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April 2004

30th April

A surreal article in today's Guardian profiles and interviews a man who technically doesn't exist. "Jim Lee has no documentation to prove who he is. He doesn't have a birth certificate. He doesn't have a national insurance number. He has never had a passport, or a bank account. He has never been registered with a doctor, and he has never been on the electoral roll. There is nothing to prove he is who he says he is - 68-year-old Jim Lee from London." I mean it's all very well, but anyone could have given that interview, couldn't they, let's be honest. Or maybe Jim Lee is the Urban Spaceman from the Bonzo Dog Band song? "Here comes the twist, I don't exist," I believe the lyric ran.

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The headline Police try 'chocolate cosh' on clubbers from today's Times could also have come from a Bonzos record. Disappointingly however the fuzz aren't actually going round armed with surreal equipment: "The 'chocolate cosh' was deployed for the first time in Bournemouth in the early hours of this morning as thousands of clubbers poured on to the streets. They were met by police officers armed not with truncheons and CS spray, but with 12,000 packets of KitKat Kubes." The report of course failed to mention exactly how painful those things can be when used in ways not recommended by Nestle.

*

The Independent reports that MI6 has set out recommendations to companies to protect themselves against possible terrorist attacks. Among these apparently is "cutting back shrubbery". I'm sure Osama Bin Laden is quaking in his boots at the very thought of less bushy bushes.

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29th April

The Independent reports that Nasa is taking steps to ensure that astronauts on long-voyages-to-come do not give in to their animal urges. "Interplanetary interplay" between crew members, zero-gravity conditions notwithstanding, could cause tension in the team and scupper America's mission to colonise other planets. One of the precautions Nasa is considering is sending only astronauts over the age of 50 on missions to Mars and so forth. All sounds a bit bloodless to me.

*

Elsewhere in the Indy, Booker-winning novelist Margaret Atwood answers readers' questions. Asked about her predilection for future dystopias in such books as The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, she comments, "No one can predict the future - there are too many variables - but you can make educated guesses. A lamb is likely to become a sheep rather than an octopus, unless something untoward takes place."

*

The Times reports that the new Dr Who series featuring melancholic actor Christopher Eccleston as the two-hearted time-traveller from Gallifrey will reflect the "darker times" we live in post-September 11th. Surely this is one for Private Eye's "Warballs" section? It's a myth anyway that our times are any darker than they ever have been. Subscribing to this view only buys into the Bush/Blair propaganda that is The War Against Terror (acronym: TWAT).

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24th April

Went to see Kill Bill Volume 2 last night at the Odeon in Tottenham Court Road - a full house (of course) and a great atmosphere in which to see a superb film. When the news came out last year that Tarantino's new movie was to be released in two parts, meaning everyone would have to pay "twice" to see the "one" film, I remember moaning about it in the blog, and even when I went to see Volume 1 I recall not liking it very much, feeling it was altogether too much of a "roaring rampage of revenge" and not enough of a "story". And as for the dialogue, well... Anyway, at the end of the day I would never have not gone to see it, and nor were any of those gripes enough to put me off watching the second instalment. Quentin diehards would probably argue this point, but if anything I found Volume 2 much better than Volume 1. While the first film was an homage to Kung Fu movies and oriental culture in general, this one switches to the West in both senses (although, thankfully, horses are replaced by cars. Don't get me wrong, horses are beautiful animals, but any film featuring one just brings back to me those dreadful endless Sunday afternoons in childhood watching Bonanza and old John Wayne movies on the TV). Vol 2 has less pyrotechnical fighting scenes, the dialogue seems to have settled down somewhat (either that or I "got" the silliness of it this time round), the pace is more relaxed (sometimes a bit too relaxed, perhaps - QT certainly does love to milk his material for all he can get) and of course we finally get to see why everything that happened in Volume 1, happened. I won't give any of that away (I was furious that the normally excellent critic Leslie Felperin revealed some of the plot in an Uma Thurman interview for the Independent the other week, apparently out of spite because La Thurman was in a bad mood) but I will say that (a) the "buried alive" scene near the beginning is terrifying, (b) David Carradine is superb, (c) the way Uma wins the fight with Daryl Hannah is inspired genius, (d) the whole "Pai Mei" section feels like a free gift with an already terrific movie and (e) the music! Ahhh... Go see (and listen).

Amazonian Killbillage - Thoughtcat recommends...

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22nd April

The BBC's short story competition End of Story has just come belatedly to my attention. From the quick look I've so far had at the site it seems contestants don't have to write a whole story but "only" finish one that's already been started by authors such as Ian Rankin, Joanne Harris, Sue Townsend and Alexei Sayle. I'll have to have another look at it as it's not clear whether you have to finish writing all eight stories or just one to stand a chance of winning. It also appears that even before you get to that point, you first of all have to find a copy of the book containing the semi-complete stories in question. Find one?? Yes: some 20,000 copies of the book have been secreted around the country and can only be located by deciphering riddles (e.g. "Whilst owning this estate of meadows and trees, complaining woman, Leonardo style is a bit of a looker"). All sounds a bit of a palaver to me, but then I've never been much of a crossword junkie. What was the prize again?

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19th April

Today's Guardian has a good feature on blogging, taking the form of an email conversation between three high(ish)-profile exponents of the weblog medium, namely Salam Pax and, er, two other blokes. One of them, Rhodri Marsden, quips thus: "I guess that starting my blog was an extension of emailing. I'd regale friends with stories of my tedious life, and embarrassingly I found that I'd be copying big sections from one email I was writing to someone in Sydney, to another email I was writing to someone in Leeds. Terrible, really. So I thought I should come clean before I got rumbled. Now it all goes up on the blog, the side-effect being that none of my friends get any emails any more." So if any of my own friends reading this are wondering how they're going to hack their way through my latest emailular epic, be, er, grateful(?) that I haven't yet dropped to Rhodri's standards of cordial communications. Equally, readers of the blog who may not know me personally (do you exist??) should definitely be grateful that the contents of those emails don't go on the site...

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Also in today's Guardian is a new short story which I haven't read yet by sometime Booker-shortlistee Magnus Mills. Thinking about it five years after the event I can't quite work out what was so Bookeresque about his debut novel The Restraint of Beasts, which was rather a slight and narrow work. It was a damn good read though, and I'd've been more than happy to have written it myself.

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18th April

Today's Independent on Sunday profiles Prince, who has finally made a new album, Musicology, after several hundred years in the wilderness. I can't say I was ever a massive fan even at the height of his fame in the mid-to-late eighties (the only album of his I ever bought was the so-so Parade, although even that had Kiss on it). But even I knew that he was an absolute genius. He played some staggering concerts in the late eighties, one of which I recall was televised (ah! more cathodic nostalgia). I can still see him arriving in the stadium in a flying car, and prancing about playing incredible solos on just about every instrument he could get his hands on. You simply don't get people who are that good playing pop music these days. I remember for that tour he also had a very sexy backing singer called Cat, although hours of Googling for a picture of her for the site have turned up nothing (I don't suppose any of my regular visitors might be able to help me out here??) I remember watching the concert on TV - I must have been sixteen or seventeen at the time - and just being spellbound. We were renting a three-bedroomed furnished maisonette above a newsagents at the time (by far the poshest and biggest place we've ever lived in) and we had a lodger, an art student from Northern Ireland called Pearse. He was very bohemian and romantic, all floppy hair and baggy cords and cigarettes, with a gentle accent and loopy handwriting, and he was a huge Prince fan. He was also a terrific painter - he did these great swirly sort of Van Goghian portraits. I often wonder what happened to him.

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17th April

Today's Guardian Review features a new short story by Martin Amis called In The Palace of the End, a nasty piece of work about, well, a nasty piece of work - a double for the brutal president of some "fictional" regime whose part-time jobs include miscellanous torture sessions. It's good, and certainly disturbing, but I couldn't help feeling it had all been done before by Harold Pinter - except not quite as graphically, although no less terrifying for that.

*

Germaine Greer meanwhile came out with what Martin Amis might have called a "black truth" on last night's Have I Got News For You, which is mercifully back for another series. Discussing the post-Iraq chaos, someone joked that Saddam Hussein was a friend of ours, in the sense that we more or less put him there in the first place. Greer then pointed out, "Saddam actually is a friend. It's only now he's gone that we're finding out what he was doing - keeping all these factions apart by simply murdering lots of people. And now we're the ones doing the murdering, and we don't like it at all!"

*

Further to the TC entry for 7th April quoting New York DJ Dennis Elsas - "What would you rather have Bob Dylan selling, ladies' underwear or cat food?" - Thoughtcat's advertising department has got together with Bob and come up with the following campaign.

Come on, you can't say no to an offer like that, can you??

*

Meanwhile, today's Times carries an interesting interview with US novelist Paul Auster. The article jumps about uneasily between his writing, personal life and political beliefs, so at times it reads like a non-sequitur, but the individual bits are good. On his fiercely anti-Bush stance Auster says, “For me, it feels almost like a matter of life and death for Americans that we get Bush out of office... This new idea of the pre-emptive war is something so terrifying to me. Obviously, over the last 100 years America has been involved in underhanded dealings all over the world. But in the big picture, our stance has always been: ‘We are not going to attack unless provoked.’ By saying we are going after anybody we like, we are turning ourselves into ugly bullies and I do not want to be part of that country.”

The article also quotes some lines from a silly anti-Bush song Auster wrote, a recording of which is featured on topplebush.com. This incidentally is a huge site "combining anti-Bush humo[u]r with intelligent articles and commentary and cool pro". I'm not sure exactly what "cool pro" is but topplebush.com has a formidable amount of stuff, including a range of satirical images and collages, some of which are funnier than others...

Carry On Dubya: the nostrils of Kenneth Williams maybe. The humour, intelligence and political acumen, no.

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11th April

Today's Observer has an endlessly fascinating article on writing by Mark Haddon, author of the bestselling prizewinning phenomenon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Here are a few selected pearls of wisdom from the piece:

"The best question I ever received came from a boy who asked whether I did much crossing out. I explained that most of my work consisted of crossing out and that crossing out was the secret of all good writing."

"Genre fiction says: 'Forget the gas bill. Forget the office politics. Pretend you're a spy. Pretend you're a courtesan. Pretend you're the owner of a crumbling gothic mansion on this worryingly foggy promontory.' Literary fiction says: 'Bad luck. You're stuck with who you are, just as these people are stuck with who they are. But use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.'"

"[Curious Incident] is about how little separates us from those we turn away from in the street. It's about how badly we communicate with one another. It's about accepting that every life is narrow and that our only escape from this is not to run away (to another country, another relationship, a slimmer, more confident self) but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves."

"I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away."

"[Writing books] is not about you. No one wants to know how clever you are. Like children, adults need to be entertained. Even those reading to make themselves better people would prefer to enjoy the process. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own."

"Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well."

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10th April

The Guardian Guide supplement, an ironic and often vitriolic, er, guide to new films, gigs, bands, comedy, theatre and TV, frequently goes so far up its own bum that all humour tends to be swept away under waves of smugness, so it's a pleasant surprise to see in today's edition not only something genuinely funny but also the magazine itself being upstaged by the subject of one of its own articles. Goldie Lookin' Chain ("GLC") are a bunch of lads from Newport who seem to be doing for hip-hop what The Darkness are doing for heavy rock (man). On their creative process, band member Dwayne Xain Zedong explains, "It's like a big fight. Have you seen Fight Club? Well this is more like Golf Club. And what's the first rule of Golf Club?" Eggsy is swift to respond: "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master." Xain nods in agreement: "The most important thing you've gotta learn is, like Shaun Ryder says, you can't skin up with a pebble. Vibe on that." GLC also have a very funny website at www.youknowsit.co.uk (note, incidentally, that this is the correct URL, unlike the one supplied by the Guide...)

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9th April

Los Angelian-out-of-Manchester cardy-popper and professional loner Morrissey is interviewed in today's Guardian. He not only sounds just the same as ever but the questions put to him are equally as drab and predictable. On choosing to live alone, he comments thus: "Well, you see, I consider that to be a privilege. I don't feel like I live alone because I've made a terrible mistake or I'm difficult to look at. Can you imagine being able to do what you like and never having to put up with any other person? And their relatives. You can constantly develop when you're by yourself. You don't when you're with someone else. You put your own feelings on hold and you end up doing things like driving to supermarkets and waiting outside shops - ludicrous things like that. It really doesn't do." My gut reaction when I read that was that he's exactly right - often in a long-term relationship you do find yourself in daft situations you wouldn't have found yourself in had you been alone. But for him of all people to say "you constantly develop when you're by yourself" is either a great Morrissey joke or an example of his emotional myopia. As I said before, he hasn't changed a bit despite living alone for about 100 years. Maybe he should investigate a live-in relationship or two and see if he actually does come up with something new to say. Elsewhere, the article reports that "he took antidepressants when he was 17 in order to help him sleep, and he has had therapy intermittently since then, but he is almost proud of his black moods. 'I think if you're remotely intelligent you can't help being depressed. It's a positive thing to be. It means that you're not a crashing bore. I mean, you don't get support groups for rugby players, do you?'"

8th April

Another April Fool just spotted (albeit belatedly) in Internet Magazine: "From the beginning of June you will need to buy a licence to access the Internet or risk facing a fine of up to £1,000. Computers with their monitors set to a resolution of 1024x768 and above will cost £121 a year to license, while resolutions of 640x480 and below will cost £40.50 a year." Great stuff. Of course, now that I've quoted this a week late, it'll probably rebound on me by actually happening. Then again, I wouldn't put it past the present government to do such a thing.

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7th April

Just what is going on in the world of Bob Dylan at the moment? First he puts the name of one of his albums to a bottle of wine, and now according to the Independent he's appearing in a TV ad for lingerie. "In the commercial the singer, who turns 63 next month, scowls out from the streets of Venice, his image intercut with shots of a model, Adriana Lima, prancing through La Serenissima in bra, panties, spiked heels and a pair of wings." Sounds reasonable, actually, although I may be in a minority here. The report goes on: "'I'm going to have to go blow my brains out,' says John Baky, the curator of a collection of Dylan material at Philadelphia's La Salle University. Many fans on websites lamented their hero had sold out; others found the juxtaposition of the wrinkled, cantankerous-looking musician with a semi-nude Brazilian model either hysterically funny or desperately sad, perhaps both. One fan, identified as D D Bonkers, said: 'Strange as it is, I'm not sure if it's the mark of Dylan selling out...he's always done these goofy things.'" This is all, of course, in spite of Dylan's famous "anti-globalisation" lines from It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding: "Advertising signs that con / You into thinking you're the one / That can do what's never been done / That can win what's never been won..."

The journalist goes on: "So now it's Dylan and knickers. Better, as one New York DJ observed, than Dylan and cat food." Now there's a thought... I'll have to work on that one. Stay tuned, Bobcats!

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*

The Independent also carries an unintentionally surreal piece about the internet/computer phenomenon known as white noise, the virtual din created by computers automatically talking to each other which supposedly could spell the end of the web as we know it. Explains the journo: "A rookie postman soon learns that on the high street, Woolworths is located next to the Virgin Megastore, and isn't about to disappear. So if he has post for Woolworths, he takes post for Virgin, too. He learns to cut out redundant journeys and makes calculations to rectify mistakes. But on the internet, omniscient calculations aren't possible. On the internet, the two 'stores' don't know they're next to each other. As their internet protocol is programmed to do, they chatter constantly, sending each other 'are you there?', and 'yes, I'm still here' messages." The poor things - bred for insecurity!

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6th April

SERENDIPITY

I had one of those lovely net moments this morning - you know, when you're looking for something in particular, or maybe nothing at all, and either way you stumble across something not only excellent but all the better for being unexpected. I was browsing the headlines on the Times website and clicked on a story about Steve Fossett's record-breaking 58-day round-the-world voyage. That article mentioned that a member of Fossett's crew was one Mark Featherstone, whom I'd never heard of but was prompted to wonder if it wasn't the same bloke who ran an estate agency that I worked for once (very briefly and at a time of total desperation, I should add). So I Googled for Mark Featherstone, by which time I'd already lost interest in whether the boat bloke was the guy I used to work for (I never really knew him anyway), and clicked instead on the second search result, a site featuring a poem by another Mark Featherstone called Again By Flood - which turned out to be bloody good. That, incidentally, makes two excellent poems I've ended up reading unexpectedly in the past two days - the other being The Lanyard by Billy Collins, which TC contributor Chris Bell pointed me to via the Russell Hoban newsgroup The Kraken. And so the links go on, tentacularly... (Note to self: curtail this habit of ending posts with an ellipsis... it really is darned irritating...)

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4th April

Quite a painful little item in a feature about blogs in the Observer today: "A second-year law student at King's College and his blog, entitled 'Honestly, I'm Sober', keenly documents his pursuit of the four cornerstones of undergraduate life: alcohol, music, work and women. I was attracted to it by its frank and funny stories (waking up on a night bus miles from home after too many Southern Comfort and lemonades at the Law Ball) and by one particularly disarming remark in his online biography. 'Relationships-wise for myself, there's nothing at all happening in my life on that front, and there hasn't been for over three years. Afraid I'm still virginal as well; 20 years old, and still a virgin. Not good.' This may be the modern route to the sympathy lay, but I doubt it. In a long post last month, he wrote about his relationship with a fellow student and principal crush he calls Girl, and it has all the authentic fumbling uncertainties." All I could think when I read this was thank God there was no such thing as blogging when I was that age...

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3rd April

Thoughtcat is very happy to read that Michael Grade has been appointed the new chairman of the BBC. He's always come across as a great bloke, very popular and creative and of sound judgment, and has languished far too long already in Lotterydom. I remember years ago (10 to be precise) watching Dennis Potter's incredible last interview, and Potter saying then that Grade - at that time head of Channel 4 - should be director-general of the BBC. "It's what it's crying out for - anyone with any nous can see that," said the often-spiky master of TV drama, adding that he'd always been "very fond, as it happens" of Grade. I also remember something Grade himself said in one of his first interviews after moving from his original post at the BBC to Channel 4: asked what his favourite two Channel 4 programmes were, he said Channel 4 News and Film on Four, and I remember even then as a 17-year-old or whatever agreeing that those were the best two things on the channel, if not the whole of British TV at the time. Channel 4 News is still going strong and retains its laid-back format, funky look and Jon Snow to boot, while tragically Film on Four long ago went the way of all brilliant TV ideas, or at least up to the Great Satellite Dish In The Sky. Ah... a Thursday evening in watching a fantastic, completely uncommercial European art-house film on the telly, and it started at 9pm and never ran longer than 90 minutes... those were the days, to be sure. Now what have we got? Make-over your house! Make-over your cooking! Make-over your cat! (Actually that's not such a bad idea.) Make-over your underpants! Make-over your makeover! And if it's not that then it's Big Brother or The Top 476 TV Repeats Of All Time. If Michael Grade still feels as strongly about the things he left the BBC to develop at Channel 4 back in the eighties, I hope he brings some of them back to Auntie in the noughties.

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2nd April

ENOUGH DOUGH, ALREADY

The news that the actors who provide the voices for The Simpsons are threatening to strike if they don't get massive pay rises has prompted a rash of "d'oh/dough" puns among headline writers. For instance:

Dough! Gimme more or I don't talk, says Homer (Times)

Dough! Make it $360,000 an episode or we quit the series, say Springfield Six (Independent)

Homer silenced in row over $8m d'oh (Guardian)

Meanwhile, the trusty old Telegraph sticks with the more conservative

Voice of Homer Simpson goes on strike over pay

- although I suspect they went for this less from a desire for originality than because most Torygraph readers have probably never heard of the Simpsons, let alone would know what "d'oh" was all about.

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*

Meanwhile today A Year In Provence author Peter Mayle is grilled (or at least lightly sautéd) by Independent readers. He comes across as refreshingly down-to-earth and honest about his success and achievements. Asked if he regrets the way his books have "helped undermine the very authenticity that you seemed to love about Provençal villages", he responds thus: "When I wrote A Year in Provence, the region was hardly a secret place and nor was it completely unspoilt. I think people confuse authenticity with some sort of medieval way of life. Authenticity just means genuineness - the way people are at any particular time. People visit Provence, see farmers on their tractors talking on mobile phones and say, 'Oh God, that's not authentic at all.' But it's authentic for today's Provence - that's the way the people are." Elsewhere, in response to the sarky question of whether just anyone who "moves abroad and has a leaky roof" has a book in them, he says "No, although I get sent a lot of chapters from people who think they do. The main mistake people make is they are too concerned with themselves and don't pay attention to what is going on around them. They are too busy congratulating themselves on buying a loaf of bread, and not on what is curious or ghastly in the foreign environment around them." Good advice to writers in general I should think. Finally, I completely agree with him about marmalade...

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1st April

You know what they say about April Fools - you have to play them before noon or else they rebound on you. Well, Thoughtcat has total respect for this rule, but even so my (albeit rather lame) attempt at a joke backfired on me today. For the past few weeks I've been temping in an office in the West End, and in the kitchen the tea and coffee making equipment includes little rectangular paper packets of sugar - you know, those highly environmentally-unfriendly sachets containing about one fifth of a spoonful of the white stuff which proverbially helps the medicine go down. Delving into a bowl of these packets several times a day for the past month, I've noticed something rather odd - every so often I'll find one which is sealed, but contains no sugar. Despite being a longtime (and heavy) sugar user, I've never noticed this before, and out of curiosity I started collecting these rare items. At some point the idea came to me for putting my discovery to use as some kind of April Fool, so today I went in a few minutes early and typed up the following sign I intended to post in the kitchen:

Armed with said notice and some sellotape I crept into the kitchen and attempted to stick it on the wall while trying not to be spotted - let's face it, not an easy thing to do at the start of the day, as the kitchen is the first place most people go. After a couple of close shaves (I feigned innocence with the aid of a sachet of drinking chocolate and some more-than-usually-mundane morning smalltalk) I managed to get the sign on the wall, but to my horror I realised I hadn't brought with me any of the empty sugar packets that had inspired this whole thing. Without an actual example, surely my sign would just look like... a joke?? Failing to see the humour, I rummaged urgently in the bowl containing the packets of sugar, sure I would find one - but nothing. Okay, I thought, they are fairly rare and there are only twenty or so sachets here, so I dug around the kitchen cupboards for the catering-style box of 1000 sachets that the firm gets from the supplier. Handful after handful of these things I lifted out and sifted through my fingers into the bowl with increasing panic as I failed to find a single sealed-but-empty sachet. Statistically I knew this was near-impossible - either that, or the sugar people had actually wised up (wisen up?) and stopped ripping its customers off. I don't want to sound bitter (or at least not sweet) but I was getting the distinct feeling that Someone Up There was playing an April Fool on me - and it wasn't fair! It was still only 9.15! In the end I had to take down the notice, throw it away, go back to my desk, re-type the sign with the "like this" bit and the space removed, reprint it and steal back into the kitchen, feigning interest in more packets of drinking chocolate and sundry other catering items as colleagues drifted through, before finally being left alone long enough to stick the thing to the wall. I never knew April Fools could be such hard work. In the end of course the "joke" (for what it was, ultimately, worth) was probably better without the example sachet because maybe, just maybe, someone might have read the sign and found themselves looking fruitlessly for one, or at least remembered the date and thought a sealed sugar sachet devoid of sugar was, actually, a pretty funny idea.

But I doubt it.

^..^

*

Meanwhile, far better April Fools jokes from various sources today include the Guardian's report that notorious New Labour fixer Peter Mandelson was in the running for the new "unbiased" chairmanship of the BBC, the Independent's story that Brian Eno had written a new "experimental" version of the Archers theme tune, and Google's excellent advert for vacancies at its new "Copernicus" moon base. The Times also ran a story about chicken-powered nuclear missiles which it claimed was gospel and sadly, in fact, probably is.

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*

PLASTIC JESUS?

Something that (probably) wasn't an April Fool's joke but certainly sounded like it was the story I noticed in the current issue of very silly "lads' mag" Zoo today (which I was leafing through in a purely researchular capacity, you understand) about Mel Gibson's current The Passion of the Christ blockbuster, reporting that for some of the crucifixion scenes an "animatronic Christ" had been used because the actor playing Jesus was less than happy with being crucified for hours at a time in freezing conditions (as you would be). There was a photo of this model crucified Christ, which only consisted of a top half, with sundry electronics hanging out of its midriff like that scene in Alien when Ash gets torn asunder (in fact, didn't a similar fate befall C3PO in one of the Star Wars movies?). Even more disturbingly, apart from the wires the thing looked even more hideously lifelike than the actor. The report noted meanwhile that the Christdroid was "operated by Gibson himself". I mean, is that playing God or what?

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