October 2008 Archives

By posting about it on the internet, are we are not extending Andrew Sachs's embarrassment, thus making us just as bad as Britain's Most Evil Men, Jonathan Ross & Russell Brand? Aaaaaaah.

I will delete this post if his slutty granddaughter agrees to touch me in the trouser area. Perhaps Russell Brand should take note of how a true gentleman behaves.

If you're just not annoyed enough about life in general, why not listen to this week's episode of This American Life, which features a segment about a group of Hilary supporters trying to encourage people to vote for McCain. There are no words for how much I hate these people and the stupid contrarian and/or libertarian axe that they grind. But then they support a candidate who is now pretty much resorting to shouting "LIBERALS!!!" and looking pleased with himself, so, well, good luck with that. It is vaguely astonishing that "Did you know that Barack Obama has a terrible bipartisan record?" is apparently a persuasive argument, as though people are voting for the one who's going to be fairest to political parties, rather than, say, people.

(Curiously, I installed a thing to suggest tags for posts, and it suggested I tag this post with the n-word.)

Look at basically anything within sight of a road in central London.

Maps of the world made from currencies of the world.

Does anyone else find reading people's petty complaints about dog poo and badly repaired kerbs on Fix My Street oddly fascinating?

Elsewhere, Right Said Fred say "No!" to Knife Crime.

Yournotme.com is a tool that allows you to search for the number of the people in the UK with a certain name (it uses the electoral roll, presumably).

We apparently share our country with 1 Batman, 1 Worf, 1 Nigger, 1 Rape, 634 DVDs (well, Dvd... Welsh?), 1 Cassette, 6 Adrics, 17 Aces, 2 Champs, 2 Casanovas, 13 Doctors, 1 Minister, 1 Church, 1 Dragon, 5 Bilbos, 2 Striders, 1 Boot, 1 Tax, 1 Train, 1 Biscuit, 2 Clerks, 2 Englands, 8 Scotlands, 1 Wales, 1 Ireland, 3 Snakes, 2 Spaces, 1 Site, 17 Biros & 1 Boob.

I know some of of this is just unfortunate cultural co-incidence, e.g. Biro was a Hungarian name long before it was a kind of pen (invented by Mr. Biro), but "Champ"? Seriously?

1) I'm starting to feel a bit bad for finding the bloke who does the links on "Dave" so irritating, because they're so terrible I suspect he might actually be mentally retarded.

2) In a similar vein, have E4 really not got bored of expecting anyone to be impressed when their continuity announcer slags off the films they're showing in the trails?

3) Since when did it become acceptable for adverts to feature people moaning on at length about their bloated guts & the life changing effects of drinking a small yoghurt? I mean, I know the yoghurts themselves have been around for a while, but didn't the adverts used to get straight to the (usually "hilariously" exaggerated, with people leaping about supermarkets in orgasmic ecstasy) after, and avoid the unpleasant before?

4) The Sweeney is great. "Don't just stand there looking like a motorway breakfast!"

This week's episode of This American Life included an interview with someone from a mousetrap company, talking about various odd ideas that they receive from people who think they've invented a better mousetrap. One such idea involved luring a mouse into a box, then sealing the box and filling it with gas. This had already been marketed elsewhere in the world. Can you guess in which country, readers?

This sounds amazing; a stage version of Point Break in which Keanu Reeves' unique acting style is replicated by picking someone out of the audience and getting them to take his role, reading the lines from cue cards.

Supposedly (i.e. it says this on Wikipedia), 1 & 2p coins from before 1992, when they switched from being made of bronze to being made of copper plated steel, have a higher value in terms of copper-content than their face value (there's about 1.5p worth of copper in a 1 pence piece).

I hope someone, somewhere, is sitting in their garage with a chemistry textbook, a Bunsen burner and a bucket of change, desperately trying to make all their dreams come true.

(My legal team advises me to point out that attempting to melt currency for the scrap value is illegal.)

I was amused to learn of a town in New Mexico that re-named itself in 1950 after a radio gameshow called "Truth or Consequences" offered to do a live show from any town willing to take the show's name as their own. They even have an annual festival celebrating this, at which the show's original host was the guest of honour until his death in 2005.

Their town's original name being the rather crappy "Hot Springs" might explain the residents' willingness to switch (they got to vote on the issue).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_or_Consequences,_New_Mexico
http://torcfiesta.com/history/history.html

An FBI agent's boyfriend gets a special terrorist disease, so she gets a looney scientist released from a mental asylum because he's the top hit when she types "weird shit" into Google. The only reason this turns out not to be even more of a pointless exercise than it sounds is that he happens to know how to turn her into a psychic by giving her a bath.

That's not all though; she can only get Dr Mental released with the help of his son, the drippy one from Dawson's Creek. One of the drippy ones from Dawson's Creek. Except this time he is DEFINITELY NOT DRIPPY because she has to go to IRAQ (imagine!) to get him, because he's just that kind of a dangerous crazy guy that he's in IRAQ doing some kind of dangerous crazy business deal for OIL! (Imagine!) Also, every time the characters arrive at a new location, we're told where they are by a giant set of computer generated letters being superimposed over that location. This is almost unbearably naff.

After all that fuss, all drippy gets to do is stand around rolling his eyes and occasionally translating dad's pseudo-scientific gibberish into slightly different pseudo-scientific gibberish.

The writer seems to have taken the pseudo-science angle as an excuse not to bother with much of a plot; the audience isn't so much expected to follow things as to wander around near them and wait for them to do something unexpected, if not actually interesting. A sudden reveal that a character is about to die! Then immediately another sudden reveal that they aren't going to die after all because they ticked box B on their FBI medical form!

For all this, the mad scientist character is actually fairly endearing in an Egon Spengler meets House kind of a way, and if they can come up with some less asinine plots for the rest of the series it might be savable; but so far it's dangerously into "It's Science Fiction! We can do any old bollocks!" territory and it isn't charming enough to pull that off.

Cedric Daniels out of The Wire is in it too, mainly to turn up at the end and say, "Well done on solving this weird shit! You're all recruited into my new FBI division for weird shit! That isn't in any way like TV's The X Files."