DIAGNOSIS: MANFLU

 - that time when you know you are growing old with the wrong woman -

Now we've got Valentines Day out of the way for another year..

In November I got my flu jab and felt indestructible. I gave blood in December, after that I felt bullet proof.

Well it's about six weeks later and at work I suddenly felt very chilly - then very very chilly. I went home early back to my flat shivering, climbed in the hottest bath I could run and then sat there topping it up with warm water until I felt warm. It took two hours.

Never felt anything like it and for a while thought I had pneumonia, luckily, I hadn't but when the rest of those symptoms and later complications arrived the symptoms did perfectly fit something else -  Adenovirus. It is now nearly a week later, I've just had my first consecutive sick days in about 15 years. Not properly slept in 72 hours and have found, as a non-optional extra, that I have gone onto develop conjunctivitis, which is at least the subject of my favourite Halloowen South Park episode ('Pink Eye').
This is the worst flu I've ever had and I'm lucky to have it now, because if I'd been ten years older I'd be in hospital now or worse.

Luckily I know I can get over it on my own.  I know what I need, and exactly what I don't need.

I think generally if I could fully share my subjective experience with British women with the rest of the  UK male population we would be living in a childless dystopian scifi thriller in a generation.

Specifically my own personal subjective experience of  relationships in the past tells me that the loving care you might hope to get from your British partner when you are ill is likely to be a lot more like "GET OFF YOUR ARSE IT IS ONLY MAN-FLU".

I'm not going to go into the history of the term, or the comedy industry that's grown up around it. Some regard it as a silly joke :

Wouldn't it be great if there was evidence that man flu was an actual thing rather than a fiction born of hypochondria, slackerdom and sexist exploitation?

In my experience it certainly is a real thing, not an aliment in itself but a handy excuse for your supposed nearest and dearest used to have a laugh at your expense when you are genuinely ill. The witless contempt I received from two different long term partners, on two different occasions, both overusing the word Man-Flu, had an even more lasting effect that my actual illness. What made it doubly annoying is that these  two were prize attention seekers who I'd been happy to wait on hand and foot when they'd been ill themselves.

Even if there was a term equivalent to Man-Flu used to describe malingering women, that could be employed without starting an avalanche of sexist controversy - would you use it on your partner? When they were ill? Consider this next time some pampered darling accuses you of play-acting for sympathy.

I don't like being miserable being ill and alone, but as always with being alone - it could be worse.

A 2010 survey by the Office for National Statistics reported on by the BBC World Service suggests that women call in sick twice as often as men do

In my case the watery eyes are conjunctivitis

23/1/15

Hidden fingers of QMUL

My contract since October has been here at Queen Mary College London. I'm very lucky, last three contracts, for Telegraph, Camelot and this one are among the best I've ever had.

This square is right in the middle of London, between Barbican (see later post) and Farringdon.

This contract has security elements with a high quotient of Mad Science. From 1964 until 1982 QMUL maintained a nuclear reactor, the first to be built for a UK university.

"QMUL-Nuclear-Reactor" by QMUL - Discovery in Science and Engineering 1886-2010. http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/node/1555. Licensed under GFDL via Wikipedia.

Boardwalk Empire Series Finale : A climactic trip to Nucky Thompson's past creates no paradox

Last night I saw the last episode of Boardwalk Empire, Martin Scorsese's trip into cable TV via the history of Prohibition and Atlantic City - and rather frustratingly it ends so well you want to go right back to the start and watch all five series again.

Thompson gets a glimpse of the future but never escapes his past

I had thought from from fairly early on that compared to the other classic American cable TV Boardwalk Empire is a bit 2nd division, in that generally it coasts along in a fairly low gear compared to the classic material. It seems to have characters and subplots that are completely superfluous and go nowhere, unlike say it's closest contemporaries, The Sopranos, The Wire and Breaking Bad. None of those classic shows for example have room for a character like Boardwalk Empire's Van Alden who seems to wander aimlessly from one identity to another.

With it's final and fifth series Boardwalk Empire had leaps forward a decade into the 1930s to show all the characters dealing with the FBI crackdown and the effects of Wall Street Crash of 1929. At that same time we are shown flashbacks to the 1880s and 1890s showing Nucky Thompson's early life and career as an up and coming Sheriff in the seaside resort becoming Atlantic City. We seen young Nucky's desperation to escape his surroundings, and how that desperation sets up the monstrous personal conflicts in the first two series.

Where Deadwood and Martin Scorsese's own Gangs of New York depict the imposition of a corrupt governing apparatus over a lawless America, and the Sopranos and The Wire show how criminal networks operate smoothly alongside the government, Boardwalk Empire fits neatly in between, showing the creation of the criminal networks, supercharged by the madness of Prohibition. In effect Steve Buschemi's Nucky Thompson starts as a version of Ian McShane's bar owner from Deadwood, and finds himself by the end reluctantly forced to compete with the likes of Tony Soprano.

And "reluctantly" is one of the standouts from the others here, made all the more impressively obvious from the series finale. I won't give away any spoilers but the reason behind Nucky Thompson's series long disillusionment and disengagement from his business and family is, at the series climax, laid bare in a way that casts nearly all of the characters from the show in a new light. One of the delights of Deadwood is that it plays with your expectations of who is the 'hero' right from the start. Boardwalk Empire does the same, but it only becomes apparent at it's very end.

I wondered in a previous post if Breaking Bad would end well compared to other series finales. I thought the happy ending of Breaking Bad was a barely believable moral cop-out and easily the worst thing about the entire series. Not long after saw the end of Hugh Laurie's House M.D. and thought pretty much the same. Much as I love the end of Sopranos part of it's shock is the moral ambiguity.

So this.. "look ! surprise! bad guy doesn't get come-comeuppance!" series ending is getting pretty stale for me.
In direct contrast the end of Boardwalk Empire elevates it into one of the best.

LIVE READ OF TEAM AMERICA WITH ACTORS VOICING THEIR OWN CHARACTERS?

see below
www.aintitcool.com/node/69850
This is 'live read' of a script against a movie by live actors, in this case a version of Empire Strikes Back with some great casting, including Stephen Merchant as C3PO and Aaron Paul as Luke.

Sounds like a lot of fun.

But what the world really needs now is a similar live read but of Team America : World Police, and not just with recasting the characters..
(For characters I'm thinking Sir Anthony Hopkins as Spottiswood, and maybe Aaron Paul again as Gary)

But how about getting the actual FAG actors lampooned in the movie to do their own voices? Alec Baldwin would probably gnaw his arm off to play himself.. Michael Moore..
And Matt.. Damon..

Come on who doesn't want to see that?

Noone apart from the obvious - and that's why it should happen.

Let's all watch The Interview on Christmas Day

UPDATED WITH SHORT REVIEW : 
A lot lot better than critics are saying. A room full of others agreed it is the best Seth Rogan movie by a distance, and the James Franco character is a fantastically entertaining twit right up there with Burgundy and Zoolander. For those worried about the politics it is best summed up as this; 
there are North Korean bad guys and North Korean good guys but nearly all of the Americans are idiots. Rogan and Franco deserve a lot more credit for what is a pretty funny and entertaining parody of FROST/NIXON - shame for them it is stolen from under them by Vancouver's own Diana Bang, playing insane hot and hilarious North Korean Colonel Sook.

The North Korean hack on Sony is a rare bit of good international news and we should treasure it.

I've just heard they've actually taken The Interview from release, as a response to threats from North Korean hackers. That is - I think -  much worse for Sony's security, as every other hacker on the planet (particularly the ones who don't like North Korea) will now be after that movie. In fact every torrent client in the planet will be downloading that on the planet in about a week - and apparently it's not a bad movie.

Why don't we all make it a highlight of our Christmas viewing? maybe after the Queens Speech (about 3pm GMT for those who don't know)

Other reasons to be jolly -

On an artistic level Sony are suggesting this is so embarrassing to them they will sell the studio. Andrew Garfield is the only decent thing about recent Sony pictures, but everyone knows this, suggesting this is even good for Sony's (current) Spiderman.

Even on a hacking level this is probably good news - the North Koreans are probably using loads of "one use spells" that Chinese hackers have been saving up to use against the West for years.

Thanks Santa, you're awesome
(but remember to change your password later to a passphrase with 16 characters and letters)

Jaine Fenn at Bombay Sapphire Distillery

A few days after seeing William Gibson at the British Film Institute, I found Jaine Fenn, author of the Hidden Empire series, at recently opened steampunk splendour of the Bombay Sapphire Distillery.

I highly recommend this place before it turns into a tourist trap.

Jaine (left) swooped in with quite a talented collection of fellow gin connoisseurs including musicians, fellow Gollancz writers such as Alex Bell (The Ninth Circle on the right above) and one of Jaine's science SMEs, Liz The Chemist, who was kind enough to give me a lift.

This, Python fans, is a juniper bush. During the tour we get to experience various slightly wierd gin ingredients before selecting them...

.. to become part of a cocktail constructed later 

My favourite gin cocktail turns out to be -  Aviation

In fact - don't go there. I like it just the way it is.