Cathays Park

My trip to see Gareth Evans' The Raid has been put back until Tuesday due to the giddy social whirl that is and will be watching the European Championship Final in the pub yesterday and cycling to, round, and from Richmond Park today.

Luckily I got my Welsh-connected action movie fix from Wesley (straight to video) Snipes on Freeview's 5USA channel on Friday. To my mind, there is something irresistibly funny about the scene above in which Cardiff's Cathays Park Civic Centre stands in for London in an identikit rifle-assembled-by-a sniper-from-a-brief-case-on-a-roof-top assassination scene.

Gosh

This Is Local London

Plans to bring AFC Wimbledon to Colliers Wood have been drawn up by the council alongside massive regenerations plans for the area, we can reveal.

The Wimbledon Guardian understands proposals for a football stadium on the site of the Savacentre in Merantun Way, currently home to Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer, are being worked on by planners.

In what is being called the "Merantun Way transformation and AFC Wimbledon master plan", it has also emerged insurance giant Aviva has been identified as a developer to build a mixed use development of 1,000 new homes along with the 20,000-seater stadium.

Perhaps the Merantun Boulevard (Icons passim) wasn't a flash in the pan after all?

Here we go!

"If you like your action movies pounding, proficient, and as bloody as a Boxing Day sale at Selfridges, The Raid is something to behold. Gareth Huw Evans announces himself with an almighty Welsh roar as the latest successor to John Woo, trapping us inside a derelict, 30-storey Jakarta apartment block for a relentlessly brutal showdown between drug dealers and an out-of-their-depth SWAT team." The Telegraph.

"There is not, to the best of my knowledge, much competition for the title ‘best Indonesian martial arts movie ever made by a Welshman’. But, if there was, The Raid would see off all comers with a flurry of flying kicks and a selection of gruesomely snapped spines." The Daily Mail.

"Such a lot of talent comes out of Wales. Ivor Novello, Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, Rhys Ifans, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Sheen, to name only the bleeding obvious...... Even so, there’s hardly ever before been quite such a drastic example of talent out of Wales as Gareth Huw Evans, the writer, director and action director of this radical martial arts film, made and set in Jakarta, using only Indonesian actors, speaking only Indonesian throughout.". The Evening Standard

"The Raid does not detain the audience with expositions of character." The Guardian.

You may safely assume that I will be visiting the Wimbledon Odeon this weekend. As the for the Grauniard's sniff, to paraphrase Gus Petch in my beloved Intolerable Cruelty, "You want tact, call a tactician. You want an ass nailed, you come see Gareth Evans".

getting in your face

This time last  year I was in the middle of a Bikram 30 day challenge (Icons passim). If I make it to the Saturday morning session I've booked for the day after tomorrow I will have been to yoga one hundred and sixty nine times altogether.

Good to see the All Black baiting Richard Cockerill getting with the programme.

Raising the roof

If a leak does occur on a flat roof then damage often goes unnoticed for long periods of time during which water penetrates and soaks the decking and any insulation and/or structure beneath it. This can lead to expensive damage from the rot which often develops and if left can weaken the roof structure.

Wikipedia may be less than perfect, but it is right on the money when it comes to a flat roof. The new one on my bathroom is now complete, and I am flirting with the notion of putting a Warre bee hive on it, though the jury is still out on whether that is a good idea or not.

Tiddy Oggy

Last night, essentially because I was so entranced by its name,  I made a Tiddy Oggy or Somerset apple and pork pasty for today's lunch.

Then I went along to a pub quiz which we won.

At this rate it can't be too long until I'm wearing open toed sandals and intoning endless folk songs about the decline of the honey bee.

Harvey and I sit in the bars...

The plan for tonight is to go along to the Antelope for the quiz at 8pm, my deep knowledge of Jimmy Stewart's 1950 Harvey having come in very handy for the film round last week.

I'd just put Ed Hickey into a taxi. Ed had been mixing his rye with his gin, and I just felt that he needed conveying. Well, anyway, I was walking down along the street and I heard this voice saying, "Good evening, Mr. Dowd." Well, I turned around and here was this big six-foot rabbit leaning up against a lamp-post. Well, I thought nothing of that because when you've lived in a town as long as I've lived in this one, you get used to the fact that everybody knows your name. And naturally I went over to chat with him. And he said to me... he said, "Ed Hickey was a little spiffed this evening, or could I be mistaken?" Well, of course, he was not mistaken. I think the world and all of Ed, but he was spiffed. Well, we talked like that for awhile and then I said to him, I said, "You have the advantage on me. You know my name and I don't know yours." And, and right back at me he said, "What name do you like?" Well, I didn't even have to think twice about that. Harvey's always been my favorite name. So I said to him, I said, "Harvey." And, uh, this is the interesting thing about the whole thing: He said, "What a coincidence. My name happens to be Harvey."

The Dharma Bums

Buddhist monks hit by scandal after devotees filmed smoking, drinking and playing high-stakes poker

Buddhist monk charged with murder after 'bludgeoning religious leader to death inside Alabama temple'

Overall a better day for the first two noble truths as opposed to three and four.

Starkey Raving Bonkers

Starkey makes 'cultural' link to gang jailed for sexually exploiting girls

Historian calls on schools to teach English history to ethnic minorities to make them 'English citizens and English men'

Has this nation a toad more odious than David Starkey? I've been unfortuate enough to share the same air with him at a couple of events. Not a day goes by when I don't regret not slapping the smug grin off his face with a wet fish.

Robbed Raided Reunited

The Profit Burglar spotted some of our software in use on the police intranet, in Staines I think, on a TV show called  Robbed Raided, Reunited earlier this week and grabbed a couple of screen shots.

Render unto Caeser

In which we are excited

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We are excited to announce the launch of Amazon RDS for SQL Server and .NET support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk. You can now take advantage of these managed database and application services to deploy, manage and scale SQL Server databases and ASP.NET applications using familiar Microsoft tools.

We have come a long way since Friday, August 25, 2006, that is for sure. These could be the final pieces of the jigsaw as far as migrating our our code base to the cloud is concerned.

(See http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/05/net-support-for-aws-elastic-beanstalk-amazon-rds-for-sql-server-.html also.)

Wordle

Hat tip, Kali

The Rain Redemption

The Bomber and I are off, later today and for the third year- tempus fugit, to the Burnham-on-Sea Rugby Festival for Under 8-13s.

The rugby club are confident that the festival will go ahead as planned with maybe a few tweeks to pitch allocation. Please come prepared for wet conditions under foot.

I hope it all goes well as my Mum and Dad are coming over from Wales to watch himself play for the first time.

I'm taking the iPad and will try out 3G access but I may not post here as I personally find Apple's globe straddling wonder device something of a trial when it comes to text input.