The Running Man

How am I going to stay fit over christmas? I'm going to go over to the house of whoever wins this Wii and jolly well use their fitness software!

Get Well, Sir.

The 'media' focus shifts temporarily to report the really dean news that longtime buddy "The Bong" (below) was pranged in his car by a 120mph nutter last week, and broke his leg 'n' pelvis. Positive things to focus on:

• It could have been alot worse, at that speed.

• The dick who rammed him was fleeing from the law, got caught, and is going to prison, where he'll most likely be somebody's plaything.
  
  
• There'll be some compensation dollars in the pipeline.
  

In the meantime, though, please send your prayers and positive brain messages towards Brother Bong. He deserves them, being awesome.

Congrat-Krill-ations!

A Savage wedding is imminent!

Rupert proposes to Krilly on the Pont Neuf in Paris, and a strong addition is made to Team Savage.

Congratulations and Felicitations abound!

God help us.

I sincerely hope the planned movie adaptation of Paradise Lost never hits the screen.

I can think of no scenario which will end well for this poem and its legacy. If the Christian Right sends its peons in droves to see it, we'll get them all whining on about how it strays from the literal biblical texts, about how it makes Satan a hero. Or, perhaps worse, a few might attempt to claim the poem's more conservative content (Eve's centrality in the Fall, anyone?) as possessing the authority of scripture... which it don't have.

What the film won't have is the awesome density and restraint of the text. The article's parallels to Troy (2004) are appropriate: it is not valid to present this text by dramatising it, just as a silent 168k GIF version of Star Wars is an echo of an echo of an echo of the original's grandeur.

I won't even start on how the producers intend to convey the political, theological and personal context of this blind, penniless, king-killing zealot's work. Paradise Lost may well be the most complex piece in English literature outside of Joyce or Hamlet, and the thought of mega-churched hicks appearing on Fox to denounce it after investing only 100 minutes of their lives fills me with impious rage.

Good. Very good.

I'd been getting worried about the implications of the religious hatred law, now thankfully defeated.

To me it seemed that drawing parallels between this law and race hatred legislation was like trying to include Intelligent Design in the Science classroom. A race, we all agree, is something you can't decide, can't change, and which says nothing concrete about how you behave or treat others. A religion, on the other hand, will often be the defining factor in your behaviour - and a bad interpretation of it should rightly be criticised.

Thank you, Mr. Atkinson.

Cross fertilization.

Y'all should check out "The Media Mew", the mega-blog by Savs associate and Johnny Depp-lookalike Jake the Peg.


I'm a kind of roving correspondent, with a particular mandate to report on movies, music, comedy and wrasslin'.

Yeah!

Narrowing tastes?

S'funny, my judgements on whether to see films or not are now pretty snap: I honestly never gave 10 seconds thought to actually seeing The Island despite the presence of 2 fave actors of mine, but a gawky, geeky little film like Thumbsucker - marketed using the Sideways/Huckabees template - pretty much has me at hello.

Wonder how many You, Me and Everyone We Knows i have to see before I learn my lesson?

))<=>((

Beautiful pretentious quote, btw, from director Mike Mills in the above article:

"The marketing thing pissed me off. It shows deep disregard for the audience, for life."

and then, later, the interviewer notes:

"I have to pop out of the room where we are talking. When I return, he is filming the bubbles in my drink with a tiny digital camera."

What we done on the PGCE.

Task: to write a poem, in the style of Blake's "Tyger," asking questions of an animal.

Respect due to co-authors Mark and Wendy.

Who rang the town?
Who? Who? Who? Who?
Who rang? Wu Tang?
Who? Who? Who? Who?
You rang the town.
Th'orangutan.

You got an ...ology? You're a scientist!

"...it was 1969 when the Scientologists appealed to be considered a religion and it was decided at that time that their chapels did not constitute a church and were not a religion."

Oral Questions to the Minister of State for the Home Office, House of Lords, 17 December 1996, Hansard, vol. 760, cols. 1392-1394

So says the UK government, whatever that's worth. But the visit I made this week to the Church of Scientology on Tottenham Court Road - and the Abu Ghraib style electromachine ordeal that they put Jake the Peg through - got me thinking about religious recruiting tactics.

[DISCLAIMER: These are my personal opinions and observations. They're based on my own experience, and I'm the first to admit I know nothing about the insides of Scientology. Hopefully that's how it'll stay.]

So the woman offers me a stress test. Having previously decided that I'll be the uncooperative 'bad cop', I start firing the questions.

- What happens in this test?

- I take this machine, she replied, and hit you over the head with it.

This might have been meant as an icebreaker - a familiar "relax, silly!" - but to me it sure seemed defensive... Passive-aggressive, even. Jake sat down and clutched the electrodes: he was so nervous, she had to turn the dial up to 11 to get a zero control reading.

The eye-contact from the woman, Jake told me, was peircing and constant. She visibly angered when two passers-by scoffed "Church of Tom Cruise" in her direction.

Jake asked her what changes Scientology had made to her life and she told him it had made her more confident in social situations, and it'd given her life purpose.

This was what I used to say when someone asked me that on an Alpha course.

Now I'm not saying that the Alpha and the Scientology are at all the same: for one I believe the content of one is true and the other is balls. But I did notice the similarities in style re: the recruitment tactics, and wondered about the sense of using laypeople as the first point of reference for curious investigators. When I led Alpha groups I certainly spoke past the level of my understanding, and was encouraged to do so by the powers that H.T.B. Now I found myself on the receiving end, I noticed the creepiness and the unconvincing tidiness of that approach.

Then again, maybe this unconvincing persuasion is the best way of saving more people from getting infected by too-shallow worldviews.