More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
29 April
When there is a shortage of water in (parts of) the UK, let's spare a thought for those counties that, in past centuries, were so unshakable in their beliefs that they got stuck in a rut, and, not unlike the Wednesbury lot who (at my hands, too) get such stick for coming to that famously unreasonable decision that no one could reasonably have made*, were worryingly in danger of binding themselves in hide.
The drastic solution was to seed this rigid application of rules and principles (and to hell with the consequences), a bit as one might a patch of ice with salt. So government-sponsored orators would go around, on the back of waggons, proclaiming alternative viewpoints, and arguing for a Grey between the Black and White. (Dr, later Dean, Jonathan Swift - although not one of these orators himself - wrote scripts for them to memorize and employ.)
Of course, some counties were so entrenched in their views, that all this achieved nothing, and the orators were hanged or stoned, and thus - as no one has dared since to send anyone into the vineyard (oops! different topic, as that's a parable) - we have modern Britain, where angels fear to tread in such homelands of dogma, discrimination and dis-ease***.
QED
End-notes
* Yes, how that decision is described** is a bit like divorce, and the behaviour that is so unreasonable that the other party could not reasonably be expected to tolerate it, except that almost any marriage will have given rise to events that are sufficient to flesh out the required particulars for a judge to certify that a divorce can proceed - broadly speaking, first, last and worst, plus a few others.
It must be said, a soul-destroying task, both for the person drawing up those particulars, and for the one reading them, even if both may be (as, respectively, solicitor / legal executive and judge) paid to do it... Pay does not make pleasant the unpalatable, as Seneca declaimed - but it does help!
** If memory serves aright, it was something to do with licensing a cinema, of all things.
*** As Stephen Potter would have called it.
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Showing posts with label divorce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label divorce. Show all posts
Saturday 28 April 2012
Friday 27 April 2012
Roulette Marriage
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 April
If you've been married and not all that happily, you know how it is, so maybe this isn't as immoral as it seems*:
1. Short of rape, which still wouldn't count, it's up to those who have gone
through a marriage ceremony whether they consummate the union
2. The law of England and Wales does not allow divorce** within the first year of marriage (a period that might be inferred to run from the date of consummation)
3. Unless, as it turns out, consummation, or the failure to achieve it, is separate and only relates to annulment, i.e. not to starting 'a divorce clock' running at a later point than the day of the ceremony
4. And applying for annulment of what appears to be a marriage, as with so much of our wretched legal system, is both adversarial and a matter of persuading a judge
5. So one party to the marriage ceremony would need to allege that the other party, wilfully or through incapability, failed to consummate the marriage***, and he or she would have not to contest, probably event assent to the truth of, that assertion****
6. So maybe, three months after the ceremony, a judge might not swallow that the aggrieved party had taken so long to seek annulment (and rumble that the parties were conniving at - what will unfold below as - a contingent marriage)
7. Which leads us to the roulette element: thirty-six men and thirty-six women agree to go into a pool of marriage candidates, from which a pairing (and a number allotted to the pair, between 1 and 36) will be made on some basis or other, but essentially not of the candidates' choice (or not based on knowledge of the other opposite-sex candidates)
8. Cleared payment to the organizer by each candidate of the full costs of a civil ceremony is a prequisite to knowing where and when to attend (advised at short notice, say, by e-mail)
9. If one party fails to attend the ceremony, the one who does attend is reimbursed from the other's payment, and might elect to start again
10. If both fail to attend, maybe they get a refund of one-half each...
11. If they go through with the full legal ceremony, they get what they have paid for - they get what some cult leaders impose, on some basis or other, on the members of their cult
12. With a better knowledge of the facts and law than stated above, they choose how to proceed, whether to consummation, delayed consummation, or none
13. Each couple will have its own outcome that links to its number, whether they never met, met and could not contemplate marriage at first sight, went through the ceremony, etc, etc.
The tracked outcome of each numbered couple (for each of many such pools, in order to achieve a chi-squared level of statistical significance) feeds into a complex betting-system for roulette, reminiscent of the plot of the film Pi (1998)
End-notes
* Though the Surrealists might have approved, as, without formulating it in marriage as such, maybe they did this by default... I gather that, despite the former Soviet regime having marriage, it was neither difficult to begin or end.
** Yet it does allow for the lesser step of judicial separation (as used when Charles and Diana first split up, I believe), which - as far I recall - relieves the parties of what is claimed to be 'the duty to co-habit' (if you can credit such a thing!).
*** Has this topic been in a news-story of late?
**** That said, if John Smith says that Boddingtons slept with someone (who may or may not be named as London Pride), and Boddingtons agrees on the right form and in the correct way that it happened, who is to say otherwise? (Except that it mustn't, of course, have been more than six months ago that John Smith first knew.)
Any better or worse than these company records that say that everyone listed as present had a meeting in Delft, whereas some, say, do not even have a passport - or were doing something quite different on Jamaica?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 April
If you've been married and not all that happily, you know how it is, so maybe this isn't as immoral as it seems*:
1. Short of rape, which still wouldn't count, it's up to those who have gone
through a marriage ceremony whether they consummate the union
2. The law of England and Wales does not allow divorce** within the first year of marriage (a period that might be inferred to run from the date of consummation)
3. Unless, as it turns out, consummation, or the failure to achieve it, is separate and only relates to annulment, i.e. not to starting 'a divorce clock' running at a later point than the day of the ceremony
4. And applying for annulment of what appears to be a marriage, as with so much of our wretched legal system, is both adversarial and a matter of persuading a judge
5. So one party to the marriage ceremony would need to allege that the other party, wilfully or through incapability, failed to consummate the marriage***, and he or she would have not to contest, probably event assent to the truth of, that assertion****
6. So maybe, three months after the ceremony, a judge might not swallow that the aggrieved party had taken so long to seek annulment (and rumble that the parties were conniving at - what will unfold below as - a contingent marriage)
7. Which leads us to the roulette element: thirty-six men and thirty-six women agree to go into a pool of marriage candidates, from which a pairing (and a number allotted to the pair, between 1 and 36) will be made on some basis or other, but essentially not of the candidates' choice (or not based on knowledge of the other opposite-sex candidates)
8. Cleared payment to the organizer by each candidate of the full costs of a civil ceremony is a prequisite to knowing where and when to attend (advised at short notice, say, by e-mail)
9. If one party fails to attend the ceremony, the one who does attend is reimbursed from the other's payment, and might elect to start again
10. If both fail to attend, maybe they get a refund of one-half each...
11. If they go through with the full legal ceremony, they get what they have paid for - they get what some cult leaders impose, on some basis or other, on the members of their cult
12. With a better knowledge of the facts and law than stated above, they choose how to proceed, whether to consummation, delayed consummation, or none
13. Each couple will have its own outcome that links to its number, whether they never met, met and could not contemplate marriage at first sight, went through the ceremony, etc, etc.
The tracked outcome of each numbered couple (for each of many such pools, in order to achieve a chi-squared level of statistical significance) feeds into a complex betting-system for roulette, reminiscent of the plot of the film Pi (1998)
End-notes
* Though the Surrealists might have approved, as, without formulating it in marriage as such, maybe they did this by default... I gather that, despite the former Soviet regime having marriage, it was neither difficult to begin or end.
** Yet it does allow for the lesser step of judicial separation (as used when Charles and Diana first split up, I believe), which - as far I recall - relieves the parties of what is claimed to be 'the duty to co-habit' (if you can credit such a thing!).
*** Has this topic been in a news-story of late?
**** That said, if John Smith says that Boddingtons slept with someone (who may or may not be named as London Pride), and Boddingtons agrees on the right form and in the correct way that it happened, who is to say otherwise? (Except that it mustn't, of course, have been more than six months ago that John Smith first knew.)
Any better or worse than these company records that say that everyone listed as present had a meeting in Delft, whereas some, say, do not even have a passport - or were doing something quite different on Jamaica?
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Thursday 26 January 2012
Helium Kid splits up from Dolphin
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
27 January
There seems to be a fair bit of Internet reporting of this divorce at the moment (whether there is any interest, I do not know, and have followed none of the 'links'*): I had heard of one party (and even heard some music some time), but the other, patent anagram Heidi Klum**, was a bit of a mystery:
Not now - and there she has the advantage over me, because, to judge from the 'thumbnails' (do we get this jargon from photography?), she bears a resemblance to a friend's wife, and he is not in the music business, whereas I do not. (The page of search-results also called her 'mother-of-four' Klum.)
In her youth (if she went by anything resembling that name), did peers jeer at her with Hi, mule kid!, approach with Hi! Like mud?, with mud-pies at the ready, or, with Hi! Milk due!, dive on her breasts?
Or did they keep invoking that device of incoherence, whenever it was sticky, and exclaim Oh, it's - like - humid...?***
End-notes
* I imagine that we have this terminology from the people of the time in universities in the States who made connections between their computers, although some will see it as more, at that stage, to do with the US military.
** Yahoo! also wants to lure me into finding out about another woman, a red ranch serf who goes under the name Crash Redfern (loads of 'em in the LA phone-book, beloved of Woody...).
*** Of course, it's quite possible that none of this happened, not even in vivid, frightening dreams, and that she wowed her contemporaries with her nascent skills as a [whatever she's famous for - to be completed, NB not mother of four at that stage].
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
27 January
There seems to be a fair bit of Internet reporting of this divorce at the moment (whether there is any interest, I do not know, and have followed none of the 'links'*): I had heard of one party (and even heard some music some time), but the other, patent anagram Heidi Klum**, was a bit of a mystery:
Not now - and there she has the advantage over me, because, to judge from the 'thumbnails' (do we get this jargon from photography?), she bears a resemblance to a friend's wife, and he is not in the music business, whereas I do not. (The page of search-results also called her 'mother-of-four' Klum.)
In her youth (if she went by anything resembling that name), did peers jeer at her with Hi, mule kid!, approach with Hi! Like mud?, with mud-pies at the ready, or, with Hi! Milk due!, dive on her breasts?
Or did they keep invoking that device of incoherence, whenever it was sticky, and exclaim Oh, it's - like - humid...?***
End-notes
* I imagine that we have this terminology from the people of the time in universities in the States who made connections between their computers, although some will see it as more, at that stage, to do with the US military.
** Yahoo! also wants to lure me into finding out about another woman, a red ranch serf who goes under the name Crash Redfern (loads of 'em in the LA phone-book, beloved of Woody...).
*** Of course, it's quite possible that none of this happened, not even in vivid, frightening dreams, and that she wowed her contemporaries with her nascent skills as a [whatever she's famous for - to be completed, NB not mother of four at that stage].
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
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