the corner office

I don't know whether demolishing the Red Road flats would be a good thing or not, but bringing them down as part of the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony would have made for some good TV.

It reminds of the Crunch advert when the Newtown cooling towers in Johannesburg were demolished in 1985: some dude steps out on a balcony, sinks his teeth into a Crunch and boom, a huge cooling tower starts coming down behind him. No special effects in those days; I remember reading a magazine article at the time about the making of the advert - the ad agency had a last-minute flash of inspiration, quickly found a place to film from a decent vantage point, and knowing they had only one shot at it, managed to get the '... and action!' timing just right as the countdown was happening.

The internet remembers nothing of the advert it seems, and there's little to be read about the towers themselves. This was about the best I could find.

I saw the news reports last night and thought 'bah'. I'm sure there've been plenty of tales of pollution before, but I've never really noticed it. Until tonight, when walking to the train station from work, my mouth was dry, and every breath left an odd taste in my mouth. Eyes starting to water. And once home, took a stroll to the post box, and noticed that all the cars are covered in a light dust. So the next in a long line of UK weather oddities over the past few years, we now have everything sprinkled with Saharan desert sand.

Speaking of said stroll, it was only on the way back that I realised I'd gone out in shorts and a t-shirt, and it wasn't cold. What manner of summer are we in for?

Setting aside the whole Internet and computer-in-a-wristwatch thing, there are two advances, I think, which will one day soon cause us to wake up and think 'by golly, we're really living in science fiction now'.

The first of these is the rise of driverless cars. The second is the use of drones - not just military, but civilian, and commercial. This is an interesting article about ways in which drones are being used around the world (but not in the USA, which despite having a reputation for being a happy-go-lucky capitalist free-for-all, isn't): US lags as commercial drones take off around globe (via)

I think I would summarise my understanding of the whole mess as 'so Ukraine, how's all that cosying up to the West working out for you?'

All that Western love when it was kumbaya around campfires in the square and now it comes to this. Poor buggers.

Just back from a week in Yorkshire. The brief was simple: the missus wanted to be near Whitby, I wanted a sea view, expecting The North to be cold and rainy and miserable, and what better way to spend a cold, rainy and miserable holiday than sitting by the window staring at the sea.

As it turned out, the weather was anything but rainy and miserable, and we got an awesome view of the North Sea down the valley, except for the small potash mine off to one side of said beautiful valley. Not a big deal, all things considered, especially when we drove past and saw that the mine also hosts an underground dark matter research laboratory. A mine housing a dark matter research laboratory is no less of an eyesore than a mine not housing a dark matter research laboratory, but it's much, much cooler, and attitude is everything.

Apart from that, what to say? Whitby is pretty, the Abbey beautiful, the Dracula vibe screaming from the gravestones in the church yard next door (even though a sign in the church says "Dracula was never here"), some of the coastal villages are even prettier, with steep roads and old houses sitting atop each other.

We went to a dinkum fish & chips restaurant (bread and buttermargarine for starters, felt like something of a time warp, in the best kind of way), although I have to say that on the whole, London chippies do better chips than Yorkshire chippies. Can't comment on the fish, but chips I have opinions about.

The moors are also bleakly pretty (Ronwen not as taken, these lacking the 'character' that the tors of Dartmoor provide). We did drive past RAF Fylingdales which has the hugest, craziest radar tower I've ever seen, and adds about as much obscure character as you could want to an already other-worldly landscape. And we took a steam train across the moors, which was over too quickly, but still great fun. Rail transport progress does not always feel like progress.

I say this after every holiday, but a week was far too short.

I read an article a couple of years back which suggested that the popularity of Scandinavian crime novels (and TV dramas by extension) has to do with the fact that they present a dark, perverse alternate reality to the happy, clean and chipper societies they're set in. A necessary yin to all that utopian yang, you might say.

So it's been with The Bridge II, tonight being the last 2 episodes of the series on BBC4. Gripping stuff. Essentially, a story about an enigmatic detective with Asperger's, a condition which helps with the detective work but leaves her a little, uh, adrift in interpersonal matters. Surround said detective with other detectives with issues (lots of issues), and then throw them at some pretty nasty baddies. It started out tense, interesting, then it just got hectic, then twisted, then ended up plain bleak.

I should know better by now, but I was disappointed at how it ended. I suppose one must put on one's sophisticated hat and accept that yee-haw happy endings are not what makes for good TV these days. A pity, because as much as the journey is the entertainment, and the resolution remains resolution no matter how it turns out, I do like happy endings.

Will there be The Bridge III? Without giving away the plot, not sure how that would go.

I needed to go to the shops this evening, so took the chance to make a detour past my favourite fast food joint.

Walking back through the local shopping mall, I walked past a nondescript couple. Next thing two mall policemen come running. Not the TV crime drama lives-depend-on-this kind of running, more like the embarassed-smile-and-really-small-strides kind of running as the dudes tried to move fast while holding on to themselves as best they could to minimise the number of accessories flapping about.

Anyway, they round on nondescript couple and the next thing the gent half of the nondescript couple is being arrested for "fretnin behaviour". It was all very weird. Especially because this fretnin chap didn't say boo or baa and was handcuffed and marched off without so much as a peep, and his missus was all like "oh well ok, see ya" and just carried on walking home.

I could also write about the little sh** with his mom in Game "I'm not happy about you getting all these 18+ games" "but I've played 18+ games loads of times" "not with me you haven't, what you get up to with your father is nothing to do with me" "it's just aliens, and you let me blah blah blah" "blah blah blah" "blah blah blah" "is this the attitude I'm going to get after what I've just said to you? If you carry on like this you won't get to spend the last of your Christmas money" and then "well, it's my money, innit", at which point I wanted to lean into this conversation happening 2 feet away from me and say "listen lady, just deck this little brat and be done with it. Trust me, the local coppers are busy at the moment, and besides, I've seen how fast they can run, you'll be gone long before they get here."

And so it's 2014. I won't be bothering with New Year's Resolutions this year (I never floss as often as I should), and anyway, New Year's Resolutions are too easily turned around to be Old Year's Failures. Who needs that kind of negativity?

Still, it's the passing of another calendar year, with all that means. I came across the following the other night, which is sobering, but possibly also a little inspiring:

I have a pair of vases that I use to remind myself that my days are not limitless ... There are exactly 3652 beads of each color: one for each day of a decade ... the beads in the smaller jar represent all the days that I have left to finish everything that I want to do in my life. Each morning, I take one bead from the smaller jar and place it in the larger jar, telling myself not to waste this day. As you can see, I have already expended most of my beads; they are behind me. There aren't that many beads left.

That's from a blog post by Chris Crawford, an influential if slightly eccentric games developer from the 80s, via a lengthy article about what he's been up to since. If the beads are one lesson, then the article provides another: sadly for Crawford, he's devoted the past 20 years to the idea of redefining gaming by designing more social, interactive games, and admits his life's work has thus far been a failure.

I'm not entirely sure what the second lesson is, though, and I suspect it's a lesson one could look back on one day and interpret entirely differently.

A very recent conversation in the M-P household.

"how does Father Christmas fit down the chimney?"

(oh boy, here we go...)

"erm... it's magic"

indignantly "there's no such thing as magic! So how does he do it?"

"well," said (proud) father, "you don't realise it yet, son, but you've just answered your own question."

at which point Ronwen stepped in and started talking about the special skeleton key that Santa uses to get into houses with no chimneys.

We went and watched it. Imax, HFR, not done in halves. The missus thought it was mostly rubbish. I wouldn't say that, myself - although I went in not expecting great things, and came out not being disappointed, if you get my meaning. I'm keen to watch it again, just to soak it all up.

What I liked:

• Visual, immersive, vast and impressive. The movie, like its predecessors, is just a bunch of people doing their best to blow your mind in a cinema. I think they succeed.

• the movies are at their best when they're being epic. The landscapes - epic. The insides of the mountain, epic. Heading up to the secret door. Epic. Mirkwood. Epic. Dol Guldur. Epic.

• Laketown. Incredible. Kind of place you'd love to live if it wasn't for the hygiene and long drops.

• The chase scenes (especially the barrels). Exciting stuff.

What I didn't like:

• Smaug's lips remind me of the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. By and large the dragon was huge, menacing, terrible, but the mouth, I found it hard to take Smaug seriously. Feeeeeed me!

• Look, I'm sorry, bizarre inter-stellar love triangle was just rubbish. Contrived and implausible. I also think it diminishes Legolas (Orlando Bloom's pained oh-noes-she-loves-another...maybe? is Pirates of the Caribbean all over again), and it certainly diminishes the significance of Gimli's and Legolas' friendship in LOTR, as well as Gimli's being smitten by Galadriel. Those were serious things in LOTR, and you had the sense that Tolkien was hitting at some big friggin' themes there. And yet here, you have Peter Jackson cracking jokes about dwarven schlongs. Dreadful.

• Beorn. It's been, oh, a year or more since I last read the book, so maybe I'm misremembering it. In the book Beorn is kinda scary, mystical, his big-assed bearity is mostly a hidden menace. Here it gets laid it out in 5 minutes flat and he turns into little more than a mostly pointless segue between the opening chase scenes and Mirkwood.

• Stephen Fry was a let-down as the Master of Laketown. I don't remember what he said but I just heard him playing up some cliched class-warrioresque stereotype that was just plain... forgettable.

• Yes, in the book you get the sense that Thranduil is a bit of a chop. In the movie he's too much of a chop.

• Too little time spent with Beorn, in Mirkwood, and in the Elven King's halls.

In summary: an incredible piece of movie-making, worth seeing just for the experience of it. Yet it could have been better, not least of all if Jackson and fellow writers weren't trying to so darned hard to juice up the story all the time.