alexsarll | The weather didn't screw me and the Victoria line worked; I suspect a trap.

Welcome to Lockdown London, where anyone who lives on the Victoria line is now being put to bed at a nice early hour on schoolnights. Supposedly it's so the line can be upgraded - and heavens know it needs an upgrade even to reach 'basic functionality', across Friday and Monday it was out on three of the four occasions when I needed it - but as with the smoking ban, it does rather fit the Spirit of the Age, in which our new PM feels obliged to make deeply unconvincing denials of his puritan tendencies while he initiates what looks like a surreptitious War On Fun. Fortunately, Finsbury Park offered local comedy for local people in a local living room, as Carey Marx tested out his Edinburgh show. The problem being, he was testing it on Us Lot, so obviously the material about rape, disability and mistaking babies for poos was going to get all the biggest laughs. Meaning we've sent him off to Edinburgh concentrating on all the material which, to an audience of tender sensibilities, is most likely to get him lynched, and there's a limit to how far even Parsnip the Teddy can defuse matters. Although - that in itself would be fairly amusing.

Like Harry Potter, like its own Mark Antony, Rome made a good end. OK, I'm sad that it was cancelled - and unsure how different the second season would have been were it not - but this was a season end which followed naturally (and as faithfully to history as the series ever was) from what had gone before, and out of which nothing naturally follows. Where would we have gone, after the grand wars of the Republic's fall - into the comparatively petty manoeuvrings by which Augustus cemented his position? Or skipping to the period already handled so marvellously by I, Claudius? They had enough problems working around Shakespeare, giving us a secret history of those events - I,C already was a secret history, so you'd lose that space. No, better to end it here, after two seasons of spite and shagging and swordplay, with the giants dead and the monster enthroned.

Further thought on Deathly Hallows: we never found out what happened to Dolores Umbridge, did we? I'd love to think that they'd have a more thorough purge of the Death Eaters and their sympathisers this time around, but she strikes me as too good a bureaucratic operator, the sort who always comes out on top. Which means that arguably the most hateful character in the entire sequence may well have escaped unscathed.
Oh, and I know pointing and laughing at imbeciles on comments pages is a bit fish/barrel, but I couldn't resist this particular peon, denouncing Potter and declaiming grandly about Literacy and Art while demonstrating a spectacular inability to spell or structure a sentence. Part of me suspects he must be a spoof.
(The Earthsea snobs, by the way, are beginning to get even more shaming for their source than the loopier elements of Potter fandom. But then, le Guin lacks Rowling's personal dignity, so what can one expect of the followers?)

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Wedding Bells/Let's Turn Back The Years - John Prine & Lucinda Williams