Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Last night we (ICE) performed at the Pembroke sticky-floor smoker. It was really quite good IMHO. It was the first time the new workshop guys had done improv in front of non-trival numbers of ‘real’ people and, for some, the first time on stage. I was really impressed with them and the audience really seemed to like it. We were given a 20 minute slot which was nice ‘cos it gave everyone a chance to get involved.

After the gig we were bonding with the excellent, and very talented, Luke Roberts (the other ‘headline act’) about how shit Jimmy Carr and Little Britain is when the obligatory drunken girl comes tottering up to me. Cue a large number of squees[1] in my direction and gushing about how it was lovely to have something new in a smoker.

Looking back on it I can see what they mean. Short-form improv is, by its nature, really quite different to standup. We have to work together as a team and really support each other. The audience’s requirement to suspend belief is higher but they are rewarded with, I think, an incredibly rich and bizarre experience. To the audience it must seem magical to have complex sketches conjured up for them literally[2] out of thin air. I think it must provide a welcome high-energy break from yet another ‘a funny thing happened to me in the student bar’.

Other nice things from the night were lots of exchanging emails with people saying ‘I’m arranging a comedy gig in $LOCATION’ so hopefully ICE will continue to be on stage near you soon :).

[1] Horrifically I now know what squee-ing is like in real life.
[2] Here I use ‘literally’ like the BBC news does — ‘Pakistan were literally over the moon’, etc. Oh Auntie, what happened to you?

Late but better than never :).

This weekend I want down to Brighton to spend some time with who had to ‘work’ over the weekend at the Brighton Comic Convention. After the usual amount of dicking around on my part in London[1] on Friday evening during rush hour I eventually arrived at Brighton and we found our B&B in which we were to have our dirty weekend^W^Wbusman’s holiday.

The B&B was really nice (props to Jennie for finding one with wifi) but Jennie, in her lovely way, said over IRC the day before ‘Oh… I think I might’ve booked us into a gay B&B’[3]. Now this didn’t bother me particularly — I assumed the owners wouldn’t be actively ‘heterophobic’ — so we had a chuckle and proceeded. It turned out that the B&B was indeed ‘gay-friendly’[4]. It was quite a culture clash to stay in a canonical English B&B which also had a box of free condoms and a sign reminding the patrons that baby oil is really hard to get out of linen.

Saturday morning, after a fine breakfast and realising the woman cleaning the tables was called Steve, we proceeded to the comic con. Now I have no particular interest in comics or comic-based computer games so, TBH, I was prepared to be a bit bored. As it turned out my job was to escort a fetish model dressed as a character from the game made by Jennie’s employers who was dressed entirely in PVC/rubber[5]. After a day of walking around with a woman who sounded like her arse was making balloon animals, taking photos of fan-boy geeks with both the model on their lap and that special hand position boys learn which doesn’t quite hide their erection, I though I’d seen it all. Not quite. There was a Dalek wandering around. The Dalek did two things which made my day.

1. After wandering around threatening people and generally being scary it came across some stairs, said ‘Oh bugger’ and turned around. The humour here is a Dalek saying ‘Oh bugger’ which, for some inexplicable reason, is hilarious.
2. The new Dalek’s can swivel their mid section. In my case, standing behind it, it swiveled and the sucker cup… well let us just say I now know what cricketers feel like when a ball hits their box.[6]

Thus endeth Saturday modulo some party afterward[7].

Sunday was a far more low-key day (mostly nursing my hangover from said party). We saw the 4th Harry Potter film in which, incidentally, they are all so terribly horny. It is just sheer sadism on the part of the film makers to dress Emma Watson up and then in the very next scene remind us she is, in the film Universe, 14 years old. Bastards. It is worth noting that I have not read the book so this was the first time I’d ever seen the story. T’was a bit odd but a good yarn and I especially loved the bit where Prince Fucking William dies.

I came home uneventfully on Monday morning and then did a full day’s work and 3 supervisions in the evening. I was quite knackered after as one might guess :).

[1] I have done the short march from Kings Cross to Kings Cross Thameslink $FLOATMAX times[2] but this time I managed to fuck it up somehow, march down the wrong street and not notice for ages because, ironically, I was preoccupied with being late for the train.
[2] Possibly a slight exaggeration :).
[3] For those that don’t know Brighton this is a non-trivial possibility. Only once one observes the people in the street there can one really appreciate what ‘mincing’ is :).
[4] Their words, not mine.
[5] The model, not Jennie’s employers.
[6] This isn’t the photo I linked to earlier — that was just a bad angle :).
[7] In fact there are likely to be a multitude of amusing stories about this party but I was a little… erm… ‘lit from within’ during most of it.

Oh, remember I said I was sexually molested by a Dalek at the weekend?

Photo taken by .

http://www.pledgebank.com/rights

“I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1,000 other people will too.”

Only 44 more people need to sign up!

Just got back from a weekend in Brighton in which I was sexually molested by a dalek and had to spend the day escorting a woman dressed entirely in rubber. More interestingly I have just found a horrible security bug in the first thing done for us by our new hosted exchange people.

For reasons which I shall excuse by calling them ‘historical’ we at work are forced to use a third party-managed Exchange server to do our email stuff, etc. Recently this third party changed and we were all given a ‘client configuration tool’ which would automagically prod the registry to setup an Outlook 2000+n profile for us. Said tool comes in the form of a self extracting exe which unloads a load of stuff into C:\Temp (or wherever one’s temp directory is) and runs setup.exe. The problem is that is doesn’t call setup.exe explicitly via its location, it just appends C:\Temp to one’s PATH. The upshot is that if you have a file called setup.exe anywhere in your path this will get executed instead. All a malicious person would have to do is get you to download a file into somewhere in your PATH and it will get executed when the user thinks it should be this configuration tool. Nasty.

Note I found this because every time I ran this tool the Cygwin setup program ran instead :).

I would like to meet the person that decided the Fortran matrix layout was going to be column-major[1] and scream in their face. That is all.

[1] Or, equivalently, the person that made every other language row-major[2].
[2] If BCPL[3] is row-major than that would be Martin Rochards for all languages I deal with at the moment.
[3] Remember kinds you can make BCPL object oritented too!

Why on earth did a random Google groups link popup in the ‘News’ bar of my Google Sidebar. I wonder what it thinks I’ve been doing :).

This entry is a bit of a hypothetical question more because I was recently reminded, because of discussions in another LJ thread, of a conversation in real life with than anything else. Is is possible to be ‘de-christened’? I myself was never christened although other people I know have. Part of the point of a christening, as I understand it, is in most branches of Christianity to welcome you into the church and to create a framework to indoctrinate you into it[1].

If I had been christened I would be actively seeking a way of undoing it — that is I want a way which says to the curch that I don’t wish to be a part with an equal strength to that which a christening implies I am. I dare say walking in on a Sunday morning with a large placard saying some suitably strong statement would be effective but not, perhaps, in the spirit of the organisation.

Futher if there is no way for someone to de-christen themselves would it be a viloation to impose an irrevocable ceremony on a child before they can reason and register an objection?

[1] Such as godparents etc. If I have this totally wrong then please correct me.

It’s all lies I tell ya!

Well TCS seemed to like our show. The review is preserved for posterity below. Thanks to Matt Thomson for transcribing.

Ice-cool Comedy (Jen Thomson)

At one point during last night’s Improv Takeover at the ADC, a member of
the comedy troupe turns to the audience and tells us, “You may be
confused.” Aren’t we just?

The hour long show was a riotous, anarchic blend of improvisation,
audience participation and impromptu song. Instead of the originally
planned, scripted, rehearsed, polished show which had once been promised
to the ADC, this motley crew took to an unblemished, unadorned stage for
an hour of…well, anyone’s guess really.

Brought to life by Comedy Iceberg, a Girton-originated improvisation
group founded in 2003 and now made up solely of alumni, the troupe now
hold regular improv workshops in town under the name ICE (Improvised
Comedy Ents). The journey to the stage for the majority of last night’s
cast of ten began in one of these workshops.

The show begins as members of the cast tantalize us with the contents of
an Oscars-style golden envelope which contains the details of the show
which was originally supposed to have taken place. However, rather than
straight-forwardly reveal the contents and recreate the show which could
have been, the audience are encouraged to shout out words guessing its
title. This audience involvement is how we ended up watching the
improbable “Gorgonzola, Cholera and the Tax Man”.

In spite of the nature of the performance, we are still presented with a
range of cohesively developing characters as the sketches continue: the
evil man from Del Monte who inflicts cholera on his pineapples; Quentin
the Fishmonger; the Revolutionary Australian Legion led by a lady in a
pink cowboy hat, and the man who really, really wants to be Egor the
monster. When the pace slows, cast members gain inspiration by asking
for a word from the audience or turning to the suggestions box at the
side of the stage - a device which manages to turn a simple interview of
the Prime Minister into a tirade against a Big Issue vendor.

When the sketches work - which the vast majority do - the results are
hilarious. The shop which doesn’t sell cheese but only emotion, the
all-singing, all-dancing Inland Revenue and the moving human graphs are
all really appreciated by the audience. Things go “wrong” of course -
people cross the stage in the darkness, two individuals enter at one
time - but this is the nature of the show and part of the fun.
Anything, literally anything, can happen.

As the words of the final charity song fade away (”Cool my Beer” for the
Australian Foreign Legion) it is apparent that Comedy Iceberg may not
have had a script, a plan or even a clue, but they definitely had one
thing on their side - lots and lots of laughter.

(Boxout: Comedy workshops are held Thursday, 7-9 at John’s and Sunday,
3-5 at King’s every week during full term. See http://www.comedyiceberg.co.uk/
or http://www.improv.org.uk/ for more details.)