Blogging when I’m in a particularly good mood seems likes an excellent plan, so I shall do so! Yesterday, by contrast, was a little bit of a multi-faceted disaster. But we won’t talk about yesterday. Instead, I’ll talk about fun things like going to see Star Trek on Friday night. By the time that we arrived at the cinema, as it happens, we were already rather happily chilled out from thoughts of work after accidentally finding ourselves in the middle of a Caius pub quiz. (Naming counties is unreasonably hard – couldn’t we name cities instead?) The film itself, though, was great. I described it to my dad thusly: “you know how Star Trek Nemesis was rubbish and made no sense? Well this one was fantastic, although it still made no sense”. I stick by this, because the more I think about it the more illogical it seems. However, it was fun, which is something that Star Trek sometimes has distinct problems with. Success!
Cambridge is another institution which can struggle with the concept of fun during Easter Term, but we turned that all around on Saturday night with the help of Abi’s friend Kat. After some successful cooking and welcome wine drinking came the social device which is almost guaranteed to result in acrimony and bitterness. I speak, of course, of Monopoly. But due to a strange fluke, no-one got enough property to start developing and the result was the most pleasant game I have ever played. You travel around the board, paying paltry little sums to each other, with no fear of bankruptcy since everyone is getting progressively richer through passing Go anyway. In the end we just called it a day, everybody ending with over £1000 in cash and a new admiration for the middle class way of life.
This photo, incidentally, doesn’t quite capture that harmony. But it does instead rather nicely illustrate Oliver’s absolute pleasure at being photographed:
Oliver and Kat
And finally! The ex-editor of the Evening Standard, Veronica Wadley – she who took it downhill from ‘alright’ to ‘awful’, and couldn’t even make ‘awful’ profitable – is screeching today about the prospect of a marginally more positive approach under its new owner. [cackles] Good good! The dismantling of the Boris PR machine is rather overdue, and all that’s really left is for Andrew Gilligan to get on his bike and we could be halfway there.
I know why you posted this. Because it’s a bad photo of Oliver and Abi and you want to feel better about your inferior photogenic status.
Am I right?
xxxxx
No… (good thing eye contact can’t be assessed online)
In this current splurge of Star Trekiness everyone is dissing Nemesis. But I liked it. It had Partick Stewart in – couldn’t have been so bad, surely?
Your take on Monopoly, however, I love.
God, its boring when people get gazillions of hotels all over the place and you owe them more than an MP’s expenses just to land there.
Who wants to go round till all the properties are gone, spend a few weeks in jail, win the beauty contest and then call it a night? Me! Me!
Oh, yes…I’d forgotten about dear old Data. Yes, that was bad, I certainly cried – and then was cross at the end because it implied that copy-thing of him could be nutured to turn out like the next Data. No!
And it was wrong too cause in one of the Next Gen they went far into the future when they were all retired and Picard had some rare degenerative brain disorder and spent all day dusting his grapes – and Data was there as some Professor at….Cambridge I think?
Ok, you win. Nemesis was bad. But I did like that bit at the end where the Picard clone pushed himself further down the sword that was impaling him. Takes guts , that…
Looking forward to the new one. I like the look of young Spok.
Okay well my memories of watching the Star Trek TV Series are very hazy but I kept remembering throughout the film which was brilliant. Enough said
Did you notice how they changes "where no man has gone before" to "where no one has gone before"?
Yes, I did! Although they changed it to ‘no one’ by the time of The Next Generation TV series, so it would have been a bit of a giant step backwards to have reverted to ‘no man’…
Noo! Nemesis was appalling, sorry
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Nemesis/Pictorial-1.html sums it up quite well, but for me it was bad enough that they *killed Data* and then treated it with all the emotional gravity of a broken toaster.
Does anyone want to see the new Star Trek film with meeeeee?