The Engineer's Thumb

Last night I was watching another couple of episodes of Twin Peaks. One of them had a very amusing guest appearance from David Duchovny (from The X-Files) as a cross-dressing FBI agent.

I was also listening to a radio play based on an 1892 Sherlock Holmes short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called "The Engineer's Thumb", in which Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson investigate the circumstances in which a hydraulic engineer had his thumb severed. It was a pretty good one.

Today I went to work and it was pretty much another quiet and fairly dull day. The pain in my teeth from the filling seems to have gone now.

Teeth Healing

Last night I was watching another couple of episodes of Twin Peaks, which resolved the main storyline of the series despite being halfway through the second season, which David Lynch was very unhappy about. He later said that he never wanted to resolve the mystery, even at the end of the series, but the network put pressure on them to resolve the story early.

My teeth were feeling a lot better today and I was able to go into work. My tooth still aches and it is still pretty sensitive but it's not too bad. I've only taken one painkiller today and that was first thing in the morning, and I've been able to eat pretty much as normal.

A Filling

Last night I was watching a couple of epsiodes of Twin Peaks, which were really good. They were among the darkest episodes of the series that I've yet seen but they did have some great comedy moments in as well, especially David Lynch appearing as the loud FBI Chief. I saw a really good ice hockey game last night between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Penguins won five to four.

I took the day off work today and went up to the Cineworld cinema and saw Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese. The film, which was based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, takes place in 1954 where two US Marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) travel to an institution for the criminally insane on Shutter Island just off the Boston harbour to investigate the mysterious disappearance of an inmate. It was a very good film and very well-made it also followed the book very closely.

After the movie I wandered around for awhile before heading up to the dentist. I had to get a filling put in due to some decay on one of my teeth that had been revealed after my wisdome tooth was extracted last November. I had to get about three or four injections in my mouth to anaesthetise it and the whole thing took about forty five minutes. My mouth is still really numb and I know that it will be painful once the anaesthetics wear off. The dentist said that I would probably need to take pain-killers for the next two days.

Flesh for Frankenstein

Last night I was watching the second episode of Lipstick on Your Collar, which was really good.

Later on I was watching the 1974 film Flesh for Frankenstein, directed by Paul Morrissey. The film is set in the 19th Century where Baron von Frankenstein (played by Udo Keir) is working on male and female creatures, with which he is hoping to breed a new species who he can rule over. Meanwhile his sister (Monique van Vooren), is more interested in their new Serbian servant (Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro, who makes no attempt to hide his very strong New York accent). The movie is also known as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, although exactly what Warhol did on it is unclear. The movie is full of sex, nudity, gore and absolutely terrible acting. There is also a lot of intentional humour, and it is so over the top that it's actually very entertaining. The movie was originally filmed in 3D, which accounts for the amount of objects and internal organs being thrust towards the camera. It was the 3D version that was being shown, actually, which added a lot to the trashy fun. It often crops up along with it's companion film, Blood for Dracula, which was made back to back with this one, using most of the same crew, sets and cast.

My teeth are actually a lot better now. I was back at work and it was another really quiet and dull day. Pretty much the same as usual. On my way home I renewed my bus pass for another month.

The Waters of Mars

Yesterday I was watching a special one-off episode of Doctor Who. There has not been a full season of Doctor Who this year, instead there have been a series of specials, one at Easter, one which was on yesterday, and a two-part story over Christmas. Last night's episode was called "The Waters of Mars", and involved the Doctor (David Tennant) arriving on Mars in November 2059, outside a newly established Earth base on the planet. Before long it turns out that there is a strange alien presence in the base's water supply, and the base itself is heading for tragedy, one which the Doctor may not be able to avert. It was a good episode, which was quite surprisingly dark for the show.

My mouth was still pretty sore, but I was able to go along to work. Nothing much had happened in the week I had been away, and it was as dull and quiet as usual. I got home at around half past five.

Twilight

Last night I saw the movie of Twilight on TV. The film is directed by Catherine Hardwicke and based on the popular novel by Stephanie Meyer. It's about a teenage girl (played by Kristen Stewart) who moves to a small town where she quickly falls for a local guy (Robert Pattinson) only to discover that he is a vampire. The story doesn't pay too much attention to traditional vampire lore, for example the vampires appear to be able to stay out in the day with no ill-effects and sunlight just makes them kind of go all glittery. It's not bad, and it is definitely entertaining enough, but I personally prefer vampires to be a bit scarier.

After that I was watching the movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno, directed by Kevin Smith. The film tells the story of two platonic friends, Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks), who share an apartment and are in serious trouble with mounting debts, and so Zack decides that they should make some money by making a pornographic movie. Despite the concept the film is surprisingly sweet-natured and it is also genuinely funny.

I have still been taking painkillers today, but I did go along to my parent's house and managed to eat some salmon and mashed potato, which was good because that's the first really sizeable thing I've had to eat all week. Afterwards my Mum and myself went for a walk to a supermarket and I got the latest copy of Empire magazine.

Jennifer's Body

Last night was really quiet and pretty uneventful. My mouth was still pretty sore this morning and I'm still taking the painkillers. I think it's from where they cut into the gums that's causing the pain now. Also, I've barely been eating lately so I have lost quite a bit of weight.

This afternoon I went along to the cinema and saw Jennifer's Body, directed by Karyn Kusama, and written by Diablo Cody (who wrote Juno). The film is a blend of horror and comedy amd is set in a small American town and centres on two High School girls, Jennifer (played by Megan Fox), the most popular girl in school, and her less popular best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried). However after a night out at the local bar ends in tragedy, Jennifer becomes posessed by some kind of demon which causes her to seduce and kill the local boys in order to eat them. It was a lot of fun, with plenty of humour and shocks.

In my way home I got the groceries for the week, still plenty of soup and soft foods, I'm really looking forward to when I can actually eat something substantial.

2012

Last night I was watching Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, directed by Tim Burton, on Blu-Ray DVD. The film stars Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd who sets up as a barber in London's Fleet Street sometime during the 19th Century, and is in the habit of cutting his customer's throats, and then dropping the corpses through a trap door to the pie shop below him, where his friend Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) uses them to make her meat pies. The film is an adaptation of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical. The character of Sweeney Todd is quite a famous figure who originated in the 19th Century "Penny Dreadful" magazines. I normally don't like musicals but this one I liked a lot. The film is very stylishly made with some fun music.

Today my mouth was still pretty sore. I'm still taking painkillers. I was feeling kind of depressed and so, to cheer myself up, I went along to the movies. I had originally intended to go and see the movie Jennifer's Body, a kind of horror-comedy film, but due to the bus taking nearly an hour to get to the cinema, I missed it. Instead I saw 2012, directed by Roland Emmerich. It's based on the idea that the ancient Mayan calendar calculates the end of time to occur on 21 December 2012. In the movie the Earth starts to suffer from massive displacment of the crust. This causes massive tidal waves, earthquakes and volcanoes all over the Earth's surface. An unsuccessful science-fiction writer and divorced father of two (played by John Cusack), and a top US Government scientific advisor (Chiwetal Ejiofor) are among those struggling to find some kind of safety as the world falls apart. It's kind of predictable and over long but it is fun, with some really great special effects and spme pretty exciting action sequences.

Ashes of Time

I managed to write another two thousand words of my NaNoWriMo story yesterday. Last night I watched the latest episode of True Blood, which was really good. I also watched the movie Ashes of Time Redux, directed by Wong Kar-Wai. The movie was first released in 1994, but the director released a re-edited (or "redux") version last year. The film is set in medieval China and concerns a cynical swordsman (played by Leslie Cheung) who sets himself up as a hired killer after his wife leaves him to marry his brother. He is hired by a man (Brigitte Lin) to kill his sister's boyfriend, who happens to be the swordsman's best friend, on the grounds that he deserted her. However the sister (Lin again) wants to hire him to kill her brother on the grounds that he is too possessive of her. He also ends up helping two other younger swordsmen in their seperate battles against the same group of bandits. It's a really beautiful looking film which, unusually for a martial arts movie, focusses mainly on emotion and philosophy rather than action (the fight scenes are depicted almost as fast-moving blurs of sound and colour). Apparently it was a huge flop on it's first relelase and was barely released.

Today my mouth is still quite sore, and I'm still needing painkillers. Also I am absolutely sick to death of eating soup (apparently I need a "soft diet" for a week after the procedure). I did manage to go out today though and I got the movies There Will be Blood and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on Blu-Ray DVD.

Fear in the Night

I managed to do another thousand words of NaNoWriMo last night. Less than usual but I wasn't really feeling into it yesterday. Later on I watched a 1972 movie called Fear in the Night, directed by Jimmy Sangster. It's about a young woman (played by Judy Geeson) who is attacked by a mysterious assailant with an artificial arm. Later, she and her teacher husband go to a remote, deserted rural school, where she meets the creepy headmaster (played by Peter Cushing) who has an artificial arm, and who wanders around the deserted school corridors in full headmaster regalia playing tape recordings of classes in the empty classrooms to preserve the illusion that the fire-damaged school is still in session. At the school, the woman is again attacked by a mysterious, one-armed figure. Of course she immediately suspects the headmaster, but there is a twist. It was actually a pretty neat thriller.

Fortean Times magazine came yesterday, featuring this month articles about the British thriller author Dennis Wheatley, who was massively successful in the 1930s to 1970s but is almost completely unknown now, and also an article celebrating fifty years of The Twilight Zone.

I woke up and I still wasn't feeling well. I was really feeling the area where my tooth was taken out and I've still been taking painkillers. I took Monday and yesterday off work on sick leave and I've booked for the rest of the week off on annual leave so, hopefully, I'll be able to do something fun later on in the week, but for now I'm having another quiet day at home.

Tooth Extraction

On Sunday night I got up to 18,604 words on NaNoWriMo. I wasn't really able to do anything to it last night.

On Sunday night I watched the movies The Notorious Bettie Page, directed by Mary Harron, which starred Gretchen Mol as the controversial 1950s pin-up model Bettie Page. It was a very stylise movie and very entertaining. Following that I watched a 1949 movie called All the King's Men, directed by Robert Rossen and based on a novel by Robert Penn Warren, which starred Broderick Crawford as an honest, "man of the people" politician who runs for office vowing to stamp out political corruption, however, once he gets elected he starts behaving worse, more brutal and more corrupt, than the politicians he replaced.

Yesterday morning I went along to the Dental Surgery Institute to get my wisdom tooth removed. Basically the procedure was to cut open my gum, drill into the bone and kind of lever my tooth out. However, apparently the tooth was so impacted, they had to cut it into two. I was given a local anaesthetic, which was like four injections into my mouth, so although I was aware of what was happening, I coudn't feel any pain. The whole thing took about forty minutes.

After the operation I went to my parent's house where I mostly sat around and watched episodes of The Wire. I also watched the movies Starter for 10, directed by Tom Vaghan, about a student (played by James McAvoy) at Bristol University who gets the chance to appear on the popular TV quiz show University Challenge. It was very funny, and An American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis, about two American hikers who are attacked by a werewolf on the moors in England. That is a really good film.

I stayed the night at my parent's and just recently got back. I've been on painkillers since the operation, and it has been sore and uncomfortable most of the time. I've not really been able to eat either.

I'm off work for the rest of the week and I hope it gets better soon.

Changeling

Last night I got to 14,526 words in my NaNoWriMo novel.

I watched a movie on TV last night called Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood. The film, which is based on a true story, is set in Los Angeles in 1928, and tells the story of single mother Christine Collins (played by Angelina Jolie) whose nine year old son goes missing. Five months later the police announce that they have found the child, but Christine insists that the boy they have found is not her son. Continuing her search for the truth, Christine comes into conflict with the notoriously violent and corrupt 1920s LAPD. It was a really good film and very well made.

Later on I watched a horror movie from 1981 called The Entity, directed by Sidney J. Furie. The movie is based on a supposedly true story from 1976, and tells the story of a Los Angeles woman (played by Barbara Hershey) who repeatedly comes under violent attack from an invisible force. Her psychiatrist believes the attacks are all in her mind, but a group of parapsychologists are determined to prove that the attacks are caused by an evil spirit. It was very slow-moving in places, but pretty atmospheric.

I went along to my parent's house today for lunch. It was a fairly quiet afternoon.

Tomorrow I'm going to get my wisodm tooth removed. Apparently, because of the angle it's coming in at, they are going to be cutting open my gum, drilling a hole into my jawbone and kind of levering the tooth out. Then stitching it back up again. needless to say, I am not looking forward to it. I'll have to take a lot of painkillers apparently and probably won't be on-line tomorrow.

Dental Institute

Last night I listened to another episode in the Doctor Who radio series. This one, called "No More Lies", starts in the middle of a story, as a strange alien criminal escapes from the Doctor (played by Paul McGann) in a time-travelling escape pod. The Doctor follows him and arrives at a sophisticated garden party, where he finds out that the alien has been living on Earth for thirty years and has become very wealthy. However, the party is caught in an endlessly repeating "time-loop" and there are dangerous monsters from outside of space and time trying to manifest themselves. Later on I watched the third and final part of the Red Riding trilogy of TV movies based on the David Peace novels. In this episode the scene has switched to 1983, where a troubled defence lawyer (played by Mark Addy) begins convinced that the person arrested for the brutal murders in 1974 is in fact innocent, and one of the corrupt police officers becomes increasingly disillusioned by the day-to-day brutality and corruption. Interestingly, there were four books in the series, bu the second novel was never adapted for TV. I don't know why.

I was off work again today, but I was out early to meet my Dad at the dental institute. The young dentist who spoke to me (who was female, Irish and very attractive) explained what I'll be in for. They did an x-ray of my mouth and the problem is that my two lower wisdom teeth are coming in at an angle, and so food is getting caught there and it means that there is starting to be decay, and I'll have to get the one on the left out. Apparently, they are going to cut a flap in my gum, drill a couple of holes in the bone and lever the tooth out, after which they'll stitch my gum back up again. I'll also need to get a filling in the tooth immediately in front of the one that is being removed. They said that they'll monitor the left hand side wisdom tooth and decide what to do about it in a year's time (by which time I may, hopefully, be in Canada but we'll deal with that when the time comes). However, I have an appointment to get my tooth out on the 9th November. They riginally wanted to schedule it for the 2nd November, but I changed it to avoid it clashing with my Mum's birthday.

Dad and I then went to the Royal Museum of Scotland, where we had coffee and a scone and had a quick look around the collections, what there were out anyway. The museums being refurbished and not much of the collection is on display. Then we went to Pizza Express and I had a Four Seasons pizza (a pizza divided into quarters with each quarter having a different topping: plain cheese and tomato, mushrooms, pepperoni or capers and anchovies). It was really nice. We had a look around the shops and then went our seperate ways.

I got three books in a three for two offer: Just After Sunset by Stephen King, A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre and Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. So they should be good. Back home I went and dealt with the urine sample that I had to deliver to the doctor's surgery as part of their New Patient check-up.

The internet has been down most of today and that has been extrmemely annoying.

The King of Comedy

Last night I was watching a 1982 movie called The King of Comedy on TV. The film was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin a hapless individual who lives with his mother in New York and dreams of being a top stand-up comedian, despite the fact that he has absolutely no talent. Pupkin is set on securing a spot on America's favourite chat show, The Jerry Langford Show, and to that end he doggedly pursues the show's host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), eventually resorting to more extreme methods to secure his goal. The movie is kind of a dark comedy-drama. The thing about the movie is that it is very balanced, neither the Jerry Lewis or Robert De Niro characters are heroes or villains. The Rupert Pupkin character could very easily be a really disturbing stalker, but in the end he is tquite a warm character and is treated with affection and sympathy as someone who is mainly a wannabe, but lacks the talent to achieve his goals. In fact it's quite a contemporary movie with it's focus on the cult of celebrity and the pursuit of instant fame. It's actually one of my personal favourite movies and I must have seen it countless times.

At work today I called up about the appointment to pull my wisdom teeth. I'm booked in for Tuesday 22 September at half past nine. This appointment is just an assessment to see what needs done. I've also booked next Friday off work. I decided to do it because I'm going to be seeing Neil Gaiman on Thursday and I'll want to get some books signed, so it might be very late by the time I get home. Also I would like to have the chance to see more festival things while there is still time.