Coronavirus Update

NUT4R2 VS Coronavirus

Hi all. 

I was recalled to the office setting for one day a week and, in spite of being Covid free for the last two and a half years, I caught Covid from the one day I went in. So I apologise for the lack of bloggage this week but, hopefully, normal service will return either later this week or sometime next week. So please revisit me soon for some fresh updates. Lot's of interesting stuff coming, including an unusual themed week.

All the best and thanks for reading. Back soon.

NUTS4R2

The Bone Code

Pandemic
Professionals

The Bone Code
by Kathy Reichs
Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 9781471188893

Warning: This one will have slight spoilers...

The Bone Code is the 20th of Kathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan novels, not to be confused with her other character of the same name who is more ‘based on the writer in her early life’, in the hit TV series Bones. I’m not really into the TV show, as yet... the regular characters are all different, it seems to me and, the main one doesn’t quite seem like Tempe as written in the books to be honest. But, wow, have I really been reading these for that long? Not sure I’ve got all that much to say about the new one but, here goes...

Okay, so once again, Tempe is up to her neck in cases and this one involves two errands, one big and one small and, surprisingly, the smaller of the two... trying to find a woman's twin sister’s ancestor from her death mask... doesn’t quite hook up to her other, much bigger problem as you might have expected it to... well, not that you would expect it to in real life but there are usually a lot of connecting dots in these novels. However, I will say that the punchline reveal of that  side of the story, once the main action is done and everyone is recovering from the last act... is pretty cool. That one’s worth a ‘google’ when you know the answer.

Okay, so Tempe’s much bigger problem is a casket which washes ashore during a hurricane where she and her other half, ex-police officer turned private investigator Andrew Ryan, now live together (although these two still haven’t got married as yet). The casket contains the remains of two young women, one a mere child and this prompts the memory of a very similar case with many identical traits that she and Ryan worked 12 or so years before in another part of the country. As the action moves forward, there’s also a backdrop of a flesh eating virus suddenly breaking out near her area and, against all odds while the mystery starts to unravel, that backdrop element soon comes hurtling into the foreground as there may be a connection to the outbreak of a disease that humans shouldn’t even be able to transmit to each other... and the case that Tempe is working.

So, you know the drill with Reichs’ fastidious ‘bone pathologist’ (yeah, okay, or forensic anthropologist if you like) and she starts working all ends of both this case and the one from years ago, in her usual style and with lots of exclamations from Brennan, talking in first person directly to the reader, to foreshadow events and leave the reader wondering just what is about to ‘rock her world’ next. And yes, the same style of hooking the reader into mini cliff hangers... where a vital clue or link in the story drops right at the end of a chapter and all you read is the character’s reaction t it, making sure you jump straight into the next one where, after a little more teasing, the next break in the case or some such is finally revealed to her audience... is practiced throughout. I used to get upset at Reichs’ over use of this technique in her novels (although it certainly never made me put one down... quite the contrary) but over the years I’ve realised just what a master she is at combining hard facts about the highly professional world that both she and her main character have inhabited, mystery spinning, sharp humour and a shameless sensationalist, pulpy writing style which really shouldn’t fit so snuggly into that world.

In this one, Ryan is mostly off working his own cases and is absent for stretches of the book but he pitches in when he can. Also, there’s no appearance from her regular police person Skinny Slidell in this one... he doesn’t even get a mention. I don’t remember Reichs killing him off yet though but, Tempe has changed location so maybe the character is taking an extended rest for a while. In this, she has a new policewoman character called Vislosky who’s not quite as abrasive as Slidell and who, despite her abrupt and shuttered manner, does bond with Brennan more than they both thought and, due to certain events, has become part of her extended family by the end of the book. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from her in future novels, for sure.

I’m glad to say that Covid 19 is admitted as an element of the book and it’s even used to highlight the ‘over kill’ reaction to the new outbreak of the other disease with the general public at large. I’ve been sick of writers and film makers ignoring the pandemic and so I was really pleased to at least see it acknowledged a few times in print here. So, yeah, I breezed through The Bone Code fairly quickly and it’s the usual attractive cocktail of thrilling mystery, very real danger and consequential injury to a few of the regular characters, Ryan’s amusing puns, Tempe’s trademark eye roll reactions and more of her very economically entertaining prose... “...the fog was thick enough to make snow angels.” It’s all pretty good stuff and I’m sure her regular readers, of whom I’m one, won’t be disappointed.

Autopsy

Weightless
Autopsy
Turvy

Autopsy
by Patricia Cornwell
Harper Collins
ISBN: 9780008467258

Warning: Some ‘how the characters have moved on’ spoilers included.

I’m so happy to finally, after a good few years, be able to return to what has been my annual Christmas ritual for some years now... starting the first chapter or so of the latest of Patricia Cornwell’s Dr. Kay Scarpetta hardbacks. Autopsy sees Scarpetta, one of my favourite contemporary characters, returning to her old stomping ground of Virginia, taking over as the chief. However, it’s not an appointment which everybody is happy with and, as she tries to get a handle on what can only be described as ‘adverse interpersonal working conditions’ (yeah, had enough of those in my time), she becomes embroiled in a number incidents which are all connected although, at least from how I understood it, not all connected in the same way.

So Cornwell weaves a tale of a woman found with her head bashed in and her hands removed... a neighbour of her regular character Marino. Marino has both followed Scarpetta and her husband Benton to Virginia and also, it would seem, married Scarpetta’s sister (aka Lucy’s mother). Also added to the mix are a poisoning which Scarpetta has to deal with up close and personal, not to mention what looks like a double murder in space, where Scarpetta has to remotely instruct from a video link as two astronauts try to work a crime scene with her help. And it’s all gripping stuff.

Also like a fair few of her Scarpetta mysteries of recent decades, the time frame in which all the events take place is a small one. Not as small as some of them but certainly this one takes place over no more than a few days, in the December run up to Christmas. Also fitting her usual pattern, the solution to the whole mystery... or in this case, set of mysteries, is left until the last minute. It rarely seems rushed but it’s quite an effective sprint to the finishing line, as it always is. Happily enough, I didn’t arrive at a solution before the main protagonist did (and I don’t think I was armed enough to be able to, in all honesty) but I did get myself believing I would this time due to my concentrating on two specific clues which, while not red herrings, were not going to be all that workable to the reader, I would say (and that’s not always a bad thing if you don’t want to tip off your audience too quickly).

And it’s the usual, intriguing tale told from Scarpetta’s regular first person world view of things but, it has to be said, it’s also quite scary. Not scary because of the various murders and so on which come to light but, scary because I completely trust this author, due to her various life experiences and thorough research, to know what she’s talking about in some of the more, up to the minute stuff. Unlike some creators have been doing, this story is firmly set up in the real world and in real time... so the characters tend to move on with their lives between books. In this one, my favourite supporting character Lucy Farinelli (who Cornwell’s legion of fans have all read about as she grew up in the books) is staying on the same property as the good doctor herself. The reason being that this book is set firmly in a post-outbreak world. The pandemic is still, as it is, thriving and Lucy’s young girlfriend and their small child have both been to London, caught Covid and died between books. I read with worry as Cornwell describes just how truly bad the Coronavirus is in London, with mass burials etc and, as I noticed the information spinning much more ‘on the nose’ than we are getting on our own news over here in the UK... I was reminded once again how badly off we are now in this pandemic. Because if there’s one thing I trust more than the news being reported at the moment, it’s Cornwell’s research into what’s really going on.

So that element is quire scary and, indeed, so is the way Lucy has chosen to deal with the death of her lover. She basically talks to her all the time as an AI version on her computer... one who is almost impossible to tell from the real life model in terms of behaviour, responses, look and resourcefulness. Almost like having the real person, now deceased, standing in the same room as you. I’ve no doubt, as Scarpetta worries about how commonplace it will soon be for this technology to be commercially available that Cornwell probably knows it’s already here and it won’t take all that long to trickle down into the public domain. I’m used to her dealing with cutting edge technology a year or two before we realise it’s already here. Stuff which seems like pure science fiction when she first published it has turned out to be hard science ‘already with us’ on more than one occasion. So, yeah, this is an interesting and perhaps worrying thing to be reading about but... I do appreciate the heads up, for sure.

Interestingly, at a high level, presidential meeting where Scarpetta works a crime scene in space, remotely, I found it similarly interesting that the people in power are not ruling out the idea that the problem they are facing in space might be extra-terrestrial. Also a scary but not unexpected attitude given various little nuggets of information being let slip to a ‘Covid distracted’ public of late.

Of course, with Scarpetta now moving in these circles, one has to wonder how long it will be before she comes face to face with Captain Calli Chase, the lead in protagonist from Cornwell’s other main series of books at the moment (reviewed by me here and here). I thought it might even happen in this very novel but, for the time being, the two are not quite inhabiting each other’s personal universe as yet (although I suspect this is only a matter of time now).

I look forward to the day when that crossover comes but, for the time being, Cornwell does just like her main protagonist does in Autopsy, peeling back layers of story with her writer’s scalpel (okay, you know, pen or keyboard) until she cuts back to reveal the truth of the fiction. It’s amazing stuff and, as a bonus to me, when I googled a word to find what I thought was a bad typo, I was happy to also learn a new word... so I won’t be looking for a splash in every plash now, that’s for sure. If you like Cornwell’s Scarpetta books, which surely must have a built in audience by now, then you’re sure to love her latest taut, tension filled procedural thriller. I hope she manages to get the next one out for November so my once and future Christmas ritual can kick in again next year.

1900th Post - The Traveller

For my 1900th post I thought I’d try my hand at a very short piece of fiction. Hope you like...

I was nine years old when I first met the traveller.

It was around the end of August 1962. He spotted me in the street and we got to talking. He had one of those faces which always seem familiar and I kinda trusted him from the start. Good move by me, for sure.

He bought me a coffee in a local cafe and started to tell me about his talent for prediction. He must have been in his fifties and we hit it off straight away. At the end of what, even for me, was a most unusual conversation, he looked down at the comic I was reading. It was an issue of Amazing Fantasy and it featured the first tale of a brand new character called Spider-Man. I didn’t expect the comic to last but I kinda liked the story on this one. Anyway, I digress, he looked at the comic and pulled out two £10 notes which, frankly, was more money than I’d ever seen at the time... and told me to buy a few more copies of the comic and to save them for later. To take real good care of them and then he gave me a list of other comics which, he said, his contacts in publishing told him would be coming out in a few years. He told me to buy a few issues of each and to keep hold of them and to never forget. Just keep them safe. Put them in an attic or something but save them until I could sell them for some real cash. And after that it was a few years before I saw him again.

I don’t know why I trusted him then or, well, what made me do it anyway but I did what he said and didn’t think back on it. But then, every few years, I’d run into him in the street in exactly the same place and every time he’d have a hot tip for me. Like who to bet on in an upcoming Grand National or, as I got older, which artist to invest in. And, after a little while, I got used to him being right. I started looking forward to these random encounters and, though I didn’t see him every year, he usually had a good piece of financial advice with him. I managed to get the fees to pay for college to study the sciences, all off of the money made from buying the things he told me to procure. I mean, it took a while for the comics to suddenly become worth a fortune but, other stuff had a quicker pay off and, after a while, I stopped questioning him about why or how he knew this stuff because I’d figured it out by then, of course.

I mean, I didn’t know who Damien Hurst was but I know investing in his art helped me pay my way for a better house and the money I made meant I was doing my own research for myself. I was my own boss and the things I was interested in were what I got to study every day, in my own laboratory which, due to my mysterious (seemingly ageless) benefactor, I set up not far from where we’d first met.

And when those comics paid off in the late 70s and early 80s... which amazed even me (nowadays everyone knows who Spider-Man, The Hulk and The Avengers etc are)... I was able to use the money I’d invested in them to buy shares in a new computer company he told me about called Apple. It took a little while but, honestly, not too long before... well, you know Apple I’m sure?

Of course, by now I had a pretty good idea of who my mysterious benefactor was and, I suspect you do too, right? I mean, my scientific research into things that interested me was going pretty well and though I didn’t outright say much about it, I think he knew I had figured things out by now too... just as he’d figured things out back then, so to speak.

What I hadn’t expected was for the visits to not stop when I’d caught up with him... or we'd caught each other up.

I mean, sure, the visits slowed down a lot... the intervals when the traveller came to me were now sometimes as much as six years apart but, once I’d finished inventing the time machine (my chrono-perambulator, as I called it) which... well let’s still call him 'The Traveller' shall we? When I’d finished my time machine, which 'The Traveller' had told me never to tell anyone about, I expected the end goal had been reached but no, even as I went back to visit my younger self and advise him... um... me... about the comics and the art and everything else, I was still getting visits from myself. So I did what I always did and kept taking my own advice... or rather, his own advice. Gets confusing sometimes. 

 So there I was in 2012. I was 59 years old and, honestly, The Traveller seemed like he was getting slightly younger every time he popped up. Or, at least, the frequency of his trips, from his point of view at least, were obviously getting less spaced apart and I was really catching up with myself, if that’s the right way to say it.

I never once questioned the paradox I was living. I guess a more philosophical man might have stopped to wonder how this cycle got started in the first place but... well, I have no room for philosophy. I am a man of science or I would have never invented my chrono-perambulator in the first place.

But, I’m getting away from myself again... so there I was in 2012 and he tells me to start building a big storage warehouse out of town and to start filling it with canned foods and then, he tells me, start storing water around about mid-2019 and also... you know those little surgical masks you see people wearing in countries where they’re worried about infectious diseases? Get some of those, he says. So, since I know enough to trust myself, I did what he... is ‘he’ the right word? I did what 'I' said.

So now it’s 2020, right? I’m just getting the first reports of the new breed of Coronavirus in China and I figure, this is it, we’re going to have a pandemic this year... just like The Traveller implied...

I was hoping to see him again just to make sure we’d survived this whole Covid 19 thing okay but, I tell you, now I’m self isolating with my stash of water, tinned goods and, yes, loo rolls... well, I really worry when I think about when he last came to see me a few weeks ago. I’d gone back and advised myself to stock up on these things as soon as I had a spare minute, of course.

However, when I last saw him he was looking decidedly dishevelled... a far cry from the impeccably dressed, older version of myself I had been used to seeing over the years. I even think I noticed a rip on his sleeve but I didn’t say anything about that... nor about the bruise on the left side of his head, either. He said he couldn’t have more than a few minutes stay this time because he had to get back to... well wherever... make that whenever... he came from but he just wanted me to know that, 2020 was just the start of our problems and, stupid as it may sound, I should try my best to gather some of the things on the list he handed me as soon as possible. He knew I was good for the money, he'd... okay, we’d... been investing in profitable items for almost sixty years but he warned me I needed to keep an open mind about how things were going to go.

He then went his merry way but... I don’t know... I’m not so certain I’ll be seeing him again. He bounced back to his own time quicker than usual (the shorter the length of the journey the shorter the duration of the visit before the physics of the situation mean that it’s a good idea to bounce back to your point of departure or... untested things might happen to you... don’t ask me to explain the technical stuff unless you can keep up).

Anyway, I hope I see him again someday but, in the meantime, I have the latest shopping list to get to. The machine guns and ammunition shouldn’t be a problem. But the amount of timber and the necessity for crossbows might take a little longer. Goodness knows how I’m going to be able to get all that Holy Water from the church though... I wouldn’t even believe in such a thing if it wasn’t on this list. I wonder what happens to make me become all religious in the future? Only time will tell, I guess. Like I said, I hope I see that traveller again soon... there are some pointed questions I’m just going to have to ask him.

The End

Coronavirus At The Movies

 
The Movies Have Got It Covid

Warning: This article gives away the endings to Wonder Woman, Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Over the last six months of pseudo lockdown, I’ve been writing and editing a monthly Pandemic newsletter which I send to a small circle of friends to help keep them occupied and smiling through these trying times. Normally I don’t repeat content from here that I’ve included there and vice versa but, I thought the following article which I wrote for inclusion in the final issue (volume 2 starts up when we hit the second wave of Covid), number 6, last week might interest some of my blog readers too so, here’s the article I wrote speculating how cinema content might be shaped in the Covid and post-Covid world. I hope you like it.

It’s been suggested to me recently that, once movie production gets going again properly, it’s doubtful that the future of film will be reflective of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. The argument is that people will not want to see depictions of social distancing on screen and, instead, will want to see a world untouched by the disease that has been, err, plaguing us these last six months or more. Audiences go to the cinema for escape, after all.

I'd have to say that... I think it’s probably quite dependent on how long this ‘new normal’ will be with us but I don’t think that people who are working on any form of art... be it film, fiction or music (to name but three), will be necessarily falling over themselves to provide people with a Covid-free environment in their work. Also, the fact that it seems people can get reinfected just a few months after having the symptoms, possibly prompting four times a year vaccines* if, indeed, an effective one can be found, is also going to be a factor in this. I think we could be stuck in this for a while and I fully expect our films to represent this. Even those set in alternate fantasy versions of our current reality such as the DC and Marvel universes, for example.

One of the things you need to remember is that a lot of fictional creators tend to base their stories in a world of historical accuracy. Unless they’re set in the past or in some remote fantasy land such as Middle Earth or Cimmeria, they’re going to want to base their story in the real world as much as possible. Why? Well simply because conforming to a facsimile of the real world helps make the fantasy they are weaving... be it superheroes, spy stories or even romantic comedies... more believable. If the audience can buy into the physical, psychological and sociological environment in which certain characters are interacting with each other, then it makes the story they are telling more credible.

Historically there are plenty of things which buy into the time period of when they are set and in which great pains are taken to explain certain historical inaccuracies conjured up by the subject of their stories.

Take the comics of DC published during the Second World War, for example. The DC characters were so powerful that kids would wonder why they didn’t just go over to Germany and stop the war. A good point... Superman would have finished the war in one afternoon.  So the writers came up with (or is that fell back on?) the artefact which Hitler himself listed among his occult obsessions. In the DC comics, Hitler absolutely had possession of the Spear Of Destiny (the spear that allegedly pierced the body of Christ on the cross), an artefact which has been used over and over again in genre fiction and movies since... well, for a long time. Because of the strange properties of the Spear Of Destiny, the readers were told, the superheroes couldn’t go near Hitler because the Spear would negate their super powers. And so, the comics could go on publishing superhero tales without the question of quickly ending the war ever coming up. A useful side step.

And we’ve seen things using historical context time and time again at the cinema. Take the recent Wonder Woman movie, for example. This was set in the First World War and, because it was Diana’s mission to end that war by destroying her war god brother, the film-makers brilliantly made sure that the day that she does this also coincided with the day the armistice was signed. So in the real world about her, the war was over but... we flies on the wall know how it really ended... right? Wink. A nice solution to what could have been a huge fantasy versus reality problem. One which allowed the fantasy world of the character to play out in a relatively accurate historical backdrop without the two elements ever fighting one another. Nice work.

Of course, some writers and directors don’t care about historical accuracy... or so it seems at first. Look at the two Quentin Tarantino movies Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, for example...

I work in an educational establishment and I can’t even begin to tell you the horror stories of the genuine historical ignorance of a large number of the students making their way through colleges and universities across the country. It’s astonishing and I can tell you now that there are a lot of people of a certain age (and younger, now) who believe that Adolf Hitler met his death by being machine gunned down in an exploding cinema and... that’s how the Second World War ended, didn’t it? Because that’s what happens at the end of Inglourious Basterds so, it must be true, right? That was set in World War II. Now, I’m absolutely all for artists doing what they want in movies but, when something presents itself as historically accurate then I think they should just have a little warning put in at the beginning of the film saying that the outcomes of this film are in no way representative of real life. Because, you know, a lot of people think these things actually are.

Similarly, even though the ending Tarantino was going to go for was obvious even before I took my seat at the cinema to see Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, there are a fair few people of, again, a certain age, who think Sharon Tate went on to have a long, prosperous career as a Hollywood actress. I guess at least some of the people who go on to explore her post-Manson body of work will hit a wall of truth when it comes to the IMDB, at least.

The thing is, though, even these flights of fancy on the parts of Tarantino are taking a lot of time to paint that fantasy into a world which is backed up by the time in which they are set. Sure, the outcome is different but all the window dressing of 1940s Germany and 1960s Hollywood is brought into play to make his fantasies credible. So, really, he’s doing exactly the same as most filmmakers do these days... setting the story in a historically accurate environment.

Which brings me back to Covid in the movies (and other art forms). If this thing truly does last less than a year then I think the virus and the distancing will, at the very least, be used to have a scene or two with ‘light hearted social distancing’ scenes used to show, say, a development through time for a romantic relationship. “Oh, look guys, now they’re in the 2020s and they’ve got that kooky social distancing going on!”

At the worst... which I’m guessing is where we are at (the news hasn’t been very encouraging of late), I think we’ll be seeing the long term effects of social distancing and coronavirus in movies for a long time to come. Because, for one thing, it demonstrates what the audience are living themselves and thus adds credibility to the story line (whether you want to see it or not) and two... because if you’re forced to film scenes in a socially distant manner then, surely, it will be easier to do that if the scenes you are doing that with are having socially distant content?

So yeah, I’m sorry to say that, in terms of the virus and its more visible side effects, I think art will be imitating life just as much as it always does in the future and, since coronavirus is such an important part of our everyday lives currently, I don’t see us escaping that anytime soon.

*has been suggested at time of writing

My 1800th Post

Thou Shalt Not Covid Thy Neighbour’s Life

My 1800th Post

My mate survived corona virus and all I got was this dry, persistent cough.

Well, that’s not true actually but it would make a great t-shirt.

So here we are, 10.3 years into my blog and on my 1800th Blog post. I usually do something to celebrate each 100 posts but I figured I really don’t have anything that special to say because we are, most of us, still currently in the midst of our cora-nora virus pseudo lock down. So I figured I might as well say a few words about that here now since, when else am I going to get the chance? After all, it will all be over by the time I hit the next 100, won’t it?

I mean, the current UK government seem to be doing such a good job that I’m sure we’ll all be safe and ‘out of it’ soon. Or, you know, the absolute opposite.

I’ve always been pretty much a political atheist throughout my life... don’t care who is in power because they’re all as bad as each other and they all seem to be corrupt as hell and lie to the public while doing a bad job. I’m not sure what the viable alternative to governments is, by the way... I’m not suggesting a solution, just looking at the basic truth as I see it.

That being said, looking at what the current government have been doing in the face of the cora-nora blues, I’d have to say that they seemed to have screwed up way worse than I could imagine anybody in power screwing up right now (unless, as I can’t help but thinking, they’re trying to thin out the population deliberately so they don’t have to pay out of the pension pot). I mean... I get it... it’s been a while since we’ve had something as threatening as the great plague was to this country back in times of old and people have forgotten how to cope or are just unprepared for it but... honestly... I wake up on a daily basis now not even bothering to check out what the news is because it’s just one life threatening ‘peoples lives vs the economy’ shambles of a bad decision after another. The economy is more important it would seem, to those in power, so can you all just die now please? Oh wait, if you all die we don’t have an economy. Let’s all just take pot luck then. It’s enough to make you get in a taxi and head out for Barnard Castle because, well, my local optician still hasn’t opened their doors again and I’m definitely due a check up.

So, yeah, at the moment I am, like a number of people in the country, working from home and trying to stay indoors. And that’s where I’m staying for a while I suspect because, let’s face it, I don’t want to risk going back to a prematurely opening cinema and kill myself and the people I am shielding. This is just madness.

But let’s look at the cinemas for a minute because... well... this is, after all, mostly a film blog (with some book and TV reviews too, as you’ll know if you’ve ever scrolled down my long and unwieldy index). So... I know the cinemas, like everybody else in the UK, are in danger of going under. However, people, for the most part (those who don’t go to pubs and crowded beaches or hop on a riot bandwagon because they’re bored of lock down), have got more sense than going out while this virus hasn’t even nearly gotten properly started yet. I mean, I hope I’m wrong about that but something tells me that, I’m possibly not... we’ll probably get a second wave, it may be much more deadly than the first wave and... I suspect the government won’t mandate any proper lock downs any time soon. So let’s look at what could happen to cinemas if we’re not careful (to pick on just one sector).

If a cinema opens now, regardless of the fact as to whether they’ve got anything new to show (they don’t appear to have, to be honest), they’ve got to pay for heating the building and whatever other overheads they have when said buildings are open... so they’re paying out way more money than if they were closed during the ‘night of the living covid’... and they’ve got to put in some kind of social distancing measures which, if they do it properly, will reduce the number of seats available for each performance to somewhere between a half and a third of what their normal take for a movie screening would be... plus turn off a good deal of the audience who might have risked it but don’t want to bother with all that social distancing malarkey. So, surely, with no covid vaccine and the rate of deaths and infection not really subsiding all that much and, possibly, going up (from what I can tell... it seems to be doing lots of things I was told was bad at the start of lock down but which now the government seems to be saying is perfectly acceptable)... it’s surely going to be more cost effective, as the lesser of two evils, to keep your gateways to our celluloid dreams...um... doors... shut for a fair while longer. If, of course, the government can come up with a way out of this mess.

And this already seems to be true, from what I can understand, of some comic book shops in the country. They can all open their doors now according to the powers that be... so they did and some of them have gone under because they’re getting less physical customers walking into their shop a day than you can count on one hand. People are staying away in droves and this is a niche market, don’t forget, of passionate comic book collectors and readers who care about this stuff a lot. It’s all a bit hard at the moment and I think we’re going to see a fair number of businesses start going under very soon. It will be a changed world.

So, yeah, cinemas probably shouldn’t open but I’m hoping that doesn’t mean certain movie companies will start releasing stuff digitally. Frankly, if a movie is limited to digital download then there are enough ‘ahem, free’ sites where you might as well watch it like that. If you’re not being provided with a proper cinematic or even Blu Ray experience... what’s the point in paying out for it? We can all just go and do our lock down jigsaw puzzles for much cheaper than the price of a subscription streaming fee. Actually, I’m not going to get started on the evils of non-physical media on here now and get myself all worked up. If you don’t understand why physical media is the only option in a post-cinema world then maybe you’ve not been thinking things through or observed what’s been going on with people who rely on streaming services. Let’s not go there now.

So anyway, lets all be keeping our fingers crossed not just for the survival of cinema but also, actually, the survival of governments. Much as I hate governments.

And I say that because I can’t believe some people are all that surprised but the sudden appearance of this virus (in an overpopulated world where usually a big war has helped cull the unwieldy population by now so, hey ho, nature needs to come up with its own solutions quick... nature finds a way, right?). Scientists have been warning us for... what... ten to fifteen years? Antibiotics have lost their usefulness and they have been telling us that a whole batch of super viruses will be coming for us soon and then we will be in big trouble as a species. And I suppose this Covid 19 is the first one of those and... yeah... if this is just the opening salvo then goodness knows how the various governments will cope when we’ve got three or four (or more) of these loose at the same time exhibiting different behaviours. So... yeah... I think the world leaders and the clever people of this world really need to start thinking out of the box sometime soon because all the response so far means the economy is crippled by the survival measures so... we need to stop relying on a bartering system to live together. I don’t know what that alternative is or if it’s even possible but... time to think on alternative ways of living and surviving on this planet methinks. Because if we don’t...

Let’s just say that I hope you’re the kind of movie lover who likes post-apocalyptic films like The Omega Man or Waterworld or Mad Max 2 or The New Barbarians because, if we’re not careful, this time ten years from now we’ll all be hunting in packs trying to fend off the people riding motorcycles in chain mail who are out to kill us for a flask of precious water.

And if you’re still with me at the end of what I thought was only going to be a couple of paragraphs... may I just say thank you so much for reading and spending some time on this blog. I do appreciate it and am always humbled by the blog statistics. Cheers. Normal review service will resume in a couple of days.