The Wire

I've been reading that The Wire is the greatest TV show ever and I got a chance to watch the first episode last night so I did. 

OK-  it's gritty, OK-  it treats the crims with sympathy (which may be new to TV but isn't new to literature or cinema) but otherwise we get the usual testosterone-heavy shit with a pretty-looking white guy (in a sea of black faces) playing the maverick cop we're supposed to identify with and no women in starring roles except for the token lesbian cop who is so tough she's effectively a man.  (Phew, that was a long sentence!). So- and nobody I've read has noticed this which makes it even sadder-  it comes with racism and misogyny built in. Maybe if I stick with it I'll change my mind, but right now I'm thinking same old, same old.

Stray Thought

HP7 owes a hell of a lot to The Thirty Nine Steps.

Dr Lovelock Says

James Lovelock, the old bloke who wrote Gaia, thinks we're doomed. Global warming? There's no way of stopping it now. And, besides, most of the CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere comes from human beings just breathing. There are far too many of us and what with natural disasters and the wars that will follow in the scrabble for scarce natural resources billions are going to die untimely deaths by the end of the present century.

But, he concludes- on a hopeful note- even if our civilisation destroys itself, there'll be another along shortly.

You know what?  I think he could be right.

I gathered this from an article in Saga- the magazine for old folks- which I picked up and skimmed in the doctor's waiting room.

Out of the mouths of greys and fogies...

Jesus! What did I just do there? I'm writing about future genocide and I crack a joke. What is it about  human nature that makes us so greedy for the apocalypse? But it's true, isn't it? We love that stuff.  Look at the popularity of the Book of Revelation and all the cults it has inspired- from early Christianity to... er...present day Christianity. Look at the Hollywood disaster movie. When I was a very small boy some millennarian sect prophesied that the world was going to be destroyed by a huge tidal wave and I remember how I was planning to grab hold of my best friend and we'd bob up to the surface and swim to a desert island and live together like Crusoe and Friday- the sole survivors of the human race- and what fun it was going to be....