More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)28 AprilFew - not even Bruno Bettelheim's adherents, acolytes, agents, and (they think) apostles - would doubt that the (core) impulse is something of the order of:There's one that I haven't got!Mrs President Marcos [I'm calling her that just to be flippant] knew that feeling well, but what did the possessor (as I cannot well speak for ownership) and person displaying this number-slave have at the forefront of his or her mind to have collected it?GD15 SIXWhich one has to translate into GD IS SIX, as well as postulating that there must be many, many others in the series (in fact, as the whole aphabet isn't used, it must be 23 or 24 squared, some of which might mean more than others):DD IS SIX (for Dating Direct*)
BB IS SIX (I need not explain that one, I fear)GG IS SIX (good old Germaine**!)
BJ IS SIX (now that is rating something...)
CJ IS SIX (for those flagging already, just skip to the closing homily!)
All of which, though, assumes that the proposition talks about an age, anniversary, or score, whereas there could be something else going on...x = 2x x y = 6y = ?Back with the proposition GD IS SIX, could it, itself, be a known acronym, maybe for:* Gross Diameter* An open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by programmers (according to www.boutell.com/gd/)* Graeme Dixon* The ethical URL shortener with no registration required (according to v.gd/)* Grand Designs* Great Dunmow* Gérard Depardieu (or, to extend him to his full height, Gérard Xavier Marcel Depardieu)The end is listless, I believeBut it must really be to do with the spirit of North by Northwest (1959), one of the craziest, but still best, Cary Grant films ever - we are being (or feel that we are being?) set this puzzle to work out, who - or what - 'GD' is, and what it means for it to be 'six', or '6'.But maybe it's a metaphor for what we make of life, and could mean no more than the title of that Hitchcock film - a big confusion about nothing (where people get killed - or do they?).Maybe God's Design for Richard Dawkins, maybe Dawkins' message to a God (whom he states is fictional) - God Deficiency is Six?In closingPersonally - if I can be intimate and private for this closing moment - I don't go along with much of thatWe will never know the answer, but that's because it's all wrapped up withCheltenham - GCHQ - MI6 - Whitehall - Harry Palmer - hush hush - need-to-know basis - Reggie Perrin and his brother-in-law JimmyAmenPost-Amen (as at 6 May)In fact, it was GL15 SIX, so please ignore suitable amounts of the above!End-notes* Or Deadline Dave...** Would that be a kind of rating (a bit as for bowed Eric)?
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)Christmas Day
Whatever one thinks of Philip P., if one has read any of his work*, the one whose title I'm parodying was not the snappiest, and more resembled the label of a Ronseal® tin in terms of subtlety.
For those not in the know generally, it appears that Mr Pullman has some issue with religion (maybe even Christianity as a formalized faith), and calling a book The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ is only a little less of a battle-cry than much of what Richard Dawkins naggingly wants to assert every waking minute of his life.(Culturally or racially intolerant people want to bleat on about mosques, minarets and muezzins, but Dawkins is a foghorn in his own right, together with a blindingly white tower in one's view and a powerful light that he keeps shining in one's eyes.)
I can just imagine Alison Weir subtitling an account of Anne Boleyn's courtship and marriage The chaste, monogamous, home-loving king and his slatternly, unfaithful bitch of a wife - maybe she should try, if in need of boosting her sales: what about writing history for the masses in headlines worthy of defunct News of the World? (A sort of Horrible Histories of popular events, but for a different age-group.)
Anyway, back at PP: he's been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of the Moon, but the catch is that he has to go to collect it! (Presumably some bright spark's wheeze for keeping him out of the way for a while.)
Though that trick wouldn't work with RD, maybe, since he wrote The God Delusion, someone should write (something like) Dawkins: The Delusion of Anyone Giving a Frig - or God himself could prove that RD doesn't exist by dropping a huge tome on him called The Dawkins Delusion, a self-fulfilling title...
* Someone whom I know was so afraid, when reading the Dark Materials trilogy, that - and I quote - 'I would die before I got to the end' that he bunked off his lecturing job to make sure that the latter was completed before the former happened (although, for why it should have done, you'd have to ask him...).
