Reading etc.

Push

Oh dear, come on lads, you can do better than that.  Not recommended.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I liked this. If you like science fiction (surely my sister and I can’t be the only women who do), you will like this.

In the Loop

Very funny. West Wing meets BBC thingy. Full of clever one liners and a cast of thousands; all of them very good.

Syecdoche

I quite enjoyed this. It was a bit long but very clever. Honesty compels me to add that my husband thought that it was utter rubbish as did my friend L who commented that the experience was made worse by pretentious idiots pointing out that it was very clever.

Ice Age 3D

I took the children and the childminder along to see this. They all enjoyed it (seriously beginning to wonder whether F is really 25). I found it a bit dull myself but I had the unalloyed pleasure of taking each of the children on a toilet break during the screening. Daniel was first. He announced “I want to do a wee” and then had to be dragged away from the screen. He had a touch of diarrhoea and when I took him to the bathroom he had done a poo in his underpants. I stripped them off and cleaned him up with toilet paper and water and put on his trousers with no underpants. I then washed the underpants. I tossed out some cinema sweets from their bag and put the underpants in the sweet bag and popped it back into my handbag. There was a time when I might have jettisoned the underpants but there’s a recession on, you know. Michael was next. Due to some poor planning on my part, he had been in the pouring rain with F for some time before the film started. This necessitated a quick dash into Penny’s for new trousers and socks (€4 for the trousers, €2 for 6 pairs of socks – fear child labour – extraordinary contrast with the cinema trip which cost €40 in tickets and €15 (!) in popcorn and ill-fated sweets). He too was anxious to get to the toilet but equally anxious not to miss a minute of screen time: a love divided which led to damp trousers. I noted gloomily in the bathroom that the trousers were wet before we had got all the labels off – surely some kind of record. The Princess’s bathroom trip was only remarkable in that no sooner had she left the auditorium than she hauled out her book (Daisy) and started reading it as she walked. Today at work, I found the sweets which had been tossed into the base of my bag to make room for the pooey underpants. They were a bit fuzzy and I had a mild worry about poo contamination but, reader, I ate them.

The Hangover

I appreciate that I am not the target audience of this film about three men on a stag night in Las Vegas (what can I say, everything else was full) but I did find it anti-woman. The female parts were small but they were: uptight bride to be; harridan girlfriend and hooker. Funny in parts all the same.

Martine features in an iconic series of French children’s books. Sometimes she gets to hang out with Jean-lou and Sophie. The pictures in the books are very recognisable.

The other day, in the parents-in-law’s house, I saw Martine or possibly some of her friends lurking at the bottom of a pile of children’s books. This was unsurprising as their house is filled with classic French children’s books which belonged to my husband and his siblings when they were little. What I expected to see was something like this:

What I actually saw was:

I’m hoping that someone else out there will find this as odd as I do. My mother-in-law used also pick up a lot of books for her children from the Irish language publishers “An Gúm”. Apparently the Irish rights for translating foreign language publications were cheap. I still find it hard to believe that anyone was convinced that the scene below was typical of an Irish beach in summer:

If you want more Martine and friends in Irish, you need only say the word but I fear it may be a minority interest.

My sister-in-law, the publishing exec, has a new blog. Who knows how long she will be able to keep it up, if someone doesn’t go over there and have a look. This is a woman who put all her clothes in her mother’s washing machine in Dublin before her planned return to London that evening. It was only after the wash cycle was complete that her mother discovered that the new washing machine did not have a dryer incorporated. About the same time my sister-in-law realised she had lost her keys. She dolefully packed up a bag of wet clothes and travelled to London to cast herself at the mercy of strangers until she could get copies of her keys. Blogging gold, I think you’ll agree. I have high hopes for her blog.

A friend’s daughter has recently moved to Africa to work in a Commission delegation there. I am really enjoying her account of being a junior cog in a distant outpost.

Our friend, the Professor of Hard Law has just had her second volume on hard law published by Oxford University Press. This is exactly the kind of publication that I associate with OUP. On its website it says: “Oxford University Press is perhaps the most diverse publisher of its type. It publishes in many countries in a variety of different languages, for all levels, and across virtually the whole range of academic disciplines. The main criteria in evaluating a new title are its quality and the contribution it makes to the furtherance of scholarship and education.”

This is why I am always mildly surprised to see that “Winnie the Witch” is one of their bestsellers. Aside from the fact that all of the titles of the books on Winnie’s shelves are in Greek characters (academic joke for men who studied Greek in school – my experience is that this option is even more unlikely to be offered in girls’ schools), these are definitely aimed at the under sixes and I’m not quite sure how they contribute to the furtherance of scholarship and education. Nevertheless, Winnie is a big favourite in the Waffle household and we are familiar with Winnie in French, under which guise we first met her as “Pélagie la sorcière” and in Irish as “Cití Cailleach“. As far as I am aware, the sales and translation rates for the OUP’s more traditional output can in no way match Winnie’s success. Odd but heartening for OUP, I am sure.

Thoughts on the usefulness of examinations from the ever estimable Lucy Kellaway.