I glomp this, for obvious reasons:

Thanks to my amigo Christian Read, author of the very damn wonderful Eldritch Kid, for the heads-up. Solomon Kane, witchhunter. As I said to Christian, the guy being a puritan who never laughs is something of a drawback. But really, with those lips, and all the rest, who cares? Kane was the invention of Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan. If the Kane movie is half as cool as Conan the Barbarian, I’ll be a happy viewer.

I’m thinking about the music now. (I care about soundtracks.) Sadly, Basil Poledouris who wrote the kickass soundtrack for Conan has left the earth. Lisa Gerrard jumps to mind as an obvious choice for something grand and epic, but I’d love to see what Nick Cave would do with it — or Shinjuku Thief, aka Derrin Verhagen, composer of the great, gothic-postclassical Witch Hammer, Witch Hunter and Witch Haven albums.

Oh, yeah. And a decent script. Better have that, too.

Sometimes around the beginning of November I decided to write a first draft at 2000 words a day. I didn’t realise it was NaNoWriMo until about the 17th, duh… anyway, I stuck with it, and it’s done, after a fashion. 60K words. About another 4K is still lying around in notes that I’ll either discard or work into this rough beast of a draft over the next few days.

It’s a mainstream book, dealing with ideas that have been bouncing around in my mind for a while. It doesn’t have a definite title yet. I also started on another mainstream book while I was writing it. Now I’m going to put the first one aside for at least a month and work at a slower pace on the second, as well as on Horn and other projects.

I’m happy about three things: I made myself type 2000 words a day whether I wanted to or not; I started at a beginning and finished at an end, and there’s a middle with a kind of plot in there, which means it’s the first draft of a novel and not just a pile of words; and I found a passionate, interested place to write from that didn’t have Gwynn in the middle of it. I’ve been able to do that with my other projects this year, too.

I’m not so happy with how messy it all is. It switches between 1st and 3rd person, a lot of things are out of order, and there are probably too many themes in it for the shortish book I originally wanted it to be. So I have a lot of decisions to make and quite possibly a lot of drafts still to write.

I’m pretty sure the fast writing process helped to facilitate my catching the characters’ emotion and thought. I didn’t have the energy or time to play with language and style, so I concentrated on the substance and I’m happy with some of the fish I caught.

And now I’m going to take the weekend basically off, play with the Wacom and book our hotel, as we’re going to Angkor Wat the week after next. Holiday in Cambodia!

…Sudan’s clerics, over this week’s case of Mohammed the bear. In brief, British teacher Gillian Gibbons, teaching in Sudan, asked students to propose names for the adorable white bear, then vote on a name. They chose Mohammed, provoking a furore and resulting in Gibbons being charged with inciting religious hatred, since it would be an insult to Islam’s prophet to name an animal — even, it seems, a toy one — after him. Even though it was the students, mostly Muslim, who put the name on the ballot and then voted for it, Sudan’s top crackheads clerics called the incident part of a broader Western plot against Islam and called for the full weight of the law — up to 40 lashes, six months in prison and a fine — to be brought against Gibbons.

The Sudanese Foreign Ministry is playing the incident down, and may their less confused minds prevail. In all likelihood neither the students nor their teacher were aware of their transgression. Children tend to anthropomorphise toys — a teddy bear is a stand-in for a person, not a stand-in for a bear. They may have thought of family members and friends with the name of Mohammed, which is used a lot more widely as a name in the Islamic world than Jesus in the Christian world. Maybe their prophet’s name even seemed a natural choice for the white, benevolent-looking teddy.

The incident reminds me of my run-in with Mrs Catford in prep grade. I drew God in the way my little heart responded to the idea, as a spirit pervading everything, with clouds for hair and a row of red flowers for a mouth. Mrs Catford reprimanded me fiercely, with a sincere anger that astonished me since I had never encountered a religious zealot before, for not drawing God as an old man in a bathrobe. “He’s meant to look like Hugh Hefner,” she said. (Okay, she didn’t really.) After that I liked neither Mrs Catford nor God, since the latter had not come to my defense with a lightning bolt.

Fortunately, Mrs Catford’s power didn’t extend beyond our classroom. Nothing seems to bring out the really barmy side of people more than religion. Without denying that in past times the world’s great religions had some beneficial influence on government, those times are long gone. Any time I hear our leaders in the west speaking out about the importance of their faith, I get nervous. When not kept separate from the state, religion too easily swells from being a carrot and stick arrangement in people’s minds, not entirely useless in having an ability to promote social justice, to being a creepy, reality-deprived end in itself. Even a bear with very little brain can see that.

Update 30/11/07:

Gibbons was convicted of the lesser crime of insulting Islam and sentenced to 15 days and deportation. The British Foreign Office said it was very disappointed and summoned the Sudanese ambassador to explain the verdict. Weak.

The new Labor government will inherit a wealthy Australia. That isn’t to say the people are wealthy, but the country is. This is thanks in no small part to huge demand from China for our coal and iron ore - a demand which is unlikely to slow anytime soon.

The Labor party is committed to maintaining a strong economy and, far more - at least in rhetoric - than the outgoing Coalition was, to fighting climate change.

It doesn’t take a brain the size of a planet to see a conflict of interests here. Realistically, if China doesn’t embrace non-polluting technologies, it won’t matter much what the rest of us do. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t do our utmost, because if we don’t, China sure won’t. But if we want to reduce global warming, China has to be on board. Obviously, coal-fired power plants are not what we’re after here. And the iron ore? Makes steel. On top of steel goes concrete. And concrete manufacturing (specifically, the cement that glues it together) is a major cause of greenhouse gas pollution, currently accounting for 5% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

It seems to me that we’re already too late, and things are going to get much worse on the environmental front before they get better. Australia does have one thing in the ground that might help: uranium, and lots of it. Nuclear reactor technology has come a long way in terms of safety and cleanness. It seems to me that nuclear power has to be part of at least the band-aid solution to the world’s energy demands, and possibly even the long-term solution. Meanwhile, as long as Australia cashes up thanks to Chinese coal plants and concrete construction projects, we’ll remain entrenched in being part of the problem rather than the solution.

In the world of reality, we’re going to sell whatever we can to whoever wants it. Given that, I believe a tax should be imposed on any company engaged in business that leads to greenhouse pollution, and all revenues from it put towards developing and implementing clean energy solutions and addressing the problems already caused by climate change, such as water shortages.

Because John Howard is no longer Prime Minister of Australia. He may not even be Member for Bennelong anymore, though that’s still too close to call.

Labor has won the election with a likely majority of 20-25 seats

Here in Thailand it’s the night of Loy Krathong, where people set little raft-lanterns afloat on waterways to thank the rivers for their water, apologise for throwing bad things in them (ironically, many modern krathong are made of styrofoam…) and carry away one’s anger, grudges and bad thoughts.

So I won’t vent spleen here. I wish the Labor Party and Kevin Rudd, who will be our new PM, good luck, because the best governments can come unstuck without it. I hope they will stick to their promised programs for education, the environment and workplace relations, that they will govern wisely and courageously, and that Mr Rudd will not give in to the temptations of the dark side, even when Australia stands to make a buck by buckling.

The Australian Federal Election is tomorrow, so this morning I went to the embassy after Tai Chi to put in my postal vote. I was wearing tracksuit pants and a loose white cotton shirt which is starting to get thin and a bit see-through. There were two Thai security guards on the gate, a woman and a man. After I’d handed over my handbag and sword and walked through a metal detector, which didn’t beep (as I had left my chainmail bikini and ben wah balls at home), the female guard asked me to raise my arms so that she could go over me with the hand-held detector. As she did so, the strong morning light no doubt reduced my shirt to the gauzy illusion of fabric. “Lovely,” said the male guard behind me. I turned. “You are lovely woman,” he elaborated. Thai men, I must say, are not usually so forward.

“Oh, thank you,” I replied. A woman knows she has taken another step out of youth’s country when random male compliments at inappropriate times no longer feel like offences against her mind and inner being but reassurances that her efforts to maintain the nip of her waist and the uplift of her buttocks are not failing yet.

Voting for the Senate was the usual agony of deciding whether to put the Very Loony Christians or the Racist Bogans last. I put the shooters above the anti-abortionists, since we don’t need any more people on the planet. I looked for a horse to vote for, or a ficus plant, but regrettably none were on the ballot this year.

The guard who had admired my silhouette was very much taken with the sword, so I told him he could get one for 600 baht (about $20) from a lady who sells them out of a shopping jeep in Lumpini Park. She has all kinds of weapons in that jeep - she’s a one-woman wandering Jane’s.

She doesn’t, however, sell guillotines.

Melbourne artist Rick Amor, who is well known as a painter but considers himself an amateur sculptor has won the prestigious McClelland Sculpture Award for his work “Relic”, a bronze figure of a man with no arms and the head of a dog. (full view)

Amor said, “It’s a relic, it’s a distant memory. I don’t know where it came from, from the unconscious. It’s not meant to be an Anubis or any Egyptian deity, it’s just something that popped up.”

I like it very much. It also reminded me of the creatures in my sketches Casualty and A Little Thing (except that his is, you know, better!). It does make me wonder about these like-animal-headed figures–what they might represent in the collective unconscious, if there is such a thing as the collective unconscious. What gives us the urge to stick an animal head on a human body, in these times long past they heyday of anthropomorphic deities? I don’t think it’s as straightforward as wanting to attribute the qualities of that animal to a person.

…when a sewing machine meets an umbrella on an operating table, they have an affair, then the sewing machine has subsequent non-overlapping affairs with a spit-roasted camel, a fishtank and a tennis net?

A. Surreal monogamy.

What the world has been waiting for. The Bible translated into Lolcat.

(Has this already gone around lots? Is i laughably late?)

Theoretical physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi has come up with a unified theory of the universe that takes into account the strong force, which binds quarks in atomic nuclei, the weak force, which controls radioactive decay, electromagnetic force and, last but not least, gravity, which has so far only been included in the string theory model. Lisi thinks the universe is the shape of the E8 pattern, which I recall seeing hanging on the wall in our kindergarten circa 1975.

Kabbalists will note that E8 has 248 points, which is the number of positive commandments in the Torah. It is also the number of Indian tailor shops between Sukhumvit sois 3 and 13, and the number of times I check my reflection each day to see if I’m getting fat.