Stalingrad. It may well get a good write-up at IMDB. It might even be a good film, it might live up to “Excellent” and “A Masterpiece” on the cover. But this DVD has a HUGE fault similar to ‘Tell No-one”. That one was in French with English subtitles. I really don’t like subtitles for most films but a thriller? It’s still unwatched. But I see Stalingrad, see that good places gave it good reviews so I buy it. And it’s dubbed. If I don’t like subtitles then I really really don’t like dubbed films. It’s like watching something that is not only ever so slightly out of sync but also where the lip movements are different. And the accents are ridiculous. But does it say ‘dubbed’ on the box? Hell no - they want to sell it and they assume, probably rightly, that putting those 6 letters on a box will kill the sales.
Yesterday I mended the punctures so P and I went for a 2 hour bike ride around a couple of villages. Lots of ups and downs and we planned it with drinks breaks at a couple of shops. Really enjoyable. She mentioned the GPS when we were out and she agreed to see what we could do today.
I checked out geocaching.com and sent a few to the Garmin, played with the unit so I had more of a clue as it’s been a while since I used it and then checked out the site for the 3 caches in the village. P read the descriptions too then off we went. To Russia, with love was first. Rated easy and after about 45 mins we gave up. Although we’d both read some of the clues we hadn’t read them properly so we were actually looking for the wrong thing. I was thinking Russia / Bond / Fleming. Wrong. So off we went to Ratae corieltavorvm . This was up at the very rich end of the village. Expensive cars, big houses, manicured lawns and in one case gaudy fountains either side of a gated entrance. The path we needed wasn’t marked as we headed out but we got it on the way back. A wander through a field and bingo - our first cache.
We hadn’t really known what to expect but this one had everything. Several small items, a laminated guideline card, the notebook. We hadn’t taken anything with us to we took nothing. P complete the notebook and I put the box back. Pleased we both were. We then went to try for Thomas’s Legacy. We have lived in this village for 19 years and we had not the slightest clue. We sat at the start point for a while then decided to go back to the first one. This time I said the clues out loud so I concentrated better and actually read the gravestones. 2 minutes later I called P over and she discovered the second cache. Micro-size - a 35mm film canister. Notepages and a 20p coin. Notes left - as was coin - and we called it a day and came home. Some googling and thinking later we headed out again for the local park to try the Legacy again. The cache is rated as difficult which I assume is for the clue and the location and despite going to and fro along the track we found nothing. As I type P is on the computer trying to dig more clues out. But knowing it is meant to be hard is not so bad.
There is a choice of 3 for the next discoveries, all with cycling distance for P. Really good fun doing it though, even if it was just a couple found.
http:// www. tomcruise. com/
In the ‘Biography’ there is no mention of the Cult of scientology. Why ? Is he ashamed? Why would one of the top guys in the Cult not want to proclaim how wonderful it was and that people should sign up to the Cult of Scientology and give them all their money for lessons about whatever crap it is.
It also has autoplay music which puts it firmly in the same league as Myspace.
It also has flash
It also has frames
It degrades terribly.
Check the Source and the keywords.
Check the link at the bottom which says “Unsubscribe”. I didn’t know I had subscribed in the first place. Maybe I should give him by email just in case?
So it looks like crap and it’s about crap too. But you want to know what makes it totally the pits? It also has his smiling f*****g face.
Scientology
P has just finished a week of SAT’s so had the time to come for a walk earlier with Winston. Chatted about a variety of things - including Scrubs - and also found great place for some pics. Some huge boulder sized stones which she sat on and I fired away. They are good but not as good as I would have liked - tremor and lighting being the problems. So as this weekend we’ll do it again in the time before sunset. I also agreed to watch some TV later (rare event - I usually work past her (late) bedtime. Bedtime? Wrong word - she goes bed when she is tired. Never have seen the point in a ‘bedtime’. Why send someone to bed to go to sleep when it’s plain they are not tired? Pointless. That said, the deal is they get up and go school regardless. That works.)
I loved Cheers. It formed an essential part of my learning the art of sarcasm (Rebecca could never pull it off as effectively as Diane) and it was the only US comedy that I actually found funny. Not just amusing but actually LOL. According to wikipedia there were 269 episodes and I’d love to see them all again. Other US comedies I just didn’t get. Some lines seemed so forced you could tell the huge writing team had sweated for it and just to be really sure the audience knew how hard they worked they threw a laughter track at it. I would talk about how John Cleese and Connie Booth wrote Fawlty Towers, or Curtis / Atkinson / Elton who brought us Blackadder. 5 people, two extremely successful series. And then came the one I hate with a passion.
We have all seasons of it and if DVD’s could be worn out these would have been. P has seen them so many times I swear I could give her a line of dialogue and she could tell me which episode, which character, what happened just before / after and a precis of the full episode. I absolutely hate Friends. From the first bars of the opening track - which I used to like before it was hijacked - to the last credit I abhor everything in between. It’s just plain horrible. I fail to see how anyone can find it even amusing. Scripted and scripted again. The ‘perfect’ people in it with the perfect this that and the other. It’s all so freaking (the new family-friendly swear word here. I still prefer the alternative - it has passion. While we were out I said to P that my boots were pretty cool now I’d worn them in. Apparently it is sooo old to say ‘cool’ now. I checked on ‘awesome’ and that was ruled out. The phrase in vogue right now is ‘hip-hop fresh’. I tried but that just does not trip off the tongue. Seems so wrong. While I’m on the subject, I played Advance Wars on the Nintendo DS. Was it about a year ago that ‘word’ was the .. word .. for something? Or two years? I never got that one. But that is used in Advance Wars - which instantly both dates the game and makes it clear the demographic they were aiming at. Bad move.) predictable. There is nothing interesting happens and the love thing? Crap - that’s like those coffee ads we had here. If Friends had been so short maybe it would have had more depth. Given the choice between replying to support tickets that would take twice as long or sit through one episode of Friends I’ll take the tickets every single time.
So when the girls started watching Scrubs I was dubious. We bought the Season sets and when we did they would both sit through them laughing constantly. But as I’m moving past the TV I catch the odd line, see something happen and I would laugh. I’d even stop and watch a few minutes. Not bad for the first US comedy since Cheers. So while out with Winston P finally got me to agree to watch Scrubs from the very start. Work felt good today so I stopped at 10 (or maybe 11, I forget) and we watched the first DVD (of 4) of season 1. Excellent. Very funny but not stupidly so. It didn’t feel so over-scripted and false and contrived as Friends. It had no laughter track (a ‘live TV audience’ is still a laughter track). I didn’t look at the credits and I don’t actually care if more people wrote it because the overall package that is Scrubs is really good. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve probably seen a lot of bits of lots of episodes so I’ll now be able to flesh them out. I think P is looking for a DVD a day. Which probably wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Because (1) I got into a mixup with someone about a hotmail account which did / did not work and (2) because I could I changed my IM details. so AIM / Y! are m69105, MSN is m69105@live.com, Jabber is m69105@jabber.ambrero.nl. Skype and GTalk are the same. Twitter is now 69105, Friendfeed is 69105 and socialthing stays as it was. I think these are (were) the last ‘podz’ ones and this brings everything slightly closer. A real mix of names was annoying.
Being just a number isn’t so bad :)
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The Archbishop of Westminster has urged Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with “deep esteem”.
So far so good.
The leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales said that a “hidden God” was active in everyone’s life.
Err, no.
“I want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe.” BBC
So he wants the believers to not actually respect us atheists, but to instead just think to themselves that actually really we do have God and we just don’t know it and he’ll look after us etc etc. That’s garbage.
You either respect someone or you do not.
Pretending to respect is ….. I worked with several people who would say “If I don’t say it you you then I won’t say it at all” and they were without exception that nastiest bitchiest people. So they would appear to respect, appear to be nice but all along they had different ideas. How is this behaviour different to what that idiot Murphy-O’Connor is telling others to do?
And what’s this “without faith” about? What he means is without the faith he has. Given the garbage he preaches I’d be surprised if there are any that do agree with him but that statement excludes other faiths. The Church being divisive ? Never..
If she goes into hospital then the Neurologist will see her, as will the MS Nurse, as will the Physiotherapist as will an Occupational Therapist. If she does not, appts far into the future will be made.
J doesn’t want to go because in the end there is no point. Cannabis would apparently help the pain in her legs but nothing that could be prescribed. The Consultant will just makes notes for his own benefit and MS Nurses seem have a good line in “there there”. The OT we do have hasn’t even asked about using a pen or cutlery which is an actual issue and the hospital OT would defer to the “one who knows you best”. And going in means no TV, no familiar home, no internet, a different bed, people poking with needles, being used as a specimen by some. All not good, all experienced before.
But if you don’t go to hospital you cannot be ill. Screwed either way really. Which is really really annoying.
She’s fed up of the relapse which the steroids haven’t shifted at all, she’s fed up of seeing me doing all the house stuff (which I don’t mind) and she’s fed up of the MS. Like you would be.
We all live in a bubble of some sort. We like to think we have rich, varied and exciting lives but in the end it’s all just more of the same each day / week / month. “Same shit, different day”. But sometimes events happen that make you step back and see your life for what it is, who you know, where you go, why you do things. You see your life more dispassionately for short time - your bubble burst. And despite thoughts and ideas about change and improvement things drop back into the regular pattern soon enough. A relapse bursts the bubble here.
Nothing can be done of course but for me at least I want to get the bubble back because thinking about what could / should have been or be isn’t such a great path to go down. J feels the same but she takes the blame even though there is no blame. There are things we haven’t talked about which will happen in the future. We haven’t talked about them because we adapt, we make our bubble suit us - no different to other people. But when it bursts those issues come really close to being talked about and yet that is the time you really shouldn’t be talking about future negatives. And when it goes back to what passes as normal we will ignore that monster in the corner.
Time from passing driving test to needing £250 to mend the car - 2 weeks. Not me - I have yet to motivate myself to learn a set of skills I actually don’t care for - but D. Third time lucky and she got the license. Which was useful because she had bought the car before the first fail.
So now I really do have to hope she’s okay, safe and all the other things a parent wants. We can’t be there - we can’t even know if she has no credit on her mobile - and it’s a weird feeling as you look out the window and see your own daughter piloting a car out of the drive and heading off. I’m the world’s worst passenger but even so I wanted to be there to say Slow down, look at the road not the stereo, be careful. But you can’t can you?
It’s the last step to leaving home. Nothing now stops her. I mean, apart from food, heating, cash, laundry and no other costs there really is nothing keeping her here :) If all goes to plan she’ll be off to Uni in 3 months. So if I think driving feels weird I imagine seeing her go off to Uni is going to feel a whole world of different.
I moved blogs and drDave is doing something sort of similar. He says he has a blog elsewhere which we can’t find and that may well be the case but it will still be shared with people I assume. But what if you had a blog that was not connected to you at all. It could be a domain with private whois details, it could be a blog at wordpress.com. Would you say what you think, what you really think? We all self-censor be that in how we write or if we write at all so if you had a place where you could throw all those thoughts out would you? The fact that others may come across your words isn’t really the point because they do not know it’s you. So you got a disposable email address and set up a blog. There is absolutely nothing connecting you to the blog. No-one shares your computer so there is no sharing data there. Would you be honest? Really honest? Would it be useful in a cathartic way? If yes, why haven’t you done it?
So apparently http:// tomcruise . com is going to arrive soon according to several sites. Hmm.
Anonymous asked people to use the words ‘dangerous cult’ and to link them to the scientology site. That Google bomb worked. Neat. True too. http://xenu.net ask that you link to them using that link but the word scientology which is also good. But the (silent! You must keep quiet!) birth of Tom “don’t call me toothy” Cruise’s site means the google bombing can start again. Thing is, what word to choose? Be interesting to see what Anonymous choose and indeed to link from here too - every link counts.