Monday, April 30, 2001

[4/30/2001 2:51:10 AM | Mike Crowl]
According to my little 'help' friends, when I try to post the stuff below, which I wrote at 4/30/2001 (helpfully put in Americanese, a language that apparently has only 12 days in the month and up to 31 months), I have nothing to post. Okay, so now I have something to post, and I'm going to do it - to my own website, and slogbog, or whatever you're called, you'd better believe it.
[edit]
[4/30/2001 12:06:56 AM | Mike Crowl]
Just a starter - trying to make sure this all works.
[edit]


According to my little 'help' friends, when I try to post the stuff below, which I wrote at 4/30/2001 (helpfully put in Americanese, a language that apparently has only 12 days in the month and up to 31 months), I have nothing to post. Okay, so now I have something to post, and I'm going to do it - to my own website, and slogbog, or whatever you're called, you'd better believe it.

Where it started

I'm debating putting an abridged version of my journal online here; testing out how I feel about doing that yet, though, and whether it's worth the effort. Oh, the effort!

Somehow in my efforts to get the last entry on, I've managed to put it on twice. I thought I could edit the additional version out, but can't seem to. Ce la vie - more clogging on the blog.

Celia’s present, for my birthday, was an all-weather hat, which turned out to be slightly too small – we can get a bigger one, but that was a disappointment for her, as well as me. Stef and Doug gave me a black jersey with white stripes across the chest that I’ve been wearing all day, and Abby and Steve turned up with a little bonsai – a tiny one – as well as bringing Steve’s Mum, Dawn, for tea. So it was crowded Crowl house again. Ben had the bright idea of going to see the film Memento – Dominic had been last night – and so he and I went. Celia wasn’t keen on it – we’d discussed the possibility a couple of weeks ago – and anyway was too tired to do anything else, like sitting through a movie that tests the brain somewhat!

Memento will be well known by now as the movie in which the story is told backwards, scene by scene, the beginning of each scene proving to be the end of the next one we see. And in the middle of it we have the Guy Pierce character, Leonard, talking on the phone in a rather disjointed fashion, telling us about the past, which is all he remembers, because he has some rare disorder, as the result of an ‘incident’, which causes him continually to lose all his short term memory, like the latest ‘scene’ he’s just been involved in. The result is a jigsaw for the audience as we have to figure out whether Leonard is telling the truth, or the detective, Teddy, who keeps popping up (and whose photo has on the back that he always tells lies), or whether the girl who appears about a third of the way through is as honest as she first ap-pears – it’s all mind-boggling, and though I don’t imagine it’s anything like the mental problem that the character is supposed to have, dramatically it makes for a most interesting movie.

It’s set in a sleazy area of California (I think!) and drugs and murders are fairly com-monplace. To talk about the plot would only annoy anyone who might read this (and who hasn't seen it) because it’s almost impossible to talk about it without giving something away. Suffice to say, you’ll come out of the theatre with your head buzzing, and discussing with whoever your with what they think happened and what you think happened. Ben caught the trick of the ending fairly well, which I didn’t, but Dominic seemed, when I got home and talked to him about it, to have a slightly different view of things. I’d enjoy watching it again on video some time, and seeing what more I pick up than I did at the first viewing.

We went and saw it at the Metro, that tiny cinema next to, and overwhelmed by, the Town Hall. It’s almost a nothing place, with only about fifty seats, and the screen in a sense is rather like a large home tv – naw, it’s actually larger than that! While we were waiting for it to start, Ben and I went over to the Pool House and had a quick couple of games of pool. He won one, and amazingly, I won one. Perhaps I play better under such speed conditions (less than ten minutes all up) than when I have time to consider what I’m doing. I certainly played better than that night the men from church went and played – then all I could seem to do was pot the occasional ball, or judder the cue in such a way that the ball dribbled off a few inches with an insolent sort of sneer.