Sound and fury, signifying nothing


Another strange night at the fickle mercies of the Sky Movies programming schedule. Having watched the last couple of hours of the first Lord of the Rings movie (you want the geeky anagram? OK then...LOTR:FOTR. Bask in the glory.) when I got home tonight, (really good movie, great actors, mucho sword fighting, big fiery demons, crazy dwarf, right up there in my top 10 or 20 favourite films) I now find myself confronted by the minor crime against humanity that is Valentine (acting talent Denise Richards and David Boreanaz, not funny, not scary, not original, not in any sort of way connected with any concept that is, might be, or even vaguely relates to 'good'). Poor. Poooooor. Clearly a film that screams out 'go write a blog Ben, you slack bastard.' Well actually it doesn't, but if it did, the dialogue would be greatly improved. Who approves these movies? Damn them. Damn their eyes...give ME the budget you use to make these films. I may just run away to Mexico with it, but it will be a lot better for the world in the long run. If Sky is going to show this sort of film, they could at least have the decency to put one that I have never seen before on. But no. There goes the bit with the arrows and thefalling into the dumpster. Oh dear. But perhaps I'm being harsh. There's certainly a lot of crap scenes and poor lines, but the movie is certainly redeemed somewhat when the killer turns surprisngly out to be...the person that you suspect within the first 5 minutes. Oh, for God's sake. Time to change channel and watch Sylvester Stallone go vainly in pursuit of a mythical beast called 'post-Rocky acting credibility'.

Anyway, long time, no blog - again. This is partly a matter of being slack and partly a matter of having little to report. Both of these seem to be sort of ongoing problems. Weeks seem to be rattling along at a fairly alarming pace in a familiar pattern - sleeping during the day, getting up and watching MASH (I am trying to find out why Frank leaves. Nobody seems to remember, although there are plenty of theories from different people - he goes mad, gets sick, is promoted to Colonel, finally gets a transfer, etc. He is still there so far. You are allowed to tell me, but only if your answer has not been sourced from the Net. Interestingly, after getting dumped by Hotlips, he becomes even worse than previously, until he is surely the most unsympathetic character in TV history, so if it turns out he steps ons a landmine that will be good as well) not doing enough thesis, maybe going to a movie or two, messing about at Picton, coming home and playing around on the net until around 5am, and then looking up and finding it's Thursday. Damn. Well, so long as I don't one day look up and find that it's February. Hopefully not, because at least the odd bit of thesis is getting written lately, even if it's not at a pace that my supervisor is probably entirely comfortable with. Currently this work involves waiting to see if various newspaper editors are prepared to acknowledge my existence. Hard to impress the good old supervisor with a report on that waiting action though really. Like all supervisors however I'm sure, he is legally obliged to pretend that any given student's capacity to produce a great deal of work in a short time is some kind of urban legend, that regular work is the key, and that all those students who did manage to make leaving things until the last minute work for them were extremely dodgy types who all met unhappy fates later, trampled to death to a man under the hooves of stampeding wildebeest. It's like in undergrad when they tell you something like you should be doing 90 minutes study per subject per night, without which you will surely crash and burn and find yourself on the village idiot audition circuit. This is the conspiracy theory I'm going with, anyway. And surely as a theory it is almost totally flawless. I certainly fear no wildebeest, at least from the safety of my living room in New Zealand.

So those are the weeks. The weekends are a lot like the weeks, but at the end, and without any of the vague attempts to do work, and with beer. Oh, and I watch Samurai Jack instead of MASH, when I make it out of bed at 9:30 on a Saturday morning. But those are about the only differences, really. So as you can see, life lately makes for scintillating blog material. It's really just a matter of chronicling the level of inebriation attained each weekend, which from the last entry, in order, goes: enough, enough, too much. It's all been tough going lately, what with Fi here now and Jess (and Leland) doing a fly-past a couple of weekends ago, and Teena having going away things this weekend, and it doesn't look like it will be getting any easier, what with Emma getting here this Tuesday, and Dan having going-away things next weekend apparently, and some eCosm party on, and then the High Priestess of Good Times herself looking set to renew her semi-annual assault on my liver the weekend after that. One wonders when one is supposed to write a thesis amongst all this tiresome frivolity. Still, nothing to do I suppose but square my shoulders and make the best of a bad job. Perhaps someone at the end of the academic year will take note of my efforts and award me a Masters in Lifestyle. Detox of some kind might well be required after Pen's requests for all round bad behaviour have been sated, although the way we're going at the moment, the weekend following will probably see something along the lines of a frantic Civil Defence official bursting in the door of home, or Picton or, God help me, the computer lab, or wherever I am of a Friday evening, yelling: "For God's sake man, quickly! There's been an explosion at the brewery, and a bus full of orphans, old-ladies and kittens is cut off and trapped in the path of the flood! We need every able-bodied volunteer we can get! Grab your mouth and let's go!" It wouldn't surprise me, I can tell you.

In actual news of a kind that by now I have already told to nearly everyone, the dastardly perpetrator of the crimes detailed in a previous episode of our 637 part serial "One Night Out Drinking"("Episode CXLIII: The Random Menace, or Two Get Drunk and Robbed in the Colonies, One Falls Down, the Other Merely Mentally Scarred"), one Mr Norman Sio, has it seems pleaded guilty to a couple of charges of illegally taking a bank card, and a couple of additonal charges of using said cards to steal money. I was hoping we were gonna nail him with illegally taking our bank cards and using them to clean frost off his car windscreen, but I suppose the lesser theft charge will have to do. Off to remand he goes for sentencing and probation and repariton, and a nasty Big House appointment with my friend Elisabeth 'Fat Tony' Norcliffe, who will no doubt staple his thumbs together. In a pithy way, The Press, identifying James and myself as the somewhat enigmatic 'two men', reached a fair summation of our whole experience in their courts report, while at the same time warning their readers public-service style, with the headline: 'Doesn't pay to booze with a shoulder-surfer'. Valid point there The Press, although given the fairly sort of obvious nature of your advice, I expect to see high quality journalistic feature articles entitled 'Doesn't pay to leave the oven on' and 'Doesn't pay to lie quietly in the path of a combine harvester' published any day now. Still, if the example of James and myself can serve to provide a wider lesson to the public in how getting duped and robbed sucks the kumara, then I'm happy to send Tim out to get robbed as often as it takes until we all learn.

5:39am, and I'm running down the battery. Must be time to save this mid-post and set the alarm for Hawkeye and company.

I said mid-post, but here we are the next night and I am gonna make this second part very short indeed because it is 3:41am and I intend to get up at around 9 to go to a seminar. Yes, a seminar! See, I told you I was getting a bit serious about my thesis lately. Anyway, it's not like I've got anything particularly interesting to add right now, besides, because today has gone pretty much exactly in the previously described slack manner, with the exception being that I actually managed to watch MASH from my bed. Nice one, me. BJ cheated on his wife and felt guilty. Frank was a prat. Hawkeye told jokes. I was amused.

Bed it is then, followed by another entry sooner than 3 weeks from now with luck. I MUST actually pay attention to my alarm later this morning. It is far, FAR too easy to simply get up, take 2 steps across the room, turn it off and go back to bed without actuallly waking up.

Right then, carry on.