Greedy, nocturnal and irregular of habit

So. Floating mountains. How does that work, then?


You know, the one thing I never expected, walking into the film after reading all the hoo-ha, was to find the big blue people beautiful. Rivetingly so. I would happily have spent the entire film just watching the way they moved.


My elder daughter thought it was a good film but had too much boring war in it.


The story is crap, the dialogue is crap, and in places it is completely cringeworthy, but I would certainly watch all the roaming-about-the-forest-learning-about-the-world bits again.


The 3D doesn't always work - sometimes the screen looks like those 3D postcards you used to get, where flat layers are superimposed on each other. But when it does work, it can be wonderful. And I really liked it when bits of sparkly stuff apparently floated out of the screen and into the auditorium.

Whinge moan grumble grumble bitch complain.

We've just been watching another DVD of archive film, this time Austria from 1918 to 1938. It's a bizarre feeling to see these streets and buildings that I know so well with history happening on them right in front of my eyes. There was one snippet shot in 1918 of crowds waiting outside the parliament building while the end of the Hapsburg monarchy and the creation of the Republic was declared - it was a rainy day, lots of people had umbrellas, and the pavements were shiny. There was another one of the burning of the Ministry of Justice in 1927 - this is not a famous event in world history, but it's a hugely significant moment in Austrian history - smoke came puring out of the windows, and then you could tell the police had arrived because the crowd suddenly scattered, and then they started firing, and bodies fell to the ground and little clusters of people came out with stretchers. And in the background all the time was Cafe Raimund, opposite the Volkstheater, where we used to have tutorials, and which still exists. It felt utterly bizarre.

Today, I finally figured out how to get Famosa collected, not just in walk, and not just for a couple of circuits round the school but THE WHOLE TIME. Well, okay, not in canter, but the whole time whe she wasn't cantering. The non-horsey among you will not appreciate what a triumphant achievement this is, but let me tell you, it is AMAZING. I have been trying to get good enough to do this for well over a year now. It requires a degree of coordination between your seat and your hands that I just don't have naturally, but since Famosa hasn't been allowed to hack out for over six months, I've had a lot of time to work on my seat, and now I seem to have finally cracked it. Getting the horse collected is a prequisite for any kind of dressage, so it's a giant leap forward for me. At last I can stop feeling utterly inferior to my children and start feeling smugly superior tomy husband (who is very well coordinated, and would doubtless have learned to do this long before me, except that his slipped disc has prevented him from riding, oh dear, such a shame).

I have sold my soul to the devil and am currently directing a play which could most politely be described as "an old-fashioned farce", although it isn't actually all that old. It bears a structural resemblance to the lousy play being put on by the run-down theatre company in Noises Off, except it isn't as well written (and there are no sardines, although I am tempted to insert some randomly as an hommage). In the way of old-fashioned farces, the textual humour consists largely of deeply unfunny sexist and racist stereotypes; unlike good old-fashioned farces, there are no carefully timed exits and entrances to create a frenetic pace. I have had to rewrite one section to insert a sequence where doors open and close and people miss each other by a hair's breadth because the playwright for some reason failed to include one (How, I ask you, can you specify a set with four doors, if you are not going to use those doors to have people enter and exit at a rapid pace, always teetering on the edge of disocovering each other?) It's the kind of thing which, if I saw a performance put on by someone else, would make me groan in disgust at their appalling taste.

But I would rather direct a crap play than no play at all, and there aren't many directing opportunities that fit in with my work commitments, so I have waved farewell to all my principles and am beavering away fitting in all kinds of comic stage business, so that the audience actually has something to laugh about, and milking the stereotypes for all they're worth. And I have to admit that I'm enjoying it. I like creating lolz, using nothing but a couple of actors and a prop. Next time anyone wonders how an actress can demean herself by appearing in an appallingly sexist role, just point them at me. I am so going to hell.

And in a kind of karmic exchange, the book is going really badly. This, I suspect, is what happens if you sacrifice your artistic and moral principles. I can only hope things will pick up again once the play is over.

Wow - I put in Stacie from Hustle. The program didn't have that character in its database, but its first suggestion was Lila from Dexter, who's played by the same actress. I was quite freaked by that.

Gacked from reera_the_red

Hoo boy, if anybody needs another time waster, I've got a really good one:

http://en.akinator.com/

It's a kind of Twenty Questions about characters. You think of a character and the program tries to guess who you're thinking of by asking questions with yes/no answers. It's particularly interesting if you think of a character it hasn't got in its database - when I tried Anne Elliot, it got her completely wrong on the first guess, but then came up with Lizzy Bennet, Fanny Price and Emma in subsequent rounds before admitting defeat. Bunter was even more fun - its first guess was Bob the Builder (!), then a Captain Someone-I'd-Never-Heard-Of, who is apparently a friend of Poirot's, and then Jeeves. So in both instances it got awfully close, even though it didn't actually have the character in its database (it asks you to add the new character at the end. LPW is already up there).

93% won't copy and paste this. Will you?

No. Why on earth should I?

This is the foal's father, Favory Bellatria, aka Bello. Presumably the little one will look like this one day, though it's rather hard to imnagine.

The foal had his first photoshoot today. It was also the first time he'd been out of his box, and with the temperature an icy -4.5C he soon started to shiver, so the plan to let him run around in the school was abandoned, which is why all the pics are of him in the mud paddock. He is, of course, utterly adorable. The horses thought so, too. There are three who have boxes in the paddock, Famosa, Adria and the baby's dad, Bello. As soon as he appeared, they all got terribly exciting and started making heavy breathing noises and rushing around inside their boxes. You could see they wanted nothing more than to scoot over and investigate him - evidently horses find a foal as irresistible as humans find a new born baby. Knuddel, the wild horse who lives in the paddock, spent all day glued to the foal box, much to the annoyance of the baby's mother, who kept banging on the window to try to chase him away. In the end, he had to be lured away by a large pile of hay because Toskana was getting so noisy.




He didn't want to come out at first.




Not even when mum was outside.




Lipizzaners are born black or brown and gradually turn white, but he seems to have a head start with that huge white blaze and all that white on his legs. Apparently his father was the same.

This made me giggle.

The first foal has arrived! Favery Toskana, a little colt. He was born at 7.30 this morning and he's all fluffy and adorable. His mother is a black Lipizzaner, but he's already got white feet and an enormous white blaze down his nose. He was huddled up in the conrer of the box having a snooze when we saw him, but tomorrow we're going to watch him run around in the covered school. It's so exciting!

One of the Christmas presents that Wolfgang and I gave ourselves was a DVD with a collection of Austrian and German archive film from the year 1938, which was, as history buffs will recall, the year of the Anschluss, when Austria was incorporated into the German Reich. A month after the German troops marched across the border, a plebiscite was held, to determine whether the Austrian people wanted to be part of the Reich or not (this is where the famous slogan "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" came into play). The DVD includes a public information film about the plebiscite. It shows a vast mass of people queuing up to vote and being kept in line by a black-clad SS man. A young woman approaches him and asks in a rather flirtatious fashion if he can tell her the procedure, as she's never done this before. Oh yes, says the SS man, flirting right back, it's very simple. You go into this room here and you show the man behind the desk either your baptism certificate or your certificate of national identity. He crosses your name off a list and gives you your voting slip. On it are the words Adolf Hitler, Ja with a big circle underneath. You put your cross in the big circle, and hand in your slip. I'll repeat that, just in case you didn't get it the first time. You put your cross in the big circle. That's the procedure. And the most important thing of all is that after you go home - here he gets even more charmingly flirtatious, and you think he's going to suggest that the most important thing of all is that she give him her phone number, so he can come round after she gets home and they can have wild passionate sex, but he suddenly he turns to face the camera, which zooms in to a close-up of his face, and now he's looking furious and barking straight at the cinema audience - the most important thing of all is to MAKE SURE all your friends and relatives vote for Hitler as well.


And this is what the voting slip looks like:




Hmmm, I wonder where I should put that cross?

And guess where 99.73% of those eligible to vote (which didn't include Jews, socialists or known anti-Nazis) put their cross?

It's so blatant, and so shameless, that it would be funny if it weren't so awful.

As is traditional at this time of the year, I have taken stock of the last twelve months, considered the directions in which those months have taken me, what significance they have had for my life and the lives of those I loved, and what changes it would be meet and right to make in the coming year. And having thus passed review, I have made the following resolutions:

I will go out and get pissed a great deal more often
I will engage in more risky behaviour
I will spend more of our overdraft on unnecessary luxuries
I will go to bed later


That should do it.

We got a lot of DVDs with our Christmas loot this year - and blessings be upon the Amazon Customer Support people who, on discovering on December 22nd that the parcel had gone astray, packed up a replacement lot and got it out to us by the 24th, thereby doubling the number of presenets under the tree - and the children have accordingly been glued to the telly screen for hours at a time. They asked for vast numbers of episodes of Gossip Girl and Skins, neither of whch I'd heard of, and both of which I've only seen out of the corner of my eye on my way through the sitting room. I can say with some confidence, however, that you'd be unlikely to find two series about teenagers that summed up more acutely the difference between US and UK TV. Gossip Girl is set in some fantasy version of hi society (it's not meant to be a fantasy, but it clearly bears as much relationship to real high society as a Ferrero Rocher chocolate ad bears to the job of being an ambassador). Everyone is phenonemenally rich and ridiculously beautiful, in a plastic surgery sort of way, and their lives and interactions are structured by the conventions of the genre American High School. It is so glossy it makes the whole room gleam. Skins, by contrast, is shot in the kind of British Grot-O-Vision used to such effect on The Professionals, and is about spots and drugs and desperately awkwards sex, and being a loser and getting off your head and throwing up at parties. It uses non-realistic devices to tell the story - someone bursts into song in the gents' toilet, with two strangers pissing into the urinals in the background - and I think you have to actually be a teenager to understand what is going on half the time.

The adults got Spooks and Ashes to Ashes (yes, we are faithful Kudos consumers). I've only seen half an episode of Spooks, but Ashes to Ashes is great, and I have conceived a dark anger in my heart against the Life on Mars slashers, who slagged it off so badly when it first aired that I didn't bother to order it last year. It was only when friends from England - who are not fannish - happened to mention that it was better than LoM that I decided to risk buying it. And you know what? It is better. It's more gripping and it's more interesting and the main characters are more developed. I liked LoM, but I got a bit fed up by the end at the way the most intriguing part of the story - what the hell has actually happened to Sam? - just went over the same old ground, over and over again. I disliked the way loose ends, like his girlfriend, weren't tied up, and the Crime of the Week plots were desperately thin. I've also found myself unable to rewatch it - though I have tried on occasion - because once the central mystery had been cleared up, the actual episodes were just boring. Ashes to Ashes solves all that. Because Alex knows that this is all a fantasy, they don't waste time on half-cocked what's-really-happening stuff; there's a real urgency about her need to get back to the present; the mystery of what happened to her parents is far more interesting than Sam's Daddy issues, and it's tied in much more effectively to her attempts to wake herself up.

But the slashers hated it, because instead of hot Sam-'n'-Gene sexual tension there was a WOMAN in the main role. I'd read so much criticism of Keeley Hawes' dreadful performance that it came as surprise to discover that actually she's really good. So much for slash as a subversive feminist activity, when what it means in economic terms is that they won't watch actresses in lead roles because they're not men.

It's very much not Life on Mars rebooted, and the changes are all for the better. One of the best things is that since it's accepted right from the start that it's Alex's sub-conscious that it responsible for everything, you can read plot weaknesses as insight into her character. We've just watched one where - spoilers ahoy - a prostitute drops rape charges, so Ray plants concaine in the boot of the rapist's car. Normally, that would annoy me, because (1)having ploughed my way through Stieg Larson, I'm getting really fed up with stories in which sexual violence against women is treated as a special kind of crime that the legal system just can't deal with, and (b) merely planting the cocaine wouldn't be nearly enough for a conviction. But given that Alex has already mentioned that only 5% of rapes result in conviction, I can buy that her subconscious would imagine the man getting off; and the planting of the cocaine works as a revenge fantasy - like Sam, she's discovering that police corruption can be satisfying at times, but unlike with Sam, it's clear to the audience that this isn't a gradual conversion to the joys of beating up perps in back rooms, it's a momentary indulgence in fantasy.

I also really like the way her other recurring fantasy is getting drunk and having sex with Thatcherite businessmen. I find it hilarious the way she fancies the pants off them while suffering ideological guilt, and I approve of the fact that she gets to get laid without having to suffer Consequences (I can't tell you how much I appreciated the fact that in the prostitute story, she didn't end up going undercover as a sex worker and nearly getting raped).

She's also much better than Sam at actually using modern police methods. And having a woman in the central role gets round that unpleasant LoM trick of using a white male to tell other white males in 1973 how sexist and racist they were. Alex has to deal with sexism directly - and manages it very well most of the time, largely because she doesn't believe any of these people are real and therefore genuinely doesn't care what they think of her. How the writers will deal with race remains to be seen. So far they seem to have decided to include a (token) black police officer and otherwise introduce black characters without comment, which is an improvement on the paternalistic approach of LoM.

So, Yuletiders, did y'all get your stories finished and posted on time?

I suspect I am possibly the last person in the world to have discovered this, but just in case there is someone out there who has yet to watch the Harry Potter Musical (created and performed with enormous wit and talent by university students, and clearly moulded as much by extensive reading of HP fanfic as by the texts themselves), then that person should go here.

If you have any doubts about the impact fanfiction has had on this particular Transformative Work, just take a look at Draco Malfoy in Act 1, part 2 (he enters at 2.46)

Gacked from georgiesmith

Well, wow...

It's minus 11.5 degrees C today, and sunny. We've had several centimetres of snow, so this morning I took the children up the hill to sledge down through the woods. Halfway up, the car started to smell a bit funny; three quarters of the way up, Tashi said "There's smoke in the front". I didn't dare stop, though, not on a hairpin bend on an icy road, so we drove the last few metres to the car park and then flung ourselves out. The car evidently wasn't on fire, because whatever it was that was producing smoke stopped when the engine was switched off, but it wouldn't start again. I rang Wolfgang, who said he would get his sister to drive him up, so he could have a look at it, and in the meantime we should come home. So we all sledged down through the woods. And I invented a rhyming moral homily:

Zieh dich immer ganz warm an
Falls dein Auto nicht mehr kann

Which means "Always dress up warmly in case your car breaks down", because although I was perfectly adequately dressed for sitting in the car reading, in between ferrying the offspring and their sledges up the hill, I was not adequately dressed for crashing into snowdrifts, or pulling a sledge all the way home.