After watching Hellboy 2, which didn’t do much for me, I’m sitting at home (Clare has a thing this evening) eating müesli and mango yoghurt. I’m also watching the second season of House. I’ve seen it before, but it’s great. It’s putting me in mind other stuff I go back to again and again…
Wodehouse, obviously. He’s the safe, warm place I go back to when I’m ill or sad.
Stargate SG-1. Christopher Judge is a brilliant comic actor. I am not in the least bit kidding. They’re all good. Judge is hilarious.
Al Jolson and Bing Crosby singing “The Spaniard Who Blighted My Life” (which they did in 1947.)
“Fancy” by Bobby Gentry…
You know, as I was writing that, I came to the end of the DVD and I was confronted by the image of a bald bloke in a dungeon and a voiceover which informed me that
PIRACY FUNDS TERRORISM!
I’d really like to see some evidence for that, but even if it does, it’s a fabulously stupid thing to say on an anti-piracy ad. Why? Because it sounds insane. It’s so huge a claim that it’s laughable. It’s trying to put buying a DVD on the same level as making a direct donation to some outfit which proposes to kill people in vile ways to further a political agenda through the power of fear.
Biiiig stretch. More likely to point up how far apart they actually are in moral terms than to tar one with the other.
And another thing: how is it ‘piracy’? It’s ‘infringement’. It’s ‘unauthorised copying and reproduction’. I get that. That is not the same as sailing up to a merchant ship, murdering your way to the treasure and sinking the burning wreck in shark-infested waters with the surviving passengers. (All those of you who are about to object that pirates didn’t do that… there’s a lot of kinds of pirates and not all of them are the swash and buckle kind – but more relevantly, that’s the image this use of the word in the ad is supposed to evoke, even if it’s not historically accurate.)
The whole thing is overblown and frankly patronising. (I don’t mean that I’m being frank, I mean that the ad is.)
You know what else gets me about it? That on some DVDs, you have to watch the damn ad to get to the content. You can’t fast forward or skip the chapter. You have to mute the damn thing and do something else for a few minutes while you ignore a lecture you already know which changes nothing. In your own home. On equipment you own. It’s futile and it’s in the way, which makes it stupid, and it increases resentment against the company which owns the DVD rights – who are of course hoping you’ll take their side in the ‘piracy’ battle, which makes it twice as stupid.
I hate that.