Beware of the Train

I know I'm very late to the LOL$thing party, but what the hell:

( Cut for size )

Now, I reckon about half of you will recognise the guy in the pictures, and about half will understand the captions. I'm interested to know how large the intersection is...

evath has put some clips from The Matrix: The Pantomime up on Google video. Enjoy!

*watches for a few seconds*

Damn, I really need to work on my stage slaps...

Last night was the first Edinburgh performance of The Matrix: The Pantomime.

We sold out.
(In a good way).

I'm slightly in shock. I've done six Edinburgh shows before, five of them pretty good, and this is the first sold-out performance.

The actual performance was good, though could have been improved in places. My daming was slightly off at the beginning, and there was a confused bit in the middle where Neo and Morpheus managed to interpolate a joke from one scene into an earlier one (but, to their credit, recovered, and didn't repeat any lines - we all noticed, because we're very familiar with the script, but I'm not sure if the audience did). And special notice must go to Keith, playing Cypher, who nailed the part. The audience, however, were absolutely awesome, got all the jokes, had huge enthusiasm, did all the "he's behind you" etc with gusto, and were generally great to perform to.

83 tickets left for tonight. We can do it again. Oh yes.

...when he wakes up one morning and, not unreasonably, says to himself, "I shall never play the Dame".
</uncle_monty>

Fortunately, this will not happen to me, because I have been offered the part of the Oracle in The Matrix: The Pantomime! Not the part I auditioned for, but I'm not complaining. Apparently I impressed them with my comedy Northern stylings. Sorry, saf2285, you're going to have to put up with my travesty of a Yorkshire accent...

[For those among you who aren't familiar with the British pantomime tradition (which is entirely unrelated to, or at least totally unlike, the German tradition), this may provide some enlightenment]

I got back from the high that was the Scottish Juggling Convention to find the following waiting for me:

• A big stack of letters from the library, who had decided to cut out the customary "Your book is due for renewal" stage, and proceed directly to the "Return your book NOW or pay the replacement cost (or £20, whichever is higher), and pay a £5 fine. Per book. For eight books" stage. So, I was looking at at least a £40 fine, with a strong possibility of £200, and possibly more. Damn those six-month library loans. Fortunately, I could still find all the books, and subsequent investigation showed that the reason I hadn't got any warnings was because they'd reset my email address from the one I'd specified to one I never checked. With a combination of outrage, politeness, and having Right on my side, I managed to get let off the lot (plus about 80p of fines that I did actually owe them, but I'm not complaining). Hurrah!
• A lovely email from benparker saying that while Birdshot! showed great promise, and deserved to be finished, Two Shades of Blue would instead be taking The Matrix: The Pantomime to Edinburgh. Which was pretty gutting, but not entirely unexpected: TMTP is a cracking show, it's already finished, and it'll be a lot easier to market than a Dick Barton/film noir spoof. As evidence of this, benparker and r_e_mercia apparently couldn't decide if Birdshot! was a James Bond spoof or a Thirties spoof, even after reading the script. [Hint, guys: it's both, and neither. Try a decade later, and read up on Dick Barton, Special Agent].
  
  This was doubly annoying, as I'd just missed the deadline for STaG's own Fringe submission process. I should really read those STaG emails more thoroughly...

Anyway, I still intend to finish Birdshot! - now I know its fate for certain, I should be able to do some writing on it again :-). I don't suppose OULES/CULES/BULES/ALES would be interested in doing it as a summer show? Camp spoofery, stage fighting, tormented Private Eyes, beautiful dames, deadly deathtraps, and a Plot To Hold The World To Ransom? The cast can be pretty much any size - there's plenty of scope for doubling-up, and we can add as many henchpersons as we like. I've got about 35 minutes written at the moment, and a fair idea of where the rest is going.

Among the many good features of terpsichore1980's New Year party was the first full read-through of (the current draft of) the Forties play, which I think I'm going to call Birdshot! for now. Some interesting things were discovered, and some good ideas were suggested.

• At least some of the jokes are actually funny - this was something of a relief to me.
• Someone (Andy?) suggested having a big blueprint visible during the deathtrap scene, so PV can trace out the progress of his trap. I like this idea.
• The text takes a lot longer to perform than I'd realised. I'd thought (based on the number of words in Paradox) that 1hr =~ 15,000 words, and so I'd written about 20 minutes of script. It took us nearer 35 minutes to get through it all. There was some faffing, and some bits got read more slowly than they would in production, but we didn't have any fight scenes, so it averages out. And it's usually a bad idea to rely too much on the pace being faster in performance.
• The deathtrap/evil scheme scene is pretty long. This could be a Bad Thing, especially since the majority of the characters are tied to chairs for most of it. Shortening the deathtrap description would defeat the main point of the joke, but might be necessary. It would probably be funnier if delivered at great speed, anyway.
• Dancing contemporararararily while tied to a chair can be very funny.
• totherme suggested that all untying, de-gagging, etc, be accomplished by W snapping his fingers and the bonds falling to the floor. This would eliminate a lot of faffing.
• The S scene currently isn't working at all.
• The Cryptonomicon references probably aren't funny enough to compensate for their obscurity.

On a slightly related note, I got the complete DangerMouse on DVD for Christmas, and wormwood_pearl and I have been watching it (it's research for the play, honest). It's so good. Obviously I loved it deeply when it was first shown, but I think I'm loving it even more now - some of the jokes I simply couldn't have understood back then. The sheer crazy, anarchic fun of the show is just brilliant. Where else would you get a villain who'd try to take over the world by turning elephants into sugar cubes, then hiding them in the tea-services of the powerful? Or by stopping the Earth's rotation, causing a sessation in the gravitational force? (Gotta love the total disrespect for the laws of physics). Not even Pinky and the Brain were that daft.

I flashed five balls today, which is to say that I threw five balls up in the air, one after the other, and caught them all before they hit the floor.

It's a lot harder than it sounds :-)

In other news, I gave the second half of my abelian categories seminar today. I'd timed it at 32 minutes in rehearsal, so I was rather annoyed when it took over 40 in the actual seminar. Plus we started late, so I suspect I annoyed a lot of the audience. Then we had another hour by one of the professors on monads and comonads, almost all of which I knew :-(

And while I'm here, a couple of links. First, crazy bare-metal optimised algorithms in Quake 3. The Real Programmers are alive and well, it seems... Secondly, some actual English subtitles from Hong Kong films. I may have to nick some of those for the play :-)

Friday: homological algebra lecture. Think I might be starting to get it now. To QM, to help out with the People and Planet shaving-heads-for-Children-in-Need thing. My role was money-collector and clipper-use consultant. Despite the promised 9pm start, we actually started nearer 11, and finished way way late. Home, sleep.

Saturday: up, panicked last-minute packing, dash to Queen Street (we shouted the name at the taxi driver about four times before he deigned to understand us). Train trip to Cambridge, on which I met a linguistics student, whom I asked about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ("well, it's more sociolinguistics, which isn't really what I do, but..."). It seems the Stockholm anti-SWH bias is not worldwide. Then, a nice walk through Cambridge (apart from the loss of my hat), to the house of Gill, which was filled with joyous people who I hadn't seen in far too long. Don the old soup-and-fish, and then off to Saf's 21st birthday party! At which many many lovely people who I hadn't seen in far too long were present! Hurrah!

I've been trying for the last couple of days to think of a party I've been to that I've enjoyed more than Saf's magical masked ball of joy, and I don't think I can. My own 21st, the Full Moon party I went to in Kho Pha Ngan, Balliol Summer Event in 2000, the Ladpad housecoolings, and the Prior-Jones Penguin Party come close, but none of them exceed it. So: Saf's party was the best party I've been to in a lifetime that has been dedicated largely to hosting^* and attending excellent parties. It rocked. The food and drink were great, there was a ceilidh band (and I actually danced most of the dances, and what's more enjoyed it), there was a FREE BAR, there was a lovely setting, and most of all, the company was excellent. I was surrounded by countess_rezia and antoniabaker (first time I'd seen them since they got together, and they're just as lovely together as I'd suspected), steerpikelet, sebastienne and Sian (sorry, don't know her username) [Edit: and neoanjou, who said nice things about my blog :-)], which was lovely, and before and afterwards I got to talk to or dance with pretty much everyone (apart, alas, from Saf herself, who was in full-on organisy mode, sushi_radical, whom I'd been looking forward to meeting, and half_of_monty, who was much missed). We were kicked out of New Hall at about 2, then we went back to the House of Gill, drank some more beer, had a great conversation with Sian about the Welsh rugby team, and collapsed into bed somewhere between 4 and 6am (that bit's a bit of a blur).

Sunday: Awoke at about 1030, then slowly gathered faculties and had a read-through of some of The Adventures of Stoke Mandeville, Astronaut and Gentlemen, before heading out for a long brunch at Wetherspoon's and the rest of the read-through. Mmmm, brunch. Mmmmm, b33r. Hurrah, people enjoying one of my favourite plays. Then I went to a camping shop with Gill et al, and bought a new hat to replace the lost one. It's made by North Face, who make me a bit suspicious by the aggressiveness of their marketing, but it's a nice hat, and it's RED. Then we went back to the House of Gill, watched some Star Trek, then went over to the House of Light Entertainment for a rehearsal of The Matrix: The Pantomime. I cannot describe just how good that's going to be. Then there was lovely curry, made for us by short1sandwich and r_e_mercia, then home. A largely sleepless night, filled with kittens walking over me.

Monday: Arose at 0645, drank tea until things started to come into focus, said goodbye to Gill (who was poorly - send her sympathy), then packed and walked to the station. Long long train journey back to Glasgow, punctuated by attempts to understand the various definitions of abelian category (each equivalence theorem is easy, but there are so many of them, it's hard to get a sense of the structure). Met at the station by the lovely wormwood_pearl, then back to the department just in time for my flatmate's lecture on André-Quillen homology. My office-mate Martin said that he had some exciting news, but wouldn't tell me until after the lecture. "Oh, are you getting married or something?" [Pause] "Well, that's just taken all the excitement out of it". So the raclette evening that Philipp had planned for that evening served double-duty as an opportunity for us to congratulate him :-)

Blimey, that was a busy (not to say bloody fantastic) weekend. I'm off to do some marking. Or possibly have lunch. Yes, wouldn't do to mark on an empty stomach.

* This may be presumptuous, but parties I host myself do tend to be full of my friends, who are all lovely people, and this is always the most important factor, at least as far as my enjoyment of the evening is concerned. And I think the guests tend to enjoy them...

So, the Edinburgh Fringe is over for another year. Yesterday, wormwood_pearl and I returned to the Weej, to discover a fridge full of curdled milk, a dead chilli plant, and a big stack of unpaid bills. It's good to be home.

Edinburgh was great: our show was blinding and audiences mostly seemed to enjoy it, I saw some great stuff (the sequel to Macbeth in the style of a zombie movie springs to mind), and generally had a good time hanging out with some cool people. As well as seeing old friends, it was great to meet some of the new Light Entertainers, including some that I've heard much about but never met, such as sebastienne, arifirh, fi_h and mi_guida. I was also rather pleased to learn that neoanjou had a LiveJournal. I've added you all to my friends list, guys: hope you don't mind. Thanks also to those who came to see us: weaselspoon, roseofoulesfame, adqam, susannahf, terpsichore1980, totherme and his other half, and half_of_monty and her other half. And all the other people who don't have LiveJournals, of course. It was great to see you all after what's been far too long a gap in most cases.

Looks like I'll have to go now, but first, some links I've been meaning to give out. Everyone should read this book, because it's awesomely good. It's the SF book I was ranting about, with the interstellar wormhole network controlled by a gang of two-bit gangsters from Glasgow. This is the article about a "rape" in one of the earliest online roleplaying games - thoughtful, interesting stuff. And the CIA World Factbook entry on Vatican City should serve as a warning to all who try to fit the world into neat pigeonholes.

For the fourth year running, I will be appearing in Two Shades of Blue's Edinburgh Fringe Show. This year we're doing a serious piece about Man's fundamental loneliness and the emptiness of an uncaring Universe called Paradox: Set Phasers to Pun. The character is apparently 'your typical Manly "oh look it's an alien, I shall have to remove my shirt, have a fist fight with it and then sleep with its surprisingly beautiful wife" brand of starship captain', so I'm not being typecast in any way whatsoever. Oh no.

We'll be in Edinburgh from the 21st - 26th August, and there'll be a production in Cambridge a day or two before that. G'wan, you know you wanna.

Right, if I'm going to be taking my shirt off on-stage, I'd better go and become buff and ripped. Unless they're thinking Captain Kirk in his later years. /me -> gym.