What You Can Get Away With

As mentioned before, James tagged me with his ‘What three questions would you ask Alan Moore if you were sitting opposite him on a train?’ meme. While I suspect that in the real world, the first (and probably only) one would be ‘will you please stop staring at me like that?’ here are mine:

1) Having seen the ideas you proposed for Twilight Of The Superheroes, were you disappointed with the way the character of John Constantine was developed in Hellblazer?

2) If DC had allowed you to continue using the Charlton characters for Watchmen, do you think the final work would have had the same impact?

3) If parallel universes exist, there’s one where you and Frank Miller have swapped places since the mid-80s. How would you feel to have been responsible for 300?

James has already tagged everyone I can think of, but if you fancy having a crack yourself, please do so.

Someone at the Herts and Essex Observer appears to have a sense of humour. (This may or may not be obvious after Saturday, should you be reading this then)

(And yes, I appear to have been memed by Mr Graham - answers soonish, hopefully)

A trailer for the film version of Watchmen has been released (large version, so may take a while to load) and it does look rather good. Mind you, I thought the trailler for V For Vendetta looked good, and the film turned out to be someone using the original comic series as toilet paper, so I’ll resist the urge to get too excited about it yet.

Blood and Treasure:

It seems to me that the choice available over this is to outsmart yourself by trying to uncover the “real reasons” behind his resignation or take him at his word and push the issue.

The question that occurs to me is this: Who knew about this first - Nick Clegg or David Cameron? It seems that Clegg’s agreement to not stand a Liberal Democrat in the by-election was required for Davis to go ahead and do it, so did he get the agreement from Clegg first and then present it to Cameron as a fait accompli?

Yes, I’m still alive…

Been reading Ken Macleod’s The Execution Channel this week and found it amusing that there’s a section of it set in Heptonstall in Yorkshire. Why? Because that’s where I met him, on an Arvon Foundation course at Lumb Bank in 2001. The reason it links in with the subject matter of The Execution Channel is that the course finished on a Saturday, and the day after saw the first waves of NATO bombing in Afghanistan. Of course, I’ve no idea how intentional that linkage is on his part, but it struck me as interesting.

Second, following the BBC’s announcement of a remake, I’ve been watching the original series of Survivors. Now, I know there have been various critiques about it being incredibly middle-class and all that, but one thing in the second episode struck me as being incredibly 1970s. (and don’t click the read more link if you don’t want to know what happens)
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I know airlines are ruthless and INS officers at American airports can be very harsh, but I hadn’t expected this:

There is overbooking and lots of passengers are simply being bumped off.

Just reading this story and then Alex’s comments on it prompted a thought. As 2010 now seems the most likely date for the next General Election, what if the referendum on Scottish independence happens on the same day? I haven’t got time to write up all my thoughts on it right now, but it would make for a very interesting campaign, both north and south of the border.

I think it’s time I started blogging more regularly again - and now the elections are over, I’ve actually got some time to do it.

I’ve had a stressful month, but in the end it was all well worth it. I spent most of yesterday on my bike dodging rain (and even hail at a couple of times) as I was number-running for my ward, so I’m not quite sure how I found the energy to stay up for the count, but I suspect adrenaline played a large part, replaced after a while by a bit of euphoria.

Yesterday we did a very good job in bucking the national trend and gained four seats off the Tories to put Colchester Council back into no overall control. The first key result was in my ward (Castle) where we saw off the Greens yet again, with my colleague Henry Spyvee increasing our vote as he got re-elected with a bigger majority than me. After that, we were in the Chinese whispers part of the election count with everyone trading box counts and tallies back and forth as we tried to work out how we were doing.

For a while, it seemed like we were going to have a so near and yet so far night as we missed out in Prettygate by 30 votes (after a 9.6% swing to us from the Tories) and in Berechurch by 55 votes (with a 10% swing from Labour) but then came the biggest win of the night as Martin Goss stormed home in Mile End by over 700 votes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a candidate who’s worked as hard as Martin has over the past year and it was a thoroughly well-deserved victory over a member of the Council’s cabinet.

After that, the coin-flips started landing in our favour - Jon Manning followed up on Mark Cory’s win last year to turn Wivenhoe Cross all gold, Laura Sykes won Stanway and then finally, after several recounts, Nigel Offen unseated another member of the cabinet to take Shrub End and leave us all with great big grins on our faces. On top of that, our sitting Councillors all did well and Mark Warner did a great job in Labour’s St Andrew’s heartland with a swing of almost 11%.

As for me, I’m now having my recovery day - my legs are reminding me of how much work they did yesterday - and looking forward to our first new group meeting tomorrow for the 23 of us.

Full results here, if you’re interested.