Pretty disappointed by it actually. Very stagey with tons of "as you know, Cardinal Bob" exposition delivered mainly facing the audience. You obviously have to expect a certain amount of pontificating, but at nearly three hours including the interval, found it somewhat buttock-challenging. Didn't help that I had a tall left-right-twitchy guy in front of me and an extremely large lady spilling over from the left.

The obligatory conspiracy theory isn't too convincing. It's based mainly on inconsistent witness statements, but witness statements tend to be inconsistent, and all the "Aha! So you say he had the pain in his side at seven thirty not three o'clock!" doesn't really seem too impressive.

Pretty decent if over-the-top performance from David Suchet as the tormented Cardinal Benelli, evinced by lots of conspicuous sobbing. Michael Jayston did a great job as his confessor. Script a bit clunky though, with rather unbelievable feed-lines delivered for the sake of only moderately amusing ripostes.

Overall, I'd give this one a miss.

Review, review, review, review, review. Wikipedia on the conspiracy theories, Benelli. Time on Luciani, Benelli.

What I'm Reading
Finished Desolation Island. Thought it seemed familiar at first, but it wasn't till the second half that I was sure I'd read it before. Don't have a record though: my system's let me down somewhere.

Could be my What I'm Reading for it is lost in the vanished HuSi archive for 2003, but I did manage to preserve that year's reading list before the GoogleBot reindexed everything as "Sorry. I can't seem to find that story" and it's not there.

The first half, on shore is a bit weak. Aubrey is all at sea when he's on shore, getting ripped off by card sharps and horse-dealers and investing in dubious enterprises; while a depressed Maturin hits the laudanum.

When they get to sea things get more interesting: Aubrey is given command of 50-gun two-decker Leopard and sent off to the Antipodes with an inconvenient group of convicts. "Gaol-fever" then wipes out a large part of his crew, and he's left short-handed when stalked by the much more powerful Dutch 74 the Waakzaamheid. The chess-game chase between them is as tense and gripping as anything he's written. After that his luck turns really bad...

Update [2007-9-9 9:19:53 by TheophileEscargot]: I do have a record of reading the next book along, "The Fortune of War" in 2004. I think the HuSi black hole extends to about June 2004, so my original write-up might be lost in there. Bah, I should have kept on cross-posting to K5.

Shelfari
Trying out this Shelfari thing but not totally convinced. I like the idea of a book recommendation / review / discussion site, and like the way it's relatively easy to import and export, and it seems to have a decent-sized userbase.

Stuff I don't like: social-network abominations like the friends list. I have one friend so far, who has 232 other friends. More importantly, it doesn't let you add new books to its database and its database is frustratingly old and US-centric: I can't list major books like Swords and Ploughshares.

Me
Feeling irritable. Not sure why: work isn't stressful at the moment. Just feels like a million petty annoyances are driving me insane. I need a crisis to manage, or someone to punch, or a mission up the Nung River.

Web
John K on Hanna Barbera and cartoons moving from film to TV

They had been used to making high-quality fully-animated Tom and Jerry cartoons for budgets around $35,000 per 6 minute short... The TV cartoons were $3,000 now per short - less than 10% of the budgets they were used to.

Pics: toilet signs.

Video. Matchstick Hendrix portrait burned.