Movie: Catfish

Keeps you on your toes as the story unravels.

 

Catfish, a clever idea and an absorbing story.

Catfish tells the story of photographer Nev Schulman and his relationship with eight year old Abby, a talented artist who sends him paintings of his published photos in the mail.  Things then progress as before long Nev has started up an online relationship with Abby’s attractive older sister, Megan, and the ‘documentary’ then switches its attention to how that develops.

Right from the start Catfish has you asking questions and just as you start to formulate a hypothesis as to how all the pieces and clues fit together, the movie then reveals a new twist which has you changing your theory once again.  It really sucks you in and gets inside your head, and even the day after watching it my thoughts kept returning to this movie.

I won’t go into the plot in any greater depth other than to say Catfish provides a powerful lesson regarding the emotional risks of trusting someone you meet on the internet and especially of forming an ‘electronic’ relationship with them.

Website: Travellerspoint.com

 
A friendly, helpful and active community of travellers make this a great travel site.

Travellerspoint.com is a highly recommended travel website which is equally ideal for a travel beginner planning their first backpacking trip or an experienced traveller.  The website features a number of sections covering almost everything you could want from a travel website including detailed travel guides, travel blogs, a photography section and the section I personally use the most, the forums.

Niagara Falls ... just one of hundreds of travel photos on
the travellerspoint.com website.

These are organised into three categories (general travel forums, destination forums and community forums) with each category then being split into further sub-forums, so pretty much every subject you could want to discuss is covered.  For example the destination category includes a sub-forum for every continent (except Antarctica!) and the general travel category includes sub-forums for such topics as travel companions and travel photography, so it’s all very easy to navigate.

It’s also a very friendly community and new members are made to feel welcome.  I’ve come across other forums where if you deviate even slightly from some of the draconian forum rules you will instantly be hit with a stream of criticism from high-maintenance forum members informing you that you’ve contravened ‘article 4(ii) sub-section 7(a) of the forum regulations’ or whatever.  However, the travellerspoint community has a friendly welcoming vibe to it, and the more experienced forum members will generally try to answer any questions as helpfully as they can.

Music: Proof Of Youth by The Go! Team

Proof Of Youth: Infectiously groovaphonic!

Proof Of Youth by The Go! Team ... infectiously groovaphonic!

I’m the type of person who usually needs to listen to an album at least five times before I can tell if I’m going to like it or not, so it was quite uncharacteristic when I heard a brief snippet of The Wrath Of Marcie on TV one morning and instantly loved it.  It’s the perfect early morning song to grab you by the scruff of the neck and fill you full of enthusiasm for the day.

The rest of The Go! Team's Proof Of Youth album is similar in style and has an early seventies hippie vibe to it, but repackaged for a modern audience.  I don’t know if the following analogy only rings true in my head, but if you took the music from Sesame Street and crossed it with Fatboy Slim then I imagine that you would end up with an album somewhat like this.  Doing It Right, Fake ID and I Never Needed It So Much Right Now in particular fit this analogy of sounding like they’ve been swiped from Sesame Street and given the Fatboy Slim remix treatment.

iPod App: Babbel Swedish by Babbel

Can’t Recommend This Highly Enough.

Match the word with the correct photo.

If Babbel decided to make this a paid app it would still be brilliant value when you consider the amount of content it features.  The fact that it is actually free therefore makes it an absolute must have app for anyone currently learning Swedish or who would like to learn Swedish.  Twenty seven categories of vocabulary, each with a further twelve sub-categories (split between six basic and six advanced sub-categories) means there’s enough content to keep the Swedish student going for quite a considerable length of time.

To add even further to the depth of content, once you have selected your vocabulary category and sub-category, you then have three sections within each sub-category to work through and help you learn.

Section one is ‘Learn And Remember.’  This breaks you in gently and involves basic tasks such as matching a Swedish word to the correct photo or simply identifying the correct first letter of the Swedish translation of a selected word.

TV: Alan Partridge, Welcome To The Places Of My Life

One Of The Funniest Characters On TV...

Alan Partridge, as hilarious as ever.

He’s back, and once again he’s at his brilliant best.  In Welcome To The Places Of My Life, Alan Partridge is as unintentionally hilarious as ever.

 

In the show Alan introduces us to some of the key places in Norfolk and if like me your immediate thought was ‘surely Norfolk doesn’t have enough places of significance to fill an extended special,’ then you’d be right.  Even before the halfway point Alan is introducing us to his local newsagent, but the great thing about Alan is that he can make even the most mundane location or event sound incredibly dramatic.  For example at one point in the show he guides us around Norwich City Hall and reveals with the unmistakably over-the-top sense of drama that is his trademark, “It’s incredible to think so few people know how close this city came to a blanket imposition of night-time parking fees.”

Graphic Novel: I Kill Giants

If you've never read a graphic novel, then I Kill Giants is an excellent place to start.

Despite the title, I Kill Giants has
a modern day setting.

I Kill Giants tells the story of Barbara Thorson, a young girl who talks about killing giants and generally behaves quite weird at school and as a result gets labelled a freak by one of her less than charitable peers in particular.  As the story develops you eventually learn the reason behind Barbara’s strange behaviour and you also can’t help but admire her bravery and courage.

Ken Niimura, the artist on I Kill Giants, has gone for a cool distinctive look rather than outright realism, and I have to admit it took me a few pages to get used to the style of art, but once I did I realised that it fitted with the story very well.  Despite its characterised style, or perhaps because of it, Ken manages to squeeze a massive amount of emotion and personality into some of the frames.

Music: Six Cover Versions Worth Checking Out

In my opinion there’s not much point in covering another artist’s song if you’re just going to reproduce a perfect recreation of the original.  For a cover version to be worthwhile the cover artists should add their own personality to it, so for this selection of cover versions I’ve tried to include covers which do just that.

Tori Amos' version of Smells Like Teen Spirit
can be found on the US version of her Crucify EP.

1) Smells Like Teen Spirit by Tori Amos
(Originally by Nirvana)

The first cover on this list unarguably ticks that box and is Tori Amos’ version of the Nirvana classic Smells Like Teen Spirit.  Although no-one will ever be able to recreate the brilliance of the original, Tori has nevertheless produced her own unique version which is excellent in its own way.  It’s a beautiful rendition but with a touch of bleakness thrown in and as you’d expect from Tori it’s dripping with emotion.  Find it tucked away as one of the bonus tracks on the US version of Tori’s Crucify EP.