Category: Comment

Boldly Going

Friday June 19th 2009

Last night I went to see the new Star Trek movie with my brother Andrew up at Clydebank cinema. After buying our tickets from a machine in the foyer, due to the tills being closed, we went curiously unchallenged from that point on. Even stopping to buy some popcorn and asking the guy who served us which screen the movie was on didn’t make him ask to see our tickets.

This was possibly because there were only about six people in there, including ourselves. They’d probably be happy with folk wandering in off the streets in the hope of making some cash from the treats and sweets. Personally I kind of liked it being a near private screening, with infuriating inconsiderate teenagers putting me off going to the cinema most of the time.

The movie itself was great, I thought. It could have been paced better in places, but still – as an attempt to reboot the franchise it was certainly successful in my eyes. It was well cast, visually stunning, and in well trodden territory as far as Trek lore goes, especially in using time travel as a plot device and in glossing over plot holes without a second thought.

cinema, clydebank, movies, Star Trek

A Brighter Idea

Thursday February 5th 2009

Towards the end of January I made the distinctly untrendy decision to give up on updating my Twitter account in favour of using Brightkite instead. Talk about swimming against the tide; Currently the world + dog & other assembled pets are washing up fail whales in a tsunami of tweeting.

But, after almost a year of daily use, I’ve decided the world’s largest text adventure isn’t for me.

Brightkite, microblogging, Pownce, social networking, Twitter, web

A diversion from desolation

Monday January 26th 2009

Interesting to see the mostly positive effects of children experiencing skateboarding for the first time in Afghanistan.

Skating really is a sport that crosses the class barrier, and is favourable towards the poorer or working class in terms of accessibility – all you need is a deck and you’re good to go. When I first started in the early 80’s I had a cheap green plastic deck that I think I swapped a friend something for and it did the job for me to learn the basics of skating. Not that it mattered where it came from, as back then pretty much everybody was skating similar plastic decks that would shatter under a heavy impact.

In that regard, it’s a shift to the opposite end of the spectrum from one of my other favourite sports – tennis. When I was in my teens and a member of my local tennis club, I always found that the other kids – generally from the middle and upper classes of the area – had much better clothes and equipment than myself. I was using a metal hand-me-down raquet that vibrated like a big tuning fork as I struck the ball, when the rest of them were using carbon fibre and other exotic materials. (It made it all the more satisfying when I occasionally beat one of them – rare occurrence, sadly!)

Of course, nowadays both my tennis racket and my skateboard are made from exotic materials and cost a good bit more than your budget variety. Hasn’t improved my skills at either sports, sadly, but it does always make me smile at a skate park to see some kid tearing up the place on a board that looks like it was found in the trash. 🙂

skateboarding, Sport, tennis