almost witty

So far, my most embarassing desk-work moments have involved:

- merrily miming along to a superlative Pet Shop Boys track called I’m In Love With A Married Man.
- shrieking like a girl when I played a video that unexpectedly turned into one of those scary jumpy videos.

But fortunately, I’ve not yet been caught looking at things I shouldn’t have, quite like this:

Video placement paid for by ChannelBee

As long-time readers of this blog may know, I (along with lots of pop-culture-obsessed UK’ers) am a huge fan of Spaced. For those not in the know, it’s almost a British piss-take on Seinfeld, albeit obsessed with pop culture instead of the people around them. (In so many ways, Seinfeld would have worked better if it was British! I mean, what other nation is such an expert when it comes to examining the innards of human society, and the bizarre rituals and expectations that grow up around them?)

Anyway, skip to the end and while Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright (director) went off to do many funny things (and Pegg is the new Scotty for Star Trek), Jessica Stevenson’s career seemed to take an interesting turn.

She could have continued to mill her geek comedienne persona into all sorts of interesting things - but after a BBC-helmed comedic misfire, she seemed to turn her back on all things comedy, getting married, having three children and, of course, falling in love with David Tennant in Doctor Who: Human Nature.

Fortunately, to commemorate the American release of Spaced: The Complete Series on DVD (Americans! buy it now! It’s got commentaries and praise from the likes of Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino & Matt Stone!), the triumvirate have hit the publicity trail, complete with this video interview with Empire at Comic-Con. and I’m pleased to report that Jessica is as funny, geeky and - damn it, rude - as ever.

To recap, the Spanish basketball team pose for a pre-Olympic-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures in one of Spain’s major newspapers. Freelance Madrid-based journalist Sid Lowe points this out in the Guardian, spreading the story everywhere else with predictable outrage in English-speaking media.

To which the Spanish wonder what the fuss is about. The Spanish-language paper El Mundo debates whether the advert was racist, and accuses the British press of trying to smear Spain’s good name. One Spanish basketballer apologises, saying “It’s wrong to interpret it as racist.”, while the head coach says “I don’t think it was offensive”.

Now, brilliantly, the original journalist who filed the report has filed a piece defending himself against accusations that he had a hidden agenda, pointing out that he never said it was racist. Of course, if you see someone carrying an umbrella, you don’t wonder if it’s raining or not.

Oh, and here’s the Spanish tennis team making a similar gesture. Interestingly, a random sampling of Chinese people in Beijing suggests they aren’t that bothered - but then they don’t have the history of racial harassment.

Believe it or not, I used to be able to develop and program a computer (and yes, I can choose the perfect time). Admittedly, nothing more complicated than BBC Basic, HTML and adjusting a Javascript code, but I did think I’d lost those skills.

I was - and am - a huge fan of the LJ Hook Firefox extension. It basically allows me to add HTML code to a Firefox text entry window via a simple right-click - but it doesn’t work out-of-the-box in Firefox 3.

Tonight, since I couldn’t sleep and am still coughing/spluttering/snorting/having difficulty breathing, I ended up fiddling with the extension, having vaguely remembered reading a blogpost about tricking Firefox into installing old extensions.

And somehow, I’ve managed to get LJ Hook to work - and even slightly improved it by letting it work on all websites. Now, I’m wondering about the ethicacy of uploading an improvement to someone else’s extension when it’s not Creative-Commons licensed but the original author seems to have disappeared…

As I got on a random London bus this morning, I grabbed a copy of freebie newspaper The Metro which was lying on a bus seat. As a freebie newspaper (supported by advertising, given away across London and other major cities), it has a discernable value of, well, zero. Aside from the articles inside, which are of the same level as the international coverage of your local American paper ie it’s just copy from the news wires.

However, the paper was evidently of some value to the woman behind me, who sat down with an audible harumph and tut. I offered her the paper, to which she snootily replied “Oh no, I have a much better paper!”, and proceeded to loudly take out some copy of The Literary Economist (not a literal title, but something of that ilk) and concentrate on that. Even though I’d put the paper back down on the bus seat so she could read it.

The bus proceeded to where I had to get off, and as I was waiting for the bus to stop, I noticed her putting down her better paper, and grabbing the Metro as if her life depended on it. I never knew something that’s available for free would be so valuable…