliberately turned their backs on lefty bullshit and have decided to do things their way, as often as not with their own money. Ask yourself this. How often do they get drunk and sing this song at NGO/tranzi conferences? Not often is my guess, or if so only with post-modern irony, which doesn’t count. So, thanks to Dave Barry for linking to this story, which shows that in the Philippines people take this song seriously, just as people do everywhere else. Basically someone wasn’t singing the song very well, and was stabbed to death.
He sang more truly than he knew. June 25th, 2003 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
To be honest I have never understood what the fascination people have with so-call ‘reality TV’ programmes like Big Brother. I have forced myself to watch a couple times and ended up despairing for the future of western civilization. Suddenly my taste for explosion filled action movies and lycra clad starlets with guns does not seem so low-brow after all. 
Oooo! Very exciting! No doubt some of our faithful commenters will put me right on this area of complete disconnection between me and an entire baffling area of popular culture. But maybe this Disneyfication of the entirely unfunny term ‘Big Brother’ that George Orwell coined will soon be coming to an end. Then maybe we can start getting more people frowning with concern rather than smiling vacuously at the sound of the words ‘Big Brother’. Why bother watching the TV to see a bunch of self-absorbed cretins in a room back-stabbing each other when you can be in your very own rolling endless episode of ‘Big Brother’ by just walking down almost any CCTV filled high street in Britain? Here is some real reality TV, staring… you.  
June 24th, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the Radio Times (paper only) of 14-20 June 2003, on the subject of the BBC4 TV programme “High Rise Dreams”, shown on Thursday June 19th:
In the Radio Times of 21-28 June 2003, on the subject of the repeat showing on BBC4 TV of the same programme on Sunday June 22nd:
Well that removes the obvious political bias, but I’m afraid that if the idea was to make this puff less wrong-headed, it scarcely begins to deal with the deeper problems of it. The implication, still being assiduously pushed on the quiet by the more blinkered sort of dinosaur partisan for the Modern Movement in architecture, is that the failures of the Modern Movement were all externally imposed, by penny pinching bureaucrats and by horrid, politically motivated politicians like the hated Margaret Thatcher, and that if only more money had been made available and they’d been allowed to get on with what they were doing unimpeded by their mindless enemies, all would have been well. A logical (if not moral) equivalent would be if the Radio Times were to talk about how a group of idealistic Nazis tried to improve the world, inspired by the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, but about how they were thwarted (a) because not enough resources were devoted to doing Nazism, and (b) because Nazism’s opponents decided, for who-knows-what wrongheaded and arbitrary reasons, to barge in there and put a stop to it. With more money and less silly opposition from ideologically motivated enemies, all could – and would – have been well. (I dare say there are still a few old Nazis around who think this.) The truth is that if (even) more money had been made available than was, the devastation cause by the Modern Movement in architecture in Britain would have been even more devastating. The Modern Movement was animated by numerous seriously bad ideas (and by just sufficient good ones to make all the bad ones catch on seriously). It would require an entire specialist blog to do full justice to all these errors. I’ll end this post by alluding to just two such ideas, among dozens. The Modern Movement is shot through with the idea that to put up an “experimentally designed” block of flats and immediately to invite actual people to live in it is a clever rather than a deeply stupid thing to do. Experimental-equals-good is the equation they swallowed whole. This is rubbish. Many experiments are excellent, as experiments. But what they mostly tell you, the way his numerous failed lightbulbs told Thomas Edison, is what not to do. Imagine if Edison had gone straight to production with his first idea of what a lightbulb might be. That was sixties housing in Britain. No wonder so much of it had to be dynamited. The idea of a “vertical street”, also made much of by certain Britain’s Modern Movement architects, is also rubbish. Streets have to be at least a bit horizontal or they don’t work. Think square wheel. I’ve chosen those two notions in particular because they were emphasised in the programme itself, the general tone of which was decidedly different from the puffs in the Radio Times. I think I’ve found the culprit. June 22nd, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
About twenty years ago – Binghamton University in upstate New York – a paved plaza between the main library building and the computer center building – an installation of assorted works of “modern art” sculpture is scattered about this plaza as part of some arts festival. There is an empty cement base near the entrance to the computer center, apparently the sculpture that is supposed to be there has not yet arrived. There is a construction project at another part of the campus, at least half a mile away. During the night some unknown group of pranksters hijacked a huge section of concrete tube – perhaps six feet in diameter and eight feet in length – and somehow transported it to that empty base. Hundreds of people passed it every hour as students went from class to class. Most ignored it, just as they ignored the other sculptures, but many paused to glance at it, even to stop and study it, discuss it. Everyone assumed it was another example of modern art. (I must confess that I fell for the trick; to me it didn’t look any stranger than any of the other “works of art” on display.) Several days passed before the organizers of the art exhibit realized what had happened. The temporary work of art was returned to its intended use at the construction site and campus security was ordered to investigate. The arts community was in an uproar. The perpetrator of this crime against society must be tracked down and punished! I don’t know if campus security took this seriously or not. (I think that they probably just enjoyed a good laugh over the matter.) The culprits were never caught. Jim June 21st, 2003 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Anticipation is growing… Angel of Darkness, the latest instalment of Tomb Raider is about to hit the streets, Deus Ex: Invisible War is coming soon, Doom III is snarling its way towards us and the most anticipated of them all, Half Life 2 will soon be on the shelves. After the disappointment of the by-the-numbers Unreal 2, the bug-fest of the otherwise promising Devastation, the even buggier CFS 3 and that mixture of complete genius and forehead-to-keyboard annoyance that is Splinter Cell, I think on balance it will end up a fulfilling year for hardcore gamers. One of the things the (relative) failure of Unreal 2 suggests to me is that for single player games, great graphics and effects are just not enough anymore… those are more or less expected now. For a game to really rock a gamer’s world these days, there needs to be betters quality plots and an engaging story (which is what made Half Life and Deus Ex such durable successes and in so doing, raised the bar).  June 21st, 2003 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC has a great, big monkey on it’s back and that monkey is America. The nabobs who run that state broadcast organisation just don’t understand how a country that (in their eyes) does everything wrong can end up so supremely dominant in terms of power, wealth and influence, while a country that does everything right (such as France) seethes and whines impotently about the unfairness of it all. You can see the tension in their news reportage, torn as it is between a horrified revlusion of America and, at the same time, an unquenchable fascination. That was very much on display tonight in a 90-minute TV special run on BBC2 and called ‘What the World Thinks of America’. Despite all the negative polling data that was apparently gathered from all around the world and a studio in London that consisted of people like firebrand British leftie Claire Short and former French Culture Minister Jack Lang, it was not the belligerent anti-American hate-fest that I thought it was going to be. What amused me most was general agreement that the USA was rich because of its economic model and, at the same time, a complete rejection of the idea of copying it. In fact, it was rather dull, equivocal and not quite sure of itself. The underlying theme was largely one of self-pity and petty jealousy culminating in a morose admission that America was the unchallengable world superpower and there isn’t much the likes of France can do about it except whine and bitch. They may as well have called it ‘Inferiority Complex – The Movie’. Over on the BBC website (and doubtless in anticipation of forthcoming EU regulations) they have provided a forum for Americans to answer back, hosted jointly by the respective Chairmen of Democrats and Republicans Abroad. Perhaps some Americans might waggishly suggest an US TV special called ‘What Americans Think of the EU’. Now that I would pay to see. June 17th, 2003 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
… and that includes making music, creating pictures, writing verse, shooting films and producing computer games that annoy the crap out of other people. An attempt by the usual ‘guardians of morality’ to regulate the nature of computer games in a way that would never be tolerated for the written word has been defeated in a US court.
Score one for the good guys! The full ruling can be found here [pdf file]. June 4th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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Now let me fire up my copy of