A Winner is Announced

The Norwegian jury has just come back and awarded Ian the non-prize for guessing that the quote "We are living in a world.....etc" is from the track "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

And now, a real cruncher. Here's the quote:

"Nobody puts baby in a corner."

Name the film.

Dang. You can get the answer just by typing it into Google. But of course none of my readers (or should that be neither) would do that...

 

Random Music

I've recently upgraded my MP3 player. Now it has a feature where it will play any one of its 4530 tracks completely at random. Most clever. I keep finding lots of wonderful tracks that I'd forgotten I had. But the thing that puzzles me most is this:

When I'm feeling upbeat and all's well with the world the machine picks lots of appropriate music which sounds really good. However, when I'm fed up (yes folks - this does happen) the device finds lots of stupid and wrong sounding stuff. Strange eh?

 

Puzzle

We are living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods.

Interesting statement. Made some years ago. But who by?

 

Kill Bill. Why not?

Watched Kill Bill 1 tonite. Number one son bought a copy and we had the house to ourselves so he persuaded me to watch it. Hmmm. In the films that I enjoy the most you have at least one character that you care about and you would like to end up happy when the credits roll. This is not how Kill Bill is. The only person worth caring about is four years old and has her mother killed about 10 minutes into the picture. I doubt we'll see her in the sequel. People talk about how video games have influenced popular culture. Kill Bill is like watching a video game being played. Kill lots of baddies before reaching the level boss. Then on to the next one. Lots of completely unrealistic physics and enemy behaviour. And perhaps a weapons upgrade every now and then.

Film buffs will tell me that I have missed the point, and that the whole thing is a subtle homage to various classic films which I haven't seen and never will. Or that it is a fantastic take on the samurai, honour amongst thieves and the nobility of martial arts. That may be so. I just didn't enjoy it much. And when it stopped I didn't think, "I can't wait 'till the next one to find out what happens". The way I see it, she either Kills Bill or he kills her. Whatever.

 

Outbreak

I expect you've all seen at least one of those plague movies. Well, here's mine:

Scene, a packed exam hall. Students from the four corners of the globe are sweating over exam questions and exchanging viruses and infections with those sat around. One of the students sneezes into their exam answer book and then closes it.

The camera follows the answer book as it is collected and sealed into a brown envelope to be transported to the exams office. Then the envelope is picked up and handed to the marker who breaks the seal to an appropriate minor chord from the orchestral accompaniment. The music then seethes ominously as the marker is seen to work his way through the pile of answer books, eventually arriving at the infected script. He opens it and an explosion from the string section indicates that this was a bad thing to do. Close up of drops of perspiration forming on the brow of the marker........

Or, to put it another way, I think I'm coming down with a cold. Or perhaps worse.

 

Beyond Boredom

Spent just about the whole day marking exams and projects. Marking is beyond boring. I've done boring jobs; picking stalks of conveyors of peas, film processing. shovelling grease into buckets, making plastic chairs. What a morning that was. Boring jobs are easy, once you have the job sussed you can then let your brain wander off into flights of imagination and then note with some small surprise that the shift has ended.

Marking is not like this. In marking most of your brain is working hard decoding handwriting, extracting meaning and then mapping it onto the marking scheme. There is only a teeny tiny fraction left over. And while the rest of your head is getting on with the job of marking this little fraction is going slowly mad. You end up listening to Britney Spears records as you mark (and humming along). Shudder. Never mind, by the end of this week I should have got all the numbers written in. And used up four or five red pens....

 

Sunday Sunshine

Really good weather. On a Sunday. Shurely Shome Mishtake.