The home page of BBC News is currently reporting on BP CEO Tony Hayward getting a telling off from the US Congress. And they are illustrating it with this picture:
If Michael Sheen is looking for his next real life role then he need look no further, the similarity is much greater than with Brian Clough, David Frost or even Tony Blair.
As a follow-up to Desert Island Discs, the team at work have been doing our top ten films, and this week was my turn. The only condition was that one of the ten had to be set in London. Once again, I’ll be buggered if I’m writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.
( My Top Ten Films... )
The new Star Trek film rocks.
Everything that mattered was right, and many of the things that didn’t matter as well (they even did the sideburns).
However, I have a problem with Scotty, it’s quite simply that Simon Pegg + scottish accent = Wee Hughie from The Boys and that brings to mind all sorts of very strange crossovers.
cheerfulSo I found this file, last modified 10 June 1997, on a set of back ups and it’s a pub quiz that I ran in Balliol bar. In fact considering the date I suspect that this is the night that ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
pink_weasel first clapped eyes on me and thought “nice guy, shame about the jumper”.
People on facebook and twitter said that they wanted to see the quiz, so here goes.
Read the rest of this very true thing…
Earlier today, for reasons best known to herself, pink_weasel linked to the Wikipedia page on Allen Keys. In the sidebar they have diagrams of various shapes of screw head. One of them is the Bristol head:
Remind you of anything? How about The Empire (from Star Wars for the culturally ignorant…):
curiousSeen the pics from the new Star Trek film yet? Spoilers ahoy ‘cos here are the treknical ones…
Hands up who thinks that this ship looks like it should be an intermediate stage between the movie-era Enterprise and the Ambassador class? I can hear the fanboys screaming…
So this is the USS Kelvin, destroyed some time before the main timeframe of the movie. NCC-0514. Hmm, I want to see more. And, on the really pedantic level, how does this fit into the same registry scheme that includes the NCC-638 USS Grissom form ST III?
And has it really been four years since I updated my Star Trek ships web site? Ouch.
Via lonemagpie. Below is the Entertainment Weekly’s list of 100 Classic Movies of the past 25 years. Bold the ones you’ve seen, underline the ones you plan to.
( Films )
Went to see 10,000 BC this afternoon. Oh boy, history, biology, geography, astronomy – they all get a hammering in this film. I can’t be bothered to even start listing everything that was goofy here.
It was one of the most by-the-numbers renditions of (the easy to understand bits of) Joseph Campbell’s monomyth that I’d seen in a while. I smiled at the bemusement when hunter-gatherers first came across the evidence of agriculture, but of course in Campbell’s scheme there has to be a ‘boon’ to take back home at the end (sorry, that was a spoiler). There were also bits lifted from the Bible, Stargate, Conan and 300, just in case the mention of Campbell misled you into thinking there were highbrow sources being used.
The action and CGI were very good, the actors managed to keep straight face. It’s not a bad movie in the sense that it’s exciting and visual, but it’s certainly one to watch with the brain switched off.
Oh, by the way, the Doctor Who and Star Trek trailers look amazing on the big screen.
sleepyThere’s a pro-creationism, anti-science movie called Expelled, in which a number of prominent scientists were conned into providing interviews by the producers describing a very different and more balanced movie. One of these scientists, PZ Myers, tried to attend a screening and was turned away on instructions from the producers, but there’s a twist. To see why this was as about a perfect own goal as can be, read his account of the evening.
chipperThere’s a film about to open (on my birthday as it happens) called Shoot ’Em Up and the posters for it have infested bus stops all over London. And everytime I see them something niggles me. The problem is that the posters, indeed all art for the film that I’ve seen, use a left single quotation mark ‘ in place of the apostrophe ’.
(Yes, anyone who examines the code of this page will see that the only way to produce a typographically correct apostrophe on the WWW is to use the right single quotation mark character – it’s a long and messy story and I won’t go into it now except to note that the typographically incorrect but now traditional ‘apostrophe’ ' is now recommended for SEO because that’s what people are able to type into search forms.)