CRRRaSh! 348 Chair

By Roy Mathur, on 2020-12-09, at 23:55:32--00:45:25 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rocket Radio Show, Listen

The State of the Pod

I am wrecked. I have been burning the candle at both ends. I am so tired, but the one piece of really good news is that vaccine and the vaccination programme that started yesterday. Well done scientists.

It is a nice coincidence that a couple of days earlier I discovered The Mission's re-interpretation of their old song that I really like, Tower of Strength, dedicated to frontline healthcare workers.

Small Axe: Red, White and Blue and Alex Wheatle

After watching Steve McQueen's Mangrove, I also recently watched Red, White and Blue and Alex Wheatle. Red, White and Blue is about Leroy Logan's real-life as a black career police officer in the 80s, and that was after a serious assault on his father by the police.

On John Boyega's brilliant and incendiary performance McQueen said Boyega was taking part in the BLM demonstrations in Hyde Park at the time and implied it might have affected his performance. I say if it did, it did it for the better.

Alex Wheatle worried me going in because his story of growing up in care and then his prison sentence was so sad, and I can�t deal with stories like that. There was, however, a happy ending as today Alex Wheatle is a lauded author of mainly YA fiction today.

I have not yet seen Lover's Rock, but when I was a child, although my experiences are different as I am from a Mauritian background. Also, by the time I was old enough to want to go into clubs, I could mostly get into any club I wanted to without too much hassle. As a child though, I remember my parents hosting a lot of boozy, dancey, loud parties that I know for a fact annoyed the neighbours, who, in retrospect, can frankly go screw themselves.

The Flight Attendant

Kaley Cuoco is a flight attendant who gets embroiled in a mystery when she wakes up next to her murdered one night stand.

Imagine an amped up version of Penny from The Big Bang Theory. It's light and funny and thrilling and I'm really enjoying it.

The Mandalorian

This show is hotting up!

We got other Mandalorians. Then we got a break-in caper.

Then we got Rosario Dawson as Jedi Ahsoka Tano from the animated show Star Wars: The Clone Wars. She has an amazing opening combat scene in the petrified forest, there's House of Flying Daggers style fantasy martial arts, tense standoffs, incredible Samurai and Western movie style cinematography, Japanese garden settings, and a foe played by Bruce Lee's god daughter, Diana Lee Inosanto, a real life stunt person. This is as cool as having Michelle Yeoh in Star Trek: Discovery or Zoe Bell in Death Proof. More stunt people turned actors please. They can act and they can kick bottom.

In that same episode, I loved the combat scene by the village bell, when Ahsoka lets the trooper go. It shows that she is kind and merciful as well as a bloody wicked ninja. Michael Biehn was in it just to be cannon fodder chump. What a waste.

Most of all, most importantly, we finally got the return of Boba Fett. Boba. Goddamn. Fett. The man himself, i.e. "just a simple man making his way through the galaxy." The moment I saw Slave 1 my hackles rose. And then there was that fantastic combat scene with Boba wielding that war hammer highly reminiscent of a Polynesian war club from Temuera Morrison's own Maori culture.

The only downer is the scene where Boba proves his father Jango was a Mandalorian foundling. I wish he was just a nasty bounty hunter who had looted the armour. I do like that Boba is scarred and his voice gravelly like the Boba from Legends.

If you want to read how, according to Legends, Boba escaped the pit, read the story A Barve Like That: The Tale of The Tale of Boba Fett by J.D. Montgomery in the book Tales from Jabba's Palace published in January 1996 by Bantam Spectra.

Regarding the Mandalorian himself, I really hope that's Pedro in the suit most of the time.

The introduction of Grand Admiral Thrawn from Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire books is a good twist. Though it is a long time since I read those, it is interesting to have an antagonist who isn't actually evil, but still believes in the Empire.

A confession: I shamefully did not know, or had forgotten, that there was another of Yoda and Grogu's species called Yaddle, visible on the Jedi Council in The Phantom Menace. Shame on me.

Finally, the build up to the rescue job---putting the team together like The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven---has me rabidly excited.

Star Trek: Discovery

I love that there is a Star Trek show and there are more shows coming, but I'm sorry that I'm finding Discovery largely uninteresting. My problem in the main Burn plot is so incredibly boring. It's like one middling episode of TNG stretched into a whole season.

eBay

I was back on eBay, after a few years absence, buying some retro gear. It's too early to talk about, because a lot can go wrong with old stuff you buy and I don't want to jinx myself before my purchases arrive.

I actually have a fair amount of retro hardware stored in boxes from ten to twenty years, and I plan to be talking about it on the pod and rummaging though it on my YouTube channel next year.

Expect unboxings.

Expect fire.

No, please don't expect fire.

IKEA Desk Chair Excavation

I found a long lost screwdriver bit in my chair recently, left from self-assembly. So that's what happened to the damn thing!

If anyone is interested, I have had the Millberget Swivel chair in Bomstad black. I bought it in 2016 for GBP 55, though it's now priced GBP 65. It's an okay average chair that I use in front of my computer.

Commodore 64, The C64, Commodore 65, Commodore 128

I had a Commodore 64, though I was already late to the personal computer when Mum and Dad bought one for me. Ostensibly it was to help with my education, but really I played games with it.

After that, I spent a good number of years as a non-techie, before jumping back in with an overpriced Amstrad PC that died years later when it caught fire.

While I still have a Commodore 64 in a state of sad disrepair, should the nostalgia bug bite me, there are several options. Repair the machine I have. Buy one on eBay (or an even better Commodore 128) or buy a brand new retro machine. There's the C64, which is a full size breadbox with a nicely set up emulator and is a replacement for the mini before it.

Then there's the new and very expensive Commodore 65 based on an unreleased prototype. I don't have time to talk about it in this pod, but there's a nice vid from Nostalgia Nerd on YouTube that I suggest you watch.