aka “Bear Cub”
Director: Paul Andrew Williams / Genre: Comedy / Year: 2004
dvd Gay Sex Spanish Parenthood Boy

The Film…
Cachorro (known as Bear Cub in English-speaking markets) is a 2004 Spanish gay-themed (in particular, the gay Bear community) drama film written and directed by Miguel Albaladejo. It is about a bearish gay man who ends up looking after his nephew while his sister goes away to India and in turn makes him develop a fatherly bond with the boy as well as forcing him to alter his lifestyle. The Spanish word cachorro describes any young, furry animal such as a cub or puppy. (cc) Wikipedia

My Thoughts…
This film explores quite a bit, including a fair few sides of gay culture without getting muddled at all. It attempts to put right some mis-conceptions about gay men bringing up children. I especially liked how the boy simply didn’t care about what his uncle got up to and as is typical is a lot wiser than a lot of the adults. Which makes me wonder, what age is it that people start seeing things that are different as being wrong? Ah well.

The film doesn’t flinch at all from what the “bears” can get up to, ding-a-lings et all, which is really strange considering the general tone of the film. But I guess, the whole message then should be… why should any of it matter?

My Rating:92

The other day, whilst packing for Somerset I discovered that my iMac’s Superdrive was about to give up the ghost just as it did previously.

So instead of purchasing AppleCare and going through the same rigmarole as last time I’ve bought an external affair.  Who knew that already externalised dvd +- writers were so cheap? (can’t be bothered to work out how you do that plus/minus symbol)  Just 30 quid for a LiteOn 20x affair.

Sure it’s not exactly a looker, just a black dvd writer in a black enclosure but stick it out of sight (I’ve stuck it on top of my equally unsightly amp) and all’s fine.

It’s refreshing also to have a burner that burners at least close to its advertised speed.  The superdrive in my iMac, being a slimline affair is slower than a very slow thing (mollasis or something?), it’s supposed to be 8x but it only actually reaches 8x at the final few seconds.  This new drive, with the same media blasted through a burn.

It seems quiet too.  Woo.  I knew I could trust LineOn, I had one of their drives on the last custom built PC I had a few years ago and it was solid as a rock.

I created a diagram to accompany todays post, I hope you find it useful and it should also serve to summarise the post’s information in a quick manor.

For the long trip down here and any other passages of isolated boredom that may strike I figured some movies may come in handy. Playing DVD’s is quite a battery drain, partly because of the power being used by the optical drive, and I think also because the low compression of a dvd’s video is a fair amount of data that has to be wizzed around the machine’s guts. So I downloaded Handbrake which is a really easy to use dvd compression/converter app, its easier and more straight forward than I think any of the free ones on the pc were, that i had used before.

I first tried converting the dvd’s to 1000kbit H.264, but unexpectedly when I tried it later on the iBook, even with the standard definition of a DVD movie it struggled to play it back, pausing here and there to take a breath. Which is a shame because they really did look almost identical to the original. So I did them in xvid instead, which isn’t too shabby anyway, except in the odd fast moving scene where xvids tend to look grubby.

I encoded them on the iMac and it really is silly fast, came as quite a shock actually. Handbrake does the whole thing in one pass, it doesn’t even have to dump the dvd’s contents on the HD first, does it all in one go. And managed to encode xvids at an average of 34 FPS, with PAL films being 25FPS thats much higher than real time! Probably even more incredible it encoded h.264 at about 24FPS. Crikey.