Emily Perry has died at the age of 100. I remember her Madge Allsop with fondness.
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RIP, Madge
2 responses to “RIP, Madge”
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I kid you not, Geoff, as I leave for work every morning, I ask myself in an Aussie falsetto, "Where’s your badge, Madge?" She could steal the scene by just sitting there. Wonderful.
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Yep, Edna and Madge left a lasting impression on a lot of us…
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Not A Good Idea
My heart goes out to the shade of Sir Adrian Boult. His earthly remains must surely be spinning in his grave over this LP cover. Yes, it was the 1970s, but still – did no-one register that this was not quite the best image to use to advertise Gustav Holst’s The Planets? And I can’t help feeling that the comment by Extracrispy points out something further that is troubling in the image.
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David Shenton
This seems like a blast from the past – I’ve just been told that David Shenton is still producing his comics. And here he is! I remember his work from years ago in the old Gay News. Good to see that he’s still around. Here’s a typical example. His amateur artist has obviously never met Detective Inspector Twist (a private reference for those who knew me back in the 1970s)Leave a comment
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There’s Nowt So Queer As Folk…
And here’s the next installment of an occasional series. This time, a tip of the hat goes to Jim Downey for drawing our attention to people who trepan for fun. Warning, if you follow his links to the diary entries, you’ll get the full works – amateur operating theatres, blood, and clear contenders for the Darwin Awards.Leave a comment
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Service Change
I’ve just noticed that Microsoft has introduced a change to Windows Live Spaces. For some reason best known to themselves, they’ve bolded the fonts used on Custom Lists, and the descriptions of List entries are no longer displayed when the list is displayed in narrow layout columns.This non-displaying of descriptions has transformed some of my lists into total incomprehensibility. For example, in my "Wines I Have Known" list, I used the description field in the entries to display a rating. Now, these ratings no longer show up on the main page – all you see is a simple list of links to the wine producers. Not very useful.Needless to say, Microsoft made this change without telling anyone. The Spaces product team even have a Windows Live Spaces blog – The Space Craft. I would have thought that they could have used it to announce changes like this; but no, they are wittering on about The Oscars. As if I could give a toss… I’m in full GOM mode today.Update: Well, as of the 27th March 2008, I’m pleased to see that Microsoft has responded and rolled back some of the changes. In particular, my wine list now works as I intended. Good stuff.Leave a comment
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Lunar Eclipse
Well, I attempted to see the lunar eclipse last night. There was just this slight problem of there being 100% cloud cover and mist. So I saw nothing. Bugger.Leave a comment
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Screams in the Night
Two nights ago, we both woke up in the middle of the night on hearing a sound. It was made by something that was just outside of the bedroom window. Neither of us had ever heard anything like it. It was so strange that neither of us wanted to get out of bed and investigate the owner of the sound.Thanks to Bill Oddie’s Wild Side, I’ve now found out what was screaming outside of our bedroom. It was a hedgehog. It was very angry or distressed about something. Here’s what it sounds like.2 responses to “Screams in the Night”
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Hi, I had no idea that they made that noise…Kaz x
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Hi, Kaz. No, neither did we, until I saw the item on the noises that animals make on the Bill Oddie programme. I have to say, that when we heard it in the middle of the night, it was somewhat scary…
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Dissecting Dawkins’ Fleas
Over the past year or so, a new niche in the book market has appeared: books written by authors who attempt a riposte of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. They have become known as Dawkins’ Fleas (an allusion to a statement made by the poet W. B. Yeats about his imitators).Paula Kirby has taken on the sterling task of reviewing four of these books in great detail. She has done a magnificent job. Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables comes to mind.2 responses to “Dissecting Dawkins’ Fleas”
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Please buy and trash my book!
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For my publisher…I make barely a pittance off it
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Who Are The Fire Starters?
David Thompson asks this question over at his blog. A valid point, I feel. It would appear that some folks think that Mo should not be castigated for wanting to find his cigarette lighter. But hang on, who is starting these fires?Leave a comment
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Despairing
Damian Thompson is in a somewhat despairing mood at the moment. Can’t say I blame him.Leave a comment
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Poor Max
Max Gogarty is 19. Just about to start a gap year, and he’s off to India to discover himself. He’s also landed a job blogging about it in The Guardian. Fun, huh? Let Mr. Eugenides take up the story. Poor Max. I feel a smidgen of sympathy for him. Only a smidgen, though.Leave a comment
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Cretin
When I saw and heard President Bush justifying the use of torture and citing the families of the London 7/7 bombings as a rationale, I wondered how long it would be before Rachel responded. As I expected, she is not impressed. Bush is beyond contempt.Leave a comment
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Watch the Skies
Just a heads up to say that this week sees a lunar eclipse on Wednesday night. I’m hoping that the sky will be clear enough to see it. I’m also reading up on what I need to know in order to try and photograph it.Leave a comment
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A Vignette
It’s almost 14 years to the day since Derek Jarman died. His friend Howard Sooley pens a touching vignette of Jarman and his garden at Prospect Cottage in today’s Observer. Worth reading.Leave a comment
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Geek Toys
I’ve been somewhat distracted of late and neglecting my blogging. Nothing untoward. Part of it has been because of building work here at the farmhouse, part of it is because the garden is waking up unseasonably early from its winter sleep. But part of it is because I have acquired a new toy.
I’ve been longing to get a Tablet PC for some time now. Ever since I had the chance to play with the first Tablet PC that HP brought to the market back in 2003. Needless to say, that first model had limitations, but now with the latest generation of models I feel we are at the point where it’s worth my investing in a tablet for myself.
I’ve gone for the latest HP Tablet for the consumer market: the HP TX2000. This entry is being blogged on it using the handwriting recognition capabilities of windows Vista – which I have to say are quite scarily impressive, even with my appalling handwriting.
Thanks to its wireless capabilities I can now use the Tablet in the house and garden, and even listen to music that is being streamed from my music collection held on my Windows Home Server. At the moment I’m being serenaded by Cecilia Bartoli giving her all to Vivaldi. Bliss.
One response to “Geek Toys”
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[…] date, I’ve had an HP TX2000 convertible, a Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2, and currently I have a Lenovo ThinkPad 10 and a Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro […]
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Theatrical Experiences
Alastair Appleton writes of his visit to see the National Theatre’s production of the hour we knew nothing of each other. He thought it was wonderful, and his enthusiasm makes me sad that I no longer live in London with those cultural experiences just outside my door. But only for a moment. I can now take a different kind of pleasure from a walk in the countryside. It’s just outside my door.Leave a comment
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The Apocalypse Bus Tour
The Beeb’s been showing a series of quirky documentaries, each highlighting a slightly off-beat look at people: the Wonderland series. They’ve all been rather good, but last night’s episode: The End of the World Bus Tour was a particularly fine example. The documentary crew joined a group of nearly 50 Christian fundamentalists who were touring the Holy Land in a coach, clearly relishing the forthcoming apocalypse, and the fact that they would be whisked off to heaven by the Rapture. There’s a good review of the programme here.The filmmakers did not sneer at these deluded folk, but let them speak for themselves. And indeed, it was easy to feel compassion for some of them, who had clearly been damaged by life’s vicissitudes, and who had turned to a simple faith to bear them up. Not all of them though. I won’t readily forget the dead-eyed Hannah, a teenage student who seemed to take some pleasure in avowing to the film director that "we are all born evil", and that while she would be going to heaven, "you will burn in hell for all eternity". Hannah is apparently taking a number of courses of study, including photography, textile design and, astoundingly, critical thinking. The irony is, I feel sure, totally lost on her.3 responses to “The Apocalypse Bus Tour”
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Hi Geoff,
Saw this one too. It left me with a similar sort of impression I got from a documentary re the Westboro Baptist Church by Louis Theroux: you could even imagine liking some of these people on a personal level despite their crackpot ideas.
Cheers,
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Hi Jim, yes, I saw the Theroux programme as well. While some of the younger tribe might be approachable, Shirley scared the shirt out of me. Not someone who I ever could imagine warming to in the slightest degree.
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I second that.
Cheers,
Jim
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Below The Horizon
I’ve complained about the falling standards of Horizon before. It appears that what was once the Beeb’s proud flagship of its science reporting has in recent years been dumbed down to a level more suited to the audience of the Teletubbies, if that wasn’t an insult to babies everywhere. I did entertain some faint hopes that the programme seemed to have improved somewhat in the latest series. The programme fronted by physicist Dr. Brian Cox was interesting and thought-provoking. Probably because it let him do the talking.So I admit I had been lulled into a false sense of security when I started watching last night’s Horizon: How To Make Better Decisions. It began with the voiceover smugly stating: "You thought that deciding to watch this programme was a rational, logical decision made with free will" … "Congratulations about watching this programme, it might be the best decision you’ve ever made." On hearing this, my heart sank. This sounded like an ominous warning that the programme would prove to be a clunker. And so it came to pass; we were introduced to some irritating twit called Garth Sundem who fills pages with abstruse mathematical formulae in an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes about the decision-making process. I lasted about five minutes before I took a rational, logical decision of my own free will to turn the channel to something else. From Thomas Sutcliffe’s review of the programme in today’s Independent, I’d say that was the best decision I made last night. Tellingly, Sutcliffe ends his review with the damning observation that:There was a time when you couldn’t check up on Horizon’s contributors on Google in this way. There was also a time when you didn’t need to.Quite. Oh, and what did I end up watching in place of Horizon? Well it was the first episode of Phoo Action. Totally bizarre, but at least it didn’t take itself seriously, and had nice caricatures of the royal princes. It reminded me of an update for the Noughties of the old Sixties Batman TV series, and was none the worse for that.One response to “Below The Horizon”
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[…] here, my argument would not be because the programmes are reverential, but because they are bad. I’ve said in the past that Horizon has been simultaneously both dumbed-down and jazzed up by the programme makers to an […]
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Geoff Coupe's Blog 
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