New toys

Alex and Clare at British Camp, the Malvern Hills

Here is positively the last of the holiday snaps.

Yesterday I was mulling over a replacement for my 'smashed at the summit of British Camp' Samsung Galaxy S3. So two years almost to the day, a new mobile phone should be arriving this morning, the Nexus 6. It's not cheap, but it gives me hours of innocent pleasure (yes, you at the back!).

We should all be wary of being captured by some tech giant's platform ecosystem, but I am seduced by the lack of bloatware and the raw technical specs of Google's stuff. The pain of configuration hangs as a black shadow, etc ...

The other Amazon toy due today - out of the blue, so to speak - is the "Interstellar" DVD, ordered months ago after I refused to sit through three hours of inchoate mumbly hokum at the cinema. Obviously I have lower standards at home, although I shall tell everyone that it's to study the accurate visualisation of black hole orbital kinematics in regions of ultra-high spacetime curvature .. or something like that.

The chances of it being watched are not high: my copy of the Scarlett Johansson vehicle "Lucy" still lies unviewed weeks after its arrival, and that's been rated pretty good. Last night, after our arrival home, we all sat and watched Sigourney Weaver in "Aliens", marvelling at the mash-up of "Star Wars". "Starship Troopers" and "The Matrix" that film was (I may be getting my chronology a bit mixed up here).

Vanity

From the current (Catholic) parish newsletter:

"In Luc Besson’s new movie, Lucy, Scarlett Johansson plays a young lady who inadvertently receives a very high dose of a new drug, which unlocks the untapped potential of her brain. As a result her powers become superhuman and knowledge is soaked up in her like a sponge.

"The pursuit of knowledge is a good thing per se. However, it’s what we do with this knowledge which really counts. As Christians, seeking to serve as missionary disciples, knowing Jesus and desiring to enter his mind is what is most important."

Here's a picture of Scarlett Johansson.

Scarlett Johansson in Lucy

Such good advice: my copy of the DVD will be dropping through the letterbox in January.

Meanwhile I feel I understand almost too well* the case of Tory minister Brooks Newmark, who just resigned after a sexual entrapment exercise by the Sunday Mirror. A combination of a male reporter posing as a young, female, activist hottie plus WhatsApp proved his undoing.

More symptomatic is the account of how he "negotiated" with the Syrian leader Assad.

"Newmark first met Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in 2006 and continued "regular" one-on-one meetings until 2011, the start of the civil war"

Picture it. You're smart and photogenic, you've made a pile of money and have expensive houses and property. You're a successful and senior politician. Why shouldn't you be a player? Solve the Syria crisis where your betters and world diplomacy have failed?

The vanity of the B-lister, totally out of his depth and used by the real operators (reminds me of a film I just saw). Why wouldn't he be the exception to the iron law that hot young women do not find men the wrong side of fifty attractive (and the photos he sent - let's not even think of going there).
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* Writing a blog - the epitome of vanity - is what I had in mind.