Paul Newman, 1925-2008

Sad news in the papers this morning. Paul Newman was that rare combination - a monumental movie icon, a brilliant character actor and - to the best of my knowledge - a thoroughly decent human being. This was, after all, a Hollywood A-Lister who remained happily married to the same woman for over 50 years. I always loved that line he used when a Playboy reporter asked him if he'd ever been tempted to stray. "Why go out for hamburger," said Newman, "when you can have steak at home?"

Many of his films have become cinematic classics and many of his performances contain moments that have burned their way into several generations worth of collective imaginations. The egg-eating contest from Cool Hand Luke springs to mind, as does the beautiful, fatal freeze frame from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. My favourite Newman moment, though, comes from The Sting, which Philip French mentioned and, unless I'm mistaken, misquoted in this morning's Observer. While sizing up an opponent, Redford's Hooker turns to Newman's Gondorff and says: "He's not as tough as he thinks."

Newman replies: "Neither are we."

Moby Dickheads

From Variety:

Universal Pictures has made a splashy preemptive buy of "Moby Dick", a reimagining of the Herman Mellville whale tale that Timur Bekmambetov ("Wanted") will direct.

Studio paid high six figures to Adam Cooper and Bill Collage to pen the screenplay.

The writers revere Melville’s original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.

"Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s ‘Moby Dick,’ " Cooper said. "This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story." ( My italics)

Roadkill

I was sitting at my desk today, doing some work and trying to mind my own business. Some colleagues sitting across from me were talking about Roman roads. I don't know why, they just were.

Against my better judgement, I decided to elbow my way into their conversation: "Is that Roman roads you're talking about?" I asked, rhetorically. "Do you know that substantial parts of one of Birmingham's major 'A' roads - the A38 - follow the course of a famous Roman road? Between Worcester and Birmingham - and again between Lichfield and Derby - the A38 follows a route built by Roman invaders over two thousand years ago."

There was a pause. I did that to prime them for the punchline:

"Of course, back in those days the Romans didn't call it the A38. They called it the A XXXVIII."

The sudden outbreak of silence distracted everyone.

I heard from my very good friend and former small-press comics collaborator Phil Walsh at the weekend. It had been way, way too long since we'd last had a chat, but we more than made up for lost time by having an impassioned natter on the blower about films, comics, books and a veritable plethora of other shared obsessions. It was very therapeutic for me and probably did Phil the world of good, too, but our respective girlfriends are probably still scratching their respective heads in bemusement. So it goes.

Anyway, after chewing on the geekazoid gristle and lancing a multitude of fanboy boils it was time to move on to proper, grown-up subjects. I was reminded that I hadn't been to see Phil and Beth's baby boy Alfie yet, so I plan to do something about that as soon as goddamn possible. Phil also told me that he and Beth are planning to get married next year.

They've asked me to be Best Man.

I can't begin to explain what an honour this is.

Football isn't something I tend to talk about on here. Come to think of it, football isn't something I tend to talk about anywhere. For once, though, I'll make an exception.

If you feel an urge to annoy, perplex or provoke a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur today simply ask them the following:

Q: "What was Obi Wan Kenobi's brother called?"
A: "Too-Wan"

It works a treat.

You have been watching

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is regarded by many as one of the greatest rock albums ever. I'm not here to defend, deny or debunk its status. I'm very fond of it, many people I know are very fond of it, but there's one thing about it that has always niggled me ever so slightly:

Is it just me, or do other people find that the first few seconds of the classic intro to B-side opener 'Money' bears a remarkable similarity to the first few seconds of the classic theme to saucy 70s sitcom 'Are You Being Served'?

Oh, it is just me.

Danse Macabre

"Sometime in mid-July 1518, in the city of Strasbourg, a woman stepped into the street and started to dance."

There was a fascinating piece on this morning's Today Programme about a historical curiosity I'd never heard of before. This dancing woman was soon joined by others - men, women and children - and by the end of August 1518 there was more than four hundred of them. This was no lavish, Busby Berkeley production number, however: these people were in the grip of some mad, uncontrollable compulsion. They danced all day and all night and they danced against their will. It was a sweltering summer, and it wasn't long before some of them started to die...

"This was not the first outbreak of compulsive dancing in Europe. In fact, there had been as many as ten dancing epidemics before 1518, one in 1374 engulfing many of the towns of modern day Belgium, north-eastern France and Luxembourg."

Well, fancy that. John Waller, a British historian of medicine and author of the recently published book on the subject, A Time to Dance, a Time to Die, discussed and dismissed various theories on this phenomena - including the ingestion of psychotropic substances and heretical cult high-jinks - before settling on 'mass hysteria' as the most likely cause. This collective brainwrong of toe-tappery was fuelled by an acute state of psycho- and physiological stress (the city's poor were in the grip of a particularly nasty famine) coupled with a superstitious belief in Saint Vitus, who - as all good Roman Catholic former-altar boys like me will tell you - is the patron saint of jive, throwing shapes and causing mayhem on the dancefloor.

Waller concluded:

"In the long run, the fervent supernaturalism of the medieval world had to make way for the rise of modern science and rationality. The dancing madness was effectively starved out of existence. Even so, half a millennium later it still serves as a reminder of the ineffable strangeness of the human brain."

Maybe so. Waller's conclusion seemed to encourage us all to feel ever-so slightly smug and superior: those 16th Century eejits - with their crazy medieval theological hang-ups - might be susceptible to a terminal outbreak of the Martha and the Vandellas, but that sort of thing couldn't happen here. Thanks to the Enlightenment, the Renaissance and Sky Plus we're all way too smart to behave quite so stupidly.

Maybe, and maybe not. Sentiments like that may pander to the prejudices of certain types of Radio 4 listener, but I don't quite buy into them. Our belief systems may have moved on a bit (although some times I wonder...), but I'm inclined to believe that our capacity for buggier-than-batshit crazy acts of mass hysteria remains the same.

As an Orson Welles fan, the reported incidents of widespread panic in the US following The Great Round One's 1938 War of the Worlds radio play spring to mind. But there are plenty of other examples. Here are just a few:

The Taginyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962. This was a more recent variation of the dancing mania described above, except instead of doing it mid-80s, what-were-they-thinking, Jagger & Bowie-style this time it involved a particularly bad case of the giggles. This "Laughing Matter" took place in the vicinity of the village of Kashasha in what is now called Tanzania and according to its Wikipedia entry:

"The epidemic seems to have started within a small group of students in a boarding school, possibly triggered by a joke. Laughter, as is commonly known, is in some sense contagious, and for whatever reason in this case the laughter perpetuated itself, far transcending its original cause...

"The school from which the epidemic sprang was shut down; the children and parents transmitted it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village, comprising thousands of people, were all affected to some degree. Six to eighteen months after it started, the phenomenon died off."

The Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic, 1954. Here's another example, this time from CSI - the scourge of Robert Anton Wilson, the publishers of the Skeptical Inquirer and the artists formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal:

"On March 23, 1954, reports appeared in Seattle newspapers of damaged automobile windshields in a city eighty miles to the north. While initially suspecting vandals, the number of cases spread, causing growing concern. In time, reports of damaged windshields moved closer to Seattle. According to a study by Nahum Medalia of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Otto Larsen of the University of Washington (1958), by nightfall on April 14, the mysterious pits first reached the city, and by the end of the next day, weary police had answered 242 phone calls from concerned residents, reporting tiny pit marks on over 3,000 vehicles. In some cases, whole parking lots were reportedly affected. The reports quickly declined and ceased. On April 16 police logged forty-six pitting claims, and ten the next day, after which no more reports were received.

"The most common damage report involved claims that tiny pit marks grew into dime-sized bubbles embedded within the glass, leading to a folk theory that sandflea eggs had somehow been deposited in the glass and later hatched. The sudden presence of the 'pits' created widespread anxiety as they were typically attributed to atomic fallout from hydrogen bomb tests that had been recently conducted in the Pacific and received saturation media publicity. At the height of the incident on the night of April 15, the Seattle mayor even sought emergency assistance from President Dwight Eisenhower."

And here's another:

The Monkey Man of New Delhi, 2001. Reports began to circulate in May 2001 of a strange, monkey-like creature that was scaring the blue bekrishna out of the good people of New Delhi. According to Wikipedia:

"Eyewitness accounts were often inconsistent, but tended to describe the creature as about four feet (120 cm) tall, covered in thick black hair, with a metal helmet, metal claws, glowing red eyes and three buttons on its chest.

"Theories on the nature of the Monkey Man ranged from an avatar of a Hindu god, to an Indian version of Bigfoot, to a cyborg that could be deactivated by throwing water on the motherboard concealed under fur on its chest.

"Many people reported being scratched, and two (by some reports, three) people even died when they leapt from the tops of buildings or fell down stairwells in a panic caused by what they thought was the attacker. At one point, exasperated police even issued artist's impression drawings in an attempt to catch the creature. Many people today still believe this 'monkey man' continues to haunt the streets."

Would you like to see a police artist's impression of the Monkey Man? I'm sure you would:



I regret to say there were no sightings of accomplices, although I'd like to think that a fish, a pig and a foxy monk were somehow involved.

This all illustrates - to my mind at least - that really bloody odd acts of mass hysteria are not confined to some bygone age. Others may argue, of course, that these bizarro events may have taken place in modern times, but only in the strictly chronological sense of the term. They all occurred within cultures where the "supernaturalism of the medieval world" was still hard-wired into the local consensus reality. Over here its different. The sort of archaic mindsets that would cause a mass of people to act as an irrational whole is not part of our world.

These people obviously don't read the financial pages.