Nearly the end of my birthday. Things achieved today:

- Spent an inordinate amount of time discussing planning for our Ars Magica campaign
- Bought a chocolate Dalek cake from M&S to feed to my work colleagues. One of them joked it was the "Extermi-cake!"
- Assembled an IKEA wardrobe (with bigHair's help)
- Got rid of a gym workout bench to a grateful teenage son and his family
- Filmed my first undoubtedly seminal piece of cinema (a touching exploration of my corridor in the Von Trier/Dogme95 style) with my new baby.

All in all, a rather successful, happy day, made ever so slightly weird by a random Facebook invitation from a girl in Montreal who mistook me for somebody with the same name and physical appearance as me. Yay - I'm special. :)

The BBC are engaged in a total onslaught of Dr Who advertising at the moment, with the latest series starting at the weekend. Russell T Davies in the Metro yesterday mentioned that he has so much Dr Who merchandise his flat looks like a paedophile's den. David Tennant was trading innuendos and pick-up lines with Graham Norton on the Graham Norton Show last night, and even the children's series Blue Peter was getting in on the action on Wednesday, demonstrating how to make a rather tasty-looking Dalek cake from chocolate mix, two chocolate Swiss rolls and some milk-chocolate sweets (I was, erm, working from home while some flooring was being installed by a laconic Polish man). Despite the hype, I'm still looking forward to the new series.

I think the direct relationship between Inanity of Statement vs Human Proximity to Cat, as shown in xkcd, could also apply to synchronised swimming otters holding hands. Sooo cute!



Wet and chilly today, but at least it's Friday. Roll on weekend!

Disgusting - British Summer Time kicks in tonight and look at this awful weather.

I found this tea cafe and think it would be a good place to take my mother. You can't go wrong with somewhere that has 16 pages of tea to choose from. Especially good on a cloudy day like this, I reckon.

Zooming past the vernal equinox, and into Aries territory with a bang - the celebration of Scroobius' birthday in Farringdon last night. bigHair and I started as we meant to finish by packing away a swift pint even as we were supposed to be waiting for kadekraan outside the tube station; as the rest of the evening was an enjoyable pinot grigio-tinted hue, it's not altogether inexplicable that I felt a little dry-mouthed and strained this morning.

I was recovered enough by the afternoon to make very agitated noises when my manager excitedly suggested sending me to a Spanish-only customer in Madrid to do a site installation. Imagine - being yelled at in technical radio engineering jargon. In Spanish. By an angry customer. It would have marked a new low in Anglo-Spanish communications not seen since this:



Coming home, I bumped into my neighbour this evening. She complained about her downstairs neighbour, who sings evangelical songs at all hours of the day. He was apparently singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" at 5:30am the other morning. What's almost worse, his voice breaks when he tries to sing high notes. She's written to the council (who sent him a letter) and tried calling the police, but so far he's still wailing on.

Below are the fruits of our weekend. A trip down to Pier in Kingston for curtains was only a partial success, but at least we netted a new sheep, resting on the new bed we have finally managed to assemble. Name ideas for the sheep welcomed.



Two things I wasn't sure what to make of this weekend, both significant. The first was More4's programme on The Great Global Warming Swindle; an apparently well-supported, well-presented argument that global warming is actually unavoidable, cyclical, and strongly linked to cosmic radiation and solar activity, but the public are being misinformed and brainwashed by the media, zealous environmentalists, and the now-massive green lobby (who quickly suppress any doubters in the scientific community) into believing that it is human carbon dioxide emissions to blame.

The second was the public's choice of pop band Scooch for Eurovision. I'll be the first to admit cheesy pop can be great, and the first to admit Eurovision isn't exactly renowned for high-brow music, but this sounds like a tired Eurotrash track from Best of Ibiza Dance Classics, 1996. The UK have enough political enemies in Eurovision already without giving them real cause to make us lose. Although maybe this music is genuinely what Europeans like; the Ukrainian entry (RealPlayer required) is even more frenetic (although catchier, IMO), and they won a couple of years ago.

bigHair went to Stockholm for a flying visit on Friday. He said it was warmer there, and the Swedish were all stick thin.

A sense of lethargy permeated my day at work today. Although we're supposed to have been in code freeze three days ago, my manager spent most of the day in meetings to view several design companies' tenders for our new office layout (words like "breakout area" and "web bar" and images of developers seated on "funky" ottoman-type things were being bandied about). Meanwhile, my team seemed to do a lot of lolling around; in response to this image of "the Most Dangerous Door on the London Underground" (image on left), my work colleague came up with his own version:



Unfortunately I wasn't in time to catch a ticket for LCD Soundsystem at the Astoria this week. But ginger songster Tori Amos is playing at the Hammersmith Apollo in July - I'm thinking of going to see her.

"I quit on you when you cleared outta De-troit with Willy the Pimp!"

For some reason this fucking kills me every time.



I saw The Tempest on Friday night. Patrick Stewart excelled as an imperious powerful leader far from home, who had to confront strange and exotic natives. But that's enough about Star Trek : The Next Generation.*

I also watched the original version of Casino Royale at the weekend. It's a pretty trippy film, treading a fine line between surreal, hysterical, and abysmally bad. It features Bond in a car chase with a remote-controlled milk float, Orson Welles' Le Chiffre performing magic tricks at the Casino Royale card table, Bond shooting exploding ducks with M's widow and her 11 daughters, and a UFO landing in Trafalgar Square to kidnap the love child of Bond and Mata Hari. Watching this film on drugs would only improve it.

On the tube this morning a woman sat down next to me and started reading the Multiclass Characters section of a Dungeons and Dragons source book. Two stops later a man rushed onto the train, talking on his phone, and sat down saying "Yeah, bruv, all I know is, I'm gonna plead guilty straight away." I bet everyone around him was wondering what it was he was going to plead guilty to.


* Apologies for the recycled gags, I'm trying to be eco-friendly. ;)

Dr Who and the French Dalek. This is very silly.



Perhaps it explains France's entry on Conservapedia.

As my significant other gets increasingly workaholic, I find my own life turning more work-focused. I come home from work in the evening and end up in front of the computer, working. At least last night I managed to get a respite from work, courtesy of drinks and excellent, very cheap vegetarian food at Beatroot in Soho with S and his friend Kim. Kim works as a graphic artist; he did most of the giant turtle opening scene from Hogfather, and he's now working on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. He's a fanatical artist, and spent most of the evening making pretty cool manga-like drawings of the people around us.

Private Eye's Quote of the Week this week had a certain thuggish amusement value:

PC 5566 said: "Due to my inability to deploy my Taser, I had to resort to punching him as hard as I could in the face. It is a taught technique.
- Witness at trial of 21/7 suspects.

I managed to catch a bit of the lunar eclipse last night as we were standing in the queue outside a rammed bar on Hoxton Square, having just finished some fantastic pizza at a place around the corner called Furnace. A pity I didn't have my camera with me.

A topic dear to all Londoners, the transport network. This blog is probably worth reading, if not for the apparent insider's view of the tubes, then for the Tube Fashion Victims.