Dreams / totty / politics, all thrown together in an unholy soup
A real mix-and-match of "stuff for Friday" today. First of all have a look at this video if you haven't seen it before - Pixels. The embedding doesn't seem to be working properly but it's worth following the link to watch the short film in its own right, but I also had a dream about it the other day. Not much to add to the clip except I dreamed I was actually in the movie, but fortunately it wasn't as destructive as in the clip itself. I was in a car with a sunroof, with a couple of other people, so we could see across a dual carriageway when a pixellated spaceship landed on the other side. A little pixel man jumped out and landed on our car's roof, but instead of turning us into pixels as well he just disintegrated.
Next up another clip, and it's sexytime as last month I not-quite-reviewed the show Soap, which I took penny_p to as her birthday treat. Unfortunately at the time all the online publicity for the show featured the original cast, which varied a bit from the acrobats we saw. Particularly, it didn't feature Fernando Dudka, the "handstand acrobat" aka the one I fancied. This has now been remedied though so here's a YouTube of the Riverside Studios cast (where the show still has a couple of days to run.) Fernando's the first one you see in the clip:
And finally, definitely moving away from sexytime and demonstrating that, despite all evidence to the contrary I do occasionally give a shit about what's going on in the world, a few political links. The Prime Ministerial candidate debates are all on Thursday nights, when I've had theatre booked every time, but despite not watching the debates themselves (in any case I've long since known how I'm voting) the aftermath has been fascinating. The positive reaction to Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg's appearances has shaken the media up a lot, and thrown focus on something that depressed me in all the years I worked at JY, surrounded by the newspapers. Namely the way a small, rich group of newspaper owners use their positions to tell their readers how to vote.
I was always frustrated by the insidious way the papers tried to stop people from voting Lib Dem, not through attack but through all-but-ignoring them. How many times have you heard people say that a Lib Dem vote is a wasted vote? It seems people have for years been made to forget just how democracy works, and "tactically" vote for a different party, possibly in a constituency that, if all the voters who did so actually followed their instincts and voted Lib Dem, would get a very different result. If we should be worried about people's votes giving any power to what are very marginal, extremist lunatics like the BNP, why have people for so long accepted that this same democratic process has no chance of giving power to a party that represents a large amount of the population?
Three particularly interesting articles about all this in the last week: The most damning has to be this one, which backs up my first point about the media employing an "ignore them and they'll go away" technique, as former Sun editor David Yelland outlines how the paper had a firm stance of doing exactly that. On a similar note here's an article in the Independent about more recnt attempts by The Sun to bury Lib Dem support - and check out the interesting figures about how people would actually vote if they thought the Lib Dems had a chance. And finally an article from Johann Hari that covers a lot of the issues I've been interested in - and remember this article next time the Daily Mail tries to tell you what the "silent majority" thinks.
Phew. Well that's far too much like being a serious human being for me. I'd better get back to thinking about nipples. As you were.
Next up another clip, and it's sexytime as last month I not-quite-reviewed the show Soap, which I took penny_p to as her birthday treat. Unfortunately at the time all the online publicity for the show featured the original cast, which varied a bit from the acrobats we saw. Particularly, it didn't feature Fernando Dudka, the "handstand acrobat" aka the one I fancied. This has now been remedied though so here's a YouTube of the Riverside Studios cast (where the show still has a couple of days to run.) Fernando's the first one you see in the clip:
Click to viewAnd finally, definitely moving away from sexytime and demonstrating that, despite all evidence to the contrary I do occasionally give a shit about what's going on in the world, a few political links. The Prime Ministerial candidate debates are all on Thursday nights, when I've had theatre booked every time, but despite not watching the debates themselves (in any case I've long since known how I'm voting) the aftermath has been fascinating. The positive reaction to Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg's appearances has shaken the media up a lot, and thrown focus on something that depressed me in all the years I worked at JY, surrounded by the newspapers. Namely the way a small, rich group of newspaper owners use their positions to tell their readers how to vote.
I was always frustrated by the insidious way the papers tried to stop people from voting Lib Dem, not through attack but through all-but-ignoring them. How many times have you heard people say that a Lib Dem vote is a wasted vote? It seems people have for years been made to forget just how democracy works, and "tactically" vote for a different party, possibly in a constituency that, if all the voters who did so actually followed their instincts and voted Lib Dem, would get a very different result. If we should be worried about people's votes giving any power to what are very marginal, extremist lunatics like the BNP, why have people for so long accepted that this same democratic process has no chance of giving power to a party that represents a large amount of the population?
Three particularly interesting articles about all this in the last week: The most damning has to be this one, which backs up my first point about the media employing an "ignore them and they'll go away" technique, as former Sun editor David Yelland outlines how the paper had a firm stance of doing exactly that. On a similar note here's an article in the Independent about more recnt attempts by The Sun to bury Lib Dem support - and check out the interesting figures about how people would actually vote if they thought the Lib Dems had a chance. And finally an article from Johann Hari that covers a lot of the issues I've been interested in - and remember this article next time the Daily Mail tries to tell you what the "silent majority" thinks.
Phew. Well that's far too much like being a serious human being for me. I'd better get back to thinking about nipples. As you were.