The History Boys

Made me wish I had seen it on stage (only because I love theatre but have very little chance of going, rather than any deficiency of the movie). Bennett packs so much into his scripts it makes me want to grab the nearest copy, quantities of coffee and chocolate-covered rice cakes and hole up until I have read the thing many many times, highlighted all the important bits using a colour coded system for crossreferencing and footnoting, and underlined all the really important bits and written in the margin 'how true . . .' . And learn half the dialogue for casual insertion into conversation and passing it off as my own.

I haven't seen enough Bennett to pontificate, but it does seem to me that the bottom line in all his work is LOVE. Many-formed, many-splendoured, and many-prosecuted. No writer I know makes the occurrence of love between men such a tender thing.

p.s the piano-playing hottie is Jamie Parker, MUCH sexier than his photo.

International Leather II

Trying to keep my mind on the Scrabble game,

HER: We were at Erotica, the trade fair at Olympia, the usual, y'know, happy hookers, hermans in 5" stilettos and 5 o'clock shadows, and so on, when I spotted a pair of VERY pally young men wearing chaps and not much else. They were walking in perfect unison, very very close to each other. I realised why when I spotted that they had a joint penile / scrotal piercing.

ARGH!

I lost.


Then I had a game with a first-timer who turned out to be a 16 year old schoolgirl in New Zealand. On my turn halfway through the game the only play I could reasonably make was - well, I typed furiously into the chat box, "I'm really really sorry about this, but it does give me a score of 36, and gives you the possibility of a K in a triple word, and please please don't tell your parents!" as I laid down the word FUCK.

Hey, if she can't stand the heat she has to get out of the kitchen. In the event, she told me that her father had dropped his gardening, her mother the cooking, and her brother his - well, whatever teenage boys like to hold - all to stand round the monitor to watch the game. Great - a whole kiwi family watching me lay obscenities on a virtual Scrabble board. And she didn't even use the triple word - I did. HA!

International Leather

Me, early hours of the morning, playing Scrabble with a lovely chatty woman from - well, I guess I had better not say, three grown-up kids, just in from her salsa class. As near as I can remember it,

ME: So what do you do?

HER: My husband and I have an international leather business

ME: (spluttering) Its late and I'm tired - I daren't comment as anything I say will be so inappropriate

HER: But you'd be right

ME: ??????!

HER: we cater to the BDSM trade (I dunno what BDSM is but I guessed at the SM bit)

ME: I just laughed so much my forehead hit the keyboard

HER: We had a customer who ran a business in Southend. Dennis is the name, perversion's the game. He commissioned full face masks, with zips for the mouth and eyes. He went out of business because customers complained that they were catching their eyebrow hair in the zips!



At which point I cracked up - I thought I would wake the entire household I was laughing so much. What I didn't get was why poor Dennis went out of business - surely he could have charged extra for the eyebrow torture! Why on earth don't eyebrows count?

She has more stories for me - I expect the coming few Scrabble games to be eye-openers . . .

Another Sunday . . .

Q: How do you make God laugh?

A: Tell Him your plans.

Good one, eh? Funny, clever, thought-provoking. The thing I really don't like is that in order for the joke to flow, it needs the masculine pronoun in the answer. Actually, the feminine one would flow as well, but nothing gender-neutral does. I tried the answer as 'Tell God your plans', but that didn't work either.

The way that language defines the way we think, what we think and how we think it has been a matter of discussion for years and years. In '1984', Orwell posited a government-run project to prune the language of 'unneccessary' words. If there is no word for 'treason', you can't commit it. If there is no word for 'love', you can't fall into it. This pronoun thing is another straitjacket which seems to me to be invisible to everyone interested in matters religious. Except me, of course.

All they (the ones in charge) ever do is brush the issue aside with a reference to ?*. Great - one biblical reference to counterbalance acres of masculine pronouns. And the others (the willing participants) just tell you of course they know God is both, or rather, neither, male and female but it's simply convenient usage.

But I can't discard the notion that anyone who doesn't question this, au fond only ever believes in an old man with a long white beard, which is demeaning to all parties. Every time I hear it I run into a perceptual blank wall and I stop thinking and start fuming. I don't know how to get over this hurdle.

* I have no idea what the verse is, something to do with God being one's father and mother, but I have just spent an hour searching Wikipedia, online concordances and discussion sites, and can't find a thing. (A whole hour! When I could have been playing Scrabble online!) Anyone out there know what I am talking about?

Scam at ASDA . . .

A new scam is being pulled on women mainly in broad daylight in ASDA car parks.

What happens is that when the intended victim goes back to her car to put her shopping in the boot, an almost naked, good looking, tanned, muscled young man comes up to her car and pretends to wash the windscreen.

While he is doing this, another two handsome, young athletic men open the back doors of the car, jump in and insist the woman drive off with them to some lonely spot, where they have their wicked way with her and steal her handbag.

They are very good at this…

They got me three times Friday and five times Saturday.


I couldn't bloody find them on Sunday.

Just a quickie

Have a look here - the cake made me laugh immoderately, and the post for Sep 25 made parts of my unravelled life click smoothly into place.

Playing games

Just got spanked by BiB. Virtually, of course, but my cheeks are still glowing. And he kept talking all the time he was doing it! It takes a corpus callosum of staggering proportions to do that. I was agape with excitement.

On the Scrabble website! What did you think I was talking about?

Morgan Szymanski

What a cracking name. Forename Welsh, surname Polish, and the man himself is Mexican. He also plays one mean guitar. We heard some Giuliani, Albeniz, Tarrega and Piazzolla. The last I had only heard played on a bandoneon which I found painful in the extreme, but young Mr Szymanski quite converted me.

I find it interesting that while the performance itself was not as flawless as you might find on a recording, the the very occasional, microscopically small imperfections added to the huge excitement of the live performance.

He is also a lot more handsome than his picture . . .

Barclays b*ll*cks

I taped an hour and a half of ITV on Monday just to be sure of catching the new Barclays ad - oh sad me. And even sadder me to be so disappointed by it. If these schmoes are supposed to be their GW characters someone needs suing. The JRT one just about does it, until he gets to the bit about interest levels dropping (in SO-OO-O many more ways than one!) when I just wanted to cry, and SM just cannot do stupid. Arrogant, opinionated, self-obsessed yes, but stupid, no. And all to impress a girl? When girls are there to impress him? I don't blame the actors one bit, but the scriptwriters have blown it badly. And what the hell is wrong with Kent? What did I miss?

I'm off for a game of Scrabble, courtesy of a recommendation by BiB. I haven't got anything remotely as urgent to do!

Tale of the Unexpected

Tomorrow (well, later today) it's Cleaner day so today (well yesterday) is Tidy-up day, so of course I settled down in front of the telly. Having more than five channels is a recent novelty, and I am so pleased to have found another way to aggravate the RSI already caused by over-mousing.

ANYWAY. Synchronicitously, the opening credits of something I had never heard of called 'Birthday Girl' were rolling, so I left off depleting the stock of sinovial fluid round my right fore-knuckle. Actress with Fake Russian Accent turned out to be Nicole Kidman, a piece of casting I felt was a bit of a mistake. Mind you, I think casting La Kidman under any circumstances is a bit of a mistake.* But the piece of casting I did like was, as Smarmy Bank Employee, my very own favourite, let's hear it for, Mr Stephen Mangan! In, it has to be said, a really crap hairstyle. And sporting a charisma bypass. With, as Terry Pratchett said, char-isn't-ma. Can anyone out there tell me when SM crossed the line between eeuw and phew? Same thing happened when 24 hit UK screens - only question I had was, when exactly did Kiefer Sutherland get so hot?

* JOKE! Honest! Certainly don't want a copycat Gina Ford / Mumsnet scenario erupting. By the by, I heard that at her recent photoshoot at Waddesdon Manor, Kidman ate with the family in the room where Ingo Maurer's Porca Miseria hangs. There is an upside to mega-Hollywood-stardom after all.

It's Sunday, so . . .

How does redemption actually work?

If we go partway with the analogy of a pawnshop, we get a pawnbroker who is powerful enough to exact payment for our souls, in the of the life of God's son. Where does that leave God? Not powerful enough to claim our souls without paying some entity as strong or stronger? Not very God-like, that.

And I really, really don't get why a punishment meted out to someone else exculpates me. Especially someone not guilty of anything. I don't believe that people (99% of them anyway - of course there are glaring exceptions) can commit crimes against God that can't be atoned for personally, in some sort of after-lifey, purgatorial way. Metempsychosis does it neatly.

I did wonder whether the whole redemption thing wasn't some sort of uber-parable, a way of using physical symbols to explain the human relationship with God, in a way that we humans can understand, but blimmin' heck if we need a story of such sheer bloody nastiness what the hell does that say about us?

Of course the whole concept would have been much more accessible to a Jew of 2000 years ago because of their tradition of the scapegoat. Rene Girard notwithstanding, anything located so firmly in a time and place has a limited unsefulness, neh?

I am fuelling this post with far too much chocolate . . .

I love a good wedding, me

. . . and the three in 'Confetti' were splendid. Naturally not nearly enough S. Mangan, but inordinate amounts of Robert Webb. I mean LOTS of him. Really, really lots. WOW. I was left feeling that any putative Mrs Webb will be one contented lady. I struggled a bit to find a good review for the link, most reviewers were luke-warm, but then they were American so what do they know. (Not thoughtless racism (this time) but you have to be English to get English humour. Hmm - maybe I liked it more because I am familiar with a lot of the cast's previous, which is mostly terrific, and therefore saw the film as funny, than because it actually was.) Nevertheless and in spite of everthing, mazeltov Mrs Webb.

Brand New Blog

Can I actually have a blog without having a paying job? Looking around Blogworld it appears that, like a salary, a necessary adjunct to employment is a displacement activity. We didn't have blogs in my (working) day, I had to be far more inventive to avoid work. You youngsters don't know you're alive.