"I need to get to a library"

Apologies for the hiatus. It's been a week of sickness and busy-ness. Came down with a rotten cold on Friday, which found me on Saturday hunched in my dressing gown pounding away at Elder Scrolls Oblivion. Have reached a rather nasty difficulty ramp which left my Breton mage Cinnadar splattered all over the various castle and dungeon walls of Tamriel with a depressing regularity. Despite the frustrating have an itch to get back playing the thing as am convinced that with just a little more tweaking and the right spells I'll be able to "bring the noise" especially when it comes to those sodding trolls.

In other news have experienced the cinematic - erm - 'experience' of the Da Vinci Code. Have the immense scepticism towards this of the Foucault's Pendulum fan and am sad to say that nothing I saw in the film changed this. Indeed - though I haven't read the thing all the way through - the movie just seemed to emphasise its clunky and narratively limited nature. It is amazingly poorly constructed, pisses away its best assets (Paul Bettany's mad albino monk and Ian McKellan's eccentric recluse) and is, fundamentally, impossibly to engage with: the lead characters are unsympathetic, their quest nonsensical and their adventures drably unexciting. Will crash and burn.