The Passion

Mel Gibson's latest, for those of you who don't follow film news as maniacaally as I do is "The Passion", a teling of Christ's Death told entirely in Latin and Aramaic. The trailer looks fantastically authentic. However there's a fair amount of controversy about it.

Mel Gibson's new movie The Passion has been given the official thumbs down by America's Anti-Defamation League. The controversial film, about the final hours of Jesus Christ's life, was screened for select religious leaders Monday, and Adl officials were far from happy with what they saw. Abraham Foxman, who has been among those heaping criticism on the ambitious project - shot in Italy in the ancient languages of Aramaic and Latin - is convinced the film will infuriate and upset religious people. Foxman says, "We are deeply concerned that the film, if released in its present form, will fuel the hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism that many responsible churches have worked hard to repudiate." Fellow ADL official Rabbi Eugene Korn, who also saw the movie, adds, "This is not a disagreement between the Jews and Mr. Gibson. Many theologically-informed Catholics and Protestants have expressed the same concerns regarding anti-Semitism and that this film may undermine Christian-Jewish dialogue and could turn back the clock on decades of positive progress in interfaith relations."

So, lacking any precise details about the anti-semitism, I went looking at the New Testament to see what the original sources say. Guess what - all four apostles agree that the guiding force of the crucifixion was the Jewish Priesthood and Mark states categorically (15:11) that the pristehood stirred up the crowd to have Jesus crucified. So unless the complaint is basically that the New Testament is both false and anti-semitic (which the Anti-defamation League doesn't seem to be going for this week) I'm wondering where there complaint lies.

I'm now rather looking forward to this, just to see what happens. Maybe there'll be a double bill with Life of Brian so we can compare and contrast.

No kitchen sink yet

Google now has a calculator built in.

More .NET fun

I've had a stressfull 24 hours. I hate it when things don't work. I hate it even more when things don't work and don't give you enough information to even start looking for your problem...

Erin had asked me to find her a baclup program and, following 3 hours of searching, I decided that there wasn't a simple program that would do the copying on a daily basis. so I'd write my own. How hard could it be?

I got a simple program up and running yesterday which copied a folder from one place to another. That was actually fairly easy. I then decided I needed to store a list of which folders needed to be backed up. Now, I could play around with databases, but frankly that would mean digging out Access and finding out how to do Data Access in .NET, more trouble than I could be bothered with at that moment. Instead, I figured I'd just store the data in XML. XML's dead easy, after all. Any idiot can do it.

So I broke out the .NET book I have, discovered I was going to have to get myself involved in schemas (which define what a valid XML file can look like) and threw myself into it. And bounced off. With a fucking usless error message.

24 hours later, and much swearing and stress later, I discover that the problem is that alhough my XSD had a perfectly reasonable heirarchical structure, and validated just fine, it didn't contain an actual 'element'. I assumed that the top of the heirarchy would get automatically recognised as the root, but no. Apparently I needed an actual element to sit at the top. Not that the error message told me anything that useful. Noooooo.

I haven't got anywhere near the actual programming bit, either. I'm still futzing around in the IDE. I hesitate to think what the actual programming will be like...

My week ahead

Gaming tonight.
Fringe Stuff with Ed tomorrow
Lake District Friday (evening), Saturday and Sunday (followed by meeting JH Brennan with Erin)
Move stuff through with Ed on Monday (and move living room to Study)
Tuesday-Sunday are then mine again...

Wooden TV screen

Now this is steampunk