almost witty

So it’s Glastonbury weekend - a weekend where I traditionally muse on the fact that I’m starting to get too old to go to such a weekend as a first-timer, and that I really need to get off my backside, and make arrangements to go.

Except this weekend, if I really wanted to go by myself, I could - tickets are still available for a festival that usually sells out within the first day of tickets being made available. Scalpers are probably walking the hills of Pitdown bereft and blaming the credit crunch.

Some commentators blame the lack of sales on poor weather, although most of them are blaming it on the fact that rapper Jay-Z is headlining what used to be a rock music festival. Although since the Pet Shop Boys have also headlined it in the past, I’m not sure that excuse stands up.

An element of the truth may be heard in a work conversation I overheard, where someone expressed a genuine fear that because a rapper was headlining, the crowd would essentially be full of chavs and violent gangsta dudes. Which therefore meant this person wasn’t going, because he/she was afraid of all the violence that would ensue.

and there was me thinking Glastonbury was meant to be a haven of openness, love to your fellow man, and meeting cool new people and all that.

Then again, one of my friends is working it this year, and she’s taken a 12-pack of condoms…

Appropos of nothing, I ended up upgrading to Windows Vista last night. (well, rather, my new swanky laptop which I got for a ridiculously cheap price arrived).

Straight away ran into a few problems. All the fancy graphics are nice, but don’t actually amount to even a ramp of beans, let alone a hill. The much-vaunted security issues seem positively annoying when you’re trying to set up a new laptop.

The worst issue is that my favourite game in the whole wide world, Civilisation 4, refuses to run on Vista. I’ve tried running patches, installing DirectX, uninstalling and reinstalling and each time various little bugs come up. including that it can’t find the DVD - even though I ran it from the DVD in the first place.

Which wouldn’t be so bad if … half the reason I upgraded was so that Civilisation 4 could run comparatively smoothly on it instead of crashing when my old laptop would overheat.

Have you used/tried Vista in earnest and anger? Would I really be sad if I resorted to trying to dual-boot it just so I could run a game?

My random thoughts on the latest incredibly dark episode of Doctor Who: Turn Left…

(continue reading…)

were utterly fab. Seriously. It had something for everyone. Something for the kids (and cheap in terms of monster budget too!), and something to make us geeky old romantics sigh. and endless lines to quote over again and again. and enough stuff for jaded Whovians to sit up and take notice, musing “Well, I’ve never seen THAT before…” Oh, and Alex Kingston in a spacesuit.

Gawd knows how parents managed to get their kids into bed after those episodes though.

And better yet … Top Gear is coming back!

Dodge This!

Finally, I have finished painting my living room (a combo of dark red and violet white!), and thought must now go towards how to decorate it.

I want to put up one movie-related poster or photo frame, and when I stumbled across a canvas print of the Dodge This! moment from The Matrix, I thought I’d found my ideal print.

But then zuzula counselled against this for the following reasons:

- The Matrix is soooo 1999. (Well, not her exact words, but it was about a decade ago)
- That picture is going to put off any women from stripping in my living room. Given that there are enough reasons for women not to strip off in my living room, adding extra obstacles to their path is not a good idea.

I didn’t buy it in the end because £25 for an unofficial canvas print is a wee bit extortionate. But is that image *really* going to put off women? Is the Matrix really that dead and buried now? Admittedly, the sequels were quite terrible, but I still think the original film stands up as almost a perfect combination of science fiction, cod psychology and computer effects.

Of course, other movie posters are also available. But I do want to avoid the cliche of sticking up a poster from Blade Runner or Betty Blue, so need to think of alternatives. Maybe Kill Bill. Or maybe the one of Angelina Jolie in Wanted, but that really *will* put women off from stripping in my living room.