Whale blog lands me in deep water
My earlier blog about the whale vet on BBC News 24 has provoked an angry response from an anonymous gmailer. I cross-posted my comments on ecademy.com and soon received correspondence accusing me of being an "abject ignoramus". I've been given chapter and verse on animal post-mortems and rapped over the knuckles for daring to poke a little fun at someone who probably has a PhD - or a the very least an MSc. My unknown critic guessed (rightly) that I only have a BSc (Hons) and wouldn't be able to perform an autopsy myself.


01.21.06 @ 02:57 PM PDT [link]

Good point
I was teaching presentation skills to a group of postgraduate students at a university in London today. One of the exercises involves people getting up and spontaneously presenting an argument taken from a list of topics that I supply.

An Italian gentleman chose to speak about why London coffee shops are a rip-off. He said that it costs 2 or 3p to produce a cup of espresso and that it's sold for 50p in Italy. By his reckoning, you could spend £2.50 in London on the same thing. Add in some pastry and you wouldn't see much change out of £6.

His solution to rip-off Britain? Grab yourself a £5 return flight on easyjet to somewhere like Milan and buy an espresso for 50p.

You have to admit, he does have a point.
01.21.06 @ 01:25 PM PDT [link]

Phil's observations on life 011: everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame
As you may have heard, that whale in the Thames sadly didn't make it. It's a genuinely interesting story and one that's obviously captured the imaginations of people around the world.

I was just watching BBC News 24 and there was some bloke who was described as "marine mammal vet". He was talking about all the whale autopsies he'd performed in his time. And how there was a good chance that worms had got into the whale's brain and upset his sonar.

I'm sorry?

Whale autopsies?

Worms in the brain?

Does this guy really do this stuff for a living? And how did it happen? He was obviously particularly captivated by a half-hour lecture on sea mammals at veterinary school in the 1960s. And his fifteen minutes of fame has finally arrived.

01.21.06 @ 01:12 PM PDT [link]

Telewest Channel 890
Anyone who has Telewest Broadband will be familiar with the information channel that launches when you boot up the set-top box. There's an extremely irritating actor who visits a make-believe house of Telewest viewers and introduces them to things such as "bluetorials" (online instructions for "doing cool things, like downloading music") and the process of rebooting (turn the telly off for five seconds and turn it on again). The cod script and acting are enough to drive you insane after a single viewing, but our acting friend is on a permanent loop. He finishes after five minutes with the news that he's about to walk down the same street and visit the same house all over again. There is a pause of about half a second and then he's doing exactly that.

If the batteries in your remote are playing up, you find yourself desperately struggling to get the TV on to a proper channel before the next bit of the tired information film appears on your screen for the 890th time. But as the actor informs us, it's always good to change the batteries on your remote, say, once a year...
01.18.06 @ 04:09 PM PDT [link]

£9 p&p for a couple of ink cartridges?
That's what it cost at amazon today. Someone's having a giraffe at Phil's expense, methinks. I trawled around the web to find something cheaper, but you have to wait a week for the stuff to arrive. So you pays your money and you takes your cartridges.
01.18.06 @ 04:03 PM PDT [link]

My birthday party still raises a smile
That 35th birthday party I organised a couple of years ago (see www.35forphil.com) still brings in e-mail correspondence. Take this delightful contribution today, for instance, from Tim in California:

This is the stupidest thing ever on the internet. 3/4 of the people you invited are freaking nobodies in reality. I love humor, that is my thing, but this my friend, is not funny.


01.18.06 @ 06:03 AM PDT [link]

Another ridiculous London travel thing
You can buy a Zone 1-5 daily Travelcard during the peak, but not off-peak. You're forced to buy a 1-6 for £6.30. It's crazy. And don't even get me started on the oyster business again.
01.17.06 @ 03:55 PM PDT [link]

Another plug for Aliche
This youngster hasn't chalked up that many running miles in her training programme just yet, but she's providing a good commentary at www.bloggersnipple.co.uk. As a freelancer, I obviously can't afford to shell out masses on sponsorship, so I'm hoping that you might be able to help.
01.17.06 @ 03:50 PM PDT [link]

Life on Mars update
OK, I have to admit that I really quite like this programme. It's obviously going to be the same thing every week, but there's something particularly striking about the gritty realism of the 70s setting. The flat of our star timecop is especially grim. His black-and-white TV doesn't really have a lot to offer in the way of entertainment. The sequence last night in which he imagined that the girl from old BBC test card is in the room with him was really quite spooky. Turns out that he was in a dream. While in a coma.

Now there's something to conjure with. Imagine waking up from a dream, only to find that you were in a coma. I expect it was the kind of thing that happened quite a lot in the early 70s.

You can view old test cards at http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/bbc_test.html Although quite why you'd want to, I'm not entirely sure.
01.17.06 @ 03:48 PM PDT [link]

Southampton at sunset

The Civic Centre, Southampton, as captured by my Canon A95 Powershot. I was on the south coast doing some work with the City Council.
01.17.06 @ 03:42 PM PDT [link]

Comics in the 1970s
I was thinking today about the comics I read as a boy during the seventies. One that particularly sticks in my mind is Warlord. It was all about the Second World War, which certainly seemed to dominate the boys' toys market at the time. (I had lots of plastic soldiers of the British Eighth Army from WWII, along with US infantrymen, Wehrmacht mountain troops, Japanese guys with samurai swords and so on. They all fought convoluted battles on the floor of my parents' London home.)

Anyway, Warlord reinforced every stereotype about the Germans you care to imagine. Doomed Messerschmitt 109 pilots exclaimed things like "Gott in Himmel!" as they spiralled towards the drink. British characters would unleash a volley of bullets from their Sten gun. "Eat lead, Fritz!"

I wonder when all this became politically unacceptable? Part of me feels that it never did. It just became out of date. Probably about 1980. Nowadays, young boys wouldn't know anything about World War II anyway.

Spitfires? Battle of Britain? Yeah, yeah, right whatever.
01.15.06 @ 11:18 AM PDT [link]

That time travel drama on the BBC again
Remember I blogged about Life on Mars, the BBC's time travel show, where a policeman in a coma imagines he's in 1973?

I wonder if they considered the title Nick of Time? If they change it for the second season or some re-run in the far distant future, remember that you read it here first. It's copyright and I want my share of the cash.
01.15.06 @ 11:10 AM PDT [link]