Tom Charman

I’m off to catch a train. Fa la la. The 5:56pm from Brighton Beach. What’s that? The train’s going to be 3 minutes late? Maybe I’ll be able to validate my 2 hour ticket at 6:00pm and get on! No need for a daily!

My cunning plan doesn’t work. The train comes at 5:59. I validate the 2 hour and go. I’m only losing 30c in buying another one. Maybe 40.

time passes…

Mmmm. Beer. Parma. Tasty stuff. Oooh, ooh, there’s the tram. Perfect timing. Oh, gosh, this guy’s in a hurry. Almost fall into the seat as he drives off before the lights change. Where were you, speedy tram man, when I needed you yesterday? I elaborate on this point to my companion for some time. Two stops later, just as I’m really hammering home the injustice of fast tram drivers when you don’t need them and vice versa, someone interrupts.

Oooooh. They look all ticket inspectorish. And as it’s not Halloween… Ah. Where’s my ticket again? Oh. I was going to buy another one, honest. We just got on. I have many other non-valid tickets, look. No, I got a 2 hour. Yes, it expired 2 hours ago. I was going to get a ticket but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Have you noticed that there’s never a fast train dr…

Right. OK. Infringed. Reported. Bother. Well, let’s just catch the train home. Wouldn’t it be funny if I wasn’t, in fact, under 0.05 like I think I am, and there was a booze bus around this corner?

Well, will you look at that. Wouldn’t it be funny if I won the lottery and travelled through space and time and had abs you could beat people to death with? Huh. This is my granny’s car! Where’s the winding down window thingy? I can’t find it! I look drunk! What kind of idiot can’t… oh, there it is. No harm, no foul, officer. I will gladly blow into your white thingy.

In a twist that makes this story something of an anticlimax, but me massively relieved, I’m in fact nowhere near 0.05 at this point, as I expected. I will, however, have to take Metlink up on their “contest this fine” policy and write a firmly worded letter to get myself out of this fine.

It may have become obvious that I haven’t been writing much about things here. This, naturally, is because I’ve been too busy playing/watching/reading the things that I should be writing about. Thus, a quick catch up is in order, on some of the more interesting things that I should have been writing about recently…

Heroes

Heroes has just begun in Australia, but through the usual channels, I’ve been following the American broadcasts. At first, I must admit, it looks like it’ll be a snorefest a la LOST, but there’s one or two key differences that become apparent as time goes by…

For a start, most of the questions tend to get answered, and replaced with new questions. There’s none (or not much) of the ‘unanswered thread escalation’ that one gets in The X-Files and such. Most of the mysteries are simple “How did he get here?” sort of things that don’t stretch out irritatingly. The “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” arc actually finishes (to an extent) halfway through the series or thereabouts. Which is nice.

Also, because all the characters are split up and moving in different directions, if there is a plotline you don’t like, often it doesn’t stink up the rest of the show. Like, hypothetically, if the Nikki/Jessica plotline was really, really dull, you can kind of deal with it.

Wii

My brother got a Wii. Finally. I’d been playing me a bit of the old Wii tennis, and thought I’d put my Pro Tennis Mii onto the Wii remote and show him off to Andy. Irritatingly, it turns out your Wii Sports information is not kept in your Mii, or at least not the bits that come along when you put the Mii on a Wii remote. Unless I did something wrong.

That was a confusing paragraph. The Wii is fun though. A quick variation on the anecdote that everyone’s been telling; my Mum has been playing Wii Sports and loving it, despite almost never playing a game ever before. That’s how good Wii Sports is. Excite Truck is also good.

Stargate SG-1

Still patchy, this show. And it’s sneakily come back in other countries before Battlestar Galactica has finished. So you can’t expect Andy to start reviewing it again. After all, he’s busy not reviewing Battlestar. Maybe he’ll get to it later. Last week’s show, ‘Family Ties’, was particularly disappointing. I don’t know what it is about shitty character actors that so enthrals the makers of the show. It’s as if they see this actor mug for the camera, do an irritating voice, and completely fail to bring any sort of believability to the part and think “Yes. Yes. There’s a story about him. I can see it now. It’ll be completely unbelievable and irritating. How cool is that?”

The Fountain

Do you like overwrought emotion, long periods of silence and a general lack of drama? Then this film is for you. I can see how The Fountain could have been an awesome film. Bits of it are exciting, bits of it are beautiful. As a whole, though, the word “ponderous” comes to mind. I doubt I’ll review it, but someone else might.

An interesting point about The Fountain — the space backgrounds were done not with computer generated effects, but with particles in water being filmed in slow motion. An interesting point about going to see The Fountain — if you don’t know that, you assume it’s computer generated, and it goes completely over your head.

Firstly — go see Pan’s Labyrinth. If my review hasn’t convinced you then I have failed, but don’t make my failure yours as well.

Woah. I’ve been tagged! By a meme. For those who don’t read many blogs, getting tagged by a meme is like receiving those irritating emails that ask you to answer a bunch of questions and pass it on. Except memes are better. Bloggier. Usually. This one isn’t bad.

But before I get to it, some quick, incidental news; there’s now one handy feed for all updates at atypicalreview.com. Reviews, blog posts and notables, all included. For the 3 people who actually subscribe to the feed, I’m sure this will be helpful.

Now, let us proceed to five things you don’t know about me. Luckily I haven’t been blogging as much as reviewing recently so this should be easy.

1. Part time work at AMES isn’t as boring as it used to be. There’s new people about and a slightly happier attitude. In short, it’s starting to shake off that “we’ll be shut down by the end of the year” feel. Having said that, of course, I assume we’ll be shut down by the end of the year.

2. I’m playing one of the lead roles — Caldwell B. Cladwell in a production of Urinetown. Some people do know this but it’s already becoming apparent that I’ll be stretching to get five things.

3. I used to have dreadful night terrors about near-infinite tasks. Not actually infinite, mind — the scary thing (somehow) was that I knew I could do it but that it’d take, say, a few years non-stop work. The most public example was when I woke up at school camp convinced I was going to have to wash billions of dishes, and consequently looked like a big whimp.

4. I have never watched any of the Terminator films, and until recently had never seen any of the Alien films. I’m probably the first person to watch Alien and think “Gosh, this looks so much like ‘The Impossible Planet’ rather than the other way round.

5. I hate seafood, but I ate a baby octopus at a yum cha the other day and it wasn’t bad. Until I ate the legs. They were gross. In conclusion, seafood has some redeeming features, but ultimately still stinks.

It’s traditional to tag more people to do the meme now. Luckily (coz I really don’t know that many bloggers) this here’s a group blog, so I don’t have to look far. I tag Jackson, Andy, Andrew and Sam.

Dear God. All this sucking up to you, America. Free Trade Agreements. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Showing The World According to Jim on our televisions. And still, we don’t get the Apple iPhone at the same time as you bastards.

What was it all for, I ask myself? What was any of it for?

The iPhone looks awesome. It’s arguably the One True Video iPod (but with a small hard drive and battery life). The interface looks sweet as. It has wi-fi. It can tell when it’s on its side. And they won’t be releasing it in Asia until 2008. Oh, how I am fuming. It wouldn’t be so bad, but we only just started 2007! Gaaaaah!

Steve Jobs doesn’t care about Asian people.

The Apple TV is less exciting, but far more available. I’ll have to do some investigating into what sorts of video can be played and streamed, but it seems like a nice alternative to an actual media centre PC.

Oh, woe is me. The One True Video iPod Slash Phone has arrived and I’m not one of the chosen ones.

Meanwhile, Canadians have sneakily been showing Stargate without telling me. Sneaks!

We had our first ever (and most successful) review-a-thon last Wednesday, in an attempt to catch up on Battlestar Galactica. You’ve seen the partial fruits of this endeavour. As the review-a-thon drew to a close, Andy told us he had done two reviews himself, and promptly went to sleep. It’s been a week now. I’m not calling him a liar. I’m calling on you, the people, to bash down his door with flaming torches.

I mean, the door to his room. Not the front door. That might irritate Jackson. Try to keep your wild cries and angry chanting to a minimum as you enter the house.

I’m not addicted to these new asterisks. I could stop any time I wanted.