Spot the Graveyard Book post..

The new Subterranean Press edition is gorgeous so I couldn’t resist posting a few pictures:

An intriguing black cover

Oh, ok, it was the wrong way up..

Inside the slipcase (Jungle Book style)

Photographic fold-out art

Signed by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

Gorgeous title page

Rejected Covers

Rejected Wrap-around cover

Spooky artwork

People who bought the book had the chance for their names to appear in the back to join the ghostly protectors of Bod in the graveyard..

Hey! That's me!

Freedom of speech issue?  In my opinion, no.  Amazon is a private company and so are perfectly entitled to list titles in any way they see fit.  They can discriminate against whoever they like if they want to.  In any case, they are still selling gay and lesbian literature and they’re certainly not the only online book retailer.  If you don’t like their listing policy, shop somewhere else.

If you want something to get upset about, get upset about internet censorship, over zealous government legislation of pornography or just about Jacqui Smith, but online, non-taxpayer funded organisations can do what they like.  If they lose custom, chances are they’ll change their policy back, but please, online petitions?

If you really want to tackle this issue, go watch This Film is Not Yet Rated and then go and complain to the MPAA about their policy of rating equivalent gay and lesbian sexual scenes more strictly than their heterosexual equivalents.  Unlike Amazon, they do impose an effective monopoly on movie screenings in the US and so are far more deserving of your condemnation.  That looks like censorship to me.  Not showing book selections to people who probably aren’t going to buy them anyway just isn’t.

This is the first one I’ve seen that seems scary enough for the book.

I’ve been hoping that the movie would manage to preserve the air of fairy-tale menace that the story conjures up so I’m now optimistic that the film should be great too. Is it just me or does that doorway seem somewhat reminiscent of Being John Malkovich though?

It seemed particularly odd being addressed to an audience in London who, I would imagine, were largely old-school Eddie Izzard fans and are pretty unlikely to have the sort of closed religious fundamentalist opinions he seemed to be attacking.

To me, attacking organised religious belief is like shooting fish in a barrel.  It’s easy to dismiss as founded on ancient myths and legends in the 21st Century if you take a logical viewpoint.  The days where this was a controversial issue were surely buried in the middle ages.  I did wonder whether spending time in the USA, as presumably he does these days, it’s closer to the surface and perhaps I’m misguided in my judgement that the intelligent majority these days are largely non-religious.  Certainly skeptics I’ve met over there are very fond of preaching to the choir to demonstrate their own non-religious superiority.

I will accept that the rise of fundamentalist Islamic belief is a cause for concern, but I still think that it is the beliefs of a relatively small number of people which are being inflated as being much more important than they actually are by religious leaders anxious for power and control.

If you’re a comedian and you want to make jokes about religion, go ahead, it’s a subject ripe for parody, but don’t insult the intelligence of your audience by preaching at them, that’s just lowering yourself to the level of the evangelists.  Be funny – that’s what people have paid for.

Chris Morris, the king of UK satirists, a while back announced that he wanted to make a comedy poking fun at Jihadi terrorism. Anyone who has seen any Brass Eye episodes, which tackled other ‘media sensitive’ subjects such as paedophilia will recognize that the subject fits right into his field of expertise, both in the subject itself, and the media’s hysterical approach to it so the announcement wasn’t a particular surprise. What also isn’t a surprise sadly is it seems that the mainstream TV channels don’t want to touch it, so he’s making it into an independent film instead.

The really interesting bit is they’re looking for donations with the promise of a chance to appear in the film itself. You can email fundingmentalists {at} warpfilms(.)com or visit their Facebook group for more details.

To quote the producers:

In three years of research, Chris Morris has spoken to terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims. Even those who have trained and fought jihad report the frequency of farce. At training camps young jihadis argue about honey, cry for their mums, shoot each other’s feet off, chase snakes and get thrown out for smoking. A minute into his martyrdom video, a would-be bomber looks puzzled and says “what was the question again?” On millennium eve, five jihadis set out to ram a US warship. They slipped their boat into the water and carefully stacked it with explosives. It sank.

Terrorist cells have the same group dynamics as stag parties and five a side football teams. There is conflict, friendship, misunderstanding and rivalry. Terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks.
Four Lions is a funny, thrilling fictional story that illuminates modern British jihad with an insight beyond anything else in our culture. It plunges us beyond seeing these young men as unfathomably alien. It undermines the folly of just wishing them away or alienating the entire culture from which they emerge. It understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous. As Spinal Tap understood heavy metal and Dr Strangelove the Cold War, Four Lions understands modern British jihadis.

They’re planning on offering a one-click payment scheme soon. I’ll certainly be watching with interest.

[UPDATE: The film has now premiered at Sundance and there's a trailer available!]

In the past, in was relatively hard to get into a position to publish any form of information to the masses, so anything that you read had at least a reasonable chance of being true, barring the biases of the reporter.  However, as this post demonstrates, it’s now very easy to present information to the world giving us generally far too much to process and removing the sort of peer review that you would get from published books in the past.

Tim Burners-Lee has recognised that this could be an issue and believes that we need a mechanism for rating the reliability of pages, but this relies on having a reasonably authoritive source to make those judgements and keep them up to date.  To some extent peer-review can help here, but correct information from one source can easily be overwhelmed by more interesting sounding false information from another.

The problem gets worse when it’s not just people like me skimming pages and not researching them properly, it’s the mainstream media.  Major newspapers in the UK have reported that Ronnie Hazlehurst wrote the song ‘Reach‘ by S-Club 7 before he died, a ‘fact’ cribbed from Wikipedia but not actually true.  More recently, a David Anderson, a reporter for the Daily Mirror, reported from Nicosia that fans of the local football team “are known as the ‘Zany Ones’ and wear hats made from shoes.“, another Wikipedia gem which five minutes of research on the ground would have revealed as false.

Now, neither of these pieces of information are particularly noteworthy in themselves, but when you continually read the same pieces of misinformation, such as the ones I mentioned yesterday for example, presented both on the internet and in the mainstream media, then it gets to be a problem.  We can no longer rely that any facts presented to us have been sensibly researched as we might have done in the past.

That doesn’t mean that we all need to become authorities on everything, just that we need to be wary of information presented to us and think about how likely it is to be true.  Do some background research of your own, visit sites like snopes.com and see if they mention the fact you are interested in (but don’t necessarily assume that they are right either!).  Ask someone who knows about the subject if you can find someone, but don’t just blindly accept things as true, no matter what the source (including me!).

Be a sceptical consumer of information and you stand a better chance of working out what’s actually going on, and you might actually learn something new as well.

The second half is probably the stronger of the two, and features a strong contribution by the internet’s instrument of choice, the cowbell, in a performance reminiscent of Morecambe and Wise at their best.  Watching Bill putting the excellent BBC Concert orchestra through their paces in a nail-biting cop-drama too is strangly mesmerising.  If he’s performing anywhere near you it’s well worth catching.