James at 50 Weeks - walking!!!!!!!!!!!

Hey Everyone

as we head to James's first birthday, here he is, still happily messing around with my book collection :




for some reason Haunted is his top book to play with, probably the eyes on the cover!!

and here he is walking! now it is quite tricky to capture a pic of someone walking, but here he is diving for Mummy :



and, for all the thousands we have spent on toys, a R20 Batman beach ball seems to be his favourite :





be excellent to each other!!!!

James and some of his Favourite Toys!!

hello again

here's James with some of his favourite things :



when it comes to pulling, pushing, prodding and the odd loving cuddle now and then, James is very happy with Marmite the dog and Grandad the fun playground!!

we are nearly walking! he likes to grab hold of things and walk along, and is very comfortable either throwing away anything that gets in his path, or just kicking and slapping it until it does!

be excellent to each other!!

James at 49 weeks (and a bit...)

Hi Everyone

sorry for the lack of recent pics, we have had a bit of a nightmare week! pretty much all of it involves traffic in one form or another, but nothing to dwell on here!!




here's James this Sunday, very happy with the most excellent toy his Grandad brought him back from America! the Tigger thing is class, doing some ace bouncing and singing!

it is tricky to believe that James will be a year old very, very soon!!

be excellent to each other!!!

James at 48 weeks

hello again - wow, three updates in a row :)




here is the man, posing away with his new cup, his desire to feed himself and his wish to make a mess all over his face and shirt with the stuff he is supposed to be feeding himself!



he has had Uncle Mike visiting from Australia this week, and the two get on very well indeed. no surprise there - Mike is one of the best friends you can have, and who does not love James?



be excellent to each other!!!

Happy Birthday Katie!!

hey everyone

just a couple of pics of Katie, celebrating her birthday in her new home of New Zealand.




it looks like it was a most excellent birthday party!!

James at 47 weeks

hi there

sorry these pics are really late! i have been a touch ill again (not having a good run on the health front) and have not been up to the internet!



as you can see, he is fast asleep!!



be excellent to each other!!

Hannibal Rising - first poster

here it is! not sure about the tagline.....



the novel Hannibal suggested something far more eloquent and intelligent than "revenge" being behind the characteristics of Hannibal Lecter, but let's wait and see what gets released.

i still raise concerns over the fact that the novel has been written in conjuntion with the film screenplay, but i remain optimistic.

now this looks quite class

Evil Dead : The Musical is not really a new development - i believe it premiered a year or so ago at some festival. however, it seems that it is at last getting the recognition it deserves and is being made available to a much wider audience.

it's on the go in Broadway (or thereabouts) as you read this, and we can only hope that it gets to play internationally aswell.

i can't really list any of the song names here, but follow the link in the title for the official site, and a link to some most excellent merchandise for this outstanding theatrical production.

how is it that i can say that it is an outstanding theatrical production without actually seeing it? well, it is The Evil Dead we speak of, and it has chainsaws in it. as far as i am concerned, if they had more stuff like this on the go, theatre would not be a dying art, if you will excuse the play on words.

be excellent to each other, and if you have seen this show, please leave a review on the comments section!

a major musical event

this looks like it could be the most amazing, mindblowing musical event in history. Michele says it looks like the stuff of nightmares.





i would be interested in hearing from anyone who has heard the cd's or, even better, seen this band live.

i often wonder what he is dreaming...................

there is not a great deal i can say about this picture which is not said by that smile.

we have no idea why you are smiling or what you are dreaming about, son, but you go ahead and keep doing it.

James at 46 weeks

hey everyone


here's the little fella, fast asleep!!

James is developing and growing with each passing hour, never mind day! he is crawling about and is doing all that he can to walk. he grabs hold of anything that slides and uses it as a walking frame!

be excellent to each other!!

US Government 'knew CD cases would all break'

Secret files from the 1980s to have emerged in Washington reveal that the United States government knew full well that plastic CD cases would all break, but did nothing to prevent the impending disaster.

The CD which was invented in 1982, became widely commercially available by the end of the decade. But little did billions of music fans know that they were sleep-walking into a broken-CD-case epidemic that would bring misery across the Western world. By the mid 1990s it was estimated that one in three compact disc cases was cracked or didn’t close properly or completely fell apart when opened. The problem was enough to slightly spoil some of the satisfaction of owning a long-awaited new album, but not quite bad enough for anyone to come up with another method of packaging CDs.

Now it transpires that all of this could have been avoided had the American government heeded the warnings of a secret CIA report that acurately predicted teenage bedrooms and student apartments littered with cracked and broken bits of useless perspex.


Conspiracy theorists had long maintained that the US government knew about the inherent design flaw in the CD case but didn’t want to threaten the profits of the major US media companies. Plus billions of dollars had already been committed to designing all sorts of novelty CD racks, shaped like electric guitars or curvy naked ladies, so a thicker sturdier CD case was already out of the question.


‘The bottom line man, is that the big politicians in Washington didn’t think it was very important’ said Jez Eckstein, an anarchist blogger from Oakland, CA; ‘It’s like, they were more concerned about the Middle East, the economy and the end of the Cold War and all that shit than the fact that the tiny plastic hinges on CD cases would snap off the moment they were like, subjected to the slightest pressure. What does that say about their priorities? What are they hiding from us now man?’

A spokesman for the White House confirmed that the American government had indeed been more concerned about these issues at the time.

watching closely?

my enthusiasm for The Prestige continues unabated with the sight of these new posters for the film :

James at 45 weeks

hey everyone

well, OK, again a few days after 45 weeks! he was asleep when we took the exactly 45 weeks ones!!

as you can see, James and Grandad have a soft spot for each other!!



and, of course, here are a couple of pictures of him posing on his own!!




be excellent to each other!!

blimey - a good film released in 2006

THE DEPARTED had an awful lot riding on it. granted, Martin Scorsese's career has had something of a yo-yo effect anyway, but after the disappointments of Gangs Of New York and The Aviator, something extraordinary was expected. and that's what has arrived.

let me make something clear - it is not an A-Grade classic like Taxi Driver or GoodFellas. it does, however, sit very nicely with Scorsese's films that are "almost masterpieces", like Casino and Cape Fear. the fact that this one is a remake does tie the hands of the director, as you have to remain relatively loyal to the original plot.

the plot? how much to reveal? basically, the mobs have a plant in the cops, the cops have a plant in the mob. sat atop of the mob is Jack Nicholson, giving a remarkable background performance. Martin Sheen, almost anonymously so, is in charge of the cops.

Scorsese has assembled an impressive cast, and they just about all deliver. Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg and Ray Winstone are just as good as Nicholson in this, and Sheen serves the part of the role well enough. the weak link, and this makes it a hat-trick for Scorsese, is Leonardo Di Caprio. whereas Leo is not exactly bad, he's not dazzling and looks a touch out of his depth. the problem is, once more, his pretty boy looks. it's difficult to accept him in a more demanding role like this one when he still looks like a 12 year old, not matter how hard they try to hide that fact.

the structure is curiously fragmented, compared to Scorsese's usual, more linear approach, and it works. the film is not going to spoodfeed you the plot - expect to fill in the blanks here and there as you watch it.

and watch it you should, dear reader. i remain confident, from what i have seen, that The Prestige will be the film of the year, but this one cannot be far off.