We have two exams next week, and everyone must be at home revising because I have the office to myself today. Revision is going slowly. I somehow managed to distract myself by watching the first few episodes of Black Books using the 4OD thing from Channel 4 to watch the episodes on-line.
I also managed to lose a tea bag. I keep a tin on my desk with assorted teas in it - at the moment it has a couple of types of green tea, some earl grey and some rooibos (aka Red Bush). I reached into the tin, grabbed a bag at random, picked up my mug and walked towards the door. I realised I was only carrying the mug, not the teabag, which was nowhere to be seen. Not on the desk. Not in my pocket. Not dropped on the chair or floor. I came to the conclusion that I must have put it back in the tin.
I've suffered from senior moments before, but this was one of the more extreme.
We got a tip-off about how bad this programme was when we read in the newspaper how the audience were desperate to get out, and how they were fed up with being told when to laugh or applaud.
If this is the new re-branded BBC3, then God help us. As I write, Lily is laughing at some Internet video of animals having sex, while David Mitchell looks uncomfortable and a bit embarrassed. You can't blame him really. The programme is the worst sort of childish crap.
Please BBC, cancel this shite. We really expect better than this from you.
Now Lily Allen is putting her fist in her mouth. Oh dear this is pathetic. I don't expect the programme to get any better so I'll switch off before I get too angry.
It was good to see our friend Ben on Channel 5 tonight, in a programme about the World Memory Championships. He's written extensively about it on his blog so I won't bore you with the details here.
It was good to see him wearing the t-shirt which Emma bought for him a couple of years ago. He referred to it as his lucky t-shirt and he tries to wear it sometime during the competitions.
We've been watching the Hugh's Chicken Run programme on Channel 4 (final part tonight) where Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall highlights the plight of intensively farmed chicken.
The aim of the programme and campaign is to encourage people to buy free range chicken. In the programme he created a chicken barn according to industry standards, to illustrate the conditions the birds have to endure.
I just wish the website wasn't so annoying, with 'sign up' banners making beeping and honking noises all the time. The banner below (which you can click on to sign the petition) is one of the less annoying ones. It only beeps when someone new signs up.
I have never had a positive experience with DRM (Digital Rights Management). I can appreciate why content producers use it, to restrict unlimited copying of their copyrighted materials, but in my experience it just doesn't work.
Part of the problem is that it relies on proprietary (and possibly untrustworthy) software which often demands a specific computer setup. The original version of the BBC iPlayer insisted on Windows XP and the latest version of Media Player. Pretty much the same configuration was specified for Channel 4's 4OD system. Despite my computer complying with all of the requirements, neither system would work on it. I never managed to work out why. I eventually managed to get iPlayer to work on my new laptop.
Thanks to the BBC iPlayer, I finally managed to watch the episode of Top Gear where they 'celebrate' 40 years of British Leyland cars. Unfortunately the episode I originally downloaded failed to work - the licence had 'expired' despite having 5 days left - so I had to watch the version with the sign language person 'flapping' in the corner of the screen.
In the episode, the presenters had to go out and buy an old BL car each, and then perform various tasks. They drove to the sites of some of the old factories, but most of them had since been demolished. The only one still in use is now owned by BMW. Others had been demolished and (like Longbridge) were derelict land or had been turned into hotels or offices.
At the site of the old factory in Coventry they commented on how it had turned into a hotel. They complained that there was nothing to commemorate the site of the factory, apart from a few road names (Herald Avenue, Dolomite Avenue). They must have missed the metal plinth which gave some of the history of the site.
The Canley factory has gone the same way as most of the motor manufacturing in Coventry. A lot of the sites have been converted into flats, offices or shops. The Canley site has an industrial estate, a hotel and a Sainsburys. The Peugeot site at Stoke is now flats and offices. The only cars made within Coventry are the Black Cabs, made by London Taxi International, at the factory on Holyhead Road. This factory (tucked behind the BMW/Mini dealership) is opposite yet another shopping centre built on the site of an old car factory - the Alvis Retail Park.
Anyway, back to Top Gear. They took their old cars to a test track and had to drive along a bumpy cobbled road, with a colander of eggs taped over their heads. They scored depending on how how much egg was still in the colander, and lost 'points' for any trim which fell off. The biggest bit of 'trim' lost was the back door from Clarkson's Rover SD1.
Another of the tests was to drive up a 1 in 3 stretch of road, apply the handbrake, and see if the car would stay there. Now 1 in 3 is very steep - lesser gradients make it feel like the car is tipping over backwards. The Rover had great difficulty even getting up the slope. The wheels lost traction and the wheelspin hid the car in huge clouds of smoke.
Back when I lived in Aberystwyth, there was a 1 in 4 road between Waen Fawr and Llanbadarn. At the bottom of the hill there was a T junction and I had to approach it very slowly because it always felt like the car wasn't going to stop. Heading the other way, up the hill, unless I managed to get a good run up I had to take the hill in 1st gear. At the time I only had a Rover Metro with a 1.1 litre engine so it struggled when presented with challenges like that.
We got rid of the Metro a few years ago, but we noticed the address in the back of the handbook was given as 'Canley Road' - the site now occupied by the hotel/industrial estate/Sainsburys. I did a search for the postcode on Google maps but it doesn't exist any more.
Getting back to Top Gear, the tests became more surreal. They filled the cars with water and drove around the track to see which would go the furthest. The surprising winner was an Austin Princess driven by Captain Slow.
Top Gear is at its best when they have the silly games and challenges. Most of the car reviews get very tedious. They tend to be either overexpensive cars being driven fast around the track while being compared with other overexpensive cars, or small/affordable/economical cars being accused of being dull and boring. I can't be the only viewer who gets tired of hearing about the latest supercar with zero relevance to everyday life. It's like a car version of the pathetic Celebrity type of magazine.
Despite these problems, the banter between the presenters is good. The 3-way reviews, where they all go out with similar cars and compare them, tend to be more interesting than the one-off reviews with individual cars. Hopefully they'll continue to do more of the motoring challenges - the one where they had to drive old cars across Africa was one of the better episodes of the series.
Summer's here and there's crap on the telly. Our video recorder died last night while I was trying to find a tape to record The Butterfly Effect. In the end we stayed up to watch it - odd film. I gave it 7/10 on IMDB.
Last night's episode of Dr Who was a good one, but a little bit scary. I'm going to be a bit wary of statues from now on.
Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty have both finished so there's nothing to watch on a wednesday night and not much on a friday. Thursday is looking like the best night for tv - the second series of My Name is Earl and House are both on.
I'm so glad we've got a decent collection of TV Series on DVD to watch. Otherwise we'd have go to the pub or read a book or something like that.
Europe seems to have suffered a collective sense of humour failure tonight. The contest was won by Serbia with a fairly dreary ballad, whereas the Ukraine deserved better but only came second.
Apart from the Ukraine (who benefited from the Eastern Bloc policy of voting for friends and neighbours), no other novelty act scored well. France should have scored better than they did - the singer jogging around the stage with a toy cat around his neck had to be worth something. Scooch did surprisingly badly - we would have been better with Pif Paf Pof.
The swedish song sounded very familiar but I can't work out what it reminded me of.
The BBC's supernatural series has returned for a one-off special. The show stars Bill Patterson as a paranormal researcher in a Scottish university (possibly based on or inspired by the The Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh).
Tonights episode was part one of a story based around the spooky happenings in a scottish manor house which has been bought by a couple who want to convert it into a hotel. The resident 'ghosts' have a different idea and try to convince them to leave, by intimidating the wife and frightning off the builders.
The house seems to have been the scottish base of an occult organisation called the Golden Dawn (who really existed and counted Aleister Crowley as a member at one time).
This lookes likely to be one of the better episodes, resembling a dramatised issue of Fortean Times magazine. I must remember to watch the conclusion on thursday.
Tonight's episode of Dr Who had the Doctor and his new assistant travelling back in time to Elizabethan London and meeting Shakespeare. Part of the episode was actually filmed in Coventry and made the local news at the time.
The episode featured Shakespeare, Witches, Alien Monsters, the usual mix of nonsense which we've come to expect from the programme.
We were watching an episode of House on DVD when it occurred to me that it would be an ideal programme for a drinking game. There are many phrases and themes which recur repeatedly during a series so it would be fairly straightforward to compile a list of them.
A few which came to mind from the one episode we watched tonight were:
- House takes a Vicodin
- House asks for a Differential Diagnosis
- Someone suggests Cancer
- Someone suggests Lupus
- They stick a needle in someones eye
- A patient gets worse when they start a treatment
- A patient lies about taking drugs
- They suspect ALS (aka Lou Gehrig's Disease)
These are only a few initial ideas - the list could and should be expanded.
At last there is something worth watching on a thursday night (at last there is something worth watching on Channel 5!). The 3rd series of House has started.
We've ordered the first 2 series on DVD and we're waiting for those to turn up, then we'll have plenty of grumpy doctor episodes to watch.
Tonight the lucky viewers of BBC1 got a chance to vote for the act to represent us in the Eurovision Song Contest. After the first round of votes it was narrowed down to 2 acts:
Cyndi, with a dull unoriginal 'power ballad by numbers' combining the worst bits of that Titanic song, Wind Beneath my Wings and various others and
Scooch, an act reminiscent of the 'Piff Paff Poff' episode of the highly underrated short lived comedy The High Life. It's been far too long since British TV has had a camp Air Steward song and dance routine.
The final phone votes were counted and it was down to Terry Wogan to tell us the winner. He initially announced that Cyndi had won but there was a confused silence then he corrected himself. I had mixed feelings - I thought poor cow, she briefly thought she was going to Eurovision followed by that's more like it, Cyndi's song was a bit crap.
We'll have to wait til May to find out whether our novelty song and dance act is good enough to win.
Most of the 50 Shocking Facts About Your Food on Channel 5 weren't that shocking or surprising. Most of them must be common knowledge by now (eating too many burgers is bad for you, the French practice animal cruelty as a means of food production, tomatoes contain something good called lycopene).
For me I think the only real eye-opener was quite how rubbish modern fruit and veg are compared to 40 or 50 years ago. According to the programme, vitamin levels have dropped so much that, taking oranges and tomatoes as examples, you need to eat 8-10 times as much as earlier generations did. The blame was put on intensive farming and exessive storage and transportation.
It might have been a mistake to watch this film in our cold non-centrally heated house, especially the 2nd half where the entire northern hemisphere is frozen over.
We had to bring our small fan heater downstairs so we got a gentle waft of warm air blowing over us during the film. Warmth shouldn't be a luxury in modern england but that's how it feels in our current house.
Back to the film - it's quite surprising that it actually got made when you realise that Fox was one of the production companies behind it. Global warming denier Dubya friendly Fox (although he's now changed his tune slightly since).
