Daibhid's Journal

As all Discworld fans know[1], the new novel is out in November and involves steam trains being introduced to the Disc. And the reaction I've seen includes a lot of comments to the effect of "Discworld advances from medieval fantasy to the Victorian period" or even "Discworld goes steampunk!" And these comments annoy me, because they're wrong.
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Okay. If there's one thing I think people reading this know, it's that I'm not one to criticise media too harshly, and certainly don't usually tear things apart. "Didn't quite work for me", "Wasn't too keen on that aspect of it, so I'll focus on what I did like", "Not sure I'm the target audoence", those are generally my harshest critiques. Occasionally I'll be so flabbergasted by a "bad" aspect of a work ("Borough of Staffordshire"?) that I'll focus on it, but I'll still add that I basically enjoyed it if I did, or - if I didn't - that I might have if I hadn't been so distracted by the problem. That's how I roll.

DC Comics Presents Challengers of the Unknown is a horrible, horrible comic. It is a godawful mess on multiple levels.
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It's been a while since I had a good rant about the local area, and what the Council are doing to it.
( Probably very dull if you don't live here, feel free to skip. )

Since I'm having a moan about stuff anyway...

As mentioned in my last rant about an irritating song, they play Radio 1 in the BHF storeroom, where I'm often spending my day cataloguing the electrics before they go to Pat Testing. And Radio 1 seems play a lot of rap[1].

I'm not keen on rap. Never have been. I grew up in the eighties thinking "Yes, okay, they can talk in rhythm and maybe that's a bit clever, but it's not music". But there are several rap songs amongst the twelve records that comprise Radio 1's playlist, all day every day, which do feature someone singing. In each of them, in between the talking-guy gibbering about his amazing gangsta lifestyle (another reason I don't like them; what I can make out of the lyrics suggests they're seriously self-obsessed), there's a chorus by a female singer. They aren't usually anything amazing, but hey, at least they know what a tune is.

And if they're very lucky, they might get credited as "Featuring..." No, she's the one who's actually singing. The only time it's reasonable to have the name of the person who isn't singing first is if it's a novelty single and they're a comedian or fictional character. Most of the time the singer doesn't get credited at all (see above under "seriously self-obsessed").

Maybe it wouldn't irritate me as much if I wasn't already irritated by the actual genre. But I am and it does.

[1]Rap, drivel by people I assume won Britain's Got The X-Factor and maybe one decent song a month. This month's is that Scouting for Girls one about people who've won Britain's Got The X-Factor.

Are adverts getting stupider, or am I getting less tolerant of them? While watching Jonathan Creek last night I saw three in a row that deeply irritated me.

1. Volvic, the bottled water that gives you intense hydration because it's filtered through layers of volcanic rock. No, it hydrates you because it's water.

2. Cow & Gate toddler milk. Apparently toddlers need the equivilent of 20 litres of cow's milk every day. You have to wonder how the human race survived long enough for this to be invented, since every child until now must have been severely malnourished.

3. Sensodyne toothpaste has a revolutionary new formula, but were remarkably cagy about what it actually does that the old Sensodyne doesn't. But there were lots of scenes of men in white coats, so it must be very scientific.

I dunno, maybe I'm getting more irritated by this stuff since I started reading Bad Science. Now I don't see them has harmless nonsense, but as a symptom of the public misunderstanding of science that leads to the stuff Ben reports.