words only ever used in tabloid newspapers

Another in the occasional series of the same name.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... "romp".

causality and correlation

They’re all wrong.

I’ve yet to hear one commentator give the real reason why the delegates cheered and wept at the end of Tony's speech to conference yesterday, or as Nick Robinson puts it, “like every great showman, he left the crowd wanting more”.

As Levitt and Dubner remind us in their excellently accessible, holiday-read explanation of “real-life” economics (like there’s any other sort?), we need to understand the difference between causality and correlation.

The delegates didn’t cheer for however-many-minutes in a standing ovation because they love TB and want him to stay on for a “full third term”. They did it precisely because they know he’s going. And thus the affectionate farewell has begun…

And while we're on the speech to end all political goodbyes, what a bold and risky use of Take That’s Never Forget to walk in to! It paid off. It’s now ranks as one of those tracks I’ll never hear the same way again. like I used to think that U2’s One was a love/ hate relationship song, now I think it’s an anti-poverty anthem. Once you’ve heard it that way, you can’t unhear it.

reel spirituality

1st Sunday of the month at Nexus
Doors: 6.30pm Film starts: 7pm prompt

If you want to explore the film’s themes and issues:
Post-film discussion: 9.15pm onwards Evening ends: no later than 10pm

THIS MONTH - 1st October
Donnie Darko: Director’s Cut (15)
The first in our 'The Outsider' series - four films exploring alienation, isolation, exclusion and ‘the other’



Feel free to bring your own food. Drinks and snacks available on the night.
+ Book stall of film and spiritual books +

Upcoming films include:
5th November - Kes (PG)
3rd December - Old Boy (18)
7th January - The Life Aquatic (15)

high on hope

Well, last night's Sanctus1 service, High on Hope, seemed to go pretty well and a few people said some nice things about it afterwards. Here's the prayer that I wrote for one bit of the service, using naive hopes as prayers.

So here’s hoping and praying for a place…
Where the grass is always greener
Where there’s light at the end of the tunnel
Where we give peace a chance
Where hope springs eternal
Where love conquers all
We wait in hope for the LORD
He is our help and our shield.

So here’s hoping and praying for a place…
Where we’ve got all the time in the world
Where every cloud does have a silver lining
Where we always look on the bright side of life
Where good things come to those that waitWhere we do to each other as we would be done by
We wait in hope for the LORD
He is our help and our shield.

So here’s hoping and praying for a place…
Where the road to hell isn’t paved with good intentionsWhere good hearts aren’t hard to find
Where hope is not abandoned by those who enter there
Where nothing’s too good to be true
Where we don’t have to be cruel to be kind
We wait in hope for the LORD
He is our help and our shield.

So here’s hoping and praying for a place…
Where we don’t have to take the rough with the smooth
Where it’s not a jungle out there
Where we don’t see through rose tinted glasses
Where no-one has to put a good face on it
Where we don’t worry and are happy
We wait in hope for the LORD
He is our help and our shield.

So here’s hoping and praying for…
Sight for the blind and healing for the sick
Freedom for the prisoners and good news for the poor
Release for the oppressed and love for each other
And the coming of God’s upside-down, inside-out, topsy-turvy kingdom.

11 into 5 goes...?

I’m a lucky young lady.

M decided recently that we should do something suitable to mark my upcoming birthday. Nice. He decided that he should share the idea with me, to sound me out and to give me time to get properly excited about it. Even nicer. Sooo…we’re going to the London Film Festival! Very nice!

And yesterday after days of pouring over the programme and website, I got to choose and buy my our tickets.

We’re seeing 11 films in 5 days – and amongst the highlights that I picked and managed to get tickets for:

Little Children – the new Kate Winslet film which is apparently the best thing she’s done in years

Princess – a Japanese live action/ anime film about a brother seeking revenge for his dead porn star sister’s memory…

Bobby – directed by Emilio Estevez about the assassination of Robert Kennedy

Two films about mysterious deaths in Hollywood – Infamous and Hollywoodland

Christopher Guest’s new film, For Your Consideration

Anthony Mighella’s Breaking and Entering with Jude Law and Martin Freeman

Plus a film about a female suicide bomber in New York, called Day Night Day Night

I’ll try and post up some reviews when we get back…

goodbye European Microwave Week...

Goodbye to the unnoticed and unseen European Microwave Week. Come back soon...


Hello to the over-policed and over-exposed Labour Party Conference. Wish you weren't here...

win, win, win

I just won this (plus the soundtrack) on Phill Jupitus' 6music show this morning for correctly identifying The Vanishing on the Hollywood Pitch.

Hurray! Thanks guys...

more NOT fashion statements

So as I suspect the Indie/ Giorgio wanted - it's all caused a bit of a fuss, blacking up Kate Moss for their Africa edition.

I've always liked Hannah Pool's writing in the Guardian. Right now I think she's better than ever.

"Blacking up has become acceptable in the same way that pole dancing is now sold to women as an empowering thing to do. Both assume that the thing they are poking fun at no longer exists - ie discrimination, racism and sexism. But of course they are wrong. If blacking up existed in a society where racism was not an issue, then it would not be such a problem. But then it would also lose its power to shock. After all, what is so shocking about a white person being made to look black if black and white are equal?"

And the BBC Magazine's Paper Monitor gave it a bit of a roasting too...

NOT a fashion statement. really?

film night

presented by www.sanctus1.co.uk

1st Sunday of the month at Nexus, Northern Quarter, Manchester
Doors: 6.30pm Film starts: 7pm prompt

If you want to stay and explore the film’s themes and issues:
Post-film discussion: 9.15pm onwards Evening ends: no later than 10pm
(otherwise please feel free to leave in the break after the film ends)

You can bring your own food. Drinks and snacks available on the night.
There will be a selection of film and spiritual books on sale.



The Outsider
A series of four films exploring alienation, isolation, exclusion and ‘the other’
1st October - Donnie Darko: Director’s Cut (15)
5th November - Kes (PG)
3rd December - Old Boy (18)
7th January - The Life Aquatic (15)

Heroes and Villains
A series of four films exploring the good, the bad and the rest of us…
4th February - The Proposition (18)
4th March - House of Flying Daggers (15)
1st April - Leon (18)
6th May - 15 Minutes (18)

gubbins

Some bits and bobs.

Etsy is like a homespun eBay – thanks to Sal for the link.

This the first in an occasional series (in other words, bear with me)…
Words only ever used in tabloid papers. Today’s word – fracas.

Manchester Facts makes for interesting reading if you’ve got 2 minutes and are interested in the headlines of the city.

And for those of you who thought that I was either hallucinating or just plain lying (!) here’s a snap of the Water Womble from the other morning:

bore of the worlds

A film by Steven Spielberg with Tom Cruise, a score by John Williams and cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, coming together in an everyman film about struggle against ‘the other’. An easy blockbuster right? Wrong. My advice based on Saturday’s viewing of War of the Worlds? Don’t bother if you’ve not already had the misfortune to waste your cash on it.

Even with time to mull it over, I’m honestly struggling to think of a redeeming feature – there were plot holes and inconsistencies, corny dialogue, far, far too much screaming, an overlong cameo involving Tim Robbins, and one of the most underexplained and anticlimactic endings of any recent summer ‘hit’ (basically we were all doomed apart from the stupidity of the “intelligences greater than our own”).

If it’s true that it takes about a decade to get something from inception to screen, thereby reflecting in our present-day viewing the concerns and events of ten years earlier, maybe we should blame 1995 its part in the making of this film. It was the year of the Oklahoma City bomb, the collapse of Barings Bank (courtesy of Nick Leeson), and the Srebrenica massacre. It was the busiest hurricane season in 62 years, and the year that OJ Simpson was tried and found not guilty. I know that if you searched any year it’d look pretty bleak, but if even this short summary doesn’t invoke ‘fear of the other’ and ‘struggle to survive against events outside our control’, I don’t know what does.

In the greater scheme of blockbusters though, I’m struggling to think of a better (worse?) example of wasted potential. Maybe Minority Report? A film by Steven Spielberg with Tom Cruise, a score by John Williams and cinematography by Janusz Kaminski… Ah. I was blind but now I see...

royal wail

It used to be so easy. You put whatever-it-was in an envelope, weighed it, affixed the right cost in postage stamps, put it in the post box. Hey presto! It arrived on time/ late/ not at all (delete as applicable). But you know, generally, it worked fine for a century or two. And then Royal Mail decided that items should be subject to postage cost regarding their dimensions AND weight.

So my very current dilemma is that I have two copies of a 14-page contract to send to a client’s office near Huddersfield. It’s printed on A4 paper and weighs 150g. I can’t send it as a ‘letter’ now, because it’s too large. If I fold it to make it fit the ‘letter’ category, it’s too thick. And regardless of all that, because of the new 100g rule for ‘letters’, it’s also too heavy… So this document now comes under the ‘large letter’ category – slightly larger than A4, up to 25mm thick, and weighing up to 750g.

Frankly, I don’t give a feck that “although some things will cost more to send, over 80% of all mail will cost the same or less to send.” It’s taken me the best part of quarter of an hour to work out how to post the thing. And at my charge out rate, that means posting the contract has cost me a cool £7.55 (not including the time to type this rant).

So - do you think I should invoice the client or Royal Mail for that?

And what would RM do about it if we all just ignored their new guidelines and used the old ones? Surely their “lost items” rate can’t get any higher than it already is?

[btw I could go on the train and hand deliver it for only 15p more. AND do some work on the train! Next time…]

howies mcr sample sale

I think we're going to try and go tonight.

now i know i'm (really) old

My niece has an email address.

She's five years old.

Geeeeez...

hold up your badge

I've just uploaded a post about last night's repeat viewing of LA Confidential at the Sanctus1 site. Seemed like a waste of good bandwith to reproduce it in full here...

five years on

Things that I remember, 11-09-01.

Listening to Simon Mayo narrate the TV pictures on FiveLive as it happened
Trying to track my mate down and eventually finding her on the end of an email, alive and well, unlike so many others
Switching off the TV, being unable to watch anymore reruns of the planes hitting and the buildings collapsing
Hearing the many stories of friends and family – one who missed their connection into Boston and hence one of the two hijacked NYC planes, one who was meant to be in a meeting on the 80-something-th floor but stayed home with a cold, one who was on a trans-Atlantic call to a colleague in the north tower as the first plane hit…
A colleague asking me why we were still planning on going to New York for Thanksgiving that November (if she didn’t know, I couldn’t explain)

Five years on. Where exactly are we now? I don’t know, but I do remember and I know many, many others do too.

onwards and upwards...

Hi to anyone who's stumbled over here whilst I've been swanning around for a couple of weeks. I know a few kind souls have linked here - ta guys. I just find it amazing how quickly this sort of stuff spreads itself across the blogosphere. I only told about ten people...

Anyhoo I've not given up posting anywhere else just because this is in process - check out some of my other stuff via the links on the RHS if it's of interest.

So, just to give you a flavour of what I've been up to while you've all been at Greenbelt, enjoying the end of the "summer", generally working hard hard hard, whatever... we climbed a few of these (see pic), spent two days learning to sail (on a Wayfarer - v cool but covered in bruises!) and generally relaxed after a crazy first half of the year. Shame that I'm now wading through the 500+ emails but hey... that's the price you pay!