black and white and read all over

I happily blew my brain on Thursday night by watching Fahrenheit 911 and Sky High back-to-back, an extremely random and unlikely pairing that gave me a momentary case of dissociative identity disorder, and left me with the slightly confused impression that the world would be rather better off if it were run by secret cabals of campy superheroes than by secret cabals of venal old men. I managed not to see Fahrenheit 911 when it came out, for no adequately defined reason: it's a pretty powerfully manipulative piece of cinema, building up an inexorable case against Bush which is clearly and unashamedly biased, and thus makes for a rather more honest counterpoint to the manipulations of the conservative media. Bit self-indulgently slow in parts, though. Sky High is an equally black-and-white view of good and evil, but infinitely more fun - random props to Kurt Russell and a bonus Bruce Campbell taking the mickey out of themselves.

While we're in the Department of Venal Old Men: I'm afraid that with regard to Zimbabwe at this stage I imitate the action of the ostrich - I don't want to know the details, they make me cry. But I am deriving considerable vindictive satisfaction, even if symbolic rather than meaningful, from the discovery that the Queen has stripped Bob of his knighthood. Go Queenie!

In the Department of Ineffable Cosmic Mistiming, I'm going to have a nicely relaxed week of leave noodling around with the Tepper/Shelley/gothic/sf/marginal genres paper. Then I'm going to go back to work just as my publishers, who seem to have suddenly snapped into production mode, land me with a 100 000-word book to proofread and index in under a month. Note to onlookers: I may be largely unavailable for much of July.