Aka Monday 18th
May - Sunday 24th May 2020
…and we’re back in
the office this week…and it’s pretty much the same routine as before, get all
the work scanned on so people can work on it at home, and do the work that
can’t be done at home and then leave around lunchtime, get home and do the rest
of the shift working from home…but it is nice to get out of home, to get a
change of scenery and speak to people who I’m not related to! Non work-related
things that happened this week include:
…buying the latest
Lego Star Wars magazine, well two copies actually, for the free minifigures, I
got two copies because the minifigures are of troopers, rather than main
characters, it’s better to have two of them, as just one looks lonely (although
the Imperial Snowtrooper looks a little Klan-like with just the hood and no
jacket/cloak!):
…my Mum asked me to
take £100 out of her account for her and I said no problem, easy peasy, plus it
means I can pop back to the local Co-op. The first cash machine I go to is
outside the Co-op, but it isn’t doing receipts, but that’s okay because there
are three other cash machines on my way home.
The next cash machine I try takes
my Mum’s card and accepts my request for £100 and then spends the next few
minutes just whirling and then it announces that it isn’t working and gives me
back the card. But with no indication on rather the request has gone through or
not and whether my Mum has been stiffed for £100 and we are going to have to
spend ages getting the money back. The third cash machine takes the card, but
before I can tap in an amount it spits the card out and announces that it isn’t
working anymore. The fourth cash machine I try works fine and from the receipt
it looks like the second machine transaction didn’t go through and we won’t
need to mess about getting the money back. Which is nice.
…on the way into
work I saw this sign:
…and it made me
wonder if the youth no longer use the word ‘lush’ for drunks and alcoholics. Is
no-one watching or reading Noir anymore! 😊
…and more new comics
arrived:
…which makes things
feel a tad, a mite bit more normal…
…I’d done some extra
hours Monday to Thursday, so that I can finish early on Friday and enjoy the
nice weather and relax in the garden for the afternoon, which I did:
…I enjoyed some
drinks, some crisps and reading ‘Rick and Morty’ #55 to #60, which is the end
of the current series and in which we see the end of a Rick and Morty (or do
we???):
…the main stories
were written by Kyle Starks, illustrated by Kyle Starks and Marc Ellerby,
coloured by Sarah Stern, and lettered by Crank! and the back-ups were written
by Magdalene Visaggio and Terry Blas, illustrated by Ian McGinty and Benjamin
Dewey, coloured by Sarah Stern and Benjamin Dewey, and lettered by Crank! And
they capture the feel and tone of the show spot on. With plenty of action and
humour and pathos. 8/10.
…on Saturday I went
for a Long Walk:
… and my copy of
Alex de Campi’s ’The Scottish Boy’ arrived:
…a tale of Knights
and love, which I back on Unbound ages ago, because like the blurb says Alex
writes good stuff. The only problem is that my to-read pile already has a few
books on it already and when I say a few I really mean a few dozen!
…watch finished
watching ‘Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries’, and it was a bit sad to reach the
end, but at least there was the follow-up film, ‘Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears’, to enjoy. And it is a fun enjoyable romp involving exotic locations and long hidden secrets (all in the grand tradition of the Peter Ustinov Christie films, like 'Death on the Nile'):
…which spurred me to also watched ‘King Kong’, ‘The Rocketeer’, ‘The Shadow’, ‘The Mummy’ and ‘My Favourite Brunette’, all of which shared the same aesthetic:
‘King Kong’ is about a film crew filming an exotic adventure movie, but
things don’t go according to plan and they end up travelling to a faraway
island, finding and capturing a massive a gorilla and bringing it back to New
York to put it on display, where things don’t go according to plan. ‘The
Rocketeer’ is about a hotshot flier finding a rocket pack and keeping it out of
the hands of Nazi’s, all while save the girl (and being saved by the girl). ‘The
Shadow’ is about a bad man who has been taught mysterious powers to fight evil
and his battle with against the son of Genghis Khan. ‘The Mummy’ is about a
bunch of adventurers who accidently awaken a Mummy and their attempts to stop
the Mummy from resurrecting his beloved and taking over the World. And ‘My
Favourite Brunette’ is about a wannabe detective getting involved with a real
case of kidnapping and maybe even murder! And there is a bit of a pattern
there, the films are mostly set in the late ‘20’s to early ‘40’s and mostly
with a touch (or more) of the supernatural. And the good guys always
(eventually) win and there’s a strong element of tongue-in-check, on at the
very least the tongue is in the vicinity of the check. And there’s probably an
element of escaping from the problems of the modern day into the certainty of
the fictional past. Plus, all five are top-notch entertainment and well worth
watching.
…and I did today’s
G2 Crossword:
…and Monday’s crossword gets the week off to a dire start as
we had to cheat on a quarter of the clues (six out of 24). We just couldn’t get
a good grip on this grid, maybe it’s the due to the hot weather, making it
difficult to get a good night’s sleep and putting the little grey cells out of
step? Whatever the cause, we did learn that the ‘Ural’ is a ‘river flowing
through Russia and Kazakhstan to the Caspian’, that ‘Anathema’ is the ‘formal
curse leading to excommunication’ and that the ‘leading European imperial
dynasty from the 13th century to 1918’ was the ‘Hapsburg’ dynasty…
…Tuesday’s crossword went a tad better, we just had to cheat
on a sixth of the clues (four out of 23). After the Monday’s terrible
performance, the little grey cells have rallied themselves a bit, although we
should have gotten ‘crop up’ and ‘outcry’, from the clues ‘appear’ and
‘exclamations of opposition’ respectively and we went for ‘smell’ and not
‘scent’ for ‘get wind of’ and we learnt that a ‘coppice’ is a ‘dense growth of
small trees and bushes’. Is this the start of an upswing? Let’s see…
…could be, Wednesday’s crossword goes really well, we just
had to cheat on a thirteenth of the clues (two out of 25) And it would have
gone slightly better if we had gone for ‘thorny’ rather than ‘thorns’ for
‘causing difficulty (like a bed of roses?), but we did learn that ‘Palermo’ is
a ‘city in Sicily’. I think the key to this improvement is down to taking our
time and using the intersecting letters as a double check on our guesses…
…or maybe not, as Thursday’s crossword took a slight dip and
we were back to cheating on a sixth of the clues (four out of 24). Two of those
four were silly misses, we should have gotten ‘wolf’ from ‘eat hastily’ and
‘escort’ from ‘accompany’, but we did learn that ‘Christchurch’ is ‘New
Zealand’s second largest city’ and that the ‘Yellowhammer’ is a ‘species of
European bunting’, a so-so performance, but still, just about, okay…
…and we bounce back with Friday’s crossword, only having to
cheat on an eleventh of the clues (two out of 22). Maybe the sunny weather has
the little grey cells amped up and on tip-top performance? Or it’s down to
taking our time and double checking that our answers make sense with
intersecting letters. And we learnt that ‘extortionate payment demanded from a
tenant’ is called ‘rack rent’ and that ‘blood poisoning from a local bacterial
infection’ is called ‘toxaemia’…
…and things take a tumble with Saturday’s crossword, as our
performance was affected by a hangover (from enjoying Friday’s good weather, in
the garden, with a few Blue Lagoons and some Rick and Morty comics), meaning
that we had to cheat on a fifth of the clues (five out of 26). We did miss out
a couple of obvious answers, such as ‘ham-fisted’ from ‘clumsy’ and ‘personnel’
from ‘staff’, but we did learn that a ‘demitasse’ is a ‘small coffee cup’, that
‘entr’acte’ means ‘interlude’ and that a ‘tournedos’ is a ‘small round thick
beef fillet’. A bit of a meh week, hopefully next week will go better…
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