By Roy Mathur, on 2020-11-07, at 23:02:31--23:44:30 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen
What can I say? Things have not improved; personally and otherwise, e.g. The Lockdown Part Deux, which doesn't surprise me, due a lot of really inconsiderate people who ignored all the warnings, and our government's utter incompetence. Ahhh, forget it and let's do the goddamn pod.
No, not that one, but Vader.
My mum, during her morning prayers, appears to be worshipping the Dark Lord of the Sith because of the location of my non-traditional Hindu shrine. As well as Vishnu, Garuda, Hanuman, and numerous Hanumans, the nook in the corner of my sitting room also contains a lot of nerd toys; Lego, Playmobil, etc., in additional to some classic Star Wars toys including Darth Vader.
I find the situation hilarious. My mum? Less so.
The iconic black and yellow t-shirts are no longer being sold by Fred Perry due to their popularity with right wing extremists like those idiotic Proud Boys in the US. (What exactly do these morons have to be proud about?)
Unlike Doctor Marten, who ignored the problem and even profited from it for the longest time---thinking to proudly expound their football terrace heritage---Fred Perry took a stand.
This co-opting of fashion isn't a new phenomena, but there was a time when I actually wore those shirts, eight hole Docs, and flight jackets, and I'm Asian, so... I think Fred Perry perhaps should have considered addressing the problem by changing the narrative. How? By putting even more effort into brown, yellow, and black people modelling their wares, like Alpha Industries did with flight jackets. Hell, you know what? I'm sure they already tried. It sucks when a bunch of toxic lunatics decide to adopt your brand. I sympathise with the company, but I'm uneasy because it seems like giving in to extremists.
Personally speaking, I just can't win, because, though I kissed goodbye to Docs and Fred Perry many years ago, apparently the Boogaloo Boy twits are now into hula shirts and camo pants; both of which are garments I like. For god's sake! What next? Will some nutters decide to start wearing my tartan boxers forcing me to go commando?
By the time you hear this, hopefully, you will have rid yourself on the enormous orange wart and we can all celebrate together (You did, so well done).
Please wish the same for my country, and other countries currently governed my right wing popularists.
Good acting, FX, and most of the screenplay, in this suspenseful horror thriller about an evil stepmother.
It is, however, somewhat let down in the last few minutes by a twist that seems bolted on.
I actually did it. I watched the entire Scream franchise on Halloween, and disposed of an obscene amount of choccies. It was exhausting, but someone had to do it.
Oh, and Halloween? There were no trick-or-treaters this year, after I really creeped out the one family who had the misfortune of turning up on my doorstep a few years ago.
What did I think about revisiting the franchise years later?
Scream, the first film, is the original horror comedy meta deconstruction of the teen slasher movie. It broke new ground and, while laughing at itself, also managed to pull off a decent horror film.
Scream 2, the sequel, has Courtney Cox in streaks, at her hottest, and most like the character she played in the later TV show Dirt.
Scream 3 got topical, with Lance Henriksen as a Weinstein-like casting couch-like producer---and, of course, the Scream franchise was produced by Weinstein. How could Harvey Weinstein not see himself in the character? Or did he secretly gloat? Scream 3 also seems the most meta of the series.
Scream 4 stayed woke and criticised internet fame.
All in all, a successful Halloween, though spending it in and amongst the great unwashed would have been even nicer. Even I, Mr Misanthrope, miss the masses.
I watched the finale of season. It was sad that being a wizard makes you an arse. On the other hand, given our hero's war record, he deserved to die. I'd be happy to leave things as they are, as a one season show.
Positives: well acted except for the main guy who's a Robert Downey Junior-type mumbler. What the hell is he saying? I don't get it. The rest of the cast are easily understandable, so why does the star have to mumble? Stop bloody mumbling so I can hear what you are saying!
Good diverse cast who can actually act, very good FX, but, and it pains me to say this as a writer, the long term story arcs are awful.
And why must Star Trek now always be about saving the entire universe? Why isn't visiting "strange new worlds" enough?
He's back and so, spoiler, is the Fett! What's going to happen? How did Fett escape the Sarlacc? This is covered in non-canon, but what's the story here? I suppose they had to bring him back after rabid fans like me kept banging on about how The Mandalorian was good, but we were expecting Boba.
Stuck indoors, we are all watching suffering from too much passive screen time.
I noticed that the free channels in the UK have a glut of despair porn disguised as medical human interest stories.
And what of the Nazi fanboy films disguised as WWII themed documentaries? This is nothing new. See Media Circus: All Hitler all the Time by Mark Schone of The Salon, but I'm sick of it.
This is too large a topic for me to do the actor justice in one episode, so all I'll say is RIP Sean Connery, the original and best (if not the first) James Bond.
God help me, I'm an only child with tech skills, so I'm helping Mum with the chaos of her unsorted, un-backed up photos of the last twenty years.
It is utterly absurd that I, as a very techie geek with too much stuff, only have about 3 TB of data, whereas Mum, a non-techie geek, has used up about double that. This is the curse of people who take too many photos.
The copying process was so intensive that it locked up me computer, which, following a cold shutdown refused to boot. Corrupt NTFS? Screwed boot record? No Idea. Luckily, I had the MacOS partition to fall back on... for about five minutes, until that when hairy man-chest up. Cue two days of ongoing reinstallation of OSs.
It is a nightmare, but it's nice to foist my on nightmares upon the listener. I hope that it will make them feel empathy and sympathy, but I'm guessing it is instead inducing laughter. Thanks. A. Lot.
Just remember, storage isn’t free. At some point you’re going to both offload thatphone, stuffed to the point of failure, to another drive. And you’re also going to have to backup that drive. That means two extra drives to budget for, in additional to your primary device’s storage. Fail to do this at your peril. And remember, one onsite backup is the bare minimum. You can also consider cloud backup services, but they are not cheap. I have said this until I’m blue in the face, but few people ever seem to understand the need for backups. So again, there is no such thing as infinite storage, be economical with your storage use, and back up your data.
Boots Chemists (a UK pharmacy chain) quoted my dad well over a grand plus (GBP 1500) for a hearing aid as a private patient. And, by the way, this was one of the cheaper options.
This happened after my mother, calling on his behalf, was fobbed off with the entirely wrong information by both the GP's practice who told her that private was her only choice. The receptionist at the local hospital also told her that the audiology department was not taking patients, and with no choice left, she went private.
When I heard, I directly called the hospital's audiology department, bypassing the hospital's main reception, and was told completely the opposite. They told me that they were still open, and that my father should insist on a GP referral if the local Adult Hearing Services couldn't help.
If you have sight, hearing problems, or, for that matter, any serious health problem, don't be bullied into not making a fuss by petty bureaucrats who are confused about the current Covid-19 guidelines. Even before coronavirus, I had stories like that myself, and also heard similar ones from other people all the time. Don't resign yourself to dying quietly and conveniently. Make a fuss. Be a pain in the backside.
The NHS is a great institution, but constant budget cuts by successive governments, the hiring of bean counting managers who think they can run the hospitals like businesses, a labyrinthine ill-informed bureaucracy, petty paper pushers, and underhand plays for privatisation is destroying the NHS.
Since the Millennium Falcon (my nickname for our PT Cruiser) recently scraped through its MOT after an initial failure, and with several expensive advisories to attend to, we have been looking for new wheels. While looking at some electrics, I was taken by the Nissan e-NV200 Combi, but for it's low range and price.
Though electrics are completely out of the question due to the expense, it did get me interested in electric vans and I discovered two delightfully retro machines.
The LEVC VN5 and the Morris JE are two cool and very retro hybrids, with a 300+ mile range. To save weight, the LEVC VN5 features a bonded aluminium body and the Morris has a carbon fibre body. Great, but at GBP 45,000 and GBP 60,000, not quite the Mystery Machine I can afford. Oh well.
A belated happy Halloween to listeners, and a reminder that Divali is on Saturday 14 November.