July 30, 2006 by dafyd
For your entertainment while I think up new things to post, I present the worst movie ever made… Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space:
You need the free Macromedia Flash Player to watch this video. Download it here.
If you’re reading this in a feedreader, you’ll have to click through to the actual post. Make sure you do, though – it’s worth it!
Enjoy!
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July 30, 2006 by dafyd
16 hours gone, and I’m almost out of ideas.
The sun is shining outside again, it’s a beautiful shiny bright morning.
But I’m starting to struggle for things to post.
Any ideas? Anything you’d like me to review?
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July 30, 2006 by dafyd
I’ve just uploaded to Flickr most of the photos I took at Disneyland a fortnight ago, including this one, which shows exactly why I love the place:
The sheer scale of the place, the ability to lose yourself in the park and forget that there is another world outside… just wonderful.
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July 30, 2006 by dafyd
According to Wikipedia,
In the 1970s, TV was typically used to provide [Open University] lectures, and the image of the OU lecturer in brown ‘kipper-tie’ and flared corduroy trouser became something of a national icon. OU programmes are generally now much more innovative, using documentary styles.
That’s not what I’ve seen tonight. The brown ties are alive and well on BBC2 in the early hours of the morning.
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July 30, 2006 by dafyd
Anyone else getting annoyed by those Volkswagen Safran adverts? The ones with the kids, meeting their “new neighbours”?
The first couple of times, it was pretty entertaining. But during three hours of the West Wing on Friday night, it was shown in every ad break. That’s ten times in three programmes. Which is, possibly, just a small amount of overexposure.
For some fairly awesome VW adverts, though check out these two gems.
Update:
I must have been tired. It’s not an advert for the “Volkswagen Safran”… it’s for the Vauxhall Zafira.
You can watch it here, if you really, really want to. It seems the new controversy on teh Interwebs is whether the kiddies are saying “Oh they’re tired” or “Overtired”. The subtitles say the latter, but I reckon the former makes more sense.
Hello anyone who got here Googling “Oh they’re tired”. Looks like I’m the first-ish hit. Goody!
Category 1 | Tags: advert,blogathon,tv | Comments Off
July 30, 2006 by dafyd
…and someone’s getting tired:
He ain’t the only one.
I’ve just looked at my last few posts, and it turns out I’ve been titling them out of 28 (26/28, whatever). Stoopid.
Caffeine helps, I think… I’m powering through this! There’s some exciting Open University programming on BBC2 at the moment (complete with dodgy haircuts)… or live Big Brother coverage on C4. Great.
Category 1 | Tags: blogathon,tiredness | 1 Comment
July 29, 2006 by dafyd
Over at Blogathon HQ, they’re posting “games”, basically post suggestions for which the best wins a prize of sponsorship money. Most haven’t been terribly exciting, and I’ve had other stuff to write about, but I just spotted Game 7 – I’m too late to enter, but I thought I’d post my answer anyway:
Post about your earliest memory.
My earliest memory is of 15 September 1988. It is the day my brother was born. I don’t care about that, though – heck, I didn’t care about it then.
I was being taken – by, I assume, my dad, but I can’t really remember – in to Nottingham’s City Hospital to see my ickle brother. I had been bought a Duplo helicopter, with a pilot. We stopped at the Happy Eater on the A52 (I think), and I remember playing with the Duplo underneath the table.
But then disaster struck: the pilot fell out of the helicopter, and down a gap somewhere. He was lost. Never seen again (at least, not by me). I was gutted.
So there you have it – Dafyd’s earliest memory, aged two years, one month and six days.
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July 29, 2006 by dafyd
So, we’re nine hours into the Blogathon, and reading back over my last few posts, I can tell I’m getting tired. My prose has started to get a tad rubbish, and some sentences don’t even make sense. Bother.
I’ve not been sleeping terribly well for the last few nights, mainly because of the heat and my hayfever, so I’m coming into this at somewhat of a disadvantage. I think I’ll move downstairs in a bit to be closer to the coffee…
Anyhoo, here’s something that dropped into my RSS reader:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned all foreign words from government and cultural agencies. They are now to be replaced with clumsy made-up Persian words.
This may be new in Iran, but it’s something that’s been going on for years in France. In the late 1700s, Cardinal Richelieu established the Académie Française to monitor the French language, and especially to ensure that it didn’t become too threatened by English.
In the 1990s, the French government enacted the loi Toubon (the “Allgood Law”), which forced all media to be in French. Any English used, for example in adverts, had to be subtitled in French. The DGLF (Délégation générale à la langue française) regularly updates its list of forbidden English words, recently expanded to include computers and the internet. This does, of course, create a huge number of stupid phrases… for “webcasting”, for example, the French equivalent is “diffusion systématique sur la toile”. A DVD, of all things, is a “disque numérique polyvalent”.
I think somewhere someone has lost the plot, somewhat. Creating long French equivalents isn’t going to make people use them…
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July 29, 2006 by dafyd
My laptop just died. Drat.
I was trying to get the TV card to work and show me BBC1, but it refused. So I’ve switched to the backup computer until it restarts.
I could, I suppose, just move the laptop downstairs to where the TV already is… in fact, I think I’ll do that in a bit so I don’t disturb the sleeping peeps.
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July 29, 2006 by dafyd
Just over a quarter of the way through the Blogathon, I thought I’d pause the reviews for a sec and point to an article I just found on the BBC:
African elephants hate climbing hills because it is too costly in terms of energy, a study suggests.
They found that the animals rarely visited high ground and scientists think this is due to the energy they must expend to climb the slopes.
How is that news? I’d have thought it was bleeding obvious that elephants won’t climb hills because they get tired.
Apparently, and this is even better, they find it just as tiring to walk back down the hills. “Icy Mike”, a Kenyan elephant, lived and died 4,400 metres up Mount Kenya, because he couldn’t be bothered to walk back down. Bless. Also, who called him “Icy Mike”? Sounds more like a Mafia hitman than a nellyphant.
So…
How does an elephant get up a tree? It stands on an acorn and waits for it to grow.
How does it get down from a tree? It stands on a leaf and waits for autumn.
Seems there’s more truth to the old jokes than anyone would ever have thought!
(Gorgeous photo by Cynthia Cavalcanti on Flickr)
Category 1 | Tags: blogathon,elephants,hills | Comments Off