The Time Is Now...

Well, 7 hours from now. At 9pm tonight, Season 2 of Bimbogami will go live. I think it could be a fun night/weekend. We have seen all the puzzlers gathering on the site since we announced the date/time and it looks like they might all jump on tonight to see who can complete first.

Based on last time, I think there is a good chance that one or more people will have completed all 40 puzzles by the end of the weekend. It's a bit like the Olympic 100m final. Months of preparation and it's over in a flash. Except that people will still be joining and playing for months to come. So, in that sense, it's nothing like the Olympics at all. Good. Glad I cleared that up.

So, come along, join in the fun, I promise you you will at least get the first puzzle...

Independence Day

After many months of cogitation and musing, the launch date and time for the next incarnation of the online puzzle quest Bimbogami has been announced. Bimbogami Season 2 is almost upon us. So, get your puzzling head ready for Friday 4th July 2008 at 9:00pm BST and another rollercoaster ride through 40 devilish free online puzzles. Well, 39, the first one is really easy.

Don't forget that you don't need to have completed season 1 to play season 2, you can play both at once. So, if you've not tried season 1, register now and get some practice in.

Look forward to seeing the previous players back and. hopefully, a lot more noobs...

Until such time...

And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on!We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

Bimbogami - Season 2 is Coming

Not long to go until Season 2 of Bimbogami is unleashed on the puzzle world. Testing has begun on the new set of puzzles and MorFF is busy scurrying about behind the scenes to get the site ready. Thankfully, there's not a huge amount to do due to the genius of the original data model.

If you've not seen or heard of Bimbogami before, it is an entirely free online puzzle challenge.

We'll be announcing the precise date/time of the launch of season 2 sometime soon. So, if you've not tried Bimbogami before, there is plenty of time to register and try the 40 puzzles of Season 1. We're hoping for a great battle between all the puzzle teams that took part last time as well as getting some more newbie puzzlers hooked.

Facebook users can now become a Bimbogami fan on Facebook.

My Top 10 Foreign Films

Following on from my recent spate of clip posts, I'm going to go for a Top 10, thus propelling me nearer to the top of the "Blogs with an editorial style close to Channel 5" charts.*

So, inspired by a chat on the way home with Stu the other night, I decided to work out what my favourite foreign** films. I'm not claiming this to be the best ever, more my favourite. Which is why you won't see the habitual list faves like Kurosawa/Truffaut/Goddard. Just not my thing. Maybe one day.

There are a few films that are filed under "Nearly Made It". Betty Blue (37°2 le matin) might have made it for reasons of student nostalgia and nakedness but, having watched it again recently, think that it doesn'y quite hang together. Amélie (Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain) is (and looks) lovely but maybe a little too quirky. I had a very lovely birthday the day I saw Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long), it looks lovely but on repeated viewings all that flying about starts to look silly. A final word for The Host (Gwoemul), its just good fun. No harm in that.

There is also a pile of DVDs still to be watched like Oldboy, Festen, Hidden that might have made it. Maybe one day.

So, on with the big 10.

10. Germinal
OK, I'll be honest. This isn't a truly great film but it makes it into the list because of the book and the fact that it is a very good attempt at a very difficult book to film. As with any film like this, the natural abridging leaves anyone who read the book first a little at a loss. That's why I thought the Lord of the Rings films were fine. I didn't know what was missing. But with Germinal, it was the bits that were missing that stood out.

That said, the grimness, the poverty are all come across powerfully. Although I'm compelled to say Jeunet would have done it better (more of him later). And talking of later, this isn't Gérard Depardieu's first appearance in this list.


Trouble at mill mine

I don't know if its the film or the subject matter that are unappealling but this is still missing from DVD, which is a shame.

Everyone should experience at least part of Les Rougon-Macquart and this is a very good place to start. Although this post has led me to find the DVD of La Bête Humaine, which I've just stuck in my LoveFilm rental list. Nice. Best ending for a book ever.

9. La Reine Margot
Isabelle Adjani, amazing visuals/production design, what's not to like? It looks great, it pulls no punches it in brutality and makes it into my top 10 because these things make it very memorable. I suppose you have to like period pieces and perhaps 16th Century French history isn't for you. But I'll say it again, Isabelle Adjani is in it.


Best we don't discuss the moustaches


8. La Heine
La Heine is the kind of film I don't normally like. Bit modern, bit purposefully gritty but it all works well. Insightful, shocking and all shot is an ultra-vivid documentary style. Love the soundtrack too, something about French hip-hop I love in a film but which I can't really listen to otherwise (like the Taxi soundtrack gathering dust somewhere).


"See me, ahm no' happy"

It's shocking at times (but not in a crass way like the truly abysmal Baise-Moi) but it all works. Its the sort of film the British do very well, you could easily imagine Gary Oldman being in this film and going a bit nuts.

7. A Very Long Engagement ( Un long dimanche de fiançailles )
OK, so when I mentioned Jeunet earlier you were all expected Amelie, right? Well, more of that later. But this film is a worthy inclusion in this list for one very, very simple reason. It looks stunning. Every moment, every frame is a work of art. And me with me photos and that, I'm a sucker for that.


Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion

OK, so maybe its a bit of a sweet, poetic tale of love etc etc. Don't care. Did I say it looks amazing?

And yes, that is Jodie Foster acting in French. She does Latin too, quid quo pro, very talented.

6. Delicatessen
That man Jeunet again. So we'll forgive him for Alien: Resurrection. The reasons why this is film is great can be summed up by its plot keywords in IMDB, Surrealism / Metaphor / Dystopic Future / Black Comedy / Cannibalism. Come on? How cool is that? Imagine Black Books, if Dylan Moran killed Bill Bailey and fed him to Tamsin Greig, all directed by David Lynch. Oh yes, you betcha.


Bring me the head of Mark E. Smith


5. Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del fauno)
Spotting the common threads yet? Bit sad, visual feast, creature with eyes in its hands? This has it all. At its heart, just a very sad story of a young girl living fascist oppression and a brutal stepfather. That would probably do it for me but this film is most remembered for the lavish creations of the girls fantasy world. Very lovely indeed, won Oscar for Art Direction, say no more.


Here I come, ready or not!


4. Life is Beautiful (La Vita è bella)
Very sad, visual feast, sadly no eye-handed creatures. It is unbelievably hard not to cry at this film. Not in a wrought Dancer In The Dark way, you don't feel manipulated. This film tries at all times to keep you uplifted. Despite the horrors unfolding, what this film does is teach you a solemn lesson in unflinching optimism. You find yourself thinking "well, if he can be cheery through all that, what am I moaning about?". Joyful. All together now "Buon giorno, Principessa!"


Ooooh, Betty!
(I know these keep getting funnier)


3. City of God (Cidade de Deus)
You knew this would be here somewhere. From its opening moments it grabs you and throws you about the cinema. Looks great, sounds great and with the dizzying claustrophobic scene in the club, really achieves a major assault on all the senses.

You can talk about the realism, the unknown actors, the trueness of the story and cry "oh the deprivation" but that will always serve to hide the facts about how well this film is directed and put together. Watch closely. Its a marvel.

All the nice boys want to be a photographer

What is most exciting is that Fernando Meirelles is directing the film adaption of Blindness (will probably feature in a future Top 10 books if Channel 5 commission it). To say I'm looking forward to it is an understatement. Hope there is a creature with eyes in its hands.

2. Tampopo
"Marjory, pass me the crayfish, I'm going in."
I love Tampopo as much as I love food. And that about sums it up. A film about a noodle shop shouldn't make it this high in the list but it does for several reasons. Its a feel good film, its fun, its quirky, amusing at times but very focused on its central point. The joy of food. There is doubtless an element of nostalgia for me. I first loved this film many years ago and it has stayed with me for 20 years or so now. It hasn't lost much in all that time and, as I type, I'm very keen on watching it now.


A lump of purest green


1. Jean de Florette/Manon Des Sources
OK, so you saw that coming. And now you are complaining that its two films and I'm cheating. Well, it isn't two films, its a long one chopped in half and if you've only seen the first watch and were either a) enchanted or b) saying "rabbits, eh?" you've entirely missed the point and you're an idiot. It's like never having seen The Return of the Jedi and wondering why Vader "seems a bit off on occasion".
To return to the point from the beginning, L'Eau Des Collines is a great, if simple, story and these films bring it to life perfectly.


Now that's a 'tache

OK, so Emmanuelle Beart gets a bit naked for a while, that is far from the central draw here. The visuals, the music, the story, it all sits at a perfectly lazy pace. Watch them back to back, its a marvellous way to spend an afternoon.

* come back later tonight, there might be boobies
** i.e. not in the English language or "bloody subtitles, no way!" as my Dad would say

Golden Years Indeed

It is said that time adds a rosy hue to most things. And the urge to be and feel young again drives a seemingly unquenchable thirst for nostalgia and unending mutterings of how "things were better then".

There is one area of such nostalgia for people* of my vintage that seems to have me in a very tight grip. The sights, sound and memories associated with our first computers. I have touched on the wonder of this in a previous post and I revisited it briefly here after a magical find.

Stuart and I have a yearly quest to find Christmas presents for each other that only 30-odd years of history can find. This year I discovered a great book, The ZX Spectrum Book - 1982 to 199x. This ticks all the necessary 3 R's:

• rare (only 1000 copies produced, so hurry! )
• retro
• reminiscing

The days of the Spectrum were when it all really started to look good. Sure, the ZX81 was special, but I think even we knew then that it was maybe a wee bit pants. The Spectrum was altogether different, colour, sound and the birth of the game that had some sense of size and expanse.

You can easily find many sources online to fuel your nostalgia for this, but this book is a must for all such starry-eyed gazers into the past as it is not simply a trotting out of the available resources in print form, you can tell it has been produced with genuine affection. Great design, layout and attention to detail. If you loved the ZX Spectrum, you really need to get this book, it even looks like a Spectrum so you can hand it to your kids and say "never mind the Wii, this is a games machine, just imagine it with rubber buttons".
So, with this one simple book I appear to have won this year's Xmas present battle, although, with one much-trailed present from Stuart still to come, he could still snatch it, but he is already admitting defeat.

The best news of all is that the equivalent book about the Commodore 64 is about to come out and Stuart is going to buy me one for my birthday. If the ZX Spectrum was great, then the C64 was, well...if you know, you know...

* I say people, I really mean boys.

The Von Südenfed Family Singer

It is not customary for me to do reviews herein but I was moved to write about my experiences last night at a Von Südenfed gig in the Liquid Room in Edinburgh. Where to start?

Lets start with the album and the reason for going. Tromatic Reflexxions is a good album, quite a different sound for me and those familiar Mark E. Smith groans make it simultaneously new and old. I can't lay claim to being a hardcore Fall* fan. OK, I've maybe got 10 albums or so, but I know there is quite a lot of it I find average at best. Not something a real devotee would ever say. Clearly, there are many highlights, Frightened is probably in my top 10** songs ever. Mark has always been able to bring something different to songs. Take, for example, way back in 1994, his inspired addition to the Inspiral Carpets' I Want You ( Note use of lyric sheet, of which more later. )

The album isn't universally great, but The Rhinohead is marvellous, filled as it is with the spirit of the SID chip and Rob Hubbard. So, I was looking forward to hearing it live. Well, I might have heard it live. I'm not too sure.

Don't think I've been to a gig before were no one played instruments. That itself was novel. Two blokes behind and desk and they did their thing very well. The bass was like some form of battlefield organ-curdling weapon. I'd imagine that the Mouse of Mars fans in attendance would got exactly what they were after. Loud, incessant, kicking beats. Wasn't much of a dance atmosphere. No obvious signs of dancing or moshing. I thought I'd survived as much bass as was humanly possible in a night club in Mumbai, but this was much bigger and louder than any Bhangra.

A good few minutes in and no sign of Mr. Smith. Which was fine. Built up the expectation a bit. And then he arrived. He wandered onto stage, not too steadily and with ill-defined purpose. Dressed like he had just got out of jail in the clothes he went in with (in 1979), he cut a fine dash in a leather jacket that even your oldest, coolest Uncle would be proud of. Thing is, any concept of what he looked like was instantly over-ridden by the realisation that he looked not unlike the dwarf from Twin Peaks*** This was even more of a dramatic likeness as he bent over a light, reading the lyrics from an A4 sheet. If, at this juncture, I was auditioning for the more pretentious end of the music press I would launch into a discussion about David Lynch and dystopian nightmares.

That isn't as ridiculous a description as it my seem, but maybe not all that accessible. Imagine you had hired a rave band to your wedding. The young ones are dancing, the old ones are tutting and then your crazy Uncle gets up and starts shouting the words to "Ghost Riders in the Sky", except that he doesn't know the words and blurts out noises incoherently instead.

The first mic doesn't seem to work to well. A roadie appears with a new one and calmly escorted aside by a wise hand "Listen son, I've been in this game a while now." Good, he's on his game. Maybe. Things progress well, lyrics are read, mic is rammed into amp for ear-splitting reverb. Every time he approaches the desk there is a definite look of foreboding on the faces of the ever bouncy knob twiddlers (a great name for a band/porn film if ever there was one ).And then, as if my magic, he's gone. Off stage. Somewhere. Must be the smoking ban we think. The 'singing' continues from afar. Seems louder than before. Is it him? Is it a conveniently available sample. Its amazing what they can do nowadays.

From there, nothing much changes. The bass assault continues until my face starts to hurt in a way that you think it shouldn't. And then he's back for some more hunched burbling and away again. At this point, I am laughing almost constantly. Somehow it just wouldn't be right to turn up and just hear the album, only a bit louder. This is a proper occasion. Mark doing what Mark does best. Its not like he hasn't got previous. Even on live Fall albums from nearly 30 years ago he had a tendency to randomize any on-stage attempt at normality. This is what it should be.

A roadie appears on stage and can be seen to start a sentence with "Mark..." in the ear of the left boogie-meister. We all believe the full sentence is "Mark has passed out." But no!

The last triumphal appearance on stage is a tour de force. He's back, the lyrics match the tune, its kicking. For a couple of minutes. Cue march to front of stage, lyrics flung into air, mic handed to audience member and exeunt. No bears in attendance. Fantastic. Although, fantastic with "WTF?" tattooed on it.

There have always been those who saw Smith as a genius. And these aren't fools. But, to accept what I saw last night as genius demands quite a lot. Clearly he was out of it and it was undeniably funny. But a 45 minute set in which the lead 'singer' appears on stage for about 10 of those, seems to be a little profligate. Not least because of our foolish hope that there might be an up tempo, techno cover of Cruiser's Creek thrown in due to lack of material.

But hey, this was proper rock and roll, it was a much better story. And as I climb into my family MPV on the way home, you have to respect him for what he is and what he has been. Ain't none of us is as young as we used to be.****

In case you are wondering what it was that took me there in the first place, have a listen to this.

* For a start, the real fans would insist on saying "The Fall", then again, I've read the book, wonder if they all have.
** This is a "Tardis" top 10 containing 100 songs, deliberately not capitalised to annoy another set of devotees
*** If Stuart also uses this image, I thought of it first, he stole it
**** That was Stuart's line, I just stole it.

Puzzle People of the World Unite

Since the disappearance of Puzzle Donkey there has been a big hole in the puzzlers life. Sure, there is Sudoku and Nonogram sites aplenty but nothing that really gave the same sense of quest, of progress of, well, frankly, eye-bleeding frustration.

For this reason, it is with great delight that I write about the next in the line of great free online puzzle sites, Bimbogami. Due to launch this weekend, Bimbogami should be manna from heaven for all those puzzle fans that loved Puzzle Donkey and Not Pron. But, whilst it borrows from their sequential puzzle format, Bimbogami has a flavour and style all of its own. A combination of traditional logic puzzles with a new breed of interactive puzzles, makes it stand out as the next generation in online puzzling. Also, a unique taunting system reacts to your desperate guesses, a first in online puzzling.

The innovations don't end there, your thinking time is measured, your guesses are counted. When you mplete Bimbogami, the Hall of Fame will show who have been the real puzzle kings or queens.

So, we, the puzzling public thank you ManIC MorFF for this new puzzling experience and hope that all the many thousands of keen puzzlers out there get right behind it when it goes lives and turns it into he phenomenon it deserves to be. After all, its free, its fun and its utterly compelling. And there is currently no free online puzzle experience that gets anywhere close.

There is a simple taster puzzle to get you going and from there get right on to registering. You know you want to.

Enjoy.

No, not the Brandy

There are those among my reader(sic) that believe my love of Albert Camus comes from a teenager's desire for pretentious chic or, at best, some sort of angsty, pseudo-philosophical hankering. ( And anyway, if I had wanted to be pretentious for the sake of it, I was reading Ionesco too in those days, and you only read that in French. Sadly, this is no longer an option.)
There has to be an element of that in that somewhere. Not least because I had read pretty much everything he had ever written by the age of 17 or so and there is no doubt I didn't understand much of the more philosophical stuff (The Rebel, Myth of Sisyphus etc). But it did all sound cool when you read it.
Perhaps I will have a go at such philosophy again one day but for now I am re-reading L'Etranger (The Outsider, or The Stranger if you prefer) and La Peste (The Plague). I'm currently half-way through The Outsider (my Penguin edition still in very good condition and bearing the sticker inside that testifies that I bought it after winning an Engineering prize at school, which is altogether a very distant memory).
I decided to re-read them as I plan to embark on writing Terra Exitus sometime this year and I wanted to read something very bare to see, florid as I am, if I could have a slight style adjustment.

Without doubt, Camus is the most stripped down prose you could read. This could be related to the translation but, get ready for the sigh Stuart, having read it in French I think its just like that. The text doesn't really flow, its quite choppy and what comes across most is the sheer simplicity of it. And therein lies the tale, there is no way I could even think about trying to write in anything like that style, it would drive me mad. So, I'm not going to try, don't get me wrong though, Terra Exitus will be far from cheery.

Still, it has been great to go back to over 20 years since I first read it. And the important thing is, that for all its simplicity and starkness, I still love it. I'm very much looking forward to La Peste now which, for all its chill outlook on the 'human condition' is by far the best book I have ever read. I would encourage everyone to read it.

Track of the Day:
Deadbeat Club by the B. 52's, for all their sillyness, this really is a moment of splendour.

Website of the Day:
Ball in a Cup Vid - I admire the dedication it took to make this and because of the 'Box Game' we used to play at University