Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2007

  • He’s Baaack!

    Dylan Evans, I mean. I’ve mentioned him before, as he does seem to write an awful lot of what strikes me as the purest codswallop. He’s popped up again in today’s Guardian. This time his thesis is that the boisterous play that was once an accepted feature of boys’ behaviour is now ruthlessly curbed by a feminist-inspired thought police. Cough. As one of the female commentors on his piece so aptly says:
    Oh for goodness sake – when will boys get over the fear that we’re going to chop their willies off!
    Quite. 

  • Bankrupt Moral Capital

    I see that yesterday’s Observer carried a piece by Richard Harries (ex-Bishop of Oxford, and now Lord Harries of Pentregarth) defending his friend, Richard Dawkins, against those who claim that morality is not possible without religion. He summarises some of the arguments that Dawkins has given to state that it is possible to be moral without God. Naturally, Harries, as a believer, then makes the sideways move of stating that:
    …all of us, whatever we believe or do not believe, have been created in the image of God and this means we have an ability not only to think, but to have some insight into what is right and what is wrong.
    A case of "heads I win, tails you lose", it seems to me.
     
    But then he goes on to use another argument that I had not come across before (I lead a sheltered life): the argument of moral capital. He says:
    First, many people who have strong moral commitments without any religious foundation were shaped by parents or grandparents for whom morality and religion were fundamentally bound up. Moreover, many of those in the forefront of progressive political change, who have abandoned religion, have been driven by a humanism that has been essentially built up by our Christian heritage as Charles Taylor has recently brought out in his magisterial study, A Secular Age. How far are we living on moral capital?
    This does strike me as a rather shaky proposition. I am reminded of a somewhat similar argument used by those who are not in favour of same-sex marriage, because it will destroy traditional marriage. It’s as though they think there is only a fixed amount of love to go round… Moral capital seems to be an equally dubious idea. The philosopher Stephen Law examines the concept further here and here, and comes to the conclusion that:
    …the most serious difficulty with this move is that it’s simply unjustified. Why suppose all these ethically committed atheists are living off the religious capital built up by previous generations, and that this capital must inevitably run out, with disastrous consequences? What’s the evidence for this claim? We are offered none. Except of course for some vague hand-waving in the direction of the moral malaise. But as it’s precisely the moral malaise argument that morality can’t be sustained without religion that this “religious capital” claim is supposed to salvage, the moral malaise argument can’t then be used to support the religious capital claim. That would be circular reasoning.  

  • Plus Ça Change…

    I see that my old colleagues in Shell IT are faced with yet more major changes. I don’t envy them one little bit.

  • The Infinite O.Z.

    Interesting "infinite" zoom picture inspired by an American TV series, which may, or may not, be worth a look as well…

  • So It Goes… II

    Double damn. John Moore was present at Benazir Bhutto’s last moments. Tragic and terrifying, but also the moment to affirm that those responsible shall not prevail.

  • Tim Meets Sweeney

    Matthew Cheney, over at Mumpsimus, gives his thoughts on Tim Burton’s adaptation of Sweeney Todd. It rachets up my anticipation. This is a film I want to see.

  • Winter Solstice At Newgrange

    Here’s a fascinating post about the tomb at Newgrange in Ireland, where the rays of the rising sun on the winter solstice strike inside the tomb chamber. There’s also a live webcast of the winter solstice at Newgrange in 2007. As typical for our modern civilisation, the people chosen to be in the chamber when the rising sun strikes inside the chamber were selected by lottery.

  • So It Goes…

    Damn. Not entirely unexpected, but a dark day all the same.

  • Voyage of the Damned

    Well, I, along with apparently most of the population of the UK, watched the Doctor Who Special on Christmas Day. To be honest, I wasn’t all that impressed. Too many bangs and crashes and creaky plot devices, I thought. This interpretation by Cavalorn hits the mark, I think.

  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

    When the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was released, there were some real stinkers of reviews; mostly, but not all, from die-hard fans. As I quoted at the time:

    "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won’t believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular – but that’s just peanuts to the Hitchhiker’s movie. Listen.

    And so on…" 

    So when the Beeb showed it as one of the films for Christmas the other night, I decided I had to see for myself whether it really was as bad as some people made out. And, at the end of it, I give it a 7/10 score. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly not the stinker that some have claimed.

    Yes, there are some odd missteps in it, for example of Ford Prefect turning up with a shopping trolley full of beer at the beginning – why on earth would he have done that, when they then go off to the pub for the six pints?

    Another misstep is the excision of some of Douglas Adams’ great lines. For example, the unforgivable castration of the great riff on the display of the council plans. The original was:

    "`…You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.’
    `But the plans were on display…’
    `On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’
    `That’s the display department.’
    `With a torch.’
    `Ah, well the lights had probably gone.’
    `So had the stairs.’
    `But look you found the notice didn’t you?’
    `Yes,’ said Arthur, `yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".’"

    In the film, this is unaccountably replaced with:

    "’These plans have been on display at the planning office for a year.’
    ‘On display? I had to go down to a cellar.’"

    Not quite the same impact, it seems to me.

    I was also none too impressed with some of the casting choices, which seemed to me to reflect more on Hollywood’s whims rather than what Adams would have wanted for what is quintessentially British humour. So Mos Def, Sam Rockwell and Zooey Deschanel did not really work for me. On the other hand, Martin Freeman was a good choice for Arthur Dent, while Stephen Fry and Bill Nighy fitted the roles of the Guide and Slartibartfast to perfection. I felt less certain about Alan Rickman as Marvin; he seemed to bring an edge of unnecessary sarcasm to a character who, it seems to me, is a genuine zoophobic depressive.

    Some reviewers have poured scorn on the Humma Kavula character, played by John Malkovich, on the grounds that the character did not appear in the original material. But apparently, Douglas Adams himself wrote the character in especially for the film. Given that Adams was an atheist, his portrayal of Kavula as a "semi-insane missionary" seems rather fitting, and Malkovich is genuinely creepy in the role.

    The look of the film was genuinely good, in particular the Vogons, their architecture and their bureacracy. There were strong echoes of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil here, I thought. The chief Vogon, Commander Kwaltz (nicely voiced by Ian McNeice), reminded me strongly of Sir Patrick Moore; almost to the point where I wonder if that was the intention… And the Magrathean factory floor was stunning (particularly after the humour of the rickety "ghost train" start).

    The graphics used in the Guide have been somewhat updated from those created for the BBC TV series, but they have recognisably the same style, which is a good thing.

    And there were some nice touches. For example, giving Simon Jones (who played the original Arthur Dent) a cameo role as the Magrathean recording, and the appearance of the Marvin android from the BBC TV series as an extra in one scene. Many more exist, as described in the IMDb’s Trivia page for the film.

    All in all, I enjoyed the film.

  • Could Do Better

    I should have done better than this, but some of the clips were too tricky for me…
     
    Take the Sci fi sounds quiz

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    Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz canon s5 is

     

  • My Feelings Exactly

    I think that this cartoon by Martin Rowson sums up my feelings about Blair and his faith pretty well.

  • Speaking for the Future

    Once again, over at BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh posts another interesting item. This time, it’s a long interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, a writer of Science Fiction. It contains a great deal of common sense, which, alas, is not always quite so common as it should be. Example:
    Robinson: It’s a failure of imagination to think that climate change is going to be an escape from jail – and it’s a failure in a couple of ways.
     
    For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.
     
    It’s easy to imagine people who are bored in the modern techno-surround, as I call it, and they’re bored because they have not fully comprehended that they’re still primates, that their brains grew over a million-year period doing a certain suite of activities, and those activities are still available. Anyone can do them; they’re simple. They have to do with basic life support and basic social activities unboosted by technological means.
     
    And there’s an addictive side to this. People try to do stupid technological replacements for natural primate actions, but it doesn’t quite give them the buzz that they hoped it would. Even though it looks quite magical, the sense of accomplishment is not there. So they do it again, hoping that the activity, like a drug, will somehow satisfy the urge that it’s supposedly meant to satisfy. But it doesn’t. So they do it more and more – and they fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when they could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour.  
    Quite.

  • Old Photos

    Geoff Manaugh, over at BLDGBLOG, stumbles across a veritable treasure chest of old photos of the UK on the web. Wonderful to see that some of them were taken in the Isle of Man.

  • Losing the Knack

    Near where we live, there’s an open field that has street lighting installed in it. At first, I thought this somewhat bizarre, until I twigged what it was – a natural ice rink. The field gets flooded, and in cold weather, becomes the local ice rink. After a week of sub-zero temperatures, this weekend it became the centre of much activity. But it was noticeable that the most accomplished skaters seemed to be people of the older generations. Most Dutch people of my age grew up when winters were almost invariably colder, and learning to skate was a natural part of growing up – just like learning to ride a bike. But the opportunities for skating on natural ice these days seem to be fewer and farther between. Hence there’s a whole generation who have never learned to skate…
     
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  • In Praise of Panto

    Aphra Behn pens a pæan of praise to that great British institution: the Christmas Panto. Quite right, too.

  • Duuuh!

    There is a UK comedian called Jasper Carrott who, when faced with human idiocy, sums it up with a certain gesticulation whilst uttering the immortal word: Dickhead.
     
    He came to mind today when I read a Microsoft Knowledgebase article reporting on an issue with Windows Home Server. The article contains the advice:
    Make sure that you have a backup copy of any important program files before you store these files on a system that is running Windows Home Server.
    Errm, doesn’t this blow a rather large hole in the raison d’etre of Windows Home Server? An environment that exists primarily for the purpose of making backup copies of important program files?
     
    Talk about shooting oneself in the foot…
     

  • Don’t Try This At Home

    I was going to write that I find it amazing that some people (generally US politicians) can claim, with a straight face, that waterboarding is not torture. On second thoughts, it’s not amazing at all, it merely feeds my misanthropy.
     
    That notwithstanding, what is the experience really like? Syclla will lead you to the depths of Hell and tell you. Now, torture or not? Frankly, what I would like for Christmas is for all those who claim that waterboarding is not torture to be put through the process. The rest of us can wait until it’s over and then come by and take a survey.

  • The Tastes of Hell

    Liz, over at Gastronomy Domine, goes far beyond the call of duty when she subjects herself to tasting the various chemically-enhanced liquids marketed by the Coca-Cola Corporation around the globe. Rather her than me.

  • Animator vs Animation