January 2008 Archives

Once again CAMRA rolled out another popular beer festival in the boozy town of Cambridge. Jez and I decided to attend on the first night as we know how busy these events get on a Friday night or weekend.

Unfortunately I have to start with a complaint this year. I arrived a good five minutes after the first evening's drinking was due to begin only to see a large queue formed along Mill Lane. At first I thought I'd been scuppered by the popularity again, but it soon became obvious that the doors were not open yet! A further 10 minutes passed and then, after a phone call from someone outside who knew someone inside, the doors miraculously opened! It was business as usual from this point on.

So I had 4 halves at a rather sedate pace. There was no attempt to break any records that night lest I not gain entry to my bed in the homeless shelter. Here's the list (typed into my cheap mobile phone as I'd left my pen with the Su Doku club at Willow Walk):

1. Woodfordes - Norfolk Nog (4.6%) - Nice and malty, however a little bit too much hops for my liking 5/10.
2. Titanic - Black Ice (4.1%) - Tasted identical to the aforementioned Nog! 5/10.
3. Sarah Hughes - Dark Ruby Mild (6.0%) - Excellent mild, very red hues as indicated by the name, quite sweet rather than malty, a nice surprise! 9/10.
4. Fullers - Old Winter Ale (4.8%) - Very generic ale, but quite good, once again quite similar to first two I tried. 6/10.

Bonus Beer (the next day):
5. St. Peter's Brewery - Spiced Ale (6.5%) - Interesting taste rather than downright pleasant, tasted a little like burnt cloves, a good one for Christmas I would have thought. 7/10.

The ambiance was very pleasant once again, as usual space is at a premium at these events and while attendee numbers are controlled you'll have to work hard to get a seat if you arrive during a popular spell.

I talked to a number of strange men during my wait for Jez to get back from his haunts around Jesus Green. Most interesting was the discovery that the Norwich beer festival, in the summer, is on for a whole week! Lucky scavvers!

Overall I wasn't as impressed with the selection of beers this year. There were less interesting flavoured beers, in previous years we've had ginger and various other varieties of spiced beer. Maybe this is a sign that brewers are heading for generic, easily marketed ales. Maybe it's just the Special Brew that's spoilt my palate. Only time will tell.

Roll on May and the summer festival!

This latest film by the Coen brothers lives up to expectations, offering to eager fans a visually-arresting, intriguing thriller that manages to be both suspenseful and thoughtful. Of course, some of the credit should go to Cormac MacCarthy, on whose novel the screenplay is based. Not having read the book myself, I now feel inspired to go away and read something by this author; surely the sign of a good film, that it returns us to literature, the older art-form.

Without giving too much away, the plot centres around the attempt by Llewelyn Moss, a backwoods welder, to escape the clutches of a ruthless assassin with his life and, if possible, the fortune he innocently came across. The action starts when Llewelyn stumbles across the corpse-strewn scene of a shoot-out and a truck-load of notes. Llewelyn wins our sympathy by his actions as well as by the affectionate bond that links him and his wife. To a large extent, it is the likeableness of this central character that stops the film from becoming too dispiriting, in spite of the extreme violence of some scenes and the nihilism that is displayed by the villain. The villain's mechanically ruthless behaviour seems to go beyond mere criminality and to be motivated by a deterministic philosophy of life that has been hard-won. On many occasions, he tosses a coin (or invites his victims to toss a coin) to decide whether he should let someone live or die, a detail that reminded me of the film adaptation of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Although some might say that the philosophical elements of the Coen brothers' film are pretentious, I would disagree: they add interest and an almost wistful, elegiac atmosphere. The end of the film is a good example of this: it closes ambiguously with the good cop - who's been chasing the killer throughout, but is now retired - recounting a dream to his wife. The meaning of the dream is not entirely clear but seems to hint at the cop's feeling that his career has been a mission to follow in his father's footsteps and combat evil in the world. This takes us back to the beginning of the film, which opened with a voiceover by the same cop describing how hard it could be to defend law and order in that county. The circularity of the film's structure is apt, given the theme of fate and inevitability running throughout.

The best features of the film are the dialogue (it reminded me in this respect of Pulp Fiction, but this is definitely slow-motion Tarantino) and the cinematography. The atmospheric landscape shots, panning across eerie desert scenery, were haunting. As usual in a Coen brothers film, there was also a quirky humour that added zest. The short snatches of dialogue between the killer and random (usually thick-witted) hapless shop attendants or concierges exemplified this humour best. Although the violence seemed a little over-the-top in places, this is no ordinary shocker.

Chenapan forwarded me this article today about a couple of goths up in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. I feel that the photo sums it all up. Personally, I'm not so poor as to need to use public transport like Dani Graves and Tash Maltby, but I do keep my wife gagged and bound in the boot of the car.

So it's well into 2008 and the NoFear.org Chimps have updated the website again, which means that we're back in business. In the next few days we'll have a film review and, if we don't binge drink, a review of the Cambridge Winter Beer festival. There are also plans to reinstate the Radio Armageddon podcast! Looking further into the future we should be reviewing, if we don't drink to much, the summer beer festival and the Cambridge Film Festival as well. Some time in September you can expect to read about our travels through the continent in search of the perfect wine, it'll be like 'Oz and James Big Wine Adventure' without the obvious attempts to add human interest! There'll be more fun as we discover what the Pervenkel has been up to at his bible class. No doubt there'll be more monkey and cheese madness as the year progresses. Oh yes, we might even talk about cycling a bit if we can be bothered...

There is a form of Debt Collection Agency (DCA), which preys on the uninformed and attemps, via all kinds of devious means, to extract money from you to which they are not entitled.

Today I received a letter from one such agency, Lowell Portfolio I. Please click on the image above to see a larger copy of the letter. They specialise in purchasing old debts from Banks and other insitututions, and then trying to obtain payment for said debts, which are normally 'Statute Barred'. For a debt to be statute barred, for a period of six years there must not have been any written acknowledgement to the debt, no payment made towards the debt, and no legal action for the debt taken against you.

Lowell Portfolio rely on you not knowing this, and will attempt many means to get you to pay up. For the informed consumer, the tables can be turned.

This blog will track my dealings with Lowell Portfolio over the coming months.

If you have received such a letter then first of all, no matter how tempting it is to telephone them, do the following:

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

Simply wait for the next letter, and I repeat, do absolutely nothing, apart from file that letter away. Do not, under any circumstances telephone them. If they call you, hang up. You are under no obligation to speak to them.

And we shall await the next letter, stay tuned viewers...

[UPDATE 07-MAY-2008]

Sorry for the lack of news kids. My advice continues to be, ASSUMING YOUR DEBT IS STATUTE LIMITED, to do nothing.

Don't answer the phone to them or reply to their letters. They've since passed my debt to JB Debt Recovery in Glasgow, but the advice remains the same.

I'll follow up later on with the various letters I've received.

This musical film, directed by Christophe Honore, reminded me very much of the work of Eric Rohmer. This is because, like many of Rohmer's films, it's a moody evocation of the lives of some confused young French people looking for meaning and direction in their lives and (largely) failing. It began blithely enough, showing the carefree but slightly callous behaviour of three twenty-somethings - Julie, Ismael and Alice - who have formed a menage-a-trois. Things get steadily darker, and the web of relationships gets more complicated as the film progresses. The songs actually helped contribute to the dreamy, introspective mood of the film, since the lyrics emerged out of the main dialogue almost like unspoken monologues, conveying the thoughts and inner emotions of the protagonists in a subtle way. Having said that, the songs were not so good that you wanted to rush out and buy the CD to listen to at home. They were casual and almost rough-around-the edges (not bad qualities necessarily) but without being compellingly catchy. The songs reminded me of the kind of good busking you sometimes get in Paris (the city in which the story takes place) or maybe a grungy rock band like Elbow on a slack day. They certainly didn't have the passion of an Edith Piaf number! Many of the characters in the film were quite unlikeable, especially the narcissistic Ismael, but the family scenes involving Julie's parents and her sisters (who, for some reason, all seem to worship Ismael like an adopted son) were interesting and well-acted. The close relationship between Julie and her family seemed one of the more positive aspects of modern French life to emerge from the film. Seeing this film with my son at one of the 'Big Scream' screenings made me wonder what society will be like by the time he reaches his twenties. I hope that love and intimacy will not be derided as 'uncool' by people from his generation! I'd rate this film a 2.5 out of 5.