Prime Suspect: Obscured by Smoke

I’ve just seen Prime Suspect for the first time – yes, I know I’m nearly 20 years late – and it’s rather good isn’t it? One thing really stood out for me almost as much as the great acting, writing, etc – just how much everyone was smoking.

If the show is in any way accurate, every man in London (not just the police) is not only a sexist alcoholic, but they also smoke like a chimney. And all of the women are merely alcoholic chain-smokers.

Every scene is seen through a blue haze, if a character isn’t smoking at the start of the scene, they are by the end of it.

It’s interesting to see what dates a television show, at the time  you might have guessed the clothes, or the cars maybe. Probably not the cigarettes.

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House

I love this show. The acting is great, the stories are interesting , there is much sarcasm,  and – obviously – Hugh Laurie is in it. What’s not to love? (and isn’t that a horrible phrase?)

A friend at work is a serious House nut (he watched it all in about two days), so I got to watch season 6 less than a week after the DVD was released – Result!

Of course the sooner I finish the box set, the sooner I need to find something else to watch…

Flu gone. I hope.

Swine Flu gone?

It seems my Swine Flu has more or less passed, so I’ll be back at work tomorrow. This is a relief, as I was going mad from boredom. It’s all very well telling people to stay at home to avoid passing the virus around, but you very quickly run of things to do.

I have plenty of books to read, I just didn’t feel like reading. I watch a couple of DVDs, surfed the web a little, but really I was very bored and felt like crap, which is not a great combination. I might even celebrate with a bottle of beer – I’ve not had any alcohol for about 9 days.

It’s not actually progress, is it?

Are electronic books just another example of making something more complicated just for the sake of it? Yes I know that’s sort of stating the obvious, and it’s not the sort of the thing the entertainment industy juggernaut wants to hear, but then they don’t care do they; it’s going to happen.

It’s like DVD. DVDs are OK, the picture’s pretty sharp compared to VHS, and the sound is a hell of a lot better. The only problem with them is that they’re not selling quite as much as they used to, we’ve replaced our knackered old video collection, and apart from the occasional boxset of The Wire and Gavin and Stacey, we’ve finished with our movies collection. So now they have convinced everyone that they need HD or Blu-Ray or whatever, so everyone needs to go out and buy everything all over again. Well they can fuck off, I’m not buying into any different formats – am I made of money?

Anyway, they reckon the same thing is going to happen to books and newspapers. It’s all very impressive in a techno way, if you’re a robot. But not if you’re human, and paper is a human sort of thing, where a TFT screen isn’t.

Why do we have replace everything with plastic and metal, and then pretend it’s progress? I’m reminded of the story of the NASA space programme, when they realised that pens weren’t going to work in low-gravity. They spent tens of millions of dollars on research to come up with a pen that would work for astronauts. What did the Russian comsonauts do? They used pencils.

Don’t get me started on our radio being switched over to digital whether we want to or not, else i shall get quite irate.

It’s only money

Whitecap: It looks more dramatic on screen, honestly

You can buy stuff with only about 3 clicks now, if you include ‘are you sure you want to buy this?‘ confirmation buttons, and it is so easy to spend stupid money – I almost bought a load of blank mini-CDRs, for no really good reason, it was a close thing. The only thing that stopped me was the courier delivery – there’s never anyone in to sign for it.

On the plus side, I now have 20 DVDs of Battlestar Galactica to watch – hooray! I also have 2 CDs on the Earth Monkey label which come on mini-CDs in a limited edition (that seems to be the latest thing with micro-labels, might write something about that) and with free limited edition badges.

Yesterday I spent about £20 on a fancy screensaver/music visualiser, for no better reason that I always wanted a really good one and this seems to fit the bill. It’s only money, after all.