The ones I like have ideas and no SFX and are often low-budget. Godard's Alphaville is in there. So are a few by such directors as Weir, Altman and Rudolph, plus sundry Russians and east Europeans. Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' is near the pinnacle.

But it's doubly unusual to find a treatment of the 'aliens' theme without SFX -- even if they make the alien convincingly humanoid, they can rarely resist a brief shot of their home planet (which looks like either Texas or Alaska). Even Nic Roeg fell for this in the otherwise superb 'The Man who fell to Earth'.

(I'd have liked to see a Russian version, Chelovek who fell to Zemlya, in which the alien arrives in time to rejuvenate the moribund soviet system with his advanced technology, he gets a command economy working for him, and capitalism is crushed).

Anyhoo, the film I'm working round to introducing is this: Friendship's Death, written and directed by Peter Wollen around 1986. Tilda Swinton stars as a humanoid robot sent from far away to address the united nations: but the alien version of Smurphy's Law lands her in Amman, Jordan, in 1970, during a war between Arab factions. She arrives with a message of peace and friendship (her name, too) but something in humanity gets to her and she ends up getting involved in somebody's struggle. It doesn't seem to matter whose. Bill Paterson plays a journalist - burned out war hack type - witnessing her ethical dilemmas.

There may seem to be an essential hubris and humano-centricity in the idea that human problems might be valued by advanced aliens -- maybe like the way we value 'primitive' tribes for their authentic closeness to nature? Well then, why not value wars and commitment to causes and - get this - *willingness to die for an abstraction*... ?

You don't get that on Deneb VII. And the Truffles of Aldebaran II would wiggle their parasitic lichen in laughter at you. Sentient beings don't *choose to die*, you idiot, not even somewhere as backward as Urth.

I recommend this film, if you can find it.

Also, failing to understand that "Bearing Straight" is a pun- quite obviously a pun--especially given the context that phrase was posted in- bespeaks a rather embarrassingly ironic form of plain stupidity. And to mistakenly criticize such a pun as evidence of some kind of ignorance or "inferior speech" is not just arrogance- it is the most embarrassing form of ham handed arrogance.

<"Probably just a coping mechanism"> to deal with some kind of emotional anxiety.

Indeedy. Laziness, as I like to say, is the mother of invention. It's not the compulsively industrious folk, the kind who actually take pride in their hard work, that try to find easier, faster, more efficient ways to do things! The driving force behind progress have always been the guys and gals who would rather sit and try to come up with a way out of those bloody chores. ;)

Personally, I prefer the term "procrastination" though. Partly because I have my own fond relationship with Poly, and partly as it allows for more choice - I may actually get some things done once in a while, so long as it's not done <too> promptly.

Ahem, so... is that library assembled yet?! ;p

<<The inevitable semantic loop> I previously mentioned trolley dollies on trains -- *of course* I meant coffee, as a confirmed caffeinoholic. You thought I drank *tea*? Naaaah, rarely. My point was, if I must drink the stuff, I add lemon to it. But coffee is my first and second love, and that which gets me functioning in the morning. With sugar. These multiple addictions are good for the 'soul'.>

Hear, hear! =)

<(1) <DoM is not a short story> ... too true, alas. Far too verbose. But it's about 20 years since I last read Dimension of Miracles. I hope it stood up as well as I remember it.>

Heh. As I'm sure you know, I was referring to 'Dimension of Miracles' as "DoM", but I *did* suspect you would pick the ball up and run with it. Not disappointed! :) And yes, it's quite a fun read, even with some good insights included.

<(2) <Star Trek IV> ... is that the one where they save the whales, and Spock "took too much LDS in the 60s"? Hilarity agreed. When they took out the self-importance they could be quite good, really.>

Yup, that's the one. My fave quote is the part when the search party leaves the <invisible> Romulan Bird of Prey they arrived in and had landed at Central Park, and Kirk matter-of-factly cautions his crew "everybody remember where we parked!" Cracks me up every time.

<The point is that the electronic media *do* seem to arrest change. American, Australian, Irish and English versions of English should have diverged by now -- instead they've reached a sort of unstable balance, where they retain certain marks of their individuality and culture-specific tropes, yet on a broader scale they somehow evolve in parallel. Something to do with constant feedback, I expect -- the kind of thing we're doing now, actually.>

Absolutely!

<... but in this case I'd assume that anyone who wrote 'Bearing Straight' was creating a clever pun (the fact that both 'bearing' and 'straight' are correctly spelled, even if Bering and Strait aren't, is a dead give-away). Your true cretin writes something like *Berring Strate*, I think.>

*Berring Strate* wouldn't work, as the specific subject here was misspelling "miscorrected" by automatic spellcheckers - so the words would *have* to be correctly spelled for <some> meaning. And yes, 'Bearing Straight' would actually be ok, but I'm afraid that was really a breakdown on my part -- the original I was referring to was actually written "Bearing Strait" (see here: http://www.geocities.com/gardenofda... - search for "Bearing") -- and wasn't meant to be a pun by any means... but I just had to do <something> about it... I couldn't stand the pain, I just couldn't! *sob, sniff...*

<Inappropriate use to describe agreement? Hmm. They 'really' mean 'defenestrate' or 'defec...' ... doh! Of course. It's *definitely*, innit? Never even crossed my mind until now.>

Yup. Definitely. Thing is, the commonest atrocity in my Pet Peeve collection is the appallingly common misspelling of that poor word as "definately" - which most spell checkers, for some mysterious reason, insist on "correcting" to 'defiantly' rather than 'definitely'. So it's a dead giveaway of spellchecker abuse. :s

I love 'defenestrate' BTW, but other than discussing failures of Windoze (as Mac users like to call it) it can be hard to work it into a conversation. ;)

Using traditional notions of gender, I can't imagine why. Sheer persistence, maybe, and a dash of politeness? After all - to pick a few names at random - Bill is funnier, Eyal is smarter, mack is younger and better-looking (and smarter), while Niels has actually achieved things in his life.

I can only invoke <Taleb's Law>, named after Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of 'Fooled by Randomness' and 'The Black Swan'.

Taleb points out that human beings are not adept at grasping probabilities. Extremely improbable events *do* occur - in the universe as a whole. They are only unlikely if we restrict ourselves, as people tend to do, to our own corner of the cosmos.

So *somebody* will win tonight's lottery. Probably not me, however. I've heard you have to buy a ticket first? Pfui.

Anyhoo: Taleb's Law suggests that *some* place was going to accrue a statistically improbable concentration of female posters. So here we are. And I wish you better luck in the Korean lottery than I will have in the Irish one ...

(2) You seem to be angry about something. Are you angry about something? Cretins do actually exist -- in the original sense, from 'chretien', meaning 'poor christian soul' (is Canada the only country to have had a leader named Cretin? Bush, Banana, and Eden run him close ...)

Your regular contact with learners of English has clearly given you some perspective on this topic, and an understanding that there is no correlation between intelligence and ability in English.

But what I said was that *ignorance* often drives linguistic change, and is value-neutral. The language changes anyway -- in the long run, the reasons for change don't matter much. Except maybe to phonologists working out whether a new vocalic system requires less energy than the old one.

Take a classic example of the kind that seems to annoy some people: *decimate*. We know that it originally meant to kill one in ten; furthermore, we can *see* this in its relationship to the Latin *decem*, meaning 'ten'.

But a less fastidious generation has decided that decimate should mean 'destroy, wipe out, ravage, lay waste, stomp on the CPU and whack the drives' ... or something. Conservative moans about etymology will not arrest this change: it's already standard ... to the point that it now seems *wrong* if somebody employs the one-in-ten usage.

Oh, dam. Remind me what the problem was, somebody. Let's leave learners and 2nd-language speakers out of it: many people manage heroically at this site by using English.

Even I have a tendency to use my personal variety of English, which is incomprehensible to nearly everyone. (Not just here - my editor says the same thing ... if Rupert made funds available, Jess could waltz into a job as interpreter).

The cretinism in question is found among people whose first language is English. If memory serves, Jess, you've taken a pop yourself at the "If English was good enough for J. Christ" types ... ?

So the squall bloweth over. Those biblical translators pulled off some neat tricks -- 'camel through the eye of a needle' instead of 'rope through the eye of a needle', confusing the Greek words 'kamelon' and 'gamelon', that was one. Another is 'Sea of Galilee' -- OK, it had fish. I still reckon that 'Pond of Galilee' would suffice. Makes walking on it a tad less impressive, though.

The real question is this: which came first, the cretins or the Christians? And when did the populations diverge so that they were no longer genetically compatible, ie a cretin and a Christian could not have viable offspring.

Apart from the fact that the cretin might not understand about offspring-making, and the Christian may have had valid moral qualms about exploitation and copulating with fruits of the desert. Better, in such cases, to make like Onan.

A glass of wine
A jug of coffee
And thou

Two drugs and a simulation
With quite a powerful effect.

At least you'll have time to get that library set up now! ;)

Quite right- I *do* understand your amplifications.

Christian-cretin: is that the real etymology? Or is it one of your jests?

That wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years. Do you think <Richard Dawkins> is happy about this etymological blockbuster?

I wonder how many Christians in the USA, for example, would appreciate this knowledge.

Nowadays, I suppose, one can be a cretin without being a Christian.

I believe I may be living proof of this, and I'm not a Christian, if you get my drift.

I usually write 'xtian' rather than 'christian' - for various reasons. It amuses me because some people think it's an insult, but it isn't -- in fact abbreviations like Xmas, Xtian, Xtianity etc were routinely used by monks on manuscripts in the middle ages, to save space, time and ink. The X is 'chi' - the first letter of Christos in Greek. Clever chaps, those monks.

The fundamental units of the cosmos, as all scholars once knew: <space, time and ink>. Until they got garbled into bastardized versions like spacetime and inkspace.

Under the 'rules' of the Culture of Complaint -- as Robert Hughes called it in his brilliant book of that name, thus avoiding loaded phrases like 'political correctitude' -- if somebody *feels* insulted, they *are* insulted. Even if it's a factual error. This is both stupid and dangerous. Our feelings have or had a use, but they did not evolve with the modern world in mind, and they're not good at coping with it.

I *like* being difficult to insult -- but sometimes I think it puts me at a relative disadvantage vis-a-vis those types who are ready to be insulted (even on somebody else's behalf) at the drop of a pin.

- I heard that pin drop! You did it on purpose, you callous male brute! A vile slur against workers in the millinery industry, which is the fetishism branch of the sex industry, and we should take our hats off to them! And stick pins in them! - So, er, how many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? - That's not funny!

The point is that 'xtian' is a good, documented, traditional, authoritative, monkish usage - and therefore good xtianity. And a Dawk in the eye for those who claim we're 'descended from monks'.

As if such a thing were possible. Monks evolved on a different branch, where celibacy is hereditary.

Yet, despite this stuff, I recall being told by a Catholic teacher that 'Xmas' was a Protestant plot to take Christ out of Christmas. We were told never to say Xmas: it was anti-God. Worse: it was protestant.

It would be funny - like the cretins being simple christian souls - but *stupid* beliefs like this -- propagated via indoctrination aka child abuse -- are responsible for much of the trouble in the world.

It's almost funny, in a sense, how many religions teach that their rivals are 'anti-god' -- as though opposition to an omnipotent being was the kind of thing a bad person would engage in. I can imagine being against a tribal boss or a political leader, but I wouldn't take up arms against a deity. Except by not believing in it, which is even worse where many believers are concerned.

Admittedly, I escaped without serious indoctrination, or believing any of it, but not everyone is so lucky. In my case, they made the mistake of telling me a transparent porky about Santa Claus when I was already reading sci-fi. I got suspicious. And it's hard to sell religion to a suspicious kid ... like, what happens to the molecules in a miracle? Did people in China see the sun dance too? If not, isn't it really a hallucination?

All that rotten ergot-ridden bread in the medieval diet. No wonder they saw visions: stained glass windows by day and ergotamine tartrate for supper.

Yes, I might well have meant that, but I wouldn't have said it. Because the last male head of state in Ireland was President Patrick Hillery, way back in the 1980s. Ever since, only women have been elected to the job.

Perhaps they cope better with the ceremony and the lack of actual political power -- the President is something like a queen without the family jewels, the vast wealth, and the right to give places like Wales and Cornwall to one's offspring.

- Another piece of conquered Celtic territory, Charles? Just to keep you occupied until one snuffs it.

- Thanks, Mum. Is 'Prince of Wales' acceptable?

- Of course, m'lad. Anything for one's firstborn parasite. In fact, one is thinking of changing the family name to Windsor-Goa'uld.

So I'd be more likely to say "Hillery preceded". Unless we were talking about mountain climbing, in which case I'd say "Hillary clambered after Tenzing onto the roof of the world, accidentally dislodging a slate which later beheaded several residents of Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, who took it as a sign that Genghis Khan would return soon".

Also, that's the first time I ever heard (well Ok read) someone equate religious indoctrination with <child abuse>.

Strong beer, surely?

I suppose this all hinges on the difference between using the <always pejorative> term "indoctrination" and using the <always postive> term "education."

One would have to get down to more specifics here to define and distinguish between the two. I think.

Question: I know how strong the literary tradition of anticlericalism is in Ireland- the "eye opener" for me was the very long, very powerful, almost pornographic description of Hell in <Portrait of the Artist>, and of course <Brien O'Nuallain> goes without saying.

Actually he probably didn't go very quietly if you think about it. He said a lot as he went, and even wrote much of it down, for which I'm quite grateful.

So my question is this= in your opinion/experience, is the prevalence/intensity of anticlericalism greater in Ireland than in other "European" countries, if there's still such a thing- or greater than in America and the Commonwealth States-- that is, in other states imbued with a dominant Christian culture for the last two millenia?

I need to know.

From John Ford's classic western, <The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence>:

<Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?

And the once-pious lower classes aren't anti-clerical. They just don't care about any of it.

So it's all finito here. An end to god-bothering and the god-bothered. I suspect Myles would be horrified.