Mark Baillie

2011 Retrospective

Once again I've let my poor blog fall into disuse, mostly as the duel forces of Twitter and Facebook have allied to become my social portals of late.

Well, it's been a hell of a year. Not since we welcomed Beth have I had such dizzy heights of merryment. Not just for us either, friends have had babies (and maybe even family might sneak one in past the clock), friends have moved houses and jobs and found great success. As a year its had it's downs as well as ups - but i'm holding onto the good and letting go of the bad. 

We recreated prom night, survived snow storms and hurricanes, been excited and disapointed by politics, returned to Dead by Dawn (with hardly any illness this year), gotten fitter (for a while), had a celebrity birthday message for clare (hoping for an invite to their wedding), geeked out with a return to d&d, enjoyed clares 30th, seen Glasgow taken over by zombies, become a mac user, read loads of books, and much more.

Reading though past posts i'm sure you'll be able to see some great events that rocked my year.

In June I was invited to London to take part in a magazine article for Cosmo magazine. A long knackering day out, but a day like no other. I've found out recently that I'm going to be in the Cosmo Australia edition too - i'm international !
http://markbaillie.posterous.com/a-day-out-in-london  

My family has always been Mum, Dad, and my sister Janine. In August, through facebook, I began talking to my other sister Debbie from a wing of my family long since separated. In a short space of time I've gotten to know them all really well, it's been a real pleasure.
http://markbaillie.posterous.com/68012201 

I wonder what 2012 will bring ?

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You're waiting for a train

I'm sitting at the train station, slightly too early, making me the only person here. A train rolls in, it's destination opposite to mine, but it'll be back soon enough. People disembark and quickly leave. Soon I'm alone again.

People, as a general rule, get through their day by planning. Little minute to minute plans are made, always getting adjusted to meet the situation. Food spills, roadworks, poor timing; we wrap these into our plans and adjust on the fly. We can do this because, for most of our plans, we can anticipate the outcome. Leave late in the morning, you'll arrive late for work. Go to bed late, you'll be tired in the morning. So what do we do when something is so far beyond our normal routine that plans just can't be made? Like light striking a prism and dissolving into infinite waves of colour, so too are the results of our choices when no outcome can be determined.

I'm now on the train. The destination is less a place and more an event. The destination is Glasgow, but the event is much bigger. For the first time in my life I'm about to meet a brother and sister that I never knew I had. I am terrified and elated. I simply don't have the vocabulary to express my thoughts in anything close to understandable.

I’m a result of a first marriage, and when that marriage ended so did my communication with the paternal line. My awareness of that side became very sparse.

I’m standing outside our pre-arranged meeting spot, more nervous than ever. I worry that I won’t recognise them, having only seen photos online. I tell myself that it’s time to act like an adult, and head inside. Scanning faces as I approach the bar I think I see them everywhere at once. Reaching the bar, I order a beer. From text correspondence I’ve already established that they are here, so I send a text, “I’m at the bar”. There are lots of little cubbyholes in here, hiding at least one half of every group, so I move to get a better vantage point. There they are.

I’ve spoken to them both over recent days and have been very eager for this meeting to take place. I’m happy to say that they both exceeded all hopes. After a slow start of awkward conversation, this gave way to a more relaxed atmosphere. Perhaps next time though, and this is warning only to myself, a few less beers would be advisable

It’s 2am, raining lightly, and the streets are quiet. Once again I’m alone with my thoughts. The events of the past few hours have been exhilarating, and I’m very happy about the progress made. 

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Woman on the web

A long time ago, back when I was still using S9y as my blog engine, clare asked me to make a blog for her. It was called "It's Ups and Downs", the name taken from a quote in our favourite TV show spaced. This was online at www.itsupsanddowns.co.uk.

This eventually died when I cancelled my old hosting.

A while back Clare tried her hand at blogging again, choosing tumblr as her platform. Around the same time I made the leap to posterous. Arguments aside, they both had their own pros and cons and both seemed to suit us well.

Recently Clare’s moved beyond photo posts and is actively trying to write content to prompt discussions. The tumblr platform relies on Disqus for comments, again a system with its own pros and cons, but not the best for what we needed. On her behalf I made the move from tumblr to posterous.

Things ran pretty smoothly, except for a bunch of untitled posts (from photoblog entries) and losing all existing comments. You see, since disqus is a separate system, posterous couldn’t make the join between blog post and its comments. You can't really blame posterous for this, but it would have been nice.

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Book to Screen

Why must 90% of conversions from novel to film be so abysmally bad ? Sure there's some greats like Carrie and The Shining, both of which cut great amounts from the novels but still managed to respect the source material. More modern than those two classics would be the Lord of the Rings series, or the Harry Potter series, both of which were brought to screen with a fantastic job made of them.

So why is it for every Harry Potter there's a Tom Clancy series ? I'm a big fan of the Tom Clancy Ryanverse novels, but so far we've had Alec Baldwin (average), Harrison Ford (great), and Ben Affleck (awful) all playing Jack Ryan. We've had four movies, all presented in the wrong order, which is exactly  why people can't think of it as a series. If the Harry Potter books had been shot in the wrong order with different characters, it wouldn't have done half as well at the box office.

So there's this series of novels, Lee Child's Jack Reach series, that I love. They're not deep thinkers, being the book equivalent of an action movie, but they are incredible enjoyable with a great main character. On Lee's site they've been talking about turning one of the books into film, a proposition that made me anxious, would they do a good job ?

The first disappointment was the announcement that it would be the book One Shot that was getting made. This book comes about halfway through the series, and i felt was one of the weaker books. The first book Killing Floor would have been much better, its a far stronger story, and it's the first book in the series ! I can though put my feelings aside here, there isn't much in the novels that changes start to finish, so there is always the possibility that this would open the door for some of my favourite books in the series to be made at a later date. I am left with mixed feelings about this point.

So taken from wikipedia, here's a description of Jack Reacher.

Reacher is a giant, standing at 6' 5" tall (1.96m) with a 50-inch chest, and weighing between 210 and 250 pounds (100–115 kg). He has ice-blue eyes and dirty blond hair. He has very little body fat and his muscular physique is completely natural (he reveals in Persuader, he has never been an exercise enthusiast.) He is exceptionally strong but is not a good runner.^[3] Reacher is strong enough to break a man's neck with one hand (Bad Luck and Trouble) and kill a villain with a single punch to the head (61 Hours) or chest (Worth Dying For). In a fight against a 7 foot, 400 lb steroid using thug, Reacher was able to lift his opponent into the air and drop him on his head.

Does this sound like Tom Cruise to anyone else ? No ? I do understand that there are some practicalities that have to be taken into account. A big name like Cruise will draw people and increase revenue. It'll make the studios happy that their investment is safe. It'll get the movie made. It's just incredibly disappointing. He's turning into Robert Downey Jr's character from Tropic Thunder, dying his skin to get the role as a coloured person. Maybe next they'll cast him as Andre the Giant.

Maybe they'll have changed the novel to screenplay so much it'll be Reacher in name alone, then we can all pretend it had nothing to do with the books. At least until the sequel comes out.

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A day out in London

I've delayed posting this in order to keep my facebook/twitter guessing game going for as long as possible, the cat's out the bag now though :)

It’s 11:30 PM, I’ve been awake for the last 21 hours, spent 10 of those travelling, and I can feel the exhaustion weighing me down.  Still, it’s been a day like no other.

Crowdsourcing, the act of throwing out a question or request to a large group, has found a home in social media. So when Jacqui, a journalist at an established woman’s magazine, sent a tweet asking for people of a particular relationship status, and Tv personality Dawn Porter (@hotpatooties) sent this to all her followers, it came to my attention. I then sent it to Clare; we spoke about it, and completed the circle by replying back to Jacqui.

I’m not going to write much on the article as it’s not my place to give away what Jacqui and the team has been working so hard on.

Jacqui and I sent a few emails back and forth, and before it had really struck home, I was offered a place in their article. This is how I found myself waking at 3AM to get the 4:30AM train from Glasgow to London.

Being more introvert than extrovert I’ve not had a great amount of time in the spotlight. Having the attention of a makeup artist, a stylist, a journalist, and a photographer (as well as their supporting staff), and put alongside four guys I’ve never met before would normally kick off all kinds of anxiety. How often though would a guy like me get an opportunity like this? It was time for me to get some backbone and try to do the best that I could.

So at 10 AM I found myself inside a London bar in Maida Vale. This was certainly a woman’s world, with talk of hair, make-up, clothes, and weddings; myself and the first of the other participants Joseph were left to stare in wonder at this whirlwind of activity. Then the whirlwind got us.

I’ve never really had much call to wear make-up, Vicky (the make-up artist) thankfully put me at ease throughout. I’m not sure how you ladies cope with wearing it all day, it certainly does get a little itchy and I was very conscious of touching my face and having it smudge. In my case I could understand the necessity, my large cro-magnon forehead threatening to add its own flash reflection to the photos.

As a thirty-something guy I’m well aware that I’m never going to be a style icon. I tend to dress myself with whatever’s first to hand, and if it wasn’t for Clare I’d probably run out of clothes. Never before have I had such an array of choice, with Laura (the stylist) plucking out items with her practiced eye and sending me off to get changed. I put my faith in her choices, she did a great job on the other guys so I can only assume (or hope) that she somehow managed the same for me.

Speaking of the other guys, that was certainly an experience! With only five guys we were a diverse group, a real melting pot of backgrounds and experience, similarities and differences. Finding myself to be the oldest I was probably the most commonplace, filling the traditional family-man role. Several of the others worked within “The Industry” and were brimming with confidence, almost an opposite to myself. Their confidence alone could be enough to send me screaming towards my mid-life crisis, desperate to prove i'm still capable of wooing the ladies; although if you have to prove it then I'm sure that itself is an indicator of the truth.

It was a real treat seeing how much time and effort goes into producing a few short pages. The whole day had a very strange feel, with one minute having lots of energy as the photographer snapped frames, the next minute just sitting around leisurely chatting whilst someone else has their turn. Lots of time was taken with photographs, they must have been numbering into the hundreds. Furniture was moved, drinks became props, single profile shorts were followed by group shots, all with Jacqui holding interviews in between.

Then just like that it’s finished, for us anyway. We change back into our own clothes, say our goodbyes, and head off out into the rain. For Jacqui and her team there’s still lots to be done, but none of us will see that, only the finished results.

See the full gallery on Posterous

So thanks to Jacqui (@JacquiCosmo) for the invite to participate, Laura (@Stylaura) for her fashion sense, Ben (@benriggott) and Anna for the photographs, Vicky for making me look presentable to camera, Joan for organsing the shoot, and everyone else involved. It certainly made for a more interesting Tuesday than most. 

Edit : Attached the pdf

Cosmo.pdf Download this file

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