(no subject)

::waving hello from the library:: I am not in fact dead or missing, but we got a shiny new computer yesterday, and I may spend all my leisure time between now and 2010 playing computer games on it to enjoy its huge screen.

Zimbabwe is mush in the news here in the UK -- I have no idea whether the situation there is reported at all in North America, but as it's a (former) commonwealth country, the UK establishment tends to care what's going on there. And this week in particular there's been the awkward combination of Mugabe's government bulldozing shantytowns, relocating people to the countryside, and preventing people from growing their own food in towns, and the UK government trying to send asylum seekers back to Zimbabwe. (Here's what the Archbishop of Canturbury has to say about it, and the page has other links to BBC reports of the background of the situation in Zimbabwe, largely from South Africa, since my understandingis that they're still banned from Zimbabwe. Channel 4 News had an interview with the Catholic Archbishop of Zimbabwe, which I found deeply moving.)) It sickens me to see representatives of the government of Zimbabwe on the television, and hear them on the radio, speaking as if they represented a legitimate government and not a thuggish regime determined to hold on to power by murdering its opposition, and treated by journalists as if every word coming out of their mouths were not in fact the basest of lies. (And I know that it isn't the fault of the journalists in question, who are at least trying to report on the situation, but it still infuriates me.)

Meanwhile, like most liberals (I suspect) I was willing to give the government of South Africa a fairly long honeymoon, but they've lost all my respect for their unwillingness to criticize Mugabe on his treatment of his own people. I don't care what the ANC owes him.

I have another post on a documentary I saw last night about AIDS in Africa, and why western countries didn't suffer the same degree of social breakdown, but I think work calls.

Weekend update

Saturday was miserable: cold and gray. I spent most of it reading two Flashman books -- the most recent (Flashman on the March), and Flashman and the Tiger, which is actually two short stories and a novella. All very good, and Harry Flashman remains his cowardly, sex-obsessed self throughout. (It is, in fact, entirely the fault of George MacDonald Fraser that for quite a while I believed that "subaltern studies" was a field devoted to, or at least taking its name from, junior officers on British imperial service. I was deeply disappointed to learn that it's just a coined word for "other and below," although you'd think that the people coining it would have realized that it already had a meaning.)

The last story in the collection has as a major character Tiger Jack Moran, who got his start in a Sherlock Holmes book (the footnote on him compares Flashman's account of the man with Watson's), but also makes a cameo appearence in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula as one of Moriarty's associates. That did get us talking about the question of derivative fiction, and BH raised the idea that it's one thing to hold a copyright on a text, and another to hold a copyright on a fictional character. It's an interesting thought, although he's no more a copyright lawyer than I am. (ETA: I see that the fanfic discussion continues, but I doubt I'll be tracking down all the posts I've missed.)

( a little explanation about Flashman )

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We also watched a few episodes from Homicide Season 5. It always amazes me that people argue that the Mahoney shoot was clean. Nothing of the sort -- Mahoney had his gun down, and was in the act of surrendering. That's not to say that Luther Mahoney didn't deserve to die, but call it what it was: an execution. Not self-defense, and not in Lewis' defense, and not, in any technical sense of the term, "a clean shooting."

Whether Luther Mahoney would ever have been convicted of murder, even though they had him on tape shooting one of his lieutenants and a kid playing nearby in the park, is another matter, but still not grounds for shooting him.

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I was in the process of desctibing our plans to solve the chaplain-hiring problem by instituting a public college religion modeled on that in ancient Rome (how one of the fellows, who happens to work on the behavior of birds, could head up the college of augurs, or my plans for the boat club processions and the honors to be paid to the numen of the Master of the College) when the fancy new computer we'd ordered turned up, 12 hours earlier than scheduled. Now I need to go set it up! Huzzah!

(ETA: I wrote this Monday morning, but thought I might as well let it stand as is.)