Month: March 2008

It looks like we’ll be gone before it gets to the last couple of episodes, but I’m still delighted to see The Apprentice back on telly. I stayed up late last night when I got in to watch the first one, while a still sick Sal went straight to bed. Of course it’s the same old stuff as every other year–the same hapless, arrogant, twats giving it 110% all the way while they make catastrophically idiotic decisions and then get rightly ridiculed by siralan in the boardroom, but it’s entertaining stuff anyway.

I’d love to write something witty, but I’ll leave that to Andrew Collins and the Watch With Mothers lot, who’ve beaten me to it.

What I will write about, a bit, is the other TV that I’ve been enjoying recently. Since getting back from Oz earlier in the month, Sal and I have been watching the excellent Underbelly, a dramatisation of the retributional gangland killings that took place in Melbourne for about 10 years from the mid nineties onwards.

It’s cracking TV, but all the more remarkable for the fact that–so far as I can tell from reading old news reports off The Age website–much of what is depicted in the show actually happened, and did so pretty much the way it’s presented.

They’ve even chosen to use the real names of all the people involved, which is an interesting decision given that there are still ongoing legal proceedings involving some of these people (the ones who aren’t either dead or in prison, at least, although even some of the dead ones have a part to play in some of the ongoing cases…). Having said that, perhaps you don’t have to be totally cynical to wonder whether this might not have been a deliberate calculated move, given the publicity that was generated for the show once Channel 9 had been indefinitely banned from broadcasting it in the state of Victoria by the Australian Supreme Court. I also wonder if it is a complete coincidence that suitably technically savvy Victorians have conveniently been able to watch the show anyway, given that there were high-quality torrents of the first 10 episodes up on Mininova before even half of them had been shown on TV in the other Australian states (and the only versions of episodes 11 – 13 that I’ve seen out there so far must have been leaked by someone inside the production company, given that they are rough cuts with an incomplete soundtrack and a timer running on the bottom of the screen).

It’s also interesting to us because many of the events took place in Sal’s bits of Melbourne, and some of the show was filmed in Essendon itself. One of the characters, for example, is Jason Moran, who ends up getting shot dead in front of his children (who had just finished an aussie rules game) in his van in the car park of the Cross Keys Hotel on Pascoe Vale Road. Yeah, that’d be the same Cross Keys Hotel that we’d just been to a few weeks ago for Sal’s dad’s birthday drinks…

Now, having seen the first 10 episodes, we just have the tricky decision of whether to watch those unfinished final 3 now, or wait 4-6 weeks for Australian TV to catch up so we can watch the proper ones. Decisions, decisions…

Right. If the NME tells you that Danny Goffey and Gaz Coombes of Supergrass are going to busk in Covent Garden at lunchtime, then don’t listen to them, because (as the updated news story now says), the band will be at the Royal Festival Hall instead, but you’ll go all the way over to Covent Garden and hang around for 15 minutes with some other confused people and won’t find out what’s really going on until the two paps who have also been given duff information find out where the band really are and you then end up legging it down to Embankment and over the bridge to see what remains of the busking gig…

Ah well. I might have missed the start, but it was still a more interesting use of my lunch hour than normal. I made it across to the other side of the river just in time to see Danny and Gaz (performing as the Diamond Hoo Ha Men for charity on the BBC’s Culture Show’s “let’s see how much real bands can make busking” spot) doing Beat It, which they then followed with what they described as “covers” of this band they really like called Supergrass–Lenny, Caught By The Fuzz and Diamond Hoo Ha Men.

At the end of the gig, as I hung around to watch them passing the hat around to collect for homeless charity Crisis, I overheard some confused American tourists:

Middle-aged American Lady: Who are they? They’ve got white jumpsuits on and one of them says “Randy” and the other one says “Duke”. Who are they?
American Lady’s Husband: I think they’re off TV.

American Lady: Well if they’re off TV why are they outside collecting money? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Obviously the concept of “collecting for charity” hasn’t quite made it across the Atlantic…

When XFM woke me up this morning, the first thing I consciously heard was Heather Mills talking about her divorce settlement:

Beatrice only gets £35,000 a year – so obviously she’s meant to travel B class while her father travels A class, but obviously I will pay for that.

Gosh.

How will poor 4 year old Beatrice survive on a lowly £35K + nanny and school fees?

Every now and again I go through phases of trying to geotag all my Flickr photos. There’s something very satisfying about looking at a map of the world and seeing all your pictures on it in the right places, but it is a very time consuming process, and with only about 1,500 of my 6,000ish Flickr photos on the map so far, it’s going to be a while before I get round to doing the lot.

Sadly, Flickr’s technology isn’t quite as helpful as it could be either. What with them being owned by Yahoo and everything (for now at least–I dread to think how bad things will get if Microsoft get their grubby mits on them), you’re stuck with Yahoo’s rubbish maps. Trying to put my photos from our recent Australia trip onto the map using Flickr alone would have been virtually impossible, for example, because Yahoo’s maps of Melbourne don’t really exist (unless you count a grey blob with no distinguishing features as a “map”). Oddly, their satellite pictures are really quite clear, but there’s no street-level mapping at all, even in the CBD. I’ve had to resort to installing this nifty mapping bookmarklet that lets me use Google’s much better maps to put the first photo from a particular location onto the map, and then I can drag the rest onto the same spot in Flickr.

And Flickr is equally confused by my home town. This previously geotagged photo correctly identifies itself as being “taken in Southport, England”, but this one (which I’ve dragged to exactly the same spot at the end of Southport pier at latitude 53.655505 and longitude -3.021492) was apparently “Taken in Banks, England“. A few hundred yards along the pier, closer to the town centre, we’re apparently in Brown Edge, England.

And I think it’ll be news to my parents when I mention to them that their house, despite being clearly visible on the satellite picture is not in Southport after all as we’ve all thought for all these years, but in fact in “Shirdley Hill, England”.

Having said all that, it looks like Google Maps aren’t immune to their own special brand of oddness. Looking at their maps to see where “Shirdley Hill”, “Banks” and “Brown Edge” actually are, I was somewhat surprised to see that there’s a place called Dummy1325 just over to the right of Southport. Must go and take a look next time I’m home.

From the BBC News website:

Memo to BBC News website readers: keep emailing this article to people. Email it to as many people as you possibly can…

#1: Surprises are good.

We told no one over here (apart from the bride-to-be) that we were on our way over to Australia for our friends’ wedding and Sal’s dad’s birthday. We turned up on Sal’s parents’ doorstep in Melbourne at 8:30 AM the other Friday morning and just rang the doorbell.

“Hello”, we said. “We were just in the neighbourhood and thought we’d drop in…”

#2: The Aus Dollar is bloody expensive these days.

When I first came to Australia, back in 2001, the pound bought nearly 3 aussie dollars. This time I was getting only just over 2. Not that that makes a massive difference if you’re only here on holiday for a couple of weeks, but it might be a big deal in the hypothetical scenario that someone needed to transfer their life savings across in the future…

#3: 7 Years is a Long Time.

Real cutlery appears to have made a return for inflight dining. How times have changed: I can’t take liquids on the plane and have to have my shoes X-Rayed, but I can be given a real knife. Hmm…

In other flying news, on the way back from Melbourne to Singapore on the way home we were on one of Singapore Airlines’ new 777s with their upgraded KrisWorld inflight entertainment system (this is the same one that they’ve put in the A380). Even in economy, the seat back TVs are huge (10.6″, apparently), although the entire system did crash just after takeoff (just as I tried to select Reckoner off of In Rainbows to listen to, but I suspect that that wasn’t the root cause), resulting in the slightly surreal experience of sitting on the plane watching Linux boot up on the back of everyone’s seat. “Can you understand the computer language?” asked Sal as the seat in front of me verified its memory and allocated itself an IP address.

When it was back up, I watched the excellent No Country For Old Men.

#4: It’s hard to see everyone.

With such a short time here, and as we hadn’t told anyone we were coming (and therfore hadn’t pre-planned anything) we struggled to get to see everyone. I think we did our best. And anyone we missed we will see the next time we’re in town.

#5: It’s surprisingly easy to fill a 2GB memory card in the space of a week.

It may take me some time to upload the 500 odd photos I’ve taken while we’ve been here.

#6: Melbourne weather is not all it’s cracked up to be (and Melburnians don’t half like to talk about it…)

Let’s just say I needed my jeans a fair bit more than I would have expected to, what with it being “summer” over here and all (although the sun did finally choose to make an appearance for our final weekend).

#7: Racecourses Are Cool

With the F1 Grand Prix coming up shortly, the authorities in Melbourne had already set up the grandstand and other assorted paraphernalia around the Albert Park course. As this is simply a public road for the rest of the year, you can just drive around it. So I did.

Sadly the limit on the road had been reduced to 40KM/hour, but I still got a strange childish satisfaction out of driving our tiny hire care around underneath the hoardings.