On normal service.

Unfortunately, you will not be writing a blog entry tonight.
Die Hard 4.0 is on the TV.

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On the idiotbox.

Best Friend recently commented that it was time for Mutual Acquaintance to go back to work. She was starting to contemplate which of the CBeebies presenters she fancied.
It hasn’t yet come to that,* but you have started heckling the TV.
You originally only tuned in because the education geek inside you was curious about the way the world was [...]

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On oochie coo.

It was while you were watching some soppy reality TV zoo documentary programmy whatsit about a month after the Star was born that you finally realised that something was very very wrong.
There were lions. There were penguins. There were lizards. There were elephants. There were meercats. There were polar bears. There were ostriches. There were rhinos. [...]

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On inflation.

Being a Formula One fan in Russia was not easy.
They never seemed to conclude negotiations for the TV rights before the third race, which meant that not only did you miss the beginning of the season, but you had to surf the channels every Sunday from March until you found out who was showing it [...]

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On lies and damn lies.

You have to confess to a certain ambivalence towards news journalists.*
One of the charges the postmodernists throw at historians of the old school is that they create the illusion of empiricism by the style they employ in their writing. No hint of a mention of ‘I think…’, an attempt to surpass the amount written in [...]

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On the aging process.

Never before have you felt so old.
There you are, watching the TV (again), when along comes the next installment of the BT ad.
This time the Bloke and his Woman are having an argument. On some kind of instant messaging service because he’s away on business. This being the source of the spat. His being away, [...]

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On how to produce a good Eurovision entry.

You adore the Eurovision Song Contest and you say this totally without the kind of qualifiers that Brits usually add at this point. Such as ‘it’s so tragiclly kitsch’.
In fact, you are rather bemused by the fact that the British persist in regarding the thing as a monumental joke and yet follow programmes like Pop Idol with [...]

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On being in favour of inequality.

You are no longer convinced about the value of the concept of equality.
This is mainly because there’s a common misconception that in order to be equal, things have to be the same.
You can claim until you are blue in the face and ready to stick a fork in someone’s eye that, say, feminism – to take a concept entirely at [...]

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On auld lang syne.

You used to be awful at New Year’s. You’d like to be sniffy and say it was because you aren’t very good at having fun to order, but actually it was probably more because you had a tendancy to be bad at ordering the fun and would rather wait and see if it would turn up of [...]

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On greeting the season.

 AB’s Christmas meme:
This quiz makes some assumptions about the way that various mid-winter festivals are celebrated in the modern world.  Feel free to change it to suit your circumstances. 
Which mid-winter festival(s)  did your family celebrate when you were a child?
Christmas and New Year.
Which mid-winter festival(s) do you celebrate as an adult?
British Christmas.
New Year in the Russian style, which is the [...]

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