Month: January 2021

Only a while back we were discussing how UFO sightings seem to have diminished radically in an age of smartphones and ubiquitous cameras. But not completely gone, and thanks to Joe Mooney for forwarding the link to this for the Star – a report on how a ‘shaggy haired warehouse worker’ saw “an “evil” seven-foot tall telepathic alien mantis and drawn a picture of the bizarre creature for the Daily Star”.

Not only a drawing, but also photographs of an orange glowing object he saw before the encounter with the mantis. Now that’s the way to do it.

Frustratingly the report ends like this – as he details meeting the alien mantis:

“I felt like it could read my mind and I could read its mind,. “My fear was replaced with completely alien thoughts of utter hatred and evil I felt projected from this thing. “I suddenly snapped out of this hypnotic kind of state and it made a step back as if it was gonna pounce on me.”

And then? What happened next? How did he get away from a creature with telepathy, a glowing aerospace craft and perhaps, just perhaps, an ability to leap huge distances?

Mantis aliens are apparently a thing in the UFO community.

Stephen Collins is preparing for the next political war…

Massive extra spending on this scale was required to deal with the war on Covid but, like all wars, it will have to be paid for in time. With luck, economic growth will reduce the proportion of debt to national income but a return to prudent spending policies when circumstances permit will also be required. Finding a way of doing that will be political challenge when the Covid war is over.

Mark Paul continues, yet again, to argue everyone is apparently living in ‘biting fear’ and make the (inexplicable and) unsupported case that indoor dining is being ‘blamed’ for the spike in Covid-19 around and after Christmas.

All of this judgment and aspersion and blame spews from a place of anxiety deep within us. It isn’t normal to have a six-foot commute to work, from the end of your bed to the desk just inside the door. It is depressing. It is upsetting for parents to keep their young children away from their little friends, replacing precious socialisation with awkward interactions snatched on tablet screens. We all miss friends and family. There is a climate of biting fear, even if a little bit of it is logical in a pandemic. This fear and anxiety manifests in us lashing out, often with questionable justification. Recently, every woe currently befalling us supposedly was all down to the decision to reopen indoor dining for a few weeks. That decision may have errant, but it was never on its own a plausible explanation for the scale of the current carnage. Now, all our fingers are pointing at tourists. But nobody can credibly argue that the UK strain could have been kept out of the country. It is unrealistic. We share this island with the UK.

Any other examples welcome…

Too weeks behind the zeitgeist I was when it came to Lupin, the French Netflix production which this month became extremely popular on the streaming platform. It’s very likeable and watchable – apparently coming out in a season split into two lots of five or so episodes. And here’s a good interview with Omar Sy, the lead role and Louis Leterrier the director. It is, of course, utterly escapist fare, and perfect for the second year of the pandemic in its depiction of a world that seems so recent and yet so different. I guess in tone it is a bit like Sherlock but with considerably more charm.

It’s not alien to the political as the following notes – btw not a spoiler but some may prefer not to read details of scenes:

While using the original stories as a blueprint, by putting Sy’s Assane at the centre of the story, it makes the century old tales feel entirely modern. He is a con artist with a conscience, his target is the wealthy establishment, and he’s happy to use people’s prejudices against them in his scams, while rarely resorting to violence. One particular scene really hammers this home. In a flashback, Assane poses as an undercover detective who persuades an elderly woman to hand over her most valuable items, including a rare Fabergé egg. She shamelessly admits that her husband “assisted with the extraction of diamonds in the Belgian Congo”. “The good old days,” Assane says with a wry smile. “The locals were sitting on a fortune, and they didn’t even realise it,” the woman continues. Assane is just playing the white establishment at its own game, one rigged from the very beginning.

The treatment of race and class is something Sy and Leterrier were both very conscious of, and works well.

What’s that you say, that two multi-tonne monsters couldn’t actually stand on the deck of an aircraft carrier as they slug it out with one another? I’m actually really looking forward to this latest addition to the Monsterverse…

Interesting new site giving analysis, projections on seats and so on. Lot’s to agree and disagree on in the constituency analysis but worth looking at.

Site is here

Gewerkschaftler suggested this recently:

<blockquote>I suggest this blog should have a regular (weekly) slot where people can post happenings at the personal or political level that gives them hope that we’re perhaps not going to hell in a handbasket as quickly as we thought. Or as the phlegmatic Germans put it “hope dies last”.</blockquote>

Any contributions this week?