To Hobbit or not to Hobbit

This piece of news has been taunting me for the last few weeks.

Once again, Unions are planning on destroying something for the sake of greed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11417340

Film-maker Peter Jackson has warned that production on The Hobbit movies could cease over a pay wrangle with acting unions.

I do understand that low-paid actors sometimes want to fight for better working conditions, etc. However, refusing work because you want more money is, from my point of view, something very very very stupid to do. Aren’t there many more million actors out there willing to do the job? Unions are redundant in this day and age, I believe…

If they fuck up my most awaited film of the last 8ish years, I am going to be very pissed off…

Jesus Christ

I am not a religious person. I haven’t been for the last 20 years. I don’t like talking about religion, however I enjoy very much listening to intelligent people sparking off some good debate, like Stephen Fry’s speech last year at Intelligence Square (really worth watching if you can spare 20 minutes – I was actually surprised to see how nervous and angry Fry was…)

However, one of my favourite songs from the last 5 years IS a religious song (in some way). The song talks about this guy who is feeling doubtful about his existence and what comes “after”. I believe he feels alone at that point in his life and is trying to find “meaning” somewhere else. I don’t believe the song is “pro-god” or “against-god” but it definitely is a religious song in the way that someone is looking for answers from a supernatural entity… I suppose the song can be interpreted in many ways but some lines of the words leave no room for imagination, for example:

Well, Jesus Christ, I am not scared to die / I’m a little bit scared of what comes after

I have never turned to god (notice I don’t write that word with capital G) in any circumstance because I simply don’t believe that “anything else” can help me apart from myself in troubled times. I tend to believe that only you and your most intimate confidants (say a partner, lover, family member or friend – whoever you’re closest to) could ever “take you out of a hole”. Maybe this is too simple for me to say, because I somehow think of myself as a positive person and have never had a “crisis” or “been depressed”. If one day I am sad, me myself and I will take me out of that sad state through positive thinking and other stupid “mind techniques”. I don’t think I’ve ever been sad for more than a couple of days…

Well, here is the song that I’ve listened to 5 times in a row today on my way back home from work. Somehow my finger kept going back to the “<<” button, bringing memories of me crying with this song when I saw Brand New last time and wondering WHY I was crying, and reaching the conclusion that sometimes there are things that one can’t explain, there are songs that reach out to you and “touch” in mysterious ways. Maybe it’s god telling me something? Doubt it. It’s the delicacy of Jesse’s voice and the guitar riffs that does it for me….

Enjoy.

Cambridge is pretty

I visited Cambridge yesterday for the first time. Two hours car journey from Basingstoke, but completely worth it.

A Spaniard that I know is moving to Cambridge very soon. His level of English is not that great and when we spoke he was a bit afraid that he wouldn’t be able to get his point across with the estate agents or understand the technicalities. I suggested that Jon and I could go and spend the weekend in Cambridge, give him a hand with the dreaded estate agents and visit the town at the same time. And so we did, except for the staying the whole weekend bit. We went there and back on the same day.

I am not sure what I was expecting from the city. I suppose I wanted to compare it with Oxford, but it has been a very long time since I visited Oxford, so I wasn’t going to be able to make a proper comparison between both places. So in the end, I thought the best thing would be to just judge Cambridge on its own.

From the point of view of someone who has just spent about 8 hours there and probably only seen the typical touristic places, I can say I was very impressed. I am fully aware that there is more to Cambridge than colleges, punts, students, bikes and tourists – but I didn’t get to see that part of the city. Nevermind though, because I liked what I saw.

I really liked it and maybe I’ll go back again some time…

Now I have to go back to Oxford soon, so I can compare

Shame about the name

This song brings me gooood memories of my childhood. I remember when my uncle bought me my first stereo. It was one of those chunky ones with double tape recorder, fm radio and a record player. Lots of useless buttons and no CD player. Proper old school…

Well, the thing is that then I had to buy vynil records! I was quite young and I never used to have pocket money, so I would have to convince my mum to take me to the record shop. The record shop was manned by this old gentleman, whose taste in music was definetely translated in the stock that he kept in the shop. I don’t remember seeing many of the “radio hits” albums on the shelves. However, you could find all kinds of late 60s and 70s rock (the good old Patti Smith, Genesis, Dusty Springfield, Deep Purple, Alan Parsons, etc). Let’s just say that the selection wasn’t that good for a 10 year old girl… On the other hand, I was easily impressed back then and both my mum and I let that good old gentleman convince us that probably Lionel Ritchie and Phil Collins was the type of music that I should be listening to anyway…

I can’t be embarrased admitting that I enjoyed those albums, and when the next Phil Collins album came out (“But seriously…“) I was down at the shop waiting to buy it. The whole album captured me. It was so good! I remember sitting at my desk with my huge English-Spanish dictionary, translating the words into Spanish and singing the songs again and again (actually, a couple of years later my English teacher told me that my pronunciation was fantastic probably because I always sang along to songs whilst reading the lyrics)

And this song is awesome. Shame about the title… Clapton’s collaboration is genius and what actually makes the song.

Nah, how can I be embarrased to admit that I love the song? I can’t!

Happy weekend, everybody

TLAs

TLAs are “three-letter acronyms” basically an abbreviation of three words that make a phrase. One of the most famous one is LOL = laughing out loud. Everybody uses it and some people don’t even know what it stands for. OMG is also becoming quite popular…

For more information on TLAs go to the wikipedia, there’s lots of stuff in there.

I just wanted to write a list of all the TLAs that I work with everyday. The most common ones I use everyday, some others sometimes I forget what they stand for and I have to guess what they are from the context.

And here we go, in no particular order:

ATL, BAA, DAA, LHR, MRF, WOR, BOM, EWN, RFI, ATP, O&M, H&S, IPW, POD, GRN, FAT, ETS, LCS, LCP, DMB, BID, PBI, PIR, SAT, TTS, CBU, PSU, BSI, BOH, FOH, OPC, PCR, SCR, FYI, FAO, COC, TBA, TBC, PPL, CSA, ELT, WIB, and…. MLD!

I can’t really think of any more, but I haven’t even counted the two-letter ones (DN, PO, etc) and the four-letter ones (CSCS, MSCP, FLAN, DALI, etc)

Oh, the beauty of my job…