All Terrain Thinking

A Compendium of things I think are Important

Wonderful strange stories from around the world

Oscar Bait

In the old Soviet Union, there were two major newspapers. Both, naturally, were run by the Communist Party. One was called Pravda (The Truth), the other, Izvestsia (The News). The joke on the street was that in The News there was no truth, and in The Truth there was no news. Sound familiar?

Don't worry, money and great prizes can be won from both paradox and hypocrisy.

Let's take the Spratly Islands. Why not? Everybody else wants to. It's all illegal and perfectly media-friendly. I tried to find them on a map the other day. It took a while. Oh, there they are. Believe me, they are nowhere near China.

However, China is very big, and the other contenders are very small. Land claims from ancient maps, and from ancient peoples, have always been at best dubious, and at worst emotional. Result? Trouble - and a godsend to the legal business. World courts are used, expensive lawyers are hired, and the press presses.

And these days everyone is doing it; comfort women, Australian Aboriginals, and large ocean-going mammals are all putting in their claims. But just how far can you go back in time to claim injustice?

"Look, the ale was just kicking in. T'was sometime in 1066, methinks. We were just sitting peacefully on the beach at Hastings in England, enjoying our rat-on-a-stick picnic, and the next moment, these yobs with appalling haircuts hit the beach. Next thing we knew, our mate Harold had an arrow in his left eye and was screaming, "What French hooligan threw that . . .?"

Result? Nine centuries of mutual insults hurled across the Channel, and I end up with a French surname.

So what are you doing on the weekend? Come on, let's take the Spratlys before anyone else does. What the hell! It'll soon be called the Splatlys before long anyway. We could pretend we were Greenpeace. No we couldn't. Forget that; I own them money. You see, I cuffed one of their canvassers when he knocked on my door at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning. He had long hair and I couldn't see his face. I thought he was a crazed Jehovah's Witness. Well, what would you have done?

Anyhow, Greenpeace are too politically correct, and they are never wrong. I'm neither of these things. So, what we will do is get smart and make a movie out of it as we invade.

In the immortal words of Carl Sagan: "Come with me."

Our picture opens on a turquoise sea. Sigourney Weaver, mohawked and saddled on a killer whale, called Kill Willy, emerges next to one pathetic hump of sand in the ocean upon which four Chinese soldiers are trying to erect a television aerial. She smirks, and they freak and jump into the water. She submerges, follows, and it's lunch for the whale.

It's disturbing, but timely. It's Oscar bait.

The camera then pans to another Chinese-occupied blip of land deeper into the Splatly claim. The commander, whose name is Wun Hung Bak, is a militant but well-meaning guy. But he has an evil streak owing to the loss of his left eye in a laboratory experiment in Shanghai in 1962. It is covered by a patch, ingeniously fashioned from the sloughed husk of a favorite tarantula. He has more hair in his ears than he does on his head.

To a hip-hop soundtrack, Sigourney emerges once more, erect on the whale. She is powerful. Wun Hung Bak wheels around and spots her with his good eye.

"Ah, so we meet again old friend, eh?"

He immediately launches himself into one of those ridiculous twenty-foot Kung Fu backward somersaults, and lands on his sword at exactly the same place he started.

Sigourney is unmoved, but stiffens at the sight of the approaching ships.

Dramatic pan to Splatly panorama. Sigourney, using only a blowgun and a flare, takes out the entire Chinese deep-water navy. It's action. It's nineties. It's Eco-Aliens with a Guerrillas In The Mist twist.

Of course there'll be dolphin-related casualties and heavy gunfire, but it's topical. It's worth a fortune in baseball cap and T-shirt contracts. When the greenies arrive to congratulate her, she blows them away too, mouthing, "Hippy wimps . . . " as she slowly disappears beneath the waves.

Final scene. Sigourney, now peroxide blonde, triumphant, and astride her whale, cruises up the Chao Phraya river, where they receive a dramatic welcome just opposite The Oriental Hotel. There's thunderous applause, the teenagers scream, the paparazzi snap, and the whale blows water on cue. Sigourney holds her blowgun aloft in triumph.

But unknown to her and the crowd, a soured, female English language teacher with distressed hair and a chin that shows no signs of coming out of the recession, edges towards the river with a sawn-off shot-gun.

So how was your week?

By Roger Beaumont

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