Entertainment

I have seen a bunch of Fringe Festival shows here in Edinburgh and surprisingly most of them have been very good. Here are my personal ratings of them (on a five asterisk scale):

• (***--) Nuts Coconuts - a great play that plays a great trick on the audience.
• (***--) Bongo Club Vaudeville Cabaret - a mish mash of various acts, some great, some terrible, luckily weighing in more on the great side.
• (****-) Apocalypso Now by Robert Newman - very humorous and intellectual wit with some interesting history lessons thrown in.
• (*****) Tau - a really amazing moder taiko performance.
• (***--) Circus Immortal aka No Fit Sate Circus - a fairly engaging mystical circus story.
• (*****) La Clique - an absolutely fucking amazing collection of acts. 'nuff said.

I am going to go see The Burlesque Hour tonight... I hear it is quite good. :)

Exercise

I have started taking martial arts classes from Rick Young (who is a relatively famous world class competitor). I'm currently taking Brazilian Jiu Jitsu classes at his school and being amazed that I'm getting to train with people I had only previously seen on tv/video and in martial arts magazines. I've also started going to the gym next to work regularly.

I'm getting quite a workout from these and hope to be getting in better shape from all the physical activity in relatively short order, but we'll see. I've been working out more in the last month than I have in the whole last year.

Inventions

I've picked up three smoke machines for the astonishing price of 18 pounds total. I was wanting to get the smoke machines to use in making a laminar smoke screen to project video images onto. Basically, a projection screen you can walk through. Imagine a curtain of fog coming down from a long thin edge; now imagine that there are fairly clear moving images projected onto that fog. I've also acquired some other parts so I can do a test to see if the basic design I've made is sound. If the design is sound then I could make one good enough for club use by the end of this weekend. :)