right.

and so it's a lazy saturday morning, i leave on wed morning and it's 85 shows in. all kinda flown by, actually. revelation two nights back when i looked at the schedule for friday, and went, 'ah. it's an easy day tomorrow - five shows, but easy locations, and within walking distances of one another' - it'd become a job of sorts! enjoyable (well for the most part, anyway, i've seen some real clunkers). have lost patience with the bad (or what seem like bad ones) so have discarded some i bought two months earlier when i didn't know what the hell was going on, and gone for some that have received more reviews, and which i've got more info on. *Think* final tally will be close to 100 lah. which is kinda how many i thought i'd watch.

one thing that's really got me steaming, has been the reviews, use of stars and quotes from 'stars' and the like. they don't mean anything at all! it can refer to previous work done by the company or performer, can be totally made up, or in more insidious cases, a simple reference to the play/source material itself, which has no bearing on how it's going to be performed/interpreted/etc. such as say, i dunno, publicity materials using lines from reviews praising a particular performance of Hamlet put on on by the RSC, for a particular (and completely different) show put up by the Stage Club.

i know it's done a fair bit, but with thousands of shows available, a man needs more perfect information than that, you know. and i DO have a deeply ingrained sense of fair play - there's so much casual queue hopping here, for example, it drives me mad, but no one seems to make any noise about it, so i figure it's part of the landscape.

out of the 85 i've seen so far, theatre's come out smelling the best. the musicals and improvised comedy tend towards the same old same old - funny enough, and smart enough, but insufficient for a proper meal, really. stand up has been rather disappointing - don't know that many by name, so tended to go for the more famous / established ones, and they've not been very good at all. especially the american ones, who tend to mistake vulgarity and crude toilet jokes as humour.

best stuff i've seen has been animation/puppetry stuff, some of which reduced me to tears (the good kind). adventures of alvin sputnik, and swamp juice, in particular, were bloody fucking good. don't know if there're clips floating around, but go see them if they're on at a theatre near you. saw a super sexed up version of a clockwork orange last night as well, which was uneven but quite brilliant at parts. and i think that's been the main problem for me, for the fringe - going by the title of the festival, you'd expect more... different stuff that take risks, but there isn't really, just lots of comedy and 'easy' stuff, which has its place in the scheme of things, but doesn't really do justice to the idea of a fringe festival. read an article which quite astutely pointed out that the fringe isn't so much as festival, as it is an audition for 'greater' things/gigs. which makes sense to me, now two weeks into the festival. would definitely love to come back again, now that i've kinda gotten how the thing works, and would be happy to see the crap if it also means catching some awesome stuff, but i'd prob do fewer musicals/improvised comedy (unfortunately for me, the fringe booklet was arranged by genre, alphabetically, so by the time i arrived at 'theatre'...)

food situation's a little silly, been eating at this one palce, piemaker, on south bridge. excellent pies which i've been guzzling everyday, and i'm trying to keep healthy via an apple a day and fruit juices, but i can't understand how people here don't drop earlier from the complete lack of balance in their diets, especially if one's eating out most of the time, as i am. have a super craving for chinese food at the moment, in particular rice, so will prob pop into any old chinesey looking place soon, man needs his carbo delivered to him in grain form!

haven't seen the bloody castle yet, and at this point in time, little inclination to. guess i can always leave it for a subsequent visit, eh. heading off to glasgow after this, just to take a break for a couple of days, and chill out with a book or two. maybe hit the highlands? if anyone's got any recommendations...