His Oscar-opening monologue for your viewing pleasure:
Archive for February, 2008
gazuky.net
I’ve just finished putting together a website to promote my comedy writing.
I’m stepping up my efforts to sell my abilities to producers and editors, and this website will be a useful way of showcasing some ‘end results’ rather than scripts that rely somewhat on individual interpretation. Scripts will feature on the site, but I’d like visitors to be entertained in other ways first.
I’ve tried to make the site as simple as possible to navigate, while providing enough content to keep visitors busy for as long as they wish to stay.
You can view the site at gazuky.net
A Bootiful Song
Eurovision time is nearly upon us again, with countries all over Europe frantically trying to pick a song that will win them the prestige that is a Eurovision Song Contest victory.
Ireland came in last in 2007, and could easily repeat that feat, judging from their entry for this year. You can view and hear it here. I’m saying nothing more, except it will be interesting to hear what Terry Wogan has to say about its first line…
We (the UK) will be choosing our song next weekend, although there will be some studio judges this year to ensure that, unlike Ireland, we don’t pick a complete turkey (Scooch anyone?)
However, anyone who knows a thing or two about music hasn’t a hope of predicting the winner. You’d be much better off asking someone who has their finger on the pulse of Eastern European politics. Any country that’s disliked by the majority of Europe doesn’t stand a chance.
Which makes me wonder why the UK and the BBC is bothering at all…
Comedy Magazines
Given the popularity of the ‘comedy industry’ (stand-up gigs, comedy films, government press releases), you would think that there’d be more magazines dedicated to this well-loved genre. But take a walk down to WHSmiths (or Borders for a better class of clientele) and you’ll see all the usual suspects: computing (geek porn), lad’s mags (porn lite), bodybuilding and fitness (gay porn lite), card-making (granny porn) and porn (porn) – but no comedy!
There have been some cracking comedy mags in the past, but they’ve all bitten the dust within a few issues (except for ‘Punch’ which took a few decades). There was one called ‘Comedy’ in the early 90s that barely survived past issue 2 despite a wonderful interview with Stephen Fry in its first issue. Then there was ‘Squib’ which carried no advertising (therein lies a clue to its demise) but was absolutely jam-packed with hilarious cartoons and articles (one of which was mine!)
So it’s great to see a new comedy magazine bravely attempting to make its mark: ‘Mustard’ is a new independent mag that I picked up last week in Borders in Birmingham. Its cover feature is an interview with Graham Linehan (of the IT Crowd and Father ted fame) that provides some great insights and tips for budding comedy writers. There are also enough cartoons and short humorous pieces to while away a train journey of some length (Cheltenham to Bristol Temple Meads perhaps – if you’re going to Exeter, take a ‘People’s Friend’ too).
Check it out – their website is www.mustardweb.org – issue 2 is out in March and you can still buy issue 1 on-site. They’re also looking for contributions.
Highly recommended!
It’s nice to be 80, to be 80…
…NICE!!
Happy 80th Birthday to Bruce Forsyth, one of my favourite entertainers who never fails to make me chuckle when he’s on the box.
May he continue to entertain the nation for many more years!
It’s not easy not seeing green…
I’ve been designing a couple of websites over the past two weeks – an activity that I find particularly challenging due to my colour-blindness.
Whenever I tell someone I’m colour-blind, it usually triggers a series of questions about what I’m able to see (sometimes including the classic “what colour is that grass?”). But it’s almost impossible to explain the experience accurately.
Rather than not being able to see certain colours at all, colour-blindness is more about not being able to see colours in certain contexts. The most obvious is not being able to see colours when they’re in close proximity to others (as in the well-known colour-blind test ‘blobs’). There are countless ways that this problem manifests itself in day-to-day life: picking the desired coloured-pencil out of a tub containing many colours, picking out subtle colours in a fabric and so on.
The problem seems to worsen when the areas of colour are very small, and are quite close to each other in terms of shade: it’s almost impossible, for example, for me to see red berries on a tree (or even a robin).
There are more bizarre problems when it comes to even large areas of colour. Although I can ’see’ every colour when it’s spread in a large area, I find it incredibly difficult to identify many of them without some frame of reference. The most bizarre of which is identifying grey as pink and vice versa. Unless certain shades of grey and pink are side by side, I can never be sure quite what the colour is. It’s the same with shades of green, brown and red. And I can never tell what colour dark suits are.
I really do envy everyone who can see the full spectrum of colour, as I suspect I’m living in quite a dull world in comparison. I can see rainbows, but can only see them change from shades of blue to shades of orange unless they’re particularly striking.
It’s also a good job that I’m not particularly devoted to on-line gaming. The mini-maps that are used to pinpoint the location of friends and foes usually employ red and green markers which are impossible to distinguish. I guess that’s why I like Pacman – at least I can easily tell who’s who!
And if you think that colour-blind people have no trouble on the roads, think again! Yes, I can see the traffic lights OK, but it was years and years before I was told that cat’s eyes are actually different colours depending on where they’re sited. Didn’t have a clue.
I use blue in most of my websites as it’s the most distinctive colour I can see, and I can be much more sure of picking it out correctly than I can most other colours. Most of my websites tend to feature very bold colours, and I’m guilty of picking some pretty awful combinations.
Still – why should I care? I can’t see a bloody thing!
Stamford Links
My mum and stepdad are moving to Stamford in a few days time, having lived in Bristol for nearly 3 years.
I was born and raised in Stamford, and have missed having frequent trips back to the old haunting ground (*edit* LOL – hunting ground!) I love living in Birmingham, and Bristol is a great city to visit, but when you live in a city it’s always nice to get a break away from the pollution and concrete.
Stamford is a few miles away from Peterborough in the very southern tip of Lincolnshire (it’s actually on the border of 4 counties). It’s supposed to have the highest density of pubs for a town of its size in Britain, and has some beautiful architecture. The BBC have chosen it as a filming location for their period dramas on more than one occasion.
If that all sounds very British and middle-class, then you’re right. It’s a world away from Birmingham and its tatty suburbs, which I do love in my own strange way.
St Philips Cathedral
I took this atmospheric picture on the way to the gym this evening. It’s of St Philips Cathedral on Colmore Row, Birmingham.
I
My Nokia N73 tends to take slightly blocky pictures in low light, but this was one of the more successful efforts. It’s a bit ropey in parts, but you get the general feeling.
I have a cold at the moment and the gym was absolute hell. Hopefully it’s knocked some of the nasties out of me. This is one of those colds that takes aaaaages to come on – hopefully it won’t hang around too long. Oh god, I’m sounding like a typical bloke aren’t I? Man-flu alert!!
Flash! A-aaaaaaaargh!!!!!!
I’ve just wasted several hours of my life trying to add a Flash animation to a 2-minute sound file of Topical Pish.
My idea was to show the narrator speaking in a studio, with a monitor screen showing stills that relate to the dialogue/news and a news ticker scrolling underneath providing some humorous extra content.
Everything was fine visually until I came to add the news ticker. This is something that Flash can’t do easily, and so I had to get a plug-in. This worked well, and I was back on track.
Then it was time to add the sound file. This gets added to a separate layer, which was fine. I then started to match the timing of the visuals on the ’screen’ to the dialogue. Again, this was fine… until I exported the movie as a test-file. Two issues:
The first is that the audio goes ever-so-slightly out of sync with the visuals. So what worked in the editing environment, failed in the movie – and spectacularly so, as a few of the pics need to appear in sync with the sound for comic effect.
Also, it seems that the news ticker can’t cope with the addition of a sound file – I wanted the news to scroll across the screen at a rate that would allow everything to be shown before the end of the two minutes. Unfortunately, the addition of sound slows it down to a crawl no matter how hight the value you enter for ’scroll speed’.
I then looked for a workaround. Maybe, I thought – foolishly – I could export the Flash file without sound as an AVI clip, then add the sound in Windows movie maker? That would get the ticker working at the right speed, and I could play around with the movie to get it in sync with the audio. Nope – the export-to-AVi function doesn’t like something about the movie (probably the news ticker add-in) and just creates a corrupt file that can’t be imported to Movie Maker.
There are no other file formats I can export to that work with Movie Maker, so that’s that idea scuppered.
So, I’m sitting here having done all the work without anything to show for it because of bloody software glitches.
Does anyone have any ideas!? Please?!!
He speaks for us all…
I have to pass this on from a Facebook group celebrating the aural pleasure of mobile phone music on public transport:
“I swear I’m not making this up! Yesterday, business-as-usual, some school age chav-wannabe twonker was trying to impress his lady by playing his entire fone-mp3 collection as loud as possible in the middle of my train carriage. (Well I say mine, actually it’s Central Trains, but I digress)
This huge blackguy, (I’m not kidding when I say huge, I thought we’d gone through a tunnel when his shadow fell on me) asked him nicely to put his fone away and was rewarded by a mouthful of profanity.
Blackguy, just smiles, nods, sighs resignedly, then plucks the fone from twonkers fingers, drops it to the floor and stamps on it!
Blackguy – now my personal hero – bends down and plonks the remains of the now ex-fone into the hands of the disbelieving twonker – and says ‘Oops.’
Twonker just sits there, while his lady cracks-up and my own personal hero goes back to his seat to a smattering of applause from the general direction of my seat.
Facebook is amazing, you suggest something and it happens the day after – today I’m wishing for a Bugatti Veyron!
“
- by Robert Powell
If only I’d have started going to the gym when I was 15, I too could have done things like that.
