TV, movies, music, that kind of thing
Have I mentioned how much I like The West Wing? It’s coming back onto Australian TV in a fortnight, at the rather more acceptable hour of 9:30 Thursdays on the ABC, starting with season 4. The problem is I’m only two-thirds of the way through season 2 in the DVDs my sister lent me. Which ... [More]
At the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan, they’ve built a copy of Flinders Street Station from ice: (via Rod) The Grauniad have done a London tube map of 20th century music. Full version here
“Classic” Doctor Who repeats finish tonight on the ABC, after running almost every episode still in existence over the past 2 1/2 years. It’s funny to think they started just before the new series was announced. It was also a few months after I had introduced my kids to the show (with DVDs and old ... [More]
I’ve done a lot of TV interviews on location, but never in a studio, until today. Community TV station Channel 31 did an interview for tonight’s “C News Focus” story on public transport. The interviewer guy asked a couple of curly questions, so hopefully I acquitted myself well. It airs at 10:15pm. A few observations: ... [More]
If you want to see the Margaret Preston exhibit at the Ian Potter Centre/National Gallery of Victoria, you’ve got until Sunday. Marita and I went on Australia Day — a good escape from the heat. Good stuff, a reminder that Preston didn’t just do floral illustrations (though they were certainly prominent) but also dabbled in ... [More]
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — Good stuff. I’m not sure if I agree with the other reviews saying it’s the best HP movie ever, but I really enjoyed it. It’s not really worthy of the M15+ rating the OFLC gave it. Had to chuckle at the (probably unintentional) Doctor Who references: the ... [More]
A little project originally I started about two years ago — to move my entire online diary (which goes back to 1994) into WordPress — has finally been completed. I’ll spare you the boredom of the details of trying to write programs to convert the old handwritten HTML into something I could import, and instead ... [More]
Happy Gravy Day everyone. May you and yours all be together for Christmas.
Dan Brown: Angels and Demons. (Disclaimer: I was forced to read this.) The good: after a plodding start, the plot did get interesting, and exciting enough that I wanted to keep reading and find out what happened. Nice twist at the end. The bad: Wooden, two-dimensional characters. Romantic scenes written like Mills and Boon. Spelling ... [More]
Astonishing literary discovery of the week: in the US version of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day it referred to Australia, not Timbuktu.
The hot rumour is the ABC has bought The West Wing off Channel 9, who couldn’t have programmed it in a worse manner if they tried. I’ve been watching DVDs of the series courtesy of my sister. And let me tell you, it’s rivetting. This is political drama at its best. (Mind you, I’ve heard ... [More]
Andrew asks what blog posts have been later regretted. I’m struggling to remember, but I think there have been one or two over the years that I’ve edited, deleted, or not quite posted, after realising how cranky or stupid I sounded. Maybe I’ll regret this post. For I have a deep dark secret. I’m reading ... [More]