TV and Cinema – Page 18

Satellite Archeology

I would have called this ‘Satellite of Love’, but Dr Alice Roberts wasn’t at the dig 🙂

The ABC (sorry, as of last week it’s ABC 1) is currently playing repeats of Time Team on Tuesday nights, and tonight it was the Castle Howard episode. So I was watching, and decided to have a look at the place on Google Earth. I head to Yorkshire, and do a search which takes me right there. I zoom in to have a look at the walled garden they’re digging in….. Are those trenches!?

Yep! A big trench right across the walled garden!

So I zoom out to the west lawn. More trenches!

Has the Google satellite captured Time Team at work?

It sure looks like it! 😀

Now I won’t swear it’s actually the Time Team dig. But the trenches are in the right places, and seem to be the right shape. In fact (given that the trenches in the walled garden have been extended, but there are none on the north lawn) I’d be willing to date the photographs to the morning of day three. There’s a bit of a mystery in that one of the trenches (trench 2?) is missing from the west lawn, but possibly they closed it and replaced the turf before opening up the north lawn.

So yeah, how about that then?

(The location is 54° 7’14.46″ N 0°54’34.09″ W for those who want to take a look)

Big day tomorrow!

What Sean Did Next

ZARDOZ!! ZARDOZ!!

So, you’re a world famous actor playing a world famous character in a series of successful films, but you’re getting bored. So what do you do? Obviously the logical thing to do is quit, then star in a movie where you get to run around in a red nappy (with suspenders) shooting things, while a giant, floating, stone head yells about how a certain part of the male anatomy is evil…

Zardoz!

That’s footage from the 1974 masterpiece of insanity Zardoz, staring Sean Double-O-Seven Connory in his first major role after leaving the James Bond franchise. And giant stone heads vomiting guns isn’t even the half of it – you should see the theatrical trailer. It’s like three minutes of the worst drug trip you’ll ever have. How such a bizzare monstrosity ever made it onto the screen I’ll never know – unless it had something to do with the “star power” of Mr Connory combined with the incredible amounts of acid everyone was doing back then.

It’s too hot today.

Are they still talking gospel to the people? If so, their voices must sound strange…

The Wyrmworld plan for large scale, distributed Civil Defence.

Jericho is turning out to be not bad at all. A bit overwrought at times, but all in all an enjoyable watch. The one weird thing though is as much as I enjoy watching it, it always leaves me feeling all wound up and anxious in the pit of my stomach.

I put this down to my being a child of the 80’s. Back then we were all living under the threat of the bomb. Every moment of every day we knew in the back of our minds that without warning some idiot in Washington or the Kremlin could hit the button and incinerate us all over some stupid point of political ideology. It was there all the time, much like the threat of terrorism today but worse because while a terrorist attack can kill hundreds, nuclear war would kill everyone. So I reckon Jericho freaks me out on some deep level because it’s the stuff of my generation’s childhood nightmares.

I’m still going to watch it though 🙂

Next week is the fourth episode. The adds are terribly cryptic as usual, but I strongly suspect that a wave of desperate refugees from Denver is about to descend on the town, and drama shall ensue. This supposition has got me thinking about how a society could actually cope with people abandoning the big population centers and descending on small towns, and I’ve come up with some novel ideas that I shall now inflict on the world in general 🙂

(On a side note we’re seeing each episode of Jericho only a few hours after it premieres in the States, which makes a fantastic change. The usual lag for American TV is six months to two years. I suspect someone in Hollywood has finally twigged that the best way to prevent torrent piracy isn’t legal action, it’s giving international audiences the ability to see the shows legally without having to wait for ‘ing months).

So, here’s my idea. You put legislation in place (in peacetime so people have the time to get used to it and make preparations) that in a time of emergency every settlement of more than 100 people is legally required to take in refugees equal to 5% of the population (you also provide government funding to help towns get the necessary facilities in place – extra hospital beds, emergency shelters and food supplies, etc). Jericho for example is a town of about 5000 people, so in an emergency it would be legally required to take in 250 refugees. Once those refugees have been taken in the settlement is perfectly within its rights to tell everyone else to move on, and can enforce that right by any means necessary.

Who gets accepted as a refugee is based on a priority system. The highest priority are the critically injured, the chronically ill, the elderly (let’s say over 65), and children under 16 and their parents/guardians. The first 250 (since we’re continuing to use Jericho as an example) of those people to turn up in town are taken in. The rest are given cursory medical treatment, some water, and told to keep on down the road to the next settlement.

To help the settlements taking in refugees cope, there would be a special provision for medical staff, military and emergency services personnel – 10% of the refugee intake can be allocated to these people at the town’s discretion. So Jericho could take 25 firefighters, cops or paramedics (if they’re available) in place of 25 higher priority refugees.

The diaspora from the city would spread out across the countryside with the weakest finding help and shelter almost immediately, and those able to go further going further. The majority of people would end up somewhere safe and have their needs met, and no settlement would be crushed under the pressure.

Now all of this probably sounds pretty harsh, but it’s meant to be. The situation portrayed in Jericho is harsh – a small town about to be swamped by thousands of desperate people seeking food, water, shelter and medical assistance. Incredibly hard decisions would have to be made and then enforced if anyone were to survive. The idea of the laws described above is to take those awful, inhuman decisions away from the townsfolk, give them a clear framework to work with, and provide the right to defend their home and themselves against the desperate hordes that would otherwise destroy them. It would also give the refugees a clear idea of what to expect, reducing some of the panic and violence that might otherwise ensue.

So yeah, that’s my plan for large scale, distributed Civil Defence. Not bad eh? ;D

I’m out of food, so I’m going to go shopping now.

PS: You may well be wondering what any of this has to do with “talking gospel”. Well, absolutely nothing! I just woke up with that phrase in my head the other morning and thought it was too good to waste. I have vague impression it’s got something to do with Al Jolson in minstrel makeup riding up and down a beach on a jet ski yelling at people, but any deeper significance is forever lost in the world of dreams 🙂

PPS: What!? Wikipedia is down! But it’s the source of all human knowledge!! How can I be sure that my links about Al Jolson and racist entertainment practises of the early 20th century are correct?!?

Malaise

A vague and unfocused update about being vague and unfocused

You know I seem to be having a bad few weeks – feeling all tired and run down, and distinctly stressed out and anti-social. At least part of this is due to figuring out a new work shedule that fits 70 hours into nine days, which is trickier than it sounds (particularly when you’re feeling tired and stressed out and simply don’t want to go in in the mornings). But I’m sure I’ll get it sorted out eventually.

This general malaise is why the blog hasn’t seen many updates lately – I can’t seem to find the energy to do much except sit around watching DVDs. On a whim (well, basically because Amazon recommended it – I’m letting computers choose my viewing now, great) I purchased the first season of Dead Like Me. It’s a curious beast, rather hard to get into at first. I seem to recall that Ali didn’t like it at all, and I can see why – it took me until about the fifth episode to even start liking the characters. But past that point it’s actually rather good, in a very weird and messed up way. I’ve got two episodes left which I may or may not get around to watching this afternoon. I’ll have to wait and see if I feel like buying the next season.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of podcasts. Well, three really. Hack (current affairs) and Sunday Night Safran (interminable bickering) from Triple J, and the incredibly geeky role-playing oriented Dragon’s Landing, which Ryan got me into. Ryan’s actually quite keen to set up his own podcast and keeps trying to to recruit me to the concept. I would actually be very enthusiastic about this except for the fact that we have no idea for a subject and absolutely nothing thing to say. We could easily set up a weekly podcast but it would just be us sitting around going “um… uh… well what about… err….” for forty five minutes, and I’m sure there’s more than enough podcasts like that out there already.

Oh yeah, I’ve also done something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and started on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. I’ve read Dream Country, Season of Mists and A Game of You so far, and will probably power through the rest as soon as I can get my hands on them because they’re really very much like mythologically-inclined-geek crack cocaine. At the same time I’m also halfway through American Gods, which is making things slightly confusing because characters and situations from one keep leaking across to the other in my head (I keep wondering when Shadow is going to run into Morpheus).

(Oh, did I ever mention that I read Neverwhere late last year? I meant to, because it’s one of the best books I’ve ever come across 🙂

In spite of all this reading and DVD watching I have managed to do a few things, which I was intending to write about, but now find myself without the energy to. I’ve also got to get the washing and ironing done so I have something to wear to work tomorrow. So I guess I’ll break off now then. I will endeavour to write about the other subjects later this week but suffice to say they involve such wonders as footwear, dragons, con-men, ewoks, mysterious disapearances and Leonardo da Vinci (figuring that out should keep you occupied for a while!).

I could be bound by a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space were it not that I dream of toasters…

Indulging in some Shakespearean/Sci-Fi celebrity spotting.

Just remembered – Over the weekend I happened to catch some of a documentary series on Shakespeare. Very interesting stuff (for a tragic history nerd such as myself) but what really grabbed my attention was a few scenes featuring a troupe of actors entertaining the tourist crowds at Stratford on Avon. They were doing a A Midsummer Night’s Dream, playing it totally for laughs (which of course is how it would have been played originally) but – here’s the thing – I swear to God one of the actors was Gaius Baltar!*Or more properly James Callis. I suppose it makes sense – he’s British after all and presumably had to start acting somewhere, but it was still quite unexpected, and had me peering at the screen going “It’s not! Is it? It can’t be! It is! No it’s not! It has to be!” and so on for a good five minutes at least.

Oh, and in news from the Missing Racists department the police now believe Jack van Tongaran is on the run, rather than dead. Apparently he decided to make a break for it (allegedly) because he figured having to report in to the local police station every few days was part of a police plot to murder him (allegedly). There’s a nationwide alert out, so hopefully he and his also missing associate will be caught sooner rather than later. Last thing we need is white supremacists with paranoid delusions (allegedly) running around the place.

Yes, well…

The frequency of my blog entries getting back to normal eh? So much for that idea 🙂

There’s been a lot of stuff to get done at work before I finish up, and there’s still a lot of stuff to be organised for the trip, and as a result I’ve been busy as all get out. And as a result of that I’ve been too tired to do much in the evenings except throw something in the microwave and collapse in front of the TV (and an unremitting diet of microwave dinners is probably not helping anyway). So keeping up with blog entries has sort of fallen by the wayside. But they should pick up sooner or later – maybe 🙂

A few quick notes on things though.

Justin and Marika

I caught up with Justin and Marika last week. We went out to dinner at Kailis Brothers in Leederville (where I had a very nice salt and pepper squid) and then walked up to the Luna to see some film I’d never heard of but which Justin and Marika said was a documentary about a family who’s house was stormed by the police and FBI in the middle of their thanksgiving dinner – sort of a social justice/abuse of power by the authorities type thing. In actual fact it turned out that the police and FBI stormed the place because the father of said family was a paedophile trading in child porn, which was frankly not what I’d been lead to expect. But it was interesting anyway, in a somewhat unsettling way. I’ll probably have more to say on it later.

Oh and it turned out that the reason Justin and Marika didn’t turn up to my birthday dinner back in February/March was because they’d just found out Marika was pregnant – and were in severe shock at the time. They’re extremely happy about it now, so congratulations guys!

The Charmed Season Finale

Gideon is dead. Good. You do have to wonder where Leo picked up the ability to shoot lightning bolts from his hands Emperor Palpetine style though. And since when was Chris telekinetic? They did a very good job in the adds of suggesting that Piper was going to die (not that I figured she’d stay dead of course, name one Halliwell sister who hasn’t been dead at some point or other) but in the end it turned out that they killed off Chris, which is fair enough because the entire temporal paradox of his very existance was rapidly becoming an embarrasment. Ummm what else? Oh yes, Barbus. It’s good to see him back. Every TV show needs a demon of fear who looks like a cross between David Bowie and Tom Waites and speaks with a Tennassee accent (Tennasse? I dunno, somewhere like that). And his turn as the Demon of Hope in the mirror universe was hilarious. Actually speaking of the mirror universe it was nice to see that they kept to the convention of the guys all having pointy little beards and the girls done up as goths – just so we could tell who was who 🙂

(Oh yeah, normally I’d regard Rose McGowan done up as a goth as a dream come true, but they went way overboard with the hair – it looked like she was wearing three wigs on top of each other – so no dice 🙂

Ummm, sure there was some other stuff I was going to write about, but I’d better get on with some real work (I’m in the office early again today) . So, farewell until I get myself together enough to write again, which could be sometime in November at this rate 🙂

The Pornographers were ripped off!!!

I had a rather weird dream last night. It was an episode of a new sitcom about a bunch of people taking a university course together (actually I think it might have been the second or third season premiere, since there were some implications of some cast members having left and other new ones joining). It was kind of like that old Head of the Class show, you know the one that featured Billy Connolly for a while? Anyway the weird thing was it had an ensemble cast of characters from other sit-coms. The class was made up of Dr Frasier Crane from Frasier, Phoebe from Friends, Linda from Becker and… well Andy Dick (no matter what he’s in Andy Dick only ever plays one type of character and they’re all completely interchangeable, so we’ll just say Andy Dick). Lisa and Beth from Newsradio and Finch from Just Shoot Me might have been hanging around at the back, I can’t quite remember. In any case the teacher was the guy from According To Jim.

Not a lot happened really. Frasier acted like a pompous ass, Linda and Phoebe got into a prolonged and bewildering conversation about some inane subject, and Andy Dick made some stupid Andy-Dickesque comments about the teacher’s new PDA. Oh, and the teacher accidentally spilled the contents of his bag on the floor, and Frasier leapt from his seat and started picking them up in a blatant attempt at currying favour. But that’s about it. WIERD no? 🙂

I suppose all the Newsradio stuff had to do with a documentary on the archeology of Alexandria I watched before going to bed (one of the Archeologists looked surprisingly like Maura Tierney), and this week’s TV guide has a photo from the last episode of Friends which would account for Phoebe, but the rest is completely beyond me.

Anyway I had a pretty busy week socially (for me that is). On Tuesday night I went to the Sunset Cinemas at King’s Park with Ryan, Justin and Marika. They were playing that French bird film that everyone’s been raving about for the last years or so, so after work I caught the train down to Victoria Park and walked to Justin and Marika’s new place. As usual with Justin we were a bit delayed getting going (we had to make pizzas so as to have something to eat which took a while to cook) but we only missed the first ten minutes or so, so that was OK.

The Sunset Cinemas are held in the open air, you sit on the grass and watch the movie on a big screen held up by scaffolding. It was really good actually, the weather was perfect (although it got a little bit chilly by the end) and the film was amazing. Three bits in particular stuck in my mind, a gaggle of geese wandering around the Arizona desert (on their migration from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, they didn’t just truck geese out to the desert for the shoot – or at least I hope they didn’t), some grebes running across a lake in Oregon (they looked like penguins speeded up five times, it was hilarious!) and a baby snowy owl waddling across the tundra looking like a disgruntled overweight hobbit with a backpack. The pizzas were great, Ryan bought a gigantic heaped platter of grapes (some of which we fed to the ducks while packing up, they couldn’t get enough of them!) and all in all it was a really fun night. I even got a pot plant as a belated Christmas present. It’s a succulent, which is great because it only needs to be watered about once a year which is about as often as I’d remember to 🙂

On Saturday night I headed down to the Red Orchid with Rebecca and Dom, just to catch up. We ended up sitting outside in the little courtyard at the back, which was great because it wasn’t as crowded as out the front, but didn’t have the appalling acoustics of indoors (in order to look cool and trendy the interior has a whole lot of bare concrete and girders, it echoes like crazy). As usual the food was excellent, although the service was a bit sloppy. We were asked for our orders twice, had to ask for a carafe of water twice, and the lemon lime and bitters I ordered with my meal failed to appear until I asked for it again. Oh, and we were offered desert and coffee menus three times, but by that point they may have been trying to get rid of us 🙂

The weird thing is that people kept coming out to sit at the table adjacent to us, then changing their minds and moving indoors. We figured we were doing something to drive them away, although we couldn’t quite figure out what.

So yeah, that was my week socially.

Today of course is the Australia Day/Invasion Day public holiday, depending on how you look at it. There’ll be the big firework display over the river tonight, but I’m not going. To get a decent seat you have to go in at about nine in the morning, and then spend the entire day sitting out in the sun surrounded by even increasing numbers of other bored people, all for fifteen minutes of fireworks choreographed to mindless top 40 tunes which you just know will feature Guy Sebastian. Then you’ve got the hassle of getting home through the thousands of other people all trying to get home. I can do without it frankly.

There was some kind of fireworks display last night as well, to judge by the noise. Either that or an artillery attack of some kind. It was probably over at Gloucester park or something, although I did entertain myself with the thought that the barges for tonight’s show might have caught on fire and the display was going off 24 hours early with no-one to watch it. Haven’t heard anything on the news though, sad to say 🙂

This being Australia Day means that yesterday was of course the Triple J Hottest 100 countdown. All in all it wasn’t too bad, although once again Powderfinger got way more placings than they actually deserve. The New Pornographers didn’t get in at all which annoyed the heck out of me, we could have taken out a few Powderfinger tracks to make room – no one would have missed them!

I would list the top ten here, but Triple J haven’t seen fit to put the results on the website yet. I can say that number one was Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet, and two was Hey Yah by Outkast. The Royskopp (which is not how you spell it I’m sure) remix of Coldplay’s Clocks was at about five, and… um I can’t quite remember the rest. A full update when Triple J does one I promise 🙂

As for the songs I voted for, a big chunk of them failed to get in alltogether. That’s what happens when you limit people to ten songs I guess, stupid policy that it is. Let’s see…

Biftek – Read To Me – Didn’t make it in!
Downsyde – El Questro – Didn’t make it in!
Eels – Dirty Girl – Didn’t make it in!
Electric Six – Gay Bar – Got in at about 26, which is good
Nofx – Franco Un-American – Made it in
Screamfeeder – Ice Patrol – Didn’t make it in
The Herd – 77% – Made it in
The New Pornographers – All For Swinging You Around – Didn’t make it in!
The New Pornographers – The Laws Have Changed – Didn’t make it in either!
The Waifs – Lighthouse – Got in at about 12, yey!!

Of the other four I would really have liked to vote for, they all made it in except for Spencer Tracy. They played the ‘Armageddon’ version of ‘Bomb the World’ I’m happy to report by the way, which is the far superior version of the song. A lot angrier than the normal one. Oh, and two songs I maybe would have voted for if I’d remembered them are Growing on Me by the Darkness, and Man of Constant Sorrows by the Soggy Bottom Boys. Now they rock!

Well that’s that for another year then *g*

Finally I should mention that Wyrmworld has undergone a major revision and re-arrangement. I’m aiming to reformat the entire site over the next few months, lord knows it needs it. Next on the horizon are the Tales of the Geek Underclass, I’ve got a design worked out, it’s just a case of finalising it and converting all the files. *sigh* so much work, so little time.

OK, I’m shutting up now 🙂