A Serious Man | London film festival review
Oct0
A Serious Man | London film festival review |
Film |
The Guardian
Blimey:
“The Coen brothers may just have made their masterpiece with this, their 14th feature and yet another hairpin-bend change of direction, which has been their trademark for their entire career.”
Blackpool Illuminations
Oct0
We went last night, it was my first time seeing them and while everyone else said they weren’t as good as they used to be I enjoyed them a lot.
Long queues though in the car, we were lucky to get through before the switch off at 11 pm!
Bookmarks for October 14th through October 28th
Oct0
Links for October 14th through October 28th:
- SamKnows Broadband – LLU Operators – O2 / Be Unlimited –
- MissionClock – Keep up-to-date with space launches from NASA and other agencies around the world with MissionClock for your iPhone or iPod Touch.
MissionClock shows you a real-time countdown clock for upcoming missions, as well as information about missions that are currently underway. You can see major launch and ascent events as they happen, and receive alerts when mission conditions change. - 15 Large Cardboard Boxes –
- Fred-Talbot –
- Fur flies on ‘Mr. Fox’ — latimes.com – Does it make Wes Anderson slightly more endearing to know he's a nightmare to work with?
Good or bad, it'll be an interesting film.
Nice to know it was made in the UK too.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Oct0
I lov the weird world of Wes Anderson films. It’s the kind of world you would love to live in but know it’s impossible. As you might have guessed, went to see Fantastic Mr. Fox last night. Is it for kids? Marketing people might think so but suspect Anderson doesn’t really care he just wanted to make it. I think it’s more for people who remember the story fondly. But I think it’s nicely updated.
I don’t know what it is about his films, it’s not only the aesthetic which he manages to keep spot on even in an animated medium it’s all the rest too.
Question Time
Oct0
Yeah so I was one of the 8 million who watched the BBC’s Question Time with Chris Huhne, Jack Straw, Bonnie Greer, Sayeeda Warsi and Nick Griffin.
Of course there’s been a lot of debate surrounding the broadcast so I thought i’d state some of my own thoughts.
The BBC was absolutely right to invite Nick Griffin on, he’s an elected politician now – a million people used their one precious vote in favour of his party and that cannot be ignored. I think people voted for the BNP out of spite, revenge and ignorance. People don’t like the Conservatives and now Labour have been in Government for a while they don’t like them either, they don’t see the Lib Dem’s as worthwhile so they make a protest and vote BNP. The BNP then see this as people agreeing with them which if people even researched their votes with some care they might find that they actually don’t. While most people protest by just spoiling.
We live in a country of free speech, so you cannot shut a speaker out of the conversation. It by no means states you agree with them just by listening to them.
I did feel sorry for the protestors, I didn’t understand why they were there. Of course they don’t like the BNP but why have a go at the BBC? I’m sure they would be more upset if the BBC didn’t listen to them as well.
And so, with this programme, it’s opened up debate about the BNP and Politics in general, all the papers are talking about it and with a general election coming it can only be a good thing to be talking about what we want, where we want to go.
Michael McIntyre – Reviews – Comedy – Greater Manchester’s CityLife
Oct0
Michael McIntyre – Reviews – Comedy – Greater Manchester’s CityLife.
Went to see him at the MEN last night, it was great to see a man who clearly enjoys life and finding funny things in it.
I hadn’t been to see comedy in the arena before so I was curious as to how it would work. Our seats were block 109 which is pretty much at the other end of the arena from the stage – so the TV screens there are essential. It is not, however, the same as seeing it on TV – it’s live, you are there and a part of it even though there are 16,000 other people there.
General Election 2010 – Bury North
Oct1
Out of interest just looked up the prospective candidates for MP’s in Bury.
It’s a majority of 2000 so it’s fairly close, currently a labour MP but a tory council.
Labour David Chaytor 19,130 43.0% ?8.2
Conservative David Nuttall 16,204 36.5% ?0.2
Liberal Democrat Wilf Davison 6,514 14.7% +2.5
Majority 2,926 6.6% ?8.0
Turnout 44,439 61.5% -1.5
The Labour guy at the moment got caught up in the expenses thing and has said he will step down at the next election, labour haven’t named their replacement yet but the candidates are all women.
This is the conservative guy: http://davidnuttall.info/davids-views/
He:
- Wants to reduce abortion time limit to 20 weeks
- Is *for* capital punishment for murder
- Against euthanasia
- Wants to repeal hunting ban
!!!!
Lib Dem guy is Richard Baum, lists all his GCSE’s results, A-levels and volunteer work and so on.
He’s on the council at the moment. Was against congestion charge
Interestingly the Labour website still lists David Chaytor as the next prospective MP for Bury North, despite being officially barred from standing as an MP.
First Time Buyer
Oct0
There should be a book for first time buyers, or a pamphlet or easy to read guide on buying a house. It’s possibly the most bewildering purchase ever. It’s nothing like buying anything else, anything normal off the shelf or completely tailored.
Everyone has an opinion with different degrees of correctness about the process and unbelievably it seems the finding of the house you actually want to buy is the easy bit – but you can’t let them know that you actually want it, this is a negotiation don’t you know.
You find the house, find the mortgage, convince the mortgage people you can pay them back eventually with a job that you have at the moment, convince the estate agent that you can afford the house who in turn convinces the sellers. But you don’t want to be too convincing otherwise they’ll want more money for the house. Get yourself a solicitor, get him to actually work for you, check up on him and make sure he’s doing some work give him every little form he needs go over what their solicitor has sent to him, make sure that there’s nothing hidden that you don’t like. Sign contacts and your life away, transfer moneys make sure everybody’s happy and then you might even be able to pack up your things make things good with your landlord and live in a different house that needs more money spending on it becuase the reason you could afford it in the first place was that it needed a little bit of TLC.
But we’re not that far along yet. Nearly there though.
iPlayer
Oct0
I know i’m in the minority, but I don’t really ‘get’ the BBC’s iPlayer. It’s not that I don’t use it – I do but I don’t use it very regularly. In fact what I really use it for most is when I hear of a band I like were doing a session on Zane Lowe, so I listen back to it.
For TV, pretty much everything I want to watch gets recorded by my BT Vision box and if I miss it I usually just search for a repeat and watch that.
I can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t have a DVR but is prepared to leap a few technology steps ahead of just a TV and watch the iPlayer to see what they’ve missed.
Where is the iPlayer project heading? Really I would like to see things like the BBC’s catch up service along with the other channels all work with eachother and could then replace the recorder parts in your set-top box. What’s the point of everyone having 160GB or whatever hooked up to their TV when the BBC will stream it to you for free anyways? To catch it in case of rights issue’s and them not being able to stream it to you?
I just find it a bit odd that we have these competing methods and nobody’s unified them yet (nor is likely to be allowed to either).
The BT Vision box does On Demand stuff very well all coming from BT’s servers and it does have catch-up content from the channels but strangely you have to pay for it.
Someone at some point will merge Plex or similar to have an iPlayer that will work for all the channels including Sky’s, that’s the holy grail here isn’t it?
Frank Turner
Oct0
Quite excited, going to see Frank Turner again tonight at Manchester Academy 2.
Update:
Well, amazing of course! Especially loved the bit where Frank brought on a girl from the audience to play a Harmonica solo, apparently though her boyfriend was at the bar at the time and missed the whole thing!
Being suckers for Merch we also bought some playing cards and thought yeah that’ll do us and outside afterwards were some really nice t-shirts and hoodies, having some money left in my pocket, how could I refuse?
Setlist
- Live Fast Die Old
- The Road
- Long Live The Queen
- Substitute
- Try This At Home
- Dan’s Song
- The Real Damage
- Poetry Of The Deed
- Imperfect Tense
- Smiling At Strangers On Trains
- Sons Of Liberty
- District Sleeps Alone Tonight (The Postal Service cover)
- Love, Ire & Song
- Father’s Day
- I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous
Encore:
- The Ballad Of Me Of My Friends
- Reasons Not To Be An Idiot
- Photosynthesis