marramgrass

Garfield Minus Garfield.

Exactly what it sounds like. Really. Check it out.

(HT Gruber)

Over the weekend, Larry Norman died. There’s been talk of his poor health for what seems like years and years, to the point where I’d assumed he would just keep going and going.

He was a cracker, and the three or four Larry gigs I made it to over the years rank among some of the best I’ve enjoyed. I didn’t love all of his music, but I loved enough of it.

The thing about visitors is that they have to leave, in the end.

(HT: TSK)

High ideals combined with a frugal attitude to spray paint.

(Spotted this yesterday on the fence outside the Ulster Museum — the museum is currently being refurbished.)

21 st 4 lbs.

This was not part of the plan.

Technical modifications are strictly forbidden due to the inherent dangers!

It’s a coffee grinder. For now.

Winding down in front of E4 yesterday evening, I caught episodes of two new (here in the UK) TV shows I’d seen trailed and been intrigued by.

Reaper is an hour-long drama-comedy-fantasy thing about a guy whose parents sold his soul to the devil in return for a favour (!). I’m hazy on the detail. As payback, he works as Satan’s hitman-type, hunting down rogue bad-guy souls who’ve escaped their due torment and are wreaking havoc in the world. It’s a nice idea, but aside from a couple of high quality comedy sidekicks, the episode I watched (about a nasty toxic-waste dumping dead businessman killing off the lawyers pestering his heir-to-the-family-ick son) didn’t really excite. Great premise, doesn’t live up to its promise.

The Big Bang Theory, on the other hand, was great fun. It’s another light-hearted sitcom in the vein of Two And A Half Men (without turning into a Charlie Sheen vehicle) or 8 Simple Rules (a favourite of mine). A pair of shy and nerdy physics PhDs share a flat. When a pretty girl moves in across the hall, hilarity ensues. The humour is of a properly geeky (even internet-y) tone:

“If you don’t have any other plans, do you want to join us for Thai food and a Superman movie marathon?”

“A marathon? Wow, how many Superman movies are there?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Or even better:

“Now we’ve got an inclined plane. The force required to lift is reduced by the sine of the angle of the stairs. Call it 30°, so about half.”

“Exactly half.”

Maybe you had to be there, but hey, I loved it.

21 st 0 lbs.

2 down, many to go.

The trailer for this year’s bizarrely-titled fourth Indiana Jones movie is out: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I’m curious to see how they play Indy being almost twenty years older than last time.

Am I looking forward to it?

Oh yes.

Back in September I mentioned that I was giving Google Reader another go in case I ended up with an iPhone in my pocket.

Four and a half months later, it appears to have become my feed reader of choice. Since the first time I tried it out, way back when it became available, Reader has been developed into a much slicker and more usable piece of software, and it seems to have successfully weaned me off my desktop feed reader (on Windows I was a lover of FeedDemon in the days before it was eaten by NewsGator, then I discovered Thunderbird’s abilities in the field and brought it with me to the Mac).

Before we go any further, an interlude:
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It may only be February, but I don’t expect to see a better film than Juno the rest of this year. If you object to some mild spoilers, it’s probably best you stop reading now and go and play a game instead.

Juno of the title is a sixteen year-old girl who decides it’s time to experiment sexually and enlists her friend Paulie to join her — then she ends up pregnant.

It’s a familiar enough premise, but where the movie then goes is unlike anything I’ve seen recently. What marks it out for me, and what makes it so special, is the sheer believability of it all.

Underneath the so-hip-it-hurts witty banter (Juno talks like every teenager wishes they did — she talks like I wish I did), the characters and their relationships, their confusion and fear and their developing reactions to the situation all ring true.

The only real sticking point is that dialogue, which initially feels a little contrived and a little too self-aware, but within ten minutes my brain had found its rhythm and took it for what it was, a little bit of humourous caricature that emphasises depth and honesty rather than hiding it. Ellen Page layers it over her character while still showing us the confusion and insecurity that Juno doesn’t quite want to admit to.

Michael Cera is half of the duo that made Superbad so engaging despite its ick, and he does the same here as the father of the child, fumbling his way through the sweet little love story. He also has the line that captures perfectly what it’s like to be a teenager (at least the way I remember it): Juno says, “‘Cause you’re, like, the coolest person I’ve ever met, and you don’t even have to try, you know…” Paulie’s reply, “I try really hard, actually.”

Other highlights include, unlike in most teen comedies, that Juno’s parents are actually very likable, doing their best to look out for her while they themselves haven’t a clue what to do, and their reaction to her news also seems spot on. The soundtrack sent me straight to iTunes, and the whole look of the film was… I’m sorry that I’m having to stop myself using a word like ‘enchanting’.

The trick the film pulls is that by the end you’ve come to really care about the characters, and when Juno gives birth and is giving her baby up to be adopted, and her father sits with her without saying much, you’re just about ready to cry with her.

Teenage pregnancy is a headline-grabber of an issue, but what Juno does, with its little glimpses of grace, is remind that completely apart from sermons and glib ’solutions’, real people have to get on dealing with real life.