On the rare occasion I actually write a post here, I keep seeing all the draft posts I never finished or published. Most of them are film reviews from over a year ago so for posterity’s sake, here are some very short opinions of them.

Saw (USA, 2004)
Good production design for a low budget film but let down by a ridiculously schlok script that never explains why Cary Elwes’ doctor couldn’t tell that a dead body in the same room as him was actually alive. Tried to be the next Se7en but nowhere near the same pedigree. Fun if you just want to squirm a bit though.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (USA, 2004)
Sienna Guillory is just about the only thing worth watching in this ridiculous follow up to a film of a video game. Being faithful to it’s source does not make it a good film. Or watchable.

Layer Cake (UK, 2004)
Guy Ritchie’s producer Matthew Vaughn’s directorial debut is a pretty nifty gangster film that is trademark Ritchie style but somehow fresh and less poncey. This could be the lack of lovable cockney rogues leading the way in favour of Mr Daniel “Next James Bond” Craig providing some decent acting and rhyming slang free dialogue. It’s a shame that Vaughn is no longer doing X-Men 3 but I look forward to his next offering.

Constantine (USA, 2005)
A comic book adaptation that mutilates it’s original source material but is actually quite entertaining. Keanu Reeves does manage to carry off the chain-smoking, nihilistic demon hunter John Constantine transposed from Liverpool to Los Angeles and although some of the original comic’s dark humour and bleakness is eschewed in favour of a slightly more poignant and upbeat feel, I enjoyed this film a lot.

Okay, so I admit. I’m a bit of a six nations whore when it comes down to it. I’ll get in bed with anyone and saturday found me rooting for Scotland. The boys in blue held the ground in Fortress Murrayfield with some of the best defensive play I’ve seen in many years. (The Sunday Times gave the stats as follows: Scotland made 112 tackles and missed 6. England made 35 tackles and missed 5.) They’re tactic was totally different from the aggressive forward play that they used to subjugate France and this, along with their tenacity and determination, gave them the upperhand against the visitors.

But why was I rooting for Scotland? Am I really that fickle? Well, no. You see, if England had won, they would have been on course for a Grand Slam. If Scotland won then it would have put England, France, Scotland and Wales in contention for the trophy and it would be game on for the last two matches of championship.

Did I say Wales? Yes, I did. They would have been in the running for retaining the six nations ground providing they beat Ireland at Lansdowne Road yesterday.

They lost.

I’m not happy.

Can’t say it suprised me at all given all the hoohaa surrounding Mike Ruddock’s controversial departure and another injury set back with captain Gareth Thomas being out for the rest of the season but after the opening 10 minutes I thought the boys in red would do the job. Ireland, however, showed that despite recent outings, they really can play a good game of rugby and demolished Wales in the second half.

So the chances of us retaining the six nations crown are looking very slim.

On the up side, Wawp beat premiership leaders Sale this weekend with a 26-16 victory at home. They face Leicester in the Powergen Cup semi-final this coming Saturday while Bath play Llanelli Scarlets. Could we be looking at a Bath v Wawp Cup final? That would be something to get tickets for! However, Leicester stand in the way and it’s not going to be easy. The last encounter resulted in a 29 all draw and although the time before that Wawp won (in the Premiership final last year) they lost twice against Leicester prior to that again.

Time to get the hatchling a Wawp babygro I think.

A meme that I picked up from Matthew has got me thinking. Do I have five weird habits I can talk about? For that matter, do I have any weird habits?

I don’t think I do. In fact, I can’t think of much that I do that is habitual (apart from consume alcohol). I have some odd quirks - for example, I have difficulty with left and right. This is more a routing problem in my brain as I know which way left and right are and I have a pretty good sense of direction and rarely get lost. But if I’m directing someone in a car, I’ll point left and say “Go right” and conversely, I’ll point right and say “Go left.” My wife now understands that she should always go the way I’m pointing because it’s only the verbal direction I give that is wrong.

I have a similar problem when laying a table. I can’t seem to ever get the knife and fork the right way around. This isn’t because I was never taught it - I grew up in a restaurant and have been laying tables for over twenty years. But as much as I know the right way to eat, I tend to place the knife and fork the wrong way around when laying a table and I won’t ever notice.

When I started my degree I was doing a joint honours degree with Psychology. I remember one of the experiments we did was a cognitive test on “mental rotation”. The idea was that you were shown a series of pictures of a capital letter R that would be at different offset angles from upright. You had to press one of two buttons to say whether that R was a mirror image or not. The experiment is meant to show (and does) that the further away from upright the R is, the longer it will take to tell which way it is facing. A side result of this experiment shows that it takes longer for someone to tell a mirror image R from a normal facing R.

Not in my case.

I remember my lecturer being intrigued that I was the first person in fifteen years of him doing this experiment who could tell a mirror image R faster than a normal facing R. And I’m not russian. I have no idea whether or not this is related to my inability to correctly articulate left and right. But this isn’t a weird habit, it’s just something about me.

A habit I do have is only buying black socks. It’s a convenience thing. It’s rare that anyone will ever see your socks and I hate trying to pair them so it made it easier to buy only black socks so I don’t have to try to match them at all.

Other than that, I don’t like sitting in a room with an open door. This isn’t a hundred per cent but invariably if I’m sitting in my lounge, I have to make sure that the door nearest to me is shut. Perhaps it’s an acoustic thing or a privacy thing but it’s something I have to do.

I honestly can’t think of any other habits I have, weird or otherwise. How about you?

Andreas Katsulas, best known for his role as G’Kar in the television series Babylon 5, has died.

He was a long time stalwart of many television series, particularly in his his more recent career where he appeared in several cult shows, normally acting under heavy makeup as a variety of aliens including the notable the Narn ambassador in B5 and also the Romulan Commander Tomalak in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He appeared on the big screen too, acting opposite Harrison Ford in the movie version of The Fugitive (he was the One Armed Man) but will mainly remembered for his roles on the small screen.

I met him very briefly at a bar in Blackpool at a large B5 convention many, many moons ago and he seemed a very personable chap. Especially to put up with a very drunken me. Well, I had been drinking with Gareth “Roj Blake” Thomas all evening!

Sony are delaying the release of their next-gen console, the imaginatively nomenclatured Playstation 3. Apparently, the current estimated build cost for a single unit is £515. As The XBox 360 is retailing for between £200 to £300 which means that if they did release it this year, they’d be making a substantial loss on each unit sold.

The reason for the huge unit price is probably because they are planning on shipping the PS3 with a Blu-ray Disc drive - the next generation digital media format. Blu-ray is intended to support recording and playback of high-definition video and will also allow storage of up to 25Gb or 50Gb (single or dual layer) of data on a single disc, as compared to a standard DVD which can hold about 5Gb give or take. I won’t go into the technical reasons here… oh, okay, I will. It can do this because rather than using a red laser beam to read and write to the discs like current DVDs and CDs it uses a blue laser beam (hence being called Blu-Ray) which has a narrower wavelength and therefore a more precise laser focus.

The cost of developing a Blu-ray unit is quite high. But Sony - being one of the partner manufacturers of the Blu-Ray Disc Association - is committed to releasing the PS3 with Blu-ray technology. So it looks like they’re going to have to delay the release until they can get the price down. Expect to see it arrive at about the same time as the XBox 720!

The ultra-controversial game series Grand Theft: Auto is one of the top then nominees in the Design Museum/BBC2 Culture Show’s “Great British Design Quest” to find the most popular British design of the twentieth century. It’s up against that other great (but less controversial) British video game institution, Tomb Raider. Oh, and Concorde, the Spitfire, Red Telephone Boxes, Routemaster and the London Underground map. Which frankly means it won’t stand a chance but it amuses me that it’s made it into the top 10.

In the mean time, amuse yourself with this video of GTA for real:

I hate digital cameras. With a passion. An absolute loathing.

Actually, more than digital cameras, I hate digital imaging altogether. It’s an obscene fad which should die a quick but painful death. The advent of digital imaging has meant that the world and it’s dog now think they are all publishers and can do clever things with a digital camera, a scanner and a high resolution colour printer.

Which leads to me getting several birthday cards with highly dubious pictues of me as a child/young adult/nearing middle age with humorous comments that make the jokes inside christmas crackers look like they’re written by Oscar Wilde at the peak of his literary wit.

Digital imaging should be banned.

And what do we think of that?

Yup, I’m smiling too!

I both hate and love the fact that Blizzard run seasonal events in WoW. They’ve had two recently. Well, three if you include Christmas. One of them, as far as I’m aware, didn’t have a real world equivalent and that was the Lunar festival held by the druids. The others were christmas and valentines.

I hate them because, well, christmas is one thing but to be reminded of such tedious, corporate coercion like valentines day in the fantasy world of a game almost defeats the escapist reasons I play such games in the first place.

I love them because they’re so well implemented. The christmas (or Winterveil) celebrations featured a Father Christmas character who would give out seasonal gifts but never forgot to mention the corporate sponsors (in game corporate sponsors - don’t know of many real world companies run by goblins. Apart from the one I work for of course). And this week the inhabitants of Azeroth have been subjected to romantic poems, boxes of chocolates and quests to fix broken heart. It’s all very twee and yet Blizzard have undermined the whole valentines ideal by making it so that a chain of quests leads you to investigate this “sickness” that is spreading throughout the world and to find an appropriate cure.

It just appeals to the subversive in me.

I hate my laptop. I write a long piece about epistemology, inductivism, a priori reasoning and empirical knowledge and it freezes on me. I can’t blame it really. It was merely waffle that was going to loosely segue into the news that a certain Dr. Franklin Felber has this week put forward a theory about how it might be possible for man to travel at speeds near to the speed of light.

I’m waiting for Sevitz to jump on this and discuss it at length because of recent (read last 6 months) discussions on his site about how much he gets annoyed when people say “One day humans might travel faster than the speed of light” and start putting forward philosophical arguments about why you can’t make absolute statements about the state of affairs in the future. But here, in a dumbed down Metro version, for all to consume, is a theory from a (presumably) respected scientist, highlighting how a craft could be accelerated to a great fraction of the speed of light and overcoming the problem of a) getting the energy to do so and b) the enourmous g-forces that would accompany such acceleration.

And what’s more, none of it contradicts of falls out of the theory of relativity, general, special or otherwise.