How about those midterms

Which kind of sums up my reaction to the US election. From what I can see, the Republicans cannot win; if all the still uncounted senate and house seats went their way, it still wouldn’t be enough. The Democrats have pulled off the “blue tsunami”.

And… that surprises me, to be honest.

I’m always left with a terrible feeling about US politics because, you know, US politics, and despite all the enthusiasm in my particular online bubble that the Democrats would succeed, I couldn’t convince myself. It was obviously pleasant to open up the Graun and see that they did—not a gigantic margin but enough to give the Republicans grief—but I wouldn’t have been surprised somehow to find they didn’t. I’m still half-expecting a repeat of January 6. I thought that if the Republicans won that would make them behave worse than they already do, and if they lost they would behave even worse than that, and I still expect that from them. And I feel there’s only so much the Democrats will do to frustrate them. Too many in the Democrats need to get the hell out of there too (especially you, Fetterman).

Still—a positive beginning that the Democrats will hopefully be smart enough to take advantage of. There’s been some really historic flips (apparently the Kansas senate has gone Democrat for the first time since 1932). And we’ve already had one outstanding meme, with no doubt more to come:

…When?

How odd that a presumably official FBI account would be claiming that election day in the US is Wednesday, not Tuesday like it always is. How very bloody odd indeed. I feel fairly certain this was an honest mistake, to be sure, but with this regime you can never be too certain…

In happier news…

There was one amusing spectacle yesterday when Mark Latham was served paperwork while he was chilling out at Randwick Racecourse. Even better, we now know what it was:

Mark Latham faces a fresh threat to his political future after being served with a bankruptcy notice at Randwick Racecourse over money owed to independent Sydney MP Alex Greenwich.
The former federal Labor leader was handed the documents while attending the Golden Eagle meeting on Saturday, October 31.
According to NewsWire, the notice seeks about $175,000 in court ordered damages and interest. It does not include separate legal costs Latham has been ordered to pay. […]
The notice follows years of litigation triggered by a graphic social media post Latham published about Greenwich in March 2023.
In September 2024, the Federal Court found the post defamatory and ordered Latham to pay $140,000 in damages.
The dispute also produced separate proceedings before the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
In April 2026, the tribunal ordered Latham to pay another $100,000 after finding he unlawfully vilified and sexually harassed Greenwich. It also ordered him to remove offending social media posts and refrain from repeating unlawful vilification.
Latham said he intended to appeal that decision.
In October, the High Court of Australia rejected former Latham’s application for special leave to overturn a ruling that he defamed gay independent Sydney MP Alex Greenwich.

If he becomes bankrupt over this—which he could if he doesn’t comply with the notice’s instructions in 21 days—that could also mean the end of his parliamentary career, cos being morally bankrupt is considered fine but financial bankruptcy means having to vacate your seat. Which Latham should be looking at doing anyway, he’s 65, so it’s about time he was thinking of hanging up his hat and going back to attacking taxi drivers… Just think, he could’ve NOT been a grotesquely homophobic shit on a carriage service to Alex Greenwich and he wouldn’t have been in this position now. Obviously that would’ve been asking too much of him, though.

EDIT Tuesday night: Latham’s crowdfunding campaign is evidently going marvellously. Got this screenshot from a friend’s FB, but verified it was in fact real:

RIP Model 500

Juan Atkins, pioneer of Detroit techno sound, dies aged 64

Juan Atkins, one of the pioneers of Detroit techno and a huge influence on dance music more widely, has died aged 64.
His agency, Greensmith Artists, confirmed the news to the dance music website Resident Advisor, saying Atkins had been found unresponsive in a hotel room in Mexico City prior to a performance there, and was pronounced dead after being taken to hospital.
Atkins created a gleaming, mechanistic form of electronic music, first as part of the duo Cybotron and then under the alias Model 500, that could command a dancefloor while also evoking sci-fi fantasias. He was the first person to use the term “techno” in tandem with this hard electronic style, pre-empting an entire genre that now stands as one of the pillars of dance culture.

To be honest, techno has never been my particular flavour of choice when it comes to electronic music, but it would be churlish and wrong to deny Atkins’ particular place in musical history. In their way, him and the rest of the Detroit mob really were as transformative as the British Invasion had been in the early/mid-60s, kind of taking European and Japanese influences like Kraftwerk and YMO and selling that sound back to them…

RIP K9

John Leeson’s gone too. What a hideous week for TV sci-fi fans. I have read some, hmmm, not entirely positive reports of his behaviour in the past, being a little bit “handsy” at conventions and fan gatherings and so forth, though I don’t know what evidence for said allegations there was, and I only ever saw them circulating on Tumblr, not any proper news stories, and they never got in the way of his career… but then again that’s so often the way with this sort of situation, isn’t it? People overlook and cover up… and yet Leeson doesn’t seem like the sort of person people would go to the trouble of overlooking and covering up. I can imagine stories about Tom Baker being hushed, for example, but I can’t imagine the same effort being made for the voice of K9. And in fairness to him, there are far worse allegations about other Doctor Who staff out there… sigh.

Fuck this year

Patrick Stewart, Star Trek actor and acclaimed thespian, dies aged 86

Patrick Stewart, the acclaimed British stage and screen actor renowned for both Shakespeare and sci-fi, has died. He was 86.
The Star Trek: the Next Generation and X-Men star died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles after “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia”, said Kelly Bush Novak, his longtime spokesperson, to the Hollywood Reporter.
“He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all,” she wrote. “We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.”
With his authoritative baritone voice and commanding visage, Stewart was already a staple of the British stage by the late 1980s when, at 47, he was cast as a graying Capt Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: the Next Generation, the first live-action spin-off of the groundbreaking 1960s TV series. Over seven seasons onboard the Starship Enterprise, Stewart’s even-keeled performance and steely directives – “engage!” and “make it so” – turned him into a global star.
Stewart reprised his role in four feature film spin-offs – Star Trek Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) – as well as the TV series Star Trek: Picard, which ran from 2020 until 2023.
His longtime friend, fellow Shakespearean actor and X-Men co-star Ian McKellen called him “the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic”.
“Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end,” he wrote on social media. “You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.”

Just a few days after we also lost Walter Koenig, too, and on top of all the other good and useful people we’ve lost this year. Honestly, I was over 2026 a long time ago, but now I’m done with it.

The Changeling

I read on Wednesday night that Peter Medak had died, and since I was already thinking of watching his 1980 film The Changeling for my October viewing anyway, that news kind of settled what I’d be watching tonight. As I’ve said, I’ve been limiting myself this month to first-time watches, and trying to finally see some films I really should’ve seen years ago. This was one of those films; I REALLY should’ve seen this long before now. The Changeling tells the story of composer John Russell, who’s just lost his wife and child in an appalling accident, and he finds himself somewhere else to live. Unfortunately for him, one of the previous residents of the house hasn’t quite left it… or at least they didn’t leave it under normal circumstances. If the film has one major problem, it’s the music; not that it’s bad or anything (a lot of it is very good), it’s just that I felt the film leaned a little too heavily on it to announce “this is some spooky shit, folks”, as if it didn’t quite trust the audience to get it. Pacing could maybe have been tighter too, though it gets better in the second half and builds to a really great conclusion. But The Changeling is very much carried by George C. Scott in the lead role; it’s the sort of film that needs a really good main performance, and Scott delivers, alongside Trish Van Devere as the female co-lead, who was his wife at that time (so you’d hope there would be something between the two). Peter Medak’s career had almost been destroyed a few years earlier by Peter Sellers when the latter worked with him and Spike Milligan on a production that became a nightmare; I’m pleased that he eventually overcame that debacle to produce this very fine bit of work.

The Snow Woman

Another one from the Daiei Gothic collection. This story had recently been adapted by Masaki Kobayashi as an episode of his Kwaidan anthology four years earlier, but Daiei felt good to go with making its own standalone film of it, and I think they were right… One thing this has that Kwaidan doesn’t is a much stronger sense of naturalism (even though I don’t know how many of the exterior scenes were actual exteriors); the other film is more notable for its brazen stylisation and artifice. Our hero, Yosaku, is a sculptor’s apprentice, who is with him when the old man finds the tree he needs to carve into a statue of the goddess Kannon, and when the titular yokai finds them; she lets him live on condition that he never tell anyone what happened, but that just leaves him having to finish the old man’s work and deal with the odious local lord. What’s going to wind up being his biggest problem? The Snow Woman has a strong sense of sadness and tragedy to it, especially as the film goes on; Yosaku and his wife Yuki make appealing leads against the villainy of Lord Jito and his men, and things do not exactly end well for them, cos, well, Yuki’s true identity is not exactly hard to guess (nor concealed for long, admittedly). It’s all a bit slowly paced, and very much in the folk horror vein, so you’re not really going to get buckets of gore. But you are going to get a surprising amount of charm, and I’m satisfied with that.