Patrick Stewart as you’ve never seen - or heard - him before. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jean Luc Picard, Captain of the USS Enterprise, singing A is for alphabet:
Apparently, the song was filmed as a birthday tribute to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenbery.
While I’m on the theme (sorry) of Picard singing, I thought I’d also take the time to bring you the rather moving Picard’s Song:
(Can you tell that I’ve spent this evening procrastinating?)
War on Terror: The Boardgame is just about to hit the streets in England. The aim of the game is world domination, with ‘terrorists’ fighting against ‘empire builders’.
Predicatably, people are upset - particularly those who survived terrorist attacks:
“If someone had told me that barely a year after the London bombings someone would create a board game like this, I wouldn’t have believed them. It is beyond belief,” said Jacqui Putnam who was injured during the suicide bombings, which killed 52 commuters in the British capital.
“The idea that it can be reduced to a board game … amazing. And they announce the release on the anniversary of 9/11!” she said.
The decision to release it on the anniversary of 9/11 was certainly crass and, doubtless, the game itself will be too.
But, when it really comes down to it, I can’t see much of a difference between this game and Risk. Or any PC wargame.
Catherine Sanderson, the woman behind Petite Anglaise has apparently just netted a two book deal with Penguin - worth a cool £400,000. Colin Randall, at the Telegraph Blog, has the scoop.
No one likes talking figures on these occasions, but I have reason to believe the contract is worth in the region of £400,000 and that more may end up going her way from deals with America and the rest of the world.
An eventual film also seems a strong possibility.
Not bad for the Yorkshire lass who, only a few months ago, was wondering how she would ever keep up payments on the flat she was buying, having been summarily dismissed from her job at an English accountancy firm.
Kudos to her - it’s a great blog, and she deserves every penny. But I kind of get the feeling I’m in the wrong blogging niche…
Britain is to get a brand new internet tv station covering news and politics. 18 Doughty Street - which will broadcast for four hours each evening - promises to “break the mould” . Here’s the trailer:
Having just watched the trailer myself, I must admit, I found it difficult to muster much enthusiasm. Dull, but worthy, was my immediate reaction.
I would be happy to see a new non-mainstream tv news channel, though, so I am keen to see how it develops. And, yes, I’ll happily eat my words if I turn out to be yet another cynic with a blog.
A bit of a media sandstorm seems to have blown up over a video called Is This the Way to Al-Jazeera, which features BBC staff dressed as Osama Bin-Laden, singing a version of Is This the Way to Amarillo.
The tape was shown only at a private party but someone, described only as a BBC insider, thought that it was necessary to leak the tape, claiming it would be “offensive” to Muslims.
Call me a cynic, but that’s the most gratuitous excuse I’ve heard in quite some time. Let’s just take a closer look at the logic of leaking this tape:
This was a video that was to be shown only at one person’s leaving party.
It would have been seen by a hundred people at most, of whom probably no more than 10 (at the outside) would have been Muslim.
This insider is worried that Muslim’s will be offended.
So, in order to prevent this offence, he releases the tape to a global audience of approximately 1 billion Muslims.
What? Does this insider have no brain cells at all?
I simply can’t believe that the person who leaked this tape was motivated by a desire to protect sensibilities of Muslims. Their motivations, surely, must have been more sinister than that - either an attempt to discredit one of their work colleagues, or the BBC as a whole.
To wrap it up in an attempt to protect Muslims from offence is a disgrace.
Cyclists in busy urban areas may have to sound a bell almost continually as they cycle along under government plans to force them not only to have bicycle bells fitted, but to use them to warn pedestrians of their approach.
I was going to use this post as an excuse to point out that pedestrians who get run over by bikes should have bloody well looked before they stepped into the road, and to pose the sarcastic question - how long until someone gets fined for noise pollution after ringing their bell constantly?
But instead, I was reminded of David Prowse, a true giant of a man. If there were more people like him around today, there wouldn’t be any need for such stupid legislation.
David Prowse, for those of you not in the know, was the very tall man in the Darth Vader suit in the first three Star Wars films. His greatest role, however, was the Green Cross Code man, who taught a generation of British schoolchildren how to cross the road without getting squashed.
I’ve never been squashed while crossing the road, so I can confirm that the Green Cross Code Man’s advice really does work.
Anyway, enough of spuriously trying to link this to cycling. I’m not really interested in making a point about cycling. I want to reminisce.
You see, I had the very great honour to meet David Prowse once - he came to my school when I was about eight years old. As you can imagine, to my eight year old eyes, he was by far the tallest thing I’d ever seen. (Although, if pressed, I probably would have admitted that he did look a bit silly in a green and white suit). I was far too shy to ask for his autograph, but I do remember him telling me very nicely how to cross the road correctly.
That was nothing compared to the highlight of the day, though. We were allowed to go outside, and gawk at his car. And what a car it was!
Prowse was the owner of a very shiny, very low-slung red Porsche, a vision of futuristic metallic coolness the like of which had certainly never been seen before in dull old Bridgwater. And, to top it all, his license plate was DARTH 1.
Upon mature reflection, I’ve no idea how a man so tall managed to get into a car so small, but that will have to just remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of my life. To the eight year old me, David Prowse was a God. And, true to my god, I always (well, occasionally) stopped, looked and listened before I ran out into the road.
Despite all this, I can completely understand why George Lucas chose to get James Earl Jones to do a voiceover of Darth’s voice. You see, I got to hear him talk when he taught me to cross the road.
For a frighteningly tall giant of a man, David Prowse speaks with a remarkably soft Bristolian burr. And, with the very greatest of respect, hearing Darth Vader utter the immortal words…
The first picture was taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer to the Russian Tsar, who developed a revolutionary technique for taking colour pictures.More of his amazing pictures, documenting life in late Tsarist Russia can be found at the Library of Congress website - The Empire that was Russia.
Star Trek is 40 this year. And what better way to celebrate than to remaster the original series and put Kirk, Spock, McCoy et al back on syndication across the USA?
So far, so good. But for the geeks at Paramount, remastering wasn’t enough. Oh no. They had to go and get all George Lucas on us, and update the special effects.
Fools!
Star Trek was classic entertainment. By all means, clean up the picture so it looks a bit crisper - the original film stock is four decades old, afer all. But for God’s sake don’t replace all the cheesy 1960s effects with even naffer cgi graphics. They’re a part of tv history, a part of what made the show great. To replace them with effects that will look dated again in less than a decade is nothing short of sacrilege.
My dad will not be happy. And, frankly, neither am I.
I have, unfortunately, as part of a little mid-afternoon snack, just had my first taste of the new style Marmite.
DISGUSTING
The time has come, my friends, to fight for our heritage, to break out the pitchforks and rampage through the kitchen cupboards of middle England as we hunt high and low for the last remaining jars of real Marmite…
Robert Lindsay, who played the prime minister in its satire of the David Blunkett affair A Very Social Secretary, will reprise his role for The Trial of Tony Blair. Also written by Alistair Beaton, the political satire imagines a future in which Gordon Brown is in No 10 and Mr Blair is put on trial for war crimes.
I’ll leave aside, for now, cracks about how some impressionable young prosecutor might try to emulate the movie and ruin an upstanding Prime Minister’s life by putting him on trial.
Because, actually, I’m quite looking forward to this show. The cynic in me thinks there will be one of two endings:
He’ll be found guilty.
The programme will demonstrate conclusively that he is guilty, but he’ll get off on a technicality.
I hope, though, that Beaton takes the more challenging route of having the court exonerate Tony Blair. Not necessarily because I believe he is innocent (or that he is guilty, for that matter), but because I think it would make for a more challenging and thought-provoking piece of television.
The programme uses computer effects to portray an assassination of current US President, George W Bush during an anti-war rally in Chicago (althought what he’s doing at an anti-war rally is anyone’s guess).
And the reactions from the stupid? Well, try this for starters:
John Beyer, of TV watchdog MediaWatch, said it was irresponsible.
He said it could even trigger a real assassination attempt and told the Daily Mirror: “There’s a lot of feeling against President Bush and this may well put ideas into people’s heads.”
Yes, apparently there are people out there who are so suggestible that a tv drama will induce them to assassinate the President.
(Update: Mediawatchwatch (!) spots Beyer’s even better follow up, which the BBC didn’t think to include in its report: “If something happens as a consequence of this film, then blood is on their hands.” Priceless).
The Republican Party’s response wasn’t all that much more rational:
Spokesman Gretchen Essell said: “I cannot support a video that would dramatise the assassination of our president, real or imagined.”
“The greater reality is that terrorism still exists in our world. It is obvious that the war on terror is not over.
She added: “I find this shocking, I find it disturbing. I don’t know if there are many people in America who would want to watch something like that.”
And we all remember how badly Harrison Ford’s President in peril flick Air Force One flopped, don’t we?
Frankly, the only sensible response I heard came from the White House itsef = they refused to comment on the film.
I wonder how long before Michelle Malkin picks up on this story?
Farmer Lloyd Green of Glastonbury, one of the West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers, said: “I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl.
Clearly this demonstrates that cows are on the verge of developing identity politics. The outcome is now certain - the once unified cow camp will rapidly descend into inter-bovine conflict, the horrors of which we can scarcely imagine.
Kira O’Reilly will provide her own answer today by spending four hours naked, hugging a dead pig - at the taxpayer’s expense.
The controversial Irish performance artist will invite one person at a time to watch her sit in a specially-constructed set and perform a ‘crushing slow dance’ with the carcass in her arms.
She claims the bizarre exhibition is an attempt to ‘identify’ with the pig, which she cuts with a knife during the show.
I tend towards thinking it’s all about the self-publicity myself. But then I’m somewhat cynical.
Steve at Outside the Beltway seems to think much the same. He has, however, put his thinking cap on and come up with a suggestion as to how Kira could really learn how to identifying with the dead pig:
My first thought upon reading that was, “Wouldn’t she identify better with the pig if she were butchered in a similar manner?” Now that would be an example of one willing to go the distance for one’s art.
I can’t fault the logic of Steve’s suggestion.
Personally, though, I’d prefer if she tried to identify with a live pig. Perhaps she could visit a petting farm.
I watched Flightplan, the Jodie Foster film from a couple of years ago, on DVD last night. It was quite entertaining stuff, although filled with a few plotholes that really were big enough to fly a jumbo jet through.
But the howler that amused me most was the film’s portrayal of the FBI.
I don’t think it’s giving too much of the plot away to reveal that, at one point in the film, the plane lands in Newfoundland, Canada. There’s an airport there, because the first place where flights from Europe to the US fly over continental North America.
Anyway, the plane lands on Canadian soil and is at once surrounded by… FBI agents. Who then go on to reveal that agents in their ‘Berlin office’ have arrested someone.
Tehran’s decision to launch a Holocaust cartoon competition is as unacceptable as Prophet Mohammed cartoons in the European press, a senior member of Russia’s lower chamber of parliament said Tuesday.
Unfortunately, he’s consistently taking the wrong position.
War on Terror: The Boardgame is just about to hit the streets in England. The aim of the game is world domination, with ‘terrorists’ fighting against ‘empire builders’.
Star Trek is 40 this year. And what better way to celebrate than to remaster the original series and put Kirk, Spock, McCoy et al back on syndication across the USA?
