Tim‘s going for it then.

Dear Every Single Motorist on the M56 between Manchester and Runcorn

The pedal on the right makes your car go faster. You might like to try it sometime.

Love, Chris

It’s far too hot to do anything today. It’s one of those bleh days where your brain just shuts down and everything’s all horribly and fuzzy and muggy. It doesn’t help that my room is at the very top of a large house, and therefore all the heat in the building accumulates here. I’ve got all the windows open and the fan on full, but I’m still dripping sweat onto my keyboard. Yeuch.

Nothing much happened today. Discovered I allegedly look like a cross between Dolph Lundgren, Sean Connery and Leonardo Di Cappucino, which could hardly be further from the truth, and that other, rather more high profile bloggers have been stealin’ my ideas. But then, I’ve stolen from him before, so I guess it’s some sort of karmic balancing thing.

Oh, and we had a new guy start at work today:

“Chris, this is Simon, our new AI programmer.”
“Hi Simon. I’ve seen you wearing tights.”

I’ve been waiting weeks for that moment.

If you do, you should probably be aware that Microsoft are about to break it. In particular, IE will soon refuse to render a page if the Content-type: doesn’t match up to what it believes is the correct file extension for that type – which is clearly insane and is going to break nearly every bit of dynamically generated content in the world. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Makes me glad I’ve now moved to Firegibbon.

Geekery

In other news, this is post 256. Is it just me who thinks this is a curiously satisfying, nice, round number?

To my great surprise, this actually isn’t a bad film. In fact, as a piece of
film-making, and as a piece of cinema, it’s pretty bloody good. The acting,
casting, direction, and special effects are all excellent, and the styling of
the film is quite unlike the usual Hollywood-produced kids trash I had
expected – in parts, the film has a distinctly European flavour (particularly the Knight Bus chase sequence, which reminded me greatly of the manic style of some French animation). The director is especially good at bringing across the human aspects
of the characters, and it’s the first two acts of the film that really shine
through here. Unfortunately, all the action is crammed into the third act, and
it feels something of a letdown in comparison to the first two – in particular,
the use of magic is something of a Deus Ex Machina: the characters are often
led into desperate, tense situations, only to be given an escape route through
a wave of a wand and a magic word. In addition, the dialogue (especially where
it’s been lifted straight from the book) sometimes feels cliched and stilted –
although this is more a problem with Rowling’s texts than with the script; for
all her pretentions to modern social relevance, she still can’t help slipping
in the odd Blytonism here and there.

In fact, whilst the film wouldn’t exist without the book, it’s also the biggest
thorn in the side of the director: when you read a book, the best pictures are
always the ones in your head, and when the book is as hugely popular as Harry Potter
you’re never going to satisfy everyone. Also, Prisoner of Azkaban is (for a kids
book) fairly complex and densely plotted – and as such, in its transition to the
big screen large portions of it have had to be cut out – to the point that some
parts of the film may be incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t read the book.
Similarly, though, die-hard fans of the book are likely to be sorely disappointed
that some key points are missing from the film – particularly the explanation of
Harry’s patronus, and the reason that Lupin knows about the map.

Ultimately, though, you can ignore these points and the film still holds
together. It’s a nice piece of filmmaking, and it’s a thoroughly enjoyable way
to spend a couple of hours. Pleasantly surprising.

I don’t know who came up with the idea of these, but they’re great. No longer do I have to make judgements about other drivers on the road purely based on the quality of their driving and the car they’re in – now people have started attaching these Moron Identification Devices to their cars, I can tell from over half a mile away if I am about to encounter an idiot on the road. Brilliant – nearly as good as the Universal Symbol of Bad Driving.

We’ve just been having a little discussion about conspiracy theorists in the office. It seems someone here doesn’t believe a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 11/9/01, and is insisting that it was a rocket fired by the US Government in order to generate international sympathy and justify their stomping all over the middle east to get oil. As conspiracy theories goes, it’s not a particularly inventive one and has been thoroughly debunked, anyway.

But that’s not the interesting bit. No sooner does this discussion end than the following email arrives in my inbox:

From: ***** <*****@bbc.co.uk>
To: ****@parm.net
Subject: YOU STILL DOING THE URBAN MYTHS ROUND? BBC TV NEWS HERE..

Hi Chris, just doing a bit of internet research and spotted your paper.

Are you still based in the North West, any chance of a chat?

That’s slightly spooky timing, in my book.

(I assume they’re referencing an essay I wrote about 5 years ago ranting about emails people forward round telling you that they found Hell in Siberia and how I’ll go to hell and Jesus will stop loving me if I don’t forward this email about a non-existent documentary about how Jesus was gay onto every other Christian on the planet, but that’s besides the point).

Genius.

Whatever kit you’ve owned, I’ve owned and if I didn’t own it, I’ll still forget more about it than you’ll ever know. I’ve written software, I’ve worked on websites, I was the first person to use an Animated Background and, as soon as they become unpopular, I was the first person to tell you how lame they were.

Following on from yesterday’s alien mind probe shenanigans, another strange piece of synchronicity. I was just this morning thinking about how it’s now about six months since I heard from or wrote to an old friend of mine – and then, who should email me this afternoon but – yes – said friend. She was writing to inform me of the Grauniad article on the First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, a quite terrifying musical troupe whose specialities include pumpkin solos and a disturbingly phallic instrument made out of a cucumber. The MP3 samples have to be heard to be believed. Quite, quite terrifying.