Attenhundred

He made it!

David Attenborough has made it to his century. I’ve always believed that if you manage to make it to your 90s then you kind of deserve to make it to your 100s as well, but obviously once you do make it to 90s the chances of you then making to 100 become a lot narrower. So I think a lot of us have worried about Sir Dave in recent times not making it, with the world being what it is that would’ve been hard to take. But here we are, he’s racked up his century, and though the world is still what it is, that’s a point of light worth being happy about.

Mind you, standing that close to an erupting volcano doesn’t necessarily help your chances… I mean, I watched that clip and he said they weren’t in any danger, but still. I got that picture from this Guardian piece, which offers a useful reminder that, on top of his own productions, Attenborough was controller of BBC2 (and later director of programmes for both BBC TV channels), in which capacity he introduced colour TV to the UK and commissioned shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus; it also offers the interesting trivia that his first actual on-screen appearance was a game show in 1953. But the ABC article linked at the top offers an even better story of how he initially tried to get into radio but failed:

Then, someone else from the BBC called and asked if he was interested in a television role:
“I had to confess that I hadn’t actually seen much television. I had once watched a television play in my wife’s parents’ house, but they were the only people I knew with a set, and I certainly had not got one myself.”
Sir David took a chance, quit his job and underwent a three-month BBC traineeship with no guarantee of employment at the end.

Clearly he did something right. Happy hundredth, Sir David.

Bullshitfront?

Australian director Phillip Noyce shoots feature film for Saudi Arabia celebrating ‘heroism of security men in combating drugs’

The acclaimed Australian film-maker Phillip Noyce is being paid by the Saudi regime to make a feature film portraying the repressive state’s narcotics officers as heroes.
The Watchful Eyes, based on a real Saudi ministry of interior narcotics case, is billed as a dramatic depiction of the “heroism of security men in combating drugs”.
Saudi authorities executed 356 people last year, including 243 for drug-related cases, and analysts say an increase in the kingdom’s execution rate is largely due to its “war on drugs”.
Noyce has enjoyed a decades-long career with directing credits including the 1970s classic Newsfront, Dead Calm, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and The Bone Collector. […]
Noyce said he had accepted the job “for the challenge of working outside my comfort zone” and for the opportunity “to investigate a previously closed society” but did not address specific questions about the ethics of making a film paid for by the Saudi regime.
Joey Shea, a Saudi Arabia senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the Saudi government used its huge investments in sport and entertainment as part of a strategy to whitewash its human rights record.
“Given the subject matter of this film from what’s publicly available, combined with the reality of the rights abuses that have been so inextricably linked with this new war on drugs by the Saudi government, it’s really, really disturbing the role that these narratives may play in covering up the reality of these executions that have just been served the last few years,” Shea said.

Yeah, this looks like the same sort of bullshit as the Riyadh Comedy Festival, and I’m as disappointed in Noyce as I was in some of the people who did thar. Noyce himself doesn’t seem overly hyped about his own work:

Noyce described The Watchful Eyes as “a low-budget kidnapping thriller”.
“Gritty and raw and shot entirely in Arabic, I don’t think the movie will attract any tourists to Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Asked about the country’s human rights record and executions for drug offences, Noyce said: “I guess the story could be edited to send an anti-drug message, but the story I shot was told from the highly emotional point of view of the lead detective in the hunt for a missing child.
“Surprisingly, Sela never once interfered from a creative point of view.”

Probably not, cos I imagine they wouldn’t have needed to; they would’ve made sure they had all the creative control right from the beginning. And if Sela weren’t doing that, someone in government/the royal family would’ve been. I know that in real terms there’s been any number of Hollywood films over the decades that have performed the same function, but they don’t seem as bad as this does…

Good advice, I presume

Friend posted this on Facebook. It is, remarkably, quite real. I further presume that one of those top 5 guns is not the one you shot the faithless bitch with, which I presume you did (and then got rid of the gun) after she dumped you and now you’re building up an arsenal in case she comes back from the dead for revenge, cos I can’t see why else she appears as a zombie in the video thumbnail…

Scum and villainy

As a not exactly mega fan of Star Wars, I have always found Star Wars Day kind of irritating…

I made this a few years ago in “protest”

…but tonight I have discovered something interesting:

Oh?

OH.

Apparently this is something that’s always been known about, in that there was a making of book about Empire Strikes Back and this was recorded in that (albeit with slightly incorrect details), but, because I am me, I am only finding out about it now forty-seven years later. I wonder how much this influenced the later popularity of the phrase. Either way, though, I now have an actually good reason to be irritated by May the Fourth…

Abe Lincoln would like a word, too

OK. According to the story that I presume this Cody Simpson believes, Jesus was judicially killed by the Romans. Trump is still alive, even if only just, and his rotten physical health will almost certainly do him in before the courts ever will. I think that’s a slight difference between him and that Christ character (we will, of course, leave aside the theological question of whether the latter still “lives” or not)…

Geography lesson

Mark… my brother in Christ… mate… you’re only going to be a state senator if you even get that far. Even as a proper US senator, though, this would be somewhat beyond you. Hagia Sophia is in fucking TURKEY, and not even that goon Graham can do shit about it. Erdogan reopened it as mosque in the face of opposition from within his own country amd the UN. You think he gives a fuck about a trifling racist cunt like YOU? And it’s been a mosque since before the US was even a country, for fuck’s sake. It’s not exactly a new thing. I mean, Erdogan making it a mosque again in 2020 after Ataturk turned it into a museum in 1935 is probably not a good sign of Turkey’s health as a secular country, but if this Dixieland pissant thinks he’s going to stop him Islamising the place, he’s delusional…

WHCD? Whatever

I honestly don’t know what to say about the perplexing “events” at the White House Correspondents Dinner a couple of days ago, so I’m just going to let Mike Figueredo do it for me. Personally I don’t know what to make of all the “false flag” theorising that’s emerged from it…

…in that, frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover it was a false flag, but I’d be equally unsurprised to discover it wasn’t. Not, of course, that we’ll ever find out either way, but still. It’s just, you know, America being America in the age of Mushroom Cock. You get up each day, have breakfast, check the news… “yeah, that’s the bullshit America’s on today, oh well, time I was getting on with my own”… I mean, someone actually did die in that 2024 shooting, which is the consideration that stops me writing that off as a hoax in the way that even MAGAts are (apparently) increasingly thinking it was. But there’s so much cynicism about what the administration does and how it does it that you can’t blame people’s cynicism about this sort of thing. A false flag? The real deal? I can honestly believe either. I don’t know either way, and I’m not sure I even care either way. It’s America’s bullshit as usual, whatever it is, and I’m just so fucking sick of it.