Bond and Bragg

Well I guess I should start of today by explaining I cut my hair this week. I was getting far too scruffy and had decided to trim my beard. I felt it only made sense to go the whole way, so I enlisted Jeff as my spotter and took the clippers to my scalp. I got Jeff to grade and neaten up the back for me, and I did the rest myself. Check it out.

I'm just covering the patch of bloody scalp

As you can see in the picture, I’m quite happy with it. All I can say is that I’m damn glad that my hair grows fast.

This week’s big news is Bond. Jeff and I decided to get all excited for the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. Not for any particular reason other than to irritate Wendy by mentioning it as much as possible. We even managed to get Wendy to learn to play the theme on the bagpipes (coming soon to YouTube, probably) under the guise of making our own Bond trailer but then totally dropped it when she had stayed up all night figuring it out. Bless. So anyway, Jeff and I decided to make a day of it and visit the coast while we were at it. We drove over to Fort Bragg and headed straight for the cinema to check out the times. It was too early to get tickets because the box office hadn’t opened yet, so we decided to have our picture taken with the poster instead.

Oddly enough it didn't feel stupid at the time

The best part of this picture is where you can see the reflection of the woman we asked to take it. You can just about make out the look of utter bemusement on her face. Excellent. With the photo taken we decided to have a look around for music shops because Jeff is learning piano and guitar while he is here, and I’m trying to keep up my practice. We managed to stumble into a guitar shop that didn’t sell any music but the guy there talked to us for ages. It was pretty interesting and he told us that he played golf with the old bassist from Van Morrison, which was nice. Then he showed us the bass guitar that the guy had given him. It was pretty cool and had a rotating pickup on it. He told us it had been used on stage and only two of them were ever made (the other one was stolen). Then he let me hold it so I could tell everyone but as I forgot to take a picture, can’t remember the name of the bassist, or find anything on the internet about it, it was ultimately pointless. The guy did tell us to go check out the coast for the great view though. Jeff insisted on getting lots of great pictures of me walking as well as this fantastic shot of me looking completely confounded by the concept of a forked path.

'Two paths! Now what am I going to do?'

I opted for the more voyeuristic approach and took an arty shot of this couple smooching.

They jumped moments later

We looked around a few shops and finally after being sent up and down the main street by various people giving directions, we found some sheet music. Find-of-The-Day was the sheet music for Vangelis’ Hymn, so I was pretty chuffed. We had sushi with waaaay too much wasabi on it, I thought my eyes were going to start bleeding at one point, and then on to the cinema for the main event.

I’ve seen some pretty bad reviews for Quantum of Solace but I liked it. The thing that really struck me though was the difference between an American audience and a British one. I always thought it was ridiculous when you see those little PSAs about piracy in the cinema and the audience are all like ‘oooh...ahhhhh...wow!’ and then cheering at the end. I thought ‘What kind of moron gets that excited at the cinema that they actually applaud the screen at the end?’. Well, to be fair, I don’t think anyone applauded the screen (if they had, they may not have made it out alive) but the rest of the movie was like sitting in a crowd of 5 year olds. I could actually hear grown men repeating lines from the film that had just happened. Without wanting to ruin it for anyone who may be intending to see the film, here is an example.

Bond: When is the next flight back to London?

Female spy: Tomorrow morning.

Bond (in a rather suggestive tone): Then we have all night!

Man behind me (like an excitable idiot): ‘Then we have all night’! oh man... ‘Then we ha...’ huhuh jeez. I like eating candles duhuhuhuh.

Ok so I added that last sentence for effect but hopefully you’ve got the picture. Now I understand why big movies have so many action scenes, they were the only time where the constant idiotic droning was reduced to simple cooing and drooling. If there is one thing, however, which I have learned since being here, it is that America is pretty big and to use one small town cinema as a basis of comparison is quite unfair (as anyone who frequented the Chester Odeon, before it was justly shut down, will tell you).

Wendy had a concert this week. She is the newest member in a singing group who performed at Lauren’s, a local restaurant. They did renditions of all sorts of songs, the only one I recognised was Georgia on My Mind, but it was all very good. Having discovered what a great soprano Wendy is and also knowing it doesn’t take much to force her to do stuff (like learning to play the Bond theme on the bagpipes) I’ve tasked her with learning Schubert’s version of Ave Maria which I’ve been learning on the guitar and piano. She certainly takes these challenges to heart.

The final bit of news for now would be that Peter has been so eager to put the new floor into the apple shed that I did a quick mock-up last night so we could see what kind of headroom to expect. It’s pretty basic and I’m adding details today to make it more accurate but I think it’ll be a cool project for my portfolio.

Obviously the apple shed doesn't look exactly

like this, though that would be pretty cool

That’s all for now. I leave you with the greatest Christmas card I’ve ever seen.