Constantine: Hearts and Minds

Third panel done, half way there!

Inappropriate soundtrack

I've recently been watching some German TV to brush up my German. Today I saw a documentary about Wetzlar cathedral, but it was really weird because every time they showed a reconstruction of the cathedral they played the theme from classic 80s show Street Hawk.

Who the hell thought that Wetzlar cathedral's unique combination of romanesque, gothic and baroque architectural tradition would be best illuminated by the theme song from a 1980s American kid's show about an ex-cop who solves crimes by riding around on a top-secret superbike? Was there some 80s manboy on the production team who ground down the will of every other person?

I wonder if this is a common problem at the production company, maybe it comes up with every TV documentary they make. They should fire this guy, but he's probably the son of the company director or something.

Constantine: Hearts and Minds

Second panel from my Constantine strip. I based Constantine's face loosely on his surviving sculptures.

The comic does get funnier, I promise.

Constantine: Hearts and Minds

Since I don't have an Xbox or a PC to waste my time on at the moment, I spent today pencil-sketching a short comic strip about Emperor Constantine. I'd almost forgotten how much fun drawing is. The best thing about it is that a day spent drawing cartoons actually feels like a day well spent, whereas the same can't be said for a day spent pwning noobs on Call of Duty 3.

I'll try to draw the strip up properly over the next few days. I can't colour it yet cos I won't have a graphics tablet for the next couple of months. I also don't have my scanner so I'm having to improvise with a digital camera.

Here's the first panel. Starting with a bird's-eye perspective shot seemed like a cool idea, until I realised that drawing a crowd of people takes bloody forever.

In hoc signo amabis

This is a cartoon for late Romanists. Constantine was the first Christian emperor. In AD 312 he won the Battle of Milvian Bridge, attributing his success to the favour of the Christian god. Soon afterwards he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, and the rest is history.

On the eve of the battle Constantine was supposedly visited by Christ in a dream and commanded to create a new standard for his army using the Christian symbol of the chi-rho.

But what if Constantine had been visited not by Christ, but by a time-travelling hippy from the future? That's the question I often ask myself.

Rome/Empire review part 1

Something awful happened a few weeks ago: I finally reached the last episode of the last season of The Wire. This was bad because it meant I would have nothing to do in the evenings, except maybe try to get a social life, which of course would be absurd.

Gratuitous picture of Hadrian's Wall

Happily Mithraea came up to visit around this time, and we took a long-overdue trip to Hadrian’s Wall. Later we were in HMV when I noticed a Rome-themed drama I’d never heard of – Rome: Blood and Sand. I bought it on the strength of the box art, and because the blurb on the back said:

ROME boasts “powerful acting,” says the Wall Street Journal, with a hot young cast that includes [a bunch of people you’ve never heard of] and Emily Blunt. Filmed entirely in scenic Italy, ROME tells the thrilling story of a hero’s rise amidst the greed, blood, and lust of anctient [sic] Rome.

Emily Blunt struggling to cope with so much powerful acting

So I paid my eight pounds Sterling and walked home, clutching the DVD excitedly.

I was already intrigued by the name of the mini-series, because there’s another show called Rome, and also a show called Spartacus: Blood and Sand. What could this be? A bizarre mish-mash of the two? A cheap attempt to cash in?

Actually, both. It was hard to find on IMDB, because the show, broadcast in 2005, was originally called Empire, not Rome. In fact the DVD menu screen still has the title Empire. So changing the title on the front of the box to Rome and ripping off the subtitle Blood and Sand is a pretty transparent attempt to trick idiots (like me) into buying it.

Now I am confused

We’ll put aside for the moment the fact that the blurb also claims that the first emperor Octavius was Julius Caesar’s nephew, rather than his great-nephew. The box art is unintentionally hilarious for another reason: the tagline.

Really? Because I assume that this is referring to the hero of the mini-series, Octavius. And unless Wikipedia has been lying to me all these years, didn’t he found the Roman empire? Maybe ‘one man’s fight to found an entire empire!’ just doesn’t sound as good.

So even before we pressed the play button, the signs were promising. And it would only get better. This show, which on the surface looks like a tacky TV mini-series, turned out to be a radical re-interpretation of Roman history. It has changed everything I thought I knew about the founding of the empire. For instance, I never knew that the young Octavius fled from Rome, was taken into slavery, and was then sent to the ‘Combat Dungeons of Arkham’. My education was about to begin...

Colorado Trail

This last week I've been visiting A&T, two friends who recently transplanted from the UK to Denver, Colorado. After a few days they grew fed up of my drunken midnight rampages through the house and my endless racial tirades, and decided to drug me, tie me up, drive me a few miles outside the city and dump me at the start of the Colorado Trail. They told me to bugger off and learn some respect, and said they might pick me up three days down the trail if they felt like it.

It was a desperate situation. I had nothing to survive with except a tent, sleeping bag, food, water filter, trowel, pocket knife, first aid kit, compass, map, guide book and clothing. So I suppose it wasn't that desperate really.

I've done some hiking in the UK before. Here are the Top Ten ways hiking the first three segments of the CT was different from my UK hiking experience.

1. Bears
2. Altitude (starting at 5,000 ft and finishing at 8,000 feet, twice the altitude of Ben Nevis)
3. Seeing lots of Americans (for the first day)
4. Seeing hardly anyone at all (for the second and third days)
5. Bears
6. No running water or toilet facilities (which is where the water filter and trowel come in)
7. No shops
8. Bears
9. It's very hard to get lost
10. Bears

Here are some photos.

Did I already mention they have bears? 

The CT also has mountain lions (click to zoom).

And rattlesnakes.

On the plus side, it has gorgeous views:

And biting political commentary. Trailheads do actually have occasional public toilets, but I took one look inside this example, and decided I was happier shitting in the woods.

Another gorgeous view:

The second segment passes through a huge swathe of forest that was destroyed by wildfire in 1996. This was a tough hike, because of the stiff climbing, the total lack of water sources, and the lack of shade from the searing sun as one walks through post-apocalyptic desolation. On the other hand, having no trees means that it was easier to spot attacking bears.

My camp for the second day, hunkered down between two boulders (I checked the crevices for rattlesnakes, though not too closely).

See if you can get my food now, you stupid bears.

My first clear view of the Continental Divide, three days hiking away - not this trip, though.

I saw one stile in 40 miles.

This was one piece of trail advice I took for granted:

In my brief time on the CT I didn't see a single bear, despite smearing myself in honey every night. Instead I saw some amazing views and got some appreciation of the peace and solitude that hiking over here can bring.

One of the things which impressed me most was how well-kept the CT is - I lost the trail only once, but that was my own fault for not paying attention to a perfectly obvious sign. Ironically enough, it's far easier to get lost hiking in England, where you often have to negotiate a tangle of different public footpaths, than in a wilderness like the Colorado Rockies, where you pretty much have just one trail going through the woods for miles. The trail maintenance and signage is mostly down to CT volunteers who 'adopt' a portion of the trail and go out twice a year to clear away fallen trees, replace culverts and repair erosion damage. I was lucky enough to meet one at the end of my hike, so I could thank her in person.

In three days I did less than 10% of the whole CT. It has 28 segments, is 485 miles long, and stretches from Denver all the way to Durango, regularly reaching elevations of 12,000 feet. I reckon I might be able to tackle the whole thing over five weeks next June-July. If anyone fancies coming along, let me know.

A&T did pick me up at the end of the third day. I promised not to act like such a jerk again.

War Horse

This started out as a comment on Vlad's blog, but it got so long I thought I'd just write a blog entry of my own. It's a review of War Horse, which Vlad and I saw over the weekend. Vlad makes a number of good points on his blog that I shan't bother to repeat here. Go and read his review first, and my comments are a follow-up.

First of all, the nonsense about the boring horse that can't even jump I can almost forgive, because I assume that's in the original book and play.

What most annoyed me was the saccharine style Spielberg adopted for the pastoral scenes. I have a lot of admiration for Spielberg as a director despite his frequent lapses into schmalz, but this time he waaaay overdid it.

Take the lighting, for instance. It looked fake, like studio lighting, even in the external shots. Maybe that was a deliberate echo of the stage play, I don't know. But it gave the film an unreal quality that didn't seem to fit the inherent darkness of the material (I know it's a kid's book, but it's still dark).

Please leave me my horse, he fits so well with this pastoral idyll

The father of the hero (to the right in the above screenshot), a Devonshire farmer, was a drunken failure whose stubbornness almost reduced his wife and son to beggary. Now, if rural Devon had been made to look as grim and depressing as it probably was at the time, and less like a biscuit tin, maybe the appearance of this beautiful horse would have meant something. But the whole world looked so idyllic it was impossible to believe that anything bad could happen. That's why I thought Ken Loach would have done a better job directing.

Eeee but tha's a beautiful bird, our Kes

Like Vlad, I was also irritated by the scene of the horse wrapped in barbed wire in No Man's Land. But I was mostly irritated because it was the most potentially interesting and believable scene in the movie. It's not unknown for units of men in the midst of war to form close emotional attachments to animals, as mascots or totems of good luck. So when a British and German soldier awkwardly joined forces to free the horse, and then tossed a coin to decide who gets to keep it, I was really drawn in, and I thought the scene was genuinely poignant and beautifully written.

It just happens that the surrounding two hours were crap.

River Browney

This river near my house is one of my favourite thinking places. It's a place I go to think when I need to think about things, for example what I'm going to have for lunch.

Stab boy

This disturbed me. On the front page of my Yahoo Mail, the main news headline was 'Life meaningless' without stab boy.


'Stab boy', otherwise occasionally known as Seydou Diarrassouba, was murdered in London last Monday, as the news article explains. His family shared their grief in a press statement:

"This is a very difficult time for our family and we would really appreciate to be given the chance to grieve privately and honour his memory. Whoever took his life took our backbone away.

"Seydou kept us upright and now we feel weak as we have lost a very special part of us. Life seems meaningless without our special son and brother."

After reading this heartfelt elegy from his distressed loved ones, the Yahoo news editor still thought that 'stab boy' was an appropriate way to commemorate Diarrassouba.

I mean, I know that his surname is unfamiliar-looking to most of the British public, but 'stab boy'? It sounds like the name of some kind of depraved super villain.

First of all, he was 18 years old, which makes him a man, not a boy. Also, if anything it should be 'stabbed'. Are we so eager for bite-sized news that we can't spare time for three extra letters which don't even add up to another syllable?

Normally the peculiarly succinct English of tabloid headlines is just another interesting adaptation of language to a specific media. This example stuck out because it seemed so heartless, especially when juxtaposed with the words 'life meaningless'. It sounds almost sarcastic. Imagine the family saying:

"Stab Boy kept us upright and now we feel weak as we have lost a very special part of us. Life seems meaningless without our special son and brother, Stab Boy."

This isn't print media, where every inch of headline costs money; surely the Yahoo news editor doesn't need to trivialise someone's existence for the sake of economy. How about 'Life meaningless' without Oxford Street murder victim? Or what about even using his actual name?