On the way into work yesterday I saw a Scottish lorry with the logo Thistle Removals
emblazoned across the side…
… I wondered if they also took out splinters?
What an unexpected delight. Failing to read the cover properly, and assuming that because it had Nicole Kidman in it was going to be another Holywood number (itself a strange assumption given the awesome Dogville), I was amazed when it opened with John (Ben Chaplin) recording his pitch for a Russian bride in St Albans on his webcam – in a clearly low budget exercise.
I supposed the involvement of FilmFour should have given this away, but the real surprise was that it was hilarious, low budget, but also very gripping. There wasn’t any doubt from the start that this was going to be a very funny film, although very much black comedy rather than sit-com.
The basic premise is that Nadia (our Nicole) is the bride John has ordered, and after his initial shock at her not speaking English, starts falling for her. Then it’s her birthday, and two Russian friends from her past – Alexi and Yuri – turn up for the party (actually only one of them is her friend, the other is in a band with her friend). Party is probably an overstatement too.
It soon transpires that the Russian guests aren’t quite as nice as Nadia seems to think…
To say anymore would spoil it, but it was only shortly after this point that John seemed to snap and become a much more interesting character – as indeed did Nadia.
A really well executed film – full of ambiguity about who people really are, and what they feel for each other. And the ending was fantastic – very much in the Tarintino vein of not really resolving anything (e.g. Reservoir Dogs, and more modern films like Memento, Sideways, …), which I kind of like. It was a nice length too – very punchy!
I went to an Ebor lecture last week, at York Minster, by the Archbishop of York – John Sentamu. The title was Uncovering the Purposes of God
, and he was really talking about the purposes of God through
There were two quotes in particular that stood out to me
Faith is not a crutch to lean on, but the act of leaning, and
Reason and human worth are core to our Christian culture in the UK
The second one was particularly in the context of wanting to rename Christmas Winterval – he said that it wasn’t having a Christian culture that offended, but the cynicism of politically correct people trying to deny it.
The other really good bit was the Chocolate Trinity – Cadbury, Rowntree, and Fry – three Quakers who essentially were the UK Chocolate industry in the 18th,19th, and start of the 20th centuries. A quick Google gives me Quaker food. I’m a died in the wool protestant, and so disagree with some of the principles and beliefs of the Friends Movement, but clearly the principles and ethics are basically Christian.
Well, survived my first day in my new job. It’s always an interesting experience starting a new job – new people to meet, new systems and software to learn. I’m very much a pioneer in my outlook, and am happiest when forging ahead with new things, so in many ways the first few months in a new job are my favourite. The real satisfaction comes from completing projects, of course, but I just love learning new things and starting new ventures.
The applications are really interesting too – it’s a GIS company, so there’s lots of mapping and route finding code which I’m getting to grips with. Takes me back to my undergraduate days at Imperial, when I wrote a GIS tool called GERMS (Generic Environment for Reviewing Municipal Statistics) for my friend Phil. Actually the really interesting about that project was the data structure I used, rather than the graphics bit – but then again the really clever thing about the “RouteFinda” software is the memory management (anyone can find the shortest route through a graph and draw a picture of it – doing it quickly with a small memory footprint is the real challenge). It is weird how you can not understand something, but know that you will understand it after having put in the hours thinking about it. It almost begs the question why we can’t just instantly understand things. I guess it’s the brain making new connections between the neurons and what-not.
Anyway the other people in the office are all very nice, and there’s a really good work atmosphere. I think I’m going to enjoy it. A lot! 🙂
I don’t think the suffix -trix is used enough these days. It is apparently the feminine version or -tor, thus wherever you could have a (male) -tor, you would have a female -trix. The only two uses that seem to be current are dominatrix and testatrix, but I don’t know why we should stop there. Oh yes, and T3 gave us the terminatrix I suppose.
Actrix has a certain ring to it – and the Queen becomes protectrix of our land. A newspaper could have an editrix. If heroes have mentors, why shouldn’t a heroines have a mentrix?
Is a female alligator an alligatrix? Or maybe a woman who debases something is in adulteratrix. Cars are meant to be female, so why don’t they have motrixes to power them? (apparently it’s allowed to be -trixes when it’s the plural of -trix in this sense.) A female blogger becomes a promulgatrix, and a female gardener a propagatrix. And would a fridge full of chocolate be a refrigiratrix?
Or perhaps it could work the other way – clearly The Matrix is female, so what about The Mator?
So this week I will attempt to refer to a female guest as a visitrix.
Sorry about all the parenting entries, but I’ve been meaning to say this one for a while! 🙂
One of the thing Ben really likes watching is Storymakers on CBeebies. The basic premise is that when the library closes for the night, these two creatures and a literary magician appear to make stories using all our imagination and their special storymaker computer. Hang on – there’s bound to be a website… yup, Storymakers on the BBC website. The target audience is broadly pre-school – other programs are Bob the Builder, Teletubbies, Balamory, Tweenies, and so on. Anyway, there are various characters who appear in the Storymakers’ stories, but everyone’s favourite is Blue Cow, who wonders about things, and gets on the bus to find out about them.
The thing I like about Blue Cow, apart from the fact the whole concept and execution is very funny, is that there’s sometimes little grown-up asides, and I’ve not yet worked out if they’re intentional or not. I think they must be, but they don’t happen very often. The two most recent instances are when Blue Cow wanted to find out what her own voice sounded like, so she went to Echo Beach. I know I’m showing my age, but that can’t have been an accident, surely? The only example is not quite so good, but basically set up a “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke – not exactly grown-up, but a bit above the target age for the program, I would have thought.
Anyway, it’s a freeview channel, and Storymakers is on between 6 and 6.15pm everyday.
I think my little boy had his first nightmare last night – well his first conscious one anyway. He woke up around 5am in floods of tears saying I don’t like
, which would have been quite funny, except that he was so upset.Honk Honk Honk
The honk honk honk
thing might be one or two things – he sometimes rides around on his hobby horse saying honk
, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. I usually point out horses say neigh
rather than honk
, and sometimes his sound changes to neigh
, sometimes it doesn’t. This doesn’t really fit with not being liked though, as he clearly enjoys riding around on his little horsey.
The more likely explanation is that he’s referring to Brum, who’s a car on CBeebies who drives around saying the aforementioned honk, and which he watches sometimes at nursery. We know that he doesn’t like Brum.. or more precisely there’s one episode of Brum that involved two clowns that really scared him, so much so that one day he suddenly started crying as we were getting him ready for nursery, saying I don’t want to watch Brum
. Anyway, nursery were fine with not showing it to Ben, and in any case this was several months ago, with no further problem. So who knows? I can kind of understand the whole ‘scared of clowns’ thing though, as they are pretty dark. I’ve never found them particularly funny, but then I’m not really into slap-stick.
On the subject of dreams, I’m making my acting debut this morning! At least, my acting debut in the sense of having to learn a script and recite a monologue. The church are running a holiday club for kids, and this year’s theme is learning all about Joseph – who of course was a well known dreamer and interpreter of dreams. I’m playing the part of Pharaoh’s cup-bearer, who gives a 5 minute eye-witness account of Joseph; his time in prison, his rise to prime minister of Egypt, and the dreams he interpreted along the way. It was actually easier than I expected to learn the lines, at least in the context where it doesn’t have to be verbatim, but then I guess most acting is really getting across the gist rather than the exact words? I should probably reserve judgement on how easy it was to learn the lines until I’ve done it for real!!!
Go on then – been tagged by watchandweigh who I once shared an office with.. Here goes for my first ever meme…
The Marriage Book by Nicky and Sila Lee. The affianced and I worked through Nicky and Sila’s course for our marriage prep, and it made us discuss with and deal with a whole lot of issues that would probably have otherwise caused all sorts of marital strife in the early years. It really is scary how much you assume about yourself and the person you’re about to marry!
Lots of choice here – I usually read books more than once. Lets go for
This Present Darkness, by Frank Peretti. I just love his handling of spiritual warfare, with angels and demons being real/corporal beings that we just can’t see.
No real choice here – got to be the Bible! Although I did like
watchandweigh’s suggestion of “1,001 edible topical plants.”
Again plenty to choose from, but I’ll plump for Inconceivable by Ben Elton, as I only read it last week.
Lord of the Rings. Oh – you didn’t mean tears of boredom and frustration?
Ok, so it’s not that bad.. but there’s just pages and pages of battles and poems and arrrggg!
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. And not just cos of the money (honest).
The training manual for al-Qaeda terrorists. Not that I believe it really exists as an “it”, or would make much difference if it did or not. But you know what I mean.
The Mysterious Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Not as good as it sounds.
His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman. Oops, that’s three books. Mind you, LotR and the Bible are also many books combined into a single book, so I’ll count it as one. I happened to have got Northern Lights out of the library this weekend (along with Sherlock Holmes and “VBA for dummies”, which turned out to be no help whatsoever it what I was trying to do), so that’s a good start…
So there you are. I don’t have any friends who blog (except watchandweigh and imnotasaint, who’s already been tagged), so I can’t pass it on. How sad is that?
Well, surprise surprise, the accuracy of (native) GPS is not really enough to be useful in a maze, at least not the sort of maze where it’s relatively easy to keep your bearings. The screen resolution also becomes a factor.. if you keep the scale large enough to be able to see paths, then not enough of the maze fits on the screen to actually be useful. Still, it was fun.
I had hoped that at the end I’d at least have a GPS version of the maze – but of course the receiver only stores the track of where you’ve actually been! So if you see a dead-end and don’t go down it, it doesn’t appear on the track. This year the maze itself was based on a Star Trek theme, with the Enterprise and Picard and Spock all featuring in the design, so it would have appropriate, somehow, to have a GPS track of it. In the event by about a quarter of the way round I realised it wasn’t working, so gave up and just enjoyed the maze instead.
I remember wanting to make a grass maze in our garden in Norfolk when I was growing up – only mow the paths and let the rest grow up – but for some reason I never got around to it. Probably wasn’t allowed to. These days I’d be more likely to build a labyrinth than a maze. Perhaps this should be my next Lego project with Ben…
Just watched the Miracles of Jesus (part 1), a BBC documentary on, well, the miracles of Jesus. Rageh Omaar presents this overview that’s principally concerned with what the miracles meant, rather than if they happened or not.
I have to say I actually enjoyed it, although the programme was about twice the length it needed to be – I got the distinct impression they spent a lot of money filming Rageh smooching around Israel (and environs) looking reflective, and even more generating the clips of Jesus doing the miracles, so they were going to give them both as much air-time as possible. Not that the clips weren’t impressive, quite the opposite, it’s just by the tenth viewing they wear a little thin…
The BBC’s version of the miracles certainly looks quite different from my own – and I quite enjoyed trying to decide what was artistic license, what was speculation, and what’s actually there in the gospels. The thing that really struck me though was just how charismatic Jesus must have been. Even if you think the miracles themselves are bunkem, the people at the time believed them – and more than that Jesus was able to march in with Dr Who like authority and order people around (I know this is getting the mythological types back to front!). Christopher Ecclestone in particular never had his authority questioned, and everyone (on earth) meekly submitted to him, and the portrayal of Jesus was a little like that – for instance striding into a funeral procession, and pulling the death shroud back from the body…
Anyway, it’s on BBC 1 at about 18.30 for the next two Sundays. Worth a watch.