[●REC](2007)

Great little movie. Probably one of the best "dude-with-camera" films made. It does suffer from a few "in reality, he would have dropped the camera and helped" moments and zombie-children never look good, but other than that not bad at all. The acting looked quite convincing and natural, but the fact that they were all speaking Spanish could have clouded any subtle stiffness that might otherwise have been noticed.

I think the key to its effectiveness lies in the fact that the makers weren't over advantageous. Unlike other films, the story revolves around a very small footprint, only a few rooms in a building, and there are very few breaks in the filming, so its an awful lot easier to believe than some guy running around a whole city at night. Plus, its being filmed by a "professional video-journalist" and as such would be used to keeping the camera rolling unlike a total newbie-amateur.


Reporter "Ángela", as played by Manuela Velasco

Like all good foreign films, Hollywood feels a need to remake them in English. Well if they manage to keep it low-key they might be on to a winner with it, but if they blow it out of proportion with some famous bint like Jessica Alba as the reporter then it will probably fail like they rest of the muck they are producing these days.

[Suggested by Karlhungus.com]

Irishtimes.com free?

So let me get this straight. We now get the new news ("news") for free, but we have to pay for old news? A very interesting pricing model there, I think they should do the same with cars. Get the new model for free and then as the years go by, it appreciates in value. People from a hundred years ago would think we're bonkers, paying good money to read old news. Mind you, they'd probably think allowing women to vote was bonkers too.

Play.com Shenanigans

Anyone who's ordered items from play.com over the years will know that a good while back they demanded that all orders outside the UK had to be made up of items added to the shopping basket with the Euro price already on them. Fair enough I thought, but look at the fucking exchange rate they're giving you. If £10 --> €17 doesn't ring alarm bells for you, check out the actual exchange rate.



Nearly a full fiver. Fuck, I used to buy DVD's off them years ago for that amount. Shitty DVD's I'll grant you, but for a fiver nonetheless. So what could the old "expensive" vetern, Amazon.co.uk, do for the same item. Postage would surely mean that they are still more expensive...



Yeah of course, a whopping 9c dearer. I'd gladly pay the extra because at least with Amazon you're getting some kind of professionalism for your money which means you'll actually receive the item in a few days as opposed to play.com where you'll be lucky to get it in the same month you ordered it.

We said no to Lisbon but welcomed in the Euro... that still doesn't make sense to me. I heard George Lee pointing out recently, if we were still using Punt's today, current exchange rates would mean that one punt would be worth one pound and one penny Sterling IR£1.00 --> GB£1.01. Think about that the next time your fumbling around in your pocket for that scrap called Euro.

So many sad faces attached to lonely frames. I find it so upsetting, more than I should really. If only I could help, but that would be the blind leading the blind.

Shrooms(2006)

The tagline reads "Get Ready to Get Wasted" but the only thing being wasted here is tax payers money. The full heading to this post should read "Shrooms, and how the Irish Film Board is pissing your money up against a wall". This was one of the worst pieces of shit I've made myself sit through in a while. I always thought Boy Eats Girl was the worst Irish horror movie ever made, but "shrooms"... what a bad fucking trip, man!

It's easy to see why they called the movie "shrooms", the dialog consists solely of "shrooms; the shrooms; dude, the shrooms; these are the best shrooms ever; shrooms; I shouldn't have done those shrooms". As one reviewer mentioned, if you were to play a drinking game based on the amount of times the word shrooms was mentioned, you'd more than likely suffer liver damage by the end of the movie.

The plot is rediculous. Why would a bunch of Americans fly halfway across the world for a few magic mushrooms? Mushrooms containing psilocybin are indigenous to North America, and Ireland carries the same penalties to consuming the illicit fungi as in America, so why you'd bother to make the trip is a mystery.Even if they went far out and came up with a totally stereotypical anti-psychedelic movie about people jumping off roof tops after consuming mushrooms would have made a better story.

So was there anything good about this film at all? Well it wasn't fucking scary anyway. It did look beautiful though. Absolute respect to those involved in the photography, the lush forest scenes made it watchable. There was a lot of moody atmospheric shots. Just look at the following frame from the movie.



Hopefully, a better film will be made in the future that looks just as good because it would be a same to waste the visuals.

More like Arse-Waves...

As I feared, it looks like the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator, is a crock of shit. And its still not for sale on Komplett. Ah well, looks like anal probes are the way to go.

Atari had the same kind of thing years ago, the "MindLink" as pictured above. It measured electrical impulses in your facial muscles as opposed to brain waves. Its basically a Slendertone unit in reverse then. I guess to be fair, no matter how it works its still as useful as before, but its not so fucking cool anymore.

[Technologyreview.com report on brain-wave devices]

Sorry Kids, No Jazz For You!

You know, occasionally things just suddenly hit me... like rocks and cars and stuff. Sometimes its web sites. I've been browsing around the Cork Jazz Festival site for the past few weeks, waiting to see if any new acts have been lined up. Each time, I enter my (random) birthday on the homepage to access the main content. This is to make sure that the visitor is over 18 (yeah we all know its a fucking stupid way to prove ones age) and as such legally entitled to drink alcoholic beverages.

Even after all the jazz festivals of the past, only today did I take this one in. The official 2008 Cork Jazz Festival web site demands that you are of legal age to drink before they let you in. Since when has jazz been about drinking? Since Diagio hijacked it, thats when. Why don't they go the full hog and rename it: The Guinness Jazz Festival (in Cork). Oh wait, they did. Fucking ridiculous.

[Note] Before any cretin offers misinterpretation, this is a specific post about the alcohol and age thing, not the festival as a whole. Oh and another thing, all 109 year old jazz lovers shouldn't come to the Cork Jazz weekend either because you are too old according to the age verification drop down menu. Bypass all that legal shit and go straight to here.



To end on something lighter, how about a caption contest for the above jazz related pic. My entry reads: "Looks better in black".

[picture via gandalfe]

Best Commodore 64 Mod Ever

I have no idea what the hardware specs are, but it looks (and sounds) very fucking cool. Its called a MidiboxSID V2 and made by a character called Subatomicglue. I'd link to him now but his sites been down for the last two days. Linky at the bottom instead. "Subatomicglue embedded 8 SID chips under the covers of this puppy, which lets it generate 4 stereo pairs of sound, and 4 synthesizer “voices” at the same time."... apparently.


I'd ditch the original PSU, gut it at the very least, and do something fun with it instead.


Very nice indeed!


Ignore the Korg controller keyboard. I love when the lights on the matrix get going.

[Subatomicglue's Website (down; back in a few weeks)]
[Technabob.com write-up on the MidiboxSID]
[via MAKE:blog]

Jerry Sadowitz versus Scientologist

Jerry Sadowitz is one of my favorite comedians. I first came across him in 1998 while watching an episode from his short lived show "The People versus Jerry Sadowitz" on Channel 5. The late George Carlin had nothing on him in terms of profanity. While his acts are quite profane and vulgur theres an honesty and fairness to them not seen in other comics. He's also one of the best close-up magicians in the world.

Rather than discuss Sadowitz in detail now, I'll just comment on the above clip. The format of the show basically entitles guests to come on and talk about whatever they want until Sadowitz "bells" them off. As you'd expect, they usually don't get to talk for long before they're interrupted and eventually booted off. Sadowitz has a history belittling Scientology and this is no exception. The fact that he doesn't swear even once in this clip makes it all the funnier.

I put this up now because of another unsolicited email I got today from "Anonymous" regarding an upcoming covert Scientology drive masquerading as a "Mental Health Awareness Weekend" in Cork. Whatever, but when will they send me an email about the Pope masquerading as a Catholic.

Jerry Sadowitz: Magician, Comedian, Psychopath

Jon Lord: The Telemann Experiment

I just wanted to try out the HD facility vimeo.com. I don't have any actual genuine HD material at my disposal so I just took a SD rip from a DVD and upped the resolution to match HD. I think you'll agree that even this pseudo-HD looks superb though. Note, to view the HD version you'll have to go to the vimeo page for the video. You can also expand it to full-screen there.

The video is a live performance of Jon Lord's The Teleman Experiment. It's taken from his DVD, "Beyond the Notes: Live". It's a real mixture of musical styles and hard to pin it down to a single genre. Lord himself jokes at the end of the piece, "Catagorise that!".

You'll notice it begins with a piece of Nordic folk styled music played by Emilia Amper on the Nyckelharpa. Emilia is a talented Swedish musician who has spent years playing the Nyckelharpa, a traditional Swedish musical instrument. The story goes, Lord had always wanted to incorporate a piece of music written by the Baroque composer Georg Telemann into a work of his own, but never found an appropriate way to do this. Then he came across Emilia playing the Nyckelharpa and felt inspired to merge the two musical styles. Something like that anyway.

When I watched this dvd for the first time last year I meant to review it. (If youre interested, try this short review[progressiveworld.net]). Its a lovely performance, encompassing most of the Beyond The Notes album and some songs from his other solo works. Only available in Germany though, I had to buy my copy from Amazon.de. And you should buy a copy too, because you can't just get 8 minutes for free and give nothing in return... unless its Metallica albums, they love it when you download their music :)

Jon Lord: Beyond The Notes - Live

Released: 2004
Label: Capitol
Cat. No.: 7243 5 44468 9 4
Total Time: 156:21

For the sake of completeness, here's Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden with a Nyckelharpa. I came across this picture when writing up a post about her a few weeks back. At the time, it reminded me of Emilia Amper and The Telemann Experiment, hence why I used it to test out vimeo.com's HD facility. Yes this post has been a while in the pipeline.

Esbjörn Svensson Trio - Dodge The Dodo

I was informed by a friend that Esbjörn Svensson died in a scuba diving accident during the week. Who is he? Well thats exactly what I asked him, because as far as I knew, I hadn't heard of him before. I was to soon realise however, that that wasn't altogether true.

I was told he was a jazz pianist, and played in the Cork Jazz festival last year, but it still didn't ring any bells. I read up on him, found out he was Swedish... then I searched around youtube until I found a song by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio called "Dodge The Dodo". I paid no attention to the title. As soon as the track got going I felt goosepimples rise on my skin. I had heard this music before, and I knew where. It was the same music as a random midi file I downloaded nearly 10 years ago, which I used to listen to and mess about with. I had forgot the title of it, but the music was unmistakable. I might have read it was by Esbjörn Svensson all those years ago but it was soon forgotton. The midi file itself was transcribed by Michel Blomgren.

It's funny how things eventually fall into place, and unfortunate at how its sometimes because of death.


Esbjörn Svensson Trio - Dodge The Dodo

Diary Of The Dead (2007)

In a word: terrible! Jeez how the mighty fall. This was a mess from start to finish. Whatever you thought of "Land Of The Dead", whether you liked its comic book feel or not, you're sure to hate this monstrosity.

I thought I'd hate this because of the whole "dude-with-camera" thing, but it was done so badly, I forgot that it was being used; at least Cloverfield looked natural. Thats so weird for a Romero film, because all his other movies, incidental scenes (like news reports, and candid shots) looked authentically real. Being blunt, everything was shit in this movie, the plot, the characters, the dialogue... the gore was done well but not really all that amazing these days.

As a long time George A. Romero fan, I am so disappointed by this release. He was always one for making movies with strong social commentaries, but he seems to have pulled this one right out of his arse. The ending line in the film is so pretentious I nearly choked on my bowel of brains. The Crazies was better than this, heck, even Knightriders was better than this. Perhaps most disturbingly, even the remake of Dawn' was regrettably, better than this.

The only redeeming thing I can say about the movie is that I dreamed of zombies after watching it, which is something I haven't done in a while. Check out The Zombie Diaries(2006) instead. Boring, but with a good start and nice British Army scenes.

Eire Models: Anthology

Annmarie Fitzgerald, formerly of Eire Models

Ok I'm going to wrap this up now. I never thought it would get so out of hand. A few people asked for a background to the story so I'm going to quickly run through it all from the very beginning, to the best of my recollection. Corrections can be made in the comments if anyone so wishes.

Preamble: There's a program on Irish radio called "Liveline" which runs for an hour everyday, Monday to Friday. It's been running for over 20 years and is currently hosted by Joe Duffy. The format of the show allows every day people of Ireland to call in about personal grievances or concerns they may be having.

On Tuesday last, a woman rang in saying that her thirteen year old daughter, was approached on the street by two young woman promoting eiremodels.com, the modelling course they run and a TV show they had lined up to find "Irelands Next Top Model". Not only did the caller object to her daughter being approached but she was also annoyed at how pushy the two women were for a down-payment of €150 to take part in the Eire Modeling course. At this stage it seemed fairly innocuous, and not much different from other stories heard before on the show. A spokesperson from Eire Models then came on the line and proceeded to throw fat on the fire. She literally sounded lost as she attempted to answer the now constant barrage of vexed callers ringing in. She was unable to back up the claim made that they were in partnership with TV for the TV program. TV3 denied all knowledge of this. Mr. Mark Townley, MD of Eire Models, then rang in and attempted to answer concerns raised. He pretty much failed and other made things worse for himself. The show ended at 3pm and I thought no more of it.

The next day, the now infamous Mark Townley rang in to defend his company, Eire Models. Townley suggested he owned the rights to the TV program "Irelands Next Top Model". He said he had the patent on it. The patent office rang in saying no such claim was ever made. Townley was unable to prove other claims he made (like Eire Models being the biggest about Eire Models and was unable to defend how cheques he wrote to people involved in the organisation had all bounced. The conversation got gradually more intense when Joe Duffy started slowly leading the conversation into Mark Townley's background. It reached critical mass when Duffy directly accused Townley of being the same Mark Townley, sentenced to 6 months imprisonment for fraud and barred for two years from entering the UK. He was heard saying "and you can take me to the High-Court on this". There was quite of lot of evidence to suggest that he was indeed the same person but what stunned listeners as well as putting Joe Duffy on the back foot was Townley's adamant and courageous denial of these accusations and his threats to sue over the statements being made. Writing about it will do it no justice, you have to listen to it.



After this an animated caller rang in to say he had seen the same Mark Townley on BBC's Watchdog program. He was sure it was the same person and said he was shown to be "selling to underage children". Townley appeared flabbergasted at the Watchdog story be told. Duffy, seemingly once again convinced of his innocence declared "I'm sure its a different Mark Townley".



On the following days show, Duffy stated that Townley was quite convincing in his defense and admitted that he too at times was convinced by him, but he then went on to list what can only be described as a "damning" string of evidence practically proving that Eire Models Townley was the same person banned from entering the UK and found guilty on charges of fraud in April 2008.



Eire Modeling Agency and their website eiremodels.com have both been indefinitely suspended. Mark Townley has gone awol and nobody seems to know whats going on.

All calls relating to Eire Models on Tuesdays Show:


All calls relating to Eire Models on Wednesdays Show:



All calls relating to Eire Models on Thursdays Show:



I wrote a few words about Joe Duffy in my initial post which seem to have confused a few readers. One such reader e-mailed to ask if I was Mark Townley and when I replied lamenting that I wasn't, he insisted I must have some personal interest in the case. His argument was that because I allegedly criticized Duffy in the post over his handling of the call I must have some hidden agenda. What I actually said was "If his turns out to be true, Joe should really retire". If Mark Townley turned out to be innocent, the way in which Duffy slandered him live on-air would surely have had disastrous results to his career anyway. Or at least, I hope they would. I believe is freedom of speech but what Duffy said was enough to ruin an innocent mans business and personal life, and that should never go without punishment. I went on to say that I think Duffy has become less and less interested in the job. This has nothing to do with Mark Townley or Eire Models. It's something I've noticed listening to the show over the past few years. I've been a Live Line listener in one way or another for close to 20 years and I've defended Joe Duffy in the past when others had accused him of bias and ignorance. Unfortunately, I find myself agreeing with them from time to time now. While I concede perhaps some bias of my own as, on a rare occasion I still find myself expecting to hear Marian Finucane's (Original Liveline host) voice after the start of the theme music, I refuse to believe that my feelings on the way he handles callers like this has anything to do with my fondness for the past.

I object to sensationalism. The amount of times I heard him use the phrase "thirteen year old girls" when talking about Eire Models was enough to hang a pedophile. There was enough legit evidence for him to pursue without descending into the "won't someone think of the children" argument. Of course who's to say this was Joe's idea. As we later heard in the show, a voice could be heard prompting Duffy to ask certain questions to the final caller. Most of the audio contains incomprehensible speech but there are a few obvious examples which I've included here:



I still enjoy listening to the Live Line with Joe Duffy as host, if I didn't, I just wouldn't listen to him. The "Funny Fridays" are great and in general theres nothing to complain about. Regarding Eire Models, like most people, I don't know what the real story was. It was too convoluted to be just a scam and yet so shambolic as to be nothing more than one. I had barely heard of them before all this. I had come across them and their models a few times on PureStorm.com. I notice that even their Pure Storm account has become suspended now too. I saved the page a few days back on my phone in case it disappeared in the mean time, hence the strange format to the picture.

[All my posts regarding Eire Models]
[Eire Models website]
[Eire Models "related" Bebo Page]
[Eire Models June Magazine]
[Annmarie Fitzgerald, Eire Models model]
[Olivia, Eire Models model]

This post is dedicated to Alan Harvey Jnr. Who believes in the Loch Ness Monster, 9/11 conspiracy theories, bigfoot, and that I'm really Mark Townley.

Mark Townley

Bad hair day

Mark Townley pictured at the launching of eiremodels.com. Well, I'm convinced.



[via RTE.ie]

Lisbon Voting

I voted "Yes" to the Lisbon Treaty on Thursday last. I felt it was a good deal overall. We got all we looked for.


Then again, I could have voted "No", for no reason really, maybe just because I was easly led and frightened by the sensationalist No campaign.


I could have spoiled my vote, for the craic.


Or not voted at all because I was still undecided.

I actually voted Yes.

eiremodels.com... The Magazine

The soft-copy pdf of the now infamous Eire Models Magazine is still up for grabs from eiremodels.com. Get your copy quickly because this is bound to disappear soon. Its about 106MB by the way, so broadband is needed.

http://www.eiremodels.com/USERIMAGES/Eiremodelsjuneglossy08PDF(1).pdf

The World Will End Tomorrow!

Jesus Yisrayl Hawkins is predicting that the world will end tomorrow. I think I'll change my underpants just in case.

"Self-proclaimed prophet Yisrayl "Buffalo Bill" Hawkins is predicting. He is predicting that nuclear war will be declared either today or tomorrow which will result in the end of the world.

According to this report, his followers are standing by with hundreds of truck trailers loaded with food and water on the group's 44-acre compound in Abilene, Texas.

This is not the first time that Hawkins has predicted the end of the world. Back on September 12th, 2006 he also thought the world was going to end but obviously was wrong and hundreds of his followers in Kenya who were hiding out in bunkers removed their gas masks and walked home in humiliation. Link"

[via A Welsh View]

eiremodels.com... gone

Well it looks like thats that...

"Please be advised that due to recent negative publicity and attacks Eire Models feels in a position to suspend it’s operation and school due to the extreme damages caused by untrue and inaccurate media claims.

We would like to make it clear that we always operated a professional business and worked very hard behind the scenes to make it the success which it was.

We always put our models first and provided a unique professional service which only ever received positive feedback.

No one has ever had a negative thing to say about our business before, although it’s clear that we cannot recover from such an unprovoked, shocking and continued attack.

Eire Models can assure all of our models who have not completed our schooling program that they are entitled to a full refund of fees paid. We will be writing to each of our models today explaining our unfortunate position and ensuring that you personally don’t lose out, as a consequence of the slander against us.

This is a truly distressing time which has led to severe damages caused to both individuals and the company as a whole. It is very unfortunate that this attack has lost us good relationships throughout.

Eire Models wishes to make no further comment to the media as they chose to portray our company in a very untrue light. Although these matters must be left to our legal team and accountant at this time.

We wish to thank all of those who showed us support at this very difficult time, including our existing models and parents alike and we apologise for the upset that this has caused to you. We have been very grateful to receive your messages of kindness throughout."

Luckily I had the foresight to download their "unpublished" 100+MB pdf magazine before it went offline and will be drawing upon it for future posts, along with the radio broadcast in question. They seemed to give up easy though, a little "too" easy. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

eiremodels.com

War on the Live Line today, from a story that started yesterday. Joe Duffy accused Mark Townley (eiremodels.com) as being the same Mark Townley who spent time in jail and is banned from the UK for two years for violent [and perverse] crimes. The "Mark Townley" speaking on the Live Line was adamant that he was not the same individual and threatened to sue over such slanderous statements.

If his turns out to be true, Joe should really retire. He's been getting less and less interested in the job for the past few years. It's manifested itself in irritability with guests and audible yawning.

[UPDATE] Definitely need to download todays show later... you can hear every question Joe asks being prompted by his production crew in the background. Christ, what a sham of a presenter.

Prince in Croke Park? FALSE

Ha Ha, even when the Daily Mail are right they're wrong. On the day Prince announces the cancellation of his Dublin concert, scheduled for the 16th of this month, the Daily Mail had the above competition. The question is, what's the correct answer?

Tom COSM, not coming to Ireland :(

I got word from Tom COSM recently that he unfortunately won't be including Ireland in his inaugural world tour. I feel a bit mixed about that because while I was quite excited at the prospect at his arrival on these shores, I'd probably only have gone to see him play my living room or something as I'm quite lazy when it comes to these things (am I going to see MUSE in Marlay Park later this year? Am I fuck!). Nevertheless, its sad that Ireland won't be graced by this Kiwi Trance Minstrel and especially sad that Cork won't as the scene is quite dire.



A few weeks back I left these impromptu Tom COSM fliers around The Savoy as it was the poorest night I ever saw there. A Saturday night, nothing unusual but there were literally only a dozen people there. They didn't even open the downstairs.



They had the "Blue Man Group" playing upstairs. Well one of them anyway. He loved having his picture taken. Aww bless.



We left after 30 minutes. €10 wasted. I've said it before but it'll be a long time before I step inside the Savoy again.

Tom COSM, hacked!

Click to view full page

Poor old Tom COSM had his homepage hacked by some Turk. Not sure when or why it happened, but the real question is: is Tom visiting Turkey on his world-tour? :)

Bypass 3's Banned Website List

Have a look at the full resolution version of the above image (clicky, clicky). It shows "Gavins Blog" being viewed over a 3 Mobile Broadband connection, which was previously blocked. Theres also a few other windows in the foreground and if you don't understand whats going on, keep reading.

The obvious way to beat 3's "sanitised" version of the internet is to use a proxy. The problem is, unless you know the address of a proxy already, it will be hard for you to find one because 3 block any site even remotely related to proxying. Unless you have an alternative connection or know a uber l33t hackrs site unknown by 3, you'll be getting nowhere fast.

The program windows opened in the above image (left to right):

• Mozilla Firefox (you know, that browser thing)
• QuickProxy (an add-on for Firefox which allows you to quickly switch routing through a proxy on or off)
• Firefox's connection settings (with a currently working proxy IP address and port entered)
• MidpX (Kwyshell's excellent java midlet emulator which turns any jar file into a windows executable)
• Opera Mini (browser usually only seen running on mobile phones)

The trick here is that Opera Mini routes all internet connectivity through its own proxy by default so you can effectively view any page you want on your mobile, therefore find a page full of proxy lists is easy-peasy using it. I won't go into setting up a proxy in FireFox, there are plenty of pages out there explaining that already, and its not that hard anyway. Instead I'll explain about MidpX.

While MidpX isn't nessecery (you could browse using Opera Mini on your mobile first and note down a proxy from there) it does make the process a whole lot easier. All you do is download the MidpX J2ME Emulator Suite, download the jar and jad files for Opera Mini and then run them through midpX. You will now be able to browse the net using Opera Mini on your PC. It uses an emulated mobile display so the resolution isn't great, but it works. If you want a higher resolution solution, try java4me's project, its a bit more involved however. You can use MidpX for any jar file so its well worth downloading and having a look.

Thats it then. Complements given to freakitude.com for mentioning MidpX first. Oh, and if you just want a proxy without the fuss, try this one, it's working for me now at least:

193.136.191.25:3127

Cloverfield

Stupid, stupid film. Nah, to be fair it was just flawed. It was quite engrossing really, and had a great atmosphere, I'd give it full marks for entertainment, but the storyline, characters, and feasibility were total schlock.

The original use of camcorder footage in The Last Broadcast was praised when it came out in 1998. The Blair Witch Project, was greeted with mixed feelings but ultimately rewarded with praise that such a technique was brought into mainline cinema. Since then there has been countless uses of the technique in films. It's well about time that they killed off this novelty photography type; no more please!

It's not that I don't like POV, I love it in fact. First-person perspective is the way to go, but rather than wrapping a story-line around a ludicrous and tired plot device of "Dude has camera", perhaps instead shoot it all through the eyes of a character. Or just shoot it in traditional third person but all at eye level up-close, with a gimbal or even just shoulder mounted camera. The idea of a character hanging onto a "magic" consumer camcorder even when he's screaming "oh fuck god jesus christ jesus christ forgive me jesus" and running for his life but yet still deciding to turn around and film the monster chasing him, is just pathetic and off-putting. The funny thing about the camcorder in this particular movie, no matter what the light level or condition it was shooting in, it had no problem with exposure and focus, yet the one scene we get in daylight it struggles to find focus on the grass, with internal servo's screeching. A camera that could produce video of the quality seen in the movie would not have noisey focus servo's. And even if it did, how come we didn't hear them earlier?

A lot of the incidental dialogue was obviously stolen influenced from real New York 9/11 footage. Perhaps the film makers saw the footage and said "wouldn't it be cool if you could make a film out of this kind of footage". Grand, but shakey camera shots are not by themselves, exciting. And no matter how realistic a film, canted angles (unless they are shots from the 1960's Batman series) are seriously annoying. I kept screaming at the screen, "straighten the fucking camera you cunt!"


Same Bat-Time, same Bat-Angle

So the big monster thing is running around town and Johnny decides to save his woman, "awww how romantic". But why did they all have to go!? and why oh why, did yerman film it all, even when crossing between buildings 40 stories up when it looked so cumbersome to do so. Most importantly though, why did the little monster things make Donald Duck sounds? "Quack, quack, quack", oooh scarey!

Anyway, not a bad film overall, but please, enough with the camcorder movies, they've been done to.... oh for fucks sake, George A. Romero's "Diary of the Dead"... christ!

Jessie Buckley, needs a few lessons.

I was flicking through TV channels this evening when I came across Jessie Buckley on "Saturday Night with Miriam". Apparently she was a contestant on some talent show to find a singer to play the part of Nancy is some production of Oliver! (yeah, I don't watch a lot of tv).

She got up to sing a song (Killing Me Softly...) and immediately we were assaulted by clicking and popping and ssh'ing and sushing. Not saying a thing about her voice and not intended as an insult, but her microphone technique is brutal and I'm surprised a finalist of a televised singing contest wasn't coached to eliminate this.

Easy to fix though and best of luck to her!

Michel Camilo, Cliff Almond - On Fire

This is quite special, really quite special indeed! Jazz so tight, it almost hurts. Some complain about the drum solo at the end during the salsa bit. They think Cliff comes off the beat he ruins the flow... pff.. whatever. [Incidentally, as a personal by the way, playing salsa on piano is hard!]

There's a rumor that Michel Camilo will perform at this years Cork Jazz Festival. I might be starting that rumor right here right now, but its still classed as a rumor, right? :)

The original video was hosted on youtube but the embedding was disabled so I took the video and re-upped it to vimeo, hence the quality isn't the best.

Nearly 2 Million Views, but why?

It's currently at 1,752,494 views, but nothing actually happens in it!



And look at this one, its almost identical but its only a 100k views behind! But don't stop there, here's another one!



In fact, theres a whole bunch of these "nothing" videos floating around. I just don't understand youtube popularity at times. I'm going to have to watch these again a few times to see if I can get it. And then watch them again a few times after that just to be sure. And maybe once more after that again :)

Colour Camera On Mars, when?

West Valley Panorama "True Colour"/False Colour

With Phoenix still sending back black and white images from Mars, I feel its time to ask: When will NASA send a bloody colour camera to Mars? I'm sick to death of black & white photographs with red cum all over them. To a lesser extent I'm also sick of wacko's thinking that NASA are deliberately colouring images red to hide the big blue sky and green foliage on on the ground, in case the super secret cosmic space pact the Martians have with George W. Bush gets found out. The Mars Rover is either on Mars or in the Arizona desert somewhere, thats the most amount of cynicism anyone needs to have.

The image above shows a cropped picture I made up of two identical (but coloured differently) b&w panorama images taken by NASA's Mars Rover "Spirit". Believe it or not, NASA states that the murky brown section to the left is what they think a Mars vista actually looks like. The one on the right is what they class as "False Colour" and is used just to show a clearer contrast between objects. The colour in neither of these images is actually real though, and a element of fantasy is used (along with, I concede, some sound science).


Earth, as might be seen by a Mars Rover.

Alright so, they say that b&w provide better scientific images over colour and that sending an extra colour camera wouldn't be feasible due to excessive payload. Grand, but don't the tax payers of America deserve a little bit of "emotive" photography for their money? If photographing celestial objects was all about the brilliance of b&w "scientific" photography, why then did they use colour film in the Hasselblad they sent to the Moon with Neil Armstrong & Co? Isn't it more scientific to photograph a colour object (like Mars) in colour anyway? It's like hanging a black and white print of a Van Gogh painting up on your wall, "By careful interpretation of a colour chart, I can definitely say, what a wonderful use of colour he made in the actual painting". Colour is important in nature, it tells us things; like when a banana is ripe or, how bad your hangover is or, is it time to go and see your doctor about bowel cancer.

Just to catch out eager little cretins who feel compelled to hammer the "add comment" button to tell me how wrong I am, without reading the full post first, here's an actual colour photograph taken on Mars.



Yes sir, thats a real image from a colour camera on Mars alright. Sent back from Phoenix just three days ago. It's an image of some Martian soil inside Phoenixes Robotic Arm Scope. So there you have it, a colour camera on Mars. Problem is, thats for up close photography only. So my point still stands (kinda).

Next time, please send a colour camera capable of taking landscape shots, because we need to know, is Mars beautiful.

DPJ Harvey

I saw a flyer for PJ Harvey in the Bróg on Sunday last. I was quite surprised to see her name listed on a flyer in the Bróg of all places. Not only that, but she played Dublin only last December. Then I reread it; it actually said "DJ" Harvey. I always felt that to be a shit stage-name to be honest. Harvey might be his real first name but I doubt he'd have gone for DJ Johnny if his name was such. It's more likely that in the early days he thought it cool to sound like PJ Harvey, but then he found the name stuck. Can't wait to see an Irish DJ hijack "DJ Carey's" name, and unleash "The mighty wheels of ash". Anyway, that little incident is a perfect excuse to lash up a video by Harvey (PJ).



Yeah, "Dress" from her debut album is an obvious choice, but its so damn good, I just had to put it up. Any track from that album would be worth including.

Just Ice

I was working on a 30 second video and needed some simple incidental music for the background. As always, the music took over and the video idea ended up being scrapped. It only took me about 2 hours to complete, whether its crap or not isn't the point, the fact that music production is flowing so lucidly for me now is fantastic.

During the process, I came across a patch in Thor that reminded me a bit from the [cross] album by Justice. I worked on a riff until it was a close approximation of what I could recall from memory. It sounds fairly right but I have no idea what track its from because I'm too afraid to listen back to the album now in case I'm way off :)

I think I might have come across a bit harsh on the album, but nothing says flattery like imitation. I've rounded the production off to suit my own tastes, the stock re:drum sounds are unprocessed and as such, still sound Reason'y.

• Just Ice.mp3

Nice Of The Now

Still loving this picture via glassyalley.com.