Info and forum posts by 'Cuba Boy'

RE: Going to Liverpool on Friday.....Any suggestions???

You don`t say if you`re staying overnight but, if you are, there`s a good new hotel - Hope Street Hotel:
http://www.hopestreethotel.co.uk/

It`s half way on the rather nice street between the two cathedrals (which, if you like architecture, are well worth visiting). And every room has a dvd player, in case you wanna stay indoors...

RE: Latest Poll

Uncharged_Water wrote:
"If people are so angry about the war in Iraq, then simply vote Blair out at the next election, I can assure you that will get rid of him immediately".

That`s a nice theory, but I live in Kensington & Chelsea (no, not the posh bit). My vote is so overwhelmed by loyal Tories that it makes not one jot of difference who I vote for. My vote is, literally, a waste of time and has zero effect on the national result.

But even if I lived in a more marginal constituency, the fact remains that I have absolutely no option of voting for - or against - Blair. His electors in Sedgefield are the only ones who have that privilege. Britain is, in effect, a presidential state, where the Prime Minister personally holds "Crown" powers to, for example, make war without Parliament`s say. And yet the overwhelming majority of us have absolutely no say in whether or not he is elected.

Despite most (but not all) of the hereditary peers being ejected from the second Chamber we still have a system where politician`s cronies are appointed for life. Can you imagine what we would have said if Saddam had announced he was introducing democracy to Iraq by creating a second chamber in which all his close personal friends would be appointed for life? And we think this is democracy?

Voting in general elections is, for most of us, a farcical waste of time.

This item was edited on Monday, 17th May 2004, 11:31

RE: Doh!I`ve just worked out why Warner Bros cinames have changed its name to VUE!

I thought Warner Bros was owned by Time-Warner. Isn`t MGM the only Hollywood studio still not owned by anyone else?

This item was edited on Thursday, 13th May 2004, 15:27

RE: Innapropriate TV

That's true, but wossname's original point was that he thought the new legislation might make illegal images like the Vietnam War photograph of the naked girl who had just been napalmed. The BBFC make the point that simple nudity is probably not sufficient to make an image obscene (and therefore illegal under this legislation) - there has to be a sexual dimension.

It's certainly true, though, that local authorities have the right to censor all cinema films exhibited in their areas, although most by default adopt the BBFC ratings. But that's why you can't see a public cinema screening of David Cronenberg's "Crash" in Westminster Council's area - although, bizarrely, you can buy a dvd of it in that Borough since local authorities have no authority over BBFC decisions on video/dvd…

RE: Innapropriate TV

wossname wrote: "so anyone who owns or makes a documentary about the Vietnam war should stay away from the much-used photo of a naked girl running away from a Napalm attack."

I don't think so, because the BBFC makes this point:
"An important definition in case law has been that an image is indecent if it "offends the ordinary modesty of the average man" [R v Stanley (1965)]. In order for an image to be indecent, there may also be some kind of sexual connotation. Simple nudity may be unlikely to be considered indecent."

A correction to comments about Clause/Section 28...

Hm, this is a bit of a diversion off-topic, but I thought it might be worth correcting a couple of the comments made earlier in this thread.

I always knew Clause 28 was a staggeringly badly-drafted piece of legislation, but who would have predicted back in 1988 that it would still be misunderstood so long after the Local Government Act was passed (at which time, incidentally, a "Clause" in a Bill automatically becomes a "Section" in an Act).

Section 28 prohibited local authorities - not schools, certainly not individual teachers - from promoting homosexuality as a "pretended family relationship".

There were several problems with this wording. Firstly, it presumably meant that local authorities were *not* prohibited from promoting homosexuality as a "real family relationship". This is almost certainly not what Mrs Thatcher's government intended, but it's what the law actually says - and how it is interpreted by judges - that counts.

Secondly, because the law is so badly worded, not a single case was ever brought before the courts under this Section. Not one. This has had a couple of consequences: the judges have not given a definitive interpretation of what the law actually meant; and therefore we still have widespread confusion about who was prohibited from doing what. Huge numbers of teachers thought that they were prohibited from even mentioning homosexuality in the classroom.

Thirdly, so far as Section 28 was concerned (subject to the caveat that no judge has ever decided exactly what the wording means), individual schools and teachers could do what they wanted about homosexuality - promote it, condemn it, ignore it, contextualise it; counsel children; deal with bullies… It only ever applied to local authorities and did not proscribe teachers` behaviour.

Finally, even if a judge had decided that Section 28 had some impact on what could be done in a local authority's schools, the Section had absolutely no effect whatsoever on independent schools - so Rik Booth's teachers could spend as much time as they wanted promoting homosexuality. Depending on its legal relationship with its local authority, the Catholic school mentioned above may also have been immune from Section 28.

Oh, and finally, finally - Section 28 was repealed in the Local Government Act 2003. If it ever had any legal power over what happens in a classroom it certainly has none today.

RE: Pasolini - `Trilogy of Life` on DVD

I`ve bought all three bfi titles over the last couple of years. The quality is as good as you can expect given the age of these films, so there`s not much difference between watching them on vhs and dvd. Sound is pretty ordinary, too - especially on Canterbury Tales, where the original spoken English is dubbed into Italian and then retranslated into English subtitles...

But these films are joyful. They are faithful to the bawdiness of the originals - rude, grown-up and funny - and ultimately they're rather life-affirming.

Salò is an interesting movie: I`m torn between thinking it`s a necessary film to explore the inhumanity of fascism, while it sometimes seems to take a bit too much pleasure in some of the S&M. It`s intelligent and sometimes near unwatchable, even though some of the final special effects look pretty tacky today.

If you`re interested in these, it`s worth getting hold of Oedipus Rex - currently only available on R1. A tremendously ambitious take on Sophocles` play (and on one of the foundation stones of modern psychoanalysis), Pasolini makes brilliant use of landscape and manages successfully to relate the story to the modern world. I think it's his most affecting film (though others seem to prefer the Gospel).

RE: Old People

Jay's argument that the length of time it takes to drive to work in the morning is a measure of "over-population" is simply ludicrous. Isn't it more likely to be a measure of government incompetence in providing a decent and reliable transport infrastructure?

Cahill's statistics are clear and pretty undeniable (or are they?) - that in the UK, about 60 million people live on about 60 million acres. However, more than 99% of us are crammed into less than 7% of the land available. You think East Anglia's vast Euro-fields are "green and pleasant". No, the majority of the UK's countryside is an agro-industrial nightmare of limited aesthetic value which, thanks to being drenched in pesticides, has far less biodiversity than the average scrap of wasteland in a town centre. Let's double the amount of land given over to urban life, build a proper transport infrastructure, stop subsidising farmers to grow unwanted and poisonous food, and all live happily ever after.

Incidentally, every single person in these islands is descended from immigrants, it's just that some people got here earlier than others. My family may have arrived here centuries earlier than yours, but that doesn't give me any moral right to tell you and your family to leave "my" country.

"We" began in the Caucasus? No, actually, we all began in Africa, from the same ancestors.

RE: Old People

Here's a jolly quote from our American friend at The Best Page in the Universe

"I`m sick and tired of lazy gluttonous Americans bitching about immigrants "taking" our jobs. It`s not like they can literally come to America, ambush us in the parking lot and take our jobs.

"If you lose your job to an immigrant, it`s probably because he or she was willing to work harder for less money. ... If they do equal work, then they deserve equal pay. It`s just that simple, and I`m not going to sit back like every other racist piece of s*** bitching about having to work harder because there`s a little competition for my job, immigrant or otherwise. I know I can do my job better than anyone, and if an immigrant thinks he can do a better job than I can, I welcome him to try.

"What kind of chicken s*** pussy is afraid of competition? Can`t get a job because you lost out to an immigrant? Well TOUGH S***. Nobody wants to pay you for your half-assed work if someone else can do it better. That`s what America is all about. Our president may be a moron, but I`ll be damned if I`m going to let any more jackasses sully the reputation of hard working Americans who are willing to work just as hard as anyone else with or without competition. If you can`t cut it, then the people with money will pay it to someone else who can. Maybe if all you people bitching weren`t such lazy, pathetic, blood sucking leeches, you`d get off of your dead ass and work HARDER to do a better job. Get some balls people. If you`re too chicken s*** and you can`t cut it, then maybe it`s you who doesn`t deserve to live in America. Not the immigrants."

It's ridiculous to take one moment in time and argue that all migration should stop - where you're born is where you must stay. Humanity has benefited from constant flows of people although these flows have been increasingly constrained over the last century (since passports and visas became commonplace around the time of the first world war). Freedom of movement is the essential third "leg" of the economic tripod of global free-market capitalism: we've almost achieved freedom of movement of capital (which currently largely benefits the rich), we've gone a long way towards freedom of movement of goods (still lots of subsidy and tariff distortions to overcome), but we've made little progress on freedom of movement of labour (with the exception of relatively rich people, who've always found it easy to move around). Without this latter freedom, globalisation is just a device for transferring all economic risk from the rich to the poor bloody worker, who is stuck in their country when the local economy goes wrong while the rich people pull out their cash. This is both economically inefficient and immoral. If we want global capitalism (that's a whole different "if"…) then we have to have freedom of movement.

Jay's post on how crowded our island is reminded me of some work by the economist Kevin Cahill, who wrote a fascinating book "Who owns Britain?". Here's a letter he recently wrote to the FT:

"Martin Wolf's perceptive column "England's great housing dilemma" (Feb 6) brings clarity to the debate ignited by Kate Barker of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, in her interim report on housing supply. But he perpetuates the myth of crowding in the UK.

"We are an island of 60m acres, populated by 60m people. We have an acre apiece, in theory. In practice, all but about 400,000 people, 0.6% of the population, live on urban land, which constitutes a maximum of about 4.2m acres. The remaining 55.8m acres are hardly threatened by a proposal to take 110,000 acres for the 1.1m houses projected by Christine Whitehead, professor of housing at the LSE, over the next 20 years.

"Mr Wolf touches on this issue in terms of economic costs. The reality is that the agricultural acreage of the UK - 41.9m acres - on which no-one is allowed to build, is costing the taxpayer £3.9bn in direct subsidy a year and as much again in indirect tax breaks. Agricultural land is not only uneconomic. It is vastly expensive. It is time that economic use was made of some of that expensive land."

Anyway, the original post made me smile by reminding me of Gareth from The Office, explaining how his dad hadn't kept up to date on the correct terms for different minority groups…

This item was edited on Friday, 26th March 2004, 12:04

RE: That `religious` poll..

Saqib - apologies for my sloppy phrasing: when I wrote "elsewhere on this topic" I meant "topic" with a small "t" - I was indeed referring to your posts on The Passion thread.

I'm not sure we're disagreeing about the evolution of some (and I deliberately used the word "some") religious systems into governmental systems. And some governmental systems, as you point out, are far more comprehensive and intrusive than western-style liberalism, covering judicial and economic aspects of life in great detail. Theocracies have grown out of many religions including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But not all religious systems become theocracies (and, indeed, nor have all countries where Islam is practised become Islamic theocracies). And some theocracies have, in turn, changed into liberal democracies. The point is, I guess, that religion as a concept has for humans proved to be a profound and adaptable response to a sometimes overwhelming environment.

But I think you've missed my point about thought versus belief. Belief is a category of mental activity that is hardwired into us - we all have belief systems. Sometimes, some of these belief systems are formally religious - ie, some people believe that Jesus is one part of a Holy Trinity, and so on. But belief systems exist outside formal religion, too, and while individual elements of a particular belief system may be amenable to rational argument, the fact is that the world is too complex for any one person to comprehend in a rational way (let alone that we simply don't yet understand, rationally, whole chunks of the world around us). Therefore all of us, of necessity, use (irrational) belief systems as an essential way of surviving the modern world, whether it's my friend the shaman or me flicking the light switch. These systems are not comparable in a rational way because they are not rational systems - although, of course, they all have their own internal logic. Hence, for example, I can "explain" why the light sometimes *doesn't* come on when I flick the switch.

I *have* met and worked with people from Native North American cultures, although part of the problem in discussing these issues is that, of course, not everyone from any one culture believes exactly the same thing as everyone else in that culture.

Thanks for the offer of a private email correspondence on this subject but, since my position is that our religious belief systems are not really subject to rational persuasion, it would be inherently contradictory for me to do so!

RE: That `religious` poll..

"at the end of the day most religions started out as simple methods of controlling the public & creating order"

I'm not sure that's true. All humans seem to be hard-wired to "believe" in things, to "have faith" - it's a simple mental process that enables us to interact with a world the complexity of which even the cleverest of us can't possibly understand. Put crudely, there's no qualitative difference in the nature of the belief I have that, when I flick the switch, the light will come on, and the belief a Native North American shaman has that, when he does a rain dance, it will rain. Hm, but it often doesn't rain when he does the rain dance? Well, guess what, sometimes the light doesn't come on when I flick the switch. Ah, but that's because the bulb has blown, or the fuse-box has tripped, or maybe the switch has broken or there's a power-cut. Yeah, well, it didn't rain because someone else has interfered with the ritual, or we've upset the gods who are now punishing us, or… You get the idea. The point is that the *qualitative* nature of the belief is, in both cases, identical. We are all fundamentally belief-bound creatures.

As a species we also live in a vast range of environments - maybe more than any other - and face a huge range of unpredictable circumstances. Because we are conscious creatures, as well as constructing belief systems we also construct systems of meaning (why am I here? why did my baby die?). These enable us to resolve the inherent contradictions and unfairnesses of life. Structured religious beliefs are an obvious way of doing that. Because we are so often powerless (when we see a family member dying, for example), we have to believe that there is some power greater than ourselves. By merging belief and meaning systems, we can more easily reconcile ourselves to our fate - we gain some sense of purpose and, therefore, feel a little bit more in control than we otherwise would.

Over time, it's clear that religious systems did in many instances evolve into governmental systems or other systems of social control. But they didn't "start out" that way, and even today some of them aren't primarily or even secondarily methods of control - and in some instances they act as a focus of public dissent (some elements of the Catholic church in Latin American during the military juntas, for example).

While I disagree with pretty much everything Saqib has posted on this topic, he has highlighted exactly why this issue is impossible to debate - it is about a clash of belief systems which are literally incomparable. My North American shaman and I speak totally different languages because our fundamental belief systems are so different (and irreconcilable). We are arguing about two closed belief systems with no significant overlaps. Neither of us will persuade the other on a rational level.

But is it Art?

The first question, I guess, is should the Fourth Plinth be occupied by a memorial sculpture? For the last few years the Royal Society of Arts has put a series of modern artworks on the empty plinth - including Mark Wallinger's life-sized sculpture of Christ and Rachel Whiteread's resin plinth. Despite the Evening Standard's best efforts to pour scorn on them, a majority of people surveyed expressed approval. The government then decided that the Mayor of London should take responsibility for the plinth. His independent commission (chaired by John Mortimer, the creator of Rumpole) recommended that the plinth should carry on being used to display a changing programme of modern sculptures. The sculpture that Jed Maxwell has picked up on is the first of these.

So, it's not a "memorial" sculpture (like Nelson) to commemorate a particular artist, it's a bit of modern art which happens to use an artist as the model. And to answer MildMan`s specific question, it was indeed chosen because the committee believed it was the "best art" not because it was a token representation of a person with disabilities (and anyway, Nelson has only one arm and one eye, but does anyone think he's on his column as a bit of PC tokenism?).

There's some debate in the art world about whether it's still possible to do memorial sculptures because of the less deferential world in which we now live. Are there any heroes anymore? I tip my hat at, for example, Nelson Mandela, but I guess most of the student unions which named their buildings after Winnie must now rather regret it.

I dunno, I'm not a Christian but I thought Mark Wallinger's sculpture was really affecting. Marc Quinn's looks similar, so maybe it would be best to wait & see what it looks like? And you can always console yourself with the thought that if you don't like it, it'll be replaced in about a year's time with something else. If the plinth had a memorial sculpture (anyone want to see the Queen Mum on a horse?) it`d be permanent whether you liked it or not...

RE: Personal DVD Player - Goodmans GDVD 60

Or there`s a larger Goodmans, the 67, also available from Richer Sounds. I bought one: 7" screen, multiregion out of the box (or you can get the cheaper R2 version), mains adaptor & car-cigarette-lighter-adaptor are included, as is adaptor to connect to external tv. Battery life is pants - lasts about 2.5 hours. Sound is ok, better through the headphones than the speakers. Screen is pretty decent, and 7" is obviously much better than 5" (fnar, fnar).

RE: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - worth getting?

Or wait until 26 April when "The Day Today" is released - including Alan Partridge`s early outings, the brilliant Chris Morris, and the Currency Susan. Or buy some porn.

Back to the original topic

Gay marriage features heavily in this week`s edition of The Economist.

There`s an editorial here:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2459758

and a background article here:
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2460765

RE: Moments of madness...

Sultan wrote "Before you state that I cannot liken the acts of gay people with that of a murderer let me state that religious books such as the bible, koran, and the jewish books condemn these acts as wrong/immoral. They make no distinction. So, we should not make any distinction, otherwise it is a classic case of pick and choose things which you like in a religous text."

Actually, I'm not remotely interested in what one religious book or another has to say about these matters - that's exactly my point. They were written (or translated, and then retranslated…) at particular historical moments where things that seemed appropriate to the writers were set out as "gospel". The Bible is riddled with sanctions or warnings that most of us today would regard as preposterous - including eating seafood, or attitudes to menstruation, slavery, adultery… Why on earth should we all have to abide by codes of behaviour, belief and thought that were set down hundreds or thousands of years ago by groups of people living in pre-industrial societies, most of which were organised on nepotistic, racist, sexist, homophobic and/or illiberal lines?

But I think you want it both ways - your post states: "Things should change as the world changes but any changes must not go against what is clearly wrong". "Clearly wrong" to whom? Obviously you think it's your judgement that is most important in determining what is "clearly wrong", but from the evidence of your posts so far I wouldn't want to live in a society which lives by your rules. I think each society should write the rules which suit them best. Isn't that what democracy is? If a society happens to exist in which the majority of people think theft is ok - let's postulate an extended 1960s hippy commune which believes that all property is itself theft - then why on earth shouldn't they live like that, just because some old bloke a few hundred years ago was part of a society which didn't believe that?

I think it's unsurprising that few teenagers living in repressive countries would go public about their sexualities - how many teenagers in 1950s England went public? But that is not evidence that there is no homosexuality in the regimes you describe, merely evidence that people are protecting themselves from unpleasant fates - and you state that execution awaits people in some of these countries for the "crime" of homosexuality. Who in their right minds would be open about their sexuality in a regime where death might be the consequence? Does that mean that regime is a nice place to live? Well maybe, for some people, just as 1950s England was all very jolly for some, and our own departed Mary Whitehouse was constantly campaigning for a return to that society. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Anyway, my point was that Sultan seems to imply that all these glossy lifestyle magazines make otherwise heterosexual teenagers want to be gay. Really? My argument is that heterosexuality must be incredibly fragile if that's the case, or homosexuality must be a truly wonderful lifestyle. I've seen absolutely no evidence for either proposition, although I have seen substantial evidence that homosexual teenagers are more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual ones. I'd argue that was because of the grinding pressure of illiberal social attitudes, but others might argue it's because they're racked by guilt at doing what they know is against "God's law"… Whatever. I'm not much interested in the cause, but more interested in creating a society in which vulnerable teenagers don`t want to kill themselves.

Sultan wrote "Countries in South Asia and the Middle East do not have gays." He then went on "Some exist...". I'm still struggling to follow the logic of those two sentences following one another, but from the clarification I think we are in agreement. There are homosexual people everywhere. Some of them keep quiet for fear of the consequences, or leave at the earliest opportunity. That doesn't mean they don't exist. Nor does it mean the societies they come from are either right, morally superior, or even very nice.

Moments of madness...

The society Sultan describes sounds to me alarmingly like 1950s rural England - the place in which I was raised, and which for me was one of the most unpleasantly repressive regimes I've ever experienced. Divorced people were shunned. Single parents were outcasts - as were their kids. Black people faced unspeakable prejudice. Gay people were either invisible, blackmailed, imprisoned or repressed. I guess for some people that was a Paradise on earth: if they want to live in that sort of society, I wish them well. What I don't accept is the imposition of that value-system on everyone else.

Implicit in Sultan's post is the view that we should all live under a value system which was designed in a particular historical moment, irrespective of its suitability to the modern world - the opposite of a liberal perspective (that the members of a society set the rules by which they are prepared to live and which suit them). I struggle with Sultan's view: what right does any particular generation have to set in tablets of stone the rules by which all future generations will live?

"Alcohol was wrong and illegal, now it is legal…". Alcohol has never been "illegal" in the UK - indeed, for much of our history it has been the only readily available way of obtaining drinkable fluids, since most water supplies were polluted. Certainly there have been some (minority) parts of the UK which have restricted or refused licences to retail alcohol but that is not the same as making alcohol illegal - you could still legally carry your own bottle of whisky into the most tea-total parts of Methodist Wales, for example, and legally consume it.

This trivial factual inaccuracy of Sultan's illustrates part of my problem with his approach: whose historical determination of what is right and what is wrong should be forever binding on the rest of us?

I loved Grackan's whine "I mean its political correctness gone mad when you can`t express your own point of view without being called a bigot by Haggis and others". Erm, no, that's called "free speech": you have the freedom to spout off about anything you like, and in return Haggis has the freedom to call you a bigot or anything else he likes. Surely you can't be arguing that you should have free speech but Haggis shouldn't?

I actually put "don't care" as my answer to the original question. I don't think personal and sexual relationships are any of the state's business, so for me the legal concept of "marriage" is an unacceptable intrusion into an individual's private life. I don't think "marriage" should exist for anyone, straight or gay, if it implies that there are some relationships between consenting adults that the state considers more valid than others and which it then rewards either with privileges or by taking taxes paid by one group and giving them to another. How dare politicians decide what relationships should be state-sanctioned?

Equally, I can see that it's handy to have some form of contract which makes it easy for people to deal with, say, the recognition of joint tenancies when one party dies, or which awards primacy in deciding medical matters to a nominated person. Those contracts between consenting adults should be gender-neutral - in fact, blind to anything other than that which the parties wish to contract.

"Marriage" as a religious concept is something else entirely. If one group of people wants to specify what in their view constitutes an acceptable relationship and to apply the label of "marriage" to that state, I say "good luck" to them. They can do what they want within their own religion, including deciding who else can be members of their club. My only issue comes when they try to impose that definition on anyone else or argue that the state should somehow get involved in protecting their views.

I love another idea that is implicit in Sultan's post - that given the choice, people are desperate to adopt homosexuality. Is heterosexuality really so unattractive that heterosexuals need to be protected from the fantastic range of amazing lifestyle options offered by homosexuality, or they would instantly start fancying their mates? Strikes me that most of us are pretty certain about our sexualities, and that part of the trauma experienced by young gay people is the social pressure they perceive to conform to heterosexual norms. If homosexuality were really perceived as equivalent to heterosexuality would there be more homosexuals, or just more people who felt comfortable being open about their sexuality?

"Countries in South Asia and the Middle East do not have gays". What? Does even Sultan really believe this drivel? It may well be that large numbers of them have chosen to live abroad in more liberal societies rather than, as Sultan suggests, face execution at home. It may be that large numbers repress themselves (like in 1950s England). But to argue that they don't even exist…

RE: Writing a letter to the police, who do I title it to...?

You`re in Norfolk, aren`t you? Your Chief Constable is Andy Hayman, who has been in post for a year or so and is, actually, very nice.

RE: MUSTEK PL207 Portable DVD

I bought the Goodmans multiregion model a little while ago which looks identical - I think it was about £260, so you`ve found a great price.

It's played everything I've put in it (about half my dvds are not R2).

The picture-quality is ok but very sensitive to angle. Don't buy it expecting the last word in sharpness. You can adjust brightness and colour and… no, that's it.

Sound through the speakers is as thin as you`d expect - it`s ok through the headphones.

The remote control on my model is pants: it still doesn`t work and I`m not sure I can face another trip to the retailer... but since I normally play it within arm`s length that doesn`t matter much.

Battery life is enough for one dvd, so not much use if you want to use it for transatlantic commuting. I bought mine to use in hotel rooms when I`m working away from home, and for that it`s great - my model included a mains adaptor/recharger and a bag full of other extra goodies.

RE: cdwow doubt

Since both Portugal and the UK are in the EU (CD-Wow is based in the UK rather than the Channel Islands, I think?), there should be no taxes or duties to pay on any goods bought in one EU country and shipped to another.

RE: Where can I get a list of decent region 3 retailers?

This is a handy list (tho some of the links don`t work...):

http://www.worldwidedvdforums.com/links.php?sid=ec62f09290e2460a5238e935372c3b05

RE: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Thanks for the reply, but... my original post was last November, and since then Tinker was released on R2 by BBC Worldwide, and I`m now a proud owner...

BBC are still not listing a release date for Smiley`s - I guess it depends on how many of us buy Tinker.

RE: Very Much So and other annoying phrases

To be honest, I really hate the phrase "to be honest".

Does that mean everything else they`ve said has been a lie?

RE: Help Please Portable dvd player

You could try http://www.iwantoneofthose.com/CGIBIN/PRIAMLNK.CGI?CNO=1&MP=PRDUPD^GIN132&STNO=ST01204&WHAT=info.

Also claims to be multiregion.

I had hours to kill at the airport last week, so asked the nice man at Dixon`s why their portable dvd players were not multiregion. He replied with a completely straight face that Dixon`s had taken "an ethical decision" not to stock multiregion players. What? The company that has probably sold more of those end-of-warranty insurance policies than anyone else, actually taking an "ethical" decision?! Hm, anyway, still mystified as to how it is more ethical to stock R2 only (or maybe he meant it was less ethical? Damn, I should have asked...).

This item was edited on Monday, 15th September 2003, 12:46

RE: `One Hour Photo` - good film, have a query re the ending (SPOILER ALERT)

I think he was slipping back into his fantasy world.

I don`t think he ever broke into their home (the first sequence showing that was book-ended with shots of him sitting in his car, and there was an abrupt lighting shift between the different locations).

RE: South facing gardens, what`s so great?

Whaddya mean, "no Santa Claus"?!

RE: South facing gardens, what`s so great?

And if you`re in the Northern hemisphere and don`t have a compass, it sometimes helps to know that the sun travels* from left to right across the sky... so, if you want to take a photograph of sunshine on the front of a building which is in shade, you can work out if it`s worth waiting or if you should come back tomorrow...

My garden faces west, so I have sun until about lunchtime then shade in the afternoon. Which is crap. Go for a south-facing garden if you can.

*Yeah, yeah, I know it`s us that travels around the sun, but this is making it simple, right?

RE: Tony Martin

I often find myself nodding in agreement with ebony's posts, but not this one … because I think there's something fundamentally different about a burglar entering your home. Your home is your own sanctuary, your escape from the world. It is, to quote the cliché, your castle - a principle that judges way back in the seventeenth century found important enough to lay down as a fundamental tenet of English law: in an act of considerable courage, they ruled that not even the king himself has the right to enter your home without first obtaining a lawful warrant from the court. They recognised that there is something psychologically overwhelming about the importance of your own home.

So, when people choose to unlawfully invade your home, I think the stakes are pretty high. What would be unreasonable force if you were confronted by someone on the street might become reasonable force in the heightened circumstances of discovering someone in the middle of the night in your own home. I'm not sure I could, or should be expected, to act rationally if I discover a burglar. If I live on my own in the middle of nowhere, I guess I'd have an even more heightened sense of terror.

I'm not sure I know enough about the Tony Martin case to comment on whether or by how much his actions were disproportionate - is pursuing with your shotgun an apparently fleeing burglar still reasonable? - but there is also something particularly repugnant about one of the burglars considering suing for injuries sustained while being where they shouldn't have been.

RE: S**t scared of flying, what should I do?

British Airways run short courses to help people who are frightened of flying - they involve a psychologist and a pilot, offer exercises in how to overcome your fear, and culminate in a special short flight for you & all your classmates where you can put your learning into effect. I`ve heard good reports from a former colleague who went on one, although I`ve just had a quick look at BA`s website & can`t find a reference to them.

Good luck!

RE: new hulk trailer!

I agree with RJS: I thought the Hulk looked like a green Michelin Man.