Don Jimmy Gambino OBE: Savile the mob boss?

After the US election, there was much comment on the fact that the Democrats had outpolled the Republicans in the elections for the House of Representatives, by 49% to 48.2%, but ended up with a significant minority of the seats, 201 to 234. The question is, was this achieved by gerrymandering? I've been browsing through the data provided by the Guardian to make up my own mind.

It's not all that unusual for results in a tight two-party race to be perverse, ie for the losing party in votes to win more seats. Well-known examples include the 2000 US Presidential vote, the first 1974 British election, the 1951 British election and (for us STV fans) the 1981 election in Malta. It is unusual for such a tight race to deliver a seat benefit to the losing party, and that is worth investigating further.

First of all, we should be clear that not all 435 seats were contested in a straight fight between Republicans and Democrats. 21 seats had only one candidate, and another 24 saw only one of the two main parties represented. Had there been a contest in every seat, the Democrats would I think still have been ahead in the national vote total, but even more narrowly, and of course it's a reasonable assumption that the seat total would have been the same. The proposition that the overall result did not really reflect the will of the voters survives the hypothetical challenge that too many seats were uncontested to tell, since the uncontested seats were fairly evenly split (25 Republicans, 20 Democrats). Having said which, 10% of seats being uncontested is not really a sign of a healthy democracy.

Looking at the 410 seats that were contested between the two parties, it becomes clear that there is some systematic disadvantage for the Democrats somewhere. In the 191 seats where they beat the Republicans, they averaged 67% of the vote; Republicans averaged only 61% of the vote in the 209 seats where they beat the Democrats. In other words, more Democrat votes were in areas where they had a large majority, and more Republican votes were in areas where they were comfortably smeared out to just beat the Democrats. On a uniform swing from this year's results, Democrats will need to lead the Republicans by more than 7% nationwide to win a majority in the House, which is a pretty colossal differential (and very unlikely to be achieved in 2014, given the tradition of mid-term swings against the White House).

The question is, to what extent is this an imbalance inevitable consequence of the geographical concentration of Democratic voters, and to what extent is it the result of human design? There are seven states where human design for the House is irrelevant because they elect only one representative (two Democrats and five Republicans). Looking at the other 43 states, there were 23 where Republicans got more votes and 20 where Democrats got more votes as a total in the state House races. Since the electoral districts are designed separately by each state (there is a handy table of procedures here) it's not all that surprising that the 23 states where Republicans won should over-deliver Representatives for the GOP, and that this has a greater effect than the 20 states which the Democrats won. However, the margin of the GOP victory remains surprising.

What is a bit more surprising is that there were five states where the 'wrong' party won, where despite winning fewer votes the party in question won more seats. They were Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In Arizona Democrats won 5 seats and Republicans 4, despite being behind by 43% to 53%, on boundaries drawn by a bipartisan independent commission.
In the other four states, Republicans controlled the redistricting process.
Wisconsin voted very narrowly for the Democrats, by 50.5% to 49.0%, but Republicans won 5 seats to the Dems' three. That is possibly a fluke which cancels out Arizona.
In Michigan, Democrats won 50,9% and Republicans 45,6%, but the GOP won 9 seats to the Dems' 5.
In North Carolina, Democrats won 50,6% and Republicans 48,9%, but the GOP won 9 seats to the Dems' 4.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats won 50,2% and Republicans 48,9%, but the GOP won 13 seats to the Dems' 5.
In those last three states, where the Republican control of redistricting delivered a large majority of congressional delegates despite a majority vote for the Democrats, the GOP won 31 seats and the Democrats 14, a difference of 17; that accounts for more than half of the congressional majority of 33 right away.

Republicans were also able to draw the boundaries to deliver a bigger majority of seats than their vote share would have indicated in Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Florida and Ohio, and got clean sweeps of the nine congressional seats from Oklahoma and Kansas with vote shares in the lower 60s in each state. Against this one must set New Hampshire, where despite full Republican control of the process the Democrats won both seats by slender margins. One should also consider the states where Democrats controlled the process: they won all seven seats in Massachusetts on two thirds of the vote, and Illinois and Maryland both over-delivered on a substantial Democratic majority of the popular vote. However West Virginia returned two out of three Republicans, and Arkansas four out of four, suggesting that for whatever reason no successful gerrymander was implemented there by the Democrats.

I come away from this exercise not completely convinced that the Republicans owe their majority in the House to systematic gerrymandering, but that it certainly accounts for more than half of it, possibly much more. When you have a single-seat electoral system, it's not unusual even for fairly drawn seats to lead to a systematic imbalance in favour of (or more often against) particular parties. The creeping increase of constituencies in Wales, with consequent benefits for Labour, is my favourite example of this. However it is actually on the record that the seats in almost half of the 50 states are not fairly drawn, but designed for partisan advantage.

Just because gerrymandering may not have the decisive factor in the unequal outcome in the House vote doesn't mean it isn't a problem. I think it is a problem that gerrymandering is institutionalised; I think it is a problem that one race in ten is not contested by both major parties; and I think it is a problem if the election results fail to reflect the will of the voters.

Oh yes, that was a very fraught time. That was when they took all the Doctor’s friends off him and sent them home. It was like they were saying, ‘That’s your lot. You’ve had your fun.’ It was most upsetting, that whole thing at the end of the adventure I found myself labelling ‘The War Games’ when I came to write it up in my 500 year diary. They were ruthless, the Time Lords and I suppose no one could blame them really, for he'd made quite a fool of them, hadn't he? Running rings around them so to speak. So off went Jamie and off went Zoe and they weren't allowed to remember their Doctor after that and all the time they'd shared together.

No one would remember the black and white years. That was the Time Lords’ plan.

No one, except for me. Because they’d all forgotten me, hadn’t they?

I, who'd been stuck in a cupboard for ages. For goodness knows how many years. Ever since Stephen Taylor left, all that time ago, at the end of the adventure that I’d named ‘The Savages’ in my 500 year diary (I was much better at filling up the pages of my diary than the Doctor was. But then, stuck in the TARDIS locker, I had more time, didn’t I?)

Oh, even the all-seeing, all-knowing Time Lords forgot (or ever even knew!) about Hi-fi in the TARDIS locker. The lost little Panda and former companion of Stephen, Vicki and the old Doctor. And no one cared, did they? There I sat, on the shelf, absolutely furious.

Well, I wasn’t being sent anywhere. I wasn’t going to be exiled. I wasn’t going to have my mind probed by anyone. And I wasn’t going to forget the black and white years. How could I? A Panda?

So – before they could mess about with the TARDIS, and while the poor old Doctor was arguing for his life at his trial – out I nipped. I hopped out of the cupboard, through the massive, gleaming, oddly quiet console room, and outside. I toddled very quickly out of that particular bit of the Capitol. Somewhere high up in the Tower of Canonicity, I believe. Rather chilly place.

No one noticed a rather small Panda take the elevator to ground level. I scooted out quickly and ran through what appeared to be a busy shopping mall, and then a railway station. Except they weren’t trains that everyone was rushing to catch, they were strange things that looked like a cross between a jellyfish and a Rubik’s Cube. Anyone tell you Gallifrey is a sedate and boring place, don’t believe them. It all looked pretty busy to me that day. There was a parade of antedeluvian beasts through the streets of the city. Hand-plucked from alternate dimensions by some kind of rabble-rousing political group.

I went to the under-city, where things were even wilder. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, or where I was going. I wasn’t sure at all what I was going to do with the rest of my life. You must remember that I had spent many years in a cupboard, amongst a whole load of old junk. Electronic stuff and beach balls and umbrellas and stuff. I was thrilled with excitement, being set free upon the world.

Gallifrey stood at the nexus point of all time and space. It was terribly exciting in those days. But no one seemed to know that there was a trial going on, somewhere up in that needle tower right underneath the jewelled dome. No one had ever heard of the Doctor, and no one cared.

Except for myself – and for one drunken old woman in a bar somewhere deep in the under-city. When I hauled myself up onto a stool beside her she was already seeing double. She looked very much like a bag lady, dressed as she was in a variety of clashing styles. She was smoking pink Sobranies with golden filters and this warmed my heart. Gallifrey had always been no-smoking. She looked marvellously sophisticated in her peacock hat. I realised she was looking at me beadily.

‘So who are you when you’re at home, lovey?’

I stood up hopefully on top of my glass stool and adjusted my cravat. ‘But that’s just it, my dear. I’m not at home. I’ve never had a home, you see. Being a wanderer in the fourth and fifth dimensions.’

‘Oh yes?’ she beamed. ‘That’s what you are, are you?’

‘Indeed!’ I said hotly. And then I remembered I’d left my 500 year diary behind me in the TARDIS, just as I was writing up ‘The War Games.’ Ah well.

‘As it happens, chuck,’ said the old woman. ‘I’m a bit of a wanderer, too...’

Borusa – sooooo crazy with the Time Scoop. They called us in afterwards to clean up the mess. I’d never seen a Death Zone like it.

I had a right faff with the yeti. Turned out they were controlled by a disembodied intelligence? Operating via silver spheres in the beasts’ chest cavities? No one ever tells us stuff like that.

Met a few other waifs and strays from time and space. Up on the moors and scrubby wastelands several miles from the Tomb of Rassilon. All the poor sods who never got anywhere near playing the Game with the others.

We had to go round with a big lorry picking up Zabri, Voord, Mechanoids and Quarks. Each one requires their own special handling. No wonder they shut down the Death Zone and closed the Games. What a palaver!

Saddest case I saw. Big robot thing, sitting on a tussock of grass at the top of a hill. He didn’t move or flinch when we drove the lorry up to collect him.

‘Hello, chum,’ I said, trying not to look like a threat.

He swiveled round to see me. ‘They said Sarah Jane was here somewhere. Have you seen her?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Who?’ I said, wondering how we were going to fit this fella in with the rest. They don’t give us dimensionally transcendental lorries, more’s the pity. ‘What’s your name, chum?’ I flipped through the list on my clipboard. Of course, it wasn’t terribly accurate, what with President Borusa being out of control crazy when he went on his time scooping frenzy.

‘They call me The Giant Robot,’ he sighs, heavily. For a moment I can hear all the howling wilderness of the Death Zone rattling through his empty metal form. All the way down to his big blocky feet. I admit it, I feel a twinge of pity, which you don’t often do on jobs like this.

‘Why don’t you come with me?’ I suggest. ‘We can send you home again…’

‘But isn’t Sarah Jane here?’ he says. ‘Someone said she’d come this way? Isn’t she still here today? I would so love to see her again.’ 

‘I hate you,’ he thought nastily, glaring across the railway carriage at his unwanted companion.
Hippo was still in full flow, describing all the marvelous treats in store this weekend. A picture show with his Aunt this afternoon, straight after she met him from the train. Then tea in Fortnum and Mason’s. Then the theatre this evening. A pantomime. But not before a little shufti round Hamley’s, so she could pick out her favourite nephew’s Christmas present.
The carriage was painfully cold, and the white fields were flashing by. Banners of hot, noisy steam went billowing past, and sometimes the engine’s noise was enough to drown out Hippo’s endless boasting.
Turlough wasn’t going to London to be petted and spoiled by a doting aunt. He had been summoned to the office of his guardian’s solicitor. (‘And a very strange man he is, too,’ headmaster had said, when signing Turlough’s weekend release form.) It was bound to be something dreadful and dull and to do with money and Turlough’s dead parents. But he was twelve and beyond being upset at being alone in the world. He also didn’t mind travelling into London by himself on important business. Not like Hippo who, he suspected, was jabbering away like this because he was nervous of being out in the adult world.
They went through a tunnel and the train gave an almighty screech. Still Hippo rambled on. All about Aladdin and the Genie of the Lamp. That was the pantomime he was supposed to be seeing. Though now, he noted, the train was thirty-five minutes behind schedule. He started fretting immediately that his Aunt would worry about him.
The train stopped for longer than necessary at a small rural station.
A very peculiar woman came to sit in their carriage. She had lilac hair and a ragged carpet bag on her knee. She slipped a hipflask out of her silver furred coat and drank thirstily. A boozer, Turlough thought, with an amused scowl.
To his astonishment the ancient woman put her tongue out at him.
Still Hippo droned on about his wonderful Aunt Alice.
Then a small, furry Panda climbed out of the old woman’s carpet bag. He glared crossly at both schoolboys, just as the train flew into another tunnel and covered them in darkness.
The old woman said, ‘We won’t get as far as London. Just see. There’s something very wrong with this train.’
Another, gruffer voice said, ‘They think they’re heading straight to the centre, but they’re not. They’re veering off. They’re going off on a tangent. They’re travelling along the borders.’
Turlough gave the two newcomers a hard stare. Hippo was beginning to look frantic, sweating and rubbing at his round glasses with both thumbs and a smudgy handkerchief.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Turlough asked, icily.
‘The borders,’ nodded the old woman. ‘The borders of other people’s stories. You aren’t the heroes of your own, you know. And you’re not really headed for where you think you are.’ She seemed to believe this explained everything, and lit herself a pink cigarette. She turned to stare past Turlough out of the window.
‘Any idea where we are?’ the Panda asked her, climbing fully out of her carpet bag. As he did so, he seemed to expand, rapidly filling up more than his fair share of the already-cramped compartment. The lights flickered as another tunnel was gone through, and by the time they were on again, the Panda was the size of an adult human being.
The old woman didn’t answer his question. She asked him instead to pass her knitting. ‘The snow’s really coming down, now,’ she observed.
‘I say we shall be in London very soon,’ Hippo said, peevishly. ‘Did I tell you my Aunt Alice is taking me to Fortnum’s for tea? I’ve been promised macaroons.’
‘Bully for you,’ growled the Panda. ‘But you’ll never get them, you know.’
‘If we aren’t the heroes of our own stories,’ Turlough couldn’t help himself asking, ‘Then what are we the heroes of, precisely?’
The old woman was knitting very quickly and pretending that she couldn’t hear him.
The view through the window was beginning to look very unlike how it should.
‘Shall we wait until it stops before we hop out?’ asked the Panda.

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, the next comic will be a rerun. Properly warned, ye be, says I!

No, I'm not going to use Thanksgiving to create a cheesy segue that leads to my standard message of gratitude to those who use my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Here's someone's list of 25 Things I Want To Say To So-Called "Aspiring" Writers. And if I were Morey Amsterdam, I'd say, "Tell them that if they're aspiring, they should use a good deodorant." So we're all lucky I'm not Morey Amsterdam and I'm especially fortunate.

I find little on it with which to quibble. I think writers often make too much of the "no one respects us" routine...and sometimes, the reason we're not respected is that we tell the world that we aren't. The rule about how you're going to starve for a while is not always true. I've never starved (isn't it obvious?) and in more than 43 years, never been without paying work. But I do think it's a good idea to understand that it could happen and it could even happen suddenly.

Also, this thing about "finish your shit" is not to be taken literally. If what you're writing is shit, don't waste your time finishing it. Throw it out and start something better. The main thing is to be prolific and finish something, preferably a lot of somethings. But you really shouldn't be reticent to give up on something if ain't working...and if it doesn't fly, put it to one side and write something else. I know guys who'll write a novel or a screenplay or something...and then their lives are all about selling that one thing and if no one buys it, they let that stop them from the next project and all others.

But I do believe in the author's main point, which is that talking isn't writing and hanging out with other writers isn't writing and even thinking about what you're going to write is at best a part of the writing process. And I especially agree that a person who writes is a writer and a person who doesn't write is not a writer...and that too many people don't get that.

You can’t politicise the police any more than they have politicised themselves

Every time the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Police Federation or someone like Lord Blair complains about the “politicisation” of the police, the Baby Jesus cries. The police have always been political, and over the last decade have become quite shameless about this: Ian Blair representing perhaps the apex of this.

Let’s not forget the hacking scandal, and the close links between the police and media that it revealed. Or the interplay between police and politicos over the De Menezes shooting. Or the transparent way in which the Police Federation and the Sun worked together over the Andrew Mitchell affair in a blatant attempt to divert attention away from the Hillsborough inquiry.

I don’t like PCCs for very many reasons, but in terms of “politicisation” the only thing they will do in terms of the police is to take that politicisation slightly out of the hands of the establishment and put it slightly in the hands of people at a more local level. Of all the reasons to oppose them, this is the weakest.

The Lib Dems are to blame for holding the elections in November

They deserve the credit for this and twelve months ago, Nick Clegg was claiming it to everyone who would listen internally (I was on the party’s Federal Executive at the time and can claim first hand experience of this). They insisted on this partly because the party was woefully unprepared for fighting the elections in May 2012, the government’s original plan, and partly because they very much wanted them to be held as far from the council elections as possible, fearing that the increased prominence of law and order issues during that period would damage the party. This went hand in hand with a mindset, not universally shared across the party, that it shouldn’t field candidates in the PCC elections at all.

In retrospect, I’m not entirely convinced of the wisdom of this. The answer to the party being weak on law and order issues is to be better on law and order issues, not to pretend they don’t exist. I disagreed with the argument that the party should not field candidates and am pleased that in the face of some quite strong pressure from the centre, the FE did at least say it was a local issue rather than the original position of attempting to actually ban local parties from fielding candidates.

Nonetheless, as it is a stupid policy anyway, moving polling day to November has only undermined it further – and thus increased the chances that PCCs might get replaced with something better sooner rather than later. My only real concern about it is what the Tories got in return for this delay, which I fear we won’t discover until the main player’s memoirs are published.

The Tories are to blame for everything else

The sad fact of the matter is that the creation of a role like Police and Crime Commissioner goes hand in hand with the mindset that you can hold elections without having to promote the elections whatsoever. It’s all part of a “no such thing as (big) society” philosophy that dictates that participation in elections is solely due to personal responsibility and the ability of individual candidates. I’m only surprised that someone managed to force them to provide any online information at all, and that they didn’t ban the Electoral Commission from doing what it could.

Returning to Andreas Whittam Smith, it is hard to see the creation of these posts and not see clear parallels between them and the direction he wants to see British politics to go in: surely this shift from politicians to “managers” is exactly what he wants, so why not simply support the Conservatives? And it is hard to see what he brings to the table. 12 independent PCCs were elected on Thursday, out of a possibly 41. Meanwhile, Democracy 2015 managed to garner just 35 votes in the Corby by-election.

More than 4,000 people have signed Unlock Democracy’s open letter to Theresa May, calling for her to take steps to ensure we never see a repeat of Thursday’s elections, and for her to consider alternatives to PCCs. Please add your name.

A filmmaker is attempting to raise £40,000 on Kickstarter to make a film about the development and legacy of Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. It’s an ambitious project which I’d love to see happen, so I’ve chipped in and would encourage you to do the same.

I was one of the first generation of Fighting Fantasy fans, starting with the publication of the Warlock of Firetop Mountain in 1982. We didn’t have the Puffin Club at my school; we had the Chip Club. Nonetheless, that was how me and my sister discovered the series and I quickly graduated onto the Forest of Doom, City of Thieves, Starship Traveller and Deathtrap Dungeon.

I had a bit of a pro-Ian Livingstone bias, which was probably unfair in retrospect and I suspect was limited to the fact that I got Forest of Doom while my sister got the more experimental Citadel of Chaos. That changed when I discovered the Sorcery! series, with its spellbook, overarching plot and gorgeous John Blanche artwork. I was pretty hardcore, buying Warlock magazine from issue 2, the Out of the Pit monster manual, the background book Titan, and so on.

They weren’t perfect. Like most RPGs at the time, they tended to be both combat heavy and leave you rather dependent on the luck of the dice, which was a little redundant as if you died, you would tend to simply ignore the result and carry on. But the Fighting Fantasy books opened so many avenues for me. Like many other people, they encouraged my reading, and it will be no surprise to anyone to learn that they got me into roleplaying games. But I’d credit them with something more fundamental than that, in that they made me realise at a young age that I didn’t have to just be a consumer, but an active participant in my media as well (of course, this also came at the same time as the rise of the home microcomputer – which had a similar democratising effect. As it happens there’s also an open Kickstarter at the moment to fund an updated version of Elite).

This is an important part of my personal history, so I’m keen to see the documentary get made. Plus, it is possible I might be making a minor appearance in it as they appear to be using footage from Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s presentation at this year’s UK Games Expo in it, in which you can quite clearly see me in the audience! So please have a look at the Turn to 400 Kickstarter and consider putting some dosh behind it.

Sorry to hear about the death of Ray Zone...and though I knew Ray for years, I never knew if that was his real name. It was just so perfect. I mean, if you were a guy who was obsessed with 3-D movies and 3-D comic books and you needed a new name, wouldn't "Ray Zone" be a great one for you?

That was Ray's main interest and I can't recall ever talking to him about anything else. He was probably only about half-kidding (maybe less than half) that his mission in life was to get rid of all movies and comic books that weren't in 3-D. He knew everything about the various formats and history and the processes. In fact, he invented a new process that made possible that brief glut of 3-D comics we had in the early eighties, mostly from small publishers. Previously, the making of a 3-D comic book was a messy process involving pieces of panels being drawn on different layers of acetate and then someone had to apply white paint to the back of certain layers on the acetate and then...well, it took a long time to do a page that way. Ray invented a much simpler process that involved no overlays and even made it easy to convert an existing, drawn-for-2-D comic book to 3-D. I did one with him and it was amazing how, with no real technical advances involved, he'd figured out a much faster, better technique than had been used on the original 3-D comics of the fifties. Joe Kubert, who was one of the pioneers in that field, was reportedly agog when he saw how Ray did it.

Ray died Tuesday evening at the age of 65 and I do not know the cause. I do know he was one of the good guys and I always enjoyed seeing him and talking with him. The last time that happened was about five weeks ago — on October 3rd when I went to the Cinerama Dome to see It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in its native setting. Cinerama isn't exactly 3-D but it's close and Ray was there for every screening in a lengthy film fest devoted to films made in Cinerama. He dutifully told me about the print we'd soon be seeing and the problems with it and with the projection equipment. He really, really loved movies with depth and his enthusiasm was contagious and grand.

Sarah Teather is interviewed by Toby Helm, the paper's political editor, in tomorrow's Observer:

She accuses parts of government and the press of a deliberate campaign to "demonise" those on benefits and of failing to understand that those in need of state help are just as human as they are. With vivid outrage she describes the language and caricatures that have been peddled. 

"Whenever there is any hint of opposition they wheel out a caricature of a family, usually a very large family, probably black, most likely recent immigrants, without much English, lots of children, apparently chaotic, living in a desirable neighbourhood that middle-class people would like to occupy. That is the caricature and of course it is a partial spinning of the truth and it allows the demonisation to take place. 

"I would really urge particularly Conservative colleagues but people in all parties to be careful. I don't think we can afford to preside over a society where there is a gradual eroding of sympathy for people at the bottom end of the income spectrum and a rapid erosion of sympathy for people on benefits." 

She returns to the theme of morality and politics, saying: "I think deliberately to stoke up envy and division between people in order to gain popularity at the expense of children's lives is immoral. It has no good intent. 

"There are all sorts of things you have to do when times are tight that have negative consequences but you do them for good purposes. To do something for negative purposes that also has negative consequences – that is immoral."

Me, writing in 2010:

I cringe a little when I hear students refer to college work as a matter of — dire phrase — “retaining information.” Pick a field, any field, and think of people who are competent in it: are they “retaining information”? No: they know stuff. They understand the contexts in which “information” may be meaningful and are thus able to draw relevant conclusions and solve problems.

I heard the dire phrase again yesterday, and it occurred to me: “retaining information” sounds like a grim successor to toilet training. Holding it in, whatever it is, as long as the teacher requires — yipes.

You’re reading a post from Michael Leddy’s blog Orange Crate Art. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

We just got home from Thought Bubble. I'm going to do a second post about the stuff I enjoyed later on, but I thought I'd get the cute over with first.

Things of which Holly approved:

• pretty much everything to do with The Phoenix, including going round "finding" Phoenix feathers, and getting an art lesson from Neill Cameron, whom Holly describes as "the Epic-est of Epicness". In fact, I really want to give props to whichever person or persons decided the stuff that The Phoenix folks would be doing, because it was pitched exactly right for Holly. The challenge to go "find" Phoenix feathers was great, and gave us an incentive to go around the whole exhibition and see all the cool things; the drawing tables with a constant supply of paper and pencils were great (and attracted a few adults as well as kids); but the best bit as far as Hol was concerned was getting to meet Neill Cameron (because he writes/draws her favourite bit of the Phoenix - How To Make Awesome Comics* - and do a workshop about drawing robots with him - of which there are a few pictures below.


• Doctor Simpo, and his draw-a-monster game, which we had to go back to because one go at it wasn't enough.


• Seeing lots of artists just sitting around drawing cool stuff - especially lots of lady artists, and the lady artists were POPULAR, and Holly really noted that. She pointed out to me that the biggest queues were for Becky Cloonan and Kate Beaton.


• Cosplayers. There were many cosplayers, and she liked them. Especially the Dead/Skeletal Captain Jack Sparrow


• Elderly heroes - I wish I could remember the artist's name, but he was drawing decrepit versions of DC heroes. She particularly liked The Flash in his motorised wheelchair


• Cindy and Biscuit, which I would have bought had I had any money left, and will be buying once I have a bit more brass.


• Getting to see Andrew and his magnificent beard (although we rushed off reasonably quickly because she kept seeing more cool things)

( Pictures and stuff under the cut )

comments

Friday:

This week there's a call from Daddy Alex (supported by Auntie Jennie, following Lord Bonkers) for REVITALISATION of the Liberal Dcemocrat Blogger of the Year Awards.

And rightly so. In 2010, when my obvious awesomeness was (finally!) recognised, it was a HUGE deal. This year's ceremony, for the just-as-deserving Mr Mark Reckons, didn't feel as SPECIAL. And that's a SHAME.

But today Mr Paul Burblings, who's usually very wise, falls into the TRAP of ANTI-INTELLECTUAL SNEERING about "long blog posts", implying we should drop the BLOG of the year for the TWEET of the year.

Which would be GHASTLY!

For the better part of five thousand years, Rhetoric, the ability properly to couch an argument, whether in speech or essay, has been one of the seven Liberal Arts and a bedrock of what we laughingly call Western Civilisation.

And while the likes of Mr Dame Stephen Fry may (from time to time) Tweet a bon mot with the erudition of a latter day St Oscar that doesn’t stop most of Twitter being an exchange of rather dull, partisan rants.

I'm on Twitter myself (@millenniumdome) but increasingly I don't like what it does to my arguments. It seems to me that 140 characters is ideally calculated to reduce them to the meanest and often stupidest. The immediacy, the brevity, the peer pressure to big up "your side" or, more often, bait the "other side", all combine to incite the sort of Tweets that lead to flame wars. The advantage of a "long blog post" is that it makes me THINK about what I'm writing and consider the OTHER viewpoint(s), not just fire off for instant gratification. And what the fluff is WRONG with allowing a bit of NUANCE anyway? Or even some circumlocution?

Twitter is a conversation in a crowded room with everyone shouting at once, some of whom are friendly, some hostile, some utterly indifferent and no one is really, entirely LISTENING to each other. It’s not as shared an experience as blogging, where a post is out there on the aggregator for anyone to see. The great thing about “Lib Dem Blogs” is the sense of community that it creates and fosters. We all feel we’re on the same team, sharing viewpoints. Twitter never gives me that same sense of togetherness.

As for a “tweet of the year” – at least with a “blog post of the year” there’s a chance of it being memorable/having hit the golden dozen/at least you can look back over the aggregator archive. But if you *want* to produce a “tweet of the week” post every week for 52 weeks then maybe people will have something to base their choices on, otherwise you’re asking people to review an unspeakable number of tweets. Most of which will be dribble.

There's nothing wrong with praising a well put, pithy Tweet. There's no reason not to praise short, gossip or "look at this" style blog posts. If that's what you're good at then more power to your fluffy elbow. But there are NO EXCUSES for dissing the long essay. Writing a long essay is HARD WORK, and people who have put time and HEART into writing – even IF they're only read by eight other people ever – deserve respect and encouragement, not contempt.

Usain Bolt can run a hundred metres in nine-and-a-half seconds. But you wouldn't tell Mo Farrah that his 10,000 metres is "too long and boring", would you? And Jessica Innes would be well within her rights to stick you with a javelin if you criticised her for doing seven events over two days when she should be getting it all over quicker by doing just one.

We complain about SHORT-TERMISM and FALLING ATTENTION SPANS. We are DEEPLY AGGRIEVED when people make SIMPLISTIC black and white judgements – like "the Lib Dems just jumped into bed with the Tories cos they wanted bums in ministerial limos". We have EVERY RIGHT to be BADWORDED off when the BBC reduces political arguments to "left v right" or "rebels v loyalists". So why put up with a trend that says "I can't be bothered to read more than two sentences".

Dammit, I'm here to FREE PEOPLE FROM IGNORANCE not to REWARD IT!

One of Americaland's greatest presidents, President Bartlet, once said it like this:

"There it is. That's the ten word answer my staff's been looking for for two weeks. There it is. Ten-word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They're the tip of the sword. Here's my question: What are the next ten words of your answer? Your taxes are too high? So are mine. Give me the next ten words. How are we going to do it? Give me ten after that, I'll drop out of the race right now. Every once in a while... every once in a while, there's a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts. Other than that, there aren't very many unnuanced moments in leading a country that's way too big for ten words."

If you're going to approach the Internet with an attitude of "tl:dr" then it's YOU who has a SERIOUS problem, not me.

A "blog" is a diary, is a journal, is a body of work that builds up over time and develops coherent and self-supporting philosophy. You CAN read it one post at a time. Or you can read it in long stretches. You can read it as a single essay that catches your eye, or as chapters in a developing narrative.

As Liberal Democrats we EXPECT MORE of people than just a grunted "didn't like it". We NEED more too. Unlike the Red or Blue Labservatives, we pride ourselves on our grasp of HISTORY and PHILOSOPHY and IDEAS and INNOVATION, not our TRIBAL DOGMA. We NEED "long blog posts" because we need to be always renewing our intellectual STRENGTH IN DEPTH. We, far more than the knee-jerk Conservatories or Her Majesty's Loyal Opportunists in Hard Labour, we need to know what the next ten words are. And the next ten. And the ten after that.

Perhaps we expect too much, but if we have it in our power to encourage the "better angels" of human nature then that is what we should do.

Prev: Batman (1942)

Yes it has been two years. Shut up, I had  family issues.

Anyhoo.

Format: As with Batman (1943): A single story movie serial consisting of one half hour and 14 15-minute episodes, each moving the plot along just enough to leave us with a suitably gripping ‘how will they get out of this one?’  cliffhanger.

Batman: (Robert Lowery)

A forensic scientist ahead of his time, Batman no longer works for the US government, but is a private citizen using gadgetry, fists and smarts to assist a grateful, cooperative police force. His fighting skills are fine, but not
outstanding, as he often gets outfought just enough to be left in a certain death situation at the end of an episode.
And when [SPOILER] someone else wears the suit for a few minutes, his fighting skills are indistinguishable from
Batman’s. But his biggest asset is his brain and his gadgetry. Mostly his brain.

Bruce Wayne: Poor ol’ Bruce Wayne is so TIRED all the time. So. Tired, all the time, Vicki Vale really doesn’t have much time for  him. It’s a pretty good disguise: even though Vicki catches Batman driving Bruce Wayne’s car, she still knows Bruce too well to know they can’t be the same person. The only problem is that he thens becomes too lazy to keep up the  charade, and swans around being smart and detective-y even when being Bruce Wayne. So much so that the police even call up Bruce Wayne for advice.

Poor secret identity maintenance there, Brucey boy.

Supporting Cast: 

Batman’s partner Robin (John Duncan) gets to be pretty important in this series. There are a lot of episodes in which Robin takes center stage, gets the credit, or is otherwise a valuable asset to the team. He is there for Batman to bounce ideas off, to rescue Bruce Wayne when he gets himself in trouble, and generally fails to come across as a teenage boy.

After the last serial, Alfred is an utter delight. He co-conspires with Batman, butles for Bruce Wayne and generally does all the things you need Alfred to do. Which admittedly, mostly involves telling Vicki that Bruce is busy right now could she try another time?

The photojournalist Vicki Vale (Jane Adams) is probably dating Bruce, or she’s a friend, or really she just likes to hang around him to make fun of him. she knows that lazy good for nothing can’t be Batman, but her keen journalist mind won’t let her give up trying to track down the mysterious figure. Even though the mysterious figure – and indeed Bruce Wayne – are jerks to her a lot of the time. Still, she cheerfully ignores everyone’s assholishness and does a pretty good job of fighting the bad guys

We also get to see Commissioner Gordon (Lyle Tarbot)! He’s little more than a contact between Batman and the police, in a show that’s very crowded with characters already. But he has a batsignal! Which he shines out of his window.

Villain:

The Wizard is a mysteeeeeeeeerious profiteering crime lord who is terrorizing Gotham using a machine that can control any moving vehicle, including trains and Batplanes and armored bank vehicles. the big mystery of the series: WHO COULD HE BE?

Is it professor Hammil (William Fawcett), the inventor of the machine, who is in a wheelchair but has SECRETLY INVENTED a machine that gives him the ability to walk?

Is it Barry Brown (Rick Vallin), the radio personality who is mysteriously making announcements of the Wizard’s movements before even the police know what he will do?

 

Is it the private investigator who happens to turn up at key incidents in the Wizard’s crime career?

WHICH COULD IT BE?

Spoiler: it’s not important.

Gotham City: Nothing to write home about, still. Generic 1940s movie land. It’s more about the crime than the setting. But it does have an awful lot of caves.

His Wonderful Toys: Gadgetry plays a large part in the show, on both the part of the bad guys, and for Batman, who has a much higher tech batcave this time around, with microscopes and measuring machines and a filing cabinet for the costumes. Half of the crimes are solved by taking evidence back to the cave and doing TECHNOLOGY to them. It’s like CSI, but good.

Still lacking a batmobile. Still driving around in Bruce Wayne’s car. STILL GETTING CALLED ON IT.

 Batmannery: Detecting! As mentioned above, there’s fighting, but everyone fights.  Mostly the fancy moves that make Batman ‘Batman’ are in gadgets and in the fact that he’s just smarter than everyone. Except the Wizard, but – no, he’s smarter than the Wizard too.

The Best Thing About the Story: Vicki Vale. There’s not stopping her, and her RELENTLESS QUEST FOR THE TRUTH. A Lois character at her finest.

I’m a particular fan of the scene in which Batman tells her she can’t drive to the crime scene, takes her keys and says Bruce Wayne will give her a lift. So what does Vicki do? She gets the spare keys out of her purse.

(And she only has to be rescued every three epsiodes at most)

The Least-Good Thing: The Wizard plotline is actually incredibly boring. It’s really only worth it for the incidental character moments. And by that I mean Vicki.

Batman from the Beginning:

Batman (1943) | Batman and Robin (1949)

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

I am often asked to teach Liberal Democrat candidates the theory and practice of polling day organisation.

After I have taught them the rudiments of knocking up and how to prime the Bonkers Patent Exploding Focus (for use in marginal wards), I give a little homily. (Or was she a Dickensian heroine?)

Anyway, what I say to them is this: “Always remember to vote for yourself.”
The truth of this was borne in upon me with renewed force today. Because, thanks to my decision to follow my own advice, I am the new Police and Crime Commissioner for Rutland.
I won yesterday’s election with a majority of one – and that because I rushed down to the village school to vote just before the polls closed.
So you can see that my vote was quite decisive. It was not just that I had a majority of one: mine was the only vote cast in the whole of Rutland.
But a victory is a victory, whatever the turnout or majority.
Tomorrow I shall begin work on my plans to ensure that all police constables are fat and jolly and spend their time alternately helping old ladies across the road (preferably when they want to cross) and clipping apple-scrumpers around the ear.

LAB moves to its biggest ever lead in a ComRes poll. See table. www7.politicalbetting.com/?p=53790 twitter.com/MSmithsonPB/st…

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) November 17, 2012

And there’s goodish news for UKIP & the LDs

ComRes operate two entirely separate polls. The monthly phone surveys for the Independent and a much less expensive online poll for the Sunday Mirror and the Independent. Tonight we have the latter with the shares above.

The voting intention shares are showing the trend seen in the week’s only phone poll from Ipsos-MORI.

In this poll ComRes ask a question that it has put before which, I think, was first used by Populus a year ago. It goes: “Which, if any, of these parties would you seriously consider voting for at a General Election if it were held tomorrow?”

From this we find that 26% of current CON voters would consider UKIP and that 18% (up 4) would consider the Lib Dems.

Labour voters possible other choices include the LDs at 13% (+3) and UKIP 13% (+2). 29% of LD voters said they would consider the Greens.

I like this question because it adds a different dimension and points to the scope for tactical voting.

Mike Smithson

For the latest polling and political betting news

Follow @MSmithsonPB

Also known as THE DADDY ISSUES EPISODE.

I mean, uh. YET ANOTHER DADDY ISSUES EPISODE.

 

Don’t get me wrong, even the slightest bit wrong, I have a huge crush on stories about legacy and family and being the best person your parents could conceive. But… this is a lot of Very Special Daddy Issues episodes for a show only six episodes long. And this isn’t the most exciting of episodes either. One of my favorite characters isn’t in it at all, and two of the others are involved in a chemistry-free tacked on “love  triangle” plot that has nothing to do with anything. So it’s not the strongest.

Bright side, though – if you can call it that: We are now at the shortest DRAMATIC VOICEOVER EVER. Basikly: Ollie was on an island, he had one goal, now he has another goal, thanks for that Daddy. I did get another look at The List during the opening sequence, but none of the names were very interesting.

The episode proper opens with a pretty run-of-the-fictional-mill bank robbery. A bunch of three bad guys march into a bank wielding shot guns and beating on people, wearing hockey masks, each of which is marked with playing card decals.

At this point, L starts singing The Ace of Spades, and I am thoroughly earwormed for the day.

Note for Non-Comics Readers: This is the Royal Flush Gang, who in comics are a second-string supervillain gang with a pretty fluid membership, always running by code names corresponding to a Royal Flush. Which means usually there’s five of them. (Ace through Ten). At one point the gang was a national organization with 52 ‘cells,’ but usually their motivation is money and their narrative purpose is to have the crap beaten out of them.

Anyhoo. Bank Robbery. Money is stolen. A man is killed and he turns out to be an off-duty cop. The gang escape by dressing all the hostages up in similarly themed hockey masks and sending them out to the waiting police, while the four of them escape through a tunnel in the vault. As they do, they bicker about cop-killing. It’s not very interesting.

Fortunately, the next scene has shirtless Stephen Amell and David Ramsey in a tank top.

You’re welcome, internet.

Ollie is teaching Diggle some sweet hitting-things-with-sticks moves, and dropping him a few tempting hints about his island experiences. We also learn Captor-Mentor’s name. It is Yao Fei.

NNCR: Yao Fei is the name of Accomplished Perfect Physician, a member of the government-approved Chinese superteam the Great Ten. He appears in the excellent series 52, but otherwise I know very little about him

The next man on Ollie’s List is a man called Scott Morgan, who does a Bad Thing in the Glades by which Ollie means he jacks up the price of the water and power he supplies in winter, thus cheating people out of money. Which is nice, Diggle says, but hey, how about that Royal Flush gang, huh?

NNCR: The gang were first seen in Keystone City. This is the city that the first and third Flashes (Jay Garrick, Wally West) operate out of.

The cop who was shot is in a coma, Diggle explains, and may or may not make it. He and Oliie then have a disagreement over whether this is Maninnahood territory. See, Diggle was under the impression that Hood was a hero, who wanted to help the city, fight crime &c. Ollie, meanwhile thinks that it’s really a way to get at all the people on The List. There’s talk of symptoms and causes, but Diggle is not buying it for a second.

I start wondering at the screen whether Diggle can’t just half inch the outfit and go after the gang himself. It’d confuse the cops, for one, and throw John Barrowman off the scent. But apparently the show’s only going to give me one chance to draw a yellow goatee onto David Ramsey’s beautiful face. Stupid show.

Mind you, I do love to see Diggle tell Ollie that he’s rubbish at being a hero.

ISLAND FLASHBACK TIME. Ollie is in the cave on his own, and he’s sad about it.  He’s got the book he took from his Dad’s dead body (which still has blank pages, and he’s throwing a page at a time onto a fire to keep warm. Then suddenly, he is rolled over from behind and finds himself looking at… dun dun dun… HIS DAD.

Yep. time for a dream sequence. In a flashback sequence. END DREAM. END FLASHBACK.

Joanna is back! And she’s talking to Laurel about something that isn’t a man; she’s talking about business! The largest donor of CNRI (City Necessary Resources Initiative – Laurel and Joanna’s legal clinic) is pulling out, and this leaves them in financial trouble.

NNCR: The company in question is Stagg Industries, a nod to Stagg Enterprises : a large multinational in the DCU that is famous for the R&D accident that turned Rex Mason into Metamorpho/The Element Man.

Enter Tommy! (Good bye, Joanna, who disappears from the scene.) Tommy wants to take Laurel out on his private jet to Coast City, wine, dine and generally boyfriend at her. Laurel tries to explain that she has this work thing going on.

NNCR: Coast City is the home of Hal Jordan, the second Green Lantern and comics!Ollie’s sometimes dead best friend. It is usually set in Southern California, the fictional LA to Star City’s fictional San Francisco.

At Queen Manor, Thea is worried about her mother, who has been down since Walter ran off to Australia. Ollie is surprised Thea is paying attention to her mother, but that’s because Ollie’s always surprised when people pay attention to other people. Meanwhile, Moira announces that she’s invited Janice and Carter Bowen over for brunch. Janice is apparently a friend of Moira’s the latter’s admiration of Carter’s prowess growing up was apparently quite the shadow over Oliver’s less prestigious academic career.

NNCR: I got nothing.

Ollie tries to bow out with an excuse, but Moira’s having none of it. She wants to see the Bowens, and she wants her kids there so for once be less of a dick, Ollie? Please and thank you.

Diggle phones Ollie’s cell to let him know that Scott Morgan tried to kill himself, and that he’s at Starling General, so Ollie drops everything to run over there. And by ‘everything’ I mean Tommy, who shows up fresh from being blown off by Laurel in order to get blown off by Ollie. Poor Tommy is left alone with Thea, who offers to be there if Tommy wants to talk about.

And Tommy, who is either an idiot or a giant douchebag (or BOTH) proceeds to tell Thea all about this “cryptic girl” he is interested in, who he has known for a long time, and that his usual ‘I’m a millionaire’ line doesn’t work because she’s not interested.

L and I both have our heads in our hands for this scene. The only saving grace is that  Tommy clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing, and Thea is seventeen and this is the kind of mess seventeen year olds get into. (Or at least it was in the 1990s. I assume it’s the same now)

“Maybe you just have to figure out what’s a big deal to her and make it a big deal to you,” is Thea’s relationship advice. He says she’s amazing and kisses her cheeks before running off.

Hey, you know who’s learning from everyone around him how to lie to and play his friends like xylophones? Diggle’s line about Morgan attempting suicide was just that – a line to get Ollie out to the hospital at short notice. There, he introduces  him to Janice Washington, the wife of Stan Washington, the cop who was shot in the opening scene. Diggle himself arranged for the victim to be transferred to the better hospital, using Ollie’s name and money to do so. Here you go, Ollie, have a few veiled references to helping others at all times and the opportunity to look a grateful wife in the eye and see her hope for her injured husband.

Put that in your “I’M DOING THIS FOR MY DADDY” pipe and smoke it.

(Diggle continues awesome.)

Ollie responds in typical Ollie style. He storms off to catch the bank robbers and gives Diggle the chance to be smug.

In the Arrowcave, Ollie and Diggle search the security footage for a clue to the robbers’ identities, and fix on a ring being worn by the Ace – one of those college or high school rings that Americans do? I’m not sure what the ring thing is about, really. Anyway, the best part of this scene is that it acknowledges that even magical photo enhancements don’t actually do much apart from make pixels bigger, and they’re not going to identify it from the footage. The worst part is the conclusion that by punching someone with that hand, he would have left an impression on the face of his victim, and that’s where Ollie’s going to investigate.

Time to break into the police station!

Boring scene – Ollie breaks into a police station and downloads some stuff onto a flash drive. Back in the Arrow Cave, he finds an impression of that ring that perfectly matches a logo for Larchmont High School. Ollie grabs a list of students and alumni of of about the right height/approximate age (what?) and from there found a boy (Kyle Reston) who dropped out before senior year and went missing along with his entire family (what?) Mom, Dad, two boys.  Double checking the robbery stats shows that one of the female customers did not come out of the bank – Mom had acted as a ringer. It turns out, in fact, that she was the one to alert Ace to the cop’s presence and get him shot.

Joanna is interacting with someone who isn’t Laurel! Sure, it’s about Laurel and Laurel’s storyline, but baby steps, I suppose? Tommy turns up at CNRI to propose sponsoring a benefit. Laurel tries to turn him down because it’s a clear attempt to get laid, but Joanna jumps on this and suggests that not everything is about Laurel’s privates and really, they need the money, OK?

So they go with yes.

Brunch time with the Queens and the Bowens! Um, nothing exciting happens here, either. We learn that Carter Bowen is a neurosurgeon and now a popular medical writer. Also that Diggle is now apparently pretending to be Ollie’s PA, because he comes in the middle of brunch to tell Ollie that his liquor distributor is calling – although really that’s a front to say that another bank is being robbed.

So Ollie runs off, and his mother is peeved.

The Royal Flush Gang hit the bank, and make their escape underground as before, into water treatment tunnels where they run into the police. Gunfighting ensues! Hood is there too, and fires a few trick arrows to pin the bags of cash to the ground. Then everyone except the police runs off.

This incident leads the Restons to had e family spat about what to do. The Hood leaves the adults jumpy, but the kids really want to have ONE MORE robbery before they retire. Ace in particular insists on one more, and Dad concedes.

Ollie, who can hack into a school’s personal records and come up with a missing guy based on rough age and heights, needs Felicity Snoak to track down Daddy Reston – Derek. She finds out that he used to work for the Queen steel factory.

Me: “Is that the Queen factory that makes steel, or the factory that Robert co-owned with Walter?”

L: “…I’m not exactly sure.”

Derek was the foreman before Robert outsourced to China, laying off 1500 employees and using a loophole in the  contracts to avoid paying severance packages and pensions to the employees. Reston, among with others, lost his home. Remember people, outsourcing is EVIL.

ISLAND FLASHBACK. DREAM SEQUENCE. Dream!Robert hands Ollie a gun with a single bullet in it. And then says that his suicide is made meaningless if Ollie follows suit. Ollie protests he is starving to death anyway, and Robert tells him he has to survive to do his work. Ollie apologizes and holds the gun to his own head. END DREAM. END FLASHBACK.

Ollie is going to see if Reston’s at a bar the factory employees used to go to 5 years ago, and “give him the chance to do the right thing.” Diggle, as usual, lays it out plain:

“They already had the chance to do the right thing. It’s called ‘not being a criminal.’”

But of course, Diggle DOESN’T UNDERSTAND. Because it’s all OLIVER’S DAD’S FAULT. It’s all about the Queens, Diggle!

(I sorta see Ollie’s point here, I mean, the cause of crime being poverty and unfairness and the 2%. But he does tend to make it ALL ABOUT HIM.)

Ugh, even the subplot is boring, and Laurel agrees with me. Tommy is insisting on involving her in every decision about the fundraiser, and she distracts him by asking him what on earth he’s doing. He gives a speech about how he misses making her breakfast. And he wants to be a boyfriend.

And L and I wince, because there are 1,001 ways to set Tommy up as Ollie’s archnemesis. Doing it over Laurel is boring.

Ollie tracks Derek Reston down, apologizes for his Dad being a dick and offers him a job with Queen Consolidated. You know, that business Ollie doesn’t work for. Derek tells him to get lost. Ollie slips a bug into his coat pocket and leaves. But not before giving a speech about consequences and actions.

Bloody hell, I’m bored.

Time for the benefit! Apparently fundraisers only take a day to organize, or something, because dialog confirms this is the day after brunch. Tommy compliments Laurel, has another line of dialog to exchange with Joanna, then  thanks Thea profusely for her great advice, and how well it’s working out for him. She is surprised that he did it all for Laurel, despite having no evidence that he was trying to find out what Thea was interested in.

What is Thea interested in, other than drugs and partying? Not much, apparently, because now she’s gone off to get drunk.

Anyway, Laurel is schmoozing with Carter, who is impressed with all the good work Laurel is doing and considering opening a free clinic in the Glades. The two of them go off to discuss, leaving Tommy with a sickend look on his face.

Basically, Carter Bowen is Doctor Rick.

(And Tommy is Jeff Winger, Thea Annie and Laurel Britta. I am not amused by these ridiculous out-of-the-blue parallels)

Oblivious to the fact that his love interest and his BFF are branching out their love triangle into something more polyhedral, Ollie chooses the party as the right time to apologize to Moira. In her awkward Moira way, hs esays that she’s really hurt that she never gets to spend time with the son who was miraculously returned to her. With SPECTACULAR  timing, Diggle interrupts to say that the Royal Flushes are picking right now this instant to stage a nighttime bank robbery. Moira lets him go, but not after twisting the mother guilt knife a little.

Derek and Kyle are burgling when they are interrupted by the Hood. Fortunately, Kyle has the superpower of being able to pull a riot shield out from nowhere, and arrows are rendered useless. They fight, and the bank’s nightwatchman recovers from having been knocked out. He grabs a shotgun, and when Kyle doesn’t drop his weapon as ordered, shoots. Derek, because this is the daddy issues episode, throws himself in the path of the bullet.

Security guard runs off to call an ambulance and Ollie kneels down beside Derek, unmasking them both while I yell at him not to be an idiot with his secret identity. Derek says how bad he feels that he turned his son into this. Then he dies.

ISLAND FLASHBACK. DREAM SEQUENCE. The gun Ollie shoots himself with doesn’t work because he’s hallucinating it. Dream Robert is still mad at Ollie for not being good enough at staying alive and throwing away the ‘gift’ of Robert dying for him. He yells at Ollie to RIGHT HIS WRONGS and lectures him about responsibility. Oh also? He loves him. END  DREAM. END FLASHBACK.

Ollie’s Head!Dad is even more of a dick than his real Dad. Which is OK, I guess. My Head!Mum is more of a dick than my real mum, definitely.

Tommy is watching Laurel and Carter jealously when he is drunkenly come on to by Thea. It is embarrassing to watch, there is no chemistry and I am sad. She does tell him that she’s used to rejection from her Mom and from Oliver, which is playing into her storyline, and makes me want to introduce her to Lydia Bennet (and not just because I’m thinking of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries since Fitz was in the KFC commercial just before this scene)

While Thea is throwing up in the street and Tommy is holding her hair back, Laurel comes out to check on them. He drops a passive aggressive remark about Carter Bowen, she says that he’s a dick who she was dancing with because he wrote a check to the clinic. Tommy  - well, doesn’t apologize, but you know. He goes to drive Thea home, and Laurel promises him a dance, then kisses him on the cheek and goes back into into the party, shooting him a killer smile that basically destroys all the knees and the ladyparts of the people watching it.

This was one boring-ass episode, but it was worth it to see Katie Cassidy smile like that.

The end? Not quite.  Diggle finds Ollie brooding in the Arrowcave and tells him that Derek’s death wasn’t his fault, and that The List isn’t the only way of righting his father’s wrongs – going after the people Robert hurt is a good way too. Which basically means Diggle has realized that the best way of persuading Ollie to do some proper crimefighting vigilante justice is to figure out how to make crime ALL ABOUT OLIVER QUEEN.

ISLAND FLASHBACK Ollie wakes up from the dream and goes back to burning the blank pages of his dad’s book. Except when he holds the latest page to the fire, he starts to see writing materialise on the paper. The book was filled with heat sensitive invisible ink. This is where Ollie’s List has come from. Ollie makes his promise to his dead father there. END FLASHBACK.

Moira can’t sleep, because she misses Walter. She’s pouring herself a nightcap when Ollie finds her. They apologize to each other for being shitheads and Ollie takes her out to dinner at Big Belly Burger. No, Carly isn’t there, but I look anyway. It’s basically an adorable little mother son scene, and it melts me.

But still, nothing happened this episode and I was bored. The bright side? Now you don’t have to watch it!

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

So Becca and Shoroko and I went along to the Film Forum on Monday to see Mark of Zorro (1920) as part of their Douglas Fairbanks season. This was relevant to my interests for the twinned reasons of secret identity heroics and swashbuckling swordplay. Just the kind of movie, in fact, that warms my happy place.

I said before that Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes was my nomination for best Batman screen adaptation of all time. With that in mind, I think Mark of Zorro is my favorite Green Arrow screen adaptation so far. (Sorry, Arrow, but our show-fan relationship was always going to be an open one, don’t claim otherwise.)

For Zorro (aka Don Diego Vega)  does in fact epitomize all the things that make Green Arrow great. He makes speeches about poverty! He has ridiculous facial hair! He isn’t very good at keeping his secret identity secret! He gets distracted by ladies a little too easily.

It’s kind of funny. After being introduced to the lady his father wants him to marry, and failing to impress him with his Blakeney esque lazy stupid persona, Diego immediately gate crashes her garden as Zorro in order to woo her properly.

Because what’s the point of being a dashing swashbuckler if you can’t use it to pick up chicks, amirite? Becca was of the opinion he had something to prove. I was of the opinion that he’s just trying to prove how RIDICULOUS he is. Which I approve of.

Of course, you know the plot. Poor people are being oppressed in California, Don Diego decides to help them out by putting on a mask, wielding a sword (and a gun – the only gun in town as far as we could tell) and giving speeches about JUSTICE. The fight scenes are proper swashbuckling – great acrobatics and foot work, lousy sword work but who cares?

I certainly don’t. I shall be running along happily to as many of the Fairbanks Festival screenings as I can, because  there’s nothing like a good old fashioned swashbuckler for my money.

A warning if you decide to download this (public domain) movie – the score to the version I found is dreadful. This wasn’t a problem in the theater, where we were treated to superb live accompaniment by Steve Sterner, but you might prefer to turn the sound down.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Jennie Rigg and James Graham have both written posts recently that have touched on issues that have been concerning me. To quote Jennie:

And because people are just generally pissed off with politicians, political media, and elections this feeds into the perception that there is a lack of meaningful choice – if all politicians are the same and they are all venal scumsucking money-grubbing bastards, why bother to try to choose between them? It won’t make any difference.

And James:

What we need in the UK is almost the exact opposite of what Andreas Whittam Smith is proposing: greater accountability of parliament and a return of the battle of ideas. Neither are easy to achieve within a system which is as jury rigged to favour the status quo as ours

(Read the whole thing from both of them, of course)

We’re sleepwalking into a democratic crisis in this country. In fact, we may already be in the middle of the one. I know there’ll be lots of ‘whither democracy?’ articles floating around the ether after the PCC elections, but they were just a symptom of the ongoing issues that are affecting the country, not the cause of something in itself.

The problem is that in many people’s perceptions democracy has become conflated with ‘voting for things’. We forget that democracy is meant to be an ongoing process, not just something you turn up and do periodically and then forget about. To borrow from Michael Bywater’s Lost Worlds:

The core of democracy, for its inventors, was participation. You not only voted, you served in office when called upon. Now, perhaps, a gentleman might think it poor form to discuss politics; his Athenian forebears would think it idiotic not to. Literally idiotic: those who ‘kept out of politics’ were risible, contemptible, ‘The Selfers’, idiôtes, foolishly self-absorbed and out of the swim.

Now, this could be a rant about people not getting involved and not voting. How dare they sit at home when we’ve given them things to vote for! Why would they not want to take the time to have their say about whether they want someone as their PCC who’ll cut crime or someone who’ll priorities crime cutting instead? But that’s definitely not the issue: the problem isn’t that voters are idiots (under any definition of the word) but that the system insists on treating them like they are. People discuss politics and political issues, they do it often and in great depth – they just don’t feel any connection to the political systems that are supposed to deal with these issues. To quote from Jennie again:

The causes of this are many and complex, but a large part of it is the electoral system which forces there two be two big broad church parties of disparate people BEFORE an election rather than coalitions forming after; a large part of it is the media who love to take politicians down and misrepresent them for sensationalist reasons; some of it is a lack of education on politics and its processes; and some of it is the dishonesty of politicians in not admitting that actually, there is very little difference between any of the main parties precisely due to the above effects.

And as James points out, ideology is being slowly removed from British politics in favour of a form of competitive managerialism, where people don’t compete on vision and ideology but on who can best hit a set of ill-defined targets.

And the reaction to this disengagement between the political system and the public is to promise more disengagement. PCCs, like elected Mayors before them, come from the rather Mussolini-esque belief that too much democracy – lots of people discussing different views and coming to a joint conclusion – is horribly inefficient (and nothing’s worse for a managerialist than perceived inefficiency within a system) and we’d be better served by a single leader making all the decisions because – for reasons no one can quite explain, but seem to revolve around the ability to vote them out in several years if they choose to stand for re-election – that one person will be ‘accountable’. Again, this is managerialism in action, where you set one person a group of targets to meet and assess them on whether they make them or not. The problem here is that I’ve never met a voter who makes their decision based on that sort of criteria.

This is why I’m concerned about a democratic crisis in this country, as voters become more and more disengaged from the system, and the system responds in ways that only deepen the divide and invite contempt. As well as government, though, there’s a crisis of trust in many institutions in the country: the police after Hillsborough and other events, the BBC after Savile, the press after phone hacking, and so on. Add to that all the problems of the economy and austerity and we’ve got all the precursors for a complete collapse of confidence in all institutions in place.

My fear is that we’re in a position similar to Italy’s in the early 90s, and all we’re lacking is a Berlusconi to come along and take advantage of the situation. The main political parties are all seeing their membership dwindle and their capacity to engage the public be correspondingly reduced, and there’s a huge vacuum waiting to be filled. People want to be engaged in politics and political discussions, but they’re not getting that from the system at the moment. As I wrote a few months ago, the parties have reduced politics to a big game, and people want more from it than that. Given the right message, the right funding and the right figurehead, a British version of Forza Italia could bulldoze the other parties out of the way – and thanks to our electoral system could be swept into a huge majority and near-absolute power. We might be lucky and get a movement led by someone who wants to be a benign dictator in the style of De Gaulle, or we might be unlucky and find ourselves like Italy after the early 90s, finding we’ve got rid of one damaged system to replace it with one that’s worse.

That’s where my fear comes from – that this perfect storm of crises might be used by certain forces to bounce us into a system of government that’s a long way from where we are today. Scotland might be lucky enough to get away from it if that were to happen, but what of the rest of us?

So far this Noirvember, we’ve looked at an incredibly dark noir novel masquerading as a domestic drama centered around a dance contest, and a non-fiction noir that frames a series of historical mass murderers as perfect little short stories.  And today, having moved from crypto-noir to non-fiction noir, we’re going to move on to something altogether unique:  the meta-noir novel.  (Jesus, when are you gonna just talk about movies?  Quiet, you.)

When Gary Mairs — a gentlemanly film scholar, a fine filmmaker, and a good friend — first introduced me to David Thomson’s novel Suspects (as in “the usual”), I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  Now, 27 years after it was written and 5 years after I encountered it for the first time, I’m still not sure what to make of it.  Thomson is a British film critic and historian who is largely known in this country for his reference books and a recent series of short, punchy biographies of leading movie stars and noteworthy directors.  His reputation is mixed, even among those who like him:  he has opinions that it would be overly polite to characterize as ‘eccentric’, and he’s obsessed with particular movie stars — especially women — in a way that borders on unseemly.  He’s never really produced anything like a revolutionary reading of a film, and his value as a historian and scholar are more due to his voluminous capacity for remembering detail than any exceptional insight.  But he’s also a very engaging writer, with a lively if not groundbreaking style, and his books are hard to put down because his enthusiasm for the medium of film is so obvious and infectious.

Gary told me, when he first hipped me to the existence of Suspects, that he actually preferred it to Thomson’s film writing.  I wasn’t sure how to take this, since his film writing was all I knew of the man.  (I’d later find out that he’d written screenplays for some Hollywood heavy hitters, but none of them had ever been produced — not that this is necessarily a black mark against him.)  The idea sounded intriguing to me, especially given my consuming devotion to film noir, but I’d also been burned time and time again by non-fiction writers — and critics, especially — trying their hand at novels and flaming out in an embarrassing unspectacular way.  So it was with more than a little trepidation that I finally picked up a copy; but I burned through its 270 pages in a single day, and while I still have decidedly mixed feelings about the book, I return to it again and again.

What is Suspects, exactly?  It’s not an easy question to answer.  Written in 1985 after years of false starts, it’s a novel, but almost none of its characters are original creations of Thomson’s.  It’s a historical fiction, but the history it depicts is itself fictional:  it delivers to readers the background and fallout of events that never happened.  It’s an invention, but one that blurs the lines between fact and fiction:  even its narration — putatively delivered by a character it would be churlish to identify and spoil for the potential reader — seems to flag between the person identified as the speaker and Thomson himself.  Each italicized link between chapters can be read as a narrative connection between one event and another, but also as a commentary on film and its power to enthrall us by the critic who wrote the book.  This device and others makes it unabashedly post-modern, another quality that I enjoyed, but is likely to rebuff readers who see it as a mere gimmick.  ”Is the order of these entries significant?” the narrator asks early in the book.  ”I do them as they come into my head, but my head keeps running back to system.  So design and randomness bump together, skirmishing, like lovers.”

Then what, exactly, is the gimmick?  What on Earth is Suspects about?  Like many such exercises, it is easiest to understand in the terminology of the geek:  Suspects is an attempt to impose a Wold-Newton structure on the world of film noir.  But the number of people who know both noir and Wold-Newton are (hopefully) few, so a further explanation is in order:  essentially, Thomson gives us fictionalized biographes, each forming a single chapter, of some of the most notorious figures in crime drama.  Chinatown‘s Jake Gittes and Noah Cross; Casablanca‘s Ilsa Lund and Richard Blaine; Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker from Laura; Johnny Clay from The Killing and Dickson Steele from In a Lonely Place; Kit Carruthers from Badlands and Harry Lime from The Third Man; and outliers from films as diverse as Rebel without a Cause, American Gigolo, and It’s a Wonderful Life (one of the book’s most carefully constructed pieces of hidden criticism is to identify the latter as a far darker and bleaker film than it’s usually given credit for).  Thomson invents histories that show us where these people came from before we picked up their stories on the big screen, and what happened to them after the cameras stopped rolling.

If this was Suspects‘ only accomplishment, it would be compelling enough; Thomson has a gift not only for the fictional biography, but for weaving the true and the false together:  he not only works in little Easter eggs for the attentive out of the stuff of reality (the judge in Jake Gittes’ trial for criminal negligence following the death of Evelyn Mulwray, for example, is named Robert Evans), but he also cleverly incorporates events from the real lives of the actors who played the characters into those characters’ life histories.  (Appropriately enough, he engages this tendency in the most pronounced way when he writes about Harry Lime and Hank Quinlan, two characters played by Orson Welles.)  But it would still be nothing more than a clever collection of fantastical mini-bios, and Thomson clearly wants it to be more.

This is where the novel tends to stumble on its own ambition.  What becomes clear, after a certain point, is that Thomson is not merely trying to flesh out the pasts and futures of these dwellers in the shadows:  he’s also trying to connect them into a grand narrative.  The links that bind them crop up almost immediately, with some of them being satisfyingly obvious (Sidney Falco as the teenage protégé of Waldo Lydecker; a tenuous, if downright operatic, connection between two of the all-time great femmes fatale, Phyllis Dietrichson and Matty Walker) and others being completely out of the blue, with varying degrees of success (Kit Carruthers traveled in his wild youth with Rev. Harry Powell; Harry Lime once worked at a car dealership run by Beat the Devil‘s Henry Oliver Peterson).  These connections can get a little stretched, and Thomson has to futz around with timelines quite a bit to get all these folks in the same places at the same times, but it’s fun just to watch him try, and the central narrative reveal is a killer.

Some of the hiccups in Suspects‘ narrative aren’t Thomson’s fault.  In a handful of cases, sequels to the films to which he writes a speculative ending were made after the book was published, and while his outcomes are generally superior, it’s hard to drive the memory of the big-screen version from one’s mind.  Others make it something of a curate’s egg; Thomson has a gift for spotting patterns in dialogue, and often, his characterizations are terrific, sounding like scenes and snippets lifted from might-have-been deleted scenes; other times, though, he simply recycles a famous line in another context, a device that never fails to sound cheap.  The worst excesses of the book are thematic, and those who have criticized Thomson for the borderline-creepy way he deals with the carnality of some of his big-screen heroines will find nothing to dissuade them in Suspects.  He’s also got an obsession with incest that he wears so far down on his sleeve that the narrator tries to hang a lampshade on it, but that just makes it dangle all the more clumsily.

With all that against it, though, Suspects is a book of undeniable intrigue and charm.  For all its imperfections, it’s nearly impossible to put down, and it ranks as #1 among the books I have given away to friends and replaced for myself, just because I’ve wanted to have people to talk about it with.  Today’s omnivorous mash-up culture has given us far too many variations on this sort of geek-genre cross-pollination, but Suspects resembles Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen crossed with a Larousse biographical dictionary more than it does any half-assed modern what-if.  It is, predictably for Thomson, meticulously researched and historically rigorous; but, unexpectedly for Thomson, it contains little wonders of style, characterization and feeling, three qualities almost always lacking in such metafictional speculation.

Of course, while I would never characterize Suspects as pandering, I probably wouldn’t rate it so highly if the characters he presented and the milieu in which they operate didn’t so precisely tickle my noir sweet spot.  (Indeed, five years later, Thomson tried much the same thing, only with the Western genre, in a novel called Silverlight; the plot was stronger, but the characters were less resonant and the interplay less complex, leaving it less a daring piece of post-modern reclamation and more simply a mediocre oater.)  Any book where Norma Desmond secretly bears Joe Gillis’ love child, Kaspar Gutman and Joel Cairo ride off into the sunset to become bridge columnists, Double Indemnity‘s Barton Keyes and Scarlet Street‘s Chris Cross turn out to be the same person, Evelyn Mulwray and Carmen Sternwood are best friends, Jack Torrance is born in the town from It’s a Wonderful Life, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy has a baby that turns out to be a rather famous writer of comic books — well, that book is going to get my attention.

But the greatest strength of Suspects is that it does more than that — it carries its narrative beyond the childish dream that all our favorite characters live in the same little kingdom and know each others’ names, and turns it into a cleverly paced, surprisingly deep, and undeniably adult work of fiction that folds in on itself without ever crawling up its own ass.  It’s also that rarest of things, a book that, by its very nature, will never, ever be made into a movie, and thus — despite the fact that it’s constructed entirely out of characters from the movies — can be appreciated solely as a work of literary fiction.  It’s newly in print after seemingly random gaps of time being unavailable; its air is not entirely clean, but it is exceptionally rare.  Breathe it in while you can.

Mirrored from LEONARD PIERCE DOT COM.

It turns out that the author of the above screed, comic book artist Tony Harris, was born the same year I was.

I can’t actually conceive of a forty three year old man, particularly one who has presumably functioned reasonably well in the real world, with other actual human beings, writing a paragraph like that one up there.

There has to be an alternate explanation for it.

Perhaps, and I’m just spit-balling here, all these years Mr. Harris has kept, Kuato-like, a maladept fifteen-year-old boy in his gut. Then one day, when Harris sat down at a keyboard to exclaim how much he liked kittens, that gut-boy seized control of his body to have a vent. Perhaps Harris went into a trance when it happened, and by the time he came to, gut-boy had already posted his screed to Facebook. At that point, Harris had no other choice but to stand by it, because to do otherwise would raise too many questions, mostly about the adolescent man-child that lives in Harris’ intestine. I mean, how do you explain that away? How did gut-boy get there? Is this his first eruption? At conventions, when Women of Insufficient Nerdity walk by Harris’ booth in their unearned cosplay, does gut-boy strain at Harris’ abdominal wall, trying to get out, screaming “UNCLEAN” loud enough that Harris has to cover up gut-boy’s muffled howling with a carefully-staged coughing fit? Does Harris exist in a state of existential despair, never really knowing when gut-boy will unfold, like a scrotal origami, to rail at the feminine injustices of this world? And at boobies?

I fear he must. I fear Tony Harris truly has a gut-boy, lodged well into his duodenum. Rationally, it is the only explanation. Indeed, it’s the only explanation for a depressing number of grown men in nerd circles: They suffer from a plague of gut-boys, lashing out while their hosts can only look on, horrified and embarrassed at the misogynistic words and statements they will soon be obliged to own.

In which case, I will pray for Tony Harris in his life-long struggle against his angry, wailing gut-boy. It’s a difficult life he leads. I can only hope one day, he can expel his splenetic parasite and live a freer, fuller life. In the meantime, he should consider staying away from keyboards. You never know when gut-boy will strike again.

I’ve been following the development of Democracy 2015 in a professional and personal capacity since it launched this summer and listened with interest to Andreas Whittam Smith’s speech at the Unlock Democracy AGM on Saturday. Sadly as a result of Whittam Smith’s speech on Saturday I’ve been forced to reassess the project, away from a relatively harmless hopeless cause and towards a dangerous, profoundly undemocratic idea – which fortunately is unlikely to go anywhere (I should emphasise at this point that these are my personal views only).

If you don’t know, Whittam Smith’s big idea is as follows: he’s trying to find 650 people to stand in every constituency in the 2015 general election, sweeping the board and helping to establish a reforming parliament that will take all the difficult and radical decisions that the politicians from established parties consistently fail to. The candidates, who will preferably be selected by primaries, will served for a single term and all have experience of “running things” – be it the head of a school, a trade unionist or a someone with a business background. And finally,this will all be paid for by supporters donating a maximum of £50 each.

As a former party agent and campaign organiser, it is easy to scoff at the practicalities of all this. Even leaving aside the election campaign itself, there is the question of how all these targets will be reached. Whittam Smith stated that he expected the £35,000 cost of running a primary in each constituency that the Conservatives have had to spend would be lowered if you had economies of scale – ignoring the fact that largest single cost will be on postage which will have a fairly flat marginal cost. If you think this all sounds hopelessly impossible and impractical however, Whittam Smith has a simple answer: he agrees with you but feels he has to try anyway.

That isn’t a remotely satisfactory answer. I don’t find it especially noble or inspiring to see people embarking on a project without any credible strategy or targets whatsoever. It is, after all, other people’s money – and blood, sweat and tears – which he is planning to use up on this project. He isn’t so much a Scott of the Antarctic as a Lord Kitchener: sitting safely behind enemy lines while sacrificing others on deeply flawed plans. I can guarantee that his followers will remain quite as enamoured as they clearly are if they end up with nothing to show for at the end of this little adventure.

Thus far, this is nothing I didn’t conclude from the first week of Democracy 2015′s launch. I was struck however during Whittam Smith’s speech on Saturday by how his analysis was not only wrong but positively scary.

His main broadside against the political establishment is that it is fundamentally incompetent. No argument there, we see evidence of this pouring out of Whitehall and Westminster on a daily basis. But his analysis is that at the root of all this is the fact that politicians are simply poor at managing things: replace them with people with managerial experience, so the argument goes, and everything will be solved.

I’ve been a “manager” for the last 5 years but it is only in the last 12 months that I’ve had to fully manage staff on a daily basis. What I’ve learnt as both a manager and an employee is that “management” and “competence” can often be wildly divergent. Often the most talented person in an organisation can be someone who lacks the temperament or inclination to be a manager. Often the people who rise the most rapidly are people who’s ambition is far greater than their actual ability, but manage to float to the top because other people lower down the food chain manage to keep things on the rails and because few organisations would risk giving an incompetent employee was a bad reference and face either being stuck with them or an industrial tribunal. And then there is the Peter Principle, the dictum that “employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence.” Great members of staff can make terrible managers, and vice versa. So when Whittam Smith dismissed the idea of cleaners and lower down the work chain as making suitable MPs, he wasn’t just being snooty but actually quite naive.

Perhaps a good test of how good a manager an MP would be would be to force them to manage and motivate a team of volunteers, raise their own money, build relationships with constituent groups and the press and generally run a difficult and stressful election campaign? Of course that happens to be what most winning candidates in marginal constituencies do indeed have to do. Not all of them do (sometimes you can get away with recruiting the right campaign manager at an early enough stage and leaving them to it – the lucky ones have the right campaign manager allocated to them by the party), and not all of them go on to become good managers, but it’s as good a test as any and certainly suggests that the key to having good people with managerial experience in parliament is to have more competitive elections.

But is management the answer to everything? Here I just think that Whittam Smith doesn’t just misunderstand the problem but is actually seeking to reinforce the status quo which has got us into this mess in the first place. As well as believing that having more managers in parliament would improve things, his concern is that ministers spend too much time interfering with the peope who are meant to manage the implementation of policy – the civil service. As an aside, I think he has a rather uncritical attitude about the civil service (the civil service is often known as the fourth political party in party circles with good reason, as anyone who has tried dealing with them will know), but the simple question you have to answer yourself is this: if the problem is too much ministerial interference and micromanagement, how will promoting more of a management culture in parliament and government help? I can’t think of anything that would make it worse. Imagine the former head of a school blundering in as the new secretary of state for education attempt to run the department like a school?

I have a rather different analysis. In my view, while I agree that the problem is that politicians have become obsessed with micromanagement and find themselves out of their depth, the cause is that politics has converged. Because there are no longer any big ideas being fought over in parliament it is only natural that politicians will turn their attention to things like competence and organisation. If parliament was fighting a daily battle over what kind of immigration policy we should have, it would be rather more content to leave civil servants with the job of implementing government policy – and ministers would too.

If I’m right, then Whittam Smith’s proposal would only make things worse. Having hundreds of MPs elected specifically on the basis of their management skills and a mandate to crack down on incompetence will only lead to more micromanagement, not less. The civil service, will not thank us for it even if former members of their ranks like Gus O’Donnell and Siobhan Benita seem to have similar shortsighted views.

What’s more, it’s the same agenda that Tony Blair inherited from Bill Clinton and bequeathed Cameron, Clegg and Miliband: ideology is dead; what matters is what works and seizing power. Whittam Smith was extremely dismissive of the people who criticised him from the left and seemed proud of his position in the centre ground. It seemed pretty evident that if he has his way, Democracy 2015 will fight on a platform firmly in the middle of the major two parties, but with a populist, anti politics edge. That’s the platform Nick Clegg adopted in 2010 and it didn’t work out too well for him.

Where he differs from the Blair copybook is his insistence that his successful candidates should only serve a single term. Whittam Smith sees this as a way of avoiding corruption, but the main purpose of re-election is accountability. What accountability will we have over MPs who plan to vanish after five years? At one stage in his speech, Whittam Smith said that he was sure that his one term MPs would have no problems seeking future employment. I agree, but most likely in the same jobs all too many MPs find themselves doing: consultancy, lobbying and public affairs. How many will spend the last few months in office behaving like taxi cabs Stephen Byers and Patricia Hewitt? And how many will find themselves in the same position as Louise Mensch, bored of the role and walking after just a couple of years?

None of this remotely resembles anything which you can call democracy. When unaccountable “experts” take over a country we call them technocrats. It’s the last throw of the die for a failed state. Is the UK a failed state? It is certainly failing but I don’t see us having exhausted all other policies first.

What we need in the UK is almost the exact opposite of what Andreas Whittam Smith is proposing: greater accountability of parliament and a return of the battle of ideas. Neither are easy to achieve within a system which is as jury rigged to favour the status quo as ours, but even if it has as much a chance of success as the Whittam Smith plan, it is certainly a more worthy prize (which isn’t to say we should be as excited by adventurism and simply stumbling along in the way that he intends to proceed). By contrast, no good can come from a project which ultimately has nothing more to offer than the technocracy of modern politics without even the veneer of idealism.

David Foster Wallace’s writing on language and mathematics comes with many mistakes of fact. But the following statement has gone, to my knowledge, unremarked:

Early Blues history reports Chess Records’ legendary Chess brothers shlepping out into Mississippi cotton fields to recruit promising artists on their lunch breaks.

Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1990).

Sheer nonsense. Leonard and Phil Chess were Chicago-based. The post-war musicians they recorded are not a matter of “early Blues history,” whatever that may be. And no writer on blues ever described the brothers Chess recruiting musicians in Mississippi.

My best guess to explain this howler: In 1941 and 1942 Alan Lomax recorded Muddy Waters in Mississippi for the Library of Congress. The recordings were released on the Chess label in 1966 as the album Down on Stovall’s Plantation. And years later, a writer with a cursory knowledge of his subject attributed the recordings to the brothers Chess.

[Why assign an error in a co-authored book to Wallace? The sentence I’ve quoted is from one of the “D.” sections of the book.]
You’re reading a post from Michael Leddy’s blog Orange Crate Art. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

It wasn’t like Jackie didn’t have enough to do. She wasn’t filling up her extra hours because she felt lonely or nothing. It was just good, Mandy from the Poundshop said, to give a little something back to society, and that.
But now Jackie was thinking Meals on Wheels maybe wasn’t for her.

‘Mr Ross? Are you in there?’

She was spending longer each day shouting through his letterbox at him. Old git.

The tray was steaming hot in her hand. The one that wasn’t braced against the front door of his flat as she knelt there on the cold concrete.

‘And you can clear out of it, too,’ she muttered at Mrs Higgins, who came by with her tartan shopping bag. Wondering why Jackie was shouting at Mr Ross again. Maybe it was a mistake volunteering herself for her own block?

‘Mr Ross. Please open up. It’s mince and dumplings today. And jam sponge. You’ll like it.’

The pensioners ate better than she did, actually. Some of them complained about the quality of the stuff they got doled out. Jackie wouldn’t have complained. I live off chicken nuggets and Sainsbury’s Chardonnay. I’d be glad of a bleedin’ home cooked meal, even if it did arrive in foil.

‘Mr Ross!’ she banged harder.

Course, with Rose gone again it wasn’t like it was worth cooking a proper meal in the evening. This was the longest stint her daughter had been away for.

Mr R…!’

The old boy opened the door sharpish, catching her out so she stumbled again. He liked making her do that.

He was there in his front hall. Glaring up at her from his wheelchair.

‘Decided to let me in, eh?’ she smiled at his cross old face. He really was the worst old sod she delivered to. Some of them were so sweet, the old folk. So pleased and grateful to see you. Others were just evil. Like this old git.

Jackie had been on the Meals on Wheels for a week and it seemed like a lifetime.

‘How are you doing today, Mr Ross?’ she asked breezily, taking his tray into the kitchen to dish up for him. He slammed the front door with his one good arm and followed her.

‘I’ve been plotting the ultimate destruction of this world and my revenge upon all of mankind,’ he said, furiously.

‘Oh, yes?’ Jackie smiled, and went through the cupboards looking for a clean glass. ‘Look, shall I do these dishes? They’ve been standing here for days.’

‘You will all beg for my mercy in the end,’ he shouted. ‘When my invasion force arrives in Earth’s solar system at last. You will all see then what I have planned for this miserable planet.’

‘It’s mince and dumplings. You’ll like that.’

‘I will reserve the worst suffering for you, Jackie Tyler,’ he cursed in his gravelly voice. That’s where a lifetime’s smoking gets you, Jackie thought, shaking her head.

‘Shall we get you settled at the table? I’ve ever so envious of your open plan living / dining area. Was it like this when you moved in?’

He followed her miserably, wheeling down the hall. ‘You will die horribly in uttermost agony! Rueing the very day you first heard my name! I can promise you that, Jackie Tyler!’

She popped the tray down, with a knife and fork, a glass of tap water and a paper napkin. A Christmas one, but she was sure he wouldn’t mind. ‘There you are, love.’

‘Oh,’ he said, wheeling forward. ‘Dumplings.’

I first heard of the allegations against Cyril Smith when I read them in Private Eye in 1979. The Eye had picked them up from the Rochdale Alternative Press (RAP - those were the days when any self-respecting town had an 'alternative' newspaper). Northern Voices reprinted the original RAP story in 2010.

My instinct has always been to assume that they were true, if only because I could not see why anyone would trouble to invent anything so tawdry - he "'told me to take my trousers down and hit me four or five times on my bare buttocks" - about someone who was then only a local politician.

Today Paul Waugh, who grew up in Rochdale himself, revived this story with further allegations, as did Simon Danczuk, the current MP for the town, in the Commons. In the current climate it was inevitable that someone would do so.

And when the alleagations did become public, the old Liberal Party's reaction was not exactly to deny them.

A quotation from 1979 - "It's not a very friendly gesture, publishing that. All he seems to have done is spank a few bare bottoms" - was attributed by Private Eye (at least in a piece following Smith's death in 2010) to David Steel. But it originates from the original RAP story, where it is attributed (one suspects more accurately) to Steel's press office.

Perhaps the Liberals and Cyril Smith are a bit like the BBC and Jimmy Savile. We had all heard the rumours, were not sure if they were true or what to do about them if they were. It was easier to believe the legend of Big Cyril and do nothing.

When Cyril Smith died I did my best to write an even-handed assessment of him. But these stories - if they are true, of course - do reinforce my view that local politicians who present themselves as Mr Rochdale (or anywhere else) and bigger than their party tend to be bullies and braggarts and are not to be trusted.

I also raise my eyebrows at David Steel's statement on Any Questions? last Friday: "I have never come across it [child sexual abuse] in all my years as an MP."

Once again, the religious right is threatening “civil disobedience” in opposition to same-sex marriage.

And so once again we see that the religious right does not know what “civil disobedience” means.

The Family Research Council is the latest group to mouth this threat:

The senior vice president of the Family Research Council said on Wednesday that civil disobedience may be necessary to prevent same sex marriages after voters in several states approved marriage equality.

John Lewis (left) and Jim Zwerg in 1961 in Montgomery, Ala.

In a special broadcast titled “Election 2012: Aftermath & Aftershocks,” FRC president Tony Perkins told Senior Vice President Tom McClusky that LGBT marriage rights were still “morally wrong” even though pro marriage equality measures passed in Maine, Maryland and Washington. Voters in Minnesota also defeated a proposed amendment to codify marriage discrimination in the state’s constitution.

“The people can vote on it — it’s the first time we’ve seen that [pass] — courts can rule on it, but I don’t think you can violate natural law and force Americans to recognize it as morally right,” Perkins explained.

“I think the term for a lot of things over the next four years, civil disobedience is going to come into play,” McClusky agreed.

This has been a standard refrain from the religious right for years, and it gained momentum after it was popularized in Chuck Colson’s “Manhattan Declaration” in 2009. Most of those repeating this call for “civil disobedience” seem to mean little more than what Colson meant — that it is pleasant to indulge in imagining oneself as heroic, good and courageous, and as the moral heir somehow of Gandhi and King. (See recently, for example, Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, or the group ActsFive29.)

But beyond such fantasy role-playing, what could the Family Research Council’s McClusky possibly mean when he says “civil disobedience is going to come into play” to protest same-sex marriage?

I can’t imagine. I would guess that what FRC is thinking of, if they’re thinking of anything at all, is organizing protests that end with some demonstrators getting arrested for trespassing. That used to be an effective tool for grabbing media attention, and it does display a level of commitment on behalf of those willingly facing arrest, but as we’ve discussed before (Civil Disobedience in Hazzard County), that’s not civil disobedience. Getting arrested for trespassing is only civil disobedience if you’re protesting laws against trespassing.

Civil disobedience can be a powerful tool of nonviolent change, but it is really only appropriate or effective in response to an unjust legal prohibition. It does not apply easily or work well as a protest against what one regards as an unjust lack of legal prohibition.

Let’s consider an unlikely hypothetical situation. The governor’s ex-wife collected stamps, so the governor railroads through legislation banning stamp-collecting and imposing mandatory life sentences for all convicted philatelists. That would be an unjust prohibition, and thus civil disobedience would be an appropriate and powerful tool against it. The strategy is obvious — everyone collects stamps until the courts are swamped and the jails are filled or until the outcry forces the unjust law to be repealed.

But consider the opposite situation: The law permits stamp-collecting, but you feel it ought to be prohibited — you believe that the lack of a prohibition is itself unjust. You’re not without options in that situation — there are paths you can take and strategies you can pursue to try to get such a prohibition written into law. But civil disobedience will not help you. This particular context will not allow for the use of that particular tool.

The latter situation is analogous to where the Family Research Council finds itself. In an increasing number of states, the law permits something — same-sex marriage — that FRC believes ought to be prohibited. And that means civil disobedience cannot “come into play.” Marriage equality does not impose any unjust prohibitions that FRC or its members could violate as civil disobedience. Their complaint is that the law is too permissive, and a law that extends permission is difficult to violate in protest. Civil disobedience just isn’t an option in such cases.

It’s also possible that by “civil disobedience,” McClusky was referring to specific action taken by those few individuals who are in a position to violate laws permitting same-sex marriage. Perhaps McClusky meant disobedience to those laws on the part of county clerks and justices of the peace. Maybe what he means is that such officials should disobey the law by refusing to fulfill their duties when it comes to same-sex couples.

But that would not be civil disobedience either. Those clerks and justices would not be acting as individual citizens, but in an official capacity as public servants — as civil authority. When civil authority chooses to disregard the rule of law, that’s not “civil disobedience” or “conscience,” it’s just petty tyranny.

And petty tyranny tends to have the opposite effect of civil disobedience when it comes to galvanizing public opinion.

So when I hear the Family Research Council call for civil disobedience to protest marriage equality, I give up. I have no idea what they mean by that. And I’m fairly certain they have no idea what they mean by that either.