Destroy All Onions!

You’ll have noticed there’s an election coming up. Who should we be voting for?

The good news is that today I found the candidate for me – Harry Hamilton. Because he is the only candidate standing for election who is also Northern Ireland’s leading Freddy Mercury impersonator, performing for many years as Flash Harry.

Who else will have policies on the following:

• Killer Queens
• Fat bottomed girls
• Wanting to ride my bicycle
• Wanting to live forever
• Finding me somebody to love

I hope no-one stops him now, and that he’ll be the champion (my friend).

There’s something about being conservative and unionist as well, but I’m sure that’s not important.

The only problem is that he’s not standing in my constituency.

Boo! More musical impersonators for parliament.

Abba impersonators for Prime Minister!!

Things I did today I’m all pleased about:

• I got 54 mpg out of my car by driving a bit under the speed limit instead of at it (or over it).
• I cycled 15 miles, along the Comber Greenway.
• I walked 4 miles up and down Cave Hill.
• I had an Indian for tea.
• I like Saturdays.

I finally caught the end of Dollhouse tonight, and I thought it was worthy of comment. It was the latest tv show from Joss Whedon, the legendary maker of sci-fi and fantasy programmes like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, its spinoff Angel, and Firefly.

And just like Firefly, it didn’t last very long – its cancellation was announced early in the second season. But I enjoyed it while it lasted. Indeed, I almost think it may have even been better that way – the cancellation meant that the timescale of the programme’s story got accelerated, and the final few episodes have covered a lot of ground.

Dollhouse tells the story of a group of “dolls”, people who have chosen to have their personalities erased as part of a contract with the mysterious Rossum corporation. Rossum then use their bodies to fulfill various jobs by implanting new personalities into them, so that the dolls aren’t merely actors, but completely believe all of the false memories and skills that have been implanted. But as the story goes on, the dolls start to redevelop personalities again, despite having their brains repeatedly wiped. Victor and Sierra find love in the sterile environment of the dollhouse, while Echo’s desire to help others despite her programming (or lack of it) asserts itself.

There’s been some good stories about the effects of this unexpected technology (a highlight was the story of the woman investigating her own death in the body of a stranger, which was very poignant), and the morality of science and power. There’s also been some great acting, as the cast have played such a variety of different people inhabiting the same bodies. But I think the strongest thing has been the storytelling along the way, getting sucked in by the unlikeable as well as the likable characters, and some marvellous plot twists.

The premise behind Dollhouse has always been hard to explain (see above!), and I suspect that made it quite hard to sell to viewers and other television channels, but I think it’s been worth following. I suspect it won’t quite receive the critical acclaim that Firefly did, but I predict that in retrospect it too will find a niche in the sci-fi hall of fame. I might even splash out on a box set.

There was a small hiccup with the domain registration over the weekend.

But now the blog is back.

And due to a number of requests, there will probably be some changes soon, and my magnificent (but slightly unpopular due to its placement) logo will be moved around in some way.

I had cause to visit the toilets in Starbucks the other evening.

I found this sign:

I have to admit, that I had planned to put something more than toilet roll down the toilet, so I was a bit stumped by this. Should I ignore the sign, or obey and just hold it in? I have to admit, I ignored the sign, and went in the toilet, as I usually do.

But the worst part of the story is that there wasn’t even any toilet roll there, which meant you couldn’t put anything in the toilet! So what was it there for? Perhaps it’s an art installation of some sort. Or maybe just for washing your face in. Who knows!

We’re used to the pace of technology these days, with constant improvements in mobile phones and the like meaning that anything more than a few years old is unusual because it’s so out of date. But some areas of life don’t seem to change so often. Or so you’d think.

Recently the toilets in my office got a bit of refit, so we now have the 3rd set of toilet roll dispensers in 11 years. These ones look like large white eggs stuck onto the cubical wall, and they dispense pre-cut pieces of toilet paper (an actual roll is apparently so last decade). I had no idea that toilet roll technology moved so quickly! We also have an exciting new soap dispenser, to go with the 5 signs that tell us to wash our hands. I can hardly wait to see where bathroom technology will take us in the future!

I resisted for a week, but I just have to share this.
The following conversation occurred between myself and my friend the Coke Shy Hero in Burger King. It followed an appearance by Ian Paisley on the news the day before.

Me: I thought Paisley was looking well.
Him: Did you? I thought he had a bit of a limp.
Me: Probably from kicking Peter Robinson. He’ll be shouting “Come back Peter and I’ll kick you with the other foot”.
Him: You mean Ian Paisley kicks with the other foot!!

Yes, that’s it. But I thought it was hilarious.

I am lacking in moral fibre, and finally got myself an iphone this week. I’ve wanted one for months, but O2 decided that I needed to learn the value of patience, and kept me waiting for my contract to finish.

There are a lot of things to like about it.

• Bluetooth works nicely – with my little in ear headset for calls, with the stereo headphones for music, and with the car. I had the stereo headphones with me to the gym tonight, and had a carefree wirefree evening. Great!
• It is a lovely small but functional internet browsing device.
• In addition to my own music and videos, BBC iplayer streams beautifully on it (using wifi), but even on lesser connections it was happy to stream radio in the gym over the internet.
• It’s a terribly clever controller for games. There are some where you turn and twist it in your hands to control things, and others where controls get drawn on the smooth surface and can be as complex or simple as the game requires.
• It has some clever apps, and some useful apps, and some that are both, and some that are neither, but I’ve been impressed so far.
• It has good taste in shuffling! It picked Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder for me to run too, following by Mark Ronson’s God put a smile on your face. Instrumentals are great to run to, since you don’t have to put any effort into singing along (mainly silently when I’m in public, thank goodness).

• The good news – I bought some Pepsi Raw today in Tescos. I hadn’t heard about it, but it’s an interesting idea. If you’re familiar with the process of making cola, you’ll know that some of the ingredients in it are not very friendly (there are these sorts of warnings). So Pepsi have launched a back to basics product, with all natural ingredients – so no artificial colouring, flavourings or preservatives. My friend described it best – it had a nice fruity hint to it that was reminiscent of Christmas cake. It has a premium price, but I think it’s very nice. Well worth a try.
• But the bad news – I haven’t been able to buy a bag of flumps since before Christmas. If you aren’t familiar with the joy of flumps, they are truly wonderful marshmallow sweeties like these. Usually you can get a nice big bag of them in Tescos, or Sainsburys, or any fine sweet shop. But not these days. I worry that the increase in the popularity of Rainbow Drops (more widely available than they were a year ago) is somehow at the expense of flumps in some frightening cosmic balance thing.

I started reading Stephen King’s The Stand just before Christmas, and finished it at the weekend.

“The end of the world as we know it” is very fashionable just at the minute. Over Christmas, we had the Day of the Triffids on television, and Survivors is just starting up again. In the cinema we had 2012, and we’ve now got The Road and The book of Eli arriving. I don’t know whether this has been caused by environmental concerns, swine flu, or the global recession, but there’s certainly a lot of it about.

So how was The Stand? Well, Stephen King is well known as a master of horror, and so I guess I was expecting this to be gruesome. But the story is a bit more subtle than that. The first third of the book tells the story of the plague, and the tales of the individual survivors. While it didn’t give me bad dreams, it is unsettling, especially in the context of this year’s swine flu. The second part of the book is the story of how the groups come together and form a community. What I found most interesting here was the character of Mother Abigail, and the fact their dreams led the survivors to an old Christian lady. I somehow can’t imagine that being the case in a more contemporary book, and I found her to be a beautifully written character. The final section is then the climax of the story, when the communities of good and evil collide. And there’s lots to like here too. I hope it’s not giving too much away to say that good triumphs over evil not by resorting to evil themselves, but because evil defeats itself. And yet at the end, there is no definitive happy ending – the human race has survived, but what will the society that they build ultimately look like, and will they just create the same problems all over again?

This is a big book, but it’s a real page-turner that’s very easy to get into, and not a difficult read. It’s a little dated now, not surprisingly since it was first published in 1978, but I thought it was a good book, that deserves its reputation as a classic.