Walk the Dinosaur

Monday morning, aching bones, cold, damp, busy roads, nuff said.

I forgot to top up my phone to get my free internet allowance again, but fortunately I spotted the reminded and switched off cellular data before I racked up any charges. I put my usual ten squids on, which covers me for all of my usage for a month and leaves £2.50 left over, and I've now set a monthly reminder so I don't miss it again. I suppose that I should look at monthly contracts, but I doubt if I'll find anything as cheap for my typical usage (500MB of data, 300 texts and unlimited calls to one number).

Last night's movie was 'The Man From Earth' - a micro-budget indie film that has apparently done well on the convention circuit and benefited from publicity on file sharing sites. The premise is intriguing - a university professor plans to quietly retire from his job after ten years and move on without a fuss until his colleagues turn up to throw an impromptu leaving do for him. He poses a hypothetical question for them - what if he was a fourteen thousand year old survivor from the Cro-Magnon age? What if he had lived through every major shift in human history, observing and learning as he went? He asks his colleagues - experts in the fields of anthropology, history, biology and psychology - if such a thing might be possible and if so how it might be explained. Is he playing a game with them, is he mad or is he telling the truth?

The film is set almost exclusively in one room and I suspect that it would have been better being staged as a play. It's also a bit overwritten in places - the writer Jerome Bixby originally worked on scripts for Star Trek and Twilight Zone, and it certainly would have benefited by being cut down to around an hour. On balance it was an interesting idea and worth a watch, if you can rent it or track it down online.