Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens

You, my travelling public, may recall the dark days that befell us in the wake of the August 2006 revelations that British trrrists were, at the very edges of the realms of possibility, planning to mix liquid explosive cocktails on board transatlantic flights. And that there was therefore an immediate, overnight and deliberately panic-inducing ban on passengers carrying most liquids on transatlantic commercial aircraft. What's often overlooked is that this ban could not have been decided on just the day before it was imposed when the news of the very early stages of the plot 'suddenly' broke one early morning; it is something that actually must have taken at least a week to be properly coordinated by the transport security organisations on both sides of the Atlantic: to ensure all US and UK airports had sufficient awareness and the necessary procedures and materials in place, as well as the creation of long, well-prepared documentary-style public information TV news items of the background to the supposed trrrist plot that suddenly appeared on both sides of the Atlantic on the same day, collectively indicating the coordinated UK and US governmental purpose of simultaneously educating the public and, not to put too fine a point on it, keeping them scared. Over those few days we were given a textbook example of actualising the potential for news manipulation by governments, and in the thoroughly terrorised society in which we already live it was one that was seized upon and enhanced. Consequently, we were then witness to the farcical and ill-thought-out scenario of passengers being forced to pour whatever (presumably potentially explosive) liquids they were carrying into single, giant tanks at some airport security gates in the US. Fortunately nothing actually exploded, but over on Making Light this was all usefully dubbed the Exploding Shampoo Plot, although sadly that excellent name never really caught on.

So, thanks to the Home Secretary we had at the time, a pugnacious piece of lowlife called Dr. John Reid MP (his website informs us he enjoys reading history and solving crosswords in his spare time), for the last two years I have of course felt immeasurably safer now that all the potential trrrists in my tender care have been forced to place their toothpaste and bottles of baby milk inside a protective, all-purpose (and presumably explosion-proof) sealable plastic bag. This security measure has since been adopted by just about every country on Earth, and I have personally experienced degrees of enforcement that vary from the draconian to the I-really-don't-give-a-fuck. It is also now a commonly voiced opinion wordwide in aviation security, along with much of the travelling public everywhere, that this limit on liquids (and the necessity for the meaningless inconvenience of a sealable plastic bag in which to put them) has to be one of the weakest and most wasteful transport security measures ever introduced. The end to this farce is now in sight.

1960s SF film

Mars Needs Women, 1967, USA   DIRECTED BY LARRY BUCHANAN
Larry Buchanan was known for both working under tight schedules and also radically cutting production corners, and Mars Needs Women is an example of both: the amount of Air Force stock footage used is proportionally higher in this film than just about any other Hollywood z-movie. It also took a total of two weeks to make: Buchanan would often finish his screenplays one day and begin shooting the next. One noticeably odd thing about this film is that it's something of an anachronism, as if production values or any degree of sophistication in the screenplay had been frozen back in time: you feel like you're watching a movie ten years older than it actually is. It's also a film that I wanted to be far more camp and the fact that most of the Martian acting is so deliberately unnuanced perhaps leaves them wide open to some uninvited reinterpretation: even though the main star Tommy Kirk had been released from his contract with Disney a couple of years previously because of his sexuality, and while there's little visible enthusiasm from the five clean-cut handsome Martians for their cruising Houston for available women, there's also little room for any suggestion of homoeroticism (though one could leap unfairly upon a mention of "a freak in their genetic code"). Abductee Yvonne Bolan also played Batgirl in the 1964 TV series of Batman, and here too she is the liveliest actor on set. To get the complete story it's sometimes hard to fight the feeling that Mars Needs Women is intentionally sleep-inducing, there's so little material that's visually captivating, although the Martian ship is as retro-cool as their shiny Martian uniforms and headgear are just plain ridiculous. A pretty bad film compared with other science fiction being made around the same time, but as it's meant as harmless fun it's probably best to just see it as neither great nor completely worthless.