Solved

My internet troubles have finally been taken care of and I now have a stable connection to call my own.  Time to get back on track.

Except, unfortunately, that I have to leave for six hours of class at the present moment.  Maybe after, though.

It is also the case that winter has at last come upon us in Ottawa.  It came like a thief in the night.  Not even Jack Frost himself knew the moment of its return.

Frozen in

My apartment building has been without heat for several days now, though they’re working hard enough in attempting to fix it.  Nobody seems to know what the problem actually is.  In the interval, however, the landlord will pay our electricity bills and a guy came around giving out space heaters.  I already have one, and as such declined, but I’m glad they are not ignorant of the nuisance this constitutes.

10 degrees (Celsius; you Americans and your crazy system will find no sympathy here) sounds comfortable enough, but it loses its lustre when it becomes the new norm.

Pirates: Not actually cool

I welcome the recent resurgence of piracy on the high seas (a new Golden Age?) if only for the fact that it might finally demonstrate to my hapless generation that pirates are actually miserable bastards and not free-living heroes with a code of honour that puts our own lubberly laws to shame.

Also: real ninjas can actually be seen.  The reason you can’t see them nowadays is because there aren’t any left.  And don’t even get me started on robots.

Quantum of Solace (2008)

A fair enough film in its own right, but within the context of the series as reinvigorated by Casino Royale, and the world of spy thrillers as established by the Bourne trilogy, Quantum of Solace is a bewildering parade of disappointments.  6/10.

The Flail of Jehovah

Such was the emphatic (and in his case derisive) epithet attached to bureaucracy by Ezra Pound in an essay of 1928. I can’t agree with his characterization, but I’ve always loved the phrase.

I haven’t traditionally loved bureaucracy, though, and I’m pretty sure it’s because of cases like the following from England that Pound made the connection between soulless institutions and his most hated enemy:

A memorabilia collector has been jailed for five years for possessing a Second World War rifle listed as a prohibited firearm. The rifle was not in a condition to fire live ammunition.

But Stafford Crown Court heard replacing the deteriorated pin would have made that possible. Phillip Peter Kent, aged 29, of Owen Walk, Highfields, Stafford, was arrested in the street by police acting on information at 7.30am on June 20 this year.

Well, great! A dangerous gangster off the streets at last. Looks like he put up a hell of a fight, too:

Officers asked what they would find if they searched his home and he immediately told them about the Lee-Enfield rifle.

Mr Stephen Bailey, defending, told the court yesterday Kent had not bought ammunition nor sought to make any alterations to allow live bullets to be fired.

[...]

“He was told by the person who sold it to him it was de-commissioned. He was a bona fide, not secretive, collector and was immediately and absolutely co-operative.

“The gun was in the state in which he received it and, although that does not make it a non-prohibited weapon, there was no ammunition, no evidence of his seeking any or of intentional or actual use.”

Well, great! They caught a lying, desperately cunning hoarder of monstrous weapons. Lock him away. The judge was right on the ball with this one:

Kent pleaded guilty to possessing the rifle. Pleading with Judge John Maxwell to spare him the minimum five-year jail term for this category of offence on the grounds of exceptional circumstances, Mr Bailey said: “Custody would be devastating. It would deeply affect his family and he would lose his accommodation.”

But Judge Maxwell said Parliamentary guidance meant strong sentences should be given for illegal firearms possession. “I feel bound to impose the minimum sentence of five years,” he added.

Well… great.

In a stronger and more excellent world, somebody would be hanged for this monstrous affair at daybreak tomorrow, and it would not be Mr. Kent. At the very least there would be a flogging and a sending-into-exile. A judicial bureaucracy is still a bureaucracy, anyway, and carries with it the added and malignant feature of being able to ruin people’s lives with the full force and blessing of the state.

Do those involved in this on state’s side not understand this? It’s over for Mr. Kent. It’s done. His life is ruined. His family broken apart. If he even survives the five years in prison for this “offense” he shall no longer be the man he currently is when he comes out. Will there be anyone waiting for him? Will the country remember what was done for its alleged good? The individuals responsible for Mr. Kent’s destruction will likely have been shuffled into other posts, bureaucracy being by its nature a highly modular construction with lots of room for advancement or sliding along.

That’s all in the future. For now, the prospect of five years of hell for nothing lies before him. What can be done now? What can we do?

The Thin Green Knight

A long time ago there was this guy.  Nobody really knows who he was, though of course there are theories.  All we definitively know about him is that he was appallingly smart and completely awesome, and we know this because of the poetry he wrote.

The Pearl Poet, as he is often called, wrote a number of poems of exquisite complexity and grossly interesting content.  Pearl, the most technically accomplished of the works attributed to him, is an allegorical meditation on various religious matters in the form of a sort of dream, and the structure of the poem itself boasts certain mathematical features that bear upon the work’s general drift.  It’s pretty impressive.

There are other works to consider as well, but the most important of them is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  In this small-scale alliterative epic, Sir Gawain of the court of Arthur finds his mettle tested in various ways and discovers that virtue is not necessarily what he had assumed it to be.  The whole thing boasts fighting and philosophy and sultry ladies and mysterious giants and general excellence in equal measure, and it’s well worth the time of anyone who might be inclined to read it.

Or watch it, I guess, because it appears that the mysterious and accomplished director Terrence Malick is determined to bring it to the screen.  Malick is known jointly for his poetic and accomplished filmmaking (Badlands; The Thin Red Line) and his curious personal quirks (he grants no interviews and allows no photographs of himself to be taken), and the possibilities he brings to such a production are enormous and promising.

There’s nothing definite about this, of course, and the story has certainly been adapted before (with varying degrees of success), but even the hypothetical concept of such a film is enough to get me excited.

Remembrance

On Tuesday I attended the national Remembrance Day ceremony in downtown Ottawa (our nation’s capital, for those readers not well-versed in obscurities of geographical trivia). I have been to many such ceremonies in my life, both in Barrie and in London, but this is the first such national event. It was much as I expected, to be clear, but the experience was significant enough to warrant further reflection.

I arrived around 10:15AM to find the square already packed with thousands, and I had to climb up a lamp post to see what was going on (a position I shared with two other people; it was quite a crowd). Situating myself thus gave me a fairly decent view of the staging area about fifty feet away whereat the Governor General and the Prime Minister got out of their cars and walked up to the monument proper. The ceremony was well-attended and well-run, and certainly conducted in good taste. Although there was the usual long process of placing sponsored wreaths upon the stone, the names of those placing them were, mercifully, not read out aloud. Attention was instead focused rather upon those men and women, alive and dead, for whom we had in fact gathered there in the first place.

Some highlights:

- The periodic artillery blasts were marvelously executed, and even as a bare minimum of actual military hardship were effective in unsettling many of those present.

- That modern warplanes fly faster than the speed of sound is difficult to appreciate without watching them pass silent and low over your head, the appalling noise of their presence only arriving long after they’ve been lost to sight.

- The tomb of the unknown soldier that lies before the Cenotaph is an elegant and touching thing. I was able to lay a poppy upon it for my grandfathers and their friends (and enemies), but it was no easy feat. To be surrounded by such a crush of doggedly feeling people as I was in making my way up to the shrine is to remember that the world and its people are sacramental, and though they strive always to banish their Creator they cannot help but persist in His reality and maintain its effects.

- The parade was an excellent and solemn joy. From where I had been standing during the ceremony I made my way down to a nearby spot on Rideau to watch as each group passed along, played through by a regimental band and under the gaze of the aged veterans arrayed along the street at attention. Their roars of encouragement as the cadets marched by were beautiful to see and hear, and were matched only by the wild applause that burst out around them when the parade had passed and they were formally dismissed.

I do not know if the Prime Minister said it, or if it’s something that I thought he should have said and have misremembered him as actually having done so, but I agree – and the events of the day demonstrated – that remembrance is not only an act of mourning but also of celebration. Chesterton once wrote that there was something unnatural about a crowd collectively expressing grief, it being by its nature a lonely and isolated thing, and I was glad to see that at the present hour, while soldiers under our flag are taking fire in a desert on the other side of the world, neither the memorial’s organizers nor those in attendance were disposed to trivialize the concept of violent death for a just cause, whether by wallowing in its nearness or aestheticizing its distance.

It is well to remember at this time that the final stanza of Lt. Col. McCrae’s poem is more ominous and severe than the treatment it often receives would suggest:

“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

I do not think we did those words ill this day.

The picture above is taken from the photo gallery for the event on the Governor General’s website. I include it to give some sense of the crowd present and the lengths to which its members were willing to go to witness what occurred. I also include it because I’m in it. Look to your far, far right, at the very back of the crowd, and there you will see me, all in dun and green, standing on a lamp post to look out over the mob in front.

Q & A

Brian Visaggio writes:

How do you do it? You post a picture and people comment. I get four-hundred people to read one post, but nobody’s got a thing to say.

Well, Brian, I’m glad you asked.

Checking through my stats page, I’ve noted with pleasure that this blog is host to some 200 posts. That’s pretty good. When it comes to comments on those posts, however, the number leaps up to about 530. Clearly there’s a reason for this.

I’m not sure what that reason is, in all honesty, but I do have some ideas. Back in the Gentle Fuss days, I really didn’t get many comments. There were a few loyal readers who offered things up (may they live forever!), but most of the feedback I got was from robots trying to get me to do things to my genitals. There were rare exceptions, as on those occasions when I would post something more controversial or inflammatory than usual, but for the most part it was all very orderly and quiet.

Here, though, there are some differences. First, it’s simply easier to comment on a WordPress blog than it is for one hosted by Blogspot. Less of a fuss, no opening of pop-ups, etc. It’s also the case that I have a higher readership now than I ever did before, and (what’s more) a larger roster of regular readers. You know who you are. You have my thanks and my apologies.

In terms of Brian’s question, anyway, there is much to be said, but I’m not going to say much of it. I’m going to take a stab at breaking it down:

People are more likely to comment on posts that don’t say much.

I should probably immediately qualify that statement with about a dozen “howevers,” but in general terms it certainly seems to be true. In Brian’s case, the posts tend to be lengthy, well-conceived and well-written meditations on topics both serious and fun. What could the average reader add to that? Give them a picture of a pretty girl and an ominous mention of disappointing qualities, though, and there are any number of places they can go with it. This principle can be taken to some heartbreaking extremes, naturally; consider the example of ICanHasCheezburger, a site where users post pictures of cats with captions attached to them. Each post gets hundreds of comments, each more worthless and stultifying than the last. Clearly this is not a model to emulate too closely.

What are we to make of other examples, though? Within one of the blogging worlds to which I fitfully belong (that of Catholic issues), there are many places whereat long and elaborate posts are the norm, and yet many people sling about comments anyhow. It’s helpful to distinguish between certain types of site, of course, and the different purposes that inform them. Some folks have online magazines with a good-sized readership. Some folks have group blogs devoted to the humourless gainsaying of 2 Corinthians 6:14-16. Some folks have personal blogs whereat the substantial and the weighty duel with the light-hearted and the fun. All three of these places receive lots of comments on their posts, and they aren’t always short.

So what’s the difference? They’re pretty clearly better, for starters, and have higher readerships, but it’s also the case that the less-is-more principle does not necessarily apply. InsideCatholic’s posts and articles about lighter topics typically get only a handful of comments, mostly in appreciation of what was said, but their more substantial efforts receive a great deal of feedback, much of it quite elaborate in itself. The group blog in the middle engages in the religious equivalent of autoerotic asphyxiation and attracts readers who like to do that as well (while talking at length of how important it is that they’re doing it). Mark Shea, finally, takes advantage of his status as a popular apologist by posting things that are both popular and apologetical, and not necessarily at the same time. The people who read his blog (and there are a lot of them) are the kind who like to contribute, and who have found in that blog a venue eager to receive such contributions, substantial or otherwise.

In Brian’s case, I guess it might be possible that the stable coterie of readers likely to either challenge or bolster his already impressive positions simply has not yet arrived. He no doubt has many regular readers at the present hour, but they could be a quiet and reticent crowd. If he were to take another correspondent’s advice and simply “post pics of hot girls” it would no doubt be a step in the right direction, but for the moment, though, I can only advise my own readers to go over there and start saying some things.  Now’s a great time to start, too, as I see by his most recent post that he’s looking for new contributors to expand the blog’s scope and appeal.

To sum up, then, as a sort of Theory of Blog Comment Encouragement:

1. Don’t post things that are so good that your readers cannot expand upon or challenge them (I do not have this problem).

2. Don’t post things that are too stupid for even a comment offering basic praise (also called “Lolcat’s folly”).

3. Tailor your content towards the people you know are already reading your blog.

4. If all else fails, post some comments on your own material under a fake name to encourage people to do likewise. I’m not saying it’s a perfect solution, but it’s certainly the sort of thing that would happen on the Internet…

A complete mystery pt. 2

For some reason, Ridley Scott – you know, the one who directed all of those great movies about all sorts of excellent things like robots and aliens and gladiators and crusaders – has signed on to direct the feature film adaptation of Monopoly.  No word yet on whether it will be a direct adaptation or something more meta, like a film about people playing the game, but there are reports that casting has already begun and some big names are in the mix.  Powers Boothe is slated to play Uncle Pennybags, Phillip Seymour Hoffman has been approached to fill the role of the Top Hat, Jim Carrey will go against type and essay the Little Car, and Orlando Bloom is in talks to be the Shoe.

Also, not even kidding here:

[Scott has] an eye toward giving it a futuristic sheen along the lines of his iconic Blade Runner.

More curious yet.

Excuses

Yesterday I posted nothing in honour of the fallen.

Today also I will post nothing, in honour of the anniversary of the birth of Grace Kelly, a beautiful and unstoppable woman with many disappointing qualities, but also many that were wonderful.