brazlillian

This weekend it's the Brazilian Grand Prix. Well, actually it's the Brazilian F1 GP and the Valencia MotoGP, but the MotoGP is already decided, as Jorge Lorenzo won the championship several races ago.

The F1 GP is far from decided, as there are still five drivers who could technically win it. Well, I say that, but for two of them - Vettel and Button - it's pretty much a long shot. Both would almost need the other guys to all get no points in both of the remaining races to win it.

And to be frank, it's a bit of a long shot for the third place man, Lewis Hamilton. He's in one of those situations where the others could score a few points and he'd have to win both races to take the title.

Now to be fair, Brazil is well known as a track where unpredictable things happen. It's not unusual for there to be rain, for example, and there have been some big pile-ups in the past. Also, it's a circuit where there's loads of opportunities to pass.

However, the last Grand Prix - Abu Dhabi - has been much more processional and predictable. So although you can see odd things happening and going in Vettel's, Button's or Hamilton's favour at Brazil, it's much less likely at Abu Dhabi, so really you have to say that there are only two contenders with a good shot at taking the championship.

First there's Mark Webber, who's had a very up and down season. By rights, the championship should be a Red Bull fight to the finish. Barring a few circuits they've clearly had the quickest car all year and the number of pole positions and front-row lock-outs they've had is amazing.

In years gone by these would all have been converted to race wins (or at worst second places) and you would have seen both drivers fighting it out for the championship. But that's not really happened - Red Bull have been plagued by all sorts of technical and other problems that have seen them if not throw it away then not exactly help themselves.

But then, to be fair, Red Bull are a relatively new team - they're not like Ferrari and McLaran who have years of race and title winning experience to draw on. They're the upstart new kids who've persevered and got themselves into a championship winning situation.

The other real contender is Fernando Alonso.

Weirdly, Alonso seems to have become something of a pantomime villain for the British press. There was the whole thing of Massa being told to let him through and he can be a bit of a spiky character. Plus he's won several titles already, and the press love an 'underdog makes good' story, which is more what you've got for Webber. And I guess there's something of an antipodean affection, if you will.

My own take is that Alonso is probably one of the best drivers on the grid at the moment and is definitely one of the all time great drivers. So personally, I like him. Plus of course, he's driving for Ferrari, which is my favourite team.

However, I also think it would be nice for Webber to win, so it looks like it could be a cracker of an end to what has, I think, been one of the all-time classic seasons.

no change

Well, it finally happened.

When I weighed myself on Sunday, I found I had lost no weight.

Now, I could regard this as a bit of a disaster or I could console myself with the fact that I've not put on weight. I'm inclined to do a bit of both.

See, last week was a bit of a tough one. Firstly, it turned out that it was someone at work's birthday, so we went down the pub on Friday. That meant having a big old pub-lunch type meal. Then of course there was Saturday, where we had a three course meal at a restaurant.

Neither of these adequately fit into sensible meal sizes, calories wise, when you're on a diet. Oh, I'm sure that because of my otherwise diet-friendly eating I wasn't in a situation of having too many calories, but the point is there were sufficient calories to bugger up the diet.

Plus, the person whose birthday it was brought in some cake and I had a slice. I mean, technically I could have avoided most of these things, but there are two problems - firstly, it would mean admitting I'm on a diet to my work colleagues, which I'm not fully comfortable with, but also as part of that it'd be a bit rude to say I didn't want any cake or not go to the lunch.

However, there's also a bit of a double whammy here. Last week I was talking about how I'd scared myself a little by not feeling hungry and that I was worried I was taking in too few calories. This sounds daft, but one of the weird things is it can be bad loosing weight too quickly - as I understand it, your heart can be put under quite a strain, for example.

Anyway, the point is that as a result of that I was actually eating slightly more. Not to the extent that I wasn't still on a diet, but enough to take me up to being safely above 1,300 calories. If I'd thought about it properly I'd have not done that, so as to try to compensate a bit for the big meals. But I didn't, so I think that all pretty much explains why I didn't loose any weight.

Certainly I didn't do enough exercise to make up for it either. I mean, I tried on Saturday to arrive early and have a nice long walk around London, but of course on Sunday I was so tired I didn't do any walking at all, so I'm betting those two have cancelled each other out. And of course I'm now in a period where I'm doing less exercise generally.

So yeah, bit of a mixed bag. Part of me is pleased it wasn't as bad as it could have been (I think putting on weight would be a bit of a blow), but the other part of me is a bit annoyed with myself that I didn't think things through and plan the week out properly.

the road

During my lazy, bed-based yesterday I watched my latest DVD rental, which was The Road.

The Road is based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, who was the guy who wrote No Country for Old Men. And to be frank, it has some quite similar elements, while at the same time being radically different.

One of the things that marked old men as being something a bit different was that it didn't really follow narrative conventions. Not wanting to spoil it, that basically means that the later part of the film doesn't really do what you'd expect it to do.

In a way, the road is a half-way house. There are some parts to it that aren't quite what you'd expect, but others do follow more traditional narrative paths.

Let me go back a bit. The road is at heart a post-apocalyptic road movie. However, what it focuses on is two characters - 'the man' and 'the boy' (they're never named - indeed, nobody is) almost to the exclusion of everything else. So, we never really find out what the apocalypse was, or what caused it and indeed we barely even glimpse what happens.

This of course is in stark contrast to most every other post-apocalyptic film, in that we would normally tend to focus on the spectacle of the disaster itself, rather than what happens afterwards. There is one very notable exception here - the Mad Max films.

The mad max films are pretty much post-disaster (from memory) and they also have strong elements of what you might call unusual narrative. And to be frank, the road does tread a fine line of being on the verge of being similar and simply exploring similar themes.

The biggest difference is that the mad max films are primarily action-oriented, where the road is more of a dark thriller.

I'm skirting around points here a bit, because it's really difficult to avoid spoilers. I don't want to really give away anything about the film, as I think it would rob it of its impact. And it is a film with some serious impact. The performances are remarkable, the presentation is very fitting and the whole thing hangs together very well.

If I was to make one criticism it would be that everything is a bit dark (I mean that in the sense that it's physically dark, rather than dark in tone, although it is quite dark in tone as well). This is obviously deliberate, but it can make things more than a bit difficult to see - I actually ended up turning the brightness up.

But then if that's the extent of my criticism I think you can tell I really quite liked it. Certainly I think I preferred it to no country.

ouch

Yesterday's blog post talked about the main activities of Saturday night. Today's blog post is all about the other stuff.

The first thing to mention is that when I eventually got back on Saturday night (well, Sunday morning, I suppose, technically). The road leading down to where I live was blocked by a police car, one of those pick-up type trucks that Aussies call "yoots" (utility vehicle) and a low-loader.

I waited for a few minutes to see what they were up to, but it was abundantly clear that whatever it was was going to take a while. I therefore parked up on the side of the road and walked the last bit.

On the way down I asked one of the coppers what was going on and he said they'd basically chased the yoot for failing to stop and he was in the back of the police car while they confiscated the car.

What I did was go back home, change, tidy my stuff away, sort my bedroom out a bit and then by the time I'd done that they'd buggered off, so I was able to drive my car down and park it where I usually do. But what that all meant was I didn't get to bed until about 2:30am.

Now luckily it was clock change-over night, so I got some extra time in bed, but it meant that I woke up on Sunday absolutely shattered. I mean, it was bad enough that the time I was getting back anyway, to have that delayed by the best part of an hour didn't really help.

The upshot of this was that I basically spent all of Sunday in bed. Now I'd pretty much anticipated this and hadn't planned on doing much more anyway, but it does always end up feeling like a waste of time. However, saying that I did do a bit more e-baying and put up the auctions I'd planned to.

Also, of course I watched loads of stuff I'd recorded, so in a way that was productive.

Anyway, the real problem I had was that when I went to bed I was suddenly struck by the most ferocious stomach pain. This actually seemed to be a repeat of a bout of stomach pain I had a while back. On that occasion I'd clearly eaten too much and a glass of milk seemed to calm it down, suggesting it was basically heart burn. However, on this occasion I hadn't over-eaten during the day and milk didn't really seem to help.

Of course I had eaten a big meal on Saturday, so maybe it was that. And after a few hours I decided to try massaging my stomach and (huge) gut area. For some reason this seemed to help and rather suddenly the pain went away.

But by this time it must have been something like 3am, so I ended up getting very little sleep and was like a zombie all day.

dinner and a show

So then - war horse on Saturday night. How was it?

Well, truth be told it was okay. If I'm brutally honest I was keener on the (and I'm not sure this is the exact word for it) stagecraft than I was the actual play.

See, the title of the play pretty much tells you what one of the big features of the story is - horses. But, being a play, you couldn't very well rely on having actual horses in the show, not least of all because the horses in the story need to play proper 'parts', rather than just be there.

This was achieved by having puppet horses, which were actually control by three separate performers. If you imagine a classic pantomime horse, with a buy at the front and one in the rear of the costume, and then add someone else to control the head and take the whole thing through the technological equivalent of going from the stone age to the IT age, then that's roughly the idea.

But there's also all sorts of other clever staging things, like a tank and a scene stealing goose. And what I found most remarkable was the fact that even though you could see the people operating these things, it still very much 'worked'. I mean, I wouldn't say it ever got to the stage that you forgot the people were there, but there was enough cleverness and the performance side of things was so strong you were able to suspend just enough disbelief for it to really work.

And the play itself was okay. I'd been told it was a bit sad and weepy and I can kinda see where people were coming from, but I didn't find it that bad. Perhaps it's one of those where if you're expecting it to be really sad then that sort of undermines it, as it were.

As for the rest of the evening that went okay. The idea was we were having dinner before the shows and unfortunately some people were rather late - to the tune of us starting nearly an hour late. That ended up meaning that we basically had the main course and desert in a really compressed fashion, which wasn't ideal. I mean, it was good that they were willing to be quick for us, but it didn't really enhance the dining experience.

But the food was okay and luckily I ended up with the people who I know. as mentioned last week, there were partners and a few people I don't know that well coming along, so there was the distinct possibility of ending up sat amongst people I couldn't talk to.