Monthly Archives: July 2006

Pirates, The Devil, Fast Cars and the Holy Grail

PiratesYesterday twelve of us went to see Pirates of the Caribbean. The film is a great action movie, with amazing CGI and stunts. The only problem, the film never ends. I’ve seen many films which are clearly made to promote a sequal, however they normally tie up most of the plot lines, leaving one or two to be carried over. In Pirates none of the plot lines end, so the film turns into a 2.5 hour trailer for Pirates 3. 5/10

OmenThe Omen, saw this on the 6/6/06. Unlike the orginal this isn’t scary. Instead of using music to set the scene, they have scary dream sequences. 3/10

Toyko DriftFast and the Furious – Tokyo Drift. Unlike Pirates this film didn’t really have much of a plot, nor any real twists. However it did have fast cars sliding around and that was the reason why we went to see the film. A great fun film to watch with the freaky kid from American Gothic all grown up. 6/10

Da Vinci CodeThe last film that I haven’t been bothered to blog is The Da Vinci Code. As a Catholic I didn’t find it offensive. The film was ok, but Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou were crap, you just couldn’t believe in their characters, whilst Ian McKellen was just playing the same character he always plays. Jean Reno was good though. 4/10

Next week, Superman!

Do we need dual carriageways?

Yesterday the BBC reported that the East Midlands Regional Assembly failed to get government spending to dual the A46 between Newark and Widmerpool.
The section of road has a high number of accidents and sees 23,000 vehicles a day.
One of the big issues for the East Midlands and Lincolnshire is that we have lots of major A roads, but they are only single carrigageway. The costs and disruption to upgrade these road are massive, however could there be a compromise.
The main problem with these roads is slow moving vehicles and impatient drivers. If we had frequent overtaking spots (a bit like crawler lanes without the hills), you would only need to gain an extra lane (which in some places can be taken from the two lanes already there). By telling drivers who wish to travel at the speed limit that they can overtake in half a mile they will be more likely to wait and then overtake safely.
Will we see this happen? Who knows.