Green Square

Early entry this week and no entry for a few weeks, we're off to Iceland tomorrow.

Here's an interesting contrast. Modern Green Square. Look at all those 4WD in the photo, they must be a tourist desert troupe because when I took this photo over a year ago, 4WDs were illegal on the roads. Now they're everywhere.









And then old Green Square, though I'm guessing it was called something else back then.



Watching: Wordplay, a fantastic documentary about the New York Times crossword and its editor, Will Shortz; the fans, including some famous ones eg Bill Clinton; and the annual crossword tournament in the US. It also showed how a compiler comes up with a crossword, which was really interesting. Funniest bit was Shortz reading out letters from irate solvers, saddest bit was...

SPOILER SPOILER STOP READING IF YOU CARE





...was poor poor Al who should have taken 10 extra seconds to check over his work in the final (Always finished third in the final for years! Barely even made the final this year! Was five minutes ahead of young punk Tyler! Just had to look up and see he hadn't quite finished One Across before announcing he was done...). Poor, poor Al.


END OF SPOILER

Also watching: Thank You for Smoking, black comedy with very sly humour, right down to the three "merchants of death", lobbyists for cigarettes, guns and alcohol, arguing about which of them is most deserving of being kidnapped and punished by protest groups.

Trying to watch: Grendel. Turned it off in the first ten minutes due to incredibly awful acting and script-writing. The halls were mighty, the warriors were mighty, the ship was mighty...you know, we invented a mighty thesaurus of adjectives since Beowulf was written, maybe you should use it.

Reading: Memoirs of a Geisha. Solid research, interesting insight into this ancient sub-culture, very careful about presenting certain unpleasant aspects with too much comment.