Thursday 30th July 2026

[refitman]

Morning all.

[Frog222]

[Frog222]

Nice quiet relatively cool day, one of my favourite nurses in charge of transfusing, and the usual copious lunch before I could go home . For once I obeyed instructions of nurse and also daughter so she weeded the flower garden without me !

I've always had a poor impression of Polansky, in this he sounds like a drip --

[Sky'sGoneOut]

So I've had the DWP on my back again, this time about a couple of million quid I thought they'd missed after I (cunningly I thought at the time) paid it directly into my Dad's bank account then asked him to dish it out to my mates so they could stash it. They've got me bang to rights this time I'm afraid to say, and what's most embarrassing is I released a book just a few months ago about money laundering, like I was some kind of expert. The DWP agent on the phone kept bringing it up and laughing, properly rubbing it in. But I'll be having the last laugh because what they don't know is I took another couple of million quid out in cash and hid it somewhere nobody will ever think to look, under my mattress. It's true I probably shouldn't have taken it all out in tenners so my mattress is about 3 feet above my bed, but if the DWP ever come round I'll tell them it's orthopaedic. It's certainly uncomfortable enough to qualify as such. Am I the only one left who likes a nice soft mattress? What's the fascination with sleeping on something that feels like lying on a granite slab? Maybe next they'll start putting little spikes in mattresses for added discomfort and people will love it, pay a fortune for them. Not a bad investment idea actually, and deliciously ironic, use the 2 million making my bed uncomfortable to set up a company to make uncomfortable beds. I'll us postal orders to transfer the cash this time, they'll never think of that.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

If I thought The Odyssey was bad (which I very much did) it was as nothing compared to Spielberg's return to 'Aliens are real' territory.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15047880/

(Spoilers ahead, for what they're worth)

I fully expected it to be awful but I like Emily Blunt so against my better judgement gave it a punt.

Big mistake. Despite its blatant references to Close Encounters (including the soundtrack) if it had been released 20 years ago it would have seemed dated, it made repeats of the X-files look cutting edge. There wasn't a single original idea in its bloated running time, but plenty of rehashed tropes. Crop circles were real, an alien ship really did crash at Roswell (amongst other places, somehow they can travel interstellar distances yet have failed to master the simple physics of flight that humans worked out more than a century ago). Then laughably old man Spielberg has the protagonists go to great lengths to release the truth of what's been going on using a local TV channel, rather than simply releasing it online, then when word spreads (instantaneously) everyone on Earth is staring at their phone taking it in, from soldiers on battlefields to folks going home on the subway. All silently taking it in, no arguments, no doubts as to its veracity, just a worldwide collective acceptance that our place in the Universe had been irrevocably changed.

What absolute bollocks. All of it.

2/10.

And I've bumped that up 1 because despite it all Emily Blunt was great.