The ipod Macbook

Well, looks as if Amazon.co.uk knows its audience pretty well. This reminds me of the time I heard a friend say "I want and Ipod, what is an Ipod?". We're all doomed.
(posted from the new Ipod MacBook)

Football after an 8 year rest period

Our new 5-aside team does seem like we’re mostly all mouth and no trousers. The entire thing is Jack’s fault:

“A bit of football on Saturday would be good. It could even lay the foundations of a certain soon to be legendary five-a-side team. We are called The Mighty Mitchell Hot Rods. (I am also captain).

Anyone else want to play football? Low standards expected.”

Joff: I put them away up front like nobody's business. I used to play upfront for the Guildford and Shere league and once guided my team (as captain) to the league title, won player of the season and scored 30 goals in the process, including a hat-trick in the last game (which was the title decider). Although I have lost my pace a little in the last 12 years and my touch has waned slightly my positional play is still second to none. However in five a side I prefer to play all over the pitch. Kind of a roaming role, like Gerrard but with more of a killer instinct.
Therefore my position in the team will be crucial to our success.I hope this gives some food for thought.J. Griffiths (No.11).

Simon: I played for Onslow Boys for three years... Started on the A team and scored in the first game during a crushing 11-1 defeat. Played in every game following that for the B squad, flanking the right wing with blistering pace on the half sized pitches. I was know for breaking up the wing, loosing the defence and being so tired that my eventual cross was disappointing at best.

The first two seasons we came in around the bottom half but the third season we came second, loosing out to Send who had a 6.2” black guy up front who's probably in the premiership by now, living in a mock Tudor house with a Ferrari sitting on 16"s... That season I scored about 8 goals, one of which benefited heavily from the constant shielding of the keepers vision by 20 excited boys ball chasing and was actually pretty good. From the outside of the box, I took a blind shot and it ended up top right corner. With no netting to stop the ball in the goal that game, only half the players believed it had crossed the line. Ace.

Drink, drugs and smoking then took a heavy toll on Onslow Boys and we were consistently sick week in week out on the touchline. I quit when the manager lost all our kits and asked for us to pay for new ones.

Dan: My football career began in an assistant coaching role alongside my farther and football suprimo Philip Griffiths. Philip has football genes in his blood as his farther was asked to play football for Everton. After helping leading Guildford City Boys to the title which largely involved pretending I kicked the ball so hard that I needed to collapse on the floor due to the shear speed I decided that the role as Goalkeeper would be more fitting so I retired from coaching for a role on the field in the big boys league. After only two training sessions the manager threatened to give me half a game. This day never came and I retired after only four training sessions.

I am not in goal.

Jack: Coming from a family with a fine football heritage (my father George Mitchell once had a trial with Cowdenbeath FC) it was always inevitable that I too would fall in love with the beautiful game. I started out as lightening quick forward before steadily being moved away from the oposition goal. My career was blighted with injury concerns in the mid 1990s that helped speed up my retirement from competitive sport (I had a sore knee) but I have retained my thirst for the sport as a keen spectator and judger of others, and as an admired and sought-after master of Pro Evolution Soccer.

Nicknames:
'Flash'
'Dead-Centre'
'Dynamo'
Teams, Positions and Honours:

Team: Daven County Primary School
Position: Centre Foward (1982 - 1992); Central Midfield (1992 - 1994)
Honours: Seimans Cup Winners 1992

Team: The Vale FC
Position: Full-back (1993 - 1994)
Honours: Clubman of the Year 1994

Team: Shere Tigers FC
Position: Full-back (1994 - 1997)
Honours: League Two runners up 1996; League Cup finalists 1996; Most improved player of the year 1995

References:

Mr Tamplin from Congleton
'Jock' from Chilworth

Jim: My career began in Cwmnedd Primary School where I featured several times for the school team in midfield. My memories of this time are poor.

At age 11 I joined Glynneath Juniors and played as a full-back (left and right) for 4 seasons. We came 5th out of 20 in the first season and never really recaptured that form. I played in midfield for a couple of games, I did not score a single goal and only accumulated a handful of assists. I almost scored an own goal when I hit the post against local rivals Onllwyn, and once accidentally hit the opposition crossbar against Lonlas. I was reknowned for my distinct lack of fitness, my feeble pace and for being so short that I actually ran underneath my boots. The only advantage that came with my relative immobility was that I slowly developed enviable yet irrelavent ball control skills, which I pride myself on to this day.

The team disbanded when I was 15, and I think shortly after I broke my hand in 3 different places. The next competitive match I played after that was in Newport where, despite still being horrendously drunk from the previous night's shenanigans, my playing style was likened to that of Ronaldinho's. This, I feel, is entirely inaccurate and I regularly claim that my style is more Le Tissier/Merson/Gascoigne-oriented. Then I joined the Mighty Mitchell Hot Rods......

Viva Piñata!

I've been able to import a new game before the scheduled 1st Dec UK launch. Viva Piñata is quite possibly the polar opposite of anything I’ve been playing in the last couple of weeks. From Gears of War's ambitious urban settings and slaying a Locus horde to last night when I spent an hour trying to convince two little Piñata birds to bang each other (or as they call it 'Romancing') to make more cute little chicks.

I've barely scratched the surface, but as far as I can gather I'm an enterprising gardener with a penchant for Piñata. To begin with it asked me for the name of my new plot of land. After careful thought I decided upon the name "The Kingdom of Smiles" as not to alienate the online community with something vulgar - I'll save those for my Piñata names. The first resident; a tiny Piñata called Whirm wandered into my garden. I took the opportunity to rename the cute little wormy thing to Spaz and he pottered about making odd snuffling noises while I acclimatised myself with the simple controls.

Spaz occupied himself and explored the garden until another worm came along, imaginatively called Whirm2; so I renamed him Spack and they got on like a house on fire. I was offered a tutorial on how to build Spack and Spaz a little house made of pipes but excited at the prospect I skipped through it and was left confused at well, lets face it - a children’s game. It turns out the Whirms would need a home to begin the 'romancing' side to the game so I was definitely interested in this. After trawling through all 4 available pages of the ever-expanding Journal, I managed to get a kind man to build the Whirms a home to start what in my mind was some sort of pornographic worm dungeon love. In actuality their 'Romancing' was played out through a sweet dance which if true, I've probably fathered many a child in the early 90s during all those school dances.

During the creation I was distracted by a new resident arriving and totally forgot about the Whirm 'Romancing' project I’d started. Maybe I figured they were getting on so well that I’d lost interest anyway. The new arrival was a little bird that seemed pretty reluctant to stay awake even during the daytime. The extent of his laziness is still the bane of the Kingdom of Smiles as he simply won't show any interest in 'doing' the other bird that turned up minutes later. I've tried different approaches, pushing them together, buying them a home, even showing them a crude demonstration using the cursor but the buggers won't even gain eye contact.

In any case, Viva Piñata seems to be a great game. I'm enjoying its total change of pace when stacked up against the epic Gears of War. Seriously, if Amazon had an ounce of sense they'd offer this as one of their 'Perfect Partners' and they'd sell plenty more in the run up to Christmas. I like the idea of using this game as a cunning excuse to buy an XBOX360 for people who have young kids too, I certainly would choose this avenue of deceit if I had a child and hadn't have already splurged £300+ on one.

Without a doubt, Viva Piñata’s one of the more surprising flagship titles to turnout my wallet this year, t'is good.

Simon reviews the theatre

It's not often I'm taken to the theatre. The last time was 1997 to see Michael Flattley dance from the waist down in the THREE HOUR production of River Dance. Ten years later and I'm offered to see a play called ‘Porgy and Bess’ about a 'cripple', Porgy who incidentally can only dance from the waist up.


‘Porgy and Bess’ places its focus on a Middle America town that somehow has an ocean meters from the front gate. Either that's a choppy lake or.. Well it might not have been Middle America. In any case, there was a nice setup of wooden building fronts and a ladder that was regularly used to ascend and descend from the upper floor. Sadly even my best attempts at willing an actor to put one foot wrong and end up on his arse didn't work but it made me giggle a few times just at the thought.

Opening the play was a scene where they were all inebriated and taking a drug called 'Happy Dust'. The sheer amount of people drunkenly dancing so close to a 12ft drop down to the orchestra had my mind in over drive at the potential mess that could be caused; but I was left as disappointed with this as I was with the ladder incident. I felt a bitter taste in my mouth when I realised they were acting drunk and probably quite sober and able to judge distances. They began to feel more like liars than actors.

We met each character in succession using the perfectly natural occurrence of using one another’s names 4-5 times in each sentence and they set the ground work for what crap was going to surface later on. Notable crap includes the transparency of each major character, with each personality trait magnified to the extent that even the dullest of theatregoers would get the gist that "He's a bady, he's a goody and she's from the wrong side of the tracks but wants to change her ways". We met Bess and a big guy who, even though the name was drummed into my skull, I cant remember his name. These two seemed from the outset to be the main characters but then I considered the play's name and figured that the guy Porgy must be pretty high up there too.

As Porgy's character was built into a tortured soul who'd lived a lonely life, (at one stage in his bedroom which cleverly extended out into centre stage) I found it hard to understand why this play had just crashed through the 1hr 30 mark. It really was dragging and the novelty of song had all but gone. Although one bit that made me appreciate the music was when a couple of bars coincidentally sounded like a score from 'O Brother Where Art Thou' so I spent the rest of the play thinking how out of character George Clooney had been to accept a 90% pay cut to do that film.

I heard the woman in front of me breathing a sharp sympathetic breath when Porgy was treated badly or pushed about. She seemed to be touched by the hardship that a life of being a 'cripple' has but I doubt she'd lift her heavy jewellery to help him in the street. On that, the theme of Porgy being a cripple was constant and weak. Instead of writing tricky lines of dialogue to express emotion they'd just ping him out of his chair and we'd all watch as he looked uncomfortable on the floor. After 3 times of him staggering back into his chair I lost patience with him.

It's a good time to mention that there wasn't a moment when I didn’t feel I was suffocating under the weight of the music; the orchestra were very excitable at every opportunity, especially on an entrance or exit of ANY character. When Porgy made another trip to the floor or struggled with his crutches we got a Disney esq swan song; when they were all happy at a picnic we got bold brass and crashing symbols. Predictable but I believe standard so I’ll let it that slide. I suppose really when I didn't even notice the music it was working at its best to simply provide a cinematic, subtle experience but when it was in your face, it just plain pissed me off.

The story rolled on with a murder, which was quite thrilling for a time. The murderer then fled and later came back to get his girl, Bess who'd conveniently shacked up with Porgy to complete the play's title. Porgy then rather out of character murdered the murderer and was dragged off to prison only to return a week later (mercifully only 20mins real time) and all was ignored and forgotten. Surely I wasn't the only person that found it hard to ignore Porgy had just brutally murdered a man? Then came a string of lines (sung, naturally) that I felt we were being asked to show sympathy. Of course, his girl Bess had run off with a drug dealer to New York, so there was some sympathy but more importantly this was setting us up for theatre’s comedic moment of the century.

Waiting for a three-hour punch line, I wasn't disappointed. To cut it short and ruin the ending, Porgy sang an uninspiring song that he was going to go get his girl back, got steadily to his feet… now bear in mind I'd lasted 2hrs 50mins without a peep but disaster struck when he threw his crutches away and walked off stage in such a way that it made me spit at the people sitting in front of me. Thankfully the loud applause drowned out my snorting and giggling.

In conclusion, theatre hasn’t changed significantly enough in the past ten years to compel me to go again. It's the same twisted storylines as the last one I saw and a same crossed fingers that the curtain would drop. If it wasn't for the free review tickets I doubt I'd have even considered attending such a show but even though the gripes are there, I did kind of enjoy being out on a tuesday.

Three hours I’ll never see again but a lifetime’s lesson that'll prevent such a reoccurrence. Although, that whole Lion King looks pretty…