Is the force still strong?

So Disney have bought Lucasfilm and with it the right to the Star Wars franchise, and are promising a series of new films, starting with an Episode VII in 2015.  So should those of us who were blown away by Episode IV back in 1977 be excited or worried?  Or should we just accept that that film was very much a one-off of its time and we're never going to recapture that magic?  None of the other five episodes have really come close and several have been panned - although I seem to be one of the few who thought Episode I was quite good and rather liked Jar Jar Binks. The interesting thing is that George Lucas (who will still be involved in a consultative capacity) always envisaged an ongoing story line, which means that Episode VII should be a true sequel to Episode VI, and Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher are all still available to continue their roles - now that would be something!

Doomsday, anyone?

I'm a long-time fan of The Simpsons, and one concept which keeps cropping up in its episodes is that of The Rapture.  So what exactly is it?  Well perhaps "exactly" is an unfortunate word, because the idea is anything but exact.  It's all to do with the second coming.  Christian dogma says that Jesus will one day return to the earth, and that will be the "end of times" - the world will end and we will all be judged - the blessed will go to heaven and the rest of us will go to the other place.  But there is some dispute as to the way this will happen and one version prevalent in the US is that the blessed will be taken up (literally) to heaven first, and this is The Rapture. The rest will be left behind to await their fate.  Interestingly the word rapture comes from the same Latin root as the word rape!

Three espressi please waiter.

Interesting article in the paper the other day about the way you should grammatically treat foreign words which have been accepted into the English language.  Did you know, for instance that "panini" which is now regularly used in English for a posh toasted sandwich is, in its original Italian, plural?  So to order "two paninis" could be said to be a nonsense.  Of course, we've always been used to the potential peculiarities of Latin and Greek words - like "what's the plural of octopus?" (strictly it's octopodes) but these are now so well embedded into the language that none but a pedant (like me) would baulk at octopusses.  But with some more recent imports it's not that easy.  Pizza for instance is an Italian word, the plural of which should strictly be pizze.  Is it now so accepted as an English (or maybe American) word that pizzas goes without comment?  I've talked before about the strength of English being its easy absorbtion of words from other languages, so there's no right answer - it's pizze for the purists and pizzas for the rest.

Déjà vu?

A little village in Warwickshire, in common with towns and villages all over the country, holds a parade of veterans to the war memorial on Remembrance Day. Has done every year since the end of WWI.  But this year, the local council have told them that they cannot parade down the street until they have provided -

• an event plan
• a full risk assessment
• emergency contact details
• marshals
• traffic management procedures
• road closure applications
• an evacuation plan, and
• public liability insurance

Does this ring a bell?  Yes we had something similar four years ago - that time it was somewhere in Wales.  I would have hoped we'd moved on since then, but apparently not - if anything things have got worse!

LOL???

Once again, I find myself struggling to understand something that the media are getting all het up about.  These texts and e-mails which may or may not have been going back and forth between David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks - so what?  Are we really saying that a Prime Minister (in fact I don't think he was Prime Minister at the appropriate time - just Leader of the Opposition) cannot have close personal friends and correspond with them?  Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether private messages should be subject to Freedom of Information legislation, just what is going to be achieved by publishing them?  Even if, as some people hope, they turn out to be "salacious"? Am I missing something?

Three for a quid - they're lovely!

You go to a market, you expect the traders to be shouting their wares - it's all part of the atmosphere.  Well not in Scunthorpe it isn't.  The council have unilaterally imposed a "charter" on market traders there which prohibits "pitching" as they call it. And it's no idle threat - one trader has been taken to court, had an injunction slapped on him which bans him from the market for three months, and been hit with costs of getting on for £1000 - and all for calling out his prices. Where do councils find these people?

Double standards?

So in the backwash from the Savile business it seems anybody is fair game provided they're dead.  Recent accusations have been made naming Leonard Rossiter and Derek McCulloch (Uncle Mac of the radio "Children's Hour" programmes of my childhood), who of course are in no position to answer back, but the BBC's Newsnight programme earlier this week was careful not to go further than talking about "a senior Conservative politician".  Why?  Because he's still alive and might sue for defamation.  You either have the evidence, in which case you should put up or shut up, or you haven't in which case you should just shut up!

It's not called "The Fall" for nothing.

Here's an interesting question - at this time of year trees lose their leaves.  Who do those leaves belong to, or more to the point, who is responsible for those leaves? An elderly lady in Stratford-upon-Avon lives on a tree-lined street.  Some of the leaves coming off those trees end up in her front garden.  She (or more accurately, her gardener) sweeps them back onto the pavement and into the road.  She has now been advised by the council that this constitutes fly-tipping which is punishable by a fine or even imprisonment. But the point is that the trees are on council land - the pavement - and therefore I think it could forcefully be argued that the leaves "belong" to the council, and that this is simply a matter of returning them to their rightful owner.  Discuss - as they would say in an exam question.

Not so elementary?

So - if you watched it - what do you make of "Elementary" - US TV's attempt to update Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century.  Comparisons with the BBC's "Sherlock" are obvious - in fact as I understand it, "Sherlock" was offered to CBS but they preferred to go their own way.  But it seems to me that they've missed the point. Sherlock succeeded because it remained faithful to the Conan Doyle stories - effectively updating them and giving them a modern twist.  Elementary on the other hand is just another detective show where the detective happens to be called Holmes and the sidekick Watson - could just as well have been Smith and Jones. So it's perfectly OK of its type but other than that the detective's MO is heavy on observation and deduction it has little connection with Conan Doyle's original concept.

What's next - Marmite?

First it was HP Sauce being bought by Heinz and production transferred from Birmingham to the Netherlands, and now it's Branston Pickle which is to be sold to a Japanese company - is nothing sacred?  At least it seems Branston will still be made in the UK - one must be thankful for small mercies.