Recently in Misc Category

Yesterday I was about to go into a newsagent, when a couple of kids stopped me just outside. If they gave me the money, would I go in and buy them a packet of cigarettes?

"Sorry, no," I replied.

It's a moral thing - I'm not buying their cigarettes for them. They're under-age, and I'm not helping them out.

The same thought came today, when, in response to a request for present ideas, someone suggested buying the Mamma Mia DVD as a Christmas gift (no names - no pack drill).

Just like I'm not going to help feed some youths' nicotine addiction, I'm not going to support someone's terrible taste in celluloid - even if it's ironic.

I have to have standards. I'd feel dirty just buying a copy. I'd have to explain to the shop assistant that it wasn't for me. I'm feeling a cold shiver down my back just typing these words, and thinking about quite how appalling the film might be.

When I give a gift, however much the recipient desires the gift or has asked for it, the fact that I've given it is a reflection of me and my tastes.

So no Mamma Mia DVDs, no Mariah Carey CDs, no Martina Cole novels, and so on.

Third time lucky - today I finally made it into the Hadrian exhibition. When I'd previously popped in to try to see it, I'd gone on Saturday afternoons when all the tickets for the day had already been sold.

I tried to book online for today, but no luck, so I pitched up early to buy tickets in person. I still had to wait an hour and a half before I could get in, but that's not a problem when you're in one of the world's great museums.

What I hadn't quite realised was that Statuephilia was also on at the museum. This is a collection of five "sculptures" by contemporary artists, placed amongst the museum's other exhibits.

They're quite fascinating - and I decided to take photos of them. Well easier said than done. With four of the five, you can take as many snaps as you like - indeed with a few exceptions, you're free to photograph away inside the museum. The Hadrian exhibition didn't allow it, and although I suspect that the reason was partly to ensure that they sold plenty of £25 catalogues, it was very full and taking photos tends to get in the way of the exhibits for other people.

Taking photos of the exhibits in Statuephilia was also fine for most of the exhibits as I say, but there was one for which photography was expressly forbidden. That, of course, was Damian Hurst's piece. Now as it happens, I did take a photo of his piece. It's not very good, and it was before I read the sign banning it.

I've noticed that it's quite common for Hirst to ban taking photos of his pieces. I was in the Metropolitan Museum in New York last year where he has one of his sharks on display. Once again, the museum was happy for you take photos, but his piece banned it.

Perhaps my feelings on the subject aren't too different from those of some others. The skulls on display at The British Museum really aren't anything to write home about and certainly aren't as clever and involving as Tim Noble and Sue Webster's Dark Stuff which was given plentiful approval from those who I saw it with. The relative merits of the vaguely obscene gold statue of Kate Moss are also in the balance, but it's undoubtedly the most popular piece from the unscientific survey I made today. People were taking photos from every angle. The Hirst piece simply had a woman with her daughter sitting on the floor sketching it, which I assume doesn't break the rules.

A friend mentioned the other day that when BAA were determining their marketing plans for Terminal 5 at Heathrow, post its opening, "...Is Working" probably wasn't what they were hoping to use. But following the initial fiasco, that's what they're having to do to prove you can fly from there.

I wonder if "Planes Still Flying" mightn't be a better option following the collapse of XL, and the possible-collapse of Alitalia.

Congratulations to all in Sheringham today, after Tesco finally lost an appeal to build a massive supermarket in the small Norfolk town of Sheringham.

If you've never visited Sheringham then perhaps you won't understand quite what this means. You probably live somewhere where most of the small independent shops, from bakers and greengrocers to butchers and fishmongers have disappeared. You go to your local supermarket to buy all those things - perhaps out of choice, but most likely because it's simply the only place to buy those things. And of course supermarkets sell far more than just food - books, magazines, clothes, CDs, DVDs, electrical appliances and so on.

Sheringham is a town which still retains all those small locally run indendent stores, adding to the unique charm of the seaside town. Instead of a town centre filled simply with identikit chainstores, all empty lots, it has a thriving variety of retailers selling all and sundry.

And this is more important than just a local planning concern of interest only to locals. There national interest in this outcome since big business usually wins.

Tesco's avariciousness is unbounded, and it's been trying to put a store in the town for years, even going so far as to put a secret deal in place with a previous local council's administration.

But now, finally, they've lost their appeal, and Sheringham won't have a superstore that would leave the town centre bare and bereft as business is lost by the rest of the town.

This is great news because large supermarket groups have much deeper pockets for legal fees that local and district councils. They simply can't always afford to fight these battles.

Now of course Tesco can put in a new application for a different store. And they probably will - supermarkets never seem to let go. But it'll have to be smaller, and better designed to fit in with the local town.

Read the full findings here.

I don't mean to underplay the potentially serious nature of Hurricane Gustav when it hits the US coastline, probably tomorrow. But Bush and Cheney not going to the Republican convention this week, answers a lot of the questions that Carl Hiaasen raises in his column this week.

It's a good get out. Bush gets criticised for over-flying the aftermath of Katrina rather than being down on the ground. So this time he's proactive.

In the meantime, as the media coverage here in the UK escalates, and impending arrival of the hurricane dominates the news, we shouldn't forget that more than eighty people have already died - especially in Haiti. In Cuba, 300,000 people were moved and there are no reports of any casualties. Say what you like about Castro (Raul that is), but the regime does seem to know how to look after its citizens.

And let's not forget that elsewhere in the world, there is plenty of ongoing suffering - especially in Birhir, India, where widespread flooding has left over a million people homeless and a frankly unknown number have died.

While in China, the Sichuan province, still getting over its terrible earthquake earlier this year has suffered a further quake killing yet more people.

For some reason, these natural disasters don't quite merit the on-the-hour coverage from multiple places of events with live satellite two-ways.

At work a few weeks ago, we had a nice chap come in to talk to us about the consumer behaviour at the moment, in light of the credit crunch and a falling housing market as people tightened their belts. It was all a little gloomy if you work for a company who depends on advertising as I do.

He also talked about who he thought might do well, and obviously internet companies are set to do even better. One of his examples was white goods retailers who have struggled with the internet so far in his opinion.

I've got a couple of recent experiences with white goods retailers to share in light of this.

A few days after I his talk I was due to take delivery of a washing machine, and seeing how strongly retailers had grasped the digital domain was to prove interesting.

First off, I had been expecting the washing machine the previous weekend, but Comet had called me at work to let me know that it'd be delayed a week as they'd run out of stock. Since the particular model I had chosen was a special offer, this wasn't perhaps surprising.

Ordering the machine had been reasonably painless. They'd offered a fitting service and could take away my old machine both at modest additional cost. But since I live on the second floor, this is a useful service to which I had to avail myself. In fact, this had been the main reason for choosing Comet ahead of other retailers. I don't simply want a washing machine to be delivered - they have concrete blocks built into their bases, and my old one isn't going to leave my flat on its own.

As is the way of these things, you get a delivery window - in this instance it was Sunday 8am-12pm. I must admit that offering a Sunday delivery is somewhat surprising, but the four hour window is less so. I obviously had to be up and ready to receive them at 8am, but guess which end of the window they arrived?

I was expecting a call to let me know when they'd arrive, however I didn't get one. This wasn't surprsing because on arriving at the following Monday morning, I discovered a recorded message on my work phone, despite having supplied both mobile and home numbers as well.

Delivery of the new machine and the collection of the old one was painless, and there were two of them so I didn't have to help out. Indeed overall, I'd probably use Comet again despite communication issues.

What I would suggest is that considering I ordered the product online, they should also communicate with me electronically - at the very least sending email confirmations of my new delivery details alongside the phone call. They later emailed me a post-delivery service questionnaire and I told them this.

Then yesterday, I needed to replace a DVD player. My first DVD player was a Samsung and it cost £250. I'd had a £50 voucher, but that still made it pretty expensive.

More recently, with the exception of my very nice Sony Freeview hard disk/DVD recorder, my DVD players have been closer to £20. But then you get what you pay for and my third cheapo failed on me. What should I replace it with? DivX playback is useful (my Sony does this) and obviously it should be trivially easy to make multi-region. I settled on a Philips DVP5980 which ticks all of the above boxes with the added advantage of a front mounted USB socket from which you can play movies, music and JPGs from a memory stick. It also upscales to HD TVs - not much use for me currently, but worthwhile for the future.

It was available in-store from Currys for a reasonable £40. Like the other major electrical firms, Currys allows you to reserve online. Frankly, unless you have serious stock issues, every retailer should allow this. It means that I can go to the store safe in the knowledge that the product I want is in stock. Otherwise, I might as well just buy online. With my confirmation slip in hand, I headed off to the retail park where my nearest Currys sits.

Inside, on a Bank Holiday Saturday afternoon, the place was deserted. This is a sector that's in real trouble. Before making my purchase, I thought I'd check out the other DVD players they had onsale. They had a reasonable range, but curiously, the model I'd come in to purchase wasn't there. I double checked, but no, it wasn't on display anywhere in the store.

I began to worry. Perhaps the computer system had lied to me and they were out of stock. I went to the tills where at least three sales assistants were milling around with little to do (me being the only customer). Much typing on the computer and a failed attempt to get me take out an extended warranty (never!), and I was in possession of a receipt. I simply had to go to the collection point to complete my purchase.

I headed to the back of the store where two assistants were chatting. One immediately took my receipt and disappeared off behind a locked door. The other returned to some administrative computer-based task. Another customer came over and when he approached this second assistant, he was simply told to ring the bell. He, personally, wasn't able to help.

He rang the bell and waited.

We both waited.

I stared at washing machines and fridges to relieve the boredom. Eventually five to ten minutes later, the first assistant appeared with my DVD player, and took the receipt from the other customer to find his purchase. I left the store without much good feeling.

Why was my model not on display? You're not going to sell stock that isn't displayed. Why were the tills over-manned, and the warehouse under-manned? If there's nobody buying anything, at least make the process comfortable and quick for those who are actually contributing to your bottom line. It's just very poor all around.

With Best Buy taking a stake in Carphone Warehouse before it expands into the UK, the whole marketplace is ripe for being thoroughly shaken up in this country. Shopping should be pleasant. If you can do that, then more people will end up going online. At the moment, the big-box retailers still have a bit of an advantage in that they have trained employees who can install a washing machine for me. Much as I love Amazon, that's not yet something I'd give to them. But they can do better. Supermarkets' delivery windows are pretty tight these days - albeit the service they providing is simpler. But it won't take much to improve on what we currently have, and then the retailers will be in big trouble.

No - this isn't yet another post about the release of a new mobile phone. This is far more important. This is about Apple's iPods.

Actually, it's not even really about that. You see love or loathe Apple, broadly speaking the iPod is a great device. It does the job it was designed for simply and effortlessly. It's a joy to use. But it has one fatal flaw - an almost unforgivable flaw. It comes with the most useless headphones imaginable.

How dare you package your pride and joy with such a useless set of audio accoutrements to listen to your music with.

I've owned two iPods so far, and both times I basically threw away the unwanted headphones without even unpacking them. Instead I've bought Sony and Sennheiser earbuds to get decent sound into my head. But it's not actually even the poor quality audio that is the worst crime of Apple (although that's pretty bad).

No, it's the fact that they leak so much!

This is a failure that actually affects non-iPod (or indeed other mp3 or audio devices) more than it does Apple's customers. If you have the misfortune to sit on public transport somewhere near somebody listening to their iPod with the original Apple accessories then you have my pity. It's not fair on us! I listen to my iPod a lot travelling to and from work. But sometimes I don't wear it. Yet if my neighbour is listening to their iPod with their Apple headphones then I'm faced with either singing along to their song (might as well - I can hear all the words), or more likely being forced into wearing my own headphones to block out their racket (you can bet your bottom dollar that the music they're listening to is not to your tastes).

This is your fault Apple. Seemingly you're selling lots of Macs, iPhones and iPods at the moment. So please put some decent non-leaky headphones into their packs or Steve Jobs name goes to the top of my list for first up against the wall come the revolution.

It's June and a nice day. Who wouldn't fancy an ice cream?

I can't help but agree with Roy Greenslade on the subject of London's evening freesheets. They're both still uniformly abysmal with not a single thing to read. The trouble is that even the paid for Evening Standard is woeful with its ridiculous vendetta against Ken Livingstone and Mail-lite features. A bit more news would be nice. I actually have an "Eros" smartcard charged up with enough cash for ten copies and I've still not bought an issue for ages (aside from the day they were giving away a free Nicci French novel).

And while I know that London Underground is paid handsomely to allow distribution of both The London Paper and Metro in its stations, does that revenue really cover the vast cost of clearing up the mess? Despite signs telling people not to, every morning there's a pile of read/discarded copies of the paper at the bottom of central London escalators. These just go on to get jammed into the mechanism of the escalators causing un-needed delays to exiting the station when they go out of service.

[Update: Love this]

Meanwhile in further parochial news from this parish, our local Soho Post Office is closing. Or rather, it's moving to the other side of Oxford Street and into WH Smiths. The net result will be that Soho - home to a rather large media and creative industry - will not have a single Post Office left.

I realise that at least I'm lucky enough to still have a Post Office within walking distance, with many planned closures leaving whole communities without access to one at all. But the Soho Post Office is regularly jammed with people. On a recent trip, my knowledge of Key Stage 3 Science increased enormously as the queue snaked around slowly - I read the only interesting literature on offer whilst for a window to become free.

So there's enormous demand, and yet economics dictate that it's cheaper to sit inside another store where I very much doubt there'll be room for as many counters. Ironically, Soho will still have drop-off points for DHL and FedEx deliveries. Is it any wonder that the Royal Mail struggles?

As you may or may not know, His Girl Friday is one of my favourite films of all time. The film is screwball comedy and was made in 1940, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It was written by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the latter two of which had written the play, The Front Page, on which it was based.

The wonderful Howard Hawks directed it, and it famously has possibly the fastest dialogue in any film ever made. The characters regularly speak over the top of one another, and indeed the final screenplay ran to 191 pages for a 92 minute film. Usually, screenplays run at around a minute a page.

In 1940, you had to record the sound all at once without multi-track capabilities, so a sound mixer had to switch between microphones as the characters spoke the lines.

Anyway, a link on Waxy's Links the other day pointed to a version of the film edited a couple of years by Valentin Spirik which removes all the film's dialogue. The end result is an 8:25 edit of the film. It's also embedded below:

What we're left with is very revealing about the speed of the film with jump cuts aplenty that mightn't seem out of place in a 21st century reality show.

The full original film is in the public domain by the way. That means that you can stream it or download it yourself at the Internet Archive.

The public domain nature of the film means that you'll see plenty of ridiculously cheap DVDs kicking around of it. The problem is that they mostly come from poor prints. So I do recommend the Columbia Classics DVD which is pretty cheap itself and uses an excellent print (ignore the comment that says otherwise at Amazon - I suspect that they're looking at a different DVD - there are many around).

For more on Howard Hawks, I'd also recommend Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy.

I absolutely love this new Banksy image on the side of a building around the back of the Rathbone Place Post Office sorting office.

There were plenty of other onlookers since the painting appeared over the weekend.

More photos via Flickr.

A few weeks ago John Naughton explained some his reasons for not accepting comments on his blog. And I have no problem with that. Although it's a lot easier for me to correct errors if comments are allowed (Photoshop Express is available to people on UK ISPs, although the dropdown when registering is limited to the US for some reason, and you need to know that Shift-2 is where the @ sign is on US keyboards. Photoshop Express is well worth playing with incidentally, and I hear that Flickr will shortly be joining Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket on the affiliated sites list). I would drop John an email noting this, but I don't have his email address, and while I could guess it, I couldn't be certain.

Of course we can all have fun with comments. Yesterday I posted about some poor experiences I'd had at Cineworld when going to see The Orphanage. I had a fairly aggressive commentator as a result - I suspect someone who works for the company. I'm happy to let that comment through and reply to it. But I'm also quite happy to delete comments that I don't want appearing on my site. It's my site and my blog, and I'll determine what appears here!

So the Daily Mail has suddenly become devoted to going bagless - that is, seeing the end of the free plastic bag.

Earlier this week it launched a massive campaign, and by a complete fluke, and in no way pre-planned, the next day Marks & Spencer announced that it'd no longer be supplying free plastic bags for its food shopping. Instead customers would be encouraged to get bags-for-life and later it'd start charging 5p a bag if you still wanted one.

I'm not going to complain about this, as I've desperately been trying to cut down on plastic bags myself. I have a variety of reusable bags now to take with me when I go grocery shopping, and I carry a "fold-up" reusable bag in my rucksack for those unplanned shopping excursions.

At the same time, most retailers are beginning to ask if you want a bag rather than automatically giving you one.

But what I'd like to know is this - will the bulky Saturday Mail and its sister Sunday title begin to start being distributed without their own plastic bags? It's called poly-bagging, and given the number of supplements, leaflets, CDs and DVDs that come with the average paper now, some retailers demand plastic bags around the papers. You especially notice this at supermarkets and train stations.

So I'll be on the lookout this weekend to see if the Mail has the courage of its own convictions.The Mail on Sunday is giving away a Nigel Kennedy CD the weekend after this, so how will it be distributed without a plastic bag? We shall see...

Utterly bizarre. I was just sitting here in my flat at 12.55am, when the sofa started shaking.

I live on a top floor flat, and the light hanging above me was moving while the rather precarious stack of CDs against one wall started to move. It all went on for about ten seconds.

Turning on Five Live reveals that the tremor was felt across the country - as far afield as Rochdale, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, and, well, London.

I've only ever felt one earth tremor before which was in Athens (i.e. very close to the meeting of some of the earth's tectonic plates). That was an aftershock that I felt in a sixth floor bedroom.

I'd say that this was actually quite a similar force. This time I was on a sofa, last time I was lying on a bed. In both instances it felt like someone bouncing on a bed near me.

Anyway, Sky News now has it as breaking news...

[UPDATE] Here it is (thanks to the magic of Twitter) - a magnitude of 4.7.

Well that can be the only explanation. Unless the system is just flaky of course.

Let me explain. I live in London, where the public transport system is divided into circular zones. The further out of the centre you live, the more you pay for your all zone ticket - or travelcard.

A couple of years ago we were introduced to the Oyster Card - a smart card system that removed the need for paper tickets with magnetic strips. Instead of putting your card through a slot, you just swiped your Oyster Card and the gates opened. Magic!

Except I get on an overground station, and although the Oyster system could work there, the fact that the gates to the station aren't permanently manned means that travelers can't use all aspects of the Oyster system.

I get an annual travelcard from my local station and each day I have to use it at least twice to get through barriers - as I say, there are no barriers at my station, otherwise I'd have to use it a lot more. A piece of cardboard being used several times a day is not going to last a full year, so every so often I had to get it replaced. This would happen a couple of times a year. I'd always go to the station at the weekend, because you can't possibly realise how complicated a procedure this is. The assistant has to find my details on the computer system, invalidate my previous card and then issue a new one. He or she then has to print it, and write on it. A bore, but an infrequent bore.

I did once go very early in the morning during the week to get it replaced, and got told off my the ticket assistant for attempting something so rash at such a busy time! The assistant's incompetence meant that it took a full ten minutes to get a replacement issued.

But last year something changed. My ticket stopped working just a week or so after getting it. I got a replacement. That lasted a few days before it again stopped working. When tickets stop working in a station, you have to wander around looking for a station employee to buzz you through the barrier. Often you have to queue behind someone who hasn't paid for their journey, and are arguing their point. It's terribly frustrating.

By now I was convinced my ticket wallet had somehow become magnetised - the tickets work on a paper magnetic strip system. I replaced the wallet. The ticket stopped working again. I got another new plastic wallet, and kept my ticket in a different pocket altogether, well away from my wallet. It stopped again. I removed my photo card (you're supposed to keep it with your ticket) and put the travelcard in its own entirely separate wallet. It stopped working once more.

You can't believe the frustration. I've had perhaps seven or eight cards in less than twelve months, all of which have stopped working. Yesterday it stopped yet again - the card only being a week or so old. As I say, I can only think I have magnetic legs. Is something in my diet giving me too much iron?

People who live in London will probably be laughing and pointing at me asking why I don't get an Oyster Card. Although the pay as you go system doesn't operate in my locale, the annual card system does. The problem is that I still have several months to go with my current card before I need to renew, and I have some serious issues with the Oyster system. You can be tracked quite successfully with it, and I quite like my civil liberties (Yes, I know that by having my mobile switched on, I can be tracked quite effectively enough thank you - check out the recent Google Maps update for an idea of the precision available).

But enough is enough. Come and find me authorities! Next time around it will be an Oyster Card.

There is one additional advantage that the ticket assistant who sold me my last card pointed out (even though he can't sell me an Oyster Card) - you can cancel them. When I first got my annual travelcard, I lost it within a month. The rail company issued a replacement, but sent me a letter explaining that this was the first and only time they'd do this since the lost card was still 'live', and I could be a fraudster (They didn't spell it out in quite these terms, but that was certainly my understanding). They suggested that in the future I might like to look into seeing if my home contents insurance covered any further losses. At least with Oyster Cards, you can cancel them remotely, like mobile phones, ensuring that your personal losses are minimised.

(Yes, I really am on the subscription lists of both these organisations).

You may well have seen the pictures of all the wood that's piled up in places like Worthing beach from the wreck of the Ice Prince which sank a week ago off the Dorset coast.

But the timber's not limited to Worthing. Walking along the Brighton beach front earlier today, I was amazed at the quantity to be found there!

The wood is piled up right along the shoreline.

The local paper has pointed out that the wood is useless since it's been in the sea for a week and therefore won't be too useful if you're planning on decking your garden. And in any event, you can't just go and grab stuff off the beach without filling out a form.

I've got a copy of Bella Bathurst's book on Wreckers in my "to read" pile - and she also fronted a recent Timewatch on the same subject. It'll be interesting to compare and contrast.

I also spotted this sign which might refer to the wood.

But there are some uses for the wood.

I was disappointed recently, when watching the Ewan McGregor/Charlie Boorman series Long Way Down, that they reinforced the nonsense about water going down the plug clockwise or anti-clockwise depending on whether you're in the northern or southern hemisphere. Along the border, there's a few quid to be made perpetuating this party trick to unwitting tourists. Michael Palin got similarly tricked in his series Pole to Pole. But it's not true, and you can see it yourself in your own sink.

Anyway, Long Way Down wasn't a news programme. But over the last few days, we've heard an awful lot about a pair of twins who were said to have unwittingly married following their separation at birth. A judge then annulled the wedding. Now while I can't absolutely prove this didn't happen, I'm really not at all happy with the facts of the case as I've seen them so far, and there's no proof so far that it did happen.

Here's the BBC's version of the story. And here it is in The Guardian.

But the story has actually emerged via Lord Alton during debate over the human fertilisation and embryology bill. He said he'd been told the story by an unnamed High Court judge. Yet that's not far removed from the "friend of a friend" basis of most urban myths.

Now while I wouldn't hold the News of the World up as the bastion of truth, their reporters, obviously sniffing a great story if they could get hold of the couple in question, only seem to have got as far as talking to the judge who's president of the High Court Family Division. He's not heard of such a story despite it surely being a cause celebre if it had happened.

So to me, this is case unproven, and really doesn't deserve the coverage it has received until it's been confirmed one way or another. You'd imagine that the couple would be in for a big payday from the News of the World or Mail on Sunday if they wanted to tell their story. But even if they want to remain anonymous, I think first hand proof positive is essential before we can take this at face value.

Until then, have I told you about the friend of a friend who got mugged in London and woke up in Turkey with just one kidney...?

My local train station - the one I use to get to work every day - doesn't have any barriers. As a result, there's no real ticket check on the way in and out. To avoid ticket evasion, they have ticket inspectors on the trains, and spot checks. If you travel on the train at the weekend, you have about a 50% chance of being checked. If you travel on a weekday in rush hour, you have about a 1% chance of being checked. I'd have thought capturing the commuter who's evading a £1000+ season ticket is probably of more importance than a teenager avoiding a £5 Travelcard. But there you go.

When the train company carries out spot checks, they send a team of ticket inspectors to the station and check tickets on the way in and out, handing out penalty fares to evaders. But it's important to note that they're employees of the rail company.

So this morning I was surprised to see the police checking tickets. While it's an offence to travel without a valid ticket, I was under the impression that the rail company determines that, and only then do any legal ramifications take place - either a fine, a court appearance or whatever. There might be police officers in attendance to deal with unruly customers who won't pay a fine, or try to run off, but the police tend to be upholding the law rather than enforcing a rail company's rules.

In a post 9/11 7/7 world, that's obviously changed.

Once the police had looked at my ticket, I rounded a corner to be confronted by a collapsible machine that looked something like this:

(Picture sourced from Avanti Security.)

Regaled with green flashing LEDs, I took it to be a metal detector. I had to walk through it.

To be honest, I would have stopped to ask, but my train was departing in about 30 seconds and I was running to catch that. Unusually the "detector" didn't stop me, which considering I was carrying money, mobile phone, iPod, various electronic gadgets, a belt and a metal watch, was a little odd.

Perhaps the device is tuned to pick up large knives? Or maybe it's not a metal detector at all.

What on earth was the point? As far as I'm aware, there haven't been a spate of knife attacks on my commuter service. And while I think someone did get shot a few miles away over Christmas, I'm not exactly on the mean streets of Baltimore (sorry - been watching The Wire DVD boxsets recently).

So what was the purpose?

The ticket inspection aspect is fine, but these machines are just supposed to make us feel safer aren't they? We're supposed to believe that the government is doing something about crime. The chances of someone actually being captured for a serious offence is surely remote without prior intelligence.

This report suggests that 50 knives were found when the devices were used in Birmingham. I'd be surprised if much more than a Swiss Army Knife was found in this morning's sweep.

Get your pills here!

I moaned the other day about how Hollywood movie studios seemed more interested in awards than the piracy of their films - hence the existence of "Screener DVDs" which inevitably end up being made available on the internet.

Anyway, one positive side effect of this scramble to win awards is that all the studios put together sites promoting the awards you think their titles should be considered for. And these sites now include PDFs of the films' screenplays. So you can download free and legal copies of most of the big films 2007 (and early 2008 in the UK).

So here are a few sites you might want to visit, although be warned, you don't want to spoil films like Juno or No Country For Old Men by reading the scripts in advance.

Miramax - includes No Country For Old Men and Gone Baby, Gone
Paramount - includes Sweeney Todd and Beowulf
Foxsearchlight - includes Juno and Waitress
Universal - includes American Gangster and The Bourne Ultimatum
Focus - includes Lust, Caution, Atonement and Eastern Promises
Paramount Vantage - includes The Kite Runner and There Will Be Blood
Warner Bros - The Assassination of Jesse James and Michael Clayton (note - Warners don't seem to have scripts or indeed much information beyond screening location details)

I couldn't find a link to Fox's awards website.

A recent entry on Boing Boing pointed to an article in Rolling Stone magazine which highlighted the fact that producers mix tracks so that they sound good when they're ripped to an mp3 player, at the same time, removing the subtleties that a wider dynamic range allows.

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow comments "...it seems to me that as a society, we're happy to sacrifice fidelity for ease of use, flexibility and low-cost (see, for example, the trend from landlines to cordless phones to mobile phones to Skype). Designing for that, as opposed to lamenting it -- is a damned good and realistic thing to do."

But has he read the full article? If he has, then he'll see that engineers and producers aren't happy with this trend. What we're getting are tracks with dynamic range compression to make them sound loud, thus removing some of the subtleties of the original sounds.

When you rip a CD to mp3 or similar lossy compression format, you're losing some of that range. We're often told that this compression simply loses audio beyond our hearing range, but it's really not as simple as that - an mp3 does not sound as good as a CD track when you play it through some decent speakers.

If all you're going to do is listen to your track through your iPod listening via the terrible ear buds that came with it, then you probably don't care. But give the crappy compressed version of the track to people who buy it from iTunes if they're happy with that. I still buy the majority of my music on CD because I want to hear the full range. I've got a rather nice stereo system with big floor standing speakers, and I can very much hear the difference.

Most FM radio stations also use lots of compression to make them sound "louder" and clearer than other stations on the dial. The music suffers.

You really can't just design for the lowest common denominator, otherwise we might as well design music to be optimised for those kids who listen to it from the speakers of their Nokia mobile phones at the back of the bus.

It really is strange that at a time when in the A/V world, we're all being persuaded to upgrade to HD TVs and high end 7.1 surround speaker systems to watch our Blu-Ray movies on, the CD world is going the other way.

But it's not just CDs - there are plenty of other areas where quality is losing out.

In the digital broadcast arena, poor quality seems to be accepted. Look at TV channels on Freeview and compare, say, BBC1 with ITV4. The latter, even with recently made programming looks terrible in comparison because it has a much lower bit-rate. ITV4 is on a multiplex that uses a more efficient compression technology, but it's still significantly worse. What that means is that channels look more "blocky" - something that's especially apparent as we all get larger and larger TVs (you can see a range of bitrates here).

A recent Deloitte & Touche report into the efficient use of spectrum by the BBC even recommended that the BBC should reduce its bitrate to squeeze more channels on. Viewers don't care they claimed. The BBC has promised to look into it.

In the run up to a full digital TV switchover in 2012, we're now looking at the resulting over-the-air pictures being worse than the previous analogue pictures. Yes, plenty of households had ghosting on their sets due to misaligned aerials, or coat-hangers stuffed into the back of their portable units, but that's not a reason to accept lower standards.

Satellite and digital cable are better but have their own issues. There's not a bandwidth shortage (at least for satellite), and those channels that are obviously lower in quality are so because they output in that format, or they're not prepared to spend enough on decent bandwidth on those platforms.

I am surprised that so few channels are broadcasting in widescreen - yes I'm looking at you UKTV and Virgin Media. Just about every TV sold these days is widescreen, yet even when a good proportion of their programming is now originated in 16:9, they persist in cropping it. There really is no excuse in 2008.

I'd love to say that my industry, radio, is better. But it's not is it? DAB can sound fine, but unless you invest in up to date codecs (ahem, Digital One), or don't overcompress, then it really doesn't beat a good analogue signal. Ask a Radio 3 listener or a DAB listener to the mono Radio 7.

The industry would argue that listeners don't care. They'll point to the fact that most DAB sets sold are "kitchen radios" which natively come with a single speaker. So there's no problem if they broadcast in 128k stereo (nearly every station), or even mono. Last Christmas, GCap launched theJazz and it's been pretty successful, in audience terms at least. Yet it's broadcast in mono. Now I'm no jazz aficionado, but surely this was a mistake. Jazz fans that I've met tend to be very particular about their listening environments, and high end kit is part of that. And maybe theJazz isn't really aimed at those hardcore fans (in the same way that Classic FM isn't really aimed at the die hards who prefer Radio 3), but it's telling that they even answer the mono question in their FAQs (and there is some space on Digital One these days...). Stereo was first broadcast in the UK in 1925 yet over 80 years later, we're not seeing greater dynamic range and more channels (5 or 7), but fewer.

If you look at the newspaper industry, they're continuing to upgrade presses to allow full colour on all their pages, and trying to ensure that ink doesn't rub off on your fingers. The technical quality is improving. Your local cinema probably sounds better than ever, and many screens are slowly becoming digital, meaning that we're seeing fewer scratchy old prints, instead getting pristine copies as we tend to see on recent well-mastered DVD releases.

But in so much of the broadcast arena, we're seeing declining quality. I'd argue that it was only recently that TV technology has improved to match a decent tube from ten or fifteen years ago, not displaying motion blur when showing sport, and handling dark pictures with lots of greys and blacks without "jaggies" appearing everywhere.

Quality really does matter. There are still many more stereo CD players in the world than mp3 players. At a time when record companies are facing a bleaker future than ever before, they might want to consider maintaining a quality product.

[UPDATE] Well what do you know? theJazz has just become stereo! Only 128kbps stereo - but that's still a vast improvement! Well done GCap/Digital One for finally getting that sorted.

And while we're talking about DAB - it's a shame today to hear that Oneword is effectively being closed down as Channel 4 pulls out of it. Oneword has always been a troubled station since there was never any real investment. Ironically they did have some decent programming, but it was just packaged badly. There'd be an unabridged adaptation of, say, Oliver Twist, that would run to forty episodes. Nobody is going to follow a series that long apart from one or two very real die-hards. Radio 4 rarely run a daily serial over more than a couple of weeks, and their hour long Classic Dramas tend to be between 1 and 4 weeks with very occasional "epics" that might run 13 weeks. But getting a producer to edit down the readings to more manageable lumps from the original unabridged audiobook versions was obviously expensive. And in any case, they filled time, and filling 24 hours a day with non-music programming is not a cheap thing to do.

There were some good shows like "Between The Lines," which felt almost unique in that it was book programme not presented by Mariella (Open Book on Radio 4, The Book Show on Sky Arts) Frostrop. But sadly it was lost amid the miasma of long form serials.

Of course this is also the problem that Channel 4 Radio is going to have. Widely touted as an alternative to Radio 4, it seems to me that it's bound to be closer to the non sports parts of Five Live. Not for nothing have they hired Five Live's Bob Shannon. They're unlikely to have more than a few serial book readings if they're sensible. Instead, the current affairs phone in is likely to prevail - less adversarial than Talksport perhaps.

I read an obituary about this man the other day, and he's someone I'd never heard of. He was a compatriot of Jesse Owens who ran in 1936 Olympics. Like Owens, he was also black:

John Woodruff, who has died aged 92, was the first black to win gold in Berlin. His triumph in the 800 metres, though overshadowed by Owens' later feats, was one of the most remarkable in Olympic history. To counter the favourite, Italy's European champion Mario Lanzi, Canada's Phil Edwards set an exceptionally slow pace. After 300 metres, Woodruff, an inexperienced 21-year-old college freshman, found himself boxed in. So he stopped. After the field had passed, he restarted in the outside lane, and, within 100 metres, took the lead. A gangly 6ft 3ins, with a 10-foot stride, Woodruff was nicknamed Long John, and though Edwards moved ahead on the back straight, Woodruff strode past him on the final turn, then held off a late charge by Lanzi to win in 1min 52.9secs.

He died a while ago, but his life is certainly one worth celebrating.

Happy Christmas everyone.

I've not exactly sent a lot of Christmas cards this year, so please treat this as your Christmas greeting.

Anyway, I'm off to watch the Doctor Who special, and all those Fred & Ginger films they're showing on BBC Four.

On his newsblog, Nick Robinson links to the emails and letters sent between the NAO and HMRC.

As Robinson says:

The key thing we learn comes not from the detail but the tone of all the exchanges. They demonstrate little concern from either the NAO or HMRC about data protection. The NAO wants, it would appear, simply to reduce the size of the files it is sent. The HMRC is worried about the cost of filtering information in order to send the smaller files the NAO request. What about our privacy and our rights? No mention is made of them.

But arguably even more concerning is what's to be seen on page 6 of the PDF - somebody at Benefits and Credits uses Comic Sans as their email font. Shocking.

Last Thursday I decided that I'd quite like to order a copy of the recent Radio 4 adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Produced by the same production team that made the recent Hitch Hikers' follow-ups, I missed the Radio 4 airing, so thought I'd catch up on CD.

I headed off to Amazon and searched for it. I couldn't find it. All I could see were various new and old editions of the books. I knew for a fact that the CD set was out - it was rush-released the nano-second the Radio 4 series had ended. BBC Worldwide were perfectly aware that this would be a big seller in the run up to Christmas.

Now when I look for audiobooks, I never know whether I should be searching in books or music. My site search had failed so now I searched in music and then books. In books, I found the audiobook section and finding it not-featured on the front page, I looked at Amazon's top selling audiobooks. It must be in there somewhere.

It wasn't.

Now I began to wonder if something strange had happened with the release. Perhaps there was a cock-up and the CDs couldn't be released for some reason. I went to Play, but there they had not only the CDs, but a background video promoting the production - this was evidently a major audiobook release for play.

I went back to Amazon. I couldn't find it. Then I looked for another high-profile BBC audiobook release - Down The Line - featuring Paul Whitehouse et al. This is another massive Christmas comedy release. It too was not to be found anywhere on Amazon.

I emailed Amazon:

I wanted to drop you a note because I'm quite surprised that Amazon doesn't seem to stock an audiobook that I'm after. It's the recent BBC Audiobooks release of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" starring Harry Enfield, and recently broadcast on BBC Radio 4. I'm pretty sure that in stores it must be one of the bestselling titles currently, yet I can't find it anywhere on the Amazon website.

Adam

A couple of days later, I got a response:

Thank you for contacting us at Amazon.co.uk.

You could also search our Auctions (http://s1.amazon.co.uk/exec/varzea/subst/home/home.html/) or zShops
(http://s1.amazon.co.uk/exec/varzea/subst/home/fixed.html/) sites to see if anyone is selling a copy of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "Down The Line", there.

It went on to explain a bit more about Amazon marketplace.

But it was all a little odd. Could they really be out of stock of an item that only went on sale this month? It's not as though it's a Nintendo Wii for which stock is always low. Why should I have to go to Amazon's marketplace?

I did have a look in my local Waterstones. No sign of Dirk Gently but plenty of copies of Down The Line.

On Sunday evening, all was back to normal. Dirk Gently was back in stock, and I ordered a copy which has just arrived.

Now Amazon may well have run out of stock of this item, but surely all they have to do is say that they can get copies within 4 to 6 weeks or whatever is the default. This item is not likely to go "out of print" for months or even years.

I suppose, in the end, it's more likely to be cock-up than conspiracy, but still not great service.

I wish that there was some kind of London equivalent of UX. Somebody please tell me there is!

For most things, if you opt to download the material rather than get physical media, if there's any difference in price, it's cheaper to download. Think of iTunes v CDs, or software that you can download from many sellers. There's no postage or packaging to account for, and minimal physical production costs.

So it's odd then, that this morning I got an email from Adobe to my work address trying to get me to upgrade to Photoshop CS3, but which gives cheaper prices if I pay for the physical media rather than download a large file. I realise that thousands of people downloading 700+ MB is a significant bandwidth cost. But sending me a big box through the post should not be cheaper.

Try it yourself.

Very odd.

A company called Lionsgate Films has been advertising recently on the tube as well as in newspapers such as today's Metro (Note: I saw the ad over somebody's shoulder - I still don't read Metro).

Here's a copy of the ad:

Lionsgate seems to specialise in offering recent US TV fare on DVD. Now none of the three series in the ad especially appeals to me: I saw The Lost Room and thought it was fairly average; The Dresden Files doesn't appeal, and I wasn't really taken with Weeds.

Nonetheless, the ad offers a free episode download, and I was curious. So I committed the URL to memory (lionsgatefilms.co.uk/viptv - not the easiest URL to remember when you're on the tube and out of internet access range) and gave it a go. As much as anything I was keen to see what format they were offering the downloads in. Windows Media perhaps, or Quicktime? Would I be able to play the episode on a PSP or iPod?

None of those.

A closer examination of the advert shows this:

"Download will be via streaming and will be the first episode of each series."

Huh?

Let me explain for the hard of thinking - download is not the same as streaming. Now I'm not about to go to the ASA to complain, but companies really need to be careful about how they advertise these things.

If something is a download, then I believe I should be able to save it somewhere and play it back later at my convenience without the need to go online. So don't advertise a "Free Episode Download" when it's not. How about "Watch an exclusive episode online" or "See the first episode free"?

In fact, I'm not sure why they don't simply make the episode available as a DRM-free download. If you like what you see, you may well go and buy the DVDs.

Dave Gorman is stopped from taking photos of funfair rides because he might be up to no good and trying to take pictures of children. Even when he shows that he's completely innocent, the police tell him to leave.

The daily newspaper I once worked for, The Bath Chronicle, is becoming a weekly newspaper. It's been around since 1760, although I'm not sure if it's always been a daily. They reckon the weekly will run to 250 pages. That'd make it the Sunday Times of weekly newspapers.

I tried to buy a train ticket for tomorrow earlier on and came across a few difficulties. First of all, I couldn't find an online system that lets you book a cycle reservation, so I had to phone up. But not before I'd first tried to buy my ticket. The system asked me how I'd like to collect the tickets - either same day delivery (not cheap) or through a FastTicket machine (free). I selected the FastTicket option. But they don't have a FastTicket machine in Liverpool Street where I want to depart. One of the small stations near me does have one, but seemingly, one of London's main terminals doesn't have one. Neither does Waterloo come to that! The next problem was the cycle reservation. After being put on hold for several minutes I was told that pre-reserved spaces were full, but that there was always space for walk-up ticket buyers. So, I can take a risk and show up at the station and try to squeeze the bike on, or I just forget about the bike, and go without it.

New sign on Golden Square, originally uploaded by Adrian Fitch.

In the week after The Tour de France hits London and literally millions of people come out on the streets, this sign appears on the railings of Golden Square where I work.

One of Mayor Ken Livingstone's main reasons for getting the Tour to start in London was to pursue his encouragement for more people to cycle to work.

Adrian, who took the photo, cycles in every day, and like many others, has to lock his bike to the railings for lack of anywhere else to put his bike. Most businesses in expensive Soho, do not have space to store bikes inside.

There's one bike stand on the square serving probably over 1000 people. It has spaces for ten a maximum of ten bikes. It's full. If there's nowhere that you can leave your bike, then you're not likely to cycle to work. Joined up thinking at the heart of government there.

This is something I still can't quite get my head around.

If you're an actor, sportsperson, artist or musician, you're probably regularly asked for an autograph. It's something personal, and I understand why people like that personal touch. When I'm buying a book, if there are copies that are signed, then I'm likelier to pick up one of those. This isn't because I've got pound signs flashing in my eyes and I'm about to get on Ebay; it's because I quite like the idea of having something the author has written in themselves. Similarly, I've been known to collect sportspersons' autographs in the past.

So I've no issue with the idea of collecting signatures, although I wouldn't collect them for their own sake.

I also understand that if I'm an actor in a successful TV series or series of films, I'm likely to be asked repeatedly for autographs wherever I go. I guess that depending on circumstances, I'd be happy to either sign or not sign accordingly. But I'd also understand that my success comes in large part from lots of people enjoying my work.

There's the possibly apocryphal story of a film star who used to write cheques instead of paying with cash wherever he went. He knew that most people wouldn't cash the cheques, preferring to keep his autograph.

But what I find truly incredible are fan conventions - particuarly in the SF world - which largely involve people showing up to queue and pay for a signed 10' x 8' photo. I've only ever seen it at first hand many years ago when I saw Dave "Darth Vader" Prowse offering his signature for something like £10 a go on a black and white photo of Darth Vader. Not having ever seen such a situation before, I found it very strange. I understand that colour (or even black and white) photos cost money, so there's something fair about charging for them. But it was clearly the signature that people were paying for. Actually, not that many people were paying for the signature, which made the whole enterprise even sadder.

And it didn't escape me that next to him was a box of cash. This wasn't a cheque or credit card operation. Even in my naivety, I understood the "tax-free" possibilities of such schemes.

But now you have operations like Collectormania which holds large scale events in places like Milton Keynes and Glasgow where dozens actors from "genre" series and films (sometimes with very small parts), gather together to sign autographs over a weekend.

The FAQ notes: "There will be a charge for each actor's autograph. This will generally be between £10 - £25 per signature depending on which guest."

So there's a market there, like everything else, and I guess that your worth as an actor is determined by how much you can get away with charging.

It's a nice little earner for the actors, many of whom will be flying into the UK specifically for this event. When you've factored in the cost of a decent hotel room, first-class flights, and the fact that many events don't charge an entry fee, you can see that there's obviously money to be made. Additional cash can be generated by buying your way into parties, receptions and dinners.

I can't quite put my finger on why I find the whole enterprise quite so squalid, but I do. Maybe if you had a small part in Dr No and the parts subsequently dried up, charging a few Bond fans might help your pension go further. But if you're currently starring in your US network's only breakout hit of the last season, and are on between five and six figures an episode, then do you also need to charge for autographs? Yes, meeting the fans can be fun, and better that than being aloof and dismissive of them. But the whole thing just can't shake that taint of seediness. Showbiz isn't the glitz and glamour that we sometimes think it is, but this industry is just low-rent.

BBC Parliament is covering the Falkland Islands crisis by replaying the BBC News coverage of the time, linked by Brian "I counted them all out, and I counted them all back" Hanrahan.

I'm flicking between a Sky+ recording of this and Lewis Hamilton winning the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis.

Incidentally, isn't it ridiculous that the drivers put on their sponsors' wristwatches before the presentation ceremonies? With that, and the caps that have to have the tyre manufacturers on. And why do they even bother with national anthems any longer? They get the British anthem down to about ten seconds and even then, it sounds like it's coming out of a Binatone cassette player from circa 1983.

Mortified to discover that I managed to chose precisely the same father's day card this year as I did last year! That's what happens when you choose your card from the wide wide selection at your local newsagent. And it wasn't even a "Father's Day" card - just a plain one (Why do so many greetings card feel the need to pre-print some fatuous message? I can write a message with somewhat more meaning myself).

Not sure what's happening to all the Amazon links to books on this website. If it's not righted quickly, then some remedial action's going to be needed by me.

[LATER] It seems that I'm not the only person suffering, and that it's likely to be some kind of weekend Amazon problem. I'll wait until tomorrow to see if it's fixed.

[LATER STILL] And Amazon seem to have fixed it now. But those temporary orange flash things are horrible.

Back in February, I posted a piece about the new style Lynx deodorant cans and said that I thought the design was faulty.

Well, as the comments to that post seem to confirm, I'm not the only person who's noticed the fault. OK - four other people isn't a great deal, but these are people I don't know, and who were so disappointed with the product's design that they Googled to see if anyone else had noticed the fault. There must be plenty more people who've got faulty cans who didn't Google for others in the same boat.

And there are more people who've blogged on it including Mr Biffo (new book out now) and this person here who's a little worried about being sued.

Well I'm not so worried, because it seems to me that the design is flawed. I'm sure that if I complained I'd be sent a replacement can, or a voucher for one at least. Unilever need's to acknowledge this, and redesign their cans.

In the meantime, I've not bought another can of Lynx since the new design arrived, and I'd suggest that you do likewise. Look - I'm not especially in their target market, but a deodorant's a deodorant, but if the can won't work, then I won't buy the can. And a drop off in sales will bring about a redesign in the long run.

I really did get my Google Talk application letting me know that these two emails arrived in fast succession.

Why do we keep getting new versions of TV and film classics adaptations? Every Jane Austen novel has now been adapted on countless occasions and you just know that there'll be more.

Even "definitive" versions of the classics don't stop someone else making the same story again a few years later. So we had a film version of Pride and Prejudice after the exceptionally popular Colin Firth TV adaptation.

There's a film version of Brideshead Revisited coming soon which seems pointless considering the incredible Granada TV adaptation of the eighties simply couldn't be surpassed. Andrew Davies wrote the first draft of this but is reported now not to be still attached - although I too think it's bizarre that they're filming in Castle Howard again.

And now we read that there's a new version of A Room With A View starring Timothy Spall coming, even though the Merchant/Ivory film version practically defined a genre. And the same, very busy Andrew Davies is adapting it and he said at Hay this week that it is a tough task because there was such a good film, but his version will have an "edge" to it.

You could argue that there's always room for another Hamlet, but stage plays are ethereal and there's always a new audience who's yet to experience the play. But films and TV series live on, with DVDs and satellite channel repeats.

New directors always feel that they can bring new visions and ideas to a project and attack the story in a different way, but I always feel that it's a little like deciding that you're going to remake a classic film. When was the last time that worked? Psycho? The Ladykillers? The Texas Chainsaw Massachre?

It's just a pity that we can't either adapt some less popular works in an author's cannon - ideally ones that have never been filmed before. Or perhaps - shock horror - actually commission new stories. I'm sure that someone must have written one, but I struggle to think of a costume drama, particularly a major one, in recent times that wasn't based on an original novel. I suppose there was the recent Lilies (which I didn't see), but the list must be short.

And speaking as someone who loved Andrew Davies' original series, A Very Peculiar Practice, why doesn't he write a few more original stories.

Realising that the reason the woman in front of me exiting the tube this morning is walking so slowly is that she's checking her Blackberry the nanosecond she's back in reception.

(We'll leave aside my Facebook refresh tendencies...)

John Naughton and Sean French are baffled about how someone could put this sequence together of 100 quotes from 100 films counting down the numbers from one to one hundred.

Naughton thinks that it's un-Googleable. Well it's very Googleable. Or rather, with a good knowledge of various sites, you could do it.

It's worth noting that the sequence includes a lot of popular classics. Many of the lines are either familiar themselves, or come from films that have significant fan-bases. Those films have digital scripts and quotation collections to be found around the internet.

IMDB, for example, has a page that lets you search among quotes listed on the site. Using letters and numbers, you could quickly generate a list to get editing from.

As an example, a search for "thirty-seven" brought up Clerks, Men In Black (used in the video), Mission Impossible II, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as well as other films I've not seen.

The editing is, of course, the slow part. But I'd also make use of somewhere like Drew's Script-O-Rama which has hundreds of scripts and transcripts for more searching and for finding where in the various films, the quotes occur.

Of course, if I was doing this, I'd share the load. I'd get a film studies class on the case. 30 students each finding 3-4 clips a piece would soon give me what I wanted.

Anyway, a seemingly impossible job without an obsession like Peter Greenaway, is actually very doable. And the guy who made it, writes about it here.

Excellent news: Uri Geller is being sued (Via Bad Science).

Hey! Every other muppet is launching a range of clothing. Obviously, I have zero designing skills, but I have worn clothes nearly all my life, so I must know something right? I'm not even a singer.

Get queuing now, as my exclusive range of geek-wear will be available from 9am Monday in branches of Halfords, where you'll also be able to pick up my patented engine de-greaser anti-aging cream. Seriously - it works. Some woman on Horizon said so. And it'll all come in my limited edition, environmentally friendly black bin-liner. They're trading on eBay for literally pence.

Coming soon, my childrens' books...

The London news today is that the Mayor is giving away 100,000 free Oyster Cards to people who don't yet have one. This is an attempt by Transport for London to get some of the die hards who've not yet got one, to get around to picking one up.

Ordinarily you have to pay a "deposit" of £3 to get one. Once you have one, you're entitled to discounted public transport tickets... Well I say "discounted", when what I really mean is that, if you don't have an Oyster Card, you have to pay significantly more for your travel.

Why is this initiative limited to 100,000? Why doesn't TfL just make Oyster Cards free for everyone all the time? You see, while I might have "Big Brother" issues with the ability of the authorities to track you around London, I have an even bigger issue with the fact that the really big losers are tourists and visitors to London.

Why should a tourist have to fill out a form, put down a "deposit" for a plastic card, just to travel around London at a reasonable cost? Sure, they can get their cash back at the end of their visit, but who's really going to bother with that? And I'm not just talking about overseas visitors - I'm also talking about those who come from other parts of the UK to visit London. It's just not fair.

I do feel sorry for Kate Middleton. This is Monday's Standard billboard - "Kate Shows Strain: Picture"

And indeed, the front of that day's paper showed a picture of Kate sitting in the back of taxi or similar looking seriously pissed off. That wouldn't be anything to do with photographers following her everywhere she goes would it?

Why are Google press releases emailed so slowly? Given everything else Google does is incredibly fast and efficient, I find it odd that GooglePress mailshots take so long to appear.

At around 14:40 this afternoon, I noticed message posted on the Google Blog, via Bloglines (in other words, it was posted earlier). The message in turn pointed to a press release from Google.

Yet it took over two hours before I got a copy in my inbox of the same email - and I can honestly report that we're not experiencing any email issues here today.

I don't doubt that Google's email list is awfully long, but the press release I finally received at 16:59 is unpersonalised and in plain text. And Google does have an incredible amount of resource to call upon for a job so trivial. Their emails are administered, seemingly, via Google Groups, so there's no real excuse as I get other Google Groups emails in a very timely fashion.

On the right hand side of the Google Press page, we're told we can sign up to get "timely news from Google." Just not that timely...

Do you know the story of the "stolen" biscuits? Two strangers sitting somewhere in public - perhaps at a train station café. One dips into the other's biscuits. Insensed, the other person does the terribly British thing of not saying anything but pointedly helping themselves to "their" biscuits. This continues for several minutes until the packet is finished. Only then does one of the two realise that they'd not actually opened their own packet.

That probably makes no sense. Instead, for a better telling, read Douglas Adams' So Long, And Thanks For All the Fish for a good variant of it. I think that this is where I first came across the story, but in fact it's something of an urban myth.

I mention all this because every few months or so, I like to see what Chloé Micout's been up to. She's a French short film-maker, who I first came across a couple of years ago. One of her more recent films is based around this very tale. It's only a minute long, so go and see it on her site (Go to films, and select Les petits sablés - I can't link directly because it's all embedded in evil Flash. But it does also seem to be available on YouTube.

He's not a massive fan (NSFW language):

Via Waxy links.

I don't quite know why, but I'm really pleased that the House of Lords chucked out Tessa Jowell's super-casino last night.

In the meantime, am I the only person who thinks that the new Ministry of Justice sounds like a cross between something you'd find in 1984 and Judge Dredd?

I found myself not watching a great deal of the woeful Andorra v England (it may have ended 3-0 to England, but it was 0-0 at halftime), and more of Northern Ireland v Sweden last night, with a touch of Italy v Scotland. But by the times the second halves were underway, I wound up watching more of The Apprentice than anything. I know that it's all in the edit, but these people really don't come anywhere near being "16 of Britain's brightest business prospects."

Rumour has it that they're not going to concentrate quite so much on sales tasks this series, since effectively it can just boil down to who can sell the best to consumers. Andy was voted off, but we were given plenty of opportunity to dislike both Tre and Jadine. Tre's probably not bad, but he's a touch arrogant (actually - they all are) and seems to get into hostilities a bit too easily. Meanwhile Jadine's just mad. Thirty-eight minutes into the programme last night, the follwing happened (in the words of Anna Pickard's minute by minute Media Guardian blog with Anna Pickard):

9.38: Oh for the Love of GOD! I've experienced Television hell, please kill me now. Hang on.

I don't know if that's a firing offence, but SURELY there's some kind of health and safety proceedure being breached there.

It was hideous. I turned back to the football unable to watch.

Finally - there's 24. Isn't it absolutely abysmal this year? They're just retreading the same ground over and over again. The episode I saw this week even ended up with exactly the same storyline that was used two or three years ago (I forget which, and quite honestly, can't even be bothered to look it up). I can "buy" unlikely and so-on, but it's just sheer tiredness of the writing. They need to hire new writers pronto, and next year they should lose any presidential aspect to the storyline - much as I despise politicians, they can't all be corrupt. CTU leaks like a sieve, and if I hear one more character use the hackneyed phrase "within the hour" I'll... I'll... well... I don't know what I'll do.

The series has descended into a hunt for one man after another, the next always having some hidden ultimate superior, and so the hunt continues. The writers completely ignore things that happened in previous episodes, and they've completely forgone any pretence at all of how long it takes to travel from a to b around the Los Angeles area.

The real problem is that the terrorists seem to be moving and acting quickly for no discernable reason at all. The bad guy still has a couple of nukes with Jack Bauer et al thwarting him for the most part so far. In reality, he'd lie low for several weeks/months and regroup. What's the rush? He's got a suitcase nuke and can use it anytime he likes!

24 has always been an essentially fun action series not to be taken too seriously. But you have to believe in the story and characters to some degree for it to work. Frankly, I really don't care any longer.

I'm sitting opposite a man.

He's probably in his early forties, and he's one of those commuters who carries no briefcase; no rucksuck; no bag of any kind. He doesn't read a book, or a free evening newspaper. He just toys with his mobile, sending and reading text messages.

His suit screams cheap, and his tie reminds me of something I wore at school rather than something I'd choose to wear.

On the lapel of his suit he wears an oval metal badge. In the middle is a star. Around the edge it reads "Superstar Performer 2006-7."

I silently thank any listening deities that I don't have to work in a job where they hand out badges like that to "Superstar Performers." There's certainly nothing wrong in praising high-achievers and handing out merit awards. My employer hands out "Hero Awards" and "Sales Person of the Month" trophies. Winners accept the acclaim of their co-workers. It's deserved and appreciated.

But really! Having to wear it on a badge, on your commute home?

The other day, before my screening of Blades of Glory, we also saw the trailer to the forthcoming Stardust - based on the Neil Gaiman novel (Admission: I've not read this book... yet). I hadn't quite realised that this was something of an exclusive, but can say here and now that it looks stunning. I don't know if it was a British trailer, but there was a significant amount of Ricky Gervais in it, whereas I didn't think his part was all that big.

Anyway, it may be that we have to wait until October for the film to be released here, but it looks like it'll be very much worth seeing.

Or Mother's Day as some would have it!