As briefly mentioned in my Film Watch post of Red, John Malkovich’s character Marvin is a bit paranoid about the world around him and he has a bunker. Rather than having a hatch like in LOST, or a big door highlighting where his bunker is, he is so paranoid that he’s hidden the entrance as well. It’s marvellous. Here’s a clip of Malkovich’s first scenes in the movie, and more importantly, how he gets into his bunker (ignore the bit about LSD).

Woo, another great film to banish the bad mood that Expendables left me in. Great cast of characters, all very likeable and most amusing. Interesting story, although it took a while to become clear. The Morgan Freeman bit was not quite done right, left me feeling a bit weird, but that’s the only bit I would fix. Otherwise, it was fabulous.

“Your wish is my command, just be careful what you wish for.” This is the episode where Rose tries to change history, and finds out she can’t, even though that is what the Doctor does… quite a lot. After building her up to be something super special in the last episode, the Doctor is reduced to calling Rose “another stupid ape” after she messes up the space time continuum.

Had a bit of trouble with this “week”, thanks to a pretty awful January. Week 2, Day 1 Run 4 min/walk 1 min. Repeat x 5. First half was all good, the second half was really hard. Just ran out of energy, I think. (Note: You can almost hear the dramatic music here. “Just ran out of energy. Dun-dun-duuuuuuh.” Because then I came down with the flu and well, you know the rest.)

I really liked this. It was a bit too Bourne in the end, which is why I’ve knocked a point off, but there wasn’t anything to grumble about it really. The story was complex enough that midway through Mr C was contemplating watching it twice, but then it all started to unravel and everything became clear. Pretty much. I was impressed with Angelina, although it’s fair to say there were more stunts than any serious acting going on. I approve.

I’ve cooked lasagne for years but as I have got busier and spent less time in the kitchen, my version of lasagne has become lazy. Gradually, I swapped out all the separate ingredients for an easy version: a few veg, jar of red sauce, jar of white sauce, mince, pasta, go. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, I am a big fan of easy cooking, but now I have found a bit more time I thought it would be fun to go back to the ingredients version.

When the iPlayer stats first started appearing, they were a one-page document with just a few bits and bobs to take note of. Now, it’s a 20-page pdf full of fascinating figures and statistics. There were a few pages of January’s statistics that I found more interesting than others. Firstly, the average minutes consumed by users per week. That’s just over six months of data and it doesn’t seem to be getting much higher or lower. These people are clearly not like me, who consumes pretty much all my TV via the iPlayer… and that amounts to more than 75 minutes!

A couple of weekends ago, Premier League football had one of it’s best weekends. Record-breaking numbers of goals were scored, matches with eight goals altogether, penalties, men sent off, that kind of thing. Mr C and I figured that although our taste for football is still vague, we didn’t want to miss the highlights of an epic day. So, we sat and we watched Match of the Day, and it was good.

Perfect film to recover from The Expendables. Just brilliant. It was funny pretty much the entire time, and even though some of it was slapstick, some of it wasn’t clever, the way it was constructed was excellent and the verbal back and forths were brilliant. The only thing I can find wrong with it is that there were far too many characters to keep track of, and then just as I was getting the hang of it they added some more.

I went for my first run post-flu today and it did not go at all well. I’ll save the story for another post, because what it did inspire me to do was to decide how I’m going to blog this next phase of my running journey. As you can see, I have created a rather whimsical banner to highlight the running posts, and I intend to blog each “week” of the Ease into 10k app as and when they are completed.

It’s done! And yes, I totally cheated. My dad found this book in his attic, and it is the very same book that I used as a child. As I mentioned before, this is the book that we had sitting around the house and even with that in front of me, as a little kid I still couldn’t get the cube to work properly.

LibriVox is an organisation with a simple goal - to make all public domain works accessible in audiobook form. I’ve been involved for a long while now, part of an enormous group of volunteers who record chapters, poems and entire books to attempt to reach this goal. The third book in the Grace Harlowe series follows the girls as they face off against another enemy, only this time they create a sorority to make sure they are all on the same side. Grace Harlowe’s Junior Year at High School is another ride through a year at Oakdale High School and there’s plenty to be discussed!

So, I don’t know if it was because neither of us were feeling 100% or if the film really was that bad but we switched off after an hour. I wanted to like it, I really did, but it made no sense. They were a weird gang to begin with, the story was strange, I couldn’t understand half of what they were mumbling and in the end, I just wanted it to stop.

It wasn’t at all as bad as I thought it was going to, but as you can imagine the story was even more far-fetched than the original. Partly because it had to be something big to get all the people back together again, and to even rival the first movie in any sense at all. It was good, but nothing special.

What a strange film. Completely depressing throughout, and no real uplift towards the end, despite the fact that you’re always waiting for something to come along and turn his life around. I quite often felt like I wasn’t really getting it, but I still liked it, so I can’t figure out how I feel about it.

Franck!!! Taking part in a Peugeot press conference. And by taking part, I mean sitting looking a bit bored. Although he did get to speak for about ten seconds, so he was a bit less bored then. ♥

So far, 2011 hasn’t shaped up all that well. I started the year feeling a bit peaky, and I blogged it, thinking to myself - well, it’s been a while since I had a proper cold, perhaps I should mark the occasion so I can look back in three years when I next get one and remember it better. Silly girl. I even made the mistake of saying: I don’t mind being ill so much, because I always think no matter how bad I feel, it can never be as bad as those two weeks post-Silverstone.

Naturally, this month has been dominated by the repercussions from Nigel’s death - both in Ambridge, and in real life as well. The outpouring of indignation from Archers listeners is quite incredible, with some even going so far as to demand a rewrite for Nigel to be reinstated. I can understand some of the anger - previous Ambridge deaths have coincided with real-life, with the death of the actor playing Phil Archer, and the ill-health of the actor playing Sid Perks. Nigel’s untimely demise was specifically written in to the story, for no reason other than to shake up the village. On the other hand, it is a fictional village where everything is written anyway. Even if you have grown up listening to these characters for thirty years, that doesn’t change the fact that… well, change happens.

Mr C spotted the tutorial for this over on the Pixelmator site, and I was keen to give it a go. It certainly looked like a challenge, and it came right about the time we were talking all things space, and that programme was on the BBC and everything. I didn’t really like the clock bit in the middle, so I just replaced it with another planet. It kinda makes less sense now, but it’s just pretty planets anyway, so I like it more.

Sincere apologies for the delay in getting this final part up, I wasn’t trying to drag out the ending in a reality show results style, honest. Here’s how the last voting of this series went: Sometimes we like to play it safe, sometimes we like to take a risk. Mitch watched as both the cars in front of him peeled off the racing line. In his mirrors, he saw Bruno leaving it late, but then the Shuttleworth also jinked right and was heading towards the pit lane.

Can’t quite believe this is the penultimate part already. Time flies. As Ian mentioned in the comments, I am still chasing that second unanimous vote but it was not to be this time. Here’s a bumper edition to see us into the final part nicely. “Come on,” Pierre said, pushing Mitch back towards the car. “Do you want to give Mason more reason to consider Diaz?” “What?” “Get back out there. Now.”

As with most of my Life List items, if you’d told me I would be doing them a year ago, I would have thought you were crazy. On Saturday evening, I found myself in a stadium with more than 37,000 other people, cheering on Aston Villa as they scored the winning goal. Well, they might not all have been cheering for Villa, but you get what I’m saying.

I was secretly hoping for a repeat of the unanimous vote achievement, but this one was not quite so straight forward. A couple of people are concerned for Mitch’s welfare, but most want to see him back behind the wheel. “I’m in!” Mitch yelled, bursting back into the motorhome with glee. He stopped abruptly, when he realised a group of fans were being shown around. Melissa hurried over to him, grabbed at his arm and pulled him out of the room.

Twitter is a strange beast, isn’t it? Everyone uses it differently. For some, it is a means of promoting their work. For others, it is a place to follow comedians and laugh at jokes. Some use it as a replacement RSS feed, following those streams that are simple “new blog post” updates. Others use it as a way of keeping in touch with the family. A handful of people follow only celebrities. Some follow and don’t type, others type and don’t follow.

Here we go then. My attempt to get back into running. I’ve picked up the 10k app because I want to continue moving forward with help from the training app, not necessarily because I’m intending to run a 10k. I think my main aim is to complete a 5k in a better time than before. Previously, I have used the My Tracks app from Google, but the Runkeeper Pro app was free during January so I thought I would give that a try. I’m glad I did. The graphs are amazing, and it’s great at keeping track of your stats and letting you know your own personal records.

I thought I would throw this poll open as it was great fun when we did that last time. You guys didn’t disappoint. Sandro was the top answer, the obvious choice really, I suppose. I do love the options, although I’m not sure Mr C has a super-licence at the moment. Also, I’m quite intrigued by Mason’s cousin. Would that make him Uncle Mortimer’s son, and what kind of family dynamic would happen if he tried to move up to a new formula? Or is there another secret Mortimer brother, and does he bear any grudge to the sport? Interesting. All that is for another time, though.

Party people! It’s only right to celebrate, no matter what kind of a headache you’ve got! See? Let us see what a Mortimer celebration is like! Mitch sat at the hotel bar, watching the celebrations going on around him. Mason and Bella were entertaining a large group of mechanics, regular bursts of laughter drowning out any other chatter. He sipped at his orange juice. Melissa appeared at his side, and she hopped up onto the stool next to him. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

Several times on this blog I have talked about how very excellent the Four Chords song is by Axis of Awesome. And it is fabulous, I’m not going back on my word. At the same time, though, it’s fair to say that those four chords have ruined my musical life. Twice in the past couple of weeks, Mr C and I have ended up racking our brains for hours and hours trying to work out where we know a song from, and it turns out to be somewhere in the megasong.

I’m not sure we’ve ever had a unanimous vote before, how exciting! I hear ya! Mitch brought the car in, stopping perfectly inside the Mortimer GP pit box. He was hoisted up on jacks, the crew changed his tyres, and out of the corner of his eye he spotted an extra mechanic having a closer look at the rear end of the car. It felt like he was stationery for hours, but in reality it was about ten seconds - longer than a pit stop should normally take, but not so long that he would lose the lead.

We recapped Mr C’s top five films at the very end of 2010, and after a little bit of pondering (and a little bit of tardiness on my part), he’s back with his top five songs released in 2010. It was a good year for us and music, after a few years of not being that interested in the output of that particular industry. So, here are his top five: Forget You - Cee Lo Green. “One of those songs where nothing before it had been anything like it. The style of the video was unique, and captivating. Not particularly bothered if it’s the version with or without the swearing. I love the retro references too, like Atari.” This Ain’t a Love Song - Scouting for Girls. “It’s the follow-up to every other love song. Every pop song is about saying sorry and getting back together, and much like Forget You, this is the bit that comes after - where they’ve given up and are moving on. It’s also a fine pop song, and it’s also quite amazing they’ve done something that is different to their other songs. I didn’t think they had it in them.” Amazing - Bruno Mars. “What a talent, what a songwriter. I also like his new song, but that’s 2011. Aside from the fact that he seems to have nicked Jason Mraz’s style, he genuinely is one of the talents of 2010.” Written in the Stars - Tinie Tempah. “The song hangs on the chorus, it’s one of the best choruses… blindingly good. Probably made slightly better by the fact the rap isn’t very good. Worth putting up with Tinie for the chorus.” Mine - Taylor Swift. “She’s the new Shania Twain, it’s as country as I’ll ever go in my whole life. However, I like the premise of it, the storytelling. It’s like a mini-movie in a song.” Honourable mention goes to Shakira with Waka Waka, which Mr C debated over for quite a long time. It’s really far cooler than Taylor Swift, and great fun, but not quite as memorable a song. Personally, I thought it took to long to get going, as well, but that’s me and not Mr C.

I mentioned this in my recent Life List recap of 2010, but it bears repeating here. I’ve been finding these episodes of Doctor Who a bit of a struggle to get through. It turns out that I’m really just not that big a fan of Christopher Ecclestone. I still think he was absolutely necessary as the Doctor, and it wouldn’t have worked if David Tennant had just dived right in and started running about in his big, long coat, but still… these episodes don’t do it for me.

I haven’t had a proper cold for a long time, well over a year. The occasional sore throat descends upon me, and I always prepare for the worst, but then it just goes away. I don’t know whether that means I have a better constitution than I used to, or if I am just lucky enough to have already had all the germs that have been circulating recently, and therefore gained some useful antibodies.

Here are the results of the gridwalk poll: As noted in the comments, Mitch is normally painted as the good guy, and I had thought the gridwalk would be a sure thing, but as a die-hard racer, Mitch is more professional than that, and Pierre wins his attention. So, on with the chapter. Mitch waved a hand at the cameras and offered a positive thumbs up, but turned his attention to Pierre. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the crew turn away disappointedly. Mitch knew Melissa was going to be mad at him for passing up a promotional opportunity, but the numbers on Pierre’s clipboard looked far more important.

You’re all so adventurous! I will not chatter too much now, except to say the wiki page is pretty much done, so head over and have a look at everything you could possibly need to know about Life in the Fast Lane. Don’t go yet, though, we’ve got a chapter to get through. The dry tyres were on, and Mitch’s car was lowered to the ground. He could see the mechanics from the team in front eyeing his car warily.

I really liked this, and it made a lot more sense than the last time I watched it, but I still got a bit confused towards the end. Why do there have to be so many sides all against each other? Anyway, my fascination with Matt Damon continues to grow, and I can’t wait to see the third movie. Whenever that may be.

Ahh, I missed this. Mitch and Mason and them all. As my favourite lady of the moment would say: Such fun!I must point you towards the brand new section of the wiki dedicated to Life in the Fast Lane. It has all kinds of crazy information about characters and plot points, plus some fantastic livery designs from Lukeh. It’s a work in progress but it’s going to be excellent. Anyways, it was a bit of an off-beat poll to begin with, no harm in trying something different, and it sets us up nicely for the rest of the series. But, which way did the votes go? Drum roll please.

For some reason, I saw the word ‘witch’ this week and it started me thinking about all the different witches that are out there in books and on TV. There are quite a lot when you give it some proper thought. To narrow it down to five, my top five at that, I decided to pick only the good ones. Sabrina the Teenage Witch. My goodness I loved Sabrina. Those shows were a staple of those lazy days watching kids TV. Even when I was too old for them, it was still fun to watch Sabrina messing everything up and trying to deal with a troublesome and talkative cat. I saw Melissa Joan Hart in some kind of Christmas tv movie thing over the holidays and it was not great, but it reminded me of the good old days. It all went a bit wrong when Sabrina moved to college, and I didn’t see the last couple of series, but it hasn’t really taken the shine off for me. Willow from Buffy. Mostly good, I said. Not always good. Willow was much better when she was just discovering her magical powers, and I still can’t quite fathom how she went from a tentative spellmaker to that all-powerful evil overlord who wanted to end the earth. Where did all that power come from? Perhaps practice really does make perfect after all. I haven’t seen any Buffy in ages, now I want to. Bewitched. I’m assuming that all subsequent programmes of the Sabrina ilk came about from Bewitched. You can’t really argue with a witch who just wriggles her nose to make things happen. There seems to be quite the market in programmes about running around trying to fix things with your magical powers, breaking things, and then having to run around and clean it all up without revealing your hidden talents. I’m happy with that though! The Worst Witch. There was a TV show of this but I have only glimpsed it. I get my knowledge of Mildred Hubble from the books, and they are brilliant. I suppose it is really a tale of being quite useless and bullied at school, but finding friendship and making the best of it. Inspirational stuff for kids, if you don’t count the broomsticks and cats. Simon and the Witch. This is a weird one for me. I know that I love it, but I can’t really remember a single thing about. I know that I’ve seen it on TV, and I know it had that girl out of Eastenders in it. I also know I had a novelisation of it at one point. But truly, I don’t remember anything about it. I’m guessing it was about Simon? And presumably a witch. In not quite so good witches, I had Anjelica Huston for her portrayal in the Roald Dahl movie, plus the evil scary witches from The Craft. I wonder if I could make another Friday Five of bad witches. Hmmm.

I’m rubbish at birthdays, okay? Many happy returns to Franck who turned 33 yesterday. I wonder what he did to celebrate, wherever he is hibernating away for the winter. The worrying news is that Franck’s website is no longer working for me. Anyone else? I mean, it’s not like it had been updated in forever anyway, but even so. At this rate, I will not only forget FKM’s birthday, but I’ll be forgetting about him too!

From the Chengdu Panda Breeding Centre, the subject of that BBC programme I sort of live blogged. Credit: tinachensf/Flickr

“WHERE IS IT?” Mason roared. The mechanics nearby jumped, and rapidly turned their attention to minute tasks. Mason glared at them, but getting no response, he began stomping around the car. “What’s going on?” Melissa asked, approaching Mitch with his drinks bottle. They watched the spectacle from their side of the garage. “Mason has it in his head that he needs his lucky wristband,” Mitch shook his head. “It’s a crazy idea that he just dreamt up over the last few races. Like he hasn’t been lucky enough without it in the past.”

I’ve made lots and lots of New Year’s Resolutions before, both on the blog and in my head, and very few of them have worked out. This year, I changed the concept around completely and debuted the Life List - a long-term set of goals and things to aim at. Some are crazy, some are impossible, some are easy and most will take time. I figured a quick review for the year would be appropriate, with some thoughts on what is next.

I don’t know if it’s because I have read this so many times before, or if it is the quality of the writing (or maybe both), but it feels so effortless to read this book. Almost as if the words are floating off the page directly into my head. It’s so easy to picture everything, and that’s not just because of the on-screen versions that have planted imagery there.

The BBC have gradually been building up to this evening’s episode, with behind the scenes stories and footage littering the news and blogs and a great campaign to get listeners to tweet-along with the episode. Although I knew it was supposed to be something special, I was just going to treat it like any other episode and listen to the podcast when I had the chance. How much damage are they really going to do? If a normal storyline is how many different kinds of species Pip can find in the grass, a massive storyline is probably not going to be a plane crashing into the village.

The story gets off to a bit of a slow start, although personally I did enjoy reading all the history of the colony and exactly how things work there. I’m not sure it would be gripping reading for everyone, but I could be wrong. In the end, this type of story is right up my street - a little bit science fiction, but quite a lot about how human behaviour affects the situations that these people find themselves in.

Excellent, excellent film and exactly what we were looking for. The plot was unpredictable, there was nothing too complicated to try and figure out but it wasn’t boring. Steve and Tina were both brilliant and very funny, and it just ticked every box. I feel like it shouldn’t get top marks, but I can’t quite put my finger on why, I certainly have no complaints about it. Great way to spend 90 minutes.

For the new, I’m switching up the way I change headers on the site. I’d come to a position where I could make a perfectly good header in a week and that was fine. I could keep on finding brushes and doing what I could, but a week wasn’t really long enough to make anything particularly special. Instead, I’m going to do a monthly header, with the hopes that I can spend more time on them and keep up the learning process, rather than settling for what could be done in such a short space of time.

To celebrate Christmas with the Archers (and a year since I have been blogging about Ambridge - a year? Where’s that gone?), I thought I’d do this post a little differently. I’m experimenting with the format a little, and will go through the month show by show. It’s not as scary as it sounds. Let us just begin. **1st **- Tony is mean to Kathy again, but she is still whining about Jamie, so who can blame him? Meanwhile, Kate is being far meaner to Ruari - just because Phoebe wants to go to Laser Quest, she drags Ruari along, and makes him sick. Equally, she’s not telling Phoebe the whole truth about her return to South Africa. Kate is just awful.

I must have read this before. I must have, surely? I don’t recall! I know I have seen the film with Keira Knightley, and I know I didn’t like it as much as I liked the Emma thing with Johnny Lee Miller. But have I read the book before? Well, either way, I have definitely read it now. It’s quite long, isn’t it? I didn’t realise quite how drawn out it was when I started, and not that that is necessarily a bad thing, because you get quite a sense of all the characters, but it did seem to take forever to read.

This may be the first time in a long time that we have watched enough recent films to create any form of top five list. We have indulged in many a movie night, so I tasked Mr C to choose his top five films that were released in 2010, that we watched in 2010. Here is what he came up with: Inception. “The closest thing to the Matrix since the Matrix, which was the closest thing to perfection since forever. It was everything that Shutter Island should have been but wasn’t. Still needs a second viewing, though.” (Film Watch link) Kick-Ass. “The slow start lulled me into a completely false sense of security. The trailer had ruined it slightly, but once it got into it’s stride, it was the most remarkable film of the year.” (Film Watch link) The A-Team. “Because they flew a tank. Also, because they didn’t ruin the original. The only disappointment was BA, probably not as dominant as he is expected to be.” (Film Watch link) Green Zone. “For being the least Hollywood blockbuster Hollywood blockbuster portrayal of American military politics seen to date.” (Film Watch link) Leap Year/Cop Out. “These two are neck and neck, the introduction to Cop Out is the greatest five minutes of any movie sequence ever, but Leap Year has a lot of Guinness in it. I’m more likely to watch Leap Year a second time, so it should take the fifth spot.” (Film Watch link/Film Watch link) Mr C would like an honourable mention to go to The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was his favourite film that we watched all year long, but of course came from 2009.

This was surprisingly good in the end, but it took a long time before it started making sense. The business model still remains a mystery, and for at least half the film I was pondering exactly where they were going with it all. Maybe that’s a good thing? It certainly wasn’t predictable. I enjoyed the fact that there was a romance element but it wasn’t mushy, and I would mark it higher if the premise actually made it a bit more sense.