In Leicestershire Ego Est

...which looks a lot better than "made it" as a title.

The journey was best expressed as a series of vingettes, really.

Sky Harbor
Two airport workers express an interest in my Kindle 2. We chat - or rather, they chat and I do a very geeky gush about the technology - and then one of the pair (the shorter, slightly more aggressive one) says how he's always two or three years behind the curve to get the cheaper kit and to let the format wars settle down, which is how he got his BluRay player for almost nothing. I nod, and tell him about Toshiba selling the HD-DVD format to China, and what this will mean for grey market imports. He leaves looking concerned.

PHX to LAX
I'm reading the Sharpe novels, in order. The guy sitting next to me on the plane tells me he likes the Kindle 2 and wants to know more. There is another geeky gush from me about the K2, and this time I manage to cover some of the downsides to the device too.

LAX
A heavily armed security guard stops me to ask questions about my bag. My carry-on luggage is a replica Mk7 gas mask bag from Magnoli, of the type sported by Indiana Jones in "Raiders". He likes it, but was more concerned with whether it was functional. I assure him not, and even so I don't have a WW2 vintage gas mask. (And even if I did all I would do is wander around asking "Are you my Mummy?").

LAX is HUGE! Bigger than that, in fact, and in a state of disrepair.

At the international terminal, which LAX uses as a last attempt at getting money out of visitors (ten dollars for a sammich? You have to be kidding me!), the announcements in English are made by a guy who has a "Welcome! to the woooorld of tomorrow!!!" voice. Don't know what that is? Watch the first episode of "Futurarma".

LAX to FRANKFURT
Any way you cut it, flying economy sucks.

The journey was made marginally less hideous by the following elements:
- the very pleasant german lady I sat next to. She spoke very little English, I spoke very little German, we found ways to communicate.
- assorted movies. I never thought I would be glad to see "Night in the Museum 2", or "The Proposal", but I was. I was also glad to see "My Life In Ruins" and a John Malkovich movie in which he plays a character based on The Amazing Kreskin.
- the Doctor Who soundtracks for seasons 1 to 4, parts of which made all the turbulence over Greenland entertaining rather than worrying. Somewhere out there, someone has to have had the idea of a Doctor Who thrill ride.

Frankfurt Airport
The taps in the Gents are rather more intelligent than I would like. As you approach the basin, the tap turns itself on. The flow is quite...forceful, one assumes to get the water hot enough to do any good, but immediately you place your hands anywhere near it, the tap slows the flow down and thereby avoids you spraying water over yourself and anyone standing near you.

This usefully entertained me for some minutes, which was just as well because at this point I was little more than an ambulatory fungus anyway.

I did another little demo about the Kindle whilst waiting for the near plane - Frankfurt to Birmingham - and the final flight I admit I spent in something of a daze.

Birmingham
My how efficient it all was. In baggage retrieval I couldn't change money in order to get a trolley, nor could I get my hands on any UK currency. No one seemed to know anything very much, so I yomped the length of another bloody airport looking for my next connection. Eventually I made my way to the station and got on the right train. I navigated Birmingham New Street with whole minutes to spare, whilst assorted Rail staff watched me being kicked around by my luggage.

To be fair, they'd no idea how little sleep I'd had in the last 24 hours and they had no idea how difficult everything had become.

Leicester
The hotel: cheap and cheerful, theIbis in Leicester has MDF tables with a matress slung on the top for beds. The showers have little or no water pressure, something of a disappointment to end the mighty crossing with.

Everything else, though, is fab.

It's good to be back.

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Keeping the Faith

America is becoming increasingly Godless, says Glenn Beck, and this is the cause of everything bad!

For those of you who don't know...Glenn Beck is a former standup comedian turned conservative talking head. He, as you can see, is on the Fox network.

Early in the piece he makes several claims.

1: ten commandments at a court house

2: Can't pray in school

3: Can't sing Christmas carols in this country.

Oh and the national motto "In God we trust" is being taken off the currency.

I'll let Snopes take the currency issue.

One of the things about the USA is that it doesn't have, or sanction, a national or state religion. Quite a few Christians wish this were otherwise, although they're still very much in the minority.
The USA doesn't have a state religion because it was founded on principles of religious freedom. The state is entirely separate from the church (or churches), as in France.

To a Brit like me, this seems a little odd. When I grew up, there were daily faith based assemblies in school and we sang hymns. We also sang a lot of groovy christmas carols at Christmas. None of this prevented me from growing up Agnostic, but at least I got to enjoy all the religious flummery that goes along with holidays like Easter and Christmas. At least I understood what those holidays were for. Kids in the USA do too, although they also associate nearly everything with the acquisition of cards and sweets. Commercialized? Why yes! Certainly!

That aside, the reasons that kids don't say prayers in school is because the schools in which they may not pray are State schools. They are funded by a government which is constitutionally unable to pick religious sides. The First Amendment to the Constitution says

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

So schools either represent all faiths or none. Which is great, really. How hard would it be to get into a multi-faith based system that represented all the major religions?

Well, except that the USA cannot prohibit the free exercise of any faith. Which means that any faith based assembly is going on for a while and will contain some startlingly contradictory elements; it's got to represent the assorted schismatic factions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism...the list is endless. And you just know that the Scientologists would want equal representation, as would the Pastafarians and possibly some of my own nearly-beloved Discordians. Also, what would be wrong with Rastafarians wanting in on the deal? Or Satanists? Or the members of the Reformed Cult of the Ichor God Bel-Shamharoth? Or even Cthulhu cultists?

No, that way lies madness. So, no prayers in school.

As for the singing of Christmas carols, well, people are at liberty to do so. Just not in schools. There are some commercial groups - like Wal Mart - who would prefer to not alienate their non-Christian customers at Christian festival times (because Wal-Mart is a tool of Mammon, when you get down to brass tacks, and doesn't care what's happening to your immortal soul as long as it can have your cash in the here and now, and it knows that infidels of all kinds have money).

Of course, this could all be taken care of if the President was also a Defender of the Faith (and no, Charles, you can't be defender of the faiths, you get the title from Henry VIII who was named it by a Pope and didn't give it back after he broke from the Church). The President could pick one of the countless flavours of Christianity.

They really are without number, especially as it turns out that Baptists regard each and every church building as a separate little faith-ette. Which is quite scary. Or they just have a healthy respect for swimming and wet t-shirts. Who can say?

I would count them, but it gets confusing after you've hit the big ones (Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Unitarians, Latter Day Saints, Menonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists, Methodists) and you soon get lost trying to work out which ones regard the others as Christian and which don't. Apparently the Baptists still think that the Catholics aren't Christian because they "worship Mary".

IN the light of all this, is it any wonder that the Founders of the nation took a look at the state of religion in their time (and I suspect that Thomas Jefferson may have sneaked a peak into the future as well), and decided that if you wanted all the colours of the rainbow to be seen equally, you had to make sure there was no chance of one being allowed to drown the others out.

Hence this nation being Godless, apparently. But given the number of churches, temples and places of worship I pass on a daily basis, I can't help but think that there are more gods here than anywhere else in the world.

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Series Cancellations, TV Conservatism and The BBC

Yes, I'm returning to a current bugbear. The thing is, many folks in the UK have no idea what they would be letting themselves in for if the UK's television landscape became like the USA's.

A quick reminder of How Things Are in the land of the free: Television programs exist to create a reason for you to watch adverts. Their primary purpose is to sell advertising space. This is how the networks make most of their money. A TV show that doesn't get an audience is taking up valuable space which could be better used by a TV show that people actually watch.

It's not about art. It's not about good. It's about "watched".

Our case in point is the ABC series Defying Gravity. This was a brave attempt to write some interesting sci-fi coupled with the proven-popular mechanics of relationships and angst as seen on Gray's Anatomy. Add to this the now-popular "every episode contains flashbacks" thing, as popularized by Lost and we have a patent way to get to know the characters and their inter-relationships while we advance the plot.

The plot is a goodie: after a tragic Mars mission, NASA decides to take a Grand Tour of the solar system. In flashback, we follow the crew of the ship through training and selection. In "realtime" we follow the progress of the mission and the challenges they face. The production design is nice - very "20 minutes into the future" - and the characters are engaging and interesting. They're all sympathetic to a greater or lesser degree, so the ensemble cast works really well, and we have only one real standout villain - the control freak Mission Director back on Earth.

We also have a problem: a mysterious entity known only as "Beta" is with the crew. We know it's alien and very powerful, but nothing else. In Episode 8, after all hell has broken loose, Beta decides to reveal itself to the crew. They stand in front of an open door - some are awestruck, some disquieted, and one is wondering what the hell is going on...and we only have to wait a week to find out for ourselves.

Except that episode 8 is the last we will ever see on broadcast TV. The show was quietly - and I had to Google "defying gravity cancelled" in order to find the news - canceled with the remainder of the 13 episodes to be seen. They won't be broadcast, so when ABC releases the DVD we can buy them and watch them that way.

I was watching the show on the Hulu website, since I don't have a TV, and was therefore contributing to the ratings. However, the show is gone. The stated reason for the cancellation was that the show was "having trouble finding an audience". This means that the ratings were not where they needed to be in order for the show to be worth broadcasting. Not that it failed, or was bad, but it just didn't get watched by enough people. It may not have been watched by enough people as it was shown, so they might not have included the online viewers. I don't have the figures, so I don't know.

However, it's my case in point: in a commercial environment the success and failure of a TV show, the drivers for every decision made about it, are economic. Let's use a more familiar example: Doctor Who would have been canceled in 1963 after the first story: BBC Execs were not happy with the show, it seemed to be having trouble finding an audience too - and if they'd been looking at advertising revenue, we would never have seen "The Dead Planet" let alone an actual Dalek.

If this sounds like sour grapes because a show I was watching got canned, you'd be wrong: I was far more invested in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which was just as interesting and well written, but also didn't get an audience. Primarily, I think, because not enough things exploded.

It's possible that Defying Gravity was too scifi for the Not We and not Scifi enough for the We. It's possible that the We decided there were too many squishy organic relationship things going on and this show was clearly for [edit: Not We], while the Not We were having a hard time reconciling the presence of people in space and an alien with romance and angst. These things are not mutually exclusive, but the audience was having a hard time deciding whether it liked the combination and ABC weren't really helping with the marketing. This show should have been perfect: it should have been a show that the Scifi Nerds with Normal Partners could have watched together, but for some reason that didn't happen. It's a shame, since I think it could have happened, but the show wasn't allowed time to develop. It was on the air for two months, and I found it on Hulu totally by accident whilst trying to find Better Off Ted.

Now imagine if this were to happen to the BBC. The typical BBC season is six episodes. If the BBC were dependent on ads it might kill a show after three. ITV axed Primeval because it was too expensive, and this means that we end up in an environment where if a show is going to succeed it has to be cheap. So you can kiss Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, a third season of Being Human, another season of Survivors and almost anything else not guaranteed high viewing figures goodbye. The TV landscape doesn't have space for anything that isn't able to justify the production costs, which is why we have seen so much reality TV over the years and why so much if it is awful.

It also means that TV becomes formulaic, that there is little or no risk taking in story or script, that you simply don't take chances. Look at the output of the BBC over the last few years and compare it to ITV and Channel 4. Look at the output of NBC, CBS, ABC and compare them with HBO.

If we end up parceling out the license fee or making the BBC accept adverts, we will end up with conservative, dull, ugly TV where nothing interesting or dangerous ever happens.

The alternative to the BBC is not something we want to see, because the alternative is shit.

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Sarah Palin

I'm English, I'm intending to remain so and I live in the USA. I am not a citizen, but I do pay taxes and that - whatever some Americans think - at least allows me to air an opinion on the current political process.

Sarah Palin, whatever her abilities and her real skills as a politician, is a satirists dream. Tina Fey's caricature of her on SNL is very, very funny. So funny that you start to wonder whether it's all a bit too easy. People are saying she's dangerous; I've been invited to join a group on Facebook that claims she's the most dengerous woman in the Western world, or somesuch hyperbole.

I don't agree that she's dangerous. The reflex of the American political system is to Fearmonger as soon as something unexpected happens. We're seeing it with the Right's insistent harping about Barack Obama's links to "unrepentant domestic terrorists" and "extremists", and with a variety of people drawing undue attention to the possibility that there are root vegetables (long the bane of Vice Presidents) smarter than Sarah Palin.

Fine. She's not bright. We were spoiled by President Bartlett.

She is also far too easy to satirise. I don't think it's a good idea to have politicians who are this easy to make fun of.

Not because we shouldn't satirise our politicians. That's our right, and as an Englishman I have come to regard it as a sacred trust. We put them in power and we should do our utmost to remind them of this at every single opportunity to keep them honest and humble. They do not deserve our respect or admiration, they need to be called on every decision and every utterance, until putting the interests of the people ahead of their own becomes second nature.

Nope, it's because we shouldn't be thinking about the personalities in this election at all.

The human race is, and this is a technical term so brace yourselves, in the shit.

I could take the time to rattle off the things that are looming over us right now, but if you watch the news (oh please, do watch the news!) you already know what those things are.

OK, if you're an American, please watch something like CNN or somewhere with international news, instead of depending on Fox and Local news.

Anyway. You should know what's looming over us. Given that all this stuff is definitely looming, but has not yet reached the "oh *^$@!!!" point where it tips over and becomes a doom, we need to know what our darling politicos are going to do about it. I haven't heard too much about that, as yet.

I feel we should be told.

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