Well, I do.

I’m just back from there. I don’t know if I mentioned it in the earlier post, and I’m too lazy to go back and look, but probably I did. In any  case (actually, I’ve just checked and I haven’t, although I did say this to someone in the pub, I think. So probably it’s not news to them, but it is news to some of you. And Padje, I told Padje. But probably few others.)

When you go to the gym, there are a couple of sections. It’s got really loud dance music pumping everywhere (more on that if I remember to mention it later) but it’s broadly speaking got two areas. There’s the aerobics section, which contains things like step machines, cross country things, and the like. You stay on them for like 30 minutes, then stop, towel yourself off, and go do something else. Everyone wears headphones there. Also, this is where the women spend their time. Linus spends his time there too, or a reasonable percentage thereof. That’s where you get rid of calories and that stuff. On the other side of the gym, there’s the weights. No one wears headphones there, and everyone grunts.

Everyone. Except me. But everyone else grunts. They grunt when they pick up weights, they grunt when they put down weights, they grunt when they hold weights. They grunt when they are across the room from a weight, but see it. When a weight is lifted from their mind, they grunt the shit out of it. I spend some time there, lifting weights. I was incidentally, doing the leg lifts and I was feeling proud of myself. ‘Fuck off, Linus, you’ve never been proud of anything in your life’ I hear you cry. And you’d be wrong, for I jumped out of a fucking plane, you cunts. What the fuck have you ever done? Eh? EH? But anyway, I was doing the leg lifts. Well, leg pushes. They consist of sitting with your back against a solid surface, and your legs parallel with your shoulders. You push your legs, and then you feel proud, for you can push a lot with them. As a point of reference, I can pull 35 kilos towards me using my chestal region (that’s the scientific term, I know a doctor), and using the leg push things, I can legpush 82 kilos. This had me feeling rather chuffed until I remembered I weigh 92 kilos, give or take, so assuming I am able to walk around, I’m probably pushing somewhere near that weight around on a steady basis. I felt like a pathetic worm then, I tell you.

But everyone but me grunts. I remembered a couple of years ago, getting in an argument on the internet (better than real people as they can’t come round to your house and smash your windows) with a bunch of morons. They were members of gyms, and they were getting upset thatweightlifters (such as them) were being asked to tone it down or leave the gym. No grunting rules have come in in America. This, of course, is a freedom of speech issue as grunting is about as close as some of them can get to actual speech. Seriously, people were complaining that their rights were being rode roughshod. I opined that it was a commercial decision, and probably more women would come in to the gyms if the weightlifters stopped the grunting. I had nothing to base this on apart from my utter contempt for people who have enormous muscles (apart from you, Brock Lesnar!) and my utterer. Utterest. UTTER AGAIN contempt for the people I was talking to. I’m glad to say I was right. Really, there’s nothing (well, there is (imagine having your testiclesladyparts torn out by wolves while the kid who bullied you in school looks on and laughs)) worse than hearing some lackwit grunting and such, over the headphones, and over the thumping dance music (which reminds me, they were all working out and having a great time, picking up large weights, grunting, dropping large weights with a clang, and grunting again, then high fiving each other (and who really high fives anymore?) when No Doubt’s Just a Girl came on. It’s an awful song, but it’s hard to maintain an aura of machismo and the optimum conditions for a high five when you have Gwen Stefani warbling about stuff in your ear.

I signed up at my local gym. Apparently this is one of the few gyms in the Tallaght area that doesn’t have a stabbing or shooting at it, so you know, it’s got that in its favour.

I’m not fat, per se. Although technically, yes I am. I went in for an examfitness report, which as far as I could tell was some young punk laughing at me as I tried to stop wheezing. Granted, I was only climbing the stairs to get into the gym, but still. He made me take off my shoes and stand barefoot (I also removed my socks) on the weighing machine. Then some electricity or something, I believe, was fired up into my feet, and found out all that fat I’d been hiding from public view under t-shirts. 21% bodfyat. That’s like a fifth of me. That’s a leg. I could have 0% in the rest of me, and a solid left leg of fat. Or a right leg of fat. A leg of fat.

Ick.

Anyway, I didn’t really think that I had that much fat. In my head, the problem is more that I have no muscle. Like, none. There’s some on my legs, I suppose (which is probably as well because a leg of pure fat would be difficult to stand on) from the snowboarding, but not enough. There’s none on my arms. It’s terrifying the sheer lack of muscle on my arms. Anyway, that’s not even the current bete noire (a touch of culture and sophistication there). My heartrate is for shit. When I started, my heartrate was at 180 bpm, which is good for techno, but bad for living. That was doing moderate exercise, the sort of stuff you break a sweat over.

So, I got put on 30 minutes of this cross training thing. It’s cross country skiing thingy. It’s good. Keep it about 120 strides per minute, and the heart rate now tops off at 160. Which still isn’t good, per se. But it’s better. It’s also a drop of 20 bpm from what I had 5 days ago, so y’know, there’s a visible improvement.

Then I do weights. The weights are bad, man. I’m doing them, but the sweat fair breaks off me. The weights are light, it’s the repetition. 103. And occasionally, depending on how manly I’m feeling, 153. It’s weird though. You can be going along fine, and have a total of 17 in the bag, and suddenly, around lift number 18, it’s like your muscles suddenly catch on that not only is this hard work, it’s not even strictly necessary, and they decide to down tools. The pricks.

Then off to the cycling machine. That’s on variety, for 20 minutes. Which is good and bad. The exercise tends to be split between a couple of high points in terms of resistance, and then a fair few midpoints, and then a couple of low points. It’s alright at the start, because it’s the minimum setting, but then it can shoot up instantly. I’ve got to keep the RPMs going at about 80 per minute, which I haven’t really managed too well, probably because I’m terribly unfit. But it’s decent.

I will say, it’s given me a complete appreciation for Daft Punk. Everyday, I start off with Daft Punks live album, and every day, I fucking rock out to it. It’s got just the right tempo, and considering the disaffection I feel for a lot of dance music, it’s quality sounds.

But anyway, after about  5 days, I’m down to 20.5% body fat. I’m not sure whether that’s a statistical margin of error or not, but it’s nice to feel the improvement, even if the improvment is mostly  in my head, and the pain when I finish up.

Continue reading this post…

You probably don’t know Ric Flair, or have heard of him in passing at best. He’s pretty much the bestmost successfulwhatever you want to call it wrestler of the past 40 years. And that’s about how long he’s been going, and he’s been at the top or near the top since about 1972. He’s looking to retire at Wrestlemania, which is the biggest wrestling event of the year. Other events cluster around it. Ring of Honor put shows on in the area it’s on at the time it’s on, because whatever town it’s in, it’s going to have about 80,000 wrestling fans there. It gets about 1.2 million buys on pay per view. It sells itself, really, but this year is a bit different. Ric Flair is retiring, and he, for many fans, is the real deal.

In wrestling, there are territories. Over here in Europe, we mostly got WWF on Sky, since about 1987. That’s when I started watching. There was the British wrestling too, which had Big Daddy, who was an enormous old fat gent, and grannies in the front row. It was nothing compared to WWF at the time though. They had Macho Man Randy Savage, Junk Yard Dog, Jake the Snake Roberts, Bobby Heenan and his family, Jimmy Hart and the Hart Foundation, the Can Am Connection, Superfly Jimmy Snuka, Rowdy Roddy Piper and about 15000 more fans at their events, because they had their crown jewel, Hulk Hogan. He’s probably still the most recognisable face in wrestling. That was the WWF, though. It relied on glitz and glamour (weird as that sounds) for success. Hulk Hogan may have been the big star in New York (which is what people call WWF), but Ric Flair was the Man in Atlanta (which is where the NWAWCW was based.

NWA was different to WWF. It had more emphasis on ac  tual wrestling. There were less storylines about lusting after the lovely Elizabeth, and more stories about really wanting the title. I want the title, I need the title, the title consumes me. The South was more attuned to that kind of storyline, where there was some veneer of realism. Most knew at heart that it wasn’t real, but the issue was muddy enough for me that I was sure NWA was real, but WWF had some peculiar points system I wasn’t aware of for deciding who won. The NWA was real to me when I was ten. They had Dr. Death Steve Williams, Mike Rotundo, Barry Windham, the Midnight Express, The Road Warriors, the Fabulous Freebirds, Sting, Lex Luger and most importantly, they had the Four Horsemen. <-This clip is quite famous btw.

The way wrestling works is this. Everyone, largely, is out for themselves according to storyline. Unless you have a tag team partner, then anyone who is a wrestler is a potential opponent. Fair enough. The Four Horsemen were a group of singles wrestlers consisting of Tully Blanchard, Arn Anderson, Ole Anderson, and Ric Flair. Their job was to keep the belt on Ric Flair. They’d brutalise people out of the ring, in the ring, cause dqs, hit fans, hit the ref, hit whoever it took to keep the belt on Ric Flair. It was quite unique. Through most of the 80’s, Ric Flair was the centrepiece of the NWA. He was their go to guy. During this time, the NWA was a collection of local wrestling organisations, who had their own minor champions, and every few months, the NWA world champ, Ric Flair (or previously Harley Race) would come through the territory, and fight the top babyfaces. Babyfaces being good guys, Ric Flair being a heel, or bad guy.

The thing was, you can’t have the champ beat the local boys handily. It’ll kill the territory. Why should someone from the territory pay their ticket if Ric Flair is just going to steamroller him. He had to carry them. And he did. Night after night, Flair would go from town to town, carry the local wrestler to a good match, sometimes a great one, if his opponent was good too, then go out and party. Then he’d get up the next morning, and go to the next town, and do it all again. 300 nights a year, of extreme physical exertion. Flair had his critics, and still does. He wrestled the same match a lot of the time. If you followed him from Charlotte N.C. to Greensboro S.C. to the Omni in Georgia, you’d probably see pretty much the same match if he was against Nikita Koloff, Ivan Koloff, Ricky Morton, Robert Gibson. On the other hand, it was a good match, and the matches weren’t televised. People in attendance would be able to tell their kids that the local boy came within a whisker of beating the Nature Boy, Ric Flair, in a hell of a match. People in the next town would say the same thing.

You couldn’t say the same thing about Hulk Hogan. He only worked the big towns, did short matches, and left early. He couldn’t wrestle, frankly. He’d come out, throw weak punches, not sell the opponents move, hit his finisher, pose, and leave. Which is fair enough. It’s carried him quite far, but his name was mud to NWA fans. Workrate, the ability to wrestle a good match, good to the point where it’s possible to forget that someone has previously decided who is going to win and who is going to lose, is important to some fans (I’m one of them).

Here’s Triple H vs. Taka Michinoku from about 2000 (it’s quite short, and it has nuclear crowd fervour), to illustrate how you can make someone suspend disbelief, incidentally. Triple H weighs about 100 pounds more than Taka, all of it muscle. He is the world champion and headlines the show, whereas Taka has been wrestling mostly opening matches, or lower card tag matches. The crowd doesn’t even care much about Taka prior to this, he’s a joke. During the match though, anything Taka does, Triple H sells like death. A dropkick will take him down, a punch will knock him back. You can hear and see the crowd catch their breath several times, when by all logic they know who will win, but they’ve been fooled into believing that the upset can happen.

Flair was a master of that. He was a heel for most of his career, and heels are responsible for calling most of the match flow. He has to dish out punishment, so the crowd feels sorry for the babyface and wants him to fire back, decide when the babyface can make a comeback, then when the babyface finally does start firing back, he’s got to look appropriately terrified of the babyface, and sell the pain and emotion he’s having to the crowd, to make them believe he’s in trouble. And then, when he wins, he’s got to sell that he’s a cocky sonofabitch who is thebest in the world, even when the people in the crowd clearly know he isn’t.

Did I mention he can talk? And talk? And talk? And talk? And talk? And talk?

A lot of what’s important about wrestling is talking. You’ve got to be able to sell the opposition. I’m not a great champion unless I can beat great opposition. If you run down your opposition, and call them weak, then you’re only beating weak people. If I can put over to the audience that you are a worthy contender, and on any other day, against any other man, you’d win, but against me, it’s unlikely (but with the tiniest hint of uncertainty) then you can make people pay again and again to see you take me on.

About 1991 or thereabouts, Ric Flair left the NWAWCW. There’d been a change in management, and he was on the outs. Management wanted him to drop the belt, and move lower in the card. He went to New York and agreed a deal with Vince McMahon, to come and wrestle for him. He brought the NWA belt with him. This was a big thing. This was a television star jumping from one program to another, bringing the belt, the centrepiece of the program, with him. Flair actually owned the belt, in lieu of money that should have been paid to him, so he was technically able to bring the belt over. It was fascinating though, seeing the Big Gold Belt on WWF television, and having Bobby Heenan announce that the Real World Champion would be there soon.

Ric entered the Royal Rumble, at number 2, and went on to win. For clarities sake, he was in the ring, wrestling for 62 minutes, against 29 other people, who had to be thrown over the top rope to be eliminated. He went on to unsuccessfully defend the title at that years Wrestlemania, and then departed the company again. NWAWCW had been inundated with complaints since he left. The areas where WCW ran its live events, and thus, where it’s television and pay per views were taped, were deafened by changes of ‘We Want Flair’. They got him back, and he won the title back again there. He has accumulated 16 World title reigns. Think about that for a second. It doesn’t mean he was a person who could really fight, and it doesn’t mean that he was a good person. It means that the people booking the company thought 16 separate times that the person they need to represent their company, in the ring, out of the ring, was Ric Flair. There were times when they wanted to get rid of him, when they said he was bad for business, when they had someone new and incredibly untalented they thought they could push to the top, and he’d go out there, wrestle a good match, make whoever it was look like a million bucks, and end the night looking like a loser.

It’s crazy, really that he kept going on through the 90’s, when people were thinking he should retire, and the 80’s when people were thinking he should retire, and the 70’s, when he BROKE HIS FUCKING BACK IN A PLANE CRASH, when he really should have retired.

He’s got a passion for the business that they refer to constantly.  The fans see it now, and could see it then. In the 80’s they booed him because they hated him. In the early nineties in WCW they were chanting WE WANT FLAIR despite him being the most despicable heel in the business when he was there, when he left, and when he was wrestling for the WWF. They knew what they had lost, and they wanted it back. I sort of do too. If you chop someone in wrestling, the crowd goes WOOO. They do that because he did it. Other people do it because he does it.

Now he’s doing what amounts to a farewell tour, leading up to Wrestlemania 24, this Monday morning. He’s in a retirement match. He’s 60 years old, give or take, and last week, he jumped off the top rope through a table. This week, as a sign of respect, the current world champion submitted to Ric Flair’s figure four. He’s the original kiss stealin’ wheelin’ dealin’ limousine ridin’, jet plane flyin’, sonofagun. He’s going to wrestle against Shawn Michaels, another veteran. Rumour has it they were talking in the back, and the idea was to give ‘the rub’ or prestige, of retiring Ric Flair to a younger wrestler, but after thinking about it, Shawn Michaels was the best wrestler they have at the moment. Him winning won’t do him any good, but if Ric Flair has to lose, then it’s got to be a fucking awesome match. And it will be. I’m still hopeful that he somehow cheats his way to victory, and retires ‘on his own terms’ in the storyline. I think most people would like to see the dirtiest player in the game steal one last victory, and I think he’s owed it.

I’m just back from Andorra, round 4.

I’m pretty tired, and fairly sore. It wasn’t the best holiday in the world, there wasn’t enough snow. The first few days, we were able to board around alright, the snow was melting, and turning to slush. I was turning, on the shallower inclines, and getting down the steeper ones ok. Slush is good to turn on. It’s not soft, but it does have some give and resistance, if you are trying to turn. As the week went by, there was no new snow, and what there was was melted by the sun, and then hardened at night again. It turned to ice. Ice has no give, it gives you no purchase, and you end up skidding along. More on that later.

Encamp, the place where I went, is a sort of locals place. It leads to the Funicamp, which goes to the highest slopes in Andorra, of the various places, so it’s good to go there, if the snow is good. If the snow is bad, though, you have to fall back on conversation, with your group (who are lovely, and were too, in case they read this). You also have to rely on beer, and will to find something to do, because Encamp is not the place to supply you with distractions. The locals don’t seem to have much available in terms of entertainments, at least, not that they’re willing to share. It gets to you. Everyone apart from our group of five was either Andorran or Russian, so there was no real opportunity to meet people. I thought that wasn’t important last year, and the year before, but with the snow as bad as it was, it’s essential that you can have some sort of human contact with people. I don’t speak spanish, I speak mangled french and point, which does the job. It’s not good when you want to pour your soul out to another, or tell people what you are thinking about. My French is not up to abstract concepts and flights of fancy, and it’s the Andorrans second language too, so bad luck there.

There’s another resort, Soldeu, which is filled with English. It’s more expensive, so we never went before, but the next year, if I do go back to Andorra, I’m going to go there, for a week. The days of no snow were filled with looking at forecasts, wishing for snow, playing Gin, and drinking in the bar. I don’t drink that much right now, really. I’m not that good at it, but it was cheap and there was lots of it.

When I was packing I was thinking ‘I’ll bring books that will take me some time to finish’, because I was going for two weeks, and if I’d finished the books, they’d have been little more than extra baggage by the end. So I brought Shakespeare’s Sonnets, The Great Shark Hunt, and The Ancestor’s Tale. There’s a nice mix of things to think about and just fun in there. I read a bit, but kind of felt that if I went off on my own, I’d be abandoning the others to their fate. I’m sure they felt the same way. It’s better to be a bit bummed together than to have a few relatively happy people and one person with nothing to read or do making a noose for themselves. Not that I was bummed all the time, but I did have one night where I was sitting in the bar, watching the umpteenth fucking football match, and I was sure I had enough. I just didn’t care about any of it, or anything. I wanted to be at home, eating food that wasn’t hideously meatladen. And I like meat.

We were thinking of heading back at the end of the first week, because the snow was getting worse and worse, the ground was stripped bare. But then you’ve got to figure in the outlay you’ve already made vs. the outlay you will have to make if you head home early. I’d booked a hotel in Barcelona to stay in the night before I flew back (this avoids the frankly hideous 4.30 am wake up to get the bus from Andorra to Barcelona, and is TOTALLY WORTH IT) so that’d be wasted, and the extra charges for changing flights, plus the hotel we were staying in, I wasn’t sure if we’d get stuck with the bill. I was travelling with two other people as well, so it pretty much had to be unanimous. I was pretty certain though, that I wanted to go home. I had my board packed up on the Saturday, and was tired of it.The next day, we found out there was going to be a big dump of snow on the Tuesday.

SAVED!

Tuesday rolled around, and we were at the base, ready to go up, and we felt the snow beginning. It was pretty great. Hope sprang up. It was snowing! And it snowed. And it snowed. And it kept snowing.

This is great, we thought. We miss Tuesday, but Wednesday, we’ll have powder. Powder is like crack for snowboarders. It turns you from an unconfident snowboarder into a superme world class snowboarder. It’s deep snow, a couple of feet, that you can fall into with no damage, and you don’t have to remember to lean forward on your board. Leaning forward on your boarding involves balancing yourself over the front of your board, on bended knee. It’s alright to do it if you have soft snow, but on ice, it’s not optimal. It requires an amount of faith. Powder though, you lean back, lifting the front of your board, so it cuts through the powder, sending fountains of snow to each side, and making you feel like a complete badass.

Wednesday, it was still snowing. While we like snow, we’re not crazy about it snowing. Visibility is reduced. You have to be able to pick out the contours of the ground, so you can tell do you need to shift your balance on the board, or to select a good place to turn. Heavy snow means you can’t really tell what the fuck is going on on the ground, so it adds an element of risk. In any case, the place was closed on Tuesday, but on Wednesday, we had some good runs in Soldeu. We had to get a bus around to that, because Encamp, being the highest resort, was also the most vulnerable to the incredibly high winds that were bringing the snow. And getting rid of it.

The next morning, the last morning, we went to the Funicamp, which is the highest point on the range. We were buffeted by winds on the way up in the gondola, which made me nervous. When we got to the top, the snow had been completely blown from the top by the wind. It’s icy. It’s all icy. So I thought about going straight back down. Prevailed upon to go down one slope. It was awful. Where it was icy it was thigh burning, where it was powder, the clouds came over, so you couldn’t see the ground contours, so you couldn’t go at speed or tell where was good to turn. That’s all there was. I was told that there were parts on the left that were powder, you could see the furrows where previous boards had cut trenches in the snow. I went over there, and fell over a few times immediately, as it was powder yesterday, but had frozen overnight, so it was just a series of huge furrows that were completely frozen and impassable. I walked back down to where it was safe.

I was pretty certain I wanted to go back, at that point, but again, I was asked to go up to another slope, one last run to change my mood. I pointed out that this would be the second run to attempt to change my mood. Still, I went up again. The slope we were going up to was a lift leading to an immediate harsh dropoff. As there was a skier on my right and I naturally turn to the right to stop, him falling over completely ruined my attempts to stop, and I went over the edge, with one foot in the board and one foot out. I started skidding down the mountain.

I then fell over onto my posterior, and started speeding up. I started kicking my legs up and down trying to stop the descent, and after 40 feet or so, I stopped. I sat there for a while, trying to breathe. I then turned over, prior to climbing up the slope, the board still attached to my right foot. IT’s heavy and awkward. I lay on my front. I could hear a voice shouting at me, ‘move over to the right, it’s got snow there. Where I was had tiny flakes of snow, but was icy, and the sun had come out, and was melting the ice. It was slippy and getting slippier. I started climbing up the mountain again, and the first time I moved to the right, the ice had completely replaced the minimal amount of snow, and I began skidding down the mountain again. I went another 40 feet while scrabbling at the ice with my fingers.

I stopped again, and started climbing up. I am now bruised.

I went to see the Diving Bell and the Butterfly today. I also performed a selfless act. I spread the gift of the Wire. At last count, I think about 9 or 10 people have started watching the Wire due to my direct cajoling, begging, whining, incessant talk about it, and generally being an annoying swine about it. It’s actually more, but it starts looking weird if I go on about it too long.

But the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It’s a film about a french bloke who has a problem, where he can only move his eyelid to communicate. So he dictates a book, in between having chairfights with Stephen Hawking. Well, I assume that’s what happens, because it was totally sold out when I went to see it. So I didn’t technically get to see it, but the effort was put in.

I went to see it with a mate, Niall. We went to that, and were dismayed to find it was not a going proposition, so we hemmed and hawed and eventually decided to see what was on in either the Screen or the Savoy. I’m not sure exactly why we chose the Savoy (possibly it had more screens(I mean, it does, but y’know, was that why?)). When we got there, we had limited choices. I had just seen Cloverfield the previous evening (yesterday, for those keeping score at home, or the day before yesterday, if you want to read this on friday), so I didn’t want to watch it again. We had missed the start of National Treasure 2, in addition to which, we had separately seen National Treasure 1 and fucking hated it, and also, we had avoided going to see National Treasure 2 once before, so it seemed a weakness to go watch it again. This left us with Juno, which we had seen previously, and loved (GO SEE IT)  but too soon, man, Jumper, which had universally awful reviews, and the Bucket List, which is about old people growing old disgracefully and features Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman. Faugh.

So Niall was for the Bucket List, because it was full of life lessons, and I was against the Bucket List, because it had Life Lessons. So we played Scissors Paper Stone in the queue at the cinema to decide what we were going to inflicton ourselves (incidentally, we were both against Jumper, but I was less against it).

Here’s the thing about scissors papers stone. I have a theory, and a system. It’s a system that’s largely based on conjecture, but it seems to do ok. It’s stupid when I think it out, but then, I’ve referenced it in the title so I’d better go a bit further. When you start scissors paper stone, you do the 1,2,3 display. The problem is, not everyone starts 1(bob) 2(bob) 3(b0b)-reveal. Some go 1(bob) 2(bob) 3Reveal. So the people who go on 3reveal are at a disadvantage, because they reveal what they’re thinking while the other person is still merrily bobbing. Further: No one really picks paper at the start. People mistiming the reveal tend to stick with Rock, because then it looks deliberate that they miscued, because they don’t have to alter handshape.

Niall and myself did 1,2,3- Reveal, a flawless matching. I went with stone, as did he. It was a tie.

As you know, when strong men such as us compete, there must be a winner, so the game began again.

1,2,3-Reveal Into duplicate Rock once more. Trying to fake each other out, we succeeded only in confusing ourselves.

1,2,3- Reveal- I chose Rock once more, secure in knowledge that Niall would think that I couldn’t possibly go for Rock again, and I wouldn’t go for scissors as that was too obvious, so paper was my only option.  Niall chose Scissors, blunted against my trusty rock.  The audience that had gathered sighed orgasmically, secure in the knowledge that they had seen two of the greatest go against each other that day.

So anyway, I don’t really think the unified scissors paper stone theory has much weight to it, but does anyone ever really start with paper? I think not.

We went to see Jumper, which is I am going to ruin by saying it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. We were talking all through the trailers (quietly, can’t disturb other patrons of the arts) about how terrible this was going to be, and how it must suck to have nothing to do like all the other fools in the cinema. We expected nothing. What we got, was admittedly not a whole lot better than nothing, but on the other hand, it was not as bad as we had expected. There were action scenes that were at the least, creative, and showed me something I hadn’t seen before, even if the actual plot was unexplained muck. And the acting was muck. Johnny Paycheck was giving the orders that day, I feel. Hadyn Christensen (that’s a misspelling,  but fuck him) can’t act. It’s not even something I feel strongly about. He’s not bad or anything, he’s just got absolutely nothing to make hime watchable. When he finds his father dead (Michael Rooker, who ably played Daredevils father who got killed early in the film of Daredevil too) the level of distress looks more like a man who has been unemployed for three weeks accidentally burning a hole in his second favourite shirt before an interview, so he’ll have to wash and iron his favourite one instead. When he’s full of love for his romantic interest, his eyes get a dull sheen like he’s been in a coma for four days, and someone has prised open his eyes to check for Rems.

He can handle confusion alright, I suppose.

Have you noticed that Samuel L. Jackson is sort of well, shit? I know he was the epitome of badass, but what’s the last thing he was actually good in? He’s got a stupid haircut in this, and he wears stupid clothes, and says stupid things. He looks well aware that this is the case, and obviously doesn’t give a fuck. Which is fair enough for him, but paying punters would like some vim and vigour.

The plot, such as it is, is based around Jumpers, who can teleport themselves and about two tons around the place. Anywhere they’ve seen. Paladins, led by Samuel Jackson are after them. They seem to see it as a religious calling. Only god should be able to be everywhere, according to Samuel. So they have been killing Jumpers since the middle ages. We don’t know how many there are, of either group. We aren’t told how the paladins are organised, we’re not told how they’re financed, or anything about them really. This is all based ona book which probably explains things. I hope it does. There’s a business with the mother of Haydn Hadyen oh who cares? who presumably ran the cardboard factory where he was created, being a Paladin. Why she stuck with Poor Michael Rooker as a Paladin is beyond me. But now she’s protecting Haydn, and has been all along or something except now she can’t because something something something.

It’s directed by Doug Liman who gave us Go, and the Bourne Identity. He also gave us Mr and Mrs Smith, which might not have been his fault. The man can hold a camera, and knows his way around the action scenes, which are done with verve and panache. Characters run, disappear, run, disappear, punch, all while moving through various locales. It’s something to see. Really, it’s a series of set pieces in search of a movie, and it’s a shame it didn’t find one.

Started watching this. It’s the precursor to the Wire, which as you should know, is the best thing ever. You may say to yourself: I watched this back in the day, and I didn’t really get it. It’s a procedural, set in the homicide division in Baltimore. In Baltimore, there are currently 641,000 people living in the municipality, with 269 murders per year.

There’s a Homicide division, who catch the murders, comprising three shifts, who work in rotation. Each shift supervisor has a squad of five detectives, and they clock in and clock out. The phone rings, whoever picks up the phone becomes the primary, establishes the crime scene, and dictates the course of the investigation. When each murder comes in, the whiteboard in the room has the victims name written in red marker. That’s an open case. And this means a viable suspect is found, not that he is necessarily guilty) he wipes off that name, and writes it back, in black. Case closed.
You add up the 269 murders, divide by number of detectives, you get 17.9 murdes for each detective to solve. Round it up, I suppose. 18 murders for each detective. When David Simon was writing the book Homicide was based on (Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets) he followed the detectives of a particular shift around. He followed a couple of cases in depth. What’s interesting though, about the series isn’t the cases. Most murders are stupid, random things, a fight over drugs, a sicko who wants to murder kids, someone who wants sex and gets angry and violent when they’re denied. They’re drenched in mundanity, and they’re bad people. The detectives are the focus, as they try to maintain some dignity, try to work, endure the same office politics a lot of us do, while at the same time they are wading waste deep in shit.

There are interesting focuses in the book, on Miranda rights, born from the Miranda case, in 1966, which established the need to be informed of ones rights, and the right to remain silent. In Homicide, actually being read your rights is the total enemy of the police., it’s a thing to be manoeuvred around. In interrogations, the police interrogating make it clear to a suspect that sure, they’ve got the right to remain silent. And yes, they do have the right to an attorney. But if they remain silent if they ask for their attorney, then the cop, interrogating, who really, is their only friend, is unable to help them, as they’ve declared themselves the enemy of the cop. You can’t help your enemy, after all.

Intellectually, I find the whole idea of the Miranda rights to be essential, and part of what living in a free society is about, the protections afforded by the state. On the other hand. On the other hand. On the other hand. I got the Blue Planet, a while ago. It showed animals being hunted, first from the perspective of a gazelle being hunted by a lion, then a polar bear hunting animals for food. It switches the sympathies around well. So showing cops trying to get around Miranda rights is like them navigating a hazard when catching prey.

That’s mostly what the book deals with. The television show is a bit different. It focuses more on interior lives, and what is going on with the actual lives of the characters. It’s not really a change for the better. Each of the characters in the first season is a full fledged character already, most of them already based on the detectives in the book. Then, they expand the characters, start giving them divorces, bisexuality, suicides basically under pressure from the network, because they don’t have enough ratings.

It’s funny, in a way. The first episode of the third season, the main characters come into the canteen, and are looking at the television, where a crappy soap opera is playing. Bolander, played by Ned Beatty, starts complaining about it. He doesn’t like sex scenes, and all the nudity. The other characters inform Bolander that no, they don’t like them either. In fact, they tell him, script writers don’t like having the sex if it’s unnecessary, but the networks make them do it. 32 minutes later, the first sex scene in Homicide occurs. It’s the most blatant example of the message being pushed at the viewer that they’re being forced into what they do. It’s still a good series, but it loses some of the unholy focus of the earlier shows. Entire episodes devoted to a single interrogation seem to fall by the wayside, and relationships come to the fore. John Polito, who you may remember (you fucking should) from Miller’s Crossing, is a conspiracy theorist cop, who is a fine fine actor. He’s also, to say the best, homely. If you shaved Danny Devito so he looked less like a hairy testicle, and instead, more like a shaved testicle, then stuck a pencil mustache on himit, you’d have something a bit like John Polito.

I do fucking love John Polito.

But he’s fired between season 2-3, so they write him out as a suicide. It’s awful, it’s n character for him, and everyone seems to make a point of this. They replace him with an attractive shift supervisor, but luckily on another shift, so the godly Yaphet Kotto can remain all sicilian.

A friend of mine asked me: You don’t still watch wrestling, do you? and I instantly answered in the negative. What I answered was ‘Do you still watch WWE?’ which is the only wrestling, probably, that he knew of.  And I gave that up. I  know, and knew then, it was fucking stupid. I mean, It’s watchable, at times, with beer, as a sort of testosterone driven soap opera, but it’s one of the things that if someone comes into the room when WWE is on, you’d really have to pretend you were looking for double anal porn and found WWE by mistake. It’s that high on the socially acceptable scale.

I still keep up with the storylines, and the shenanigans backstage, which colour and influence the storylines. Who is sleeping with who, who has married who, and who has a grudge against who. There’s a fairly large online community who look at that sort of thing, and folllow it slavishly. As an example, in real life, Matt Hardy was going out with a girl, Lita, who was also on the show. Unfortunately, also in real life, Lita started having sex with one of Matt’s best friends, Edge, another wrestler on the roster. Matt plays a good guy, Edge plays a bad guy. Unfortunately Matt didn’t take the infidelity well, and started cursing out Edge online. As Edge is higher placed on the roster, Matt got fired.

That sort of thing happens a lot in television shows. Real life intrudes on storylines. Michelle Rodriguez got a DUI while working on the set of Lost, in Hawaii (I think it was Hawaii), as a result, a few episodes later, she was shot. There, problem solved. The problem with wrestling, and what made it all a bit more interesting, is that the fans of the show are also in the show. The same fans who read Matt Hardy freaking out over the situation were also in attendance at the live events. They began chanting ‘We Want Matt’ at Edge, and during the shows at various points. The commentators wouldn’t acknowledge the chants, but they couldn’t stop the audience at home noticing. Once the audience at home noticed, when they went to see the show a week later, even if they didn’t know why they were chanting, they might chant, or ask someone else at the show, and they’d tell them.

Think if that sort of think happened with oh, I dunno, Friends. Fans of Phoebe getting upset with Monica and Chandler, and booing them because they dominate the screen time. Pretty interesting stuff. I’d bring up a more recent live audience show, but I don’t actually watch any.

Anyway, what’s going on at the moment, and made me think ‘Christ, the world is fucked up’ is about incest. Vince McMahon is the proprieter, and lead carny of the WWE. He plays the boss, and he is the boss. He did a Playboy interview where he tacitly admitted to being abused by a family member as a child. It now appears that he’s pushing an incest angle between Paul Burchill and Katie Lea, who play brother and sister. Apparently, he was also pushing for himself to be revealed as the father of his (actual, real life) daughter’s baby.

So yeah. Aside from actually being completely unwatchable, could you imagine telling anyone that that’s something you like to watch?

I’ve been reading lately, also. I picked up No Country For Old Men, and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Pretty damn good books, really. I picked them up because I was going to see No Country For Old Men, and I generally read the book before watching the film, if the book is supposed to be any good. I wouldn’t rush out to buy a Stephen King book for example, because the fucking things are doorstops, and also, I can’t really stand Stephen King.

But yeah. Generally I do my reading on my way into town. I drive into the Square, then sit on the Luas for about 45 minutes. I’d get through around 70 pages of your average paperback in that wise. Another 70 coming back. Another 40 or so waiting for people to turn up, maybe. My point with this? Not sure I have one, but that’s what I do.

I really liked The Road. It’s a relentlessly depressing book, one of the ones that scoop you out and leave you hollow inside. It’s the story of a man and his son, wandering the Road, in the wake of an unspecified natural disaster. All artifice is dropped, there’s very little musing on the nature of man, or what this all means, the questions mostly come from the action in the book. It’s quite draining to read it, and it’s not really a spoiler to say there’s no real happy ending. A scientist doesn’t come along with a miracle cure for the parlous state of the world. There’s a daily struggle in the book to eke out another day, every day, and that’s the triumph, for as long as the characters stay alive, some shred of humanity stays alive.  For them, a tin of peaches that’s unspoiled is a tiny victory that should be celebrated.

The man and his son aren’t named, and encounter other people who at best mistrust each other, and at worst try to kill each other for whatever they possess. They’re all wandering the Road, even if they’re staying where they are.
You should probably read it.

Well, I never really stopped. But for a period there, I was watching movies, on a greater scale. I wasn’t putting effort into getting to what probably qualifies as arthouse. Pleasingly, the thing I thought qualified as arthouse was in Savoy 1, the biggest screen in town. I went to see Juno, which is one of those films that has a cast you would kill to have, all character actors from various movies and televisions shows. Allison Janney (CJ FROM THE WEST WING!Juno’s Stepmother), J.K. Simmons (Vern SchillingerJ.Jonah JamesonJuno’s Dad), Jason Bateman (Michael from arrested developmentJuno’s kids prospective adoptive father), Jennifer Garner (Well, jesus, put me on the spot why don’t youJuno’s kid’s prospective adoptive mother(this gimmick didn’t seem as long winded initially)) are all in, it, but wonderfully, they’re not the best thing in it. Ellen Page plays Juno, and she’s wonderful, a sensitive, vulnerable foulmouthed horrible 16 year old kid, who gets knocked up, and spends the rest of the film dealing with the consequences. She’s weird and interesting, and completely believable in everything she does, even when it’s obvious Juno doesn’t quite know what the hell she’s doing in life, and that she’s out of her depth.

I dunno. I used to have arguments with people about terms for pregnancy. It didn’t involve shouting at a pregnant woman, it was just that in Ireland, ‘She fell pregnant’ is a common phrase. It implies pregancy is like falling over, nobodies fault. In this, Juno is clearly at fault, not least because she’s impregated (hey, I didn’t want to say knocked up again) by Bleeker, played by Michael Cera, a goofy sweetnatured awkward kid who is crazy about Juno. She makes it clear that it was her call to have sex with him (not that that absolves Bleeker of responsibility, of course) and Bleeker was surprised by the whole thing, as he thought they were going to watch crappy movies on television.

Anyway, the movie is largely about how she deals with the pregnancy and the aftermath. It’s great, the script gives everyone something to be doing, or thinking, and people generally surprise you, but consistently for them. If someone flips out, it’s generally unexpected at the time, but in character for the character. I love that.

It’s hard to say why I like the movie without going into detail, which would spoil the fun of seeing where the movie is going. It’s just a sweet natured movie that essentially wants good things for all its characters, and tries its best to make you see where it’s coming from.

There’s also a lovely lovely soundtrack, and a particularly fantastic lyric, which sadly doesn’t make it into the movie, but over the end credits, there’s a snippet:’Up up down down left right left right B A start, just because we use cheats don’t mean we’re not smart’

Which probably means nothing to you, but to a videogame nerd such as I, Up up down down left right left right B A start is probably the most famous videogame cheat code in history, apart from IDKFA. It’s the Konami Code, and just the fact that it’s in a song makes me smile a little.