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It's still on at the pictures, just about. I saw on another thread Eric Plumrose was off to see it some time ago.

I went to see it myself this afternoon. I'd been looking forward to it, but as it turned out, I'd been looking forward to it rather too much, because it's a very serious and dreary beast, with no lightness to relieve the doom and gloom. As Eric surmized, it was far too CGI for its own or anybody else's good.

What I would have liked to have seen was a bit more gaiety at the begininning, like in the 1940s version which had Angela Lansbury in it, but no: right off the bat we know we're in the realms of moral jeopardy and that very, very quickly messing with the supernatural is going to have very, very bad consequences. After that the film became a study in inevitability, and all suspense was throttled to death.

Did somebody mention 'amber smugglers' ?

I was just reading in The Guardian that, on the international space station, "a first for space was celebrated this week with astronauts drinking water recycled from their urine, sweat and water condensed from exhaled air." Funny thing is, I'd imagined they had been doing it for decades! And all along it was just being mooted as a possibility for future long-range missions where carrying an adequate water supply would be a problem.

Did anyone else not know hitherto that astronauts' wee wasn't recycled as drinking water?

Holy shit! There's been some strong stuff in this title up to now, quite stomach churning; some unbearable pathos. But this issue, I think, goes into new and twisted and horribly awful territory. Previously I've felt the adrenaline thrill of jeopardy and endured blow-by-blow unpleasantness because there was the possibility of escape, rescue or revenge. Flipping through this issue just made me want to look away and close the pages.

Awful, but it's a cunning move. I don't want to say too much about it yet, but I think Robert Kirkman has been really clever here. Perhaps the worst atrocity yet, but at a comparatively very low cost for the title and the protagonists (so far).

10/10

Review it here!

In between bits and pieces of work I've had to do and meals and so on, this has been fascinating me and filling my head all day. I found it more satisfactory than satisfying. If I had to sum up what it is about I'd say the futility of heroes. Nothing the protagonists do in this volume seems to make any difference to the outcome of anything. There are two plots going on here, aren't there? There's the Threepenny Opera goings-on at the East End docks on the one hand, and there's the doings of the cult in King's Cross on the other, neither of which is helped by the actions of the League. I found the climax so strangely anticlimactic for all its carnage that I then seized upon the text pages, Minions of the Moon, Chapter One: Into the Limbus, with an unexpected eagerness. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill obviously enjoyed themselves. I didn't, but I was still enthralled by it and it made my head spin, in a good way. I can honestly say, and without fear of contradiction, this is the most depressing book of LOEG yet. And with good reason given the century they're dealing with here and the source material being handled. Really looking forward to the next volume!

Hello! I'm just back from attending the Saturday only of Bristol Expo. Too tired to tell you any news yet, but I thought I'd start up a thread for news as it comes in.

As expected it was a much quieter affair than previously. I missed the huge walk-round spaces for stalls, and all of the traipsing about outdoors and bumping into people between venues. The 'Gusto' cafe on the corner of the Commonwealth museum was empty when it'd normally be full on an Expo weekend, and the street was empty between Temple Meads station, the Reckless Engineer and the Ramada. I really did miss that. I missed the crowds.

The Small Press Expo was really well organised and had some great small press publishers exhibiting. Geoff Banyard's Fetishman stall is always a highlight for me. At the Ramada the atmosphere was a bit livelier. FutureQuake had one of the most colourful stalls in the small press room there next to Paul Grist (Jack Staff) and Violent and The Girly Comic. The strong colours of FutureQuake's output really shout 'Comics!' at you.

I got my League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1910 signed by Kevin O'Neill in the big exhibitors and dealers room where Rebellion had a huge and impressive stall with tons of their Case Files reprint books front and centre, and met up with a whole bunch of familiar fan and droid faces in the bar, who were all lovely as usual.

[Life's sometimes sort of okay because]

Life doesn't always 'spug' (old word, new meaning there) and it's not always drokking fantastic, so I thought I'd start a new thread for anyone who wants to share stuff that's just sort of okay and makes life more agreeable without making you whoop for joy.

I'll start with:

Life's sometimes sort of okay because I watched Clerks II last night and I enjoyed it and didn't feel let down by it at all.

Those of you who have kids, do you ever wonder/worry exactly what they're being taught in school?

I recently started privately tutoring a girl just starting her GCSEs. She comes to me for English tuition, and she has been studying Macbeth at school. I went through a 10-page essay she had written on Lady Macbeth, from which I learned that Lady Macbeth is "mental" and "a bitch".

Lady Macbeth, you mad, mental bitch!!

I thought her essay was a bit too long. My own English Lit class is expected to produce essays of three to five sides A4, in common with the examples circulated by the exam board ahead of coursework standardization meetings. When I asked the girl about her essay, she told me her teacher had specified the page count and another girl in her class had submitted an essay 14 pages long. It transpires it was her teacher who told her Lady Macbeth is being a bitch. Now, the typical reading of Lady Macbeth is that her ruthless ambition drives her to encourage her weak-willed husband to murder the king and everyone else who stands in their way. To drive this message home, my tutee's teacher invented an acronym: B.I.T.C.H. which stands for 'Being In Total Control of Him' (!). Is this helpful? My view is not. It's is enough to know that Lady Macbeth is the big villain of the piece and she puts her husband up to all the terrible things he does. Are students likely to forget that without a rather tenuous acronym? It reminds me of the bit in Green Wing where Guille teaches Martin a mnemonic to remember the bones of the head, and Martin ends up having to list the bones in order to recall the mnemonic.

I am aghast that here we have an English teacher, working in a school environment, where bullying is a major political issue and name-calling and stereotyping aren't particularly helpful, who is introducing her students to a sexist discourse. If you're teaching English and don't recognize a discourse when you see it, you're really not earning your £30,000 a year. On a final point, I asked the girl where she'd got that Lady Macbeth was 'mental'. Apparently, it's what her teacher had told the class. I did a double take. Yes, the girl said, laughing, the teacher had actually said "Lady Macbeth is mental". When I was at school, if I had written Lady Macbeth was mental, my teacher would've crossed out 'mental' and written 'insane'. Mental is not a literary term; it's street slang. And my tutee's school teacher is promoting it to her class as appropriate terminology to present to examiners and coursework moderators.

No wonder people think journalists are lazy scum! Here's a headline from today's MSN news.

"Woolies pic'n'mix fetches £14,500"

http://news.uk.msn.com/odd-news/article ... d=14461721

From this article, which states that the 'last' bag of Woolworth's pic'n'mix fetched £14,500 in an eBay auction, you might imagine the last bag of pick'n'mix was actually worth something. But hang on - that's only half the story, and it's made the more interesting half by removing anything resembling context. What the article fails to mention is that this was a charity auction for a retail workers' benevolent fund, and as such the winning auction bid is more a charitable donation than an investment.

I admire journalists who believe their job is to inform the public, but far too many of them think their job is just to go "blah blah blah - it's a funny old world, innit?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_west/7790280.stm

[So...]

Disturbing development here. For some time now there's been controversy about UK retailers (and distributors) profiteering from the exchange rate, adding a bit extra onto the price they charge for US comics in the UK, over and above the extra shipping costs incurred. So much so that it is sometimes possible to find a cheaper retailer selling the same comics for up to 15p cheaper.

At the moment we have a weak pound, so it's only to be expected that we're going to see a price hike in the £ cost for $ comics, as the pound is inevitably going to buy you less in the was of $ priced goods these days.

However, it's a bit much when a retail chain puts the price of a $2.99 book up to £2.45 and a $3.50 book up to £2.99 in the same week. It shouldn't take a maths genius to work out that the $3.50 book has gone up by more. I'm thinking about taking my business elsewhere.

So... how much does your retailer charge for a $2.99 book and a $3.50 book, respectively?

I've just read this on MSN....

"Peter Kay has been voted the UK's best comedian - while Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand are among the least popular."

Hmm. Is it because Peter Kay is loveable and unpretentious, and almost totally lacking edge?

Almost two-thirds (63%) of people questioned believe that the Bolton comic (Peter Kay) provides the most laughs.

Meanwhile, Ross and Brand - who came under fire during the recent Andrew Sachs prank calls row - came second and eighth respectively on the list of the worst comedians.

The nation's second favourite comic was slapstick comedy actor Lee Evans with almost one in five (19%) of the vote.

Oh, Jesus F. Christ! I've never understood his enormous popularity. I like him as an actor, but I just don't find him funny. I don't want to sound stuck up or anything, but most people I know who find him funny left school with no GCSEs and carry stuff for a living. If you carry stuff for a living, please don't take offence. I know some people who carry stuff are actually quite clever, but, you know...

"Star of The Sunday Night Project, Alan Carr, gained third place with one in eight respondents (12%) enjoying anecdotes."

Oh  no, what, really? Him? Why??? Being self-deprecating and deprecating everybody else at the same time while masquerading as Olive from On the Buses shouldn't be funny in 2008. It's crap. And anecdotes? I've never heard him tell one!

A survey of 3,000 adults was conducted for the Co-operative Bank's internet bank http://www.smile.co.uk during November.

Just noticed how many message boarders are celebrating their 9th birthday today. That really is quite a lot! And what a bunch of unlikely names too. What's going on here??? Are they all Cybermen or something?

Hello, and welcome to the message board!

Allow me to correct your grammar in time-honoured fashion.  :ugeek:

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm just about clinging on by my fingertips, here.

How the credit crunch has affected me directly is 'not really all that much' - essentially what has happened is my mortgage has gone up by £40 a week. That's not the worst of my financial problems by a long chalk.

What's worse is my employment situation generally, and the poor return I've had for approximately 20 years spent in professional development - trying to get into a profession through education - rather than in actual work (in my experience, opportunities for advancement by 'actual work' in my field tend to go to middle class graduates who have contacts or else went to Oxbridge). During that time I've spent a few years on benefit, a couple of years in retail on minimum wage, a year working nights in a homeless hostel because my choices were extremely limited. I've done a bit of university tutoring, three and a half years actually working in a very dismal side alley of my chosen profession, and a year retraining for a fall-back prodession (adult education) in case there was no way back into teaching higher ed. - an already crowded field.

Having optimistically put together a curriculum of 8 classes a week I can teach, with the encouragement of my employer, I find my livelihood potentially going up in smoke as half my classes are threatened with cancellation due to low take-up of the courses my employer is offering. You'll notice here that all the risk lies with the tutor: I only get paid to deliver as many courses as student numbers will allow to run at 66% capacity. Any courses that fail to enroll the requisite number of students get cancelled and I don't get paid, regardless of the fact that all the courses have enough students to make teaching possible and the fact that my wages couldn't exceed £12,000 a year if all of them ran. So they're preparing to cancel up to half my hours, leaving me with earnings from my main job of less than £6,000. No wonder I'm agreeing to any offers of work I get from employment agencies.

You'd think, wouldn't you, that £12,000 a year would be quite cheap to pay someone to teach 70 students in 8 classes? That's a tutoring cost of about £171 per student, set against grant income of more than £80,000. But according to the funding formula, 70 students spread so thinly is not financially viable. My classes are not allowed to cross-subsidize. It would be more cost-effective to have an empty classroom than to pay me to teach a class of 6 students in a room large enough for 12. I am not convince that the figures make sense, nor that the hidden costs (my pension, liability insurance, having the lights on) amount to as much as £68,000. As much as my loss of earnings, I'm angry at the personal cost to the students of having their classes scrapped, when some of them have a lot of hopes pinned on just gaining a handful of GCSEs, and I'm angry at the impression given that a public body running adult education seems to hold education in such low esteem that it will put accounting ahead of the social and educational value of allowing a course to go ahead at less than 2/3 capacity.

So, having put 20 years' worth of effort into the professional development that allows me to teach 3 different subjects at GCSE level and a few related topics only to find myself prevented from doing so and faced with annual earnings of about £117 a week, with intense competition for jobs in the current circumstances, what should I do?

I am on the lookout for more lucrative employment, which might involve turning my back on both education and service to my community. But what is there to prevent me from turning to crime if that doesn't work out? I hear crime can be very lucrative. Have I made a mistake in playing it safe all my life?

What do you reckon, and just how bad is business at your end?

Hmm. This is a tough and possibly hopeless query. Can anyone help?

I want to be able to remember the title - and anything else at all about - a drama series that used to be on after The World At War on Sunday afternoons! I can remember some details of the opening titles. There was a military checkpoint - possibly a border crossing, either during WWII or some time after. I'm fairly confident a car drove through the checkpoint without stopping. The checkpoint guards - possibly German soldiers in WWII uniform, or possibly Soviet soldiers stationed in East Berlin - may have opened fire on the car; and I'm fairly certain the car crashed as a result and turned over on its roof. Maybe it exploded into flame as well.

In the drama itself the action moves to the present day (the mid-1970s). I think it was set in Germany. It may even have been a foreign import rather than a British-made programme, but I can't be certain at 30 years' distance. I have a feeling the thriller concerned the efforts of a man in his twenties to find out about his real parents (who may have been spies and not merely fugitives, and who I suspect were killed in the car attempting to cross an international border).

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

I know a few members of this message board read The Walking Dead, and I was just wondering what the rest of you make of it all.

Do you think Robert Kirkman has let a few too many of his characters slip off this mortal coil without developing them properly first?

I'm proposing that anyone contributing to this thread should presume that anyone reading it has already read issue #48 at least. It does say "SPOILERS!!" in the title after all.

Is this how you use the spoiler tags?

Did anyone see this last night?

Guh! Absolutely incredible. It did make me wonder though who was paying for the guy's treatment, which began with 4 months in hospital to lose 12 stone prior to surgery. Anyone got any ideas on that?

I'm in the last few weeks of my teacher training course, so never before has the debate about 'dumbing down' education been so close to home!

In the course of my teaching practice I've come in for criticism for not giving my students something called a 'task sheet' for every assignment I set them, having not encountered one before in 11 years of university study and 3 years of university teaching; and my teachers and mentors have had an uphill struggle trying to make me identify 'learning objectives' and 'learning outcomes' for every class I teach; again something we managed perfectly well without when I did my A-levels and when I studied at 3 different universities. It was only when I started my teacher training that I first encountered a 'learning outcome'.

From my own (recent) experience this means that the students don't see the relevance of anything I tell them that isn't directly related to a specified 'learning outcome' (of which you are supposed to have no more than three per lesson, and they are inclined to ask which bits of the lesson are important for them to learn. Which logically presupposes that I'm filling my lessons with information that, whilst interesting, isn't important for them to know, in which case why bother? I might just as well summarise the lesson in three sentences and let them all have the next two hours off!

What I need to know is:
- did any of you encounter lesson aims and learning outcomes in your A-level or degree study?
- did you get a Task Sheet for your university assignments outlining what you had to do and what criteria you had to satisfy, or did you just get essay questions, word limits and reading lists like I did?
- do any of you have kids who are at school who get given Task Sheets to go with their homework, or does their teacher just tell them what to do and then mark it?
- if you have kids at school, does their teacher identify the 'learning outcomes' for them for every lesson they get taught, so they know which bits of the lesson to instantly forget because they're unimportant?

Following links from one blog to the next in the Garfield Without Garfield thread, I came across this cute cartoon that really made me laugh. Complete with bad spelling and intenet memes, these cartoons are made for teh www.

Link: http://apelad.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">laugh-out-loud cats (lol)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c381/HouseofUsher1/dalekcatz.jpg">

[Superhero Dating]

Here's YOUR chance to be Vicky Vale or Vesper Fairchild...

Go to the Superhero Dating website and select the preferences you think are most likely to make Batman your romantic match.

The first one to get matched with Batman and post their percentage match and the choices that got them there wins an inexpensive Batman-related prize (I'll post it to you, bring it to Comics Expo in Bristol, or paste it on this thread in lieu of *actually* giving a prize). Please note: no actual date is offered, although if you twist my arm I might put on the cowl and buy you a panini. You supply the cowl, though.

You can post your choices in terms of numbering them 1-5 from left to right, i.e. Not at all =1, Hellz ya! =5.

I'm not expecting this competition to last long, as my girlfriend tells me it's quite easy to suss Batman out. Now it's over to you...

Link: http://www.comicvine.com/dating/&g=1" target="_blank">Superhero Dating