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29th March If Banana has one weakness it is her vanity. Grandma has, for quite a while, been trying to cut Banana's hair but my little friend is having none of it. Trained professionals have run crying from the room at their failure to snip so much as a hair from her obstinate head. But I and I alone have unlocked the secret. By playing videos of her from my camera I can hold her wrapped attention long enough for Grandma to cut away to her heart's content. And by grandma I mean Mother - every has jumped a generation nowadays. Banana feeding ducks, Banana climbing stairs, Banana being pushed on her tricycle - she watched them all. She would point at the screen and giggle "Nana", unaware that her locks were being chopped. Here she is in the aftermath, crawling in what was once her hair. Well done me. I saved the day like a very minor super hero.
~~~~~ We're only a week away from the fourth series of New Doctor Who. That fact astonished me briefly yesterday. Not that it was so close but that it is the FOURTH series. It'll be the last thanks to BBC sabotage if you believe an unnamed uber-fan who Googles his name a lot. All nonsense - if ratings were the sole factor they would give it an autumn slot when the nights are dark. Moving the show as part of an overall scheduling plan is a sign of confidence that the series can perform well as part of the ratings battle. Besides, this is the age of the DVR - it doesn't matter to me if it is on at 6.20 or 7.00 (yes, we have people all but ready to commit murder or suicide over 40 minutes) as my V+ will just record it. If I watch it, I'll watch it later anyway. Now I see RTD has come out and slagged off the BBC for moving it. That could do more harm than a dip in viewers - no one at the BBC is going to want a producer who thinks he's bigger than the Corporation. If he falls out with the big nobs down South it could strain relations and there will only be one winner from that clash. ~~~~~ I've been lucky enough over the past few weeks to be dumped right in the middle of a project. It's technically a promotion from what I usually do but at times I've felt rather like Doenitz after Hitler shot himself. Sort of officially vaguely in charge but being told what to do by the ones who have real power based on actually having something behind them rather than just a rough approximation of a title. Which is fine but it does mean I get to look foolish when one arm tells me to email everyone and say "The rates will be changed to 20.5% and 20% respectively". Only for someone else to reply that it is the other way round. So I have to email everyone a second time to say "The rates will actually be 20% and 20.5% respectively". Then someone else emails to say they thought I was right the first time. So I check with one of the actuaries and she agrees with me. So it's another email to say "Actually the first email was right..." and so on. It wasn't the most inspiring performance of my life. ~~~~~ One thing I've learned over the past few days is that deciding Pierce Brosnan was the best James Bond based solely on vague memories of liking "Goldeneye" was foolish. He's fine - especially in the early ones - but he's no better and no worse than any of the others. They're all really good. I watched "The Living Daylights" last night and Timothy Dalton deserved more than two oft-dismissed films. Though I can't imagine what it would've been like if he'd accepted the role in "OHMSS" nearly twenty years before. Indeed, the only bad Bond performance I've seen was Sean Connery in "Never Say Never Again" but that was a wretched film all round and no one came out of that with any credit. A nasty, ugly, tacky, spiteful film which was one man's act of revenge on a franchise which had left him behind and which he was determined to belittle and destroy. And I'm not talking about Sean Connery. I'm looking at you Kevin McClory. Needless to say you're not looking back. ~~~~~ I've actually bought four more Bond DVDs in the last couple of days. I've been seduced and am replacing all my SEs with UEs. The only two I still need are "From Russia With Love" and "The Living Daylights". Both are under £7 online but I fancy we can do better than that. Sometimes you have to turn these things into a game to stop yourself asking why on earth are you doing this? Anyway, I've told myself that there is absolutely no way they will be releasing even more impressive Collector's Editions any time soon. We'll get the UEs on Blu-Ray and that will be it. Or not. ~~~~~ I don't know why but that "or not" reminded me of one of our favourite meeting moments. It was for the other big project m'sidekick and I are engaged on and involved a strange IT man who looks just like a 1970s Open University maths lecturer. He was already a cult hero for a previous meeting where he appeared to nod off while drinking a cup of water. He was asked when his bit of coding would be finished. "I don't know" he mumbled. "Are we talking hours or weeks?" asked his boss. "Hours... or weeks... I haven't really done anything yet." He was quite literally the most laid back person I've ever seen. All but horizontal in his chair, he had his say and that was it. Back to lightly dozing for the rest of the meeting. Much more fun than people who go to meetings and start every single sentence with an aggressive "sorry". As in "Sorry - why are we doing this?", "Sorry - when is this going to be finished?" or "Sorry - has anyone thought about this?" Really, if you think about it, if he didn't say "sorry" each time he might sound a bit rude.
26th March I've been on another Bond-a-thon of late. Without meaning to, I watched one every evening over the long Easter weekend. It started I think because I happened to listen to a "Best of Bond" CD. Yes, I know, very Alan Partridge. Friday was From Russia With Love (good but it didn't really have much of a climax and the gypsy stuff was a bit rubbish), Saturday was The Spy Who Loved Me (very good - even with Partridge's reconstruction in my mind - and it is remarkable watching it just how similar it is to Moonraker which was hastily assembled to cash in on Star Wars a couple of years later). Sunday was more classic Connery and Diamonds are Forever (one I remembered very well from numerous TV showsing but it was only recently I noticed the astonishingly obvious gay subtext with the two amusing assassins). Monday brought it to a close with Live and Let Die (which, about ten minutes in, made me come over all Mitchell and Webb and ask myself "Do you think... this might... a bit... racist?" To which the answer is probably yes - several hundred black people in it and only two aren't actually baddies. not to mention all the voodoo, primitive dancing, painted faces and colossal hair). So three really enjoyable films and one lousy film but with a cracking theme tune. I'll add this for nothing - the Ultimate Edition DVDs do have a noticeably better picture than the Special Edition DVDs. It isn't quite VHS "Seeds of Death" vs DVD "Seeds of Death" but the UEs do look crisper and shiner. ~~~~~ Something which is sadly missing from DVD is Tom Baker's starring role in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Noted around the world for being one of the worst adaptations (though nothing compared with the last one which had Holmes injecting cocaine to help him solve a case instead of as a means of coping with not having a case), I'd been eager to see it for ages. I mentioned this once on a message board and had two offers of help by return of post. But part of me wanted it to remain forever out there to be discovered. Then it turned up on an unnamed tracker for collectors of rare archive material and I had to have it. Well blow me - the quality is quite remarkable. It hasn't - as far as I know - ever been released on DVD anywhere in the world so it must've come from VHS. But it is absolutely superb. It reminds me of the Borgias - the time clocks at the start of each episode suggest it came from a vault rather than a collection - definitely not something taped off the telly and definitely not a multi-generation copy passed round in jiffy bags. Splendid. I don't know when or if I'll ever watch it but I have it now and it looks fantastic. ~~~~~ So that was one good thing to happen on Easter Sunday, another was a rather convincing victory over Liverpool. The score line was in no way flattering to United and it was only their lack of an out and out goal scoring striker (a van Nistelrooy or Shearer) which kept it down to 3-0. The big talking point was of course the Mascherano affair. Aside from Any Gray and some Merseyside media which doesn't count, everyone is pretty much in agreement that he was rightfully sent off. He's protested his innocence and Liverpool's manager has made himself look rather foolish by agreeing with him but that is only to be expected. In the current climate it was inevitable that someone was going to be made an example of and Mascherano's constant moaning to the ref (something picked up live each time by the director - a very good piece of foreshadowing which puts many scripted dramas which try to be clever to shame) made him the obvious victim of the clampdown. He has absolutely no one to blame but himself. But - and he's the thing - he shouldn't have been sent off. Not really. Not if football was sensible. Mascherano's problem is that he earned himself two yellow cards and that automatically means sending off. Referees are tied by many things and one of the big things is that they have so few options when it comes to punishing players. One yellow, one red. That's no kind of system. What about:
Players should be sent off when they are either a danger to other players or are severely damaging the game (by their behaviour or by cheating). Sending people off for two infringements is a terribly outdated idea - even American judges give three strikes before sending you to prison for dropping litter. All that said, if throwing the book at Javier Mascherano does some good - which it won't - then it is a good thing that they are readying their throwing arms. And it didn't change the game - United were ahead before it happened, on top before it happened, Liverpool had their best spell after it had happened and so on. ~~~~~ I want an iPod Touch. It's bonus time of the year and such foolish thoughts go through such foolish heads as mine. They are just so cute and lovely. I don't need one and I know a better one will be out in six months or less but damn it... It just is.
22nd March It is a mark of how useless my life has become that the highlight of my week was the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. I rummaged around the Microsoft website and eventually found it - they know from past experience that their servers can't cope if everyone downloads at once so they make it as difficult as possible in the early days. They tried to dissuade me from downloading it (saying it was much bigger than the Windows Update version - as if that matters to me and my hugely fast connection) but download it I did. It took an hour to install - always scary installing Windows or a major update - and I've no idea what the benefits are or were meant to be. My boot time is still annoyingly slow and several things still won't work, but Windows Explorer is zippier and I've regained 30Gb of disk space (which I assume is because Vista was using too much disk space as it didn't manage the RAM as efficiently as it ought). Speaking of RAM, Windows now recognises the full 4Gb instead of the 3.25Gb it did before the upgrade. I don't know why this should be. So it wasn't worth the excitement - if it had happened in the background I wouldn't have noticed anything had changed. Mind you, you could say the same thing about some of Apple's OSX upgrades that they've charged £80 for so lets me thankful for small ones. ~~~~~ A more productive upgrade is that released for V+ boxes. It hasn't included the BBC iPlayer - still due any time now - but it has enabled the disc-resting functionality. The V+ had been running its drive 24/7 almost since it launched. Initially it would rest if not in use but this was unreliable and buggy and soon disabled. It isn't the quietest machine in the world and all that spinning can't have been good for it. TiVo was just the same - never a moment's downtime unless it was unplugged. But Virgin's bright little boys and girls have obviously fixed what was wrong before and now the V+ will happily power down - and more importantly power up when needed - and we can all feel less guilty about wasting electricity. The upgrade also apparently fixes several issues around overlapping recordings but I've noticed anything. Which may be a good thing - if everything is working properly now I probably shouldn't notice. ~~~~~ There is another round of discussion about video evidence in football after Ashley Cole's shocking behaviour on Wednesday night. I am - as I've always been - in favour of video evidence. The FA's stance is that the referee booked Cole and so the punishment can't be increased because that would undermine the referee. This is nonsense - if a policeman arrests someone for suspected breaking and entering and they turn out to have killed someone, you don't charge them with breaking and entering just so you don't undermine the constable. The referee thought the challenge worthy of a yellow. He should be able to review that and upgrade it to a red after the game. The FA should be able to ban someone for something they do on the pitch. It doesn't undermine the ref - players have so little respect for referees because they know how easy it can be to fool them. If that ref will have video evidence (and we're only talking about the ref watching the match on video after the game) they will be less inclined to try and con them. It is all about what they think they can get away with. If there is a chance that they will get a retrospective yellow or red card, they might think twice about diving, arguing, lunging or kicking. I can accept that there are arguments against video replays during games (though I'm in favour of those too) but viewing the match later and punishing those who got away with offences during games? Let's be a bit twenty first century about this and maybe we can stamp out the Ashley Cole's of this world before they stamp someone else out. ~~~~~ I see the Catholic Church is banging on about embryo research again. The gist of the plan is that human DNA will be injected into animal cells, embryos will be produced from which stem cells will be extracted, these cells will be studied and the embryos will be destroyed after a few days. The benefits are potentially vital new knowledge about various incurable diseases. The risks are... well there aren't any risks. These embryos won't escape, no toxins are produced and no one is going to build travel machines for them so they can conquer and destroy. So opponents of the plan - lacking any kind of actual tangible objection - have to resort to absurd rhetoric. The Bishop uses words like "monstrous" and "Frankenstein" to disguise the lack of any persuasive arguments. This research could save millions of lives and improve the lives of millions more. Maybe it won't - maybe they'll gain nothing useful from it. But it has to be tried. The potential benefits to humanity are too great to cast this line of research aside because a largely discredited book says some vague things which can be twisted to oppose it. So what if this research is illegal in most countries - it is illegal here too but that is no reason not to legalise it. Being Catholic has been illegal in the past and there were plenty of theologians with moral arguments against legalising it. If you object to how treatments come about, then refuse to have those treatments. Just don't try and prevent others from having them. By all means have a free vote in the House about it - all votes should be free votes otherwise what is the point of electing MPs - but those voting should at least have the professionalism to learn something about the issue rather than relying on the ignorance of their "conscience" and some men with big hats who think that science is the devil's work. ~~~~~ I started a big clear out yesterday and one of the previously untouched and rather dusty boxes was junk from my student days. Nothing exciting, illegal or valuable - just an electricity bill for our house, a bus pass from my final term, a couple of annotated exam papers and a bunch of letters from my late grandmother. I don't want to think how long ago it all was (when it became double figures I stopped counting) - I don't feel nostalgic. Just sad. It wasn't a happy time - I don't think I've had any happy times - It just doesn't seem that long ago.
16th March I survived. More or less in tact. Apart from having teeth taken out when I was little (ten in one go because I couldn't bring myself to part with my first teeth and my grown up teeth wanted to come out and I suppose I've always been a hoarder) I've never had any kind of operation. Not counting fillings. Of which I've had two. But massive ones apparently. That's why he keeps x-raying my face. But I digress. The first thing I thought was that the map supplied by the dental hospital was a bit out of date. I would've thought an enormous and very reasonably priced car park being built ten yards away might've justified a reprint but apparently not. I went in and headed for the reception. First mistake. There was actually a pre-reception desk (a little desk set up in the foyer) and a woman who wanted to see my letter before I was allowed in to the proper reception. This actually made sense as they were appointments-only and didn't want any old hobbledy hoy barging in and getting tetchy because they had to stand in a queue before being told to leave. There were a lot of different booths at reception. Too many booths actually. I picked the wrong one and a woman sent me to the other end of the desk to see a strange man who reminded me of Weird Ian. You know how camp can appear a bit sinister if it is a completely joyless camp? That was him. He took my registration booklet thing and told me to sit down while he read it. There was nothing of interest in there - I saved time by ticking 'No' to everything. Naturally, after sitting and being ignored for ten minutes, the moment I went to the loo he was ready for me. So I found him when I got back, inconvenienced out of his mind, all but tapping his fingers on the desk and grumbling about what a dreadful patient I was turning out to be. I was shown into my second waiting room of the day and had nothing to do for fifteen minutes except look at the notice board. It was depressing to see that the biggest notice was one warning people that verbally or physically threatening the staff wouldn't be tolerated. The second biggest had a cartoon camel on it so I read that instead. I think it was about cancer - slightly less depressing a subject than the moral breakdown of society. At exactly the appointed time (not earlier even though I was there in plenty of time and the dental doctor person was running ahead of schedule) I was taken into a little room. She looked at the lump. Then she asked me a bunch of questions that were on the form. I said no again. These were all no questions anyway. Do I look like someone who chews tobacco? Then she said it probably wasn't cancer - just "fibrous tissue" caused by my having too narrow a jaw or something. Does this mean Doctor Alice will want my skull when I'm dead? Or is it not that narrow? She said we should whip the thing off (the lump not my skull) and biopsy it just in case. Which meant going to my third waiting room of the day. I'd only been there about twenty minutes and it had been all go. There weren't many people about and it had a strange atmosphere. Parts of the place were buzzing with life and others were dark and lifeless. I was soon taken into one of the buzzing bits and sat in a chair. Throughout this I've developed a strange habit - whenever anyone asks, I stick my tongue out. So they will say "I believe you have a growth on the tip of your tongue?" and rather than just say a witty "Yes", I nod and stick the offending muscle out. Is it a muscle? Wiki says yes and I'll go with that. One day I'll have my rant about people who go on about Wiki being crap but that would be another digression and I like to keep to the point. The point being that it is never normal to stick your tongue out at anyone unless they specifically ask to see it. This surgeon chap did ask to see it but only after I'd already stuck it out. Hmm, he said. Yes. That'll be it. I lay back and did what I always do during dentistry - I picked a ceiling tile and stared at it. Vigorously. He took my tongue firmly in hand and stuck a needle into it. I'd been fine with the idea of chopping something off but in the build up I'd been appalled at two ideas - sticking a needle into my tongue and then putting stitches into it. The needle made my eyes water. "Ha! Your eyes are watering" he said. I made a mental note that this was an observant man and that I would do well here. They had one of those tubes which sucks spit out of your mouth and it was happily sucking spit while he injected me. My tongue was completely numb which you're probably thinking is obvious but I've not had much experience of anaesthesia so the degree of numbness came as a surprise. I felt him prod my tongue slightly with what I supposed was a prodding thing and suddenly the spit sucking tube was bright red. That was it - he'd cut it off in one smooth and entirely missable instant. I was gushing blood like Jim Cornette that night on TBS when he had to do his first blade job and, because it was live TV, he panicked and swiped his forehead two or three times from temple to temple. That almost got Crocket thrown off the air. Anyway, it was like that but without a man called "Loverboy Dennis" in attendance. There's an anecdote for the young people. He held my bleeding tongue in a towel for a while as it bled and bled and bled. Then he stitched it up. Which didn't stop the bleeding. So he stitched it some more. He was perhaps a little generous in the amount of stitch stuff he left behind when cutting it. It is dangling. Most irritating. The first thing I did was go back to the loo and look at my injury. The numb half of my tongue was yellow. Or black. Or red. Or white. It was a festival of colour when by rights there should only be pink. Imagine a hard line pride march. Then it was back to pre-reception to be allowed into reception and to make an appointment for a post-op check up and the results of the biopsy. I struggled to eat cake yesterday afternoon. Which appals me. Mother's coffee cake too - a thing of joy. When I think of places my tongue has been I tended to overlook the really obvious - that it is really difficult to chew properly if you're trying to keep stitches away from teeth. So I'm sticking to pasta which will slide down. And so my most minor of operations is more or less done with. Unless it turns out I do have cancer in which case there will probably be some fuss. But I don't so there won't. Almost certainly. Now all I need to do is let someone zap my eyes with a laser and I'll be done with operations for another thirty odd years. Hopefully. ~~~~~ You'll notice that I've been watching "Father, Dear Father" on DVD. I first saw it around 1995 when (unless I'm much mistaken) it was on UKGold. I did think it was Granada+ until I saw the Thames logo at the end. Either way, it is a long time since I've watched it. And that ususally means disappointment all round. Things that you found fantastic almost half your life ago rarely come up to scratch. I'm delighted therefore to say that "Father, Dear Father" is utterly fantastic. The writers - Cooke and Mortimer - went on to greater fame with "Man About the House", "George and Mildred" and "Never the Twain" but FDF was their finest hour. Or twenty odd hours. The key the whole thing is Patrick Cargill - one of our great underrated comic actors. FDF was written for him and he gives far more than you usually get in star-vehicles. His two daughters are gorgeous - normally retro girls just don't seem as hot as their modern counterparts but Natasha Pyne and Ann "Earthshock" Holloway have retained their loveliness across the years. The only slight downside is that I looked them up on IMDb and they are about the same age as Mother. Was my mother ever a dollybird? So I'd wholeheartedly recommend Father Dear Father - the first three series are out on DVD from Network and hopefully they'll see it through to the end. For all the criticism they get, Network are releasing this and the Doctor Series so they earn my undying thanks. Who said ITV never made a decent sitcom? Over their fifty years they've made at least three. Possibly as many as five.
12th March How is this possible? I am in the queue in Tesco. In front of me there is a woman with a trolley. In front of her is an empty trolley. In front of it is a bloke. And yet no one in that queue was responsible for the empty trolley. The bloke was buying three tiny bottles of something and carried them in his hand. The woman had her own, slightly smaller trolley. It was just there. One of the elderly helpers-out asked up and down if it was anyone's trolley and when he got no's all round he took it away. It must've just appeared there somehow. Most mysterious. ~~~~~ This is an utterly contemptible story. I'm all in favour of motorists dumb enough to use their phones while driving (I don't buy the idea that hands-free kits are just as dangerous - the main risk in using a hand-held phone is that you only have one hand for driving not that your mind is elsewhere). I see loads of people doing it and they should be fined and docked points. Absolutely no quibble with that what so ever. What infuriates me is that these two took a photo of Clarkson using his phone not because it was someone using their phone but because it was Jeremy Clarkson. If it had been anyone else they would've just ignored it. And then they send it not to the police but to the Daily Mirror. Then they have the nerve to try and claim it was some sort of public duty and that they were doing their bit for safety. Why can't people just be honest? They saw a chance to get some grubby money and they leapt at it. The Daily Mirror will no doubt spout off a bunch of sanctimonious bullshit about how terrible it is that he was a danger to blah blah blah. Can the two who caused this say honestly that they've never used their phones while driving? Or is it just that they are nobodies and aren't worth selling out to the tabloid filth? Looking at the photo, it is remarkably clear for a picture allegedly taken while driving at 70mph. It's almost as if the cars were stationary at the time and someone was making up extra details to get more dirt money. But obviously no one would ever do that. Not even to Jeremy Clarkson.
~~~~~ And this story is just stupid. A man gambles and loses two million pounds. He then sues the bookies for letting him gamble. I mean, what kind of world have we created where gamblers who lose tonnes of money sue the bookies? He claims he had an addiction and he probably did. Addictions are real and he obviously needed treatment. But that is hardly William Hill's fault. It says he opened other accounts to continue gambling so he was prepared to be underhand about it. William Hill is a huge company - if it was his local betting shop where they knew him then maybe he'd have a small sliver of a point but he was telephone gambling - they couldn't be expected to recognise him. Personal responsibility demands that you either help yourself or accept your situation. Him suing the bookies is no different from a fat bastard suing McDonalds or someone with no teeth left suing a well known brand of sugar rich cola. It is lawsuits like this which make everyone hate the legal system. There should be codes in place so that people can't run up huge debts. But bookies - like credit card companies - are happy to let people get into debt because they are more profitable. If William Hill had monitored his situation and said "No more - you owe us a hundred grand, you can't pay so we're not taking any more bets from you", what would he have done? Chances are he would either have opened an account under a different name with a new credit card or he would've gone somewhere else and started again. If he really was an addict then he would've acted like an addict - going to any lengths to get his fix. I'm sorry his life has been ruined but it isn't anyone else's fault but his own. And thankfully - unlike the United States - we still have a judiciary capable of an occasionally sensible decision. Watch him appeal next week and get a decision his way. ~~~~~ This is probably the last time I'll write to you before going under the surgeon's blade on Saturday. If I should die then think only this of me - I finished Captain Marvel last night and I know who The Scorpion is.
9th March Occasionally the website's inbox will get something of interest. The once thriving and bustling open house for wit and wisdom rarely gets anything other than offers of free pornography, physical enhancement pills and the latest news on Britney Spears and her difficulties. A while back I did get an email from Dennis Brent. Yes, there actually is an author in America called Dennis Brent. fortunately he didn't do a Levine and start threatening me - he seemed amused if a little confused. I didn't go into the origins of my Dennis Brent's name. This past week I got an email from Derek Burgan. He's the guy who originated the "Enjoyment Index" feature which I briefly borrowed. He too seemed amused if a little confused to find a pro wrestling column adapted for a television series which, to him, was on PBS in the late 70s and didn't seem to have done anything since. It proves at least that the inbox still works. I had been wondering. ~~~~~ Ground for a Pound is a splendid idea. Stockport County is owned by its fans but the ground had to be sold some years ago to keep the club in business. Now they are looking to raise a million pounds as a deposit to buy it back. It's got a lot of good publicity around the internet (and beyond) and I hope that translates into cash being pledged. ~~~~~ I got the bumf through about LASIK. It says 1 in 5 people who go for the consultation are refused treatment. This troubles me - I don't want to steel myself for this only to be told I'm not suitable. I can't think why I might be unsuitable (it's years since I've worn contact lenses, I don't do anything dangerous, I've never had a serious eye infection) but now I'm convinced I will be. I'm going to fail an eye test - that could be a new low. Short of failing a blood test I can't think of anything more feeble. ~~~~~ I tried the BBC's iPlayer a few months ago (I might even have snuck in when it was still in beta stage) and thought it was fine but limited. Now it is available for the iPod Touch and will shortly be arriving on Virgin Media and I'm interested. I wanted an iPod Touch anyway and this just makes it even better. I know I could achieve the same end result with uTorrent and a file converter but I'd far rather try something cool and new than tried and trusted methods. The VM version will either be the best thing ever (more or less) or an epic fiasco. My money is on the latter. ~~~~~ I watched a bit of Cage Rage last night on Sky Sports. The UK's own MMA promotion has been putting on shows for years and, following the success of UFC on Bravo, Sky have started airing them live on Sky Sports 3. I find them completely unwatchable - the fighteres are, I'm sure, decent enough but the broadcasts are wretched. There are these two guys - the owners of the promotion before selling out to EliteXC - who look like extras from "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" babbling on about how great everything is. They are annoying beyond belief. Then there is the ring announcer - a smarmy East End emcee who wears horrible suits, horrible shirts and is fifty years too old for the earring he insists on wearing. They have horrible music - dreadful home made garage rubbish - and pointless dancing girls. They have British commentators who are noticeably inferior to their American counterparts. I would praise Cage Rage for trying to develop their own on-screen talent rather than spending money importing American names but they haven't really tried - they stick with the same awful people show after show and never try anyone new. The people we see are there because they own(ed) the company, not because they were any good. One message board summed it up - the whole promotion has a "gangster" feel about it because they are all straight out of a Guy Richie film. And not in a fun way. So I fast forwarded to the main event and saw legendary Ken Shamrock face a stepping-stone bum who no one had ever heard of. Naturally, given that Shamrock is so washed up he has pebbles in his hair, the bum knocked him the heck out. Not a bad fight and being able to fast forward through all the people I can't stand made it easier to watch.
6th March How's this for perhaps the best reason ever why a server should've been out of action for over a week. We're in the midst of a project to add automatic interest calculation to a cheque production engine. IT decided they wanted a "light touch" so I've ended up doing a lot of what the IT project manager would normally do. Which is fine - eventually - and apart from some longer hours, the odd sleepless night, a bucket of stress and being designated the person to blame if things don't go according to plan, it has been fine. Then, last Tuesday, things ground to a halt because one of the servers packed up. Some of the people round the table said we couldn't go on - I, to my cost, insisted we could. The final chunk of the process wasn't doable but the rest was. So we ploughed on. This proved to be the right thing to do as we've now drawn a line under cycle one. Anyhoo, this server was defying explanation. It had worked perfectly well for five years and now it suddenly throws a wobbler. Calls were logged, names were taken, logs were sent, more calls were logged, engineers were summoned. In the end, it was diagnosed. The problem was caused by the file we uploaded being of a size (in bytes) which was exactly divisible by 4096. I know - it sounds like the worst kind of bollocks but a single extra character was added to the uploaded file and everything started working again. It was like "The Edge of Destruction" but without the felt tip pen. ~~~~~ I've made two appointments - I still need to make a third to get my now-no-longer-brand-new car serviced - one to get this thing on my tongue removed (which is "probably not malignant") and the other is to have a trained professional scan my eyes and tell me if I can have them zapped. The former is a painful inconvenience, the latter is me getting dangerously close to actually achieving a goal. I made the mistake of looking LASIK up on Wikipedia. They have a list - a long list - of things that can go wrong. I don't want a list of things that can go wrong. I want a list of happy things like being able to shoot beams of energy out of my eyes or being able to see (selectively) through clothes. Not theoretically possible infection, blurriness or only being able to see my own brain. ~~~~~ You'll all be astonished to learn I didn't win vast sums betting on last weekend's UFC show. I made the fundamental mistake of assuming Anderson Silva was merely very good when he is in fact awesome. If he'd knocked Dan Henderson out I would've gone away still thinking he was very good. The way he HUMBLED Henderson on the ground was something else. Henderson didn't compete at two Olympic games by being rubbish. This is one seriously good wrestler. But Silva was able to control him, manoeuvre him and ultimately choke him out. The trouble is that there is no one in the division left for him to fight. Now if GSP would move up from 170 to 185 we'd have ourselves a fight for the ages. ~~~~~ Aside from LASIK and Sooty I've been reading about "Happy Days" on Wiki. Did you know that the now commonplace phrase "Jumping the shark" comes from an episode at the start of the fifth season? The show ran for 11 seasons. I always imagined it was near the end when the show had run its course not less than half way through. They made seven seasons when the show was "past its best". Not even Doctor Who managed that. We got on the subj of Happy Days after this exchange. TheArtist: (drops his pencil clumsily) Oops - I almost lost my air of coolness then. Me: It's like that episode of Happy Days when Fonzie strutted into the diner, slipped on a sausage and banged his head on the juke box. That would've been the best episode of Happy Days ever. You don't need sharks - you need slapstick. ~~~~~ I tend to think I know everything there is to know about Doctor Who (but in a cool and ultimately sexy way). And then I find something fantastic like this line from "The Space Pirates" which I'd never heard before. Zoe: (Severely.) It's very rude to point, you know. Especially with a gun. Now that's a good line.
1st March Once again JK Rowling is making herself look absurd - this time by making some ever-so-slightly over the top comments about an unofficial reference book being published soon. The hard done by billionaire would feel "exploited" by the unofficial Harry Potter encyclopaedia. Diddums. You have to feel sorry for her - a book is going to be published and she won't get any money. She'll have to make do with the hundreds of millions she's made from official merchandise, movies and books. This hell hound of an author is daring to offer unofficial and unauthorised opinions about Harry Potter. This scourge of a writer is daring to produce an objective work about Harry Potter which won't have to be cleared by those who sit in judgement over the HP-IP. If only this had happened to other writers and producers. If only there had been unofficial works published on other topics - then she'd have somewhere to turn for comfort. But as no one ever wanted to publish an unofficial book until Harry Potter came along there is nothing to prove that this won't destroy the Harry Potter franchise irreparably. Her audience might be so disillusioned by this unsanctioned tome that the well might dry up forever. I'd like to think she really was concerned about her fans being ripped off but I don't think she is. She's concerned it might harm sales of her own guide (which is more or less admitted in the article). She isn't doing anything noble by opposing this book - she's acting out of self-interest and nothing more. I lost patience with her over the Dumbledore-is-gay revelation when she tried to make out she was doing something heroic when in actual fact she waited until she'd sold most of the books she was going to sell before revealing it. Her priorities were clearly (1) money, (2) money, (3) money, (4) saying something to get publicity to make more money. Now she's attacking an author who is almost certainly publishing a book full of love and praise for her creation simply because she won't make any money from it.
The more I read it, the more appalled I am. It was bad enough when she refused to allow abridged audio versions of her books (she claimed it was for artistic reasons but a 3-disc set would be so much cheaper than a 15-disc set and that would mean (a) less money, (b) less money and (c) far less money). There is a control-freakery about her which is not pretty to look at. She started out as a terribly nice, down to earth woman who wrote a book in a cafe and was delighted and humble when it took off. Now she's suing people for writing books about the Potter-verse and heaven help the person who dares to write a critical, nick-picking guide to the series. If she feels exploited by a fan (sorry, "a former fan" because she's cast him out into the wilderness) then she'll feel positively raped by someone out to expose the series as mildly entertaining children's stories which have been blown up out of all proportion. Paramount, Warner Brothers and many others have tried to be heavy handed with their fans. In the end they all realised that it is much better to have talented, dedicated, loyal people promoting your series out of love than to show your fan base that the series is made by big, nasty bullies who don't care about their customers. If the book is shite, people won't buy it. If the book is good, people will enjoy it. JK Rowling will publish her own book and everyone will buy it. That seems fair. Remind me again why there needs to be a nasty lawsuit lying around? ~~~~~ "The Palace" finishes on Monday night and I'll be sorry to see it go. When it started I was rather dismissive of it but it has turned out to be really rather good. Apparently the ratings started out ok but dropped like a stone so recommissioning seems unlikely. But on the other hand, ITV have been pleased that it is attracting a better demographic than their normal programming so it might get a second season after all. Which is rather flattering - I'm officially a desirable demographic. Anyway, it's been a surprisingly intelligent series with some interesting questions posed amidst the pantomime and the soap. The antics with the servants aside (because they have been painfully embarrassing and totally unfunny) I've endjoyed it far more than I expected. Normally, series will stack up on my TiVo/V+ drive and never get watched but somehow I keep getting dragged along to watch the latest episode. On Monday we might get a coronation, the King takes a DNA test to prove whether he really is the king, Big Suze digs up a whole history of dirt and something makes lovely Zoë run out of the King's bedroom crying her eyes out. It's all too utterly exciting for words. ~~~~~ And some UFC predictions for this weekend - Silva vs Henderson is ridiculously close to call. Anderson Silva has looked unbeatable against the likes of Travis Lutter and Rich Franklin but Dan Henderson is a different type of fighter. Rampage couldn't put him away. He ground out a five round decision but he couldn't do any real damage. Silva is largely untested against a Henderson type fighter - someone who has been around the block a few times and has seen it all. Rich Franklin was beaten before he even got in the cage - you could see in his face that he was scared to death of Anderson Silva. Nothing scares Dan Henderson. If he can weather Silva's early storm, I think he can take him. If it goes to the ground he can certainly beat him. If it stays standing he's knocked out Wanderlei Silva (no relation) which isn't on many peoples résumé (especially as Henderson is a career middleweight who fought Wanderlei at light heavyweight) and has never been knocked out himself. But you can never discount Anderson Silva's clinch and sick knees to the head. I've put money on Henderson but only just. The rest of the card doesn't really interest me - Herring and Kongo are two big heavyweights with not much going for them who really expose the weakness in that weight division. And I don't actually know any of the other fights. My head has been elsewhere for the past couple of weeks. If it wasn't for my desktop wallpaper I may well have forgotten the show all together. |
 
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