There's More in my Head than there Ought to Be, Jen

Maybe one day it will be easy to make the pictures and the sounds and the feelings and the smells in my head into beautiful images in words so wonderful that you will see the make-believe world which plays across the inside of my eyelids. 

When I'm not listening, when I have to sit there on the train ignoring the boring conversations of people around me who have never heard of discretion, when I'm driving along that dark road at night, when I'm not watching the boring film, when I have my eyes closed pretending to sleep, when I'm sitting there at my modelling bench doing nothing with that piece of plastic, then I am there, then I am listening to the sounds, making conversations happen you'll never hear, full of passion and righteousness, and anger and even love, then I am starting wars and fighting them and finishing them, then I am revelling in moments of sheer wonder, then I am being bit parts and major players, then I am understanding things I cannot fathom in real life, then I am writing words so wondrous and complex that if I ever wrote them down I would never write again, for fear that I could not live up to them. 

I hope so much that one day you'll be able to see it too. I promise to try to make it real. Even if you are the only one to read my words, that will be enough, because they are for you. 

I love you. 

Disappointment

After months of carefully tending to plants, spending hours per week ensuring that they are growing well, the British 'summer' along with some sort of plant disease has done for the tomatoes. The aubergines and the peppers never grew. The beans produced a meagre harvest, well short of their promise, and the peas likewise. 

Why do I bother?

The Good Life

Self sufficiency might be a few years off yet, but the summer has finally arrived and the tomatoes, beans, peas, aubergine and pepper are finally waking up. This is the bulk of it, although there are other bits and pieces around the place. Second and third rounds of tomatoes still to come, and there's some rocket on the windowsill too. Bring on the harvest!

NZ judge orders 'odd' name change
I offer no comment other than to urge you to read the list of allowed and blocked names on the right hand side. Some of these verge on comedy genius.

Karadzic 'worked in Serb clinic'

... and had a seasonal job as Father Christmas...

Renewed Focus

Not the car, me. For some time now I have been growing disillusioned with my hobby, wondering why it was that it no longer excited me. That's a pretty rubbish state of affairs. I won't speculate as to why this is the case.

What has improved my mood was paying a visit to the North Yorkshire Moors Railway on Sunday and discovering a little bagged injection moulded kit of a diesel shunter. Suddenly the joy of building has returned. And the great thing is that I don't care about accuracy or what other people will think, I'm building purely for my own pleasure again. I've even been considering a diorama for it, something I've never bothered with for my aircraft.

Happy days...

Photographasizing in B&W

Black and white photographs look so much cooler than colour ones. Not like TV, where monochrome = monotonous. Why would you ever take a photo in colour when you could take it in greyscale and have it come out so much better?

I eagerly await the black-and-white-only digital SLR from Cannon. Get to it, boys and girls.

NZ dolphin rescues beached whales

As always, click on the title to read the story. I was going to blog about Jeremy Clarkson being caught talking on a mobile phone on the motorway (I never thought he was that safety-conscious anyway), but this story seemed so much more worthy. Douglas Adams was on to something...

Cloverfieldddeddddd = not that good


I don't know, I s'pose I just wasn't blown away. Didn't care much about the characters, got a bit bored by the camera work, just generally thought it was a bit half-arsed. Much like this post.

Juno

I've mulled over blogging about this film for a couple of days, since I saw it the other night. Given the hype, and the trailers, I'd expected a good film, and I wasn't disappointed. It's just that I'm still trying to work the thing out.

OK, so we have the obvious plotline, and its moral message (or strange lack of such). We also have subtexts - the weird Lolita complex of one of the characters, and the outsider=cool approach to the main character.

But there's something else there wrapped up in the highly stylised approach of the direction which I can't quite put my finger on. It has certainly stayed with me in a much stronger fashion than most films manage, and it's something I will almost certainly purchase on DVD, because I feel like I want to watch it a few more times, even if that's simply so I can get it out of my system.

I felt like drawing after having watched it. Hmm...