Day 2974

Aka Friday 13th January 2023

A busy, but quiet day in the office. Since the redesign, which cut the number of staff in our section by 25%, we’ve been under the cosh and we’re about a week behind on our work. There is literally not enough of us now to keep up with it. We are getting a few new people in, as not all the post in the new design were filled initially but training them is taking us awhile and away from work. Obvs in a short time they’ll be up to speed and we’ll be able to catch up, but until then it’ll be a pain. At lunch I picked up these two albums:

…’Elvis in Nashville’, which, as the title suggests, collects the recordings Elvis made in Nashvillein over a week or so of the Summer of 1970. And it’s a great collection of songs. It’s nice to have the released tracks in their “pure” form (the songs that were used for ‘Elvis Country (I'm 10,000 Years Old)’ had snippets of the song "I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago" fading in and out between each track, acting as a bridge) and the unreleased takes, rehearsals and jams show how much fun it could be recording with Elvis and how the songs were worked up into their final form. I also like how it's packaged to resemble a reel-to reel tape box …

…while the Jive Bunny album was a bit of impulse purchase, I do have fond memories of their late ‘80s work and hopefully it still stands up…we had a quick few drinks after work and when I got home started watching Season Three of ‘Elementary’:

...and, as it's Friday the 13th I rewatched 'Friday the 13th: A New Beginning':

...my snapshot review is I liked the try at a new direction and the characters, while stereotypes, were not played to broad, everything feels heighted, like Jason via Dario Argento. The dirty hillbillies, the coked out paramedic/orderly, the greasers, “oh baby, oh baby”, the robot, etc. There’s some harsh kills, like the flare in the mouth and the belt, but some are just tame. A lot of not showing much and leaving our imagination to fill in the blanks. It doesn’t hit all of my criteria for a Friday film, but I really enjoy it...and I worked on the cryptic crossword:

…and today’s G2 Crossword:

…Friday’s crossword didn’t go quite as well, as we had to cheat on 4.00% of the clues (one out of 25)! So, still damn fine. The little grey cells didn’t burn themselves out yesterday and we only stumbled on not knowing that a ‘Petrel’ is a ‘small oceanic seabird, comes ashore only to breed’…