random: space! mad-ness!

BBC NEWS | Americas | Space tax takes off after US vote: Residents in the US state of New Mexico have approved a new tax to build the nation's first commercial spaceport.

Supporters including New Mexico's governor and billionaire, Richard Branson, had called the tax vote a make-or-break election for the port. But others say the money should go towards improving local problems and resent having to subsidise the activities of wealthy space tourists. Taxes will contribute about $50m (£25m) in to the nearly $200m project. [...] Sir Richard Branson has signed a long-term lease with the state of New Mexico to make the new spaceport the headquarters of his Virgin Galactic space tourism business. The spaceport is expected to open in 2009, and Virgin Galactic says space flights will cost around $200,000 for a 2.5-hour flight...

I have no idea what to say about that. Except that my old home state has lost its wee little mind. Seriously, do they even have $50 million to spare for this? It's one of the poorest states in the country.

On the other hand, what with NASA about to go out of the space business for a decade or so, maybe the time is right, and this will prove to be relentlessly visionary.

Purely a side note: the venerable Beeb needs to watch its grammar and commas a bit better. For a moment, I wondered why on earth they thought that Richard Branson was New Mexico's governor, and why they thought New Mexico's governor was a billionaire. It's also somewhat disingenuous to call Branson a "supporter" when he's going to be pretty much running the whole shebang.

random: the tudors

Watching The Tudors is moderately surreal if you've studied British history at all. They've relocated Buckingham's rebellion into the wrong reign entirely; he revolted against Richard III, and was quite thoroughly beheaded long before Henry VIII was born. They've given Bessie Blount a cuckholded husband, when she didn't get married until after Henry Fitzroy was born; her husband was her reward for giving birth to a son. There's also the small, and yet not inconsiderable, point that pretty much every person in the cast looks approximately as described in various historical documents and paintings, with the exception of Henry himself, who most emphatically does not. For a historical drama, history is certainly not its strongest point.

It also seems that Henry VIII -- pardon, Henry 8, as Showtime would have it -- was prone to taking off his shirt with wild abandon. In fact, most of the men of the period seem to take off their rich garments with a certain facility. Strangely, it turns out that the British and French aristocrats of the time were all very very pretty without their clothes. (For what it's worth, Henry Cavill-- playing Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Henry's best friend and future brother in-law, if they stick with history (although Mary Tudor, Henry's sister, has yet to be seen) -- is much prettier without his clothes than Jonathan Rhys-Davies. And seems to discard them more frequently, which, considering the frequency of Henry's disrobing, is saying quite something.)

And Thomas Boleyn pimped out both of his daughters to his king -- which, OK, true enough, depending on how you look at things. Though how the then-virginal maiden Mary Boleyn even knew that blowjobs existed, let alone what to do... (Anne, in fact, gets two-way pimpage from both her father and her uncle. Such a lucky girl!) Oh, and it turns out that royalty shaved Down There, judging from the considerable amount we've seen of His Highness. (Or rather, given that we've seen his bodyservant shaving his face, one suspects that perhaps someone else did so. Which, considering the prevalence of body lice at the time, might actually have happened.) My, the extent that Showtime will have its actors go to achieve physical realism!

Mind, it's still fun. Opulent and cheesy fun, though not so opulent and not so cheesy and considerably less bloody than Rome -- even allowing that The Tudors is on pace for at least one noble death per episode. Can't say that it's grasp on history is really much worse though; Rome turned the devout and proper matron Atia Balba into something quite different, and the real Servilia, Brutus' mother, died of old age, surviving most of her contemporaries, and certainly not committing suicide on Atia's doorstep, and so on, and so on ...