craigoxbrow

A collection of five hundred fairytales compiled a hundred and fifty years ago has been found in Germany, some not collected elsewhere such as The Turnip Princess.

I figured it'd be fun (just about up there with The Rocketeer) but it's the funnest of the summer. Standup two-fisted heroics, hyper-Nazis, great effects, heartfelt emotion and a catchy song.

Lots of little geek callouts, from the Synthetic Man to Zola's first appearance to the Wilhelm Scream to Rosie The Riveter.

Also, Hayley Atwell and Dominic Cooper together again for I believe the first time since The Watch House.

Trailers: Tom Hardy as a UFC fighter, Dominic Cooper as Uday Hussein and his double, Rosamund Pike as the Bond girl in Johnny English 2. And Troll Hunter, which doesn't feature anyone who was ever in The Watch House.

Oh, and The Avengers! It ain't even done filming yet. It's a long way till May.

A chapter of history has now ended. Looking back at September 11th 2001 and after, I remember being scared for people I knew (one had a father in New York and didn't hear from him for two days - he'd been helping the relief effort) and for what it would mean. Mostly since it's meant two wars, one justified by it and the other justified by bad intelligence, and air travel security becoming rudely intrusive.

Fifty years ago, Yuri Gagarin took off and left the Earth behind. A human being stepped beyond the world. We did that. Look up, and imagine what more we can do.

The Gorbals Vampire

Back in 1954, two policemen were called to a disturbance at a Glasgow cemetery. They discovered hundreds of children searching for a vampire with iron teeth.

I'll give the programme a listen, and find out how that happened. How do you organise hundreds of kids to hunt vampires in the first place?

I'm sure there's a joke here about Glasgow versus Edinburgh. Probably something how Edinburgh kids would be out trying to get bitten instead...

Yoinked from artbroken: "Possibly as an act of vengeance, a history professor--compiling, verbatim, several decades' worth of freshman papers--offers some of his students’ more striking insights into European history from the Middle Ages to the present."

The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic.

It's copyrighted 1983, which explains some of the more glaring spelling errors as coming from a time before Word, although it wouldn't catch the one about wars both foreign and infernal.

We came in our dozens, maybe hundreds, to see it on a big screen near the university. It was a fine and moving speech.

There were some choking up, cheers and applause at the the end.

So why the laugh? Well, during this section...

"As for our common defence, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake."

... the BBC cut to Former President Bush sitting and looking uncomfortable.

Perfect timing. Gotta love that.

Spielberg's War Of The Worlds is on TV tonight - its big terrestrial premiere, 8pm on BBC One.

Cat and I saw it three years ago in a rather charged atmosphere. The Gleneagles summit was starting, and Make Poverty History was all around town. There were riots in the Old Town and the whole area had been cordoned off. The Cameo was about as far in as we could actually get. It was really about half a mile from anything going on, but still...

So there we were watching the rioting, looting and chaos caused by huge events beyond the characters' control on the big screen, on an evening when it wouldn't have entirely surprised me if we'd actually been evacuated.

My Make Poverty History white band snapped a few weeks ago. Poverty still exists.

I'm gonna go watch a movie.