Pulp Fiction - Goo style!

Pulp Fiction - Goo style!

New Mythbusters!!

Yay, new series of Mythbusters on Discovery!!! BBC2 showed a cut down version for a while but it never seemed to get going there, which is a shame as Beeb 2 is usually good with cult shows, but luckily it is available in the UK on Discovery. It has to be one of the best geek-friendly shows around, its fun, interesting, main presenters Jamie and Adam are a great straight guy/funny guy double act and as a bonus we get Kari Byron, the thinking geek's pinup. Everything from rude myths like does a lit match get rid of the fart smell (leading Adam to have to build a rig to capture his bottom trumpets) to refloating a sunken boat using ping pong balls or trying out Archimede's infamous 'death ray'. Brilliant stuff. The only thing that could be better is if they did a motor myths special in conjunction with Top Gear.

Happy 50th birthday, Lego!!

Yep, today is apparently the fiftieth anniversary of the granting of the patent for one of the best toys ever invented in the entire history of the world, Lego. How great is Lego? And how unfair is it that once we grow up we're not supposed to play with it as it is an immature thing to do, leading to us buying sets for kids in the family then 'helping' them build stuff with it... From the simple bricks first patented back then to the dizzy heights of Lego Star Wars, how bloody cool is Lego? Do I care how immature that makes me sound? Nope. Lego's great and we all know it.(link via Boing Boing)

Accordion by the beach



Down on Portobello beach this afternoon (a dry day!!! a day with no howling gales!!! Quick everyone outside!!!), my mate's dog happily running around sniffing interesting smells (most animals walk about with their heads held up to see around them, except dogs, who trot around with their head pointing downwards so they can sniff everything) and as we walked along the beach we could hear music. Walking up onto the nearby esplanade we saw this chap playing the accordion, while nearby a wee boy was dancing happily to the music. It sounded like a little bit of France in the middle of Edinburgh's seaside and put us in happy mind of our trip to Paris coming up in a few weeks. I imagine in Paris accordion players busking must be a bit like bagpipers in Edinburgh.

The day after Burns Night

And what comes after Burns Night? Why Smithers Night, of course!

Happy Burns Night

It's January the 25th when Scots at home and the many-times that number of Scots and those of Scots blood abroad celebrate the life and art of our national bard, Robert Burns. Actually more than Scots - Burns is one of that handful of writers, like Austen, Borges and Cervantes, who cross the centuries, national boundaries and language to become a writer who belongs to the world. A Makar, as we would say, an old term which implies more than a writer, but a maker of words, ideas and worlds, one who translates notions, symbols, thoughts and feelings into that magical form we call words so others can share them.

"There's nane that's blest of human kind,
But the cheerful and the gay, man,
Fal, la, la, &c.

Here's a bottle and an honest friend!
What wad ye wish for mair, man?
Wha kens, before his life may end,
What his share may be o' care, man?

Then catch the moments as they fly,
And use them as ye ought, man:
Believe me, happiness is shy,
And comes not aye when sought, man."

"A bottle and friend", Robert Burns, 1787

This year the city of my birth, Glasgow, has taken this day to mark another great Scots poet as well, the bard I personally consider the greatest living Scots poet and my personal favourite, the quite wonderful Edwin Morgan. Sadly Eddie, now in his mid 80s and suffering from cancer, isn't up to taking part but nonetheless some 15, 000 free copies of one of his collections of poetry is being given out over a 24 hour period in Glasgow with poets doing readings all over the city and ordinary folks in the street being encouraged to explore a part of their culture and heritage that many of them perhaps don't think about too much.

Actually, even among many book folks I often hear the ignorant "I don't like poetry" response from people all the time. That's usually from people who never bother their arse to actually try reading some different types of poetry. Its like saying I don't like jazz, I don't like Indian food, I don't like... Well, you get the idea - dismissing a whole and very diverse area without exploring it, or rubbishing it on perhaps one or two tiny looks. Its a sign of a closed mind and that's a shame because poetry is one of the finest ways I know to open minds and expand not only the imagination but the senses and the ability to perceive more with them; good poetry reaches beyond what even the best prose can do (and some of the best prose feels poetic), it interacts with our intellect but also our spiritual side and connects us, ideas, dreams, the world and the other worlds behind the one we see with our ordinary eyes.

Still say you don't like poetry? Think about it next time you are listening to some beautiful piece of music that moves you in a way you didn't think anything could and then realise you're listening to another form of poetry, told in notes and beats. Poetry is music, its words, its rhythm, its life.

But now, if you will excuse me, my personal Burns Supper awaits - something a little different this year, vegetarian haggis samosas in chili sauce! (if you are wondering how you get a veggie haggis, you take an ordinary wild haggis and feed it on tofu) Thus combining two great Scottish traditions, the haggis and Indian food, on one meal and of course a very fine single malt to toast the Bard. Slainte!

Happy Burns Night

It's January the 25th when Scots at home and the many-times that number of Scots and those d

New Cockney rhyming slang


Peter Hain = government's shame

Gordon Brown = what a clown

tricky Alsatian = dodgy donation

minister beware = no money to declare

Rhythm song

Checking YouTube for something completely unrelated I stumbled across this decent quality clip of one of my favourite musicians, the Scottish solo percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie. I've loved Evelyn's work for years; being a solo percussionist was pretty remarkable in the classical world, being a woman who chose to forge a path as a solo percussionist even more so, but being a deaf woman who carves out an international career as a highly respected musician is just astonishing. I've been lucky enough to hear Evelyn perform live several times and she is a powerhouse on the stage, utterly immersed in her music; the notes she cannot hear she feels.

This clip is from the documentary Touch the Sound, which I saw at the Edinburgh International Film Festival a few years back and at which Evelyn surprised the audience by appearing during the director's Q&A and giving us an impromptu performance, just her alone with a snare drum, in the dark a single light shining up through the skin of the drum as she stood on the Filmhouse stage and utterly transported a rapt audience. I came out of the cinema into a bright summer day, a head full of music; that was one of those days where I floated home feeling the world was wonderful sometimes.

Surf's up!

Kite surfers taking advantage of the breeze at Longniddry Bents on the Forth for a bit of winter surfing across the waves and sometimes right into the air - so damned cool.





Take off time!

Who has the time?

I see a lot of different Doctor Who merchandise coming out, but I especially love this replica of the fob watch from the two-parter story Human Nature/Family of Blood from last season, written by the brilliant Paul Cornell (himself a lifelong Who fan as well as screenwriter, novelist and comics scribe). It was the one where the Doctor is seemingly posing as a teacher at an Edwardian boy's school just before WWI, but it turns out he is doing more than posing - he is human. Too escape the tracking of the Family of Blood he's altered himself both physically and mentally from Time Lord to human and the watch contains his real essence. Meantime the human Doctor has strange dreams of travelling in time and space and also finds himself falling in love with the school matron - a romance he could never have as the Time Lord. Paul also uses the story to explore the price the Doctor pays for being who he is, the toll on him emotionally to stand apart and be the one who saves the day, to be the hero in a dangerous universe. Its wonderfully emotive material and a nice take on the old Joseph Campbell exploration of the Hero; one of the best stories from the new series so far.

"Space, the final frontier... These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise; her five-year mission to seek out new life and new civilisations. To boldly go where no man has gone before..."

I've been cynical and wary about JJ Abrams' new Star Trek movie - if you haven't been following developments the Alias, MI-3 and Cloverfield creator is taking the series back to before the beginning, with the early days of the classic 60s Trek characters (Zachary Quinto - Sylar in the brilliant Heroes series - plays a young Spock). I have no problems with Abrams' storytelling abilities but I am wondering if I can possibly accept other actors in these roles, even essaying younger versions than we saw. After all I grew up on the original Trek - repeats of that and Pertwee then Baker era Doctor Who were my 1970s televisual SF fixes in those old, three-channel days - and I'm not sure I can take anyone else in those roles. Nonetheless this glimpse of the original, classic 60s style Enterprise under construction is pretty exciting to a geek like me; I especially like the way in the bigger version you can see inside the ship where the hull plates haven't been fixed yet; this looks like the original ship being 'born' and there's something romantic about the big ships, fictional or otherwise.



Trekmovie also had a link to this low quality YouTube someone uploaded of the teaser trailer being shown with the opening of Cloverfield in the US. Little to see except flares of light from welding torches as the camera pulls back to reveal the Starship Enterprise in drydock, being completed for her five year mission. The soundtrack is a mixture of speechs from the glory days of the Space Race, which again appeals strongly to my geek heart (I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up; I still do), from Kennedy's inspirational speech to Armstrong's "one small step", culminating in Leonard Nimoy (who returns to play the older Spock) uttering those immortal words, "space, the final frontier..." Despite my wariness the geek hairs on my neck stood up...

Quack quack

Walking along the Union Canal this weekend, ducks and other birds (sadly I do not know everything and bird types is one area I am weak in - anyone know what these black waterfowl with the white bills are?) swimming around. The ducks go past, the black birds swim past, their little red-orange webbed feet just visible through the greenish water, working away like the paddles on an old Mississippi steamboat. Then suddenly they start diving. Ploop! One minute they are there, next moment only concentric ripples spreading outwards on the surface of the water to show where they had been, then suddenly they pop up again elsewhere, like a WWII German U-Boat doing an emergency surface. I had a sudden urge to do my Jack Hawkins impression and call for the depth charges...

It was very hard to capture these sudden movements on the camera, so I switched to video mode instead. You can hear a voice at the start which is a tiny little girl with her dad shouting "quack quacks!" in delight. Nearby some narrowboats which are lived on the whole year long, the restored old Leamington Lift Bridge (I don't know why but it gives me such pleasure to see it raised and for holidaying folks to sail under it), the floating restaurant barge which cruises at the weekend, new waterfront cafes, offices and homes, the remains of the old Scottish and Newcastle brewery slowly being taken apart as the area is remade (Sean Connery lived just right round the corner from this spot as a boy and delivered milk in the area - now he comes back to the nearby cinema on a red carpet for the Film Festival every year). And this is all a short walk to my home in one direction and to Edinburgh Castle the other way. The little marvels we can see even in the middle of the city if we only stop and look for a moment and share that simple, childlike delight in these little surprises and presents the world offers us.



(apologies for the poor quality - my camera does very good video but that means big files so I need to reduce it so much to fit on YouTube it never looks right - oh well, it's free!)

Gitmo is six

I missed noticing this until today, but Guantanamo Bay's odious prison camp marked its sixth anniversary on Friday, an event marked by Amnesty International. Gee, I feel so much safer, hasn't the world become a much better place as a result of this place and the rest of Bush's foreign policy (not to mention their State Department announcing that under US law it is legal for them to go to another country, including Britain and kidnap someone they think is a suspect)? If only Gitmo made as much sense as most six year olds... (via Boing Boing)

Pardon for witches

A Lothians-based paranormal group, Full Moon Investigations, has asked the Scottish parliament to issue a posthumous pardon to all the people persecuted under charges of witchcraft throughout Scottish history; not the finest part of our long history and not a part the tourist industry likes to talk about too much, preferring either (often wrong) ancient history or extolling the Enlightenment (except, of course, if you are promoting a ghost walk tour!).

I know, I know, some people sigh cynically, what is the point of this nonsense? Every month there seems to be someone demanding a government issue a retroactive apology for something which happened long before most folks in the country were even born and aren't we all fed up with it, isn't it just trying to apply political correct modern sensibilities backwards onto long-past events to make us feel better? Well to be honest it is easy to think that way, but then consider that when we ignore past injustices we tend to allow those patterns to repeat.

What were some of the principal elements of witchcraft allegations in previous centuries? Picking on someone who was a bit different (old woman living on her own with cats), groups who may not have been popular with the majority (ultra Calvinists suspicious of Catholics), people in positions of power encouraging utterly irrational hatred, suspicion and fear of those who are different for their own ends and using them to consolidate their own grip over the populace, justify draconian changes in law and to prosecute actions which would normally be seen as uncivilised... Gee, sound even remotely like certain events in modern society? And if you are still thinking nah, it is just PC nonsense, just remember how the phrase 'witch hunt' has become a phrase we use regularly when talking about the persecution of any individual or small group. Then think again.

snowy Saltire
Originally uploaded by byronv2

Wind whipping around a Saltire above the entrance to the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh as snow makes streaks across a leaden night sky

Jezza shoots himself in the foot

Not for the first time Jeremy Clarkson has managed to shoot himself in the foot then put that foot in his big mouth. Writing in that most odious of tabloid rags, the Sun, he waffled on smugly about how the enormous loss of private date belonging to some 25 million citizens by the government late last year was all a load of rubbish and a panic about nothing. And to prove that confidential data couldn't be used against people he published his own banking account details and other information in his column for all to read. And guess what? The stupid bastard got stung! Someone took that information and fraudulently set up a direct debit for 500 pounds to the charity Diabetes UK. Numpty. Although to give Jezza his due, when he does something bloody stupid at least he admits he was, as his colleague James May might say, "a prize clot."

The last man on Earth

Grabbed some time to go and sit and watch I Am Legend before I go back to work. Now I had already surmised from trailers and articles in Empire that yet again Hollywood had not done the book. Third time a film has been made of Richard Matheson's classic 50s novel of Cold War paranoia and humanity's seemingly endless ability for self-destruction and third time they haven't done the bloody book! Come one, please....

That said the film, although different from the book - relocated to New York, which actually works well during the scene of Will Smith hunting wild game in an overgrown Times Square, main character Robert Neville is now an army doctor working on a cure, the scientifically created vampires are now fast, aggressive zombies (although still photophobic) - it actually works very well in creating a sense of isolation and terror as the last man in the world tries to hold it together in a Manhattan populated only by him, his dog and a legion of the infected.

Instead of an unspecified biological agent from a war (as in the book) the cause here is genetic engineering in an attempt to beat cancer, although even if you knew nothing about the story going in you could guess nothing good would come of a medical breakthrough by a character with a name like Doctor Crippen (a cameo by Emma Thompson). Scenes where Neville heads to the DVD store during daylight to withdraw films and return old ones illustrate how he is trying to use routine to keep himself together, rather than simply grabbing whatever he wants from the store. Populating the shop with store window dummies so it looks occupied and he has someone to 'talk' to adds to that feeling, being both slightly amusing and disturbing at the same time, stirring sympathy for Neville.

(SPOILER WARNING: don't read on if you are going to see it, I won't describe the whole finale, but it might spoil it for you if you are planning to see it)

Which makes it all the more annoying when the final section totally destroys what had been so carefully built up earlier, opting for the big fights with masses of CGI infected, big bangs and adding a redemption arc which clashes with the themes established earlier in the same way the original 'happy ending' forced on Blade Runner on its original release, really annoying the hell out of me, Hollywood managing an interesting, bleak, disturbing film then getting cold feet and going for SF CGI action fest at the end. And the CGI is annoying because the infected are hyped up creatures (why? they are diseased, why do they have amazing superhuman abilities now???), leaping up high buildings and their leader's jaws opening preternaturally wide as he yells - yes, they come right out of the Mummy (except some infected dogs which was copied shamelessly from Resident Evil), which was fine for the Mummy which was daft but fun and knew it, this was serious and bleak and psychological then went all cartoony and bollocksed it up.

And if they had stuck to the bloody book in the first place they might have avoided it. The book is far more effective - each night Neville has to be home and barricaded in his home before sunset. Outside his home many of the infected who have become vampire-like creatures due to the virus are people he knows, friends, neighbours (his next door neighbour bellowing 'Neville!' each night seems worse than simple roaring fiends in the movie, more personal) and in a harrowing flashback we see Neville in the book burying his wife then finding her resurrected by the virus and coming back to try and kill him and feed on him. In the book there are live and dead vampires as the virus mutates living victims but also resurrects the dead, who act differently. None of this comes in the film. In the book Neville hunts them by day as they lie in their comas, staking them and wondering why it is that this method of killing from myths works, all the time becoming more paranoid, more bloody and violent himself, staring into the Neitzchen abyss and having it stare back into him, becoming a monster as he fights monsters.

I won't spoil the ending of the book here, but suffice to say Matheson maintains the bleak atmosphere he established effectively with such commendable economy (the book is very short), a skill he used also as a screenwriter (he would work on many of the Vincent Price-Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe movies), in contrast to the movie which ruins itself at that point. And the title I Am Legend has a very different, darker explanation at the end of Matheson's powerful novel than the film. Film - watchable but be prepared to be suddenly let down at the clunking gear change towards the end (and what a shame, the earlier bits as I said are effective and Smith is allowed to act for once). Book - bloody brilliant, one of my personal top books of the last century, a real insight into the paranoia and fear of the Cold War era which still works perfectly in today's troubled world. You should read it.

Free your mind, style monkey

I love this story on Boing Boing - a man bought an Ipod for his daughter for Christmas, but when she opened the box instead of the over-priced product there was a note, written in classic 'ransom note' style of cut-up newspaper lettering, reading: "Reclaim your mind from the media's shackles. Read a book and resurect [sic] yourself. To claim your capitalistic garbage go to your nearest Apple store." When they returned to the store it transpired others had the same experience. I think if this had happened to me I'd have rather mixed feelings - annoyed but also quite amused at the same time. Mind you it would be more appropriate for the Iphone, really, wouldn't it? Not that I dislike the product (in fact it looks quite cool), just the mercenary (and anti-competitive) way Apple screw their loyal customers (and also stupid fashion junkie monkeys) with over-inflated costs and tying them to a single service provider, which seems to me to be so anti that freedom Apple was originally supposed to be about...

100 year old twins

Nice story on the BBC about a pair of twins celebrating their one hundredth birthday on New Year's Day. When they were born in 1908 the doctor arrived on horseback. The way petrol prices are going they might be going back to that method of transportation sooner than we think :-). Happy New Year, folks.