1) X-MEN: FIRST CLASS ****
2) SKIN I LIVE IN, THE ****
3) CARS 2 ****
4) RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES ****
5) CONTAGION ****
6) SOURCE CODE ***1/2
7) WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN ***1/2
8) TRUE GRIT ***1/2
9) PAUL ***1/2
10) HUNTER, THE ***1/2
11) GUARD, THE ***
12) IDES OF MARCH, THE ***
13) 127 HOURS ***
14) SENNA ***
15) BARNEY'S VERSION **1/2
16) CATFISH **1/2
17) TREE OF LIFE *1/2
1) Inception ****1/2
2) Scott Pilgrim vs the World ****1/2
3) Up In The Air ****1/2
4) The Social Network ****
5) The King's Speech ****
6) The Hurt Locker ****
7) The Road ****
8) Animal Kingdom ****
9) Boy ***1/2
10) Kick-Ass ***1/2
11) The Men Who Stare At Goats ***1/2
12) The Town ***1/2
13) Robin Hood ***1/2
14) Tron 3D ***
15) City Island ***
16) Love and Other Drugs ***
17) Red Hill **1/2
18) Invictus **1/2
19) Monsters **
20) I'm Still Here 1/2
Movie Rankings 2009
I don’t want to be friends with my kids. I want to be their Dad and their confidante and their teacher of life lessons and their geeky example to rebel against. But not their mate or their buddy or their pal.
Why other Dads call their kids ‘mate’ or ‘buddy’ or ‘pal’ is a complete mystery to me. Sure my three-year-old sometimes calls me his ‘best friend’, but then on other occasions his brother is also his best friend, and on others so too is his Mum, his teddy bear, the next-door neighbour’s cat and the stink beetles we pull off the lime tree every weekend.
When I call someone ‘mate’ it’s because I don’t know their name. I’m either attempting to be casual and non-threatening or I want to be deliberately threatening, such as in, ’Hey mate. Get your hands off my girlfriend’.
If I’m going to threaten my kids (with the naughty corner and its ‘comfy chair’ for those of you familiar with Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition) you can bet I’ll be using their name and possibly their middle and surnames too.
Why any father would think that calling his son ‘mate’ will improve their relationship is just as strange. Surely a toddler is no more likely to brush his teeth or go to bed just because his friend is telling him to instead of a father figure such as their actual father commanding it.
Any why do male children get the ‘buddy’ treatment and not girls? I hear plenty of Dads in the playground calling their male children by a matey nickname but never have I heard a girl being called ‘mate’ by their father let alone ‘sheila’ (unless it’s her name), ‘gal’, ‘chick’ or even ‘girl’, though Dads will often call their dog ‘girl’.
Imagine the damage being done to a girl’s confidence knowing that in the esteem of her father she ranks third in the friendship stakes behind the family heir and the family pet.
One Dad I know even calls his son ‘Mister’ as if elevating him to premature adulthood will somehow speed his self-esteem and his physical and emotional development. At least he calls his daughter ‘Miss’, although all he’s probably doing there is reinforcing sexual stereotypes.
Why not let kids be kids and call them by their own name no matter what the situation? Let them find their own identity in the world and work out who their friends really are rather than confuse the issue with meaningless labels that speak more of the father’s insecurity than their kids’.
Flying into Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii is one of the more interesting aircraft descents this planet has to offer. It’s not quite up there with descending into the old Hong Kong airport or skipping over the Andes and into Santiago but it’s close.
If you choose the right side of the plane on a good day you get a great view of 5000m high volcanoes and a patch work quilt of old lava flows including the one you land on which is only 30 years old.
That novelty was lost on the kids who began screaming for food the moment we landed...
As travel destinations, the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Hawai’i (also known as the Big Island) offer unique delights and an interesting use of apostrophes, but the experience of travelling with two small kids is as about as rewarding as being caught in a lava flow.
1. Avatar ****1/2
2. Moon ****1/2
3. A Serious Man ****
4. The Wrestler ****
5. The Reader ****
6. District 9 ****
7. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus ***1/2
8. Mary & Max ***1/2
9. Milk ***1/2
10. Star Trek ***1/2
11. Samson & Delilah ***1/2
12. The Informant ***1/2
13. Bruno ***1/2
14. Changeling ***1/2
15. Disgrace ***1/2
16. Public Enemies ***
17. Looking for Eric ***
18. The Girlfriend Experience **1/2
19. Gran Torino *1/2
Movie Rankings 2008
There is no real difference between an Apple Macintosh and a Microsoft PC.
There, I’ve said it. May the cool young t-shirt clad things of the Mac world throw their twittering i-phones at me in disgust. I don’t care. May the tweed wearing, goggle-eyed PC aficionados threaten me with their Bill Gates dolls. I still don’t care.
I used PCs for years. I have recently been using a Mac. I’m yet to notice a genuine difference and I have no preference. What may sound like blasphemy to you is pretty obvious to me.
PCs have black or cream functional cubic shaped boxes. Macs have rounded corners and are any colour or even transparent. Woohoo.
PCs accept DVDs on a tray. Macs have a slot in the side. Yeehar.
PC mouses have a wheel in the middle and buttons. Mac mouses have pressure sensitive pads and a strangely erotic nipple in the middle. Big deal.
PC icons are clear and precise. Mac icons are funky and cartoonish. So what?
PC applications minimise and maximise in business-like fashion. Mac applications minimise and maximise dynamically. Yawn.
One of these computers may be fractionally faster than the other at processing binary digits through electronic circuits, but at the end of the day I don’t care what computer I’m using as long as I can send emails, write documents and browse the internet. If one computer can do this a thousandth of a second faster then why would I even notice? I’m not designing space shuttles or modelling the weather.
Whatever the computer looks like on the other side of the screen or inside makes not one iota of difference to whether my boss gets his report on time. If I’m playing a game at home no aliens are getting blasted more efficiently, no cars will drive faster and no Sonics, Marios, pedestrians or prostitutes will react any differently to my inexpert use of a keyboard, mouse, joystick or fake-guitar no matter who makes it.
The differences between PCs and Macs are a triumph of marketing, not of engineering. Marketing is after-all about perception. Cleverly, Apple have managed to position the Mac as the computer of choice for anyone young enough to have never seen a Commodore 64. Apple have seen their profits soar in line with an increasingly affluent Generation Y that have embraced the i-pod, the i-phone and the i-wank to accompany their Mac.
Yet millions of people still successfully use PCs every day. If Macs were really that much better then everyone would be using them.
So face it, the choice between a Mac and a PC is about as pointless as the choice between a Commodore and a Falcon. There’s no difference between them either.
Get over it.
1. Slumdog Millionaire *****
2. The Dark Knight ****1/2
3. Charlie Wilson’s War ****1/2
4. Burn After Reading ****
5. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead ****
6. Tropic Thunder ****
7. Lars and the Real Girl ****
8. There Will be Blood ****
9. Frost/Nixon ****
10. In Bruges ***1/2
11. Get Smart ***1/2
12. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ***1/2
13. The Counterfeiters ***1/2
14. American Gangster ***1/2
15. Mongol ***1/2
16. Iron Man ***1/2
17. The Wackness ***1/2
18. Body of Lies ***
19. The Bank Job ***
20. Quantum of Solace ***
21. In the Shadow of the Moon ***
22. 3:10 to Yuma **1/2
23. Taken *1/2
Movie Rankings 2007
1) The Lives of Others *****
2) Letters from Iwo Jima ****1/2
3) No Country for Old Men ****1/2
4) The Last King of Scotland ****1/2
5) The Simpsons Movie ****
6) Hot Fuzz ****
7) Zodiac ****
8) Sunshine ****
9) Michael Clayton ****
10) Breach ***1/2
11) Bobby ***1/2
12) Daywatch ***1/2
13) This is England ***1/2
14) Perfume: The Story of a Murderer ***1/2
15) Curse of the Golden Flower ***
16) The Prestige ***
17) Beowulf ***
18) Notes on a Scandal ***
19) Venus* ***
20) The Namesake ***
21) Fracture* ***
22) Noise ***
23) The Host ***
24) The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford ***
25) Lucky Miles **1/2
26) Black Sheep* **1/2
27) The Bourne Ultimatum* **1/2
28) Transformers* *1/2
*watched on DVD
Movie Rankings 2006
It was with great excitement that I learnt about Apple's new i-Wank. As soon as I did I knew that I wanted one and was prepared to go to any length to get it.
The i-Wank comes with an assortment of features that 'traditional' wanks are incapable of. For one thing it has an extended battery life which means you can use your i-Wank more often and for longer periods without having to wait and recharge.
I'm a big fan of wanks as you have probably guessed, so much so that my old wank rarely left my hand. Now with all the new features I almost never want to put my i-Wank down. My wife doesn't like it but she understands that I'm addicted to wanks and when a new wank comes onto the market I'm bound to want to spend a lot of time playing with it.
I particularly like the fact that the new i-Wank is so interactive. It has been designed with the user in mind so has a lot of hands-on features like a real-feel touch pad and an intuitive interface. The touch pad means that with one finger you have access to a whole new world of i-Wank functionality, and even with two fingers you can do things that make the old palm pilots looks like museum pieces. This is important because older wanks often gave you a sore thumb in particular after too much use.
The i-Wank also looks great. It's sleek and black and has none of the cumbersome knobs and fiddly bits of older wanks. I reckon women in particular will love it because in my experience women are much more dexterous with their fingers when it comes to wanks, so this is right up their alley.
I'm particularly impressed that even with all the new features the i-Wank is only slightly larger than the older wanks and still fits comfortably into your hand or pocket.
So of course when the i-Wank went on sale I made sure that I was one of the first in line to get it. You might think it's crazy but it wasn't just about the i-Wank, it was about sharing a wank experience with other wank addicts. Using and having a wank is something that by definition you can only do by yourself even if you are thinking about someone else at the time. So when an opportunity does present itself to get together, as odd as it seems at first, you leap at the chance. Not all Wanks are the same and you'd be amazed at the different things that people do with them and that even I hadn't imagined.
But the i-Wank takes it to a whole new level. Since getting my new i-Wank I've barely left the house. I don't need to. I've got all the pleasure and entertainment I need in the palm of my hand.
