Skyfall weeperoonie: a small but delicious wager

I will give a small but reasonably generous prize of chocolate (or fruit if you would prefer) to the first person who can correctly guess which one scene made me cry in Skyfall. 

Hints and clues an ting are not available. Multiple tries are allowed, up to some reasonable limit, which is unspecified but probably falls short of trying the entire script line by line. (Let's be realistic - it's not that much chocolate ...)

If you already know, because I already told you, then you are disqualified. Yeah, I might give you chocolate anyway, but please don't post the answer here.

Note: I'm using "scene" here in a broad sense of "something in the film" rather than some formal filmic/technical definition with a scene number in the  script or change of shot or whatever it takes - I really wouldn't know about that stuff. This probably doesn't matter but I didn't want to risk confusion.

Over to you. :)

Ros Asquith shortlisted for Dahl Prize

This is quite cool! The von Neustadt family's dear friend Ros Asquith has been shortlisted for the Roald Dahl funny prize with her book Letters From An Alien Schoolboy. Please read all about it at the Guardian's rather nice article with sample pics an ting.I'm like yeah baby.

Glenn Bengry: nice man needs our help

Hi there ... please have a look at this:

http://glennsfriends.chipin.com/glenn-bengry

If you have a couple of quid, bucks, yen, zloty etc to spare please send a few in that direction. Matters arising:

• I promise you on my honour as a cavalry officer of the old school that it is real. 
• Glenn is far too nice and good a bloke to be in this bind. 
• Please help if you can. 
• Thanks!

Bizarre-Connect-o-Fact-a-blog (Picard to Richard)

(No. 793 in an Occasional Series of, er, 42,452)

(Deep breath) Now pay attention: I shall only say this once. 

Captain Picard's nemesis Q was played by John de Lancie whose dad John de Lancie inspired Strauss to write his Oboe Concerto. 

Got it? Good, good. :)

Robert

This makes me very, very happy indeed. If you responded to this or this then that's what you did! Thanks a BIG lot. I am seriously chuffed to bits to see this update. Hats off to Robert and the Sassers and GSM and Know Think Act and Bringing Hope and Home Again and ... the whole thing! Just great. :)

Annoyed

I am post-surgical, grumpy, and annoyed at a surprisingly wide range of things and people! (This does not, however, include my wife, family or colleagues. Just in case you were wondering.)

But I should, really, try to write something a bit more constructive than this ... tsk. And grrrr.

Phew!

Delighted to find that despite age and weight I still have not entirely lost my touch (as it were) with gay waiters. :)

The sheer bliss of being normal

I got home last night to find that Mrs von Neustadt has bought a lovely new long-arm stapler to enable her - and me, if I'm good - to staple music together for Stringwise and other fine musical type thingies. This is good. I like staplers.

To my horror the stapler, perhaps because it's a cheapo own-brand Ryman job rather than one with a proper maker's name on, does not appear to have printed or stamped on it the type of staples it needs. I thought this was absolutely standard practice, and to not do it seems … foolish … at best.

Naturally Mrs von Neustadt, before I'd got my hands on the new stapler, had thrown away the box, and compounded her sin by filling the device with staples that she thought seemed to fit OK. Seemed to fit OK? Seemed to fit OK?? Reader, do you not now begin to see the searing pain at the very heart of my existence? (No? Oh well, never mind, have a cuppa.)

In all honesty but through gritted teeth I'm forced to pause and admit that, by the purest fluke and not (of course) because 98.3% of all staples in the Cosmos are the same, Mrs von Neustadt did just happen to have filled it with the right staples. Absolute coincidence, mind, and clearly it does not in any way affect the purity of my argument. Ahem no indeed.

Anyway, I did what any red-blooded officer of my regiment (yes, thank you Tamsin, the ladies and gentlemen do, I suspect, know full well exactly which regiment we mean here) would have done, and retrieved the box from the recycling. I then tore off the little corner of cardboard which records the stapler's preferred diet and concealed it about my person before rerecycling its parent-box. Well I mean you would, wouldn't you? (No? Gosh. We should talk.)

Travelling to work this morning I was delighted to find the said insignificant-looking, but information-rich, fragment in my pocket.

Naturally I have now transcribed all of this crucial staple data into a small but strangely effective information system which lives on my portable wireless telephonic device, and which, entirely gorgeously, synchronizes silently and without fuss with its online webitty-web-access version - so if the information is here, it's also there, and, y'know, over there too. This I like, a lot.

So now I have this vital and very interesting data safely stashed away for all eternity or at least until a large systems failure of some kind. Empires may fall and rise, new elements emerge, Earth's orbital wobble may subtly change but I will always be able to tell you which staples you'll need.

I can't tell you how happy and fulfilled this little information handling and storage excursion has made me feel. I'm just glad I'm so normal. It's great.

Worry

I probably ought to worry about things a bit less.

Hintons

Photo by Twiggles at Flickr.
Original here.
Licensed by-nc.

So ... Hintons became Presto became Safeway became Morrisons. Goodness me. Supermarket history, eh ... I wonder if you can do an MA in it?

Fine Fare, anyone? Gateway?? No?

(Since you ask, yes, I was indeed thinking about the Guisborough shop at 71 Westgate!)

School reunion

I went to my school reunion and dinner the other week. This was an interesting and significant experience, about which I should write one day - if I ever get the time. I was pretty apprehensive, having not seen the people or place for about 35 years. It was, however, an overwhelmingly nice day. More soon, or sometime, or something.

The Cosmic Bank of Goodwill

My Theory (which is mine) of the Cosmic Bank of Goodwill. (ahem)

Motto:

You make withdrawals; you make deposits.

Any questions? No. Good. Carry on."

Sunny

It's 1st September today, and though it's not warm it is lovely and sunny. Woohoo! I rode a Borisbike for the very last bit of my commute this morning and it was simply delightful on a day like this. (Come November, I may be less gung-ho about the whole cycling thing ...)

Just checking ...

Hello dear reader,

I'm just checking that you've seen I'm after your money ... please! from a short while ago in which I grovellingly try to solicit money from you for a worthy cause.

• Sorry it's a bit unglamorous, just some Ugandan kid with smashed-up legs and a surgical bill. I mean, who cares about him, right?
• Obviously I would rather be trying to help fund heritage cinemas or establish a better walking route through the wildflower meadows of the West Midlands Orchid Preservation Zone, while amusingly discussing the government's latest faux pas over a balsamic latte in the intellectual hotbeds of Muswell Hill. Nevertheless, some tiresome little Imp of the Right Shoulder is telling me I have to have another bash at this and so, darlings, despite the tedium, I'm asking you to have a quick dekko.
• I promise that normal service will soon be resumed and I will stop trying to be nice or anything. See it as just a temporary aberration, OK?
• If you have already coughed up please accept my thanks, and sorry for bothering you again.
• If you do go and look at the post, please also look at the comment where I explain what to do about the Zip code on the donation form if you're not in the USA.

Thanks!
Thanks a lot!!
Thanks a big lot!!!

I'm after your money ... please!

Hello. If you read this blog and like it or me at all, or even if you hate me and it - I really don't mind - please consider coughing up a few quid or dollars or whatever to help...

I do hate people grovelling to their online friends for charity money ... er, unless it's really necessary. Please follow this link and scroll down to "Medical Bills for orphan hit by car". I guarantee that this is the real deal and that every dollar you donate is a DIRECT help. The cool thing is, if a few friends donate 5 or 10 bucks/quid/whatever each that very quickly builds. No-one's expecting you to go there and donate crazy money, but, like I say, a few bucks ... all the difference. Sorry to grovel like this but please please go and have a look. Thanks!

Just to clarify:

• Kaihura is Martha's village.
• The people making the appeal, who run the orphanage, are Martha's friends.
• The kid injured in the RTA is well-known to Martha and was in her class at school.
• Hospital treatment in Uganda costs ... not a fortune by US or UK (private) standards, but it costs.
• You can help very directly. Thank you.

I really ought to write something productive and interesting for this blog and not just poke fun at infelicitous language in news stories and other easy, lazy stuff.

Please see header line. Yes. Yes indeed.

Foopball - a review

Thursday, 26 May 2005

There was a foopball match shown on the televisual receiver last night.

I watched it with my friend Adrian and my wife Deborah and my collie called Daisy and a great big glass of wine called Fitou. It was most exciting! At the end a lot of plump gentlemen who had been spectating from the upper parts of the auditorium took their shirts off and waved them around. My word. They did seem jolly. They were infected with enthusiasm by a gentleman called Mr Dudek who very kindly did some funny little dances to cheer up the foopball players from the opposing "team" or "side". Goodness, how we clapped and smiled at this little foreign chap's merry antics!

Yours sincerely

Mr Strawberry Yoghurt

Note: this was first posted on my then-LiveJournal in 2005.

Moonshot disappointment

In which we proudly present the first and best NASA LCROSS impact photography, complete with massive explosive dust plume and who knows what else. Guaranteed fully authentic and very, very scientific. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the image for which the world has been waiting.

I got very excited about the LCROSS mission and the fact that at 1130 today it was due to smash a great big rocket into the moon. This would create an excitingly massive debris cloud which, the Metro told me, would be visible for a couple of minutes from here, which is a pretty cool proposition, so as I was travelling at that time (long story) I got off the Tube at Kings Cross and went up to the street in the hope of seeing something. What I could see at exactly 1130 was a lot of cloud with maybe an inch or two of blue sky, so I wandered off again to finish the journey. When I got to work, though, it was even more exciting because it was still going on - I think maybe I'd seen 1130 GMT and forgotten we're on summer time, or they'd run out of petrol and had to go back, or something. Anyway, the point was that it was still happening and was live on the Beeb. As the time got closer I watched it and even sent email round the office pointing it out to others. (Sounds a bit didactic of me but, well, I am, plus doing stuff like this has had good results in the past.)

As the moment approached they cut to a camera which I think must have been in the nose of the Centaur upper stage rocket - the first and biggest hitting-the-moon thing - and it showed some quite nice, but not over-exciting, footage of craters getting bigger, then bigger ... then the screen went white, and there was no more. (I conjecture that this was when the camera operator baled out before it hit so he or she could get home safely in their Rocket-Pak™.)

I then thought, great, they will now show us the footage from the other bit of spaceship, or from a big telescope, or something, in which the rocket smacks into the moon and a huge explosion of debris blasts up into the atmosphere (yes I know I know, don't bother me, I'm on a roll here) and it's all dead exciting, because that's what the whole thing was about.

Ermmmm, nothing. No footage, no explosion, no dust plume blowing in the wind (shuttup shuttup), no nothing much really. As I write they still say they're analysing the data but, so far, no wonderful pictures have emerged showing the moment of impact. Well, apart from this one, which was pretty difficult to research. But what actually happened, I wonder? Ho hum ... Onward and, er, downward!

Oopsie

From an all-staff email today:

Dear all, this is to let you know the talk below has been cancelled as the speaker is unwell.

Division of Infection Journal Club presents: [and so on]

I know, I know, I am a bad and pathetic person. It just made me smile a bit, is all.

ITG 2009 – miscellaneous weebling on about stuff

I thought I might use this page for some miscellaneous weebling on about stuff, if that’s OK with you?

• ITGdex 2009