The Grax Domain

30 Jan 2006 One two cha-cha-cha

So yeah, I've just got back from my third week of salsa dance lessons. It was pretty good, though not as good as the other weeks, partly because there were so many newcomers and there wasn't much room to dance around. Still I'm learning some new stuff, that's the important thing.

Oh, didn't I tell you I've been doing salsa? I thought I did tell you... Oh well. I've been learning to dance the salsa for the past three weeks and I quite like it. My housemate wanted to do salsa for a while and I found a place, so... we went. It relatively simple, just a case of remembering all the moves and keeping in time with the beat and giving the right signals and blah blah blah. Trust me, it sounds more interesting and challenging than I am describing it now. Do a video search on salsa to get an idea. Plus there are usually a lot of women compared to men, the ratio is about 3:1. And a lot of them are pretty fit. There's certainly a lot more attractive ladies in a salsa dance class than there is at church. That's what Christians need; sexy ladies!

On a side note I've also been learning Spanish from a book; Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish in fact. This book is interesting because rather than using the boring "listen and repeat" method of teaching, it basically states that lots of English words can be translate to Spanish by changing a few letter here and there, and it encourages you to think about how to create and form phrases. So far I can say basic things like "I prepared dinner" or "Did you invite your mum to the party tonight?" but y'know, baby steps all the way.

Man, women can make me do the strangest things.

14 Jan 2006 Comic Book Fanboy Rant: X-Men 3

Kesley Grammer as Beast in X-men 3?? That was the new snippet I read in a newspaper several months ago. I threw it away in disgust. They can't do that, putting him in a blue monkey suit won't work! But then I thought that maybe they'll only have his voice and CGI the body of Hank McCoy. That would work, after all Kesley is usually typecasted as the intellectual.

Then I saw that trailers for the new X-men movie were available to see. So after downloading the latest version of Quicktime (and iTunes cos I had to, which I then promptly removed) I began to watch the trailer. I threw my monitor away in disgust.

I don't like what I'm seeing here.

Yes, Kesley Grammer is in fact covered head to toe with blue make-up and blue patches of fur on his face. But there's more reason why I'm not liking what I'm seeing.

• Vinnie Jones is the Juggernaut and it looks like he's wearing a six-pack foam suit. Juggernaut is one of my fave super-villains and it pains me to see him represented like this. He should be CGI. His arms should be as big and as wide as me!
• From the trailers it looks like it's going to be "The Halle Berry show; guest starring the X-men". Seriously when is on screen she hogs most of it. I think her superhero-success has gone to her ego and she wants more. Well let me bring you down to earth sister; you were in Catwoman.
• I'm not sure if Ben Foster is the right actor to be Warren Worthington. In my humble heterosexual opinion, he is not pretty enough, or his looks are not quite right. Though I'm willing to admit that I might be wrong about this one.

"But Grax" I hear you cry "You're just being a fan-boy twat because you're complaining about some of the characters not being CGI. It'll still gonna own!" I will admit that I am knit-picking. In fact I think live action films of superheroes shouldn't happen full stop. You can't make comic stuff look good in real life. If you wanna make a film about it, make it all CGI or animate it. It'll look much better as a cartoon because it is a cartoon! But the point is I fear that it's going to suck not because of those petty reasons, but because superhero movies usual suck. I felt Spider-man 2 was terribly cheesy and he kept revealing his secret identity to everyone! The Hulk was terrible because it just didn't follow the storyline. Spawn, Catwoman, Batman and Robin! Need I go on?

I just don't have high hopes for X-Men 3.

In related news the makers of Spider-man 3 have revealed that Topher Grace will be playing as Venom (I know this might be old news, but I only found out about it recently). What?? Eric, from That 70's Show fame is going to be Venom, my all time favourite comic book character? He had the body of a nerd! Judging by this it'll probably mean that the storyline will follow a similar storyline to the Ultimate Spider-man comics, which means we'll only get about 25 minutes of Venom actually being on screen. Place your bets now on how long Venom will be on screen.

This had been a rant from your local comic book fan-boy.

8 Jan 2006 Stylesheet assistance: What the hell is going on?

OK here's the situation. I've recenty changed some code for this website and changed the stylesheet as well to generally make it more cleaner. And I am sure it works fine.

Then I had one complain about it acting funny. This kind of funny. As you can see the footer links are not on the foot of the page, the buttons are on the right and the text is right at the bottom. Then this said person said that she looked at it in IE and it worked fine. So it's probably a browser issue.

The thing is it works fine for me. I've tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer, I've even downloaded Opera to try it out, and it works exactly as I expect it to. I've even tested it on browsers at work and it's all fine.

Some people might say that I should ignore this one complaint, on the grounds of she's using a 'special' browser for 'special' people, but I have to be sure.

Could people PLEASE tell me if something is wrong with this site as it is. Drop an email, or leave a comment, I don't mind which. Prove her right or wrong.

Thank you.


When I said "2006? Bring it." this wasn't what I had in mind.