Category Archives: Recreation and Entertainment

Posts on recreation, photography, film, and TV.

Recreation and Entertainment

Four Still lifes

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A couple of years ago, when I’ve just about purchased my Nikon D50 I snapped off a number of “still life” like pictures. These are the sometimes unusual things you just happen to have lying around in an otherwise rather uninteresting apartment.

Still life 1: Pile of laundry
Still life 1: Pile of laundry

This is obviously one of the first things I snapped a picture of. After looking at the picture closer I realized it was a rather nice picture, selection of subject excluded. Anyway, as far as I’ve been able to determine there’s no underwear on the picture, and no insanely dusty socks, so I hope it’s at least PG-13 😀

The thing with this picture I like is that the object in center, the pile of clothes are actually adding a kind of calm from the rather detailed background. It feels kind of backwards, and perhaps it is.

Still life 2: Knick-knacks
Still life 2: Knick-knacks

This is a bunch of knick-knacks lying around on my desk. Among other things you might notice a burnable CD box, a can of 5-56 universal oil and an ear cleaner rubber thingy. I’m especially proud of the bizarre factor that one adds. To my defense I might add that I used it to dust off my computer… you squeeze it and it blows air…

The ear thing sits atop an ancient letter scale, a bit crooked from being in my possession. I inherited it from grandpa who got it sometime in the fifties…

Still life 3: Bookshelf
Still life 3: Bookshelf

This is one of my favorite pictures. A classic book picture, true but still… it has a kind of uneven, haphazardly-piled impression to it that I really like.

What you probably don’t know is that this is my unread-books “pile” or part of it anyway. The thing you can’t see on this picture is that all the books are quite dusty…

Too much work makes Hoakzie a dull boy!

Still life 4: Fruits
Still life 4: Fruits

Okay, I confess: I’m a sucker for the classics. The only extenuating circumstance would be that there’s no banana or pine apple in there. And that the “cloth” in the “basket” is in fact a dish towel mom gave me when I moved away from home…

Humor, Recreation and Entertainment

Balking Talkwards

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I woke up this morning after having gotten about 5 hours of sleep, however, I’ve snoozed wildly for about two hours so I was in fact in real trouble. Crawling to the edge of the bed and forcing my legs over the side I happened to look at the clock which simply confirmed my creeping suspicions: I was late beyond repair and then some.

I fell back on the bed on my back moaning. Just as I realized I was on my back, and with no snoozed clock at that the thought popped up in my head: “This will bad endly…” (No that’s not a translation or anything, I’ve been known to have my mind invaded by English from time to time.)

Which brings me to the topic of this post: Talking backwards, or as the proper phrase would be, Balking Tackwards (in forgiving circumstances it can be paraphrased to: Balking Talkwards… if that is indeed the purpose of the backtalking…)

Basically what you do is swapping consonants, nouns, vowels or even whole words. If there’s only one of them just switch its place. Don’t let things like word limits stop you, you can take a word like unseemly and turn it into suneemly as easily… Here are a few examples, I am sure you can come up with tons of more!

  • Bad endly, bend adly — end badly
  • Stackbabbing hassole, Ass-stabbing Backhole — Backstabbing asshole
  • Earl Startly, Tart Searly — Start early
  • Heal a voter icicle — Steal a motor vehicle (no this isn’t really talking backwards… or is it? And I can’t see it entering gangsta rap any time soon either :o)
  • Weighing a Stake — Are you having a problem weighing a stake…? I usually have a problem falling asleep. (Staying awake.)

Even though the baby-talk factor is pretty high, the purpose, if an exercise like this one needs a purpose, is to have fun until something like balking talkwards, or badding endly comes up.

One warning however. Don’t do this if your are over 65. They might come and take you to the doctor and/or home if you talk like this… (I’m looking forward to it myself…)

Recreation and Entertainment

Review: Children of Glory (4/5)

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Children of Glory (2006) (IMDB, Amazon), or Szabadság, szerelem, as the original is named, is about Karcsi Szabó (Iván Fenyö), a member of the Hungarian Olympic water polo team. How he meets Viki Falk (Kata Dobó), falls in love with her, gets involved in the 1956 Hungarian revolution against the Soviet Union and finally goes to the Olympics to play the Soviet Union water polo team in what will become known as one of the bloodiest matches in the history of water polo.

You can read the whole review by clicking the below link, but there may be spoilers in that text…

Continue reading Review: Children of Glory (4/5) →

Recreation and Entertainment

Stargate Atlantis: Whispers (4/5)

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Episode 7 of Stargate Atlantis season 5 starts on a foggy Gate World planet where two persons, apparently natives make their way through the fog. As they move on they come upon a sitting figure turned with her back at them. They approach and we can all see something bad is going to happen. One of them touch the figure who leaps on her feet, growling. Screaming, running and dying ensues and one of the scarier episodes of Stargate Atlantis starts.

This episodes continues a theme development in Atlantis that at least I noticed already in previous episodes (not sure if it was in the Shrine or Ghost in the Machine I noticed it first…): The use of women not only as bosses or doctors (which to be honest is just a continuation of the age old matriarch and caretaker roles assigned to women). This time we see them as grunts. And although the episode had me biting my nails and turning down the volume (in preparation for the bang-crash- monster-attack- heart-attack sequence of events) none of the women came even close to the classic horror movie almost-naked-blond- running-screaming-through-the-forest- when-she-should-be-home- with-her-door-locked moves.

This fresh and interesting episode only features Joe Flanigan from the permanent cast and I’m giving it an 4 out of 5. Its only demerits would be that it is a rather uncharacteristic Atlantis episode, and that the cast-dynamic suffers a bit from not having any of the other permanent cast members.

Recreation and Entertainment

Review: Knocked Up (2/5)

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“Knocked Up” (IMDB, Amazon) is about Ben (Seth Rogen) and Alison (Katherine Heigl) who gets drunk, has unprotected sex, gets pregnant and decides to keep it (or at least she does…)

This is a sweet movie and all. Some quite good characters, but the main problem here is, I don’t buy it. People just aren’t this cute and cuddly. Sure, she might have jumped into bed with him… if he’d given her roofies… and sure, she might have wanted to keep the child… if she felt jumping off a bridge was the only alternative, but the guy she’s doing all this with…

Don’t get me wrong here. Ben is a pretty cool guy…. in fact I bet most men think he’s really cool… he does his own thing, and … well goof off completely. Checking the IMDB page for this movie I’m not surprised to learn the director is a man (Judd Apatow) he’s also the writer, and four out of five producers are men (unless Clayton Townsend isn’t a male name, but I think it is…)

So, male fantasy coming up: Photo model beautiful woman will want to have your child even if you don’t have a job, smoke pot and are piss poor. Don’t tell me he got his act together in the end…. she didn’t know he was having a work, and apartment etc when she took him back.

Anyway, this story doesn’t have to be logical anyway since it’s just a big poster child for making people have kids (or at least not abort them) so much so they had to put in (definitely SGI’ed) shots of the baby “breaking out” just to scrape some of the sugar coating off.

This movie, ladies and gentlemen is nothing but the product of a frantic society (and I bet the rest of the western world are just as frantic as they are “over there”). The authorities want us to make lots of consumers and tax payers, but we’re not really doing so good in that department, so when they go old nobody will be able to pay for the care of them, at the rate of growth most western countries have today we’d have to import daily buss loads of immigrants or there will be no consumers or tax payers in the end… and that’s why this movie screams… get knocked up, do it regardless of the cost “Just do it already” and it doesn’t matter if the guy is a complete looser or if you brought condoms, just as long as you don’t use em… Wonder if the Catholic church is a sponsor?

This movie gets a 2/5 score for being a good laugh, but it could have gotten more, if it hadn’t been for the propaganda.

Recreation and Entertainment

Review: Paycheck – Let the future be untold (4/5)

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Paycheck (IMDB, Amazon) is a story about Michael Jennings (Ben Affleck) who is an engineer, or to be more precise a reverse engineer. Michael is paid to take competitor’s work and reverse engineer it into something his employees can make into a products of their own.

Since it would be very bad if information about whose technology was reverse engineered into what, Michael’s assistant Shorty (Paul Giamatti) helps removing all of Michael’s memories of the project once work is finished.

A once in a lifetime opportunity comes along as Michael’s old friend Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) offers him work that will give him stocks in Rethrick’s promised-to-become-great company. Michael takes on the three year project, even if he risks losing his memory for the whole period, and that of a probably blooming romance with one of Rethrick’s employees, doctor in biochemistry, Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman).

Three years passes, Michael finds himself back where he once begun, in Rethrick’s office, his memory wiped and all that stands between him and his millions, a trip to the bank.

That is however, when problem starts, because Michael finds not only has he switched the personal effects he once had to leave before entering Rethrick’s employee, he has also forfeited a 100 million dollars worth of stocks in Rethrick’s company.

Why did Michael say no to the money and, of significantly less importance, what became of his personal effects? Michael soon realizes his former employees and the FBI are out to get him, and his bag of assorted effects seems to be the only thing that keeps him ahead of the game. A game, that if lost, could cost him his life…

You can read the whole review by clicking the below link, but there may be spoilers in that text…

Continue reading Review: Paycheck – Let the future be untold (4/5) →

Recreation and Entertainment

He heard her own gasp of astonishment

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I just read the following sentence:

“He heard her own gasp of astonishment”

Some words just don’t work well with things no one else can do for you, I mean…

I entered the room and guess if I was surprised. My neighbor gasped with my astonishment, and as he had one of my thoughts, he came over to my own apartment to have a talk with me. He told me, with his wife’s voice, he disliked all but his own ideas. I had one of his ideas and in a contrary to his position, decided I liked it, so I made it my own idea.

It could get pretty interesting after a while of that. Perhaps the next pop-style of writing…?

Recreation and Entertainment

Review: Ultraviolet – Xenophobia (3/5)

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Ultraviolet (IMDB, Amazon) is a story about Violet, an ordinary woman whose life changed when she was infected by a virus that turned her into a feared and hated hemophage.

Once contracting hemophagia, Violet was incarcerated and experimented on, and perhaps these experiments cost her the child she was bearing when infected, perhaps the infection itself did, regardless, Violet escaped and now she is out to steal the government’s latest and most deadly weapon in the fight against hemophages.

The hemophages have superhuman strength and speed, but at a cost; few live longer than a decade. Since the virus that causes hemophagism infect on blood contact, the number of hemophages should have grown had it not been for the government’s prosecution.

Like vampires the hemophages have pointy eyeteeth, but unlike the vampires they do not require sucking blood and taking lives to survive. They are far from demons, and rather unfortunates infected by a deadly and infectious disease, and the only demon thing about them is the demonizing of them done by the government.

You can read the whole review by clicking the below link, but there may be spoilers in that text…

Continue reading Review: Ultraviolet – Xenophobia (3/5) →