For enlightenment and erudition, a quick rundown of how the various sharks are killed in the Jaws films.

Jaws: Sheriff Brody pops open a gas canister in Sharkey's mouth. Boom.
Jaws II: Electric Shark Boogaloo (stray power cable)
Jaws III: saw it again last night. Crazed mother shark gobbles up British hunter before he can pull the pin on his grenade. Dennis Quaid spots this, snags the pin on a stick and, explodes the beast, sending fragements of 'jaws' hurtling towards screen (orignally made in 3-D don't you know)
Jaws; the Revenge: Ellen Brody has flashback to husband's triumph over fish, shoots open yet another gas canister and, once again, the shark blows up.

So what can we learn from this? It's probably too dangerous to take a powerful electrical source to sea and grenades are a bit risky too (you might not have time to pull the pin). The best bet seems to be carry a gas cylindar and gun with you at all times and try and be (or at least sleep with) Roy Scheider. Oh and as an interesting postscript, the various sharks killed in Jaws rip-off Deep Blue Sea are killed by an exploding gas oven, electical current and explosive grenade in that order. How terribly exciting.

Well now, why haven't I made any posts in over a week? Firstly I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to find work though mostly it's due to the scarily addictive quality of GTA: Vice City. I really can't describe how engrossing this game is- it's come fairly close to supplanting my actual life at times. Also been gearing up for Die Another Day. Got tickets for preview screening tomorrow (ah, that's why I live in London) and even though it's going to be terrible I am getting rather over-excited; lasers, hovercrafts, the sinfully beautiful Rosamund Pike, plus I'm very interested in seeing how they propose to make Cadiz look like Havana. On a totally unrelated note, have you seen those new Jamie Oliver adverts- just when I'm feeling some sympathy for the fool and his miserable efforts to bring hope into some people's lives, he goes and makes a sickeningly unfunny advert with bloody skateboarding as the theme and some of the worst body-double work since View To a Kill. If only Sainsbury's weren't the only decent supermarket in Camden.

The new issue hasn't been updated yet, but Sight and Sound continues its gradual slide into unreadable nonsense. It's been going downhill since the design was revamped; the increased concentration on TV, the increasingly poor features, a feel that it's becoming a glorified trade periodical even a rather pathetic industry insider column. The worst development is in the tone of the body of the magazine. The reviews remain intermittently good but the rest is unreadable; the Bond article last issue was insulting- a messy mix of passages ripped straignt out of a UA press kit coupled with some sneery, inaccurate and ill-thought out comments on the series. This month things have got worse. In their best films poll a while ago there was much moaning about the lack of representation of contemporary cinema along with a nasty, snyde commentary on the results denouncing them (and the opinions of a hundred or so respected experts on film) as irrelevant. Now a poll of films of the last 25 years (a good idea in theory) has been denounced in a similar fashion; because of too much Scorses and Coppola and underrepresentation of non-Hollywood films. There is a selective attitude to interpretation of these results that I find really distasteful- Sight and Sound *must* be right, everyone else is wrong.

With regard to the last post, the shape of things to come?

Writing at 0808 GMT, 0308 ET it look as though the American mid-term elections have ended in the worst possible result for the Democrat party, the world and possibly the USA itself. As the New York Times reports, the GOP now has a 4 seat majority in the senate (with three races undecided) and a 23 seat majority in the House (with nine races undecided. In addition the prestige target for the Democrats- the one they *had* to win- the Florida governership remains under the control of Jeb Bush. And the big election for me personally- the attempted comeback of Walter Mondale- hangs in the balance but with Mondale lagging 47% to 53% of Republican Norm Coleman's 50% and 53% of the vote reported things do not look good. At the very least there will be no swingeing protest vote against the presidency that a victory for Carter's vice-president could represent.

So why the melodramatic nay-saying above? Firstly the world. If margins of control remain as wide as at present, Bush will have the mandate and the ability to continue his reckless foreign policy to his heart's content. Protest has been far from forthcoming within his own party, and this great victory for his "allies" will cow the already quiet Democratic oppostion, such as it is. Prepare for even less regard for other points of view on Iraq and the middle-east and the terrifying potential of Bush cooperating with a new hard-right government in Israel (note that Sharon recently called for any war on Iraq to be immediately followed up by a strike on Iran)

Second the Democrats. this is self-explanatory but to re-cap the Democratic party, the *other* party in US politics, manifestly failed to score anything off of economic turmoil, an incredibly flawed and solipsistic foreign policy and corruption reaching dangerously close to the president himself. The failure of Mondale (if this likelihood occurs) would be the nail in the coffin of any return to the more thoughtful era of Carter. With no outstanding candidate for 2004 (all previous favourites have by and large faded) and the inability to take any sort of dominating position in Congress what hope for the party in two years time?

Which leads to the last point. To emphasise, Bush has an unquestionable mandate. He can, within fairly flexible reason, do whatever he likes for the next two years at least and probably the next six. He can and probably will, increasingly alienate America from all states (save Britain and Israel), will continue his bizarre redistribution of wealth to the wealthy and, with his partisan and now Congessionally empowered viewpoint, ride roughshod over any opposition. He doesn't have to pay any attention to them now. The results of all this are unknown, but I have doubts that they will lead to anything good. Here in the UK recent political events seem to indicate a consensus of power around a middle ground. In America politics have undergone a polarisation but without the bright light side to contrast with the fearsome darkness.