Memo to self, type post – please ignore if you don’t have a Mac and a Nintendo DS…
You will need:
And then there we are, enjoying Shaun the Sheep, transferred off the Humax PVR and onto the small screen – 1 episode clocks in at about 9 MB. Perfect for boredom-relieving.
I was going to write about asthma, but then realised that someone’s been there already and he can’t be beat.
For me, the poet of asthma is not Proust, it is not even Fedinand Mount.
It’s Bruce Robinson, in the introduction to the screenplay for the film he his famous for writing and directing:
Asthma struck in the middle of the night outside a little tin-roofed town called Macksville. A dash to the rusting hospital where they shoved me on a device to measure my air intake. The average breather hits around four hundred. I was coming up fourty-eight. Apparently a prospective corpse can produce about twenty-five with the fucking death rattle. Oxygen on and in go the needles, the latter featuring pure pharmaceutical adrenalin. Suddenly one’s heart is converted into a small diesel engine that could get a motorbike up a street at about fifty.
So there you are, the author of Withnail and I is the asthma poet. But not the ‘tomato poet’ which is the way to remember how to spell ‘onomatopoeia’.
They were handing out free Mentos at Charing Cross the other week – I couldn’t resist introducing them to some diet cola…
A colleague had tried it with no luck, so perhaps the trick is to do as we did, and warm the cola in a bowl of hot water from the kettle. A smaller nozzle and pin to allow controlled dropping of the Mentos would be good ideas too. I could only get the first Mento to fizz – I added 4 more and nothing much else happened.
Two nice things happened to me today.
Being a bit spoilt at the moment… an excellent series on photography started on BBC Four this week, and an adviser to the programme is one one of my favourite photographers, Martin Parr.
There was also a nice supplement on photography in The Guardian today – including an article by Parr. The opening paragraph is great, confirms why I rate him so much – and seems to chime with my notion that in photography as in many things, it’s a bad workman who blames his tools:
Modern technology has taken the angst out of taking the perfect shot. For me, the only thing that counts is the idea behind the image: what you want to see and what you want to say. The idea is crucial.
That and the bit on the BBC web site where it describes how Martin Parr only got into Magnum by a single vote and how much some other Magnum photographers hate him.
