The man who proposed outside the beautiful 5th Avenue Apple store reveals how to use your Mac to get married.

How Do You Want Me is finally going to be available on DVD, and you owe it to yourself to get a copy. This hugely under-rated sitcom from the late 90s was shot on film, without a laughter track, and had a superb cast led by Dylan Moran (from Black Books, which it’s better than), Charlotte Coleman (from Four Weddings and a Funeral, which it’s better than), Emma Chambers (from The Vicar of Dibley, which of course it is far better than), Mark Heap (from everything), Frank Findlay, and the wonderful Clive Merrison (from The History Boys). Note that all the above inferiour shows are available on DVD and have been for some time whilst I’ve been waiting, frequently checking the message boards for any news of this DVD release.

There is an excitement factor for new releases of DVDs. Obviously there are some brilliant releases (Blackadder, Jeeves and Wooster) but they’ve been widely available and have been for ages. There are others, however, that I’ve been waiting for since the medium was invented, and it’s especially exciting when they come along. The formula for this, I’ve decided, should be

DVD Excitement Factor = Excellence / Availability

Thus shows like How Do You Want Me?, Between the Lines and A Bit of Fry & Laurie score huge!

…a beginner’s guide.

There’s a story my grandfather told me. It’s almost certainly apolcryphal, but I can’t remember the specifics anymore anyway, so what the hell. It concerned the writer of a popular weekly adventure comic strip. Each strip ended on a cliffhanger, and the strip ran continuously, so when the writer left for a holiday, leaving the hero at the bottom of an aligator pit surrounded by cannibal savages his deputy found himself racking his brains over how to extricate him from the perilous situation.

After puzzling for ages, trying to imaging what his boss had had in mind, he ends up having to get in contact and admit, sheepishly, he can’t see how to get out of it. “It’s easy” he’s told. The hero “jumps out of the pit in one mighty bound and defeats the cannibals”. So there you go.

The Age of Steel

You may have guessed from this that I’ve just watched The Age of Steel.

Just as well we had the ending of the “Mickey arc” to keep things interesting. A great conclusion to a great character and an arc that has been almost flawlessly written across two seasons (only School Reunion sticks out, in that he hardly seems to be the post World War Three, post Parting of the Ways Mickey).

There’s been a lot of speculation about where the writers have borrowed the ideas for this reinvention of the Cybermen from. Clearly, they’ve used the history of the Cybermen within Doctor Who, without needing to being bound by it in the parallel unitverse. And with the alternate reality, and the Twelve Monkeys style resistance fighters, a lot of sci-fi has been here before.

With respect to the plot, several people have posted on forums about the similarity to the The Cybernauts from the fourth season of the Avengers. Certainly, with a wheelchair bound villain hell bent on using cybernetics to prolong life and increase productivity there’s an obvious parallel, but this needn’t have been directly plagiarised, since I’ve always been convinced the original Cybermen owed a lot to their predecessors on the Avengers.

The thing I haven’t seen noted anywhere is the free borrowing that has to have occured from A View to a Kill. The zepplins could just be coincidence, but together with the C for Cybus logo this seems unlikely. I particularly remember the Z for Zorrin logo that is so similar, because I regularly visited Mainstrike Mine where it remained painted on the sides of the wagons throughout 1984 (in reality this was Amberley Chalk Pits in East Sussex, not Silicon Valley California). And as a clincher you have the final struggle hanging from the airship (although perhaps this was more like The Living Daylights).

And it surely can’t be coincidence that McKellen’s Richard III not only used Battersea Power station, but also had the villian fall into its flaming remains? Or am I getting carried away here? Nurse!

…yes, you certainly will, especially if you’re supposed to be recording The Age of Steel for the kids, and you allow your conviction that Doctor Who always starts at 7.15 to cause you to record only the last five minutes, because

it starts at 6.35pm

tomorrow. A little reminder, just in case.

Meanwhile, you can point your browsers here through to the parallel universe.

Other sites from the other Earth include….
http://www.internationalelectromatics.co.uk
http://www.cybusfitness.co.uk
http://www.cybusindustries.net
http://www.henriksonline.co.uk

Sorry readers, for the 50 or so spam trackbacks that have appeared tonight. The Little Storping police force are looking into how to make our village safer… All suggestions welcome.

Update: Trying Trackback Validator. If it works, you know who to thank.

Inevitable as it was, I’m a bit surprised at how fast the first article has arrived on Windows on the Macbook.

Sad bad news for Mac users who believe in open source. Apple have closed down OS X, or at least the Intel version, “for fear of pirates”.

This is not good for the consumer (okay, most of us don’t hack up our own kernels, but why shouldn’t we?) and it doesn’t say good things about Apple’s shaky relationship with open source.

A piano has been “discovered” on top of Ben Nevis. The Guardian is reporting it’s a mystery how it got there over 20 years ago. They link to the John Muir Trust press release stating it’s a mystery how it got there.

They obviously didn’t Google “Ben Nevis Piano” or they’d have found the John Muir Trust press release from 2000 stating a piano had been pushed up the mountain. Or indeed the claim on moutainwalks.co.uk that it was Kenneth Campbell of Ardgay, Ross-shire that did it, to raise money for charity.

It’s an amazing what the internet as a medium can do for journalism. But it doesn’t seem to be being used for research.

The pictures are breathtaking though.

The new MacBook, completing Apple’s line up of Intel laptops, is everything I hoped (except lighter and cheaper).

But in addition:

• audio in and out BOTH optical AND digital!!!
• glossy screen (!?!)
• they’re thin thin thin! (1″)

That’s got to be worth a little extra money and a little extra weight.

Strangely, although it comes in black, it’s not an option but a function of which specification you choose. This is bad, I though - I want a white high-end version. But then I found I could configure the white mid-range model to match the black model’s spec. And this seems to be £90 cheaper than getting the black one…

Still, must go. Got to see my bank manager!

When BBC News 24 interviewed a London Cabbie instead of his intended fare, he found himself in front of the cameras being questioned about the Apple vs. Apple verdict, and rather than spoiling everything, played along. The Daily Mail, ever the BBC’s best friend, has made the video available.