Having watched the new comedy The Hangover, the only people who couldn't warm to it would be the prudish and the denizens of Las Vegas staff who clean rooms. It's mix of screwball absurdity and good-time laughs, with soupcons of subtler comedy, left me in an elevated sense of deep-down happiness.
It only strikes two bum-notes - an unexpectedly lucid and witty song spontaneously performed by the dentist character played by Ed Helms about a tiger napping. which is incidentally what they have also done; and Alan, the semi-autistic dude, cuts his hand with a knife across the palm and then never seems to feel the injury again. Two small gripes in what has to be the benchmark for all stag parties. Heather Graham also still looks good after a decade of career mediocrity - maybe this will give her the boost of a second wind. One of the cleverest jokes has to be (Alert! Caution! Vital plot details to be revealed that will affect your viewing experience) that we think the missing groom is living it up crazily or in serious peril, when actually he, mundanely, has just been locked out on the roof of the hotel and left there. Unspoken, but very clever the way the film toys with the audience. A gem of a movie to cherish.

R.I.P. Michael Jackson. You lost your marbles in the last third of your life, but you're at peace now. A life almost from the start in the spotlight and a domineering father meant that he never felt comfortable in his own skin (which brought surgical consequences). He attempted to have his childhood all over again at his Neverland ranch, but became more and more isolated from reality. People gradually stopped talking about his magical feet and when children made claims regarding his magic hands, it confirmed his fall from grace. He was never found guilty though; I remember that moment four years ago as I sat in a barber's shop as the radio news announced that he had been acquitted of child abuse charges and seconds later the DJ announced his relief that he could play Michael Jackson songs again, followed swiftly by a playing of Billy Jean. I loved the brazen black-and-white outlook of that DJ, even if it could be cynically dressed up as topicality.
All that said, fifty is too young to die, but on the flip side he's done more in that span than most people who reach one hundred do in theirs. He was a mould-breaker and a minor part of Barack Obama's ascension to the White House can be attributed to the achievements of Jackson. One of the defining icons of the twentieth century.

Once a control freak, always a control freak

It seems that far from entertaining himself in the cosseted world of JP Morgan or engaging with the everyday humiliations that pass for life in the Palestinian territories, our former prime minister has made an extraordinary rendition: not one that will take him to Guantanamo Bay or a CIA 'hole' in Romania or Afghanistan, but rather a rendition of being a prime minister in power.
Gordon Brown throws his backbenchers the bone of an inquiry into the Iraq war but insists it will be conducted solely in private, partly to get frank advice, but mainly to keep down its costs by avoiding the hiring of lawyers. The Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday, with cost topping £100m, is regularly cited (but that was never an investigation to get to the truth, more a prevaricating committee instigated as a condition of the Good Friday peace process, that would meander on and on as Northern Ireland slowly healed).
Now Brown has been forced to back down and might even be defeated in the Commons over a motion to hold everything in public and udner subpoena 'whenever possible'. This could all have been avoided, but a certain Mr A. Blair who claims almost £7,000 of decoration work for his constituency home two days before leaving Number 10, demanded that the Iraq inquiry should be in off-limits to the public. There would not be a show trial'. Gordon has no loyalty to Tony anymore, but Peter, as First Secretary of State and the power behind the throne, made it so. Totally private, no subpoena.
In a way, Tony Blair is right. We all know that the decision to go to war was based on mendacity and lies and motivated not by a desire to disarm Saddam Hussein or even help the Iraqi people (as exemplified by the pitiful post-invasion plans), but rather to secure a geo-strategic position in a crucial world arena, get their hands on oil (as testified to by Alan Greenspan, Rupert Murdoch and Alexander Downing, the Australian foreign minister of the time) and juicy post-invasion reconstruction no-bid contracts for firms they sat on the boards of and implement a woolly notion of some kind of democratic domino theory (definitely low on the list as demonstrated by the lack of follow-through, especially when Hamas won elections in Palestine). This inquiry is blood-letting of a sort and will not alter the facts on the ground. There are up to a million dead Iraqis on methodology used by the government for conflicts in Rwanda, Bosnia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Let's not forget how Sir Mike Jackson, former top soldier, put it regarding the inquiry - "179 reasons for holding it in public." Yes, 179 British service personnel have indeed died - being from the West we at least have accurate figures for them.
But this is no show trial where Blair will be forced to recant before being summarily garrotted, his body cremated and his ashes used as tarmac for new roads (vis a 1948 Czech show trial). He would just be asked did he mislead the British people on the reasons for going to war and when he dissembles, will be asked more detailed questions. Blair, with his vigorous religious convictions, would never dare perjure himself. Hence the lack of a subpoena.
So, in effect, Brown has taken a lot of flak because he is beholden to Lord Mandelson for sticking by him (Mandelson is in the sublime position of not having to worry about being elected again, making his support invaluable) and through the old chums network, Blair extends his control freak tendency once more. Friends of Blair will be sniggering at this. They always felt that Brown never gave enough backing to Blair over the invasion of Iraq (the idea of a moral conscience finding a war of aggression repugnant and therefore being less forthcoming in backing it, probably never crossed their little minds). The feel if Brown had been more supportive then Blair could have won a fourth general election and then let a Blairite protege leapfrog Brown into being prime minister. The true Machiavellian nature of Blairism is thus exposed and makes Brown's actions somewhat justifiable. The hollow heart of 'The Project' has eviscerated the Labour grassroots, emasculated the civil and public services and led gaily by its own hubris into the most catastrophic war for the West since Vietnam. The reckoning will come at the general election next year. The only trouble is that will leave the Tories with as large a majority as Blair got in 1997 and 2001. Power tends to corrupt and Blair had, until Iraq, pretty much untrammelled power over his party (despite occasional Brownite griping).
The Iraq inquiry should be open 'whenever possible' and under subpoena. Otherwise the country will never truly have closure.

End of eras - for this year

So the Apprentice and Ashes to Ashes ended. I have to admit I was wrong in both, but that's why I'm not a betting man. As the candidates will call him next year, Lord Sugar (destroying the brand of Suralan) picked Yasmina Siadatan ahead of Kate Walsh, but not it seemed so much for the outcome of the final task, more for his 'gut instinct'. Once he had resolved that Yasmina would not be resentful for leaving her own business, the fact that she was already an entrepreneur and had been there/done that made her an automatic choice. This was despite Kate being as smooth as cream, but never quite having that spark of passion because he had kept herself so controlled. Anyway she lost the final task because, like last season, the losing team let unit costs run away with themselves. Lord Sugar must have liked Yasmina's buy 'em cheap, stack 'em high philosophy, which was first in evidence from the second episode.

Ashes to Ashes had a very good plot twist in the mean, empty streets of London (you wouldn't think eight million people would be such homebodies). The bad guy wasn't out and out bad, just had led a disappointed life he was determined to change. I would have liked Season Two to fade out to the strains of Bowie's Ashes to Ashes, like the first season did, following the model that Life on Mars did for its eponymous song. But there's potentially a nutter gunman out there for Alex in 2008, plus is she in a coma within a coma?
In the last few days, it seems the Met haven't entirely abandoned the ways of Gene Hunt, with allegations of a suspected drug dealer having his head shoved down a toilet which was repeatedly flushed. It's being called torture; Hunt would probably have derided the sissy state. Whether such attitudes are embedded in the police or if really is a case of life deliberately imitating art, is a moot point. All ends up though the court case was abandoned and some officers suspended and other moved to desk duty. Police brutality can't be swept under the carpet anymore.

On a completely unrelated note, move your right foot in a clockwise direction (or if you are left-handed do the same with your left foot), then try to draw a six or and eight in a conventional fashion. You'll find your brian reverses the signal your foot initially had or severely impairs it, as the motion of drawing either sloping digit, is to go in an anti-clockwise direction.

The day yesterday

Amusement from Channel 4 news at 7pm last night. First John Snow fluffs his lines as (presumably) the teleprompt fails. For a few moments of live air, the news dies, before Snow apologises fro a 'technical glitch.' Something mostly unremarkable, but this was a bad night for Channel 4 news and a good day for the rest of us. Next James Blake, reporting from Plymouth, has to put up with a cat walking in and out of vision behind him, then a youth running the other way in the background, waving his hands in the air and creating a hullabaloo. Then, following more excited murmurings of southwestern young off-screen, the camera pans in for a close-up of Blake to try and minimise any further embarrassment but so painfully (though pleasingly) obvious.
Then Channel 4 stretches a video call interviewee of Amber Foley (but we can see how she should look, fully-bodied, as a main presenter - in the studio - talks to her). Then at the end, we get further grovelling from Snow, that a report from Tehran cannot be brought, but will be showed the next day and "it's got some really great stuff in it," like an overenthusiastic teen reviewing the latest blockbuster movie. The best thing since that lady journalist had her arse pinched live on air during the floods and acrried on a model of professionalism.

A pile of stones in a glasshouse

After much justifiable anger with the French president saying that the 65th anniversary of D-Day (technically the start of Operation Overlord) was a 'Franco-American celebration' overlooking the contributions and sacrifices of the other two Allied Powers (and therefore dishonouring the dead to boot), the BBC keeps on mentioning Britain and America's efforts, singularly failing to mention Canada. Duh.

The decision of a court to remove a baby from her 'stupid' mother is reprehensible and part of the knee-jerk fallout resulting from Baby P(eter)'s death. Social workers are playing it safe beyond all reason when they referred the case to the law courts, but the judge compounded it by backing them and delivering the child into care because the mother has an IQ of 70. Okay, so she may not be the best at spatial awareness and a raven might beat her at a logic puzzle, but there is no evidence that she was not a loving, caring parent who would riase the child to the bets of her abilities (which, incidentally, are rated far from debilitating, indeed, her capabilities are 'within the normal range'). The majority fo children put into care are unhappy and have children in their teens. But fear stalks the social services and this riduculous decison must be reversed and the child returned to its mother.