Genericism

Listening to - Ex:El - 808 State

I have been 'discussing' something with a colleague here. From blaming Sky for the ills of the football league (see the woes of Leeds United) we got on to James Bond films and my colleague mentioned that the last James Bond film - Die Another Day - was good apart from the Invisible Car and that such a technology was never going to be possible. I see this as a dangerous sort of comment especially bearing in mind that the technology in the film actually mentions a real technology used in 'daylight' stealth aircraft. Now of course, the real thing is nowhere near as good as that portrayed in the film but I would have thought that having even a rudimentary system is enough to suggest that a perfect invisibility technology is possible. Cue Arthur C. Clark and saying something is possible is probably true whilst saying it is impossible probably isn't true.

Think of what we have today that we didn't have fifty years ago, or even ten years ago. I mentioned the Asimov short stories written in the fifties, which had people a hundred years in the future still using film scanning and microfiche. And that was from one of the best sci-fi visionaries. There are only a few things I consider not possible and even then I think you have to qualify them. Time-Travel, Matter transference etc - both demonstrated on some very low level.

Film Fun

I was off work yesterday and for the sake of filling time I watched the comedy film of Channel four. It was called Captain's Paradise. It starred Alec Guinness as the captain of a ferry travelling between Gibraltar and Tangier. In each port he had a wife, one home-loving and respectable and one more passionate and out-going. It might sound contrived but it wasn't; A lost gem of a movie. Films these days seem to rely far too much on cinematography and not enough on story. What goes in through the eyes always outweighs what goes in through the ears.