Shortlist?

It has been a incident-packed month or since I last posted on here, here's the abridged version -

- Friend Dave takes a sozzled tumble and managed to smash his own head in to the extent of requiring almost immediate brain surgery and widespread panic amongst family and friends. Fine now, Facebook image of his 40+ stapled head can be found readily online, but the whole thing was scary for all involved.

Give them your cash you slags

- Nana Burr, stepmother of Father Fisher, dies after a long struggle with leukemia. Funeral attended, I nearly break right at the end but cover well by closely inspecting random nearby tombstones to hide wobbly lip. The phrase "see you at the next one" is banded about by the elders to many chuckle but also actually quite true. Also definately have the vibe that my parents have now moved up a generation, and brother David and I are now officially Adults. Further compounded by...

- Brother Dave reveals his love with an America lady called Jade who he has visited many times over in the States (I always thought he was visiting random people, not the same person), and his intention to marry and begin the emigration process. After being told of the death of Nana Burr in the morning, this bombshell follows in the evening, and in someways worse as it was totally unexpected and involved someone I am very close to leaving the country for ever. Further explanation reveals Dave has known her for eight years, she has two kids (making Dave the English "weekday daddy", his own words), and his reasoning is that he can either abort the entire relationship or give it one-hundred percent and get hitched, and you can't really argue with that. Indeed, within three weeks of telling us all the big news he and Jade were married in Las Vegas (last Friday), he will be coming back here and then in approx. 1 year or so moving over there. Dramatic, but actually very pleasing and exciting!

- My Xbox 360 had the Red Ring of Death error, cause me reasonable psychological trauma. Thankfully (?) it happens all over the globe as Microsoft rushed the process, meaning they have the repair process down to a fine art, and I had it sent off, repaired and back in my hands free of charge at about nine days.

- Reading has slowed down slightly, I read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler for the book club, very good and seems ridiculously modern for the time it was written, as well as funny and interesting. Very near to the end of Grotesque (see previous post) and need to get cracking with the next book club book, London Fields by Martin Amis - my heart tells me I am not going to get around to it and will be forced to make my excuses from the next meeting...
- Gaming continues at pace, and I have logged over 50 hours on the amazing wonder of Fallout 3, something that disturbed me heavily when the XBox died, until I realised the hard drive was fine and it was the motherboard and my efforts had been saved. Set in a world where, post-WWII, American culture has stayed the same in a heavily extended Cold War, whilst technology has advanced at a rapid pace. Think The Brady Bunch, stinkin' Commies, drive-through talkies and soda fountains with lazer weapons, atomic cars and advanced robotics. Anyway, the prolonged Cold War leads to a massive world-encompassing nuclear holocaust, with some lucky citizens finding their way into a series of Vaults, designed to hold a limited number of survivors with food, water and education.

I won't reveal anything further, but the game mainly consists of you wandering a massive landscape of post-apocalyptic Washington DC, rendered in immense graphics, and dotted with hundreds of different shacks, towns, cities, and giving you the choice of how to behave in every encounter. My character, for example, is the purest, kindest, gentlest, most caring individual ever to walk the landscape, dealing out kindness to those in need, blowing the legs off those who break what law remains, helping anyone with any problem, solving conflict and even giving what little water I find to the thirsty. Adam's character tricks children into wearing tight metal "necklaces" with explosives inside and sends them off to be child slaves for the rest of their lives. She blows people in half after getting everything out of them he can through other means, breaks into houses, uses her wiles to seduce men before murdering them as they sleep, and generally looks after Number One. It is so open ended that you can't get bored, and there is so much to do you will never see it all. Currently I am far as I can get, experience points wise, until they release an expansion, so the only thing left to do is finish the main story of the game. I HIGHLY recommend buying it, it is in the top five all-time games for me I think. Street Fighter 4 is immense, and I have reserved a copy of Resident Evil 5 for Friday's release. Nice.

- Saw 'Watchmen' at the cinema on Sunday, excellent and very enjoyable, even more impressive that Zack Snyder has managed to get a more than decent version of a very complicated graphic novel onscreen! It is long, although I didn't check the clock once, infact the only annoying this about it was the two pissed juggernaut black-eye wearing scallies who wandered in half-way through the trailers, one of whom shouted "YO!" every three minutes to no replies, and generally sat around being loud. After about five minutes of the film, with the same random shouting and jabbering, I went and snitched on them to the ushers, who called the security, and after a couple of minutes hidden in the toilets so I didn't walk in alongside the security guard who told them off, thereby revealing myself as The Betrayer, they shut up a bit and ultimately left. Take THAT, scum.

- Trying to watch every Lovefilm sent out to me in the post within a week and then sending it back, thereby getting my money's worth instead of keeping the same three 1980s Chow Yun Fat blood operas for three months at £15 per month. Just got through Star Wars Robot Chicken (comedy classic), United 93 (sad and amazing at the same time), Another Gay Movie (Graham Norton performing scat on a boy under a glass table), and Shiri (Sun from Lost as a female assassin from North Korea, wrecking the South). Also saw Frontiers, French horror about robbers who seek refuge during a Paris riot in a remote hostel, only to discover - we can all relate - it is ran by cannibalistic Neo-Nazis. Ouch(witz)!

Anyway, the idea of an abridged version was to to minimise the size of the post, but it is already a massive length, so I will end it now. I will try and post more often and in more digestible chunks, but I seem to have a penchant for binge-blogging, storing up lots of information about my day to day life and then purging them all over my screen at once, it can't be healthy.