The Fry debacle

I've started writing about what's been going on today on Twitter from all kinds of angles. And several paragraphs or just sentences into each effort, I've decided that it's the wrong tack.

I've decided that until I've had a chance to sleep on it, I need to say fairly little.

I will say this though. Comments on this blog have always been "moderated" (i.e. Blogger sends them to me for approval before they appear). It's not something I've just instituted because of the kerfuffle. This has mainly been to stop spam and certain individuals being abusive. I have always accepted all valid comments made on my blog whether I agree with them or not. (Why wouldn't I?)

That said, I am refusing to accept "anonymous" comments. Regardless of whether you want to be positive or negative, I expect you to be open to a conversation. Your email address will not appear in public if you so choose, but should I need to clarify a point, I want to be able to contact you privately. I have no intention of being a defenceless punchbag.

In the meantime, here are some links to other blogs or online stories I've seen, with a word or two of comment where I think it's needed:

@brokenbottleboy:
Stephen Fry, depression and the rage of the Twitter mob
Regarding why I included the @ symbol bringing the conversation to Stephen Fry's attention (see comments section), it was simply force of habit. Specifically, two habits: when I see Twitter usernames, I immediately prefix them with @ as they otherwise seem "wrong" to me. Secondly, I feel it's fair that if I'm talking about someone, they have a right to know about it. I'm really not a fan of talking about people behind their backs.

I appended "sorry Stephen" on the phenomenally tiny chance that Mr Fry himself would see my tweet. I have replied to hundreds of his tweets or otherwise addressed tweets to him in the past with positive comments or attempts at humour, and have never been acknowledged. Ditto his own blog/website on which I have left many positive comments in the past. Why should I assume that this time would be any different? The "Sorry Stephen" was also addressed to those who disagree with me, to make it reasonably clear that I mean him no ill-will.

I have potentially much more to say on the subject.

@thoroughlygood:
Stephen Fry & @brumplum in the playground
To maintain the playground metaphor and the spirit of the final paragraph, "sir, sir, I've already said sorry, twice. I'm waiting for Fry Minor to say sorry now".

More seriously, though, Stephen Fry does not need to apologise to me for anything. On the infinitesimal chance that he, or someone who has his ear, sees this, I want to reiterate that I am truly sorry for any offence caused. I would, however, appreciate some sign of life from him because until then the loss of Britain's Greatest Tweeter will all be my fault. Unlike his theatrical experience several years ago, no individual was blamed, in public or in private, for breaking his spirit. In this case, the cause of his escape has a name, and that name is @brumplum. One of his last tweets indicated that he was about to travel to the USA so I fear I will be Twitter's flogging horse for a while. So be it, but please, Stephen, do come back.

@derekbarry
Stephen Fry, Twitter and the Fifth Estate
I'm so glad he brought up Stephen Fry's recent blog, which was, to an extent, about the fact that it's very easy to say stuff in the heat of the moment which one lives to regret. And so Stephen Fry should, perhaps, be mindful of the fact that I also regret elements of what I said and how I said it. An earlier draft of this very blog entry included reams of self-justification, but I'll let it drop for now.

For the record, I would like Mr Barry and others to reflect on this: if Mr Fry, after thirty years in the public eye, has difficulty adapting to his current position as a visible leader of people and maker of causes, then what about me, who after decades of obscurity, have been thrust into the international limelight for saying something no more objectionable than I have said before, and had said to me countless times too, the only difference being that I said it to and about someone famous.

Oh, and for the record, my own history includes the loss of three relatives of my father's in the same Auschwitz concentration camp in which Stephen Fry lost several of his. Catholic Poles rather than Jews, and two of them were condemned for having saved Jewish families - the third just for being related to the first two. So Stephen's "we know which side of the border Auschwitz was" has particular resonance with me. Even so, I don't hold it against him, and has not reduced the esteem in which I hold him as an entertainer, educator and all round Jolly Good Egg. (And said as much on his blog. )

The Times Online (as representative for the purposes of this blog of the traditional media)
Stephen Fry in a flutter at horrid tweeters on Twitter
OK, this is where things get seriously scary. For a major newspaper to pick up a spat between users of an ultimately insignificant glorified chatroom is absolutely mind-boggling. To make a national (and international) story of it is beyond silliness. I really would have thought that there were far more important things in news generally, and the tech sector in particular, to talk about?

To quote one of the comments under that story? W.T.F?

People threaten to leave websites and/or chatrooms every day of the week, several times over. I know of at least three (popular) Tweeters who've voiced uncertainly about their future presence on the site in the last week, and nobody's batted as much as an eyelid.

What's so different about this case?

To end this blog on a positive note. I would like to voice my sincere gratitude to everyone I know and don't know on Twitter who has said anything in my defence today, whether it was in public or in private. I have deliberately kept away from Twitter not because I can't take the vitriol, but simply because I've not had the time. It also means I've not had the time to see the wonderful messages of support, so I can just thank you all en groupe.

I hate to single anyone out, but just because they supported me on the phone throughout the day while I wasn't online, very, very special thanks to @stigblog, @stigsbf and @squawkbox for being real, genuine friends. It's people like them who make Twitter worthwhile.

Just a Minute Reloaded

I've been a fan of Just a Minute on Radio 4 more or less since it started (yes, I am old enough to remember it, and yes, I was already a Radio 4 listener as a small child). Since his first appearance in the late 1990s (I'm not enough of a JAM spod to know exactly when) Paul Merton and his surreal sensibility has been a perfect contestant.

I've just discovered something the interesting creative folk at the BBC do, making animations to edited highlights of some of the rounds, called Just a Minute Reloaded and I can't decide if my own love of Sudoku puzzles, Paul Merton's verbal inventiveness or the way it's matched by the wacky visuals in this clip are what I like most about it, but I'm in stitches! (Your Mileage May Vary)

A day in the life of a dieter

Well, Jae and Andy have diet blogs going so why shouldn't I?

Also, a while back, Stig did a picture blog recounting a day's activities and I've always wanted to do something similar, so I thought I'd combine the two ideas and provide a photographic record of a day's activities relevant to a guy trying to lose some flab.

The idea is to provide details of everything of nutritional significance that went into my mouth and every significant calorie-burning activity in one day, in this case Tuesday 28th July 2009.

(Nutrition details come from packaging (not that there was much packaged food involved) and an excellent site I found called Nutrition Data com.)

9.53am, coffee with dash of milk, approx 25 calories

12.12pm, bowl of Special K cereal (approx 120cal) with semi-skimmed milk (approx 120cal) and a chopped banana (approx 100cal) = 340 calories

2.10pm walk to my dentist to discuss my checkup appointment

2.51pm and from there to the Bull ring Open Market to do some fresh fruit and vegetable shopping.

and from there to my gym, a total of 2 miles or 3.2km. Burned approx 200 calories.


3pm arriving at gym.

3.32pm First exercise completed: 20 mins rowing, burned 220 calories

3.46pm Second exercise completed: stretching and flexing. Burned approx 10 calories

4.28pm Third exercise completed: 20 minutes (plus 1 min cooldown) on bike. Burned 200 calories


4.36pm Break in fourth exercise: resistance training (in all, 3x12 shoulder press, 3x12 chest press, 3x12 pecs, 3 x 3x12 leg resistance exercises). Burned approx 40 calories

5.17pm Fifth exercise completed: 13.30mins cross-trainer. Burned 200 calories.

5.20pm after a mad rush, sitting down for some R&R in the sauna. No calories burned immediately, but it feels good!

5.30pm More R&R in the hydrotherapy pool. No swimming today (big pool off shot to the right; note sauna & steam room straight ahead). No calories burned, but muscles well massaged!

5.55pm three small plums (what else!) bought earlier at the market as a prize to myself for completing the wortkout. Approx 25 cals each = 75 calories

I forgot to provide evidence of two apples eaten during the course of the evening once I got home, about 95cals each = 190 calories

9.08pm late dinner of mixed salad with cottage cheese and lemon dressing (approx 100 cals altogether) and grilled lemon & ginger & paprika chicken breat pieces (basically, home-made nuggets, approx 260cals) and watered-down sugar-free cranberry juice, approx 40 cals = 400 calories

9.33pm dessert, Flora pro-activ low fat apricot yoghurt, 71 calories


11.42pm mid-evening cup of blackcurrant tea (4 cals) and currant bun (which was a lot tastier than it looks!) 174cals with cottage cheese filling (approx 20 cals) = approx 200 calories

1.25am late-night cup of Rooibos tea with a splash of milk = approx 25 calories

I haven't recorded the 3 litres of water drunk at the gym and during the evening while sitting at the computer, with no calorific value.

The balance, though: 1125 low-fat calories in and about 870 calories burned with exercise.

Two unusual things about this day: normally there'd be a sandwich, salad or bowl of soup in the mid-afternoon/early evening with a value of about 300 calories, and I'd not walk to the gym so I'd burn about 200 cals less. Even so, I'm extremely surprised I'm not losing weight more quickly (OK, admittedly there are a few food sins along the way on a weekly basis, but I'm fairly consistent...).

Any comments, tips or hints are most welcome!

Family

I am starting to write this at 1.46 local time having spent the evening drinking local French rosé wine (1€20 a litre from the wine cooperative down the road) with my sister (3l of said beverage has been drunk between us). I say that to explain why this blog is probably full of typos and non-sequiturs and drunken ramblings.

The evening and the conversation we had has made me think about and re-evaluate a few things.

For the first time in my life, at the age of 47, I uttered the phrase "yes, I am gay" to, and in the physical presence of, one of my siblings (I have 5 sisters and one brother).

It's not that I've ever lied about this rather important element of my life, or tried to hide it. The simple fact of the matter is that in our family, we don't talk about these kinds of things. Not about people we like nor about relationships nor about our deep-seated dreams and/or fears. Most of us will happily talk about these things to other people, but not to each other. We are, in short, a fucked-up family.

All my adult life I've assumed that my status as not-entirely-heterosexual was taken as read among my siblings. I've left enough clues through the years and said more than enough things that should leave them wondering. Through the years, several people outside my family have picked up "vibes" from me and asked me outright whether I'm other-than-straight, and I've never lied. And that's apart from circumstances in which people have known from the moment they met me for whatever reason.

From what my sister said to me during our drunken conversation, she is not aware that any of my other sisters suspect that I may be gay. This leaves me wondering whether I'm an idiot, or they are. Or alternatively, that conversations between my sisters go as I think they do, as I have most definitely outed myself to one of my brothers-in-law before (both of us were stone cold sober at the time, so forgetfulness doesn't come into it) and I'm open with another of my sisters about passers-by I find alluring.

Do most straight people REALLY find it that problematic that others in their midst might not be like them, that they need it spelled out?

Are streotypes in our society so entrenched that short of dressing in a skirt (of the non-kilt variety) or being as camp as Graham Norton, Alan Carr or their ilk, that being gay is just not a valid reasoning for most people? I've never talked about having a girlriend to any of my siblings, never presented a female as a potential girlfriend to any of my family, never talked about attractive
female celebrities (though VERY frequently about male ones) and what's more, I attended an all-boys boarding school.

HOW MANY HINTS DO YOU NEED, PEOPLE??

I might be oddd, I might be shy, or I might be gay. There are no other explanations.

I don't dispute that I display one or more or these characteristics at any time, but people who know me very well (as my siblings should, and unlike our parents, they should at least consider some things as "normal" which an older generation didn't and I know that none of my sisters are even slightly hompophobic) really should be able to addd one and one and get two.

I had no problem coming out to my sister and I didn't feel the weight lifting that so many gay people before have mentioned about their conming out. My primary emotion is wondering, as staated above, which one of us is the idiot? My sister((s) for not making (to my mind) obvious assumptions I'd make about anyone else, or myself for expecting them to make these assumptions?

On a completely different level, and this perhaps comes under the "blowing your own trumpet" heading, I had a kind-of epiphany this evening about the kind of person I am, regardless of my sexuality.

I need to say that reason I'm here in the first place is that my sister is in deep financial and emotional doo-doo and effectively needs to sell her house (which was bought with the intention of being a retirement home) in order to survive financially and emotionally, and I've paid my own way to come here to help her prepare it for sale (it needs a lot of work). She is currently completely pissed on wine, and so am I. By some fluke, I had the presence of mind to put her to bed, wash up after dinner, clean up the mess we'd made, lock up the house and wash all the tools we'd been using prior to our break for a drink (which ended in a lot more), feed her cats and basically make sure we're all safe, secure and in a position to carry on normally in the morning as if it had been an ordinary evening.

What I'm trying to say is, I think, I'm a good person, and I have my wits around me.

So why the fuck doesn't anyone want me? Or even answer my calls?

Am I THAT fucking ugly?

P.S. There are different kinds of drunks: merry ones, maudlin ones, violent ones, incoherent ones, philosophical ones, sleepy ones, etc. Normally, I am a merry drunk who then becomes a sleepy drunk. So what's happened this evening that I've gone through maudlin and philosophical (and, arguably, incoherent) insteead?

Angels and Demons

I gave in to the hype today, as I knew I would.

Everyone whose opinion I respect and has seen Angels and Demons has one of three reactions: they don't want to talk about how bad they thought it was, they break down into fits of hysterical laughter, or they go off on a rant.

I've already displayed the first two reactions today, so here's my chance for the third, having seen it this afternoon. This little rant (I can't really call it a review) will be spoiler-free but of course if anyone wishes to engage with anything I have to say, it would help if you've seen it...

On my way home from the cinema, I starting developing a mental list of pros and cons about this movie. Regrettably the only pro I could come up with is that Tom Hanks has had a haircut since the Da Vinci Code (bearing in mind that his odd barnet was one of the LEAST ridiculous things about that particular movie).

In the meantime, the con column just got longer and longer.

Let's start with one of the first characters we encounter, Ewan McGregor. Don't get me wrong, Ewan's a decent actor and he's been called upon to play characters of all kinds of backgrounds from all sorts of places in his career, and has normally acquitted himself quite admirably.

Where this particular character comes from is fairly important, so it's a major disappointment that he was capable of five or six different accents within the same sentence at times, ranging from his native Scottish, through "proper" English, mid-Atlantic, generic North American and even a bit of several Mediterranean countries. By my count, through the whole movie he pronounced maybe half a dozen words the way he should have.

Also, I may be wrong here, but his character's name is only ever mentioned once in the two hours-plus running time although he appears in every second scene. He is generally referred to by his job description/title as if the dimmer members of the audience need to be reminded just who he is and what he does rather than gleam any symbolic importance from his rather bland name.

There's a principle in dramatic writing known as Chekov's Gun, which has two basic facets. These are generally summarised as: if a gun appears in Act One, make sure it's fired by Act Three; also, if you plan to fire a gun in Act Three, make sure we know it's been introduced beforehand.

In painting-by-numbers movies like this, the writers always remember that lesson from creative-writing class whenever they need to introduce a deus-ex-machina means of resolving a plot point. The problem is that it all becomes a bit simplistic and the introductions often come out of any rational context, perhaps even moreso than their use might.

For instance, it's only a question of time before we discover why we're shown during his otherwise pointless first scene that Tom Hanks's character is an EXCELLENT swimmer... Or when another character informs us that he used to be a helicopter pilot, you can bet your bottom dollar that at some point, he's going to be called upon to fly one!

There's an adjunct to the principle of Chekov's Gun, which is fairly basic to dramatic narratives: remember who's got the gun, and who knows how to use it! This is a big element of many thrillers or murder mysteries, along the lines of "ah, but how did you know she was throttled with a silk scarf, if you didn't do it?"

Regrettably, the writers of this piece of garbage seem to have forgotten those principles, such as for instance remembering which skills which character possesses.

Why, for instance, would Tom Hanks's eminent symbologist Robert Langdon, who is working on multi-tome analysis of Galileo, require assistance in translating Latin? I'm a multi-lingual kind of guy with a bit of academic textual analysis behind me, and if there's one thing I know, it's that at this level of scholarly discipline, you don't work from translations!

Langdon isn't the only one who seems to forget what he knows, as at least two other characters need to have Latin translated to them, when they'd previously shown more-than-adequate skills in that themselves.

This parallels one of the other shortcomings of this poor excuse for cinematic entertainment: no fact or argument is valid unless it's been explained to us in dialogue, at least a couple of times. It's not enough to show, for example, a montage of statues featuring very prominent arrows, Hanks has to shout "The Arrows!", before we're shown them all again. And then someone else has to shout "Oh, the Arrows!" before they all set off at speed to discover the next clue.

I don't like being patronised and even more than that, I don't like being patronised with a tautological and self-referencing script that thinks it's oh-so-clever when in fact it's dumber than it thinks its audience might be. I have no idea whether this is Dan Brown's fault (I never read the book, and I now have even less desire to do so than ever before) or the writers of the film. I really expected more of David Koepp, who has a fairly distinguished track record to date.

It became a running (ha ha) joke in the most recent season of Doctor Who that the Doctor and his assistant had to do a lot of running. Well, the running the Doctor & Co have to do isn't a patch on Robert Langdon and his friends. Angels and Demons should really be called The Running, Jumping, Standing Still and Pointing Film (as a vague tribute to this). He reads a map to find out where to run to, they run (or drive, which anyone who's ever been in a car in Rome will know is impossible) there, find something gruesome and then run again.

And frankly, the way it's all put together makes one not care one iota where they are running, whether they'll get there in time to stop the gruesomeness or, indeed, whether it means anything. At least the Da Vinci Code sparked a debate about whether the basic ideas behind the plot had any merit; this waste of celluloid doesn't even have the benefit of that.

About half an hour into the film, I suspected I'd worked out where it was all going, and cringed. An age later, about 15 minutes before the end, I was pleased because they threw a curveball and I thought I'd got it wrong. That didn't last long though, because the train got onto the tracks it had been on all along, towards the inevitable crash. Except that even then, I didn't care.

There are SO many more things I don't like about this film, but I've come to realisation that I don't care enough to continue. I needed to get off my chest a few ways of saying that is a pile of manure from which anyone with more than two grey cells should stay as far away as possible, and I've done that. I welcome anyone who disagrees with me about any of the facts, or who found this film to have kind of merit, to comment - I really don't bite.

Too many t-shirts?

I've just folded up a load of t-shirts which I've washed over the last couple of days. Is it normal for a 40-something bloke to own this many? This isn't my complete collection by a long shot - this is just over a week's wear and wash.



Something one doesn't realise when embarking on a course of daily gym-going is just how many t-shirts one uses. In my case, it's three, sometimes four a day: one when I get up and do stuff around the house, one at the gym, a fresh one for the journey home and occasionally a fourth if I'm going out.

(BTW is it really sad of me that I rarely wear proper shirts any more?)

A small amount of kudos to anyone who can tell me exactly how many badly-stacked shirts there are in the photo (not as easy as it seems)...

Confusing your space opera franchises

Confused about your space opera franchises? You will be!

Watch My Favorite Movie (Star Trek vs. Star Wars) and more funny videos on CollegeHumor

(I don't actually think that the comparisons are so close, but it's a comment I've seen in lots of places)