There I was, trying to get my morning paper, and then it appeared in front of my eyes: a 100 meter queue in front of an O2 shop.
In Ilford !
Iphone fever must have truly gripped the last corner of the British Isles.
Iphone Fever
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Bonekickers. Huh?
I don’t watch a lot of television. Nevertheless, the Observer’s TV guide heartily recommended the new BBC1 show ‘Bonekickers‘, featuring a ficticious archaeological team that through sheer luck and scientifical reasoning unearths a new mystery every week. Think Indiana Jones meets ‘Carry on Camping’ and the ‘X – Files’.
So today I was treated to sixty minutes of worried looking faces, jokes about bosoms and pubs, a terribly bad man that was killed by losing his footing and tumbling into a small fire and all sorts of terrible cliches.
Rarely does the BBC get it so terribly wrong.
I really wanted this show to work, as it promised everything that one loves about archaeology on TV: weird men wearing hats, women with degrees and sex-appeal, terribly evil people, traps, conspiracy theories and, in ths case, real ale.
What did we get? A story David Duchovny wouldn’t get out of bed for and a bunch of characters so cliche ridden that it was painful to watch. There was some completely unnecessary gore in form of a ludicrous beheading. There were monks. The final showdown between good (feisty archaeologist with cleavage) and bad (creepy christian who wasn’t able to stand up and dust of a couple of flames from his evil trenchcoat) was so embarassingly painful that I started to watch Sky One on the other screen instead. A terrible disaster.
It can only get better from here.
Michael O’Leary explains his business model for transatlantic longhaul flights.
Funnily enough his German understudies refuse to translate his last comments.
Ryanair introduces acoustic mayhem to entice consumers.
I used to be a happy Ryanair client/customer/passenger. I was happy to accept the comfort and the standing in line typical of a London bus journey and did not grumble about their sometimes creative airport naming, as I was aware that I was flying 1500km for 20 pounds, which is a great price for such a long journey.
For one or the other reason I had no need to fly with them over the last number of years, so when I took a Ryanairflight to Porto last week I was a little bit surprised to be greeted by a neverending, loud soundtrack reverberating through the cabin, which, accompanied by an accoustic attack that makes the ‘fastfood song’ a piece of suave classyness, was telling me that I was able to drink even more alcohol for less money (by purchasing their ‘premium spirits’, served in little plastic bags), buy phonecards and scratchcards. This ran for ca 20 minutes during boarding and was repeated during the flight.
I am aware of the economics of no-frill flights, but isn’t Michael O’Leary taking this a little bit far? Most of the passengers in the cabin looked initially bewildered and then disgusted by the endless aural mayhem that was inflicted on us.
I flew back with Easyjet.
The Tunguska Event, 100 years on.
This week’s New Scientist has a superb feature on the current state of research on the Tunguska event. Just to refresh your memory, on 30 June 2008 an explosion 1000 times more powerful than the nuclear detonation over Hiroshima incinerated the sky over the northern half of our planet. Originating somewhere above the Tunguska river in Siberia, it knocked down trees over an area of 2000 square kilometers.
image courtesy of wikimedia
This week, a bunch of scientists will be meeting in Moscow to discuss the current state of knowledge about this immense event. The theories are mindboggling. There’s the usual UFO theories, the more plausible explosion of an asteroid, and the intriguing idea of the ‘Verneshot‘: with other words an ‘Earth Burb’, in which a large bubble of C02, accumlated via vulcanic activity, suddenly gets released, spewing toxic gases and large chunks of matter into the atmosphere.
And why am I interested in all this?
Messaged from the Outhouse 