I have just returned from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. My official review:

w00t and w00t some more.

That is all.

I received ‘Analyze That’ from my DVD rental club this morning…with the label shown on the left. Goodness knows what the postman must think. To make things worse I received another DVD at the same time, with a similarly constructed ID code: The Ring!

I’m not entirely sure why I blurred out the address there…it’s not like it would be difficult to find it out, after all. Oh well, stops casual spamming, I suppose. I thought I’d better make the ID code slightly less clear, in case someone wants to steal my identity. I’m thinking that’s quite likely. Who wouldn’t want to be me, after all? Other than pop stars…and famous sportspeople…and zookeepers…and matchstick men…and quality control operatives at the jigsaw factory…and test pilots…and game developers…and builders…and students…Hmmm, maybe it was a pointless exercise after all.

Yesterday I went into Woolworths (sorry Ben) to buy the ‘Mad World’ single I’ve been going on about. I had a look at the other singles on the shelf at the same time. The Pop Idol cover is £4, whereas The Darkness’ is only £2. Shrewd. Though, as Kate said, if you’re going to buy the Pop Idol single you’ll probably buy it anyway, no matter what the price. Current bets have The Darkness most likely to win, followed by Pop Idol then Gary Jules.

Not content with stopping light, now ways have been found to fire bullets around corners. That’d be great at Laser Quest…

As one of the comments says, this is an excellent summary of why maths is cool.

Winamp 5.0 is final, by the way. I’m just downloading it now, as someone must have tripped over the ftp server’s power cable during the day, or something.

Oh kak, today was Amazon’s last free shipping day! What do you mean, it’s Christmas Eve a week tomorrow? Don’t be so ridiculous!!! Presents? I’m meant to have sorted PRESENTS by now?!

Kate & I went to Ed’s yesterday for his birthday party and had a great time. After a meal we went for a walk around Chester, which looked very nice with all its Christmas lights. Ed assembled the airzooka and we spent an inordinate amount of time fine-tuning the aim on each other Many thanks to Ed for inviting us, it was good fun!

We had to go an interesting route back as the M42 was closed due to a chemical spillage of some kind (was still closed at 6 this morning, actually), but we’d used the M6 Toll that morning so the travelling time probably evened out overall. The latter road was the clearest motorway I’ve ever used! I haven’t used the M6 enough to appreciate any difference between the two, but it was certainly nice to drive on.

If you read the Michael Crichton speech from the other day, Lil’s reply is quite interesting.

Breaking news: Saddam ‘arrested in Iraq’!!!

Like the title says, this is some very late-night postage!

Kate’s back :-))) We went christmas shopping today, and this evening had a small get-together to celebrate Simon B’s birthday. We watched Donnie Darko, and I picked up on a lot more on the second viewing. There are some extremely interesting ideas in that film!

I saw a shooting star earlier this evening…I’ve only seen two or three before. It’s a lovely thing to witness.

Anyway, I should be off as it’s waaay past my bedtime…Night!

Kate’s on the way home! Yay!!

Renée Zellweger has a voice that irritates me. I can’t explain why, she just does. Well, in Jerry Maguire and Bridget Jones, anyway. Chicago was fine…Much as she bugs me, though, I have to admire her for this. Good grief.

I see that Jonathan Ross’ TV show won Comedy Entertainment Programme of the year at the recent British Comedy Awards. About damn time, in my opinion! He’s been the funnist man on TV for ages. I like him because his humour is on my wavelength, he actually knows what he’s talking about during interviews and he genuinely seems to be a nice person. I always find his radio show very entertaining (thankfully Kate does too, since I always insist on listening), even if the music isn’t really my thing.

I was reading a review on Amazon earlier, when this line cropped up:

They always say that God is in the detail, and the Flight simulator team have proved it here….

Isn’t it the devil who’s in the details? This is obviously an important life question, so I put it to the test. Googling (oops, shouldn’t verb nouns) “god is in the details” gets 185 results, while “devil is in the details” returns 5,340. Oh yes. Who wins? Me. Excuse me while I perform a victory dance.

Yesterday’s Michael Crichton link raised some interesting issues on the subject of skepticism, which this article furthers.

Some people say that men are inherently lazy…What, you knew that already? I can’t remember where I read that, should have written it down, really. It’s not our fault, though, things get easier all the time…

What’s the longest film you’ve seen? Titanic? Apocalypse Now? Pah! They are mere Minogues (small-but-perfectly-formed units of time dreamt up today by someone who shall remain nameless). Return of the King is well over 3 hours. We’re going to need supplies.

You know what this weekend is? It’s TB weekend. Some of you may know what this means and will now be experiencing surges of joy or hate, according to preference. Others will not. Boy, do you have a treat in store.

That’s called a teaser, by the way.

I signed up to the Extropy mailing list today and one of the first things it pointed me to was a thought-provoking speech by Michael Crichton. He makes the argument that environmentalism has developed many religious parallels, to the detriment of the cause as well as the world as a whole. I’d be interested to hear Lil or Lynsey’s view on this, as while it’s not directly their subjects I imagine it crosses over into their fields. It certainly stands up from the viewpoint of an uninformed observer, though I disagree with a couple of his points, particularly that second-hand smoke isn’t dangerous (just today I was reading this). I find the whole global warming not-being-real issue very interesting. It’s a subject that just won’t go away, and I’ve yet to hear any arguments contradicting them with reasons other than ‘the consensus is’…a position which doesn’t go down well. The speech is certainly worth a read, if you get a minute.

How much do you reckon this lens would cost, then? I’d love to have a play

I always like an amusing t-shirt, though they tend to just sit in the cupboard as I never have the guts to wear them. I don’t think Kate would let me wear this one, and I’d probably never actually want to display this. There are other, more expansive, models linked from that page, but be sure to read the description first, or you might end up spilling your cereal or something.

Michael Schumacher today felt what losing feels like…I shouldn’t think he’s too bothered, though, given that he was racing a Eurofighter.

In ‘Executive Orders’ by Tom Clancy a Nutso Terrorist Group lets loose the Ebola virus at a US convention hall. The fallout isn’t pretty, and given Tom Clancy’s penchant for predicting actual events (spoilers for Debt of Honour and Executive Orders) it’s a bit worrying. This is therefore nice to read.

By the way, not to brag, but 9/10.

Kate’s back tomorrow!! Yippee!! Right, I’m off to watch Apocalypse Now Redux. It’s going to be grim, but far too many people have said how great it is for me not to want to watch it. See you on the other side.

I just watched 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Can someone please email me and tell me whether it’s meant to make any sense if you haven’t read the book? I have, so I knew what was going on…but I can’t see how you would if you hadn’t (gotta love prepositions). Also, isn’t there the famous line “My god, it’s full of stars!”? Is it only in the book, or did I miss it?

I really, really, really hate to do this to you all, but I just have to:

http://www3.sympatico.ca/spore/wip/abg.swf

I’ve been working on a Ballistic Duck christmas card for a few days now. I got the idea into my head that I should take a photo myself, and now it’s a matter of pride. Yesterday I moved practically every piece of furniture in the lounge for one reason or another. Books were removed from bookshelves, drawers from desks, ornaments from mantelpieces, computers from other offices…I’m really hoping it looks good in the end! I’ve been using Photoshop Elements to do all my editing. I’m sure The GIMP is better, but I don’t have time to learn it atm…also the lots of little windows floating over my desktop thing doesn’t endear me to the program

This morning I added a large update to yesterday’s post, in case anyone’s interested.

By the way, does anyone know what song ‘We’re going to have ourselves a convoy!’ comes from? I’m sure I heard it on the radio once. Google isn’t turning up anything useful, which probably means I’ve got the lyrics wrong…Aha, found it! Never mind.

Ben and I played the Broken Sword 3 demo at the weekend. It’s very nice graphically and the sound seemed effective, too. The control system may take a little getting used to, however. Firstly, it’s obviously designed for consoles, so isn’t exactly complex. Given the vast necessity for everything to be in 3D, there is no mouse at all. You move around with W, A, S and D (more on this in a tick) then select the options for whatever you happen to be looking at by using the arrow keys, which correspond to a 4-button arrangement of options on screen (ie, perfect for joypads). It’s somewhat limited compared to Monkey Island, but if that’s what people want, whatever. What bugs me is the navigation system. In Monkey Island / every other 3D game, you move around in relation to the character. If you push ‘up’, the character moves forward, ‘down’ goes backwards, ‘left’ left and ‘right’ right. In BS3, however, it’s done in relation to the screen. So if you want the character to move to the right hand side, you press ‘right’, no matter which direction he’s facing. ‘Up’ makes the character walk upwards, towards the top of the screen. This isn’t overly intuitive, and will require a lot of unlearning. I don’t find anything wrong with it in itself, I just don’t see why the ‘normal’ system wasn’t used. It’s only a minor quibble, really. I’ll probably be buying it anyway, since I adore adventure games of any kind, and Play currently have it for £17.99.

EDIT: Oops, I got the WASD and arrow keys the wrong way round…The latter control movement and the former the options. I hope the makers don’t sue me

I just finished The Stand by Stephen King. I’d link to the amazon page but it’s just full of whinging people (I wish there was an option to turn off reviews). It was the largest book I’ve read in years - over 1400 pages with very fine print - and I enjoyed it very much, it’s certainly worth a look if you’re in the mood for an epic. Don’t be put off by the writer, he actually writes comparatively few horror stories and this isn’t one of them. Many thanks to Kate for recommending it to me

I’m quite glad to have finished it, my to-read pile has been growing steadily higher for a few months now and I’ve made very little impression on it! Next, I think, is the third in Stephen Baxter’s ‘Manifold’ series, which I’ve been enjoying thus far.

UPDATE: As has been pointed out to me, I haven’t actually said what The Stand is about. Here’s the blurb:

First came the days of the plague…Then came the dreams…Dark dreams that warned of the coming of the dark man. The apostate of death, his worn-down boot heels tramping the night roads. The warlord of the charnel house and Prince of Evil. His time is at hand. His empire grows in the west and the Apocalypse looms.

That makes it sound much more dark and unpleasant than it actually is. You essentially follow a variety of characters from many different backgrounds as they struggle to cope in a now very different world. The above is part of that struggle. That’s all I can say without giving things away The book was originally released in 1978, and was 400 pages shorter. This was due to the accounting department adding up the sales of his previous four books, comparing these to production costs, and deciding that £6.95 was “about what the market would bear”. So 400 pages had to be removed to reduce the price. Once SK had become the world’s bestselling author he could do whatever he wanted, so the book was re-relased in 1988 with most of the missing material.

If you haven’t read any SK before I’d recommend starting with something else, as his style isn’t to everyone’s taste. Bag of Bones and The Dead Zone are similar in tone and in my opinion superb. I can’t say much about the plots of either of these, as I’d give away surprises.

And I thought the Canon EOS 300D was good…

A camera that can do this in a single click would be an excellent Christmas present for me, so get saving!

Here’s a hint to all criminal masterminds out there: I could easily be bought off with US cop show DVDs. I love ‘em, from old to new, and will happily drop whatever i happen to be doing if one comes on TV. The Rockford Files, Cagney & Lacey, Law & Order, CSI and just one more thing, Columbo (my personal favourite). The good thing is, there are lots more that I’ve never had time to watch or have just never been shown regularly here: NYPD Blue, Homicide, Starsky & Hutch, Kojak, Boomtown…the list just goes on and on. I generally prefer the US shows due to the decent plots and sense of fun, as compared to the more gritty repression often found in their UK counterparts (Kate’s not going to be impressed by that…criticising Morse is blasphemy!). So this got me thinking about al the TV genres I enjoy.

As we all know, my opinion is far more important than most other people’s, so I thought I’d create a list of my favourite TV shows of all time, from any genre. So I boldy and brassily present to you the Watchability Ohne N00bage Galactic Awards:

Best Sitcom: Cheers
Best Drama: The West Wing
Best Crime: Columbo
Best Sci-Fi: Quantum Leap

Short, but I think you’ll agree, sweet. I’ll probably think of some more in the coming days.

I sent my phone back to O2 with a ‘wrong phone supplied’ reason on the returns form. Given that I can’t email or phone them, this seemed to be the best option. Time will tell…

The Oxford term ends today! Woohoo! It’ll be nice to see people again. Kate finishes a week today, too :-))

My latest dvdsontap rentals are Taxi Driver and 2001. I watched the former last night…interesting! 2001 I want to see but it’s not dragging me in…so I haven’t got round to it yet.

Anyway, I’d better be off to bed…Goodnight!