We’re off on holliday to the Greek islands for the next 2 weeks.

Note to self: Don’t try to take anything off the islands.

Appropriately enough it’s the kind of logo you’d expect to see on the sign outside a private care home for the elderly.

Proven!

from here via here

You know those times when your personal music player of choice plays a series of songs on random that seem to mesh so well with your environment at the time that you suspect some kind of secret mind reading technology is at work? How ACE is that?

This morning I had the exact opposite.

On the Jubilee line: Cramed in with pasty commuters including one guy who looked like Pete Doherty might look if he drunk a bottle of scotch a day for the next 10 years and didn’t get the sores on his hands seen to (note the strange juxtaposition of web 2.0 approved bag and overpowering aroma of Magners filtered though sweat glands).

On the iPod: David Lee Roth - Just Like Paradise

♫ This must be just like living in paradise ♫
… er not really.

Since I moved to using Macs about 4 or 5 years back I’ve been irritated by the lack of decent text editors, even the one that comes with the OS isn’t as good as Microsoft’s ultra-simple Notepad (I hated bbedit/textwrangler, seriously, $99 for the full version!?). On Windows there’s plenty and they’re all free (i use TextPad, fast and simple to customise, and ended up paying for a license because it’s toally worth it), on the Mac there’s a couple and you have to pay for them. (despite it’s free love and let’s all be creative image I’ve discovered the Mac is all about shiny happy capitalism). Anyway, recently I’ve discovered
TextMate and it’s great. It’s annoying you have to pay for it but for a change it’s actually worth it.

I’ve swam with sting rays on several occasions and they pretty much ignored me on all those, one time a friend’s dad accidentally pulled one of their tales thinking it was a bit of rope coming from under a rock but it just darted off, my overall impression was of fairly peacful animals who’d just like to be left to their own devices.

Mind you I wasn’t holding them in a head lock or hitting them with meat or anything. Steve Irwin may have liked animals but from what I saw he never treated them with much respect, more like a child kicking an ant hill to see what happens, it’s not a huge surprise to anyone who’s seen his ‘documentaries’ that he ended on the wrong end of a stingray’s barb.

Edit. Obviously it’s very sad though, I was just annoyed by the news coverage of the whole thing.

This is the type of tape on to which my uncle recorded us a Eurithmics album and a Phil Collins album before we went out to Papua New Guinea. Around this time I was given my first tape deck and some pre-recorded tapes, A-Ha - Scoundrel Days and Bangles - A Diffrent Light, my sister got Queen - A Kind Of Magic and my mum got Paul Simon - Graceland. The player itself was a cheap plastic white thing from Boots, (it’s strange to think Boots used to brand stereos and sell computer games (The first time I played on a Super Nintendo was in Boots in Macclesfield (F-Zero, didn’t think it was great to be honest though the latest iteration is one of my favourite Game Cube Games), hold on I’m getting ahead of myself time to close these brackets and get back to the scheduled meandering reminiscence)). This was all in preparation for moving to PNG where they didn’t have any TV at the time (they do now) so we needed some tapes to make sure we didn’t have to spend all our time talking to each other and doing things outside.

The first thing I recorded with my tape deck was the Flash Gordon sound track. This was achieved by putting the stereo infront of the speakers turning the volume up and holding our dogs mouth shut until each song was over. The quality wasn’t great.

Ms John Soda and B Fleischman doing a cover version of a Slowdive song.

Scanner Darkly.
It’s alright I guess, the much hyped rotoscoping isn’t really that great though, not sure it adds to the film much. A bit boring if anything and the acting is pretty lame a lot of the time. Story-wise it’s fairly faithful to the book, not that I care much about that, but despite all the surface wierdness it doesn’t really manage to tap into the unsetteling core of the book. Basically don’t bother, or watch it on video on a Sunday morning or something.

Volver.
Brilliant. Having been a fan of his early stuff I didn’t really like the last 2 issue heavy Almodovar films. This one kind of dials back the ‘maturity’ in favour of more of the kitch melodrama of his earlier films, lays some things on pretty thick (as you’d expect (esp the bit where Penelope Cruz sings, I probably would have prefered a less perfect rendition esp as she’s supposed to be choking up, and where did all that echo come from?)) but basically do bother, there aren’t many people making films this good.

Also, it has one of my favourite posters of recent years.