hi everyone
check out those rosy red teething cheeks!! James now has about 7 teeth, but probably more as i type this!
he is doing well, still healthy and happy!
be excellent to each other!!
Thursday, August 31, 2006
James at 37 weeks (asleep)
hi everyone
check out those rosy red teething cheeks!! James now has about 7 teeth, but probably more as i type this!
he is doing well, still healthy and happy!
be excellent to each other!!
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
The if..... Online Petition
quality cinema
could anyone reading this shed any light as to why exactly one of the greatest films of all time, if..., is not available on DVD?
the amount of rubbish that finds itself on a digital versatile disc and distributed to the masses is shocking.
who do we have to complain to in order to have a nice shiny disc of this? one of the reasons i still have a VHS machine is because i may one day need to play this film again!
when excellent soundtracks happen to bad films
hey everyone
i was getting rather bored with the music in my car, and happened to discover a couple of David "Derek" Bowie comps i had made years ago. i threw them in the shuttle, and have been listening to them on repeat.
it occured to me that Derek's original recording of the theme for the film Cat People is a considerably better artistic achievement than the film itself. i am curious to find out other examples of this. Derek's other soundtrack work has normally been for very, very excellent filmns, such as This Is Not America for the soundtrack of one of my all time top films of all time, The Falcon And The Snowman. i suppose Absolute Beginners was a decent song for an average film, and i try not to comment on Labyrinth when possible.
if you are curious, please do not listen to the version of Cat People featured on the celebrated Let's Dance album. it features a "re-imagining" of the tune, with a lot of clumsy, wah-wah synth pop. seek the original, awesome drum driven version.
a most excellent picture of James
hey everyone
here's a fantastic picture of James, taken by his Grandma Ricketts. nice one!!
alas, i still have no proper, reliable internet access at home, and for some reason those happy people at my verk have taken the time, trouble, effort and imagination to block the login section for blogger! oh well, updates are now going to be more sporadic until at least the end of September.
i shall do my best to post regular James pics!!
be excellent to each other!!
Saturday, August 26, 2006
Department of Tourism, Middlesbrough
as i was clearing out some of our packing (only 3 or so month after we had moved) i found this advert from Viz stuck in a box with some books.
well, i am proud of where i come from, and Michele has enjoyed both holidays that she has had in Middlesbrough!
at that price, a visit there would be a bargain!
a decent film released in 2006 at last??
i have no idea if this film will be any good as i have not seen it, but all the signs for The Prestige being one of the best of the year, if not the best, are there to see.
it's made by Christopher Nolan, which is a very good sign - Memento, Insomnia and Batman Begins are his masterpieces to date. and if the cast listed on the poster are not enough to cause enthusiasm, it also features David "Derek" Bowie, who tends to have more good acting roles than bad.
i am trying to find the novel by Christopher Priest, but alas no luck locating it as of yet.
what is the film about? magic. sort of. it seems.
counting down to the proposed release in October......
Open Eyed James Pictures!!
hello again
well, here are some pictures that show that James sometimes does stay awake when i take some pictures of him!
he's very healthy and happy!!
be excellent to each other!
James asleep at 36 weeks
hello again
well, i did mention in my last post that he tends to be asleep when i take a weekly pic of him!
let me see if i can find some of him wide awake!!
James at 35 weeks at last!!
hey everyone
well, we still take the weekly picture of James at the same time he was born. the problem, however, is that he tends to be fast asleep when we take them!
all is well here - sorry for the lack of updates of late, still no reliable internet at home so it is tricky to upload!!
be excellent to each other!!
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Holiday Pics!!!
Hey Everyone
just a few pictures from our Holiday in Sun City. had an ace time!!
i am sure i have more to say, but knackered from the long drive!!
be excellent to each other!!!
Monday, August 07, 2006
James and the Class New Car Seat
hey everyone
well, we are getting ready to hit the road and head off to Sun City for a couple of days. one of the main things we needed to get for the holiday was a new car seat or two, as young Napoleon has very much outgrown his old one already!
he seems to like the new style seats, especially as he can see forward now!
check the teeth in some of these pics!!
be excellent to each other!!!!
James at 33 weeks.........Holiday!!
hey everyone
here is the young one, as usual fast asleep, at 33 weeks. i stuck "teddy" on top of him for these pics, as it makes a change to see him not throwing him on the floor!!
we are off on holiday for the week, Sun City beckons us. we are celebrating our 3rd wedding anniversary, and it is the first time we have taken James away!
be excellent to each other!!!!
Thursday, August 03, 2006
quick update
hey everyone
sorry, really busy at verk at the moment, and getting ready to go on holiday next week!
here's some pics of James and I from the weekend. yes, yes, i will get the beard trimmed soon!
be excellent to each other!!
Friday, July 28, 2006
James at 32 Weeks
hey everyone
some pics from last night, showing James hitting the 32 week old mark. as usual, he was asleep when we wanted to take the pictures!!
the teeth are coming through thick and fast, but he's doing OK!!!
be excellent to each other!!!
Monday, July 24, 2006
more James and the Ball Farm
hello again
well, access is s-l-o-w, but here are a couple more pictures of James playing in his most class ball farm.
note the teeth!!!!
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!
James and the Ball Farm
hey everyone
well, here are some pics of James very much wide awake and having immense fun in something called the "Old McDonald Ball Farm". i must confess, it is a most excellent device, and certainly seems to be helping Young Napoleon with his eye-hand co-ordination.
he has almost learned how to throw the balls in the general direction of the cats...........
well done to Mrs R for inflating the device!!!
be excellent to each other!
James at 31 weeks
hey everyone
James at 31 weeks for you all. erm, they do not look too different from the 30 week ones, do they! for some reason he has taken to being asleep at our usual weekly time to snap pictures. ho hum, will make sure that there are more!
otherwise, managed to see Superman Returns at the weekend, and was pleasantly surprised by it. my greatest concern was true - Kevin Spacey did an OK job, but he is no Gene Hackman. wisely, it seems, Spacey's screentime was somewhat limited.
be excellent to each other!!
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Katie and James
good morning
here are Katie and James happily playing along earlier this week!! nice to see the two of them getting along so well!! with some luck, this afternoon i will be putting together something called a "McDonald Ball Farm" for James. i shall let your mind boggle for now and load some pics soon-ish.
thanks to the arrival of Virgin Mobile here in SA, i now have an internet connection at home again. sort of - i can receive email but not send (well, not without some messing about), and it is not ideal to download large files with. however, i can browse away, so no grumbling from me!
be excellent to each other!!
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
20 years old already??? no way.....
In Lynch's 'Velvet,' the real is unreal
When "Blue Velvet" was first released 20 years ago, the reviews were split and heated. Sides were taken over the question of authorial intent. Did David Lynch mean for audiences to laugh at his square-jawed, perky teenagers Jeffrey and Sandy, played by Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern? Or were the scales supposed to fall from our eyes along with theirs as they unearthed the unspeakable horrors lurking beneath the surface of their placid, all-American town? Considering that its horrors were so utterly horrifying, why should the Arcadian innocence of Lumberton seem so corny and funny and out of touch? And what did it mean that Dennis Hopper's sadistic, drug-addled Frank was funny too? Did Lynch have a point, or was he just trying to pass off a fancy visual style as substance?
Alighting on screens somewhere between "Back to the Future" and "Peggy Sue Got Married," "Blue Velvet" reflected — or, rather, refracted — the cloying, claustrophobic nostalgia for the 1950s that had overtaken the popular culture at the time, a nostalgia that would seem to stand for an impossible desire to go home again. But since his beginnings as a painter, Lynch has fixated on the idea of home as a dangerously fraught and vulnerable place. "The home," he has said, "is a place where things can go wrong." Thanks to the release of a 35-millimeter print that will be shown at Landmark's Nuart Theater for one week beginning today, we can take another good look at how, exactly.
In hindsight, since "Blue Velvet," Lynch has consistently returned to the same theme: In the postmodern era, reality and normality and truth have been supplanted by the pastiche of pop images and ideas that have come to stand for them. No wonder the kitschy picket fences, the technicolor lawns, the eugenically perfect roses, the impossibly corny fireman waving to the impossibly corny kids that kick off "Blue Velvet" ring so disturbingly false. They're anachronistic idealizations (the movie is set in the '80s, after all, despite its allusions to movie representations of the '50s). But the same thing goes for the flip side. The gleefully sadistic (and psychologically mysterious) gangsters and corrupt cops that swarm Lumberton's underbelly are no easier to peg than the benevolent aunts and mechanical robins that populate the town's surface. They do, however, raise a good question: The movies have entertained us with violence and degradation since their inception. Are we supposed to keep pretending that we only watch for the moral lessons?
A modest commercial hit, "Blue Velvet" nevertheless broke one of the basic conventions of Hollywood narrative: It pitted innocence against nightmarish corruption and refrained from telling us how to feel about it. (Jeffrey never sounds more laughably naive than when he tells the possibly corrupt detective, "Frank Booth is a sick and dangerous man," even though he's right.) And Lynch himself was no help. When, in an interview with Cineaste, he was asked if "everything in art has to have a meaning, a reason for being," the director replied, "I don't know what a lot of things mean." There are a lot of "things" in "Blue Velvet," and it's not easy to glean the meaning of all these memes when they're jumbled together. But two decades, five films, a seminal TV series and many Internet shorts later, it seems clear — or clearer, anyway — that Lynch's response was slightly less evasive than it sounds. The only reality that interests Lynch is subjective reality, and our tenuous grasp of it. Whether something is good, happy and pure, or dark, rotten and bad, depends entirely on who's doing the looking; how willing one is to cross illusory protective boundaries.
The fact is, Jeffrey's reality is too fake to be grounding and too fragile to be safe. (The perfect lawn is roiling with gruesome insects.) Nor is there a lesson to be extracted from his eventual walk on the wild side, since what happens there mirrors his basest, scariest desires. A dualistic battle of the B-genres, "Blue Velvet" pits the aggressive Cold War optimism of teeny-bopper fantasies against the postwar pessimism of film noir, challenging the ever-popular notion that things were good once, until they went to pot.
What's interesting about watching "Blue Velvet" 20 years after it was made is not that it finds us wallowing in the swampy nihilism of Frank Booth-land but that it finds us clinging to the fantasies of home, hearth and wholesomeness. We may be soaking in another reversion to idealistic conservatism, Hollywood-inspired political posturing and empty mass-culture referentiality, but it's hard not to notice how postmodern, how pliable and un-curious, our inner Jeffrey has become. Two decades ago, Lynch upended the meaning of the emerald lawn and the white picket fence and made them seem scary. Today, the same imagery Lynch used to trigger existential freakouts has hardened, elsewhere, into a weary and wearying cliché — a cue to go ahead and feel smug about whatever. (Is it ironic that the same network that dared run — and then Aristotelically destroyed — "Twin Peaks" is now home to "Desperate Housewives"?) Pastiche and genre parody are big business, and therefore ubiquitous. What's not so easy to find these days is a weird kid in the closet as our stand-in, peering through the slats like "a detective or a pervert," and concluding, with lantern-jawed, non-relativistic certainty, that "it's a strange world."
When "Blue Velvet" was first released 20 years ago, the reviews were split and heated. Sides were taken over the question of authorial intent. Did David Lynch mean for audiences to laugh at his square-jawed, perky teenagers Jeffrey and Sandy, played by Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern? Or were the scales supposed to fall from our eyes along with theirs as they unearthed the unspeakable horrors lurking beneath the surface of their placid, all-American town? Considering that its horrors were so utterly horrifying, why should the Arcadian innocence of Lumberton seem so corny and funny and out of touch? And what did it mean that Dennis Hopper's sadistic, drug-addled Frank was funny too? Did Lynch have a point, or was he just trying to pass off a fancy visual style as substance?
Alighting on screens somewhere between "Back to the Future" and "Peggy Sue Got Married," "Blue Velvet" reflected — or, rather, refracted — the cloying, claustrophobic nostalgia for the 1950s that had overtaken the popular culture at the time, a nostalgia that would seem to stand for an impossible desire to go home again. But since his beginnings as a painter, Lynch has fixated on the idea of home as a dangerously fraught and vulnerable place. "The home," he has said, "is a place where things can go wrong." Thanks to the release of a 35-millimeter print that will be shown at Landmark's Nuart Theater for one week beginning today, we can take another good look at how, exactly.
In hindsight, since "Blue Velvet," Lynch has consistently returned to the same theme: In the postmodern era, reality and normality and truth have been supplanted by the pastiche of pop images and ideas that have come to stand for them. No wonder the kitschy picket fences, the technicolor lawns, the eugenically perfect roses, the impossibly corny fireman waving to the impossibly corny kids that kick off "Blue Velvet" ring so disturbingly false. They're anachronistic idealizations (the movie is set in the '80s, after all, despite its allusions to movie representations of the '50s). But the same thing goes for the flip side. The gleefully sadistic (and psychologically mysterious) gangsters and corrupt cops that swarm Lumberton's underbelly are no easier to peg than the benevolent aunts and mechanical robins that populate the town's surface. They do, however, raise a good question: The movies have entertained us with violence and degradation since their inception. Are we supposed to keep pretending that we only watch for the moral lessons?
A modest commercial hit, "Blue Velvet" nevertheless broke one of the basic conventions of Hollywood narrative: It pitted innocence against nightmarish corruption and refrained from telling us how to feel about it. (Jeffrey never sounds more laughably naive than when he tells the possibly corrupt detective, "Frank Booth is a sick and dangerous man," even though he's right.) And Lynch himself was no help. When, in an interview with Cineaste, he was asked if "everything in art has to have a meaning, a reason for being," the director replied, "I don't know what a lot of things mean." There are a lot of "things" in "Blue Velvet," and it's not easy to glean the meaning of all these memes when they're jumbled together. But two decades, five films, a seminal TV series and many Internet shorts later, it seems clear — or clearer, anyway — that Lynch's response was slightly less evasive than it sounds. The only reality that interests Lynch is subjective reality, and our tenuous grasp of it. Whether something is good, happy and pure, or dark, rotten and bad, depends entirely on who's doing the looking; how willing one is to cross illusory protective boundaries.
The fact is, Jeffrey's reality is too fake to be grounding and too fragile to be safe. (The perfect lawn is roiling with gruesome insects.) Nor is there a lesson to be extracted from his eventual walk on the wild side, since what happens there mirrors his basest, scariest desires. A dualistic battle of the B-genres, "Blue Velvet" pits the aggressive Cold War optimism of teeny-bopper fantasies against the postwar pessimism of film noir, challenging the ever-popular notion that things were good once, until they went to pot.
What's interesting about watching "Blue Velvet" 20 years after it was made is not that it finds us wallowing in the swampy nihilism of Frank Booth-land but that it finds us clinging to the fantasies of home, hearth and wholesomeness. We may be soaking in another reversion to idealistic conservatism, Hollywood-inspired political posturing and empty mass-culture referentiality, but it's hard not to notice how postmodern, how pliable and un-curious, our inner Jeffrey has become. Two decades ago, Lynch upended the meaning of the emerald lawn and the white picket fence and made them seem scary. Today, the same imagery Lynch used to trigger existential freakouts has hardened, elsewhere, into a weary and wearying cliché — a cue to go ahead and feel smug about whatever. (Is it ironic that the same network that dared run — and then Aristotelically destroyed — "Twin Peaks" is now home to "Desperate Housewives"?) Pastiche and genre parody are big business, and therefore ubiquitous. What's not so easy to find these days is a weird kid in the closet as our stand-in, peering through the slats like "a detective or a pervert," and concluding, with lantern-jawed, non-relativistic certainty, that "it's a strange world."
Friday, July 14, 2006
another poster for The Descent
hey everyone
OK, don't be fooled by the reference to Hostel and do note the reference to the first Saw film. The Descent is one of the greatest horror / suspense films of all time, and i urge you to see it if you are a fan of the genre.
once concern, actually more of a curiosity - apparently the version released in the USA and the rest of the world (here in SA in August, i believe) has a different ending. i will be having a gander to see!
be excellent to each other!!
My Super-Ex Girlfriend For My First Class Wife
hello againMrs R seems very excited about this upcoming release, some scene involving a shark or something appears to have piqued her interest.
knock yourselves out!!
the Katie Louise update
hello again this fine morning
i am sure Gillian & Grant will not object to this - here are some recent pics of young Katie for you, so that you can all see she is growing on a par with her younger cousin, James!!
note how she is practising eating by usage of the bunny!! there's also a quick snap of her here in the aforementioned "Walking Ring Of Doom", sat with the ever-proud Grandad!!
nice to see that she is also healthy and happy!
be excellent to each other!!
Fear. Terror. James And The Walking Ring
hello again!!
here are some images of James in his other walking ring, which awaits him (and indeed young Katie) when he goes to visit Gran & Grandad R a couple of times each weeks.
if you value your shins, you will steer well clear of young Napoleon when he is in this device. it is also wise to ensure that everything and anything of value, that is to say things which you do not want to be eaten, are kept out of reach as he goes about procuring everything within an ever increasing arm reach.
you will also note that there is a pic showing James knowing what he wants, and what he wants is food. copious amounts!!
be excellent to each other!!
James at 30 weeks
hello there
in an unusually fast update, here are the pics from last night, showing James sleeping away as he celebrates 30 weeks with us. nice one!!
Thursday, July 13, 2006
for the more intellectual of you........
Los Angeles - An opening sentence containing a burrito, an angel and a shovel was judged appalling enough to win the annual Bulwer-Lytton literary parody prize on Tuesday.
Retired mechanical designer Jim Guigli of California was proclaimed winner of the contest, which challenges entrants to submit their worst opening sentence of an imaginary novel.
Guigli's winning entry read: "Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean."
Guigli's powers of invention and his determination to succeed - he submitted 60 different entries - also won him a "dishonourable mention" in the historical fiction category.
"My motivation for entering the contest was to find a constructive outlet for my dementia," Guigli quipped.
The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest was started in 1982 by the English Department at San Jose State University to honour the Victorian novelist who opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford with what were to become the immortal words, "It was a dark and stormy night."
It began as a quiet campus affair and now attracts thousands of entries from around the world. But the grand prize winner receives only a pittance and other winners "must content themselves with becoming household names", organisers say.
The 2006 runner-up, Stuart Vasepuru from Scotland, played with one of the most famous pieces of dialogue from the Clint Eastwood movie Dirty Harry.
"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"
Retired mechanical designer Jim Guigli of California was proclaimed winner of the contest, which challenges entrants to submit their worst opening sentence of an imaginary novel.
Guigli's winning entry read: "Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean."
Guigli's powers of invention and his determination to succeed - he submitted 60 different entries - also won him a "dishonourable mention" in the historical fiction category.
"My motivation for entering the contest was to find a constructive outlet for my dementia," Guigli quipped.
The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest was started in 1982 by the English Department at San Jose State University to honour the Victorian novelist who opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford with what were to become the immortal words, "It was a dark and stormy night."
It began as a quiet campus affair and now attracts thousands of entries from around the world. But the grand prize winner receives only a pittance and other winners "must content themselves with becoming household names", organisers say.
The 2006 runner-up, Stuart Vasepuru from Scotland, played with one of the most famous pieces of dialogue from the Clint Eastwood movie Dirty Harry.
"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
this speaks for itself......
hello
a rather amusing article about the very worst of 2005 - 2006. hope you all enjoy it as much as i did!!
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