More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
In mental-health roles, as well as those in nursing or social care, it will be quite common to encounter reflective practice, which has even become the stuff of [the obligation to undertake] CPD (or Continuing Professional Development, as, say, a practising lawyer or doctor) :
This posting is nothing much to do with reflective practice, yet - the phrase has it (which Eliot made unavoidable - ineluctable, if you are a Joycean character and / or adherent) - Everything connects.
For (1) Google® owns (2) Blogger®, (3) Amazon® owns (4) IMDb®, and Tweeting a link from (2) on (1) soon leads to potential purchases on (3) being promoted in adverts on (4)... - just try it and see !
Meanwhile, for the statistical month just gone, this indicates where visitors to this blog have come from, in a Top Five by Page-View :
1. United States ~ 29,621
2. France ~ 5,988
3. Germany ~ 958
4. United Kingdom ~ 685
5. Czech Republic ~ 664
And, for the lifetime of the blog, we have a changed perspective - as to players and priority :
1. United States ~ 200675
2. France ~ 46652
3. Russia ~ 37539
4. United Kingdom ~ 13915
5. Germany ~ 13668
Maybe more Tweets / blogging about Svetlana might bump Russia back into prominence for the month (placed only sixth, on 350)...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Showing posts with label Google®. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google®. Show all posts
Thursday 8 January 2015
Thursday 9 October 2014
Mathematics for the Million (after Hogben) ?
This is a Festival review of How I Came to Hate Maths (2013)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 October (Tweets embedded, 15 December, 22 April 2015)
This is a Festival review of How I Came to Hate Maths (Comment j’ai détesté les maths) (2013)
Amazon sellers hit by nightmare before Christmas as glitch cuts prices to 1p http://t.co/IV29NIiUK8
— The Guardian (@guardian) December 14, 2014Except as far as the first part of the film is concerned, the title How I Came to Hate Maths is somewhat misleading*, for we actually spend much time with people who are studying, or employed in, higher-level mathematics…
Contrariwise, some seem to have complained that the film is not what it does not seem to try to be, which is a sweeping account of how mathematics affects our lives and what mathematicians might be like : one, in particular, with an unusual dress sense and a striking scorpion fashion-accessory (pictured below), speaks very potently about what mathematics is and what the prize that he has gone to India to be awarded means to him.
Cédric Villani, who won a Fields Medal in 2010
He, and another Frenchman, who teaches the subject, both also touch upon (as the start of the film does) the changes in presenting it that brought about what the appropriate generation would know as The New Maths, when textbooks such as that of the Midlands Mathematical Experiment were being used (for some reason, Sarah Dillon, in her review for TAKE ONE, seems to interpret this development as a specifically French one). The film makes clear that The New Maths was not, as it might be in another subject, a change in emphasis or on techniques used to understand concepts, but redefining, at much greater length, such things as what one might mean by a straight line.
What is equally clear was that there were winners and losers, in, respectively, those who related to this approach, and those who found themselves excluded by it, but also that the change itself is still not viewed, all this time later, as having been self-evidently right, but having been partly influenced by forces and paradigms outside what is essential about mathematics itself. For those who get to study mathematics in depth, those matters may be less material, and it is with them that we spend most of the film.
Some mathematicians have religiously defended maths as being on the arts side, as if to defend it from being tainted by the sciences (by not being seen as creative). One mathematician, however, was keen to stress how studying the patterns created by dripping honey onto toast, as both one moves in relation to the other and the speed of the falling material changes, is actually relevant to laying cable on the sea-bed, so that it falls smoothly and does not make those convolutions.
Maybe we duplicated our attention unnecessarily in seeing two ‘retreats’ / summer schools for mathematicians (please see comments below as to whether the film could have been ‘trimmed’), in one of which they even made seating plans so that each person sat at table with every other person at least once (hardly a higher-level mathematical task since, once a program had been devised, the names could just be slotted in each time) – and maybe it would have been nice to have heard more interesting comments from those working for organizations such as Google® than appreciation of the topology of a favourite (commissioned ?) sculpture…
In reviewing the film, Sarah Dillon takes issue with the time devoted to high-speed (or quantum) trading, as if this is somehow peripheral to the subject of mathematics, although a former academic mathematician, Jim Simons (who set up Renaissance Technologies), is at the heart of what has been happening with computer-driven decision-making. Dillon claims that :
The film loses its pace when it moves away from this world [that of ‘higher-level mathematics research’] in order to address the role of mathematics in the global financial crisis. Whilst this is clearly an important contemporary moment in the story the film is telling, the film spends too long on it – cut by about fifteen minutes it would have been a good end to an otherwise perfectly balanced piece.
Just on the figures and with a run-time of 110 mins (and, as remarked elsewhere, The Queen’s Building at Emmanuel College does not, in its lecture-theatre, have the most comfortable seating in the world), that would mean cutting it to around 95 mins. However, Dillon must be mistaken in thinking that the film’s financial focus took it this much out of her ideal proportion – for, although she may have had a stopwatch on it, fifteen minutes would seem more like the total ‘spend’ on that topic, not the amount by which it could have been shortened. The Tweet embedded now at the top of this review is meant to suggest further why such things matter to us all...
Market Turbulence: Wall Street’s Whipsaw Week Shows Global Economy’s Flaws http://t.co/TqSvkKPzql
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 10, 2014That said, as long as one credits the meaning of the world economy, and that global trends ought, because governments subscribe to its having significance, to be allowed to crush the lives of millions who are not at fault, quantum trading in commodities, futures, etc., will continue to have the potential to cause chaos. Couple that with the incident that occurred on 6 May 2010, which has been trivially called The Flash Crash (and which no one in the film seems to be able to explain in detail), and it must be right to question what high-speed trading has led us to, and what it might lead to again : in something of the order of 30 minutes, 10% was lost from the value of the Dow Jones, only to be gained back within the day.
Trader charged with manipulation that contributed to 2010 "flashcrash" http://t.co/aIT7M2alOC pic.twitter.com/aWm2Ydypiw
— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 21, 2015Some human decision-makers would have ‘held their nerve’ and traded their way out of the position, others, seemingly along with the automated trading that was going on at phenomenally high frequencies, would have ‘cut their losses’ – and all over what, as no one even identifies market insecurities as being responsible to so-called positions collapsing? These are the Modern financial instruments, and does not a film about mathematics fitly ask some questions about this, when mistakes in super-string theory, not even mentioned, do not damage people’s pension-funds ?
People who like to talk about Google sometimes speak of its algorithm (as if that explains anything, when there are countless algorithms in how it is put together, not just one). With trading, we are essentially talking of the effects of one program going through the contingencies, which have been dictated by the program-steps, over and over at enormous speeds, coupled with that other programs doing the same, each at the same time, and in a process of not necessarily predictable feedback, shifting their stances / responses. Possibly a massive game of crying wolf, such as unautomated trading could also give rise to, but where one could never go back to who cried it…
The calm tone of acceptance of Wikipedia®'s article also makes for alarming reading !
Post-script
For his Movie Evangelist (@MovieEvangelist) blog (up to Day 9 of 11 so far in writing up the Festival), Mark Liversidge wrote this review, which, at two paragraphs, is rather on the short side :
Although Mark is certainly right that it is a kind of anthology, in that it begins with maths teaching and rarely, if ever, returns, one has to ask Where (in the film) is it suggested, let alone stated, that it intended 'to come close to helping those in the “normal person, hate maths” understand why maths is so cool to those of us in the other camp' [word missing, but Mark divides the world in two : 'those people like me who are good at it and enjoy it, and normal people who hate it'].
But what if the film actually is what it says, an anthology of reasons (such as high-speed trading) to hate maths, not like it... ?
For there was also, as well as implicating mathematics in the minutiae of trading, mention of how those algorithms had been written to automate lending criteria - although it was less that automation was inappropriate, but that human oversight both of the parameters, and of the resultant body of lending within a portfolio of risk, was defective.
Unless (as some will boldly still have it) one discredits such banking as one of the factors in this world economy of ours, the point is likewise : another instance of giving over the task of making decisions about risk to a program, and not seeming to check it or its ongoing performance, as if computers will necessarily do what we would have wanted.
End-notes
* And it is far from obvious that it conveys the same message as the original French title, Comment j’ai détesté les maths.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Thursday 9 May 2013
Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Claire Martin
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 May
I never tire of Claire Martin's (@CMartinJazz's) gigs : the quality is consistently very high, the energy and love of jazz evident (along with appreciation of her fellow musicians, applause for whose solos she always encourages), and Claire is a very worthy holder of an OBE for services to this music, not least as a regular broadcaster on Radio 3's (@BBCRadio3's) Jazz Line-Up.
I was going to say that Gareth Williams is her unfailing pianist, forgetting for a moment that she did some duo performances with the much-loved and recently departed Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, one of which I caught at Concerts at King's in Cambridge. Gareth was, however, in her quartet, along with another regular, Laurence Cottle (on electric bass), and Mark Skelton (until now, I hadn't managed to find his surname, or identify him via Google®).
Perversely, when there is something that I love, I can be a bit D. H. Lawrence and find myself looking and hearing with an unconverted companion's eyes and ears, but there was absolutely nothing to disappoint, and, unlike what I felt about a jazz Clare whose gig I left after the first set, nothing stagey or false in Claire Martin. When she referred to Sir Richard, I could sense that she was welling up, and it was poignant to be reminded that he had died on Christmas Eve, and to learn how strange it felt that the CD of Irving Berlin that they had recorded was just about to come out.
It must be a good few years ago that I was joshing around with Claire and Gareth after they played at Anglia Ruskin University's Mumford Theatre (something about my being the only person with a pen when others, too, wanted a signed CD, and I also wanted to get Gareth to buy the CD of his that I had bought), and I know that how she is on stage is how she is - as some would say, no front.
So this was a lovely set from Claire, and no matter that I knew much of the content as the repertoire from her long list of CDs on the Linn label - not utterly in the same way that I can listen without tiring to Bach's great Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) or the great Handel arias, but it did not hurt to have heard Claire sing 'Love is a necessary evil' or 'Cheek to cheek' (her tribute to Sir Richard) before, or to learn that a song or two was by James Van Heusen*.
With someone who loves the songs that she sings in the way that one knows that Claire does (one feels it tangibly), and who can swing them this way or that as fits the occasion, a gig is a chance to meet old friends, be it the amazing finger-quickness of Gareth or of her other unfailing choices of collaborators, or the songs themselves, which, as she picks them as well, are full of goodness and freshness.
I see that Claire is doing a tour with a quartet of cellos, the Montpellier Quartet from Brighton, and I am just sad that I cannot be back in time to catch that particular date near me...
End-notes
* I recall now that, not for the first time, Claire mentioned the singing of Julie London - must have a look at the content of the link that I've just put there...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 May
I never tire of Claire Martin's (@CMartinJazz's) gigs : the quality is consistently very high, the energy and love of jazz evident (along with appreciation of her fellow musicians, applause for whose solos she always encourages), and Claire is a very worthy holder of an OBE for services to this music, not least as a regular broadcaster on Radio 3's (@BBCRadio3's) Jazz Line-Up.
I was going to say that Gareth Williams is her unfailing pianist, forgetting for a moment that she did some duo performances with the much-loved and recently departed Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, one of which I caught at Concerts at King's in Cambridge. Gareth was, however, in her quartet, along with another regular, Laurence Cottle (on electric bass), and Mark Skelton (until now, I hadn't managed to find his surname, or identify him via Google®).
A great set from @clairemartinjazz at #cheltjazzfest - a songful, joyful, heartfelt, playful show all with Messrs Williams, Cottle & Skelton
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 5, 2013
Perversely, when there is something that I love, I can be a bit D. H. Lawrence and find myself looking and hearing with an unconverted companion's eyes and ears, but there was absolutely nothing to disappoint, and, unlike what I felt about a jazz Clare whose gig I left after the first set, nothing stagey or false in Claire Martin. When she referred to Sir Richard, I could sense that she was welling up, and it was poignant to be reminded that he had died on Christmas Eve, and to learn how strange it felt that the CD of Irving Berlin that they had recorded was just about to come out.
It must be a good few years ago that I was joshing around with Claire and Gareth after they played at Anglia Ruskin University's Mumford Theatre (something about my being the only person with a pen when others, too, wanted a signed CD, and I also wanted to get Gareth to buy the CD of his that I had bought), and I know that how she is on stage is how she is - as some would say, no front.
So this was a lovely set from Claire, and no matter that I knew much of the content as the repertoire from her long list of CDs on the Linn label - not utterly in the same way that I can listen without tiring to Bach's great Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) or the great Handel arias, but it did not hurt to have heard Claire sing 'Love is a necessary evil' or 'Cheek to cheek' (her tribute to Sir Richard) before, or to learn that a song or two was by James Van Heusen*.
With someone who loves the songs that she sings in the way that one knows that Claire does (one feels it tangibly), and who can swing them this way or that as fits the occasion, a gig is a chance to meet old friends, be it the amazing finger-quickness of Gareth or of her other unfailing choices of collaborators, or the songs themselves, which, as she picks them as well, are full of goodness and freshness.
I see that Claire is doing a tour with a quartet of cellos, the Montpellier Quartet from Brighton, and I am just sad that I cannot be back in time to catch that particular date near me...
End-notes
* I recall now that, not for the first time, Claire mentioned the singing of Julie London - must have a look at the content of the link that I've just put there...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Thursday 11 October 2012
A Tweet review I
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
That was a Tweet that I couldn't trawl through Splatter to find (I found), so got it on Google® instead...
I need to say a little more about this, in another posting.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
The Idiot (2011) pares Dostoyevsky's story down to essentials, but, by fully realizing key scenes in a stylized universe, hints at the whole
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 12, 2012
That was a Tweet that I couldn't trawl through Splatter to find (I found), so got it on Google® instead...
I need to say a little more about this, in another posting.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Monday 10 September 2012
All on one day
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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10 September
No, not a Hollywood title of a film, conflating One Fine Day (1996) with I Don't Know What (2012, post-production), or anything else...
I'm referring to World Suicide Prevention Day* (WSPD), but, being controversial, it all does seem a bit like that Spielberg film that I could never face seeing, Saving Private Ryan:
Tom Hanks, I am sure, is fine, but not so much what is the concept (or what facts - there apparently are some - is the concept rooted in?), as what's the point of the concept? (Substitute any other industry-standard (or non-standard) screenplay-writing word for 'concept', if you object.)
Mother of four (?) can't be subjected to the announcement of the death of x of them (where x is 3 (or fewer)) on one day, I gather, so save one of them (i.e. he doesn't die), y, so his death, too, doesn't need to be announced at the same time: 'take him out of' the dangerous position in which he is, at the risk of z lives, rather than lying about whether he is dead or not.
The military, of course, always scrupulously honest, especially when (as with the Battle of Culloden (or Prestonpans, for that matter)) it comes to agreeing with the enemy where the sides will engage each other (cf. Winfrey's Last Case**), so a real bind for them to lie, if y were to have died:
How could they lie to a poor mother about whether her son is / sons are dead? Sob, sob.
Back at WSPD:
The parallel? A flurry of activity to publicize the cause, prevention and statistics of suicide on one world-wide day.
Why not a lot less, not all at once, just all the time, done properly, so that, on the 362[.25] days of the year that are not WSPD (or either side), Private Ryan gets as good a chance of getting saved then? For, aren't days*** and weeks of this kind in danger of being tokenistic, too little focused on a tiny part of the year, and no encouragement to proper funding, day in, day out?
I don't know, but when else have I had all these Tweets about suicide?: I don't mind - but don't much need - them, but couldn't they just piss off with overload and quash any compassion or understanding, when too many people wrongly think those weak who choose to end their own lives?
Requiescat in pacem
End-notes
* The name is simply wrong, in Ronseal terms.
And I type it, to check, into Google®, and Google doesn't even know what 'world suic' leads to, in its form-completion mode!
** Ripping Yarns, courtesy of Jones & Palin.
*** And I might include World Mental Health Day, because the people with an interest in it huddle (and everyone else can pretend to have been 'off the radar' or 'not to have had a signal' that day, but, never mind - there's always next year...).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 September
No, not a Hollywood title of a film, conflating One Fine Day (1996) with I Don't Know What (2012, post-production), or anything else...
I'm referring to World Suicide Prevention Day* (WSPD), but, being controversial, it all does seem a bit like that Spielberg film that I could never face seeing, Saving Private Ryan:
Tom Hanks, I am sure, is fine, but not so much what is the concept (or what facts - there apparently are some - is the concept rooted in?), as what's the point of the concept? (Substitute any other industry-standard (or non-standard) screenplay-writing word for 'concept', if you object.)
Mother of four (?) can't be subjected to the announcement of the death of x of them (where x is 3 (or fewer)) on one day, I gather, so save one of them (i.e. he doesn't die), y, so his death, too, doesn't need to be announced at the same time: 'take him out of' the dangerous position in which he is, at the risk of z lives, rather than lying about whether he is dead or not.
The military, of course, always scrupulously honest, especially when (as with the Battle of Culloden (or Prestonpans, for that matter)) it comes to agreeing with the enemy where the sides will engage each other (cf. Winfrey's Last Case**), so a real bind for them to lie, if y were to have died:
How could they lie to a poor mother about whether her son is / sons are dead? Sob, sob.
Back at WSPD:
The parallel? A flurry of activity to publicize the cause, prevention and statistics of suicide on one world-wide day.
Why not a lot less, not all at once, just all the time, done properly, so that, on the 362[.25] days of the year that are not WSPD (or either side), Private Ryan gets as good a chance of getting saved then? For, aren't days*** and weeks of this kind in danger of being tokenistic, too little focused on a tiny part of the year, and no encouragement to proper funding, day in, day out?
I don't know, but when else have I had all these Tweets about suicide?: I don't mind - but don't much need - them, but couldn't they just piss off with overload and quash any compassion or understanding, when too many people wrongly think those weak who choose to end their own lives?
Requiescat in pacem
End-notes
* The name is simply wrong, in Ronseal terms.
And I type it, to check, into Google®, and Google doesn't even know what 'world suic' leads to, in its form-completion mode!
** Ripping Yarns, courtesy of Jones & Palin.
*** And I might include World Mental Health Day, because the people with an interest in it huddle (and everyone else can pretend to have been 'off the radar' or 'not to have had a signal' that day, but, never mind - there's always next year...).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Wednesday 2 May 2012
Trout-fishing in Essex
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 May
Sorry, I keep getting that one confused with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), for a screening of which on Thursday afternoon I have a ticket: worryingly, if only for the publicity employed by the film's distibutors, searching for it on Google® by typing in just Yemen brings up no immediate results.
We shall see, and at least it's not
* Fishing for Cod Russian in the Quietly Flowing Don
* Dolphin Fishing in the English Channel
* Tuna Hunting in my Kitchen Cupboard
* or even Catching Red Snappers in the Bedroom
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 May
Sorry, I keep getting that one confused with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011), for a screening of which on Thursday afternoon I have a ticket: worryingly, if only for the publicity employed by the film's distibutors, searching for it on Google® by typing in just Yemen brings up no immediate results.
We shall see, and at least it's not
* Fishing for Cod Russian in the Quietly Flowing Don
* Dolphin Fishing in the English Channel
* Tuna Hunting in my Kitchen Cupboard
* or even Catching Red Snappers in the Bedroom
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Monday 6 February 2012
Fickbereit
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 February
I was trying to find out the source of the interest (which I see 'in the stats') in the posting Schlafzimmer.
Now that, in my list of top search-results from Google®, I have found the following, all has become clear:
Sie ist fickbereit und wartet auf dich
If only! - as if anyone could be kept in that state of readiness indefinitely...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 February
I was trying to find out the source of the interest (which I see 'in the stats') in the posting Schlafzimmer.
Now that, in my list of top search-results from Google®, I have found the following, all has become clear:
Sie ist fickbereit und wartet auf dich
If only! - as if anyone could be kept in that state of readiness indefinitely...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Friday 3 February 2012
Another successful search with Google®
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 February
It couldn't just have been hearing Mary Ann Kennedy to-night presenting a largely live show, the last of those that have been on during the week, from events at Celtic Connections (in Glasgow), but I was reminded a little while back of the name Shona Spurtle.
Now, I knew perfectly well what the name meant (to me) - and I will wager that it doesn't mean a whole lot to many others - but I didn't know if it was spelt Spirtle (as I don't remember paying any attention to when I could have seen it written). So, rather than putting into my search-box the name of where Shona comes from, I put in that spelling - setting a challenge.
Obscure though it is - but I might, although I doubt it, find a plethora of fan web-sites in my search-results - Google® knew what I meant, and has taken me straight there:
I now know that there is a clip on YouTube, and that someone liked the name enough to have it as a user-name to comment on a story connected with the Scottish Parliament.
Amazon®, ever ready to please, even claims to have a web-page called www.amazon.co.uk/spurtle, which won't be the laugh that I hope for it to be, as I think that I have clicked such advertising links before...
No, it turns out that I am wrong, for, although it looked like a page of ball-point pens, it is some sort of culinary stick - it could be a magic-wand, for all that I know! - in connection with porridge (the making of, I have to think, as I have no conception how (or why) one could eat that dish with something looking like this).
In any case, they go for nearly £5.00 (well, more than that with postage - is there a standard Amazon® charge for a spurtle?), the best ones boast of being made of beech* (how that can matter to anything?), and you can even buy a box of six. Plus there's a hardback book, but it's miserably not available, called Mrs Spurtle goes South, which, I think, precedes this other appearance as a name.
Bizarrely, there is even a double of the Wikipedia® web-page for the vehicle in which our Mrs (or Ms) Spurtle appeared. It is called Wikipeetia, and it claims to exist solely because 'you spelled someting wrong'**, so:
For your amusement, we've also included a copy of the entire Wikipedia article misspelled
Helpfully, as I am obviously a remedial case for making such an error (?), there is a link that will take me where I can learn to spell English, or just to the unprocessed Wikipedia® piece.
As yet, though, nothing to lure me to buy a recording that shows Siobhan Redmond's exploits as Shona, but she may have gone on to use that 'handle' on Arsebook® and Twitter®, both of which claim that Shona has a presence.
No, again I speak too soon (what a rich vein this is: or is that the - I kid you not! - Glayva talking?), because I can buy a pirate DVD, and there is a web-site with a quotation (and they don't even know where it's from!), which I shall use by way of an ending of all this - for want of a better word - craic:
You are a waster, Sebastian! You are a lying cheat! You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cousining cardsharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a palterer who perjures, a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!
Yes, she likes him!
End-notes
* Then again, it is traditional for wash-backs to be made from pine, and not just any old pine, but Oregon pine. We are talking of - if you know what I'm talking about - a very conservative means of producing a drinkable spirit, where they reproduce the dents in the copper-stills, when they have worn so thin that they need repair.
That said, some have taken the view that this Oregon pine approach adds nothing to the all-important taste (too much liquid in there for too short a time to make a difference - except, perhaps, at the leve of homoeopathy), and have gone for stainless-steel vessels. Which you would have no way of knowing when you buy the product, unless you have visited.)
** This seems a tenuous reason to have gone to the trouble of having such a dual text (even if, in it, for example,the word not is turned into 'nto', in a restless attempt to misspell everything, whereas what is really presented is often enough just a meaningless rearrangement of the letters).
I cannot believe that the reason applies in all cases, since this is not the only time that I have looked at what is just the fourth page of search-results, and I do not reall seeing such a thing, although I am often enough searching for a name precisely because I do not know how it is spelt. However, I shall attempt to find the famous Helen Mirran... Well, it didn't surface in the first hundred search-results, but I now know that 66-year-old Mirren, the famous typing error, has - seemingly by her much-vaunted posing nude - earnt the title of having 'the sexiest body on [the] planet' (according to www.salon.com), and also wants not only to appear in Doctor Who, but to be the first female Doctor***.
*** Doubtless her part-time role appreciating art for MOMA (the Museuem of Modern Art in New York) fits her for such a role (I cannot wait for the first Cubist Doctor Who). In the commentary on a clip that she filmed for the museum, which I might have to resist watching (after such a write-up), we are told:
Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of the dame. In addition to being a fantastic actor, she’s beautiful, smart, and completely unpretentious. She’s an art lover, and she is especially enamored of the pioneering abstract paintings of Vasily Kandinsky, whose work is represented in MoMA’s collection and whose “Four Seasons” were very fortuitously on view on the day of her visit. [...]
Like these amazing works, Helen does not disappoint, and in this interview she talks passionately about her great love of painting—particularly her “lovely friends” the Kandinsky paintings—and about the connections between painting and her work.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 February
It couldn't just have been hearing Mary Ann Kennedy to-night presenting a largely live show, the last of those that have been on during the week, from events at Celtic Connections (in Glasgow), but I was reminded a little while back of the name Shona Spurtle.
Now, I knew perfectly well what the name meant (to me) - and I will wager that it doesn't mean a whole lot to many others - but I didn't know if it was spelt Spirtle (as I don't remember paying any attention to when I could have seen it written). So, rather than putting into my search-box the name of where Shona comes from, I put in that spelling - setting a challenge.
Obscure though it is - but I might, although I doubt it, find a plethora of fan web-sites in my search-results - Google® knew what I meant, and has taken me straight there:
I now know that there is a clip on YouTube, and that someone liked the name enough to have it as a user-name to comment on a story connected with the Scottish Parliament.
Amazon®, ever ready to please, even claims to have a web-page called www.amazon.co.uk/spurtle, which won't be the laugh that I hope for it to be, as I think that I have clicked such advertising links before...
No, it turns out that I am wrong, for, although it looked like a page of ball-point pens, it is some sort of culinary stick - it could be a magic-wand, for all that I know! - in connection with porridge (the making of, I have to think, as I have no conception how (or why) one could eat that dish with something looking like this).
In any case, they go for nearly £5.00 (well, more than that with postage - is there a standard Amazon® charge for a spurtle?), the best ones boast of being made of beech* (how that can matter to anything?), and you can even buy a box of six. Plus there's a hardback book, but it's miserably not available, called Mrs Spurtle goes South, which, I think, precedes this other appearance as a name.
Bizarrely, there is even a double of the Wikipedia® web-page for the vehicle in which our Mrs (or Ms) Spurtle appeared. It is called Wikipeetia, and it claims to exist solely because 'you spelled someting wrong'**, so:
For your amusement, we've also included a copy of the entire Wikipedia article misspelled
Helpfully, as I am obviously a remedial case for making such an error (?), there is a link that will take me where I can learn to spell English, or just to the unprocessed Wikipedia® piece.
As yet, though, nothing to lure me to buy a recording that shows Siobhan Redmond's exploits as Shona, but she may have gone on to use that 'handle' on Arsebook® and Twitter®, both of which claim that Shona has a presence.
No, again I speak too soon (what a rich vein this is: or is that the - I kid you not! - Glayva talking?), because I can buy a pirate DVD, and there is a web-site with a quotation (and they don't even know where it's from!), which I shall use by way of an ending of all this - for want of a better word - craic:
You are a waster, Sebastian! You are a lying cheat! You are a fibster, a fabulist, an equivocating shim-shammer, a cousining cardsharp, a pathological mythomaniac, a yarner, a palterer who perjures, a whited sepulchre, a cantering serpent, a rat!
Yes, she likes him!
End-notes
* Then again, it is traditional for wash-backs to be made from pine, and not just any old pine, but Oregon pine. We are talking of - if you know what I'm talking about - a very conservative means of producing a drinkable spirit, where they reproduce the dents in the copper-stills, when they have worn so thin that they need repair.
That said, some have taken the view that this Oregon pine approach adds nothing to the all-important taste (too much liquid in there for too short a time to make a difference - except, perhaps, at the leve of homoeopathy), and have gone for stainless-steel vessels. Which you would have no way of knowing when you buy the product, unless you have visited.)
** This seems a tenuous reason to have gone to the trouble of having such a dual text (even if, in it, for example,the word not is turned into 'nto', in a restless attempt to misspell everything, whereas what is really presented is often enough just a meaningless rearrangement of the letters).
I cannot believe that the reason applies in all cases, since this is not the only time that I have looked at what is just the fourth page of search-results, and I do not reall seeing such a thing, although I am often enough searching for a name precisely because I do not know how it is spelt. However, I shall attempt to find the famous Helen Mirran... Well, it didn't surface in the first hundred search-results, but I now know that 66-year-old Mirren, the famous typing error, has - seemingly by her much-vaunted posing nude - earnt the title of having 'the sexiest body on [the] planet' (according to www.salon.com), and also wants not only to appear in Doctor Who, but to be the first female Doctor***.
*** Doubtless her part-time role appreciating art for MOMA (the Museuem of Modern Art in New York) fits her for such a role (I cannot wait for the first Cubist Doctor Who). In the commentary on a clip that she filmed for the museum, which I might have to resist watching (after such a write-up), we are told:
Truth be told, I’m a huge fan of the dame. In addition to being a fantastic actor, she’s beautiful, smart, and completely unpretentious. She’s an art lover, and she is especially enamored of the pioneering abstract paintings of Vasily Kandinsky, whose work is represented in MoMA’s collection and whose “Four Seasons” were very fortuitously on view on the day of her visit. [...]
Like these amazing works, Helen does not disappoint, and in this interview she talks passionately about her great love of painting—particularly her “lovely friends” the Kandinsky paintings—and about the connections between painting and her work.
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Thursday 2 February 2012
Google® has its uses
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
For some reason, not that the scrolls on any of the string instruments were in any way exceptional, I was reminded of a film that I had seen - and which I couldn't place - where a teenager saws, almost hacks, the scroll off a violin in a symbolic gesture regarding his relationship with, as I recollect, his father.
My first thought was to ask the friend who might have seen the film with me, but the e-mail didn't even get drafted, because I tried searching with the following, and, much to my surprise, got what I wanted as item 7 on my list of results:
"scroll"+"violin"+"film"
The film, it turns out, is Adoration (2008), and, courtesy of About.com's DVD section, I have very quickly been reminded of it. However, other than telling me that a scroll made by the teenage main character's (Simon's) father 'decorated' an instrument played by his mother, I am none the wiser just now...
Still, if only all searches were as succesful!
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 February
For some reason, not that the scrolls on any of the string instruments were in any way exceptional, I was reminded of a film that I had seen - and which I couldn't place - where a teenager saws, almost hacks, the scroll off a violin in a symbolic gesture regarding his relationship with, as I recollect, his father.
My first thought was to ask the friend who might have seen the film with me, but the e-mail didn't even get drafted, because I tried searching with the following, and, much to my surprise, got what I wanted as item 7 on my list of results:
"scroll"+"violin"+"film"
The film, it turns out, is Adoration (2008), and, courtesy of About.com's DVD section, I have very quickly been reminded of it. However, other than telling me that a scroll made by the teenage main character's (Simon's) father 'decorated' an instrument played by his mother, I am none the wiser just now...
Still, if only all searches were as succesful!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
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