A Journey Through London

I haven't blogged for a while, so I thought I'd go back about two weeks to the start of the Easter fortnight. I was on holiday that week, so I thought I'd go into London to visit some museums and art galleries.

Stratford to Kew Gardens

I got off the C2C from Pitsea at West Ham and made my way to Stratford to pick up the overground. From there, I got the Richmond train. I normally get off at Camden Road, but I stayed on all the way to Kew Gardens. The Overground shares the same rails as the District line from Gunnersbury.


View Larger Map

I got to Kew and wandered around for a bit (£15 to go in!) and ended up at Gunnersbury station, where I took the District and Piccadilly to Hyde Park:


View Larger Map

The idea was to go to see the Hockney exhibition, but the queue was massive: a four hour wait. If it had been Rembrandt or Raphael, maybe, but not a Yorkshireman!

The Design Museum

Being at a bit of a loss of what to do, I decided to walk to the Design museum on the South Bank:


View Larger Map

I hadn't seen Design of the Year competition last year, so it was good to have a look. The standouts where a giant dandelion for blowing up mines;

a suite of furniture which folded up into crates;

a font for Nokia phones (as a fontophile, one of my favourites); two electric cars; and a temporary house built of wooden blocks under an overpass in East London:

In particular I liked the idea of Not-so-expanded Polystyrene (NSEPS), created by making textile moulds, filling them with polystyrene granules and then steaming them, causing the granules to both expand and harden. Cool materials stuff.

Magic City

A new crime series is starting over in the states called Magic City, on the Starz network:



Obviously taking a cue from Mad Men and other such nostalgia related shows, such as Pan Am, this is going for a much harder edge. Looks good, though.

Awake

A new TV series has started over in the states on the NBC network which looks intriguing:



The premise is that a man, a police detective, has a car accident in which a member of his family is killed. When he recovers, he switches between two realities when he sleeps, one in which his wife survived, and the other in which his son survived.

There was a similar series a while back called Journeyman, which involved time travel rather than alternate realities, that wasn't successful, so it remains to be seen whether this stays the course. With so little competition at the moment, though, it might survive, and it does look good.

Update: The show got five stars from SFX magazine this month.

Remembering Moebius

Jean Giraud, a.k.a. Moebius, has recently passed away aged 73:

Moebius wrote The Airtight Garage, The Blueberry books and The Incal, amongst others, and always impressed me with his complex, intricate style. He also worked on the initial stages of Alien, Tron and influenced the Star Wars movies. If I had to choose only one comic book artist to be like, I would be Moebius!

"Oh-point-Oh" - Microserfs

I've been reading Microserfs by Douglas Coupland:

I read jPod a few years ago and this is pretty good as well. In it there's a part where everyone is offered jobs at a new start-up and leaves their secure, and profitable, jobs at Microsoft. One of them explains that he want to do it because he will be "oh-point-oh": he'll be in at the start of something new, something potentially revolutionary.

I think that's what's been eating at me the last few years with the job. I've been working, time after time, on systems well past their best years and it's been grating on me a little bit too often. I want to start anew, make something no-one has ever made before, even a new programming language. "Oh-point-oh".

The relationship between the protagonist, Daniel, and his girlfriend Karla also intrigued me. He's not as smart as she is and she provides a way for him to grow into being someone better than he starts off being, while he and his colleagues and family provide something for her to belong to, being alienated from her real family. Maybe this is the post-modern situation, that we are closer to our friends and colleagues than we are to our own flesh and blood?

Daniel keeps a sort of diary on his laptop (an Apple Powerbook) and he writes some of the most romantic and hauntingly direct prose I've ever read:

"I don't want to lose you. I can't imagine ever feeling this strongly about anything or anybody ever again. This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you. You stole my loneliness."

There's a moment when he's with Karla and she's reliving a traumatic episode in her life. He holds her tight, almost holding her together, and says:

"you're a thousand diamonds - a handful of lovers' rings - chalk for a million hopscotch games"

(the elemental composition of the human body: carbon, the diamonds, and calcium, the chalk)

Another one of the themes of the book is the transition, or even evolution, of the characters from merely being corporate cogs in the Microsoft machine ("cannon fodder" as Daniel says at one point), to being individuals in the start-up. It's a little like the self-actualising personality Maslow was on about.

Hey "Karla"! Thought you might like it this way. Try looking at the source.

25 Years of W40K, Tron Plaza & Leverage RPG

Warhammer 40,000

Is it really the 25th anniverary of W40K?

I feel old. Good job I've got shares in Games Workshop.

Finsbury Avenue Square

While walking back through the City the other day I passed through Broadgate and encountered this:

It's like a Tron grid. Now where did I put my Lightcycle!

Leverage Role Playing Game

My sister is into the TV series Leverage. There's an RPG for virtually everything, this being no exception, and I found one at DriveThru RPG:

It's one of the quick start ones, rather than the full core rule book which is £20 or so.

Laid Low and Sanjuro!

Being laid low by a bug (of which there seems to be many going around at the moment), I thought I'd watch one of my favourite Kurosawa/Mifune movies, Sanjuro:



It's easy to see this as inferior to The Seven Samurai or Yojimbo, of which is was meant to be a sequel, but I think it stands well on it's own and is a classic samurai movie.

Spy Story

I've just been watching Body of Lies, which is a not-half-bad spy story set in the Middle East, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Strong and Russell Crowe.



What's interesting is that the original author of the story, David Ignatius, who is also a Washington Post columnist, started a competition, writing the first chapter of a spy novel and running a competition to write the rest.

Snow Joke

Yes, folks, like the rest of the UK, Chez Lemon and BasVegas have been hit by a gigantic snow fall:

It started last night and it looks like it's about three or fours inches. Luckily, this hit on a Sunday, giving public transport at least a day to think up excuses for things not working. Looks like it could be fun on Monday morning! Normally I'd rely on Calvin and Hobbes to express my feelings on the subject, but I thought I'd give Zippy a try this time:

Mmmm, perhaps a bit too obscure? Oh, well:

Are My Methods Unsound?

Although I have it on DVD, I watched Apocalypse Now through LoveFilm. It's the original edit, not the redux, but no worse for all that.



Willard's journey up the river and his confrontation with the enigmatic Kurtz marked the end of an era in Hollywood and nobody made films quite like this again.

Changing Names

Mr. Glitz has changed his name to...Mr. Glitz. You can't really have a new name without a new badge, so...:

Borrowing Your Watch To Tell You The Time

Back to Don Cheadle, he's the star of a new TV series from the states called House of Lies, all about business consultants.



Seems quite good, if a little bit near the knuckle.

Life During Wartime

LoveFilm have recently updated their apps such that the films download a lot faster and more reliably, so I've been watching a lot more movies.

Brooklyn's Finest

This is an American cop movie starring Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, Ethan Hawke (who once signed one his novels in Chelmsford!) and Richard Gere.



The movie follows the paths of three different policemen: a burnout seven days until he retires (Gere); a desperate family man who hits on the idea of robbing drug dealers (Hawke); and an undercover cop and having divided loyalties (Cheadle).

Although an excellent crime drama, it does suffer from having too many stories to tell. The burnout story could have been left out and more effort put into the other two stories, but each of the stories could have made a decent movie all by itself. Cheadle stands out for me as the conflicted undercover cop, but the others are all excellent, despite their limited screen time.

Angels and Demons

This is the adaption of the book by Dan Brown, whose name is a curse on the lips of every second-hand book seller:



If The DaVinci Code was silly, this is just ludicrous. I just wanted the bomb to go off - right in the middle of Vatican City, half way through the movie, so I didn't have to sit through the rest of this waste of celluloid. I hope it bombed.

Persepolis

This is an adaption of Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical comic book about growing up and living in Iran and Vienna:



Satrapi was co-director of the film, so what you see is pretty much as the books tell it. It's also a sad film as her family suffered terribly in the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war and she ends up leaving Iran forever, but it is a story about freedom and what it costs. The rendition of "Eye of the Tiger" was beyond funny.

World Book Night 2012

Amongst the usual flyers in my e-mail in-tray was an advert from Waterstones regarding World Book Night. I don't usually pay too much attention to these as, like the Booker prize and it's ilk, it's not what everyone reads. I scanned down the list and noted that Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, was on it, as well as my brother-in-law's favourite author, Martina Cole, with her novel The Take. Also included are A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Sense and Insensibility by Jane Austen. All very well, I thought, until I spotted my all time favourite book in the list: The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks.

I suppose most gamers will like it for the title alone, but it's certainly Banks's best (Use of Weapons comes close, and The Bridge is his other masterpiece, but he's not done anything that great in a long while: Surface Detail was dire!).

Anyway, the deal is that you get 24 copies and give them away. I'm not giving away my first copy (1st edition paperback) nor my signed copy, but if you want one, I'm more than happy to send you one on the day, which is 23rd April.

Sweet Smell of Success

Occasionally I form a list in my head of the best films I've ever seen. Not many of them are less than twenty years old. This is one of the best:



It has star-crossed lovers, a villain only Burt Lancaster could play and the anti-hero of them all in Sidney Falco. "Match me, Sidney!"

Winter Soldier

In 1972, a film was made using statements from the Winter Soldier investigation:



This was a public investigation, not Congressional or formal in any way, into atrocities of perpetrated by U.S. and allied forces during the Vietnam War. This was in the wake of the My Lai massacre, which was reported as an isolated incident. Winter Solder demonstrated that, although an extreme occurrence, these atrocities were "SOP" (Standard Operating Procedure) and by no means unusual.

This all seems like ancient history: it took place when I was about seven years old, but a new Winter Soldier project has been set up, both in America and Europe (but not the U.K., strangely) to document Afghanistan and Iraq.

Christmas and New Year

Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger

For Christmas, I got Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger on DVD:

Thor has got quite a few positive reviews, mainly because Kenneth Branagh has directed it, but there's nothing particularly exceptional about it, for a Marvel movie.



I thought it was well done, in particular the special effects, but seemed a bit one-dimentional (yeah, okay, it's Marvel, but Iron Man 1 wasn't like that). Saying this, it could have been really, really bad and maybe Kenny was just the right guy to do it?

More fun, perhaps, was Captain America: The First Avenger:



This is getting back to what the super hero comics were all about in the first place, kicking seven bells out of the bad guys. It's worth remembering that a lot of the early super heroes were created by Jewish cartoonists (Jacob Kurtzberg = Jack Kirby; Stanley Lieber = Stan Lee; Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created Superman; Bob Kane, or Kahn, who created Batman) so Nazi's are a natural enemy for super heroes.

As an aside, the flying wing used at the end of the movie by the Crimson Skull is based on real designs for an "Amerika Bomber" by the Horten brothers and others.

A Budgie for Christmas

And someone bought me a little budgie:

Made from resin, but a nice little addition to the menagerie.

Submarine

This is a film about being a teenager in Wales during the 1980's, so how someone like me can possibly relate to this I can't imagine:



The protagonist, Oliver Tate, falls in love with pyromaniac, while simultaneously trying to save his parents marriage. It's all a bit surreal and I don't remember that much swearing, but Tate's monologue sounds familiar. Plus it's got quotes like:

"Her lips tasted of milk, Polo mints and Dunhill International"

I can't see everyone liking it, but I do. And it did feel a bit like that.

Boxing Day - Green Lantern and The Station Agent

First up is The Green Lantern:



This is a DC character, one I vaguely remember, but wasn't that impressed by at the time. Here it's been done very well, although the plot, and the villain along with it, aren't particularly brilliant. Plus DC don't have Marvel's Avengers as a movie franchise to tie all the different heroes together, or Stan Lee to do his Hitchcock thing in every movie. Shame really because the DC heroes were always more iconic than Marvel. All in all, not a bad pizza movie.

Second is The Station Agent:



This was on a few weeks ago, which I missed and, based on Mr. Glitz's recommendation, rented on DVD to see what it was like. It's a drama-without-drama, or melodrama, and not really a comedy, but is nice viewing. Dinklage is quite good, and the supporting cast is good quality. Worth a watch.

Christmas Day

At the end of a quiet Christmas Day, I thought I'd watch The 39 Steps:



Classic stuff!

Aliens Prequel

Look what I found:

Why We Fight

This film concerns the effect of the military industry on American Foreign and Domestic policy.

Having been part of this for nearly ten years, half of that in the cold war, it has a certain resonance. I've always felt that we were becoming more militarised as a society, more de-sensitised to increasingly imperialistic foreign adventures.

The singing, though, is teeth-grindingly awful.

Streaming LoveFilm

I'm currently watching The Ghost, via my subscription to LoveFilm.



I'm streaming it, not through the laptop, but on the TV through the new digital box I bought last weekend. It does have a tendency to drop the connection occationally (the box has wi-fi), so it's not ideal, but not bad.

As for the movie, well, it was okay. The acting was top notch but you could see the plot coming a mile away. Le Carre this isn't.

The (Second) Long Weekend - Movies, RPGs and Luck

The second long weekend started, as the other, with movies. I finished watching Pandorum:



Not bad, but I've never been over-enamoured of horror/sci-fi. Whether it's just natural squeamishness or my rather Utopian view of the future, I don't know. I think Mr. Glitz might like it as a good pizza movie, but it wasn't to my taste. Dennis Quaid was in it, though, so it wasn't a bad movie and he is better than Nicolas Cage.

Next up was Inside Job:



Not a heist movie in the precise meaning of the word, but no bank robber ever got away with billions like these guys have. Thanks to this movie, I now know what CDSs and CDOs are and why the executives at Goldman Sachs are being asked awkward questions by the U.S. Congress (but not by the British Parliament it seems. Funny, that).

A Day Out in Northfields

I decided to go to the Shadow Warriors Role Playing Game club meeting in West London, which is the only one I know of that play on a Sunday. It took quite a while to get there from BasVegas, well over two hours, and I forgot my dice (the height of embarrassment: I had to borrow two D10's and a D6! Me!). We played a D&D type game of the GM's devising called UnBound (link is to a PDF). The people were very pleasant, mostly blokes with two women, one an American, who crocheted a lot, which seems to be in vogue. It was an entertaining few hours, if a little slow at times: six players is about the limit.

Luck

A new TV series has started in the States which seems to be a cut above the norm:



I won £75 at a dog track a few years ago, so I've got a bit of interest in this, plus it has Nick Nolte in it who is always worth the money. I look forward to it over here soon.

White Winter

The first frosts of Winter have arrived here at Chez Lemon and this has put me in mind of one of my favourite songs at the moment:

Adventures in Android Programming

Someone I know recently bought themselves an Android phone. This reminded me that I managed to get an early Beta of the AppInventor from Google which allows you to program the phones using a really easy user interface, so I decided to build them a simple app (they have a cat, so the app plays a purring sound or meowing sound when they click on the picture).

The AppInventor is web based but involves using a Java WebApp and an emulator, which you have to download. The designer is relatively straightforward, but it's the blocks editor which is the great bit for the programmer. Look at this:

It even clicks when you place the components. How cool is that. It's like Lego for programmers, not that most programmers don't already have Lego.

Clash of the Titans!

Except that the Titans weren't in it. It was Greek Gods (and heroes) and not Titans, see.

When I was a kid I was given a book written by Roger Lancelyn Green, "Tales of the Greek Heroes" (still in print). It was full of stories about Hercules, Jason and The Argonaughts, Theseus and the Minotaur. Clash of the Titans is about Perseus, Andromeda, the Kraken and the Gorgon, Medusa:



It's a pretty good pizza movie, although the acting isn't brilliant, but, although it's not as much fun as Ray Harryhausen's work, it is true to the spirit of the greek legends. No fighting skeletons, though:

Monday Mayhem a.k.a. Christmas Shopping at Bluewater

As has become traditional over the last few years, my sister and I went to Bluewater, just across the river in Kent, to do our annual Christmas shopping. I thought a Monday would have been quiet, but it was Bedlam, like a Saturday, with queues everywhere.

I already have most of the presents, so there wasn't much to get, but I did buy some Sugru from W.H. Smiths.

It's air-curing silicone rubber you can use to fix and modify almost anything with a surface.

Afterwards, me, my sister and brother-in-law were watching "Have I Got News For You" and in it was this Youtube video which seems to have become viral.

It seems to me to reflect the human condition: that at some deep down level, we're not that much different than some lunatic in the middle of Richmond Park shouting at his dog.

Ringer

Do you ever wonder what happened to Sarah Michelle Gellar after Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Well, she's in a new TV series:

The Long Weekend and Dragonmeet 2011

I have some holiday left at the end of the year so, taking a tip from my erstwhile colleague Mr. Woodcock, I have used some of it to have one day off a week in the run up to Christmas, taking two long weekends.

I started by watching my film subscription which turned up Jonah Hex:



Not bad for a pizza movie, but all the action seems to take place in the dark for some reason, which does diminish the fun.

I also watched Hobo with a Shotgun, and immediately wished I hadn't (don't watch this if you're going to watch Blade Runner in the near future. It'll break you heart):



It's sad to see Rutger Hauer reduced to this rubbish. He wasn't half bad, but you can see he's at the fag-end of his career.

Dragonmeet 2011

Because I was able to do some shopping on Friday, I went to a games festival on Saturday at Kensington Town Hall. It was the usual fare, but I got to play a couple of games. The first was called, fittingly, Lancaster, run by the Phoenix Games Club from East London:

Based on Medieval England in the time of the 100 Years war, it takes an hour-and-a-half, five turns, and is a political, military and economic game for up to five players. There are no dice, but some cards, to simulate fortuna. There were three experienced players, one eight year old girl (the daughter of one) and me. I came third and I got a nice logo embossed dice for playing!

Next up was Wings of War run by the Shadow Warriors RPG Club:

The game was catch the pidgeon, shooting down your opponents. I flew an S.E.5a:

and got pretty banged up, but gave as good as I got. A half-hours fun and I enjoyed it!

Kurosawa - Stray Dog

Not all of Akira Kurosawa's movies involved Samurai. He did make quite a few movies set in modern times. Stray Dog is a film noire made in 1947 (Mifune looks about 23!) that I've started watching:



It also stars Takashi Shimura, another close collaborator. I couldn't find a trailer for the film, so here's one I could find:

Salt

Any film with Angelina Jolie in it has got to be a bit suspect. Think Tomb Raider, Mr. & Mrs. Smith... Salt isn't half bad and tries to be a good, if convoluted spy/action thriller:



The problem is that no-one seems to have their heart in it. Liev Schreiber is fairly robotic, Andre Braugher has a cameo role and is sorely wasted, and the whole thing is like one big action sequence. Watch only if you like Jolie a lot.

Off Sick with a Cold

It was inevitable that I would catch one of the many colds that have been going around recently, so I'm stuck indoors with the budgies:



I've also noticed some new U.S. TV series which might be worth watching. The first is Once Upon A Time, which has been compared favourably to Grimm, which I pointed out a few weeks ago:



Anything with Robert Carlyle in it can't be all bad (arguments about Stargate Universe at a later date) and a fair bit of money has been spent on it, so who knows. It's in a similar vein to the Fables comic books by Bill Willingham:



Another new series is Homeland:



Damien Lewis is always worth the money. He was in Life a few years ago which was pretty good, if short lived. I'll warn you now, though: he is ginger (sorry Matt).

Frozen River

After about eighteen months of sitting around on a pile of other DVD's, I finally got to watch this:



It's not a half bad drama, but slow in places. A woman (Melissa Leo) tries to get the money for a new trailer home by smuggling people across the U.S. - Canadian border.

Sucker Punch

I'm not entirely sure this movie was about anything:



It seemed to be a sort of down-market video game version of Inception, which was overblown, but even that would be giving it some kind of status. Loathe though I am to say this of any movie, but it was 128 minutes of my life I'll never get back again.

Life in a Day

Last year, a film was made on my birthday, 24th July. People from around the world uploaded video that they'd made of their day and the directors made the segments into a complete film. I'd heard of it and planned to watch it when it came out, and completely forgot about it. Then last night it happened to be on TV, so I watched it (this is the complete film).



It was quite good, with a certain poetic quality.

Various Valentines

I was walking along the towpath of the Regents canal today when, passing by the bottom Lock, I saw a chap in a hoodie wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, like one of these:

It gave me quite a start, but I don't think it was meant to represent Guy Fawkes, but the anarchist in Alan Moore's story V for Vendetta.

It's been well over twenty years since I read the book and I remember it having a profound effect on me then: I joined Amnesty International after reading it. All the story chapters begin with the letter V, Valedictory, Venom, etc. thus the title of this blog. Strangely, given it's reputation, I always thought of it as a dark romance, as well as a political work. Althought the film was not a critical success, it did get the chapter on Valerie right.

Dormouse

And here's a picture of a dormouse

Orcs Must Die!

I've been playing this over the weekend, and what a jolly wheeze it is too...

New TV Series

There are a few new TV series in the states which look quite good and should be winging their way over to us shortly. The first is Grimm, a bit like Supernatural, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but a bit more serious:



The other is Person of Interest, which is a bit like The Equaliser, if you can remember that far back:

It's the end of the world...

... as we know it!



I mean 6 - 1 !!! 6 *!£$%-ing 1!!!!
After I stopped laughing, I realised how this might feel for all those Stretford people with their team being beaten by a Manchester team. And started laughing again. So I think I'll be watching that this evening.

The Price of Sci-Fi

I'd like to contrast two new science fiction tv series, Terra Nova and Pioneer One.

The first is a muti-million dollar epic from Fox with Steven Speilberg as one of the producers:



It follows the fortunes of a family sent back in time from a poisoned future to the Cretaceous period, the era just before the final extiction of the dinosaurs, about 85 million years ago, to start a new life.

It is, as you would expect, a lavish spectacular, with all the latest special effects, CGI dinosaurs, etc. It's main problem is that it's somewhat safe, even predictable.

To contrast, there's Pioneer One (Below is actually the entire first episode, not a trailer):



The is a low budget, web based tv sci-fi drama. An object from space crash lands in Canada containing a young man, speaking only Russian. It turns out that he's from Mars, a survivor of a small colony sent there by the Soviets in the 1970's.

I like it. Yes, you can tell it's low budget: there are no special effects and the actors are not "names", but it is rather charming and thought has gone into character and plot, rather than gimmicks. It's funded mostly through donations and I've got a mention in the credits for the season 1 DVD for mine!

R.E.D.

The latest movie I've watched is R.E.D., an action movie with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Brian Cox and Mary-Louise Parker.



It's not a half-bad movie, elevated from the mundane by Mirren and Cox as former oppenents and covert lovers, obviously enjoying themselves and acting everyone else off the set. The other is Mary-Louise Parker who has a kind of geeky charm as Willis's love interest. Willis is a very one note actor, and a flat note at that, and I've never understood why he's a lead, but if you can stand that it's a good pizza movie.

"Try and look normal"

This should be out some time next year:

Angel-headed Hipsters

I'm watching Howl, a film about Allen Ginsberg's poem and the subsequent trial after it was published in 1956:



He was more than a little screwed up, but it is a good film and Ginsberg had a certain endearing geekiness to him, which I quite liked. Also James Franco is so like Ginsberg in looks, manner and voice it's difficult to say where one ends and the other begins, as in the final scene where it's actually Ginsberg singing, rather than Franco.

Monsters

I've been watching Monsters, which has just come out on DVD. It's a sort of alien invasion/road movie/love story.



Not bad, but I found it difficult to really empathise with the leads.

"Get In"

There are moves afoot to go and see the new film Drive:



Back in the 70's there was a very similar movie called The Driver, with Ryan O'Neal, Bruce Dern and Isabelle Adjani. This is when movies were good (The French Connection, All The President's Men, Three Days of the Condor):

Danny Trejo is Machete!

Now expoltation films aren't really my cup of tea, but I thought I'd give this one a try:



It looks like it was a lot of fun to make and Trejo looks right for the role (I liked him as one of the assasins in Desperado). There also seems to be an attempt to make social statement by playing up certain stereotypes but I'm not so sure it works as a movie. B movies are B movies for a reason and very few stand the test of time. This may be the flaw: they're trying to make a trash movie deliberately using A movie methods, actors and budget. It does compare favourably with Drive Angry, however, which might be classed as an accidental B movie.

Drive Angry and Winter's Bone

With having a subscription to LoveFilm, I get to watch the occasional movie on DVD. Upon Mr. Glitz's recommendation I got Drive Angry.



Although not quite as enthusiastic, I too thought it wasn't bad for something to watch over pizza on a Saturday evening. Notable was William Fichtner as the Accountant from Hell (literally) sent to bring back Nicolas Cage's character to the Underworld and also, typically understated, was David Morse as Cage's old friend. Either of these could act Cage off the screen without too much effort, and proceeded to do so, Fichtner especially. Maybe the Devil doesn't have all the best tunes, but his accountant certainly had all the best lines.

Contrasting with this is Winter's Bone.



This is a modern crime drama centered around a young woman in the Ozark's struggling to keep the house she lives in from being repossessed. There's not much to the film, a bit slight, but it has one of the scariest anti-hero's I've seen in a while in the form of Teardrop, the protagonist's uncle and self-appointed guardian angel. Played by John Hawkes, this is a performance that makes Nick Cage look like Doris Day. If there was an Academy Award for Supporting Actor in a Scary Meth-head Role, I know who my money would be on.

Klaatu barada nikto

I've been watching this and The Forbidden Planet:

Judge Parry

I found a web site that makes Judge Dredd badges:

Tron

I was shopping in Bluewater today and I noticed that in the HMV they had this on sale:



I know it didn't do well, and the original wasn't that fantastic, but I bought the double pack anyway.

Discovering New Worlds

Today I went for a trip to London. ("Hang on a second, doesn't he work in London") Yes, I do but I decided that I wanted to see one or two exhibitions as well as do something I've been meaning to do for a while.

Starting in Camden
I've wanted to visit a Morrocan Tea shop which is situated in the Stables, a sort of shopping area just to the north of the Lock. I had mint tea and sat and read something appropriate:



The tea was really nice, a bit like spearmint chewing gum, although it becomes an aquired taste if it's allowed to stew. I then walked along Regents Canal and through the park:



As you can see, there are some rather nice houses down by the canal.

I had some more tea at the Royal Institute of British Architects in Portland Place. It has a rather nice cafe and an exceptional bookshop. Even the tea pots look art deco:



I also managed to take a picture of that icon the Post Office Tower, which I remember visiting as a boy when you could go inside:



Out of this World
On the advise of Matt, I went to the Out of this World exhibition at the British Library, and what a fantastic exhibit it is:



I saw a lot of rare and first editions, as you would expect, talked to an AI who explained to me how it worked and listened to both H.G. Wells and J.G. Ballard being interviewed. It's really good and I highly recommend it. Not only that, but the book that accompanies it is fantastic as well.

The Vorticists
Tate Britain currently has an exhibition about the Vorticists movement of early 20th century (doesn't it still feel weird saying that). They were a British modern art movement, roughly analogous to the Futurists in Italy at about the same time, but without the Facist leanings. They also didn't last long and fragmented pretty quickly. The artwork was very abstract, but it did produce artists that went on to do great things, such as Jacob Epstein and T.S. Eliot. The exhibition even commisioned a repoduction of Epstein's famous Rock Drill sculpture.

I hit 47, and 47 hits back

It's my birthday again, same time every year. This time it's 47. Wouldn't it be nice if it's random every year. 65 and I could retire, 16 and I could go and watch Apocolypse Now! at the cinema. There's something similar in Philip Dick's novel "Counter-clock World".



Also Happy Birthday to Barry Bonds, same age as me, but with a better career.

25st Century Foss

Growing up back in the 1970's, you got an occasional glimpse of the future thanks to Chris Foss, whose illustrations of disintegrating starships and alien landscapes coloured our imaginations. Now there's a new book published by Titan:

G'wan. You know you want to. My treat.

News International and the Cult of Celebrity

It's not often I take an interest in the news as it's a distraction from what's really going on but, for once, the media itself is under the spotlight and that might be no bad thing.
I don't want to comment on the actual story coming out as many people will no doubt be doing that, but there has been a trend over the past twenty years or so within politics and the media. This is that celebrity gossip columns have come to dominate newspapers and the other media over news journalism. A few months ago, I watched a documentary called "Starsuckers" which demonstrated that the people who had started out running the gossip columns of newspapers and other media had gradually replaced news journalists as editors and executives. Some have, like Andy Coulson, become advisers to politicians, knowing next to nothing about politics, but a lot about celebrity. Remember, this is the person who has the ear of the Prime Minister.
That this phone hacking scandal has come about is no real surprise. What has been a surprise is the extent of it and that it was covered up for more than five years by the politicians, specifically Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and the police. Also worth thinking about is if this is what News International have been up to, what else have they been doing and what have the other media organisations been doing?

Another Budgie

Being the summer time, my sister has left her budgie with me while she and the brother-in-law are off on holiday. She calls him Faure, but what he calls himself who knows. My budgies treat him as they would any other and ignore him, beat him up and generally accept him as one of their own. A sort of idiot cousin from Benfleet.

He's a pleasant little fellow, though, and warbles a lot.

Rhythms of the World 2011

Another summer and another RotW. As a change from previous years, John and I were asked by Gill to go and work on the gate, taking tickets and attaching wristbands. The pace was different, more frantic and static at the same time, sort of mechanical. At six o'clock, the heavens opened and it lashed it down for half an hour, clearing away the crowds, so much so that I decided to go back to litter picking for about an hour. After our shift ended, we went for a walk to get our free meal and saw the Selector, for the first time in I don't know when.

Doctor Who

I've recently been watching a lot of old Doctor Who DVD's, in particular The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Planet of Evil.

In the former, there's an old documentary from the 1970's called Who's Doctor Who, all about the series, which had been going for about twelve years at that point. Talk about a step back in time!

HTML5 Features in Google Web Toolkit

I went to my usual weekly meeting at Skills Matter, this time about HTML5 and the Google Web Toolkit.

Before the meeting started, I got talking to one or two people, unusual as I'm usually too tired to be a good conversationalist in the evening. At one point, someone asked what we all did and here we had four completely different approaches to the idea of work. There was the two salaried, one of which was a telecommuter. Another was a small-businessman and the fourth was what you might call a flexi-worker. He worked three twelve hour shifts in a bar (thirty-six hours) and then had four days off to work on whatever he wanted. The start-up guy was trying to promote a planning and organisation utility called Plancake. Ironically, throughout our conversation he was continuously writing things down on paper and post-it notes with a pen.

Tonight was a talk by Dmitry Buzdin, a Latvian, and was about how the GWT copes with the changes in HTML5 (A friend of mine pointed me in the way of this useful web page on the subject). GWT is a compiler that takes Java code (or Java-like) and converts it into JavaScript enabling it to be run client-side in a web browser.

The Cloud

A recent conversation reminded me about my recent exposure to the Cloud, a word which has been banded around a good deal recently. It's been used regarding new technologies and is the latest bandwagon to jump on, but try to determine what the cloud is and the focus is on the technology, partly because anyone with any interest in the subject is a technologist of some kind. This is missing the point.

The Cloud does have a technological angle but the main aspect is a commercial one. It allows companies to scale their web applications easier and more economically than in the past, allowing small companies to compete with much larger companies with greater resources.

For example, a three-man company, consisting of a business analyst, web developer and a QA specialist, develop a treasury web application. To deploy the application such that one customer can use it requires that either the customer hosts the application, the company does, or an ISP or other third party does. The first requires that the customer buys the relevant hardware/software and is responsible for maintaining it. The second requires that the development company do the same. The problem with the third option is that, previously, the inflexability and cost is was prohibative, especially if the application is complex and as the number of customers increases. It's this third aspect that the Cloud, and it's technologies, have changed. By making available complex and powerful resourses, and making them scalable at an incremental cost, the small company can provide the services that the large company, with it's own dedicated servers, can. Added to this is the fact that smaller companies have much better operating costs than large ones.

Spring Roo

The London Java Community (LJC) meeting this month was regarding Spring Roo. This seems to be a CASE tool for depoying Java objects to the web, giving similar functionality to Ruby-on-Rails and saving programming time doing so.

The event was well attended, with nearly a hundred people, and introduced by what were termed "lightning" talks, lasting about ten minutes. One of these described the LJC's involvement in the Java Community Process, which determines what the specifications are for the Java language and, more importantly these days, what happens with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which powers not just Java but a host of other languages.

Black Crusade

Fantasy Flight Games, as has become a tradition, have created a free introductory adventure for their new W40K RPG, Black Crusade. Called Broken chains, it's available here.

Cloud Foundry

I attended the London Spring User Group seminar on the Cloud Foundry. This is styled as "Platform as a Service (PaaS)", which extends services such as Azure and AWS to allow deployment of web services (in the larger sense) involving multiple technologies. The talk was given by Russ Miles, who had the habit of walking up and down, causing the video podcast to have to re-focus every so often. Russ demonstrated the public service by deploying Java, JavaScript and Ruby code and then did the same with a private Cloud Foundry he's set up on his own server.

Information is Beautiful

I was watching a program on statistics the other day and they referenced this (clicking in the image will take you to the full diagram):

UK Games Expo 2011

I was in two minds about whether to go to this as it was in Birmingham, a good three hours drive, but in the end I relented. And it did take me three hours as I got lost in the city suburbs trying to find it.

It was different from Salute, in that instead of being in just one giant room, it occupied lots of differnt rooms in what is Birmingham's Masonic Lodge. Unfortunately, the Talisman sessions were the day before, which would have been very enjoyable, but there was plenty to look at and quite a few games being played. There was a model of the Battle of Towton (War of the Roses):



and someone has thought up a game of Catch the Pidgeon:



And I bought some stuff.

The first is a collection of game poems, which is an on-going project. It's a party game (or several, really) but unusual, and I was intrigued.

Next is an RPG called Polaris. It's as much a work of fiction as an RPG, and has me somewhat baffled.

The third is a hard science-fiction RPG called Shock.

As I was leaving, I was stopped and asked for my identification:

The Casio F-91W

The other day I found my watch. It had been missing for about a week, but it was in the pocket of my trousers all this time. Unfortunately, the trousers had just been through the wash and the watch was a right-off: the strap was broke and there was water in the casing.

So I bought myself a design classic: The Casio F-91W.
Possibly the worlds most popular watch, and certainly one of the cheapest, so I bought two, just in case.

MongoDB User Group Meeting

I went to the MongoDB Usergroup meeting at SkillsMatter, who run these things. The Guardian were hosting it (they are in the process of converting their Oracle DB's to MongoDB) and SkillsMatter have produced a videocast of the event.

It was similar to the one they did at the MongoUK event, but talking more about how Mongo fits into the future strategy at The Guardian.

Software Product Development

I've been giving some thought recently to the business of software development. That is, what are the factors to be considered when proposing to develop a software product.

Revenue
Lets take two examples: Microsoft and a company that sells high-end foreign currency trading systems. Both these companies sell software, but their markets are very different.
     Microsoft's customer base is enormous, potentially the total number of PC's in the world, approximately 2 billion by 2012, so even charging a fairly low price of, say, £50 and you only have 25% of that market (new PC's being only a fraction of the whole) you're looking at £25 billion. Actually, MS made $62 billion revenue last year, about £37 billion, but it's still more money than I made.
     For the trading system, the market is very small, about twenty customers at most so, in order to make money, you have to charge enough per unit to make it worthwhile, say, £250000. That gives you a total of about £5 million. If you also charge £100000 for an annual maintenance contract (included the price for the first year) and you get one customer per year, on average, you're looking at £350k the second year, £450k the third and so on. If you do get twenty, you make around £2 million a year. This sounds like a lot, but read on.
     Most companies have a model similar to the latter, but with a lot more customers, and a correspondingly lower price.

Costs
The flip side of revenue is costs. This can be separated into operating costs and overheads.
     Overheads are things like the rent of any accommodation, servicing bank loans, the costs of having an accountant or lawyer. Anything you have to pay regularly irrespective of how big you are.
     Operating costs are usually wages and the taxes that go along with them, plus capital gains and corporation tax. Say a software developer or analyst or tester costs £40k a year. A team of four developers plus an analyst and/or a tester and/or a support person will set you back £280k. A software developer can write about 10 - 20,000 lines of code a year, so it will take four developers upwards of two and a half years to write 200,000 lines, which is the initial size of a system with any degree of useful functionality. Remember that there's no revenue so far (you've no system to sell) so you'll be down £700k by the time it's built.
     There are things you can do to short-cut this:

• Employing a framework of some kind will cut down the amount of code you have to write by anything up to 50%. If that is the case, you can reduce the number of programmers or reduce the time to market. It also increases the reliability, as the framework will have been used by others and a lot of the bugs will have been sorted out. Think Hibernate/NHibernate for Java and .Net. Spring for Java, etc.
• You can use CASE tools which can generate code from models. They've always been of dubious value in a project, especially where reverse engineering is concerned, but if you're starting out, it might save time.
• Open source will reduce the licensing fees, but it's worth taking into account that something which purports to be open source as a development license turns out not to be when you're rolling it out to a customer (see MySQL).
• You can reduce the wage bill by only having minimum wage for the first couple of years and offering stock options: jam tomorrow, so to speak. Minimum wage in the UK is £6.08 an hour which works out at about £13k a year.
• Working from home saves on overheads and is the basis of a lot of start-ups, plus you've always got tele-commuting.

Competitive Advantage
Obviously, you're not the only company selling software products, and you will be competing with other companies even before you start selling. To compete successfully, you have to have a competitive advantage. This is something that your company has that customers want that the others don't, or don't have a lot of. The classic example of this is Google, who have such a large advantage over their rivals that even the mighty Microsoft has problems competing. It's so large, in fact, that it's referred to as a "moat".
     There are many different advantages, but the main ones are price, quality (both of the product and the support) and functionality.

• Price is a reflection of cost (see above). If you're cheaper than your competitors, your customers will come to you, not them, but you have to keep your costs down.
• Quality is how good your software is at doing it's job. Bugs will also cost you money to fix as the customer is not going to pay for you to fix them (but that should be covered in the maintenance agreement). Also the amount of knowledge your support people have counts as quality.
• Functionality is how much work your software does for your customer and how much money it saves him. If your software connects to an external system and, say, creates foreign exchange trades, it means that your customer doesn't have to spend time extracting information to a file from your system and uploading it into the other or, God forbid, creating the trades by hand.

There are, of course, other advantages including customer contact (can you play golf?), business knowledge, etc.

What if it all goes wrong?
You've set up a business and you're eighteen months in. There are no customers to be seen and what one's you have already have a system which is more functional than yours but not as pretty or reliable. Your competitors outclass you at everything apart from the software and are even cheaper than you because they are big enough to undercut you and make a loss just to put you out of business. What have you got to show for your efforts apart from the bills and a load of software nobody wants?

You.

You've been running a business for eighteen months and gained an insight into what it's like to do so. You may have gained desirable skills, such as .Net, Java, PHP or Ruby which you can sell to another company, whether permanently or on contract.
     This all sounds very positive, but commerce is littered with dead firms who tried and failed. If you're young, you still have a career ahead of you and the optimism of better times, but when you are middle aged, everything looks uncertain.

Calibre

I've been looking around for an ePub manager/reader and I think I've found a very good one. Check out Calibre. It's got lots of features and a half decent converter, so if you've got old PDFs lying around and want to read them on your ePub reader, you can convert them across. Nice.

Barca, Barca, Barcelona!

Y'know, I feel so sorry for the Stretford people. I really do. They deserved so much to win the Champions League and the FA Cup, only to be outclassed by much better teams. Sad. In a way. Probably. Not.

SQL Anti-patterns

Most people know of my love of SQL and dislike of anti-patterns (no, sorry, the other way around) so I've found a book which combines the two and it's rather good:

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: RIP Gil Scott-Heron

but also unbelievably cool and funky:

Slaine the Horned God Fan Film

Not half bad.

The No Asshole Rule

For the life of me I can't figure out how I found out about this book:

but it looks hilarious.

Foundry Miniatures

Normally a company like Foundry wouldn't raise much of a blip on the modelling radar. It is after all just a small company producing a range of historical metal soldiers. However, there are two things which make it unusual.

1. They have an amazing paint range, hundreds of different shades and colours, all matched such that you have the base shade, the dark shade and the highlight shade.
2. To go along with this is Kevin Dallimore's painting guides:
   
   
   
   one of the best in the market and very influential (have a look at how similar they are to GW's, which came along much later).

If you want the historical equivalent to GW, or you want materials which compliment or replace GW stuff, I can't recommend Foundry highly enough.

Inception

There are some movies which just are not really worth the effort of watching. Inception is one of them.



By the end of the film, which couldn't come too soon, I honestly didn't care for any of the characters. Some of the special effects were rather good, especially the zero-g fight scene in the hotel, but the plot was way too convoluted.

M.O.T. Day

Today was M.O.T. day for the car, so I took it down to the garage in Benfleet. It had a few electrical faults, one being that the washer motor didn't work and that the dashboard lights had dissappeared when I switched on the headlights. The car is a Vauxhall Corsa and one of the problems with the make is the heavy wear on the front tyres, so I had them replaced the previous weekend (one was very worn on one side and the other was getting there).
The garage services the car, repaired the washer and did the M.O.T., which it passed. The dashboard light problem was because there is a dial to one side of the lights intended for just this thing. The idea is that you can adjust the brightness so that you don't dazzle yourself when switching on the lights. I must have knocked the dial when I was cleaning a few weeks ago.
The car has done over 111,000 miles in just over eight years, which is about 14,000 miles a year average, about 50% more than normal. This is mostly because for the first few years I had it I was travelling to Kent everyday, doing a 75 mile-a-day round trip (about 20,000 a year).
As a nice, cheap car, Corsa's are great. I've had very few problems and highly recommend them.

FA MCFC

So after 42 YEARS!!! City have won the FA Cup and it's returned to Manchester. I cannot say that the match was a classic and since there was only one goal in it, hardly a high scoring one, but the two teams were evenly matched, with only a slight lapse in concentration by Stoke resulting in an opportunity to score, which was not wasted by Toure.



As to the future, well, we could be looking at third spot next year and there is always Europe. Better days, I think.

As for Shrews, well they didn't get automatic promotion, thanks to Wycombe, so they had to play Torquay in the playoff's, which they lost 2-0 in the first leg, so off to a bad start there. They might get through, but I think with Turner in charge, next year definitely.

AV

I voted to change the country today:

Tank Overhaul

There is a TV series from Canada. It's a bit like a cross between Time Team, Scrapheap Challenge and Top Gear where these guys overhaul a tank. Whoever came up with this idea must be a genius. It's the perfect Sunday afternoon TV for middle aged blokes.

Royals Day

After spending most of the day cleaning the car, I decided to sit down and watch the Royals (the Rajasthan Royals) play the Mumbai Indians at T20 cricket.They are currently 56-2 having to beat 94. Well played, gentlemen!

Oh, apparently there's some sort of wedding going on, but, despite contributing to the cost of the event, I didn't get an invitation, not even to the reception. I did know how it was going to end, though, so it's not like I really missed anything.
Update: Republicans have held an alternative street party in Holborn, London, where you can pledge allegiance to anything you want, rather than the current monarch. So far they have "pledges of allegiance to English beer, test cricket, Dr Who on Saturdays and cake". Sounds like my kind of country.

Virus

As befits an Easter weekend, I've been laid low by a flu virus, or at least a bad cold. It's taken about five days to shake it off and I'm still coughing up yellow stuff, but at least I'm on the mend. One of the many undesirable effects of commuting into London.

I'm of the belief that people are susceptible to certain viruses which others are not. Either that the viruses are keyed to us or we are keyed to the virus. We are supposed to develop an immunity, but the virus mutates slightly and we become susceptible again. "Virus Wars: This Time It's Personal"

Holiday!

Eleven Days!!

Confused

As a Manchester City supporter, I am somewhat confused by what happened this weekend. On the one hand, I'm glad that City have managed to make it to the FA Cup Final for the first time in thirty years. On the other I'm even gladder that the Stretford team didn't make it. That it was City that beat them is just the world turned up side down. The only thing better than this would have been to beat them in the final. The final is going to be a bit of an anti-climax. For the record, the last time we played Stoke, we drew one each.

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

One of my favourite RSA animations.

RSA Animate - The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?

Salute 2011

I decided to go to Salute this year, which is the big wargames shindig at ExCel in the docklands area of London. What actually happens is that it ends up being a trade fair for wargamers and associated types, such as myself. As you may know, I'm an avid collector of Role Playing Games, especially sci-fi, as well as interested in the modelling hobby in general.

ExCel is a somewhat charmless concrete and steel structure next to the old Royal Victoria dock. It holds about a dozen exhibition spaces, which are just large aircraft hangers, and a long concourse joining them all together, which has seating and the usual franchised eateries.

I spent about an hour browsing the stalls and looking at the various displays. There was a particularly good diorama of one of the Gallipoli beaches and a wargame in progress of a battle of the second British Civil War, 1938 (imagine that what happened in Spain had happened here instead). I came away with a load of flyers for a steampunk wargame, called Dystopian Wars; a wargame based on 70's cult TV; a steampunk horror game and an MDF base specialist.

I also managed to pick up a few RPG's which I hadn't seen before. These are:

• Fiasco, what might be termed a party RPG, very informal and loose, based on the Coen brother movies such as Fargo and Blood Simple. Something bad happens and you have to somehow try to get out of the fix you're in.
• Diasporia styles itself as a hard sf game set in the far future.
• Spione, a spy RPG, of which there are surprisingly few. Spycraft is the only one I can think of, and there must be an espionage extension for GURPS and other games, but you'd expect more.

MongoDB: The Future of Databases?

I've been having a look at NoSQL databases recently, to see what all the fuss is about, and have become rather enamoured of MongoDB. It's early days, but I've found it to be rather intriguing. Throw away all you've learned about data storage and start afresh, storing data structures, rather than just data.

The Expendables

The Expendables has introduced me to a new experience: feeling sorry for Jason Statham.

How bad is it? Everybody has a walk-on part, even Sly Stallone; Mickey Rourke acts everyone off the set, including himself; Dolf Lundgren acts in it; Eric Roberts is quite good. So, yeah, pretty bad. It makes even "The A-Team" look good, and that was awful.

Ooh, yes!

I'll have one of those please!

Woodbridge, Work and Blood Pressure

Woodbridge

I decided to go and see a friend of mine, Gillian, who is now manager of the newly opened Oxfam bookshop in Woodbridge, Suffolk, which is just the other side of Ipswich.
The journey was a bit dull, up the A130, onto the A12 and then via the A14, but Woodbridge is very pleasant. I'd got there a bit early and, when I asked at the shop, she wasn't on shift until 1PM, so I had some lunch and did a bit of shopping, as well as walking by the picturesque river Deben. When I got back, she'd arrived and she made me a cup of tea and we chatted about the new shop and the old one. I hadn't been to Chelmsford in a while, so it was good to catch up with the gossip.

Blood Pressure & Work

Due no doubt to work and the stress of commuting, my blood pressure has hit new highs. I test it myself on an irregular basis and I've been having a few problems, so I wasn't surprised when it hit 180/90 the other week. I decided to go and see the quack about it on Wednesday to see what he had to say. When he tested it to confirm my findings, the machine didn't work at first, but then registeres 208/100, or thereabouts. "I never trust the first reading", he said, and tried again, when it came up with the same reading I got. He's put me on Ramapril, with an initially low dose, ramping up after a week or so to 5mg a day.
Work, of course, is the main cause of it and, although I won't go into the details, I've had better jobs.

Deathwatch Latest

Fantasy Flight games have produced yet another free suppliment for their Deathwatch RPG.

You can get it here along with other supliment, free adventures and previews.

Game of Thrones

Ooooooooo, new trailer...

Top Ten

As some may know, I've been a comic book fan for getting on decades. I've been going through the collection weeding out those that can be donated to the charity shop, having read them and not thought them worthy of keeping, and it occurred to me to set out a list of the best ones (so far).

Concrete, by Paul Chadwick.
I read these stories when I was in my mid-twenties and,  having now collected them in trade paperback (TP) format, they are still excellent. They move comics from the super-hero vs villains format to telling truly human stories.

The Treasury of Murder Series by Rick Geary
This true murder series, spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, seem a little bit like CSI, but Rick has turned them into works of art far superior to anything on TV. The books have a truly Gothic feel to them.

100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
The ultimate comic crime series. No super-heroes, no cops, just bad, bad, people trying to stay alive. The first stories were excellent, really hard boiled, making Sin City look like a Doris Day movie. After that, it seemed to get embroiled in a dark conspiracy plot that I just found to be confusing. I've got all the TP's so I'll probably give it another go at some point.

Scalped by Jason Aaron and R. M. Guéra
My current favourite crime comic at the moment. Think Raymond Chandler on a Native American Reservation.

The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba
Okay, if you want a super-hero comic book, I'll give you this one. This will blow your mind. It's what League of Extraordinary Gentlemen should really have been, but funny, rather than just pompous.

BPRD and Hellboy
I've included these together as they represent the work of Mike Mignola, even though he's not having much to do with them these days. Plus the movies weren't bad.

The Losers by Andy Diggle and Jock
The movie was okay, but it came out at the same time as The Expendables and The A-Team and got lumped in with them. Not only was the movie better than the others (oh, yes it was) but the comic books were better than the movie.

Stray Toasters by Bill Sienkiewicz [pronounced sin-KEV-itch]
A work of true genius, and I don't say that lightly. You know the saying that there is a thin line between genius and madness. Well I think that he must have wandered over the line a few times doing this. The fourth, and last, issue didn't seem to have a proper cover, it was just black, until you tilted it and it caught the light. It was gloss black printed on matte.

DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli
This is an unusual war comic book, about as far removed from Sargent Rock and Major Eazy as you could ever get.

Queen and Country by Greg Rucka
Back in the seventies, there used to be a spy series called The Sandbaggers. Not Bond or even Le Carre. It inspired this series about MI6 operatives.

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Although it tails off a bit at the end, this is Ellis's magnum opus and what a work it is. The first episode is free to download if you can find it.

Okay, eleven, but I had to include the last one. In addition, the following are ones that I think are worth an mention:

Northlander by Brian Wood
A comic book about Vikings, but see his other work above.

Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
What would happen to someone if the stories written about them became real.

The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson
Despite the ultra-violence (which is what happened to spoil Ennis' Preacher) a worthwhile attempt at the anti-super-hero genre.

Cerebus by Dave Sim
This holds the record for being the longest English-language comic book by a single team (Usagi Yojimbo has the overall record). It's also self published, no one having the patience to handle Sim for any length of time. I only managed to keep up as far as Reads, Volume 9, but I got single issues up to Going Home, Volume 13. I liked it mainly because of the art work, which always draws me into a comic and Cerebus is fantastic to look at, the high water mark being Rick's Story, which looks like a modern Book of Kells.

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Why this one and not Watchmen or V For Vendetta? It's the notes in the back of the book which make this so good. You don't realise how much research goes into a comic book like this, and this alone made it worth a mention.

Vegetarian Friday

Apparently, the Belgian city of Ghent has a vegetarian day once a week, to decrease it's impact on the environment so, in order to eat a little healthier and to reduce my own environmental impact on planet earth, I've decided to have a vegetarian day, Friday. I was already having vegetable soup on Friday evening anyway, so I thought I'd go the whole hog. Lunchtime was a bit of a problem. My usual supplier, Pret-a-Manger, don't have much of a veggie selection beyond cheese and pickle, but Eat seem to be a bit better. I might try going up to Camden Lock where the food stalls are to see if there's a better selection.

A Long Ride Home
On Fridays, to break up the monotony of the ride home, instead of taking the tube to Bank and then Fenchurch Street, I get the Overground from Camden Road to Stratford and then the Jubilee to West Ham. This week, just short of Hackney Wick, the train came to a shuddering halt and we got stuck there for about half-an-hour. Turns out there was a signalling fault at Stratford and the driver didn't want to risk smashing into the train in front. I would imagine that this is due to all the work they're doing for the Olympics next year: that's going to be commuting fun next summer. When we got to Stratford, there were huge queues of people waiting for the train, a bit like a Tunisian-Libyan border post.