Timothy Olyphant, sounds like elephant

There's something refreshing about a low budget film. More often than not you'll be watching actors who rarely make A lister status and the lack of funds can sometimes, but not always, push directors to be a bit more creative. "The Crazies" is definitely one of those films, punching well above its weight.

It's hardly ground breaking, being a remake of a 1973 George A. Romero pseudo zombie flick about a small American town that accidentally falls victim to a biological weapon designed to "destabilise a population" by either killing them or turning them into homicidal "zombies".

I loved it, mostly because it's a perfect example of old school 'scary' movies. The frights come thick and fast, aided in no small part by perfect timing and excellent 'jump out of your seat' music.

It's also got a well picked cast, none of whom overwhelm the movie like some big names do, and it's always good to see Timothy Olyphant, an actor who doesn't really get as much work as he should.

Mr Romero, the grandfather of the zombie, would approve.

If you like a good fright now and then, I highly recommend it.

Pardon?

"Hello Meeester Eeeeench" says the consultant audiologist, "I 'ave taken a luuuuk at your resooolts, and you haaave gradual onset chronic deafness".

Suddenly her accent wasn't funny anymore.

"I have what?" says I......

The irony wasn't lost on me.

I have lost 50% of my hearing ability, mostly in the upper frequencies, the ones that speech falls into, which is kinda important. Apparently I have the kind of hearing that someone in their mid to late fifties would be expected to have, and it can only get worse. There's no surgical or medical procedure to sort out my lugs, the only option I have is a hearing aid.

I think I'll pass just now, maybe in another twenty years or so, I'll get back to ya!

I've never considered myself to have a hearing deficiency, but after losing out on a new job last year because I wasn't able to meet the minimum hearing standard, I thought I better get my ears checked out.

Sure, I like loud music, (who doesn't?) and have a long-running love affair with noisy motorbikes, but I never thought that I'd done them any damage by subjecting them to 120 decibels or beats per minute, whichever came first.

As it turns out, I haven't damaged my ears at all, it's the sort of speaker cable in between them and my brain that's degrading.

Not the best news I could have received this week, but at least I'm not nearly forty.

D'OH!!

My God, It's Full Of Stars . . .

They get a hard time of it, do the boffins at NASA. Budgets being cut, launch vehicles being retired, continually having to justify themselves to an increasingly introverted home population, but as long as they keep churning out images like this, then they get my vote.

Note how thin the atmosphere is at the edges of the image (click the image for a bigger version), that's all that's keeping us alive folks!

Unforgettable . . .

 . . . is how I'm going to describe the Lostprophets at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange on Friday night.
Unforgettable, but not for the reasons you might think.
Sure, it was a rocking gig. The Lostprophets have been around long enough to know their way around a stage, and around a crowd for that matter. "You guys are much fucking better than (insert previous venue town here) were last night!" etc etc. Don't get me wrong, they can rock alright, and rock good, but that's still not really why it was a memorable gig. No, it will stay with me because it was:

A. The hairiest gig I've ever been to. There were mullets and afros, long hair and strange metrosexual flicks everywhere. And yes, I was jealous.

B.  It was one of the loudest gigs I've ever been to, and I've been to lots. It was so loud that The Demon had her ear plugs in from the first song onwards.

C. It had one of the best mosh pits I've ever seen, which at one point featured a totally spontaneous 10-man human pyrimid! Seriously.

D. Mostly as a result of B and C,  it was fucking stinking of BO, I mean proper 'amateur rugby team changing rooms' type pong.

None of which detracted from a top show by a top band. They even threw a little bit of Welsh pantomime in for free. Top lads.

Ripping Yarns

10 days.

That's how long it's taken me to rip my entire CD collection.

10 days of staring blankly at a monitor, 10 days of searching the net for the album art that dBpoweramp can't find, 10 days of "OMG, I can't believe I bought that!", but, as the last few digital notes of the "You And Me Song" by The Wannadies made their way to their new home, it was finally over, 6217 songs and over 187Gb worth of music.

It seems quite strange seeing my musical timeline laid out on my bedroom floor. I bought my first CD  player in 1986 when CDs were all spangly and new, and my first CD was the U2 single "With or Without You". Along with  "Don't Go" by The Hothouse Flowers and "Brothers In Arms" by Dire Straits, it was about the only music available on these strange silver discs that everyone thought you could use instead of toilet paper and they would still work.

As I've been ripping I've been "Rediscovering Music", to quote a catchphrase from the company I work for.

I'd forgotten all about "Megablast" by Bomb The Bass, "Muscle Deep" by Then Jerico or "Connection" by Elastica. Songs from my past that instantly take me back.

I'm thoroughly looking forward to having instant access to my new library, the ability to make playlists and browse my tracks through my PDA and to hear all this wonderful music better than it's ever sounded before.

Vive la digital revolution!

*PS - Bonus points for anyone who can correctly identify all the top CD's in the photo.

No prize, just glory . . . and my respect.

The Man Who Fell To Earth

There are some bizarre activities in my non-existent list of 'Things to do before you're 40':

Ride a racehorse very fast.

See whales in the ocean.

Drive an F1 car or MotoGP bike.

Be a passenger in any military fast jet.

Falconry.

Watch Falkirk win the SPL*.

But in a few weeks I'll be fulfilling another, I'm going to do a skydive.

I will be strapped to someone who will actually know what they are doing.

We will clamber into a rickety wee plane.

We will climb to approximately 10,000 feet above the very beautiful but very hard Auchterarder countryside.

At this point, the nice man strapped to my back will shuffle us to a gaping hole in the side of the plane, something I never thought I'd ever see and live to talk about, where we will then leap like heroes, but plummet like stones.

In a few seconds we will be travelling at something like 120mph, because as everyone knows 1g [m/s^2].

If everything goes to plan, our 'chute, as we skydivers call it, will deploy at around 5000 feet, and we will glide like a sycamore leaf  to a pinpoint accurate landing on the unyielding ground below.

.....where I will stop crying and change my pants.

It's all for a good cause of course, a Scottish charity called ENABLE, which is why, dear reader, I'm looking for sponsorship. 

No amount is too small so get clicking HERE! 

*It is a fantasy list after all! 

Men are from Mars....

....Women are just mental.

A rare long lie this morning found me waking up to The Demon watching one of her current favourite tv shows, MTV's "reality phenomenon" The Hills.

If by some miracle of fate you have missed this gem, I'll give you a brief synopsis:

It seems to consist mostly of various camera crews following four or five totally affected, self absorbed, narcissistic, snobby, bitchy, vacuous Hollywood rich tarts around their "ordinary" daily lives.

I say four or five because I can't really be sure how many of them there are, they all look the same with their perfectly coiffured $300 hairdos, their Beverly Hills apartments and their BMW's, Mercedes and Range Rovers. Not bad for a bunch just out of their teens.

After five minutes of this show I wanted to smash the tv.....

....straight into the face of Heidi or Audrina or Chiara or whatever the hell the Barbie doll tootsy on the screen was called. She was having a particularly bad day at work. Work which mostly seemed to consist of sitting around in constructed poses bitching about her flatmates to co-workers who clearly just wanted her to die. Horribly.

It was at this point that I felt the need to question The Demon on her attraction to this turd of a show:

"It's fun, it's escapism, it's a good show..." she claims.

Even after all these years together I still don't understand her, but I suppose it works both ways.

"You'll quite happily sit all day on a Sunday watching 'A 4x4 Is Born' or 'Mythbusters' or that bloody 'Overhaulin'!" she retaliates, at which point I highlight the informative nature of the shows she mentioned, their emphasis on empirical data, engineering, science, all wrapped up in a highly entertaining package. It's what tv was invented for! 

The look I received could have brought on a nuclear winter.

Vive le difference.

Green Shoots

Winter, don't you just hate it?

It usually causes a nationwide hiatus, where people just put their lives on hold in many was until the hustle and bustle of Christmas is over and until the weather improves, although here in Scotland any improvement is academic at best. It feels like years have went by since my mountain bike has seen any action, and the little voice urging me to put myself in some wet and muddy danger is becoming louder and harder to resist.

I need my mountain bike. Some people need football, or retail therapy, recreational drugs or alcohol to keep them (arguably) sane, but I need my bike. It's strange that a sport that requires so much concentration can also be, for me at least, a time when I can clear my head and reboot, sort of.

But Spring is a-coming. The snow has melted and I can hear The Patriot calling me from its garage hibernation.

If global warming can eliminate this climate-imposed recreational coma, then I'm all for it!

Spare a shekel for an old ex-leper?

This week's earthquake in Haiti has, at current estimates, killed at least 50,000 and has made over 300,00 people homeless....

....and if I'm honest, I really don't care.

Don't give a shit, couldn't give a monkey's.

Don't get me wrong, on one level I know that these people are experiencing a human tragedy that I really have no comprehension of, but still I find myself looking at images of the dust-caked survivors being pulled from the ground and I feel nothing.

It all started on October the 23rd, 1984. Michael Buerk's now famous news report from Ethiopia highlighting the famine there was the first push downhill of the media snowball. In the years since, it has just been one humanitarian crisis after another, disaster upon disaster, and I'm sorry, but Compassion Fatigue has well and truly set in.

I've become so overexposed to starving black babies with flies in their eyes, roadside ditches filled with dead Kosovans or Rwandan rebels butchering civilians that I now just stare blankly at these news reports, wondering what the next emotionally blackmailed tv advert will be.

I'm not an uncharitable, uncaring person, I currently donate monthly to three charities that I believe do good work both here in the UK and around the globe:

Cancer Research UK

Riders For Health

British Red Cross

In a purely selfish way, I feel better knowing that "I've done my bit", and indeed I've doubled my donation to the British Red Cross this month in the knowledge that I'm probably paying for five plastic water buckets for some Haitian families.

Job done.

Conscience clean.

At least until the next A-list celebrity pops up and tells us that we really need to give more for the next humanitarian disaster.

Wanted: Transit Van. Will pay cash

Apparently, in a former Madge-free life, Guy Ritchie used to be a furniture removal man, and after witnessing his latest stab at directing, 'Sherlock Holmes', I'd recommend that he log on to Autotrader.co.uk and see if he can find a nice, low mileage van for sale.

It's an appalling film. The plot, what little there is, can only be described as tenuous at best, and fails to take the viewer on any kind of journey at all. I felt completely disengaged and couldn't really figure out what the bad guy was attempting to do or why I should really care in the first place.
The film also suffers from miscasting of truly epic proportions. A box office draw he may be, but wise-cracking Robert Downey Jr is terrible as the worlds most famous aristocratic detective. In fact a swap in roles between him and Dr Watson, played by Jude Law, would have been preferable. Even better still would have been to let the excellent Mark Strong, a man seemingly born to play Sherlock Holmes, don the deerstalker and wander around muttering "Elementary etc etc" under his breath, rather than play the one dimensional villain, Lord Blackwood.

The problem, as I see it, is that Guy Ritchie only knows how to make one kind of film, a "cool" London gangster flick featuring guns, explosions and lots of comedic "cockney banter".
'Sherlock Holmes' movies on the other hand, as typified by the great Basil Rathbone, were always a cerebral, intellectual crime thriller, and Holmes always defeated his enemies with the power of his mind, not with his pugilistic skills.

There are just some film franchises that cannot survive a Hollywood makeover.
The game is most definitely not afoot.

Fail.

Mad Dogs & Englishmen

We Brits do 'mental' better than most nations, and it's quite clear that Florence Welch here is a bit bonkers, but she's also amazing!



...and quite fit.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly . . .

Well that's it.
2009 has come and (almost) gone, and I for one will be glad to see the back of it, as it was easily the worst year of my life, but we'll get to that in a second.

The Good
It wasn't all tears, pain and anguish in 2009, there were some good times to be had as well.
I had, without a doubt, the best holiday I've ever been on when I took my mountain bike and my best friends off to Morzine in the French Alps in the middle of the summer. It was just perfect, and we're already booked up for a repeat adventure in 2010. Bring it on.
On the music front, Biffy Clyro stopped being 'that hairy band from Kilmarnock' and became 'that awesome band from Kilmarnock' and their album 'Only Revolutions' was the stand out of the year for me. It makes me want to grow a beard, 'Mon the Biff!
At the cinema, JJ Abrams 'Star Trek' made phasers cool again, but it was Neill Blomkamp's 'District 9' that floated my sci-fi boat. So good it almost could have been made specifically for me, yet so different to anything else out there.

The Bad
The death of a parent tends to put a bit of a downer on things. Losing my father to his long running cancer at the beginning of the year was a maelstrom of emotions, some of which still whirl around the inside of my head. We were never best friends, we didn't have that sort of relationship. We were just father and son, but he was still My Dad and I miss him.
Having to have my dog put down this year was just so hard. You always tell yourself that it was the humane thing to do, but it still feels like you just committed murder
They say "it comes in threes", but after being in the recruitment process for a job as a police constable for over a year, after passing everything that was thrown at me from long division and ratios to public speaking and a timed 2 mile run, to then be told on the night before I was due to pick up my uniform that I was being rejected because my hearing is a tad too low, was one kick in the bollocks I really could have done without.

The Ugly

My mate, Brian.
He's minging.


Suffice to say that I'm hoping that 2010 is a vast improvement on its predecessor, it certainly wouldn't be difficult, and besides, Arthur C Clarke is never wrong!
So if you've stumbled into my little corner of cyberspace whilst looking for a Wookie, or whether you're one of the small band of (misguided) regular visitors, may I take this opportunity to wish you a very happy New Year.

My Precioussss

Once every 18 months or so, a gadget nerd early adopter like me spends hours and hours trawling the tinternet looking for the latest and greatest mobile phone deal.
My requirements were:
Unlimited text messaging,
Unlimited mobile internet use,
Some free anytime/any network minutes,
and an uberhandset.

Thanks to a rare and sensible recommendation from Mr Jaggy, I'm now a week into ownership of my shiny new Motorola Milestone laptop-shrank-to-the-size-of-a-phone phone, and it has already become the most precious thing in my life, including my girlfriend.
It's just so . . . tactile. I find it extremely difficult to be parted from it and all its little downloadable 'Android' applications. It handles text and emails with aplomb, it has a browser as good as a laptop, it plays music like an iPod, comes with an 8GB memory card and, apparently, you can even phone someone on it!
I have to admit that the battery life is 'compromised', but for something that is more laptop than phone, it's acceptable.

Androids are taking over the world, and I for one am totally fine with that.

Jim's Magnificent Octopus

$237, 000, 000.
$237 million dollars.
Two hundred and thirty seven million dollars.
It doesn't matter how you say it, it's an awful lot of money to make a movie.
James Cameron's magnum opus, Avatar, is the current uber movie doing the rounds this Christmas, and, if Mr C himself is to be believed, it will change movie making for ever.
So . . . what's it like?

Well, what I can tell you is that this weekend I've also watched Sam Rockwell in Moon, and I probably enjoyed that as much as Avatar, and it only cost $5 million to make.
Don't get me wrong, Avatar isn't a bad movie. Far from it, it's an excellent movie. The problem for me is that James Cameron claims that he wrote the story for the film after waking one morning from a dream, a dream that quite clearly featured Kevin Costner from Dances With Wolves or Christian Slater from Fern Gully, as the plots of those two movies is broadly identical to that of Avatar.

The film itself is only 40% live action, the other 60% being CGI and it's here that all that cash has been spent. The CGI portions of this movie are utterly convincing, especially planet Pandora's flora and fauna. In fact I think the only way that the plants, creatures and landscape of this planet could have been any more believable is if there had been a running commentary by Sir David Attenborough. It's that good.

But not perfect.
One or two scenes still look a bit comic book-ish, and the 3D is mercifully subtle and restrained, but overall Avatar is a really good movie, not a great one. A great film needs a great story.

So has it changed movies forever?
The answer for me is no, unless you happen to be a film director with $300 million dollars of someone else's cash in your back pocket.

Scent Of A Woman

Sometimes, just sometimes, the level of disregard that some people show towards others simply beggars belief. Today, for example, I found myself stuck in my daily commuter rut home from work alongside a silver BMW X5 filled with Mum and the two kids, one looked around 5-6 ish and I could see the arms of a toddler waving from a kiddy seat in the back.
Nothing unusual in that of course, there are millions of mums doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, day in day out, but three things drew my attention to this car in particular:

1. Mommy was clearly babbling away in the middle of a phone call as I could see the blue LED of her Bluetooth headset twinkling at her ear.

2. First-born was un-belted in the rear of the car and doing that 'wave at cars following behind' thing that we all did as kids whenever we were on the back seat of a bus.

3. All the windows in the "car" were up and Mommy was happily puffing away on a fag.

I know that it's #2 that should be angering me the most, but #3 made me want give School-Run Mom some of my horn and the finger, and I don't mean that in a fun, stag-night sort of way.
Now I know that she was technically breaking the law twice, first by allowing her elder son to become an unguided missile waiting to be launched and second by smoking in what would be considered a public place, what with the kids there and all, but by her actions she just graphically displayed to me how little regard she holds her kids in.

Manky cow.

The Placebo Effect

Placebo don't really fit the mould of what you might call 'a conventional rock band'.
An androgynous bisexual lead singer, born in Belgium to a Scottish mother and an American father, growing up in Dundee before moving on to further education in Luxembourg and London, and a gay guitar hero who looks kinda like a skinny 7 foot tall version of that bloke Phil from 'Location, Location, Location'.

...but rock they most certainly do!

I've been a fan from 1996's 'Nancy Boy' [Jaggy: insert homophobic joke here] and have seen them live twice before, so when I saw that they were playing Glasgow's SECC on December 14th, I was more than happy* to blow £63.50 for two tickets.

It was an excellent gig. Placebo are a band clearly happy in their own music, and this came across in the show. Big Gay Stefan strode around the stage, and off it, like a tin-foil suit wearing colossus, trying to fornicate with his guitar at every opportunity, while Brian Molko sang his pretty little heart out, screaming and strumming in equal measure. They played a great mix of new material and old favourites, but it was the belting rock tracks like 'Song To Say Goodbye' and 'Every You Every Me' that really got the crowd baying for more.

One of the best live bands you'll ever see. Full stop.


*When I say "I was happy to pay £63.50 for two tickets", what I actually meant to say was that I was "fucking incandescent with rage" at having to pay £13.50 to fucking Ticketmaster over and above the £50 price for two tickets to cover the 'booking fee and delivery'.
I noted down my anger and queried the price in the "Please place any comments here" section of the booking page but as of yet I have received no reply.
Fuckers.

Santa, if you're listening . . .

The winter nights are here, the weather is depressing and you probably had to scrape ice off of your car windscreen this morning. All in all, Christmas notwithstanding, December is a pretty miserable month.

But think how much better it would be if you had a brand new car made from stainless steel!

Yes, the DeLorean is back!
Like a phoenix from the flames, the DeLorean Motor Company has arisen, Lazarus like, from its own ashes and it's business as usual, only this time it's in Texas and not Dunmurray in Northern Ireland.

The DeLorean DMC-12 has to be one of the most iconic cars ever made, right up there with the VW Beetle and the original Mini. I've stumbled upon most supercars, Bugatti Veyron and McLaren F1 included, but I've never seen an original DMC-12 in the stainless steel flesh.
It's also one of the WORST cars ever made. It was heavy, it had no power steering and very little brakes, and it only had 137 horsepower from its Renault engine, so it was about as fast as a diesel Mondeo.

But who cares?!
It doesn't need to do 200mph, it only needs to do 88!

You can configure your brand new DMC-12 on the DeLorean website and mine worked out at $67,775.35, which is around £42K.
Considering that no other car will draw attention like a DeLorean, you'd have to say that's a bargain.

Time for a letter to Santa . . .

Generation X

Things have improved a lot since the 70's.

I can't imagine living in a world without the Internet, without instantaneous worldwide communication, without cars that don't break down, without smoke-free pubs, without (much as it pains me to admit it) mobile phones with web access. Yes, Planet Earth: Version 2009 is vastly improved over Version 1970, albeit still riddled with bugs however.

One thing that doesn't appear to have got better is the quality of "entertainment" we are subjected to on the myriad tv channels that now govern our lives. This is most apparent (to me at least) on Saturday evenings.
If you're around the 40 mark like myself, then I'd imagine your Saturdays were spent in a similar fashion to my own. You'd have dinner somewhere around 6 o'clock, and then the whole family would sit down to watch that evening's shows.
For me, and indeed everyone in my house from what I remember, this culminated in what I consider to be one of the funniest and most entertaining tv shows ever made 'It's A Knockout'.

It was a perfect storm tv moment. Britain was ready for town vs town comedic rivalry and Stuart Hall had the most infectious laugh known to mankind. It ran from 1966 to 1982, an offshoot of the show 'Jeux Sans Frontières' which brought the nations of Europe together in friendly combat in 1965.
We never missed either show in my household when I was a kid, and even my father, Mr Bah Humbug himself, used to cackle with laughter at it. Genius.

It would never work nowadays however, which is a real shame. We're now too fixated on identi-kit "popstars" and Z list celebrities dancing or eating Rhino beetles to enjoy friendly competition for its own sake rather than for a reward.

More's the pity.

I feel the need . . . for speed

I'd like to ask a question:

Have you, or anyone you know, ever had a speeding fine from an Average Speed Camera?

I only ask because my 40 mile commute to work has a stretch of some 14 miles of the buggers and they're going to be there until September 2011!
It's sending my stress levels through the roof, sitting at a constant 40mph, eyes focused on the speedo, occasionally glancing at the road ahead, pulling out to overtake a car moving a 1/2mph slower than you, when the thought struck me:

I know no one who has ever had a ticket from these cameras, myself included.
The day they "went live" I hadn't heard the announcement on the radio and careered into the 40mph zone with my usual mix of 70mph+ abandon. This was now some weeks ago and, touch wood, no speeding ticket.

If it turns out that there is no one manning the cameras, or indeed no cameras in the boxes at all, then I'd actually have some respect for the authorities in charge of said cameras. Having said that, the temptation to take the numberplate off of my motorbike and scream through the 40 zone at 150+ is becoming harder to resist!

(For any members of the law enforcement community, this is clearly meant in jest . . . honest.)

Sonic Boom Boy

I don't know whether to call Wing Commander Andy Green a hero or a fool.

He's either one or the other, or perhaps both.
He's already the fastest man on earth at an official 763.035 mph (or Mach 1.016 which sounds much cooler), a speed he set in Thrust SSC back in 1997. He also holds the world Diesel speed record at 350.092mph, set in the JCB DieselMax in 2006. You'd think this would be enough for any Boy's Own hero . . .

. . . but you'd be wrong.

In three years time, Andy Green hopes to be the first man to drive a car at over 1000mph in his spiky new car, Bloodhound SSC.

Like any red bloodied young man, I was fascinated by the world land speed record from an early age, mostly thanks to Top Trumps it must be said. I remember, as a geeky 13yr old, Britain's Richard Noble in his car Thrust2 bringing the record home "for Britain and for the hell of it!" with a speed of 650mph. I remember being glued to the tv, my father snoring in the background, my dinner uneaten on the table, as John Craven showed Thrust2 screaming across Black Rock Desert in the USA, a huge plume of dust billowing behind it.

Fast forward to 1997, and I sat glued to a computer monitor at the Motorola factory where I worked at the time, surfing this new 'interweb' thing, desperate for any info on the rumoured sonic boom from Thrust SSC.

It's no surprise therefore, that I'm now completely hooked on the new challenge that awaits Wing Commander Green, so much so that I've paid my £10 to have my name on the side of the car when it makes its attempt in a few years time. Oh yes, got my certificate and everything!

Andy Green, the hopes and prayers of geeks, nerds and engineering students the world over, rest on your shoulders. Godspeed, my friend.


PS - Just in case you forgot what he gets up to in his spare time . . .