Ooooh yes, exam time. Studying hard. Yes indeed. Muchas studioso.
But while I wasn’t, I put together the first of our little series of home movies from Canada. NTGF are nothing if not efficient. Check out The Canada Files #1 — Tunnel Mountain.
Meanwhile I’m cautiously optimistic about the US elections. Cautiously. More so than last time. Clearly what’s needed is more cautious optimism if I’m to imprint my will on the rest of the universe.
American television makes crap and lots of it. Fortunately here in Australia we are safe from most of it,[ftn] so any shows I hear about are usually top notch. There’s been a couple of interesting series made recently: The 4400 and Lost. They have a common mysterious theme which I like. I think I prefer Lost more at this stage. Although only having seen one episode, the idea of being stranded on a tropical island appeals to me more. Hopefully one day I will be lucky enough to be stranded on island with only my wits to survive and a bunch of nutters and maniacs to keep me company. While many movies about survival strike me as trite and contain many factual errors,[ftn] the subject as a whole fascinates me. I loved the conversation in The Day After Tomorrow about which books to save and which books to burn for warmth.[ftn]
It would make my day to have my plane crash although I’m concerned that I might be one of the ones who’ll die. I’d hate to be killed and miss the exciting survival part. No, I hear you say, you’re clearly the main character and the action would be centered around you. Well, I thank you for those kind words. Still I must be careful where in the plane I sit. The tail of the plane is always ripped off so it would have to be somewhere in the middle. The people in first class didn’t make it in Lost so I’m glad I never travel that way. I’m also concerned about being prepared. You may know that the scout motto is be prepared. It always struck me as being odd because you can’t possibly be prepared for everything; how would you prepare for the streets of New York flooding and freezing over?[ftn] What equipment should one have to deal with emergencies like zombie attacks? There’s a limit to the amount of ammunition one person can carry. The main character in Lost has a mini bottle of vodka which turns out to be handy for sterilising wounds. It’s easy in a computer game. If you can pick it up, you should. You’ll need it at some point and as most games have unlimited inventories you can pick up everything. Mind you, MacGuyver makes do with a pocket knife. I guess a knife is all you really need. Except you can’t bring one on a plane. So I don’t know.
Enough of my survival concerns, back to the show. Lost is about a group of people whose plane has crashed on a tropical island. It’s no ordinary tropical island however. There’s something mysterious going on. Their plane was off-course when it crashed so they won’t be rescued soon. The plot so far makes sense. They’re on a tropical island so they’ve been able to sit around for the first two days without shelter and they’re eating airplane food.
I like all the characters at the moment. I try to resist spotting the expendable characters to keep the surprise in the show but it can’t be helped sometimes. When one of the plane’s engines is still running after the crash, someone is going to be sucked in. There’s no surprise there.[ftn] This looks like it will be a very interesting show. It doesn’t look like the kind of show where they’ll be sitting around waiting for a boat to come past. I’m sure they’ll have many dramas and problems to overcome.
THE RED SOX WON THE WORLD SERIES. As a long time Boston fan this makes me extremely happy. To see them win so emphatically after the close call wiith the Yankees is euphoric.
Daniel’s stopped working at his restaurant during exam time so I’m filling in for him. It’s much like working in Banff. I seat the customers, I serve food and drinks, I clean tables, there’s a cute girl called Sylvie in the kitchen who speaks French, the customers are whiney bitches, there’s cardboard on the floor and there’s a pot smoking manager named Craig who likes ice hockey.
Ah, that last bit isn’t strictly true.
Allow me to indulge myself and post this.
What a TARDIS! What swirls! What orange! What magnificent pouting! Jackson and I have begun the Australian branch of the Billie Piper Appreciation Society, but others are welcome to join.
Obviously a gap in understanding is to be expected between us and the previous generation when it comes to technology. What could be interesting is in the details they choose to highlight in their stories.
I’m not going to into the details of the problem — it’s far too banal. Needless to say my new work colleague in her 40’s seem far more interested in telling me about the behaviour of Internet Explorer and how she couldn’t log onto hotmail, than the dialogue box she had got previously regarding missing files and her internet connection.
I blame caches. Certain cache settings give old people the illusion their internet is working.
Anyway the amazing part of this story is that after several minutes of her explaining it, and me asking all sorts of questions, only at the end did she choose to casually mention something about something popping up with the text “Trapdoor virus”, and then innocently ask if it could have anything to do with the problem.
I give up. Surely even our baby-booming friends know that the word “virus” is reasonably pertinent when it comes to the world of computers. Needless to say, if it IS the Trapdoor.338 virus, it’s very bad. Although I get the impression from this description then a lot more would be going wrong. Although it had only happened this morning before she came to work. Anyway I’m not sure, I just thought it amusing she didn’t mention it, you know, first.
I apologise for the small number of reviews posted around here these days. Uni work has started to seem more important, which means one must spend solid time intending to do work, and a large project like a review simply can’t fit into such improvisational time-wasting.
Today I learned about hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes. Hyphens, of course, are the little dashes that you make when you press the key between ‘0’ and ‘=’ at the top of your keyboard. If you’ve got a sensible keyboard, anyhow. They’re used to join words together like combined last names, and see-saw. Often they’re phased out of common usage because coordinator looks nicer than co-ordinator and it’d be a bitch to pronounce any other way.
The dashes are a bit different though. You’ll probably have noticed that when you write a sentence with a hyphen separating it, such as
Examples – so difficult to think of relevant ones…
Word will stretch out the hyphen when you press ‘space’ after typing “so”, making:
Examples — so difficult to think of relevant ones…
This may please you or piss you off, but Word is being reasonably helpful here — when you use a dash to separate two ideas like that (in a similar way to a comma or colon), it’s correct to use what’s called an em-dash. This dash is named because it’s the width of a lowercase ‘m’, theoretically.
The other dash is an en-dash — the width of an ‘n’ — which is used for situations joining words or numbers together that aren’t making their own word in the hyphen style. For example: 1914–1918, or the Burke–Wills Expedition.
Of course all these rules are just guidelines. Some people like using em-dashes to separate ideas, others use brackets first. Some like semicolons. The Australian Cambridge Style Guide did suggest however that it was unlikely that a sentence could work effectively with a tiered system of all three within it.
This is just a teaser of my forthcoming essay on the use of dashes. It’s for Principles of Editing and Publishing, but I might publish it on grapefruit too, if I feel particularly malicious.
I should point out that a forum has appeared on grapefruit — use it wisely. If at all. And I promise to review some stuff soon.
[added later: Heh. Well, in Trebuchet MS on the Mac at least, en-dashes and hyphens look highly similar. But if you’re using Firefox, you can switch to ‘No Style’ and see that in most fonts, there is a difference.]
Now that Lara Croft is telling people to vote there will be a decent turnout. You can watch the video at MTV.com – Choose or Lose. The link is at the bottom on the right.
It’s a weak song and Lara Croft has a weird voice. I would have thought that 20 year olds are too cynical to fall for this crap. I did like the idea that Sonic plays chess with Scorpion in the park.
I noticed Giles has become the Prime Minister of Britain.
I’ll just come out and say that as a self-appointed zombie expert it shames me to admit that I haven’t seen the original of the Dead trilogy. I know your faith in me is shaken. I aim to rectify this deficiency; rest assured that I have increased my anti-zombie training to 4 hours a day. I decided to watch the recent remake first as remakes are usually worse than the originals[ftn] and I prefer to go from bad to good. Unfortunately Resident Evil 4 has been delayed again and won’t be out until next year, and Resident Evil Outbreak is PS2 only but Shawn of the Dead and Resident Evil: Apocalypse are being released soon so I should be able to keep my training on schedule.
This film opened my eyes to a couple of home truths. For one thing, I shouldn’t assume that zombies are slow moving. Apparently some of them can run really fast.
Another thing: God bless America. They truly are safe.[ftn] When the zombies attack, they just run to the gun store and stock up. What would we do in Australia? No semi-automatic weapons, no oversized military packed to the gills with high explosives. When the dragons awake to reclaim the earth, we’ll have half a dozen choppers to hold them back. America recently decided to let ordinary citizens wield automatic weapons. What progress! What forward thinking! Iraq will be safe too. I pity us poor schmucks here in Oz.[ftn]
This film turned out to be pretty good in the end. The special effects were good, definitely above B-grade standard and there was some decent characters. It’s a fairly standard zombie movie. For no real reason, some people wake up as zombies one morning. They want to feast on human flesh. There’s a group of people holed up somewhere. They decide to leave their safe haven and go on a wacky road trip. They have to kill their loved ones who have come back in zombie form. They make some stupid decisions and they fight amongst themselves. No one wears protective clothing. There’s self-sacrifice. Things go horribly horribly wrong. There’s hot pregnant zombie action.
It’s the little differences that make a zombie movie. The light hearted scenes in the middle were a nice touch. Once the group was established in the mall they were able to relax and enjoy things. These scenes break up the tension nicely. There was a funny scene standing in the elevator listening to the cheery music while running from the zombies.
It was a curious choice not use the word zombie in the film. Most horror films usually have a character early on call the creatures zombies or vampires and everyone says things like ‘zombies aren’t real, maybe he’s just let himself go’ until they actually see zombies climbing out of their graves. Here they do mention that people have come back from the dead but no one says zombie. I liked it at first but it seemed odd after a while.
There was some interesting stuff on how people react to a zombie epidemic. It was subtle and more believable than other movies. The suspicious mall security guards tried to keep people from looting the shops. Dr Pratt refuses to kill his zombie baby.[ftn] No one knows what to do with someone who has been bitten but only has a minor wound and isn’t going to die for a while.
I liked the style of the ending. I thought the film was going to end without the final fate of the characters known but it continued on into the credits showing what one of the characters was filming with a video camera. That way it felt like the rest of the adventure was shown while being cleverly compressed to fit into a decent length film.
Dawn of the Dead is a good film, especially for a remake. It’s a lot more consistent than 28 Days Later which started out good but finished badly. There’s a couple of plot holes in the movie: I don’t know why the guy was waving a chainsaw around in a moving vehicle and they should seriously wear some protection against zombie bites.
I have to go build myself a bomb shelter now. I’ll need about 6 months supply of food and water. That should be along enough time for the zombies to decay.
The DVD some clever extras. Instead of the usual deleted scenes, there’s background footage about the zombie plague. There’s a recording of what happened to the guy over the road from the mall and the news reports from the day of the zombie attacks. There’s also the usual commentary and behind the scenes stuff, most of which focus on how to make zombies’ heads explode convincingly. A worthy goal in my opinion.
While searching the web for things Dawn of War related, I came across this: Relic Forums – 2nd Edition Rules.
My money worries are over. A man from Nigeria has contacted me with deal to transfer funds out of his country. I’ve already given him my bank details.
I’ve been waiting a long time for today – a day when one of the greatest television series of all times makes a triumphant return. Yes believe it or not the ENTIRE THREE SERIES of Bananaman is being released on DVD in the UK.
I’m so happy. No really. I’m buying it as soon as I can. Screw Halo 2. Those not gripped with ecstasy at hearing this news will be after listening to this.
And yes, the Farscape mini-series will have finished airing in just a few hours, which is also damn exciting. It’s also a perfect example of how fans can make a difference.
So we should waste no time in setting up our savabananaman.com website. If we all work together we can get a fourth season of this brilliant show. I have a plan that involves stealing all the funds raised by the evil stinky savewonderfalls.com .
Who’s with me?
The cartoon is from Fox Trot incidentally. Figure I better source these things.