Suburban Glamour preview

Jamie McKelvie has issue 4 of Suburban Glamour previewing at his live journal right now.
Looking lovely as ever.

Image is a teaser Jamie did for the series.

Vista …..

I’ve always been a windows user. More out of a default position rather than anything else. The first computer I actually did any work on was at university and that was (I think) a windows 3.1 running word perfect for writing reports – we had 3 in the entire biological sciences department for student use.

The first time I ever really started to use computers, just before I got one of my own was at Lordswood Girls’ in Birmingham – windows 3.1 and then 95. My first machine was a Windows 95 machine. My second a Windows 98 and my third (this one) Windows XP.
(Of course, since then I’ve gone back to Windows 98 through using the 1995 era Libretto.)
And dammit I like XP. It’s stable. It’s easy to use. I’m used to it and it’s comfortable.
I can’t ever see my fourth machine being a Vista though.

In fact, my biggest fear at school right now is that at some point in the future we’re not going to be able to get a machine with windows XP on it.

My four experiences with Vista so far are when people come to me with their problems on their vista machines. And I’ve been reminded of these by a recent Neil Gaiman post where he neatly sums it all up thus:

Sitting in an airport, getting really sick of Windows Vista on a laptop. It doesn’t work — I’m tired of waiting seconds for things to appear on the screen, of taking half a minute or more for something that ought to happen instantly to occur. The poor computer obviously can’t run Vista, and shouldn’t have been Vista certified, and the author isn’t impressed with the way that a number of things that were easy in XP have got harder, nor with the fact it took most of a day for Vista to run a search on the hard disk to find a mislaid introduction I was working on, nor with its refusal to read or copy a bunch of files on a DVD Dave McKean burned for me.

It just seems like another bad idea from Microsoft. But what’s my alternative?
Apple Mac?
Linux?
I just don’t know. Never having used either I’m naturally a little unnerved by the prospect of having to relearn what little I know.
Of course all of this would be solved if someone at RM reads this and decides I’m just the person they want to give an Asus eeepc to. I’d use it at school, review it for anywhere they wanted me to review it for – honest! That way I’d get a nice introduction to Linux.

But Vista. I don’t think so.

A busy day?

Today was, in theory, a work day.

Molly was very, very, very excited this morning and eventually I had no excuse and had to let her out of the cupboard under the stairs, give her breakfast and take her round to her friend’s house where she’s off to a farm this afternoon and having a sleepover.
(I always worry slightly about putting in obvious gags like the idea of keeping Molly in the cupboard because someone out there will look at it and be offended. Then again, these people are probably offended by the bloody sun rising in a morning anyway.)

So, getting back home for midday, I had planned to spend the entire afternoon doing reviews of loads of lovely small press comics I have at the moment.

That was the plan.
So far this afternoon I have:

Listened to 2 Now Show podcasts, Mitch Benn’s podcast, last week’s Kermode podcast.
Reorganised Itunes.
Downloaded some Yazoo, Weather Report, Siouxsie & The Banshees and Cabaret Voltaire.
Cleared out the 200 plus bloglines feeds I’d not gotten round to reading.
Deleted a lot of bloglines feeds (see above).
Realised the links on Fictions in the sidebar are very out of date – reorganised, deleted and added.
Tried to sort out a problem with the school website.
Looked around online at Ipod speakers – after something very good for no money.
(Anyone got any ideas? Currently using a JBL On Stage 8wRMS and after something a bit punchier).
This blog post.

It’s now 4pm.
I really need to get around to these bloody reviews……
Just off to price up TVs…..

Update 5:25: Have re-re-arranged my entire bloglines feeds and found some Pocklington specific feeds.
Still no reviews. Arse.

I can see Kevin Spacey’s point. How are these shows not promotional?

Kevin Spacey has come out and asked why the Beeb are allowed to get away with producing 13 weeks of promotional material for specific West End Shows.

He does have a point. The Maria one was obviously promotion for the Andrew lloyd webber production of Sound Of Music. The Joseph one was obviously promotion for the Joseph musical (another ALW production). And now, the Oliver one is obviously promoting Cameron Macintosh’s new Oliver show.

The Beeb’s response:

shows were not “unduly promotional”. “These Saturday night shows celebrate musical theatre generally, not just one West End show,” said Elaine Bedell, controller of entertainment commissioning.

Public to BBC. You’re wrong.
They are unduly promotional.
They celebrate these specific musicals and act as direct adverts for the shows.
The TV series will directly drive sales.

Can I get a rebate from the license fee from the multi-million pound revenues from these shows please. I’m not greedy though, please put my rebate directly into BBC Radio. Thanks.

Paul Pope’s Avengers……

Over on Pulp Hope and his Flickr stream.

Tear jerkers

What’s your favourite tear jerker?
We were watching Nanny McPhee earlier. We’ve come to realise that we’re very, very soppy. This list of things that makes me weep uncontrollably includes but is no way limited to:

Films:
Field of Dreams
A Life Less Ordinary
Betty Blue
Moulin Rouge
Love Actually
Vanilla Sky
Silent Running
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence
It’s a Wonderful Life
Holiday Inn
White Christmas
Miracle on 32nd Street
(in fact, most Christmas things will have me dabbing the tears away at some point)
A Matter of Life & Death
Nanny Mcphee

Books:
Atonement
Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Comics:
Raymond Briggs’ Ethel & Ernest
Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby

It’s harder for a book or comic to make me weep as the emotion creeps on slower than it does with film. I’m sure there are more, but I can’t think of them right now.

In fact, it’s pretty obvious that even the slightest touch of sentimentality is almost guaranteed to have me weeping pretty uncontrollably.
And like many of you, at least those of you willing and strong enough to admit to this, there’s a strange feeling of enjoyment from the act of physically breaking down. The weeping, the sense of loss, sadness, joy, pain, misery, whatever it is that brings me to tears is nothing more than an emotional release.
Of course, being me, I like to watch these sorts of films late at night, alone, so I can dab my eyes in peace and quiet.

When I’m watching Field of Dreams and Burt Lancaster just walks over the threshold of the baseball diamond never to return in order to save the life, or when Costner plays ball with his dad, or in the final scenes of salvation and hope – I’m full of sadness, full of tears, full of that feeling when your voice catches in your throat and you know you can’t speak without having your voice break and knowing you’ll be in pieces, uncontrollably sobbing if you even try to speak. That feeling of sadness, that feeling of emotional release is cathartic. It’s the emotional release that’s important and invigorating.
But then again, I’m just a soppy thing.

But the unexpected film that gets me, the one that I catch a lot of flak for with most people I know, people who really can’t believe I’m that soppy, is Love Actually. There are key moments in the film that I just can’t get through without the tears rolling down my face. There are just so many in there that I can’t really list them all. But the one that always stays with me is the Keira Knightley and the bloke who played Egg in this life scenes. No matter what my mood is, no matter how steeled I am towards not getting emotional, is the scene where Egg turns upo at her door with his boards and his music and just tells her what he feels, thats the moment I will never be able to get through without uncontrollably sobbing. The sense of lost opportunity, the sense of regret and hopeless love is just too much, too sad for words. Usually, from that moment on I’m inconsolable. And the enjoyment I get from those feelings is a wonderfully freeing, wonderfully liberating thing. I’m crying for every moment in my life that I regret, every moment in my life that I’m thankful for and everything in my life that I know I’ll never be able to change.

Superman: this is going to change everything….

The rights of the Siegel family heirs to the character of Superman have been ruled on in the US this weekend. As expected, it’s complicated and will no doubt be appealed by Time warner.
But the important summary is that the Siegel family heirs now effectively have co-ownership of the character of Superman as represented in Action Comics #1:

a copyright interest in the Superman material that Siegel and Shuster created before they were employed at DC–namely, the material that appeared in Action Comics #1.

The concluding paragraph in full:

After seventy years, Jerome Siegel’s heirs regain what he granted so long ago -– the copyright in the Superman material that was published in Action Comics Vol. 1. What remains is an apportionment of profits, guided in some measure by the rulings contained in this Order, and a trial on whether to include the profits generated by DC Comics’ corporate sibling’s exploitation of the Superman copyright.

You can barely peruse any of the comics sites over the weekend without falling over these links, with possibly the best summary, including a perfect FAQ from Jeff Trexler here.

The visual comes from this week’s All Star Superman by Morrison & Quitely but it’s timing is eerie.
In an interesting aside to the whole issue, Neil Gaiman makes his comments on the whole thing and, if I’m reading it right, just invited publishers to bid for publication of an Angela or Medieval Spawn comic. Which may just be a throw-away coment or, who knows, could be a sign that he’s looking to move along with all this and, more importantly, get those Miracleman stories back into print.

Atonement

We finally got around to watching Atonement last night.
I read the book a couple of years ago and it affected me deeply, but I’d forgotten exactly why, my memory is always unreliable at best after all.
However, in a precursor to this blog I had started writing quick memory jogger notes about books, comics, films and the like so I reproduce it here:

(and if you haven’t read the book or seen the film and want to, look away now)

A beautifully written book dealing with a life transformed by a childish mistake. Briony Trellis falsely accuses a family friend of the rape of her cousin, resulting in his imprisonment and separation from her older sister.
The story passes through time when the family friend Robbie is part of the BEF at Dunkirk, then to Briony’s horror as a nurse tending the victims of the Dunkirk retreat. Only at the very end, following Briony’s partial reconciliation with Robbie and her sister Cecelia in 1940, does it become clear that Brony, a successful writer since the war’s end, has been creating it all. Her tale of Robbie’s salvation at Dunkirk, the reuniting of the lovers and Briony’s reconciliation with them, her attempts to make atonement, all of it just words from her final novel in 1999, before she dies.

McEwan’s ability to create beauty from language, making his characters so real merely adds weight to the final hammer blow that damns Robbie to a tortured death at Dunkirk and Cecelia to a lonely death months later in the blitz. Briony’s life is laid bare in the final pages as destroyed through guilt and regret that the atonement she sought, the atonement that you as a reader believed she had found, is only available to her after her death.

McEwan’s writing, descriptive, stunning, kept me going through the slower early stages. But once into Dunkirk and the horrors of the military hospital there wasn’t a thing that could make me put this one down. The first part took a month, the second and third, two evenings.

Well, the film was everything I had hoped for. In truth, the sloppy, sentimental side of me could have cried at many points through it, but that’s just me.
In so many ways the film is a faithful adaptation of the book and I feel the strong desire to re-read the book to look at what they changed, what they left out. I started the film trying to remember exactly what was going to happen and in truth it didn’t come back to me until nearly the end. I saw Bryony visit Cecilia and Robbie and the memories flooded back and the tears nearly came as well. The sense of loss and yearning for a happy ending that I remembered from the book flooded back as well.
In the book though I remember the climactic reveal, that Bryony had written a fiction around Robbie and Cecilia to bring herself Atonement, to be like a physical jolt to the brain, with a turn of the page everything changed and the entire basis of the book was changed. A spectacular moment in fiction, and one which I don’t think they managed to convey in the film, but they at least attempted it, at least gave a sense of the shock expressed on the page.

A beautiful, moving and emotive film. Not a patch on the book, but a great film based upon a greater book could do no more.

Cooling the Tube

This is the sort of fascinating thing that the Interweb is so very good at throwing up. A look at the many problems and solutions of cooling London Underground.

(via Pete)

Good Grief, it’s the Watchmen……

(via) If Schulz had drawn Watchmen…..