Aka Monday 20th
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 26th 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…
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