Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

Celebratory day out in London

Posted on in Books, Doctor Who, My Life.

Today was the 10th anniversary of my first date with Lettice. Back in 1999 we went to see The Matrix in Streatham. Today we had an adventure to celebrate.

Robot Grasshopper from the Robot Zoo

First up was the Robot Zoo at the Horniman Museum. Did you know that it took three people to drive a chameleon?

Then we did a bit of shopping. Lettice bought beads and I bought Doctor Who books.(About Time 3 2nd edition is 500 pages long and has an end note about the Chuckle Brothers, how can you not want it?)

If you missed James May’s plasticine garden at Chelsea you can now see it at the Royal Festival Hall.

Then we went on the London Eye. Yes, we live in London. Yes, we work in London tourism. Yes, it’s been open for nine years. No, we hadn’t been on it before.

Then there was yarn shopping. Followed by Yo! Sushi (between you and me, the County Hall branch is always nice and quiet in the evenings and only a short walk from the heaving, 45 minute wait to be seated, restaurants along the Southbank).

Anyway, I’ll do a proper image post either tomorrow or on Monday, in the meantime there are pictures on Flickr.

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Desert Island Discs

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Music, My Life, Work.

At work, we’ve been doing Desert Island Discs and this week is my turn. I’ll be buggered if I’m writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.

I win. No seriously, I win this game because I have had a theme tune written for me. Well, technically it was written for my blog, oh okay, it was inspired by the name of my blog. What? This isn’t a contest and I can’t win? Oh. Sorry.

According to my mother my first musical experience was dancing (or being danced, as I was baby at the time) round the room to T Rex. Was I too young to be influenced by this? Or did it somehow generate an interest in dinosaurs rather than glam rock? Lucky escape.

Adam and the Ants – Stand and Deliver

I was torn between a classic Ants track or something from his later albums. In the end memories of Saturday morning’s spent watching this video on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop won the day (but if you’ve only heard his old material check out the 1995 album “Wonderful”).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPgHbt0ODr4

Drill Queen – Born Depressed

Justin is an information architect with whom I worked on several projects; he also played guitar for Drill Queen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRrq6zp2_M8

Traveling Wilburys – Tweeter and the Monkey Man

Just about the only bits of vinyl from my dad’s music collection that I copied to tape, and one of the few bands that Lettice and I both love. It looks like the record label have been at YouTube so we’re lucky to find this animation:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cb4t_tweeter-and-the-monkey-man_creation

Moxy Früvous – My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors

Moxy Früvous were a cool, funny, somewhat cheesey Canadian band who I was introduced to via two friends at university. If you saw the groaning bookshelves in our flat you’d know why this song always makes me smile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9F_XHb81N0

Cerys Matthews – Oxygen

I can’t sing. I really can’t sing. Neither can my brother, though as churchgoer he makes up with gusto for what he lacks in aptitude. Clearly we got our singing genes from the English or Swedish parts of our family not the Welsh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPqaPHTlhdg

Pulp – Mis-shapes

The end of the summer of 1995. On the news it’s Blur vs Oasis. But, before Blair, there was a much better third way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7rxAeF1wmQ

Aziza Mustafa Zadeh – Ay Dilber
Stiff Little Fingers – Tin Soldiers

Hands up who wanted (or even expected) to hear some Azerbaijani Jazz today? Well, you’re out of luck as I can’t find it anywhere on the web. So have some classic punk instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl5V26oXHUI

Tanita Tikaram – And I Think Of You

The reason I’m here. Sort of. I created my first home page in 1995 (personal home pages, remember them? Like Facebook profiles but you had to do all the work yourself) and wanted to do a bit more. So looking around the nascent web for the various artists I liked I spotted that Tanita didn’t have any fan pages dedicated to her. The resulting site helped to get me my first job at a web design agency.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9bphQpCLNA

Book

Assuming I’m going to be here for a while then I want something fairly long. An old favourite or something I’ve never gotten around to? I think I’ll go for the latter and take Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography to remind myself of home.

Luxury Item

A brewing kit. Let’s see which of the fruit on the island makes the best booze.

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Star Trek

Posted on in Films.

The new Star Trek film rocks.

Everything that mattered was right, and many of the things that didn’t matter as well (they even did the sideburns).

However, I have a problem with Scotty, it’s quite simply that Simon Pegg + scottish accent = Wee Hughie from The Boys and that brings to mind all sorts of very strange crossovers.

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Quiz like it’s 1997

Posted on in Books, Films, Games, Music, My Life, Science, Sport, The World, TV.

So I found this file, last modified 10 June 1997, on a set of back ups and it’s a pub quiz that I ran in Balliol bar. In fact considering the date I suspect that this is the night that Lettice first clapped eyes on me and thought “nice guy, shame about the jumper”.

People on Facebook and Twitter said that they wanted to see the quiz, so here goes.

Read the rest of this very true thing…

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K-9

Posted on in Doctor Who.

I’ve just watched The Invisible Enemy for the first time. This is the story that added K-9 to Doctor Who and the tin dog comes across really well in his debut. The plot is as nonsensical as every review I’ve ever read says it is. There are some good ideas in there, Leela is great, the design and effects work – with the exception of the infamous prawn – are excellent. But the plot is all over the place and the technobabble is unconvincing not so much because a lack of basic science as a lack of basic common sense.

So next DVD to watch will be K-9 and Company for the first time since 1981…

Meanwhile. This is a teaser for the forthcoming K-9 series:

Oh dear.

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Pass the hydrospanner Chewie

Posted on in Films.

Earlier today, for reasons best known to herself, linked to the Wikipedia page on Allen Keys. In the sidebar they have diagrams of various shapes of screw head. One of them is the Bristol head:

Bristol

Remind you of anything? How about The Empire (from Star Wars for the culturally ignorant…):

Empire
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2008 Books

Posted on in Books, Doctor Who, My Life, RPGs.

Well, here’s what I’ve been reading this year. I said there was a lot of graphic novels.

Over on the LiveJournal version of this blog you can fill in a poll to show which of these you’ve read as well (not necessarily in 2008). I understand that you can use OpenID to log into LJ rather than creating an account there but I’ve never tested it myself.

Non-Fiction

  • A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich
  • Counterknowledge by Damian Thompson
  • Dry Store Room No. 1 by Richard Fortey
  • JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
  • jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz
  • Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich
  • Stand and Deliver: The Autobiography by Adam Ant
  • The Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey
  • The Economic Naturalist by Robert H. Frank
  • The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Fiction

  • A Spectacle of Corruption by David Liss
  • Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell
  • Flashman’s Lady by George MacDonald Fraser
  • Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
  • Making Money by Terry Pratchett
  • Matter by Iain M. Banks
  • Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell
  • The Coffee Trader by David Liss
  • The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde

Graphic Novels

  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: No Future For You
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Wolves at the Gate
  • Black Orchid by Neil Gaiman
  • From Hell by Alan Moore
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore
  • John Constantine Hellblazer: Bloodlines by Garth Ennis
  • John Constantine Hellblazer: Family Man by Jamie Delano
  • John Constantine Hellblazer: Fear Machine by Jamie Delano
  • John Constantine Hellblazer: Joyride by Andy Diggle
  • John Constantine Hellblazer: The Laughing Magician by Andy Diggle
  • Lucifer: Inferno by Mike Carey
  • Lucifer: Mansions of the Silence by M Carey
  • Planet Hulk Omnibus by Greg Pak
  • World War Hulk by Greg Pak
  • Serenity: Better Days by Joss Whedon
  • Ultimate X-Men :Ultimate Collection Book 2 by Mark Millar

Doctor Who

  • Ahistory by Lance Parkin
  • About Time 6 by Tat Wood
  • Doctor Who: Bullet Time by David A. McIntee
  • Doctor Who: Business Unusual by Gary Russell
  • Doctor Who: Companion Piece by Mike Tucker
  • Doctor Who: Emotional Chemistry by Justin Richards
  • Doctor Who: Endgame by Terrance Dicks
  • Doctor Who: Festival of Death by Jonathan Morris
  • Doctor Who: Grave Matter by Justin Richards
  • Doctor Who: Halflife by Mark Michalowski
  • Doctor Who: Sometime Never… by Simon A. Forward
  • Doctor Who: The World Shapers by Grant Morrison
  • Faction Paradox: This Town Will Never Let Us Go by Lawrence Miles

Odds and Ends

  • Star Wars: Dark Empire II by Tom Veitch
  • Star Wars: Vector Prime by R.A. Salvatore
  • Star Wars: Dark Tide 1 – Onslaught by Michael A. Stackpole
  • Star Wars: Dark Tide 2 – Ruin by Michael A. Stackpole
  • A Magical Society: Ecology & Culture
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Shark Jumping

Posted on in TV.

There are only a few things that and I disagree on, but one of them is the concept of jumping the shark. Lettice believes that it is a binary event – a show can only jump the shark once; there’s a before and there’s an after. I believe that it is always possible to find a new and bigger shark to jump over.

This disagreement normally surfaces whilst we’re watching or discussing CSI: Miami.

Tonight’s episode. In fact the pre-titles sequence of tonight’s episode is a perfect example of my thesis.

I’m not going to put a spoiler cut for CSI: Miami, okay?

Horatio gunned down seven gangsters – several armed with automatic weapons, three in or on vehicles – armed only with a pistol without getting a scratch on him; in fact it was nine shots, seven kills. Now, considering that this show jumped the shark a long time ago (Lettice maintains that it jumped, before a single episode had aired, as soon as David Caruso was cast) was this not a new and bigger shark to jump? Will there be a scene next year where Horatio takes out a tank or a helicopter gunship with his trusty sidearm?

Star Trek

Posted on in Films.

Seen the pics from the new Star Trek film yet? Spoilers ahoy ‘cos here are the treknical ones…

USS Enterprise

Hands up who thinks that this ship looks like it should be an intermediate stage between the movie-era Enterprise and the Ambassador class? I can hear the fanboys screaming…

USS Kelvin

So this is the USS Kelvin, destroyed some time before the main timeframe of the movie. NCC-0514. Hmm, I want to see more. And, on the really pedantic level, how does this fit into the same registry scheme that includes the NCC-638 USS Grissom form ST III?

And has it really been four years since I updated my Star Trek ships web site? Ouch.

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Talk (a lot) like a Judoon

Posted on in Blogs, Doctor Who, Memes, My Life.
Judoon

It’s November so some brave souls are embarking upon this year’s NoNoWriMo. Good luck to you if you’re one of them.

I’m in no way dedicated enough to try an entire novel in one month, but I do want to write more so I’m declaring November to be my NaBloPoMo – I will be endeavouring to post at least once a day for the next 30 days.

“Na No Wri Mo Na Blo Po Mo” – I think I know how RTD comes up with Judoon dialogue.