Blog
1 November 2008
I can believe it’s been almost two months since my last post to this blog. And yet you’re still reading it. I guess I should’ve really posted this last night so that I didn’t have yet another month on my blog without any posts. Oh well.
Anyway, here’s what was keeping me so busy in October that I couldn’t find the time to post. And I’m actually going to try and keep it short for once:
The Mighty Boosh – Monday 6th October 2008
Saw these live at Sheffield City Hall. We had excellent front row seats thanks to Chris going to buy tickets early on the morning they were released. I didn’t watch series one or two of their TV series show when it was on BBC Three. I remember watching about five minutes, thinking it was a bit mental, and then turning over to watch something else. After seeing them do a bit of live stuff on TV another time, Suzy bought me the DVD box set of series one and two and from then on I was hooked. Series three was really good, so I was looking forward to finally seeing them live. Although this was obviously an expensive production, it still had that raw home-made-fancy-dress-costume feel to it like the Mighty Boosh TV series had. I enjoyed it.
Michael McIntyre – Wednesday 8th October 2008
Saw him live at Sheffield Lyceum. We had cheap seats up on the balcony thanks to Chris not going to buy tickets early on the morning they were released. I’ve always thought he was funny on BBC Two’s Mock the Week but wasn’t sure what he’d be like doing stand-up. I was pleasantly surprised that he was actually really funny and did a lot of those jokes where he’d keep coming back to them later. I enjoyed it.
Vampire Weekend – Wednesday 22nd October 2008
Saw these live at Carling Academy Sheffield. We were standing for this gig thanks to nobody called Chris going to buy the tickets. Despite having not heard all the album, I thought they were really good. I’ve downloaded it now and actually think they might have been better live than recorded. Nevertheless... I enjoyed it.
Apart from all that, Suzy and I have also been to a few wedding fairs, we’ve been busy decorating our new house, we went to try out the fixed price lunch menu at Loch Fyne (really good food for just £11 per person) and I’ve been reviewing yet another book for O’Reilly.
So there you have it. A very busy but enjoyable October.
Labels: music, personal, theatre, tv
8 March 2007
(This was going to be one big post containing a few things I kept meaning to blog about because I couldn’t be bothered to write separate posts, but once I started writing I realised they were long enough to be posts on their own... so get ready whilst I open the post flood gates!)
Last month, I took Suzy to see Shakespeare’s romantic comedy “As You Like It” at the Crucible for Valentine’s Day. The play was alright; the usual minimal sets were used and there was some decent acting by young actors. (We didn’t understand all parts of the play though due to all that crazy Shakespeare language.) However, the main thing I took away from the evening was the realisation that young people today don’t have the same flair for language as the older generations.
This struck me when we were making our way to out seats and decided that rather than disturb the several elderly people already sitting on our row, we’d walk down the row behind and step over the backs of our seats. Upon doing this, the gentlemen sitting next to Suzy said:
Your kindness is only exceeded by your athletic ability.
Now that’s miles betterer than how da kids spk 2day innit.
D’ya get me?
Labels: personal, rant, theatre
4 May 2006
We went to watch Cats on Tuesday night at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield. (I would’ve posted about this earlier, but I was waiting for Chris to write an in-depth review so I could write a quick post and link to it, but it looks like he’s too busy talking about flowers and hot days...)
I like to think that I’m pretty good at following the plots of plays and musicals. However, it usually helps when there’s a plot to follow. I later learned from Wikipedia that I was almost there: the cats were having their annual Jellicle Ball at a junkyard to make the Jellicle Choice and announce the cat who can be reborn. And that’s it. (Except when they say “reborn” they actually mean “die”.) As the Wikipedia entry also says, “While CATS is often criticized for its lack of plot, it does have a minimal story used to string its musical numbers together.”
The production was very well presented, so it’s a shame that Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t spend more time on the storyline really. I guess the producers felt that the lack of plot meant that they should add extra dance sequences and reprises of songs to give the audience their money’s worth. (The fact that the cats came to interact with the audience was a nice touch though.)
I noticed one of the ‘Jellicle’ cats (possibly The Magical Mr. Mistoffelees, although I can’t be sure because they all looked quite similar) had been to the Wayne Sleep School of Dance and learnt Wayne’s favourite dance move. You know the one I’m talking about – I’ve mentioned it before – it’s the one where he spins around as fast as he can on one leg. It got a huge round of applause again anyway. (Why the contestants on Strictly Dance Fever don’t just do that each week I’ll never know!)
My conclusion? I’m glad I’ve seen it. I was a bit unsure about going at first as I get the impression that all ALW’s shows are too pantomime-like. Having said that, any show that’s still running after 25 years must be worth seeing.
Labels: music, personal, theatre
15 February 2006
To celebrate our 6th Valentine’s Day together, I took Suzy to see The Magic of the Musicals starring Marti Webb and Wayne Sleep (I’ve heard of both of them) with some other guy called Robert Meadmore (I’ve never heard of him before and he’s apparently not important enough to have his own entry on Wikipedia either).
The show was generally very good, although the lighting was pretty amateurish in parts. Marti Webb is an excellent singer with an extremely versatile voice; she’s also great at convincing the audience that she’s actually living the part. Wayne Sleep isn’t anywhere near as good, of course, but I suspect he was there primarily for his dancing capabilities rather than his singing voice. Watching the show, it’s obvious that his favourite dance move is the one where he spins around as fast as he can (sometimes on only one leg) as though trying to make himself dizzy – just like primary school kids do in the playground! Maybe I’m missing something, but that doesn’t look too difficult to do. I don’t understand why the audience applauded each time he did it. His tap-dancing was much better.
Robert Meadmore’s singing was okay, but it wasn’t that great in my opinion. He just didn’t seem to empathise with the characters he was supposed to be playing. His voice even caused a bit of distortion and vibrated parts of Sheffield City Hall when he hit certain notes which didn’t help. He was also very keen on promoting his latest album and some of his introductions to the songs were quite annoying.
The backing singers and dancers were entertaining, although one of the blokes looked far too cheesy with his fake tan, huge mouth full of gleaming white teeth and over the top expressions. My sympathy and credit must go to one of the girls who slipped and fell during one of the songs but immediately got back up and carried on – a true professional! (Although a true professional probably shouldn’t have fallen in the first place...)
The live band consisted of eight multi-talented musicians, with a few of them alternating between several instruments throughout the show. Watching the band and listening to the music reminded me of when I used to play the piano and trumpet for the school choir and orchestra, and Bolton Schools Concert Band. In fact, watching the show last night has inspired me to go out and buy some valve-oil and a practice mute so that I can blow my own trumpet again – quite literally!
If I actually manage to get a note out of it, I’ll think about posting some recordings here... so watch this space!
Labels: music, personal, rant, theatre
3 January 2006
I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions, mainly because I’m totally incapable of keeping them. Previous years have seen me try to stop biting my nails (several times) and give up kebabs (which is actually impossible). This year, however, I’m going to try and do a couple of things: chew my food more thoroughly and post to my blog more frequently. Only time will tell whether I’ll keep to either of them, but since it’s the third day of the year already, it must be time I posted something to my blog. (Especially since the extra food chewing hasn’t been going too well over the last couple of days...)
Anyway, it seems fitting that my first post of 2006 should review what happened to me in 2005 – i.e. all the things I probably should have posted about at the time but couldn’t usually be bothered.
Warning: anyone with a low boredom threshold should probably stop reading now as I’ve just read the post before publishing it and I have definitely rambled on a bit too much...
January 2005
I’ve been researching my Ruscoe family tree for around five years, but over the last year or so I’ve started to take it more seriously and decided to visit Shropshire Archives in January 2005 to help fill in some blanks. Whilst we were in the area, I took the opportunity to have a look at where my ancestors would have lived back in the 1800s. If you’ve got the Ruscoe surname in your family tree, you might want to look at my photos from the trip, my Ruscoe Family Genealogy website and the Ruscoe Family Genealogy Google Group.
February 2005
I received a letter from a popular men’s magazine threatening legal action against me unless I removed photos of two TV celebrities. The images showed how the celebrities looked before and after they were photoshopped for the magazine. I received them by email and made them into Flash movies so that you could hover over each to see the differences. Needless to say, the magazine’s legal team didn’t like this, so I kindly agreed to remove them. I now get hundreds of disappointed visitors looking for the photos on my website each month.
I also made a gingerbread house for my sister’s birthday and Suzy helped me to build a snowman.
March 2005
We managed to get some tickets to go and see The Games being filmed in Sheffield for Channel 4 and watched a few celebrities compete in Olympic style sporting events. The line up included Craig Charles (comedian/actor/presenter), Princess Tamara Czartoryski-Borbon (model), Danny Foster (former member of Hear’Say), Kirsty Gallacher (presenter), Mel Giedroyc (comedienne), Chesney Hawkes (singer), Lisa Maffia (singer), Jonathon Morris (actor), Philip Olivier (actor), Kevin Simm (member of Liberty X) and Anna Walker (presenter). There’s not much else to say about this really. Chris posted an equally brief description at the time.
April 2005
We went to see Richard Herring at the Lescar. I’m not really a fan of his but I thought he was very, very funny. Chris Hill covered it at the time, so there’s no need for me to say any more.
May 2005
During the first Bank Holiday weekend, I built myself a brick barbecue in our back garden. It’s something I’d had planned ever since we moved into our house and, even though we only got to use it three or four times, it was worth the five trips to Wickes, sore arms, aching shoulders and the sunburnt neck!
I also finally updated my website (again) to use XHTML & CSS, moved my three-year-old weblog to use Blogger and was kindly given a Flickr Pro account, which I really should be making more use of. (Maybe that should be another new year’s resolution...)
June 2005
I travelled more in this month that I’d travelled in my entire life. First of all, we went camping in Malham, North Yorkshire for Andy’s birthday (like we did the previous year). Then we went on holiday to Florence for a week, also visiting Pisa whilst we were in the area. About a week later I then made a business trip to Montréal, Canada. (You can read a bit more about these escapades in my Around the World in 25 Days post.)
July 2005
Chris and Dawn tied the knot and I had another birthday, which was when I played Singstar for the first time. (Sadly, this was when we also introduced Chris Riley to the game and he now takes it quite seriously...)
August 2005
A surprising number of rather large spiders made an appearance in this month. I’ve not seen many of them since then, so I can only presume that they’ve been beamed back up to the Planet of the Rather Large House Spiders by their mothership.
September 2005
Suzy and I visited Combe Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park in Devon with Lil and Chris (see my photos) and I got to feed a lemur for the first – and probably last – time!
Google released their Gmail button for Google Toolbar, which enabled me to figure out how to add custom search buttons to the toolbar. They then released Google Blog Search which would later result in my website traffic increasing considerably as people found my blog posts much more quickly than they would through the normal Google search.
October 2005
October was an exciting month (for a geek). First of all, I wrote a script to check for Google Subdomains and found a few that people hadn’t seen before. One of these was purchase.google.com which might have inspired the folks over at WebmasterBrain.com to dig a bit deeper, resulting in them discovering the Google Purchases (AKA Google Wallet / Google Payments) sign-up pages. Incidentally, almost three months on and this new service from Google still hasn’t been released yet.
I decided to run the script again after reading a comment by Wouter Schut and discovered the Google Base subdomain. What happened in the days following my post about this discovery was remarkable. Within 24 hours, Google-watchers all over the world were discussing a new service that they didn’t even fully understand. As screenshots started to appear on the Internet, people were speculating what the new service would be capable of, which caused eBay’s stock to reportedly drop by as much five percent at points during the day! The Guardian and The New York Times – amongst many others – referenced my website and I was even interviewed by Business Week magazine! Incidentally, the title I chose for my post – All your base are belong to Google – was used all over the Internet, with some people even posting it to their blogs without even knowing why they were doing it!
November 2005
I finally went to see The League of Gentlemen live in Llandudno (as I’d mentioned earlier in the year) and the show was absolutely excellent, completely exceeding my expectations. It was well written, well performed and well worth the wait. My only real gripe was that it wasn’t long enough; the two 45-minute acts just went far too quickly! For any League fans didn’t get to see it, I’d definitely recommend buying it as soon as the show is released on DVD.
I also held my school reunion and bought myself a PSP. I actually posted an update around that time, so you can read more about all that if you like.
December 2005
T’was the week before Christmas and my sister gave birth to a baby girl, making me Uncle Tony and ending the year perfectly.
The End.
If you’ve read all the way to here, you deserve a medal! Please accept my most sincere apologies. When I started writing this post, I only intended it to be a brief look back at 2005 but then I got blogorrhea and I couldn’t just hit the delete button after spending so much time on it...
Happy New Year!
Labels: gadgets, genealogy, google, personal, photos, psp, ruscoe.net, theatre, travel, tv
8 June 2005
My mate Dave (yes, that’s right – the one Papa Lazarou always talks about) introduced to me to The League of Gentlemen (not literally) when I was in my 3rd year of uni. Their 2nd series was airing on BBC2 and I’ve been hooked on their work ever since. In January 2001, I visited Hadfield to take a tour around the real life Royston Vasey. When you walk around Hadfield, you really do feel like you’re in Royston Vasey; the local butcher even sells special stuff sausages...
Earlier this year I came across The League of Gentlemen Scripts and That book, which was released ages ago but wasn’t really very well promoted. I bought it Dave for his birthday hoping that he’d already have a copy so that I could keep it. (He didn’t have it, so I had to buy it again for myself.) It contains all the scripts from the series, biographies of each character, and loads of pictures. It’s an ultra-heavy hardback book that every TLOG fan should own.
At the moment, The League seem to be pulling out all the stops. Not only have they just released their first motion picture, but they’ve also released The Complete Collection DVD Box Set (all three TV series and that disturbing Christmas Special) and a new special edition of their Live At Drury Lane DVD, featuring five minutes of new footage from their hugely popular "Local Show for Local People". They’ve also got another live show planned for later this year titled "The League of Gentlemen Are Behind You" which I’ve just booked some tickets to see at Llandudno’s North Wales Theatre.
Until very recently, they didn’t have an official website (there were, of course, hundreds of "unofficial" fan-sites popping up all over the Internet) but with The League now moving from cult to mainstream, it’s not surprising to see official sites starting to appear. For anyone that hasn’t managed to track them down, here are the ones I’ve found:
And in case you’ve never been to any of the unofficial sites before, here are some of the better ones that have managed to survive:
Labels: books, film, links, personal, photos, theatre, tv
