Bonfire Night

I'm missing out on Bonfire Night, Fireworks Night, Guy Fawkes Night, remember, remember the fifth of November. In truth I imagine that most people had their fireworks last night.
Pompey is particularly fond of its fireworks, they'll celebrate absolutely anything by sending explosives into the sky, sometimes you have no idea what the reason for them is.
Poor old Guido. Horrible, horrible death, and amazing that whatever awful ways people were put to death over the course of British history, it never stopped 'em expressing their religious or political beliefs. Maybe I should expand that, European history.

Perhaps it's because of this long and gruesome history that the European Union are requesting that Saddam Hussein's death sentence should not be carried out. There is no capital punishment within the EU and hasn't been for some considerable time.
It's a tough one. The verdict is from just one of the charges, the killing of 148 Shia, he can't be put even more to death for the Kurds and all the thousands of others. In spite of his outburst at the designated method of his death, it couldn't be made to match the nature of the deaths he imposed upon others, and nor should it, if we haven't moved on from hanging, drawing and quartering, then we're not better than him and we are, by thunder we are.

Moving on. Movie night at Château Schnee. Geoff the Rental clearly didn't entirely approve of my two picks this week.
'Our friend's in 'Slither',' I said apologetically.
But in fact neither Slither nor Nacho Libre actually sucked.

Nacho Libre - Jack Black, a Swede (Peter Stormare) and a bunch of Mexican actors was quietly enjoyable. Jack mesmerised with his ability to pose, posture and generally throw his five foot five 208 pound frame around like you wouldn't believe. Some of it may have been a stunt double, some of it certainly wasn't. His partner in la lucha libre, Héctor Jiménez as Esqueleto was like a cross between Napoleon Dynamite's Pedro and the Jungle Book's Mowgli. Little Darius Rose as orphan Chancho was wonderful, oh and not so little either. Jack Black's awful attempt at a Mexican accent that kept slipping into New York Italian just served the overall humour. We liked.

Slither, supposed to be set in South Carolina but actually filmed like everything else in BC, also managed to avoid some of the worst excesses of horror sci-fi. I only identified two 'oh for pity's sake, look behind you you total moron,' moments. We didn't manage to see Steve very clearly, but we identified his screaming.

The film I am looking forward to seeing at the cinema is 'Borat'. I didn't like Borat as a character when Sasha Baron Cohen first introduced him, but I feel he has developed him. My son Ben has seen the film and assured me that he laughed all the way through, those weren't quite his words but let's leave it at that.

My daughter Alex has been experiencing one of the by-product educational aspects of going to uni, a multi-culturalism that is different from school where she felt that the Pakistani kids for example would often all hang out together in a huge group. At uni, she has friends from India, the Middle East, the States, and all over the UK. She told me about political discussions with her Kurdistani friend, about budgeting, about the depth of her studies, then she bugged me about how I still needed to make her a Christmas Stocking.
Hmmm...Bah, humbug.