Orange!

A colleague's office was being cleared out and these chairs were going spare. Two are destined for the flat of some friends, and the other two are mine to deal with as I please. Aren't they beautiful? It makes it look like my office's been breeding wee orange pod-chairs. Maybe skynet's been busy...

(Orange! is to be said in the style of that sample from a Boards of Canada track. Fantastic.)

Lecture

I just gave a lecture. It was bad. I feel very disorganised at the moment and it's paying off as I manage to make an dog's dinner of my job. Argh! I'm preparing now for all the stuff to come. I'm resolved to get it all out of the way this week and then just sail through it for the rest of the semester. Is this wishful thinking? Probably. But I can only try.

I finished Lunar Park, which was quite good, and now I'm reading The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde which is really good fun so far. I'm also desperate to see some films but feel like there really isn't the time.

This was dull. I'll stop whingeing and get on!

Mogwai!

More Mogwai. Yet again. I just bought tickets to see them at the Queen's Hall here in Edinburgh, just around the corner from my flat in fact. I'm so excited. There's even some live footage here on the BBC. The quality's pretty poor, but the band look like they're on good form which bodes well. Apparently certain parts of the shows have been deafening so I'll be keeping my distance from the stage.

In case you were wondering, I'm still reading Lunar Park and there's a character in it who pretends to be the Patrick Bateman and `looks a lot like Christian Bale'. This has reminded me that I have to buy American Psycho on DVD: if you haven't seen it, it's pretty nasty, but is like a costume drama, it's so accurate about the 80's. Christian Bale is hilarious in it.

Lunar Park

I've been reading Lunar Park, the newish novel by Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho etcetera. It's very odd: it's written in the first person and the main character is Ellis himself. As such it's presented as being like a memoir, except it quite obviously isn't. The first chapter or so was like an account of Ellis's life since he was a student up to the `present day', which is a weirdly but not implausibly nastier version of the real thing. Anyhow it just got very fantastic because after only 70 pages there's an evil furby. That's right, an evil furby. I can't wait to see what happens next.

In other non-news I start my number theory lectures tomorrow. I'll be telling the students about the Sieve of Eratosthenes and I will be loved for it! I've also been listening to the last track of Explosions in the Sky's album The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. It's very cool and at some point I'll see if I can make it available to you lot.

Films and other stuff

First, let me apologise for the lack of recent posts.

I'm so sorry.

In the last few weeks I've been to see a few films: Brokeback Mountain, A Cock And Bull Story, and Hidden. It seems like everyone's seen Brokeback Mountain, and rightly so: it's very good, and so sad. I didn't cry though. AC&BS was a wee bit patchy, but enjoyable enough to merit seeing. The parts where Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon were let loose were especially good. The structure was far less interesting than I expected. Not that I think any film less scrambled than Memento is a shod of water-treading pap, just that AC&BS let itself down a wee bit. Finally, Hidden is this new French film about a couple who receive video tapes of their house in the post. It was really gripping the whole way through, and then ... Also, it had one of the ickiest moments I've seen since Jack got his nose sliced in Chinatown. A sizeable portion of the audience screamed. Honest.

Anyhow, there you go. If you people aren't careful then I'll start telling you about Joyce manifolds.