Still Hanging Around

Last night was really quiet again, and I spent the time watching TV and reading my books.

My cold is still around but it is getting a lot better now. I had a fairly dull day at work, but tomorrow should be pretty eventful. I'm planning on getting into work for 7AM and doing a six hour day. Then I'm planning on going up to the comic book store and in the evening I'm going to the Vampire/Zombie/Horror group, which should be interesting.

Clearing Up

Last night was pretty quiet. I spent most of my time watching TV and reading my books. I was feeling pretty tired and dropped off on the couch a couple of times.

Today was another fairly dull day at work. My cold is still around, but it does seem to be starting to clear up now, which is good. I just really hope that it all clears up by Friday.

Lipstick on Your Collar

Last night I was watching the first of a six part series on TV called Lipstick on Your Collar, which was written by the acclaimed writer Dennis Potter and first shown in 1993. The show is set in London in the late 1950s and deals with a group of soldiers, working in the War Office, tracking the movements of Soviet troops. One of the soldiers (played by Ewan McGregor) deals with the boredom of his job with surreal musical fantasies, while a young Welsh soldier becomes infatuated with the girlfriend of his brutal commanding officer (to make matters worse, they're billeted in the same house). It's very clever and very funny, with a great soundtrack of 1950s rock n' roll. I can vividly remember when the show first came out, because it was a really big thing, and my Mum watched it (she loved all of the Dennis Potter dramas), but my brother and I were never allowed to watch any of the Dennis Potter stuff.

My mouth was still kind of sore, but I do think that it's getting better. It was another really quiet and dull day at work again.

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.

Recovering

Last night was really uneventful, and today has been pretty quiet as well. The only time I was out today was to get my groceries for the next week. Mostly I've been reading my book (I'm still reading The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns, but I have nearly finished it now, and it has been really good). I'm also still trying to get over this cold!

At the moment I'm watching the film Metropolis, a 2001 animated Japanese movie that is very loosely based on the classic 1926 silent film of the same name. It's a good film, and beautifully animated. The screenplay was by Katsuhiro Otomo, who is most famous as the creator of the comic Akira, and the subsequent movie version.

Starting to Get Better

Last night was really pretty miserable due to the cold. I barely slept at all. I've taken a few paracetamol tablets and that seems to have helped, as did a few extra strong mints. The cold is still around but it doesn't seem to be quite as strong as it was. It's still really annoying though. I think I might have a bit of hayfever, because I do seem to get colds every summer.

Today was another really quiet day at work, and it was pretty dull. I've got a dentist appointment tomorrow morning. It's my six month check-up, so hopefully it shouldn't take too long.

I also need to get back to my writing, because I've not really done much in the past couple of weeks.

Summer Cold

Last night was really quiet. I spent more time reading and listened to the first part of a three part reading of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving on the radio. It's a very famous story about a teacher who is pursued by a Headless Horseman. It was made into a film called Sleepy Hollow by Tim Burton.

I was back at work today, and it was pretty quiet, as usual. I've got a cold at the moment. I seem to get one every summer. Hopefully it will pass soon.

The Mighty Boosh

Last night was pretty quiet. I was watching repeats of comedy shows on TV, and I watched an episode of The Mighty Boosh on DVD. That was a really bizarre sitcom written by and starring comedians Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, which was adapted from a radio series, which itself was taken from a series of stage shows. In the first season, which is pretty much taken from the radio series, fashion victim and would-be rock n' roll star Vince Noir (Fielding) and uptight "jazz maverick" Howard Moon (Barratt) work as zoo keepers in a surreal "Zooniverse" and frequently go on strange journeys featuring talking animals, shamans, monsters and magic. The show featured kind of conventional sitcom elements, animation and frequent musical interludes. The show is usually very funny, and even when it isn't it's too bizarre to ever get dull.

My cold is not as bad today as it has been but it is still definitely there, and still very strong. I hope it will go away quickly. of course, it's that birthday party tomorrow evening. If I feel okay, then I'll go, but if I still feel like I do at the moment, then I won't.

It was a fairly dull day at work, but apparently they are planning yet another big desk move. It will be interesting to see in which office I end up when I come back after my holiday, although I doubt it will be uppermost in my mind while I'm in Amsterdam.

Still Feeling Bad

Last night I was listening to the fourth and final episode of Weird Tales, series of one off horror dramas. This episode told the story of an unhappy Scottish man who meets a Californian woman in an internet chatroom and goes to visit her, only to very quickly regret it. The feel of it was a bit like Hostel if it had been done by Irvine Welsh. After that I saw an episode of The Big Bang Theory, which was very funny.

My cold was still pretty bad today so I've been taking paracetamol which usually helps. I've had a sore throat and my nose is completely blocked up.

I was watching a really bizarre episode of Millennium this evening which featured a bunch of demons hanging around in a late-night diner trading stories on how they drive humans insane, one story featuring a TV network standards and practices executive who ends up going beserk on the set of The X-Files (the two shows were made by the same team) after objecting to the inclusion of machine-gun wielding aliens. It was one of those pretty offbeat episodes that both The X-Files and Millennium threw up occasionally, with the regular cast members playing pretty much cameo roles.

Not Feeling Good

Last night was really quiet. Today, however I have a really bad cold, which came on at around lunchtime, so that was pretty unpleasant. Although there are a lot of colds going around at the moment, and it is better to get it over with now rather than have to put up with it when I'm on my holiday.

I was listening to a few episodes of The Mighty Boosh on my iPod at work. Apparently, someone saw me kind of smiling to myself as I was listening to the shows and thought I was going mad. It was only at the end of the day when I mentioned that I had been listening to comedy on my iPod that they realised what I was smiling at.

My whole internet, TV and telephone system went down for about two hours tonight. It's only just come back on again. I spent the time playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on the Playstation.

Magazines

Today was yet another fairly uneventful day. On my way in to work I bought the latest issues of Radio Times and Total Film, which featured a double-sided poster advertising The Dark Knight and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

Work was really quit today, as it almost always is on a Friday, and, as usual, by afternoon there was barely anyone around. I had a sore throat all day as well. I got back home at around half past five.

Window Inspection

It was back at work today after my day off, and it was pretty much the same as usual. At around half past one I had to go to an hour long training meeting, which was amazingly dull.

I had to leave early, because someone from the Window Advisory Service was coming to check over my double glazing that was installed yesterday. This was quite important because we only have to pay the company if the windows pass the inspection. It turns out taht they hadn't filled in a gap between on of the walls properly and one of the windows hadn't been fitted properly so they will have to go back and do it again. The guy arrived about an hour late and was here for about half an hour. My mum, who knew the inspector, was there as well. When the guy left, my mum propsed that we phone up my dad and all go out to the Scotch Whiskey Society clubrooms for dinner (my parents are both members). I had sausages, with mashed potato and onion gravy, with a glass of red wine. It was very nice. The clubrooms are really nice. I'd never been in the evenings, and they seemed to be going for the look of a 19th century "gentleman's club" complete with subdued lighting, candles, roaring fires and thick leather and wood furniture.

I have to say, I've not been feeling at all well for most of today, with a very strong cold. Hopefully it will pass soon.

Sunday

Last night I watched some more from the Ingmar Bergman weekend. Namely Bergman's 1953 film Sawdust and Tinsel and a documentary called Bergman and the Cinema.

I went out to my parent's house today for my lunch, so that was nice. The latest issue of Sight and Sound magazine had arrived with a list of 75 films which were considered undeservedly forgotten.

I'm still feeling really bad aches but I took some paracetamol and that seemed to help a bit. Still been pretty sore and depressed though for most of the weekend.

Saturday

When I woke up this morning I still had terrible aches all over, and so I didn't go out at all today. It's still quite painful.

Instead I stayed in and watched an all day Doctor Who marathon on TV. They showed the first pilot episode from 1963 in which the Doctor (then played by William Hartnell) was a much more sinister and ambiguous character than later on. It was an interesting episode, even if it featured several actors forgetting lines, wobbling sets and the camera bumping into props.
Then there was a story from 1989 called "The Curse of Fenric" in which the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) arrives in England in 1942 at a top-secret military base where a scientist is working on a computer to crack enemy codes, the local waters are haunted by an old Viking curse, and the Doctor encounters a powerful enemy from his past.
After that was a tenth anniversary story, "The Three Doctors" from 1973 in which the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) finds himself being chased by various aliens, apparently from another universe, while the Time Lords discover something is draining their power, so they decide to send in the Doctors previous incarnations (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton) to help him solve the mystery.
Finally there was a story called "The Deadly Assasin" from 1976, in which the Doctor (Tom Baker) returns to his home planet of Gallifrey only to find himself framed for the assasination of the President of the Time Lords.
It was really fun to see the stories. I remember watching "The Curse of Fenric" when it was first broadcast, I was about ten years old at the time and I thought it was pretty scary. I'd never seen "The Three Doctors" or "The Deadly Assasin" before.

I'd had real trouble all day and all last night trying to top up my mobile phone credit, but I finally managed to do it, so that's one good thing.