iPad

So Apple’s latest offering is the iPad. Mmmm. Not so sure that an A4-ish size iPhone/iTouch is something that anyone really needs. I’m sure it will be a well made piece of kit and will perform well too, as most of Apple’s recent offerings do, but will it really sell? After all the only benefit I can see for a device of this size is the ability to view a magazine size page and being able to download and view lots of magazines or newspapers on one device.

Seems like its just another “must have gadget” rather than a genuinely useful tool. I reckon it’s too big to be a portable book/magazine/newspaper reader and there are smaller higher capacity devices for playing music and video on. For this type of device to catch on there will really need to be a technological breakthrough (graphene?) that makes thinner more flexible devices available – the kind of technology that would allow you to roll your touch-screen tablet up and stick it in a pocket. Then you’d have a must have gadget worth having.

Code

I’m sure lots of people are aware of the Bible Code phenomenon – the idea that meaningful messages are encoded in the text of the Bible. You know, the idea that you take a page of text place all the letters in a matrix (minus the spaces and punctuation) and then you look for a meaningful word amidst the letters. If you find one, you then look for another meaningful word related to and appearing near or across the first word. Find a second and look for a third, etc. If you’ve found a message you’ll come up with something (and BTW I’m making this something up) along the lines of “twin towers from the sky struck down” or something equally Yoda-esque.

These codes have (retrospectively) been used to show that the Bible predicts things like Hitler’s rise, nuclear wars, earthquakes, etc.

It’s all baloney, of course, being a product of coincidence as you can pull the same trick with any book or other block of text as demonstrated by a recent post on Science, Reason and Critical Thinking.

The Walking Dead

Another piece of good news on the zombie front is that Frank Darabont will be making a pilot for a tv series based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series The Walking Dead. I’ve managed to read borrowed copies of volumes 1 and 2 of the trade paperback version of this series which include The Walking Dead comics #1 thru #6, and #7 thru #12 respectively and they were very, very good.

If Darabont does as good a job with this material as he has done with Stephen King’s [Rita Hayworth and] The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and the outstanding The Mist then this play to bring zombies to the small screen should indeed prove to be something special. No idea how long it would be after completion before it reached the screens and/or DVD players over here in the UK but at least by then I should have managed to catch up with the rest of the series.

Executive producer on the pilot will be Gale Anne Hurd (Terminator 1 thru 3, Armageddon, etc).

Cool.

Survival Of The Dead

Another entertainment offering I’ll be looking forward to is Survival Of The Dead, the next instalment of George A. Romero’s zombie franchise. There are a lot of zombie films doing the rounds at the moment bit in my opinion Romero always offers something a bit different, lacing his contributions to the genre with social commentary, wickedly inventive humour and characters you feel fully engaged with.

I’d like to see this one in the cinema as it’s a big (relatively) budget affair but I don’t expect it to screen in my local theatre so I’ll probably have to wait for the DVD. Unless it happens to be on general release during one of my infrequent mainland outings.

That said, I’ve only seen it’s most recent predecessors Land Of The Dead and Diary Of The Dead on DVD and still enjoyed them immensely. Though on looking round the interweb today for more info on Survival, I find myself wondering if I’ve seen different versions of those two movies to almost everyone else. Everywhere I turn I find comments and reviews that slam Land and Diary as awful and paint Romero as destroying the genre he created. Other remarks suggest that these later movies contradict the rules established in the first three films (Night, Dawn and Day). And many of the remarks make me think that those making them haven’t really got a clue what they are talking about – especially when the hold the remake of Dawn up as being a better example the genre than either Land or Diary. Mmm, IMO the Dawn remake is an excellent movie but it focuses on the biggest contradiction of all in zombie lore, that of the running zombie.

Further just about all the detractors of Land and Diary also complain that they don’t contain enough action and gore. They also say they are too focused on characters, on humanising the zombies through empathy, on attacking the Bush administration in Land and passing other comments on the nature of our behaviour towards each other. Which clinches it for me – the people making these arguments definitely don’t know what they are talking about.

Neither Night, Dawn or Day are action movies and are all very much of their time when it comes to their gore content. They are all dramas with a strong emphasis on character and social comment set against a backdrop of graphic horror and occasional black humour. Each film introduces an increasing amount of empathy toward the zombies who, despite steadily decomposing, gradually evolve from the shambling monsters of Night, through the instinctive memory that leads them all to the Mall in Dawn, into the saluting, pistol-totting Bub in Day who, although “trained” to an extent, seems to know both how to salute a man in uniform and which is the business end of a gun. Land very much continues Romero’s own evolutionary process in that regard with the introduction of Big Daddy who not only thinks but is able to communicate through a rudimentary vocabulary of grunts and gestures.

As for Diary, it was intended as a reboot of the Dead and I think it does a very good job of doing just that. It takes the story back to the beginning, updates it and shows how that story would be told with the technology of today – hand-held cameras, internet posts, etc. It’s not your typical zombie film but then Romero is not a zombie film-maker, he is simply a film-maker and a damn fine one at that.

So there!

If you want to read what other folk have to say about Survival either Google it or try the following links:

• Twitch
• The Hollywood Reporter
• FilmSchoolRejects
• SlashFilm

Scratch

Peter Gabriel’s much mentioned album of cover versions Scratch My Back is due for release by Virgin on 15th February. It sounds like an interesting take on a set of songs from a wide range of artists (David Bowie, Paul Simon, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Randy Newman, etc.) so it very much looks like one to add to the collection.

Holy Wars

There’s a lot of noise cropping up across the interweb about rifle sights which are used by the US military and have been inscribed with references to biblical texts by the manufacturer.

Apparently the references are very subtle, reported to take the form of some extra characters added after the serial number, but they are causing great concern because of the potential implications. The rifle sights are being used by US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan so the worry is that the biblical references could be used as propaganda to infer that the US troops are just as religiously fundamental as their enemies. Such propaganda would encourage the likes of the Taliban to become even more determined leading to an ever bloodier conflict. That is certainly something to be avoided.

What really gets me about the whole thing though is that the rifle sight manufacturer, Trijicon, was founded by a “devout Christian” and is run according to “Biblical standards”.

As the company makes and sells a product designed to make killing another human being from a distance easier, I assume we’re talking Old Testament standards. It was, after all, the OT version of god who was keenest on smiting, vengeance, genocide and other forms of wrathful and otherwise unpleasant behaviour. Isn’t the NT version supposed to be an overall nicer and fluffier one? Whatever, I really don’t imagine that Jesus would be too chuffed to hear his teachings were being used to improve the chances of the combatants in a war no matter how holy, or unholy. Or a meringue?

The following all have more to say on the matter:

• unreasonable faith
• The Freethinker
• Bad Astronomy
• Pharyngula

I’m sure there will be many others with more to add.

Taxes

I watched Billy Bragg on the BBC Breakfast News this morning as he explained why he is prepared not to pay his taxes in protest over how the greedy wbanker’s at RBS are planning to award bonuses despite the bank having accrued the biggest loss in British banking history and then having to be bailed out with oodles and oodles of taxpayers’ money.

Unfortunately, I can’t afford not to pay my taxes – which are deducted from my pay at source anyway – but I support Billy Bragg’s position and if I was in a position to do so I would withhold my tax payments too.

If RBS is in a position to shell out £1.5 billion in bonuses then what it should be doing is paying all that money to the Treasury in order to pay us (the public, their majority shareholder) back sooner rather than later. No one at RBS deserves a bonus (with the exception of staff in branches who do an excellent job for a relatively low wage) when the state of the global economy is considered along with the part RBS played in bringing that situation about.

As for the government, well, they are making a total arse of dealing with the bonus situation. They need to take a much harder line with RBS and any other institution which has been propped up with public cash. If these institutions have a bonus fund the government should grow a pair of balls and take the whole damn lot instead of fannying about with windfall taxes. It is utterly wrong that a relatively small number of bankers should live in luxury whilst the country struggles with a financial burden imposed upon them by the incompetence of those same bankers. The £1.5 billion RBS has up its sleeve should be easing that burden not lining already well padded pockets. Or better yet, it should all be going to an aid fund for the people of Haiti.

I also read about this story on Reuters UK and was a bit alarmed to read that:

When asked about Bragg’s initiative, a Treasury spokesman said: “We can reassure people there will not be a significant amount of taxpayers’ cash going to bonuses at RBS.”

Erm, excuse me, BUT!!! I hope that not so much as a single penny of taxpayers’ money is going towards the bonuses at RBS. Letting that happen would be the crowning turd in the cesspit that the British system of economics and government has clearly become!

Unbelief

Here are a couple of links to some short videos that made Big Think’s list of their most popular videos of 2009.

• The Importance of Unbelief by Stephen Fry, and;
• Jesus Was My Invisible Babysitter by Ricky Gervais.

Stephen Fry’s offering made number 8 on the list with Ricky Gervais taking the number 1 spot. I prefer Stephen Fry’s video which is, as you’d expected, witty and informative and is delivered in his typically nice and reasonable manner. I was never that impressed with The Office but I think I may be warming to Ricky Gervais as a stand-up comic, having watched a few clips on YouTube such as this one:

Obviously that one appeals from the position of my own atheistic world view but I also find his delivery of the subject matter quite appealing. I think I’ll have to check out a complete show by him at some point and see if he delivers other material as amusingly. 

Drink?

If there is any truth in the statistic that on average each adult in Scotland is drinking the equivalent of 46 bottles of Vodka a year, I want to know who the hell is drinking my share?!?!?

Seriously though, I kind of doubt that this is a genuinely accurate statistic. A bottle of Vodka for every adult every week? Not likely. I’m sure many people in Scotland who drink just drink occasionally. Many others will have a binge every now and again on special occasions. etc. And of course, there will be many, many Scottish adults who don’t drink at all. So allowing for these exceptions for this statistic to hold true, you’d have to assume that hardened drinkers are drinking a hell of a lot more, possible twice as much as is suggested. Which makes it even less likely – at that level of consumption they’d no longer be a problem for anyone though we might need bigger cemeteries.

The presence of a quote from Nicola Sturgeon in this article suggests that the numbers are being spun rather wildly here in order to bolster the Scottish National Puritan party’s ill-thought out minimum price for alcohol strategy.

There is a drinking problem in Scotland but a minimum price will not address it. You need to provide real help for the people who can be seen stepping out of the off license at 10:01 a.m. rather than just upping the price of their drug of choice. And you are going to have to up the price of alcohol to one hell of a high minimum to discourage those who can afford to hit the clubs and binge every weekend. If the price of alcohol, which I don’t think is anything like 70% lower in relative cost (more damn lies), goes up that much then I foresee a sudden resurgence in the rum-running trade. Pehaps I’ll change my name to Al Capone.

Onions

I pay The Onion a visit every once in a while but it has been too long since my last visit. They offer a nice line in satirical news making and here are a couple of recent stories they have broken:

• Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian – via unreasonable faith;
• Scientology Losing Ground To New Fictionology

Why not read them during your next coffee break? Or sooner, obviously, I’m sure your employer won’t mind that much