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- Laziest Polar Bear Of All Time
Laziest. Polar bear. Ever.
(tags: )
- In support of the UK Uncut street party outside Nick Clegg's house
Not mentioned: I hardly think that "holding a street party" can be considered an "extreme tactic" now that we're forbidden to protest outside the Government building he wasn't elected to.
(tags: activism protests politics )
- 13 Simple Steps To Get You Through A Rough Day
Warning: May Contain Pictures Of Dogs
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- So now we know whose fault the recession is. Ours | Comment is free
"Pressed on whether his was an updated `on-your-bike' idea, Hague replied: `It's more than that. It's "get on the plane, go and sell things overseas, go and study overseas". It's much more than getting on the bike, the bike didn't go that far.' That's the government's new way of dealing with unemployment: persuade people to leave the country. It's original, you have to give it that.
(tags: bloodytories politics debt recession )
- Those that do not learn from history
are condemned to repeat Neil Kinnock
(tags: economy politics bloodytories )
- An idea worth at least 40 nanoKardashians of your attention
"Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate...."
(tags: )
- Why Take The Flour Back are wrong and I’m leaving the Green Party
Contains important FACTS.
(tags: politics GMOs food )
So, apparently, yesterday some people propelled a ball into a rectangle slightly more frequently than some other people propelled the same ball into a different rectangle. As a result, today thousands and thousands of people gathered in the street, all wearing clothing of a particular colour, to watch a bus go past. The bus had some overpaid teenagers on it. There was singing. Did I miss anything?
We couldn't get that many people out on the street when they dismantled the NHS, ohhh no. But apparently propelling a ball into a rectangle is important.
- GOTCHA! « sturdyblog
Cameron caught lying about meetings with Murdoch. Cue one very self-satisfied blogger and a lot of backchat about what the "mainstrream media" have missed.
(tags: politics news )
- #youareold
Edd the Duck is 24 years old. So is Count Duckula. You have been scared of velociraptors for 19 years.
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- Review: Steps at the O2
Courtesy of the demigodlike Frisky & Mannish. This sounds like it would actually have been a lot of fun. And I still have a massive crush on Claire.
(It's not been called "the Millenium Dome" for seven years: #youareold)
(tags: review music the nineties )
- Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids, and Everyday Objects - YouTube
Welcome to the future. The future is how we, at Disney, stop children from eating their cereal with chopsticks, because if that ever happens then all is madness and decay. (Seriously though: the future! This is fascinating, guys.)
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When I got to work at seven o' clock this morning, there was a car alarm outside that had already been going off for at least an hour. One of those annoying ones that, in order to comply with legislation, doesn't sound for any longer than twenty seconds. Then it waits 2.5 seconds and then immediately goes off again. And again, and again. I remind you that this scenario is taking place at 7am. And the alarm is on a shitty 1980s Citroen that no one would ever want to steal.
By 8am everyone at work was going a little bit mental. And by "everyone", naturally, I mostly mean me. So I printed out this:
laminated it, and stuck it to the offending windscreen. The noise stopped sixty seconds later. I probably shouldn't claim credit for the shaming into submission of an inanimate object solely with the use of satirical webcomics and the Laminator of Justice, but I'm going to do so anyway.
Tonight, a little bit of Ludwig Van, O my droogs. Specifically, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra perform the Choral Symphony at the Usher Hall with ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) scotm and stormsearch. scotm didn't realize that the Choral Symphony was the same one as the Glorious Ninth until the interval. The look on his face reminded all present what the Ode to Joy is about. I should have charged him extra for the tickets.
Speaking of. This was the second time this week that I've spent money to be the youngest person in the room. The pleasant white-haired old gentleman in the seat next to me made indignant snorting noises when he heard me saying before the concert began, perhaps just a touch louder than conversationally, that the libretto to Ode to Joy was a load of old wank . The house lights dimmed before I was able to explain myself: if you don't speak German, then the Glorious Ninth appropriately remains music.
If you understand German, the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth is an excruciating exercise in George Lucas-level dialogue. Joy , sing the choir, joy is a good thing, we'd like more joy please, and less not-joy would be nice too, joy joy joy, joy is cool. Also: joy. Then there's something about shiny happy people holding hands and the whole thing degenerates into hippydom. I'm working from memory here.
Beethoven wasn't a poet. I'm fairly safe in making this assertion—he has many other sterling qualities—and, besides, and it's been said before. (“That ‘Ode to Joy’, talk about vulgarity! And the text! Completely puerile!”, said Leonhardt.) Schiller, who was a poet, and who wrote the original text that Beethoven adapted, frankly should have known better. It goes: joy (which is a good thing that we'd like more of) is like a joyful river of joyous joy , but it says it in German, and therefore it still sounds kinda cool.
We, who are privileged not to understand German, can listen to the Ode to Joy without engaging the semantic cortices, and thus we can listen to the human voice in a symphonic setting simply as another instrument. The voice is a flute as designed by David Cronenberg. It sounds fantastic when you put it in an orchestra. It sounds even </em>better</em> when you use a hundred of them. Just please don't think too hard about what the words actually mean.
What intrigued me about this particular performance of the Glorious Ninth was the second movement, which was among the best I've ever heard. The first movement of the Ninth is grand and regal and wonderful, and then there are the second and third movements, which... exist, and then the audience wake up again for the fourth movement and that glorious Ode. This orchestra took the second movement (molto vivace!) and made it their own. It was peppy; it zipped along. It was energetic and vigorous and it had zing. The tempo was such that I wondered if the conductor had some urgent appointment at the bar, and then the third movement was an appropriately reassuring, lugubrious, respite from all this orchestral fanfara that I forgot any such concerns. Usually I, like most of the audience, would be quite happy to sleep through the third movement, because it doesn't count. This third movement was a good one. It was, in a way I've never appreciated before, a welcome respite between the breathless gallopping rhythm of the scherzo and the relentless onslaught of that glorious fourth movement, which amazes all the senses through purely orchestral means and then, as if it was an encore, breaks out the choral section in order to make the perfeact more perfect. O that fourth movement. It gets no better.
The solo vocalists weren't quite top-rank and the percussion was a bit louder than it should be, and we were in terrible seats way up in the gods, but that's why we have live performances. The Glorious Ninth will never sound exactly like that again, and it was personal and intimate, and it was marvellous.
We applauded until our hands stang. On the way out, the pleasant white-haired old gentleman who'd been in the seat next me collared me and said: the words may be awful, but didn't they do them well? Not appropriately placed for a discussion about semantic cortices, I could only agree. And then, perhaps overheard on the way home, as we walk down the main road past the well-known Sauna :
Oh. So that's where all the cute strippers have gone.
I went to school with her.
A good day and an interesting one. I hope it remains so after I write it down.
Thu, Apr. 19th, 2012, 08:51 pm
Aww yeah
So this is me walking through Newington on my way between the organic food market and the artisan vintners & victuallers, carrying my organic jute tote bag—emblazoned with the logo of the local specialist American/Mexican delicatessen—currently stuffed with Polish honey-flavoured Wódka Żołądkowa Gorzka and copious quantities of sopocka. Carefree I stroll along, my second-best girl at my side and my mind on a double mocha latte with three sugars, when a mad bearded Scotsman runs up, addresses me by name and thrusts a script into my hand.
This happens more often than you might think.
To be strictly accurate: it was a mad bearded Scotsman with whom I'd already worked a few times, and he took my email address so he could send me a script. He'd just been running a casting session and had apparently had a poor turnout. By the time I got home, his production assistant had emailed the script across.
If I were to attempt a summary of this script in one line of dialogue, it would go something like this:
COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE, likesay ken ya wee dos radge, Grasshopper.
It's brilliant. I would be an idiot to turn this gig down, despite the fact that I can't do the accent he wants. I've got a better idea for the accent. This is going to be awesome.
A good day.
Okay, so when Chekov and Captain Terrell beam down to investigate the planet for suitability for the Genesis Project, they think the planet is Ceti Alpha VI. Then, when Khan explains that THIS IS CETI ALPHA FIVE , he says that Ceti Alpha VI asploded—secretly!—fourteen-and-a-half years ago. This is stated as the reason why Ceti Alpha V looks a lot less hospitable than it did during TOS, and it's presumably the reason why the crew of the Reliant weren't capable of accurately counting to six.
Planetary systems are numbered from the inside out. Ceti Alpha Prime would be the planet nearest the star, Ceti Alpha II would be the next one out, then Ceti Alpha III, IV, and Ceti Alpha V would be inside the orbit of Ceti Alpha VI. So when the Reliant warps in on its planetary survey mission, they count planets Ceti Alpha one two three four five six... and beam down to the wrong one.
If Ceti Alpha IV had asploded, they might be forgiven for getting the name of Ceti Alpha V wrong. There would still be the pressing issue of a suspicious-looking additional asteroid belt that wasn't on the charts. But when Ceti Alpha VI asploded, six months after we were left here, the only planets that change their name are Ceti Alphas VII and onwards. The only way for Chekov and Terrell to end up on Ceti Alpha V in a system that, unknown to them, has the sixth planet missing, is if they were actually trying to beam down to Ceti Alpha VII and they still fucked that up.
This has bugged me for thirty years, and no amount of Ricardo Montalban's acting can change basic planetary physics. No, Ricardo, stop trying to distract me with your chest. This isn't even basic planetary physics, it's basic planetary arithmetic.
Also, did the star chart not have a big X marked on it, with Here be incredibly dangerous genetically engineered criminals from the 20th century ? Did Kirk not actually tell anyone when he established a colony of psychopaths in a habitable system at the end of `Space Seed'? Carol Marcus does mention, only fifteen years afterwards, the galactic problems of population and food supply. Did Kirk hide a bunch of incredibly powerful, genetically-engineered lunatics on a valuable planet, and then try to act surprised when an innocent survey vessel caught hell for it later?
I used to own The Nitpicker's Guide to Star Trek (unsurprisingly), and it went on at length about Kirk apparently forgetting to notify Starfleet about the nest of big-titted maniacs he left carelessly strewn about the galaxy. It didn't mention that Ceti Alpha V cannot be mistaken for Ceti Alpha VI. The guy who wrote the Nitpicker's Guide also failed to count accurately to six. This bugs the hell out of me.
In the vain hope that some among you might find it interesting, here is a list, in reverse chronological order, of the most recent films I've seen at the cinema:
</p>The astute among you will note a lack of new releases on that list. The last new release I watched at the cinema was Quantum of Solace (2008). I paid eight quid to sit in a room with a sticky floor, enjoying the interesting smells of strangers, to watch a 106-minute movie. They forced me to watch 45 minutes of adverts beforehand—I counted—and every single one of them was a spoiler for the upcoming flick. And they won't let you smoke and they refuse to pause it when I need to go to the loo. Eff cinemas, I say, eff them right in the A.</p>
Since Quantum of Solace I only go out to see films that are important. Fortunately I live in a city that caters more than adequately for film nerds.
Note that I'm specifically excluding Sex And The City 2, which I saw at the cinema, but that was entirely for professional reasons, and trust me, sitting through that was hard work. I'm also making an exception for Star Trek (2009), because it's frickin' Star Trek; also, because I spent an hour phoning around until I found an independent that was showing it. (I spent ten quid at the Dominion, but I got to sit on a sofa in a category-B listed building—streamline moderne, dontchaknow—that still has ashtrays fitted above the urinals. You're not allowed to use them, but the thought is there.)
Now I've been getting some practice in, I'm starting to become aware of the difference between glorious 70mm and regular film. Admittedly, it's most noticeable when they switch from the trailers to showing the actual movie. I'm far better at music appreciation than I am at looking at things with my eyes, so the quality of six-track magnetic sound on glorious 70mm filmstock is still the big draw for me. When things asplode in glorious 70mm, you know that they've asploded. And, importantly, since James Horner was given a fortnight to score Aliens and ended up reusing a lot of his previous work (a habit he evidently developed a taste for), last night's showing at the Filmhouse was the first time I got to hear the soundtrack from Wrath of Khan the way it's supposed to be heard.
Frankly, it's a touch distracting. There are Space Marines running around and driving APCs about, and in the back of my head Spock is telling us all that Reliant's prefix code is one six seven, zero, nine. It's disorienting because everyone knows that Star Trek never had marines. No, they didn't, not ever.
So it looks like it'll be Robocop on Friday (COME TO THE CINEMA OR THERE WILL BE... TROUBLE) and, after that, the next new release I'm willing to break my rule for will probably be Prometheus, which looks awesome.
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comments there already. Be the n+1th!