Haiku

Lacking in content

No Posts in quite a long time.

Apologetic

Kick Ass: Or how I learned to stop worrying and review a movie

So I was in Manchester this weekend, as you do. And of course the obvious thing to do when visiting a city you have never previously visited save a couple of hours waiting for a coach is to go and experience something Quintessentially Mancunian. So of course I went to a cinema…Ok so maybe it wasn’t the most unique thing to do, but it should be stressed it wasn’t the ONLY thing I spent my time there doing, it’s just the thing I felt like writing about.

Anyway, our film of choice was Kick-Ass. Depending on which country you are reading this from I guess this willeither be really old news, tremendously relevant or horrendously premature. I think two of those have already been used to describe me in the past, so hopefully this time for once I shall be tremendously relevant! And maybe this review will tip your internal weighing scales towards seeing what I found to be a very good movie (i was toying with the idea of saying “will either make you want to see it more…or not! you will have to read on to decide, but then realised that it is possibly the most obnoxious thing ever)

Anyway, so I went into this film with very little in the way of expectation, having not read a single review/preview and only watched the one trailer probably 2-3 months back when I last was in a cinema (or at least last in a cinema that was showing a film of 15 certificate and up thanks to some bizarre viewing choices on my friends parts recently), and found myself pleasantly surprised. The plot is entertaining, I would be lieing if I said I didn’t see a lot of the twists coming before they did, but that is largely irrelevant and it held my interest well for the 2 or so hours (i honestly can’t think how long it was, which i suppose is a good thing as clock watching in a movie is never a good sign). There were more laugh out loud (or at least chuckle of mirth out loud) moments than I can remember, altogether a good film.

I am reminded of why I don’t write reviews by the way. For some reason, possibly because I am an idiot, i am unable to write a review that goes much deeper than “yeah it was pretty cool”. Let it be known that I give this movie my “yeah it was pretty cool” seal of approval. Clearly the person who was sat next to me in the cinema was enjoying it a fair bit aswell, as i happened to glance over the gentleman way during a particularly frenetic action sequence by the films main heroine, only to find his hand suspiciously near his genitalia via what looked like a hole in his jeans, as i noticed this, he noticed I had noticed this and his face was a picture of “oh god! ive been rumbled!” I decided it was best to return my gaze to the film and pretend it never happened.

I cant think of a satisfactory way to end this, so im just going to end…abruptly!

Update or : How i learned to stop worrying and leech wifi in weatherspoons

Yeah I guess its been a pretty long time, my bad. Though I havent really had anything particularly gripping to write about in my defence.

This is a considerably classier drinking establishment than the one i am currently situated in

I still dont by the way, but im sat in a weatherspoons with time to kill, trying to drink this pint as slowly as possible (because when its finished i will feel guilt tripped into either not stealing their internet, or buying another). Given its 11:03, not even mid-day yet, and im on my own. Having more than one point would stretch the already thin veneer of my belief that im not an alcoholic, this is, in my defence, the only place I know with free-wifi and plug sockets in the same place. Because everywhere else assumes that if you want to use their internet, its only for a maximum of two hours at a time. Perhaps thats a deliberate deterrent actually.

I imagine this is pretty much how my university time will play out, only replace the moderately sleazy setting of weatherspoons with the moderately sleazy setting of a student dorm, and replace the terrible self-indulgent blog with a terrible self-indulgent essay on the importance of bromance in modern culture or something. Other than that it would be exactly the same, down to the chipping MFI tables and the watered down pints. Aswell as the curry friday, no doubt.

Oh and also, i wont be awake at 11:13.

Quick Edit : Ahem, formatting disaster there

Most pointless DIY project ever

First off on an unrelated note, I don’t understand the internet sometimes. While I was basically away a week i got a huge spike in activity, and then the day after i post something new i get two consecutive days of absolutely no visitors whatsoever, odd.

keyboard before it was murdered

Anyway, no ridiculously long preamble about coffee this time. This is a simple blog, about a simple activity. Home crafts.

What is it I have crafted I hear you ask? Why a wallet of course!

Why is this relevant you ask? because I say so of course!

Ok, so I read on the internet a guide about turning the insides of an old keyboard (of the computer sort, not the electronic music device kind) into a wallet. Having read it i decided this sounded like a pretty cool idea, and i was in need of a new wallet. Also, because our house has been consistently contributing to the computer revolution since sometime in the early 80’s we have more than our fair share of old keyboards.

Oh incase your curious, i was reading this to guide me. I also recorder parts of this experiment to video, don’t know if ill get round to messing with that to make it into something though, i shall let you know if I do.

all those aforementioned accursed bobbly things

anyhow, after getting all the screws out of the damn keyboard (by far the most labour intensive part of the whole job, there were 24 of them holding the thing together, including one hidden underneath one of the feet which i only discovered after about 5 mins of fruitless tugging on the damn case to come apart.

What happened at this point was the bottom immediately fell off and clattered onto the table, followed closely by a shower of little rubber things that resembled frogspawn. I of course maintained my composure by swearing loudly.

A few moments of de cluttering later, and i had successfully obtained what it was I was after all along. Two circuit sheets, im fairly certain (for those of you who are interested) that these are they look like this (now with 50% more red pen to demark where i am going to be cutting it).

There was at this point a long pause, as i realised i owned no transparent masking tape, and my activities were then resumed the day after. To be fair a “wallet” isn’t exactly a tricky thing to make, what with having no moving parts and absolutely no volatile properties (except for maybe the volatile properties displayed by anyone who has ever LOST their wallet), but i still felt a sense of achievement. Oh and if anyone has any ideas for what i could do with the out shell/keys of an old keyboard and all those little blobby things, please send your answer on the back of a postcard to…me.

This was considerably less pretentious than my previous blog, a lot less wordy, and possibly a lot more or less interesting. I don’t know, It’s difficult to judge really since I’ve no idea why the people who read this (if indeed anyone does) actually DO read this, other than to humor me and to assuage my constant pestering of “LOOK AT MAH NEW BLOG ENTREEEE”. Follows is a real of pretty pictures

im 98% confident I havent revealed any info I shouldn't have in this picture

success!

Drugs or : How I learned to be pretencious and loathe the coffee

Oh boy. This is what happens when you leave me with time to kill before a train I have to catch. I go and write stupid stuff like this. Ah well, makes up for my lack of update for night on two weeks I guess. Oh yeah and stupid post titles are making a comeback it seems

Theres no real reason for this to be here, other than it shows a large cup of coffee and is a somewhat hilarious image if you think about it

I am currently seated in one of the myriad of chain coffee shops you get all over the place, an enormous pitcher of coffee is sitting to my right, you know the sort, the huge Vats of the stuff they always give you and which are totally impractical. If you happen to be the sort of person who sips their coffee (and I am) then chances are the damn stuffs gone cold before your even 2/3rd’s of the way through. And even if this isn’t the case, chances are by this point you feel like you have just devoured a small banquet where the only dish on offer was some sort of cloying rich sludge. Added to this fact, is the way my now lukewarm beverage appears to be going through puberty, or at least you would think so from the number of oily blotches developing on its surface, both to remind me that I have just drunk a cup of dubiously manufactured sugar rich commercial coffee, and also, I suspect, as some sort of primitive survival technique, an attempt to trigger remorse and disgust in the drinker and thereby save the coffee from a throaty demise.

Evolution People, the proof for it is everywhere you look.

At any rate, it appears to have worked for the stuff, I have chosen to scorn the remaining dregs of my self-aware mocha and proceed to actually write about what exactly it is that is on my mind right now. Yes, not only was this whole coffee thing a massive preamble gone terribly, terribly wrong. I have yet to address the actual cause for me putting pen to paper. Clearly I had a lot of steam to let off over long-standing disagreements with coffee in general that I needed to get off my chest.

The topic that was playing on my mind was in fact methylone, a plant food come recreational drug which, while not technically being illegal, is somewhat heavily frowned upon when used for the completely unintended purpose of human consumption. Obviously, equipped as I am with this knowledge I would be a fool to ingest such a substance, and even more foolish for me to publish onto the internet, a record of me doing exactly that. So do please understand that what follows must surely be an elaborate work of fiction, pulled from a mind that is high only on artery-clogging caffeinated drinks.

As I write this I am pretty confident that every last vestige of methylone has left my system. And while I would not like to give the impression that I am an expert on it, (or any drug for that matter, being by and large a good boy who stays on the straight and narrow) I would like to think that /i have experienced it at least enough to write an il-considered opinion article on it. And by simple induction that must mean I have at least 4 times the knowledge on my chosen subject as any daily mail reporter ever does when they sit down to write a piece.

Oh come on, just look at her! she even gives off an aura of "smug opinionated newspaper columnist"

Given the general view of drugs taken by almost all governments the world across. It would be ludicrous to suggest that methylone will not be banned at some point in the reasonably near future. I am however, willing to bet that it will be for the entirely wrong reasons. A supposed health risk maybe, or perhaps it is a gateway drug? Maybe the production of the stuff requires you to punch a baby in the face and shoot a rare rhino, I must confess to not actually knowing at the time of writing. I accept that all of these would to varying degrees be acceptable grounds for a ban. But far more potentially dangerous in my experience, is the effect it has on the empathy of the one who has taken it. It seems to me like a man on methylone is like a man who has injected himself voluntarily with a powerful truth serum and then opened up a conversation. Suddenly he would think nothing of blurting out his innermost secrets, the kinds of which they may never have told a single person before, possibly even themselves.

Now, in many cases you could easily see how this is in fact a good thing, not a bad one. Two close friends, or two partners could make great use of it to get to know each other even better than they did before, and this has been my experience with the drug to date. But what about if it was in the wrong hands? In what is possibly a controversial and ill-advised move I am going to compare it to Rohypnol, AKA that date rape drug stuff which unscrupulous wretches use to take advantage, physically, of others. (Coincidentally I hear people also take it as a recreational drug, presumably only on their own or with people they trust quite well unless they are very stupid indeed) Now take methylone, could not an equally unscrupulous wretch use it to take advantage, mentally of another person? This is possibly the ravings of a caffine-hyped up lunatic, and I don’t particularly want to attempt to argue the comparative harm of physical and mental abuse. (I sense it will end in tears) But I at least know that I would be very traumatized were all my most intimate thoughts were suddenly out there for the whole world to know. In methylone you have a drug with the potential not to enable physical abuse, but a rape of the mind.

Good god, wasn’t that pretentious!

My Cop-out or : How I learned to stop worrying and write about polish movie posters instead.

You can guess this one yourself

Those of you more blessed with the ability to notice things, may have noticed that I havent posted anything in a while. Then again those of you who didn’t notice might just not care as much. Regardless though, I have been in different stages of busyment for the past few days, but felt I should really rectify this with a new post.

This would of course, be an ideal moment to write a hard-hitting or emotional piece about some political oddity of the day and/or the deepest inner workings of my human heart. But be damned with that I shall instead regale you with these really incredible abstract movie posters from Poland. I stumbled upon these while browsing the internet in the usual fashion. But found them to be really incredible, just as a straight up comparison to UK/USA posters they are far more “interesting”. But on top of that, some of them are beautiful, some are very abstract and clever (for example the fatal attraction one, which I love). Some are even downright scary, almost all of them succeed in telling you what the movie they are about is though, which I guess is the most important thing for a movie poster to do. I may at some point in the future do a more comprehensive post about some of these, but for now consider this a heads up.

Fatal Attraction

I can’t stress how awesome I think these are and you should totally check out the whole collection, I have yet to find a good comprehensive site that contains all of them, though ill be sure to link it whenever I do, here are some of the sites which seem to have a good collection though.

http://tinyurl.com/54wkh8

http://tinyurl.com/2vzq5k

http://tinyurl.com/ydwjj6r

http://tinyurl.com/y8hehfd

Oh one last thing. While I said that for the most part, these are pretty self explanatory. I will give serious kudos to anyone who can work out what the bottom poster is without resorting to google. No not the Stanley Kubrick one as that’s pretty damn obvious. Answers on the back of a postcard please. Or alternatively leave a comment (preferably not on facebook you facebook readers because I’m just like that and can’t be doing with reading multiple places for the same things)

Oh and one last thing. Ill stick it down here for good measure, but Will has been writing a seriously awesome blog for almost as long as I’ve been writing this one, for those of you who know Will (and those of you who dont) go to His blog Because he posts about some seriously interesting stuff. Like early cinema, and insane foreign kids television, and the like. /plug

101 Bromantic Holidays

It has come to my attention that there is a definite gap in the travel book market. There is not a single book out there (to my knowledge) that covers the subject of “bromantic getaways”. I cannot find a single travel guide tailored to highlight the locations to which two men can travel to while still preserving their masculinity. Fist bumping, high fiving, bear hugging and all. But at the same time allow the “bros” to bond in a way that doen’t leave either “bro” feeling awkward. In an attempt to rectify this I shall hand over to my far more articulate friend, and eternal bromance. Mr Nick Inkerman

*

A good bromantic holiday must bring together two disparate elements; the foundations of the trip must be inherently

manly  (say: a motorbike race or some healthy bull-fighting in Pamplona, but all of the frills of the trip must be sufficiently bromantic: good resteraunts, a spa, a gallery, or at least something not inherently masculine, but with a definate emphasis on companionship teamwork and oneness.

*

Well said!

Example of a very rare double bromance

Ode to a Baker

Those more astute of you reading this will have noticed a sudden and abrupt end to the naming conventions ont his here blog. I figure it was getting to the point where peoples urge to read was being tempered by their urge to kill me for flogging a dead horse to an unnatural degree.

Oh I set myself up one of those RSS feed thingies for anyone who is mad enough to want to be constantly informed of my every posting (stranger people have existed im sure).

Clicky here or visit your friendly neighbourhood sidebar doohicky.

Lets try something different today, I’m thinking poetry sultry poetry no less, go into your music player and pick something suitably pretentious and/or sultry to go with.

when I say sultry…I mean sultry you have been warned

Ode to a Baker

Up at dawn, still drowsy for the day

He fears the end result, but knows he must

So wills himself to mold that special clay

That stirs his forlorn heart from all its rust

He plumps, he kneads, he beats and spins

possessed by passions that come just to him

His motive is not to put bread on the table. But

his craft masks a much greater, loaf-some sin

that comes on a whim

When surrounded by his smut

.

For it seems this baker; is a maker

of double entendres, that only he knows.

For it seems this baker; is a faker,

and he harbors a secret that he never shows.

Except when alone with his freshly baked brothers

and sisters, sitting there neatly in rows.

The bagels, the rolls, oh! an iced finger…

they call to him like lovers.

whose words tingle through to his toes.

he knows what to do, and he doesn’t linger.

.

Finally spotting the one that he’s after

reaches out for her, needing her loving

a bout of maniac laughter

Is it the way she is still warm and fresh from the oven?

Or her floury skin, taut; not crusty

shaped perfectly for the hand

runs his finger down her, she parts neat as a pin

Lets loose a gasp of steam, panting and lusty

Spread to him, on demand

He digs in

.

Her tattered body lies upon the floor

His face the perfect picture of remorse

But he is never sated… he wants more

But now its opening time, of course.

From nearest cranny grabs a broom

sets to work to hide his tracks

and readjusts his bakers hat.

Sweeps the viscera from the room

Lays out the loaves on display racks

The shop is open, just like that

.

Right…well that was the weirdest thing I’ve ever written

Edit: Apparently i already had an RSS feed. But this one is COOLER or something.

A sad and depressing fact

I heard something today that stuck with me over a 12 hour period of drinking, debauchery and lechery ( is there a difference between the last two? or are they synonymous?). And it struck me as a sad yet undeniable fact. Despite claims by such newspapers of “great repute” like the Daily Fail, the end is not yet upon us, we have not been mercilessly crushed beneath a tidal wave of foreign workers and paedophiles, though the idea of such a tidal wave does conjure a somewhat hilarious mental image. Indeed, we haven’t even succumbed to the latest outbreak of Lemur dissentry, and the latest inoculation I received did not cause me to implode.

Dare I say it; I doubt even that anyone reading this blog has contracted cancer as a result of drinking water, wearing fleecy jumpers or by having too much (or to little) sex. None of these things are true, and by paying even the merest attention to such drivel we give credence to these moronic notions and distract ourself from the real calamity, the disease eating away at the core of British society as we know it. The one truth that is plummeting our society towards it’s Nadir.

It is a melancholy and forlorn fact that, as a country, we are fast running out of people who can successfully carry off a Dickie bow.

Björk or : How I learned to stop worrying and have a flashback

Ok, slight confession to make here. I’m liking how I’m managing to maintain a “one post a day” thing. But at the same time I really can’t stomach another piece of foreign exotica*. So instead ill try and come up with something interesting to write about.

This blog is in danger of sounding a tad depressing, this should lighten up the mood

Thats easier said than done though I must say, I guess it would be easier if I was always off doing something exciting every day but my life as of late has actually been surprisingly sedentary and predictable. Well actually I suppose it has been slightly more interesting since new year. But before then my blogs would have most likely consisted of “slept again today, had a dream about goats”. Such is the problem with having an illness.

To clarify for anyone who either doesn’t know me, or who just hardly pays attention, I got glandular fever back in September, conveniently just before I was due to ship off to the University of Warwick. Being told by a doctor however that I shouldn’t really drink for 6 months and that I would need an ungodly amount of sleep doesn’t really inspire you with confidence for a first year at uni (I can’t wait to be introduced to everyone as the sleepy teetotaler); added to the fact that I had made an enormous cock-up of my uni accommodation and was going to likely end up with an off-campus apartment in the heart of Coventry’s Knife crime hotspot and deffering seemed like my best option.

So that’s exactly what I did, deferred. Although apparently Student Finance England never got the memo as they sent me a £3k loan sometime in early October (which is apparently only sent upon enrollment of your course but clearly wasn’t). This left me with a bit of a conundrum though really, as I had been treading water all summer activity-wise, using the excuse that I was going to uni at the end of the summer so there was no great need to get a job or anything like that. The prospect of an entire year of this is somewhat depressing it must be said.

Not much I could do about it anyway though, as I spent a good deal of months properly recovering from my illness anyway, although I had glandular fever relatively mildly it’s after effects were still rather unhelpful. Also because of the lack of drinking I got out of the habit of going out of a night with friends, something which I guess my liver will thank me for in the long run but made my days even more repetitive at the time. And by the time I had recovered enough to go drink (the mathematically gifted people reading this will have realised it has not yet been 6 months, but im going by the assumption that it was more of a guideline than a rule) it seems that a lot of the people I used to go drinking with usually had either gone of to uni or assumed I was at uni the whole time. Doh.

At any rate, It feels like my time till now this year has been spent doing an awful lot of nothing in particular. What I mean is that when I think about my past week, it has been rather activity packed I guess, but I cant really pinpoint anything I’ve done. Theres nothing that cries out as any sort of progress, I suppose I learned a few more russian words and learnt that the barmaid (is that still a politically correct term? or should I go with barwench?) of Carpe Diem is an avid fan of Hunter S. Thompson . But as far as achievements go I draw a blank.

That being said I guess it doesn’t really matter so much, I don’t need to wrestle a bear or write the next great american novel every week or anything. And looking at the time between now and september its all looking a bit hectic and I probably have TOO many things that are being planned (Spain, a eurotrip, derby, a couple of festivals, the Netherlands and Tuscany are all place people seem to want to be dragging me off to to name a few). So you can probably expect a blog near identical to this in about 4 times where I bemoan how little free time I have (and god forbid I get a job in this time aswell).

Anyhoo, Björk just shuffled her way into playing on my music player of choice just now, that means I should wrap this up as I recon there can be no worse an omen. Nothing foreshadows disaster like a uninteligable icelandic woman mumbling about the weather, or whatever the hell it is she is on about.

*so is exotica a word? Spellcheck tells me no… I may ave had my wires crossed with exoticas busty cousin “erotica”.

ADDENDUM: If exotica isn’t a word it definitely should be, it sounds totally rad.

 

FURTHER ADDENDUM: There used to be an image of bjork dressed as some sort of marracca here. But apparently it was full of malware, so now it is gone