Aka Monday 15th February - Sunday 28th February 2021
Lockdown III is still on, although we now have a road map out of it…and I’ll be able to get my haircut in about a month and a half! And I’m still running behind, so let’s get this bad boy done! This fortnight I brought:
‘Saint Maud’ (which I haven’t watched yet, but have heard good things about it), ‘Jiu Jitsu’ (which I thought would be a fun b-movie, with Nic Cage able to go full Nic Cage, but he doesn’t and the film is a bit of a mess and a bit meh)…
…and this month’s Mojo (mainly for the CDs, which were okay, but nothing special) and fortnight’s Private Eye (ever since I stopped commuting into London I’ve lost a lot of reading time and I find myself not being able to finish a copy of Private Eye before the next issue comes out, the same is true with my daily newspaper. Unfortunately without the hour the commute afforded me, I’ve just got too much competition for my reading attention)…
…and the postman delivered a lot of goodies:
...my copies of ’Sympathy for the Devil’, John Carpenter’s ‘Lost Themes III: Alive After Death’ and The Stooges ‘The Stooges’, ’Once & Future’ #16 and ‘American Vampire 1976’ #5, Rachael Smith’s ‘Hourly Comic Day 2021’, ’True War Stories’, ’Avatar: The Last Airbender – Toph Beifong’s Metalbending Academy’ and ’Music for Soundtracks Vol. 1’ by Richard Norris. I’ve listened to ‘Lost Themes III: Alive After Death’, while out on a walk, and it was enjoyable, typical Carpenter basically, moody and brooding sythns, although with a bit more guitars than the previous albums (I think), although I realised later on that I had my Walkman on shuffle, and I’m not sure if it sounds better when listened to in order! At the other extreme I couldn’t listen to the 2-CD edition ‘The Stooges’ (with John Cale mixes and full versions of some tracks) on the walk, as when I tried to play it on my laptop, and to rip it to my Walkman, it was covered in static and distortion, and not the sort of distortion that you expect from a Stooges album! But the CDs work fine on hi-fi’s, so I don’t think the CDs are faulty. Very odd, probably some kind of copy-protection. But from the hi-fi listen the alternative mixes don’t sound that different from the official versions. And I read Rachael Smith’s ‘Hourly Comic Day 2021’, which was an absolute joy to read, chock full of humour and humanness and really relatable, and ’Sympathy for the Devil’, a fun retelling of Lucifers fall, that is also full of humour and humanness and relatable, and I’m looking forward to the next issue…
…also re-read ‘Apocalyptigirl: An Aria For The End Times’, this edition has bonus content, early story attempts in the Apocalyptigirl universe, and I read ‘Firefly: Watch How I Soar’ & ‘Firefly: The Sting’, both of which do a damn good job in capturing the feel of the TV show, while playing to the strengths of being a comic/graphic novel, with some fabulous art work, especially ‘Watch How I Soar’ which focus on Wash, telling stories across his life.
…went for a Long Walk on the 20th (but no Long Walk on the 27th as I was feeling knackered, and decided to rest and recuperate instead):
…and last Saturday I spent way too long trying to sort out my mp3 player, I had transferred a couple of albums to it, as normal, but they showed up as drives on the mp3 player and not as music files, and they wouldn’t play. After an hour or so of googling, I had to copy all the working music files (and the mp3 player’s software) to my laptop, reformat the mp3 player, and then re-transfer the music back to the mp3 player, just to get it back to normal!
…and I did this fortnight’s G2 Crosswords:
Week 1
…and Monday’s crossword gets the week off to a grand start, as we only had to cheat on a tenth of the clues (two out of 19). The little grey cells are keeping up last week’s excellent performance, knocking over the clues like skittles are scoring multiple strikes. And we learnt that ‘Lyme Regis’ is ‘where the French lieutenant’s Woman lived on the Dorset Coast’ (we also learnt that Lyme Regis is in Dorset😊) and that a Gibbon is an ‘Arboreal ape – English Historian, d.1794’…
…and Tuesday’s crossword goes even better, as we only had to cheat on one of the 24 clues. We couldn’t get ‘erstwhile; from ‘former’, but the rest of the clues just tumbled like…things…that tumble easily…and we learnt that ‘voluble’ means ‘fluent in speech’ (we only got it by guessing the missing letters, deciding what fitted best with the intersecting letters)…
…and the same happens with Wednesday’s crossword, a couple of answers, like ‘Desdemona’ took a little dragging from the back of the little grey cells, but the majority of the 23 clues tumbled easily, and we only had to cheat on one of them. We didn’t get ‘palatable’ from ‘tasty’, but we did guess, from the intersecting letters and the hyphen, that a ‘large metal gong’ is called a ‘tam-tam’. And ‘infamy’, for 6 down, did set the little grey cells replaying the ‘Infamy, infamy…they’ve all got it in for me’ scene…
…and things take a little tumble with Thursday’s crossword, we had to cheat on nearly a fifth of the clues (four out of 25), which is better than I first thought. It did seem a tricker grid, but the little grey cells knuckled down and ground out a reasonable score, only missing a couple off obvious ones. And we learnt that the ‘mark used over ‘a’ or ‘o’ in Portuguese’ is called a ‘tilde’…
…there’s a little tick up with Friday’s crossword, taking us back to normal, as we only had to cheat on an eighth of the clues (three out of 24). 13 down was a little tricky, ‘salty liquid bead’, which stumped us for ages, till it just twigged, it’s a ‘teardrop’! And we learnt that ‘Eritrea’ is an ‘African country that won independence from Ethiopia in 1993’, that ‘largo’ means music with a flexible tempo and that ‘largo’ means ‘(musically) slow and dignified’…
…and Saturday’s crossword ends the week on a bum note, as we had to cheat on nearly a quarter of the clues. Mainly down to too many easy misses, like not getting ‘stroke’ from ‘caress with the hands’, but we did learn that a ‘scut’ is a ‘shorttail e.g. of a deer’ and that the ‘Atacama Desert’ is a ‘600-mile arid plateau of northern Chile’…
Week 2
…and Monday’s crossword gets the week off to a damn fine start, as we only had to cheat on a ninth of the clues (three out of 26).And we have to give a nod to popular culture, like ‘Nam flicks, Andrew Lloyd Webber and The Beach Boys, which enabled us to get ‘put-put’ from ‘sound made by a small petrol engine’ or ‘sloop’ from sailing boat with one mast’ or ‘Cats’ from ‘musical based on TS Eliot poems’. And we learnt that ‘Gore Vidal’ was the ‘American author of Myra Breckinridge, d.2012’ and that a ‘church residence’ is called a ‘parsonage’…
…Tuesday’s crossword went even better, as the little grey cells powered through all the 24 clues without need for any cheating, like an invincible Mario rushing through Koopas. A tip-top performance…
…Wednesday’s crossword goes almost as well, we only had to cheat on a twelfth of the clues (two out of 24). Mario’s invincibility is wearing off! But we did learn that ‘plainsong’ is an ‘unaccompanied liturgical chant’…
…and things took a massive tumble with Thursday’s crossword. We had to cheat on a third of the clues (seven out of 21). I think the little grey cells were a bit burnt out, maybe. We did miss some obvious answers, like we went for ‘get your kit off’ for ‘undress completely’ instead of ‘get ones kit off’ or ‘koed’ for ‘knockout’ instead of ‘kayo’. But we did learn that ‘scherzo’ means ‘(musically) a playful movement’, that a ‘stack of dried grass’ is called a ‘hayrick’ and that a ‘female Ruff’ is called a ‘Reeve’…
…luckily things pick back up with Friday’s crossword, we only had to cheat on a twelfth of the clues (two out of 23). Although I think that the little grey cells aren’t 100% back to full strength as we missed ‘mischief’ from ‘bad behaviour’, but we did learn that the Colorado beetle is a potato pest…
…and Saturday’s crossword ends the week on an up note, as we only had to cheat on an eleventh of the clues (two out of 21). It took a bit longer to get through the grid, but the little grey cells did it and we dodge some of the traps, like for ‘pulse’ at first we thought it meant ‘pulse’ as in heartbeat, but then the lightbulb went on and we knew it was a trap and the answer was ‘bean’. And we learnt that ‘laic’ is ‘of those who aren’t clergy’ and that ‘food cooked or severed in a roll’ is ‘roulade’…
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