Green Room is coming along nicely.

Object inheritance is a more complicated business than I thought, but they seem to have good reasons for all the complications.

Christmas didn’t make me very happy, but other people had a good time.

Apparently I have puha in my garden, and didn’t even know it.

My garden sprinkler system now goes all around the two lawns. The next phase will be tricky.

It’s much easier to stick to plans during the holidays.

Uncle Terry and Aunty Sylvia are staying here. Inside of ten minutes after their arrival, there was a three-piece Irish band in my dining room.

On Friday I took a job as commentator for a robot cooking competition. I also covered the other events in the X-treme Machine Challenge, and gave helpful spelling guidance and proofreading.

I was surprised to find that I’m quite competent at voice acting. Up until now I have only had a small rôle saying “What a mess!” in a slurpy slug voice for Soup. My slurpy slug voice was highly praised, but I never thought I was good enough for a big part. But the commentator rôle turned out to be the main voice in X-treme Machine Challenge, and once we got into it it turned out that about half the time Vahid and Maile liked the very first take of each line I did.

Libya is planning to destroy its Weapons of Mass Destruction. Which is good news.

They don’t seem to have much of anything that could actually be called a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Maybe some mustard gas and anthrax, and some Scuds that go more than 300km, like the ones Iraq destroyed before the war. But it’s good news.

I’m a little unclear if as to why Bush and Blair are suddenly in favour of international weapons inspection programmes, but if they’re rather inconsistent, at least they’re doing the right thing this time. That’s good news.

In a groundbreaking new advance in RSS technology, you can now subscribe to an RSS feed of your own personal lightcone. You give it your date of birth, and it keeps track of which stars have distances from Sol in light-years that are lower than your age in years. If you look at those stars in the night sky, you’re seeing photons that left during your lifetime.

How old am I? I am Delta Eridani, going on Beta Comae Berenices.

It’s the biggest hedgehog I’ve ever seen. Fully one and a half times the size of a regular serving of hedgehog. And since hedgehog is usually served after dark, I let it stay somewhere in my garage through the daytime. I figured a couple of hours after sunset was enough time for even a very nervous hedgehog to relax and start exploring its environment for cupcakes and licorice, or whatever it is that hedgehogs eat. Not that this is a very nervous hedgehog – it was investigating one of Ari’s cymbals when I turned the light on.

I was taught from a young age not to pick up a hedgehog. Apart from the obvious problem of excessive pointedness, they are reputed to be riddled with unpleasant disease. Although obviously not wasting disease in this particular hedgehog. So I encouraged it gently with a broom in the direction of the outside world, and it eventually got the hint and toddled off into the garden.

So if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, or know somebody in a similar situation, there’s an encouraging happy tale of successful hedgehog wrangling. You too could have such marvellous control over small sharp creatures, if your heart is true and you believe in yourself.

This morning when I got home from Return of the King a hedgehog ran straight into my garage. It was dark, but it seemed particularly determined to get in there. Then it buried its nose in my lawnmower and refused to budge. I tried to convince it that outside is the place for hedgehogs, but it clearly had its little prickly mind set on an intra-lawnmower lifestyle. So I left it and went to bed.

Now I have a hedgehog somewhere in my garage, or possibly under the house. There’s no way out except the garage door or the door into the house. So if you have experience in hedgehog coaxing, I’d like a few pointers.

It really is very good.

But at three and a half hours, it’s not long enough. More than previous two films, it has obviously suffered from what must have been a heartbreaking editing process. There’s so much going on that few of the characters have time to develop, which is especially a problem for Denethor, who’s new in this film and rather subtle anyway. He doesn’t get enough screen time to really carry the implication that he’s being influenced by Sauron, so there’s nothing to explain why he’s come so unhinged as to be trying to burn his son alive.

However, if you had to pick a few characters to focus on, your best choice would be the Hobbits – and that seems to be what they’ve done.
The scenes with Sam and Frodo and Gollum play out beautifully. Merry and Pippin change the most in the books, and that’s covered well in the film too. Pippin’s scenes wandering through Gondor before the battle with the soldier’s son are missing, presumably because they would have spoiled the tension, but his relationship with Gandalf and his reaction to Denethor’s despair are very strong.

Hollywood epics generally don’t go in for despair as a theme, but Return of the King is drenched in it. Like the Helm’s Deep scenes in Two Towers, the tension builds up relentlessly as Gondor falls under siege. But it’s several orders of magnitude bigger, and there’s no hint of hope in the preparations.

There’s been much discussion of the changes made to the plot in all three films, and up until this one I thought they were all well justified. Tom Bombadil was silly, and had to go. Faramir was a better character for being more deeply tempted by the Ring. The Elves arriving at Helm’s Deep was more effective than vaguely mentioning that they were fighting their own battles against Sauron somewhere up north. But I think it was a mistake to leave out the Scouring of the Shire.

If you haven’t read the books (and I’ve only read them once), when the Hobbits return to the Shire they find it’s been turned into an industrial wasteland, and their kin have been enslaved. It turns out that Saruman and Wormtongue have escaped there from the ruins of Isengard and taken it over. Frodo is sick and weary, but Merry and Pippin have become brave warriors, and they personally defeat Saruman and save the Shire.
It serves to really bring home the point that everything has changed, even in the Shire, which makes Frodo’s eventual fate more understandable. I think a lot of what’s awkward about the conclusion of the film is the fact that they didn’t seem to quite trust Tolkein’s judgement in this section. Or maybe it’s just that I thought it was the best part of the book.

But that’s not to say what’s there isn’t very good. Because it is very good.

I think I already said that.

Oh yes, at the start.

It’s a very good film indeed.

I woke up this morning to an American voice on the radio saying “We got him”, and apparently being quite happy about it. I naturally assumed they’d caught Bin Laden, but it turned out to be Paul Bremer saying they’d caught Saddam Hussein.

So well done, I suppose. But now that they’ve got him, what are they going to do with him? Apparently they don’t intend to assassinate him any more, or they would have done it straight away.

If they put him on trial, how exactly would it work? Anybody else would send him to the International Criminal Court, but the USA doesn’t recognise it. I sometimes wonder how you fail to recognise a court – do you walk past it and loudly say “That is a very nice Ice Cream Factory”? Presumably any relevant court in Iraq was removed when the USA dismantled the apparatus of the Iraqi state. And it’s hard to see how Saddam Hussein could be said to have done anything to be tried by a US court.

Which leads to the next question: what would they try him for? Having weapons of mass destruction which aren’t there? Waging a pathetic war in defense against an invading power? Buying weapons from Donald Rumsfeld? Gassing Kurds during the Iran-Iraq war? Invading Kuwait? I expect they could make a decent case against him concerning the purges of his political enemies, but it’s going to be a tough job. And if the recent debacle with the Guantanamo prisoners is anything to go by, it doesn’t seem like the USA is particularly interested in trials any more.

So… what? They put him in a cage and try to forget they have him?