"Would you like to come to my party Pom Pom? Would you like to be my guest? It's gonna be a Poo Poo Party Pom Pom, a Poo Poo Party's the best."

This surreal masterpiece was originally created by Adam Buxton for the Song Wars segment of the BBC 6 Music radio show he shared with Joe Cornish. It's now been given a rather disturbing video to accompany it.

Mark Gatiss commissioned to write 50th Anniversary drama for Doctor Who

The Guardian reports that the show 'An Adventure in Time and Space', will air on BBC2 in November of next year, 50 years after the first Time Lord graced our screens.

Until then, here's an incredible fan-made trailer to mark the big five oh.

Tear-jerking testament to 'nature red in tooth & claw'

The list of films, books and songs that are capable of making me cry is extensive. The list of things that genuinely upset or distress me is far shorter but has just grown by one.

Is the defection of Syria's Prime Minister the final blow for Assad?

The BBC have reported that Syrian Prime Minister Riad Hijab has defected to Jordan.

Unconfirmed reports suggested that two other cabinet ministers had also deserted and there were claims that a third, Finance Minister Mohammad Jalilati, had been arrested while trying to flee.

The article goes on to say that:

Last month, Syria's ambassador to Iraq, Nawaf Fares, deserted to the opposition. Like the former prime minister, he was also from Deir al-Zour. Brig Gen Manaf Tlas, who was considered close to President Assad, also defected in July.
Thirty other generals have crossed the border into Turkey and Turkish news agency Anatolia reported on Monday that another general had fled with five high-ranking officers and more than 30 soldiers.

Could the loss of such a high ranking member of his government in so public a fashion be enough to convince Assad that it's time to admit defeat or will it cause a further escalation in the violence that is tearing Syria apart?

Nobody told Malcolm Tucker that swearing was a sign of a limited vocabulary

Featuring extremely NSFW language, these scenes from the BBC's "The Thick of It", show that profanity can be beautifully artistic in the right hands.

47 years of Doctor Who in 6 minutes

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Want to see an idiot who superglued a tiny sequined top hat to his head?

I had a feeling you might.



Source: BBC Three's Bizarre ER

This is somehow simultaneously hilarious and horrific

I heard this mentioned on Charlie Brooker's radio show and had to share it with you. It features Keith Chegwin, Lionel Blair, Jim Bowen and a trouserless Bobby Davro in a clip now used by the BBC to show how not to do things.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

First video footage of uncontacted Brazilian tribe

The intro to the BBC's DVDs in America is rather humorous

In the UK we don't get to see the BBC's advertising efforts. Turns out we've been missing out:



Via: thedailywh.at

How To Become A Dragon

This is impressive and must have taken a great deal of practice...which is obviously a bad thing and most likely has long term health consequences

10 of your favourite anti-tech words

An interesting little piece on the BBC website:

BBC News - 10 of your favourite anti-tech words

I have had occasions where these words would have been useful to describe what I was doing or had done. My favourite, which shall be incorporated into daily use with immediate effect is "Memail: e-mail I send to myself to remind me to do things". A large number of the emails I send every day fall into this category and now I finally know what to call them.

Headlines - Wednesday 10th March 2010

There is no evidence acupuncture or Chinese herbal medicine increase the chance of getting pregnant through IVF, fertility experts say in new guidance. The methods are increasingly offered as a way of boosting the chances of a baby, but the British Fertility Society suggests couples may be wasting money. (Well duh! - BBC News)

Large Hadron Collider to shut down for a year to address safety concerns (BBC News)

Lost Jewish tribe 'found in Zimbabwe'. They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones. (BBC News) Oh, and they also have the Ark of the Covenant!

 


Porn internet domain name 'dot.xxx' plan revived three years after it was rejected by internet regulators. (BBC News)

Hard drive evolution could hit Microsoft XP users. By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them. However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old drive for one using the changed format. (BBC News)

British Telecom's chief executive, Ian Livingston, says illegal file-sharers should be fined rather than have their internet accounts cut off (BBC News)

The driving test should have compulsory questions on level crossings to cut the number of drivers who take risks on them each year, Network Rail has said. (BBC News)

Royal Mail sets its sights on delivering more junk mail. [Royal Mail] insists that removing the cap on junk mail deliveries will not lead to householders receiving more items. (Yeah right! - BBC News)

Deforestation has revealed what could be a giant impact crater in Central Africa, scientists say. The 36-46km-wide feature, identified in DR Congo, may be one of the largest such structures discovered in the last decade. (BBC News)

Survivors

I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic fiction and it's rare that I come across an example of the genre that doesn't captivate my interest. So why is it that I'm struggling to bring myself to watch any more of the BBC's series 'Survivors'?

Shown on BBC One in prime-time it is clearly a key part of the Beeb's early 2010 programming. This is the second season and tonight saw the broadcast of it's second episode but it's unlikely I'll be tuning in for the third episode.

I must start by saying that I missed the first season, not by choice I just didn't realise it was on until the season had finished. That being said I started watching the second season having done my homework. I'd watched the recap clips and read the episode guides and so had an overview of what to expect. Unfortunately none of this preparation lead me to expect such poor quality from a flagship show. The dialogue is nearly unbearable at times, tonight's episode in particular had the token child (Naj - because Najid is too long to say repeatedly it seems) spouting awful lines and behaving in a manner that apocalypse-or-not would have earned him a slap if I'd been around.

I'm used to forgiving Sci-Fi and Fantasy fiction for it's many flaws in exchange for a look at the worlds they provide but I can't seem to bring myself to grant 'Survivors' this concession. Not knowing the details of the first series I can't really comment on why the minuscule number of survivors are starving to death in a major metropolitan city. I can comment on the fact that the show seems to be geared around constantly placing the 'Survivors' into perilous predicaments (they clearly haven't been through enough in surviving the downfall of civilisation).

The previous series concluded with one character laying shot in the raid by sinister men in black which saw another character kidnapped. The new series picked up immediately from this point with the group racing to save the life of their fallen comrade by visiting the nearest hospital. This was the setup for an episode in which a hospital collapses upon half the gang, Max Beesley gets to slow motion run through a lot of dust holding a shotgun, the shot character has a fever flashback and another female character has to submit to being raped in order to obtain a rather pitiful piece of rescue equipment:

There is clearly an attempt to focus on the relationships and the emotions of this handful of individuals forced together by the apocalypse. This is muddied by the stories insistence that they spend their time shouting at each other, running for their lives or laying very still (either under rubble, on a table bleeding to death or in a sinister lab surrounded by figures in Haz-Mat suits). The two aims don't work on screen at all, in the hands of better writers or with better actors perhaps this wouldn't be the case, other works have managed it (none perhaps more skilfully than Stephen King's 'The Stand').

It is disappointing that a big BBC One show, in a genre for which I am a fan of and aimed squarely at the demographic I inhabit, can fail to arouse more than minimal interest from me. This wasn't helped by the decision to have a two week gap between the first and second episodes due to the football - this isn't America, scheduling should be continuous.

Next week I think I shall be re-watching Skeet Ulrich in 'Jericho' instead.

Fire!

Well, Firefox anyway...



I know there about 7 million tech blogs out there giving advice, so just to be clear this is not one of them. I merely wanted to say a few things about Firefox that occurred to me whilst writing the previous post.



Unlike most people, I only started using Firefox because I couldn't get Internet Explorer to work on my PC. After being offline for almost three years, all my software was way out of date and after many hours getting the various service packs and product updates, I found that IE wouldn't work properly when it came to handling videos and other flash based services. This was of course a large problem as the entire net now seems to revolve around flash including two of my favourite sites YouTube and the BBC iPlayer, neither of which would load, let alone stream.



So I downloaded a copy of Firefox at the start of the year and I am now in love with it, even though it has its flaws. I can't run the fancy version of Yahoo Mail for instance, (IE could though) so have to stick to the classic option and it Firefox does have a tendency to crash every so often. This may be due to my habit of opening 20 tabs at once, but thankfully with Firefox this is not a problem as I can just restart the old session. - I know IE probably does this now. They copied the tabs so why not steal this also?



The star feature of Firefox has to be the quick and easy plug-ins and extensions due to it's open source nature. I've got a load of them that I've tried out but there are two that lead the field. The first allows you to save the page you're viewing and come back to it later without having to bookmark it. I used to use "Read it Later", recommended on the BBC tech show Click. However with the recent record breaking release of Firefox 3 most of the extensions needed updating, and as there wasn't yet one for this feature, I looked around a found a better one called "Taboo".



Again, you click a button on the task bar to save the page and another one to display it later. The difference with Taboo is that it takes a screen shot to remember where you were on the page and the text of any fields you'd entered. Another button displays a drop down list of all the pages you've marked. So while "Read it Later" has now been updated, I'm sticking with my "Taboo".



The other extension that I like is "Googlepedia", a nifty addition which allows you to combine the powers of Google and Wikipedia (hence the name).



For every Google search you perform, it displays a wiki page - based on your keywords - down the right hand side of the page, replacing the adverts. This can save a lot of time as the wiki often provides you with the information you need to narrow down your search if not the information itself. The links within this wiki page can also be set so that clicking on them displays the requested wiki page on the right hand side of the screen whilst displaying a Google search on the keywords on the left hand side. With the power of these two internet giants you should be able to find just about anything within a few clicks, but the unexpected pleasure fo this extension is the entertaining (or distracting) diversions and tangents it inspires as you find yourself following wiki links or Google search results you wouldn't have gone looking for. This is most obvious when your search keywords load a wiki page seemingly unrelated to the item you were looking for.



My final point concerns a controversial new feature present on Firefox 3 dubbed "the awesome bar". Negating the typing of full web addresses it allows you to just begin typing the keywords of the site into the address bar, generating a drop down list of suggested sites based upon your surfing history.



Those of you with a habit of visiting the murkier side of the net may find this worrying (thus the inevitable controversy) but there are numerous edits and patches to remove the function or restrict it's ability to display certain site's. This should mean that if another user types in an innocuous keyword such as "horseriding" they won't be directed towards that interspecies erotica site you visited the previous day.



If like me you tend to clear your history every 30 seconds (you need to stop looking at so much porn!) the awesome bar uses you're bookmarks. If you don't see what you're looking for in the list, hit enter and get a Google search. This will of course have a wiki page thus triggering a flurry of links opening in to new tabs, the chance of a crash but the relief of a restart so you can begin the cycle anew.

I'll leave you with a little something to think about that I came across whilst searching for a  picture of dear old Nelson for the previous post.

P.S. - While I was writing this post, Firefox did suddenly disappear from my screen. I'm assuming it crashed (although I won't rule out abduction with the recent UFO sightings that we should all be paying so much attention to). Thankfully it all loaded up again easily enough, only for me to realise that the auto-save function was disabled on my post and I had to redo half my work. Ah well...