The BBC tribe show is fantastic

I watched the Tribe last night. The basic premise of the show is one English chap goes and joins various tribes in Ethiopia and around that region. To join a tribe for a week he has to usually undertake some kind o initiation.

Yesterdays he was joining the tribe of Dassanech, Omo Valley,Ethiopia. Most of the tribe are herders but there are some of them go and hunt crocodiles in shallow water armed with only a home made harpoon.

It was a fascinating program and I'm glad to say he website to accompany it is also pretty good and has 3 full episodes and some interviews along with lots of other information about the tribes he has stayed with.

The only downside is that I watched the last of the series but hopefully it will be repeated so I will be able to watch them all.

It was quite heart warming to see how generous and heart warming the people from the tribe where, especially the mum figure. Although they were very poor and hardly had anything they were always keen to look after Bruce (the presenter). Bruce said that he was amazed by the generosity of the these poor people and it seems stranger that people in the western world are becoming the opposite of that. Perhaps it may be something to do with possessions and money, everyone seems to be very concerned with wealth in England, I attribute the violence and aggressive hostile attitude to this, people wanted more wealth like they see on TV all the time. I don't really know and I'm talking shit here but it was fascinating watching the generosity of a small very poor tribe and comparing to England.

In the tribe they also have female circumcision, where they chop off the woman's clit, holy moly what's that all about. According to the episode it's a big part of the Ethiopians culture, I can't really imagine what it does, what's the point but Bruce wasn't keen on it either.

The other interesting bit about the show is Bruce gets stuck in trying the food, helping/hindering in the croc hunts/fetching water (3 mile trek). The leave in the subtitles and you can hear the children and others saying, look he's getting the water himself, look he is eating the crocodile just like we do hhahahaa.

It must be very odd if someone totally alien came into your work/town and leaved with you for a bit, perhaps an alien will come down and live with us for a week.

here's the link to the BBC site

http://www.bbc.co.uk/tribe/

go check it out

Wolf Creek review

Holy cow I just watched Wolf Creek and that is one scary movie. It's a small Aussie outback movie and it brings a real sense of horror.

like all good horrors, you have the calm before the storm as you slowly build up the characters and it this bit is filmed in what I would call a classic aussie style, very light hearted and good honest characters mucking about, laughing and taking the piss out of each other.

What I liked from the first part of the film was the rough almost gonzo style of the film quality, it made you feel like you were there and it added a personal touch to the film. The dialogue and acting is great from the main cast to all the rough edged locals.

Are fool hardy youngsters head off to walk called Wolf Creek. When things go wrong I can't help thinking if they had gone to goat creek or something similar it wouldn't have ended so badly.

I won't ruin it for people who haven't seen it but if anyone who has seen it and want to leave some comments and start a discussion then I would be up for it.

The villian in the piece is fantastic bumbling local and he carried real menace, I was scared for the people.

Imdb only gave it 6.2 out of 10 but because of its extreme nature and the fact not everyone likes horror films I think this is a pretty good showing and gives you a sense of the quality of the film. I don't personally take to much notice about the number rating of sites like this, I usually like to read the comments and then you can see what the viewer/reviewer is like whilst reading their comments.

The fact that this was based on a true story made it even scarier but after you had seen it. I am still buzzing from the film, it was one of the best horror films I have seen and well worth checking out if you like horror and don't mind a bit of gore.

I think what pushes the film above your average horrror is that it wasn't done in America and it didn't have to tick all the American horror boxes (good looking girl, minor teen famous actors).

I never expected this day to come

An interesting turn of events has happen to me. My girlfriend who is baffled about "blogging" and who often tells her mates whislt on the phone that her boyfriend is "writing on his little nerdy blog". Well she is at the same stage of her internet evolution e.g. she has a hotmail account, goggles things, buys stuff of Amazon etc.

My Mother on the other hand has branched out, not only has she left a comment or two on my blog but has started up a blog of her own, called

http://old-gits-wife.blogspot.com/

she was discussing today what she should put in the blog. Initially she was going to put humorous comments and a sort of diary of her everyday life. I think she has changed her mind slightly. My Mother said that after reading a few other blogs she found blogs that just talked about their life bloody boring. So she is going to break it up a bit with some facts. She might include some data about the weather temperature because she has got into a habit of checking the temperature all round the world and bringing it up into conversation. This has it's benefits because it means I don't have to look, the disadvantages are that it can be a tad boring sometimes but then again us Brits do like to talk about the weather, although I did think it was tradionally our own weather.

So there you go, what is the world coming to when your mum is blogging as well. I suppose in the future whole families will have blogs. Soon I imagine we will hear around the dinner table, Mum tell her she keeps blogging nasty things about it.

Anyway I thought I would give my Mum's blog a bit of advertising and give her a link on my blog and it's not to bad.

Pink Floyd - are they spinal tap turned up to 11

I saw this blog Old Gits Wife: Sid Barrett and I thought I would write about it. I have to admit I have mixed feelings about Pink Floyd. On the one hand their albums,

Dark side of the moon
Wish you were here
The Wall

are brilliant and what's more because they were older I brought the albums for about 5 quid each. On the other hand all of their other material is not as good, in fact it's pretty rubbish and boring. Anything before Dark side of the moon isn't as polished and sounds very odd, especially the totally overatted stuff with Sid Barrett in. Piper at the gates of dawn sounds like spinal tap, muttering odd lyrics which I do not think are inspired they are just a brain dump from some guy spaced out of his mind.

Anything after the Wall is self indulgent that it only has 1 maybe 2 good songs on an album.

The three albums I like are fantastic, classic albums that will be liked for the next 100 years and more, the other albums I would just give a miss.

This bloke sums it up pretty well

http://timedoor.textdriven.com/index.php?id=19

and he also links to 4 songs from Piper at the gates of dawn so check it out if you fancy hearing Sid Barrett. When i saw the songs on here, I thought they seemed familiar, it turned out that I actually own the album, it's that good I forgot.

here is a link to some Sid Barrett solo material as well

http://www.funtimeok.com/?p=358

I might not have like Sid's work that much but you have to doff your cap, at least he was an interesting chap and he did start up Pink Floyd. If anyone knows please leave a comment stating how pink floyd got their name.

Superman returns - well he can go back go there

I watched the new Superman movie and found it massively boring. Firstly I don't really think films should be 2 and half hours long in the cinema, if the film is that long they should go back to the script and cut out all the nonsense don't need. I suppose that is what you would done in the good old days but these days they should cut out some of the soap emotional waft.

I don't really like all the stuff about showing characters are sensitive souls, you should be able to that and push the script along. Thinking back to the old Superman films they didn't have much of this stuff.

Special effects seemed to have taken over films these days. Like pirates of the Caribbean (and many others) there are bits just to show off some special effects. The problem is special effects are a bit like fire works, everyone has seen them and I for one are quite bored of them. Special effects just thrown in are doubly boring. To be honest people don't really care about the quality of the special effects, by stepping into the cinema we have already agreed to leave reality at the door. Think back to films like ghostbusters and the Skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, the special effects are rubbish by today's standards but who cares the quality of them isn't really important, its the part they play in the film. When you see Jason fighting some skeletons you are thinking bloody hell this boy is in a bit of a tight spot.

Another comment I have about the special effects in this Superman film is they are tremendously boring. Basically someone is in trouble, falling/car trapped /plan about to crash and you know that Superman is going to save them, he pops up, a bit of a struggle and saves them, boom, bam, boring. In the old supermans he was pulling some moves, like freezing lakes and melting them to put out fires, flying round the world backwards to turn back time. At least they were interesting and you wondered how Superman was going to save them.

Finally the plot seems so much a second rate citizen and unimportant to the movie that it appears and then ends quickly, no warning, no twists, no real motivation, not really a very good plan and in the end I couldn't really give a monkeys what happened I was just hoping that it would finally end.