UK Election 2024: July 4th Means Independence from the Tories

This week the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, set the date for a general election for July 4th. My original headline for this post was "About Damn Time", but I decided instead to go with a play on words relating to the US's Independence Day. This Tory government has been a disaster, and it's time the UK broke the shackles and liberated itself from their haphazardly misrule.

I say "this" Tory government, but which do we mean? There's the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government that ruled from 2010 to 2015; the Tories ruling on their own under David Cameron from 2015 to 2016, when he had to resign after the Brexit referendum turned out for Leave; the Theresa May government that lasted from 2016 to 2019; the Boris Johnson government that held the reins through the Covid pandemic until 2022; Liz Truss's 45-day tenure in 2022; and finally, Rishi Sunak's government, which has been in power since then.

In that time, other than the 2010 general election that brought the Tories to power after 13 years of Labour rule under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, there have been three general elections, in 2015 (which gave Cameron's Tories enough of a majority to rule without the Liberal Democrats), in 2017 (to cement Theresa May's position post-Brexit vote, but ended up forcing them to team with Northern Ireland's DUP), and finally in 2019, when Boris Johnson faced off with Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and returned a pretty strong majority.

They've all been pretty terrible. We might look back at the pre-2015 days as a beacon of stability - and they were - but those five years saw the Tories pretty much run roughshod over their coalition partners as they slashed public services, cut welfare benefits and raised university tuition fees. I was in the UK for the first three years of their term, and I remember the student protests at the tuition rises, which went from about £3,000 a year to over £9,000 - that might seem laughable to us in the US, where you have to fork out much more than that even to attend public universities, but consider that tuition tripled from one year to the next, effectively putting higher education out of reach for a certain amount of families.

That period was notable because the Tories had come to power on a wave of excitement about their young, dynamic new leader, Cameron, who urged people to call him Dave and seemed to court the votes of the bien-pensant sections of the electorate by biking to Parliament and installing a wind turbine on his home. He seemed to position himself as a sort of Conservative Obama, and he also benefited from anger at the chaos caused by the 2008 global recession - stuff like that always blows back against the government in power, and a significant portion of UK voters in 2010 seemed to blame Gordon Brown for the recession.

Never mind that it was actually caused by bank deregulation and risky behavior by investment bankers, plus the infamous sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps. Voters were pissed off at their lost jobs and cratered portfolios, and they needed someone to punish. The sad thing is that they punished possibly the one politician, Brown, who was best-placed to cushion the UK's fall.

There was some idea that Cameron's Tories had shed the "nasty party" label that's always dogged the Conservatives, but he immediately started talking tough about "benefit scroungers" and illegal immigrants. In 2013 his Home Office secretary, Theresa May, approved a campaign where vans inviting illegal immigrants to go home or face arrest drove around.

This same kind of atmosphere led Cameron to call a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the EU or not. When it blew up in his face, he resigned, leaving the UK to enjoy May's premiership and everything that followed. May's time was pretty chaotic, as she found herself trying to negotiate a Brexit deal that would actually deliver on the Leave campaign's (false) promises, and having to fight against her own party multiple times in the process. Part of the problem was that, notwithstanding promises to avoid a "hard" Brexit, the other option was taking on a similar status to Norway or Switzerland, which meant following directives from Brussels - which they'd been doing before 2016, but with the crucial difference that, as members, the UK could actually influence those policies.

When May resigned, Johnson became the Tory leader and promptly won a landslide election against Corbyn, painting him as a dangerously loony socialist. This delivered the famous Red Wall Tories, i.e. those who stood for constituencies that had voted Labour (ergo "red") for generations, in part because of fears that a Corbyn government would immediately rejoin the EU.

Johnson faced two big crises in his premiership, the pandemic and the Ukraine war. Neither was his fault, and the latter allowed him room to actually behave in a moderately statesmanlike way, by becoming one of Ukraine's most vocal defenders. Of course, this was after decades of the UK turning a blind eye to Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin turning London into their own playground; on top of that, the war kinda saved Johnson's bacon, by diverting attention from the scandal that arose when it emerged that he'd broken his own lockdown rules to host parties at 10 Downing Street.

His handling of the pandemic was pretty awful, even apart from Partygate, as it became known. He was probably the first major leader to catch Covid, and his government's inability to settle on a policy (lockdowns vs herd immunity) led to way more cases and deaths than was necessary. Indeed, the only advanced economy that did worse was the US, which had its own mismanagement going on.

I could go on about Liz Truss and the shenanigans surrounding Rishi Sunak, but I don't have all night. The main point is to sum up the chaos that the UK has suffered as a result of this succession of Tory governments. Cameron's pitch in 2015 was that Labour would cause too much chaos, but in the end he destroyed the UK's biggest trade agreement, which has led to decreasing international confidence in the UK and gutted investment. Immigration has soared, even though the aim of Brexit was to kick the foreigners out, and UK businesses have a hell of a time exporting to the Continent. Brexit also almost destroyed the Northern Ireland peace accords of 1998, which depended on both Ireland and the UK being EU members, so there wouldn't be a hard border between the Republic and Northern Ireland.

For me, the original sin is Brexit, and everything bad comes back to that. Liz Truss may have taken just 45 days to tank the economy with unfunded tax cuts, but she wouldn't even have been in the conversation for PM if the Brexit referendum hadn't happened. Likewise with Sunak's signature policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda - if Labour had won any of those elections from 2010 on, he wouldn't have been there to implement this cruel policy.

So when I say that this upcoming general election signals independence from the Tories, I'm hoping that it breaks the back of the Conservative party for another few election cycles, just like Blair's 1997 victory did. I'm not naive enough to think that it'll destroy the Tories as a party, or naive enough to think that they'd be replaced by a more sensible center-right party.

But I do hope that it sends the worst, most xenophobic elements like Lee Anderson or Suella Braverman or Priti Patel packing from Parliament, never to be seen again. As a friend pointed out on Facebook when I posted about this very subject today, it could hopefully be an opportunity to introduce a more progressive voting system, which would give more representation to parties beyond just Labour and the Conservatives. At the very least, they could get ranked choice voting, which was the Lib Dems' pet project in 2010 and the main thing that the Tories bulldozed cynically to destroy their coalition partners.

Beyond that, I'm reminded of conversations I had with friends in the lead-up to the 2010 election. Some were so angry at Brown and Labour that they asked things like, "Who'd vote for Labour now?" I even remember seeing an article somewhere suggesting that saying you planned to vote Labour was enough to get you ostracized from your friend groups in some circles. Even back then I could see that Cameron's "call me Dave" act was false, and that they'd just pick up where Margaret Thatcher and John Major's policies left off.

Fourteen years later, I'm absolutely not above saying, I told you so.

X-Men 97: Probably Marvel's Best Offering Since Iron Man (more spoilers)

So here's why I usually wait until I finish a show before blogging about it here. In the past I've written about shows I was watching, while I was currently watching them. I've never had a Battlestar Galactica style crack-up between post and end-of-show, but the danger's always there.

With X-Men 97, the danger is the exact opposite. When I wrote my original post, I'd only seen two episodes and the show hadn't really taken off, as it were. I was cautiously optimistic, but not prepared to rave about it.

That's now changed. Largely on the strength of the fifth episode, Remember It, I'm prepared to call this season the best thing Marvel's put out since Iron Man, back in 2008. The comparison isn't entirely fair, because there have been individual MCU movies I've liked since then (Avengers, Civil War) but it does reflect the drift the MCU's been suffering from - compared to that, X97 is admirably cohesive and well-structured.

So let's get some quibbles out of the way first. When I say X97 is cohesive, that kind of ignores the fourth episode, the double-header of Lifedeath and Motendo. Lifedeath (and its sequel, Lifedeath II, which was the sixth episode) is a classic story, a quiet moment amid the chaos where Storm reckons with the loss of her powers and her complicated feelings toward Forge, whose technology cost her those powers.

I wasn't sure that giving Lifedeath barely 10 minutes of runtime was the right decision, nor that having Storm reclaim her powers so quickly worked either. It isn't to say that either episode is done badly, but more that the power-loss story doesn't really get to breathe. Storm leaves the mansion in Episode 2, doesn't appear in Episode 3, we see Lifedeath for half of Episode 4, and then she comes back again in Episode 6, where she regains her powers.

I don't want to be churlish, because for one thing, it's amazing to see these classic stories from the comics get the TV treatment. For another, the beats of the stories, while different from the comics, are broadly pretty satisfying. Lifedeath II is basically not at all an adaptation of the story from the comics (where Ororo is finding herself in Africa and comes to terms with her loss of powers, rather than regaining them), but it still does right by her, showing how strong she is as a character.

However, if I had to point to something wrong with this show, it's that: the classic stories are referenced but not always explored in depth. The original show had the advantage of more episodes per season, so it could do 4 or 5-parters like the Phoenix saga, and that would be unfair to expect of this show, with its 10-episode order. But the original comics were better able to set up storylines across a long time, so we got to go into a lot of the characters' motivations and relationships. That said, there are some amazing character moments here, like where Morph confesses their love for Wolverine, or where Jean and Storm have a good sisterly moment before they kick all the ass.

Overall, Motendo is really the one dispensable story here. It was nice to see Mojo (to the extent that I like Mojo stories, which isn't much), but I don't feel like it gave a sense of either Roberto or Jubilee's characters. As I read more of the original Mojo stories, I might have to revisit it, but for the moment, I'm glad it only got 10 minutes or so of runtime.

But back to the positives! In my previous post, I wondered if we were going to see any Grant Morrison or Jonathan Hickman stories, and I now have my answer. Remember It is basically a street-level view of E is for Extinction, the storyline that Morrison opened their run with, and it really fucking works. There's a lot of emotional and relationship business in the first half, as we see Rogue and Gambit dealing with the Magneto love triangle, but then Cable shows up trying to avert some catastrophe and then basically everyone gets killed.

Part of the reason it's so audacious is that the previous four episodes didn't really prepare us for the sight of the Wild Sentinel vaporizing everyone. We see Banshee and Archangel get killed, Madelyne Pryor and Callisto are confirmed dead, and even poor Leech (one of my favorite minor characters) dies horribly, despite Magneto's best efforts. This is a big difference from the Quiet Council scenes at the start of the episode (and there's our Krakoa reference: Sebastian Shaw, Emma Frost, Moira MacTaggert and everyone sitting together and governing an island nation for mutants).

The rest of the show maintains the momentum of Remember It, and works in commentaries on alt right intolerance and the cynicism of the news cycle. Bastion - who's revealed to be the season's big bad - explains at one point that the attack on Genosha was necessary to deaden the sympathy the mutants had built up since Xavier's disappearance: by killing so many at once, Genosha just became a news item that could be superseded. There's a bit of a chilling resonance with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza there.

The fact that Bastion is the big bad is another of this show's strengths. The original show could only play with the storylines and characters from 1963 to 1997, but this can hop forward, giving us references to Krakoa, E is for Extinction and Operation Zero Tolerance, not to mention Fatal Attractions. There are possibilities of Age of Apocalypse and other storylines in coming episodes, given that the final episode ends with half the team in Apocalypse's past, Scott and Jean in his future, and the man himself unearthing one of Gambit's playing cards in the rubble of Genosha, hinting at the storyline where Gambit became the Horseman of Death.

The thirty years since I stopped reading (I consider it that, though I was there for most of Morrison's run) are a worrying tangle for me, so I'm hoping the show can make sense of it all. The 90s, in particular, seems to be held up as the X-Men's worst time, just because they had so many bad storylines and writers who didn't know what to do with certain characters (usually the women).

It's also significant because of all the Marvel cameos in the second half of the season. I never watched the 90s Spiderman show, or the other programs referenced here, but apparently they're all canon to this show, and we get to see a bunch of other characters, like Daredevil. This is important because of the way that Marvel was essentially erasing the X-Men during the heyday of the MCU, just because they didn't want to boost the Fox X-Men franchise. So while I'm glad that X97's show runners have cooled rumors that this is part of the MCU, it's also good to see the X-Men being embraced once again as part of the wider Marvel Universe.

On that note, the question is now how the House of X will integrate into the existing MCU. Deadpool and Wolverine is expected to hint at it this summer, but that's also going to turn on the multiverse concept that's been driving the MCU since Endgame. There's an X-Men movie in the works, but I'm hoping that its creative team takes its cues from X97 - they shouldn't follow the cartoon slavishly, but they should keep its obvious love for the characters and storylines, and take into account that X-Men is about the characters as a family, rather than just a vehicle for Wolverine.

It's been 4 years since we last had an X-Men movie (New Mutants), and there's been very little mention in the MCU's 16 year run, apart from the odd Easter egg or post-credits scene. But now that all of Marvel's characters are back under its control, I'm looking forward to seeing the X-Men take their rightful place as Marvel's premier characters.

And it'd be nice to see Beau DeMayo involved in some way, given his deep love and knowledge of the characters.

Shogun: Early Candidate for Best Show of 2024

I just finished Shogun and the thought struck me, that this is probably the standout show for me of 2024. One may qualify that with phrases like "so far", but it's hard to see what's going to surpass it. BTW, there are likely to be spoilers in this post, so proceed with caution.

When I first heard about a new adaptation of the James Clavell novel, I wasn't exactly skeptical, but I didn't think of starting on it straight away. As I've mentioned, I fear I'm going to lose access to Hulu soon, so I'm trying to be very careful about which shows I start watching there and on Disney Plus. I was watching something else when Shogun started, so I didn't want to start a completely new show.

But then I started seeing and hearing comments about how good it was. My mom said it was great, and so did Craig Mazin, one of the hosts of Scriptnotes (and, as the guy who wrote HBO's Chernobyl and The Last of Us, he knows a good TV show when he sees one). When I heard Mazin's recommendation, I immediately checked it out, that very evening.

In terms of the plot, it's probably not the most groundbreaking or pulse-pounding premise I've ever seen. Though Shogun is kind of the grandaddy of the "Westerner goes to Japan and becomes a samurai" genre. That said, the characters are mostly fascinating - Hiroyuki Sanada is particularly good as Lord Toranaga, the scheming warlord who drives much of the politicking of the show. Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, the warlord who essentially brought Japan under his control in the 1600s, so you can see how the show is informed by historical fact, if not exactly a perfect recreation of it.

Anna Sawai is also excellent as the doomed love interest, Lady Mariko, of our POV character John Blackthorne (played by Cosmo Jarvis). Because she's a Christian (specifically a Catholic), she acts as an interpreter for Blackthorne throughout, though there are multiple interesting strands to their relationship. For one thing, as an Anglican he's considered a heretic by the Portuguese, who have converted a number of locals to Catholicism, and Mariko shares some of this religious distaste for him.

They also predictably have a romantic relationship, which is accompanied by her guilt at her estrangement from her overbearing husband, whom she believes dead for a while. On top of all that, Mariko has a tragic past as the daughter of an accused traitor, which diminishes her in the eyes of her husband but also means she's able to connive along with Toranaga to achieve his aims of control over the Imperial Heir and of all of Japan. Sawai plays the conflicts in the character very well throughout, especially when she acts as the intermediary between Toranaga and Blackthorne's sparring.

For me, the star of the show isn't a specific character or actor, but rather the set design. The mansions and castles and villages in which the action takes place all look amazing, and the costumes, movements and camera work all add drama to many scenes that are essentially just people sitting in large rooms and arguing. Not being a scholar of feudal Japan, I can't tell how accurate the costumes or blocking are (though I did some searching and discovered that the dialect of Japanese spoken in the show is accurate to the time period). But almost everything looks amazing, even down to the splashes of blood on the shoji doors when assassins try to murder characters at various points.

The one thing that looks a little dodgy, at times, is the scenes onboard ships. One or two of those scenes looked like they were shot on a green screen, which is unfortunate, because you shouldn't be able to notice that. That's a minor quibble, though, because everything else is just so good.

Apparently it was initially planned to be a limited series consisting of these ten episodes, but the reaction has been strong enough that it appears to have been greenlit for a second season, with Sanada returning. I've never read the book or watched the previous adaptation, so I don't know how much of the story this version adapts, but it should be interesting to see what happens next and if it's as well-done. Though I wonder if, rather than continuing Shogun, subsequent seasons shouldn't instead revolve around Clavell's other novels in this series, such as Tai Pan or Noble House.

In any case, despite my initial inertia, I'm glad I gave this show a try. It may not be as compulsive as HBO's We Own This City or The Last of Us, but it's a worthy addition to Hulu's library of prestige TV. If you don't mind blood and subtitles, it's a great watch and well worth the investment of time.

Can Arsenal win the Premier League this year?

I'm holding fire on writing a post about X-Men '97, because I'm waiting for the final episode, and I'm also only halfway through Shogun, and on top of all that, I don't really want to wade into politics (but ceasefire now, please), so it's a football post this week.

It's now been four seasons since anyone other than Manchester City won the Premier League, it's been seven seasons since a London club won it, and 20 seasons since Arsenal last won the title. I may not be a fully paid-up Gooner, but I do tend to prefer the red side of North London, and overall, I think it would be nice to see a different club run out as champions this year.

Around this time last year (actually a couple of weeks later, but with a similar number of games left to play), I wrote a post about Arsenal relinquishing the title race with a 3-0 loss to Brighton. Arsenal had two games left to play while City had three, but were ahead by four points. As of this writing, Arsenal has three games left to play and is a point ahead of City, which has four games left. If neither side drops any points for the rest of the season, City will win by two points, but if City draws a single game before then, they'll need Arsenal to slip up, because Arsenal has the better goal difference.

Last year was a bit of a weird season for Arsenal, because they roared out of the traps and were on top for most of the season. They were so dominant in the early stages that they actually built up an eight-point lead over City, squandered it, and then built it up again. The trouble is, they squandered it again at the end of the season, and found themselves overtaken.

This year, on the other hand, they've shared top spot with City for most of the season, and with Liverpool for certain parts. The team that's had a weird season has been City, which hasn't really fired on all cylinders from the start. Erling Haaland has been generally quite deadly in front of goal, but not as much as last year, and the team has suffered. The various podcasts I listen to talked about City's drift earlier in the season, as if they lacked a concrete motivation after doing the treble last year; I didn't quite agree, but when City started talking about doing a "double triple", it struck me that Football Weekly might have a point. It didn't help that City then crashed out of the Champions League at the hands of Real Madrid the next day.

But as both Football Weekly and Totally Football are at pains to point out every year, this is the part of the season where City always do the business. They're talented and professional enough not to let nerves get to them as they close in on the end of the season each year, even when they've been behind or when they've had competitors like Liverpool keeping pace with them and waiting for any sort of slip-up. So I still have to assume that City is best placed to win, unless they lose or draw any matches.

Arsenal hasn't seemed as brittle this season. They've lost five matches, versus City's three, but have lost fewer games against weaker opponents. Aston Villa appears to be the only team that's beaten them home and away, but West Ham and Fulham have also beaten them, but no team has beaten Arsenal by more than two goals (so far). They do seem to have strengthened since last season, with more attacking options from midfield and the wings than just Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli and Martin Ødegaard - Leandro Trossard and Kai Havertz seem to have done a good job for them in particular, especially recently.

It'll be interesting to see if City do slip up, because I think I'm not alone in watching for cracks in their armor. They've been extremely dominant since 2017-18, and Liverpool's 2019-20 win notwithstanding, are poised to have a period of sustained success like Juventus in Serie A or Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga. Everybody talks about how much more open the Premier League is than other big European leagues (and France), but that openness has meant only that City rarely ran away with the title - most years they've had someone nipping at their heels, only to lose at the final hurdle.

If Arsenal can maintain this lead, it'll be an impressive achievement. Arsenal may not be a poor team by any reckoning, or even really underdogs, but given how City and Newcastle are essentially sports washing projects, and how Chelsea's billionaire owners have been driving them into the ground, it's good to see a team with less expansive resources challenging.

Again, let's keep this in perspective - Arsenal is rich as fuck, but not like these more expensively assembled rivals. I hope to see them lift the trophy in May... and while I'm at it, it'd be hilarious if City ended this season without any silverware.

I can dream, can't I?

American Politics Has Too Much Tolerance for Nonsense

My brain is about 80 to 85% comic books these days, but I kinda missed the boat on posting about Episode 5 of X-Men '97, and now I'm stuck waiting until the end of the season. I could have written about The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series by Ryan North and Erica Henderson, but decided it might be better to write about something else (although I'll get to Squirrel Girl at some point soon).

So you're getting a post about politics instead. Specifically the amount of foolishness that pervades electoral politics in our current age. I hinted at my thesis in a post I wrote last year, in which I wondered what the heck was up with Britain, but the main point for today is that American voters are oddly forgiving of absolute nonsense.

I should qualify that I'm mostly referring to, erm, one side of the aisle, though I do think that most establishment Democrats also fall for their own brands of, dare I say, malarkey. It's kind of built into the whole exceptionalism thing, which is why Britain seems to suffer from this malaise too.

But what do I classify as guff, nonsense and malarkey? It goes beyond structural disagreements about economics. I do think that most conservative/libertarian economic ideals are built on fantasy, at best, as when the UK pushes through a bunch of unfunded tax cuts (as Liz Truss tried to do last year), or when entire financial sectors are given carte blanche to gamble with everyone else's money (as we saw with the savings and loan collapse of the 80s, or the subprime mortgage credit crunch in 2008).

Rather, I'm talking about some of the more outre behavior of the West's populist leaders. I've seen a number of variations on the idea that "I never thought the apocalypse would be this stupid", and it's hit home for me. I'm talking about conspiracy theories that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation, or that the Uvalde shooter was a trans person, or that when Barack Obama told the people of Britain that Brexit was a bad idea, some dummies thought it was a set-up because he said leaving the EU would put Britain "at the back of the queue" for trade deals, and Americans don't say "queue", so he must have been coached by Remoaners, ergo and QED.

I could also go into the fact that people were setting fire to 5G masts during the pandemic, or that they were listening to some roided up idiot agree with his podcast guests that they should be taking an anti parasitic to not get Covid (which is, er, a virus), or that some folks were blaming the 2020 and 2021 wildfires on Black Lives Matter because they forgot that BLM can also stand for Bureau of Land Management... though I don't understand why the Bureau of Land Management would be setting fires.

(Don't try to explain it. If you give this theory any credit, you're stupid and I don't want to hear it)

(Also, I could list all the QAnon conspiracy ideas but we'd be here all day. Though I'm particularly fond of the idea that JFK Jr faked his death and that he was all set to make his return at Dealey Plaza a couple of years ago, where he'd immediately join Donald Trump's presidential ticket)

It seems to me that Americans are particularly susceptible to falling for nonsense. Part of it comes back to Richard Hofstadter's essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", which I haven't read but from what I know of it encompasses this idea that "they" are all out to get "us" and we need some demagogue to protect us. "They" could be communists, Black people, LGBTQ people, foreigners, or simply the favorite target of bigots throughout the ages, Jews (who are supposedly the ones behind communists and foreigners anyway). 

I get that conspiracy theories come from people feeling disempowered, whether politically, socially or economically. What I don't understand is why feeling disempowered means blindly swallowing every false and/or incoherent thing Donald Trump says. Trump is not exactly disempowered himself - he shits on a golden toilet and has a bunch of buildings with his name on them all over the world. He does and says some of the crudest things you can imagine, but a not-insignificant portion of American Christians think he's basically the Second Coming of Christ.

This is why I think Americans are particularly susceptible to nonsense. Nobody in Britain thought Boris Johnson was Jesus, or particularly smart - they just voted for him because he's an edgelord with an Oxford degree and they thought it'd be a laugh. Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni are deeply weird individuals (she's part of some Italian Neo-fascist strand that has built its identity on the radical agrarian society of Tolkien's Hobbits), but no one has built a quasi-religious conspiratorial framework around either of them.

Hell, Australians are probably the most naturally libertarian people I've ever encountered, but because the idea of a "fair go" is so ingrained in the national psyche, they found the political will to ban assault weapons after Port Arthur and have made great strides to attempt to atone for what they did to the Indigenous Peoples from the First Fleet through to the 20th century. Whereas in America, supposedly the land of the free and a place where "all men are created equal", we give undue attention to people who say that their right to buy assault rifles outweighs children's right to not be shot to pieces in school.

I don't know why exactly Americans fall for stupid and lazy arguments so easily, but I do know that this tendency is what underlies the big threats to our society. Trump may run around telling people that he should have won the election, but for some reason a lot of people are prepared to believe him, despite, or because, his arguments are so flimsy. If so many people are willing to disbelieve their own eyes on the say-so of the Party, at least the Party could come up with some lies that are internally consistent and not the deranged power fantasies of people who should know better.

Back to Australia

Just a couple of weeks ago I flew to Sydney for my sister's wedding. This was my first time visiting her there (the pandemic kinda got in the way), and my second visit to Australia and Sydney, the first being back in 2012. That time I only had a couple of nights in Sydney and didn't get to see much, but this time, apart from family stuff, I had about 10 days to rove around the sights and see what I'd been missing.

Circular Quay at night

As a prelude, I once again sprang for a business class upgrade for the flight over, so I got to travel in style. I reasoned that, with my departure time at 11.50pm and a flight time of 14.5 hours, I really needed to be able to sleep. I'll say my thinking was spot-on - I stayed up long enough for dinner (a caprese and chicken coconut curry with noodles, plus dessert) but ended up dozing for most of the trip. This meant that when I landed at 9am local time, I was reasonably well-rested and able to hang out with my sisters for the rest of the day. Indeed, I'd say that I was blissfully free of jet lag for the rest of the trip, so... result?

Fancy dinner and legroom

The other big difference from my previous trip is where I stayed. In 2012 I was paranoid about catching my onward flight to Cairns, so I ended up staying in an Ibis Hotel near the airport, but this time I stayed in a place near my sister's flat. It turned out to be a great location: about 20 minutes' walk to hers, and five minutes to Green Square train station, which I used to get into town most days. There was also a little shopping precinct nearby, with cafes, restaurants and a supermarket (one of the restaurants was, of all things, a Taco Bell).

With the extra days compared to 2012, I had a lot more time to see the sights and to just walk around. There was some stuff that my sister scheduled, like going to see local A-League side Sydney FC play against Central Coast Mariners, but otherwise I was able to hop trains into town pretty much whenever I wanted.

My first evening at liberty in town was actually Easter Sunday, when I went looking for Chinatown. I don't think I found the "real" Chinatown, i.e. the place with Chinese gates, but I walked along a number of streets that had all the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai restaurants you could ever want. I also spent A$20 in an arcade, where I also got to enjoy a dance battle on Dance Dance Revolution, which is always a treat. I was tempted to try out a karaoke booth, but that felt a little too Aggretsuko (and about 75% of the songs were in Korean anyway).

They seem to be really strict about PDA

I made a couple of stops at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, enjoying the galleries devoted to modern Australian art and the ones for paintings by European artists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I also took a morning to finally check out the Australian Museum, which I'd missed by minutes 12 years before. It was, as Bill Bryson writes in In a Sunburned Country, delightfully old-school, with room after room of stuffed animals and exhibits relating - sometimes in tangential ways, like the Irish elk skeleton - to Australia.

One morning was also spent at the Rocks, on the opposite side of Circular Quay from the Opera House. I caught the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Rocks Discovery Museum, as well as the Sydney Museum, which sits on the site of the first Government House. I'd have liked to check out the Police and Crime Museum, which is just up from the Quay, but it was closed until 13 April.

The rest of the time I was wandering around, looking for bookstores and nice places to eat. As to the former, Dymock's was reassuringly similar to Waterstone's, and I bought a couple of things there, though my favorite bookstore in Sydney is the Kinokuniya, pretty much for its enormous and well-appointed graphic novel section. I don't know what bookstore culture is like in Sydney generally, though it sounds like there are plenty of literary events and festivals; but the Kinokuniya was marvelous and I regretted not having more space to drag back a cartload of books from there.

As to places to eat, those are also varied and excellent in Sydney. I mentioned Chinatown, which had plenty of good places, but I also had loads of great Japanese, Thai and Chinese throughout my trip. The sushi was pretty much all high-quality - not as life-changing as in Tokyo, but invariably fresh and delicious. I even made it out to the Fish Market one day, where I sampled some tuna nigiri straight from the day's catch.

Another highlight was a family dinner at an RSL (Retired Servicemen's League), which maybe conforms most closely here to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Halls, but was actually quite different. It was like a combination of decent gastropub with casino attached, and the food and beer were nothing flashy but all went down nicely. To get in you need to register as a guest member, but apparently it's all a formality.

It struck me as I walked around the place that Australia is one of those countries that's made a place for itself in my heart, much like the US, the UK, Italy and Germany. I've never lived there, as I have in those others, but I could entirely see myself moving there... or I could, if it wasn't so damn far from everything else. Still, apart from the high house prices, it seems like a great, comfortable place to live, and I'd love to spend more time there. Indeed, in my last post about it in 2013, I talked about how great it would be to rent a flat there for a month and just enjoy it, and damn if that doesn't still sound like an amazing idea.

Now that my sister is married and settled on her partner visa, I was asking if I could use her as a reference to move there myself, but apparently my other sister has dibs on that. In any case, watch this space - maybe I'll meet an attractive Australian lady and get to move there with her?

Spoiler Filled Thoughts on X-Men 97

I wasn't going to watch X-Men 97 on Disney Plus, or not quite yet, for a number of reasons. The big one was that I didn't want to get sucked into a new TV show, and I reasoned that I needed to watch the previous five seasons before I tackled this new one. I get my Disney Plus from a friend and Disney is getting ready to crack down on password sharing, so I didn't want to find myself cut off mid-season (this is why, when I heard about the imminent crackdown, I binged Daredevil and The Punisher on Disney, and series 1 of Line of Duty and Modok and Justified: City Primeval on Hulu).

The other, slightly more fundamental reason, is that I don't actually have that much regard for the X-Men animated show. It came out at about the right time for me to appreciate it, when I was at the height of my first obsession with the X-Men, but I seem to remember being put off that it played fast and loose with the lore (this was important to me when I was 13), and it didn't have a lot of my favorite characters. The animation style wasn't that great either, as I recalled - it looked and sounded cheap, like the worst of the Ninja Turtles show or other contemporary cartoons, whereas something like Batman: The Animated Series might have variable-quality animation, but it looked interestingly stylized.

What happened, as ever, is that my social media feeds exploded with X-Men 97, and the YouTube algorithm, in its wisdom, also knew that I'd want to see a bunch of videos related to it. So I got served up a bunch of this stuff, and then, on Friday night, I cracked and watched the first episode.

Well, it was a lot better than I expected, in various ways. First off, the animation is miles ahead of the original show. I know, because immediately after watching the first new episode, I watched the first episode from way back in 1992 (this is the exciting life I lead on Friday nights). I'd gotten an inkling of this in some video clips I'd seen, but it was confirmed in the entire first episode. Standout scenes are Jubilee dancing in the nightclub when the X-Men go looking for Sunspot, and then the bit where Cyclops uses his optic blast to cushion his fall.

The sound was cleaned up nicely, too. Some cartoons from the 80s and 90s had this weird distortion, which I always associated with VHS tapes, but it was present in the first couple episodes of X-92, whereas X-97 was free of such artifacts. The voice acting was also generally better, though a couple of voices (mostly Rogue) sounded a little more aged than the characters warrant, though as one YouTuber put it, that's what happens when you hire the original cast 30 years later.

As far as the X-lore, there were some super interesting Easter eggs and teasers here. I don't know all the internal lore of X-92 because I don't think I watched anything beyond the first season, but the stuff I saw that was intriguing was a series of storylines and deep cuts from the books, specifically the 80s and early 90s era that I know best. The Trial of Magneto, in the second episode, was extremely well done, both in terms of visuals (the bit where he rips whole chunks of the UN building and flies them into space) and storytelling (specifically the X-Cutioner, who's presented as the reason Storm loses her powers here, as she did in the 80s). 

The second episode also ends with a great cliffhanger, as Jean Grey has just given birth to her and Cyclops's son, but there's a knock at the door and when they open up it's another Jean. Everyone looks surprised, but Jean (the one in the house) looks aggrieved. I guess this is them setting up Madelyne Prior, but I wonder how the Phoenix arc from previous X-92 seasons will be involved.

There's also all the cultural baggage to contend with, because of course there is. First off is the supposed wokeness, which many, many, many commentators have noted is the EXACT FUCKING POINT of the X-Men. Of course Gambit's going to dress... not entirely straight, and folks are going to drool in unseemly ways over the shipping potential of various characters whose sexualities in the comics have always been subject to discussion. If you're not prepared for someone to float the idea of a Magneto/Gambit/Rogue throuple, then I hate to be a gatekeeper, but wtf are you even doing watching X-Men?

The stupidest cultural baggage is the thing where some dummy got mad that they made Rogue's ass smaller because of "wokeness", because this is the darkest timeline and somehow people take you seriously when you argue that libs hate women with hourglass figures. This is just another manifestation of the alt-right mind virus that spilled a lot of ink when Sydney Sweeney was on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, and rightwing idiots made this argument that by having a figure she was triggering us. It's a different kind of triggering, I guess? By which I mean, appreciating Sweeney's acting chops and work ethic, because showbiz is harsh, y'all.

More serious is the firing, on the eve of the premiere, of X-97 show runner Beau de Mayo. When last I checked neither party had given a reason, so I won't speculate, but I'm curious what it will mean for any subsequent seasons. De Mayo is credited as the writer for both episodes so far, and he hasn't turned X-97 as fucky as Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa did with Riverdale, but, y'know, he might have if given the chance. I don't know if I'd like to see X-Men turn into a big gay melodrama like Riverdale, but I also hope that this firing isn't the result of some weird struggle for control that sees Marvel water the show down and make it less interesting.

Though for the record, turning X-Men into a big gay melodrama a la Riverdale would at least honor the source material from Chris Claremont, and it would be my second most desired treatment. My absolute greatest wish would be for someone to turn Patrick Willems' video of "What if Wes Anderson Directed the X-Men" into an actual movie, but again, darkest timeline.

Anyway. My verdict on X-97 is "cautiously optimistic", as well as "resigned to eventually having to add another damn streaming subscription". They've teased Jean's Clone Saga, Storm's search for herself post losing powers (and presumably hanging out in a hot tub with Callisto), and Morph's weird situationship with Mr Sinister. We've also seen cameos from some favorites like Colossus and Psylocke (though both were played by Morph). I'm hoping de Mayo worked in some references to Grant Morrison's run and the recent Krakoan Age, but we'll see. At any rate, it's a fun show and better than I was expecting.

And yes, it still has the absolutely iconic theme song. Go watch it.