go large with the guitar and mic

A great and only slightly surprising aspect was just how many audience were prepared to participate in the pictures.

There was also a high number of then that would pick up the guitar or microphone and immediately 'go large'.

They'd pose in the middle of bars, in corridors, outside the doors, even outside the venues.

Most of them living in that rock band moment.

Although, its fair to say, we had a few proper guitarists and singers along as well, but this was all about the pose.

Singer, Singer songwriter, Ultimate-guitar Legend, Emo, Indie, We didn't care. As long as it was fun.

A few of the fans of #FANS

The visitors to the show were terrific. They fully entered into the spirit of it, right from the moment they entered the various theatres.

It was amazing how many were very prepared to pick up a guitar, and/or a microphone, even form bands with complete strangers, and all before they'd even reached the bar.

Heres a few from the collection. There's plenty more on flickr. Click any picture to take a dip into the world of #FANS.

I'm with the band (I)

#FANS dates and booking FAQ @thesixtwenty

Time for that last minute splurge of tweets and other general advertising for the FANS show, which starts next week in the North East.

The above picture, as shown, would be unsuitable for twitter, because there a particular format that displays better. Kind of 16:9-ish seems to work best.

Although I often use 500x333 as the base.

The Six Twenty is dedicated to creating playful and immersive work that is bold, ambitious and fun. The Six Twenty make theatre that excites, engages and provokes.

FANS on tour

Theatre meets gig. An eclectic and hilarious mix of stories told through raucous live music and verbatim theatre interwoven with fictionalised scripted drama. Based on people’s love affair with music FANS fuses together true stories (and some not so true stories) with real music fan confessions.

TOUR DATES

Tues 6 & Wed 7 Sept
ARC Stockton @ 7.30PM
Box Office: 01642 525199

Fri 9 Sept
Alnwick Playhouse @ 2PM & 7.30PM
Box Office: 01665 510785 


Tues 13 & Wed 14 Sept
Northern Stage @ 8pm (doors 7.30PM)
Box Office: 0191 230 5151

Thur 15 & Fri 16 Sept
Arts Centre Washington @ 7.30PM
Box Office: 0191 561 3455


Sat 1 Oct
Pop Recs (Sunderland Stages) @ 7.30PM
Box Office: 0191 561 3455

FANS has been awarded this year’s Bridging the Gap (an initiative designed to aid the creation of new theatre work within the North East region). FANS is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and has received support from The Sunday for Sammy Trust, which supports creative talent on Tyneside.

shake it

A couple of weeks ago I had one of those notifications about a possible hack from Morocco into one of my accounts. Annoying, but stopped at source. It's a recurrent problem for long term userids where we tend to flit around both virtually and geographically.

Asking myself, "What would Taylor Swift do?", I decided to re-run the have i been pwned test to see whether there were any new hacks to report.

All the ones listed were the ones I had previously dealt with, although nowadays there's probably a couple of hundred sites and over a billion accounts listed in their site.

Actually, as well as this list of my compromised accounts, I've also been compromised on LinkedIn.com, but that's via one of my professional userids, rather then my play ones.

Many years ago I used to keep a hotmail account especially for browsing, because that way it could attract all the spam and so on "set shields high" etc. Then all the social media sites wanted to monetise everything, and inevitably the account got linked to something else.

Actually it's one account I don't use at all now, along with a BT account that gets stupid amounts of spam considering I don't even log on to it.

I suppose it indicates that there's still an awful lot of frontier behaviour around the networks.

And yes, I do follow @swiftonsecurity.

another black chain imprint on right leg

Time to mix it up with the bikes.

Mainly so that I can make an early test of the bike I'll probably use during the colder months. It's a lot easier to work out what needs to be fixed whilst the weather is still good.

And there's a list of things to fix. Some oil, pumping up the tyres and the search for the various lighting systems. I know it seems early to be thinking about those things, but I'd better start the process.

Meanwhile, I'm still on track for my annual mileage target, even with a few gaps. Strava says I'm 265 miles ahead of pace, although being away for the next couple of weeks will soon erode that.

another miaow from the Celtic tiger?

I doubt Apple will be bringing out an operating system codenamed Green Tiger anytime soon?

With the backdrop of that EU ruling it's still hardly a secret that Ireland is a good place for US European headquarters.

The difference in definitions of domicile allow lightly taxed US corporate money to be parked on the edge of the EU. As Father Ted said, "Just resting in our account."

Who wouldn't mind a sub 1% tax bill? But wait, if we believe the EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, Apple's Irish tax is only 0.05%, dropping to only 0.005%. That's maybe until they could shift the money back to America. Many American companies plan to repatriate money to the US after favourable taxation changes (which haven't happened).

The quip about US folk popping over to Ireland to look at some horses, have a round of golf, drink a Guinness and run a quick HQ meeting is so old that it could probably be used in a new BBC sitcom.

As well as Apple, there's plenty more companies with this kind of EU HQ arrangement. They are often based around Silicon Docks, which is an area specially built to help these companies get established.

Around the Grand Canal area there's Google, Facebook, Accenture, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, to name a few. The city centre has a few more well-known ones including Amazon.com, Linkedin and Dropbox.

Some companies have been in Ireland since the start of the light taxation business practices. Oracle, Microsoft, Intel and Salesforce spring to mind, with Microsoft outgrowing its original site (which it sold on to Blackstone) before building some
new campuses. Some, like Dell, Intel, Apple and Microsoft have also been notably big employers in the country.

So I'm wondering whether there's any more of these companies enjoying taxation advantages by being based in what was once called the Celtic Tiger?

It seems to be a curious win-win for Ireland anyway. They get everyone over for the cheap taxation and then apparently reluctantly get to take a further lump of it later. Maybe these windfalls will help the kitty have more lives?

Miaow.

Giulietta sees the light

We'd just walked back the mile or so across the field to pick up the car. Blip the alarm.

"That's funny? only one light has come on."

It was daylight, so no problem to drive away, but later it was off to a local filling station to pickup an H7 bulb. It's not my car, but I knew I'd better make an attempt to replace the bulb. It was the round one in the middle of the lighting cluster that needed fixing.

The venerable H7 car bulb has been around since the days when cars still had recognisable engines although the way the bulb is designed to be attached is by something resembling an intriguingly bent paperclip.

The red car is Italian, modern and has one of those don't touch me type engines, filled with computers and cleverness.

The bulb is still held in with that mid 20th century pipe smoker paperclip design, although 21st century Italian stylists have created a special black plastic tunnel leading to the area where the bulb lives. With contortions, it's just about big enough to get a hand into.

The cleverness of the design means it is impossible to actually look into the plastic tunnel to see what is in there, so it requires a vivid imagination as well as some muscle memory from changing prior car lightbulbs to (a) detach the wires from the bulb and (b) unclip the spring clip.

I can remember that cars have the notch for the clip such that the spring clip has to be slightly pushed towards the outside of the car and then flipped backwards. Too much exuberance and the little spring clip completely detaches requiring a different skill to reattach it blind to the two small holes before replacing the bulb.

I did manage to do everything, but it took about 45 minutes. It seems like an embarrassingly long time for such a simple fix. It's not something they mention in new car reviews or on those car programmes. Still, I'm told some cars require the whole front section to be removed for the bulb to be replaced. Or a wheel.

"Sia la luce," as they say in Milan.

confetti cannons

Making the most of standing around in fields in good weather this weekend. This time it's Somerset.

Admittedly we did have one absolutely HUGE downpour. The raindrops were the size of 50 pence pieces (Somehow 'half-crowns' sounds better?)

But add some smoke machines, flashing lights, confetti cannons and music and everything is fine.

Even if the pictures are a bit fuzzy. Maybe that should be fizzy?

alternative parallel parking techniques

This time we've been off to Jody Scheckter's farm at Laverstoke in Hampshire. The Carfest South event is like an open air festival, with music, tents, food and cars. Lots of them, with some fairly unusual ones zooming around a track.

Just like most modern festivals, there's also a good supply of street food and specialty drinks available from local traders as well as the increasingly sighted bigger players like Marks and Spencers and Waitrose. I'm guessing it won't be long before Amazon start to show up to these events. Order with Amazon Now and pick up at the event?

Actually M&S had a mix your own smoothie on a bicycle component, whilst Waitrose had a deconstructed Ploughman's Lunch on a cheeseboard served with Prosecco.


As well as the big stages and music, there was a notable array of fancy cars on show too. A chance to try out the latest Maserati or even one of those Jaguar SUVs, which can go up an almost vertical incline. In Scalextric fashion, I reckon they are really Range Rovers with a different shell.

Unlike my brochure illustration above, a notable trend among the new cars on display was to have the entire chrome work painted black, as well as blackened wheels. Whatever the reason, there were lines of people waiting to try out the new F-PACE and take it up and down the slopes.

They seemed to be doing better than some of the cars going along the straight bits, like this little blue number which managed to ride up the grass just in front of me. Difficult keeping some of these cars going in a straight line, although, come to think of it, other cars more or less defined straight lines and it was difficult imagining them turning in less than a field width.

Also a chance to catch a few new cars whizzing around, like this one, with its understated exhaust system and special smoking tyres.

And entertaining moments watching the antics of three bright yellow cars which seemed to be able to complete the equivalent of a parallel parking manoeuvre at about 50 mph.

Don't try this at home, as the announcer mentioned.

I'll remember that as I head over to the buffalo ice cream tent. Come to think of it, I'm not driving today, so maybe even a Pimms before listening to some music in a field.

whatsup? just a few more messages from randomised sponsors

My Facebook deliberations continue. Every day, it handles something like 10 billion messages, 4.5 billion hits on the ‘like’ button and 350 million new picture uploads.

I see they are now about to blend their sub-company WhatsApp's data with Facebook, so that they have ready access to phone numbers which can be used in marketing and *ahem* 'offer' messages from corporations.

Yep, it's all about the money.

I can't help thinking that the Facebook client looks like a badly engineered legacy environment. Things you'd want to do to arrange information as an end-user just aren't available or obvious. Most of the control is behind the scenes.

Some of that design will be deliberate, like obscuring the buttons to opt out of certain things, but the rest looks messy. I'm sure the millennial view is that it doesn't matter and a blast of Hadoop or Spark can make it all make sense.

Just splatter a few number crunchers over the top and sell the results to marketeers.

I'm not sure. Even with the post rationalist architectural drawings, I sense snake oil lubricants in the machine.

Thursday Thirteen 100: a movie list

I see the BBC has recently polled a bunch of critics about the top films of the 21st Century.

It's an interesting list because it largely avoids mass market movies that may sell well at the box office but are largely derivatives of a franchise. There's also a few in the list that somehow 'feel' as if they have been around longer than the list implies - Lost in Translation is 2003, for example.

I estimate to have seen around only half of the ones listed, so there's an interesting project to look up a few more that have somehow slipped past.

The top spot goes to a movie which I have watched two or three times. David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. A displaced Hollywood dream. No wonder the critics enjoy it. I'm not sure if I'd put it top, although I'd have it in my upper quartile at least.

A low budget one that's made the list is David Glazer's haunting Under the Skin, which I've also seen several times and its good that the original Tomas Alfredson version of Let The Right One In is included instead of the re-make.

Much to consider, if you like movies. Feel free to scroll...

21st Century 100 Greatest Films - BBC Poll

100. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)
100. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)
100. Carlos (Olivier Assayas, 2010)
99. The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000)
98. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)
97. White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)
96. Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003)
95. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)
94. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
93. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)
92. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
91. The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan José Campanella, 2009)
90. The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
89. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
88. Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)
87. Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
86. Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
85. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, 2009)
84. Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)
83. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
82. A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009)
81. Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)
80. The Return (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2003)
79. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000)
78. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
77. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007)
76. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)
75. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
74. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012)
73. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
72. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013)
71. Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012)
70. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
69. Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)
68. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
67. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)
66. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003)
65. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)
64. The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)
63. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011)
62. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
61. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
60. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
59. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
58. Moolaadé (Ousmane Sembène, 2004)
57. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)
56. Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, director; Ágnes Hranitzky, co-director, 2000)
55. Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013)
54. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)
53. Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
52. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
51. Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
50. The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015)
49. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
48. Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015)
47. Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014)
46. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
45. Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
44. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)
43. Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)
42. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)
41. Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015)
40. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
39. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
38. City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)
37. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
36. Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014)
35. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
34. Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015)
33. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
32. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
31. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)
30. Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)
29. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
28. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
27. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
26. 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
25. ​Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
24. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
23. Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
22. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
21. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)
20. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
19. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)
18. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
17. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro, 2006)
16. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)
15. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
14. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
13. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006)
12. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
11. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)
10. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
9. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
8. Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
7. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
4. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
2. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)