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January 16th, 2014: Thanks to The Dragon for putting me up yesterday, and to all the readers who came out - it was a great way to spend an afternoon! Speaking of great ways to spend... the rest of your life??... here is a cool mug that if you treat it carefully will last the rest of your life: there's one way to find out One year ago today: what - what about the friendly ghosts i've read and been forced to watch shows about when nothing else was on? – Ryan

Regular readers will be aware I’m no fan of either Russell Brand (misogynist turdbagel) or No More Page 3 (too liberal to function). So, when I saw this tweet, I felt like I needed gloves to handle the sheer quantities of ewwww that it generated.

 

It’s hard to work out where to begin with this, so maybe I’ll counterintuitively start at the end with the reaction. It’s been rather gross to see feminists falling over themselves to praise Russell Brand for taking a free t-shirt and tweeting a picture of himself with it. That’s hardly a conversion, or a redemption narrative. That’s taking a t-shirt and not even bothering to wear it. 

I somehow doubt that Russell Brand has slain his internal sexism. It would take rather a lot of work to get over such unpleasant behaviour as bragging to a woman’s grandfather about her sexual behaviour, or prank calling a rape hotline. Frankly, I don’t think an expression of support for one small thing in any way makes up for what he did, and in order to move forward, first he must show understanding of his past sexism and hold himself to account for this.

Of course, that’s a moot point, when the very tweet in which he ostensibly renounces sexism is dripping with benevolent sexism. It was not winning the argument that brought Russell Brand round. It was a sexy lady with her magic lovely lady powers. It is only in thinking about where he could put his dick that Russell Brand was persuaded to take a photo of himself holding a t-shirt. He admitted this himself. And something murky lurks beneath this “good woman” narrative–none of the other women were good enough. No other women in Russell Brand’s life are apparently worthy to convince him that women are actually human. No wonder he treated Katy Perry so appallingly–she wasn’t good enough. It has handed the fedora brigade an excuse for sexism: if women won’t have sex with them, how can they learn not to be sexist dickwaggles?

It is only the good that can change the hearts and minds of sexists through having sex with them, says Russell Brand, to rapturous applause from liberal feminists.

And who was this good woman who managed to change Russell Brand’s mind? None other than Jemima Khan, who posted bail for Julian Assange. Forgive me for becoming even more pessimistic.

Russell Brand deserves no praise or gratitude for his participation in a blatant publicity stunt to get the heat off him a bit. He knows by now that women think he is a sexist bellend and has made a rather pisspoor effort at trying to deflect this criticism. Whether you support No More Page 3 or not, there is no reason to fawn over Russell Brand for this tweet. Let time be the judge of whether he has changed or not.

Labour Uncut reports a "reprioritisation" of the party's list of 106 key seats:

Underpinning this reappraisal are two broader developments: first, the increasing effort Labour is having to devote to retaining marginal seats it already holds and second, the party’s flagging performance in the south. 

At the last election Labour won 17 seats where the majority was only in three figures. Although Labour’s vote in these seats will undoubtedly be bolstered by defections from the Lib Dems, there is a real danger that anti-Labour supporters of the coalition parties will switch their votes to maximise the chances for a Labour defeat – after all, both the Tories and the Lib Dems will be standing on the same economic record. 

In 2011, when Debbie Abrahams won the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election, it was notable that the Lib Dem vote held up, sustained largely by massive switching from the Tories. 

If this type of behaviour were replicated at the next election then Labour could face losing large numbers of seats, with shadow cabinet members like Gloria De Piero, who had a majority at the last election of 192, under threat.

Labour Uncut goes on to name Dover, Crawley and Battersea as examples of Southern seats where the party is struggling to make progress.

It quotes a party source as saying that Labour’s realistic target list is nearer 60 than 106, and concludes:

In effect, Labour is now targeting a coalition with the Lib Dems following the next election.

This would certainly explain Ed Balls' wooing of Nick Clegg, though perhaps not Ed Miliband's new-found wish to save the middle class.

The new Liberator is out - or so Liberator's blog tells us - so it is time to spend another week with Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer. Lord Bonkers' Diary appears in each issue of the magazine, as it has done since 1990.

Looking at the subject of today's diary entry, I am struck once again by his ability to identify the most important issue of the day.

Monday

A busy day in my new capacity as Pastoral Care Officer of the Liberal Democrats. Reading from my early volume Frank Chats for Young Canvassers, I say: “Now that you are growing up, I expect you find yourselves doing things like cutting out photographs of Megan Lloyd George from the News Chronicle.

Let me reassure you: there is nothing wrong with such feelings. However, it is important that we do not allow them to get in the way of our Liberal activism. So rise early, take a cold tub, exercise with Indian clubs and then, if you still find yourself troubled by impure thoughts, ask your branch secretary for an extra Focus round to deliver. I assure you that, after that, you will have no energy left for beastliness of any sort.”

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

Have I got this right? The Liberal Democrats asked Alistair Webster to decide whether there was a better than even chance that an inquiry would find beyond reasonable doubt that Chris Rennard had intended to harass women in the party.

So we didn't hold an inquiry: we asked a QC to guess what would happen if we did.

If it were not so damaging to the party's reputation, our adoption of this byzantine approach would be comic.

This is a difficult issue for me to write about, because I have known Chris Rennard for almost 30 years. When I first heard of the allegations against him my reaction was to hope they were not true. I make no comment on them now beyond what is contained in Alistair Webster's statement.

But I am struck by the difference between his treatment and that of someone I first met even before I met Chris.

When Jenny Tonge suggested that Israel would not last for ever in its present form, she was given an ultimatum by Nick Clegg: apologise or resign.

When she failed to apologise, Nick told the Guardian:

"I asked Baroness Tonge to withdraw her remarks and apologise for the offence she has caused. She has refused to do so and will now be leaving the party."

If Nick has the power to force someone out of the party like this, why is he not exercising it now?

The kindest explanation I can think of is that Nick is scared of Alex Carlile.

#747, 12th October 1996

This is a story about the twilight of innovation in British independent music. Oasis in Summer 1996 were impossibly big, big beyond almost all yardsticks of British rock bigness. They had the fanbase and the opportunity to take their audience anywhere the band cared to go – and the motive, too, with critics enthralled by their power but often sniffy about their range. With his hand on the tiller of British rock, with the chance to put anything he wanted at the top of the charts, Gallagher lent his star power to the Chemical Brothers, and made what amounts to a big beat remix of “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Stop the clocks, as Oasis later put it.

It’s a harsh story, and perhaps it sounds like a reasonable judgement on the existence of “Setting Sun”, or the motivation behind it. But a story is all it is. It leaves out how the record actually sounds and feels, and it leaves out the world “Setting Sun” exists in.

“Tomorrow Never Knows” is one of those Beatles tracks that’s become a touchstone for inventiveness and originality. Certainly everyone involved with “Setting Sun” revered it. Its invention, though, is there for a purpose. Like a lot of Lennon’s later 60s songs, “Tomorrow Never Knows” is a manual for change. Like “Imagine” specifically, it’s a series of instructions set to music that brings to life what those instructions promise – zen calm and respite in “Imagine”’s case, ego-death and psychic transformation in “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Placed at the end of Revolver, “Tomorrow Never Knows” sounds like a door opening, its phased and looped backing piping the listeners of Britain through into a new world, and not just for pop.

That door, once opened, can’t be re-opened – you can’t just make something psychedelic and say, this is our “Tomorrow Never Knows”. You can match the Beatles’ speed but not their acceleration. But I don’t think that’s what “Setting Sun” is doing. The question the Chemical Brothers are answering here isn’t “How do you make “Tomorrow Never Knows” in a world where “Tomorrow Never Knows” already exists?”. It’s “How do you make “Tomorrow Never Knows” in a world where “Tomorrow Never Knows” worked?”

That’s obviously an oversimplification, in that the world Lennon or the Beatles wished for isn’t at all the world we got. People didn’t become transcendent creatures of total awareness upon hearing Revolver – and I doubt a cantankerous sod like John Lennon would have enjoyed it much if they had. What people did do was start to take drugs in culture-warping quantities. They did this not because of “Tomorrow Never Knows” or any other song – it was the trend the song was surfing, and the Beatles had the talent, imagination and knack for theatre to package it better than almost anybody else. But from the mid-60s onwards, drug-taking became a part of mainstream youth culture, and it’s stayed that way ever since.

There’s your difference. “Tomorrow Never Knows” is built for a world in which very few young people take drugs. “Setting Sun”, its descendent, parallel or perhaps its tulpa, presumes a world in which almost all of them do, with all its unintended consequences.

What makes sense in that world? The Chemical Brothers locate their answer at the moment hedonism shades into chaos. “Setting Sun” might not be the noisiest Number One, but it’s one of the most aggressive and turbulent – great chthonic shudders of bass, a drum loop that seems to be trying to punch a hole in the track, snatches of drone on endless spin cycle, the whole song strafed by feedback squeals then swamped in machine-goblin chatter as soon as the singer tries to communicate. Any attempt by the song to be a song is undercut – the breakdown sounds like an equipment failure and reboot, and Gallagher’s vocals are treated and flattened into irrelevance. (Apparently he performs “Setting Sun” as an actual song live, which is hard to imagine – the lyrics are flotsam and the track’s main weak point is his attempt to corral the noise into a tune.)

We wouldn’t be talking about this song without Noel Gallagher, and he adds resonance to its Beatley overtones, but as a track this isn’t his show. The Chemical Brothers had just supported Oasis at Knebworth, and like that band they were tied up with Britpop but also not completely of it. They were remixers by appointment to the new pop stars, and their sweat-drenched club residencies provided Britpop’s hedonistic soap operatics with an apt backbeat. But by now Britpop is falling apart in a bloody-nosed mess – “Setting Sun” the perfect soundtrack, really – and the Chemical Brothers’ main context is coming to the fore: big beat.

The clue to big beat’s failings is in the name – when you bring a loop that far forward in the mix and get it to dominate proceedings, it tends to sound static, even leaden, over the course of a whole song. It’s just variable enough to not reach hypnotic, just repetitive enough to need a lot of other stuff happening. So a lot of big beat sounded – and was – crunchingly unsubtle next to techno or drum and bass, and far more beery than psychedelic.

“Setting Sun” wanders dangerously close to this trap – and other big beat Number Ones will march gleefully into it – but chaos wins out. The mood of the track is more speedfreak psychosis than a bad trip, but the video makes it clear that something nasty is happening, imagining raving as a kind of demonic possession or manifestation of a second self.

You can see “Setting Sun” as a turning point for its makers, a farewell of sorts. The Chemical Brothers are about to become the kind of dance act that gets five No.1 LPs on the trot – they will rarely sound this unfettered or vicious again. And “Setting Sun” – though Noel Gallagher is the only member involved – is the last we’ll see of the early, snarling Oasis. But the record reaches far further back than the early 90s. It’s the second No.1 this year to reference 1966 – and where the Lightning Seeds promised it could be like that again, “Setting Sun” shuts that possibility down. To live in the world 1966 made is not to try and get back there: this thrilling cacophony is the sound of a time machine crashing.

Hetty Green was one of the first women to make a killing in stocks.  The heir to a considerable whaling fortune, the dour and grim New England Quaker increased her net worth more than tenfold with canny investments in everything from real estate to railroads to war bonds, and when she died in 1916, she was the richest woman the world had ever seen.  She was also notoriously stingy; her own son had to have his leg amputated because when it was broken, she frittered away precious time trying to have him treated for free at a local charity hospital, even though she was worth hundreds of millions in today’s dollars.  For a number of reasons — her creepy demeanor, her uncanny ability to predict the markets, and good old-fashioned misogyny — she was nicknamed “The Witch of Wall Street”.

When I first heard about The Wolf of Wall Street, the latest offering from Martin Scorsese, I briefly thought it might be about Hetty Green; now that I’ve seen it, I wish it had been.  Of course, it’s a cardinal sin for a critic to talk about the movie he wishes he’d seen instead of the movie he actually saw, but Scorsese sorely provokes the temptation these days.  I used to think of him as the greatest living American filmmaker, a title that I think he’s long ceded to the Coens; what mostly stands about about him today is that it’s more interesting to discuss the critical reaction to his movies than it is the movies themselves.  This is a bad scene for everyone involved.  Once any artist in any medium becomes more of a creature of the media than an inhabitant of their own art, it’s a huge caution lamp being lit, and though it’s often accurate to blame the critics for the state of affairs, that’s not the problem with Martin Scorsese anymore.

The reason why is that his films have begun to resemble performance art rather than acts of filmmaking, leaving us to contemplate what should be irrelevancies rather than what’s present on the screen.  Watching the story of boiler-room swindler Jordan Belfort (portrayed by a powerful but never especially engaging Leonardo DiCaprio, who never seems to be his own age), we care much less about his life and times than we do about what might have motivated Scorsese to tell his story.  That’s not something we could say about Jake LaMotta or Henry Hill, characters whose inner life and outer conflicts were always so present as to seem to be burning up the screen, but Scorsese doesn’t really seem like he’s been all that interested in a narrative film since Gangs of New York.  (His documentaries are a different matter, for a different review, but it’s telling that he’s more engaged with the real world as he’s drifted away from caring about story.)  This detachment seems to be contagious, as no one on screen — with the exception of Jonah Hill, whose dramatic chops seem to be growing with every role he takes — is particularly engaged with the movie either.

This isn’t to say that Wolf is a bad movie.  Scorsese has enough craft and dedication that the likelihood of him ever making a genuinely bad movie is close to zero.  It’s a gorgeously assembled movie, full of incredibly cinematography, clockwork editing, powerful rhythms, and scenes that move so muscularly and confidently that you can’t help but be drawn in.  It never seems bloated, even though it’s easily too long by half.  There are probably half a dozen moments you could pull out of it and stick into a highlight reel to back up my long-ago assumption that Scorsese is as good as American directors get.  It’s just that — well, we’ve seen it all before.  I don’t think the idea that this is Scorsese remaking GoodFellas for a new generation is particularly credible (he didn’t need to; stock frauds of the sort that Belfort engaged in were heavily mobbed up), but he’s certainly not showing us anything new; he’s pulling out bits from his greatest hits and ramping them up with new technology just to prove he can do it, to show the kids who have spent 20 years stealing his act that he still does it better than anyone.  It’s performance art.  Which is all well and good — the instinct to bristle up and swing for the fences must be powerful at that age — but there isn’t a moment in the whole movie where I thought Scorsese cared a tenth of a shit as much about Jordan Belfort as he does about Mick Jagger.

That lack of commitment to the material carries over into what has, curiously, become the movie’s biggest talking point.  The charge that Scorsese doesn’t do enough on screen to condemn the moral failings of his subject is pretty silly, and the accusation that he glamorizes Belfort’s misdeeds would carry a lot more weight if you hadn’t seen pretty much every other movie the man has made with the possible exception of Kundun.  Scorsese is well aware of what he’s doing and the kind of waters he’s swimming in, and generally, he trusts the audience to know what lessons should ultimately be drawn from his stories, whether it’s GoodFellas, The King of Comedy, or Taxi Driver.  But if anyone leaves the theater, especially now when the country may have suffered a fatal economic blow from short-takers of Belfort’s stripe, thinking Scorsese hasn’t come through with a powerful enough referendum of his character, it’s not because he doesn’t understand or appreciate what Belfort has done; I think he just doesn’t care enough to let it show.  Scorsese was obviously deeply engaged in both the highs of Henry Hill’s gangster life and the lows of his eventual downward spiral; I never once got the impression that he (or Leonardo DiCaprio) were particularly interested in the moral arc of Jordan Befort’s career.

At this point in Scorsese’s career, he’s literally got nothing left to prove, which is both a blessing and a curse.  He could have stopped making movies 20 years ago and still be considered one of the greatest talents ever to lens a film.  It’s meaningless to ask, even in light of a flawless failure like The Wolf of Wall Street, to ask how many great movies the man has left in him; he’s got nothing but great movies left in him, as many as his health will let him make.  It’s just that we’ve seen a lot of them before.  For him to return to making not just great movies, but great movies that matter, we’ll have to find a definitive answer to the question:  are there subjects for narrative film that engage his mind the way he wants them to engage ours?  For all its considerable strength, Wolf answers that question with a resounding “not yet”.

Mirrored from LEONARD PIERCE DOT COM.

Jim Hines has some interesting things to say about chasing the market: at writers workshops he (and I) are often asked, by folks in search of success, "What's popular right now? What's the next Big New Thing? What are agents and editors looking for?"

I'd like to remind any aspiring writers reading this right now that the only reason for paying any attention to the current runaway success is that you should avoid writing anything like it. Here's why:

The production pipeline at a major publisher runs on a 12 month production cycle (with quarterly or thrice-annual batches of new material being pushed out to the marketing/sales force), but finding a slot for a new author can take longer—my first sale to Ace was followed by book slots at 12 month intervals but it took nearly two years after acquisition (2001) before it came out (2003).

Furthermore, turnaround time for those editors who read slush, that is, unsolicited submissions, is abysmally slow: even if you're agented, if you're a new author you probably had to go through your agent's slushpile. So, call it 12-24 months from first submission of your finished manuscript to getting a contract—if you're successful in selling that first book. (Most authors aren't.)

Then there's writing time. If you have a day job to hold down, you can't write as fast as if you're writing for a living. I used to take 3 years per novel when I had a day job. (I now aim for an average of 2 novels/year.)

Upshot: it takes about 5-6 years to write a book, run the gauntlet of agent and editorial processes, and then get it into a publisher's production pipeline. If you self-publish, you can shave 2-4 years off this odyssey. You also shave off a lot of essential quality control in the process, and lose access to marketing resources. Unless you write like a maniac and don't bother editing, you're still going to be behind the curve.

Furthermore, a publishing trend takes some years to become established—Harry Potter, Hunger Games, et al were not overnight successes: they took 2-3 years each to build, and the derivative follow-ups (from writers with existing contracts and slots to fill) took another 2-3 years to begin filtering out of the pipeline after seeing the success of the type specimen. Someone trying to break in for the first time is therefore going to be not 12 months behind the bleeding edge, but more like 5-10 years.

Even if you've got a book slot to fill and the flexibility to chase the latest trending hot topic, it's a fraught affair. I'm working like crazy to do an SF thriller trilogy that riffs off the NSA/Snowden revelations: I was in the right place at the right time with a noir near-future thriller under contract, and it wasn't a great leap to update my plans. Nevertheless, it'll only show up on bookshelves in mid-2015. Hopefully ubiquitous surveillance and paranoia about the global security regime will still be a hot topic two years after the Edward Snowden story broke: otherwise, I'm stuffed.

Upshot: novel-length fiction is not an appropriate vehicle for commenting on current affairs, and trying to chase annual trends in novel-length fiction is just plain silly.

So what should you write?

Firstly, don't chase the current market trends: by the time you get there you'll be behind the curve. Instead, try and go where there's demand but no supply. (For example: I noticed around 2005 that there was an eerie shortage of near-future SF—as if millennial anxiety intimidated everyone into tip-toeing away from that area. Hence "Halting State" and "Rule 34".)

Secondly, be flexible: have a number of different ideas ready to write. Ideas are easy, execution is the hard bit. If you're set on writing zombie romance and there's a lot of it on the shelves, you'll probably have trouble selling a new novel in that micro-genre because it was the hot new thing 2-3 years ago. But if zombie romance is just one of your strings, you can focus on something else.

The laser-sharp focal point of my writing is crime. And humour. And espionage. And Lovecraftian horror. And space opera. And time travel. And politics. And urban fantasy. With side-orders of LGBTQ interest and traditional romance and hard SF on top. This has worked for me because if something comes into fashion and then goes out again I've still got something else that can sell. (The New Space Opera was hot in the late 1990s. I sold "Singularity Sky" in 2001. If I'd stuck with that series, and written nothing but, my career would probably be in big trouble by now because the New Space Opera is old enough to vote and is no longer terribly sexy.)

Third and final piece of advice: never commit to writing something at novel length that you aren't at least halfway in love with. Because if you're phoning it in, your readers will spot it and throw rotten tomatoes at you. And because there's no doom for a creative artist that's as dismal as being chained to a treadmill and forced to play a tune they secretly hate for the rest of their working lives.

Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky! It's Lieutenant Mary Sue!

Oh boy, here we go. Yes, my friends, the time has finally come.

“A Trekkie's Tale” needs no introduction. A notoriously vicious bit of satire attacking a particular trend within Star Trek fanfiction, the story is infamous for introducing the world to the hated Mary Sue. It took no more than five brief paragraphs to completely tear Star Trek fandom asunder and, as a result, “A Trekkie's Tale” has transcended fan circles to become ubiquitous in the larger pop consciousness such that it's had a truly transformative, profound, and arguably profoundly negative, effect on the way we look at genre fiction even to this day. A case could be (and has been) made that the introduction of the Mary Sue archetype is one of the largest and most sweeping acts of reactionary silencing tactics in the history of genre fandom.

And yet “A Trekkie's Tale” itself is misread and misunderstood by pretty much everyone.

First, some background for those perhaps less familiar with what this is than others. “A Trekkie's Tale” is a piece of satirical fanfiction published in 1973 and featuring a character named Lieutenant Mary Sue who is the youngest, most beautiful and most talented officer in the entirety of Starfleet. On her first day on the Enterprise, Lieutenant Mary Sue outperforms everyone else on the ship, causes Kirk to instantly fall in love with her at first sight, outwits Spock with logic (that is never fully explained) and singlehandedly saves the ship, the crew and the Federation at least twice before tragically dying randomly at the end of the story to be mourned by everyone and essentially turned into a modern-day saint. Lieutenant Mary Sue, and “A Trekkie's Tale” more generally, is fairly transparently an attack on a certain kind of Star Trek fanfiction, and is most often read as a parody of (usually female) writers who create author avatar characters as wish fulfillment, thus sidelining the original cast and narrative in the process. In the years since the initial publication of “A Trekkie's Tale”, the term “Mary Sue” has become a stock character archetype and nowadays gets tossed around rather carelessly, most typically as a knee-jerk reaction from insecure male fans to the concept of “strong female character I don't like and who makes me uncomfortable with my masculinity.”

What's the most interesting thing about the Mary Sue archetype to me, however, is how uniquely Star Trek a concept it really is. Star Trek fandom has, in my opinion, a very peculiar fascination with an *extremely* specific sort of fantasy: It's an almost omnipresent dream amongst Star Trek fans of all ages, generations and genders to be captain of their own starship, command their own crew and, essentially, to be the star of their own Star Trek spinoff. This goes totally contrary to the stereotypical conception of the obsessive fan, which would be someone fantasizing about the characters or the actors, either in a romantic or sexual way or just a desire to meet them in person. But that's not what Lieutenant Mary Sue does (indeed, the fact Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the others are largely incidental to her story is the whole point of it) and it's not what Star Trek fans seem to want either: Instead, they want their own personal slice of the Star Trek universe to themselves and they want it to revolve around them, or at least to explore it on their terms. It's the entire point of things like the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas or the video games Star Trek Starship Creator, Star Trek Bridge Commander and Star Trek Online.

So, despite how much the fans will talk up Star Trek's commitment to strong character development, it seems that when the cards are down they're ultimately going to default to projecting themselves onto the show. To me this is very interesting and unusual, if for no other reason than it doesn't match up with my own personal history of Star Trek fandom at all. This was never a fantasy that ever would have crossed my mind for a moment: What I always liked about Star Trek was its sense of wonder and exploration, the familial atmosphere the crew shared with each other and the characters themselves. I admired Jadzia Dax and Tasha Yar, saw them as role models and wanted to be like them, so a lot of my experience with Star Trek consists of looking up to people like that and trying to learn from them to better myself, and to, in a sense, take a little bit of them into me. From my perspective, that's as fundamentally, purely Star Trek as it gets, but it seems like my emotions aren't shared by fandom at large in this case.

But the other thing that defines my experience with Star Trek is wanting to write my own version of it, and for that there is a precedent. Here's where the other half of “A Trekkie's Tale” comes into play and, for my money, it's the more interesting half. So, if we're going to get anything remotely near an understanding of what these five little paragraphs actually are and how they fit into the history of Star Trek (as opposed to merely the way people have responded and interpreted them), we need to establish some simulacrum of context. By this point in the mid-1970s, Star Trek fandom was largely clustered around a series of fan-published and distributed zines. In the 1960s, the fan culture around the show, despite how loyal and vocal it had been, was still largely a disperse mainstream phenomenon. By the 1970s with the Original Series in syndication and hardly anyone watching the Animated Series (or at least hardly anyone seemingly willing to write and talk about it), Star Trek fandom was now very definitively a niche thing, with the first proper Star Trek convention (that is, separate from larger science fiction conventions) taking place in 1972.

As such, the 1970s Star Trek fandom comprised mainly two different factions: Middle-aged women who had been general science fiction fans in the 1950s and 1960s and remembered when Star Trek first started and the scene people like Bjo Trimble belonged to (and that Gene Roddenberry overtly tried to court), and younger college-aged women who were just getting exposed to the show through syndicated reruns. Both groups were very much interested in writing their own Star Trek stories, and there was such a surplus of them the zines had trouble keeping track of them all. So a situation arose where fans would be inspired by zines and cons to write, thus necessitating the need for more zines and cons so the cycle continued to self-perpetuate in perpetuity for awhile.

Back then, there was a stronger link between science fiction fans and science fiction writers than we might think would be the case today, perhaps a holdover from the days of the Golden Age conventions where readers and writers commingled and the dividing line between was quite blurry. It was not an unheard of scenario even as late as 1973 for science fiction authors to get their start writing for zines, and the fan culture sort of acted as an unofficial pipeline to more professional gigs. The problem was, of course, there was nowhere to go if you were writing about Star Trek, because the famous live-action show had been off the air for half a decade and, once again, nobody cared about the animated reboot. So you'd frequently get a lot of writers contributing a lot of really excellent, professional grade Star Trek stories as fanfic to zines because there was nothing else to do with them. Because of this, the fans introduced a kind of loose structure of their own, with zine editors oftentimes acting as a kind of surrogate script editor. One of the most prolific and influential of these semipro writers and editors was Paula Smith who, as it so happens, wrote the story we're talking about today.

Yes, shocking as it may seem, the person responsible for giving us the insecure femmephobic fan's favourite trump card is, in fact, a woman. It's at this point I'm probably expected to pull a Margaret Armen and take Smith to task for internalized misogyny issues, but I'm not going to because I actually don't think that's what's going on here. Like all works of satire (including Gulliver's Travels), “A Trekkie's Tale” has been badly, badly misinterpreted by generations of clueless readers who don't seem to get the joke. In fact, an even better point of comparison might be Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: Intended as a condemnation of wage slavery of migrant workers in the United States, which is helpfully and blatantly compared with the literal enslavement of Africans by that same country, history has largely proven itself to be the domain of white male middle class authoritarians by comprehensively missing the point and using it as a call-to-arms against lax heath code regulations in the meat packing industry. I feel something similar happened to Paula Smith.

The key to figuring out what I think Smith is actually saying here is to keep in mind her status as a kind of D.C. Fontana for fan culture. She was responsible for vetting hundreds upon hundreds of Star Trek fanfics and giving an innumerable amount of writers tips on how to hone their craft (actually, it was from interviews with her that I gleaned the majority of the historical information I use in this post). Indeed, one of the most classic, foundational maxims of fanfic, Langsam's Law, comes largely from her. It states that (in Smith's words)

“There is a special caveat for writing media-based fiction. Don't make an established character do or say something out of line with his established character, of if you must, give good, solid reasons why."

which is frankly just good writing advice in general as far as I'm concerned. This touches on the other side of the 1970s zine culture, which was that because Star Trek was off the air, and regardless as to whether or not they knew about the Animated Series, the fans sort of saw themselves as penning if not the official continuation of it, at least one semi-proper, semi-authorized version of it. So it would kind of make sense that these people would take good care to make sure their stories could plausibly have been Star Trek episodes themselves had the show not been canceled.

And this is the nut of “A Trekkie's Tale”, because what Smith is lampooning with Lieutenant Mary Sue is not women daring to write Star Trek fanfic, or introducing new female characters, or introducing female author avatar characters or even introducing new female characters who go on to be love interests for canon characters. What Smith is lampooning is bad writing in general. As many good editors often are, Smith was a prolific writer herself, penning countless fics (debatably literally so, since she used a different pseudonym practically every single time she wrote something, making her work a headache to track down today) for not just Star Trek, but also Starsky and Hutch, Harry and Johnny, The Professionals and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. She had written enough and been around the scene enough to know what worked and what didn't, and “A Trekkie's Tale” is her way of compiling and caricaturing the most egregious and problematic trends she noticed in an attempt to show new writers “Here: This is what not to do”.

And if we divert our attention momentarily from Mary Sue herself, who is indeed admittedly a veritable perfect storm of painful amateur writing mistakes exaggerated beyond infinity, it becomes obvious she's not the only thing we're supposed to pay attention to. The fic's dialog is stilted, repetitive and awkward, plot developments happen out of thin air, there's no sense of internal coherence or consistency, a general feeling the whole thing was banged out in a terrible rush and even the tense keeps jumping back and forth between past, present and future. Even the title “A Trekkie's Tale” itself is a dead giveaway, eschewing completely any and all pretenses that this is going to be anything remotely resembling a straightforward or recgonisable Star Trek story because, their obvious boundless energy and enthusiasm notwithstanding, this is something the writer has clearly put next to no effort into (not, it must be stressed, that this is entirely their fault, however: They're clearly too young and/or inexperienced to know any better). As the saying goes, it takes talent and skill to craft something this memorably awful.

So, while Smith did hold up the Mary Sue archetype as something to be avoided, unlike successive people who have appropriated the concept, she recognised it for what it was: One type of mistake among many that beginning writers have a tendency to make but that can be expunged through experience, guidance and support. But as noble as Smith's intentions with “A Trekkie's Tale” might have been, and I do think they were noble, the question remains: Has the story actually done what it was supposed to do and had a net positive effect on fandom such that it's help blossoming writers, fanfic or otherwise, to learn and develop their skills? Of that I'm not so sure, because the Mary Sue as it exists today is a terribly problematic concept loaded up with toxic connotations and, as is well known, a favourite silencing technique of the patriarchal hegemony. Decades of reactionary reappropriation have twisted and distorted the Mary Sue archetype into a misogynistic weapon.

It's an altogether too common story to hear female writers, even professional ones, confess that they consciously avoid having too many female characters in their cast or writing their women too strong or too independent out of a very serious and legitimate fear they'll be scorned and attacked for writing “Mary Sue stories” and will never be respected or recognised as proper writers (or even worse, have their careers completely destroyed outright) as a result. Anybody can write a character like Lieutenant Mary Sue, and such a character can be of any gender. But the “Mary Sue” archetype has become exclusively female and that's a problem. That does retroactively harm the original work and make me wonder whether the actual satire was ever all that clear to begin with. Because of that, I'm uncertain that Smith's original five paragraphs can now be taken apart from the tangible, material and very negative effect they had on female fans and writers, as riotously funny as those five paragraphs might be (and they are riotously funny: Phrases like "Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky”, “Tralfamadorian Order of Good Guyhood” and “beautiful youth and youthful beauty” crack me up every single time).

But regardless of the quality of the actual story, let's make sure we don't damn the author as well. Good writers have bad days. We all do. The most important thing about Paula Smith is that she always kept trying no matter what: She wrote an incalculable number of stories, oftentimes just on a dare or as an attempt to do an experiment or proof-of-concept for just herself. Like anyone, she missed her target just as much, if not more, than she hit it. That's only called being a writer, after all. Because she was involved in zines and conventions to the extent she was and ran so much (and kept so much running), I'd call her showrunner of her own underground version of Star Trek. Hell, given the staggering scope of her fanfic resume even beyond Trek, Smith should probably be seen as someone just as seasoned as the most experienced TV writers and producers of her day. So, even if she did strike out with “A Trekkie's Tale”, it's ultimately one minor bump on the very long and winding path of a career that spans literally decades and frankly puts most professional writers to shame.

Paula Smith never gave up, never stopped trying to challenge and better herself and never let anyone stop her from writing what she loved. And I think that's the lesson she'd like her readers to take with them most of all.

Paula Smith keeps the Enterprise running at warp speed.

Man poses as woman on online dating site; barely lasts two hours.

Another typical night in the pub of forgotten celebrities.
No-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that one day man would be able to watch the beasts of the New Victorian Creation Story in three-dimensional, full-colour kinematography and find it dull. Certainly, no-one of the 1970s generation – a time when it seemed perfectly natural for children to recreate the Cretaceous in any medium from fuzzy-felt to poo, and when it wasn't unknown for a family with a single (boy)child to spend their one-holiday-per-year on the Isle of Wight purely because it had a park full of 1:1-scale plaster triceratopses – would have predicted that in adulthood, they'd be capable of looking down a carnosaur's throat with a sense of ennui. Not because of middle-age, or because of a crippling bout of Adults' Disease, but because our culture has spent twenty years arranging for a tyrannosaurus to be the de rigueur way of advertising bottled water and Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes.

Easy to blame advertisers, just because they're evil and their filth pollutes everything good and decent in the world. But when the technology's capable of dropping something huge and predatory into the picture for less than it costs to hire David Tennant for the voice-over, advertising is just the inevitable end-point: cinema post-CGI has made all monsters seem casual, and dinosaurs have an (economic) advantage in that film-makers don't even have to design anything new. Two decades ago, you could rightly assume that if a movie featured prehistoric animals then prehistoric animals would at be the heart of the story, even if you had to suffer a gauntlet of exposition and child actors to get to them. Dinosaurs are now so easy to mass-produce that they've become supporting artists and/or pretexts for throwaway gags, like the big angry guy in a Laurel and Hardy movie whose job is to have a piano fall on his head and then chase the leads around with his sleeves rolled up. We consider 2009's Land of the Lost, in which scenes are constructed so as to ensure that the allosaurus is always playing second-fiddle to Will Ferrell's gurning. And having considered it, we trust we're never going to have to consider it again, ever, for any reason.

Incidentally, this is one of the dinosaurs from the Isle of Wight.
And this is the Wikipedia message that now accompanies it. Harsh.
The problem is one of context. Anyone who ever had a saurian crush as a child will, as a grown-up, have experienced the Naked Lunch moment when they realise that the creatures they've been secretly mooning over for most of their lives are just big lizards. Big dead lizards. The giant frilled reptiles of Australia, with their startling habit of getting up on their hind legs and running towards humans while waving their “arms” and hissing, are as close to dinosaurs as makes no difference. Crocodiles would, if capable of understanding cultural nuances, be seriously pissed off that we don't give them as much attention as the animals they managed to outlive. As with self-destructed rock stars, extinction bestows a kind of glamour that's hard to justify. The dinosaurs were so big they just burned out, man. And this never-confronted disappointment with our dead heroes is, we'd suggest, far more prevalent in the twenty-first century. Part of the reason is sheer dinosaur proliferation, but just as big a factor is that thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, the best monster-wranglers knew how to put their creations in a context that seemed to mean something.

You knew this would get round to Ray Harryhausen, and he's our paragon here. The Valley of Gwangi isn't his most-lauded work – it's not even his most-lauded work that actually involves dinosaurs – but its climax has a sense of the bestial that most digital-age set-pieces lack, even though modern TV screens make it harder to pretend there are frames-between-the-frames that smooth out the stop-motion, and even though there are occasional close-ups which make it clear that what you're watching is really just a highly-evolved form of plasticine. Like Jurassic Park, it's a film of unendingly tedious “human” scenes, occasionally interrupted by hot saurian action; like Jurassic Park, it ends with an extended tyrannosaur showdown. The conclusion sees the King Lizard, known as “Gwangi” by the superstitious and occasionally deformed Mexican peasants, meet its end in a burning cathedral. It's memorable not just because a cathedral is the best possible place for a tyrannosaurus to be, but because the rest of the film has been pushing home the idea that Gwangi is literally Satan. To the locals, the Great Beast is the absence of God, his valley a domain forsaken by time, goodness, and the Baby Jesus. In his final minutes, Gwangi attacks a gigantic church-organ as if it's a rival behemoth. The last time we see him, he's the heart of an inferno.

Not the last time a dinosaur would stand in for the Devil, either.

Number 18 in our series, “The Aggressive Catholicism Metaphors of Pat Mills”. Although this dinosaur is only angry because his name ends in “anus”.
In contrast, skip ahead by 36 years and experience the cruel and unusual punishment of Peter Jackson's King Kong. In Jackson's version, it's assumed that putting virtual theropods in front of the virtual camera is a noble enterprise in itself, and before long they become the victims of Kong's Mortal Kombat special moves (“tail-swing combo, Kong win!”). For the Great Beast to become a video-game opponent was inevitable on this occasion, given that this comes from the man who turned the Balrog into an end-of-level monster, but his assumption is almost universal in both modern cinema and modern TV. It's a dinosaur, isn't that enough...? It isn't, as Harryhausen knew, and it means there's nothing to support your childhood fantasies when your sense of “just a big lizard” kicks in. If Harryhausen's dinosaurs are David Bowie dressed as Ziggy Stardust, Jackson's are David Bowie in a suit at the Brit Awards. If it's reptiles you want, you'd honestly have more fun visiting the zoo and going “Jesus, are they real?” at the skinks.

Yet for all its 187 faults – we haven't counted them, but let's assume an average of one per minute – the digital King Kong had one thing to its credit, at least at the planning stage. The majority of dinosaur productions use known, familiar species: when “aberrant” dinosaurs appear, it's usually because the film-makers had a general contempt for research, or because the monster suit had to be modified to fit the actor, or because known dinosaurs just don't have enough horns. (Or all three. We're looking at you here, At the Earth's Core.) Pre-CGI, the most notable deliberate “aberrant” was Harryhausen's rhedosaurus in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, devised simply because no known carnivore was big enough to hump lighthouses and tread on New York taxis.

But for twenty-first-century Kong, a conscious decision was made that the dinosaurs should be descended from known species, acknowledging that life on Skull Island has been continually evolving in the 65 million years since Cousin Sue in Dakota died of comet-shock. None of the characters in the film bothers to comment on this, even though it's the one piece of scientific exposition which might actually have been interesting. Few other productions have gone out of their way to suggest that prehistoric throwbacks might not look exactly like fleshed-up museum specimens, although occasionally there's a hint that a surviving organism might have been tinkered with by human(ish) agencies. C.f. The guard-lizard in “Doctor Who and the Silurians”, described by the Doctor as “like nothing I've seen”, and that's from a man who's apparently been hanging around the Cretaceous between episodes.

Then the novelisation turned it into a tyrannosaurus. And somehow gave it nipples.
The moral would seem to be that if you do have a good idea to back up your Lost World, then it's probably best to make it part of the plot rather than turning the film into its own Xbox tie-in. Clearly it's not impossible to do modern dinosaurs properly, provided you've got something worthwhile to do with them. “Let's have them fight ghosts, that'd be a cool” doesn't count, but nor does “worthwhile” necessarily mean anything terribly clever. Ponder this question, for example: when was the last time you saw anyone in a filmed medium riding on a pterosaur?

Yeah, it's annoying, isn't it? You're absolutely sure you've seen it, probably more than once, but you can't immediately think of an example. Someone being carried off by a pterosaur, yes. Someone racing a pterosaur in a biplane, possibly. Riding on one, though... it happens all the time in comic-book and pulp-SF culture, yet on film, it's elusive. But the idea remains thoroughly lickable, which might help to explain why the closest we've come to witnessing it in the modern age – Avatar, the success of which seems otherwise rather baffling – was a bigger hit than any other product of its oeuvre. Picture a modern-day reboot of the Edgar Rice Burroughs continuum (Earth branch, not the Martian one), with a feral, ochre-smeared Tarzan dominating the underskies of Pellucidar at the head of the pteranodon cavalry. Even those of us who've grown cynical in the era of Crunchy Nut Carnosaurs might show a little twitch of excitement. It has a definite edge over someone, man or ape, facing off against a land-predator. Why?

Because, again, the context is greater than the fossil. The notion of a human being riding on the back of any winged animal is gut-level wish-fulfilment: it's not something anyone's ever managed in the real world, and it's been a key what-we-now-call-trope of mythology for millennia. Harryhausen knew this (natch), and with Pegasus in Clash of the Titans, he completed a process that began with Raquel Welch dangling over a nest of reptile-chicks in One Million Years BC. Putting an army of tribesmen on the backs of wing'ed beasts is endearing because it'd be a primal human fantasy even if neither dinosaurs nor aliens were involved. Replace the pterosaur with a roc, or a giant bat, or the mother of all budgerigars, and it still works.

Or a man with the head of a budgerigar riding on another kind of bird. True: the creator of this image, '70s prog-art demigod Roger Dean, considered legal action against the makers of Avatar due to similarities with some of his paintings. Maybe not this one.
(As has been noted elsewhere, one of the heroes in Arthur Conan Doyle's original The Lost World was based on Roger Casement, AKA Sir Roger Casement until his conviction and execution for treason. The novel ends with said character preparing to return to the plateau in search of more pre-human loot, and this was published in 1912. Four years later, the historical Casement backed the Easter Rising, and would have participated if the British hadn't caught up with him. Firstly, the idea of the Rising being led by the Irish Republican Brotherhood on pterodactyls sounds like a Hell of a sequel. Secondly, note how much less compelling it would've sounded if we'd said “the Irish Republican Brotherhood riding on dinosaurs”. What tactical advantage would dinosaurs have over horses? That's just silly.)

Nor, it seems, is it difficult to stumble into great prehistoric scenarios without expecting it. The 1976 remake of King Kong is widely regarded as an abomination – often by critics who find the 2005 version perfectly acceptable, which shows you how far critical standards slumped in the intervening three decades – yet one overlooked detail is that according to Jeff Bridges' all-knowing hippy adventurer, the Vatican knew about Skull Island as long ago as the 1600s, but suppressed it.

A Papal S.H.I.E.L.D. unit of inquisition-era priests who hunt down giant gorillas... that's how you set up a Lost World story. Instead we got Primeval and 800 identical velociraptors.

A cover that's only famous because of what it looks like when it's cropped.

And yet you dress like that.

Batman No.188 December 1966 – THE ERASER WHO TRIED TO RUB OUT BATMAN

It’s the tail end of 1966 and the Batman comic book is doing everything in its power to evoke the television show which has swept the nation. Gone are the moody shadows of even a year ago and now it’s deliberate camp, a little sex appeal and a whole passel full of Zows, Bams and KaPows!

The Eraser identifies Bruce Wayne because he spent years in college just breathing in his scent.

The opening tale in Batman No.188 fixates on Bruce Wayne’s good luck with the ladies and an enemy who – like the best of all Silver Age supervillains – was clearly inspired by office supplies. A parade of goo-goo eyes made in Bruce Wayne’s direction by a bevy of wordless, nameless sexpots he’s encountering in both his identities leads Gotham’s most famous ninja-slash-millionaire into a reverie about former college classmate and inveterate screw-up Lenny Fiasco, a name which sounds like a Southern California ska band if ever there were one.

Remembering Lenny’s simultaneously terrible track record with both women and competence, the Dynamic Duo coincidentally finds themselves at odds with The Eraser, lean and rubber-helmeted criminal mastermind who dresses like a number two Dixon Ticonderoga and hires his services out to erase the evidence left behind by other crooks.

Lenny’s repeated experience with having to correct his own copious errors throughout school gives him an almost preternatural ability to detect the shortcomings in other baddies’ plans, and moreso even manages to identify old schoolchum Bruce under the Dark Knight Detective’s criminal disguise. The Eraser then goes on to prove he’s evolved beyond his limitless collegiate screw-ups by promptly unmasking in front of Bruce Wayne and pretty much ending his usefulness as a crime scene fixer. Whoops!

Helmet or no helmet, his skull has clearly been crushed.

The whole thing ends with The Eraser trapping Bruce Wayne in a freezing death trap in order to pay him back for stealing the girl of his dreams during a Winter Carnival, a story as old as time. Not that Batman’s above twisting the knife – when Fiasco finds himself in prison, the Caped Crusader can’t resist gifting him with a giant eraser to remind him of his failure. Passive-Aggressive Batman!

If the story ends up reminding your humble editor of anything in particular, it’s of “Hush”, the high-profile Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee Batman arc which featured a childhood pal of Bruce Wayne’s returned to deal out the frustrations of a troubled childhood on the Dark Knight’s head. Consider this the prequel, won’t you?

That's A message, to be sure.

In the news last week were reports that the Electoral Commission wants to introduce mandatory photo ID before people can vote in England, Wales and Scotland. (It’s already a requirement in Northern Ireland)

The obvious reason for wanting to do this is an attempt to reduce electoral fraud in the UK, which is laudable. (For those not familiar with UK elections, the current system means you can only vote in one location, and your name is crossed off the list once you’ve voted, preventing voting twice)

But there are always drawbacks. In this case, two – firstly, the obvious that you get with nearly any measure is that it will cost. In order for this to work, the Electoral Commission or Returning Officers locally would need a process of issuing electoral ID to anyone who does not have a driving license or passport.

The second drawback is the one that is of more concern, and that is disenfranchisement. It is far more likely that marginalised groups will not have a driving license or passport, or have changed their name recently via marriage, or have a name that doesn’t translate into English consistently, which could cause problems matching up ID with voter records.

So, do the benefits of introducing voter ID outweigh the problems? It would seem not.

Widespread voter fraud does get detected in a number of ways by those involved in the process, such as individuals being seen voting more than once, people attempting to vote twice, (Once legitimately, once fraudulently by an imposter) known deceased people voting and so on. Despite this, only 25 allegations of voter impersonation at a polling stations were recorded by the Electoral Commission in 2012. (PDF Link, see paragraph 1.16) 19 of those related to one specific area, Peterborough. The Electoral Commission also highlights that none of these cases had any influence on any election result.

You’d not know this from reading press coverage, as news outlets list all electoral fraud, not cases that would have been stopped by mandatory voter ID. The Daily Mail is, unsurprisingly perhaps, the worst at this, with four of the five cases they listed having nothing to do with voter impersonation at polling stations. The fifth case involved corrupt polling station staff, so requiring polling station staff to check ID would not have helped. But it was not just the Daily Mail, as Channel 4 news also fell into this trap, citing the 2004 case in Birmingham which was down to postal vote fraud, not in-person fraud.

So why the push for ID? The Guardian gives us a clue, stating “tightening of the rules is necessary to restore public confidence following fears of ballot-rigging“. But we need to turn to the Electoral Commission’s own paper on the issue (PDF link, paragraphs 3.28 onwards) for the full story. They are pushing for ID checks for voters not because of fraud or even because they think it will have any impact on fraud, but purely because asking leading questions suggests the public think it will reduce fraud.

I would rather the Electoral Commission spent the money on voter education, rather than fixing a problem we don’t have and inevitably creating new problems.

Over in Facebook, Dale Herbest wrote to ask…

Garfield and Friends was one of my favorite Saturday Morning cartoon shows when I was kid and I was always upset that it only ran for six years. I feel it should have gone on another two or three seasons. Officially, what was the reason and/or cause of the show's demise?

I'm probably going to "over-answer" your question here but I've been asked this and similar questions a lot so here's a rough explanation of how it used to work and sorta still does.

When a network buys a series from an outside supplier, they pay a license fee for it. The fee gives them X number of runs for Y number of dollars. Infinite variations are possible on X and Y, which are negotiated and then renegotiated and then re-renegotiated, etc. The contract also usually specifies that the network can order additional seasons. Almost always, and this was the case with Garfield and Friends, a "bump" is built into the deal which says that every time the network picks up another season, Y goes up.

If you're a producer and you sell a series, you have three choices. You can try to produce the show for less than the license fee and then the difference becomes immediate profit. This usually means you won't produce a very good show but that doesn't bother some people.

Or you can try to produce the show for the license fee — in other words, break even on its initial network airings — and then make your profit when you sell those shows into syndication or on DVD or overseas.

Or you can dig into your deep pockets — you need deep pockets to produce a TV series — and do the show for more than the network is paying you. This is called deficit-financing. You take a loss on each episode you produce but this results (usually) in a better show. You do this because you figure a better show will lead to more success, more demand, more overseas sales, a bigger syndication payoff, more merchandising, etc. If the show only runs one season, you're not going to have enough episodes to sell to other countries. You're not going to have much of a syndication package for stations to purchase. The folks now selling the syndication package of Seinfeld are making millions per year of pure profit. They wouldn't if it had only lasted a season or two.

And of course, if you have a long-running hit, you have the clout to negotiate a higher license fee from the network. So most shows deficit-finance to some extent.

The initial order for Garfield and Friends was for two seasons and a pretty high license fee. Networks rarely commit for two seasons but The Cat was a highly-desired property and the two main guys behind the show — Lee Mendelson and Jim Davis — had the clout to get what they wanted and, equally important, the willingness to say no if they didn't get what they wanted. So they got a deal for 26 half-hours. Thirteen would air the first year and thirteen would air the second. As soon as it hit the air though, it was apparent that it was a huge hit and CBS asked, almost immediately, if the show could become an hour for the following year. So we just kept making more and more and by the time we'd reached the end of what turned out to be our last season, we'd made 121 half-hours. So you kind of got nine and a half seasons of shows in six years.

CBS never had the rights to air all 121 shows in rotation. As per the terms of the contract, every time they ordered a new season, they got the rights to air the new shows and they got the rights to retain a certain number of older episodes in what is called "the library," meaning a selection of older episodes which can be reaired along with the new episodes and reruns of the new episodes. The network folks would pick what they thought were the strongest past episodes to retain for their library and we were then free to sell the other episodes elsewhere.

Once 73 half-hours had fallen out of the CBS library, our producers felt we had enough to make a strong syndication library…so those 73 episodes were sold to local stations and they ran over and over and over. In the meantime, all the episodes that were produced were syndicated to other countries. They easily earned back all the money that the producers had put up to deficit-finance the show and to also make a very nice profit. In fact, the 73 reran so well in this country that we never bothered to syndicate the other 48 episodes in the U.S. once CBS turned loose of them. The math was such that we could make just as much money syndicating a package of 73 as opposed to a package of 121.

After we finished Show #121, CBS said they wanted to order another season but they wanted to renegotiate the deal. Because of the annual bumps in the license fee, the show had gotten very expensive. At the same time, the viewing audiences for all of Saturday morning TV had declined. When we went on the air in '88, the main place kids could watch cartoons was on CBS, NBC and ABC on Saturday mornings. By the time we went off, you had your Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon and the WB Network and Fox and a few others airing cartoons every day, in some cases morning, noon and night.

And there was another problem. A lot of those cartoon shows were being produced at a loss, mostly funded by toy companies. If we're such a company marketing a new doll called Braindead Duck, we want all of the kids in America to know of him and love him. It might be financially prudent for us to spend a few million underwriting a Braindead Duck cartoon show and to go to stations and say, "Hey, we'll give you this show real cheap if you'll put it on the air." We might lose a lot on the show but make it up selling more Braindead Duck merchandise.

I'm occasionally asked to be the show runner on such programs. One time, I told the man trying to hire me that I didn't think it was a very good idea for a show and asked, "Why would a network buy this?" He said, "Because we're going to offer it to them for one-fourth what a new series usually costs them." A number of shows have gotten on the air that way. His did. Sometimes, the toy company gives a local station the show for free and advertises its other toys in half the commercials. Then the station airing the show can sell the other commercials and keep the money they get for them. (Again, there are many variations.)

So CBS said to us, "We want another season of Garfield and Friends but we want it much cheaper. You're making so much off the domestic and foreign syndication — to say nothing of what it does for the cat's popularity in general — that we think you should do it for us for about a third of what we've been paying you." That, of course, would have meant a lot more deficit-financing from our side if we wanted to maintain the same level of quality.

Our producers did the math and decided the numbers didn't make sense. As I noted, we weren't even putting all the episodes we had into domestic syndication. What the additional episodes would have made in foreign syndication didn't really make up for the deficit costs. Also, with the reruns doing so well in syndication, Garfield didn't really need the exposure of being on Saturday morning…so our producers declined. CBS gave our time slot to a show that did cost about a third of what our show cost them and got about a third of the ratings. We would have probably dropped a lot over the next year or two because fewer and fewer kids were even bothering with the three major networks on Saturday morning by then. And that's more than you probably wanted to know but this is the weblog that always does that.

Vladimir Putin is a product of the most ruthless elements of the Soviet era. The KGB and its predecessors took human torment to new levels of barbarity in the name of the relentless will of Marxism. Now VVP- as he is known in most of Russia- chooses to operate these same ruthless dictates in the name of a Conservative, Orthodox world view. Yet, in reality both Marxism and Conservative Orthodoxy are both ideas that do not accept challenge, let alone compromise. In the Russian world view, the Slavophile tradition that has always rejected the freedoms of Western Liberalism and which has been reborn under Putin, has much in common with the anti-Western agenda of Communism. We should not be surprised.

As a student of Marxism-Leninism and as a loyal officer of the KGB, Putin has been well schooled in two other traditions: conspiracy and deception. From the earliest days of his rise to power, one can detect elements of both. There are many unexplained episodes and considerable evidence that the Russian secret police- now no longer called the KGB- has used criminal ends to blacken the name of its enemies. The bombings that took place in 1999, and which cemented the coming to power of Putin, for example, have been convincingly linked to KGB operatives, rather than the putative Dagestan Liberation Army which had never been identified before- or since. Ruthless in nature and determined to achieve his strategic goals, Putin is a formidable foe.

As far as the UK is concerned, there is no doubt that Putin is an implacable enemy. He regards Britain as an historic competitor with Russia for influence and control in Europe. As a nationalist and conservative figure, he regards British traditions of tolerance and openness with something close to contempt: "a small island no one listens to" as one senior Putinist official said last year. David Cameron is known to personally detest Putin, and the feeling is clearly mutual. 

This is why the story that appeared in Scottish newspapers over the weekend, suggesting that David Cameron had asked Putin for help in averting Scottish independence, is both much less and possibly much more than it appears. The source for the story is ITAR-Tass, the Russian state news agency, which, after the closure of RIA Novosti, is little more than a propaganda organ for the Putinist state. This story is then a direct intervention by Russia in the debate over Scottish independence and far from Russia being approached to save the UK, it is an attempt by Putin to discredit the UK Prime Minister. Number 10 have laughed the ITAR-Tass story out of court, and for once their denials have the ring of truth.

The break up of the UK would be a massive strategic victory for Putin- and would be way beyond anything the most Slavophile nineteenth century Russian nationalist could have hoped for. As a good conspirator, Putin knows perfectly well that he is unpopular in much of Western Europe and that an association of David Cameron with Putin would be very damaging to the British Prime Minister- which is of course precisely why ITAR Tass has run the story.

Neither is this the only intervention that Russians have made in Scotland in recent years- the mysterious figure of the supposedly Lithuanian, but actually Russian, banker Vladimir Romanov is alleged to have been a Russian agent of influence. Romanov's 2005 purchase of Hearts, the Edinburgh football club with many well known supporters, including Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond is said to have brought significant connections between Russian interests and senior figures in the SNP. The role of Romanov's bank, Ukio bankas, which had one branch in Edinburgh, is also highly questionable. Clearly after the SNP former publicity vice convener, Colin Weir, won £161 million on the Euro lottery in November 2011, there was certainly no need for covert funding. Ukio bankas in any event went in administration in February 2013.

So, as we digest the news stories of this last weekend, it is as well to think with the eye of a KGB agent and perhaps to think wryly, that "just because I'm paranoid, does not mean they are not out to get me". One thing is sure, it does not pay to underestimate the ruthlessness or the malevolence of VVP. The Russians have a word Disinformattsiya which is rather more than disinformation, it implies aggressively and actively misleading ones protagonist with information which is directly opposite from the truth. In the hands of Tass, the primary source of Russian state propaganda it is hard not to believe that journalists in Scotland have been rather naive. They have not asked the first question of any detective story: "Who benefits?". David Cameron certainly does not. What about Vladimir Putin? He is a student both of conspiracy and disinformattsiya and who would win a massive strategic victory if the UK broke up. 

He is certainly that ruthless, and perhaps there are those in the Yes Camp who would take help from Russia if it were offered. Of course that the story is raised now means that were any stories to come which linked the SNP to Russia would just look like tit-for-tat. Yet the question of who benefits is so much more credible when you look at the story from the other way round. Precisely, in fact, the way a KGB colonel would look at the situation.

#746, 5th October 1996

It’s by no means a hard-and-fast rule, but if you’re writing a break-up song it’s often a good idea to try to make your protagonist sympathetic, or at least not a fool. Here we have a guy who knows his girlfriend is going to break up with him and clutches at an Audrey Hepburn-shaped straw as evidence that maybe – just maybe – the two still have a chance. Your judgement may rest on whether you think “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” trades in bathos or pathos. Is it a merciless document of the kind of undignified rhetorical lunges men will make to avoid being dumped – or is it supposed to be touching?

Probably both. “We both kinda liked it –“ – this comes across as baffled politeness from the girl, and establishes only the feeblest of rocks to cling to. The attempt to stall an oncoming end is surely doomed. But the song, for all its conversational pretences, isn’t necessarily happening in the real world. As “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” frames with its title, the track nods to romcomland, a special place where predestined lovers ultimately overcome their differences, however unpromising the start.

The song’s clunking reference fits ever so slightly with the zeitgeist, at least. Outside the charts, we’re in the age of early Tarantino films – mixing stylishly choreographed violence with nerdish dissection of cheeseburgers or Madonna – and more pointedly of High Fidelity, with its seductive (if ultimately doomed) intertwining of music taste and romantic destiny. Both nail particular tropes of what will become “geek culture” and its relationship with consumption and preference. “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” shows one logical extension: if being into the right things is a precondition for love – the geek romantic dream – then breaking up when you both like an old film really is an injustice.

Or the man’s a ridiculous whiner. Anyhow, when I first realised I detested this record – a minute or two after I heard it – the lyrics weren’t my only problem. It mixes ingredients in the same broad way the Cranberries do – light indiepop guitar hooks on a bed of mild post-grunge crunch. Neither element does the other any favours. The song is too self-pitying to have any bite, but the attempt to flex its muscles and telegraph serious feelings just underlines how over-sensitive and entitled our hero sounds. Almost no mid 90s American alt-rock made it successfully to Britain – even the fakiest most corporate examples tended to stall or go unreleased. So it’s hard to know how typical this weak effort was, even of the blandest end of modern rock radio. Probably “Breakfast” was a harmless fluke. But to this day I’m annoyed far more than I should be by its sulky self-importance, its overwrought beating on a very puny chest. Just let her go, man!

There is no doubt some truth to the closeted homophobe meme. We need only look at Nigel Evans, Cardinal O'Brien or, possibly, Aaron Schock to see this and need not even look at the studies pointing out the links between an extremely closeted life and projections of anti-LGBT sentiment.

But the gusto with which some have adopted it to explain every case of homophobia concerns me for a number of reasons.

Giles Fraser today implies, rather than looking with true curiousity at the fact Uganda is at once a country recently infamous for anti-LGBT legislation but also the one with the 3rd for search requests on Google for "man fucking man", that Ugandans looking at gay porn might well be homophobes. Perhaps LGBT Ugandans have plenty else to be worrying about without some Westerner labelling them closested homophobes on top of that.

I can think, just off the top of my head of a couple of possible reasons Uganda is so high on the listing.

1) They aren't all that high in reality for searching for gay porn or similar search terms. "Man fucking man" is hardly likely to feature highly on most Western English-speaking countries lists (where gay is currently the near universally accepted descriptive for such liasons) nor in many non-English speaking countries so the list is dominated by Commonwealth (or former Commonwealth) countries where English is spoken but which are not overly Westernised. The very basis for Fraser's assumptions is flawed. I'd like to see some real evidence LGBT Ugandans are uniquely incredibly drawn to gay porn before we start calling them homophobes!

2) Perhaps Uganda is so high up in search results for "man fucking man" because anti-LGBT feeling in their country makes engaging in such sex for real rather risky? Surely this would have some affect on porn consumption among sexual minorities?

Fraser falls into the trap of victim blaming in order to insult opponents. And it is a typical liberal-leftie move to insult opponents by calling them gay. "Eww... that homophobe is a GAY!"

Yes homophobic homosexuals are hypocrites. All readers of this blog know that I find them abhorrent and never waste a moment in bringing up their names (NIGEL EVANS) to remind the world to avoid them at all costs. But not all homophobes are homosexual, I suspect not even a majority are. And them being homosexual isn't the problem... their homophobia is!

No matter whether the people behind "Kill the Gays" are LGBT or not (I suspect a big "Not" on that one), the bill itself was fundamentally wrong and what has come after it remains so.

We need to stop casting aspersions on whole groups of people just because it fits into our neat pseudo-psychological political aims. LGBT Ugandans need our sympathy and our support. Not ridiculous accusations.

Alan Moore is well known for his groundbreaking comics, his mistreatment at the hands of his former publishers, and his tendency to respond to any sort of criticism or disagreement by abruptly and dramatically cutting off all contact with the offending party. Unfortunately, this post is about the last of these.

I don’t follow Twitter, so I hadn’t realized until last night that comics scholar Will Brooker took to that outlet to criticize some of the more unsavory elements of Moore’s recent work. Moore has now responded in a lengthy interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid where he doggedly lays into rank after rank of straw men while refusing to acknowledge the real reasons Brooker and other readers have criticized his comics.

To unpack every bad-faith assumption, projection, or inaccuracy in this interview would be a month’s work, but I hope a few examples will show why I found this interview so profoundly disappointing (while also sadly typical of Moore’s public statements in recent years). For reasons that I’ll explain below, I want to focus on his response to the criticisms of his use of the Golliwogg in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, criticisms that were first and most substantively expressed by Pam Noles in a series of blog posts from 2007. This is how Moore (with a helpful prompt from Ó Méalóid) represents those criticisms:

PÓM: How do you respond to the contention that it is not the place of two white men to try to ‘reclaim’ a character like the golliwogg?

AM: The idea that it is not the place of two white men to ‘reclaim’ (although I’m not certain that’s exactly what we were doing) or otherwise utilise a contentious black character, unless I am to understand that this principle only applies to white men using black characters, would appear to be predicated upon an assumption that no author or artist should presume to use characters who are of a different race to themselves.

Pam Noles has not been shy about her criticisms of Black Dossier. It would be easy to read her work and discover that Noles never makes the assumption that Moore generously attributes to her. (In fact, I’m not familiar with any critic of Black Dossier who has made that assumption. Brooker criticized Moore and his fellow panelists for defending the Golliwogg as a “strong black character,” not for writing characters of a different race.) It would be easy to learn that Noles cites several examples of artists and writers who she feels use blackface characters and imagery in an appropriately critical or historical context, including white artists like David Levinthal and white writers like Paul Theroux and Bill Willingham. It would be easy, in short, to grapple with the actual criticisms Noles made and not the ludicrous arguments Moore makes for her—but that might require recognizing that Noles has a point.

I also have to point out Moore’s historical revisionism when he claims he’s not certain that he and Kevin O’Neill set out to reclaim the Golliwogg. He seemed pretty certain when he told Jess Nevins,

Now, it seemed to us on looking over this material that the Golliwog as a figure had been grossly misrepresented. […] So what we thought we’d like to do is take this perhaps needlessly controversial figure, strip him of the minstrel clothes that he was later, and not in any of Florence M. Upton’s narratives, but he was later dressed in, to take all of those elements away, to restore him to the original figure (Nevins, Impossible Territories 201-2)

Moore seemed pretty certain when he told Nevins “We mainly wanted to dispel any racist notions. […] we wanted to further distance our character from any Golliwog that the readers may have previously come across” (Impossible Territories 203). O’Neill seemed pretty certain when he told Noles to her face that “he and Moore want to rescue the Golliwogg by reintroducing it to the mix in a new form.” Not only is Moore not being honest about his critics’ statements, he’s not being honest about his own.

And he is supposedly responding to Noles’s statements, as indicated by his reference to the “American photographer” who met Kevin O’Neill at a signing. I also want to point out the unctuous manner in which he feigns respect for Noles and her views while refusing to represent them honestly or accurately. (Or, you know, learn her name.) From later in the interview:

Now, this person has an absolutely inalienable right to her reaction, and I am not suggesting or implying that her response was ‘wrong’ in any way. If that was her reading of the story, then she is fully entitled to retain her opinion. I would hope that in my lengthy response to the first several questions on your list that I may have perhaps allayed some of her misgivings, although my feeling is that this is frankly unlikely.

Apparently Moore is just conscious enough of the racial politics of the situation that he doesn’t subject Noles to the same scorn he visits on other critics. Instead he goes through all the outward observances of respecting her opinion while slipping in little passive-aggressive digs, like the implication that she’s too close-minded to have her misgivings allayed.

I at least hope that in having raised her concerns and been listened to in a personal encounter with the book’s artist, and now having these issues addressed to the best of his ability by the book’s writer, that she will accept that her concerns have been engaged with to a degree that is greater than most readers could or would reasonably expect. I would point out that while everyone is entitled to their informed opinion, this is actually the full extent of their entitlement.

Or the implication that Noles’s criticism stems from her entitlement, with maybe just a hint that her opinion is misinformed.

Possibly because I’m typing this on Christmas Eve I feel inclined, despite the long hiatus between this person first airing her grievance and us hearing anything further from her, to take her stance at face value.

Or the implication that her failure to contact the notoriously private Moore in person, or to voice her criticisms continually over the past six years, means those criticisms are suspect. (If she had contacted him in person or voiced her criticisms continually over the years, perhaps he would accuse her of being a stalker, as he does Laura Sneddon and Grant Morrison.)

Also, taking somebody’s stance at face value isn’t generally a favor that you do them only in a burst of Christmas cheer. It’s a basic courtesy you show anybody who presents their views honestly, assuming you are interested in presenting yours honestly in return. And it requires that you actually read and respond to their words, not somebody else’s misleading summary of them.

I can readily imagine how justifiably angry the depiction of non-white characters in contemporary comics, or the relatively tiny number of artists or writers of colour compared to the number of non-white comic readers, could make anyone, irrespective of their colour or ethnicity. I simply feel – and this is only my personal opinion and in no way privileged over her own – that in this instance that anger is misdirected.

Now Moore wants to demonstrate that he’s a committed anti-racist who understands institutional racism and privilege. Earlier in the interview he tries to separate his use of the Golliwogg from the statements of Carol Thatcher and other right-wingers who cherish their golly toys and stickers (or, in Thatcher's case, their right to use the name as a racist insult without any consequences). But his separation boils down to his insistence that the original character wasn’t racist, only the later exploitations of the stereotype (Noles demolished that one six years ago), and his somewhat befuddled statement that “I would have hoped that it might be fairly obvious, with a little thought, that neither I nor Kevin are likely to be of that persuasion, but it appears not.”

Moore seems genuinely to believe that his own politics indemnify him against racism, that asserting or even hinting at his left-wing bona fides means he couldn’t possibly be lumped in with Carol Thatcher even though they both defend the same blackface imagery. Moore seems to believe—as many of us do—that racism is solely a matter of bad intentions, not actions or institutions, and that not having those bad intentions means his actions couldn’t possibly be racist. I’m sure he is quite sincere in this belief. I’m sure he’s honestly shocked at the criticisms of his use of the Golliwogg. (Although how surprised should you be that people in the twenty-first century might object to the use of a blackface character?) It doesn’t change the fact that he chose to use a racist caricature in his comics, free of any critical or historical context.

It also doesn’t change the fact that Moore seems to think any anger at racism is justifiable, provided it isn’t directed at him.

As I understand it from the questions I’ve been asked, the major bone of contention seems to be the question of whether white creators can presume to present possibly controversial material relating to black characters.

No. Just no.

I’ve addressed this more comprehensively above, but would only add that if I had adopted this attitude back in 1999/2000, there is every likelihood that the United States, surely embarrassingly, would be nearly a decade-and-a-half into the 21st century and still without any positive examples of mixed-race marriages producing mixed-race offspring anywhere in its media. Certainly not in its comic books.

Yes, if Alan Moore hadn’t written a couple of minority supporting characters in his book about a square-jawed white guy fifteen years ago, the United States wouldn’t have any positive examples of mixed-race marriages producing mixed-race offspring anywhere in our media.

Thank God we have Alan Moore to save us from ourselves. Which book was that, by the way?

(I’m referring to Tom Strong here, incidentally, which is apparently also distinguished by the fact that it is the one title in my oeuvre in which I somehow managed to restrain myself from depicting acts of sexual violence against women.)

No, that would be the one where Moore changed it up by depicting an act of sexual violence against a man.

The whole interview is like this—although to call it an interview is being generous. Ó Méalóid only asks six questions, apparently submitted ahead of time as a list, and Moore responds at length. It’s not clear whether Ó Méalóid asked any follow-up questions, but it looks like he lets Moore’s responses go unchallenged. And the questions he does ask, particularly on the Golliwogg, invite Moore to respond to the weakest possible version of his critics’ arguments. But perhaps I’m being too hard on Ó Méalóid—he asks Moore these questions more directly than anybody else has, and Moore’s answers reveal more about him than I, at least, have ever wanted to know.

Noles, of course, is more than capable of answering Moore on her own and doesn’t need me or anybody else rushing to her rescue. I’ve focused on Moore’s defense of the Golliwogg because that happens to be the area I’m researching right now—literally right now, as in I would be wrapping up my section on the Golliwogg today if this rancid little ball of spite and denial hadn’t dropped from the ether—and I’ve spent the last month and a half looking over Black Dossier, the Upton books, Noles’s criticisms, and all the Moore and O’Neill interviews I could find on this subject. The distortions, the revisions, the straw men, and the outright lies jump out at me most clearly on this issue, and the evidence that exposes and disproves them is closest at hand.

But the whole interview is like this. Moore is just as evasive and intellectually dishonest in responding to criticisms of his frequent reliance on rape and sexualized violence. He’s just as misleading about Grant Morrison, fudging dates and inventing interview quotes and acts of plagiarism. (If anybody can identify the Morrison work that copies Lost Girls, let me know.) He’s just as defensive in his final paragraph on Gordon Brown, where he expresses something that could almost pass for contrition if he didn’t lace it with those hallmarks of the non-apology apology, “I’m sorry if anyone took offense” and “Some of my best friends are ____.”

All in all, this is not so much an interview as an increasingly ugly self-portrait of an artist who, for all his considerable gifts, cannot accept that he has said or done or written something offensive and does not know how to respond other than to double down on the original mistake.

Moore has been cutting off his acquaintances and announcing his retirements for some twenty years now. I have to say, I hope this one sticks. In this interview alone, he says no longer wants any contact with Morrison’s publisher or Sneddon’s employers. He doesn’t want any contact with their friends, artistic collaborators, or associates. He asked Lance Parkin, as sympathetic a biographer as any author could ask for, not to interview any of his friends and family. (Perhaps the book would’ve had fewer Morrison quotes if he had?) And now he claims he’s going to cut back on interviews and withdraw from what remains of his public life. I’ll believe that when I see it, frankly, but I think it’s a good idea and I hope he follows through with it. Certainly this last one has done him no favors.

He also asks if “admirers of Grant Morrison’s work would please stop reading mine, as I don’t think it fair that my respect and affection for my own readership should be compromised in any way by people that I largely believe to be shallow and undiscriminating.”

That one, I’m afraid I can’t oblige, at least when it comes to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If there’s one thing this interview has made clear, it’s that Moore’s body of work needs more criticism and more pushback against his frequent recourse to sexual violence and racial stereotypes. Because we need to make it impossible for him to minimize or isolate or misrepresent the thoughtful and judicious criticisms that are already out there.

Because while Noles and Brooker and those other critics are more than capable of responding to Moore, the fact is they shouldn’t have to do it alone. When Moore fills his comics with racist caricatures and misogynistic violence—and defends them in such dishonest terms—he makes them everybody’s problem.

An anonymous reader calls on the Liberal Democrats to save what remains of the Social Fund.

Many people haven't heard of the Social Fund. It was introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1987, following the so-called Fowler reviews of the social security system. Part of it covers regulated payments, some of which are familiar: winter fuel payments, cold weather payments and Sure Start maternity grants all come out of this side.

The other part has often been called the 'discretionary' Social Fund. When it was first brought in, charities and individuals argued against it, because it chiefly consisted of loans - crisis loans and budgeting loans - given to people on low or no incomes during periods of extreme need. These were then paid back out of dole money or other benefits later on. In effect, it loaded the poorest of the poor with debt payable to the state (although in both cases the debt was interest free).

In 2010/11, the Coalition government began a process of reform to cut down drastically the growth in discretionary social funding. According to Steve Webb, a Lib Dem minister in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), demand had risen sharply, particularly for Crisis Loans, due to the introduction of telephone claims in 2006. Webb therefore stated that it was the government’s intention to "manage crisis loan demand back towards pre-2006 levels," despite the obvious economic reasons why demand might also have increased.

The DWP duly went to work, doing what it does best, or perhaps worst. It tightened the rules for applications drastically over a 12 month period. This meant that gross expenditure on Crisis Loans fell from £228.3m in 2010/11 to £133.3 m in 2011/12, at a time when the economy had only regained a small amount of the ground lost over the recession.

However, that wasn't the end of the story. The government then decided that discretionary social funding, other than budgeting loans, would be 'localised' via the Welfare Reform Act 2012. This infamous Act contained so many other iniquitous decisions ('bedroom tax,' universal credit, disability living allowance etc.) that this vital, if flawed, niche in the social security system went unscrutinised and unlamented.

The government decided that it would devolve the funding to Scotland and Wales and allow the separate administrations to set up their own system for delivery. In England, however, the funding would be devolved to councils. Crucially, though, the funding would not be ring-fenced, there would be no statutory duty on councils to provide these services, and there would be no national guidance. The funding would be for two years initially, with DWP to review how councils had chosen to deliver welfare provision in early 2014.

The extent of central government direction on local councils was a short “settlement letter” from Steve Webb stating merely that "it is the intention of the Government that the funding is to be used to provide the new provision ... we expect the funding to be concentrated on those facing greatest difficulty in managing their income ... the funding is to allow you to give flexible help to those in genuine need". Beyond this short paragraph, no further guidance or suggestions have been given.

Unsurprisingly, at a time of drastic cuts to local government funding, councils have taken a patchy approach to setting up local welfare provision. Some councils have done almost nothing, and are now consulting on abolishing local provision entirely, such as Oxfordshire County Council, which includes the Prime Minister’s constituency. Others have set up commendable schemes which improve upon what had previously been offered by DWP. Many have settled for referring people to food banks and handing out the occasional voucher.

Yet even this patchy provision is preferable to what is to come. On the 3rd of January, the Guardian reported that DWP had made the decision - early - to simply cut the £172m from council funds entirely in 2015/16. This is despite the review of welfare provision being carried out as planned. So the government is now busily gathering evidence for a decision that has already been made.

Some councils may attempt to continue to provide some kind of local assistance. Indeed, many will have no choice from time to time: the recent flooding has seen strong and predictable demand for precisely this kind of support. But they will now have to balance this need - which is, lest we forget, not a statutory requirement - against the more pressing legal requirements to provide social services, transport, housing, and all the rest.

The tale is sad. It is a typical story: a government doesn't like a particular policy, so it first localises the funding simply to abdicate responsibility for its delivery, and then quietly scraps it entirely when everyone is still recovering from their New Year hangover.

As a former Liberal Democrat member, parliamentary researcher and sometime activist, my sympathies lie with the Yellow Peril, and most likely always will. But the silence on decisions like this is deafening. If such a capable, intelligent, and caring minister as Steve Webb can go along with this tearing apart of a vital part of our society’s safety net, fears that the party has lost its way seem very well founded.

I hope it is not too late for members, activists, councillors, MPs and peers to notice this small but extremely significant mistake – and try their utmost to reverse it. That is the sort of small but significant action that would bring a person like me back to the party.

The author of this post previously worked for Lib Dem MPs, but wishes to remain anonymous.

Carte Blanche: a social experiment with cloned blank credit cards.

Today is the anniversary of the 1928 Northampton by-election, which saw the return to Parliament of Cecil L'Estrange Malone.

The result from Wythenshawe & Sale E at GE2010 Looks like a LAB hold on reduced turnout but could UKUP do something? pic.twitter.com/Sfkud1U3my

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) January 8, 2014

The purples can’t go on getting good 2nd places – they need MPs

The sad and untimely death at the age of 60 of the popular former minister, Paul Goggins, creates what could be a tricky by-election defence for Labour and an opportunity for UKIP.

For in spite of all the good polling the party has yet to win a Commons seat. In fact the best it has ever done in a Westminster election was the 27.8% in the high octane contest at Eastleigh last February.

By-elections don’t come round very often and UKIP needs to be totally committed to the fight in a way that they weren’t in South Shields in May filling the vacancy created by David Miliband’s departure.

Major UKIP donors were not convinced about South Shields and there was a reluctance to put the money in.

For Labour there’s a problem. Wythenshawe and Sale East is one of those heartland seats which, not to put too fine a point on it, it takes for granted and puts very little effort into. The Tories, who when I lived in the constituency in the 1960s, had the MP have now all but given up with the result that turnouts are pitifully low. At general elections the parties just go through the motions.

It’s low vote outcomes in heartland seats like Wythenshawe and Sale East which are a main reason why the electoral system seems biased to the red team.

This means that there is nothing like the machine in place that you get in a marginal. Thus if it’s like South Shields there’ll be very limited data records which, as the yellows showed in Eastleigh, are the platforms on which wins can be based.

If the parties could only get 54% out to vote at the general election then the chances are that we’ll see turnout in the 30s. Thus the threshold in terms of votes for victory will be quite low. If UKIP can manage to build on the 7.3% that the party and the BNP secured last time then who knows.

What’s aboslutely certain is that a UKIP by-election victory would totally change the media narrative. UKIP will be the undisputed challenger to Labour in the red strongoholds.

Mike Smithson

Blogging from OUTSIDE the Westminster bubble 2004-2014

Follow @MSmithsonPB

Great news from the House of Lords this evening. The government has suffered a massive defeat over its plans to bring in injunctions against 'annoying' behaviour. Peers defeated the clause that would have introduced IPNAs - Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance - by 306 votes to 178.

Alex Stevenson on politics.co.uk quotes some of the speeches made against the proposal, including Patrick Cormack:

"I find it difficult to accept a Conservative-led government is prepared to introduce this lower threshold in the bill," Tory backbencher Patrick Cormack said. 

"We are sinking to a lower threshold and in the process many people may have their civil liberties taken away from them."

And I find it difficult accept that a government of which the Liberal Democrats are a part is prepared to introduce it.

For years, when asked to explain what we stand for or even to justify our existence as a separate party, we Lib Dems have said that civil liberties are at the heart of what we believe. Yet, given a taste of government, we appear happy to make things worse in this area.

This measure also marks a retreat from the original Coalition agreement, which promised:

We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties. We need to restore the rights of individuals in the face of encroaching state power, in keeping with Britain’s tradition of freedom and fairness.

And on a more personal level, I spent years writing columns for Liberal Democrat News pouring scorn on New Labour's contempt for civil liberties.

It wasn't just the party's promotion of the concept of 'antisocial behaviour', which had the paradoxical effect of making the police feel they could turn their backs on some crimes, it was the extraordinary pettiness of their concerns.

The post Berlin Wall, pre 9/11 years of the 1990s, with their growing economy, now seem close to a political Shangri La, but that was not how New Labour saw them at the time. They were concerned about aggressive begging. They were concerned about noisy fireworks. Many of their backbenchers were obsessed with leylandii hedges.

Back in 2014, this bill is made worse by the fact that it is being piloted by one of my favourite Lib Dem MPs, Norman Baker. He has tried to justify IPNAs both on Lib Dem Voice and on his own website.

I do not find these articles reassuring, if only because - as Caron Lindsay points out - it is not going to be Norman Baker making the decisions on how this legislation will be used. I dread to think what uses it will be put to in the hands of Labour councils.

Caron also reminds us of the words of Nick Clegg to Henry Porter:

You shouldn’t trust any Government, actually including this one, full stop. The natural inclination of Government is to hoard power and information, to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.

The headline on Porter's article is:

Why we should believe Nick Clegg when he promises to restore liberties stolen by Labour

I do hope this will not be another case of Nick wooing an interest group with almost exaggerated language, only to let them down when given a chance to do something about that issue.

The Girl of Steel’s solo adventures – in Adventure Comics and elsewhere – were an interesting (if typically, sad to say, unentertaining) mix of stock superhero story formula and lovelorn romance soap opera comic. The arguable bottom-line financial advantage of giving Supergirl a solo feature in a monthly book was, after all, that she attracted female readers to the Superman franchise, and by this point DC has established its mix of superhero/romance in the pages of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane – so, in brief, when romance reared its ugly head, embarrassment should follow.

Lacking a recurring beau, though, Supergirl ended up with a minor parade of single-issue lotharios and would-be paramours, including; a cursed centaur, a Phantom Zone criminal, a power-thieving super-mobster, some guy named Jeff who had a chili dog moustache (immediate disqualification), a hunky athlete who liked to disguise himself as a sea monster and rob yachts, a polka-dotted muppet who was secretly Mister Mxyzptlk and a seemingly perfect match in an alien boy hero who turned out to actually be a female hero using science to masquerade as a boy on her endemically anti-feminist world and neither lady ended up being “into it” (so pack up your deviantart portfolios, fellas, that question was answered) – among literally dozens more.

That first panel is nothing but sexts.

In Adventure Comics vol.1  No.388 and No.389 (Jan-Feb 1970), Supergirl (and her alter-ego of Linda Lee Danvers) ends up meeting KIMBOR, an intergalactic bad-boy who was freed from hard labor on a prison planetoid by Superman’s Coluan nemesis, Brainiac.

The baddie who bottled Kandor finds his mind turning more and more to Supergirl and, like the boy who yanks on his classmate’s hair in order to deal with the confusing emotions and urges of pre-adolescence, mistakes affection for aggression and decides to copy the head-turning, heart-throbbing Kimbor into an identical up-blowing, collateral-damage-making robot bomb with which to destroy Supergirl. (Kimbor manages to switch himself out with his robot duplicate in what’s meant to be a twist in the story but which ends up actually not accomplishing much except padding pages, so let’s not bother with it beyond this).

If I make a joke about Brian Wood right now, is it libel?

Adopting the Earth-identity of Kimberly O’Ryan - because having frat boys exclaim “That’s a GIRL’S NAME!” was essential to Brainiac’s convoluted plan – Kimbor zeroes in on Supergirl in both of her identities. Intent on using his inescapable charms to destroy the Maid of Steel by basically being a huge, sexist asshole to her all the time, Kimbor’s in great company with at least a couple of 2013’s most notorious comics professionals and half the guys at Cons in general.

Kimbor’s hot-and-cold running abuse proves effective, with both Linda and Supergirl falling over themselves to gain Kimbor’s non-existent approval. In fact, Kimbor seems to be following, letter-for-letter, the steps recommended in the Pick-Up Artist Community, despite having debuted in a comic some twenty-five years older than the movement (Brainiac’s from space, maybe in space they’ve already figured out peacocking).

It's uncalled for to cap off this much inane bullshit with a pun.

So Kimbor “Approaches” (Step 1, visiting the Stanhope Supergirl Fan Club where Linda is hanging out because of some weird ego issues which this story kind of underlines), “Raises status” (Step 2, by savagely negging the poor girl), and then speeds up through Step 4, “Establish Physical Contact” by trying to get her blown up.

Kimbor’s negging largely consists of outright abuse and insults, sometimes violent arguments, he even hauls Linda in front of a speeding car so that she gets splashed with mud, right after he sticks her with an expensive dinner tab. The champions of the PUA technique are guys with names like “Mystery” and “Style”, so they already sound like third-string supervillains … late Nineties villains, mind you, but who knows, maybe these guys are the modern-day Legion of Doom, providing the Legion of Doom headquarters blares Smashmouth and reeks of Axe.

"You're going to jail for treating women exactly like comic books taught you to treat them!"

Ultimately, when Kimbor dumps Supergirl, the action turns a little convoluted as it begins to justify the cover illustration; Supergirl takes Kimbor to outer space, inside a giant fake space-dragon, shows him a garden of stone statues, reveals that those are all her ex-boyfriends and she turns them to stone to punish them for breaking her heart, starts to turn Kimbor to stone, whereupon Brainiac reveals himself for some reason I dunno, and then Supergirl admits that the last four pages of nonsense was, indeed, nonsense and just hauls Kimbor to Earth jail for being a dick. A blow against the patriarchy if ever there were one!

I said last month that, were it not for the actions that led up to it, Cardinal O'Brien's very public fall from grace would've been the highlight of 2013 for me. What actions was it that made me a little more reluctant to gloat? Was it the fact he'd hurt so many people with his aggressive and hurtful language in opposition to LGBT freedom? Nope, though he did. 

2004:

VIENNA, Austria – Even if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq, the U.S.-led war was justified because it eliminated the threat that Saddam Hussein might again resort to “evil chemistry and evil biology,” Attorney General John Ashcroft said Monday.

Saddam’s willingness to use such weapons was sufficient cause to overthrow his regime, Ashcroft told reporters, alluding to the use of chemical and biological arms against Iraqi Kurds in 1988 and during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

“Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of U.N. resolutions,” Ashcroft said.

(AP report)

2014:

God, of course I remember the sixties. Being young in those days…there’s just no way to convey the way it felt, unless you were there. Kennedy had gotten the whole country excited about science again, with the moon shot and the Civilian Corps. There was a sense that science was something noble and important, that it was as heroic a calling as being a soldier or a fireman or a captain of industry. We were only little kids then, of course, but Kennedy had inspired a whole generation. Hearing his speeches, watching the Apollo team on television, reading about people like Einstein and Von Braun — that was the fuel for my dreams, and the dreams of my friends. We were born and raised on the idea that science was something to be proud of.

But don’t get me wrong — it wasn’t just popular science that excited us. We weren’t just attracted by the sexy stuff like the space program, or national defense. We were interested in everything; the whole gamut of the hard sciences seemed to us an endless array of cabinets waiting to be opened in the world’s biggest candy store. Watson got us interested in genetics; Dorothy Hodgkin was doing exciting things in molecular medicine; and Murray Gell-Mann changed the way we thought about physics. And yes, I won’t deny it. It was a turbulent time. An exciting time. And a lot of us got interested in evil science. It’s not as if we had any shortage of heroes — Von Doom’s work in temporal displacement, Blofeld’s pioneering toxicology experiments, Alice Krippen’s vira-genetic research. With so many thrilling things happening, who can blame us for going into the evil sciences?

In San Francisco in the mid-’70s, we practically started our own Enlightenment, my friends and I. My first roommate, Skip Harley, and my childhood friend Rusty Ignatevsky won a Nobel Prize in Evil Physics in ’79 for their work on the weak particle and its inevitable conquest by the strong particle. Joanna Heinrich, who I dated for a few years in grad school, became one of the most respected names in evil chemistry for her study of covalent bondage and domination. It seemed like everyone in our circle of friends was making a splash in the evil sciences: Bill Ballmer in evil microbiology, Amos Sadler in evil biochemistry, Srina Gandrushar in evil oceanography…I could go on and on. This guy I played squash with, Tim Yohalem, practically invented evil macrotechnology, and even my kid brother Randy, who I always thought was more interested in football and girls, ended up being one of the first evil computer programmers. Not many of us were friendly with the evil mathematicians — all that theoretical stuff was too heady for our practical tastes — but believe me, Berkely turned out some of the best evil math of the last 50 years.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I myself was some kind of titan of science. I was always a nuts-and-bolts type; I felt more empathy for the NASA guys in the short sleeves than I did head-in-the-clouders like Bohr. I could never have been an evil researcher. But I never complained for a minute. Entering the field of evil food chemistry was incredibly rewarding. I was part of some really innovative research teams: the ConAgra team that produced the first lethal strain of triticale; the U.S. government black ops group that bred bananas that could ensnare people in their peels before they were even removed from the trees; and, of course, the pinnacle of my professional career, leading the Blofeld squad that crossbred tuna with fugu. And that wasn’t the only productive field in which you could put evil science to practical use: some of my best friends were evil architects, evil aeronautical engineers, evil radiologists, and evil failure analysts. You’d open up the want ads of the Chronicle, turn to the “Evil Sciences” section, and it would literally be six, eight pages long. It was a golden time.

And, as incredible as it seems, the ’80s were even better. With the advent of personal computers and advances in evil telecommunications, everyone from evil psychiatrists to evil electronics technicians were part of the boom; evil biologists and evil chemists got to put their theories into practice everywhere from Kurdistan to Bhopal. Evil medicine was getting more sophisticated than ever; the magazine racks were stuffed with evil scientific journals, and with Reagan in the White House, the evil defense industry could fund as many dream projects as it wanted. Even my mom got in on the act; only seven years away from retirement and she got a job as an evil x-ray technician at Rossum Memorial Hospital. (There was a commensurate boom about the same time in the evil liberal arts, but I never really saw the point of that. It’s one thing to do important work serving mankind as an evil cryogeneticist or an evil metallurgist, but being an evil music theorist or an evil religious historian seemed sort of lame.)

I don’t really know where it all started to go wrong. Maybe it was Chernobyl; the evil nuclear physicists pretty much lost momentum after that, like there was nowhere to go but down. Maybe it was a political sea change; after ’88, it seemed like all the funding went to evil performers and evil entertainers, and with the National Endowment for the Evil Arts eating up all our grants, we had to look to the private sector for research money. And that’s really how it fell apart. The big corporations, they’re all about the bottom line. They don’t care about the art of evil science or the thrill of pure evil research; they just want to move product. Evil chemists became evil pharmacologists; evil astrophysicists stopped working on orbiting death lasers and got busy making giant billboards in space. Of course, as long as people need to eat, there’ll always be work for an evil food chemist, but it’s just not the same anymore. In the old days, I used to work on bread that was fortified with Strontium-90 and molecular groupings that made a common Slurpee taste like bleach and turn your insides into crystal. Nowadays…well, it pays well, but making zero-nutrition coal-based energy bars as a tie-in for the new Hunger Games movie doesn’t deliver the same kind of kick.

I thought things would get better with Bush in the White House. Pro-science, pro-spending and pro-evil…he seemed like a dream come true for us. But then his flunkies are talking about evil chemistry and evil biology like they were something to be ashamed of, and when he finally came out with a proposal for a manned Mars mission? Lots of talk about putting a man on the surface of the red planet; not a word about performing horrible medical experiments on him once he gets there. And this new guy…he likes his sciences like he likes his national defense:  soft.  I’ll take a job at Kmart before you catch me being an evil economist or an evil sociologist.  I don’t know. Days like this I wonder if I shouldn’t have just done what my cousin Ben did. Evil plastic surgery…now that’s a field that’s going somewhere.

I was planning on hitting another hornets' nest with a baseball bat this week just to keep you amused (candidate topics: why Libertarians are like Leninists; how to solve the housing crisis (and why it won't happen); the end of the American Century), but my ability to cope with delusional narcissists and real estate agents is running critically low right now. I am 70,000 words into the first draft of a 100,000 word novel, which is great, except that I really want to get it finished by January 28th—and I'm about to take three compulsory days off writing (because family stuff).

So instead, I want you all to pitch in and try to come up with the best caption for this really cute cat photo I found on reddit. Such teeth, very hairless, wow!

Maybe some enterprising cipherpunks can base a cryptocurrency on it ...

Okay, so the Supreme Court has put a hold on further Gay Marriages in Utah pending an appeal of the ruling that allowed them to proceed. I didn't like that but I can kinda understand it.

Then today, the government in Utah said that not only will no further licenses to marry be granted to same-sex couples but the marriages already performed of man and man or woman and woman are no longer to be recognized. In other words, they weren't valid even though they were valid when the state issued these people licenses to wed. On the other hand, couples who obtained new drivers' licenses under new married names can keep them.

The Attorney General said, "Please understand this position is not intended to comment on the legal status of those same-sex marriages — that is for the courts to decide." But of course, refusing to recognize a marriage is commenting on its legal status. It's changing it from an actual marriage to TBD.

Has this ever happened anywhere? Has any couple, straight or gay, ever gone down to a courthouse, obtained a marriage license from the state, entered into Holy Matrimony, then been told, "Whoa! We're not sure if we had the power to issue you that license we issued so for the time being, let's pretend for the time being you aren't married"?

I understand that the state's position may be mandated by the wording of the laws that are in place but, boy, does this just point up how ridiculous it is to have any of these laws and not just let consenting adults marry each other. What about a couple that abstained from having pre-marital sex? I think that's what you're supposed to do in Utah, right? So they refrain until they're married and once they're married, they consummate the marriage with a lot of sex. That's also what you're supposed to do in Utah, right? And then the state says, "Whoops! Maybe you weren't married!"

Hasn't the state just retroactively turned marriage into adultery? Or something like that…