alexist

Well, yeah, er, Stuff happened yesterday.

Neil had planned to go in late but ended up deciding to call in sick. Good move, because by the time he left he wouldn't have been able to get to work anyway. Just after he left to go to the locksmith I saw the news. At first I really did believe it was electrical, but when I heard there were several explosions I got suspicious, and I knew it was bunk when I heard about the bus.

As soon as it was 6am in New York (and there was a reasonable chance of my mother being up) I called home. I know my mother's morning routine. She gets up, gets her coffee, and turns on the TV. If she turned it on to "Explosions on London tube" she'd immediately go into a panic. She was a bit out of it at the time, but she rang again later and said she was really glad I'd told her first.

Luckily everyone we know is fine.

A little ironic how two of the affected stations were near big Muslim communities, eh? (Aldgate East and Edgware Road).

I'm glad (in a way) that they did just go for disruption... I mean 37 people are dead and that's horrible, but I was in New York on 9/11 and that was way worse. I don't mean this in a "our tragedy is worse than your tragedy" way, I just mean how it all felt then. At least we're not sorting through rubble for body parts.

So, returning to realm of the totally trivial, we can close our door again so we can both leave the flat, and I found this out of the way post office where Parcelforce had left my package. It's a good thing I didn't try to go there yesterday--they still do early closing on Wednesdays! (And close for lunch.) I have no idea why Parcelforce use it.

Someone has started talking about what a quality film The Shawshank Redemption is...

I HATE The Shawshank Redemption. OK, it's not the worst film of all time, but it's just OK, and it enrages me that it's #2 on the IMDb Top 250 Films of All Time. And its fans disparage genuinely classic films and say that groups like the AFI are just wedded to "classics". No, they're film buffs, so they've actually WATCHED older movies, unlike you philistines who have never watched anything made before 1980. If that.

And don't give me a snobbery argument either, because many of the films on critics' top lists (and certainly the AFI list that was denigrated on the IMDb forums... I shouldn't read those) are popular entertainment--Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Singin' in the Rain, etc. Being a critic does not equate to being the sort of film snob who looks down his nose at anything the "masses" enjoy. But they have seen enough films to recognize when something is really not exceptional--and that's what Shawshank Redemption is. It's overly sentimental and dramatic and just not that good compared to other, truly great movies. (And it always annoyed me that they introduced a racial element that was simply not present in the original story and IMO was simply unnecessary.)

I was talking to my sister (Jen) on the phone and mentioned Crazy Frog (segued in from her talking about Coldplay's new album). She'd never heard of it. So I sent her to the Jamster website.

She just sent me an e-mail with the subject "axel f rocks!"

Nooooo!

BTW she has bought a 42" plasma screen. Grrr, not fair :-)