End of the Month

Last night was fairly uneventful. I was watching a few of the extra features on the Peep Show season four DVD, and then I was playing for awhile on Grand Theft Auto IV, which once again I actually spent longer on than I had intended.

Today has been really quiet. I got up late and went ought to get my groceries for the coming week. Which basically means microwave meals, cheese and bread.

January seems to have been a really long month this year. It always does tend to be kind of a slow month but this month even more so than usual.

Steel

Last night I was watching a few episodes of The Twilight Zone on DVD. The first one was called “In Praise of Pip” and involved an alcoholic bookie who, on learning that his son has been seriously injured in Vietnam, is filled with guilt at not having been a better father, and then given a chance to make amends. The second episode was called “Steel” which starred Lee Marvin as an ex-prizefighter in a future where human boxing is illegal and only robots are allowed in the ring. The third episode was called “A Kind of a Stopwatch” and involved a loud-mouthed bore who is given a stopwatch which has the power to stop time. They weren’t among the best episodes but they were still pretty good. Later on I saw a repeat of an episode from the latest season of Peep Show.

It was another fairly uneventful day at work today. At least it’s the weeekend now. I got an invitation to the 50th birthday party of someone at work. The party is being held in a bar at the end of February.

No Lunch Today

Last night was really quiet. I was mostly flicking through the TV channels. I watched an episode of a comedy series The IT Crowd, and was interested to see one of the characters wearing a T-shirt from the same website where I ordered mine from the other day.
Actually, speaking of those T-shirts, I just had a phone call from my mum to let me know that they arrived today, so that’s very quick. I’m impressed with that. I get packages sent to my parent’s house because there’s usually someone in, and there si less chance of it being mis-delivered. As long as I let my parents know, they don’t mind.

Today I got out of bed later than I had intended so I had to hurry out without any breakfast. I also realised later on that I had forgotten to pack in my sandwiches for lunch, so I was pretty hungry all day, just having a couple of chocolate bars and a packet of crisps. I had some fish and chips on my way home.

Also I have two weeks of holiday to take off before the end of March, so I’m going to try and get a couple of weeks off. If I don’t, I’d just lose the time.

Weird Tales

Last night I was looking at a website which had some really interesting movie-themed T-shirts, but the twist is that instead of featuring the movie’s title or logo it features logos and details of the fictional corporations, brands, or places from the movie. I bought a couple, one promoting emigration to the “Off-World Colonies” (inspired by Blade Runner) and one for “Stovington Academy” (inspired by The Shining). In fact the Stovington Academy one is based on a T-shirt that Jack Nicholson wears in the film. They’re kind of different and fun.

I was also listening to the first episode of an interesting radio show called Weird Tales, a series of original radio dramas inspired by the world of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. The first one involved two sisters who return as adults to the strange seaside resort where they used to go on holiday as children, only to discover that something has been waiting there for them for a long time. I also watched an episode of the original series of The Twilight Zone called “Spur of the Moment”, written by Richard Matheson, which concerned a young woman who is haunted by a nightmarish figure of a woman in black on a horse. At first the young woman is convinced that the vision wants to kill her, but later begins to wonder if it might have been a warning. It was quite a downbeat episode with some pretty scary moments in it.

It was another fairly quiet day at work, and pretty depressing again. I was really glad to get away this afternoon. I just went straight home and had a microwaved spaghetti carbonara meal for dinner.

Notebook

Last night I was playing Grand Theft Auto IV. I had intended to just play for a short time but I ended up spending about two and a half hours on it. It is a good game once you get into it, but it did take a while to get used to the controls.

I went back at work today. It was pretty much the same as usual. I had brought along a new notebook which was small enough that I could fit it into the inside pocket of my jacket along with my book of Sylvia Plath poems, my copy of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and my phone. I have a big inside pocket. I wrote a rather strongly worded warning to the curious on the first page.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote it actually. I was at work, and depressed. I’d intended to use it to write down thoughts and feeling and poems and stuff like that, it’s good to have a notebook you can carry around for that. Joe came down to talk about the Resident Evil 5 demo that he played last night.

On my way home I picked up a jug of milk and a bottle of coke. When I got in I had a microwaved pasta and melted cheese meal and a glass of apple juice.

Untraceable

Last night I was watching the film Untraceable on TV. The film tells the story of an FBI agent (played by Diane Lane) who is investigating a serial killer who broadcasts his crimes live on his internet site, the twist being that the more people log on to the site than the faster the victim dies. It starts off with a pretty interesting idea but by the end becomes a pretty predictable horror-thriller.

It was the start of another week at work. I was still working back in the old department (the department that I was working in when I first started in the company almost six years ago)and I’ll be there for at least a couple more weeks. I can’t remember much about the workday, but I know I was pretty bored. When I got home I had a microwave meal of spaghetti and meatballs.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Last night I listened to a radio adaptation of an episode of The Twilight Zone. It was an epsiode called “A Piano in the House” and told the story of a cruel drama critic who buys a player piano for his wife’s birthday. However it turns out that when the piano plays it forces the person using it to reveal their secret, true selves that they keep hidden from the rest of the world. When the critic decides to use it to humiliate his wife and his friends he soon finds it backfires. I’ve got the whole of the old 1950s-1960s series of The Twilight Zone on DVD, and the radio adaptation was pretty well done. I really like that show. I remember watching it when I was about thirteen, I would record it from TV where it was on during the early hours of the morning. I remember that one of the best things about it was turning it on and having no idea what it was going to be.

I played my new game during the evening, and it was fun. Later on as I was watching TV, I fell asleep on my couch and woke up in the early hours of the morning, with a splitting headache and headed to bed. When I woke up in the morning the headache had gone. My parents came along to pick me up and we went along to the Cameo cinema with my mum to see a preview of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher, and based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story told of a man named Benjamin Button (played by Brad Pitt) who is born at the end of the First World War with the physical age of someone in their eighties. As time goes on, he grows younger instead of older. It was a really great movie, which was much better than the premise might sound. In fact it is probably one of the best movies that I have seen, certainly the best film I’ve seen recently. Also it manages to be a film which lasts nearly three hours which just flash by.

After the film my mum and I went along to my parent’s house. It was Burns’ Night tonight (the annual celebration of Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland) so we had the traditional haggis and potato. I got back at around quarter to six, and listened to the latest episode of The Man in Black which this week involved a woman in hospital who becomes involved in an experiment into hypnosis, which stirs up a dark secret from her past. After that I listened to a reading of The Recognition, a short story by J.G. Ballard, about an English town that is visited by a sinister circus.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

Last night I listened to the second part of Guards! Guards!, based on the Terry Pratchett book, and the second and concluding part of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, which was a really good reading of the story.

Today I was up pretty sharp and went out to get my groceries for the week. After I had put them away in the fridge and taken out my rubbish I set off again to meet my mum in the city centre. We were there to get my Ridacard bus pass transferred to Direct Debit payment, but were told to wait until the card had actually expired. Also it turned out that the initial cost of transferring to Direct Debit was more than we had expected. So we had a look around the shops at the Tvs on sale, before heading over to the opticians for an eye test. It was just a check-up, like I have every two years. It turned out that my eyes were fine and there was no change to my glasses. After that we went along to Pizza Express for some lunch. I had a Diavolo pizza (a pizza topped with tomato, cheese, pepperoni, spicy beef, green peppers, jalapeno peppers and some tabasco sauce) it was really nice. After the meal we went our seperate ways and I bought the game of Grand Theft Auto IV for my Playstation 3 in the sales.

This afternoon I finished reading the novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre. The book was published in 1963 and tells the story of Alec Leamas, a British secret agent in Germany during the Cold War, who has been running a spy network in communist East Germany. However, his spies are being killed off and, with his network completely destroyed, Leamas returns to Britain in disgrace. Broken, burnt-out, cynical and bitter, all Leamas wants is to leave the world of espionage and spying (in spy terms to “come in from the cold”) until he is offered one last mission to set a trap to destroy the sadistic spymaster who slaughtered his network. However before long Leamas discovers that he is a pawn in a much crueler game. It was the third le Carre book to be published, but this was the one that made his name. A million miles away from the glamorous world of spies such as James Bond, this relentlessly downbeat book depicts a brutal, morally ambiguous world filled with casual violence, with very little, if anything, distinguishing the “good” from the “bad”. Well worth reading.

Hollywood

Last night I finished reading the novel Hollywood by Charles Bukowski. The story revolves around Henry Chinaski, a hard-drinking author and poet with a fondness for betting on horse-racing. Hired to write a screenplay for a movie, he soon finds himself caught up in the sometimes bizarre and often hilarious world of the Hollywood film industry. Like most of Bukowski’s novels, this one is semi-autobiographical concerning his experiences of writing the screenplay for the 1987 film Barfly. The book is very well-written and often very funny.

Later on I was listening to the first of a six part radio adaptation of Guards! Guards!, a comedy fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett. It’s one of his Discworld novels and involves the City Watch, kind of the Discworld police force, trying to stop an evil plan to unleash hordes of dragons. It was very entertaining. I also heard the first of a two part reading of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, which was very good. I’ve really go into listening to the radio, since I got the digital system.

Today I bought the latest copy of Radio Times on my way into work. It was another very quiet and slow day. As always on a Friday the place was almost deserted, especially by the afternoon. On my way home I got a sausage in batter and some chips for a bit of a change.

Young Sherlock Holmes

Last night was pretty quiet. I was watching the film Young Sherlock Holmes, directed by Barry Levinson. Set in 19th century London, the film depicts Sherlock Holmes (played by Nicholas Rowe) and John Watson (played by Alan Cox) meeting as teenagers at boarding school, where they discover that a number of wealthy, prestigious men (including Holmes’ mentor) have been killed by a strange poison that induces horrific hallucinations. It is a very enjoyable film, and one that I have seen a few times before. Released in 1985, the special effects are still impressive and it’s notable for having the first entirely computer generated character (a knight which leaps out of a stained glass window during a hallucination scene). The film is only very loosely based on the original “Sherlock Holmes” stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (in which it is explicitly stated that Holmes and Watson first met as adults). I used to love the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was young, I read most of them when I was about eleven and I have a book that has all the original stories presented as reproductions of how they first appeared in the 19th century magazines. For my twelth birthday I remember being given a set of tapes of radio plays based on the original stories, but I don’t know what happened to them. I bet they’ve been thrown out, which is a shame because I would really like to listen to them again. I remember watching the TV shows as well.

Later on I was watching a couple of episodes of the third season of The Mighty Boosh, a deeply surreal British comedy series. The funniest of them was the second one I saw in which Vince (played by Noel Fielding) becomes preoccupied with making his legs thinner so he can fit into a pair of drainpipe trousers and sing in a band, while Howard (Julian Barrett) has to overcome his crippling stage fright in order to beat a talking crab for a part in a movie. It’s a very, very strange show!

It was a very quiet day at work today, as it usually is. I got some milk on my way home and when I got in I had a microwaved spaghetti carbonara with a glass of apple juice.