Days 1180 - 1186

Aka Monday 20^th April - Sunday 26th April 2020

 

…home working this week…it’s all settling into a routine of working for 7 and a half hours,, re-watching shows and films I’ve already seen (maybe because it’s familiar and comfortable…I think I’ve watched ‘John Carpenter’s The Thing’ five times since the Lockdown started!) and not reading anything, except for newspapers, or watching new stuff (or if I did it hasn’t stayed in my mind!) or doing much of anything…

…although I did make a couple of edits, one was a very, very simple edit of DJ Food’s Blech mix, which has this great section using dialogue from 'Dark Star'. And it was simply cutting that part out and doing a fade in as the intro. The second was an edit of ‘John Carpenter’s The Thing’ intro music and some dialogue from the film. This one was a little more complicated as the music under the dialogue is different from that of the intro, so it needed a little finessing. Now I’m leaving them for a week or two before listening back to see if they stand up as being at least half decent!

…and I took part in a video team meeting, which was interesting. Our managers what to check in with us and see how we were doing. But it was a little tricky with 15 team members and only four on screen at a time, making it a bit tricky to have a proper chat. And that’s not even worrying about lagging and freezing and at one point my laptop crashed. But it was nice to see and hear everyone. And on Friday a few of us had a virtual trip to the pub via text chat. As it was only a few of us and we didn’t have to worry about lagging and stuff. The only issue is that because your writing instead of talking, sometimes by the time you’ve replied the conversation has moved on! But it was a nice bit of almost normality.

…and I got my copy of ’Hey Amateur’ in the post:

…in which comic book creatives explain how to “go from novice to nailing it nine panels”. And it’s a stellar cast list of writers and artists, including John Alison, Gene HA, Jill Thompson, Rafael Albuquerque, Katie Skelly, Peter Bagge, Lucy Sullivan, Simon Bisley, Gail Simone. And they cover a whole range of topics, from how to eat ridiculously spicy food to ho to letter a comic to how to spot a galaxy to how to destroy the internet. And as a big John Allison fan, his was the first ‘How To…’ I checked out, ‘How To Pack Groceries With Machine-Like Efficiency’, in which Shelley Winters instructs Desmond Fishman in the fine art of packing your food shopping, and it’s a very fine ‘How To…’. 8/10.

…and I took a Long Walk on Saturday:

…and Sunday was Alien Day (the 26^th April is always Alien Day, because the planet they landed on and found the alien ship was designated LV426 and April is the fourth month, so 26th April = 426), so I had to re-watch Alien and Aliens (it got too late for Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, the Alien Versus Predator 1 & 2, Prometheus and Alien Covenant) and they still stand up as scary and thrilling and pulse pounding films.

…and I did this week’s G2 Crosswords:

…and Monday’s crossword gets the week off to a flying start, as we only had to cheat on a twenty-third of the clues (one out of 23). We couldn’t remember that ‘Amnesty’ is an ‘international organisation concerned with human rights’! And we also didn’t get ‘payments’ from ‘acts of defrayal’, the only reason we did get ‘payment’s is that we had gotten all the intersecting letters ‘ P, Y, E, and T and ‘payments’ was the first word we could think of that fitted the gaps…

…and things take a teeny tiny stumble with Tuesday’s crossword, as we had to cheat on an eighth of the clues (three out of 25). The little grey cells were able to steamroller through a good chunk of the clues, but there were a few that needed a bit of chewing over and those three…we just couldn’t puzzle them out. Like we got too stuck on what is ‘time off work’ – it’s holiday, leave, sabbatical – and forgot that the opposite of work is ‘leisure’ (and also Blur’s second-best album). Or too stuck on thinking that ‘sheepish?’ meant something like follower or cattle or zombie, when it actual meant ‘ovine’ aka the technical term for sheep. And we learnt that ‘lodge’ can also mean ‘deposit’…

…Wednesday’s crossword gives us a little stumble as the little grey cells struggle to get a concrete grip on the clues, having to cheat on a fifth of them (four out of 21). We did manage to get most of them, but got “answer-block” on ‘curious’ and ‘wrote’ and couldn’t get ‘strange’ and ‘authored’, but we did learn that ‘Crimea’ is an ‘Ukrainian peninsula’ and that a ‘tanner’ is a ‘pre-decimal sixpenny piece’…

…and Thursday’s crossword was a bit of a nightmare, mainly because I was trying to sort out my online Barclaycard account at the same time. Barclaycard are so, so customer unfriendly, if anyone fancies paying off my card please let me know! I really, really, really hate them. So customer unfriendly. Anyway, we had to cheat on a fifth of the clues (five out of 24) most of which I think I would have gotten if I hadn’t been distracted, but we did learn that an ‘Avocet’ is a ‘long-legged wading bird with upward-curving bill’ and that ‘Karachi’ was ‘Pakistan’s first capital’…

 

…and with Friday’s crossword we’re back on the upswing, as we only had to cheat on a ninth of the clues (two out of 18). The little greys cells just chomped their way through the clues, spitting out answers, with a little help from the intersecting letters. Without getting the ‘w’ from ‘pussy willow’ we would have gone for ‘muscle cramp’ and not ‘tennis elbow’ for ‘inflammation of an arm tendon’. But we just couldn’t get ‘vile’ from ‘abominable’ and ‘per se’ from ‘in and of itself’…

…and Saturday’s crossword ends the week on a high note as we only had to cheat on one of the 19 clues. Again, the little grey cells chomped their way through the clues, bulldozing them down and leaving answers in their wake. And we only fell down on that one clue, ‘low in calories’ because I forgot the golden rule, do the intersecting letters of the answer jibe with the other clues. We went for ‘slimming’, but the answer was ‘slimline’ and we would have known that if we had considered whether the ‘g’ in ‘slimming’ fitted with the answer to the clue ‘ok, fine!’, ‘agreed’, which it didn’t…roll on next week…