Letters of note

One of the feeds that I follow on Twitter is from Pixar, the wonderful people who brought us Toy Story 3. Understandably, a large amount of the recent stuff has been promotion for the film, but who can blame them! However, they did retweet an entry which had a link to a site called Letters of Note, which turns out to be rather fun.

The link in question was to a letter written by Pete Docter (bigwig at Pixar and director of Monsters Inc and Up) in reply to a piece of fan mail. It's great - have a look here.

Finking about Fibonacci

Driving home from Brighton today the circus / funfair was setting up in the park, and for some reason it reminded me of a trip to the funfair when I was little. I really can't remember very much about it, but I think that it was on the playing fields over the road from our house, and swingboats were almost certainly involved. What I do have a vague recollection of is coming home with prizes: a goldfish in a polythene bag and possibly a 7" vinyl record - how bizarre! Maybe my parents can help me with this and let me know if I am remembering correctly or if I am managing to piece together fragments of separate events.

Anyway, it was great to see Mum and Dad at the weekend at Bec's and entertaining to hear that Dad has already got the book that I have my eye on for holiday reading. As it seemed to get his seal of approval I have put my order in with Amazon and it should be arriving any day now. Apparently, one of the topics to look forward to in this popular maths tome deals with the Fibonacci sequence, a numerical sequence easy to grasp but with some fascinating properties. The first two numbers in the sequence are 0 and 1, and then new numbers are added onto the sequence by taking the sum of the two previous numbers. So, the sequence goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on.

The particular property being considered is that if you take any number in the sequence and square it, then compare the answer with the product of the two numbers on either side of it in the sequence, the difference is always 1.

For example, 5 squared is 25, and 3 x 8 = 24 - difference 1. Similarly 8 squared is 64 and 5 x 13 = 65 - difference 1, and so on. Also worthy of note is that as you move along the sequence, the differences alternate between +1 and -1.

Being the fully paid up member of the amateur nerd society that I am, I have just bemused the rest of my family by writing up a proof about this and e-mailing it over to Dad!

The Sloop John B

When I change radio stations in the car, they tend to stay changed. The key determining factor for me seems to be what I listen to in the morning. I went through a fairly long phase of pretending to be a proper grown up and listening to the Today programme on R4, and this meant that I usually caught the 6:30 comedy on the way home, along with other random programmes when driving around from meeting to meeting during the day - Ed Reardon would often be a late morning treat!

But now I have acknowledged the fact that I'm not really a grown up at all and stopped listening to R4. The main reason is that I now start the day with the Chris Evans breakfast show on R2 (perhaps this is a rather bad sign and I really should start drawing a pension any day now). But, even once the breakfast show is long gone, I don't manage to change channels very much, although I do occasionally draw the line at some of Jeremy Vine's lunchtime nonsense and turn off.

R2 tends to go a bit off the safe popular hits piste at 7 o'clock with a selection of Jazz, Folk, Country and so on programmes. Tonight we had a programme from the Cambridge Folk Festival, introduced by Mike Harding amongst others (wasn't he a comedian in a former life?) and one of the acts that they featured was a group called the Fisherman's Friends (from Port Isaac - been there).

One of the songs that they sang was the Sloop John B. Whenever I hear that song, I am transported back to the mid eighties and my first year at grammar school. We had a mad and slightly eccentric music teacher (there were two, and they were both mad and eccentric, but at least this one was mad in a nice way) and quite often our music lessons would consist of nothing more than handing round the song books and having a jolly old sing-a-long, accompanied by our teacher on the piano. Looking back, I remember enjoying this a great deal, and yet I still get a lump in my throat when I hear that song. I think that I must have been having a bad day one time when we sang it, and that the enormity of moving on from the cosy, know the ropes world of junior school to the scary, small fish in big pond world of senior school was weighing heavy on my mind, and I did have to stifle a tear or two as we sang the chorus:

Let me go home

I want to go home

I feel so broke up

I want to go home.

The small matter of a quarter of a century or so has passed, but I still seem to have the occasional day just like that one.

TS3

OK, it has taken me a while to get around to posting about Toy Story 3, but better late than never. In some ways it probably helps because I usually come out of a movie thinking that it is the best one I've ever seen, but then start to get some perspective on it as time passes.

There was definitely a mixture of nervousness and excitement about going to see the third instalment of the adventures of Buzz, Woody et al, as is always the case with sequels, but this was tempered by the fact that since bursting onto the feature film scene 15 years ago with TS1, Pixar really haven't had a bad movie in all that time. And, it's amazing to think that it has been 10 years since TS2, so this is the first new Toy Story story to be released in Jake's lifetime! We took great delight in being ahead of the UK curve in seeing the second film, as we saw at the end of 1999 during our Las Vegas holiday, a few months before it was released in the UK.

Anyway, as to the film, my review can probably be encapsulated in three words: it was fantastic. Once again it was a film with a great story, lots of fun, and full of heart. Tinged with an undercurrent of sadness (people moving on, toys being neglected ...) it still managed to be positive and upbeat.

Libby Purves wrote an excellent piece in the Times about it last week (I would link to it here but the meanies have started to charge for online content). Whilst I don't really go for the political analogies, I thought that she'd got it spot on with this observation: "In their prison-break adventure they all put aside self, take risks for the group and nobly attempt to save even their fascist overlord. When it seems that they are doomed to the martyrs' fire, they tremble but quietly reach out hands to one another, knowing that what will survive of them it love. Inspiring stuff." And not a dry eye in the house either!

In other Disney movie news, it has been announced that Disney are selling Miramax, looking to concentrate their efforts on the family movie end of the market under their more recognisable labels, presumably in part to tie in more closely with other parts of the corporation (i.e. opportunities for merchandise and related theme park attractions). Got me to thinking that probably a fair few people hadn't realised that Disney owned Miramax anyway, so here are a few more things that are part of the Disney family (at least I think they are - don't quote me on any of this!!):

1. Spiderman - as per one of my previous posts, Disney have acquired Marvel, and hence own Spiderman and a few thousand other Marvel Superheroes.

2. Monday Night Football - we all know how huge (American) Football is in the US, well Disney owns ESPN, the sports network, who pay huge amounts of money for the privilege of showing live NFL action.

3. Desperate Housewives - Disney also owns the ABC broadcasting network (of which ESPN is a part I think) and the tales of Wisteria Lane are one of ABC's hit shows.

4. Kermit and Miss Piggy - Disney acquired the Henson characters a while back and so added all of their characters to the Disney stable (personal favourites - Dr Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker!)

5. Woody and Buzz - may seem obvious but when they were first created, Woody and Buzz were not strictly Disney characters. Pixar was a separate company which had a film distribution deal with Disney. At one point once that deal ended it looked like Disney and Pixar may go their separate ways, but differences were ironed out (possibly thanks in part to the departure from Disney of Michael Eisner) and Disney acquired Pixar a few years back (making Steve Jobs - Mr Apple - one of Disney's biggest shareholders).

Darkest Peru

No I haven't wedged in another holiday, I am sat on a train at Paddington waiting to go to Reading - no sign of a lost bear.

Decided to let the train take the strain today to get to my lunch meeting, so get a day off from the M25. Am in London tomorrow morning as well but will need to drive to Gatwick and get the train from there as I have another meeting near the office in the afternoon. Still, at least it means that I will be able to jump in the car and be back in time for the end of term treat - the much anticipated and eagerly awaited Toy Story 3. Not sure who is most excited, probably me!

On my way through St Pancras this morning I took a picture of the tallest model railway in the world - as featured on this morning's GMTV. If I was cleverer I would send the picture straight from phone to blog - maybe I'll attach it via flickr later. (By the way, St Pancras continues to be a good place for occasional celeb spotting - shared the Ebbsfleet flyer with Vic Reeves today!)

I am reading A Game of Thrones by George R R Martin at the moment and am gradually getting sucked into the story. Had the book sat on the shelves at home for 10+ years but only just picked it up. The last time I got really stuck into an epic fantasy saga was 15+ years ago when I read Tad Williams' Memory Sorrow and Thorn trilogy.

Two observations so far - firstly it's great knowing that if I really get stuck into it there are several thousand more pages to go (sometimes with an author I really like I have to ration them out for fear of discovering that I've read everything and have to wait for their next publication). The other thing is time - when I last got stuck into a dense saga like this I had the luxury of time. Now it is far more of a rare and precious commodity. Still, only three and a half weeks to holiday and I plan to pack a few books in my case.

Agent Coulson

Watching the second half of Iron Man on one of the movie channels, and noticed a couple of entertaining things. Firstly, one of the locations used in the movie was the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA (which we visited a few months ago) and secondly one of the characters was called Agent Coulson! A quick check on IMDB confirms this, and also that we can look forward to seeing this character in a number of forthcoming releases (Thor, Nick Fury and the Avengers) as well as this year's Iron Man 2. Might be reason enough for watching the films - mind you Iron Man wasn't bad for a superhero action movie.

I would have added some WD Concert Hall pictures to this post, but I am still trying to get back up to date with Flickr uploading, and I still have well over 1,000 of the California pictures to upload, so have got nowhere near LA just yet. Don't rate my chances of being up to date before we go on Independence and take a few hundred more.

Finished Superfreakonomics this week (excellent book - borrowed the first one from the on board library and read it when we were on the Legend cruise in 2006!) and also read Frankie Boyle's autobiography. Outrageous, disgusting, offensive, but also very very funny.

Cross about Cross?

Finished the most recent Alex Cross outing from James Patterson the other day. I actually found it not too bad, but having said that I suppose that my expectations were set pretty low by some of his recent novels. Once upon a time, many years ago, I picked up a second hand copy of Along Came A Spider in a second hand bookstore, and from then on I was hooked on the thrillers about Alex, the detective / psychologist battling against the bad people of Washington DC and often the rest of the US as well. I thoroughly enjoyed the series for quite some time, and would grab the hardback as soon as it came out, but in recent years the quality has gone rapidly downhill. Now I pick up the paperback when it is on special offer (which they always will be now that Patterson is well and truly in the quantity over quality game). I then read with trepidation, hoping that Patterson hasn't hammered too many more nails into his reputation. Then again, it's not clear how much he cares as no doubt he can rely on there being a huge number of mugs like me out there, willing to buy and buy and buy, hoping for a return to form one day.

The current book ends by giving us a sneak preview of the first few pages of the next one due out soon. Alarmingly, Kyle Craig seems to be back again - wheel out the old adversaries when ideas are thin on the ground ...

One other thing - renting out his name to other authors to help them up the publishing ladder is just not on! He can't have that much involvement in the books that show his name plus another on the cover - there just isn't time.