Month: April 2009

April 24, 2009
Just got back from seeing Little Shop of Horrors at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham.

Last time I saw this show was in New York, with a full cast and a spectacular Audrey II, which was able to extend over the first two rows of the audience. This UK touring production, based on the successful revival from the Menier Chocolate Factory (and later the West End) is notable that it has only 10 people in the cast with one one actor in particular – Alex Fern – playing virtually all the bit parts, as well a drunk and dentist Orin Scrivello.

April 23, 2009
I’m hoping that someone with some knowledge of fruit trees can help me.

I have a long established pear tree in my garden- it was here when I moved in 10 years ago.

It was badly neglected and overgrew a path, so I gave it a trim and a trellis to grow against. For a couple of years it bore some good fruit, but then went into decline. Every spring it would grow nicely, and be green, and then the leaves would get some kind of bug or mite and curl. The fruit, if any, would be scarred and not very appetising. I tried various things over the years, and ended up cutting the whole thing back to the trunk on a kind of “kill or cure” idea. This also enabled me to train it against the wall, solving the path problem.

Last year, I had no pest problem, but no flowers or fruit either. This year looked really good, with good growth, and lots of flowers. However, there are signs of the pest again.

Pictures follow after the cut.

April 20, 2009
April 16, 2009
Who watches the watchmen? Well, if you believe this, kids watch the watchmen.

Caught this on YouTube, and it is just about perfect, in that it so wrong on so many levels. Someone has way too much time on their hands, but you have got to love their attention to detail.

April 14, 2009
Got back from Bradford last night, and I am off to Liverpool today, so I’ve no time to post in much detail.

I have to say that LX2009 is the best Eastercon I have been to for many years – and that is a comment on the quality of this year’s con, and not putting down previous years at all.

April 9, 2009
April 8, 2009
Following my recent posts about Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece “Hallelujah”, someone emailed me with this link, which is an MP3 of probably one of the best versions I’ve heard.

On the Sad Kermit website, there is also a YouTube video of Kermit singing “Hurt” as originally performed by Nine Inch Nails, and later covered by Johnny Cash.

April 3, 2009
I’ve just come back from seeing Watchmen, and it’s the best film I have seen this year. For anyone who has read the graphic novel, I think you will find it an absolute delight, because it *is* the graphic novel, but it moves. A mixture of good casting and makeup means that all of the characters look just right, and the shooting uses many of the same angles as in the original – clearly they used the book as the storyboard.

With one notable exception, there were no changes to the overall plot, and although many of the subplots were missing (how else are you going to make tell the story in two and half hours?), it was more that they were left untold, rather than missing completely. So we still saw the comic-reading boy, and the newspaper seller, we just didn’t get to hear their story.

April 2, 2009
I played about with the LiveJournal cross-poster last night, but it got late, and I’ve only just tested it out properly. To my surprise it all seems to work.

With an addition of some CSS to my LJ template, my images are now appearing as they do on WordPress, with correct alignment, and margins etc. This was the main reason for my decision to make new LJ posts temporarily private – to give me time to check and correct the formatting.

April 1, 2009
It looks like I have run into a minor problem with how my Wordpress blog is being forwarded to LiveJournal. This seems to have resulted from a change I made so that the posts on LJ are initially private until I can verify they look ok. It immediately went back and made all of my Wordpress-forwarded entries private.

Normal service will be resumed when I get a chance to look at it. Meanwhile the Wordpress version of the blog is still full steam ahead (and looks a lot better) at http://www.filklore.com/