FML.

The SFX Weekender is taking place as I type this. In case you haven’t heard about the event, it’s a huge great honking convention with thousands of attendees, guests and the entire SFX team taking place over two days at a holiday camp in Camber Sands. I couldn’t go due to my finances being in a pathetic state at the moment (Christmas really messes up your payments when you’re a freelancer – once an Accounts department shuts down for the break you can effectively expect no money for six or seven weeks until they clear the backlog of invoices in January… sigh).

The convention appears to be going rather well;  I was following all the Twitter comments earlier before deciding I was fed up of hearing about what I’m missing. To take my mind off it I thought I’d clean out my fish tank, which – if I say so myself – is a particularly awesome fish tank these days. My fish are blissfully happy, it looks great, the plants are thriving and the new shoal of serpae tetras I added yesterday are unfeasibly perky and pretty. Awww.

Unfortunately, in order to filter the gravel in my tank I have to use a special vacuum pump. To get it to work you have to suck the end of a plastic pipe to get the suction going. It’s a tricky maneuver – you really don’t want a mouthful of manky fish-water, so you have to time the suction very delicately and make sure you drop the pipe at the last minute.

And because today has been unbelieveably spectacular, I ended up with a mouthful of manky fish-water not just once but twice.

I can haz new life now pls? This one, quite literally, sucks.

Yeah, so I found a website…

Link here. I’ve been giggling a lot…

Angry Jayne is angry

So my bank have accidentally taken two loan payments out of my account in the space of a week, leaving me in a lot of trouble unless I can get one of the payments back as soon as possible.

When I called them to tell them, I got a sniffy girl telling me to ring their Customer Support team, which I did using the number she gave me, only I couldn’t get past their automated menu because every time I pressed a number related to my query, it took me back to her department. Eventually I spoke to her department a second time to check if I had the right number, only to be greeted by an even sniffier girl who informed me gruffly that “everybody was busy and I should try again later.”

Well, NO. Because ‘later’ would mean I’d incur bank charges, as there’s a time limit on how long I have to report a problem.

So I called the not-quite-working number again, sat through the automated menu twice, decided to press a number that had bugger all to do with my query just in case it put me through to someone who was actually helpful, and finally, after 35 minutes of pissing about, I spoke to a woman I could hardly hear who didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. She then put me on hold for 5 minutes, came back on the line and told me to ring back at 3pm because their records haven’t updated yet.

I should have a witty punchline to this story, but I’m afraid my witty punchline consists of me slamming the phone down very hard into the receiver ten times in a row until it shattered into little pieces.

Seriously, imagine if your bank took two loan payments in a week and not one out of the three people you spoke to even apologised for it, let alone offered any help?

My bank is Lloyds, by the way. Who were, until today, not that bad. Now I want to smash them like I smashed my poor, unsuspecting phone.

Proof that Capricans can’t spell for toffee

Two episodes into Battlestar Galactica prequel series Caprica and I’m quite enjoying it, especially Esai Morales’s performance as Joseph Adama (magnetic and growly and totally convincing, rather like Edward James Olmos as his son William in the original show – great casting!).

However, the second episode contained these two spelling howlers:

As a pedantic sub-editor and grammar Nazi, I think I understand now why the Cylons decided to nuke the planet.

What’s with the horns, Horner?

I finally got to see Avatar today (I clearly fail at being a film journalist because I waited for so many weeks. Please don’t tell anybody).

I wasn’t quite as impressed as I thought I would be; obviously the FX are impressive and it’s utterly beautiful in places, and I loved the Na’vi very much. But there wasn’t a single surprise in the entire film – I’d seen everything before, whether in a fantasy novel, a computer game or a less well-budgeted movie. It was derivative and bland, but somehow those three hours still sped by and I enjoyed myself, so I’ll forgive it its sins. And I suppose what I should remember is that there are generations of younger people who won’t have seen any of it before, so I should just pretend it’s fresh and go away and feel old all by myself.

And anyway, I heard a Wilhelm Scream at one point. It gets points for that.

One thing that seriously annoyed me, however, was James Horner’s score. While the vast majority of it was as competent and evocative as you’d expect from a man who’s been composing music for some of Hollywood’s greatest films for four decades, every now and then I’d hear a refrain from Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, coupled with a frighteningly similar piece of music from Aliens, or, indeed, any number of the many, many films Horner’s soundtracked which contain bits he’s plagiarised from himself.

Please, James, hear this plea: you’re great, you really are, BUT PLEASE STOP USING THOSE BLOODY HORNS PLAYING THOSE SAME BLOODY NOTES.  We’re onto you. Just write something new, okay?

And The Daily Mail does it again!

I have no idea who this Liz Jones woman is but she wrote a wonderful column today in which she claims:

But to be honest I don’t think the majority of women, once they are past the teenage crush period, even think about sex that much.

They put up with it, with the repetitiveness, the ridiculousness, the inconvenience and the inevitable disappointment, because it gets them to where they want to be: married, with children and someone to help shoulder the bills and dig the garden.

Thank you, Liz Jones, for telling the world that women only want a man to provide for them, that they will never enjoy sex and that having children and a nice garden is all they can ever aspire to.

And by way of reply can I just point out that when you have your very first orgasm – because you’ve clearly never had one – I hope you look back on this and think, “Oh. Perhaps I was wrong.”

(I think there’s another point she’s trying to make here about how women shouldn’t dare to date men who are younger and prettier than they are, but someone else can fight that battle for me. I’m too busy fuming about the ’sex’ thing.)

Ice, ice, baby

I’ve been working from home this week and so I haven’t been affected by the Snowpocalypse (TM) currently affecting the UK, if you excuse giggling at all those news reporters on TV who’ve spent the last few days standing in a blizzard and reporting back to the studio, “Yes, it’s still snowing here!” as though we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves from just looking at them.

I did pop out to get some bread earlier today, however, and it really is amazingly icy out there – and considering I live in Richmond, which is a rich enough borough to have massive stockpiles of rock salt and top-class vehicles to spread it, that’s quite worrying. I feel sorry for all those folks whose councils ran out of salt ten minutes before it was needed…

Before the Snowpocalypse (TM) hit I spent a lovely day out and about in London with my friend James, who has now made it a yearly tradition to fly over from Los Angeles to see me every January (and possibly his family and all his other friends too, who knows?). We visited the Landscape Photographer of the Year Exhibition at the National Theatre (which was not only free but also warm) as well as our regular haunt, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition at the Natural History Museum. I have to say, this year was possibly the most disappointing year I’ve ever seen – not because the photos weren’t uniformly good, because they were, but because no image leapt out and smacked me round the face like they had in previous years. Which is sad.

Still, here are my three favourites…

Eyes in the Oasis:

Footprints:

Respect:

That cat’s called Ryska, by the way, and she’s Russian.

DON’T MESS WITH RUSSKIE KITTIES. DEY BADASS.

At the end of the day James and I found ourselves in Trafalgar Square, where, for the first time I can remember in my seven years of life in London, the fountains had frozen over. I’m talking thick ice, too, two inches thick and possibly even strong enough to walk on.

Just after taking this shot, James and I said goodbye for another year, and the moment I got home it started snowing. Thankfully he made it back to LA despite the weather, too. The Snowpocalypse (TM) was kind to us – I hope it’s been kind to you, too!

There’s nothing magical about THIS…

Happy New Decade, everybody! Here’s hoping you all had a lovely Christmas and a great start to 2010!

I want to show off one of my Christmas presents. It’s a Merlin calendar, based on the BBC’s joyous, family-friendly kids’ show. I always get silly calendars for Christmas from my friend Biddy and, seeing as we’re both fans of the show, this was a lovely treat.

Well, I thought it was until I opened it. Look what awaits the unsuspecting owner in February:

Yes, a bloody great spider. Thanks for that, Merlin calendar. Considering that the vast majority of people in the UK are arachnophobes, sticking a giant hairy spider on the page for them to stare at for an entire month was a GREAT idea.

But that’s not all! Look what awaits us in July!

Isn’t that something you’d love to hang on your wall during the sunniest summer month? Of course it is! We all love slimy monsters, don’t we?

And if that’s not enough, check out November:

YES, IT’S THE SPIDER AGAIN! JUST IN CASE IT DIDN’T TURN YOUR STOMACH ENOUGH THE FIRST TIME!

And finally, let’s just take a look at May…

Beetles. For the love of God, BEETLES.

I mean, what the hell were they thinking? There’s so much lovely photography out there and yet these poor calendar designers were obviously only given high-res pictures of hideous monsters and random insects. For every shot of Merlin or Arthur or Gwen or Morgana (and the latter two ladies are beautiful, so how they managed to find bad photos of them is a mystery to me) there’s a crappy CGI thing you don’t want to look at for five minutes, let alone 30 days. Ludicrous!

No offence to Biddy (who also bought me lots of other, better, presents, including the film Moon on DVD), but I went out and bought another calendar today.

Fie on you, Merlin! *shakes fist*

A perfect Blackadder moment…

The train announcer at Richmond Station tonight should have said:

“The train now arriving at platform one is the South West Trains service to Wimbledon.”

What he actually said was:

“The train now arriving at platform one is the South West Trains service to… Wibble.”

I can’t understand why I was the only person on the platform who laughed.

Come on, people! Lighten up!

In which Calvin gets what he wants

I just looked out of the window and saw it was snowing. Five minutes and lots of happy dancing, squealing and jigging about later, I looked again and it had stopped.

DAMMIT.

I feel like Calvin this week:

I always seem to blog these days to whinge about how busy I am (well, not whinge, considering how I’m self-employed and it’s a good thing to be busy). This month has been INSANE, however. I’m not sure I’ve made a lot of money doing it all, but I’ve certainly been rushed off my feet, so much so that when I get a rare day off I just stare blankly into space and can’t quite decide what to do. I’m looking forward to Christmas now: I finish my sub-editing stint on DVD & Blu-ray Review on the 23rd, and then I seem to have about eight days off. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I WILL DO WITH ALL THAT FREE TIME! Except possibly collapse.

My Christmas Day is shaping up to contain three things: a viewing of Aliens, which I haven’t seen in a decade because I banned myself from watching it yet again in case I ruined it (30 times has to be enough, surely?); a viewing of the Region 1 extended version of Watchmen (not very Christmassy, I know, but nice and long) and a viewing of Doctor Who, which is now as much a part of Christmas as mince pies and roast potatoes (neither of which I’m having, seeing as my festive meal will most probably be pizza). All in all, sounds like a good day! If only it would snow, though… I’d go for a walk up to Richmond Park and look at the deer if it did. Sigh.

I’m always hyper-paranoid about talking about what I’ve done workwise because I never know what things I’m allowed to talk about what things I’m not; I work for all sorts of magazines who don’t want their subject matter discussed till they hit the shelves. I will say that in the last few weeks I’ve interviewed two actors (three, once I’ve got another phone interview out of the way tonight), three film producers, one writer/director and a screenwriter. Best of the lot was Supernatural’s Misha Collins (check out SFX in a month or so!), although our chat took place in a very large, very cold room and neither of us could believe how chilly it was. Definitely the coldest interview I’ve ever done – and he said it was his, too, so at least it was memorable in some way, I suppose!

Last month I also found myself freezing on the red carpet at the film premiere of A Christmas Carol in Leicester Square, this time under a barrage of fake snow (fake! Ha!) while my cameraman colleague filmed me interviewing Colin Firth, getting a lovely grin from Jim Carrey and having lots of amusing chats with a handful of other celebrities I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t really know (singer Taio Cruz – who was a lovely chap – and several Britain’s Got Talent or X-Factor types). Peter Andre had very warm hands, too.

Best of all, I got to hear Andrea Bocelli sing ‘Silent Night’ a few feet away from me. What a voice that man has. I’ve now heard Bocelli, Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo singing live and I count myself very blessed, but Bocelli was possibly the highlight. Wonderful!

Here, have some pics (a little blurry):

And here’s one of the Pussycat Dolls, apparently, wearing a dress so small she must have been an icicle by the time she got in to see the film…

(I also have no idea why this picture is so big, but there you go.)

Oh, wow, I just looked out of the window again, and it’s SNOWING.

Hall-e-lu-jah!

And with that, may I wish you all a Merry Christmas?

A Striped Red Tomato

This week has been the most horrendous mixture of work, stress, more work and more stress, culiminating in a really thoroughly miserable Friday (barring the two interviews I did – one with James Purefoy, who amused me greatly – and a screening of Where The Wild Things Are, which delighted me greatly).

But then THIS HAPPENED, and the universe is forgiven:

I’ve been obsessed with the Starsky & Hutch Gran Torino since I had a toy version of it as a four year old. I have models all over my house. I own a Starsky cardigan and a pair of his SL76 Adidas shoes. I love Starsky & Hutch madly and finally getting to meet the car was a (slightly weird) dream come true.

I even resisted the urge to throw myself over the bonnet. Go me!

After this picture was taken I bought a very large cuddly toy Totoro, watched Supernatural’s Misha Collins and Julie McNiven give a bloody hilarious talk and was chased around by two men dressed as the Xenomorph from the Alien movies.

It was a very weird day.

Flame on

You know, typing in a room lit by candles on a dark and stormy night is very soothing, romantic and relaxing…

…but it plays merry hell with your eyes and gives you a headache. God bless the light bulb!

 

The Waters of Mars (and Worthing)

Please excuse the long silence – I’m currently drowning in a sea of work, which sounds a damn sight more poetic than it is.  It’s great to be busy – just ask my credit cards – but I’m getting to the point now where I’d like an entire week off with absolutely nothing to do and nothing to feel guilty about.

Still, I had a few weeks like that two months ago, which explains why this month I can barely afford to pay my rent. Woe is me, etc etc.

But anyway, because I don’t want this post to be all doom and gloom, check this out:

Clever kite surfers jump over pier!

That looks like SO MUCH FUN. I am very jealous!

Also: I loved last night’s new episode of Doctor Who – The Waters Of Mars. Less action than I was expecting, true, but I thought Lindsay Duncan was marvellous (I really liked her in Rome, so it was good to see her again) and Tennant’s Doctor was his usual batshit-crazy self.

Best of all, though… the trailer for the Christmas episode. Sweet Jesus, how many days left until we can see it? It looks like all our Christmasses will have come at once!

 

Don’t mess with his elephants, okay?

I just watched Warrior King, a Thai martial arts movie featuring ‘new Bruce Lee’ Tony Jaa on fine form as a young man on a roaring rampage of revenge after his two elephant friends are stolen from his village in Thailand and shipped to Sydney, Australia, by a crazy woman with a whip (no, I couldn’t make this up).

The film is absolutely dreadful – plot, acting, editing, everything – but HOLY CRAP, WHO CARES? Every time a fight scene starts it suddenly becomes the most amazing thing in the history of the world. Just as in his previous Muay Thai jawdropper, Ong-Bak, Tony Jaa fights without wires or CGI or stunt doubles or anything even resembling camera trickery: it’s all real.

And nowhere is it better displayed than here, in one continuous shot – no cuts at all – which lasts almost four entire minutes and is probably one of the greatest fight scenes you’ll ever see. The quality isn’t 100% but I just watched this on DVD with a crystal clear picture and can assure you, IT’S REAL.

Enjoy…

 

Happiness Personified!

Here’s a clip from this week’s episode of Nathan Fillion’s detective series Castle (which, may I say, is kicking ass in its second season). You may recognise this outfit. If you don’t… go watch Firefly, you mooks!

Warning: swearing ahead

I fancied a change, so here’s the new design for your perusal…

I took that header pic of the Daily Planet sign last year in Vancouver when I stumbled upon the filming of an episode of Smallville. (I snapped the picture from the steps of Luthorcorp!) I thought it was too cool to leave neglected in a folder on my desktop, so I’m happy to put it to good use here!

To continue my theme from yesterday: I’m still fuming about Jan Moir’s Daily Mail article and I note that not only has the newspaper STILL not issued a decent apology – only the one in which Moir seemed to blame everybody except herself – but they’ve also left the article up, despite the fact it has now become the most-complained-about piece in British newspaper history (or so I hear; I haven’t been able to confirm that story yet).

Which just goes to prove, and I very, VERY much apologise for my language here, that the Daily Mail are a bunch of utter cunts.

At least more people know that today than knew it yesterday morning. Progress of a sort.

Why Twitter Is Amazing

I’m fascinated by the Twitter phenomenon, and never more so than on days like today. In case it’s escaped your attention, this morning a columnist at the Daily Mail - not one of my favourite newspapers, minority-hating, self-righteous bastards that they are – posted an article online about the death of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately.

Here’s a jpg of the article’s first headline:

(Since then, the headline has been changed to the marginally less-offensive “A Strange, Lonely And Troubling Death…”)

You can read the article here.

To sum up, what Jan Moir is saying is that Stephen Gately’s death, despite being put down to ‘natural causes’ by the coroner, was actually something far more sinister. She mentions how he was out partying beforehand (how terrible of him!); how he may have taken drugs (god forbid he do such a thing!); how he and his partner brought home a young man with them that night to ‘play canasta’ (and Jesus, of all the euphemisms, how nice of her to choose one so appropriately 1950s in tone – which is where her homophobia belongs, too). She lists the death of another gay celebrity last week, too, as though that had ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS STORY WHATSOEVER; calls into question the future of gay marriage in the UK (because now two gay men have died within a week of each other, clearly gay marriage is eeeeevil) and claims that “Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again” (which obviously never happens, because she is an expert on such matters, even more so than the coroner who said Gately died of natural causes).

In other words, she’s saying one of either three things happened to this poor young man:

1) Stephen Gately drank himself to death that night (despite the coroner saying he died from natural causes).

2) Stephen Gately drugged himself to death that night (despite the coroner saying he died from natural causes).

3) Stephen Gately died that night because he and his partner brought home a young man to have sex with.

Or, to put it bluntly, Stephen Gately died because he was a young man with a lively social life.

…AND BECAUSE HE WAS GAY.

Moir claims that she’s not homophobic, but her article is all the evidence we need to prove that she is. She’s since issued possibly the most laughable apology in the world, the Daily Mail has had to remove advertising from the article because its advertisers were unsettled, and Twitter…

Well, Twitter went MAD. Moir’s name has been at the top of its trending topics all day, along with the Daily Mail and Stephen Gately. Thanks to the efforts of celebrities Stephen Fry, Derren Brown, Peter Serafinowicz (who came up with the hashtag thedailymailisgay, which trended all afternoon as well) and Charlie Brooker, so much of a storm was whipped up on Twitter (and then on Facebook) that the Press Complaints Commission have already received over a thousand complaints. Their website crashed and it’s looking likely that this will be a record-breaking subject for them. And other news sites are reporting the furore, too; you know it’s hit big when the BBC deign to cover it.

I’m so angry with Moir’s vile homophobia that I’d like to punch her squarely on the nose, but I must admit that the worst thing about her article was the wilful disregard she showed to the feelings of Gately’s family, friends and, most of all, his partner. By implying – however carefully – that Gately’s death ‘wasn’t natural’, she’s all but saying that he was murdered, and by drawing attention to his two companions that night, she’s placing the blame squarely on them. Her contempt for Gately (who, from all accounts, sounded like a thoroughly pleasant young chap with no scandals in his past and no skeletons in the closet) is sickening.

But thanks to Twitter, the outrage of the general public on this subject was both swift and loud. At times like this, Twitter is truly extraordinary.

And I’ll leave the final word to Charlie Brooker at The Guardian…

Still here… just…

I’m currently drowning under a pile of work. I’ve only had one day off in four weeks. Hence this blog, sadly, is being neglected. Apologies.

However, on the bright side, I can pay my rent next month! Yay!

“That’ll be two crowns and thruppence, missus.”

I had to go to my local sorting office yesterday to pick up a parcel I needed to pay customs duty on (an occupational hazard when you buy so many DVDs from the USA). When I pulled out my card to pay the £12 fee, the guy behind the counter looked rather embarrassed.

Post Office Guy: “I’m sorry, we don’t accept cards.”

Me: “You only take cash? Seriously?”

Post Office Guy: “There’s an ATM across the road.”

Me: “But why don’t you take cards? What is this, the 19th century?”

Post Office Guy: “We’re the Post Office, you know. I’m surprised we don’t still use horses and carts to deliver letters.”

Me: “In that case, you won’t mind if I pay you in shillings and farthings, will you?”

Post Office Guy: “It’s only fair.”

Honestly, the Royal Mail are trying to position themselves as an organised 21st century business but they don’t even accept Visa? How dumb is that?

Sometimes it amazes me this country even has the internet. Or the wheel.

Tea and Sympathy

This is what happens when you pick up a takeaway cup of very hot black tea in the cafe at Future Publishing’s London office and the lid isn’t on tightly enough so you end up spilling scalding water all over yourself.

What also happens is that you get first-aided by about nine different people because it happened in the workplace and they’ve all been trained in first aid but rarely get to use their skills so they get all excited, and you get burn gel smeared all over you that smells like raw alcohol and tea tree oil and sears the inside of your nostrils, and when you go home that afternoon because you can’t do any work you discover one of your favourite fish has died (sigh) and the filter in the tank has stopped working and you have to take it apart to fix it while trying to keep your bandages dry. Eventually you remove the bandages completely to have a rather painful shower and then discover you don’t have any fresh ones afterwards, so you have to wrap your arm in a tea towel and hold it in place with Sellotape because you are really sad and pathetic.

And then you’ll wake up in the night with burn gel all over your nice clean sheets, and you won’t be able to sleep at all, so you’ll go back to work the next day feeling like crap and you’ll get first-aided again and receive a nice new bandage, which becomes less important during the course of the afternoon because your burn’s improving underneath it, but it DOES come in handy when you end up having an impromptu shoving match on the Bakerloo line on the way home when a woman goes to sit in a seat at the same time as you and you accidentally knock her out of the way. She’ll take one look at the bandage and think, “This woman’s hurt! She can have the seat!” And then she’ll apologise profusely for trying to steal your seat and tell you she really likes the ring you’re wearing (ring not pictured above) because she feels so guilty about almost knocking you over, even though you were the one who almost knocked her over, and it feels really bloody weird having a stranger looking at you so guiltily when really they haven’t done anything bad at all.

And then you’ll arrive home and remove the bandage and marvel at the giant red stripe around your arm and be very thankful you don’t have hideous blisters or anything.

And then you’ll watch the third episode of Supernatural’s fifth season, hear the Lynyrd Skynyrd song ‘Simple Man’ being played over the opening credits and wonder HOW THE HELL YOU GOT TO THE AGE OF 37 (38 NEXT WEEK!) WITHOUT EVER HEARING IT BEFORE BECAUSE IT’S POSSIBLY THE GREATEST SONG IN THE WORLD.

See? TV makes everything better. I’ve been saying it for years.

*DEEP BREATH*

So, in conclusion: always make sure the lid is on a cup of boiling hot water before you move it. Or, at the very least, put milk in the damn thing.