Month: June 2004

  • The Outsider

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  • Dumb ITV

    ITV has been berated by viewers and forced to apologise for including the Scottish flag in a title sequence for a programme they showed on Saturday called Dumb Foreigners. It seems that there were upwards of 100 complaints from Scots who were ever so slightly miffed that ITV should think them foreign. I was unfortunate…

  • Idea For Terrible Gameshow #1

    [And this better not turn up as an Endemol production any time soon – I’m retaining copyright on the idea for the good of humanity] How Low Can You Go? Two teams of contestants compete for cash prizes. Each round one person from each team is picked to perform a terrible stunt (eg. worm eating),…

  • Washout

    Guess who had a pair of tickets to Wimbledon yesterday? We stayed until around 4ish before deciding that there was unlikely to be any play and headed off home. Once we’d made that decision, you begin to hope that all play really will be cancelled, because you’d hate to think that as you’re getting on…

  • TV Invasion

    Listened to an enthralling documentary from the BBC World Service entitled TV Invasion, trying to detail the impact that television has made to the Himalayan country of Bhutan since its arrival in 1999. At the same time, the country also got the internet, so you’d think that it’d be quite an upheaval. But the country…

  • Neil Report

    The BBC have today published the Neil Report, which is effectively the BBC’s response to the findings of the Hutton inquiry. I’m not a journalist, and I don’t particularly work with journalists, but good and accurate journalism is a fundamental principle of a democracy. And the BBC is probably the world’s greatest news gathering organisation,…

  • Commercial Naming of Sports Stadia

    So this article from Media Week has the findings of some research that says that fans don’t mind company-sponsored stadia. What a load of nonsense. This research was conducted for Arsenal, and is obviously paving the way for some blue-chip company to pay many millions for the right to call the new Arsenal stadium something…

  • Fox News Nonsense

    Thanks to Rob for pointing out in my comments that John Gibson, Fox News’ commentator, is at it again, speaking out over his disdain for Ofcom’s ruling. And should you really not be able to complain if you think the company you work for is being unfairly maligned by others? Gibson seems to think so.…

  • Cards As Weapons

    Also via Boingboing comes this link to a site that has an excerpt from Ricky Jay’s infamously out of print book, Cards As Weapons (as featured in an episode of Jonathan Creek – something which probably keeps it rare).

  • SpaceShipOne

    Congratulations to the team of SpaceShipOne (I’ll even forgive the needless nospacesrule in their name). I did try to listen to live audio at work, but had problems, and only saw the video on the news earlier on. Quite a good source of coverage here (via Boingboing).

  • Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded

    Krakatoa is one of those volcanoes that everyone knows about, and in 1883 it exploded in the largest recorded manner killing thousands. This brilliant book sets the explosion in its full historical context, filling the reader in on both the scientific and social situation. Well worth a read.

  • Clinton Autobiography

    With his autobiography due out tomorrow, the PR machine is in full flow. So yesterday there was a big article in The Observer about Clinton’s post-Presidential life. Then today, The Guardian had an interview with the man himself, while tomorrow Panorama (who had a great programme last night on the superdollar) sees David Dimbleby get…