New Year Post

Just a totally random post as usual ;-P (By the way, I might be updating my blog a little less in January... we'll see...)

Anyway, firstly something that should have been in my Christmas post, but I was sent this link a bit late, so I'm including it in my New Year post instead:


Secondly, there's lots of end of the year articles, statistics, polls etc. few of which I find interesting ;-P (even the Bollywood ones don't seem to be holding my attention) But here are two exceptions to the rule...
This is a ranking of 100 strange facts compiled from BBC news stories in 2006.
And here's something for movie buffs - the IMDb Starmeter. Every year IMDb (the biggest movie database on-line) compiles a ranking of the most visited star pages, which may well be one of the best ways of determining who are the most popular film stars in the world...

Virgin births

Because I think virgin births are a very appropriate subject matter at this time of year, here is a BBC story concerning some. Flora's eight babies will be due around Christmas which makes this story even more appropriate ;-P And in case you're wondering Flora is a komodo dragon :D

A Christmas post

So, er, Merry Christmas everyone :D

Here's a Christmas card from Greenpeace (it's rather indoctrinating, but I still think it's nice ;-P).

This on the other hand is a rather amazing (and ridiculous) show of Christmas lights which my mum sent me a link to:

You can read more about it here.

And finally I wanted to link to PotterCast #68 (right-click on the link to download the mp3) which has some absolutely amazing Christmas Carols with Harry Potter lyrics (they start at about 0:33:30 on the file). My personal favourites are the one to Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer about Moaning Myrtle (about 0:35:30) and the one which is supposed to be Snape singing (about 0:42:30). Of course they'll probably only be funny to those who read Harry Potter obsessively, but I still thought I'd pass the link on ;-P

Polish National Figure Skating Championships 2007 (Senior and Novice)

My more detailed skating impressions are in Polish on the walley forum where they belong. This is just a random post which pretends to be about skating, but is actually a very bad attempt at proving that I do have something that you might call a social life and that isn't confined to the internet (something that everyone including me seem to notoriously doubt). Just to keep up appearances though, here are the results of this event.

Anyway, back to my social life - here is the proof I have for its existance:

See, I am sitting with as many as four people (and a fifth is taking the picture), don't you think that's impressive? ;)

Ok, ok - I know I've not convinced anyone ;-P I am a sad, lonely person who doesn't have a social life and nobody likes me, so I keep writing a blog instead ;-P
I do however have a peculiar passion for watching figure skating and it can get so extreme that I go to watch skating events that no more than 5 other people (who aren't skaters, coaches, skating officials or families of a skater) want to watch and then I torment innocent people by putting up video clips of these performances on-line.
If you think you're up for the challenge, here are two clips from Nats (do you like my camerawork? ;-P). I uploaded them to google because youtube doesn't like me (either me or my firewall). There will be more vids on the walley forum, but this is all I'm putting on my blog from this event.

This is Ania Jurkiewicz who has made a comeback this season. She was once 5th at junior Worlds, but has not competed for the last 4 years or so. Me and the 4 people you can see on the photo above tried to remember when was the last time that a lady in Poland landed a triple flip at Polish Nationals and we had to go back to about 1999 or 2000... Therefore please enjoy the first triple flip performed by a lady at Polish Nats in the last 7 years or so ;-P (and the program is pretty good too, she won the senior ladies by a mile)


And this is the short program of Przemek Domański. I'm a huge fan of his. And while probably a major reason for my fandom is that he likes to tell us about how he keeps wiping his nose on his trousers during sit spins and what happens during a jump if he doesn't find a moment in the performance where he can wipe it (which apparently was particularly problematic at these Nats because the rink was very cold), he is also a very ambitious skater and I think this season he's skating at a truly international level. Proof of that is that he was not satisfied with this short program which he said was his worst this season (he had meant to start with a triple-triple combination, not a triple-double). He still won both parts of the senior men competition and ended up with a 20 point margin over everyone else.


So after having failed to convince anyone that I have a social life or that Polish skating is interesting (which it really is to me although sometimes even I'm surprised by this), I convey my Christmas wishes to all who are reading my blog :) I hope the one or two people reading it spend it very enjoyably!

NOTE (29.XII.2006): I would like to give credit for the wonderful photo I used to Magda :D (see the comments to this post). I have also been instructed to say that she is not in fact a blackmailer contrary to what I've written about her in the comments (but I'm not sure if you're better off believing her or me about it ;-P)

Very geeky article about how google works

A bit of a follow-up to my previous post. You can read a very geeky article about how google's search engine works here. I didn't read the whole thing (too mathematical), but even reading just the beginning where they explain about page rank I thought was very interesting.

My favourite part of the article is the opening:
Imagine a library containing 25 billion documents but with no centralized organization and no librarians. In addition, anyone may add a document at any time without telling anyone. You may feel sure that one of the documents contained in the collection has a piece of information that is vitally important to you, and, being impatient like most of us, you'd like to find it in a matter of seconds. How would you go about doing it?
Posed in this way, the problem seems impossible. Yet this description is not too different from the World Wide Web, a huge, highly-disorganized collection of documents in many different formats.

Something (from the article) that I found particularly cool to play around with is this page rank checker. It's only an estimate, but it's fun to play around with. Can you find any pages with rank 10? :D The only one I tried that got 10 was google itself ;-P But I found a couple of 9s (wikipedia, IMDb,yahoo).

Search Mash - the new Google (literally)

Google is always changing and developping (and it has to if it's to stay the biggest in its field). But of course whilst it's testing new things out, it can't afford anything to break. This is where Search Mash comes in. It's the bleeding edge version of google.
It's already quite cool, so you might want to try it out. If you want to find out more, check out this article.

The Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves (1991)

I just watched "Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves" and had a really good laugh. It is a very Hollywoodish film (as in Robin Hood is your classic unflawed action hero), but I was surprised at some of the themes in it to the point of wondering how it's possible that censors and Hollywood producers (in the early 1990s no less) let that through. And then I visited IMDb's trivia page for this film and found out that actually they didn't let these things through ;-P
Don't get me wrong, it's not as if there's anything that shocking in it, but it's not what you'd expect of a light-hearted movie like this - particularly one which is aiming at rather low age certificates (PG in the UK, PG-13 in the US).

From what I can make out (based on the IMDb boards for this film), I was watching the extended British DVD version which has less cuts than the original theatrical release, but is still cut more than some of the DVD releases elsewhere in the world. The reason for this is that the British distributor wanted to retain a PG certificate for the film.

What does the Sheriff of Nottingham have to do with all these censorship musings? Well, that was the character that they cut the most of (this film is quite a different take on him). The cuts not relating to him were done purely because of excessive gore, although why they were excessive I cannot say because the version I saw didn't have them in ;-P (Although to give you an inkling - even in what I saw, this film is pretty heavy on medieval torture)
Most of the scenes relating to the Sheriff were thankfully (because I thought they were the best part of the film) left in my version, although I'm rather disapointed at not having seen him scheduling his whores with words such as "you! my room...10:30. and you! 10:45. and bring a friend." .
One of the most baffling cuts that were made to the version of the film that I watched is the removal of part of the famous spoon dialogue (it's so famous that WikiQuote has it on its spoon page). They kept the first line, but removed the other two. I don't quite understand this cut (why would those lines make a difference between a PG or higher certificate?), but see what you think for yourself - here is the quote:
"Locksley! I'm gonna cut your heart out with a spoon."
"Why a spoon cousin? Why not an axe?"
"Because it's dull, you twit, it'll hurt more."

I cannot continue writing without mentioning how good Alan Rickman is as the Sheriff and prewarn you that there might be quite a lot of gushing about him in the rest of this post ;-P I would have put in a video link here, but I haven't found anything suitable (the trailer is awful and has hardly any of Rickman in it anyway), so I'll content myself with a link to a picture of him as the Sheriff of Nottingham.
So first of all, one of the reasons to love the Sheriff of Nottingham in this film is that he has all the best lines ;-P There's some very black humour there (something that I think doesn't usually feature in American action films) and the way Alan Rickman delivers it is absolutely hilarious.
While the darkness of the character is maybe not portrayed that graphically, it is certainly one of the most perverse Hollywood villains I've seen in a while. Right at the start we're introduced not just to the atrocities he inflicts on people and his lack of anykind of fair play (quite classic elements to any Hollywood villain ;-P), but also to his total lack of sexual inhibition and perhaps most perversely (at least I was very surprised to see this and it didn't make the theatrical release) the film also shows him worshipping the devil.
But apparently, Alan Rickman wasn't playing a villain *grin* Here is something he says in the DVD extras:
I'm not playing a villain. I'm just playing somebody who has a certain checklist of things that he wants in life and he goes after them. And other people say, like Robin Hood decides, that's appalling and it must be stopped.
While the quote totally cracks me up, this is actually what I most loved about Alan Rickman's portrayal. Despite playing some things which are quite perverse when you start thinking about them, the way it's done there's just no judgement of whether the Sheriff is doing right or wrong, it's played as if whatever Nottingham is doing is the most natural thing in the world to do. This, as you might imagine, has a rather bizzarre effect in scenes such as a bishop performing a marriage ceremony while the Sheriff is holding his bride down on the floor and preparing to rape her in front of the bishop the moment the marriage is proclaimed (this was probably my favourite scene, although hardly the only one I loved).

On a final note, here's a thread on the IMDb boards that amused me a lot. I'm very obviously not alone in adoring Alan Rickman as Nottingham (the thread is titled "Did anyone else want the Sheriff of Nottingham to win?"). I doubt anyone will want to wade through the whole thing because it's very long. It's basically lots of people gushing about Alan Rickman and many of them saying he was much better than Kevin Costner (who played Robin Hood) and then there's people who think these people who like Nottingham so much are mad and saying Costner was way better and how can anybody find such an evil character sexy anyway. There are two quotes that particularly cracked me up. The first is by somebody who like me clearly enjoyed Nottingham a lot, but I find her wording rather amusing:
Its very impolite to want to cut someones heart out with a spoon but he makes it sound so funny!
And then there's a post by somebody who thinks all these people gushing over such an evil character are completely mad:
Lets's see...you guys are all rooting for a man who is a: murderer (of his own cousin and no doubt thousands of others); a would-be rapist; a devil worshipper; a contract killer (hiring Celts to do his dirty work); a pervert (with dozens of whores at his beck and call). Yeah, you picked a real upstanding criminal to admire and drool over. WELL NOT ME!

Freaky deaths

The BBC somehow managed to report three deaths that rather freaked me out in very short succession of each other.

Here's the story of Mariesa Weber, who was missing and then finally found dead by her family wedged upside down behind a bookcase in her room.

This is about a baby murdered in a microwave.

And this is about a boy who was eaten alive by a herd of pigs.

At first I read these stories in the way I would read a fictional horror story (I even once saw a film in which one of the characters was eaten alive by pigs). But then after a moment of reading and thinking about it I totally freak out - it's real! People really do die like that!