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Thursday 29 July 2010
Sunday 25 July 2010
RIP Alex Higgins
One-of-a-kind, snooker player Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins has died, aged 61, from throat cancer. He was literally a shadow of his former self when he died, weighing just 6 stone and having lost most of his teeth. A sad end to an extraordinary (in the true sense of the word) sportsman - he was truly out of the ordinary. He made me laugh (and gasp) at some of his outrageous, seemingly illconsidered snooker shots, reminding me of my own approach to the game: 'have a go and see what happens'!
Former world champion Stephen
Hendry said about Higgins: “He wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea but he was a great player and
he’ll be sadly missed. When I was just starting out
as a professional it was always exciting when you played him – you never
knew what to expect."
A maverick, Higgins was from an earlier era of snooker, when it was more of a novelty on television and the likes of Ray Reardon, Doug Mountjoy, Terry Griffiths, Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor (he of the upside-down glasses) kept us up watching late into the night at the end of knife-edge competitions. Alex was world champion in 1972 and 1982.
Amazon.co.uk link:
Saturday 24 July 2010
A Single Man (2009)
Based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood and set around 1962, this is a tour de force for lead actor Colin Firth and was shot in just 21 days. It gained him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and a 2010 BAFTA win for his performance of a gay professor distraught over his lost love. Mr Darcy doing a skinny dip in Santa Monica doubtless provides some satisfaction and eye-candy for the ladies? Great scene with Colin dancing with Julianne Moore to Booker T's Green Onions. Unusual line about asking an old lesbian whether she was 'hung like a doughnut'. Good performance also from Nicholas Hoult (the young lad in About a Boy with Hugh Grant and in BBC's Skins). First-time direction from fashion designer (Gucci creative director and his own Tom Ford label) Tom Ford.
Brothers (2009)
From IMDB (7.3/10): 'Before leaving on his second tour in Afghanistan, Marine Captain Sam Cahill, a leader, an athlete, a good husband and father, welcomes his screw-up brother Tommy home from prison. He'd robbed a bank. In country, Sam's helicopter is shot down and all are presumed dead. Back home, while Sam wastes away as a prisoner in a remote Afghanistan encampment, Tommy tries to take care of the widow and her two children. While imprisoned, Sam experiences horrors unbearable, so when he's rescued and returns home, he's silent, detached, without affect, and he's convinced his wife and brother have slept together. Demons of war possess him; what will silence them?'
Good movie, worth watching.
Paywall Blues - Times website readership plummets
Good redesign recently from the BBC news website - and an interesting article about
the way that 'people find new ways to access news in a post-print world...'
"...Our focus fritters away. Fast news has had the same effect on our minds as fast food has had on our physiques..." The BBC's Andrew Marr hits the nail on the head: why should he be asked to pay for inappropriate news content? He's "interested in politics, social policy, business, technology and the arts. I am not interested in sport, fashion, property, crime stories or celebrity".
Package up the news he's interested in, make each story easily followable as it progress, serve it up on platforms as and when you want to consume it - and then it might be worth paying for, if you are prepared to pay a premium for a 'trusted source'. The BBC, of course, is one of the UK's most trusted sources and all its news, across all media platforms, comes for the price of the TV licence.
The Grauniad lays into The Times and The Sunday Times, as their user consumption goes into freefall, following the introduction of registration and then a full paywall (to read anything beyond the homepages) on July 2, in a provocative article entitled:
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