Monday, May 21, 2007

Making It Up As We Go Along

This weekend I went to a friend of mine's house who happens to be Indian. We started to watch some Bollywood movies, the first was Bride and Prejudice, which was actually quite good and in English. The second film was entirely in Hindi with the odd English word thrown in, with no subtitles. So we made up what they were saying which made the film probably far more amusing than it really should have been.

Friday, May 18, 2007

Having A Rammstein Moment

Many years ago my then boyfriend introduced me to 80s rock bands. Many of the music he left me with (after a badly-executed finale) is still top of my playlist. One of the songs he gave me was Rammstein - Du Hast.
For those of you who don't know, Rammstein are a German rock band that, apparently, are still touring. I did try and find a decent picture but random won me over in the end.
Anyway, the years have gone by, and hard times have befallen the Tall Scientist, who is about to be demoted to Mother's Fruit Picker and Plant-Fixer. It's not that I mind helping my parents, it's just that I'm 28 now and I'd really like a life and a place of my own, but I've managed to mess that up by not being offered any of the jobs I've been interviewed for. In my rollercoaster ride of trying to find a new job, I have encountered excitement, hope and despair. There's not much I can do about the last one, but I have found a solution. It's Rammstein. Something about angry German music (never, ever listen to it in English, it's just not the same) just makes things better.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Oefs Sur La Visage

Ah... Eurovision. I'm sure at some point this was actually a competition where members of Europe competed in a song contest. Now, they let countries such as Russia, Georgia and Serbia compete, with the end result being that the Balkan states run away with the competition.
The entire show runs on one premise: introduction, then before each country's entrant comes on, they show some kind of random skit about the country (this year, it was in Helsinki, and I gather most of the skits were about snow...) , then the entrant (a lot of freaky people and/or traditional style). Interspersed with this was commercial breaks (filled for us by some scary woman in pink) and, as always, keeping the sanity in what is otherwise completely mad, our Terry Wogan (who DID NOT like the woman in pink!!!!), then another interval after all the entrants for everyone to vote where they have a weird show, which this year for some reason or other included some very mad cellists and a bloke in a bubble.... Then every country in "Europe", even the ones that got kicked out in the semi-final, get to vote, with points ranging from 1 to 12 being awarded to the other countries. At this point the "neighbour" voting comes into place, with Norway giving the most points to Sweden, Macedonia giving the most points to Serbia, etc etc. The UK, being not a very popular country, narrowly missed being stuck with the dreaded "nul points". A couple of years ago, just round the time of our invasion of Iraq, we did get that, and it was embarrassing. So, I have some suggestions for next year:-
1) Get Gordon Brown to make a suggestion that Balkan States become part of the EU (it'll never pass, and they might like us more!)
2) Get some kind of weirdo to represent us - that bloke from Dead or Alive would do
3) Get morris dancers to do it
4) Get someone whose family originally came from a Balkan State to do it (then they'd all vote for us!)
Bye, bye Scooch.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007