gove forth and multiply

Couple of brief items that may be of interest:

If you can't be arsed sitting through the full 158 minutes of David Fincher's adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, here's a condensed version which you can zip though in five minutes and also accurately skewers most of the ways in which the book, though a lot of fun, is in many ways pretty silly.

More school-related religious madness now: Conservative Education Secretary and Pob and Rick Moranis impersonator Michael Gove's plans to give every school in the country a copy of the King James Version of the Bible seem to have stalled a bit, more for reasons of finance restrictions than as a result of any sort of Oh For Fuck's Sake What Was I Thinking moment of clarity or anything like that.

Also, I'm sure this is probably a slight misquote, or at least taken out of context, but the Mail has him referring to the KJV as "the most important book written in the English language". Well, of course this particular version is written in the English language, but if I started saying that, say, Crime And Punishment or The Unbearable Lightness Of Being or Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter was the greatest novel ever written in the English language people would probably take issue with my reasoning, and rightly so.

Note, however, that there are undoubtedly people in the more scary bits of the USA who would probably run you out of town on a rail for pointing out that the English versions of the Bible are translations from the original Hebrew via Greek with all the attendant loss of nuance and mistranslation of idioms that you might expect. I would strongly recommend stopping short of pointing out that even the original manuscripts were just folk myth and other made-up stuff anyway if you don't fancy a hot lead sandwich.