The Drifters

Last night I watched the 2007 re-make of Halloween, directed by Rob Zombie. The story involves serial killer Michael Myers breaking out of an institution to wreck havoc in his old home town of Haddonfield, Illinois. The re-make spends about an hour detailing the back-story of Myers (which is given about ten minutes in the original) and the main plot of the original takes about the second half. It's not too bad, as far as horror re-makes go.

I went along to my parent's house in the middle of the afternoon today, and had my dinner there, which was salmon baked with vegetables on rice. After dinner we went along to a local high school to see a concert by the Drifters, the 50s and 60s vocal group who had huge success with "Saturday Night at the Movies", "Under the Boardwalk" and "On Broadway" among many others. It was a really great show, with some brilliant music. It was great value as well since the concert lasted about three hours.

A Trip to a Concert

Last night I was watching a couple of Doctor Who stories. The first one was "The Mind Robber", which was from 1968 and starred Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor. The Doctor and his companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Zoe (Wendy Padbury - who I always really liked, she looked a lot like Rachael Leigh Cook ) escape from a lava flow (which looks more like lumpy porridge) by using an emergency feature in the TARDIS which involves breaking out of time and space. Trapped in a strange other dimension they encounter fictional characters made real and are chased by killer robots. It's possibly one of the most surreal Doctor Who stories ever made, but I really enjoyed it. I remember seeing it on TV once when I was about thirteen. The other Doctor Who story I saw was called "The Brain of Morbius", which starred Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. The TARDIS is brought to the desolate planet of Karn by the Time Lords and the Doctor and his companion Sarah (Elisabeth Sladen) soon find themselves trapped by a mad scientist who is trying to resurrect the evil Time Lord Morbius (who is currently just a glowing, talking brain in a jar) by making a body for him out of bits and pieces of aliens. He also decides that the Doctor has the perfect head to house Morbius' brain. It was a fun story, but very controversial in it's day due to the violence.

Today I went to my parent's house as usual. My brother was there because he was playing in a concert. My mum had got a really nice purple orchid for me. I put it in my bedroom where it looks really good. The telephone line to my house isn't working and so the engineers have to come and fix it on Wednesday afternoon, which means I'll have to take the day off work so I can let them in. It's annoying because this isn't the first time it's happened.

In the evening I went along with my parents to the Festival Theatre to see my brother playing with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The show started with The Clock Symphony by Joseph Haydn and after the intermission we heard an 75 minute long compressed version of The Ring by Richard Wagner. Of course the full uninterrupted playing time of The Ring Cycle is fifteen hours, so quite a lot had to be cut. It was great though.