2013 — 3 February: Sunday
An overnight email from my New York friend Carol updates me on her recent "PeaceWorks"-related trip to Nicaragua1 putting my own retirement misadventures to shame. How can my weekly/weakly tramping in failing boots around the soggy local countryside (with scarcely a plate of rice and beans to be found) even begin to compare?
The first week of the trip we traveled to some very remote areas in the northwestern highlands. Transport was a pickup truck equipped with an incredibly skilled driver. There was room for five inside, and the other six (plus the odd passenger from one project or another) rode in the bed. Very crowded, very dusty, and very hard on the tush. I can't even begin to describe the roads — you would not credit it. Some were just dry washes, full of boulders and ruts like canyons. But there's something liberating about piling into the back of a pickup and I usually rode there.
I hardly dare ask her what a "tush" is :-)
P(l)ot holes
Numerous pot holes have opened up in our roads locally after our frost and snow. But this entertaining (movie) plot hole site compensates.
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Note to self: don't leave salads quite so long before eating them in future.
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How can it be 16:30? It's not dark yet.
Banned by the BBC
Jarvis Cocker has just finished playing a couple of tracks by Shawn Phillips. That takes me back a mere 40-plus years. Good grief! I'm just about to start dispersing the 126 tracks on my five-CD set called This Record Is Not To Be Broadcast - 1931 to 1957 — though what on earth was deemed offensive in (for example) "Sabre Dance" by Woody Herman & His Orchestra defies my limited capacity for rational analysis. The CDs turned up back in November 2010, but the tiny cover artwork I published back then was obviously illegible. Here's what's on the first three CDs:
"Banned by the BBC" indeed. Priceless twits.
And now, the "Freak Zone" is playing some of the music from Godley and Creme's "Consequences". Another curio from the (not quite so) dim and distant. A mere 35 years ago. Amazing.
Not that I'm...
... any kind of geek, you understand, but having now watched "Looper":
- Pure and simple
- Again, with the director's commentary as on my Blu-ray
- And again, with a carefully-synchronised playback of the director's "In theatre" downloadable (solo) commentary I mentioned
And having also transcribed for more leisurely examination (from the last of these) the salient comments the director himself concedes (approximately 30 minutes in) regarding the precise point — an anomaly, as one of my chums put it, in the timeline — that had indeed troubled me, I'm now finally prepared to say it's an excellent film.
Phew. Time for another cuppa. Or have I been here before?