LG42PQ3000 - Nice

I had a bit of a surprise yesterday.  Jayne came home with a new TV.

Only the other day I realised that I was possibly the only person I knew who was persisting with a CRT television, and now I don’t have that distinction as we have one of those plasma jobbies.The screen is about 15cm larger than the old set, but it doesn’t dominate the room so much because of the reduced bulk and the fact that it is black and does not stand out so much against the dark wall.    I have spent half the weekend getting all my stuff wired up to it and changing the settings to display in HD.  I even bothered connecting the old VCR.

Haven’t actually watched a lot on it though; I am on a bit of a book binge at the moment, reading all of Christopher Brookmyre’s books again in order, one ofter the other.  Currently halfway through the seventh after starting about a week and a half ago.

Had to test the thing out though, and remembered I had a DVD I was saving for a special occasion: Survival of the Dead.  Brilliant film, but it is a zombie film by George A Romero so it was knew I was going to like it anyway, but I wasn’t prepared for the excellence of ‘death by fire extinguisher’.

I should have stopped while I was on a roll, but tonight decided to watch 2012 just to see if it really is as bad as everyone says it is.  I figured that the spectacle and special effects would look good on a big screen even if the story was a big pile of cack but by the end I had to agree that it really is bad.  Even worse than Forrest Gump.  Maybe even worse than that Sherlock Holmes mockbuster.

But who cares.  Got a nice big screen to watch the World Cup on

She is having a bit of a moan about the phrase ‘political correctness gone mad’, which is as good an excuse as any to plug the books of Christopher Brookmyre with this quote from Be My Enemy:

And there it was, the line he’d known would be along soon enough: ‘Political correctness gone mad.’ [He] had referred to it in a column recently as ‘ the distress cry of the thwarted bigot.’ Any time he heard it, he felt he ought to rejoice, because somewhere, something must be being done right. In that respect it was the opposite of ‘a victory for common sense’, which invariably hailed some act or decision that satisfied the base and brutal instincts human civilisation had spent the last ten thousand years evolving away from.

I would love to quote his even better rant about SSCs in A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away but I might have to say what the C stands for and get blocked by all sorts of obscenity filters… just read the books!

I enjoyed it so much that I put a few more of them on my Xmas list and then bought up the remaining back catalogue in February. The books are very Scottish, but do not go too far with the language, so us English people can still understand them. They are crime thrillers, but with lots of humour and satire in them – similar in some ways to Carl Hiaasen.

The best thing is that the author must be about my age and has similar interests, which are reflected in his characters. There are loads of references to indie and punk music and computers which are absolutely spot-on. The casual use by characters of terms like “leet speek” or “404-ing” are not explained, there is no concession to less technical readers, which makes a change from having to put up with patronising explantions of terms, although I guess a less nerdy reader will still appreciate the books for the humour, pace and intricate plots.

Only yesterday I noticed that the author has his own website, so I had a look, and its great. Its not huge, but its very human. There is a section for each of his books with the cover, blurb from the back and a selection of reviews. The way he organises the reviews is that he summarises them as three lists – headed “Good“, “Awright” and “Shite” where he lists the papers which gave good reviews, the papers which gave so-so reviews and the papers which gave bad reviews. There is then a selection of quotes from reviews (with his own headline for them) and he doesn’t shy away from listing quotes which slag off him or the books. Having said that, he does take the opportunity to respond to some of the criticism…

Some reviews quoted are:

“I didn’t need to read it to know it was shite” Colin Waters, Sunday Herald.

and my favourite

Most ironically noirish instance of a journalist blindly stumbling upon a vital clue when it is tragically too late:
“If he decided to move on from his love affair with low brow… then he might one day aspire to literature.
But perhaps he doesn’t want to.” Peter Jinks, The Herald

I get the feeling that Brookmyre enjoys the bad reviews more than the good ones.

If you haven’t read any CB books why not take a risk with the first one “Quite Ugly One Morning”? (“Deeply unpleasant and thoroughly nasty… the novel makes for somewhat tedious and disappointing reading.” Allan Laing, The Herald) I’ll be surprised if you can resist reading all the rest, despite what the Herald thinks of it.

Or failing that, just have a look at the website and find some odd stuff like a couple of short stories and a piece about the rules for playground football

And the title of the new book? “All Fun And Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye”.

There is no way I could have waited 6 months for that to appear in paperback!