Now I'm back, from outer space.

Actually, I've never been away, I've just allowed other parts of my life to take over my routine, so the movie reviews over at the sister site, and mindless meanderings here have not been forthcoming.

Did you both miss me?

In fact, the only place I've been regularly posting is TWITTER, and my last 25 posts at the moment (whichever moment it happens to be) will appear now on this blog over there ---->

For those wo receive my blogs via email, bad luck. You'll have to actually visit my site to see the tweets, if that's your thing, but that's where they are.

I'm undecided on Twitter at the moment. I have nothing to sell, and I'm not a celebrity, but I have a few conversations with people on there I wouldn't normally become "facebook friends" with because I don;t actually know them. Many of these posts are board game related.

An interesting thing I saw on Twitter ast week was just how fast people started making fun of Michael Jackson's death. I was seeing horrible jokes at his expense certainly before his corpse was cold, and I think this may be the downside of Twitter.

It gives you the chance to share in people's internal monologues - the problem being, of course, that people aren't used to censoring their internal monologues so you sometimes get mindless, pointless mental meanderings (like many of my posts) or things that seemed funny in the posters' heads only to find they'e not so funny out of context or without inflection.

I treat Twitter in two ways - first as a genuine micro blog - I tweet often about what I'm doing, watching or thinking. Secondly to respond to others' POV and micro blogs. I am never going to be interested in it as a self promotion tool or as an information gathering medium (although that was how I heard of MJ's death - I double checked it on the news just in case it was a wind up) and there are many irritating market research bots and sex site linkers getting in the way.

So I'm undecided. We shall see if I keep it up.

Anyway - here's to some happy tweeting, and thanks for reading (if you still do)

A

I'm afraid of Americans

Bowie reference aside, and taking into account the editing choices that can be taken, I was still horrified by a quite astonishing clip from Fox news shown today on Jon Stewart's "Daily Show".

In a particularly daft and tasteless rant, a defence pundit stated, well, you can see below. DO bear in mind that Stewart's show is a comedy programme and I'm sure this is edited for dramatic effect, but the guy clearly calls for an attack on America.

FOLLOW THIS LINK AND JOIN ME IN INCREDULITY

I apologise for the advert beforehand, but that's the internet for you.

Er... I don't normally post links to videos since it's not a big thing for me, but I didn't think my quoting could do this justice. Is there any version of our planet on which this isn't hideously inappropriate?

And this isn't some half arsed small audience talk show on a small station - this is prime time FOX news. Boy am I glad I have only two channels full of 24 nonsense to watch.

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Well, aside from the obvious fact that odour control cat litter is less effective at odour control than the wooden kind not a lot has been going on in Algo world recently.

Many factors contribute to this lack of reportable activity. Here's a list;

• I was recently given a huge pile of books by our neighbour who is moving out. They are RPG rulebooks and I've been flipping through them when normally I would have written on my blogs.
• I have been up against it with these cats. The mum and older daughter are ready to be rehomed, but noone is taking them - this means I have to spend a lot of time looking after 5 reasonable sized cats and the resulting mess and hygiene challenges.
• I've had a little more work than usual recently, though this is no excuse since I can email posts to my blogs and have a mobile with email capability.
• The freaking heat! This was even more of a problem until this week since I was under orders to not cut my hair or shave until I had done my days on Harry Potter. This is no longer an issue since I won't be in Harry Potter because my (background) part has been cut.
• Desperate searching for jobs.
  
• I've been more than a little victim of a recurrence of past problems.

So there we go - while you've been wondering why I didn't write a rant on MPs expenses (boring - already done to death by others) or the Scottish Church having to vote on whether to allow a homosexual to hold office (they were overwhelmingly in favour) that is why.

Hopefully more posts should be appearing soon.

For now, though, I have to feed the cats for the fourth time today. Sigh.

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I looked up Sophies Choice... this isn't as bad.

I am officially a cat owner.

Here's what we agreed - we'd keep two of the kittens, one would go off with the mum and his big sister to a lovely new home.

Only, well, when it came to it I had real trouble choosing which one would go.

We were always going to keep Tiny (or The Bandit) since there's no way one could give up a cat you raised by hand from birth, but the other two are more problematic.

Dimitri (who used to be Smokes) is fairly docile and likes to be held a lot more than Bootsy does, who is a bit fraidy, but has, in my opinion, tonnes more personality and a penchant for standing up on two legs and setting about himself with double handed slaps etc.

They're both lovely.

So what do you do?

Here's my advice. DON'T try and make the decision while sitting in the room with them playing around your feet - it's just too hard.

What decision did I make? That should be patently and embarrassingly obvious.

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Will ebooks replace the real thing?

This was my response to a semi rhetorical question from regular reader and fellow blogger Gary on his Musings Cafe blog. I reproduce it here for my readers.

The question was, in short, will ebooks replace their paper ancestors?

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Hmm, I wasn't alive during the vinyl era, but it's a comparison I'd have used as well.

Unlike vinyl though, I would say that the survival of books in their current form is certain.

The difference is in the way you interact with them. A book is experienced through the eyes, not the ears - which makes a big difference, and as anyone who has stared at any screen for a length of time will attest, using your eyes to read text on a screen for four hours is actually quite painful.

The difference between this and digital movie formats is the requirement viewing detail - individual words read at arms length have a different effect to a movie or tv show on a screen two or three metres away, since you are not scanning line after line of text.

In addition, the move to DvDs was uncontroversially a huge improvement to the home movie experience - unlike with Vinyl you never hear people say that VHS had a "warmer picture"

The improvements in musical formats have been to its portability - enabling everyone to experience outrageous levels of variety in a single commute.

Unlike music, books are read over many hours, not three to five minute bites - and enabling someone to pack 1000 books with them in something the size of a single book does not, to my mind as someone who only reads one book at a time, make any discernible improvements to the experience.

In their current form, I can't see eBooks catching on like CDs, MP3s and DVDs. It'll be used by some folk, but universal appeal will escape them.

IMHO, of course - I have been wrong before.

A

Especially for Gary

I believe in keeping my reader happy, so especially for you Gaz, me old mucker, here are a pile of kitty pics (apologies for the eye watering cushion!) They will five weeks old on Tuesday.


Bootsy asleep - the only time he's quiet!

We have spent a lot of time worrying about The Bandit, but here he looks alert and happy. All that handfeeding is finally paying off!


Bootsy again. The throw behind him is his favourite climbing frame. Shame he hasn't quite learned landing from height...

More later.

A

Getting started...

Your faithful movie reporter, myself, Algo has separated his personal life from the movies to simplify the reading experience.

This is now the repository for all off topic nonsense as it comes up.

Expect it to become better populated soon!

A