If you know me then you will know I love watching movies, all sorts of movies, I am not a movie snob.

If you know me then you will also know what I hate about most movies is that they don’t follow their own internal logic. 

When we go to the cinema or stick on a dvd or whatever we are essentially holding back our disbelief and buying into the fantasy that the flickering images before our eyes is representing.  Immersing ourselves in totally fantastic worlds.

So anyway, Cloverfield, I loved it.  It’s a great movie, shot from the Point of View of a camcorder, when an unknown giant monster attacks New York.  Excellent.  The idea even stands up from a film theory perspective…  For example, when the original Godzilla movies came out, Godzilla the giant monster attacking Tokyo was a metaphor for the American influence post World War 2.  Cloverfield is about the horror and confusion and chaos that surrounds a group of friends when NewYork is attacked by (to them) an unknown monster… Hmm can I think of any parallels in real life, could the monster be a metaphor for anything, well of course yes.

So far so good.  There were some good special effects, the monster was weird enough etc.

But then the internal logic falls apart, or at least isn’t followed.

At a crucial point in the story (STOP now if you haven’t watched the movie and want to!!!) one of our heroes walks into an electronics store that is being looted and finds a replacement battery for his mobile (as his has run down) so that he can call the love of his life.  Fine.  He puts the battery in and phones.

WTF!

I know that people from New York are always supposed to be in a hurry (the media tells me this is true) but really.  The movie-makers want me to believe that the batteries on shelves come pre-charged!!!

PLEASE!  And if they do come charged why not pocket a handful of camcorder batteries as well.

The camcorder being used for night-vision in horror has been done before, and arguably a lot better in other movies, see Blair Witch and perhaps even better in Descent.

</rant>

A big ‘holla’ to Silverbacks who posted this.

I have to admit that the image shows what looks like a girl, but there’s no telling if she actually is naked or actually if she is dancing.  Spinning would be more accurate.

Okay, so having had a disagreement with my sister as to which way the girl was turning, I thought I’d ask a few more people what they saw.  So I put the image of the dancing girl on my pc desktop at work and asked all and sundry which way they thought the girl was turning if you were looking down at her from above, clockwise or anti-clockwise.

The idea being that if you see her turning clockwise you are predominantly right-brained and left-brained if you see her turning anti-clockwise.

So what way do you see her turning?

8 out of 9 Phd students saw her turning clockwise!  I was surprised.  The original page gives descriptions of traits that left and right brained people have.  I really did think that most would be left brained, but there you go.

How sad is this though, I’ve seen it so much now that I can close my eyes and decide which way I want her to turn.  And she does!

Also, if I don’t look directly at her she sort of sways from sided to side.

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” was his response. 

This of course got me thinking.  Hmmm….    Okay so most of the characters in Harry Potter have an explicit sexuality.  However, now that I think about it, some of the major characters don’t.  Dumbledore and McGonigal for example.  Interestingly Chinese Student just pointed out that those two dance together during the ball in Goblet of Fire.  Can we then extrapolate McGonigals sexuality from this, I would have thought not actually.

Anyway as we discussed this, we of course ended up Googling the subject.  It’s interesting to note that it seems that Dumbledore was outed while JK was making script notes for the next film and that she also mentioned this during her recent talk in the US.

Now it’s been argued that Dumbledore’s gayness wasn’t explicit in the books.  Okay, that’s fair enough until you consider that JK has mentioned before that she wrote extensive back stories for all the major characters, it would be interesting to see if there’s anything in those. 

One could even conceivably think that JK may have said this in order to raise her the Harry Potter profile.  Although I’m not sure she needs to.

Perhaps then the only question that’s left is….
In a school filled with hundreds of teenagers, why do none of them have a mobile phone?

I mean, in the Harry Potter universe, there seem to be no mobile phones!  No teenagers with silly ringtones going off in the middle of Snape’s class.  No texting.  I’m not sure if there is a Web or email either.

Why I wonder is there no mobile phones?  We have an unrequited love that lasted decades, giants, magic and all the rest but not a stupid ringtone, text message or mobile anywhere.

So I lay there thinking and it occurred to me that I could get a programmer at work that I know to build a really simple application for me that would just save a bit of time and effort when messing with words for sigils.  Why was I thinking about the mechanics of sigil creation as used in Chaos Magick at 2.00 in the morning?  I don’t know, I just was.

I realised then that I wasn’t just going to drift off to sleep.  So I put my bedside light on and did some reading.  After an hour or so I thought I’d risk trying to fall asleep again.  As I finally started to drift off to sleep I had an idea….

All day today I was trying to recall what that idea had been, I knew it was something helpful to me, not Earth saving or anything.  I went over in my mind what was in the book and any tangential trains of thought but I couldn’t quiet grasp it.

All day I was screwing over what I had forgotten.  Every spare moment I had, my thoughts turned back to trying to recall my lost memory.

By about 7.00 in the evening I had resigned myself to the fact that I’d probably never remember.  Well it couldn’t have been that important could it? 

I was having a smoke out the back round about 8.00ish and I was thinking about how I really should update my database that I have for recording meetings and what not at work.  And that’s when I finally REMEMBERED!

I couldn’t believe it.  It was nothing to do with the book I’d been reading.  I’m not sure why I was thinking about improving my database at 3.00 in the morning though, that’s a little bit sad I suppose.

But isn’t it odd how you remember stuff when you’re not trying to.  When your mind is on something else altogether.  I read somewhere, that relaxation helps the memory process, can’t quiet remember where I read that though…

This is what I found

Well I never knew any of that.  Dunno what to make of it all.  White, as well as the lighter phases of the moon opposing krishna the darker phases.

A while back somebody called Dazzer123 left a Comment on my blog and asked for me to link to his blog (I assumed it was a fella because of what was written).

Well I had a look at his blog and it wasn’t all that, a funny cat picture and a few sentences.  But we all gotta start somewhere so I thought I’d link and give it a couple of weeks to see if anything good went on the site.

So when I posted for the  first time in ages earlier this evening, I thought I’d check it out…

And WOW!!! 
Check it out.  It’s got everything.  It has humour,  it has creativity and some of it is just from the heart.  That last one is particularly poignant.  Thankfully there is also hope.

Funnily enough as I was looking through it I was on the phone with one of its authors!

On top of all that it’s written by 13/14 year olds and yes my son is one of them…. 

Infomancie has started a blog and was showing us all in the office.  I know I should be writing on my own blog far more often than I have been.

In my defence my laptop at home has a tricky keyboard, sometimes the 1qaz keys just don’t want to work.  I guess I was just using that as an excuse though.  I have other computers I could have used.

But it’s just about priorities.  For Blogging just wasn’t up there for me in my list of things to do today for the last three or so months.

Will it be in the future?  Well I suppose only time will tell. 

So what has been so important that I haven’t been blogging?  Well after the two events back in July in Manchester and Cambridge   Well I could go into one about work and research and the camping trip that got absolutely soaked with rain but the fact is I just haven’t bothered.

I realised this of course as I was stood in the office, that’s why I said what I did.

But I have been too busy/lazy to.  So a quick catch up, my lecturing contract has finished as of the end of July but I have managed to get myself onto a PhD.  So I was really busy with getting things finished up with the teaching and getting on with the PhD.

It’s my 37th Birthday today!!!!
The family gave me an excellent day on Saturday. 

I was in Glasgow two days before the ‘terrorist’ actions there.  In fact looking at the photos on the news, I was stood exactly where the Jeep was.  I had a meeting at the Glasgow Caledonian University on the Wednesday and it all kicked off at the airport on the Friday.

I bought a whole bunch of bits to build a new computer with, my old tower was pretty much dead.  Being an experienced techy I thought I would build a new one anyway but try and fix the old one.  Well, I just made it worse and if it was fixable before I got in there, it wasn’t once I finished.  Although I faired much better with building the new computer which runs like a dream.  Although I have to say my brother in law did oversee the whole building process.

I got some excellent techy books some money and a funky shirt as presents as birthday gifts.  The books will take a while for me to get through as they are both significantly thicker than I thought.

Right that’s it for now, I have to go and get ready to travel to Manchester for a meeting/conference/workshop up there.

Typically, my students don’t carry on like that.

Call me a stick in the mud, but I’m not sure that allocating the best dinner tables by a stripping competition is sending out the right message about how to get ahead in life.  Although, you could argue that it is realistic.  Comments?