Destroy All Onions!

I’m catching up on all the stuff I’ve been recording over the past few months. In the past week I’ve seen the series finishers for Lost, Fringe, and Heroes.

All of them were pretty good, with a nice build up that explained a few new things, wrapped up a few loose ends, but then left me wanting more. Which I suppose is exactly what they’re meant to do. The other good news is that because I got so far behind, the long summer of having nother on tv is nearly over, and I haven’t suffered too badly.

I’ve also been enjoying Season 1 and now Season 2 of Smallville on DVD. It’s fairly lightweight, but it is fun.

Hello Internet!

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I’m sure you haven’t missed me at all, but I’ve been rather busy. Here are the things that I didn’t blog about over the past while.

• Being a puppeteer.
  Our church was looking for a bit of gimmick for our children’s club and we hit on the idea of using puppets. So Christine and I duly spent over a week putting together scripts for nightly sketches, plus a big sketch for use in the local schools, and a final sketch for church on Sunday. It was hard work! But in the week before the club, we did our puppet show in front of over a thousand children, as we were able to get into all of the Primary schools in Craigavon, where we got a great reception. We then had a very successful kids club, and one of the most unusual church services we’ve ever had.
• Having a sore finger.
  I know it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I hurt my finger playing basketball over a week and a half ago at our teenager’s club, and it’s still a bit stiff and sore. I always said no good would come of playing sports.
• The changing mobile phone market.
  It’s offical – I can’t have an iphone. Because my contract has several months to run, O2 have no intention of letting me upgrade my phone. And they told my brother in law the same thing when he tried to blag an upgrade. Changed times in the mobile phone market, when they used to be very keen to give you new toys as long as you spent more money with them. Oh well. I’ll just have to be patient.
• Andrew’s wedding.
  My old school-friend Andrew got married a few weeks ago. It was a great day, and the most unusual wedding I’ve ever been to – very customised. But what was most strange was that no-one mentioned his tendency to break things (for which he was truly legendary during his school and university days). I guess he got better as he got older.

The past week saw the return of Torchwood, for a special 5 day run on BBC1. Torchwood is one of those things that I quite enjoy, but I have to admit that I didn’t have very high hopes for this. I was wrong. It was good tv.
Since folks may not have caught up with it yet, I’m going to avoid any significant spoilers, but here were the highlights for me:

• It retained its sense of humour. Admittedly, less so as the week went on, but there were still some good funny moments that were in keeping with the show.
• The scenes with the cabinet, where they tried to work out what to do about the alien’s demands. I know that public opinion of our politicions is at an all-time low, but I think it was a fair reflection of what could happen in such an impossible situation.
• It retained it’s Britishness. Right from the start, the look of the camerawork said BBC drama. With Torchwood being so successful in the US, it was possible that they might have watered down some of the local feel, but it was still there, with great lines like “Otherwise, what use are league tables?”
• The big reveal of why the aliens wanted the children was really good. Really chilling. Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, it did. That explanation put other things into context too, like why there were no sleek and gleaming alien battleships, for instance.
• And a nice role for Nicholas Briggs, who normally voices the Daleks, and here managed to get an on-screen role, playing an equally nasty piece of work in the cabinet.

The other thing that interests me is that, although I don’t think that it looked cheap in any way, it did not go over the top with the special effects. The children were eery, but did not require any special effects, just acting. Likewise the 456 themselves, who by appearing in clouds of chemical mist never needed to be done with sophisticated prosthetics. I can’t help thinking that this is a return to traditional values in a way, and showing that good stuff can be done with creativity and imagination, rather than lots of money and computers.

Because of how things ended up, I don’t think that Torchwood will be back after this. And yet its huge success in America makes it almost certain that the BBC would want to keep it going for as long as possible. So it will be interesting to see what happens next on that front.

But if it is the end, I think it had a great finish – a drama that raised moral questions about prices that are and are not worth paying for peace. And in a one-liner by the 456, it asked an even better question – why we would fight so hard for one set of children, while another group of children die every day, in the real world.

Tonight Matthew, I’m going to be Alan in Belfast, and write on a political event at a local arts festival.

It was an interview of crusading journalist John Pilger, by BBC NI’s William Crawley, which was meant to happen a few weeks ago but was delayed because he had a bout of pneumonia. St George’s Parish church was well filled, with a pretty enthusiastic audience. The acoustics weren’t fantastic, but I was near the front, so it wasn’t a problem for me.

Pilger has been writing and making documentaries for a long time (about 50 years), so he has a wealth of experiences from all over the world, and the evening reflected that. His view on Barack Obama was perhaps the most interesting of the evening. To paraphrase, he felt that

Barack Obama is a brand… American foreign policy, like British foreign policy, has continued in a straight line since 1945… Going by the first 250 days, Obama is continuing what Bush had done before…

I thought that was quite interesting. Also interesting, though I guess not surprising, were his views on Israel. He stated that because Israel is a special case in so many elements of international law (nuclear weapons, the continued occupation of Palestine), that resolving that one single issue is a precondition to the resolution of conflicts all over the world, because until justice is seen to be done there, there will be an excuse for it in other places. When challenged on how this could happen, he advocated boycotts, but acknowledged that the UN as it is now wouldn’t do that.

There was also a fascinating question from one member of the audience who asked “How can you, an Australian, sit here in Northern Ireland, and talk about ‘we the British people'”. I don’t think anyone was entirely sure whether he was being funny or provocative.

Pilger is scathing on the modern media, which he believes simply reports whatever is in the best interests of the news corporations and governments which own them. He believes that the kind of journalism that made his name just doesn’t happen in the mainstream media any more.

But he does have hope for the future. Not necessarily in the western governments (especially our MPs with their snouts in the trough), but he sees the people-led movements in South America as being a sign of progress.

It was an interesting evening. He is someone who is very well-informed about the world, and although some of his views are challenging, they can’t be dismissed.

It was a beautiful day again today, so off I went again on my bike. Not going for any dramatic distance or speed, but just to do something outside.
My cycle was going very well until I was unexpectedly bombed by a bird. I didn’t see the varmint, so I don’t know if it was a precision strike from a great height, or whether he come in low and took time to aim.
But in any case, it hardly matters. I got bird crap on my bare leg. Any time this has happened before, it’s usually been on a good suit, or my nice coat. When it’s on your bare skin it’s even worse – you can actually feel the heat of the birds body still in it. Or maybe it was just burning my skin. Or maybe even my imagination. But it felt real.
Worse still I was going quite a good speed along a road, so I couldn’t even clean it off until I could get pulled in somewhere safely.
So cyclists – be careful out there! It’s not just the drivers that are out to get you!

I went out on my bike today.
Since the not-entirely-excellent Marie Curie cycle ride (here and here) a few weeks ago, I’ve been looking a bit lustfully at new road bikes. So today I decided to prove to myself that here’s nothing wrong with my current bike. So I pumped the tyres up (which helped it a lot – amazing the difference it made), charged up my ipod, and headed out down Cycle Route 9 towards Lisburn.
I’d planned to go further than I’ve gone before, and do the whole thing non-stop, but I failed. I made it 20 miles out, to Maze, and was doing well coming back, but it was warm, and I was thirsty, so I gave in at Shaw’s Bridge and stopped at an ide-cream van to buy a drink. But I missed and bought a 99 instead. The 5 minutes that took to eat made a big difference, and I made it home successfully from there.
So yes, I can cycle 40 miles on my bike heavy mountain bike. But not without getting slower and slower, or stopping for a break at some point.
So that road bike is still tempting…

please could you fix it for there to be something decent on tv when I’m at the gym.
It was Gok’s Fashion Fix again…

Dear Jim,

please could you fix it for Anne Robinson to be the new Speaker for the House of Commons. I think our MPs would benefit greatly from having more put-downs in their lives. The more brutal and barbed, the better. Ideally, she should make one or two cry.

Thanks!

I finished reading a very interesting book a few weeks ago, but hadn’t got round to writing about it. It’s Dawn of the Dumb by Charlie Brooker, a collection of essays from his newspaper columns for the Guardian. I’m quite shocked that some of these got published – he must keep their lawyers fairly busy. It’s a book that no-one should enjoy, as it is shockingly pessimistic and negative about basically everything that Charlie encounters. I would say that he hates everything, but every so often he unexpectedly admits to liking something, and writes a few warm and enthusiastic words. But it never lasts because he’s a complete misanthrope.

Here’s a quote from the back cover, which is a reasonable summary of the book:

“I don’t get people. What’s their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles. They’re awful.”

From this, you’ll guess that he isn’t really a people person. Doesn’t he say terrible things about our fellow human beings? Except of course that we all feel that way some days. Well I certainly do anyway.
Here’s the start of the introduction:

“Hello.
Thanks for buying this book. I hope you enjoy reading it more than I enjoyed writing it, because I hated every minute. Well almost.”

I did enjoy reading it. He has some great ideas, and is very witty. Just flicking through, I found his theory about the link between dark matter (which scientists know exists, but can’t find) and Emmerdale watchers (who apparently there are millions of, but who knows anyone who does), who he claims are “Dark matter with shoes”. Perhaps there’s something cathartic about reading a collection of such angry thoughts. Perhaps revelling in irritation, and really throwing yourself into it helps you to let it go. I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to reading his other book Screen Burn, which I guess is more of the same.

But before I go, I can’t resist a few quotes from the essay called “I hate Macs”.

“I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper compuers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui”

What a hoot 🙂

We had some presentations from senior managers in work a couple of weeks ago. One of the points that came across very strongly was that our management has a very definite obsession with measuring things to keep score.

I have to admit that this didn’t impress me very much, as it strikes me as a slightly childish way to have to deal with the world, that nothing matters unless it can be counted in some way. The risk is that you know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

But I have to confess that I understood on Saturday that I am, in my own way, part of the problem. There was some excitement in Team Lard when we approached another group of cyclists on the road ahead of us for the first time. And when we passed them, it seemed perfectly natural to count that we had passed 3 people. And so I started to keep score or how many people I had passed, and how many had passed me.

Now there are lots of ways to measure success on a cycle ride. The obvious one would be whether I finished it or not!! A more advanced one would be the time it took. More complex still would be a placing of where my time put me in the overall list of riders (which isn’t possible to calculate, since they didn’t collect times). But I think it’s a bit childish to make up a score based on passing people.

Anyway, however childish it may be, my score for the day was 21-2, with me passing both of the people who passed me after only a short time. A good result.

But I think it shows that when it comes down to it, I’m no better than my managers. I was not satisfied with purely measuring the outcome (I completed the cycle), or even how well I completed it (my time of 2 hours 30 minutes for the 34 miles). I was more excited by knowing that I had done it better than 19 other people.

Oh well. Maybe I have a future in senior management after all 🙁