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a hint about my brain

Well it's now a real live blog (well might be ;) )

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Draft Review of V for Vendetta

I wrote this just after watching the film at the Cinema

A friend at work has just bought the DVD and my review came up in conversation with someone else. Anyway here it is.

Anarchy, democracy, fascism and V for Vendetta

While this is a review of a film, and basically a film (especially one made by Hollywood) is never going to change anyone's way of life or way of thinking, I would suggest the issues of personal responsibility, and styles of government that it raises are valid. I'm going to leave out any spoilers so hopefully won't spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it.

But first a bit of history about the source material. It was created by Alan Moore (whose name you will not see anywhere on the film) and David Lloyd in the early 80's as a response to then Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher. The reason Alan Moore wanted to have his name taken off it is best described here http://www.alanmoorefansite.com/news.html#moorevfv

While it's never actively discussed in the film, it has three basic ideologies running through it. Fascism as shown by Norsefire (the Government), and Anarchy as practised by V. The examples of fascism used are the concentration camps populated by homosexuals, non white races and any undesirables. The use of torture, breaking curfews punishable by imprisonment, medical testing are all elements of the nature of the fascist Government. V's response to this is to attempt to show to the people that they are mainly to blame for letting the situation get to this level. He also practices Insurrectionary Anarchism tactics to try to cause the Government to lose control. (ie he blows stuff up). Democracy is the third ideology however it is arguable whether it's in the film or not. It's power if felt by it's lack.

It's far too easy to say the Government in the film is based on Bush's current government or indeed on Thatcher's 80's Government (although both [and many others] have shown elements that cause worry, Clause 28 in the UK and elements of the privacy laws in the US) It's about the Government that could happen if people allow themselves to be ruled by fear and abdicate responsibility to the Government.

"A people shouldn't be afraid of it's Government , a Government should be afraid of it's people" As my copy of the book is several thousand miles away I'm not sure if this quote is in the book. However as V's inital soliloquy I'm pretty sure if lifted straight from the book it wouldn't suprise me.

Governments (a bit of politics)

Recently the Bermudian government (or perhaps it was just one element of it) have made a series of really good decision about information and how to distribute it, and one huge howler.

There's a blog about a Bermudian Policy called Sustainable Developement which initially had problems hosting files as well. So someone asked Limey in Bermuda to host the documents. Really good idea number one.

Anyway when Florence hit, the Bermuda Government web site went down (and in fact still appears to be down) so the above blog was hijacked to give information about the hurricane, and what to do. Really good idea number 2.

After Flo (as her friends like to call her) I along with a load of other Bermuda blogs and forums, got an email asking if we would like to help distribute information in the future. Basically the idea is if you have a network of information sources it's better than having a single one. Really good idea number 3 (slightly letdown by including me, however this was mitigated by sending it to the wrong email address ;) )

Now apparently TPTB have got the hump about the above Documents being on Limey's site. And asked him to take them down. So the whole idea about the having a network of sites distrbuting the information is already ignored. Funnily enough not a great idea

Now reading between the lines it looks like all the good ideas can be traced to one person (or one department) and the bad idea comes from higher up in the Bermudian Govenment. Now Limey isn't even that critical of the current Govenment.

On a slightly related note am going to see a play of Ben Elton's book Popcorn tonight so that should be fun.

Blogging to Fun-Da-Mental new album All is War

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

The crane part 2

Well after the huge (for me) influx of readers on Sunday and Monday (a whole 126 page loads and 94 unique visitors) I'm sure I'll get back to single figures again very soon.

For everyone that was worried that the Crane was going to be turned into a large pretzel by the storm, don't worry, looking at it today I could see no damage at all. (Yes I'm a bit disappointed by that as well)

For some reason the most of the videos I took yesterday got corrupted but I do a have a few of trees being blown around.

Click on these links
Vid 1
Vid 2
Vid 3
Vid 4
Vid 5

There are all quite short, which makes things better. :)

There is another storm coming up but that looks like it's going to pass about 300 nautical miles away, so that shouldn't cause any problems.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Post Hurricane Post.

Well it all went past, not 100% sure it did end up being a Hurricane. No damage to the house (or any people inside it). Ended up watching series 1 of House until the power cut at about 14:00. Then went to bed for a while as we were knackered. As it was all over by about 17:00 we started clearing up , and are now ready to go back to work tomorrow. As it looks like another one is turning up on thursday, we're not putting most stuff back outside.

Hopefully the power will come back up tonight or early tomorrow. Luckily as we're in a valley we didn't get hit with much of it. I hope everyone else had as an easy ride of it as we did.

Anyway first hurricane (or maybe tropical storm not sure what it ended up being) was a bit boring. But I'm told that this is much better than the alternative.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

10pm Sunday

Not a lot happened. Just wind and rain. All ok. Waiting for the real thing tomorrow at 9:30am
Ok edit to actually make this into a real post.

After the thunderstorm at 10:00 it's basically done nothing all day.

To alivate the boredom, my in laws and myself took a trip down to South Shore, popped into Mid Ocean Club and had a look at the waves. Apparently this is a common destination before a hurricane as Phil from Limey in Bermuda went there too. I have a few photos and videos from the day but they're on phones and cameras and I haven't re-plugged in the desktop to upload them . I'll do that after the Hurricane goes away. (If the power goes down here it'll wait until work on Tuesday.)

In an idea nicked (as well an actual copy and paste, he gets a lot more traffc than me so I don't feel too guilty :) ) from Limey here's some other blogs posting about Flo.
Bill Davidson, Sean Soares, Shawn and Sue and Mark Carey.

Shutting down due to thunderstorm

Well we have a thunderstorm over our heads so I'm shutting down all the computers and unplugging everything. Yes I have surge protection on everything but the number of those I've seen blown while I've been here means I don't trust them that much.


I'll still take photos and video interesting weather. And I'll blog really interesting stuff by my phone but I want to keep that charged for emergencies (That assumes the wireless network stays up, it probably will)


So everyone on the Island hope everything goes ok, and everybody I'll speak to you all later.

T-1 day

Well it's still on track. Have taken a few videos with my phone that I'm planning on editing together and post after it all calms down.

After all the prepartions yesterday went out to a restaurent in town called Portofino's which Ness' dad likes a lot and is a really nice Italian place.

Anyway I've eaten there before (it really is lovely) and funnily enough do like pizzas. And the best pizza in the entire world is a Calzone, which is a folded Cornish Pastie type affair (oh yea even though I am from Devon I hate Cornish Pasties sorry Paul). So far the best Calzone I have ever had was a takeaway pizza place in Headingly, Leeds called Harpos, I used to live on these when I was a student and when I had the money (which was often as they were really cheap)

Anyway Portofino's Calzone is almost as good but is much much bigger (and the Harpo's one was sold in a shoe box). The one I had last night was hanging off a plate that looks about 12inchs in diameter. So very big. Basically I now don't need to eat until Flo gone her way. :)