Transform

Transformeh

As a bit of a lad's night out with the guys from work (including honorary lad Mrs. Y, but not Jane, who really didn't fancy it!), I went to see a 2 hour special effects shot called "Transformers" last night.

I really wanted to like it, I knew that it would have no story, and was actually looking forward to the mindless nostalgia and OTT-ness of it all, but it left me completely cold. I was actually falling asleep near the end, despite the noise!

Shame really. I suppose I shouldn't have gone to see it, because I can't really put a finger on why I disliked it. It was everything I expected it would be... except enjoyable.

For a considerably more positive (and no less valid!) tranny Transformers review, check out Connie's blog. :-)

I never owned any Transformers toys as a kid, but I used to play with my brother's collection, and I absorbed the whole Autobot vs. Decepticons mythos through my brother's enthusiasm for the whole thing. We even went to see the original film (featuring the final movie performance of Orson Welles, non-obscure trivia fans), and my probably faulty memory tell me it was in a double-feature Saturday Matinee with The Care Bears Movie (god forbid Michael Bay ever gets hold of that franchise).

In a way what Bay has done with Transformers reminds me of what my brother used to do with my toys when he was little.

When I was a dodger of six or seven, I'd be told to share my precious toy cars and soldiers and dinosaurs (which I'd given characters and stories to, and cared for deeply) with my younger (by 3 years - an eternity when you're seven) brother. Who'd then, with considerable relish, not play with them properly. Tyrannosauruses would be ridden on tanks! Matchbox cars would be used as building blocks! Lego men, who under my benevolent charge had suffered little more than occasional head and leg transplants, were bashed together and made to fight!

Last night I watched Michael Bay take some cherished childhood toys and, like a four-year-old younger brother who doesn't know better, bash them together and not play with them properly.

Two Veg

There's nothing quite like fresh vegetables from your own garden.

Well, actually, slightly better than that is fresh vegetables from someone else's garden. Because then you don't have to bother with the whole tedious seeding and growing and weeding bit.

My granddad is a gardener, and has a fine garden with a plot put aside to growing veg, and a small highly but productive greenhouse.

We visited him over the weekend, and came away with a great haul of onions, shallots, and radishes. Plus two of these lemon cucumbers.!

They have a wonderful, tangy taste. Not at all like a lemon, really, but so much nicer than your bog-standard Cucumis sativus "Tescos".

Do you wanna be in my gang?

It's called the "we didn't watch Heroes on any other channel, but we are going to watch it on BBC2 and pretend that it's new" gang. It's very exclusive.



Last night the first two episodes were given their first "terrestrial airing", a term that seems to be becoming increasingly meaningless in this age of near-ubiquitous satellite, cable and computer downloads.

Because I'd missed the start of the series on satellite, and I'm still taking the tenuous moral high-ground against pirated downloads, I decided to cover my ears to the office Heroes gossip and wait for the series to appear on BBC2.

I was also relishing it as an opportunity to bring back an "event program" into the EnVérité household. The only program that Jane and I made a point of sitting down and watching "properly" was Doctor Who, and now that's ended it's current run, the TV has gone back to being the noisy background wallpaper while other innumerable distractions are being taken care of.

It seems strange to be nostalgic about the golden age when the TV was the focal-point for household social interaction. After all, older generations are equally nostalgic about the days before watching the goggle-box was the default home leisure activity. These days computers and digital entertainment are gradually taking over broadcast telly's role as the leisure-time staple, but despite all its multi-player and social network potential, the digital world is often remarkably single-player and antisocial.

Just sitting and watching broadcast TV, rather than partaking in an interactive and personalised experience, is almost seen as a failing these days. As if you've settled for being passively "spoon fed" entertainment. But taking out the individuality and interactivity from entertainment often frees up other forms of interactivity. Talking about it to the person sitting next to you, for example, or the people in your office the next morning.

It turned out this morning that two other people in my office had watched Heroes for the first time last night, and it was great to discuss it's potential, and try to guess the future plot-twists. A few other guys in the office had watched it variously on copied DVDs, UK satellite (both live and recorded), and downloaded from the net. Their conversations in previous weeks were limited to ones that started with "have you seen that bit yet where..."

So that's 3 people in my gang already.

As for Heroes itself? Here's my review from the universe where the first series hasn't already finished yet.

It looks like it's got great potential, it does feel a lot like "Lost", with it's numerous plot threads, coincidental links between the characters, and intriguing loose ends. I'm hoping it doesn't go down the Lost route of just adding more and more loose ends until the whole thing resembles a frothy dessert of plot holes, with no real chance of them ever all being filled in.

It will also be interesting to see how they prevent it evolving into an X-Men-alike, or similar. I'm guessing that in the first series it will be fairly easy to maintain the premise of it being ordinary people with fairlt ordinary lives (who just happen to have extraordinary powers), but what about when they've become more of a cohesive group and their powers are more well known?

If you're already half-way through downloading series two, please don't answer that question!

Bring me the head of Robyn Rihanna Fenty

FACT: The British summer this year so far has been a complete wash-out, with almost two months of rain.

FACT: Rihanna has now spent over two months at Number 1 in the UK Charts with her song "Umbrella", featuring the lyric "now that it's raining more than ever... you can stand under my umbrella".

FACT: The last single at number one for this length of time was Wet Wet Wet's "Love is all Around" in 1994

FACT (probably, although I admit this fact is based on Thought Research): 1994 was an equally wet summer.

Conclusion: Rihanna is making it rain.

Solution: She must be stopped by any means necessary!!!

That Fictional Bear IQ Scale in full

It bothered me that I referred to the Fictional Bear Scale of IQ (more properly known as "Pooh's Scale of Thickness") in that last post without actually linking to the list itself. After extensive googling, I realised that no-one has actually placed this information on line!!

So, after extensive Thought Research*, I've compiled the list in full:

Pooh's Scale of General Thickness

1. Gentle Ben - Pretty smart as bears go, but not one for higher thinking.
2. Pooh - The original "bear of very little brain", but could talk, which is more than most bears.
3. Paddington - Could dress himself, but frequently misunderstood situations.
4. Fozzie - Failed continiously at stand-up, a profession requiring above-average wit and intelligence.
5. Baloo - Overflowing with jungle-smarts, but lacking in basic knowledge about the human world.
6. Yogi - "Smarter than the average bear", but only just.
7. SuperTed - Teddy bear imbued with superpowers and above-average intelligence.
8. Iorek Byrnison - Kick-ass armoured bear, skilled blacksmith, leader of his race... bit of a piss-head.
9. Rupert - quite intelligent for a youth, but lacking the wisdom that comes with age.
10. Smokey - visionary who spread the message of conservation and environmental responsibility before it was "cool".

How to use this scale
Much like it's geological counterpart (developed by Frederick "Diamond Geezer" Moh) Pooh's Scale of General Thickness is based on comparison. If an individual is, say, thicker than Fozzie but cleverer than Paddingdon, he would be recorded as being about 3.5 on the Pooh's Scale.

So now you know.

*Philosophers use "thought experiments" in place of real experiments, I do "thought research" in place of real research. It's quicker and cheaper, and the results are often more impressive.

An open letter to the Guardian "Quick Crossword" compilers

Dear Sirs,

Completing your puzzle in the G2 section of your organ is one of the small pleasures of my day. I find it pitched at my level of intelligence (somewhere between "Pooh" and "Paddington" on the Fictional Bear Scale of IQ), and generally witty and well-designed.

I have noted from time to time you have "themed" periods where a few major clues each day are based around the same topic. Often these topics seem to be beyond my sphere of knowledge (for example "poets" featured heavily for a while), which means I am often unable to complete your crossword for several days in a row. But I have in the past been reassured in the knowledge that these "themed" seasons never last more than a couple of weeks.

Imagine then my disgust and horror on discovering in today's Guardian you have begun a third week of crosswords themed around horticulture, specifically the names of flowers!

I am a predominately heterosexual male, and therefore I obviously know bugger all about flowers and their names. I wouldn't, for example, be able to name flower of primrose family (7) if my very life depended on it!

Please please please end this madness and get back to running normal crosswords for normal red-blooded men!

Yours,
Becky EnVerite (Mr.)

P.S. How about a week themed around make-up? I have some great clues if you want them.

Sample: Door-to-door cosmetic company - Blake's killer (4).

Good eh? There's more where that came from!

Words fail me

I'd love to be able to reply properly to this in the forum itself but unfortunately it was written in a private forum with closed membership.

(That's a snapshot of the page, I couldn't link to the original, for obvious reasons.)

I'm not going to even attempt to engage. I'd write something about how the only people who could have taken what I wrote personally was if you identified yourself in the group I was ranting about... i.e. stupid, sexist, false, self-centered morons. I'd write something about being accused of not making my comments in a "public forum", by people writing in a private and locked community that I couldn't even access to view myself.

I could write something like that, but I'm suffering from an overdose of irony at the moment.

Thanks for all the positive replies to the last post, I don't need cheering up really. I'm still happy, honest. :-)

An open letter to the stupid trannies

Hello,

I'm addressing this to all the stupid trannies. You know who you are. You're the ones on Flickr who post 1000 identical pictures to 1000 groups because all the other stupid trannies have posted 999 pictures to 999 groups and you want to be even more conspicuous. You're the ones in the forums who spout stupid, sexist, false, self-centered crap to anyone who'll listen, and then take it personally when people dare to disagree with you. You're the ones who think pressing the period key on your keyboard continuously while you think of the next thing you want to say is how punctuation works.

There comes a time when you have to admit defeat. You've won. Well done.

I should have realised long ago that any online place where more than a few people are able to contribute, will inevitably become over-run by the lowest common denominator. The liars, and the fakers, and the bigots, and the nutters, and the plain simple morons.

I used to think I could change things. That by taking part I could show that not all trannies are like that. Make links to other intelligent, self-aware trannies who shared my values. And that, somehow you (the morons and the loons) would see the light and either raise their games, or move on.

It was basically a naive hope, I know.

I happen to believe that trannies are, basically, decent normal people. But any trip to any forum where trannies congregate nearly always leaves me depressed and severely doubting that belief. There are just too many of you (reminder: I'm talking to the morons, nutters, bigots and liars) for it to be a statistical anomaly.

I should keep trying. Join in, make myself heard, but I'm tired. Tired and bored. I don't want to be one of the little sane voice among the screeching horde of lunatics and morons. Because it's starting to abrade my sunny disposition.

So I'll hand in the towel. Withdraw from the forums where the great unwashed of trannykind congregate. There'll be others along like me, maybe they'll have more luck in turning the tide.

I'll stay here, on my little blog. Talking about the things I want to say, and reading the comments and blogs of my friends and the online acquaintances I make who are also a bit like me.

Not totally like me. That would be sad. I admire a lot of trannies online who are nothing like me. A lot of non-trannies too.

And if this post sounds terribly conceited and arrogant... well, I suppose it is. If you're a stupid, sexist, unhinged tranny then I'm basically saying I am better than you. Live with it. You can have your forums, your flickr groups, your mailing lists, enjoy them. I'll stay here. You can come and see me here if you like, if you play nice and don't make a mess, but don't expect a return visit.

I did went to the ball

Jane's work are great for arranging excellent morale-boosting events for their staff, and the Summer Ball we attended last night was no exception. The theme this year was "The Oscars", and different teams had been been given the job of decorating their sections of the building to movie motifs.

I've been to several of these things with Jane now, but this was by far the most impressive. There was a huge buffet themed on "Titanic", a whole room set aside to showing movies on a wide screen, with comfy leather seats and free popcorn and ice cream, a "Star Wars" themed room with free arcade games, a "Cocktail" bar with vats of serve-yourself tequila sunrise (and the ubiquitous chocolate fountain), a funfair with rides and sideshows (Jane won a coconut!) and too many free bars and food places to count.

My diet went out of the window for a night, but it was worth it. :-)

Today we have mainly been recovering. At lunchtime we visited Jane's mum to help her with her new PC, which gave me my first proper taste of Vista (they should have called the interface "Windows U-boat" because it's sub-Aqua [geddit?]). And then we went to John Lewis and pointed a scanny-thing at stuff.

The scanny thing magically puts products on our wedding list. Yes, there was a fondue set involved.

Stiletto flippers

I wonder if I can get a set of these for my holidays. :-)

(BTW: not my pic, it was just doing the rounds at work under the title "what the girls in Hull have to wear now".)

Back by non-popular non-demand

My, hasn't the year flown? Tomorrow is Non Non Photography Day again!

Yep, once again, to counteract the worst excesses of the frankly evil Non Photography Day, I ask you all to spend July 17th photographing everything and anything, just like last year.

Once you've filled your flash cards with images documenting the minutiae of your day (and hopefully thoroughly pissed off a few Non Photography Day adherents with your incessant shutter-clicking) you can upload them to the resurrected Non Non Photography Day Flickr Group which has already started to buzz in anticipation. (Well, a few people have mentioned it, anyway.)

Lets make NNPD 2007 the happiest, snappiest one yet!