Sunday - A Trip Out

I decided today to take advantage of the excellent sunlight and took a trip down to the seashore at Shoeburyness.

As you can see, a nice bright day with not many people about, just dog walkers and the occasional jogger. One or two people were at Remembrance Day ceremonies and I could hear the strains of a brass band playing "For Those In Peril Upon The Sea", a reminder that we pride ourselves on being a maritime nation.

Another reminder was all the boats ashore in preparation for the Winter storms:

There are some rather nice apartments along the sea front, looking fashionably sun-bleached:

But you can't escape sea gulls!

I had a nice walk for an hour or so and the sea air cleared my head a little.

The Empress and The Warriors

Another day, another Wuxia film. This one's about the conflict between love and duty.

Princess Fei'er inherits the crown of Yan after her father is killed in battle. Vowing to become a warrior worthy of her father, she is wounded and goes missing after an ambush and ends up being looked after by a doctor and former warrior.

A nice film, if a little tiresome in places, and the hot-air balloon was a bit ridiculous, but Kelly Chen is beautiful (but no Maggie Cheung) and the battle scenes are impressive. There is a rather unintentionally funny bit where a General, trying to restore order, shouts "No fighting in the Sword Room!" (a bit like Dr. Strangelove). You'll have someone's eye out with that!

Run, Lola, Run

A film which relates the role of chance in life, Lola, played by Franke Potente, has to find 100,000 marks (the film was made in pre-Euro days) before mid-day. The story is told three times, a minor change happening each time resulting in a different outcome.

An original plot, plus good acting, add up to a decent film for Friday eveing viewing.

Seven Swords

I've been watching another martial arts film on LoveFilm Instants. A bit like Hero, it's in a Chinese fictional genre known as "Wuxia".

Not bad, and some incredible sword fights, but it's a little over-long at two hours plus. For the connoisseur only, I think.

2001 - Blue Danube

Waiting in the queue for the Dartford Tunnel this afternoon, I listened to The Blue Danube on the radio and it put me in mind of this:

Classic!

DIY Cola

When I was at the Maker Faire in Brighton a while back, there were some people selling Cola concentrate in small bottles:

The brand is called Cube Cola and is open source under the GPL, just like Linux or MySQL. I made some syrup with it at the weekend and the resulting drink is not bad. You can smell the lavender oil when you drink it, which is a bit unusual, but not unpleasant.

Conan The Destroyer

Occasionally, Oxfam gets some donations which we can't sell. Most go in the bin, "recycled", but DVD's that you get free with magazines we put into a shoebox and they're available to the staff. I picked out this old Schwarzenegger movie:

Yeah, it's a bit crap compared to the previous one, but it's a bit of a giggle none the less. I found this classic clip from the first movie. "Conan, What is best in life?":

Most of the original short stories and books you can download free, apparently.

Oxfam Tuesday

Went into the shop today to do an afternoon shift. Another part of Francis's anatomy had failed (nothing serious I hope: it was her knee last time), so Mark asked me to locum. Not much trade, a couple of LP's, but I got to listen to some rather nice Soul and The Flaming Lips:

Oh, and last week we made an awsome £950 on fiction, in no small part due to the comics bonanza and the window I set up. I asked John if he wanted to classify the comics as Literature to boost his figures. I said that comics needed the "gravitas" that Literature provided, but he said that Literature needed all the gravitas it could muster and none could be spared.

Hitman

I got this as part of my LoveFilm subscription. It's a movie made from the video game of the same name.

A surprisingly good pizza movie, Timothy Oliphant, who plays Marshal Raylan Givens in the TV series Justified, is Agent 47, a trained assassin working for The Organisation. Chasing him is an Interpol agent, played by Dougray Scott. Betrayed, he hooks up with an ex-girlfriend of one of his targets, played by Olga Kurylenko, who was the Bond Girl in Quantum of Solace.

The plot is not exactly taxing, and everyone takes the film in their stride, but the fight scenes, especially the one between four assassins in the railway repair shop, is pretty fantastic. The only really obvious flaw in the film is that a bald assassin going around with a barcode tattooed to the back of his head would be a bit conspicuous...

Robin Hood, Ironclad and Raging Phoenix

Over the weekend I managed to watch two films exploring the socio-political dynamics of late 12th - early 13th Century England and a Thai martial arts film. First up, Robin Hood:

A nice twist on the legend, and Crowe does a pretty good job, making the hero a bit grittier than previously. Mark Strong plays the villain with relish and Cate Blanchett does well as Lady Marion, although wearing a suit of armour was a bit ridiculous. Have you ever worn a chain mail shirt? It's heavy stuff!

Ironclad I've blogged about before. It's a good pizza movie, with, as expected, a lot of fettlin'. Purefoy is good and Giamatti really enjoys himself as King John, but I don't think a Templar would have given up his vows so easily. Religion was a serious thing back then. Still, although practically everyone gets killed, he gets a decent girlfriend out of it.

Raging Phoenix is a good, old fashioned, chop-socky Thai martial arts film.

Girl meets Boy; Girl helps Boy rescue long lost love from hands of criminal gang; Girl loses Boy at hands of serious martial arts villain; Girl beats living crap out of said villain (and it's a girl fight). What's not to love? The only thing that put me off a bit was the heroine's incredibly squeaky voice, but the fights are pretty good. Buy it for your Mum for Christmas!

Better Thinking Through Chemistry

Today, I went along to see Andrew Vladimirov give a talk called Hacking your Wetware, as part of the London Futurist meetup group. This was about studies into enhancing your brain using pharmaceuticals and electromagnetic fields.

It looks a bit weird and groovy, but it was all about neurochemistry and was fascinating, if a bit involved for someone with O-level Chemistry and who didn't do Biology because he didn't like the idea of cutting up frogs.

The first part of the talk concerned how the brain works and what was required to improve it. Most people know that the brain is composed of neurons, brain cells. These cells are connected together and it's these connections that form memories. The more connections, the easier they form and the quicker the electrical impulses travel down those connections, the smarter you are because the more you can remember and the quicker you can remember (and recall) it.

Andrew went through the various drug types (called Nootropics) and discussed their effectiveness, before covering genetics. He didn't get time to discuss the use of electromagnetic fields and will be discussing that in some detail in a further lecture. He also uses the drugs on himself, notably Piracetam, which he found to be quite effective, but he emphasised that the brain gets smarter by learning the way that muscles get bigger by exercising. The drugs and other techniques only make it easier to do so.

All in all, it was a very good lecture, leavened with some dry humour (he discussed the effect of amphetamines on rats, saying that it did not seem to improve their intelligence, but made them highly active, agitated and nervous. No kidding!).

Get Knotted!

I have a small pendant, which I always wear, made of Goldstone.

This is neither gold nor stone but vitrified copper dust, but I liked the colour and picked it up in a shop in Bluewater. The cord has been slowly wearing away, so I got some from Hobbycraft to replace it. The next problem was how to tie the cord.

I found this nice little web site called Animated Knots, which shows you, step-by-step, how to tie knots for almost anything. I've used a Blood Knot (which turned out to be very awkward to tie) to join the ends together,

an Alpine Butterfly to put a loop in the cord,

and a Cow Hitch to attach the pendant to the loop, as you can see in the first picture.

The Truth About Dishonesty

My subscription to the RSA stream on Youtube just popped this one through the post:

Understanding Comics

If you want to really understand comics and graphic novels, as an art form, a good book to read is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud:

It's become something of a classic and I came across this edition while sorting through the books in the shop. It takes you through a very thorough analysis of the art form. For example,

why is it easier to relate to this:

rather than this?:

(Ugleeeee!) It's because we don't really have a good image of what we look like in our heads, just a rough sketch, as we only look at ourselves once or twice a day, whereas we are always looking at other people.

Scott McCloud also wrote a comic for Google as a guide to the Chrome browser.

I also found a complete set of Paul Chadwick's Concrete:

It's a good story drawn in a brilliant style and highly recommended especially for those new to the genre.

Oxfam Wednesday

I offered to do a shift on Wednesday and I did a long one, 11AM - 4PM. As I walked into the shop, I noticed that some of the graphic novels, notably Stray Bullets and the Walking Dead, had already sold!

Being Halloween, I was wearing something fitting to the occasion:

I was upstairs for the duration and had a decent number of customers, given the miserable weather:

As you can see, we've got a fair amount of vinyl, which is how the music side of the shop makes it's money. Notice also the more prominent signs telling people to watch out for the step. It didn't prevent someone stumbling over it, although nothing happened other than a little embarrassment.

I also got to play some Woodpigeon:

A Soft Cell Moment

I was walking around the supermarket and heard a certain tune over the P.A. system. The tune was Soft Cell's Tainted Love (which was, in turn, an old Northern Soul favourite), but the song over the top of it was more recent. What it was I don't know, but I kept singing the original all the way home. These guys have done it to ukulele's and it's not bad! (Amazing what you find on Youtube)



This is actually how it sounds when I sing it rather than the original version in my head.

And this takes my breath away!



Rock on!

Bond Deathmatch!

I've just spotted this on Youtube (via Boing Boing):



Connery beats Craig! Yeah, sounds about right.

Ooooo, extra points for the movies (not counting the Lazenby one). For answers see the comments.

Orlando

I got the book, by Virginia Woolf, from the shop a while back, and I got the film using my subscription to LoveFilm.



Although the film is beautiful to look at, it seems to be unable to express what it's about. There's no real plot, as such. Orlando falls in love twice, once as a feckless nobleman to a Russian diplomat's daughter, and then again as a Victorian woman to an American man. The film doesn't seem to be a romance, though. Tilda Swinton acts well enough, but doesn't quite persuade as a man, although she was perfect to play the Archangel Gabriel in Constantine a few years later.



I suppose it's one of these films you see just to say you've seen it, but I think it's worth taking into account the context of the story. It was written in the late 1920's. Women had only recently been enfranchised and just the idea of someone who can live forever and change sex at will must have seemed incredible and exotic.

Steampunk Video

I saw this rather nice Steampunk-style video for a song by Lovett:



Looks a bit like Dean Motter's Mr. X:

Oxfam Monday - Window Dressing

Due to it being half-term (Bromley, despite running University of Greenwich courses, is still a local college and runs to school schedules), Mark asked me to sort out one of the shop windows as we had a large donation of comics and trade paperback graphic novels:

Being Halloween this week, I've put Hellboy, the Walking Dead and Buffy's Tales of the Vampires (great Mignola cover) in the front. There's also Stray Bullets and Sin City at the top left and Queen and Country at the top right. Not a bad job. Mark also asked me to take one of the whole shop, to update the Oxfam web site. Fame at last!