Newstocks

Muzzling your critics

First, appeal to race by accusing your critics of asking "plantation questions".

Second, use the courts to shut them up, appealing all the way to the Privy Council if necessary.

Third, intimidate and arrest the country's financial watchdog.

Fourth, pull funding from critical media outlets.

Fifth, shut down debate in the House of Assembly whenever Opposition MPs get too critical.

Sixth, avoid answering inconvenient Parliamentary questions by strong-arming the Speaker into quashing them.

What next?

The Order of the Shrill

I joined it. Stuart Hayward joined it, as he demonstrates again today. Some say Larry Burchall has joined it too. In fact, I think most columnists and bloggers in Bermuda are now members.

What am I talking about? The Bermuda chapter of the Order of the Shrill, made up of "those who were once sane, fair, and balanced, but who have been driven into shrill unholy madness by one or more of the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence, or simple disconnection from reality of the [Ewart Brown] administration".

And I suspect that the longer the Premiership of Ewart Brown continues before some members of the PLP with some balls step up and put an end to it, the more members it's going to attract.

Swinging with grandma and grandad

Formats available:Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)

The game that thinks it's a movie

One of the biggest upcoming titles on the PS3 is, apparently, Metal Gear Solid 4. Lots of people seem to be getting very excited about it. I don't understand why.

Admittedly, I've not played any of the previous titles in the series, but based on the dull introductory video ("war has changed" - yawn), which looked little different from any other shooter set in the Middle East, and now the news that there are several cut-scenes in the game that are approaching 90 minutes long, I remained resolutely unimpressed.

In the words of one of the commenters on Ars Technica, referring to the game's developer Hideo Kojima, "If he wanted to make a movie that's what he should have done. Games are meant to be played."

Quite.

Yawn

Battlestar Galactica is becoming self-absorbed and dull.

Still catching up on the last few week's episodes, last night we watched this season's fifth episode, "The Road Less Travelled". Despite this being the show's final season, it was another episode in which not much happened.

I'm tired of Kara Thrace and her crazy, wall-painting antics. I'm tired of Gaius Baltar and his incomprehensible religious gibberish (given his role on New Caprica I struggle to understand why anyone sees him as messianic). Can we move on already?

I used to look forward to every new episode of this show, even during the somewhat uneven third season. Now, not so much. Needless to say, Mandy is having even more trouble staying interested than I am.

Please God don't let this be another X-Files that starts with a bang but ends with a whimper.