20 east

As Zosia is away we have had a chance to catch up on some films. The summer season is not the best time to get out there so we had to supplement with a few DVDs as well. I tend to keep my reviews simple! IMDb scores in brackets after the titles.

Terminator Salvation (7.0) – kind of okay if you like action films. This whole thing about not letting the machines kill John Connor is really boring now. As is pouring molten metal on the bad robot guy and a few other things that keep cropping up. Hopefully the last we’ll see of this franchise.

Public Enemies (7.6) – Why do all 30’s gangster films have to steal images from the Grand Central Station scene in “The Untouchables”? This was good but it could have been a lot better. Bad casting of Christian Bale, or bad acting. I’d have to question the direction too. Also it seemed to be shot in very high definition and if the instructions for the correct viewing distance for a HD TV are correct, we should have been sitting in Poznan to have optimum viewing pleasure given the size of the screen! Hard to keep track of HD shots that are moving fast. To be honest, if you want a film like this I’d recommend The Untouchables (8.0) (1987 – Costner, Connery, De Niro, Garcia) or Bonnie & Clyde (8.1) (1967 – Beatty, Dunaway, Hackman). Both far better films.

Ice Age 3 (7.3) – Another Ice Age film. Good in parts. Zosia enjoyed it. Watched Polish language version. (She was home one weekend)

Milk (8.0) – Was expecting something far better given the reviews. That’s why you have to be careful with American reviews if it’s a subject close to their hearts. Not being gay nor American and not having heard of this Milk guy the movie was not really relating to me on any deeper level. As a film it was okay, worth seeing, interesting but that’s about it. I know others disagree.

Dorothy Mills (6.1) - Or as the Polish title maniacs call it “The Exorcism of Dorothy Mills”. Don’t ask me why, there’s no devil and no exorcism. What could possibly be wrong in calling it Dorothy Mills like the makers wanted? Doesn’t deserve the poor IMDb score. Slightly spooky film but not outright scary and hardly any blood. Certainly no spinning heads, pea-soup projectile vomiting or deep voices…..actually there is a deep voice. Sort of low budget feel to it. Based in a small Irish island village where one gets the impression there’s been a fair bit of inbreeding.

Brüno (7.0) – Rates a 3.0 with me. There are a very few truly funny moments but these take up about 5 minutes maximum of the films length and are mostly when nobody is forcing it to be funny. For example, when the idiot is sitting there with the red-necks and nobody’s saying a word. The rest of the red-neck scene is supposed to be funny but it isn’t, unless you’re 10 years old and a bit slow. This might appeal to non English speaking people in the same way Mr Bean or Benny Hill does but I hate both of those so………. This is actually a pretty dishonest film as was well explained by Toby Young in the Spectator & I agree with him.

Coco Chanel (6.8) – Deserves a better score but it’s not about the USA saving the world so…. Audrey Tautou does a good job, as do the supporting cast. For lovers of Chanel fashion it might be a let-down as the film finishes just as the fashion gets started. Focus is on childhood up until death of the guy she loved, essentially on how she got started. This was in French with Polish subtitles.

Changeling (8.1) – Clint’s a good director, Jolie puts in a good performance and it’s an interesting, if a little unbelievable, story based on real events. We enjoyed it but think the reviews are a little OTT.

There were others but I forget which they were now! All we’ve got left at the kino is the latest Harry Potter and possibly Transformers but I expect we’ve seen all the good bits of that last one in the trailers!

I have to pass this amazing news on immediately. I was downstairs ‘taking the air’ and this bicycle courier emerged from the building, the guy who often visits, the one who looks like he needs psychiatric help. Anyway, he had a cigarette in his mouth and I’m thinking “Anytime now he’s going to ask for fire.”. Shock of shocks, instead of asking he produces no fewer than two cheap plastic lighters from his pockets. Well, I’m assuming pockets but being a Lycra-clad cycle-boy this may be a false assumption. Perhaps he keeps them in his delivery pouch?

I’m paying little attention now but there’s this annoying sound of frantic clicking behind me. I turn to see cycle-boy holding the two lighters with their heads facing each other at 45 degrees while he’s desperately turning the spark wheel of one of them as if to light the other one. Having no success he moves behind a pillar out of the wind. Still no success but he’s resisting the temptation to make the inevitable request and before he can change his mind I’m inside and gone.

So there we have it. There are some people in Warsaw who own lighters, two lighters even, but none of them work properly. I have to assume this guy had one lighter that was full of fuel but had no spark and another lighter that had a spark but was empty. He was trying to put 2+2 together and make fire but it just wasn’t happening. It would be interesting to see statistics for the relative success of Slavic Neanderthals versus others, given that making fire was more important back then.

Of course the other possibility for his behaviour is that my judgment that he needs psychiatric help is correct.

I post this just in case it might help anyone else with similar problems or desires to my own.

Being keen on football and being English I enjoyed last year playing (badly) the Telegraph Fantasy Football game so I tried to sign up again this year. They have improved the game but also improved the system running it such that at some point in the registration process it kept telling me that my IP address was not acceptable and ended the registration. This is a similar problem I would often encounter with interesting radio transmissions, live football, golf, formula 1, etc, also with anything available on the excellent BBC iPlayer and with certain videos attached to news items too. Although I understand the legalities behind it, more or less, it has been a source of some annoyance for quite a while now. This latest blockage by the Telegraph spurred me on to find a solution.

Can I use BBC iPlayer outside the UK?

Rights agreements mean that BBC iPlayer television programmes are only available to users to download or stream (Click to Play) in the UK. However, we are aware of demand for an international version.

Most radio programmes are available outside the UK in addition to podcasts, although sporting and other programmes may be subject to rights agreements.

In addition, many BBC News programmes are available for viewers outside the UK, as are BBC Sport highlights.

Do make sure you check for the latest updates on BBC iPlayer or contact your own country’s broadcasters to find out if they offer a similar service to BBC iPlayer.

Everyone knows the problem is that my IP address gives me away as being located in Poland and so what you need to do is change your IP address into something more suitable. There are ways to ‘cloak’ your IP such that it appears to come from either nowhere or a random country. These may be okay for security issues but for my purposes I needed something to positively identify me as being in the UK, that means I needed to connect my computer to a server in the UK.

In the past I’ve had a go at assorted free “proxy servers” that people have suggested might help but I’ve found all of them to provide very unreliable service, if they worked at all, and so I sort of gave up on the whole thing. Now with new impetus I searched again and found the “UK Proxy Server” service. I signed up for the free trial and gave it a very successful workout first of all dealing with the Fantasy Football but then going on to listen to the open golf championship and then watch it and other programmes on the BBC iPlayer. It really couldn’t be any simpler to deal with – they give you an IP address a username and a password, you create a new network connection using all these details and bingo, you’re finished in 2 minutes or less. You then connect to the internet in the usual way, then activate the new connection as well and as far as the virtual world is concerned you are moved seamlessly from Warsaw to somewhere in the UK. When you don’t want to be in the UK you just close the new connection and it leaves you with your normal one working as it always did. For example, my mail programme doesn’t work when I’m in the UK, not exactly a big deal.

I’ve chosen the VPN (virtual private network) option as opposed to the proxy server and the smaller bandwidth version, 30Gb/month as opposed to the unlimited one. As with anything that is well put together and works as it is supposed to work, there’s a cost involved. In my case it costs 100.99 GBP per annum (or 10.99 per month), this is perhaps a little steep but considering the things I’ll be able to access now I think it is good value – even if only for the Saturday football radio and Match of the Day on the Beeb on the Sunday!

I’m certain there are cheaper ways of doing this, possibly also as reliable although my experience differs but if so I’ve never been able to find them and therefore I’m more than happy to have found this and that it installed and worked in a very painless fashion.

One warning. If you pay using ‘paypal’ be sure you double check the subscription for ongoing payments that is automatically set up. Mine was going to make the annual payment EVERY month!! It is easily cancelled and I’m certain from correspondence with their customer service that this is not a scam but a technical issue with paypal.

Last thought, comment. The statement I’m making here is that I’m happy to pay for access to UK generated content from my home in Warsaw, in this case BBC radio and TV primarily. I can understand why certain bodies might want to try and stop me getting this for free but surely it’s in their interests for my money to go directly to them rather than where it is going. Maybe they could think about how they could provide this as an option in future instead of just telling me “You live in the wrong place – bog off!”.

As you can tell from the Google headline logo above, we are supposed to be celebrating the 40 years that have passed since that small step for man. But that’s the problem isn’t it, what these 40 years have proved is that it was indeed a small step, the giant leap for mankind never materialised, certainly not as far as the exploration of space is concerned. I suppose the fact that I can write this and publish it on the internet so you can read it is about as near to any great leap that has happened in the last 40 years. Or am I being unkind? Perhaps the work being done by the many satellites up there, providing communications and mapping across the earth might also be considered “giant”, although all of these things would have happened with or without us hearing “the Eagle has landed”. And as the Chinese have proved, this web of intelligent space debris is a pretty fragile thing so I’m sure there’s a way to go before that’s considered to be ‘properly done’ no matter how impressive the results appear to be down here in the gravity belt.

Don’t get me wrong, the moon landing was a wonderful thing. I was 10 at the time and been living in London for three years in the delightful end of terrace shown below courtesy of Google Street View. The neighbourhood has clearly gone downhill since we left. We used to have a front garden, not a parking lot and rubbish dump! The biggest change, I suspect, is the more than subtle whiff of “Eau De Balti Prawn” you’d encounter if you were standing there right now!

View Larger Map

So, we may have gathered around our black & white TV, probably a relatively recent purchase in fact as when we moved in here we only had a radio – and dad used to whip us every morning while mum boiled some old shoelaces for breakfast! I can’t say I have strong memories of watching the event and having called my parents this morning neither do they! “We didn’t watch the TV very often but I’m sure we did watch the moon landing.”, is the best we can come up with. Bit of an anti-climax really but probably because it was an American thing, my dad’s not great with American things. I called at the weekend and we discussed the golf, which he said he was watching. I said something like “Wouldn’t it be great if Tom Watson could win!”, thinking that having an old man win the open might be considered good news for a wrinkly. “I’d rather see any of the British guys win”, was the reply. Oh well, some deep rooted dislike of Americans is my diagnosis, must delve into that one day, probably something to do with the war.

Mind you, I just looked it up and the actual time of the “small step” was 22:56 Eastern Standard Time on the 20th, that would be 04:56 on the 21st in London so it is quite possible we were sleeping. Typical Yankee trick to keep all the fun for their own evening entertainment!

And so, 40 years on and we still await the “great leap” of continued space exploration. Hubble is fun, some of the probes have also been interesting but we really should get out there and spend a lot more face time with these planets. It’ll take everyone’s mind off trivia here on earth. I actually have a feeling that this might just be going through a few politicians minds right now, how to get people focussed on some bigger purpose and stop whining about petty local difficulties. I also think the thought of China being the big stars of the next era of space exploration might just wake people up a little. Still, China more or less owns the US these days as far as all the media goes (prudent Chinese savings fund American excesses) so perhaps there’s not much difference between NASA and SINO anyway.

It is the final round of the open championship (golf) at Turnberry today and Tom Watson has, exactly as I type this, just hit his shot off the first tee into the middle of the fairway. Tom was the overnight leader at -4 and he knows the course well so it would not be too surprising if he were to go on and win. It would not be too surprising that is if he wasn’t a 59 year old golfing legend who won his last open championship in 1983 and his last open on the same course at Turnberry in 1977. Can he repeat that victory after a gap of 32 years?

Tom Watson

Turnberry Ailsa Course – 10th green

Tom was the world’s #1 ranked golfer from ‘78 to ‘82 and was squeezed in the spotlight between the one and only Jack Nicklaus and the equally legendary Seve Ballesteros. He’s won the open championship a total of five times in his tally of eight major victories. Some of the senior players have had decent runs in majors outside of their peak years but I can’t remember any of them coming this close to actually winning. It really would be major back-page news if he could keep it going today. Best of luck to him!

If he can’t keep it going, then we still have a possible “fairy-tale” open result with Ross Fisher winning for England. Ross’s wife, Jo, is expecting to give birth to their first child at any moment (about 5 days late so far) and he’s already threatened to drop clubs and leave in previous rounds if he gets the call. Will he leave if he’s likely to win the open? I notice Ross is the pro at Wentworth, one of my favourite courses that I played often when I lived in the UK so I’m warming to him!

Ross Fisher

LIVE EDIT – Fisher is playing well with a couple of birdies and is now leading the championship having gone to -5 while Watson is doing the opposite and has dropped a few shots to go down to -2.

There are others in contention of course, a Tasmanian called Goggin for example who might be a good winner for the Aussies as retaliation for losing the Ashes (as looks likely). Of course there’s always the other English interest in Lee Westwood, time he won a major, surely? Stewart Cink another one not to be ruled out.

Lee Westwood

So, a 59 year old legend with nothing to prove, a young guy who’s filled with the adrenaline of imminent fatherhood or neither of them? Should be interesting.

PS – for American readers, the Open Championship is called the British Open in your language. We call it THE Open because it was where it all started back in 1860 (as opposed to the U.S Open which started in 1895)!