Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

Ben Kingsley's best ever screen acting performance. It enters the Realm's top 20 movie list. But who has heard of it? Last night I watched for the first time this 2003 movie with the above singularly uninspiring name. A debut by director Vadim Perelman. It is an unheralded masterpiece of Shakespearean stature . Ben Kingsley's performance as an immigrant refugee to the US from post-Shah Iran is as fine a screen acting performance as I've ever seen by anyone, anytime. And Jennifer Connelly's nuanced and edgy rendition of her flawed character was revelatory. I have since briefly Googled , Wikipeed and Amazoned it, discovering it is based on a book by an Andre Dubus III. The Amazon book reviews are mixed. Surprisingly the brief reviews of the movie I've seen also seem mixed. Some even suggest this movie lacks believability . They must live in some cossetted urban Westernised material uberworld in which the type of espresso they order is a defining existenti

POST MODERN POLITICS : THE NEW RULES. Fantasy rules because fantasists have the power to declare their fantasy true. Truth is whatever the powerful choose it to be. The new Truths are: All government spending promotes economic growth; and Humans are causing our climate to change for the worse. Anyone who looks for a different truth outside the current cultural zeitgeist is now the fantacist . Afterall post-modernism decrees; truth is the just the prevailing fantasy. GET WITH THE PROGRAMME: THE LEFT RULE The Left say government spending is good for us and that humans cause climate to change for the worse. Those who say otherwise are deniers of the Truth. Resistance is futile. You simply adopt your team's position on policy. Only idiots or fantacists argue for Truth. The Truth is what we receive from those who we make powerful. It seems as if most of us are allocated a political team to support at birth or we choose a team in early adulthood, and that's it for life. You'

Media implicated in stampede. Dispute over cause of injury. 3 News report from New Zealand that, at the controversial annual "Running of the Sheep" in Te Kuiti : " a woman was bowled over by the marauding mob, her injuries no laughing matter . .." The event co-organiser, John Fagan was reported in The Waikato Times as saying: "We underestimated the crowd at the beginning of the sheep run and they (the crowd) kept coming in on the sheep and the opening kept getting smaller and smaller and just baulked them a bit." However, in a developing controversy, he denied the 3 News suggestion that injuries were caused by the rampaging sheep: A woman was also injured, but Mr Fagan denied reports it was the fault of the sheep. "A lady who was watching stood back, and caught her heel on something and fell backwards ... it wasn't as if she was caught in a stampede or anything." It seems the catastrophe could have been precipitated by the media itself: