Cambridge Folk Festival, 2012

I haven't been to a festival proper for a while (I don't count ROTW as I'm a volunteer), so I was looking forward to Cambridge as I'd never been before.

It was all very well organised, but relaxed. I managed  to get to the site fairly easy and parked up in a huge field dedicated to the purpose. Walking in, I noticed that Crabbies were a major sponsor and had brought their own bus:

I had one of their alcoholic ginger beers later on and it went down very well. It's the ideal festival drink!
 
I got myself a drink of lemonade flavoured with mint:

I think it was meant to be strained, but the mint tasted OK.

Benjamin Francis Leftwich

I missed the first act, but the second was a singer/songwriter who wasn't bad.

He sights his influences as being Bob Dylan and Eliot Smith, but he's not derivative of either. He's a good musician and the songs were engaging, plus he's a good singer.

Dry The River

I confess, I didn't have much time for this band.

Maybe it was the sound system, but they jarred on me. They got the crowd going, though.

Billy Bragg

I saw him walking around the field earlier, looking for a bite to eat, so a man of the people.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Woody Guthrie, so Billy is touring with a set of his songs. He was as good as ever, bantering with the audience. Small gigs like this are his meat and drink.

Overall, I really enjoyed the festival. It still has a local and folky feel to it which make it relaxed, with just a little commercialisation (inevitable in order to pay for the acts) but not too much to spoil it. Whether I could have enjoyed it for a full weekend, I don't know, but I'd certainly recommend it for the day.

On Holiday

I'm on holiday until next week. The plan is to see Billy Bragg at the Cambridge Folk Festival tonight and then to travel into the bosom of my family to take my father and uncle to the Manchester Mini-Maker Faire at the Museum of Science and Industry on Saturday.

Also, the actress Mary Tamm has died recently. She played Romana, a Time Lord companion in Doctor Who back in the 1970's. Men of a certain age can be defined by which Romana they fancied: Mary Tamm or Lalla Ward. I'm the former, so I felt an odd moment of poignancy at the news. A Memento Mori.

Shoeburyness Shore

Yesterday I went to Shoeburyness for some exercise and quiet contemplation. Unfortunately, it was the first week of the school holidays and also the first bit of summer weather we've had, well, all summer, so the shore was crowded:

I settled for just the exercise and took a few photo's of the shore and wildlife:

Sad Stories of the Death of Kings: Richard II

Currently, on the BBC, a set of Shakespeare's history plays are being broadcast under the title of The Hollow Crown, which I've just started watching and recommend.

As a person brought up in the Anglo-Welsh education system of the 1970's, Shakespeare fills me with less than fond memories. I did Julius Caesar for mock O Level and Richard II for the real thing: no comedies in Wales in the 1970's. Probably just as well.

Julius Caesar is all about ambition, pride and treachery; Richard II about tyranny, mental instability and paranoia. And treachery, again. However, the best thing about the plays is that they are quotable:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of Majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress built by Nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England

Stirring stuff from John of Gaunt.  ("Star spangled banner" is not really in the same league; we're English, we do this thing for a living. Mind you, they did have Richard Nixon, a Shakespearean villain if ever there was one).

How about this from Hamlet, which seems to have the most quotes:

one may smile, and smile, and be a villain

How many politicians would fit that description?

Appropriately, it's also my birthday today, a whole 48 years. How hard can it be?

On the Subject of Gay Marriage

OK, so why is a middle aged bachelor commenting on marriage at all, much less gay marriage. Normally, I'd agree and say "what's this to do with me?"

Let's examine marriage from a functional angle, removing the emotional, historical and religious aspects: what is marriage for? From a legal perspective, it allows the secure transfer of wealth, property, estate etc. from one generation to the next, especially if the family has only daughters. From a health perspective, in a time before advanced medicine, it prevents (in theory at least) the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases: most societies frown upon infidelity and it's even punishable by death in some. It creates a stable social unit in a society which has grown beyond the extended family, clan or tribe.

What is now being discussed is extending this social and legal structure to encompass a social phenomenon which, although has been around for as long as we have, has only been public for the last fifty or so. Non-mixed marriage, anybody?

What bothers me is this: why is it such a big deal? If we have so many problems doing this simple thing, what are we going to be like dealing with real issues which affect everybody? Stem cell research, cloning, anti-ageing drugs and longevity, sentient and semi-sentient AI, genetic modification, physical and mental augmentation, smart drugs, consciousness uploading, nanotechnology. These are not trans-gender issues, these are trans-human issues. The next fifty years, much less the next one hundred, are going to see a revolution in what it means to be human, and I don't think we are even ready if we are bickering about whether two people who love each other can get married or not.

Back at the Shop

As part of my post work therapy, I've started back at the Oxfam book shop in Chelmsford. It was a most welcome return, after a bit of a shaky start, and I'm now doing Friday afternoons on the top deck, looking after the music and DVD's. Surprisingly little has changed in eighteen months and there were a few familiar faces. Michelle and Michael were still bickering over shelf space (she does sci-fi and general fiction and he does literature), and Mark has now been proper (paid) manager for some time and runs a tight ship. I had a few hours serving on the till, lightened by a conversation with a young Spanish woman who wanted Heavy Metal. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of my kind of music, except for a Goldfrapp album, Black Cherry, and an old Groove Armada album, back when they were actually good, but there was also a so-so James Brown Greatest Hits (aaaaaaooooooowwww!!!! git down! funky! Tell me if there's a better tune that Papa's Got a Brand New Bag. Not likely). I then did a few hours labelling things and price research on some AD&D books which weren't worth as much as I thought. I'm not much of an expert on Fantasy RPG, mostly sci-fi.

It's a Wrap

While on a weekly trip to Southend, I spotted a couple of Tesco employees shrink-wrapping a colleagues car. "Payback", said one. I know it's been done loads of times, but it's the first time I'd seen it. I gave them a hand and took some photos.

Rhythms of the World Part 2

Yes, folks, it did indeed rain and it was muddy.

I did my four hours picking up litter and then went for a meal afterwards, as usual. There were a lot more volunteers than last year and, rather than seeing one or two people throughout the shift, we were bumping into them all the time. Plus people seemed to be a lot more cautious about littering (perhaps because of the mud?), so the job seemed a little more aimless than before. Maybe I ought to volunteer for gate duty or programme selling, at least for a few hours to break it up a little.

Here's young John after the shift:

He's going through a CHiPs phase, I think.

One of the Lovettes posed for me back stage, replete with wellies:

Very charming.

Rhythms of the World 2012 Part 1

On Thursday evening, I went with my mate John to the get it for ROTW. This is usually a walk-around, but I was really late due to all the nonsense on the M25 (some things never change) and we missed it. It hammered down all the way through Hitchin and all the way back, so I was cold, wet and miserable, plus the site was pretty muddy as you can see:

So what it's going to be like on the day... Bring your wellies: I will.

Rezzed 2012

On Friday, for a trip out, I went to Rezzed, a computer games show in Brighton.

Despite being billed as an "Indie" games show, the vast majority of the PC's were for big name publishers, SEGA for example. Amongst the new games being shown were Borderlands 2, Aliens: Colonial Marines, and lots of other FPS's too boring to mention (I'm a 3rd person RPG man, myself). I played a strategy game called Prison Architect where my first task was to build Death Row (seriously, this is a game). I also had a go at a game called Krater, a proper RPG I have now bought, but seem unable to run on my PC properly.

I attended a demo of Total War: Rome 2, developed by local game subsidiary of SEGA, The Creative Assembly. It's pretty astounding stuff, technically, but I think they are in something of a rut creatively (what are the odds that the next game will be Medieval Total War 3?).

It lashed it down most of the day, so I was glad to be inside, but I got a free T-Shirt, loads of flyers. Brighton seems to be something of a centre for game development, not so much a silicon roundabout as a silicon seafront. But you know what Britain is like: we don't really do industry, we just pretend to and try to rip people off.

The End of Something...

...and the beginning of something else.

Leaving Work

I left work yesterday for the final time before I began my University course in September. I'd given about three months notice but, for some reason, they had not managed to find a replacement by the time I had left. The work has been a little slack of late, though, so that might not be an immediate problem.

It's been rather a strange little job. Stressful, yes, but as if for no reason other than no body could think of any other way of doing it. Baffling. I asked one of my colleagues why, despite all the problems and inefficiencies, the company was successful and he thought that it was because there was little competition. One does feed off the other: if you are successful doing it this way, there is little reason to change. You'd think some big firm would have come along by now and bought the firm up, for the customer base alone, but no one seems to be interested in the market. Odd.

So, onwards and upwards.

On the way back from the job yesterday, I kept humming this: 



Seems appropriate somehow.

Down with the Monarchy, Up with the Republic

As an antidote to all the b***s*** which usually permeates this country where the Monarchy is concerned, I decided to join the Republican protest on the South Bank of the Thames, near Tower Bridge. Both sides of the Thames were cordoned off, tickets only. Most of the flag-waving crowd had been allowed onto the site first, with a couple of hundred protesters getting in early. Mid-day was the official start time, but the gates to the area were closed long before that. When I arrived, I noticed a small group with T-shirts and loudhailers and followed them, but, after trying to get through the cordon, we ended up outside a gate where we were told we were not to be admitted for health and safety reasons as too many had already gone through. Someone on the inside was contacted and came along with banners for us to hold and we staged our own little demo:

 

All very well and good, but hardly a real protest. We numbered about fifty until another, much larger, group joined us, swelling the numbers to about two hundred:

In the end it was claimed about a thousand, but five hundred, inside and out, was about right.

As for the cause, well, personally, I don't like the idea of being told, literally or otherwise, to know my place. If this country is going to be one worth living in, and it is the country of William Blake and Thomas Paine, all the unearned and inherited privilege and corruption (witness the tip of the iceberg that is the Leveson Inquiry) has to be got rid of. And that starts at the top. When people say that this is not a popular protest it's worth remembering that appeasing Hitler in the 1930's was a very popular government policy and that overwhelming majority were against legalising homosexuality in the 1960's. The majority are not always right.

Southend Air Show

This year I decided to attend the Southend Air Show. The show started at 2pm, and I arrived early, so I spent a delightful few hours on the cliffs overlooking the seafront waiting for the show to start.

The first show was the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight:

 

Then a display team called The Blades, all ex-Red Arrows pilots, came on:

Not bad. I retired somewhat early as there were suddenly a lot more people around, and load more when I got back to the station.

Software: The Past and Into The Future

Yesterday I went to see a presentation on the architecture of the ZX Spectrum at the BFI in London. This was part of SCI-FI London. The presenter had reverse engineered both the hardware and the software from several spectrums (I still have a Spectrum+ boxed up somewhere). I was somewhat dull, as you'd expect, but I respected the dedication!

I'm also watching "The Hunt for A.I.", a BBC Horizon program which shows how advanced the science is at the moment. In particular, pattern matching people in a crowd and evolving robots.

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.