The Nightmare before Christmas

SPOILERS: Classic Disney magic, now over 25 years old.

We see Halloween Town as a fantasy world filled with monsters and supernatural beings associated with the time of year.

Jack Skellington, the "Pumpkin King” and prime minister of the town, leads the town in organizing the annual Halloween celebrations. However, privately Jack has grown weary of the same routine year after year and wants something new and diverting.

Wandering in the woods he stumbles across seven trees containing doors leading to towns representing various celebratory holidays, and opens the portal to Christmas Town.

Awed by the unfamiliar holiday, Jack returns to Halloween Town to show the residents his findings, but they fail to grasp the idea of Christmas and compare everything to their ideas of Halloween

They do relate to one Christmas Town character; a red lobster-like king who flies at night named "Sandy Claws".

Jack goes to his tower to study Christmas in order to find a way to rationally explain it, but cannot. He decides that it's unfair for Christmas Town alone to enjoy the holiday and announces that he and the citizens of Halloween Town will independently take over Christmas this year.

Jack assigns the citizens of Halloween Town Christmas-themed jobs, based upon the ones in the real Christmas, including singing carols, making presents, and building a sleigh to be pulled by skeletal reindeer. The tasks and outcomes may look similar, but they are not.

Sally, a beautiful rag doll that is secretly in love with Jack, experiences a vision that their efforts will end in disaster, but Jack dismisses this and assigns her the task of sewing him a red coat to wear.

He also tasks Lock, Shock and Barrel, a trio of mischievous trick-or-treating children, to abduct Santa Claus and bring him back to Halloween Town.

Jack tells Santa he will be bringing Christmas to the world in his place this year. Jack orders the naughty trio to keep Santa safe, but the children instead deliver Santa to Oogie Boogie, a gambling-addicted bogeyman, who plots to play a game with Santa's life at stake. Sally attempts to rescue Santa so he can stop Jack, but Oogie captures her as well.

Jack departs to deliver presents to the world, but the Halloween-styled gifts terrify and attack the populace. As concerns over "Santa's" behavior grows, the military takes action and shoots down Jack, causing him to crash in a cemetery.

While the residents of Halloween Town think he's been blown up, Jack has survived, and he bemoans the disaster he has made of Christmas, he finds he enjoyed the experience nonetheless, reigniting his love of Halloween.

Jack returns to Halloween Town and finds Oogie's lair. Oogie tries to kill Jack, but Jack pulls apart the thread holding his cloth form together, revealing a massive pile of bugs that fall into Oogie's cauldron and are killed. Jack apologizes to Santa for his actions, and Santa assures Jack that he can fix things and returns to Christmas Town.

As Santa replaces the Halloween-style presents with genuine ones, the townspeople of Halloween Town celebrate Jack's survival and return.

Santa then visits Halloween Town and brings them a Scissorhandian snowfall for the residents to play with, which in a way, fulfills Jack's original dream. In the graveyard, Jack and Sally declare their love for each other.

Boris Johnson Boulevard (there’s not much business going on)

There's something disturbing about the kind of politician who writes two contradictory notes to the EU, whilst still clinging to the principle of "implementing the voice of the people".

We know he is a mischief maker. His attempts to undermine the EU from his times as a journalist confirm this.

That he misrepresents things. From the platform of the red NHS bus.

That he can't be trusted. Any number of private/personal events illustrate this.

That he'll use bluster and handwaving as a cover-up. The million to one chancer and his ditch hyperbole demonstrate this.

But he's got a good script-writing team. The dark strategist, a partner in PR and a club of Old Etonian hedge fund managers.

It makes it easier for middle-folk to follow and replay the sound bites. "Get it done", "Get on with it", "Over the line", "Take back control", the platitudes foam easily and fit placards well. Throw in a few serious looking softly spoken henchmen, and the blend is complete.

Of course, there are other placards too.

This opportunist wilfully ignored the chance for re-negotiation, preferring pretence whilst building a blame case. Then, as the water became rather hot, he substituted a few pages from Theresa May's deal around Ireland and borders, reverting to one of the prior attempts at a resolution.

He's also rebranded the paper. It is not Theresa's paper (4th Attempt). Now it has egotistically become Boris paper Mark I.

Many people ignore that the Withdrawal Agreement just gets Britain out of the EU, along with that payment of £39 billion. Call it a divorce settlement.

It's the Political Declaration that sets the non-binding aspirational aspects of life after Brexit. All of it will need to be negotiated. After it has been costed.

The EU don't regard it as commitment. Everything in it will be up-for-grabs in the months and years succeeding the so-called deal.

giri/haji ギリ/ハジ

I started to watch Giri/Haji (duty/shame), which is a gangster series set in Tokyo and London. At the centre are Kenzo and Sarah (Takehiro Hira and Kelly Macdonald) who are two broken, lonely, people. There's unexpected crime and gangster moves almost from the start and a few drifts into Manga comic-telling.

The story moves from Tokyo to London, which gives a few "Crocodile Dundee" style fish out of water moments and some fun with the subtitles as the story-telling is in Japanese and variously accented English.

Throw some noir, grit and plenty of rain into the mix and then add a few epic story telling moments about saving face, honour and reputation and the series has the makings of an atmospheric few hours.

The same goes for the characters, which have been purpose designed to provide for the most colour and texture. Some might say it has the usual tropes, a cockney geezer running a London night club, a ruthless female fixer, the wayward daughter of the main Japanese cop, various suited Japanese henchman. The list goes on and just as the series reaches a climax in Episode 4 there's another whole heap of goodies tipped into the mix to sustain interest for the other half of the series.

A few scenes run long, when the characters are chatting about life and the universe, but there's enough quirkiness to keep things moving with a light knowing touch.

It's a tad experimental in places, with monochrome, spilt screen and contemporary dance blended into the mix. I didn't mind in the least, it made for a trippy dippy experience.

a stick of liquorice in the remains

“This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle.
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise.
This fortress built by Nature for herself, against infection and the hand of war.
This happy breed of men, this little world.
This precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

Well, that is how Richard II saw it, according to Shakespeare.

Richard II didn’t have it all easy though, what with Baron Bolingbroke and the Duke of York always plotting. Bolly became King Henry IV after Richard's surrender. At Henry's command Richard was carted first to London for display and then to Pomfret Castle, where he was starved to death on Henry’s instructions.

Not that Richard II had a tidy life. He was involved in the Peasants' Revolt, and the murder of Wat Tyler. He later married the teenage Anne of Bohemia as a way to rally Germany against the French.

Then he tried to raise taxes for an army but the Wonderful Parliament said nay. A gyration of Britain to whip up support for an army, but his card was already marked by John O' Gaunt and the Lords Appellant. Roll on the Merciless Parliament where Richard’s previously supportive chamber Knights were condemned and executed.

Richard reestablished control with the volte-face 'moderation' of John O’ Gaunt(above). Consultancy 101: Never trust an advisor who enjoys standing in the shadows.

Richard could blame his erstwhile councillors for the choppy conditions. As a 29-year old he soon let loose, and after the plague took Anne, he decided that to maintain peace with France he would marry the then six-year-old Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of France.

We are just entering the tyranny phase of the King, who sought to eliminate his rivals from earlier years. John O’ Gaunt was using his direct influence to manipulate Richard and to set up the duketti, his private fawning courtiers.

Now Richard could summon his packed Parliament to Shrewsbury – known as the Parliament of Shrewsbury – and there to declare all the acts of the Merciless Parliament to be null and void, furthermore to announce that no restraint could legally be put on the king.

This had the effect of delegating all parliamentary power to a committee of twelve lords and six commoners chosen from the king's friends, making Richard an absolute ruler unbound by the necessity of gathering a Parliament again.

And all the time manipulators could whisper little commands in Richard’s ear.

I sense some parallels with the influencers and fawning courtiers of more recent times.

“Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.” ― William Shakespeare, Richard II (act-i, scene-iii)

sorry, chum, but you can't travel on this line without a ticket

Famously, the Mekon of Mekonta devised 10 ways to destroy the world. Cumming's brain isn't as large and his social graces are not so expansive, so he's had to settle for one main idea and a selection of cheap tricks.

Boris already knows the desk-dumping trick. It's a classic in business. Friday afternoon, and too much to do? ~Email the problem to someone else. End of Quarter? move that troubling debt to someone else. Inconvenient Withdrawal Agreement? Move the difficult bits into an Appendix...oh Wait..Into the Political Declaration.
It's a masterstroke.

Troubling complexity about trade agreements and tariffs? bung it into the Appendix.

No-one will read it, anyway.

Those bits of Theresa's paper that were the most contentious? Slide them across to the PD.

But that's not all.

Obfuscation will also assist.

Make the new Withdrawal Agreement a Revised Protocol. It doesn't remove the original agreement, but shifts plenty of paragraphs around. "Of course it isn't the same document...Look how much work has been done on those 58 new pages" (ten percent should be enough).

And unlike the original Political Agreement, don't publish a PowerPoint summary. People might be able to understand that, instead of going swivel-eyed trying to match the original PD with the new one. In practice, the changes from Theresa May's Withdrawal Agreement are limited to a few pages. Check out the yellow changes and the red deletions here:


And then, the final master touch. Go unconstrained. No budgetary limits. Resource needed? Spend. Spend. Spend. Promises? Unconstrained. Even facts can become unconstrained, too. Soundbites? Unconstrained. Listen to Duncan-Smith, Gove, Raab or Rees-Mogg. These Treens are not communicating, they are fabricating. It's straight from the Mekon's handbook.

Charon's Ferry

When I was travelling across deserts in places like Arizona, Utah and Colorado I was told to watch out for the scorpions. Now, I’d expected them to be quite large things, appropriate to my birth-sign, but actually, most of the scorpions were small, weedy and transparent looking. That’s not to say they couldn’t pack a sting if they were surprised and needed to throw some self-defence moves. Many scorpions are nocturnal and hide in crevices, caves and under rocks during the daytime. A pair of boots makes a snug hidey-hole.

With this in mind, I realised my mistake with the analogy to cornered rats in a recent post. Surprised scorpion is a more likely analogy. Boris can scuttle into a tunnel and then surprise everyone with a sting operation.

I suppose that is what he is doing now. He’s sent out slathering Gove to break down the electorate into digestible pieces, whilst he waves his arms about threateningly.

Then he’ll use the crushing claws of a mendacious deal like a peace fund or a slab of infrastructure as an attempt to appease the Irish politicians. He’s not averse to using a few morally dubious negotiating chips too. All will be revealed over the next few days.

It's all a con, of course, Theresa May’s paper makes a reappearance, with the expensive consultant helpers translating it into French and then back into English to make it look different: "Ceci n'est pas un accord de retrait.”

Don't give anyone time to read it or analyse it, just reveal it at the last possible moment with a tilted one-page summary.

Then it will be casino time. As Downing Street puts it: “Britain is out of all EU laws. We will be able to change our laws in a huge number of areas from product standards to fishing rules and farming subsidies where we are currently bound by EU rules.”

Yes, we were all aching to do just that.

It’s like a scorpion looking out of a tunnel but not noticing the heavy tyre marks and threatening equipment all around. This time the Farrago has noticed the smaller print. That the deal ties UK to EU regulations, despite Boris’s puffery. Boris and the ERG Tories have their eye on deregulation, where foreign companies can join the buccaneering sprint of the freshly repositioned UK and benefit from a loosening of certain inconvenient restrictions. It can be made to sound glamorous to the voters too so that they dont notice that they are racing to the bottom.

So it's dangerous days ahead as the Get It Done brigade wax lyrical about their relief that Boris has Got It Over The Line. Don’t confuse with facts. This is a matter of national pride. Cummings knew that a simple respray was all that was possible in the limited renegotiation time.

If Boris is a conventional scorpion, then maybe Cummings is more like a whip variety. Whip spiders and scorpions will lash out unexpectedly to stun and grab their prey. They don’t even have stings in their tails, but I suppose Mr Cummings has the armed police force on speed dial to handle any little irregularities.

A well-known variant of the whip scorpion is the Charon. Named, if I remember correctly from Boy’s World comics, after that oarsman who ferried souls to Hades. It would explain Cummings’ wry smile.

In which I effortlessly scrap 50 defunct 32 bit Apps from Catalina

I decided to go through the Apps that were on the iMac, to check if any others needed updating after Catalina. It was a useful exercise, because I found about a dozen or two four that were no longer needed.

Most surprising was Aperture, which has been left stranded as a 32 bitter. I've shunted everything across onto Adobe Lightroom, so it really didn't matter. Salutary to think that Apple would jettison one of its original 'big apps' in this way though.

I also had an old version of Ableton (I have the latest too). The no-longer-needed AdobeApplicationManager. A version of Apple's database builder Bento, which has been replaced. Then there was the old version of the Boom sound manager and an old version of Dragon Dictate.

Some alpha releases (oops) and a pile of Garmin utilities which have been superseded. A couple of screen recorders (I use IshowU for this) and a few bigger league Apple programs comprising Logic Node, MainStage, Remote Desktop Connection and Xcode - all of which have been superseded.

Then there was the old Mindjet (scrapped by me) and a few Mpeg and H264 converters, which have long since been superseded. FL Studio has been replaced and I've a current licence - which leaves just a few bibs and bobs to worry about.

Magic Bullet - looked bleak but actually Photolooks still works. I expect I have already got a licence and just not got around to downloading it - I'll try it in Lightroom in a minute. Final Draft - already updated, Yummy FTP - already updated and Scrivener - where I did have to pay new money for the update.

Net result, I've finally cleansed about 50 programs. I reckon its the first big piece of actual Apple systems management I've had to do in about five years, and it comprised spotting each app with a no-go sign, considering my action and then mostly dragging them to the bin.

Hasty test picture shift tilted in Magic Bullet

Catalina

Installing a new MacOS is a fairly low-key affair. The installation takes about 25 minutes and everything just works. The user interface is generally unaffected and often a few things run subjectively faster.

That's what happened with the latest update to 10.15/Catalina a few days ago. It all works, although there was something of a pause before the mail system had re-indexed itself with a new database.

There's a few subtleties under the hood with the new release, although the much vaunted Sidecar won't work with my particular combination of kit. They've built the iPad/iMac integration for post 2016 machines apparently because the HEVC compressed video stream came along in a later intel chipset than my venerable iMac.

<gossip>Is it a taster of what will happen when, in 3 years, Apple ditch intel quad for ARM 10-way processors or go fusion?

</gossip>

The whole operating system is now 64 bit too, which means a few ancient Apps have had to be pensioned off. Farewell TextWrangler, you served me well, but now I'll have to use your replacement BBEdit.

And Scrivener, although V3 from the App Store doesn't work with Catalina, but the version from Literature and Latte works fine. Thank you, Apple, for providing me with the refund.

Then there's a few new security alerts. Grant the relevant permissions or see the application stumble.

Aside from that, there's very little downside to report, although I suppose I keep my system fairly up-to-date. And I've just had the SpamSieve and Chronosync 'free' updates come through, so it's slick, speedy 64 bits all the way.

El Camino

I didn’t realise that El Camino was only released on Friday. It just came up as a recommendation on Netflix, so I clicked yes to watch it.

Rather than a road movie, it’s more like a Vince Gilligan penned extra double episode of Breaking Bad. From the end of the series (i.e. it knows everything), but with some mid-series story-telling in it.

I was surprised how instantly the Breaking Bad style production values and universe kicked in, such that a new story didn’t need to explain anything to this long-haul viewer.

Give or take a flashback, It picks up after the incident at the hut, from the Breaking Bad Series Finale. Like Killing Eve Pt 2, it's about 30 seconds later.

I’ve enjoyed Better Call Saul in the interim, although this Jess Pinkman special episode took off in another direction.

I always thought that Albuquerque played a unique part in the TV show, with the dramatic desert scenes providing almost another character to mix into the plot.

This time the storyline gave me Death Valley and Zabriskie Point flashbacks, plus alongside the action scenes we get some Jesse reflection. And there’s a number of well-known characters included. Even enough for a Hollywood Ending.

The trailer is pretty good too. It doesn’t give away the story or any plot points.

A little secret. I watched BB last episode again afterwards. I notice that Netflix automatically scheduled El Camino as the next Episode.

Ce n'est pas un tunnel

Prorogued again, plus a tunnel negotiation and lambasting anonymous tweets from Downing Street.

"The rats have it. The rats have it."

cornered rats

It's schoolboy games now. When a bully Invents new rules to help his side win. “Extension”- define it. “defer” - define that too. might as well define “legal”, for that matter.

Then we get the trite backup singers like Gove and Leadsom trotting out the same contradictory lines. Nauseating.

This time the Crime Minister is saying he won’t break the law. Maybe not, but he is trying to think of a way around it. The briefings from Downing Street have sunk to gutter level and the public are being treated with disdain by mendacious hypocrites.

I suppose cheating could comprise writing a legally compliant letter asking for an extension to Article 50, but then writing a second one which says ‘I was only joking.’


yes, it's Brexit Bingo time.

Or, it could be something to do with the legal position being about a No Deal exit, and claiming that that ‘legality’ beats the Benn Act. Mister Bombastic Mister trump-tastic.

Boris is struggling to find somewhere to point blame. Instead he is cornered, but we know what rats do in this circumstance.

Fight.

Composed, Rosa Postlethwaite #exeter

Along to The Phoenix to see Composed, Rosa Postlethwaite’s compressed deconstruction of a night at the theatre.

A witty and increasingly edgy one-person show, it even had the audience fretting about the content on the way into the theatre: “How loud is the scream?”/“Can I borrow the ear protectors?”

Rosa uses familiar first hand experiences of set pieces from a night at the theatre, comedy club, awards ceremony or an audience-based live TV show.

There’s the pre-show mood-music (Frank, of course), the Welcome, a list of Sponsors, various linking pieces (the act's not ready..., here come the dancers…)

But with Rosa’s portrayal of the spokesperson for the institution we see the relationship with the audience begin to fray.

Rosa’s performance tiptoes along the edge of acceptability, whilst she builds an inner rage at some of the situations she finds.

Maintaining an outward composure, look closer at her eyes, her expressions or her sometimes flailing arms and there is another angrier story being presented.

Rosa presents the impersonal dynamic of slots for hosting the show, against the backdrop of power of the institutional voice. She’ll reference the audience too, starting carefully, but then unravelling until she clearly crosses a culturally significant line.

Composed may be examining the micro-aggressions of a self-anointed institutional voice, but viewed wide, it is all too pertinent today in the political setting of rowdy politicians with their faux muted mood music as they hide behind the privilege and power of their organisations.

Rosa’s Master of Ceremonies provides hard challenge to many of the situations it represents, presenting a sharp new voice questioning both rituals and behaviours.

A cracking show.