Days 532 – 538

Aka Monday 16^th July to Sunday 22^nd July.

This was a bit of a lazy week, partly due to the really, really hot weather making doing anything a tiring, sweaty, will sapping bit of work.

Thrice this week I was up early enough, when it was still cool outside, to go on my morning work, but by 8am or 9am it’s too hot to be out walking 9km, which means I’ve had to skip the walks and I’m getting out of the routine of doing them:

On Wednesday I had my second dentist appointment, in which the crown was fitted. It feels much lighter than the filling and it has that ‘new’ feel to it and it feels a little alien/odd in my mouth, but that should settle down in a few days. After the crown fitting I popped into London Town for this weeks New Comic Book Day haul:

I also got delivery of the latest Sarah Horrocks comics (which have been great and you should get them too):

And I brought some DVDs – ‘The Stone Tape’, ‘The Treasure of Sierra Madre’, ‘Man Bites Dog’ and the BBC series of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy’:

…and at the weekend I had a double bill of ‘Suspiria’ and ‘The Stone Tape’, the common thread being commentary tracks by Kim Newman. 

‘Suspiria’ is an odd film, it’s got a relatively light story, but it’s told in a grand and expressive way, that gives you a creeping sense of dread till the climax where our heroine faces the bad guys. If on my laptop the colours of the shots and their framing of the shots were impressive and awesome. It’s almost like it’s a fairy story that has come to live, which is kinda appropriate as our heroine is a stranger in a strange land and the baddies are a coven of witches. 

‘The Stone Tape’ is a ‘70’s BBC TV movie about a research team, part of a British electronics firm, who find out that a room in their new building is haunted. They stop their work into a new recording format and investigate the haunting, which leads them to believe that the haunting is just a recording in the stone work of the room (hence the title, ‘The Stone Tape’), but it’s not that simple and there are terrible consequences for the team. It’s a good story, well filmed and acted, but the British firm is in competition with a Japanese firm and there are jarring references to beating Nippon and one of the characters does a racist impersonation of the competitors, at a party he does the “funny” accent and pulls back his eye lids to look “slanted”.

I saw this slightly odd sign in Southend Town, I know that it’s important to have accessible public toilets, but I didn’t know that they were such a big draw:

I added a third Ghostbuster (Egon Spengler) to my Ghostbusters tableau (but I still haven’t seen a Winston Zeddemore on his own, he’s always part of a bigger, and pricier, toy set, which I can’t justify buying): 

I also did the G2 crossword: