How would I feel being outed (as a blogger)?

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Well, first of all I would congratulate the outer on their hard work. My name is embedded in the URL of this blog, I never fail to plug my books where the possibility arises, and the column on the left contains a link to www.benjeapes.com, which itself has a headline feed from this blog. So, it would be good to know the art of investigative journalism wasn’t completely dead.

If I was Detective Constable Richard Horton of the Lancashire Constabulary, I might feel differently. He anonymously created the Night Jack blogger, giving an insider’s view of the workings of Her Majesty’s Northern Plod. It garnered awards and has been turned into a series. He took the Times to court to try and stop them revealing his identity, and failed. Now identified, he has been given a written warning, the blog has been deleted and no further action will be taken. I surprise myself to find my sympathies are with the police, in this instance.

Yes, bloggers should have a right to be anonymous, if that is their choice. If they commit libel, or the public interest or national security are adversely affected, a court should then be able to order their identity to be revealed. (Public interest and national security <> sparing the blushes of the powers that be or catering to the public taste for titillation – but that too is for the courts to decide.) It’s also up to them to make a reasonable effort, however. Horton wasn’t so much leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind him as several unsliced loaves. For instance, mentioning his jiu-jitsu activities, when the Lancashire Constabulary jiu-jitsu club only one lists member who is a detective. I have my suspicions as to why, after 17 years on the force, he’s still only a constable.

Under those circumstances, pleading a right to anonymity is just silly. Note that in this case it wasn’t the repressive forces of law and order that tracked Horton down – it was the Times, following a perfectly reasonable line of enquiry now that his blog had made the big time. I would guess Lancashire Constabulary was quietly ignoring the matter, until it became unavoidable.

So, why the reprimand? It’s a question of balance. I rarely name my friends or even family, though it’s no secret I live in Abingdon. I don’t deliver the juicy gossip from work or reveal stories about my colleagues – but I don’t hide the nature of my employer’s business or its geographical location, so Woodward & Bernstein would track it down in about 30 seconds (the Abingdon Herald, maybe a minute). Horton, apparently, was not only giving hints on how to act when arrested (not such a bad thing) but giving out information that could affect cases in progress (very bad indeed). Your work is your work, it’s not your hobby or your life; but even then, an employer can reasonably assume a reasonable degree of loyalty from its staff. 17 years on the force, remember – it’s not as if he was suffering in a hellhole with his blog the only outlet for his righteous resentment.

How could he have played it safer? Easy. Make up names for everything, including Lancashire. Leave out the links to the jiu-jitsu and anything else associated with him. Make it impossible to pinpoint himself or his activities. As long as the made-up names were consistent, the truth of his posts would be unaffected. Has Belle du Jour been positively identified? (No, she’s not Billie Piper.) I don’t think so. Does her discreet use of pseudonyms affect her veracity? Not at all. See, easy.

50 not out, and Biblical hit jobs

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If either of us makes it to our 50th wedding anniversary we will be in our nineties. My parents are a little younger but then they started earlier. Still, 50 years, eh? The oldest friends I am still in touch with, I will have known for 31 years this September – I met them upon starting at a new school in September 1978. That’s still not 50.

So, a weekend given over to due celebration of the Big Gold, and quite right too, in far better weather than we had any right to hope for. Mostly shirtsleeve order, with just the occasional sprinkling of a few molecules of water to remind us we were having the weather by special dispensation of grace only.

Saturday saw two dozen friends and family converging on the parental home, the criterion for non-family being that they (or at least a spousal partner) had to have been at the wedding itself. I asked one of the former bridesmaids if she was retired now.

“Yes, thanks. Fifty years, remember?!”

Well, okay, point taken but she was quite a young bridesmaid.

The one of my father’s close army pals who isn’t one of my godfathers, i.e. the one who became a multi-millionaire, remarked that he had been married for a total of 45 years. “To four different women, of course …”

As well as hundredth birthdays, the Queen will apparently send congratulations to long-lasting couples … but only starting at the 60th anniversary, so the Aged Ps will have to stick with each other for a while longer.

For Sunday we (family only) gatecrashed what used to be my grandmother’s local church and was the one where the ceremony had taken place, 50 years and 24 hours earlier. I’m delighted to see it now has a lady vicar and what looks like a really thriving all-age congregation, and all that without going all ghastly and modern. Good on them.

It’s a very pictureskew little village south of Salisbury but I had always thought of it as a rather staid retirement community. In my thirties, to my surprise, I met a retired Spitfire pilot who during the War had been shot down by Adolf Galland. Blimey, someone interesting! Where had he been all my life?

And yesterday I had someone pointed out to me: “He designed part of the Eurofighter …”

And in my grandmother’s former local, where we had lunch, there was a poster with photo in support of the village’s team entry into the Spire FM Naked Gardener competition. (Apparently they won, too.)

Eurofighter gent also drew my attention to the legend inscribed around the pulpit: “I have a message from God unto thee.” Even though I spent probably about half my Sunday mornings between the ages of 8-13 in that church, and many more before and after, I had never really noticed it and it would certainly never have occurred to me to look it up. Now I was gleefully told it is from Judges 3:

“… And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee. And he arose out of his seat.
21And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly:
22And the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.”

There’s lovely. I hope that’s the kind of Bible reading they still do in their Sunday School.

Days the Earth Stood Still, as a game of tennis

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The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur: the two exceptions I will allow to the golden rule of Do Not Make Remakes.

Case in point: The Day the Earth Stood Still. The classic 1951 original gave us a film that can still hold its head up with pride today: good acting; properly thought out science fiction; a clever story; a ground breaking, eerie theremin score; Gort; and a b&w 1950s movie that wasn’t about Commies in disguise. The 2008 remake gives us … a wonderfully snarky review by Roger Ebert (Keanu Reeves “makes Mr Spock look like Hunter S. Thompson at closing time”).

1951 serves.

  • 1951: gets straight into the action.
  • 2008: utterly missable prologue set in 1928, in which a lone mountaineer (Keanu Reeves plus a beard) encounters a strange glowing sphere which, presumably, takes a DNA sample so that he can be recreated later, though why anyone would want to recreate Keanu is a problem not tackled.
  • Score: this is a bit of a cheat but the alternative would be to give 2008 minus points from the off. So, by sheer virtue of doing nothing, 1951 leads 15-love.
  • 1951: flying saucer lands in the national mall, Washington DC and is immediately surrounded by troops.
  • 2008: big glowing sphere lands in Central Park, New York and is immediately surrounded by troops.
  • Score: 1951 let itself down a little by jumping on the flying saucer bandwagon, though what we saw was impressive. It was blank and featureless; when it opens and closes it does so without even leaving a seam behind. But it is still obviously a flying saucer. What the 2008 sphere is and how it works is anyone’s guess. Utterly alien technology, totally unlike anything seen on Earth. 15-all.
  • 1951: spaceman Klaatu emerges and is shot by a panicking serviceman. Gort emerges behind him and destroys a couple of tanks before Klaatu tells him to stop. After which, he just stands there.
  • 2008: as above, though Gort doesn’t at this point cause any destruction and just looks scary.
  • Score: new-Gort looks scary because he’s a 50′ tall CGI robot. Old-Gort was a mere 7′ man in a shiny suit – in fact two shiny suits, one with the zip in front and one behind, so that it could be filmed from any angle and appear seamless. Both have the same basic humanoid layout, with a single beam weapon hidden behind a visor in the head area, but old-Gort comes across as much more menacing because he’s there and doesn’t look like something off a Playstation. 30-15.
  • 1951: in hospital, Klaatu is revealed to be Michael Rennie. His default expression throughout the movie is a slightly quirked smile, like a parent so totally in control of his toddler that he will let the kid think he’s the one in charge. When that smile vanishes – and it does – you know you’re in trouble.
  • 2008: Klaatu eventually becomes Keanu Reeves, a man who we know from Bill & Ted and Parenthood can in fact laugh and smile and have fun, until 10 years ago he got typecast in The Matrix and hasn’t cracked a smile since.
  • Score: On that basis alone I would make this 40-15. However, whereas old-Klaatu wore a (fairly futuristic looking) spacesuit, new-Klaatu is clad in an organic false skin akin to a placenta that everyone at first assumes is his natural form. This nicely follows the philosophy of his sphere – it’s so advanced it doesn’t resemble anything we have, and is therefore nicely sfnal. So, 30-all.
  • 1951: Klaatu has a conversation with a bone-headed government functionary, is told it will be impossible for him to address the UN, and is put under lock and key from which he effortlessly escapes – though we never see how.
  • 2008: as above, though this time we do see how he escapes and for the first time get an inkling of just how unstoppably powerful this man is.
  • Score: Very nice. The functionary is slightly more sympathetic, but whereas the 1951 version could never have seen ET, she must have so her actions are even more inexcusable. 30-40.
  • 1951: Klaatu, now in civvies, finds lodgings at a Washington guest house with a diverse mixture of fellow guests, including war-widow Helen Benson and her son Bobby. As plan A, address the world leaders, isn’t working, Bobby fairly plausibly sets up a meeting with Einstein-alike Dr Barnhardt, world-famous scientist and thinker who happens to live in a quiet DC suburb.
  • 2008: Klaatu goes on the run. We have already met Helen because here she is one of the scientists drafted in to handle him, and one of the few to be sympathetic towards him. He gets in touch with her and uses her help to meet up with – um – one of his own race who has been here for the last 70 years. Here we learn that the plan is to exterminate humanity to save the other forms of life on the planet. Smaller spheres start emerging all around the world – presumably they were here all along, or had slipped past our defences – and creatures of all kinds start heading into them. Watching human scientists deduce: “it’s an ark!” Helen then sets up said meeting with Dr Barnhardt.
  • Score: this is where the 2008 story breaks down. So they’ve been here all along? So they intend to exterminate us anyway: it’s a foregone conclusion? So what possible purpose does Klaatu’s public arrival in Central Park serve? Deuce.
  • 1951: Klaatu meets Barnhardt, points out the errors in his life’s work and agrees on plan B – he will address a meeting a world scientists and thinkers.
  • 2008: Klaatu meets Barnhardt, points out the errors in his life’s work and agrees that maybe humanity deserves a second chance – he will call off the extermination, if he can.
  • Score: here the new version actually improves on the original. Part of that is the surprise choice of actor for Barnhardt who plays the role completely straight; part of it is the convincing meeting of minds; part of it is that some shots and dialogue are lifted directly from 1951, but reworked. The ease with which Klaatu is persuaded to call of the extermination, however, robs it of a point. It would have been a pretty weighty, well-thought-out decision in the first place and so not something to be randomly overthrown by a field worker. So, score steady at deuce.
  • 1951: Klaatu is betrayed to the authorities by Helen’s irritating boyfriend. Shot and killed, but not before giving Helen the famous instruction that should Gort go on the rampage, the words “Klaatu barada nikto” will calm him down again.
  • 2008: Klaatu is betrayed by Helen’s even more irritating stepson. Nice one!
  • Score: Advantage 2008.
  • 1951: Gort goes on the rampage. Helen calms him down with the safe phrase. He retrieves Klaatu’s body and, back in the ship, manages to bring him back to life.
  • 2008: Gort goes on the rampage and begins the extermination, for no particular reason except perhaps irritation with the humans who keep trying to blow him up or take samples out of him.
  • Score: Nice visuals – new-Gort dissolves into a storm of nanobots that destroy anything artificial, and which goes on a rampage across the US. But it still raises the question – why now? Why not the moment he landed? Deuce.
  • 1951: Klaatu addresses his meeting. We’re under observation, and the powers that be are worried about us. If we keep on as we’re going, they’ll step in and destroy us. Oh, and Gort, who we’ve all assumed is Klaatu’s servant? Actually it’s the other way round. He’s one of a corps of galactic peacekeepers. Don’t make them angry. Bye!
  • 2008: Klaatu’s human body is destroyed getting back to his sphere, a victim of the nanobots, but he still manages to call off the attack. The sphere takes off. It’s all over.
  • Score: Pathetic ending. Advantage 1951.
  • 1951: The Day the Earth Stood Still: this actually occurs earlier, but I put it here for ease of comparison. Barnhardt persuades Klaatu that we could do with a demo of his power, so he arranges for (almost) every electrical device on the face of the planet to come to a halt. For 30 minutes, 12-12.30 eastern seaboard time. Crucially, that “almost” does not include hospitals, aircraft in flight … it’s a benign but terrifying demonstration of his total superiority, and of course it just convinces certain parties that he Must Be Destroyed.
  • 2008: The Day the Earth Stood Still: the price for humanity’s continued existence is that the EMP that disables the Gort-swarm also disables all electrical devices on the face of the planet, presumably for good.
  • Score: So, hundreds of thousands have already been killed by Gort, millions more will die of starvation and humanity is knocked back to the Stone Age. But look on the bright side – the race survives, Earth abides, and bratty stepson finally accepts stepmother as his new mum! Gee, thanks so much. Game very definitely 1951.

Remakes. Don’t.