2011 — 16 April: Saturday
Last night's over-long lump of occasionally leaden video entertainment — the title on the right, clocking in at 153 minutes, though it felt much longer...
... arrived in the same clump as the more welcome (and, frankly, more exciting) confirmation of my tax rebate yesterday. There's even a second Blu-ray just of extras, but I'm in no hurry to watch that. How the fan boys can have voted it #10 in the IMDB Top 250 says much about the demographic targetting of huge budget films. As I said in my weekly letter to dear Mama in earlier times:
We have also now seen the most expensive movie in the world, Kevin Cost-a-lot's Waterworld. It irritates me when so much is spent to so little effect other than spectacular splashes and crashes, unhelped by the $1600/night hotel in which our Kevin apparently had to stay... After all, you can still produce a witty, literate, character-based movie for less than $5m, so every Waterworld represents up to 40 better movies that won't now get made. <Sigh>
There was a related exchange, too, in Alan Alda's low-budget mini-masterpiece "Sweet Liberty" between the "director" and the "author":
Director: You realize who goes to see movies. Eighty percent of them are
between the ages of 12 and 22. And you know what the kids like?
Author: What?
Director: Well, this may sound silly to you, but kids go completely ape if
you do three things in a picture: defy authority, destroy property,
and take people's clothes off.
It's still a winning formula.
Leaping slowly1 into action this reasonably bright but cloudy morning I find that "Sounds of the Sixties" is long since over. Tut, tut. Still, my next batch of strawberries is much nicer than the previous organic fiasco. It remains to be seen whether my policy of benign botanical neglect in Christa's garden will yield any of the home-grown variety in due course. It didn't seem to last year, but I was rather too busy lugging cartons of books around to investigate.
A phone call...
... tells me the youngsters are en route and about an hour away. No time, therefore, to watch today's arrivals:
Time enough for lunch, however. It's 13:01.
There's a small team...
... of gardeners hacking away at stuff in the various jungles that surround my house. This is good. I'm listening to the BBC Radio 3 jazz to give them plenty of virtual encouragement from a safe distance.
She can't mean me, surely?
Ouch!
Why do you see having space as such an important thing in our lives?
Our environment affects everything in our lives. It affects our health. It affects our relationships. It affects our finances. It makes a huge difference when people
can transform their space. They feel more relaxed, less stressed, and they don't have to go out and buy duplicates of things because they can find what
they need.
My emphasis. If I could find it, I'd scan the badge I have somewhere that says "He who dies with the most toys, wins." Grrr.
My, the front garden is immensely neater-looking and there are three full "green" bags to be tipped. I think I'd better offer2 them a meal out somewhere! I've been unamusing myself updating some video lists and merging cover artwork into a series of 13 folders and silver discs into the CaseLogic folders...
Sorting and merging cyberspatial lists is far easier than dealing with real-world physicality.