But first, another bit of dream.
One of my former colleagues moved to Australia and has recently started a family. I was never exactly friendly with the guy, so I don't keep in touch by any active means. He was one of the Salespeople I didn't actively dislike, but he made my life more difficult that it needed to be often enough that I certainly didn't like him much. So when he turned up in a recent dream, I was a little surprised.
It started out in the typical anxiety dream fashion - one of my teeth spontaneously popped out of its gum, and another one was extremely loose (possibly bleeding)... I'm not sure this was the same dream, to be honest. It doesn't quite flow from one to the other but, the next thing I remember is meeting up with this former colleague on a sunny day, in a park. He's wheeling along his offspring in a buggy, his wife wandering nearby. He spouts platitudes about the old days, working together... and then suddenly says something about working together again... In Australia. Of course, such a move hold some unhappy associations with me (admittedly more to do with New Zealand than Oz, though Sydney was a stopover on the flight there) and the shock (coupled with his slightly dopey, over-earnest grin) was enough to wake me up.
Still, weird. I know I've been talking about changing career recently... but am I really associating that kind of change with the act of moving to the other side of the planet?
So. Trousers. Or, more specifically, jeans.
I recently discovered that I had worn holes in the upper-inside-leg of both pairs of light blue jeans I own. One pair is a positively ancient pair of 501s, the other, a more recent random, non-designer label from a department store. My first attempt at replacing either or both netted me another pair of dark blue jeans (honestly, I'm not sure what I was thinking!) and I only got round to making another attempt earlier this week, now that I'm working in the area of Oxford Street.
Popping into the nearest branch of Next one lunchtime, I managed to find a pair of light blue, button-fly jeans that I liked the look of, but they didn't have my size (32S) on the racks. I picked up the next best thing (34S) because sizes on jeans tend to be a little... shall we say "non-standard", and I've had pairs of jeans that were ostensibly the same size, yet which fitted very differently. When I got to the checkout, I asked if they had the ideal size in stock, and the cashier - somewhat reluctantly - sloped out back to check, reporting moments later that they were currently out of stock. I liked the jeans, though, so I bought the size they had. And, really, what kind of difference would two inches really make?
Gentle reader, let me tell you exactly what kind of difference a mere two inches can make to a man's jeans.
The first day I wore them, before I'd even left my home for work, I knew I was in trouble. Sure, there was lots more 'breathing room' (gents, you know what I mean here, right?), but these jeans - which were designed to, quote, "sit low on the hip" - just kept slipping down. Inside the flat, all was fine - I could hitch them up regularly and no-one would know the difference... but the moment I stepped out and started walking down the street, it felt as though they'd be round my ankles within a few paces.
So I took to holding them up through the pockets of my winter coat.
I managed to get a seat on the train into work and, looking down, I saw the crotch protruding from the hem of my coat - which hangs over my hips when standing - and realised that the problem was worse than I'd originally suspected. Were it not for the coat, my underwear would have been very visible to all around me.
Seriously, I would have looked like the most middle-class rapper ever.
So, on a whim, I switched my route to work so that I'd be arriving via Oxford Circus, thus giving myself the opportunity to peruse the menswear section of Marks & Sparks for a belt... And you wouldn't believe how difficult it was to find one of them in my size! A 32 inch waist must be the menswear equivalent of size zero, or something. I guess I'm lucky that my waistline hasn't deviated much over the last 20 years or so, but it does seem that my size is constantly out of stock (in certain styles, in certain shops... so perhaps I'm just too fussy?). Wandering round M&S just after they open, when their staff are still calm and stress-free enough to greet a passing customer, was a very weird experience while I was having to hold my trousers up... Getting the belt into my backpack (because I could hardly say "No, thank you, I don't need a bag, gimme a moment and I'll put the belt on straight away!") was an embarrassing scene because it was utterly uncooperative and just wanted to unravel... And every moment I was wrestling with the belt, my jeans were slipping further down my hips.
When I got to the office, I dashed straight into the lavatory to put the belt on and, on another whim, tried pulling my jeans down without unbuttoning them.
Yep, they came all the way down.
With minimal effort.
Just let that image sink in for a moment, there.
Thankfully, with the belt, the jeans fit brilliantly... I still have the extra breathing room, but don't need to worry about finding my trousers round my ankles unexpectedly.
And that, after all, is all a man can ask of his trousers.
Thursday 24 January 2013
Monday 14 January 2013
First Weird Dream of the Year
And, in typical fashion, I can only remember the last couple of bits:
A chase around a massive, yet derelict (or not, it seemed to switch between depending, perhaps, on character perspective) hotel, which seemed to have its own on-site hospital, because the particular chase I remember was between a seriously injured woman - crawling either because her legs were broken (hence her presence in the hospital?) or because she was paraplegic - and an evil, spectral and, above all, able-bodied version of herself. It was one of those situations where, due to its presentation, I can't be sure if it was playing out as part of a movie or a videogame, but there was a bit where she was crawling toward a lift, only to see it leave her floor with a passenger (possibly referring to the bit in Inception where Ariadne has invaded Cobb's 'prison' for Mal, runs back to the lift while he's distracted, and heads to the 'basement' alone). She immediately dragged herself down one of the dingy staircases running either side of the lift shaft (featuring some neat impossible geometry, where the two staircases curving around the sides somehow don't intersect or interfere with the lift shaft!), then almost literally flies through a bunch of doors toward her room in the 'hospital' area. At one point, she collapsed to the floor and looked behind her, to see her twisted twin shambling after her at the centre of a whirlwind that's wrecking the doorways in her wake. When she finally reached her room, getting herself into bed (and trying to look innocent, as if she'd never left the room) was enough to dispel the monster.
I have flashes of other, slightly similar circumstances from other points in the dream - the opulent hotel in its heyday; a massive central foyer overlooked by many balconies, all brightly lit with chandeliers; chases between other people and other monsters, all ending badly, and one involving the lift in a way that suggested all chases were happening concurrently - but can't remember enough to flesh out the 'story'. What I do remember is that, after a movie, I was walking toward another lift (or was it the one from the chase sequence?) discussing the events of the film. Just as I got into the lift, I had been talking about the alternate ending posited by a post-credits sequence that was removed from the final theatrical edit. Just as I was about to reveal the 'true' ending, "They all got to the airport and..." I was shushed by one of the actors from the film - Bradley Cooper, strangely - who, taking on the quiet, warbling tone of someone concluding a particularly chilling ghost story, said "...and they all got headaches..."
I don't believe that was the ending I was about to reveal... My dream-self felt he was talking about the next Hangover film...
In other news, after a pretty fantastic weekend, I'm back to work now, for three months on contract with one of my regulars... It's going to be interesting... And I've just remembered that I failed to procure a new notepad for this most auspicious occasion...
Nuts...
A chase around a massive, yet derelict (or not, it seemed to switch between depending, perhaps, on character perspective) hotel, which seemed to have its own on-site hospital, because the particular chase I remember was between a seriously injured woman - crawling either because her legs were broken (hence her presence in the hospital?) or because she was paraplegic - and an evil, spectral and, above all, able-bodied version of herself. It was one of those situations where, due to its presentation, I can't be sure if it was playing out as part of a movie or a videogame, but there was a bit where she was crawling toward a lift, only to see it leave her floor with a passenger (possibly referring to the bit in Inception where Ariadne has invaded Cobb's 'prison' for Mal, runs back to the lift while he's distracted, and heads to the 'basement' alone). She immediately dragged herself down one of the dingy staircases running either side of the lift shaft (featuring some neat impossible geometry, where the two staircases curving around the sides somehow don't intersect or interfere with the lift shaft!), then almost literally flies through a bunch of doors toward her room in the 'hospital' area. At one point, she collapsed to the floor and looked behind her, to see her twisted twin shambling after her at the centre of a whirlwind that's wrecking the doorways in her wake. When she finally reached her room, getting herself into bed (and trying to look innocent, as if she'd never left the room) was enough to dispel the monster.
I have flashes of other, slightly similar circumstances from other points in the dream - the opulent hotel in its heyday; a massive central foyer overlooked by many balconies, all brightly lit with chandeliers; chases between other people and other monsters, all ending badly, and one involving the lift in a way that suggested all chases were happening concurrently - but can't remember enough to flesh out the 'story'. What I do remember is that, after a movie, I was walking toward another lift (or was it the one from the chase sequence?) discussing the events of the film. Just as I got into the lift, I had been talking about the alternate ending posited by a post-credits sequence that was removed from the final theatrical edit. Just as I was about to reveal the 'true' ending, "They all got to the airport and..." I was shushed by one of the actors from the film - Bradley Cooper, strangely - who, taking on the quiet, warbling tone of someone concluding a particularly chilling ghost story, said "...and they all got headaches..."
I don't believe that was the ending I was about to reveal... My dream-self felt he was talking about the next Hangover film...
In other news, after a pretty fantastic weekend, I'm back to work now, for three months on contract with one of my regulars... It's going to be interesting... And I've just remembered that I failed to procure a new notepad for this most auspicious occasion...
Nuts...
Tuesday 8 January 2013
Ripping Stuff
It's not often I'll waffle on at length about television on this blog... Torchwood may well have been kindling to my ire, Doctor Who might get a mention once in a while... and there were cases where I started watching a series only to find it too terrible to continue watching or commenting on... But even those are few and far between. So it's only fitting that I give an honourable mention to BBC1's Ripper Street, a new police procedural set in the Whitechapel of 1889, in the times after Jack the Ripper.
There's a core cast of three protagonists and, by the looks of it so far, a villain of the week. So far, so blah, but the protagonists are a motley bunch. Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew McFadyen playing it inscrutible/tortured/constipated as usual) is the well-spoken and typically uptight vaguely posh copper, with Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn playing it Cockney and cocky) forever at his side... but then there's former Pinkerton (or is he?) Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), the drink-drug-addled forensic genius who seems to do all the actual detective work while the other two mooch about looking moody and occasionally getting into fights.
The pilot episode dealt - oddly enough - with the death of a prostitute. Clearly the work of Jack, said the press (and the Detective formerly in charge of the Ripper case). Clearly not, insisted Reid. I'm not entirely sure where this episode thought it was going, but it did its level best to confirm the commonly-held theory that the driving force behind any innovation in entertainment is pornography. Overall, it seemed rather bitty, as if someone thought the core crime wasn't enough to sustain an hour's worth of television (which it was), so they threw in an underground prizefight fixing 'scandal', possibly by way of an introduction to the villain of the week, a moustachioed toff with a taste for bare-knuckle pugilism and sexual asphyxia (not together, though - there is such a thing as too kinky).
Some of it stretched credulity - a police photographer who, guilt-ridden, tried to burn the Detectives alive? - and it seemed like it could have either made use of another half hour or so to flesh out the story properly, or just cut out the prize-fighting bits so it could focus on the main story - but, surprisingly graphic (for the BBC) sexual deviance aside, it worked pretty well as an introduction.
If I had any gripes about the first episode, they would be that Matthew McFadyen does a very good job of portraying wood at the best of times but, when given a period costume and some unbelievably dense dialogue (in the sense of verbose, but tightly packed, rather than stupid), his clear and careful enunciation makes him come across like an alien, rather than a (police)man of his time. Reid is clearly a clever man, but often seems incapable of connecting any of his clues. Jerome Flynn suits his part admirably, but it's a shame he didn't get much dialogue, generally seeming to be around purely to punch things... and something doesn't quite ring true about Adam Rothenberg's former US Lawman from the very beginning. One of the strangest aspects of the show was the significant looks that passed between Reid and Drake during the fisticuffs, which led me to suspect they'd later end up snogging in an alleyway... but it turned out to be purely for the purposes of signalling.
Episode 2 came across like a combination of Oliver Twist and Assault on Precinct 13, but with some rather heavy handed referencing to the London riots of August 2011. It also went to show that the Beeb doesn't always shy away from showing drug usage by 'the good guys': with Jackson suffering from the mother of all hangovers, Reid whips up a medicinal drink involving cocaine (which works suspiciously quick for an oral solution!). Now, OK, I'll accept that cocaine was more acceptable then than it is now... but why, oh why, did Moffat/Gatiss's Sherlock have to resort to nicotine patches? It's all the more galling when the US series, Elementary, purportedly gives the world a contemporary Sherlock Holmes who's a genuine recovering addict.
Also, perhaps I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but when a TV show presents a seemingly respectable toymaker getting beaten to death by a child, surely I'm not the only one to draw the obvious conclusion? Ripper Street wins points, then, for coming up with a larger puzzle and a more complex solution, but then loses some of them by being perhaps a little too clever about its twists and having a rather clichéd denouement. So much of the story is effectively smokescreen for a much simpler crime, one almost wonders why they went to such trouble about it. Nevertheless, in these days of dumbed-down television, a slightly less dumbed-down series is particularly welcome.
McFadyen is still rather wooden, though his exchange with Amanda Hale, playing Reid's wife Emily, comes across as merely starched instead - Reid seems to be a man keeping his emotions under lock and key. Flynn is still woefully underutilised, barely even getting to punch anyone till the big confrontation at the end, but he does get two key scenes with the murder suspect, both offering hints as to his background, as alluded to in an earlier conversation with his Detective Inspector.
In many ways, Ripper Street seems to want to be one of those US-style 'period' series that bring in subtly anachronistic elements to bridge the gap between then and now. The inclusion of an American character in the mix seems quite cynical - an obvious sign that the BBC intends to flog this show to the States - and his Sherlock Holmes-like ability to discern all sorts of things from the slightest forensic detail means that the audience has to just take it as a given that the man is the best in his field... despite very possibly not being who he purports to be.
In other news, I had a couple of weird fragments-of-dream lately. One simply involved switching off the power to my PC before it had finished shutting down (which is going to happen, sooner or later, because I tend to switch off the monitor while it's shutting down), meaning I was in fear of a warning message - in real life - when I switched on the next morning.
The other was quite a clever puzzle, very much like something out of a videogame. Well, I call it a puzzle... it was more of a serendipitous solution. I was in the shower (not actually mine, more like a communal shower, by the looks of it - dark and grimy granite walls, thin exposed pipework covered in limescale, algae and moss) and noticed that the water wasn't coming out of all the holes in the shower head. Granted, it was encrusted with limescale, but the absence of water was rather too regular for that to be the sole cause. I turned off the water, unscrewed the shower head and opened it up... only to find a large (2", maybe?) coin wedged into the outlet.
It would have been nice to see what that coin was all about, but that was when I woke up...
There's a core cast of three protagonists and, by the looks of it so far, a villain of the week. So far, so blah, but the protagonists are a motley bunch. Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew McFadyen playing it inscrutible/tortured/constipated as usual) is the well-spoken and typically uptight vaguely posh copper, with Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn playing it Cockney and cocky) forever at his side... but then there's former Pinkerton (or is he?) Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), the drink-drug-addled forensic genius who seems to do all the actual detective work while the other two mooch about looking moody and occasionally getting into fights.
The pilot episode dealt - oddly enough - with the death of a prostitute. Clearly the work of Jack, said the press (and the Detective formerly in charge of the Ripper case). Clearly not, insisted Reid. I'm not entirely sure where this episode thought it was going, but it did its level best to confirm the commonly-held theory that the driving force behind any innovation in entertainment is pornography. Overall, it seemed rather bitty, as if someone thought the core crime wasn't enough to sustain an hour's worth of television (which it was), so they threw in an underground prizefight fixing 'scandal', possibly by way of an introduction to the villain of the week, a moustachioed toff with a taste for bare-knuckle pugilism and sexual asphyxia (not together, though - there is such a thing as too kinky).
Some of it stretched credulity - a police photographer who, guilt-ridden, tried to burn the Detectives alive? - and it seemed like it could have either made use of another half hour or so to flesh out the story properly, or just cut out the prize-fighting bits so it could focus on the main story - but, surprisingly graphic (for the BBC) sexual deviance aside, it worked pretty well as an introduction.
If I had any gripes about the first episode, they would be that Matthew McFadyen does a very good job of portraying wood at the best of times but, when given a period costume and some unbelievably dense dialogue (in the sense of verbose, but tightly packed, rather than stupid), his clear and careful enunciation makes him come across like an alien, rather than a (police)man of his time. Reid is clearly a clever man, but often seems incapable of connecting any of his clues. Jerome Flynn suits his part admirably, but it's a shame he didn't get much dialogue, generally seeming to be around purely to punch things... and something doesn't quite ring true about Adam Rothenberg's former US Lawman from the very beginning. One of the strangest aspects of the show was the significant looks that passed between Reid and Drake during the fisticuffs, which led me to suspect they'd later end up snogging in an alleyway... but it turned out to be purely for the purposes of signalling.
Episode 2 came across like a combination of Oliver Twist and Assault on Precinct 13, but with some rather heavy handed referencing to the London riots of August 2011. It also went to show that the Beeb doesn't always shy away from showing drug usage by 'the good guys': with Jackson suffering from the mother of all hangovers, Reid whips up a medicinal drink involving cocaine (which works suspiciously quick for an oral solution!). Now, OK, I'll accept that cocaine was more acceptable then than it is now... but why, oh why, did Moffat/Gatiss's Sherlock have to resort to nicotine patches? It's all the more galling when the US series, Elementary, purportedly gives the world a contemporary Sherlock Holmes who's a genuine recovering addict.
Also, perhaps I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but when a TV show presents a seemingly respectable toymaker getting beaten to death by a child, surely I'm not the only one to draw the obvious conclusion? Ripper Street wins points, then, for coming up with a larger puzzle and a more complex solution, but then loses some of them by being perhaps a little too clever about its twists and having a rather clichéd denouement. So much of the story is effectively smokescreen for a much simpler crime, one almost wonders why they went to such trouble about it. Nevertheless, in these days of dumbed-down television, a slightly less dumbed-down series is particularly welcome.
McFadyen is still rather wooden, though his exchange with Amanda Hale, playing Reid's wife Emily, comes across as merely starched instead - Reid seems to be a man keeping his emotions under lock and key. Flynn is still woefully underutilised, barely even getting to punch anyone till the big confrontation at the end, but he does get two key scenes with the murder suspect, both offering hints as to his background, as alluded to in an earlier conversation with his Detective Inspector.
In many ways, Ripper Street seems to want to be one of those US-style 'period' series that bring in subtly anachronistic elements to bridge the gap between then and now. The inclusion of an American character in the mix seems quite cynical - an obvious sign that the BBC intends to flog this show to the States - and his Sherlock Holmes-like ability to discern all sorts of things from the slightest forensic detail means that the audience has to just take it as a given that the man is the best in his field... despite very possibly not being who he purports to be.
In other news, I had a couple of weird fragments-of-dream lately. One simply involved switching off the power to my PC before it had finished shutting down (which is going to happen, sooner or later, because I tend to switch off the monitor while it's shutting down), meaning I was in fear of a warning message - in real life - when I switched on the next morning.
The other was quite a clever puzzle, very much like something out of a videogame. Well, I call it a puzzle... it was more of a serendipitous solution. I was in the shower (not actually mine, more like a communal shower, by the looks of it - dark and grimy granite walls, thin exposed pipework covered in limescale, algae and moss) and noticed that the water wasn't coming out of all the holes in the shower head. Granted, it was encrusted with limescale, but the absence of water was rather too regular for that to be the sole cause. I turned off the water, unscrewed the shower head and opened it up... only to find a large (2", maybe?) coin wedged into the outlet.
It would have been nice to see what that coin was all about, but that was when I woke up...
Saturday 5 January 2013
Rules of Thumb for a Publishing Environment, Part II
Following on from the first installment...
In the end, since I was training the newbie anyway, I ended up defining and documenting this project's procedures so that she doesn't have the same trouble I had when the next one rolls round later in the year. It's not as if it's a difficult project, or even time-consuming... The bits I gathered together were simple enough to collate, it's just that no-one told me until too late that they need to be collated in a particular way, so I ended up undoing and then redoing great swathes of my work.
But what really bugged me - because I can handle (dare I say manage?) so-called managers who aren't managing - was that, in my penultimate week, the Project Manager asked to play around with my last few days, shifting one day into the following week so that I'd be there for their press day... Sadly for them I already had other plans for next week and, even if I hadn't, I don't appreciate being dicked around like that, so I turned them down flat.
I mean, let's face it, if the project had been properly managed, my work would be done once I'd collated all the copy... and the only reason half of it wasn't sent to the Printers today was that - oh dear - the Project Manager hadn't managed the project in such a way that the Printers were set up to receive the files by my last day. And why's that? Because the print order is supposedly a Production task... and so the newbie had to be trained in the art of preparing this particular print order, but that only happened yesterday, because no-one had thought to sort it out before then.
That's a piss poor performance as far as I'm concerned. One should never rely on the availability of a Temp, even if that Temp is me. So much more could have been done with my last three days if only the project had been managed properly.
Thankfully their newbie is awesome... briefing her on the few bits and bobs that remain wasn't a problem, and she'll have no trouble finishing it all off.
- If your job title is 'Project Manager' it is not unreasonable for your staff or colleagues to expect you to know every aspect of the project. Consider the job title for a moment: does it not suggest that you are the manager of a project? Does it not follow, then, that when a new member of the team - or, heavens forfend, a Temp - asks you a question about the project, you should be able to give a more useful answer than "I don't know", and certainly something better than "I don't know, that's your job"? Perhaps I'm a hopeless romantic, but I would have thought that a Project Manager - the person who manages the project - should know that project backwards and forwards, inside out, from beginning to end, and be able to take direct control of any aspect of that project if and when the need arises. Having been a manager myself, that is how I work. One cannot support one's team and facilitate their work without knowing every aspect of it for oneself. That a Publishing company may be broken down into separate Sales, Editorial and Production Departments is no excuse. The Project Manager is the one who oversees the involvement of all departments, ensures smooth communication between them and keeps everything on track and on schedule. The Project Manager is the one who is present at all times while the project is ongoing. If that isn't you, kindly do your co-workers a favour, and don't call yourself any kind of manager, let alone a Project Manager.
In the end, since I was training the newbie anyway, I ended up defining and documenting this project's procedures so that she doesn't have the same trouble I had when the next one rolls round later in the year. It's not as if it's a difficult project, or even time-consuming... The bits I gathered together were simple enough to collate, it's just that no-one told me until too late that they need to be collated in a particular way, so I ended up undoing and then redoing great swathes of my work.
But what really bugged me - because I can handle (dare I say manage?) so-called managers who aren't managing - was that, in my penultimate week, the Project Manager asked to play around with my last few days, shifting one day into the following week so that I'd be there for their press day... Sadly for them I already had other plans for next week and, even if I hadn't, I don't appreciate being dicked around like that, so I turned them down flat.
I mean, let's face it, if the project had been properly managed, my work would be done once I'd collated all the copy... and the only reason half of it wasn't sent to the Printers today was that - oh dear - the Project Manager hadn't managed the project in such a way that the Printers were set up to receive the files by my last day. And why's that? Because the print order is supposedly a Production task... and so the newbie had to be trained in the art of preparing this particular print order, but that only happened yesterday, because no-one had thought to sort it out before then.
That's a piss poor performance as far as I'm concerned. One should never rely on the availability of a Temp, even if that Temp is me. So much more could have been done with my last three days if only the project had been managed properly.
Thankfully their newbie is awesome... briefing her on the few bits and bobs that remain wasn't a problem, and she'll have no trouble finishing it all off.
Tuesday 1 January 2013
Gratuitous First Post of 2013
It seems fitting and right that the first day of 2013 begins bright and sunny, with barely a cloud in the sky and less wind than has recently been blowing around.
This sort of day is hardly uncommon for the British winter, but yesterday was truly grim. I popped out briefly to find myself a new pair of jeans (holes having been worn into the upper inside leg of both blue pairs I own) and, on the way back home, the light, pervasive drizzle turned briefly into an outright deluge - something like the one I experienced a while back where the water seemed to be coming down in sheets. That had tailed off back to light drizzle before the bus delivered me home, so I wasn't actually caught out in it, but it was still pretty surprising.
Gratifyingly, the tarpaulin on my roof is still keeping my flat dry. I'd been worrying recently that all the wind might have dislodged it to the point where water would be leaking in again but so far, so good. Really need to take some bleach to my bedroom ceiling, though...
With such a massive selection of possible things to do over New Year's Eve, I ended up doing what I usually do - watching Jools Holland - because I couldn't decide between my other options... My sister borrowed the three TransFormers movies because one of her friends wanted to do an all-nighter with her kid(s), and thought they might be suitable material, and that inspired me to look into my movie collection for similar material. I ended up with seven possible options, some of which would take most of a full day to get through. Another option was playing videogames all night... but I haven't been paying much attention to videogames recently (despite looking around desperately - and, thusfar, fruitlessly - for the TransFormers: Prime videogame on Wii). I made some progress in Project Zero II some time ago, but it got really spooky and I still haven't quite got the hang of the controls - or the slow pace of it - so I haven't returned to it since.
So Mr Holland's Annual Hootenanny seemed like the best choice, and turned out to be brilliantly entertaining while I was up. I had to give up around 1am because I'd developed quite a nasty headache that really seemed to be demanding rest, but what I saw of the show was cool. My sister will probably be kicking herself, because one of the guests was Adam Ant, so perhaps I shouldn't mention that to her... Petula Clark seemed like an odd choice for a guest, but fitted in quite nicely with the scope of the show and the range of old and new music on offer. She also proved a point that often pops into my head about music: if a song is good, it remains good whichever genre it's reappropriated by - her version of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy was truly awesome (see also that Country & Western version of Word Up used in the VO5 ads (not to mention the version by KoRn), the Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt and, of course, Nine Inch Richards' Closer to Hogs).
Less impressive was the collaboration between Professor Green and Emili Sandé, Read All About It... Considering my penchant for mashups between rap and just about any other form of music, it didn't come across well live on the show. Emili Sandé was good, but the Prof. just came across like a petulant and ranty teenager. The recorded version works somewhat better, even though it seems like a watered down and self-indulgent version of Eminem's collaboration with Rihanna, Love The Way You Lie. Both are largely rap, with a properly sung chorus by someone who can actually sing, but perhaps the subject matter is more generally open to empathy in the latter.
Anyway... that was last year (sort of - it might have been this morning, but it was before I went to bed)... And there's so much to look forward to in 2013...
This sort of day is hardly uncommon for the British winter, but yesterday was truly grim. I popped out briefly to find myself a new pair of jeans (holes having been worn into the upper inside leg of both blue pairs I own) and, on the way back home, the light, pervasive drizzle turned briefly into an outright deluge - something like the one I experienced a while back where the water seemed to be coming down in sheets. That had tailed off back to light drizzle before the bus delivered me home, so I wasn't actually caught out in it, but it was still pretty surprising.
Gratifyingly, the tarpaulin on my roof is still keeping my flat dry. I'd been worrying recently that all the wind might have dislodged it to the point where water would be leaking in again but so far, so good. Really need to take some bleach to my bedroom ceiling, though...
With such a massive selection of possible things to do over New Year's Eve, I ended up doing what I usually do - watching Jools Holland - because I couldn't decide between my other options... My sister borrowed the three TransFormers movies because one of her friends wanted to do an all-nighter with her kid(s), and thought they might be suitable material, and that inspired me to look into my movie collection for similar material. I ended up with seven possible options, some of which would take most of a full day to get through. Another option was playing videogames all night... but I haven't been paying much attention to videogames recently (despite looking around desperately - and, thusfar, fruitlessly - for the TransFormers: Prime videogame on Wii). I made some progress in Project Zero II some time ago, but it got really spooky and I still haven't quite got the hang of the controls - or the slow pace of it - so I haven't returned to it since.
So Mr Holland's Annual Hootenanny seemed like the best choice, and turned out to be brilliantly entertaining while I was up. I had to give up around 1am because I'd developed quite a nasty headache that really seemed to be demanding rest, but what I saw of the show was cool. My sister will probably be kicking herself, because one of the guests was Adam Ant, so perhaps I shouldn't mention that to her... Petula Clark seemed like an odd choice for a guest, but fitted in quite nicely with the scope of the show and the range of old and new music on offer. She also proved a point that often pops into my head about music: if a song is good, it remains good whichever genre it's reappropriated by - her version of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy was truly awesome (see also that Country & Western version of Word Up used in the VO5 ads (not to mention the version by KoRn), the Johnny Cash cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt and, of course, Nine Inch Richards' Closer to Hogs).
Less impressive was the collaboration between Professor Green and Emili Sandé, Read All About It... Considering my penchant for mashups between rap and just about any other form of music, it didn't come across well live on the show. Emili Sandé was good, but the Prof. just came across like a petulant and ranty teenager. The recorded version works somewhat better, even though it seems like a watered down and self-indulgent version of Eminem's collaboration with Rihanna, Love The Way You Lie. Both are largely rap, with a properly sung chorus by someone who can actually sing, but perhaps the subject matter is more generally open to empathy in the latter.
Anyway... that was last year (sort of - it might have been this morning, but it was before I went to bed)... And there's so much to look forward to in 2013...
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