Caboose

Just got back from my friend Andy’s stag night in Blackpool. I didn’t take my camera so there aren’t any pictures, which is probably just as well.

The town seemed to be dominated by stag and hen groups, which makes the atmosphere a bit feral. It’s like a British version of Las Vegas with all the tackiness but a bit grubbier.

We spent yesterday afternoon down at the Pleasure Beach, managing rides on the Big One
and Steeplechase. All good fun.

Going out on the town in the evening plunged us into a world of crowded bars, groups in matching outfits and sticky carpets.

Short cultural note: Stag and hen nights are a night out for the prospective groom and bride and their friends, usually held in the weeks before the wedding. I believe Americans call stag nights bachelor parties.

My housemate Al and I decided to head out for a bit of kite flying on Sunday afternoon, here’s Al with his:

As my shoulder is still not quite back to normal yet I couldn’t take my Blade out, instead I had my old single-line kite. Not very exciting and I couldn’t even get a photo of me flying it because my camera batteries ran out!

We started out at Magog Down, just south of Cambridge but there was hardly any wind there. Next stop was Newmarket Heath, still not brilliant but at least windy enough to get the thing up in the air.

I discovered today that the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office has a travel advice page for the British Antarctic Territory.

Apparently there is an extremely low risk of terrorism and “There is no evidence of crime or disorder”.

I’ve been very lazy recently and haven’t done anything worth writing about.

This evening I’ve mostly been looking at car hire websites, trying to sort out a car for the trip to Andy’s wedding in April. The internet makes things like booking with Irish car hire companies much easier.

OK, this is almost certainly the most stupid film around at the moment. It’s also the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not often you sit in a cinema with everyone laughing throughout the film.

Yes, it’s juvenile humour, but you don’t go to see it expecting high art. You expect to see a group of young men doing stupid things to themselves and that’s exactly what you get.

Classic moments include the destruction of a hire car and attempt to return it and Bam Margera’s way of getting his Mum to say fuck on film.

Weirdly the bit that had everyone cringing most was the paper cut scene, with the Jackass team giving each other paper cuts between the toes and fingers. There were more people in the cinema curling up in horror at this than at Bungee Wedgie or the disgusting wasabi snorting.

The IMDb link is here, if you liked the TV series you have to see the big screen version. If you didn’t like the series or don’t like the idea then go and watch something else.

I especially liked the scene where they were hiding on a golf course putting off golfers by sounding airhorns, but that’s just me.

“They can take back the Statue of Liberty as far as I’m concerned.”, after all they don’t want large reminders of all the things they’re enthusiastically giving up in the fight against terrorism, such as personal liberty, justice and free speech.

via Obscure Store

Comments closed, I can’t be bothered with semi-literate people (whatever nationality) using these comments as a forum for attacking each other: get out more!

It was another one of those weird coincidence days today, I passed five car crashes on the way to and from work.

This morning there was one at the Elizabeth Way roundabout, another (with lots of broken glass on the road) on East Road beside the fire station and a car vs. motorbike accident on Babraham Road just before the Audi garage. The Babraham Road one looked nasty, an ambulance was in attendance but then even a little shunt with a motorbike can have very serious results.

In the evening there had been an accident just before the bridge over the river outside Stapleford. The last one was at the roundabout at the junction of Queen Edith’s Way and the ring road.

(the arrows on the maps I’ve linked to aren’t the exact sites, just in case you were wondering)

I got an email today from somebody pointing out that I had been consistently misspelling the word ‘accommodation’, in the Journeys section of this site.

I apologise if this has been irritating anyone beyond endurance. The error has been corrected.

One of these days I might even run my posts through a spellchecker…

I finally gave up on my old mouse this afternoon, the insides had got all gunged up again and were making it very difficult to move the pointer around on screen.

So I nipped out to PC World and got myself an optical mouse (hence the ‘shiny’ title), £9.99 is a small price to pay to get rid of that irritation.

On Tuesday night I went to see Solaris, since then I’ve not had a chance to write about it.

My main impression of the film was that it was trying too hard to be arty and mysterious. Everything about it seemed slightly forced. It probably wasn’t worth going to see, there are better ways to spend the time.

I liked the design of the space station though, it avoided the sci-fi cliche of spacecraft always being dark and gloomy with all the walls painted black and lots of flickering lighting. There seemed to be a few nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially the scene where Gordon is about to reactivate the station’s AI.

There was of course some of the usual pseudo-scientific babble, beams of Higgs bosons featured. They also managed to come to the conclusion that the apparations were composed of sub-atomic particles. Nobel prizes all round for the scientists of Solaris!

The best thing I can say about the film is that it’s better than the Seventies Russian effort, which is even more deliberately bewildering and dull.