... about programming, growing up in the 1970's and 80's, games, science fiction, working in a charity book shop, films, spending too much time watching television, living in Basildon and Essex, and whatever else emerges from my fevered imagination. If you're reading this, it's your fault you clicked on the link: I am not responsible for your actions.
After months of waiting, Torchlight II has finally been release. Yay!!!!
Update: Yeah, pretty good. They've been smart enough not to screw around with a successful formula, so playing is familiar. I like the idea that you can play female characters as well as male. As an example, here's my current character, a level 5 berserker:
Obviously appealing to the burgeoning women's market. Jolly good show, chaps!
My sister asked me for pictures of the budgies, so here's the two of them sat on the cage:
Oliver, the male on the left, is standing on one leg, which usually means he feels happy and secure enough to do so, and, clearly, Snowflake, the female, is also happy. Plus she's not beating him up. Once I was watching Oliver in the cage. He wasn't doing anything in particular, just being content and at one with the Universe. Snowflake went up to him and knocked him off the perch. No reason as I could see. Maybe he was too happy, she was feeling a bit frustrated and wanted to take it out on him?
The software equivalent of the Booker prize is called the Jolt Awards, given by Dr. Dobbs, an old programming magazine, and this year one of the finalists was a book I bought about six months ago, Running Lean:
which is about how to run a start-up successfully.
Another one of the finalists was this, which also seems interesting:
While at the shop on Tuesday, an unusual music donation was handed in:
It's a baby violin! When a mummy violin and a daddy violin love each other very much...
John also showed me one of our latest acquisitions.
It's a first edition! Nice and £50 to the discerning collector.
I only did a short shift at the shop as I went into London to see Calexico in concert at the HMV Forum in Kentish Town. It was a good set, with classic tunes and some stuff from the new album, Algiers. This is from an old album, Feast of Wire. Outstanding!
Today I started my education in earnest with a class on software development. To teach us this, Bromley has decided to use C, which is the basis of quite a number of development languages. It's a fairly safe bet as C has been around since the early 1970's, taking off with the introduction of Microsoft's Visual C++, which, for a while, was the only way to make serious windows software.
We're using a package called Dev C++, which has an IDE written in (wait for it) Delphi 6. I kid you not. Wherever you go, there you are.
We've yet to get really into it: we've spent the lesson going over data types and functions are next month, so no rush then. I thought I'd show keeness by asking the lecturer if there were any exercises for us to do. He was mildly impressed.
While updating on the status of Torchlight II on Steam (yawn) I chanced across a new game called FTL (Faster Than Light), which seemed quite entertaining.
It's got itself a review on Wired interviewing the creators. Cheap too.
The first half of the lecture consisted of a short description of how futurists work and produce results, which was fascinating. They tend to work on four axes; political, economic, social and technological.
The second half of the lecture consisted of examining the idea that there will be a "golden age" of new technology starting in 2030 based around a scarcity of resources. These will be food, energy and water, mostly caused by increasing urbanisation, changes in climate and growth in population. The technologies are things like recycling, energy efficiency, energy storage (batteries in particular), and alternative energy sources.
One of the more interesting ideas was illustrated by the following:
Technology adoption/prevalence/success follows a certain path. The Crisis of Maturity in this case was the .Com bubble bursting in the early 2000's. The maturity phase is more a case of roll-out, what Gibson alluded to when he said that "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed".
All-in-all it was a great lecture which didn't seem like the two hours it was.
I managed to get the top deck today (yay!) and had a look through the soundtracks for some decent tunes. Normally this is old show tunes and the like, but I picked out two that I rather liked. The first was from Paris, Texas, a film by Wim Wenders starring Harry Dean Stanton, Natasha Kinski and Dean Stockwell:
It's not a half-bad film, if a little slight. A man comes out of nowhere after years of being missing and tries to re-enter his life and find his wife and son.
The other was a Mike Myers film called So I Married an Axe Murderer. It's an amiable hit-and-miss comedy, but it has some funny beat poetry:
One of the tracks on the album was the La's There She Goes, which is about as good an Friday afternoon's song as it gets:
I pulled a double shift at the shop today and was on the bottom deck throughout. Not much trade, but under the desk was the novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name the word masochism is derived. Whoever left it there was obviously very naughty and will be punished severely at some point, if he's very lucky. It does give me the excuse to show the track of the same name by the Velvet Underground:
Which is what Southend is like on a Saturday night. Venus in Furs depicts the sexual and emotional domination of a man by a woman. Sacher-Masoch was a utopian and an advocate of what we now call gender equality. The novel ends with the moral:
"That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating
her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work."
In real life, Sacher-Masoch had a contract with his then mistress, Fanny Pistor (I'm not making this up; that was her name) which stipulated that she "promises to wear fur as often as practical and especially when being cruel". This contract was for six months, so he couldn't do much else as he was all tied up for that time.
Fun Fact: Sacher-Masoch is Marianne Faithful's great-great uncle on her mother's side.
I didn't get chance to play any music, but Lee on the upstairs till managed to dig out a sixties album which seemed to consist of Rolling Stones tracks, including this one:
If you want to pout, ladies, this is how you do it!
I also managed to get a pristine copy of the Penguin hardback publication of You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming. The Bond Girl in the novel is called Kissy Suzuki; I kid you not.
We've also had donated a lot of Folio Society books. These are re-prints of existing popular books in a distinctive, high quality format.
Sometime last year, I watched a film called Catfish:
It's about a sort of Facebook scam. The protagonists are deceived into thinking a little girl is an art prodigy, whereas in fact, it was her mother. No money was taken, just a bit of pride lost.
It's interesting to note that the woman wasn't particularly bright or well educated, unlike the three men who made the movie. She was just simply amoral enough to take advantage of someone who wanted to believe something was true when it wasn't. The moral being we can all be deceived no matter how sophisticated or intelligent we are, probably more so.
The title of the film is taken from an anecdote related at the end, by the woman's husband, about cod being exported from Alaska to China. They found that the quality of the fish, which were kept alive, degraded over the time of the journey and were almost inedible. After some trial and error, they realised that putting in a catfish with the cod kept them active (catfish and cod compete for food) and the quality of the meat was maintained. The analogy was implied that some people are human catfish: they take advantage of other people to keep them on their toes (almost "inoculating" them, if you like) so that they do not get taken advantage of in the future.
The London Movie Meetup Group is meeting to watch the new Bond movie Skyfall on Saturday, 27th October at the Vue cinema, Islington, with optional socialising afterwards.
As an aside, here's some young people having fun running about:
I didn't know whether to go in to the shop today as Mark had seemed in two minds when I spoke to him last. I phoned this morning but he wasn't in, so I spoke to Debbie. She said that they were a bit short handed and best to turn up just in case.
I turned up, had my lunch and was assigned the top till (yay!) so I played music all afternoon. I managed to play Midlake's Young Bride:
And I met Annette, who I hadn't seen in about four years! She was polishing some gardening books (which is very Annette!) I didn't get much chance to say anything other than hello, but it was nice to see her hale and hearty.
I also bought Ironclad from the shop, which looks a little over the top. It portrays the siege of Rochester castle in 1215 by King John and even has the destruction of the south-east tower by mining:
There seems to be lots of "fettling", a word used by my Uncle Alan to describe brutal combat. Seems an appropriate medieval word!
One of the things I noticed at the Brighton Mini-Maker Faire was the number of women involved. In the past, they tend to have been middle-aged women on the craft side of things (representatives of the WA, I suppose), but this year I noticed that they are bright young things doing electronics, computing and 3D printing! (One phrase guaranteed to get my notice: "There's some young women over there doing 3D printing").
There are also a number of web sites dedicated to what might be termed the Geek Girl phenomenon, notably GeekGirlCon (a geek girl convention in Seattle, Washington State, U.S.A, but most active on Facebook) and The Mary Sue, sort of geek gossip for girls. I noticed this article on there: 17-Year-Old Girl Invents Cellphone Heart Test For Patients In Developing Countries, which is something you'd expect a team of scientists from Oxford or Harvard Medical School to be working on, not a 17-year old student. I like the way she kept going even when she was failing: I think after a few weeks I'd have given up.
There's also a convention in London for 3D printing, the 3D Printshow in October. Make magazine have also been running a 3D printing weekend and have a slideshow presentation of day 1 and day 2. This is an example of what can be made:
It's called a Nautilus gear, but whether it's practical or just for display I don't know. Impressive anyway.
Today, I played what must be the slowest game I've ever played. The game was Android, by Fantasy Flight Games:
The background is that of a murder in New Angeles investigated over a two week period, six days per week. Each turn takes one day and our game had five players, the maximum.
Timo, a Berliner, is the owner and game master (and rule encyclopedia) and had really lavished attention on the game, using cellophane sheaths (called card sleeves or deck protectors) on all the cards, putting little paper bands around the decks of cards and then putting the decks in their own plastic boxes. He'd also put all the counters in compartmentalised boxes, and put the character specific cards together in their own boxes with the right counters so they didn't all get mixed up. I'd like to say that this was unnecessary with Android, but it was necessary and made the game much easier to set up. I'd never seen the point in having deck protectors before, but I'm a convert now.
Each player gets a character as detective and I got to play Floyd 2X3A7C, a bioroid (biological android: the replicants from Blade Runner). One of the advantages my character had was that I got an extra unit of time on top of the standard six.
Android is not a bad game but it's just really slow. To get to the end of turn four took us three hours! This is an average of 45 minutes per turn, or 40 if you have a 20 minute set up, which was at least what it took. The last time I was in a game this slow, there were eight players. I estimated that we would take until about eight o'clock to finish the game, so I called it quits at two o'clock. Maybe if we'd been more experienced or there were only four players it would have gone faster?
I wasn't due in at the shop today as I had another engagement, but I said to Mark that I could do up until 2:30PM and no later. "Great!", said he, and we agreed to me turning up at 12:30PM to cover for a few hours. When I got there, I looked upstairs and saw Mark on the upstairs till instead of Simon. Where the hell was Simon!!
Here's him making a big deal of doing the morning rather than the afternoon shift as he didn't want to work the same shift as Judith and now he doesn't even turn up! So, yeah, I was more than a little narked with the big, ginger lump (sorry Matt).
All this was more than compensated by being on the top deck for about an hour or so to play some nice tunes. I managed to find a rather original video of Darkstar's Dear Heartbeat. For those of a scholarly turn, this is a fine example of counterpoint.
After a few hours in Chelmsford, I went to Shoeburyness to look at the sea:
Notice how blue the sea was, and that's no Photoshopping! I also managed to get a picture of the wind farm on the Eastern horizon.
This is part of the London Array, the largest offshore wind farm in Britain (and we have about 15!)
Update: It has occurred to me that Simon might have had a epileptic episode, which he's prone to, and forgot to tell us he couldn't come in, so forgive me for the outburst.
When I was making coffee in the kitchen this morning, there was a lot of fluttering in the living room. Everything was curtained, so I expected the budgies to be all quiet, but there was a big commotion in the cage.
Snowflake (the female on the left) was on a swing, but Oliver was clinging onto the bars near the bottom, eyes white. Who freaked out who I don't know, but Oliver was the most freaked out of the two. He freaked out again while I opened the curtains and uncovered them, but seemed okay when I put them in the kitchen.
With me being all weird on Wednesday and the budgies freaking out today, maybe the flat's haunted!!
An uneventful afternoon in the shop. Mark had asked me to swap with Tuesday and I did downstairs. I also got to see Andrew, who I hadn't seen since I came back, so it was good to catch up. He also does for the Sudbury shop, which is in Suffolk. He's a pleasant chap, if a little vague, and spent time pricing History books, which I helped him with. It was a bit of normality after the weirdness of yesterday, although there were customers to deal with, so "normal" was relative.
No music, so I thought I'd leave you with Caribou:
It began strange, though. I awoke at about 4:30. The block was completely silent, with only the muffled roar of the occasional car on the bypass to break it. No noise in the flat itself. No noise (the rattle of pots in the sink, for example) from next door to explain why I had been woken up. It was dark with no dawn approaching, so it wasn't that. Sometimes I have woken shivering, but it wasn't cold enough for that: cool but not cold. I've also awoken cocooned in bedclothes, with a vague fear that I'm suffocating, but the sheets were to one side. All very baffling.
I tried to get back to sleep for about an hour or so and finally admitted defeat, got up and made myself a cup of coffee, by which time dawn had arrived.
Throughout the day, I had a strange feeling that I had forgotten something really important, but couldn't figure out what it was. Because of this, I had a very edgy day.
I thought it best to get out of the flat and away from the Internet and the computer. I took the train down to Southend Central, had a cup of coffee at Cafe Nero, and walked from Southend to Shoeburyness.
I took a few photos along the way. This is the old Palace Hotel with the new pier lift:
Very space age.
The view along the shore towards Thorpe Bay. This was about an hour into the walk and by then my legs were feeling a bit heavy but not much else.
By the time I got to the seafront at Shoeburyness, I was very fatigued, practically everything from the waist down ached in some way (yes, even those). I sat down for a while on a bench and watched a pair of windsurfers:
Eventually, I got on a train for London and headed back.
I got back to the flat eventually and collapsed on the bed. I didn't feel tired, just exhausted physically, and lay quietly for half-an-hour or so until I could get up without it being a drama.
All in all, a very odd day indeed, without any particular reason why. The reason I've blogged what is otherwise an unremarkable day is to show that it's not all good times at chez Lemon.
I've been looking at a new web browser called Midori:
I saw a review of web browsers in this months issue of Linux User & Developer and it scored pretty high, given that it was up against FireFox and Chromium (Google's fully open version of Chrome). Everything seems to use WebKit these days and Midori is no exception. It's not a bad little browser and reasonably fast too. I noticed that it looks to web sites like you're using Safari on a Macintosh, so if you want to cover your tracks... I wonder if there's a Firefox add-in which changes what your browser tells web sites?
I went to a public science event in London today. It's called The Quantum Workshop:
It seemed to consist of shining lasers at pieces of dust or ash in a vacuum.
I think the idea was to demonstrate that photons have mass as well as energy: hit something with enough light and you can cause it to move as per Newtons third law of motion. A laser is an awful lot of light in one small space, the ash is light enough, and gravity isn't that strong, so you can levitate the ash particle.
As an aside, I noticed that there were a number of quite attractive young women attending the stand, whether deliberately selected for this or not I couldn't say. Remember, this is theoretical physics, so maybe this is the Cox effect in action, attracting bright young things to an otherwise unattractive (for women) field.
I went for some lunch near Tate Modern and noticed how the Shard now dominates the sky line:
Actually, the thief was asked to leave before he got anywhere near anything valuable. Mark put on his sternest I'm-taking-no-shit look (which can be incredibly intimidating) and told the tea-leaf, who's well known, that he wasn't welcome. This is the first time I've seen anyone asked to leave the shop for any reason, so I knew it was bad.
The second thing was that I managed to be up on the top deck all afternoon and play music. To do this, I had to get the drop on Tom, who's like Simon's evil, slightly (but only just) smarter, twin brother, except they don't really look much like each other apart from being big. He was skulking around in the basement when I bumped into him, to avoid having to replace Mark who was on the bottom till. When we both got to the ground floor, I gestured to the downstairs till and said "all yours, mate" and skipped lightly up the stairs to the top till. A victory for the common man, I say, and a defeat for idle skulkers everywhere!
I played Stanley Odd, a rapper from Scotland. This is one of his more mellow tunes and, although not as good a rendition as the album, the lyrics are straight from the heart:
I played some Paavoharju (a Finnish psych-folk band), but they don't have any decent videos. Kevätrumpu is one of my favourite tracks, but no dice. I thought I'd have a Sigur Rós video of the track Rembihnútur instead, both beautiful and sublime. It's from the Valtari Mystery Film Experiment which goes along with the album of the same name:
As my Mother would say, where there's no sense, there's no feeling, and vice versa. Got something in your eye there, mate?
Me being an old socialist an' all, I consider it a sworn duty to protest at the cuts now being levied against those who can least bare them, so I went along to the Closing AtoS Ceremony demo in London.
AtoS are contracted by the government to assess the fitness of people with disabilities to be able to work. All well and good, you may think, but private companies notorious for having very little accountability or transparency. You don't know how they make the decisions and you have very little room for appeal if you don't like it. Ordinary benefits claims are bad enough, but you're talking some of the most vulnerable people in society here, and there are an increasing number of deaths resulting from claims being wrongfully withdrawn. It is said that Doctors bury their mistakes and it's looking like AtoS does too.
Here's an interesting thought, though. If they are trying to outsource benefits assessment, why don't they do the same with tax evasion? It would be far more profitable: millions of pounds as opposed to thousands at most. Maybe it's because those who are likely to suffer contribute to the major political parties, and those on benefits don't. Nah, that can't be it, surely!
Coda: I've just had a look at the Department of Work and Pensions web site and there's an interesting case of doublethink. There's a phrase used, "... help people break the cycle of benefit dependency". It's the same phrase used to describe the help given to people on class A drugs. Use the word "heroin" instead of "benefit" and you can see that they are equating people claiming with smack-heads. Nice. People are also dependent on the wages given to them by their employer, so lets see how that works: "... help people break the cycle of wage dependency". Suits me. Try governments and taxes: "... help the government break the cycle of tax dependency". Something for the Financial Times reader there. Howabout a certain political party and contributions: "... help the Conservatives break cycle of dependency on donations by corporate fat cats". That's more like it.
Wandering outside my comfort zone again, I picked this up at the shop:
It's all very glitzy and glamorous, "She defied convention!", blah, blah, and she's been lauded as the epitome of a sophisticated, independent woman. I got the impression that there wasn't much warmth in her childhood, though. Bit of a sad kid.
It's also very sanitised, given the controversy surrounding her, but they've picked a part of her life that was that wasn't controversial. There is no mention of her later habitual drug use (she was a daily intravenous morphine addict throughout most of her life), coke parties or bisexuality, but you get the impression that this is the way the Chanel company (and even Coco herself) would want her to be remembered. Having a founder portrayed as being smacked off her tits might not be good for sales. Then again...
It has occurred to me that she might have suffered from one of the mental illnesses that we now know as eating disorders, for example, bulimia or anorexia. I made a bit of a study of this after I read Microserfs a few months back (two of the characters, Karla and Dusty, suffered from eating disorders: Dusty from bulimia and Karla from an unspecified illness). Coco was noted for being very thin, was promiscuous (eating disorders can affect sexual appetite as well as for food, drugs and alcohol), and had no children, despite affairs with numerous men (infertility can also be an effect of the illness). It's an interesting theory and, if she did have the illness, what would things have been like had she got treatment for it? She might have been less wild, and a lot happier, but her parties would have been a bit dull.
As a coda, this all seems very sad, pathetic or scandalous depending on how you feel about her, but relatively harmless, until you read about her supposed collaboration with the occupying Nazis. How much, and to what effect, is the subject of much conjecture. She did live in the Paris Ritz hotel during the war, which was used by the German High Command to billet it's senior officers, plus supplying her drugs would have given them leverage. She also supported the family of Walter Schellenberg, head of SS foreign intelligence, while he was in prison after the war, as well as paying for his funeral. Maybe they were bridge partners or something? The allies did clear her of any collaboration, so it's possible that she might have been a double agent of some kind. Espionage is a murky world, no less then as now.
As with a lot of things, I found that the reality was more complex and contradictory, and sadder, than the movies.
My subscription to LoveFilm brought me this the other day:
A lot of fuss was made at the time. Technically it's unbelievable and it's a visual feast. The floating islands are straight out of Roger Dean's Yes albums.
The plot is not bad, noble savages vs. corporate bad guys, but it goes on a bit too long. It also struck me that what the bad guys were after didn't require life on the planet, so the humans could have just simply left, come back later and wiped out the planet with atomic, chemical or biological weapons, leaving the minerals intact. Obviously wanted a feel good ending. Good pizza movie, though.
A bit of a tough day at the shop. I was doing downstairs, which is usually busy, and a load of donations came in, so I was running around sorting out GiftAid. This is a system whereby Oxfam can claim a percentage of the money earned by selling the donation back off HMRC. At about 20% it's very profitable.
While I was serving, I noticed someone graffitting the boadings of the old Nat West bank opposite:
When they left, it was all boarded up again, but it looks like one of those cartoon doors that gets used in the old Looney Tunes cartoons where somebody draws it and then opens it up to escape!
I didn't get to play any music, which was a bit disappointing, but I'm in on Saturday so you never know. In the meantime, here's some Daedelus which I quite like (the video's a bit naughty!)
I joined a boardgames group on Meetup that meets at a pub near The Houses of Parliament, called The Old Star:
It's a very popular group, with nearly forty people. What's nice is that it fairly mixed, husbands/boyfriends bringing wives/girlfriends, making less of a "forty-year-old geezer" feel to it (careful!).
This week I played Notre Dame:
It's a resource building game of a fixed number of turns, the aim to aquire victory points. It's not bad and I held my own, despite coming last (the winner got 50-something while I got 39). My attitude with a new game is that I'm going to lose anyway as the winner is usually the one who knows the rules the best, so I just play to have a bit of fun, enjoy it and gain some experience.
The second game was Frag!
Basically it's Quake Deathmatch as a boardgame. The game's a bit brutal and you don't have much time to enjoy success before being fragged yourself, but it's good fun when you get going.
With going to the exhibition I've been thinking about Bond films. There's been quite a few by now and everyone has their opinion, mostly based on which one they saw first, so I thought I'd put mine down.
Best film: You Only Live Twice. It's based in Japan and it's got lots of helicopters and Little Nellie and Sumo! and it's a Connery film (see below) and it's got spaceships and ninjas and samurai swords and Donald Pleasence as Blofeld and a pool full of piranhas and... It ticks a lot of boxes.
Runner Up: Difficult. Any Connery (even Diamonds Are Forever at a pinch) apart from Never Say Never Again, or any Brosnan apart from the last.
Best Bond. Sean Connery. The original and still the best.
Runner Up: Pierce Brosnan. Not as iconic as Connery, but understood the role better than the others.
Best Villain: Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe), but only just (see below), and he set the mould really. Fröbe couldn't speak very good English, so he was dubbed! Bet you didn't know that.
Runner Up: Dr. Julius No (Joseph Wiseman). I know Blofeld is a more obvious choice, but he got played out pretty quickly. A more recent alternative would be Electra King (Sophie Marceau), the ultimate bad girlfriend!
Oooo, pop quiz. Which Bond villain was played by Royalty? (see answer below)
Best Henchman: Oddjob (Harold Sakata), no question. Jaws was just too silly.
Runner Up: Tee Hee Johnson (Julius Harris), from Live and Let Die, but I thought Richard Stamper (Götz Otto) from Tomorrow Never Dies was good.
Best Girl: If I had to choose, it would be Solitaire (Jane Seymour) in Live and Let Die, first impressions being the best.
Runner Up: Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi, but voiced by Barbara Jefford) from From Russia with Love or, more recently, Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko) in Quantum of Solace or Colonel Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) in Tomorrow Never Dies. She's got to be a lot more than eye candy.
First film: Diamonds Are Forever (1971). I was about eight.
Fun Bond fact: "The World is Not Enough" (Orbis non sufficit, in Latin) was actually the family motto of Sir Thomas Bond (ca. 1620–1685), James Bond's supposed ancestor.
I've not been convinced of recent Bond films. Brosnan's era ended with a damp squib (far too self referential) and the last two films have been a bit tame. Maybe it's the Bourne thing, but Daniel Craig doesn't convince either: Bond has style and charm, "a man that shakes the hands that shake the world" (Dean Motter's expression, not mine, sadly), while Craig just looks like a scary nightclub bouncer who's been hit in the face once too often. Maybe third time lucky with Skyfall:
His heroine, Tara Chace, makes Bond look like a part-timer. The dialogue's pretty good too. When she and a contact are in a corner, she asks how fast he can run. He replies, "When someones shooting at me, I'm bloody Carl Lewis!"
...and another thing, when Grosse Point Blank has a better two-blokes-trying-to-kill-each-other (John Cusack and Benny Urquidez, the former's kick boxing trainer) fight scene than many a Bond movie, you've got to wonder!
Pop quiz answer: Dr. Kananga/Mr. Big in Live and Let Die was played by Yaphet Kotto, who's father was a Crown Prince of Cameroon.
Mark asked me to do a Saturday afternoon shift as he was short. When I turned up there were a few people browsing, but no-one on the tills! Mark had been let down completely and was doing it all by himself. He'd been caught short and disappeared down to the basement to answer the call. I covered while he got back and did downstairs while he did up. He was playing Frank Zappa's jazz album and I think everyone was relieved when Heather turned up and I went upstairs to replace him. I played Mr. Scruff!!!
There's a new show started over in the 'states about a police officer in New York in the 1860's (about the time of the Civil War).
It's a pretty tough show, with the cops being almost as bad as the robbers, and it doesn't pull any punches either: backhanders were practically a way of life.
It's treading the path of Scorsese's Gangs of New York, but with a lower budget. It looks like it could be pretty good, though, and may make an antidote to the CSI's and Sherlocks.
An uneventful, if frustrating, day at the shop for what looks like my last Friday shift. I'm moving to Tuesdays as I won't be able to do the afternoons for the forseeable. I had hoped to do the mornings, but Simon wants to shift to mornings (he doesn't get on with Judith, apparently), so Tuesday afternoon it is.
I did get to listen to U2, Supergrass and Portishead! The album wasn't Dummy, but the eponimous, but it has my favourite all time track, Humming!
You can't get more Portishead than a Theramin! I thought I'd throw in Only You as well, as the video's by Chris Cunningham and pretty damn good.
I know U2 is not to everyone's taste but this has been going through my head recently and I played it in the shop today as well.
Another film I got from the shop, this one is about a young man going to University during the 1980's.
I don't know if it's a post-modern thing, but it didn't look in the least bit 1980's to me. It just looked like now. Remember, this was immediately after the 1970's, but there was almost no reference to punk or two-tone, nor the miner's strike either, which was very prominent at the time.
Anyone who knows the Southend-on-Sea area will know that it wasn't set
there, but probably somewhere like Frinton further on up the coast.
Southend doesn't have sea defenses like that and, anyway, is on the
estuary, not the coast itself. (Yeah, yeah: picky, picky, picky)
The story was okay, if a little weak, but the characters were engaging. I liked Catherine Tate as his Mum. She's got quite a good line near the end. He's feeling a bit sorry for himself and she says, "It's not the mistake that you made, but what you do afterwards that matters", which I thought was quite good.
I went to see some former colleagues today who've moved into new offices in 30 St. Mary Axe, a.k.a. the Gherkin. It was good to catch up with current developments in the team and I did the obvious joke, "who's got the corner office?" I'd worked with them two years ago, but with all that's happened since then, it feels half a lifetime ago. After much gossip, we parted and I continued on to The Barbican to see the James Bond exhibition.
Designing 007 at The Barbican
I couldn't take any photos in the exhibition itself, but I took one of the Aston Martin outside the front entrance:
Even if you're not a Bond fan, I'd recommend the exhibition, certainly to those who are interested in films generally. The sheer quantity of things on display is astounding: gadgets (Oddjob's hat!, Scaramanga's golden gun), costumes (a LOT of tuxedos and amazing outfits for the ladies), plus lots of film clips, original storyboards and models used for both planning and filming.
Afterwards, I took a walk through London from the Barbican to The V&A, through Holborn, Picadilly and Knightsbridge:
Every so often, I like to go out of my comfort zone and watch something I wouldn't normally. This is a Bulgarian romance/road movie whose theme is lying; peoples' motives for doing it and the benefits, not just to the lier but to those being lied to.
It's a bit slow in places, not helped by the language barrier as it's a wordy film, but it's a bittersweet romance, which appeals to me, and I did find myself empathising with the couple. What the director had to say was quite interesting too.
It was fun! Fiasco uses playsets, which are pre-defined options to generate stories in a particular context. We had the Los Angeles, 1936 playset. The City of Angels, gangsters and Femme Fatale's with 45's.
I played a gangland boss who gets ripped off one last time, gets blackmailed and dies in a shootout in a burning building. So a bit like work, then.
Having worked with a few white South Africans, including one who's an authority on the works of George Orwell, they seem to think of themselves as decent, honest, hardworking, upright members of the community. There are exceptions, though:
It's all pretty true: Andre Stander robbed over 30 banks, often on his lunch break, and then turned up as one of the investigating police officers. As in the UK, sometimes the Police aren't as bad as the criminals: sometimes they are the criminals.
I found the DVD at the shop. The movie is pretty good, even if it drags a little towards the end, and is a good pizza movie. The hair styles are amazing and, considering the number of car chases, I'm surprised it's not called Drive.
When I got into the shop this afternoon, Mark said to me "You've missed all the excitement! There was blood everywhere!". Apparently, some pensioner had fallen down the little step on the first floor, obviously wondering what step was being referred to by the sign saying "Mind the Step", and had landed nose first. There was quite a bit of blood, but luckily no worse than that.
I did slightly longer than my normal shift upstairs as my mate Simon was doing Saturday. Suits me as I got to play a new compilation which has Joan as Police Woman and Radio Moscow:
Rock On!
About halfway through the shift, a rather well dressed chap in a real hurry asked me where the love songs were. We don't have any specific stuff, but I pointed him in the direction of Classical instead. He said that he wanted something for a wedding and he grabbed a CD, saying, "You'll just have to trust me: I haven't got any money!". I just shrugged and said that he could pay us later.
Just before we closed, a similarly attired lady came to the counter, with a little bridesmaid in tow, to pay for the CD. It turns out they'd been waiting for a hour or so, but the music had been fine. "What's an hour when you've got the rest of your life". A nice philosophy.
You have a load of cargo each and you have to load them all onto the ship, which is gimbaled at the base, and thus unstable. The numbers correspond to cards that you hold. When the ship unbalances, the cargo falls off and if you can't catch them, you have to keep them. The one who gets rid of all his cargo wins.
Of interest only to the minority, I know, but Fantasy Flight Games are planning to publish an addition to their Dark Heresy W40K RPG range:
Called Lathe Worlds, it promises to cover the Mechanicum, the engineers and technicians for the Imperium, something only hinted at from other sources (The Black Library, mainly), and not at all from Games Workshop. Yum!
I never manage to get all the way through A Princess of Mars, the beginning of the Barsoom series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The film is really good, a superior pizza movie, with the tribal Tharks in particular being very well done. I don't know why it didn't do well at the box office, because it's a good romp, with a decent romance thrown in, but maybe The Avengers coming out at the same time, plus the ambiguous title didn't help.
Apparently, this is the largest Swedish film production in history:
I can't say I really warmed to it. The acting is good, but there's a mix of languages which can be a little confusing. It's epic in length, but it feels more like a joined together TV series, rather than a truly epic film. It doesn't compare well to Kingdom of Heaven.
Unknown is a not-half bad spy thriller starring Liam Neeson and Bruno Gantz. Dr. Martin Harris (Neeson) awakes from a coma in Berlin only to find that his life has been taken by someone else.
It's has more than a few twists and turns and, for a film not called Drive, it's got quite a good car chase.
My relationship with drugs of any kind has always been a bit patchy. I do smoke on odd occasions (and they are odd), and my alcohol intake is low and very specific (alcoholic ginger beer is my favourite tipple at the moment). Coffee I do like, although I've noticed that if I drink in the afternoons, I don't sleep so easily that night. Recently, my Father gave me a percolator:
It's an old fashioned way of making it; percolation steams the coffee grains and it makes a strong brew that has a smoky quality I rather like. This model is a one from Asda and it doesn't have an element, so you have to use a hob, but it's simple construction means it is reliable.
'Sall supposed to be a bit passe now, but I was looking for a Youtube of Professor Longhair's Mardi Gras in New Orleans when I found this:
The music is Big Chief and I felt a bit ripped off until I started watching it. I'd forgotten how good Parkour is to watch, and these guys are good! Plus it's a good backing track. I don't know why we don't have this stuff in the Olympics.
G'won. Treat yourself, but don't tell your Mum or I won't hear the end of it.
It's a list of might-have-been (or even might be made) sci-fi movies. Included at 46 is Mel Gibson's idea to remake François Truffaut's adaption of the Ray Bradbury novel. I'd pay to make this NOT happen.
I was playing The Secretary Song in the shop today, but the video for that is a bit underwhelming, so I thought I'd post you Junior Kickstart, which is still a good song, but a much funnier video:
I was also playing The Black Keys "Grown So Ugly", so which this is quite a good version, if more laid back than the original.
Rock on!
Gravitas
While I was in the shop, Mark, John and I were having our usual giggle-fest. John was feeling extremely chipper for some reason, singing and whistling ("Where the Streets Have No Name", by U2 was being destroyed at one point, it was that bad), so Mark and I tried to bring him down a bit by discussing his rival Michelle and how successful her fiction section was. Fiction is a larger category than John's literature and she shifts a lot more books, to which we suggested that John have a handicap (a positive one, like in golf) to give him a fighting chance and to enable those that are interested to see how successful he is on his own terms. To this John said, in a mock forlorn tone, "... but a literature section adds gravitas". To which me and Mark fell about giggling and snorting again.
It's a pretty tough (i.e. bloody) crime drama. Ryan Gosling plays a getaway driver who gets too involved in a robbery gone bad. There's lots of double crossings and one decent car chase (the above is not it, although that is clever).
Although it's a pretty good movie, it's not as good as it thinks it is. It's too long, more complex than it needs to be and a bit too arty. The players are under-used (Gosling's not bad, but he's no Pacino) and for a film called Drive it needs more car chases.
I thought I'd change the name of the blog for a while as I noticed that when I searched the name, there were a few sites with a similar name, including a restaurant. Obviously, I didn't want to use theirs, so I thought of a new blog name. Let's see how it goes.
Yes, folks, I went to the Olympics. A former colleague of mine asked me if I wanted to meet up with him and his family to watch the Triathlon in Hyde Park. When I got there, I couldn't contact him directly, so I just joined a flood of people heading for a cordoned off area called the BT Live area.
I got searched and had to surrender a pen-knife and multi-tool which I always carry. The security was absolutely abysmal (what Schneier has called "security theatre") because the person completely forgot to search the coat and bag I was carrying. I even got frisked while carrying it. Also, no drinks and food were allowed in, which meant that food and drink were to be bought inside (£5 a pint!), so you can see who the security was meant for.
The area itself was covered in wood chippings, just in case it rained, and it was just giant TV screens. Everyone parked themselves in front of the big one:
but around the corner on the left was another screen which had tables and chairs, so I sat there for a while. There was also a better bar, and while I bought an orange juice, I asked the barman about a band that were forlornly playing in the corner.
He said that they were a band of a mate of his brother's (or maybe a brother of his mate's). They are called Jaimie Thorn and the Mystery Pacific and what a damned good band they were! I'm not saying that they were worth the price of admission, but WOW! Sort of Alt-country, like Calexico. At least some good came out of the debacle.
Afterwards, I walked down to the V&A museum to sit in the courtyard and relax:
Kids paddling in the pool, everyone mellow. A total contrast to the crap earlier.
I went around the Japanese room afterwards and saw these:
They are called "Netsuke". The Japanese at the time had no pockets in their Kimono's and so used pouches or lacquered boxes tied with cord that were then looped through a belt. To prevent the cord slipping, these toggles were then used and became very decorative. Each one of these is about the size of my thumb, so you can appreciate the skill!
There weren't many films of note that came out of Britain in the 1980's. We didn't do blockbusters, and there wasn't much CGI. Handmade Films, owned in part by George Harrison, made one or two notable ones, in particular this:
It's a Film Noire. The protagonist is an ex-con called George, played by Bob Hoskins, who is hired by his old boss Mortwell, played by Michael Caine, as a driver for an expensive escort Simone, played by Kathy Tyson. Mortwell's motive is to get George to find any blackmail material on Simone's clients, but Simone manages to turn the tables on Mortwell and she and George form a bond while she uses him to look for a friend who's embroiled in the seedy world of London vice.
They do find the friend, but instead of a happy ever after, the gangsters catch up with the trio and there's a gun fight, Simone and Mortwell being killed. George confides in a friend Tom, played by Robbie Coltrane, who's supplied him with detective novels while he was in jail. At the end, George is forlorn at the death of Simone and they discuss what has happened, ponder on the nature of love and whether George had made any real difference to Simone's fate.
The film won a host of awards, but missed out at the Oscars, and it's a film worth watching even now.
I've been doing a few shifts in the shop of late: I usually do Friday afternoons anyway but the manager, Anne, had asked me to do the Saturday afternoon as well, downstairs. Upstairs is pretty quiet, but downstairs is where the action is, so I was fairly busy.
We were winding down to shut-up the shop when I got Angry Customer of the Day. He picked a book that, in retrospect, he must have had his eye on for a while. It was an old Penguin paperback that was priced at £6.99, which, I agree, was steep. What I didn't like was that he wanted to pick an argument and I wasn't in the mood. It went something like this:
Mr. Angry: "The price of this paperback is £6.99"
Me: "It is, sir"
A: "All the other paperbacks are £1 - £2, so do you think this is a fair price?"
Me: "I can't possibly comment on the pricing, sir"
A: "Is the person who does the pricing available to discuss this?"
Me: "Not today, sir"
There was a few more equally frustrating moments of conversation (for him: I was having fun), but it had to end.
A: "If I come back in a few days time, will the prices have changed?!!"
Me: "I couldn't possibly say, sir, but, in my opinion, the odds would not be good"
A: "Should I put this back on the shelf then?!!!!"
Me: "If you would, sir"
At which point he stormed off in, what I took to be, an air of frustrated self-righteous indignation. One of the student volunteers was watching all of this and she seemed a little awestruck by what had happened, which gave me a bit of a lift. The Great British Public: always there when you need them.
Back in the steam age, there was a job on the railways known as a wheeltapper. This guys job was to go around the locomotives in the shed and tap the wheels, listening to the sound that they made to see if there were any defects, which would make a discordant sound. A perfect wheel would ring like a bell.
There have been some people that I have met that can also described in the same way: they ring true. I did a psychology course a few years back and one of the theories of the development of human personality was Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the concept of a self-actualised personality. They seem to be really "together" and you get the feeling that whatever they wanted to do or achieve they would. They have ambition, but it doesn't unduly affect their personality. They are not achieving in order to be happy, but are already happy and are achieving in order to satisfy a sort of curiosity. To see how far they can go, what can be achieved.
