Went to the movies again tonight (my wife's away and I'm unemployed...)  Say the singing detective.  If you like weird trippy movies, then I highly recommend it.  Hell, just go see it to see what Mel Gibson looks like (trust me, he's not playing Mel Gibson at all).  It's all weird and kinda focused around this writer guy who's stuck in hospital with some kinda freakish skin condition (looks like his skins been burnt off or something).

Then I saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre... now I didn't expect this to be any good, and I wasn't surprised.  The thing is, I either want a horror movie that's total cheese but fun/funny or something that's genuinely suspenseful/scary.  Unfortunately this movie takes itself very seriously and then fails to deliver the thrills.  It's also chock full of every cliche in the horror movie book, imagine for a second, you are the last surviving teenage girl running through the rain pursued by a psycho with a chainsaw.  Where would be a safe place to hide... oh, I know... a meat works.  Nuff said.

So, I heard about this exercise gadget off some people on the web, and bought one.  This thing is so neat, it's got a weighty little gyroscope inside, and as the gyroscope spins (it spins vertically) the axle the scope is on slowly rotates around the horizantal plane.

Basically by holding it in your hand and rotating your wrist at the right timing it spins faster and faster and also becomes harder to rotate as the gyroscopic forces increase.  The best thing of all is that it makes a crazy humming noise when it gets going.  It has a max speed readout so you can see if you are quick (I'm not).  I've had it for half a day now and get a max of about 8500 from my right wrist and 7600 from the left (my left wrist is screwed tho, which hopefully this will help with).  Apparently these are poor scores with most guys pushing up in the 10-12000 range.

If you decide you want one, I'm told there's a version which has LEDs in it so the faster you spin it the more it glows... mine is the non illuminated one.

Get glowing ones here:
http://www.paramountzone.com/powerball.htm I'm not recommending these guys, I got mine from www.firebox.co.uk but they don't do glowing ones.  I'm sure there's other retailers out there.

So, I'm unemployed till next thursday, I took the opportunity today to spend the afternoon watching movies.  Saw "In The Cut" which is a bit arthousey and very sexually explicit (I would say most graphic blow job I've seen outside of porn ever).  It's kinda a murder mystery serial killer thing except that the main focus of the plot is the relationships and eroticism of the central character very ably played by Meg Ryan.  I've since read a bunch of reviews on the web and unsuprisingly a lot of americans hated it, but then, americans aren't noted for their tolerance of sex.

Then I saw "Mystic River" which is quite good, but a bit slow paced at times.  Certainly no real plot twists that surprised me in it, but I was pleased that the makers had the balls to play the ending the way they did... doesn't quite go the "Hollywood" way.

But lets get back to it.  I went to a murder mystery evening last weekend.  It was good fun.  Apparently I was an insane german officer with a dislike for actors and specifically mimes.

It was good fun although the main thing that made the mystery difficult to solve was the quanitity of wine involved :)

Other than that, I haven't been up to much recently... but, I have seen Matrix Revolutions, which was OK, but nothing too amazing.  I was quite happy with what it contained and how it ended etc, just didn't feel that there was anything too WOW going on there.

I've got a new job tho, so that rocks.  I start that next tuesday.

Later

So last wednesday I went to the tacheback party and a quality time was had by all.

The basic layout of the evening was that we turned up, drank free Sol (mexican beer) and Jack Daniels.  At about 09:30 they had a parade of tached people for big prizes.

Unfortunately my tache didn't rate inspite of looking very magnum...

then at 10:30 some american barber was available to make my wife a very relieved person.

Heres a pic of the 118 boys and above some of the contestants (including me) waiting at the end of the "Catwalk"

Well... another week dawns.  Had a second interview for a job yesterday... it went OK in some ways, but in others the interview was "challenging" because of the format that had been selected... I had to make a "presentation" :(

Anyway... haven't heard back yet, but fingers crossed... I seem to be on a big mood swing roller coaster between thinking it might have gone OK to thinking I messed the whole thing up...

Was off at a mates wedding in Oxford over the weekend which was cool and they had found a real nice location to have it.

I'm feeling the effects and insecurity of having a bald lip, but hopefully I'll get over that soon... post up a couple of pics of the tache bash tonight when I get home.

Right... better get back to it.

We have officially completed TacheBack.  I went to the conclusion party tonight in Islington and walked the catwalk with all the tache'd people.

Then some american sounding barber in a 10 gallon hat made me look as pictured....

Matt asks: ... oh that and I'm generally very sceptical about such things. Do you have any (good) web links on the subject, Mr Monkey Who is in Space?

Yes Matt, I've done a little further research.  This link to The Skeptics Dictionary provides a fairly good disparaging view of NLP.  This site http://www.nlp-now.co.uk/tips-n-tech.htm has some good free techniques if you want to have a play without the pay.  On my course we did Goals, Rapport and Anchoring which are all described to some degree here.

Most of the other stuff I could find on the web was like a big infomercial "I can change your life in 15 seconds, listen to what these previous customers had to say", and "achieve the unimaginable" well yes...

Just to re-iterate from my previous NLP post... I'm not saying NLP is great or we should all go spend cash on it...  I did a 1 day course that didn't cost too much and as a food for thought exercise it was worth it to me.  I'm not sure whether it's something I'll pursue any further.

So I went to the movies the other day and saw a couple of interesting trailers... LOTR Return of the King... won't say any more about that... don't want to give away the ending :)  But it looks ALL GOOD.

Also I saw the trailer for Matrix Revolutions.  Warning spoilers follow assuming I've guessed the plot right (which I haven't).

The plot for the third Matrix movie is as follows.  Agent Smith has been replicating like nuts... this is causing Neo et al some issues, but more importantly this is screwing with the entire AI backbone of the machines.  Ultimately after a bunch of fighting etc the machines realise that regardless of the humans the Agent Smith situation is going to completely destroy them.  They realise that Neo is the only hope of defeating Smith and so the humans and machines form an alliance, Neo kills Smith and everyone lives happily ever after.  Follows sequences of machines cleaning the burnt skies and humans returning to the surface.  Queue credits.

Also saw the Kill Bill trailer... that looks cool, but the trailer is a bit poo... bit too much relying on being edgy and Tarantino's rep.  The movie is supposed to be outstanding action so I'll wait for that before passing judgement.

From the upcoming (2004) new Sam'n'Max adventure by lucasarts.