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31st January There were signs all over Tesco about their stopping accepting cheques very shortly. On those divider things you have on the conveyer belts the message was that they were stopping cheques to speed up the service to us - the customers. Because obviously that's what they care most about - seriving us quickly. All of which ties in nicely with the delay I had this evening ebcause the woman on the till insisted on carrying out a second transaction for the people in front so she could add 9 Clubcard points to their card as they'd re-used nine bags. This involved scanning an item, manually deducting the cost of that item, swiping the Clubcard, doing something manual to satisfy the till that it wasn't seeing things when the total purchased was 0 and printing off a new receipt. Nine Clubcard points is after all 9p. Or possibly a tenth of that, I never did understand their system. So putting the speed of customer service first is something so ingrained into Tesco's staff that they'll bend over backwards to make the checkout experience as swift as possible. None of those ghastly old cheques here - just slick, efficient service. Bollocks. The death of Jeremy Beadle won't make me one of those hypocrites who comes out of the woodwork and does a 180 degree turn when someone dies. I didn't like his television programmes but I can see that he did those formats better than any of the many copycats to have come along afterwards. He did shows that weren't cruel to the victims, something largely ignored today in favour of that warm audience glow which comes from seeing someone genuinely hurt or upset. It's easy to say Jeremy Beadle should've been above that sort of thing but if such shows must exist then at least he did them well. He was what might be called a QI person - like Stephen Fry, Gyles Brandreth or Danny Baker - and it surprises me that he never appeared on the show. He would've been good and it would've shown him in a truer light than his legacy of howling ITV prime time trash. The fame those shows brought him enabled him to raise huge amounts for charity. Those he helped could look past Game for a Laugh and You've Been Framed and now so can we. I read this on PWInsider.com about Ring of Honor's need for cost cutting. I like ROH and hope they contirnue, I also like PWInsider for the most part but this bit seemed to miss a couple of important points.
It's the sort of thing people write about a lot at the moment across the whole entertainment spectrum. But addressing a couple of points specific to ROH, firstly, the logic that 100 people who download a show would otherwise buy it is deeply flawed. The music industry bang on about there being 20 downloads for every legally purchased track but that isn't the same as them losing out on 20 purchases as a result. There is a massive difference between what people will take for nothing and what they will pay for. Secondly, ROH makes a lot of its money from bringing in foreign wrestlers for dream matches. Their biggest show ever was Joe vs Kobashi and why was it their biggest show ever? Because people bootlegged or torrented Japanese tapes and saw how good Kenta Kobashi was. It's the same for all Japanese wrestlers - those Americans who will pay to see them are the ones who have illegally obtained tapes and DVDs of their work. So it goes both ways and those who benefit (directly or indirectly) from so-called piracy shouldn't ignore the benefits when raging about the negatives. I agree with the point he's making - ROH lives and dies by its DVD sales and if people like ROH they should buy the DVDs and the pay per views - but there are two sides to the digital distribution debate and as long as people only focus on one then the discussion has no credibility in my eyes. And finally, this weekend is the most interesting fight in ages. For the first time ever a former UFC heavyweight champion battles a former WWE heavyweight champion in what one might describe as genuine athletic competition. Sunday night, 9pm on Bravo. It may well suck but it's going to be a happening (as Gorilla would say).
26th January There is a thread going on at Roobarbs about certain cable and satellite channels filmising old TV programmes in an attempt to make them more attractive to modern viewers. When I started reading it I assumed it was a joke or possibly a one off clip in a documentary that was being blown out of all proportion by one of those internet message board users. But no - it turns out that various channels including UKGold and its family are filmising old episodes of Dr Who, Porridge and other old 4:3 videotaped classics. This strikes me as being a very strange thing to do. Filmising (roughly speaking) involves removing half the frames from video so instead of having 50 images per second you only have 25. This buggers the picture around a bit so it looks slightly as if it was shot on film. Except it doesn't - obviously - it looks like the EP setting on my DVD recorder which can cram 8 hours on a 2 hour disc by discarding so much of the picture information that the end result is unwatchable. But it does make it look ever so slightly like film. A lot of modern series are shot on video and then converted to film-effect before transmission. But they are recorded on equipment designed for this process - they aren't old tapes shot 30 years ago. Although ironically, in those days video was often put on film for overseas sales (something which means we now have computer software which turns film back into video so people like me can watch "The Seeds of Death" as it was meant to be). Do UKTV really think people are so stupid that they'll stumble across a filmised Porridge and think "Wow - I didn't know they still made Porridge"? Or will they see it and think "Wow - Porridge looks horrible. This is why I don't watch old TV - it's from the stone age". All of which is as naught compared to the fury which will be unleashed when channels make it their policy to filmise old shows AND crop them to 16:9. Compress them, convert them and crop them - you'll be convinced that one of the blurry shapes is Ronnie Barker but you won't stick around long enough to find out which one. On the other hand I've just watched the best DVD extra ever. It's on "The Invasion" and is all about people recording Doctor Who onto audio tape in the 60s and 70s. I've suddenly forgiven Mark Ayres for all his online pomposity, rudeness and arrogance. He is the nerd all other nerds should worship. I demand he be granted either a statue or an OBE for services to audio restoration. The other men (shockingly it was indeed all men) were fantastic with their tales of microphones pressed against television speakers but it was Mark Ayres - with his endless assortment of audio restoration jargon (most of which I'm guessing he made up as he was going along) - who was the star of the show. It is a few months since the disc was released and I can't be bothered to check but I'm assuming he got the cover of DWM that month. If not, the magazine can go to hell. Mark Ayres is a man who can turn the "brightness" down on a sound clip. If he didn't exist we'd have to invent him. But he does so we can just enjoy him while he lasts. And finally, a picture of Banana eating a banana~! It's like adorable cannibalism.
She'd just spotted a robin in the garden and was about to lose interest in her lunchtime fruit/herb/berry/whatever.
23rd January I love this story. I can't believe I forgot to write about it at the weekend. It is, as far as I know, absolutely true. One day last week the system we test and maintain - and through which everyone does just about everything - began to throw out error messages. We went to see our chaps in IT before the first call had been logged by users. They ummed and ahhed - one of them asked me if I'd been immaculately conceived which I hope was part of the conversation they'd been having before we arrived - and came to the conclusion that everything was basically fine. One of them went downstairs to reboot a box and all would be well. Fifteen minutes became an hour and all was still not well. An hour became two hours and things were better but still flaky. Eventually it was up and running again and everyone put it down as just One Of Those Things. Well, business users wouldn't have - they use the (on average) six-monthly outages as fuel for their belief that new stuff is bad and always breaks down and what was wrong with mainframes anyway and can't we just use a pencil? But this was not just one of those things. This was more serious. This was... an ATTACK~! Yes - an actual attack. A denial of service attack carried out against our web server. Thousands of useless commands repeatedly bombarded the server until it shut down to protect itself from this heinous crime. Was it the Russian Mafia? Was it an international gang hell bent on extorting cash from us? Rebooting the box did no good - thousands of commands kept hitting it and it kept shutting down. Surely this was a well planned, well executed attack by some of the most evil minds in international computer crime. They set to work trying to trace the source of this barrage of requests which was crippling one of the country's biggest insurance firms. And trace it they did. Was it Budapest? No. Was it Moscow? No. Was it an anarcho-nerdist commune in the United States? No. It was a desk in customer services. They went round to have a look. Someone had left something resting on their keyboard and the keystrokes were being sent thousands of times per second to the web server. The file was moved. The attacks stopped. The lights came back on and everything was fine. We laughed.
19th January I've just finished another rotten book. "Great Email Disasters" claims it is hilarious and toe curling as it recounts dozens of stories of email calamities. Alas, none of them are funny. There are a couple - such as the US naval officer who kept sending secret information to a school girl by mistake - which are mildly interesting but the number of stories which set out a premise, say "he hit reply-all instead of just reply" and then the payoff is that the email was sent to lots of people is just lazy. Worse are the ones where someone sends an email to the right person and that person mean-spiritedly sends it on to all their friends, who send it to all their friends and the punchline is that millions read the private email. Hilarious. Or not. Then they add a second punchline that the media latch onto the story and harass all concerned for a few days. What larks - people who have done nothing wrong are publicly humiliated and have their lives ruined. Let's ignore those who do bad things and instead write about people who make the mistake of trusting twats. It was a depressing read because we're told elsewhere that 90% of all email traffic is spam. From the sounds of this book, most of the remaining 10% is cruel and witless forwarding of emails which weren't funny at the time and aren't made funny just because millions of people have read them. If George Bush sent an email to the President of Iran saying that the President of Iran was a wanker when he meant to send it to one of his golfing buddies called Ira Pressman and got confused in his address book then that is mildly amusing. Certainly better than anything in this slim volume with enormous text to try and disguise how thin it really is. We went out for pizza last night. TheArtist didn't make it because he double booked himself and preferred to look at houses with his lady friend rather than eat pizza with people he sees all day, every day and secretly despises. After that we went to the pub as one of the IT developers was leaving. I liked him - he was a character but in a good way. We'll miss him - he was a classical geek. He can tell you what every port is used for without having to look it up. He also made demonstrating new functionality from the development port an adventure as if you clicked on a link to something that wasn't finished you were likely to get a white screen with "bumhole" or "you're not the messiah - you're a very naughty boy" written on it in big letters. M'self and ShirtGuy only stayed for a few minutes - he had to go because his little one wasn't well and I left when he did because it was an escape route and I'm always looking for an escape route from the moment I arrive at such events. I should've stayed longer but that's that. On the plus side I did call at the big Tesco on the way home and bought a new SCART lead. This means I can now use the SCART switcher I got months ago and choose whether to feed my video or cable box into my DVD recorder (via my macro-master). Life was simpler when I had TiVo as it had three SCART sockets and I had the perfect set up. I celebrated by recording "The Ambassadors of Death" onto DVD as a proof of concept. There doesn't seem to be any interference (which I've always had before when trying a SCART switcher and it doesn't properly insulate each signal from every other signal). So it was worth leaving social congress early to get this new lead. The overwhelming sense of misery when I got home was entirely incidental. I read this story about David Gill's house being vandalised and felt entirely vindicated for the things I wrote about football supporters last time. How much of a coward do you have to be to paint slogans on a man's house when you know he's away? The people who did it probably think they're brave but brave would be to do something where you aren't hidden by darkness as you daub nonsense on a building you know to be empty. And what is all this anti-Glazer stuff anyway? Is it still 2005? Can they not look at a newspaper, see what is happening to Liverpool and realise that the Glazers have actually done a good job? They will moan about ticket prices. Firstly, Old Trafford sells out every week therefore ticket prices cannot logically be said to be too high. Secondly, they are still a hell of a lot lower than those of their two main rivals. Arsenal bring in more gate money than United despite 15,000 fewer people in the stadium. You do the math. Maths, obviously. I was once sent a text message (yes, it happens) which ended "You do the math" after the phrase was used in Peep Show. Ten pence it cost me to reply with a single "s". They will also moan about the debt. This is a common misconception about debt. The size of the debt is irrelevant unless it cannot be paid back when requested. United can pay their repayments and the banks are not going to suddenly demand their half-billion pounds back. They will counter this by saying that all the profits the club makes are going to pay off the debt. Which is obviously less good than the pre-Glazer era when all the profits went out of the club to shareholders. Which, admittedly, included a lot of these self-important fans who no longer receive a dividend so maybe that's why they're pissed off. The Glazer's sanctioned more spending on players last summer than any other window in the club's history. And they've indicated that more is available if Sir Alex wants it. Two sets of American business men bought two great English football teams. One lot were successful, one lot were failures. One lot brought renewed success, the others made their club a laughing stock. One lot are disliked, one lot are despised. It's odd that it is the successful ones who are despised. Hey, look on the bright side - maybe the Glazer's will get fed up of the threats and the abuse and sell up to a shady foreign billionaire who will pump some of his ill-gotten fortune into the club. Wouldn't that be great? Money is always best if you know someone else had to suffer for it. Just as long as it isn't the supporters who suffer price increases.
16th January Well done to the electrical manufacturers and media conglomerates who stumble from appalling idea to appalling idea in the so-called next generation DVD race. Having given their quest a really bad start by trying to replace the most successful format for a generation after less than a decade they launched with two rival formats. A tactic which worked so well in the early days of home video. Come - the public were urged - spend a fortune on a new DVD player which may become useless in two or three years. With the studios taking sides early it became clear that some big releases would be exclusive to one format or the other. Well done again - they hit upon the perfect way to make a handful of home cinema enthusiasts buy two expensive machines. Everyone else chose not to but the pioneers (no pun intended) had lots of shiny new boxes to play with. And what benefit the new format offers - at least to the small minority which have televisions able to show off the benefits. So, having targeted a minority within a minority within a minority, they have now played their ace trump joker card - they've redefined the Blu-Ray specification so all current Blu-Ray players are now technically obsolete. Well done to the Blu-Ray consortium for winning the HD battle and then making their first act as winners to screw over everyone who stumped up a fortune to buy one of their machines. Kudos all round and I hope Blu-Ray dies the same stinking death as HD-DVD. As do Microsoft but that's an internet conspiracy which only sounds plausible and has no evidence to back it up. Yet. It's too soon for a new format to come along and take over. I know next generation players will be backwards compatible (at least they claim that - who knows how long that will last in a marketplace where forcing consumers to re-buy everything they like has proved an invaluable source of income in the past) but DVD is only eight years old - discs only began appearing in a small corner of HMV in 1999 - and it isn't going anywhere. CDs have seen off all comers because they were better than the vinyl they replaced (yes they were - it's time to stop praising LPs, shave and get a job, hippy) and will probably be around for another 25 years. Videos were better than anything that came before (basic telly, film projectors) and anything which came after (Laserdisc, SVHS, CD-i) until DVD got it absolutely right. DVD launched with one format, a set of fixed rules, a marked improvement in quality and convenience, they were cheaper to make and sell and their launch coincided with the growth of internet commerce. DVDs will be superseded one day - almost certainly within the next decade. But when the next format takes over it will have learned from DVD's success and not decided that format wars are good, consumer exploitation is good, minority minority minority target audience is good and screwing people over is good. And maybe - pigs flying Santa's sleigh and all that - they'll drop any form of region coding for good. Because that was DVD's only mistake. It was only a minor irritation to get round but next time they're more likely to do it properly than drop it all together. And if they decide to do it properly, the EU and our government will bend over and enforce it legally. Making your machine multiregional will become covert, illegal and the big corporations will be tempted to do what Apple did with modified iPhones and find a way to blast unlocked machines. I wouldn't put it past them to put something on an anticipated film's disc which screwed the firmware of any machine which dared to be different. Elsewhere, the FA have come out and said that football fans are scum. Their decision not to have a minute's silence in memory of the Munich anniversary because they don't believe their fans would honour it is a clear admission of the low regard they have for the people who will be paying for their stadium for generations to come. I don't have a high regard for football fans en masse (any body of men which will consider any form of protest which doesn't include not buying a ticket to the match even if that money is going to the very chairman or board they are protesting so vehemently against is hard to take seriously) but this is giving them shorter shrift than even I would offer. Turn the microphones off so any chanting won't be heard around the world if that's what it takes. And then if there is any disturbance then it proves that football ticket prices should continue going up. The sooner the moronic, hate-filled, tribal supporters are priced out of the game the better. Fill the stadiums with nice, quiet, middle class people who don't enjoy seeing other clubs' players die.
12th January There is such a thing as the moment passing. Imagine, if you will, one of our IT bods coming up to see me about a problem I'd raised. The issue was that we - as in everyone - were getting a "document preparing" message whenever we tried scrolling through a PDF. For most people, who don't care, this either hadn't been noticed or was ignored. After all, most of them only open PDFs to check what they've written or to try and answer customer enquiries and they're very reluctant to do either. So the guy comes up to see me and I explain that we're rolling a new system out soon and people will be opening huge PDFs and this message could be a serious inconvenience. Naturally, I can only find documents with a few pages as he stands there expectantly. "If you find a really big one can you let me have a look at it" he says. I raised a quizzical eyebrow but said nothing (nor sniggered). I couldn't find a big one for him to look at and offered to email one to him if I did. "If you find a big one, send it to me downstairs" he says. Of course it was too late to snigger by this point. If one is too mature and sensible to chuckle at his first remark, one is by definition too mature to chuckle at his second one. The moral of the story is to laugh childishly as soon as you get the chance because if you miss the window people will assume you are grown up. Postscript - I ended up solving the problem. It has baffled IT for weeks and the time came for someone with a catchphrase to resolve it. He's going to put in a global fix this weekend. Because that's how I roll. I'm also feeling reasonably creative at the moment. Which is just as well as I need to write six things a week just to keep the site ticking along. It started in the shower on New Year's Eve. I suddenly had the urge - after a fortnight of illness during a planned post-Brenty Four break - to start a Department S review. There are worse things to think about in the shower. Since then I've not really looked back. Some of the stuff has - modesty aside - been better than the stuff I was doing before. Despite the impression I sometimes give in the text, I'm rather enjoying "Mysterious Doctor Satan". How long this will last I don't know but I've got a new feature in mind which should come together soon (warning - it is quite obscure). I'm also going to pitch an idea to Si for a project he does elsewhere on the internet. I quite fancy writing for someone else and the idea would work best done by him rather than anything I could do here. And now a few brief moans about newsy stuff. I don't get what the problem is with people selling concert tickets on the internet. The government wants to make it illegal or something and I really don't see why. I get the arguments about banning the sale of football tickets because of security - football fans like starting fights and if segregation is to work you have to control who is able to get into each area. I get that. But concert tickets are a whole other thing - people don't go to Led Zeppelin gigs to start fights. It comes down to the artists and the promoters wanting either the resale to be banned or to get their cut of it. I think, deep down, they'd be happy for a £50 ticket to be touted for £500 if they got 50% of the mark up. They may say in public that their loyal fans are being ripped off but greed is at the heart of it. So why are the government getting involved? If someone buys the in-demand games console in bulk and flogs it at a huge profit just before Christmas no one says that should be illegal. As long as the goods were sourced legally and are genuine then you either believe in a free market or you don't. The people buying and selling tickets on line may or may not be scummy people taking advantage of their fellow man but charging £500 for a pop concert ticket with a face value of £50 is hardly war-time spivving. It is hardly gouging the innocent for basic necessities. The price something sells for is the price someone is willing to pay. If you are prepared to pay £500 for a ticket then that is your choice. If you can't afford it you can't afford it. Life is full of things we can't afford. A ticket to a Led Zeppelin concert is not a basic human right and the government shouldn't be at the beck and call of a greedy music industry which doesn't want any profiteering going on if it doesn't get its share of the booty. In yesterday's United vs Newcastle game the commentators annoyed me. They kept talking about Michael Owen having a perfectly sound goal disallowed. It is true that he was almost certainly level and therefore not offside. But the flag went up, the whistle went, everyone stopped and Owen, as strikers are programmed to do, had a fruitless and frustrated pop at goal. It was not a disallowed goal - it was a pot shot after everyone had stopped playing. There is a difference. No one tried to stop him scoring. In the end it was 6-0 to United and all was right with the world but the oafs on the mics kept banging on erroneously and it pissed me off. Then six goals went in and I mellowed. Is it just me that saw the headline "Water-boarding 'would be torture'" and assumed water-boarding was a new cross between skiing and snow boarding? It's probably murder on the thighs and the wetsuit might chafe a little but calling torture is just further debasement of the language. It turns out water-boarding is a modern version of the old ducking stool used to try witches in the middle ages. Who knew medieval punishments could be described as torture? The debate in the US has opened. Next week they'll ask the question "Is burning people alive 'justice'?"
9th January Before we start, and with thanks to TheArtist for providing my new favourite piece of movie information, what is quite interesting about P.H. Vazak's nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1984's Oscars? And now for something torn quite literally from the headlines. The BBC yesterday lead with a rather misleading headline on their website and on the scrolling ticker-bar contraption on News 24. "Copying CDs could be made legal" they trumpeted. They actually meant that copying CDs onto your computer and transferring them to your MP3 player will become legal. Something most people didn't know was against the law in the first place. It was an irritating story because the BBC - as part of the wider media obsession with keeping on the right side of the record companies so they can fill time and space with the latest pop nonsense - repeated the same tired lies without any hint of objectivity. So we get statements about how CD sales are tumbling because of "rampant piracy" and no one stops to suggest alternatives. CD sales could be falling because - (a) the rise of places like eBay mean people buy and sell perfectly legal CDs without the transaction coming into the record companies' accounts. (b) people prefer to buy grey imports from non-EU countries because they'd rather pay £8 for a CD than the £15 HMV charge on the high street. (c) the rise in short-term pop acts which win a talent show and are pushed to the moon for nine months until the next series starts and they are tossed away is beginning to turn people off buying CDs. (d) their records are shite. (e) they are downloading them from file sharing sites. Illegal downloads are certainly a factor but I don't believe they are anything like as significant as we're constantly told. Most downloads are of things people wouldn't buy - every track downloaded does not represent a lost sale. And many of those that do are simply that people hear a song, like it and don't want to wait until they're in a shop to get it. They would buy it from an online music store but DRM would make it a nightmare. The dropping of DRM by an increasing number of sites is a step in the right direction and it will slowly encourage people to go to iTunes when they hear a song they like on the radio or in an advert rather than pop4u.wow or whatever music sharing sites call themselves. Until the record companies differentiate between people who casually download for convenience and to sample; and people who flog a suitcase full of knock offs, they won't be taken seriously. Privately they do differentiate but publicly they don't want to be seen endorsing casual misuse so they make themselves look like buffoons. The American election is beginning in earnest. That's Earnest, New Hampshire probably. Their system - which I've been reading about on Wiki - seems needlessly complicated, unnecessarily expensive and very divisive. I don't know most of the candidates yet - I know Hillary because she's Hillary, I know Barack Obama because I saw a picture of him where he looked like The Rock and I know John McCain because he's the fucker who very nearly drove UFC out of business with an ignorant, ill-informed and highly inflammatory vendetta against the company and the new sport of mixed martial arts. The Democrat race is an interesting one - obviously we want a Democrat in the White House (that goes without saying) but a race between a black man and a woman seemingly guarantees a first either way. I have my doubts about whether America - as a whole - will be willing to vote in their first black president or their first female president. I worry that there are plenty of people who will vote against them simply because of their race or gender. But I'm also worried that people will vote for Obama purely because he's black or they'll vote for Hillary purely because she's a woman. That's very nearly as bad - voting for or against a candidate because of colour or gender is a bad way to pick the next ruler of the western world. But as long as a Democrat wins I'm happy. The lead story on the BBC's six o'clock news was the announcement that battery farming will be banned in four years time. It got watered down to just eggs during the report but we had farmers on talking about it. Chicken seems to be a big issue at the moment - Sainsbury's sent me a leaflet about how organic their chickens are today which just goes to show their customer profiling database isn't quite as good as they think it is. The mood of the piece seemed to be that free range chickens live cruelty free lives. That free ranging is a very good thing. And for eggs it is - you pay a bit extra but you don't get haunted by visions of mutant chickens gassed up to the eye balls pressing their faces against your dream's eye and begging to be allowed to die with dignity. But a free range chicken is still slaughtered. There is still a reasonable amount of evil going on there. Their idyllic lives of pottering, pecking, a spot of laying and then back to pecking, pottering and the occasional squawk still ends with someone wringing their necks and chopping them into bits. Besides, any ban on battery eggs or meat won't mean anything because stores will start buying foreign products. The insanity of the modern world means it is undoubtedly cheaper to raise chickens in Polish hell-sheds and bring their eggs right the way across Europe than let chickens potter about in Kent and take the eggs from there. And finally, the doom mongers were giving the last rights to the retail sector because M&S - that barometer of British buying - reported catastrophic sales figures. It is proof positive - the reporter proclaimed - that we're turning our backs on shopping and everything is fucked. You might as well go out now and take photographs of shops because they'll all be gone soon. Replaced by employment agencies, Link machines and posters advertising records by people I've never heard of. After all, M&S sales fell by 2.2% and the world is thus about to end. Slow news days annoy me intensely but they are better than days when something terrible has happened. I mean something genuinely terrible and not just record company scare tactics, M&S selling slightly fewer pairs of knickers than they did last year or farmers moaning because they don't want government interference in how they torture living creatures. The answer to the question is that the quite interesting thing about P.H. Vazak's Oscar nomination is that he was a dog. The real writer was so appalled by what the studio did to his script that he insisted on a pseudonym being used. He was rather astonished then when his pseudonym - his pet's name - was nominated for an Academy Award.
6th January Is it the 21st century? Or Century Twenty-One if you prefer. I only ask because I ordered a book from Amazon.ca (the bi-lingual store which always seems to lag a few years behind its southern big sister) which cost $17.50. Postage was another $15 (and the Canadian dollar is more or less the same as the US dollar these days) so almost the cost of the book again. It was shipped on the 22nd November and the estimated delivery time is 22nd FEBRUARY~! Are we still so amazingly primitive that it takes three months for a book to get from Canada to the UK? Or is it just Canada assuming they will be under ten feet of snow for the full duration and the postal service will be lucky to dig their way through a hundred yards a day? Unacceptable, Canada, unacceptable. I finally gave in and went to see the doctor on Wednesday. I'm not a big fan of breathing as you know but if one must, it would be nice to be able to do it without choking. I got there well before surgery hours but still had to wait an age to be seen. Almost an hour and a half in order to have two minutes of his time. He listened to me breathe, gave me a prescription and sent me on my way. The only people to report from the waiting room were the mother and child who had clearly never seen chairs before as they insisted on standing the whole time despite there being places to sit down. Which amused me because I've been watching Fawlty Towers and I'm sure Basil comments at one point that two of their guests have never sat on chairs before. Fawlty Towers is every bit as good as I remembered it being. Some shows wither after repeated viewings but I've been watching the Towers regularly since first getting it on video in 1994 and it never loses its magnificence. People can bang on about statues and ceilings and symphonies as being peaks of mankind's achievement but Fawlty Towers is just so much more impressive. Watch John Cleese. Just watch him. And then tell me he doesn't deserve to be in the Louvre. He's great in everything he does but as Basil Fawlty he redefines comedy. From the smallest look to the loudest rant. Po-faced people will pontificate about kitchen sink dramas and social relevance but John Otto Cleese's achievements with a few wobbly sets and some jokes about Torquay surpass anything else that television has produced. Heck, his legs alone are funnier than anything ITV has ever produced. If you don't own it, buy it - you'll get change from thirteen quid. I've also possibly made something close to a new year's resolution. It's something I've wanted to do for ages but have been put off by what's involved. I mean, they cut your eyes open and shoot you with a laser. That's got to be scary. But Bryan had it done recently and his description suddenly made it less scary. Ok, it doesn't sound fun but it's over in ten minutes and you don't feel anything. The Americans can give patients valium to calm them down which I don't imagine we can in this country but the eye drops and stuff will still numb you to anything and everything. So, once I've paid off my new computer and March's inevitable car bills I'm going to have a serious, blurry look at laser eye surgery. I actually think I could go through with it. Maybe.
1st January 2008 Here, more or less, is what I can remember of the Festive Season. As it were. The entire fortnight has been blighted by a never ending conveyor belt of symptoms which have refused to go away. They have included a vicious cough, a dreadful cold, headaches, dizziness, painful shivering, nausea, migraine, a dreamlike haze, absurd fatigue and trouble breathing. But on with the larks. Christmas Eve I got a text message from m'colleague. "Bodge" it began. It went on to explain that the parcel he'd ordered from Benson's World for his mother had not arrived. He called home and his housemate said "Yes - there is a parcel" and he assumed. Not only was the parcel not what he was expecting, it wasn't even for him. Luckily I had foreseen this because I am gifted and a plan B was already on the table. Thanks to an Amazon "misprice" which they actually honoured (I don't, by the way, believe in Amazon misprices - they are stunts Amazon quite deliberately pull to get people to come to their website and order stuff. They cancel most of them - the item not the whole order so the paperback you added will cost you price+postage as you're now under the limit - but a few get through so people keep believing) I happened to have the same Miss Marple boxed set he needed. It was a great plan - the only down side being that I had to give him directions to meet me. I can't give directions. It's the only thing I'm worse at than following directions. I gave him my address - he PAF'd it which is a remark few will appreciate it - but still called to ask for help. I suggested the swimming baths car park because I knew it would be open and it is a fairly landmarky sort of thing. Sadly, he mistook the leisure centre for the swimming baths on the entirely reasonable grounds that you can't get into the swimming baths car park from the road he was on and by the time you've got all the way round you're virtually at chez moi anyway. Luckily, I'd prepared for this cock-up (or cocks-up depending whether you aggregate them) by creating a new ring tone for my phone so I had a burst of "Bring Me Sunshine" whenever confusion was on its way. Christmas Day I was genuinely useful this time as I took with me not only a supply of batteries for children's toys but also a Swiss Army knife for those things which might need assembling. Banana got a Dora the Explorer tricycle and that was a bitch to put together. Here we see Banana and Granddad putting stickers on the finished article.
It wasn't just me that was ill - everyone seemed to have something and I'm sure being together all day in a warm and enclosed space merely exchanged germs and made everyone feel that bit worse. I got a new camera for Xmas and all the pics of Banana make her look in the grips of the worst kind of flu. My little nephew got a WWE ladder match rig - which was massive and was actually so like TNA's "Ultimate X" set up that they could have an action for breach of copyright. It was amusing to hear him explain to Grandma what a ladder match is. Grandma sounded almost exactly like everyone else did before Wrestlemania X when the gimmick got over so unbelievably well that it has been a money match ever since. The Doctor Who special looked fine. I couldn't follow it properly as there were excitable children running around and Aqua Drawing in front of the TV. I was also all but out of it by this point. Finding Nemo passed in what felt like half a confused hour during the afternoon and I was even less aware by tea time. On the plus side, the new theme tune annoyed Ian Levine so much that he was too angry to enjoy the rest of the show. What a twat. Speaking of food, my sister in law was very accommodating - she even did two lots of roast potatoes, one in goose fat and one without. This was not just for my benefit - her mother is vegetarian on Tuesdays (it's a Hindu thing) so that was fine. Lunch was worth it just to see Banana trying to wear a paper hat that was far too big for her.
Boxing Day The only two bits of New Series merchandise I've ever bought are a sonic screwdriver and a mini sonic screwdriver (the one that is just a torch and makes none of the noise). The latter was to stop the little ones squabbling over the former and because I thought it would look cute if they both had appropriately sized sonic screwdrivers. It did. They happily ran around in the dark for an hour. RTD will be disappointed to hear that the first words out of m'nephew's mouth when he got his sonic screwdriver were "I'm Doctor Who - [Banana] is Rose Tyler". So the public has perhaps not quite taken Martha to their hearts then. Thursday It is rare that I am quite so appalled with myself. On the pretext that I was too ill to go anywhere or do anything I just sat around eating chocolates and watching QI until my back catalogue was exhausted. Then I started on Monty Python's Flying Circus. When I first got the Python DVDs I was very disappointed - the series seemed to be a pointless and unfunny dribble of badly written rubbish. Revolutionary in its time perhaps but utterly unworthy of its reputation. Luckily, that is just the first disc of series one. It's amazing how much it changed when you get half way through the first series. It suddenly becomes everything you hope Monty Python really genuinely was. It is clever, funny, startlingly imaginative and at times you can really see how this show single handedly changed British comedy. The second series is even better. By the time they made the second series they'd really nailed the formula and made half-hours that fitted together so well that it is a crime to break them into compilations or edit them in any way. But that aside, I was so disgusted with my abject lethargy that I was actually fine with going to work the next day. Friday No one quite understood why we had to have so many people in over Xmas. The 50% idea which seemed heavy handed for Customer Services seemed even more heavy handed for a support function like us. Walking round the building in a period of boredom it was fairly obvious that Customer Services were well under 50% staffing so it was even more annoying that the only area to have stuck to the edict was the one that had absolutely no reason to. It was a very boring day. Since we moved to new desks - and ostensibly got more space - m'self and TheArtist have been in a sort of no-man's-land. We have people behind us and to the left of us who completely ignore us. There is no one from our gang (some say team) within speaking distance and when either one of us is off the other is left as isolated as the United Kingdom is during Eurovision voting. Not my finest seven hours plus lunchtime. The highlight of the day was going to Tesco in the wee small hours on my way to work. Saturday Thanks to CBeebies I've had the theme tune to Balamory stuck in my head since Saturday. Sunday I went out to the sales for the first time early on Sunday morning. I reasoned (rightly as it happens) that no one would bother getting up early on a Sunday morning when they had had the previous few days and would have the next few days to do it instead. I got a couple of calendars and a couple more Bond Ultimate Editions. Ever since I rather enjoyed On Her Majesty's Secret Service on what seems like a distant Saturday but was probably the one just before Christmas Day, I've been picking up Bond UEs whenever I've been out. And I've been watching them too. The reason I had so few Bond DVDs what that I never thought I'd actually watch them. They looked fine on paper but when was I ever going to watch a film I'd probably seen lots of times before and wasn't all that keen on? Since OHMSS went down so well I've watched GoldenEye, Thunderball and Moonraker. The latter has a bad reputation due to its comatose villain and ludicrous premise but it is a heck of a lot better than I remembered it being. New Year's Eve To Tesco in the morning. A horrible busy place where one had to queue just to get into the car park. Naturally, the overflow was half empty and I got parked really easily. I then had a slightly longer walk than usual past the hundreds of cars queuing for a prized spot in the main car park. It is good for me that most people are too lazy or stupid to park those few yards further away but it really does baffle me why they'd rather crawl around for half an hour waiting for someone to go, raising their blood pressure and quite possibly getting into arguments over who was there first. Take the hit - walk a hundred extra yards and live a simpler life. Fools. Tesco - despite the crowds - was fine. I only got eight items so qualified for the "No more than ten items" lane. This is a new lane replacing the grammatically incorrect "Ten items or less" one which had come under fire from the plain English society's paramilitary wing. I got three more Bonds - Octopussy, You Only Live Twice and A View to a Kill. I also got some fancy (half price) shower stuff which is so fruity that they actually have to put this warning on it.
That's the only reason I bought it - I can't smell anything at the moment so a burst of fruity goodness is wasted on me. And shower gels only ever smell of "miscellaneous fruit" no matter how specific the packaging is. In the evening we went to m'brothers to see in the new year. Two year old Banana was the most lively person there. She was still running around doing things well past midnight. The rest of us were flaked out by 9.30. There was a quiz thing on hosted by Graham Norton. It was harmless but annoying in almost every way. John Barrowman - who had to be on it because it was televised - laughed uproariously at every one of Norton's off-colour remarks. His laughter-face is possibly the scariest thing I've seen all year. He looked like the Sarlacc from George Lucas's new "Cosmetic Dentistry" special edition of Return of the Jedi.
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