Sunday 21 February 2016

Once upon a time....

once upon a time, a very long time ago, Apple was out in the dark, benightificated, all it had to eat was the grindings of it's increasingly blunt teeth and the bits of profit it could pick off Newton's head.(That's a JOKE boy! I keep pitching 'em and you keep missing them!) Then Steve came back and squeezed the Apple brand so hard it changed colour and became see-through. He kept on squeezing, longer than was wise some smarties said, until the imacs went all spotty, went"e" and were reborn, as white as ghosts  with a new CPU

In the process, on the shoulder of a wave of multicoloured iMacs, Apple produced the iphone 1 and the world simply shat. In truth it wasn't that wonderful and now five generations later, it'd only be an interesting museum exhibit (and one I'd like to play with but never mind) but the phone was so much in the way of "new" that the world could barely believe it, it was as if aliens had given the human race a pocket-portable wipe-clean internet complete porn machine. With one giant lurch (I would hazard a guess) birthrates dropped, eyesight got worse, emoticons mutated into colour and 3d, people got (It*was* possible!) Even stupider, and Apple shares bulked up, went green, announced "Hulk angry!" and just headed north.

Then Steve Jobs found that herbal tea didn't cure cancer but that Cancer cured just about everything, especially gullible illusions about herbal tea and the hubris of headstrong genius billionaires, and Steve died and the jackals at the other phone companies started feeding on his rotting body. Apple shares started smelling funny, and dropped in value. People started telling me that (for example) Samsung Phones were "just as good as Apple ones" and *standing their ground* even after I vomited on them! Night seemed to be falling again. Then Apple announced the apple watch and it all happened again. The world freaked out, the stock tickers overheated and caught fire, and it was the turn of the watch companies to see their stocks drop in the esteem of our fickle, fickle world.

It's interesting, I bought an Apple watch - it replaced the Pulsar that I could no longer fit on over my dysfunctional left hand, which replaced the Seiko automatic I'd worn for years for no rational reason.  

Review: How to be Single

the strangest thing, I found, about "How to be single" was that I kept getting the title wrong. I had laughed out loud at the trailer several times and my carer and I had started calling the film "the tit-punch film" after a line of dialogue in the trailer - we both knew it wasn't called that, but in the interests of communication we didn't care. We talked it over and I asked the ticket girl at the multiplex for two to "Learning to be Single" and she did a double take and corrected me, giving me tickets to the right film there being, due to some failure, only one film on with "single" in the title. 

The film started, I laughed a few times, true the jokes weren't especially witty but neither were they retarded and I wasn't ashamed to acknowledge the humour with a laugh. The film went on, tracing a indirect course between shallow and rubbishy on one hand and misplaced attempts at depth on the other. The film has a running time of ten minutes short of two hours and by the hour -and-a-half mark I was fatigued, fidgety and becoming crotchety. I  found myself starting to channel Kurt Vonnegut and mutter things like "If they think they can fob us off with *that* as an ending they can take a flying fuck at the MOON!" (I didn't shout "moon" but I may have muttered it more loudly-out of respect for Kurt Vonnegut). In any event I was very pleasantly surprised; the film saved up it's philosophical big guns to the very end and actually moved me to tears in the last few minutes of its running time and better than that  explained its own title in a sensible adult manner. 


It was weird. for about 107 minutes I thought I'd been watching a fairly trite RomCom then I found the reverse was the truth.