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26th October A somewhat unusual Friday update here. This is because I'm working all weekend and won't be able to do the usual high jinks. Fortunately, I'm working from home so I'll be paid double-time while still wearing my pyjamas. Result. There is another customer service restructure and after IT run their ten minute script I have the lovely task of remapping twelve hundred work types and moving two hundred people, all with an admin system designed for the odd tinker. Though we're lucky its happening at all - there was a political hoo-hah and IT refused to write any scripts for us. They were all suddenly too busy to support what is supposed to be their customer. Fortunately there was one chap willing to write the scripts in his spare time (we're paying him overtime) so we got away with that one. It's going to be a fraught and busy weekend. I have it within my power to fuck up the whole of customer service. I might be a little more confident had the scripts been through - I don't know - more than one cycle of testing. When we changed the DD logo from JPG to PNG it had more than one cycle of testing. I've spent the last two weeks doing little but preparing for this weekend and I still have doubts. And if it works everyone in customer service will hate me. If it doesn't, everyone in IT will hate me. So it's double-time in my pyjamas but with a catch. The money will be good though - I've decided to get an iMac next month. I'm going to go and play with one at the Apple store, order one online using a company discount, get a copy of Windows XP to install via Boot Camp, buy VMware Fusion so I can run Windows in a virtual machine and, after a period of running parallel with my old PC, clear my overcrowded desk and have something simple, elegant and ruthlessly powerful. That's the plan anyway.
I've been trying to find a new series to watch in the gap between finishing Robin Hood and starting season three of Battlestar Galactica. I first tried Stephen Fry's "Kingdom" and when that failed to be quite what I wanted I went for "Doc Martin". They are basically the same - charming village packed with characters who cause amusing trouble for the relatively normal central character. It's a formula which has been done many times in comedy, drama and comedy drama and it shows no sign of going away. Kingdom was mediocre fare - Stephen Fry was excellent of course as the so-perfect-he-may-well-end-up-being-crucified solicitor surrounded by local characters. But the series has such a fondness for sentimentalism that I couldn't get past the second or third episode. Doc Martin has even more local characters, a sit com set up and Martin Clunes as a one dimensional Gregory House. It might prove ok - they both might prove ok - but I'm not hopeful.
Isn't JK Rowling annoying? I've come late to this bandwagon as previously I didn't care. The woman could get richer and richer and blonder and blonder and I wouldn't really have given a rat's ass about it. But I saw this and it really annoyed me.
Yes of course they are a prolonged argument for tolerance. That would be why you didn't mention this AT ANY POINT during any of your SEVEN NOVELS or in any of publicity tours promoting your SEVEN NOVELS. No, you waited until pretty much every copy of every Harry Potter book is sold and THEN reveal this bit of info. Because arguments for tolerance are all fine and dandy but you don't get royalties from them do you? And you wouldn't want to do anything which might cost you money by scaring ignorant parents into not buying your books. So instead you wait and go on the principle that outing someone after they've died (in the sense that the books are finished - I've no idea whether he literally dies or not) is just as valid as them coming out themselves while they are alive. Squalid publicity stunts are contemptible enough without trying to make your squalid publicity stunt out to be some kind of civil rights statement. You were gutless and you know it. So shut up. I tried to watch some of yesterday's Rugby World Cup final and it was strange fare. It was five minutes (for I could stand no more than five minutes before giving up and going back to Sherwood Forest) where a chap would pick the ball out of a huddle of other chaps of both shirt colours, throw it sideways to another chap who seemingly picked out two or three of the largest opponents to run into. They then grappled him manfully to the floor, the ball squirmed loose and the whole thing started again. It reminded me of nothing so much as trench warfare as a seemingly pointless territorial battle was going on with neither side able to improve their position. Once, the referee spotted an infringement (it looked like every other bit of rugby to me) and the dark shirts got to kick the wrongly shaped ball through some sticks. That was worth three goals and they were pleased about it. I concede slightly that there are probably nuances which take longer than five minutes to understand (otherwise why the popularity of cricket?) but from what I saw we have no reason to be downhearted about losing the contest because we won the first (and hopefully last) trench warfare world cup so we have something to bask in. Leopard is out this week. I want it. Not for any specific bit of it - I just want it. I may have to bring forward buying a Mac Mini. Part of me thinks it would even be worth buying a mother of a Mac because these days duel booting and virtual machine emulators mean that running Windows on a Mac is a piece of pie. The trouble is, I don't know enough about it - you need an official copy of Windows (which is fine) but with activation and shit like that, do you need two copies - one for Boot Camp and one for the virtual machine? I still need Windows but the chance to run it on reliable, well made hardware is an appealing one. But will Windows run well on a Mac? It's all fine and large to say it runs but does it run smoothly? Now I find that OSX cannot write to NTFS formatted discs which is a bugger. And so on. Watch my indecision grow over the next few months. It won't be pretty. Talk is coming round to what we as a department will do at Christmas. The dread spectre of the local pub comedy night has been mentioned and the head of said department is keen. Christmas dos are wretched enough when every restaurant seems to think that a stuffed aubergine is worth twenty quid but throw in two and a half hours of pub comedy and it gets worse. If it was up (or down) to me we would go to Pizza Express, pull a few crackers, eat terribly good pizza and then go home. No stuffed aubergines, no comics who think that courage, swearing and tired sexual observations make an act and no misery. I still agree with every the Candy Man says about stand ups (except that I've never seen the point of Peter Kay) and will play this as my excuse not to go if necessary. It just sums the whole depressing business up so well.
And the ADBS is supposedly back on Wednesday. Though you never quite know when to believe him and when not to. In the past week he's claimed he's taking over the BBC London breakfast show and that he's leaving the BBC to concentrate on the podcast. It isn't that he's a liar - he's just someone who makes jokes and delights in the fact that only his inner circle are in on them.
14th October While out shopping today, as is my wont, I observed the following. A large, round lady in a pink hooded top. The top was advertising a jujitsu school and an MMA supplies website. It surprised me. That's all. Why do people get to the top of an escalator and just stop? They take one step off the escalator and just stand there, looking round and wondering who and where they are. I'm not always entirely sure who and where I am but at least I have the basic courtesy to find a nook (some say alcove) in which to question things. I never thought I would see the day when a regular British toyshop was selling an official Abdullah the Butcher action figure. The man has spent the best part of fifty years travelling the world doing the same "I stick a fork in his forehead and he sticks a fork in my forehead" routine and now he's a plastic doll in a toyshop. The same toyshop had the brilliant idea to put a balloon twiddler (what's the right word?) near the door. This meant that parents with HUGE pushchair/pram contraptions were standing in the doorway, blocking it almost completely, as they stood and watched him not make anything rude out of his pink rubbery props. I saw an extremely overdressed woman amidst the human traffic. I wondered whether she misunderstood "Meadowhall", assumed it was an actual Hall and dressed for tea. There was a guy in the Apple store who had what looked like a fantastic job. He was wearing a microphone and demonstrating Mac stuff. I've done a fair bit of demonstrating in my time but to do it for something as impressive as OSX must be great. At the very least the audience would actually want to be there and be interested in the product. I was in there looking at Macs because I still have my ideal set up in mind. I want a motherbitch of a PC with a big monitor. Add to that a switch-box and a Mac Mini (running the forthcoming Leopard OS) so I can use one keyboard and one mouse and run both a PC and a Mac. To quite literally have the best of both worlds because I'm greedy like that. And the whole thing would cost less than any of my three previous PCs. One day, one day. I saw this story about a campaign to ban plastic pen tops and, from the headline, thought there might be something in it. Even though she's nearly two, Banana still has a habit of putting things in her mouth which she shouldn't and which might be dangerous. When she's using felt tips - ones specially designed for little people - we have to watch what she's doing with both the pen and the top. Becuase the pen could ruin the carpet but the top could do something worse. Then I read the above story and my mind went something like this.
Well done them for doing something to prevent other parents going through what they've been through.
THIRTEEN??? He chocked on a pen top at the age of thirteen?? That's not the fault of the pen top - that's just an accident. A two year old chocking on the pen top and that's either the fault of the pen top or whoever was looking after the child. But a thirteen year old - even a thirteen year old boy - should know better. He would've done a great many things more dangerous than chewing a biro in his life and occasionally shit happens. It's a tragedy that he died but banning pen tops is an absurd reaction to a freak accident.
What?
That's what I thought it said. A thirteen year old boy dies at home from swallowing a biro top and a school bans plastic pen tops? I hope none of the teachers drive to work, that none of the pupils ride bicycles, that no one who works at the school smokes and that the school doesn't have mains water or electricity because all those things kill far more children each year than plastic pen tops. Anyone would think they were massively overreacting to get their name in the papers. And it worked. A quick word about "The Idiot's Lectern" - the new TV review section. Paul Hayes has been writing TV reviews for a year or so and will, I hope, continue to do so. I'm not looking to tread on his toes by doing this new column - he writes proper reviews and the site needs proper reviews. I don't write proper reviews. I've never been able to review anything, I didn't even do an English Lit GCSE and outside of work I am very seldom objective about anything. I wanted to write a TV column partly because I'd like to get better at it and partly because I have about 500 TV channels and never feel like watching any of them. So I hope two TV review columns can live side by side because one will be good and mine will be bad. Thus no confusion in the market place.
11th October October it may be - and there seems little alternative to it being October - but the mince pie season has begun. Apparently it is an annual tradition amongst a couple of m'colleagues to taste every mince pie it is possible to acquire between now and the Festive D. I say "apparently" because neither m'self nor m'sidekick can remember this happening last year but it has definitely happened before. Anyway, we're joining in this year and will be giving marks out of ten for outside (i.e. the pastry) and inside (i.e. the mince meat - a badly named foodstuff if ever there was one as it sounds revolting but is actually nice - the exact opposite of the sweetbread). I've never been keen on mince pies but every one we've had so far - and we're up to six already - has been really nice. I think the root of my problem is that my mother makes fantastic Christmas cake (the best there is, I'm sure your mothers and supermarkets have a jolly old go but they are simply not the same) and commendable Christmas pudding but she makes lousy mince pies. And for years I had assumed they were what mince pies are like - the dreadful little brother of Brer Cake and Brer Pudding. How wrong I was. Today was Mr Kipling pies and I made the mistake of looking Mr Kipling up at Wikipedia. There is no such person. Worse than that - there never was a Mr Kipling. Not even a Mr Kifling or Mr Kilting who thought thought their name might be made more friendly with a P for Pie in the middle of it. There was no Mrs Kipling, no little Kiplings waiting for daddy to get home from his bakery. Nothing. Just a bunch of pastry tycoons in the 1960s who invented the name in a cynical attempt to shift more goods than they were under the name Generic Faceless Pie Company of London Limited. Maybe everyone connected with pies is a figment of someone's imagination. That would certainly explain HalfPastThree and Ian Levine.
7th October I got a new DVD player this week. My Sony wasn't doing too badly but its three years old and had had one or two issues with a few discs. The main reason though was to get one which played DIVX files. It's nice and slim - it makes my Sony look positively chunky. Heaven knows what my first DVD player would look like in comparison - probably the tacky golden suitcase it was but worse. It even has a USB socket on the front of it so I don't evne have to put files onto DVD to play them. If I want to watch videos or view JPGs (or, heaven forfend, someone else wants to show me some photos) I just pop a pen drive into the socket and it reads it. It would even cope if I plugged an external hard drive into it. But that is just silly. Maybe. My first attempt to put DIVX files on and play them didn't work. I used Roxio - as I always do - and burned the second series of QI. Although the files looked fine on my PC, the DVD player read them as being split into two or three parts. A rudimentary chaptering I thought. Unfortunately, it would only play the first "chapter" in each title. Not great. Not useful. Fortunately, I found a burner which didn't have this "handy" feature. Its the one in today's Toolkit update and it has done a splendid job. A well encoded DIVX file is actually pretty good in comparison with a regular DVD. It is on a par (at least for something pretty static like QI) with some of the cheaper cable channels. It's certainly better than VHS. Given that converting DIXV files to proper DVD files was a real time process (and that it is impossible to make files look less compressed because the information has already gone and your basic home kit can't put it back) I'm saving a tonne of time with this new player. 'Tis a good piece of kit and a steal at fifty English pounds. The Peter Serafinowicz Show started on Thursday. I had high hopes for it because he's a talented guy and it sounded good from the hype he did on one of Danny Baker's shows a while back. It turned out to be more bad than good. The opening titles were extremely Light Entertainment and I kept waiting for the gag. None came. It was straight LE. The Michael Caine sketch about keeping your face on camera was a nice bit of absurdity and the fat lawyer was ok but mostly it was over-produced and under-funny. There are two kinds of sketch show made by the BBC these days. There are the BBC3 type ones with an ensemble cast and clearly a tiny budget. Sketches are shot with minimal makeup in real locations and you see the same parks, offices and rooms cropping up over and over again. The other kind sees the Beeb throwing so much money at a series that the production becomes all about elaborate makeup and costumes and the humour is sacrificed so the people involved can show how amazingly clever they are. That is why French and Saunders have never been funny in their own self-titled shows but are both more than capable of being funny elsewhere. The Peter Serafinowicz Show had a lower hit ratio than Mitchell and Webb's hot-cold-hot-cold series (and episode of which followed TPSS and was vastly superior even at second viewing). I don't think it is that it was the first episode and we don't yet know the characters - I think it had too much money, too little focus, not enough writing talent and failed to use its most obvious asset properly - that being Peter Serafinowicz himself. I was in The Works today, buying four hard back books. Two of which reviews say are rubbish and one I only really bought to annoy TheArtist. Despite me not having any carrier bags with me or any visible means of carrying these four hard back books, the boy on the till (for he can have seen no more than fourteen summers) still asks me if I want them in a bag. I'm all for environmental nonsense but is it so hard to train your staff to use a little common sense? PC World go to the other extreme - I bought two DVD boxes which would've fitted snugly in one medium sized bag and the checkout bod lazily shoved them into two massive bags. But then PC World's staff training probably concentrates more on ensuring they know fuck all about computers and can be rude to customers and less on the pros and cons of plastic bags. I've now seen the Dida incident. When it was first reported on the BBC website it sounded like a fan had attacked him. It turns out a fan mocked him slightly and this was enough to induce a House pre-titles style collapse in the big goalkeeper. If indeed a diagnostician and his team of slightly obnoxious assistants spent the next few days running tests, ruling out Lupus and doing plenty of MRIs then he should have our sympathy and a rousing round of applause when (and if) he makes his comeback. If on the other hand he was faking injury in an attempt to get the game abandoned then he should be banned for a considerable period of time. Not just a couple of Champions League games - he should be given a worldwide ban for six months. Short of actually trying to end another man's career, there can't be many more serious things a footballer can do than try to get a game his side is losing abandoned. Obviously the fan should never have been on the pitch and Celtic should be fined heavily for that breach of security but what Dida did was cynical cheating of the worst possible kind and he absolutely should not get away with it. I know the people who run football are more interested in punishing those who say the wrong things rather than those who do the wrong things but even his own team mates say he did something unforgivable. And now, Mister Danny Kelly with a tale about one of football's most sought after talents.
3rd October Ten cool things I've torrented over the last couple of weeks. (1) The untransmitted pilot of "Blackadder". Rowan Atkinson has famously refused ever to let this be included on any DVD release of the series so there will never be a truly "complete" boxed set. I've only watched the first couple of minutes so I won't say the whole thing is shite but the first couple of minutes are. I may go into it more another time (perhaps even after I've watched it) but I got the impression that anyone who thought the first Black Adder was cheap and unfunny would come away from the pilot with a fresh insight into what cheap and unfunny really looks like. (2) "The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film". During the 1200 page Peter Sellers biography I read recently (generally referred to in conversation by me as "that wretched Peter Sellers book") the RJSF is mentioned on pretty much every page. It seems to have been one of the few things Sellers actually liked, the writer of the book actually liked and Spike actually liked. Which means it has to be worth a look. (3) Richard Dawkins's "The Enemies of Reason". I don't know why but Dawkins seems to make a lot of television programmes and I never know about them until months or years later and of course they never get released on DVD. Richard Dawkins is one of those people I think I really ought to listen to a bit more. I've read the God Delusion and it was (in parts) extremely good. If he was on television tonight I would ask my V+ to record it. But he isn't on tonight - he was on in August and I need to find a way to find out about it. Either that or let someone cap it and download it later. (4) QI series 2. The arrival of the fifth series of what is perhaps the funniest panel game on television (yes, perhaps even nudging ahead of HIGNFY) has made me want to go back and watch some of the early one. Series 1 is out on DVD and sitting on my shelf (next to the still unplayed interactive DVD game). Series 3 and 4 were on in 2005 and 2006 respectively so I have those recorded to DVD. But series 2 aired in 2004 - in the last months of my VHS dependency - and I can't find the tapes. Whoever makes the decisions at BBC Towers has decided not to release the second series in the run up to Christmas so I was pleased that the internet could come to my rescue. There is even part of me that looks at the guest list and thinks I may never actually have watched series two. So its either a treat or an uber-treat. I like that. (5) "TV Offal". Victor Lewis Smith - TV critic, writer and inventor of the "Seaman Staines" joke which has forever tarnished Captain Pugwash - made a series of weird programmes in the mid-90s. It was somewhere between "In Bed With MeDinner" and "Screenwipe" if memory serves. It was certainly the show which broadcast Philippa Forrester saying "fuck" and aired the infamous swearing Rainbow sketch where Jim Davidson nearly wets himself when Zippy says rude words. Short lived, vaguely remembered and possibly brilliant. (6) The Battlestar Galactica "webisodes". There were a series of ten short (two or three minute) episodes released on the official BSG website during the gap between the second and third seasons. Except that if you weren't American you couldn't watch them. They were on the R1 DVD of season 3 but not those released elsewhere in the world. Bad form. They give a brief snapshot of life on Cylon occupied New Caprica after the surrender. They're low budget of course but they are part of the overall story. (7) "The Derren Brown Lecture" - I've no idea where this comes from (other than it is sourced from VHS and says it was recorded in a hotel in 1999) but it is a Derren Brown magic show from before he was famous. His recent work has been too gimmicky (the "Trick or Treat" series seemed to be more Candid Camera than illusion and magic) but when he does what he is best at (and he's so ridiculously talented that he is best at about a dozen things) he is ace. I've only skipped through the video file but (a) he's got more hair and a less stylish beard and (b) it is him doing what he does best. (8) The Thick of It - Red Button Bit - the recent Thick of It special apparently had a red button bit which was fifteen minutes told from someone else's point of view. I'm a bit vague as I haven't watched the specials yet. I bet it won't be on the DVD when it comes out. Actually it might be - there really is no way of knowing at the moment. Extra stuff gets made for the web or interactive TV and you can toss a coin as to whether the people making the DVD will bother or not. Will we ever see "Attack of the Graske" on shiny disc I ask myself? (9) "Attack of the Graske" - because I don't think we will. I was on ntl: at the time and the interactive service didn't work nearly well enough for A of the G. And as a two for one, "Scream of the Shalka" too because that DVD keeps not happening. (10) And finally, the 1979 BBC staff Christmas tape. An annual tradition in the late 1970s, the video tape editors put together collections of outtakes and specially recorded wackiness to amuse their colleagues at the Christmas party. Lots of pillars of the community are heard to swear vigorously (and Frank Bough). It's basically 52 minutes of the sort of thing that would make drunken BBC staff laugh and it pisses on anything Dennis Norden ever did on the night. So yes you can argue that torrents are evil and are killing the music and film industries but it is also a way to get the sort of rare treasures you might only get if you knew someone who knew someone who knew someone. If your Quicktime plugin works and my use of the Quicktime plugin works you should be able to sample the professionalism of Mister Frank Bough.
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