I Don't Know Why It's Weird...

...but it is.

I was taking my rubbish down to the bins outside my flat, and happened to bump into one of the Managing Agents - the one who visited my flat a few months back to check on my damp patches (that is, the ones on my ceilings, you dirty, dirty people) - standing in the stairwell with a dictating machine. She was surveying the entrance way for the redecoration they're intending to do at some point, inwardly (and soon outwardly) bemoaning the textured paint that had been used on virtually every surface. We got chatting about the state of the roof (apparently they'd had a visit from Health & Safety, who'd done a spot-check on the kebab place downstairs, and found too many signs of leakage), first impressions of the building ("like a prison"... but then, her first visit was during winter, when it was cold and dark), and the usefulness of insurance. Then the weird thing happened.

Although I really don't know why I think it's weird.

She recognised my t-shirt - the 'evil fluffy bitey thing', from Genki Gear.

I guess, partly, it's because I have a fairly large collection of weird and wonderful t-shirts, 'EFBT' being but one of many from Genki alone, and yet no-one in the past has said "Oh, I recognise that t-shirt... it's from Genki!" Once, and only once, a colleague recognised a Penny Arcade t-shirt (although not worn by me that day) and, other than that, my t-shirts drew very few comments (to my face, at least), and generally not much more than a bemused look or a brief chuckle.

So when a grey-suited Managing Agent recognised one of my cool t-shirts from a very cool English company, it felt like I'd stepped into an alternate dimension where perhaps, just perhaps, I wasn't quite such an outsider...

Many moons ago, I blogged a letter to Hasbro UK in which I wondered why their release schedule and level of publicity for TransFormers movie toys were such unmitigated shite. It's interesting to see that, four years and two movies later, nothing much has changed (except that the toys are smaller and they have even more ridiculous gimmicks). I popped over the Friern Barnet Smyths at the end of last week, and was disappointed to find that their shelves were basically still stocked with Wave 1 items. Plenty of Voyager Megatron, Optimus and Ironhide, loads of Deluxes that were released 2 months ago, and very little else. They did have the all-new Leader Class Ironhide, which I gratefully snatched up, but with the movie still doing so well in cinemas worldwide (latest figures put it at making just over a billion dollars, and it still hasn't been released in Japan!), I can't understand why the toys are taking so long to hit the shelves.

The USA is up to Wave 4, at least, but it looks as though they may be stuck there for a while, as all the new stuff on show at the San Diego Comic Con was labelled as being due to hit the streets between October and December, with one or two slated for 2012 release. If Hasbro UK is looking for a more balanced release schedule, one can only applaud their logic... yet with so much to come, I can't understand why any of it is being delayed. Are they hoping to ensure that their next quarter's results will be as good as this one?

In other news, I decided to watch The Lovely Bones last night... Strange film. I'm not entirely happy with an ending that lets a murderer escape justice, even if he does end up dead in a ditch himself, and I'm almost tempted to pick up the novel, to see how such rich visuals could be expressed in words. There have been a couple of other movies I watched recently, but I'm damned if I can remember what they were at the moment...

Oh well. Plenty of other things to be getting on with, besides blogging here...

That Was The Other Thing...

Yesterday morning, I had a very strange, very brief power cut. It was accompanied by an alarm going off down the street and - possibly by sheer coincidence - a lot of people running around outside. It was about the time of day when people might be running to their offices to minimise their lateness, or they may all have been running to pick up the bus that was approaching... Who knows?

After only a couple of minutes, the alarm stopped, and power returned... If I'd phoned my electricity supplier to report the interruption, power would probably have been restored before I finished giving them my details.

Weird.

I mean, I can only assume that the alarm and the interruption were somehow connected... but it's not as if anyone was digging up the road/pavement nearby...

Weirder still, when I checked on my boiler to ensure it was back up and running, it's clock was something like an hour out... So it seems there have been other power cuts while I've been asleep or out of the flat.

The Wisdom That Comes With Age

And other such trite nonsense.

Absolutely not applicable to any discussion about Noel Clarke's Adulthood, the followup to Kidulthood. While I had reservations about the first - too much crammed into one night and, while it didn't glorify the lifestyle it portrayed, it certainly seemed to be making excuses for it - I found the second utterly, breathtakingly brilliant.

Following the continued existence of Sam (for it cannot truly be called a life) the day he's released from prison, we learn that people want him dead immediately, if not sooner. To ascertain who, he tries to track down old acquaintances who, no surprise, are reluctant to have any contact with him. He has to break into his own home because his mother changed the locks. He feels the need to reconnect, to do something to show that he's changed, that he realises his mistakes and that, while he can never make up for what he did, he at least wants to move on...

...But no-one wants to listen.

Meanwhile, people still want him dead... Money is changing hands, weapons are being sought, and Sam's enemies are closing in.

The climax of the film - without wishing to spoil it for anyone - reminded me somewhat of Gran Torino, in that Sam goes out to end the cycle of violence that he started more than six years before, knowing full-well that it's likely to be the end of him, one way or another. And, just like Gran Torino, the film left me blubbing.

I still think that Kidulthood should have been made as a mini-series, spread over several weeks (both in terms of the story and in terms of broadcast, just to give the viewers time to recover from one set of bruises before receiving the next), but Adulthood was perfectly judged, and fit more easily into the single-day timeframe.

It ends on a positive note, for which I'm glad... But it's a sad truth, spoken by Sam, that being in "big man prison" didn't teach him anything, least of all what to do when he came out.

In other news, I heard today from an agency I signed up with last year (technically). It'd be nice if it was in response to an email I sent almost two months ago, but it really wasn't. They spoke to my former boss about a vacancy that needed filling, she sent them my way. Amusingly, the email I got from the agency was formatted as a reply to my 2-month-old email, with a brief apology for the 'delay'.

Ahem.

This summarises my objection to Agencies. They make money by putting other people to work, and yet those same people have to basically beg for the privilege? Call in regularly to ask "Any work going this week?"?

Not I, gentle reader, not I.

They know what I can do, they know how to contact me. If I wanted to beg for work, I'd be claiming income support and visiting the job centre every fortnight.