"A beer and some convo"
Well this evening’s entertainment was an eye-opener and no mistake.
Tom had managed to finagle a couple of free seats to see “Aluminum“[sic]. In the end me, Tom, P&C went. Tom’s freebies came from a guy called Matt who turned up with 6 free tickets and 2 companions so we had to buy ourselves 1 ticket. Cue Tom using his student discount.
The show should really have been at the Palladium but as this was Nottingham it was not to be.
We had no idea what to expect really. We’d been lead to believe it was “a bit like Stomp“. Other descriptions mentioned circus arts, illusion and performance. So without a clear definition we went in a bit blind. Magic – just how shows should be. So we steeled ourselves and headed in.
We ended up in the 3rd row of the stalls. And I was right in the middle. Top seat!
The set up was a few ducts dangling from the roof and loads of smaller ducts coiled up on the floor.
It started with some people in weird silver flight attendant style mode telling us not to smoke, drink, eat ore use our phones. And they set the mood as dark and foreboding – lots of low rumbling noise and industrial sounds going on.
Then the dangling ducts started bouncing up and down a bit and throwing themselves around. At the same time it was like the floor came alive and the tangle of smaller ducts started pushing itself off the stage. This bit was cool and slightly spooky. I couldn’t see exactly what was going on and having inanimate objects just pushing themselves out into the world made for an intriguing start.
This was looking good.
Then a piece of fat duct came out (clearly with a performer inside) and another, slightly narrower tube came on as well. These two then “got to know each other” with a bit of mildly pornographic dancing (well the most pornographic dancing 2 tubes can do) and then headed off stage. Shortly to be replaced by a tiny version, clearly the baby, inching its way across stage front. This led to a bizarre piece of puppetry and singing and dance which just seemed wrong to me.
The gloomy and worrying soundtrack vanished into a mess of Bohemian Rhapsody and various classical pieces all mashed up together. The puppetry wasn’t that hot either, poor considering they only had to manipulate a couple of tubes.
And the mood was gone and they never really got it back.
But there were some perfectly decent set pieces. There was a nice bit with a huge inflatable man (made from balloons). And some audience participation with some bouncy balloon stuff (not as fun as Slava’s though).
But the main entertainment for me was just watching the sheer amount of stuff not working properly. At one point they fired bits of foil into the crowd but loads got stuck in a lighting rig. Another bit was using a huge sheet of foil. This tore twice and then got stuck in the same lighting rig. Comedy gold it was.
An audience volunteer came up at one point. He was apparently wrapped in foil and then eaten by a giant duct. Shame was that it was clear that he’d gone before they finished wrapping him and then when he was surrounded by dancing ducts (yes that is as odd as it sounds) the figure that was supposed to be him was standing stock still; clearly a fake as it wasn’t moving a muscle, not even breathing. But then the finale of that little piece was done in the dark but you could still see a stagehand moving around (ironic really). Really poorly done bit of stage magic. And the killer was that the guy never re-appeared. So it wasn’t even the classic disappear – re-appear trick. He just vanished and was never referred back to again.
More stuff didn’t physically work (a cannon failed to shoot its load into the crowd). Other stuff broke (one tube got caught on a light fitting and, alloyed with the dancer not noticing for a while, it unravelled). At one point 4 performers just had to stand and wait for a tube to drop down from the roof while managing to stand in the right place to end up inside said tube. 3 of the 4 managed this leaving the last to scrabble somewhat to get in hers – very ungainly and a bad place to miss your trick. Just poor at times.
But the real turd on the wedding cake was an utterly pointless catwalk section. For reasons known only to themselves the cast stopped doing the inventive stuff with tubes and props and wandered onto stage with a variety of sub-”Buck Roger’s in the 25th Century” “futuristic” outfits, posed for a bit then wandered off. The ultimate outfit was some woman dolled up like a tall ship complete with rigging and sails – awful. The naked bloke wearing a tube was quite entertaining though.
But even that wasn’t the worst of this bit. Towards the finale of this catwalk was a tanned bloke (one might say he was bronzed) coming on with a really obvious “this is mine, isn’t it ace?” face. Completely out of place with the rest of the show and as far as I can tell this whole section was included just to show off some 6th form “fashion” ideas. Truly terrible interlude. It took a brass neck to dare to put this bit in.
It may sound like I’ve not enjoyed this show. That’s not true. I had a massive smile on my face through a lot of it, the rubbish didn’t really tarnish the event too much. The catwalk bit sorely tested my patience but otherwise the exuberance of the piece made up for some of the apparently amateur preparation. And the mistakes themselves were funny enough to compensate for their being there.
In all if I’d paid full price then I’d be annoyed now. As it is though, for a fiver it was definitely worth the trip. (Tom’s discount meant our one ticket cost seven-tin pounds).
No circus, nothing like Stomp, but nothing like I’ve seen before.
Paying for parking was a pain though as the machine wouldn’t accept any coppers.
Then we came home only to find that the ^**&ing Highways Agency had closed off the junction 21 exit without bothering to tell anyone before J22 meaning I (and no doubt plenty of others) had to drive the 20 mile round trip to get back to the North bound junction. Bastards! I shall be writing a very angry letter tomorrow wondering if they’ll reimburse the £5 worth of petrol it cost me.
This is one of the most amazing pieces of writing I’ve ever seen. It’s a creation vs evolution thing so don’t bother clicking if it’s not your bag.
The author seems to know enough to string sentences together but logic and reason seem anathema to him. It really is some of the most startling bollocks I’ve ever read.
Top bits:
- Evolutionists are largely incompetent
- They are largely unproductive leaches on the productive members of society, else they are totally destructive.
I love the first part of that. Nothing like a radical generalisation to get you started.
The second part is even better. “Largely unproductive leaches” must include huge numbers of scientists in the world, many managing to produce the scientific breakthroughs that for instance mend more damaged humans than prayer ever did.
Then we get to “What should be done with evolutionists?”
Well the obvious answer would be nothing. But this guy’s first (note FIRST) response is
“Labor camps. Their fellow believers were high on these. But, my position would be that most of them have lived their lives at, or near the public trough. So, after their own beliefs, their life should continue only as long as they can support themselves in the camps.”
And if that’s not radical enough for you try:
“Require them to wear placards around their neck, or perhaps large medallions which prominently announce “Warning: Evolutionist! Mentally Incompetent – Potentially Dangerous.”
Marvellous this humility taught by Jesus eh?
I’m watching the Olympics closing ceremony at the mo. It’s all very pretty and that.
But the Beeb commentators are wittering just as much about London in 4 years and what the “legacy” of these games are.
How about “letting us see all these other sports”? You know stuff like archery, cycling, swimmiing, rowing and more.
I know that there are some competitions shown but they’re few and far between and you get bugger all of the backgrounds to the competitors or any detail about what is involved in the training and preparation, who are the favourites and why. Etc etc…
Give us some stuff about water polo, Greco-Roman wrestling and that. People will hate lots of it but the more people inspired to get active in any form of sport the better. And the BBC is the perfect vehicle for opening up the world of sport to us Brits. Show us new stuff, inspire people and some of it will be entertaining.
When I was a kid I wanted to do gymnastics. Couldn’t at my school as it was a “girl’s sport” (as stated by my PE teacher). So I had to spend my PE lessons standing in the cold whilst people played football (or rarely, rugby) around me. So I ended up this unhealthy, sport phobic lump you see today.
Now if I’d had some gymnastic training back then maybe I’d be fitter and more active now.
I’m not a great one for competition but I do like watching sports (some of them anyway).
Get to it Beeb – 4 years of getting us aware of all the weird and wonderful sports that are in the games should provide a cheap and entertaining thread of programmes. I’ll be watching.
[edit: Oh my word Boris Johnson is there and he may have to speak. Everyone else is immaculate, he's upper class shabby and has amazing legs (valgus deformity it looks like). Oh my word indeed he gets to wave a flag around and a fiver that he drops it.]
A while ago I talked about saving money on bills n’that.
I sent British Gas my gas meter reading as I expected it to be substantially lower than their estimate. It was. Hoorah!
They’ve finally sent me a bill and it makes interesting reading.
There are 4 time periods on it.
They are:
So what they’ve actually done is carry on using their own estimated readings anyway and my supplying of the actual figure has had absolutely no influence on their bill or charges whatsoever.
If we are to believe their figures then they are “estimating” that in one 7 day period I “used” 52% more gas in that one week in summer than I did in the height of winter for 3 months. And just over 93% of the gas used for the first 6 months of the year.
I spy a grumpy phone call on Tuesday. Bastards.
It’s the time of year for GCSE results again.
Which means it’s time for the annual “exams are getting easier” argument.
Are they?
From what I’ve seen…maybe.
It may not be that exams are getting easier but I heard something yesterday that convinced me that they’re easier to pass.
Radio 1 did a thing where some of their presenters did the hardest version of the GCSE maths paper.
Oh and quell surprise. The results were startlingly shit.
All of them except 1 failed. They even had their percentages read out (although I could guess that none of them actually know what a percentage is), 7%, 11% and one even managed the feat of getting “nil”. Now to manage this last would have involved not understanding enough to write your name in the “name” box on the paper.
And oh how they laughed. “Well done us we are so dim, ah but we’re friendly so that’s alright”.
Fucking imbeciles! Let’s just celebrate the fact that we have a nation of thick as pig shit people doing well shall we? Fucking hell.
The worst of it was the woman who “passed”. She got a grade C. With 26% correct.
What the fuck! 26% is a pass nowadays? For christ’s sake what the hell is going on here?
No bloody wonder that new uni students don’t have a clue, uni courses are adding more and more “remedial years” to their courses, new employees can’t write an understandable letter, and nurses struggle to figure out that if an EMG chart goes at 60 squares a minute through the machine then 1 square takes 1second.
Oh my word.
Send me a bloody paper. I haven’t done maths at that level for 21 years but I seriously doubt I’d struggle to make an A* grade considering the pathetic easiness of the sample questions in the papers this morning.
And stop fucking celebrating the fact that you’re shit at things. It doesn’t help.
Not 12 hours after my first CSers leave I have another request!
Now do I really fancy having 2 20 year old german girls staying at my house this weekend?
Hmmm.
It’s a toughy.
[edit: pah! They've decided that Leicester isn't the cool place to go. (Either that or someone else responded sooner)]
OK strike that.
They’ve been. I’ve broken my CouchSurfing cherry.
Hyun, her boyfriend and a mate of theirs showed up at mine around 6.30 yesterday evening.
I actually had no idea how many people would be coming. My profile on CS.com says I can deal with 2 surfers at a time; Hyun’s original request didn’t state a number so I assumed 1. Her next message said “we” so I assumed more but I only discovered how many at, ooh about 6.30 yesterday.
Her English was good but the 2 guys didn’t speak it very well but they gamely had a go. Shame they wanted to talk about football. I’ve come to expect football talk. It’s an instant way of finding common ground and heaven knows there’s precious little of that between S.Korea and the UK.
I didn’t know what their plans were for the evening but it seems that they’d more or less stepped off their plane and got the bus here so they were more than a tad tired.
But they still made me a proper noodle dinner with weird fish and flattened sheets of proper seaweed – was actually rather nice.
Shortly after that they disappeared off to sleep.
I discovered this morning that they’d left my stove on overnight. I guess that gas hobs aren’t common there. They’d obviously tried to turn it off but didn’t figure the “press it in and turn” move to proper turn things off. Sigh, there goes my frugality re gas for the month.
Oh and their bedroom light has been on all day.
Tsk.
But all in all they were a nice bunch of folk and they’ve presented me with a rather swish looking bottle of Korean alcohol (rice wine I think).
[edit: just remembered their next bit of journey. I wanted to put this in because it's a beaut (as Tan would say). They're off up to Edinburgh. That's cool but they're going on a bus. That wouldn't be completely awful but they decided to go for cheap rather than practical. So they got the bus this afternoon. To London. Their bus will go this evening from there to Edinburgh. Urgh. What a bizarre route.]