AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

Unless you're Judge Kavanaugh. What a cry-baby. Unless it was deliberate in which case, what a performer!

[Grant]

I can't decide whether Kavanaugh misplayed his hand. Surely he should have dispassionately analysed Ford's case to show that in the absence of evidence it can be discounted. All that blubbing showed he's not fit to be a judge.
On the other hand, maybe he thought the media demands that level of emotion. If he had been cool the TV viewers would have said he was guilty.
What if he had said "I was so drunk and it was so long ago I can't remember if I groped the woman or not." It's hard to see how the Democrats could have proceeded to attack him as he was still a minor at the time.

[Mick Harper]

He played the right hand but rather overdid it. What he's stuck with though is the absolutist goody two-shoes position he adopted (had to adopt, I suppose -- it sure convinced me). Several contemporaries from school and college have come out saying he was not in the least two-shoed. Rather the reverse. This would not in itself be a disqualification for judicial high office but perjury would be. It all depends on what position the news networks take. If they trawl the barrel then he's doomed; if they take the high moral ground, he should survive.

If he fails, do they have enough time to get a Kavanaugh clone with clean hands installed before the November elections (in practice, January) and if not, and the Democrats win the Senate, does that mean no Trumpite judge will be acceptable for the next two years? They would be justified in refusing all nominations because the Republicans refused an Obama judge for more than a year. An eight-judge Supreme Court in any case is the best arrangement in such partisan times. I wonder when the current curious climate will come to an end. Or perhaps that should be, what will it end in?

[Wile E. Coyote]

Kavanaugh could not refute.... because Ford did not try to prove anything.

He could only say this is who I am. But he didnt.

Ford did not say who she was either.

Still neither committed perjury.

[Mick Harper]

Here's something that an eager beaver telly bloke walking lost railways came across near Buckie on the east coast of Scotland, the Bowfiddle rock.



He claimed it had been there for millions of years which even an orthodox earth scientist would probably guffaw at. But it is significant that quite intelligent people think that surface rock formations are of their nature millions of years old. On the coast, it would be more like hundreds though of course that would be a problem for us since we would much prefer 'thousands'.

[Mick Harper]

So, the new Dr Who season is upon us. We open on a nineteen year-old black (but not threatening) male talking rather engagingly on a computer. Cut to Yorkshire moors where young black is being a bit pathetic, but sympathetically so, while a black woman authority figure is trying to teach him to ride a bike. There is a third figure present, an elderly rather ineffectual white male, a retired bus conductor who turns out to be the black authority figure’s (second) husband. Not a great catch there, petal. Next scene: the apparently pathetic young, black male is now alone on the moors and turns out to be quite unafraid (even cautiously curious) as various utterly terrifying alien manifestations take place all around him. I wished he'd've joined the British Army.

I’ll report on the social engineering that features in the next scene after I haven't emerged from behind the sofa on account of not entirely identifying with the characters.

[Mick Harper]

Countryfile Producer: Who have we got to cover the clifftop walk feature?
Researcher: We thought Mark could do that one.
Producer: Is he the one in the wheelchair?
Researcher: Yes, he insists on doing everything himself. It's quite inspiring.
Producer: Check the insurance position, would you?

[Wile E. Coyote]

King Arthur's Britain "The truth unearthed" ..... was a bit like Time Team without the excitement.

Alice arrives on a speedboat, with stirring music. Why? Surely there was other transport available but no, they have forked out for a speedboat.....she wonders about Arthur, the forming of the nation.....


She heads off to meet some history buff to consider the evidence. Turns out that the Arthurian myth was just that, myth. This was a shame as the silhouette red graphics (bloody, dark age) were quite fun, less 300, more Noggin with ketchup......

So Alice with her fiery red hairstyle concentrated on the archaeology to find out what life and death was like in the Dark Ages instead....

Life was mundane and, with skeletons only having 2% battle wounds (damn), generally peaceful. Genetics showed that the Anglo Saxons gradually moved in and only occasionally bonked the locals....Yikes, no invasion.

Back to Tintagel, new evidence shows that it is a high status site, it don't look it to Wiley, but cripes, they have found a stone with an inscription and loads of shards from all over the world. This shows that people were trading pottery for tin......

Some more views of Cornwall. What does it mean? It means that we have always been connected to the continent by land, in fact William rode over on a Elephant?...No, we have always been connected by sea and rivers, we are part of Europe, and the World, we feel divided but we are not, because we have always traded.

Alice goes dewy eyed...Some more shots of Cornwall.....

GOSH

[Mick Harper]

A review of a book about the film Where Eagles Dare appeared in this week's Guardian Review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/03/broadsword-calling-danny-boy-where-eagles-dare-geoff-dyer-review
about which I thought ‘how self referential can you get?' and decided ‘not by half' when the film turned up the next day on Turner Classic Movies and I decided to review it for you. Not a film I would have seen since soon after it came out in 1970 but quite interesting now.

First surprise: three stars with above title billing: Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood and Mary Ure. Who she? Apart from being Robert Shaw's wife and a standard British character actress, nobody at all. And a nobody who has a minimal amount of screentime compared to the Two Biggies. Which is why she's there -- with three you can put them in alphabetical order thus avoiding problems over top billing between the Two Biggies, which is quite important if you read the Guardian article. It is, as the article says, fascinating watching Eastwood having to defer to Burton for plot purposes but making sure it's for no other reason. Burton wins by not noticing.

But back to Mary Ure. And the equally blond bombshell she is paired with amidst a host of other blond bombshells (it's set in the Bavarian Alps). They all look like men in drag. Such is the societal advance when it comes to the way women should look. You'll know what I mean whenever a female Trump supporter pops up on the telly. The only halfway decent piece of arse on view was the sour-faced, middle-aged German SS frau-commandant but that may be me rather than society.

After some classic British understated dialogue for a fallen comrade:

[Mick Harper]

Remind me to look up the meaning of 'solecism' before I so airily use it. But anyway the reason they're all off to Schloss Nazi is because a US general has been shot down, captured and is being interrogated in said schloss. Why all the fuss? Well, because the general was on his way to Crete to discuss the D-Day landings with his Russian opposite number and is sure to spill the beans to his captors. By fair means or foul.

First question from Nazi interrogator: "So, herr General, vy ver you going to Crete to meet your Russian allies ven Crete has been occupied by the forces of our glorious fatherland since May 1941? You 'ave no answer for zat, hein?"

[Mick Harper]

Unlike all the socially engineered series we've been regaled with lately, Vanity Fair was played fairly straight. And was boring as shit.

[Mick Harper]

It is no accident that Vanity Fair is on ITV-1 and Doctor Who is on BBC-1. Nor that Where Eagles Dare turned up for discussion last night on BBC-2. People talk about 'watercooler moments' but these things have to be orchestrated to some degree. The Americans (foolishly, in my opinion) think these things can be left to market forces and federalism whereas we do it by more statist means.

Problems always arise though when important arms of the state are captured by ideologues. Ideologies by definition are unpopular (people like the status quo which does not require an ideology) but are necessary to keep things moving along. Normally ideologies are themselves fed into the mix in safe doses but when the rulers start going too quickly or an ideology hasn't been updated quickly enough, the populace rises up in, say, Kett's Rebellion or Brexit or voting for Donald Trump. I will demonstrate this when I return to my parsing of Doctor Who.

[Mick Harper]

Remind me to look up the meaning of 'parsing' before I so airily use it. The chief social problem of our time is the fact that modern economies require the importation of vast quantities of labour -- not necessarily cheap labour -- to do the jobs the natives cannot or will not do. People don't like foreigners. So how to square the circle? Both the US and the UK have by and large adopted 'multiculturalism' (a policy that goes back to the Roman Empire) but are constantly bedevilled by the fact that the prevailing ideology is liberalism, one of whose tenets is egalitarianism (unlike the Roman Empire).

In its present guise, this dictates that one imported foreigner (that can do the job) is as good as any other imported foreigner (that can do the job). The populace begs to differ. So they have to be taught it...

[Mick Harper]

Doctor Who -- The Applied Epistemologist's Cut Part Two

Next we have a fascinating establishing scene. It consists of three women -- one white, two non-white -- and a parking quarrel in a salubrious Sheffield suburb. Its ostensible purpose is to establish one of our heroines, an Asian policewoman, to be a no-nonsense source of Solomonic wisdom though the subtext is "We can all get along if only we had more a) women and b) non-whites in the police force." Which may very well be true.

Then we shift to the police station itself where it turns out that the non-white policewoman has a non-white male supervisor. No other police officers in sight. I blame the cuts. However, by a neat plot development, her querulous demand for more responsibility (a less than subliminal nod to racial and gender glass-ceilings) leads her to the Yorkshire Moors, with hat, to meet the aliens. They don't stand a chance.