Andrew Hickey

From a legal point of view, “civil unions” just don’t cut it.

To see why, just consider why the idea of civil unions as a separate-but-equal marriage-like thing for same-sex couples seems initially appealing for some folks. Anyone who views civil unions favorably arrives at that point because they’ve recognized that there’s an injustice — an inequality under the law — that needs to be corrected. They’ve recognized that it’s fundamentally unfair for opposite-sex couples to have access to more than a thousand legal benefits that come with getting married while same-sex couples are barred from access to such benefits.

That’s wrong, and those who advocate for civil unions see that it’s wrong.

So far so good. Recognizing an injustice and wanting to correct it is a Good Thing. But proponents of civil unions balk at the obvious next step. If you’re upset by inequality, the simplest solution is to establish equality. Civil unions are an attempt to get that result without quite actually doing that. They are an attempt to allow same-sex couples access to all the legal benefits of marriage except that of being legally married — an attempt to grant legal equality while still denying social equality.

And like all separate-but-equal schemes, that can’t work. All such schemes rely on mechanisms to enforce and perpetuate separateness, and all such mechanisms deny the possibility of real equality.

That’s why civil unions, here in the U.S., can’t be squared with the Constitution and its guarantees of equal protection under the law. As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, the Constitution doesn’t allow us to grant one set of citizens marriage while offering others only “skim-milk marriage.”

For all of that, though, this is still a big deal: “Pope Francis: Church could support civil unions.”

Pope Francis reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s opposition to gay marriage on Wednesday, but suggested in a newspaper interview that it could support some types of civil unions.

The Pope reiterated the church’s longstanding teaching that “marriage is between a man and a woman.” However, he said, “We have to look at different cases and evaluate them in their variety.”

States, for instance, justify civil unions as a way to provide economic security to cohabitating couples, the Pope said in a wide-ranging interview published Wednesday in Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily. State-sanctioned unions are thus driven by the need to ensure rights like access to health care, Francis added.

A number of Catholic bishops have supported civil unions for same-sex couples, including Pope Francis when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 2010, according to reports in National Catholic Reporter and The New York Times.

But Wednesday’s comments are “the first time a Pope has indicated even tentative acceptance of civil unions,” according to Catholic News Service.

Roman Catholic thinking on the relationship between church and state is … complicated. John Courtney Murray is still dead and in many ways it seems his ideas about how the Catholic church should behave in pluralistic societies under secular government were buried with him. But Murray’s theology suggests that Francis’ “tentative acceptance of civil unions” is a positive step for the church.

Again, civil unions just don’t cut it legally. Separate-but-equal cannot be squared with the legal system of any country whose constitution guarantees equal protection under the law. So it would be inadequate and wrong — both unjust and illogical — for the pope and his church to advocate civil unions as a legal reality in America or in any other country. Marriage equality — the full and equal legal recognition of same-sex marriage — is the only just aim, and the church should never stand opposed to justice.

But for the church itself, and for how it regards legally married same-sex couples, I think the framework of civil unions can be helpful.

This is, after all, how the church already regards most legally recognized marriages — including most “traditional” legal marriages between opposite-sex couples.

My marriage, for example, is really only a “civil union” in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church. My wife was previously married in the Catholic church. That marriage ended in divorce (just as my previous marriage did — although the Catholic church doesn’t care about that one so much because my first wife was Protestant). But the Roman Catholic Church does not recognize divorce. In its eyes, my wife’s first marriage wasn’t just a legal covenant, but a “sacramental, indissoluble union … established by God” and “it is impossible for any human power to break the God-made bond, or sacramental covenant, between husband and wife. ”

And thus, since the Catholic church can never recognize that divorce, it also does not recognize my wife’s current marriage — to me — as legitimate or real.

But note the important thing here: Despite this firm commitment to its doctrine of marriage, the Roman Catholic Church is not attempting to bar Catholics from access to legal divorce. It is not lobbying to make it illegal under secular law for anyone to obtain a civil divorce. Nor is it attempting to prevent divorced people from access to legal, civil remarriage. Divorce and remarriage are, in the eyes of the Catholic church, sins. But the church acknowledges that they are also a legal right that it would be unjust and immoral (i.e., sinful) to deny others.

There’s no reason — no Catholic reason — that Pope Francis and his church could not take the same approach to same-sex marriage.

A further point on this: Official Catholic doctrine says that my marriage is actually the sin of adultery. My wife, the church says, is thus an adulteress living in sin, and must therefore be denied the sacraments. That’s not merely false and unjust, it’s rude — which is why I think it was utterly appropriate for the ‘vixen to respond with a hearty “Same to you, buddy”* and never look back.

Yet for all this sacrament-denying, soul-damning-for-eternity condemnation, the Catholic church is also able, however grudgingly, to admit that my marriage is a Good Thing. Without compromising its condemnation of our shameful wickedness and adultery, the church also acknowledges that, granted that regrettable context, it’s nice to see a couple of wicked adulterers settling down together and getting along so well. There’s a sense in which the church is even able, somewhat haltingly, to be happy for us. It’s able on some level to recognize that there are a lot of wicked adulterers and other “intrinsically disordered” people in this world and that, all else being equal, if some of those adulterers or intrinsically disordered people find love and make lifelong commitments to one another then, well, that’s something that deserves to be celebrated.

There’s a sense, in other words, in which the Catholic church regards my marriage as no different from any other marriage that occurs outside that church. A couple of lifelong atheists are legally wedded by a justice of the peace in a courthouse? That is, in the eyes of the church, not the same as a sacramental, indissoluble union established by God and overseen by a priest. It’s not what the Catholic church thinks of as a marriage, merely a “civil union.” But it’s still nice, isn’t it? It’s good for them and good for the whole community. Sure, yes, they’re hell-bound sinners, but we can still honor the commitment they’ve made to one another and smile as we wish them a happy anniversary every year.

There’s no reason the Catholic church cannot take that exact same position toward legal marriage equality for same-sex couples.

That is, in fact, the most just course of action for this pope and this church. That is what the Roman Catholic Church ought to do if it is to be faithful to its own teaching. It needs to get out of the way of legal equality and abandon all opposition to the full legal recognition of secular same-sex marriage just exactly as it has done with the full legal recognition of secular opposite-sex divorce and remarriage.

I think it should also reconsider and reform its teaching on the ecclesiastical and sacramental validity of same-sex marriages and opposite-sex remarriages, but that’s a separate matter. That step would involve a change in Catholic theology, and Catholic theology is their business. It’s their prerogative to work out their business on their own. If they want to continue denying the sacraments to Catholics who are divorced and remarried or to Catholics in same-sex marriages, that’s a mistake and an injustice (a harmful, hurtful sin) that the Catholic church is free to continue. Within their own church, they have every right to keep being utterly and perversely and cruelly wrong in that way.

But the Catholic church’s legal opposition to legal marriage equality is not occurring within their own church. This is an injustice the church is committing outside of its own jurisdiction. That’s wrong. And it’s wrong according to Catholic principles and Catholic teaching.

There’s no good Catholic reason for them to be fighting against the secular, legal right of same-sex couples to get married. That is a mistake and a sin and an error and an injustice that Francis and his church have no business continuing.

They need to, in a word, repent.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* Not her actual words, but this is a family friendly blog.

Today is International Women's Day and the anniversary of the "Spread 'Em" campaign.

The freedoms of women and people like that were always very important in Scarfolk. As you will see from this poster and magazine ad issued by the council in early 1970, women had even more social and legal rights than domesticated foreigners.

Scarfolk was one of the first places to give women the right to ask a man if they are allowed to vote.

The council also fiercely lobbied to permit women's sports such as ironing, being pretty & sweet, and sobbing without cause in international competitions, including the Olympics. That the council was unsuccessful is testimony to the reactionary structures and attitudes that still hinder a woman's place in society. Poor dears.  

Click picture to embiggen.



From all Marvel comics cover-dated February 1987

Labour's press team has been having fun with the result of yesterday's local by-election in Nottingham, where the Liberal Democrats finished behind the Buss-pass Elvis Party.

The result is a reminder that, though we Lib Dems are doing well in our areas of strength, our vote can by close to non-existent in areas where we have no history of campaigning. But as a pointer to the next general election it has little value.

There was, however, a local by-election yesterday that does look significant from that angle. Last night the Conservatives gained the Rambsbottom ward on Bury Council from Labour.

Mike Smithson writes on Political Betting:

Ramsbottom, where my mother was born, is part of Bury North which was taken by the Tories off Labour at GE2010. It is a seat that EdM really has to win back at GE2015 if his party has any hope of forming a majority. 

It is a ward that has a history of hard-fought contests between CON and LAB. In 2011 the two parties tied and LAB was given the seat after lots were drawn. 

A key factor in this latest election was the very high number, 60% or so, of postal votes which is vey good indicator of local party organisation. 

So a very good result for the Tories and a very bad one for Labour.

This one is going to take some explaining.

For me, Star Trek and astronomy are connected in a particular and important way. Not because of the material connection between Paramount's PR wing and NASA; it's debatable whether that can even be called astronomy in the first place. No, the reason why I think of astronomy when I think of Star Trek is quite simple: My love for one inspired my love for the other, and I feel the true strength of both can be found in wayfinding.

Though I've mentioned it several times before, my personal connection to and relationship with the realm of the sky is going to become a major, central theme in my reading of not this next phase of Star Trek's history, but definitely the one directly after it. One of the benefits of living where I live is that my relative distance from urban civilization and comparatively high altitude mountain residence means that I have access to something that's sadly not afforded to many people these days anymore: A truly vast and open night sky free of light pollution. On a clear night, it seems like you can look into infinity, with layers upon layers of countless stars and the dazzling ribbon of the Milky Way winding its way across the celestial sphere. The cliche is that looking up at the night sky is a humbling experience that makes people aware of their cosmic insignificance, but that's not how I've ever seen it: To me, spending a really good night under the stars here is a truly profound experience that makes me aware of the Cosmic Whole, and our interconnectedness with it. When I was younger it would also fire my imagination, causing me to dream of travelling amongst those stars.

The very first thing that struck me about Star Trek: The Next Generation was a captivating, hypnotic sense that permeated throughout the whole show: Everything about it seemed to exude an awareness and embrace of the mystical vastness of the universe, and to say that humanity is not in fact dwarfed by it but belongs to it, as much a part of it as the inspired planets, comets, nebulae and other cosmic wonders that sailed by in the show's intro sequence, which remains possibly the single piece of visual media that inspires and means the most to me to this day. I guess I may have been immediately drawn to this and had the kind of reaction I did because it reminded me so much of the way I felt when looking at the real sky at night in my backyard. Considering we only got Star Trek: The Next Generation in syndication late at night, that just compounded the effect and to me created the perfect mood to get lost in the imaginary dreamscapes the show would evoke at me. Sometimes I'd go out at night, look up at the Milky Way and imagine the Enterprise and all those who lived on her sailing to all those different stars.

Astronomy is said to be the oldest science and the oldest scientific pastime, and to me this sense of rapturous awareness is central to what it is. Among my many dead-end career paths prior to becoming an anthropologist who writes about pop culture, I briefly attempted to be an astronomer because of my own love for the Celestial Sphere, but also partly inspired by Star Trek. Funnily enough, real astronomers tend to hate Star Trek because real astronomers are actually physicists, and physicists get very upset when fiction is not 100% scientifically accurate. This gets at an interesting point about the technoscientific side of Star Trek fandom: It's almost exclusively made up of engineers and computer people, and nobody else. A number of books and documentaries have been written about why this is, but in brief, a lot of it comes back to the tech-inclined youth growing up with Star Trek and being inspired more by the cool imaginary technology than anything else, and then dedicating their lives to making it a reality. Apple in particular seems almost entirely staffed by these sorts of people, because Quicktime, the iPod, the multitouch interface and the iPad can all be directly traced back to someone watching Star Trek and saying “I want that”.

Suffice to say, my breathless, heartfelt stories about the borderline spiritual way I've been inspired by the heavens and parts of Star Trek did not go over terribly well with my astronomer colleagues. It's one of the many reasons I'm not a professional astronomer and the exact type of thing that makes me extremely difficult to get along with. But there is a visible trend, if rather small, in amateur astronomy that does seem at least somewhat aware of the more primal and fundamental aspects of it, and that brings us to Robert Burnham, Jr. and his Celestial Handbook. Burnham was a passionate amateur astronomer in the purest sense: He received no formal training and was a chronic loner, but by his twenties had already discovered a comet. This led to him being picked up by the Lowell Observatory, who wanted his help in compiling a survey of stellar proper motion, where he discovered five more comets with his co-worker (a fellow astronomer by the name of Norman G. Thomas). While at Lowell, Burnham began work on his masterpiece, a three-volume set meticulously cataloging every single star and deep sky object (galaxies, nebulae and globular clusters) it was possible to observe with backyard telescopes, alphabetized by constellation. Burnham's Celestial Handbook is truly an amazing accomplishment, made even more so by the fact that it was entirely self-published without any backing or support from Lowell and, despite the last revision coming out in 1978, it still remaining an indispensable staple of amateur astronomers all over the world.

What makes Burnham's Celestial Handbook so unique, apart from the staggering scope of the thing, is that it somehow manages to be and do everything: All the information a beginning astronomer could possibly want about history, terminology and methodology is all here, written in engaging and easy to digest prose, but Burnham also combines this with exhaustive data tables, charts and diagrams alongside achingly gorgeous exposure photographs of every single object that would have looked absolutely unbelievable in 1978 and still look a million times better than anything you can actually see through a telescope with your naked eye. On top of that, Burnham fills out the handbook with lore and mythology about the stars from around the world (which is precisely the sort of thing professional astronomy severely frowns upon because it's unscientific and superstitious), actual poetry (some of it his own: One of my favourites is the prefatory poem “Midnight” that opens Volume 1) and Native American proverbs.

Every ounce of Burnham's love of the night sky and the universe is on display on every page of the handbook. I was of course particularly moved by how much Burnham stresses the primacy of humanity's connection to the Celestial Sphere, and how indigenous people throughout history and around the world have found enlightenment and truth in the stars. Like Star Trek: The New Voyages, I once again find myself wanting to quote everything because it's all so genius, but that would be ludicrously impractical, especially as the majority of the handbook has been archived on Google Books, so you can go read it over there (seriously, if you take nothing else away from what I say here, please do yourself a favour and at least read the first two chapters of Volume 1). What I will do is cite two of my favourite passages from the introduction. Firstly, in regard to the all-too-familiar argument that humans have no business engaging with outer space in any fashion and should concentrate on the problems we've made for ourselves on Earth, Burnham has this to say (emphasis his):

“Yet it sometimes happens, perhaps because of the very real aesthetic appeal of astronomy and the almost incomprehensible vastness of the Universe, that the more solidly practical and duller mentalities tend to see the study as an 'escape from reality' - surely one of the most thoroughly lop-sided views ever propounded. The knowledge obtained from astronomy has always been, and will continue to be, of the greatest practical value. But, this apart, only the most myopic minds could identify 'reality' solely with the doings of man on this planet. Contemporary civilization, whatever its advantages and achievements, is characterized by many features that are, to put it very mildly, disquieting; to turn from this increasingly artificial and strangely alien world is to escape from unreality; to return to the timeless world of the mountains, the sea, the forest and the stars is to return to sanity and truth.”

In my mind, this is just about the definitive response to the perceived split between the Space Age and the Environmentalist Age, and speaks real, hard truth about Westernism that's even more valid today than it was in 1978. No matter what your views are on politics or social justice, it's tough to argue human civilization as it currently exists is built around recognising the interconnectedness of being and living in harmony with ourselves and the rest of the world. Again, the takeaway here isn't that humans are insignificant specks of dust against the unknowable cosmic vastness, its a reminder that our identity and being are part of, and irreducible from, the cosmos, and that understanding this is the first step towards healing, peace and enlightenment.

Along those lines, the opening to chapter 2 means a great deal to me, for reasons that are hopefully obvious to most by this point in this project:

“We are beginning a journey.

It will be a journey both strange and wonderful. In our tour of the Universe we shall travel the vast empty pathways of limitless space and explore the uncharted wilderness of creation. Here, in the dark unknown immensity of the heavens, we shall meet with glories beyond description and witness scenes of inexpressible splendor. In the great black gulfs of space and in the realm of innumerable stars, we shall find mysteries and wonders undreamed of. And when we return to Earth, we shall try to remember something of what we have learned about the incredible Universe which is our home.”

In my experience, the best astronomers are also mystics. It's one of the very few widely known and accessible hobbies and professions that, if not actively encourages this sort of thing, at least offers an easy pipeline to a more spiritual way of viewing the world. This is something that I find extremely evident in Burnham's work, and perhaps this is why I find myself drawn to him above and beyond many others who've written on astronomy, either the professional or amateur kind. And this is also a philosophy and worldview I have always found in the Star Trek from the Long 1980s, but really seen the most clearly in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not the Original Series or the Original Series movies-I've always found, and even still find after revisiting them in this manner, them to be far too much Golden Age technologistic and militaristic Hard SF for my tastes. In my personal interpretation and headcanon, Burnham's words above are precisely the sort of thing Jean-Luc Picard would say. Perhaps I'm wrong to project that onto the show, but by this point in my life it's been so firmly linked to Star Trek: The Next Generation in my mind there's simply no way for me to separate them anymore. This is what it means to gaze upon the Celestial Sphere, and this *is* Star Trek: The Next Generation to me.

But what this also is, I think, is a sentiment that would be very much understood by the ancient navigators. The Polynesian Wayfinders were, and are, of course, extremely well versed in their own form of astronomy. Navigators use the positions of the Polynesian constellations to determine with peerless accuracy the locations of the islands they voyage to. But the sky in general has always played a very important role in Polynesian mythology, with many variants referring to the Sky Father and Earth Mother. In Hawaiian spirituality in particular, practitioners are taught that we are all part of the stars in some form. Ancient Hawaiian custom dictates the centrality of night to the division of time, because only at night is it possible to distinguish between days as each night the sky is ever-so-slightly different. Hawai'i is also, of course, home to Mauna Kea: Geologically speaking (and counting from the sea floor) the tallest mountain on Earth and in traditional Hawaiian belief the realm of the gods, most notably the Sky itself, Wākea. Today Mauna Kea is the home to a collection of observatories and considered to be the best place for astronomical observation on the *planet*.

One has to be somewhat careful when speaking in generalities about modern astronomy and the astronomy practiced by the navigators. There's a risk of falling into the trap of projecting onto the ancient traditions, or worse, appropriating their concepts and imagery and distorting them into a defense of the increasingly indefensible state-sponsored space programmes (NASA in particular is not above dabbling in this). That said though, there is a strong enough connection to astronomy and the sky in Hawai'i that the existence of the Mauna Kea observatories tend to feel a little more like an extension of pre-existing cultural systems then imperialist Western cultural appropriation. As part of their somewhat excellent interactive exhibit on Polynesian Wayfinding, the Exploratorium (linked to the side on this blog) has a video interview with a native Hawaiian astrophysicist who works at the observatories, claims to be descended from one of the oldest clans of Hawaiians and who sees his work in astronomy as a logical extension of his deeply held cultural beliefs and personal feeling of connection to the Sky. Though, full disclosure, the Exploratorium gets some of its funding from NASA, there does seem to be an underlying truth this exhibit is at least trying to touch on.

And this is the same truth Robert Burnham, Jr. knew. We are all stardust. We are of the Earth and the Sky. And we voyage to reaffirm this to ourselves and to each other. Burnham's books themselves know this as well: These are books with genuine soul and character. Even the layout seems to have a personality: The entire handbook is done on a typewriter in the same distinctive Arial, the charts and diagrams feel either literally cut-and-pasted or otherwise carefully arranged by hand in a notebook and the whole thing has a charming and endearingly analog feel that evokes images of a tirelessly dedicated person from the early Long 1980s working patiently throughout the night in a tiny, dimly lit wood-paneled workshop striving to produce something that captures some part of the profound love and meaning that inspired it. It's a bit rough-around-the-edges and much of it is very outdated today (not just in data, but in language, tone and attitude), but absolutely none of that matters. Burnham's Celestial Handbook feels like nothing if not an artefact of this era that, through reading it, allows us to cross the gulf of time and connect with the person whose unique love it's so very much the product of: The love of someone who's been able to touch the transcendent immortal and been, if you will, transformed. But though an artefact it may be, it's an artefact that still speaks a profound truth that ought to be heard and taken to heart.

In some ways then, perhaps much like Star Trek itself.

To the voters of the great state of Montana,

I, Horace Nettleton, campaign manager for the Great Azkar, have been ordered to issue this statement to you in hopes of clarifying certain issues which have recently come to the public attention. It is to be hoped that when each of you go to the voting booths on this November to elect a new leader for out state, you will remember that the Great Azkar made this attempt at reconciliation rather than using violence, although the Great Azkar certainly could have done so.

A great deal of misinformation has been spread by the Great Azkar’s political opponents, who are terrified of the Great Azkar winning the election. They are right to fear the Great Azkar, for the Great Azkar’s victory would mean an unspeakable fate for them, for their children, for their families and supporters. In a vain attempt to derail the Great Azkar’s unstoppable momentum, they have circulated lies about this tremendous leader of men in hopes their vanity and stinking corruption will go unchecked. The foremost of these lies concerns the Great Azkar’s alleged ineligibility for the governorship of this great state.

Please direct your attention, voters, to the attached holocopy of the Montana state constitution. It explicity states that the only requirements for holding this state’s highest office are that one be 25 years of age, posses United States citizenship, and have been a resident of Montana for two years leading into the election. I shall, as the Great Azkar commands, address the last of these issues first. Is it true, as the craven Republican candidate Arthur Johannsen the insipid weakling charges, that the Great Azkar has not lived in Montana more than three months? Voters, this is an utter falsehood. The Great Azkar has, in fact, lived in the beautiful state of Montana for over six years. The Great Azkar’s permanent residence, as listed in the Great Azkar’s application forms for the office of governor, is a subterranean pit sixteen miles northwest of Bozeman, and three hundred and fifty six feet below the surface. Despite the cowardly degenerate Johannsen’s claims, nowhere does the constitution specify that the residence of the governor be established by time spent above ground. Is the Great Azkar to be punished because the Great Azkar does not react well to sunlight? Is the Great Azkar to be penalized because the Great Azkar prefers the glories of damp, pitch-black caves in Montana to single-family ranch homes in Montana? Is the Great Azkar to suffer becase the Great Azkar only occasionally emerges from the vast beneath to make shopping mall appearances, deliver policy platforms, and feast on some of our state’s excellent beef cattle? Above ground or below, the Great Azkar (and the Great Azkar’s lovely children Garalak the Flesh-Eater, Merciless Hangahar, and the Great Azkar, Jr.) is as much a resident of this state as you, I, or slobbering mouth-breather Arthur Johannsen.

Secondly, the decrepit eater of filth known to you as Democratic gubernatorial candidate Harlan Shepherd, may his bowels leak outward from his body and fall to his feet in bloody-ribboned heaps as a foul-smelling testament to his perfidy, has accused the Great Azkar of violating the first requirement for the governorship. While it is technically true that both the Great Azkar and the Great Akzar’s devoted wife Mandy, Bringer of Tears, are only fourteen years old, the first eight years of the Great Azkar and Mandy, Bringer of Tears’ lives were spend on the distant planet of Gaa’alath in the Quadrant of Blissful Agonies. On the Great Azkar’s homeworld, one year is equivalent to seventy-three years here on Earth. This means that the Great Azkar is, in fact, just under six hundred years old, and had accumulated a sterling record of public service more than 200 years prior to the founding of the United States of America. Compare this, if you will, to the incompetent and repulsive Arthur Johannsen’s six years as lieutenant governor, or the slothful and impotent Harlan Shepherd’s twelve years as a district attorney, and ask yourselves: who is truly unqualified to lead our state into the future?

Finally, allow me to address an issue which has come up repeatedly since the Great Azkar began campaigning, and which very nearly led to tragedy at the recent debate in Jackson Hole. Some putrid worms in human shape have been spreading the malicious slander that the Great Azkar is driven into a murderous rage when the Great Azkar is referred to by a pronoun rather than as the Great Azkar. Now, it is true that on the Great Azkar’s homeworld, cultural tradition deems it a grave insult to refer to someone with a pronoun. However, claiming that it sends the Great Azkar into a “murderous rage” is nothing but the basest political mudslinging. First of all, while the Great Azkar, upon the Great Azkar’s inevitable ascension to the governorship, vows to enforce all the laws of our state and our nation, on the Great Azkar’s home planet of Gaa’alath, there is no such concept as ‘murder’, and to the Great Azkar, killing is not substantively different from exterminating a termite. (Hence the Great Azkar’s tough-on-crime stance, which has been so widely embraced by the voters of Montana.) Second, ‘rage’ implies that the Great Azkar is not in control of the Great Azkar’s actions, which I can assure you is not the case. The Great Azkar always knows who the Great Azkar is eating, and why the Great Azkar is eating it, or in some cases, them. (It is not only on Gaa’alath that pronouns cause trouble!)

To call the activities of the Great Azkar when the Great Azkar’s cultural norms are not respected ‘murder’ smacks of intolerance, lack of compassion, and — dare I say — racism. This is simply a concerted effort by bigoted party hacks to prevent you, the voter, from electing the first non-human governor in the history of the United States with a bunch of racist, xenophobic, ridiculous fairy tales about insanity, murder and cannibalism (I will not dignify this last charge with a response other than to say that if Mr. Johansen believes that the Great Azkar’s having eaten his daughter constitutes cannibalism, he obviously hasn’t been reading his dictionary). Do not be fooled by these scare tactics, voters of Montana. Elect the best: elect the Great Azkar. I thank you, and he thanks you.

Oh, shit.

“Taylor.”

“Chief, I know. It’s just that…”

“Taylor. Don’t talk. Listen.”

“All right.”

“What is the press going to say?”

“…”

“You can talk now.”

“The press will say what we tell them to say.”

“They’re not going to buy this, Taylor.”

“You always said that journalists were dumb, chief.”

“They may be dumb, but they aren’t stupid.”

“I’ve never really understood that phrase.”

“That’s because you’re dumb and stupid. I told you, at least thirty pounds.”

“It was.”

“It was 5 ounces.”

“Well, when you count the container…”

“Do you count the weight of your car on your driver’s license, Taylor?”

“Are you saying I’m fat?”

“You have put on a few pounds. But no. I am saying, you kinda fucked this one up.”

“Kinda?”

“Kinda a lot. What sort of container was that?”

“It was a tank. You know, like, an empty helium tank.”

“How come it had those bright colors, then?”

“I bought it off a circus clown.”

“Nice.”

“I thought we wanted to call attention to it.”

“Taylor, have you ever heard of the world ‘verisimilitude’?”

“Is this about the spelling?”

“Well, no, but now that you mention it…”

“Here we go.”

“Did you really expect the president to call a press conference standing in front of a big photograph of a red, green and yellow-painted helium tank with ‘uranium’ spelled wrong on it?”

“It’s a hard word, chief.”

“I realize that.”

“Hard to spell.”

“Well, for future reference, it doesn’t have a Y in it.”

“No?”

“Or an O.”

“Hmmm.”

“Or another O.”

“Gotcha.”

“What was in there, anyway?”

“Talcum powder.”

“Why…why did you think anyone would buy that?”

“They buy it when we sub it for cocaine. I figured people might think, you know, powdered uranium. Or something.”

“I think that we’re going to have to consider this mission an unqualified disaster, don’t you think, Taylor?”

“I guess.”

“Is there something you’d like to say, Taylor?”

“May I speak frankly, Chief?”

“Of course.”

“I didn’t join the Company because I’m a good speller, chief. And I’m not so good at P.R. and advertising.”

“I can see that.”

“But, damn it, I’m really good at what I do.”

“And…and what is that, Taylor?”

“I…huh?”

“What do you do? As an intelligence agent, you’re pretty much a wash.”

“Well…I’m an economist.”

“An economist.”

“Yeah. I majored in economic theory, with a concentration in two-sided matching models.”

“Why did you join the CIA, then?”

“I’m just paying off my student loans.”

Feeling slightly groggy and disoriented this morning? Thank daylight saving, the pet project of A. Lincoln Filene.

Daylight Saving was first tried in the US during WWI. It was adopted nationally for one year, in 1918, and then repealed. From 1919 till 1966 Daylight saving was observed by “local adoption.” In 1966, it made federal law. The times when Daylight Saving begins have been moved more than once. Most recently, in 2005 the dates of daylight saving were shifted to the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November

It’s always been paraded around as a measure to save energy, but it’s always been nothing more than an effort to benefit some industries by rigging the clock in their favor.

Before the Civil War, American businesses–factories, railroads, steamship lines, schools of all sorts–changed their hours of operation to suit the available daylight. The well-known timetable of the Lowell Mills, below, shows this clearly.

As the hours of daylight changed, businesses and life itself shifted to fit them

Standard time zones, introduced in 1883 changed this equation. Now the time of day might have little to do with the local sun. A person on the eastern or western edge of a time zone, for example, might find that noon by the clock differed by up to an hour from noon by the sun.

Detroit, for example, had long objected to standard time, because it was on the western edge of eastern time or the eastern edge of central time. The city had used local sun time till November 20, 1900, when the city council tried proclaiming central time the legal standard. A week later they reversed themselves under public pressure, and adopted Eastern time, but by 1907 the Detroit had returned, temporarily, to central time. Newspaper cartoonists lampooned the city’s confusion. “It would not be surprising,” mocked the Literary Digest, “if the old village returns to its first love, horse cars, before spring.”

Central time synchronized Detroit and with the railroads, with Lake Erie shipping, and with Chicago markets. But it put both cities approximately half an hour behind local sun time. The ninetieth meridian of longitude, which provided the standard of time for the central zone, passed almost directly through Memphis, Tennessee, well to the west of Detroit. Using the central zone in effect put Detroit on Memphis local time. By central time, Detroit sunrises and sunsets thus occurred roughly half an hour earlier than they would have by the local time.

Eastern time, on the other hand, adjusted Detroit clocks to the seventy fifth meridian, approximately Philadelphia local time, and put Detroit on the same standard as the major eastern financial markets. Even better, eastern time slowed the sun. On eastern time, the sun arrived fashionably late in the morning and lingered pleasantly into the evening. Detroit’s children straggled off to school in darkness, but had more time to play outdoors in the evening. On central time, the sun rose much earlier—Detroit’s children awoke in full daylight at seven o’clock central time, but darkness cut their playtime short.

“We are creatures of the clock,” reasoned Detroit’s “More Daylight Club” in 1907; “our habits are governed by it to an even larger degree than we suspect.” The founders of the “More Daylight Club,” Dr. George Renaud and C. M. Hayes, saw that no matter what zone Detroit chose, the clock, not the sun, governed life—schoolchildren woke up when the clock said seven, not when sunlight kissed their rosy cheeks. “We get up in the morning, we go to bed at night, we go to work and quit, and we eat, when the clock says to,” they asserted.

Detroit’s early risers drew on the singular obsession of William Willett, a prosperous English builder. Like many fans of daylight saving, Willett loved golf, and regretted the early sunsets that robbed Englishmen of healthful exercise outdoors. In 1907 he wrote a pamphlet, “The Waste of Daylight,” which proposed setting all British clocks ahead two hours each summer. Willett sent copies to members of Parliament, businessmen, “Physical Culture Organizations” and foreign governments including the United States Congress. In Detroit and Cleveland, Willett’s idea strengthened the movement toward eastern time. The More Daylight Club’s constant agitation brought Detroit to a vote on the issue by 1911, and enthusiasm for the plan spread southward. Cleveland adopted eastern time on May 1, 1914, and a year later Detroit, following a similar protracted battle, set its clocks to “fast time.” 

By 1918, Daylight Saving had become a national movement, thanks to the lobbying of A. Lincoln Filene, head of Filene’s Department Stores, the “National Daylight Saving Association,” a lobbying group he helped form. After six months of extensive lobbying in New York and Washington, the National Daylight Saving Association held its first meeting in New York City on January 30, 1917. Over one thousand eager National Daylight Saving Conventioneers converged on the city for two days, “wearing lapel buttons bearing a picture of Uncle Sam turning the clock forward one hour.” Speakers on the virtues of more daylight included John Tener, President of the National Baseball League, who spoke on “why fans favor the movement,” and the president of the National Lawn Tennis Association.

More important, the US officially entered WWI in April of 1917.  Daylight Saving was now cynically pitched as a way to save fuel for the war effort, and to encourage patriotic Americans to go out and start “Victory Gardens.”

For example, President Ban Johnson of the American Baseball League spoke enthusiastically about beginning ball games an hour later under daylight saving. Previously (before artificial lights), games started at 3:30, leaving many office workers no time to get to the ballpark. Under the new time sunsets came a hour later. Beginning games at 4:30 gave fans more time to get to their seats, raising attendance and profits. Here seemed a perfect example of the charms of saving daylight, especially for the wallets of baseball leagues and team owners.

“Slackers,” declared Charles Lathrop Pack of the War Garden Commission—“Slackers of the worst type is the brand placed upon baseball team owners or managers who plan to move down the scheduled times of starting games.” President Wilson, Pack recalled, had named food production for the war effort a top priority, and to waste the increased daylight at the ballpark “violated the spirit of the law.” Changing the starting times “will take thousand of hours of time from gardens,” and the daylight saving law, Pack preached, “was not intended to give extra hours of recreation.” “I hope,” he added, this is not the attitude of those in control of the greatest of national games.” In the climate of war, such appeals touched a weak spot in the nation’s psyche.

Despite its official-sounding name, the “War Garden Commission” was in fact a lobbying organization for the makers of garden products—tools, seeds, fertilizers, canning and preserving equipment, including jars, cans and rubber ring seals—who stood to gain dramatically from any increase in wartime gardening. Pack issued pamphlets and newspaper advertisements insisting that “the preservation of vegetables and fruits…is a patriotic duty and a national war time need.” Accompanying the message of conservation came a list of manufacturers of garden products. Masking itself as a government agency, Pack’s organization used daylight saving to raise sales, and used patriotism to head off the competition. In this case, one recreational business—baseball—lost out to another—the makers of gardening and canning equipment.

Daylight saving was repealed in 1919, after a wide range of objections. Popular opinion tended to blame the repeal of daylight saving on farmers, as in the cartoon below. But in fact objections to daylight saving came mostly from places on the borders of a time zone. The boundaries between standard time zones had been set to fall in rural areas as much as possible. A farm located at the extreme edge of a zone—like much of rural Ohio, for example—was already half an hour or more ahead of the “real” time of the sun, unless it ignored standard time.

Daylight saving put some places nearly two hours ahead of the solar time—in some Ohio communities, the clocks showed “noon” at what had been one forty five or even two in the afternoon by the sun. These disadvantages combined to present farmers and their families with a considerable hardship, or at the very least with substantial and genuine reasons for wanting the bill repealed. 

But in their arguments against the bill, rural Congressmen blamed it for the manifest ills of the age. It embodied the trend away from real production and towards idle consumption: the bill “is a pet of the professional class, the semileisure class, the man of the golf club and the amateur gardener, the sojourner at the suburban summer resort,” charged a Minnesota representative, “who can all close their desks an hour earlier and hie them to an extra hour of play.” As a thoroughly nonproductive, silly game played on the coiffed and manicured surface of perfectly good land, golf symbolized the utter decadence that underlay the daylight saving movement. By their honest sweat the farmers wrested the world’s sustenance and ease from stubborn ground; instead of asking more sacrifice from the farmer, or laughing at his ignorance, rural politicians claimed, “you should rise up in your refinement and call him blessed.”

One of daylight saving’s most outspoken opponents, Representative Edward King of Illinois, saw daylight saving as the impractical child of the professional reformer and the University dreamer. During the war, King insisted, the farmer supported all sorts of boneheaded “scientific” measures for “‘economy,’ ‘efficiency,’ ‘coordination’” in good faith, even to the outrage of common sense. But now King lambasted “the impractical, the Utopians, the theorists, political astrologers, medicine men, and advance agents of the millennium” who he insisted constituted daylight saving’s main support.

“Now that the whole world has been made safe for democracy,” remarked a member from Illinois sarcastically, “perhaps it is appropriate that the President should insist that every day in this country be made safe for the joy rider and for the patron of the golf links and tennis courts.”

Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama spoke for many when he insisted that “time has been fixed for ages by the movement of the sun.” Now that the war is over, he asked, “let us stand by the custom that generation after generation has adopted.” Daylight saving interferes, added an Iowan, “with the natural order of things as regulated by the rising and setting of the sun.” Representative Ezekiel Candler of Mississippi angrily insisted that “the rising of the sun and the going down thereof fixes the time.” “God’s time is true,” Candler rang out; “man made time is false.” “Let us repeal this law and have the clocks proclaim God’s time and tell the truth,” he thundered to his colleagues’ applause. “Truth is always best. It is mighty and should always prevail.”

Daylight Saving, then and now, is a measure designed to benefit certain businesses. Today it’s the makers of softball gear, charcoal briquettes and mosquito repellant who most love daylight saving and seek to extend its period. There’s no reason at all why we could not simply shift the hours of work to reflect available daylight, as our ancestors did. I like the proposal of Representative Otis Wingo of Arkansas, who in 1918 suggested “that Congress provide for a winter thermometer and fix the freezing point at 45° Fahrenheit.” Placed in American homes, Wingo continued, the thermometers would read thirteen degrees higher than the actual temperature, and so “they could look at the thermometers and be fooled, and in that way save fuel next winter.”

 

 

 

 

The new issue of Liberator was waiting for me when I got home from work. So it is time to spend another week in the company of Rutland's most popular fictional peer

Monday

A ticklish few days in Pendle have come to an end. You may recall that the Liberal Democrats recently issued a statement condemning without reserve the burning of witches at the stake. I wondered if this was wholly necessary – it is some years since such an incident has taken place even in the Upper Welland Valley – but our people in Pendle (where they have previous in the matter) cut up rough. “There will be leaflets handed out in areas where we are as a party strong and active,” fumes one. “In Pendle I expect the Labour lot will be doing this (we hear they are already planning to do so).”

In the end I managed to bring both sides together and they signed a statement saying “We now call on those on both sides of this argument to return to moderate debate, free of insult and threat and we do so because we believe this is in the interests of our party.” It didn't mean a thing, of course, but what is Liberalism about if it is not about winning local by-elections in the shadow of Pendle Hill?

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West, 1906-10.

The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary.

England (managed by Ronald) top Group D at the moment – sparking tabloid frenzy back home – while Uruguay (Matthew), Costa Rica (Pete) and Italy (Andrew Hickey) will be looking to stop their momentum. It could be a closely fought group, with mind games aplenty as several managers have played down their chances of progress.

Four tracks, two votes – the poll is below the cut, along with the latest Group B standings.

ENGLAND: Natalia Kills – “Controversy”
Current Points: 3

“After winning the first match, England wants to show that it’s not all the same thing like some of its detractors think. England has a style but that style has many facets, some expected and some unexpected. Our next player up is Natalia Kills with her second album’s buzz single, Controversy. The West Yorkshire-born, London-raised Kills has dabbled in various genres over her career, including a run as a teen pop rapper named Verbalicious in the mid 00s. Controversy starts of with some instrumental that wouldn’t sound out of place on a 1950s tv show but then some bitchy voicemail comes and the song goes in a different direction. It gets harder, heavier. The song is more of a drone/chant than your typical pop song. But it still makes you want to bop.”

URUGUAY: Carmen Sandiego – “Generacion 2002″
Current Points: 2

“Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? Oh, that’s right, making a stab at the goal while in the guise of a twee Uruguayan man. Los Uruguayos want to keep the UK on their toes, hence the surprise tactical switch after Dani Umpi’s flashy yet noble efforts in Round 1. Plus Carmen’s got a surprisingly strong kick, considering.”

COSTA RICA: Patterns – “Martian”
Current Points: 1

“After hours of digging through the no-good metal mines of Costa Rica, and skirting the “not sure if anyone even likes this anymore ” Reggaeton suburbs of San Jose, the task of being Costa Rica’s manager seemed almost impossible. And yet, there, in a roadside shack was an impressive funk dance fourpiece who, for whatever you might feel about the dated eighties smoothness of the track, were tight, bought the song in on time and scored where it matters. Lord knows why its called Martian though.

ITALY: Baustelle – “La Natura”
Current Points: 0

“La Natura by Baustelle is from their award-winning 2013 album Fantasma (no relation to the Cornelius album of the same name) and is a break from their normal Scott Walker-meets-Depeche Mode style for something altogether lighter and more melodic.”

THE POLL:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

RESULTS: Group B has suddenly got a lot tighter after Spain’s John Talabot track netted them 3 points. Australia make steady progress with another 2, Chile grab a solitary point, and Netherlands perhaps suffer from being made to play their game behind closed doors: 0 points to them. Which means the standings are: Australia – 4 points. Netherlands – 3 points. Spain – 3 points. Chile – 2 points. The winner of the third game will definitely qualify, but beyond that all sorts of permutations are possible, and this one may go to percentage totals, where Holland’s first game performance gives them a distinct advantage.

Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).

Anyone running a database with personal information in it is supposed to register with the Information Commissioner's Office and follow best practice guidelines for ensuring confidentiality.

So, Google, am I pregnant?

I'm asking because it now appears that management consultants PA Consulting acquired the hospital admission and treatment records of every NHS patient in England and Wales (all 47 million of them). This is almost certainly inappropriate, and comes at a point when the roll-out of the care.data national health statistics database is on hold for six months over concerns about who would be able to access it and whether the records could be de-anonymized. Now it appears that PA Consulting staff uploaded the entire hoard to Google servers based outside the UK—a process that took weeks, as the data came to them archived on 27 DVDs (making it on the order of 125Gb, after compression).

The system PA uploaded your personal hospital records to is said to be Google BigQuery. It supports one-click database sharing with any other Google account, and is hosted on servers outside the UK (and possibly outside the EU, in breach of the EU Data Protection Directive). And what they uploaded was the entire shooting match—full personal medical records indexed by NHS patient number—with enough additional data (post code, address, date of birth, gender) to make de-anonymizing the records trivial.

(Side note: In the USA, doing this would be a federal offence under Title II of HIPAA. In the UK, it would appear to be governed by the Data Protection Act (1998) and other healthcare-related acts, as applicable.)

Ben Goldacre has been on top of the NHS care.data fiasco from the start; to my eyes it looks like an inevitable balls-up, collateral damage arising from the Conservative/LibDem push to privatize the NHS piecemeal. The goals of care.data are laudable: epidemiology and hospital care quality can really benefit from the statistics it was intended to provide. However, implementing it by throwing everyone's medical records onto Google is probably not the way forward. Especially given the potential for abuse.

Random scenario: a burglary gang gains access to the database and can thereby identify patients aged over 80 living alone in up-market neighbourhoods who have recently been admitted to hospital with conditions suggesting that they will be vulnerable but not supported by full-time carers. A religious organization targets men of a certain age who are HIV positive. Or women below a certain age who are single and pregnant. Or an insurance company notes that a patient made a mistake in their declaration of a pre-existing condition, and thereby invalidates their claim. An identity thief uses the postcode and date of birth, in conjunction with a copy of the public electoral register, to pick victims. The possibilities are endless.

And the sting in the tail?

Per Twitter, Dr Goldacre just announced that hospital records data on individuals released by the Health and Social Care Information Centre in September 2013 was publicly available online. (The web site in question has now been taken down.) He's describing the breach as "catastrophic", and it's quite likely that this is an accurate description.

Folks, this is probably the biggest personal data breach in British history. In terms of its intrusiveness and depth, it may be the biggest ever. We are told that worse is to come. Watch this space for updates.

PS: Yr hmbl crspndnt has seldom felt so happy about living in Scotland. Hint: the NHS is a devolved issue.

UPDATE: It turns out that the catastrophic follow-through wasn't. (For a while, it looked like a company called Earthware was demo'ing a visualization tool for NHS patient info from HSCIC on the public internet: HSCIC have now clarified that this was using dummy data. Website got taken down in the general panic before it became clear that it was a mock up rather than an even worse breach of confidentiality. At least someone's behaving responsibly.)

It seems an awfully long time ago now since the Hammer horror / M.R. James weekend which I began writing up in this post, but I do still want to record the rest of it, as it really was spectacularly awesome.

In my previous post, I wrote up individual reviews for the three Hammer films which we saw at the Media Museum, but I also wanted to note down a few thoughts on the experience of watching all three together over the course of a single weekend. For some reason, they weren't actually screened in the order they were produced - we saw The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Mummy (1959) on the Saturday, and then hopped back in time for Dracula (1958) on the Sunday. I can't figure out the rationale for that, and obviously it isn't critical as I'm sure we were all perfectly well able to re-order the films in our heads and understand the progression from Frankenstein to The Mummy, but I do think that watching the three in their original release order would also be an experience very much worth having.

The three films were the work of very nearly the same 'dream team' of people - Terence Fisher as director, Jimmy Sangster as script-writer, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as lead actors, Bernard Robinson as the designer and Jack Asher on cinematography. The only slight differences emerge for The Mummy, where the role of producer shifts from Anthony Hinds to Michael Carreras, and the music is the work of Franz Reisenstein rather than James Bernard. So watching them as a set really brings home the consistencies which you would expect to see in that situation, as well as revealing the evolution of the studio's collective vision and aspiration. Things like Bernard Robinson's love of green and red colour schemes and stained-glass windows are particularly striking, as is Jimmy Sangster's penchant for writing what are essentially love-triangle (or sometimes love-square) stories. The sense of evolution through the three stories is perhaps harder to pin down to specific details, but I definitely felt a strong sense of increasing confidence, scope of ambition and of course available budget from the first to the last, culminating in the visual spectacle of The Mummy.

Obviously my real focus was on Christopher Lee, and his developing acting partnership with Peter Cushing, though. I thought this was probably the case before we started, but was delighted to be able to confirm that Lee really does strangle Cushing in all three of these films. It's almost like Sangster was a tropish hack writer who re-used the same limited range of ideas in every script he ever wrote, or something. I like to imagine the two of them practising this between takes, with Lee perfecting his vengeful domineering face while Cushing worked on getting his bulging frog-eyes just right. In return, Cushing only actually kills Lee in Dracula and Frankenstein, since in The Mummy Kharis essentially commits suicide instead by walking back into the swamp from whence he came.

Lee's monster-characters also become progressively more sympathetic with each film. This isn't scripted into his first role as the creature in Frankenstein at all, but is nonetheless inserted by Lee's physical performance - for example when the Baron is instructing the creature to stand up or sit down, and he manages it haltingly with a sort of pathetic willingness to please. It is perhaps slightly scripted into Dracula, as for example in the fact that Dracula is clearly motivated for much of the film by the desire to replace his staked vampire bride, but again it isn't very prominent - rather, it is Lee who fills Dracula's eyes with a tragic sense of unfulfilled longing and (as he dies) agony and confusion. But then finally for the The Mummy the sympathy is strongly scripted in from the start, as we learn how Kharis has been motivated all along by unrequited love, and has suffered very badly for it. In part this may just be the nature of the source material, but Frankenstein's creature is written to provoke considerable sympathy in the book, so taking that out was clearly a conscious choice by Sangster, and yet a direction which he successively moved away from in the subsequent films. Perhaps he was just developing a better sense of what makes a 'monster' truly fascinating - but I like to think too that he was beginning to realise what Lee was capable of, and to write for him accordingly.

Anyway, the course did not end with the third film, but culminated instead with a trip down to the Media Museum's archives to see the most relevant items from their Hammer special effects make-up collection, acquired from the estate of Roy Ashton (but also including material used by his mentor and colleague, Phil Leakey). I saw some of this material in 2012 during a Fantastic Films Weekend, but on that occasion it was all on display in glass cases, and my mobile phone camera at the time was definitely not as good as the one I have now. So this time I was able to see the material at a much closer range, including getting to see inside the exciting tins with labels reading 'vampire bites', 'eye pouches' etc., rather than just seeing them from the outside, and I was also able to get rather better photos.

They had various prosthetic body-parts, including what are believed to be the eyeballs purchased by the Baron in The Curse of Frankenstein:


The grim reaper face mask from Amicus' Tales From the Crypt:


Lots of photos of Peter Cushing, including some lovely ones of him at home with his wife and a great caricature:


A publicity shot of Christopher Lee, with a dedication to Phil Leakey, presumably written for him when he retired (or just left Hammer?):


It reads "Phil, with all my most grateful thanks for all your heroically patient and brilliantly effective efforts on my behalf - and on my unfortunate face. From one sensitive creative artist to another, Christopher Lee."

But the highlight from my point of view was of course the exciting combination of prosthetic vampire bites (basically just latex disks with holes in the centre) and the teeth responsible:



The importance of not touching any of the material was, of course, strongly impressed upon us, resulting in some of us having to carefully hold our hands behind our backs to stave off our all-too-natural urges - especially where Dracula's lovely shiny curving fangs were concerned. And then of course there was general banter around the fact that 56 years earlier those very fangs had been in Christopher Lee's mouth, and there was probably enough biological material left on them to clone him. And somehow on the bus back to Leeds and during our walk into deepest Holbeck in search of M.R. James stories, this turned into a film script entitled Touch the Teeth of Dracula, which would involve some poor innocent soul succumbing to the urge to reach out and touch the fangs, and pulling their finger away with a shock to find it bleeding profusely, and the Count himself taking over their body and being reincarnated in 21st-century Bradford.

miss_s_b and I would then start fighting over him, and somehow (presumably after a thrilling coach chase to the Carpathian mountains) it would all end up with a fight to the death on the battlements of his castle, by the end of which we would both be on fire, and one of us would do Christopher Lee Death Pose Number 1 (falling forward) while the other did Christopher Lee Death Pose Number 2 (falling backwards), so that we tumbled in opposite directions to our doom. It was one of those classically geeky conversations where everyone is madly chucking in ideas, and no-one is quite sure where any of it came from, and all of it is completely ridiculous but somehow the sum total of it adds up to a thing of genius. I love those conversations - and the people I have them with.

All the while, we were traversing a landscape of Victorian industrial chimneys rumoured to have inspired Tolkien's Two Towers, moving steadily further from the traffic and lights of Leeds city centre and penetrating deeper into a domain of crumbling warehouses, cobbled side-streets and eventually open urban scrub waste-land. Catching up with a huddle of people ahead of us wearing long coats and wide-brimmed hats, we confirmed that we were indeed on the right course for the Holbeck Underground Ballroom, which was frankly welcome news as we started to pass work-yards populated with barking dogs and burly-looking men stoking oil-drum braziers. But the journey was well worth it. Inside, we found cheerful people serving wine in chipped white mugs for £1 a pop, free hot water-bottles to make up for the lack of central heating, and a room furnished with tatty sofas, drapes and various antique nick-nacks to mill around in while we waited for the show.

Eventually, we were ushered into the main performance space to snuggle up together on creaking sofas veiled in fabric throws, and watch Robert Lloyd Parry bringing M.R. James to life. If you saw Mark Gatiss' M.R. James documentary on the evening of Christmas Day, you will have a sense of what we experienced, because it featured several clips of Lloyd Parry in character as James, but seeing it in such an evocative space in the second row of an audience of no more than a hundred people was something quite different. I doubt James' studies at either Kings or Eton were quite so cold, or his readings of his own stories quite so impassioned, but I think this is probably the closest I'll ever get to the stories as they were originally intended to be experienced.

Lloyd Parry's performance seemed a little histrionic, or at times even hysterical, at first after a weekend spent immersed in the cinema, but I appreciated his intensity from the start, and once I had adjusted to the different medium it was truly spell-binding. His ability to convey characters from middle-aged women to pre-pubescent boys by means of body-language and accents is really impressive, and he certainly knows how to use dramatic pauses and inflexion to good effect. The closing word of his performance of A Warning to the Curious - 'since' - left chills running through all of us, and we now eagerly await his performance of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine which is apparently coming to Leeds in May.

I close with a couple of pictures of the set, taken without flash in order to capture the shadowy candle-lit feel of the experience. The text on the table is Pseudo-Anacreon's 'At the mid Hour of Night', and the post-card is of a church in Southwold.



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A fascinating but frustrating post by Lance Schaubert at Red Letter Christians points us toward a fascinating but frustrating G.K. Chesterton essay I hadn’t read before, his short 1929 piece “On American Morals.”

Chesterton’s essay is awkward in places because his subject is the blinkered moralism of ”American Culture, in the decay of Puritanism,” yet it offers numerous examples of the ways his own morality was similarly blinkered.*

The main target of his wrath in this essay is Prohibition — a “curious thing now part of the American Constitution” — and the kind of moralism that led to it. But he goes after it from an angle, mainly by discussing cigars. Chesterton is both amused and appalled that Americans seem to view cigar-smoking as a moral question — as a vice or a sin. He begins by tackling an article from Harper’s** lamenting the lack of objective morals in kids these days. The article was titled, “Wanted: A Substitute for Righteousness”:

By righteousness she means, of course, the narrow New England taboos; but she does not know it. For the inference she draws is that we should recognize frankly that “the standard abstract right and wrong is moribund.” This statement will seem less insane if we consider, somewhat curiously, what the standard abstract right and wrong seems to mean — at least in her section of the States. It is a glimpse of an incredible world.

She takes the case of a young man brought up “in a home where there was an attempt to make dogmatic cleavage of right and wrong.” And what was the dogmatic cleavage? Ah, what indeed! His elders told him that some things were right and some wrong; and for some time he accepted this strange assertion. But when he leaves home he finds that, “apparently perfectly nice people do the things he has been taught to think evil.” Then follows a revelation. “The flowerlike girl he envelops in a mist of romantic idealization smokes like an imp from the lower regions and pets like a movie vamp. The chum his heart yearns towards cultivates a hip-flask, etc.” And this is what the writer calls a dogmatic cleavage between right and wrong!

The standard of abstract right and wrong apparently is this. That a girl by smoking a cigarette makes herself one of the company of the fiends of hell. That such an action is much the same as that of a sexual vampire. That a young man who continues to drink fermented liquor must necessarily be “evil” and must deny the very existence of any difference between right and wrong. That is the “standard of abstract right and wrong” that is apparently taught in the American home. And it is perfectly obvious, on the face of it, that it is not a standard of abstract right or wrong at all. That is exactly what it is not. That is the very last thing any clear-headed person would call it. It is not a standard; it is not abstract; it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong. It is a chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial, but, above all, nearly all of them concrete and connected with a materialistic prejudice against particular materials. To have a horror of tobacco is not to have an abstract standard of right; but exactly the opposite. It is to have no standard of right whatever; and to make certain local likes and dislikes as a substitute. We need not be very surprised if the young man repudiates these meaningless vetoes as soon as he can; but if he thinks he is repudiating morality, he must be almost as muddle-headed as his father.

From here, Chesterton’s personal defensiveness in reaction to this “queer taboo about tobacco” starts to take over his essay a bit. These moralistic Americans have outlawed his drink and now he worries they’ll be after his cigars next and that will not stand.

“Nobody who has an abstract standard of right and wrong can possibly think it wrong to smoke a cigar,” he writes, getting back to the point.

Yes, today we know things about the health effects of tobacco that no one knew in 1929, but the people Chesterton was complaining about weren’t condemning cigars as unhealthy or condemning cigar-smokers for supporting a deadly industry. Nor were they making an ascetic argument — a la Judas or Peter Singer — suggesting that the money Chesterton spent on cigars could better have been spent aiding the needy.

Their argument, or rather their assertion, was simply that cigar-smoking was somehow intrinsically evil. Chesterton’s response was that anyone who says such a thing has lost any clue as to what “evil” actually means. Americans, he feared, had lost any ability to think about how or why something was either good or evil, and that we had substituted, instead, an arbitrary list of Dos and Don’ts that were nothing more than the “particular cut and dried customs of a particular tribe.”

Here in 2014, that arbitrary list isn’t identical to what it was back in 1929, but Chesterton’s critique remains valid. Such a list is:

Not a standard of abstract right or wrong at all. … It is not a standard; it is not abstract; it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong. It is a chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial, but, above all, nearly all of them concrete and connected with a materialistic prejudice against particular materials.

Schaubert’s RLC piece recognizes the truth of that, citing Chesterton’s essay and encouraging everyone to read it. Yet he doesn’t quite seem able to surrender the habit of making such lists. He wants them to be less arbitrary, less chaotically sentimental and accidental. He seems to think that by making such lists painstakingly biblical — based on a more precise exegesis of more precise texts — we will be able to refine our lists of taboos into a viable substitute for a clearer “notion of what is meant by right and wrong.”

The specific subject in Schaubert’s piece is alcohol. (Yes, that’s still very much a thing for many white evangelicals.) I think, though, that it also provides an excellent example, by analogy, of what I’ve argued here about the utter lack of a coherent sex ethic among evangelicals. Bring up the subject of sex and morality and white evangelicals will begin loudly harrumphing about the need for “objective” morality and for “biblical” morality and for “objective, biblical” morality.

But by “morality,” they mean only a narrow list of tribal taboos, though they don’t know it. They can’t provide any real moral guidance, only “a chaos of social and sentimental accidents and associations, some of them snobbish, all of them provincial.” They say that “traditional biblical morality” and “traditional biblical marriage” are the objective standard for sexual ethics, but that is not a standard; it is not objective; and it has not the vaguest notion of what is meant by right and wrong.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* See, for example, his droll tangent musing about whether or not America’s warped moralism might be a “barbaric” inheritance from the “savage” Native Americans. That makes it difficult to know what exactly to make of this Sobchakian quip shortly thereafter:

Something of the the difference and the difficulty may be seen by comparing the old Ku Klux Klan with the new Klu Klux Klan. The old secret society may have been justified or not; but it had a definite object: it was directed against somebody.

That recalls the great line from The Big Lebowski: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” I think that “may have been justified or not” bit from Chesterton is meant to be acidly ironic in its understatement — intended to be heard as the Coen brothers intended their “at least it’s an ethos” line to be heard, rather than in ignorant earnest, the way John Goodman’s character, Walter Sobchak, seems to think of it. That line in Chesterton’s essay comes right after he mocks the Scopes trial for being a forum in which a bunch of racists were claiming to be the arbiters of morality:

The men of Tennessee are supposed to be very anxious to draw the line between men and monkeys. They are also supposed by some to be rather too anxious to draw the line between black men and white men. …

Chesterton wasn’t  so much a white/black racist as he was a “civilized”/”savage” racist.

** The writer, Avis D. Carlson, continued writing for another 60 years, and if you read the .pdf paper at that link, you’ll find she was — or became — a more complicated and interesting figure than Chesterton’s take on this one moralistic article of hers would suggest.

People’s incredulity that Harriet Harman might have something to explain or apologise for over relations between the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) arose from hatred for the Daily Mail and a willingness to accept Harman at her own high estimation.

Another factor, though, was that some younger people did not realise just how different social attitudes were on the left in the 1970s.

It happened that I discussed this era in a book chapter that I published in 2005.

This is an era in which books with titles like Escape from Childhood were written. John Holt’s work contains chapters on, among other subjects, ‘The right to vote.’ ‘The right to work’ and ‘The right to drive’. Reading him today it is hard to resist the idea that Holt was not so much calling for a change in our attitude towards children as calling for the abolition of the very concept of childhood. See for evidence his rather stern chapter on ‘How children exploit cuteness’. 

The chapter that reads most strangely today is the one entitled ‘The law, the young, and sex’. One would not, I think, come across a passage like the following in any current book:

Some people have voiced to me the fear that if it were legal for an adult to have sex with a consulting child, many young people would be exploited by unscrupulous older ones. The image here is of the innocent young girl and the dirty old man; few worry about the young boy having sex with an older woman. Here, too, we are caught with the remains of old myths – in this case that only men were sexual, that women were pure and above it – from which it follows that any young girl having sex with an older man must necessarily be his victim.

This is not a simplistic call for the ‘sexual liberation’ of children; if anything, it is an anguished examination of Holt’s own internal conflicts on the idea. But such ideas were in the air in the 1970s. When I worked in Birmingham, which dates it as late as 1981 or 1982, pamphlets from the Paedophile Information Exchange [PIE] could still be found among a tableful of literature from other municipally approved good causes in the Central Library. 

There is some coverage of this period in Christian Wolmar’s book on childcare scandals, Forgotten Children, but he treats it largely as a plot by a few paedophiles to infiltrate more respectable movements. This approach tends to underestimate the extent to which a broader strand of educated opinion was prepared at least to entertain the idea of something like the sexual liberation of children.

Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman were the public face of the NCCL in the 1970s, but ultimately they were its employees , so it is not clear how far they were responsible for the organisation’s policies. (Jack Dromey flew beneath my political radar in those days.)

But I note that Patricia Hewitt has broken her silence and apologised for the NCCL’s stance in those days. I find this preferable to Harriet Harman’s self-righteousness - however much she hates the Daily Mail.

Times have moved on, thank goodness. As I concluded with something of a rhetorical flourish in that chapter, the problem with abolishing the concept of childhood is that you also abolish that of child abuse.

Not that everything has improved over the past 30 years or so. We have made parents nervous of photographing their own children at sports days, but the most vulnerable children of all - those in public care - do not seem to be much better protected.

It was in the spring of 18-- when I returned to Baker Street after a lengthy sojurn in the wilds of Dorsetshire.  It had been some months since I had last called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes and so I found myself quite anxious to renew that acquaintance which had, over the years, led to my involvement in various grotesque and singular events, many of which I have subsequently recounted for the interest of readers. 

I was let in by Mrs Hudson and climbed the 19 steps up to the rooms which I had once shared with Holmes before my marriage, the old wound from the jezail bullet troubling me but a little. 

I found Holmes slumped in an armchair, smoking a long clay pipe and seemingly locked in a brown study.  He barely responded to my halloas, giving only the faintest twitch of one of his eyebrows to acknowledge my arrival.

Well used to my strange friend's extremes of mood and temper, and the sullenness which was wont to affect him during fallow periods when he happened to have no case to stimulate his restless desire for intellectual work, I did not take offence.  Instead I sat myself down opposite him before the fireside and regarded Holmes with a watchfulness which I found it hard to disguise.

How well I recalled the years when I, a bachelor in those days, had shared these rooms, these chairs, this fireside with the most brilliant consulting detective in the world. 

It seemed an age before Holmes took full notice of my presence.

"Watson," he said through the gritted teeth clamped around the stem of the pipe, "you have been in Dorsetshire, I see.  How was the 12.22?  I usually find it rather inclined to be tardy.  I observe that you stopped by at Romano's on the way here.  Did you enjoy your kippers?"

"Oh fuck off Holmes," I said.  And walked out.

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February 26th, 2014: DID YOU KNOW: yesterday at the dog park I met THREE new dogs and I know it's got nothing to do with anything but I just wanted to share how rad these dogs were, which was extremely! One year ago today: total rise of a staircase is calculated simply by taking number of steps and multiplying them by the rise height of each step – Ryan

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February 27th, 2014: Janek sent me this Professor Science he made and... I kinda love it?? One year ago today: thank you internet, now i can't read it as anything other than "om nom atopoeia" – Ryan

There's nothing terribly new about the Picturephone; video telephony goes back to the 1960s, and was a very long time catching on. I myself remember one excruciating intercontinental video conference from 1994. (The problem with using it for work is that you can't look away from the camera, relax, or otherwise show any sign of weakness or humanity. And it doesn't get you much extra, over a regular phone call. But I digress.)

Over the past decade, webcams have become ubiquitous and we've gotten used to the occasional skype or other video call. And there communications go, the spooks follow ...

It turns out that the British equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ, has been spying on Yahoo webcam users. And they're a bit upset by what their Optic Nerve program revealed.

For starters, it turns out that 3-11% of Yahoo! webcam traffic involves "undesirable nudity". Which presumably means the users are not merely baring their faces at the cameras, but baring their other bits, with rather more enthusiasm than Big Brother's salaried employees are happy about. It's nice to have a figure for just how much of the internet is for porn; more amusingly, the serious people at GCHQ seem to have been taken aback to discover that people on Yahoo! were actually broadcasting their amateur action for all and sundry to see.

The deeply serious spooks tried to spare the sensibilities of their employees by employing automatic image porn filters. Unfortunately naive porn filters block images on the basis of how much of the picture consists of flesh tones. In the case of video conference calls, this turns out to be too much: they were getting lots of false positives (images classified as pornographic that were not in fact so), and as the whole point of the program was to trial face recognition software in order to detect Bad People Discussing Terrorism On The Internet, this was a bit of a problem.

More hilariously, GCHQ is not a law enforcement agency but part of the defense establishment, and the UK has one of the most draconian child pornography laws in the developed world. Possession of child pornography images is a strict liability offence — intent has no bearing. Only a handful of categories of people are permitted to possess this material: police investigating a crime, some forensics specialists, lawyers and judges and other people involved in a trial. GCHQ personnel stumbling across images of child abuse could be committing a criminal offence. And possession or dissemination of indecent material (pornographic but not criminal stuff) on government computers? Oh dear, the mind boggles.

I am still trying to get my head around the implications that the British government's equivalent of the NSA probably holds the world's largest collection of pornographic videos, that the stash is probably contaminated with seriously illegal material, and their own personnel can in principle be charged and convicted of a strict liability offence if they try to do their job. It does, however, suggest to me that the savvy Al Qaida conspirators[yes, I know this is a contradiction in terms] of the next decade will hold their covert meetings in the nude, on Yahoo! video chat, while furiously masturbating.

It is nearly, but not quite, That Time Of Year Again. Yes, I mean the time when the persevering few take to the keyboard to challenge the disinformation put about by the ignorant but well-meaning many, concerning 'Eostre', the Easter Bunny and all that blather. (On the offchance that you are new to this blog and don't know what I mean, feel free to start here and keep going until you are a) up to speed or b) very sick of the topic indeed.)

So, as an aperitif of sorts, something a little different. I'd like to cite, once again, the magnificent prologue to The English Year by Steve Roud:

'The real danger is from a far more virulent virus - the idea that all customs, indeed all superstitions, nursery rhymes, and anything that smacks of 'folkiness', are direct survivals of ancient pagan fertility rites, and are concerned with the appeasement of gods and spirits. Although the suggestion of an ancient origin for our folklore was the central tenet of the Victorian and Edwardian pioneers of folklore collection, this notion has only become generally known in the last forty years or so, and has taken hold with astonishing rapidity; the majority of the population now carry the virus in one form or another, while some are very badly infected. The problem here is not simply that these theories are unsupported by any evidence, but that their blanket similarity destroys any individuality. All customs will soon end up with the same story.'

That last line is so chilling, isn't it? 'All customs will soon end up with the same story'. And that's exactly what we are seeing.

Please consider how many of the neopagan 'explanations' for modern customs refer to the most entrenched, corporate-enshrined, iconic versions of those customs. In an age of instant mass communication, the holiday traditions and the characters associated with them have become standardised. Regional variation steadily vanishes. So, when neopagan 'explanations' of The Easter Bunny or Santa appear, they often sound like probes into the secrets of well-known celebrities. The modern icons have become monolithic.

No surprise, then, that the neopagan Easter Bunny origin stories are equally monolithic, attempting as they do to appropriate a standardized, ubiquitous, iconic rabbit by means of a standardized line about a Goddess and her sacred hare. We thus arrive at a notion of Paganism which, in responding to globalised imagery, has become equally timeless, placeless and divorced from actual practice. The Eostre business becomes 'the story', regardless of what your inherited traditions may be, how they may have changed over the years, or what regional nuances may have shaped them. It is both ironic and tragic that pagan religion, which placed so much emphasis on the local, should now have been reimagined as Paganism (TM) in all its amorphous boundary-crossing homogenity.

This relentless standardization and homogenization of our common pagan past, with its wilful blindness to any research that does not serve the grim purpose of appropriation, drowns out many exciting and fascinating aspects of folklore that are much more deserving of our attention. It's as if a historical site of immense significance had been buried under a huge concrete bunny with a neon pentagram stuck on top.

Take, for example, the Osterfuchs - the Easter Fox.

You could be forgiven for not even having heard of the Easter Fox, and yet it's described as an older Germanic tradition than the Easter Bunny. In some places, it was supposedly more popular. A translation of some Easter Fox information by Arkady Rose:

Until the mid-20th Century, according to older literature, it was mainly the Easter Fox who was responsible for the eggs in the Easter tradition. Gradually this was then displaced by the Easter Bunny. A note of 1904 from the Schaumburg area states quite specifically that the eggs were laid not from the Easter Bunny, but the Easter fox.

Traditionally, on Holy Saturday the children would prepare a cozy nest of hay and moss for the Easter Fox. They also made sure that the Easter fox was not disturbed during his visit - for example by shutting up pets for the night.

Furthermore, the Easter Fox was described in a Westphalian document of 1910. Interestingly, the tradition seemed at the time to have been in a transition period to the Easter Bunny. Thus we read in Scripture that "... it would look as though the Fox might return before the hare. "

Where the Easter fox comes into the story, we can only surmise today. It was considered early on that it is based on the Pentecostal fox. This is an old custom in which people at Pentecost went with a pet fox from house to house to collect donations. Other descriptions suggest the Easter fox harks back to the tradition of Christmas Gebildbrot pastries.

You won't see any neopagan interpretations of the Easter Fox, or any suggestion that Eostre's sacred animals were a fox and a rabbit. That's because fakelore interpretations only concern themselves with imagery that it is assumed you already know. You continually see attempts to appropriate Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny because everyone is familiar with them. It never seems to occur to anyone that these traditional figures were not always so standardized or internationally accepted, even in the English-speaking world.

In the Easter Fox, however, there is a sniff - possibly no more than a sniff - of a tradition that may be genuinely old, forgotten and occluded. Personally, I find that wonderful.

Next Easter Rant: On what we mean when we say 'pagan fertility symbols'

In the couple of weeks between my thinking I should write about HBO’s new series True Detective and me getting around to writing this, the show’s become a bona fide phenomenon. Eleven million people are watching and that’s only going up. So, I’m going to have to do a little more than I was originally planning, which was to just declare that you should watch it because it’s the best show since The Wire and to note that series creator Nic Pizzolatto’s novel, Galveston has a protagonist who carves figures out of beer cans and a jarring time jump.

The first episode reminded me a lot of Alan Moore’s work, so it was no real surprise to find an old interview with Pizzolatto saying,

‘The first time I got excited about writing was reading comic books by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison as a kid. Growing up in southwest Louisiana, in a house without many books, the sophistication and depth of their stories were really mind-blowing for a kid.’

It’s got the Louisiana setting of Swamp Thing, it’s got the Lovecraft stuff, it’s got that pervading interest in consciousness and symbolism. But, to me, it feels most like Watchmen – there’s a murder mystery that’s an excuse to tell a character piece, it’s told in a nested set of flashbacks with a narration that doesn’t always synchronise with what we’re seeing.

The other Moore-esque touches are the ironies that don’t quite qualify as jokes – we see some weird events when we follow Rust Cohle’s side of the investigation, and those of us of a certain age will remember the early X-Files episodes where odd coincidences, swirls of leaves or glimpses of shapes added up to a compelling exercise in Fortean worldbuilding. Here, just as we’re getting used to seeing the world through his eyes, Cohle casually mentions that, yeah, he took a lot of drugs and still gets the occasional flashback. Cohle has that quality many of Moore’s protagonists do, where it’s unclear if they’re deranged or the only person sane enough to see what’s really going on. The series looks to be heading to the same answer Moore always gets to: it’s nothing personal, it’s reality that’s deranged. You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.

Yeah, yeah, the series namechecked the King in Yellow and there are lots of fun little details that suggest a set dresser was sent out to buy everything they could find with antlers, stars or crowns on it. I just don’t see the show as a puzzle box, there’s no real ‘Who Killed Laura Palmer’ aspect to it. For one thing, it’s not exactly got a huge cast, so the pool of suspects is a pretty shallow one. Making Cohle or Marty the murderer would also make them far less interesting as characters, so I doubt that’s where this is heading. That dodgy Church guy is clearly covering something up and senior police guys are in on it. Well … duh. Louisiana. The various elaborate online theories about which incidental character did it – the gardener, the Vietnamese cook, one of the women in the school photo – seem not to be missing the point of the show so much as missing the category. It’s called True Detective, but it’s about the nature of truth, not the nature of detectives.

We’re encouraged to challenge the ‘reality’ of the show. We’re getting – and, crucially, seeing – basically different people’s opinions of what happened, rather than any objective accounts. We’re being lied to, we’re being told partial truths, we’re seeing things unfold both gradually and out of sequence. A lot of us quickly noticed that Marty was happily married in the flashbacks but not wearing a wedding ring in the present day sequences. The process of that marriage breakdown is … well, broken down into inciting incidents. We see the spikes, the betrayals, the drama. ‘The marriage ended when she found an incriminating picture’ is a story they tell themselves, but it’s clear that the real issues were things like the way Marty ate pasta and hogged the remote and didn’t mow the lawn. People have concentrated on Rust’s monologues about life, the universe and everything, but … well, if you’ve read any Alan Moore, or anything else in the Gray Tradition, you’ll have heard a lot of this kind of stuff before, some of it practically verbatim. What makes the show tick, and practically unique, is melding that with the beautifully done domestic scenes that manage to get the real sense of years and decades passing in double quick time. Anyone can make a cop investigating a burnt out church spooky, it’s the everyday stuff that’s the difficult bit to get right.

This is a masculine show. The women are almost all lightly drawn, and for all I said about the portrayal of Marty’s marriage, Michelle Monaghan doesn’t really get to colour outside the lines of a fairly standard ‘long suffering cop’s wife’ stereotype. In places – mainly Alexandra Daddario’s Lisa Tragnet, Marty’s court stenographer mistress – more was needed, I think. But it’s a show that concentrates on its two leads. None of the other male characters really get much to work with, either. And when I say it’s a masculine show, I mean it’s one where masculinity is a problem, where masculinity is in crisis. This is a patriarchal dystopia. The police department, the biker gangs and the business savvy church are symptoms of the same problem – male dominance, a culture of violence with members barely pretending to follow their codes of honour. Rape culture, sure, for starters. Marty is struggling to even realise he has to navigate this terrain. In a show about what can and can’t be taken for granted, Marty thinks being a man is the easy bit. As it turns out, he can cope with the monsters and the shooting. It’s the real life stuff that scuttles him. Three times, he has physically attacked other men for having consensual sex with women he knows. All the things Marty takes for granted as a man are shown to be just lies we all agree are true.

It’s a great show, one that without any fuss and without spoonfeeding sets down the rules (‘if they’re drinking from a bottle, it’s 1997, if it’s a can it’s the present day), and then delights in subverting them, to the point that a straightforward shot of someone getting up and walking out the room feels like the fourth wall just tumbled down. The cliffhanger of the sixth episode is that the two series leads meet. They’ve spent half the show in the same scenes, but somehow the cliffhanger is as momentous as Locutus of Borg stepping into shot.

True Detective’s a beautiful show, intensely told. Er … you’re watching it already? OK. Carry on.