January 3, 2009
I have finally made the decision to move Emm Media over to blogger. Wordpress has a better ‘pages’ facility, better tagging and a category hierarchy; whereas Blogger has a far superior commenting system, the ability to use javascript and thus post playlists and other plugins, greater freedom in designing your layout and the superb facility for allowing people to ‘follow’ your blog.
I designed the new layout myself and I am pretty please with the outcome.
The link at MyBlogLog has been moved over and BlogCatalog should be completed anytime now.
In the next month or so I will redirect links and feeds and close this site down. All of the posts that were on this site have already been exported over.
Finally, if you do decide to follow me over to Blogger or if you have been following here, then please feel free to drop me a comment and say hi. It’s always nice to touch base with readers!
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December 24, 2008
I work in an open plan office with a couple of flat out television addicts. Many people have commented that on starting at our company, they thought that the heated and animated discussions related to friends and family dramas, the trials, tribulations, hook ups and betrayals evident in modern relationships. Sadly, however, it emerges that my colleagues are usually talking about the reality TV show of the day, be it Big Brother UK, I’m A Celebrity or Strictly Come Dancing. They get so involved with it! Anyway, a recent discussion centred around the new season of Spooks, a series I had surprisingly never watched despite glowing recommendation from my friends and a general attraction to the spy / terrorism genre of television drama. Not wanting to sit around for an entire season listening to spoilers on the show, I decided to watch season 7 of this UK television series.
Being a shameless wench, one of the major drawing points of this series has to be the gorgeous Rupert Penry-Jones in his role as Adam Carter.
Warning - episode one spoiler below.
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Posted in Season, Television No Comments »
December 14, 2008
I discovered two outstanding authors in 2008, namely Anthony Horowitz and Garth Nix. They are both masters in the young adult fantasy or science fiction genre and I discovered them while trying to fill the void left in my life after finishing the Harry Potter (JK Rowling) and His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) books.
In October, I wrote about how impressed I was with the first three books in The Power of Five series by Anthony Horowitz and I was waiting (not so patiently) for the latest book in the series - Necropolis. Does this fourth book live up to the promise of the previous three books in the series?
I felt like an excited child when I opened up the package from Amazon and I noticed with glee that the pages of the book were teal-edged to match the front cover. The cover of the book is metallic and shiny and really did look quite the Halloween treat!
The fourth book focuses mainly on the last of the Five, Scarlett Adams, as she is taken by the evil Nightrise Corporation and held hostage in the dying city of Hong Kong. This book does not have the fast and frantic pace that the other three books had and on the surface, it appears that there is not as much magic in this book as there was in the other books.
In the end though, the book absolutely does deliver and it has a magnificent and explosive ending. We realise that the magic was there all along but that we simply weren’t noticing it.
Naturally, being a book series about the Power of Five, there are five books in the series. Necropolis perfectly sets the stage for the final book yet I have to admit that I don’t think it would be able to stand alone as a story on its own. On second thoughts, a lot happens in this book to Scarlett and in the end, none of the books could have stood on their own because you are always going to want to rush to the next story so that the Five can come together and the fight for the end of the world can begin (again).
I am certainly not disappointed with this book and once again, my only feeling of sadness has to do with wondering how long I will have to wait until the final book in the series is released. Oh well, it looks like 2009 is going to be concerned with trying to fill the void left in my life after finishing the Old Kingdom (Garth Nix) and existing Power of Five books.
Posted in Books, Fantasy & Science Fiction No Comments »
December 12, 2008
Reporting from the sick bed of Emm:
Despite my glowing review of Twilight, I have managed to discover one extremely redeeming quality of the film: it has the most awesome score I have heard in a film since The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The score is beautiful and haunting and I purposefully stalled in putting it on my iPod because I know it is the type of music I could lose myself in. It has the power to transport me and stir my imagination and I had needed to remain grounded up until now.
Read on for more babble about the film
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Posted in Album Review, Film, Music 2 Comments »
November 26, 2008
Had I not just sat through two long, excruciating and painful hours (two hours that I will never reclaim in my life) I could perhaps get away with thinking that I’d just watched a “highlights” feature of the upcoming Twilight film. Alas, it wasn’t a bad dream and it wasn’t a disjointed mish-mash of random scenes from the book; that was actually the film and my current calculations regarding whether it could be the worst film I have ever seen says it all. I haven’t figured out yet whether it is the worst film I’ve ever seen (I mean it is possible that it is) but I need to study now and I could have spent two hours studying rather than watching this film. I could have spent two hours watching paint dry - the possibilities are endless really.
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Posted in Film, Film review 2 Comments »
November 19, 2008
Link: Doctor Who tapes ‘missing in Thailand’
This is excellent news - I so hope it is true and that they turn up.
A while ago, I started watching the old Doctor Who episodes from the very first episode broadcast in 1963. Unfortunately, when you get to the fourth arc (starting with episode 14: The Roof of the World) you get to the missing episodes where they have tried to recreate the stories from the audio tracks and from still photographs. These episodes are completely unwatchable in my opinion.
So if they were to find some of the missing tapes it would be all made of awesomeness and it would be fabulous to be finally able to watch those episodes.
Posted in TV Shows, Television No Comments »
November 15, 2008
Two weeks ago I decided to scrobble the genre “Electronic” on my iMandy. As always happens when I attempt this, I soon landed up listening to only Jean-Michel Jarre. I have been listening to Jean-Michel Jarre for 30 years now and there is the old family legend about the time we were travelling from Liverpool to London (I presume) in 1978 and the ‘thunderclap’ in Equinoxe woke my months-old baby brother up and gave him one heck of a fright.
Jean-Michel Jarre was years ahead of his time and his music is certainly infectious. Out of the 117 times I played his songs in the past couple of weeks, these were the songs I played the most:
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1. Oxygene II: I find the energy of this song to be amazing. It reminds me of all things exciting and alive and good in the world and It is no surprise that I can listen to it over and over again.
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2. Equinoxe IV: Johannesburg is amazing when it rains with primordial thunderstorms and lightening that seems to split the Earth apart. The Equinoxe album takes you through the anatomy of a thunderstorm from the calm through the chaos to the quiet afterwards. Equinoxe IV is about the thuder and lightening and it is this song that woke my brother up 30 years ago.
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3. Ethnicolor I: Zoolook became a firm favourite of mine while I was studying for my Matric in 1990. I loved this first song on the album because of how he combined the strange animal songs to produce an emotional and engaging piece of music. It is a really long song (over 11 minutes) and I’d recommend that you listen to it all the way through.
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4. Rendez-Vous II: This has to be my very favourite Jean-Michel Jarre song. It reminds me of rain in manicured gardens, unrequited love and heartbreaking farewells. I was a very romantic 19-year-old with my heads in the clouds when the film Indochine came out and this track reminds me of that time. It’s another long track and you have to listen through the ‘choir’ - it’s amazing.
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5. Beautiful Agony: This amazing song is from Jean-Michel Jarre’s latest album, released in 2007. Now my music tastes are completely schizophrenic and I can listen to indie, dance, classical and metal all in the course of a morning. This song rocks because the master of electronic music could still show the likes of Tiësto or Paul Oakenfold today just how to make a dance track.
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Posted in Music, Week in Music No Comments »
November 15, 2008
I had some nice feedback from JAPRA the other day (in her art blog) that she enjoyed listening to my playlists. I found this quite encouraging and have decided to start up my Week in Music playlists again.
The primary reason that I stopped the playlists was a concern for their legality. I investigated Imeem but Imeem playlists do not play on Wordpress as they do not allow embedding of flash content. I then considered moving my blog to Blogger but that is almost unheard of as most people move to Wordpress not from it.
So in order to make the playlists as legal as possible, I have specifically uploaded very low bitrate versions of the songs that are only good for listening and streaming purposes and I’ve uploaded a disclaimer as well. Hopefully this will keep me on the right side of the law and we’ll see for how long I can continue with the playlists.
Posted in Meta 1 Comment »
November 8, 2008
OMG! I never knew Langley Kirkwood was in Generation Kill! I am so happy for him. I am going to have to rush out and watch the series now. Langley and his friend Brendan Pollecutt were at Wits University with me. They were rising stars and I was always taken with how down to earth they were. Okay, more specifically, they were always really nice and made the time to chat to me. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for those two.
Those of you in SA will remember Brendan from the Volkswagen ad - he is the kid that gets his Dad’s car at the end of the advert.
Posted in Actors, TV Shows, Television No Comments »
November 4, 2008
Okay then. Not too certain how I feel about this. I was devastated to hear that Guy Flanagan was no longer involved with Being Human and I feel (at best) lukewarm about the latest cast announcements.
The BBC announced today that Aidan Turner will take the role of Mitchell and Lenora Crichlow will take the role of Annie. Well. I specifically didn’t like Sugar Rush because of Lenora Crichlow so she is going to have to blow my socks off and give a non-irritating, superb performance if my interest in this show is going to remain. [And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how one pulls off a temper tantrum at the tender age of 35].
![beinghuman101[1]](http://www.missus-emm.com/coppermine/albums/userpics/WLW/TVBeingHumancastannounced_DD6C/beinghuman1011_thumb.jpg)
It looks like the team that captivated us with their chemistry is no more. I am so sad.
Icons courtesy of madmancunian at livejournal
Posted in Actors, TV Shows, Television No Comments »
![beinghuman101[1]](http://www.missus-emm.com/coppermine/albums/userpics/WLW/TVBeingHumancastannounced_DD6C/beinghuman1011.jpg)
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