Daily Prompt: Toy Story | The Daily Post

Posted on 18 November 2013 by SJPONeill

What was your favorite plaything as a child? Do you see any connection between your life now, and your favorite childhood toy?

Photographers, artists, poets: show us MEMENTO.

The prompt above was quite timely as I was already thinking on a post along these lines after reading Caron’s post last month Odd Things I Own #1…

This is the study…

…it lives at the top of the stairs…

…it’s full of books so you can guess I like books…many of these books are old friends that I either read or had as a child (some were lost along the journey so I have replaced them)…

The big ship on the top shelf has a chequered history…it started life in a model shop opposite Far East Plaza and a mate of mine brought as he was going through a phase of wanting to own the biggest of each sort of plastic model e.g. biggest tank, biggest ship, etc. I’m not sure if he got as far as the biggest aircraft but he had the biggest tank, a 1/16 King Tiger. I remember we all sat around the barracks courtyard for a morning helping him link up the steel tracks and once it was running, he could spin it up and the tracks would chip the tiles on the floor…

The ship was only acquired as we packed to come home in 1989 and he paid some guy in Palmerston North $600 to make an (at best) average job of building it (I would have done it for the cost of materials!). This guy was also into sports cars and bought a Corvette when we got back to New Zealand – the ’73 shape – but it needed so much maintenance so that there was no vibration that might crack the fibreglass body that he had to sell the Yamato on. One of our company commanders bought it for some hundreds of $ for his son but when his wife commented “He’s only 2, idiot!“, it feel into my hands for a lot less than either of its previous owners paid for it…

It was remote controlled – it used to terrorise the sailing boats in the Esplanade before I acquired it – but I ripped all that gear out and sold it when we moved here and my intention is still to restore it as a static model – one day – but in the meantime, it remains up high away from little fingers and performing a valuable function keeping dust off the shelf…

…it is also home to my funny hat collection (you can only see some of them here) – over to you whether they are funny hats or it is a funny collection……and many of the figurines and models I have collected…most are not worth much except to me…I remember this Renwal Skysweeper from advertisements in magazines when I was really little but it has never been rereleased so tracking it down was a mission: I now have this built one that I found in Foxton of all places and another unbuilt in the my stash…the Batman figure was with the inaugural (and thus enticingly less expensive) issue of a super-heroes magazine…where possible and where the subject matter grabs me, I like to buy just the first issue, just for the figure or model…

…in the case of these guys, I so liked the inaugural Hawker Hurricane, I subscribed to the series …I quite liked the excitement of waiting each fortnight to see what the next one would be but after a year I went off them because there were too many missed issues, the scales varied between 1/72 and 1/100, and there was consistent damage to the models at the packing end…

This is a Dinky USS Enterprise…I never even knew that Dinky made an Enterprise – I thought I would have as the rich kid up the road from us had most of the Dinky models – until I saw this sitting in a gaming shop in Vancouver for the princely sum of $10: the shuttle is missing (it would normally live in the at the bottom of the nacelle where you can see one of the open bay doors) and the disk missile launcher needs work (and disks) but I think it’s pretty cool. Alongside is a special piece, a Micro Machines X-Wing…it is special because my wife (who is not that into such things) bought it for me on a whim one day…Up here is a Hasbro Star Wars ship…what Google tells me is Dash Rendar’s Outrider…I found this in a great junk shop in Florida just down the road from Eglin AFB and barely managed to squeeze it into my bag for the long unwind home…it has lots of moving parts but no pilot – certainly no Dash Rendar whomever he might be? – but it strike as I type that I very well may have a suitable figure in one of the actions toys I bought while living in Singapore. The book that the Outrider is sitting on is a 1947 New Zealand telephone book – one country, one book! – that the kids got me for Father’s Day in 2007 or 2008…it is treasured not only for its age and rarity (who keeps old phone books?) but also because it has a listing for my grandfather’s farm at Ngapara in North Otago…sadly this book was stolen when the house was broken into during one of my periods working overseas…

…and, courtesy of my Mum, who has kept and stored so much of our childhood books and toys, this collection which still languishes in a wardrobe…mainly Matchbox, with a smattering of Dinky, Britains, Tonka, and Corgi toys, all eagerly awaiting the day that they will be dusted off, repaired where necessary, and displayed in the light of day once more…

Until such time though, I think that I can offer them more dignified accommodation than this box and will rummage around to see what I can come up with…

via Daily Prompt: Toy Story | The Daily Post.

Babylon 5: Crusade

Posted on 17 November 2013 by SJPONeill

Domestic DVD acquisitions have been limited this year due to the reduced availability of disposable cash. I am a big fan of the original Babylon 5 series and recently rewatched the first four series – I am a bit cool on the final series as it lacks the overarching story arc of the previous series and many of the cooler characters and character interactions are missing. That, aside I did enjoy the five movies that accompanied the series before it declined into products like The Lost Tales and The Legend of the Rangers that only sought to quite blatantly milk the franchise for more profit.

Crusade has been available here for a number of years but retailing for $99.99 most of the time which is pretty steep for only 13 episodes, more so when the original B5 series usually go for only $29.99. I stopped in Te Kuiti on my way home from my trip to Germany to stretch my legs and grab a bite to eat. To pass the time while I refreshed myself, I went for a wander through the local Warehouse looking for any bargains, and found Crusade in the bargain bin for only $9.99 which was more to my liking and this formed the basis for my next week’s big screen entertainment.

Overall, I found Crusade rather pretentious – every aspect of the series seems to think very much that they it is part of an epic saga – and quite boring. The stories are uninspired and lack anything like the sense of drama or urgency that a. the original series developed so well and b. that you might expect would dominate a series based on the premise that all life on Earth will cease in less than five years. Instead many plot lines are more concerned with petty bureaucratic squabbles and only a few actually contribute to the main theme of the series which is to find a cure for the Drahk plague.

The characters are bland and two-dimensional with none of the interplay between the key characters of B5 e.g. Londo and G’Kar, Sheridan and De’enn, or between Garibaldi, Ivanova and everyone else. The only two characters of note are both guest roles: Edward Woodward as a maverick technomage in The Long Road, and Richard Biggs reprising his role as Dr Stephen Franklin in Each Night I Dream of Home. All the rest struggle to reach an average standard.

Although there are regular reference to ‘First Contact protocols’ what these are is never spelled out and they seem to be the plot device equivalent of the dilithium crystals from Star Trek – no one really knows what they do what they are handy to write stories around. If anything, Crusade takes more joy in breaching these protocols than upholding them – but only because it can, not to support the driving imperative of the central story-line. Episode 12, Visitors from Down the Street, has some potential for an interesting tale reversing the popular ‘they walk amongst us’ and ‘the truth is out there’ devices but is handling rather clumsily with an ininspired conclusion. Also, one has to wonder about a story’s sensitivity when a story in the premiere season already starts to rely on cute role transpositions when such are normally reserved for the ‘shark jumping’ stage of a series life cycle.

My verdict on Crusade is that diehard B5 followers (if which I guess I am one) will get something out of it if they can find it for the right (as low as possible) price but generally most will find it underwhelming. Personally, I got more out of re-watching the original Babylon 5 than I ever did from Crusade and it is probably a small mercy that it was canned when it was.

If there is anything in the future of Babylon 5 that we should be pinning our hopes on, it is that J. Michael Straczynski will release his George Lucas-like strangehold on the franchise and sell it off to Disney or some other group capable of realising its re-imagination potential…OK, just to Disney then…

PS. If you area B5 diehard, on Facebook and haven’t already, then sign up to follow Claudia Christian’s fan page…

Movies – Dubai to Dusseldorf

Posted on 13 November 2013 by SJPONeill

A darker re-imagining of Superman is what they claimed and to a point this is that…Russell Crowe makes a credible comeback from the disaster of Robin Hood as Jor-El and certainly improves on Marlon Brando’s 1978 hack at the role…I thought the villains were largely unconvincing and not nearly as intimidating as the General Zod and his henchfolk in Superman II and was disappointed that the final battle was not much more than a knock ’em down, drag ’em out kind of thing. The story of Clark’s early years is more credible than any of the previous takes but I remain ambivalent about the lack of even a cameo from anyone from the Luthor family and have high hopes that this will be remedied in the sequel…

More fun with guns…I had low expectations of this movie but it is a must for the home library…it moves fast with an excellent selection of big boys’ toys and plot turns to keep me engaged. I do however have to say that it is EXTREMELY unlikely that any sort of RPG-7 is going to upset an M-1 Abrams with a direct frontal shot…

All the reviews for World War Z that I heard before I left NZ were bad but I have a thing for this sort of movie and had to see for myself. I am glad that I did because, while flawed in some areas, it is an interesting take on the zombie genre and fun to watch. I can only assume that those that than gave it such bad reviews are the same crew that bleated because The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are not 100% true in every detail to the original books. The flaws I found in it are more from poor editing than poor story development especially during the final flight where time is wasted with inflight emergencies that add nothing to the plot but their eventual landing is not shown…in the plane, now on the ground, in the plane, on the ground, plane, ground…did we miss something in the middle – the first time I watched it, I thought that I had nodded off for a few minutes. Only on rewatching the last 30 minutes was it clear that this apparent teleportation was simply the result of poor film editing…

Movies – Dusseldorf to Dubai

Posted on 12 November 2013 by SJPONeill

Emirates have massive movie libraries on their most modern aircraft…they claim 350 across all genres and languages which is a pretty good effort…and this includes a variety of classic aka old movies. I had never seen The Desert Fox and while not a big James Mason fan, thought that I would give it a shot. For its time, it really is quite an amazing movie – I’m not sure how many others would celebrate a soldier who only seven years before had been one of its nation’s most dangerous foes..?

It recounts the tale of Erwin Rommel from the Battle of El Alamein until his mysterious death in 1944 and covers his involvement with the anti-Hitler movement in Germany over that period. It is based on Desmond Young’s Rommel the Desert Fox, which he researched and wrote immediately after the war, and which is considered a credible if not full treatment of one of Germany’s greatest generals. Although no attempts is made to conceal the American accents of all the actors, the plot and story-telling are sound and I found that I quite enjoyed this oldie…

I see that Tom Cruise is ‘starring’ again for allegedly comparing his absences from family during movie shoots with the absences felt by soldiers in Afghanistan and generally I think that he is a bit of a big-headed dork…but…I do like some of his movies and this is one of the ones that I like. I didn’t have high expectations of it but found it, if not challenging, certainly clever in the unfolding of the story and the final realisation of what has occurred on Earth…a little like Wall-E with a darker flip side…

Sherlock gets his rocks

Posted on 27 October 2013 by SJPONeill

As you might be able the deduce from the title, I am not a big fan of the UK series Sherlock...I don’t like it for many of the same reasons I’m not that fussed about the Robert Downey Jr take on Sherlock Holmes either. I especially dislike the superior manner in which it points out all the key clues in such an blatant instead of relying on simply writing a good enough script to illustrate Holmes’ deductive powers. I also also not that keen on Sherlock because the stories are not much more than poor adaptations of the classic Holmes’ stories dragged screaming into the 21sr Century. I much prefer Elementary as a contemporary Holmes tales because a. the stories are original and b. it has Lucy Liu in it.

So, anyway, last night was the first time that I’ve flown Emirates and I must say that the in-flight entertainment system is most excellent: over 300 movies to choose from and a decent size (the better part of 30cm) touchscreen to watch them on. International flights are usually I get to catch up on new release movies and I wasn’t disappointed with the selection last night. First up was Star Trek: Into Darkness which I did enjoy because I do quite like the ‘JJverse’ Star Trek although I was disappointed that the bottom line of the plot was a rehash of the Khan story, with attempts to liven it up by swapping some of the roles from the original Khan story. I don’t think that device worked that well but I’m reserving my final verdict until I see it on the big screen: I was pretty scathing on the first ‘JJverse’ story when I saw out on a small scree but now it’s firm favorite. I was expressed pleased to see Sherlock get his rocks though as he plays the same sort of supercilious superior character as he does in Sherlock. There wasn’t enough time for another full movie before the end of the trans-Tasman leg, so I caught the pilot episode of Elementary just to rub it in + I do really like it…

After a brief stopover in Melbourne, it was back in the air for dinner and into Ironman 3. Quite simply, too many Ironmans…Tony Stark is Ironman, Roadie is Ironman, Pepper is Ironman, even Ironman is bloody Ironman! Much as I enjoy the Marvel universe, this one had a very X-Men feel about it with more super-powered mutated adversaries who seem to come from nowhere; coupled with Tony Stark’s continuing angsting over the events in The Avengers, it started to get a little boring and didn’t really contribute a lot to development of the characters of the universe. I think this franchise really has to get back to a ‘one movie, one Ironman approach’ and some more credible adversaries…

I only got about 20 minutes into GI Joe: Retaliation before I needed a snooze. That not really a reflection on the movie and more a result of my body time being around 3AM. On watching the remainder some four to five hours later, I didn’t think that it was as good as The Rise of Cobra…way too much very passé ‘fight by wire’ and not nearly enough of the cool GI Joe toys that were the backbone of the franchise. I’m also not a big fan of ‘famous actor, cameos and, to be really honest about it, the Bruce Willis character could have been played by anyone. Ditto for Channing Tatum’s character, Duke…what happens to him loses any shock value as the character has been so poorly developed. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised as director, Jon m. Chu’s other claims to fame include inflicting Justin Bieber: Never Say Never on the world…

And thoughts of Justin Bieber bring us to the next movie in our journey, the 2013 version of The Lone Ranger. No, Bieber is not in this movie but his presence is about the only thing that could make it any worse! This is one of the worst movies that it has ever been my discomfort to sit through – and I did sit through the whole thing in the unrequited hope that it could only get better…this bloated aberration fails totally to offer even the slightest entertainment value and turns the legend and values of the Lone Ranger into a painful vehicle for Johnny Depp to meander around the screen for two and a half hours with a rotting bird on his head. Do your kids a flavour and get them ANY other version of The Legend to watch instead of this nonsense…even forcing them to watch Gigli to to the William Tell Overture would be a vast improvement…

I always liked the buddy action movies of the 80s and Walter Hill’s Bullet the the Head looked like a good easy to fill the last couple of hours as we approached the Gulf. I might have needed to find something even shorter as Emirates have so many pre-landing PA announcements that I wasn’t able to finish it before touching down – in all fairness, I was in an exit row so had to stow my screen early. Although I still have 7-8 minutes of the movie to go, I can already say that I did quite like this one. It remains true to its action buddy roots but has a very clever and well-executed twist in that Sylvester Stallone’s character is not a very good person at all and the strength of this character is only slightly eroded by the blandness and weak development of his cop ‘buddy’…I think this one is worth a look for this alone….

A battle lost…

Posted on 12 October 2013 by SJPONeill

Don’t Use the ‘D’ Word: They’re ‘UAVs’ or ‘RPAs’ But Definitely Not ‘Drones’

I came across this article on the Information Dominance Corps Self Synchronization (yes, it is bit of mouthful) Facebook feed…once upon a time this argument may have mattered but now it is nothing more than ambient noise. We have far more important things to worry about in the UAS world than mindless semantic games…

Does it matter really if I call this a plane, an aircraft or an airplane?

Or this a helicopter, a whokka, a helo, a rotary-wing aircraft or a whirlybird.

Or this, a car, an automobile or a vehicle?

No…it doesn’t, not in normal colloquial speech and writing…many years ago, I remember great battles ranging over whether vehicles like LAVIII and Stryker were medium infantry, mech infantry or some weirdo thing called heavy infantry. This went on for months and about the points of agreement were that they were neither the light infantry or tanks so dear to our hearts. In the end, the general issued an all-points stating that he didn’t care if they were called the Third Pink Flying Pig Brigade and that he was more interested in what we could do with these things.

Dictionaries have already added the unmanned aircraft definition of ‘drone’ so there is not much point arguing the toss anymore. What is important is that we use the correct terminology when we talk about unmanned aircraft within our community and when we engage with external audiences. The general public can quite happily refer to them as drones, just all of us equally happily refer to cars, planes and choppers…

Personally I think that we need to stop treating UAS as something mystical and special and start to treat them simply as what they: unmanned aircraft…aircraft that do not normally operate with an onboard pilot…and within unmanned aircraft, we have , in our technically correct lexicon, remote-piloted aircraft, optionally-piloted aircraft, remote control aircraft, drones (in the technical sense), etc,etc…

The more that we treat UAS as something special, the harder we make it employ properly and integrate them in to our airspace. Do we really need Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle or UCAV, or would unmanned combat aircraft suffice? …and unmanned fighter, unmanned bomber, unmanned transport etc? Hmmm…

Just call me Al

Spring arrives….

Posted on 1 October 2013 by SJPONeill

…or maybe ‘the first day of sun’ or just ‘I have a new toy’…
Today was the first day this spring when it has been real springy weather, lots of sun, not to much wind but enough to dry two loads of washing…a good day for getting out and doing stuff. Unfortunately, though I had some returns due today so spent most of the afternoon in the study hammering away at the keyboard…but it has just shifted over to daylight saving so I was able to get out and do some stuff…
I have a new toy. Most of my work is computer-based, mainly writing or researching online and so most of my day, like all the daylight hours in winter, is spent in the study. I haven’t had much luck with netbooks, having been through two of them in three years but really miss portable computing, especially being able to tap away in front of TV or somewhere else that isn’t the study – yes, I am getting a little ‘study shy’…
I’d been thinking this way for a while and had been researching phones and tablets but wanted something definitely bigger than a phone and preferably bigger than a 7″ but not as large as a 10″ tablet. My catalyst for action was a Leemings e-flyer that popped into the inbox – one of those things I have been meaning to unsubscribe from but never quite got round to – 8″ Asus Iconia tablets substantially reduced as an introductory offer…really glad that I did take the plunge on this. I can work when I’m traveling or even lying in a hammock in the garden.
The potential downside, for you the reader, is that this is the first time that I have had an integrated device like this so you’ll probably be on the receiving end of my experimentation… Sorry…
So anyway, this my first tablet-driven blog entry…I find that I can see enough of the screen to scribe happily away while the virtual keyboard is not so small that my fingers are in typo hell – fingers? Finger really…l’ve tried the slidey-swipey way of using the keyboard but, so far, I just as happy single finger tapping away and not much slower than with a normal keyboard. I’m using the WordPress app and it is more friendly that using the normal browser based WP interface but it is a bit of a pain not having all the formatting buttons just to hand…
And, yes, it is quite definitely Spring time…it doesn’t seem that long since the trees just started to shed their leaves…and it has been so dreary and sodding wet the past few weeks that it has been quite lovely today to not only have a beautiful sunny day but also to have the first explosions of color in the garden…so these are my first photos taken with the tablet and it is a lot easier than the old act of having to transfer photos from the camera to the PC and then uploading them. I don’t think it is the best of cameras but it’ll do the trick for convenience work…

“…the scariest things ever…”

Posted on 16 September 2013 by SJPONeill

Caron Eastgate Dann pens the most recent blog that I have started following…I didn’t spend much time online over the weekend – not necessarily a bad thing – as youngest daughter came to visit for the first time in a few months…

…but I do have to occasionally check the (e)mail for booking requests for the Chalet Raurimu, especially since it is ski season and the weather is so damn good at the moment. Caron’s weekend post I, Robot or, “Danger, Will Robinson! “Exterminate! EXTERMINATE!) made me laugh out loud: it was so close to my own memories…

When I was a kid, robots were all the rage. Before the digital age, before the time of personal computers, they had a kind of mystique about them.

This was encouraged by the romanticisation of robots on screen as either heroes or villains. The loyal bodyguard-type robot in the 1960s series Lost in Space, which I saw in endless repeats in the 1970s, was endearing and long-suffering, as Dr Smith referred to him variously as a “Neanderthal ninny”, a “blithering booby”, a “nickel-plated Nincompoop”, a “tintinnabulating tin can” and many more sensational insults….

…so near my own experiences, it was scary…I too was terrified by Doctor Who and Lost In Space…Dr Smith was soooo despicably evil – quite the counter-role model for primary school me…last year, I found LIS Season 1 in the bargain bin at The Warewhare: for a price I couldn’t walk away from and so I grabbed it, enjoyed it and the next time I was in civilisation I was searching the bins for Seasons 2 and 3 – still no joy on Season 2 which is apparently quite elusive – but Season 3 kept me off the streets during the rainy part of last summer. I can switch off any disbelief or even incredulity at the sheer hammishness of the dress-up monster and alien costumes or the flatness of the characters and plotlines and just enjoy it as a new phrase I heard last week, just enjoy it as “…brain candy…”

My own specific terrifiers were more the Abominable Snowmen (but I tried to find a suitable scary pic but now they just look like walking furry bean bags) and the Cybermen who have so far survived their First Contact with the uber-franchised new Doctor Who…I was more a child of the second and third doctors and the Daleks really made their initial play for power against the original Doctor. That notwithstanding though, I was sufficiently aware of the Dalek evil to have the stuffing scared out of me one afternoon exploring the darker confines of the Oamaru Squash Club and running headlong into a five-foot tall metal badminton shuttle which in the shadows to a six or seven year old liked exactly like guess what!!

My earliest scary memories are of Stingray, which must have been about 1967ish – definitely before I started school…not so scary now but good still entertainment…

…and from a few years later, Forbidden Planet when it screened as the Sunday afternoon movie – what were you programming people thinking?!!! The whole idea of an invisible monster that could creep stealthily up stairs – our house had stairs – and slay whoever it liked stuck with me as the most scariest ever movie til I saw Halloween (the original not the rehashed copies) around 1980…I used to carefully check our internal stairs for any signs that might indicate an Id monster on the loose in Oamaru…

Like Caron, I also did not get to see 2001 until sometime in the early 80s – having read the books a number of times, I must admit to being rather underwhelmed by the movie and more so by its sequel…for me the 2001 legacy is not much more than “open the pod bay doors” and some cool additions to the archives of cool spaceships with the Discovery, Moonbus, Aries 1B and Space Clipper all being wannabe builds I never got to – all bar the Space Clipper are now Uhu02 designs so I may finally get to build them…

…and, as I may have mentioned before, I am bitterly disappointed that all those 1960s and ’70s predictions of flying highways and moonbases and jetpacks and, yes, robots, especially robots that are our friends (but not nerdy like C3PO)…curse you, George Jetson and Gerry Anderson and…and…and you other predicting type people…!

I don’t remember having any robot toys but I do love the retro look of these toys – of many toys from this era – I was lucky that my parents kept all of my toys (those that survived three younger siblings) and – one day – I plan on restoring them all, purely for my own satisfaction. Many of these are 40+ years old now and some have had quite a beating: I’m looking forward to new technologies like 3D printing allowing me to just ‘print’ out a new set of hooks for Matchbox 1972 #74 Tow Joe, or a new deck cover (I still remember when the original was broken) for #61 Alvis Stalwart (no year listed so I’ll have to be careful that I don’t get parts for what ever #61 became as Matchbox used to rollover the catalogue numbers)…

Caron is right when she says that even the box for her brother’s robot toy would be valuable today… I misread what she wrote and thought that the photo was the surviving memory of the robot but on checking it now, her mum is also a non-tossing mum and the robot lives. It would probably be worth quite a bit now as there are not that many toy survivors from that era but I don’t think that any amount of money could outweigh the memories that particular toy carries…that why I so glad my mum saved mine: regardless of their actual or potential worth, they are valuable links for me to the younger me that believed in flying cars and moonbases…

So although I never had any, I still like the retro robot toys – not so much that I am likely to buy any of the repopped modern imitations – but enough that I will, in the fullness of time, build some of the paper model reproductions of these toys as they have a retro appeal in their own right…

This little guy was designed specifically for this year’s International Paper Modelling Convention – each year there is a simple downloadable model – and by clicking on him, you can learn more about the convention next month and even download him and his buddies…we’re all kids at heart deep down inside somewhere…have a little fun…try it with the kids or grandkids: they’ll get hours of enjoyment watching mum, dad, poppa or nana playing with sharp knives and superglue…

So today’s meander from Supermarionation, 50s science-fiction, BBC, retro robot toys, paper models and moonbases has been inspired by The Crayon Files – please check it out, even if only to learn why its called The Crayon Files….

Afterthought note thingie – I just zipped over to Caron’s homepage to grab its URL and noticed that her home page introduction concludes “...“Actually, it’s fine,” he said. “Not everything old has to be thrown away”....” Nothing could be more right…

Something Batty This Way Comes | rarasaur

Posted on 7 September 2013 by SJPONeill

As may be obvious from more and more of my posts outside The Thursday/Friday War, Rarasaur is becoming my dominant (in the nicest possible undomineering way) muse. In Something Batty This Way Comes, she discusses the idea of the project juggler: the person who can never just have one pot on the boil or ball in the air, the sort that doom themselves to endless ‘just-in-time’ catches and saves…yep, that’s me…

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Anyone that has checked out my Workbench at the Unofficial Airfix Modellers’ Forum might get a glimmer of one way in which the affliction of project jugglerism manifests itself: I will start one model then be distracted or get bored with it or run up against a problem, and start on another and did so for years…and years…and years…

But now…there’s hope…with great will power, I have limited myself to only working on started modelling projects, only only those from this part of my stash, elevated to being allowed to stay in the lounge – mainly to minimise my exposure the temptations of the primary stash in the garage. I probably could have cropped the image but as is adds some perspective to how small this working stash actually is…Actually, to tell the truth, the original game plan was to restrict myself to an even smaller group – then I realised that that group was stack on a stash box that i had omitted to return the garage and once I opened that box (did someone say ‘Pandora’) I couldn’t resist playing with some of what was in it too…

So, yes, I am a project juggler, starting many things and striving to finish one…I’m clearly not the only one though as I came across this advice on Caron Dann’s The Crayon Files after she commented on one of Rara’s posts: ditch the to-do list:

The answer? Don’t have a list! Obviously, it’s good to have goals, but when you have so many that you’ll never have any hope of achieving them, it’s counter-productive. Often you have so much to do, you don’t know where to start.

So, the idea is, only put on your list what you can reasonably achieve.

Simple, you say.

Easy, you say.

Just do it, you say.

Were that it was so easy but I am knuckling down to focus…someone that I have a lot of time for once told me that if I aimed to do two things every day and did those two things, then I would very soon start to make progress…well, OK then but I have been getting up in the morning and going to bed in the evening like clockwork now and I’m not getting that warm fuzzy progress feeling yet…

Yes, I need to do this…I had a a trawl through the hard drive last week and was appalled at the number of unfinished writing projects (some going back years but still valid) that were gathering e-dust in forgotten folders; I need to finish current projects on the house before I start anymore…at least I am writing more which is positive and keeps skills alive…

Right then , enough of this time to get some stuff done…

Things Pop Culture Ruined for Me

Posted on 1 September 2013 by SJPONeill

Another great thread from Rarasaur here, always so thought-provoking, at times just provocative…

I get where Rara is coming from with this and my thoughts since she posted it the other day were that perhaps she is being just a little precious over this…I mean, if something is precious to us, then we should still be able to hold it close…right?

Then I woke this morning, considered the issue again and the first thing that leaps into my head was Jar-Jar Binks (I hope you didn’t arrange that just for me, Rara, because it wasn’t a very fun experience…) and all of a sudden, I got it…

While I think that the original Star Wars trilogy started its downhill slide when the Muppets took over Return of the Jedi (and Palpatine thought he had problems) and then the revisionism of the 20th and 25th Anniversary releases (yes, I am on again about Han shooting first!) but the following prequel trilogy just leaves me COLD. The one anchor of my faith in the Star Wars Universe is the theatrical release of Star Wars that George Lucas grudgingly included on the 25th Anniversary release DVD – even though he spitefully refused to remaster this version, it remains the same awe-inspiring epic that first wowed me in January 1978. And, just for the record, I have great hopes for the Disney/Abrams epics in this universe planned for first release in 2015…

The other modern take on an old classic that leaves me shivering is the last few seasons of Dr Who, specifically the Matt Smith regime of weirdness. The original BBC black and white Doctor series used to terrify me as a child because it was a. really scary, b. had a diverse range of monsters, and c. it had lots of cliff hangers (each story would typically run over 4-6 30 minute episodes – At one a week the terror could be drawn out to the nth degree…now the Doctor’s all about love, fish fingers and custard (an offence against humanity in its own right), and Daleks, Daleks and more bloody Daleks – what part of extinct don’t you guys get???? And it’s all driven by how much the Beeb executives think that they can squeeze out of the franchise as opposed to any desire to actually rethink or revitalise it for this century…

So little Sunday morning rant over…Rara again drives her point home when I open my mind a little…

PS. I love both BSGs even if the 21st century version does ramble on a bit at times…

Edit: another WordPress tool that doesn’t work so well – I thought I’d give the reblog tool a go but the editing tools in it are sooo limited, I will just stick to my current practice of ‘pressing this’ on any page I feel like commenting further on…if I could have saved this, it might have been longer (that could be a good or a bad thing); ditto if the reblogging text window was more than three lines high – clearly this is meant to attract twits et al…and the formatting is all screwed up too…fail WordPress…..