Superlative Criminality

There is no criminal like an old criminal,
the expert who can bend the law further,
and further still, towards his own ends
where nobody can guess the end point,
beyond how he bends the law into shapes
that it will never be bent back into.

Financially, the lawyers will always do well
out of this sort of thing, the judges will suffer
much more - as they repeat themselves
in judgement after judgemnt, where each time
the client instructs his lawyers 'Disobey that.'.

Nobody know how the history books
will record all this new lawlessness,
how it will end, or what will replace it.

But whilst we all live through this age
of superlative crminality the little people
can only watch how wealth and power
makes the wealthy unmindful kleptomaniacs.

From Tech To Text

Recently there has been an uptake
in technology from the recent past
that has became passe with buyers
of what has replaced it, as tech firms
make needless changes to what they sell
to increase sales and beat their competitiors.

This consumer choice give me hope
that those who are taking up such old tech
might also rediscover the oldest tech of all
 - language and reading, so that old books
get new editors to be rediscovered/reformated.

The Long And The Short Of A Smile

The time it takes for a smile to be shared
can be very long or so short that to comment
on the sharing takes longer to say than it's sharing.
It took Brian Wilson 37 years, and overcoming 
multiple nervous breakdowns, for him to get
his song suitr 'SMiLE', from it being written
and recorded in 1966/7 to it being edited, fit
for Brian to it perform it live. Such was the strife,
and the travails of the times that Brian lived through,
But part of the pay off was that the publishing rights
were much better for his patience with the waiting.

By contrast  it took the Danish humourist and musician
Victor Borge less time than his satires on classical music
to say to the world one of his most enduring epigrams
'A smile is the shortest distance between two people.'.

Out Of Time

How can I describe living with dyspraxia
in a way that makes sense of it, to anyone
who does not have the condition?

Well, having it does not mean that
the carrier does not know how to write.
or that they cannot read, or cannot listen.
But to those who live without the condition
it seems that the dyspraxic cannot learn
how to follow cues at the same speed,
and with the same confidence, they have.

And after a certain age, a diagnosis
of the condition becomes impossible,
unless in getting the pronouncement
the experts can award themselves 
some social and material advantage. 

The length of time it takes for the dypraxic
to appreciate how they react and understand
is slower than other people expect is painful.
But, when they recognise the condition,
better late than never, life will get better.

But too late for there to be any real recovery.

The British Commonwealth And Anti-Homosexual Law

The British Commonwealth was first formed in 1931,
after a 1926 conference that passed the second Balfour declaration.
The first such declaration having been made in 1917.
In 1926, including Britain, The Commonwealth
was defined as being six or seven countries.
The Irish Free State left it in 1949, never to return.

Nowadays the number of commonwealth coutries
and former commonwealth countries is 57, combined.

Of those 24 have rescinded or updated the laws
that were written in the days of empire, to make consent
the basis of all modern law about same sex sexual activity.

The 24 are Australia, Bahamas, Belize, Botswana, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, India, Lesotho, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Rwanda, St Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, Seychelles, Singapore, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago (subject to appeals) and the United Kingdom.

The other 33 British Commonwealth countries retain homophobic laws that originated from the days of Empire. Their disinterest extends to obscuring the difference between homophobic and non-homophobic law, and in obscuring the nature of the case law rhat follows. So it is hard to distinguish homphobic case law and non-homophobic case law, and the decisions that follow from it. 

They are Antagua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Brunei, Cameroon, Eswatini, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Kirfibati, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanatu, and Zambia.

The wave of recent recinding of colonial era anti-gay law started with the Nauru, Belise, and the Secchelles in 2016. Trinadad and India followed in 2018. Next Botswana overturned colonial era anti-gay laws in 2019. In 2022 St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Singapore overturned their colonial era anti-gay laws. In 2023 Mauritious overturned some of its anti-gay laws. The present focus on overturning colonial era anti-gay laws is focused on an appeal held in Britsh courts over colonial 'anti-sodomy laws' in Trinidad and Tobago. For much more about the advance in civil liberties please left click here.

It is odd how new American money is buying into 500 year old British colonial law. Many Commonwealth countries are now little more than tax havens to the people who don't live there. This might explain how  American homophobes with money are attracted to this now weak institution. If that is the draw, how do we dismantle that attraction?   

'The Burdened' - Kithchen Sink Drama Lives! A Film Review

It is rare to see a film set in Yemen, a country that is new to film making. It is rarer still in 2026 to see a kitchen sink drama. 'The Burdened' (2023) is both of these things, and more besides. It was co-scripted and directed by Amr Gamal, and was his second film and only the second film to be made in Yemen. I watched without doing any prior reading about the film, or the country that I expected it be set in. That the film script, co-written by writer Amr Gamal, was rooted in the theatre was obvious from the first scene onward. 

The film focused on one family, a mother, father, and three chidren all well under ten years old, living a hand to mouth life in the city port of Aden, which as I read after was until 1967 British, and like many cast offs of the British Empire was left to fend for itself in a very uncertain post empire world. In the last decade or more uncertainty turned to civil war. The effects of the war were there to be seen in the footage of the streets of Aden, where there was very little rubble but the place looked like mny bombs had hit it, and there was not the money to fully repair buildings. The script was terrific and made a virtue of its theare roots and minimal resources to craft a tight story where desperation fought decency, and wanting to do what was approved involved conflict. 

I lost count of the number of times when two characters met one would say to the other 'As-salamu alaykum', 'Peace be upon you' where the reply was 'Wa alaykum as-salam', 'And upon you be peace'. Those two phrases were the most used words used in the 91 minutes of the film, to the point where I wondered if there was some private intonation of the two rsponces in the film where, different intonations conveyed more private meanngs between the women who used both phrases. But the fact that the women where the majority of the characters and greeted each other so often with those two phrases pushed the film far further than I would have expected into it passing the Bechdel Test. The indications of the taboo with women's dress was also made clearer with, depending on the company, the women wore veils that were detatchable in an instant.

The core of the film was a family trying to get by an economy where the government does not pay its own workers the wages they are due for months after the wages were due. And yes, just as talk of illegal abortion was the sure fire way to spice up a BBC kitchen sink drama in the plays it broadcast in black and white in the 1960s, so the same rule of drama follows here. The real delight was in seeing not a second of the camera framing or the script wasted, as the characters explore disaster after disaster narrowly avoided. 

The film ends on an uncertain note of hope.

How Is Your Appetite For Life?

I can't mind appetite suppressants
taking up the air time that they take,
as they are talked up in the media.
I take control of what I eat,
so I have less need of them,
whether they are pills or injections.

I would like to be modest in how I live,
so I ask, is there a pill that will help me
reduce my appetite for living? Something
that as it helps me ask less of other people
will give those people I no longer ask for
more time that they can be with the truly needy?