Haven't been online for most of this week as i am still retrieving most of my life out of boxes. There are still boxes a-plenty but considerably less so in the house. My god I have a lot of stuff. I even culled some precious shoes today! That was tough as i love my shoes but I have to be ruthless and moving house is as good a time as any. I'm getting there slowly but honestly, I could do with another week off to get fully sorted.

Now I'm actually living in the new house, there's no internet until I can be arsed to unpack and plumb in my 'puter and only sporadic access from work and folks' place until then. I miss the internet...

Right, let's go unpack some more crap...

Toodles!

It's moving day! :D

This is our "CSI" pose.

Shame my hair looks so terrible :o(

It's a good thing I took today off because it's been nothing but dealing with personal admin stuff and other people's cock-ups. Namely Arley Hall and United Utilities. I spent most of today dealing with phone calls and letters and the other half getting ready for tomorrow.

For yes, it's that time of the year again when Sheffield fears and trembles before the onset of 20 - 30 assorted sci-fi geeks and their lightsabers! It will be great to see old friends again but there are those who can't make it who will be muchly missed. If I was in the position to pay for them, I would. But until I obtain my dream job of millionaire philanthropist, I'll have to settle for raising a glass in their name and looking forward to the next time I see them.

It's going to get busy over the next few days. I have a weekend away, a birthday on monday and finally...finally moving house on tuesday! Then I'm off all week unpacking, sorting and tidying. Things could get quiet on the LJ front for a while.

See you after the downtime...

Next film I'm likely to see...

The definition of a 'seamless' software upgrade in our office:

'Seamless' in the sense of 'not put together, it's all falling apart and someone needs to be stitched up'.

Do you sometimes get special offers and events where you work? So do I. Want to see the amazingly exciting opportunity that's heading my way? This is the mail we got today:

"Ticket up for auction to watch Flying Scotsman re-wheeled!

For those of you who missed out on a free ticket to watch the Flying Scotsman being re-wheeled, here's one last chance.

As part of their fundraising for the Three Peaks Challenge, a group of four Network Rail graduates are auctioning their ticket to watch the milestone moment in the overhaul of the iconic locomotive. The VIP event will be held in the National Railway Museum's workshop in York at 4pm on Wednesday 16 July."


Whooyeah, we're partyin' now! I can think of a very good reason to visit York but it doesn't involve watching someone nail some fresh wheels on to a train!

How many times now have they tried to make a Captain America film? Well excluding the old 1940s stuff, it's two. And I've seen both of them and they're not good.

In the 1970s version, Cap wears a painted motorcycle helmet instead of his mask and his shield (if you can call it that) is see-thru plastic instead of indestructible metal and doubles as a removable windscreen on his motorbike. I don't remember the plot at all as I was too busy watching how much the costume sucked.

The 1990s version was slightly better but again there were laughable costume errors. Instead of creating holes in the side of his mask for his ears to stick through, they just put pink plastic ears on the side of the mask! It's laughable.

i think the trouble with poor ol' Cap is that no one knows what to do with him. He's always fighting the nazis which is hardly relevant to today's audience. He's never seemed like a total ass-kicking badass until he was given a makeover in The Ultimates and all of a sudden he was cool again and seemed like the ultimate soldier he should always have been.

I've always been a fan of Cap for years. I'd like to see a well-made film about him. After going to see The Hulk last night, I now think this can be done. The Hulk is full of squee-ing fan moments. They mention SHIELD! Tony Stark shows up! He mentions putting a team together! They talk about super soldier serum! It's enought to get you excited about the whole Marvel universe. And it's about time.

Whenever there's a superhero film they make out like that superhero is the only one in the world who exists. You never see Batman mention superman or Spider-Man talk about Daredevil. You get no sense there's a shared universe out there. Getting cross-franchise cameos and working towards the ultimare goal of an Avengers movie is a really smart move. I think the next step is to do a Captain America film in 2011 according to IMDB.

In The Hulk, Tim Roth gets a taste of the serum that made Cap back in the 40s and he looks way cool when he executes his moves. You do get a sense that this is one augmented badass soldier boy and if they apply those moves to Cap and enhance them, it will be the first time that he's appeared on film and not looked ridiculous. Hopefully when they make it, it will be the 'ultimate' version of Cap and a completely nails guy to boot.

I loved Iron Man and this Hulk was much better than the last one. It had more continuity moments in it and he got to fight someone more exciting than 3 mutant dogs as in Ang Lee's version. What this version did was get me excited about Marvel films again. Fantastic Four? Meh. X-Men? Suffered the law of diminishing returns. Ghost Rider? Nick Cage vs a gothic boyband. 2008 is the year that superhero films became supercool.

I was a Bad Count last night and deliberately did a social taboo. I went to Asda and parked in a mother and baby space! Oh noes!

Hey, at least it wasn't a disabled parking space. I wouldn't park in one of those, but mother and child spaces? They're fair game. In reality I think the mum n child spaces should be the ones as far away from the shop as possible, not the nearest ones. If they're far away from the entrance, it gives the kid time to burn off a bit of energy by running over the car park so it takes the edge off them by the time you start shopping.

All I wanted to do was pull up by the cash machine but all the spaces round the cash machine are either disabled or mum spaces. Technically they should have a designated 'stopping to get cash' space or two.

Since when did we need all this segregated parking anyway? How far are they going to take it? Red cars over here and blue cars over there so the car park looks nicely colour co-ordinated? Special big spaces for SUVs so the inconsiderate wankers stop action-parking their enormobiles across two-spaces as if this excuses them for buying such a big car and being unable to park it in the first place. How about special spaces for drivers with really small dicks especially for anyone driving a BMW?

http://progressiveboink.com/archive/robliefeld.html





...and they only get worse.

Watched the new series of Top Gear last night. Always makes me laugh. The only downside was the cretinous Alan Carr and the buffoonish Justin Lee Collins. If ever two figures were the incarnation of the 'Barry Shitpeas' figure from Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn, it's these two bozos. They looked totally out of place on the show, like a couple of unfunny chancers being interviewed by their teacher in front of roomful of people who didn't find them funny. I don't really recall the audience laughing at anything they said. Talentless fucking gibbons. Carr seemed to try and excuse his lack of knowledge on any subject on the fact that he was gay. I never knew that a sexual preference could be responsible for making someone a gibbering twatburger, I thought it just meant you fancied men not that it made you fail at life.

Wouldn't you just love to ask Richard Hammond if after he had that collossal accident, did he wake up and find himself in 1973 and then awake from his coma and bring back styling tips for Clarkson and May after watching too many old Open University lectures?

"Never buy toupees, bridal gowns, drapes or shoes on the internet or by mail order."

Aw really? There goes my idea for an online wig-selling business called syrups-direct.com.

This weekend I have mostly been watching episodes of Primeval for the first time. Never seen it before and wasn't bothered when it came out. I thought 'meh - dinosaurs' and turned over for Doctor Who. Actually it's not that bad and quite watchable in a light entertainment sort of way. Not sure about some of the acting but I remembered Dougie Henshall from This Year's Love which is a great film if slightly depressing. Shame they seem to have cut out some of the interesting bits. In one trailer for the next show, it showed some guy take a leap off a high-diving board and a huge prehistoric crocodile leap out of the water and swallow him whole. Kewl. When I watched the actual episode, they cut that bit out! Denied!

I also had a fortunate phone call from the people delivering my new bedroom TV. They didn't have the exact model but are sending one like it. However they did have the order down as a black TV and not a white one like I ordered, so I managed to get that changed or I would have been pissed off and disappointed on thursday. It's not that I particularly wanted this make of TV, they were just the only ones doing one in white that matched my furniture! I am more bothered about co-ordination that branding and I just want mah white TV.

They say that when you get that on-the-tip-of-your-tongue-but-can't-quite-remember feeling, then your brain subconsciously won't let go of the problem and one day you'll remember what it was you were trying to think about when you least expect it. I wonder sometimes if the world around us works in the same way.

Last time I went down to London, I was walking around town on saturday as I waited for my train and I was tired and footsore. I was weary and had no real shopping agenda, I just wanted to kill time and have a bit of a sit down. I stumbled across a Borders. Brilliant, thought I, they have chairs in there!

I went in, grabbed some Wonder Woman graphic novel, found a comfortable spot and sat down and the read the whole thing while I waited to get some life back in my tootsies. As I sat there, they played this great piece of music. I thought I'd heard it before somewhere but couldn't quite place it. It was some jazz piece and I know little about jazz so it wasn't something I'd recognise. I meant to go and ask what it was but my brain was full of 'ow my feet!' thoughts and I totally forgot until I was halfway to Euston Station.

Last night I was hanging out with my dad in the new house and we watched Casino Royale together. When the film finished, we channel hopped for a bit until we found Broken Flowers starring Bill Murray on BBC2...and I heard that piece of music again. I didn't get it at first but my brain slowly caught up and I realised it was the same piece I heard in London months ago. One quick nip upstairs later and I was downloading the soundtrack and now it's mine all mine. Also by coincidence, the guy who plays Felix Leiter in the Bond film also plays Murray's best friend Winston in Broken Flowers. Talk about coincidence.

It seems the universe gifted me with remembrance of that piece of music months after I thought never to hear it again.

Growing up doesn't mean goriwing old. It just means you can afford better toys.

Almost forgot - I also bought a plant today. A suitably boy plant.

It's a hot chilli pepper plant.

It says I should leave it on the windowsill but I might just put it under the bridge. Narf!

A walking cliche, that's me.

On an old episode of Top Gear that I watched the otehr day, it said that a typical bloke's house will have a big TV installed in it before any other furniture. *ahem* *looks guilty*

Not only that but after shopping around online today, I bought a second LCD TV that comes with a built-in DVD player, is a fetching arctic white colour and will be installed in my bedroom and will match the furniture perfectly. They even had a 22" version that was cheaper than the 19" version I saw in Currys. I can has TeeVee! I can watch DVDs in bed. When I get a bed. I see a future with not much movement from the bedroom on weekends. Now all I need is an outside dumb waiter to lift up pizzas from the delivery guy and I'm sorted(!)

Oh, I also bought a new dining room table for downstairs. Not quite as exciting to me. However they did ring it up on the till and it was £30 less than the asking price. So technically with the money I saved, I added 3" onto the size of TV I was after. Go me.