TV: DEFIANCE (2013)

This is the new Science Fiction series on Sy-Fy (or however they spell it this week, stupid name that it is). As it's only one double and single episode in I'm not going to review it yet as such. Just a brief outline and one pedantic grumble.

It's set about 30 years after a motley collection of several alien races arrive on Earth and ask us to share our planet with them. This doesn't go down too well with us humans who tell them to sod off back into interstellar space. This doesn't go down too well with the several alien races who are going to make Earth their new home and sod the what the humans (us) think. After fifteen years of conflict (or something like that -there's so much going on, not all of it revealed, that it's hard to be sure) we're stuck with them and the humans have to adapt to a changed environment as well as living with several alien (but all humanoid) races. Fifteen years later (or something like that, et cetera) our story starts.

A starship crashes and our mature hero and his adopted alien daughter (well played by British actress Stephanie Leonidas, I forget his name) attempt to loot it but disturbed by a bunch of aggressive aliens who want to loot for themselves. Hero and adopted alien daughter have to run away, get menaced by monsters in a forest but are saved by the sheriff of Defiance (the new name for the remains of St.Louis and you can guess where the rest of this series is going to be set) where several alien races and human live in relative (relative being the important word) harmony. There are two rival families, one human and one alien (husband and wife played by British actors Tony Curran and Jaime Murray which gives the show some class). Also giving the show some class is Julie Benz as the newly appointed mayor.

It's actually all very promising, the special effects are good as is the acting (and not just by the British cast members) and there is quite a bit of scope in the scenario. Of course it is early days and it could fall flat on its face. I hope not because, although I'm still uncertain about it, there's enough good stuff that I want it to succeed.

However, this isn't what I wanted to write about here. What's happened is that the several alien races have altered Earth's environment introducing new species (presumably) animals and plants and also altering it physically -most of the original St. Louis is now underground. This is consistently referred to as terraforming. Sorry, let me emphasise that a little more-

Terraforming

Now, as I understand it, terraforming actually refers to altering conditions on an alien world so as to transform into conditions that make it into an earth-like environment.

This is exactly the fucking opposite of what has happened on Defiance!

Earth has partially been transformed into an alien environment. There may or may not be a word for this but I do know it isn't fucking terraforming.

Okay, here are some pictures taken, from as always, Google Images.

Jaime Murray (alien)

Tony Curran (ditto)

Stephanie Leonidas (alien), Hero (human) (I can't be arsed to look up the actor's name but he's American. Or Canadian).

Defiance (city).

Julie Benz (one of my favourite American tv actresses, see Buffy, Angel, and a shitload more. She's wonderful, beautiful, okay I have a crush on her.)

Group shot of the main characters.

This may not be the last you read about this TV series in this blog. Hopefully not as a major disappointment.

SCIENCE FICTION DVD REVIEW: TRANCERS THE ULTIMATE DETH COLLECTION (1985-1994), TRANCERS 6 (2002)

Back in the mid-80s, Science Fiction fans discovered a gem of a low budget sf film called Trancers and took it to their collective hearts as did fans of oddball cult movies everywhere. 

Set around 250 years in the future, a megalomaniac called Whistler has found a way to mentally dominate suggestible people into obeying his will and, when the need arises, turning them into frothing at the mouth homicidal maniacs. Our hero is Trancer-hunter Trooper Jack Deth, trenchcoat-wearing, heavy-smoking, hair-greasing (who can forget his immortal line "Dry hair's for squids."?), tough cynic. Deth is played by former comedian Tim Thomerson who should be as big a cult name as Bruce (and if I have to add a surname, you're reading the wrong blog -"The toolshed!") but for the fact the he either didn't get the breaks or he was happy making a modest living from low budget crap, though he has had minor roles in major movies and works regularly on TV. But, dammit, he should be huge!

Anyway, our bad guy has gone back in time ('down the line') to the then present day LA inhabiting the  body of an ancestor from which he intends to kill the ancestors of the ruling council. Deth follows him and finds himself very conveniently incarnated in an ancestor who looks identical. His ancestor's new BF is Helen Hunt before she became Oscar-winning Helen Hunt!! Deth is helped by a cigar-chomping cop from his own time ('up the line') whose incarnation is a pre-adolescent girl. The young actress (Alyson Croft), I should add, is absolutely terrific in the part and also appears 6 years later in the first sequel and in same role and is even better. Croft seems to have worked steadily in TV ever since.

So Deth, to whom LA is Lost Angeles where he goes to sit and contemplate on the shore of the drowned city, has to find his way around, find and save the council's ancestors, and survive the attacks of Whistler's trancers. Just to make things harder, Whistler is incarnated as the police chief.

Add in a barrel-load of characters, sharp dialogue, and a good pace, with limited but effective special effects and you have a load of fun.

Alas the picture quality was pretty poor which rather spoiled things. The good news is that it improved with each successive film. The bad news is that the Trancers sequels also follow the law of diminishing returns.

It took six years before they made Trancers 2 which, despite being pretty much a rerun of the first film with a similar cast and a different villain, isn't too bad and is worth a look. In Trancers 3, the basis of what trancers are is changed into a combination of drugs and mental domination to create super soldiers. Helen Hunt now appears in little more than an extended cameo (contractual obligation perhaps?). 

In Trancers 4 it all changes again as Jack in accidentally transported to a medieval world (aka a castle and a forest in Bulgaria) where trancers are more or less soul-sucking vampire types. It also includes the Castle of Ultimate Terror which, as you can imagine, is a prime case for contravening the Trades Description Act. It does have one very funny moment. In previous films Deth has a watch which can activate a long second whereby he is speeded up by a factor of ten. On this world it slows him down resulting a scene where the villains stand and amusedly watch him moving in slow motion.Despite being written by the well-regarded novelist and comic book writer Peter David, it's still pretty crap.

Trancers 5 (or, as it should be called, Trancers 4 pt 2) follows on directly to no great improvement.

Then I learned of a Trancers 6 which didn't have Tom Thomerson in it. I checked it out and found it going for around £15 which was too much for something that was probably crap anyway. Not long after I saw it on Ebay with a starting bid of £6.00 (plus £1.20 postage). I put in the minimum bid and promptly forgot about it until several days later when I learned I'd got it.  Well, despite having the original writers, it is, as you'd expect, not much cop. The acting is poor, the budget looks tiny, and, brief clips from older movies aside, no Thomerson. Instead the lead role is taken by the now-adult daughter whom he fathered on Helen Hunt in his ancestor's body. A mousy astronomy enthusiast, she's immediately transformed when Deth takes over her body. Not physically, you understand, just her attitude. And here the actress, Zette Sullivan does a very good job. Despite being an elfin five foot nothing she manages to convince as Deth. Apart from one earlier minor role in an erotic movie, I can find nothing else about her. Did she get lost in drugs or become a soccer mom or what? She definitely had promise and is the only really good thing in it.

So, my recommendation: skip this lot, buy Trancers, and maybe Trancers 2, as separate discs.

Here's a selection of stills I've nicked from Google Images.

DVD: THE EMPEROR AND THE WHITE SNAKE (2011, Blu-Ray)

Revised from an Amazon review.

This is also doing the rounds in the States as Sorceror and the... This is more appropriate but still misleading. A more accurate title would be The Buddhist Abbot Who Uses Buddhist Magic To Fight Demons. Admittedly this lacks a certain something as a catchy title, like not being catchy. No matter.

If you like Chinese fantasy movies you'll certainly like this one. If you aren't familiar with them you may find it a little strange as Chinese myth and folktales are very different from their European equivalents. Also, don't expect much in the way of martial arts either. What you're actually getting is a romantic fantasy. When one of two snake demon sisters (who can wear human form, half human, all snake, and all giant fucking big as Godzilla snake) surprises a nice altruistic young man into falling off a cliff into a lake, her white snake sister saves him from drowning by kissing him which causes them to fall in love. Meanwhile, Abbot Jet Li and his young brave but dumb assistant the comedy relief) are hunting down nasty demons and consigning them to another dimension where there's nothing to do but meditate on their sins and seek salvation. Susu, the white snake, pursues our young hero and they get married. When Jet Li finds out all hell breaks loose as a demon is a demon and they aren't meant to fall in love with humans because it won't work.

About halfway through the assistant gets bitten by a vampire monster demon and begins to turn into one and that's the last we see of him apart from his saving his ex-colleague monks from drowning during the climax and again in the final scene where he encounters Jet Li who, it implies, has actually managed to learn something new. 

This film manages to do several things and mostly quite well. It's a nice romantic story with teasing gentle humour (at least in the early stages). It's also a monster-fighting action movie. It's other things as well but to say what they are would spoil it. The acting is standard for this type of Chinese film. The special effects and cgi are mostly pretty good and the climax is spectacular. It's not too long either with the end credits starting at the 87 minute mark. Absolutely no extras, not even a trailer.

Perhaps not the best introduction to Chinese fantasy but fun for afficionados. 

No, it isn't what you're thinking, this is a 12 rating and they're sisters.

Married life can be a problem when your wife can turn into a large snake.

BOOK REVIEW -SCIENCE FICTION: GREAT NORTH ROAD by PETER HAMILTON (2012, 1087pps)

So how could I resist an SF novel with large chunks of it set in Newcastle 130 years from now, especially with a title like that?

(For newcomers to this blog, I should explain that I live in the City of Sunderland, a mere 12 miles south east of Newcastle. Both cities boast prominent football teams which are arch-rivals, particularly their fans and just last weekend Sunderland, the under-dogs, beat their rivals 3-0 away at Newcastle. As a result a few hundred Newcastle fans trashed their own city centre which gives you an idea of the mentality of the Newcastle United supporter. This has nothing to do with the review, I just wanted to mention it.

(On the other hand, the Great North Road refers to the A1 which starts down south and continues all the way up to Scotland. The Romans built the first one nearly two thousand years ago. In this novel, however, it also refers to a road that leads to another planet on which the rest of the novel takes place.)

You may have noted the page length of the novel. This does not include those pages devoted to the timeline prior to the start of the novel nor the list of key characters and their functions (e.g. detective). It's a very long book which took me only five days to finish.

As I don't do long reviews -I write reviews not criticism- it's very difficult to briefly summarise the plot. But I'll do my best. 

It's triggered by the discovery of a body, one of a clone family of industrialists, who has been murdered in a unique way that was only seen once before and the woman found guilty of the early murders, which included another clone, is still in prison; also the clone can not be identified. A local detective is put in charge of the case and what is discovered prompts a military expedition to a colonised world, which provides vast quantities of bio-fuel, in search of a previously undiscovered deadly alien species and is accessed via the Newcastle gateway.

Woah! That's not bad even if I say so myself. 

Of course it doesn't begin to even hint at the richness and complexity of this terrific piece of SF. There are so many things that Hamilton does so well. 

His portrayal of the not quite near future is comprehensible and accessible. My view of the future is that it's not unlike the present only with twiddly bits. Not that many years ago I took my first look at Sunderland's new bus station from which is visible a new shopping complex and it looked like the future as seen from 1950's illustrations. And yet in between bus station and shopping centre were several buildings which have remained pretty much unchanged in nearly 60 years or more. The future, with twiddly bits. People still go to pubs and chat up women while every dust mote is a camera watching everything. Well, almost. Many car accidents are caused by drunks who won't let the car drive itself.

He doesn't lay it on with a trowel but global warming has given the north of England long winters full of blizzards and snow drifts and short hot summers.

The main foci of the novel are the detective and his team trying to solve the murder and identify the victim and the story of the woman, who was found guilty of the original murders and claimed it was an alien, who goes to the alien world with the military expedition. In one sense it's a mystery novel set in the future with both plot strands essentially being attempts to solve a mystery which ultimately has one solution.

Hamilton uses his flashbacks well, revealing only part of an incident which suggests one thing only to show something different when it is continued. Characters who appear to belong to different subplots are revealed to be closely connected. Sometimes they're even the same person.

Frankly I stand in awe of the author who juggles so many different things yet manages to bring them all together in what is finally revealed as a gloriously woven tapestry.

If you want a book to lose yourself in, this is it.

TV: IAN'S TWO TV TREATS OF THE WEEK.

They aren't Dr Who, though it's pretty darn close, or Game of Thrones -I'm about to watch Season 2 on DVD and am recording Season 3. They aren't Casualty or Holby City though I never miss an episode. They aren't Dexter, which is running out of steam, or The Good Wife (ditto), though I still watch them. They aren't Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, a sharp and sexy series set in Australia in the 20's, or the supernatural thriller series Grimm which I find fun for very different reasons, or Arrow the superhero series that isn't. And the excellent three part BBC zombie series didn't last long enough to quality.

They aren't profound and they aren't particularly serious. In fact they both have a lot in common. Let me see: two different protagonists who nevertheless like each other, one is a cop and the other isn't, the cop has two supporting likeable junior cops, the cop is female, there is a small but good supporting cast as backup, there is a lightness of touch which doesn't preclude darker elements, both are police dramas (though I suppose that's obvious by now). They are both on Alibi.

Anyone familiar with cop shows will have guessed what I'm writing about and that's assuming you haven't noticed the incredibly glaring images below.

There are more images of these two than you can shake a stick at and it was really hard to pick one. I almost went, out of sheer awkwardness for this piece of fan art-

The show is very popular with lesbians -see the websites After Ellen and Dorothy Surrenders- and while there's no doubt there's a lot of shipping (Kirk-Spocking for SF fans), it's just wishful thinking as the two characters are totally straight. It's more The Odd Couple meets police procedural. Coincidentally, there was lesbian sub-plot in the most recent episode shown in the UK. The out of town lecturer-professor mother of the young sharp black cop and her female younger lecturer professor roomie (plus young son) have come to visit him and as soon as I saw them I went roomie, yeah shure, and winked sardonically. I don't know why I did that as I was on my own. They'd come to try and tell him that they were partners and were getting married. The subplot weaved in and out of the murder something about a retired-injured athlete murdered by his best friend for reasons I can't be arsed to go into) before the son finally finally admitted he'd known about them for ages and he was delighted.

Anyway, (Jane) Rizzoli is a senior homicide cop with a large Italian family some of whom work for the police. He mother is played by Lorraine Bracco whom I last remember seeing as the female lead in a 1980's movie with Sean Connery (Medicine Man?). She's tough, competitive, and funny. (Dr Maura) Isles is a forensic pathologist who goes out to every murder scene then dissects the body later. She's quirky with a dark past she only recently discovers (gangster father, mother who thinks she's dead, neither of which she knew when the show started. They're best friends and the chemistry between the two actresses is terrific.

L-R: cop, brother, Rizzoli, Isles, cop.

The main supporting characters are the young black computer expert cop and the gruff but good-hearted older cop who form her team. Then there's her younger naive beat cop brother who wants to be a detective and her mother. There are several others who weave in and out of the storylines. The acting all round is of a high standard and the dialogue is sharp and funny. The murders they have to solve are almost a distraction.

NB It's based on very different in tone books by Tess Gerritsen.

Currently on its fourth season (still showing) and if I can get them cheap enough I'll pick up the box sets to keep me warm while waiting for the fifth to start.

It came as no surprise to me that the next one should be a success seeing as it stars the one and only -

And if you don't know who this is go and get hold of Buffy Season 7, Firefly the complete series, and Serenity. For starters.

Nathan Fillion has more charm than any actor since Cary Grant and could probably charm his way out of Hell itself. Anything he's in is worth watching but especially-

 

The premise is this: he's a popular crime writer who, through the influence of his good friend the mayor, gets attached to a three-person murder detective team lead by Kate Beckett (Stana Katic who had a quick cameo in Skyfall recently). It works so well that he's now been on the team for five seasons. This one is a will-they, won't they police procedural. Katic is a real find who can hold her own against perennial scene-stealer Fillion and, as with Rizzoli and Isles, it's the chemistry between the two leads (plus good dialogue and good supporting cast) which has made it so successful. 

Castle is so inspired he writes a series of novels about Detective Nikki Heat based on Beckett. You can actually buy Nikki Heat novels by Richard Castle. I tried one and it read too much like a novelisation of a series episode.

The dark aspect to this series is Beckett's attempt to find out who murdered her mother some years earlier and it gets murkier and more complex the more she discovers.

Here's some of the main cast. A number of supporting characters arrive, leave, come back, or never come back.

L-R: Boss Cop (gone), mother (over the top self-absorbed actress), daughter (student), Castle, Becket, pathologist, team cop (Latino), team cop (white) good buddies.

In the current season (5), the question -will-they? won't they?- has finally been answered. They will, as often as possible. But it has to be kept secret as people on the same team can't be on the same team.

In the most recent episode, they manage to get away to Castle's place in the Hamptons. (Beckett (amazed): "How rich are you?" Castle: "Not James Patterson but I get by.") When a man staggers onto the grounds and dies the police are called in. The local police chief thinks Beckett is a hooker which is a very fun scene. Castle can't resist investigating, dragging an unwilling Beckett alone with him and he has to liase with the two guys back home without them finding out their boss is with him. They've been trying to vainly to track down Beckett's mystery boyfriend.

(Yes, one episode was a noir set mostly in the 1940's.)

If you aren't watching either of these two series, you are depriving yourself of enormously enjoyable slick light entertainment. Fuck art, let's dance.

BOOK REVIEW: ROCK CHRONICLES (2012)

An Amazon 2* review.

Neither nowt nor summat.

Or, in English, it is neither one thing nor another.

Basically, this book tries to do too much and fails as a result. It attempts to present an overview of each of the world's best rock acts. To do that it spreads its net wide to encompass: alternative, blues rock, classic rock, country rock, experimental, glam (glam is rock?), grunge, hard rock, metal, folk rock, new wave, pop rock, progressive, psychedia, punk, rocknroll, and soft rock. It also, worthily, includes a number of bands from non-English speaking countries many of which most readers will never have heard of. By trying to cover all the bases it never satisfactorily covers any and numerous worthy artistes are omitted. Two examples: Stephen Stills isn't in (but Neil Young's there as is Buffalo Springfield), Echo & the Bunnymen aren't but The Teardrop Explodes/Julian Cope is. I'm sure any reader will find their own examples.

The book also lists the years active which in some cases is highly misleading. Example: Buffalo Springfield is listed as active 1966-2011 which is just ludicrous. They were only active for a couple of years and were really a springboard for Stills and Young. A couple of late reunion gigs don't, or shouldn't, count. Also 'active' is not a synonym for 'creatively viable'. Many artists are still trundling on doing live gigs where they play their greatest hits from many years ago. Example: As a creative force Chuck Berry (a truly great artist)was played out by the end of the 60s.

The overviews themselves aren't bad but you can read better on the website All-Music Guide.

It's a book for people to borrow from libraries rather than buy for themselves because it just isn't worth the money. 

MARGARET THATCHER

It would seem to be impossible to hold an objective opinion about this late ex-Prime Minister. There would appear no room for any middle ground: one either loves her or hates her. Just to make my own standpoint clear for anyone not a regular follower of this blog; I am someone who falls roughly into the category of the libertarian left with an emphasis on the left. In other words, a socialist.

But it isn't that simple. When our recently retired member of Parliament Chris Mullin first arrived in Sunderland in the mid-80's I considered him a good guy but a little too much on the left compared to my views. By the time retired, I had moved from a central position to the left of centre-left (if that description actually means anything) while he was more to the right of centre-left. Confusing, isn't it? Oh, and when I retired I also had to resign from my position as departmental union steward which I'd been for the previous five years.

There's no question that, as she believed, for the greater good of the country she destroyed entire communities. I suspect that wasn't her specific intention but that was just one of the many prices the British people paid in her quest to modernise Britain and put it on a sound economic footing. Unfortunately she threw the baby out with the bathwater. What she did to the mining community was far worse than even the demagogic leader of the Nation Union of Mineworkers Arthur Scargill feared.

While always a supporter of unions throughout my working life, I did believe that in the 70's they had grown too powerful to such an extent they could dictate the way the economy went. Closed shops were wrong because it is unfair to force an individual to join. But without it... Thatcher castrated the unions and her successors continued, with ever restrictive legislation, to hack at the body of unionism which was weakened further by fewer and fewer people joining. I found out just recently that in the nearly five years since I left, Sunderland libraries has not had one union representative, no-one to speak up for them, to defend the interests of the individual worker.

The Thatcher era transformed Britain's economy from one dependent on manufacturing to one based on service industries with a more flexible working approach. From the point of view of workers' rights this is not necessarily a good thing, though it does have its advantages.

There are many justifiable reasons for many people to detest Thatcher and the legacy she left behind. Nevertheless no-one can argue that what she did she did from conviction that it was the right thing for this country. She was, and this is something rare these days, a conviction politician. There are many things she can be hated for but does she deserve the demonisation accorded to her by so many people?

For example, because she opposed sanctions on South Africa she was labelled as being pro-apartheit. This is very far from the truth. She opposed sanctions because she believed they simply didn't work and that it was the wrong approach to force concessions from the SA government to the black majority. Behind the scenes she worked to bring about the end to apartheit, to legalise the ANC and to free Nelson Mandela. Since his release Mandela has been open about his respect for and gratitude to Thatcher, not just for what she did to help change in South Africa but also on a personal level.

And then, of course, we have the war against Argentina over the Falklands. Those opposing the war argue she went into it for self-aggrandisement and as a vote-winner at the next election. Personally I have trouble accepting this. The Argentine government sent troops to take over islands which have been British for over a hundred and fifty years and whose own claims to legitimacy of rule over the islands are dubious at best. Thatcher decided that this wouldn't do, sent the task force half a world away to Argentina's back yard and they won. Many forget the huge sense of national pride engendered at the time.

I remember at the time listening on the radio every morning of reports from the conflict -this was before breakfast TV, if you can imagine such a thing- and being fascinated by it all, by every victory and every disaster.

This brief account of mine is obviously superficial. It has to be. There are many areas I'm not qualified to write about and have no intention of trying. I am writing to put in perspective my own reaction and the reaction of others to her death. I'm as repelled by the overblown tributes from the right as exemplified by the Daily Mail as I am by those opposite reactions of the hard left and the morons who are literally dancing on her grave. They are celebrating the death of an old woman who had been ill for some time and this leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.

I have no doubt that Margaret Thatcher was a great British Prime Minister. Whether or not she was a good one will be for history to decide.

Barry Spence commented:

A pretty excellent presentation of a very balanced rundown on Thatcher - almost all of which I find I agree with you on.

 

Why are you bothered about meaningless labels for yourself (and Chris Mullin) involving pointless and very variable concepts of left, right and centre? Depending who runs the show, definitions change monthly so as to eliminate all sense and reason from pigeonholing. During Thatcher's spell in charge, her mocking schoolboy minions developed a Norman Tebbit expression into a supposedly effective label. ANYONE not 100% behind Her Ladyship was "a raving leftie loony", and that was repeated to the stage of terminal over-use. As a label, it actually embraced half or more of HER party's "centre" Tories, yet New Labout branded those very same Tories as "Right wing tyrants"!

 

Lord Tebbit made a serious error of historical fact the other day. He correctly said that - with one exception - Blair reversed NONE of the changes Thatcher had made (denationalisation, sell offs, council house buying, as a start). He named that one exception as the Poll Tax, omitting the fact that Blair didn't do anything about that either - it had already been scrapped by Tebbit's pal Hesletine some time before Blair got in!

 

Some media material has been questionable: George Galloway as a start - how ironic is RESPECT for the name of a party when he shows zero of it but buckets of hatred and contempt? HE stated that she called Mandela "A terrorist; I was there and I saw her mouth move". It turns out that she actually said that SOME of the ANC were terrorists but named nobody. My complaint is not about his lies - I just object to the way papers repeat these as if they had to be true.

 

She destroyed manufacturing industry but personally fought to get Nissan here.

 

She was a devoted pal of Pinochet the butcher, presumably admiring his proven remedies for removing communism?

 

She never learned the difference between "socialism" and "communism", always presenting them as the same thing. I presume that Germany's famous raving leftie loonies were Hitler and his National SOCIALIST Party, and Stalin's "Soviet SOCIALIST Republics" was politically identical in her tiny mind. She commented on the busy bulldozers ripping the Berlin Wall down as "the end of socialist" - no, you ignorant bitch - it was the end of Russian-style communism!

 

She may have been wrong (only in MY opinion) over several things, but I admire her determination and sincere confidence in her own beliefs. She genuinely acted to make needed change for the better - "better" in her opinion, that is.

 

She said, "There is no such thing as 'society'", but her worshipper Cameron fantasised about a "big" version of something that doesn't exist - or is he contradicting her?

 

As far as being an old woman who died goes, these dancing hypocrites should have justifiably worked the hate out of their obsessed minds way back when the gutless conspirators disposed of her. For over 20 years, she had no direct effect to do good or bad and was well and truly politically dead. Now that the actual person has died, I find it very distasteful that many revel in that as a cause of celebration - as if her dying changes anything?

 

I read yesterday - do not mock METRO - that the illiterate cretins who twattytwitter, and find labelling needs no spaces between words, were alarmed that the singer Cher had died. They understood a string of unpunctuated letters "nowthatchersdead" as "Now that Cher's Dead" - I have no sympathy for them at all. LEARN ENGLISH, then we'll all understand it!

 

And finally, I will let HER have the last word. You must allow for her maybe being in whatever stage of Altzheimer's, or she may have been more astute than most  When asked about her greatest acheivement, she answered. "Tony Blair".

 

I look forward especially to SPIKED!

 

 

George "Xenophobe" Grovellaway, leader of The Contempt Party