The law of Sod

I am taking a break from writing a presentation to write about the law of Sod. I spent about 4 hours yesterday afternoon stuck alone in my office as the summer sun baked the outside revellers to contentment. I was going through some graphs and putting asterisks and small font letters next to error bars to indicate which blocks of colour were ‘significantly’ different from others. I’d done the stats wrongly, of course, I don’t think you can ever do stats 100% correctly, but ive realised this morning that id done them badly enough to mean that I have to do them all again this morning. Oh great.

The presentation is for a conference im going to in Glasgow in a few weeks which is where the law of sod comes in. Back in the depths of winter, 5 friends convinced to come on a sailing holiday with them this summer. None of us really sail, but two of the six had recently been awarded their ‘day skipper’ or something licences, and so wanted to be skipper for a few days. We booked to go to Greece this coming Saturday for a week. All good. Then a few months ago my boss mentions a conference she wants us to talk at, and mentions the week after the holiday booking. All good again I think, a week in the sun, then a week up in Glasgow to continue the not working. A few weeks later the details start to emerge, and it becomes apparent that the conference actually starts on the Sunday. Really? I think, that’s a bit silly isn’t it? Still, the chances of my talk being put on the Sunday are quite small, especially with my boss’s influence on the organising panel. I check the flight times back from Greece and we arrive late Saturday night. Then I get my talk date through and its not only on the Sunday, but Sunday morning. This strikes me with a little bit of panic. I check the flight times to Glasgow. The latest flight out is 9.20pm. Not enough time. I check the morning flights, and again, not enough time. I check the night trains, and while one exists, you have to get off the train at Birmingham for 6 hours, so it isn’t really much of a night train and more of an evening and then morning train. My last hope before contemplating driving up through the night is the good old night bus. Great stuff, I think, as I book a £34 single from Heathrow to Glasgow. The best conference talk preparation I can imagine is sitting next to some Glaswegian Trainspotting impersonator for 9 hours as i try to sleep with one eye open. Then ive got 3 hours to get showered and changed and answer difficult questions on a difficult subject I don’t fully understand. Can’t wait.

But I don’t really care too much, as its holiday time next week.

Back to the graphs.

Blockbusters begin

The sun, and summer blockbuster season has begun in anger. I sat watching Terminator Salvation last night with the warmth of some mild sunburn combating the over eager air-conditioning in screen nine of Vue Plymouth. That’s the biggest screen, which makes the films far more impressive if they’re the blowing things up after a chase or fight type of affair. The new Startrek was good in there, Terminator similar, Transformers Revenge of the Fallen hopefully too, but they’re all a bit too predictable - heavy on the effects and light on the subtleties. And it’s the little things that matter right? The Hollywood bods are trying to cater for everyone at 70%, which is great, but comes at the expense that no one is ever going to love it at a hundred. But it’s probably not as simple as that. Terminator suffered from the plot ‘twist’ being obvious from the first scene – the ‘Cyberdyne systems’ headed paper that Marcus signs makes it clear what his fate is if you’re any sort of a fan of the franchise. And with that removed, there’s not much of a story to get attached to. There was also some really annoying dialog where people stated what was happening on screen just to make it doubly clear what was happening on screen, which I had already got because I was in the cinema watching what was happening on screen. I also struggled with Bale’s voice, much like in Batman, which he seemed to over gruff to the point of sounding like a 40-a-day granddad in some scenes. It was good fun overall though. I enjoyed the nods to the previous films – ‘come with me if you want to live’ ‘ill be back’ and a really eighties looking Arnie were all thrown in, though why Arnie didn’t just crush John Connor’s head instead of throwing him around for five minutes was a bit troubling. There were a suite of new terminators to feast your eyes on, and the action scenes certainly made the most of the big screen. The packed out cinema too, was a testament to the quality of the previous films (T3 excluded, obviously) and luckily enough for the fans, the films seems to have the same traits as the terminators that they depict; just when you thought they were dead, they unexpectedly rise up and come back to get you again.