{"id":4830,"date":"2011-04-22T15:49:47","date_gmt":"2011-04-22T14:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=4830"},"modified":"2011-04-22T15:59:10","modified_gmt":"2011-04-22T14:59:10","slug":"battered-but-not-unbowed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=4830","title":{"rendered":"Battered but not unbowed"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s 08.15 local, or 15.15 BST.<\/p>\n

I’ve just crawled out of bed after 10 hours sleep; my body aches with with the kind of pain that only comes from being unconscious for a long period of time.<\/p>\n

Or maybe a cryogenically-induced state of suspended animation.<\/p>\n

The flight over was excellent; the United Airlines cabin-crew were brilliant, the 777-200 did what it was supposed to do and the inflight entertainment was a bizarre, but erm entertaining mix.<\/p>\n

We started to record this week’s show in the departure lounge at LHR, we added a little more from 30,000′ and +500 miles an hour. We’ll finish it off today and publish it later.<\/p>\n

There will be, obv, very little chat, but we will still carry four tracks.<\/p>\n

En-route I watched ‘Sleeper’ which, despite it’s age, still made me laugh out loud several times.<\/p>\n

‘Monsters Inc’ got itself watched again.<\/p>\n

Also seen was the woefully pedestrian ‘The Tourist’, in which Depp and Jolie did nothing much whilst a pastiche of brilliantly scored orchestral music set the scene for the next turgid piece of dialogue, delivered against yet another internationally renown backdrop, for no really good reason.<\/p>\n

However that pile of garbage was the perfect set up for the brilliant ‘Wild Target’, a funny, sharp action\/comedy pic that cost less than 8% of ‘The Tourist’ and yet ‘Wild Target’ is a better film by slightly more than 150%. Bill Nighy delivers a perfect foil to the kooky character played by Emily Blunt.<\/p>\n

Arrival at LAX produced no surprises and reinforced the bond between the UK and the US even further.<\/p>\n

If you think that only the British customs and border patrol would have just three officers on duty to deal with a 777 full of sleepy, bewildered passengers, I need to tell you that’s how they swing in LAX too.<\/p>\n

We picked up the car and got sold an upgrade, but we did talk the guy out of giving us an SUV.<\/p>\n

Driving from LAX to E 7th Street was made difficult due to a couple of closed roads. We understand this was entirely due to Obama being in town. We’re seeing him for dinner tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Soph had one brain explosion, three full-on heart attacks and two minor myocardial infarctions en route. I failed to hit anything even though a lot of other traffic was on the wrong side of the road. Cyclists and pedestrians don’t count, right?<\/p>\n

On the way to the hotel we drove past Nakatomi Plaza\/Century City. I was very disappointed that Alan Rickman wasn’t in residence; the police were most insistent that we leave as we were on private property.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The room is brilliant, as is the rest of the club. We’re on our own when we leave LA; picking up overnight accommodation as we go, but I wanted us to start off from a solid base. This place is it.<\/p>\n

We ate in last night, the restaurant is pleasant and the kitchen gave me the perfect pasta-based dish; the cellar offered me some nice Rioja to accompany it.<\/p>\n

And Soph got told ‘Gee, I love your accent’, but the chatting-up waiter dude.<\/p>\n

Today, breakfast will be followed by us being camera-toting, microphone-wielding tourists, as we hit Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And that’s it, really.<\/p>\n

I hear that, back in the UK, there are still people who ‘don’t get’ the need to switch the voting system from First Past The Post to AV.<\/p>\n

Presumably these are the same people who vote on X-Factor, Big Brother and Britain’s Got Talent – which are all, obv, AV methods of selecting the best candidate.<\/p>\n

Because if Britain’s Got Talent used First Past The Post we would have elected a tap-dancing dog. And if that’s not a metaphor for ‘Vote Cameron’, I don’t know what is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s 08.15 local, or 15.15 BST. I’ve just crawled out of bed after 10 hours sleep; my body aches with with the kind of pain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}