That's What Passes for a Good Movie These Days?

The other thing I did on Sunday was finish watching "Top Gun: Maverick", which I'd made three previous attempts to watch and only managed ten minutes (the joy of Funsize and Surprise! discovering TV). It was one of a handful of things I wanted to watch before our Paramount+ subscription expires (the remaining two being "Scream 5" and a second watch of the D&D movie).

Anyway, I had been quite hopeful about TG:M, as it had had some rather good reviews.

Um...

The film follows a time-honoured formula: Maverick is a hotshot pilot who falls afoul of authority. He finds himself called back to Top Gun as an instructor, taking on the mentor role from the original film. There he deals with students with such well-developed personalities as "the arrogant one", "the angry one", "the female one", and, um, "the other one". (There only being three character traits possible for a fighter pilot, and "has boobs" is one of them.)

He also rekindles an on/off affair with Generic Bar-owner #1, in which Jennifer Connelly does her absolute best with a character with no personalty at all. (In theory, the character does also have the hook that she's a single mother. But as far as I can tell, her daughter exists for the sole reason that the two of them can have a conversation about a boat, thus passing the Bechdel Test.)

Anyway.

Maverick has to train his students for an almost impossible mission: they have to blow up a uranium refinement plant in an entirely-undefined enemy nation (might as well be Canada). The approach to this will not be easy: they are required to skim the surface to this point. Then they have to hit a target point that is only two metres wide. Oh, and they have to use missiles, presumably because the shaft is ray shielded. (They even have a bit where one of the characters has to make do without a targeting system, presumably using the Force instead.)

Throw in a couple of scenes lifted almost whole-cloth from the original (replacing beach volleyball with beach football), and then add a handful of callbacks to the first film to tug on nostalgia. And we're done.

On the one hand, it's a work of absolute genius - huge numbers of people went to see it and by all accounts had a great time, and to do that with no originality in either characters or story is impressive. On the other hand, it's just plain silly.

So I must admit, I'm perplexed as to how it can have garnered such impressive reviews - I can buy "terrific, brainless fun", but anything beyond that...?

A Lucky Escape

My big challenge on Sunday came in the form of a broken PC - after restarting Chrome to update I discovered it suddenly wouldn't load my home page (which is a page of links stored on my D drive). I then rebooted the machine as a whole, only to find that the D drive as a whole had disappeared.

Needless to say, I was less than pleased with this, given that the PC is less than six months old. I was less pleased still when I discovered that Dell's automated chat assistant was only able to point me at a couple of utterly useless troubleshooting articles. And, of course, it being Sunday there was no chance of speaking to an actual human.

Though in the event that wasn't such a big deal - the root cause turned out to be nothing Dell could really help with anyway.

In an attempt to diagnose the fault I removed the drive, plugged it into my adapter, and connected it to LC's laptop. That confirmed that the drive itself was working. I then reconnected to the other machine, and accessed the BIOS, and it was working there too. But rebooting the machine still showed the problem.

Then I got lucky. Somewhere in there the machine restarted, and suddenly it was all working again!

The reason for this is that I have a powered USB hub attached (which is on its way out) and an external hard drive (which is definitely on its way out). When the PC restarts, but not when it boots from cold, this hub often fails to activate three of the ports, including the one with the drive attached. It appears that one of those two components is causing the problem.

Which is all to the good. I'll need to get a new USB hub sooner rather than later, since the other devices that are attached are rather important. And one of these days I'll find time to actually set up our NAS, after which the external drive will be obsolete.

So, a lucky escape. Not my best ever Sunday though.

Strange New Worlds

The new Star Trek shows have been a distinctly mixed bag. I've enjoyed "Discovery", but it has been fairly workmanlike rather than a true "must see". "Picard" was okay in the first season, pretty dire in the second, and then great in the third. "Lower Decks" has been consistently great, and after a slow start "Prodigy" came together well (just in time to be cancelled).

"Strange New Worlds" is the best of the bunch. Starting with a fantastic cast, and a setting that hits just the right level of nostalgia, it then adds a whole bunch of really good episodes that just ties things up neatly. Plus, with it being more than 20 years since "Voyager" ended (with "Enterprise" doing something distinctly different), it seems like the writers found themselves sitting on a bunch of really great Star Trek stories that they've now had opportunity to pull out.

It's all great. I don't know how long they'll be able to maintain the quality, and I'm also not sure when I'll get to watch (my current offer on Paramount+ isn't for much longer, and it isn't worth subscribing to for anything other than Trek), but I have no hesitation in recommending this one - if you get a chance to see it, take it!

The Weekend From Hell

It's fair to say we've not had the best of weekends.

In honour of the schools going back, Surprise! came down with some nasty virus last week. By Friday he was mostly back to himself, or so we thought until about 10pm, when he woke up and spewed everywhere. As a consequence of this, I found myself sitting up with him until 1am, initially watching nursery rhymes on YouTube, and then later catching up on the new Futurama while he slept. (Sadly, I'm not particularly impressed with this latest reboot, but that's another story.)

I was then up just after 6am to take Lion for her morning walk. Needless to say, that meant that Saturday was essentially a write off. I'm sure I did the Broxburn Gala Day, but don't really have any memory of it.

Sunday started okay, with us getting up, going to church, and then having lunch. So far, so good. Unfortunately that's where things came unstuck - Surprise! really needed a nap but absolutely refused to go to sleep. Cue lots of crying, lots of frayed tempers, and a generally bad time had by all.

Eventually he did go down, and once he'd had a sleep and then something to eat (after another bout of crying because he was hungry but refusing to eat), all was well once again. But the weekend was thoroughly destroyed.

Needless to say, I was glad to reach Monday!

Catering for Fifty

I have recently found myself cooking BBQ for fifty people. The story of how this came about isn't something I can share here, but fortunately I can share that it went extremely well - the food all came out well cooked (well, mostly - there were a couple of very crispy burgers in there), everyone had enough, and there weren't any points where there was a big queue of people waiting to be fed. Which was all good.

The big lesson to learn from this is: never again! It was too much to take on, at least with the facilities that I had available. For cooking for fifty I think there would be a need for some other cooking facilities, such that I can produce some pulled pork, or similar options to cook for a lot of people at once - a water smoker or similar would be needed.

The second lesson is that the job was actually a lot worse in the build-up than in the reality. I had spent quite a lot of time worried that it just wouldn't work out, and in the end it turned out just to be a big effort, but not fundamentally difficult.

The final lesson, and one that is of use even for our 'regular' BBQs is that the approach of having a dedicated serving area was definitely a good idea - we had a big table set aside for all the non-meat foods, and then another table with the meats (and meat substitutes) to be served from. And these were carefully segregated to account for dietary needs.

And that's really all there is to say about that. It was a really good day, quite aside from my part in it.

Edinburgh

A few weeks ago I found myself needing to go to Edinburgh. That's something I avoid as much as possible as a matter of course, but this time there was no avoiding it. Planning the journey, though, reminded me of why I try to avoid the place.

The first thing that I discounted was driving. Edinburgh Council are famously anti-car - the roads are terrible, the parking is extorionate and quite some distance from the center, and if you do get lost it can be a nightmare.

For much the same reason I discounted the buses. Although there are some buses from close to the office that go in to Edinburgh, without pre-existing knowledge of Edinburgh it's really hard to know which bus you need, which stop to ask for, or indeed how to get back out. Plus, the roads are terrible.

There's the tram link. On the face of it, this is pretty ideal - it runs from Edinburgh Park right in to Princes Street, there's only one stop there, the tickets are a fixed price, and there's a tram every 8 minutes or so. Ideal.

Or it would be, except that there's no parking at Edinburgh Park. There is the Retail Park, which does indeed have parking... but only for customers. Which means that getting the tram means either walking the few miles from the office to the stop (which, in fairness, is quite pleasant - but which adds an awful lot to the journey), or it means driving to Ingliston and parking there - defeating the point of using the tram.

Finally, there's the train. Which has all the same problems as the tram, but also only runs every half hour.

However, in the end I did take the train - just not from Edinburgh Park. Instead I worked from home in the morning, then took the train from Livingston. Which was fine, since it has parking.

But, honestly, it's really not good. For Scotland's supposed capital city, it really should be more easily accessible. Really, how hard would it be to provide usable parking at the key train and tram stations along the way, so that the public can actually make easy use of the public transport that is available?

Oh Deer

I almost hit a deer on my way to work today. While the schools are on holiday I've switched to using the motorway to get to work as it is, in theory, marginally faster. While heading towards the motorway this morning I saw a young deer crossing the road ahead of me. Then it got spooked before crossing the other carriageway and instead ran back across the road - right in front of me.

Fortunately, I was able to stop safely and in time, and so the deer emerged unscathed. Less fortunately, I fear that may be an indication of just how my day is going to go.

#15: "Parenting Hell", by Widdicombe and Beckett

Introducing "Lion"

It has been an exciting week. In addition to the potty training/broken washing machine combination, we were visited by the new addition to our family: as of Thursday the Knigdom of Stevonia will adopt a dog!

She's a retired greyhound - huge, but very calm. She immediately took to the children, and they to her.

LC and I have been talking about getting a dog basically since we got married, but while we were living in the flat in Falkirk that just wasn't an option. When we moved, Funsize was already on the way, and then there was a small window of opportunity once she was two but Surprise! not yet on the way. So this is, in effect, the earliest this has really been a realistic possibility.

Since everyone else has a chocolate-themed "blog name", our newest addition needs one too. And since I could think of only one animal-themed chocolate bar (though I expect the immediately think of another dozen options once I post this), she shall henceforth be known as "Lion".

Bad Timing

We started Surprise! on potty training on Sunday. It's probably a little overdue, but not by too much, and children do seem to take to it a bit better if it's left later.

Our washing maching broke down on Sunday. Because, of course, the moment you start doing something liable to generate a load of extra washing, that's when you want the machine to give up the ghost.

The good news is that it's covered by warranty, so someone will be out to fix it on Thursday. But the next few days could be exciting.

#12: "Lion", by Conn Iggulden
#13: "Star Wars Roleplaying Game", by various authors
#14: "Guardians of the Wild Unicorns", by Lindsay Littleson (which started as a book for Funsize, but she lost interest)