Still painting, patching, spraying, scrubbing, rubbing, brushing, and coating the bloomin' flat. Yesterday, Saturday, was an all out exhausting day, with no let up. We'd planned to get started really early, but the weather was very patchy, and we didn't get off the ground till about nine. Then the weather packed up again and drizzled, and put paid to another stretch of time; then we started again, and Doug and Stef arrived with the famous granddaughter, who managed to get paint and goo and mud and various other elements on her body at different times during the day. Had to pack up again because of the weather so we went and got the paint, and I listened to a very unuseful conversation between a polite customer and an apparently polite retailer: the customer had been waiting to have a bathroom cupboard stripped of its varnish by the firm's stripping dept which was located in Stafford St. The customer had been put off more than one with the excuse that the stripping wasn't finished, and was finally told that it would be ready by Friday - definitely. The customer went there at 4.35 on Friday and found the place closed at 4.30. He came into the main shop of the firm, where we were, on the Saturday morning, hoping he'd be able to get someone to open up the other dept and collect his cabinet. The retail assistant behind the counter seemed to come to conclusion very early in the piece that the customer was being difficult and really had no case. Whatever his reasoning was, he argued quietly and politely back and forth with an increasingingly irritable customer and was plainly not prepared to do anything; furthermore he claimed that because it was the weekend he (they - the shop) had no jurisdiction over the other dept. This went on until it almost reached interminability - at which point the assistant (who wasn't one of your young know-it-alls, but a middle-aged man who should have known better than to handle a customer the way he did) went off and got the other bloke, who cheerily agreed to meet the customer round at the other dept and open up for him! How to make a customer mad for no good reason...!
Celia and I did have one night off this week - when we babysat the granddaughter - and watched a DVD of Miss Congeniality, with Sandra Bullock and Benjamin Bratt - and Michael Caine. Bullock plainly has the time of her life in this movie - the promos that were also on the DVD showed her barely different in reality to her character on screen, at times. More amazing, to Celia, was the fact that whole scenes had been excluded from the end product: three of them that we saw, and all of them involving quite a heap of people and the equivalent of several minutes screen time.
Showing posts with label dvd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dvd. Show all posts
Sunday, November 25, 2001
Saturday, November 10, 2001
More on Writing
Finally Sanchona, the writer from Australia whom I've had a lot of contact with by email, after 'meeting' on the writers' list, has got in touch with me again. I left a note on the writers' list itself in the end, as it seemed to be the only way to contact her (my emails to her address were going nowhere, bouncing back). It worked, because she has a second email address that was accessible, when the main one wasn't. She claims since then that I then wrote to her normal address, but I think she's confused about how the email got to her. Although anything is possible, since my work emails were coming to my home address on Friday morning, I discovered.
On the research side of my writing, I re-discovered the news groups the other day, and spent a good deal of time copying material on memorizing...both play scripts and poems. It's the sort of thing I hadn't been able to find just on ordinary searches before. So it's obviously a place to keep an eye on. I'm in the process of checking out the subject of steganography again, because an article has turned up in the the Wired News by Farhad Manjoo (there's a name to grapple with!). In the Google search of the newsgroups, there's even a steganography list, but there are also several other lists where steganography is the subject under discussion. That's the intriguing things about these lists: they began kind of in a wide format, and then suddenly hone in on a topic - and veer grandly off it too! The rec.photo.digital group has a longish discussion on steganography, but much of what's there is stuff I've already picked up (with comments) from the Net proper. Another group started a discussion earlier than Sept 11th, on three combined (apparently) newsgroups: comp.security.misc, sci.crypt, talk.politics.crypto, and wound up with 74 entries, many of them veering off the track. There's also discussion on a hackers newsgroup.
Like all conversations between a group of disparate people with a moderately common interest, these discussions on the newsgroups are only marginally useful. There are some very knowledgeable people out there, but also the usual bunch of know-it-alls who don't know-it-all. And whether I can be bothered to track my way through all that stuff for a bit of useful material is another question.
Off that subject entirely, I managed to both go to the movies and watch a DVD today: both comedies and both a lot cleverer than they first appear. The DVD was Best in Show, a film I'd had a hankering to see for a while, though Celia wasn't keen. (She sat through the DVD without enthusiasm, although she did give the occasional laugh - but ceased when we got to watching the deleted scenes. some of which were definitely verging on the not funny.) The sense of improvisation came through quite startlingly, and some scenes had the wonderful overlapping of conversation that you only get when the actors are playing with the idea of the conversation rather than working on a received text. Equally, some scenes, particularly the deleted ones, had a touch of the 'we don't know where to go next' feel about them. This afternoon, Ben, Stef and I went to see Ben Stiller's Zoolander, and absolutely crazy piece of nonsense, that works, in spite of itself. Stiller presents a simple-minded character with a voice verging on the unbroken, and a host of equally off-the-wall people who stroll in and out of the film with no comprehension that the rest of the world isn't anything like this. The only sane character, Zoolander's girl-friend, played by Christine Taylor, sees something in this lunatic that appeals. Of course it helps that he becomes an accidental hero in the end. It just goes to show that when you're on the 'in' side of film-making, you can present a crazy idea and get it to come off...and get the dollars to make it work too. Best in Show probably didn't cost a heap of cash, but Zoolander must have. The great thing about both movies is that everyone has got in on the idea, seen the potential for outrageous humour and gone all out for it. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Times has some strong words to say about it, not positive, and he's right. However, he does miss saying the positive things about it: that it's full of wit, in spite of the fact that the main character is a dummox.
On the research side of my writing, I re-discovered the news groups the other day, and spent a good deal of time copying material on memorizing...both play scripts and poems. It's the sort of thing I hadn't been able to find just on ordinary searches before. So it's obviously a place to keep an eye on. I'm in the process of checking out the subject of steganography again, because an article has turned up in the the Wired News by Farhad Manjoo (there's a name to grapple with!). In the Google search of the newsgroups, there's even a steganography list, but there are also several other lists where steganography is the subject under discussion. That's the intriguing things about these lists: they began kind of in a wide format, and then suddenly hone in on a topic - and veer grandly off it too! The rec.photo.digital group has a longish discussion on steganography, but much of what's there is stuff I've already picked up (with comments) from the Net proper. Another group started a discussion earlier than Sept 11th, on three combined (apparently) newsgroups: comp.security.misc, sci.crypt, talk.politics.crypto, and wound up with 74 entries, many of them veering off the track. There's also discussion on a hackers newsgroup.
Like all conversations between a group of disparate people with a moderately common interest, these discussions on the newsgroups are only marginally useful. There are some very knowledgeable people out there, but also the usual bunch of know-it-alls who don't know-it-all. And whether I can be bothered to track my way through all that stuff for a bit of useful material is another question.
Off that subject entirely, I managed to both go to the movies and watch a DVD today: both comedies and both a lot cleverer than they first appear. The DVD was Best in Show, a film I'd had a hankering to see for a while, though Celia wasn't keen. (She sat through the DVD without enthusiasm, although she did give the occasional laugh - but ceased when we got to watching the deleted scenes. some of which were definitely verging on the not funny.) The sense of improvisation came through quite startlingly, and some scenes had the wonderful overlapping of conversation that you only get when the actors are playing with the idea of the conversation rather than working on a received text. Equally, some scenes, particularly the deleted ones, had a touch of the 'we don't know where to go next' feel about them. This afternoon, Ben, Stef and I went to see Ben Stiller's Zoolander, and absolutely crazy piece of nonsense, that works, in spite of itself. Stiller presents a simple-minded character with a voice verging on the unbroken, and a host of equally off-the-wall people who stroll in and out of the film with no comprehension that the rest of the world isn't anything like this. The only sane character, Zoolander's girl-friend, played by Christine Taylor, sees something in this lunatic that appeals. Of course it helps that he becomes an accidental hero in the end. It just goes to show that when you're on the 'in' side of film-making, you can present a crazy idea and get it to come off...and get the dollars to make it work too. Best in Show probably didn't cost a heap of cash, but Zoolander must have. The great thing about both movies is that everyone has got in on the idea, seen the potential for outrageous humour and gone all out for it. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Times has some strong words to say about it, not positive, and he's right. However, he does miss saying the positive things about it: that it's full of wit, in spite of the fact that the main character is a dummox.
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