Although pretty soon even that will be digitised, and only dinosaurs like Conrad will ever remember that metric, and the one for video tape - 25 frames a second - is already long-forgotten. Conrad also wonders, idly, what the speed of a tape cassette used to be? - that's only rhetorical, they're even longer gone than video tapes.
Anyway, I thought I'd warn you that the first bit of the blog is about films.
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| Jenny sulking after being turfed out for eating the puppy's food Yes, it's nothing to do with film but I had the photo anyway |
LET BABBLE COMMENCE!
"Ghetto Klown"
This is film of a stand-up performance by John Leguizamo, a kind of autobiography on-stage, which got retweeted by Jon Favreau. Why? Well, John is in "Chef", Jon's latest film.
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| John, daring you to laugh at his hat |
"World On A Wire"
This one is an oldie, from 1973, which makes it's premise all the more interesting, and you better believe there's a SPOILER ALERT! on the way. Really, there is - SPOILER ALERT! - just for the attention-deficient. Okay, the film concerns the computer project Simulacron, which involves creating convincing simulations of the real world. The project director dies and his successor begins to experience strange phenomena, wondering if Simulacron plays a part in what's happening. He's entirely right, because his entire world and everything in it is a simulation created by Simulacron. Very Philip K Dick, and a good twenty years ahead of the Matrix. And it appears to have been remade as "The Thirteenth Floor", which isn't bad in it's own right.
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| The title is a clue. Fibre-optics, do you - oh you do |
I seem to remember that Anything Horror really liked this one. A zombie movie, set in the American Civil War*, about a young man struggling to survive the attentions of the undead. It only scores 5.4 at IMDB, but several reviewers have good things to say about it, and - very unusually - the forum threads are all very positive**. It's also a very low budget indie production ($300K) and we really need to support films like this, right gentle law-abiding DVD-buying readers?
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| "As your dentist, I find your oral hygeine to be - lacking" |
FIN
A Little More Musical Critique
Yes, let's pick up the cudgels and belabour Simon and Garfunkel again. "Why Don't You Write Me" part two, this time and - gosh! - how did Conrad the Grammar Nazi miss that one! It should be "Why Don't You Write TO Me"
Why don't you write?
Because there's a postal strike! Really, don't you read the papers?
Something is wrong
You're being very vague here. A Hangnail? Sunspots? Little Timmy's fallen in the well?
And I know I got to be there
WHERE?! Look, work with me here, identify a location, use your GPS
Maybe I'm lost,
OF COURSE YOU'RE LOST YOU'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BLOODY JUNGLE!
But I can't make the cost
If you explained where you are we could wire you some money.
Of the airfare.
"Airfare"? You need airfare? Hang on, how did you get there in the first place?
Tell me why
Why? You appear to have squandered all your money on a one-way flight to Upper Volta and now you want us to bail you out? Pshaw!
What is the plural of "folio"?
"Folios".
There you are, a little better educated thanks to BOOJUM!
"What's A Hyphen?"
A lady I spoke to on the phone asked this question. I explained it wasn't a backslash, nor an underscore, and it floated in the middle of a sentence. What I wanted to say was that it helps the world become a terrifying place. How so? "A man eating vegetable" is utterly mundane, but "A man-eating vegetable" is a Triffid come true ...
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| Which leads us to - |
Conrad often tries to encourage people at work to eat his cakes with the not-quite spurious claim that they are one of your 5-a-day.
This morning, with time to think*** whilst waiting for the bus, he mused - "Well, you could have five new potatoes a day for seven days a week, that's thirty-five^ potatoes, except to save time you could just eat them all on Sunday, then you have the rest of the week to be unhealthy in."
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| Erwin Schickelgruber and his annual potato intake - 1,820 of them. |
* Nice people, the Americans, but we have to point out we had our Civil War way ahead of them.
** You can guarantee - absolutely guarantee - that one thread on every film forum will declare "This is the worst film ever". Well they can't all be right!
*** A very dangerous situation for the rest of the world.
^ See? Conrad is working that hyphen!
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