Ford Prefect

The Opposite Of Frequent

2007-10-08T08:57:00.000Z

Feathers keep falling into my flat from the ledge by my skylight where the pigeons sit in the sun. I like the way they float down and found it almost serene until I remembered how disease-ridden pigeons are.

Also happening outside my window: lots of noisy construction. They're drilling right now. We still get transient guests in the building, using a flat for just a week or a weekend. One of them stole my neighbour's bike when they left. These young souls were in town for a wedding and we said hello out of the window.

Why I choose this to share, of all the things that have happened in the eight weeks since I last posted, I'm not sure. Perchance to highlight how trivial blogging can be? If I told you everything that's happened, it would take me eight weeks to write!

I like having this outlet but when you start to find it a chore to post frequently, as I have, it's a bit like the tail wagging the dog. National Novel Writing Month is on the horizon and Shig has convinced me to take part this year. I hope to improve my writing style because I've become bored with the stock turns of phrase that I use here all the time. I've been reading more, because there's something unhealthy about reading your own words more than anyone else's. I'd love to (ultimately) have something more concrete than an online diary to show for all the time I spend writing.

This blog ain't dead. It's still twitching and medics are en route. Thanks for all the messages about it.

Big Trouble With Little Objects

2007-08-18T14:18:00.000Z

I thought I'd left my phone in the car so I went downstairs to check. At the bottom of the stairs (but still a short way from the car) I realised I'd hadn't brought my car keys because I knew, subconsciously, I wasn't driving anywhere. So, my dilemma: go back for the keys now when there's no guarantee I'm actually going to need to open the car, or continue to the car, see the phone on the passenger seat and then go ALL the way back for them? Tricky stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

I drove to To-ne's barbecue so we could buy beer on the way, but I'd planned to drink and pick up the car on Sunday. We took a taxi all the way home that night before I remembered I'd left my house keys in the glove box. (It's what I do when I park at airports so I can't lose them overseas.) I smoked while I considered ways of breaking in but it was clear we were going to need another taxi. There again. And back again. Thirty pounds for all three trips. An expensive mistake.

Now That's What I Call Great Storytelling

2007-08-17T21:33:00.000Z

The recent six-part Jekyll on the B.B.C. was a style-over-content masterpiece: snappy dialogue, beautiful people and the most O.T.T. lead performance I've seen since... ooh, James Purefoy's Marcus Antonius last month. There was some rather original violence too, such as when James Nesbitt delivered a still-twitching torture victim to A&E in a holdall slung over his shoulder, or when he killed a lion with his bare hands at the zoo. Whatever this program wasn't, it was consistently entertaining.

The absolute superlative highlight for me was the opening of the final epsiode. The previous week's preview showed a ruthless mercenary who, we assumed, would be sent after the escaped Mr. Hyde. The teaser sequence the following week is all about the same fella: he's training, killing, taking no shit from his employers and (through a flashback to a moment of the series we've already seen) waiting to be called into action when he is needed. He's a secret weapon, a boss level, a nemesis.

Then we're back at last week's cliffhanger ending and Jekyll/Hyde/Nesbitt is still surrounded by bad guys on a rooftop. Up steps the new ultimate tough guy character. He approaches Hyde with a tough-talking line and, in one fast fluid movement, Hyde turns and throws him off the building to his death on the pavement below. What a set-up and what a way to reinforce that your central character is the bad-ass of bad-asses! The credits hadn't even rolled. The writer in me was in awe at that.

Update 2007-08-18: Having described it, I now find you can watch the whole delicious sequence online. They changed the title to "Hyde" instead of "Jekyll" for the last part too. Who got the style? They do.

It's Duck And Rabbit Season

2007-08-12T16:21:00.000Z

I love me a good barbecue, especially when the meat isn't shaped like an animal. (Fish I can handle.) Yesterday, Tone did the honours. Phil brought a cooler for the beer to save us walking to the fridge and back which was my kind of decadence. Chris brought a chocolate fountain - like a fondue with added drippiosity - which was Alice's kind of decadence.

I wore trainers and a brown shirt but you could tell it was summer because I had sunglasses on. I don't really do summer clothing on account of our short summers. I did look an underprepared British fool in Miami that one time, and also those three times I played lunchtime soccer in the park in Norfolk wearing all black. But I coped with the Downend sun by taking off my socks and rolling up my jeans. Underpreparedness 1, Adaptablity 2!

You could tell it was summer by the Bristol Balloon Festival too. We didn't go but they were in the sky so difficult to miss.

Saturday was my revenge on Alice for taking me to a garden party full of her lovely friends earlier in the summer. The host told me his life story and asked me to choose a Bowie album to play so I was good. We went for a walk and ended up in the only park in Clevedon I'd ever been in before, approximately twenty years ago. (Maybe there's only one park?) The day was rounded off watching a travel video from North Korea: the background music, added by the tour company, was overtly militaristic and a camp German tourist with bleached blonde hair and Noel Edmonds' hand-me-down jumpers wouldn't stop winking at the camera.

The film ended with the spectacular Arirang Mass Games in which 100,000 brainwashed citizens prance around for their glorious leader's entertainment. Pretty though. Almost worth it.

Post Yourself Yellow

2007-08-05T11:45:00.000Z

They're having fun marketing The Simpsons Movie. Select 7-Eleven stores have been kitted out like Kwik-E-Marts and the Burger King promotion lets you "simpsonize" yourself into a cartoon. That's me, innit?

Chabon (And On And On)

2007-08-05T08:45:00.001Z

The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay is possibly the longest novel I have ever read. It's only 600 pages but it took me nine bleedin' months, in which time I think I picked it up about twenty times. That's not a bad average per sitting but I blatantly need more sittings!

I enjoyed it yet, here I am, not thoroughly recommending it. That's embarrassing because I gave it as a birthday present a long time ago, back before I'd started the first chapter. Do we still use spoiler warnings on books when, like, nobody cares about books any more? All this Deathly Hallows nonsense would suggest so. We'll have a warning, then: spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler! There are seven hallows, not six.

Returning to the book I just read:

Samuel Clayman and Joseph Kavalier are two New York Jews (one fresh off the boat from Czechoslovakia) whose rise in the comics business paralells the rise of the Nazi party in Europe. They can't fight physically so they write big Nazi-bashing adventures for their trademark superheroes, The Escapist and Luna Moth. They fall in love but not with each other. One goes to war, one stays behind to mind the other's wife and child, they are reconciled and live as an unconventional family unit of four in the 1950s.

I cared about what happened to the characters but wished I would make it happen faster. The early sections were heavy on Jewishness which was educational but failed to resonate with me personally. Harry Houdini, Salvador Dali and Stan Lee had entertaining cameos. The lines between the real-life New York and the fictional Empire City often seemed blurred and I was disappointed when this aspect of the story was written off as the fantasy of a delusional man halfway through.

Best for a comics nut like myself were the affectionate tributes to genre characters as Kavalier and Clay ripped off Action Comics without infringeing copyright. Unfortunately, I took an hour out one Sunday morn to read Kurt Busiek's Astro City which does the same trick faster and in colour: The Samaritan is Superman, Cleopatra is Wonder Woman, the Honor Guard is the Justice League, etc.

Read either (but not both) and don't dally. For all the Potter-knocking, Rowling is probably more balls-out fun. And for my next trick, something light like The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry.

You Can Cook Cucumber!

2007-08-03T20:46:00.000Z

I admired KitKat's pledge to herself to accomplish something new every week. Unfortunately, a lot of her new things looked like new ongoing commitments - joining a gym or a book group, for example - and I was sure I didn't have the time for all that.

So, to Plan B: one week I tried sweet and sour chicken balls from the Chinese take-away instead of pork balls, and the week after that I had chicken with cashew nuts for the first time. That's my kind of tasty adventurousness but somehow, I can't help feel, it wasn't quite in the original spirit. So I comprimised, bought a cookbook and now I'm trying to cook something new every week.

The Mod and Helen finally came to Bristol last weekend and good fun was had by all. I met them in the middle of a harbour festival that I didn't know was happening and probably would have missed altogether if they hadn't made me leave the house. We scoured the food stalls for delicacies and picnicked in a quiet spot beyond the safety barrier on the waterfront.

People get nervous cooking for Helen because she's a rather talented chef. I wasn't, but I did opt for a dish I'd done before. She made sticky toffee pudding from scratch. Good food was had by all.

Salmon And Cucumber In A Creamy Sauce
1 cucumber
1 small onion
flour
vegetable oil
150ml whipping cream
seed mustard
350g filletted salmon
lemon juice
parsley

Slice the cucumber in half longways. Scoop out the seeds and cut into half-rings. Chop the onion. Fry both vegetables in a splash of oil for 2 minutes. Add a couple of tablespoons of flour and stir in.

Add the cream and a few teaspoons of mustard. Dice the salmon and add it raw to the mix. Cook the whole lot on medium heat for 8 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season with lemon juice. Decorate with parsley. Serve with anything you like. (We had white rice.)

Baby Been A Bad Blogger

2007-08-03T14:36:00.000Z

Remember me? I used to post stories here that somewhat resembled the truth about my life. No? You can get in on the ground floor now then.

Facebook has played its part in occupying my time, though what you do with what you find there is what it's really all about - not all that messing around with silly add-ons where vampires fight werewolves. I've discovered new things about people I thought I knew back-to-front. I've discovered common interests with people I only knew slightly well and now we're closer. I've checked out my friends' friends for potential singles and I've been on a semi-date. I've laughed at the female student trying to run her own private escort service, though she's not ugly and her rates are very competitive. I've joined groups for local events and I've introduced myself to a handful of people that will be at The Beastie Boys' Brixton Academy gigs in September. And I'm just getting started...

The rain has abated here, Blair has begun his mission of atonement in the Middle East, Gordon Brown is our new Prime Minister and there's been a "credible" sighting of the missing Madeleine McCann three months after her abduction when most people, like myself, had begun to consider her another tragic statistic.

I had mad insomnia this week but it's better now. Sadly, David Tennant's mother died of cancer. And Kylie Minogue, a waitress on the Titanic in the Doctor Who Christmas Special, was mistaken for an actual waitress during filming in Cardiff. Apparently, an old lady from a nearby hotel asked her if it was too late to still get a cup of tea!

Carry on.

Cause Of Flooding (9,8)

2007-07-22T19:05:00.000Z

We Brits are having a really wet year. June was the wettest June since records began in 1914. The last seven days have seen some truly excessive rainfall and there's no respite in sight. Bristol's been alright because it's mostly hills - just don't live in a trough. But less than fifty miles away, the town of Tewkesbury is all sandbags and insurance claims.

How many people know the nursery rhyme Doctor Foster Went To Gloucester? It's just dawned on me that different regions might have their own variants.

The worst surprise I had all week was that new Coke Orange doesn't taste much like Mezzo Mix, a popular coke-orange drink in Germany. It's also a product of the Coca Cola Company so why the difference? Coke Orange is being marketed as a limited edition with the slogan "get it before it's gone", to encourage consumers to get onboard faster than they did for Coke Zero. Canny stuff!

That's "canny" meaning "clever", not "it comes in cans".

Schoolboy Error

2007-07-20T18:03:00.000Z

Nine days away from the blog. I guess I had some motivational problems! Going back to work was a drag and now the boss is back too so I have to be visibly pro-active (which so much tougher than simply getting the job done). He's not all bad, though: this morning he called before work to say to stay home because of the bad weather.

My old high school made the national news this week for all the wrong reasons. The local papers said it was the result of an internet spat over a boy the night before. One parent said the same thing happened when he was in school thirty years ago so perhaps the country isn't completely going to the dogs after all. Or it's always been going to the dogs.

I used to want to be a teacher but it wore off around the same time teachers started getting shot. Talk about being under-appreciated at work! I really ought to remedy that one day, seeing as how it would take all of five minutes. Mr Turasiewicz, Ms Roberts, Ms Davies, Mr Lewis, Mr Newman and Mr Fry: when I paid attention, you were all brilliant.

Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em

2007-07-10T12:32:00.000Z

England has been a non-smoking country for ten days now. Places you can still do it include the privacy of your own home or car, and in the open air. A trip to Ireland in May prepared me for the change and I'm dealing with it while the weather is fair. I'm only annoyed there's no provision for clearly-labelled smoking dens where black-lunged bastards like myself could go to exercise our free will.

Eleven days ago I was celebrating the engagement of Tom and Johanna in a pub called The Globe. It was hot enough there without everybody lighting up like it was going out of style. Sweaty pictures follow!

A startled Thomas.
Jo dancing Zorba The Greek.
A fiver says Legolas and his friend aren't from round here.
Basquiat uses mind control to keep her portrait off the interweb.
I didn't take this picture and I don't know 75% of these people.
Always dress for the occasion.
Erika and myself doing Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers ('78 version).
Cute bar-person #2679.

While we're making sweeping changes to the country, can we do something about drivers who don't keep left unless overtaking?

Unfinished Tales

2007-07-09T20:52:00.000Z

On the trip to Amsterdam where I missed my outbound flight, I almost missed the return too. Schipol is twenty minutes from the Centraal station, we reasoned as we headed to the area for after-work beers. I left the bar at the last possible moment and my train sat in the station, going nowhere. I met Elvira, Richard and David because they were sitting nearby and I'd just rushed three beers. Richard took a group photo but didn't e-mail it to me yet. He said all hope of catching my flight was lost but I was derermined to try and, luckily, my plane was delayed more than my train. I think I was the only passenger smiling about that.

A long weekend with Alice was the cherry on the top of my vacation last week. I invested in a second controller for the PS2 and several two-player games. We had a blast with Rayman: Raving Rabbids, shooting rabbits Time Crisis-style. Alice says she concentrates better when she doesn't breathe. She cut my hair again, because she is patient and it was due. The end result is blatantly too short but we didn't quarrel over it (though I'm gonna need a month before I go out in public again).

We watched The Sinful Nuns Of Saint Valentine which was like an Italian Hammer Horror film with more boobs and flagellation. It was hilarious. Redemption titles are dirt cheap from certain online vendors, so I think I'll have myself a little "phase".

Rome has been good too. They aged the character of Octavian by bringing in an older actor who carefully bases his speech patterns and mannerisms on the original. I bought the transition. Pullo is still comedy and Vorenus has been better since his annoying wife (Suzie from Torchwood) died.

I was banging on about the true meaning of 'decimate' last month. It's often confused with 'dessicate' or 'exterminate'. When a Roman legion lost a battle, one tenth of the survivors were ritually stripped of their armour and beaten to death by their fellow soldiers - decimare, in Latin. The Paranoid Mod thought I would find this Photoshopped cover of The Amazing Spider-Man amusing, and he was right.

Holidaying At Home

2007-07-05T16:06:00.000Z

Midsummer's Day has passed already and I'm taking a full week off for the first time this year. Is it any wonder I felt stuck in a routine? About a month ago I considered throwing it all in for something closer to home - until I remembered that our bonus scheme pays out in October. More on that idea in November...

Including weekends and days scheduled to work from home, I'll be away from the office for eleven whole days! I worked hard last week so no-one could grumble while I was gone. The other reason I was quiet here was: I discovered the joy of Facebook. Only through sheer will power to forego half of the functions and use it like my basic internet "phone book" entry am I here now. You could waste days on that thing.

Of all the social networking sites on all the web, why did I have to sign up for this one? I suppose I didn't really get the point at first. MySpace pages seemed like blogs with no content and they assault your eyes and ears. (Your band isn't signed for a reason.) Facebook has a clean white layout and I could immediately see what was going to be useful about it. For any one of these sites to prosper, it's going to need a critical mass of people behind it and - to quote a friend who signed up recently - only "poor people and Lily Allen" use MySpace. Find me on Facebook under my real name.

I'm getting better with my new phone but still keep sending unfinished mis-spelt messages because the Clear and Send buttons are in the opposite places on my old Nokia. If you receive one, I'm not drunk.

My mail is opened, the bills are paid, the washing up's done, the laundry is on and my cupboards are no longer bare. I saw my doctor on Monday and I'm having my hair cut to match my Facebook profile tomorrow. I've had lunch with my mother, got drunk with my neighbour, been to a party in Brighton and, tonight, Phil and I will prove that you're never too old for a bit of Playstation 2. I've watched Rome, Jekyll, David Bowie in concert as Ziggy Stardust and The Kentucky Fried Movie. Plus, I've read fifty pages of a real book (the difficult kind by authors who can't draw).

This is precisely the kind of week I wanted and it's only Thursday.

Because Of The Unique Way The B.B.C. Is Funded

2007-07-03T19:13:00.000Z

Please ask the man who just did the weather on News 24 (5pm, Bank Holiday Monday) to stop making sound effects during his reports. Is his vocabulary really so bad that he can't find the words? It's not Newsround!

Also, if the announcers on BBC Three could not wander off into who's the most shaggable in the next programme, that would be nice. ITV is still there for people wot like that kind of thing.

I am available to stay focussed, on-topic and not insult the intelligence of the viewer if you are having trouble finding people.

...wrote I, trying to sound like the letters page of Private Eye.

Dear [Mr. Prefect]

Thank you for your e-mail. I understand that you felt it was inappropriate for the BBC News 24 weather presenter at 5pm on Monday the 28th May to make sound effects during his report. I also have noted that you feel that certain comments made by the continuity announcers on BBC THREE are inappropriate.

Please be assured I have registered your comments on the daily audience log which will be made available to the 'BBC News 24' production teams and senior BBC management. Feedback of this nature helps us when making decisions about future BBC programmes and your comments will play a part in this process. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you again for taking time to contact the BBC.

Regards

P McDaniel
BBC Information

I didn't expect a response but that's public service broadcasting!

Norwegian Good

2007-07-03T14:02:00.000Z

I always knew I was smart! My younger brother's only doing a Masters degree to finally get one over on his childhood nemesis (i.e. me) and now some scientists from Oslo have come out on my side. Tough break there, bro, since I got the looks too.

This new discovery is like a horoscope: I believe the parts I like and brush aside those that don't fit with my own experience... such as my own sibling achieving more academically and physically than I (on paper). Perhaps the eldest develops faster and becomes more resourceful because he/she meets the challenges of growing up head-on? Or maybe the second child benefits from having the first as a guide, chooses his/her battles more carefully and develops more steadily as a result?

I'll defer to the experts because they plainly know more than I do and their conclusion bolsters my ego. Just yesterday I saw an ad for a beauty product bragging about its "Norwegian formula" as if that were a selling point in itself, so don't be questioning the Scandinavian science!

S3E13: The Last Of The Timelords

2007-07-01T10:03:00.000Z

That was pap in every respect except the theme tune. All we needed was the plot elements of the previous two weeks to come together in a coherent and somewhat surprising way. Is that really asking so much? I'm all for pushing narrative boundaries but not at the expense of the basics.

Why wasn't David Tennant in it for more than five minutes when he's the show's greatest asset and it's him we tune in to watch? How do you book talent like John Barrowman and John Simm for fifty minutes of screen time and squander them so? What science there was in this fiction was glossed over to the point that it looked like magic and felt like Harry Potter. A shoddy end to an otherwise strong series.

I was so glad to be with friends when Doctor Who jumped the shark (he said, sarcastically). They went easy on me and didn't actually hold me responsible for the turd onscreen. At one stage, I left the room to make coffee and said to shout if anything good happened.

Human Nature, The Family Of Blood and Blink are the year's killer episodes so all that remains for me to do is i) play the arse out of that D.V.D. when it releases and ii) adjust to there being no minimum guaranteed standard of quality on the show any more. It's just like the old days!

S3E12: The Sound Of Drums

2007-06-25T12:43:00.000Z

There have been references to a powerful man called Saxon throughout this series of Doctor Who. See, the villain from last week escaped back in time to before the first episode and it's been him all along! He heh. I'm mightily impressed, especially with this concept of effects coming before their causes being "seeded" in earlier stories (cf. Queen Elizabeth's grudge in The Shakespeare Code) so the mainstream audience's collective brain doesn't implode during the finale.

The hypnotic drumming central to the plot is from the bloomin' theme tune! Metatextual, man. What am I supposed to drink for that?

Sarah-Jane's counterpart at The Sunday Mirror is wily too.

Trophy Wife and Chan'tho are to The Master as The Doctor's faithful companions are to Him. The youth, the energy, the humour... has everybody got the message that hero and villain are equals? P.S. Thank heaven for no beard!

"'The man who makes people better.' How sanctimonious is that?"

I'd like to see Her blame for Him develop but I doubt a kids' show will dwell on such stuff. (And on the seventh day, God created fan fiction.)

Methinks the script was finalised after the rumour about The Master being The Doctor's brother went around the internet, since dialogue here outright mocks the idea. Did they change their minds or did they manufacture the leak in the first place? Whichever, it's a good decision.

Karma pays out for Bitch Mother From Hell.

In 1971, The Master watched The Clangers in prison; these days, he watches Teletubbies from 10 Downing Street. How times have changed.

Nick Fury is gonna sue when he sees our aircraft carrier.

He said "decimate" then killed a tenth of the population. Yay for oft-misused words being used correctly!

I've no idea who the Toclafane are but there are several references to them being children. The Archangel Network sounds like a planet-wide Chameleon Arch to me. It would be nice if the unresolved rocket ship plot from last week was tied up but it feels like there's too much else to do now. Whatever happens, they've got a Paradox Machine so they can undo it all again by plugging it in or unplugging it or reversing its polarity.

Top Five Glastonbury-On-T.V. Moments

2007-06-24T11:36:00.000Z

The rain beat on my skylights on and off all weekend. I went out once per day for groceries. A friend and colleague from more rural parts reports bridges out and houses flooded down her way. I'm so glad I didn't go to the festival! People were mud wrestling for fun.

The B.B.C's Glastonbury mini-site has content galore (though it might not be accessible overseas). Just beware of rude, egotistical presenters like Colin Murray. Not even they could mar my enjoyment of:

5. The Mutoid Waste Co.
Not a band but a green concern that makes animated sculptures from electronic and machine waste.
4. Amy Winehouse
Played twice on different stages. What legs!
3. Lily Allen and some of The Specials
Performing Gansters.
2. The Arctic Monkeys
They played so precisely and were polite to the audience. Covering Diamonds Are Forever in tribute to Shirley Bassey, who played on Sunday, finally converted me. Alex Turner has a better voice than I knew.

1. C.S.S.
I fast-forwarded a lot of drab music this weekend so hooray for Cansei de Ser Sexy bringing the disco rock party to my living room. I danced to the kettle and back. Singer Lovefoxxx stripped off her multi-coloured catsuit to reveal a yellow one underneath and went crowd-surfing. (I read that she doesn't always bother with the second layer of clothing.)

Honourable mentions: a topless Iggy Pop falling down and staying there; Beth Ditto's bits dancing independently from the rest of her; Rufus Wainright being straight out of Will & Grace.

Splinter!

2007-06-23T11:52:00.000Z

It's on the underside of my right index finger between the knuckle and the first joint. I got it taking down a sheet from my window in the dark and forgetting about the cactus on the sill. It's the tip of a spike. I've sucked it and squeezed it and now I'm going to ignore it.

There's a patch of blood on the sheet at the foot end of my bed today. I haven't bled though. It could be chocolate pretending to be blood...

I have no travelling to do this weekend, praise be. Three people might call round at various times for tea and sympathy. If it weren't for food I might not need the outside world all weekend! Greetings from my sofa.

Glastonbudget

2007-06-18T16:56:00.000Z

Glastonbury Festival Of Contemporary Performing Arts is set to be a mudbath this weekend, according to the Met Office. I went four times in the Nineties and, luckily, only got muddy the once.

Apparently there's a new drainage system on-site this year that feeds back into the sea at Burnham - most impressive for the erstwhile "Pilton Pop Festival"! But, unless cutting-edge sewage is your thing, you should save yourself the £150 entry fee and watch it for free on the telly. You can switch between stages instantly using the red button, which sure beats ambling half-cut through a crowded throughfare with only a baguette stall and lasers in the sky as landmarks.

There aren't many essentials on the bill this year... or is that my inner thirty-something talking? Bloc Party, Arcade Fire, The Stooges and The New Pornographers would be my must-sees. I think I'd like The Killers, The Editors and The Klaxons if I heard them. For 2008, I think I'll investigate Glastonbudget: the tribute festival for tribute bands!

S3E11: Utopia

2007-06-17T13:32:00.000Z

Captain Jack's back and, to prove it's no cameo, the titles have been re-timed to squeeze John Barrowman's name in.

It's Claudius In Space! Sir Derek Jacobi says he's longed to be in two popular programmes for most of his career: this one and Coronation Street. There's no accounting for taste.

I do believe this is our first adventure on the surface of an alien planet in three years of the revived series. (New Earth doesn't count.)

I oughtn't find the feral Futurekind female crush-worthy but she's like a biker chick and a goth chick combined. Somebody knows my Achilles' Heel...

What's with Blue Insect Girl's speech pattern? The Ship translates all foreign speech into forms we recognise so why not hers? It's over-cute and irrelevant, just like the ten-year-old Scots girl put to work in a base full of a thousand adults. (Welcome to the writing of Russell T Davies. As producer, he's been the most enthusiastic spokesman for the show that we could have wished for but he writes in big blockbusting sweeps that often leave me wanting for detail and structure.)

I like the over-layed "tunnel effect" that they always use on flashbacks - until now. Boo to production inconsistencies.

"You built this system out of food and string and staples."

I suppose The Face Of Boe could have chosen his words to reference Professor Yana in a kind of Nostrodamian Hister/Hitler-like prediction, but as a pre-packaged important revelation it stinks of parmigiano. If Ol' Rubber Mouth really wanted to help, he could have said more. One thing in fiction that really annoys me is a crisis that's prolonged (or even created) by characters on the same team withholding information from one other. I knew The X-Files was bollocks when Mulder and Scully only talked about the big conspiracy in sweeps week.

Reminiscing about Rose was nice but let's hope that closes that particular book. Poor, second-tier Martha.

The Futurekind are not merry men when their lunch flies away.

He can't get into the T.A.R.D.I.S. using his Yale key because The Master has flipped the catch on the other side! Who needs technobabble?

"I know that voice!"

This episode works as pay-off to what's gone before and set-up to the finale much more than a beginning, middle and end on its own terms. Will the rocket reach Utopia and is it even real? I doubt we're supposed to care about the first thirty minutes any more now another classic villain has been dusted off. Somehow I think it won't be followed up.

I like that Jack's story ties up without needing to see Torchwood. In fact, it makes more sense if you ignore it. Shouldn't be hard.

Kudos to the Beeb for not billing this as Part 1 of 3 cos the fans knew The Master was coming back - Gene Genie from Life On Mars let slip that his co-star had been cast in the part - but we assumed the grand finale wouldn't start until next week. I can't be harsh about an episode full of cool stuff when there's another 90 minutes of story on the way.

P.S. Which incarnation of the Master was Jacobi? Was it #13 again, grown old in yet another stolen body? Why did he hide as a human? How did he know he would regenerate? Does the loss of Gallifrey mean the rules are broken? Is this how we'll get round ending the series after Doctor #13? Does the Blinovitch Limitation Effect still work? My brain hurts. Nurse!

We'll Always Have Paris

2007-06-13T16:06:00.000Z

So, the Hilton sister I love to hate actually went to jail. Then she got out and then she went back in again. She's doing the Hokey Cokey! So mature. Can we call her Paris Days Inn yet?

In case anybody is in any doubt why I don't want my as-yet-not-even-conceived daughter growing up with people for role models who had Paris Hilton for their role model, this page from the same site goes some way to summing the lady's talents up. Probably further than you want it to. (The linked page has blurred-out nudity and rude words, so it's safe for most offices. I'm not responsible for what you click from there.)

Update 2007-06-15: Stan Lee is producing an animated series for Paris to star in. Somebody please make a joke about her acting like a cartoon character all her life anyway. Thanks.

S3E10: Blink

2007-06-10T20:09:00.000Z

I don't have enough info to understand how adding a Christmas Special to the production roster means two regular episodes have to be filmed simultaneously - or why that means one episode needs to be "Doctor-lite" instead of making two episodes where He's in it half of his normal screen time or three where He's only missing a third - but it does.

Should Kathy's grandson have been able to ring the bell that summoned Sally to the door and left Kathy alone with an angel when being alone with the angel is a fundamental event in the creation of the grandson in the past? The forums at Outpost Gallifrey are usually alive with debate about what's ontologically possible in a show about a man who travels in a box that's bigger on the inside than the outside. Get some perspective!

For copyright reasons, the D.V.D. shop has films no-one has ever heard of. That can't be good for business.

Monster Voices Man makes a cameo as a policeman. I am the geek.

"This is my timey-wimey detector. Goes ding when there's stuff. Also, it can boil an egg at thirty paces - whether you want it to or not, actually, so I've learned to stay away from hens. It's not pretty when they blow."

I'm fairly certain He wouldn't take Her to the moon landing four times because it would mean crossing His own time stream. I've no idea what that means or why it's bad but it's been cited as a reason not to use the T.A.R.D.I.S. loads lately.

Making the mundane terrifying (scarecrows, statues, etc.) is one thing the show excels at. The final sequence served no purpose whatsoever except to scare the bejesus out of little people and I heartily approve!

"Got to dash. Things happening. Well, four things. Well, four things and a lizard."

Stephen Moffat is my favourite scriptwriter not least because his endings never resort to blowing things up: tonight He won with a chess move. Moffat is also the brain behind Jekyll. I hear the Fan Plan is to make that an unmitigated ratings success so the B.B.C. take him seriously when it's time to replace Russell as producer on Who. Sounds good to me.

Have we been on a roll since the break for Eurovision or what? Next time: the return of Captain Jack AND Sir Derek Jacobi!

Black Dog Day

2007-06-10T16:08:00.000Z

I have to tell you about last Wednesday - one of those days when, if it can go wrong, it bloody well will.

I awoke with a headache but that was nobody's fault by mine. I took milk, juice, eggs and whatever else a person needs to get going in the mornings. I showered then answered the door to a bailiff, come to take away my possessions in lieu of taxes. He left with a cheque for $900 instead which I now need to claim back in this mess o' red tape. (They can't fine you more than you owe and I am certain that I owe zero - I was either working abroad or back here on P.A.Y.E. for the year in question.)

I tried to go to Holland for a meeting. I'd begged to fly from Bristol Airport because it's ten miles from my house. Roadworks cost me thirty minutes and I waited nineteen more for the every-twenty-minutes bus from the car park to the terminal. When I got there, there was still twenty minutes til take-off but the flight was boarding and I couldn't check-in.

I was booked on the next available flight at no extra cost, which makes me suspect the first one was over quota. But I wasn't about to argue. You make your own luck to a degree: if you start shouting at people because you're having a bad time, you're probably going to make things worse for yourself. I smiled and whistled Black Dog by Led Zeppelin. The (same) bus driver said I looked upbeat for a man who just missed a flight.

I went home for a cuppa. I called Alice to laugh at my luck so far. I called my doctor to be told my repeat prescription had been ready for four days. The drugs are good but they don't make me psychic! I'd been 'clean' for ten days by then, which is like Winalot Prime to a black dog. So I took my 'smack' and made my flight on time the second time.

Overheard In (And Near) Meetings

2007-06-09T00:33:00.000Z

"Expansion is only exciting if you get a thrill out of the work in the first place. If you don't then it's just a bunch more shit you've got to do."

"Have you been to Ireland before?"
"Of course. My father is from Aberdeen."

"I see a chicken and I want it painted black."

"Every time someone goes into the toilet, the lights go out in here."

"We're doing some new activities in Butlin's holiday camps. If you're not familiar with Butlin's in England, the people that go there are the same ones you see throwing up at Schipol airport. On the way in."

"Don't give me that 'meandering river' shit!"

That last one had airquotes and a hand gesture for the river. JH, HB and I kept catching each other's eyes and we were all on the verge of busting up laughing at inappropriate times.

S3E09: The Family Of Blood

2007-06-03T15:17:00.000Z

Baines is an instant-classic villain and he's a schoolboy. I prefer a villain that you can look in the eyes so it's a good thing that bodysnatching aliens are also very easy on the F/X budget.

The tears on the schoolboys' faces as they machine-gunned the advancing enemy put a lump in my throat and Daughter Of Mine (a little girl with a red balloon) daring them to shoot her was sinfully good!

David Tennant will look like Bill Nighy when he's older.

Five epilogue scenes?! The Return Of The King has a lot to answer for.

"He still visits my sister once a year, every year. I wonder if one day he might forgive her. But there she is - can you see? He trapped her inside a mirror. Every mirror. If ever you look at your reflection and see something move behind you, just for a second, that's her. That's always her."

So it wasn't The Doctor's usual ingenuity that saved the day but the sacrifice of a human, John Smith. We saw the fulfilled life that He wasn't going to get to live any more and how much He didn't want to let it go. The Doctor dished out vengeful punishments like the lord of time and space that He really is - not the man that ran and hid at the beginning of the story because it was the most compassionate solution for all concerned. I was speechless - if you don't count saying "this is so good!" every two minutes - and Alice needed a tissue. That was great television.

S3E08: Human Nature

2007-06-02T13:16:00.000Z

Last Sunday I fiddled with the Mod's video recorder until it recognised Freeview and my reward was taping the re-run of Doctor Who when we went out. Phew! I wouldn't have missed this story for all the tea in China.

The teaser scenes get better and better: this time, we're under attack from an enemy that can follow us anywhere in space and time AND the Doctor's adventures as we know them are only dreams. Beat that, other shows!

"Tell me, Jones... with hands like those, how can you tell when something's clean?"

Life imitates art somewhat with this episode's love interest, Jessica Hynes from Spaced, who recently changed her stage name to her married name. I guess she finally decided he was a keeper. I find that very romantic.

The metaphor of dancing for carnal relations continues. Drink an aphrodisiac (and put your rubber dancing boots on).

John Smith's Journal Of Impossible Things is the prop that every fanboy wants for Christmas. How warmed were the cockles of my heart to see the face of the forgotten Doctor, Paul McGann, in the middle of the page?

Invisible spaceships are easy on the F/X budget.

The ship has a chameleon circuit and a chameleon "arch"? You can teach an old dog new mythology!

"The Doctor has an eye for the ladies. A girl in every fireplace."

5. The fifth rule of T.A.R.D.I.S. Club is never talk about T.A.R.D.I.S. Club.
6. Don't feed me after midnight.
7. Wake me up when I'm Peter Davison.

The new series is now long enough in the tooth to do a Best Monsters flashback.

Machine guns at school seem odd, even in 1913 with a war brewing. If it ain't a set-up for shooting some aliens later then I'll eat my hat.

There were too many great lines this week. You'll just have to watch it. Martha is so capable compared to her predecessor (Her "sardines and jam" scene, for instance). Rose was lovely but they simply didn't give Billie Piper this kind of meat to work with. And The Amazing Tennant got to play a brand new character, albeit quite a Doctor-ish one. Here's hoping Part Two tonight doesn't cock it all up.

Games And Fun

2007-05-31T21:50:00.000Z

London: When working a Saturday isn't a waste.

Have your photo taken with the first family of animation.
I want an X-box.
Breaking news from Space Channel 5.
Say hello to Rosie from London.
These aren't the nerds we're looking for.
Wig out!

I got lost north of the Thames looking for the South Circular. The signs suggested that it and the Woolwich ferry were two different routes when they are, in fact, one and the same. To an out-of-towner armed with only his wits and a map, it wasn't obvious at all.

Brighton: The Paranoid Mod (and Mrs. Mod) showered me with hospitality: coffee, ghoulash, shampoo and improved sleeping arrangements. The Rose Hill is still a fine pub. I didn't want to like Basquiat's new fella but he made it impossible not to.

She and I made a lousy Trivial Pursuit team on Sunday. It was four wedges vs. one when we conceded in a huff at the outdated questions. Much has changed since the Mod got his original copy of the game twenty years ago - not least what passes for acceptable grammar in a board game. We corrected it in biro. Back at Mod Towers, three of us played Rizla Head: with no conferring, we all chose female singers. In round two, again by chance, we were all historical figures... and two of us were Joan of Arc!

Fun And Games

2007-05-31T19:41:00.000Z

Since Ireland, I've been to Reading, Oxford, London and Brighton. Leaving the house is the new staying in. Next week I go to Holland so I need to share some tales before that part of my brain fills with fresh nonsense!

Reading: Is where I work. No big whoop. Keep READING.

Dublin: My V.I.P. was A.W.O.L. all weekend so I ambled around outside, which is where you must go to smoke now or face a $3000 fine. England goes smoke-free soon and I'm prepared for it following Ireland; I welcome the kind of camaraderie I saw there. I also saw how this city squandered its millennium money (cf. the Millenium Dome/Eye/Square) and the only bridge in Europe that's wider than it is long.

I returned to the internet cafe and met Sophia from France. We got confused over our different pronunciations of "hierarchy" and she theorised that Torchwood had no moral code. (I swear I didn't start it.) We had a drink but, predictably, she had to leave to meet her girlfriend. They're either too married, too young, too into girls or have too many kids - or I don't meet them. It's the rule that makes my love life funny.

I met a colleague in Bruxelles then walked back to The Burlington (i.e. my gaff), stopping to donate to the Anglo-Czech Integration Fund en route. I was pleased to meet Veronika and Iveta. They cheered me up about cancelling a trip to Nottingham with Phil for a work-related wild goose chase. Veronika was the better dancer.

Oxford: Alice chided me for the above then cooked a fine meal.

Top Five Beatles Lyrics

2007-05-30T19:38:00.000Z

Mmmm. Tonight I had an amazing hot bath with The Beatles' Love album on and the ceiling light was so bright that the pattern of the water reflected back onto the ceiling. The waves made different shapes as I moved and I soon figured out that moving in time to the music produced more synchronized visuals. There it is: I've invented bath dancing.

I didn't buy Love on release because I thought it was a compilation of their love songs, like 1 was a Number 1s anthology. D'oh! It's so good. Paul McCartney allegedly suggested the Martins (the producers) went "further out" with it and I can't help agree, though it's still a grand hour-and-a-bit's listen with many impressive sequences.

I hold my nose and submerge to wash my hair in the bath, and I realised I was playing A Day In The Life too loud when I could still hear it underwater. Sorry, neighbours! We were miles from the crescendo too. But who doesn't like The Beatles, with their three phases and acid-influenced lyrics?

5. A Day In The Life (1967).
A crowd of people turned away/But I just had to look
Having read the book
4. Polythene Pam (1969).
Get a dose of her in jackboots and kilt
She's killer-diller when she's dressed to the hilt
She's the kind of a girl that makes the News of the World
Yes, you could say she was attractively built
3. Norwegian Wood (1965).
I once had a girl/Or should I say she once had me?
2. I Am The Walrus (1967).
Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye
1. Back In The U.S.S.R. (1968).
Show me round your snow-peaked mountains way down south
Take me to your daddy's farm
Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out
Come and keep your comrade warm

Their worst lyric is the second line of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

S3E07: 42

2007-05-24T14:13:00.000Z

Today I suffered the final episodes of the worst series of 24 ever. Let's see what Doctor Who can do with the real time format: a spaceship is falling into a sun and He only has forty-two minutes to save everybody...

There's our digital clock, counting down. There'll be one in every room on this boat.

Why tell the captain what's going on in the med room when you can say something suspenseful instead? So 24.

Glasses! The return of the super-phone! I'd drink except there isn't a quiet moment to pour.

"Any number that reduces to one when you take the sum of the square of its digits and continually treat it until it yields one is a happy number. Any number that doesn't, isn't. A happy prime is a number that's both happy and prime. Now type it in! I don't know... talk about dumbing down. Don't they teach recreational mathematics any more?"

Corwin puts a helmet on so he can do better stunts later.

Martha's phone number is 07711 911905. (It goes straight to voicemail and the mailbox is full. I tried.)

Nobody on this ship is on first name terms - not even the husband and wife!

Remind me to put the controls on the inside of the spaceship next time.

The last ten minutes of countdown was almost precisely ten minutes of screen time, thus robbing me of an easy nit-pick. We're so conditioned to expect a countdown timer to stop with a second or two spare that my brain had to play catch-up when this one reached zero. The crisis was averted but there wasn't time to turn the clock off too.

She's snogging her way around the galaxy like Captain Kirk. Go, girl!

That was better than I expected from the chief writer on Torchwood, which was light on character development and heavy on running around. Flaws like that become virtues under the real time format: things happen without perfect causality under pressure, especially when working out why what's happening is happening is part of the puzzle. You don't have to know the bit-part characters inside out to not want people to die, etc.

Can we have more Sinister Woman from Hollyoaks, please?

Stupid Lyric Of The Month

2007-05-21T19:38:00.000Z

I like the way you work it/No diggity
I'd like to bag it up

- No Diggity by BLACKstreet. It's bad music but those lines had me coughing smoke out through my nose one moment ago.

Top Five-ish Things Wrong With Spider-Man 3

2007-05-20T15:43:00.001Z

With great expectation comes great responsibility. No-one's gonna go George Lucas on Sam Raimi's ass because this sequel is far from an embarrassment - in moments it shows more complexity and maturity than its predecessors - but it ultimately disappoints. Here's why:

7. The locket didn't turn to sand when everything else did.
6. According to dialogue, Eddie Brock works at the Daily Bugle in Spider-Man (film one) but here he's trying to get hired. This one could be the son of the former and photography could run in the family but why create confusion for no reason? Why not pay off your set-up?
5. Not enough May or Jonah and no Alex Ross.
4. Ret-conning Ben Parker's death.
3. Peter and Mary-Jane's relationship faltering through a lack of communication like an average soap opera couple when I credit them both with more brains than that.
2. The Osborn butler waiting until now to speak up when he could have done so years ago and saved Harry ALL of his anguish.
1. Telling an even worse version of Venom's story than in the comics!

By featuring two villains (plus whatever Harry's doing this week) and adding only ten minutes to the run time, we can't explore either of them very fully. Sandman first trying to assemble in his new form was surprisingly emotional for an all-C.G.I. scene. They should've concentrated on him and the new suit and had the "creation" of Venom as a cliffhanger leading into Spider-Man 4. Why have the goo arrive by random meteor shower when Mary Jane's ex is an astronaut? Why have Eddie fake pictures of our hero robbing a bank when, in the comics, the suit committed crimes when Peter was unconscious and Spider-Man got the blame that way? Etc.

There was much I liked about the film. I'd rather see something new and imperfect than a re-tread of what's gone before, though that's not a popular view. If "1" scored a 7 and 2 got a 9 then 3 is a 5.

Green And Windy

2007-05-19T14:57:00.000Z

Greetings from Dublin. I'm here for work though there's no work to do yet because the V.I.P. visitor I was sent here to chaperone has yet to show herself. I can't help my colleagues with what they're doing (different skill sets, innit) so I've had a tasty pub lunch and now I'm in an internet cafe on O'Connell Street. It's 0-0 at halftime in the F.A. Cup Final as I write this.

I forgot to record any T.V. while I'm away so those of you enjoying the respite from Doctor Who - and judging by the number of comments on recent articles, there's a fair few of ya - are safe until at least Tuesday.

This trip was last minute so work approved a four-star hotel because it was all that was available in the city. I was assigned Room 420 (no snickering, please). Unfortunately, it was over a ballroom where a party raged until 0200 and I played Name That Tune for hours using only basslines.

According to the first of two hilarious taxi drivers, the local lasses have the permanent hump with all the Czech and Polish women living here now because the local men think they're exotic. I couldn't possibly comment. The head receptionist, Charlene, is a cutie with rock chick hair and a mixed up accent proving that she worked in the U.S.A. for a year or so, just like me. But what am I going to do about it? Nothing. I'm so over the distance thing and my appetite for the one-night thing has waned too. I don't know why I'm sharing this, but I am!

My hour here is up - more later or Tuesday.

Hitch-Hiking In The Real World

2007-05-13T23:57:00.000Z

I couldn't get www.fordprefect.blogspot.com as my U.R.L. because it was already taken and, three years later, I find it's not even being used. Ford Prefect is a dick!

Google 'ford prefect' and this site is your 8th result. Pretty neat, huh? (It must be one of the two pages mentioning pornography.) The others are for some guy from The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy and the car.

Douglas Adams also named Hotblack Desiato, a rock star in some versions of The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe story, after something in the real world. Alta Vista's Babel Fish translation site (see sidebar), on the other hand, is clearly based on the book and not the other way around.

Blogging under a fictional name is easier than making up your own and an easy way to get hits. Arthur Dent found me, as did Slartibartfast, though I think she goes by a different name these days. Can you blame her? There are Zarniwoops, Tricia McMillans, you name it. It would be quite interesting to see whether distinct types of people in real life identify with the same characters - all the egoists with Zaphod, for example. Blogger itself uses Stavromula Beta as the name of the fictional blog on its How To pages. It's the height of fashion, don't you know?

Listen To Him!

2007-05-13T12:41:00.000Z

Growing up in Bristol, I found the coarse accent to be a real barrier to finding girls attractive. On the rare occasion that I plucked up the nerve to approach one the fantasy would crumble the moment she spoke.

Bristol is a large city in the otherwise rural South West, so you get the worst of both worlds and sound like a farmer in a hurry. A friend is involved in the commercial redevelopment of central Bristol and, allegedly, several retailers were reluctant to invest because they thought all Bristolians were like Vicki Pollard in Little Britain! The Powers That Be made a promotional video featuring Cliftonites to convince them otherwise.

Beast Clothing in St. Nick's Market sells a nice line of t-shirts celebrating local places and phrases. I understand most of them because I'm native. How many can you decipher?

The Spoiled Life

2007-05-10T18:24:00.000Z

Paris Hilton is a stupid selfish whore. Oh, be as rude about her as you like! She's famous for having sex on video, taking drugs on video and being racist on video so she can't accuse other people of lowering the tone.

Paris Hilton is going to jail. Probably. Her counsel went with the I-forgot-I-was-banned-from-driving-when-I-drove defence because it's vacuous enough to be true, but she got 45 days of glorious incarcertion anyway. Try showing a paparazzo your coochie from in there. You can't, can you? Where's your rat-dog now?

But Paris Hilton thinks she deserves special treatment and has petitioned Gov. Schwarznegger to intervene. People who think celebrities (and I use the term loosely, like I called her a "woman") should not be above the law are counter-petitioning. Please, Lord, give us this one thing.

S3E06: The Lazarus Experiment

2007-05-07T19:30:00.000Z

Dig the "fun undies", Martha. An auspicious opening if ever there was!

I blame the parents. If Richard Lazarus were born of, say, Mr. and Mrs. Moses instead then might he have been less obsessed with building a dangerous rejuvenation machine and more into, say, mounting climbing?

Dig the tattoo, Martha. She looks stunning tonight. His pulse must be up too because He ain't pining for Rose any more.

The final taboo on television: young men smooching old women. Tish looks up for a bit of trans-generational action too. I can't watch.

There's a Pertwee-ness about this adventure (and plenty of The Fly, of course) but I'm getting a Davison vibe too, particularly off Mark Gatiss. He's older than me - too old for Davison to be his childhood Doctor - but his is an informed performance. He's written two of the better balanced scripts for the new series and he's pitching this villain just so. Bravo, sir!

I wasn't watching the clock so I thought it was really wrapping up when there was an off-screen crash and another ten minutes of fun to go!

"We need to turn this up to eleven."

He hung out with Beethoven. Everybody drink schnapps.

Well, that was a rollicking ride. You can keep your Face Of Boe intrigue-by-sledge-hammer: mysterious men whispering lies (reminiscent of Our Ten in The Christmas Invasion) is more my cup of tea. Mr. Saxon is finally "in play" and didn't he look psychotic in that trailer? Was he tapping out the theme tune on the table there? The post-modern nerve of him. I know they put the best bits in trailers but I think we're in for some blinders. "Ruuuun!"

The Eurovision Song Contest's next week so geek off until the 19th.

Superhero Comics Are A Lot Like Soap Operas

2007-05-03T14:08:00.000Z

With mild spoilers for comics fans and wild boredom for escapism-o-phobes.

The Marvel Universe is a sprawling mess of current fan favourites, has-beens and relaunches spanning sixty years of "it seemed like a good idea at the time". Marvel.com recently opened up its hero database (wiki-style) in case the public can remember more than the staffers. Take the picture of the cast of Civil War waiting for a big bus below: I can name twenty heroes with certainty - and me, a fan. Explaining Pat from EastEnders' family tree would take less effort.

Civil War was one of those annual blockbuster events that promised to change the Marvel Universe forever (again) but, for once, it lived up to the hype. Following a televised superhero tussle in Connecticut in which a school full of children becomes collateral damage, the U.S. Government passes the Superhero Registration Act forcing mutants to reveal their identities and undergo training. Many comply but as many refuse, to protect their families and their freedom.

For kids who wonder who would win if Iron Man fought Spider-Man, it's hero vs. hero in knock-down drag-out action. For the politically aware, The Neutral Zone is Abu Ghraib, the S.R.A. is the Patriot Act, and Steve Rogers is Michael Moore. Captain America leads the resistance, standing for the principles upon which the country was founded rather than siding with the current administration out of blind loyalty. Also, each issue of the Civil War: Front Line mini-series ends with a short story comparing the comic's events to real historical conflicts. (#3 reprints Futility by Wilfred Owen.)

Like soaps, comics rarely end. Successes spawn spin-offs (cf. The Colbys). Spider-Man has two or three ongoing titles each month because Marvel really pushes the limits of a Spider-fan's spending ability. "If we put Spidey and Wolverine in The Avengers then do you think it'll sell like hot cakes too?" It did and, somewhere online, a fan is trying to explain how Peter Parker does all these things at once.

A staggering twenty books carry the Civil War banner. The main story is told in bold strokes in one. For insight into why a particluar hero chose the side they did, you need to read that hero's own comic for the duration of the war. (In the soap opera analogy, the main book is a brouhaha in the Queen Vic pub on a Friday night. The other books are the "kitchen sink" scenes where Stacy tells the milkman she's been sleeping with Max and Tanya switches dairies so you know a storm is brewing because it's a bank holiday weekend and everyone will want an extra pint.)

For the full play-by-play, read the first issues of every title before all the second chapters, and so on. But that's expensive. Reckon I'll go about six books deep for now and end up buying The Mighty Avengers (ongoing) on top of The New Avengers because the team split during the war. It was a moral decision and not a strategy to double sales at all.

Internal Chronometer

2007-05-03T08:55:00.000Z

Good morning, campers. I have an hour to decide if I want to go to Dublin today. Boss Man and I were supposed to go last Thursday but somebody booked the flights for the wrong week. So it's pre-paid and everything. Now I know why airlines over-book.

I've been in bed before midnight twice lately. I slept so much on the weekend that I couldn't sleep overnight on Sunday. I read, gamed, had a nap at 0700 and went to work as normal. I prefer to sleep when I'm tired and eat when I'm hungry (instead of at some pre-approved bed or meal time). It's easy when you're single.

19 times out of 20 in the course of a day I can guess the time to within five minutes. It was freakish at first, never being wrong, but when you're surrounded by clocks like I am it probably just means I'm attentive. The day I glanced at the bottom corner of a book to tell the time was the day I knew I was spending too much time online.

Frag Party

2007-04-30T16:38:00.000Z

You should de-fragment your hard drives regularly. I'm easily distracted though, and my good intentions stay intentions. I transferred a ton of downloads to The Speedboat (so called because it has the same aerodynamic design as my last external hard drive but this one is big enough to drive to France in) which helped my speed but not as much as when I finally de-fragged. Please learn from my mistake.

A good free tool for spring cleaning is Crap Cleaner. It flushes out your temp and cache files in seconds so you don't have to go digging around in different folders and programs. Though remember to keep your cookie for any site that gives you a hard time logging in, like bastard Flickr.com.

This seems an appropriate time to share how much I'm enjoying "middle clicking" in Internet Explorer 7. Say a Hail Mary if you can't control the urge to tell me to change to Firefox!

Before you log off, you might wanna grab the latest tunes to get me to work awake and on time. This time there's a tracklist so you can decide up-front if they're worth the jail time:

Where Everybody Knows Your Name ~ Gary Portnoy
Song With A Mission ~ The Sounds
Three Or Four ~ The New Pornographers
Chills ~ Peter, Bjorn & John
Low Happening ~ Howling Bells
I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor ~ The Sugababes
The Safety Dance ~ Men Without Hats
War Of Confusion ~ Edwin Starr/Genesis (arr. The Kleptones)
Snow Flower ~ Ananda Shankar
Fidelity ~ Regina Spektor
Waiting To Know You ~ The Fiery Furnaces
Eleanor Rigby ~ The Handsome Family with The Rivet Gang
Lady Madonna (Love version) ~ The Beatles (arr. George & Giles Martin)
Bennie & The Jets ~ Elton John
You Know My Name ~ Chris Cornell & David Arnold
Horsemen ~ The Bees
She's Not There ~ The Zombies
Devil's Answer ~ Atomic Rooster
Wishing Well ~ Free

S3E05: Evolution Of The Daleks

2007-04-28T21:04:00.000Z

Part Two is where a Doctor Who story either surpasses the previous week's set-up or descends into an action-packed mess where the good guys win by exploiting dissention in the bad guys' ranks or by blowing a lot of things up. The first is dissatisfying because the established threat is reduced and our heroes don't face the enemy at full strength like you thought they would, and the second is just lazy writing. What kind of Part Two will it be? That's the real suspense of a cliffhanger ending.

Tired of staircases foiling all their plans for world domination, the Daleks installed anti-grav technology. So now everyone escapes up manholes and the Daleks are investigating slimming technology.

Dalek Jast looked over his shoulder to make sure no-one would hear him badmouth Dalek Sec. I think he's got the Human Factor already.

Glasses! Shot glasses.

What have lightning, solar flares and gamma radiation got in common? Search me, but for the purposes of this story they're all the same thing. Throw in some D.N.A. splicing and the science gets muddier from there. It's fiction so I'm not saying it's wrong per se but it IS a big bag of bollocks.

"YOU TOLD US TO I-MAG-INE AND WE I-MAG-INED YOUR IR-RE-LE-VANCE!"

People with different accents speaking in unison sounds odd. Try it.

The companion just killed a bunch of people. Yay for getting your hands dirty! Somebody should have smelled bacon.

Did the Daleks blast through the roof of the sewer to get into the theatre? It looked like they appeared in a puff of stage smoke.

So dissent did do the Daleks in in the end. But there were no deus ex machinae so my storytelling sensibilities haven't been offended. Despite a rubber-masked villain and Darth Vader getting away for a sequel I'm a reasonably happy camper. The extra story time could have been spent on something more original but there are more two-parters coming up. And I'm really glad the Daleks didn't "evolve" into something that the B.B.C. wouldn't have to pay royalties on next year (as I thought would happen).

Next week: Tennant in a tux.

Next Christmas: Kylie freakin' Minogue!

Bad Memory

2007-04-28T11:52:00.000Z

My bed is the most comfortable sleep in the world (claimed Ford, reasoning that, in a Berkeleyan sense, we all perceive our own personal worlds. In his, he knew no better sleep). Anyone doubting this hard fact should email me for an appointment.

My mattress has no springs. (A rusty spring under a college dorm bed scarred me for life aged sixteen, but that's a story for another day.) It has little compartments of memory foam so you can move around and your cup o' Java sitting one foot away won't spill. The "memory" part describes how the mattress moulds to the contours of your body over time, like the memory cloth from Batman Begins.

The downside is that I sleep alone at least five nights a week so there's a me-shaped groove down the middle of the bed that I can't turn off when I have company. Two people trying to sleep on either side of this valley will inevitably end up rolling together in the centre. On second thoughts, it's not really a downside at all.

Ford Bunks Off, Skives And Thoroughly Plays Hooky

2007-04-24T16:45:00.000Z

It's been a while since my last confession. (Guess I have less of a guilty conscience these days. I assure you I'm still having buckets of fun.)

Today I woke up sweating following a nightmare where my nose wouldn't stop running and my mother told me off for looking at pornography when it never bothered her before. I cancelled a 0930 meeting in London and went back to bed. After lunch, I rigged a duvet cover up to my blinds so I can play Playstation during the daytime. A game is loaded but I haven't touched the controller because I even skive half-assed.

Lest someone from work should find this, never to confuse a good story with the truth. This is a somewhat-sanitised, occasionally-entertaining version of what the truth might look like. As viewed through a prism. In a dark room. If you're wearing a bag on your head and facing the wrong way. Beware Of The Leopard and all that.

S3E04: Daleks In Manhattan

2007-04-22T20:00:00.000Z

Daleks are B-movie villains par excellence so I dig the hokey episode name and wish it had an exclamation mark. The city is an island, however, so wouldn't Daleks On Manhattan be more accurate?

He's changed suit again but She has nothing else to wear. I assume there's a T.A.R.D.I.S. laundry room or the bad guys will smell Her approaching.

I realise I have a strong preference for historical stories: the production values on any B.B.C. period drama are sharp enough for the writer not to have to hard-sell the setting. Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue and the gorgeous Chrysler buidling place you in mere seconds. As a bonus, I learned about Hoovervilles and Alice learned about the Mole People.

Captain Panaka from Star Wars: Episode I isn't crap in this.

The typo in the newspaper headline has changed... to a different typo.

Last week's episode ended with a fast pan up from street level through several floors of a building to the busy skyline of New New York. This week we pan up from the sewers to a schematic of the unfinished Empire State Building, coming to rest near the top. The camera then pulls back to reveal the next scene (in a room near the top of the building) where this diagram is being discussed. Style, baby. Pure style.

"He's into musical theatre, huh? What a waste."

Dalek Sec tells Diagoras to shut up. Daleks mean so much business, they don't even have time to be ass-kissed by their underlings.

A brain is one of the more unusual things He's ever put in His pockets.

She name-dropped meeting Shakespeare. Everybody drink a ladies' drink!

The Cult Of Skaro was created to think "outside of the box" so it's no surprise that their brilliant plan is for Daleks to live outside of their boxes! Points for the best ever realisation of a Dalek mutant, using C.G.I. instead of rubber. The lashing tentacles even make a cliffhanger from Genesis Of The Daleks seem less naff in retrospect.

"They survived. They always survive while I lose everything."

A musical number! Note to other writers: you can get away with murder if you're telling a compelling story in the first place.

I have issues with the catchphrase "I'm so sorry" being used by other people. The coincidence tests my suspension of disbelief unnecessarily.

This episode had two things stacked against it before it began though neither was the fault of the production team. The B.B.C.'s own Radio Times magazine spoiled the ending on its cover, killing any shock and surprise stone dead. And the earlier start time for the episode meant that sunshine washed out the picture being projected on my living room wall. Despite that, I found the episode hard to fault. The story is far-fetched and they used That Jaws Shot to make the ending as O.T.T. as possible but the characters behaved as if the danger was serious and real, which is precisely how I like my escapism.

The Wisdom Of Clowns

2007-04-21T16:52:00.000Z

I spend enough time on Wikipedia even though one if its founders thinks the whole "wisdom of crowds" concept is broken beyond repair. Half the things I Google return Wikipedia results anyway.

Searching for an Oscar Wilde quote today, I found Uncyclopedia - the "content-free" encyclopedia with a potato for its emblem. What is it with root vegetables and satire?

S3E03: Gridlock

2007-04-15T23:36:00.000Z

Two unknowns die (pre-credits) and their television plays on. It could happen to me!

Points to whoever put seats in the T.A.R.D.I.S. control room when they revamped it for the new series. Tennant makes such a good show out of flying it short-handed that he deserves to sit down once in a while.

Whenever He dipped into Time Lord folklore/mythology with Rose, He told it mostly straight so a new audience could learn it with her. With Martha, there's a nice ambiguity: we know His planet is gone now (if it ever actually existed following the Time War) but, this time, He uses the opportunity to reminisce and leaves Her in the dark re: the truth.

Ol' Rubber Face is back. Why is there such a gap between the quality of the digital effects and the quality of the prosthetics on new Doctor Who?

A distraught woman ignores His advice and takes an anmnesia drug to forget about her missing parents. So He asks her again about her missing parents. That's cold.

Ardal O'Hanlan's doing his Father Dougal routine but that's grand, so it is.

Allow me to rephrase: why is there such a gap between the excellent cats and all the other prosthetics in the series?

I like this Motorway concept but if you knew you'd get five miles in twelve years wouldn't you walk instead? The streets are deserted. It would be more ironic if it was called The Freeway but this is a rare case of pandering to British viewers.

The grain cake made of recycled waste looks like wholewheat...

"We've got contact with [the other cars]. Well, some of them anyway. They've got to be on your Friends List."

Over on Heimlich Maneuvers, the good Dr. plays a drinking game during his 24 reviews. He takes a shot whenever anyone sets up a "perimeter", goes "data mining" or when Jack says, "dammit!" I feel the catchphrases and motifs on new Who ought to be similarly recognised. Support for alternative lifestyles has been a motif of the new series so we take a shot for the old gay couple and another for the woman who mated with a cat.

He name-dropped meeting Janis Joplin. Drink! And I'll buy a drink for the first person to explain the link between her and a long brown coat.

The vertical sequence (climbing down the cars) just zipped by. Encore! It's funnier when you know they redressed the same set for each interior. The nudist car was, predictably, my favourite. God love the gay man in charge for remembering all the dads watching.

The Macra are here! They're doing nothing any brainless monster couldn't do! The Macra are gone! That was pointless.

He's wearing glasses. Is that drink-worthy?

"I've invented a sport!"

I promise I won't be this big a killjoy every week but wasted potential really gets my goat. The first twenty minutes tonight introduced clear parameters for the story: a contained world, characters with believable motivation, danger, a rescue-quest and some neat S.F. ideas worthy of Philip K. Dick (whose dystopian futures are imitated here). On its own it would've made a strong Part One in the old four-part format.

In the second half, the Doctor was transported to the resolution of the story where someone else explained what was going on and provided a push-button solution to it all in the very same room. He pushed the button and, instead of rescuing Her, sent Her a flight path home. It's like the middle act (where our hero works out what's really going on and uses elements of the story that have already been introduced in His ingenious solution) was just absent. Why/when/how did the Macra come to New Earth and set up shop in a man-made structure? What happens if you wear two conflicting mood patches at once? Who's the villain of the piece and how will they be brought to justice? Without an opposing force, it's yet another tale about technology run amok with the ending from THX1138.

My brain gave up on this episode when the writers gave up on telling me a good story. The little I know about next week has me giddy though.

Nice Weather For Lizards

2007-04-15T15:28:00.000Z

or Here Comes The Sun Hing

Not so long ago, I was getting strategic with the timer on my swanky underfloor heating system because the days were too cold to leave it to chance. March brought slight respite from the rain and wind but you still wouldn't have set your watch by it. Then, suddenly, yesterday was balls-out hot. I literally undressed at one point and let the breeze blow across me before it escaped upstairs and out of the skylight.

Contrast this with Thursday, when I left the window open overnight and woke up with a headache... or Friday, when I left the towel rail on in the bathroom to dry laundry (but the door was closed, creating a 'hot box' beneath the bedroom) and I sweated all night. Do I need mothering or what?

Yesterday was great weather for an F.A. Cup semi-final though the vibe in my house was less about Watford beating Manchester and more about either side winning quickly, or else! When the crisis was averted, I celebrated with duck chow mein from Sun Hing on Stapleton Road. On a day so hot, the last thing I'd do at home is switch on an oven.

Invasive Procedures

2007-04-13T19:35:00.000Z

A friend of mine has been in his job for years but recently the company was bought by an American firm. Now it's introduced random drug and alcohol testing. This appears to be legal in the U.S. but here there's controversy because it probably contradicts the 1998 Human Rights Act. (Europeans have rights, you know. Rights feel good.)

This really is about a friend of mine and not me, by the way. Though I think I'm more outraged by it than he is. It's obviously not a good idea to show up to work drunk or hungover but, beyond that, if your private life isn't affecting your output, it shouldn't be any of your employer's business. Your performance reviews have always been tip-top and your supervisor is totally happy with you but they won't call you loyal until they can take something out your body to prove it? I don't want to live in a world where this is considered normal. For our children's sake, resist!

Of course, in certain judgmental circles, objecting to being tested on moral grounds is an admission of being a filthy drug-using scumbag yourself and you'll be branded before anyone else gets their results back from the lab. There are safer ways to "fight the pee-sniffers".

My local hypermarket sells divorce paperwork packs now, near the A/V section. They should do Request To Test forms next - though don't buy one in Bristol or the first question is likely to be, What's the big deal stealing my tetrahydracannabinol (T.H.C.) when I paid for it? Rasklaat.

Hefty Surcharge Brings Controversy

2007-04-12T23:20:00.000Z

The H.S.B.C. is in the news again. One week ago, it announced record profits of $22 billion. Now one British branch won't serve customers unless they have $100,000 in savings or pay a monthly subscription.

I wish this came as more of a surprise. When I worked for the bank (eight years ago) I saw no such discrimination but the trend has become apparent recently. The neighbourhood I live in is not an affluent one and there isn't a branch of any bank nearby. Why open one only to have it be your worst-performing branch? Everybody's got targets, people, even when we expect them to provide a darned service first and foremost. More "premier branches" are surely on the way.

There are three private A.T.M.s in the vicinity that I can use. The nearest is in the foyer of a massage parlour (so if you see me ducking out of there, I didn't just get the lunch hour special). So the banks back off from low-income areas, the independent contractors move in and charge you a fee for accessing your own money, and the locals just get poorer!

Have you seen the dollar exchange rate lately? Let's all go to America! Or somewhere fun that uses greenbacks, like East Timor.

Top Five Heroes

2007-04-09T22:54:00.000Z

5. Matt Parkman, mind reading
4. Micah Sanders, influence over electronics
3. Eden McCain, power of persuasion
2. Peter Petrelli, absorption of other super powers
1. Hiro Nakamura, manipulation of space/time

That would be my Top Five Characters From Heroes, my current favourite bit of escapism (yes, better even than that thing with the Time Lord) rather than my Top Five Heroes Of All Time or From Marvel Or D.C. Comics. Influenced ever-so-slightly by which super-power I'd most like to have! We've been having some lovely Spring weather lately and I've noticed most of it through the window to my left as I watch television.

So what's so great about Heroes?

5. Each episode looks the proverbial million dollars, with sumptous colours and daring comicky compositions.
4. It's made up of several mini-arcs for each character which resolve/evolve every three or four episodes, rather than leaving you dangling unsatisfied for years like Lost or confused with irrelevancies like 24. In related news, you are absolutely rewarded for making the effort to see every episode.
3. Mr. Bennet (played by Jack Coleman).
2. The subtitles in scenes with Hiro and Ando have a habit of drifting up near the characters' mouths where speech bubbles are normally drawn. They play with the font size for shouting and whispering too!
1. For all of the above reasons and more, it feels more like a modern Marvel comic brought to life than any big screen outing save the universally-acclaimed Spider-Man films.

Heroes will be on the B.B.C. in a few months when Sci-Fi Channel here finishes the U.K. first run.

Update 2007-04-10: The original prop painting of the eclipse above by Tim Sale was auctioned by N.B.C. for $7,650. The series' core painting (the cheerleader on the steps) went for $25,000.

S3E02: The Shakespeare Code

2007-04-08T19:16:00.000Z

Let's start with a correction: this was the first script outing for Gareth Roberts, who wrote The Sarah Jane Adventures pilot, and it was pretty solid.

He says Martha's not replacing Rose but Her first two trips are into history to meet a famous writer and the furthest into the future that the Doctor has ever been - the exact same moves He put on Rose two years ago. Smooth.

Elizabethan England looks fab but I'm glad we don't have Smell-O-Vision.

Never mind what the natives will make of a black woman in 1599... what do they think about a blue box materialising in a busy street? Is it supposed to be cloaked like the elevator in Torchwood?

"No autographs, no, you can't have yourself sketched with me and please don't ask where I get my ideas from."

Martha knows about the grandfather paradox and the butterfly effect but She's never heard of Bedlam? Methinks that line was written for Rose.

Super Hans from Peep Show is the architect of The Globe! Is that mead a bit more-ish?

I could have slapped Him for hurting Her feelings in the bedroom scene. But it rang true that He was completely oblivious to the intimacy of the situation and all the consummation going on around Him because He had more important things on His mind.

If the flying C.G.I. things are what the Carrionites really look like and they can disguise as human if they want to, what's the deal with choosing to half-transform into witches?

"How to explain the mechanics of the infinite temporal flux? I know: Back To The Future. It's like Back To The Future."

Letting Shakespeare use "Sycorax" in his work after the writing team borrowed it from The Tempest for an alien race in 2005 was a nice touch. There was dialogue fun all episode for anyone clued up on Shakey.

The deliberately unresolved ending with Queen Elizabeth was reminiscent of Queen Victoria last year. That came back to bite Him in the ass and I expect this will too. At least, it (along with last week's little stunt) is whetting the appetite for more time paradox malarkey by season's end.

Next week it's a Fifth Element-style future New York with Ardal O'Hanlan and the rumoured return of a monster last seen in 1967. No flipping!

Music From Earth

2007-04-04T17:04:00.000Z

With spoilers for the Battlestar Galactica third season finale (which you really don't want spoiled) a couple of paragraphs down.

My Mars music mission is going well: I bought the soundtrack album and downloaded forty other tracks from the first series. Then I asked myself why I bothered with four by Hawkwind. I cut the modern music and stuff that was already old when they played it in the Seventies. I cut the Bowie and the Rolling Stones because I have those songs elsewhere and I cut bad pop like Wizzard to fit it on one sixteen-track rock 'n' reggae bonus disc. The final episode of Life On Mars airs Tuesday. Gimme til the weekend to make a Series 2 bonus disc.

Music's a funny thing. I associate it with good times. When I was unhappy living in Virginia I didn't feel like putting a record on very often. And I'd turn them off halfway through, dissatisfied with something intangible. My mood was actually spoiling new albums. Now my hunger is back and there's usually something playing at home. Read into that what you will!

The winner of the Even More Integral Use Of Music In A Serialised Drama Than Life On Mars award goes to Battlestar Galactica. Drunk Colonel Tigh was hearing music that no-one else could hear and mumbling how there was too much confusion and he needed to find some kind of way out of there. Then three other characters started hearing it... and reciting other lyrics from All Along The Watchtower. It turns out, the cylons were transmitting the signal into the heads of four of their agents. Transmitting Earth music! By implication, the bad guys have reached Earth before us and it's at least 1967 (when the song was written) there in the show.

There are many questions still to be answered but I adored how they communicated huge conceptual changes using more than plain dialogue.

S3E01: Smith And Jones

2007-04-01T21:22:00.000Z

For the next twelve weeks I'll be doing a Heimlich on the new series of Doctor Who. It goes without saying that it'll be i) laden with juicy spoilers and ii) lost on the incognoscenti. Saturday nights being what they are, I'll usually post on a Sunday. Here goes!

Odd not to have a pre-titles scene but I like that they play with the format. That Music alone gets the episode off to a thumping start. How the hell do you pronounce new girl Freema Agyeman's last name?

Black people only listen to urban music, you know. If it's diegetic then this whole family listens to the same radio station.

Nice incongruous entrance for The Lone Doctor. Must be a time travel thing. Two minutes in and we have ourselves a fun little mystery! Russell T. Davies wrote this one so I'm apprehensive going in but he has improved over time. Fingers crossed, the trend will continue.

He's wearing Jackie's boyfriend's pajamas again and using an old alias. Fanboys everywhere touch themselves. "Alias Smith" meet Jones.

The rain's going up; the building's going up; nobody's wearing a skirt.

Martha's bright and brave. Let her be a modern Sarah Jane. Let her be a modern Sarah Jane. Let her be a modern Sarah Jane. She won't stop asking intelligent questions! I like Her.

Red Herring Bad Guy is doing a good amount of ambiguous actions. The evil old lady now sucking his blood out with a straw is more scary than silly.

"I thought, 'Two more years and retire to Florida.' But there's Florida in the sky. I can see it."

If the stormtroopers had parked closer to the building they couldn't have marched across the moon in foreboding formation.

Martha looks and acts different enough from her retcon cousin (played by the same actor two episodes ago) that, if The Doctor doesn't recognise Her then, hell, I buy that it's not the same person too.

These Judoon only have one vowel! They don't kill; they put an X on your hand with permanent marker. Now we can't get served at the bar.

If their guns take that long to charge, you'd think they'd be used to their targets escaping. Stupid aliens.

Alice was excited when He was wearing her Converse. Now that He's barefoot, she's spasming.

When will He run out of technobabble excuses to kiss people?

"'No sign of a non-human. We must increase our scans up to Setting 2.'"

The Doctor mouthing "it's bigger on the inside" - because everybody says that when they first see it - was to die for.

Two bits of undercover work, two costume changes, a bit of manipulating people, Plasmavores, the original version of what T.A.R.D.I.S. stands for (even though it makes less sense)... you can tell the lead actor, writer, script editor and the man who does the funny voices were all fans first.

In every department this was a stronger story than the Christmas Special and the introduction of the pevious two companions. The only flaw was that I bet my mate Shig that Martha's family would all die horribly right off the bat, to contrast with Rose and give Her less motivation to pop home all the darned time, and it didn't happen.

Next week it's another R.T.D. script and the same director. Bodes well.

Stormont!

2007-03-31T21:28:00.000Z

Something huge happened this week. It didn't get many column inches compared to the latest celebrity wardrobe malfunction so perhaps you missed it. Two men from opposite sides of a very high, very long and very old fence put their personal feelings aside to discuss a better future for the people of Fenceland.

If you don't understand the Irish conflict, join the club; I know enough to keep my foreign mouth shut about it when I'm around Irish people. Take this start point and good luck.

Ian Paisley gets the merit award for making up the most ground the fastest. The **** is so hardline, the joke goes that he calls for a priest on his deathbed to convert to Catholicism because "better a dead Catholic than a dead Protestant". On Monday, nine years save a week since the Good Friday Agreement, he sat at the same table as Gerry Adams [imagine Amri Assad from the current series of 24, my American friends] for the greater good. I'm welling up just thinking about it.

Two Liner

2007-03-31T17:21:00.000Z

"Who are you and how did you get in here?"
"I'm a locksmith and I'm a locksmith."

- Al Ruscio and Leslie Nielsen in Police Squad! (1982).

Product Review Section

2007-03-30T16:39:00.000Z

In which Ford explains the workings of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain and Arthur leaves a confused comment.

I've an economic collection of appliances at home. It eschews surround sound but it pleases me no end. Call me old fashioned but I like the sound coming from the direction of the picture. I've only got two ears anyway so stereo speakers work fine. Likewise, they can keep their H.D. and Blu-Ray: it's the old "whiter than white" soap powder routine and I'm not buying into it. The Sony Bravia ads are laughable: do they really expect us to buy a new television based on some pretty pictures when those pictures just looked as pretty as they did on the set we already own? It defies logic.

When I first viewed my apartment and saw the white walls, a little light switch went on in my brain. All credit to Phil and To-ne for planting the seed of an idea that germinated and now I watch everything blown up to 100 inches and there's no screen to pack up when I'm done. I can't recommend Projector Point enough and I'm downright chuffed at my decadence every time I switch on. Roll on Saturday and David Tennant's big head on my wall...

Dampening the party a little is my Sony SVR-S500 hard disk recorder which feels like it was rushed through testing. Some menus let you switch between them directly but others don't so you don't build up an intuitive feel for navigation. The E.P.G. updates noisily at 0300 daily and you can't change it to midday when you'd be out and not trying to sleep. Worse, you couldn't view a program's description until you selected it for recording (which is a bloomin' long-winded way of identifying repeats) until last week when I got an unexpected software update in the daily download and this bug is now fixed. I didn't even ask!

Reverse Perkology

2007-03-25T16:13:00.000Z

SJ and I must have reputations as workaholics who don't, in fact, spend most of the week working from home because Head Office sent us both an expensive BlackBerry - hereafter "Strawberry" because the notion of paying more to recieve email on-the-go and outside of work hours when I'm really not that committed and I have a phone for emergencies is ridiculous to me. (Breathe.)

The week they arrived we got a memo to go easy on the expenses* for a while. Sweet irony. Boss Man is all up into being in touch all the time (though he is paid to feel that way) and he got jealous at my shiny new slice of technology compared to his black plastic brick. I told him he could put it on the desk near me in meetings and I'd make it look like mine belonged to him. He threw me out.

I've identified a colleague who goes to more meetings than me and I'm trying to pass the Strawberry off on her so I don't have to carry it around. I'll offer to reconfigure it for her and then work out how to do that.

For no particular reason other than she could, HK applied for membership at a cash-and-carry outlet for the whole office and eight cards arrived by return of post. They must need the business! But I need to go there and buy things within four weeks to activate my memberhsip, making it less of a perk and more of an unwanted bill.

*The last thing I want is to start a rumour that U.D.E. is in trouble and I'm some kind of corporate jinx. Just last week my office achieved its annual operating target with three months of selling still to do. We're tightening our belts to ensure we have a profitable year, which is the kind of forward thinking my last employer could have benefitted from (and that's so easy to say in full hindsight).

Note To Self About Configuring P2P Software

2007-03-23T14:48:00.000Z

Listen, self: if eMule gives you a low I.D. (i.e. yellow icons instead of green) but you haven't changed any of your settings, fiddling around with those settings and getting frustrated about it is not going to fix the problem.

Do not get sidetracked by helpful suggestions in error messages. Do not mess around with Windows Firewall when it's already making exceptions for the relevant ports. Do not turn off worm script debugging in Norton because it worked for some Dutch guy on a message board.

Remember that you've been through this before, only those brain cells have since died off. Go to the set-up page for your router because you have a dynamic connection and it may have auto-assigned a new I.P. address if one of your laptops wasn't powered up at the start of your session. Change the final digit under Virtual Servers until it forwards ports 4660-4712 to the right computer. Or forward those ports to both of your computers all of the time and never go through this pain again!

Peacock Feathers

2007-03-23T09:46:00.000Z

I had another inch of hair taken off the back. By Christmas I will be bald and also rich from not paying professionals to do what a friend can do in my kitchen in five minutes.

The conversation widened to include what we euphemistically call "personal grooming". According to my sources, men on the continent trim their body hair almost as much as women. And why not? In this day and age, do we actually need it? We have central heating, underwear and thermal clothing to protect us from the elements. I know plenty of bald men that didn't die of pneumonia yet.

We have showers and soap now too, negating the hygienic need for a mass of fur to keep out the dirt and bugs of the medieval battlefield. Hair is fast becoming the new appendix: I simply don't see the point in it any more except to attract a potential mate in our animal kingdom. Off with it! Or style it. It's the new law.

Music From Mars

2007-03-21T19:57:00.000Z

Coincidentally, I started watching Life On Mars just as its star, John Simm, was announced as appearing in the new series of Doctor Who.

It's rumoured that either he or Derek Jacobi will play another Time Lord - possibly both the same one since they have a habit of regenerating into new actors. I'm excited. A youthful portrayal of The Master would be a fine nemesis for the current Doctor in the same way that Tobey Maguire and Topher Grace are cast well as opposites in Spider-Man 3. You can expect plenty of Doctor content here when he returns to my screen in ten days so let's concentrate on Mars for now.

It's a cop show with a surreal twist: D.I. Tyler is hit by a speeding car while listening to The Best Of Bowie on his iPod. When he wakes up he's inexplicably living in the 1970s, dealing with out-dated methods of policing and the social attitudes of the era. What stops it being just another Quantum Leap is the suggestion that Sam (Tyler, not Beckett) is actually in a coma from his accident and the people he meets "in the past" are facets of his own psyche trying to lead him back to a waking life in the year 2006.

Take a look at the lawman beating up the wrong guy
Wonder if he'll ever know he's in the best-selling show

- Life On Mars? by David Bowie (1971).

Because we're watching Sam's subjective coma experience and not something that purports to be reality, the station interior is lit and shot oddly and the dialogue is more fun than real life too: "It's 1973. Almost dinner time. I'm having Hoops!" There's the occasional anachronism when the budget falls short of the cost of retro-fitting the entire city of Manchester to look like it did three decades ago, but nothing so sloppy as the Wolverine comic in the opening flashback of The Departed!

The music of the period plays a prominent role in the drama - if Sam had been listening to Hungry Like The Wolf when he was hit, would he think he was living the 1980s now? My only real gripe is that the official soundtrack album contains only half of the music used in the series. Thankfully, I'm not the only one who feels this way and home-made compilations aren't subject to the same rights clearance issues...

Top Five Dumbed Down Docutainment Shows

2007-03-14T22:20:00.000Z

Personally, I'm a fan of no-frills advertising but it don't half lead to some vulgar brand names, like If You Think This Is Butter I'll Smash Your Fucking Head In (or whatever that margarine is called).

In broadcasting, the theory is seemingly that your ch-average viewer, if he/she can actually read a newspaper, won't, so you'd better give your show the most descriptive title possible if you want to grab his/her attention before something shiny distracts him/her.

5. Who Do You Think You Are?
4. I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!
3. Honey, We're Killing The Kids
2. Help! My Dog's As Fat As Me
1. £50 Says You'll Watch This

It's idiotic lowest-common-denominator stuff and it's everywhere.

Top Five Villains

2007-03-10T17:10:00.000Z

They don't call me "Bandwagon Ford" for nothing.

5. Number 2 (The Prisoner)
It's usually a psychological battle and Number 2 often wins.
4. The Kingpin (Spider-Man and Daredevil comics)
New York mafia boss who can more than hold his own at close range.
3. Dracula
No particular screen portrayal - the concept of an enemy that can turn you into one of their own is enough. Vampires are the original Bodysnatchers, the original Borg.

2. Mojo Jojo (The Powerpuff Girls)
"The city of Townsville, I hate you. I do not enjoy the fact that three superhero female children take up residence in you. And by hurting me and forcing me to dwell in one of your correctional facilities, these mutant infant girls prevent me from obtaining political control of you."
1. Ralph Cifaretto (The Sopranos)
A real high point in the series' patchy run. Ralph was as nasty a piece of work as I've seen on film. His eventual demise had a satisfyingly humiliating quality to it, as if there was no way they'd allow someone so reprehensible to bow out with dignity: Tony beat him to death with the frying pan he was cooking with and Ralph's wig fell off for the first time. Take that for the horse! And another for the girlfriend you beat to death when she told you she was pregnant!

Identity Crisis

2007-03-10T13:08:00.000Z

I remember watching Channel 4's first moments of transmission in (if memory serves) 1982... that music, and the logo forming out of those multi-coloured pieces. A quarter of a century later, the channel has a series of more sophisticated idents.

I love the ones with a moving camera where you don't see anything coherent until the scene aligns in just the right way (the one set in Tokyo is a good example of this). If you're seeing these for the first time then look for the big "4"!

Double Versatile Discs

2007-03-08T08:49:00.000Z

Add up what I've rented from two D.V.D. clubs, what I've recorded, downloaded, and borrowed from friends, etc. and I have a big-ass pile of stuff to watch. It's starting to feel like a chore so I want to separate the must-sees from the turkeys below, save some precious time and get on with real chores like my overdue taxes.

Films: Walk The Line, 36 (French thriller), The Departed, Sky Blue (Korean animation), 28 Days Later, The Apartment, Changing Lanes.

Television: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 24 (Season 6), The Book Group, Funland, Life On Mars, Family Guy (Season 4), Deadwood (Season 3).

But which is the chaff and which the wheat? Please help me decide.

The new series of Doctor Who starts in three weeks and video hosting websites continue to entertain with oddities like A Charlie Brown Christmas as voiced by the cast of Scrubs. I'm drowning, I tell you.

Top Five Coats

2007-03-06T21:24:00.000Z

A man has reached a certain maturity when his taste in clothes no longer changes like the weather and he can amass enough of one type of clothing to write about his favourites...

5. The Damned Dirty Ape
An orange/tan leather jacket reminiscent of what the science monkey wore in the original Planet Of The Apes. It's a little tight around my middle and it's missing some buttons so I wear it open in the summer a lot.
4. The Captain America
A short leather biker jacket with red, white and blue stripes like Peter Fonda's in Easy Rider.
3. The Jack Bauer
A blue waterproof with "C.T.U." in big yellow letters on the back. This is a genuine 24 promotional item that was sent to an overseas broadcaster by Fox and somehow found its way into my hands in time for the rainy season.

2. Big Black
I was cold last Christmas, going outside to smoke all the time at my dad's place. So I picked up a heavy duty coat this winter. Depending what I wear with it, I can look like Johnny Cash or I can look like Harold Steptoe.
1. The Luke Skywalker
The day I discovered H&M did men's clothes too was a happy day in the House Of M. I bought a short brown canvas jacket with poppers and pockets on the arms that reminds me of the flight suit Luke wears when he meets Yoda in Empire. Mine's missing some buttons though.

I have way fewer than five pairs of shoes.

Short Cuts

2007-03-04T08:35:00.000Z

Short Cuts is an good old movie by Robert Altman. It got me reading Raymond Carver. I just saw King Kong and it was as long but nowhere near as complex so my mind wandered because it wasn't occupied.

Alice took inches off my hair and cut it level for a recent business trip. Later that week I added some finishing touches in my hotel bathroom mirror. Last week I cut it more while I was high at home. I strongly recommend against such action though I think I got away with it! I'm aiming for this kind of thing but we're not there yet.

Britney Spears has shaved her head and written P.U.S.H. on her arm, which usually stands for Pray Until Something Happens... but in her case it could just as easily be Photograph Up-Skirt Here or Pills Undermine Sanity/Health. Like words? "Britney Spears" is an anagram of "Presbyterians".

Charlie Brooker and I celebrated our birthdays on Saturday - he with his friends and me with mine. Mine went to The Old Duke on King Street and the bar of Loch Fyne on Little King Street, then back to mine to play Guitar Hero for the third Saturday night in a row.

I drove past my exit on the motorway because I was listening to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on the radio. I did eight miles re-tracing my "steps". That was NOT a short cut.

Brad is a star for sharing the Tea Girls blog with me. It uses the phrase "at tea"! Bless it. (Safe for work and for kids too.)

Related paragraphs that develop a theme or idea will return shortly.

Validation!

2007-02-28T12:09:00.000Z

We've covered before how I talk to strangers. If you have to interact with a real live human being rather than a touch-tone menu then savour that rarity. Life is so much more pleasant when you make an effort with people. Friends call me either naive or a big flirt for this.

Yesterday I got a customer service call from Virgin Media, who have moved into the technology convergence market and taken over my broadband supply. Kitty's job was to get me to add cable to my package for an extra three quid a month but I've got too many rentals, downloads and Freeview recordings to watch already. Plus, Rupert Murdoch vs. Richard Branson has been all over the news: Virgin won't pay Sky's new price for their premium channels so I wouldn't get 24 or Galactica anyway. (Shig tells me Sky One via Virgin Media already "went dark".)

Kitty joked that calls were recorded so she couldn't say what she really thought of Mr. Murdoch. I didn't upgrade but perhaps I brightened her day for a minute or two. Before ringing off she told me that, if I called 150 to complain, they might agree to put me on the cheaper tariff for my existing services that they use to entice in new cutomers. I did, and they did. Kitty gave me this tip because (she said) I was "so nice". I just saved £72 p.a. by being friendly! Now that's what I call validation.

Fella Could Use A Time Machine

2007-02-25T10:41:00.000Z

"Captain Jack says, 'It's time for Thunderball!'"

- Actor/presenter/singer/dancer John Barrowman takes time off from Doctor Who, Torchwood, Strictly Come Dancing, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?, This Morning and covering Elaine Paige's radio show to present last night's National Lottery Draw.

Read It And Wiip

2007-02-24T12:00:00.000Z

No matter how hard I try, when I think of the Nintendo Wii I associate going number ones before I think "we". Look, I'm not trying to be puerile. I didn't name the darned thing. Apparently the lower case 'i's are suppposed to signify two people coming together to play or two Wii remotes side-by-side. It just occurred to me that companies pay good money for such bullcrap concepting. Where do I sign up?

Nintendo is in the middle of a free strap replacement scheme for morans [sic] who let go of their controllers when they shouldn't. There's much hilarity, much of it probably faked, at the Wii Damage blog.

I wonder if we're meant to like Microsoft Hotmail more now that it's called Windows Live Mail and Bill Gates' oft-criticised company name doesn't stare you in the face when you use it? Or was the re-branding designed to extend the use of 'Windows' to an umbrella term that encompasses now e-mail and soon more online activities until one day the word is so synonymous with turning on a computer that we'll say, "I Windowsed today" the way we already say "Hoover" when we mean vacuum clean a room? It's one strategy for Microsoft to gain final dominance of the home computing market.

Another, more bandwagon-esque, method would be the Microsoft Pu: the eighth generation console with the dodgy name...

Superman Retards

2007-02-21T10:19:00.000Z

Time passes slowly when you watch a Bryan Singer film. With Superman Returns it passed super-slowly. I liked the old school music and title sequence. I liked Kevin Spacey and Brandon Routh. I didn't like Lois one bit. The action sequences looked C.G.I.-gorgeous but, with the exception of the pan up from the baseball game to the falling aeroplane, failed to provide much in the way of genuine shock or surprise. 154 minutes felt like 1054. I thought my watch was broken.

The references to the first two Christopher Reeve films - such as Lois smoking and spending the night with Supes - were neat. They gently ret-con the later sequels out of the series by simply ignoring anything that happened in them, to position Returns as the third movie proper... though I fail to see how a love triangle with super-powered offspring jumps the shark any less than Richard Pryor in Superman III.

Now I need to send the disc back to LOVEFiLM and cancel my account. I joined to watch the second series of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex but I got the opposite of help when the fifth disc in the series refused to show up. One particular form response from their customer service people ignored my question and stepped me through the process of cancelling my account instead, which should tell you all you need to know about these e-tards.

I trialled a membership from amazon.co.uk and it's cheaper, it has more copies of new releases so they arrive faster and you get an additional 10% off your D.V.D. purchases too. Try it yourself!

Top Five Games Of 2006

2007-02-19T19:55:00.000Z

Phil brought his guitar controllers over on Saturday for my first experience of the legendary Guitar Hero for Playstation (using my new Eltax floor-standing speakers). The fella who sits behind me at work raves about it and it's inspired Dr. Heimlich to learn REAL guitar. I see now what the fuss is about.

It's like one of those dance games where you have to stamp the pads in time with the music except you have to hold down one of five buttons on the fretboard (with only four fingers, unless you have undergone a rock mutation) and simultaneously strum at the right moment. You get a "whammy bar" to waggle on long notes but that was one piece of co-ordintion too much for me and I forgot to strum whenever I attempted it.

Still, for an hour I was the leather clad hair-mountain Lars Ümlaüt, jumping around my flat with the neck upright (it can tell) when in Star Mode and playing bum notes to Killing In The Name. Those special controllers are worth every penny of someone else's thirty quid each.

5. Outlaw Golf 2, Take Two Interactive.
Strippers on the golf course reminds me of this guy I used to work with. In spite of the silliness, it's a darned good golf game.
4. Midnight Club: Dub Edition Remix, Rockstar Games.
Super-fast and arcadey street racing with lots of jumps, boosts and four famous cities to abuse. Unbeatable for adrenaline.

3. Hitman: Blood Money, Eidos Games.
This requires stealth, not brute force or a spray of bullets. In the previous game I poisoned a target in Japan by infiltrating his kitchen and mis-cutting his fugu fish. I'm currently in disguise at Mardi Gras in New Orleans dressed as Big Bird.
2. Guitar Hero II, Activision.
1. Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, LucasArts.
As much as I hate to pay George Lucas' piper one measly groat, this is just too much fun to be denied. Six famous scenes per movie have been expanded into full levels where everything is made of Lego: C-3PO's limbs fall off and Chewie can carry him; you can fly as minifigure Boba Fett and use the Dark Force as the minifigure Emperor; Leia's close combat attack is a slap to the face - useful when Lando's nearby and not under player control. You know you want it. But don't buy it - borrow mine.

I highly doubt those all came out last year but count the Platinum Edition re-releases and maybe... maybe. I think I only played five games last year. I forgot Ratchet & Clank 3! Well, hey. I'm not re-writing this.

The next biggie for me is Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories because the devolved gameplay of Liberty City Stories, like, sucked, man. I don't care about bicycles but I hate drowning. Two people are still with me.

Top Five "Specialist Short Film" Actors Updated

2007-02-18T16:11:00.000Z

While the subject is still vaguely hanging in the air somewhat:

5. Roxy DeVille
4. Haley Paige
3. Gianna Michaels
2. Joanna Angel
1. Sativa Rose

Apparently my taste changes as often as my girlfriend. D'ya think there's a correlation to be made? (Criticism will only encourage him. Better to say nothing at all and he might go away.)

Update 2007-03-07: Harmony Rose is out and Haley Paige is in, making an all-brunette line-up. This is tougher than Desert Island Discs!

Yesterday In The Life

2007-02-17T10:10:00.000Z

0645: Woke at my "old time" for a day in the office. Rolled over.
0715: Got up, made coffee, took the cup back to bed.
0730: Re-filled my cup. Moved to the sofa. Watched the end of Our Hospitality while the caffeine kicked in.
0750: Set the D.V.R. and cranked up eMule to work while I'm out today.
0815: It's bathroom time! Still no need to rush.
0845: Left home an hour later than I'm accustomed to. I was awake already and there was little traffic on the road between Bristol and Reading. Listened to the Panic At The Disco! album until the singer's voice annoyed me halfway through the first song.
0945: I was early for work for possibly the sixth time ever.

1030: Sales meeting. Two hours. I made my to-do list for the week.
1300: Everybody else took lunch but I felt like I'd just arrived. It was quiet while they were away from their desks.
1430: Sainsbury's was dead on my break. Read Brad's A Day In The Life post and decided to borrow it. Put Panic At The Disco! up for sale on amazon Marketplace.
1530: Work work work. You don't want to read about that.
1600: Sold Panic At The Disco! already. Apparently they're popular with Da Kids and I asked the lowest price.
1730: Everybody else went home so my last hour was distraction-free.
1830: The News Quiz was starting as I got into m' wheels.
1945: The roads were crazy less busy after Newbury. I know where the cameras are and managed 90 m.p.h. most of the way from there. I was home forty minutes later than I am when I leave the office an hour earlier.

"Late shifts" are so much easier on the constitution!

Overheard Regarding Porn

2007-02-17T08:23:00.000Z

"I wouldn't object to watching sex per se but I think I'd need to read a biography of each of the performers first... to know how they got into the industry and be sure I agreed with their reasons for doing it."

"Everyone says your boss used to be a porn star. Is it true?"
"Of course not. He just looks like that."

"Amy Winehouse is the spitting image of Roxy DeVille!" (N.S.F.W.)

"Look at me! I'm such a whore!"

Old Enough To Re-Paint But Young Enough To Sell

2007-02-13T18:46:00.000Z

It was getting tricky logging in here without upgrading. The words promising a wonderful new life on the other side got bigger with time; the log-in field shrank and moved around the page. Today I switched to New Blogger.

Wise old Shocho warns us about upgrading all the time. I just lost the image toolbar by installing Internet Explorer 7 - it became a footnote in the Help file with no hint of warning to the end user. So guess what? Everything seems fine with Son Of Blogspot.

There's loads new you can do with the layout. The Search Blog function works now, instead of just pretending to. I can give my posts tags though I probably won't because - did I mention? - the Search Blog function works now and I rarely write about a thing without mentioning it by name! So just search porn (or another likely Ford Prefect tag) and you'll get the same results - nay, better.

Suggested searches: galactica, doctor who, hitch-hiker, album, film, game, book, feeling, crush, America, Britain, overheard, top five.

Digital Versatile Disarray

2007-02-11T14:09:00.000Z

Last week wasn't so much fun. I was burned out from the travelling, the long days, my pal Joeri switching my phone to Turkish for a laugh at every opportunity and the general filth on show at Nurnberg Toy Fair. I couldn't drag myself to the office on Thursday and I got ticked off for it on Friday.

But I'd lined up the laziest weekend ever to set me right again: Alice's smiling face was coming to town for the first time in a small age and she was bringing a feelgood movie that I hadn't seen in years: Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2001). Like Raimi, I was a Spider-fan as a young boy. My gran bought me The Incredible Hulk comics because I liked Bill Bixby on the telly and, when poor sales forced Bruce Banner to become the back-up act in Peter Parker's comic, my admiration switched too.

Civil War is coming soon to bookshelves and Spider-Man 3 to cinemas. You bet I was looking forward to some webslinging! But when Alice went to borrow the movie from her friend, the disc was not in its case...

Moments like this, you can either admit defeat, get mad or get even. I messaged my neighbours to see if they had a copy we could borrow. I messaged my other Bristol friends in order of proximity to where I live. Tone replied to say he was in France but he'd seen it for four quid at Asda. We drove to Asda and Asda was closed. We drove to Tesco but it wasn't in stock there. We eventually borrowed a pirate copy off a family member and ended our evening's detour at around ten miles.

My Playstation rejected the pirate disc when the Green Goblin showed up. (It must know he's a crap villain.) So finally I bought the damned film even though I own it already (in storage in California.) When we were done we gave it to the nice man who was going to lend us his copy in the first place, to replace the one he'd lost.

Cheers

2007-02-08T07:47:00.000Z

"Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica. And tonight... the smokes are Shermans, the scotch is Glenroth, and the episode is Taking A Break From All Your Worries."

- Ron Moore's official commentary for said episode (2007).

Spanish Humour From Germany

2007-02-06T21:48:00.000Z

Socialising through work can be a royal pain in the rear. I'm talking about when you take a client to dinner after a busy day at a trade show and your colleagues tease you about your free meal at a fancy restaurant when all you want to do is take your game face off and have a little personal time before you have to go to bed and do it all over again.

But Nuremberg Toy Fair is an exception for the British and French sections of our company, who both just proved their worth at a major show in their own country. Last week the pressure was on the Dutch and German teams while the rest of us - MZ, JH, ES, MD, CP, SM and LH in particular - laughed.

I had time to look out some new trend items at the show, like Gelli Baff and the Ugly Dolls (of which my favourite is Ice Bat.) We hosted a party with a live band and dancers. I fell in love for about fifteen minutes until I discovered someone else had had the same idea and married her already. I asserted myself a little in my relationship with one of my superiors and it didn't backfire. I danced like a bastard.

The best joke I heard all week was told to me slowly by a Spanish colleague. I dream of being this funny in a second language:

"A man hates his girlfriend's dog so, one day, he puts it in the back of his car, drives 100 miles from where they live and leaves it by the side of the road. But when he arrives home and opens the front door the dog is there, looking up at him in the usual way.

"The following day the man drives 200 miles and again leaves the dog by the side of the road. But again, when he gets home, he finds the dog already there! He can hardly believe it.

"On the third and final day, the man drives 300 miles of the most contorted and convoluted route he can think of: up hills, around mountains, through forests, left, right and all over the place. He throws the dog out and begins the journey home. Shortly, he decides to call home and his girlfriend answers. 'Hi, honey. Is the dog there?' She replies that it is.

"'Could you put him on the line? I'm completely lost out here...'"

Chicken Curry Rules

2007-01-30T13:52:00.000Z

I believe Shipla Shetty winning Big Brother wasn't a fix because I predicted the order of finalists three through six and wavered on the top two all night. But the live audience didn't consult me and heckled the result. There were no Brits in the top three. Dirk placed third.

Shilpa broke her trademark calm by proclaiming how much she loved chicken curry as she walked from the house to the studio. But before I could vote this the Surreal Moment Of The Year So Far I realised she was reading a fan sign held by an out-of-shot member of the public. Now I want Chicken Curry Rules on a t-shirt.

Davina McCall opened the live final with "it's only a game show" direct-to-camera, in response to the media furore over this series. She went on to milk the subject dry anyway. The racists were conspicuously absent from the after-show press conferences and parties. Their publicists went into Damage Control Mode and issued typical statements of non-culpability instead. One agent sadly died of a heart attack. Danielle Lloyd's Wikipedia page is closed for editing following what the site calls "vandalism" to her article: when I read it last week her full name was cited as Danielle Slutty Lloyd.

It's been a circus, and circuses are fun. But Ford will not be watching or writing about the next series. Trust me on this.

Satan's Cheeseboard

2007-01-29T09:21:00.000Z

I was eating my £4.95 corporate bagel when I glanced down at the paper it was wrapped in, which was covered in bold red type. But instead of the usual

way Subway Subway Subway Subway Subway Sub
Subway Subway Subway Subway Subway Subway
ay Subway Subway Subway Subway Subway Subw
ubway Subway Subway Subway Subway Subway S

I got

ette Flaming Nosebag Christ On A Bike Fish Mittens Je
sus Wept Cor Blimey Satan's Cheeseboard Y-Fronts Merk
in Chipfat Chalfont-St-Giles Jesus Wept Merlin's Shag
pile Jean De Florette Flaming Nosebag Christ On A Bik

Apparently you can't make bagels all day without burning your fingertips a few times and the folks at Oi! Bagel don't like to "real swear" in front of their customers. Well, a double dumb-ass on me!

Don't Suffer In Silence

2007-01-26T11:09:00.000Z

Greetings from London Toy Fair! Next week I'm off to Nuremberg for more of the same in a different language. Right now I want to tell you about when I ventured into London proper for a beer with Shig last night.

I was trying to read The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay by Michael Chabon on the train but some young punk decided to play music on his phone. People were bothered but no-one said a word. I was this close to bragging how my phone came with free headphones but I wondered if other men died for less and that's why nobody was speaking up. Apparently this happens all this time in the capital.

That night there was banging in the hotel corridor. I tried the old pillow-on-the-head but it didn't help. A guy had somehow locked himself out of his room in only his underwear and was trying to wake his drunk friend inside rather than go and get a key. I called the receptionist to come upstairs instead. But, in order to hide my own nakedness, I'd poked my head out around the door frame and caught it between a high shelf and the door itself on the way. It ricocheted as I pulled back from each knock and knocked my head again on the opposite surface. If it had happened to someone else and I'd been watching, it would have been funny.

On All Fours

2007-01-21T14:35:00.000Z

Big Brother is big business. Channel 4 has a highlights show daily, three discussion shows based on developments in the house and also Diary Room Uncut. Digital cousin E4 repeats many of the Channel 4 shows plus fills gaps in its own programming with "live" "action" as it happens (though they cut away or mute the sound if it gets too interesting so you have to watch the main show to get anything coherent). Factor in the surrounding advertising, sponsorship and premium rate call lines and its little wonder they started paying celebrities to take part when they ran out of has-beens who were willing to do it solely for the exposure.

I confess I've been watching far too much of Celebrity Big Brother 5. This is very unlike me! It started innocently enough with a cup of tea round Phil's on the opening night. We talked shit about the contestants as they entered the house because reality television is crap and the people who go on it are morons who deserve everything they get. Right? Then they revealed the final contestant and my interest was sealed: Dirk Benedict from The A-Team and the original Battlestar Galactica!

(If you're overseas or don't own a television or have been living underwater all month then this would be a good time to skim the show's Wikipedia page for the lowdown on who's in it and the whole racism controversy.)

Donny entered the house drunk out of his tiny mind and, upon meeting Face Man, exclaimed, "It's Dirk fucking Benedict!"

Dirk replied, "I seldom use my middle name." He's since shown himself to be above the inanity of the younger housemates yet no humourless old sow either. He was the bookie's favourite to win at first but that seems unlikely now he's had a couple of strops.

There will be mighty suspicion of result fixing if Shilpa Shetty wins because, in the outside world, the pressure is on Channel 4 to make amends for broadcasting alleged racist behaviour and not intervening. For my money, Jade Goody (a.k.a. The Accused) is insecure, uncultured, unhinged, intolerant and ill-mannered but she's far too ignorant to be what the meeja have made her out to be. She says "racial" when she means "racist", for goodness' sake! I don't think she intends anything. In all seriousness, there are two Americans, a Brazilian, an Indian and a Welshy on the show and Jade only fought with one of them - the beautiful, intelligent, dignified one - which leads me to conclude it was more about jealousy than anything else.

Jo and Danielle spouted far worse "racialisms" only Shilpa didn't hear them. Life IS far from normal on Big Brother but you don't suddenly turn into a close-minded bitch if you weren't one to begin with. They too deserve a career funeral like the one Jade got on Friday when they re-enter polite society. (The irony of somebody who made their name on a game show ruining their reputation on the same show has escaped nobody.)

I like the live show on when I work from home, for the background noise. There's noise in the office but it's often someone asking me to do something and I'm not allowed to ignore them.

For the record, either Shilpa or Jermaine Jackson will be victorious.

The Sound Of Silents

2007-01-14T14:03:00.000Z

Bristol played host to its third silent comedy festival this weekend and I thought it would be a nice treat to take my father to a show. Paul Merton compèred three old American films and a composer called Neil Brand played new scores for each of them.

Harold Lloyd does little for me but there's a great sequence in Get Out And Get Under where he drives over a bump in the road and his case falls out of the car. He gets out to retrieve it and then has to catch up with the driver-less still-moving vehicle before it crashes! I watched a lot of Laurel and Hardy when I was younger so there was nostalgia value in this for me as well as for Pops. Apparently a third of their catalogue is silent, and they lasted all the way to colour.

I'd never seen Buster Keaton's work before, however, so I viewed Steamboat Bill Jr. with fresh eyes. The jokes stood up well after 79 years, especially the one where he clumsily knocks a life preserver over the side of a boat... and it sinks out of sight. He's fearlessly physical and his deadpan face kills me. No sound, no colour, no tits, no explosions: with luck, his films will be cheap as chips on eBay.

Welcome To The O.C.

2007-01-11T21:37:00.000Z

Time once again to display my obsessive compulsive tendencies with a musical compilation. Help yourself to Part I and Part II in mp3 fomat.

Choosing twenty of the best recent tracks is easy. Agonizing over the running order, as if there was one - and only one - completely correct way for this particular bunch of songs to sequence together, is the time-consuming part for me. Par example, the first few have little in common on the face of it but I decided that they shared some prominent percussion and a kind of Western feel, so they segue. Beck's Black Tambourine gets things shaking next and we head off into silly chart territory for a while before three contemporary songstresses bring the mood back down again. Et cetera! I am not making this up.

Sometimes a track is so over-the-top as to be impossible to follow. Those go last. This time it's Mr Blue Sky - which, incidentally, would have broken the Top 40 singles chart after being featured in Doctor Who last summer if downloads were included then as they are now.

Bruxism

2007-01-11T15:51:00.000Z

The doctor gave me some medicine and it's working damned well but one of the side effects is bruxism. (Another side effect is learning new words.)

I was grinding my teeth and not even realizing when I read that. I must have been grinding in my sleep too because, when I looked in the mirror this morning, my tongue was dented around the edges like a 20-sided coin. As side effects go, it's hardly debilitating. But I don't want strangers to think I'm on amphetamines.

In my early thirties my bathroom cabinet contains paracetamol, vitamin C, St. John's Wort, ginkgo biloba and citalopram. I rattle when I run! Last week I almost wrote about the thing in my left nostril that wouldn't come out. But I decided it was gross and no-one would want to read about it.

Paxo

2007-01-09T18:54:00.001Z

"That's all from Newsnight tonight. It's all available again on the website along with our editor's pathetic pleas for you to send us your bits of home movies and the like so we can become the B.B.C.'s version of Animals Do The Funniest Things. Good night."

- Presenter Jeremy Paxman in a no-nonsense mood on Newsnight (2006). A compilation of his grouchiest weather reports lives here.

Bloody New Year

2007-01-06T17:33:00.000Z

Rather than dump six new articles here on 2007-1-17, a day so wholly unremarkable that I actually found time to blog, I'll spread them over the first weeks of the year. Like diary entries from when these things happened. Ooh, am I posting from the future now? No, I'm just a big fat charlatan.

New Year's Eve is so over-rated: the pressure is on to have the best time of your life (and you'll never have the best time of your life if you're waiting for it to happen). Alice and I, no longer dating, decided to celebrate together anyway. We went to a pub in her neighbourhood and ignored the karaoke in the corner. Friends joined us. London topped Sydney at fireworks on the telly. It was "beer and skittles" all round... until midnight.

The less said about what happened next the better. Alice hurt my feelings and made me feel unwelcome at the after-pub party (at which, adding insult to injury, the only booze available was what I'd brought with me). It wasn't the first time alcohol and Irish rage have mixed to leave me wondering what the hell is going on, but I struggle to recall having a worse time at a time when I was supposed to be having a good time. Poor me!

But I didn't come out of retirement to bitch and moan - far from it. Like a bad dress rehearsal followed by a great opening night, Alice and I are getting along better now than we did before. Does that seem strange? It's so easy to walk away from a messy situation and I was secretly impressed at her for doing quite the opposite in the days that followed. On Friday we had a good ol' fashioned heart-to-heart of the kind we somehow never had when I was her boyfriend. Then, on Saturday, we re-celebrated New Year on a bar crawl, roping in two bemused couples from the next table in Baroque to toast with us at midnight.

So in the end I had a fantastic night and nobody needs to open a can of spam-bots on my ex-girlfriend's website after all. She'd only thank me for the extra traffic anyway, although traffic ain't been a problem since USA Today linked it last week. (Click "shocked and upset" in the last paragraph and prepare for some disturbing subject matter.)

Casual Christmas

2006-12-25T09:33:00.000Z

I tried to be oh-so-modern and do all of my Christmas shopping online this year. On the plus side, I've avoided pikeys, malls and fake cheer for most of the month. Unfortunately, not everything has arrived in time.

This afternoon my mother is roasting a duck for two. Tomorrow my sister has invited me over for curry. That's when I'll see my father too. (I don't actually know what he's doing today but he has friends... I alternate between divorced parents on an annual basis.) I have presents for none of the above. Ironically, I have presents for Alice but we broke up as boyfriend/girlfriend recently and we won't see each other until New Year.

I hauled my ass to Sainsbury's on a lunch break last week so my colleagues did get Christmas cards. I chose a virgin-mother-and-child design which put the cat among the secular pigeons. If you're going to "do" Christmas I think you should do it all, is all. I bought some fancy chocolate biscuits too but they came home with me when we realised we had too great an abundance of food at the office.

I'm out of milk now and have four cigarettes to last until the shops re-open.

This morning I'm drinking black coffee and reminiscing about when there were only three TV stations and each pulled out their best-ever programming on Christmas Day. The I.T.V. network has four channels to fill nowadays which may explain the triple bill of Police, Camera, Action! today. News 24 has documentaries looking back at the year in conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Lebanon whereas Sky News has The Day The Whale Came To London. Other piss-poor highlights this year include a clip show called Best Ever Christmas Films (which must be cheaper or quicker than actually showing a film) and the complete World At War series on the History channel, to annoy whoever just got the boxed set from Santa.

Naturally, the jewel in the day's programming crown is the new Doctor Who episode. And don't the B.B.C. know it. There's a Making Of feature at 1300, a radio show from the show's set in Cardiff, and the feature broadcast at 1900. Plus you can watch a charity concert of music from the show all day via the magic red button on your remote control. I forgive them tugging the teets of the franchise quite this much while the output is still this good... though perhaps I should come back to that statement post-Catherine Tate.

So 2006-12-25 is really just another day with a different amount of driving. Whatever your plans, remember to remember those less fortunate than ourselves (with our internet and our food and our warmth and our television) today. Happy misappropriated winter solstice festival!

Welcome To Old Market

2006-12-22T18:36:00.000Z

I've rented twenty-two places since I first ventured out from the family nest and I absolutely categorically love my new place the best. It's in a neglected corner of central Bristol called Old Market. Before the fog descended upon us with a density and durability that would make John Carpenter proud, I got out and about in the neighbourhood with a camera.

Where the heart is.
Where my neighbour's heart ought to be.
The place for guitars and classic rock memorabilia.
There are several specialist shops because rents are low here.
Several.
They have a price promise and a cash machine on the premises.
For the green-fingered.
Even scarier than the one on EastEnders but the beer is dirt cheap.
The Trinity: both a church and a nightclub.
Nice almshouse.
Civilisation lies this-away!

It has real... "character", wouldn't you say?

Plane Decadance

2006-12-10T11:50:00.000Z

I've been travelling. Mostly for work. York and back in a day was an endurance test: 500 miles for an hour with a customer! My other meetings were all in the South and felt like trips to the corner shop for a packet of peanuts after that one.

I spent a lovely weekend in Brighton catching up with The Paranoid Mod, Basquiat Scrawls and their "entourage". I discovered how to make coffee when your host has no coffee-making apparatus and I completely forgot to take any photographs.

I got up at 0400 on Friday to get to Heathrow Airport by 0730. I met four colleagues there and twenty more at Schipol. We were bussed to a canal boat where a tour guide tried to tell us what we already knew about the city of Amsterdam while we tried to have conversations in second languages with people we hadn't seen in twelve months.

That evening we were taken to a converted army barracks somewhere off the road to Haarlem. There were glittering decorations and, inexplicably, there was a unicorn suspended from the ceiling. There was a D.J. and an organ grinder playing I Shot The Sherriff. There was a free bar. There was no sales meeting. (I enjoyed not carrying my computer.) The entire trip was a "jolly" because we've had a good year. And when management is happy, we drones in Sector 7G are happy!

By Saturday afternoon I was home again, like nothing had happened.

I wouldn't say the Dutch always know how to have more fun but here's what we did on the last U.K. office outing.

Top Five New Celebrity Squeezes

2006-11-23T15:05:00.000Z

Emma Barton (EastEnders)
Eve Myles (Torchwood)
Sophia Myles (Art School Confidential)

Molly Parker (Deadwood)
Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar Galactica)

There are indeed only five ladies in this list - unlike last time. Though none of last year's crushes have offended me in the intervening months and none have been "struck off" so I suppose I'm actually crushing on a total of fifteen people now. Dag!

Eve and Sophia Myles aren't related but it's still a nice thought.

U.P.P? Yeah You Know Me

2006-11-21T19:38:00.000Z

In days of old when knights were bold and Poles still lived in Poland, I'd get my arthouse flick fix at the Duke Of York's Picture House in Brighton. These days it's the Watershed Cinema in Bristol and the modestly-named Ultimate Picture Palace in Oxford.

The first film I saw at the U.P.P. was Hidden, with Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. At first we thought the cinema was closed until the manager ran over from the cafe where he was watching the World Cup and opened up just for us. There was nobody else in the auditorium so we commented on the action just like we were at home.

Our next visit was equally entertaining. While waiting outside, Alice and I became the target of an old drunk's abuse. I think we disturbed his sleep! Alice got some racist nonsense and I got the fighting talk. (Most people leave well alone when they see how tall I am, but every now and again someone takes it as a challenge.) I was riled enough to steal the old boy's walking stick to teach him a lesson. Of course, I didn't do it. I'm a nice boy who was brought up not dragged up.

Inside and two rows in front, a white-haired man was muttering to himself and twitching. He looked a lot like God. Once the film started he behaved quite normally - proof, if proof be needed, that escapism is good for your state of mind. The film was Brick. It was suspenseful and noir-ish.

Since then I've seen the wonderful Little Miss Sunshine and little else "in theatres". I'm tempted by the new James Bond though my instinct tells me it's just another turd with gold paint on.

Radio Radio

2006-11-18T14:58:00.000Z

I bought a Belkin wireless-G router in Oxford two weeks ago. I mean, I happened to be in Oxford and I went shopping... they don't have a better class of peripheral up there or anything. It took more than the advertised three minutes to set up but I think they were being optimistic. My personal laptop and its professional counterpart are both online at the same time now and I can move from room to room without losing the connection. (I have two rooms.) Mission accomplished!

The upgrade was intended to allow me to a) work from home and b) simultaneously and constantly run peer-to-peer software: the company V.P.N. is on one machine and eMule is on the other. Unfortunately, adding the router created T.C.P./U.D.P. port issues that eMule didn't like. The help file was in German. I didn't know what D.C.H.P. was. I'm not entirely sure how I fixed it but it was a combination of advice from Adrian (what lives with Alice) and four hours' "trial and error", plugging numbers and settings into various boxes until it stopped complaining. The breakthrough may have been telling the router to forward a range of ports instead of the precise address the program needed, but don't quote me on that or why it makes a difference.

While eMule was down I made the discovery that you can watch whole episodes of Battlestar Galactica in eight-minute parts on YouTube! In this clip from S03E04, Adama finds an ingenious way to get fighter ships past the orbital defences of New Caprica to rescue his people on the ground. (Battlestars can jump from point to point in space using "Faster Than Light" technology but they can't fly in an atmosphere themselves.) I'm usually down on these epic C.G.I. sequences because too often they come at the expense of original story ideas but the Top Gun fan in me came screaming out of the closet when he saw that. And I HATE Top Gun.

For my next trick, I was going to network my two machines together. But the wizard didn't work. Does anyone have any pointers for me?

People bitch about Microsoft but I'm using XP features that I've never used before and, unlike Windows 98, they work. When I damaged an external hard drive I thought I was going to lose 40GB of personal files but my tech friend, Ed, fixed it using Remote Assistance. I was in Gloucestershire, he was in Yorkshire and neither of us needed to get up off of the sofa.

NaNoWriMo

2006-11-13T17:53:00.000Z

It's National Novel Writing Month. The project was designed to overcome the idea that a 50,000-word novel is an insurmountable task that no amateur author could ever hope to complete in his or her lifetime. But over a month it's just 1650 words a day - the length of a college essay, if memory serves (and plenty of those took less than a day).

Shig invited to me to pair up with him so we could spur each other on but, sadly, I was compelled to decline. I feel like I'm struggling to stay on top of life right now, so now is no time to take on a new commitment. Ten-out-of-ten for sensible decision making but minus several million for fun.

Shig's been quiet online of late so I assume he's deep into it. Good luck! And don't worry if you end up writing a lot of stream-of-consciousness crap because March is NaNoEdMo.

That Mitchell & Webb Clip

2006-11-07T21:13:00.000Z

Three little complaints about the quality of daytime television from That Mitchell & Webb Look, edited together for your convenience.

David Mitchell and Robert Webb also starred in That Mitchell & Webb Sound on radio and That Mitchell & Webb Situation on cable.

Top Five Flaws In Torchwood

2006-11-06T19:57:00.000Z

In early interviews, series creator Russell T. Davies described Torchwood as The X-Files meets This Life - though he now shies away from the comment, presumably to let the new brand stand apart from its influences.

So... what's gone wrong so far?

5. The most interesting "regular" died in the first episode.
4. Fun-loving Jack Harkness from Doctor Who is traumatised here.
3. Despite the sex and swearing, it still feels like children's television.
2. Torchwood has neat corporate branding for a secret organisation!
1. Jack's car has go-faster lights in the front windscreen.

Torchwood is perfectly fine filler while we wait for the next instalment of real Who but I do hope Mr. Davies isn't spending too much time on ideas for Series Two. At this rate, it'll be time wasted.

Danny Boy

2006-11-04T15:01:00.000Z

I'm having time management issues. Once the working day is done, and the commute, and dinner, I just want to sleep. I keep my eyes open long enough to play a game or watch The Daily Show but I'm brain-dead already and in no mood for long catch-up phone conversations. I know I'm neglecting good friends but I don't know what to do about it except bitch about the problem here.

I made an unwanted friend when I first moved "downtown". I always talk to people in the street because I don't want to live in a world where people don't talk to each other in the street. Shig says it will be my undoing. Coming back from the corner shop one day, I chatted with someone walking alongside me. He told me his life story: heroin addiction, fights with his girlfriend, and the person he manslaughter-ed once. (The judge showed leniency because he stayed with the victim while he died.) He followed me to my door. I did not invite him in.

I saw him around the neighbourhood from time to time after that. I kept the conversations short, wanting to neither encourage nor antagonize him.

One Tuesday in September, he rang my door buzzer. I couldn't tell what he was talking about but there was trouble and money was involved. Shig was visiting at the time so I made my excuses and hung up. Next my neighbour, Lisa, came over to talk about my friend, Danny. I said I didn't have any friends called Danny.

While I'd been at work, "Danny" had given Lisa a sob story about his girlfriend being attacked at knife-point. She'd loaned him £10 for a taxi so he could get to Frenchay hospital to see her. I felt no sympathy because I was still reeling from the invasion of privacy. I offered to pay Lisa back in case she thought I was part of the scam, but she wouldn't hear of it.

The following week a policeman called to see if we'd been robbed. (We hadn't.) A local man had gone up in front of the magistrate that morning and his girlfriend blabbed about a burglary on the way in. I wondered if my mother was the one passing sentence at court that day.

I saw "Danny" in the street once more after that. He vowed to pay Lisa back as soon as he could but he vowed so much that it didn't ring true. I hope he considers £10 a good result and has moved on to new prey. We consider a tenner a bargain to be rid of a nuisance like him. Security Dave, who guards the construction site on my street, says he last saw "Danny" in the back of an ambulance. He said it looked like an overdose. Nobody I know has seen him since.

Hallowe'en

2006-10-31T19:33:00.000Z

"You can tell trick-or-treat is an American tradition because there's the threat of hostile action if you don't get what you want."

- The Party Line by Steve Punt & Hugh Dennis (2006).

Cosplay

2006-10-30T12:58:00.000Z

Dressing up was so much fun when we were young. So why do we stop? Some don't and I, for one, am not going to give them any shit for it.

Crazy 88.
Unknown blue-haired cat-girl.
Known girl in unknown costume.
Mischief on our booth.
It's not easy being green.
Affectionate trio.
This is just wrong.