My Winnipeg

My Word! My Winnipeg

Surely one of the weirdest 'documentaries' around, Guy Maddin's 'My Winnipeg' is off the wall enough to have something for everyone, but perhaps not enough to hold everyone long enough to find whatever it is that's for them. Apparently a personal history of Maddin's home town, it's littered with throwaway curiosities like seances conducted through ballet, octogenarian hockey protests, gay buffalo stampedes, frozen horses for lovers, cemeteries for old signage, Citizen Girl (righter of working class wrongs), a longrunning TV show called 'Ledgeman', and well, so much craziness that you'll just have to watch it yourself. Unfortunately it is all told in a low-key, sleepwalking style that, though quite beautiful visually and aurally, made it difficult for me to watch through in one sitting, despite being only 80 minutes long. Not quite the masterpiece it's been made out to be in some quarters, it's still well worth a look. Bizarre.

THIEF!!!!!!!

By the way, did I tell you my headphones got robbed from my desk at work the other day (well, night actually)? You know who you are, you music-depriving reprobate! So much for Security!

Tunguska

As the programme put it, 4 hours later and there would have been no Leningrad....Think about that.


There was a relatively uninformative documentary about Tunguska on More4 earlier. In case you don't know your mysterious happenings too well, in 1908 something exploded with the force of 1000 atom bombs over wilderness in Siberia. Trees were uprooted for over 800 miles around, all laid flat in radiating lines, all scorched by the blast. No one knows exactly what it was for sure, but the general view today is that it was either a meteorite or a comet, though some still believe the theory of an exploding alien spacecraft. The curious thing is that there was no crater and no debris (well, not unless you believe some wackos shown in the programme who claimed a meteorite was intercepted by some guardian aliens, and the wackos have the alien spaceship's unearthly alloy metal to prove it!). Personally I think it was a meteorite with a relatively thin shell and a frozen gas core. As it passed through the atmosphere heating up, the shell would burn while the core would melt, building in pressure until it reached a point where the shell was too thin to contain it. The explosion, though powerful, would leave little in the way of debris. There's my tuppence worth. Of course, I believe there's an episode or two of 'The X Files' that also deals with the matter.