Stuff and Nonsense

It’s the 2nd best show on Radio. After Wogan of course.

“Facebaulk.com”. A social network to make you vomit with boredom.

It’s great. It’s basically the same as Facebook but instead of the ability to type status updates you are only able to select from the following list.

• “I’m bored”
• “I’m drunk”
• “I’m going to get drunk”
• “I’m going to be bored”
• “I was bored, now I’m drunk and bored”
• “Facebaulk is so boring I want to vomit”
• “I wish I was drunk”
• “I’m going out”
• “I went out, it was boring, I’m drunk”
• “OMG I’m so bored!”

It also has an option to automatically pick one of the above and post it at 3am for those nights when you are just too bored or too drunk to actually type.

I think it’s a winner.

I wonder… A pair of polarized glasses and similarly polarized sheets placed in front of a of monitor should be all that’s needed, then generate left and right images on relevent side of the screen.

Aha! So, last night I had a better than typical cinema experience at Gloucester Cineworld. I watched Terminator Salvation which was actually much better than I was expecting and the picture quality was ok this time. Only ok mind you. Not sharp by any stretch. 35mm film may well have much higher resolution than any digital source but if your man on the projector hasn’t tweaked his lens right then the focus will be soft and all that resolution is for naught.
The good news is that it turns out this cinema does have one digital projector. I still haven’t managed to find anyone who can tell me which screen that is (if only because, the screen itself must be better quality than typical screens in order to work with the new 3d digital movies and so, I reason even if what’s playing is a film from a reel at least part of the setup must be improved).
It does seem as though the only way to be assured of seeing a digital film is to see a 3d one. TS, while chock full of CGI you would have thought would be showing in digital but now, only film.
A friend saw Bolt in 3D at the same cinema and tells me there was no blurring as was common in the first generation of polarised light 3d solutions and the experience was tremendous.
So, I hope to take the kids to see Ice Age 3 in 3d when that shows up later in the year. Previous Ice Age films were very watchable so I’m hoping this will be an all-new cinema experience for the whole family.
My eldest wears glasses… does that affect the 3d experience at all? My instinct says it shouldn’t so long as the polarized glasses fit over the regular ones.

So, my Wife received a hoax email. We get a lot of these so I always go straight to google, and try to see if it’s a known hoax. It is so I helpfully told the sender and the other recipients. One of the stunningly clever ones asked…

“How do you know it’s a hoax?”

Well, I don’t KNOW it is a hoax. I believe it is a hoax though. Because to believe it is true also requires me to believe that…

Criminals the world over have tried a slight variation on a theme and the would-be-victims have relayed their worrysome ordeal in such a way that it has found its way into a rich variety of email forms with a remarkable number of words and phrases in common.

Or, there is only a small band of dedicated criminals trying the same scam whilst globetrotting and, judging by the prodigious number of near-misses, being very bad at the criminal game while still being able to fund their travels. A “Whicker’s Gang” if you will. If an email comes to light where the victim is duped by a small group of elderly, charming men wearing horn rimmed glasses and smart blazers you’ll know I’m right.

Or, this is a crime pandemic that Interpol, The FBI, our own home office and regional police forces deem so unimportant that none of us have ever seen a poster, tv ad, crimestoppers, window sticker or a sign in a car park or an appeal from whoever that bloke is who says “Don’t have nightmares”.

Or, despite the fact that there are apparently several perpetrators, instead of rushing the victim and bundling them into the car they send just one of their number to go do it using some Ether and a dubious story. Lots of things to go wrong there. For one thing, Ether is heavier than air so you will need to give it a pretty good sniff to make sure it gets up your snozzle instead of meandering over the neck of the bottle and falling to the floor; secondly – and I expect to be put right by some medical type on the cc list, but what the hell, let’s live dangerously – my lay person’s understanding of Ether is that one gets high, possibly in an explosive and troubling way for some time before becoming compliant and finally, helpless and unconscious. Not very efficient on the abduction front is it?

So, that’s why I (and people who collect these things and put them on hoax slayer et al to help others) believe it’s a hoax. Because it just doesn’t sound plausible. Does anyone think it does sound plausible, really?

No offence to Alan Whicker by the way. I like him. I’m sure if one were to be abducted in the style of Alan Whicker it would be charming and he’d probably apologise afterwards. Of course he’d probably use sherry instead of Ether.

So, I’ve been to the cinema twice in the last 10 days. First, to see Star Trek and then to see Angels & Demons. Both good films. Star Trek way better in my opinion that any of the other Star Trek films and Angels & Demons is better than the book and better than the previous film, The Da Vinci Code.

Anyway, the point of this particular post is to whine a little about what spoiled the experience for me and, in fact what always spoils the cinema experience for me… PROJECTION!

I’m always amazed that in these days where even DVD is now being replaced by BluRay and digital technology in the home is old-hat, the Nation’s cinemas are still showing brand new films on such old technology. It’s just miserable. Start Trek suffered throughout by what seemed to be an unstable picture with closeups being marred by the whole scene shifting up and down perceptibly. Angels and Demons less so (different cinema as well) but both viewings were grainy, blurry, indistinct, “low-res” pictures. It was (and has been on all cinema trips I can remember of recent years) a very disappointing experience visually. It really did look like watching a VHS tape at home on a modest sized TV. Obviously it is higher resolution being purely optical, resolution may not even be the right word to use but the fact is the quality of picture I get at home on a large (42 inch) but budget plasma TV is in a different league.

Contrast is the other victim of cinema. Not so much with Star Trek but Angels looked like the entire lot was shot through cheesecloth with dull colours and contrast.

It just feels like a waste of money. The only way to see the film soon after release is at the cinema and the quality is dire.