Decimation

Someone on The Reality-Based Community speaks of the power Obama may get from having mobilized a mass movement.

Like Oliver Cromwell, Barack Obama is more conservative than his core supporters. (Cromwell was originally against executing, or even deposing, Charles I.) An electoral sweep, backed with a movement that can still be mobilised against a recalcitrant Congress, would give President Obama an authority greater than any of his predecessors since FDR. In this scenario a more vindictive politician could get away with putting Bush and Cheney on trial for treason: fortunately for the republic as well as White House malefactors, this won't happen. Obama clearly has the moderate temperament of Augustus or William the Silent rather than the hubris of Julius Caesar or Napoleon III.

They do know that Augustus got to rule as a peaceful old uncle by dint of having had (as Octavian) everybody who could possibly look crossways at him executed on day one? Think Cicero.

That was what pissed me off about Gladiator. Roman generals didn't get thrown into paroxysms of revenge when people massacred their families; happened all the time, something you could have a good laugh at over a cleansing ale next time you met over the negotiating table, something you'd done yourself to the families of your conquests after you'd had them march behind your chariot in chains at your triumph. No biggie.

Listen to Octavian and Anthony in Anthony and Cleopatra haggling over the proscriptions - ok, you can kill my uncle, but only if I get to kill your brother - Shakespare didn't make that mistake.

I knew that, 86

Actually, no; 99 and the Chief.

I knew that, 86

For no particularly good reason I ended up seeing the new Get Smart, and it's as inexplicable as everybody says. The whole joke of the TV show - 100% - was that Max believed himself to be James Bond and was in fact utterly incompetent (in fact, as near as dammit George Bush). The new Max believes himself to be a nerd, with occasional small vanities (closer to Al Gore) and is in act a nerd with occasional ups and downs; and that really doesn't amount to a funny.

That's what McCain/Palin evokes; Get Smart, only with 99 being dumber than Max.

Movies

Hellboy II
The absence of epic, because the absence of tragedy, because no main character can die. The last Batman got its hit from Heath's having died.

Old Boy
How extraordinarily Jacobean. I mean, revenge drama. So literal.

In Bruges
A Wildean comedy of manners. Though sister Sally tells me it's unsound on the Walloon question.

In the wars

From Jasper Ridley's Palmerston:

Next day the newspapers confirmed the news of Waterloo...It was the last of the 182 engagements in which the British Army had fought since the first action at Valenciennes in July 1793. Palmerston, with his usual methodical habits, tabulated all the battles and losses sustained in each; in the twenty-one years of war, including the war against the United States of 1812-1814, the British Army had suffered a total of 920 officers and 15,214 other ranks killed, of whom nearly one-sixth had fallen in the last week in Belgium. In the Navy, the total losses were 3,662, the combined losses in both services of twenty-one years of war being less than one-third of the number who fell in one day's fighting at the Somme in 1916.

Memories, memories

It's so exactly the kind of fantasy that occupied so much of our lives between the age of eleven and eighteen. where by 'our' I mean 'us boys'.

In the Age, 13/08/08

Bound and gagged teen feared for her life
IT WAS a warm Tuesday in March when a Gippsland teenager and her boyfriend set out for a romantic picnic. He picked her up from her parents' house and they began the drive to a waterfall on his family's land.

Not far past the gates their attention was drawn to the carcass of a deer. The young man got out of the car to look around and was gone for a few minutes.

"I started to get worried that he hadn't come back yet," his girlfriend later told police in a statement."Then a guy came up from behind the car … wearing a grey-and-white-coloured balaclava and blue latex gloves."

What followed was an eight-day struggle to survive in some of Victoria's remotest terrain. Bound, gagged and blindfolded, and not knowing what had happened to her boyfriend, the 17-year-old was shoved into the back of the car and covered with a blanket for a long drive.

"When he pulled me out of the car and when he was tying me up, he was shaking more than I was," she said. "The man didn't say anything the whole time. When I tried to talk he put his hands over my mouth to stop me."

She told police: "I was extremely scared. I kept wondering where he would be taking me, why he had taken me and I was trying to think what I or my family may have done to cause someone to kidnap me."

She lay in the back of the car trying to imagine how to get free.

"I thought that I was going to be killed during the drive. When we stopped and I was dragged out of the car and my clothes cut and ripped off me. I also thought that I would be raped before I was killed."

But the mystery abductor disappeared. Her boyfriend, who told her he had managed to free himself, untied her and removed her gag. She was terrified, naked and lost, but together they set out to find their way home.

They took with them a sleeping bag she believed was left behind by their attacker and some food and water.

"During the week that I was with (him) we ate very little … The third day … (my boyfriend) caught a snake. He killed it with a stick, but we were unable to make a fire and therefore we didn't eat it as we didn't want to eat it raw," she said in a statement to police.

"The fourth day I ate blackberries and raw fish. (My boyfriend) was walking in the river and a fish jumped between his feet, (he) grabbed it and killed it. Again we were unable to make a fire so we shared the fish and ate it raw."

The ordeal ended on March 11 when they were found by farmer Ian Minchin on his way home to Wulgulmerang, 130 kilometres from Bairnsdale.

Leading Senior Constable Raymond Moreland said in a statement that the young man had told him he was "hit on the head a number of times" when he got out of his car to check on the deer and had been put semi-conscious in the rear of his own car. "I gained consciousness and located a knife and freed myself and then freed my girlfriend."

After being fed, checked by a nurse and questioned about their abduction, the pair were taken to a motel for the night.

But the next day police charged the young man, alleging that the 22-year-old had staged the abduction to persuade his girlfriend to have sex with him and later marry him.

He appeared in Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court this week charged with seven offences, including kidnapping, abduction with intent to marry and abduction for the purposes of sexual penetration.

The young woman said in a second statement that her boyfriend had asked her repeatedly to marry him and have sex for warmth while they were lost in the bush.

"Basically he told me that if we had sex it would keep us warm and we would have a better chance of survival and that we would be married before God, as we had had sex," she said. "I think that most days he would say it was getting colder and maybe I should reconsider having sex with him to keep warm."

In another statement, she said that for some time their relationship of almost two years had been strained because he wanted to get married, but she would not agree.

Detective Sergeant Rodney Arthur told the court that the man was charged after inconsistencies in his statement were revealed during a visit to the bushland where the pair had allegedly escaped.

The man has reserved his plea and is contesting all charges.

It's such a note-perfect adolescent fantasy. We worried endlessly at weaving these extraordinarily complex scenarios that could conceivably be made to terminate at a point where a girl would fuck us without our having to expose ourselves to the possibility of ridicule inherent in having to ask her. As one might imagine, necrophilia came in quite a lot - the dead can't giggle - but something like this wasn't far behind. Very unusual to carry it through, though - and even then, the poor bugger didn't actually get laid.

Flashback: McCain joked about how much women love to be raped.»

The blog Rum, Romanism and Rebellion pulls out a 1986 Tucson Citizen article recounting a joke about rape told by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Speaking to the National League of Cities and Towns in Washington, DC, McCain allegedly said:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, “Where is that marvelous ape?”

McCain was swiftly criticized by women’s groups. A spokeswoman for NOW in Arizona said the organization’s members were “incensed by his cruel and sexist remark.” McCain said he did not “recall” telling the joke. More recently, the McCain campaign scheduled a fundraiser with a Texas oilman who compared rape to the weather while running for governor. “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it,” said Clayton Williams in 1990. After public outcry, the event was “postponed.”

Update - Huffington Post's Sam Stein spoke to reporter Norma Coile, who wrote the original article. Coile told Stein, "I'm not sure exactly what the wording was of the joke, but something was said. Some joke involving a rape and ape was said."

The 'joke' as given makes no sense; no punchline, no funny.

I think I can identify the actual joke; Near enough,it's

There were these two little old ladies visiting the zoo. As they lingered around the gorilla cage, the biggest male of all the gorillas reached through the bars of his cage, grabbed one of the little old ladies, dragged her through the bars of his cage and began having sex with her right there in front of God and everybody!

Well, the zookeeper came and sedated the gorilla, the paramedics came and sedated the little old lady and her horrified friend, and they took the little old lady to the hospital.

The little old lady's friend was shaken and embarrassed by the incident, and she didn't know what to say, but after a couple of days finally got the courage to go see her friend in the hospital. "Are you hurt? Does it hurt?" she asked.

"Does it hurt? Am I hurt?" repeated the teary-eyed little old lady. "Goddamn yes, it hurts. It's been two days -- he doesn't write, he doesn't call!"

http://www.ssqq.com/jokes/

Which is more or less the way I happened across it first some decades ago.

What is odd, though, is that that version comes a fair way down google; the top ten or so are on racist jokes websites - that is, specialist anti-black 'white pride' type websites, or at a pinch jewish jokes.