iainjclark's Mysterious World

Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season. Warner Bros are making a big budget movie of Primeval. And Star Trek is a smash box office hit. It's like the world's been turned on its head.

Still, this plus Niall's admittedly lukewarm defence of the show may finally prompt me to give Dollhouse a try.

EDIT: And as if that isn't enough craziness, they've greenlit a remake of alien-lizard invasion series V which stars Alan Tudyk (Wash) as a human and Morena Baccarin (Inara) as an alien. There's a spoilery review of the pilot, which I haven't read, here.

EDIT to the EDIT: Comment from Joss Whedon confirming the Dollhouse renewal.

What? Seriously, what?

A number of local councils in Britain have banned their staff from using Latin words, because they say they might confuse people. Several local authorities have ruled that phrases like "vice versa", "pro rata", and even "via" should not be used, in speech or in writing...Other local councils have banned "QED" and "ad hoc"...

Assuming this is real and not a Daily Mail scare story dressed up as journalism (which it manifestly sounds like, except that it's on the BBC website) this is crazy. Surely no-one seriously believes that "vice versa" is an obscure latin phrase. It's an English phrase; who cares about its etymology? Next someone will suggest banning "cul de sac" because it'll confuse non-French speakers. Or "margarine". Half our language is appropriated from elsewhere, and it seems meaningless to tag a few key phrases and mutter darkly "those are foreign".

Even leaving aside their derivation, are these phrases really obscure and elitist? I don't speak a word of latin, but I know perfectly well what all these examples mean, yet according to the Plain English Campaign "the ban might stop people confusing the Latin abbreviation e.g. with the word 'egg'." Because, you know, that one always confuses people. Why not just go the whole hog and ban words of more than two syllables?

I find this all very surreal because this kind of "PC gone mad" story is normally anathema to me. Usually the journalist has ridiculously mischaracterised a fairly sensible decision, and it's the press facing my ire not the bewildered subject of the story. In this case the councils are not imposing an outright ban, merely "discouragement", but on the face of it I still can't understand what they could be thinking.

Okay, I'm taking a few deep breaths and disengaging rant mode. On a tangentially related note, the godlike Stephen Fry talks lengthily, wisely and poetically about the beauty of language and the insanity of trying to freeze it in place on his new improved blog. An oasis of common sense.

1,800-year-old Roman stone sarcophagi found in Newcastle. That's not far from us! I learn from this story that they're apparently building a Great North Museum in Newcastle including antiquities, a planetarium, an interactive model of Hadrian's Wall, a life-size T-Rex dinosaur skeleton, and special exhibitions from London. This could be very nice for us as it's not always convenient for us to get down to the British Museum. I'm only amazed that my wife's normally excellent Archaeology Radar hasn't tipped us off to this sooner. The website banner appears to feature Egyptians on chariots hunting Dinosaurs, but I'll assume there's some artistic licence involved...

Of course if that recent bonkers think tank report was listened to there'd be no point in doing any of this because everyone in the North should just give up on their cities, which are beyond all hope of revival, and move south. This is so patently absurd that it probably isn't worth getting upset about, but Exhibit A would surely be the fact that any number of Northern cities have already succeeded in transforming themselves and their fortunes into thriving centres of business and culture. Like Newcastle & Gateshead, for example. Sunderland is one of those named by the think tank as "beyond revival" yet -- although it's hardly the largest or most cosmopolitan of cities -- in the relatively short time I've known it Sunderland has transformed itself from a shipbuilding town to one with a beautiful riverside and coastal area and a strong service industry base (including the University), not to mention the famous Nissan plant. The fact that anyone could seriously suggest otherwise reflects blinkered attitudes to the 'North' of England (i.e. anywhere north of the M25) that are quite surreal. It's the equivalent of saying that the London Dockland area was beyond revival prior to Canary Wharf being built.

And finally...

A sensible, evidence-based story about the British Summer. Will wonders never cease.

The Wire star hits out at Emmys. Sergeant Ellis Carver thinks the Emmys are ignoring his show, and rightly so. I still can't believe that The Wire has never won an Emmy. It does at least have a single nomination this year: Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series for its final episode. Maybe that means it'll get the 'lifetime achievement' sympathy vote.

Fresh from last month's Ben Folds gig, we now have tickets to see Counting Crows supported by Ben Folds in December. This is good. Counting Crows' latest has some strong return-to-form stuff on it but has left me a bit cold overall. Nonetheless the combination of Crows and Folds is pretty much a slam-dunk. Folds has a new album Way to Normal out on 30th September which sounds a good deal more up tempo than anything he's done since the first couple of Ben Folds Five albums.

Hot on the heels of The Dark Knight (spoilery review here) there are preview screenings of Hellboy 2: The Golden Army on 5th August, so we have tickets to see that too. This is double plus good. My Cineworld Unlimited membership is a process by which I willingly allow Cineworld cinemas to scam £12 from me every month in return for me not going to the cinema. To add insult to injury, even though I only found out about the screenings through their Unlimited newsletter, my membership doesn't let me book advance tickets. So I've paid for the tickets. I really should cancel that membership...

The trailers for Hellboy 2 look a bit mediocre but I sense there's a good film hiding behind the crappy marketing. Plus I like the comics and really enjoyed the first flick and Janet is a sucker for dark mythological faerie types, so really the film is pandering to us shamelessly.

Today is the day on which the fact-free conspiracy theory that Prince Phillip had Diana assassinated (for a plethora of reasons that only exist in Mohamed Al Fayed's head) finally went up in smoke once and for all. Not that it will stop the conspiracyheads of course, but then conspiracy theories don't thrive on rigorous public examination anyway. They thrive on half-truths and insinuations that often make a seductive amount of sense until you take a single step backward and remember all the other facts that make them impossible. So, although it will make no difference and I stopped caring about Princess Diana's death approximately ten years ago, I do think it right to pause briefly and genuflect at the altar of rightheadedness.

In that vein, Charlie Brooker writes hilariously about the so called 'Brain Gym' for school-children [via badscience.net].

Torchwood Season 2. This is one of the more surreal press releases I've ever read. For example: "We're delighted that Torchwood is joining BBC Two. We know from the success and popularity of Heroes that there's a growing appetite for smart, high-quality, sci-fi drama on the channel so Torchwood is a perfect fit.".

But the real gem is this actual, genuine, no-really-it's-not-a-joke quote: "I'm also pleased to announce that, due to popular demand from families and younger viewers, we will be showing a special pre-watershed repeat so everyone can enjoy the new series."

...

That'll be a ten minute version then. The question is, will there be a special *post*-watershed repeat that's been edited so that the rest of us can enjoy it?

These classic Doctor Who aliens will be in Season 4. That's good.

No more Deadwood. That's bad.

David Tennant is likely to stay on for a fifth season of Doctor Who following the "gap year" of three TV movies. That's good.

They're remaking Near Dark, a film only released in 1987. The Horror remake bandwagon careens, driverless, through yet more innocent pedestrians. (That's bad, by the way.)

David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Boston Legal) is making a US version of Life on Mars, and the pilot episode will be directed by Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing, Studio 60). My instinctive reaction to this idea is to grab a couple of candlesticks and hide behind Peter Cushing, but actually the chances are that a US version of the show would be different enough to be worthwhile. US cop history is more than rich enough to provide a subtly different seam of influences, and the nostalgic imagery would be very different. It depends on whether they're adapting the UK scripts or taking the premise and spinning it into new stories. The latter would be a much better idea.

I've been meaning to mention this for ages, so by now most people have probably seen this really disturbing promo image of Heath Ledger as the Joker from the upcoming Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight. It's an impressively pared down interpretation and one that bodes well for how gritty and risk-taking the movie version could be compared to the rather camp Jack Nicholson performance. If anything it's almost too far gone, but there's another low quality image here that gives more of an overview of how the character will look, showing that the green hair and purple jacket are intact after a fashion. I like this look for the character overall. My wife is much less convinced. I think she's still hoping that they'll cast Mark Hamill.

Fans of Sherlock Holmes be afraid. It's not that a big screen adaptation casting Holmes as a more "edgy" action-oriented hero is doomed to crassness but... well, quite. The quote about "playing up his skills as a bare-knuckle boxer and expert swordsman as he goes about solving crimes" does not fill me with confidence. Then again, the world has already witnessed the astonishingly poor yet strangely entertaining Young Sherlock Holmes.

Further weirdness: how does the inestimable Cate Blanchett in the fourth Indiana Jones movie sound? In other casting news for that film, has anyone ever seen Shia LaBeouf and immortalradical at the same time?

Meanwhile Stephen Fry is writing a script for Peter Jackson. The world has gone mad, I tell you. Sadly it seems Mr Fry didn't have the time to write his promised episode of Doctor Who. Sniff. (The trailer for the new series of Doctor Who is now up at the official site and looks much more promising than the last one, once you get past the painfully hokey intro.)

Got up early this morning. We sat and drank coffee and watched the end of the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story "Carnival of Monsters" on UK Gold+1. Very creaky production values but quite entertaining, and a very civilised way to start the day.

Then we flicked over to the Heaven and Earth Show on BBC1, which was staging a small 'debate' between a Creationist, a Christian, and Geneticist Steve Jones. *bangs head on desk* It may take me several hours to stop ranting.

It was your typical example of the Creationist planting a few choice seeds of doubt over evolution which, while absolutely unscientific, are impossible to refute in an interview sound-bite. And since the Creationist only has to create specious doubt while the scientist has to summarise and prove the entire theory of evolution in one sentence, it's really a no-win situation. Thankfully the CofE representative agreed that Creationism doesn't belong in the science classroom, and Steve Jones chose to step back and argue that belief in divinity and the soul are not inherently incompatible with evolution.

Nonetheless, the Creationist was allowed to get away with all the usual tricks: saying that science is just another "competing" theory equal to any other, that "science" is interpreted through the context of our culture and so is not objective fact, that evolution is science's version of a "Just So" story (oh the irony!), and this recent favourite - which I still don't understand - that the mechanism for evolution by genetic mutation is apparently unupported by any evidence (!) and that evolution requires the spontaneous creation of genetic complexity out of nowhere. Apparently. Indeed, although the creationist admitted to not knowing much about genetics, well-informed people had told him that antibiotic-resistant viruses actually have less genetic complexity and therefore don't prove evolution! I'm no expert myself, but I'm staggered that anyone can fundamentally (or wilfully) not understand the process of natural selection and mutation to this extent. Am I missing something that makes this whole 'genetic complexity' argument even remotely logical?

What really annoys me is that Creationists are always pitched against geneticists, yet Creationism by definition refutes not just evolution but also most other branches of science. After all, to say that the Earth and human life are only thousands of years old is contradicted by the evidence of plate tectonics, geology and erosion, radioactive decay and carbon dating, the stratification of fossils and other biological material in a geological context, cosmology and microwave background radiation from the big bang etc. etc. You can't just cherry-pick evolution as being false without invalidating more or less every other branch of science.

Sigh. Why do I even get sucked in by these things?