The Braineater Gazette & Clarion

Cheering myself up by watching Absolutely (also available on youtube). So many blissful, ridiculous moments. And scabrous, grotty ones too. And daft songs, and madly quotable punchlines, and silly linking devices. The famous sketches are the recurring ones, like Stoneybridge and the Little Girl, but I think many of the one-offs are even better (the swanky clothes shop in series 1 is a favourite, so's the woman at the opera with her flunkies).

Buy the box set (region 0) and get excellent special features too; the commentary's great because it was done 20 years later and they're all still friends so they're taking the piss out of each other and wondering why the hell they wrote the scripts like that. ("Oh, a Don and George sketch. This'll be short, then." "Yeah, you've got time to go and get a cup of tea." "You've got time to go and have a three course meal."
"Ah, now this one's biting satire." "No it's not, it's about shoving a giraffe up your arse."
"Oh, more squalor."
"Is this kid's TV, or are you just trying to be Morecambe and Wise?")

I didn't get round to putting reflective film on the skylight again today. But I took 8 1/2 hours of stuff off the PVR, so a productive Sunday anyhow.
(Three hours of that was the first six episodes of Live at the Electric from BBC3- once I realised the only thing I was interested in were the Two Episodes of Mash sketches and Humphrey Ker's The Wire parody The Van, it took very little time. I liked Lady Garden when I saw them a couple of years ago but the sketches they picked for this were quite dull. [Uncharitable comment on BBC3 comedy omitted])

I thought I had all the stuff for taking on hols but realised as I looked at last year's list that I'd got Xmas presents for the cousins but forgotten the older generations, oops. It saved me from making a start on packing because we give them calendars and they have to go right at the bottom so's not to get creased...

Aargh, my security settings ate my entry.

A. and I have muttered occasionally about having a Musical Episodes evening, and yesterday this came up again because I played him "Land of the Luvvies" {*}. Anyway, I said, "TV tropes must have an entry for this", I said, and so it does (Warning! TV Tropes link!). It doesn't yet have "Land of the Luvvies" listed, or "Can We Sing For a Whole Episode?" from Little Howard's Big Question, but it does have our other usual thoughts, "When Janet Met Jonny" from Two Pints of Lager, the Scrubs episode, and "Once More With Feeling", of course.

Red Dwarf's "Blue" would probably be out, because although the Arnold Rimmer song is amazing, it is actually just the one song in the episode. Whereas Flight of the Conchords, say, would be out because the whole thing is musical, so a Musical Episode isn't a departure from the norm. I'm dithering about the Mighty Boosh episodes with bands in- if they usually have a song or two, and then there's an ep with half a dozen, is that a musical ep? Let's say yes. (On that note, are there any Monty Python series episodes with more than one song in them?)

I reckon it might be slightly cheating to specially look up episodes of shows you've never watched, so that means the Star Trek, Xena, Simpsons, Futurama and South Park episodes listed on the page would be ok (I haven't watched the whole run of any of those, and I don't happen to have caught the musical episodes, but I could have done)- except it would be difficult to track them down without knowing episode names.

Anyway. There's plenty of musical episodes available for a marathon. Now, what order to show them in...?

{*} From The Legend of Dick and Dom. Mwahahaha.

I didn't mention when it was on how much I liked Holy Flying Circus, did I? Well it was excellent. And these two Yuletide fics based on it are both excellent as well.

Sometimes everyone needs a friend just to tell them that everything's going to be OK. Or that there will be a new pixie in the eye of heaven.

(It's a pretty good clip right from the start, actually, as Ian's wig falls off and Dom stomps on furniture...)

OMG Fist of Fun really really is coming soon. With extras and everything. SO EXCITED. Definitely not asking for it for Xmas- I'm not waiting that long to get my hands on it!

Just watched Sue Perkins, Alison Steadman and Stephen Mangan getting adorably confused about which way is south all over Cornwall in All Roads Lead Home, which was just lovely. Highly recommend it to other UKers.

In bloom: Alyssum, lobelias, sweet peas, campanulas, red daylilies, sunflowers, pansies, violas, geraniums, crysanthemums, Michaelmas daisies, nasturtiums, autumn-flowering cyclamen, ragged robin (at least I think that's what that pink thing is). Needs harvesting before a frost: Greek basil.

I'm all excited becaue I've bought a 500-gig PVR. So far I haven't kept anything I recorded; our intermittent terrible reception kicked in at the wrong time (switchover in Sept should help there.) I'm out of the habit of videoing things, too! I know that of the stuff I've still got on old tapes, I actually value the ones labelled "ephemera" most- that turned out to be the stuff that isn't out on DVD or getting repeated.
So far I've got Shooting Stars and Diddy Dick and Dom on series record. Choices, choices...

I had some trousers altered and now I have trousers that aren't falling off me and I haven't had to go shopping.

Over the long weekend I ate at the Fountaine at Linton (yum), saw some weeny wild violas, did not go for a walk round Malham Tarn because there were many other people already doing that, watched a couple of overs of village cricket (there kept being pauses while they dashed over the bridge and across the road to get the ball back), planted marigolds and pansies, replanted sunflowers because the last lot all died, did no tidying or DIY, and watched much rubbish TV. It was very nice.

I've ordered series 3 of Naked Video, series 5 of Spitting Image, and The Best of Friday Night Live; nostalgie de la recession precedente, perhaps. (Naked Video certainly is terribly terribly Eighties, from the animation in the titles to the sketches about nuclear war, and the huge amount of parodies and references to then-current TV mean that there's a good half of it that you wouldn't get at all if you weren't here then (remember whan Taggart was in Taggart?). Perfectly OK gags if you do remember the referents, mostly, though I think the best things in it, like John Sparkes doing Siadwell- so uncharacteristically sweet!- Helen Lederer's upbeat woman, and the early Rab C Nesbitt, are the fairly timeless ones. (And breathe. Sometime I must learn to write without overlong parentheticals.))

I wish it'd rain. My waterbutt's already half empty.

If Robin Ince talking about Kafka for three minutes including a moment of lying on a bed and then sitting up looking all tousled *hides screencap* is relevant to your interests, here's the 4OD link- the segment starts at 7min 20sec. (Pervy Ince fanciers form a queue at 9:11.)

I posted a massive rant about topping up a T-mobile dongle and found the original top-up card a couple of days later. D'oh. But their staff training, website and phone helpline are still shit so I'm not that eager to give them any more money anyway.

Um, er, also... oh, yes, a lovely weekend with devongarden last weekend- we didn't do anything touristy, just lots of gardening and hanging out, and it was really nice.

I'm feeling a bit boring. I think the trouble is that I'm between obsessions- no more Who till Christmas, the new series of Top Gear is fun but I'm not in massive squee mode over it any more, and I've run out of Bottom (ha ha). I'll have to go through the DVDs again to find something nice and voluminous. (Red Dwarf's always reliable but I don't want to end up actually knowing all the lines. Absolutely? Drop the Dead Donkey? Buffy?) And there are a bunch of new books by authors I like, but they're mostly still in hardback, and anyway a book only lasts a couple of hours and I want something I can immerse myself in for days (with a bit of rationing it out to give myself some rewards to look forwards to!)- but on the other hand, the thought of a hundred hours of Collings and Herrin podcasts seems like far too much of an effort to get through. Seek out something new or fall back on rubbishy comfort food for the brain like Mercedes Lackey where you can zoom through 20 books all with the same plot.... Oh I dunno. I do miss London, I'd really like to have a massive choice of people preparing their Edinburgh shows right now.
And! I had to rescan my freeview box and Dave+1 has now dropped off (I never got Dave in this house.) Yes indeed, my choice of rolling news channels to be depressed by has now gone up to five (BBC, ITN, CNN, Russia Daily or something and now Al-Jazeera), all the blasted shopping channels are still there, but no more reruns of HIGNFY and QI. Grr.

At least it's looking like it might rain. (Not sarcasm. I like cool and damp. No sunburn, no watering the garden!)