The year is ten days old already and I haven’t written a thing about prog rock. How did that happen? Perhaps I should mention the latest Yes CD: In the Present: Live from Lyon, which I treated myself to as a belated crimbo present to myself. [Read more →]
In the present: live from Lyon
January 10th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Music
→ No CommentsTags: Prog Rock·Yes
Betta Bilda
January 10th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Life
The box design for Betta Bilda set No. 3
In one of those strange coincidences I had some thoughts about toy building blocks this morning, specifically Betta Bilda bricks, and then in the afternoon a colleague raised the topic of Lego in a conversation, giving me the opportunity to voice my recently-formed theory about Betta Bilda. [Read more →]
Tokyo Gore Police
January 8th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Life
Sometimes a film comes along where just the title makes you think that at least it won’t be boring. Many of these are Japanese and one of them is Tokyo Gore Police. How’s this for a summary?
From the people who gave you The Machine Girl comes the even crazier Tokyo Gore Police! The makeup and special effects guru behind The Machine Girl, Exte, and Meatball Machine, director Nishimura Yoshihiro remakes his own award-winning 1995 indie short Anatomia Extinction into a gleeful splatter galore bound for cult classic status. Spilling buckets of blood and then some more, Tokyo Gore Police has all the gore, exploitation, action, and sickly inventive use of body parts you could possibly ask for. Eihi Shiina from Audition stands tall and beautiful in the midst of the sadistic mayhem as the vengeful monster slayer in a very short skirt. Living up to its billing with eye-popping gore, comically over-the-top perversions, and thoroughly entertaining madness, Tokyo Gore Police is a must-watch for fans of gore and extreme cinema.
“all the gore, exploitation, action, and sickly inventive use of body parts you could possibly ask for”? Tempting. I saw a similar film in HMV the other day, with an equally does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title: Robo-Geisha. It is summarised thus:
Get ready for the most unashamedly over-the-top and deliriously inventive cinematic experience of your life, as the Japanese masters of movie mayhem achieve a brand new level of jaw-dropping craziness. To help them achieve their goal of taking over the world, a megalomaniac Japanese businessman and his son recruit a vicious gang of Geisha assassins. These include two feisty sisters with an amazing range of surgically added weapons. But when one of these Robo-Geishas refuses to kill an innocent group of ex-employees, its butt-blades versus wig napalm and machine breasts against killer-cleaver socks as the assassins take on the Geisha’s in one of the most mind-bending movie battles of all time. Throw in the buildings that bleed, the Giant Castle Robot and the Breast Milk From Hell, and you have a wonderfully insane Kamikaze movie that will have you laughing out loud!
Apparently the film also features “rectal missiles of mass destruction”.
They sound like films to make Battle Royale seem like a Disney film in comparison. No idea if they are good, bad or so-bad-they-are-good, but I think I will have to find out some time this year. The whole genre is fertile ground for anybody looking for hardcore band names though.
→ No CommentsTags: DVD
The Hawth: under new management
January 5th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Politics
There is something just a little bit worrying about the way the deal for outsourcing the management of the Hawth theatre has been rushed through.
I know that not everybody shares the objections in principle (the principle being that any savings will end up coming at the expense of staff and by ramping up prices) so here is a practical objection. The story from the Crawley News which reads like it has been largely cut and pasted from a council press release, says that the new management company
…has experience in running theatres, being part way through a ten-year contract to manage the Playhouse Theatre and Winter Gardens complex in Weston-Super-Mare.
Slightly weaselly words there. When it says ‘part way through a ten-year contract’ it implies a lot of experience. Reading it you focus on ten years rather than part way. How big a part is it exactly? The contract in Weston-Super-Mare started in April 2011 so it has now been running for 9 months. Presumably the negotiations and tendering process will have taken a while, so conceivably at the time they put in their bid the only experience they had of running a large theatre was in winning a contract and not in successfully managing it for any length of time.
The real concern, therefore, is that not only has the deal been made with what is effectively an unproven company but that it is locked in for ten years. That is a long time to live with it if they turn out to not be so good after all.
It is almost as if the Tories running the council want to get us locked into the deal quickly and for a long time while they still can. Are they starting to get a bit worried about keeping control of the town hall in May?
→ 2 CommentsTags: Hawth
Should I stay or should I go
January 4th, 2012 · Posted by Skuds in Technology
I really don’t know what to do about LinkedIn, which is sort of a business equivalent of Facebook. A while ago I was getting invites from people to join their networks so eventually I did set up an account. I put a little bit of information in it but just enough for people to know if I was the Andrew Skudder they knew and not one of the millions of other Andrew Skudders out there.
I’m sure there are lots of things you can do on LinkedIn but I don’t do them. I just accept invites from other people and very little else. I don’t list all my previous jobs including full descriptions using key buzzwords and I certainly don’t pay for an upgraded account. Now I’m getting a little worried.
I know that the site is sometimes used by companies to headhunt people for specific jobs and also by recruiters to check up on applications they receive. If I ever need to change jobs and anybody looks me up they will find an very incomplete set of contacts, quite a small list for 30 years of work, and sketchy descriptions of some old jobs. Would it be better for them to find nothing rather than such a half-arsed set of data?
In other words, should I make an effort to really make myself shine on LinkedIn, delete myself from it or just leave it as it is? Part of me says that the first option is for the sort of person who is a lot more driven than I am.
Anybody got any strong opinions about the benefits or perils of LinkedIn?
→ 1 CommentTags: LinkedIn
2011 – glad to see the back of it
December 31st, 2011 · Posted by Skuds in Life
What a year 2011 has been. It was as if the world had suddenly noticed the proliferation of rolling news channels and social media, noticed how much waffle was on them all and decided it had better come up with stuff to fill them all. And so we had tsunamis, floods, a royal wedding, phone hacking scandals, riots, superinjunctions, uprisings, more floods, deposed despots, Osama getting taken out, economic armageddon, Kim Jog-Il pegging out and to top it all Katy Perry and Russell Brand announce their divorce.
But I wasn’t really paying much attention. [Read more →]
→ No CommentsTags: 2011
Kindle vs Sony Reader
December 30th, 2011 · Posted by Skuds in Life, Technology
A lot of people got a Kindle this christmas, according to Amazon’s PR and verified by my Twitter feed where half the people I follow seem to have one now. Jayne and I bought each other a Kindle. I thought it might be fun to do a little review and compare the Kindle to the Sony Reader that I have had for more than a year. [Read more →]
→ 4 CommentsTags: Gadgets
Chavez out-crazies the Daily Mail
December 29th, 2011 · Posted by Skuds in Life
With Gaddafi and Kim Jong-Il out of the way the world had the potential to have a little less crazy in it, but Hugo Chavez has stepped in to compensate by suggesting that the US government has found a way to infect left-wing Latin American leaders with cancer. Even the Daily Mail hasn’t come up with that one yet, and they can never resist a cancer theory, having previously suggested that cancer can be caused by Facebook.
The rationale for Chavez’s theory is that Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Dilma Rouseff and Lula Da Silva of Brazil, Cristina Fernandez De Kirchner of Argentina and himself have all had cancer in the last few years. He says that these incidences are “difficult to explain using the law of probabilities”.
Well my first thought was: clustering. Right or wrong, it is always a viable option whenever there is any sort of apparent outbreak of a non-infectious disease.
Then I read a bit further and saw that these leaders all had different types of cancer making a common cause just a little less likly.
Best of all, Chavez says he is not making” rash accusations” but is merely “thinking aloud”.
→ 2 CommentsTags: Chavez
Scrap the Paralympics
December 20th, 2011 · Posted by Skuds in Life
I have been saying since at least 2008 that the Paralympics should be laid to rest, so I was glad to see the other day that it is an opinion that is gaining a bit more support (as well as a fair bit of opposition). It is too late to make any change in time for the London 2012 Olympics, which is a shame having just one opening and closing ceremony would save a few bob wouldn’t it?
Not that cost-cutting is the reason. I just think that it would be better for all sorts of reasons. Countries take the medal table very seriously for the Olympics, and I reckon that if the current Paralympic events counted towards that total it would give a lot more prominence to those events. Anyone agree?
The tide of spam
December 20th, 2011 · Posted by Skuds in Life, Technology
I seem to be getting a lot less spam e-mail now and I am not sure exactly why. It sort of started when my PC packed up because ever since I set email up on the new one I have had hardly any spam. Ther is still a fair amount of junk mail but nearly all from companies I have bought things off or registered with. Mostly it gets deleted straight away but at least it is valid and I know I could get off those mailing lists.
It might be because I didn’t set up all the mail accounts I had on the old PC, some of which only ever received junk mail and spam, but I’m sure I used to get spam on my ‘real’ email addresses too. The thing is that my mail comes via several different providers so it can’t be them all tightening up their filters at the same time. Not complaining, just wondering.
At the same time, the number of spam phone calls we get is increasing enormously. There is always somebody trying to persuade us to chase banks for PPI refunds, make a claim for an accident, change our gas supplier, or something like that. The other day we even had that company who try to con you into thinking you have a virus so you buy their anti-virus software. It has got to the point where we rarely even bother to pick up the phone if it rings before 8pm, and sometimes unplug it completely. I would even consider getting rid of it except it would probably cost more to do that because of the way the TV/phone/broadband bundles work.
→ No CommentsTags: Spam
