Spare the snark, spoil the self-hatred

I'm a big fan of TelevisionWithoutPity, which pretty much invented the art of the TV episode recap and over the years has honed an inimitable house style, despite having somewhere north of 30 writers. Often (particularly when the series you're watching goes downhill) the recaps are more fun to read than the eps are to watch. Like for Seasons 5 and 6 of The West Wing.

At the moment I'm watching Season 2 of Lost. I know, it's still on, so technically anyone who watches Lost is watching Season 2 "at the moment"; what I mean is, I've watched all there is so far in the last week. I do that with most things: I can't bear to watch TV at the rate of one a week - I'd go crazy, particularly with cliffhanger TV like Lost. But the other day I caved and, unable to wait for the end of the season before starting it myself (although I'm still holding out with 24), I got going.

One of the recent episodes was called One of Them, in which we flash back to Sayid's days in the ("elite") Republican Guard ("not quite so elite as we may have led you to believe...") during Desert Storm. Sayid's a torturer (that's not to say that that's his job, but I think one's either a torturer or one isn't, and Sayid is). He put Sawyer to the question early in Season 1 over something that now escapes me (although TWoP could tell me! If I could remember in which episode it occurred, of course), and now he's got someone else to extract information from. So he flashes back to how he became a torturer.

Here's the point: his first experience of torturing was at the behest of the US Army, and he tortured his commanding officer in order to obtain the location of a US pilot who was shot down a day or two previously. The following never occurred to me, but I guess that's why I'm watching Lost and writing a blog nobody reads, and not watching Lost and writing for TWoP. The byline for this epiode's recap reads:

For anyone who thought it was weird that a soldier in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard somehow acquired torturing skills, this episode addresses that burning question: it was the U.S. Army who gave them to him. Naturally.

OK, so my critical faculty is probably slightly impaired at three in the morning or whenever I watched this episode. And I suppose it's possible that the writers didn't want Sayid to be seen to torture an American, which would undo all his hard-won sympathy. But it seems to me that if he has to torture someone in the flashback he either tortures an American, or he tortures a fellow Iraqi at the behest of an American. So in order to maintain him as a sympathetic character, the writers must turn the US Army into a mobile torture school. No big step for Hollywood, I suppose.

Go, Johnny, go.

Leaving aside what Tony Blair means when he says that John Prescott is absolutely vital to the Labour Party - that John Prescott is absolutely vital to the continued survival of Tony Blair, in the sense that Mr. Prescott pacifies the socialist throwbacks that still make up the core of the party's grassroots, and does this in retun for Mr. Blair's having given him a high-profile job at which he is, demonstrably, almost criminally incompetent - this article in today's Telegraph contains an interesting snippet:

...after pledging that he had had no other mistresses since Labour came to power.

One grows accustomed to these pedantic, legalistic constructions, and it can be taken almost for granted that when Mr. Prescott affirms having strayed only once "since Labour came to power", the line is drawn where it is for a very good reason. So all that political hay made in the mid-Nineties at the expense of Tories like Steven Norris - "Life's better under the Tories" suggested to be one of his chat-up lines, for instance, or the suggestion that they believed ethics to be a county near Middlesex - was not only cheap, politically irrelevant and opportunist, but is now more-or-less revealed to be entirely hypocritical.

I've never held with the notion that adultery makes a man unfit for public office, and I don't believe that Mr. Prescott should be sacked for it, although the list of things for which he should be sacked has probably needed updating pretty much weekly since Labour came to power, so I'd be quite happy to see him go over this matter if public opinion is strong enough (which unfortunately I don't believe is the case). I don't, in other words, believe many people agree with the father of the friend at whose house I had dinner last night, who opined that of the three Labour crises this week - Clarke, Hewitt and Prescott - this was the worst of the three. I'm not sure whether he meant it would prove the most damaging or whether he meant that he personally found it the most dishonourable, but either way I think he was flat-out wrong. No-one cares about affairs any more - or at least the majority are these days capable of distinguishing the straying husband from the competent (or otherwise, in Mr. Prescott's case) minister - and even if they did, in a week in which the Home Secretary admits to having lost track of 1,000 foreign criminals who should have been considered for deportation on their release from prison, and in which the Health Secretary is booed and heckled by a group so generally pliant and placid as nurses, it could hardly matter less. Adultery is indeed dishonourable, and my friend's father, from what I know of him, places a high premium on fidelity, but in political terms surely the dishonour is greater in having known, for example, of the release of, and subsequent failure to monitor, hundreds of prisoners who could have been deported and instead were left free to recidivate, for some ten months, and neither said nor done anything about it until the whole murky matter was dragged into the light.

Clarke should definitely resign for his mess. Prescott, were he remotely able, shouldn't, but if this is the only way to rid ourselves of this knockabout yob, so be it.

In the courtroom of honour, the judge pounded his gavel...

All of this article is worth reading, but of particular interest is the description of the first two incidents and the response of the British criminal justice system thereto. One can't help but be put in mind of the last verse of one of Bob Dylan's most affecting songs, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. Sung gently, but with a barely disguised fury, Dylan tells the true story of a 51-year-old black maid who died following an assault by a local white landowner, who was subsequently (allegedly to spare him the attentions of the black inmates at the state prison to which a longer sentence would have condemned him) sentenced to six months in county jail for manslaughter. But that those responsible for the crimes described by Dr. Dalrymple are not "nobles" by any stretch of the imagination, Dylan's words are all too applicable to these outrages.

In the courtroom of honour, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled,
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em,
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom;
Stared at the man who killed for no reason,
Who just happened to be feeling that way without warning,
And he spoke through his cloak most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zanzinger with a ... six month sentence.

The pause before "six month sentence", articulated by Dylan as might a conjurer, does more, I think, than all the foregoing words to convey his disgust at this idea of justice. I am disgusted that it wasn't until I read Dalrymple's article that I had even heard of either of these crimes, but of course I was well aware that a drunk student in Oxford suggested a policeman's horse was gay. Admittedly I had heard it in the same context as Dalrymple now relates it: as an example of the lunacy of our justice system; nonetheless the fact that neither of these infintely more serious crimes was widely reported is all the evidence that I need of the decadence to which Dalrymple refers at the end of his article.

Bloody oath!

What are the odds that the gentlemen who took matters into their own hands in order to remove trespassers and resume the work they were being paid to do would, had they done the same thing in this country, currently be languishing in cells somewhere awaiting the delicate attentions of Her Majesty's Constabulary?

Angelina acquaints a man with strange bedfellows

Samizdata reports that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are poised to take the leading roles in a screen adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.

The report describes Angelina as a "long-time devotee" of Ayn Rand. Can this possibly be the same Angelina Jolie that just more-or-less endorsed Gordon Brown as our next Prime Minister? I can't quite see Gordon settling down for an evening's Objectivist reading. Rand developed a philosophy of, essentially, righteous selfishness (she called it rational self-interest); Brown's is more self-righteous compulsory charity. Rand was a confirmed anti-statist; Brown is, at heart, the very definition of an old-style collectivist.

Assuming the article's accurate (dangerous, admittedly), then either Angelina's a bit stupid and doesn't understand a word of Rand's writings, or I pretty much need to make the acquiantace of her dealer.

Back in the USSR

Several questions raised by the foreign prisoners non-deportation affair.

Perhaps the most obvious is what, exactly, a minister must now do that warrants resignation. The days when the Home Secretary would resign whenever some lush hopped the wall at Buckingham Palace are of course long gone and little missed (at least for that reason), but some kind of absurd inversion of those attitudes appears to have taken root these days. Clarke, apparently, offered his resignation but Blair didn't accept it; the line Clarke then adopted was that it was his mess so he should clear it up. An admirable sentiment, perhaps, if he'd got drunk and thrown food everywhere before falling asleep face down in a tub of ice cream, but not one that makes any sense managerially; it was comprehensively skewered by David Davis on Question Time last night with a little reductio ad absurdum. On that basis, he said, a minister could keep his job forever by periodically making an horrendous dog's breakfast of his brief.

But Blair has a history of reluctance to fire allies, more and more so as he has fewer and fewer: it is to Clarke's credit that he was one of the few to at least offer to resign. David Blunkett was made to resign twice, yet Blair stubbornly insisted, with that classic petulance, that he left "without a stain on his character". Except the corruption, the illegitimate fatherhood, the coveting of another man's wife, the bearing false witness ... sorry, wrong blog. I went a bit West Wing there.

So, for the moment at least, Clarke's not resigning. Various people have opined that his resignation would if anything be counter-productive since it would serve as an indication to people that the affair was over and we could all, as Blair urges us to whenever he wants to diminish the importance of some scandal or fuck-up, "move on" or "get past it", when in fact what really needs to happen is that people focus on this problem minutely, fiercely, and for some time yet, until it is fixed. Again, this seems like an oblique way of saying that ministers should never resign, and even leaving aside the institutional resistance to reform that is the hallmark of all self-perpetuating bureaucracies, the Home Office would need to be focused on for a very long time indeed.

The obvious counter-argument, apart from the evidently outmoded notions of honourably accepting blame and taking responsibility, and the analogy with a private sector organisation, from which Clarke would have been ignominiously sacked last July when the issue first came to light internally, is to point out that if ministers are never sacked, or even if ministers are only rarely and begrudgingly sacked, only to be eulogised to the skies immediately thereafter, a culture is created amonst ministers where no-one is to blame and their jobs are never in danger no matter how woefully their department performs. Hold it, I'm getting West Wing tingles again.

I was wrong. I was. I was just, I was wrong. Come on, we know that. Lots of times we don't know what right and wrong is. But lots of times we do. And come on, this is one. I may not have had sinister intent at the outset, but there were plenty of opportunities for me to make it right. No one in government takes responsibility for anything any more. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalise. 'Everybody does it.' That's what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame so no one's guilty. I'm to blame. I was wrong.

Of course, the real reason I want Clarke to resign (apart from the shuddering, wincing, toe-curling embarrassment I feel every time I see him on TV or in pictures and remember that he, the man the otherwise fairly ghastly Jo Brand described just last night as looking as though he'd just been paroled without deportation from a twenty-year stretch himself, is a Minister of the Crown) is that it will remove from his brief the responsibility for all those things the press are being so mean about at the moment. That said, it's not as though any Blairite replacement will be less committed to this onrush of Stalinism, it's just that they might be a little less competent in the debate. The Brownites are equally committed to it, of course, but the lover of Schadenfreude in me still wants the man who's brought it this far to resign.

And speaking of Stalinism, apparently one of the most alarming things about this whole affair is the breakdown of communication between the Prison Service and the IND. Frankly, so far as I'm concerned, the most alarming thing about this whole Government is that the IND isn't the Immigration and Nationality Department: it's the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. Like, seriously? Wasn't it just the Soviets that had directorates? Are we now so inured to government control of our lives that we don't even notice when departments become fucking directorates?

Bad choice, Andy...

[Andy Burnham] is clearly intent on riding the scruffy, unshaven coattails of Charles Clarke all the way to the top [...]

Hmmm. Perhaps it's time to hitch your trailer to another tractor, old boy.

PIPS [en masse]: Squeak, squeak.

Today is Tax Freedom Day in Australia. And they seem pretty pissed off about it.

It might console them to know, then, that here in Great Britain Tax Freedom Day hasn't come this early - in fact, hasn't even come in April - since 1963. We're on the yoke until June 3rd.

Litigation. Guaranteed to reduce humiliation.

Former Special Agent Lee Paige, who would certainly have been mentioned here had he had the decency to make a total idiot of himself and subsequently end up on the net after the 10th of January, is suing the DEA, for which he used to work, claiming his notoriety renders him useless as an undecover operative and that he no longer has the respect of his colleagues after shooting himself in the leg in front of a load of children. (It's possible that even the children were able to discern the delicious irony inherent in Paige injuring himself immediately after stating, "I am the only one in the room professional enough to use one of these.")

Brilliant. Clearly the DEA is at fault here, since there's nothing they like better than spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars training a man like Paige for undercover work and then blowing his cover with one of the Net's most downloaded videos. This is transparently a DEA conspiracy, and it's not in the remotest sense likely that some guy at DEA stole the tape against express orders, or at the very least against clearly stated protocol, and put it on the Net either to settle a grudge or just for a laugh. Certainly the DEA needs to identify this guy and fire, and probably prosecute, him. But, given the almost autistic level of bureaucracy and offical paranoia for which the US' institutions are renowned, it's clearly a waste of money and time to pursue this case, and it's hard not to conclude that Paige is simply compounding his humiliation with a blind, instinctive swing at the first thing he can think of.

What? You don't like lackey? Hmm. Or how about, uh, toady? Or lickspittle? Lickspittle's nice. Oh, wait, I got it. Flunky. That's it.

I'm becoming quite the fan of Andy Burnham. This Home Office lickspittle is clearly intent on riding the scruffy, unshaven coattails of Charles Clarke all the way to the top, so earnest and full-throated is he in his support for ID Cards.

The intent expressed therein should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the methodology of this increasingly bankrupt and oppressive government. But I can't help wondering if he's been a little over-eager in the actual expression. For a government usually so secretive, it's a startlingly frank admission of intention: not just to force this totalitarian initiative on an unwilling nation, not just to invert the relationship between state and individual, making the latter answerable to the former rather than being accountable itself, not just to implement the political oppression, so redolent of unspeakable crimes, of numbering people; but openly to admit to the intention to make it as near as dammit unrepealable. Perhaps such unwonted transparency may in the end prove his downfall: maybe even ID Cards'. Or we could always rely on the incompetence of the state to implement such an enormous and complicated scheme inside three years. With a bit of luck it will become such a farrago that no-one in his right mind could possibly continue to support it (which will not, of course, mean that it goes without support...).

In the meantime ... and in case you (silent, invisible reader) didn't make it down to the comments section of the first link, check this out.

Bad karma

I'm not going to pretend that David Cameron has so far been the leader I would have wanted the Conservatives to have. He's spurned numerous gaping opportunities to attack the Government from extrememly firm ground, and in so doing has allowed them to get away scot-free with many things any one of which would have done significant damage to the last Conservative government. Many think he's doing this to keep Blair in office as long as possible because a) most people hate Blair now - I was here first - and the longer he stays the fewer people will want to vote Labour, and b) if Gordon Brown is still Chancellor when his house of cards economy collapses, people will know whom to blame and won't want to vote for him as Prime Minister. Perhaps these are worthwhile tactics, but right now I'd rather see someone stand up for grammar schools, for example, and also take this institutionally corrupt government down a few pegs.

The really frustrating thing is that, despite, or perhaps because of, Dave's questionable tactics and notable lack of, well, Conservatism, the Labour party appears to be scared. Scared enough to pay various people to conceive, design and host this total-waste-of-time website (actually hosted at labour.org.uk, you may note), for example, and to write the 12-page Word document you can download therefrom. And certainly scared enough to resort to their classic get-out-the-vote tactics for the May 4 council elections. The merest mention of the BNP is usually good for an extra couple of percentage points on Labour's vote tally.

But the question is, which approach would yield better results? Cameron thinks he can win more votes by aping the statist policies the people in this country have been conditioned relentlessly to admire and expect from government. But the trouble is, if he wins votes this way he'll actually have to act like it in power, and I think he's too smart and, behind all the gloss, a man of too much conviction to betray his country in that manner.

Meanwhile, in countries that still have a free press...

Mark Steyn, as I previously intended to note, but apparently never did, has suddenly found himself non grata among the British press Establishment. Having disappeared unremarked from both The Telegraph and The Spectator, mere days after both organs were advertising his writing on their front pages (The Telegraph even managed to advertise his Tuesday column on the Monday; the Tuesday column was nowhere to be found and he hasn't been back since), we Brits are now reduced to reading him on the Web. Doesn't make his writing any less compelling, of course.

Citizens caned, indeed

Were I Motoring editor at The Daily Telegraph, I'd've sent this one up to the actual editor. The points it raises are far too wide-ranging and important to be tucked away near the bottom of Honest John's agony column, deep in Saturday's Motoring section.

Parking Charge Notices (PCNs) appear to deny citizens access to a court of law should they wish to challenge them. Is this not contrary to the Bill Of Rights 1689? The Bill is constitutional law and above any parliamentary law. It does not differentiate between civil and criminal offences and is quite clear on this. This Bill, and charters such as the Magna Carta (1215), Act of Settlement (1701) and so on, are not grants from the monarchy to the people.

We own them and any law that infringes them shall be of no force or effect. They cannot be repealed or subverted and are not subject to votes. To quote from the Bill of Rights presented to William of Orange: "All grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void."

It seems quite clear. You cannot levy fines or forfeitures on any person before a conviction. The only people who can convict and issue fines are the courts of law. If this were not true, people would have no protection from the might of the state, which would be able to wield all the power it liked (as now seems to be the case).
M.W., via e-mail

Relativist recidivism

The BBC link I gave in my last post now leads to something approaching the actual story, which is intriguing. I've been trying and failing to dig up Google's cache of the page from Monday afternoon (it seems that the BBC requested their pages not be archived, which is comfortingly transparent for a news organisation: "No, we never reported that. This page always said this!"), when Mr. Livingstone's fatuous remarks were almost dismissively mentioned towards the end of an otherwise entirely unremarkable article about his trip to Beijing. This is particularly odd, since I got the story from the print media on Monday afternoon, which means it had to have been a story for getting on for 24 hours by the time the BBC were making absolutely nothing of it. Now that it's refused to go away, of course, they have to make grudging efforts to be seen to be actually reporting the news - but see how the story is trivialised, even dismissed, before you've actually read it by the use of inverted commas around 'comparison'.

That's the first time I've had cause to type "Beijing", by the way, which reminds me of a pet peeve of mine. I very nearly typed "Peking", for the same reason I would type Cologne instead of Köln, Moscow instead of Muskva, Prague instead of Praha, etc.. Wikipedia points out that it was the traditional Anglicisation prior to a sound change in Mandarin (how does that work, by the way? Is there a decree? "This character now sounds like this. It never sounded like that!"), so I suppose the modern use of Beijing is just about acceptable, but for the fact that no-one seems to realise it's not pronounced bay-jing (soft J) but is, in fact, pronounced by-jing (hard J). (However, I still delight in the reproachful looks I can generate from a certain type of person should I ever have cause to talk about Bombay, Madras or Bangalore.)

Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold

Much more alarmed this afternoon, and naturally our buffoon of a Mayor is to blame. Apparently, the cold-blooded slaughter by a brutal totalitarian regime of some 2,600 Chinese hunger-strikers, along with the injuring of some 10,000, is somehow comparable with the control of a riot in Trafalgar Square initiated by violent anarchists. Perhaps Mr. Livingstone genuinely believes that the generally non-lethal use of a few riot police vans and mounted policemen in the face of some 200,000 protesters represents an equivalent exhibition of the crushing repressive power of the state to a massacre wrought by the declaration of martial law and the use of tanks, infantry and flamethrowers. But he is surely an idiot if so. Perhaps he's been talking to Alan Moore. Or perhaps in his addled morality, the abominations of Communism are mitigated for having been performed in the name of the state?

On a side note, this story is barely mentioned on the BBC. Funny, that.

Spurty knowledge

One or two things are alarming me this morning. The first is that Buffy was someone's specialist subject on Mastermind. I love Buffy, but Mastermind specialist subjects are supposed to be things like, "The creation of intrusive, ultrabasic, peraluminous ingenous rocks in North America between 5,000,000BC and 3,000,000BC". Somehow a thorough working knowledge of a TV programme, however widely lauded, however fully realised and thematically weighty, seems a little feckless in comparison with the Mastermind I grew up with. Still, times change. The second alarming thing is that I knew all the answers but one off the top of my head.

1) What was the address Buffy gave when she phoned for an ambulance in The Body?

2) Who was Xander’s best man in Hell's Bells?

3) In which episode was Dawn introduced?

4) To whom did Anya think was she engaged in Tabula Rasa?

5) How did Flutie die in The Pack?

6) How did Buffy kill The Judge?

7) How did Buffy prove that Kathy was a demon in Living Conditions?

8) What did Anya think, apart from bunnies, might be causing the singing in Once More With Feeling?

9) What was Ted’s job?

10) What was the name of the oracle that Giles and Anya consulted in Showtime?

11) In which episode did Giles and Joyce kiss, Buffy drive a car and the doctor body surf?

12) How many hearts did the Gentleman have to get in Hush?

13) What happened to Amber the cheerleader in The Witch?

14) Who played Joyce?

15) What kind of statue did Brad steal for Harmony in Real Me?

16) What was the name of the character who was Buffy’s boyfriend between Angel and Riley?

17) What three word message did Ethan Rayne leave behind in Halloween?

If you're curious, the one I didn't know was 9.

Business as usual

Right. Back to bitching. The usual objects, I'm afraid: Ken and the BBC.

Ken's latest wheeze, in his ongoing mission to be informally deified by London's bien-pensants, involves promoting his extension to the Congestion Charging zone (ie, his application of the screw to yet more small businesses in the name of buggering the motorist) with a poster that shows the London skyline, the left half of the picture in daylight and the right in darkness (or perhaps that should be, "the Left half of the picture in daylight and the Right in darkness"). The caption is "7am - 6.30pm". Now that the clocks have gone forward and summer's on the way it doesn't get dark by 6.30 any more, but Ken would never let the facts get in the way of an arresting image. The crowning glory of this image, however, is the C logo perched on the horizon, clearly intended, with its terribly subtle glow effect at the edge, to resemble the sun, rising above the city and imperiously burning away the frost and dew of congestion and immeasurably improving our lives the way all Ken's initiatives have, don't you know.

BBC News 24 is a pretty shambolic affair occasionally. The guy presenting last night stumbled over his words five times during a 90-second piece to camera (and when you consider that he is also frightfully well-spoken the question arises how in the world he holds onto his BBC job, being both crap and posh (the BBC hasn't consciously employed anyone without an impeccably egalitarian regional accent for many years now, barring a few superannuated institutions like Dimbleby and Paxman)) and that was just what I noticed in between playing Day of Defeat and rolling Js. But here's a thing. Going through the headlines of tomorrow's (ie today's) papers with an analyst, I was intrigued to note that he instigated discussion on the front page stories of The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and The Sun. The Scotsman had bird flu, The Grauniad (first edition) had a link discovered that solved a mystery of evolution, The Indy had the peace protesters accused of terrorism (natch), The Times had credit card charges being "slashed" ... The Telegraph, which in its first edition ran with Gordon Brown's new retrospective "wealth tax", apparently didn't merit discussion of its front page story; instead presenter and pundit spent an animated couple of minutes discussing the story on page 3, which was a report that JK Rowling thinks girls worry too much about being fat and she'd never allow her daughters to become so obsessed with being skinny, which led the pundit to remark that JK was a "fine figure of a woman" and then hastily recant as though he could already hear the armies of humourless feminists sharpening their nibs. A good laugh was had by all and with a bit of luck no-one really noticed that they declined to comment at all on the front page story.

Am I ridiculous in finding that odd? Am I paranoid in considering it yet more evidence of the BBC's inherent soft-Left bias? After (rightly) working themselves up into paroxysms of righteous anger about the two sexagenarian women accused of terrorism for civil disobedience, are we to believe that they genuinely thought JK Rowling's opinion of our diet-obsessed culture was a more important talking point than a retrospective tax on wills that could impinge upon one in ten households?

L

So it turns out it takes cancellation and the untimely death of one of their stars in order for the team of writers responsible for never being anywhere near as good as that one guy virtually on his own actually to raise their game and write a few decent episodes.

Yes. I've actually been enjoying The West Wing of late. For sure, it still looks like it was shot on a cold afternoon in Norway, but it's almost been possible to overlook that. And occasionally I also manage to forget that this election should be taking place next year. In fact, since it came back from Christmas hiatus following John Spencer's death, it's been totally gripping. And I'm not just talking about Josh and Donna.

Those two were always symptomatic of the loss in quality of this show. Clearly utterly devoted to one another, if unable or unwilling to admit it, the genius of their scenes together was in the unresolved sexual tension they injected into Aaron Sorkin's beautifully rhythmical banter. Not until his penultimate episode, Commencement, did Sorkin even come close to making explicit the dynamic between the two of them (and even then it was only an unanswered question Amy asked of Donna: "Are you in love with Josh?"). But it was all there from day one.

John Wells, on the other hand, clearly wasn't so into the whole suggestion thing. Following Donna's experience as collateral damage in the Season Five finalé explosion that killed Fitzwallace (a mindless aping of 18th and Potomac in terms of being a meaningless death to get Bartlet to a certain space, and not done as well), Josh spends a fraught couple of days in a German hospital trying to figure out what went on between Donna and the Evil British Photographer. Then, in Season Six, he quits, ostensibly to go and help Santos get elected but really so that he's no longer Donna's boss and they can fuck like minks. Now, as any self-respecting X-Files fan will tell you, it's not as good once they fuck. So they didn't: their attraction was just made lots more obvious, and consequently less delightful. But now, with cancellation looming, finally, on Sunday night, Josh and Donna went to bed.

Fair enough, I suppose. In the end it was handled pretty well. I like the idea that Josh is still totally unsure of how to handle a woman he just slept with, like we saw with Amy. I like the idea that Donna understands this - after all, if she doesn't, having worked with him for nine years at this point, who would? Looking at the wider picture I've enjoyed the Santos/Vinick rivalry, their debates, their intrigue (the briefcase scene in Two Weeks Out was great). I still don't understand what the hell Bruno is doing campaigning for the Republicans, and I understand even less how we're supposed to buy the idea of a man with hair like his being attractive to hot Yale graduates, but these are carps. It's been good. And when Annabeth went into Leo's hotel room at the end of this week's episode I, knowing what she was going to find, had something no Wells episode has given me before: a lump in the throat.

Politburo fun

Who wants a Zil?

1805 Days

While those self-righteous, deluded narcissists in Westminster apparently take a break from undermining a millenium's worth of hard-won liberties, I can talk about something less depressing. Like the new Tool album that's out in a month or so. So far they're telling us it's called 10,000 Days, which means nothing so much as it probably isn't called 10,000 Days. They've sent cover art to Amazon, but I still don't buy it. 10,000 Days just isn't a very Tool title. It's not a made-up word, for one thing. And the tracklist looks like an entirely different band wrote the songs. They always do this though.

The question is, how much do I care? The last album (2001's Lateralus - don't even get me started on their glacial output) was an utterly epochal moment in my life. I've been entertaining the nagging suspicion, however, that I just don't care that much about this one. Maybe when I hear the real titles I'll start getting excited. On the off-chance that they are the real titles, maybe when I hear the songs I'll remember why Lateralus was such a huge deal.

But I'm not sure I haven't simply got past Tool. Sure, the other night The Grudge randomly came on on my mp3 player, and it's still amazing and it still got me gritting my teeth and throwing metal signs in the street, and it still brought the hairs on the back of my neck to attention at the climax. But the fact that this is news is the point. My mp3 player hasn't been on shuffle for ages, and that's because I've been listening to Opeth literally all the time. Of course, when you consistently don't get new material for five-year stretches (Lateralus, likewise, arrived after a five-year wait. That time they had an excuse: they'd been getting sued. This time it pretty much seems that singer Maynard James Keenan was too busy with his more accessible, and therefore more popular, and predictably enough, therefore, far less interesting, other band, A Perfect Circle, who managed one good album before greasing themselves up, finding the very steepest part of the slide into mediocrity and hurling themselves down it with all dispatch, only to find when at the bottom that their own banality wasn't quite banal enough and so soggily embracing predictable political themes and topping it all off with a disastrous cover of the tedious Imagine. None of this, of course, bodes particularly well for new Tool material) you can get pretty bored with what you've got.

But if it's really called 10,000 Days, I'll eat my hat.

I don't actually have a hat, but I'll undertake some forfeit or other.