Think of me as your last minute personal shopper. Nobody in your life would be disappointed to unwrap this.

Forgot to take a photo today, for the first time since starting my project in May. Don’t even have anything on someone else’s camera, or a webcam shot or something. Damn! For a while there I thought I might make it the full year. Oh well.

*spoiler alert*

*for the film and the book*

*all of the book*

Dudes, what happened? Obviously you forgot to film the scene where Lyra ran across the ice bridge. There she was in the middle, then suddenly she was on safe ground. Fair enough. Mistakes happen. But the entire ending?!

The finale of Northern Lights is one of my favourite literary scenes. The aurora borealis break open and Lyra walks into the sky. It’s beautiful. I wasn’t expecting that the image in my head would be fully realised - such a thing is obviously impossible - but some realisation at all would have been appreciated. It is rather the crux of the story, a wonderful cliffhanger and an extremely important moment in Lyra’s character development. She leads Roger to his death - the final words of the film directly refer to this: “I’m taking him what he wants.” You can’t just bolt this onto The Subtle Knife as a minor plot-twist. It’ll be like the kid dying at the beginning of Alien 3 - you completely betray the previous film. And it’s just so great - I honestly can’t understand the motiviation for ditching it.

There was lots I didn’t like much. I am now going to mention some of those things. Gyptians don’t live on the sea - that’s stupid. And gyroscopes don’t power cars. Well done for making Pan annoying, too, and giving him a similar voice to Lyra was really helpful. (I am currently mentioning some of the things I didn’t like about the film). And I never need to hear the words ‘Iorek Byrnson’ ever again. But removing the ending? Just don’t understand it. I would just like to spell out that this paragraph contains some of my criticisms, because apparently it is important to be clear at the expense of all surprise, tension and wonder.

Having said all that, the Magisterium/Catholic Church link wasn’t exactly subtle, was it? I haven’t read the book recently, but I’m pretty sure that was toned up. What was it Derek Jacobi said? ‘Freethinkers are evil’? Also, Lee Scoresby was cool and should have his own film.

An ok first draft, but I want to see the final version please.

Our second six-week project this term was to recreate a studio photograph, then make an interpretation of that image. I chose Philippe Halsman’s jumping pictures, and made I think an ok recreation of this image of Marilyn Monroe (I haven’t checked whether the model minds me putting the image online yet). This was my interpretation:

It’s an homage to Dali Atomicus, based around Albert Einstein’s nickname for photographers as ‘lichtaffen’ - german for ‘light monkeys’. The Einstein image is by Halsman too.

I kept friends and family up until late on a Sunday night trying to take this shot. I had my mother holding the chair, Abi throwing beads from one side, Ben throwing monkeys from the other and Dad trying to press the shutter at just the right moment. The project had to be on film, so we took about 70 shots on digital to get roughly consistent results, then 36 ‘blind’ shots on black & white film. My legs caved in a few shots from the end!

None of the shots came out quite as I wanted - in the above you can’t see the camera around my neck and the yellow beads are covering a little too much of Einstein - but there are so many variables that something’s always dodgy, and I’m happy with the end result. The final black and white print is different - I’ll get the negative scanned in at some point - but similar enough to the above that you get the idea.

We had the critical assessment yesterday and people seemed to like it, which was nice. I liked someone’s description of it as a ‘box of madness’
Other final shot possibilities are here, and outtakes here. Thanks to everyone who helped with this - no way I could have done it without you!

While travelling this week I’ve been reading The Language Instinct and Semiotics: The Basics, the latter being an ‘accessible’ recommended course text. While they don’t focus on exactly the same topics there’s plenty of overlap, and it’s been like going to a dinner party and being seated between Claudia Winkleman and the Queen.

It’s not surprising to be initially attracted by the obvious physical charms of Ms Winkleman, but you quickly discover she’s also fast, witty and quirky - a pleasure to spend time with. But you can’t ignore the Queen, who is obviously renowned and popular; it’s just that once you start chatting you find that she’s going batty in her old age. Everything takes ten times more words than necessary, and is endlessly repeated. So occasionally you slip back to the increasingly endearing Claudia for some unpatronising conversation, but after a while feel guilty about leaving the Queen on her own so start engaging her once more.

And the more you chat, the more things start to get a bit weird. You’ll be having a reasonable if somewhat circumspect conversation about squirrels in the forest, and she’ll all of a sudden tell you about the invisible unicorns that live in the same area. You ask her to repeat, but it still makes no sense. Ah well, this is clearly a hiccup and is forgiveable - the Queen is a complex and interesting person, everyone says so, and it would be unreasonable to let one thing reduce your opinion of her. So after a quick Claudia fix you persevere. And she says this:

Psychoanalytic theory also contributed to the revaluation of the signifier - in Freudian dream theory the sound of the signifier could be regarded as a better guide to its possibly signified than any conventional ‘decoding’ might have suggested (Freud 1938, 319). For instance, Freud reported that the dream of a young woman engaged to be married featured flowers - including lilies-of-the-valley and violets. Popular symbolism suggested that the lilies were a symbol of chastity and the woman agreed that she associated them with purity. However, Freud was surprised to discover that she associated the word ‘violet’ phonetically with the English word ‘violate’, suggesting her fear of the violence of ‘defloration’ (another word alluding to flowers) (Freud 1938, 382-3). As the psychoanalytic theoriest Jacques Lacan emphasized (originally in 1957), the Freudian concepts of condensation and displacement illustrate the determination of the signified by the signifier in dreams (Lacan 1977, 159ff). In condensation, several thoughts are condensed into one symbol, while in displacement unconscious desire is displaced into an apparently trivial symbol (to avoid dream censorship).

And you’re thinking ‘I’m not a psychologist and have no expertise, but my bullshit-o-meter just exploded’. Checking that it is 2007, you gaze adoringly into Claudia’s eyes for a while and regain some optimism. Lots of people like the Queen. There must be something to her conversation. There must be. And shortly afterwards she says:

Clearly, the extent to which a text may be perceived as real depends in part on the medium employed. Writing, for instance, generally has a lower modality than film and television. However, no rigid ranking of media modalities is possible.

Phew. Doesn’t sound too unreasonable. She continues:

John Kennedy showed children a simple line drawing featuring a group of children sitting in a circle with a gap in their midst (Kennedy 1974). He asked them to add to this gap a drawing of their own, and when they concentrated on the central region of the drawing, many of them tried to pick up the pencil which was depicted in the same style in the top right-hand corner of the drawing! Being absorbed in the task led them to accept unconsciously the terms in which reality was constructed within the medium.

You can’t take much more, and catch Claudia in the middle of a related topic which seems suggests that the Queen is outdated. A bit of surreptitious mobile googling suggests that Claudia’s topics of conversation are widely considered to stand in complete contrast to the Queen’s. So you’re in a bit of dilemma.

On the one hand you have the ridiculously-attractive-in-every-way Claudia, who seems to make perfect sense, and on the other you have the Queen, who everyone is telling you is very deep and very clever, but just isn’t coherent. You want to make sure you’re not being won over by Claudia’s overall beauty and clarity - and, to be fair, you’ve been watching her on tv for years and perhaps have a bias for this reason - and perhaps it’s just that the Queen is very subtle and clever, just rubbish at explaining herself. But without any kind of expertise, there’s no informed way to decide which is the case. But, still, the skeptical brain can’t help but lean towards Claudia. We’ll see.

Removed today’s advent calendar image after a request from the original photographer who, indeed, briefly took the image offline to prevent it being shown. First time this has happened in the couple of years I’ve been doing it and…well, I think I’ll stop there, but I will of course do as requested. Replaced with a quick shot I took in Willesden last week.

My big university project due date is tomo…today, and it’s just about finished. Which you’d obviously expect, but it was a close thing. Despite being determined not to leave things until the last minute I left uni just before 2200 today, and while I’m not happy with the standard of my ‘workbook’ - supposedly a chronicle of my project’s development, but actually a hastily assembled collection of scraps - the images themselves have turned out ok. It’ll be a hell of a relief to get it all handed in.

We got our first essay back last week, and somehow I managed to pull off a 73/80. I did choose the english lit. style ‘compare and contrast’ question, mind - played to my strengths a bit, there. I don’t think this project will do so well due to the low standard of accompanying materials (to say nothing of the images themselves), but I’ve learnt that workbooks are actually cool and not just a chore, so I’ll definitely assemble one properly next term.

This time tomorrow it might actually feel quite Christmassy.

Sorry about the advent calendar. Probably annoys me more than it does anyone else, but apologies nevertheless - I don’t like missing these things. Standard excuses: out early, back late, no access to computers in meantime. It’ll be back soon.

Saw The Golden Compass this evening. Wtf.

The Plain English Campaign’s annual awards were announced today, and are once again rubbish. This year’s ‘Foot in Mouth’ winner is Steve McLaren, who said:

He [Wayne Rooney] is inexperienced, but he’s experienced in terms of what he’s been through.

It’s badly-phrased, sure, but did anybody really take more than half a second to understand what he meant? After thinking for ten seconds or so I reckon he could have said ‘Wayne Rooney has lots of experience in some specific areas, but little in others’. Which still isn’t great, and I had plenty of time to ponder. There’s no context to the McLaren quote, but I’m going to guess it was part of an interview and he had maybe a second to articulate a not particularly simple thought-shape. Everybody starts sentences and realises halfway through that they could be better phrased; if your skills are in, say, managing football teams rather than speaking publicly then it’s fairly likely you’ll make mistakes. Calling him out on it is just silly, especially given the competition.

The PEC give plenty of awards to organisations they consider exemplary, and that’s a good thing (even if they do think The Sun is the clearest national newspaper). I applaud their efforts to improve the standard of dialogue, and I’m sure they’ve done a lot of good work. But their ‘Foot in Mouth’ and ‘Golden Bull’ winners get plenty of press attention, and it’s wasted. The latter award has a couple of reasonable winners - ‘passenger shoe repatriation area only’ made me laugh - but also includes minutes from a Warwickshire council meeting that probably make sense if you know the background, a railway sign that uses ‘low adhesion between the rail head and the wheel’ to explain why leaves slow down trains, and legalese from a Courier’s terms and conditions that is awful because it’s legalese and has to be unambiguous.

If this is the best they can come up with I’d say the country is in pretty good shape, language-wise. But it clearly isn’t: there’s plenty of misleading and plain insidious dialogue in politics - the ridiculous ways in which politicians of all parties refer to people trying to move to the UK, for example - and with all the media attention paid to these awards the PEC could make some strong points if they wanted. Rubbish.

Buying Christmas decorations on your own is no fun. I always forget this until I’m actually there, though, and this afternoon I headed to Notcutts to pick up a tree. I usually treat myself to £10 worth of decorations too. For years they’ve had an enormous room full of trees, lights and sparkle, and I always look forward to walking around it, alone or not - it’s just a pleasant experience.

Unfortunately this year it was like an Edgar Allen Poe Christmas nightmare. Not because of crowds, but because of the sounds. It started with the background music, which was repetitive and quiet - all you could hear was a regular chick beat. But not in a nice way - it was like music from a thriller, as the heroine is creeping down a dark corridor, looking for the intruder. It set you on edge immediately.

Then there was the ringing. Oh god, the ringing. Something, somewhere, was making what was probably intended as a festive trill, but it sounded like an unanswered phone. I counted, and it was ringing about three times every two seconds. When I have nightmares they’re always heavy on endless repetition - it’s just something I dislike. And it never stopped.

I could maybe have ignored the ringing and the music, but then came the tunes. A group of ornaments contained little village scenes in glass domes under which snow was regularly sprayed upwards while some easily recognisable midi carol played. But all of the ornaments were playing at once, so four different tunes in four different keys intertwined in a horrible mixture of tunes just-comprehensible-enough-to-be-recognisable while simultaneously merging into something awful. You could imagine it being the chaotic, atonal soundtrack to a scene where Santa goes mad as a wide-angle lens 20cm from his face spins as he reels around a workshop of broken dreams. Nasty, nasty, nasty.

But that wasn’t all. Another display contained a revolving carousel on an ice-rink. Every few minutes the children on board would yell in delight. On its own it would have been fine, but with the atmosphere of everything else in the room the children were simply screaming. It was like some fairytale hell.

And then, finally, I saw this:

Is it my brain, or has Santa has hung himself from a Christmas tree?

I picked out some baubles, found a baby tree and got the hell out of there. Ugh.

I’ve been watching Strictly for four years, and despite dancing myself I’ve rarely been particularly emotionally affected by routines on the show. Sure, I’ve really liked some and disliked others, but there’ve only been two that have sent shivers down my spine. One I was in the audience for: Mark and Karen’s salsa from last series. The second was their Argentine Tango a few weeks later. But nothing else really got to me until today. Gethin’s jive came close, but Alesha and Matt’s Viennese Waltz was just astonishing:

If you don’t want to watch the preamble you can start playing, then pause and skip to 1:40ish once it’s downloaded.

YouTube mangles the quality somewhat, but the essence is there. I’ve seen it a few times now, and it’s got me each time. Here’s Gethin’s jive, for good measure (skip to about 2:30):

It’s 0030 and I just got back home. The private car park behind my flat is completely full, and I’ve had to park on the road. I was annoyed until I realised there’s no noise at all. My block is mostly owned by an old person’s housing association, and I’m a bit worried now…Why would so many people be here so late, and so quiet? Trying to decide whether this is reasonable, or just making stuff up. Probably the latter.

Update: 0300 and they’re still there. Have to get some sleep now, which means I might get a parking ticket in the morning, depending on when the wardens start checking.

Update 2: Ah, isn’t there some middle-of-the-night boxing match going on? I wonder whether the local pub is showing it, or something.

Tesco signage:

Girls 9-15 must have waistcoats

Don’t know whether it’s commercial or merely informative, but either way I call shenanigans.

Exciting news!

Pope Benedict XVI has authorised special indulgences to mark the 150th anniversary of the Virgin Mary’s reputed appearance at Lourdes.

What are indulgences? Have a guess. Go on. Bear in mind it is the 21st century. Give in?

Catholics visiting the site within a year of 8 December will be able to receive an indulgence, which the Church teaches can reduce time in purgatory.

I am not making this up.

The pontiff also said believers who prayed at places of worship dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes from 2-11 February next year - or who were unable to make the journey - would also be able to receive indulgences.

I am not making this up. 

Note: “would also be able to receive’. You don’t think they’ll cost anything, do you? Because that would be what’s colloquially known as ‘a racket’. They wouldn’t dare, would they?

Hey, I’ve just remembered: I’ve a voucher offering 10% off at Tesco. It’s only valid this weekend, though. Not sure why I thought of that.

While some might consider indulgences an outdated concept, great spiritual importance have been assigned to them by Benedict XVI and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

I am not making this up.

Going to head to Tesco right now, actually - for some reason I fancy a carrot. Also, a stick.

Well, kinda. There’s an edit button above each picture that sends you straight through to the Picnik system, anyway. Is cool. Obviously no match for Photoshop, but 90% of my edits are cropping and a bit of levels adjustment, which Picnik can handle without a problem. Also useful for mobile uploads.