Is There Anyone Home?

 My resolution to post more often on my shiny new computer didn't work out that well. I am intimidated by the size of the screen. In any event there is still no wargames activity, although without wishing to tempt fate I expect to have something to write about by the weekend. 

What I have done since last here is attend a same-sex Hindu wedding - the food was excellent -  and also the first gig since before my illness. It was the rather fine Elles Bailey, who I had last seen some years ago at a local blues club. She has obviously gone up in the world in the meantime because she can now afford to hire the rightful, albeit reluctant, King of Gondor on drums.

Here she is in action:

The people have spoken, the bastards

"All political careers end in failure" - Enoch Powell

My own political career started in failure and has stayed there. I have lost again. I have never won in any election from standing for the Student Union Executive at university in 1975 until today. Well until yesterday, but you know what I mean. To be honest I never had any hope of winning on this occasion, but democracy involves offering the people a choice and so I did. It wasn't a choice they wanted, but I offered it to them regardless.

It did have its interesting moments though. One of my opponents mentioned in conversation that the actor John Rhys-Davies (known best perhaps as Gimli) had been on 'Question Time' last week where he discussed Kenneth Arrow and his Impossibility Theorem. Perhaps the son of Gloin is a reader of the blog - many well-known actors have of course been wargamers - although given his unpleasant political views I sincerely hope not. In any event, you heard about it - Kenneth Arrow that is - here first.

Our Luxembourg correspondent may by now be thinking to himself "But weren't you on Union Council? Didn't you have to get elected to that?". My reply is to claim that I was elected unopposed and challenge anyone to prove otherwise given the intervening forty five years or so. One of my fellow representatives on Council from the Board of Studies in Physical Sciences was rather more successful than me yesterday and was elected as an independent to East Staffordshire Council. I'm slightly tempted to view it either as a pity vote because he put his full middle name on the ballot paper or perhaps a plea not to pull any more stunts like his 'running every street in the ward' from last year's by-election. (As an aside that by-election was caused when the chap elected in the first place as a Conservative immediately resigned because to his surprise none of his friends would talk to him any more.) Anyway, congratulations to Graham 'H' Lamb for winning a seat in a safe Tory ward despite his politics being anything but, and best wishes for the next four years.

As it is?

And so to the theatre. It is obvious from the comments on my previous post that my readers are a bunch of philistines. Having said that, General Fwa's desire for one of the Trammps' stage suits is understandable, indeed commendable. The subject of dressing up for wargaming has been discussed here before, but going the full disco would be a significant and brave departure. It would, I suggest, work best in multiplayer games where moves, dice rolls etc would be made simultaneously in a choreographed routine by all those on one side of the table, involving a mix of twirls, shuffling feet and syncopated handclaps. This is gold; I haven't been so excited by an idea since the time it was suggested that all competition wargamers wore mankinis.

The relevance of the newly revealed philistinism of you, dear readers, is that I shan't be able to ask you to explain the meaning of Pinter's 'No Man's Land', which I went to see last night. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but must admit that I have bugger all idea what it was about. Memory perhaps? Aging? Marital infidelity? My accompanist for the evening suggested it was about the inscrutability of women, but I suspect that she was merely trying to appear deep and meaningful herself, and in any case there aren't any women in it. Instead, there are four male actors and the words Hampstead Heath and cottage appear a lot, so I'm going to stick my neck out and say there's a gay subtext that I didn't understand any more than I did the rest of it.

I saw the live broadcast  of the production that has been touring the UK before ending up at Wyndham's Theatre on Charing Cross Road, and which features both Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart. The brief recorded interview with the two shows Picard to be somewhat more of a luvvy than Gandalf, which accords with the views of my ex-wife ( who seems to have suddenly started making a lot of appearances in this blog for no particular reason) who got boomed at by him at a reception when he was Chancellor of the University of Huddersfield. As actors however, I'd give McKellen the edge. One lengthy monologue by Stewart in the second act was completely upstaged by the silent MacKellen simply sitting and reacting; an episode that I think proved again the benefit of watching the cinema version, with its cutting between closeups of actors. Kudos must also go to Owen Teale who made the line "We're out of bread" so full of menace that I was unnerved despite being 200 miles or so away.

These bats are bred for one purpose...

I have seen The Hobbit: Battle of The Five Armies, a title that somewhat misleads as the fifth army hasn't even arrived before it's all over for them courtesy of some oversized animals. Such large beasts ('bred for one purpose') appear a lot in this film. Should you ever have harboured the ambition to see Billy Connolly riding a pig then your dreams have come true. My hearing isn't the best and even with my hearing aid turned to the appropriate setting he appeared to be playing a sweary, dwarf lord called 'Dave'; one part of that description isn't particularly surprising. In any event, cue Black Sabbath:

The film is, as you would expect, complete tosh, but is very entertaining. The dragon in full destructive action is most impressive. However, I can't help feeling that the whole series of films is simply the various scenes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy reassembled in a different order with different characters. Good fun though. One word of advice: revisit the previous two episodes prior to going; no recap is provided and I was completely lost until I remembered that it doesn't actually matter that much.

The Battle of the Pelennor Fields

OK, time for another complete digression coupled with a futile attempt to make it look as if this blog has some sort of planning involved. The last two postings have concerned the Fall of Constantinople and Wagner's Ring Cycle. The former prompted MS Foy to refer in a comment to the sinister and superhuman dread that the Ottomans inspired then and now. As for the second, Wagner was clearly one of the sources for Tolkien's later ring based epic although the elf-fancier rather strangely denied it when asked.

Gandalf the Orangey-Brown

There has always been speculation - also strongly refuted by the author - that Lord of the Rings was allegorical. As a callow youth I indulged myself in a large number of pointless and no doubt erroneous conversations regarding the ring as atomic bomb or orcs as the Japanese in the second world war. Now it seems obvious that a more likely parallel would be between Gondor and Byzantium and between Minas Tirith and Constantinople, with Tolkien - a devout Christian - rewriting the events of 1453 as a counter-factual more to his taste; this time the west does come to the aid of the besieged city, the heathens are seen off and civilisation (as JRR would understand it) is saved.

This isn't an especially original thought, but if completely new stuff was all the blog contained then postings would be pretty damned infrequent.

Pot21pouri

So, a whole load of nothing been going on here. I hurt my leg on a Boxing Day walk which has rather restricted my movements. I did go to see the new instalment of the Hobbit. It's a lot better than the first although still far too long.

I'm sure that I've played more boardgames recently than I've written about here. Anyway, today at the Meeples was Zombie Fluxx, The Manhattan Project and Qwirkle. I promised myself that I'd never play Zombie Fluxx again, but fortunately it was one of the shorter games. Manhattan Project was a two hour worker placement game, but far more enjoyable than that sounds. I won, but then I suspect that I was the only one playing who'd ever dealt in WMDs, or any other sort of arms come to that. My tip: a uranium only strategy.

As the Seven Years War is the wargaming focus leaving the old year and starting the new one, perhaps a quote from Frederick is in order:

"It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country as a consequence. Everybody is using coffee; this must be prevented. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were both his ancestors and officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war."

The Hobbit

I enjoyed it, but to be honest it is basically the same scenes and dialogue from Lord of the Rings shuffled into a different order. There are more hedgehogs in this one though.

Herbie - as not featured in The Hobbit

Do you remember the beat combos of your youth? Whenever they had a hit record they just made another one that was basically the same in the hope that people would buy that as well. Peter Jackson obviously does because that's what he's done. Pick your favourite scene from LotR and there will be a version of it here.

One further thought: why do the baddies fill their armies with Orcs and Goblins when they are so useless at fighting? Oh, and another thought: Barry Humphries is very good, as is Sylvester McCoy.

And, finally, apropos of nothing, I have had my first roast turkey of the season.