Good news for people who like the Mighty Python. Er, I mean Monty Python.
Category Archives: Life
wish me luck
dentist tomorrow, one extraction (blurgh) and 2 fillings (blurgh). really not looking forward to it. my teeth don’t hurt which doesn’t help, no motivation.
had domino’s pizza tonight, screw diabetes, screw losing weight.
probably won’t blog anything more today, will see how bad i feel tomorrow.
The John Sergeant effect
I don’t watch any reality TV shows, and I certainly don’t watch any celebrity ones (doesn’t that defeat the purpose?), but since we had visitors over the weekend both X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing were on TV. It became apparent that John Sergeant is considered not a very good dancer by the judges, but the public seem to love him. Likewise, the judges on X Factor were disappointed when the public voted to keep Daniel Evans a couple of times, despite their view that he didn’t deserve to stay.
I’m going to call this the John Sergeant effect. In my view, an increasing number of the public are tired of reality TV competitions, and either vote to annoy the judges or vote based on criteria other than those which would normally win. They aren’t voting for the best singer or dancer, they’re voting for the person they find most interesting or amusing, or they’re voting for someone they know the judges don’t like.
The shows have stopped being entertaining, and so the public is voting in a way which increases their entertainment value.
I’m not sure if affects the overall result yet, certainly Daniel Evans was dumped in the end (as soon as he ended up in the bottom two, the judges got rid of him). I can see the same happening to John, that as soon as he fails to get enough votes to end up in the bottom two, he’ll be gone. But I think producers of reality TV shows should be taking note, that if people aren’t voting for the best performer they’re doing it for a reason, and they need to understand that reason.
Of course, outrage, shock and surprise just increase viewer numbers so they probably don’t really care too much.
Fringe and Burn Notice
I promised you I’d write something about Fringe and Burn Notice. With Criminal Minds and CSI (Vegas) being on a break, we’ve been scouting for stuff to watch.
Fringe
This series is either going to be awesome, or going to become totally annoying. The pilot was intriguing and promised an X Files like experience without the stupid alien story arc. Do not watch this show if you intend to analyse the fringe science, it’ll only annoy you and it’ll only annoy us when you explain how annoyed you are. The show follows a female FBI agent investigating weird shennanigans with an elderly formally insane scientist who appears to have been involved in a lot of this stuff, and his son. Clearly these events are tied together with some intricate back story and there are a range of supporting cast members all generating more questions and giving no answers.
The episodes so far (5 I think) are formulaic, typical of early episodes in a series of this kind. Something weird happens, some people are injured or killed. The team investigates. The insane scientist admits he was involved in this kind of thing in the 60’s, comes to a conclusion, and they either save another potential victim or they catch or don’t catch the people involved.
The characters are interesting, which is critical since the formulaic story at the moment isn’t quite enough to keep me tied in. Sure I want to know more about The Pattern (the link between all the weird stuff), and they’re clearly laying the groundwork for some subplots (the son, there’s something up with him).
The reason geeks are flocking to the show, is that it contains a huge amount of self referrential material, injokes, scientific references and subtle facts. For example, in one episode a character looks at his watch and it’s 3:14 and 15 seconds (Pi).
We’ll keep at it throughout the first season and see how it goes. We miss a lot of the references, so we’re just watching it for the characters and the obvious plot.
Burn Notice
This turned out to be exactly not what I thought it was. We saw some teaser-trailers for it and set it to record on Sky+. It looked like a spy drama, but has turned into a one-man A-team story. Not that it’s bad, just that it’s not what we expected.
The simple premise is that an American spy has been burned by his agency and hence has no money, contacts or anything to do. To add to his misery he’s essentially confined in Miami (he’s told early on if he tries to leave, he’ll be activley hunted by the police rather than being just watched).
Each episode involves our main character (can’t remember his name) trying to work out why he’s been burned and who did it, while also trying to fix a problem either a friend, a friend’s friend, his mother’s friend, or some random person is having. For example, one week he helps an airport security guard who’s basically being blackmailed to ignore illegal weapon imports. Helping him out in his endevours are his mother, his brother, an ex-spy buddy and an ex-girlfriend spy. As I said it’s a one-man A-team. It’s funny, engaging and entertaining, we’ll see where it goes.
And Sunday arrived in that usual Sunday arriving style
In which every paragraph is a segway.
Lovely fresh November morning. No rain yet although it looks like we might be in for some later. I’m not sure how it works but during October it’s always too cold to have the patio doors open, where-as in November there’s nothing better than sitting in the computer room with the door open enough for the crisp clean air to sneak in.
Because spending 7 hours at a craft exhibition wasn’t enough, the girls are all going to Hobbycraft in a bit, maybe it’s considered a suitable ‘warm down’ after the full on exhibition.
A friend of mine found a screen callibration bit on a THX DVD and mentioned it to me, so I may spend the time they’re out seeing if I can tune our screen any more. I’m quite happy with how it looks but there’s always that vague concern that you’ve picked some weird settings and pink skin is looking orange but you never noticed. Sunday’s just the kind of day for doing lazy LCD screen tuning I think.
John Scalzi wrote up a Quantum of Solace review, which I totally agree with. Despite the fact that I still don’t really know who John is (I just stalk his blog) I feel at least now I could share a pint of beer with him and have one topic to chat about that we agreed on 🙂 That’s the internet, bringing together people who don’t know each other and fooling them into thinking they do.
Mark wrote a blog update, which I really enjoyed, despite his implication that he shouldn’t write them too often. How am I supposed to live vicariously through other people if they don’t tell me what they’re doing?
We watched a comedy show on ITV last night, in honour of Prince Charles’ 60th birthday and some of the acts were really funny. One guy stood out, I’ve seen him before and really enjoyed his stuff. He’s Omid Djalili and you can check out his web site over here. He manages to poke fun at a lot of racial issues and particularly racial accents and still stay on the right side of the line (in my view) and is pretty funny. There’s some videos of him on the site, check them out.
Moussaka success I think
The moussaka seemed to go down pretty well. The cinnamon is a bit of an odd item in the list but it complements the lamb really well. Overall I was really pleased with it although I’ve stopped believing anything the book says about how much liquid to add. All of the recipes I’ve made now from the one-pot book have totally over estimated how much liquid they need. I just didn’t add any of the 3-400ml of water it suggested and it was fine, in fact it was still a little over-runny just from the canned tomatoes.
Anyway, hopefully the guests enjoyed it, that’s the most people I’ve cooked for (6) in quite some time.
Snoozing
Grete and our guests are out, in Birmingham at a craft exhibition, at which they’re meeting up with Grete’s mum and aunt.
Meanwhile I’m home alone with two snoozing cats, emitting strong snooze pheromones.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Guests are here
Guests are here. Made roast chicken (rosemary sprigs) on a bed of roast vegetables (courgette, aubergine, sweet potato, onion and red peppers) with some boiled new potatoes for tea. The non-diabetic amongst us then had low-fat high-sugar ice cream, while those of us with diabetes had cheese and crackers (nice and smelly brie). The roast chicken was nice I have to admit, and it’s the first time I’ve tried to cook aubergine so I was pleased it turned out at least edible.
I don’t care if they enjoyed it, I’m just pleased we didn’t get takeaway.
Tomorrow (when there’s 6 of us) it’s moussaka, and they better eat it because the recipe serves 8.
