Thursday, January 31, 2008

On London

Recently I had the opportunity to go down to London to visit some close friends of mine. Now I guess I could tell you about the wonderful time we had...or I could just whine about the capital!!

London is BIG, I mean stupidly big. OK so there are several American settlements that dwarf it but nonetheless it is rather massive. I was astounded to see that a train journey from Euston (universal arrival station for us up north) to where I was going to meet up was estimated at a little under an hour - no journey withing the same city confines should take that long!! OK, so it actually took ten minutes, even with changing trains due to cancellations but the point stands.

On arrival at Euston I was greeted (not personally) by several policemen strolling the station keeping watch. I guess this is necessary because of the terror attacks but it is still a strange sight. The only other time I've seen police at a train station was when Liverpool Central went into lockdown because of fire, and even then it was only two bobbies casually leaning on a wall.

The next step into weirdness was purchasing an Oyster Card, London's new travel solution. Not too far from Science Fiction the card is "topped up" and then swiped over a reader on your journey deducting money for your travel as you go along. The most bizarre thing was when the system extended to buses too, you no longer have to exchange words with the driver you just beep yourself in and get off creating a very impersonal feel, which apparently suits Londoners down to the ground.

After meeting up with my friends and perusing the National Gallery one of the first sights of London was to see a large black man unashamedly singing and dancing in front of the historic building. People were passing by absently videoing him, but apparently his rendition of "Billie Jean" really got them going. There aren't many such nutters up north but enough for it not to be a complete shock. It makes you wonder why they do it though, I mean was he just hoping that Simon Cowell was going to take in some art that day or did he have some perverse need to publicly express himself. Nonetheless I got a good few seconds video out of it and moved on like everyone else.

The last negative, fuelled by Oyster Card human independence is the dispassionate nature of people travelling in London. On the tube it is practice to avoid all contact with people on your journey..which begs the question why put all the seats facing each other! Anyway, I managed to get onto a tube train by jamming my bag into the door at the last second. Anywhere else the people on the train would be having a giggle about it and swapping stopries of close shaves for the next few stops at least, but on the tube everyone just stared at the floor. No sense of humour whatsoever just minds numbed by travel on a system designed to be as inhuman as possible.

OK, so it's not quite that bad, and we did have one nice conversation on the tube. And it was a good day out, but nonetheless the big city is a weird weird place!!

Word of the post: Vignette - noun
1.a decorative design or small illustration used on the title page of a book or at the beginning or end of a chapter.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Weekly Quote W/E 26/01/08

Bit late...I've been busy...tell you later

"It is better to marry than to burn." - 1 Corinthians 7v9

Now there's motivation!!!

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Weekly Quote W/E 19/01/08

Well there's not much to say really...another week has gone, so here's another quote. Oh I think it may be the last Facebook one...oooh!

"The way to become famous fast is to throw a brick at someone who is famous" - Walter Winchell

Till next time...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Stuff I've read recently 2

Hello. Well it's been a shamefully long time since my last one of these posts, so long I could barely remember I'd done one of these and I'm struggling to remember which books I've read since the last one, though that's not to say I've read lots, just a few...and very slowly! But anyway, it's still a good practice to remember what I've read, and if you find it interesting then all the better.

I'll start with the Bible, I've got through a fair few books of it while plodding through secular literature. Since there's a few books to get through and my summaries have generally been grossly inadequate I'll just note down the books I've read and maybe link to better written reviews later.

The Bible - God et al.

Since the last post I've read through Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea and Joel. These books, especially the early ones take place during a time when Israel/Judah had been humiliated and defeated by the nations around them, but these books emphasise God's control and authority during this dark period in Israel's history, which was ultimately his judgement on them.

Planet Simpson - Chris Turner

"On Thursday 21st January 1993, around 8.20pm I was standing on the edge of a dance floor at a campus pub called Alfie's with a glass of cheap draught beer in my hand. The dance floor before me was packed with people, all of them waiting - as was I - for the nest mind-blowing riff from the in-house entertainment."

This is one of the first non-fiction books I'd read in ages, or at least the first I'd read purely for entertainment. It tracks how the development of pop-culture has influenced the dysfunctional yellow family and how they have had more than a little impact on it in return. While at times a little overreaching in my opinion the book charts how the show is one of the most vivid and accurate reflections of consumer culture in modern times. Dense, but a very easy read I would recommend it to anyone who wants to think a little more about the impact one TV show has had on our world.

Elephants can remember - Agatha Christie

I've returned this to my Dad so I don't have the opening line, but it was a great read nonetheless. Again Christie shows her great ability to weave unique and thrilling plotlines in many different ways. This story builds on intrigue rather than tension, with the murder being long in the past and no one at real risk of death. The story follows a girl's need to find out whether her parent's death was murder or suicide. No one knows, there is little evidence to prove anything other that that they are dead and most witnesses so old they only have foggy recollections. With this scant evidence Poirot must try to piece together an ancient case, and makes good reading while doing so.

Transformers: Ghosts of Yesterday - Alan Dean Foster

"Standing taller than a thirty-six-story building and weighing six million, seven hundred thousnd pounds, in the year 1969 the Saturn V moon rocket was the biggest man-made object ever sent to space."

While I wouldn't class this as one of the best books I've read, and tie-in fiction is hardly renowned for it's masterful prose, it was still a pretty decent read. The book is set around the time of the Moon Launch where a secret crew enter space and inadvertantly find their way into the middle of the conflict between the Decepticons and Autobots, not knowing who to trust and struggling to survive, lost in space and outclassed by the far superior Transformer race. Some of the details were a bit unclear and there seem to be a few discrepancies between it and the film it prepares you for, but nonetheless it was a good intro. If you're a fan of the film and want to know more then it's probably worth the flutter, otherwise I wouldn't rush out to get it.

Untold Stories - Alan Bennett

"There is a wood, a canal, the river, and above the river the railway and the road. It's the first proprer country that you get as you come north out of Leeds, and going home on the train I pass the place quite often. Only these days I look. I've been passing the place for years without looking because I didn't know it was a place, that anything had happened there to make it a place."

While prose this was again one of the few non-fiction books that I've read in recent times and though it's taken far too long I'm glad to say that I read it and enjoyed it. The book is comprised of numerous pieces of writing including prose, essays and Alan's diaries. The title piece is an autobiographical account focused on his mother's deppresion, but telling a good chunk of his life's story around it. While non-fiction it certainly has the flow of a prose piece, and it took me a good few pages to realise it was about real life, which to me made it all the more interesting. The man has had an interesting and diverse life yet he tells his story with a good deal of humility or "shyness" as he so often terms it. There is a great variation in types of writing and that keeps it fresh and readable throughout and as a last note the man manages to talk about art and actually make me interested and sympathetic to him as he manages to approach it with both a collector's eye and an appreciation of how it looks to someone who's come into the gallery to keep warm - a rare gift in my book!!

The Forever War - Joe Haldeman

"'Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.' The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn't look five years older than me. So if he'd ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he'd done it as an infant."

The Forever War is more my cup of tea, being an epic and unique Science Fiction adventure. The story is told of William Mandella, recruited into a war against an unknown enemy, the Taurans, and finding he spends much longer at war than he could possibly imagine. The method of travelling they use distorts time so when they first attack the Taurans they spend a few days attacking with limmited success, then return only to find decades have past, Earth's economy crumbled and reformed. Unable to cope with such a drastically changed homeworld he returns to the army only to have his so called "veteran" status mean he gets promoted and pushed into command and back into the field. Time and again he fights the unknown, time and again he returns to a drastically changed world, how will a man cope under such circumstances. This book has well deserved the awards placed on it and I reccommend it highly.

Well I've taken up enough space so I'll leave it at that methinks, well apart from word of the post
Word of the post: Apropos - adverb

1.fitting; at the right time; to the purpose; opportunely.
2.Obsolete. by the way.




Saturday, January 12, 2008

Weekly Quote W/E 12/01/08

Well I've nearly blundered my way through another set of books, taking much longer than needed, but hopefully I'll be able to post about literature and add a splash of interesting colour in addition to these quotations. But for now, here's yet another one...

"So what you're saying is we all have to live like hermits or eskimos or thirdworldsters just so we can save 19 species of hummingbirds so they're around to get fried when the sun goes mental?!" - Mitchel and Webb, That Mitchell and Webb Sound, Vol 1

Back soon I hope

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

And a happy new year!

Well we're a good nine days in now, but I though I may as well post something welcoming y'all to another few weeks of constantly getting the date wrong!! 2008 will get some getting used to, for some reason I never even realised until now I'm quite fond of 2007, it having a much better ring to it than any other year of the decade, with 2001 being a possible exception.

I digress, the number notwithstanding it is great to be in 2008 and to have a whole year to look forward to. Though for the most part the "new year" period is often taken up with reminiscing over the holidays which already seem so far away. Unlike the great majority of the British public I can still remember what went on over the festive period.

Christmas was early in on the holiday time, with only a few days to cram in a bit of last minute shopping before the big day. I've already detailed Christmas so I won't go into it much other than to say it was a nice day spent with family eating chocolate and watching embarrasing home videos...as always! Immediately after I caught up with some close friends and we went to see I Am Legend which was the well written Sci-Fi thrill ride it promised to be. The next few days were spent "chilling" and catching up with folks.

New Years Eve I spent with Edd, who I hadn't seen for a while due to conflicting work schedules. We set about wasting as much time as we could, bolstered by the fact that work rang to say they'd cancelled his shift and many an hour was spent on his Wii before I realised it was getting dark and I'd better get going before the very inclinous way home became even harder to traverse. On arriving home I got an invitation to have a Bourne Marathon evening to pass the New Year, it was good fun and I got to put my doughnut maker (from mum and dad) to good use. We spent the crossover period arguing about how many seconds there were left as all of our watches disagreed!!

Well I'm now back to work, but I managed to squeeze in a few more catchups, a trip to the much missed Laser Quest (now Quasar) in Chester and even a wedding so all in all a very full and satisfactory holiday period. And that's probably enough from me now, but I'd like to wish all my reader(s) a very happy new year.

Word of the post: Proxy - Proxynoun, plural prox·ies.

1.the agency, function, or power of a person authorized to act as the deputy or substitute for another.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Weekly Quote W/E 05/01/08

Well a bit late and a bit of a gap again in bloggage I'm afraid. I've had a very satisfactory Christmas holiday which has kept me occupied and away from my computer. I will endeavour to let you know what I've been up to and do some kind of Happy New Year type post at some point, but for now...

"You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I beat you with till you realise who'se in ruttin' comman here!" - Jayne Cobb, Firefly.

Speak to you soon