2015 — 24 August: Monday
I gather a new Roger McGough poem is the basis for this year's BBC Radio 3 "write an Xmas carol"1 competition.
Meanwhile, an email...
... led me, albeit fairly indirectly, to a review of a new film version of Robert C O'Brien's "Z for Zachariah". Less Xmassy than a carol competition, perhaps, but still rather more to my unelevated pagan taste. It's directed by the chap, Craig Zobel, who made the deeply unsettling "Compliance" a couple of years ago:
As I noted at the time: "its subject is not all that far removed from Stanley Milgram's ghastly early 1960s experiment on obedience to authority figures." I watched it once. It's well-made, rather horrid, and I feel no need to watch it again. Thus it's just become another in my steadily-growing pile of "culled" titles.
Reading...
... Roger Ebert's one-star review of "Failure to Launch" (another discard) I noted this at the end:
I shall remove...
... today's lunch venue from the list of places I shall be revisiting any time soon. People who arrived after us were served earlier and, in one case, even departed before our food had arrived. There was a muttered apology, but no explanation. My lunchtime companions approved of everything about the Mazda2 except its colour. However, when I pointed out that all other colours were £560 more it did seem to grow on them a little. I left them heading across the road to the nearby Kimbridge Farm Shop and made my way home.
[Pause]
Well, that's an hour of my life spent cursing up in the loft as I was shifting 'stuff' around to be able to access, and carefully manoeuvre, a large plastic container into a "catchment" position where it stands some chance, at least, of heading off most of the incoming rain2 that's been heading to the party being held in the corner of the ceiling of my little reading room upstairs. <Sigh>
I suspect I have now burned far more calories than I lately (!) consumed in the "Bear & Ragged Staff". And it's definitely time for a cuppa.
I thought (correctly) it...
... would be an interesting exercise in cognitive dissonance to re-watch Edward Zwick's somewhat over-heated 1998 film "The Siege" before culling it. The film examines a fictionalised US military response — the imposition of martial law in Brooklyn, opposed by the FBI — in the wake of "Arab" bomb attacks there.