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31st January 2003

Saw Faith by Helen Kelly at Birmingham University.

Before seeing the play, all I knew was that it had been commissioned for the drama course at BU, and one of the constraints was that there had to be a large number of female lead parts.

The play was set in an anti-war protest in London, which had been cordened off by the police. Caught inside were variouse diverse groups of people: muslim women out food shopping, two catholic girls - one at college and her youngere sister, two girls (Hayley and Becky) escaping from a school trip, some socialists, two (male) louts out for trouble, and two american girls - daughters of a right wing senator.

The set was fairly plain but the struture of the room was used to good effect, with the action "rotating" around the audience as the crowd moved around the raised seating.

At the beginning of the play, the various groups appear on their own, in their own worlds, with their own concerns. By the end, the groups are mixed, people jump from one group to another and have their beliefs challenged by their interactions with others.

Overall, the dialogue was very witty and intelligent, and the play made interesting points about the complexity of beliefs and the clash of contradictory beliefs in a very interesting way.

Certainly a play I'd see again.

29th January 2003

Last week I got some great Shiitake Mushrooms at the Moseley Farmers Market. I'd heard that, as well as being delicious, they also had some medicinal properties, so I read around a little - Shiitake Mushrooms.

26th January 2003

Read some of the cartoon strip Elftor - http://elftor.com/ also found this list of other web comics - http://www.topwebcomics.com/index.php

Removed the links Internet Researchs and Travels And Voyages from my front page, as I've not been updating them. They're linked from here now

Watched Chapter 10 of The Little Ninja http://www.ninjai.com

Both Pram and Misty's Big Adventure have gigs coming up.

25th Januarty 2003

Added a Andy Pryke Recommends page.

Global warming exposes tonnes of 10,000 year old caribou shit:

• http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF14/1423.html
• http://krd.realcities.com/html.ng/site=krsouth&proptype=krd_np&webprop=charlotte&product=mld&subproduct=observer&size=sponsor&pos=popup&c1=news&c2=none
• http://www.taiga.net/yourYukon/col198.html
• http://www.taiga.net/yourYukon/col199.html
• http://www.taiga.net/yourYukon/col200.html

24th January 2003

Saw Rainer Hersch (sp? and Donna Mc Phail(sp?) at Jongleurs

23rd January 2003

Saw Dirty Pretty Things at The MAC

22nd January 2003

Saw Talk To Her at the The MAC

21st January 2003

Had occasion to do some DNS Troubleshooting

18th January 2003

Trying to find out the sites in Birmingham which Adam Chodzko used for his "A Place for 'The End'" piece.

Listened to the Sherlock Holmes story "The Lion's Mane" in the Clive Merrison and Michael Williams version. This radio adaptation extends what is quite a short Holmes story by having Watson play the detective whilest Holmes recounts the facts. It also examine their relationship and hints at the relationship between Holmes and his depiction on stage and in print.

Spoiler - the solution to the mystery can be found here: http://www.tnaqua.org/Special/lion'smane.html

Saw Herman Dune at the Jug Of Ale.

12th January 2003

This weblog has good rants on webdesign etc - http://www.dcjt.demon.co.uk/dc/weblog/

11th January 2003

Saw Anita And Me at The Electric.

Richy C has a nice blog, with good links to interesting sites - http://blog.beebware.co.uk/

8th January 2003

Saw Huite Femmes at The MAC.

5th January 2003

Ate at The Lime And Chilli House.

Heard "Keeping The Feast", a mixture of a specially commissioned "poem" and interviews on the link between religion and food/fasting - very good. Added a Places To Eat page.

I also found http://www.resonancefm.com/ Resonance FM which sounds like it carries a very interesting mixture including Sound Art.

2nd January 2003

Saw Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine at the Electric Cinema.

1st January 2003

Putting together a list of Birmingham Bloggers, came across this article by mailto:ron@chrisley.freeserve.co.uk on warchalking in Brum - http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rlc/warring/warring.html

Been running all day on Mandrake Linux - still haven't settled on my prefered web-browser. Opera 7 isn't available, but Opera 6.1 is - but the fonts are a bit funny - it also seemed to have problems with the editing the TWiki.

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