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23 August
For the record (though somehow we are already in summer, following the last Futile Bulletin):
* They are chicken nuggets - devotees can doubtless explain what they have (or lack) that distinguishes them from 'dippers' (and the like)
* Strictly as a layman, and never having considered the question before, how a disc-shaped item can be a 'nugget' now escapes me, but perhaps it is too late to challenge this convention
* I have looked at a packet: below the stated 23 appears 'APPROX.' - which prevents me complaining, because, when I opened it, there were 28
* If it had been 53, maybe I'd have more of an argument about surface-area, and whether it would mean a disproportionate amount more (or less) coating
* At any rate, all of this aside, the packet is sold by mass - its contents are 450g, however many or few of these alleged nuggets there are
* And, quite frankly, the only thing of which they taste is the coating!
* Unless I should take some delight in the visual appearance of the chicken (in a sandwich between one side and the other), the only sensation (they make no noise, and let's pass over the cooking smell) is of something that is hot and can be chewed, coupled with the crisp[i]ness of the outside
* Perhaps those devotees can tell me that this is all bound up in the usual expectations of the word 'nuggets', so more fool me...
PS The packet that the nuggets came in* not only shows that they can be beautifully served by tipping them into a deep white ceramic bowl (cunningly accompanied, in a matching ramekin, by what only looks like a portion of strawberry mousse caked in that quick-setting gel so beloved of those, such as my mother, who used to render bought sponge flans fruit laden with something highly processed from a tin), but assure me that the largely bland product has been 'made with 100% chicken breast'.
Damn, could have sworn it was (a) turkey!
* At around 1mm in thickness (designed, doubtless, to keep in that gorgeous chicken flavour that I so signally failed to detect - or, probably, to stop the 23 items cascading all over Veran's freezers so often), the packets have a much higher specification than the free shopping bags (which are so keen to biodegrade - and earn green credibility - that they have started before you come to use them), but then these terms 'supply side' and 'demand side' do have a meaning.
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Monday, 23 January 2012
Eric Morecambe and the evils of e-mail (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
23 January
In the days of love letters, being given them back was an unavoidable, physical demonstration of the desire for separation, of severance*.
Hard to think what the e-mail equivalent is (especially for those who have what I view as a mania for purging their inbox, and keep virtually nothing anyway, as they have already done it). Equally hard to conceive of what asking for something 'by return' means, as against with an item of correspondence received in the post.
Which brings us on to Eric, who, as a set-piece (turn, party-piece, trick, etc.), used to throw (or, maybe, feign to throw) something into the air, which he would then catch in the large, invariably brown, paper-bag - with a sort of 'plop', as the bag received it.
A metaphor, in our minds, for what (for it was magical in its way, every time)?:
* Capturing what can't otherwise be seen (cloud-chambers and particle-colliders)?
* Hans Christian Andersen and his little tale (lovingly told by the University of Southern Denmark)?
* Hamlet on the limits of Horatio's 'philosophy'?
* Or what about this: how can you see the tears shed when a letter was written and which smudged the ink, or the sweat of Beethoven's effort of composition, if it's, respectively, actually an e-mail or a page of a score, printed from an inbox or a web-page?
And the evils (which I am in no way laying at Eric's door)?
1. Well, how many times have you turned out to have imagined that you replied to an e-mail, when you must merely have run through, in your mind, what you would say, when you had the chance - and maybe even fondly hoped to jog your memory, by marking the message as 'unread'? Which is more real: Eric's stone (or whatever it is) or the imagined reply?
Contrast the entirely fictional reply with writing a letter (by hand, or typing it - and, if not using an actual typewriter, then printing it), signing it, addressing the envelope, sealing the letter inside, affixing a stamp (maybe having to buy one first, and wince at the price), and going to a postbox (maybe even having to find one first) where you post it - rather hard to have a false memory about all that, though, I will grant you, if the item cannot be posted (for want of a stamp, a postbox, or even the address), it can lurk in the car or a jacket pocket, where it was put in the hope of making it into the post some time soon...
2. Oh, and there's the over-hasty response (hard to be hasty with the process outlined above and do what some call 'fire-fighting'!);
3. There's sending your e-mail to the wrong person (and letters, too, can be switched, in error, between a pair of more of intended recipients);
4. Including to yourself, if you find a message of your own to which there has appeared no response (the other extreme - the message comes back straightaway and it's horrible, or you wait in vain for it), and, instead of pressing the 'forward' button, the 'reply' button is pressed, so it later shows up in your inbox, if you start some other task;
5. And those missing replies - did your message ever reach the addressee, or did his or hers not reach you (mimicking the post)?;
6. Unless you attach the intended document(s) at the time when you write about them, false memory is all too possible about that (but my 'send' function has the trick of spotting the words 'attach' or 'attachment', and prompts me as to whether I intended to send a message with no attachment) - but one can, just about, manage to post an empty envelope;
7. The attachment that you cannot open (either because it shows as one, but doesn't seem to be there, or because, say, it has a DOCX file-extension, and you don't have that version of WOrd) has, as far as I can see, no equivalent with the physical posting of a document;
8. Nor has pressing the button to send your message and then seeing a howler, which can't be corrected (although one can, for other reasons, have just posted something, and wish that one had long arms, or the postbox a backlog of letters, so that it can be retrieved);
9. Not everyone likes spam, but I find some of the gambits that the senders dream up to make me interested quite entertaining, and, for those who are prudish, junk mail has no equivalent;
10. Finally, back to missing messages, the one that 'gets delayed' and so you only see news of a good concert (or training course - whatever the event may be) when it is too late to do anything about it - or there is just so much in the inbox that, although it was there all along, it got overlooked.
QED
[Continued, in a way, at: http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2012/02/eric-morecambe-and-evils-of-e-mail-2.html]
End-notes
* As Eric retorted in that crazy Egyptian skit (I think that it was Glenda Jackson as Cleopatra) to Ernie's question 'Have you got the scrolls?', 'No, I always walk like that!'.
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23 January
In the days of love letters, being given them back was an unavoidable, physical demonstration of the desire for separation, of severance*.
Hard to think what the e-mail equivalent is (especially for those who have what I view as a mania for purging their inbox, and keep virtually nothing anyway, as they have already done it). Equally hard to conceive of what asking for something 'by return' means, as against with an item of correspondence received in the post.
Which brings us on to Eric, who, as a set-piece (turn, party-piece, trick, etc.), used to throw (or, maybe, feign to throw) something into the air, which he would then catch in the large, invariably brown, paper-bag - with a sort of 'plop', as the bag received it.
A metaphor, in our minds, for what (for it was magical in its way, every time)?:
* Capturing what can't otherwise be seen (cloud-chambers and particle-colliders)?
* Hans Christian Andersen and his little tale (lovingly told by the University of Southern Denmark)?
* Hamlet on the limits of Horatio's 'philosophy'?
* Or what about this: how can you see the tears shed when a letter was written and which smudged the ink, or the sweat of Beethoven's effort of composition, if it's, respectively, actually an e-mail or a page of a score, printed from an inbox or a web-page?
And the evils (which I am in no way laying at Eric's door)?
1. Well, how many times have you turned out to have imagined that you replied to an e-mail, when you must merely have run through, in your mind, what you would say, when you had the chance - and maybe even fondly hoped to jog your memory, by marking the message as 'unread'? Which is more real: Eric's stone (or whatever it is) or the imagined reply?
Contrast the entirely fictional reply with writing a letter (by hand, or typing it - and, if not using an actual typewriter, then printing it), signing it, addressing the envelope, sealing the letter inside, affixing a stamp (maybe having to buy one first, and wince at the price), and going to a postbox (maybe even having to find one first) where you post it - rather hard to have a false memory about all that, though, I will grant you, if the item cannot be posted (for want of a stamp, a postbox, or even the address), it can lurk in the car or a jacket pocket, where it was put in the hope of making it into the post some time soon...
2. Oh, and there's the over-hasty response (hard to be hasty with the process outlined above and do what some call 'fire-fighting'!);
3. There's sending your e-mail to the wrong person (and letters, too, can be switched, in error, between a pair of more of intended recipients);
4. Including to yourself, if you find a message of your own to which there has appeared no response (the other extreme - the message comes back straightaway and it's horrible, or you wait in vain for it), and, instead of pressing the 'forward' button, the 'reply' button is pressed, so it later shows up in your inbox, if you start some other task;
5. And those missing replies - did your message ever reach the addressee, or did his or hers not reach you (mimicking the post)?;
6. Unless you attach the intended document(s) at the time when you write about them, false memory is all too possible about that (but my 'send' function has the trick of spotting the words 'attach' or 'attachment', and prompts me as to whether I intended to send a message with no attachment) - but one can, just about, manage to post an empty envelope;
7. The attachment that you cannot open (either because it shows as one, but doesn't seem to be there, or because, say, it has a DOCX file-extension, and you don't have that version of WOrd) has, as far as I can see, no equivalent with the physical posting of a document;
8. Nor has pressing the button to send your message and then seeing a howler, which can't be corrected (although one can, for other reasons, have just posted something, and wish that one had long arms, or the postbox a backlog of letters, so that it can be retrieved);
9. Not everyone likes spam, but I find some of the gambits that the senders dream up to make me interested quite entertaining, and, for those who are prudish, junk mail has no equivalent;
10. Finally, back to missing messages, the one that 'gets delayed' and so you only see news of a good concert (or training course - whatever the event may be) when it is too late to do anything about it - or there is just so much in the inbox that, although it was there all along, it got overlooked.
QED
[Continued, in a way, at: http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2012/02/eric-morecambe-and-evils-of-e-mail-2.html]
End-notes
* As Eric retorted in that crazy Egyptian skit (I think that it was Glenda Jackson as Cleopatra) to Ernie's question 'Have you got the scrolls?', 'No, I always walk like that!'.
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STOP PRESS - Google® reveals the truth about Veran!
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23 January
A certain synergy in how this theme, and that of Resident Evil (2002), are coming together...
Find more, and meet the Sorceress of Shadows, at:
http://www.zeldawiki.org/Veran
All that we need is Awld Worrisome Thompson's involvement (Treatment for Worrall Thompson) to make our joy complete!
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23 January
A certain synergy in how this theme, and that of Resident Evil (2002), are coming together...
Find more, and meet the Sorceress of Shadows, at:
http://www.zeldawiki.org/Veran
All that we need is Awld Worrisome Thompson's involvement (Treatment for Worrall Thompson) to make our joy complete!
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Tell your friends about your listing
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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23 January
This, at any rate, is what one place for hoping to dispose of items (maybe even at a profit) urges on its sellers:
Yes, it's that old Arsebook thing again (and / or whether I should want to tweet about it)!
If it stopped to think about it, is this forum for facilitating selling - seen, one must understand, not from the viewpoint of the corporate or business supplier, but that of the individual - actually trying to do itself out of the tidy fees (plus that VAT thing) that it charges on every transaction?
Follow me, if you will:
1. I have just acquired a very nice copy of, say, Rats of the Twenty-First Century, whose photographs I have carefully flicked through (if one isn't at odds with the other). But I never intended to keep it - my BlackBerry® told me, when I found the book on sale, that it is worth 4 to 5 times what I was being asked to pay for it.
2. Amongst other things already there, I duly list it on the web-site. I even stop to rub my hands in glee, not only at the potential profit on the deal, but at actually being able to make on the flat-rate allowance for postage: because the book is slim (and even not too heavy), it will go as a so-called 'large letter'*.
3. The web-site confirms that I have done so, and then makes this anarchic suggestion: Tell your friends about your listing. (It also does so when I have just placed an order - brilliant surprise, it must be said, if I have just bought it for a friend, who will then see that I have done so!)
4. OK, so I tweet about it and / or put it on my wall (as I understand the practice to be), and all my merry friends, followers and fans (as the case may be) are instantly bothered with tidings of this trivial happening.
5. Except what if Dave, until now, has unsuccessfully been looking for this item (or any suitable item) for his mate Dan's 'big birthday'**?
6. Now, I have something that Dave wants, but Dave and I are reasonable blokes (they do exist), and he knows that, albeit for a quick disposal, I would be losing a lot to give it to him at cost; I, at the same time, know how much, one way or another (i.e. postage, fees, and VAT), will inevitably come off the price at which I have competitively pitched my copy of Rats.
7. So Dave and I will, of course, try to work out an exchange: to have Rats, he will reimburse me what I paid for it (or more, if he wants), and also give me - then or at some other time - his time in painting the fence, stroking the cat (probably pet-sitting), or something else that he can supply to make good as much of my net loss of profit as I am inclined to recover.
8. Dave's happy, I'm happy, and I take the item out of my listing.
No fees or charges paid, though, so maybe someone - who unwisely suggested the whole thing - should be unhappy? Or is it all in the spirit of altruistic love and friendship that is behind all this social networking?!
QED
* How many real letters, as thick as 2.45cm, have you ever had?! (Were they not actually DVDs, to add to your burgeoning collection of 'The Desirable but Unwatched'?)
** How are some birthdays larger than others, and in what does the greater size both consist and evidence itself?
I believe that there may be a circularity, in that one can deduce that the birthday is 'a big one' only by how much fuss people make about it - otherwise, it seems exactly like any other one.
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23 January
This, at any rate, is what one place for hoping to dispose of items (maybe even at a profit) urges on its sellers:
Yes, it's that old Arsebook thing again (and / or whether I should want to tweet about it)!
If it stopped to think about it, is this forum for facilitating selling - seen, one must understand, not from the viewpoint of the corporate or business supplier, but that of the individual - actually trying to do itself out of the tidy fees (plus that VAT thing) that it charges on every transaction?
Follow me, if you will:
1. I have just acquired a very nice copy of, say, Rats of the Twenty-First Century, whose photographs I have carefully flicked through (if one isn't at odds with the other). But I never intended to keep it - my BlackBerry® told me, when I found the book on sale, that it is worth 4 to 5 times what I was being asked to pay for it.
2. Amongst other things already there, I duly list it on the web-site. I even stop to rub my hands in glee, not only at the potential profit on the deal, but at actually being able to make on the flat-rate allowance for postage: because the book is slim (and even not too heavy), it will go as a so-called 'large letter'*.
3. The web-site confirms that I have done so, and then makes this anarchic suggestion: Tell your friends about your listing. (It also does so when I have just placed an order - brilliant surprise, it must be said, if I have just bought it for a friend, who will then see that I have done so!)
4. OK, so I tweet about it and / or put it on my wall (as I understand the practice to be), and all my merry friends, followers and fans (as the case may be) are instantly bothered with tidings of this trivial happening.
5. Except what if Dave, until now, has unsuccessfully been looking for this item (or any suitable item) for his mate Dan's 'big birthday'**?
6. Now, I have something that Dave wants, but Dave and I are reasonable blokes (they do exist), and he knows that, albeit for a quick disposal, I would be losing a lot to give it to him at cost; I, at the same time, know how much, one way or another (i.e. postage, fees, and VAT), will inevitably come off the price at which I have competitively pitched my copy of Rats.
7. So Dave and I will, of course, try to work out an exchange: to have Rats, he will reimburse me what I paid for it (or more, if he wants), and also give me - then or at some other time - his time in painting the fence, stroking the cat (probably pet-sitting), or something else that he can supply to make good as much of my net loss of profit as I am inclined to recover.
8. Dave's happy, I'm happy, and I take the item out of my listing.
No fees or charges paid, though, so maybe someone - who unwisely suggested the whole thing - should be unhappy? Or is it all in the spirit of altruistic love and friendship that is behind all this social networking?!
QED
* How many real letters, as thick as 2.45cm, have you ever had?! (Were they not actually DVDs, to add to your burgeoning collection of 'The Desirable but Unwatched'?)
** How are some birthdays larger than others, and in what does the greater size both consist and evidence itself?
I believe that there may be a circularity, in that one can deduce that the birthday is 'a big one' only by how much fuss people make about it - otherwise, it seems exactly like any other one.
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The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)
The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)
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23 January
The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)
* Contains spoilers *
For sure, there's no easy way to do it, when:
* It can be hard to avoid trailers totally, which - whoever makes the things - dish up (as Percy Grainger described his arrangements of Bach) bits of the film (and maybe even bits that don't make it to the version that goes on general release and which you will see) in an often unrepresentative way¹ ;
* The man who can make Midnight in Paris (2011), no great masterpiece though it actually is², can also produce Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), where, I believe, the point of interest is not Vicky or Cristina (whichever is which) and what they get up to, but very nearly the third named, if it weren't for the performance from Ms Cruz;
* Likewise, we were given Pan's Labyrinth (2006) by the director who followed it up with (?!) Don't be Afraid of the Dark (2010);
* Not knowing Luc Besson's canon that well (except Subway (1985) [and also The Fifth Element (1997)]), but being well aware that it was not that / either type of film, The Lady (2011) still wasn't what I expected at all in the wake of 2010's Festival opener (which said a lot, but probably not too much, in its title), The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec³ (2010);
* Even the publicity image used for The Future (2011), of much of the top half of Miranda July protruding diagonally from a sash-window (and dressed in a frilly white(ish) dress with black features), is a striking one. However, it actually captures a moment, for me, of utter inconsequence (save to demonstrate a write-up's description of audiences finding her work / acting either 'kooky or cute')⁴.
Which leads us, neatly or otherwise, on to Part 2 - to be found at The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 2)...
End-notes
¹ Trailers often enough create a longing to see where that moment fits in, what happens next, when it turns out not to be that interesting. (And, of course, they (distributors, directors, whoever) know that it's not that interesting, but they show it to you out of context to create an appetite that they know that they cannot satisfy.)
² Review to come, some time: it was started in the third week of its run, and unnecessarily long delayed, although oft picked at in the meantime.
³ Call it versatility (DVD, again), I guess, which is what one gets in the range of Woody Allen's work, from mock-documentary Zelig (1983) about Leonard Zelig, 'the human chameleon', to a fraught, but chilling, drama in Interiors (1978).
⁴ Except that, for what one could loosely call The Future's plot, it is part of the zany way in which (as writer) July chooses to set her character up with another man: he is being asked to say whether he can hear the shout that she is making - or about to make, or has just made - from said window, although, from what he has already told her (us) about where he is in LA, he is almost assuredly out of earshot.
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Sunday, 22 January 2012
Veran's odd approach to chicken (1)
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23 January
So it seems to me - and, no (following Every Veran helps), I am not always shopping there, just that there is nowhere else (near) to do so after midnight on a Sunday night!
I have bought a pack (in fact, two packs) of chicken nuggets (or pieces, or dippers - some agglutinations, at any rate, in breadcrumbs of fragments left over from whatever gruesome process of 'waste not, want not' our modern food ('food'?) nowadays goes through), and that is just my point:
For I am boldly told that I am purchasing exactly twenty-three of these chicken bites, when I could have sworn that twenty-four was more usual.
At the same time, most bottles of beer (in Veran) are up tenpence (to £1.99, and may be 550ml, or just 500ml - in either case, not a full pint), and the cat, thinking herself addicted to milk with a special formulation for her kind, may have to forgo it, as, even with the better way of buying it (as a three, rather than individual little bottles), it is still 20% more in price than a fortnight ago.
And yet shoppers will, maybe, prove easily spooked by other things than price - being told that my frozen pack of baby kievs contains 15 may seem fine, whereas 19 (one short of a favoured multiple of 10) might not: I stress that I have not seen that product advertised in that quantity, but it does not inconceivable, when I have just bought one short of two dozen of these nuggets (well, with both backs, 46).
Will the packs of sausage rolls (to cook from frozen) be following suit? - or have they already done so? And if enough consumers do react badly to odd numbers (or certain ones), as against even ones, why would that be?
Is some bias or prejudice built into our numerological world-view, as, surely, even the roulette tables ask us to bet on the difference? And an odd whole number, when squared (or cubed), stubbornly preserves its oddness...
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23 January
So it seems to me - and, no (following Every Veran helps), I am not always shopping there, just that there is nowhere else (near) to do so after midnight on a Sunday night!
I have bought a pack (in fact, two packs) of chicken nuggets (or pieces, or dippers - some agglutinations, at any rate, in breadcrumbs of fragments left over from whatever gruesome process of 'waste not, want not' our modern food ('food'?) nowadays goes through), and that is just my point:
For I am boldly told that I am purchasing exactly twenty-three of these chicken bites, when I could have sworn that twenty-four was more usual.
At the same time, most bottles of beer (in Veran) are up tenpence (to £1.99, and may be 550ml, or just 500ml - in either case, not a full pint), and the cat, thinking herself addicted to milk with a special formulation for her kind, may have to forgo it, as, even with the better way of buying it (as a three, rather than individual little bottles), it is still 20% more in price than a fortnight ago.
And yet shoppers will, maybe, prove easily spooked by other things than price - being told that my frozen pack of baby kievs contains 15 may seem fine, whereas 19 (one short of a favoured multiple of 10) might not: I stress that I have not seen that product advertised in that quantity, but it does not inconceivable, when I have just bought one short of two dozen of these nuggets (well, with both backs, 46).
Will the packs of sausage rolls (to cook from frozen) be following suit? - or have they already done so? And if enough consumers do react badly to odd numbers (or certain ones), as against even ones, why would that be?
Is some bias or prejudice built into our numerological world-view, as, surely, even the roulette tables ask us to bet on the difference? And an odd whole number, when squared (or cubed), stubbornly preserves its oddness...
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After Martin in Leonard's shoes... (1)
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23 January
Fascinated by Martin Clunes taking the lead in remaking Reggie Perrin (i.e. The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin), I have conceived a project where he would re-create the role of Edmund in Blackadder the Second. (It may, for the sake of completeness, be released in the boxed set, but who gives a hang about The Black Adder? – after that, it’s a miracle that we ever got the BBC fund any other series!)
The supporting cast is as follows:
Percy – Neil Morrissey*
Baldrick – Bob Mortimer
Melchett – Paul Merton
Nursie – Jo Brand
Flashheart – Vic Reeves
Yes, you have spotted an important omission – I just cannot cast anyone better to play Queenie than the original Miranda Richardson (and don't even try suggesting that other Miranda!).
And so the whole plan may fail (unless I persuade Bill Bailey that he does look good in a frock)…
* My first instinct had been - for some reason - Dylan Moran, but Clunes' old on-screen flatmate seemed a better proposition: not that I'm typecasting.
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23 January
Fascinated by Martin Clunes taking the lead in remaking Reggie Perrin (i.e. The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin), I have conceived a project where he would re-create the role of Edmund in Blackadder the Second. (It may, for the sake of completeness, be released in the boxed set, but who gives a hang about The Black Adder? – after that, it’s a miracle that we ever got the BBC fund any other series!)
The supporting cast is as follows:
Percy – Neil Morrissey*
Baldrick – Bob Mortimer
Melchett – Paul Merton
Nursie – Jo Brand
Flashheart – Vic Reeves
Yes, you have spotted an important omission – I just cannot cast anyone better to play Queenie than the original Miranda Richardson (and don't even try suggesting that other Miranda!).
And so the whole plan may fail (unless I persuade Bill Bailey that he does look good in a frock)…
* My first instinct had been - for some reason - Dylan Moran, but Clunes' old on-screen flatmate seemed a better proposition: not that I'm typecasting.
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Saturday, 21 January 2012
Woody, the alleged Augustan
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21 January
His first new humour collection in over 25 years
So says the front of the dust-jacket of Mere Anarchy, but it might have done better to say:His first new prose collection in over 25 years
This eulogy (taken from the inside of the jacket) by The Daily Telegraph is pretty far fetched:
If Allen had lived in Augustan England[,] scholars would now be considering him alongside Dyden, Pope and Swift.
If Allen had lived in Augustan England[,] scholars would now be considering him alongside Dyden, Pope and Swift.
So, John Dyden (1631 - 1700) was a poet (but also a dramatist, critic, and translator of Virgil), Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744) was another poet, and also made and published translations of the classics (as well as making an edition of Shakespeare's works), and Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745), although he was a poet, is best remembered for his prose satires, his political pamphleteering, and his essays (e.g. A Modest Proposal).
Am I alone in missing where Allen would obviously have fitted in, when all three are poets (whereas I have never, to my knowledge, seen any poem of Allen's), and Dyden was even Poet Laureate, with Pope (when in fashion) celebrated in society for his verse?
This Augustan period, even if scholars did agree about its duration (Pope had no opportunity to know Dryden, because of their dates), strikes me as a time not obviously suited to Allen's humour and insights - and they certainly do not, by and large, come out in the eighteen allegedly 'witty, wild and intelligent pieces' that the dust-jacket claims describes the contents of Mere Anarchy.
And why, when he is such a successful film director, who has given the world wonders enough, does such an assertion need making about Allen?
The quality of that directorial work far exceeds that of the best of these pieces!
Trailer for Resident Evil: Retribution
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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22 January
* Contains spoilers *
Oh no, what should have been the response to the first film, the audience retribution of avoiding any more of it, has become a self-fulfilling title for film no. 5!
After I had caught up with the original film, I took the trouble to hear these people (Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, and their co-stars, plus the writer, producers, set and costume designer, Marilyn Manson and his collaborator on the score, etc.) talk up what didn't need it, as I'd already got the DVD by then, and had seen the fruit of their labour**.
(But it's not a Digital Versatile Disc for nothing - why do we have to have its versatility (it makes a great frisbee, too?) hidden in the acronym DVD, when most people reasonably imagine it to stand for 'Video' anyway?: or is the the videodisc still a patented, if aged, format?)
The only truth in any of it was - although (for someone with no knowledge of the pre-existing videogame) it was fascinating to hear how they had tried to replicate its cult world in order not to disappoint the potential fan-base - when Jovovich, as some might say, cut to the chase and said how great it was, because you could watch her half-naked in a mini-dress, much of the time soaking wet, too.
She went on to stress how important it was to be able to see her legs in the action scenes, and, true enough, we did see her break the neck of one of the living dead between her naked thighs. Probably all of this and the origin in the game explain her costume, as little suitable as Lara Croft's is as a tomb-raider, but I still do not know what it was meant to be:
Boots, for sure; then the mini-dress, with a hem on the slant; and then what covers Jovovich's modesty - at least for the majority of the film - in the form of some sort of pair of shorts. But why does the shorts' purple colour have to be so at variance, such a clash, with the bright red of the dress (don't ask me about scarlet or crimson - I haven't a clue)?
What woman, after all, seeing that outfit laid out on a bed and not knowing who she is or how she got there (just that she appears to have been showering and taken a fall), would think 'Oh, perfect - I'll wear that!', rather than 'By all means revealing, but why reveal these purple shorts?'?
Still, the video-game designers, probably 11-year-olds, covertly working on the first version at home after school, and being paid peanuts for their piecework, may not have had much visual sense, or have been under the direction of somebody with some form of colour-blindness, unable to tell that the shorts and dress, which were intended to be co-ordinated, were not in the work supplied to him / her...
* The beloved term 'theatrical trailer', as if we might be mistaking it for where Jovovich has been hanging out between takes! Fatally, she is married to the director, so she might be playing this role for the rest of her natural (as Anderson is also the writer, and, having been seen enthusing at length about his creation, convinces that he could easily generate another 23 screenplays!)...
** Perhaps they believe that there is still a rental market, for those not patient enough to wait for the item to stabilize to buy at a decent price - or perhaps they honestly believe that anyone watches the extras first, which (apart from the trailer*, which they didn't watch on the DVD) nobody does - or, more likely to be near the truth still, they make these featurettes to boost morale so the crew don't instead think 'Oh, God - another day of this mindless script!'.
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22 January
* Contains spoilers *
Oh no, what should have been the response to the first film, the audience retribution of avoiding any more of it, has become a self-fulfilling title for film no. 5!
After I had caught up with the original film, I took the trouble to hear these people (Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, and their co-stars, plus the writer, producers, set and costume designer, Marilyn Manson and his collaborator on the score, etc.) talk up what didn't need it, as I'd already got the DVD by then, and had seen the fruit of their labour**.
(But it's not a Digital Versatile Disc for nothing - why do we have to have its versatility (it makes a great frisbee, too?) hidden in the acronym DVD, when most people reasonably imagine it to stand for 'Video' anyway?: or is the the videodisc still a patented, if aged, format?)
The only truth in any of it was - although (for someone with no knowledge of the pre-existing videogame) it was fascinating to hear how they had tried to replicate its cult world in order not to disappoint the potential fan-base - when Jovovich, as some might say, cut to the chase and said how great it was, because you could watch her half-naked in a mini-dress, much of the time soaking wet, too.
She went on to stress how important it was to be able to see her legs in the action scenes, and, true enough, we did see her break the neck of one of the living dead between her naked thighs. Probably all of this and the origin in the game explain her costume, as little suitable as Lara Croft's is as a tomb-raider, but I still do not know what it was meant to be:
Boots, for sure; then the mini-dress, with a hem on the slant; and then what covers Jovovich's modesty - at least for the majority of the film - in the form of some sort of pair of shorts. But why does the shorts' purple colour have to be so at variance, such a clash, with the bright red of the dress (don't ask me about scarlet or crimson - I haven't a clue)?
What woman, after all, seeing that outfit laid out on a bed and not knowing who she is or how she got there (just that she appears to have been showering and taken a fall), would think 'Oh, perfect - I'll wear that!', rather than 'By all means revealing, but why reveal these purple shorts?'?
Still, the video-game designers, probably 11-year-olds, covertly working on the first version at home after school, and being paid peanuts for their piecework, may not have had much visual sense, or have been under the direction of somebody with some form of colour-blindness, unable to tell that the shorts and dress, which were intended to be co-ordinated, were not in the work supplied to him / her...
* The beloved term 'theatrical trailer', as if we might be mistaking it for where Jovovich has been hanging out between takes! Fatally, she is married to the director, so she might be playing this role for the rest of her natural (as Anderson is also the writer, and, having been seen enthusing at length about his creation, convinces that he could easily generate another 23 screenplays!)...
** Perhaps they believe that there is still a rental market, for those not patient enough to wait for the item to stabilize to buy at a decent price - or perhaps they honestly believe that anyone watches the extras first, which (apart from the trailer*, which they didn't watch on the DVD) nobody does - or, more likely to be near the truth still, they make these featurettes to boost morale so the crew don't instead think 'Oh, God - another day of this mindless script!'.
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Supposedly, Holden makes 'brainless' dig at Brook
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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22 January
Nothing nicer than a link so entitled under a picture of the two ladies, smiling nicely enough together - shark-fins, the phantom menace beneath the unruffled surface...
I blogged yesterday (Allegedly, Katy Perry unfollows Russell) tangentially to a so-called story about so-called celebrities. What now has to be asked is:
If Amanda Holden actually had to make some public pronouncement that damns Kelly Brook (rather than, more easily, just allowing it to be put about that she did), who actually believes that said Kelly did not license her to do so, because it is part of some agreed way of trying to boost what they are now calling BGT (and / or their own presence* and careers)?
It would, at the very least, invite AOL users, about to sign in to get e-mail (which is where I saw it, and actually, for a change, knew who both people were), to take a look at what it's all about, and so show Huffington Post attracting readers into the bargain...
And 'BGT'? Doesn't that sound like a reworking of Roald Dahl and his BFG - or a beverage made out of three men who sang (probably still do) with high-pitched voices?
Or maybe the modern attention-span is so short that, just as British Oxygen Corporation thought plain BOC more sexy back in the 1980s (and, after all, they did capture and, under pressure, liquidize many other gases - still do), Britain's Got Talent had too many potential viewers glazing over.
Personally, I don't think it's that at all: all along, the programme has been open to misinterpretation between couples shouting out its name to each other as to what's on, but only now has research revealed the crucial and damaging mishearing, leading to the hostile response:
Oh, I know well enough this country's got that bastard - that's why I'd emigrate, if I could, to get away from his bloody millionaire suspense!'
* Why is it always 'media presence', when doesn't 'presence' say it all, when it is self evident that these people are present - or invisible - to the public?
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22 January
Nothing nicer than a link so entitled under a picture of the two ladies, smiling nicely enough together - shark-fins, the phantom menace beneath the unruffled surface...
I blogged yesterday (Allegedly, Katy Perry unfollows Russell) tangentially to a so-called story about so-called celebrities. What now has to be asked is:
If Amanda Holden actually had to make some public pronouncement that damns Kelly Brook (rather than, more easily, just allowing it to be put about that she did), who actually believes that said Kelly did not license her to do so, because it is part of some agreed way of trying to boost what they are now calling BGT (and / or their own presence* and careers)?
It would, at the very least, invite AOL users, about to sign in to get e-mail (which is where I saw it, and actually, for a change, knew who both people were), to take a look at what it's all about, and so show Huffington Post attracting readers into the bargain...
And 'BGT'? Doesn't that sound like a reworking of Roald Dahl and his BFG - or a beverage made out of three men who sang (probably still do) with high-pitched voices?
Or maybe the modern attention-span is so short that, just as British Oxygen Corporation thought plain BOC more sexy back in the 1980s (and, after all, they did capture and, under pressure, liquidize many other gases - still do), Britain's Got Talent had too many potential viewers glazing over.
Personally, I don't think it's that at all: all along, the programme has been open to misinterpretation between couples shouting out its name to each other as to what's on, but only now has research revealed the crucial and damaging mishearing, leading to the hostile response:
Oh, I know well enough this country's got that bastard - that's why I'd emigrate, if I could, to get away from his bloody millionaire suspense!'
* Why is it always 'media presence', when doesn't 'presence' say it all, when it is self evident that these people are present - or invisible - to the public?
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Merry birthday ! (2)
More views of – or after – Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 January
I have looked out Sir Gawain, and, after it opens vividly with lines describing the sacked Troy¹, it goes on to some schoolboy history about how one of the heroes' descendants, after they had dispersed with Troy in ruins and cinders, went on to found Britain² (named after him, Brutus, grandson of Æneas) – the key words being underlined in the text (which is in Middle English):
And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus
On many bonkkes full brode Bretayn he settles with wynne,
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythes has wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysses and blunder
Ful skete has skyfted synne.
(lines 13–19)
(All terribly hard to learn (and forgotten now), but, for my degree and in alleged proof that we could translate from Middle English, I had to be able to render in modern English any passage from Gawain's first Book, and from a specified Book from each of Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde – no one knows who wrote Gawain, but it was then believed that it was the same poet who wrote Patience and Pearl (not to mention the snappily named Cleanness³, with all of which it appears in my edition.)
So, after the noble lineage of Britain's founder has been established, we go on, before the introduction of Arthur and his court at the end of the introduction, with a rather worrying couplet (lines 21–22) – unless you are a football thug – that, and I spare presenting a chunk of the original just now, tell how bold men were bred there (fair enough so far), but who loved fighting (baret that lofden) and made mischief (tene that wroghten) in many a troubled time. (It's just a guess, as it's a long time ago that I looked at this, but I doubt that 'mischief' has quite the right ring for that phrase.)
We have men who brawl and cause trouble, and then we have Arthur, in all the nobility of his person and of his court (lines 23–29). It is a time of marvels, and of stories long told with lel letteres loken (line 35), linked with true letters, as are the unmistakeable 'l' sounds of that phrase in this alliterative verse.
And then the story proper opens with these lines (in which I have highlighted the words that we can still easily recognize to-day, even if a line like the fifth might leave us cold – apart from spotting that the knights are doing something 'full many times'):
This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde, ledes of the best,
Rekenly of the Rounde Table alle tho rich brether,
With rych revel oryght and rechles merthes.
They tournayed tulkes by tymes ful mony,
Justed ful jolilé thise gentyle knightes,
Sythen kayred to the court, caroles to make.
For ther the fest was ilyche ful fiften dayes,
With alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse[...]
(lines 37–45)
If you have ever seen the Douglas Fairbanks' take on Robin Hood, as I did at the Film Festival in September (in the magnficent setting of The Great Hall of Trinity College – and with Neil Brand's and his percussionist colleague's performance of his score for it for a solid two hours), then you may have a sense of the sort of tradition from which he got that notion of what the court of Richard I might have been like, with jousting and merry-making.
Which brings us on to this word 'mirth', which is there twice (once in a variant form) in this Christmas scene, with Christmas itself, it is to be noticed, not lasting twelve days, but fifteen. All that memorizing means that I had remembered something right, and the way that the word is used (certainly the second time) does suggest a richer meaning for the word than we have for it.
C. T. Onions, in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology that he edited (my copy is from 1966), tells us that the word is from Old English, and gives a meaning, for the 13th century, of 'joy, happiness OE; rejoicing, gaiety'. The word has, then, already started to divide between what the Sussex Carol means by it (the first meaning), and a usage in the 14th century, 'gaiety of mind; diversion, sport'.
I should check when Gawain is generally dated to, but have gone on longer than I intended – that, and Onions referring me to what he says about the word 'merry', must wait for a later time. (Suffice to say that he gives an Old English sense (noted as obsolete) of 'pleasing, agreeable', and says that, in the phrase 'merry England', it was 'later apprehended as "joyous"'.)
End-notes
¹ The opening lines of Gawain:
Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes
(lines 1–2)
I seem to remember being told that it is thought that the choice of alliteration with the word 'brittened' is deliberately meant to anticipate, in sound, where the narrative is going next.
² A sop to the historians and others who claim that Britain was a political invention of the Acts of Union, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that willy nilly brought the Scots and then the Irish under the uneasy yoke of the English Parliament ?
³ Cleanliness is always said to be next to Godliness, but only in the [possessive adjective of the nationality to be spited] dictionary.
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21 January
Continued from Merry birthday ! (1)
I have looked out Sir Gawain, and, after it opens vividly with lines describing the sacked Troy¹, it goes on to some schoolboy history about how one of the heroes' descendants, after they had dispersed with Troy in ruins and cinders, went on to found Britain² (named after him, Brutus, grandson of Æneas) – the key words being underlined in the text (which is in Middle English):
And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus
On many bonkkes full brode Bretayn he settles with wynne,
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythes has wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysses and blunder
Ful skete has skyfted synne.
(lines 13–19)
(All terribly hard to learn (and forgotten now), but, for my degree and in alleged proof that we could translate from Middle English, I had to be able to render in modern English any passage from Gawain's first Book, and from a specified Book from each of Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde – no one knows who wrote Gawain, but it was then believed that it was the same poet who wrote Patience and Pearl (not to mention the snappily named Cleanness³, with all of which it appears in my edition.)
So, after the noble lineage of Britain's founder has been established, we go on, before the introduction of Arthur and his court at the end of the introduction, with a rather worrying couplet (lines 21–22) – unless you are a football thug – that, and I spare presenting a chunk of the original just now, tell how bold men were bred there (fair enough so far), but who loved fighting (baret that lofden) and made mischief (tene that wroghten) in many a troubled time. (It's just a guess, as it's a long time ago that I looked at this, but I doubt that 'mischief' has quite the right ring for that phrase.)
We have men who brawl and cause trouble, and then we have Arthur, in all the nobility of his person and of his court (lines 23–29). It is a time of marvels, and of stories long told with lel letteres loken (line 35), linked with true letters, as are the unmistakeable 'l' sounds of that phrase in this alliterative verse.
And then the story proper opens with these lines (in which I have highlighted the words that we can still easily recognize to-day, even if a line like the fifth might leave us cold – apart from spotting that the knights are doing something 'full many times'):
This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde, ledes of the best,
Rekenly of the Rounde Table alle tho rich brether,
With rych revel oryght and rechles merthes.
They tournayed tulkes by tymes ful mony,
Justed ful jolilé thise gentyle knightes,
Sythen kayred to the court, caroles to make.
For ther the fest was ilyche ful fiften dayes,
With alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse[...]
(lines 37–45)
If you have ever seen the Douglas Fairbanks' take on Robin Hood, as I did at the Film Festival in September (in the magnficent setting of The Great Hall of Trinity College – and with Neil Brand's and his percussionist colleague's performance of his score for it for a solid two hours), then you may have a sense of the sort of tradition from which he got that notion of what the court of Richard I might have been like, with jousting and merry-making.
Which brings us on to this word 'mirth', which is there twice (once in a variant form) in this Christmas scene, with Christmas itself, it is to be noticed, not lasting twelve days, but fifteen. All that memorizing means that I had remembered something right, and the way that the word is used (certainly the second time) does suggest a richer meaning for the word than we have for it.
C. T. Onions, in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology that he edited (my copy is from 1966), tells us that the word is from Old English, and gives a meaning, for the 13th century, of 'joy, happiness OE; rejoicing, gaiety'. The word has, then, already started to divide between what the Sussex Carol means by it (the first meaning), and a usage in the 14th century, 'gaiety of mind; diversion, sport'.
I should check when Gawain is generally dated to, but have gone on longer than I intended – that, and Onions referring me to what he says about the word 'merry', must wait for a later time. (Suffice to say that he gives an Old English sense (noted as obsolete) of 'pleasing, agreeable', and says that, in the phrase 'merry England', it was 'later apprehended as "joyous"'.)
End-notes
¹ The opening lines of Gawain:
Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes
(lines 1–2)
I seem to remember being told that it is thought that the choice of alliteration with the word 'brittened' is deliberately meant to anticipate, in sound, where the narrative is going next.
² A sop to the historians and others who claim that Britain was a political invention of the Acts of Union, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that willy nilly brought the Scots and then the Irish under the uneasy yoke of the English Parliament ?
³ Cleanliness is always said to be next to Godliness, but only in the [possessive adjective of the nationality to be spited] dictionary.
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Allegedly, Katy Perry unfollows Russell
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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21 January
And I doubt that it's Grant of that name (or Hoban), I like the verb (even if it relates asuredly to disengaging from someone presence on Arsebook, that even more potent waste of time than blogging), and here the woman is again miraculously, just days after (supposedly) being 'slammed' by Dim Sum, I mean David Cameron.
Whatever next in the autonomous world of my AOL sign-on page (where I never know whether it will be the angry bearded man or the girl with the copper hair and appealing green eyes, both trying to interest me in its product System Mechanic)...?
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21 January
And I doubt that it's Grant of that name (or Hoban), I like the verb (even if it relates asuredly to disengaging from someone presence on Arsebook, that even more potent waste of time than blogging), and here the woman is again miraculously, just days after (supposedly) being 'slammed' by Dim Sum, I mean David Cameron.
Whatever next in the autonomous world of my AOL sign-on page (where I never know whether it will be the angry bearded man or the girl with the copper hair and appealing green eyes, both trying to interest me in its product System Mechanic)...?
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Friday, 20 January 2012
Tired old nag of a film (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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21 January
Anyone who may already haunt the web presence of New Empress Magazine will know that I have already been scathing about the premise, amongst other things, of Spielberg's latest, War Horse. (I think that I admitted there that I did not ever see Private Ryan, but truly never felt the need to do so.)
Well, I saw the trailer again in full and thought the same, but another NEM posting has softened my attitude to the origins of the piece, if not to the film itself, or to making a film of it, for two reasons: it still does not render it of any greater worth, to my mind, than the Disney true-life adventures that rather irritatingly punctuated my childhood, when I had most wanted from the week's Disney spot that evening was the adventures of Donald Duck or the like, but the esteemed British children's writer Michael Morpurgo had originally written it, and he had adapted it, in a highly successful way, for the stage.
So those, for me, are the parameters of the work, and, as for Spielberg's daughter - or somebody - loving horses and the play, that is really neither here nor there, except that you can be sure that (and no sour grapes, honestly), if I shared my liking for a very good pork-and-stilton pâté that I buy from my local farm shop, Steven wouldn't dreamwork up a treatment about the people who make it. The basis is a children's story, and so fits with much of what he directs, with its corny, schmalzy emphasis that somehow diminishes the big picture for the small story of some indviduals.
Oh, life is about individuals, and, in this and in Ryan, the idea of looking out for your mates in the theatre of conflict (why ever do we call it that?) is part of it, as in Band of Brothers (whose executive producers include, of course, the selfsame Spielberg and Ryan's own leader of a smaller such band, Tom Hanks), but not everything: militarily, sacrifices do need to be made, and deploying even eight men (at the risk of their lives) to save one man - for whatever reason - would have to be seen as one to be made an objective.
After all, the film of The Cruel Sea, as Simon Heffer has recently argued on Radio 3's late-night slot The Essay, tellingly depicts men in the water who think that they are to be rescued. However, the wider perspective is that it appears from sonar that a U-boat is underneath them, and dropping depth-charges, rather than saving them, has, hard though it is, to be the decision to make.
So, much as Matt Damon has become my mascot on these pages, he'd have to go. If children want to see a story about a horse, that's fine, but don't bother me with your take on it, Steven!
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21 January
Anyone who may already haunt the web presence of New Empress Magazine will know that I have already been scathing about the premise, amongst other things, of Spielberg's latest, War Horse. (I think that I admitted there that I did not ever see Private Ryan, but truly never felt the need to do so.)
Well, I saw the trailer again in full and thought the same, but another NEM posting has softened my attitude to the origins of the piece, if not to the film itself, or to making a film of it, for two reasons: it still does not render it of any greater worth, to my mind, than the Disney true-life adventures that rather irritatingly punctuated my childhood, when I had most wanted from the week's Disney spot that evening was the adventures of Donald Duck or the like, but the esteemed British children's writer Michael Morpurgo had originally written it, and he had adapted it, in a highly successful way, for the stage.
So those, for me, are the parameters of the work, and, as for Spielberg's daughter - or somebody - loving horses and the play, that is really neither here nor there, except that you can be sure that (and no sour grapes, honestly), if I shared my liking for a very good pork-and-stilton pâté that I buy from my local farm shop, Steven wouldn't dreamwork up a treatment about the people who make it. The basis is a children's story, and so fits with much of what he directs, with its corny, schmalzy emphasis that somehow diminishes the big picture for the small story of some indviduals.
Oh, life is about individuals, and, in this and in Ryan, the idea of looking out for your mates in the theatre of conflict (why ever do we call it that?) is part of it, as in Band of Brothers (whose executive producers include, of course, the selfsame Spielberg and Ryan's own leader of a smaller such band, Tom Hanks), but not everything: militarily, sacrifices do need to be made, and deploying even eight men (at the risk of their lives) to save one man - for whatever reason - would have to be seen as one to be made an objective.
After all, the film of The Cruel Sea, as Simon Heffer has recently argued on Radio 3's late-night slot The Essay, tellingly depicts men in the water who think that they are to be rescued. However, the wider perspective is that it appears from sonar that a U-boat is underneath them, and dropping depth-charges, rather than saving them, has, hard though it is, to be the decision to make.
So, much as Matt Damon has become my mascot on these pages, he'd have to go. If children want to see a story about a horse, that's fine, but don't bother me with your take on it, Steven!
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Great books that bored me (and I didn't finish)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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20 January
So, maybe, they weren't so great...
At any rate, whilst looking for Sir Gawain, to see what the so-called Pearl poet said about the word 'mirth' - as I seem to recall a feast (probably Christmas) when the Green Knight makes his dramatic entrance, on horseback, and challenge - to shed light on the posting Merry birthday!, I spotted the Penguin volumes of Goethe's Faust, and suddenly found a strange linguistic connection with something else that I gave up on:
Faust
Proust
When, in the 1980s, Penguin (again) brought out its three-volume new translation of Proust's Temps Perdu (even the title's too long!), I cautiously bought just the first volume, and wisely so, as I didn't get beyond around p. 153 and all that flannel about Swann (excuse the repeated double 'n'), which left me not caring to know any more about any of it (let alone some prized lines about the power of a cake to spark off memories, which, without reading, I struggle to see as any great insight, if maybe an example of synaesthesia)*.
So what, other than the letter-combinations (above) those works have in common is their length (and falling into parts as a result) - I had read Part I of Faust, but withdrew from Part 2, because I simply wasn't interested in what betrayals and debaucheries Faust could, under devilish encouragement, commit - and whether I could stay the course. Trying to be dutiful, when I found the task distasteful, I did plough through the whole (i.e. both parts) of Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, another catalogue of cruelty and depravity, during the first week of my degree course, but took next to nothing - save a greater dislike for Marlowe - from doing it.
And I have too further confessions, one of which I will excuse on the basis that (as with the Marlowe, though who knows when that - or a substantially unabridged version of it - was last performed**) it is meant to be seen performed, not read as a text, and the other that endless stories where a jealous husband (usually unreasonably and sustainedly jealous, so as to make Leontes seem the model of trust) repeatedly tests a wife by putting temptation in her way were (a) just padding to the long-stalled plot and, to me, (b) not of interest anyway.
For those who haven't already guessed, I refer to the following works, and am guided by a carefully placed slip of paper in each, which indicates where I stopped:
Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth Parts One to Three - another attempt to be dutiful, I stalled partway through Act Three, Scene Two, of Part Two, and should have taken the opportunity, when the RSC did marathon sessions of it, to encompass it;
Cervantes' Don Quixote - I didn't even make it to The Second Part (giving out at the end of Chapter XXXV in The First Part).
In conclusion, I have two copies in tranlsation - don't ask why! - of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which, it should be known, is a three-volume work, so some may know how to place their stake, if offered the chance of odds on whether I'll ever read it all...
* The great, and perhaps a little overlooked, Paul Jennings wrote very humorously about his similar aspirations to be an educated man and, amongst other things, have read Temps Perdu - I didn't just find my copy of the jokily called attempt at anthologizing his Oddly collections, which (my recollection is) were themselves anthologies of (the best of) what he had published in something like The Observer, The Jenguin Pennings (yet another Penguin!), but, if it doesn't contain this piece about Swann, where the fictive narrator, at least, too foundered, it is still a very good introduction. Copies don't seem cheap though, according to Amazon®.
** More often than I could imagine, according to the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine_%28play%29#Performance_history.
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20 January
So, maybe, they weren't so great...
At any rate, whilst looking for Sir Gawain, to see what the so-called Pearl poet said about the word 'mirth' - as I seem to recall a feast (probably Christmas) when the Green Knight makes his dramatic entrance, on horseback, and challenge - to shed light on the posting Merry birthday!, I spotted the Penguin volumes of Goethe's Faust, and suddenly found a strange linguistic connection with something else that I gave up on:
Faust
Proust
When, in the 1980s, Penguin (again) brought out its three-volume new translation of Proust's Temps Perdu (even the title's too long!), I cautiously bought just the first volume, and wisely so, as I didn't get beyond around p. 153 and all that flannel about Swann (excuse the repeated double 'n'), which left me not caring to know any more about any of it (let alone some prized lines about the power of a cake to spark off memories, which, without reading, I struggle to see as any great insight, if maybe an example of synaesthesia)*.
So what, other than the letter-combinations (above) those works have in common is their length (and falling into parts as a result) - I had read Part I of Faust, but withdrew from Part 2, because I simply wasn't interested in what betrayals and debaucheries Faust could, under devilish encouragement, commit - and whether I could stay the course. Trying to be dutiful, when I found the task distasteful, I did plough through the whole (i.e. both parts) of Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, another catalogue of cruelty and depravity, during the first week of my degree course, but took next to nothing - save a greater dislike for Marlowe - from doing it.
And I have too further confessions, one of which I will excuse on the basis that (as with the Marlowe, though who knows when that - or a substantially unabridged version of it - was last performed**) it is meant to be seen performed, not read as a text, and the other that endless stories where a jealous husband (usually unreasonably and sustainedly jealous, so as to make Leontes seem the model of trust) repeatedly tests a wife by putting temptation in her way were (a) just padding to the long-stalled plot and, to me, (b) not of interest anyway.
For those who haven't already guessed, I refer to the following works, and am guided by a carefully placed slip of paper in each, which indicates where I stopped:
Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth Parts One to Three - another attempt to be dutiful, I stalled partway through Act Three, Scene Two, of Part Two, and should have taken the opportunity, when the RSC did marathon sessions of it, to encompass it;
Cervantes' Don Quixote - I didn't even make it to The Second Part (giving out at the end of Chapter XXXV in The First Part).
In conclusion, I have two copies in tranlsation - don't ask why! - of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which, it should be known, is a three-volume work, so some may know how to place their stake, if offered the chance of odds on whether I'll ever read it all...
* The great, and perhaps a little overlooked, Paul Jennings wrote very humorously about his similar aspirations to be an educated man and, amongst other things, have read Temps Perdu - I didn't just find my copy of the jokily called attempt at anthologizing his Oddly collections, which (my recollection is) were themselves anthologies of (the best of) what he had published in something like The Observer, The Jenguin Pennings (yet another Penguin!), but, if it doesn't contain this piece about Swann, where the fictive narrator, at least, too foundered, it is still a very good introduction. Copies don't seem cheap though, according to Amazon®.
** More often than I could imagine, according to the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine_%28play%29#Performance_history.
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Thursday, 19 January 2012
Every Veran helps! (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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20 January
Anyone who has ever used so-called predictive text (that terminology probably calls for a whole posting of its own) on a Nokia® phone will know that the software is programmed to know the name 'Nokia', but not the name that comes out as 'Veran', which, if you will ever be writing a text-message to say that you have called in to one of its shops and is anything needed, you will have to spell and save - but nothing will alter the fact that the first option always comes up as Veran*.
Well, my local Veran, in a sign prominently stuck on the self-service machine such that it impeded the scanner, proudly announced to-night that, between midnight and 6.00 a.m., I could use the machine - and, if I didn't want to, they would open a till! (I can see that being a really popular request - from the point of view of how it would be received, that is...)
The point was that not a single till was then operating, it was well before midnight, and so I was disenfranchised from this marvellous offer of having a human being serve me. The slogan 'Every little helps' may well have disappeared (it only ever was a little, and it helped damn all), so perhaps the new one is 'Lump it or leave'.
Plus whatever happened to their much-vaunted 'Value' range, whose products I realize, all of a sudden, that I don't recall seeing for a long time - were they so choked with toxic ingredients that you could buy a kilo of Value peanuts for something of the order of sixty-nine pence, but, within a week of finishing them, you'd have ingested such a high dose that planning a funeral would be in order?
* And I know well enough why that is - some geek's supposition, in setting it up, that, just as I am more likely to be writing 'Dear Nun' than greeting my own mother, I want to write about the verandah to the recipient of my message, not concerning a well-known chain of supermarkets.
(I've not tried the key-combination, but, as a message to Anna always comes up as 'Dear Bomb', for all that I know the phone is programmed with supposedly useful things like 'dacha', 'veldt', 'lebensraum', 'samovar', etc., etc.)
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20 January
Anyone who has ever used so-called predictive text (that terminology probably calls for a whole posting of its own) on a Nokia® phone will know that the software is programmed to know the name 'Nokia', but not the name that comes out as 'Veran', which, if you will ever be writing a text-message to say that you have called in to one of its shops and is anything needed, you will have to spell and save - but nothing will alter the fact that the first option always comes up as Veran*.
Well, my local Veran, in a sign prominently stuck on the self-service machine such that it impeded the scanner, proudly announced to-night that, between midnight and 6.00 a.m., I could use the machine - and, if I didn't want to, they would open a till! (I can see that being a really popular request - from the point of view of how it would be received, that is...)
The point was that not a single till was then operating, it was well before midnight, and so I was disenfranchised from this marvellous offer of having a human being serve me. The slogan 'Every little helps' may well have disappeared (it only ever was a little, and it helped damn all), so perhaps the new one is 'Lump it or leave'.
Plus whatever happened to their much-vaunted 'Value' range, whose products I realize, all of a sudden, that I don't recall seeing for a long time - were they so choked with toxic ingredients that you could buy a kilo of Value peanuts for something of the order of sixty-nine pence, but, within a week of finishing them, you'd have ingested such a high dose that planning a funeral would be in order?
* And I know well enough why that is - some geek's supposition, in setting it up, that, just as I am more likely to be writing 'Dear Nun' than greeting my own mother, I want to write about the verandah to the recipient of my message, not concerning a well-known chain of supermarkets.
(I've not tried the key-combination, but, as a message to Anna always comes up as 'Dear Bomb', for all that I know the phone is programmed with supposedly useful things like 'dacha', 'veldt', 'lebensraum', 'samovar', etc., etc.)
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More on AI: Boxie
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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20 January
Another item that I find of interest at Writer's Rest, where I have posted:
Well, I have to ask: would an investigator from the IRS using such an interface remain as cute in many people's eyes for very long...?
And my AOL sign-on page bombards me with images of people getting hostile and rough with their no less cute PC in an effort to get me to sign on for their System Mechanic (another piece of sotware probably likely to make worse a situation of functionality that is tolerable).
The point being that for someone who sees beyond the 'face' and sees it in a reductionist way as housing just cameras, not real eyes, and the means of controlling the traction and 'the voice', there is nothing to like, and there is nothing capable of feeling any dislike.
It's not, after all, like shouting at the cat when she asks for food and then, if she persists, locking her out!
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20 January
Another item that I find of interest at Writer's Rest, where I have posted:
Well, I have to ask: would an investigator from the IRS using such an interface remain as cute in many people's eyes for very long...?
And my AOL sign-on page bombards me with images of people getting hostile and rough with their no less cute PC in an effort to get me to sign on for their System Mechanic (another piece of sotware probably likely to make worse a situation of functionality that is tolerable).
The point being that for someone who sees beyond the 'face' and sees it in a reductionist way as housing just cameras, not real eyes, and the means of controlling the traction and 'the voice', there is nothing to like, and there is nothing capable of feeling any dislike.
It's not, after all, like shouting at the cat when she asks for food and then, if she persists, locking her out!
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Teatime Tasties Ltd
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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20 January
Either you will understand (and share) this compulsion, or you will not - I saw, just once, an HGV bearing this name and was so heartened by its old-fashioned ring that I had to record it. Now is its moment of flying more freely!
For another that puns on the name of a famous painter, this oft-seen one takes some beating:
Vincent Van Hire
I do hate to think what they ask for as a deposit...
A more curious one (again, seen but once) is not for what it obviously relates to - as there is a time of year when it and related matter is fluttering in the currents on our roads - as the choice of name:
R. F. Straw Services
'Would you have need of some straw services?', the pitch might go, I guess. (Beats that stupidly misused word 'logistics', when it means little more than 'haulage', even if the load is refrigerated.)
Finally, a friend has the initials RPC, so I am always tickled by:
RPC Containers Limited
PS And how could I have forgotten - except that I did forget:
Central Crushing Ltd
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
20 January
Either you will understand (and share) this compulsion, or you will not - I saw, just once, an HGV bearing this name and was so heartened by its old-fashioned ring that I had to record it. Now is its moment of flying more freely!
For another that puns on the name of a famous painter, this oft-seen one takes some beating:
Vincent Van Hire
I do hate to think what they ask for as a deposit...
A more curious one (again, seen but once) is not for what it obviously relates to - as there is a time of year when it and related matter is fluttering in the currents on our roads - as the choice of name:
R. F. Straw Services
'Would you have need of some straw services?', the pitch might go, I guess. (Beats that stupidly misused word 'logistics', when it means little more than 'haulage', even if the load is refrigerated.)
Finally, a friend has the initials RPC, so I am always tickled by:
RPC Containers Limited
PS And how could I have forgotten - except that I did forget:
Central Crushing Ltd
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Merry birthday ! (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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19 January
If anyone can explain what has been raised by adapting some Christmas labels to identify whose is which of two presents being sent together, I'd be glad to know:
We say Happy Christmas and Merry Christmas interchangeably, but we only say Happy birthday*...
End-notes
* The same is true of Easter, actually - does Christmas especially embody merriment (a word used twice by friends this season, when it has no common place in our vocabulary)? Plus there is the word 'mirth', rhymed with 'birth' in the Sussex Carol in a line (or part-line) that goes something like 'news of great mirth': the birth of Jesus is not what we would nowadays think of as a subject for mirth. (I must check, but I think both that the words 'merriment / merry' and 'mirth' are cognates, and that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may shed light on an older meaning of the latter... - it does, so see, if you will, Merry birthday ! (2))
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19 January
If anyone can explain what has been raised by adapting some Christmas labels to identify whose is which of two presents being sent together, I'd be glad to know:
We say Happy Christmas and Merry Christmas interchangeably, but we only say Happy birthday*...
End-notes
* The same is true of Easter, actually - does Christmas especially embody merriment (a word used twice by friends this season, when it has no common place in our vocabulary)? Plus there is the word 'mirth', rhymed with 'birth' in the Sussex Carol in a line (or part-line) that goes something like 'news of great mirth': the birth of Jesus is not what we would nowadays think of as a subject for mirth. (I must check, but I think both that the words 'merriment / merry' and 'mirth' are cognates, and that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may shed light on an older meaning of the latter... - it does, so see, if you will, Merry birthday ! (2))
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Woody on Amazon®
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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19 January
No, not Allen's opinion of Amazon®, although he probably has one and it may be a strong one (heaven help him, if he ever made a joke about Amazon® - the Keaton biographer would infer deep insecurity regarding Internet shopping!), but something that I have just read in a review of Stardust Memories, a series of eight mini-reviews of a boxed set (contrary to popular usage, they are not 'box sets').
If you want to see what K. Gordon rightly wrote, follow this link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woody-Allen-Gift-Region-NTSC/dp/0792846052/ref=sr_1_52?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1326966006&sr=1-52
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19 January
No, not Allen's opinion of Amazon®, although he probably has one and it may be a strong one (heaven help him, if he ever made a joke about Amazon® - the Keaton biographer would infer deep insecurity regarding Internet shopping!), but something that I have just read in a review of Stardust Memories, a series of eight mini-reviews of a boxed set (contrary to popular usage, they are not 'box sets').
If you want to see what K. Gordon rightly wrote, follow this link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woody-Allen-Gift-Region-NTSC/dp/0792846052/ref=sr_1_52?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1326966006&sr=1-52
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Tuesday, 17 January 2012
Let me dress you like a Hero!
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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18 January
Having sensed, not strongly, but sufficiently, that things punk are coming back in fashion, what with all that post-Potter Bonham Carter look, I have prepared and am about to announce my new Kleinzeit range of bondage gear.
Even lords and ladies will feel terribly out of place if they don't have one of my Hypotenuse corsets, to be worn over a suit, dress or separates, and, with every one purchased, there is a free five minutes' worth of ripping, slashing and general tugging at the seams of two garments.
Then with the Zonk hat, a ball-bearing the size of Sweden has to be carried around, so it needs to be screwed to the head in five places - get your co-ordination wrong, and the spring that houses the bearing might just behave unpredictably and smash you one in the face.
Those who like to keep things simple will adore the Plain Deal restrainers, lengths of pure Norwegian heartwood that are bolted from the back to halfway down the calf, rendering movement much more painful, if achievable at all - a whole new dimension on popping down to the shops, and cutting out all of that unnecessary sitting behind a steering-wheel.
The Glockenspiel manacles offer all the restriction, plus, of course, chafing that you would expect from a quality accessory, plus they give you a significant discount (we dare not say how much, as initial supply is likely to be outstripped by demand, as one would want with such bijou purchases) on the Nurse charging-unit .
On a rolled-steel harness, which is again guaranteed to dig and rub, and in a pure titanium housing, the unit is capable of delivering shocks of up to 100V at currents as high as 10A (thrilling, eh!), depending on where you are from A to B. Trigged by a special Swiss sensor, it detects any, even the smallest, deviation from Kantian moral principles and shocks you - and anyone nearby - into obedience. Strict doesn't come close to it!
And those are just a few of the most exciting articles in this extensive range, which personally excite me greatly and have given me pleasure to design.
(As I say, initial supply will be limited - just that little business of being sued about the Philosophical Investigations underwear, which I swear had nothing to do purchasers starting to issue instructions to others to pick up and move blocks of masonry...)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 January
Having sensed, not strongly, but sufficiently, that things punk are coming back in fashion, what with all that post-Potter Bonham Carter look, I have prepared and am about to announce my new Kleinzeit range of bondage gear.
Even lords and ladies will feel terribly out of place if they don't have one of my Hypotenuse corsets, to be worn over a suit, dress or separates, and, with every one purchased, there is a free five minutes' worth of ripping, slashing and general tugging at the seams of two garments.
Then with the Zonk hat, a ball-bearing the size of Sweden has to be carried around, so it needs to be screwed to the head in five places - get your co-ordination wrong, and the spring that houses the bearing might just behave unpredictably and smash you one in the face.
Those who like to keep things simple will adore the Plain Deal restrainers, lengths of pure Norwegian heartwood that are bolted from the back to halfway down the calf, rendering movement much more painful, if achievable at all - a whole new dimension on popping down to the shops, and cutting out all of that unnecessary sitting behind a steering-wheel.
The Glockenspiel manacles offer all the restriction, plus, of course, chafing that you would expect from a quality accessory, plus they give you a significant discount (we dare not say how much, as initial supply is likely to be outstripped by demand, as one would want with such bijou purchases) on the Nurse charging-unit .
On a rolled-steel harness, which is again guaranteed to dig and rub, and in a pure titanium housing, the unit is capable of delivering shocks of up to 100V at currents as high as 10A (thrilling, eh!), depending on where you are from A to B. Trigged by a special Swiss sensor, it detects any, even the smallest, deviation from Kantian moral principles and shocks you - and anyone nearby - into obedience. Strict doesn't come close to it!
And those are just a few of the most exciting articles in this extensive range, which personally excite me greatly and have given me pleasure to design.
(As I say, initial supply will be limited - just that little business of being sued about the Philosophical Investigations underwear, which I swear had nothing to do purchasers starting to issue instructions to others to pick up and move blocks of masonry...)
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