…you come across a pair of images that are just that little bit too similar for comfort… like these -

Every now and then you come across an idea so bizarre that you have to wonder whether the blogger in question has even read back their original post to see if it makes sense before hitting the ’save’ button.

Here’s the situation:

Saddam’s on trial at the moment and most likely heading for a short drop and sudden stop, or whatever means the Iraqi’s choose as their preferred form of capital punishment.

Now faced with such a situation and, no doubt, believing the eventual outcome of his trial to be largely pre-determined - ‘Gentlemen of jury, how do you find this evil, bloodthirsty, torturing bastard of a tyrant? Guilty or Guilty as hell?” - Saddam’s been acting up a bit in the dock.

Nothing unexpected there, you kind of expect the odd outburst of ‘Hey, fuckwit! Don’t you know who I am? Only the President of this whole fucking shitpile that’s who’ - or whatever the Arabic equivalent of that might be, and now he’s even decided not to play ball at all and turn to his own show trial.

And so we come to Marcus over at Harry’s Place who’s clearly incensed by Saddam’s behaviour and worried that if he keeps acting up it might harm ‘the credibility of the Iraqi judiciary and the legal process.’ (???)

But never fear, Marcus has a solution - send Saddam down for a couple of days on a charge of ‘contempt of court’ until he learns his lesson…

…as if he’s really going to give a flying fuck about offending the court when there’s a rope waiting for him at the end the legal rainbow.

Saddam’s on trial for crimes against humanity here. What makes anyone think that chucking a charge of contempt on top is going to make the slightest bit of difference at this stage?

What’s the court going to do here? Extend his sentence for fucking with them?

“Saddam Hussain… You have been found guilty of the most heinous crimes against the Iraqi people and it now my duty to pronounce sentence upon you…

You will taken from this place to a place of execution where you will be hanged by the neck until you are dead - may Allah have mercy on your soul…

… Oops, before I forget, I also sentence you to twenty-eight days imprisonment and a fine of $10,000 for contempt of court - that’ll teach you, you bastard”.

I wonder if Marcus has any suggestions as to whether the sentence for contempt should be dealt with consecutively or concurrently with whatever Saddam gets for genocide, torture and generally being an evil cunt?

Tim’s post on ‘THE BOOK‘ at Bloggerheads has reminded me that I owe the other Tim (Worstall) the courtesy of a review.

Well, what can one say about ‘2005:Blogged‘ that hasn’t already been said?

In terms of the ‘great typeface controversy’, I can’t say that I find the ‘tags ‘n typeface’ approach to Tim’s introductions overly obtrusive – it actually works fairly well on short intros but perhaps gets a bit much on some of the longer ones where Tim has a bit more explaining to do.

Still, nothing worth worrying about overmuch.

Appearing in there myself has had one pleasing if unexpected side effect – ‘Dad’ has gone up several shades of cool in the estimation of his 13-year old son since appearing in print, which is no bad thing in itself, not least as this has enabled a return to conversations in English with the oldest of my two offspring having spent the last few months becoming fluent in Grunt just to convey even the simplest of messages like ‘It’s your turn to do the washing-up’ and ‘If your room’s still in that state when I get back you’ll be grounded until the next Lib-Dem government’.

It also meant getting sent a freebie copy, just one more reason why I owe Tim a review.

Next observation – a quick scan of the blog index left me wondering just how the hell I was going to cope with adding another 25-30 blogs to the 150 or so I track at the moment by their RSS feeds. While there was a quite a bit of familiar material in there, there was also plenty of stuff which was either completely new to me or that I’d missed out on at the time it was posted – much easier than trying to play catch-up with an RSS reader, let me tell you.

Best of all, not only does THE BOOK show just how good some of the writing is out here on the electronic fringe but it does a fine of job of putting over the essential character of British blogging. From ascerbic and howlingly funny one-liners to the fine art of the obsessive ‘Fisk’ one can’t help but be impressed simply by the sheer weight and range of ideas that Brit-blogging is generating.

This is an element of the ongoing dialogue between bloggers and the UK’s dead-tree press that’s often overlooked, especially by professional journalists who’re invariably keen to impress on their readers the virtues and superiority of their own editorial process. Quality, in terms of the writing itself, is only part of the equation – and one where bloggers like Justin at Chicken Yoghurt acquit themselves extremely well. But where bloggers really score over the MSM is in the range and diversity of ideas they can bring into play, the freedom they have to express themselves without constantly having to look over their shoulder at the latest circulation figures or being lectured by marketing drones on the importance of hitting the right market segment with their work.

Bloggers have the freedom to pitch ideas that the MSM daren’t touch, to play with day’s news stories from angles the MSM often wouldn’t contemplate and call the world how they see it, not how it needs to be to sell newspapers and advertising copy.

This facet of blogging is something Tim expertly puts over, not just in his choice of articles but in his own short intros to each piece. Hell he deserves a round of applause simply of having the balls to include ‘Tampon Teabag’ amongst the featured blogs – can you imagine what would happen if the Grauniad tried that? Five days of impassioned diatribes and polemics on sexism and bad taste from its female op-ed contingent with Polly Pot firmly in the vanguard, no doubt.

Lay out your hard-earned cash for ‘2005: Blogged’ and what do you get for your money?

Great writing, brilliant ideas, humour, serious bits (some of which, especially Random Acts of Reality’s apology to a patient leave a lasting impression) and a whole load of different views of the world around you that you may never have realised existed, yet alone contemplated – and all packaged neatly into something you can safely read while taking a long, relaxing bath.

Could anyone ask for more?

Ok, ok. I know I’m rather a late arrival at the party and taking pot shots at yet another bout of Polly Pot histrionics is hardly the most tasking of activities but I really couldn’t pass up the chance of commenting on her views on the new movie version of CS Lewis’s ‘The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’.

General views on Lewis and Narnia first - speaking as an atheist I’ve never been offended by Lewis’s obvious proselytising in the books, just find them a bit po-faced for my personal tastes. Tolkien does ir better and for a real meaty read I’ll generally turn to the Byzantine intricacies of Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy but as a set of fantasy stories for kids, Narnia’s innoffensive enough.

If parents are somehow concerned by the overt Lewis’s overt Christian mythologising then the best antidote I’ve always found is to simply open your kid’s minds to the full spectrum of mythic literature. As literary characters go, Aslan/Jesus suffers from much the same problems as any story-book good guy, what is comic book terms might be called the ‘Superman Effect’ or ‘good guys are just soooooo fucking boooooring!”.

I mean come on, if you’ve ever watched the TV adaptation did you not find yourself thinking, as it came to the bit about sacrificing Aslan;

“Come on. You’re a fucking lion. Why don’t you just eat the bitch!!”

You don’t need to cast your literary net too widely to find kid’s versions of classic mythic stories from outside the Christian mythos and introduce kids to a whole range of far more interesting (and flawed) heroes; just start with the Greeks (Heracles, Jason, Achilles, Odyyseus) and work from there - one your kids get a taste for Theseus, Beowulf, Arthur et al there’ll be no looking back.

Getting back to Polly, her main problems with the film seem to be.

1. It’s got the usual Disney schmaltz about it.

Hell, its a Disney film, whaddya expect? If that’s problem (as it was to Tolkien) you just stick something in you will about them never being allowed the film rights.

2. Disney are actively marketing it to Christians in the US.

So.

Mel Gibson makes a film about Jesus in a dead language that only Christians are going to go and watch and rakes in £600 million at the box office - what the hell else are Disney going to do but pitch to that market.

Thar’s gold in them thar fundies, for fucks sake.

The worst you can accuse Disney of is taking a few tips from dear old Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

‘Bagwash’ as he was affectionately known to his cynics had a simple philosophy when it comes to money - Money is bad karma.

And being the humanitarian he was and an enlightened old soul with phenomenally good karma he decided he could help people out by relieving them of some their bad karma. Lets face it, karmicly-speaking he was so far in th black that the odd Rolls-Royce or ninety-three was barely going to make a dent in his personal karmic bank balance.

Disney are just applying the same principle - if money if the root of all evil then why not relieve a few christians of a bit of that evil - they’ll only thank you for it in the long run.

3. She hates all the religious bits and the fundies will love it.

Fundies are fundies - they don’t need an excuse to interpret everything from their own peculiar view of the word anyway, so why worry if Narnia makes it a bit easier for them than usual.

Lets face, if these twats can conceive of Adam and Eve riding around on the back of dinosaurs then it really doesn’t matter what you try and throw at ‘em by way of reason - it won’t stick.

Somewhere out there now, you can be sure there’s a fundie in a Christian publishing company wonder whether he might just get away with publishing kids books of Jesus’s lost stories - Jesus and the Parable of the Very Hungry Caterpillar, for example and were I in his position, I’d go for it - his target market is dumb enough to swallow it so why not?

That’s all I can be arsed to write from now - try Nosemonkey for a good bit of vituperative shouty commentary and start from there - this is Polly, there’ll be no shortage of good stuff to read if you look.