Hellboy is cool.

Mutterings continued.

Last night Leece left poor sick Rob at home. We had a mooch around Belmont Forum - Big W looks like a typhoon has gone through it, picked up the different items and dumped them somewhere else in the store. They had an extensive, albeit difficult to find, DVD section where Leece secured a series 3 set of B5 for only $49 and a bit. She'd bought me Series 1 so now I just have Series 5 and the movies calling to me from Canadia.

We had a meal in the food court and a wander around Reading Cinemas, not a lot to see. A coffee and a pot of Earl Grey later (I tried to wander out without paying. Good thing Leece called me back! Tres embarrassing.), we hung around the foyer with other SwanCon type people. I was surprised at the size of the complex; I had thought it was a small place but there are 10 cinemas. #1 where Hellboy is being screened is a nice size, the screen is a nice size but the place hadn't been cleaned after the previous screening.

We were fully expecting a preview of Thunderbirds (more later) but didn't get one, thank the small gods. Ron Perlman, as others have pointed out, is perfect as Hellboy. He's done a lot of good stuff, and some not so good. His most memorable performance for me was playing a very big, very butch, bent copper in Happy Texas. And when I say 'bent', I don't mean corrupt.

I'm pleased to see that Hellboy 2 has been announced for completion in 2006, which I'm not so pleased about. For anyone who hasn't seen HB (or Big Red as he's known to his friends), there's an easter egg about half way through the end credits. It answered a question I asked at the beginning of the credits.

I was hoping to post a comment from Gerry Anderson about the travesty that is the Thunderbirds movie but scifi.com seems to be down. In essence he said, don't blame him, he had nothing to do with it, the reviews have been awful and it's not his fault.

Amusement from The Guardian's The Northerner:

"The Liverpool Daily Post has discovered that the entrepreneurial

spirit that made Britain great is not dead, and that some people are

prepared to push themselves to the limit to succeed in what appears

to be a task that would make lesser men and women tremble.

"It is a huge challenge, it's like climbing Mount Everest, you do it

because it's there," Brian Radam told the paper.

Radam is leading a team that Brunel himself would have been proud of:

they want to build a 100mph lawnmower and so set an invincible world

record.

The team are all based at the British Lawnmower Museum in Southport,

of which Radam is curator. He is also a former northern lawnmower

racing champion.

"We want to reach around 100mph because anything lower would be too

easy to beat," he told the Daily Post. "The biggest problem is not

the speed, it's keeping the machine in a straight line for that

distance, because they aren't built to travel that fast.

"Ideally you would try to get an aerodynamic shape, something that is

low and long, but the racing rules state you can't change the shape -

it must be recognisable as a lawnmower."

The Americans have already topped 100mph, but British enthusiasts are

sniffy about their achievements.

"The Americans are not using real lawnmowers, they just take bits of

lawnmowers and stick them on a big engine," said John Gavin,

president of the British Lawnmower Racing Association. "It's like

having the world's fastest fried egg or the world's fastest wig. If

it doesn't power itself then it's no use."

I find the concept of the world's fastest wig rather disturbing. A museum for lawn mowers even more so.

I discovered why I couldn't do a spell check on Blogger with Mozilla - it automatically blocks pop-ups unless you tell it not to. And I hadn't. Silly Poss.