chickenfeet

I watched Bergmann's The Seventh Seal last night for the umpteenth time. It takes my breath away each and every time I watch it. Gunnar Fischer's black and white cinematography is amazing and allows Bergmann to create a sequence of precise, stark images in which nothing is wasted. There really isn't a single frame of fluff in the whole 96 minutes. This film was made in 1957. There are no technical gimmicks, just actors and a camera. The Seventh Seal doesn't try to trick the audience, condescend or be cute. It's disturbing, very beautiful, utterly compelling. If you haven't seen it, go see it as soon as you can. If you have seen it, see it again!

Today is the first Saturday that summer fruit has been around at the Saturday market in all its glory. There were peaches and apricots and nectarines and cherries of many sorts and berries of many colours. Ironically, this is the weekend that the megafruitbat, lemur_catta, is in California.

The Hungarian pig guys had yet another kind of very delicious looking dry sausage.

I tried lunar_affinity's idea of sleeping with a blue freezer block last night. In a way it was comforting but with the humidity being the way it is here it rapidly became a very wet freezer block.

oursin linked to a Guardian article about railway timetables.. I love timetables almost as much as I love maps and used to have hours of fun with the old BR timetable. In my youth I was taught by one of that dying breed of eccentric English schoolmaster. He had memorised Bradshaw for the summer of 1914 for the whole of Europe and could work out in his head, for instance, how to get from Auchtermuchtie to Trieste starting on a Tuesday morning.

It has of course been hot and humid to a distinctly uncomfortable degree for what seems like weeks now. Thus naturally the day I should choose to go and watch some rugby for the first time since doing the shoulder and also the first bike ride since then (my physio thinks biking may be a good way of testing out how it reacts to being jarred around a bit) should turn into a day of somewhat less heat but vastly increased humidity. It pissed down. Total torrential tropical downpour for about an hour.

Besides getting very wet that meant that what might have been a very good game (Balmy Beach vs Irish Canadians - the #2 and #3 teams in the league) turned into a battle of tactical kicking and handling errors not improved by some rather idiosyncratic refereeing. It finished up Irish 9 - Beach 3.

While the rain was pouring down I kept getting smiled at by this really rather attractive woman who looked vaguely familiar. Eventually I went over to talk to her and I don't think I'd ever met her before but it was rather odd. Turned out it was her first rugby game and her daughter's boyfriend (who apparently also plays for Canada U21) was playing second row for the Beach. So I got to share her umbrella and be a pundit for a bit.