Full Metal Wheelbarrow

We went to Nottingham yesterday to see the live War of the Worlds concert. We went in early so as to do at least the drive in during daylight and managed to get a surprising amount of Christmas shopping done.

We had dinner at Pizza Express. The food was fine, but honestly, when it's too dark to read the damn menu, they need to turn the lights up a bit….

Having booked with extreme rapidity more than a year ago, we had front row seats which was brilliant, if a trifle disconcerting when the Martian heat ray started blasting away :) And we were "blessed" by Parson Nathaniel (Jason Donovan) which was a tad unexpected!

We enjoyed the show very much, although calling it a new generation was probably a bit OTT - there were definite improvements in the film stuff on the big screen and a couple of very clever moments of apparent interaction between the Liam Neeson hologram and the physical cast, but the changes weren't that radical. Neeson is good, but his voice, while pleasant, falls short of Richard Burton's in my opinion - but since Burton is sadly no longer available they could have done a lot worse for a replacement.

The levels seemed a bit off too - some of the singing was getting drowned out by the orchestra at times, especially during "Thunderchild". One of Rob's friends suggests that this may have been because we were close to the orchestra and thus were hearing the instruments directly , while the speakers for the singing may have been a bit further back. There's some support for this theory in the fact that the singer who seemed least affected by this was Kerry Ellis, who played Beth, the parson's wife - her background is mainly in musicals like Wicked and she's likely better at "projecting" than the others…

But it was an splendid evening, despite the ginormous queue to get out of the car park afterwards.

A wind turbine has been damaged in Lincolnshire and various people are speculating about the cause, up to an including an alien spaceship having crashed into it (!).

I rather like the Daily Mash's take on it.

The page may not be entirely work safe, although the article itself contains far fewer rude words than DM articles tend to (and is funnier for it, IMO).