Talk To Rex

Congratulations to the Guardian for printing possibly the most meaningless headline I have ever read. Their front page today reveals the shocking news that:

Al-Qaida has revived, spread and is capable of a spectacular

Well! That’s exciting, isn’t it? Let’s just hope it’s a spectacular along the lines of Les Miserables, or Michael Flatley’s Feet of Flames…

It seems like a good idea to post something on this blog, for the summer months are coming to an end and the traditional excuse of Tony Blair – the Musical won’t hold for much longer. Both Alastair Bennett and John Finnemore have been doing better than me recently, which is a bit of a wake up call.

Naturally, having attained international fame (alas no fortune yet) doing that show, I’m hoping to cement my reputation with a big Hollywood blockbuster or something, and the closest thing to come along so far is the part of Socrates in a production of Aristophanes’ Clouds, which I can promise will be a hugely entertaining. They are building me a flying machine and everything. I’m currently in the midst of rehearsals as I type, so…er…I may not be able to blog very much over the next month.

But I had a good dream about Neighbours last night, which combining as it does at least two of my pet blog subjects ought to make for a month’s worth of reading satisfaction, yes? In my dream, Helen Daniels announced to Madge Ramsay on the eve of Scott and Charlene’s wedding that she was pregnant. So far, so predictable, but it was Madge’s response that had me punching the air in my sleep and thinking “the scriptwriting on Neighbours is so witty and well-crafted!”: after a pause to assimilate Helen’s bombshell, Madge announced “that’s the thing about Tuesday mornings”, and I continued to chuckle for several minutes after I awoke before realising that it was neither a funny line nor a sensible one.

Surely the perfect summer gift for any music lover.

I’ll be a bit quiet this August.

Except inofar as I’ll be singing, quite noisily, in a musical. And doing all sorts of radio interviews.

In that sense, I’ll be being quite noisy, I should imagine.

But in a Talk to Rex sense I’ll be quiet. If you do want to hear about me being noisy, we’ll all be blogging away over here, and you’re warmly invited to keep us company.

I seem to have accidentally caught a couple of minutes of Big Brother, which I found excruciating.

Let me make it clear: it’s not that I remotely object to these people being locked up in a house together. It’s just the televising of it that seems unnecessary.

We learn three things from the movie of Transformers.

1. Moving (as opposed to static) cinematography does not work with incredibly fast-moving action sequences, because you can’t tell what the hell’s going on
2. CGI isn’t nearly good enough to make Transformers look real yet
3. Otherwise capable Hollywood people get a hard-on when thinking about giant robots, and stop doing their jobs properly

I mean, come on, people. Did it totally escape everyone’s notice that the reason everyone loved the comics was that it was about the people interacting with the robots, not having two indistinguishable grey blurs beat the crap out of each other? And what was up with the military thing? When has adding the military to any film made it better¹? And did you just, like, look over the last draft of the script and go “oops, we missed out the love interest”, and bolt on Geek Love Story 101, then edit it out again in post?

But then, Steven Spielberg has had problems with extra-terrestrial films before…

¹ Aliens doesn’t count.

• to re-read every book I own
• to hack the arms off people who wear large and ungainly rucksacks on crowded tube trains
• to get a large number of stickers saying "terrorist" and start tagging people with them
• to subcontract my job to a history of art graduate

There are people trying to sell our book on Amazon, used, for more than the RRP. Given Amazon is offering it at about 65% RRP, this seems more than somewhat crazy. Or is it just more clever than I can figure out?

Is it just me, or does Pilsner Urquell sound like a particularly nasty creature from Tolkien?

Frodo slept on the ground that night, famished as he had never been before. Amongst Hobbits, missing one meal was considered eccentric, and he had never heard of anyone missing two. It had been three days now since he had seen Sam, with his blessed ability to make food out of whatever he could find. He could smell the meal that the orcs were cooking, and wished that he could not.

Morning light was kissing the mountains when they came for him. The leader of the orcs was joined by the Pilsner Urquell, fresh from the caverns beneath the Orthanc. Frodo could sense Saruman’s stench about him.

—-

Normal blogging will be resumed once I stop having strange ideas run through my head when I look at bottles of beer.