• 22:10 Getting frustrated with House of Leaves. So much data! So little information! #
• 10:26 Morning, world. ♫ blip.fm/~5wbp #
• 11:26 Today I am wearing sunglasses with the curtains drawn. ♫ blip.fm/~5wkl #
• 11:54 Old skool… ♫ blip.fm/~5woi #
• 12:08 If you don’t enjoy this there’s something wrong with you. Now where’s that DVD… ♫ blip.fm/~5wqd #
• 12:14 @splinister Yeah, but it’s good fun though 🙂 #
• 12:19 @splinister If you ever get the chance, watch the Australian film "Malcolm". The bin scene is fantastic. ♫ blip.fm/~5wsc #
• 13:08 The first time I heard this I was 14 and sitting in the bedroom of a guy in Hamburg… Don’t ask. ♫ blip.fm/~5x2t #
• 13:17 One of my favourite videos of all time. ♫ blip.fm/~5x4u #
• 13:28 "Quantum of Solace"? WTF is THAT supposed to mean? #
• 13:30 @splinister George Orwell meets Dada… ♫ blip.fm/~5x8m #
• 13:52 @splinister Your Bobby Womack reminded me of this one from Ghost Dog. ♫ blip.fm/~5xh5 #
• 13:54 Chicken good! ♫ blip.fm/~5xhx #
• 14:14 I don’t think this needs any more Walken or cowbells… ♫ blip.fm/~5xpr #
• 14:27 @andygates yeah. Sometimes I love having enough basic knowledge to run parity checks 😉 #
• 14:29 @cosita made me think of this. Japanese happy bum music no doubt. ♫ blip.fm/~5xww #
• 14:57 @andygates Remind me? #
• 15:01 In honour of my latest obsession with comparing things to the LHC. ♫ blip.fm/~5yda #
• 15:02 Cake! ♫ blip.fm/~5ydt #
• 15:24 @andygates I don’t remember. I remember being the only one on deck at 2am in my undies stressing about the mooring, you lot snoring below! #
• 15:42 @andygates You bet! This planet-sized brain isn’t for nothing, you know. And I can cook, too! #

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After a rotten month, Anth got this month’s CityCycling up yesterday. Go check it out. Jaquie Phelan on round food (Yarly); Russell McGilton on Bombay to Beijing by bicycle; and all the regulars.

Go waste some time.

As seen on spEak You’re bRanes:

Spider ‘kills’ pet dog after paratrooper accidentally brings it home from Afghanistan

When Rodney Griffiths came home on leave from Afghanistan, he thought he was leaving the perils of the desert behind.

But a little bit of danger had hitched a ride back with him.

A camel spider has been seen scuttling across the floor of the paratrooper’s home – and is thought to have killed the family’s pet dog Bella.

A camel spider? Not a true spider and, coincidentally, not venomous. This is my favourite bit:

She has left out traps and plates of raw mince in the bedroom. The meat has been devoured, but so far the spider has managed to escape.

Ha ha ha ha ha. You couldn’t make it up.

Better yet, as you can see from this delightful picture showing the concerned dog owner, the “traps” they’ve put out include mousetraps.

Good one! I’m sure that’ll be brilliantly effective!

Facepalm.

This is the first ever picture of the Earth taken from the surface of another planet.

That is awesome. I mean, the pic itself doesn’t have the same heart-stopping beauty of the Earth taken from our own orbit, but a photo taken from the surface of another planet in our Solar System is just so neat.

And the bio of Scott Maxwell, the rover driver, is not exactly what you’d expect to find on the NASA website…

It amuses me immensely that the various NASA projects tweet at each other in the first person, such as this one from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

“Appreciating my awesome instrument teams…so glad they’re here with me during my testing!”

While over at Cern it’s a rather more dry style:

“The final LHC synchronization test before first beam was a success.”

It’s the same as the cultural difference demonstrated by comparing “Good job!” with “Well done,” I suspect.

Frood is putting leftovers in the fridge for tomorrow’s lunch. He’s singing.

“What are you singing?”

“The putting the cous cous salad in the fridge song.”

“?”

“Cous cous salad goes in the fridge, goes in the fridge, goes in the fridge,

Cous cous salad goes in the fridge,

That’s where it goes to sleep.”

If you’re a regular reader of the BBC’s Have Your Say (or even if you’re not); have the same low opinion of the majority of the seething biomass out there that I do, a hefty dose of misanthropy and a need for some amusement accompanied by confirmation that the world has more than its fair share of morons: I can thoroughly recommend spEak You’re bRanes.

10,000 BC

Where do I start?

Where do I even start?

I can summarise this film by saying I had to pretend it was on an alien planet to make it bearable. We start somewhere apparently in Siberia — I mean, it’s called 10,000 BC, right? One naturally assumes that they mean Before Christ. Given the state of scientific knowledge these days one would expect a certain amount of, if not realism, then at least lack of preposterousness.

But no. Our hero first of all goes hunting mammoths in the most ridiculous way possible: anyone hunting mammoths is in it at a cost/benefit threshold. They’re not going to go stampeding herds and then running around between their feet. No. Really. Then slave traders arrive. On horses.

Um. WTF? Slave traders? And since when did they have domesticated horses 12000 years ago? In Siberia? They had stirrups and everything! Oh! And what looked like steel weapons! Not to mention intercontinental trade.

That’s right, folks. Because before long our hero is tracking his girl through the foetid swamps of South America (where they had bamboo!) to which he has somehow walked from the ice fields of Northern Russia. Complete with megafauna, some of which died out around 40 million years previously. After that he moves onto the desert, where he meets the Africans. Who have chilli peppers.

Then we broach full Stargate territory with aliens from Atlantis, despite some proto-Masai and a bunch of pygmies and people wearing stupid hats, all of whom looked like they came out of an Ancient Greek’s Rough Guide to the World; as well as a religious set-up that’s halfway between Aztec and Ancient Egyptian. I was waiting for the tribe that had one giant foot they used as a sunshade.

FFS.

If I’m being kind I can assume that we’re talking the end of the Pleistocene during a period in which the Siberian Land Bridge was in existence, but, but, but…

They had aliens from Atlantis living in South America and stealing people AND MAMMOTHS from wherever the fuck they were supposed to be and then FORCE-MARCHING them all the way to the Gulf Of Mexico. Or something. And then they tied the mammoths into harnesses and made them drag big blocks of stone around in the sort of heat and humidity that would have made them drop dead inside 48 hours.

Plot. Oh plot. Chosen one boy meets chosen one girl and together they bring down the big bad and save the world. Rah. Bullet Proof Monk made a better hash of that tired old story.

I can’t even claim that the effects made it worthwhile because I was too busy gawping at how inaccurate they were. HOW BIG DO YOU THINK SMILODON WAS? They’re called megafauna, not gigafauna. Lead boy did an okay job. Lead girl was a washout. The narration made me want to tear my own skin off and stuff it in my ears to block out the sound of horrendous scriptwriting.

Oh, and oh… The Aesop’s Fables Slave and Lion trope? Just fuck right off. This isn’t Beastmaster, yo.

I can’t find anything on which to recommend this film even if you don’t have a passing familiarity with prehistoric climate, flora, fauna, geography or civilisation (or lack thereof). It was even worse than I expected it to be. 10,000 BC = 100 minutes of suck.

I just saw the men’s 10k Olympic swimmers going through a feed station.

That was awesome!

I have a suspected stress fracture in my right foot and this year’s weather appears to be mostly flooding. So Frood decided our imminent annual camping trip must be a departure from our usual bike-based, lightweight style. It shall be ‘plush’.

To this end this morning (we were supposed to leave today but there are flood warnings for the Highlands) we drove down to Tisos in Leith and purchased ourselves one of these:

I felt an odd sense of betrayal. My lightweight, kit-fetish, gear-geek nature was offended that I should be buying this great hunk of appliance weighing nearly 6kg (which is about 3 times the weight of our tent, and nearly as much as my Pinarello weighs). Why was I purchasing this monstrosity of a stove when right next to it was the Primus Himalaya Omni-Fuel, complete with wooden presentation box: a spider-web light, steampunk joy of a thing that can burn anything you throw at it except possibly yak dung? Why was I turning my back on my MSR Pocket Rocket, nestled so snugly within my MSR titanium mug? Why was I spending what strikes me as being a small fortune to get something for which I also needed to buy a gas cylinder I won’t be able to use with anything else and yet which cost about as much as the stove?

Was I doing this just for toast? I don’t even eat toast! And we have a toasty thing for our other stove anyway!

Dammit, I own a titanium spork!

“We’re going plush camping,” Frood told me. “And you know what else it will be good for?”

Of course! The Dumb Run! Never mind disposable barbies and sossajes: we can do bacon and egg butties on the beach at St Andrews with this! That should see us to the end, even if we are bringing about Armegeddon.

Well, that’s all right then.

In sharp contrast to The Dark Knight, the second of the weekend’s cinematic offerings is one of my favourite films of all time. It sits on my list of top ten films next to other obscure pieces of cinema such as Subway, The Big Blue, Ghost Dog and the Director’s Cut of Alien³. And Death Machine, obviously.

Hardware was made in 1990 by director Richard Stanley, who also wrote the film adaptation of the original story. Stanley went on to make the creepy horror Dust Devil before being fired from the remake of The Island of Dr Moreau (which is probably better for his career than him having completed it). Stanley himself showed up at the cinema to introduce his film, looking like a cast member from The Mighty Boosh and seeming quite overwhelmed by the large audience who had turned out to watch it.

Based on a 2000AD story, Shok!, Hardware tells of an artist’s encounter with the Mark 13 (No flesh shall be spared) cyborg, brought home for her as a Christmas present by her boyfriend Mo (himself slightly cybernetically enhanced) who thinks its a scrap maintenance droid. Found in pieces by a Zonetripper out in the Dune Sea, the Mark 13 — being self-repairing and able to charge itself from any power source, including the sun — extracts itself from the sculpture she has made out of it, puts itself back together and proceeds to tear the shit out of her entire apartment and anything that gets in its way. Including, thankfully, the wibbly wobbly pervert who spends his time masturbating sweatily as he watches her through the longest zoom lens you have ever seen and takes pictures, all while wearing latex gloves.

The story is delightfully iterative: the themes spiral in on themselves, echoes upon echoes like a giant fractal curve. Indeed, there is a fractal curve in the utterly mesmerising death scene, appearing full-size on the screen and swallowing the viewer into its depths. The lens of the Mark 13’s infra-red vision reflects and is reflected in the infra-red of the pervert’s camera watching through her window. The sexual fantasies of the voyeuristic neighbour are turned back on themselves when he finally makes it into her apartment and discovers the blinds are closed: when opening them the Mark 13 plunges its phallic drill bit into his belly and rams its thumbs into his eyes. The heart-stopping beauty seen by Shades in a butterfly as he’s ritually tripping on hallucinogenics is echoed in the fantastical psychotropic effect of the Mark 13’s deadly poison.

Jill the artist is the object of affection and obsession of every other major character in this film, including the Mark 13, resulting in the storyline for each of them weaving around her in the same way that her pet spider weaves it web, and the way all her artwork twines organically around a central hub. Each of them tries to possess her in the only way he knows how, only for the Mark 13 to out-obsess them all. No one wins, not even the robot: Moses gets inside it, echoing from beyond the grave through some link formed with his cybernetic hand while the machine is killing him, telling his beloved about the one flaw that will allow her to kill it.

This is an absolutely stunning movie. The vision of Mega City One is vastly superior to the later Judge Dredd. It has a gritty, believable realism, despite some now rather dated special effects. It has an intense claustrophobia, and some truly gut-kicking moments used apparently casually, which is exactly what gives them their power. The few seconds showing the filthy, crying toddler tied by a rope to her dead mother are skimmed through with as little focus as the two men passing pay the child. It’s exactly the sort of institutionalised desperation and inhumanity that one would expect from such a dystopian future.

Jill, locked away in her penthouse fortress, trapped inside there behind bomb-proof doors with the cyborg from hell that does not want her to leave, reminds us that sometimes the very act of trying to prevent ourselves being at risk puts us in far greater danger than if we’d faced up to our fear in the first place. Shades says to Mo at one point: “She doesn’t have to stick her little toe out if she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t need you.”

But what happens when she does want to get out, and can’t, and Mo isn’t there to help her?

This film is about fear, about violence, about depravity and desperation and weakness. It’s not just a sci-fi shocker. Things are turned inside out and outside in. The danger isn’t outside any more, where it can’t get in: it’s inside, and she can’t get out. A mother lies dead on the landing while her surviving toddler cries by her side: in the news a population control bill has just been passed and people are queuing up to be sterilised. The cyborg has an artifical intelligence that allows it to think and act and plan: it’s Mo’s slavish robot hand that allows him to get inside the machine and force it to speak out about its own vulnerability.

Everything in this film has meaning. Everything is telling you something. Everything from the Gwar video showing on the TV screen as Jill turns a killing machine into art (even though it’s not a Gwar song that’s playing) to the image of the Hindu deity (I need to watch it again and see which deity it is, as I suspect it’s Shiva but can’t be sure) on the wall of Shades’s apartment. This film has, packed into its 90-some minutes running time, more story than you’d find in the average 140 minute epic blockbuster.

I can’t recommend this film highly enough. If you ever get a chance to see it, do so. I had to import my copy from Germany and no, you can’t have it. If you weren’t there yesterday you missed a rare treat: I’ve seen this film more times than I can count and I still found new detail in it with the benefit of the cinema screen.

I’m only sorry it was on too late for me to stay and hear what Stanley had to say about it.