A great-grandmother and great-grandson.

My Nanna Margherita holds my nephew Marco. She remarks at what a big boy he is! She tells him that he'll be a policeman when he's big and that he'll go around clobbering everyone.

"You'll go round clobbering everybody. That's what you'll be doing. Clobbering everybody", she says to him.

I can't figure out which one of them I find cutest.

Some nice quotes relating to weasels.

Hello. Lately I've been looking around for some quotes involving weasels. Here are some I've found:

"I have come up with a plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel."- Blackadder (in Blackadder the Third)

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines." - John Benfield ( a very wise man.)

"Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what seperates us from the animals... except the weasel." - Matt Groening

"Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether." - Hunter S. Thompson (from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

As awesome as those quotes are, here's something more awesome:

What it means to be a fan of the Beatles.

Annie - The Movie

This is about the 1982 film. For any other Annie things, sod off.

Man, me and my friend Elizabeth were reminiscing about how we used to watch Annie all the time when we were both little. So, a couple of days later, we got together and watched it. It was the first time either of us had watched it in about 15-20 years and we were both freaking out a bit beforehand. When you have such great memories about a movie from your childhood, sometimes it's not a good idea to watch it as an adult. Like, often (as was the case for me with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie), you realise that it's just not that good a film and you feel like you've ruined the idealised memory you had of it. But Annie was just how I remembered it. Awesome.

I think I had a grin on my face through the whole film. Seriously, let me tell you about how I loved the characters:

Little orphan, Annie is really cute. I never realised this when I was little because I guess I was younger than Annie the last time I watched the film. I never realised how optimistic and positive and happy she was. Her best qualities are: a) her smile, b) her singing voice, and c) her ability to beat the living shit out of a gang of boys.

Miss Hannigan, who runs the orphanage and who is perpetually drunk (she brews her own gin in her bathtub), is even more entertaining now that I have experienced being drunk myself. I believe she would be an absolute riot to have as a guest at a wedding reception.

Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks (billionaire) shouts when he talks - like a deaf grandfather type guy, (except me and Liz reckon he's about 50 so he's still got a lot of energy and enthusiasm). He's the ultimate capitalism success story and hates liberals and commies. He owns an Autocopter and he's pretty good mates with the President. The character of Daddy Warbucks really went over my head as a child.

The music in the film is nothing short of genius. My favourites include: Maybe (which makes me well up a bit), Little Girls (sung by an inebriated Miss Hannigan), the heart-warming Dumb Dog/Sandy sequence, and, of course Lets Go To The Movies which is such a bloated epic that it can only exist in a broadway musical setting.

Topping it all though is It's a Hard-Knock Life, OMG what a freakin' sweet sequence. Not only is it the type of song that you can happily have on repeat in your head at work, but the choreography on display in the scene where the girls are singing it, while simultaneously doing advanced acrobatics and cleaning up the orphanage, blew my adult mind.

Other choreography of note is the scene I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here number, where Annie is overwhelmed after arriving at the Warbucks Mansion and finding that the entire staff are really bloody good at singing and dancing.

I don't know whether it'd be quite the same to watch Annie as an adult without having seen it as a kid, but I'd still recommend it. But to all those of you who haven't seen it since being a wee thing (Joanne, I'm looking in your direction), DO IT!

How to grow a Snow Man.

Growing a snowman is easy! It's good when you have no real friends and need some company. To be perfectly honest, a Snow Man provides little company, but it's better than being Nigel No-mates. Anyway, here's how you do it:

1. Choose a patch of ground where there are not likely to be any people or animals to interrupt the process. I chose my disgusting backyard. IMPORTANT: There needs to be a red bucket near the site otherwise this will not work!
2. Every night, before your bed time, repeat the following rhyme that I just made up:

Silly Billy, Peter Pan,
Jack be nimble, ripped and tanned.
I've got no friends to eat my flan,
Beam me down a real Snow Man!,
or Snow Woman.

Then, the next morning, you go outside into the shitty backyard and this is starting to happen:

3. Make sure you keep repeating the spell every night, otherwise all you'll end up with is a snow Foetus - (not half as fun, and a little creepy).
4. At this point, the Snow Being has reached adolescence. Soon, it will begin frothing out snowy spunk, not unlike human adolescence. One of these particles of spunk will develop into the head of the snowman. In fact, there is evidence of the seed of the head to the right of the photo.
5. Here's what I was describing in point four. I stress, keep saying the spell. You don't want the Snow Foetus to be stuck in adolescence forever.
6. The head is now attached to the body. This is one of the most special parts of the whole Snow Man creation. If you get a chance to witness this moment, bring popcorn.
7. Another violent discharge marks the point when the Snow Man is about to be born.
8. Finally, on day 8, the arms now erect, there is one more violent eruption, and the Snow Man springs to life!

It's easy. Now have a go yourself.

Museums, museums, and, astoundingly, more museums.

London likes it's museums. Big museums. And so do I cos I'm a nerd! So over the past few days I've been fortunate enough to have some time to start checking them out. And I say "start checking them out" cos I've only really looked at bits and pieces of the museums pictured below.

Rant alert, rant alert:
God, seriously, there are soooooooo many people at these museums who walk around with their digital video cameras and just seriously take footage of everything in the whole damn building. It's as if they're scoping he place out for a raid or something. But not me. I think the whole fun of going to a muesum is that you are actually there and you can see a ridiculously huge dinosaur skeleton right in front of you! As if it's gonna look as cool on your TV screen. To these people I say "Why not just hire Jurassic Park on DVD and be done with it?! You'd obviously enjoy it!" However, I did take a few photos of stuff that just made me go: "wowzer!". And I can justify each one - and I will. End of rant.

This is the ceiling of the middle area of the British Museum.

I thought I'd had enough for the day at the Science Museum when I entered a room with this thing in it. And I thought, hey, that looks like a really big version of the model of a NASA Apollo Command Module that my Dad used to show me when I was small. Turns out, it wasn't just a big version of that model, it was the actual Command Module from the Apollo 10 mission around the moon.

It was even all melty on the bottom from entering back into Earth's atmosphere!

The Natural History Museum was really big. See? It has to be big to fit all the cool stuff inside.

On the day I went to the Natural History Museum there was an Ice Sculpting Festival on outside.

This doesn't have anything to do with museums but I laughted to myself when I saw it. I have a soft spot for silly graffiti.

Greenwich - Not actually a green sandwich.

I went out to visit my friend Toby in Greenwich a few days ago and he offered to show me the local sights. Of course, I only had one thing on my mind - I'm in Greenwich, show me the Greenwich Mean Time related sight! Damn tourist.

So we wandered over to Greenwich Park (yes, there were squirrels), and up Greenwich Hill (I assume it's called that), to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (Greenwich sounds quite self-obsessed at this point). This is where old white men with glasses concocted the idea of GMT a couple of hundred years ago I guess. It's also where the longitude is 0 degrees. The "Prime Meridian", it's called. So on one side of that line of longitude is the Eastern Hemisphere, and on the other is the Western Hemisphere. And the touristy part?

THEY HAVE THE LINE DRAWN ON THE GROUND! AND A LASER TO SHOW THE LINE TOO! hehe The perfect nerd-trap. See my sweet photos.

Toby and Myself. The view is out over Greenwich Park, looking towards the Canary Wharf business district (those tall buildings).

The Laser. To the left of the photo is the Eastern Hem. To the right of the photo, the Western.

This is how one ought to conduct one's self when in two hemispheres simultaneously. I considered pulling out the old Simpsons gag of "Now I'm in the West, now I'm in the East, now I'm in the West..." etc, but, in Greenwich, I don't think they tolerate that kind of crap.

This is Canary Wharf as it started to get dark. Look closely... can you see the green laser beam going across the photo?