Join a Flashmob

The flashmob was part of the Size of Wales project, which aims to raise money to protect an area of rainforest the size of Wales. The concept is a bit of an ironic take on the way, whenever people talk about rainforest destruction, they often make reference to "an area of rainforest the size of Wales" being destroyed. Nice to know we've given the world a unit of measurement.

So, on Sunday morning I toddled along to Torchwood HQ. At first, not much appeared to be happening...

...and then this bunch of people appeared.

The guy in the middle with the microphone was some minor celebrity I've never heard of Dan Mitchell from ITV's Show Me the Funny.

There then followed a couple of hours of running around with lumps of chipboard painted as leaves while being filmed for a promo video. I didn't get any photos of this happening, but I'll post a link to the video when it appears on the Intercyberwebs.

Meanwhile, the postcrossing task continues to pay out returns. Today I got a postcard from Japan.

Arigato Yuuyu!

Complete a course on iTunes U

If you haven't come across iTunes U, it's a resource of free university courses distributed through iTunes. Naturally I wanted to learn something that would enrich me spiritually and come in useful in my daily life, so I picked the course Zombies! The Living Dead in Literature from the University of Alabama.

Okay, before you all start laughing, don't tell you lot haven't already got your survival plan worked out for the Zombie Apocalypse. I reckon I could do a good job of fortifying my flat - plenty of sturdy fire doors between me and the shuffling masses, and I live on the first floor, so the neighbours downstairs will get munched first. Also I could use the terraced roofs as an escape route if my perimeters got breached.

On a more serious note, the course was actually pretty good, and covered such issues as race, consumerism and religion through the medium of zombies. I certainly never thought I'd have Freud's concept of the Uncanny explained to me in a lecture entitled, "She's not your mother any more."

This has been one of my favourite tasks so far. I think I may have to spend some more time on iTunes U.

Postcrossing: The Revenge

Success on the Postcrossing task! I got one back from the Netherlands.

According to the sender, she picked a postcard with a drumkit because I live in "the land of the Beatles". True, but I do also come from the land of Shed Seven, so we can't have it all our own way.

Bake Bread

I hadn't quite planned to do this task straight away. But my electricity company got me to do it.

Well, sort of. I was on the phone, sorting out my electricity bill, and Helpful Call Centre Lady pointed out to me that a couple of years ago I'd signed up to some thingy where I collect Argos points as I'm paying my bill. Since I'd then promptly forgotten all about it, the account had accumulated over 60 quid's worth of points.

So, what to spend those points on? I scanned the task list, my eyes settled on number 11...Get a breadmaker!

One trip to Argos later, and this here thingummy appeared in my kitchen.

Yeah, I know, it's probably cheating. When I said "bake bread" you were all probably expecting me to hand-grind the grain into flour, then construct my own wood-fired oven with which to bake the bread. Not go out and get something that looks like what would result if Delia Smith started building robots to take over the earth. Come to think of it, I may have had a dream about that happening.

But the truth is that this thing is just so much fun! You just pour in the ingredients...

...press a button, wait a couple of hours, and then out pops a loaf. There's even a point where it beeps at you to let you know that if you want to chuck anything extra into the breads (raisins, oats, whatever) that you should do it now.

On my third attempt, I decided to add some grated cheese when it beeped. The end result was this:

It looks a little spongey, but it tasted good.

The manual comes with all sorts of recipes for making raisin bread, or coffee bread, but they're mostly just variations on, "When you hear the beeps, chuck stuff in."

There could be endless possibilities here...

Vindaloo bread

Toothpaste bread

Monster Munch bread

Das Boot - The Tommies' Viewpoint

After completing the Das Boot task I found myself having mental images of the end sequence from the viewpoint of the RAF.

Cut for spoilers.

Watch Das Boot in a single sitting

This challenge was given to me by my friend Juliette, who is a big fan of the 1981 movie/mini-series (depending on which version you're watching) about a German U-Boat in World War Two. The uncut version is a whopping four-and-a-half hours long, so I've spent much of my Sunday sat in my jim-jams watching this epic.

One thing that struck is not only how well-made it is - the directing, the acting and the set design are all excellent. It also occurred to me that all this makes you completely forget just how cliched a lot of it is. Take a look at the characters. You've got a captain who hates the Nazis, and a first officer who's a fervent Nazi. There's the veteran who's close to cracking, another officer who's just completely devil-may-care. And of course, there's somebody who pines for his sweetheart back home (a war movie staple that generally screams, "I am so not getting back alive.") Oh, and the foil for all this is a naive war reporter.

A lot of the scenes are also straight from what you'd expect in a war movie set on a sub. There's a scene where the captain insists on taking the boat well below crush depth. And while they're down there, naturally there's somebody who goes mad and demands to be let out. There's a scene when they're forced to see first-hand the people they're killing rather than just hearing the explosions. And of course, there's the obligatory war-is-futile ending.

If it wasn't so well-crafted, all of this would stick out like a sore thumb. The fact that it doesn't is a tribute to the director, cast and set designers.

Go to an art exhibition

This is a spoof of contemporary art, from the TV comedy series Nathan Barley.

Such a scurrilous portrayal is of course a deeply unfair caricature of the art world.  For example, here's how Cardiff art studios tactileBosch (you can tell they're cutting-edge and avant-garde because the first word is in lower case and the second in upper case) describe their 'Moist' series of exhibitions.

MOIST is…descriptive / disturbing / visceral / erotically charged…and very DAMP. Whether ab-jective or subjective / in situ or without / it is wetness personified, a reaction to environment. MOIST is about location, not necessarily site specific but site responsive. A damp basement dripping with moisture, mould fornicating on a clammy wall. Its an environment that might make you shriek out loud or run screaming from the room… slime dripping from your fingertips…it could be sexually gratifying, an orgasmic response to a word or situation or a quagmire of mortal intrigue.

See? That's what the real deal looks like. Much more sensible.

I went to see the Moist, sorry, I meant MOIST, exhibition in a corner of a hipster fashion store.

Hmmm, I'm not sure what's particularly MOIST about it. I'm not saying it's bad art; I'm just not getting any particular vibes of dampness. If I were cynical, I might suggest that they'd asked for work on the theme of MOIST, and the various artists had just sent them whatever they'd been working on at the time.

I thought somebody had left some pieces of bric-a-brac on the floor. Then I realised it was one of the art exhibits.

Well, it's a good thing they added a bit of paper. If it had been just a teacup and a crowbar then that would have looked rubbish.

There seems to be a thing at the moment for sticking art into unused shopping space. On the way back I popped into the Literature Lounge in the St Davids 2 shopping centre, where they're planning a month of recitals and workshops in a slot where a coffee bar had gone bust. I chatted to a nice lady from Literature Wales who invited me to come back the next day for a book-swapping event.

I suppose the whole art-in-empty-shops thing makes a good amount of sense in the depths of the recession. We've got lots of bankrupted shops lying about looking tatty. We've got plenty of starving artists and writers who want to show their wares and will perform for a mouthful of thin gruel. Two problems solved at once.

Maybe this is what the Big Society is supposed to look like?