Archive for October, 2007

What If They Didn’t Come Back?

Published by Crackerwax on 27 October 2007 in Geeky Stuff and Ideas. 0 Comments

In 1969 man was beginning a new era in space exploration, Apollo 11 was destined to reach the moon in July and make America the first nation to land a man there. The Apollo moon landing was America’s demonstration to the world of its industrial and scientific might, it was to shine as a beacon to other nations.

We all know that Michael Collins, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin and Neil Armstrong made it to the moon and that Armstrong and Aldrin got the chance to dance about on the surface for a bit, before they all returned to Earth safe and sound and just in time for a cup of Kenco and a Jammie Dodger.

However thought was given by Nixon’s administration to what was to be said in the event of a catastrophe that left the astronauts stranded. It was written by presidential speech writer William Safire and it goes like this.

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

Setting aside my deeply cynical views on spin from governments, the feelings expressed in that speech are perfectly balanced. The hope for the future drawing a veil over the fact that the astronauts would, at the time the speech was read, still be alive but know that they had no hope of rescue, displays a sleight of hand that any magician would be proud of.

Great words though, made all the greater by the fact that they draw on themes I wouldn’t have expected from a nation like America. Still as Thomas Mann said, a man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

David Platt

Published by Crackerwax on 22 October 2007 in Acting, Announcements and Television. 2 Comments

I can’t believe I’m actually getting myself embroiled in something this fucking trivial but, well, and it pains me to say this. But, well here goes…

David Platt from Coronation Street is a complete cunt.

I know he’s not real and that he’s just doing the acting, but even so he’s a fantastic little actor if he can make me hate him. Blimey.

Spike Milligan

Published by Crackerwax on 19 October 2007 in Love and People. 2 Comments

I’m not going to go into how great a comedian Spike Milligan was because as good a comedian as he was, he was a better poet. Try this light hearted stuff for size.

I thought I saw Jesus on a tram.
I said, Are you Jesus?
He said, Yes. I am.

Although probably most famous for his light hearted nonsense poetry, most of it a lot more nonsensical than that one, he did do a great deal of serious stuff.

Suffering from depression all of his life, Milligan suffered from several major mental breakdowns and often locked himself away from the rest of the world and refused to communicate with anyone. Of his depression he said:

It’s the nature of who you are. You will see sunsets in a special way, you will see life in a special way.

I very much agree with him on this. Depression to me is the flip side of intelligence, the power to think turning itself inside out, like a mirror reflecting another mirror, on and on to infinity. As sad as it is I’d rather be a depressive than go through life in an unthinking daze.

Back to Spike though, and one of his finest pieces.

Strange lovers may caress you
But once, long ago
You were mine forever.
So should I reach into that past
And touch you with invisible fingers
Don’t move away.

Beautiful.

This Is Sparta!

Published by Crackerwax on 13 October 2007 in Events and Gaming. 0 Comments

Bridz popped round this evening for a spot of gaming and a pizza, and what an evening it was! Just look at this!

If only he did it using his own Mii.

How fucking awesome is that? 300! A perfect score at Wii Sports bowling.

It was touch and go for a while when on the seventh frame it dawned on me that he’d had seven consecutive strikes and I made mention of it. Oops. The last pin on the eighth frame wobbled for a while before finally falling, jinx over! Phew.

If only he’d done it using his own Mii!

Still at least he can gloat that in a handful of frames he managed to match the score I’ve been working on for about a year. Smart arse!

I’ve Finished The Fight!

Published by Crackerwax on 10 October 2007 in Gaming. 2 Comments

Although I suspect I probably haven’t actually finished the fight, I did complete Halo 3 last night. On Heroic I hasten to add. It was good fun, seemed very short and if I squinted I could almost imagine I was playing Halo. Don’t think the campaign was worth the asking price but I strongly suspect I’ll get more than my money’s worth out of the multiplayer game.

As I say, I don’t think I really have finished the fight and I’ll tell you for why. After the credits roll there’s a cut scene and in this cut scene we see Master Chief being put into stasis by Cortana. As she tucks him up in bed he says ‘Wake me when you need me.’. Hmmm, not if you need me but when you need me.

My suspicion is that Microsoft are planning on offering level downloads, perhaps even making it episodic. Although the only thing possibly acting as a bar to that is that the limited disc space on the majority of Xbox 360s might mean that owning the entire series of these (at the minute, hypothetical) levels/episodes would be limited to Elite owners.

Having thought about it a bit more I suppose Bungie’s recent split from Microsoft might cause a few minor issues too, but with an IP as strong as Halo I don’t think Microsoft will be too keen to let it go unexploited. Instead I suspect they’ll either develop it in-house (unlikely) or farm it out to a trusted third party (likely).

Whoever they decide to let develop it, I’d bet on the end result being downloadable as there’s an infrastructure already in place with Xbox Live. Every purchase then from a retail point of view becomes pure profit as there are no physical retailers, packaging people or distributors to pay. The killer reason though is that the second hand market completely evaporates when we start to talk of things in terms of downloads which are locked to the machine they’re downloaded onto.

Oh, Come On!

Published by Crackerwax on 6 October 2007 in Ranting. 2 Comments

Went to watch Superbad with Mrs Douglas tonight, very surprised at how good it was. A teen sex comedy with actual real laughs! Stunned.

That’s not the point of this rant though, no ladies and gentleman this rant is about the lack of judgment that is displayed by about ninety percent of the population of this country. About how stupid it is that a 72 year old is asked to prove they are old enough to buy some wine, because a supermarket can’t risk letting staff use their judgment on when to ask and when not to ask.

I know there’s a problem with underage drinking in this country, and it is a very bad thing but this is not the way of stopping it. Maybe encouraging parents to raise their children might be a more appropriate direction to take on this one? Anyway, as ever I digress.

As I said before we decided to go to the cinema tonight, we got there early so we bought our tickets and popped over to the games machine area for a quick game of air hockey. We found our table, I popped the pound coin in and out dropped the puck, great. It was at this point I realised there were no paddles.

So I trot back out to the nearby ice cream counter and ask the singularly disinterested youth, who’s so malnourished looking it appears the only thing keeping him upright are his clothes, where I can get the paddles from. ‘You have to get them from the ticket desk.’, he responds glumly.

Next stop the ticket desk, or rather the queue that was snaking its way towards the ticket desk. So I join the queue and I queue and I queue and finally I get to the front and am granted an audience with the slack jawed teenager charged with guarding the paddles (which given the effort required to even get near the fucking things, I assume must have been made by chiseling down a forty tonne block of platinum to the required shape with a unicorn’s horn. By Jesus).

Now that I’m there though I’m eager to get my paddles and get back to the air hockey table, which by this point had probably supplied all the air it was going to anyway, so I ask the question. The exchange goes something like this:

‘Hi, I’d like the air hockey paddles please?’
‘You have to pay a deposit.’
‘Ok! How much is that?’
‘It’s two pounds.’
‘Righto here’s a twenty.’
‘I can’t give you change.’
‘What?!’
‘I can’t give change for the deposit.’
‘Why? Why can’t you give, oh never mind.’

I dutifully trot back to Suzanne and drag her off for a drink and a game of Scrabble (on the DS natch) in The Dial instead.

Now, do I really look like the sort of person that would steal two air hockey paddles? Do I really have to stand in queue for ten minutes to be told that I need to put down a deposit for my paddles and that if I do want to pay that deposit I need to bring the correct change? Fuck me, would a sign have been too much to ask? Some form of communication that would have alerted me to the fact that I’d have to go on the Krypton fucking Factor just to get a game of air hockey?

Now I know the point is that it’s probably not about me stealing them per se, but rather that the deposit is there to remind you to give them back at the end of your game. Presumably so that they’re not stolen by a moron in an ill-fitting cap or used by children to kill each other or whatever. I get that.

I’m a grown up though, small amounts of money are relatively easy to find. Being two pounds short at the end of the night isn’t going to bankrupt me, in fact I’d rather pay two sterlings not to have to stand in a fucking queue to give them back. Meaning, that in this case, the deposit would have been totally fucking pointless anyway.

So why didn’t he just say don’t worry about it here’s the paddles, knock yourself out, just remember to bring them back though, ok? I’ll tell you why, it’s because the world is populated by morons and we now operate on the principal of lowest common denominator. So even if this guy was smarter than your average bear it would make no difference, because he works with people that would make Benny from Crossroads look like Stephen Fry and they’re the ones the rules are written for.

In the case of the 72 year old wine drinker, the reason for the demand of ID was less to do with a shop assistant being unable to tell the difference between a 16 year old boy and a 72 year old man, and more with the risk that they might not be able to distinguish a 14 year old girl from an 18 year old girl.

If that ever happened the store could lose its license and with it a fair chunk of its income. Consequently, because we’re raising a nation of idiots for whom questioning is an alien concept, it becomes a no exceptions policy. No ID, no alcohol and if you don’t enforce the rules you get sacked.

That principle applies to the guy in my cinema. He’s been told not to give out the paddles without first getting a deposit. This rather handily conflicts with another rule though, if there’s no sale the till stays shut and since a deposit doesn’t go through the till he can’t give me change for my deposit. Amazing.

Common sense and judgment have no place in the modern world, they’ve been replaced by pictograms and litigiousness.

Thesping!

Published by Crackerwax on 3 October 2007 in Acting. 1 Comment

I went to the second of my acting classes last night and what fun it was! We did a few warm up exercises, which were excruciatingly embarrassing to do initially but soon became fun, and then we had to do a spot of group improv.

The initial gist of this was that we were split into four groups of six and each group had to come up with a short piece, set in a doctor’s surgery. To make matters a little more complex we had to portray a series of emotions during the piece. The emotions were disappointment, happiness, sadness and anger. Our group were to start with disappointment.

We came up with a stonker of a little scenario. We would all be in the surgery attending a support group, I would be the group leader and would begin by talking about how I felt when I found out I had been diagnosed with cancer and how it had shocked me, I would then go around the group and ask them to describe their feelings on being diagnosed. Their feelings of course would be disappointment which would all have been described through the use of the acting.

The plan was then to move on to me describing my recovery and everybody would become upbeat and happy, then there would be the dawning realisation that perhaps for some of us it was too late, before finally moving on to expressing the anger we felt at being robbed of our lives early.

Gripping stuff I’m sure you’ll agree? Well, sadly we never got a chance to do the whole thing. It seems that everybody else was having difficulty coming up with ways of incorporating all four emotions into their pieces. The outcome of this tragedy was that we’d be doing our initial emotion only! Pah, lightweights.

Still we did our bit, everybody really made an effort and we ended up doing a fantastic job. Spot on!

Next on the list was Shakespeare! We each had a chance to look through a few of his works and decide whether to do a solo or a group piece. I chose Act II, Scene V from The Tragedy Of Cymbeline, King Of Britain and it goes a bit like this.

Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers? We are all bastards;
And that most venerable man which I
Did call my father, was I know not where
When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seem’d
The Dian of that time. So doth my wife
The nonpareil of this. O, vengeance, vengeance!
Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d
And pray’d me oft forbearance; did it with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on’t
Might well have warm’d old Saturn; that I thought her
As chaste as unsunn’d snow. O, all the devils!
This yellow Iachimo, in an hour, - was’t not? -
Or less, - at first? - perchance he spoke not, but,
Like a full-acorn’d boar, a German one,
Cried “O!” and mounted; found no opposition
But what he look’d for should oppose and she
Should from encounter guard. Could I find out
The woman’s part in me! For there’s no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman’s part; be it lying, note it,
The woman’s; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
Nice longing, slanders, mutability,
All faults that may be nam’d, nay, that hell knows,
Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all.
For even to vice
They are not constant, but are changing still
One vice, but of a minute old, for one
Not half so old as that. I’ll write against them,
Detest them, curse them; yet ’tis greater skill
In a true hate, to pray they have their will.
The very devils cannot plague them better.

How cool is that? What’s not so cool is that I’ve got to perform that in front of my class in seven weeks time, sans script.

More news on my acting odyssey next week!