Nowadays My Style Is Better, and Occasionally the Jokes Are Too...

News via the LibraryThing Blog of a newly reworked classic, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Proving that I lack business acumen, since the idea of making Austen more viscerally appealing was one I had one bored day in Sixth Form, quite a few years ago now. My Erra didn't have zombies, but it did involve death:

Erra Woodlouse, who was rich, lived in perpetual fear of an attack on her fortress of Ventriclefield by the local marauding army of ten thousand gypsies, five hundred elephants, six giant robots and a fire-breathing dragon...

The time came for the annual raid on Mr. Whiteley's strawberry crop, and, of course, Mrs. Belson had to be invited. While Mr. Woodlouse distracted Mr. Whiteley by demanding to see his seashell collection, the raiding party crawled stealthily towards the strawberry beds, swinging on vines across the crocodile-infested moat...

The incessant chatter (omitted for the reader's benefit) of Miss Bats... led Erra to decide to kill her. On the pretext of visiting Nox Hill... the execution party... tied Miss Bats to a stake atop the hill. All watched from a safe distance as Erra remotely guided the cruise missile to its target—but alas, it hit the stake, and Miss Bats's death was less exciting than had been hoped.
     Mr. Whiteley was not pleased. "Erra," he said, "that was pathetic. I had hoped to see showers of blood, explosive tissue dynamics and post-collapse arterial spurting, but I am disappointed. You handled that missile like an amateur."

I've refrained from posting the whole thing, on the straightforward grounds that it isn't very good. The horrors of having once been young...

There Should Be a Metaphysics of Bureaucracy, a Battleground Between Realist and Idealist Schools...

For such tales as these, along with the stories about dead people registered to vote one hears from time to time, there surely ought to be a genre term...

The story of Lieutenant Kizhe originates in two anecdotes published in St. Petersburg in 1901, in a collection of various materials relating to the reign of Paul I. According to one of these, a copy-clerk's error resulted in a misreading of a name by the Emperor and the creation of a nonexistent Lieutenant Kizh, who was subsequently promoted all the way up to colonel. Only when Paul asked to see Lieutenant Kizh so as promote him to general, did the authorities realize that a mistake had been made. They told the Emperor that Kizh had died. "That's a shame," Paul said, "He was a good officer." In the second anecdote an officer of a company of Dragoons was mistakenly listed as dead, and consequently asked his commandant for a certificate stating that he was alive. The commandant refused, however, not daring to do so after an official order had stated the officer to be dead. Finding himself without rights or pay, the officer petitioned the Emperor, who similarly refused since dead men cannot write petitions.

Bureaucracy becomes a text in itself, a setting for the exploits of nonexistent persons. An author with sufficient connections to insert the necessary 'errors' into official documents might generate the supreme modern narrative; the government's storehouses of Identity could be subverted as the canvas upon which the fortunes of entire imaginary dynasties are played out.

In practice, the game no doubt becomes more fraudulant than artistic: another scam for funnelling money to oneself. I like to imagine, though, that gentleman players would seek to level up their characters, not for mere personal gain, but for the sake of bureaucratic puppeteering itself: an epic tale of struggle between imaginary champions, played out in smudged forms and erroneous databases, and coming to a head in some great clerical Crufts.

Make It Stop...

Proving that there's no problem too intractable for parliamentary draftsmen to ignore, apparently we now have a Bill which, in its eagerness to punish possessors of drawings made in the wrong style, dictates that an image is of a child if 'the predominant impression conveyed is that the person shown is a child despite the fact that some of the physical characteristics shown are not those of a child'.

Even when resigned to the propensity towards evil of much of the political class, I'm still frequently struck by the sheer persistent sloppiness.

Speaking of Tolkien...

...today news comes to me of a paper about causal decision theory entitled 'Gandalf's Solution to the Newcomb Problem' (PDF). Vindication for the philosophical significance of high fantasy!

A quick scan suggests that Gandalf doesn't actually feature for very much of the paper, though to make up for it there are frequent references to killing psychopaths.

What Language Did They Speak In Angband?

Helge Fauskanger notes that besides the general tendency of Orcs to pervert other peoples' languages, 'it is also said that Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, "had made a language for those who served him" (VT39:27)' (anticipating the Black Speech with whose invention Sauron is credited). Which of course invites the question: did Tolkien ever get even as far as giving this language a name? A little Googling shows that I'm not the first to ask the question, but leaves me without a clear answer.

I suppose the corrupted Ainur, besides having telepathic abilities, could conceivably have employed Valarin or some debasement thereof (assuming Balrogs could talk at all); since that language is supposed to have fallen harshly on Elvish ears, it doesn't seem wholly implausible. But what about this language Morgoth is supposed to have invented, presumably standard among his Orcs and other lesser servants, for whom nothing related to Valarin would seem likely? And why, if an existing language suitable for a Dark Lord's servants existed, would Sauron, who presumably knew it, decide to create a new language for basically the same purpose (if indeed that is a definite implication of the sources)?

I seem vaguely to recall, though I can't now find it, an article somewhere darkly speculating that Morgoth's early and mysterious dealings with Men might not have been without consequence for Mannish speech...

How Did This Pass Me By For So Long?

There's not much you can convey in words about a fighting game based on Les Mis., and someone else already has, so I'll just let my jaw go back to dropping.

The Immortal Body

A recent academic study by Dr Katherine Flegal and colleagues found the weight group with the lowest death rate was overweight, while Dr. Jerome Gronniger's analysis found negligible differences in risk of death among people with body mass values from 20 to 25.
spiked

Okay, the preceding sentence in the source text does reveal that it's about premature death.

This Sentence Perplexes Me

Firms have failed to provide the money required voluntarily, forcing ministers to consider compelling them to do so.
B.B.C. News

Maybe That’s What the Non-Interactive House Really Is...

I wondered whether in its depths the Game Boy film tie-in DragonHeart might harbour any clues about the house in Level One that can't be entered and doesn't show up on the map, or whether there was any more to the talking grass than an incidental curiosity. No findings on either front, but I did discover this:

Those are the eight levels of the game all right, but whatever is the 'House of Beards'? (Presumably nothing to do with houseofbeards.com.) Given the jokey tone (whoever wrote the dialogue for this game really went in for beard-related banter) and its position at the end of the list, I'm guessing maybe it was the programmers'/debuggers' name for the closing credits or something like that.