Too long in the dark

Polly Churchill is worried. She's stuck in London in 1940, and the handy time-travel doohickeys that are supposed to take her back to the mid-21st century aren't working. She's afraid she, or her friends, may have changed the space-time continuum and caused the Allies to lose World War Two.

(I am indebted to TV Tropes for giving me a piece of terminology to understand this phenomenon: Godwin's Law of Time Travel - "As the amount of time-traveling you do increases, the probability of Hitler winning World War II approaches one." [1])

Polly is, of course, being silly. As she would have known if she'd read To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book: historians can't change the past like that, even if they try. The past remains the past, even when you're in it. Changes can be propagated forward, only if they're so insignificant that nobody from your own time would have noticed them - you can, for instance, place some newspaper ads in the 1940s, which may then be spotted by your colleagues 120 years later. But you can't change the course of known history.

Polly may be excused for not knowing this - she's only a postgrad student. For James Dunworthy, however - the head of time travel research in Oxford throughout the 2060s - there's no excuse. Why, after two full-length novels and several short stories, he should still be propounding this nonsense about "the continuum breaking down" is beyond me.

This train of thought somewhat mars my enjoyment of Connie Willis's marathon opus, Blackout/All Clear. Which is a shame, because there's a really good book in here somewhere. (Only one, mind you. The 'two volumes' thing is quite unnecessary.)

Connie Willis does her usual stellar job of establishing sympathetic central characters, a strong supporting cast, and the fretful, fatigued atmosphere of wartime Britain. She's done a lot of research, and it shows. She has, however, left some irritating holes in her blanket of authenticity. For instance, her British characters consistently give dates in the modern American format (e.g. "May fourth", rather than "the fourth of May" or even "May the fourth", either of which would be more natural).

Willis wanted to write a book about the everyday heroism of ordinary people that won the war:

about Dunkirk and ration books and D-Day and V-1 rockets, about tube shelters and Bletchley Park and gas masks and stirrup pumps and Christmas pantomimes and cows and crossword puzzles and the deception campaign. And mostly the book's about all the people who "did their bit" to save the world from Hitler...

And at that, she's done well. Her account of wartime Britain is detailed, sympathetic and absorbing. If viewed as a collection of narratives about people who experienced evacuation, blackouts, shelters, rationing, Dunkirk, the Blitz, the V1s, and the daily expectation of loss and grief - it's a masterpiece. Where it falls down is in the time-travel narrative that ties these little human-interest stories into a coherent tale. While that story has its high points (mostly centred around St Paul's Cathedral), it's much, much too drawn-out to be sustained by its basic premises.

The result is that, when I'd finished reading, not only were my withers (quite sincerely) wrung by the prolonged hardship endured by my forebears, but I felt I'd accomplished no mean feat of endurance of my own. Which feels like an unworthy thought, but that's the price of honesty.

Overall rating: B-. Good, but should have been better.

[1] Incidentally, if anyone with a TV Tropes login is reading this: the above-linked page, at the time of writing, incorrectly states that events in To Say Nothing of the Dog cause the Nazis to win the war. This is completely untrue - that fear is raised at one point, but the whole point of the book is to demonstrate just how resilient history is - the ridiculous lengths it can go to, if necessary, to make sure it turns out right.

Aspirations

There's one conversation I had over and over when Susan was pregnant, which still bothers me. It went something like this:

Random Person: "So, do you know what you're having?"
Me (brightly): "A baby, I hope!" (Trying humour to head off the inevitable. Seldom works.)
RP: "No, I mean a boy or a girl?"
Me: "It's a boy."
RP: "Oh, that's great, congratulations!"

At this point I found myself - stuck. It seems uncivil to cavil at the sentiment. Yet I do want to know: why is the sex of the baby considered so important? Would you not congratulate me if I'd said "a girl"?

I discussed this with one of the innumerable, interchangeable midwives who attended Susan during her 47 hours of labour. The best explanation she could come up with was: "He can be an All-Black."

Now, far be it from me to express anything but the deepest respect for New Zealand's most cherished national heroes. They're a fine body of men, and may they enjoy the very best of luck. But really, just now, I'm not thinking of pushing baby Atilla in the direction of any particular career. And if the biggest difference between sexes is that males have a one-in-200,000 shot at being an All-Black, and females don't - that doesn't seem like all that much, to me.

There are, of course, many reasons to take joy in Atilla. If the greatest hope of New Zealand youth is that they have a 0.0005% chance of one day being on a certain team, we're all in trouble.

The population density school of lit crit

One of my favourite writers is Kazuo Ishiguro.

For a while after I read The Remains of the Day, I wondered what it was that gave a Japanese-born writer such a deep, sympathetic insight into the character of his all-too-English narrator. Okay, so Ishiguro is English by naturalisation, but still - his understanding of Stevens' mentality is infinitely more insightful than that of almost anyone I know. In just two generations, it seems, the "servant" mindset has been, pretty much, completely erased from British culture.

When I read An Artist of the Floating World - one of my favourite books - the mystery began to clear. Because that story is almost exactly the same, but for the teensy details that it's set in postwar Japan, rather than postwar England, and deals with a distinguished artist and patriarch, rather than a never-married butler. Those differences don't really amount to the proverbial hill of beans, compared with the similarities.

Why, I mused, did English society have so much in common with Japanese? On the face of it, it would be hard to identify two cultures that have had less opportunity to influence one another.

The answer I came up with can be boiled down to one word: population. Both Japan and England are densely populated, and they're both islands (well, technically England shares its island with a couple of other small nations, but let's gloss over that for the moment). That fact means that in both countries, it's very hard to forget that land (room, space) is a very limited commodity.

And that, I hypothesised, gave rise to two cultures in which "manners" play a very important role. You know that you're always going to be living very closely with other people. Therefore, it makes sense to follow fairly rigid social rules, even if those rules are not enforced.

Compare and contrast with grossly underpopulated countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Wide open spaces foster the illusion of personal independence and autonomy, the belief that the individual is somehow sovereign and has the "right" (whatever the heck that means) to ignore what others think.

My theory is that if you could come up with a way of quantifying the degree to which "manners" and "formality" are valued in a society, you could then plot that value on a graph against population density, and it would show that the more people are crammed into a limited space, the more likely they are to understand the need to get along with each other.

Granted, there's plenty of counter-examples. Big-city-dwellers, from Paris to Los Angeles, are proverbially rude and unsympathetic. But they are rude, principally, to outsiders - that is, to people who are not familiar with the city's protocols. People born and raised in the city seldom make that complaint, because they understand the reasons for city manners and values.

Values such as "keeping a stiff upper lip". When you live in a community of a thousand people, and you know by sight just about everyone you meet from day to day, it makes sense to share your feelings and support one another. When you live in a city of a million, it's a different story. No-one wants to go through every day, getting drawn into the lives of another random selection of strangers who happen to be going through rough times today. Hence it's important that people learn not to show their feelings in public, out of consideration for others.

And these are the sorts of values that Ishiguro's protagonists cling to, failing to realise that the societies around them no longer understand this need. The war has mixed everything up, and now they find themselves surrounded by people from different backgrounds who no longer understand how the old ways came about, and consequently have no respect for them.

It's a haunting and tragic story, both times. Ishiguro conveys sadness and regret like no other writer I know.

Failures of imagination

I just noticed a poster for the new Robin Hood movie.

No, we're not quite that far behind the times. The poster has been there for, ooh, must be over a month already. But sometimes I'm a slow reader.

From all I've heard, I have no interest in seeing the current movie. I've often complained about the prolonged rape of British culture by America - the process by which our stories are taken without so much as an acknowledgment to a thousand years of tradition (or, in some cases, to real live heroes) - then recast in dysfunctional Hollywood molds to suit some featherbrained modern philosophy and sold back to us - and it's going to take a more appealing offering than this to sell me on such a product again. I think one per year is a reasonable limit.

But what struck me today was the tagline: "The untold story behind the legend".

Of course, every generation retells myths in its own image. That's what myths are for. What I'm wondering now is, what does it say about our generation that this version is being marketed as some kind of "true story"? (The same thing happened to King Arthur in 2004.)

Throughout the history of cinema, Robin Hood has been a fruitful vehicle for stories. You can watch virtually any version and deduce what decade it was made in by the political values it espouses. Our hero has been cast as a Saxon liberation fighter (in the 1930s), a selfless patriot (in the 1950s), an economic pragmatist (1990s), and today, from what I read, he's become a rationalist republican, chafing against taxation in general. Maid Marian's role has been steadily upgraded over the decades, from passive damsel in varying degrees of distress, to (in some cases) full-fledged bandit leader and the real brains behind the whole operation. In the 1990s it became de rigueur to include a token "Saracen" in the Merry Men. I gather the latest version was initially supposed to cast the Sheriff of Nottingham as the hero, and Robin as a sort of proto-terrorist; but then Obama's election showed a public falling out-of-love with the police state, and the Rebel-figure suddenly became glamourous again. (A shame - I might well have gone to see Nottingham.)

At the same time, films have striven for "authenticity" in sets and costumes - from Errol Flynn's tights, via Sean Connery's chainmail, to Patrick Bergin's mud. This is a fashion thing - Hollywood has long taught us to despise "stagey" settings, costumes and acting. But there's a big difference between "authenticity" and "truth". Showing something that approximates, in at least some dimensions, to the reality of medieval life, is not the same as pretending that the story you're telling is a bona-fide recreation of actual events.

Maybe it's the CSI syndrome applied to folklore: we've grown accustomed to see people using magical computers to recreate past events based on the thinnest of evidence, so why shouldn't we demand the same of historians? - that they should "know" things that no-one will ever know, short of the invention of time travel. Maybe it's the way Hollywood has infantilised its audience, to the point where we can no longer accept historical tales for what they are - an imaginative retelling of an old story.

Or maybe it's just a marketing department with a total failure of imagination, trying to make a completely redundant film seem, for a few weeks at least, like a significant contribution to our culture.

Unsilent night

There's a line in Janet Frame's amazing short story Tiger, Tiger about "the dreadful meaning quiet of Christmas Eve".

Long before I ever thought much about New Zealand, I heard that story on the radio and fell in love with it. I must have read it twenty times since then, and to this day I'm still not sure whether I'm supposed to laugh or cry at the end. I usually end up crying, but smiling as well.

(You can find it in The Lagoon and other stories. I think I've bought six copies of that book so far.)

The DMQ of Christmas Eve is a time of waiting. Nothing more is going to happen before the big day. If you're a kid it means you go to bed and, depending on temperament, try to either go to sleep to make the morning come faster, or stay awake to see it early. If you're an adult, it means your deadline is here - all your preparations are made, for better or worse, and there's nothing more you can do before the big day. "Alea jacta est", as Julius Caesar doubtless said the night before Saturnalia.

This is the time - one of the very few times - when I actually like to hear Christmas carols.

Christmas music on the whole is a pain in the ears. When played in shops, malls and other public places it just makes me feel harrassed, like I'm being nagged. (In fact I'm starting to come down against all playing of recorded music in public places, thanks perhaps to my mother's influence. But that's a separate rant.) When played in someone's home at this time of year, it becomes a thoughtless, pointless noise: it makes me think that the person doesn't really care much about music, but just plays it for its associations.

There are three occasions when I'm open to Christmas music.

One is at any Christmas party where there are strangers and colleagues and other people you wouldn't normally mix with from choice. In those cases it's a social lubricant, like alcohol but cheaper.

One is when it's being sung, live, by people - preferably children - with good voices who have put some thought and practice into what they're doing. Carol concerts - lovely. Carol singers performing in public - heartwarming. Decrepit glam rockers performing their own hit from 30 years ago - exhilarating. Any of the above recorded and replayed the next day - soulless and flat.

And the third is in the DMQ of CE. At that point I don't mind being nagged. For a few hours, although I might roll my eyes and mutter darkly about crimes against music, nothing can really dent my calm.

Although I'd rather hear silence.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Trust me, I'm a blogger

Apparently, the pope doesn't approve of the Twilight series of books and movies. The Vatican feels it's morally unhealthy for millions of teenage girls to be lusting after soulless monsters.

The only person I know who's seen the latest movie agrees that His Holiness has a point. Vampires have always had erotic undertones, from Dracula to Buffy, but at least they had the decency to remain undertones and subplots in an Epic Tale of Heroic Resistance to Ancient Supernatural Evil. Whereas Twilight, from what I hear, has abandoned most everything but the sex.

Of course, vanishingly few teenage girls are likely to care what some decrepit crossdresser thinks of their favourite soft-porn fix. The pope still carries some influence, but not as much as he'd probably like. Which brings me to today's ramble.

There was a report on Slashdot the other day of a survey that said that more than one-third of employees surveyed (in Canary Wharf and Wall Street) would sell confidential customer data, if the price was right. Of course the penalties for that sort of thing are pretty stiff, and it's unlikely they'd ever be offered enough to offset those. But it's still preying on my mind.

It seems to me that there's been a sharp drop in trust. And with trust goes loyalty.

It's not so much that, once, we would have "trusted" bankers to be honest. Really we had no choice. Bankers - like butchers, bakers, priests, auto mechanics, lawyers, computer programmers, farmers, manufacturers of everything from airliners to zip fasteners - most everyone, in fact - did their work, or at least the important bits of it, behind firmly closed, opaque and soundproof doors. Even journalists, those apostles of openness and transparency, kept their own work to themselves.

Now all that has changed.

Take itemised billing. We got into the habit of checking our bills. And occasionally there would be a mistake - not often, but it seemed often enough to make it worth the trouble. Banks and credit cards led the way, followed by phone companies, shops, restaurants, professional services, hotels... slowly but surely, we reached the point where nobody just says "That'll be four hundred and seventeen dollars thirty-two, please" any more. We get itemised bills... and we're expected, nay, actively encouraged to check them.

The Internet has spread this 'doublecheck' attitude to all walks of life. Now you're considered a chump if you believe a news report, without cross-checking. You're supposed to check prices before shopping for anything that costs more than groceries. Check reviews of consumer goods, movies, hotels. Follow every link. What we get then is a barrel of conflicting reports. And none of them is authoritative, because what we've done now is to reject the very idea of authority. We don't trust anyone to tell us "the truth".

All of which is just the way we thought we wanted it. We're all economically rational beings in pursuit of the perfect information that will enable us to make the optimum decisions about how to use our resources. We're all smart enough to make our own decisions - aren't we?

But now we don't expect the truth, most people have given up even the pretence. Politicians and corporations openly talk about "spinning". Journalists increasingly disclaim responsibility for the truth of what they say. With the notable exception of FOX News, most media make some effort or pretence to tell "the truth" - but the best they ever manage, the best they can ever manage, is what we've learned to call "spin": a single view of "the truth", which may make perfect sense within itself, yet still look entirely different when seen from a different angle.

And so the "perfect information" that, economic theory says, we need to make our decisions, is more elusive than ever. The people qualified to make decisions are the ones who not only have, but also understand, all this information. Authority figures. The very people whose advice we no longer trust.

Even this could work, in theory. Instead of letting the professionals get on with their work, we watch them with the intensity of a child watching an ice-cream cone being filled. Unfortunately, also like the child, we have only a very superficial understanding of what the cone is being filled with. This doesn't matter to the child, because she trusts the ice-cream vendor...

What really screws us up is, as always, human nature. When someone says to you "I don't trust you, I'll be watching your every move", what's your natural reaction? Do you think of the person as a friend, one of us, someone you want to help? Or is there a part of you that starts to think: how much can I get away with, can they really tell what I'm doing anyway, damn' know-it-all prodnose...

When you treat someone as your enemy, over time, they'll start to think of themselves that way.

And yet it seems that, increasingly, that's the expectation for how we should treat one another. Employers monitor their employees' activities; and worse, that's increasingly seen as "reasonable". School-age children are told to include references and citations in their work - an undreamt-of requirement in my day, until I reached university. Parents are supposed to monitor their kids, not just outdoors, but increasingly in school, on the bus, on the Internet, you name it. In the UK now, you need to be registered on a central database if you want to work anywhere near children. In the USA, I'm told, you need to show photo ID to enter a government building.

I was listening to a BBC podcast recently, which talked about the policing of political demonstrations. Protesters complained about the practice of "kettling" - corralling people in a limited area and not letting them leave for a certain time - a practice that, not infrequently, scoops up and seriously inconveniences innocent passers-by. Then there's the practice of police systematically photographing demonstrators (try to photograph a cop, on the other hand, and you stand a good chance of being arrested on the spot).

The police superintendent wheeled out to defend the Met talked about the "small minority" of "troublemakers", whom, apparently, the police can't distinguish from the eternal "law-abiding majority". And so, he concluded, the fuzz have no choice but to treat everyone as a potential terrorist.

That officer, I thought, was missing the point in the same way I've been talking about here. By casting "police" as "us" and "protesters" as "them", the police have made their job a hundred times harder. Police are supposed to see all law-abiding people as "us"; only criminals are "them". If they didn't treat every protester as a criminal - an enemy - then maybe the protesters themselves would be more inclined to help the cops do their job.

Mistrust leads to resentment. Resentment leads to hostility. Hostility leads to enmity. The pursuit of economic rationality has led us into a deeply dysfunctional world, one in which everyone really is our enemy.

Somehow, we need to rebuild trust.

A good starting point might be to rethink what we mean by "trust".

If someone lies to us, and we know they're lying to us, does that mean we shouldn't trust them?

"What are you thinking about?"

"Oh, nothing."

There are times we choose to accept the lie, knowning full well what it is, because we trust the liar.

Catholics are familiar with this concept. They've long since accepted that the fairy-tales told in the Bible are not "true" in the strict sense of being literal descriptions of actual events as they happened. But that doesn't matter. What actually happened to a bunch of ancient Jews is not important to us, now, today: what matters is how we live our lives and bear ourselves to God, and the stories in the Bible (they believe) are the best guide to how we should do that. "Truth" is immaterial - only "faith" matters. That's what our sceptical age has forgotten.

Damn stupid time

There's a curious need to believe that your countrymen must have invented every important thing. It's particularly strong among imperial powers. The British emphasis on their own achievements has waned noticeably, as the British empire fades into history; but America and China are both insistent and singleminded in teaching their children that their country did everydamnthing.

Take submarines, for instance. The first working submarine was built by a Dutchman living in England; the first one to be of any practical use in war was invented by an American living in France. Dutch, British, American and French schoolkids each hear about whichever invention fosters their national pride. Later in life, adults who like to think of themselves as well-rounded Renaissance Europeans point to the fanciful drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, who is sometimes claimed to have invented practically everything - despite never having built any of it. Then, inevitably, some idiot Chinese historian pops up and announces that China was developing them in the 13th century.

Or electricity. Every American schoolchild learns that Ben Franklin invented electricity by flying a kite in a thunderstorm. Britons may hear that story in passing, but it's not nearly as important as the contributions of William Gilbert (who invented the word, roundabout 1600), or Michael Faraday. Danes learn the name of Ørsted, Germans of Siemens, French of Ampere, Italians Volta, and practically everyone claims Tesla for their own.

And so I wasn't surprised to find an American website claiming, in all apparent seriousness, that Ben Franklin invented the idea of daylight savings time.

But I acquit Franklin. He thought he was joking. The fact that some people took him seriously says more about his ponderous sense of humour than any active ill-will on his part.

I am ashamed to say that this particular invention can be more convincingly laid at the door of a New Zealander. George Vernon Hudson was an entomologist, who wanted more time after his shift to go bug-hunting.

Independently, a few years later, an Englishman strolling through the streets of Croydon one summer morning was appalled at how everyone was still in bed. With the unfailing paternalistic instinct of the Victorian do-gooder, he devoted the rest of his life to campaigning to force everyone else out of their beds to enjoy the morning quiet.

It took the Great War to make people listen to him.

Of course "total war" justifies a lot of things. In terms of the impositions made at such a time, setting one's clock forward an hour seems pretty mild. But ninety years later, we still have this idiotic institution. Every year at this time, an hour gets stolen from our lives, to be returned in autumn when we will least appreciate it.

And that's why Susan is now getting up in the dark (again) and walking around like a zombie all day; that's why I'm trying to force myself to go to bed while my body is still screaming that it's wide awake.

It's not really Hudson's fault, or Willett's. They lived in a very different world from ours - a world of mass employment in factories, shift working, and where artificial lighting was an expensive luxury.

Today? We have no-one to blame but our own politicians - the same people whose idea of an early start is getting out of bed before 9 a.m.

Why, oh why, can't we just forget the whole thing?

Spelling disaster

I feel dirty.

Not in an erotic way. This isn't that kind of blog. Nor is this a personal hygiene issue, except perhaps in a moral sense. I feel a crawling of the skin, an itching of the scalp, but I don't think a long hot shower is going to help.

What's causing this revulsion is the sense that I find myself agreeing with the Daily Mail. The UK government has issued new guidance on how schoolkids should be taught to spell. No longer will they learn "i before e except after c", because "there are too many exceptions", it seems.

This advice comes from a report named, apparently without a trace of irony, "Understanding English Spelling", by one Masha Bell. "Children are having to fill their heads with this rubbish - because spelling is rubbish," the author is quoted as saying. Proof, if proof were needed, that here is a person who is remarkably unqualified to write a report called "Understanding English Spelling", much less have that report adopted as official guidance for schools

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I can't spell. It's a simple, if sad, fact of life: almost no-one can spell. I'm pretty sure I'm in the top 1% of English spellers, but it still happens, from time to time, that I suddenly learn I've been spelling a word wrongly for years. Quite ordinary words, like "weird" or "diarrhoea". I've no doubt there are still at least a handful of words that I routinely misspell.

And yet I take spelling very seriously. I believe in it.

The spelling of a word carries far more information than just its dictionary-listed meaning. It tells us, if we know what to look for, where the word comes from, what philosophical and intellectual baggage it carries. Most importantly, it shows something about how the word relates to other words, both in English and in other languages. A secretary, for instance, is one who keeps secrets. A library is a place (the '-ary' suffix) for books (French 'libres'). If I spelled these words the way people in my part of the world spoke them (secatry, lybrie), I'd never have made those connections.

This is one of the problems with spelling reform. It's the same problem as with every other kind of reform. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said it best: "Everything is connected to everything else."

When Mr Webster decided that the Americans needed their own spelling to separate them from the British, he ran into this problem straight away. "Center" may look more natural than "centre", but on the other hand, it means you need a whole new rule - "drop the penultimate e" - to form words like "central" and "centrifuge". American English is no easier to spell than British or International English: it's just different.

That's why I don't believe people who argue that spelling reform would improve school performance. Anyone who believes that, I reckon, just hasn't given it enough thought.

(Pop quiz: What can spelling tell us about the key difference between "thought" and "consideration", or "meditation", or any other word ending with "-tion"?)

There is one other argument for spelling reform, but it's one that is never stated, because it's so self-evidently a thing of utmost evil. It's the argument that reform will make everything written Before, harder to read.

Why would anyone want to do that? I can think of three reasons, which would be supported - equally covertly - by three equally unholy special interests.

First, it reinforces the divide between "elite" and popular culture, making it harder to bridge that gap. Thus creating work for sociologists, opportunities for class warriors and petty demagogues.

Second, it creates a New Culture for a New Britain, divorced from everything that has gone before. We get to rewrite everything, shrugging off any contradiction based on un-PC older sources. This appeals to the social-engineering wing of the radical left.

Third, it's a publishing opportunity. All those older works, hundreds of thousands of books, that can optionally be updated. And, of course, renewed copyrights on everything from Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas! When publishers hear of spelling reform, it's all they can do to keep the drool inside their mouths.

[Answer to pop quiz: "thought" is an Anglo-Saxon word (the silent "-gh-" is a dead giveaway), coming from a direct, plain-speaking culture. "-tion" words come from Latin, whose speakers were much more given to studying the art of speaking. When someone uses a "-tion" word, they're not saying what they think, they're thinking about what they say. It's an important difference.]

Contempt of court

Since you're not in New Zealand, you've probably never heard of David Bain. He's very big just now.

Depending who you listen to, Bain is either the unluckiest man in the country, or a mass murderer. Both terms in their most literal meaning. There is no middle ground.

The facts as we know them: at 7:09 on the morning of 20 June 1994, David Bain - then aged 22 - called the police, from his home in Dunedin, to report that his family were all dead. Police arrived to find that his mother, father, two younger sisters and young brother had been killed with a hunting rifle. Most of the victims were still in their rooms, but the father, Robin, who slept in a caravan in the garden, was in the lounge.

Beyond that point, the facts get more murky. If you want to know the ins and outs of the evidence you can Google it for yourself; suffice it to say here that the Bains were not a happy family. Incest, bullying and fear seem to have been the prevailing ethics. The crown says that David killed his own family before going out on his paper round to establish an alibi. The defence says that Robin killed the family, then shot himself and, deliberately or not, framed David.

In May/June 1995, David Bain was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. Over the next ten years, he steadily protested his innocence, and bits of evidence slowly dripped out that tended to support him. In 2007, the Privy Council ruled that evidence was strong enough to justify at least a retrial.

Right now, the jury is deliberating that retrial. Since they're sequestered - isolated from the media - it seems we're finally allowed to say out loud whether we think he dunnit or not.

Me, I'm not going to take advantage of that license. There's twelve people in Christchurch who have sat through three months of this stuff full-time. They know more about it than I do. I've done jury service; it's nothing if not intensive: for the duration of the trial, you really get to concentrate.

And yet, lots of ordinary people feel qualified to second-guess the jury.

It doesn't help that anyone with a decent professional job isn't expected to do jury service; they will invariably plead that they're too "indispensible" to give up their time. (The alternative is to face uncomfortable questions from their boss as to why they're not indispensible. To say nothing of a significant loss of income.) So it follows - to those people, at least - that juries are staffed exclusively by housewives, dossers, students and sundry other losers.

And believing that, who can trust them?

I really don't care much about the Bain case. But in general, on the whole, I'm for law. And I think that for the law to fulfil its primary purpose - to protect us all from vigilantes - it would be a great step forward if jury service were made compulsory: universal and unexcusable.

Update: It's taken the jury about a day to decide that Bain is not guilty, apparently. The judge told them to come to a unanimous verdict, and that's it. Evidently they don't think the prosecution did enough to prove its case.

Celebrity v talent

It's been a bad couple of weeks in reality TV. Well, arguably it's been a bad ten years, but the last fortnight or so has given us two big-time, internationally-reported upsets.

First there was American Idol. Searching Google News for 'American Idol upset' gives 1,167 results in the past month. The front runner lost in the final vote, and at least 1,167 journalists worldwide have written about how surprised they are.

Then came Susan Boyle's breakdown on Britain's Got Talent. Ms Boyle blows Adam Lambert clean out of the media, with a phenomenal 29.846 news mentions worldwide in the past month. (Numbers correct at time of writing, but likely to go up for the next week or so.)

Were these results fair? Did partisans engage in dirty tricks? How much of the vote reflected telegenic cuteness, rather than actual talent? Were the votes actually counted, or did the organisers just make up the totals? Did people vote more than once? (In fact, Idol actively encourages this.)

Who cares?

Talent shows have nothing to do with talent. Look at Kelly Clarkson, first winner of American Idol: the girl has about as much talent as it takes most of us to cook our own dinner; she's a pedestrian singer and an atrocious songwriter, penning lyrics that would shame a '50s teenybopper. She's not famous because people buy her records; people buy her records because she's famous. Because she won American Idol.

That's what these shows are about. Not finding talent, but creating celebrity.

See, the problem with really talented people is that they have better things to do than bare their lives to fan magazines. Practising, rehearsing, reading, learning, dreaming, planning... being talented is a lot of work. But celebrities, now - if your sales depend on your fame, rather than vice-versa, then there is literally nothing more important to your career than keeping your face in the public eye. So instead of "entertainment journalists" having to chase and stalk and court and flatter them, these McCelebrities can be relied on to pretty much throw themselves in front of any camera they can find.

The science of karma

A fascinating new study from Germany finds that revenge doesn't pay.

In a sane world, this would be no surprise. Energy spent on making someone else's life crap, is energy that's not working for oneself, or one's loved ones. In economic terms, it's simply a waste of resources. From Othello to Captain Ahab to the Count of Monte Cristo, our culture is full of illustrations of how revenge is a dish best not eaten at all.

The fact that this isn't considered blindingly obvious is probably because there are so many batshit-insane people around nowadays. In particular, believers in that beguiling branch of maths known as "game theory" - a category that, nowadays, includes almost everyone concerned with social sciences. Game theory, as popularly interpreted, implies that if someone does something bad to you, you should retaliate proportionately against them.

As far as it goes, the theory is fair enough. But it doesn't go nearly as far as many people think it does. Game theory, like every mathematical theory I've ever heard of, is based on a vast pile of mostly-unspoken assumptions that simply aren't true in the real world. For instance, there's the assumption that all players are following the same rules, which are not liable to change. Then there's the assumption that the number of players is constant - nobody will enter or leave the game mid-way. Or that all players have the same motivation. In most economic and social contexts, these assumptions are patently absurd. But they're so seldom stated that it's easy to forget they're there.

Now, thanks to Prof Dr Armin Falk of Bonn University and his co-authors, we have concrete evidence that "negative reciprocity" is truly counter-productive. In particular, the study finds, vengeful people are much more likely to find themselves unemployed.

What does work, on the other hand, is "positive reciprocity". Turns out that, regardless of the level of motivation, returning good behaviour leads to a much more profitable relationship than punishing bad behaviour.

What I like about this study is that it doesn't care about means or mechanisms. It doesn't try to prove, or even imply, that reward is a better motivator than punishment, or that relationships based on threat of punishment are unhealthy. It doesn't even try to argue with game theory. Maybe these things are true, maybe they aren't; that's not the point here. The point is that there is a measurable difference in outcomes.

How drunk would you have to be...?

Introducing perhaps the dumbest business idea since sliced ketchup: PersonRatings.com.

It's a website where you can rate anyone. Well, any American, anyway. You get to award marks out of five in each of ten categories: smart, sexy, confident, successful, friendly, funny, kind, classy, energetic, trustworthy. The score you see displayed for a person is based on the average rating they've received.

I don't know where to begin - but it doesn't matter, because none of my readers are demented enough to imagine for a microsecond that this sounds like a neat idea. Even the site's founder doesn't want to put his hand up to it: the only contact address given is for a "jerry.smith". Searching for "jerry smith" on PersonRatings turns up - nothing.

So whose brainchild is it? Turns out to belong to one Jeremy Stamper, of Seattle, WA. Mr Stamper, you may be reassured to learn, clocks a solid two out of five stars in each of the ten categories - meaning that, in the aggregate opinion of random people on the 'net, he's "not very" smart, successful, sexy etc.

Possibly Mr Stamper is hoping to capitalise on the Facebook Effect - that once you've got a profile, it's practically impossible to remove it, so you have no choice but to keep maintaining it for as long as the site owner chooses to hold you to ransom. Or possibly it's all some elaborate April Fool's joke that's broken early.

A Google search reveals that Mr Stamper made his first career, and name, in real estate. And now he's gone into publishing. Which, I guess, should be enough to tell us all exactly what I should think of him...

Just a couple of gems from the FAQ:

Why is Anonymous Free Speech important?

We should all be very protective of our right to express our opinions without being required to register with the government or any other entity. After all, why should governments, employers, or anyone else be tracking our personal opinions and beliefs. The American tradition of anonymous free speech is older than the United States itself. In fact, the anonymous publication of the Federalist Papers was vital to the birth of the United States. [And so on, but you get the gist.]

I swear, I'm not making this up. It gets funnier:

I see a post that isn't true. Will you remove it?

It is impossible for us to determine the legitimacy or veracity of posts. Even courts of law are seldom capable of this. With the amount of content that is posted, it is impractical for any service provider to scrutinize user generated content. We appreciate your help in trying to keep the site content legal and on topic. However, Personratings is not the author of posted content and is not obligated to remove content posted by users except in very rare circumstances. We believe that the best response to offensive free speech is not censorship, but instead more free speech. Readers will use their own criteria to evaluate the credibility of posts.

So feel free to visit Mr Stamper's profile and write - anonymously, of course - whatever takes your fancy. With a bit of determination, in six months' time, his name could be synonymous with "noted duck-rapist".

Addendum: Jeremy Stamper has added himself as a follower of this blog. Nice to see you, Jeremy - hope you enjoy it. But it does mean paragraph 3 of the above entry is probably no longer true. All the same, I'm leaving it now for the sake of Historical Integrity, or something.

Life after TV

It's odd, being without TV. There's a dusty stand for it in the corner of the living room, surrounded by discs and remotes and the Wii and all the other paraphernalia that now seems inert, frozen, waiting for the set to be returned or replaced.

I don't miss the programs. Except in the literal sense, obviously. And I'm not planning to catch up on any of them when we get a set again. The highlight of my televisual week is Pokémon on Sunday morning. I have Buffy and Firefly on DVD; both ended in 2003, and there hasn't really been anything very exciting since...

Really?, my inner commentator challenges me at this point. Because I do seem to watch quite a lot.

It's true. Dr Who, House, various Gordon Ramsay tat, Futurama, random sitcoms, The Daily Show, news... In terms of hours per week, I'm probably up around the national average at least. Although in truth, "watch" is an exaggeration for what I do most of the time. I'll read a book or play a computer game while they're on, looking up from time to time when it sounds like something might happen.

Moving wallpaper, that's all it is.

It's a far cry from my childhood, when watching TV was a family ritual pursued in almost reverential silence. I became very attached to it - still am, in many ways - and apt to get quite upset at the mere thought that I might miss something good.

Back then, TV was a communal experience. With only three or four channels to choose from, I'd watch in the reasonable expectation that my friends would be watching the same programs. Not because they were fans, or the programs were particularly compelling, but simply because that was our common culture. Missing a popular program, in those days, was like being excommunicated for a day: I simply wouldn't be able to talk to people on an equal footing.

In the multi-channel choice of today, that's no longer true. Now, people watch the programs that get talked about - Lost, Heroes, the eternally-downward-spiralling American Idol and its relatives - rather than vice-versa.

Ten years ago I'd probably have watched this garbage too. But now I have a choice. I can, and do, watch DVDs, or music videos, or Al-Jazeera, instead.

Occasionally, there can still be "compelling" television. David Attenborough is past his prime, but still broadcasts an infectious passion for his subject. And there are genuinely exciting intellectuals, like Simon Schama and Adam Curtis, who can catch and hold my attention while they gently rearrange my worldview. But it's no coincidence that all three of these people are British, sponsored by the government-financed BBC; no sane commercial broadcaster would touch them. They're rebroadcast, if at all, in graveyard slots (Schama's last series, here, was on Sunday mornings at 10:30), and I'd be amazed to find anyone else who'd seen any given program.

Maybe TV is a classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons - the more a resource is used, the less valuable it becomes. Or maybe it's simply an obsolescent technology. And I'm not sure whether broadcasters have been reduced to irrelevance by the market, or whether they've done it to themselves on purpose. After all - as our banks have recently demonstrated so dramatically - it's easier to make money when nobody is watching you.

The blind Watchmen-maker

(Spoiler-free review.)

Alan Moore famously considers his creations - all of them - unfilmable. Having watched the latest, much-touted effort, I think I see what he means.

It's easy to see why Hollywood loves to adapt comic books. After all, the original artist has already done not only the scriptwriting but also the visualisation, much of the hard work of costume and lighting design, and quite a lot of the photographic direction. You might think this would make the two media a good match.

But somehow it never quite comes together. Comic-book movie adaptations have run the gamut from acknowledged disasters (The Hulk, Catwoman, Daredevil, Batman & Robin) to merely lacklustre movies. I really wanted to like such massively hyped efforts as The Dark Knight, Spiderman, V for Vendetta - but I really didn't. And after watching Watchmen, I think I know why.

The story of Watchmen - the book - unfolds like a magnificent origami decoration. It's told in an intricate non-linear structure to which the medium is beautifully adapted - cutting and chopping between storylines is not merely smooth, it's practically inevitable. At the end of each chapter there are several pages of dense text to read, creating background and atmosphere for the main story. There's a whole story within a story - one (very) minor character spends his time reading comic books at a newsstand, and we also get to enjoy the adventure story he's reading as a bonus. And Moore skilfully weaves all these strands - even the comic-book story, which is a rattling good yarn with pirates and sharks, death and undeath and insanity - into the baroque tapestry that is the Watchmen Experience.

The movie takes some of these same threads, and tries to string them together into an epic of naïve idealism versus entrenched, institutional corruption. Somehow, the multi-dimensional tale of the book has been reduced to a cliché. The budget may be bigger than Mr Smith Goes to Washington, but the story really isn't, not any more.

In the reducing process, it's succeeded in making the story dull. There's simply not enough left to fill 163 minutes. Jimmy Stewart took just over two hours, and frankly even he drags sometimes.

Here, the action scenes and the sex scenes take on far inflated importance. Take, for instance, the episode where two of our heroes (in plain clothes) get ambushed by muggers. In the book, the fight scene fills a total of five frames, interspersed with wordy frames of Dr Manhattan's fateful TV appearance. In the movie, we're treated to what feels like a full minute of choreographed, gratuitously brutal violence. Evidently the producers felt the story was dragging at this point.

And they were right. Their error was in thinking that the fight would improve matters.

In a vain attempt to soften Alan Moore's righteous wrath, the producers have tried to follow the source material slavishly (with a few notable exceptions). The thing is: what works on the page, doesn't work on film.



Back to the abovementioned fight scene, for instance. On paper, the fraction of a second it takes to glance at the fight before getting back to the interview contrasts with the time it takes to read the speech frames. The effect is that you're reading the speech while looking at the fight. But rather than running the speech over the silent film of the fight, here the director - with a devastating failure of imagination - literally cuts between scenes.

Laborious. Tedious. Dull.

Many of the more memorable lines are lifted directly from the book. That's fine, except that half the time the actors don't seem to understand their own lines. In a comic book, the words and the artwork are used to create the character. Onscreen it's the actor who creates the character, and sometimes the words no longer fit.

I call this "Christina Ricci syndrome", after her memorably detached performance in Sleepy Hollow. The characters of Dan Dreiberg and Adrian Veidt, in particular, suffer from it: two major figures who simply don't seem to be in the same movie as everyone else.

(And what is it with Dreiberg's glasses? An eight-digit f/x budget, and they still can't make it look like the lenses actually refract light?)

Where the script does depart from the book, it makes matters worse. Now that the Cold War is a fading memory, the film feels it has to go to great lengths to Recreate the Era of Nuclear Paranoia. In doing so, it is both gratuitous - every channel and every paper is filled with end-is-nigh doom-mongering - and intellectually dishonest (fielding Richard Nixon, as a president who has somehow weathered not merely Watergate but also the 22nd amendment - as all-round scapegoat and shorthand for unchecked corruption). Thus this part of the story is reduced from an imaginative fable to a political cheap shot - and a very dated one at that.

Another failure: in the book, Laurie (Silk Spectre II) smokes. (That's why she accidentally fires off Arcimedes' flamethrower - she mistakes it for a cigarette lighter.) In the movie, she doesn't smoke, and just presses the button for the hell of it. It wouldn't be a big deal, except that the movie makes it so by sticking so closely to the appearance, costume and words of the characters in every other respect. Now, of course, it's practically illegal for a sympathetic character in a movie to smoke; but this was the 80s, and that's the era the film is supposed to be capturing.

I wish Zack Snyder, who pleased a lot of people with 300, had shown just a little more courage and cut out some of the back story. Who cares about the involved history of the Minutemen, the Comedian, Silk Spectre, and all the heroes who died long before the story begins? Let it go. If you can cut out the undead pirates, you can cut that too. In the book it adds depth and weight. Onscreen it's just confusing and distracting.

Lots of people, mostly I'm guessing those who don't even remember the 1980s, seem to like this movie. That probably means Snyder will get to make more. God help us.

Soothing the savage brats

Barry Manilow must have a phenomenal agent.

I'm not old enough to remember when he was a popular singer. The first time I heard his name, it was a punchline. And yet he's still performing, his records are still selling, and he can still make headlines.

His latest incarnation is as a sonic weapon. In Christchurch, a local business organisation has a plan to drive surly teens away from shopping areas by playing Barry Manilow at them. It's not a new idea. The Australians have been experimenting for years with the likes of him and Bing Crosby, and it looks like Manilow's indefatigable agent has persuaded someone that it's been a success.

Various business mouthpieces seem to like the idea. The local plod approves it. Central City Business Association manager Paul Lonsdale is evidently a Manilow fan: "You can create a nice environment by introducing nice music," he rashly told a reporter.

One Christchurch teen threatened retaliation. "We would just bring a stereo and play it louder", she promised - conjuring a Pythonesque image of escalating noise pollution, in which advertisers, buskers, youths, passing vikings and the Salvation Army contend to build a cacophony of Jerichoic proportions.

Of course there are laws against that, but it seems rather unfair that noise pollution ordinances can be deployed to keep J Random Teen's ghettoblaster to a lower limit than Mr Lonsdale's loudspeakers.

There is, I would think, a real likelihood that the cure will be worse than the disease - that a relentless diet of "O Mandy" will drive away more shoppers than loiterers, to say nothing of the impact on Christchurch's already-disturbing suicide rate.

But then, maybe it's just a plot to increase sales of MP3 players, to young and old alike.

Personally, I say: if you want teens to behave, forget Manilow, play them Bach. They'll still be standing about, talking (increasingly loudly) about how lame it is, but even while they're bitching, they'll be lulled into a well-tempered Germanic sense of calm.

Of night and light and the half light

The Lantern Festival is one of the highlights of our year.

It's an ancient Auckland tradition, passed down from generation to generation since 1999, marking the end of the two-week celebration of the Chinese New Year. A great gathering in Albert Park, full of lantern sculpture, more or less tacky Chinese culture, fireworks, and dodgy Asian foodstuffs. A photo-op for politicians - the prime minister gives a speech and shows off his Mandarin - and a chance for dragon-dancers, martial arts schools and Chinese opera wannabes from all over to grab some limelight for a few minutes. All on a sweltering late-summer night.

Lanterns, balloons, badges, brooches and hideous fridge ornaments take the form of great Chinese cultural icons, such as zodiac animals, dragons, Shou Xing and SpongeBob SquarePants. (Nice to see that the li'l yellow dude has decisively replaced all Disney characters at these events - there was not a duck or a Pooh character to be seen. Take that, Mickey: that's what you get for repressing your fans.)

We left it late, this year - it was dusk before we left home - which meant we missed the daylight events. But the main event - the lanterns - are, of course, seen at their best after dark. Since there is no charge for admission, the crowds are always spectacular, and quite often we found our direction dictated mostly by which way it was physically possible to go. We saw the prime minister, surrounded by dark-suited figures whose purpose seemed to be to shoulder his way through the riff-raff. Perk of the job, I guess.

I love the whole thing. My avatar picture was taken at a festival two or three years ago. Several displays this year would have made for worthy replacements - the ever-popular monkey god, kid riding backwards on a ram, a four-toed dragon pausing in mid-descent, as if to exchange gossip with some random old sage. Sadly, however, my trusty Canon doesn't seem to be entering the spirit of the occasion. Rather than the unimaginative yet honest verisimilitude of earlier times, it prefers to render images as opaque abstracts in dark colours, more like an elderly Whistler than a keen-eyed Rembrandt:


I call this one "Year of the Ox". And to think people say that machines can't do art.