Censorship and silly season!

Censorship is doing the rounds a bit lately. First of all I noticed a few weeks ago that the title of Tarantino' s latest film had changed titles from inglourious basterds to just inglourious! They did well to censor it on posters etc but in some TV interviews with Tarantino they just used a blur effect the obscure the word basterds! A bit tame in my opinion (oh and on the film, we went to watch it on Friday and its very good! Go watch it especially for the performance given by Christoph Waltz (Col Hans Landa aka the jew hunter) who manages to be both menacing and funny at the same time, but if your offended by the word Basterd I'd give it a miss as you probably wont like the scene when a nazi gets beaten to death with a baseball bat or pretty much most of the scenes for that matter! Another censorship that I saw on the Guardian website was that of lesbian vampire killers on dvd, someone has taken offense to the word lesbian and decided to place a censorship sticker over the word. If I was the censor people I would be more concerned that this film was made/released/thought of. Ok thats a bit harsh but I would definitely endorse a big sticker on it warning the potential buyer that this film contains no funny moments at all, the same sticker could probably be used when the BBC bring out the Horne & Corden first series on DVD as well!

As well as censorship, silly season is again in full swing in the media! For those that don't know silly season is the period when the papers start running stupid stories because, well, they have nothing better report on! First of all it was the story that Benson (I remembered his name as I thought it would probably come up as a question in our local pub quiz!) England's largest carp was dead, apparently poisoned! Other stories reported on a penguin who was bald being given a bloody wetsuit as he was getting a bit chilly in the cold waters, killer chipmunks attacking people and finally last week there was a huge story about a squirrel that popped up in a photo! OK it was funny to look at but the media reaction was considerably over the top! The only thing that I don't think I have seen, but is a perennial silly season story, is some sort of shark attack off the English/Spanish coast! We'll have to wait for next year for that one to raise its head again! Having said that there has been a good effort this year (it could still get better yet!) but it will never beat the story of "squirrels on crack" from a few years back!