2011 — 9 November: Wednesday
Yesterday evening's entertainment was the X-men "origin" story which was a fair amount of tosh.1 It was directed by Matthew Vaughn, of all people. Of his four films as a director, I liked both Layer Cake and Stardust very much, but I was far less convinced about Kick-Ass. (Though I'm open to the suggestion that I should give it another try.) X-men had an amusing (uncredited) cameo appearance (and the film's sole use of 'bad' language) by Hugh Jackman — but somehow I still made it through to the end.
Meanwhile, we'd tentatively planned a walk for later today, but the weather looks a bit more promising for Thursday instead. I expect I can find something else to do.
G'night.
What was that...
... saying about everything being pure to the pure? Young "Jane" from the "Twiglet" films (as Kermode calls them, affectionately) has been banned by those wondrous folk at the Advertising Standards Authority (who would do better to focus their peculiarly British ire at the UK's disgusting tabloid tittle-tattle habit of simultaneously exploiting, and demonising that which they are only too happy to exploit). The ASA concludes, in part:
We noted that the model was wearing a thigh length soft pink, polka dot dress and that part of her right thigh was visible. We noted that the model was holding up the perfume bottle which rested in her lap between her legs and we considered that its position was sexually provocative.
As the T-shirt slogan has it: Thank you for not provoking my uncontrollable lust :-)
An appropriate...
... epitaph, given his surname, at the end of the Private Eye review of the bio of Steve Jobs:
Or, as his sister wrote in a novel of a character who may or may not have been Steve Jobs, "He was a man too busy to flush toilets."
I don't recall reading that in the extraordinary eulogy she wrote for her brother's memorial service that appeared in the NY Times, of course.
On reflection, as it were, it would have been OK to fit in a walk today, but tomorrow should find us in Alresford. It's 17:59 and dark out there. Not exactly warm, either. A chicken biryani should help warm things up. (I can still remember buying myself a prawn biryani in an Indian restaurant in Eton one evening after a day of assembler programming during my first couple of weeks at ICL. Shortly before I met Christa, actually. March 1974 seems quite some time ago now.)
I had no conscious recollection that "Ruh-roh" was Astro's signature phrase in The Jetsons. But then I never watched any version of Scooby-Doo. Amazing what you can learn when you're looking up Daphne and Velma while trying to track down an offhand wisecrack in an episode of "Castle" :-)
Avaunt thee, Jeff
That evil tempter Jeff Bezos has just invited me to join his "new private-sale website, MYHABIT. Save up to 60% every day and get FAST, FREE SHIPPING + RETURN SHIPPING in the US." It's probably just as well I don't live in the US, I suspect. 20:56? Must be time for a pre-supper cuppa.
My next hybrid car?
This is a cool (indeed, supercooled) story, but that verb "inches" is very, very, very wrong:
