In the distant past, Channel 4 provided an oasis of incredible alternative comedy that turned heads and raised smiles. In those days Vic and Bob were having a Big Night Out, Frank Skinner resided in My Blue Heaven, Robert Lindsey was funny in Nightingales and in the wee small hours of the late evening we could all take a trip to Stoneybridge and beyond (what beyond Mucker?) with the cast of ‘Absolutely ‘. Yes, yes - they did release a couple of vidos in the early 90s, while Mr Don and Mr George got their own series and a video of their own; but, it has been some 20 years since the series and no one saw fit to release the whole series for home viewing until now.

So, I shall certainly be buying this one. Too long have I waited. Memorable characters like the Little Girl, Frank Hovis (on the lavatory), Calum Gilhooley, and the grumpy old man (whose cry of ‘Arse’ preceded the plaintive cry of Unlucky Alf’s ‘Bugger’ by more than 10 years). Yes, it had ups and downs, but so did ‘Monty Python’. While ‘ethnic’ comedy has not necessarily worked since, ‘Absolutely’ seemed to transcend this with characters both lovable and loathable with a British twang and a Celtic brogue.

Anyway… before I make a fool of myself with more comments, I’ll leave you with a piece of unreservedly juvenile humour in the lavatory with Frank Hovis:

I witnessed another fine example of middle lane madness today, something I see every single day in all honesty. It erks me most when drivers do it so blatantly, sitting in the overtaking lanes for junction after junction with hardly an obstruction to overtake in sight.

This morning a young woman with dark, shoulder-length hair in a black Volkswagen Polo (a very recent registration, ending with ZXM) hurtled westwards along the M56 in the middle lane in an apparently catatonic state. I could see her in my rear view mirror clocking up mile upon mile, at first in the middle lane and then the outside lane, at times with no car within several hundred yards. At one point, there was a driver in the inside lane and she sat in the outside lane - nothing to stop her pulling back across - with a great 4 by 4 tailgating her.

What possesses these people? When she finally passed me - in the outside lane - she wasn’t on the phone or singing… nothing that would explain the oblivious attitude. It seriously worries me - because that indifference to the road will inevitably lead to accidents or road rage… and then who will she blame.

OK… an old post from the old version of Boreders, the promise of Summer in the not too distant future reminded me I had this lying around. What if Molly Sims and B&Q got together to really sell you that quality wheelbarrow?

I don’t know… but, now you can have a possible result on your desktop and muse on the possibilities whenever you like. I discovered Molly Sims through an associates Sports Illustrated calendar, where she appeared all too infrequently. Later, I chanced upon her turn as a member of the cast of ‘Las Vegas‘, though I never sampled that particular show to see how good an actress she was. Still, she seems to still be busy on the small and big screen.

Charlotte Green had a fit of the giggles this morning on the 8am bulletin for the Today programme. Charlotte reported the news of an American researcher team who have discovered the earliest known still playable voice recording, which predates Edisons effort by 17 years. Recorded with a phonoautograph, which records sound on smoke blackened paper, the 10-second clip features a scratchy though audible rendition of ‘Au Clair de la Lune’. At the conclusion of the piece, listeners heard the clip played back, before Charlotte launched into an obituary piece for Richard Widmark. Moments into the obituary Charlotte started to stutter and stumble over her own fits of laughter, presumably highly amused by the mildly bizarre song. I’m sure nothing could be more embarrassing then ‘corpsing‘ during a serious news item, but sometimes you simply can’t help yourself. I know I’ve been set off my the smallest of things, then sat grinning and giggling until tears stream down my face and my jaw aches. Poor Charlotte.

Congratulations to Kellogg’s Cornflakes on their 111th birthday.

I love days like this, because they give me the opportunity to learn something new. I mean, I didn’t know that while John Kellogg created the cornflake, it was his brother, William, who added sugar to them and marketed them as a breakfast food. John and William fell out over it in the traditional American way - i.e. they got lawyers involved - and, thankfully, William won.

John intended his cornflakes to provide a healthy and rounded addition to the nutritional intake of those resident at his sanitarium. Today, we should probably think about breakfast in the same way - as the healthy foodstuff intended to inject bit of goodness into a day that could so easily go down hill.

Mind you, some of use like to mix our cereals - and I don’t think that would have gone down well with the good Doctor.

Sometimes I manage to finish reading a book (rather than meandering off on to something else half way through), and I should finish ‘Storm Front‘, the first of the Dresden Files, in the next day (exhaustion permitting).

I like Jim Butcher’s writing and I allowed my imagination to connect names with faces from the TV series (because, by and large, I liked the show). The premise and events were familiar - as this was the pilot show, though TV execs saw fit to schedule it in as the third episode instead. The book allows for a little more hardboiled detective narrative and supernatural encounters… I can’t recall whether the toad-faced demon or the fairy appeared on TV.

Harry Dresden, consultant on matters magical for the Chicago police department, has to solve a grisly murder commited with black magic. Alas, suspicion falls on Harry as his powers could easily stretch to the act and no other suspects are obvious. Morgan, an enforcer for the White Council of wizards, has Harry’s head in his sights for the crime - and the only out is to discover who really did it.

Recommended for those who tire of the ordinary murder mystery/detective series. A light, enjoyable read that kept me turning the pages - with just the right chapter length for my tired eyes just before bedtime. Nothing worse than a book with extremely long chapters or no segmentation at all… I like a natural break in my reading sessions.

Stockport County are my local team - and through some rough history the ownership of the team and the ground fell into the hands of a consortium and outside of the hands of the fans. In 2005, the fans managed to buy back the team - and now they need a lot of money to reacquire the ground. You can do your bit raising £1 million by buying pixels at groundforapound.com - as I’ve already done. I’m about an inch and a half from the top left corner, a little down from the edge… in a dark patch above the trees.

E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson made a difference to my childhood and adult life alike. Without the popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and the surge of games that spawned around the role playing phenomena in the ensuing decades, I would never have led the double life I have. Yes, I would have still read fantasy books, but I might not have read them with such interest and enthusiasm.

Having read ‘Lord of the Rings’ (or part of it) in my pre-teens, I received a copy of the Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) game as a birthday gift. I had been playing occasional games of D&D in the practice rooms behind the main music room in my school for months and wanted to run my own game. One friend, Graham, ran D&D - where I had a fighter called Ironheart, while another friend, Jon, ran Call of Cthulhu and Star Trek - which generated Matt Houston, the grizzled private investigator, and Captain James Andrew Garth, commanding officer of the USS Lexington, respectively. When I finally ran MERP, I did so with the over-enthusiasm of an amateur gamemaster with a dodgy understanding of the setting, throwing the characters into a conflict with a group of Black Numenoreans just outside Bree. However, with time I found my footing and a firmer grip on the setting, resulting in adventures that spanned weeks, then months. At one point, we gamed for an entire summer almost non-stop, spending endless hours in the sweltering heat of a caravan in Graham’s parents’ driveway.

Those were exciting times, filled with constructs of imagination and youthful excitment, peppered with references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the adventures of Guybursh Threepwood that ground sessions to a halt in storms of laughter. In time, the real world crept in and sessions became ever more infrequent until they stopped altogether… but, my interest lingered on.

I played extensively at university, finding a splinter faction of the Role Playing Society that didn’t find character generation such an exciting nine week experience. I then dragged  around my role playing collection from house to house, moving for convenience to get into work, wherever that might be. Occasional culls led to the destruction of the occasional magazine or the loss of a book to amnesiac borrowers, but otherwise my collection stayed intact and grew.

A few years back I stumbled on the rebirth of the PARANOIA role playing game and the open playtest that surrounded its creation. Allen Varney gathered a team of willing co-writers around him who have helped to generate a whole new line of books. Not only did I finally get my name into print inside the covers of a role playing manual, but I managed to beat out a supplement of my own - ‘The Underplex‘ - and fulfil some small dream. Now, I play a little with my own children, engaging their brains and voices in a way that Nintendo never will - throwing them in the face of challenges and danger without threat of harm, and seeing what they can make of it.

E. Gary Gygax (1938 - 2008) changed my life. In one way or another, without him (and Ironheart the fighter) I would be who I am today. I’d certainly have a lot more free shelf space… Gary - you willed me missed. Like that final climbing skill roll that killed my favourite Gnome rogue Golchak Grimface.

I woke last night a little before 1AM and felt the rubble beneath me. The earthquake rippled past and a moment of sleepy conversation erupted over what had just happened. I haven’t felt a quake like that in years and then I experiened the ripple pass beneath me as I worked at my desk. The experts say we have around 200 quakes a year in the UK, but most of those only register on sensitive machinery designed specifically for the purpose. Having that many noticable quakes would certainly take the novelty value out of it.

Oddly, when I heard the quakes originated from near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, one of my first thoughts was whether Jim Broadbent still had family in the area who might be effected. A big fan of radio comedy, the series ‘Saturday Night Fry‘ (which you might just be able to track down on the Internet or BBC7) featured a skit where Stephen Fry probed Jim on his family background, which noted that there had been Broadbents in the Market Rasen area since the 60s (or something like that). The essence of the skit comes down to the fact that Hugh Laurie had spent the last week trying to forget something but he can’t remember what. Only when Stephen takes an interest in Jim’s family history do we discover Hugh had in fact spent the last week trying to forget Jim’s surname - an activity now rendered completely pointless.

Funny how these things come to mind entirely at odds with the sort of things you probably should be thinking about - like whether half your roof has come off during the night.

From Fox News Sunday, 10th February:

WALLACE: So, why do you think [Barack Obama has] gotten this far if people don’t know what he stands for?

BUSH: You’re the pundit. I’m just a simple president.

You couldn’t summarise Bush a great deal better than that…