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Friday, July 25, 2008

OK, I'm on a roll of housewifely blogs... through a link on the Frugal Upstate blog, I find this scary looking "Home Ec 101". Except maybe I am coming to a time in my life where I really, REALLY need to read this sort of stuff.

You know what? Some people have too much time on their hands. That's all I am saying. Really.
Recommended rice bags to Eelco, and found this great webpage called Frugal Upstate, whch has directions in it, and also a lot of blogs about doing things frugally.

Will be back to read it in detai, but meanwhile, here's the post about ricebags.
I am starting to feel that I am being left behind by the speed of progress currently. BoingBoing links to a blog where patches for clothing are about to be sold, which will allow people to use their shiny new iPhones to scan in your patch and discover your website, or blog or youtube video.

One of the useful things about virtual worlds has been this ability to click on objects and find the link to a company's or individual's website. And here it is, in real life.

I spent a long time the day before yesterday transferring the blogs from my oooold website which I discovered on the WayBayMachine, to a new blog here, imaginatively called MyOldBlogs. I will tidy them up, and add some more explanation... and maybe I will even have the time to add some of the paper diaries which are fading fast too. It was a weird experience going back 10 years in time.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008


Ali is due to have his colonoscopy this afternoon. He had to take mega doses of laxative last night, hasn't had anything to eat since 4pm yesterday, and now can't drink again until after the procedure. I wish there was something I could do to protect him from this, would take his place in an instant... but I can't.

To keep my mind from obsessing about it, watched Bonekickers from last night on the BBCiPlayer. You know how things can look sooo good on a trailer and then within a millisecond of starting to watch an episode you can tell that they are sooo bad? This is one of those.

The plot is ludicrous... they didn't just invent a love affair between Boudicca and a Roman soldier, but also suggested that the Roman had kept her secretly in a chamber below the Roman baths in Bath, and had invented an incendiary bomb many centuries in advance of their actual invention AND that he was responsible for the burning of Rome in revenge for the death of his mistress.

The acting is poor and the writing too... actually they crammed a whole series worth of plot and backstory into the space of one hour long episode, and in places this required the actors to deliver an incredible amount of completely fantastical information at a rate of knots. There was a backstory element of a romance between two of the characters which didn't ring true... they didn't behave like people with a history. And there was a lot of banter between rugged professor and young student which would have a real student running for the forms to report him for sexual harrassment... it seemed old fashioned, and inappropriate. He wasn't even witty about it.

The sets were so dreadful, I could have done better with a bit of plaster of paris and a roomful of children... in places it definitely won the award for the least convincing rock and stone in the history of television.

You know how sometimes things are so bad, they're almost good? This isn't like that. It's obvious the people involved have no faith or belief in their product, they simply contrived a television series out of a formula. On paper it might have looked good. On the screen it did NOT.

I cannot believe that the BBC has sunk to this level of awful... didn't anyone see how bad it was? You begin to lose faith in the BBC to withstand the commercial pressures upon it when they broadcast something so unremittingly bad that I can find nothing good to say about it.

And if I spoiled the plot for anyone... you can thank me later for having prevented you from wasting a whole hour of your life.