Goodbye 2010 and good riddance

Yeah, so that was 2010 - not the best year ever. We had about three reorganisations at work, plus several more lots of redundancies, me trying a new role that didn't really suit me and not being able to get out of it, etc, etc. Plus we've had pennski 's own work issues which are still being worked through, plus the health issues that went with them. Plus we had the death of pennski's grandmother, health crises in my own family and so on.

While there was no one really major thing that was a complete disaster it was just one of those years where there was a steady drip, drip, drip of annoyance and irritations. More than any time for years I felt like all my joy at life was being sucked out of me.

I'm determined that that is going to change in 2011.

Firstly, I have got to stop letting what is happening in the office control my mood. I've even had a conversation with my manager about this last week and he basically told me that I worry about things I don't need to and take stuff too seriously. Like that's news!

Secondly, I've got to start enjoying the things I do out of the office more. I'm going to try and blog about something at least once a week (though I'm immediately going to break that next week for reasons that will become clear!) I might even try to write a critical article or two (I've had a piece about Patricia McKillip going around in my head for ages, plus possibly - just for fun - a follow-up to my Vector article for the 40 year anniversary of Doctor Who after five years of 'New Who'.

We're starting the year off well - we're off to Norway in the morning for an 8-day tour! We're as packed as we can be now, and I've had my traditional grumpy attack while making sure that we don't break our weight limit. The tour is packaged as a 'Northern Lights' tour; seeing the Lights is not guaranteed of course, but we're hopeful!

So here's to 2011. Let's hope it's a good'n.

Movies over Christmas - a question

For Christmas I bought pennski three animated movies: How to Train Your Dragon, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Princess and the Frog and we watched them all over the Christmas week. We also went out to see Tron: Legacy.

On the films themselves, How to Train Your Dragon was easily the best: fun, funny, exciting and with good characters (I found out today it was made by the same filmaker as Lilo and Stitch, one of my favourite animated films of recent years, so maybe no great surprise I liked it.) I also enjoyed The Princess & the Frog a great deal, though with a few reservations. The worse of the batch was, by far, Cloudy...Meatballs. Apart from a couple of clever lines and in jokes this was just a mess. It got quite well reviewed and I'm at a loss to understand why. My expectations for Tron were set pretty low - I've always thought the first was overrated. It looked very pretty but the acting and script are both pretty appalling. That said, I quite enjoyed the sequel. It didn't really do anything very new but it didn't actively annoy me (although there is an entire other post on the issues with the facial animation).

But what is the question I mention, you ask?

Well, this is specifically for my American friends, and forgive me if it's something I've asked before:

What the hell is US cinema & TV's thing with father and son relationships? I can't count how many times this seems to be the main character driver (in an incredible number of animated films for one). It's a driver in Dragon, Meatballs and Tron. Even Princess is driven by a daughter trying to fulfil her father's ambitions.

It seems to me from what I've seen that there is something deep in the American national psyche here and I'd be fascinated to get ideas on why this might be. It's not a theme you tend to see as frequently in the UK (in the UK it is more frequently class, overtly or covertly, that is the common theme).

Any thoughts?