End of Prolonged Summer?

At last! The rain has been falling. It has been months since it rained. I thought that this country was cursed with a neverending summer. Anyway, the holiday week is coming to an end. It's going to be Monday soon. So, everyone will be back to work.

My spare time is spent on watching DVDs, and plundering the internet for stuffs.

I'm considering looking for Dead Ringers, another British comedy series. I wonder if it's as good as Little Britain. You do know Little Britain, don't you?

Some may hate Little Britain, but I think their sense of humour are just lacking. I feel that British comedies tend to push things to the extreme limit. Mostly, towards self-degrading jokes or insulting others.

Well, got to go now. Starving!

Cheerio!

Uneventful Holiday

With a full week of holiday, it's surely a boring one, especially with the scorching heat outside. Worse is, it's like inside of an oven inside my room, even with the fan turned on! I wonder if there's going to be any rain until the end of year this year.

Anyways, it's not really a holiday at all, though. Still got to go to the office, monitoring the new internet connection. It got on and off a while ago, but I guess it was just a faulty equipment. It got replaced and everything has been pretty good now.

Meanwhile, finished the third season of CSI: Miami. Now moving towards NY spinoff. I also bought Hustle (a BBC series, not the magazine) and House. Pretty interesting stuffs, though. I'll let you know what I think about them later.

Got to go now, it's lunchtime!

Cheerio!

Background Laughter

If you watch a sitcom, there's a near certainty that you're going to hear the audience laugh whenever a joke or what supposed to be funny is performed by the actor/actors/actress/actresses.

I always wonder, if they were real laughter or not. If they were, was the audience laugh because the show was funny, or to remind us to laugh, as if they said: "Hey, start laughing! The scene is supposed to be funny!"

Well, that's a possibility, because such thing does have a strong suggestive power. People could simply laugh just because someone else is laughing. They don't know what's being laugh at, and sometimes even if they do, they actually don't think these things aren't funny. As if, laughter is contagious.

Maybe I've mentioned it before, but I surely find it hard to find a good sitcom recently. Maybe the whole genre had ran out of ideas. Maybe mocking someone else is no longer funny. Mocking yourself is no longer funny, too. While mocking God... well, it'll be tricky. Some fanatics may get themselves too upset that they're sending death threats to kill you. In the end, the whole thing is stuck in a rut.

I guess, it's not only in comedy, but in all showbiz. Variance of stories seemed to have reached its limit. What's left are the acting and the directing.

Now back to the original topic, I think the best thing is to strip off the audience's laughter. I feel uneasy because I feel being dictated, to be told or reminded to laugh.

There's no background laughter in Simpsons, fortunately.

What Makes You Laugh?

That's the question asked by Albert Brooks in his recent film "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World". I think he intended that to be a comedy but exactly like the audience in the movie to whom he told jokes during his stand-up act in India, there were hardly any critics laughing.

I did laughed a bit when I saw the movie, but well, rarely. In the movie, Brooks' attempt to look for comedy in India and Pakistan ended up in an escalation of an already tense bilateral relationship between the two countries. Fortunately enough, it did not ended in a billowing mushroom cloud of nuclear boom.

Frankly, I wasn't interested in the movie because Albert Brooks starred in it, but merely because of the title. Say, I think Mr. Brooks took the wrong turn in picking the countries to feature in this movie. Sure that there are Muslims in India, but in terms of numbers, the Hindis trumped the Muslims (don't get mad, I didn't write that Hindu is better than Islam or the Hindis are better than Muslims in terms of quality).

I even think that Mr Brooks could use Indonesia as the featured country. Muslims dominate the population here, though. Or maybe he could try Saudi Arabia, or maybe Iran.

Anyway, the movie implicitly suggested how the intelligence of both India and Pakistan got themselves easily suspicious of each other that troops buildup could easily triggered along the borderline of both countries. From India to Pakistan (illegally), and then to Al-Jazeera's office, this smelled like the trail of Osama (excluding Afghanistan, though).

Now let's get back to the title of this post. Speaking of laughing, I doubt that Mr Brooks' movie could make me laugh enough. What can make me laugh? Well, a Seinfeld episode could make me laugh, as well as a Looney Tunes episode. I laugh at Little Britain, at Douglas Adams' books, at Love, Actually. Yeah, I am quite interested in British comedies. They have different flavors than their American counterparts. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, but not Swept Away, could make me laugh. British jokes are sometimes self-degrading, yet smart. I could hardly find such quality comedies in American movies nowadays (or maybe I wasn't trying hard enough?).

So, in the end, the world is indeed needs to learn to laugh at itself and stop behaving too seriously, especially during this provocative era.

Well, got to go now. Will write again later.

The Baptism, The Veil, and The Video

Glad to be back blogging. Been busy for quite some time.

Three recent issues drew my interest:

Do the unbaptized babies go to heaven and escaped limbo? The issue was a rather low-profile one than the other issue that will be discussed later.

I don't think being baptized or not will be God's only basis for judging whether a soul is worthy for a place in heaven. The unbaptized babies in this discussion are the ones who died before being able to receive baptism. The question may be that whether they deserve a place in heaven. Well, why not? Why do those poor souls deserve a place in limbo? They didn't have any sins other than the "original sin". I also think that everyone inherit the "original sin" unwillingly. Blame it on the first two if you want.
Besides, I believe that God is surely wise enough not to be so rigid with His judgements on humans. If those who repent are spared, how come the innocents not? Also, whether people go to heaven or hell, it will be His decision, not ours.
I'm not saying that baptisms are not necessary, but seeing it as the prime requirement to attain a place up there in heaven is the one view which is not necessary. This is just my opinion.
I used to feel uneasy whenever I hear people telling others that they are bad and will go to hell, or that they do things inapproriate to God's will. I mean, let Him judges and decides later on on someone's fate. That saying, I don't think death penalty is necessary. Who are we to determine someone's end of life? But that'll be another story.
So, essentially, the thought that the souls of unbaptized dead babies are stuck in limbo is somewhat ridiculous to me. Our original sins were inherited, not committed. Our responsibility should be to live our lives well and to be humans as God intended us to be.

What about the second issue? This one has been a high-profile.

Surely, Mr Jack Straw had sparked a heated debate over the veil worn by Muslim women.
Similar religion-related issue occured in France a few years ago when the government banned the religious symbols. One of the laws was to ban headscarves from schools, but not universities and Muslim schools.

Straw's suggestion that the veil is to be removed was said to be for the sake of the cultural integration in UK. So far, some people considered that tolerance which supposed to be to support cultural differences and to avoid racial & cultural discrimination had been actually promoting segregation.

I don't think that wearing religious symbols would mean that we are distancing away from the community. People can do that without wearing such symbols. And would veil removal ensure integration? Integration can be achieved without banning symbols. It is more important to achieve integration through nationalism instead of prohibiting people wearing religious symbols. It is not important whether someone is wearing any religous symbols or not, but it is very much important that everyone holds a spirit of togetherness and nationalism in his/her heart everyday regardless what his/her faith/religion is.

Thus, if Mr Straw is worried about the community being segregated, I think he looked at the wrong direction. He should look on how to make every UK citizen, regardless of his/her faith, to be proud of being British. Such ban practiced in France, in my opinion, is somewhat unnecessary.

Another problem may also be brewing in Denmark after a tv station broadcast a video showing a contest on the best caricature of the Prophet Mohammed organised by the youth group of the right-wing Danish People's Party (PDD). I don't think such thing is appropriate at all. Doing it is one thing, but broadcasting it is another. If this kind of thing keeps on happening in the near future, one could only wonder when the patience of the Muslim world will last. Especially after Israel's move towards Lebanon, Pope's loose lips, and Mr Straw's comment. I mean, some people are pushing their luck too far.

Well, another weekend here. Will spend another one watching DVDs. See ya later.