Does it bother anyone else that "Raise the Roof" and "Raze the Roof" have opposite meanings? It's just me? Okay, then. Those of you who have been attending our weekly film nights will know that the roof of the Church has been quite exploded lately. Perhaps this is one of the more obscure side-effects of COVID, but for whatever reason, the Church roof has thoroughly failed to fulfil its obligations as a roof, and consequently we have been assembling in the basement (which would seem to be a reasonably safe distance from a recalcitrant roof). Unfortunately, the roof appears to have caught up (or down , presumably) with us. For the next two weeks, the basement of the Church will be out of action while the construction crew install scaffolding down there, as part of their efforts to repair the afore-mentioned roof. I'm still not completely convinced by the idea that repairing a roof requires scaffolding in the basement , but who am I to second-guess the noble ...
(not a real calendar) Well.... so much for 2025. If you're anything like me, you still find it a little jarring to be actually living through years with implausible, futuristic names like "2025" or "2026". It wasn't that long ago that we associated such numbers with pulp science fiction stories about the conquest of Mars, or apocalyptic interplanetary wars. 2026 is supposed to be a far-off destination in speculative stories about time travel, not the "use-by" date on the carton of milk you bought this morning. When did that happen? So yes; 2026 is come. Unfortunately, the reality of this "World of Tomorrow" we find ourselves living through has probably not quite lived up to the grand predictions of yesteryear; especially if you were hoping for flying cars or personal jet packs or world peace. It's certainly true that rather too many unglamourous and archaic relics of Humanity's past are persisting in our everyday lives (the intern...
Last week's Ruby Sparks marked "Week Ten" in this current series ( The Grok, the Glunk and the Golem ) and as a further exploration of the current state of A.I. Large Language Models, I decided to try a little experiment over the weekend. I fed the complete text of everything I have written thus far (weeks one through ten) into several different ChatBots and asked them to "read" through the entire series. I did not tell them I was the author, in the hope that this might curtail their natural tendency towards ebullient sycophancy (with mixed results). Once they had read through everything (and reacted surprisingly thoughtfully in several cases) I asked them a question: "If you were the one programming this little series, what would you pick for Week Eleven , bearing in mind everything that has come before? Where would you go after Ruby Sparks ?" Each of the ChatBots approached this question in their own inimitable way, but (revealingly) they all indep...
Those of you who have been following the films I have been showing over the past month or so will know that I have been exploring the parallels between the 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals and the modern "Step Up" franchise. But this has all been part of the larger "umbrella" series of Depression/Comedy that I have been running since the New Year. As is (hopefully!) clear by now, the Busby Berkeley musicals were not simply "musicals produced during the Depression", they were emphatically products of the Depression. The Fred & Ginger musicals had aimed for pure escapism. Their stories took place in opulent, Art-Deco re-imaginings of exotic locations around the world... …where all the men wore top hat and tails, while all the women wore lavish, improbable gowns (which occasionally caused their dance partners much grief, but that's another story). Fred Astaire grumbled about those damn feathers for the next fifty years. Watching many of those RKO Fred...
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