Loving the labyrinth

I have a prediction. By the year 2012, movie DVDs will come out 6 months before their cinema release. Based on current trends. It seems that there's already barely any time between a film appearing at the multiplex and appearing at the Megastore.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't get to go to the cinema as much as I'd like, so I rely on DVD releases a lot more these days.

One film I missed on it's cinema release was Pan's Labyrinth, so I eagerly snapped it up when it appeared on DVD, and watched it this week.

It's absolutely stunning. By far the best film I've seen in ages. My spoof (it's a pan... geddit!?!!?) really doesn't do it justice!



The film starts with a young girl, Ofelia, finding a ancient statue in the wilds of 1940's Spain. My first thoughts were this is like a live-action Spirited Away, and that turned out to be reasonably accurate analogy. Guilliermo Del Toro seems to have the same masterful feel for fantasy and fairy tales as Hayao Miyazaki. He realises that good fairy tales are scary. His eye for detail is also very Miyazaki-esque, the sets for both the real and fantasy worlds are fantastically rich and intricate. If Studio Ghibli made live action, they'd make films that looked like Pan's Labyrinth.



I was also reminded of another director, Pedro Almodóvar. Like his fellow spaniard, Del Toro seems to have an innate understanding of how to portray strong female characters. Even the "weak" character of Ofelia's mother, wearily resigned to be the complaint wife of the monstrous Captain Vidal, is portrayed in a sympathetic way.

If you've not done so already, beg borrow or steal Pan's Labyrinth! It's left me with a desperate urge to see Del Toro's other Spanish fantasy films. I'm off to steal Sophie's box set!

Colorsync, again

If you're a regular reader, you'll know that one of my pet bugbears is the lack of ColorSync support in Firefox. ColorSync (in the form of ICC profiles) is Apple's technology for ensuring colour fidelity across browsers and media.

If that last paragraph made your eyelids droop, you may leave now. :-)

I'm currently using a great browser which does support ICC profiles (and is generally The Browser that Safari Should Be) called OmniWeb.

But occasionally I hanker for the nice little plugins and stuff that come with Firefox, so I go off on little research expeditions to find out a bit more about ICC support in browsers.

It turns out that lack of ICC support in Mozilla has been a known issue for quite a while, it was reported as a bug back in 1999. Although reading that thread it sounds like it is being actively looked at.

To give you some idea of how much of a difference it makes, take a look at this page using a few different browsers. If you're using a ICC-compliant browser like Safari (or IE6, I think), it will look normal. If you look at the same page in Firefox, it will look like it was screen printed by Warhol on a bad day.

That's an extreme example, but it makes the point. Colour fidelity is important, not quite important enough that I'd go demonstrate about it yet, but still pretty important.

Thai ladeez-b

I think I first heard about these girls from Supernaut. They're an all-ladyboy girl band from Thailand who are having some success. They look amazing and their blog is kinda fun too.

Here's hoping they make it over to the UK some time!

Vestidos bonitos

iTunes see sense

Playlist: Apple introduces 'Complete My Album' on iTunes

This is such a good idea I wonder why they haven't thought of it before. I also wonder if they'll count purchases of separately released single tracks that are identical to the album version.

Quite often I'll buy a single via iTunes before the album comes out, only to end up getting a duplicate version when I eventually buy the album.

Somehow I doubt they will. It would take effort and planning to actually track which individually-released single tracks are identical to album tracks, whereas this system probably does nothing more than check album purchases against a database of previous track purchases.

Shame, I could save, oh... tens of pence!

Making history

There can be little doubt that transvestism has had a huge impact on the world. Transvestites have excelled in every sphere of human endeavor, from arts and entertainment through to politics and technology.

But many of the biggest questions have yet to be answered fully. Where did transvestism come from? When did it start? Who started it, and more importantly, why?

To answer these questions, and many more, I have begun my greatest endeavour ever on this web site. To tell no less than the complete and utter history of transvestism in the world. To lay out the grand arc of transvestite influence over the ages.

Without further ado, I give you:



1200Ma (Million years ago) to 450Ma - The beginnings of transvestism

One area that has been avoided by the Intelligent Design debate is the evolution of transvestism. This is mainly because no-one is prepared to admit that the design of transvestites is in any way intelligent. This means that theories surrounding the origins of transvestism are almost exclusively evolutionary.

Fig. 1: Paramecium Brancastrium.
Female (a), Male (b) , and Male Pretending to be Female (c).

What is known is that at some time in the distant past, primitive organisms began to differentiate sexually, possibly to increase the amount of genetic mixing within species, or possibly to give themselves something to bitch about. Shortly after this time some of the newly male organisms realised they'd been drawn the short genetic straw and demanded a recount. Thus transvestism was born.

It should be noted that during this time the Earth was highly hostile to transvestite life. The planet was spinning much faster than it does today. Nights were only 9 hours long, making it almost impossible to get ready in the dark.

450Ma to 250Ma - On to Land

Fossilised footprints of the first land animals. Note (b) was clearly wearing overly high stilettos.

The arthropods become the first creatures to move onto land, mainly to get a bit of peace and quiet. They were closely followed by the marthropods, who came to see what the arthropods were up to.

Palaeontologists studying the fossil record have discovered a third species somewhere between these two, which displays traits of both. They've tentatively named these "Neither-arthr-or-marthr-opods".

250Ma to 65Ma - The Dinosaurs

The explosion of life onto land resulted in an "evolutionary arms race" amongst transgendered species to come up with the girliest body modifications.

The dinosaurs took an early lead with fripperies such as frills that ran the entire length of the body, and some early experiments with feathers. Then the mammals trounced them by inventing boobies, which depressed the dinosaurs so much that they died out.

It was also about this time that the Y chromosome was invented, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

No need to apologise

UK slave trade apology 'needed' (from BBC News)

Apologies (from Sad, Sweet Songs & Crazy Rhythms)

Yes, the slave trade was shit, and it's effect is being felt to this day. But I can't apologise for it, because I wasn't responsible for it. Neither do I want someone else apologising for it on my behalf. For an apology to be meaningful, it has to be from the person or people responsible.

Look at the past, and learn from it, but take responsibility by the way you act in the future, not by empty words of contrition.

Because of the lack of hands

The best thing Canada ever did

You know those little facts that are blatantly obvious, but don't really hit you until you actually think about them?

I've just realised that the dog who played The Littlest Hobo must have died years ago.

I'm sad now. :-(

. . .

There's a voice that keeps on calling me
Down the road is where I'll always be

Every stop I make, I'll make a new friend
Can't stay for long, just turn around and I'm gone again

. . .

I loved that dog.

*sob* :-(

Car-less talk

And so ends the week-long experiment where Jane got to be the car user, and I joined the massed ranks of the pedestrians.

(An as aside: isn't pedestrian a strange word? It means simultaneously "a walking person" and "a bit slow and boring". Which is a bit of an insult to pedestrians, if you ask me.

I have a great joke that makes use of this dual meaning. I'm waiting for someone to ask me "how do you like the new zebra crossing?"

So I can reply "quite frankly, I found it rather pedestrian."

...

I have a feeling I might have to wait a long while.)

Anyhoo... back to my fascinating musings on being sans-automobile. I should start by saying that I'm not a car fanatic. I basically see motor vehicles as a means from getting from A to B without having to look at, listen to, or smell, C.

I can't get excited about cars because I don't have enough money to buy a car that's exciting, and if I did have that much money I'd find a lot more exciting things to spend it on.

But it's been an eye-opener this week just how much my quality of life relies on my four-wheeled friend. Take shopping, for example. I live in a nice-ish new housing estate on the edge of a much larger estate of mostly council houses. The old estate, built mainly for London Overspill (quite how they managed to get spilt this far isn't really clear), was planned with an central convenience store, because it's quite a way from the town centre. When they bolted on my housing development, even further out of town, the planners obviously thought we'd get in our cars and drive to proper supermarkets, supposedly because we're wage earners and can afford cars, unlike those workshy council house types.

That means that the only shop within walking distance of me is the estate convenience store. That would be fair enough if it was anything like convenient. I went there on Wednesday, to do the kind of mid-week shop I'd normally hop in the car and do at the local Tescos that Steg practically lives in (go on, deny it!) ;-).

I'm trying not to sound snobbish about this, so I'll avoid mentioning the 3 separate gangs of hoodies in the shop, or the man filling his basket to the brim with cans of lager. They've got just as much right to go shopping as I have.

What I do have a problem with is a shop marketing itself as a "grocery store" and not stocking the most basic forms of grocery.

I found myself in what appeared to be the "cook-in sauces" aisle. A fine selection of ready made cooking sauces greeted my eye. Great, I thought, I'll have something in sauce!

I then spent a fruitless (and more importantly veg-less and meat-less) ten minutes trying to find the something. There was no fresh meat, no fresh fish, and the fresh vegetables consisted of a few sad potatoes. There was some frozen meat and fish, but it was the kind of stuff that comes in bags and has already been processed in some way. I have a fairly broad palate, but I draw the line at Chicken Nugget Tikka Masala.

So basically, the cook-in sauces were there to fill shelf space with things that don't go off too quick. Everyone has the odd jar of Dolmio or something tucked away in their kitchen cupboards for emergencies; if the shop owners were truly trying to run a convenience store they'd have stocked the stuff to go with it. But no. Shit shop.

Anyway, all this has gone to show me just how much I realise I need a car in this neck of the sticks, unless I fancy catching a bus to do even a basic shop, and practically cutting myself off from my friends and relatives. Which I don't, so sue me.

On blog readers and blogroll etiquette

I use Bloglines as my day-to-day blog reading tool. It looks vaguely "Web 1.x" in it's design (I mean, who uses frames these days, tch!), and the colour scheme is awful, but I've yet to find another feed aggregator that matches it for speed, ease-of-use and robust functionality. There are probably readers out there that are better, but the ones I've tried aren't so much better that they make me feel like surmounting the inertia of "staying with what I'm used to".

If you're not yet using a blog aggregator to keep track of updates to this site (and all the other blog and news sites you read) I recommend setting up a free account with Bloglines. And once you have you can click this link to subscribe to this blog. Clever eh? ;-)

One of the things keeping me with Bloglines is that it runs my blogroll for me. A blogroll, for those not steeped in the terminology of the blogging, is that list of other blogs on the left hand side of my main blog page.

Basically I have set two folders of blogs in bloglines, one called (imaginatively) "Blogs", and the other called (slightly less imaginatively) "Other Blogs".

Using Bloglines's built-in Blogroll Wizard I've set it up so the list of blogs in my "Blogs" folder is replicated on my home page. And with a bit of CSS wizardry from Jessica I stripped out the tell-tale "Made by Bloglines" bit they stick in by default. Hey, I feel I've already given them enough plugs!

Because the folder in Bloglines is sorted by updatedness, my blogroll does too. Barring some glitches, the blogs at the top of the list are the most recently updated. I feel this is a fairly even-handed way to share out my "onward traffic". :-)

From time to time I look through my entire blog list in Bloglines and decide which items deserve promoting to the "Blogs" folder, hence getting a mention in my blogroll; and which should be demoted to the "other blogs" folder.

It's tricky. If I just listed all the blogs I subscribe to the list would be twice as long as the blog page. So I have to use a mental points system to decide who stays in and who goes. Points are scored for blogs that are:

• a good read
• being regularly updated
• relevant to my interests
• reasonably well-established (at least a few weeks old)
• linking to me

That last one is a bit of an awkward one. It would be wrong to only ever link to blogs that linked to me first, but equally it's wrong to link to someone just because they link to you. I'm a bit of a stickler for people at least linking somewhere outside their own site, even if it's not to me. I kinda believe that you only deserve traffic if you're willing to share it with others! So I usually make a judgement call based on that plus all the other criteria.

I went through the list today. Some blogs got promoted, some got dropped. If your blog's not on the list, then it's probably because it's fallen foul of one or more of my criteria, or I've just had a brain fart, or I don't know it exists. It's nothing personal. :-)

I probably worry about this kinda stuff too much. :-S

I wish I'd had my DSLR

Or any kind of camera, for that matter. I could have proved to you what I held in my hand this morning...

The holiest of holy grails. The most elusive and wondrous foodstuff known to Man. The legendary, mystical all-chocolate KitKat.