The Agrinautica

   Hello from Paris, France.

   I will be attending the world beekeeping conference in Istanbul and due to the vagaries of airline
pricing I am taking a very convoluted route there and back. So now I'm in France.

   Departed Melbourne Sunday after I believe not quite even two weeks back. The equinox and therefore beginning of Spring (by my reckoning anyway -- Australians are barbaric heathens who just consider the season to change on the first of every third month), which, normally I don't travel much during Spring and Summer because the beekeeping season is on, but hey this conference is Kinda A Big Deal.


And now another episode of...
In Flight Movie Reviews!
   I've watched just about everything worth watching and Etihad has an unusually bad selection (and a huge amount of auto playing advertisements! I remarked on this last time but it bears commenting again, I thought you were supposed to be classy Etihad!) so this is really down to scraping the bottom of the barrel for crumbs.

X-Files Season 10 - I've had to turn to the "TV Shows" section of the in flight entertainment I've gotten that desperate. Anyway this is the new season of X Files after something like a ten year hiatus! Ah the memories of watching that intro (they didn't change it!) back in high school! Of the three episodes I thought the first one seemed a bit more there's-very-definitely-a-alien-related-government-conspiracy than I think I remember there being but then again I'm not sure how accurate my memory is. Episode 2 was good and a bit in a different direction, glad they're starting out running through the paces. And Episode 3 was really quite funny and I really liked it. Not to give away any spoilers but it was in the strange small town happenings / cryptids / monsters category.

Arthur: Legend of the Sword: I really didn't even want to watch this the trailers had looked ridiculous but eventually during the 14th hour of the flight or so I gave in because I do really like Arthurian stuff and thought I'd at least have a look at it, and.... it's utterly ridiculous!!! Like. WTF. It seems to take place in a not-England fantasy land except London is there. There are giant (giant!!) elephants with castles on their backs, the bad guys have an army of pleather-clad ninjas, for some reason all references to druids have been replaced with "mages" lest any semblance of the actual historic context seep through and just... really ridiculous. I don't have enough internet access just now nor quite the interest to look at its critical reviews but I hope it got the shellacking it deserved. I only got about halfway through before in-flight entertainment shut off (again, WTF Etihad, the entertainment system doesn't work until you're at cruising altitude and shuts down again as descent begins, leaving us sans entertainment for a good forty minutes at the beginning and end for no clear reason), and I do not feel any need to watch the rest of this film whose underlying idea seems to simply be "so we take a few key words from the story of king arthur and just cobble together from there a super CGI heavy fantasy drama from the cheapest script writer we can find."


   Will post about Paris itself in another entry.