We got our new monitor. It am black and lovely. It’s a 17″ ViewSonic. Never heard of ’em, don’t really care. It was a reasonably good offer from PC World and is the biggest monitor we’ve ever owned so we’re happy. The tellybox is a tellybox again and I don’t have to kill my knees on the floor to type.

I also got, just cos I wanted to, an optical mouse that glows like a Mathmos. Groovy.

Superman Returns.

I’m not going to bother with plot spoiler warnings. This is because Mr Singer, damn him, has simply rehashed every cliché that has ever been in any other Superman film. So if you’ve seen the other films you’ve already seen this one: you just don’t know it yet.

Let’s start with the opening sequence. Lo, doth it tell us the entire story we all know in one succinct paragraph, ending with the additional information that astronomers discovered the ruins of Krypton and Superman disappeared.

Yay! Excellent. We can sit down and look forward to something completely new because they’ve dispensed with all the old stuff right there and then.

WRONG.

The opening sequence is there only to excuse Ms Lane suddenly being married and with a son. A son? Oh dear gods no. Please tell me we’re not going to end up… oh. We are. We know we are as soon as little tyke puts inhaler to mouth because that is classic pulp movie misdirection of the sort that left the unthinking masses wondering who in the hell Kaiser Sozay was (is it Kevin Spacey’s fault, I wonder? Does he have a thing for that?)

OK, maybe Bryan, bless his cotton socks (at this point I’m still loving him for X2, please remember), is actually going to address the burning issue of what happens when supersperm meets human ovum. That would be novel.

I spend the rest of the movie waiting for Singer to regain his sense of originality. For doing something — anything, dammit — that hasn’t been done before. Even the new landmass shtick has been done before (anyone else remember Otisland?) I couldn’t tell you what I thought of Brandon Routh, he was so vapid and bland. Oh, except: I thought he wasn’t supposed to be a Christopher Reeve lookeylikey. He was. How disappointing.

So here we are. Superman is in love with Lois. Lois is unattainable but still loves Superman. Lex Luthor has evil schemes involving Superman and kryptonite. All the old one-liners are there, cut and pasted from previous movies, and they even do the saving the plane thing. The only thing missing was the flying round the Earth RILLY FAST in order to make time go backwards — and this was a disappointment because by about half an hour through we were hoping to collect the set.

Superman as Salvator Mundi. That hadn’t been done before. There is a good reason for this. It’s sickening. I don’t want religious comparison shoved down my throat by the image of Superman holding the world (the Daily Planet globe in this instance) while Perry says “Jesus Christ Almighty”, or words to that effect.

Other problems, largely to do with casting that probably won’t affect many others…

James Marsden as Richard. All I could think was: “So that’s why you were killed off so early in X3 – what, have you and Bryan got some sort of bum chum thing happening and you had to go with him? Traitor. Get yer bloody Oakleys on and blast the crap out of that bald eejit instead of flouncing around like a wet dishcloth.”

Parker Posey as Kitty, dripping all over the scenes with that bloody dog. She was pulling the same facial expressions as she did in Blade Trinity (impressive given the lack of teeth) with the result that she continually reminded me of Minerva in Hudson Hawk. Every time she oozed into view I had to resist the urge to yell “Bunny! Ball ball!” at the screen.

Other than that we had issues with sound quality, which meant we had to be on constant stand-by with the remote to turn up the whispering and turn down the bangs (we have the sub-woofer on an eggbox, but we could feel some of it through the floor even so, and we live on the top floor). And it was too damn long. Singer did not need to take 2 and a half hours to rehash every single bloody moment from the previous films. We’ve seen ’em all already, Bryan! Get on with it! It got to the point where the standard “plane goes over the edge and disappears out of sight only to reappear in a moment having made a last ditch save” took too long. Frood and I were both exclaiming “Too long! Everyone’s seen Indiana Jones! We know how long that should take!”

Disappointing is not strong enough to describe this film. Added to that is the awful knowledge that he abandoned the X-Men series to make this film. So he left us with the crap that is X3: not to produce an exciting new take on the DC universe, but to produce this pile of pap. Double damn him!

You know, I’d rather watch Ultraviolet again. Seriously. It’s that bad.

Verdict: only good for playing a Superman drinking game on a night when you want to get totally blotto. Our copy will be donated to my parents, who will probably also hate it, but it’ll serve ’em right for foisting The Da Vinci Code on us.

Our fecking PC monitor died last night. I’m currently running the PC through the tellybox (three cheers for Samsung thinking to put a PC port on the back of their tellybox!) This involves moving the PC around and sitting on the floor with the keyboard on my lap – not ideal in the slightest.

Damnit. DAMNIT! Why couldn’t it have waited until after Christmas, when I could have got a new one in the January sales? Now I’m probably going to have to go all the way to Corstorphine to get a new one.

Something has taken an executive decision that today will be a rest day.

Fair enough. Tomorrow swim, Saturday bike and run.

Oh, and today Splinister introduced me to the forum at Runnersworld and I found myself perusing the thread on the Stratford 220 Tri. Entries now open! Hosting the National Triathlon Show 2007!

Oh dear. I think I shall leave that alone until after the Edinburgh Tri. Maybe entries will be closed by then…

To Splinister for introducing me to Pandora.

OK, so they don’t have any Plus Tech Squeeze Box, have never heard of Yellow Magnetic Star and don’t have anything by NES, Alienbreed or Laut Sprecher, but hot damn. I now know that Harvey Danger have a new album (yay!) and I’m being introduced to some funky new tunes.

“If you’re gonna keep up this sort of work rate you gotta start eatin’ properly, girl! Then maybe you won’t feel so damn tired.”

I have to go swimming.

It’s Baltic out there! ‘Tepid’, as Frood would describe it. And raining. And windy. I’ll probably get just as wet walking to the pool as I will in it.

My weekly Grist email dropped into my inbox just now and pointed me towards the news that the American EPA is considering delisting lead as an air pollutant.

Yes, folks. That’s right. Delisting lead. The justification for this is apparently that past legislation has greatly reduced levels of lead in the air. So…

Yeah. OK. So because past legislation was effective, they’re proposing dropping it. This is the sort of logic I’d expect from Milkman Dan.

“Well, you see Karen, we don’t need that pesky law to protect little girls like you from nasty lead any more because there’s so little of it left. So we’ll just delete lead from the criteria pollutants the way the battery industry wants us to, especially as they asked so nicely, and let them pump that toxic metal into the air to their heart’s content. Now we know that blood lead levels as low as 10 micrograms per deciliter can impair mental and physical development, but I think being a gibbering retarded midget would suit you, Karen.”

“I hate you Milkman Dan.”

So that’s the Kinghorn-Burntisland loop done. And, yes, it took me twice as long as it should have done, but the outward leg was uphill into a 30mph wind gusting to 40mph, and by gods I could feel it. Freezing rain to boot.

The weather really isn’t co-operating with my training schedule.

The good news as far as I’m concerned is that I don’t feel like I’d struggle to do a run now. I was due to do a bike-run brick today but the weather is nasty. It’s supposed to be worse tomorrow, but there’s a lull predicted first thing in the morning, so I’ll see if I can take advantage of that.

As I can do 1200m in the pool without any trouble, at a consistent 9mins/400m, still feeling fresh, I reckon I should probably manage to get round this tri course, even with its 1:10 climb. Put a few more runs in on Fingal before I strip off the salad to make him race fit — that’s right. I’m training on Fingal in full touring mode, so when I come to race day he’ll weigh half as much as he does now. Cunning. I think the technical term is hypergravity training, but that’s a complicated name for the simple technique of riding a bike that’s heavier than the one you plan racing.

Today was not a good day to find out his seat post has stuck again. I shall have to take him along to Mum and Dad’s tomorrow, where our tools are, dump half a gallon of WD40 round the clamp and see if I can unstick it. I need to drop 5mm to take into account the different pedals (don’t want to be hobbling through transition on Look cleats so I’ve put the Time ATACs on there). If I can’t unstick it all is not lost: my tri suit has much thinner padding anyway, and if the weather’s good I’ll be taking Peregrine.

He’s a demon ascender and those Pavé Veloflex stick like gecko feet.

Brrr. Cold now. The heating doesn’t come on for another three quarters of an hour.

And can someone tell me how I got the idea into my head that I need to get my weight below 60kg?

Have I seen this guy when in London? He looks familiar.

Fruitbooter vs messenger. Dudes. To a Leftfield soundtrack (Phat Planet from Rhythm and Stealth, if I’m not mistaken).

I have SO got to get trackstands down this year.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gr1VeQlPcc]