On Monday, P.C. Plod had tea with his friend, Harry Callahan.

"Burglar Bill is a very bad man," says Harry.

"He certainly is a very bad man indeed," says P.C. Plod.

"I think the best thing would be if he were killed," says Harry.

"I think killing Burglar Bill would be a very good thing indeed," says P.C Plod.
 

On Tuesday, P.C Plod is out on patrol.

Who should he see but Burglar Bill!

P.C. Plod calls up Sgt Goldsmith on his walkie talkie, because this was in the olden days before there were mobile phones.

"I've seen Burglar Bill!" says P.C Plod.

"He's a bad man," says Sgt Goldsmith.

"A very, very bad man," says P.C. Plod

"A very bad man indeed," says Sgt. Goldsmith.

"Can I kill him, huh, huh, huh, can I kill him, can I?" says P.C. Plod.

"Certainly not," says Sgt Goldsmith "We haven't had the death penalty in Toytown for years and years and years, and even if we did, you couldn't just shoot him, you'd have to arrest him and fill out all the necessary paper work."

"Wait a minute," says P.C Plod "If Burglar Bill had a gun, would it be legal for me to kill him?"

"Well," says Sgt Goldsmith "If he had a gun and if he was threatening you or the citizens of Toytown, then it might be legal for you to kill him."

"What an astonishing coincidence," says P.C Plod "I've just noticed that Burglar Bill has a gun, and is going to shoot me and several of the citizens of Toytown, unless I act very quickly."

Bang, bang, bang, goes P.C. Plod's gun.


On Wednesday, the Mayor of Toytown sends for P.C. Plod.

"I hear that you killed poor William Burglar," says the Mayor. "This is very bad, and you will have to sit on the naughty step till tea time."

"But I only killed him in self-defence!" says P.C Plod "He had a gun, and was threatening the people of Toytown."

"Oh, that's all right then," says Mr Mayor.


On Thursday, Doctor Bob knocks on Mr. Mayor's door.

"After P.C. Plod shot Burglar Bill, a concerned citizen called for me, and I came jolly quickly on my bicycle with my little black bag to try to patch him up with vinegar and brown paper. And guess what?"

"What?" says the Mayor.

"Burglar Bill didn't have a gun at all!"

"Oh dear," says the Mayor.

So he calls back P.C.Plod and tells him that he did kill Burglar Bill and would have to sit on the naughty step until tea time after all.

"I have already told you" says P.C Plod "That I killed him in self defence, because he had a gun."

"But he didn't have a gun," says the Mayor.

"I know he didn't have a gun," says P.C Plod "Who on earth said he did have a gun? But I thought he had a gun, and so did everyone else and so would you have done if you had been there. It turned out that the thing he was waving at the citizens of Toytown was a table leg and not a gun at all. But if it had been a gun, he would have shot me, so you can't blame me for making such a Terrible Mistake."

"That's fair enough," says the Mayor.


But on Friday, several of the citizens of Toytown go and knock on the Mayor's door.

"Mr Your Worship The Mayor" say the Citizens, who know the proper way of talking to a Mayor, "We were there when P.C. Plod killed Burglar Bill, and we can tell you that Burglar Bill didn't have a gun, or even a chair leg, and he certainly wasn't threatening to shoot anyone. In fact, before P.C Plod's gun went bang bang bang, we both shouted 'Oh P.C Plod, please do not shoot Burglar Bill, for he is unarmed!' "

"Oh dear," says the Mayor, who is beginning to think that he is trapped in an extended metaphor, and sends for P.C Plod again.

"You killed Burglar Bill, go and sit on the naughty step," says the Mayor.

"We have been through this before," says P.C Plod. "I have admitted that I made a terrible mistake in shooting an unarmed burglar, but it was an honest mistake because I thought that he had a gun, and burglars sometimes do have guns so it is better to be safe than sorry."

"But you didn't think he had a gun," says the Mayor. "At least, the several of the citizens of Toytown say that he was unarmed at the time. So there is no way that you can say that it was a self defence."

"Who ever mentioned self-defence?" says P.C Plod. "Why on earth do you keep going on about self-defence, and bringing guns into it? Burglar Bill was a very bad man, so even if I had known that he didn't have a gun, which I didn't, I would still have shot him, because Toytown is much safer without him and you should be very pleased that he is dead."

"Whether I am pleased or not has nothing to do with it!" says the Mayor, crossly. "You asked Sgt Goldsmith for permission to kill him, and he told you quite clearly that if he didn't have a gun it would be illegal to kill him however bad a man he was."

"I realise that we are never going to agree on this," says P.C Plod "And I, you know, totally respect your right to hold a, you know, different point of view, but I formed the view that Toytown would be better off without Burglar Bill, so I took the decision to remove him because I really, honestly, sincerely, in my heart of hearts, believed that it was the right thing to do."

"Oh, well, that's all right then," says the Mayor.


On Saturday, P.C Plod knocks on the Mayor's door.

"You know what I said yesterday, about how it was right for me to kill Burglar Bill because I sincerely believed that killing Burglar Bill was the right thing to do?"

"Yes," says the Mayor, whose head was spinning a bit by this time.

"Well, I think that I may have chosen my words badly. What I think I meant to say was that I really, genuinely, and sincerely believed that it would have been right to kill him if he had had a gun, but that, since bad men do sometimes have guns and since you can't ever be sure which ones do and which ones don't  the best way to make sure that he didn't have gun was to kill him, so killing him because he had a gun and killing him because he was a bad man are really the same thing, and it was self defence even if I knew he didn't have a gun, which I didn't, because he might have got a gun afterwards."

"I'm glad we've got that sorted out," says the Mayor.


On Sunday, P.C Plod has tea with his friend Harry Callahan.

"Burglar Joe is a very bad man," says Harry.  

Please do not tell any of your friends that "Where Dawkins Went Wrong" is now available from Amazon, as I get rather more pennies if they order it straight from Lulu.

Avatar (a film)

"I thought that was very good," said Andrew at the end of Avatar.

"I thought that was very good," replied Louise.

"I thought that was very good," added Jonathan.

"Bugger," said Andrew "What are we going to talk about for the rest of the weekend?"

Avatar is a gripping, involving, but not particularly original Cowboys and Indians movie; transposed to a well-drawn and convincing science fiction setting. Jake, our hero, has his mind transferred into the body of a member of a tribe of blue aliens called the Navee so he can learn their ways and help the Human Colonists negotiate with them. But – astonishingly – he Goes Native and sides with the Navee against the Humans when the shooting starts.

Jonathan, who reads Empire, tells me that all the alien planet sequences were constructed entirely on a computer: since I'd assumed that it was doing the Peter Jackson thing of recording footage in New Zealand and using a computer to enhance the scenery, this must count as an unequivocal success.

Some of the plot devices were a little clunky, but they were all either the kind of clunky plot device that is part and parcel of a movie of this kind -- or else so carefully foreshadowed that they don't seem that clunky when you got to them. It's pretty much inevitable that the squaw who finds the hero when he's separated from the cavalry is the daughter of the big chief, and equally inevitable that our hero will fall in love with her. And the silly climax, in which all the fauna on the planet spontaneously attacks the Bad Men who are going to burn the Sacred Tree, doesn't feel silly at all because we've seen our hero praying to the Sacred Tree and asking it to help him win the battle. Since we've already been told that the all the animals and plants on the planet are connected together into a sort of vegetarian computer, it makes complete sense that he should be able to influence the tree to influence the animals to attack the Humans. We spend the slightly too long final battle saying "How will the tree help out?" and react to this literal deus ex machina by saying "Ooo...clever," rather than "Oh, what a literal deus ex machina!"

It was, both literally and metaphorically, a little too green. Say what you like about the Star Wars prequels, and I have, but they keep jumping from one jaw-dropping landscape to a completely different jaw-dropping landscape, so your eye never gets bored. Avatar dumps you in one jaw-dropping rain forest and leaves you there for three hours, rather as if you'd had to spend the whole of Return of the Jedi on Endor.

And speaking of which: the final battle does rather lapse into Ewok logic. At the beginning of the film we are supposed to find it silly that savages think they can damage giant mega-tanks with bows and arrows; but at the end of the film we are are expected to believe that bows and arrows fired by a large number of really motivated and very noble savages would be able to do so. That we largely do believe this is a tribute to how well drawn and immersive the film is. But still. If a herd of really angry elephants charged a tank, I'm not completely sure which side I'd place my bet on.

The natives have a sort of biological scart cable in the pig-tails, and can literally plug their brains into the planets flora and fauna. They can become literally "at one" with their mounts; they can commune with planet's ecosystem; and the minds of their dead are literally downloaded into the biosphere. A nice science fictiony idea, this, and someone will tell me where it was swiped from. But I rather suspect that Mr Cameron has a notion that it is also a Really Profound Metaphor, and just as the Navee can literally plug themselves into the soul of the planet, so can we in a very real sense, commune with the Earth, provided we stop destroying the environment by fighting wars, burning carbon, going to the movies, etc.

The one really weak point in the movie is the characterisation of the human colonists, who work, of course, for The Company. (Sigourney Weaver herself shows up to provide the technobabble.) The Company are only interested in the planet as a source of a McGuffin called (I liked this) Unobtanium; it answers only to it's shareholders. The Colonel in charge is so one dimensional that he would be chewing the scenery if it wasn't computer generated: unable to quite decide if he's in Apocalypse Now or Moby Dick. When he announces that he's going to gratuitously nuke the Navee's Sacred Tree in order to generate some "shock and awe", his team of marines nod and grin, and seem to have been recruited entirely from the brute squad. (Had the humans been on the planet to obtain, say, a precious drug which was the only thing which could possibly save the human race from a terrible lurgyplague then Jake would have been faced with a genuinely difficult moral dilemma. Now, one man must choose, between a race entirely consisting of happy, spiritual folk living an idyllic life and a race entirely consisting of nasty sweary money grabbing thugs. Gee, which way will he decide?)

Clearly, the thing has been over hyped to an embarrassing degree: we are told that there are people who have seen the film dozens of times, that it has changed their life, that there may have been suicides by people who don't want to live if they can't live on Pandora. In fact a ludicrous amount of money and skill has been spent on what is really a very, very slight narrative.

But this doesn't matter: the film isn't making any particular claim to be a new religious movement, although the Hollywood publicity machine may be. From the opening moments when the crippled ex-marine agrees to have his brain transplanted into a Navee it is absolutely clear what kind of a movie we are watching, and it delivers on all its promises. The hero does indeed get the girl. The Navee do indeed, after much sacrifice and derring do, repel the invaders who want to steal their land. The hero does indeed get initiated into the tribe's ways, and we do indeed feel that those Ways are plausible and interesting and quite pretty and inspirational. The first time we see the nasty Colonel, he is in one of those Transformer-type exo-skeletons and, sure enough, after his big space ship has been destroyed and the Holy Tree has been saved; everything comes down to a one-on-one between Smurf and Armoured Space Marine.

The Skiffynow writer's guidelines list "does exactly what it says on the tin" as a cliché to avoid at all costs. But Avatar does.

Papal Visit Controversy Redux

Wanda: Red-headed people cannot be cauldron polishers. If my cauldron is polished by a person with red hair, than my broom stick may fail to fly properly.

Harriet: As of next Tuesday, it shall be against the law to discriminate on the grounds of hair colour.

Wanda: But that's NOT FAIR. That means my cauldron can NEVER BE POLISHED and my boom stick will NEVER FLY.

Harriet: Hmm.... I'm not at all sure I believe in all this flying broomstick stuff, but I guess the same logic which says that you shouldn't discriminate against red heads also says that the state shouldn't stop you from performing your ceremonies... So: "As of next Tuesday, it shall be against the law to discriminate on the grounds of hair colour, without a very, very good reason." That covers cauldron polishers, and also for example theatres who might not want to hire a red headed actor to play a character who everyone knew was blonde.

Wanda: By the way, did I mention that only fully certified cauldron polishers can sweep up after the ceremony? And obviously, the coven canteen has to be staffed by qualified cauldron polishers. And lots of our members run crystal shops, macrobiotic restaurants and book shops. Obviously, it would be unreasonable to expect them to hire anyone who wasn't a cauldron polisher.

Harriet: No, hang on, that's going much too far. I'll make an exception for your ceremonies, which are none of my business, frankly, but everywhere else the same employment rules which apply to everyone else apply to you too.

Wanda: But that's NOT FAIR. Refusing to employ red-heads is an IMPORTANT PART OF BEING A WITCH! Discrimination! Human rights!

Several Hon. Members: We never liked witches in the first place, they made my granny impotent, they turned me into a frog, witches are worse than child molesters, send them back where they came from, why can't we burn them like in the good old days, etc, etc, etc