Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skulls

Meh.

Not So Much Blown As Teased Slightly

3 Quarks Daily link to a piece titled The Red Pill: 10 Films Guaranteed To Blow Your Mind. The list looks like this:

The Truman Show (1998)
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
Waking Life (2001)
The Matrix (1999)
Dark City (1998)
American Beauty (1999)
Fight Club (1999)
Donnie Darko (2001)
Brazil (1985)
Network (1976)

Apparently somewhere around 1998 and 2001 minds were being blown on a regular basis. If I had to guess I'd say Ian MacKenzie, the author of the list, was aged somewhere around 28 to 32. Not that that would have stopped him from seeing, say, F for Fake, The Manchurian Candidate, If..., The Discrete Charm of the Bourgousie, Even Dwarfs Started Small or whatever, but he might have put less weight on those movies the made him go "whoa" as a teenager. You can imagine Ian and friends stroking their goatees to the wee small hours while considering the myriad intracies of the Fight Club and its place in the Fincher ouevre.

I guess I'm just disappointed, I wanted tips but all I got was list of movies I'd seen already.

Donny Champions of the Weekend

In the end it was a fine game. Both teams wanted to win, but Doncaster Rovers simply played the better football with a tight passing game and a very solid defense.

Leeds certainly didn't disgrace themselves and I am quite confident that they will be promoted next season as league champions.

More Photos At The BluesBerries Site

I finally got hold of some pictures from the April gig at The Vernissage in Gallneukirchen. I've put some on the BluesBerries site, including this one:

What's In A Name?

The Independent takes a trip to Shitterton. Literally, it turns out.

Later in the piece they discuss Nob End, Twatt, Bell End and Muff, among others. Hilariously, Muff does indeed have a diving club.

Words That Mean What They Say

Not onomatopoeia -- that's words that sound like the the thing, quack for example -- but a word that has something of its definition about it. For example "glister" seems to have an oily gleam somehow. Joseph Bottum want to call these words Agenbites:

Let's coin a term for this kind of poetic, extralogical accuracy. Let's call it agenbite. That's a word Michael of Northgate cobbled up for his 1340 Remorse of Conscience--or Agenbite of Inwit, as he actually titled the book. English would later settle on the French-born word "remorse" to carry the sense of the Latin re-mordere, "to bite again." But Michael didn't know that at the time, and so he simply translated the word's parts: again-bite or (in the muddle of early English spelling) agenbite.

Which is all very clever if somewhat lacking in any real logical reason for the choice. It's not a word I'm about to start dropping in conversation. Bottum, though, has any number of great examples many of which will have you nodding in agreement:

Ethereal is an agenbite, isn't it? All ethereal and airy. Rapier, swashbuckler, erstwhile, obfuscate, spume--agenbites, every one. Reverberation reverberates, and jingle jingles. A friend insists that machination is a word that tells you all about its Machiavellian self, and surely sporadic is a clean agenbite, with something patchy and intermittent in the taste as you say it.

Go Donny, go Donny...

Go go go. Also Leeds, Leeds, Leeds.

I'm so confused. I'm happy if either wins. I'll cheer on Rovers, though, as Leeds will get promoted next year anyway, whereas it seems like this is Doncaster's best chance.

Photographer's Rights in the UK

On one hand this page, The UK Photographers Rights Guide, seems exactly the sort of thing that the Internet should be doing. On the other it is worrying that it needs to exist at all.

Maybe it's just the sites I read but the harrassment of photographers by security guards and policemen, often for what seems to be the most inconsequential thing, is getting to be a regular happening. CCTV, which according to recent reports is of little use, is somehow acceptable but still photography is frowned upon. Perhaps it's a human presence that scares these tin pot harrassers so. To me it feels like a worrying trend to assume that any out-of-the-ordinary activity has some criminal intent and to act accordingly rather than, say, assume innocence as the law expects. I suppose that those who are paid to protect us do have some vested interest in doing the most to make us feel less safe.

The Portrayal of Bush in Advertising

I'm sure it's nowhere near exhaustive, but it's got examples from everywhere. Fun stuff.

Life On Mars In America

The same, but different.

Headlines Of Our Times

Great tits cope well with warming. About birds, apparently.

John Wayne and America

What Rio Bravo says about both.

I'm not sure what the dig on something called "the left" is about: "Wayne has always been close to a comic-book version of American power in all its swaggering crudeness". I'm sure politics does inform some of a person's reaction to Wayne, but he's always been more complicated than the caricature above suggests. To say that being of "the left" somehow blinds a person to this is ridiculous. So ignore the third paragraph and this is a fine appreciation of a classic movie.

Not Quite Random Stuff

I should find a proper home for these links, but I'm fairly busy at the moment:

• The 10 worst football managers. Two of them managed Newcastle. Coincidence?


• Characters from The Wire in the style of the Simpsons


• Internet Making Plagiarism Easy. Spotting it, too. Though one remedy is "don't re-use assignments year after year". Hmmm.


• Watching the Worlds Worst 100 Movies. One at a time.


• Charlie Stross Owns His One Star Reviews.


• Why Don't We Do It In The Road? More.


• Perfect Pitch Game.


• The world's 10 most disgusting beers. This list is probably wrong on many levels. But it is funny that all the beers, except one, are American...

For Some He'll Always Be The Operative

Chiwetel Ejiofor, I have only a vague idea of how it's pronounced but don't call him "Chewie", first came to my attention because of his role in Serenity, but I've seen him in quite a few things since and he's never been less than terrificly watchable.

The Onion's AV Club have an interview with him. He comes across as very focused on his acting, but likeable none-the-less.

Do pieces of characters ever stick with you?
For me, it tends to disappear, which is good, because, you know, I've just been playing Othello, and I'm not prone to psychopathic, jealous rages, which is fortunate. It can be a positive and a negative. You want the good things in the good characters to stay with you, but lose the bad things with the bad ones.