watch tHe skies

So I understand that today, the government will announce who has won the bid to have the UK’s first supercasino.

The eight councils named on the shortlist by the Casino Advisory Panel are the favourites Blackpool, as well as Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and the London boroughs of Brent and Greenwich.  The winner will be allowed to build one uber casino with over a thousand slot machines, with unlimited jackpots!

The rationale behind this, and the new gambling bill, is the belief that new casino projects will support urban regeneration by creating jobs and encouraging tourism. But this puzzles me, because none of the income from such a casino will be brought in from overseas, in fact it will come from those people that can least afford it - in an effort to wipe out their haemorraging debts (the average household debt in the UK is ~ £8,765 excluding mortgages and £52,811 including mortgages, the average owed by every UK adult is ~ £27,180 including mortgages). The growth of gambling in the UK (and everywhere else?) is the result of playing on the “get rich quick” concept that is so alluring, particularly to those that can’t see a way out from under their growing loans, credit cards and car financing. As Yoda so wisely said “If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice”.

So whilst yes perhaps this supercasino will regenerate an urban area, it will come at the price of cash-strapped people heading to it from all areas of the country in the hope that they will get one lucky break and win a jackpot, when the reality is that most of the money taken to a casino stays there. Just for the record - I’ve done the whole Vegas thing and it was good fun, in fact I actually won enough money to have a very entertaining evening that, if you ask me, I would be pleased to tell you about. However I realise that the only way I’ll ever beat the casino is not to go back in. I was just lucky, unlike the thousands of people in Vegas every day pumping their life savings in to those machines and on those card tables.

So it’s a long shot, but I hope that the Government’s announcement today is that they have changed their minds, and that we really don’t need an more casinos at all thank you very much. However I get the feeling that I hope in vain.

Kung Fu movies are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. I love stuff like the Transporter, the more over the top the fighting is, the more fun I have.

So when DOA: Dead Or Alive dropped through the letterbox from my rental company I looked forward to some top class craziness from the assistant director from Transporter 1&2, The One and Kiss Of the Dragon - all top class OTT Kung Fu movies that are just pure popcorn fun.

I was also aware that DOA was based on the video game that involves cgi ladies bouncing majestically around a virtual beach volleyball pitch. Bonus points already.

And so I settled down to watch the movie whilst Jen was out, and was pleased to see plenty of eye candy in the form of major wire-fu and lovely lasses like Holly Vallance, Jaime Pressly and Devon Aoki high-kicking their way through a tournament arranged by the up-to-no-good Donovan (hammed up like a butcher’s shop by Eric Roberts). Fortunately they have brought enough bikinis with them to survive through to the final.

Sure enough, the tournament is a front for Donovan’s naughtiness and before you know it our girls are fighting for their lives and hoping to escape from the island. This is a completely potty movie - it’s like a video game with real actors - even the KO’s are just like a fighting game, and as soon as characters are out of the competition, they are gone, gone, gone, we don’t see them again! The fighting is beautifully choreographed, and the fights are set in typically dramatic locations, and the only thing that gets in the way is that pesky need to have some sort of story.

It is worth mentioning that this film is a lot of fun - sure it’s daft, sure it’s loopy, but it’s fun and, particularly for male viewers, chock full of eye candy. One for the gents to hire when the missus is out shopping, but whatever you do don’t expect her to like you if you make it your Valentines’ movie… (more…)

Our previously cute, happy and lighthearted 8 month old has this week been taken away by the fairies and replaced with a grisly, whining, dribbly little monster as his baby teeth erupt from his gums like that scene in Superman where his fortress emerges from the snow and ice.

Except Kal-El’s fortress of solitude finished emerging in a few seconds, whereas Ben’s incisors seem to move but a millimetre each day, yet the pain seems to last the entire time. The result is our poor little fella is miserable all day, and we feel guilty for giving him calpol in a BA Baracus “I ain’t getting on no plane, fool” stylee.

And this is only the first tooth. Does it get easier or can we expect such bedlam for each and every tooth that appears??

Yes I know I said I wouldn’t mention it again, but I couldn’t resist! I personally didn’t see Jade Goody on GMTv, however I did read Adam Eason’s view of it on his blog. Adam looked at the non-verbal information she was giving off - body language, eye accessing cues and hand gestures, and came to the conclusion that these methods of communication, that most of us are unaware of to some extent, were congruent with the words she spoke. It makes for a very interesting read.

Non-verbal communication fascinates me because people don’t realise just how much information they are giving away if you are prepared to look. Even someone trying not to give anything away is actually telling you something, and all of this information can help you to communicate better with this person, whether it be using a person’s preferred representational systems to improve rapport, or simply trusting your instincts about a person, because your unconscious mind is reading all of these signals all of the time, and drawing its own conclusions for you if you care to take notice.

Anyway back to the subject. You will be pleased to know that Jade didn’t get paid for the interview, although the same probably can’t be said for the OK Magazine photospread that is bound to follow!

So sunday saw Jack Bauer return to Sky One as his 6th worst day ever begins with a vengeance. Showing the first two hours back-to-back, it managed to take the amazing day 5 and beat it within an inch of it’s life, leaving it little more than a bloody mess on the floor.

Given that nearly the entire cast was killed during day 5, we have a whole bunch of new CTU agents and once again, we have no idea who is a mole, who will survive and, more importantly, how we can possibly get through the week with only watching one episode. Usually we watch this on DVD, and mostly in one sleep-deprived week, but this time we will be feeding off scraps that  Sky throw us. However as Sky is only a week or so behind the US, I should be thankful that I don’t have to wait a year for the DVD box set.

And if you STILL haven’t gotten in to 24 then you obviously don’t read my blog enough, come on, sort it out! Incidentally, places like www.play.com are selling all of the previous series at an extra low price to get you hooked… Go on, you know that TV is rubbish at this time of the year!

So I had to watch Big Brother on friday just to see how they dealt with Jade when she was evicted to a wall of silence.

I feel a little sorry for her, because I don’t think that she’s racist, she’s just dim and a bully who would appear to believe her own hype (25th most influencial person in the world? What world would that be Jade?), and who has been villified in the papers to generate a moral panic and sell more copies.

It will certainly be interesting to see how she gets out of this one, when she came out of the house the first time, she was just dim, and us Brits like dim. This time she comes out a bully, and I don’t think that the public be quite so accepting of her in that capacity.

I wonder if the other two girls will get such a hard time? I’m sure that there will be a financial impact on both of them, as companies disassociate themselves in anticipation of a potential backlash. It seems to me from what limited footage I’ve seen, that a pack mentality developed in the alleged bullying, much like that which occured during the  Stanford Prison Experiment, a disastrous but highly enlightening study that predates Big Brother, but resulted in such bullying that it had to be abandoned. Check out my post on the subject here.

And so it began with the incessant beeping of a small alarm clock that had fallen, presumably knocked over during the night, in between the bedside table and the bed. Rooting blindly under the bed wasn’t his preferred way to start the day, however today, on this day, it didn’t matter.

7am. This was the day he’d been waiting for.

Waiting? Dreading? He had always had a problem understanding whether it was excitement or fear he was feeling, but whichever it was, it manifested itself in a warm, but slightly empty sensation in the pit of his stomach, and a tingling in his ears. (more…)

Last night I finally got to sit down and watch Derren Brown’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, a live performance from the Old Vic shown on Channel 4 over Christmas. If you missed it, you can download it from www.channel4.com/4od, money will exchange hands I believe, however it is well worth the cash as it is great to see him performing live.

There is a trick that runs throughout the show, as the audience randomly picks a person from the audience who is given a briefcase to hold on to. The person is then given a small piece of a newspaper torn from 1 of 10 randomly selected newspapers, and then torn randomly by another person. Lots of random as you can guess. From the small piece of paper she picks one word, and Derren stuns the audience by taking from the locked briefcase the exact page from the very same newspaper with that particular word circled on the page from which it was torn. Wow. Except then he goes on to reveal that the trick was pulled off by delivering a series of fairly overt embedded messages through the performance. At various points he directly instructed the audience which paper to pick, which page to select and which word to tear around and keep track of. Of course there are a few bits at the end that he doesn’t reveal, however it is the overtness of the embedded commands that made me smile, in recent times I have been using embedded commands a lot and I can only recall a couple of times where anyone has even said “pardon?”, let alone actually register what I was doing.

And the fact that I am consciously aware of embedded commands and still didn’t pick them up until they were pointed out to me at the end of the show, shows how easy it is to use them and get away with it.

So firstly I thought it would be useful to explain how and why embedded commands work. (more…)

To be honest I was going to ignore all this rubbish but as the bandwagon is filling up so I had better get my piece in. I would just like to point out that I would have to work very hard to care less about this TV show because it is utter garbage. However I do have a point to make and that is Big Brother profiles every contestant and designs the show to cause conflict. Every bad word uttered about the show is playing in to the producers’ hands (after all this is a programme that was looking tired about three years ago).

I say that if this show was a two year old kid, spherical supernanny Jo Frost would send it to the naughty step and have everyone ignore it until it behaves itself.

The fact is these girls causing the problem are intellectually slightly below amoebae, and I wonder why alleged racism is worse than straightforward bullying? My missus points out that Jodie Marsh was bullied last year and no-one cared.

Comment over.

You are going to start thinking that I’m a GMTv fanatic but the truth is I catch about ten minutes before I head off to work. However, once again Paul McKenna is doing his thing on breakfast TV, this time helping people to reduce comfort eating in an effort to get healthier.

Yesterday he dealt with someone who had put on a lot of weight after the death of her daughter. It seemed that she was carrying around with her a vivid image of the moment she found out. The funny thing with images and memories is that the more vivid the memory, the more vividly we will experience the emotions and feelings that were associated with that memory. Effectively she was reliving that moment all of the time, and to be fair, that’s a pretty good reason to be comfort eating.

Paul then proceeded to do a disassociation with her, by making that image smaller in her mind’s eye and draining the colour out of it. This exercise, which is similar to the method used to cure phobias, helps the mind to remove the emotion from a memory. It may be useful to have memories of sad experiences, however it can be damaging and limiting to carry the associated feelings with them. This process was a very emotional experience for her however afterwards she seemed much more centred and at ease with the memory. A useful tool.

He then moved on to talk about another method for preventing comfort eating, by taking the foodstuff in question and making an association with something that you really hate. This is, in fact, the process that we can unconsciously go through to create phobias (although this is a much less extreme version, after all a phobia of chocolate might make a trip to Tescos rather traumatic). Once in place, you will have an aversion to the foodstuff in question. This is very useful if you have a particular weakness for something that is making you miserable. However, bear in mind that usually NLP is all about giving people choice where before they had none. This takes an “attracted to” compulsion and turns it in to a “repelled by” compulsion. It would be better, would it not, to take or leave chocolate, and enjoy it when you have it. However if that isn’t an option you might benefit from using this technique, safe in the knowledge that anything that NLP can do can be reversed just as easily.

So if your New Year resolution is to ease off the empty carbs, head over to http://www.gm.tv/ for some videos by  Dr. McKenna that will help you get in to those lycra running shorts in time for Easter! The other option for you is to see a local NLP practitioner, details of which you can find at http://www.bbnlp.org/. Of course if you are in the Leicester area contact me, which is easy to do now the contact page is finally up!