Eragon

Good CGI dragon, shame about the movie.  I should have known better and not wasted two hours of my life ... again!!

Speak softly and carry a big box of chocolates?

My thank you gift from the National Union of Students for speaking today at day three of its education conference.  I was asked to talk about the National Disability Insurance Scheme.  I covered everything from the bubonic plague and the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 through to my observation that most lesbians don't testify to their sexuality by putting spots on their foreheads.  My generous audience lapped it all up then gave prolonged and stormy applause (as the Communist Party reprints of Lenin's better-known speeches used to note).  Spike opened the chocolates when she returned from her night out.  I'll pay for those unnecessary calories with extra time on my Titanic 800!!!! Three days in a row now since Spike installed it.  Let's hope it's a trend emerging.

John Carter of Mars

Forbes Magazine liked it

We watched John Carter this evening.  What can one say?  It's not as terrible as some would have you believe; not terrible at all.  I quite enjoyed it (although there was quite a bit of Basil Exposition in the middle third).  Spike described it as a perfectly watchable early-period science fiction, which sounds about right.  It is true that there's a rather 1930's cheesiness about it but it does look gorgeous.










It's not wholly original as a film (which is an understatement).  Let me think.  There's ...

• Star Wars (various scenes stolen directly from several films)
• Dances With Wolves
• Gladiator
• Flash Gordon
• Any number of John Ford Westerns
• The dog out of Up
• Cleopatra (the Elizabeth Taylor version)
• Superman
• That ridiculous fourth Indian Jones film
• A bit of Hammer horror meets steam punk Sherlock Holmes
• Tarzan the Ape Man
• Several cheesy episodes of Star Trek

You get the point.  But you know, I've spent more than the $5.99 it cost us from iTunes to watch far worse.  If they made a sequel (and it clearly ended with a sequel in mind) I'd watch it.  Given the poor box office in America, though, I doubt that any of the other ten books will ever make it to the silver screen.

Titanic 800

Get Muscular, Stronger, Unbeaten

TITANIC 800

200 LBS. RESISTANCE

OVER 200 KILLER EXERCISES

Just 11 Minutes Every time ...

Well that's what it says on the box.  Spike picked up the exercise kit from the post office in the large box sent by the good people  at Zazz (one bargain-price item ... and only one item on sale ... each day).  It's a pulley system (with three differently weighted cords) that hangs on the back of a door.  After Spike set up the gizmo on the door to our spare bedroom I started my first session: 15 minutes of pulling weights (which probably took closer to 25 minutes by the time I stopped faffing about) trying 4 quite distinct exercises.  I had to work hard (for me) on two of them.  I think this new arrangement is going to work.  I'm very glad.

I am definitely weaker now than I've been for years.  I must get stronger and fitter if I am to regain and retain functional independece. So I now have no excuse. I need to put in at least fifteen minutes every day to start with and build up.  If I don't report real improvements within a couple of months I'm a fraud.

TED talks: Bryan Stevenson

TED Talks: one of the best you'll see

Another cheery tale from Poe

Opium this time, rather than alcohol.  A dying woman confined in a turret rather than entombed in a wall.  A guilt-stricken narrator.  And a Gothic sensibility that pre-dates the Hammer Horror films of the 1960s by more than 120 years.  How Gothic can an author be and yet get away with it?  Try this from Ligeia:

Ligeia at ebooks@adelaide

The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the sole window — an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice — a single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon, passing through it, fell with a ghastly lustre on the objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window, extended the trellice-work of an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires.

The odd thing (it seems odd to me) about these Gothic tales (and the doom-laden poetry) is that they were mostly written before Virginia's death, not after.  In 1838 when Ligeia was written or 1845 (The Black Cat and The Raven) the horror of a young wife's death had not been visited upon Poe.  If the chronology had been reversed, the wife's death (aged 25) then the Gothic writing, one might see a possible point of origin.  But that's not how Poe's story went, so where did the tales spring from, I wonder?

Call that art?

Andy Warhol, 1963

We had brunch with Jon Simpson and Rosie Birch at the teeming Deus cafe on Parramatta Road.  The food was decent enough; nothing remarkable but a good place to sit and chat.  So we enjoyed a good couple of hours catching up on their whistle-stop tour of the UK, their five days in New York, New York and Spike's adventures in the Australian art world.  Jon brought a gift from MoMA.  He said he saw the poster and immediately thought of me.  Am I that transparently obvious?  A philistine! 

As David Bowie chorused on Hunky Dory

Andy Warhol looks a scream
Hang him on my wall
Andy Warhol, Silver Screen
Can't tell them apart at all