The Wire

Last night I was watching the first episode of a TV show called The Wire. It was first shown on the HBO network in the US and was shown on one of the cable channels over here, although it was a channel that I don’t get. Now the show is being shown late at night every weekday. The show is about police officers in Baltimore who face high-level corruption while trying to snare inner-city drug dealers. The show’s dialogue features a lot of at times incomprehensible street slang and police terminology so I think it will take some time to get into it, but from the first episode it’ll be really good.

It was another fairly quiet day at work, but fairly busy. The Script Frenzy challenge starts tomorrow, and I’ll be doing that. It should be pretty interesting. Script Frenzy is run by the same people that do the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November. The aim with Script Frenzy is to write 100 pages of script during the month of April. The script can be a movie screenplay, a play, a TV show, a radio show or a comic-book.

Another Week Begins

Last night was pretty quiet. I watched an episode of That Mitchell and Webb Look, which was pretty funny. I can’t remember what else I was doing, actually. I didn’t really sleep very well last night for some reason.

It was the start of another week at work and it was fairly busy without anything particularly special happening. It was one of those days were there was just not much to write about. It wasn’t particularly good, but neither was it particularly bad, it was just very average really.

I got home at around quarter past six and microwaved some Singapore Noodles which were really nice and I ate that with a glass of orange juice while listening to the latest edition of The Unbelievable Truth, which is a comedy panel show on the radio.

Scary Moments

Last night I was watching the first half of the 100 Greatest Scary Moments which I had seen before but was still fun. One thing that irritated me though was the tendency that the show had to sneer at the older shows and films. Shows like Quatermass and the Pit (which, by the way, is still scary and brilliant today fifty years after it was first broadcast) and movies like Frankenstein may look comical now but when they were first shown they were terrifying and revolutionary.

Today I wasn’t over at my parent’s house and this afternoon I went up to The Tron bar fora couple of drinks with my friend Joe. So that was a really nice change.

Back home I had a platter of chicken, spare rib, mushrooms in batter, onion rings, and potato skins with cheese and bacon, with sour cream on the side. That was really nice!

Milk

Last night I was playing some more on Tomb Raider: Underworld which is a fun game, even if some of the puzzles are really frustrating!

Due to the fact that my Dad was playing in a golf tournament tomorrow I went around to my parent’s house today. On the way we stopped off to get some groceries. The latest issue of Fortean Times (‘The Journal of Strange Phenomena’) had arrived with it’s headline feature being widespread reports of giant flying snakes seen in the skies over America in the 19th century. I had some sushi for my lunch, which made a great change since I really like sushi, but don’t have it very often.

After lunch my mum and I went up to the Filmhouse cinema to see Milk a recent film directed by Gus Van Sant. It was a true-life story which starred Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, who became the first openly gay man to be elected to major public office in the United States when he became a City Supervisor for San Francisco in 1977. It was a really good and very powerful film with a great perfomrance by Sean Penn (for which he won this year’s best Actor Oscar).

Watership Down

Last night I was playing some Dead Space on the Playstation 3 which was a lot of fun! Although it did end up with me shouting swear words at the TV with frustration as I was killed yet again by alien mutants. I also watched a new episode of The Big Bang Theory which was funny.

Today was another busy, but relatively uneventful day at work. When I had to go through to another office to get some more work I had a chance to have a chat with my friend Joe, which was fun. We were mostly talking about fun things to see in Amsterdam, movies, comics and video games. I also had a chance to listen to listen to my iPod including an episode of The Mighty Boosh and two episodes of That Mitchell and Webb Sound, so that made time pass quicker.

This evening I’ve been watching Watership Down which, for a cartoon about talking rabbits, is quite surprisingly violent and dark. It’s a British film from 1978 based on a novel by Richard Adams and follows a bunch of plucky rabbits who are fleeing the destruction of their warren to find safety in the hostile English countryside. I first saw it when I was about five or six and the ghostly Death Rabbit absolutely terrified me when I first saw it!

The Apprentice

Last night was pretty uneventful. I was watching the first in the new series of The Apprentice, which I think is one of the funniest shows around. Later on in the evening I was playing Tomb Raider: Underworld, which was quite a fun game.

It was a pretty busy day at work, but nothing particularly exciting was happening. I managed to listen to a few things on my iPod though. Namely four episodes of That Mitchell and Webb Sound.

Autumn Sonata

Last night I was watching a 1978 film called Autumn Sonata, written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. The story revolves around a woman named Eva (played by Liv Ullmann) who lives in Norway with her husband Viktor (Halvar Bjork), and her severely ill sister Helena (Lena Nyman). When Eva and Helena’s mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) a famous concert pianist, comes to stay with them it’s not long before the tensions between the two of them reach boiling point. The main problem being that Charlotte abandoned her family seven years previously to pursue her career. It’s an unremittingly bleak and intense drama. It was the last major film that Ingrid Bergman ever made, and she does give a really great performance in a role that had echoes with her own personal life (in the fifties she controversially left her family in the USA for Italian film-director Roberto Rosellini a move which pretty much ended her Hollywood career). Apparently though, on set the two Bergmans hated each other. Like many of the Ingmar Bergman films it is really well-made and very well-acted, but very gloomy.

It was another very quiet day at work, which was pretty busy, but not much really interesting was happening. I left at around six and bought a fish supper on my way home, which was quite nice.

Bioshock

Last night I was playing a demo of a video game called Bioshock where you have to fight violent mutants while exploring a submerged city. It was a lot of fun.

Today was a fairly quiet day at work, I had to get a new desk printer installed and it took all day to get it up and running. I had to phone them several times about it, but it eventually got fixed.

I got home at around quarter past six and had a microwaved meal of shrimps, pasta, cheese, spices and cherry tomatoes. It was really nice.

Lost Book Found

Last night I found a book called Incarnate by Ramsey Campbell. I’d actually bought it back in January 1996, but for whatever reason I had never got around to actually reading it, and I found it while I was rooting through a box of old books and videos. I started reading it last night. Ramsey Campbell is a British horror author who was pretty successful at one time. His stories often dealt with supernatural horror in a very realistic and well-described modern urban Britain. There was often quite a surreal and dream-like atmosphere in his writings so the supernatural elements became almost like a natural part of the city landscape.

Of course, today marked the start of another week at work. It was pretty busy but not quite as bad as it was last week.

I got home at around half past six. I had microwaved spaghetti and meatballs for my dinner, which I ate while listening to The Unbelievable Truth, a comedy panel show on the radio.

Young Frankenstein

Last night I was listening to an episode of The Twilight Zone on the radio called “Long Live Walter Jamieson”. It was about a history professor who turns out to have gained his advanced knowledge of the past from the fact that he has not aged for thousands of years. It wasn’t one of the best stories, but not too bad.

I was playing a lot of Dead Space last night. It’s a fun game where you have to explore a spaceship and fight alien monsters. Later on I was watching the 1974 movie Young Frankenstein, directed by Mel Brooks. It stars Gene Wilder as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (although he insists on pronouncing it “Frahnkensteen”), the grandson of the famous mad scientist Victor Frankenstein. However, when he becomes the reluctant heir to his grandfather’s estate in Transylvania, Frederick meets his grandfather’s wisecracking servant Igor (played by Marty Feldman) and discovers the laboratory intact. before long Frederick becomes pre-occupied with trying to give life to his own creature (Peter Boyle). The film is an affectionate spoof of the 1930s horror movies, in particular the Frankenstein films. It is really funny and very stylish.

Today I went along to my parent’s house as usual for a Sunday afternoon, so that was good. My mum seemed happy with her Mother’s Day gifts so I was happy about that!