General Musings for the week - 19th September 2010

Football season started last Sunday. A mixed blessing I would say. On the plus side it means my Sunday evenings are planned for the next 16 weeks or so (I'm UK based so we get the midday games around 6pm). On the minus side it means the long decline into winter has officially begun. Won't be too long before they start putting the clocks back. Sigh.

My cereal has a promotion in affiliation with Toy Story 3. It promises to take you 'To Florida... And beyond!' What's beyond Florida?

If your mobile network service provider offers 'unlimited texts' there can't be a 'fair usage policy'. Fair usage implies a limit and there can't be a limit on an unlimited policy! Remember that next time you buy a phone with 'Unlimited Texts' (I'm looking at you, O2).

My on-line grocery shopping provider has several great bargains this week. The one that caught my eye was the following: Quorn Vegetarian Sausages: £1.50 per packet OR 3 for £5.00. (?) Think I'll give that 'bargain' a miss.

I'm a little giddy today. I just watched 'The Special Relationship' which is a film about Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. I did work on this over last summer (including standing in for the lead actor for a couple of days) and I'm always interested to see which scenes I was in that actually made it to the final cut. Well. - of the week or so I shot on the film a large number of the scenes were edited down, thereby removing my part. Some still had me there but were shot with camera angles that didn't show me, but I am there, quite visible in the scene set aboard the Concorde. I'm behind Jonathon Powell, for those who care to look. Incidentally with the exception of a small number of second unit shots of vehicles in Washington DC, the WHOLE film was shot in the UK. In particular it was mostly shot in South East England within (or just outside) the M25. It's amazing what can be done with select camera angles and judicious framing. For those of you who have a high definition TV and get to see it on HD in the scene set in the NATO conference in Washington DC (pretty late on in the movie) as Clinton walks up the stairs with his entourage and meets Blair underneath a large leaded window, see if you can see the building on the other side of the road through the glass. It's not very clear, but it is Westminster Abbey, central London. Not what you would expect through a window in Washington DC! Now forget I told you that, it's the movies and it happens all the time. If it bothers you to know stuff like that then I apologise. By the way, the Concorde was a real Concorde - not a set - and it was the one used for most of the airworthiness certifications. It currently resides at Brooklands Museum in Surrey which is where we did the filming.

Video of the week: Regular readers of this blog and my others will know of my contempt for Ryanair and their 'Customer Service'. I was delighted, this week, to receive the following link to Fascinating Aida's take on 'The 50p flight'. I defy you not to laugh.