Desipio Message Board

Joost van der Westhuizen, mere weeks after I finally gave up on his ever dying, has spun his last pass.

Funny, because his death was announced hours ago, and I know that more than one Moran has this guy in his list.  It's almost as though his name was just copied off a "most likely to die" list somewhere without really knowing who he was.  I'm sure that's not the case, though.  I expect Pen, CD and Thrill just haven't checked their daily rugby websites yet.

John Hurt, dead at 77.

You all decided to ignore my William Onyeabor thread and NOW A MAN IS DEAD.  I hope you're all happy.

"Spleep?"

Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel, the Spanish waiter in "Fawlty Towers", dead at 86.  *sadface*

This will never not be funny.

Fidel Castro, 90, killed by an exploding cigar, presumably.

I'm off to Miami for the mother and father of all parties.

Well, he's a Nigerian musician.  Anything more than that, though, is speculation.  Nobody knows when he was born (45 or 46 seems to be the consensus), he's never played live, and has almost never been interviewed or even, it seems, seen in public.  He's a High Chief, and owns and operates a flour mill.

He's also a funky, funky son of a bitch, I defy you to listen to this, and sit still.  Chuck Dickens, I'm looking at you - this should be right up your street.

The whole album ("Who is William Onyeabor?") is available here on Spotify.  And it's beautiful.

I enjoyed the shit out of this.  Crowe and Gosling in a cop P.I. farce/buddy/whodunnit movie set in seventies' LA.  The script fairly hums along, there's some fantastic slapstick and loads and loads of little comic payoffs if you're paying attention.  Fucking magic.

Kate Granger died a few weeks ago.  That'll teach her to be a geriatric physician, cancer fundraiser, and all-round really fantastic and admirable person.

On the other hand, ten points for me, so, you know... it was all worthwhile.

This is newly available on Netflix, tracing the history and some of the science of the fastball.  Lots of interviews with Goose Goosage, Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson (who is thoroughly fucking likeable, by the way - as is Brandon Phillips, who I'd always thought was a bit of a twat), Craig Kimbrel, Justin Verlander and so on.  It features way too much Joe F. Morgan, but that aside, it's not too meatball-y and also not too technical - they're content, for example, to let the baseball players explain to you that a fastball "hops", and let the laptop statdweebs explain to you that it doesn't, without making too big a deal out of it.  There's a really interesting - and pretty sad - segment about Steve Dalkowski, and the movie's also narrated by Kevin Costner, which is nice.

Oh, and they answer the question of who threw the fastest fastball ever: Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, Nolan Ryan or Aroldis Chapman.  All in all, a well-made film that I really enjoyed.  Here's the trailer.

Interesting article in today's Grauniad about the "conscience of Chicago", Richard Nickel.

Christy Mathewson's book on pitching is available here as the free book of the day.  It's probably out of copyright anyway but I can't be arsed to check.

Billy Paul, dead at 81 from pancreatic cancer.

Alternative titles:

Am I Dead Enough for You?
Thanks For Not Saving My Life.
The Sound of Philadelphidead.

Will this do?

Martin Crowe, New Zealand international cricketer.  But then, you all knew that.

Points for me (8), Pen (6) and Thrill (11).

It may sound ridiculous, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film and yet, I was still a little disappointed with it.  It's a little over two hours long, but it absolutely flew by and I think they could actually have fleshed it out quite a bit more: two and half hours would have been good.  It's not often a director is too efficient, but this was one of those times.

One of the downsides of the breakneck pace of the whole thing is that there are many, many questions about the lead character that remain unanswered and it's to Emily Blunt's credit that she's a) hot and b) talented enough for it not to bother you too much.  Benicio del Toro benefits from just about the only backstory in the entire piece, and it's no coincidence that he completely steals the show.  Josh Brolin is Josh Brolin, but a little less so, and there are several very nicely played smaller parts, not least the Mexican cop who gets tangled up in the whole thing, and his on-screen wife's tits.  Well, her tits are bigger parts, actually, not smaller, but you know what I mean.

For those of you who like suspense and action (and who doesn't?), there's plenty of both.  The scene when the CIA/Delta/FBI/[spoiler deleted] pile across the border into Juarez and back is edge-of-the-seat stuff and never lets up for a second, and that's only one of several big set pieces in the film.  Don't see it with a full stomach, though: large parts of it are pretty brutal.

All in all, I'd give it about 14 out of 17.  It was just a shame there wasn't more of it.

David Bowie.

Have I ever mentioned how much I fucking love the BBC?

"Detectorists" is a short-season (the sixth and last episode of season two will broadcast this Sunday) sitcom, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook (Gareth from the "The Office"), and starring him and Toby Jones as metal detectorists in sleepy, rural Kent.  It's precisely as exciting as it sounds, but the show is nonetheless beautifully scripted, subtly hilarious and quite the best TV I've seen in fucking ages.  The soundtrack and photography are absolutely gorgeous and the "Simon and Garfunkel" sections (and the dozens of little gags they contain) are good enough for a series all of their own.

I urge you to watch it, unless you're Dubbs, in which case you'll fucking hate it.  And that, really, is the highest praise I can possibly give.

101: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x29hnac
102: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x27sqz3
103: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x285e1a
104: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28qki0
105: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x29hnmr
106: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x29hmzb

Anybody else watching this Pablo Escobar thing?  I don't really think much of the DEA-agent and wife angle, and Boyd Holbrook always looks to me as though there might be something slightly out of whack, chromosomally-speaking, but the rest of it is very good indeed, so far.  It manages to pull off the "being set in a different decade without making a big fucking deal out of it" quite nicely, too.

Although he's almost unrecognisable in the role, Escobar is played by Wagner Moura, and I could watch him all day long.  I've seen him before in the two Brazilian "Elite Squad" cop movies, both of which I really, really enjoyed.  They're also on Netflix, so check them out: brutal and gripping in equal measure.

I've already mentioned the following in these pages:

Green Wing
The Thick of It
The Inbetweeners
The IT Crowd
Still Game

... all of which are well worth watching.  Other older shows that you might want to catch up on include:

Sherlock
The Fast Show (probably the greatest sketch show ever)
Black Books (sitcom)
Father Ted (slightly surreal sitcom about Irish priests)
Peep Show (sitcom)
That Mitchell & Webb Look (sketch show)
The League of Gentlemen (Sitcom?  Sort of.  Not really.  Just dark, dark, DARK.  And weird and twisted.  Really fucking weird and twisted.  And dark.)

Other shit you might want to check out:

Black Mirror (a dark sci-fi/political/thriller/satirical series of short films, written by Charlie Brooker, possibly the funniest cunt on Earth)
Fresh Meat (sitcom, probably more for the young'uns amongst you, although I have watched and enjoyed it)

For those of you who have kids of school age, by the way... if you haven't introduced them to "Horrible Histories", well, you're a bad parent.  There's no other possible explanation.

I'll try and post here occasionally as I see (or remember) stuff worth watching.

BBC Scotland has made six or seven seasons of this sitcom about two old widowers living in a shitty council block in the West end of Glasgow, and two of the middle seasons (for reasons which I don't fully understand) are now available Globally on Netflix.  The episodes have CC subtitles, so you don't have to worry about not understanding what they're saying (this would genuinely be an issue for most of you, I think), and if you can get past the culture shock, you might just enjoy what is one of my very, very favourite TV series ever.  There are some fantastic characters, the humour is pretty black and risqué, and they strike a nice balance between comedy and pathos.

Slak, if MSlak hasn't seen this, you should turn her on to it: I think it might be right up her street.  The rest of you, give it a go: you might just enjoy it.