Weekend stuff
My parents-in-law were up last week and my father-in-law, star that he is spent most of it decorating the hall and landing and emptying out the scrap and junk from our garage.
Saturday, he decided it'd be a great idea if we pulled up all the paving slabs in the garden and seeded grass. I agreed as it would be much nicer for the kids to play on and one less patio is good for the environment too, apparently.
Needless to say, my back is now aching like buggery and I can barely move. I'm a video game artist. I simply don't do physical exercise. Feels good though and the garden, whilst a quagmire at the moment should look lovely and green in a couple of weeks.
I bought super-tough football pitch grass too so the little monkeys can't kill it all off like next door's. A few weeks ago we went round for an impromptu barbequeueueueueue and they had a lovely green lawn. Now it's a rectangle of dirt with the occasional blade of grass (they have three kids btw).
In between, I managed to watch Dr WHO and a couple of movies.
Dr Who, well what can I say. That was just magnificent. Touching, sad, scary. A world without the Doctor. I read a book once called, er Bloodheat I think which saw Sylvester McCoy's Doctor slip into a parallel universe where Jon Pertwee's Doctor had perished at the hands of the Silurians and they now now ruled the world, having terraformed it into a jungle. I remember hurling the book at the wall once I'd finished it because it was so bloody dark and miserable that I didn't recognise any of the elements I loved about Doctor WHO in it. This episode did the same thing, so why I should love this and hate the book I don't know. Maybe my tastes and attitude towards Dr WHO have changed or maybe this show just did it much better, I don't know but two thumbs up. Especially for Cathy Tait and Bernard Cribbins. Gold. Solid Gold.
The finale looks like it's going to be a blinder. I just hope it is.
Bill Murray's Broken Flowers was on the TV on Saturday night and it was a gorgeous exercise in subtlety and understatement with these lovely long, silent character scenes broken up with fantastically colourful character studies. Then it just ended, leaving me wondering what the hell the point ot any of it was. Oh well. It was a terrific film up to that point and inspite of it I do recommend it.
Then I watched Warriors of Heaven and Earth which I had for Christmas and haven't watched yet. Again a fantastic film with a totally inexplicable ending. Basically a bunch of misfit master swordsmen find themselves guarding a camel caravan along the Silk Road in Western China. Beset on all sides by bandits and marauding Turks it plays out like a sort of Chinese Western and it's great up until it sort of goes a bit Indiana Jones at the end. Ordinarily one wouldn't imagine that was a bad thing but it's so jarring with the style of the film to that point, it really feels wrong. Ah well.
I see over the weekend Gordon Brown raced off to the Middle East to beseech the Oil producers to increase productivity and consider alternate energies. Someone on the radio described this as gesture politics and I'm inclined to agree. Expensive though it is, Oil is still comparatively freely available and until the middle classes in the west really start suffering, there's no real incentive to do anything tangible. I think once we start finding ourselves physically unable to pay the mortgage and the food bills, and/or the heating bills and/or put fuel in the car, then something real will get done. Until then, no matter how expensive it is, if we can still pay it, there's no need to do anything except make vote-pleasing gestures.
And then there's Zimbabwe. Democracy has failed. OMG! OMG! Time to send in the troops. Oh wait! They don't have any oil. Poor Zimbabwe. Oh well, good luck with that mess guys.
Saturday, he decided it'd be a great idea if we pulled up all the paving slabs in the garden and seeded grass. I agreed as it would be much nicer for the kids to play on and one less patio is good for the environment too, apparently.
Needless to say, my back is now aching like buggery and I can barely move. I'm a video game artist. I simply don't do physical exercise. Feels good though and the garden, whilst a quagmire at the moment should look lovely and green in a couple of weeks.
I bought super-tough football pitch grass too so the little monkeys can't kill it all off like next door's. A few weeks ago we went round for an impromptu barbequeueueueueue and they had a lovely green lawn. Now it's a rectangle of dirt with the occasional blade of grass (they have three kids btw).
In between, I managed to watch Dr WHO and a couple of movies.
Dr Who, well what can I say. That was just magnificent. Touching, sad, scary. A world without the Doctor. I read a book once called, er Bloodheat I think which saw Sylvester McCoy's Doctor slip into a parallel universe where Jon Pertwee's Doctor had perished at the hands of the Silurians and they now now ruled the world, having terraformed it into a jungle. I remember hurling the book at the wall once I'd finished it because it was so bloody dark and miserable that I didn't recognise any of the elements I loved about Doctor WHO in it. This episode did the same thing, so why I should love this and hate the book I don't know. Maybe my tastes and attitude towards Dr WHO have changed or maybe this show just did it much better, I don't know but two thumbs up. Especially for Cathy Tait and Bernard Cribbins. Gold. Solid Gold.
The finale looks like it's going to be a blinder. I just hope it is.
Bill Murray's Broken Flowers was on the TV on Saturday night and it was a gorgeous exercise in subtlety and understatement with these lovely long, silent character scenes broken up with fantastically colourful character studies. Then it just ended, leaving me wondering what the hell the point ot any of it was. Oh well. It was a terrific film up to that point and inspite of it I do recommend it.
Then I watched Warriors of Heaven and Earth which I had for Christmas and haven't watched yet. Again a fantastic film with a totally inexplicable ending. Basically a bunch of misfit master swordsmen find themselves guarding a camel caravan along the Silk Road in Western China. Beset on all sides by bandits and marauding Turks it plays out like a sort of Chinese Western and it's great up until it sort of goes a bit Indiana Jones at the end. Ordinarily one wouldn't imagine that was a bad thing but it's so jarring with the style of the film to that point, it really feels wrong. Ah well.
I see over the weekend Gordon Brown raced off to the Middle East to beseech the Oil producers to increase productivity and consider alternate energies. Someone on the radio described this as gesture politics and I'm inclined to agree. Expensive though it is, Oil is still comparatively freely available and until the middle classes in the west really start suffering, there's no real incentive to do anything tangible. I think once we start finding ourselves physically unable to pay the mortgage and the food bills, and/or the heating bills and/or put fuel in the car, then something real will get done. Until then, no matter how expensive it is, if we can still pay it, there's no need to do anything except make vote-pleasing gestures.
And then there's Zimbabwe. Democracy has failed. OMG! OMG! Time to send in the troops. Oh wait! They don't have any oil. Poor Zimbabwe. Oh well, good luck with that mess guys.