5 December, 2006

Troma Night – 9th December 2006

The next Troma Night will take place on Saturday at The Cottage. Following last week’s success, we’ll be following a similar structure this week. But; there is a difference: all Troma Night folk (and everybody else, for that matter) are invited to start early this week at the Arts Centre to see The Host. The plan is as follows:

5:30pm – if you wanna, join us at The Arts Centre for The Host, a brand new Korean action/comedy/thriller/horror film. Yes, I did mean to put all of those genres there.
8:00pm – Troma Night properly begins, down at The Cottage. Pizza is ordered; drinks are poured; Gareth is teased.
8:05pm – The first film will be The Matrix, with a RiffTrax from the same people as supplied the hilarious one last week for The Fifth Element. If you don’t believe how funny it’s going to be, go watch a 2-minute sneak preview… Pretty sure I’ve got the synchronisation down to a fine art after last week’s technical shenanigans, too.
10:30pmish – The second film will be either, depending on whether people want something good or something bad, The Poseidon Adventure, a classic disaster movie and one of my favourite films of my childhood (in anticipation that we might watch it’s remake in the new year sometime and compare the two), Legend Of The Mummy 2 (mummified servant of ancient rain god wreaks hell on bad actors), The Shepherd (U.S. made-for-TV sci-fi in which a husky voiced loner spends most of his time wearing sunglasses to help him remember how great his family were), or Cyborg 3: The Recycler (mentioned it last week, go read about it there).
Midnight; we’ll either call it a night or we’ll watch another film or we’ll play Nintendo Wii. We’ll work it out when we get there.

No American Dad this week, because the next episode broadcasts on Sunday, but we’ll be at The Arts Centre anyway.

Usual rules apply. See you this weekend.

My Favourite Criminals

Sometime over the weekend – probably on Sunday night – my Nintendo DS Lite, DS-Xtreme, and a pair of Claire‘s sunglasses were stolen from her car, parked outside our house. We noticed this on Monday morning when we found Claire’s car door ajar and her glove compartment emptied onto the passenger seat. Needless to say, I wasn’t pleased, but did feel at least a little bit stupid to have left expensive electronics in plain sight in the car in the first place. Interestingly, the radio (far more valuable) was left, suggesting that this might have been the works of an opportunist thief "just passing"; possibly a child or somebody else who was able to identify a Nintendo console at a glance.

Of course, we called the police, who sent an officer round to investigate the scene and to take statements from anybody who might have seen or heard anything suspicious during the window in which the crime might have occured, but without much success. He advised us that even if they were able to get an intact fingerprint sample, the odds of a match or of recovering anything was minimal. No insurance that we had would cover the theft. So, I resigned myself to being DS-less until sometime in the New Year when I might be able to afford a new one.

This evening, I came home from work to find a carrier bag wedged clumsily into the letterbox. Inside, I found Claire’s sunglasses and my DS and DS-X, wrapped up in a tea towel. The stolen goods have been returned.

I have no idea who stole them in the first place, or what prompted them to return them, and while I can’t forgive them for the former, I certainly thank them for the latter. While it’s unlikely that you’re reading this – whoever you are; congratulations – stealing from a car under a streetlight in a residential area is both brave and stupid to the point of brave stupidity, but it’s even braver to sneak back to return what was taken, knowing that it could heighten your chances of "being caught" if your victim didn’t care much for your sudden honesty.

Thanks.

You Can Hang Out With All The Boys

This made me laugh out loud. Thanks to Faye for finding and sharing it.