Things You Don’t Want To Hear
"I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen, but our departure will be slightly delayed as the police had to come on board and remove a passenger from the aircraft. So now we need to get his bags out of the hold and also complete an additional security search of the area around his seat. We'll be on our way as soon as we're happy we're secure."
Cue ten hours of slightly nervous flying for several hundred people.
Integrity? What’s That?
The radio news yesterday covered the PM's visit to China, noting that his intention is to capitalise on objections to strengthened trade links in the rest of Europe and the US by encouraging the Chinese to invest heavily in the UK. That's right, we're capitalising on other countries' objections to trade with an oppressive, repressive regime, that has systematically flattened any attempt to organise oppostion since the Tiannenmen Square riots in 1989 by saying "we don't care about your human rights record as long as you give us your money".
I'm not the kind of person who ever feels sufficiently invested in a national identity to indulge in actual patriotism, but just at the moment I do find myself experiencing an unexpected surge of feeling about our national position.
It's shame.
Another Morning, Another Drive
So some poor bugger was having a driving lesson at 6.30am.
Several other poor buggers trying to get to work were stuck behind them doing 14mph (seriously). I'm quite certain that driving too slowly used to be something you could fail a driving test for. I was *shouting* at the learner car in frustration.
Honestly - I've really and truly turned into Victor Meldrew.
Bad Code
Driving into work this morning I found myself interminably behind a van whose owners were advertising for new recruits. No, I didn't notice it because I was particularly tempted, but because I couldn't believe the ludicrous URL they were using as part of the ad; www.kelly.co.uk/form.php
How unintuitive and, except to someone who works with this stuff all day every day like me, how unmemorable. And what I can't work out is how it could be beyond the wit of someone able to implement a PHP script to create an easy to remember subdirectory like /recruit and stick the form on its index page.
Or have I finally crossed over into some unbelieveably anal worldview based entirely on my own idea of what makes sense? Have I, in fact, become a kind of web-literate Victor Meldrew?
Air
So all the rumours are true, and Apple have announced the MacBook Air at Macworld.
Pity trying to view the ad from the Apple website crashes both browsers I have installed on my machine.
Isn’t It Ironic
This is the first year I'd have been in the US for the Golden Globes since 2000, so I was looking forward to watching them.
Then the Writers' Strike hit, and the solidarity of the actors meant that the show proper was replaced with a news conference.
Then I've ended up at no notice coming back to the UK, so I'd have missed it anyway.
Anyway, judging by the coverage, a lot of it would have been very predictable anyway. I haven't seen Atonement, but I was in the US for its opening there late last year, and the gushing made its win a bit of an easy bet.
Isn’t It Bionic
Watched the pilot of the Bionic Woman remake on a plane on Friday night. Not quite the train wreck some of the coverage might have led me to expect, but no classic either. Katee Sackhoff from Battlestar Galactica made a very good job of chewing the scenery as the nominal bad guy, and some of the effects were quite well done. But the source of the bionics seem to be some nanite-analogue called 'anthrocites' (I'm assuming the spelling). Which made it sound like Michelle Ryan was being healed by having coal injected into her.
Clean And Shiny
So the cleaner's been in today.
Look, it's a service provided as part of the package in this apartment I'm renting, I'm not really swanking or anything. But this was the first of her fortnightly visits, and this morning I found myself doing that thing that people always talk about, of cleaning up before the cleaner comes. Bear in mind that I've been there a week, and have hardly turned it into a tip, so 'cleaning up' amounted to taking some stuff off the table, straightening my shoes, and putting last night's dishes in the sink, but still, I felt compelled to do it.
Does that go away? Six weeks from now will I leave in the morning with socks on the bedroom floor and an unfinshed mug of tea on the table?
Or worse?????
The Joy Of Overreaction
So I won't go into the sorry detail, but Marvel Comics, who I've mentioned occasionally before in these pages, have just perpetrated an almighty clusterfuck in the pages of the Spider-Man comics. Long story short, they've pulled a stunt that effectively wipes out a couple of decades of continuity. They say it doesn't, but realistically, that's what's happened. And the way they've done it is incredibly messy, with lots of uncertainty about whether particular events in the past stories actually 'happened' or didn't. And one thing yer comic fan is not going to be happy about is anything that undermines continuity.
But really; it's not that important. Yet in the last 24 hours I've seen YouTube footage of people tearing up their copies of the comic in which it happened, setting fire to it (mmm, book burning), and (and I kid you not) using its pages to wipe their arses.
Yes, I'm a comic fan. Yes, I'm happy to state it quite openly and without shame. But I'm not one of those...
More Electin’
So Hilary has won the New Hampshire Democratic primary, despite the doomsaying (for her) polls suggesting Obama had a ten or more percent lead going into the day. That's surely well outside the margin of error, suggesting that something akin to the polling around the 1992 UK General Election (massive poll lead for Labour translating into a substantial majority for the Tories). Back then it was attributed to simple lying to the pollsters - essentially, people told them they'd be voting for who they felt they ought to be voting for, and then went right ahead and voted the way they wanted to. With this and McCain making such a good showing for the Republicans, to an outside view, this certainly looks a lot more interesting an election than any we've battled through in the UK for a while.