"Dude, you're screwed!" - an appreciation

One of the great features about American cable TV used to be that there were so many channels, and so few shows worth watching, that you'd be forced to channel-surf until you came across something vaguely appealing on a channel that you'd likely never visit deliberately. Thus, new shows entered the American consciousness.

Now Netflix is near-ubiquitous... the same thing is happening there. It's astonishing how big the Netflix catalogue is, but less astonishing how much of it is crap. Still, there are some gems buried in the ordure, and I stumbled across one of them with a most unpreprosessing title: "Dude, You're Screwed!"

The premise of the show is simple but brilliant. There are 5-6 hosts of the show, all with a background in wilderness survival. In each episode, one host is "abducted" and dumped in the middle of the wilderness, with no idea where they are, given a survival kit with items of varying helpfulness - a giant teddy bear and a Viking shield, in one case - and have 100 hours to find "civilization" which might be a main road, houses, or just stumbling across other people. For the viewer's benefit, a suitably well-equipped cameraman accompanies the victim but cannot help them in any way. Presumably they would intervene if things went very pear-shaped, but you get the idea.

Is is staged? At least some of the takedown-and-transport parts are; if you were a Costa Rican immigration official, would you let a party into your country with one member flex-cuffed and with a bag over his head? but I think most of it is real. The victim might know what country they're in, but not where they are or where to go. But I think this misses the point, in any case. This show is fascinating in how you get an up-and-close look at wilderness environments, and how they try very hard to kill you.

Some of my favourite episodes were Iceland (Jake), Tanzania (Matt), Namibia (Jake again) and Utah (John). In all of these you get a really good look at wilderness you'd probably never see, and its peculiar wrinkles. Of all of them, the Namibian desert / Skeleton Coast was probably the best. Jake - a former Navy SEAL - fights his way through the desert only to end up on the shore where there's still nothing to eat or drink, a whole bunch of dead wildlife testifying to the hostility of the land, and the only plants are poisonous. The legendary SEAL determination shows - in the closing hours, despite being dehydrated, starved and vomiting, he's still doggedly hiking down the coast looking for civilization. Had the others not intervened, he'd have certainly died - but even then I'm still not entirely sure it would have stopped him.

What makes the show for me, though, is the interplay between the core characters: the aforementioned SEAL Jake, Green Beret Terry, wilderness survival and atlatl master Matt, and UK military SERE instructor John. They're all very different personalities but bounce off each other well in cameraderie, perspectives, and the balance between wanting to make the situation challenging while being concerned for the victim's well-being. Jake's a balls-out "beat this in the fastest time" guy, Terry is more cerebral, Matt just seems to like making things out of trees, and John is a phlegmatic Mancunian whose early priority seems to be to find something to make a hot cup of tea. There are other hosts, but these four really stand out for me.

You can probably find this on Netflix, or maybe Discovery Channel on cable. It might also be titled "Survive That!". Go take a look, you'll enjoy it. Also, stay the heck away from the Namib.

Ellipses

Binge watching the 2008 "classic" 'Lost in Austen', I find myself drawn to Mr. "Hugh Bonneville" Bennett's observation, addressing the linguistic and cultural shift between the early 1800's and early 2000's:

You do make the most refreshingly elliptic conversation, Miss Price.

Henceforth I resolve to use this idiom whenever I have no idea what my interlocutor is talking about. Unless they're addressing the topic of ECDH when the conversation would be elliptic, refreshing, yet still prone to make one's eyes cross.

I also appreciated the reference to the "otter-strewn thoroughfares of Hammersmith"; if ever I discovered an otter in Hammersmith, I'd expect it to be draped around the neck of a Russian lady resident of the area.

Ideas that seem attractive but are corporate suicide

A huge loss for popular entertainment when Amazon successfully lured "Top Gear" hosts Clarkson, Hammond and May from the BBC: Apple were trying to hire them too:

Apple is said to have made an unprecedented bid to secure the stars of “Top Gear” when they exited their BBC series earlier this year. But Amazon ended up winning the bidding war for Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond in July.

Can you imagine that? Apple, headquartered in the terminally hip and politically correct city of Cupertino in California, recruiting Mr. Jeremy "Jezza" Clarkson, famous for such quotes as:

• It's very fast and very, very loud. And then in the corners it will get its tail out more readily than George Michael
• The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blond-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a black Muslim lesbian.
• Britain's nuclear submarines have been deemed unsafe... probably because they don't have wheel-chair access.

being employed by Apple? Within one week the Apple PR and HR departments would have a "CLARKSON" page, printed on bright red paper bordered with exclamation marks, on the front page of their operational playbooks. The only potential upside for Apple is that Tim Cook, Apple's openly gay CEO, would know with a high degree of certainty what would take up 90% of the allocated time in media interviews, and he's probably got the self assurance to handle it in a relaxed manner - I'm sure he'd rather be asked about Clarkson than about working conditions in Apple's Chinese factories.

It's a crying shame that Amazon, headed by the Dread Pirate Bezos, won the bidding war. When Jezza goes on his next rant to terminally offend half the Western World (and about 0.1% of the rest of the world, who have more pressing and immediate concerns for their welfare than the spoutings of Clarkson), Bezos won't even raise an eyebrow; I can assure you that he doesn't give a bodily functional about the squeals of the masses, as long as Clarkson continues to rake in the dough.

The BBC asks "do people become more prejudiced as they age?"

No.

Psychologists used to believe that greater prejudice among older adults was due to the fact that older people grew up in less egalitarian times. In contrast to this view, we have gathered evidence that normal changes to the brain in late adulthood can lead to greater prejudice among older adults.

There are certainly normal changes to the brain. We call that "life".

Old people have experienced more of life than when they're young, so they have more facts at their disposal to make judgements.

This isn't prejudice. It's postjudice. So the BBC approach of venerating the young and disapproving of the attitudes of older generations is precisely the wrong way around.

BBC booze bill shocker

The shocker is, it's extremely reasonable:

The Corporation stated that the figure related to 'non-production related and production related spend'.
It added: 'The total spent on alcohol for the period 1st October 2013 to 26th October 2014 with the BBC's single preferred supplier Majestic Wine PLC was £43,000.'

I'm not the greatest fan of the BBC's compulsory TV licence, but I really don't think that this is worthy even of a Daily Mail throwaway article:

• Use of bulk supplier for savings: check
• Cost per employee per year: £2 , eminently reasonable, no reason to think this is taxpayer-funded employee booze
• Cost per day: £130 over all channels and events. That's about 3 bottles of Veuve Clicquot NV at Sainsbury's prices. Assuming the BBC allocates half a bottle per top echelon (MP, MEP, sleb) guest, that's 6 top echelon guests per day which sounds about right.

It comes as up to 50 MPs called for the licence fee to be scrapped and replaced with a voluntary subscription service in its place.

Talk about tenuous connections. This is possibly one of the strongest signals of thrifty BBC spending there is, and you're linking it to a call for licence fee repeal? Your logic is not like our Earth logic, Daily Mail.

Atlas Shrugged - part 2

Nearly a year after watching Atlas Shrugged part 1 I finally got around to watching part 2 - "The Strike". I knew going into it that the cast would change completely, so was expecting a certain amount of dissonance. In the even it wasn't noticeable, perhaps because it had been so long since I saw part 1. So how did part 2 stack up?

The cast changes from part 1 were a mixed bag:

• Paul McCrane as Wesley Mouch: an improvement, a much better weasel.
• Samantha Mathis made a better Dagney, older and more world-weary. Compared to Mathis, the deficiencies of the youth of Taylor Schilling in the role were more obvious, despite Schilling being very easy on the eye.
• Esai Morales: very smooth as Francisco d'Anconia. He was used to narrate Randian opinions in a couple of scenes but did so without being too hammy.
• The nerd in me applauded Robert Picardo as Dr. Robert Stadler, the head of the SSI.
• The main disappointment was Jason Beghe as Hank Rearden: Grant Bowler was far better in part 1, the Baghe character was more smirking and annoying.
• I was in two minds about Patrick Fabian as James Taggart; he was too young in my mind for the role, but he did get the playboy attitude right.

Where I thought the film succeeded, more so than part 1, was in making the subtle nods to popular culture today so that it could be seen as a warning of an (unlikely) very near future. This was exemplified by including a Fox News deconstruction of the Fair Share Law, with Sean Hannity facing off against Juan Willians and Bob Beckel. I nearly laughed my socks off. It was no doubt a good marketing gag - after all, I'd imagine Fox viewers are over-represented in the likely film audience. Indeed, Bob's brother Graham played Ellis Wyatt in part 1 which may have persuaded Bob to come on board for part 2. Also, plaudits are due to whoever came up with the "We are the 99.98%" protest signs waved at Dagney - genius. The use of protestors and their signs in a couple of the scenes to indicate changing public attitudes was clever.

The film itself felt a little rushed, which is not surprising considering how much they had to cram in to 111 minutes, less a couple of minutes of the flight sequence duplicated at the start and end. I will be fascinated to see what they do in part 3 about the 80+ page radio monologue - maybe they'll stick it on a separate DVD... It was not quite stand-alone as a film, but made a stab at it. You needed some context from part 1 or from the book in order to make more sense of the situation and the relationship between Mouch, the Taggarts and the rest of the industrialists, but the film makers did do a creditable job in minimising this. Where it fell down was in explaining Hank Rearden's attitude - why he was refusing to roll over to the government, and why he then changed his mind so quickly when his affair with Dagney was threatened to be exposed. The film makers could have done a better job of repeating his obsession with his firm, but I suppose they were relying on part 1 to have done that.

I can recommend Atlas Shrugged part 2, on balance. You don't need to read the book for it to make sense, as long as you've seen part 1. It was engaging and cleverly pitched. I'm not sure what Rand would have made of it, but I think the tie-ins to modern society would have amused her.

Balance

If the BBC is inviting the demented and mendacious PCS union shill Richard "I don't understand the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion" Murphy of the Tax Justice Network to be their @BBCExtraGuest on Twitter this week, I'd like them to invite someone appropriately far to the economic right next week; say, Madsen Pirie of the ASI. Sound fair? What are the chances?

Richie's self-importance knows no bounds:

Here we go...#bbcqt What did I do to get this panel?

— Richard Murphy (@BBCExtraGuest) March 7, 2013

Paid your TV licence, Richard, like the rest of the UK. Of more concern: what did the Twitterverse do to get you bloviating on QT?

I don't object to Murphy spouting his opinions - after all, this is the Internet, and opinions are like arseholes. It's his complete refusal to engage in any sensible debate in his blog comments and dismissal of any dissent while he blurts out complete non-sequiturs. See his article on RR paying no tax in the UK and his comments:

Verth: Surely all RR was referring to was the fact they make their sales through overseas companies and hence pay tax there not in the UK. That's not spinning in my view. It seems to me you're the one doing the spinning by implying/suggesting that they have said they should be taxed on a sales destination basis, which I don't think is what they said at all."
Richard Murphy: But if 51% of all employees are in UK it's very likely all profit is made at point of sale In fact that's an absurd claim which has little or no foundation

"I don't want it to be true, so it isn't." No attempt at actual argument or deploying facts, numbers etc. For a chartered accountant you'd think he'd have a stronger attachment to facts. He's also an "economist", presumably in the same way that Polly Toynbee is an "economist" - he talks about economics and usually gets it wrong. Economics may be in his university degree title, but he shows no evidence of actually having read any of the literature.

Back to his QT twittering:

Melanie Phillips does not understand economic multipliers - invest is 4 times more effective as econ boost than tax cuts #bbcqt

— Richard Murphy (@BBCExtraGuest) March 7, 2013

You see what I mean. "4 times as effective". Investment by whom? In what? Investment by the Government? That well-known multiplier of money? If it's 4x as effective, why isn't every Government investing 1bn instead of cutting 4bn? Is he even listening to himself? The man has no shame.

Of equal shamelessness:

The deficit is £120 bn. The tax gap is £95bn plus £20 plus bn unpaid tax at anty time. Do you see a possible connection? #bbcqt

— BBC Extra Guest (@BBCExtraGuest) March 7, 2013

£95bn is about £1400 for every man, woman and child in the UK. Since tax paid ultimately comes from people (workers, shareholders and company owners) Richard Murphy is claiming that every family of wife, husband and 2 children will have to find an extra £5600 per year in tax - or find someone else to pay it for them - in order to fill that "tax gap". Good luck with that, Richard. Corporation tax in 2008/2009 was £51bn so you'd have to nearly triple the corporate tax take to fill the "tax gap". I can't believe that the UK Revenue is leaving £90bn on the table. This fails even the laughter test.

Turning the tables on Morgan

It's one of my personal weaknesses that occasionally I watch Piers "smug" Morgan on his CNN show, but the other night I got to see him receive a dose of his own medicine. US conservative Ben Shapiro, who looks about 18 years old (28, apparently) took Piers to task over his approach to debating gun control; he ran rings around Morgan, courteously yet firmly pointing out that if you want to stop killings then banning handguns makes more sense than banning assault weapons:

Shapiro: This is what I wanted to ask you, Piers, because I have seen you talk about assault weapons a lot, and I have seen Mark Kelly talk about assault weapons. The vast majority of murders in this country that are committed with guns are committed with handguns, they are not committed with assault weapons. Are you willing to ban handguns in this country, across this country?
Morgan: No, that's not what I'm asking for.
Shapiro: Why not? Don't you care about the kids who are being killed in Chicago as much as the kids in Sandy Hook?
Morgan: Yes, I do.
Shapiro: Then why don't you care about banning the handguns in Chicago?
Morgan: We'll come to that.

Oddly, Morgan never came to that. The kindest thing we can say about Morgan's motivation in wanting to ban assault weapons is that he realises a handgun ban isn't going to happen, and an assault weapon ban is probably the only law change with a chance of passing. Of course, its actual effect is open to debate - the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 didn't have any effect that the CDC could detect.

What really made the interview, though, was that Shapiro had brought along a copy of the Constitution to (metaphorically) beat Morgan over the head with. Morgan proceeded to display contempt for that Constitution:

Morgan: You come in, you brandish your little book, as if I don't know what's in there --
Shapiro: My little book? That's the constitution of the United States. It's our founding document, Piers.
Morgan: I know what it is, your constitution.
Shapiro: Do you really?
Morgan: I have been debating this for a long time.
Shapiro: Then you should read the 2nd Amendment again.

Go read the whole interview if you haven't got time to see the video, it was quite the entertainment.

Piers Morgan, as Shapiro accurately noted, came into the USA with the perspective that he knows better than Americans how their country should be run, and views the Constitution as an annoying impediment to making everything work as well as it does in Britain.

Today, US author Brad Thor (whose books, while entertaining, make Tom Clancy's look intellectual) took to his Twitter account with a rather good idea:

I'm looking for a TV channel in UK to host the Brad Thor chat show which I'll use to actively push for abolition of the monarchy. @BBCWorld?
Even as a foreigner, I'm sure the British will not criticize me 4 wanting to do-away w/ the monarchy. It's a relic anyway, right? #Forward!
On my UK chat show, I'll call anyone who disagrees w/ my opinions stupid & absurd. The Brits need to come into 21st C. I will lead them!
On my UK chat show, I will tell everyone that we don't have a monarchy in America - not really - and therefore the U.K.'s should be ended.
I can't wait to get the first guest on my UK chat show so I can say, "You Brits, ...sitting there with that little Magna Carta of yours..."

I would pay a large, large sum of money (say, my TV licence fee) to see this show on the BBC.

Say what you like about British TV, we don't get shows like this

ABC's "The View" had ultra-conservative columnist Ann Coulter facing off against Whoopi "Guinan" Goldberg on the issue of race. It was quite the show:

GOLDBERG: Everyone was a segregationist darling , everybody was! White people were, they didn't matter whether they were Republican or not.
COULTER: Republicans were not...
GOLDBERG: Bullshit! Bullshit, I'm sorry! That's bull, that's bull
COULTER: No, no that is not... ok just read chapter 14 in the book, the first Republicans to be elected in the south
GOLDBERG: I listen to my grandmother, who was there! Who remembers what happened.
COULTER: Howard Baker, an aggressive integrationist, first Republican elected in Tennessee to the Senate, Winthrop Rockefeller, first republican governor in Arkansas, an integrationist.

Personally, I think British TV is the poorer for not having discussions like these. I can't conceive of a BBC programme that would invite Ann Coulter as a guest -- though I suspect they'd be just fine with Our Whoopi.

BBC producers: I would like to see a Question Time with Ann Coulter, Whoopi Goldberg, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams. You know you want to make this happen.

Mark Mardell: overpaid, overconfident and over there

The quality of BBC journalism varies, and is likely higher than the average (I'm a fan of Steph Flanders, for instance, though that's in no small way due to her father Michael Flanders, of "Flanders and Swan" fame.) However, their main USA correspondent Mark Mardell is a mendacious git - and we pay for his comfortable life in Washington D.C.

Exhibit one: Mardell's coverage of the Mother Jones "exposé" of Romney's remarks at a fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida:

Mitt Romney's unguarded and undiplomatic remarks may reinforce the perception that he is an ingenue in the art of foreign affairs, with harsher views than he dare express in public. Still, what he has said is more likely to provoke reactions in the region he is talking about than at home, where many conservatives may share his views.

Let's review those remarks:

"The Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace," he says, adding that "the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish".

Hands up anyone who can name a prominent Palestinian politician who is promoting the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem with terms that a majority of Israeli voters may accept. Anyone? Bueller? Let's remember what happened to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat when he signed the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The two state solution has been in discussion since 1970 and has got nowhere. I think the situation is a little more subtle than Romney suggested - the main reason an Israel-Palestine peace is prevented is because those funding Palestinian politics (Iran, Saudi) have no interest in any form of solution. But as a soundbite it's not far off the truth.

The Republican candidate is shown saying that the 47% of Americans who back the president do not pay income tax and would never vote for Mr Romney.

That sounds about right. US (federal and state) income tax for a nuclear family of 2 adults, 2 kids filing jointly kicks in around $45,000 gross income, which is currently about £30K. Poor families are disproportionately likely to vote Democrat. Romney's best electoral strategy is to appeal to the middle-income swing voters in the swing states of FL, OH, NV, IA, WI, CO, VA, NH. The 2003 USA median household income was $45K so allowing for 9 years of inflation that should put it comfortably north of $60K in 2012. Romney's right.

Mark Mardell doesn't care about facts - he cares about portraying Republicans as out-of-touch. He, like too many of the mainstream media, carries water for Obama and the democrats without conducting the role of his profession to hold up the statements of all politicians for examination.

Atlas Shrugged - the film(s)

I happened across the trailer for Atlas Shrugged part 2 yesterday, which made me remember that I actually hadn't seen Atlas Shrugged part 1; it came out before I read the book. So I ordered the DVD of part 1 from Amazon and watched it via Amazon streaming (thank you, Amazon, for letting me immediately stream a film that I'd just bought, a fantastic idea).

It may be an unpopular perspective, but I think the film was an excellent adaptation of the book. The casting was inspired, with Taylor Schilling nailing Dagny Taggart. Grant Bowler was a more likeable Hank Rearden than the book character, but I was Just Fine with that. Even the smaller characters (Wyatt, Rearden's wife, Willers) were well portrayed and written. The visual effects were OK, though you could tell they weren't the same grade as a George Lucas masterpiece; that's what a smaller budget does for you. The dialogue was well tweaked to feel current with the 2011 political and labour scene; the world of Rearden, Mouch and the Taggarts didn't feel a million miles away from today's America.

Unlike the book, the 96 minutes of film really packed in the story; the main criticism I have is that so much was happening so quickly that if you hadn't read the book you'd be sunk; it would need maybe 2-3 viewings to appreciate it fully. Overall though it kept me on the edge of my seat, and the sudden jarring end (or "stop" as some critics had it, which was fair) was well-timed. Recommended to anyone who's read at least some of the book and is more interested in the story than the philosophy.

I'm not sure about part 2. The complete recasting is going to be rather jarring. It opens in US cinemas in October so hopefully will be available on DVD before the end of the year. We'll see how they do.

Robots: as smart as the morons who program them

A great example of the law of unintended consequences: last night the livestream broadcast of the Hugo Awards at Worldcon got cut off. Well, technical issues happen to all sorts of broadcasts - except that this interruption wasn't a failure, it was the system behaving as intended. The Worldcon livestream was blocked by UStream for copyright violations.

Wait, a live broadcast violating copyright? How did that happen?

Ustream, like many other video sites, fingerprints known copyrighted commercial works - music videos, films etc. - using techniques similar to that described in Avery Li-chun Wang's paper on Shazam's algorithm. If someone tries to upload a copyrighted work such as the latest Taylor Swift music video, the video site will fingerprint the upload and spot a common pattern with the canonical Taylor Swift video; the upload will then be marked as infringing copyright and access disabled. Job done.

What happened with Worldcon is that, in common with other awards ceremonies, they showed short video clips of the contenders for each award. Some of those clips were of copyright material; the fingerprinting robots spotted the material, flagged the livestream as infringing copyright and shut down access. This despite the fact that a) the copyright holders did not object to the inclusion of the material - indeed, they were keen for it to be used, and b) use of clips falls squarely within the safe harbour provided by fair use in copyright law.

So here's the downside of automatic policing of copyright infringement - it is only as smart and fair as the robots policing it. Because of the rabid nature of the lawyers of copyright holders, all the effort will be put into making the robots effective; no-one with money will care whether or not they are fair.

Streaming video and the insanity of copyright law

No matter what your position on the Internet, cable/satellite broadcasters and TV content makers, you should definitely read Ars Technica on why the current streaming TV legal situation is insane and how it got that way:

...the Supreme Court had meddled with the primal forces of nature, and Congress promptly swung into action, revising the law to override Fortnightly and Teleprompter. The 1976 Copyright Act added a "transmit clause" to its definitions to make clear that whether a work was performed "by means of any device or process" and whether the public received it "in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times," it would still infringe if transmitted without permission.

It turns out that letting professional politicians pull laws from their rear fundaments is a bad idea. Who knew?

The centre of this article is the concept of placing the functions of a DVR (digital video recorder, e.g. your Sky+ box) in "The Cloud"; instead of transmitting all TV stations in a multiplexed signal down a cable or satellite channel and letting the subscriber's DVR pick out a channel for recording, do the whole operation in the provider's data center and let the user just download the content they'd stored when they needed it. No longer was the size of your DVR's hard disk an issue - you could use as much disk as your provider let you have, and no doubt pay per GB. But the TV networks didn't like that idea, much as they had disliked the original concept of home video recording, and sued; the Second Circuit court knocked back the claim on these points:

First, each time a user recorded a program, the RS-DVR made a separate copy of it for her, storing it on her own dedicated hard drive space. Second, each time she played back a program, it came from her own stored copy.

If I had been an enterprising lawyer for the networks, I would have been asking hard questions about the presence of any data de-duplication in the providers' servers; does each subscriber's recording of "Jersey Shore ep. 570" occupy an identifiable and distinct GB of hard disc space, or is there a single copy that they point to? Still, that defeat wasn't enough for the networks, and they're constantly looking to take the wind out of broadcasters' sails, on and off the Internet.

It then turns out that the murky mesh of regulations has required Internet TV startups to do things that any reputable engineer would have termed "insane". Case in point: Aereo who let you buffer live TV:

Aereo filled its Brooklyn data center with dime-sized antennas — 80 on each circuit board, with 16 boards to a rack. When a user is logged in, Aereo designates one of the antennas as "hers" and starts recording the chosen channel to a unique copy on a hard drive, Cablevision-style. Then, just like with Cablevision's RS-DVR, she can stream the stored video over the Internet.

In other words, the end result isn't important - it's how Aereo is seen to be operating as a broadcaster. And it turns out that the aforementioned deduplication issue could be worked around as well:

But a federal judge thought that this deduplication wasn't a problem, explaining, "The record demonstrates that MP3tunes does not use a 'master copy' to store or play back songs stored in its lockers. Instead, MP3tunes uses a standard data compression algorithm that eliminates redundant digital data." So either the judge didn't think that individual copies were necessary, or he misunderstood what a "master copy" was.

I'm with Ars Technica on this - if I were a business relying on this point of judgement for my business, I wouldn't sleep terribly well at night. Some legal clarification would be very welcomed.

All this goes to show that it's a miracle that any substantial improvements in TV watching technology get delivered to us end consumers. If the networks have their way (and no doubt they are busy contributing to re-election campaigns as we speak) most of these will be rolled back. As P. J. O'Rourke notes:

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

CSI Balamory?

Pure genius from Uncyclopedia: CSI: Balamory:

CSI: Balamory! CSI: Balamory!
Here is the First/Second Miss Hoolie to tell us that story but how does is all begin?
Cut in half, shot in the head or whacked in the face with a bottle of gin?
Is today to die at home or get beaten because you're gay?
Drowning in a pool or spying on the kids at the Nursery?

I was pleased^[1] to see they kept the rhyming scheme at the end there.

The episode also addresses important points that the CBeebies series neglects. Who does the MOT on Edie McCredie's bus, if she owns the only garage on the island? Who interviews rape victim on the islands if PC Plum is the only officer? However, I'm not convinced by the Archie back-story; a man wearing a skirt in a pink castle with a posh English accent? He's clearly trying way too hard to appear effeminate. There's something murky going on there.

^[1] No, not really.

Thirty years of The Hoff

A heart-warming interview in The Grauniad yesterday with star of 80's TV and the Spongebob Squarepants movie, David Hasselhoff:

For those of us who grew up on Knight Rider, Hasselhoff, 60, is and for ever will be the man with the backlit bouffant, leading us each Saturday night on a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist.

The Hoff is 60? I can't believe it. We should skip lightly over the sun, sea, sand and suboptimal CPR of Baywatch (and pretend that "Baywatch Nights" never existed) but Hasselhoff's undoubted TV talent underpinned the success of Knight Rider, and he only occasionally got upstaged by his talking car.

Hoff has a very grown-up view of censorship, evidenced by his agent trying to talk him out of doing a number from The Producers:

I said, what the fuck are you talking about? This is from The Producers, one of the greatest musicals. We're mocking him. It's not a tribute to Hitler, it's a gay Hitler.

He also has a mature view of his fame, and the nature of 80's comebacks:

"... We went to [a Hasselhoff disco] in Hertfordshire and there were 1,200 people dressed up as me. They told me they loved me. And at first I thought, these guys are making fun of me. But they're not. They're really not." He says quietly. "They think it's retro and cool."

It's encouraging to see that someone who was not long ago headed for the rocks of the post-success career slide and alcohol has managed to turn it around - and in no small part because he has a sense of proportion about what he has achieved, and what it means to people today for both good and bad.

Spain must not win the Eurovision

Pastora Soler, the Spanish entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, has been instructed not to win the competition because Spain can't afford to host it.

It gives me great national pride to know that the UK entry has no need to be told this.

In praise of Malcolm in the Middle

I first got into this show a couple of years ago, more or less by accident - a spare half hour, flicking through the channels in search of something less than dreadful, and I found myself watching Lois, Hal, Dewey and Reese - and I was hooked. Over time I've come to regard it as one of the great under-rated sitcoms.

The genius of the writing is in the interplay between the extremely flawed and dysfunctional characters: loving but hopelessly downtrodden Hal, hardworking and driven-to-insanity Lois, genius nerd Malcolm, sociopathic Reese, runaway lout Francis and underestimated Machiavellian Dewey. When Dewey (about 6 years old) decided to get his mother's name tattooed on his chest, Lois (played by Jane Kaczmarek, who would have won a Grammy if there were any justice in the world) repeatedly spasms between horror and dewey-eyed appreciation of the deed. Lois works herself to near-death for the family, and woe betide any son (or husband) who fails to appreciate this or do as he is told. Francis went away to a military academy and then ran away to Alaska, but can't escape his mother's influence. Malcolm is so repressed that when he tries not saying what he thinks, he ruptures an internal organ. It's a regular working-class American family cranked up to 11.

The sheer cheek of the writers has to be admired. They needed to cast an Alaskan Inuit girl for Francis to fall in love with, and they pick Emy Coligado who's an ethnic Filipina from Texas. The scene between Piama and Lois when they first meet is one to treasure, with Hal trying his best to prevent World War 3 from breaking out between the two politely-speaking but acid-tongued women.

Season 4's "Baby" is a classic example of the writers turning conventions on their head. Heavily pregnant Lois's obnoxious mother Ida is staying, and Lois wants to get her out of the house before labour starts. Because Ida is so racist, Lois hits on the plan of getting Hal's poker buddy Abe (a high-earning, polite, well-spoken African-American chap) to come over with his other African-American poker buddies to say hello to Ida and make her feel surrounded. The comedy as she tries to explain this to Abe and it becomes clear that he doesn't actually think of himself as black...

Francis and a buddy find a totem pole and try to discern its meaning. This is explained to them by its Native American owner:

Well, if I hit it it means I'm five inches away from the back of my carport... You white boys are all the same. I have dark skin therefore I dance with bears and speak with the wind. Well I work for a living, and I'm Baptist and proud of it! Oh...and I have only one word for snow: SNOW!

Go look for it in the TV guide next time you've a free half hour - it's almost bound to be somewhere on cable or satellite. You'll thank me.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone

Shock! Horror! American comedian swears on BBC Breakfast TV:

Presenters Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams had asked funnyman Dave Fulton how he would pronounce one of Del Boy's favourite sayings 'lovely jubbly' in an American accent.
Fulton replied: 'You wouldn't, because it's like me saying w****r'.

(What kind of hack uses the word 'funnyman'? I ask you.)

I'd like to point out that Colm Meaney got to say "bollocks" and have it broadcast at 6pm on American network TV. So I don't think we have much room to complain about Dave Fulton.

Occupy Balamory

Reports have reached me that the small Scottish island town of Balamory has become the latest venue for the global "Occupy" movement's protests. The harbour-side street was blocked for most of Monday by increasingly noisy and violent protests.

Town "inventor" Archie Forbes-Pilkington (35), holding the sign "Public funding for egg carton constructions NOW!" berated the local authority for its tight purse strings. "Surely we should be encouraging entrepreneurship and economic development to stimulate the local economy!" he exclaimed. "The bloody bank is charging 8% on small business loans, and the local authority has cut off all funding for the three quangos I sit on. How's an inventor supposed to eat?"

Ms. "Hooligan" Hoolie (27) of Balamory Nursery had bolstered the protester numbers with her nursery class, several of whom were spray-painting over the windows of local tea shop Pocket+Sweet. "It's outrageous!", she shrieked, "being forced to pay an extra thirty quid a month for my pension! Do they think I'm made of money?"

Their diatribes were interrupted by a stream of PAVA spray from town constable P.C. Plum, struggling to keep order in the street. He was assisted by Evangelina "Josie" Jump (22), pressed into service as a special constable and using her considerable kickboxing skills to force the protestors back from the police station.

Mrs. Edelyn MacReady (42) of Island Tours expressed her concern about the impact of these protests on the local economy. "What these people don't seem to realise is that this town depends on tourism; if people stop coming here because of the trouble, none of us will have jobs." Asked about her previously warm relationship with Hoolie, MacReady snapped "Hoolie can drive her own bloody school bus from now on."

24 hours in A+E - the mad-as-a-fish edition

Our last view (for a while, at least) into Kings A+E. "For God's sakes, get me something for the fucking pain!" some bloke was shouting as the programme opened. Either he had a gunshot wound to the stomach, was in the middle of childbirth, or he was being a wuss. You know what I'm betting on.

Clive woke up confused with a slurrying voice - everyone was thinking 'stroke'. He was conscious enough to compliment his consultant on her youthful looks though, good man. Discussing with his nurse people who go away before exam results come back, he commented that if anything was wrong with him he'd want to know. Six years of fighting off depression (subsequent to alcoholism, sounds like), more bad days than good days. I could see how that would screw up your vascular system. Turns out that the symptoms were due to an accidental overdose of his meds.

Here came Joseph, the pre-announced 16 year old with a query stroke. He was a bit confused about times and dates, apparently remembering yesterday's events as todays. Initially you'd think 'head trauma' but there was no obvious history indicating a mechanism for it. Some unilateral weakness in his leg. Handy for diagnostic purposes having his twin brother there, I'd think. Later confirmed that it was a stroke, fully recovered.

A suicidal person with 74 previous attempts went missing from the department. Jenny the psychiatric nurse was trying to find her. Statistically you'd think there wouldn't be too much risk that this would be the one time her attempts would succeed but I guess you can't stake your job on that. Kings sees more people with mental health needs than any other A+E department in the UK. Lots of schizophrenia, lots of bipolar. I'd hazard a guess there's a strong correlation with homelessness. A lot of them are regular visitors which brings its own set of challenges.

There were funny vignettes with the two girls trying to keep themselves entertained for hours and hours while waiting for treatment for fingers trapped in a collapsible stool. A+E needs more entertaining posters, perhaps 'Where's Wally?'.

We had 28 days of filming in which time 9500 patients came through and 6 died. It may sound a little heartless to say it, but that's not bad going.