Good old Bertie Basset al Mick McGahey returned to a hero's welcome in Libya tonight. Thank goodness we live in a country where justice is tempered with mercy. He’s served his time... well, a little bit of time, anyway, and as he is dying, it is surely right for us to free him at once. Even as we speak, prayers are being offered up to St Ernest of Saunders and St Augusto of Valparaiso for his miraculous recovery.
Some may say this contrasts oddly with Jack Straw’s decision in the case of Ronnie Biggs, just lately reversing a judgment he had made only a month ago never to release him Biggs, of course, was “wholly unrepentant” about his actions, said Straw, while, by complete contrast, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi has always insisted on his innocence.
Age is a factor, too. Biggs is a mere 79, whereas the Libyan is an elderly 57. Fortunately, unlike many barbarous, uncivilised countries, Britain is free of any statute of limitations. Thus Biggs could be locked up the moment he arrived home even though his sentence would have been finished with years before, and his crime written off as being just too long ago in places like the degenerate United States. Thank heavens Britons could sleep soundly knowing that this vile old man was safely behind bars, just as they can now that Fred Basset al-Mugabe is free as a bird in Libya.
Well, those people who carp about this decision tonight should remember something important. Ronnie Biggs committed a foul, filthy and inhuman crime. He stole bags of money! He savagely parted bankers and businessmen from their loved ones. They were never to see them again.
Some of this cash was to have been destroyed by the Royal Mint, so it could have been included in Britain’s famous Back Hand Aid Programme and helped needy politicians and civil servants in their retirement. Biggs cruelly prevented this. He is an evil, evil man, and none should pity him.
On the other hand, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi never stole a penny. All he did was help remove a couple of hundred perfectly ordinary people from the surplus population. It is not as though there is any shortage of them! He did, admittedly, cost an airline company the price of a new plane, so it is right that he should have served eight years for that, but surely enough is enough.
Thursday, 20 August 2009
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
Hard-Boiled Defective
I can’t believe it of him. Talk about feet of clay. The other day I picked up a curiosity. A Hercule Poirot mystery I had never previously encountered. The Labours of Hercules it was called. Strange, I said to myself. I thought I knew all of them, but that title is news to me. There had never been a film of it, with the immortal Peter Ustinov, nor a TV version with the actor whose performance seems to have surgically moulded him into Poirot - David Suchet - nor yet a radio adaptation with the excellent John Moffat. It was an old edition, circa 1970, although the fly-leaf recorded that it was first published in 1939. So, it had been in print thirty odd years but faded since. I wondered why. It was on a bric-a-brac stall in a small market town, far from London and very cheaply priced. I bought it and tucked in on the way home, but soon discovered why it is somewhat less famous than other classic Poirots.
“Oh, I know,” you’ll be thinking. “It’s going to be like with that other famous Belgian, Tin Tin. It’ll be Poirot in the Congo - right?” Actually, no. It is politically dated, but not in that way. If anything, this one is worse...
I was highly impressed with the problem story, at first. Hercule is called in by the ‘People’s Party’ to deal with exactly the circumstances that overtook Westminster this year. Soon to be accused of presiding over a massive plundering of public funds for their own enrichment, party grandees admit that all the allegations are true, but can the story be suppressed? It’s so prescient, it’s almost spooky. The story is even called ‘The Augean Stables’! A passage from seventy years ago that sounds like it has come straight out of today’s papers.
I am sure that many politicians besieged by the expenses scandal might have wished for some help from a legendary detective to rid them of their duck house and moat-cleaning shame. Weirdly, Agatha Christie had foreseen all, in 1939, and put her top man on the case. So what happened?
Ah, well, that is where the clay feet come in. Poirot does exactly as he is told. He sets about ruining the newspaper that is preparing to air the story by feeding them a fake ‘scoop’ that he himself has engineered. They seize the bait, print the posed ‘sex scandal’ photos he has given them, and in no time Poirot has them in court for libel, trotting out a host of actors he has primed to testify the version of events that suit his clients. Success! The newspaper is forced to close as the case goes against its owners. Now no-one will believe their real story! Hurrah for Poirot! Lashings of ginger beer all round!
I turned the page, waiting for the O Henry ending, the one where Poirot reveals a far worse scandal that he has uncovered, one which will send the whole rotten People’s Party to prison forever. It was not there. I was aghast. There was no trace of irony in the mystery. Hercule Poirot, the great detective, had lied, set a ‘honey-trap’ for investigative reporters, fabricated evidence, wasted police time, solicited others to perjure themselves, faked a scandal to ruin a campaigning newspaper... and done all this purely and simply to make it safe for politicians to steal as much money from the tax-payer as they could carry! This was the moral of the story: helping good chaps in government to plunder the public purse in secret is a jolly good thing, don’cha know!
Oh, Hercule, Hercule... how you sold yourself! No wonder Ustinov, Suchet and Moffat never enacted this one. Those journalists were just like your famous compatriot! It is as if you were helping crooks that Tin Tin was trying to expose! That’s how ghastly this is! Maybe your readers cheered your actions in 1939, but today, as events repeat themselves, your reputation would look about as good as Hazel Blear’s car does right now, and you wouldn’t be using your little gray cells... you’d be in one.
“Oh, I know,” you’ll be thinking. “It’s going to be like with that other famous Belgian, Tin Tin. It’ll be Poirot in the Congo - right?” Actually, no. It is politically dated, but not in that way. If anything, this one is worse...
I was highly impressed with the problem story, at first. Hercule is called in by the ‘People’s Party’ to deal with exactly the circumstances that overtook Westminster this year. Soon to be accused of presiding over a massive plundering of public funds for their own enrichment, party grandees admit that all the allegations are true, but can the story be suppressed? It’s so prescient, it’s almost spooky. The story is even called ‘The Augean Stables’! A passage from seventy years ago that sounds like it has come straight out of today’s papers.
I am sure that many politicians besieged by the expenses scandal might have wished for some help from a legendary detective to rid them of their duck house and moat-cleaning shame. Weirdly, Agatha Christie had foreseen all, in 1939, and put her top man on the case. So what happened?
Ah, well, that is where the clay feet come in. Poirot does exactly as he is told. He sets about ruining the newspaper that is preparing to air the story by feeding them a fake ‘scoop’ that he himself has engineered. They seize the bait, print the posed ‘sex scandal’ photos he has given them, and in no time Poirot has them in court for libel, trotting out a host of actors he has primed to testify the version of events that suit his clients. Success! The newspaper is forced to close as the case goes against its owners. Now no-one will believe their real story! Hurrah for Poirot! Lashings of ginger beer all round!
I turned the page, waiting for the O Henry ending, the one where Poirot reveals a far worse scandal that he has uncovered, one which will send the whole rotten People’s Party to prison forever. It was not there. I was aghast. There was no trace of irony in the mystery. Hercule Poirot, the great detective, had lied, set a ‘honey-trap’ for investigative reporters, fabricated evidence, wasted police time, solicited others to perjure themselves, faked a scandal to ruin a campaigning newspaper... and done all this purely and simply to make it safe for politicians to steal as much money from the tax-payer as they could carry! This was the moral of the story: helping good chaps in government to plunder the public purse in secret is a jolly good thing, don’cha know!
Oh, Hercule, Hercule... how you sold yourself! No wonder Ustinov, Suchet and Moffat never enacted this one. Those journalists were just like your famous compatriot! It is as if you were helping crooks that Tin Tin was trying to expose! That’s how ghastly this is! Maybe your readers cheered your actions in 1939, but today, as events repeat themselves, your reputation would look about as good as Hazel Blear’s car does right now, and you wouldn’t be using your little gray cells... you’d be in one.
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
Seen it all before...
“Jordan’s Naked Hols Romp... Amazing Pictures...” yelled the cover of today’s Daily Star. Really? I mean, really “amazing”? There’s no doubting what the pictures will show: topless glamour model Jordan naked, having a “romp” (I believe that is a journalistic expression referring to sexual intimacy, m’lud) on her holidays. What larks! But how exactly do these pictures qualify as “amazing”? Do they feature Jordan “romping” with Elvis? Bigfoot? A space alien? The Duke of Edinburgh? Those images might well be amazing, though not because of Jordan. The sight of any of these individuals involved in “naked romp” on holiday would be amazing in and of itself, but the presence or otherwise of Jordan would produce scarcely any additional amazement value. Having sex in flagrante, on holiday is well within the bounds of what might reasonably be considered expected behaviour for Jordan, and as for being naked that is, after all, her metier.
But doncha, eh, wanna see Jordan, like nude and, you know what I mean, going at it? Yes, I know what you mean, but ho-hum. It’s not like I haven’t seen Jordan naked before. Of course, I haven’t ever actively sought out such images, but they are impossible to avoid. They are as ubiquitous these days as the adverts for Chelsea Lately that are plastered all across London in the most over-the-top campaign for a TV show I have seen since the Living channel scooped the rights to Season 5 of Will and Grace. Actually, I am a bit unsure about the image they have chosen. I don’t really know it’s doing them any favours. Yes, that picture is on every third billboard in this city right now. Mind you, it got me to watch last night, just to see if the show itself could be as appalling as the poster. It did at least answer one question for me - what Whose Line Is It Anyway? regular Greg Proops is up to these days. He is one of Chelsea’s “Round Table Regulars” it would seem. The show is not exactly funny, but it gives a strong sense of having been taped before a live studio audience... in 1981. Greg’s new hair-style - a buffant mullet - adds to the retro feel here no end. Hey, this is a show for men who love to leer up women’s skirts and drool over their gussets... what could be more 80s than that? Let’s all have a holiday from the 21st century, just like Jordan, yeah!
As for Jordan, well, if her snaps were to show her demurely dressed, reading a book or watching the races from Goodwood on TV while having a crafty fag, or talking to a plastic surgeon about having her breasts restored to their original size while not making any attempt whatever to seek publicity for herself, perhaps even shielding her face from the cameras... now that would amaze me!
But doncha, eh, wanna see Jordan, like nude and, you know what I mean, going at it? Yes, I know what you mean, but ho-hum. It’s not like I haven’t seen Jordan naked before. Of course, I haven’t ever actively sought out such images, but they are impossible to avoid. They are as ubiquitous these days as the adverts for Chelsea Lately that are plastered all across London in the most over-the-top campaign for a TV show I have seen since the Living channel scooped the rights to Season 5 of Will and Grace. Actually, I am a bit unsure about the image they have chosen. I don’t really know it’s doing them any favours. Yes, that picture is on every third billboard in this city right now. Mind you, it got me to watch last night, just to see if the show itself could be as appalling as the poster. It did at least answer one question for me - what Whose Line Is It Anyway? regular Greg Proops is up to these days. He is one of Chelsea’s “Round Table Regulars” it would seem. The show is not exactly funny, but it gives a strong sense of having been taped before a live studio audience... in 1981. Greg’s new hair-style - a buffant mullet - adds to the retro feel here no end. Hey, this is a show for men who love to leer up women’s skirts and drool over their gussets... what could be more 80s than that? Let’s all have a holiday from the 21st century, just like Jordan, yeah!
As for Jordan, well, if her snaps were to show her demurely dressed, reading a book or watching the races from Goodwood on TV while having a crafty fag, or talking to a plastic surgeon about having her breasts restored to their original size while not making any attempt whatever to seek publicity for herself, perhaps even shielding her face from the cameras... now that would amaze me!
Sunday, 2 August 2009
The Chicken and the Yegg
I hadn’t realised the new film Public Enemies was based on a book, nor that the book was a straight history of the gangsters of the 1930s. I turned up a copy of it the other day and have not been able to put it down since. The revelation in it is that although I was vaguely familiar with the names and exploits of the prominent do-badders of the period, like Bonnie and Clyde, Baby-Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger, I never realised that they were all operating at the same time... nor that most of them knew one another. The gangs were in each other’s pockets the whole time. The crest of their crimewave took place during just two years, from 1933 to 1934, and the focus of Brian Burrough’s excellent history is how these ‘supervillains’ pushed the formation and development of the FBI. Out of this remarkable period in Depression-hit America come the stereotypes that informed so much of future crime fiction. I have long suspected that the pantheon of super-criminals of this era fuelled the imaginations of the cartoonists of both Dick Tracy and The Batman which emerged in the 1930s - Bob Kane’s Batman making his first outing in May 1939. Most striking was a reference in a contemporary newspaper to John Dillinger treating one of his many arrests ‘as a joke’. An inspiration for The Joker, perhaps? Certainly Two-Face and Baby Face are not a million miles apart. Pretty Boy Floyd must have been named ironically, as he wasn’t very pretty, indeed to my mind he did bear a vague resemblance to the Penguin, although it is also alleged that he served as the model for Chester Gould’s Flattop Jones. Bonnie and Clyde left mocking poems behind them, a little like The Riddler, maybe?
Without a doubt the idea of the supervillain emerges at the time, stoked by J Edgar Hoover, keen to promote a need for his ‘G-Men’ to combat the rising menace. Dick Tracy is much more the corporate detective, perhaps owing a little to Hoover’s star lawman, the effete and immaculate Melvin Purvis.
I was pleasantly surprised to read how much of Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde actually seemed to be accurate, but I was disappointed to learn that Ma Barker was really a confused little old lady who lived only for her jigsaw puzzles - not the leader of the Barker-Karpis gang by any stretch of the imagination and nothing like the machine-gun toting Bloody Mama, or Ma Grissom in Roger Corman and Robert Aldritch’s versions of her life.
In the case of this outfit, something that has been forgotten is how much the emphasis was placed on kidnapping rather than bank jobs. The bank-robbers (or ‘yeggs’ as they were then called) made no secret of their Robin Hood ambitions, striking at the bankers who had caused the Depression. No prizes, then, for guessing why Michael Mann should be interested in the theme now that there is another great crisis in the banking system, but what sort of response should we expect? Will there be a new generation of supervillains, reincarnations of John Dillinger and Alvin Karpis? I somehow doubt it.
As noted, Karpis and the Barker brothers specialised in kidnapping the sons of mighty business magnates and holding them for extortionate ransoms. In each case, they paid up, anxious to be reunited with their loved ones. I cannot see that working nowadays. Who or what could anyone take away from, say, Fred Goodwin that he could possibly love more than his money? The supervillains of the 1930s were still dealing with robber-barons who had human emotions. I think that is long gone. The monsters of the old days have been reincarnated, but this time ‘Ugly Boy’ Goodwin and ‘Pruneface’ Paulson were running the banks, not robbing them. It’s now like the old Jack Benny radio sketch where a stick-up man points a gun and yells, ‘Your money or your life!’ There follows a long, long silence. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ shouts the stick-up man. ‘I said, your money or your life!’ After another long pause, Jack Benny replies, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ 1940s audiences thought that hilarious, but who would laugh now? With our new breed of super-banksters, there would be no thinking time necessary. ‘Kill the baby!’ they would scream. ‘Save my money!’
Without a doubt the idea of the supervillain emerges at the time, stoked by J Edgar Hoover, keen to promote a need for his ‘G-Men’ to combat the rising menace. Dick Tracy is much more the corporate detective, perhaps owing a little to Hoover’s star lawman, the effete and immaculate Melvin Purvis.
I was pleasantly surprised to read how much of Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde actually seemed to be accurate, but I was disappointed to learn that Ma Barker was really a confused little old lady who lived only for her jigsaw puzzles - not the leader of the Barker-Karpis gang by any stretch of the imagination and nothing like the machine-gun toting Bloody Mama, or Ma Grissom in Roger Corman and Robert Aldritch’s versions of her life.
In the case of this outfit, something that has been forgotten is how much the emphasis was placed on kidnapping rather than bank jobs. The bank-robbers (or ‘yeggs’ as they were then called) made no secret of their Robin Hood ambitions, striking at the bankers who had caused the Depression. No prizes, then, for guessing why Michael Mann should be interested in the theme now that there is another great crisis in the banking system, but what sort of response should we expect? Will there be a new generation of supervillains, reincarnations of John Dillinger and Alvin Karpis? I somehow doubt it.
As noted, Karpis and the Barker brothers specialised in kidnapping the sons of mighty business magnates and holding them for extortionate ransoms. In each case, they paid up, anxious to be reunited with their loved ones. I cannot see that working nowadays. Who or what could anyone take away from, say, Fred Goodwin that he could possibly love more than his money? The supervillains of the 1930s were still dealing with robber-barons who had human emotions. I think that is long gone. The monsters of the old days have been reincarnated, but this time ‘Ugly Boy’ Goodwin and ‘Pruneface’ Paulson were running the banks, not robbing them. It’s now like the old Jack Benny radio sketch where a stick-up man points a gun and yells, ‘Your money or your life!’ There follows a long, long silence. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ shouts the stick-up man. ‘I said, your money or your life!’ After another long pause, Jack Benny replies, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ 1940s audiences thought that hilarious, but who would laugh now? With our new breed of super-banksters, there would be no thinking time necessary. ‘Kill the baby!’ they would scream. ‘Save my money!’
Monday, 27 July 2009
Barefoot in the Head
I had to clamp my hands over my mouth and nose and press hard to stop laughing out loud. I had found this source of merriment by chance while looking for something else and could not believe my eyes. Hooting with hysteria in the middle of the British Library is somewhat frowned upon, but all the same, this scientific paper had to be craziest I had ever encountered. Was it a joke? No, it was in a serious journal. It had been cited by other researchers, too.
Jarl Flensmark has discovered the cause of schizophrenia and it’s right under our feet. That’s right, under our feet, because the cause of schizophrenia is shoes! Shoes are the source of all mental disease! Shoes dampen down eccentric contractions of the foot when walking, and this produces tension signals from Golgi tendon organs. Calamity ensues, because the ‘electrical stimulation of the vermis inhibits the limbic structures and increases neurogenesis, and so do the signals from eccentric contractions...’
And, as we all know, the foot bone’s connected to the heel bone and ‘the use of heeled shoes results in less eccentric contractions with decreased neurogenesis.’ Now hear the word of the Lord! We are starving our brains of vital electricity by wearing shoes! As a result we suffer from depression, epilepsia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, diabetes, and myopia!
Of course, I wondered for a moment whether this had not been written by a schizophrenic, but no. This is peer-reviewed journal, and this article has been picked up by others. An anti-shoe movement must surely follow.
But there is hope... ‘Bicycle riding reduces depression in schizophrenia due to stronger stimulation by improved lengthening contractions of the triceps surae muscles.’
Was it about a bicycle? The spirit of Myles na Gopaleen was alive and well here. A case for the Third Policeman if ever I heard one!
As I gasped for air and wiped the tears from my eyes, I had a moment of disquiet. What if he was right? I have recently become aware of the Barfuss (or ‘barefoot’) movement and even snipped out an article for a friend on the Trentham Gardens Adventure Barfuss Play-Park.
Perhaps there is something to be said for going unshod, as nature intended.
Is humanity’s ill-judged embracing of heeled shoes a devilish plot by the Dolman-Saxlil Shoe Corporation after all?
(Flensmark’s paper, ‘Physical activity, eccentric contractions of plantar flexors, and neurogenesis: Therapeutic potential of flat shoes in psychiatric and neurological disorders’ is to be found in Medical Hypotheses, Volume 73, Issue Number 2, August 2009, pp 130 - 132)
Jarl Flensmark has discovered the cause of schizophrenia and it’s right under our feet. That’s right, under our feet, because the cause of schizophrenia is shoes! Shoes are the source of all mental disease! Shoes dampen down eccentric contractions of the foot when walking, and this produces tension signals from Golgi tendon organs. Calamity ensues, because the ‘electrical stimulation of the vermis inhibits the limbic structures and increases neurogenesis, and so do the signals from eccentric contractions...’
And, as we all know, the foot bone’s connected to the heel bone and ‘the use of heeled shoes results in less eccentric contractions with decreased neurogenesis.’ Now hear the word of the Lord! We are starving our brains of vital electricity by wearing shoes! As a result we suffer from depression, epilepsia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, diabetes, and myopia!
Of course, I wondered for a moment whether this had not been written by a schizophrenic, but no. This is peer-reviewed journal, and this article has been picked up by others. An anti-shoe movement must surely follow.
But there is hope... ‘Bicycle riding reduces depression in schizophrenia due to stronger stimulation by improved lengthening contractions of the triceps surae muscles.’
Was it about a bicycle? The spirit of Myles na Gopaleen was alive and well here. A case for the Third Policeman if ever I heard one!
As I gasped for air and wiped the tears from my eyes, I had a moment of disquiet. What if he was right? I have recently become aware of the Barfuss (or ‘barefoot’) movement and even snipped out an article for a friend on the Trentham Gardens Adventure Barfuss Play-Park.
Perhaps there is something to be said for going unshod, as nature intended.
Is humanity’s ill-judged embracing of heeled shoes a devilish plot by the Dolman-Saxlil Shoe Corporation after all?
(Flensmark’s paper, ‘Physical activity, eccentric contractions of plantar flexors, and neurogenesis: Therapeutic potential of flat shoes in psychiatric and neurological disorders’ is to be found in Medical Hypotheses, Volume 73, Issue Number 2, August 2009, pp 130 - 132)
Friday, 10 July 2009
Ptang! Ptow! Ptath!
For obscure but pertinent reasons I have become highly interested in the works of A.E. van Vogt once again. By chance I picked up an old Panther Books edition of his 1940s space opera The Book of Ptath. It’s a gem.
Nobody ever did utterly insane plots like old A.E van V and this one does not disappoint. A typical van Vogtian superman appears from nowhere, does all of Craig Raine’s ‘Martian’ poet concept forty years early and far better, then goes... oh, I’m bored with the superman discovering his powers thing, I’m going to make him a WWII fighter teleported into the far future... oh, no... er, he’s a reincarnation... It’s 200 million years AD. Er, no, I like ancient Egypt better. There’s a temple and a goddess with super powers too. Oh, no, er, I think I’ll have two goddesses. And there’s a magic chair... a magic chair to turn the superman into a god, if he sits down in it but he has to invade the supercontinent that’s stolen it first, but, er, for some reason he’s just been mistaken for a prince who’s got an army of billions and he’ll do it, but he’s not sure if he’s going to sit down in the chair or not. Only if it the opportunity presents itself. And one of the goddesses wants to kill him... er, no, to save him, er, no, she’s the reincarnation of his lost love... er, no, I think I’ll make her the Nemesis of the other goddess, and she wants to save the superman... or kill him... I’m not sure. Maybe both. And maybe the evil goddess wants him to start the war, or maybe she wants him not to invade after all... or maybe she wants both. Yeah. Both. That’s better...
Like I said, no-one wrote completely raving mad make-it-all-up-as-I-go-along plots like vV, and no-one managed to infuse every word with their own unique crazed brand of man-and-superman triumphant will philosophy better than him... not even Ayn Rand.
The best thing about the edition I have though, is that it features what has to be the laziest piece of SF cover art I have ever seen. Have a look. Is it a many tentacled creature from a black lagoon? Er, no. Is it a scene from a psychedelic freak-out? A little more homespun than that. A household object seen from an unusual angle, would you believe? No need to ask the family, though. Have another, closer look! That’s right! It’s a rubber bathmat!
Does the bathmat play an important part in the drama? It hasn’t so far, but it is so barking bonkers that it would not be out of place.
Nobody ever did utterly insane plots like old A.E van V and this one does not disappoint. A typical van Vogtian superman appears from nowhere, does all of Craig Raine’s ‘Martian’ poet concept forty years early and far better, then goes... oh, I’m bored with the superman discovering his powers thing, I’m going to make him a WWII fighter teleported into the far future... oh, no... er, he’s a reincarnation... It’s 200 million years AD. Er, no, I like ancient Egypt better. There’s a temple and a goddess with super powers too. Oh, no, er, I think I’ll have two goddesses. And there’s a magic chair... a magic chair to turn the superman into a god, if he sits down in it but he has to invade the supercontinent that’s stolen it first, but, er, for some reason he’s just been mistaken for a prince who’s got an army of billions and he’ll do it, but he’s not sure if he’s going to sit down in the chair or not. Only if it the opportunity presents itself. And one of the goddesses wants to kill him... er, no, to save him, er, no, she’s the reincarnation of his lost love... er, no, I think I’ll make her the Nemesis of the other goddess, and she wants to save the superman... or kill him... I’m not sure. Maybe both. And maybe the evil goddess wants him to start the war, or maybe she wants him not to invade after all... or maybe she wants both. Yeah. Both. That’s better...
Like I said, no-one wrote completely raving mad make-it-all-up-as-I-go-along plots like vV, and no-one managed to infuse every word with their own unique crazed brand of man-and-superman triumphant will philosophy better than him... not even Ayn Rand.
The best thing about the edition I have though, is that it features what has to be the laziest piece of SF cover art I have ever seen. Have a look. Is it a many tentacled creature from a black lagoon? Er, no. Is it a scene from a psychedelic freak-out? A little more homespun than that. A household object seen from an unusual angle, would you believe? No need to ask the family, though. Have another, closer look! That’s right! It’s a rubber bathmat!
Does the bathmat play an important part in the drama? It hasn’t so far, but it is so barking bonkers that it would not be out of place.
Sunday, 5 July 2009
Right Herberts
Curious thing... Twice in the same week I have heard, on quite separate and unrelated podcast networks, former oil company executives turned New Age gurus insisting that the idea of oil being a fossil fuel is a mere conspiracy theory. It was the conclusion of just one man more than a hundred years ago. There is no other evidence that it is so, they said. Not only that, they revealed that this opinion is the accepted wisdom of the oil industry. They said this in tones that suggested their own exits from that industry had not changed their belief that oil is not a fossil.
Highly interesting. If oil is not a fossil, then what is it? That coal is a fossil ought to be without doubt, since even I have seen the ghost veins of ancient leaves etched onto the surface of that black stuff. Since you can compress and crack coal into oil does strongly suggest that it is merely an older form of the same fossil.
Yet, it seems, industry insiders are sceptical of this theory. I had never heard this before. I have, though, long wondered why they took the approach to oil that it do, namely one of always assuming they will find more of the stuff and that we should never worry about it running out. I have long wondered why our political leaders act as though there is no crisis coming, as though there will always be plenty of oil forever and infinitely into the future.
They have no Plan B because in their minds, evidently, there is no need for a Plan B. Presumably they must believe that oil is a living substance, that it is still being manufactured, generated by some underground organism that secretes it and fills pockets in the crust as it passes through its tiny burrows.
It dawned on me that I had heard this before. This is the origin of Spice on Dune... Arrakis... Desert Planet. The ‘Little Makers’, deep below the surface generate the beginnings of it, and then the sandworms feed and process their makings into the finished product...
I then remembered that Frank Herbert began his career as an oil company executive, and that Dune is a fantasy version of Arabia, the extraction of Spice based on his own experience on the rigs. Was Herbert telling us the secret theory of oil that industry high-ups believe?
I think he might have been. But is there anything in it?
I do doubt it, but even if it were true, were oil like the everlasting cheese in the Grimm Brothers’ folktale, we are tearing into it at far too great a speed for it ever to regenerate. Their story, after all, ends with no crumb of cheese left for it to regrow, so greedy have the family been to consume it all. Herbert’s novel, though, ends with the Spice provoking a powerful new level of consciousness that spreads across the galaxy... as does a Jihad which leaves billions dead and Dune a lifeless rock. That oil will provoke the former is already evident as the world wakes up to the effect it is having on our planet. Whether Herbert’s second avatar will also follow is another question.
Highly interesting. If oil is not a fossil, then what is it? That coal is a fossil ought to be without doubt, since even I have seen the ghost veins of ancient leaves etched onto the surface of that black stuff. Since you can compress and crack coal into oil does strongly suggest that it is merely an older form of the same fossil.
Yet, it seems, industry insiders are sceptical of this theory. I had never heard this before. I have, though, long wondered why they took the approach to oil that it do, namely one of always assuming they will find more of the stuff and that we should never worry about it running out. I have long wondered why our political leaders act as though there is no crisis coming, as though there will always be plenty of oil forever and infinitely into the future.
They have no Plan B because in their minds, evidently, there is no need for a Plan B. Presumably they must believe that oil is a living substance, that it is still being manufactured, generated by some underground organism that secretes it and fills pockets in the crust as it passes through its tiny burrows.
It dawned on me that I had heard this before. This is the origin of Spice on Dune... Arrakis... Desert Planet. The ‘Little Makers’, deep below the surface generate the beginnings of it, and then the sandworms feed and process their makings into the finished product...
I then remembered that Frank Herbert began his career as an oil company executive, and that Dune is a fantasy version of Arabia, the extraction of Spice based on his own experience on the rigs. Was Herbert telling us the secret theory of oil that industry high-ups believe?
I think he might have been. But is there anything in it?
I do doubt it, but even if it were true, were oil like the everlasting cheese in the Grimm Brothers’ folktale, we are tearing into it at far too great a speed for it ever to regenerate. Their story, after all, ends with no crumb of cheese left for it to regrow, so greedy have the family been to consume it all. Herbert’s novel, though, ends with the Spice provoking a powerful new level of consciousness that spreads across the galaxy... as does a Jihad which leaves billions dead and Dune a lifeless rock. That oil will provoke the former is already evident as the world wakes up to the effect it is having on our planet. Whether Herbert’s second avatar will also follow is another question.
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