Month: April 2001

Forgive me father …

Close up on the same region after a couple of hours of cleaning

Forgive me father… it has been 11 days since I last blogged. One of the things that’s been keeping me busy is the time spent on cleaning up some old photographs.

The first picture (above) is the original that I’m working on, and to the right are the “before” and “after” shots showing some of the detail. It’s sloooooooow work, and there’s much to do.

The picture, BTW, is of me and my sister, taken sometimes in the ’70s I guess. The next one to start work on, should I ever finish this one, is of my mum from the 1950s….

We watched Romeo and

Romeo and Juliet

”

We watched “Romeo and Juliet” (the 1996 one starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes) on DVD last night. I must admit to being dissapointed with it. It got better as it went on (in my opinion) but it took me a long time to get used to the setting – having a gun fight at a petrol station whilst speaking lines such as “Do you bite your thumb at me?” just seemed odd to me. I enjoy Shakespeare and normally the setting doesn’t bother me, but this just didn’t work for me I’m afraid. Pete Postlethwaite played the part of Friar Lawrence very well, and he made the film worth watching. My opinion seems to be very different than those expressed at the Amazon.co.uk review of the film, but that’s what opinions are all about :-).

Light show set to continue

Again, the BBC Science and Technology section are running a story indicating that the light show is likely to continue. Another flare was let off yesterday, which means there should be another display on Tuesday.

As predicted, observers in the UK got a poor show. The best place to be appeared to be western part of the USA.

April fools Day

Have you been got by any good April Fools Day gags today then? So far, I’ve isolated myself away from the outside world and haven’t heard any. When I was little my Dad always used to wake me up on April Fools morning to tell me it had been snowing, without fail, every year until I was around 13 (when it really had been snowing and he couldn’t work out what to say).

The best and most effective one I’ve heard in recent years, was about 5 years ago when April Fools Day fell on a Saturday. Capital Radio always broadcast a weekday morning show with Chris Tarrant as the DJ. On this Saturday morning, they did a broadcast as if it was Friday, with typical travel reports, talk about weekend plans etc etc. As the morning progressed and Chris admitted it was a joke he got a load of phone calls from people sitting in quiet offices wondering why not many other people were in, it didn’t catch me out but I did have to think twice to realise what was going on. Good one Capital.