This week's reading is taken from ...

Ireland
Sums up a whole country in just four photographs.

The Top Ten Things I Learnt From Going To Sci-Fi Conventions
From Bob Fisher author of Wiffle Lever to Full. One of these days...

Swine flu turns my son into Woody Allen
"When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

New Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian Movie Trailer
I hate myself for wanting to see this just because of the cast. And Darth. I know it's going to be rubbish.

Adding revolving headlines to the BBC Red Button homepage
I only understand about a quarter of this, but I love that the BBC allows its public face to be so expressively geeky.

Ward & White's Karaoke Circus
Because even those of us who can't sing deserve a decent band too.

Inflatable Enclosures
I always wanted one of these for the garden.

TV Review: News Wipe with Charlie Brooker, *BBC Four*
Mof says everything I would want to about the programme. It has been a revelation and made it near impossible to look at news media now without some kind of cynicism about how much of the truth has been obscured or misreported because of some hidden agenda.

Manchester's Peregrine Falcons are back!
It's Naturewatch without Bill Oddie's sinister innuendo.

BBC2 to position original drama as ‘major event of the week’
After my rant last time we did this, it's great to see the channel's new controller taking the bull by the horns and trying to do something with it. Which she would given that she's the last person who made BBC Four great. Is she the reason they've scheduled a bunch of interesting documentaries in the 7 o'clock slot every night next week?

Famous fans are excited by Angels' comeback
Mark Kermode fulfils his dream of introducing the Comsat Angels.

Faber’s Beckett covers
Wonderful, minimalist designs that attempt to capture what the play write originally wanted.

Blog it!
Flog It! visits Liverpool.

* Take cover: you're about to have a new favourite girlband
Girls Can't Catch -- what !?! Still, Shazney Lewis is writing for them so...

95 Old School Games You Can Still Play Online
Hours of fun for everyone.

Jewel Announces West Coast Tour Supporting Her New Album "Lullaby"
Not for kids actually. "It's all mellow mood music so if you want to come home at night and relax its all really lyric driven," I'm still there.

Geocities: Lessons So Far
Jason Scott's archive team are download and backing up Geocities. Wow. That is a lot of reading.

Possibly the Most Difficult Post I Have Ever Written
As good a piece of writing about dealing with a religion and the sexuality it abhors that I've seen.

The fall and rise and fall and rise and fall
I don't have a problem with remakes. I do have a problem with remakes that aren't clever enough (like BSG) to do something completely different.

Packing Hell
"I don't know when or why, but somewhere in my upbringing it was instilled in me that the highest of all human virtues is traveling light."

5 Things About “Love Actually”
The end of the film is a mess. Jamie (Colin Firth) apparently enters his family’s home after the chart show ends (usually at seven o’clock on a Sunday), and the audience is expected to believe that on Christmas Eve he is able to flag a taxi to the airport, fly to Marseilles, take a taxi to Aurelia’s village, find her house then the restaurant at which she is employed so that he can proposing to her. The Earth being dragged back into orbit in Doctor Who I can accept. But that's just pure fantasy.

Real life Twitter..!
Expect this to be ripped off by a UK sketch show very soon.

10 Worst Countries to be a *Blogger*
More outrages from the unreported world.

And now on BBC1, it’s time to pour another glass of…
I read somewhere else that the BBC have been trying to cancel this for years but are scared of the outrage.

Filling Young Minds
Spot the moment which made me feel like I was about a hundred years old.

What’s the Matter With Margaret?
I'd wondered what happened to the writer-director of You Can Count on Me. Now I know. Post-production hell. Make sure you read the comments too, because they fill in some of the gaps in the story.

Do beautiful 404 error pages still help users?
Not always, but I'd rather that than simply 'page cannot be displayed'. It's instructive to know that the website you're looking at still exists a bit.

Hollywood feels the pinch: Film production at standstill
"In the last few months there have been precisely two big-budget movies shot in Los Angeles - Iron Man II and Tim Burton's new version of Alice in Wonderland - with just six more in the pipeline for the rest of 2009. That compares with 21 major film shoots last year, and 71 in 1996."

A new format war?
It's still hard to believe that in a couple of years my 500gb hard disk is going to look antiquated.

Victoria Raimes: Twitter craze is going down a tweet
For the headline.

I'm a terrible human being. I have punched my mum in the face - metaphorically, that is. I have left home
For the comments. Congratulations to The Guardian for nurturing new talent, even if putting Tom in Charlie Brooker's slot is akin to throwing him to the lions.

1 comment:

Tempestuous Tulip said...

You linked to my scatterbrained little rant! LOL oh, man... I didn't even think of the ridiculous Jamie-time-traveling ending. It really is a mess of a movie, and I excuse my annual viewing of it by pointing to the fact that so many of my favorite actors are in it. The more I think about it, though, the more upsetting it is. The characters are so undeveloped, the stories are insultingly ridiculous and really, it just coasts along on the charm of some of the performances. Why have I not noticed or cared about these things until my out-of-season viewing, though? Is my IQ lower during the winter months?

I mean, I know full well that I have a borderline-unhealthy obsession with Rickman and Firth (I once traveled to Delaware for the more or less sole purpose of gazing upon the Austen-novel-movie footwear they wore in a S&S and P&P, respectively, at a Fashion in Film exhibit), but I think I've seen the light in a small-but-meaningful way here. There are more respectable ways for me to get a fix.