TV, Movies, Music

A month ago, I started playing the drums.

OK, that's a bit of a romanticisation.  What I actually mean is I started playing the drum part on the video game Rock Band.

Still, they reckon that if you can master the songs on "expert" level, you could sit down at a real drum kit, make the same movements and you'd be actually playing that song.

I'm sure that if real drum kits only had four things to hit, all of them being the same shape and each one always making the right sound at the correct volume no matter where or how hard you hit it, and with a couple of them doubling up as tom-toms and cymbals, then this would be true.

However, for someone of my limited co-ordination - and having never picked up a pair of drumsticks in my life before - I consider it something of an achievement that I got my first 100% score on hard level today.

The photo is horrible, sorry - I only had my phone to hand.  It just about shows Claire getting 99% on guitar (apparently just one silly mistake away from perfection, she's done it 100% before) and my massive 100% with a 1016 note streak, both playing hard level on The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go".  I will almost certainly make the effort to fetch a proper camera the first time we both nail it at the same time.

That has happened before, but only on medium difficulty (Pixies "Wave of Mutilation" is pretty straightforward for both parts) and we've already gained as many virtual fans in the "world tour" mode as we can without moving up to hard level.

I'm not unhappy at acing The Clash, but I actually wanted my first 100% song to be Weezer's "Buddy Holly" so I had an excuse to embed that video rather than just link to it.  Or Nine Inch Nails, because that sounds like it should be a lot harder than it actually is.  I've been very close on both.

Or for bonus cheese points, it could have been The B-52s "Roam".  I don't care what you think, it's great fun to play and I already had a 1600+ note streak and came within one brain fart of doing it perfectly!

So, for the next step in my drumming career, I need to decide which route to take.  Should I aspire to be as great as this guy, who owns every song on expert level, and has made many top quality videos to prove it?

Yes, he has socks strapped to the drum pads.  This is strangely appealing.  The only modification I have is a set of Hard Rock logo drumsticks painted with a flame pattern.

Or, should I paint my face blue and start hitting other things?  How would that be for a career change?

There's already an official "stage kit" with lights and a smoke machine due out this summer, but I haven't heard anything about a paint drumming kit yet.  It's inevitable though, I'm sure.

The Rt Hon Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, spotted this evening on BBC television wearing a Party Poker shirt.

OK, it's actually a Leyton Orient football strip so it probably doesn't count.  But I did get a bit excited for a moment and think that maybe he'd bought it using his PartyPoints.

Here's a rarity - I saw a movie based on a book I'd actually read.

I think the only other time this has ever happened before was with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

There's no point trying to do an objective critique of the film because - let's be honest - it was going to have to be a real turkey for me not to love it.  Just look at the ingredients: Vegas, gambling and maths geeks.  It's already a winner on paper as far as I'm concerned.  Who needs exploding helicopters? 

Of course the little things bug me a bit.  Like how they walk into the Hard Rock and then they're seen playing at Red Rock (it says so on the tables and chips, but you can't really see it in YouTube-def) - even though those casinos are about 10 miles apart.  I guess having one word the same in the names is enough that we're not meant to notice.

Then suddenly they're inside Planet Hollywood in the same sequence (the interior is quite distinctive, even without the fake plastic jewels from the former Aladdin) and finally walk out of the Hard Rock into the morning sun (guitar-shaped door handles @ 1m59 in the trailer, if you're bothered).

In one scene, the team have a discussion about whether you should split pairs of 8s and 10s, with some saying "yes, always" and others saying it's a "sucker play" against a dealer's ace.

This is a team apparently comprised of very clever individuals who have figured out how to make money by working the mathematics of the game to their advantage.  There's just no room for debate on topics like this - the numbers do the talking.

Blackjack is a game played to a fixed set of rules with a finite number of possibilities (you can't keep hitting for ever) so there can only be one right answer.  These guys would know the correct play for every situation or they wouldn't be betting thousands of dollars of Kevin Spacey's money on a hand.

In fact, you should always split 8s - even against an ace as long as the dealer checks for Blackjack first, otherwise you surrender if possible and hit if not.  You never split a pair of tens or face cards.  Unless you're card counting, when a very high count can flip the strategy on its head.  Or unless you "have a feeling", of course.

Of course, we see the big player splitting tens in the movie - and winning big because the deck is rich in tens.  You see whenever the count is high, players invariably get 20 and the dealer invariably busts.  That's just the way it works.

Perhaps including this uncertainty and - to some extent - misinformation about the game was payment in kind to the casinos where filming took place.  Or perhaps I'm a little too cynical.

Anyhow, I still enjoyed the movie and it's always good to know I'm not as picky as some.  Several reviews have plenty to say about just how bad this movie must be because it's not 100% true to life as every Hollywood movie obviously should be.  They're taking it much too seriously, and they're all wrong.

John Chang, the real Micky Rosa
http://mickeyrosa.com/?p=13

MIT team member and poker pro, Andy Bloch:
http://www.pokerroad.com/_/pokerazzi/4-1-08

Blackjack author, Don Schlesinger:
http://www.advantageplayer.com/blackjack/forums/bj-main/webbbs.cgi?read=25030

Internet legend, the Wizard of Odds:
http://wizardofodds.com/blackjack/21movie.html

Some dude called "Bootlegger" on Stanford Wong's BJ21.com forum:
http://www.bj21.com/boards/free/free_board/index.cgi?noframes;read=156592

I now have my download link for Radiohead's new "pay what you think it's worth" album, In Rainbows.

I paid 50p.

I got Spice Girls tickets! And corkers they are too. Block 106, row D - actualy facing the stage. That almost never happens.

Stopped laughing at me yet? OK. Now for the obligatory rant about Ticketbastard fees.

There are so many great advantages to trading online. Having a global presence without needing premises; staying open around the clock without needing extra staff; never needing to actually speak to customers. Reduced overheads produce savings that can be passed on to make you more competitive. At least that's how it should be.

Absolutely everything you can buy is cheaper on the internet, except for concert tickets. But when the only way you can buy tickets is online and one site has a monopoly, they don't need to be competitive.

My two £75 tickets cost £169.75. You're laughing again, aren't you?

The £2.25 charge for "standard post" I can almost live with. Who doesn't inflate their shipping costs to build in a little extra profit when they're selling junk on eBay? I know I do, so it's a bit hypocritical to take issue with an overpriced stamp.

But the "service charge" on this was the fattest I've ever seen. £8.75 on each ticket! Where the hell does that come from?  There must be a human involved in the process somewhere along the way so we can't deny them a little something towards their expenses. And sure, it's a business so they're going to want to make money by adding a booking fee. Come on though? A surcharge that's the same price as a CD (delivered) for every person who goes to a concert?

Here's the official explanation:

This Service Charge (otherwise known as a Convenience Charge or Booking Fee) is a fee that covers costs that allow Ticketmaster to provide the widest range of available tickets while giving you multiple ways to purchase. Tickets are available in many towns and cities via local ticket outlet locations, our Call Centre and ticketmaster.co.uk.

What a crock of shit.  These tickets were only available online - you needed to be selected to get sent a password to stand a chance of booking - and the first batch sold out in 38 seconds this morning.  Where's the convenience in having to be online at 10am on the dot to have to fight through the booking process in record time and take whatever tickets you're lucky enough to have thrown your way?  If you decide you don't like the look of the seats it's picked for you and want to try again, you're probably going to miss out.

Similarly, if you come up against an impossible Turing test, like these, you're pretty much buggered.

Apparently if you relax your eyes, you can see a helicopter in the one on the right.

Tickets from the first show raked in £175,000 in booking fees in under a minute. Then three more dates were announced, and then four more. Overall the juice on just those eight shows heading into the pockets of Ticketmaster shareholders is £1.4 million - I think somebody just got a new yacht.  It's not exactly skilled work stuffing tickets into envelopes. The fees I paid on just two tickets could fund three hours of minimum-wage labour. Plenty of time, even if their equal opportunities policy demands the use of partially-sighted amputees with Parkinson's disease.  It's somewhat generous.

What's most annoying is why is the service charge for this is so much higher than for other tickets? Am I somehow getting a much better service than I would, for instance, with my £12 face value ticket to see The Donnas next month (and I'm really not ashamed about that either), which carried a £1.20 fee? The postage on those was cheaper too, at £1.75. Are the Spice Girls tickets really heavy?

Seriously, if people have been successfully taking their banks to court to claim back unreasonable charges for overdrafts I might start keeping a tally of just how much Ticketmaster has ripped me off and see if I can't do something about it. It would probably pay for my next car.

It's just like how the Montecito in the TV show Las Vegas can't stand still.  That ficticious casino must have occupied just about every possible spot on the Strip by now.  In the latest season, exterior shots put it on the far south end of the Strip opposite Luxor, whereas the view from James Caan's office looks like it's taken from inside Treasure Island, nearly three miles away.

The Bank Casino featured in Ocean's Thirteen has Montecito syndrome.  It appears to have slid about a mile along the road in between being built and opening.

I finally have the photographic evidence I was so obsessively trying to find, and with it an excuse to post a whole bunch of Vegas pictures.  I actually got these screencaps from a German language bootleg - the added bonus was being able to hear the translation of Don Cheadle's craptastic English accent.

In this scene, during the construction of the hotel, you can see the Mirage dead centre and the letters "PHAN" from a banner for Phantom - The Las Vegas Spectacular to the left of Al Pacino's back.  The location has to be somewhere between Venetian and Wynn, presumably it was filmed in the shell of Palazzo, or possibly Encore at Wynn Las Vegas.

They appear to be very proud of the CGI for the Strip's latest monstrosity, and we get to see it from several angles as well as different lighting conditions - during the day, in the evening and after sunset.  This close up shows what the architecturally impossible, twisty brown thing that's meant to be a hotel actually looks like.

And here a wider shot shows its location on the Strip.

So we're looking North along the Strip with the Stratosphere in the far distance.  Monte Carlo is at the bottom left and the top of New York New York is just poking into the frame.  The Bank sits right between Polo Towers (bottom right) and Aladdin/Planet Hollywood (white hotel with two jutty out bits).  Follow the road and you'll see the fake Eiffel Tower, and just across the street the dancing fountains at Bellagio are in action.

Look really hard and you'll see the Stardust is still standing.  To be fair, you have to know what you're looking for, so I've added a subtle visual clue below.  This is surely the last time you'll see it in a movie.

The Bank's outward location is somewhat confirmed by a southerly view from inside the hotel.  Polo Towers is the building with the neon outline at bottom centre, and towards the upper right corner you can see the MGM Grand Marquee, a hotel tower which I think must be the Tropicana (where did the big green MGM go?), and Mandalay Bay.

Also from the ground, this still looks about right.  Our POV is behind crowds standing outside the casino looking across, and down the street a bit, at the Bellagio.

However here's the view that I'm just not sure about.  Ignore the silhouette of Matt Damon's legs, and you'll see Paris, Caesars and Bellagio all visible.  How does that work then?  I just wouldn't be doing my job as a Vegas nit correctly if I didn't point out that in the second photo on the far left you can just see the same Bellagio marquee as in the ground-level shot above; but from a totally different angle.  I guess it's just a big hotel, or something.

Anyway, enough pedantry and gratuitous photos of Las Vegas, what did I think of the film?

I loved it.  I'm pretty sure I was always going to, so I know I can't really review it constructively.  To be fair, it's a very average heist movie, with an over-the-top cast of big names, too many to squeeze them all into a coherent storyline.  So the end result is a bunch of megastars doing a bunch of stuff in and around Vegas.

On that basis: A+, movie delivers.

As I still haven't found the screencaps I wanted for the stuff I was going to write about Ocean's Thirteen (watch this space, I'm sure it'll be worth it, no unnecessary hype here) in the meantime I will leave you in the more than capable hands of a somewhat ranty Mark Kermode, expressing his dislike not only for the movie, but also for the city I will one day call home.  Cheekily borrowed from the podcast of his BBC Five Live show.

I'm not transcribing the whole thing - just press the damn play button, it's only a minute long - but here's a taster.

"If truth be told, Las Vegas needs to be wiped from the face of the earth because it is an evil abomination and, you know, bad and a blight upon mankind.  Obviously."

Separated at birth?

The oven is in the bedroom.  The fridge is in the garden.  The men are nowhere to be seen.

A stalker, the whistle posse and twins?

And there's clearly a hidden message in the eye, somewhere.

As usual, my summer is over before it's begun.

EDIT: LOCAL TWINS!

Saw the Pet Shop Boys last night, in Wolverhampton.  It sounded a little something like this.

When I look back upon my lie-uf
It's always with a sense of shay-um
I've always been the one to blay-um

The fact that this clip is the best I could find from about twenty thousand cellphone bootlegs on YouTube is surely reason enough to allow people to take decent recording equipment to concerts these days.

If a whole bunch of people are going to stand in front of me holding their phones up in the air, rush home and see who can be first to upload a tiny, shaky recording of half a song with terrible sound that's not even in sync with what video you can see, I'd much rather they were getting in my way with a decent camera and a boom mic.  At least that way I'd be able to see the bits I missed when I got home.

Anyway, what's so gay about an on stage shiny gold cowboy teaching another cowboy on screen to swing his pants? Am I not allowed to find this entertaining?

It's as close to official as it can get.  Sounds like nobody was meant to say anything but Peter Hook let it slip last week, and confirmed it on his MySpace page yesterday:

"so i went on and lo and behold mentioned the N>O> split so i suppose because it was me sayin it it was out at last. im relieved really hated carryin on as normal with an awful secret"

So how do I pick one song to post to mark the passing of my all time favourite group of all time?

If I had a recording of it, I'd post the dreadful version of State of the Nation that "my band" performed at Kirby Muxloe Church Hall circa 1991.  With a bonus added rap - I kid you not.  There's many reasons I don't have a career in music.  For this travesty, even though it was a one-off, I'm very very sorry indeed.

Thankfully, this will have to do.  Incidentally, this is also the song I want played at my funeral.

On that happy note...

On tonight's show, Derren Brown went to Las Vegas and brainwashed an American lady into thinking that red was black.  The effect was dramatic.  She was pretty freaked out to see that her red car had apparently been resprayed whilst she enjoyed an evening at the Peppermill.  But what the cameras didn't show is the complete meltdown, possibly followed by night in jail, she must have had trying to play roulette shortly afterwards.

In the Trick or Treat feature, he apparently taught a 75 year old granny to play poker.  For this show victims are asked to choose from two cards to pick whether they'll get something nice or something nasty.  I have to admit I thought the whole series would be manipulated so it was always a trick, but tonight's sweet old lady got a treat.

There's no psychology involved in forcing the choice: both cards are identical, with a cunning and overly elaborate typeface used so that it reads "trick" when held one way up and "treat" when flipped over.  I confess: I had to pause the show using Sky+ and turn my head right round to check this out, and had to use Google to find out that the word I didn't know I was looking for is "ambigram".

Super Gran is given a crash course in Texas Hold'em and then dropped into a tournament situation with five professionals.  Probably not ones you'd have heard of.  Derren has taught her superlative reading skills, which is apparently enough to ensure that she will win a made-for-TV crapshoot poker-style tournament.  They said it lasted a 90 minutes start to finish, fast even for a six-handed tournament.  We only got to see three hands.

She called an all-in bet with a king-high flush draw.  Perhaps she learned to recognise weakness from the bettor, but depending on stack sizes and money in the pot this could be a pretty standard call anyway.  They didn't say.  We don't know how much she'd learned about playing draws.  Perhaps it looked like the nuts against a player with a twitch, but with one overcard and a draw you're rarely a favourite.  Except the few times you come up against a smaller unpaired flush draw.  Which she did.

Facing an all-in preflop with K9s, Derren's horse makes the call.  The other player has T7o.  Given the emphasis on how good these other players all are, we have to assume that he made an automatic push with a short stack, so this was probably an automatic call.

With AQ on a flop of A88, our hero decides that her hand is good.  Maybe I still have a lot to learn, but I'm going broke here every time the other guy has AK or any hand with an 8.

She came second.  A one in six chance to win, and she still missed the glory by one.

A similarly close-but-still-busto result in Derren's Russian Roulette stunt would have been much more interesting.

The current UK series is available for free catch-up on 4oD.  Apparently a new six-part series is being made for US television by Sci-Fi channel to air in July.  Perfect timing!

I'm going to see The Pipettes tonight.

And I don't care what you think, so ner.

Is this the best dancing ever to hit YouTube?

There was a text vote on 6 Music this morning to choose a Muppets song to play later.  The candidates are Kermit the Frog, Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, and the one that I'm sure you're already thinking of.

I had to Google around a bit to find the spelling of Mahna Mahna (and I'm so glad I did, because I also found the complete lyrics).  To be honest, I'd never even thought about it before, but I was a bit disappointed to see that it contained vowels.

So how the hell did this win a text vote?  What a fix!!

This began as a comment for an entry in Mike's blog, but then I selfishly decided I'd keep it for myself instead.

Last week finally got to watch Tom Cruise running lots and doing very little else in War of the Worlds.  I'd been looking forward to this for ages, and then it was such utter bobbins that we had to watch a good film afterwards to try and forget about it.  I picked six DVDs and Claire was to have the final say - the way we choose what to watch so very often in fact.

Given the circumstances, this shortlist could be considered my de facto greatest movies of all time.  Or at least greatest movies that I have the DVD of.  Not sure I'd completely agree with that - I chose one of them purely for it's short running time, and avoided some I'd seen recently or didn't think there was any chance of Claire actually picking! - but it's definitely not without its merits.  And quite diverse too.

In alphabetical order:

• Crash
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Moulin Rouge
• Natural Born Killers
• Phone Booth
• True Lies

And the winner is....?

I'm finally getting round to selling a load of old stuff on ebay and my Creative Zen MP3 player is amongst the casualties.  I just cleared off 20Gb of stuff (resenting the fact that as sweet as my iPod nano is, 8Gb just isn't enough) and then thought I should probably leave somthing on there so the buyer can see that it actually works straight away when he or she gets it.

So, having to choose just one song to leave behind (with the condition that I couldn't be bothered to rip anything from CD, so it had to be on my hard disk already) here's the absolute cheesiest thing I could come up with, proving that I really do download some utter crap.

Legendary composer John Williams' theme from the classic movie Jurassic Park.  Remix.  Press play and be ready to cringe.