Rick-Morgan.com

Wednesday was Guy Fawkes Night in the UK, due to Guy Fawkes trying to blow up the house of parliment with gunpowder. Since the for some reason we have ‘penny for the Guy’, where kids make up a dummy to resemble Guy Fawkes, and get passers-by to give them money in order that they can buy fireworks for the big day. It used to be known as ‘bonfire night’, but due to the health and safety  crowd, no one seems to light bonfires any more. I remember as a child, I was about 6 or 7,  my (older) friends and I gather up as much wood as we could find set it up to burn in our local playground. We lit it that night - the flames must have been 30 feet high! I remember feeling the heat on a cold winter’s night, and feeling so proud of myself for helping set it up. Now days a group of kids setting up a bonfire would probably get arrested, but looking back, it help build self esteem, team work , a sense of achievement and the older kids look out for us youngers… You may say someone could have got hurt, but that’s life, you risk being hurt growing up, if oyur lucky its not too bad, so you brush yourself off and move on, and anyway no one did. These days kids are crazy from watching gangsta films. Every kid thinks that’s how life’s meant to be. Its too late to repair society by now because two generations have been living this lifestyle, so they’ve brought up their children in such a bad way that they think its cool to live like gangstas. life isn’t important to these kids, hence all the stabbings in London so far this year. They should be taught that it’s not glamorous to carry a weapon,  to hurt someone else, or to do time. But I digress, the fireworks we amazing, the colours were so beautiful, and if I’m not mistaken there were heart shapes visible, in red of course. How romantic

These days it seems harder and harder to find a decent film to watch whne you want something to distract you from the hum drum between sleeping and working/ It could be that i’m getting older and wiser (definitely older) but Hollywood seems to be churning out shallow unimaginative stories and then trying to buff them up with ‘wow look at this one’ special effects. Recently I’ve found myself drawn to the foreign releases when browsing through the monthly dvd rental I’ve signed up to . I’m not going all art house,but Spanish German and French films seem to put a lot more effort in trying to draw in the viewer and keep them guessing. They don’t have the same budget that Hollywood has, but the more I think about it, it seems this ,ay not be an advantage for reasons mentioned above. Look at Pan’s Labyrinth, not there’s a story. I was terrified throughout that film and left feeling sad at the end. Now that’s what a film could do more often, move you , without the cheap gory horror clips.

Run Lola, Run is a great German film - a guy on the subway loses 100 euros cash he was delivering to his gang boss. He’s got until mid day to get the sum to the drop off, so we watch his girlfriend running around Berlin (I think) desperately trying to get the money together. I was exhausted from just watching! France? Well its got to be Amelie a weird love story - that’s the best I can do to explain that…

Does this post have a point? Yes it does. I’d like people to refer good films to me. If I can watch them I will, and

One thing I like to do in my very rare spare time is play on my Nintendo Wii. The games are great but sometimes you just get too tired to stand up and keep waving your arms around. I know Nintendo wanted to
develop a gaming console that made you burn calories while you played, instead of sitting on the couch
stuffing your face with pizza and coke, but geez, after a hard days slog sometimes thats exactly what i’d like to do. Ok I admit that in the beginning part of the way I justified buying a Wii was that I’d burn calories playing andtherefore not feel so bad about sitting there. The Wii boxing was great for exercise and I found the Wii golf so addictive I often catch myself practising my swing while waiting for a train home from work, and I don’t even play real golf! The bowling is great for socialising with people, it avoids the awkwardness of just two people playing while others sit patiently waiting for their turn,always a conversation killer. Saying that though the Wii Tennis was ok like that. I would like to get a decent size flat screen TV too but with the credit crunch and oncoming global recession I don’t feel to secure in my employment. Maybe at Christmas, yeah right! Thats the thing about video games - they’re not cheap. I tend to trade- in or swap games these days, afterall the only game I haven’t got board of is Guitar Hero, all the other ones hold little attraction once they’ve been completed.

One other good thing I like about the Wii is that it compliments my martial arts training, namely Karate. When I say compliment, what I mean is I think that as your reacting in the game you have to react physically also, to a much higher degree than just pressing buttons on a control pad. So that’s another reason not to feel guilty!