Browsing Posts published in September, 2006
Whilst I’m on the topic of media – how the hell has Jon Stewart been on the air for ten years in the US, over a year on More4 in the UK and I only discover him four weeks ago because of some awesome Stephen Colbert clips on YouTube?
This is quite simply the best funny current affairs show on the TV globally. It makes “Bremner, Bird and Fortune” look like the repetitive snooze-fest that it became just after the era of TW3. As for “The Panel”, well to be fair, that is guest-based so the writing could never compare. But if you look at The Jon Stewart Show, this is cheap TV. Even RTE could afford to make something like this. It is nearly all studio based with lots of spoof location-based reports with blue-screens. It succeeds because of great writers.
I have never understood how a nation like ours which is supposedly bursting at the seams with literary geniuses has rarely been able to create well-written current affairs comedy. Maybe it’s not considered real writing by the numberati. Or maybe the breakthrough will come when a bunch of students with a digicam and a sense of humour start uploading self-written comedy onto YouTube?
Stewart rips everyone to shreds equally which is what makes it so watchable. All of the special correspondents are fantastic and I saw an old clip the other night with both Colbert and Steve Carell which was hysterically funny. Head over to YouTube and search for Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert and you’ll see what I mean. Any chance More4 will start showing The Colbert Report now?
Some say that YouTube will be crushed by the big media companies due to the amount of copyrighted material on their site. I disagree – clips of Stewart and Colbert and others are just advertising gold. Every viewer of one of those clips is another potential viewer of the show. TV companies in particular would be nuts to go after YouTube, they’d be shooting themselves in the foot.
My discovery of this show probably means it’ll be canned next week.
Technorati Tags: Jon+Stewart, Stephen+Colbert, The+Panel, Bremner+Bird+Fortune, TW3, That+Was+The+Week+That+Was, RTE, YouTube
All reports seem to indicate that Richard Hammond is well on the mend which is a big relief to any fan of Top Gear.
Related to this, I noticed something very interesting on the BBC web-site over the past few days when checking up on him. All of the headlines are obviously decided by editors and news experts and reflect what they think are the pressing issues of the day e.g. various Iranian or Venezuelan numbskulls embarassing their nations at the UN or the genuinely important Darfur and so on. Nowhere in the headlines, after the first announcement, has Hammond been mentioned.
But if you scrolled down to the section on “most read” or “most emailed”, it is stories about Hammond that have been number one for the past three days! It really highlights the huge difference between what we “should” be interested in and what we actually are interested in.
Those of you familiar with Digg know that it is a news site where the top stories are dictated by how many votes they get from the users. They are sometimes accused by “our betters” as pandering to the mob mentality and you often do get nonsense stories as the top ones of the day but what I have always found interesting about Digg is that it generally is a strong reflection of the important stories of the day as agreed on mainstream tech news sites too. So the mob mentality works a lot of the time. I guess it is a variation of the theme of that book “The Wisdom of Crowds“(which I really should read).
Whilst I’m not saying the BBC should dump their editors (well actually they should fire all the ones who insist on the use of inverted commas around any phrase that might be considered controversial: “terrorist”, “mass murderer”, “totalitarian dictator”, “king”), they might consider making one of the headline boxes a display for the most popular story over a 4/8/12/24 hour period. News for the people by the people.
I guess that is why I am such a fan of blogs and RSS feeds – I can subscribe to sites that feed me information that I am interested in and by taking a reasonable cross-section, I end up with a fairly rich view of certain topics and stories.
My issue with general news sites (not just the BBC) is that I don’t have the tools yet to filter the torrent of stories they push out and I can neither keep up with nor have interest in 90% of that information. A news feed which monitors my reading and filters based on what I have read historically would be a very powerful tool indeed.
Technorati Tags: Richard+Hammond, BBC, News, Digg, Mob+Mentality, Wisdom+Crowds
We planted three small apple trees a few months back in the expectation that we’d get nothing for three years. Magically the poor Cox’s Pippin ignored this and is now creaking under the weight of about 15 apples. And they are beauties:
We found out that Catherine was pregnant with our first baby. She gave up smoking that instant. I wussed out for 24 hrs but eight years ago today I gave them up too. From 40 to zero overnight. One of the smartest things we ever did.
Anarkali
Food style/ethnicity: Indian
Price: 10 – 20
Location:
North Main Street
Bandon, Co Cork
Ireland
Food rating: out of 5
Decor rating: out of 5
Service rating: out of 5
I find it interesting that many people are still more comfortable sending me e-mails to ask questions rather than writing comments on the blog. I include all of my family except big sis in that group.
Do feel free to post any comments you like, you don’t have to give your full name (most don’t) and only I’ll see the email address. Blogs should be conversations rather than monologues.
In any case, I got a question from Clare asking about Indian restaurants in Bandon and I thought I’d post the gist of my reply here.
I haven’t done sit-down in either of the Indians in Bandon but I’ve had plenty of takeaways from Anarkali (023-29762). They are a bit hit and miss but the good dishes are really good.
The chilli garlic dishes are lovely, saffron chicken very nice, bhunas are good, dopiazas are good but their chicken tikka masala is awful for some reason. They seem to do creamy dishes badly.
All of their starters are really good. The restaurant itself is quite basic (and has a lot of take-away customers coming and going) but they are extremely friendly people. It’s a husband and wife team, one Indian, the other Pakistani. I also think they do BYOB.
I haven’t eaten anything from the one that was The Chapel Steps but it has already changed hands after only a few months in operation. My wife heard that it was not good when it was called Moghul. I’m not encouraged by the new owners describing it as “exotic cuisine”. I think currys stopped being exotic in the 70′s 
We’ve eaten in one of the Indians in Clon too. Not sure if it was Cobra or the other one (it’s on the same side as the bike shop) and it was in the category of not too bad. Tiniest kitchen ever!
Pork chops in the fridge and no plan. What to do that we’ll all eat? Check the press – a Lloyd Grossman Puttanesca sauce looks out at me. Hell, I’ll make my own.
- Chops into a ziplock with garlic, thyme, lemon juice and olive oil
- Saucepan on with oil, garlic and 2 anchovies
- Two cans of Aldi’s finest generic no-specific-country plum tomatoes
- Cook it down
- Add some chopped olives from the Gubbeen gastrowagon at the Skibbereen market
- Add some chopped capers.
- Salt, pepper, hint of sugar.
- Boiling water on with a packet of Orecchiette Paesani (little ears), also from Aldi. Bloody hell, I have never seen this pasta in any shop or deli in Ireland. This is the stuff the old dears were making in that Jamie Oliver series in Italy with their thumbs. And now Aldi sells it. I’m pleasantly stunned.
- Chops onto the frying pan.
- Sizzle sizzle.
- Serve
- Eat
You can say what you like about Top Gear but I can’t stop myself loving it. It is silly, childish and predictable but it is one of the few programmes I look forward to in the week.
Sadly, I just heard that Richard Hammond was critically injured in a crash in a jet car doing upwards of 280 MPH! Fingers crossed that he recovers.
tags: Top+Gear, Richard+Hammond
Norm Geras has given the history of one of my all time favourite one liners from a stand-up comedian. It is Michael Redmond’s piece of perfection “a lot of people say to me…..”
I heard that for the first time back in the early 1990′s, probably on one of the stand-up shows on TV. Or did he support Dylan Moran at some Irish gig?
It was around the same time that Mr Trellis were are their peak and Ardal O’Hanlon delivered his best ever joke. I’ll paraphrase it badly here: ”My Dad has a great sense of humour. Once, I put the price sticker off a bar of chocolate on the fridge and said ‘Hey dad, look, the fridge only cost 32p’. ‘No it didn’t’ he replied, ‘it cost £299′”
OK, ye had to be there.
tags: Michael+Redmond, Ardal+O’Hanlon, Mr+Trellis
I see Apple have announced a new product allows consumers to manage and playback their digital-media files on their televisions.
They’ve called it the iTV. Sadly for UK purchasers, this means that it’ll only be capable of playing Corrie, Heartbeat, Celebrity Love Island and repeats of Crossroads.
