A Cryin' Shame

2 January - Not a very productive day today - did some bike maintenance by changing a tyre and repairing a few inner tubes (and throwing a few more). Headed down to the drive to do a series of objectives that I didn't really want to do but needed to be done - on the way down I walked past a park where there was a small child about three years old, obviously overexposed to Spiderman, who had climbed halfway up a fence but couldn't get down and was stuck holding himself up by his fingertips like a rockclimber screaming for his mummy. My instant reaction was to grab him and let him down but this was complicated by the fact that he was on the other side of the fence and I'd have to try to grab his wrists which would be a bit awkward and also not helped by the stupid checking of whether someone would see it as 'inappropriate'. It is probably paranoia but I could just imagine going into the playground and lifting the little boy off the fence only to have his mother materialising and snatching him off me with wild accusations. It's awful that this is something that has to be considered (or at least thought of) when you see a child in trouble but you can't fault parents with being protective of their genes but obviously this one wasn't too protective because she was nowhere to be found and after a minute another mother (obviously less of a suspicious character than I) came to let him down, all while vocally wondering where the kid's mother really was.
Ended up going to see 'Memoirs of a Geisha' with Rene, catering to his fetish for 'Asian chicks' (athough truth be told he seems to have a thing for all that is Asian), reasonably entertaining but a bit strange. The most striking thing about the whole film was that it played like a fairly typical martial arts film only the heroes were geishas rather than ninjas or samurais. There were good guys and bad guys (girls), the master and the apprentice, the hero coming out of retirement to help a friend, there was even a training montage (tres weird) - nice outfits and Rene certainly seemed to like it. The best thing about it for me was that there absolutely no ads whatsoever and the two previews were suitably intriguing (one I can't remember and one for Sofia Coppala's Marie Antoinette - very inappropriate soundtrack for the teaser, wonder what it all means?) and at the cinema.