You hear that, Mr Andersen?

FotC, Land Walker, TCP/IP

I was excited to see that Flight of the Conchords have their own BBC radio series. FotC are probably my favourite NZ commedians -- they've described themselves as "New Zealand's fourth most popular folk parody band", and mix deadpan and self-depreciating patter with songs like 'Boom She's So Hot comma Boom exclamation mark' and 'Petrov, Yeleyena, And Me' (a Russian boatsong about comradeship and cannibalism). It looks like SmokeCDs have their album back in stock, too.

I should point out that I was a fairly late arrival to the FotC phenomenon -- I have friends who were fans back when they played comedy nights at Indigo, and I only saw them because Jenni suggested that I come along to a free concert that the city council had organized at the soundshell at the Botanic Gardens. On the other hand, Bret is a friend of a friend, and his girlfriend used to work at Weta, so there's some kind of tenuous connection there. :)

Speaking of which -- in general, I tend to avoid meeting famous people. I mean, I've gone to talks and so on, but I don't really see the point in trying to hang around or chat with them, since I don't have anything to distinguish me from the hundred others who are trying to do so. I'm not keen on the whole "basking in celebrity's glow" thing, and the only way you're likely to make a lasting impression is to do something spectacular, which in my case would have to mean spectacularly dumb and/or clumsy.

(And when it comes to famous people that could also fire you -- yeah, even less keen. So despite having worked for Weta since 2002, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've been in the same room as Peter Jackson. :)

I guess I've managed to get over it enough to email the occasional web-cartoonist, but I think that's probably as far as it's likely to go. ;)

***

I think one of the weirdest things right now is how many things we could only do with special effects we can now do in real life, even when they're totally impractical. As proof of this, I submit the Land Walker -- a faux-military weapons system that combines all the manuverability of the original non-rocket-powered daleks with the convenient size of a grand piano on its end, with that top-heavy look that's certain to intimidate your enemies as you tumble down any nearby moderate slopes. Fear its menacingly awkward shuffle!

Even so... I wonder how long we'll have to wait until someone manages to put together a functional X-Wing.

***

Somewhat frustrating morning -- I went all the way into town, only to find that my dental appointment had been cancelled. Still, it was for a funeral, and they had left a message on my work phone -- which, unfortunately, has three of us on it, none of whom ever check the messages.

I did get to read another chapter or three of Mike King's History of NZ, so it wasn't a total loss. (I'd paused just after the Maori Land Wars, and hadn't gotten around to starting on the South African campaign and WWI.)

***

One of the things that people sometimes forget is that some geekiness has a tendency to balkanize -- those into Bratz aren't necessarily interested in My Little Ponies, Trekkers don't necessarily like Andromeda, and I personally would suck badly at the TCP/IP drinking game. However, even though networking isn't my field, I know enough to find it funny that the application that uses port 666 is "Doom"; and how about the following

Q: Under what circumstances should you return error number 418: "I'm a teapot"?
A: Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot according to RFC 2324, "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol."

"RFC" stands for "Request For Comments" -- it's the way you propose how a thing should be done to the larger community, and it's how standards are decided. There's a certain tradition of silly elements -- for example, it's hard for a network stack to claim "strict compliance" with RFC 1122, since there's a requirement of "SHOULD: able to leap tall buildings at a single bound." The one exception that might qualify is described in RFC1149, but it hasn't been ratified because it has only been implimented once so far -- this is the CPIP, or "Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol" (also known as the Avian Transmission Protocol), and it was implimented by those wacky Norwegians in Bergen.

(I don't think Weta will be replacing it's Telecom-supplied fiber with aviaries anytime soon. :)

Casemod, Shrift, Complaint, Gig

While I'll admit to a certain amount of geekishness, there whole vistas of obsession that I've only a nodding aquaintance with -- examples that spring to mind are scrapbooking, cake decorating and casemodding. But I can appreciate examples of their art, and The Best Case Scenario is pretty impressive.

(Admittedly, I'm also a sucker for puns -- if someone did something clever with icing that reproduced the cast of Shortland Street, and called it "A Cake of Soap", I'd probably like that, too. On the other hand, I'm not sure about this range of t-shirts -- "the girl from echinacea" and "We all live in a yellow butterbean"? Weak, very weak. :)

***

Important food-related tip: the gooeyness achieved by buying a fund-raising bar of Caramellow chocolate, putting it your trouser pocket, and forgetting it for an hour is delicious but impractical. Hmm... given that pockets often seem to be given short shrift in women's trouser designs, this may be mainly a male problem.

Does anyone ever get given a long shrift? Or an average-sized one? [utilizes the mighty power of Google] Oh, okay, it's the noun form of "shrive" (to grant penance and absolution for sins), and comes from such phrases as "a short shrift and a long drop" (or "come on and hang him, already").

Yep -- chocolate to women's fashion to the death penalty. I never know where one of these things is going to end up.

***

For political commentary, why not go to this automatic complaint generator and enter the name of your least-favourite politician? :) This particular complaint generator has been on the web for more than 11 years, by the way.

***

Some friends of mine are playing at Bodega on Friday. Here's some links to Michael-as-Jet Jaguar's musical output, but there's no easy link that I can find to the mellow tones of Andrew-as-Group-5 or Stu-as-Aquaboogie -- at least, not in the five minutes I'm devoting to looking. Sorry, guys! :)

Anyway, that gig doesn't start until nine, so who knows what I'll be doing until then. (I really hope it isn't work. :)

Politics, DVDs, Coconut chips

Friends have started talking politics, and it's come up on mailng lists at work. You know what I'd like to see on NZ television? A local equivalent of Yes, Minister -- something funny and engaging that gave me some idea of how NZ government works (or fails to work). I mean, I wouldn't be filled with dismay to get something like The West Wing, provided that it was of a similar level of quality -- but I'm not sure it would translate very well. For example, I don't think NZ politics has quite the same "cult of personality" about the Prime Minister, and party politics isn't as weirdly entrenched as the Republican/Democrat split -- I don't think long-term supporters of any party demonize any other group in the same way that the Americans do.

Well, everyone thinks that Greens supporters are stinky hippies, and ACT members hate the poor, and the Progressives are fundies, and so on... but I think that's different. ;) Actually, it's interesting that it's the minor parties that tend to be stereotyped -- presumably the major parties have to be bland enough that they don't alienate too many people. :)

Anyway, it wasn't rehashed political debate that I was interested in -- it was more the process of governing, and the interaction between the civil service and the government, and the civil service and the opposition, and the party apparatus, and the media, and all the elements that mean that politics is the clash of people rather than ideas.

I'm not sure that there's a market for such a programme outside of me. :) But if it were done in the same way Scrubs approached it, talking to the people in the trenches and filtering the stories through a comedic lens... well, I was going to that it can't be worse than many of the projects that get funded, but a very wise writer once said that you should never aim for "better than crap".

However, since I have no ambitions to be a writer of screenplays, the point is pretty much moot. ;)

***

I still haven't managed to make a web page with IMDB links and so on (owing to the fact that I'm more than slightly busy at work), but here's a list of the DVDs I currently own. My tendency to hang on to things, even when they're terrible, shows a bit here -- I can't imagine rewatching The Mod Squad, for example. And I was going to mark all the movies that I hadn't watched yet with a star, until I decided that it would be too depressing. :) Anyway, I figure that Jenni might want to use some of them for her Wednesday showings (though my meagre holdings pale in comparison to her volumous library :).

I'm tempted to order the "Thin Man" collection from Amazon, but given that my last order from them shipped on the 17th of June and still hasn't arrived, I'm somewhat hesitant. Also, I should be saving for the mortgage. :)

***

Last night I had dinner with my flatmate (who's back to France early Tuesday morning -- 40 hours in the air!), and she mentioned that in Fiji she'd been served coconut chips. That is, they cut the coconut flesh into strips, deep fried it, and served it lightly salted. I can't make up my mind whether it's a brilliant idea, or a terrible one... but I now know why destiny arranged for me to buy a deep fryer. Oh, yes. :)

(We ate at the Nepalese restaurant in Newtown -- we were goign to go to Malo, the pacific-fusion place, but it was Mysteriously Closed. It was pretty good; reminded me of Malaysian curries, and my flatmate of Algerian food. :)

Baby G, Screenwriter, TV

One of the nice things about work is that there'll occasionally be a link that leads to something like the Baby Gollum on the right. :) The guy who did it isn't related to work in any way -- he just thought it was a good idea. :)

***

Had Amphigorey and her "bro" over for fish'n'chips and random viewing -- we ended up catching the second half of E.T., which was slightly surreal, since all of us had seen it as kids, and none of us had seen it recently. Didn't remember how creepy E.T. was, or Drew Barrymore's performance at all; Amphigorey hit it on the head when she described Drew as giving the feeling of a child, rather than a child actor. I'm not sure I'm inspired to see the whole thing again, but it was interesting to watch the bit that we did. We then saw the first episode of Scrubs, because A hadn't seen it before. A very pleasant way to spend a Sunday evening. :)

After they went home, I was sorely tempted to rewatch Scrubs; luckily, I pushed down the crazy. Of course, it probably helps that I'm in the middle of watching season 5 of The West Wing. :) I seem to be falling into a pattern of watching four episodes in a sitting... which is bad when you start watching them at 10pm. Oh well, one of the advantages to having a decent laptop is that I can watch this stuff in bed.

(When I should be sleeping. Never mind. :)

***

Another screenwriter's blog, this time coming from Kung-fu Monkey -- " I find your lack of faith disturbing", which describes itself as... another screenwriter's blog. Um. Anyway, as is common with the blogs of professional writers (in this case, the co-writer of War of the Worlds) he is articulate, interesting and funny.

I wonder whether screenwriters tend to be blogspotters, rather than any of the other thousands of blogging options, or if my sampling is somehow biased. I mean, there are exceptions -- look at Doris Egan (who I was unreasonably please to discover wrote "Two Bit Heroes", one of my favourite pun titles ever :). There's probably a certain amount of "it's what my friends use", I guess. That's certainly why I'm on the AdditiveRich server. :)

***

I think TV might, on the whole, be getting better.

Now, this is a slightly odd thing for me to say, given that I don't actually watch any broadcast television. But take children's programs in the Eighties -- things like Thundercats, Dungeons and Dragons and The Smurfs -- and compare them to, say, the animated Batman series, or The PowerPuff Girls, or Arthur. Or even, bless her heart, Dora the Explorer. Now, there'll be exceptions, and you can make comparisons like Dangermouse vs. [current terrible animated program of your choice] -- at which point I challenge you to sit through an entire episode of Scooby Doo. Just go ahead and try.

(ReBoot occupies a weird netherworld for me. I've heard lots of good things about it, and have known people my age who were really enthusiastic, and taped it off TV... but I don't know that I've ever actually seen an episode. :)

Other people have written books on the subject -- for example, Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You". One of the main premises is that we remember the best of old television, and we remember it through the golden glow of nostalgia. Also, television is more complicated now than it used to be, with multiple story threads being the norm rather than the exception. Whether the rise in sales of TV on DVD is pushing or being pushed by this phenomenon is hard to say; nowdays, it's probably a little of both.

***

I should try and get a little bit more done, and then go home. :)

Rule of (N-1)s, Productivity, No Scrubs

I sometimes forget what a big geek I actually am; and then I find myself commenting in some poor friend's blog, enthusing about binary, hexidecimal, and various other bases, and it's all I can do to stop myself talking about representing negative numbers in binary by using "two's complement" and the controversy over whether a kilobyte is 1000 bytes or 1024...

I don't know why, but sometimes I just find myself thinking about things like the "rule of nines" -- you know, the "if all the digits add up to nine, then the number is divisible by nine" thing -- and working out that it's actually the "rule of one less than the base you're counting in". So in octal, it's the "rule of sevens", and you can easily tell that 1337 (in base eight) can be divided by 7 (to get... uh, 1 x 8^3 is 512, 3 x 8^2 is 192, 3x8 is 24, plus 7 is 735, and 735/7 is 105 in base ten, or 151 in base eight). I can't remember how I worked out this was true, but I also used the same reasoning to show the rule of threes worked because three is the square root of nine -- so you'd only get it's analogue if the base you're counting in is a number squared plus one.

Hard to believe I'm single, huh? >;)

Still, as long as I can still point you towards weird tributes to Ray Haryhausen and Skeletor, I daresay most of you will forgive me. ;)

***

This is mainly for Hix, who writes an interesting blog on his experiences in television production and scriptwriting in NZ, among other things: someone at work posted a link to Best Available, the blog of a visual effects supervisor in L.A. An interesting insight into a side of the industry that I'm only passingly familiar with. They also review movies and stuff -- there was an theory in the comments about who wrote the letter that motivates Broken Flowers that I found quite convincing, for example. So, hope that there might be something of interest for you there, Hix. :)

***

One of the reasons that I value coming in on the weekend is that I can actually get stuff done without being interrupted constantly. Unfortunately, today was an exception -- instead of wrapping up this project that has been hanging over my head for a couple of weeks, I've been trying to fix some stuff for the wranglers. I've got to learn not to answer the phone. :)

Actually, that's the hardest part of my job, in many ways -- being able to say, "I'm sorry, I could help you, but I'm choosing not to because I think that keeping focused on this other thing is more important." I'm repeatedly told I should be taking time out from the operational part of my job to do some of the long-term stuff that's piling up; but it's not like there's somewhere I can go where people aren't constantly yanking me out of whatever I'm doing to answer this or that "little question". Now, I have to say, they're normally completely legitimate questions, but as Joel On Software writes, you can lose fifteen minutes of productivity to save someone else a minute or two of hunting around... and the thing he fails to mention is that the person who asks probably won't remember your answer in an hour or two, whereas hunting makes it stick.

(Not that I'm any better -- I know I've asked people unix questions I could find out myself because it was easier than hunting through man pages.)

***

Here's a piece of trivia that may earn you a $20 bar tab at a pub quiz some night -- the oldest international cricket fixture is actually the game between Canada and United States, which has been played since 1844. Hey, I found it in the Wikipedia, it must be true. ;)

***

I've finished the first season of Scrubs. Now I'm really sad, because the second season won't be released until Nov 15th in the States, so who knows how long until it trickles down here? I wish my copy of the third season of Due South would arrive. :(

I've got a cousin who should have had her baby by now, who I promised that I'd send a list of the DVDs I've got (so she can while away all the copious spare time that a baby can bring). So I guess I should get cracking on making that list. :) It'll also help me make sure that I don't double-buy -- which I haven't done yet, but I know it's only a matter of time.

E.T., Music, Nemo

Why do I have "Gloria" by Laura Branigan stuck in my head?

I think I can follow the chain -- first, it was someone talking about retro-gaming, and why Atari collapsed. The E.T. game was both a big element in, and symbolic of, their failure -- they pushed it through in 40 days in order to correspond to the release of the movie, and it was completely and utterly terrible. Five million of the six million copies were never sold, and they ended up having to crush them, bury them in a landfill, and cover them with concrete.

(Someone mentioned that they'd heard that they had to dig them up again recently, and replace all the guns with cellphones. >;)

There's more information over at Snopes; but that's not why the song is in my head. You see, when the song came out, I remember hearing the lines "I think they got you number; I think they got the alias that you been livin' under"... and somehow, "I think they got the alias" became "I think they got Elliot". Quite why it was obvious that this was a reference to the FBI-harrassed Elliot of E.T. isn't clear to me any more, but the link is obviously strong, since I found myself singing it in my head on the stairs.

I don't know why "on the stairs" is a place particularly prone to random music... okay, now I have Robin from the Muppets sing "Halfway up the Stairs" in my head now. Time for headphones, methinks. :)

***

As far as listening music at work goes, I've been trying to listen to whole albums, rather than random songs. I wrote a perl one-liner to pick random album directories, which works much better than having to decide -- most recently, I've ended up listening to:

Nathan Haines, Squire For Hire
Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (the live concert album)
Bic Runga, Get Some Sleep (single)
Various, Blue Note - Saturday Night
The Black Seeds, On the Sun
Chet Baker, 1959 Milano Sessions
Basement Jaxx, Rooty

plus some random stuff, like The Cranberries covering the Carpenters' "Close To You", Scribe's "The Crusader" and Shonen Knife's "Buttercup (I'm a Super Girl)". No-one has a copy of "Gloria" at work, curse the luck -- so it must join Men Without Hat's "Safety Dance" on the pile of old music that I want to track down at some point. :)

People in my room have talked about what music they can listen to while they work -- I can't have audiobooks, comedy or documentaries, but some people can't have anything with lyrics at all. I find lyrics that I haven't heard before can be distracting, but if I've heard the album a couple of times, it works just as well as instrumentals. Other than that, I might try to suit the music to what I'm doing -- something relatively laid back for data analysis, or drum'n'base for heavy coding; but in general, I'm not too particular. But I'll generally be listening to something if I'm trying to get some work done, if only because background conversations are as distracting to me as audiobooks (and there is a lot of background conversation in my room, much of it work related).

***

It's odd how quickly traditions and jargon can build up in an organization. For example, we have a mailing list specifically for off-topic blather; and as with any such list, you'll occasionally get people posting the same thing, or reposting something only days after it was last seen. Well, within Weta, that's known as a "Nemo" -- relating to the fact that a whole lot of people posted the picture on the right without checking whether anyone else had sent it first. Sometimes people respond to repeat posts with that picture, sometimes with other pictures with Nemo in them, and sometimes just with the word "Nemo". I guess it's just a matter of time before it becomes a backronym.

It's weird to think of a company as new as Weta having traditions... but I guess that kind of thing can develop pretty quickly, especially if it's a large group of people that are working long hours together. Things like the Compositing department's Cheese Award, and the I.T. Rogue Element of the Month trophy probably help, too.

Quotes, Pizzaz, Telecom, Critics

"I say the directions were underspecified."
"Yes, but since I was the one who said, 'get a room', I thought you'd realize that I didn't mean mine."
--Two girls talking at Andronico's

This is from In Passing, which is kind of Overheard In New York, but based in Berkley, and done by one woman. Still, it's been going since 2000, which shows you my vice-like grasp of what's hot on the web.

Speaking of what's not particularly hot -- "Pizazz (We're Gonna Give It To Ya)". I actually felt a little ill at the not-goodness of it. (And that is why, dear friend, that I'm sharing this with you.) Their website has a couple of their other songs, and they're called "Peg Me With Ur Luv" and "A2M (Ass To Mouth)". I didn't feel strong enough to listen to them.

***

We have some equipment in buildings owned by Telecom, and all of the people who need access had to watch a video called "Don't Be Morons (We Really Mean It)". Okay, that's not the actual title, but it was basically Possum Bourne talking about how you have to be careful about water, dust, and randomly flailing when you're inside the machine room of the telephone exchange. Why they decided they needed a race-car driver to tell anecdotes like "this simple accident that ended up costing $50 million" was not particularly clear, but I wasn't actually watching -- after all, if I don't have a card to get in, I can't be asked to fix anything there. ;)

I guess the reasoning goes along the lines of, "Techie guys like fast cars, and some are easily bored, so let's get someone who drives fast cars so they'll pay attention." The sad thing is that more than half the people in my room are really into cars -- I believe I've mentioned that one of them has a CD of different makes of cars being driven around a race-track, with a woman with various fake accents reading out the name of the car?

***

Critics are a funny bunch. There's an excellent book, called The Frank Muir Book, that gives a history of various subjects (food, education, music) by quoting people complaining about what was happening at the time -- from Roman orators to Chaucer to Dickens to Winston Churchill. But I suspect Paige is quite right: if someone was looking for a positive review of Duece Bigalow, they're not going to look to Roger Ebert. :)

I've just started reading Rats, Lice & History, which is a biographical history of typhus written in the 1930s in a style not unlike James Thurber. Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this -- he spends a chapter complaining about modern writers and modern literature in general, saying things like:

[of T. S. Elliot] Then he drops suddenly, after a few lines of majestic verse, into completely irrelevant babble.

In room the women come and go
Talking of Michaelangelo

One is tempted to add, "Eenie, meenie, minie, mo".

You get the impression that this stuff was mainly written to tweak the noses of the literary papers that were likely to be reviewing the book. :) Anyway, I'm finding the rest of it interesting, especially since this is written before they've understood DNA, and they're still grappling with what viruses might be; and there's that optimism that you got after the Great War, and before WWII. And the book itself has retained the old fashioned ligatured typeface, even though it's a reprint -- it's always nice to look at "difficult" and see that the two "f"s are joined together, and the "i" has no dot and is nestled under the bow of the "f", and know that someone had to sort through boxes of lead type and pick out each letter, carefully lining them all up on the page.

Okay, I admit that it's kind of an idiosyncratic reason to like a book. How about -- it's got an endorsement from David Bellamy? :)

Yeah, that's pretty much all I got. Goodnight. :)

Scrubs, Shatner, Googlefight, Flatmate

I'm feeling a bit under the weather today -- the after-effects of overindulgence.

Overindulgence in Scrubs, that is.

It's important for me to remember that I'm not very good at moderating my TV show intake when I'm able to watch episode after episode. Quite how "I'll watch a couple of episodes" became "I'll watch eight episodes, plus three commentaries", and it'll end up being half-past one in the morning" is not completely clear to me, though that may be because I'm really pretty tired. :)

The commentaries were pretty interesting. I hadn't realized that so much of the Janitor's material was ad-libbed, for example.

***

Someone at work uploaded the latest William Shatner album Has Been, which turns out to have been produced in association with Ben Folds (formerly of Ben Fold Five). It's more than a little surreal hearing his version of Pulp's "Common People"; the album in general is much more spoken-word ramblings with musical settings. I can't help remembering Fametracker's assessment of Shatner... huh, listening to the album in the background, and he namechecks Tom Waits and Joey Ramone in a pseudo-spiritual called "You're Gonna Die".

Good old "weirder than you can imagine" universe. :)

***

I know it's old hat, but I'm reassured to find that I
am an effective cleaning product -- that is, I can take on "tough soap scum" in a Googlefight and come away victorious.

Oh, and speaking of fights: Roger Ebert's review of Duce Bigalow: European Gigolo is almost certainly more entertaining than the movie itself.

***

I've got to decide whether to have a big going-away party for my French flatmate in the near future. I doubt she'll particularly mind either way. Maybe I'll just suggest going out for drinks or something -- that way, I can put off tidying up the house just that little bit longer. :)

Oh, and I've actually got to think about getting a flatmate to replace her. Bah. I'm quite tempted to simply turn the room into a study -- it's not a time when there'll be a lot of people looking, and I never really enjoy having to work out whether I like people on the basis of email and a quick interview. Well, I guess I've got a couple of weeks to dither about it. It's times like this that I wish I'd bought a one-bedroom cottage, rather than a three-bedroom house.

I suppose I could get someone for a couple of months from work, but contracts finish early November, and it'd be nice to get someone slightly longer term. Ah well, no point borrowing trouble -- maybe I'll be lucky. :)

Town, Bad ideas, Flatmates

Aaaarggh! Lured into town by the prospect of really cheap DVDs (which turned out to be a bust), I bought myself a nice Pad Thai from Native Thai in the BNZ center. I then walked around doing a few more chores, and was walking back to the car, rearranging my packages -- and my food dropped out of its bag and exploded all over the road.

So annoying! I was really looking forward to eating it, and had to make do with sushi instead. I needed to listen to angry music coming back, and was still resentful a couple of hours later. Oh, the drama of my life! :)

On the upside, I managed to find a couple of DVDs for Mum -- she's been looking for a copy of Bugsy Malone for my youngest sister, and I got The BFG for the same reason. (Those who know my youngest sister, please don't mention them, since she may end up getting them for Christmas or something.)

I also bought several books, helping keep my Pile of Unread at parity - the latest For Queen and Country and Powers, several Charles Stross (though not The Atrocity Archives, which is apparently isn't out in softback yet), and Critchon's Prey (because it was about $3). So not a complete loss, I guess.

***

I was looking for examples of obsessions that might be considered more harmful than Men in Tights, and I googled "Man Faye".

In a recent Hitherby Dragons, there is passage that goes:

"It is through exhaustive implementation of our most terrible ideas," Vladimir says, "that we find the good ones that remain."

Well, you certainly can't say that I haven't been doing my best to follow this advice through. I do not advise clicking through on the "Man Faye" link -- it's what you'd get if you told Google that you were feeling lucky, which I think is a particularly cruel irony on their part. And don't let this put you off Cowboy Bebop, which is a good series that isn't responsible for the actions of its fans.

***

Do songs like "Log" ("It's big, it's heavy, it's wood!") have the same cultural status that the musical hall ditties did? Or maybe they're more like Punch's Bab's Ballads... The only reason I was thinking about the Log song was that someone was singing it on the stairs, and I thought, "Yeah, culture is a weird, weird thing." :)

***

My flatmate is back from Fiji, nicely tanned and ready to complain about the coldness of NZ weather again. :) Since she flies back to France on the 30th, there are two things I'll have to consider -- the first, and least important, is finding a flatmate (since I choose to believe that Jackie will prevail in her current Tiny Cottage Quest). The second, of course, is a leaving party. Unfortunately, most of the French people that my flatmate met in Wellington have apparently flown back by now, so I suspect it might end up mostly my friends again... but I think it would be unfair to deprive my friends of a party on such trivial grounds. ;)

I wonder -- if I were working overseas, what I end up being like? Would I make an effort to make friends and go out, or would I seize the opportunity to become a recluse -- maybe playing those multiplayer games that the kids are always talking about? Would I get to know natives, or tend to hang out with people from my home? Maybe I'd start writing really long and meandering blog entries...

Oh.

Okay, I'm going to stay here at work and finish this project, even if I'm here 'til midnight, so that's all for today. :)

Paper dolls, Radio, Dream

Just so the people in my Buffy game know -- I boughts the Flash Gordon soundtrack. Bwhah hah hah - this is a session that practically writes itself!

Speaking of roleplaying, it would be tempting to use the boy and girl doll-maker from Candybar to create characters, at least to the art-challenged among us (e.g. me). This was the approach that I took to the superhero game "Working South of the Border" - the players came up with an image they liked with HeroMachine, and I worked with them to come up with a background and statistics in the system we were using. Hey. HeroMachine 2.0 is now (mostly) available on the web! Neat!

Like anything, I think using these would tilt the flavour of the game you used it in. Luckily, HeroMachine tilted the flavour to Awesome -- which was the way it was headed with the players I had, anyways. ;)

On a slight tangent - I wonder whether Ellen still has the paper dolls of the Queen of Denmark as a little girl that I found her...

***

You know what I haven't had within recent memory? Gems. Not the silicon-based variety, but the baked goods. My grandmother used to make them fairly regularly, and I remember having them with jam, and possibly cream; but I haven't had them in the longest time.

Maybe I'll have to ask whether I can borrow her gem irons or something.

***

My sister in Hawaii may end up with a regular spot on her university's student radio. Filing this under the "awesome but kinda weird" heading.

And on the radio-station front: most of you will know about astroturfing (the creation of fakes "grassroots" movements), and I knew that record companies sometimes bribed DJs or stations to play their stuff more. But I didn't know that record companies would hire people to call up request shows, with the collaboration of the station. It's a level of subterfuge I'd not ever really thought about.

***

Had a dream last night that I'd booked a flight for a holiday to Spain that I'd kind of forgotten about. I was with my family in an earlier version of the holiday house at Hatepe, and not too concerned that the flight was tomorrow, though I was thinking about whether I'd get packed in time, and that I had no place to stay, and no idea of what I was doing once I got there. I was all, "Yeah, I better pick up a guidebook or something at the airport, and throw some t-shirts and underpants in a bag..." I think I was more worried about getting to the toilet, because I couldn't go to the one inside for some reason, and ended up trying to get to the one outside, which meant crawling under some decking through a whole lot of leaf detrius... and then there were big spiderwebs in my way, which freaked me out, because what if they were crawling into my clothes right now?

It did make me realise that (providing that you've got sufficient funds) you can travel around with relatively little planning -- especially if you have no particular goal in mind. :)

Even so, I don't think I'll be going overseas anytime in the near future, no matter what my dreams may be pushing me towards. :)

Beaks, birthday, break... and Mr T

The lovely (and talented) Ms Nelmes mentioned an interest in "Guard Dog" - well, I managed to find a clip of it on the artist's website, and as it turns out, it was nominated for the Oscar for animated short.

While I'm linking - how about a < href="http://www.pacmanhattan.com/">Live Action version of Pacman?

Oh, and I found out where that goth griffin came from - a site called Custom Creature Taxidermy. I imagine that some of these things would make excellent props for a game or movie, but I'm not sure I'd want to own any -- even "normal" taxidermy seems somewhat creepy to me. Though I wish I'd managed to find the Jeremy Bentham auto-icon when I was last in London, and meeting up with a friend who worked at UCL.

***

The good thing about water guns is that they're bulky, and so look quite impressive as presents; until the recipient starts unwrapping them, at least. I've pretty much graduated to giving crockery, glassware, wood or alcohol, so it's nice to give something much more random for a change - I hope Hix gets good use out of his birthday present. :) His party (Saturday evening) was very enjoyable. I ended up arriving at the same time as Giffy, and we were the first ones there; since this happened last time as well, we decided we were harbringers of guests, like stormcrows of revelry or something. Once others arrived, I ended up chatting to a bunch of people I didn't know, and in a near-unprecedented turn of events, I find that I can remember the name of one of the people I talked to -- though this may be because we were talking about googling your own name, and she had found out that she shares her name with a porn star. :)

(I've been driven off the first page by a German maker of erotic wristwatches, plus one or two entries on a Danish psychologist with Parkinsons. Oh well. :)

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Hix -- thanks for sharing the cake, and I hope the shot of tequila an hour wasn't to much for you in the end. :)

***

I actually took a break yesterday -- instead of going into work, I just did a few household chores, and mooched around reading. I finished the Anne Perry murder mystery I was half-way through, polished off another, and then read a couple of young adult novels that C lent me and the two Greg Rucka graphic novels that I've been meaning to get around to (Whiteout and Whiteout: Melt -- a US marshal in Antarctica, good stuff). A satisfyingly non-productive day, all in all.

I did try to mow my lawn, but the padlock on the shed seems to have rusted completely shut. Le sigh. At least I got to eat lunch outside, since the weather was pleasantly mild.

***

Okay, just before I go - do you think your life has been incomplete without the sight of Mr T rapping really badly about how you should treat your mother right, with cheesy synths playing in the background? Well pine no more, my friend. And there's even a harsh commentary on the video available, as well!

Hmm, I wonder how long before we get DVDs of terrible 80s movies that come with a commentary track that mocks them mercilessly. I'm thinking things like that Vanilla Ice movie, for example. Smells like an untapped market to me!

FF - to the end.

At work we are in The Era Of Overtime Dinners, where free food magically appears in the evenings, and migrates to the fridge to await the deserving and quick at lunchtime the next day. I have mixed feelings about this -- on one hand, hey, free food, and I enjoy turning leftovers into new dishes. (The fact that we get free vegetables and packet noodles as well as free fruit helps, too.) On the other hand, I really don't like to see all the waste that goes along with it - I've done a bit of "make a large amount of stew and freeze what you can't eat", but there's limits to what you can save.

Of course, the other side of this is that I'm tempted to spend even more time at work, and even less time at home - but I guess that's the general idea. ;)

Mmm, today's lunch was Roman-style roast lamb with apple/mescalin salad and scalloped potatoes. Delicious. :)

***

I was thinking - if I was thrown back to pre-colonial NZ, would I have anything useful to offer the Maori of the time? (Assuming I wasn't killed out of hand, that is.) I guess I could give pottery a go -- I don't have any real knowledge in the field, but I've got some idea of the kind of things to do, and even partial successes will be useful. Waterwheels are fairly easy in concept, but I'm not sure that there's anything useful for them to do in the context - maybe shifting water? It'd be interesting to see if moas could be domesticated - I suspect not, but it's worth trying if I arrived early enough and I could get the idea across. I could give them writing and mathematics, obviously - again, I'm not sure how much of it would be useful, but historically Maori were pretty good at incorporating those aspects of European technology that they saw the advantage of.

There's not much in the way of useful and easily accessible mineral resources - even the ironsand deposits have a lot of titanium, so there's no chance that smelting will get a look in. There are a bunch of gold deposits, though... not real useful for tools, but there are various things you could use it for. I might be able to introduce the bow, which would make a big difference in hunting.

Would these changes make much of a difference, in the end? I'm not sure - there might be a heavier move toward agriculture and settlement, and concommitant growth in the size of individual tribes. Bows might make them more efficient hunters -- without some other pressure, it would be easier to hunt areas out, which would again push them towards an agraian lifestyle. Pottery gives you more storage options, but is heavy, and would have the same pressures as the kumera pits in real history -- year-round settlements, etc. I doubt that you'd get big, country-wide governments, since geography would tend to push against that until you get a quick and efficient way to travel between the groups.

Would any of this make any difference when the Europeans turn up? Well, Maori might be more used to living in larger communities... but it's a toss-up whether this would make it better or worse when it comes to dealing with European diseases. The political units are likely to be bigger, so that might give them a better position to negotiate from. Gunpowder is still going to make a big difference, and it'll depend on who gets the guns first, and works out how to use them. I wonder whether horses would make a big difference, in terms of extending how far a tribe could project its power? I think you might have fewer, larger groups, though whether that will result in the Maori getting a better deal, or mean that the Europeans are able to shatter the large group and then mop up the ineffectual fragments, is hard to tell.

Okay, this was only going to be a paragraph. Never mind. :)

***

The last Friday of the Festival was hard. I woke up at about 4am with a really bad toothache, and couldn't get back to sleep. (I now realise I should have taken a panadol, but I wasn't thinking very clearly.) While the toothache didn't stop me from watching and enjoying the movies (and excellent movies they were, too), the tiredness made the fact they were in another language a little more difficult to cope with, if only because you miss dialogue if your eyes drift closed. :) I suspect I might have been predisposed to being tired, what with it being near the end of the festival and all; luckily, neither the tiredness nor the toothache lasted beyond the Friday.

I started the day with Life is a Miracle, a crazy middle-European comedy/drama set in Bosnia just before the country slipped into another little internal war. Lots of skulduggery and violence, but contrasted with some very funny sequences, and quite a sweet love story... it wasn't concerned with being particularly realistic, but more about giving the flavour of the place and time in broad strokes -- the bumbling older guy spreading jam on the bottom of his chess pieces so that the mortar fire shaking the area don't make the pieces move or fall over, or the sleazy Hungarian xylophone soloist, or the rollicking bear hunt, for example. At one point, the main character makes "Bosnian stew" - whatever he can find, all mixed together. That may be a metphor for Bosnia, but it also felt like one for this film -- but in a good way. I liked it, and might buy it. :)

36, quai des Orfevres was a hard-boiled cop drama. It was French, with some heavy-hitters in the acting department. I like the genre in general, though most of the examples that I've seen have been either Japanese or American. There wasn't anything particularly surprising in the story -- two tough cops clash, and the one willing to cheat wins, but eventually the karmic balances are restored. Nevertheless, the journey is enjoyable, and this is a film that I'd quite happily rewatch.

Rolling Family focusses on a South American extended family that piles into a huge campervan and travels a couple of days to a wedding. For those of us with large families - imagine being stuck in a hot, noisy, confined space with your siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. Yeah. I'm surprised that there weren't any decapitations. Anyway, all sorts of tensions, both old and new, end up surfacing in various entertaining ways, and it's sometimes unclear whether they'll make it to the wedding at all. I liked this film, and learned an interesting wedding custom (handing around the bride's shoe for people to put money into it - a good reason to wear sandals, so people can't give you coins ;). I might watch it again, but I don't think I'd buy it.

Finally, The 10th District Court: Moments of Trial - bits and pieces from a court in France, focusing on one judge's courtroom. This was very interesting and funny -- for example, the metermaid who was able to ask for personal damages for being called "bitch" by a builder who was illegally parked. The fact that the size of many fines are based on your earnings made for an interesting situation, with an older woman who'd been caught drunk-driving slightly over the limit appearing to be torn between boasting about how much her freelance artwork brings in, and the knowledge that a higher figure meant a higher fine. I also learnt that most of the time, it's better to shut up, and it's really, really not a good idea to use your time to complain about how you're a victim of circumstance. There was one guy who chose to defend himself, and it was amazing how obvious it was that this was a really, really bad idea -- I mean, he actually had a pretty good position, but he proceeded to dribble that away by annoying the judge and complaining about how long he had to hang around the police station, and whether the fact that the paperwork was misdated invalidated the whole case; by the end, I wanted to give him a good shake myself. Good and interesting - I wouldn't buy it, but I'd definitely watch it again.

***

The next day it was raining, and as I was running for the bus, I had to change direction suddenly so as not to crash into someone -- and my foot slipped out from underneath me, sending my headphones skittering in front of me and leaving me sprawled on the footpath. The only things really bruised were my dignity and my elbow, but that was bad enough: not being able to put your arm on the armrests is actually really annoying.

Anyway, apart from missing the very beginning of The Men Who Would Conquer China by going to the wrong cinema, Saturday went relatively well. This documentary, about a American venture-capitalist and his Chinese partner, was really interesting. The contrast between their styles, the story of their evolving relationship, and the American's little songs were all quite compelling. "Everyone's got an agenda, no-one can be trusted..." The sight of the American touring the "slums" of Bejing and talking about how much capitalism was going to directly help these people, in apparent ignorance of the appalling poverty in his own city, was... slightly mindbending, actually. But you could tell he was dead serious, and absolutely sincere; and I guess that's why people like him are dangerous. Amusingly, his venture capital firm specialised in the automotive industry, because that's where he sees the growth happening in developing countries with a growing middle class. This is probably accurate, and given that he's looking at the five to seven year time frame, not foolish... but given the current oil situation, it seems somewhat ironic. Anyway, I'd watch it again, but not really one to own.

Party Girl is a typical "good girl in a bad situation finds good man who is associating with villains for his own reasons" gangster film, but an excellent example of the type. The introductory song has dated a bit, and the ending is a touch contrived, but overall I thought it was really good. I'll certainly consider buying it.

Operation: Dreamland was next -- a documentary following around normal footsoldiers in Iraq. I thought that this was an excellent documentary, and quite sympathetic to the soldiers, without disguising the fact that they were very human; it also gave me a better picture of the type of people who enlist, and the kinds of pressures they are under. Unsurprisingly, it underlines the fact that those putting the military into their current untenable situation have no idea what they're doing, and the presence of heavily armed and nervous soldiers is probably not aiding the "hearts and minds" war. The soldiers seem to understand why the Iraqis resent their presence, and quite a few of them put themselves in the Iraqis' position... but they were also professional, and this wasn't going to stop them doing exactly what they're ordered to do, and human, so they resnet the people who are constantly harranging and sniping at them. It was a really interesting documentary, and I'm surprised that it got made under the current US administration. Would watch this again.

Bride of Silence was the story of a boy who'd never met his mother, trying to find her story. This was interesting in it's depiction of Vietnamese village life, and seemed to be deliberately ambiguous as to what era it was set in. Some people compared the structure to Hero, because of the multiple contradictory flashbacks; I think that Hero dealt with the flashbacks better, if only because it of its use of colour made it obvious and distinctive, whereas I would sometimes be confused in Bride where the events I was watching were intended to have fallen. Overall, a little slow, but okay; I might rewatch it, but I probably wouldn't seek it out.

And finally on Saturday -- Three... Extremes. This was three horror films by three different Asian directors, one of which was turned into a feature film (Dumplings). It was interesting to see how that one made the transition -- what was expanded, and what was changed. I think that the film version was both more effective and scarier, but there were certainly horrific parts of the short that didn't make it to the film -- in particualr, the end was changed. The second film was funnier, while still horrific -- a nice-guy director is kidnapped, and a crazed, obsessed extra who thinks it's unfair that the director should have all these advantages and still be a nice guy tries to force him to become evil. The third was a more contemplative piece, about a young writer haunted by events in her past and her dead sister -- the viewer is left unsure as to whether this is meant figuratively or literally. I didn't find the ending of this last film to be as satisfying as I'd hoped.

Overall -- I thought all three shorts were good, and I'm glad I've seen them; but I have no real desire to see them again. :)

***

Finally, Sunday came - the last day of the festival. I hopped on the bus, and went in to face my last four films.

The first was Hank Williams: Honky Tonk Blues. I've seen some of the other documentaries in this series, and have liked them as well. I came to the movie not knowing anything about the artist, and I feel I have a much better idea of who he was now; and while I'm more interested in the blues than country, I might have to pick up some Hank Williams at some point. Admittedly, I'm not crazy about "Hey Good Lookin'", but some of his darker numbers are really good, and it was weird to see clips of him sitting there while Tony Bennet sang one of his songs. I liked this documentary, and while I'm not sure I'd feel the need to watch it again, I'm glad I saw it.

I then had a large break, so I sat in the Penthouse with a cup of tea and a book, and chatted to an usher I've gotten to know over previous festivals... and then a complete stranger came up and told me that he'd noticed me at several films this year, thought he'd seen me last year, and that he was planning to make a documentary on the Wellington festival -- would I be willing to be interviewed? With some hesitation, I said yes. Now, I don't actually expect a film to actually happen, since I suspect the idea of a documentary about the local film festival might be the documentary equivalent to the essay on writing essays -- it seems like a good idea when you think of it, but the person marking essays (or giving out grants) will have seen it many, many times before. Nevertheless, I suppose there's an outside chance that I'll end up on the big screen at some point; the idea's a bit worrying, since I don't think I've got anything particularly insightful to say. :)

Next was Animation Now - always a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. This year, the ones I liked have stayed with me, and the ones that were "ehh" have been completely forgotten, so I take that as a good sign. An interesting mix, but the standout one for me would have to be the Victorian silhouette-style vaguely steampunkish The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, done in the style of the narrated diary of a navigator given a chance to redeem himself for an error in judgement. I wish there was more of it. Honourable mentions should go to Guard Dog (a dog sees things, imagines the ways they could hurt its master, and barks furiously to protect him - the ninja sparrow and evil squirrel are particularly good) and Little Things (a bunch of short interludes that show people dealing with the world, when the world includes things like postboxes that go off like car alarms unless you cover them with your jacket). Good stuff.

The Lost World was the silent film with live musicians, in this case a piano and saxophone. Very cool -- weirdly, when I remember it my memory has inserted the dialog as spoken. The story is actually quite complicated, and apart from the one instance of blackface, stood the test of time quite well. (I'd say that the story is actually better than the one in Jurrasic Park, but that might be damning it with faint praise. ;) I particularly liked the fact that the love triangle finished with someone unhappy -- I mean, I liked the guy who go the short end of the stick, but I'm glad they didn't see it as a loose end to tidy up. I'd be tempted to buy this one.

And then the final film on the final day: Broken Flowers. Big actors, big director -- and a good, good move. The comedy was done very well, and there were only a few places that audience laughter ended up going over the top of some dialogue, and I didn't notice a single joke that failed to get a chuckle. Bill Murray was good as the aging Don Johnston, the neighbor was really good, and the film was full of little unexpected (but not jarring) twists. And there were some excellent examples of, "If it's implausible, have a character bring it up and get it dismissed, so it's out of the way." Iona pointed at an example in Due South where Fraser pulls out a tuning fork, and Ray asks where the hell he got it from -- to which Fraser replies, "That's not important right now. What is important is..." The example I'm thinking of in Broken Flowers is when one of the women asks how Don found them all, and Don blandly replies, "Computers." Very cool.

***

And that brings us to the end of my Film Festival coverage. Be sure to check back next year. ;)

Dentist and FF14

If I had an infinite amount of money, it would be tempting to buy a bunch of tattoo shirts for Larps... unfortunately, I have neither the cash nor the physique to make this a viable option.

***

Went to the dentist today. They found seven places that need fillings, plus I've got to keep a log of the food I'm eating to see what changes I should make to my diet to slow down my rush towards mouth-based entropy. (Apparently too much citrus can be a problem, so the fact that I tend to eat two or three oranges a day probably has some affect.) At least my gums are fine, so I don't feel like all the brushing and flossing and so on are completely wasted.

I'm not particularly excited by the prospect of having to change my eating habits (Well, I'm not keen on changing any habits, to tell the truth.) Part of this will be the semi-gnostic "disdain of the body" current that runs through geek culture, and the resentment of having to track yet another thing - I have rates and GST to worry about, I don't want to have to think about my unrefined sugar intake! Bah. Coupled with a flare-up of arm pain, and the big bruise on my elbow from when I sent myself sprawling in the rain a few days ago (which makes leaning on that elbow quite uncomfortable), I'm quite tempted to feel sorry for myself.

Maybe I'll try and get an early night or two -- that normally helps. :)

***

Thursday was another "rush into town" day; I don't understand why I always leave the house at the last minute. Something to look improving next year, methinks.

Up and Down was another "lots of apparently separate stories that intertwine" film -- Czech this time, and touching on a bunch of social issues, including people-smuggling, the camaraderie and casual racism of football hooliganism, a woman's desperation to have a baby (and her partner dealing with her solution), the wierd politics of remarriage (especially when your estranged son and your lover had a thing before you were involved), and how the racial politics of the area could appear to someone who's escaped. It was quite funny at times, but also tragic; there are no easy answers when some of the stereotypes are bound up in experience, and the poverty that drove illegal immigrants to come drives them to beg or rob. In some ways, NZ is incredibly lucky that we're hard to get to and pretty obscure -- I suspect that racial politics could turn septic pretty quickly if we had economic refugees pouring in across our borders. Anyway, a movie worth watching again.

Hari Om was very cool - not a hugely plotful movie, but beautiful and interesting in a mix of Indian, French and English. A French woman travelling first class with her boyfriend in India ends up travelling with a rikshaw driver who's on the run. Unlike her boyfriend, she's intrigued by the alien culture, and I enjoyed the friendship that developed between the driver and the woman (which had to be in English, a common language that was native to neither). The backdrop was gorgeous... and so was the actress, come to that. :) I found it weird how fearless her character was -- she seemed more frustrated than frightened to be left behind with nothing more than a bag and what she was wearing. I liked this movie a lot, and may buy it.

Bitter Victory was an older film -- the intelligent, well-educated volunteer versus the army career-officer who's ridden a desk all his life, and the way they deal with fear and duty. It's very much a morality play, and some touches are a little over-the-top by modern standards, like the career officer being a South African who's retained a pronounced accent. And the violence was a lot less glamourised than it is in a typical army film - nothing spectacularly gory, but a major plot point involved the officer being squeamish when the time to act is upon him, while the intellectual goes out and does what needs to be done (namely, stab the patrolling guardsman in the neck). Another would-watch-again.

Kings and Queens was structured a little like a biography, with one of the main characters talking to the camera at the beginning and end. It focused mainly on a woman dealing with remarrying, and dealing with her father's death, with a subplot watching her ex-husband living his life and being dealt with through the mental health system. Funny at times (the two big asylum attendants are called Rozencrantz and Guildenstein), the tone was mainly dark, and while there are hopeful ends for some of the characters, others are left in an ambiguous state. I don't know whether I'd watch this again, but I'm not sorry that I did.

Finally on Thursday, Steamboy. As Jenni noted, there were plenty of people that we recognized -- and in addition to those I know socially, there were quite a few from work. The movie was very good indeed, and while the science didn't make sense, it kept on almost making sense, and there were little nods to reality (like a misarrangement of lenses resulting in an upside-down image). There was some argument about the moral responsibility of inventors, and whether some things should be suppressed until society is ready to deal with them; but since most of the inventors were pretty crazy, it should be unsurprising that the debate was unresolved. ;) Personally, I think making judgements about what society is or is not ready to know smacks of the kind of hubris mad scientists are meant to have... but on the other hand, I don't believe it's okay to sell guns to people you think are going to go out and kill innocents. I don't think information wants to be free, particularly -- it's information, it doesn't need to want anything -- but supressing scientific research because you think it's dangerous seems a bit dumb in general, since the universe is still the same, and someone else will find out whatever you found out eventually. However, that's speaking in general; I suspect that there are particular cases where there is a moral decision to be made, and desctruction of research is the right course of action.

The movie itself was good fun, though not super-surprising, and I can easily imagine buying it and watching it multiple times, if only to spot things like a pub in the background being called "The Rover's Return". ;)

***

Eleven o'clock means hometime, methinks. :) Only three FF days to blog about, and I'm pretty much caught up with other's bloggage, though I haven't even looked at some of my regular news sites. That's the problem with taking time off -- you fall too far behind. :)

FF 13 - quickish entry

I'm not dead yet - I'm just a little busy. Plus knowing that you've got 23 films to review is a little intimidating, so I'm going to break it down into chunks.

But first - what has been consuming valuable blogging time? Well, it hasn't helped that I'm reading Overheard in New York and playing Planarity. Just a quick warning about the game - it doesn't end, it just keeps getting harder. And if you've got any OCD-ish tendencies, avoid starting. :)

I've gotten up-to-date with the blogs that I read regularly, but I'm about 200 entries behind in LiveJournal (though some of that is feeds and the like). I will make an effort to catch up soon. :)

***

The Queen of Sheba's Pearls is the name of one of those games where the boys get to be forward, but the girls are in control. (The boy touches the girl where he thinks the pearls might be, and the girl tells him if he's found them - once found, the game is over.) The movie focused on a household during and just after WWII, where the main character's mother died, and a "mysterious stranger" who looks just like her turns up. I liked the movie a lot - the boy being talked to by his dead mother in heaven worked well for me, and I liked how the different characters interacted and grew. A movie I may buy at some point.

Banana in a Nutshell is a documentary about the film-maker, her Chinese parents, her sisters, and her white boyfriend. I thought it was excellent - I'm not sure it was a good documentary about the difficult question of family reactions to couples of differing races in the NZ context, but it was awesome as a document of this particular set of relationships. (Interestingly, the parents don't appear in the film except in home movies and the like -- in questions afterwards, it was revealed that they had a copy of it, but the film-maker didn't know if they'd seen it.) While I sometimes felt a little uncomfortable about how much of the film-maker's inner life we were seeing, it was well made and I'm glad I saw it. The person who made it is normally focused on feature films rather than documentaries; I'll be really interested to see her other work, if I get the chance.

Next was the Aussie mockumentary about a hitman, The Magician -- this was good in a totally different way. They made it semi-plausible (there's a bit where they clarify that they're showing the killings because they won't release the movie until the guy is dead), and it's full of little details that make it much more engaging. I think it was also entertaining because it was unpredictable - the main actor made me believe in a character who was basically good-natured, but could lash out with overwhelming force if provoked. It was funny, and at times scary, and had an interesting behind-the-scenes section in the credits. Would certainly re-watch it, and might even buy it.

Duck Season was somewhat quieter - a boy and his friend in an apartment playing computer games while his mum works; they let a neighbor girl in to use the oven, order a pizza, and then try to avoid paying the stubborn delivery guy by saying it's late. It never feels like there's any overriding narrative, but piece by piece the reasons for their actions are revealed, with off-hand remarks and bursts of explanation. It was funny, and a little sad, and had an excellent little twist just after the credits (which means most people probably didn't see it). I'd watch it again. :)

In complete contrast, there was very little to laugh at with Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, which was a semi-fictionalised version of the story of the reporter who came to find out about the locals who were trying to prevent poachers from wiping out the Tibetean antelope. There were plenty of hard questions about conservation in really poor areas, where the government either can't or won't act, and the people have to make choices about eating now, or doing the "right thing". It drew me in, and I'm glad I saw it. Plus I got to see Tama Tu again, which was just as fun the second time. :)

Oh, and valuable tip - if you've got a powder you've got to inject into someone and a clean syringe, but no sterile water, you should but the powder in the syringe, draw some blood from the person, and use that to dissolve the powder. Obvious once it was pointed out, but I would have been busy trying to melt snow or something. :)

***

Okay, that's Wednesday out of the way - hope to do Thursday, and maybe Friday, tomorrow.