late b'day gifts

I was going to make a list of the various things I got for my birthday, but neglected to do so, and now I can't be bothered. I will mention the late but welcome arrival of stuff from my Amazon wishlist courtesy of Donal and Shar; the two videos of The Singing Detective, and a DVD copy of Seven Samurai. Being nothing if not a slacker, I've watched the lot already. The Singing Detective had an entire subplot I'd forgotten about when I was watching it as a mini-series, and I don't quite understand the ending, but that's cos I'm THICK. Seven Samurai, well, it's long - 190 minutes - it's gritty, and it's surprisingly funny. Toshiro Mifune spends a lot of time with his ass quite literally hanging out, scratching himself and being the clown character who inevitably does something heroic before the end of the movie. The grittiness lends an extraordinary realism to the movie that no amount of special effects could have provided - you really get the sense that this was filmed not in the 1950s but in mediæval Japan.

double standards

negotiating with terrorists is a tricky business at best, especially when on one hand everyone acknowledges that Sinn Féin is the political wing of the IRA in all but its own eyes, and on the other hand you have a Unionist politician dismissing out of hand a statement from Sinn Féin as "not [coming from] the IRA".