“Yeah? Well let’s dig her up and find out, shall we?”
An irate christian wags a finger at Jonathan Pope: “If Mary Whitehouse were still alive, she’d make mincemeat of you”.
Yes, the best team bonding exercise for the production team of Echo Beach is a fistfight with the ecclesiastical membership of a christian viewers association, in last night’s best-so-far episode of Moving Wallpaper, and that’s saying something. This is no longer just about “how did something this good get made by ITV?”, the show’s a classic by any standard.
After a cross-channel train journey I can’t resist switching into nerd mode. Whilst in France I saw an article in a paper about the next generation TGV, called the AGV for Automotrice Grande Vitesse. Alas I’m not up to google.fr-ing it so I’ll have to try and dredge the facts from memory.
I know these are two-a-penny, but… A well respected journalist of many years’ standing wrote last week in the Guardian that “as we all know, many Wikipedia entries are just rubbish”. I won’t dispute this (though “as we all know” is lazy). What tickles me is the implication that whilst it is “grappling with an underlying and often inflammatory problem…that of quality control” papers like the Guardian have got this sorted, and would never allow a journalist’s ignorant assertion that “the best known Linux application is Wikipedia” to go to print.
Oops.
I didn’t think Torchwood would ever be really good without a radical overhaul. Turns out I was wrong. Here’s why Reset (Torchwood with Martha) works.
Let’s hope Torchwood with Martha can stay this good.
(more…)
In the last year rows of electronic bike racks have sprung up around Paris where you can use your Oyster like Navigo card to hire bicycles.
Judging by the numbers to be seen on the streets the scheme is extremely successful, though the logistics of it leave you wondering quite how much must be going on behind the scenes (were there truck loads of bikes being carted around while we slept?). You often see bike racks completely empty, which might be annoying enough if you’re looking to take to the wheels, but not nearly as annoying as finding a full bike rack at your destination and having to scrabble around to find somewhere to return your “velo” before the ramped charges start to mount up.
We sat on a cafe on a slope and counted one go up as a dozen went down. There have to be trucks migrating bikes back to the upper racks…
The bikes have lights for use at night that I’m guessing charge up when the bike is parked on the rack (sometimes you see the rack light red rather than green, presumably meaning it’s not ready to go out because the battery’s flat).
It’s a great system. London could definitely use something like this.
Since the Musee D’Orsay closed just as I arrived, last year, it was my first port of call this time.
I can never decide whether the paintings on the 5th floor or the building itself is most awesome. Bankside is nothing to this.
Through the clock you can see across to Montmartre (I didn’t have my D50, so I couldn’t capture that in the picture).
Then, after chocolat in the Jardin de Tuileries, walking back to the flat through the Louvre.
And next day, before climbing up Montmartre (having decided to visit what I’d seen through the clock), just outside Abbesse Metro station (lots of steps, but not in the Covent Garden league): the Eric Fournier Quartet.
Terrific, I picked up a CD so I can continue to enjoy the swinging sounds of Paris.
Another brief enjoyable visit to Paris at the weekend provided the opportunity to check out St Pancras International, which opened on 14th November (and I’ve only just got there). My first Eurostar trip I came not knowing what to expect and was impressed by Waterloo. The Guardian has been quite gushing and I came to St Pancras with high expectations, but with trepidation too. The truth is, I liked it the way it was, and the way it is now just doesn’t do it for me.
It is impressive. It’s a building that can’t fail to be. The departures occupy most of the undercroft where beer barrels were once stored, and part of the concourse has been cut away to feed light, and escalators, into a sunken mall. Meanwhile, the high glass and chrome barriers (dividing England from the “international” side) and the ridiculously long champagne bar add to the feeling of fussiness. The main entrance has been moved down a level creating dead space where you used to come in and the old booking office, the terrific, oak paneled booking office, is full of scaffolding and building work.
Like I say, I liked it the way it was, the old St Pancras which felt like a huge empty cathedral (there were rarely any trains or passengers there, it seemed). It dwarfed the HST units, sitting silently at the platforms. What normally appeared to be a clouds of diesel fumes disappeared as tiny wisps long before they reached the high vaulted ceiling.
St Pancras played the role of Victoria station in one of my favorite films, Richard III. It also plays a dual role: as itself, and the halls of Valhalla, in Douglas Adam’s superb The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul:
“The cold moonlight draped itself through the long ranges of glass panels that extended the length of St Pancras station roof. It fell on empty rails and illuminated them. It fell on the train departures board, it fell on the sign which explained that today was a Blue Saver Day, and illuminated them both… There was no doubt, he felt, that a space this size would make a good feasting hall for gods and dead heroes, and that the empty Midland Grand Hotel would be almost worth moving the whole shebang from Norway for.”
I’ve been waiting patiently (well, almost patiently) for Amazon to launch UK downloads without DRM. Given that they’ve done it in the US and got all the major labels on board, it looks like they’re going to get there ahead of iTunes (whose interface I like, but Amazon’s better on DRM and price). But maybe it won’t be Amazon who get there first…
play.com is now offering EMI downloads at 65-70p per track (generally undercutting 7 digital which also offers the EMI tracks) and, according to Guardian Technology expect the other three labels to join within the year, which may give them the edge on iTunes (and Amazon haven’t even left the starting blocks).
