Category Archives: Messaged from the Outhouse

Film Museum Duesseldorf. Avoid

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A postcard. Of a Cinema. Yes, it is that exciting.

Last Weekend the best girlfriend ever and myself made one of those unavoidable journeys to Germany that tend to ruin the weekend as there is the inevitable early morning dash to the airport, the never-ending desire to throw something at Germans who just can’t queue and far too much Weissbier. To alleviate this conundrum we extracted ourselves from our family duties and ventured to Duesseldorf (also known as Ork-City), to visit the city’s Film Museum, combining lore and light entertainment. Placed in an attractive street of this otherwise drab town, the entrance of the Film Museum bristles with toned down efficiency, and a friendly attendant takes your money and sends you up the stairs. There you enter the ‘panthenon of directors’, a circular collection of pillars with a picture, quotes and some trivia on famous and rather obscure directors. I have no problem with the fact that the curators find Andrzej Wajda as good as Howard Hawks and Hitchcock (but omitting Kazan and Houston) but please, at least tell us which films they were responsible for. Movies past 1980 don’t seem to be included, so no Fincher, Spielberg or Polanski.

Really?

The rest of the museum is an uninspired, haphazard collection of old projection and recording material thrown together with some postcards of cinemas worldwide, some programmes from the forties and thirties and a ludicrous motley accumulation of figurines (and a Harry Potter cup). The shelves are dusty and the whole place looks like someone has taken some cinematic collections and randomly placed them around the limited space. There is no programmatic thread and no cohesion.

Heartily uninspiring and disappointing. Avoid.

Apple, Where’s The Love?

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So I bought a new MacBook Pro. My old MacBook was starting to lag a bit and was so tattered and battered that it started to become a bit of an embarassement.It now rests in the office and is working diligently as backup storage and media server. To get the new MacBook, all I had to do was walk into the Apple Store in that monstrosity that is Westfield Stratford, tell the nice polish store assistant what I wanted, gave her my credit card and, fuuump, 2 minutes later I was walking out of the store, schlepping a nice new computer. Of course I could have ordered the beast to be delivered, but as the bloody mall is literally on my way home, this was much better.

Now, rewind to 1998. In my 5th year as an Apple owner, my main machine was a Power Mac 7100, a painfully slow G3 PowerPC based, ugly as hell beige brick that I was immensely proud of. To acquire such machines (and remember, this is year 4 of the web) you would have to search for the hidden 5 or 6 Apple dealer around the country (or, in my case, search for the even more obscure used Apple dealers). On top of that, I still had a Powerbook 165 lying around (with a 68040 chip!), a Macintosh IIfx and a Powerbook 150. All computers that were terribly slow and rather ugly compared to the then (comparatively) blindingly fast PCs. But as an Apple owner you would sneer and get a rash in the presence of any Microsoft product or Intel based PC. When in 1999 I finally bought my first iMac and thanks to Steve Jobs Apple’s ascendancy to the most valuable company in ze vorld was secured, nobody thought back to those painful years between 1986 and 1998 when Apple was almost completely irrelevant outside the graphic design studio.

So, do I get any Lurve from Apple for my unwavering commitment over 20 years of ownership (ok, their shares made me a fair bit of money)?

No. On the contrary. The bloody things seem to be getting more expensive every year.

But then, would I have any other portable computer? Looks I’m locked into their business model forever.

They are rather shiny, though.

 

Mmmh. Shiny.

 

Cultural and religious references wasted on the innocent.

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Today, while listening to the radio driving along some non-descript country lane, Ken Bruce on BBC Radio2 allowed some vacuous young man to play the ‘tracks of his years’ (mostly an opportunity to plug a new album). After playing Genesis’ “Jesus he knows me” the chap (apparently somebody called ‘Matt Cardle’ who won some TV-contest) commented what a deeply religious song this was.

Pardon me?

“I believe in the family with my ever loving wife beside me But she don’t know about my girlfriend or the man I met last night Do you believe in God, ‘cos that’s what I’m selling And if you wanna go to heaven, I’ll see you right You won’t ever have to leave your house (oohoh) Or get out of your chair (oohoh) You don’t even have to touch that dial (oohoh), ‘cos I’m everywhere”

He might want to check his references.

 

It’s … ENORMOUS!

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Via the lovely people from reddit comes this amazing picture of the Mars Rover “Curiosity” which completely bowled me over.  If they really manage to land this thing on Mars, I’ll eat a whole steak. All by myself.

Medium rare!

R.I.P. Karlchen 2005 – 2011

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Funny thing, pets.

The first time you cast your eye on the little fuzzballs your heart melts and and the inevitable ‘awwwww’ slips out. You spend every living minute with them, neglect your human partner for some atavistic fuzzy therapy, produce 500 pictures per day and pretty much behave like the parent of a newborn human.

Then come the teenage years, with some significant arguments about chewed MacBook cables, holes in the carpet, arguments about bedtime and general complaints that ones rabbit spends far more time having sex with their mate and somehow they start blending into the house like the furniture: you hardly notice them at all and take them for granted.

But then the times comes when they are getting older and less sprightly, and one day a little messages arrives via the ether that the little fuzzball that you carried around with you is no more and has joined the great rabbit orgy in the sky. And bugger me, it hits you harder than you would have ever expected.

 

Karlchen was the first and last of our little rabbit tribe. Joining us as a bloke in 2005 (and having a rapid conversion to femalehood after 2 unexpected litters) she spend hours and hours with us, racing around our little house, jumping off sofas, falling asleep on the furniture and for some weird reason always wanting to play on the laptop keyboard. A dominant little fuzzball, she made life for her more docile partner a constant annoyance (all he wanted was really lie down and sleep).

 

After leaving Kiwiana (not before exploring Singapore Airlines policy of taking pets on intercontinental travel) we were fortunate to have her adopted by friends with an enormous garden and two more rabbitts for her to bully, and the last time I saw her she was gregarious as ever, even though she was hitting pension age.

 

So today I heard that she has finally succumbed to old age. 7 years is pretty good innings for a rabbit and I couldn’t thank my friends more for looking after her.

But: Why would you ever want to buy another pet when you have to go the heartbreak of losing the little buggers every few years.

 

Oh well.