Aka Monday 9th
March - Sunday 15th March 2020
This week:
…a little group of
us from work went to see Stewart Lee’s new show ‘SNOWFLAKE/TORNADO’, which is
described as a “Double-bill of two new 60-ish minute sets, back to back nightly
from “the world’s greatest living stand-up” (Times). Tornado questions a
shipwrecked Stew’s position in the comedy marketplace after Netflix mistakenly
lists his show as “reports of sharks falling from the skies are on the rise
again. Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard is safe.” What is anything? Is it this? And
Snowflake questions our worth in a collapsing society which no longer shares
the liberal values we have for so long been keen to be seen to espouse, in a
fairy-tale landscape of winter wonder. Tons of fun!” …
…and it was a great
show (and the first Stewart Lee show I’ve seen live), very funny, very poignant,
lots of off-the-cuff moments (or moments that appeared off-the-cuff), lots of
audience baiting and a few Covid-19 references and how it was impacting the
show. And a tense moment when someone used a camera phone and Mr Lee had to
stop mid-sentence to leave the stage and confiscate the phone. And the stage
set was great as well, spare but ornate at the same time, and providing a
visual joke/summing up of the show (don’t want to say too much in case I give
it away). 10/10. I really hope that the show (Covid-19 permitting) filmed, just
so I can compare and contrast, see what improv became part of the show and what
improv was actually a planned part of the show (Mr Lee has commented before on
how some improv is so successful on the night that it gets incorporated into
the “proper” show).
…WHO, on Wednesday
(11th March 2020), declared the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak to be
a pandemic…which puts a downer on things and sets mental gears raring on what
supplies are needed and when they should be gotten (get them to early and
they’ll be out of date before you have a chance or need to use them)...
…on Thursday I made
a Lego Mr Freeze:
… and I picked up my
New Comic Book Day bounty:
…and got the latest
issue of Q, partly for the Tame Impala interview and the article on what
happens to band members after the glory days, but mostly for the Andrew Weatherall tribute (still feels weird that he died and is no longer with us):
…here’s a picture of
Flimsy (from Rachael Smith’s ‘Flimsy’s Mewsings’) out in the wild aka my
office:
…there was no Long
Walk on Saturday as I was babysitting for the morning…so I bumped it to Sunday:
…I also spent Sunday
trying to catch up and get back up to date with this blog…and I picked up my
National Lottery winnings of £2.30 and a free lucky dip…and as of 3.22pm on
Sunday I weighed 107.0kg, which means that I’ve lost 7kg since the start of the
year and 10kg since this time last year (12th March 2019) (but in
the week since I wrote that, thanks to Covid-19 and social
distancing/self-isolating, I’ve put on nearly 2kg, although I have been doing
more weights and walking, so maybe some of the extra weight is muscle and not
fat?)…
…and I did this
week’s G2 Crosswords:
…and Monday’s crossword gets the week off to a pretty good
start (especially compared to last week!). The little grey cells and I only had
to cheat on an eighth of the clues (three out of 23) and a couple of those –
‘inane’ from ‘senseless’ and ‘occupy’ from ‘inhabit’ – we might have gotten, if
we’d taken a little longer to chew them over. But we did learn that ‘Thames’ is
a ‘shipping forecast area’. We’ve taken the Sunday to recoup and recover and,
fingers crossed, we’re back to match fitness…
…and Tuesday’s crossword dips a little, we had to cheat on a
sixth of the clues (four out of 25). And if I hadn’t made a couple of
boneheaded mistakes it would have been a lot better. For ‘Christmas (4)’ I was
sure it was either ‘Xmas’ or ‘Noel’, and I went for ‘Noel’, but I’d completely
forgotten about ‘Yule’, which was the right answer. And I misread ‘spicy
Mexican sauce’ as ‘spicy Mexican sausage’ and spent way too long trying to
remember how to spell ‘chorizo’ and whether it was Mexican or not! But I did
learn that a ‘Basilica’ is a ‘large place of worship’…
…Wednesday’s crossword went a little worse, with having to
cheat on a fifth of the clues (four out of 21). Which is much better than I
thought it would go, after the first pass on the grid we only had a handful of
answers, and we weren’t all that confident about all of them. But from small
acorns great oaks grow and did manage, in the end, to get most of the answers.
Although I’m still not exactly sure how the answer ‘cubbed’ relates to clue
‘gave birth to little lions, perhaps’, does it mean a bed for a cub?...
…and things pick back up with Thursday’s crossword, as we
only had to cheat on an eighth of the clues (three out of 24). And we should
have gotten those three as well – ‘debauched’ from ‘morally corrupt’, we went
for ‘depraved’, ‘abolish’ from ‘do away with’, and ‘refined’ from ‘urbane’ –
maybe we should have chewed those clues over for a while longer…
…and they pick up even further with Friday’s crossword, as
we only had to cheat on an eighteenth of the clues (one out of 18). We didn’t
know that ‘today’s name for Hellespont’ is ‘Dardanelles’, we’d thought that
Hellespont referred to a demon or devil or maybe a term for Hell or Hades. But
no, it’s actually “is a narrow, natural strait and internationally significant
waterway in northwestern Turkey that forms part of the continental boundary
between Europe and Asia, and separates Asian Turkey from European Turkey.”. You
learn something new every day…
…and Saturday’s crossword ends the crossword week on a high
as we only had to cheat on a ninth of the clues (two out of 19), which was a
bit of a surprise as on the first pass we only got a handful of answers, and
some of them we weren’t 100% sure about. But a little bit of perseverance and
we got all but two! And we learnt that ‘traduced’ means ‘libelled’ and were
reminded that ‘choppy’ is a synonym for ‘a little rough’. Roll on next week’s
grids…
