Sandi Toksvig – a bright and highly entertaining British comedian and presenter – has this to say about the upcoming civil partnerships bill:
About three years ago I asked a member of the Labour NEC why the government, with its huge majority, was taking so long to get rid of the iniquitous section 28. The white, middle-aged, middle-class man said: “You have to understand Sandi, we’re all middle-aged, white, middle-class men and actually we don’t give a damn about gay rights.”
If the government had truly cared, the legislation would have started in the Commons and the Parliament Act could have been used to push the law through. Sadly it is a way of doing business which is reserved for foxes and not human beings.
Thanks to thegayvote.co.uk for that one. I find the world extremely depressing sometimes. Extremely. Extraordinarily.
It’s a bit late in the day, but if anyone wants to join Jim Speth, Ben Cerveny and myself for a breakfast around 18th and Castro, we’ll be at a place called Luna from around 11 until around 1ish. That’s when I have to head off to the airport.
I’m back in San Francisco after the Online Community Report summit and most of a reasonable night’s sleep (didn’t wake up until nearly 6am) and now trying to work out what to do for the next twenty-eight odd hours or so before I have to be back at the airport. A few days ago I mooted the possibility of a big breakfast with cool people somewhere tomorrow morning – however (1) Cory has suggested that my proposed venue wasn’t terribly practical and (2) I don’t know how many people are interested in coming… So I’m not totally sure what to do about that. Anyone got any ideas?
Otherwise pretty much the world’s my oyster today. I need to get some clothes and visit the Apple store while I’m here (mmm – weak dollar is gooood) and I think I’m going to visit Gayland this evening, which should be cool – but the rest of the day is totally up for grabs. Ping me if you’ve got any ideas… I’ll be on- and off-line all day.
Okay so here’s a completely trivial little irritation of mine. Can someone please explain to me why it is even possible in Movable Type to put more characters in your title field than the system can record in the database. I just don’t understand it. Surely adding a character limit would be the simplest thing to do, and the consequence would mean that if my title was too long, I wouldn’t have to wait to press “Save” to realise it. This was never really a concern until I started using the Title field to put in all the text for my linklog. Now it drives me insane.
Eurgh – long flights. Or should I say: Eurgh – long flights, other people’s screaming children, no room for a laptop unless you’re in the most extraordinarily complex and intricate of positions and why do people feel the salmon-like urge to walk directly into my elbows while walking down the bloody aisle. I mean it’s not even like they were lolling out everywhere… Still, I saw an episode of Will & Grace, an episode of The Simpsons, an episode of Arrested Development and two three films – 13 going on 30, Dodgeball and The Stepford Wives. I would say that was several hours of my life that I’ll never get back, except of course the alternatives were worse. Ooh. Check it out. The guy in front of me is actually bouncing up and down on his seat. That’s a new one…
Not a lot to add except that I got bored and in a fit of feckless lunacy decided to try and make a new hybridised NetNewsWire stylesheet on the plane out of two of my favourites – Daring Status Bar and Dashed+ – to try and make something that suits my needs a little better. Trivial problems with those two stylesheets being – not enough right padding on Daring Status Bar and not great handling of multi-line titles, not enough styling on Dashed + to make me happy. The CSS that I’ve bastardsed is atrocious and dirty and wrong and I give alll professional coders out there permission to barf when they see it. And I lost categories somewhere along the way… But if you want it, it’s here.
So tonight I’ve had two minor brushes with fame. I decided to go and see Layer Cake at the Odeon Marble Arch but arrived a little early. And while waiting for the theatre to open, I suddenly heard Drop The Dead Donkey star (and somewhat early nineties crush of mine) Neil Pearson barking into a mobile phone, “Well it’s been slammed by the press but the box office is huge”. I have no idea what he was talking about since he doesn’t appear to have been in a film for a while, but hey. If you’re interested, he went to see Saw (IMDB rating 7.3 – not bad).
And while still reeling from this little piece of celebrity spotting fun-gossip stuff, when Layer cake finally started it didn’t take long for me to start recognising little parts of London – particularly our gangster hero’s West London den, which it turns out is just at the end of my road. I pass it on the way to get the tube into work. Unless I get the bus. If I get a chance I’ll take a picture tomorrow so that you film buffs can get all excited by it when you see the movie. This is the second weird “check out where I live” moment that I’ve had in the last couple of days. The other one being this pic on Esther Dyson’s Flickr Photostream which turns the map of my area into a cool Union Jack. I live on the top left of that picture. Mr Layer Cake Gangster bod works at the bottom left.
Which leads me to the film itself. The plot’s pretty generic gangster – small-time-ish crook gets in the middle of some larger intrigue and tries to get out of it by being smart and canny – but it’s assembled carefully, paced pretty well and doesn’t look cheap. It’s got a few stylised bits in it, but essentially it’s a good old-fashioned gangster film that doesn’t try and be too clever with the format. It’s pretty well-acted, pretty exciting, the women are pretty much breasts with legs or nagging psychos but then you could say Daniel Craig is pretty much breasts with legs as well and you won’t see me complaining. London looks great and I pretty much enjoyed myself. Not a stunner, but a good way to spend a couple of hours…
Addendum Looks like (from the comments and from this link that Neil was talking about his role in the Kevin Spacey-directed Cloaca, currently showing at London’s Old Vic. It is indeed true that the press are not keen.
Right. So I’m going to San Francisco again on Wednesday, but I’m only in town for a very short period of time as I’m spending Thursday and Friday in Sonoma for the Online Community Report Summit 2004 and then flying back to the UK on Sunday afternoon. I think I’m booked up for the Wednesday night too catching up with Web 2.0 people, but Friday night / Saturday and first thing Sunday morning I think I’m free to do stuff, talk to people or muck around. Does anyone have any ideas about what I should get up to?
More importantly, my current plan will be to be in The Pork Store on 16th / Valencia around 10am on Sunday 3rd October for my last Californian meal for a good few months (or at a pinch maybe that place down by the dry docks that Jim and Ben took me to last time). If anyone should feel like they want to join me, then they’d be more than welcome… I’ll post more nearer the time.