Never start watching something on tellie, at eleven o’clock, which lasts two hours, telling yourself you’ll just watch the first ten mins to see if it’s interesting.
The cycle to work this morning hurt!
I never realized how much I thought I knew about the Qur’an and islam, and actually how little I do know.
The Islamic structure and dogma is more diverse than i imagined. There is of course the Sunni/Shia spilt… the Shia being quite like the Christian Catholics in terms of praying to dead Imams (saints), many rituals and sacraments, the need to pray to god through intermediaries (priests/imams). The Sunni are more like protestants in that they don’t think its necessary to go to god through the Imam, they set great stall by the personal relationship with a loving god whom they can commune with at any time and gain guidance and insight. (Sunni are approx 80%)
Each side thinks that the other is obviously wrong. The Sunni (like the prods) have fractured in to denominations with widely diverse ideas regarding the scriptures. Whirling Dervishes in Turkey are seen as an abomination in Egypt, whereas the Muslim women in Indonesia think it’s crazy that Saudi women agree to wear the Niqab. The Saudi women of course are very proud to wear it and feel it is god honoring them. Strangely it seems the younger generation is keener to wear veils than their mothers (who quite passionately spoke against it).
In any case, at the end of the program I surprisingly found myself feeling a lot more respect for Islam, most of the ‘non bonkers’ Imams were very much about a progressive Islam, Mohammad commanding them to go out into the world and learn from others, live a full life and help the needy.
The common thread is of course that the Qur’an was written in Mecca by Mohammad in around 500ad after regular visits from the angel Gabriel who revealed god’s one and only message to humanity. Clever and leaned professors of divinity gave complex and ‘convincing’ apologetics to why this is so obviously reliable. The Sufi mulsims spoke passionately with tears in their eyes about how much Allah means to them and had helped and guided them and deserv’ed of worship. Bonkers of course, but each to his own - and i much confess a certain beauty in their art and culture.
Defiantly, the key to getting a successful religion up and running, is keep the scriptures a bit vague and even a little contradictory and open to cultural interpretations. My lingering admiration surprised me though, I must admit. I guess my opinion of Islam had only one direction it could go in.
Does anyone else watch this, Or is it just me? Friday was the finale of this series of Trick or Treat, it was as always brilliant. It’s one of those shows which leaves me with my mouth open and the ideas exposed swirling in my head knocking up against its consequences.
This week’s was an experiment in superstition. Six people were left in a room (including David Tennant) and told that if they got 100 points in 30 mins they would win £5000 each. In the room were a number of randomly colored items, pieces of fruit, slot machines and the like. The participants found themselves holding yellow fruit while standing on a red dot on one leg, being convinced that they’d worked out what was making the counter go up. It was of course completely random… the point total going up depending on how often a goldfish swims from left to right.
Not very well explained - but interesting viewing.
It could be argued that I mostly rehash articles I’ve recently read in Time Magazine whilst stationed at the smallest room in the house - this would contain a semblance of truth.
The sad and sudden death of director Anthony Minghella was marked with an article about the TV movie he had recently completed, an adaptation of the McCall Smith mega book, No1 Ladies Detective Agency.
It raised a few interesting issues with regards to how the west sees Africa.
What is the real Africa? Is it the sunsets and savannahs of Out of Africa (which won Pollack his director’s Oscar)? Is it the chaos and savagery of Hotel Rwanda, Last King of Scotland and Blood Diamond? Or is it the white man’s shame of Cry Freedom and The Constant Gardener? Minghella knew that No. 1 Ladies’ demanded a fresh approach.
Here’s a couple of interesting quotes:
“The books don’t ask, ‘What’s wrong with Africa? What can we fix?’” says Minghella. “They’re about what we can learn from Africa, not what we can teach it.”
“…people in Africa, when asked if they are happy, are more likely to answer yes than people in Europe or the U.S.”
BBC’s Panorama last night broadcast an interesting program investigating the impact of bottled water on the environment. It caught my eye in the light of the ‘Why not waste water’ question I posted last week. I’ve nothing against bottled water, but I do find it a bit poncy. I’d never claim that it tastes better, and never actually buy it to consume at home. I would however buy it if I was out and about and it’s a choice between that and a Fanta.
The best moment (and I do love moments like this), was when they got together ‘water experts’ to do a blind tasting and mark them out of 20 on various qualities, and also to try and identify the ‘Thames tap water’ from the other 9 contenders. As you’d expect, not one of them managed to pick out the tap water, and one of them actually rated it the highest. Surely that’s gotta be embarrassing.
At this point I was 100% with the general drive of the program, I was on their side, but then it got silly. They travelled to Fiji to check out a bottling plant of a supposedly expensive water sold in the UK. It all got a bit weird when they started to blame the plant for the fact that some people in Fiji don’t have clean drinking water - even though the government guy had just said that the water plant had actually helped identify underground water sources, and the tax and royalties they were paying where helping the country’s health system. But on and on they went visiting poor families and sick children in hospital, which was of course very sad but lost the program all credibility for me.
AND THEN IT TURNS OUT the Fiji water company have just declared themselves CARBON NEGATIVE, that’s right, not neutral, negative. They care so much about the environment that they plant trees and get involved in programs to mean that not only does their water shipping not harm the environment but actually helps.
As the program ended the presenter looked earnestly at the camera to appeal to our conscious and our children’s future. I ended up thinking, if I care about the environment I need to turn off my house tap and start buying Fiji bottled water!
A bit of classic West Wing, from the final series… the worst series certainly… but still great.
This episode was actually broad cast live, apparently they only had a basic script and pretty much did a live debate… it was great at the time, and is still pretty good on YouTube. I think i ended up wanting Vinick to win the election in the end, which said a lot that the show managed to keep ‘the oposisition’ so likable.
This is at serious risk of becoming a TV review blog - which says worrying things about the content of my evenings. In saying that… on Wednesday afternoon I did manage to pretty much erase and destroy the main people/clients contact database at work… meaning I had to stay in late to get it sorted… then I celebrated my success by heading out with my bro in law and got really drunk… arriving in work late the next morning looking like Shane McGowan to confess my sins. A couple of quiet nights in front of the TV was necessary.
I love Derren Brown, he puts on a good show and his recent offering ‘The System’ was no let down. The essence is that he created a horse race gambling system which couldn’t fail taking a random member of the public on an emotional roller coaster as she bet her own money and won a fortune - but there was a sting in the tale. It turns out to be a bit of a comment on belief systems and world views - engaging, enlightening and very entertaining. I’d recommend watching it if it’s on again - or on C4 on demand.
There is quite a push at the moment, on TV at least to encourage us to be more ethical in our consumption of meat and eggs. The latest sermon was given by Jamie Oliver last week in a live audience presentation and debate about battery chicken farming. It’s unfair to call it a ‘sermon’, I like Jamie Oliver and think its great when a star like him is willing to trade in a bit of his credibility to draw attention to causes he believes in, even if it does mean that arm chair sitters like me get to call him preachy.
My better half is a veggie, which you’d think would make for much debate in the house, but it doesn’t really. QMonkey isn’t as narky and argument-baiting in real life (I hope), if it’s not too cheesy to say - we respectfully disagree. The only thing she insists on is that I buy ‘quality’ meat, preferably organic and certainly free range. I’m happy to do this as I do subscribe to the moral of treating animals with respect. At least I think/thought… you sense the unsurity don’t you?
The problem with the TV show is that I was troubled by something, not by the images of the battery hens (although that was shocking in some cases), but I was more troubled by the audience reaction. People were hiding their eyes and shrieking at the scenes of substandard farm conditions, wincing and ugghging at the sight of processed meat. Then came the real revelation for me anyway. Jamie had with him an organically farmed chicken, the kind he is promoting, he had been recently trained and qualified as a slaugherman and was kitted out with state of the art equipment. He showed the humane method of killing the chicken with an electric shock to the neck, then cutting its mouth to let it bleed before butchering.
Here’s the reveal… THIS was the event the audience were most shocked by, they turned away, and some yelped and shouted. I was honestly taken aback by this. The audience were all meat eaters who I presume have no problem dicing a nice chicken breast for their stir fry or tucking in to a tikka masala. They seemed almost surprised that an animal needs to be killed in order to make this happen.
This completely undermined the rest of the program for me, or at least turned the message on its head. In my view if you eat meat then you should be willing if necessary to do the killing yourself, and certainly should be able to watch without feeling any sorrow or guilt or squeamishness. If you don’t like killing animals for meat then become a vegetarian. I have to admit to having never killed a chicken but I have killed fish and eaten them and although I don’t want to, as it’s a bit gruesome and messy, I would have no moral twinges about killing an animal for food.
So having come to the conclusion that these audience members needed to either become vegetarian (for which I think there is a decent moral argument) or harden-the-f***-up, then what is the moral with regards to the treatment of animals before we kill them?
Jeepers, ‘her indoors’ isn’t gonna be happy … but I think I might actually be moving in the opposite direction to Mr Oliver. I think there’s a reasonable case that if these animals are bread for food, the life experience we give them is the life they know, are they really distressed/disappointed to find out that they aren’t wild birds (where a fox will mercilessly tear it apart anyway)? Isn’t the moral question - to farm and eat animals or not to?
Is it right to spend say £1 extra on your chicken fillets to give them a slightly more sanitized 54 days before we slit its throat… as opposed to using that £1 to keep an African child alive for a day longer? I don’t know the answer to that, I’m the question monkey, but if it’s a choice between keeping my child alive for a day or giving a battery chicken a foot more space in his cage, then it’s less of a difficult moral to wrestle with.
So what happened over the holidays to inspire comment? Nothing much really, so I’m gonna go with TV programs that I watched. I think we can officially call that scraping the barrel. I found myself, usually by default watching Victoria’s Empire on BBC2, three one hour programs around New Year. The premise was that Victoria Wood (yes) was travelling around the world to places that were named after her. It turns out that they were actually named after Queen Victoria, who would have thought. The premise was a flimsy excuse for a travel show, with a slice of Empire history thrown in. She interviewed all kinds of people, to mostly ask them about how they felt about the impact of the British on their country - most people gave a shrug and a puzzled look, but some, usually older folk had opinions worth broadcasting.
Wood herself is pleasantness personified, but she started to lay the Empire guilt thing a bit thick at times. I don’t know what it is about the Brits and guilt? the French or the Dutch don’t seem so bothered, when on the face of it they have more reason to be.
If there’s one thing that winds me up… well I suppose there’s lots of things… but one in particular is passing moral judgment on past generations and isolating them from their historical and cultural context.
In Australia she met with an old aborigine, lamenting the invasion of Europeans and their land grab. I couldn’t help thinking… that’s the way it goes, that’s history, the UK is made up of the countless invaders and immigrants. We don’t complain to the Romans or the Vikings or the Saxons for the way ‘we’ were treated. Not sure what I mean by that - sounds worryingly BNP
In Ghana she visited the slave prisons and ports and it was a chilling insight into the industrialisation of the slave trade. But the empire didn’t invent slavery… it DID end it, that’s the contribution to human history, the ending of slavery. How stunning is that, for people to actually stand up and deicide that something which was endemic, and completely natural to human kind actually needed to end - no mater what the loss of profit.
On new years eve I watched bit and bobs of Spartacus… here’s the opening voice over.
Yet, even at the zenith of her pride and power, the Roman Republic lay fatally stricken with a disease called human slavery. In the Greek province of Thrace, an illiterate slave woman added to her master’s wealth by giving birth to a son whom she named Spartacus. A proud, rebellious son who was sold to living death in the mines of Libya before his thirteenth birthday. There, under whip and chain and sun, he lived out his youth and his young manhood dreaming the death of slavery two thousand years before it finally would die.
Maybe making this happen is the Empire legacy more than anything else.
I’m no fan of musical theatre. Well, fan is a big word… I have been to see a few musicals, and yes, like them… but that doesn’t make me a fan… The last one I went to see was Spamalot, which was in fact brilliant. My mate GE was with me and she was a big fan, so I allowed myself to be swept along, which is always the best way I feel. Before that I went to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - it had all the great names… WILMOT-BLAIR-BIGGINS!!! A great show.
Understand that I’m not gay or ought, but I love musicals.
Last night on the south bank show (embarrasingly for the best part of a decade I thought Melvin Bragg was Billy Bragg’s dad - I was shockingly fished in by someone!) Anyway the show was about the making of Viva la Diva which ‘stars’ opera singer Katherine Jenkins and Ballerina Darcey Bussell. (It’s notable that Bussell looks really like the thin one offa trinny and Susannah, and Jenkins is fairly hot!)
Truly truly awful: Jenkins can sing but is a rubbish dancer, Bussell can dance but can’t sing. But they both had to sing and dance songs from Broadway. My word, an absolute car crash. The opening night in Manchester was a peer ‘through your fingers’ experience as they sang out of tune and bumped into each other a lot.
Whoever told them it was a good idea, was less than inspired.
The series is almost over, so it seems a bit late for a recommendation…. but Flight of the Conchords on BBC3, is very very funny.
From a shabby apartment on the Lower East Side, the friends spend their days seeking gigs for their digi-folk act, Flight of the Conchords (New Zealand’s “fourth most popular folk act”) in a bid to break onto the world stage.
Who’s the Question Monkey’s favourite comedienne?… is an oft asked question. I can reveal that without doubt is would be the lovely and very funny Sharon Horgan.
It’s been a slow burner. She’s been one of those people who’s always in programs I like such as Rob Brydon’s Annually Retentive and Broken News. She’s written and starred in the irreverent and very funny series on BBC3 Pulling, and last week saw the first episode of her self-written six parter Angelo’s.
I think i heard someone call it, the comedy of the uncomfortable… if not, then i said it first! She’s in the tradition of Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais but it’s most definitely from a female angle.
Unless someone on wikipedia is winding me up - she’s the brother of Ireland Rugby international Shane Horgan.
(point to note… the third series of the Mighty Boosh was on last week… the mrs and i were a bit underwhelmed. A lot to live up to after last series)
I know it’s sung by Leona Lewis, an X-Factor clone, and it kills any cred i thought i had, but its a great tune, and the lyric ….you cut me open, and i keep, keep bleeding love… is perfect.
… oh really?.. having the words leona lewis and x-factor on the post quadruples your hits? didn’t know that!
Here’s a couple of interesting quotes:
The best moment (and I do love moments like this), was when they got together ‘water experts’ to do a blind tasting and mark them out of 20 on various qualities, and also to try and identify the ‘Thames tap water’ from the other 9 contenders. As you’d expect, not one of them managed to pick out the tap water, and one of them actually rated it the highest. Surely that’s gotta be embarrassing.
There is quite a push at the moment, on TV at least to encourage us to be more ethical in our consumption of meat and eggs. The latest sermon was given by Jamie Oliver last week in a live audience presentation and debate about battery chicken farming. It’s unfair to call it a ‘sermon’, I like Jamie Oliver and think its great when a star like him is willing to trade in a bit of his credibility to draw attention to causes he believes in, even if it does mean that arm chair sitters like me get to call him preachy.
and some yelped and shouted. I was honestly taken aback by this. The audience were all meat eaters who I presume have no problem dicing a nice chicken breast for their stir fry or tucking in to a tikka masala. They seemed almost surprised that an animal needs to be killed in order to make this happen.
at times. I don’t know what it is about the Brits and guilt? the French or the Dutch don’t seem so bothered, when on the face of it they have more reason to be.
Last night on the south bank show (embarrasingly for the best part of a decade I thought 
