Ben, the physio, said that cycling is good for pre-op exercise. It's also good fun. This was today's ride out. Great views, empty roads, lots of up, lots of down. From New Hay road it was a really nice 5 miles of down. Shame we live at the top of a hill that makes you swear (from that direction anyway. If you go to the map my ride site you can see the elevation too.

  ¶ 8:28 PM 0 comments

  I went to see Sunshine yesterday, thanks to the National Media Museum and their policy of screening stuff again well after the original release.

I really wanted to like it. It had Michelle Yeoh, Hiroyuki Sanada (from the brilliant Twilight Samurai), Cillian Murphey and was an Alex Garland and Danny Boyle thing. So I was expecting something good.

There were good things... the sound, the visual effects were stunning. The acting was for the most part excellent. The plot... ah... here's where it got a little silly. Very silly at the end actually where it veered into a sub-Alien spaceship's not a good place to hide.

But that's not my real issue.

THERE'S NO SOUND IN A VACUUM!

But this is the tip of the iceberg. It's an indicator that you're watching a comic... something less than serious, and for me, when I see that sort of thing I need a story and characters that are totally engaging for me to suspend my disbelief... otherwise I find, completely without meaning to, that I want to say things at the screen.

• Where does the gravity come from... you're not spinning?
• If you can manipulate gravity why are you in this mess?
• How come gravity comes back on when you close the airlock?
• How come you can stop so easily? Your engines are at the back and you haven't turned round.
• Why do your designers make routine maintenance of kit that might well need maintenance into a process that means certain death for some unlucky engineer?
• How come you need to be here at all? Can't the computer do it?
• How am I hearing the whoosh as the big bit of the spacecraft goes past?

THERE'S NO SOUND IN A VACUUM (I want to tattoo it on the inside of the eyelids of movie producers).

Okay. I'm not the norm... but imagine you were watching a film set in Yorkshire, in Leeds... and it's part of the plot... it's Leeds. Yet in the background you see Tower Bridge. Do you just say 'oh it's not that important. So what? Who cares?". I care.

SOUND VACUUM

In some films and TV (Firefly is a good example) the story is so good, the characters so gripping that you don't need answers to these questions (well, tell a lie, I do. I just don't need them so much unless it's a slow episode, and in the TV series space was silent, it only had noise in the movie). With Sunshine... I definitely did.

And that ruined it. For me.

  ¶ 10:26 PM 2 comments

  I got to the back pages of the Guardian today and saw

Obituary
Carey Bell
...

In 1986 Carey and his ferociously talented guitar-playing son Lurrie came to England to tour with my band Junkyard Angels. They made an unusual pair - on the one hand Carey, ostensibly a slightly grumpy old man who loved to party, and on the other his quiet introverted offspring. Night after night watching the telepathy between them on stage was a revelation: every nuance of Carey's playing would be echoed by Lurrie's frenetic bursts of guitar, his dad smiling at him with popping bloodshot eyes urging him on.

...

The reason this struck me is that Carey Bell was my claim to fame. It was 1987, we were at the Leadmill in Sheffield on a Sunday lunchtime. He was an astonishing harmonica player. At the interval a couple of the guys I was with (we were all in a blues band at the time) disappeared, coming back to drag me to meet the man himself 'Carey wants words'. Graciously, he let me join him on stage for a harmonica duet of 'Juke' the one tune I could really do justice to at the time. He didn't blow me off the stage too far... but he was orders of magnitude better than I was. After the gig, in the dressing room he told me 'You's a man' high praise, before going on to steal my cigarettes, 'I smoke' he said, point at the empty brandy bottles 'I drink' and smile like he had a guilty secret 'I f**k too'.

According to the obit, he was 70 when he died, which means he was only 50 when I met him. He looked older: bugged, bloodshot eyes and yellowed teeth. He was drunk as a very drunk thing and not a little scary. It was one of my musical high points.  ¶ 8:19 AM 1 comments