King lives

Just found something that made me snigger with excitement. I have such a huge soft spot for bad horror (good horror too) that the news that Alex Aja is looking to make Stephen King's Pet Sematary has brought an early morning smile to my face, something that doesn't happen too often. It has also made me reach for the book itself.
King is one of my guilty pleasures. I remember reading It for the first time when I was a child. On holiday with my parents and my room was next to the pool filter system, which made perfect gurgling noises through the night...terrifying...We all float...we all float...

Chilling lack of news from the east

Alarming how corrupt and shady some of the world still is. I had a good whiff of real life corruption in Thailand where I lived for a while. The local police chief would come and sit in the bar I spent a large part of my weekends in. Bottles of Johnnie Walker and soda water in front of him, right next to the gun he plucked from his holster. If the sheer proximity of the alcohol and weapon wasn’t troubling enough, he would get half way through his Johnnie red and would often gesticulate with the pistol to illustrate some particular point he was working himself up over. His evening would be filled with a stream of visitors - store owners, bar owners, taxi drivers - who would slip into the seat across from him and nod deferentially. This would be followed by a papery wad of baht being slid across the table towards Bangkok’s finest, where it would disappear into some uniformed recess with a grunt of approval. Small time corruption, really, but I got to know Thailand pretty well while I was there and it isn’t hard to recognise that the country runs on the principal that my police chief employed: you must pay for the things you want.

China, however, is just plain scary. How there can be a country - a vast, powerful, hugely populous country no less - which desires such a severe hold on its people and image that a train crash in which 40 people died has been proscribed from being reported in the news? One brave paper defied the ban with an earnest letter to a two-year old survivor of the crash, but the fact that the story has been quashed is almost unbelievable. It’s a train crash, not proof that communism doesn't work!

It also serves to highlight the vileness of NI’s transgressions, when a paper can defy governmental bans and no doubt endanger their own existence, to report the news, rather than employing hideous tactics for creating news, or re-writing news.