Telly includes Treasure Hunt (1985) in Brighton. Been there, been there, didn't do the pavilion. Anneka ran from the sea-front to the pavilion in five minutes. Slouch!
My Hero (new, Trouble) is another of those writing-as-catharsis-and-popularity (in that order) dramas. Cheap, but well-scripted and kinda moreish. Shame it's on at 9am, while I'm at work ):
The Trial Of Jack Ruby (History) Analysing the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, and hinting at the cover-up that quite clearly happened. Lots of shots of familiar places, and confirmation of where the grassy knoll *was* - exactly where I thought it was, over to the Onion Tower.

Yep, this would be the beginning of the end of the summer. It's been a strange summer, taking the second half of June out is something I've not done before. The weather's been blowing hot and cold, culminating in a gloriously sunny day today, but a slight ground frost is just possible overnight. I'm seriously thinking about following one of my work colleagues in getting a formal set of qualifications short of Microsoft qualifications. And there's eight and a half days vacation left to take before the beginning of December. I'm leaning to a week in late October - early November. Perhaps around my birthday.

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YEA I KNOW ITS MADDDD SAD AND IT GIVES ME THE CHILLS I STILL CANT BELIEVE I THINK ITS A LIE BIT DO KNOW WHERE WAS SHE HEADED?
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Back to work, sadly. The morning is so frantic that I'm quite literally rushed off my feet. But make time for some anti-virus upgrades during the afternoon.

There's a new Spar store opened just off my route home. As all I really need is a loaf of bread, give them a try. Maybe not again - they're charging almost half as much again as the regular superstore. Maybe next week, visit the superstore before eating. Worth a shot...

Track of the day: Only Love Can Break Your Heart - St Ettienne (Fox Base Alpha, 1990) Neil Young did the original, natch. The London-based baggy group took the waltz step, turbo-charged it with a hunky keyboard line, and gave Sarah Cracknell the most swoonsome vocals in many a year. It may only have reached #39 in the weekly charts, but this is one of those tracks that has lived on.

chelle:

this won't make sense if you've not been paying attention.
And if that's the case, I'm afraid the words "tough" and "luck" spring to mind.

my best halloween costume was halloween 1997 when i went as courtney love.
The phrase "this we must see" springs to mind.

i want to have ice cream with ariel!
OK, when I come to Chicago, we head off to Toronto for a couple of days, meet Ariel, visit Greg's, and perpetually be two blocks from the CNN tower.

i saw a program on the telly ;+) about haunted places and they mentioned the tower of london and now i want to go! real! bad! (obSasha). as if i didn't already pine for places across the pond.
Brits: do we know of any mind-blowing ice-cream parlours in London? I know somewhere they serve real Cornish pasties, but that's *so* not the same.

freaks and geeks is phenomenal, truly.
Thank you, I'm persuaded (:

come visit me! or, come to coryton. as far as i'm concerned, it is still happening, even if i get to arizona and it's just me and cory havin' a latte at beans and noodles.
Mine's a cappie with chocolate. Gotta indulge once in a while.

erm... i suppose i've not made myself clear on this ... and i apologize. i moved back in with Ed, my husband. for now. because not doing so seemed more wrong than doing so. this has been the source of my unending confusion. am i making a mistake or not, and all that. so far, so good.
Yes, I can see how that would be thoroughly confusing. A candidate for weirdest break-up since - oh, November 94.

i was never really actually in the ranks of single, at least not in recent years, definitely not during my list time. i was merely ... complexly unsingle.
Not that there's anything wrong with the ranks of the single. As Paulo will doubtless confirm (:

dare i say it? life... just might be good right now.
Hurrah! And, yes, [hugs]

chelle who promises to return to normal lurking self, pronto.
Now how are we going to work out Chicago airports if you do that?

Planning for Coryton this new year is in full swing. Investigate my travel options. There's a direct flight from London to Phoenix, only a hop and a skip away from Tucson, but it leaves from the far side of England's capital. I could go from Manchester via Atlanta or Chicago, but that would mean paying over the odds. So it's going to be from Birmingham to Chicago to Tucson. On the preliminary schedules, that involved a five-hour layover at O'Hair going out, but I now see this is just three hours each way. Based on experiences at Newark, three hours is just about the right length of time for a transfer involving Customs and a probable change of terminal.

(Any readers who want to join us in Tucson over new year, please write me at the usual address, not at the link below, which is hardly ever read.)

Up on the hill over lunch hour, listening to Century Radio's news-ish feature, The Way It Is. Events with brief gobbetts (technical term) set to an aggravating drum beat. There ought to be a spoof bulletin, The Way It Isn't...

A forty-foot blancmange escapes from a school near Cambridge, and runs amuck through the fens. The pink milk-and-egg confectionary is believed to be targetting obnoxious school children, who refused to eat it during the last school year. The army would have been called out, except they're all on missions in Formeryugoslavia, disarming rebels of their battery-powered lemon meringue pies.

How do we love Eminem? Let us count the ways Jaeda:
DETROIT ROCKS JUST BECAUSE THAT GREAT CITY BORNE EMINEM!
Dee Barnfield, UK music critic, writes of his performance at the Reading festival...
"The messages of negativity, hate and misogyny seem to be most forceful. I appreciate that he�s an astute man in some ways, but I feel he�s very na�ve in others; all the crotch-grabbing reminded me of a recently potty-trained toddler."

On the upside, accommodation for new year in Arizona looks like it'll happen. Looks like the trip will happen. Yay!

Signs Of Geekiness chelle:
i love being caffeinated. caffeine and sugar are excellent cures for depression.
And for tiredness. I don't know why, but I've had zero energy on waking these last few days. Coffee + sugar sorts that out. Cola is not really appropriate for breakfast - it tends to make the corn flakes turn a disgusting brown colour.

you know, as convenient as technology is supposed to make our lives, this is incredibly irritating.
Ah, but it's not the technology that's the problem. It's the imbecile humans that are setting restrictions so they don't have to think outside the telemarketing script. It annoys the heck out of any self-respecting geek.

And I was comparing the work we do with the work done by our competitors. They'd come up with some Word document that wants to print on 13" x 9.2" paper. This is not a size that anyone has lying around the office, but it's a breeze to reformat the document to A4.

Makes me feel better than them. A sensation of geekier than thou.

---

Shana:
it's a major problem at the server end but the techs are acting like they don't know anything
The sentence above is slightly too long. The words "are acting like they" are superfluous.

"Yeah, you're right, it doesn't load! I'll go tell my boss!".
Oh my! I was wondering what former Texas governor George Bush was doing these days. And now we know.

Listeners in the UK might have heard the tape of when he called PBS to enquire about an answer to a taxing puzzle on Sesame Street... but that's a whole other track.

I'll keep checking the newsgroup and will update as soon as something useful is said! :)
Bet it didn't come from the mouths of tech support.

I would apply to become the one intelligent techie there, but someone else needs the job more.

Coryton planning continues: chelle:
Weaver:
> And 512.8 miles? Gee, that's a bit far. 510 is my limit.
buggeration.
Quite.

could be ... depends on how awful customs runs at o'hare. which i don't know, sorry :+(
From experience at Newark, the big queue is to see the customs officer. Bag claim and formal entry are five minutes after that. Even on a busy summer Sunday, it took no more than 45 minutes to clear Customs, and another 15 minutes to transfer terminals. Coming in during the quiet period after Christmas means that I should have change from one hour, never mind three.

at any rate, do need to know the flight numbers to arizona so i can scope prices, etc... and see if there is any feasibility in my taking the same flight at all.
Oh, she's after flight numbers already, and I don't have them to hand, only connections. It's American, direct, at around 1630. I'll get back to you with full details. It also connects well with AA's flight from Madrid.

jamie and i took the same flights to and from west virginia and they were much fun. i even let him have the window seat. i'm a jolly good travel companion, old bean, or something. :+)
[chuckle]
I'm hoping we'll have a lot of room on the flight. Enough so that we can all have an aisle, window, *and* maybe middle seat each. This is my main argument for flying Dec 26 - nobody else wants to fly that close to Turkey Day.

Dad had arranged to be here at 9:30 to go ladder shopping, and it's a bit of a rush to get ready for him. But I manage it, get the ladder, and the rest of the shopping. Bump into the mother of the guy next door, a charming Irish lady who knows some people in Codsall. Small world.

But it's tiredness that's the order of the day.

Come To Milton Keynes!byron c go:
I'd always wondered where Milton Keynes was, at least since I heard the Style Council song ("Come To Milton Keynes")
For those not in the know, it's a town centre that was built just after the Second World War, combining about half a dozen villages. The new construction, known as Milton Keynes New Town, is laid out on a grid system. Rather than having traffic lights at all major intersections, there are roundabouts. This makes navigation almost impossible. The easiest and safest way out of the town is by train; 50 miles south takes you to London, 60 miles NW leaves you in Birmingham.

Of course, a classmate of mine thought Milton Keynes was a person...
Almost; it was named after an economist. Just the one, mind, and we never quite know whether it was Maynard or John.

Hand-over-mouth moments in the Belgian Grand Prix, as Luciano Burti crashes straight into a tyre wall at something over 150mph. Mercifully, his injuries are limited to concussion and bruising. It could have been so much worse.

The Weaver 21: Madonna's 1989 hit Like A Prayer is an undisputed classic, and will tend to rule the roost whenever it appears. Similar explanations behind entries for Kate Bush, the Art of Noise, St Ettienne, Martha and the Muffins, the Eurythmics, and Suzanne Vega. More recent hits from U2 and I Monster stage a return, while Natalie Imbruglia has never really been away.
Of the new stuff, Cake's Short Skirt Long Jacket, a discussion of brains -v- beauty in a woman, lands highly. I finally get to hear Superman - Five For Fighting has been climbing the AT40 for some weeks, but only now makes a UK airplay. Tori Amos' new single just crept into this list by a few hours, I suspect Strange Little Girls will rise over the coming weeks. The Little Trees' Help! I'm A Fish remains the perfect pop candy, while Muse's definition of Bliss must be loud and discordant. And Blake Shelton's Austin has been a bit of a grower, finally making the cut this week.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, Countdown moves to a 45-minute slot at the end of this month. I'm wondering how huge scores we can expect.
At the moment, we have six letters games, played for a maximum of 18 points; two numbers games for 10 points each; and the conundrum, also for 10 points. Under the extended version, there will be 11 letters games, three numbers, and one conundrum. The theoretical maximum increases from 138 to 238.
Realistically, I reckon the maximum under the current format is somewhere just above the 104 we saw on Wednesday. That day had two seven and one six-letter word games, so I'll call 107 the max. The record is 83, 77.5% of the maximum.
Following a similar distribution, the longer game might see four 9-letter rounds, three 8s, three 7s, and a 6. I suspect one of the three numbers games may not be resolvable, so call the maximum 160. That suggests the all-time record will tend towards 124 points.
Such exceptional performances will, by their nature, not happen every day. A regular daily maximum under the current scoring system could be: two 8-letter words, three 7s, a 6, a 10 and a 7 from the numbers, and the conundrum. Total of 70 points.
In the longer game, this might become four 8s, four 7s, two 6s and a 5. Two 10s and a 7 on the numbers game, plus the conundrum, gives a total of 114.
Applying the 77.5% rule gives an average winning score of 54 at the moment, which is close to the observed median. It gives 88 for the longer game, which I suspect may be a little too high.
Time will tell, no doubt.

Aussie ship | More on the blancmange | Turkey

Multi-national fun and games in the South Seas. An Indian ship carrying 400 Afghan refugees sinks in the ocean off Indonesia. They're rescued by a Norwegian ship named after a Florida resort, which tries to take them to the nearest land, Christmas Island. That falls under the jurisdiction of Australia, where there's an Election looming. The Aussies deny landfall at Christmas Island, and close the port to journalists, preventing the facts from getting out. After the ship enters territorial waters, the Australian army boards the vessel, and the refugees go on hunger strike and threaten to throw themselves off the sides. Norway complains to the United Nations, but Australia raises the spectre of record-breaking Eurovision flop "Mil Ettr Mil."

Protests from international people fall on deaf ears. The Age joins the chorus: "If even one life is lost during the course of this incident, the blood will be on Australia's hands and John Howard's conservative, non-compassionate Australia will be reviled internationally." The irony of the situation, that most Australians are only there because of their own criminal heritage, is also lost on most people.

The Australian government loses a battle with the parliament to bring in a law imposing draconian punishments on all Norwegian ships that want to dock at Christmas Island. Total number of ships that would have been affected 1996 - 2000: nil. It is further embarrassed when the government of East Timor offered to take the refugees. The government was only elected the day before, and the country doesn't formally exist until October. The Aussies fail to see the irony of sending stateless people to a non-existent state, and decline the offer.

This resulted in a stand-off: the captain of the Tampa won't move her from Christmas Island until the passengers are allowed off. Australia won't allow them in. Conditions on board were bad to begin with, and only get worse as the week draws on.

Finally, a settlement crawls out of the woodwork on Saturday. About 150 of the refugees will be taken to New Zealand, which had offered to take them earlier in the week. The remainder will land in the archiapeloego of Nauru, from where they'll be dispersed around the Pacific rim. Some might even go to Australia.

The UN High Commission for Refugees includes the following on its website FAQ
Q: "Are there guidelines on stowaways, or people rescued at sea, who claim asylum?"
A: "Ships' masters have a fundamental obligation under international law to rescue any persons in distress at sea. In some cases, such as the exodus of Vietnamese boat-people, such persons have been asylum-seekers. Ships may also discover that they are carrying clandestine stowaways, who may also be asylum-seekers."

The established international practice is that persons rescued at sea should be disembarked at the next port of call, where they should always be admitted, at least on a temporary basis, pending resettlement. Certain flag states of rescuing ships (though not all) have provided guarantees of resettlement for persons rescued at sea."

The Court of Appeal rules that a lesbian schoolteacher, hounded out of her job after decades of anti-gay bullying, has no protection in English law. We wondered which clever QC is celebrating victory, having argued so persuasively that the lady in question had no right to equal treatment? Why, it's congratulations to Cherie Booth, wife of Tony Blair and current pin-up of the human rights lobby! Hurrah!

Conservative leadership (very) hopeful Iain Duncan Smith insists he turned down a job in John Major's government on principle. Major says flatly that he never offered IDS a job anyway. IDS' spokesman retorts: 'If you want to know the truth, go and ask Jonathan Aitken.' We tried to, but that would be a breach of his parole conditions, after being caught for perjury in 1999.

An update on the explosive blancmange, which moved from Cambridge, through Peterborough and much of the East Midlands before squishing into Manchester. The northern city is known for its wet climate, and rain proves fatal to any milk-based confection. Police are warning motorists of a gooey pink morass on the M60 around Stockport.

Israel moves into the Palestinian town of Beit Jalla, and vows to stay indefinitely. An Israeli missile kills the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the political leader was alleged to be plotting terrorist attacks against Israel. After a local ceasefire is arranged, the Israelis pull out after just over two days.

The inexplicable conservatism and arrogance of the Turkish customs authorities was recently shown by the prohibition of the importation of typewriters into the country. The reason advanced by the authorities was that in the event of seditious writing executed by the typewriter being circulated, it would be impossible to obtain any clew by which the operator of the machine could be traced. A large consignment of 200 typewriters was lying in the custom house at the time the above law was passed, and will have to be returned.

Item from 1901 sneaks into online news sheet. Editor "not bothered."