I'm an Aussie presently living in London. This blog consists of my random thoughts on a variety of subjects, ranging from politics to telecommunications technology, movies cricket, urban design, beer, cheese, and whatever else comes into my head.
Shrek 2grossed $104.million (including estimates and projections - for several reasons I am not going into here I expect the final number to be higher) over the weekend in North America. That's the second largest three day gross of any film ever (after Spiderman two years ago, which managed $114.8). After two lacklustre and very expensive films (Van Helsing and Troy) over the last two weeks and after ordinary looking grosses for Shrek 2 on Wednesday and Thursday, it looked like the summer wasn't going so well and that perhaps the "DVDs are cannibalising theatrical grosses" theory was getting more evidence. However, this is enormous. If the ludicrous "Global warming causes the ice caps to melt, the Gulf Stream to stop, and an ice age to occur, and all by next Wednesday" film The Day After Tomorrow turns out to be the fun guilty pleasure I expect next weekend, and the third Harry Potter film the week after is as good as advance word says it is, it may be that in two weeks time everybody has forgotten the box office decline theory and Hollywood is talking about a record summer, and by a big margin. For what it is worth, it probably will be a record summer (at least in nominal terms) but I do not expect the margin to be all that great. Summers have a history of petering out when the Olympic Games are on - this was not such an issue in 2000 because the games were held late due to being in the southern hemisphere, but it was a very big issue in 1992 and 1996. I expect that this will happen this year too, although if the Greeks completely screw up, and the games are cancelled, that would be great for Hollywood. (Things may slow down in Europe due to the European football championship, too, so it may not be as big a box office summer internationally as in the US).
I have a longer article on all this in preparation for Samizdata.
Well, it seems that after immense effort, the holy grail of the blue rose has just about been perfected. What I want to know is whether Gallium Nitride was used anywhere in its development.
I have a piece on the ongoing cricket test between England and New Zealand, with reference to a peculiar incident involving a cricket ball and a pint of beer, over at ubersportingpundit.
It seems some people are willing to offer quite a bit in return for a gmail account. As it happens I have one of my own, and Google have given me the power to grant gmail accounts to two other people. Any good offers? (In fact, I think I am willing to give them to the first two people who ask me, to tell the truth).
Update: Well, that was a quick way to discover it I had any readers. The gmail accounts are gone.
Falling for you Did you ever see me, Watching from periphery? I was playing another game I hoped you catch on all the same.
Falling from view Did you ever touch me, Floating through your potpourri? I thought I felt your fingers once After waiting all these months
But I was wrong, so wrong That was just another song you wrote, for another girl And I hoped the day could be When you'd write a song for me
But it never came, I thank you all the same, But I'll go now, so you won't know how much I've
Fallen for you, Pointless trying to be a man Boy, you don't know if you can I thought I knew you well enough But your walls are still too tough
But I was wrong, so wrong That was just another song you wrote, for another girl And I hoped the day could be When you'd write a song for me
But it never came, I thank you all the same, But I'll go now, so you won't know how much I
Thought about you all the time, Walking round, the Guggenheim. Like a rhyme, in my mind, There you are, in my car, But we don't drive very far. To the beach, out of reach Next to me... my fantasy
Falling for you Did you ever see me, Watching from periphery? I was playing another game I hoped you catch on all the same.
-- Fallen for You, by Sheila Nicholls, from the soundtrack of Stephen Frears' film adaptation of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity
The summer movie season in the US used to start on the Memorial Day holiday, and the box office statistics until recently reflected this fact. However, ever since Twister was a big hit when released two weeks before Memorial Day in 1996, the studios have started rolling out their big summer movies starting from two weeks before Memorial Day. A couple of years ago, the box office statistics compiled by AC Nielsen EDI were adjusted to reflect this fact.
This year the first big summer movie was released three weeks before Memorial Day. (This may be a one off thing. Memorial Day is late in the month this year. EDI tweaked the definition of summer again to take this into account). That first move was Universal's Van Helsing. This movie really sucked, and after two weekends it has limped to $85 million in North America after two weekends. This is perceived as not especially good, given that the film cost at least $160m to make, but the studios are making so much money from DVDs these days that the film will probably make money.
That film was followed this weekend by Troy, which managed a middling $47 million gross. Warner Bros are admitting to a $150m budget for this film, but it is rumoured to be much higher. I have heard $250 mentioned, and although I don't think I believe this that would make it the most expensive film of all time, in nominal dollars at least. On that budget a $47 million opening gross is disappointing, although the DVD factor again comes into play and the film will make money in the end. (One thing Warners will take heart in is that the film gross on Sunday of its first weekend was substantially better than expected. This is normally a sign that audiences like a film and the film's grosses are going to hold up well in subsequent weeks, so the film's final gross could still be quite good).
But still, the summer has started in a rather lackluster fashion. Rather worse than last year in fact, when the summer started really well with the X-Men sequel. Things will probably perk up this weekend, with Dreamworks' Shrek 2, followed by The Day After Tomorrow on the Memorial Day weekend (which is apparently a very spectacular and exciting movie, however ludicrous its science) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban a week after that (which also has extremely positive advance word).
What has changed thid summer is that more and more movies are now getting simultaneous releases around the world. There are two reasons for this. One is more frequently stated, which is that this is a way to fight piracy. Hollywood is frightened of illicit (or even legal) DVDs hitting the streets in countries before films are released theatrically, and releasing them in lots of other countries simultaneously makes this much harder. The second reason is that it is impossible to keep publicity campaigns from crossing national borders these days. A US publicity campaign gets attention all round the world, and the way to take advantage all round the world is to have the movie showing there too. So the summer movie season is now starting everywhere at the same time, whereas it used to start in the US earlier than everywhere else. Also, the two big summer movies so far have been released in Britain the same weekend as in the US, so I have seen them.
Van Helsing did, as I said, suck. Troy was somewhat better, but it has the same problem as any movie based on that story. This is that the part of Helen is impossible to cast. Virtually anyone is going to get the response of "A thousand ships?. Her. Give me a break". It is a truly thankless role for anyone to play, and this one is the same. Diane Kruger is perfectly attractive, but she doesn't strike me as greatly remarkable. She doesn't manage to be this great idealised beauty. Or at least not to me. It's a nighmare role for casting directors and actors, because nobody can possibly live up to the ideal.
Oddly, I observed a similar state of affairs in real life once. I was in the US in 2000, and an attempted meeting with a friend had not worked out, so I somehow found myself driving through the towns along the Connecticut coast looking for something to do. On the map, I saw the town of Mystic, once one of many cod fishing ports of New England, but today a town largely catering to tourists and day trippers from New York. I drove into town.
Mystic was familiar to me, as a movie set in the town named Mystic Pizza had been made a few years earlier. This told the story of three young women (played by Lili Taylor, Annabeth Gish, and the then unknown Julia Roberts) who worked as waitresses in a local pizza restaurant named "Mystic Pizza". As I drove into town I discovered that the pizza restaurant in which the film had been set was perfectly real, right down to the "A Slice of heaven" slogan on the pizza boxes. I parked the car, went in and ordered a slice of pizza a beer. The waitress who served me was about the same age as the three women in the movie, and was perfectly nice and perfectly attractive, but I kind of felt sorry for her. Because clearly a substantial portion of the people who walked into the restaurant came in and the first thing that went through their minds was that she was no doubt quite attractive, but was not the 21 year old Julia Roberts. And that would be a fairly hard ideal to live up to.
As I do on the appropriate evening most years, on Saturday evening I sat down to watch the Eurovision song contest, this year live from Istanbul. (The Turks won it last year, and the winner gets to host the event the next year. This policy almost sent the Irish national television company bankrupt when Ireland won the constest three years in a row in the 1990s, but I digress). Istanbul is a good place to host it, if only because it is amongst the most stunningly beautiful cities in the world, and this at least provides from pretty pre-filmed interstitial sequences between the acts.
In a move to demonstrate solidarity with Britain's European partners, I opened a can of German beer and turned on the television. I only paid vague attention to the actual performances of the songs, because as a general rule the songs aren't very good. One is occasionally distracted by some particularly ludicrous outfits, or by some particularly creative way in which the performers take most of their clothes off at the end of a song, or by somebody playing a nose flute, but nothing on the song contest was really up to the Buffy episodes that I was watching on DVD at the same time. Nothing as good as the glorious Alf Poier of Austria who sung about his homepage (and who I actually voted for last year.
However, once the singing stops, it gets fun. We get a half-time performance that attempts to convey some of the local colour of the home city while people are voting, and then we get down to the serious stuff - the voting. Since the end of the Cold War, the number of countries who can participate in the contest has increased dramatically, and many of these somewhat obscure eastern countries are quite exciting by anothing that draws attention to their country, including Eurovision contests. So there are now lots of entrants. When this problem came along a decade or so ago, relegation was introduced and the countries that get the lowest scores were excluded from the competition for the next year, but got to come back automatically the year after that. However, this year there was a new innovation, which was the instituation of a semi-final round. Those countries that did not get enough points last year and those that had been left out last year participated in a separate contest (shown only on cable and satellite television in the UK) a few days earlier. The countries that got the most points in that competition went through to the main contest. (United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Germany) get automatic selection to the main contest, on the basis that they are the countries that pay for the European Broadcasting Union).
Why am I telling you this? Well, because it affected the format of the main contest. Whereas in the past only the participating countries in the main contest got to vote, in the new format all countries that entered got to vote. So although only 24 countries got performers to sing songs, viewers in all 36 countries got to vote. And as I mentioned, the voting is the fun part. As in football, the effects of two thousand years of history can be seen in the outcome of the voting. And the more countries that vote, the merrier. Certain countries traditionally vote for one another. The most extreme example is Greece and Cyprus, which invariably give one another the maximum 12 points. There is no way this will not happen. The universe will end first. And traditionally the Nordic countries give points to one another (with the possible exception of Norway) although this did not happen so much this year because most of the Nordic countries didn't make it past the semi-final round.
And there is what may be called the ethnic minority issue. Germany always gives lots of points to Turkey, not perhaps so much because the Germans are huge funs of the Turkish people as that there are a huge number of ethnically Turkish people living in Germany. And the same perhaps goes for the Mecedonians giving maximum points to the Albanians.
Which leads to a curious fact: which is Balkan bloc voting. Virtually all the countries in the Balkans: Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Bulgaria etc gave lots of points to one another. This strikes me as perhaps more curious than Nordic bloc voting. Denmark and Sweden are on pretty good terms with one another on the whole, but the people of the various countries of the Balkans have spent much of the last 15 years killing one another, which makes it kind of curious that they now vote for one another. For instance, when Croatia gives the maximum 12 points to Serbia, as actually happened on Saturday, there is not so much I can say other than what the fuck? (One thing that does mean is that most of the Balkan countries will be back next year, as they managed to give one another enough points to avoid any of them being relegated, I think.
But it did lead to an interesting possibility on Saturday night. As the voting got underway, it was pretty clear before long that it was a two way race between Serbia and Montenegro (whose song did feature the nose flute) and the Ukraine (whose "song" was more about dancing than singing, and which featured a troupe of leather clad Xena Warrior Princess impersonators. Serbia and Montenegro took an early lead, suggesting the very surreal prospect of the contest going to Belgrade next year. That would have been interesting - perhaps we could have had Ceca, the world's most evil pop star, as the half time act, but it would have made a lot of the media contingent relatively nervous, I suspect. In the end though the Ukrainian leather fetishests won out, and by about the three quarter mark in the voting it was clear that Terry Wogan was going to Kiev next year. Which will be interesting in itself. I fear that Kiev is a fairly drab place as (a) I don't think that I have ever seen a picture of the city and (b) 80 years of communism will do that to you. I suspect that means that next year we will not have glorious scenic shots as in Istanbul, which is kind of a shame.
And there is of course one final thing that needs reporting on when discussing the Eurovision contest, which is whether anyone managed "nul points", as it is normally put. (There are two major events in the world which operate on the old diplomatic tradition of French and English: the Olympic Games and the Eurovision Song Contest). It is actually quite difficult to score no points at all in the Eurovision Song Contest, as there have always been more than 20 other countries to vote for you, and each gets to give points to ten other countries. In most years everybody picks up at least a couple of points from someone. However, Nordic bloc voting notwithstanding, there is something of a tradition of Norwegians ending up with the dreaded nul. (One or two Norwegians have actually become famous on this achievement, to the limited extent that Norwegians can become famous). However, last year something happened for the first time: which was that the British entrant managed nul points. This was quite shocking, but it didn't lead to relegation, as Britain are one of the four countries that cannot be relegated. This year's British entrant was not in any way a contender, but managed to pick up enough points here or there to finish in the lower half of the middle of the table. However, one other thing did almost happen. With 36 countries voting, it should be even harder to manage to score no points, but with just a few votes to come in, it looked just like old times. The Norwegian entrant was the last entrant sitting there on nul, for a long long time. But sadly, in a belated piece of trans-Nordic voting, the Swedes gave three points to the Norwegians. This was deeply sad, and the Norwegian entrant ended up with an unremarkable three points, rather than one of the legendary nuls. Oh well.
However, with the semi-final stage there is always next year. In recent years the 3 points would have meant Norwegian relegation, but it is possible that they qualify for the main event next year. And then all nuls are possible.
I have a piece on the Bangladesh cricket team in general, and in particular on their present one day series with the West Indies, over at ubersportingpundit.
Today, my breakfast includes some "Toulouse sausages", bought from Sainsbury's yesterday, described on the packaging as "a wonderfully flavoursome French recipe of coarsely chopped pork and bacon, richly seasoned with red wine, garlic and fresh parsley" (their use of bold). With it I am having some unsmoked lean back bacon, the consumption of which demonstrates I am a wimp (or so I am told).
Update: The sausages were tasty - pretty heavy on the garlic, but I like that. Australian practice is (or at least was when I was a child) to eat fairly plain beef sausages with tomato sauce (the word "ketchup" was never used - when I visited America and England for the first time in 1991 when I was 22 years old, I did not know what the word meant). These can be excellent, particularly when they are barbecued, but the European idea of sausages packed with all sorts of things to give them flavour is relatively recent, although all kinds of interesting sausages are available now - particularly those from Italian recipes.
However, I am open to new ideas.
Further Update: Somehow, really good food will sit on the bottom of your stomach all day (or at least until your next meal) giving you a warm and satisfied feel. These sausages managed that.
Apparently a company named Sion Power has developed a Lithium Sulfur battery, that they are claiming has four times the battery life of the Lithium Ion batteries that most of us use in our batteries and laptops these days. Sadly, it can only manage about 300 recharge cycles at the moment, so it is not quite ready for prime time. Shame. Perhaps we will get portable fuel cells first, but clearly the dreadful battery bottleneck is somewhere where we will actually see considerable improvement within a few years.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has lost the Indian general election, and there will certainly be a change of government. Few people expected this, because the general perception (certainly shared by me) has been that India has been booming recently. (Hey, they have even been winning at cricket). The new government looks to be dominated by the formerly long-ruling Congress party, although they will have to have the support of the Communist dominated "Left front" alliance to form a government. (In this day and age, people who used to be communists can end up being a lot of things, I guess). Sonia Gandhi, the Italian born widow of the late Rajiv Gandhi, looks to have a strong chance of becoming the next Prime Minister. As to whether this result means that the new government will reverse the generally free market orientation of the previous government, I have no idea. (I rather doubt it though). Elections are often won and lost for domestic reasons that are not especially apparent to people looking at the country from outside.
And of course, governments do not always end up being what they appear when they are first elected. When it came to power, the BJP appeared (at least to me) to be a rather fearsome party of Hindu nationalism, but the party became much more moderate once it was in power. I suspect this is almost inevitable in as large a country as India, particularly when there are so many competing political forces.
And writing this article, I cannot help but continue to realise just how ignorant I am about everyday Indian politics. India is becoming a very important country, and I rather like those aspects of it that I do know something about, but it is not a place with everyday goings on that are widely reported in the west.
Lots of people (starting I think with Arts and Letters Daily) have linked to this article by Elinor Burkett about her experiences as an American teaching in central Asia shortly before and then for a substantial period after September 11. The discussion of her discoveries of just what people do and don't know about America (and what the do and don't believe) is intriguing, but it gets surreal towards the end, when she discovers that it is almost universally accepted in the region that America "cheated" in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and locals feel more vehement about this than virtually anything else discussed in the article
In Bishkek, once-friendly taxi drivers assailed me because George W. Bush had bribed judges to deprive Olga Koroleva of the gold medal in women's aerial freestyle skiing. My students railed that the judges had been corrupted by pity for America -- the only possible explanation for Sarah Hughes's triumph over Irina Slutskaya in the figure-skating competition. And in Turkmenistan, strangers in the market ranted at me about the injustice of Larissa Lazutina's disqualification from the games by Americans so threatened by her cross-country-skiing prowess that they'd trumped up a charge of drug use.
This is slightly surreal at the best of times, but it becomes even stranger when you realise that the women's aerial freestyle skiing was won by Alisa Camplin, an Australian. Apparently, although George W Bush is prepared to screw Australia's farmers at any opportunity he gets, he is willing to bribe Olympic judges so that our athletes can win medals. Great.
Do you always have to tell him everything On your mind? You know that too much honesty can be So unkind And every time you throw him to the floor Why are you surprised to see he's breakable? You always try to find what's holding him Away from you But do you ever see your anger standing there Right between you? And every time you throw him to the wall Why are you surprised to see he's breakable? Tell the world that he's breaking your heart Go tell the world nothing's ever your fault Go tell them all And every time you throw him to the floor Why are you surprised to see he's breakable? And every time you push him to the wall Why are you surprised to see he's breakable?
-- Breakable, performed by Fisher on the soundtrack of Alfonso Cuaron's interesting but flawed modern day adaptation of Great Expectations (1998).
If he was a spammer, I would endorse firebombing this house, I think. As it is, I recommend that everybody keeps calm. Whilst I generally am sympathetic to young nerds, a punitive prison sentence is clearly in order here.
My brother's computer (in Australia) got infected by the Sasser worm. He is running Norton Anti-Virus, but this didn't help, as the worm arrived by exploiting a vulnerable port rather than via e-mail. Incoming e-mail is scanned for viruses as a matter of course, but that didn't help with this problem. And although Norton would have deleted the worm if it had been able to run, Sasser kept shutting down the computer before we could get that far. Symantec has a downloadable mini-application to remove Sasser too, but the problem was once again that the machine was shut down by Sasser before he could download and run it. (Yes, there is a way of stopping the shutdown after it starts, but my brother is not a very sophisticated user and it was a relatively hard thing to talk him through).
Eventually we managed to download the Symantec tool on another PC, copy it onto a CD and send him the CD. This copy of the tool we were able to run before Sasser shut down the machine, and therefore we managed to remove Sasser. So my brother's computer (a perfectly nice 3 month old Dell desktop) is now working again.
In terms of support from a distance, this was a hard one. Support from a distance is in many cases getting easier, as I can do such things as remotely take control of my brother's computer over the internet, and just fix the problem myself rather than talk him through it. (It's slow over his dialup connection though). But when a worm keeps shutting his machine down, there is not very much I can do, at least not directly.
Now, I think it is biological analogy time. I think Sasser is like the SARS virus, in the sense that it is very contagious withough being extremely harmful in itself. It shuts computers down and causes strife, but it doesn't do things like mess with or delete files, or wipe out your hard disk, or anything like that. A worm that spread the same way and was damaging could do an untold amount of damage, and I think we are pretty wide open to this kind of thing. And why is it like the SARS virus: well, the SARS virus is basically an extremely nasty variant of the common cold: it is airborne and quite contagious, and it causes nasty symptoms but does not kill very people. However, a nasty airborne varient of influenza would be something else. If we had something as deadly as the 1997 influenza virus that could spread like SARS, we would be in serious trouble, and would be talking tens of thousands of deaths. And even this is a long way short of the nastiness of the influenza of 1918.
Jackie over at Gastroblog talks about having a wonderful bottle of Argentinian red wine, but doesn't remember what it was. Do find out and tell us Jackie. Argentinian wine has long been one of the great secrets of the winemaking world. The wine is often wonderful - it's a far greater winemaking country than Chile - but it has not traditionally been an exporting country, as the Spanish and Italian descended locals are great consumers of fine wine as well. (Chile lacks a substantial domestic market, so Chilean winemakers turned into exporters). However, the collapse of the peso a year or so ago meant that it became much more attractive to winemakers to export their produce, and we have seen substantially more Argentinian wine in Britain and America. The best wines seem to be mostly made from the Malbec grape in the Mendoza region. This is interesting. Malbec is grown in France, Australia and other places, but there it is mainly a blending grape, being one of the minor grape varieties in wines dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. But in Argentina it is used as the dominant (or only) grape variety. And it makes beautiful wines when used this way.
Jackie's wine was brought back from Argentina for her directly rather than bought here, so this change perhaps doesn't really apply. Come to think of it, my friends should treat me really nicely, because I brought some stupendous wine back from Australia with me.
When I was a child in Australia (as is the case almost everywhere) the selection of food and ingredients available in your average supermarket were not nearly as impressive as they are today. (Fancy gourmet ingredients certainly could be bought (expensively) in Sydney, but the portion of the population who cooked with them was very small. And I didn't live in Sydney). And in many ways they were very limited indeed.
If my mother wanted to buy a tub of ice cream, there were three varieties: vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate (more commonly referred to as white, pink, and brown). And, as a very special innovation, there was something called Neapolitan, which contained all three of those in the same tub. (If my parents had wanted to use food for giving geography lessons, they could have told me that this was named after a city called Naples in Italy, where they make superb ice cream that the stuff in front of us did not resemble in any meaningful way. And we could have gone from there to learning that Bolognese is named after another Italian place called Bologna, and when Australian culinary sophistication proceeded beyond plain cheddar cheese when I was about 12, it could have been explained to me that parmesan cheese was named after another Italian place called Parma. I thus could have realised ten years before I did that whatever may be said about the Italians, they do know something about food. But I digress).
When I was in primany school, the school canteen sold three types of sweet bun. These were the "Cream bun", the "Finger bun", and the curiously named "Chelsea bun". The cream bun did not contain actual cream (as this could not cope with the Australian climate) but instead contained an artificial sugar confection of vaguely cream like texture. The finger bun was long and thin and had pink icing on top, but the reason for the name was obvious from the shape. The Chelsea bun contained fruit, but the reason for the name was obscure to me. I knew vaguely that these sorts of buns were English in origin, but that was about all. I didn't really understand that in England, cream buns did contain actual cream (which didn't go bad due to the cooler weather), and my mind would have boggled had it known that I would one day have a friend (Sir Geoffrey de Havilland's great nephew, no less) who would regularly invite me to fine parties in a place in London called Chelsea, and that he would once or twice even take me for breakfast to a restaurant nearby called "The Chelsea Bun", where the bun may or may not have been invented.
And that is one of the fun things about life. As you grow older, your horizons widen. And you look back and you see that the clues as to how your horizons would widen were there all along, but that you just didn't understand them at the time or understand what they were.
(I started this post to comment on the fact that I had just had pork sausages and unsmoked bacon for breakfast, whereas a week ago in Australia I had beef sausages and smoked bacon. Unsmoked bacon is like cream buns with actual cream in them: not normal in Australia due to the climate).
