It wasn’t familiarity with my birthplace that make it hard to suspend disbelief, even though Gina Carano‘s teaky depiction of rogue agent Mallory appeared to run around Dublin with nothing but contempt for natural laws of geography.  In one chase sequence she appeared to have crossed the Liffey three times without using a bridge, which can only mean that Aperture Science has joined Amazon, Facebook and Twitter in basing their European offices there.

It wasn’t even the fact that a room at the Shelbourne Hotel was trashed and no-one bothered to complain until the following morning.  “Calm down,” I muttered, “it’s still more realistic than Leap Year.”

No, what made me realise that this was pure fantasy was the fact that Grafton Street still had shops open and people spending money.  There’s suspension of disbelief and then there’s the pure naivety of believing Ireland still has an economy.

What about the rest of the movie?  Remember the sort of show that would be on Saturday evenings on ITV in the eighties?  That’s exactly it – Haywire felt like a pilot for one of those bloodless, gung-ho, let’s-shoot-a-lot-of-weapons-and-have-a-bit-of-fighting-before-bathtime and nothing more nuanced than a two-part episode of the A-Team.

I’m not saying the parts of the story wedged between the She-ra-esque set pieces were dull but, at one point, an actual tumbleweed rolled past in the mid-distance as Michael Douglas tried to exposit his way out of a paper-thin plot.  Still, at ninety minutes, it’s not going to be too much of your life wasted.

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Once a year, usually around my birthday, my parents come over to visit and make sure Ang hasn’t killed me yet.  Now, there’s one trait all Irish people of a certain generation have when it comes to food: they’re not adventurous. A bit of meat, a few potatoes, and the odd carrot or growth of cabbage and they’re happy and there’s no-one more set in his ways than my father. To keep the peace, occasionally he’ll let us go for a meal in a Chinese restaurant (only because he was in one once in 2001 and it didn’t kill him).  This has become one of the highlights of my poor mother’s year, so when a new restaurant opened in Cambridge she couldn’t wait to drag him there.

Picture the scene as we waited for the menu. Me, Ang and mam drooling in anticipation after starving ourselves all day, putting on the elasticated pants and getting ready to take in a year’s worth of Weightwatchers points in one sitting. And my father, pulling at the leash like a dog who doesn’t want his walkies to end.

Then it arrived. The menu.

Oh dear God the menu.

Nothing was made from a part of the animal we’d use as by-product, let alone eat.  Not the husband and wife starter (ox and cow tongue intertwined – one for Valentine’s Day).  Not the roast maw. Not the medley of duck tongue, cow intestines, pigs trotters or any other item on a menu that started off exotic and gradually turned in to the effects department props from the Saw franchise. I’m pretty sure they’d just started making up internal organs by page six.

That’s the funny thing about Chinese food, none of it’s really authentic.  Take General Tso’s Chicken.  Apart from the name, there’s nothing Chinese about it, but it’s good and since I haven’t had it in a decade it had taken on godlike properties in my mind.  After hearing me talk about it non-stop every time we got a take away, Ang made me find a recipe and get it out of my system.  Mission accomplished – we need the elasticated pants.

Oh, and Dad’s excuse for leaving Seven Days before the seat cushions had warmed under us and fleeing to the steakhouse next door?  No beer on draught.

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Image by drspam via Flickr

According to io9, it’s more than just the end of the world that we need to worry about for 2012.  Their predictions for this year include:

• an evangelical preacher being elected president, turning the US into a theocracy;
• the end of the US economy;
• the rediscovery of Atlantis.

They missed out on a couple though:

• Whitley Streiber (famous for being anally fingered by aliens) wrote about the boundaries between three parallel earths thinning in a parade of mental illness that would make David Icke blush;
• Dan Brown’s apocalypse, which can only be preferable to reading any more of his dross;
• Endless parkouring assassins jump around trying to give conspiracy theorists more to do than in any other year.

Still, it looks like the US isn’t going to get its first female president in time.

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Shame what turned out to be a very gentle ribbing was pulled from tomorrow’s Jonathon Ross show.  Looks like Peter Fincham is afraid to lose another job.

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Somebody give Carl Rinsch $200 million dollars and let him make what he wants. Easily the most imaginative entry in Philips’ Parallel Lines competition.

See the rest of the winners here.

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Compare and Contrast:

[Photo credits: Alfred Eisenstaedt.  Richard Lam.]

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It’s time.

Warning: May cause ocular leakage.

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Image via Wikipedia

A C Man’s Lament – Rupert Goodwin

The problem I find when I’m looking at lines
Of programs all written in C,
Is that the syntax and grammar resemble the stammer
Of a dyslexic demoralized bee.

I’ll bet any man here (I’ll wager a beer),
Can’t guess how to copy a string.
The mess is dramatic, all [
. & _ !

Pointers collected, and thrice indirected,
Collated in structs and compiled,
When traced by debugger can make coders shudder,
And conditionals drive a man wild.

I don’t wish to seem bitchy, but if only old Ritchie
Had been strangled a birth by a Nurse;
And the fate that I’ve planned for all Kernighan’s clan
Is unprintably several times worse.

I find that the pain begins with the main(),
The only way out is to hack it.
The one bit of syntax that keeps my mind intact
Is the very last }

I hope that this ode is clearer that code
I write in that monstrosity.
You might think that Pascal’s a bit of a rascal,
But the ultimate b*d is C.

My program is calling (in structure appalling),
I must finish my poetic plea.
But, let’s all face it, use Forth, LISP or BASIC,
Whatever you do, don’t use C.

Translator’s guide to pronunciation:
[ = open square bracket
. = dot
& = ampersand
_ = underscore
! = pling
} = close curly bracket
* = star

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