Mark Hughes – Wales Vs Spain
I got many a bruise trying to do this. Give it a go. It is nowhere near as easy as Sparky makes this look.

Eric Cantona – Man Utd Vs Sheff Utd
The goal is great, the celebration is probably even better.

Denis Bergkamp – Holland Vs Argentina
This is a thing of beauty. Taking into account the stage and time in the game, this is all kinds of awesome. Great commentary too.

Marco Van Basten – Holland Vs USSR
Woof! I remember watching this as it happened and it was more of an immediate feeling of surprise that he had even tried this.

Archie Gemmell – Scotland Vs Holland
When something like this happens when you’re 8, you’re never really going to forget it. At this stage of the game we still had a, typically Scots, hope that we could still go through.

Ole – Man Utd Vs Bayern Munich
For any Man Utd fan, this will always be the greatest goal ever. I may never go this nuts again when a goal goes in. Only the second time I proper lost it at football. The first time was about 2 minutes before this. I had waited 29 years for a European Cup Final. I was allowed.

Wayne Rooney – Man Utd Vs Newcastle
You don’t save those. The thing I love about this is how he seemlessly transitions from monaing at the ref to a light jog to clattering it in the net. Take a bow son.

Maradona Vs England
As Alan Hansen would say, pace, power, pace, control, pace, power. This goal is the reason that the whole ‘hand of god’ thing doesn’t really matter.

Roberto Carlos – Real Madrid vs Tenerife
I really like to think he meant this.

Zinedine Zidane – Real Madrid vs Bayer Leverkusen
Best goal ever scored in Scotland?

Goals I couldn’t add because they weren’t embeddable from YouTube were:

Ryan Giggs’ goal vs Arsenal in the 1999 FA Cup Semi-Final
This is the goal that made me get Sky Sports.
Steven Gerrard’s 2nd goal from the 2006 FA Cup Final
90th minute and he does this? Outrageous.

The coverage of the launches in those days wasn’t quite as sexy as it is now. You got the whoosh up into the sky for 90 seconds or so and that was about it. None of the on board camera showing external tank separation and the like. Even so, it left a very strong imprint on me.

It seems pretty certain that that moment was the beginning of my mini space obsession and ultimately led me to go back and become a bit of an Apollo buff. And yet, it isn’t lauded anywhere, in popular culture at least, anywhere near as much as the events on 1969. You can perhaps understand why but, yet, the significance and engineering achievement cannot be understated.

I remember the first landing too. I was outside playing football and my Mum shouted out the window to tell me the Shuttle was landing. I got some odd looks as I sprinted up the 28 stairs. In many ways, the landing was a lot cooler than take-off. I’d seen the whole rockety lift-off thing before, but something coming out of space and gliding down to the ground was something else entirely. It just seemed like an implausibly tricky thing to do. Obviously, having read all about the landing process, I’m probably even more impressed than I was then. ( Terminal Area Energy Management anyone? )

Discovery Landing

A lot of the detail of the first flight was lost on me. For example, I didn’t really get how cool it was that the guy flying the thing that day had walked on the moon. Also, I didn’t appreciate that this was the first time NASA had ever done the maiden launch of a manned vehicle with someone in it.*

For those of my generation, this was our Apollo. Except it wasn’t. Because it isn’t associated with the same romantic notions or fond remembrances. I just missed being around for Apollo. I was in existence for all 6 moon landings and was breathing air for 4 of them, albeit far too young to remember anything at all. For the kids of the Apollo generation it seems to have been very seminal. Musicians from Billy Bragg to the Inspiral Carpets people have sung about it. As yet, it doesn’t seem that the Space Shuttle has had a similar impact. I thought this particular balance needed to be redressed. By me. In a blog post. Watch the world listen.

There is perhaps a tendency to view the Space Shuttle as no more than a truck; a big white Eddie Stobart lorry (sans girl’s names). There is no romance of exploration, no big white moon, footprints or golf balls; just dull things like science and satellites.

The problem is that the Space Shuttle was not as much of a human story so it doesn’t have as wide an appeal. Sadly, and all main human stories were tragic ones. I remember both moments I found out about the loss of Challenger and Columbia. Both very sad events, not least because they were largely avoidable. It didn’t need Richard Feynman so say what the issues were they were known. And this is where, ultimately, the struggle for balance will be. NASA made great strides forward off the back of making measured risk judgements.

And therein lies the problem. Where do we go after the shuttle if we become too scared to take risks and even less inclined to spend any money?

Soon the Space Shuttles will be retired to museums and will be (may be?) replaced with something entirely less glamorous and, in many ways, a step backwards to something recognisable from the 1960′s. This isn’t how our childhood visions**** of space development were meant to look.

Discovery In Space – nice shooting kid

Just like the demise of Concorde, we are taking some backward steps in the way of more economic progress. Obviously, you can’t ignore the fact the successes of Apollo and the moon (and indeed that of Concorde) were achieved with a significant economic burden. But it seems the more fiscally prudent approach could easily become counter-productive with the lack of glamour and excitement denuding public interest and support further. For as cool as Cassini-Huygens and Opportunity and Spirit are, if you ask 100 people on the street what they are and they will not have a clue ( and will scurry off to watch Family Fortunes ).

As much I will be sad to see the Shuttles confined to museums, I fear more that the end of their missions will spell the beginning of a bit gap in space exploration and pushing new boundaries. If I can get a little grand, surely it is our duty as a race to do all we can do push those boundaries? If we can conjure up $800 billion from thin air to bail out a bunch of no-good greedy bankers, why can’t we go back to the high spend days of Apollo and set ourselves bigger and better challenges? Have we all become too self-interested, entertainment fuelled and introspective to care about doing anything for the sake of exploration or adventure.

Columbia Flies Over Endeavour

I fear I may never see my Apollo, someone walking on Mars or a space discovery of life-changing proportions. Why? Because we appear not to care enough any more. The best thing we have flying now are some ageing Shuttles designed in the early 1970′s – a bit like me.

Maybe it will only be after they are gone that a more romantic remembrance of the Shuttles will emerge. Although you never can be sure. I’ve not heard many songs about SkyLab.

So, with only a few missions left the STS party is nearly over. Perhaps the only chance I’ll get to see a Shuttle while still operational is if it lands at Cambeltown, but, on balance, I’d rather than didn’t happen.

As an aside…

I suppose that day in 1981 must have subliminally informed my decision to become an engineer.

I was lucky enough to have my very first ‘professional’ job working in the space industry. As a very young student, I worked for the summer in the Space Group at Ferranti in Edinburgh.** There they made components for satellites and the like. My very first task was to write a procedure for applying ink to circuit boards. Sounds easy enough, except that the manufacturer’s instructions were written in French.*** After a few garbled phone calls to Belgium, I had my procedure done and submitted for approval in the US. I don’t mention this to break my own boring record. The point is that I have as much respect for the patience of the modern space engineer as I have for the ingenuity. You see, in a world where you get one chance to fire something into the sky and on a rocket and it has to work in the extremes of space for maybe 15 years without failure. You tend not to take any risks. And therefore you take your time. A lot of it.

These guys can spend ten years (or more) working on a single project and, in the 30 seconds of launch, it can all go a bit explodey of they can experience a very singular joy of seeing their creation lift off into space. The extremes of possible emotion. I was lucky enough to see this first hand when we watched a video of a launch from Kourou with the Ferranti guys as one of their projects launched. On that occasion, nothing blew up, and everyone was happy. Very happy.

I suppose I would have liked to have continued in the space industry although it’s not entirely clear if I’d have had that kind of patience!

* John Young had been offered a slight less risky first mission but declined saying “let’s not practice Russian roulette”
** I now live half a mile from the flats that now occupy the site.
*** Luckily, I could read/talk French then. Et maintenant? Bof!
**** I love how that Wikipedia page appears to be in no doubt that these ships exist

Images are courtesy of NASA/Wikimedia Commons and are linked to source pages.

They say there are many ways to skin a cat. But, in general, getting movies made has always been down a more trodden path. Raise some money, make the film. OK, sometimes it can be hard, people have mortgaged their house to get films finished (as Chartoff and Winkler did to complete Rocky) but there can be few people who have laid it on the line as much as Brenna Lee Roth to get her film “Til Death Do Us Part” in the can.

The film is directed by Chris Wig and tells the story of a man and woman, so desperate for money, that they fake the death of the husband using the a dead body they dig up. You would think that that was a fairly original way to raise cash, but no, that’s not even scraping the surface of creative financing.

With a gap in the budget and nearing the end of the shoot, Brenna is currently offering 4″ X 4″ sections of her skin for people to advertise on for a year in return for $400 for the film. Believing so much in the story, she has already been actively raising money from friends and acquaintances to ensure that nothing stands in the way of completion. I chipped in a very small amount, as have others, and with the first section of skin just been taken up by a a company in the US.

If there was an award for Creative Producer of the Year, Brenna would certainly deserve it. Tenacity and determiniation unsurpassed. As the prosector says in the film:

“Sometimes life hands you a hard knock. You just got to deal with it. You can’t just create an elaborate scheme, defraud people, dig up dead bodies, and fake the deaths. Just deal with what life deals you.”

Well, maybe not, but you can put your own body on the line to make sure things get done.

If you’d like to help Brenna with a donation or an offer to advertise on her, then please let me know and I’ll put you in touch. After all, I’m a producer of the film too now, needs to get made!

Based on last time, I think there is a good chance that one or more people will have completed all 40 puzzles by the end of the weekend. It’s a bit like the Olympic 100m final. Months of preparation and it’s over in a flash. Except that people will still be joining and playing for months to come. So, in that sense, it’s nothing like the Olympics at all. Good. Glad I cleared that up.

So, come along, join in the fun, I promise you you will at least get the first puzzle…

Don’t forget that you don’t need to have completed season 1 to play season 2, you can play both at once. So, if you’ve not tried season 1, register now and get some practice in.

Look forward to seeing the previous players back and. hopefully, a lot more noobs…

Until such time…

And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night!” We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on!We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

If you’ve not seen or heard of Bimbogami before, it is an entirely free online puzzle challenge.

We’ll be announcing the precise date/time of the launch of season 2 sometime soon. So, if you’ve not tried Bimbogami before, there is plenty of time to register and try the 40 puzzles of Season 1. We’re hoping for a great battle between all the puzzle teams that took part last time as well as getting some more newbie puzzlers hooked.

Facebook users can now become a Bimbogami fan on Facebook.

Following on from my recent spate of clip posts, I’m going to go for a Top 10, thus propelling me nearer to the top of the “Blogs with an editorial style close to Channel 5″ charts.*

So, inspired by a chat on the way home with Stu the other night, I decided to work out what my favourite foreign** films. I’m not claiming this to be the best ever, more my favourite. Which is why you won’t see the habitual list faves like Kurosawa/Truffaut/Goddard. Just not my thing. Maybe one day.

There are a few films that are filed under “Nearly Made It”. Betty Blue (37°2 le matin) might have made it for reasons of student nostalgia and nakedness but, having watched it again recently, think that it doesn’y quite hang together. Amélie (Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain) is (and looks) lovely but maybe a little too quirky. I had a very lovely birthday the day I saw Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Wo hu cang long), it looks lovely but on repeated viewings all that flying about starts to look silly. A final word for The Host (Gwoemul), its just good fun. No harm in that.

There is also a pile of DVDs still to be watched like Oldboy, Festen, Hidden that might have made it. Maybe one day.

So, on with the big 10.

10. Germinal
OK, I’ll be honest. This isn’t a truly great film but it makes it into the list because of the book and the fact that it is a very good attempt at a very difficult book to film. As with any film like this, the natural abridging leaves anyone who read the book first a little at a loss. That’s why I thought the Lord of the Rings films were fine. I didn’t know what was missing. But with Germinal, it was the bits that were missing that stood out.

That said, the grimness, the poverty are all come across powerfully. Although I’m compelled to say Jeunet would have done it better (more of him later). And talking of later, this isn’t Gérard Depardieu‘s first appearance in this list.

Trouble at mill mine

Everyone should experience at least part of Les Rougon-Macquart and this is a very good place to start. Although this post has led me to find the DVD of La Bête Humaine, which I’ve just stuck in my LoveFilm rental list. Nice. Best ending for a book ever.

9. La Reine Margot
Isabelle Adjani, amazing visuals/production design, what’s not to like? It looks great, it pulls no punches it in brutality and makes it into my top 10 because these things make it very memorable. I suppose you have to like period pieces and perhaps 16th Century French history isn’t for you. But I’ll say it again, Isabelle Adjani is in it.

Best we don’t discuss the moustaches

8. La Heine
La Heine is the kind of film I don’t normally like. Bit modern, bit purposefully gritty but it all works well. Insightful, shocking and all shot is an ultra-vivid documentary style. Love the soundtrack too, something about French hip-hop I love in a film but which I can’t really listen to otherwise (like the Taxi soundtrack gathering dust somewhere).

“See me, ahm no’ happy”

7. A Very Long Engagement ( Un long dimanche de fiançailles )
OK, so when I mentioned Jeunet earlier you were all expected Amelie, right? Well, more of that later. But this film is a worthy inclusion in this list for one very, very simple reason. It looks stunning. Every moment, every frame is a work of art. And me with me photos and that, I’m a sucker for that.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion

And yes, that is Jodie Foster acting in French. She does Latin too, quid quo pro, very talented.

6. Delicatessen
That man Jeunet again. So we’ll forgive him for Alien: Resurrection. The reasons why this is film is great can be summed up by its plot keywords in IMDB, Surrealism / Metaphor / Dystopic Future / Black Comedy / Cannibalism. Come on? How cool is that? Imagine Black Books, if Dylan Moran killed Bill Bailey and fed him to Tamsin Greig, all directed by David Lynch. Oh yes, you betcha.

Bring me the head of Mark E. Smith

Here I come, ready or not!

Ooooh, Betty!
(I know these keep getting funnier)

3. City of God (Cidade de Deus)
You knew this would be here somewhere. From its opening moments it grabs you and throws you about the cinema. Looks great, sounds great and with the dizzying claustrophobic scene in the club, really achieves a major assault on all the senses.

You can talk about the realism, the unknown actors, the trueness of the story and cry “oh the deprivation” but that will always serve to hide the facts about how well this film is directed and put together. Watch closely. Its a marvel.

All the nice boys want to be a photographer

A lump of purest green

Now that’s a ‘tache

* come back later tonight, there might be boobies
** i.e. not in the English language or “bloody subtitles, no way!” as my Dad would say

There is one area of such nostalgia for people* of my vintage that seems to have me in a very tight grip. The sights, sound and memories associated with our first computers. I have touched on the wonder of this in a previous post and I revisited it briefly here after a magical find.

Stuart and I have a yearly quest to find Christmas presents for each other that only 30-odd years of history can find. This year I discovered a great book, The ZX Spectrum Book – 1982 to 199x. This ticks all the necessary 3 R’s:

• rare (only 1000 copies produced, so hurry! )
• retro
• reminiscing

The days of the Spectrum were when it all really started to look good. Sure, the ZX81 was special, but I think even we knew then that it was maybe a wee bit pants. The Spectrum was altogether different, colour, sound and the birth of the game that had some sense of size and expanse.

You can easily find many sources online to fuel your nostalgia for this, but this book is a must for all such starry-eyed gazers into the past as it is not simply a trotting out of the available resources in print form, you can tell it has been produced with genuine affection. Great design, layout and attention to detail. If you loved the ZX Spectrum, you really need to get this book, it even looks like a Spectrum so you can hand it to your kids and say “never mind the Wii, this is a games machine, just imagine it with rubber buttons”.
So, with this one simple book I appear to have won this year’s Xmas present battle, although, with one much-trailed present from Stuart still to come, he could still snatch it, but he is already admitting defeat.

The best news of all is that the equivalent book about the Commodore 64 is about to come out and Stuart is going to buy me one for my birthday. If the ZX Spectrum was great, then the C64 was, well…if you know, you know…

* I say people, I really mean boys.

Lets start with the album and the reason for going. Tromatic Reflexxions is a good album, quite a different sound for me and those familiar Mark E. Smith groans make it simultaneously new and old. I can’t lay claim to being a hardcore Fall* fan. OK, I’ve maybe got 10 albums or so, but I know there is quite a lot of it I find average at best. Not something a real devotee would ever say. Clearly, there are many highlights, Frightened is probably in my top 10** songs ever. Mark has always been able to bring something different to songs. Take, for example, way back in 1994, his inspired addition to the Inspiral Carpets’ I Want You ( Note use of lyric sheet, of which more later. )

The album isn’t universally great, but The Rhinohead is marvellous, filled as it is with the spirit of the SID chip and Rob Hubbard. So, I was looking forward to hearing it live. Well, I might have heard it live. I’m not too sure.

Don’t think I’ve been to a gig before were no one played instruments. That itself was novel. Two blokes behind and desk and they did their thing very well. The bass was like some form of battlefield organ-curdling weapon. I’d imagine that the Mouse of Mars fans in attendance would got exactly what they were after. Loud, incessant, kicking beats. Wasn’t much of a dance atmosphere. No obvious signs of dancing or moshing. I thought I’d survived as much bass as was humanly possible in a night club in Mumbai, but this was much bigger and louder than any Bhangra.

A good few minutes in and no sign of Mr. Smith. Which was fine. Built up the expectation a bit. And then he arrived. He wandered onto stage, not too steadily and with ill-defined purpose. Dressed like he had just got out of jail in the clothes he went in with (in 1979), he cut a fine dash in a leather jacket that even your oldest, coolest Uncle would be proud of. Thing is, any concept of what he looked like was instantly over-ridden by the realisation that he looked not unlike the dwarf from Twin Peaks*** This was even more of a dramatic likeness as he bent over a light, reading the lyrics from an A4 sheet. If, at this juncture, I was auditioning for the more pretentious end of the music press I would launch into a discussion about David Lynch and dystopian nightmares.

That isn’t as ridiculous a description as it my seem, but maybe not all that accessible. Imagine you had hired a rave band to your wedding. The young ones are dancing, the old ones are tutting and then your crazy Uncle gets up and starts shouting the words to “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, except that he doesn’t know the words and blurts out noises incoherently instead.

The first mic doesn’t seem to work to well. A roadie appears with a new one and calmly escorted aside by a wise hand “Listen son, I’ve been in this game a while now.” Good, he’s on his game. Maybe. Things progress well, lyrics are read, mic is rammed into amp for ear-splitting reverb. Every time he approaches the desk there is a definite look of foreboding on the faces of the ever bouncy knob twiddlers (a great name for a band/porn film if ever there was one ).And then, as if my magic, he’s gone. Off stage. Somewhere. Must be the smoking ban we think. The ‘singing’ continues from afar. Seems louder than before. Is it him? Is it a conveniently available sample. Its amazing what they can do nowadays.

From there, nothing much changes. The bass assault continues until my face starts to hurt in a way that you think it shouldn’t. And then he’s back for some more hunched burbling and away again. At this point, I am laughing almost constantly. Somehow it just wouldn’t be right to turn up and just hear the album, only a bit louder. This is a proper occasion. Mark doing what Mark does best. Its not like he hasn’t got previous. Even on live Fall albums from nearly 30 years ago he had a tendency to randomize any on-stage attempt at normality. This is what it should be.

A roadie appears on stage and can be seen to start a sentence with “Mark…” in the ear of the left boogie-meister. We all believe the full sentence is “Mark has passed out.” But no!

The last triumphal appearance on stage is a tour de force. He’s back, the lyrics match the tune, its kicking. For a couple of minutes. Cue march to front of stage, lyrics flung into air, mic handed to audience member and exeunt. No bears in attendance. Fantastic. Although, fantastic with “WTF?” tattooed on it.

There have always been those who saw Smith as a genius. And these aren’t fools. But, to accept what I saw last night as genius demands quite a lot. Clearly he was out of it and it was undeniably funny. But a 45 minute set in which the lead ‘singer’ appears on stage for about 10 of those, seems to be a little profligate. Not least because of our foolish hope that there might be an up tempo, techno cover of Cruiser’s Creek thrown in due to lack of material.

But hey, this was proper rock and roll, it was a much better story. And as I climb into my family MPV on the way home, you have to respect him for what he is and what he has been. Ain’t none of us is as young as we used to be.****

In case you are wondering what it was that took me there in the first place, have a listen to this.

* For a start, the real fans would insist on saying “The Fall”, then again, I’ve read the book, wonder if they all have.
** This is a “Tardis” top 10 containing 100 songs, deliberately not capitalised to annoy another set of devotees
*** If Stuart also uses this image, I thought of it first, he stole it
**** That was Stuart’s line, I just stole it.

For this reason, it is with great delight that I write about the next in the line of great free online puzzle sites, Bimbogami. Due to launch this weekend, Bimbogami should be manna from heaven for all those puzzle fans that loved Puzzle Donkey and Not Pron. But, whilst it borrows from their sequential puzzle format, Bimbogami has a flavour and style all of its own. A combination of traditional logic puzzles with a new breed of interactive puzzles, makes it stand out as the next generation in online puzzling. Also, a unique taunting system reacts to your desperate guesses, a first in online puzzling.

The innovations don’t end there, your thinking time is measured, your guesses are counted. When you mplete Bimbogami, the Hall of Fame will show who have been the real puzzle kings or queens.

So, we, the puzzling public thank you ManIC MorFF for this new puzzling experience and hope that all the many thousands of keen puzzlers out there get right behind it when it goes lives and turns it into he phenomenon it deserves to be. After all, its free, its fun and its utterly compelling. And there is currently no free online puzzle experience that gets anywhere close.

There is a simple taster puzzle to get you going and from there get right on to registering. You know you want to.

Enjoy.