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| Egypt 1995 |
Despite the fact that it was 13 years ago, I still vividly remember my holiday in Egypt. Mainly because I’ve rarely been out of the country, and because Egypt was just incredible. You really don’t appreciate the scale and the majesty until you have to crane your neck to see the top of the temples.
Anyway, 13 years late, here’s some photo’s on picasa.
can’t sleep. not even the birds are awake yet. both cats think it’s their birthdays being let out without having to spend an hour trying to wake us both up.
i got another 30 photo’s done last night but couldn’t manage the full 60-odd, so i’m going to work through those this morning and finally get the damn egypt photo’s sorted.
6:40am: google’s picasa2 software is really nice, i remember that every time i use it.
7:05am: 18 photo’s to go.
7:45am: Hah! Now they’re all done.
10:28am: Now ploughing my way through the Ireland photo’s, have 30 done, probably another 50 to go or so. (Adding updates to this to avoid annoying people with one line blog entries).
11:06am: 29 to go.
12:30pm: Done. All the Egypt and Ireland photo’s re-scanned at 600dpi and after having been cleaned.
I thought I was finished and I just found another 68 Egypt photo’s in a second album.
When you tell people about an event or situation from your past, maybe as if you’re telling them a story, you sometimes may find yourself adding embellishments or exaggerating certain aspects for dramatic or comic effect. If you do this enough, if you tell the same story enough times, you may find the story is a stronger memory than the reality, in fact, the story becomes the reality.
I’m fully aware of this phenomenon, as I’m sure are most people. I also, it’s sad to say, sometimes play to an audience if something has some humour value. I went to Egypt in 1995 with a couple of friends and I had a really good time, and have some really good memories of that trip. One or two of those memories have become stories I tell my friends and one of them in particular is about the food on the boat. The chef liked to dress the food up (after it was cooked) to either look how it had before it was cooked, or to just make it look more cheery.
I reminisced about how he had dressed chicken up with happy faces, and about the time he served up mutton dressed so we knew it had been a sheep. I was pretty sure about the chickens, but sometimes I doubted my memory about the sheep.
Well, as you know I’ve been scanning my Egypt photos and it looks like I didn’t make this up, which is pleasing. So here for your delectation and delight are chickens with heads and happy faces, and mutton with a tinfoil head and horns, in case there was any doubt about what it might have been.
Enjoy (click them for full size images).
So I’m back to scanning, still going through the Egypt photo’s, determined to get these done tonight.
85 done, 36 to go.
If you can cope with the handy-cam film style then Cloverfield provides an entertaining and high quality mystery drama with excellent acting and yet it doesn’t quite live up to the viral marketting hype.
I thought I’d update you all (since this blog still seems to get most of it’s visitors because of the post about tendonitis of my thumbs) that since I cut back on my EQ play time, and bought a gel wrist wrest, both my wrists and thumbs have been fine.
I still get twinges if I spend too long running anywhere in Lord of the Rings online, but there’s nothing like as much pain as there used to be. Which is a good thing [tm].
Blurgh, have hundreds and hundreds of photo’s, loads of digital photo’s, loads of regular photo’s that have been scanned in previously, sometimes more than once, sometimes getting half way through a batch and giving up.
We really need to sit down and get them all sorted into some semblance of order and get rid of the duplicates!
So I’m late to the party. We watched Cloverfield on TV this evening (it won out over Juno). It’s engaging, fresh and interesting. It wasn’t too tense for me (I’m a wuss) which was pleasing. The dialog and acting were superb I have to say, it really did feel like it was being shot live and the actors didn’t know what was going on.
But (and it’s a big but) I hate the camera work. For me it detracts 100% from the movie going experience. I understand the whole style and the entire intent of the film is wrapped up in that style, but I was just constantly dragged out of the experience by the camera work.
I really do understand how it adds atmosphere, and that the drama of the scenes were enhanced because of the style, but for me, I hate it. There, I said it.
So, Cloverfield, if you can stand the camera work, it’s really good, if you’re like me, it’ll just bug you.
I guess this is sort of a review. I blogged a short while ago that I was reading a Constantine graphic novel (Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits, an anthology), and I promised to maybe let you know if I enjoyed it. So here I am. Dangerous Habits is the comic from which one of the main threads of the Constantine movie is taken, and there are a couple of other minor references in the movie to this anthology. I wanted to read this anthology as my introduction to the Hellblazer world exactly because it was the movie that got me interested in the character.
That was probably a mistake. Dangerous Habits is not, it would appear, a typical collection of Hellblazer stories. It’s enjoyable, and I wanted to finish the material, but I got the immediate feeling that this was really a transition period in Constantine’s life and not a regular story about his world.
The artwork is okay, I’m really not that enthused about comic / graphic novel artwork, I guess I’m more interested in the story and characterisation, hence my tendency towards regular fiction. I found myself focussing on the words, and really not looking that much at the art. Every few pages I would encourage myself to go back and look at the pictures. Maybe I’m so used to having to use my own imagination 100% to form images around the words I’m reading, I’m just not used to having them presented for me. I love movies, so I obviously have no problem watching someone else’s visualisation, but if I’m reading words on a page, I’m really not expecting someone else to present images showing me how things look.
Anyway, I found the writing ok, the overall storyline is interesting and the side-characters were interesting. However, I found both showdowns between Constantine and the Forces of Darkness to be lacklustre and without logic. Supreme evil isn’t necessarily entirely stupid. Of the two showdowns, the first, smaller one was the most absurd and beyond logic and destroyed any credibility the story had for me. The final one simply iced the cake, and although I can see where it was coming from and what it was trying to do, I just didn’t feel it was given enough context for it to be viable.
Now, this may be entirely because I’ve not read anything else in the Hellblazer universe, maybe the way the enemy behaved is entirely in-character and in-keeping with it’s normal behaviour, but if that is the case then Constantine has an easy life.
Overall, maybe I picked the wrong entry into Hellblazer, but this was a disappointing purchase which provided a few hours of diversion but no real feeling of satisfaction.
I have Hellblazer: Bloodlines, another anthology which I’m intending to read as well, and hopefully I’ll see some of the material which causes so much enthusiasm among the fans.