Incidentally...

Now that our sailors are coming home safe - and without any of our government being quite craven enough to offer some ludicrous 'apology', thank heavens - might I move that the pathetic 'non-escalatory' policy which led to their capture in the first place be replaced with a policy of 'lay one finger on our service(wo)men again and we will obliterate your entire sorry fleet'?

be yourself whatever happens, in the time of the assassins

Ah, there's a long weekend ahead and that always feels good. Starting in an hour or so with a nineties nostalgia night, which I imagine will be agreeably odd. Easter - the fertility festival where the monotheists didn't even bother to change the name. And as a weekend, it does always feel like it's pregnant with possibility.

"I think we should cancel the word genre, I think we should throw the word genre out. We are not a genre, which suggests a small or perhaps even somewhat besieged condition - we are a continent and, actually most of the smaller things which came along afterwards like naturalism, realism, these things are a mere 200 years old, to pick up Ramsey's word, they are striplings. How long has naturalistic fiction been around – maybe 300 years?"
Well said, Clive Barker.
A less happy quote comes from the great Phil Spector: "[Women] all deserve to die. They all deserve a bullet in their fvcking head". This trial isn't going to go well for him, is it?

Though I've taken a brief break from Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, it's fun to see one of its subplots cropping up in the news - namely, the Russian Academy of Sciences, of whose foundation by Peter the Great the book contains a fictionalised account.
Except that in keeping with the usual "The Enlightenment - nice while it lasted" tone of events these days, it's in the news because Putin wants to subject it to a degree of central government control it didn't suffer even in Soviet days.
Sigh.

Mainly at the urging of the Voiceless One, I've had another attempt at zombie comic The Walking Dead. The first collection had been OK, but nothing I really needed in my life - then again, I'm not that big on zombie films either (with Shaun of the Dead as with Hot Fuzz I was watching more for the Pegg and Wright than the ostensible genre). But persevering - wow. It helps that Charlie Adlard took over the art after the first few issues, his hard-bitten faces and general grit being a perfect fit for the mood Kirkman's trying to create.
But what really makes it is simply that it goes on. There's no end, no sign of the Army turning up, no cure, not even the end credits of a film. The zombie apocalypse isn't wrapped up tidily, and the surviving humans have to keep on struggling and dying and killing and losing everything that made their lives worth living. I realised it at a book ahead of the characters, and still felt slow - it's not just the zombies who are the walking dead. It's the zombie Oz, basically.