Grumpy Stuff

[poliphilo]

It's raining. It has rained through most of this middle summer. The weather seems to be good for spiders. I keep walking into webs. The other day I found a very small spider had spun a very small web in one of the coffee cups in one of our cupboards. 

The Deep is the secondhand title for a secondhand TV show. A submarine full of beautiful people is going down under the arctic ice to encounter a nameless terror. It took all of an hour before they encountered it and- well I never- the black girl was the first to die. My money's on the Asian bloke to go next. Minnie Driver (sick and tired of Hollywood according to the Radio Times) chose this plodding drama to mark her return to the old country. I imagine it was only her faintly starry presence that got it greenlighted.

The Queen of Air and Darkness- liber secundus of The Once and Future King- is more of the same to less purpose. Wart has grown into an uninterestingly priggish young man. King Pellinore is in love- so is now not only silly but wet. The introduction of Celtic characters means we can have jokes about saints and shillelaghs and lots of ersatz Synge. There's a rather striking chapter in which the Queen of Orkney boils a cat and another in which her sons butcher a unicorn.  If this is really a classic then I'm Aristophanes.

Our War on Drugs is a Channel 4 documentary series about the futility of pushing puritanical wishful thinking into law. Yes, we'd all like it if human beings- including ourselves- would behave as if made in the image of god, but we don't and we won't- and, besides, a roll in the mud can be fun. One statistic sums it up: British police and customs stop a mere one percent of all the heroin that is ceaselessly pouring into Scotland. So why bother? Is it simply to keep the Puritans happy? What I say is, "Fuck the Puritans."

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I've become very keen on a webcomic called Arthur, King of Time and Space - the author is obviously a White fan.

[frumiousb.livejournal.com]

We've also had more spiders this year than I've ever seen. But our rain (for a change) hasn't been that bad.

[michaeljohngrist.com (from livejournal.com)]

SY went to Amsterdam recently and was able to observe free marijuana use, used by peope in moderation who just got chilled out. She also walked through the red light district and commented upon how safe it all felt, and how unexploitative it seemed.

Yes. Likewise with any drug or habit I suppose, of course excepting behaviours that are harmful to others. If people are going to do it anyway, why not make it somehow legal? Save huge money on prisons, police, and actually make money through tax. Everybody gets safer, just like with relegalizing alcohol after the US`s prohibition era, because it`s all above board, and there are standards. No more pills formulated with ground-up bits of light bulb.

Are the Dutch all indolent layabouts stoned off their faces, using marijuana as a gateway drug, and having sex with everything they can? That`s not what SY saw on her trip, and she hung out with several groups of locals.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

In the United States, the Great War on (some) Drugs began under Reagan. The CIA had gone into the the cocaine business, in order to support the illegal war in Nicaragua, so I reckon they needed to keep the prices up and suppress their rivals.

Marijuana was criminalized at the behest of du Pont -- who wanted to seel the US Navy nylon rope -- and William Randolph Hurst -- who owned a fuck-ton of standing timmer and was afraid using hemp for paper manufacture would decrease the value of his holdings. Racism was the weapon of choice in the war on the evil weed.

The US drug war will not end because law enforcement gets extra money to wage said war, to build more prisons, and so on. It's a racket, just like every other war.