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29th March Good things don't happen in isolation. They must always be surrounded by worse things just so you're never in danger of happiness, contentment, success or achievement. Witness the soul destroying CD player episode. An unspeakably unglobal tragedy which mattered because of what it represented rather than what it actually was. Well, after a week of miserably avoiding doing anything practical about it (save ringing the garage and finding out - surprisingly - that their mechanic doesn't work at the weekend) I finally pulled the whole unit from its berth, shook it gently, achieved nothing, had a really good squint at it and saw the tiny white tray whose slight deviation from accepted behaviour had caused this whole situation. I took my swiss army knife, fork and spoon out (which I carry around purely for novelty value because it is so unusual) and gently stuck the tip of the knife into the gap. It took the slightest of nudges and the tray was moved. The mechanism took over and the cartridge slid out. I am now mid-way through part 2 of "The Sirens of Time" and am carrying out my threat to "do" Big Finish from day one. But that glorious triumph of armed ignorance over technical prowess was book-ended by two less enjoyable things. The first was on the way home when my gear box forgot its entire raison d'etre and wouldn't let me go into gear. This happened at a roundabout and left me unable to take advantage of the brief gap in traffic. Tempers began to fray before the stick finally went into place. It's probably nothing but then again it might be something. I'm sure this car is cursed. Then I spent much of the evening looking for a particular CD. Not because I wanted to play it - I have it in iTunes anyway - but because I'd sold it. Could I find it? Could I heck. I've only seen it lying about the place a gazillion times but not this one. A sale which saw it fetch far more than it is worth is out of the window and with it will probably go my perfect Marketplace record. Oh I can give a refund and an apology but some people are petty, spiteful little weasels who aren't happy unless they've caused damage as well. Having spent well over an hour and a half trying to explain some things to HalfPastThree I now realise that the difficulty one has in communicating anything to him isn't because he is an old person (and therefore prone to being an elderly curmudgeon with selective deafness and an irrelevant anecdote for every occasion) but because he subscribes to the classic "Rowdy" Roddy Piper philosophy, "Just when you think you've got all the answers, I change the questions". I suppose it could've been worse - he could've chosen the Jake Roberts "You always knew I was a snake" promo instead. Or ripped his shirt apart like the Hulkster. Yes - he chose the safest eighties superstar to unwittingly emulate. Or, to put it another way, he asks a question, gets an answer and then rephrases his question so it means something else entirely. So you spend what seems like days trying to follow his logic in thinking the "advanced search" function is bad because it brings back (a) too many and (b) too few results. But I'll forgive him anything because he told us about his father's shed and how he had "twelve chickens and a lazy cock". It's amazing HalfPastThree ever came into existence. I am struggling to make my current video project work. The idea is a sound one on paper but there just isn't the material to make it. So much of what you think exists is actually just in the mind. In the mean time I knocked up a mini video - Pyramids of Mars given the Space 1999 treatment. It's tucked in at the bottom of the movies page. It isn't great but it'll only waste a minute of your life.
25th March This story is almost entirely pointless apart from this quote from Diane Abbott (who isn't Sid James' wife in "Bless This House" - just a pointless rent-a-quote MP) about the sale of "lads mags".
It reminds me of one of my favourite Jimmy Carr jokes.
I'm not entirely sure what is happening to me at the moment. I seem even more lifeless than ever. Even a week of high Pro Plus use hasn't made any impact. I have turned into Mycroft Holmes - he basically lived in his Club and people came to him with questions. Not for him the energetic adventuring of brother Sherlock. The elder Holmes was content to sit and solve problems from the comfort of the Diogenes Club rather than crawl around a Moor looking for footprints or cigar ash. Not that hounds smoke cigars. Unless they do. You hadn't considered that had you but since it isn't impossible, perhaps you ought. Anyway, I solve problems and make sense of things but I don't run around getting things done. This has had the unfortunate effect of leaving me out of every loop there is. Because the people that create the loops only want people to run around for them. They are convinced that being managers means they can answer all and any questions - they don't want some trifling underling getting delusions of adequacy. Not that anything even close to adequacy is uppermost in my head right now. I worked out last night that now would be a great time to kill myself. My parents are obsessed with their new granddaughter so whatever need they had for me has gone*. They have a whole new side to the family - a third dimension if you prefer - so whatever support they'd need is now there. I held my little niece for the first time last weekend. She cried almost immediately so I gave her back. But she is lovely - she's out of that ugly new-born phase and into the stage where she gives people adorably funny looks and doesn't just sleep all the time. Anyway, she's here now and that would make it a good time for me to leave. Sadly, the very things that make it necessary to do it are the very things that will stop it ever happening. I'll stay in limbo with all the black noise and shadows. *I can't make this sentence work without it sounding like I'd be doing this because I resent their shift in focus from me to her. I'm trying to say that they don't need me now she's here because she's way better and will cause them a helluva lot less problems. I'm the failed experiment and she's the second chance.
22nd March Well, it took almost a whole week for something to go wrong with my car. I committed the frankly insane crime of trying to use my CD changer to change CDs and it jammed. This, combined with the tape player not working at all and interference when I try to use my iPod FM transmitter means the car hates me and will never let me be happy. Which is a shame as I was two-for-two listening to poorly thought of BF CDs and rather enjoying them. I had a wacky plan to do them all in order. Now I can't. Even if I fix it (or get it fixed as I'm an idiot who can't fix anything) I know it will jam again so I won't use it. It was the one thing I really liked about that car. This story is interesting. Letting the patients continue under supervision while offering alternatives is an important step in the condition evolving from something that can't be understood to something which can. I'm not sure ice cubes are an effective substitute - I read one theory that an underlying motivation is giving external physical symptoms to an internal condition. It is something real, something that can be seen, something that can't be denied. The rubber band on the other hand is of no use to me - I like twanging rubber bands. A very nice snap indeed. The marks can last for weeks though so you get a certain degree of result if you're lucky/unlucky. I think I've done it four times so far this year. Maybe three plus the one in December. The one that took ages to make any kind of sense. Then it made perfect sense unless you try to be all logical about it. It is still strangely cathartic and comforting even if the last time I made the foolish decision to swap arms and my left hand was so out of practice that a bush could've done more damage. And therein lies a dilemma all of its own - try to get better or try to get better at it. I'm not even going to touch the recent spate of UTTER SHIT in the populist press about mixed martial arts. A big show in Manchester generated a wave of cretinous, hysterical, ignorant, unresearched and downright untrue articles about how "cage fighting" is barbaric, should be banned, is banned in America, is far more dangerous than boxing, must be banned, ban it, ban it, ban it, it has no rules, we're not savages, this is how ancient Rome fell, ban it, for god's sake ban it, they're trying to kill each other, bare knuckle - that's what it is - like the gypos do, write to your MP, march in protest, real life Fight Club, boycott it, ban it, ban it, ban it. We saw it a few years ago when the UFC ran the Albert Hall. Certain boxing promoters - fearing the competition from an infinitely superior combat sport - feed lies to their friends in the media, knee jerk MPs see a handful of carefully chosen photographs and everyone shouts about how something they've never seen should be banned. The most laughable part of the whole thing was that it should be banned to save lives. Because a fighter died in 1998 during a bout. Which is sad but it was in Kiev (where it is far less regulated than the US or UK could ever be), it was eight years ago and it is the only recorded death in MMA. How many boxers die each year? How many racing drivers? How many dozens of horses die at race meetings just to line the pockets of gamblers? The most serious injury in over sixty UFC events was a broken arm. The Premiership has more brutal injuries. It is futile to expect the likes of the Daily Mail to have any kind of intelligence or understanding. It's just a shame that more people will listen to their transcribed diarrhoea than will ever listen to anyone who knows anything about the subject. That's a whole paragraph on something I'm not even going to touch.
18th March I figured out how my CD changer works. The first disc I listened to - and this may well become a trivia question in years to come - was disc two of "Three's a Crowd". An odd choice but the first thing that came to hand (me having decided I must've been too harsh on it first time round). It is - or at least appears to be with the added distraction of driving - better than I thought. It is still ultimately clichéd to hell and back but there is a little more substance and intelligence underneath than I gave it credit for. This may be the development which lets me get through BFs without nodding off. This story about the impending FIFA clampdown on racist chanting is an interesting twist. Personally, I think it is a lot of hot air and nothing will happen but the statute they are saying they will rigorously enforce would eliminate pretty much all the abuse I talked about a couple of weeks ago. But if they did actually enforce it, I suspect they would be selective. They just want to make a big PC statement to win points with certain superstar players and their sponsors rather than actually do anything to make football less vile.
It is one of those rules which is so broad that it can cover anything or it can cover nothing. Not that it matters - this clamp down (if it comes to pass) is missing the point anyway. Fans (generally, though there will be exceptions in parts of the world) do not abuse black players because they are racists. If they were then they would abuse their own team's black players. I had a lecturer at university who once told a story about being at a game and was stood next to a man shouting racial abuse at opposition players. "What about [player A and player B]?" asked the lecturer. "They're ok - they're ours" replies the shouter. Too often people miss the emphasis in a sentence and thereby miss the point of it. The classic example is the line which got Ron Atkinson sacked. He described a player as "a fucking lazy nigger". The point of the sentence - the meaning of it - was that the player was lazy. Fucking lazy. "Nigger" was used because that was the first word that came into his head. Which tells us Atkinson isn't a terribly nice person (and they should've sacked him years ago for being crap) but it isn't racist abuse. "All niggers are fucking lazy" would've been. If you don't take the trouble to analyse what is said you cannot hope to remedy it. All you do is censor certain words and what good does that do? If you put a plaster on a wound that is already infected you just hide the infection from sight. That make make the people around you feel better but in the long run it only makes things worse. FIFA needs to use this clampdown to eliminate the hostile and abusive atmosphere at games. We've reached a point where "passion" in the crowd has become synonymous with noisy hatred for the enemy. Do crowds at other sports behave like that? I don't think so. FIFA need to instruct all referees to include in their match report a note about the crowd. They already have the power to report players, managers and club staff to the governing body so why not the audience? You have to have an objective judge and there is no one better placed than the referee. The Old Firm games will be an excellent test of FIFA's resolve. They play each other five or six times a season. More than enough chances for both sides to get themselves relegated under the three-strikes- and-you're-out rule. But with my realist hat on I know that UEFA have no intention of letting top teams lose enough points to remove valuable names from the Champions League. If it comes to a clash, UEFA will win and FIFA will back down.
I hope he succeeds - I really do - and then he can turn his attention to the greed, cynicism, corruption and cheating which meant football long ago stopped being "the beautiful game".
15th March Here's an odd thing. I'm currently working with HalfPastThree - he's lending a hand as a "business user" to make sure a new bit of the system works ok. I worked with his wife at The Old Place. Now I find out that I was at school with his daughter. Same school, same year. I didn't remember her but it was twelve years ago and things get muddy after a while. So I dug out my old school yearbook from our final year and flipped through it. And there, in the last of eight forms profiled, she was. I saw over a hundred familiar names and faces while looking through and about the only person I absolutely don't remember is her. The name rings a faint bell but that might just be because she has the same name as Mrs HalfPastThree. Mrs H rattled off a list of her daughters friends and I remembered every one of them well. But even looking at her as she was back in the spring of 1994 I don't remember her. I expected to slap my forehead and let out a cry of "oh HER!" but I didn't. It feels like someone has diddled around with history and added a new person to the accepted past. I even went to the same University as their son. The only possible explanation is that a future me (or a blonde that hangs out with a future me) scattered their family name throughout my life like "Bad Wolf". There is literally no other answer. I got my new car yesterday. On the plus side she has a bit of extra zip, she has mod cons and she doesn't have a persistent scraping noise while in motion. On the down side my feet keep getting muddled because the peddles are in fractionally different places, the tape player doesn't like me and I don't know how to adjust my wing mirrors. I'll need daylight when it isn't raining to try and figure out how the CD changer works. I'm really not a car person - I play it up to hide my disinterest but, like mobile phones, I really don't have any interest in anything above and beyond the absolute basics. Like how much it costs and where do I put the petrol. Like Holmes himself I confine my knowledge to certain specialised (if occasionally obscure) areas. He didn't know how many planets were in the solar system, I don't know where oil goes. He could identify a hundred different types of cigarette ash, I could describe seven different choke holds which actually work. I do have a book about car bits though so I'm prepared in case I ever decide I want to be curious. It's sitting on a shelf between a guide to twelve of the world's greatest philosophers and beginners guide to poker. I try to cover all potential curiosity bases. And here is the cover for the DVD we thought we'd never see. 210 minutes of greatness.
12th March I watched the first series of "Nighty Night" yesterday. I'd heard a lot of good things about it and it wasn't disappointing. It wasn't great but it was different, it was occasionally funny, it was nicely uncomfortable (like Chris Morris's work) and the familiar cast were good enough to make me forget they are in everything these days. I don't remember buying it but it made for an enjoyable afternoon. It has been, by necessity, a weekend in. Not that I go out much anyway. I've been working on a third video - again, it aims to be different from the two that have gone before. It is rather ambitious though and is requiring a surprising amount of material. I don't know which will run out sooner - the song or the DVDs. Today's match was certainly an odd one. United were 2-0 inside twelve minutes and then proceeded to notch up over thirty attempts on goal (one, as the commentator rightly pointed out, every three minutes) without scoring again. Van Nistelrooy was left on the bench yet again. It troubles me - maybe there is a simple explanation - that Fergie wants to develop Saha and prevent over-reliance on the proven Ruud. Or maybe the rumours of a summer departure are true. If so, this is a problem. Saha is good but he isn't great and he isn't giving any reason to think he will become great. Rooney can't be asked to carry United in the same way he's being expected to carry England. There are too many wasteful players in the current side (especially Ronaldo who can be brilliant but who can really suck too) for them to part with so reliable a striker as Van Nistelrooy. But, looking on the bright side, Liverpool lost so the gap is growing. Second place in the Premiership would be an improvement on last season and it is better to go forward than go backwards. For anyone desperate to know, I was 2 and 3 for last weekend's UFC show. The three I got wrong were Yves Edwards (he lost but we didn't see the fight in Blighty), Joe Doerksen (this was an admitted guess) and BJ Penn (he was either genuinely out-classed or he seriously under-rated his opponent). I was pissed off that Bravo cut two of the five fights - they had a three hour time slot and left in the best part of an hour of waffle. Yes, they have to fit adverts in to make any money but surely they should prioritise fights over talk. Especially as they showed three fights that all went the distance but cut out two which did not. So we didn't see a single KO, TKO or tap out all freakin' night. I knew from the first minute of the show - when the opening video was obviously edited - that something was amiss. And, yes, it did put a downer on the show from the start. I always hated it when Sky edited WWE shows (as well as the Buffy/Xena/Angel type series) and I hate it now when Bravo get out the scissors. I think I'll go and listen to part 2 of "Night Thoughts" and try and warm m'self in the bath. There is literally no way I'll stay awake for 28 minutes and 41 seconds though.
10th March Well, I was right about the car. She failed about as badly as a car can fail. So badly that I had the "it would cost more to fix than its worth" news and so she's gone. Which left me in something of a fix because I need a car to get to work. Parents are away (as usual these days) so I had to ring m'boss and get days off. Which is a bizarre coincidence as I'd been meaning to book this as a long weekend anyway but gave up on the idea when it clashed with a system upgrade and the necessary Saturday/Sunday overtime. Luckily, the upgrade has been postponed twice since then and I won't be letting anyone down. I've just got back from the garage and am nearly the owner of something that works. It's silver and has one of those key things that beeps. That's about all I know. The thing is I'd been wanting to change cars for a while now. But I don't know anything about them (a fact I hide about as well as my height). Now, as happened when The Old Place was closed, I'm reminded of the words of Bernard (surely soon to be Sir Bernard) Horsefall - "Since you refused to take the decision, the decision will be taken for you". So hopefully a happy ending is just around the corner. And a few more scars won't make a difference. Later - I've just watched "Wet Hot American Summer" - which was on the other side of the £1 flipper DVD which also included "The Independent". The latter was fantastic but this was seven times better. The humour lunged from very dark to very silly so you never know what you're going to get next. Janeane Garofalo was fantastic (obviously) and the set-pieces are so good that it doesn't matter in the slightest that it is very disjointed. I'd recommend it to anyone except AussieGuy - he wouldn't like it as it has a gaysexual scene (to set up a surreal marriage ceremony and a payoff involving the gift of furniture.)
8th March I'm not looking forward to tomorrow. Mostly because it is that day of the year where everything hangs by a thread - MOT day. Am I to be reduced to penury thanks to the diligence/extortion of an oil covered artisan? Will I be reliant on lifts for days or weeks while they differentially diagnose that strange noise that I've probably been ignoring for months? Or will everything be fine and I've been worrying over nothing? Obviously not - it will be a tsunami of bad news to further depress and derail me. On a brighter note I got to humble Twat yesterday. He came over to see us with his team manager and explained that some numbers weren't updating in the stats. There was - he said - one in there in the morning, two more had been done but only one was showing even after he F5'd it. I drank it in and said we'd get back to him. I tested a quick theory and went round to see him. He had a few people gathered round the screen and was explaining what was wrong to them. I asked him to show me. He did. I suggested he scroll up slightly. "That's yesterday" I said. I clicked on today's date and there were the updated numbers. Yay me. Childish I know but it made me chuckle. And finally, two news stories which utterly appalled me. First this this one which begins
There are seriously worrying implications that expressing support for a scientific theory and/or scientific data can lead to threats of sacking and (no doubt) an awful lot of hatred aimed at you. The whole point of science is to find out what is true or possibly true or should be investigated to see whether it is true or not. It should never be the case that research into whether ethnic origin influences intelligence (or any other) physical factor is banned because the results might be unpalatable. Equally, research into whether people of African descent are better runners or physically stronger, or more prone to particular diseases should be carried out. It isn't "racist" to observe and study differences between races - it's only racist if those differences lead to prejudice or other conscious hatreds. Sadly, research these days has become stunted because people know that only certain conclusions will be published. So they tailor their research to lead to certain politically correct conclusions (such as "there is racism in the job market because..." or "women are officially cleverer than men") rather than let the research lead to its own conclusions. Why are people afraid of differing viewpoints? Thank goodness there are people like Dr Munira Mirza - quoted later in the article - who aren't as knee jerk as those calling for Dr Ellis's head.
The second is this about rape. It centres on the issue of alcohol and consent. Some quarters want to enshrine in law the idea that a woman can be too drunk to legally consent to sex. We're not talking about drink spiking anything like that - just that she drinks too much and so her consenting to sex with (one presumes) an equally drunk partner becomes null and void. She wakes up the next morning, regrets what she's done and he's guilty of rape. What is going on? There are different kinds of rape - where a man uses violence to force a woman to have sex with him, where a man has sex with someone under-age, where a man drugs a woman and has sex with her - all should be tackled more vigorously than they are today. But since when has being too drunk to know what you were doing been a legally sanctioned excuse? If we got pissed and I ended the night giving you my complete set of Myth Makers DVDs I wouldn't be able to ring the police the next morning and be legally able to claim you'd stolen them. I'm also deeply troubled by the implication that the Home Office want to lower the evidentiary threshold so as to secure more rape convictions. It won't be long before "innocent until proven guilty" becomes "guilty until proven innocent" just to make the headline conviction rate look better. As for this bit -
This story, so the campaigners tell us, is an example of why the biased, sexists law needs changing. STOP RIGHT THERE. Am I missing something or did the judge stop the case because the only witness (and the accuser) admitted that she did not remember anything that happened. This case shouldn't have been thrown out of court - it should never have reached the court in the first place. Is it any wonder that there is a natural inclination not to take rape cases seriously within parts of our criminal justice system when the normal rules don't apply? Why don't these people do something to help people who actually need help - such as women forced into marriage and treated as virtual slaves - rather than giving slappers a way of getting revenge for regretted shags. If you get pissed and drive a car or smash a shop window or get into a fight you don't get special legal status because you are inebriated. So why should women who drink too much and fuck some guy they just met? But obviously no one will ever look at the barbaric abuses that happen in forced ("arranged") marriages because that would be racist. I know bad law when I see it*. *For all my failures in life I'm still a Bachelor of Laws.
5th March I'm half way through my second video. Not wanting to try and top the first (which was, if I do say so myself, rather good - it had a story to tell and it told it) I went for something which, hopefully, is outrageously camp in a good way. Oddly, it's a full two minutes shorter and yet seems to be taking a lot longer. Something else which will take a long time (and which is absolutely no chance of ever actually happening) is the oft rumoured "Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Whoniverse". A compendious tome which replaces the hard facts of the L'Officer-Howe-Parkin axis with jocularity, nitpicking, trivia, rumours, in-jokes and lies. All written to sound as if Peter Jones could read them in a bewildered voice.
This is what happens when I read books about grand undertakings like encyclopaedias and dictionaries. I want to create one. Something so grand and huge and wonderful that it will stand long after I'm gone. But, like everything else I want to do, I never have what it takes to do it. Otherwise I'd be gone before the huge and wonderful thing would ever be around to stand long. This is an interesting story about the possibility of two referees in football matches. It makes perfect sense - the players are increasingly cynical cheats with a win-at-all-costs mentality. I'm not sure I agree that this problem is "significantly more in Britain than in the other parts of Europe" as it is commonly thought to be the influx of foreign players that has brought it about. Two pairs of eyes actually on the pitch might help stamp it out (and I see nothing wrong in games being viewed after the fact and players being suspended for play-acting even if the referee doesn't include the incident in his report). Obviously, good communication between the two refs would be vital (and one would have to have the final say) but I don't see that as a barrier. Mic them up like secret agents and they can talk to each other. Football is becoming less and less honest all the time and it is time the authorities fought back. On the article's other point - about racial chanting at matches - I've said all I want to say before. Basically, players like Eto reacting the way they did is exactly what the racists want. They let the chants get to them and thus ruins their game. Abuse from opposition fans is what happens at football matches. They do it because they are afraid that you are better than their players. They want to distract you and bring you down to their level. Ignore it. There is nothing fundamentally different between racial abuse and regular abuse. I would like to see all abusive chanting at football matches stamped out. Why is it ok to abuse a player in one way and not another? I know I sound all naive and fluffy saying this but why not - wacky as it sounds - cheer your own team rather than hating the opposition? Isn't it time for a "Kick hatred out of football" campaign? Or is it time for players like Eto to take a leaf out of Beckham's book and ignore the inadequates who abuse them for ninety minutes because they are afraid?
3rd March With Meltzer finally reporting the full PPV card, I give you my predications for this weekend's UFC 58. The show is live in the US on Saturday night and on Bravo in the UK on Sunday at 10pm. Yves Edwards (U.S.) vs. Mark Hominick (Canada) Edwards - It was a strange decision when UFC dropped their 155lbs division. Now they've finally realised it was a bad decision and brought back one of the best 155lbs ever to set foot in the octagon. Nathan Marquardt (U.S.) vs. Joe Doerksen (Canada) Doerksen - both guys seem to like going long. That's about all I could deduce from their respective records. Thus my pick is a pure guess. B.J. Penn (U.S.) vs. Georges St. Pierre (Canada) Penn - This is the real main event of the show. St Pierre deserves a title shot more than anyone... except BJ Penn. Penn was the man who beat the unbeatable Matt Hughes for the welterweight title before falling out with the promoters and quitting the company. The BJ Penn who fought on that night was perhaps the best 170lbs fighter in MMA history. That was then, this is now but BJ Penn always struck me as a fighter who just "has" it rather than one who has to work to get it. Mike Swick (U.S.) vs. Steve Vigneault (Canada) Swick - Mike Swick's nickname is "Quick" Swick because he's fought twice for UFC and has a total fight time of 42 seconds. His opponent looks very ordinary if you look at his record and I don't see anything to make me doubt that he'll be KO'd quickly. Rich Franklin (U.S.) vs. David Loiseau (Canada) Franklin - He's been looking awesome ever since he knocked out Hall of Famer Ken Shamock. Loiseau earned his title shot by beating Evan Tanner on cuts (the same way Franklin won the belt in the first place) having made himself famous with a spinning back kick KO a few months earlier. He should put up more of a fight than Nate Quarry did but I don't see anyone beating Franklin for a while. Maybe no one will and he'll be persuaded to move up to 205lbs. I'm looking forward to this show which is probably a bad thing. Penn vs St Pierre could be one of the greatest fights in UFC history or it could be painfully ordinary and take the shine off both men. I want to see all the fights in the Hughes-Penn-St Pierre triangle and hopefully this will be the beginning of a legendary rivalry.
2nd March Whatever I was expecting it wasn't this. The website upon whose magnificent pages you currently gaze has made it to Wikipedia. But where? Is it an article on telehistorians? Doctor Who? Slightly above average UFC predictions? Peter R Newman's tv credits? No - it's something a little more obscure. thevervoid.com is linked to at the end of... Wait for it... ...the biography of Tony Gubba.
1st March There is a piece here about how optimists live longer than pessimists. Which is absolutely fine - optimists want to live longer anyway. The science is interesting and, if it's true that pessimism, loathing, misery, despair and depression can bring about fatal cardiovascular damage then pass me a mirror and I'll be cooked faster than a frozen pizza. Still, there is some good news slipped in at the end of a release about Channel 4's new season -
So Channel Four have done the decent thing and not axed two of their best sit coms of recent years. If only we could have a second series of Nathan Barley - that would be well plasic, m'niggas. Keep it dusty. *I presume this is a typo and should read "The IT Crowd" - getting that name wrong is all too easy as My Readers will know.
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