Month: January 2003

  • Wynton Marsalis in the Snow

    A very long day has just about ended. Starting with a five o’clock taxi for RAJAR (down basically – thanks for asking). Later on, the weather took a turn for the worse, and by the time it came to the highlight of my day, a Barbican concert given by the aforementioned and the Lincoln Center…

  • Protest Blocked from Hyde Park

    Now this really isn’t clever. The planned march in London in February 15, against war in Iraq, has been told that it can’t end in Hyde Park where a rally was planned. Upwards of 500,000 are expected, and so obviously it will need to end somewhere. The reason given is that the park is not…

  • Pepys Diary

    A fantastic new website is putting Pepys Diary on the net in the form of a blog, posting it on a day by day basis. The really clever part of this proposition (which might take ten years to complete at a day by day rate) is that readers can annotate the entries themselves to help…

  • Five is the new Channel 4

    Last night Five had the start of the new series of CSI and later Boomtown. The former is tried and tested, and very interesting, with its Miami spinoff this weekend. From the first episode of the latter, I couldn’t say. The cast is very strong, but whether the complex narative structure can be kept up…

  • World Cup Cricket in Zimbabwe

    Yesterday the players finally came out and told the ECB that they didn’t want to play their opening match in Zimbabwe. They spoke under the aegis of The Professional Cricketers Association. It really is dreadful that it came to this. An excellent couple of articles in today’s Guardian explain why the ECB, and the ICC…

  • Telewest Result

    It seems that I might have had a result. Telewest Digital have recently had an annoying habit of shutting down BBC4 at 2.15 every night, regardless of whether programming had finished. This is particularly frustrating if you’re recording one of their regular late night repeats. Anyway, today I got a positive response from the BBC…

  • The Lost Prince Conclusion

    BBC1 showed the second and final part of The Lost Prince last night and I’ve got to admit that I haven’t enjoyed a piece of historical drama so much for a long time. Superb.

  • Barcelona

    Wow. Barcelona are unbeaten in the Champions League this season, with a record 10 matches unbeaten, yet their poor league form means that they’ve sacked their manager Louis van Gaal. Some jobs are simply impossible.

  • The Castle

    We watched this 1997 Aussie film to celebrate Australia Day. I’ve seen a bit of it before, but it’s a good example of what the Australians can do so well. They have character actors par excellence, and aren’t afraid to take the piss out of one another. OK, so the ending is a tad melodramatic,…

  • Robert Fisk

    Thank goodness that at political times like these we have journalists such as Robert Fisk to provide a counter-argument. Today in The Independent he has an article pouring scorn on the feeble parallels that are being made between Saddam Hussein and Hitler. As if this war is nothing to do with oil? Yeah, right. Yesterday,…

  • MP Reply

    I got a bog-standard reply from my MP this morning regarding the Stand campaign against ID cards. Still at least it got registered, so power to the people. There also seems to be some indication that there might be a little backing down on the part of the Home Office, with Lord Falconer not quite…

  • Monkey

    Channel 4 have just started re-showing this – probably the first time it’s been on terrestrial television since it first aired in the early 80’s. Monkey magic, Monkey magic…