no gloss, no sheen, simply my first post in a while. That's how it is.

A bear walks into a bar and says "I'll... ... ...have a pint of beer please" the barman says "Sure. Why the big pause?"

Boom-boom!

Big pause on here, or what!?

Before we get serious i'll just mention two other jokes i've been giggling to myself at all day today. The first one i heard on the radio this morning: I used to go out with a dolphin. We just clicked.
It reminded me of the second one: I used to go out with a tall girl. I had to jack it in.

I'd like to say that's out of my system now, but i'm still tittering away.

So, where have you been? I've been doing assignments, involved in the night-shelter, having and recovering from a knee operation and watching The Wire.

The Wire - Wow! Profoundly affected i am. The Wire could well be the reason that televisual media exists. If that's potentially an overstatement, then saying it's the very best TV (perhaps audio-visual media) i've seen isn't.

It comes with a health warning: contained within is some of the strongest motherf^%$ing language ever to grace the airwaves. There's a scattering of strong sex scenes - heterosexual, homosexual, casual and drunken. The use of hard drugs is depicted regularly and frankly throughout, and vicious acts of violence are portrayed unflinchingly and with a certain ambivalence.

All that said though, if truth is important to God and something we might deem a 'Kingdom value', it remains one of the most Christian ventures in broadcasting. The Wire has it by the pound, without gloss and devoid of compromise. It strikes me that The Wire doesn't have much of a mission statement beyond letting you know the truth, that thus the truth might set you free. It is brutal in its commitment to showing how things are and it succeeds in authenticity in ways that other TV shows can only dream of.

The effect of this is that the audience is indeed set free. Viewers are completely relieved of their paradigms of goodies and baddies and of victory and defeat. What remains is the most valuable thing of all; portraits of people as whole (broken) beings. Everyone is victim, everyone is perpetrator, everyone is responsible for their own demise and everyone is bound by compulsion - and you root for them all. Through all of the unveiled depths of brokenness though, run ever such faint and delicate threads of hope. I think The Wire is the most graphically accurate rendering of the human condition i've seen. If you hold on to Jesus' hand, we'll all be safe from Satan when the thunder rolls. We've just got to keep the Devil way down in the hole.

Sorry, did i mention that (if i were to squeeze it into a crudely designated genre) it's a cop show? Set in Baltimore, the police have their story whilst also serving as a way into the stories of the streets and the stories of City Hall. Told over five series, it scans a regenerating city from the angles of drug dealers and addicts, blue collar workers, political and legal structures, education and the media, with glimpses of the penal system and homelessness briefly covered too.

The truth hurts. Fact.