Bicycle Film Festival - London, October 17-21, 2007

This looks good, even though their website doesn't work properly on my safari.

B-)

Another cultural highlight this week was a screening of Once at the NFT. It's a great film and was followed by a Q&A and then a live music performance from the two lead actors ('musicians who can half act' rather than 'actors who can half sing or play music' as they described themselves). It's a great movie. Hope everyone else realises.

B-)

I'm a big fan of Brakes ever since I saw them supporting Belle and Sebastian and then started receiving their emails. They're always playing gigs in people's living rooms and things. I've never won one of those competitions but I did get an email last week about a secret gig at the Water Rats. They came on stage at 7.30 and there were around 20 of us in the room at the time. They played a fantastic short set and revealed that 'Heard About Your Band' is about Dominic Masters from The Others (hope they didn't think that was only OK if it was in front of the 20 of us - well, it crept up to about 50 by the end). Almost as good as a living-room gig. The volume was up to the level for a bigger gig, though, and my ears are still buzzing. It's going to be a bore when the hearing properly falls apart.

B-)

Who'd have thought the author of a rant like this:

'AND THERE'S NO OFFLINE MODE!!!! A SmartPhone that insists you have a SIM card in at all times? Just bugger off Sony Ericsson, you've lost my respect. You've had thousands of pounds out of me in the past. But stick to student mobile phones called Kxxx with crap silly little jukeboxes on them, SmartPhones are out of your league. If you're going to use UIQ, then take a leaf out of Motorola’s book and apply it (in a newer version, Symbian 9.2, UIQ 3.1) to a teen phone, like the excellent new Z8. Either that or do the real design work and make a proper SmartPhone, not this insulting halfway house. As it stands, the P990i is a better phone that this P1i - it has all the same faults, but at least its double action transformer style flip makes it more usable.'

would be Stephen Fry aka the omnigenius who wrote the book I'm enjoying right now:

Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled

which, by the way, is an excellent introduction to poetry (hate the title, though ;-)

B-)

We've been taking in a lot of culture recently, since I went through a phase of grabbing those cheap or 10 squid special offers, but Apoa and I think this might be the most exciting cultural event we've come across recently.

B-)