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Thursday 20 November 2008
Everything You Need For Your Complete Entertainment And Instruction
Look at this! Plugging music again.
The new Pet Shop Boys album, Fundamental, is a quite fabulous piece of work, and well up on a level with their better productions. Favourit tracks include The Sodom and Gomorrah show, Casanova in hell and next single Minimal (though I'm not sure it's a great choice of single).
The special edition has an extra disk of remixes and other oddities, including Elton John.
The Last Stand
Off to see the new X-Men film tonight. I'm hearing very mixed things about it, so my expectations are a bit all over the place. More later.
Room With A View
In honour of Dave and Octavia's (almost) last night in town before becoming suburbanites, David and I went out for dinner with them to the recently-opened Galvin at Windows in what used to be the Windows on the World restaurant in the Hilton on Park Lane.
Yesterday morning I was expecting the experience to be somewhat minimised by miserable weather (what's the point of being on the 28th floor if you can't see anything?) but a glowing review of the place by the always dependable Fay Maschler at least suggested that the food was going to be good. As it turned out, yesterday afternoon was suddenly warm and clear, and the view was about as good as you could hope.
Quick tip if you ever go - don't plan on spending time having a drink in the bar first. It's full of people talking on mobile phones, smoking cigars and generally being conspicuous consumers, and the service is diabolical. David and I got there at 8.30 and settled into a corner on a couple of sofas. The guy in charge then very obviously sent over a waitress to make sure we were going to be a larger party and weren't hogging more space than we should (even though it was the only free space when we'd got there). David then asked for the cocktail list, which they apparently thought we only wanted to read and not order from, as we were then forgotten about for fifteen minutes until Dave and Octavia arrived. Once they then finally came to take the drink order we were then left waiting over another fifteen minutes for the things to arrive.
So avoid the bar, go straight into the restaurant and you won't regret it - the food was superb, the service great, and the evening thoroughly enjoyable. A slight marring at the end when their system went down and they couldn't provide us with the bill for a while was really no one's fault, and you've got to love a French waiter who can take the piss out of himself by apologising that his French accent isn't strong enough and then deliberately overdoing it to make up :-)
Seen Everything? I Doubt It
Two items that trigger my "What the fuck?" alarm have come to my attention today.
The first comes from The Guardian:
The town of Black Jack, Missouri, got its name from the variety of oak tree that once grew nearby. "Those stately trees represent who and what we are today, a proud city with strong roots, providing the safety and respite of community," its promotional literature explains. It is the kind of place where family is valued - just as long as the family in question meets certain criteria. Olivia Shelltrack and Fondray Loving's family, it seems, do not.
The couple could face fines of $500 (£270) a day, and Black Jack is already facing the unwelcome glare of national attention, as a result of a local regulation that bans unmarried couples with more than one child from occupying homes there.
Oh dear - What is the world coming to?
And the second comes via Dave, from the BBC News site:
A district nurse has been cleared by a court of indecent exposure after sunbathing naked in her back garden.
Lynett Burgess, 55, from Llandyfriog, near Cardigan in west Wales, was filmed by a "shaken" neighbour in July 2005 and was charged by police.
The prosecution at Cardigan Magistrates Court said Ms Burgess's nude sunbathing was "not normal" behaviour.
But magistrates cleared her, adding that it was accepted she did not intend to "cause harm or distress".
I honestly can't find the words to express what an unutterable waste of time, energy and public money this was.
And as for this from the pervert neighbour with the camcorder:
"I don't want to bring up my children in such an environment."
Well to be honest I wouldn't want to bring children up in an environment where neighbours spy on each other and report to the police, but I guess his kids are pretty much stuck with that.
Casting Against Type
The lovely Lee, who was among those gathered for Eurovision on Saturday night, posted yesterday about something from the evening which I had forgotten, namely the assertion that all gay men had a typewriter when younger.
I for one was forced to confirm that I fit this stereotype, as was My Beloved.
I had mine for years. I ended up taking it off to university with me and writing essays on it.
(I'm just making things worse, aren't I?)
This Big Brother-Free Zone
As previously mentioned, I'm not watching Big Brother this year, though as I'm living with what could only be called an addict, it would be impossible for me to be unaware of it.
And strangely, I've also discovered that a couple of people I know, know people in the house. And stranger still, more than one person I know has had some past experience of that man who has walked out. I say 'has past experience', because no one seems willing to lay claim to actual friendship, on the basis that he's apparently just as bad in real life as I gather he has been in the house.
"The XI In Team"
Look away now if you don't want to see me even tangentially talking about sport.
I don't know a lot about cricket, but I do get that it's played by a team of eleven players. The current poster campaign that Sky are running for their England Test Match coverage make much of the fact through the logo they've used, which is this:
EngXIland
Which to my mind makes the fact that of half a dozen or so variant posters I've seen, every single one features only one player, and the same player at that, utterly inexplicable.
I bet the team members who aren't Andrew Flintoff feel really valued.
So Chris Gets His Wish
And Lordi walk off with the Eurovision Song Contest. In typical style this no doubt means that there'll be a bunch of similar style entries next year. Hmmm - Helsinki sounds like a more appealing trip than Athens....
As far as last night was concerned though, I think it's safe to say that if that song hadn't been performed in that way, it wouldn't have won. But the voting was all over the place anyway. How did that dirge the Irish put in do as well as it did? And the Russian and Lithuanian entries both receieved significantly less appreciation where we were than songs that ended up getting nowhere, from Armenia, Germany and Denmark. Highest ranked song that actually should have been a contender: Sweden's Invincible, though as previously discussed they picked the wrong entry anyway.
Bye Daz - presumably we'll never hear from you again, even though you achieved the UK's strongest showing in several years.
Well That's That Then
Say bye-bye Belgium, who we thought were a guaranteed finalist for Saturday's Eurovision. And farewell too to Cyprus, Albania, Belarus and all the others who fell at the semi-final hurdle.
Worryingly, someone I work with is thinking of watching the main contest purely because of Finnish entry Lordi. I'd hate to think he'll be voting on the same basis - that whole act is just wrong.
The major theme we picked up on in last night's performances was that of large blokes in skirts - David uncharitably extended this category to include at least one contestant who is officially female.
Still, at least it provides an alternative to Big Brother.
Carry On Flogging That Dead Horse
So there's to be a new Carry On film. Starring such top quality comedy actors as Vinnie Jones, Carry On London is finally in production after a three year delay caused by issues with the financing. Really? They had trouble finding the money for what will clearly be a number 1 worldwide smash? I'm shocked!
Seriously - In the way that I used to think Doctor Who would never come back, I've always been sure that someone somewhere would find a way to do new Carry Ons, blithely ignoring the fact that the originals were at least as much about that specific set of performers as they were about the scripts or the plots (and I use that term in its loosest possible sense).
I'm sure all involved will give it their all, but nothing they do will make it possible for me to go and see a performance by Kenneth and Hattie and Charlie and co.
The Spanish Migrant Crisis
On the Today programme this morning, they ran an item about the sudden increase in African migration to the Canary Islands. Over the last few weeks, thousands of people have left the North African coast in fishing boats bound for the islands, desperate for jobs, freedom, homes, all the things that usually drive migration.
And the BBC package settled at one point on some of the little Englanders British tourists who help make tourism the number one industry on the Canaries. All of them were horrified that their holiday was being disrupted by the human crisis unfolding on the beach every day, and as one woman put it "There are people dehydrated, sick, some don't even make it to the end of the crossing alive. And I'm having to explain to my kids what's going on when we're on holiday. We won't be coming back if they don't sort it out."
Dear fucking god woman, there are people dead in front of you and you're pissed off that it's spoiling your holiday? Get some perspective.
That Time Of Year Again
No, not the imminent launch of Big Brother, for which I'm on a non-watching regimen this year, but this week is Eurovision week. The BBC kicked off last night with a Wogan-hosted look back at 50 years of the Song Contest, which missed none of the cliches and ended with 2006 UK Hopeful Daz Sampson performing his masterwork.
Now, I'm not too big a man to admit I was wrong. It's happened at least once before in the history of this blog. And a little while ago, I was rather critical of Mr Sampson and his 'schoolgirl' backing singers, but while I'm not exactly warming to it all, I'm no longer convinced that it's going to be the disaster I once thought it would be.
As David said, it's either going to be loved or hated - we're not going to end up in the middle of the table this year. Needless to say, our house will be watching.
"A Proper Future Thing"
For David's birthday, I bought him a digital photo frame - the kind that you load a bunch of photos onto from a memory card and it runs through them one after the other, or randomly, according to the way you set it up.
He's really the perfect market for something like this - he's a gadget head, a keen digital photographer, and therefore overburdened with photos that will never see the light of day.
And one of the things I really love about his reaction to it is the subject line of this post; "It's a proper future thing" - the kind of thing that sci-fi used to have us expecting. And if I can't have my personal jet pack, I'll settle for having this in the house.
EDIT: The product link was screwing up the RSS page, so I had to take it out. You should be able to find it on the Philips website.
Hitting The Road
Having made the flat cleaner and tidier than it's been in a while, and having recorded a bonus edition of the podcast (see earlier posts), and having given house and cat-sitter Rebecca the grand tour: We're off!
David's birthday is tomorrow and we're retreating to Suffolk in our usual manner.
Back on Monday.
Musical Musing
A short while ago I made a couple of CD recommendations, and now, just to show I can achieve some small measure of consistency in this here blog, I'm going to follow them up with another.
I've just been introduced to The Kooks via their fab album Inside In/Inside Out. What? I know it was released back in January and you've probably all had it on your iPods since release day, but it's new to me.
I confess that initially it struck me as a bit lightweight - one of those albums that you've hit track three of before you're really aware of it, and you worry that it's going to be one of those 'over in 30 minutes' affairs. And I also confess that a couple of the tracks leave me a bit cold, but most are the kind that get me hitting 'repeat' and singing along to them in the car. The run of tracks 7 to 9 in particular (She Moves In Her Own Way/Matchbox/Naive) is just brilliant - I could loop them all day.
If you've never heard of them (and it can't just be me, surely?) then check it out. I don't think you'll regret it.
Family Matters
Just a quick note to say thanks to people who've been in touch to offer thoughts about my mother's hospitalisation - you're a lovely bunch of people.
She's still in the hospital, and probably about to be moved to a specialist stroke rehabilitation centre where she can get more intensive therapy than in the General. She's well enough to want to get home, and to give me a hard time about travelling up to visit because she doesn't want a fuss, but she still has some work to do to get out and back in her own place.
Poor Paul and Aravon
Booted out of Strictly Dance Fever. We missed their main performance, but caught the results show, and it was very sad to see Aravon talking about how hard it was to be taken apart on national TV every week. To be told she 'danced like a builder' would be pretty devastating to anyone I'd have thought - except possibly a builder.
The Art Of No-So-Civil Partnering
David and I had the nearest thing we've yet had to a row last night, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it was over the arrangements for this damn Civil Partnership.
What do we want? Well, sometimes the same thing, sometimes not. Sometimes an actual ceremony, sometimes just the party. Neither of us want a formal sit-down do, because that's not very us. One of us would like to cater in a particular way, the other has a different view. One of us wants to provide X amount of drink, the other Y. One of us likes the idea of a particular venue, the other thinks not.
Who do we want there? Actually, I think we're sorted on that one, but then the capacity of the venue may involve slicing the list at some point.
And I've had stuff through from *dozens* of places now, some of which are crazily excessive, and others of which are actually quite reasonable, but not really places we like. And I'm stressing because I think we have to make some decisions in order to give people plenty of notice, which is more relevant for me than David, because I want to invite people from overseas.
What both of us come back to is that ten thousand pounds would be a fuck of a lot of money to spend on what is basically a party.
And so, stress and an inability to reconcile some views led to tension and raised voices.
We're okay now, and I think actually at a point where decsions about what we want to do are made, which means we can now get on and make it happen.
Neil Gaiman's Eternals
Neil Gaiman is the author of a new Eternals series from Marvel, with John Romita Jr on art. For those who don't know, The Eternals is one of the multitudinous concepts that comic legend(tm) Jack Kirby created, and is, alongside his Fantsatic Four, probably the finest example of his 'cosmic' work. There have been a few nay-sayers regarding a new series, but Gaiman has blogged a sample piece of art, and every reaction I've seen to it is, well, let's just say it's pretty positive.
I *Try* To Be A Good Person
But sometimes I just want to kill someone.
I've been back to the hospital today for a follow-up outpatient appointment from my time in there back in Feb/March. This is one of two follow-ups - the eye one. The ENT follow-up is currently scheduled for late June...
My appointment was at 2.20pm, and I arrived in plenty of time, only to find that parking on the roads around the hospital is charged at the magnificant sum of £1 for 15 minutes. So I put 1 hour 15 on the meter and went into the hospital. Over an hour later I was called through for my 'initial assessment', and when I said I needed to go to put more time on my parking I was told that the assessment would only take a couple of minutes, and if I missed the slot it could be another hour again before I was called through. Fifteen minutes later I was running for the car, where I found I'd got a parking ticket...
And then, because I try to be a good person, I actually put another hour and fifteen on the car, even though with the ticket already there, I probably wouldn't have got another one.
And amazingly, by the time I'd finally been seen by the consultant I *still* had to run back to the car and got to it exactly at the time the ticket expired.
Total time paid for - two and a half hours.
Total time actually being treated by medical practitioners - twenty minutes.
Slightly Distracted
Apologies if I'm once again a bit quiet - my mother's in hospital after a stroke and I'm exerting a lot of mental focus in that direction to the detriment of this place. I've been up to see her the last two weekends, and they're now starting to talk about her going home. It's difficult seeing her get so frustrated by problems she's having with remembering some words, and especially peoples' names.